Remarks on the End of the Gospel Age
If any one really supposes that by the end of the world, Adventists understand the end of this mundane system, or the annihilation of this globe, we are happy, with the issue plainly stated, to have the privilege of correcting that misapprehension. The material of which this earth is composed, is never to be destroyed, if we read the record aright; but, purified and renewed, it is to be re-adorned with more than its Eden beauty, and made the everlasting inheritance of the redeemed. But before this end is reached, the plan of redemption goes through several stages of development; successive dispensations, ages (αἰῶνες) are employed in carrying it forward. And what is called the gospel or Christian age, is no less clearly defined than the Mosaic or Jewish; and the canon of inspiration, to be complete, must inform us respecting the commencement, course, and termination, of the former, as well as the latter. In view of Bro. G.'s position, we raise the question, Is the gospel dispensation or age ever to end? If so, where is the record of it, and under what circumstances is it to take place? The argument of Bro. G. leaves us to infer that we, in this dispensation, are upon a shoreless ocean, to pass on henceforth, forever, without change, the kingdom of God established, the righteous shining forth therein, the bad gathered out, and burned, and all the promises fulfilled; and that the prophetic declarations uttered by Christ and his apostles, pertained exclusively to the generation in which they lived, and were all accomplished in their history. We are decidedly averse to the idea that our times are thus left out of consideration. We want to know what pertains to our age, what prophetic fulfillments concern us personally, what is the present truth for our day, and our corresponding duty. And if we thought that the Scripture record all pertained to the past, we would, with the spiritualists, entomb it with the long-buried nations of antiquity to which it pertained, as an obsolete and useless book. “Lo, I am with you always,” said Christ to his disciples, “even unto the end of the world.” Must this grand promise, which has comforted and sustained so many laborers for their Lord, from that day to this, be whittled down to the insignificant fraction of time that remained to the close of the Jewish age? “Lo, I am with you always, even to the close of the Jewish age!” And the same violence that is rendered to this text by the view in question is rendered to hundreds of others which we have not time, and it is not necessary, here to mention. If the principle we have stated in previous articles respecting the use of the present tense for the future in prophetic writing, is correct (and it cannot be overthrown), then all those passages which speak of the end of all things, the coming of the Lord, &c., as near at hand, when the apostles wrote, are fully explained, and we need say no more respecting them here. And for equally obvious reasons we pass by such an exposition as makes the shining forth of the righteous as the sun in the kingdom of their father, their shining forth among men in the Christian graces, and the tribulations of the Christian life; for a person who has brought his mind into such a condition that it can deliberately adopt and be satisfied with such a view, and believe that the gathering out of God's kingdom, of all things that offend and them which do iniquity, and casting them into a furnace, or lake, of fire, where they are consumed with wailing and gnashing of teeth, is the gathering out, or rather not admitting into, the invisible church, unworthy members, and the overthrow of a nation by the common calamities of war—any person, we say, who has become grounded in such views as these, would not probably be materially influenced by anything that might be written on the subject. What is this more than has been experienced in almost every age by almost every nation under heaven? And if such terrific denunciations of wrath can be thus explained away, what other threatenings cannot be disposed of in the same way? Why cannot the damnation of hell, and the fire of the great day, which shall constitute the perdition of ungodly men, 2 Pet. 3:7, be made to mean something in the natural order of events, and not anything so terrible after all? Is it any wonder that in the hands of such a theology the denunciations of the Scriptures fall dead upon unregenerate ears, and the invitations of the gospel are met with ridicule and scorn? The Lord was to come in the same manner that the disciples had seen him go into heaven, Acts 1:11; he was to come to take his disciples to himself, that they might be where he was; John 14:3; John, in A. D. 96, twenty-six years after the destruction of Jerusalem, saw the event as one still future; and Paul to the Thessalonians (2 Thess. 2:1-4) stated that the great papal apostasy would run its long career, before the coming of the Lord, and the gathering of the saints unto him. Perhaps these sacred writers in referring to the same event, and placing it far in the future beyond the destruction of Jerusalem, tortured the teaching of their Lord, but on present evidence, we must decline to believe it.