S. Christ coming quickly

CHRIST COMING QUICKLY

“Behold, I come quickly: blessed is he that keepeth the sayings of the prophecy of this book. . . . And, behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with me, to give every man according as his work shall be. . . . He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come. Lord Jesus.” - Revelation 22:7; Revelation 22:12; Revelation 22:20 THIS assurance, given three times within the short compass of these closing verses (Revelation 22:6-21), is not only in itself, but in respect also of its repetition, significant and emphatic. It occurs once before, in the message to the Philadelphian church (Revelation 3:11), in a connection somewhat similar to that in which it first occurs here. As it stands here, it is addressed to no particular church, but to all to whom this book of the Revelation is known. It is the burden or key-note of the book’s concluding strain. And as the book is evidently meant to be the conclusion of the whole volume of inspiration, whether it was the last written or not is not material. This announcement is the Lord’s parting word to the church as she is to be left on earth till he comes again from heaven. It is his farewell. Hereafter I will not talk with you any more, as I have been doing, in my personal ministry, through my inspired apostles, and in this book, by my angel signifying to my servant John things which must shortly come to pass. All that I have to say in connection with my coming in the flesh, and through much tribulation in the flesh entering into glory, has now been said. The Holy Spirit is to teach you all things whatsoever I have said, and to bring them to your remembrance; so that I shall be still present with you, ever apprehended and felt by you to be freshly speaking to you these things, speaking them in my own proper person to all my little ones individually, one by one, as really as I have been speaking them to John and his fellows hitherto. I will not leave you comfortless. In that way, I will be ever coming to you. Lo, I am with you always. But the revelation and the record of it. are complete. The sum of all that I have to communicate is made up. My lips are closed as to any new utterances. As the Father’s witness, I have, for the present, nothing more to say. I take my leave. But, “behold, I come quickly.”

Viewed thus in connection with the completed volume of divine discovery, as it clusters round the first appearing or advent of the Lord, this intimation of the fact of his second coming, and the manner of it - I come, and I come quickly - is plainly fitted, like the Lord’s own emphatic warnings towards the end of his personal ministry and teaching, rather to deepen the feeling of responsibility as regards the present, than to stimulate curiosity or encourage speculation as to the future. It is the admonition, as it were, of a teacher when he has finished the giving out of a lesson. See that it be well conned and learned. I shall be with you presently to hear you say it. The servants have got their Lord’s will, so far as he sees fit to make it known to them, put into authentic shape. They have got all the information they are to have on the subject of the intervening period; - all that is needful for the unfolding of his plan and for their guidance in connection with it. They have nothing more to expect. They are to make the most of what they have. For, he says, “I come quickly.”

There is, undoubtedly, a difficulty here. It arises out of the lapse of time. He says, “Behold, I come quickly.” But how quickly? Centuries have rolled on, and there is no coming, no sign of coming. I would face the difficulty, and see how it may be met.

I. The difficulty is not met by putting death instead of the second advent, or by considering the two events as practically identical. They are not so. As motives, they tell very differently on our minds. They present the future in very different lights. Death is our going to Christ. The second advent is his coming to us. Death is, in a solemn sense, isolation. It is our meeting with Christ, with God in Christ, separately, individually, each one of us apart, each one of us alone. The second advent is union and reunion. It is the gathering together of all in Christ; all in heaven and all in earth. Death is abstraction, spirituality. The second advent is substantial embodiment, fresh corporeity. Death is silent and successive, taking man after man noiselessly away, one by one. The second advent is simultaneous, one blast of the trumpet summoning all together. Death is the preparation for judgment. It is the apprehension or arrest of the parties who are to be judged. The second advent is the judgment itself It is the great and final assize. It announces the irreversible, eternal issues. Thus it may appear that there are such differences between death and the second advent, considered in the light of motives, as must preclude their being, as motives, confounded or identified.

There is undoubtedly one particular, in respect of which they may be assimilated. It is the suddenness of their coming. Death may come in a moment, at any moment. Is not this, to the individual believer, the same thing virtually as the Lord’s coming again to receive him to himself? And is not the possible suddenness of death as strong and urgent a consideration as the predicted suddenness of the second advent? To a large extent, even as regards believers, this must be allowed. And certainly, as regards unbelievers, in appealing to the unconverted, I would admit of no distinction. I would not waste a moment’s thought in weighing the difference between the two motives in question. What! When men are dying, perishing, ripening for eternal fire, shall we nicely hold the balance between the means or motives by which we may pluck them as brands out of the burning? Let us tell them that Christ is coming quickly. Let us tell them that death is coming quickly. Let us anyway and anyhow sound in their ears the alarm: “This night thy soul may be required of thee.” “The Judge standeth at the door.” “Flee from the wrath to come.” Even the Lord’s own people need to be reminded, for comfort as well as for edification, that death may be to them individually equivalent to the second advent, in respect of the immediateness of their entrance into rest; and that it is the same in respect of the obligation of being always prepared. But still, the two future events are not to be confounded or confused as motives.

One point of difference is very clear. The idea of death suddenly snatching me from this body of mine, and this my bodily and earthly condition, takes my mind off” altogether from the circumstances and characteristics of my present being. The idea of Christ suddenly meeting and confronting me fixes my mind upon them. In either case, the elements of suddenness, unexpectedness, the absence of previous warning or notification, is practically most important. But it does not in both cases tell in the same way. Where am I, at any given moment? What am I doing? How am I occupied and engaged? Let me pause and think. In another moment my soul may be away from this mortal frame, and this gay or busy scene. It will all be as if it had never been! Most affecting, most thrilling, most solemnising is the thought! Oh! that I were wise, that I were ever realising this thought, that I were always thus considering my latter end! But again, let me pause and think. Christ is to appear suddenly. He comes quickly. That sudden appearing of his is to me near, at the very door. I am to feel and apprehend it to be so. It is to me as if the very next time I lifted my eyes from the work I am doing, or the book I am reading, or the letter I am writing, or the friend with whom I am talking, I were abruptly to see my Lord! to see him in glory on his glorious throne of judgment, and to be in a moment, in the bodily state in which I am, and with the very earthly business I have on hand, cited and sisted before him, to see him as he is.

II. Is the difficulty met by getting rid of the interval, real or supposed, as by placing the coming of the Lord before the millennium? How can I be asked or expected to live, as if Christ were coming quickly, momentarily, as if he might come to-morrow or to-day, or this instant, if I believe that at least 1000 years must intervene before he comes? The difficulty is precisely the same, if any interval of time, or even any single event or series of events be interposed. Let me put myself in the position of the disciples, gazing after their ascending Lord, and listening to the voice of the angels: “Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing into heaven? This same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven” (Acts 1:2) He shall come again. From that instant they were to live as if he might come at any time. They had been so commanded by their Lord himself: “Watch ye therefore, for ye know not the time when the Master of the house Cometh, at even, or at midnight, or at the cock crowing, or in the morning; lest coming suddenly, he find you sleeping. And what I say unto you, I say unto all, watch” (Mark 13:35-37). Thus, then, from the moment they saw him depart, they were to realise his quick and sudden coming, as what might happen at any moment thereafter. And yet they knew of one event that must come in between his going away and his coming again. They were to wait at Jerusalem till they received the Holy Ghost, Again, let me put myself in the position of the Thessalonians, to whom Paul wrote so earnestly, exhorting them to live in the faith of the Lord’s coming quickly at any time. They were not to sleep, as did others, but to watch and be sober, seeing that the day of the Lord Cometh as a thief in the night. And yet they too were told of a signal event that must take place before the Lord appeared; the apostasy; the rise and revelation of that wicked one; the antichristian development of Rome. So also is it in the Revelation. The words, “Behold, I come quickly,” are uttered at the close of a prophecy, foretelling a whole ecclesiastical history. Nor does it avail to say, that in these cases, the length of time that the intervening events might occupy was concealed. Let it be granted that the disciples did not know how long the dispensation of the Holy Ghost they were to wait for might last, and that the Thessalonians did not know how many years the predicted apostasy would last, nor John, what lengthened centuries the history he predicted would take to unfold itself They might conceive of it, we may argue, as very short. Be it so. Still it was an interval It was, so far, a postponement to them, be it ever so brief, of the expectation of the second advent. They knew that there was something to happen and some time to elapse before the Lord’s appearing. They were positively, and even anxiously, informed that this was to be the case. And yet it was their duty to realise practically, and as an influential motive to personal purity and holy watchfulness, the suddenness and nearness of the Lord’s appearing; to live, in short, as if he might appear at any time. This it must have been possible for them, by faith, through the Spirit’s influence, to do. And where is the essential difference between a longer and a shorter interval interposed? Do you reply that these believers, regarding the interval as indefinite, and possibly as very brief, might feel to-day, as if what was to happen before the Lord came might be over to-morrow, and therefore, he might come to-morrow? Be it so. Still, until it was over, the expectation was to them as unequivocally and decidedly postponed, as it is by the intervention of hundreds of ages. I have no idea, however, that they were left, or that it was intended that they should be left, so much at sea and in the dark. Only I repeat. Let the event interposed be ever so hurried, and the interval ever so brief and uncertain, precisely the same difficulty is raised as by the interposition of the entire millennium; a difficulty the very same in kind, and really not at all less in degree. For, in truth, we must have some principle here to explain how a believer can live, as if Christ might come suddenly at any moment, although he knows that some certain thing must happen before he comes. I say we must have some principle to explain this, partaking of the same power or virtue, in respect of which, to God himself, one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.

III. In looking out for such a principle, I would desire to avoid everything that might appear like refining upon or explaining away the strong and plain statements of the word of God on this subject. “Behold I come as a thief.” “Behold I come quickly.” “The Lord is at hand.” There is a sense in which, from the moment of his departure, he may be truly and emphatically said to be coming quickly. He is making haste to come, inasmuch as he is putting matters in train, as it were, for his speedy return. The whole march or movement of affairs, from his ascension to his glorious appearing, is quick and rapid. There is no drawing of breath, as it were; not an instant is lost; he is no sooner gone than it seems as if he were on the way back again; and such is the ceaseless flow, the rapid and resistless force, with which all things are hastening on to usher in the last solemn crisis, that the believer seems to see and realise his Redeemer and Judge, as even now already on the wing, and on the very point of emerging from the clouds in glory.

It is a sublime and spirit-stirring view. “Ye men of Israel, why stand ye gazing up into the heavens? This same Jesus who is taken up, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven.” He shall come; he is already coming: even now, he is on the wing, so to speak, and on the way. “What though ages have to roll on, and many a world-history has to be acted out before his actual appearing? It is a rapid, swift, hasty, sudden coming after all. He is making short work; He is losing no time; nor is there any time to be lost by you. Behold, he cometh quickly. There is much practical power in an appeal like this; although it is not quite satisfactory as a solution or explanation of the difficulty. It rather evades than meets it; and giving an excellent gloss or paraphrase on the plain and solemn warnings of Scripture, it yet fails in bringing home the precise truth taught.

IV. The real explanation, as it would seem, is to be found in the power of that principle of faith which enlightens darkness and annihilates distance, which brings out the invisible and brings near the remote, which is “the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen.” The second coming of Christ, like the first, is an object of faith; and it is so in all its particulars as regards the person coming, the purpose of his coming, and the manner of his coming. Now to a believer, the mere possibility, or even absolute certainty, of ages being yet to elapse before the Lord come again, ought no more to diminish the influence of that event upon his mind, and heart, and conscience, than the fact of ages having elapsed since the Lord came at first lessens the moral weight of his constant vivid sight of Christ and him crucified, and his always bearing about with him the dying of the Lord Jesus, Everything about the first coming of Christ, and especially about the cross, the capital and central and all-engrossing subject of the picture, the sudden lifting up on the accursed tree, the streaming of the blood and water, the cry of agony - Why am I forsaken? the voice of satisfaction - “It is finished” - the prayer of unutterable faith and love - “Father, forgive them:” “Father, into thy hands I commit my Spirit:” all this I say, is to the believer ever fresh, as if it were but of yesterday, nay, as if it were a spectacle of to-day. It tells upon his whole moral nature, not as a past, but as a present reality. Before his eyes, he feels ever as if Christ were even now evidently set forth, crucified for him

Why should it be otherwise with the second coming of the Lord? Believer in Jesus, - simple, single-eyed, meek and lowly child of God, - Do you feel any difficulty in realising that first coming and all that is involved in it, as not past and gone and obsolete, but present, and pressing upon you daily? - any difficulty, I mean, arising out of the long tract of centuries you have to travel over, before you find its date in the history of time? Do you trouble yourself here with the innumerable occurrences that crowd the intervening period? And when you are living in all simplicity and godly sincerity by the faith of the Son of God, who loved you and gave himself for you, does the intrusive suggestion, Ah! but that is long gone by! ever come to mar the force and point of this all-prevailing motive to holiness? Never, you will reply, never, except to be resisted; you strive against it until, by God’s help, you have got rid of it, and find yourself enabled to realise that shedding of blood as a thing of to-day. I know no chronology and no chronological computation of long eras, in dealing with that Saviour, who eighteen hundred years ago trod with his blessed feet the soil of Judaea, and expired on the cross of Calvary. I know no chronology and no chronological calculation of the manifold intricacies of dates and cycles, in that which is my daily, hourly, momentary life of faith; my looking unto Jesus crucified, as the Lamb slain, and embracing Jesus risen as my Lord and my God. Then why, I would with all deference submit, - why should there be any real difficulty in applying this principle in the prospect, more than in the retrospect? Does faith mounting up in the ascending series of years to the opening up of the fountain, long centuries ago, lose all sense of distance and remoteness, in the bright and vivid apprehension of the cross; the cross as fresh, and new this very moment, as if that earth which Saracen and Turk have trodden down were still stained with the warm drops that fell from the pierced side? And will not the same faith in its keen glance downwards and onwards along the stream of time, seize the one great and only object of its hope, and bring it near, even to the very door, ay, though the destinies of a hundred dynasties and the revolutions of a thousand ages may seem to come in between?

Surely there is among not a few spiritual men some misapprehension here. Take the somewhat analogous instance of the prospect of death; which is not indeed to be substituted for the hope of the second advent, or confounded with it; but which yet may be referred to for illustration in this particular matter. The prospect of death is undoubtedly, to the believer, so far as it goes, a perfectly legitimate and warrantable motive to activity and to holiness. It is not, in itself, sufficient: and especially, we admit, it is not the same motive with that which the second advent presents. But it is a good Christian motive to watchfulness, nevertheless. And to the believer, as to other men, doubtless its efficacy depends not a little upon the suddenness with which it may come. But how is my faith, to deal with this event? Is it in the way of a calculation of chances? That is the world’s way of dealing, both with death and with the second advent. “Because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil.” They say: - The Lord delayeth his coming. This may be very natural in a worldly man. He would interpose something between death and his present state. Certainly, or very probably, this or that event may have yet to happen before I die. But do I, at any time, as a believer in Jesus, feel that I am reasoning thus, or that I would reason thus if I knew of any certain interval that must elapse before sudden death can befall me? It is high time to awake. And what, in such a state, is the remedy? To get the interval on which. I am beginning to reckon taken out of the way? No. But to get my soul again brought into such an attitude and exercise of faith, that interval or no interval shall be the same thing to me, and I shall live as realising the nearness and certainty and suddenness of death, as what may come on me at any moment, and in any circumstances. Simeon was told, while yet comparatively young, that he should not see death until he should see the Lord’s anointed. Hezekiah was informed that a lease of fifteen years of renewed life was sure to him, ere the fear of death again need overtake him. What should have been the effect of these announcements to these holy men, these men of faith and prayer? To set them free from the consideration of their latter end? or from the consideration of it as a motive quite as urgent and influential as if nothing were to intervene at all? Nor will it do to say that, in the instance at least of Hezekiah, such too probably was in part the tendency and the effect of the respite he obtained. That was his infirmity. He should have remembered his last end. It was still his duty to live under the influence of the prospect of death, and a divine faith would have enabled him to do so, just as thoroughly when he knew that fifteen years must pass before death came, as when he heard the knell, “Thou must die and not live.”

Yes, my friends, and when we consider the difference between death and the second coming, in one all-important particular, the application of our present illustration will be the more emphatic. Death may be sudden. The Lord’s second coming must be so. It is a possible suddenness that is to tell upon you in the one case. It is a certain suddenness in the other. And explain it as you may; adopt our explanation, or any other you prefer; the peremptory practical point is clearly and unequivocally this; - that as children of God, having in you the hope of glory, you are to be ever purifying yourselves under the vivid, realising apprehension of him who is pure breaking out of the clouds, and breaking in upon you, at any moment; and what he said to the disciples he says to you, and what he says unto you, he says unto all, “Watch!”

V. Let the event of Christ’s coming be apprehended apart from all preceding and accompanying circumstances. There are various outstanding events in the scheme of unfulfilled prophecy that are full of interest, as we try to anticipate and decipher them beforehand. The fulfilling of the times of the Gentiles, the bringing in of the Jews, the ruin of mystic Babylon, or literal Rome, the judgments to be inflicted upon the nations of the earth, the several particular occurrences, whether unclean and lying agencies of Satan, or divine interpositions of mercy and wrath that are to mark the crisis of Antichrist’s fate, and usher in the reign of Christ and of the saints, - these, together with the features and characteristics of that reign itself, - the period of its duration, and the strange catastrophe in which it seems to end, form a wide field of prophetic inquiry in which it is not wonderful that thoughtful men part asunder. I believe, indeed, that there is a closer agreement among intelligent students of prophecy in regard to the whole grand outline of this prospective history, than appears on the surface. The fond dream is now generally abandoned of a gradual and insensible sliding into millennial blessedness and peace. An era is looked for in the winding up of this Gentile form of the dispensation, quite as well defined as that which marked the close of the Jewish, only proportionally more wonderful and more terrible. It was no soft euthanasia, or gradual melting into the economy which was to succeed it, that brought the Jewish day of grace to an end, but a dreadful day of vengeance to the Jew - a day of judgment indeed. Has the Gentile day of grace been better improved than theirs? Is the Gentile apostasy, whether in the east or in the west, less ripe for God’s wrath than theirs? Nay, that unparalleled siege of Jerusalem, this long desolation of Judaea, are but faint types of Babylon’s doom; to the Gentile churches, and the nations that have had the gospel among them, the day of grace may well be expected to have as dark a close, and the day of judgment as tremendous a rising as in the case of Israel. And with what manifestations of divine majesty and power this exercise of the Saviour’s dread prerogative of judge among the Gentiles may be accompanied, or with what resurrection-wonders, literal or spiritual, the setting in of a new and brighter economy is to be signalised, the opening beauty of that millennial day, which is to be the day of special grace, not to Jews or Gentiles peculiarly, but to the whole world, who can say? At this stage in the unfolding of the future drama there is undoubtedly room for expecting much that will indicate the immediate presence of him who is the judge of all the earth; while, again, in the new impulse to be given, on a scale so much wider, and in circumstances so much more propitious, to the dispensation of the grace of God, then at last become universal; the risen Saviour, he who is the Resurrection and the Life, will assuredly, by many infallible tokens, show himself as living and as life-giving. All this might to a large extent be surveyed, and ascertained, and marked out as common ground, so that upon one condition a large measure of harmony might ensue.

Upon one condition, I say; for there is a preliminary matter to be adjusted. The second coming of our Lord, his glorious appearing, that one solemn, awful, joyful event, which is the terror of the Lord for persuading men, and the hope set before believers for their quickening, encouragement, and support - I would desire to see lifted at once and altogether out of the troubled class of these terrestrial agitations, and placed high and clear above and beyond them all. Whether he is visibly to appear in the midst of them, or not; whether his martyrs, or his saints, are to be raised literally before that new reign of his, or not; whether the reign itself is to be a state of things in which Christ the king is to be actually seen, and his risen servants are to be actually mingling with the society of flesh and blood, and a heavenly city is to be always apparent, and the nations are to walk in the light of it, and a literal temple service, with literal commemorative sacrifices, is to be reinstituted; or is to be a state of things in which what corresponds to these prophetic symbols is to be spiritual, and is to be spiritually discerned - however those things may be, I cannot but think that it were well to consider if the precise second advent and glorious appearing which is the great and ultimate terror of the wicked, and the great and ultimate hope of the righteous, be not, after all, an event detached from all these revolutions and revivals, seen, indeed, as if casting its shadow before, in them all and through them all, more dimly or more clearly, as the case may be, but yet standing out, apart and isolated from them all, in broad and sharp outline, having its own incommunicable features of majesty and awe - a Saviour judge, an assembled universe, and an unbroken eternity behind.

If indeed there is such a day coming, when all is over; and if, to the eye of inspiration in prophetic vision, it is always present, in its glory and terror, looming darkly in the distance, yet seeming ever near; then it is no wonder that all the scenes which the prophets paint of intermediate transactions, should take form and colour, more or less, from that sublime and solemn background. Especially when these transactions partake of the very nature of what is to be done at that day, when they are signal acts of divine judgment or signal deliverances and interpositions of divine mercy, falling under the mediatorial sovereignty of the Redeemer, as ruling among the nations, and as Head over all things to his church, and when, moreover, these may very possibly be occasions for some special discovery of himself, and some rehearsals, as it were, on a limited scale, of the grand consummation which is to embrace all, and to finish all; then, still more may it be expected that the intermediate prophetic descriptions will be cast into the mould of that one announcement, which, from the beginning, has been God’s alarm-trumpet to a godless world since Enoch, the seventh from Adam, cried, “Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousand of his saints, to execute judgment upon all,” Arrange the dates and events connected with the winding up of the times of the Gentiles, and the bringing in of millennial peace, as you may: let the advent of Christ then be ever so palpable, and the reign of Christ and the risen saints thereafter ever so literal: I yet cannot divest myself of the impression, as I try by anticipation to take my place under that glorious economy, that still, even then, and after all, the real coming of the Lord, with, which chiefly men, as men, have to do, is outstanding and impending, waiting in reserve, and coming as a thief for all. I do not now enter into the detailed consideration of such questions as I have indicated respecting what may be coming, and that shortly, on this earth of ours. I feel the tempting and fascinating interest, and fully admit the practical importance of such inquiries prosecuted soberly and with humility. By all means let the churches of Christ be awakened from their drowsiness, and the nations of the world startled from their security, by the loud cry, The Lord, the Judge, the Avenger, is at hand. But I plead for keeping apart the great judgment day, for the simultaneous appearance and trial and sentence of the whole countless myriads of individuals of the race of Adam, ay, and the angels too, from all these vicissitudes that yet await churches and nations upon the stage of time. And it is with that great judgment day, and its issues for weal or woe throughout the endless lapse of everlasting ages, which no subsequent interruption is ever to break, that I feel constrained exclusively to connect and identify that appearing of Christ, which is represented throughout the Word of God as so influential a motive to personal repentance and personal sanctification and watchfulness and prayer. Let the solemnities of that day, and of its results, remain entire, and let it be understood that these solemnities are the essential elements or ingredients of that great final event of the Lord’s coming quickly, which is to be proclaimed for arresting the ungodly and keeping the Lord’s own people ever on the watch, and on the look out, and on the alert; then I feel that that grand cardinal article in our common Christianity is made sure: God hath appointed a day wherein he will judge the world by that man whom he has ordained, Jesus Christ. “To them that look for him he shall appear the second time without sin unto salvation.”

Give me only that day and its momentous issues as the ultimate object of the church’s faith and hope; and you may introduce, in the intermediate space before it, interpositions of Christ’s power, and even appearances of Christ’s person, of whatever sort and in whatever manner. By all means let the onward march and movement of affairs in the world’s history, as it runs fast on and draws near its close and crisis, be broken by signs and wonders, by voices and visits from above. Let there be a quick coming of the Lord, whether personal, or spiritual, or providential, to usher in a new era of universal empire for himself, as there was when the bodies of many saints arose on the resurrection morn, when the Spirit was poured out on the day of Pentecost, when Saul on his way to Damascus was called to be the Apostle of the Gentiles. Let there even be a sojourn of the Lord and the risen saints for a season on the millennial earth. Still, let me have outstanding, beyond all that, towering above all that, the Lord’s swift coming in the clouds of heaven, to take his seat on the great white throne, to summon all the quick and the dead for judgment, to seal the final, irrevocable doom of apostate angels and unbelieving men; to complete the gathering together in one of all things in him, both of things in heaven and things on earth; even in him of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named. This is that coming of the Lord which he himself would have you ever to realise as quick and sudden; as near, even at the door. Its sharp suddenness, its immediate nearness, you are to apprehend by faith; even as by faith you apprehend as very near to you his once offering up of himself a sacrifice to take away your sin. These are the two events, the death of shame, the coming in glory, which faith, when rightly exercised, grasps; which I, believing, grasp. I grasp them as equally real, equally nigh. I grasp him, Christ Jesus my Lord, dying for me; coming again to receive me to himself; Christ crucified, Christ coming in glory; I grasp Christ, and Christ only. Is not this what is meant when I sit at his table, and show his death till he come? Seated there, I am to see nothing, I am to be conscious or cognisant of nothing, I am to think of nothing, I am to know nothing, but Christ dying and Christ coming. It is as if all the past, since that scene on Calvary, and all the future, on to the end of time, were a blank, a vacancy. It is all annihilated; it is all gone. My only past is Christ dying; my only future is Christ coming. Not long past is the one; not long future is the other. Jesus! I see thee now going from the cross now before me, fresh and gory, as on Calvary; I see thee now going heavenward. Jesus! I see thee now coming thence, from heaven, in thy love and in thy glory. Even so come. Lord Jesus.

Ah! is it not this fixed riveting of my soul on Christ; on Christ himself, on Christ alone, on Christ in this twofold aspect, Christ dying, Christ coming; is it not this concentrated gaze of my inward eye on Christ as near, as present, in both aspects; Christ dying, near and present, Christ coming, near and present; is it not this that makes my showing his death till he come, real, blessed, profitable? What though ages have run since that death I show, and ages more are perhaps to run before that coming! It is nothing to me. The world’s history, past and future; the Church’s history, past and future; all is to me for the present as if it never had been and never were to be. I am looking to Christ, dealing with Christ; Christ himself; Christ alone; Christ now dying; Christ now coming. And should not this, which is the real charm of the supper, this faith annihilating sense, and seeing only the invisible, be the habit of the whole Christian life? Should I not be always thus living; bringing to bear these two appearings of Christ, his appearing in grace and his appearing In glory, his dying and his coming, on every step I take, every choice I make, every work I do? Wherever I am, whatever I am about, ought I not to be alive to my position between these two manifestations of Christ, and these alone? Behind me Christ dying; before me Christ coming. And not far behind me Christ dying; not far before me Christ coming. Between me and Christ dying I see nothing; between me and Christ coming I see nothing. In this double light alone; in rays from the cross, in rays from the glory; in that light alone I see the step I am taking, the choice I am making, the work I am doing. All intermediate considerations being obliterated and ignored, every standard of judgment and comparison suggested by events past or future, or by friends or foes pressing them on my regard; let me ask of this duty apt to be irksome; of this trial felt to be grievous; of this pleasure tempting me; of this pain deterring me; how does it look in the light of Christ dying for me, Christ coming to me? Is it not thus, and only thus, that I live by the faith of him who loved me and gave himself for me; that I live also by the power of the world to come; enduring as seeing him who is invisible?