10. Judgments Coming at the Close of This Age.
WE looked, briefly, last month, at some of the ways of God in grace with man, since the rejection and death of His Son on earth, and His ascension to heaven, where He sits, the glorified Man, upon the throne of God. We now purpose glancing at some of God’s ways in judgment with man, of which He has told us, with which man will be visited at the end of the present age of grace. God has said―
JUDGMENT MUST BEGIN AT THE HOUSE OF GOD. (1 Peter 4:17.)
Christendom now bears Christ’s name. It is nominally the church and the house of God; for the time, the Jews are cast away as God’s nation (Rom. 11:15); through their fall, salvation or is now come to the Gentiles. Heathendom retains its ground as it did prior to the church of God being established on the earth; for though the peoples which form Christendom were once part of Heathendom, still the greater portion of the world knows neither God nor Christ. Therefore, we must keep Christendom before the mind, with its responsibility towards God as His professing church entrusted with His truth. In Christ’s sacrifice for sin, His ascension to heaven, and the descent of the Holy Ghost to earth, are the foundations of Christianity. The Jewish system of continual sacrifice ceased at the true Passover, and the true day of atonement. The divinely constituted order of sacrificing priests came to its end when Christ, risen from the dead, became God’s and man’s high priest in heaven. For men to sacrifice lambs and oxen to God after His Son had offered Himself, was open rejection of the Christ of God. The religion of sense gave place to that of faith, when God, the Holy Ghost, came to earth and dwelt in God’s children. In such divine ways lies the origin of the Christian faith, and, consequently, of Christendom, which is that area upon the earth which bears Christ’s name, and is thus distinguished from Heathendom and Judaism. Now, what do we find proceeding on the part of man in Christendom? From the earliest centuries there was departure from the faith once delivered to the saints, and, by degrees, a theory was set up by man, of a continual sacrifice to appease God, and also an order of sacrificing priests. This, in spirit, was returning to the unbelieving ground occupied by the Jews, who rejected Christ and His sacrifice of Himself, and was the beginning of a career leading to apostasy. Also a system of sensuous religion was produced. These things have developed, until in our times over a very large area of Christendom, the very idea of Christ’s one and complete sacrifice for sins, and of His priesthood in heaven, does not so much as exist, while the sensuous nature of the religion that bears Christ’s name, has so allied itself with heathenish ideas, that the Jews, who reject Christ, their Messiah, regard modern Christianity in many countries as idolatry!
The high priesthood of Christ is the outcome of His sacrifice. Christendom, at large, repudiates the Scripture truth of His sacrifice―that is to say, its real character―and offers to God in order to make expiation for sins. Thousands, who bear Christ’s name, live and die in the faith, that God requires a continual sacrifice, instead of the faith of His word, that He has set forth Jesus Christ, a mercy-seat, “through faith in His blood, to declare... at this time His righteousness: that He might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus.” (Rom. 3:25, 26.)
It is impossible that man should continue to set aside God’s purpose and counsel―yea, His glory in relation to the death and the ascension of His Son―with impunity. It is impossible that man should build up a system of religion bearing the name of Christ on the earth, which dishonors and discredits Christ. subverts God’s truth, and falsifies His nature, without meeting the due reward of his doings. We read, indeed, of God’s long-suffering, but we read also of its end. (2 Pet. 3:9, 10)
ANTICHRIST WILL ARISE OUT OF A CORRUPTED CHRISTENDOM.
The subverting of the good news of God concerning His Son, and the substitution in its place of the human and apostate priestly system, will end in the revelation of the Man of Sin, the Son of Perdition. He will oppose, and will exalt himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped, and will eventually in the temple of God proclaim himself God. (See 2 Thess. 2)
The way is already paved for the Antichrist, the central authority in Christendom having exalted himself so far, as to proclaim his own infallibility. Such spiritual daring no rebellious Jew ever reached in olden days; it is out of that which bears Christ’s name, Christ’s greatest enemies arise.
THE PROFESSING CHURCH OF GOD WILL BECOME THE ENEMY OF GOD.
Yes, the most bitter and most determined foe to God and to Christ the earth has ever produced. (Rev. 17:5.) In as determined away as the nation of God cast off the Son of God, will the Church of God do the same. It is foretold that Christ will cast off Christendom (Rev. 3:16; Rom. 11:21-24), which now professes His name, and Satan will thus be left free to work among those who have rejected Christ, with “all power and signs and lying wonders.” (2 Thess. 2:9.) Those who reject Christ’s miracles will accept the devils. Men bearing Christ’s name on them will be given over to believe a lie (ver. 11), even as God gave over the heathen nations of olden days who did not like to retain Him in their knowledge to a reprobate mind. (Rom. 1:20-28.) They had their science, they produced great thinkers, and they had their schools of thought, but their knowledge excluded God, and by God’s judgment He excluded from their minds the true knowledge of Himself, so that, “professing themselves to be wise, they,” by His hand, “became fools” (vs. 22).
The highway for the coming of the terrors of the last day is being built up. We see men’s minds being prepared for open adhesion to Satan, as we observe the development of spiritualism, and its demon-intercourse, and the stretching out of the hand of professing Christians for a better faith to the heathen worship of Buddha. While in the weakening of the belief of the younger generation, in the authority of God’s word, by their seniors, and in the preaching of Christian ministers in favor of skepticism, we observe the accumulation of so much storage of materials, for the rapid completion of the highway, when the decreed time shall have arrived.
God will in the most marked manner let loose His judgment on all the favored people in Christendom, who have heard, but refused the gospel. It may seem a light thing to men to scorn God’s message of salvation, and of love, but
EVERLASTING JUDGMENT WILL FALL ON ALL WHO REJECT THE GOSPEL.
“The Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with His mighty angels, in flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ: who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord.” (2. Thess. 1: 7-9.) No doubt this solemn statement is regarded as an old wives’ tale by many, or as one of the antiquated notions of the Apostle Paul, a notion only worthy of the credence of the age in which he lived, and quite unfitted to the science of this century! But God said, eighteen hundred years ago, “There shall come in the last days scoffers”―men “willingly ignorant” of the witness of the flood, and rejecters of the truth of God’s almighty power, and the certainty of the fulfillment of His word. (2 Peter 3:2-7.)
HEARTS PREPARING FOR CHRIST.
True it is, that there are hundreds and thousands of noble, earnest Christians working for Christ, and living for Christ on the earth, but their spirit is becoming, year by year, more and more detached from the growing skepticism prevalent in the churches. Almost in every evangelical denomination individual Christians are awaking, and trimming their lamps, but almost every such denomination has its down-grade, and the gradients of the incline get steeper and steeper, and the downward pace grows quicker and quicker year by year. Progress there is, but the progress is on the line that has for its terminus, The Foretold Apostasy.
God is separating the hearts of His people from the aims and objects of Christendom, and this is, perhaps, one of the most suggestive signs of the times. It indicates His hand directing the true and the faithful in, but not of the spirit of Christendom, to Christ Himself. Some were ready when Noah entered the ark, some when Lot escaped from Sodom, some when Jericho was destroyed, and some will be ready when the Bridegroom comes. The Lord is faithful, and will keep from the hour of temptation, which shall come upon all the world, to try them that dwell upon the earth, the faithful to Himself. (Rev. 3:10.) He will deliver true Christians from the trial, as He delivered in olden days, Noah, Lot, and Rahab.