DEAR reader, have you ever weighed these warning words of the Lord? Do you know that they concern you intimately? The Lord is coming, not only to judge the dead at the end, but the living at the beginning of His displayed kingdom. Are you a believer in Him, and ready to meet Him? If you cannot so say in truth, lay it to heart. The night is far spent, and the day is at hand, when sudden destruction comes on a slumbering world, and they shall in no wise escape.
It is not merely death you may well dread, but death because after this is judgment in its inevitable time, and in its everlasting issue. The Lord admonishes you that His coming is as unexpected and unwelcome to the unprepared, as the nightly thief to the householder.
“And as it came to pass in the days of Noah, even so shall it be also in the days of the Son of man. They ate, they drank, they married, they were given in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all. Likewise even as it came to pass in the days of Lot, they ate, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they builded; but in the day that Lot went out of Sodom, it rained fire and brimstone from heaven and destroyed them all: after the same manner shall it be in the day that the Son of man is revealed."
Do you believe that these days hang over your head, and hasten to be fulfilled? They have never yet been, and therefore must be; for the mouth of the Lord has so spoken.
Oh, hear Him, while it is the day of grace. Behold, now is the acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation. Hear, and your soul shall live. For as He solemnly declared on earth, "Verily, verily, the hour cometh and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God; and they that hear shall live." To hear His voice is to reject Satan's lie, to distrust your own natural mind, and to believe the one True God Who sent His only-begotten Son, that you, receiving Him, may have life eternal in His name. It 'is God's goodness which alone leads any one to repentance; as it was His infinite mercy which laid the iniquity of us all on the only One capable of being an unfailing sacrifice to God for us.
Oh, why should you perish in your sins, by turning a deaf ear to the only Savior? What is all that Hindus, Chinese, Greeks, Romans, or any others taught, but a religion of self, of fallen man? The Jews forgot the promises, and vainly tried the law which could but condemn the guilty. The gospel declares that Christ has accomplished the work to God's glory, and the salvation of all who believe. It is not Yea and Nay; but in Him is the Yea. For how many soever be the promises of God, in Him is the Yea; wherefore also through Him is the Amen, unto the glory of God, through us.