“And the seventh angel sounded; and there were great voices in heaven, saying, The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever. And the four and twenty elders, which sat before God on their seats, fell upon their faces, and worshipped God, saying, We give thee thanks, O Lord God Almighty, which art, and wast, and art to come; because thou hast taken to thee thy great power, and hast reigned. And the nations were angry, and thy wrath is come, and the time of the dead, that they should be judged, and that thou shouldst give reward unto thy servants the prophets, and to the saints, and them that fear thy name, small and great; and shouldst destroy them which destroy the earth.” –Revelation 11:15-18.
In a previous tract, we considered the Nature and Course of the Present Dispensation. In it, God's great design seems to be accurately expressed by the words of Peter, Acts 15:14, “to take out of the Gentiles a people for his name,” not to gather the whole world into his church. Instead of being one steady progressive course of good, expanding by degrees over all the earth, and issuing at last, without interval or break, in the fullness of Millennial light, and purity, and blessedness,—the Scriptures uniformly represent it as being precisely the reverse; as being a mixture of good and evil from beginning to end,—a mixture in which the ingredient of good bears next to no proportion to the ingredient of evil, a mixture in which the good ingredient, small at first, continually diminishes, and the evil ingredient, always large, grows larger and larger, down to the very end. It is thus a retrograde movement throughout; a movement not from good to better, but from good to bad, and from bad to worse. It is not an expansion of light, and grace, and purity, but rather the development of one grand apostasy, appearing at the very beginning like the first spot of the leprosy under the skin, continuing and spreading throughout the whole of its course, and existing in fullness and maturity even at the very end. Its first days are its best and brightest days. From these its holy light and glory, though not without moments of recovery, steadily and on the whole decline. And its last days are its darkest and its worst. Its natural emblem is not “in the morning light, which shineth more and more unto the perfect day;” but in the light of noon, which gradually declines, first to even, then to twilight, and last of all to midnight itself. It was the Church's noon when Christ the Sun of Righteousness shone full out in her horizon. That noon has already passed into the evening shadows, which are now stretching out around us on every hand. And it will be the hour of midnight, the very midnight of her history, when everything is coldest, darkest, and most death-like,— love congealed to ice, and faith almost fled,— when he who is her only hope shall again appear, and bring back with him the light of a still better day.
Now, this progress in evil, and declension in good, which marks our whole economy, and is its prevailing characteristic, naturally awakens in our mind a presumption of what “the end of these things shall be.” The course of the economy being evil throughout, its close is likely to be in judgment. Apostasy naturally leads to ruin. This, if unchecked, is its unavoidable and necessary issue. When anything grows “worse and worse,” it forebodes, as the end, not recovery, but death. Mercy slighted and abused naturally and uniformly issues in wrath; and the richer and fuller the mercy, the heavier and more awful the wrath will be. Could our eye now take in as the eye of God does, first, the unsearchable riches of grace proclaimed among the Gentiles through Jesus Christ, and then the neglect, the mis-improvement, the abuse of this, which has continued and increased for near two thousand years, the expectation which would necessarily be awakened in every breast, as the issue of such a course of guilt, would be consummate judgment. Had we God's perceptions of the past course of things, especially of his economy of richest, consummate grace, the mind of every Christian person would at the present time, and in the present juncture of affairs, “be filled with a certain fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation, as about to devour the adversaries.” The assurance of every breast would be that an economy, so conspicuous for God's grace, but not less conspicuous for man's guilt, would go out in consummate judgment,— judgment ripe and full as the antecedent grace and guilt have been. The wonder would be, how this judgment should have been deferred to a period so late as this. What is the presumption of reason in the case, is the plain and uniform testimony of God himself in his Holy Word. It would not be easy to enumerate the passages which tell us, distinct as words can do, that our present economy, instead of gradually advancing to Millennial light and glory, is to go out in darkest judgments— is to be broken up by the strong arm of vengeful power— is to issue as the preceding economy has done, as, indeed, every preceding economy on earth has done, in clouds and darkness, in wrath and judgment; only more complete in kind and measure than all before, as it has been fuller than all in the display both of divine mercy and of human guilt.
Some of these passages, making the close of the economy in signal judgment, have already been quoted in the previous tract. Still more of them may be quoted in a subsequent one, that will relate to the way in which the next economy is to enter. Meanwhile, the Scripture is so abundant in passages on such a subject, and with this meaning, that we are under no necessity either to repeat many that have been already used, or to anticipate many that will fall to be used hereafter.
The first we shall refer to is so full, express, and precise, that even did it stand alone, it would be sufficient to establish the point in question. It relates to the passing away of all previous kingdoms on the earth, the so-called Christian ones among the rest, the whole present existing state of things; and the entrance of that other kingdom, so different from all the rest, and which is not to pass away, whose seat or mode of administration may be altered, but whose power and empire are to be unbroken and endless. And the very purpose of the passage—its express design and end— is just to guide us in what would otherwise be entirely dark and impenetrable to us, namely, as to the way in which the present existing state of things is to be removed, and another and better order to be set up in their place. We refer to Daniel 2:31-45. This passage relates to that succession of kingdoms which were to stretch over so large a portion of the earth, from the days of Nebuchadnezzar, who was the head of gold, down to the setting up of that entirely different kingdom, which is yet to be, and which is to supplant and take the place of all the rest. It is the map of this world's whole history, from the days of Daniel down “to the time of the end.” The Four Kingdoms are the Babylonish, Medo-Persian, Grecian, and Roman. The three first have passed away; it is with the fourth alone that we have to do, that which now exists, which exists in its last estate; not in its legs of iron, its strong and compacted state, but in its divided and immissible condition, in its various separate and dissimilar kingdoms, “its feet— its toes, part of iron and part of clay.” Now, this Roman empire is just the several nations of Christendom filling the earth, or the old Roman world,— what we now call the Christian world, all professing obedience to the Christian faith. And the question arising out of the passage in connection with our present point, is this:— How is this great heterogeneous mass to be transmuted into the Fifth Kingdom—the Kingdom of Christ—the Kingdom which differs from all preceding ones, not only in its nature, but especially in this, that it is never to be broken, never to be left to other people, but is to stand for ever? How is the face of the Roman world to be so greatly changed as this,— to put off the earthly and assume the heavenly empire? How are these to be removed—this to enter? Is the process to be gradual? No; we see in the passage it is to be by one instantaneous stroke. Is it to be by the ameliorating influence of the gospel, which, however much we may suppose it increased, both in extent and intensity, is and must still be a gradual moral influence, producing all its changes as at present? There is nothing in the whole passage which bears the most distant resemblance to the gospel and its influence. Nothing that can by any force or violence be construed into a mere moral change, effected by any agency now in use. The transition from the earthly to the heavenly in the vision— the passing away of the image— all earthly power—and the entrance of the true and eternal kingdom, the heavenly; this is most obviously not the fruit of grace, but the exercise of immediate absolute power. It is not the doing of any agency of man at present apparent. What does affect it only appears at the moment; and it is not human at all. It is the stone which changes the aspect of the whole earth; and this stone “is cut out without hands.” This is the instrument,—the sole, the superhuman instrument; and who can think that this is the gospel, who can doubt that it is Christ himself, who remembers his own words, “The stone which the builders despised is made the head of the corner; whosoever falleth upon this stone shall be broken, but upon whomsoever this stone shall fall it shall grind him to powder?” And, then, while the agent in the change is Christ himself, who can read the passage and deny that he will effect the whole change, not by the gospel, but by an immediate exercise of his Almighty power, not by an exercise of grace, but by an act of terrible exterminating judgment? Why, judgment cannot be expressed in the language of man, if it is not expressed in these verses,—and, be it remembered, these verses are designed to describe the issue and passing away of all things now around us,— of the whole Gentile state of things, the whole existing economy. See verses 34, 35, 44, 45.
A similar conclusion may be drawn from a precisely equivalent vision in the seventh chapter— the vision of the four beasts; the same kingdoms, with a new power developed in the fourth, the little horn, the papal power. The end of all these beasts is in manifest judgment— by mighty power— by vengeance not by the “golden sceptre” but the “iron rod.” There are no words but those of wrath, “being slain”—“the body destroyed”— “burned in the fire” “dominion taken away” “consumed, destroyed unto the end ;” and all this the result of judgment —”the judgment set, the books opened”— the judgment of him “whose throne is like the fiery flame, his wheels the burning fire, from before whom a fiery stream issued and came forth—thousand thousands ministered unto him, ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him.” This is the issue of the present state of things— the night, the dark and dreadful night, in which this world's guilty career is to set; clouds and tempest— fire and hail and stormy wind— thunder and lightning, and all the elements of ruin commixed; and then, out of this scene of consummate and universal judgment— this most tempestuous and darkest night the earth has ever seen,— comes the glorious kingdom which the Son of Man gets from the Ancient of Days, and which he gives to the saints under the whole heaven, and which he and they set up and exercise in the new cleared stage and purified atmosphere of this nether world. See Daniel, chapter 7 throughout.
The second Psalm is one of the shortest but most satisfactory testimonies to be found in Scripture on this subject. Properly speaking, it describes the entrance of the kingdom, and therefore belongs to the next branch of our inquiry. The entrance of the kingdom, however, can scarcely be viewed apart from the exit of that rudimental economy by which it is preceded. And we accordingly find a most emphatic testimony on the latter point in describing the former. We refer to the decree which the Father has made to the Son, concerning his ultimate universal empire, and which the Son publishes to all the world, verses 7-9. This first announces the solemn determination of the Father, to give “the kingdom, and dominion, and greatness of the kingdom under the whole heavens,” to the Son of Man, in spite of all the opposition both of the people and the rulers of the earth, referred to in the previous verses. “Ask of me and I will give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.” Here we have the locality and the limits of his empire; earth out to its remotest boundaries, as Milton has it:
“He shall ascend his throne hereditary,
And bound his reign with earth's bounds,—
His glory with the heavens.”
Well, but how does he take this universal empire? By the peaceful influence of the gospel, or by an act of exterminating judgment? Let this question be answered by the subsequent verse, which is part of the same decree, and never should have been severed from the previous verse by that system of textual dismemberment which has made such sad havoc of the Word of God:—“Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession. Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; Thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel.” Here it is judgment, judgment utter and awful, that makes way for the kingdom. This last enters on the ruins— the total and revengeful ruin of all that precedes it, not by a gradual changing of it into a holy and spiritual state. The sway of the sceptre of righteousness and peace is preceded and prepared for by the action of the iron rod. By the latter he lays the world in ruins; and then on the ruins sets up his kingdom and stretches over it the sceptre of peace. The transition is made, not by permitting the former state of things by a gracious leaven, and quickly ripening it into one mass of spiritual excellence; but by entirely breaking it up, “dashing it in pieces like a potter's vessel,” even as the crust or fabric of the earth is supposed to have been in those successive acts of convulsion, which, each breaking up the former order and introducing a better in its place, have thus carried it onward and upward till ripe for the residence of man. Such a vast convulsion is to intervene between the gospel and the kingdom, laying the one economy in ruins, and on those ruins rearing the latter and the better— the residence of the second man with all his saints.
This is equivalent to what we find in all the Psalms “of the wicked being consumed out of the earth, and sinners being no more”— before the meek shall inherit that earth, and there “delight themselves in the abundance of peace.” Psalms 37; 104, etcetera. It is equivalent also to what is found the Parable of the Tares, as characteristic of the end of this present economy, “As, therefore, the tares are gathered and burned in the fire, so shall it be in the end of this world. The Son of Man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity, and shall cast them into a furnace of fire; there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then”— judgment being executed— “then shall the righteous shine forth in the kingdom of their Father.” Blessed reign, beyond those penal fires in which all the evil that has so long infested the earth shall be consumed! This harvest of wrath in the tares is the same, the same in nature and place, with that harvest of the earth, and that vintage of the earth to be accomplished by the sickle of the two-angels, in Revelation 14:14-20, and which are evidently preliminary to, and preparatory for, “that blessedness of the dead in the Lord,”– the happy state to be reached through such a sea of blood. Still more express to the point, if possible, is the memorable passage in Luke 17:20-31, where our Lord, discoursing “of the coming of the kingdom”— of its coming not with outward visibility, not with such visibility as would give warning of its approach, but, on the contrary, of its being like “the lightning which in the twinkling of an eye lighteneth out of one end of heaven even unto the other end of heaven;” then sets himself the Son of Man in the forefront, at the head of this kingdom, and speaking of his coming and of its coming as equivalent, he intimates that such coming— the coming of him and his kingdom— would be ushered in by awful judgment. He tells us, that his day was to find its type and parallel in the two grand deluges which had already left so ineffaceable a scar on the past history of the earth— the deluge of water in the days of Noah which had engulfed the whole ancient world with the exception of the little family— the seed of a new economy— saved in the ark; and the deluge of fire, in the days of Lot, which had in like manner consumed all that lived and all that grew in the well-watered plain, with the exception of him and his— the scarcely saved— who bent their tardy steps to the little city, Zoar; verses 26-31. Here judgment is the grand feature in both the types. Judgment direct from heaven, sudden as the lightning's flash, bursting in a moment on its warned yet slumbering objects, and leaving the scene of its visitation in either case one entire and dreary ruin— a waste of waters— a heap of ashes. And the parallel entirely fails, unless there be something equivalent to this at the day which is called the Son of Man's, and which is before the establishment of his kingdom; similar, yet only so as infancy is to manhood, as the big drop is to the bursting tempest. Unless there be judgment out of heaven, by God's own hand, on a long warned yet careless world— judgment, stealthy as the midnight thief, swift as the bursting wall, startling as the lightning's flash, but more entire and remediless in the wide-spread ruin which it brings than either of these; leaving the whole scene of the gospel economy one wide waste of ruins,— one vast heap of ashes,—
“Till He, whose car the winds are and the clouds
The dust, that waits upon his sultry march
When sin hath moved him, and his wrath is hot,
Shall visit earth in mercy; shall descend
Propitious in his chariot, paved with love;
And what his storms have blasted and defaced
For man's revolt, shall with a smile repair.”
There is, indeed, one whole Book of Scripture which may be referred to as quite decisive on this subject. It is the Book of Revelation, the very purpose of which is to tell us “the things which shall be hereafter,” to narrate the future fortunes of our race and world down to the end of all things. This Book seems to follow the fortunes of our whole race, of the church, and of the world too, down through three parallel lines, each landing at last in one common period, that of rest, light, blessedness, and glory. And, whichever of these great lines we follow,— that of the seals in the 6th chapter, that of the trumpets in the 8th, 11th, or that of the vials in the 16th, we seem to be following the path of judgment throughout, a descending series, proceeding from bad to worse, till, having reached the last, the worst, the consummation, suddenly the scene entirely alters, and, emerging from the smoke, and cries, and miseries of total ruin, from the voices, and thunderings, and lightnings, and earthquakes which are the accompaniments of consummate judgment, we at once find ourselves amid the cloudless light, the stainless purities, the high and holy felicities, of a Millennial state; amid the white robes, the palms, the Hallelujahs, the golden harps, the triumphal songs, of that blessed world, where “all is Paradise again, far happier place than that of Eden, and far happier days.” The common landing place is bright as hearts could wish, blessed as if it were the angels' home; but each of the several ways which lead to it is tracked by judgment after judgment, woe after woe, issuing in a woe and a judgment which may be called the maturity of all the rest, the largest as the last. And as we follow the angel with aching eye and weary heart, (as Milton makes Adam follow the fearful, ever-widening stream of ills and woes which issued from the womb of his first sin,) as one seal after another is broken, one trumpet after another is blown, one vial after another is poured out, we seem, in imagination, to hear the successive crash, crash after crash, by which the whole framework of existing things is being broken in pieces, and the cry of the prophet comes upon the ear, and seems to mingle in the din, as the interpreter of all, “Overturn, overturn, overturn, till he come whose right it is, and I will give it him.” We are now under the last but one of all those vials, which have been pouring out on the Roman world ever since the French Revolution, and in which we are expressly told, “is to be filled up the wrath of God.” At present, indeed, there is with us a lull in the elements of wrath; for the scene has gone to the banks of the Euphrates, and by the drying up of that empire, a way is making for the Kings of the East, those who are yet to have the “first dominion” in the earth. But he is blind to all that is passing around him, and sees not below the surface of things; and he is also deaf to the voice of that faithful prophecy, which, amid the lull, tells him of the going forth “of the unclean spirits out of the mouth of the beast, and of the dragon, and of the false prophet, unto all the kings of the earth and of the whole world, to gather them together to the battle of that great day of God Almighty”– blind to what is now passing, underneath the surface of things, and deaf to this warning voice, is he who does not see in this present lull but a gathering and a mustering of all the elements for that future and final outburst which is to leave the whole of Christendom a wide waste of ruin. And who can listen to the account of this coming outburst, ushered in as it is by the warning note, “Behold I come as a thief,” without feeling that it is “the filling up of wrath,” and that it will shiver in pieces and bring to a perpetual end that guilty state of things, amid the felt tottering and shaking of which we now so perilously stand? Revelation 16:17-21.
There is a great principle announced by the Apostle Paul, which, even separate from all these express and harmonious testimonies of Scripture, would necessarily lead us to expect such a close to the Christian economy. It is the principle which has guided God's dealings in all previous economies; and is still more likely to guide them in this the best of all, namely, that mercy slighted or failing to accomplish its object, uniformly issues in a visitation of wrath,— of wrath proportioned to the previous mercy. You find this principle stated with a special reference to the present dispensation, in Romans 11:13-22. The passage brings into comparison the Jewish and the Gentile church. The one had been broken off by awful judgment, because unfaithful to its post and call; and the argument is, that the other, if unfaithful to her still higher place and office, shall in like manner be cut off, and by a proportionally greater and more signal judgment; Well, because of unbelief, they were broken off, and thou standest by faith. Be not high-minded, but fear. For if God spared not the natural branches, take heed lest he also spare not thee. Behold, therefore, the goodness and severity of God! on them which fell severity; but toward thee goodness, if thou continue in his goodness: otherwise thou also shalt be cut off. The issue, therefore, of the Present Dispensation, the Gentile Church, can be most conclusively determined. Whether it is to issue in mercy or in judgement—merge away into noon-day glory, or be extinguished in the night of wrath—depends on this one circumstance, “Has she continued in the goodness of God?” that singular state of grace to which she was exalted, and in which she so evidently stood in the early prime of her day, all radiant with the grace and love and holiness of her recently departed Lord. “Has she stood by faith?” by and in that simple faith which characterized her at first which fixed her heart and her hope on Jesus, with such entire simplicity, that in heaven and on earth he was her all — all her confidence in the past, all her hope in the future, for whom she counted and cast away everything as loss, as even dung— retained him alone as her only foundation and portion, and Lord, and role and end of life— him alone, yet in him felt herself rich, lacking nothing? Who that knows anything of the past or of the present either, can hesitate about an answer can hesitate to say that as a church she has stood only for a little season in the wondrous goodness of the Lord? She has all but universally, and with a single exception, here and there, fallen from this pure, this primitive, this apostolic faith. Who that remembers how that throughout almost all her course she has been in a state of apostasy— that the mystery of iniquity, rising at the very beginning, spreading and ripening into form and fullness as she advanced, has at last developed itself in such gigantic form as to darken the very light of heaven, and tread out every excellence from the earth, century after century, during one entire Millennium,— who that remembers the middle ages, the eclipse of all light, the Egypt-like darkness, the infidelity, the immorality, the enormous crimes, the worse than Pagan pollutions, which have been all the Church's history, and almost all the religion of the so-called Christian world, for hundreds upon hundreds of years,—who that compares the small minority of living Christians, then, a few tiny twinkling stars in the universe of night, or even the best of Christians or of churches now, with what the church was once when she stood, Acts 2:41–47; 4:31–36; 6:3–8, 15; 7:55-60; 9:31; 11:19–27, &c., or with what she always might and ought to have been, as the Church of the living God, the Lamb's Bride, the purchase of his blood, the habitation of his Holy Spirit,— who that does this can doubt for a single moment that failure has marked the Gentile Dispensation still more fully and fearfully than it did the Jewish— that it has been, and still is, one vast apostasy, with many individual believers, indeed, in its bosom, some grains of gold, yet, as a whole, a reprobate thing? And what, therefore, have we to look for, as the issue of such a dispensation, but the fulfillment of these faithful, terrible words, “neither shall he spare thee,” “thou also shalt be cut off.” What, as its closing scene, and that right speedily, but judgment, judgment to the uttermost, a total excision. “He will finish the work and cut it short in righteousness, because a short work will the Lord make upon the earth.” Even such a desolating, consuming, long-lasting judgment, as that which ended the Jewish economy, and which continues unabated, and in its visible ruins, even down to this present day? Yea, more confounding, more stupendous, more lasting than even that. That was but the dawn of judgment; the one we look for, the last, the filling up of all, is judgment in its highest noon, “the noon of night.” Ah, yes! the current economy, like all that have already passed over this earth's surface, having failed through the faithlessness of man, shall end in the signal judgment of God. It has been so with every previous economy. Analogy, or rather the unchangeable principles of God's moral government, lead us to expect it will be so with this. Man was first tried in Paradise, in a state of innocence. He failed— he fell. And extrusion from his blessed Eden, into a wilderness, bearing his curse written on his bosom, with death to him and to all his race, was the judgment annexed. The economy of innocence went out in this wilderness, an all-pervading curse, and universal death. Paradise, though barred and fenced by its flaming sword, was still suffered to remain on the earth, and in this state was made the means of putting our race under a new economy; teaching them, as it did, when they came to worship before it, led on by Adam the first High Priest, himself a manifold lesson, having been once within its gates, and being the witness of two worlds, the innocent and the fallen— teaching them, so coming and so worshiping, first of all, what sin had lost, but, next, also what the promised seed and the typified sacrifice would one day yet regain and re-open for their entrance. Yet, even in such a school, and amid such speaking lessons, man fell a second time fell deeper than at first— into utter and total sensualism, as at first he had done into ambition and lust. And this second economy was broken up by a second and more signal judgment— a judgment wide as the limits of the earth—a deluge of water, which like the besom of destruction swept away every trace of of man's primeval state, with man himself and beast, and every living thing—leaving man's abode, and everything above it, and about it, sadly changed from what it had been before. Thus contracting the race again into a second root— that root so solemnly schooled in the ark, and by the deluge; resuming, also, as it were, the management of the world into his own immediate hand, and setting out with a sensible demonstration of his Being, sovereignty, sole proprietorship, and the awful effects of disobedience to him; God put the race upon a new trial, in circumstances so solemn, and with every memorial of inflicted wrath around them, as they had recently been with the emblems of lost innocence. But again they lapsed, and into deeper crime as it were out of his own immediate hand, into total idolatry itself. And again the trial closed in judgment in the unsparing carnage inflicted by the sword of the Lord himself, on all the principal nations then on the earth. Then leaving the rest of the world, as it were, to themselves, and concentrating all his operations on a single family, the family of Abraham; after having trained that family as never man had been, for 400 years, in Egypt, the Red Sea, the Wilderness, the Jordan, he set them down in a corner of the earth, shut out from all the world, under his own outstretched wings, under his own immediate eye, under his own personal management, with the Shekinah, the visible symbol of his own presence in the midst of them— a family in the earth, indeed, but walled off from it, and managed directly out of heaven! What an economy was this! Yet failure marked even this a fourth time man's guilt quenched the grace of God-guilt greater and deeper far than all that had yet stained the earth—“the casting out of the Heir of all things,”: the crucifixion of the Son himself, Incarnate God! And behold the mighty ruins! a nation dispersed over all the earth, a universal monument of God's wrath: enduring a kind of living death for the space of near two thousand years; as much judgment marked at this present day, as when his vengeful hand first smote their city; a nation on whom there obviously lieth that blood which nothing but itself can purge away. And now the last sands of another economy are running through, an economy higher and more gracious far than all which have gone before, which has lifted us up even to the very heavens, or rather brought all the richest treasures in heaven down to earth, presenting as its basis such wonders as these,— an Incarnate God, his death upon the cross, in the room of the guilty,—and as its fruits, such blessings as these, free forgiveness, the gift of the Spirit, everlasting life. And this economy, the most wondrous and heaven-like yet displayed, having, like all the rest, ended only in a fuller and more fearful development of human guilt; man having, under this, sinned away not the Son merely, but the Spirit also; having, for the great mystery of godliness, substituted in its place the dark mystery of iniquity, the very incarnation of all the principles of evil; such being, through man's perversion, the issue of God's best and highest plan, shall not judgment fall on the close of this economy, even as it fell on the close of all that have yet gone before. Aye, judgment greater far than all that has yet appeared, the very maturity of these, their consummation, their fullness, the full harvest of which these were but the first ripe fruits— judgment ripe even as the preceding mercy has been ripe manifold as its antecedent grace has been— a judgment in kind and in continuance such as may adequately mark the sense which God himself entertains of his creatures’ guilt, in having treated as a thing of nought, in having actually turned into the largest and most hateful evil ever yet seen on earth, that very economy which was the richest gift of his heart, which contained the last and best of all his treasures, his Son, his Spirit, his own-opened heart, his own paternal home! After this, let us dream not of an Eden-state as next at hand, of returning Paradise, of the coming back to earth of the golden age! It is a wild delusion, a fairy tale, a mid-summer dream. To speak of it in the ears of a drowsy church and a slumbering world, is to seal the ruin of both. No doubt, a better than even the primeval Paradise is ultimately coming. But what is coming first? what is before that Paradise? what is nearest, yea, nigh at hand, to this secure, unthinking, dreaming world? The tempest-cloud of heaven's judgment! the filling up of God's wrath! the last vial already trembling in the angel's hand! that Baptism of fire, through which she must pass, and in which all her pomp and grandeur must be reduced to ashes, ere there can be displayed within her boundaries those new heavens and that new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness. Instead, then, of the soothing sound of a world regenerated by the arts and agencies of man, the cry that should be everywhere raised throughout her borders, should be that slumber-breaking, soul-startling cry that was once heard in the streets of Nineveh, “Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be destroyed!” Instead of turning her eye hither and thither in search for some signs of amendment, that eye should now be intensely fixed on the cloud of judgment— that thunder-cloud which is charged with all the elements of wrath and ruin; which has overhung our economy from first to last; which is getting blacker and blacker with every change in our moral atmosphere, and descending lower and lower, as the eye goes down the course of our economy, till it seems to touch it, shrouding its further end in night and tempest. And standing, as it were, under the very edge of that ever-darkening, ever-descending cloud— every new event in these eventful times startling us as if it were a gleam of the quivering lightning— every rumor among the nations sounding in our ears like the mutter of the distant thunder; we should point forward to “the wrath that is to come, that is almost come, then backward to the cross as a guilty world's only hope— and cry, as one that wished to wake the dead:— Flee to the covert! haste to the only refuge! tarry not in all the plain! escape as for your lives! cast away every worldly, every anti-christian thing, which would attract the lightning of the last tempest! and, as men redeemed from this present world, wait for the coming Lord!
See also Advent Tract #3
Share this post