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REMARKS

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Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 22, 1872

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 40, No. 19.

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REMARKS

Bro. G. errs greatly if he supposes that we have so far mistaken the promise of the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, John 14:15–17, as to make that mean the coming of Christ, and to pray for his coming in any such manner. The coming of Christ is a coming “again,” John 14:3; it is as the re-appearance of one who has been away on a long journey, Mark 13:34–37; it is a “return,” for which the church is to “wait.” Luke 12:36. We never pray for the Lord to come again, to return, to appear after long absence, by his Holy Spirit; because we believe that he is in that sense now with his church, and has ever been with them, according to his promise, “Lo, I am with you alway,” Matt. 28:20; and that he will thus be with them till the end of this age or dispensation, according to the remainder of the promise, “even unto the end of the world.” For this purpose the Spirit was promised and given in large measure to the Christian church, to supply the lack of his personal presence, till he shall return. John 14:16; 16:17. We pray, indeed, that the Holy Spirit may copiously fill our hearts with its heavenly presence; but we pray for the coming of Christ as a distinct and altogether different thing.
Take some of the plain descriptions of the second advent given us in the gospels, and try to make them signify a spiritual coming, or an outpouring of the Spirit. How would Matt. 24:30, 31, for instance, read according to this idea? Let us see: “And then shall appear the sign of an outpouring of the Spirit in heaven; and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see a great outpouring of the Spirit in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And the outpouring of the Spirit shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.” Yet would not such a paraphrase, monstrous as it is, be strictly accurate, according to the theory of a spiritual coming of Christ?
See also Matt. 25:31–34, which we will quote as it stands in the common version, not having a sufficient command of language to adapt it to the spiritual view: “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. And before him shall be gathered all nations, and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats; and he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on his left. Then shall the king say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.” Let any man try to prove that the scene here described is simply some manifestation of the Spirit among men, and failing, as he surely will, then sit down and repent in sackcloth and ashes for having made the attempt. Well may the skeptic claim that if the sacred writers use language to no more purpose than this; if they speak of the tribes of the earth seeing Christ and mourning, when they are not to see him and mourn, and a great sound of a trumpet being heard when there is to be none, and a gathering of the elect, when there is to be no gathering, and the assembling of all nations when there is to be no assembling, and a separation of the good from the bad, when they are not to be so separated;—justly may he claim, under such circumstances, that the Bible is an imposition and religion a farce.
Great stress is still laid on the fact that Christ spoke as if addressing the generation then living, to show that all his words must be fulfilled in their lifetime; and this peculiarity of expression is all any one has to offer in defense of such a view. But we have already sufficiently noticed this well-attested and almost universally acknowledged characteristic of prophetic writing, that we are carried along down the stream of time by the prediction of events in consecutive order; and the prophet, instead of always using the future tense, seems sometimes to go forward to the time when the fulfillment is to take place, and speak from that standpoint, of, or to, the generation which is to witness that fulfillment. In no other way can some prophecies be explained. And this hypothesis is as reasonable as it is necessary.