Why Watch and Wait? by Dr. Cumming

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Mar 7, 1871

Why Watch and Wait?

By Dr. Cumming

“Watch therefore; for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of Man cometh.”—MATT. 25: 13.

The promise of the Saviour’s coming is the key-note of prophecy. “This same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go.” Again, “He will come in the clouds of heaven, with power and great glory.” Again, “Looking for that blessed hope, the glorious appearing of Jesus Christ, our God and Saviour.” “We shall appear with him in glory.” “The Lord cometh with ten thousand of his saints.” Again, said that ancient and afflicted emir, seated in the sunshine on his eastern plains, “I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth.” Even Balaam, who practiced evil, but was inspired to prophecy good, could say, “I shall see him, but not now; I shall behold him, but not nigh; there shall come a Star out of Jacob, and a Scepter shall rise out of Israel, and shall smite the corners of Moab, and destroy all the children of Sheth. And Edom shall be a possession, Seir also shall be a possession for his enemies; and Israel shall do valiantly. Out of Jacob shall come He that shall have dominion.” The Psalms are full of predictions of the advent of our blessed Lord. In the 50th Psalm, “Our God shall come, and shall not keep silence; a fire shall devour before him, and it shall be very tempestuous round about him. He shall call to the heavens from above, and to the earth, that he may judge his people. Gather my saints together unto me; those that have made a covenant with me by sacrifice;” or in the New-Testament language, “Come, ye blessed of my Father.” And the Saviour himself tells us, in language the most graphic, “The Son of Man shall come in the glory of his Father with his angels; and then he shall reward every man according to his works.” And Peter says, “When the Chief Shepherd shall appear, ye shall receive a crown of glory that fadeth not away.” And John in the Apocalypse says, “Behold, he cometh with clouds, and every eye shall see him.” When Jesus said, at the close of that splendid vision which irradiated with its noonday splendor the lonely island on the bosom of the Ægean, “Surely I come quickly,” the last words of John, the beloved disciple, who outlived the 11, and died at the age of 80, with which he closed his vision, were these: “Amen;” so let it be. “Even so, come, Lord Jesus.”

Christ is the end of creation and redemption; he is the perfection to which all imperfection soars; the glory to which all the fallen creation aspires; the great model to which humanity in its noblest specimens shall be conformed; the Sun of Righteousness, in whose light we shall see light.

But what is there in the promised advent of Christ that makes his advent the desire and the aspiration of all that know him? We desire his speedy approach because we shall see him as he is, not as he was—the Man of Sorrows, and acquainted with grief, wounded and stricken for our transgressions—but crowned with the diadems of creation, providence, redemption; angels adoring, and prostrate millions casting their crowns in flashing showers at his feet, and saying, “Not unto us, but unto him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood; to him be glory and dominion forever and ever.” If we believe in what he has done; if we love him as the author and the finisher of our faith; as the friend longs for the presence of his best friend; as the family longs for the return of its parent and its head; as the bride longs for the arrival of the bridegroom, whom he comes to accept as his wife; so must we, like John, desire the advent of him who comes to right a creation that has gone wrong, and to restore a glory that has passed away like a vision. Surely, when he comes amid welcoming shouts and hosannas, “Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord,” we too will praise and glorify and worship him.

When he comes, the glass through which we see darkly shall be removed; the mists that darken our vision will drop from our eyes; the atmosphere that is now so hazy will be disinfected and purified, and we shall see the King in his beauty, and the land that is now afar off—we shall see him as he is. Even at present the words which he has inspired and consecrated for the knowledge of him are very imperfect. There is a sense in which the Bible is an imperfect book; that is to say, it must come short, as all human speech must fail to express an infinite glory, to delineate a divine beauty, or to enumerate the excellences of him who is the chief of ten thousand, and altogether lovely. The best of photographs is but an imperfect representation of the original; the best and most inspired passages of Scripture but imperfectly set forth his glory; finite vehicles cannot contain infinite excellences, finite language cannot define an infinite, glorious, and gracious Being. When he comes, the portrait will be superseded

as unnecessary. The sacramental memorial of his death will be annulled; for we shall need no reminiscence or memorial of One who is no longer absent, but present in the midst of us, the light, in a sense intenser than it ever was realized before, that lightens the Gentiles, and the glory of his people Israel.

When he comes, we shall be like him. At present, the best of us are very unlike him. Read the perfect biography, then turn over the leaves of memory, and read your own. What contrast! It is not comparison, it is all but absolute contrast. But a day comes when he returns to earth, according to his own glorious promise; when we shall be like him; our hearts true in every beat; our intellects clear and keen as when they first came from the creative touch of God; our consciences the perfect echo of the perfect will of our Father in Heaven; all the faculties of our souls an accordant and adoring priesthood, because inspired by the breath of his Spirit, giving forth strains of music we never reached before. These bodies of ours, which have been so much deteriorated by sin, and are so great obstructions to its powers, shall be restored and reconsecrated. Between Eve in ancient Eden before the fall, and the fairest of her daughters upon earth, there is, I do not say an infinite, but a very great contrast. In every instance, bodily as well as morally, the gold is become dim, the fine gold is changed; the wine is mixed with water; the crown of glory and of beauty is fallen from our heads. But at that day we shall rise in resurrection robes; the cold and corruptible garments of mortality consigned to the grave. There will be left no trace of corruption, or imperfection, or aught of the ravages and taint of a great primal sin. Eye, and ear, and all our senses, shall be perfect as they shall be pure. This mortal shall put on immortality; this corruptible shall put on incorruptibility. Every sense shall be an inlet to joy, every sensation shall be as blissful as it is pure.

All things that offend shall be cast out; all things that are decayed shall be made new. Is not that a blessed hope? a glorious expectation? Whatever sin has done in our flesh shall be undone; every trace of imperfection, every mark of evil—every groove upon the brow—those deep grooves that record the history they would fain compress in very little space shall all disappear. Now they remind us of the brown sea-sand, from which the tide of life has long been retreating. These grooves the retreating tides of life leave behind—the memorials of a thousand cares, the deep-graven reminiscences of many troubles; the mysterious hieroglyphs that we can’t read, but that God can interpret; ah! what anxieties, what griefs, what struggles, what pains, what afflictions, do they prove we have waded through in seeking the blessed shores, where all cares are strangers, and all sorrows have fled; and where if tears be ever shed they must be tears of excess of joy, not tears of broken hearts and bruised spirits. It is a blessed hope that we shall be like Him.

The Bridegroom will come, and those on whom the cold shadow of death has lain for many a long and weary year, he will waken from the sleep of death and bring with him. The babes that fell from the tree of life, and the gray-haired men that withered by the wear of years by its branches, the fair, the beautiful, the holy ones that we would have kept because we loved them, will all reappear, with not one blemish left upon a single brow; not one rude mark remaining on the spirit, not one sting in any heart; all sensations bliss, all sights beauty, all sounds music. The bride shall receive the bridegroom, and she shall no more go out; “and there shall be no more tears.” How beautiful the apocalyptic passage; it is almost music to hear it: “And there shall be no more tears, nor sorrows, nor crying, nor death; all things shall be made new.”

When our blessed Lord comes, all creation will be purified and reconsecrated. Some think that this earth has become so vile that the sooner it is extinguished the better. They think that it is unworthy of God to retain an orb so poor and so sin-stained, and that it had better be cancelled and a lovelier placed in its orbit. There is no prediction of such a catastrophe in the Bible. The deeper we penetrate the arena of nature, the clearer is the proof that annihilation is not possible, and certainly is not fact. But apart from this, would it not be a grievous loss were a world of so historic antecedents as ours expunged from its orbit, and dismissed over the depths of oblivion forever? What! shall the atmosphere breathed by the incarnate God cease to exist? Shall the flowers that those eyes looked on, and the sweet sound of brooks, and waves, and winds, those ears heard, be all extinguished forever? Shall the Mount of Olives, from which he rose; the Mount Tabor, on which a transient gleam of his glory rested, be thrown down? Shall Calvary and Gethsemane be only names of things that no longer are? I cannot believe it; all the instincts of my nature revolt against the idea, and the instinctive desire in our hearts to perpetuate and preserve those historic scenes of the past, are ripples from the great tide of eternity, and in their measure they tell us God will not destroy scenes that superstition may in this imperfect economy pervert, which Christians treat only as they deserve, when they reverently remember them.

To destroy the earth would be to acknowledge and seal the success of Satan. What was the devil’s attempt? To get the earth and us with it. What is he now? He is the prince of the power of the air. We don’t see him, but he walks in our homes; he is here or there, for he goeth about seeking whom he may devour. He or his servants may now be whispering, “Oh! it is all nonsense; don’t believe these things; you have your business to attend to, you must not enter into religious speculations.”

Such a result would interrupt or reverse the great process that God has constantly pursued, and end the analogy that runs through all inspiration. The great law in revelation is not to destroy, and create other things instead, but to take old things and purify and restore them, so as to make them what they were or should be. All the Saviour’s miracles are indications of this. When he opened the eyes of the blind, he did not take out the old orbs, and put in new ones, but he renewed the old ones. And when he unstopped the ears of the deaf, or laid the fever of the sick, or made the lame leap as the roe; or when he quickened the dead—these and indeed all his miracles were restorative and beneficent, as well as miraculous and divine. And therefore we believe the earth will not be destroyed. Indeed, Scripture expressly promises “a new heaven and a new earth.” St. John does not say, I saw another heaven and another earth, as he would have said if it had been something substituted for the old. But does not “new” mean “another”? Certainly not. For instance, we read, “If any man be in Christ he is a new creature.” Does not that mean that his identity disappears, and that he becomes another man? Not at all; he is changed, regenerated, transformed, and becomes new only in the noblest and intensest sense of that word. So this earth will be made a new earth; it will be disinfected and purified; the last fire will refine it as gold and silver; and Jesus the great High Priest will wave his priestly hand over it, and on that earth which has shared in our descent and has become corrupt, literally, I believe, not figuratively, its deserts will rejoice, its solitary places will blossom like the rose, the lion shall lie down with the lamb, and a little child shall lead them. These are not stray fancies, but assured facts and prophecies that must be accomplished. God has so written it in his holy word, and he will so arrange it in his providence.

Have we any proximate evidence of when he will come?

About three or four o’clock in the morning of June we can see the first beams of light beginning to peep over the distant horizon; then the first rays of twilight tell you that the sun is hastening to rise, and shed his morning beams upon the green earth. Equally can we calculate when winter, and spring, and summer, and autumn, come. We can do more; we can calculate the orbit of a comet, and predict on scientific grounds the probable date of its return. But no calculus of ours can determine the day or the hour when the Son of Man cometh. Yet if he has been pleased to lay down signs, in his own word, which he commands us to read, and which it is our privilege and should be our delight to read, then, by comparing the facts of history, the phenomena of the age, the events that transpire amidst the nations of the earth; many running to and fro, and knowledge being increased; the gospel already preached to all nations as a witness, after which the Saviour says the end shall come; the troubled sky of Europe; the startling scenes of the last ten years; plagues and pestilences in diverse places,—we must say, “The coming of the Lord draweth nigh.” The prophets of peace all told us, in 1851, when the first Crystal Palace appeared a beautiful creation in Hyde Park, “The millennium is come; peace now is inaugurated; there will be no more war.” Thousands were carried away with the dream, and fancied that the dawn of the millennium was about to begin. But all who read their Bibles, and thought and read correctly, felt that anything more absurd or preposterous than such an expectation could not be entertained. Ever since that first beautiful creation onward to the last that appeared in the west of London in 1862, there have been more wars, and more terrible wars, more slaughter, more convulsion of nations, more changing of thrones, more revolutionary paroxysms, more upheaving of the continent of Europe, than has been known probably since the French revolution in 1793. These things are all shadows on the dial, indicating substance somewhere; the echoes of the warning voices, sounded by the Saviour and written in the gospel, when he told his disciples, and through them his believing people in future ages, When you shall hear of wars, and rumors of wars, nation rising against nation, and people against people; pestilences, famines, earthquakes in diverse places, then you have the budding of the fig-tree; the summer is near, the everlasting summer; “and then shall ye see the Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven, with power and great glory.”

If we look not only at the world at large, but at the condition of the church universal, we ask, Was ever the visible church in such commotion, in such convulsions, as it is now? Some churches with skepticism eating into their very hearts; others, again, with popery without a pope, or rather with many popes, very inconsistent, but very real, coming over them like a dark eclipse; others quarreling about forms and ceremonies; and every visible church in Christendom in a state of fermentation; as if God were about to teach, what churchmen of all denominations are so reluctant to learn, that there is no perfect church till the perfect Lord come; that the tares will grow with the wheat. My churchmanship is so low that I have come to the conviction that the best church on earth is simply a recruiting station for the true church which is in Heaven; and that the greatest archbishop, and the most eloquent preacher on earth, are simply recruiting sergeants, gathering in and enlisting converts for the army of the living God.

When the Saviour comes, what will he do? He will come to prove that redemption is no failure; that his own word is no fable. Some cry, “Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep all things continue as they were.” Others say, “Let us eat, drink, and be merry.” But the believer says, Come Lord Jesus, come speedily. And when he comes, he will show that not one jot has fallen from the least promise, but all has been exactly fulfilled; that Christianity, in the numbers of its converts, in the splendor of its victories, in the results and issues of its conflicts, is no failure, but has the pre-eminence in all things. That ancient servant Moses, that stern prophet Elijah, and all that believe in the Lamb, shall meet on a mountain, the glory of which shall not fade, and in a day which shall have no night, and a blessedness which shall have no end. It will be seen that redemption was no mistake, that Christianity was no cunningly devised fable; that all that it predicts, but which thousands scoff at; that all that it claims, which thousands repudiate, it truthfully predicted and justly claimed; all things made new; God in the midst of his people; the bride presented to the bridegroom; creation restored; the earth animated by a new spirit; and all things purified, glorified, elevated, ennobled, will attest, as the voice of many waters, as the voice of a great multitude, “Great and marvelous are thy works, Lord God Almighty; just and true are thy ways, thou King of saints.”—Dr. Cumming.