The Coming of the King

3. "He cometh with clouds"

Several times is it said of our Lord's Second Advent that He comes in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. This imagery is taken from the seventh chapter of Daniel where "one like the Son of man" comes thus and is brought near before the "Ancient of days" to receive the dominion of earth and an everlasting kingdom that shall never pass away. Behind this lay the memory, deeply engraved on Israel's national consciousness, of the cloud and fire of Mount Sinai where God first revealed himself to them and fixed for ever in their minds the idea that his presence and power, his judgments and his blessings, were concealed in and revealed by the dark storm clouds and the fiery radiance that crowned the Mount.

It is probable that the early Christians, familiar as they were with the symbolism of Old Testament prophecy (technically called "apocalyptic") understood these allusions in a metaphorical sense, but it was perhaps inevitable in later centuries, as the interpretation of Old and New Testament passed increasingly into the hands of Western theologians unfamiliar with ancient Hebrew thought-forms and influenced greatly by the limited knowledge of the physical universe characteristic of the Middle Ages, that men should tend to understand them in a purely literal manner. Examples of mediaeval art abound in which the Lord is depicted descending towards the earth seated or standing upon a cloud, or cleaving the skies with an attendant train of angels surrounded by a mass of storm clouds interspersed with strokes of lightning. It becomes necessary in this our day to re-examine this conception with great care if the true purport of these statements is to be understood. The Old Testament is full of allusions to the power and presence of God as manifested in cloud and fire. The majesty and solemnity of massive storm-cloud formations with their attendant crashing thunder and brilliant lightning—so much more intense in tropical latitudes—must have suggested to men at a very early date the idea of God coming upon them for judgment. The spectacular scenes at Mount Sinai during the Exodus, where for some three months the Israelites, encamped in the plain below, saw the summit of the mountain shrouded by masses of clouds from which appeared lightning and fire accompanied by thunder, and knew that within that fearsome place Moses was as it were face to face with God, was sufficient to fix this conception of the Deity in the minds of all Israel for ever. So the "pillar of cloud by day and the flaming fire by night" which was with them through all the forty years' wanderings, and led them at last to the Promised Land, was in truth a manifestation of God to them. The same visible Divine glory which gave them blessings of confidence and leadership in the wilderness was the executor of judgment upon the rebellious, as in the case of Korah and his followers, when the same glory blazed out from the Sanctuary and destroyed the enemies of the Lord. So the cloud and fire very soon became both symbol and manifestation of the invisible God moving into action for blessing and judgment.

The same idea is exemplified in the recorded visions of God seen by some of the Hebrew prophets. Ezekiel, beholding in the open desert the glory of the Lord, saw it against a background of cloud and dazzling light—so intense that he could see little else but the shining cherubim, attendant upon the chariot of God. (Ezek.10). Isaiah, seeing a parallel vision in the Temple at Jerusalem, experienced the same combination of radiant glory and obscuring cloud—the Temple was filled with smoke, he says, remembering how in earlier times the Divine Presence was a "cloud and smoke by day, and the shining of a flaming fire by night" (Isa.4.5). But the most eloquent exposition of this poetic representation of God arising to action is surely that in Psalm 18 (7-12), especially impressive as rendered by the R.S.V. "the earth reeled and rocked; the foundations also of the mountains trembled...Smoke went up from his nostrils, and devouring fire from his mouth; glowing coals flamed forth from him. He bowed the heavens, and came down; thick darkness was under his feet...He made darkness his covering around him, his canopy thick clouds dark with water. Out of the brightness before him there broke through his clouds hailstones and coals of fire." This is what the prophet Joel had in mind when he described the coming of the Day of the Lord. "I will shew wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke" (Joel 2.30), the piled up masses of dark cumulus thunder-cloud being the "pillars of smoke" to which he referred.

This is the foundation upon which is built Daniel's vision of the coming of the Son of Man as described in the seventh chapter of the Book of Daniel. The same background of storm-cloud and fire surrounding the majesty of God Most High, the fire darting out from before him to consume the powers of evil represented by the mystic "beasts" of the vision, and the clouds providing a setting for the resplendent figure of the triumphant Son of Man coming before the Most High to be formally invested with the Kingdom of earth and to receive the allegiance of all its inhabitants. The same combination of judgment and blessing, in fire and cloud; the same basic idea that the majesty and the Person of Deity, not to be perceived directly by mortal man, is both concealed by, and manifested in, the cloud and the fire. And this same conception is carried into the New Testament, for the prophetic words of Jesus, and the ecstatic outburst of John the Revelator, both take their inspiration from this vision of Daniel. "I say unto you" declared Jesus to the High Priest at his arraignment "hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven" (Matt.26.64) and at that the High Priest rent his clothes, and cried out "He hath spoken blasphemy". Caiaphas knew full well what the words implied, that Jesus laid claim to being in his own person the fulfilment of Daniel 7, that He himself was the "Son of Man" seen in vision by the ancient prophet. And because Caiaphas knew that the prophetic vision was of the Messiah and he would not admit that the prisoner before him could possibly be Israel's Messiah, he charged him, logically enough from his own standpoint, with blasphemy. A few days earlier Jesus had said a very similar thing to his own disciples. Describing to them the order of events of his Advent, and following that aspect of the Advent which concerns his revelation of himself "as a thief" to his own watchful adherents prior to the general revelation to all, He said "and then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory" (Matt.24.30). John's outburst in the Book of Revelation is very similar, "Behold, he cometh with clouds; and every eye shall see him, and they also which pierced him: and all kindreds of the earth shall wail because of him. Even so, Amen." (Rev.1.7). Now both of these statements combine the symbolism of Daniel 7 with that of Zech.12, in which at the Last Day the people look upon the One whom they rejected and break down in an agony of mourning and repentance for their blindness and folly. The prophetic visions of Daniel 7 and Zech.12-14 are thus linked together as having joint reference to this outwardly spectacular aspect of the Second Advent and it is because of this that a clear understanding of these "clouds of heaven" is so important.

It will not fail to be noticed that in these references to the coming of the Son of Man in the clouds of heaven the picture is that of something that is universally seen or discerned. Whereas the returning Lord comes first to his own followers, the Church, "as a thief", in such fashion that only the "watchers" are appraised of his coming and the world in general see and hear nothing untoward and know not what is going on, when He comes "in the clouds of heaven" the whole world will know about it. There will be no doubt as to the fact of his Advent; moreover, there will be obvious signs of repentance and acceptance of him as Lord, and that denotes what may be termed an advanced stage in the succession of events which comprise the full range of the Advent. It is very important to note here that the "mourning" of Matt.24.30 and the "wailing" of Rev.1.7 is not, as is sometimes thought, a sign of terror or consternation but one of repentance and acceptance. Both these texts derive from Zech.12 and must therefore bear the same meaning as the "mourning" of that chapter, and that quite clearly is a mourning of repentance. The coming in the clouds of heaven therefore must refer to a point in the end of the Age when resistance to the incoming Messianic Kingdom has measurably subsided and the time has come for earth's new King openly to take his power and commence his beneficent administration. There is a factor in Jesus' words to Caiaphas which highlights this point. Caiaphas himself, and presumably the members of the Sanhedrin sitting with him, are "hereafter" to see him coming in the clouds of heaven. To do that they must be here on earth, alive and in possession of their normal senses, and Caiaphas and all his colleagues are dead, have been dead for nearly two thousand years, not to be raised from the dead until the "resurrection at the last day", to use the words of Martha attesting her faith at the awakening of Lazarus. There must therefore be a sense in which the "coming in the clouds" is continuing even after the general resurrection of the dead has commenced, and this itself is a process which does not begin until the earliest phases of the Advent have become a fact and the power of the Messianic Kingdom is operating in the earth.

Notwithstanding this consideration, it is clear that the coming in the clouds must at least begin to have its fulfilment before the general resurrection, for there is one more New Testament allusion back to Dan.7, and that is the description in Revelation 14 of the harvest of the earth. Here, in a definite "Second Advent" sequence, the Revelator sees "a white cloud, and upon the cloud one like unto a Son of man, having on his head a golden crown, and in his hand a sharp sickle". (Rev.14.14). This visitant from the skies proceeds to reap the harvest of the earth and immediately thereafter follows the treading of the winepress of the wrath of God, clear symbols of the man-made strife and turmoil which forms so great a part of the judgment with which this Age will end. The "white" cloud is one that is gleaming and glistening—the same allusion appears in Matt.17.2 and several other instances—and here there is the same association of cloud and light, betokening coming judgment and blessing, that we have in the Old Testament. It is to be noted here that the A.V. has incorrectly rendered verse 14 "one like unto the Son of Man" as it has in Dan.7, whereas in both instances the Greek and Hebrew is in the singular "a son of man", a man-like being, one of the sons of men. The application of the expression to our Lord, who called himself "the Son of Man" is correct, but it is a matter of interpretation and not of translation. John saw a resplendent king-like figure in the form of a man on that cloud; like Daniel, who saw the same human figure in his vision, he knew it to be a symbol for the personal coming and presence of the Lord Jesus Christ, resplendent in his Divinity, without any reference to whether the appearance is literally visible to the natural sight or not. Every element in the vision is a symbol of a more profound underlying reality.

This fact helps to illuminate 1 Thess.4.17 where the members of Christ's Church, at the time of their resurrection, are said to join the Lord "in the clouds". It is a fundamental of Second Advent theology that the first event of the Advent is the raising of the "dead in Christ" and the "change" of the living saints that they might together be translated into the clouds to meet the Lord. In olden times when Heaven was believed to be "just beyond the bright blue sky" it was natural to think of these as the literal clouds, and the meeting as taking place in space just beyond those clouds, en route to that heaven. Now that it is more generally realised that the resurrection of the "saints" is a "change" to a celestial state and a totally different order of being in which terrestrial objects and conditions have no place, that conception is not so fitting. There may well be thought something incongruous in the idea of that wonderful meeting with our Lord in all the glory and power of celestial nature having to take place within the confines of a bank of fog floating only a mile or so above the surface of our planet. When it is seen that the usage of the symbol is to indicate that the meeting takes place out of the view of men and within the bounds of that period of combined judgment and blessing which is pictured by this "coming in the clouds" the way is open to a more spiritual and satisfying view of the "rapture of the Church".

To be continued