Saying, Where Is the Promise of His Coming?
By W. A. S.
WHEN was it to be said?—“In the last days;” Peter forewarned us. The last days have come, and we hear on many sides the cry, “Where is the promise of his coming?” Here is the New York Independent, one of the leading religious journals of the land, describing as “dangerous,” the doctrine of the resurrection of the body and the personal second coming of Christ to this earth. Commenting on the teaching of these truths in the Sunday School Times, the Independent says:— This literalism suggests that the editorship has passed over into the hands of those few extremists who hold to the personal second coming of our Lord to earth to renew all things. The particular paragraph to which exception is taken is so plain a statement of the “blessed hope” of the Christian that we quote it:— This coming, of which his resurrection makes us sure, is as real and definite and literal as was his appearance to Mary or to Peter, or to the disciples in the upper room, when he ate and drank with them. . . . By the coming of Christ, we do not mean his spiritual presence by which we are protected, nor death by which we are summoned into his presence; but we mean his personal, glorious, visible return, when he comes with the clouds of heaven, when he appears “a second time,” when “every eye shall see him,” when this earth which has been shadowed by his cross will be illumined with the glory of his throne. We are glad that a journal like the Sunday School Times, with so large a circulation among Bible students, is thus calling attention to one of the fundamentals of Bible teaching. But the Independent declares:— This is not the teaching of the Christian church. It is the teaching of a small fraction of it, a fraction which never learns. Do we not catch the note of derision in this reference to believers in Christ’s promise to come again? “There shall come in the last days scoffers,” wrote Peter, “saying, Where is the promise of his coming?” 2 Peter 3: 3, 4. Peter believed in this personal second coming of Jesus. He was in the group to whom Christ said, “Let not your heart be troubled. . . . I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again.” He stood with the disciples who saw Jesus go up bodily into heaven, when the angels gave the promise: “This same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven.” The doctrine of the resurrection of the body and of Christ’s return to this earth was no mere philosophic theory to the disciples. They had been affrighted when Jesus appeared in their midst after his resurrection, when he said to them, “Handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.” And as Christ was actually and bodily “risen from the dead, and become the first-fruits of them that slept,”—assurance of the resurrection of all that are Christ’s, “at his coming” (1 Cor. 15: 20, 23),—so also the believers in Jerusalem321were witnesses of a demonstration of the resurrection of the saved through Christ, the first-fruits. The quaking of the earth as Jesus gave up his life on the cross rent the rocks and opened graves round about Jerusalem. “And many bodies of the saints which slept arose, and came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many.” Matt. 27: 53. What could philosophic unbelief in a literal resurrection have said there? Thank God for the “blessed hope” and the sure word of promise. “For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord. Wherefore comfort one another with these words.” The New Testament is full of it; and, for that matter, the Old as well. The completion of the whole plan of salvation depends upon the personal second coming of Christ, the resurrection of the dead, and the “restitution of all things, which God hath spoken by the mouth of all his holy prophets since the world began.” We see fulfilled all about us the signs that show that Christ’s coming is “even at the doors.” The cry, “Where is the promise of his coming?” is itself a sign that will encourage believers to proclaim the glad tidings and the solemn warning yet more earnestly. W. A. S.