THE COMING DAY
‘The day is at hand.’
The Apostle says, ‘The night is far spent.’ Whether this is so cosmically and historically, we know not, though many have guessed and calculated as to the further duration of the night; but individually for each one it is good we should allow, ‘Yes, he speaks rightly; for me “the night is far spent.” ’ The Apostle goes on in the text from darkness into light. ‘The day is at hand,’ he says; ‘In omnibus respice finem’ (De Imitatione Christi, ch. 24). It is but lost labour to attempt pictures of the heavenly kingdom, for no mind confined in flesh can properly imagine it.
I. At the beginning of the life to come stands the great tribunal of question, the judgment-seat, where God will judge the world in righteousness, by the Christ Whom He hath ordained, and before that judgment-seat of Christ we must all appear. ‘Knowing therefore the terror of the Lord, we persuade men’; that is the urgent message which every Apostle pressed, and every ministering servant still repeats. There are various ways of treating this message. At Athens, some appeared to treat it as a fable, unworthy of philosophic attention; others decided to go into the matter seriously, but at another time. But others have, again, then and always, neither thrown it off nor put it off, but rather have been of a mind to say, ‘Spare Thy people, good Lord’ (Commination Service).
II. We are shut up to this alternative: one must either say there is no future at all, or one must think of it as a future of retribution, and the long-remitted dealing out of justice in a final court. At the bottom of every heart is an inextinguishable faculty of seeing after right and wrong. In spite of self-excuse and self-pretence, when we do wrong, we do not escape a suspicion that it is wrong; the voice cannot be quite silenced, but it will whisper at times; at some time it will speak so loudly, that people have been known to go and find out others patient to listen to their tale, as if the very rehearsal of the judgment were in itself relief.
III. A Christian will consider this matter reverently, and dwell on it prayerfully, and seek of God the heart’s awakening, that life may be in such holy communion of the Spirit, and such grace of Christ, that the day which is at hand may find us not unprepared, but humbly and in the strength of our Redeemer ready, as far as such beings may be, to meet our God.
Rev. Canon T. F. Crosse.
Illustration
‘’Tis here; it is begun;—
Already is begun the grand assize,
In thee, in all: deputed conscience scales
The dread tribunal, and forestalls our doom:
Forestalls, and by forestalling proves it sure.
Why on himself should man void judgment pass?
Is idle nature laughing at her sons?
Who conscience sent, her sentence will approve,
And God above assert that God in man.’