“Now, we beseech you, brethren, by the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ, and by our gathering together unto Him, that ye be not soon shaken in mind, or be troubled, neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter as from us, as that the day of Christ is at hand."- 2 Thessalonians, 2, 1-2.
I showed last night the importance of not confounding the day of the Lord with the promise of His coming. On the other hand, we must take care also of confounding the coming of the Lord with His day here spoken of. That is, we must keep each separate; each in its own distinctness. The coming of the Lord, I have endeavored to show, will be the consummation of the Lord's grace. The day of the Lord will be the execution of the Lord's judgment. Hence, if we mix up the coming of the Lord with His day, we weaken the solemnity of judgment, just as if we mix up the day with the coming we lose all the freshness and fullness of His grace. In short, grace and judgment must each have their due expression, and as the coming of the Lord Jesus is that which Scripture employs to express the Lord's return to earth to receive His own people and present them arrayed in His glory in the Father's house on high, so the day of the Lord embraces His intervention with men on earth, putting down all the pride, malice, and unbelief of men, and bringing in a new system of divine government, where all things shall be subjected to His authority. I do not say all men converted, but all men brought under His rule. There will be a feigned obedience rendered during that day of the kingdom here below. You cannot be surprised that it should be so, because not only will there be a spared remnant of men at the beginning of that day of the Lord, but its course will embrace not less than a thousand years, and during that long period of unbroken prosperity, with every mark of divine goodness lavished upon the men that are living here below, there will be millions of persons born to those who were spared from the beginning. Of these millions Scripture nowhere teaches that they will be born of God. They may or they may not be, but even those that are not born of God will have no longer the evil to contend with that man has now. No more will there be want; no more oppression; no more the temptation to open wickedness; no more wars or fightings; no more disease or pestilence; no more Satan even allowed to tempt men, for he will be under restraint during the whole of that time.
You who read the Scriptures cannot be ignorant of these things; and, happily, in this country, at any rate, most men read the Bible, and you must know that I am referring to plain positive Scripture in what I have been saying. The Bible is an open book in Scotland, and the children learn to read it, even though sometimes their elders do not explain it to them as it might he looked for. But there it is, and in very plain terms in the last book of the New Testament. Further, it is quite a mistake to suppose that it is only the last book of the New Testament which speaks of that day. On the contrary, all the Old Testament prophets are full of it, though they do not define it as a period of a thousand years. This was hidden from them. It awaited a prophet still greater than they. It was suitable in God's wisdom that John the Evangelist should be also John the Prophet, and that he should remove the veil off those times and seasons which the Lord would not allow His disciples to occupy themselves with when He was going up to heaven. It was enough for them to know, not the times and seasons of the redemption of Israel, but that now God the Father was about to accomplish the promise of the Holy Ghost, and to make them witnesses for Jesus throughout all the earth; and this is going on now. Witnessing to the Lord Jesus by the Holy Ghost is now proceeding. That is what we commonly call the gospel, and very rightly. But along with the gospel you must always remember there goes the church—the gospel being the testimony of God to every creature, and the church being the gathering together of those that receive the gospel and acknowledge the Lord Jesus, baptized by one Spirit into that which is called in Scripture the body of Christ.
Now, I have a little to say in explaining this matter more fully—that is, the day of the Lord; and I shall still keep up the contrast between the coming of the Lord and the day of the Lord, because as to these the most important point is that you should be clear about your own position as believers; that you should know your own portion in the day of grace. The coming of the Lord Jesus to make good all that His love has secured to faith is of prime importance. The day of the Lord, although it be of great interest in a positive way, is, as far as we are concerned, more negative, and we must not mix up the bearings of judgment with the dealings of grace, if we would avoid serious dishonor to the truth. This confusion was evidently a danger from the beginning. Here we see it in these verses— “Now we beseech you, brethren, by the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ and [by] our gathering together unto him, that ye be not soon shaken in mind, or be troubled, neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter as from us, as that the day of Christ is at hand.” The word “by” has no business there at all. It is printed in italics to show you that it is not in the original, but there is even more than that: the original excludes the word, and, therefore, it was really a mistake on the part of our translators to introduce it. The particular form of phrase employed by the Holy Ghost brackets the two ideas, and makes them to be one connected whole. The coming of our Lord Jesus and our gathering are the two parts of one great transaction. Now, if you bring in the word “by,” it separates them, instead of combining them together. It is remarkable that the translators, who were real scholars, should have overlooked the point; but any person to whom it is pointed out, who knows the Greek language, will see in an instant what I mean. It is one of the peculiarities of that language that one article is used when it is intended to bring in two things. If they mean to separate the two, they bring in a second article. There is no second article in this case. For instance, where it is said “Our God and Father” there is one article used, because the same person that is God is also Father, and in order to combine the two the one article is used.
This, however, is by the way, but it strengthens what I have already referred to, that the translation of the Christians that are now here below, as well as of the Old Testament saints, is the necessary and immediate consequence of our Lord's presence in the air. The moment He comes all that are His instantly rise in a changed or glorified state to meet Him on high, and these two events are bound up together in the one phrase. Thus the force of the first verse is this: We beseech you by your blessed hope, by that which is full of comfort and joy—His presence to gather you to Himself on high—do not be alarmed by the false rumor that the day of the Lord has already come. It has not come, and it cannot come until certain terrible evils are accomplished, which are future.
Now, you must carefully notice that the Apostle does not say that the Lord cannot come first. That “day” it was on which they were so entirely mistaken. To use a vulgar phrase, the cart was put before the horse. That is to say, they put the day of the Lord before the coming of the Lord, whereas the Apostle implies that the true relation of these events is the Lord's coming first of all, not to be occupied with His enemies, but to assemble His saints in His presence. He has a much nearer object. He has a loved object. The first thing the Lord does when He comes from heaven is instantly to gather to Himself all that are waiting for Him. We must always bear in mind that all children of God are supposed to wait for Him. Don't allow yourselves the thought that persons who may be somewhat unenlightened about it do not wait for the coming of the Lord. The truth of it is, that all saints do so more or less, though some of them have got erroneous notions. Some suppose that there must be intervals and terrible events between the present and the coming of the Lord; others suppose that there will be a long period of blessedness. They are both untrue.
Let me tell you, however, that what is commonly said by some to be the coming of the Lord (namely, when the Lord takes His place on the great white throne to judge all the dead) is not the coming of the Lord at all. If you look at the twentieth chapter of Revelation, you will see it is not His coming. When you talk about the Lord's coming, you ought to mean that the Lord is coming back here—coming from whence He has gone. This is the true meaning of it—He that is absent will be present. We are not told where the great white throne will be, and the reason we are not is very simple. Always in judging of distance we naturally judge from the earth, where we are. Such is the point from which all distance is naturally measured by man. It follows necessarily from his situation, and quite rightly so. Now, when the great white throne of judgment is set, the heavens and earth that now are will have completely passed away. There will be, for the time, a total dissolution both of heaven and earth.
There can be no question of coming in that case. There will be everlasting judgment. All the dead shall go and stand before the great white throne, but where that is, no man can tell. Only God knows. The reason is, that the heavens that now are, vanish, and the earth likewise, and where it is, it is impossible to say. Its elements will be in space somewhere, and we can perfectly understand that, when the wicked dead stand before the Judge of all, it is not of the least importance to say where. We know also the accompanying fact, that the heavens that now are will have completely disappeared. Therefore it is too late to speak of coming. The coming of the Lord must be before this universe disappears. That is plain; and it is what every one who speaks about the coming of the Lord must mean. He who once came in humiliation is coming again in glory; not said to be coming to the new heavens and the new earth, although I have no doubt He will be there also; but this is not what is meant by the expression, the coming of the Lord.
All creeds acknowledge that Christ will come to judge the quick and the dead, and that the heavens must receive Him till the times of the restitution of all things. This means that everything that is now groaning will be put right; that this poor world, which is now a scene of travail and sorrow, will be changed; and that this mighty change will be brought about by the intervention of the Lord in power, not by the nostrums of men. All the physic that learned men might give the world would not make a bit of difference on the earth, nor would it change the nature of the race. This mighty change is to be effected by a greater than man, and the greater One is the Redeemer. That is essentially to be the glory of the Lord Jesus. Even the Holy Ghost will not effect that change. The Holy Ghost did not become incarnate; nor did He suffer for our sins. It is the Savior who is to be glorified in the sight of all men—not merely in heaven, but on earth. Now is the Christianity that is founded upon the cross. The Lord is now glorified, and we, who walk by faith and not by sight, enter into that. Unbelievers in this day know nothing about God; nothing about themselves; nothing about God's Son. I do not upbraid them; God forbid. I feel most deeply for their carelessness, prejudices, and guilt, because if any man reads the Word of God he will find there the most powerful body of testimony to its truth. It is not merely the reasonings of men. These will never really satisfy the soul—can never set one heart right. Christ alone can do this by the power of His redemption; by His infinite love; by grace and truth, by a life of holiness and righteousness. There is no other object that one's heart can rest on. Even the wisest king that has ever lived became a fool at last. I know no person in a more pitiful position than old king Solomon giving in to the follies of his Egyptian wife, of his 700 wives, and 300 concubines. That is a sad and evil history, and yet Solomon was the son of the great king David. We want great David's greater Son. That greater Son is the Lord Jesus; the true Son of David, the one specific for the good of men; the only One that shows the perfection of holiness, but who nevertheless died that He might win the most unholy to God. There is the Person to transport the heart and bind it forever to the God which it had hitherto traduced. We had thought Him some hard taskmaster, and people talk very often to the great dishonor of God. They think it an awful thing that God should condemn a man for eating a thing so small as an apple. This is not the true way to put it. Adam sold God for such a small thing as an apple. Is not this the humbling truth? It is Adam giving up God—the woman first, I am sorry to say. She worked upon him through his affections; the man would not be severed from her even in sin. It is well when a man is not too proud to follow his wife in what is good—sometimes they do not; but to follow a wife or anybody in what is bad is a sad piece of folly as well as sin. Therefore, one wants not merely God to show Himself as He is in grace to all man's wickedness, but God in the person of a man, the Son of man that God might be glorified thereby.
All the talk of those who love to speak about the perfection of man and the glory of man is put to shame by the name of Jesus, because, after all, what does their talk come to? They are great on the theory of evolution. They think their fathers had been monkeys at one time, but all that, I need not say, is as contrary to the truth of God as it is contrary to all science, because nobody ever saw the leg of a monkey merge into the leg of a man. There is nothing of the sort in any fossil remains, not to speak of present phenomena. All true science goes upon fixed principles and observed facts. No doubt there are variations of species. Everyone knows and fully allows that. There may be a very wide variety in every species, but still you never find one species turning into another. Nobody ever met an apple that was becoming a pear. Is it not an extraordinary thing that clever men should produce such fancies as science?
Returning to our subject, here we have the Apostle exhorting from the blessed motive of hope, and telling the Thessalonians that they should not be alarmed by the false fear.
(To be continued)