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Still these disciples were afraid, afraid it could not be true.
Then He showed them His hands and His feet that they might see where the nails had gone in, torn through the flesh and left eternal wounds as the chevrons of glory.
And still the silence of hope mingled with fear.
Then he said:
“Have ye here any meat?”
And they gave Him a piece of a broiled fish, and of an honeycomb.
And He took and did eat before them.
He had said to them He was flesh and bones, not flesh and blood.
He was not flesh and blood because in the sin-offering all the blood must be poured out at the bottom of the altar, and He was Himself the antitypical sin-offering. He had poured out His blood. It had run as a living stream from every vein and artery.
Because He was the sin-offering in death, in resurrection He became for the first time a priest – high priest after the order, not of Aaron, but Melchisedec.
That very morning as the high priest He had ascended to heaven, within the vail, and sprinkled His redeeming blood (how is not revealed) on the eternal throne, changing it from the throne of judgment to a throne of grace. That night He stood before them He was their high priest, not of earth, but heaven. He breathed upon them, imparted to them the Holy Spirit – the Comforter – linking them to His immortal body. He remained with them, going and coming, during forty days, operating with them officially by and through the Holy Spirit as His unseen executive; for we are told that, “until the day he was taken up he through the Holy Ghost had given commandments unto the apostles;” and then, finally, as this scene in the book of Acts shows us, ascended to His high-priestly function and unceasing service of intercession.
He is seated in heaven now, seated there as the same Jesus who met His disciples that first Sunday night, the same Jesus who ascended out of their midst from Olivet. This same Jesus! The same not only in realistic, human body, but the same in character, full of the same measureless compassion and grace as when He sat on the well curb in Samaria and though thirsting as a real man for real water offered to give to the sinful woman who by divine and eternal ordination met him there, the water that should be in her as a well of water springing up into everlasting life.
This same Jesus is coming again, not a phantom, not an impalpable spirit, not a ghost Christ, but a Christ who is a real man of real flesh and real bones.
This is the key-note of the book of Acts.
He who died for men, who has sanctioned the Holy Spirit to operate in His name, speak in His name, reveal to us the things that are His and show us things to come concerning Him, He is coming again, coming not only as very God, the Holy One of Israel, He who has been exalted to be both Lord and Christ, but as this loving, tender, compassionate Jesus, and in a body that may be seen and handled – a body of flesh and bones.
In Romans we have the promise the Lord is coming to bruise Satan under His feet and the feet of His saints; and according to the calendar of heaven and the way in which they measure time there this great event must come to pass, as it is written, “shortly.”
In First Corinthians the Lord is coming to raise the dead who shall be His “at his coming.”
In Second Corinthians He is coming to transfigure the living who believe in Him and thus clothe them with their “house from heaven,” give them the body that shall be the handiwork of God and not man.
In Philippians our citizenship is in a country which is in heaven from whence we are to look for a Saviour, even the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall change this body of our mortal humiliation that it may be fashioned like unto His immortal and glorious body, a change which He will effectuate by that mighty power according to which He is able to subdue all things unto Himself.
In Colossians our life is hid with Christ in God, a double environment of security, and when Christ who is our life shall appear, we shall appear with Him also in glory.
In the epistles to the Thessalonians each chapter closes with a testimony to the Second Coming.
In the first epistle in the first chapter the Apostle commends the Thessalonian Church because they had turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God and to wait for His Son from heaven. From the beginning the Apostle Paul taught the new converts the next possible event might be the Coming of that Lord whom he had declared had been sacrificed for them, was now risen and in heaven. This was the one supreme thing for which they were to be in readiness every day – the Second Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
In the second chapter he assures the Thessalonians he will meet them in the presence of the Lord at His Coming; when He comes and they are all gathered before Him, saved through the Gospel Paul has preached to them in the demonstration of the Spirit and power, they will be the guarantee and occasion of the crown he shall receive.
In the third chapter he exhorts them to increase and abound in love to one another that their hearts may be established unblameable in holiness before the Lord when He shall come the Second time with all His saints.
In the fourth chapter he announces as a special revelation from the Lord that the Lord Himself is coming to awaken those whom He has put to sleep in His name. He will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and the trump of God. The dead in Him shall rise first, then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up with them in clouds to meet the Lord in the air; so shall we ever be with the Lord and with one another.
In the fifth chapter the Coming of the Lord for His saints as just noted in the fourth and preceding chapter will bring in the day of the Lord; and we further learn this coming for the saints not only precedes the day of the Lord, but as the introduction to it will be as secret, sudden and unknown to the world as is in general the coming of a thief.
In the second epistle, in the first chapter the Lord is seen coming with all His saints to execute judgment on the ungodly and the unbelieving.
In the second chapter we learn the word, “Rapture,” so often given as the name and title for the translation of the Church to meet the Lord, while it may be a deducible truth and exegetically, or, rather philologically sustained, is not the Holy Ghost title. The true and Scriptural title is: “Our gathering together unto Him.”
In this chapter we learn also when the Church has been gathered to the Lord in heaven the man of sin, the Antichrist will be revealed; then will the Lord appear in glory, overthrow him and his league of nations and set up the heaven-ordained kingdom of righteousness and peace.
In the third chapter the Apostle prays the Lord may direct their hearts into the love of God and into – patient waiting for Christ.
In the First Epistle to the Thessalonians the Lord comes for His Church.
In the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians He comes with His Church.
In First Timothy He is coming that He may be shown forth as the blessed and only Potentate, the King of kings, and Lord of lords.
In Second Timothy He is coming to judge the quick and the dead and to give reward to all those who love His appearing.
Titus gives us the inspired and official title of the Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ as, “That Blessed Hope.”
In Hebrews we see this age is the antitypical Day of Atonement; just as at the close of the day in Israel the people were waiting for the man who led away the scapegoat into the wilderness to come back without it as evidence their typical redemption was complete and secure for another year; just so our Lord Jesus Christ having appeared in the end of the age to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself, reconcile the world to God and bring in the day of grace and salvation, to them that look for Him shall He come the “second time, without sin, unto salvation”; that is, He will come back not as the sin offering, but as the triumphant Redeemer and as witness that our redemption will then be completed by Him in the immortal bodies He shall give us.
James testifies that in the closing hours of this age Capital and Labour will look at each other with wrinkled brows, clenched hands and nervous, impatient expectation.
He exhorts the Christian labourer to be patient because, as he says, “the Coming of the Lord draweth nigh,” is so near, so imminent He standeth as a judge – verily “at the door” – and ready to intervene.
In the First Epistle of Peter the Lord is coming to justify the faith of His elect.
In the Second Epistle He is coming to bring in the new heavens and the new earth.
In the First Epistle of John we who believe are sons of God. It is not yet manifested to the world what we really are, nor what we shall be; but we know when He shall appear we shall be like Him for we shall see Him as He is. When He shines out we shall shine out with Him.
We are told every one who has this hope in him, purifieth himself even as he is pure.
And thus in this special fashion the Holy Spirit affirms the Second Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ is not only the climacteric of our avouchment as sons of God, but, when held as a hope in the heart, will keep us pure and clean as the Holy Christ Himself.
In the Second Epistle of John we are warned false teachers will abound; teachers who shall deny the eternal incarnation of the Son of God. They will deny He is coming the Second time; but, above all, they will deny He could possibly come in the flesh.
The Apostle unhesitatingly affirms those who hold and teach this falsehood are nothing less than antichrists; and he warns us as faithful followers of the true Christ not to receive them into our houses, nor bid them Godspeed.
Jude is the smallest, that is to say, the shortest, of all the epistles. It is a clasp between the Old and the New Testaments.
Jude tells us Enoch the seventh man who lived on the earth testified, not of the first, but the Second Coming, saying:
“Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints.”
Then we find ourselves in the Revelation.
This is the book of the Consummation.
The supreme subject is the Second Coming.
There are twenty-two chapters.
Each of the chapters portrays conditions and circumstances leading up to the great climax – the Second Coming and the immense and measureless consequences – the millennial reign and the eternal state.
The book is like the roof of a great cathedral, like the interior of the roof, groined and panelled – each panel a chapter.
It is like the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in which, however, may be found figures and forms such as Michel Angelo never drew nor such even as his imperial and suggestive mind could conceive.
You will find in these chapters the figures of wild beasts, the dragon, fallen angels, fiends from the pit, that old Serpent called the Devil and Satan. If you will read and listen you will hear the blast of trumpets, the breaking of vials, the sounds of woe, the tramp of marching feet, the clash of battle, fire falling out of the heavens, trees and grass in flame, the waves of the sea turned to blood, fountains and streams become as wormwood and gall, the sun as black as a starless midnight, the moon hanging in the lowering heavens like a clot of blood, earthquakes, the scarlet tongues of outpouring volcanoes, thunderings and lightnings, all manner of wickedness and pervading sin, a world quivering as a ship in the storm, the bending heavens as though unbolted and insecure, all foundations apparently shattered and the universe itself as though rushing forward to its funeral pyre.
Heaven opens and the Lord comes forth riding a white horse, followed by armies on white horses, the horses the symbols of His power, each hoof beat as it smites the slant of heaven the sound of swift descending judgment.
On the Lord’s head are many crowns.
He is wrapped in a garment dyed in blood.
His eyes are as a flame of fire. His glances penetrate to the secret intents and purposes of the heart. They get behind every cloak of deception and every pretense. All the spotted nakedness of interior and intensive sin is revealed. Nothing remains in shadow, everything is illuminated to bareness, and the searching light of His looks goes through every fibre of being.
He is coming to reign and rule.
All the things the chapters record have been driving us to look forward to that; the woe, the anguish and the hell on earth have been pleading and crying out for a master to master and put an end to the cataclysms of catastrophic iniquity; the very nature of things has been testifying that He must come.
He is responding to the demand that lies in the nature of things.
He is coming to reign and rule as a king. He is not coming with an olive branch in one hand and a cooing dove on His shoulder.
Nay!
He is coming with a rod of iron. He is coming to trample all opposition beneath His feet, put down all rule and authority, break to pieces and shatter as a potter’s vessel the pride of nations and the self-exaltation of man.
He is coming to establish peace, but not by means of compromise, by gentle and persuasive ways, but by war and as a man of war, as the man who is very God and judge omnipotent.
The book closes with the thrice repeated announcement from the Lord Himself:
“Behold, I am coming quickly.”
This is the last utterance of the Lord from heaven.
To this the Church replies with its last recorded prayer:
“Amen, even so, come, Lord Jesus.”
When you close the book you feel the next thing is – the Coming of the Lord.
If the value of a statement or doctrine is to be measured by the number of times repeated, then, since from Genesis to Revelation, in every form of human language the Second Coming is proclaimed, is stamped upon almost every page of the Bible, is inwrought with every fibre of truth it finally presents; since in the New Testament alone it is mentioned directly and indirectly more than three hundred times, as there is no other theme in the Bible that approaches it in frequency of repetition, it should seem that this event and doctrine of the Second Coming with all its promises and certified consequences should easily be of supreme and all-compelling importance; and because the Holy Spirit has made it of such importance I am under bonds to preach it.
Those who persist in saying it is incidental, secondary and sporadic might well be said to be of that class of theological disputants who never study their Bible; for the fact is should you cut out every reference to the Second Coming, its cognate truths and all the events to which it gives emphasis, you would have but a fragment of the Bible; and the Book upon which faith is founded, from which hope casts its glances heavenward, sees light in the grave and immortality assured, would be but as a broken reed, a garment of beauty torn and shredded, or as a harp whose main chord had been snapped asunder.
II
The Second Coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ is Bound up With Every Fundamental Doctrine, Every Sublime Promise and Every Exhortation to High, to Holy and Practical Christian Living
IT is bound up with every fundamental doctrine.
The resurrection from the dead, the transfiguration of the living, the judgment seat of Christ, the judgment of the living nations, the consequent judgment of the white throne, the rewards of the righteous and the punishment of the wicked.
It is bound up with every sublime promise.
The recognition of the dead, the overthrow of Satan, the deliverance of creation, the triumph of God and Christ and the eternal felicity of the saints.
It is bound up with every exhortation to high, to holy and practical Christian living.
We are not to forsake the assembling of ourselves together as the manner of some is. On the Lord’s day we are to break bread and drink the fruit of the vine, show forth the Lord’s death and make known to heaven and to earth that the only ground of approach to a holy God is the sacrificial offering and vicarious sufferings of the Son of God and God the Son, and that on the ground of His atoning blood as our sin offering and personal substitute we claim Him as redeemer, saviour and interceding priest.
We are to love God and love one another.
We are not to judge one another.
We are not to cast stumbling blocks in each other’s path.
We are to walk worthy of our vocation.
We are to let our moderation be known to all men.
We are to be patient, long-suffering and forbearing.
We are to engage continually in prayer and supplication.
We are to live blamelessly before men and holily before God.
As pastors we are to shepherd the sheep over whom God has made us to be overseers.
We are to feed the flock, not with the philosophies and fictions of men, but with the truth of God.
We are to restore the wandering, sustain the weak and comfort the sorrowing.
We are to go to the house of mourning and give consolation to those who are Christians and who weep above their Christian dead.
As preachers we are to preach the Word. We are to preach in season and out of season, and to exhort with all long-suffering and doctrine.
We are exhorted to this high, this holy, this exalted and practical Christian living, this reincarnation of Christ in daily experience, this translation of His character, this manifestation of His guiding and ruling presence, not by the fact that we must die and appear before God, but by the fact the Lord Himself is coming, may come at any time, that any moment we may meet Him at His judgment seat.
In all the universe of God there is nothing so impressive as the thought that you, that I, that we must give a personal account to God for the manner in which we have used our time, our talent, our opportunity and substance; and when we are told – as we are told in Holy Scripture – that any moment we may be summoned to give an account of our stewardship, and that without dying, just suddenly, without a moment’s warning, translated bodily and with all the sense of the daily life we have been living upon us into the presence of Him whose name we have been professing – impressiveness has reached its ultimate and exhortation the fullest leverage of appeal.
And he who says the Coming of Christ considered as a doctrine, as a truth or a motive, is not intensely practical and all-compelling to Christian devotion and service, is either blindly and excuselessly ignorant of the Word of God or brutally and perversely guilty of denying a truth that flashes like lightning from one end of the Bible to the other and illuminates every hortative passage in the Word of God.
When thus you are face to face with the indisputable fact that every basic doctrine of the Christian faith, every outshining promise of hope, of comfort, of consolation, of abiding peace, every appeal to the noblest and purest life as a Christian, every demand that the Christian shall unceasingly be the light of heaven in the spiritual darkness of earth is bound up inextricably with the fact of the Second Coming, it carries with it the inevitable corollary that the Second Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ as a certified and imminent event is the very sum and substance of all available motives that can lead to a life of practical service to God and man.
III
Only at the Coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ Will Redemption be Complete and the Blood of the Cross be Justified
OUR Lord Jesus Christ did not come into this world that He might go through the unspeakable horror of the cross; He did not hang on that brutal and torturing instrument of death as the criminal of the universe; He did not receive the down sweep of the essential antagonism of a holy God against the sin He represented; He did not cry the cry of the lost, “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?”; He was not flung out like a derelict thing into the black, starless night of God’s inexorable law, measureless wrath and indignation where His humanity unanchored and alone was forsaken both by God and man; He did not hang there in the torment of His body, suffering all the agony the most exquisitely wrought, nerve-centered body of the universe could suffer of physical pain and anguish; God did not make Him to be sin and treat Him as the blackest and most repulsive thing in existence; He did not lay upon Him the weight and demerit of a world’s guilt that He might suffer in His innocence, His purity and innate sinlessness on behalf of the vilest outcast this side of Gehenna, the lake of fire, just that He might keep us from lying, cheating, swearing, getting drunk, giving ourselves up to immorality, licentiousness and sensualism; He did not send Jesus Christ His only begotten and well-beloved Son to die a spectacle to heaven, to earth and hell that He might make us merely decent and right and morally correct in our relations to one another. All that is involved in the fact of redemption just as fragrance is involved and included in the rose, as harmony is expected to be a part of music and rhythm as well as metre a part of verse and song.
Cleanness and morality are involved quantities in a Christian. The moment the new life of the risen Christ is wrought in a believer and he is linked up by the Holy Ghost to the glorified body of the Son of God he has in him all the impulse and power of the highest morality, the most exalted purity, the rarest spirituality and the discernment of spiritual things. All that is self-evident – but the Son of God came into this world and went through the amazing tragedy and sacrifice of the cross to do something more than to make us merely moral and good. He came into the world, He died the foreordained death of the cross that He might deliver us from death and the grave.
Death is the blackest and most shameful blot on the face of the earth, the grave the most repulsive of scandals, drawing the trench of its corruption and stain round the girdle of the globe.
To bring a human being into the world, give him no choice of father or mother, of place, of time and circumstance, endow him with a brain to think, a heart to feel and love and then set him face to face with death, hide from him the hour of his going like a criminal who knows not the hour of his execution; to allow the old to live till they are withered, shrivelled and helpless, a burden to others and a still greater burden to themselves, cursing the fact they must live and yet afraid to die; to take a young man in the splendour of his youth, on the threshold of assured success, snatch him away without warning from the parents devoted to him, the wife who loves him and the children dependent on him; and then leave them both, the decrepit and useless old and the needed young to drop into the tongueless silence of the grave, that silence broken only by the sound of the clods as they fall on the coffin lid or the plash of tears, or the choking sob; to allow the living whose hearts are torn and twisted and smashed by the robbery that death brings upon them to stand there and strangle themselves with the unanswered and unanswerable questions: “Whence,” “What,” and “Whither,” and then say all this is the work of a good, a compassionate, a tender and loving God, and that death is as natural as birth?
Nay!
Those who say and teach that death is as natural as birth are guilty of pure unintellectualism and are unwarranted deniers of the facts.
The birth of a child is like the coming of the dawn. It is like the note of a new and joyous song. It is the revelation of a new world, a world of life, of hope, of promised and larger activities. No one who is sane and true and wise will deliberately seek to hinder birth; but death! ah! everything is against death and by right against it.
Every fibre in the body repudiates death. Pain is the protest of life against it and the scout that brings in news of its approach. The brain, the mind, the heart shiver at it, not merely because of the native fear at the unknown, but at the mockery it makes of life, the uselessness of living a time, at the longest, so brief, so full of disappointment and bitterness, a life where plans are never accomplished nor hopes fulfilled, where tears and sorrow outweigh laughter and song.
Every remedy taken from materia medica, every operation of the surgeon’s knife that adds even a day to the sufferer’s existence, every hospital, every precaution and invention to prevent accident, all the genius exercised by man to conserve health and strength are a protest against death and a proclamation that it is unnatural, a discord and a wrong.
Every human being who has the slightest pulse of sentiment, who is not sunken in the soddenness of moral unconsciousness feels that death is the shadow shutting out the sun of day and hiding the stars of night, the false note that breaks the lilt in any song, the thief who takes the treasure no money can replace, the mocker who bids us readjust our days and live as though those whom we have loved and lost had never been a part of us, so that their going has put more of death in those of us who remain to live than life – even the brute beast feels and knows death is – an enemy.
Nor does God Himself leave us in any doubt about it.
He says death is an enemy; even as it is written:
“The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.”
And since in itself it is an enemy, it is, necessarily, the work of an enemy.
It is the work of an enemy who has the power of death.
He who has the power of death is – the Devil; even as it is written:
“Him that had the power of death, that is, the devil.”
The Son of God came into the world that He might destroy the Devil and his work of death.
He came to abolish death and bring life and immortality to light.
He came to make us something more than – just moral.
He came to make us – immortal.
There is only one man in the universe who has immortality; and that man is He who is our Lord Jesus Christ, very God and yet true and actual man.
There is not an immortal human being on earth to-day.
There is no such thing as an immortal soul.
But here I bid you halt!
Let no one take up this statement and go hence and say I teach the final annihilation of the soul.
He who should go forth and say that would be, after what I shall further tell you, a robber of truth and character.
On this round earth at this hour there is no man who has spoken more, written more and, under God, done more to rebuke and smite this slavering, slobbering, unintellectual and Devil-inspired deception known as Russellism, Christadelphianism and Seventh Day Adventism than the man who now speaks to you.
I affirm here that by the will of God the soul must exist forever whether it be in heaven or in hell; but, I say to you the preacher who seeks to deny and overthrow the doctrine of annihilation by defending the immortality of the soul is beaten before he begins. He has his pains for his labour. He can find no such expression as “immortal soul” in the Bible nor any such doctrine taught there. Above all, he is guilty of excuseless philological blundering. The soul is immaterial. Immortal is applied to that which is material. The words, “immortal,” and “immortality” are never applied in the New Testament to the soul – never! but always and exclusively to the body.
To be immortal means to have a deathless, incorruptible body like unto that of the Son of God.
This, and this alone – as related to man – is Scriptural immortality. The Son of God came into the world to give this boon of immortality to men.
This is the supreme objective of redemption.
Till that objective is obtained redemption is not complete and the blood of the cross is not justified.
Do you call the redemption of Paul complete so long as his body lies mingled with the dust of the highway by the banks of that yellow Tiber where he was slain?
Do you call complete the redemption of those you love and I love so long as the Devil like the strong man armed with the law holds the mortgage on their bodies and keeps them in his dark and worm-filled house – the grave?
It is true, blessedly true, thank God, the moment a believer dies he is absent from his home in the body and immediately present at his home with the Lord in the third heaven, in the beautiful country of Paradise, in the Holy City, the place prepared.
It is true the dear departed ones are clothed with the white robe of immaculate light woven on the unjarring looms of heaven, a temporary clothing which preserves their form and makes them visible and recognizable to one another; but with it all they are disembodied, and in spite of the comfort and the consolation of it, in spite of the fact that their state is “far better” than this at its best, still they are souls whose vehicle is no longer body, but spirit (wherefore after death they are sometimes spoken of as spirits); nevertheless, the Son of God did not come to make us eternal, even if happy – ghosts.
If Christians should continue to die and should remain as white clothed ghosts in heaven forever they would be an incongruous environment and abiding scandal to the immortality of the Son of God Himself. A living, immortal man shining in a glorified human body surrounded by bodiless souls forever! What a contradiction that would be, what a scandal, indeed. It would be the declaration that the Son of God had power to rise from the dead, make His own body immortal, impervious to death, but in respect to those for whom He died and who died trusting in His promise He either did not have the power or did not care to keep His promise.
