The Coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ for His Church is the Most
Imminent Event on the Horizon of Time
BETWEEN us and the Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ in glory to Mount
Zion to set up and establish His kingdom there are many predicted
and consecutively fixed events.
Between us and the moment when our Lord shall suddenly and secretly
descend to take the Church to Himself into the place prepared, hold
her in security above the woe hour coming on all them that dwell on
the face of the earth and then bring her back to reign and rule with
Him in glory, there is not a single, predicted event; and this--in
the very nature of the case.
In the nature of the case because this age in which we live is a
parenthesis between the kingdom postponed upon the one side and the
kingdom to be brought in upon the other.
In this age God is not seeking to convert the world, but to take out
of it a people for His Name.
It is an age of selection and therefore an age of election.
When you take some things out of the midst of other things there
will be, not only a first one, but necessarily a last one.
As there was a first one elected, called out and taken into union
with a risen Lord, so must there be a last one who shall be called
through the Gospel, quickened by the Spirit and bound up in
indissoluble union with a living Lord.
When that last one is called and responds to the life-giving power
of the Spirit the Lord will descend into the upper air and take the
completed and corporate Church to Himself--the dead raised, the
living changed.
When that last elect one will be called you do not know, it is not
known to a single soul on earth.
Since you do not know when the last elect of God shall be called,
and it is sure the Lord will come when that last elect one is
called, then you do not know when the Lord will come; and so far as
you are concerned, and so far as any revelation otherwise is given,
it may be any hour and, therefore, "any moment"; consequently the
Coming of the Lord for His Church is--imminent.
Thus the imminency of the Lord's Coming for His Church is grounded
on election.
Imminency is so absolutely linked up with election that you cannot
deny imminency without denying election; and to deny election is to
deny God Himself, deny Him in the very essence of His own
prerogative, the prerogative of foreordination, of decree.
The imminency of the Lord's Coming for His Church is grounded on the
Lord's own declaration that He is coming for her as a thief comes.
This is His declaration and warning to the Church at Sardis, that
Church which is the symbol of Protestantism in the closing hours of
the age. The warning is given to the pastor, through the pastor to
the Church and through the local assembly at Sardis to the whole
Church.
This is what the risen Lord actually says:
"Remember therefore how thou hast received and heard; and hold fast,
and repent. If therefore thou shalt not watch, I will arrive over
thee as a thief, and thou shalt not know what hour I will arrive
over thee."
The characteristics of thief coming are marked and clear.
The thief does not come with strident voice, with thunderous noise,
nor in open daylight, but between the midnight and the morn, with
shodden feet, silently, softly, and takes the treasure while all in
the house are sunken in the depths of sleep.
When the sunbeams of the morning pelt the eyelids of the laggard
sleepers they awake to find the thief has come and gone and in his
going has taken the treasure with him.
If the symbol be of avail and not a mere exercise in logomachy then
will the Lord, indeed, descend in the moral and spiritual night of
the world while men are sleeping and in fancied security pleasantly
dreaming.
He will descend unseen, unnoted. If men shall hear the sound of a
trump it will have no greater significance to their spiritually deaf
ears than any other passing sound. He will take, not the "great
house" of religious profession, but those alone in that profession
who have been regenerated and are indwelt by the Spirit, the dead
who have fallen asleep in His name and the living who abide in Him.
Above all--imminency is grounded in the integrity of the Son of God
and His apostles.
Unless all language is a deception; unless the promises of God are a
baited lie; unless the apostles of Christ are the most shameless of
all wanton tricksters; unless the Son of God Himself is the coolest
traitor to truth who ever fooled the trusting hearts of needy men;
unless He is the one being of all others who had the subtle and
effective genius of making promises that fill the ear and are broken
to the heart; unless He was the most skillful of all deceivers and
rejoiced with malignant delight in deceiving the souls of men and
thus proved Himself to be not the Son of God at all but the very son
of falsehood, then seeing He is the reverse of all that, is in truth
the very Son of God and truth itself, by His own unqualified
statement, by its very character as exhortative warning His Coming
must be and is--imminent. It is on the threshold of unfolding
history and the gates of heaven are ajar ready for His Coming. So
imminent is it that there is nothing between us and that event of
events but the shout of command, the voice of the archangel and the
shattering sound of the trump. So imminent that there is not the
thickness of an eyelash between us and that moment when the door in
heaven shall open wide and His voice with all compelling power shall
say, "Come up hither."
Listen to what He says:
"Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come."
Watch! because He is coming.
Watch! because you do not know what hour He will come.
Watch! because as the householder He said He might come in any one
of the four watches, at even, at midnight, in the cockcrowing or in
the morning.
He did not come at even.
Surely the midnight has come. It is dark enough spiritually. There
is not only enough of sorrow, sin, confusion and unbelief in a
godless world, but rank treason to the truth and repudiation of the
written Word in the professing Church to call it spiritual midnight.
It seems sometimes like the cockcrowing.
There are sounds of chanticleer, blasts of trumpets, changing of the
guards and sentinels of old customs and ways, and echoes in the
events now unrolling that prelude the great morning and the great
day.
There is nothing certain about the hour but its--uncertainty.
Watch! because you may be alive at His Coming.
That is the word of Holy Scripture and not my suggestion.
Listen to the Apostle: "We which are alive, and remain unto the
coming of the Lord."
The Apostle said that for his generation.
He said it not under his own mistaken idea as the Chicago department
of "sacred literature" would suggest, but under the inspiration of
the Holy Spirit of the Holy God.
Paul as a mere man might make mistakes just as the modern
theological professor not infrequently does.
The Holy Spirit speaking through Paul could not make a mistake
Himself, neither could it be possible for Paul under the direction
of the Holy Spirit to make a mistake.
Paul was led by the Holy Spirit to believe it possible the Son of
God might come in his day.
What Paul under inspiration said for his generation, he said for our
generation.
He said it for you and for me.
Because no man knows the hour when the Lord will come it might be in
your hour and my hour.
The Master Himself said:
"You know not what hour your Lord doth come."
Who is he who will have the hardihood to fix the hour when the
Master has said no man knows?
Who is he who will put a thousand years between the Church and her
returning Lord?
Where is the difference between a thousand years' delay and one
moment that can be fixed by any man?
If the Lord says you do not know the hour and necessarily do not
know the minute of the hour, if you fix a minute between us and the
Coming you deny the words of the Son of God Himself that the minute
and the hour are unknown.
Who is he who has it all fixed and polished and pumice stoned to the
exact date?
The Lord has said no man on earth knows, not an angel in heaven
knows. He Himself took the place of a servant and by the exercise of
His omnipotent will residing in His eternal and unchanged
personality as Son of God and God the Son, shut out the knowledge of
it from His humanity, from Himself as man, and said He did not know
when He should come.
Admit that a revelation has since been given to Him as a man or that
He has taken the ban off His human side Himself and that He knows
when He will come for the Church and the exact hour of His appearing
in glory; admit this if you like and for the sake of argument
(although there is not the slightest shade of a shadow of evidence
for such an argument) it still remains that no such revelation has
ever been given to the Church; neither has the restriction of the
Son of God to His disciples been removed. You remember what He said
just before He ascended!
This is what He said:
"It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the
Father hath put in his own power."
That this restriction was for the Church is the declaration of the
Apostle. This is what he said to the Church at Thessalonica:
"Of the times and the seasons, brethren, ye have no need that I
write unto you."
Why had he no need to write to them?
Because the day of the Lord, he said, should come as a thief, and as
that day is introduced by the Coming of the Lord for His Church,
then His coming for the Church was, as He Himself afterwards
declared in his letter to Sardis, like the coming of a thief. This
Coming Paul had described in the fourth chapter of his first letter
to the Thessalonians.
It was not for the Church to know in Paul's day when the Lord should
come as the bridegroom for His bride.
No revelation has been given in any epistle to the Church since.
What was true in Paul's day as to the attitude of the Church is true
in this day. Listen to the commended attitude of the Thessalonian
Church:
"Ye turned to God from idols, to serve the living and true God; and
to wait for his Son from heaven."
There you have it.
The Church is to wait; that means to watch, to expect, to be ready.
This is what the Apostle said.
This is what the Son of God Himself said and still says to-day.
He affirms we do not know the hour.
He exhorts us to watch.
The affirmation and the exhortation hold for this hour.
If therefore the Son of God be not incarnate falsehood; if He seek
not to play with my heart and make me a spectacle to the lost souls
of the pit as well as to the mockers among men--He means what He
said.
If He meant what He said, then He means that any day, and any hour
of the day so far as I know I may meet Him at any turn of the road.
And what would that mean if He should come to-night or to-morrow?