THE K I N G ’ S B U S I N E S S
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I will not stop to show that these words of Jesus and Paul and Peter and John about the Second Coming of Christ have not as yet been fulfilled and refer to a coming yet in the future. That is plain on the very face of them. The deniers of a future coming of Jesus Christ have tried in the past to make out that the prophesies and promises regarding His Second Coming have been fulfilled either in the coming of the,Holy Spirit at Pente cost, or at the coming of Christ at the death of the individual believer, or in His coming at the Destruction of Jeru salem; but every attempt in this direc tion has so utterly failed and this posi tion was so evidently untenable and the alleged fulfillment was so utterly unlike the promise and prophecy that this posi tion has been given up, and now those who are determined to deny His coming, and His premillennial coming, resort to the Shailer Matthews’ method of seeking to discredit these prophecies by saying they were merely “the belief (notions) of the early Christians,” that they have been obtained from the Jewish apocryphal apocalyptic literature of the second or third centuries or so before Christ—1 which by the way is an assertion without one single scintilla of historical proof. They deliberately seek to obscure the unquestionable fact that these teachings were not merely the views held by early Christians, but th e explicit teachings OP THE DIVINELY INSPIBED APOSTLES AND OF J esu s C h rist H im self whom God accred ited as His Only Begotten Son and as a Teacher sent from God who spoke the very words of God, by raising Him from the dead and of whom He once said with audible voice from Heaven: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; HEAR YE HIM." I don’t think He has ever said anything of that kind about Shailer Matthews or Professor Case. I really would like to know what He does say about them.
III. How th e L ord J esu s is C oming B ack . We have seen that our Lord Jesus has gone from the earth and is now absent. We have seen also the certainty that the Lord Jesus is coming back to this earth, and now comes the question, How is He coming? On this the Bible is very clear and definite and explicit, and what the Bible says is widely divergent from the baseless speculations and wild vagaries of Shailer Matthews, “Pastor” Russell, “Mother” Eddy and certain Los Angeles preachers. 1. jj In the first place the Bible tells us that H e is coming personally . We,see this in Acts 1 : 1 0 ,1 1 “And while they (i.e. all the apostles) were looking stead fastly into heaven as He (i.e. Jesus) went, behold two men stood by them in white apparel; which also said, ye men of Gali lee, why stand ye looking into heavent This Jesus which was received up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye behold him going into heaven.” The Lord Jesus Himself says in the passage already quoted—John 14:3: “7 will come again, and receive you unto myself, that where I am, there ye may be also.” The Apostle Paul says in I. Thess. 4:16,17: “For THE LORD HIMSELF shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the Archangel, and with • the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise' first: then we that are alive that are left, shall together with them be caught up in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord." Now it is plain as (lay that these pass ages teach that Jesus is coming ■back personally . We hear much in this day of the “ coming of th e K ingdom ”, by which is meant all kinds of social uplift and socio logical readjustment, but what the Lord Jesus Himself and the Apostles talked about and promised as the blessed hope of the church, as the one and only hope
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