Bread in the desert ...

Preface

/ give these sermons to the press in obedience to the wishes of my late parishioners of Holy Trinity Church {Harlem), New York, — whom it was my privilege to serve for eleven years, — in the hope that they may be to them a pleasant memorial of our common work for the Master, and an enduring testimony to the truths of His Gospel, which knit together the hearts of Pastor and People in a bond which no changes of time, or place, or circumstance, can sever.

X. H McK.

Trinity Rectory, New Orleans, March 3d, 1877.

Contents

SERMON x PAGE

I. Bread in the Desert i

II. "Where is the Promise of His Coming?" 18

II. "where Is The Promise Of His Coming?"

u Where is the promise of His coming ?" — 2 Peter iii. 4.

jKrst German.

THIS, the apostle tells us, would be the question of the " scoffers " who should come "in the last days." This has been the question wherewith ungodly and unbelieving men have, these eighteen centuries and more, taunted the Christian Church. The Nazarene bade His followers expect to see His " sign " in the heavens, heralding His second coming with power and great glory ; and when He ascended into heaven, angelic messengers (so the story runs) gave assurance to His disciples that " this same Jesus who is taken from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen Him go into heaven."

Accordingly we find that this expectation of the second advent was cherished with ardor and constancy by the early Christians. It formed part of the warp and woof of the preaching of apostles and evangelists. It entered into the very centre 18 and substance of the faith once delivered. They kept in mind the words of their Master, "Let your loins be girded about, and your lights burning ; and ye yourselves like unto men that wait for their lord, when he will return from the wedding; that when he cometh and knocketh, they may open unto him immediately." They remembered the solemn parable of the ten virgins and the warning it contained to watch for the coming of the Bridegroom, that they might be ready to go out and meet him, at whatever hour he might come. When they preached to the heathen, and warned them to turn from their idols, and " to serve the living and true God," they failed not to add, as a part of the Christian faith and calling, " and to wait for His Son from heaven." When an apostle poured out his devout thanksgiving to God for the progress of his converts in holiness, he named, as the crown of all their gifts, or, at least, as the condition of their attainment, that they were "waiting for the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ." He can ask for his children in the faith nothing higher than this : "The Lord direct your hearts into . . . the patient waiting for Christ." He can suggest no mightier instrumentality for raising men to a sober, righteous, and godly life than this, that they should look for " that blessed hope, and the appearing of the glory of the great God and our Saviour Jesus

Christ." Lying in a Roman dungeon, and expecting speedy execution at the hands of the tyrant, he cheers himself by the hope of a "crown of righteousness " at the hands of the Judge, which shall be given, however, not to him only, but to all that "love His appearing."

And not " the blessed and glorious Paul " only, but all the apostles and early Christians, pointed their hearers to the heavens, and bade them expect the coming of the Son of man. We " look for " and " haste unto " " the coming of the day of God," exclaims St. Peter ; and St. Jude, in his brief letter, makes constant allusion to the day predicted by Enoch, the seventh from Adam, saying, " Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of His saints." St. John, too, in his old age, when the crown of martyrdom was waiting for him, writes to the seven churches, " Behold, He cometh with clouds ; and every eye shall see Him, and they also which pierced Him." To crown all, the canon of the New Testament closes with the promise of the Lord Jesus, " Surely, I come quickly," and the fervent response of His waiting Church, "Even so, come, Lord Jesus ! "

Such was, and such indeed has ever been, the attitude of the Church of Christ. Above the din and tumult of the changes and conflicts of centuries has risen ever the voice of her steadfast confession

" I believe in Jesus Christ . . . Who suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried : He ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty: From thence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead."

Meanwhile the stream of time has flowed on uninterruptedly, and the scroll of human history has steadily unfolded itself from generation to generation until nearly nineteen centuries have run their course ; yet still the sign of the Son of man is not seen, nor the sound of His approaching chariotwheels heard. And so the scoffer rises up, and asks with scorn, " Where is the promise of His coming ? " He points, as St. Peter predicted he would, to the uniformity of natural law as a refutation of the hope and expectation of the Christian Church. "See," he cries: "unchanging order reigns in nature. i All things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation/ Where, then, is there any room for the great catastrophe which you expect ? Experience has shown that this expectation is a dream and a delusion."

What answer have we to this question ? — which indeed is not asked only by the scoffer, for it finds an echo in many a Christian heart, perplexed by the long delay in the realization of the ideal of Christ's kingdom, and in the fulfilment of the promise of the second advent.

22 " Where is the Promise of His Corning?"

There is an incident in our Lord's life which will help us to an answer. After the transfiguration in which Moses and Elias had appeared with Jesus in glory, the disciples came unto Him, saying, " Why say the scribes that Elias must first come ? " He answered, "Elias is come already, and they knew him not. ,, "Then the disciples understood that He spake unto them of John the Baptist." In other words, the great prophecy of Malachi with which the Old-Testament canon closes — " Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord" — met its fulfilment in the mission and ministry of John the Baptist, the young prophet of the desert, who came clad in the austere guise which the great seer of Carmel had worn, and whose whole work was "in the spirit and power of Elias."

And yet John himself when asked, "Art thou Elias ? " answered, " I am not." Our Lord, too, implies the same thing when He says, " Elias truly shall first come, and restore all things." And a due consideration of the words of Malachi — which connect the coming of Elias with the great and dreadful day of the Lord, the Day of Judgment — will show that the mission of John does not exhaust that prediction, — does not complete its fulfilment John, therefore, was Elias, and yet he was not. He was Elias in spirit and in power. He

" Where is the Promise of His Corning?" 23

x

was not Elias in person. He fulfilled the words of Malachi, but only in part. They yet await their final and complete fulfilment.

Now apply the principle here exemplified to the second advent of Christ, and you have at once an answer to the question, "Where is the promise of His coming ?" Christ is come already, and they knew Him not. The promise has already been fulfilled. Howbeit, it yet awaits its final and complete fulfilment, when He shall come in person. Of that glorious advent, indeed, men scoffingly ask, " Where is the promise of His coming ? " But we hold that " the Lord is not slack concerning His promise ; " — and surely a scientific age ought to be the last to dispute the position. Of this we shall speak on a future occasion. To-day we confine ourselves to those partial fulfilments at which we have hinted.

Now, the eye of faith, if it scan attentively the history of the Christian era, will find certain great crises when the Son of man has come " in spirit and power/' though not in person.

Such a crisis was the siege and destruction of Jerusalem, prophesied so fully by Himself, and realized in such appalling scenes of anguish as perhaps the world had never witnessed before. The long-gathering storm of the divine wrath burst then upon the guilty nation. The judgment long treasured up by a series of rebellious acts was at last poured out upon that wicked generation. Titus was the Imperator of the Roman armies which shut in the devoted city as with a wall of glittering steel. But a greater than Titus ordered the course of events. The Son of Man presided over the storm-cloud which broke at last in fury, and swept away with its destroying might, city and temple and polity. It was a time of judgment, and Christ was the Judge. It was a time of revolution, far-reaching in its results, profound in its significance for the future of the world and the race ; and Christ was He whose hand guided its course. The windows of heaven were opened, and the fountains of the great deep were broken up. A destroying deluge was on the land ; and out of it was to emerge a New Earth, a New Civilization, a New History, — in short, the regeneration of Society and Man. 1

And as in this, so in other great critical periods of history. Men ask, " Where is the promise of His coming ? " We answer by pointing to the conversion of the Roman Empire, when "the sign of the Son of man " was seen, if not in the heavens, in that bright cross which, according

1 Strangely enough, the Jews themselves had a legend to that effect : " He came, according to another wild legend, on the day of the destruction of Jerusalem, but was suddenly carried away, to be revealed at His proper time."

to the legend, gave to Constantine his omen of victory, yet most certainly in the famous Edict of Toleration and in the submission of the Roman eagles to the symbol of Christianity. We answer again by pointing to the victories of the cross over the Northern barbarians, which signalized the next great advance of the religion of Jesus, when the torrent which swept away the last bulwarks of the Roman Empire was subdued and calmed by the voice of the Son of man, — as of old on Gennesaret, under the mighty spell of the same voice, the winds ceased, and the waves were still. We answer yet again by pointing to the humiliations which befell the Church when, forsaking the precepts of her Lord, and forgetting of what spirit she was, she armed herself with the pomp and power of this world, and leaned upon an arm of flesh, only to provoke the judgments of that same Jesus whom John saw in Patmos, whose eyes were as a flame of fire, and whose feet like unto fine brass as if they burned in a furnace, and out of whose mouth went a sharp, two-edged sword.

"Where is the promise of His coming ?" We answer once more by pointing to the throes of the great Reformation period, when, heralded by a new John the Baptist, announced by the voice of a new Elijah in the persons of Grossetete and Wickliffe and Cobham and Huss and Luther and Tyndale,

26 " Where is the Promise of His Corning?"

the Son of Man, "the Messenger of the covenant/* " suddenly came to His temple," — came "like a refiner's fire and like fullers soap," came and sat "like a refiner and purifier of silver/* purging away the dross of long-accumulating corruptions, both of doctrine and of morals, and once more making His house an house of prayer for all nations.

"Where is the promise of His coming ?" My brethren, if you read the history of the last hundred years aright, you will not lack an answer. Did He not come in the eighteenth century, in that great awakening which swept over England like the life-giving wind over the dry bones of the valley, when again the Lord came to His temple, sending as His forerunners that goodly company of reformers which sprang out of the bosom of the Church of England, — Whitefield and Wesley, Grimshaw and Romaine, Hervey and Fletcher and Venn, Wilberforce and Law ?

And has He not come again in our own time in that great movement of missionary zeal and labor, which, beginning in that little cloud no bigger than a man's hand which was first seen about the beginning of this century, has grown and spread till it has poured its refreshing showers over a vast area of our earth ? Yes : again Elijah has prayed, and again the Lord has answered ; and the result has been a wider diffusion of the gospel, accompanied by more signal victories than at any previous period of the history of the Church. While we, grown lukewarm and unbelieving under the influence of the cares and riches and pleasures of this world, and forgetting (alas ! ) that self-sacrifice and the cross are the necessary conditions of true discipleship — while we, I say, are discussing the evidences of Christianity, and, in the weakness of our faith, trembling for the result of the great conflict with the unbelief of our time, the Son of man is actually claiming "the heathen for His inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for His possession. "

These are only examples — and they feebly traced in outline — of the truth which I would enforce. All modern history is full of illustrations of it. The centuries since Christ have heard the voice and seen the sign of the Son of man, not once or twice, but many times.

The rapt seer of Patmos Isle saw in vision a scroll-book " in the right hand of Him that sat on the throne;'' it was "written within and without," — i.e., it contained a completed record ; and it was " sealed with seven seals," — i.e., it was full of mystery, dark and difficult of comprehension.

That book seems to have been the history — the completed history — of the providential government of the world, as it shall stand when the consummation of human history shall have filled up the last blank on the mighty scroll. It rests in the hand " of Him that sitteth upon the throne ; " because He, the Creator and Ruler of the universe, holds all events in the hollow of His hand, and by His providence directs the evolution of history. But, ah, it is a sealed — a seven-sealed — book. Who can loose the seals, and open the scroll, and decipher its contents ? The voice of the " strong angel " resounds over the wide earth, and down the long corridor of the ages, and through the mighty vault of heaven, — but in vain. " No man in heaven, nor in earth, neither under the earth, was able to open the book, neither to look thereon/' Yes, the philosophy of human history mocks us like a mirage of the desert. God's ways are dark; His providence is a seven-sealed mystery ; and we might sit down and weep, like the seer in the vision, because no man can break its seals for us, and decipher its contents. We might, had not "the Lion of the tribe of Judah" " prevailed to open the book and to loose the seven seals thereof." But He — by His cross and passion, by His precious death and burial, by His glorious resurrection and ascension, and by the coming of the Holy Ghost — has won the victory which enables Him to open and read the book for us. Christ and His cross, my brethren, loose the seven seals of the history of God's providence, which is the history of man. They will at last explain all its riddles, and unravel all its mysteries, and clear up all its dark and difficult problems ; and the universe shall ring with the loud acclaim of praise of angels and redeemed saints, and of every creature in it, when the Lamb of God shall take the book, and open the seals, and display before all eyes the beauty and the order of human history in its onward march to its final goal. Meanwhile, we may learn, with Johann von Miiller, that the cross of Christ is the key to the interpretation of history ; and, as we study it more and more diligently, we shall reverently discern in many a period " the sign of the Son of man." We shall see that He has come, not the second time only, but many times, to the world and to the Church, and that His great promise has fulfilled itself in many ways.

Nor will we stop here. We will study the book of our own history. Ah, how often this is indeed a seven-sealed scroll to us ! and how vainly do we seek to loose the seals thereof, that we may read its meaning ! Of this, too, we shall find the key only in Christ and His cross. A docile and humble spirit, reverently asking the interpretation of the closely-written scroll of human experiences, will find here, too, — in sorrows, in afflictions, in losses, in bereavements, — "the sign of the Son of man,"

and in many a lurid cloud of earthly disappointment discover the symbol and omen of moral victory — even that victory "which overcometh the world/' And when men scornfully ask, " Where is the promise of His coming ? " our heart will answer, "Ah, He has fulfilled it many times to me, and each time He has left a blessing, whether He came in sunshine or in storm ; and at last, He will gloriously fulfil His promise, coming in the guise of the angel of Death, and receiving me unto Himself, that where He is, there I may be also."

III. "where Is The Promise Of His Coming?"

" Where is the promise of His coming? " — 2 Peter iii. 4.

THIS question expresses, on the one hand, the scorn of an unbelieving world, mocking at the hope of the Church ; and, on the other, the perplexity of the Church herself, as she counts up the long cycles of time since the promise was given, and scans the eastern heavens in vain to discover "the sign of the Son of man."

I showed you last Sunday where to look for an answer to this question, and a solution of this perplexity. You were reminded that the promise of the coming of Christ, like that of the coming of Elijah, though it looked ultimately to a personal advent, did not look only to that, but fulfilled itself mediately in the evolution of human history. And certain great crises in the course of the centuries since Christ were pointed out as instances of the fulfilment of the great promise, when the Lord Jesus did come again, not indeed in person, but "in spirit and power."

3 1

Such a view as this throws a flood of light upon the page of history, while at the same time it teaches us to look reverently for " the sign of the Son of man/' and for the revelation of His power and glory, not merely in the consummation of all things, but all along the course of human affairs. From this stand-point we shall see Christ " fulfilling Himself in many ways" in the past history of our race. We shall recognize His Hand in the events of our own time, 1 and we shall expect to discover the unfolding of His purposes in the future evolution of the great drama of history. Thus the promise will belong at once to the past, the present, and the future. "By divers portions, and in divers manners," the Lord Jesus has already come. He is coming to the world and to the Church, not doubtfully, in our own time, if we have discernment to see His " sign." He will yet come, in the near or distant future, working out His vast and far-reaching plan for the regeneration of society and of man.

But is this all that the promise implies ? Does this view, important and pregnant as it is, exhaust the meaning; of the second advent ?

1 Four centuries after Christ, the Talmudist says of the Jewish hope of Messiah what might be truly said of the Christian hope of the advent, — " He is even now sitting among the poor and wounded at the gates of Rome, and men know Him not."

" IV here is the Promise of His Coming? " 33

No, for the angel said that He should "so come in like manner as " He was seen to go into heaven ; and we know that that was an objective fact occurring in the sphere of the physical and external world. We know also that He shall come in such wise that " every eye shall see Him, and they also which pierced Him." With the early Christians, then, we look for a visible, personal advent of Jesus Christ to our earth, — the antithesis of the Incarnation ; not in weakness and " great humility," but "in power and great glory;" not to suffer, but to reign; not to be despised and rejected, but to be worshipped and glorified ; not to make reconciliation on a cross of agony, but to dispense final justice from a throne of glory.

But when we make this confession, immediately there rises the old question, "Where is the promise of His coming?" For all these long centuries of the Christian era have passed away, and still He comes not. Surely, " The Lord is slack concerning His promise ! " Time itself seems to mock the Christian's hope. The Church has been standing gazing up into heaven well-nigh two thousand years, and saying, " Come, Lord Jesus ; " but to what purpose ? Its experience has been similar to that of the prophets of Baal on a memorable occasion : there has been " no voice, nor any that answered." And, moreover, Nature seems to declare the fundamental unreasonableness of anysuch crisis or catastrophe as the Christian Church anticipates ; for " all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation." The stars have quietly moved on in their vast cycles ; the sun has run his daily course unwearied ; the tides have ebbed and flowed ; seed-time and harvest, winter and summer, have continued in their perpetual round ; the whole grand system of Nature has remained steadfast and unchanged in its everrecurring succession.

The objection — or perhaps I should say the difficulty — is, you perceive, twofold. One phase of it we may call the historical difficulty ; the other, the scientific.

Let us take these in their reverse order, and seek a solution of them.

I. The Scientific Difficulty. — This would require a separate treatment ; and it is not my purpose to try to meet it in this discourse, but I may hint at the line of thought in which the answer is to be found.

So far as the objection relates to the delay of the second advent, it would seem that, in a scientific age like the present, it should least of all have weight. For the history of the earth, as related by geology, and the history of the cosmical system, as related by astronomy, present periods so vast, that the eighteen hundred years, during which Christianity has been evolving its work among men, shrink into utter insignificance in the comparison. Certainly, the man of science, above all other men, should recognize the utter inadequacy of human standards of time as measures of the development of the plans of the Creator.

And, again, so far as the objection relates to other aspects of the subject, such as the regularity and immutability of natural law, which, it is alleged, forbid any such catastrophe as the end of the world, I suggest, —

First, That creation is the fundamental fact on which all our knowledge rests. Science is compelled to admit the beginning of the Kosmos. The very principle of evolution, which, in some form or other, is now generally adopted as a twin generalization with gravitation, carries with it the idea of a beginning. Even if the Kosmos had been self-evolved, the seed out of which it evolved itself must be assumed. But does not this suggest that it is working toward an end ? an ultimate solution ?

I suggest, secondly, that the three leading ideas involved in the second advent, and that which is associated with it, at least in perspective, the end of the world, find clear analogies in the latest theories of science.

{a) The second advent involves the idea of the inauguration of a higher stage of life and being for man, — emancipation from old fetters, the ascent to a higher plane, the taking on a new body with new powers, and under new and higher conditions. But this is just in the line of the story which science is telling us — whether in astronomy, or in geology, or in natural history, or in sociology, — the several spheres in which the law of evolution is traced. We meet everywhere the same law of progress, from the lower to the higher, from the simple to the complex, from the imperfect to the more perfect. Nature, through all geological time, the evolutionist tells us, struggled slowly upward to reach its final term in man. Her motto would seem to have been, " I press toward the mark/'

(b) The second advent involves the sudden manifestation of the Son of God, and a new birth of the world resulting from it.

But, again, the scientific man at our side teaches us that the ascent of matter and force to higher planes, though indeed in orderly succession, has not been by infinite gradation as upon a sliding scale, but always by paroxysms. The story of the chemist is a story of successive births of force into higher and higher forms, the transformations of dead into living matter, of physical into chemical force, and again of chemical into vital force. These

" IV here is the Promise of His Coming? " 37

are all instances of sudden births into higher conditions, with new properties and powers which could not have been imagined before.

(c) The second advent — or that great event which, in the perspective, is contiguous with it, though in reality it may lie far beyond it (like two distant peaks, which seem to spring from the same base, though a wide valley really intervenes) — involves also stupendous natural phenomena, — the regeneration by fire, the new heavens and the new earth.

But here again the analogy of science is in harmony with the scriptural revelation ; for the geologist, in telling of an internal treasure-house of fire, as well as the astronomer in his theory of "planetary old age," clearly establish that harmony. And, moreover, if there is a law of conservation of force, there is also, as its antithesis, a law of dissipation of energy. To use the language of a living scientist, " All scientific speculations on the subject of the final destiny of the Kosmos bankrupt nature. The final result is " the running down of all forms of force into heat, and the final equal diffusion of this heat, and so the final death of the Kosmos." z

II. The Historical Difficulty. — Christ promised to come again in person to judge the world. He

said, "Behold, I come quickly." But He has not come. Long cycles of history have rolled round, yet still He comes not.

Now, how do we meet this objection ? Exactly as St. Peter met it when he made this epistle ; viz., by reminding the objector that with the Lord "a thousand years are as one day." He is the strong and patient worker. Men are impatient. They say, as of old they said to the prophet, — " Where is the word of the Lord ? let it come now" (Jer. xvii. 15); or as to Ezekiel, " The days are prolonged, and every vision faileth " (xii. 22) ; or as to Isaiah, " Let Him make speed, and hasten His work, that we may see it : and let the counsel of the Holy One of Israel draw nigh and come, that we may know it ! " (v. 19). To this unbelieving impatience, the voice of the prophet answered of old, "The vision is for the appointed time, and it hasteneth to the end, and it deceiveth not : though it delay, wait for it ; for it will surely come, it will not tarry" (Hab. ii. 3). 1 And before him the Psalmist rebuked this profane cavil, when he exclaimed, " Lord, . . . before the mountains were brought forth, and Thou gavest birth to the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, Thou art God. Thou turnest man to dust ; and sayest, Return, ye children of men. For a thousand