Why I Preach the Second Coming

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?

I have told you what it would mean to me.

What would it mean to you, to some of you who have so much invested in Laurel Hill, in that white and beautiful city of the dead, by the banks of your winding river?

When I was a boy my father took me there and I watched as the winds rippled through the long grasses, and I could hear the wash of the river below, I was startled and sometimes shivered as I walked under the shadow of tall monuments, carved figures, and by stately tombs of marble. And once I started back and broke into tears at the sight of the sculptured form of “Old Mortality” bending above a slab with chisel and mallet in hand – and I suppose is there still, grown older in his stony face because more stained with the passing years.

What would it mean to you whose loved ones are lying in that cemetery or any other of the sleeping places of the dead?

Ah! it would mean the home-coming, the greeting, the rapturous kiss and hand-clasp of recognition, the joy of that heaven life that shall know no end and that immortality that shall compensate for all the weariness and the heartache of the mortal path here below.

Yes! it would mean to those of us who by faith in Christ Jesus are children of the living God, the gathering to our arms again of those who have left us and for whom our arms still ache to enfold them once more. And O my soul! it would mean the seeing of Him whom our soul loveth and who unfailingly has loved us; it would mean that boon of boons – seeing Him face to face.

Do you wonder the Holy Spirit who is the finger of God has written over against the word “hope,” that qualification, “blessed,” and affixed to it the demonstrative, “that,” so it doth read: “That blessed hope”?

And yet! and yet! there are men who call themselves the ministers of Christ who would blot out that hope and take away the vision of it from our souls.

With cold, acute, metallic voices in which you may hear the sound of the wheels of machinery and the buzz of business, they tell us that should the Lord suddenly come it would paralyze all industry, put an end to commerce and to trade, overthrow all progress, make worthless every high endeavour for the betterment of man, shut the doors of school, of college and university, render useless the architect’s and builder’s plans, throw down the mechanic’s tools, the artist’s brush, the sculptor’s chisel, the writer’s pen, still the orator’s tongue, make null and void the legislator’s high emprise and draw a line of atrophy across the unfolding processes of human life.

Oh, foolish, blind and slow to believe, do you not see that if the Lord should come it would lift our so-called civilization out of the slime and shame of its brazen folly and reeking, though perfumed sin into the glory of eternal righteousness and peace?

Do you not see that it would, at last, make men immortal and give them such beauty of form, such sanity and such culture and worth of being as all the gymnasia and all the eugenics of the hour have failed and will ever fail to achieve?

Do you not see that if the Lord should suddenly come it would at once open the gates of knowledge and bring us face to face with the secrets of the universe and make us masters under God of all natural laws such as all the curriculæ of all the institutions of learning, of applied science and philosophy have failed to impart?

Do you not see it would be the fulfillment of the highest ideals and aspirations and would make man what the creator of heaven and earth originally intended man should be – not an animal working with tools and breaking his heart in vain finally to achieve – but a very God who should speak and it should be done, command and it should stand fast; and who should be the incarnate revelation, the eternal enthronement of the invisible God, in power, in character and holiness?