The Times of the Restitution of All Things.
By Dr. Cumming
Times of refreshing from the presence of the Lord, and the times of restitution of all things. Acts 3 : 19, 21. TIMES OF REFRESHING is the translation of the Greek word, ἀναψύξις, which means coolness after heat, rest or recreation. Sin has heated the air, scorched the soil, and weakened the springs of the energy and health and happiness of mankind. The change predicted, when it comes, will be as dew on the tender grass, as health to the sick, life to the dead, and freedom to the slave. The source of all is not in earth or of man, but God; it is from the presence of the Lord. “In his presence is fullness of joy.” “Times of restitution of all things.” The Greek word for restitution is προκαταστασις, a word that means the restoration of anything to its former condition. Disorganization more or less is the condition of all creation. Re-organization is its destiny. The accomplishment of this destiny is recorded in the programme of its fulfillment in Isa. 11, and 65: 17. Do the words in Acts, “the times of the restitution of all things,” teach what is called universalism, or the final restoration of all men, angels, and animate as well as inanimate nature? There are three great passages which are alleged by some to prove this issue. Let us investigate impartially their meaning. The first is 2 Cor. 5 : 18, 19, “And all things are of God, who hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ, and hath given to us the ministry of reconciliation; to wit, that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them; and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation.” This passage clearly portrays God’s aspect toward us. It does not teach that wrath has been turned into love, but that, consistently with justice, holiness, and truth, God can pour down on guilty men the full current of his mercy and love. It teaches that it is now possible for the great Lawgiver to deal with us in mercy, and yet justly; to pardon the guilty, and yet not connive at sin; to save us not over the ruins of his law, but in perfect harmony with the most rigid exactions. God’s love now lights wherever man opens his heart to receive it. God’s mercy pardons all who will receive pardon. Sin, the obstructing element, is put away, and Christ, the uniting and mediatorial one, has taken its place. But the determining limit of the action of this mercy is found in the words, “in Christ,” “God in Christ,” “found in Christ,” “no condemnation to those in Christ.” There only must the sinner stand and pray. There only, and nowhere else, does the divine absolution fall. That alone is the area which salvation covers. The second passage is in Col. 1 : 19, “For it pleased the Father that in him should all fullness dwell; and, having made peace through the blood of his cross, by him to reconcile all things unto himself; by him, I say, whether they be things in earth, or things in Heaven.” This stretches away from the cross to its future results. In the first passage it was “to reconcile.” In this it is literally translated, “to reconcile back again,” that is, to restore and re-establish what has gone wrong. But whatever the grandeur or the extent of this restoration in the future, it is also limited by the area of it, “in Christ,” “through the blood of his cross.” Out of Christ is no restoration. In him is the recovery of all that fell. In him all is sunshine. Out of him is “blackness and darkness forever.” The third passage often quoted is Eph. 1 : 9–11, “Having made known unto us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure which he hath purposed in himself; that in the dispensation of the fullness of times he might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in Heaven, and which are on earth; even in him.” These glorious results lie in the future, and constitute an aggregate of issues the most magnificent. But in all these passages “in Christ” and “by Christ” are repeated with a frequency and fullness, alike designed and significant. To look for refreshment or restitution of anything that is fallen, or of any one who has sinned, save in Christ, is hopeless. There is indeed a “without” (Rev. 21 : 8; 22 : 15), and it is implied in the “within.” But none are excluded who do not exclude themselves. All will be saved who are savable. All who will be saved God will save. So rich and comprehensive and available is this salvation, that one does not wonder at the words of the apostle, “How shall we escape if we neglect so great salvation?” A sinner preaching to sinners, I refuse to fling broadcast denunciations of everlasting misery. I infinitely prefer, what inspiration dwells upon, to proclaim salvation wide as the sun and lasting as our mundane economy. “The Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely.” What may we expect will be included in this restitution? The will of man, now discordant, will be brought back into harmony with God’s. What is now prayer, “Thy will be done,” will then be an accomplished fact, “Thy will is done.” Our affections will be rebaptized. They will be the priesthood of Heaven, in harmony with God, and in unity among themselves. There will be the happy reunion of all that loved the Lord and one another in him. Satan shall be dispossessed of his spoils, and cast out into the lake that burneth with fire. The Saviour will rise on his people like the sun. All nature will attain its palingenesia, and “every creature which is in Heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea,” we shall hear saying, “Blessing, and honor, and glory, and power, be unto Him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb, forever and ever.” Blessed hope! the glorious appearing of Jesus Christ, our great God and Saviour, will inaugurate a kingdom that shall have no end. The earth we now live on, will not, as the popular notion teaches, be annihilated or dissolved in vapor, or dissipated into space, and the whole of its people—its redeemed people—transported into another and a more enduring realm. All must admit, as we have shown, that some great change has passed upon our globe. It is impossible to believe that the Author of the beautiful, the holy, the happy, made our world such as it now is—groaning and travailing in pain, yearning to be delivered, till its sighs reach to the Heavens, and its sorrows and its sufferings provoke to pity and the compassion of angels. Surely, surely, sickness, with its wasting influence; sorrow, with its gnawing griefs in the heart; death, with its horrible disorganization, never were in the original inventory, when God made this world, and pronounced it very good. Neither sorrow, nor sickness, nor death, can bear the impress or wear the signature of that God who is love, and who delights in the happiness and the joy of his people. What is the cause of all these? Sin alone. But sin is not the creature of God. God did not make sin, nor is he in any respect the author of it; and any theology that makes God the author of sin is to be abhorred altogether. Sin is a post-creation incident, introduced after man was made in the image, and radiant with the beauty and glory of Him that made him; and ever since sin intruded, we find its consequences follow—namely, sickness, traveling into the most sheltered, and sequestered, and sunny home; sorrow breaking hearts that long have been bounding; tears wept by eyes that have never wept in life before; death in the air we breathe, in the water we drink, in the food we eat—death in ceaseless action everywhere. The warmest heart that beats must one day grow cold; the most beautiful form that adorns the home or captivates the world, must one day crumble into dust, and signify, if not say, to corruption, “Thou art my mother,” and to the worm, “Thou art my sister.” These things surely were not originally made or originally meant. There is evidence in man’s physique alone that he was made and meant to be immortal in his body, as well as in his soul. And whatever be the cause, explain it as you please by philosophy and science, it is now fact that 70 is not in every instance reached, that eighty is still more rare, and that on the incidental patriarch, as if a link between the patriarchs that were, and the fleeting and fast dying creatures that now are, survives and numbers from his birth 100 years. But we are not left in perplexity. The same Bible that gives the story of an Eden in which all scenes are beauty, all sounds music, and all sensations bliss, tells us also the reason of our present abnormal state and the story of the disaster that introduced death and all our woe; and oh, happy hope! it tells us also that the apostasy of man shall not have everlasting consequences, but that the world will terminate its weeping day with a Paradise more beautiful, more bright, infinitely more lasting than the Paradise with which the world began. This is the only solution that has stood every test, and bears on its face the clearest signature of God. The salvation of the soul is the greatest problem, and the first to find its explanation in the Bible, for “what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” but it tells us also of the resurrection of the body, this mortal putting on immortality, this corruptible, incorruptibility, death swallowed up in victory, which the regeneration and restoration of the earth shall follow in the enjoyment of a redeemed and a rejoicing universe. Nature fell with man, nature’s lord sharing in its degradation and ruin, and nature will be raised and enthroned when her lord and representative is raised a partaker in His restoration also; and the rise, it tells us, will be vastly more glorious than the fall; the restitution more magnificent than the original; for where sin has abounded in havoc, destruction, and ruin, grace will abound much more in restoration, regeneration, and everlasting life. The popular notion is, and it is a very common one, that the earth is to be annihilated, and its redeemed inhabitants to be transported to a distant and beautiful orb. Many good Christians have written that there is something in matter itself intrinsically so corrupt, depraved, and vile, that its annihilation is the only means of getting rid of the inseparable corruption that lies at its core. I do not believe it. When Adam was in perfect holiness and harmony with the law of his Creator, he was a man, with a pulse at his wrist, and a beat at his heart, and hunger and satiety, just as I am. When Eve was made, her form was more beautiful than that of any of her daughters since, no doubt radiant with a physical and moral beauty to which the loveliest that live are but distant approximations; yet she was made of matter, she was flesh and blood; “a spirit hath not flesh and bones,” as she had; and yet she was holy. And they lived in the garden—that little spot taken in from the earth, and in which man still tries, in some things successfully, to reproduce the lost glories of Paradise; they ate of its fruit, they drank of its streams, they listened to the songs of its birds, they gazed upon its beautiful flowers; and yet, and why not? they were perfectly holy. Therefore man’s body has been pure and perfect once, just as man’s soul was holy once; and we are led from the teaching of the apostles in the New Testament to infer that man’s body will be made at least as pure and perfect as it was before. In matter there is nothing essentially polluted and irrecoverably unclean. Is there anything sinful in a beautiful flower? Is there anything necessarily corrupt in the splendid evening star that glistens like a glorious diamond upon the brow of night? Is there anything corrupt in a brilliant and sparkling diamond, in the precious stone, the ruby, or the amethyst? Nothing. These things are perfectly pure already. The only two material things that seem to me to survive as memorials of Paradise are two—the precious diamond and the beautiful rose. These look to me like lingering remains that tell mankind, the one of the fragrance and the beauty, the other of the everlasting splendor of the Paradise that once was. But there is nothing in these inextinguishably corrupt, impure, or unholy. And if matter was once holy, why should not matter be capable of being holy again? Yet the popular notion is that the world is so bad that there is no hope for it; it is to be cast out; it is useless, and the only way to have a pure earth is to annihilate the existing one. In fact, the great poet that represents English popular feeling sanctions this idea: “The great globe itself,
Yea, all that it inherits, shall dissolve,
And like the baseless fabric of a vision,
Leave not a wrack behind.”
It may be poetry, but it is not true; it may be very beautifully expressed, but it is not scriptural. The earth will not be so dissolved that it will not leave a wrack behind. It would seem to me that if this earth is not restored, or is to be forsaken, it would be unjust. The brutes of the earth, the fishes of the sea, the birds of the air, creation itself, fell with and by man, and share in his degradation and his shame. Does it not seem to be an act of justice that the unconscious, irresponsible creation, on which was inflicted the shame and degradation of the responsible, but guilty, lord at the head of it, when he is restored, should be restored also; when he is redeemed, and re-instated in his forfeited royalty, that creation, which fell with him, should rise and reign with him in glory? Man dragged creation after him in ruin; will creation feel nothing of man’s restoration? God’s great process in his work of elevation in the history of the world, has not been, for six thousand years, the creation of something new, substituting it for the old, but the evolution out of the old of that which is beautiful, and perfect, and pure. When he makes a man a Christian, what is called a new man, he does not extinguish the man, and substitute for the extinct man another man, but he inspires and makes the old man a new man. The identity of the subject remains; the moral transformation is so great that the old man ceases to be called so, and is called a new creature in Christ Jesus. In the providential arrangements for man’s being, the processes that take place are the evolution of beauty out of deformity—glory out of decay. A seed is cast into the earth; it rots, and out of its corruption springs the stem that bears the bread that feeds a world. The seed is thrown into the earth, and that seed comes out of the soil a fragrant and a beautiful flower. The contrast between an exquisite flower, with its beautifully penciled tints and its rich fragrance, and the seed from which it springs, or the root which sustains it, is not comparison, it is absolute contrast. Such is God’s way—out of the evil educing good; out of corruption bringing incorruption; out of mortality, immortality; out of degradation, elevation; out of deformity, beauty, and splendor, and glory.
—Dr. Cumming.