Hastening the Coming by Editor

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 6, 1903

Hastening the Coming

By Editor

Editorial

Hastening the Coming

It is not enough to assent to the fact that the Lord is soon coming. Our responsibility is not met by a passive acceptance of the evidences that the end of all things is at hand. This truth of the near coming of the Lord must become personality in us. It must throb in our brains. It must thrill in our hearts. It must be the impulse of every action. It must be the keynote of our life. This is simply the experience of fellowship with the purpose of God for this time. Our faith must lay hold of the revelation of this purpose in the oath of the angelic messenger that “there shall be delay no longer,” and that the mystery of God is to be finished in our day. This is a living verity. There can be no theory about it. The theory of the coming of the Lord has no more salvation in it than any other mere form of godliness without the power thereof. We must ourselves become the incarnation of this advent message. The Word of his coming must become flesh. This advent message must appear to the world in visible form in those who have become one with it in heart and life. A divine voice will then be heard through human lips, and multitudes will be astonished at the doctrine, just as of old. There will then be a revelation of that power of the gospel which makes new creatures out of the most hopeless material, and which will soon give us a new heaven and a new earth. Here is the promise: “I have put my words in thy mouth, and have covered thee in the shadow of my hand, that I may plant the heavens, and lay the foundations of the earth, and say unto Zion, Thou art my people.” And so it is plain enough that it is our personal experience with God's Word which will hasten the coming of the Lord. With what earnest appeal does the apostle Peter close his instruction concerning the coming of the day of the Lord. “Seeing that these things are thus all to be dissolved, what manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy living and godliness, looking for and hastening the coming of the day of God?” O reader, there is a personal experience in this question of the coming of the Lord. Do you know it? Can you help others into the personal knowledge of it? This is the reality of the advent message.

The Advent Message Lives

Fire cannot burn up this advent message. Satan and all his hosts cannot destroy it. It is a part of the eternal purpose of God, and it has in it the living and life-giving power of God's own life. And the home of this message is not in buildings of brick and mortar, but in the hearts of those who receive it. The burning of a building and the destruction of machinery employed in printing the truths of this message need not retard the progress of this message in the least. There are plenty of buildings and plenty of printing machinery in the world. The one thing which retards the progress of this message is the coldness of many who are only half-hearted in their devotion to it. If the flames of the burning Review Office would set on fire the heart of every one in this message, and if the fierce heat of that conflagration would make every lukewarm soul “hot” in his devotion to the work of giving “the advent message to the world in this generation,” we could find much comfort in the midst of this heavy material loss. The flames of the fiery furnace simply burned the bonds of the three worthies, so that those who “fell down bound” were seen “loose, walking in the midst of the fire.” We accept with humble submission any experience which will teach us how to stay our souls upon God with an increasing faith in the power of the naked truth, and which will set us free from the cords with which the world binds us in selfish ease, and will send us forth to the ends of the earth to carry the warning message. A greater fire is just ahead of us. “For, behold, the day cometh, it burneth as a furnace; and all the proud, and all that work wickedness, shall be as stubble; and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith Jehovah of hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch.” Let us go forth with our hearts on fire with zeal for the spread of the message which will “make ready for the Lord a people prepared for him.” “Who among us can dwell with the devouring fire? who among us can dwell with everlasting burnings?” “The heavens shall vanish away like smoke, and the earth shall wax old like a garment; and they that dwell therein shall die in like manner: but my salvation shall be forever, and my righteousness shall not be abolished.” Happy are those who know that the advent message lives in their hearts.

God's Opportunity

There is no such word as difficulty or defeat in the vocabulary of heaven. What may seem to us to be an insuperable difficulty is simply an unusual opportunity for the Lord to reveal the might of his power and to show more of his inexhaustible resources. “Hast thou not known? hast thou not heard? The everlasting God, Jehovah, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary; there is no searching of his understanding. He giveth power to the faint; and to him that hath no might he increaseth strength.” What might seem to our limited view of things as an overwhelming defeat may be the very crown of victory. The cross, that symbol to human minds of shame and defeat, is the glory of triumph to the Christian. A greater than a Roman triumph, when a victorious general entered the eternal city at the head of a procession of trophies, was the walk to Calvary. The glory of it is revealed, and yet hidden, in these words: “As a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and as a sheep that before its shearers is dumb, so he opened not his mouth.” The great lesson to be learned is that God's ways are not our ways. “When I am weak, then am I strong.” “All flesh is grass. . . . Behold your God!” Christ crucified is the power of God.

“Whate’er in me seems wise, or good, Or strong, I here disclaim; I wash my garments in the blood Of the atoning Lamb.”

Our faith “should not be in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.” “Because the foolishness of God is

wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men.” When apparent disaster comes to God's work, we should not be disheartened, but we should inquire of God to find his way and to learn what lesson he desires to teach us. The chastening hand of God is sometimes laid in love upon his children as the only way of saving them from the fruit of their own doings. Let us be strong and of a good courage, but let us diligently inquire of the Lord for the meaning of these very marked providences. Who can fail to understand that there must be a lesson in these things,—not a lesson of doubt and despair, but a call to learn the way of the Lord? It is time for us to ask ourselves the question which we have urged upon others, “What do these things mean?”