December 1927 •
794
T h e
K i n g ' s
B u s i n e s s
at once as positively a Person as in His First Advent, and as mysterious also. We base that conviction, first, upon His own plain statements ; secondly, upon the clear apos tolic teaching of the New Testament; and finally, upon the naturalness of it, indeed the necessity of it, in view of His First Advent. Whereas Grace had its Epiphany, its outshining in the lowliness of His first marvelous coming and life, so Glory must have its Epiphany, its outshining in the majesty of that coming which He described as being ‘in the glory of His Father with His angels.’ We be lieve the age in which we live is bounded by these Advents, because our Lord declared that it would be consummated by His coming; because His apostles taught that it would be so ; and because we see, in the process of the age, that there is no other Hope for the world.” “A tragic silence” has indeed prevailed too long upon this subject, as if the ministers of our churches had be come speechless by reason of the old taunt, “Where is the promise of His Coming?” “whereas [as one who has given years of patient study to the Scriptures has reminded us] when we open our Bibles, it is easier to answer the question, Where is not the promise of His Coming? for it occurs in almost every book from Genesis to Revelation.” The Bible is full of it. So much so that Renan; the famous French skeptic, declared that there was more Scriptural authority for this doctrine than for all the other doctrines of Christianity put together. There are said to be over three hundred references to this great topic in the New Testament alone. It is the conspicuous teaching of not a few of our Lord’s Parables, and not less than twenty-one passages in the teaching of our Lord have been verified which plainly declare that He is coming again.. Holy Scripture may be neglected; it can never be broken. Also there are the Red Signals of History, and the Black Signs of the Times, which so impressively confirm every Scripture which declares it will be darkest before dawn—the dawn of the Second Advent^-when our Lord is coming to set all wrongs tight, and set up a never-end ing Kingdom. V ital P art of R evelation “The doctrine of the Advents is not an aside in divine revelation, but is integral and vital.” Indeed “the two ad vents are the foci around which the whole of divine reve lation revolves.” You have read of Kepler, who set himself to discover the law of planetary motion. For eight years he labored unceasingly and made nineteen attempts to discover that law, and failed. Then he said to himself , “I will suppose that the planets move, not in a circle around a centre, but in an ellipse around two foci.” Putting that key into the heavens it unlocked them, and he cried in joy, “O Al mighty God, I am thinking Thy thoughts after Thee!” Recalling this beautiful story, W. Graham Scroggie writes most truly, I think: “In like manner, putting this key of the Advents into the Scriptures, we find that it un locks them. These events are the two facts around which the whole divine revelation revolves, and if the second of them as an event be denied, the whole prospective of Bible history is thrown out;” “This same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen Him go into heaven” (Acts 1 :11). How did he go? Personally—visibly—-bodily—sud denly—from earth to heaven. Then He will come from heaven to earth—suddenly—bodily-—visibly—personally. Only with this great difference—when He shall appear the
“There Was
Luke a:7
Yet if His Majesty, our Sovereign Lord, Should of His own accord, Friendly Himself invite, And say “I ’ll be your guest to-morrow night;” How we should stir ourselves, call and command A ll hands to work-^-!‘Let no man idle stand; Set me fine Spanish tables in the hall, Let them be fitted all, see there be room to eat, ' And order taken that there want no meat. Let every sconce and candlestick be bright That without taper it may give a light. Look to the presence,— is the carpet spread, The dais o’er the head? The cushions on the chairs And all the candles lighted on the stairs. Perfume the chambers and in any case, Let each man give attendance in his place.” Thus if the. King were coming, would we do, But, at the coming of the King of Heaven, All’s set at six and seven. We wallow in our sin And find no chamber we. can put Him in. We entertain Him always as a stranger, And as at first, still lodge Him in the manger. — Old Writer. liberalizing Hebrews (and they existed) may have smiled at Simeon’s and Anna’s hope and advised them to read the Scriptures in a more philosophic spirit; to forbear to load them with chronological responsibilities; to regard them rather as pictorial embodiments of spiritual principles. But such sages would have been wrong. T he E p iph a n y of G lory Similarly, in view of the near approach of the Second Advent, liberalizing ministers of the Gospel (found, alas, in all the churches,) would have us spiritualize away all references in the Scriptures to a Second Advent of Christ of a personal, bodily, visible nature, as if it were deroga tory to the dignity of God, and out of harmony with a ' spiritual faith. Not more so, I think, than the First Ad vent. But “this same person is again to appear, to be un veiled, to be manifested,” Dr. Campbell Morgan reminds us. “That means that His Second Advent will be as his toric as was His First; that He will actually come into the midst of human history on some date in the human cal endar, which no man knows and which no man is intended to know; that in the actuality of this coming He will be And ’twere good reason too; For ’tis a duteous thing To pay all honor to an earthly king, And after all the trouble and the cost, So He be pleased, to count no labor lost.
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