“Looking for, and hasting unto the coming of the day of God.” 2 Peter 3:12.
Our doctrine is no novelty. The church of Christ from the earliest times, has written and sung of the floods that shall overflow, the storms that shall sweep the sky, the pestilence and distress that shall walk the earth, and the earthquakes that shall rack the globe, both as heralds and accompaniments of the day of the Lord. The solemn strain has rolled down from Thomas, of Celano, the poet of the middle ages, A. D. 1221–1255, who sung of that
Day of wrath, that day of burning,
All shall melt, to ashes turning.
To Luther's solemn hymn,—
Great God, what do I see and hear?
The end of things created!
The Judge of man I see appear,
On clouds of glory seated.
The trumpet sounds, the graves restore
The dead which they contained before:
Prepare my soul to meet him.
And Charles Wesley, who says,—
Thy tokens we with joy confess:
The war proclaims Thee Prince of peace,
The earthquake speaks thy power,
The famine all thy fullness brings,
The plague presents thy healing wings,
And nature's final hour.
The plague, the dearth, the din of war,
Our Saviour's swift approach declare,
And bid our hearts arise;
Earth's basis shook confirms our hope,
Its cities fall but lift us up,
To meet thee in the skies.
And John Wesley, who exclaims,—
Earthquakes, deaths, and desolations,
Signify thy kingdom near!
And Byles, who cries out,—
Let the earth totter on her base,
And clouds the heavens deform;
Blow, all ye winds, from every place,
And rush the final storm.
Come quickly, blessed Lord, appear,
Bid thy swift chariot fly;
Let angels tell thy coming near,
And snatch me to the sky.
And Doddridge, who solemnly inquires,—
How will my heart endure
the terrors of that day?
When earth and heaven before the Judge
Astonished shrink away?
And Newton, who sings of that hour, when
Earth shall melt away,
Like wax before the flame.
And Dr. Watts, who asks,—
Who dares engage his fiery rage,
That shakes a solid world?
And Davies, who exclaims,—
How great, how terrible is God,
Who shakes creation with his nod!
And Bishop Doane, who says,
The earth shall quake, the sea shall roar,
The sun in heaven grow pale.
And Wesley, who writes again,—
Stand th' omnipotent decree,
Jehovah's will be done;
Nature's end we wait to see,
And hear her final groan.99
And Bishop Heber, who sings,—
The Lord will come, the earth shall quake,
The hills their fixed seats forsake.
And again:—
In the sun and moon and stars,
Signs and wonders there shall be;
Earth shall quake with inward wars,
Nations with perplexity.
Soon shall ocean's hoary deep,
Tossed with stronger tempests rise;
Darker storms the mountains sweep,
Fiercer lightnings rend the skies.
Evil thoughts shall shake the proud,
Racking doubt and restless fear;
And amid the thunder cloud,
Shall the Judge of man appear.
But though from that awful face,
Heaven shall fade, and earth shall fly;
Fear ye not, you chosen race,
Your redemption draweth nigh.
Thus men of all ages, sects, and lands, proclaim the coming of terrestrial convulsions as the portents of the great and awful day of God at hand.
And when, in 1727, a severe earthquake shook America, from the wilds of Maine, to the State of Virginia, all hearts reverentially bowed before it, the pastors of New England everywhere preached upon the event, and men said, “This is the finger of God.” Drake, in the history of Boston, quotes an eye-witness as saying, “The houses rocked as if they would fall down, and the people being amazed ran out into the streets, calling on the Lord for mercy.”—History, vol. 1, p. 575. The inhabitants rushed into the churches for prayer. At Haverhill, a general fast was held for two days. At Exeter, forty persons were baptized; and at Haverhill, one hundred and fifty were propounded for admission to the church within three weeks after the solemn event. At Amesbury, the whole time was given up by the people in worship and prayer. At Cambridge, the churches of Dr. Mather, Mr. Lowell, and Mr. Foxcroft, were crowded with serious worshipers. The sermon preached afterward before the General Court, was on the mighty earthquake that had occurred October 30; and William Burnet, Governor elect of Massachusetts and New Hampshire, appointed a fast to be kept on the twenty-first day of December following, as he said, “Throughout the province, on account of the late surprising and amazing earthquake, and the shaking of the earth.” In the general reformation that ensued, evil men were alarmed, and drunkards and blasphemers ceased to riot and scoff. Some laughed; but all were sober. The ministry rose to the solemnity of the occasion, proclaimed God in the earthquake, and reaped a harvest of souls.
Alas, where now is that solemn awe that trembles before the terrible hand which has of late shaken every part of the world? Where are the public and humble thanksgivings for our preservation from the destruction which has fallen upon others? Where are the ten thousand admonitions from an enlightened ministry, which should have followed the convulsions of our fire-doomed planet during the past two years? And where are the warnings of that greater earthquake, and the day of God that is behind it, of which these increasing commotions are but types and signs? “The priests' lips should keep knowledge.” Mal. 2: 7. The ministry and the whole church should awake to the importance of this solemn crisis—this awful interval of suspense—and give the alarm, lest the blood of lost multitudes, who hang upon her lips, be found in her skirts, and be required at her hands. Gracious God, do thou arouse thy people from their slumbers on the verge of the great day!
“A Swiss traveler,” says a writer in the Edinburgh Review, “describes a village, situated on the slope of a great mountain, of which the strata shelve in the direction of the place. Huge crags, directly overhanging the village, and massy enough to sweep the whole of it into the torrent below, have become separated from the main body of the mountain in the course of ages by great fissures, and now scarcely adhere to it. When they give way, the village must perish; it is only a question of time, and the catastrophe may happen any day. For years past engineers have been sent to measure the width of the fissures, and report them constantly increasing. The villagers, for more than one generation, have been aware of their danger; subscriptions have been once or twice opened to enable them to remove; yet they live on in their doomed dwellings, from year to year, fortified against the ultimate certainty and daily probability of destruction by the common sentiment, ‘Things may last their time and longer.’”
Like the dwellers in this doomed village, the world's inhabitants have grown careless and secure in sin. The scoffers of the last days are around us, saying, “Where is the promise of his coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.” But in saying this, they are too confident. Nothing is permanent that has sin about it, nothing secure that has wrath above it, and flames of fire beneath. Sin has once deluged the world with water, it shall deluge it again with waves of fire. Sodom and Gomorrah are the types that foreshow the doom of those that live ungodly in these latter times, and he who can walk this reeling world unmoved by all the tokens of its fiery doom, must either have a rock of refuge where his soul may rest secure, or else must have fallen into a strange carelessness and a sad forgetfulness of God.
But we need not wonder that the world has little thought of the coming day of wrath. Thus it was foretold. Men will say, “Peace and safety,” till the final storm bursts in fury on their heads. For as it was in the days of Noah and of Lot, when men were eating, drinking, buying, selling, planting and building, marrying and giving in marriage, till the day of trouble came, even thus shall it be when the Son of Man appears.
But when the long-forgotten prophecies shall be fulfilled, in which God says that “there shall be a great shaking in the land of Israel, so that the fishes of the sea, and fowls of the heavens, and the beasts of the field and all creeping things that creep upon the earth, and all the men that are upon the face of the earth, shall shake at my presence, and the mountains shall be thrown down, and the steep places shall fall, and every wall shall fall to the ground,” (Eze. 38: 19, 20,) men shall sorrow in vain over their carelessness and sin, lamenting that the harvest is past, the summer ended, and they ungathered, unpardoned, unsaved, unblest, at last.
And will a careless, guilty world to whom these pages shall come, continue to forget the coming Judge, and slight his offered Son? Will none heed his breath in the cyclone, nor see his hand in the tossing main, nor perceive his awful march, his stately stepping in the earthquake's desolating tread, nor hear his voice in the thunders that shake the air, nor discern the glance of his angry eye in the lightnings that flash and burn? And will sinners still refuse to listen to the entreaties of Jehovah's living word? Shall all things continue to be attributed to secondary causes, and the omnipotent Being who performs these wonders, and before whose tribunal of judgment, sooner or later, every soul must certainly appear, be put far away? Reader, dare you continue in sin and forget God?
Pressed down, and awed with an overwhelming sense of the impending doom of our world, and the possibility of that doom overtaking the worldly-minded and thoughtless multitudes of mankind at any moment, and shuddering at the terrible sins that are lighting the torch with which the last fires are to be kindled—we send out far and wide our solemn and earnest warning, beseeching men by the love of Christ, not only to prepare to meet their God, but to seek meekness, and live holily before him, and to watch and pray always, that they may be accounted worthy to escape all these things that shall come to pass, and to stand before the Son of Man!—The Coming Earthquake, by D. T. Taylor.