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THE KING’S BUSINESS
whose name shall be the Lord our Righteousness, and unto whom shall be gathered the nations, as unto the throne of the Lord. Ezekiel beheld His coming in the chariots of cherubic glory. Daniel set Him, forth in the center of ten thousand times ten thou sand of shining angels, coming to take unto Himself the crowns of all the kings of the earth, as King of kinds and Lord of lords. The minor proph ets, on every page, proclaimed His Coming. Hosea declared it in lan guage of rebuke to the people that have denied Him; Joel in speech that makes the tongue to burn and the ears to tingle, while Habakkuk rises to the heights of sublimity in a diction un equalled, as he testifies of the God who shall come from Teman and the Holy One who shall cover the heavens with His glory, who shall fill the earth with His praise, before whose feet shall go the pestilence and burning coals, who shall stand and measure the earth, drive asunder the nations, scatter the everlasting mountains, receive the homage of the perpetual hills as they bow before Him and acknowledge that His ways are everlasting, and who shall fill the earth, the whole earth, with the glory of His presence. The list utterance of the Old Testament, as it is of the New, is that He is Com ing.” This Old Testament teaching had a three-fold confirmation in the New Testament Scriptures, and was, there fore, made to be “the apostolic faith.” 1. It was affirmed by the Master, Jesus Christ. He addressed himself to this theme more often than He laid His tongue to any other. We shall not repeat the many detached texts that dropped from His lips, but call attention to the fact-that certain whole chapters, recording His words, relate themselves to this subject; as, for in stance, the eight kingdom parables that make up the whole of Matthew 13, and the multitude of references that
well nigh cover the entire 23rd, 24th and 25th chapters of the same Gos pel. In the first of these (23d) He pro phesies His return; in the second (24th) He declares the conditions that will suggest its imminence; and in the third (or 25th) He illustrates the results upon believers and unbelievers alike. Truly Jesus Himself best un derstood the time, circumstances, and effects of the day when “the Son of man shall come in His glory and all the holy angels with him,” and His declarations determine “the apostolic faith.” 2. The writings of the apostolic col lege confirmed it. There can be no dispute as to the Millennarianism of Paul and Peter and John. Phillips Brooks was not clearly a premillen- nialist, and yet; as an honest man speaking of the text, “The Lord is at hand” (Philippians 4:4), he declared “There were times when, as it seemed, the apostles looked to see the opening skies and the descending chariot. . . . They found abundant clearness and abundant inspiration in their expect ancy when they described the thing they expected as ‘the coming of the Lord.’ Every step they took ir\ life brought them a little nearer to that great end and purpose. They set out on a voyage, and as they turned their eyes away from the fading shore and looked across the broad waters, they seemed to be sailing out to meet the coming Lord.” 3. John hoped for perfect victory against sin only when Christ should appear (1 John 3:2-3). Peter sighed in spirit when he saw the day in which certain scoffers should arise, saying, “Where is the promise of His com ing,” as if God were slack concerning His promise, and remarked, as with heaviness of heart, “But the day of the Lord will come as a thief” and in view of it, it is our business to be “looking for and hastening” the same,
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