CHRIST IS COMING AGAIN.
By Lyman Abbott
CHRIST is coming again. The manifestation of God in humiliation in the incarnation is not the final and consummate manifestation. The disclosure of God to his children by his spiritual communion with them is not the consummate and final disclosure. Paul looked and waited for the coming of his Lord. Peter warned his readers not to be deceived by scoffers asking, Where is the promise of his coming? John bade the children of God purify themselves by the hope that when he shall appear his children shall be like him. James exhorted the disheartened and the discouraged to be patient unto this coming of the Lord. As they understood him we may safely understand him. The first coming of Christ was the spring-time in the divine seasons; the dispensation of the Spirit is the rich and fruitful summer; there awaits our hope the ripened and mellow autumn. When he comes it will be in such guise that no one can question or can doubt. It will be visibly and palpably. He will come as the flood came; he will come as the lightning comes. As the king comes with the trumpeters that precede him, so will he come, and his advent will be proclaimed and emblazoned far and wide. Now he is incognito. Only the spiritual sense, only love and faith, peer beneath his peasant garb and behold a king. Only now and then in his earthly life does his divinity flash forth so that the temple traders flee from the fire of his eyes, and the soldiers fall to the ground when he comes out from the garden to surrender himself to them. Then Caiaphas, and Pilate, and the centurion, and the guard, and the soldiers, shall recognize him, as well as Peter, and James, and John. All the tribes of the earth shall mourn, seeing him, and the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every freeman, shall hide themselves, and call on the mountains and the rocks to hide them from the face of him that sitteth on the throne. His coming will be unexpected. Men will be buying and selling, marrying and giving in marriage; all the industrial and social life of the world will be going on, and into the midst of it he will break in the suddenness of his glory upon the astonished world. And if we are humble we shall not pass by, as though it concerned us not, Christ's solemn instruction, Watch; "and what I say unto you I say unto all, Watch." I chiefly object to the common interpretations of the New Testament prophecy as fulfilled in the destruction of Jerusalem and the dispensation of the Holy Spirit, because they rob the New Testament of this solemn warning, and this eloquent incentive to holy, earnest, Christian living. If we believe that to-morrow the trumpets may sound in the horizon announcing the coming of our King, and our buying and selling, and marrying and giving in marriage, may be broken in upon by his second advent, and by the consummation of all things before his judgment throne, we should better understand Paul's mystical exhortation: "It remaineth, that both they that have wives be as though they had none, and they that weep, as though they wept not; and they that rejoice, as though they rejoiced not; and they that buy, as though they possessed not; and they that use this world, as not abusing it." So may each one of us be moved to live, henceforth, from the devout and careful study of this hope and warning of Christ; ever looking for the blessed hope and the glorious appearing of our great God and Saviour, with this prayer ever in our hearts, Even so, Lord Jesus, come quickly.—Lymon Abbott, D. D.