The circumstances of rejection in Matthew 22, which led the Lord Jesus at the close of His ministry to quote from Psalm 110:11<<A Psalm of David.>> The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool. (Psalm 110:1), are an indication of the course He was about to take. A right understanding of these circumstances under which He took His seat on high gives us to apprehend how morally necessary it is that His coming again should be the eager, constant expectation of His people here on the earth during His absence.
The Lord Jesus is called to sit down above until His enemies are made His footstool, and there He is now waiting. His quoting Psalm 110 when He did shows that He was aware of His rejection.
He is set down at the right hand of power. All power has been given Him in heaven and earth. He is the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the promised seed, the true Son of David. But being rejected, the Jews having refused the sure mercies of David, the times of refreshing, which should come from the Lord’s presence on earth, are postponed. He sits down at God’s right hand waiting until His foes are made His footstool. He foregoes His right and rule for a season, but this makes His return necessarily the first expectation of His people, as also the true criterion of the state of their hearts respecting Him.
His Desire
Scripture supplies us with four reasons why the coming of the Lord should be the first of our expectations. First, it is the Lord’s own desire to come. There could be no greater incentive or motive for any expectation or desire to the true heart than the simple assurance that it is the Lord’s own desire to come. And is it not so? He says that He goes away until His foes are made His footstool, thus plainly intimating that it is because of His foes that He, for a time, is absent, and therefore it is the time of His patience, as John says, “the kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ.” He waits and has patience until the time of His returning arrives, but His heart is set on it. He says, “I go to prepare a place for you,” and “I will come again, and receive you unto Myself; that where I am, there ye may be also” (John 14:2323Jesus answered and said unto him, If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him. (John 14:23)). In Revelation 22, His own reply, when the Spirit and the Bride say, “Come,” is, “Behold, I come quickly.”
Our blessed Lord also declared to them the blessing that should accrue to them if they were found waiting for their Lord. Such faithfulness of heart is so grateful to Him that He pronounces, “Blessed are those servants whom the lord when he cometh shall find watching.” He continues, disclosing from His heart how He appreciates such a state of soul: “Verily I say unto you, that he shall gird himself, and make them to sit down to meat, and will come forth and serve them.” No attitude is so pleasing to Him as watching and waiting for His return. There will be unbounded manifestations of His satisfaction in the rich servings of His love to those thus engaged. If His people are true to Him, they must be those who mourn His absence, and their heart demands it of them that they should wait for Him from heaven (1 Thess. 1). It is His own desire to come again to receive us unto Himself, and, therefore, surely the heart that is true to Him, that is near to Him, must respond to this desire of His heart, keeping the Lord’s desire to return as their leading expectation. The soul near Him imbibes His own purpose and desire and feels the desolation here during His absence and the misrule of everything because it is not the day of His power.
His Rights
And this brings us to the second reason why His coming should be our first expectation, namely, because His rights will not be established until He comes. What righteous soul or what loving heart can survey the disorder and misrule of this world now in the hands of man, under the god of this world, without being oppressed with the sense that its rightful Lord is not here, that the King of kings and Lord of lords is neither owned nor ruling. We know that He is the rightful Lord, that God has set all things under His feet, and yet we see not all things put under Him (Heb. 2:99But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honor; that he by the grace of God should taste death for every man. (Hebrews 2:9)). We know that it is man’s day, and therefore we judge nothing until the Lord comes, until the day of His power. The righteous feel that His place is occupied by another. Therefore the faithful servant is in the kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ. The place of the believer now is to be at the Lord’s supper, announcing the Lord’s death until He comes.
The more we know of His rights on earth that are usurped by another, the more we will be separated from the world — the system which still rejects Him. The more we are conscious of this, the more must we, because it is righteous, desire that He whose right it is should come and reign. He cannot reign until He comes. The power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ were displayed in the holy mount. That was the kingdom of God come with power, disclosed for a moment to a few faithful ones on the earth. How blessed and how wondrous! A true feeling and sense of His right to rule over things here will cause me to be earnestly longing for the day of His glory when He will come and reign. I cannot be truly in His kingdom and patience without an eager longing for the time when He shall take to Himself His great power and reign. So as soon as the seventh angel sounds, saying, “The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ,” there is the response, “We give Thee thanks, O Lord God Almighty, which art, and wast, and art to come: that Thou hast taken to Thee Thy great power and hast reigned.”
The Apostle (1 Tim. 6:14-16) exhorts Timothy of the “appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ.” That was to be his incentive to keep the commandment without spot, unrebukable, because He, in the suited time, would display it — He the blessed and only potentate, King of kings and Lord of lords. The heart necessarily turned to the time when He should be set in His true place and in the full exercise of His power. Also, in the second epistle he characterizes the saints as loving His appearing. It is His right to reign. He is now waiting until His appointed hour arrives. The establishment of His right will also be our gain, which is a third reason why we should desire His coming.
His Desire, Our Gain
Therefore Peter writes, “Gird up the loins of your mind, be sober, and hope to the end for the grace which is to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 1:13). His coming, His exaltation, will confer the greatest blessings on the saints. First, the resurrection of the bodies of the saints does not take place until He comes. “Christ the firstfruits; afterward they that are Christ’s at His coming” (1 Cor. 15:23). “Our conversation is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ: who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto His glorious body, according to the working whereby He is able even to subdue all things unto Himself” (Phil. 3:20-2120For our conversation is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ: 21Who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body, according to the working whereby he is able even to subdue all things unto himself. (Philippians 3:20‑21)). When Christ enters on the day of His power, the first display of His power will be the resurrection. The moment He ceases to wait — when He takes to Himself His great power, even before there is a manifestation of His rule on earth and before His appearing to the earth — the resurrection will take place. The first action of His power will be to clothe His body, the church, and all those who without us could not be made perfect, in glorious bodies like His own. His own desire is that we should be with Him where He is, that we may behold His glory, and until He appears we cannot appear in glory. How many and how blessed are the motives to our hearts to desire His coming! How suited it is that such varied blessing for us should be thus inseparably connected with His coming. Our happiness in any blessing depends greatly in the happiness of those we love, and surely in our hearts we could not desire to reach perfect blessing while our Lord was still waiting for the consummation of His glory and position. We wait for His coming “until the day dawn, until the day-star arise in your hearts.” His coming will bring perfect blessing for us. We do not see Him till then; we are not like Him till then. The more our hearts are taken up with Him in His absence, the more must we desire His coming when all these varied and marvelous blessings will be perfected to us.
We do not pass the judgment seat of Christ until He comes, that wondrous moment when all we have been in the presence of His long-suffering and continued grace will be brought forward and stand out in contrast. This cannot take place till He comes. There will be no rewards or defined sphere for us in our relation to Him until He comes. And if our hearts are thus true, if we are in any degree impressed with the force of the above reasons for desiring the coming of the Lord, the fourth, and last, reason would be only natural for us, namely, that our hearts would not consent to suggest anything else to Him but to come.
The Natural Response
Hence, the Spirit and the bride say, “Come.” There is no other suggestion to offer; no other action of our Lord could meet the necessity of the heart but His coming. It can suggest nothing except “come.” Anything else would imply that there was something which would be of more value to us than His coming, or be a substitute; nothing else is so precious or so valuable to us. His coming is so connected with the desire of His own heart, with His rights, and with our great, perfect blessing that the Spirit who acts for Him here can say nothing else but “come.” Likewise, it is the one desire of the heart of the bride. If we are in the Spirit, we say, “Come,” for the desire of the Holy Spirit is for the day of His power, and His coming for the church is the beginning of it, the day-star of it.
In conclusion, I may repeat that I have not here drawn any distinction between His coming and His appearing, my object being to set forth the moral of both rather than the details. It is my desire to engage the souls of saints with their Lord’s desire and His right, as primary even to their own gain, great and wondrous though the latter be. The heart that is true to Him will readily discern the difference between the earlier and later actions of His coming—between the moment when He no longer waits but rises from the throne and the full glow and power of the day when He appears, and when “every eye shall see Him.”
May He keep our hearts in such simple allegiance and devotedness to Himself that we may not afford ourselves any other suggestion to Him but that which alone suits the love and fidelity of our hearts, “Even so, come, Lord Jesus.” Amen.
Adapted from
Girdle of Truth, 10:1