The Coming of The King

1. The Purpose of the Second Advent

A series of studies concerning the Second Advent

". . . sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead…"

So runs the well-known Creed; most Christians pay lip-service to the words even although many give but little attention to the fundamental truth it enshrines, and some do not even believe that the event will ever happen. The doctrine of the Second Advent lies under a double cloud; in the first place the Augustinian theology, of a post-Millennial Advent requiring the world to be converted and the Church to rule the nations before Christ comes, is still, after fifteen centuries, the accepted standard. In the second place the failure of many unjustified expectations of the Advent, unjustified largely owing to incorrect systems of Biblical interpretation, has had the effect of bringing the subject into general disrepute, both among Christians and non-Christians. Despite the sincerity and fervour of the not inconsiderable body of Christian students who do maintain and preach the certainty of the Second Advent these two factors still preclude the Christian's brightest hope, as it has been called, from becoming an accepted object of prayer and expectation in Christian communities generally. Every time that the Lord's prayer is repeated the worshippers voice their plea "Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven", but all too often they either miss the purport of the words or do not really mean them. Jesus Christ made it perfectly clear that the only means by which either element in the prayer can be realised is his personal return to the world of man to bring sin and death to an end and complete the Divine purpose for this terrestrial creation.

Much of this apathy and scorn is directly due to the failure of Christian thought to keep up-to-date. Apart from the work of a minority of ministers and students and relatively minor groups there has been no change in the understanding of the subject or in the terms in which it is visualised and expressed for upwards of a thousand years. The general idea is still, as it was in mediaeval times, that upon a certain future day Christ will appear visibly, descending from the sky in human form to the accompaniment of angelic trumpets, for the purpose of conducting the "Last Assize" when—all during the scope of a solar day of twenty-four earth hours—He will raise the dead, examine every human being as to the deeds done in this life, take the worthy back with him to heavenly glory and consign the remainder, the unregenerate, to everlasting damnation, rounding off the process by the destruction of this earth and all material things in a universal conflagration. About the only concession to modern thought which this century has made is to express some doubt as to whether after all the fires of Hell are literal—and quite a few very sincere and worthy ministers still insist that they are! The idea of purpose in creation, or the use God will make of the redeemed after all this is over, is not so much as broached; neither is in fact that whereas the Fifth century, or the Fifteenth, for that matter, had no idea that the universe contained anything else besides this earth and the sun as its satellite, we now know that the creation is vaster by far than our minds can conceive. To think that the Deity can be satisfied with bringing into existence a handful of creatures on this speck of dust which we call earth when even men today are hoping and planning to do great things in remote parts of outer space is no evidence of Christian intelligence. It is rather an indication of unthinking egocentricism.

The necessity—that the certainty—of the Second Advent stems from the purpose of human creation. Man has been destined to occupy a definite and unique place in the Divine scheme of things. No other conceivable order of sentient beings, fitted as they might be for their own ordained place, can or will fill the position intended for man. The Bible does in fact indicate that the mode of existence we know is not the only one; that this earth is not the only scene of life, that there is at the very least one other world not perceptible by human senses, the citizens of which are always and altogether in absolute harmony with each other and with God—so much so that the ideal is set before men that God's will might eventually be universally accepted here as it is there. The main principle of the Second Advent, then, is that it is the process by which that object is to be accomplished.

The Second Advent is the logical—and necessary—sequel to the First advent. This is not the place to enter upon a consideration of the philosophy of the Atonement, and there is much in that tremendous subject which even yet is far from clear. The Scriptures are positive that enduring life can only come to man through Christ, involving intelligent acceptance of the fact and full acquiescence in the Will of God, and that in order to recover men from the power and effect of evil it was necessary that Christ allow himself to be put to death, giving his life a willing offering for the benefit of humanity. But the death and resurrection of Christ occurred nearly two thousand years ago, and today the world seems farther from the Divine ideal than ever. Obviously there is a further chapter in the book before the finale, another scene in the drama which has to be enacted before all that was ensured by the life and death of Christ blossoms and fruits into the reality of human maturity, and the dark shadow of evil flees, to return no more. That chapter, that scene, is the Second Advent.

The intervening time, this Christian era, between the two Advents, has not been a time of inactivity. It is seeing the development, and will see the completion, of the Christian Church. There is still a lot of rather hazy thinking over this question of the Church and many still follow St. Augustine in hoping and working for the time when the whole world of man shall be included within its membership. That hope seemed logical enough in the great theologian's time when Christianity was expanding by leaps and bounds and seemed destined to assume the reins of world control, but it appears a forlorn hope now when non Christianity is increasing faster, relatively to the increase in world population, than Christianity. The whole concept is in error. The New Testament presentation defines the Church as that company of convinced and dedicated followers of Christ in this Age who will become his lieutenants and agents in the work of world conversion and reconstruction in the next—the Age of the Second Advent. Once that fact is realised it can the more easily be seen why the New Testament says that the "saints"—the Church—shall "judge the world" (1 Cor.6.2) in that Age; that they shall "live and reign with Christ a thousand years" (Rev.20.4). There has always been a degree of perplexity among expositors of the older school over the apparent anomaly of nations remaining on earth to be ruled after the Day of Judgment and the resurrection of the Church, when, according to the old theology, earth's affairs are finally wound up. Jesus' words in Matt.19.28 concerning his disciples ruling and administering his laws during the "regeneration", which means a giving of new life, at a time when according to medieval theology all opportunity for gaining new life had gone because the Second Coming was a matter of the past, does not easily fit into current theology. But when it is seen that the Second Advent and the Millennium are synonymous terms so far as time is concerned and that the Day of Judgment involves more, far more, than the mere arraigning of men before a tribunal and passing judicial sentence on their past misdeeds, the door is opened to a wider and far more rational and satisfying view of God's purposes.

The Second Advent, then, should be viewed as a period, a span of time during the whole of which the personal presence of the Lord Jesus Christ is manifested in the earth, in power, in a manner which has not been true of preceding times. This period commences as this present Christian Age draws to its close and continues until the Divine purpose is fully realised, until every man who can be persuaded to yield himself and his life and his potentialities into full acquiescence with the will and purpose of God has so done, until every trace of sin and evil has been banished from human society, until not one remains among all of God's human creatures who is not consciously, intelligently, willingly—yea, and enthusiastically—in fullest possible accord with his plans and designs. Everlasting life is a conception almost too hard for the human mind to grasp; everlasting continuance in the growth of knowledge, in the accumulation of experience, in achievement following achievement, is an idea even more difficult to receive, but nothing less than this is the destiny of every man,—if he will, for God will coerce no man, and loyalty to him and co-operation with him must be of love and freewill not of fear and compulsion. So there may be some at the end who will not accept life in this creation which is all of God, and will deliberately cast away the blessing of conscious existence. But of those who align themselves with the Divine standards it shall be true that, as Isaiah the prophet foretold twenty-five centuries ago, "the ransomed of the LORD shall return, and come to Zion with songs and everlasting joy upon their heads: they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away" (Isa.35.10). For this will be the consequence of the Second Advent.

The commencement of the Advent, the time at which it must be said that the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ in the earth has become a fact, obviously implies that this present world-age dominated by man is then approaching its imminent end. There is no need to tie this down to specific years and dates—the endeavour to do that in the past has led to some mass disappointments and invoked a certain amount of ridicule upon a good many quite sincere people who started as prophetic students and finished up as prophets. It is much safer and altogether more satisfactory to take note of the order of events and the nature of the various factors which go to make up the work of the Second Advent. The first overt act—and this is stressed repeatedly in the New Testament—is the resurrection or "change" of the Church, the joining of all those dedicated believers, of whatever generation between Pentecost and the end, to the Lord in Heaven. St. Paul describes this in 1 Cor.15 as a change from the terrestrial state of being to the celestial, a change not only of habitat but also of nature. The celestial is of a superior and totally different order of being, and the celestial world, as real to its own citizens as the earth is to humanity, is one in which powers and potentialities, and consequently activities and achievements, are upon an immensely wider basis than are those of man upon earth. Since the Church is to have a great deal to do with the work of Christ in the earth during his Advent it is obvious that this change to spiritual conditions must precede the visible establishment of the Messianic Kingdom and the commencement of the Millennium.

The second aspect of the Advent, and one that must become evident in its early days, involves that restraint and overthrow of the powers of evil in the world which must logically precede the open manifestation of the Kingdom of Christ in power. The rule of the Millennial Age is to be a righteous and just rule in which men may live their lives and go about their business in peace and security without the threats and dangers of oppression, violence and war which overshadow life as it is lived in the present. That means not only the supersession of present day political and commercial powers by the superior power of Christ but the suppression of all those harmful institutions and petty forms of evil which wreak such havoc upon the ordinary man. The Divine rule of that coming day is "They shall not hurt nor destroy" (Isa.65.25) and the power of the Prince of Peace will be abroad in the earth to ensure that condition. There must therefore be expected, at the beginning of the Advent period and therefore more or less at the ending of this present Age, a joining of battle between the incoming forces of righteousness and the doomed forces of evil in the earth. This is depicted in many a strongly metaphorical passage of Scripture—the descent of the Rider on the white horse from Heaven to do battle with the kings of all the earth in Revelation 19, the binding of Satan with a great chain in Revelation 20, the revealing of the Lord from heaven in a setting of storm and tempest to execute judgment upon all things evil, in Daniel 7 and 2 Thess.1, the consuming and destruction of the "Man of Sin" by the spirit of the Lord's mouth and the radiance of his presence in 2 Thess.2, and many others. The reality behind the Biblical "Armageddon" is nothing so grossly material as a mere blood bath of contending military forces—it is the final conflict at the end of this Age when the defenders of earth's corrupt and doomed systems of oppression and injustice find all their boasted strength powerless against the heavenly weapons of earth's new Ruler—weapons they can neither understand nor overcome.

It is only when this suppression of the powers of evil has been accomplished that the revelation of the returned Christ to all men can take place. This is the supreme hour when, to adopt Scriptural metaphor, the Son of Man takes his seat upon his throne of glory and before him are gathered all nations. This is the third stage of the Advent and the one which is to endure throughout the whole period of the Messianic Age, until its close when the Son shall have "delivered up the Kingdom to…the Father...that God may be all in all" (1 Cor.15.24-28). But that will be when the entire work of the Advent has been completed, when the Day of Judgment has run its course and is at an end. At the time the King takes his place upon the throne of his glory that consummation is still a thousand years away. In the meantime the whole world of man is to come under a system of education and discipline such as never has been dreamed of before, and the laws of Creation, which are the laws of God, made plain to all so that none may ever be able to plead ignorance or inability. This is the truth which lies behind all the vividly materialistic pictures of the Messianic Kingdom in the Old Testament—the lion shall lie down with the lamb and so forth—and the more sober statements of the New Testament which depict the dead of this world rising to newly awakened consciousness, hearing the voice of the Son of God calling them from their graves, and taking their stand before the Great White Throne of Rev.20 (v.11) to have the standards of Divine Law set before them for final acceptance or rejection—the "judgment" of the "book of life".

An adequate perception of the manner in which Christ is manifested to mankind during his Second Advent rests upon a careful consideration of much Scriptural metaphor and analogy and its relation to what is known of the celestial order of existence. Jesus Christ appeared on earth in human form in the days of his First Advent for a purpose that was at that time fulfilled. His position as supreme over the whole of Divine creation, which it were the height of conceit on man's part to imagine could not ultimately embrace intelligent beings physically different from man but equally children of God and made in his image and likeness, precludes the dogmatic assertion that He must of necessity retain human form or lineaments. His presence could conceivably be visibly manifested through chosen earthly instruments exerting his authority and representing him amongst men, and his Advent still be as real as if his Person was visible to human eyes. A clear understanding of the relation between the celestial and the terrestrial worlds and their respective orders of life, and of the manner as well as the purpose and time of our Lord's Return, is very necessary to the Christian who would be like the "scribe… instructed unto the Kingdom of heaven" mentioned by Jesus, who "bringeth forth out of his treasure (storeroom) things new and old" (Matt.13.52) and truly understand the significance of the day in which he lives and his own position in relation to the Divine Plan.

That is why Jesus laid so much stress upon watchfulness. "Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of Man cometh" (Matt.25.13). "What I say unto you I say unto all, Watch" (Mark 13.37). He likened the Second Advent to the days of Noah. Men would go about their customary pursuits, eating and drinking, planting and building, marrying and giving in marriage, heedless of the signs that a new and hitherto unknown power was coming into earth's affairs, for deliverance on the one hand, for judgment on the other, to bring an old decaying world to an end and establish a new, virile, youthful one. All too often do men think of the Deluge story as one of unreasoning Divine petulance with a sinful world and a wrathful destruction; in reality the story is one of clearing the ground for a fresh start. That is the position today. Christ comes, not to sweep the earth away with a besom (broom) of destruction and end all further hope of human development and achievement, but to replace this admittedly very unsatisfactory order of things by a "new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness" (2 Pet.3.13), under which all who so will may attain the Divine ideal and enter upon their inheritance. Only when that consummation has been attained may it be said that "at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth and. . .every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father" (Phil.2.10-11). Only then will the day of the Second Advent come to an end and be merged with eternity, into which will enter the sons of men, mature at last and fitted for their destined place in creation.

The source of all this is in the Bible. To some degree it is in the Old Testament and to a much greater extent in the New. There is much of immature and old conceptions to unlearn and discard; a certain amount of unhelpful modern thought also to reject. There is a great deal to be gathered from the painstaking and careful examination of the many passages which deal with one or another of the several aspects of the Second Advent, and the relating of these to the light of modern knowledge. This will be the object of succeeding chapters. The subject is one of far-reaching importance; today, more than ever before, there is a need for clarity of vision and sound conviction on the age-old expectation of the Church—our Lord's Return.

(to be continued)

AOH