The Purposes of the Incarnation. 49 gracious victory, will destroy in you all the works of the devil, and set you free. IV. jT o Prepare for a Second Advent. “Christ also, having been once offered to bear the sins of many, shall appear a second time, apart from sin, to them that wait for him, unto salvation” (Hebrews 9:28). We are all conscious that nothing is perfect; that the things which Christ came to do are not yet done; that the works of the devil are not yet finally destroyed; that sins are not yet experimentally taken away; that in the spiritual consciousness of the race, God is not yet perfectly known. “Now we see not yet all things subjected to Him.” The victory does not seem to be won. I t is impossible to read the story of the Incarnation, and to believe in it, and to follow the history of the. centuries that have followed upon that Incarnation with out feeling in one’s deepest heart that something more is need ed, that the Incarnation was preparatory, and that the con summation of its meaning can only be brought about by an other coming, as personal, as definite, as positive, as real in human history as was the first. “Christ . . . shall appear a second time.” j There is no escape, other than by casuistry, from the simple meaning of those words. The first idea conveyed by them is that of an actual personal advent of Jesus yet to be. To spiritualize a statement like this and to attempt to make application of it in any other than the way in which a little child would under stand it, is to be driven, one is almost inclined to say, to dis honesty with the simplicity of the scriptural declaration. There may be diversities of interpretations as to how He will come, and when He will come; whether He will come to usher in a millennium or to crown i t ; but the fact of His actual coming is beyond question. Paul in all his writings is conscious of this truth of the sec ond advent. In some of them he does not dwell upon it at
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