Matthew 24:48
Satan always seeks to corrupt what he cannot destroy, whether the subject of his evil purpose is the saints of God or any special truth of His Word which has engaged and blessed their souls. The truth of the Lord’s coming as the blessed hope of the believer is no exception to this. Since the Lord has graciously revived it in this closing period of the day of grace, it has taken so firm a hold upon the souls of His saints everywhere, as was never known before since apostolic times, nor was it since those days ever before so generally accepted as it is now.
The Ten Virgins
At the beginning, the virgins all went out to meet the Bridegroom (Matthew 25), but how soon this testimony was given up, and the whole thing sank down to this: “They all slumbered and slept.”
But at midnight there went forth an arousing cry, “Behold, the bridegroom cometh; go ye out to meet Him” (Matt. 25:6). How perfectly this has been fulfilled, and how closely these two things — the person of Christ and the outgoing of heart to Himself as the coming One — were connected in the recovered truth! We thank God that the power of the Holy Spirit has so accompanied this testimony that Satan’s efforts will not succeed in depriving Christians of what God has so graciously restored to them. But there is danger, for the finest characteristic which that hope possesses, regarded practically, is its dateless imminence. Satan knows that if he could succeed in removing this peculiar feature — the undefined but ever-present nearness of the Lord’s return, the kernel of the truth would be abstracted. The shell of the doctrine might remain, but it would no longer be an ever-operating power and blessed hope before the soul.
Declension of Heart
Foreseeing this danger, the Holy Spirit furnishes a parable expressly to warn against this snare which the enemy lays for professing Christians (Matt. 24:45-51). The special snare of Satan now is that of the retention of sound doctrine as to the rapture, but mixed with the worldliness and the like which the Lord sets forth in the beating of fellow servants and eating and drinking with the drunken. This violence and wantonness, whether exerted or restrained, are the workings of the flesh and the allowance of the world when developed and displayed.
Therefore would we bring home to our own soul and to those of our readers the real importance of watching against this declension of heart as to the Lord’s return, which is the last snare of our cunning foe. Can we say that having been looking for Him so long, we are more and more convinced that He is near at hand? Are both the desire and the expectation of His coming, by reason of so long a time having elapsed, growing every day stronger within our souls?
One thing is clear, that if the dearly-cherished desire of our hearts has not yet been gratified by the hope of His coming, we have allowed our faith to fail, our desires to cool, and our expectations to falter. Thus the sense of it, as an everyday increasingly “blessed hope,” has escaped from the heart. No wonder that the faithless heart then turns to the world which it has allowed to betray it into declension, saying within itself, “My lord delayeth His coming,” and in consequence giving rein to the flesh and its works. He did not say, “The Lord is not coming,” but he puts it off as a thing not at hand or expected.
The Imminent Hope
How different it is to faith! Are earth’s scenes at their darkest, the poor body brought down to death’s door, as men speak, and life rapidly ebbing away? There is for us no darkness profound enough to be impenetrable to the piercing rays of the “bright and morning star,” no time so short as to preclude His coming in it. If there is time for an eye to twinkle, there is time for Him to come; to the joy of His own heart, the first act of His coming will be to produce its full effect upon the bodies of the untold multitudes of His saints in the same twinkling of an eye! To shift the scene, it is equally the privilege of faith to find the Lord’s coming the very brightest thing in our horizon, engaging our hearts supremely, even when divine favors upon earth are in their most sparkling array before our grateful hearts. And if it is not so with us, we may well challenge our souls whether the person of Christ and the promise of His coming again have ever assumed their unrivaled place in the heart as they should!
The Lord’s Supper
We may also add that we know nothing that is used of the Holy Spirit more powerfully and more refreshingly to revive, from time to time, this precious doctrine and hope in the hearts of the saints than the remembrance of the Lord. And so divinely interlocked are the two things that seldom, if ever, are saints really right about either one if they are wrong about the other.
The Lord’s supper indeed possesses the wonderful and unique property of converging into one focus His death and His coming, bringing back His death as our only yesterday and bringing forward His coming as our only tomorrow, the table being our only today, in which our fellowship is with the Father and the Son, and one with another “till He come.” Our yesterday: Christ in death whom we remember; our today: a glorified Christ to whom we are united; our tomorrow: a coming Christ for whom we are longing, shining upon us as the “bright and morning star,” while we keep vigil through the long night of His prolonged absence.
May the Holy Spirit keep freshly before our souls this “blessed hope,” nor suffer it to be impaired by any of the changing scenes of earth, above all preserving us from ever saying in our hearts, with Laodicean levity and worldliness, “My lord delayeth His coming.”
R. W. (from Christian Truth, adapted)