THE JUDGMENT HASTENS by Dr. Bartine

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 29, 1868

THE JUDGMENT HASTENS.

By Dr. Bartine

“But,” says one of my careless friends to-day, “do not all things remain as they were? The sun shines as beautifully to-day upon my head as it did upon my childhood brow. Do not all things remain as they were?” Not exactly. The infidels of the olden time dreamed that horrid dream, and were tempted, amidst their delusions, to think so. They do, in some respects, remain as they were. The judgments of God, now and then, drop here and there—the wrath of God, now and then, touches and withers a sinner’s hardened heart; and so time rolls along, and the mercy of Heaven lingers and scatters its blessed influences abroad; but just now and then the Lord God strikes down a guilty wretch, that the world may be warned and impressed with the fact that God is not asleep, nor his justice dead, but that Imperial Power still sits upon the eternal throne to advocate the rights of virtue, the purity of God, and the welfare of the universe.

God has appointed a day in which he will judge the world by the Lord Jesus Christ, and that day is coming. It already, I sometimes think, flings its shadow upon the pathway of earth. I sometimes imagine I can hear the mutterings of its gathering thunders, and that the old earth trembles as it approaches the great day of the Lord. The day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, when the heavens shall be dissolved, and the Almighty, in the tread of might and majesty, shall come forth from behind the clouds of his glory; when the universe shall veil its face from the sight of grandeur, and stand in awe while the world is judged—the righteous saved, and the wicked damned forever.

“But,” says my unconverted friend, “why is this judgment delayed?” It is that God may have mercy upon you, and that all the fruits of your wickedness on the one hand, or the goodness of the good man on the other, may accumulate, enlarge, diffuse, and grow up; for bad dead men and good dead men are working hard, and, until time shall be no more, God only can tell what good a good man will do when he is in his grave, or what evil a bad man will do when he is buried, but he will meet it at the judgment-seat of Christ. Oh! what a reckoning that will be, when the sinner will be done doing harm on earth! He will remember how he blasted the hopes of his neighbor’s daughter, and how he took advantage of the weakness of the weak. It will be enough to know that he never taught his child to pray, but lived in sin, and died without hope and without God; but oh! to think that after being dead he exerted an influence for vice, and against the eternal God! The Judgment, although delayed, is coming. The harvest will be ready, and God will come forth, in the majesty of his power, to judge the world in righteousness.—Dr. Bartine.