VI

Only at the Second Coming of the Christ of God Will a Government of

Everlasting Righteousness and Peace be Established Upon the Earth

IT was the original purpose of God to make the people of Israel the

head of nations, place them in Palestine as the geographical center

of the earth, make them its political center, send His own Son to be

their incarnate king, use them as a channel of earthly and spiritual

blessing and make this world the most perfect and happiest spot in

all the wide universe.

They failed to meet their opportunity.

Then the Lord transferred the possibility of world rulership from

the Jews to the Gentiles.

He did this by handing political power and authority to

Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon.

This rulership and sway of the world descended in its ordained and

foretold succession down through Medo-Persia with its incorporation

of Babylon, through the temporary but immensely extended empire of

Greece which under Alexander included both Babylon and Medo-Persia,

and after that the colossal and magic empire of Rome, swallowing up

as it did the three empires or kingdoms which preceded it.

Since the division of Rome into Western and Eastern empires the

rulership of the world has been maintained by the various nations

composed of those people dwelling in the territory once occupied by

Rome.

The world has been ruled by Turks, Spaniards, Germans, by the French

and by the English.

The Gentile nations in this special and prophetic territory have

been the world rulers.

It has been peculiarly Gentile rulership and in Scripture is called,

"The times of the Gentiles."

Gentile times, Gentile rulership has lasted for twenty-five hundred

years.

It has been an amazing rule.

It has been a rulership that has revealed the genius, the brilliance

and the God-given powers of man.

It has been a rulership that has revealed the iniquity, the sin, the

mad ambition and devil-inspired policies of man.

In all the twenty-five hundred years of this Gentile rule there have

not been one hundred consecutive years of universal peace.

It has been twenty-five hundred years of war, of rapine, murder and

measureless lust.

Cities have been destroyed, fields have been laid waste, women have

endured the last outrage. Children have been orphaned, right has

been upon the scaffold and wrong upon the throne, prison chains have

been for virtue, silk and velvet for vice, civilization after

civilization has been destroyed, the earth has been filled with

anguish beyond the power of tongue or pen to describe, and blood

enough has been shed through man's inhumanity to man to float all

the navies of the world, and money and treasure enough wasted to

have provided a palace for every man and woman on earth.

A little less than five years ago men everywhere were talking of

peace and safety.

Christianity and civilization were walking hand in hand.

Christianity or that which professed to be Christianity had accepted

all the claimed benefits of civilization.

Rapid transit, the telephone, all the triumphs of applied science

were announced as the by-products of the Gospel. Even though the

churches were becoming more or less empty and the people were

turning away to other centers of instruction or enlightenment or

consolation or hope, preachers were everywhere and with great

insistence announcing that the world was growing better every day

and that we were rapidly approaching the purple and the gold of

millennial times. The hour was not far distant when the lion and the

lamb should lie down together. There was much talk about the

fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. People were coming

together and having a better and more disinterested estimate of each

other. Religion was ceasing to be dogmatic and precise and becoming

more and more a profession that was free from restraint.

Christian ministers in the pulpit and supposedly wise men in the

counsels of the nations with optimistic utterance announced that the

days of barbarism had passed away, the brutality of war was at an

end. Men and nations would no longer adjourn their differences to

the field of battle. A magnificent palace of peace had been erected

in that country that had for centuries been the bloody ground where

Europe settled its political issues. In this splendid home of

arbitration the nations were to meet as friends and brothers and

calmly arrange and solve all matters that had hitherto kept them

menacingly apart.

War had become so abhorrent to what was called the Christian sense

of the nations that mothers were exhorted to banish from the

nurseries anything that might suggest the thought of war, such as

trumpets, drums or toy guns. So completely had the peace idea

pervaded the mind of the people, the idea that peace had come to

stay and nothing must be tolerated that would even hint at war, that

a soldier or a sailor wearing the uniform of his country was no

longer acceptable in a public place, were it a restaurant, a music

hall or even a church.

Men who were opposed to spending a dollar to make a nation ready for

the possibility of war were hailed as the advanced thinkers and the

men worthy of the suffrage of the people; while those who contended

human nature had not been changed, that a nation was simply the

individual grown large and the jealousies, the covetousness and

ambitions of governments would always make it possible for the

strong to prey upon the weak and for the unprincipled under the

guise of national necessity to attack their unprepared neighbours

and therefore just as much as a city rests in confidence with the

presence within it of a well-equipped police force, equally so the

comfort and security of peace could be best maintained by a nation

governed by right principles whose army and navy were ready to

resist successfully any unjust assault upon its honour or integrity,

were treated with pity, if not scorn, as still under the spell of

benighted and barbaric days.

"Peace and safety!" these were the pleasant words that lulled a

pleasure-seeking and money-making generation into self-satisfied

rest and the mirage of millennial days already arrived.

Then, suddenly, like a bolt out of a clear sky, or the overflow in

raging lava tide of an unsuspected volcano, the most stupendous,

ghastly and brutally devilish war the world has ever known was on in

all its fiendish fury, sweeping from England to the Euphrates and

from the Rhine and Danube on the north to the glittering sands of

Africa on the south, rolling its waves of blood and sending its

sickening and indescribable horrors through those lands and among

those people at one time constituting the four kingdoms to whom God

had committed the rulership of the world; that region occupied by

Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece and Rome and whose administration of

world affairs is called "the times of the Gentiles."

To-night ten millions of the world's flower of manhood lie rotting

in their graves. Six millions of women and children have been

starved to death. Women have been unspeakably ruined, children

mutilated and flung as helpless debris upon the charity of

strangers, suffering their orphaned estate and not knowing why.

All the genius, the science and invention of man with poured out,

unlimited wealth, have been drafted to produce the most terrifically

destructive means of war. All the boasted progress and culture of

the preceding centuries were called upon to wage the contest until

it should affright even the participants themselves. Clouds of

poison gas filled the once sweet and vital air of spring time and

summer mornings. Human beings wearing hideous masks and looking like

other world monsters rushed in mad onslaught upon one another. They

burrowed in holes and trenches like wild beasts concealed in their

lair and waiting for the prey. Through the startled heavens winged

things like huge vampires vomiting fire and blood took their way

over cities, towns and unprotected hospitals, leaving behind them

the dead, the dying and the tortured. Hunger with its sunken cheeks,

and pestilence with its green eyes, its slavering lips have trod the

earth till horror with wordless anguish has kept vigil by the

blackened hearthstones of ruined homes and deserted firesides.

To-night, the fields of Flanders where the poppies grow and where

the dead who died too soon and lie almost too thick to count, are as

though a mighty juggernaut had rolled its fearful wheels over them,

crushing both man and earth together into one monstrous pulp of

hopeless ruin.

To-night France, where the lilies were wont to bloom, is torn and

ripped in all the one-time beauty and fascination of her white and

winding roads, poplar fringed, in the culture of her fruited

gardens, her orchards and her royal forests, as though some

monstrous creation of pre-Adamite days had survived and broken

through all restraint of all the ages to riot and gorge himself with

unlimited delight of destruction.

All this after two thousand years of professed Christianity and the

constant iteration that the Church was slowly winning its way to the

ruler-ship of the world; that each hour the world was growing better

and more and more the principles of the Christ of God dominating the

universal heart of man.

The world awoke to find its heart unchanged and war with aggressive

animalism still the underlying and primal force in man.

To-night in face of all this, in face of the solemn declaration of

the Son of God that during the whole time of His absence there would

be war and rumours of war, and specially within the territory once

occupied by Rome; that there would be distress of nations with

perplexity, men's hearts failing them for fear for looking after the

things that should be coming on the earth; that the people like the

waves of the sea should be roaring, uttering their discordant voices

in the thunder of protest and bitter discontent, breaking the bonds

of old customs and lashing the times with lawlessness and

unprecedented crime; in face of the warning of the Apostle Paul that

in the last days, that is to say in the closing hours of this age,

there should be, not peaceful but perilous times; that evil men

should wax worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived; in the

face of the inspired assurance of the Apostle James that as this

dispensation should draw to its close Capital and Labour should

stand in bitter attitude to each other; that the accumulated wealth

of a special class called "rich men" should be "heaped together"

that they might be spoiled and that miseries should come upon them;

that on the one side should be the aggression of the profiteers and

on the other the violence of those who would refuse to be exploited;

in face of this assurance of industrial and class war; in face of

the fact that the softest toned apostle whose pen is always

transcribing the word "love," and who has reached the highest and

most sublime definition of God as love; in face of the fact that

this apostle affirms the hour will come when the whole world under

religious, political and devilish inspiration will rush to conflict,

that everywhere will be heard the tramp of armed men and the

gathering of the nations for a war such as the world has not yet

seen; in face of the picture which this apostle of love paints where

the armies of the world are seen gathered in battle array against

the Lord Christ and His right to reign; in the face of this divine

warning the statesmen of the world are assembled in counsel at

Paris, the world's capital of pleasure, in a palace once dedicated

to lust and wanton self-gratification, whose panelled ceiling and

mirrored walls are filled with and reflect the scenes and

glorification of war, that by the stroke of a pen, by a series of

resolutions, they may constitute a league of nations bulking so big

that every threatened wave of future war may be flung back as when

the dykes of Holland reject the sea.

The astonishing and suggestive thing is that in the making and

remaking of the map of Europe and Asia undertaken by the framers of

the league, they are, all unconsciously, restoring the outlines of

the old Roman Empire and preparing the way for the final and

desperate revival of Rome under the form of ten confederate nations,

with its last kaiser, that dark and woful figure, the man of sin,

the son of perdition, the Antichrist.

And there are Christian teachers who see in this league another

herald of the millennium before Christ comes which they so

sedulously preached previously to the war. They see in this league

an evidence that the Lord Jesus Christ as the Prince of Peace is in

reality reigning over the earth and bending the nations to His will

for the reign of peace.

In the whole history of theological exegesis and interpretation I

know of nothing so utterly faulty, illogical and wholly unscriptural

as that exegesis which teaches the angel song at Bethlehem to be the

announcement of the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ as the Prince of

Peace and that as such He should establish it among the nations

after His ascension to heaven and during His absence from the world.

The angels sang glory to God in the highest and on earth, peace to

"men of good will."

The angel who spoke to the shepherds keeping the temple sheep for

the morning and the evening sacrifice was testifying to them that

there was no longer need to keep the sheep for such a purpose. The

day of animal sacrifices had passed, the living God had provided the

true sacrifice, He who was born beneath the chaplet of heaven's

music, the Lamb of God ordained before the foundation of the world.

He had been born into the world that He might make peace by the

blood of His cross, not between man and man, not between nation and

nation, but between man and God. He had been born to die and by His

death reconcile a rebel world to God; on the basis of this sacrifice

yet to be and when He should have risen from the dead as witness of

the efficacy of His death He would bring peace to every soul that

should be of good will--every soul that should surrender to the will

of God by believing on Him, offering Him by faith as a sacrifice and

claiming Him as a substitute. Every such soul should be at peace

with, and have the peace of, God.

This was the meaning of that natal hour at Bethlehem.

The angels were not singing over Him as the Prince of Peace who had

come to abolish war among the nations, but as the ordained sacrifice

who should bring peace between the individual man and his God. And

yet--He is to be the Prince of Peace and reign and rule as such over

the earth, putting an end to war and establishing perfect peace

among the nations.

The promise of His reign and rule as the Prince of Peace is clearly

set forth in Scripture; as it is written in the book of the prophet

Isaiah:

"Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given. His name shall be

called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting

Father, The Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his peace and

government there shall be no end."

But when? Where?

Listen:

"Upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom to order it."

And hear what Gabriel says to Mary when he comes to announce to her

that she has been chosen of Almighty God to give birth to the

Messiah of Israel.

The angel says:

"Thou shalt call his name Jesus . . . He shall be great, and shall

be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God shall give unto

him the throne of his father David:

And he shall reign over the house of Jacob forever; and of his

kingdom there shall be no end."

He is to be the Prince of Peace when He sits upon the throne of

united Israel in their own land and not before.

He was born in fulfillment of the prophecy of Isaiah.

He was a Son given. The Son of God who was God the Son.

He was a Son given and became a child born.

He grew up to the station of manhood.

He entered upon His pre-arranged ministry.

At the appointed hour and to the very second foretold by Gabriel to

Daniel and in the exact manner announced by the prophet Zechariah He

rode into Jerusalem, went into the temple, claiming it as His

Father's house of prayer and by so much declaring Himself to be the

Son of the Highest and the heir of David's throne.

The shout of the multitude had announced Him officially.

They had said:

"Hosanna! Blessed is the King of Israel that cometh in the name of

the Lord."

In crying this aloud they were fulfilling the prediction of

Zechariah.

He had, under the vision of God, looked forward to this hour and

with the Spirit of God upon him had exhorted the people who should

be alive when Jesus should come to acclaim him.

He said:

"Shout, O daughter of Jerusalem; behold thy King cometh unto thee;

he is just, and having salvation (political as well as spiritual

salvation); lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal

of an ass."

The multitude were shouting as Zechariah said they should shout.

They were confessing that He who came that day up the slopes of Zion

was the Prince of Judah and King of Israel.

He came to His own, but His own received Him not.

Instead of the diadem of David He got a crown of thorns. Instead of

the sceptre of Israel He got the vine stick of a Roman centurion

thrust through His rope-tied hands. Instead of a throne He got a

malefactor's cross. Instead of a robe of royal purple He got the

winding sheet of the dead. Instead of a palace He got a borrowed

grave.

The Jews have paid the price of that blindness and betrayal. The

man-slayer who unwittingly slew his neighbour or was even ignorant

of it at the moment sooner or later found he had to flee from the

avenger of blood instantly upon his track. He became an exile from

his home, forced to dwell in a provided place called the city of

refuge. He could not return to his home till the second coming of a

priest.

The Jews were guilty, as a nation, of manslaughter.

They were deceived and involved by their leaders. They really did

not know that He whom they hounded to death at the last was not only

the covenant king of Israel, and the Holy One of their fathers, but

the Prince of life.

Because of their blindness, blunder and sin they were cast out of

the land. Because, even though in ignorance, they slew their King,

they were exiled by the judgment of God from their home. They

deprived the Lord of that land that was His through the covenant of

Abraham, and the Lord in turn deprived them of the right of dwelling

in the land. They should be exiles so long as He was an exile. Nor

can they return till He comes the second time as a priest, not after

the order of Aaron, but Melchisedec; for it is written that He shall

be both a king and priest upon His throne.

Only can the Jews return and be owned nationally of the Lord when He

shall come.

He will come and He will come as the Prince of Peace.

He will not come, I repeat, with the olive branch in His hand and

the cooing dove nestling upon His shoulder.

Nay! not at all!

He will come as the Avenger of His elect, as the Son of man, as the

judge of all flesh.

He will come to overthrow the combination of Devil and man.

His Coming will be the climax of old and outworn ages, the beginning

of the new.

The glory of His Coming cannot be described.

Through years of meditation and continued effort at description I

have exhausted my vocabulary and worn to tatters the oft-repeated

phrases with which I have sought with heart full of adoring

enthusiasm to announce the wonders of that hour.

If all the suns and systems were turned into speech till every

flaming center of light were an adjective with increasing emphasis

of qualification and expression the attempt to put into words the

glory of that Coming would be a pitiful and overwhelming failure.

He will come surrounded by an innumerable host whose hallelujahs

shall so vibrate that the very heavens will roll apart at their

soundings.

The Lord will come in His threefold glory, the glory of the Father,

the glory of the angels and His own glory: the glory of His eternal

and unbegun sonship with the Father, as chief of the angels and as

that man who is very God, as that God who is real and immortal man.

Then will He set up the kingdom, the government for which the ages

have dreamed and groaned and guessed and prayed.

That hour of hours!

Satan bound, iniquity overthrown, God and Christ and the Holy Spirit

ruling in the lives of men. The very air surcharged with the

righteousness of God; so surcharged that he who thinks a lie shall

fall dead in the tracks where he meditated it. No longer need of

judge, of jury, of prison bars, nor hangman's rope, nor electric

chair.

An hour when no longer the scarlet poppies of hate, of jealousies

and mad ambition shall bud and blossom into war. War over forever,

swords beaten into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks. Every

man the same right as any other man, the right to sunshine, to air,

to water, the beauty of the landscape and all the usufruct of earth.

That hour when no man shall call another his master; when no longer

a man shall toil and bend his back and break his heart for a stipend

of bread; for a hole in the ground and the worm of corruption as

mistress of his bed.

That hour when life shall be worth while and when the centuries of

peace and perfectness of actual being shall pass on till they are

counted as eternity.

And because this government of peace and splendour and all the

outflowing possibilities of a world in which righteousness shall

reign and God shall be first can be brought about only by and at the

Second Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ; because until He does so

come wars and sorrows and the darkness of sin will continue; because

all the legislation of man and all the leagues of nations will

utterly fail to establish permanent peace; because in spite of the

best endeavours of all the merely moral forces in the earth there is

nothing can keep this system called the world from going on the

rocks; because only the hand of God's Christ can break the bands of

iniquity, quiet earth's fever pulses and putting down all authority

bring in the peace that never can be broken; because when He comes

the government of right and truth and the life that is really worth

while shall come; and because from my heart I want to see that

longed-for hour of heaven on earth, I preach the Second Coming of

our Lord Jesus Christ.