Kitabı oku: «Why I Preach the Second Coming», sayfa 5
VI
Only at the Second Coming of the Christ of God Will a Government of Everlasting Righteousness and Peace be Established Upon the Earth
IT was the original purpose of God to make the people of Israel the head of nations, place them in Palestine as the geographical center of the earth, make them its political center, send His own Son to be their incarnate king, use them as a channel of earthly and spiritual blessing and make this world the most perfect and happiest spot in all the wide universe.
They failed to meet their opportunity.
Then the Lord transferred the possibility of world rulership from the Jews to the Gentiles.
He did this by handing political power and authority to Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon.
This rulership and sway of the world descended in its ordained and foretold succession down through Medo-Persia with its incorporation of Babylon, through the temporary but immensely extended empire of Greece which under Alexander included both Babylon and Medo-Persia, and after that the colossal and magic empire of Rome, swallowing up as it did the three empires or kingdoms which preceded it.
Since the division of Rome into Western and Eastern empires the rulership of the world has been maintained by the various nations composed of those people dwelling in the territory once occupied by Rome.
The world has been ruled by Turks, Spaniards, Germans, by the French and by the English.
The Gentile nations in this special and prophetic territory have been the world rulers.
It has been peculiarly Gentile rulership and in Scripture is called, “The times of the Gentiles.”
Gentile times, Gentile rulership has lasted for twenty-five hundred years.
It has been an amazing rule.
It has been a rulership that has revealed the genius, the brilliance and the God-given powers of man.
It has been a rulership that has revealed the iniquity, the sin, the mad ambition and devil-inspired policies of man.
In all the twenty-five hundred years of this Gentile rule there have not been one hundred consecutive years of universal peace.
It has been twenty-five hundred years of war, of rapine, murder and measureless lust.
Cities have been destroyed, fields have been laid waste, women have endured the last outrage. Children have been orphaned, right has been upon the scaffold and wrong upon the throne, prison chains have been for virtue, silk and velvet for vice, civilization after civilization has been destroyed, the earth has been filled with anguish beyond the power of tongue or pen to describe, and blood enough has been shed through man’s inhumanity to man to float all the navies of the world, and money and treasure enough wasted to have provided a palace for every man and woman on earth.
A little less than five years ago men everywhere were talking of peace and safety.
Christianity and civilization were walking hand in hand.
Christianity or that which professed to be Christianity had accepted all the claimed benefits of civilization.
Rapid transit, the telephone, all the triumphs of applied science were announced as the by-products of the Gospel. Even though the churches were becoming more or less empty and the people were turning away to other centers of instruction or enlightenment or consolation or hope, preachers were everywhere and with great insistence announcing that the world was growing better every day and that we were rapidly approaching the purple and the gold of millennial times. The hour was not far distant when the lion and the lamb should lie down together. There was much talk about the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. People were coming together and having a better and more disinterested estimate of each other. Religion was ceasing to be dogmatic and precise and becoming more and more a profession that was free from restraint.
Christian ministers in the pulpit and supposedly wise men in the counsels of the nations with optimistic utterance announced that the days of barbarism had passed away, the brutality of war was at an end. Men and nations would no longer adjourn their differences to the field of battle. A magnificent palace of peace had been erected in that country that had for centuries been the bloody ground where Europe settled its political issues. In this splendid home of arbitration the nations were to meet as friends and brothers and calmly arrange and solve all matters that had hitherto kept them menacingly apart.
War had become so abhorrent to what was called the Christian sense of the nations that mothers were exhorted to banish from the nurseries anything that might suggest the thought of war, such as trumpets, drums or toy guns. So completely had the peace idea pervaded the mind of the people, the idea that peace had come to stay and nothing must be tolerated that would even hint at war, that a soldier or a sailor wearing the uniform of his country was no longer acceptable in a public place, were it a restaurant, a music hall or even a church.
Men who were opposed to spending a dollar to make a nation ready for the possibility of war were hailed as the advanced thinkers and the men worthy of the suffrage of the people; while those who contended human nature had not been changed, that a nation was simply the individual grown large and the jealousies, the covetousness and ambitions of governments would always make it possible for the strong to prey upon the weak and for the unprincipled under the guise of national necessity to attack their unprepared neighbours and therefore just as much as a city rests in confidence with the presence within it of a well-equipped police force, equally so the comfort and security of peace could be best maintained by a nation governed by right principles whose army and navy were ready to resist successfully any unjust assault upon its honour or integrity, were treated with pity, if not scorn, as still under the spell of benighted and barbaric days.
“Peace and safety!” these were the pleasant words that lulled a pleasure-seeking and money-making generation into self-satisfied rest and the mirage of millennial days already arrived.
Then, suddenly, like a bolt out of a clear sky, or the overflow in raging lava tide of an unsuspected volcano, the most stupendous, ghastly and brutally devilish war the world has ever known was on in all its fiendish fury, sweeping from England to the Euphrates and from the Rhine and Danube on the north to the glittering sands of Africa on the south, rolling its waves of blood and sending its sickening and indescribable horrors through those lands and among those people at one time constituting the four kingdoms to whom God had committed the rulership of the world; that region occupied by Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece and Rome and whose administration of world affairs is called “the times of the Gentiles.”
To-night ten millions of the world’s flower of manhood lie rotting in their graves. Six millions of women and children have been starved to death. Women have been unspeakably ruined, children mutilated and flung as helpless debris upon the charity of strangers, suffering their orphaned estate and not knowing why.
All the genius, the science and invention of man with poured out, unlimited wealth, have been drafted to produce the most terrifically destructive means of war. All the boasted progress and culture of the preceding centuries were called upon to wage the contest until it should affright even the participants themselves. Clouds of poison gas filled the once sweet and vital air of spring time and summer mornings. Human beings wearing hideous masks and looking like other world monsters rushed in mad onslaught upon one another. They burrowed in holes and trenches like wild beasts concealed in their lair and waiting for the prey. Through the startled heavens winged things like huge vampires vomiting fire and blood took their way over cities, towns and unprotected hospitals, leaving behind them the dead, the dying and the tortured. Hunger with its sunken cheeks, and pestilence with its green eyes, its slavering lips have trod the earth till horror with wordless anguish has kept vigil by the blackened hearthstones of ruined homes and deserted firesides.
To-night, the fields of Flanders where the poppies grow and where the dead who died too soon and lie almost too thick to count, are as though a mighty juggernaut had rolled its fearful wheels over them, crushing both man and earth together into one monstrous pulp of hopeless ruin.
To-night France, where the lilies were wont to bloom, is torn and ripped in all the one-time beauty and fascination of her white and winding roads, poplar fringed, in the culture of her fruited gardens, her orchards and her royal forests, as though some monstrous creation of pre-Adamite days had survived and broken through all restraint of all the ages to riot and gorge himself with unlimited delight of destruction.
All this after two thousand years of professed Christianity and the constant iteration that the Church was slowly winning its way to the ruler-ship of the world; that each hour the world was growing better and more and more the principles of the Christ of God dominating the universal heart of man.
The world awoke to find its heart unchanged and war with aggressive animalism still the underlying and primal force in man.
To-night in face of all this, in face of the solemn declaration of the Son of God that during the whole time of His absence there would be war and rumours of war, and specially within the territory once occupied by Rome; that there would be distress of nations with perplexity, men’s hearts failing them for fear for looking after the things that should be coming on the earth; that the people like the waves of the sea should be roaring, uttering their discordant voices in the thunder of protest and bitter discontent, breaking the bonds of old customs and lashing the times with lawlessness and unprecedented crime; in face of the warning of the Apostle Paul that in the last days, that is to say in the closing hours of this age, there should be, not peaceful but perilous times; that evil men should wax worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived; in the face of the inspired assurance of the Apostle James that as this dispensation should draw to its close Capital and Labour should stand in bitter attitude to each other; that the accumulated wealth of a special class called “rich men” should be “heaped together” that they might be spoiled and that miseries should come upon them; that on the one side should be the aggression of the profiteers and on the other the violence of those who would refuse to be exploited; in face of this assurance of industrial and class war; in face of the fact that the softest toned apostle whose pen is always transcribing the word “love,” and who has reached the highest and most sublime definition of God as love; in face of the fact that this apostle affirms the hour will come when the whole world under religious, political and devilish inspiration will rush to conflict, that everywhere will be heard the tramp of armed men and the gathering of the nations for a war such as the world has not yet seen; in face of the picture which this apostle of love paints where the armies of the world are seen gathered in battle array against the Lord Christ and His right to reign; in the face of this divine warning the statesmen of the world are assembled in counsel at Paris, the world’s capital of pleasure, in a palace once dedicated to lust and wanton self-gratification, whose panelled ceiling and mirrored walls are filled with and reflect the scenes and glorification of war, that by the stroke of a pen, by a series of resolutions, they may constitute a league of nations bulking so big that every threatened wave of future war may be flung back as when the dykes of Holland reject the sea.
The astonishing and suggestive thing is that in the making and remaking of the map of Europe and Asia undertaken by the framers of the league, they are, all unconsciously, restoring the outlines of the old Roman Empire and preparing the way for the final and desperate revival of Rome under the form of ten confederate nations, with its last kaiser, that dark and woful figure, the man of sin, the son of perdition, the Antichrist.
And there are Christian teachers who see in this league another herald of the millennium before Christ comes which they so sedulously preached previously to the war. They see in this league an evidence that the Lord Jesus Christ as the Prince of Peace is in reality reigning over the earth and bending the nations to His will for the reign of peace.
In the whole history of theological exegesis and interpretation I know of nothing so utterly faulty, illogical and wholly unscriptural as that exegesis which teaches the angel song at Bethlehem to be the announcement of the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ as the Prince of Peace and that as such He should establish it among the nations after His ascension to heaven and during His absence from the world.
The angels sang glory to God in the highest and on earth, peace to “men of good will.”
The angel who spoke to the shepherds keeping the temple sheep for the morning and the evening sacrifice was testifying to them that there was no longer need to keep the sheep for such a purpose. The day of animal sacrifices had passed, the living God had provided the true sacrifice, He who was born beneath the chaplet of heaven’s music, the Lamb of God ordained before the foundation of the world. He had been born into the world that He might make peace by the blood of His cross, not between man and man, not between nation and nation, but between man and God. He had been born to die and by His death reconcile a rebel world to God; on the basis of this sacrifice yet to be and when He should have risen from the dead as witness of the efficacy of His death He would bring peace to every soul that should be of good will – every soul that should surrender to the will of God by believing on Him, offering Him by faith as a sacrifice and claiming Him as a substitute. Every such soul should be at peace with, and have the peace of, God.
This was the meaning of that natal hour at Bethlehem.
The angels were not singing over Him as the Prince of Peace who had come to abolish war among the nations, but as the ordained sacrifice who should bring peace between the individual man and his God. And yet – He is to be the Prince of Peace and reign and rule as such over the earth, putting an end to war and establishing perfect peace among the nations.
The promise of His reign and rule as the Prince of Peace is clearly set forth in Scripture; as it is written in the book of the prophet Isaiah:
“Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given. His name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his peace and government there shall be no end.”
But when? Where?
Listen:
“Upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom to order it.”
And hear what Gabriel says to Mary when he comes to announce to her that she has been chosen of Almighty God to give birth to the Messiah of Israel.
The angel says:
“Thou shalt call his name Jesus.. He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David:
And he shall reign over the house of Jacob forever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end.”
He is to be the Prince of Peace when He sits upon the throne of united Israel in their own land and not before.
He was born in fulfillment of the prophecy of Isaiah.
He was a Son given. The Son of God who was God the Son.
He was a Son given and became a child born.
He grew up to the station of manhood.
He entered upon His pre-arranged ministry.
At the appointed hour and to the very second foretold by Gabriel to Daniel and in the exact manner announced by the prophet Zechariah He rode into Jerusalem, went into the temple, claiming it as His Father’s house of prayer and by so much declaring Himself to be the Son of the Highest and the heir of David’s throne.
The shout of the multitude had announced Him officially.
They had said:
“Hosanna! Blessed is the King of Israel that cometh in the name of the Lord.”
In crying this aloud they were fulfilling the prediction of Zechariah.
He had, under the vision of God, looked forward to this hour and with the Spirit of God upon him had exhorted the people who should be alive when Jesus should come to acclaim him.
He said:
“Shout, O daughter of Jerusalem; behold thy King cometh unto thee; he is just, and having salvation (political as well as spiritual salvation); lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass.”
The multitude were shouting as Zechariah said they should shout. They were confessing that He who came that day up the slopes of Zion was the Prince of Judah and King of Israel.
He came to His own, but His own received Him not.
Instead of the diadem of David He got a crown of thorns. Instead of the sceptre of Israel He got the vine stick of a Roman centurion thrust through His rope-tied hands. Instead of a throne He got a malefactor’s cross. Instead of a robe of royal purple He got the winding sheet of the dead. Instead of a palace He got a borrowed grave.
The Jews have paid the price of that blindness and betrayal. The man-slayer who unwittingly slew his neighbour or was even ignorant of it at the moment sooner or later found he had to flee from the avenger of blood instantly upon his track. He became an exile from his home, forced to dwell in a provided place called the city of refuge. He could not return to his home till the second coming of a priest.
The Jews were guilty, as a nation, of manslaughter.
They were deceived and involved by their leaders. They really did not know that He whom they hounded to death at the last was not only the covenant king of Israel, and the Holy One of their fathers, but the Prince of life.
Because of their blindness, blunder and sin they were cast out of the land. Because, even though in ignorance, they slew their King, they were exiled by the judgment of God from their home. They deprived the Lord of that land that was His through the covenant of Abraham, and the Lord in turn deprived them of the right of dwelling in the land. They should be exiles so long as He was an exile. Nor can they return till He comes the second time as a priest, not after the order of Aaron, but Melchisedec; for it is written that He shall be both a king and priest upon His throne.
Only can the Jews return and be owned nationally of the Lord when He shall come.
He will come and He will come as the Prince of Peace.
He will not come, I repeat, with the olive branch in His hand and the cooing dove nestling upon His shoulder.
Nay! not at all!
He will come as the Avenger of His elect, as the Son of man, as the judge of all flesh.
He will come to overthrow the combination of Devil and man.
His Coming will be the climax of old and outworn ages, the beginning of the new.
The glory of His Coming cannot be described.
Through years of meditation and continued effort at description I have exhausted my vocabulary and worn to tatters the oft-repeated phrases with which I have sought with heart full of adoring enthusiasm to announce the wonders of that hour.
If all the suns and systems were turned into speech till every flaming center of light were an adjective with increasing emphasis of qualification and expression the attempt to put into words the glory of that Coming would be a pitiful and overwhelming failure.
He will come surrounded by an innumerable host whose hallelujahs shall so vibrate that the very heavens will roll apart at their soundings.
The Lord will come in His threefold glory, the glory of the Father, the glory of the angels and His own glory: the glory of His eternal and unbegun sonship with the Father, as chief of the angels and as that man who is very God, as that God who is real and immortal man. Then will He set up the kingdom, the government for which the ages have dreamed and groaned and guessed and prayed.
That hour of hours!
Satan bound, iniquity overthrown, God and Christ and the Holy Spirit ruling in the lives of men. The very air surcharged with the righteousness of God; so surcharged that he who thinks a lie shall fall dead in the tracks where he meditated it. No longer need of judge, of jury, of prison bars, nor hangman’s rope, nor electric chair.
An hour when no longer the scarlet poppies of hate, of jealousies and mad ambition shall bud and blossom into war. War over forever, swords beaten into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks. Every man the same right as any other man, the right to sunshine, to air, to water, the beauty of the landscape and all the usufruct of earth.
That hour when no man shall call another his master; when no longer a man shall toil and bend his back and break his heart for a stipend of bread; for a hole in the ground and the worm of corruption as mistress of his bed.
That hour when life shall be worth while and when the centuries of peace and perfectness of actual being shall pass on till they are counted as eternity.
And because this government of peace and splendour and all the outflowing possibilities of a world in which righteousness shall reign and God shall be first can be brought about only by and at the Second Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ; because until He does so come wars and sorrows and the darkness of sin will continue; because all the legislation of man and all the leagues of nations will utterly fail to establish permanent peace; because in spite of the best endeavours of all the merely moral forces in the earth there is nothing can keep this system called the world from going on the rocks; because only the hand of God’s Christ can break the bands of iniquity, quiet earth’s fever pulses and putting down all authority bring in the peace that never can be broken; because when He comes the government of right and truth and the life that is really worth while shall come; and because from my heart I want to see that longed-for hour of heaven on earth, I preach the Second Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
