The Coming of Our Lord by George W. Rine

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Jul 30, 1912

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 39, No. 29.

The Coming of Our Lord

By George W. Rine

Who Will Reject His Coming? and Why?

N his second letter to Timothy, Paul declared that when Jesus comes in the glory of His kingdom, He will bestow a crown of righteousness upon "all them . . . that love His appearing." Clearly, then, some will love the Master's coming, and, of course, will welcome that coming with unspeakable joy. But the apostle's testimony just as clearly conveys, by implication, the sad thought that some will not love His appearing.

It is evident that all who now love Jesus and live for Him will love and welcome His coming. And, conversely, all who refuse now to receive Him, by His Spirit, into their lives, will flout the doctrine of His second coming, and scoff at those who believe and teach that doctrine.

By Whom Rejected at His First Coming

Apropos of Jesus' first advent, the apostle testifies, "He came unto His own, and His own received Him not." The phrase "His own" refers obviously to the Jews, to those who professed to be God's people, and therefore to be looking for the Messiah.

In that most vivid of all Messianic prophecies, the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, the prophet asks with touching pathos, "Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?" With telling emphasis the prophet here foretells that the number who will recognize and receive the long-promised Christ will be so small as to be next to none. Yes, the divine Spirit foresaw that He would be despised and rejected of men; that His own nominal people would not esteem Him, and would hide, as it were, their faces from Him.

To the "chosen nation" had been graciously afforded every facility to recognize their age-promised Deliverer when He appeared to them as Jesus of Nazareth. The whole Old Testament scintillates with Messianic prophecies. There are in it more than three hundred such predictions, either direct or indirect. These were all fulfilled with the utmost particularity in the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ. Those very Scriptures were read every Sabbath day in the synagogs. How true it was that that people had eyes, ears, hearts, yet they saw not, heard not, understood not. Yet His citizens (people) hated Him, and said, "We will not have this Man to reign over us."

The reason for this tragic mistake on the part of the Jewish people was repeatedly stated by the Master Himself during His ministry. Did He not declare to them that if they had believed Moses they would have believed Him? "For," said Jesus, "he [Moses] wrote of Me." He told them plainly that it was impossible for them to believe His words if they believed not the writings of Moses. (John 5:45-47.) On one occasion He began with Moses and all the prophets, and expounded in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself. The fatal error of the Jews in rejecting the Lord of Glory was owing to the sad fact that they knew not the Scriptures, nor the power of God.

They made the terrible mistake of ranking their traditions above the Word of God. With them tradition was paramount; the Scriptures were secondary, or even negligible. Jesus told them fearlessly that their formal worship of God was utterly vain so long as they taught for doctrines the commandments of men; and that by their traditions they rendered void the commandments of God. It was notoriously true of the Jews at that time that they practised the letter of religion, but were utterly destitute of its spirit and power. Jesus charged them openly with hypocrisy, and declared that they fulfilled the prediction of Isaiah when the latter wrote, "This people draweth nigh unto Me [God] with their mouth, and honoreth Me with their lips; but their heart is far from Me." (See Matt. 15:1-9.)

It was their lack of spirituality that disqualified the Jewish teachers to understand God's revealed Word. As Jesus told them, they knew not the power of God. They had no experimental or vital knowledge of God, for they refused to receive His Spirit into their lives. Nothing but the Spirit of God dwelling in the heart can endue man with spiritual insight and discernment. Now, the fact is repeatedly emphasized that the Scriptures are spiritual, and that they are spiritually discerned. Holy men of God wrote the Scriptures as they were moved by the Holy Spirit, declares the Spirit-filled Peter.

Hence the essential and saving message of the Scriptures can be apprehended only as the learner is guided and quickened by the same Spirit who, through the prophets, wrote them. The religious leaders in the time of Christ felt self-sufficient, leaned to their own understanding. Hence, as Paul testifies, they were ignorant of God's righteousness. Accordingly, they failed to read Christ in their Scriptures, altho His portrait shone from every page. The day of their visitation had come, but they knew it not, simply because they knew not the written Word, and hence could not know and accept the incarnate Word. Inevitably the logical result followed—their house was left unto them desolate, and as a nation they wretchedly perished.

A very few, however, of those who made up the visible church of Jehovah at that time, lived in vital union with God. Spirit-filled, they were Spirit-guided in the study of the prophecies. Through the medium of the manifold Messianic predictions, they were led by the Spirit to see that "the time was fulfilled," and that the Redeemer was at the door. Therefore when Jesus of Nazareth appeared, the "wise men," Simeon, Anna, and many others, recognized and hailed Him as the Seed of the woman, the Desire of Ages—the Son of the living God.

In the Days When the Son of Man Is Revealed

But, as we have seen in previous articles, the Saviour is coming again—coming in the glory of His kingdom, and all the holy angels with Him. In the language of the inspired writer, "Unto them that look for Him shall He appear the second time without sin unto salvation." Heb. 9:28. Not fewer than forty times do the writers of the New Testament make explicit reference to the promised second advent of Jesus. Those who professed to be His church at the time of His first advent rejected Him, and in so doing made irretrievable shipwreck of their faith. Will those who profess to constitute His church at His second coming repeat the fatal mistake? If they do, the mistake will prove incomparably more tragic than was that of the Jews nineteen centuries ago.

The truth is that the deadly parallel is already in striking evidence in the religious world. That we are to-day living in the time when the personal return of our Lord is impending is attested by more than a score of eschatological prophecies. Numerous signs in the heavens, in the earth, in the social, the political, and the religious world, have either already been fulfilled or are in rapid process of fulfilment. Among all the races of mankind the conviction obtains that the end of the age is imminent, and that a new and radically different cycle in the history of all things mundane is impending. Yet the sad fact is undeniable that approximately the whole vast body of the professed Christian clergy not only ignore the advent message due to the world to-day, but regard with a feeling almost akin to contemptuous pity the small body of Christian workers who are faithfully teaching that solemn message to a benighted world.

As in the days of the first advent, the nominal church to-day is trusting largely in the wisdom of man as expressed in tradition, rather than in the living oracles of God. The prophetic portions of the Bible are well-nigh entirely neglected, in the face of the fact that the Spirit of God through Peter enjoins us to "take heed" to the "sure word of prophecy, . . . as unto a light that

shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn." All the holy prophets teach in the most explicit language that Christ will come again as visibly and literally as the sun rises on a cloudless morning. But what are the religious teachers doing with these obvious testimonies of the spirit of prophecy? — They are manipulating them, spiritualizing them, sophistically explaining them away. Having espoused the theories of extreme evolution and of "advanced" critical theology, which are utterly hostile to the plain, obvious teachings of Holy Writ, the typical preacher of our day has lost faith in the Bible as the uniformly inerrant revelation of God.

Not long ago, for instance, a noted clergyman, now dean of one of the most popular divinity schools of this country, preached a sermon on the "Second Coming of Christ," at one of the leading Protestant churches of the Pacific Coast. He declared that the promise of Jesus' second coming has been repeatedly realized in the past and will continue to be realized in all time to come. He alleged that that "coming" was fulfilled every time a sinner yields himself to Christ with a view to living a higher and nobler life; He comes again in those spiritual awakenings which sometimes sweep over the face of an entire community; He comes again in every righteous national or international event or movement; and so on ad nauseam. The speaker declared — incredibly fatuous as it was — that when, at the time of the Boxer uprising in China, the United States government returned to China a large part of the indemnity awarded to the United States, then this country saw the "Son of Man coming in His kingdom with power and great glory"!

Jesus and His prophets foresaw this lamentable apostasy of the latter-day church from revealed truth. Note the emphasis with which our Lord prophetically announced that faith would almost have died out of the earth when He should come in His kingdom: "Nevertheless when the Son of Man cometh, shall He find faith on the earth?" Verily this day is that prediction fulfilled in our ears. In the third chapter of 2 Timothy Paul foretells that "in the last days" men would have a "form of godliness," but they would deny "the power thereof." They would be "ever learning," he declares, but "never able to come to a knowledge of the truth." We know that the Master Himself said, "Thy [God's] Word is truth." Hence religionists in the last days would be ever learning, but never come to a knowledge of the Word of God.

Indubitably, then, all merely nominal professors of the Christian faith, as well as all the irreclaimable unbelievers of the world, will reject and are rejecting the message of Christ's imminent return to the world to receive His loyal children to Himself, that where He is — in His timeless kingdom — there they may be also. The awful terror and panic in which all those who reject the message of the second coming will be thrown, is vividly depicted by the revelator, in the last four verses of Revelation 6: "And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places. 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, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains; and said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of Him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb: for the great day of His wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?"

Is the glorious appearing of our Saviour Jesus Christ, to you, dear reader, as it was to Paul, "that blessed hope"? If you really love Jesus, as did Paul, you will, like him, cherish the "hope" of the Lord's appearing; yes, you will "love His appearing," and like the apostle, receive, at that day, a crown of righteousness. Let us, finally, remind ourselves of the words of John, "Every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as He is pure."