The Second Advent by J. Cross

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 27, 1870

The Second Advent.

By J. Cross

“And then shall they see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.”—Luke 21 : 27.

THE government of God is an economy of compensation and retribution. Our present human condition is full of disorders and inequalities. There must come a period of adjustment. Wisdom and goodness must ultimately triumph. Depressed and suffering virtue must be rewarded; and vice, too often successful and prosperous, must be appropriately punished. This doctrine, so accordant with reason, is plainly taught by revelation. It pervades the whole volume of Holy Scripture. We meet with it in many forms—in narrative, argument, prophecy, simile and parable, explicit statement and incidental allusion, the simplest records of prose and the sublimest strains of poetry. But where is to be the scene of adjustment? In this or some other world? Surely, the remedy should be applied where the evil prevails. Here, if anywhere, shall be enacted the judgment of the living and the dead. Here, if anywhere, shall be realized the retribution of nature and of man. The vague imagination that the inhabitants of the earth are to be transferred to some other sphere, and there dealt with according to their deeds, is neither rational nor scriptural.

A wise and powerful monarch has a distant province in rebellion, wasted with anarchy, ravaged by cruelty, and wretched through rampant crime. What will he do? He is just, but he is also kind and forbearing. He looks with mingled indignation and sorrow upon the miserable insurgents. What will he do? Will he commission an overwhelming force to transport the whole population, obedient and rebellious, to the mother country for judicial proceedings, and then lay waste the territory, and leave it a perpetual desolation? Nay, he will correct and reclaim; he will subdue and deliver. He will not crush by violence; but he will restore by righteousness. He will not give up the territory to oblivion, and erase a title from his royal brow; but he will chastise the insurgents with discretion, recover as many as he can to their allegiance, rescue the injured and the oppressed, and destroy the incorrigible. Instead of depopulating the land and laying its dwellings in ashes, he will prefer the nobler trophies of anarchy crushed, and enmity subdued, and beauty and fertility restored, and a redeemed province teeming with a loyal and virtuous population. Does not wisdom approve the preference?

And what teach the revelations of God? Is this globe to be unpeopled and annihilated? Is it to be made a monument of the divine wrath, and preserve no memorial of the divine mercy? Is the noble barque to be wrecked, and left stranded on an accursed shore forever? Calcined by the last fire, is this fair earth, visited so often by angels and marked with the footsteps of the Son of God, to rush wildly from its orbit, an outcast from the family of planets, The burning wreck of a demolished world, A wandering hell in the eternal space?

Are the saints to be removed from the scene of their redemption? Is the original patrimony and sovereignty of man to be wrested from him forever? Is the grant made to Adam, renewed to the patriarchs, repeated by all the prophets, and finally confirmed by “the Lord from Heaven,” never to be made good? How is Christ the “second Adam,” if he redeem not the forfeiture of the first? Why are we taught to pray that our Father’s kingdom may come, and his will be done on earth as in Heaven? Do these promises and petitions contemplate a translation to some happier sphere, or the rescue and renovation of this? Where is the kingdom of God to come? Where is his will to be done as in Heaven? In the sun, the moon, or the stars? In Mars, Venus, or Jupiter? Verily, we can offer no sublimer prayer, and none more consonant with the design of the Redeemer’s advent, than this—that the hallowed sceptre of the earth, usurped by the prince of darkness, and wielded by him so long and so cruelly over the fallen lord of this lower world, may be restored to human hands, even the hands of the mighty Antitype, the second Adam, the Lord from Heaven. Oh, no! Satan shall not wear his stolen diadem forever. His despotic sway shall be broken. His dominion shall be taken away.

“The prince of this world is judged; now shall he be cast out.” Expelled already from Heaven, he shall soon be ejected from the earth. This planet belongs to Christ, and he shall come to claim it for himself. “And thou, profane, wicked prince, whose day is come, when iniquity shall have an end, take off the crown, and remove the diadem; abase him that is high, and exalt him that is low; I will overturn, overturn, overturn it, and it shall be no more, till He come whose right it is, and I will give it him.” This proclamation which God the Father hath sent before the chariot of his royal Son, is hastening to its accomplishment. The second advent shall crown the first with glory. Then shall the whole earth be at rest, and man, redeemed, shall inherit the promised dominion. Rescued from the tyranny of Satan, to share Immanuel’s glory in actual sovereignty and perfect blessedness, the saints “shall reign on the earth.”

“Thus heavenward all things tend, for all were once Perfect, and all shall be at length restored. So God hath greatly purposed. Who would else In his dishonored works himself endure Dishonor, and be wronged without redress.”

The contrary doctrine belies the whole scheme of divine revelation. If this world is not to be redeemed and renewed, but depopulated and destroyed—if Christ is to come simply as a mighty judge, to hold a grand assize, separate the righteous from the wicked, remove the former to a happier scene of being, banish the latter to an appropriate place of torment, and then annihilate this globe, or render it uninhabitable, and leave it forever under the ban of his vengeance, as if it were a guilty thing, and deserving such severity of doom—then where is the fulfillment of prophecy? then where is the redemption of the pledge? But, the inspired charter of our hopes furnishes us better instructions, and warrants us in cherishing better expectations. “Christ was once offered to bear the sin of many; and to them that look for him he shall appear the second time, without sin, unto salvation.” His humanity links him indissolubly with this earth; and he shall come to triumph where he suffered, and reign where he redeemed. For this fulfillment of her Master’s promise, the church has been looking with joyful confidence ever since he ascended from Olivet, and a mere glance at some of the accompaniments of this glorious parousia will justify her longing expectation. *

And then shall be accomplished the eternal redemption of the saints, “who are kept by the power of God, through faith, unto salvation, ready to be revealed in the last time.” The redemption of nature from the curse includes the redemption of the body from the grave. “The first resurrection” is part of the final “restitution of all things.” “They that are Christ’s shall be made alive at his coming.” This is the promised destruction of the last enemy. “Then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory.” And in anticipation of such a triumph, even now may we take up the song—“O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” The body raised shall be the identical body buried, but the identical body changed from mortal to immortal, from corruptible to incorruptible, spiritualized in its essence, freed from all infirmities, endued with new and unknown energies, and glorified with the likeness of our Lord. Oh! how marvelously beautiful must be that harvest from the sepulcher.

The final object and issue of Immanuel’s glorious advent will be the establishment on earth of his imperishable kingdom of righteousness and peace, in which all his faithful followers are to participate as joint heirs of his inheritance, and royal ministers of his throne. Our Lord tells us that “when the Son of Man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory.” To sit upon the throne of his glory—what is it but to exercise his glorious regal prerogatives? and this he does not do till his glorious manifestation, with his angelic retinue. With this agrees the declaration of the apostle Paul: “The Lord Jesus shall judge the quick and the dead at his appearing and his kingdom;” where “his appearing and his kingdom” are mentioned as synchronous events, and with them the Judgment of “the quick and the dead.” This is the kingdom whose coming we invoke in the Lord’s prayer, the subject of a thousand promises throughout the holy Scriptures, the consummation of all the hopes of the faithful, and the crown of all their joys. Courage, ye fearful saints! Your Master will return as he departed, and enthrone you with himself in a renovated world. The night may be dark and stormy, but it is “far spent,” and the everlasting light will soon dawn upon us. “Then shall the moon be confounded, and the sun ashamed, when the Lord of hosts shall reign in Jerusalem, and in Mount Zion, and before his ancients, gloriously.”—J. Cross D. D., in Banner of the Church.