Kitabı oku: «Why I Preach the Second Coming», sayfa 3
Such a conclusion in either member of the proposition is impossible. It is impossible, for no such postulate as inability or faithlessness can be laid against the Son of God.
By His own immortality as the first-fruits of them that slept, as the ordained forerunner and sample of all those whom He has redeemed He is, and in the nature of things, under bonds to give immortality to each, to raise the dead and transfigure the living in His likeness.
As the dead can be raised and the living changed only when He is personally present then He must come to this world again to give that immortality of which seated on yonder throne in heaven He is the promise and the pledge.
He made this promise by the grave of Lazarus.
Standing there with His cheeks wet with tears of sorrow over the one He loved and in profound sympathy with the grief-stricken sisters, groaning in Himself, not merely as one who was under the spell of sorrow and heartache, but full of “indignant protest” (this is the meaning of the word “to groan”) against the havoc of death as the work of that being whom we so familiarly call “Devil,” without stopping to measure his dignity, malignity and power, He said:
“I am the resurrection and the life; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live:
And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.”
Wondrous, gracious, far reaching and full of measureless comfort is the promise, but nine out of ten who repeat it seem never to have comprehended the full import of it.
For this is what He meant.
Listen to it as I quote it in its fullness of intent:
“I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet – when I come again – shall he live:
And whosoever liveth and believeth in me – when I come again – shall never die.”
Nor is this a fictional fancy of mine, but the direct declaration of the Holy Spirit to the Church speaking through the Apostle Paul; for he says:
“Behold, I shew you a mystery: we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,
In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump; for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.
For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.
So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then (and not till then – not when we die and go to heaven, but when the dead are raised and the living are changed – then – and not till then) shall be brought to pass the saying that is written (written by the Prophet Isaiah in the twenty-fifth chapter of his prophecy), death is swallowed up in victory.
O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”
And mark it well, the context of this Holy Ghost promise is the declaration that the resurrection of the dead, the transfiguration of the living, this changing from mortality to immortality will be the resurrection and the transfiguration of those who are “Christ’s at His coming.”
Yes! He will come.
He will descend from heaven with a shout of command. He will pass it on to the archangel. The archangel will pass it to the angel who is called the “trump of God.” He will cause a sound, a blast, an utterance of power at which the doors of graves of every sort shall open outward, every secret hiding place of the purchased dead will be revealed and the sacred dust will bloom with life; for, in the body of every regenerated soul there is planted the germ of the new body; and just as the buried seed is linked by the unseen air to the fructifying sun in heaven and as at a given moment we call the germination is quickened and at last comes forth in new form yet the same essential embodiment as when planted; so, the regeneration nucleus of the new body is held by the Holy Spirit (of which the air is the symbol) to the risen, glorified body of the Son of God in heaven; and no matter what may befall the body in which it was buried it will abide to that hour we call the resurrection and transfiguration and at the shout, the voice and action of the trump of God will come forth in the glow of unfolded and eternal beauty as the sheath, the house, the home, the perfect dwelling place, the royal robe of the souls the Lord shall bring with Him; while the living shall flash forth in the same immortality and glory.
Yes! the dust of death shall bloom and mortality shall put on immortality at the Coming of the Lord.
And I for one want Him to come.
I have loved ones waiting within the gates of the upper city for that morning hour.
I have one there my heart in these days yearns to see.
But a short time ago death with rude and sudden hand snatched from me my only child, the son of my heart; a son grown to splendid young manhood; a son who loved me, reverenced me, believed as I believe, a member of my own Church, baptized by my own hand in early days: a son on whom I hoped to lean in peace if the shadows should deepen round me ere my Lord might come. And in the going of that beloved son of mine the light of day has seemed at times to fail, the stars of heaven have grown so dim and far away I think of them often as tears of distant eyes that pity me. There are moments when I crave him as a hungry man does food and as a thirsty man in desert ways yearns for a draught of limpid waters. I have a hurt here in the heart of me no medicine of earth can cure; but because I know when the Lord comes this son of mine shall rise and I shall meet him and the old glad life renew in larger, richer, fuller measure; and because I know there is only the sound of the trump between me and that longed-for hour; that the door of heaven is always ajar and my Lord may come at any moment and bring us to the hand clasp and the love embrace again, I bear my hurt, I rest in the Lord and preach this blessed hope to other hearts that ache – the Coming of Him who is the resurrection and the life and whose last earthward utterance to His Church is:
“Behold, I come quickly.”
IV
Not Till Our Lord Jesus Christ Comes the Second Time Will the Church be Exalted into Her True Function of Rulership Over the World
THE Church was not sent into the world to convert or Christianize it.
It was sent into the world to preach the Gospel to every creature.
It was not to condone the world but to condemn it.
With its twin doctrines of Incarnation and Regeneration it was to ring the knell of evolution and deny the hope of any saving energy in the flesh.
It was not to flatter, to paint, to gild nor endeavour in any wise to reform or organize the world.
It was to deal with the world, with the system called the world, as a ship pounding to pieces, and pounding helplessly, upon the rocks of fallen human nature, the dethronement of God in the soul and the enthronement and exaltation of self-interest in the soul.
The Church in its ministry and widely commissioned effort was to plunge, as a well-equipped and perfectly manned life-boat may do, into the sea and surf of natural and Satanic things and get men out of an old system under the doom and judgment of God into Christ as the head of a new system under grace and the coming glory of God.
The Church was not to build up a kingdom during the absence of the Lord.
On the contrary, she was to recognize herself as the affianced bride of a rejected king and coming bridegroom.
She was to walk in separation from the world, refusing the seductive enticements of her would-be lovers and with an upward and heavenly look serve while she waited for a returning Lord.
The Lord did not come.
The Church grew weary of her vigil.
She exchanged the heavenly for the earthly look.
She met the Devil and felt the magic of his bewitching glances.
He had led her Lord to the mount of temptation. He had shown Him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. He offered them to Him on condition that He would turn His feet out of the pathway that led to the sacrificial cross. He offered them on condition that He should refuse to go to the cross and there in the agony of His soul and body and on the loom of His vicarious sufferings weave the seamless robe of divine righteousness for sinful men.
The Lord refused.
The Devil turned and slew Him.
He now led the willing Church to the same mountain height of temptation.
He tempted her with the same temptation he had offered her Lord: The rulership of the world.
If she would turn aside from a heaven-ordained bridegroom and a king whose face she could not see, she might win the world as her kingdom and rule it in spite of the cross.
The offer of world rulership sounded pleasant in her ears.
She yielded.
She fell into the arms of the world.
The world became her paramour.
She became the world’s mistress.
Out of that ungodly and sensual alliance was born the illegitimate child, that woful ecclesiastical offspring, we call the Roman Catholic Church.
The Roman Catholic Church became the Holy Roman Empire.
The Empire was the Church.
For long and dismal ages the Roman Church exhibited to perfection the evil, the folly and fatality of that false and deceptive proposition that the Church is the kingdom of Christ on earth.
Then came the Reformation. It so smote the Catholic Church that men imagined the tiara to be broken, crushed and scattered to the winds forever.
They were mistaken.
It came from underneath that blow almost as if it had risen from the dead.
To-day it is more populous than ever, having a membership of at least two hundred millions. It has a more intensely emphasized solidarity. It is filled with enthusiasm, with ever-increasing arrogance and persistent aggression.
It is the religious incubus of the hour, the spiritual paralysis of nations and their most dangerous political menace.
With brazen effrontery and calculating boldness it has its clutch upon the throat of this Republic, controls its government from the Presidential office down through army and navy, has open mass in the shipyards of the latter, in camp and barracks its priests are masters and its wily knights of Columbus have obtained governmental favours and consideration the Young Men’s Christian Association would not dare to claim.
It rules your cities, holds the balance of political power and can, when it will, elect a President, and will promptly do so when the candidate for that high office shall be willing, as already it has been done by the present occupant of that office, to visit the Vatican or officially recognize the civil as well as religious authority of the Pope or receive the Apostolic delegate of the Papal See.
The clutch of Romanism with its strangle hold is on the throat of what remains of Protestantism.
Protestantism is the after birth of the Reformation.
Protestantism repudiated all the temporalities of Rome but held on to the proposition that the Church is the kingdom of Christ on earth.
Protestantism is to-day broken up into multiplying fragments. If there be any unity remaining in it it is the unity that comes from the compromising denial of the convictions that led to the original break into fragments; a unity that hopes to maintain itself by classifying many of its former convictions as “non-essentials” and thus constitutes a combination that must become more and more colourless and inefficient in respect to doctrine.
Some of its theological institutions are nothing better than clearing houses of infidelity and the curricula made up of Jericho theology. It has universities in which many of the professors have been graduated in Germany, having passed through the poison gas factory of the Berlin university, and under the camouflage department of “sacred literature” are sending out the mentally and spiritually asphyxiating poison of German rationalism, inoculating every fresh lot of newly made ministers and would-be missionaries with rank unbelief and Bible repudiation, distributing the poison into the back counties as well as municipal centers until there are scores of men who once stood for a whole Gospel and a certified Word of God who now stand first on one foot then on the other debating with themselves whether this Scripture that was once considered holy and sufficient is after all a revelation from God or an invention of man.
A large number of men who are at the front in the teaching, the management, the organization and control of the churches of the different denominations repudiate practically every fundamental doctrine of the Christian faith.
They deny the Virgin birth.
The denial of the Virgin birth puts a stain upon the mother of Jesus as of a woman who has broken wedlock and sends her son forth as a bastard, an illegitimate who had no legal right to come into the world; and then illogically, if not hypocritically, those who deny it bid us take this son and make Him the exemplar of righteousness, forgetting or ignoring the self-evident fact that if, indeed, He had but a human and natural father then was He bred in sin and unfit to be set up as the supreme standard of righteousness and holiness among men.
There are those who deny the sacrificial character of the death of the cross.
They repudiate atonement by the shedding of blood.
When we tell them it is written without shedding of blood there is no remission and it is the blood of Jesus Christ, God’s Son, that alone cleanseth from all sin they fling up their hands in protest, tell us we are to be numbered among the figures of the past and that the theology we seek to maintain is the theology of the butcher shop, the barbarous doctrine of the shambles and the shadow of old-time tribal gods whose vengefulness and wrath could be appeased only by the murder of a victim.
They repudiate the doctrine of the bodily resurrection of the Lord.
His body has long ago mingled with the dust of Palestine and been blown afar by careless winds. If He rose at all it was as the principle of righteousness and truth, whatever such a resurrection may mean. They will no longer tolerate the insistent need of regeneration. It has been said that “if a man is well born the first time he does not need to be born the second time.”
In the nature of the case such teaching rejects our Lord’s bodily ascension to heaven and His session as a glorified man who is very God at the right hand of the Father.
Above all, and as a further consequent of such an attitude, teachers of this class repudiate with an almost hysterical outcry, not only the thought that the Lord will come a second time to this world, but that those who love Him and yearn to see Him will ever behold Him coming in visible glory so that they may stand face to face with Him and get the very touch of His hands upon them in the vital benediction for which they are longing.
These advanced teachers repudiate the Bible as the inspired, infallible, inerrant Word of God,
The Pentateuch, the writings of Moses, is a bundle of folk lore, Moses himself a fiction no more substantial than Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The historic books of the Old Testament are unreliable and therefore not history at all. The book of the prophet Isaiah instead of one author has many, each in turn contradicting the other. The book of Ezekiel from its incomprehensible wheels as they flash by the banks of the river Chebar to the impossible temple and its animal offerings with the ever-deepening river flowing out of it, is as mystic as the amazing cherubim which the prophet seeks, but apparently fails, to describe. The prophecies of Daniel were written long after the events they pretend to foretell. From Genesis to Malachi the Old Testament is in reality the mixed history of a tribal people with a national god whose attributes and demands are no more authentic and authoritative than those of the gods of Greece and Rome.
The New Testament while a degree of advance on the Old by reason of the progress of the times and the more cultivated environment of its origin is not a whit more divinely inspired. The three Synoptic Gospels are witnesses summoned to court where their success is the contradiction and confusion of the story they attempt to tell. The book of Acts is a combination pamphlet put together by the followers of Peter and Paul as an attempt to compromise between the one who was the Apostle to the Circumcision and the other who was the Apostle to the Gentiles.
The epistles of Paul are filled with the pernicious influence of apocalyptic, Jewish fictions and the crass concept the Apostle had of the kingdom of Christ. Page after page is filled with proof that he expected the Lord to come in his day and was sorely mistaken, making that confession at the close of his writings and turning his attention to death and the grave, no longer having expectation of the Coming of the Lord as the daily hope of the Church.
It is these palpable errors of Paul, his honest, but undoubted mistakes that are wholly responsible for that strange thing (so the Post-millennialists think it) known as Pre-millennialism, a system of teaching which stands for a whole Bible, a Gospel of redeeming blood, a risen and actually coming Saviour, coming again in the flesh, and seeks with an insistent and constant “thus saith the Lord” to win the souls of men to a grace-given and grace-dealing Saviour. (And I may say in passing that Paul, under God, is undoubtedly responsible for this doctrine so persistent and aggressive, this doctrine of Premillennialism.)
To the advanced theological professor Revelation is a piece of crazy quilt patchwork, so full of symbols that have no intelligent meaning, symbols that can be interpreted by twenty different expositors in twenty different ways, is so full of monsters and nightmare doings that only an unbalanced mind could have written it and one equally unbalanced would alone attempt to decipher it.
To these teachers and leaders who count themselves as progressive followers of the Christ of God, who practically set aside the matter of miracles as no more worthy of credence than the stories of Alice in Wonderland, the final place of the deposit of authority is in the individual and subconscious mind.
These professors, teachers and leaders to a large degree are an expression of Protestantism.
Protestantism to-day stands for everything in general and nothing in particular, except its protest against being definite and particular.
It has thrown eschatology overboard.
It no longer has any interest in hereafter things.
There may be a holy city in heaven; it does not know, it will not affirm for nor against; but it does know there are unholy cities on earth.
The streets of the upper city may be paved with gold; it will not enter into controversy about it; but it is certain the streets down here are paved with poor asphalt and trodden by footsore and weary men.
Heaven may be more desirable than earth. The condition there may be a great advance on this. Advanced thinkers in Protestantism will neither affirm nor deny that; but they are convinced the conditions down here should be made much better and if possible even that of heaven on earth.
The truth is, both heaven and hell, like angelology, have fallen out of modern theology. Heaven is too high and hell too deep. No telescope has ever revealed the one and modern sweetness, gentleness and light repudiate the cruelty and sufferings of the other.
The Gospel for the individual soul, the soul the Son of God once outweighed against a whole world in all that the world might stand for of wealth and riches and power and attained ambitions, saying the profit in the gain of a whole world would not equal the loss of one soul, has been set aside.
Instead we have that modern and amazing evangel known as the “Social Gospel.”
Here for illustration are two old people living in a miserable cabin in a reeking, malarial swamp with a dozen children drinking in the poison of their environment. What folly to spend time and money on the father or mother. How inefficient any effort to save the children just one by one. Get to work at once and drain the swamp, drive out the poisonous and infectious insects with which the place is swarming, fill in the land with fine clean earth, plant flowers and sow seeds of fruitful harvests, let the salt sea blow in and breathe across the spot.
The old people may die, in all probability they will, but under right and sanitary conditions the children will grow up into vigorous elements of a strong and worthful society.
Why spend time, money, heart and enthusiasm in seeking to overcome or straighten out and make correct the bent lives that have come down to us through the unsanitary moral conditions of a previous generation? We have had wretched laws, desperate customs, children have grown up under them to become fathers and mothers of generations no better than themselves.
It is neither economy of mind nor matter, so the modernists teach, to build mission houses, gather the people, old and young, and frighten them with the thought that when they die they shall pass into an environment worse than the one in which they are endeavouring to eke out a handicapped existence. Let us do the wise thing – go not so much to the prayer meetings, but to the legislatures, get bills passed, laws made that will drive out the false and disastrous conditions now obtaining; legislate so that it will no longer be possible for people to drink themselves drunk, steep themselves in drugs, smoke themselves yellow with tobacco, yield to the fascination of gambling in any form. Let society be cleaned from these evils and the result will be certain. A generation that shall never see a saloon, a bottle of wine or whiskey; a generation that will never know the meaning of rum and tobacco and will never see a house of ill fame will be a generation that must grow up in righteousness and truth. There will be no more drunken brawls, no multiplied lawlessness, no diseased bodies, no moral leprosy. The world will be safe for each individual. Each individual will have a saved, moral life here, a life lived in obedience to the laws of nature, and as the laws of nature are the laws of God, in obedience to God. And what danger can the hereafter, if there be such a thing as the hereafter, hold for any one who is so obeying the laws of God?
Get society right and the individual will become right.
That is the modern Gospel.
That is the message to a needy world:
“Get society right and the individual will become right.”
I do not interject here in full testimony the nevertheless fact that such a pagan city as Rome, or licentious Corinth or idolatrous Ephesus were lifted into cleanness and moral decency, not by legislative action, by reorganization of local conditions, but by the regeneration of one individual at a time until the divine sanity and personal spirituality enthroned in them built up societies, assemblies of such heaven-given health that the old social conditions were overthrown; so overthrown by the personal Gospel Paul preached that throughout Asia Minor the people had been turned away from the worship of their gods, in Ephesus the temple of Diana was largely deserted and the craftsmen who made the silver, souvenir images of the goddess complained their business was almost at an end.
Strangely enough the advocates of this social Gospel set up the individual life of the Son of God as the means by which society is to be made right; but they set up, not the life He is living now as the risen, glorified God-man; on the contrary the life He lived before He died, the character He exhibited as a social reformer and an exemplar in righteousness. Men, they say, are not to be saved by the death Christ died, but by the life He then lived. He is to be taken as the proof of the doctrine of evolution and the possibilities in the natural man. He is the most advanced son of God who ever lived. All other men are innately sons of God, but undeveloped.
The fact of Christ, it is said, is a sublime encouragement to any man. He has only to copy Him in His words and deeds to find the divine life unfolding. Get away from the sacrificial Christ, this modern Gospel teaches, to the social Christ, the Christ who was interested in the poor and needy and who arraigned wrong social conditions; take the attitude of Christ in relation to the evil of His times and with Him as the inspiration institute right legislation and right social conditions and the world will soon approach the condition of heaven on earth.
This is the infidellic drive of Protestantism today.
Protestantism has come down from the plane of the supernatural to the plane of the natural.
Every day Protestantism is becoming more and more a society for competitive morality.
In short, the Protestantism of the hour is a combination of religiousness, civilization, Christianity, socialism, pagan philosophy, unitarianism and the energy of the flesh.
Nor need we be startled at this as though some strange thing had taken place. Long ago the Apostle warned us that it would be necessary to preach the Word in season and out of season – just as a watchman is under bonds to flash light in the darkness – because the time would come when the Church should have a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof; when it would not endure sound doctrine, but in obedience to the itching of the flesh should heap to itself teachers who should endeavour to respond to these worldly demands; teachers who in the end should turn the people away from the truth and turn them to the fictions and fables of men; teachers of whom the Apostle Peter warned who should bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord who had bought them, teachers whom Jude foresaw would creep in unawares.
Men who consult the chart of a seacoast which marks the place of breakers and treacherous, hidden ledges, now and then thrust out through the white foam like the gleaming sharp teeth of waiting sharks, are not startled when they see the surf breaking at the indicated spot and hear the roar of the waters where it was announced they should lift up their thunder; they are not surprised, instead their confidence in the accuracy of the chart is emphasized.
Likewise when those who have read the forecast in Holy Scripture, while they may feel a certain grief at the facts as they are, rejoice when they see these things that even the failure of man as man and the betrayal of committed trust bear witness to the accuracy of Holy Writ.
With all its failure the professing Church still claims to be the kingdom of Christ on earth and asserts its determination to rule the world. Rome holds to the idea with unfailing faith and with consistent Jesuitical and political scheming is moving forward with united front to temporal sovereignty. Protestantism with its new watchword of a “reorganized world” is making all its plans to attain the place of power by social, moral and political means.
What would be said of a queen who entered into partnership with men whose hands were still red with the blood of her murdered husband and rejected king? What could be said but that she had wholly forgotten or proved totally false to the principles for which her husband had died?
What shall be said of a Church which seeks to enter into partnership with a world that slew her Lord; which under all the smile and smoothness of moral, social and philosophical phrases and all the hypocritical laudations of His human character rejects His deity and hears in His cry of agony on the cross the proof that He was only a man who failed as other men have failed at the last.
Such a Church as that has lost the vision of its true attitude during the absence of its rejected Lord and is well-nigh to forfeiting its commission.
Over the professing Church is sounding to-day with ominous significance the Apostolic words of warning:
“What, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God; and that whosoever will be the friend of the world, is the enemy of God?”
The Corinthian Church attempted to take the place of rulership in the world.
With keen and biting words the Apostle rebukes them.
Thus he writes to them:
“Now ye are full, now ye are rich, ye have reigned as kings without us: and I would to God ye did reign, that we might also reign with you.”
Then he adds by way of contrast:
“I think that God hath set forth us the apostles last, as it were appointed to death: for we are made a spectacle unto the world, and to angels and to men.”
It is this same apostle who under the inspiration of the Spirit in his second epistle writes to Timothy:
“If we suffer, we shall also reign with him.”
It is not while her Lord is the crucified and rejected that the Church is to reign and rule over the world. Not while He is seated on His Father’s throne in heaven and His own throne on earth is cast down and trampled in the dust. Nay! if the Church is faithful she will walk in separation from the world. If the Church is faithful she will testify against the world, not testify merely against certain abuses, but against the world as a system, that it is built upon the principle of the enthronement of self and not God, the exaltation of the flesh and not spirit.
If the Church shall be faithful and like Noah in the building of his ark condemn the world; if the Church will take up earnestly the solemn truth of God and warn men that no matter how good a government may be established by human means, no matter what culture and morality may fill the earth, no matter to what extent advance may be made in art, in science, nor no matter how safe a place the world may be made to live in, no matter to what heights of natural morality and righteousness man as man may attain, the judgment of God against this system of man called the world is certain, and that He will arise in His majesty to shake terribly the earth, and that only the things that are built on God can remain, the Church will suffer and be rejected even as was her Lord.
