HOMILETICS
SECTION LI.—WAITING AND WORKING. (Chap. Daniel 12:12-13.)
Doctrine is to be followed by practice. Knowledge brings reponsibility. Faith evidences itself by works. Light is given, not that we may sleep, but work. The word of prophecy, made sure by its continual fulfilment, was given that we might take heed to it as “a light shining in a dark place till the day dawn, and the day-star arise in our hearts.” The communications made to Daniel closed with an intimation as to the use to be made of them. “Blessed is he that waiteth, and cometh to the thousand three hundred and five and thirty days: But go thy way till the end be; for thou shalt rest and stand in thy lot at the end of the days.” [372] The latter verse is thus paraphrased by Brightman: “But thou, Daniel, go thy way and rest content, till all these things shall come to pass, towards or before the end; and although they seem to be long delayed, yet the tediousness thereof shall not be grievous unto thee: for thou in the meantime shalt yield to nature, and go the way of all flesh, and being freed from the miseries of this life, shalt quietly rest, and be partaker of that happiness which those enjoy who die in the Lord: and at length also shall thy body be raised up out of the grave, in that lot and condition which God shall give unto thee, that thou mayest be partaker of unspeakable joy with all the rest of the saints, and so reign with Christ for ever and ever.” These concluding verses suggest—
[372] “Go thy way till the end be.” Keil, with Theodoret and most interpreters, understands the words to mean, “Go to the end of thy life; the angel of the Lord thus dismissing the highly-favoured prophet from his life’s work, with the comforting assurance that he should stand in his own lot in the end of the days. Daniel was to rest, that is, in the grave, and to rise again, to enjoy his part in the inheritance of the saints in light (Colossians 1:12), to be possessed by the righteous, after the resurrection of the dead, in the heavenly Jerusalem; in those last days when, after the judgment of the world, the kingdom of glory should appear.” According to Calvin, he was to be content with his lot, and expect no more visions. Bullinger understands the words as an exhortation to persevere and continue to the end. According to Junius, he was to set all things in order, and make himself ready for his end, without curiously searching further into these things. Brightman understands the words as intimating that what the Lord might have further to reveal, He would do it by other prophets, as He did by Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi.
1. The duty of securing with all earnestness a personal interest in the blessedness predicted in the prophecy. We have been told, with Daniel, of the resurrection to everlasting life that shall follow the last great tribulation, and the kingdom of glory with and under the Messiah, when “the wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament, and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever.” It was Daniel’s happiness to be assured of his interest in that predicted blessedness; and with that assurance quietly to wait till the time for the full experience of it arrived. It is for us who read or hear the words of this prophecy, to make sure our participation in the same blessedness. It is for us to secure in time our place among the wise, making sure that with the lamp of an outward possession of faith in Christ, and an intellectual knowledge of the truth, we have the oil of saving grace and spiritual light in the vessel of our hearts. Unless the Bridegroom come speedily, we too, like Daniel, shall lie down to rest in the grave till the resurrection trump shall awake us out of sleep. The question is, How shall we do so? Shall we, like the “man greatly beloved,” lie down renewed in the spirit of our mind, and made accepted in the Beloved; or as those who, unforgiven and destitute of the holiness without which no man shall see the Lord, awake only to shame and everlasting contempt; like the foolish virgins who, satisfied with the present, delayed to secure the needful supply for the future till it was too late? Let us make sure that we have gone to Him who has the oil of the Spirit of life and peace to sell, or rather to give freely to those who are willing to buy without money and without price; and let us not rest till with Simeon we are able joyfully to say, “Now, Lord, lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace; for mine eyes have seen Thy salvation.
2. The duty of patient waiting for the future blessedness. The man pronounced “blessed,” who “waiteth and cometh” to the happy period predicted in connection with Israel’s restoration, the resurrection of the dead, and the future glory. That period was in Daniel’s day far distant. It is now two thousand four hundred years nearer than it was then. There must be much less time to wait. That time may be very short. But whatever it may be, it is still to be one of patient waiting. It may, and doubtless will, be one of peculiar trial, temptation, and distress. It will be one in which the enmity of Satan and the world against Christ, His truth, His people, and His cause, will reach its utmost violence; the time in which the great enemy will come forth with “great wrath, knowing that he hath but a short time.” It will be the time of the last manifestation of Antichrist, in which all that has been predicted of the two Little Horns, of the Wilful King, and of the Man of Sin, will be fully developed, summed up, and concentrated. It will be the time to which the Church has looked forward for eighteen centuries, as that of the great outbreak of wickedness and of Satanic power, that will call forth and be only terminated by the manifestation of the Lord’s coming. There will, therefore, be need of patient waiting. In patience believing men will need to possess their souls. The period will probably be short, though severe. Its end will be glorious. From the throes and birth-pangs of the period shall come forth a new and beauteous creation, the long-looked for and prayed for “regeneration,” the new heavens and the new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness, when the petition long presented shall be at length fulfilled, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” It is worth a long time of patient waiting for it. Like Daniel, we who are now living and working may have to go our way and rest in the grave till the end be, and our waiting be completed there in the dust. But others will follow and have their waiting time on earth, it may be for another generation or two, or perhaps more. Perhaps it may be less. Apparently we are entering upon an age of scientific, as well as grosser, atheism.[373] These are the days of rapid development. As England and the world have recently been reminded, immense strides have been made in the advance of science during the last fifty years; and the outcome seems to be an upsetting of notions hitherto entertained regarding God and His works; so that a prelate of the Church, in a discourse on the occasion, could ask, Will there at last, when the problem is solved, be any place left for God, or Christianity, or prayer, or conscience, or free-will, or responsibility, or duty, or faith in the unseen? and observed that the remarks of many scientific men showed that these questions were not superfluous, and that consequently alarm and anxiety had taken possession of many minds, and his own among the rest. Thus evidently is the time of patient waiting not only still existing, but intensifying. Faith and patience will doubtless yet be severely tried. “When the Son of Man cometh, shall He find faith on the earth?” “Because thou hast kept the word of My patience, I also will keep thee from the hour of temptation which shall come upon all the world, to try them that dwell upon the earth” (Luke 18:8; Revelation 3:10). The proper attitude of the Church in these days in which we live, as it was in those of the Apostles, is that of a “patient waiting for Christ.” As the Old Testament Church was found waiting for the first Advent of Him who was the Consolation of Israel, so is it to be with the New Testament Church in relation to the second. This waiting posture is described by the Apostles in such language as, “Looking for the blessed hope, the glorious appearing of the great God, even our Saviour Jesus Christ;” “Our conversation is in heaven, from whom also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ;” “Waiting for His Son from heaven;” “Looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of God;” “To them that look for Him shall He appear the second time without sin unto salvation” (Titus 2:13; Philippians 3:20; 2 Thessalonians 1:10; 2 Peter 3:12; Hebrews 9:28).
[373] “Fifty years ago,” said Sir John Lubbock in the presidential address at the late Jubilee of the British Association, “it was the general opinion that animals and plants came into existence just as we now see them.” This is represented as the general opinion no longer. “We perceive that there is a reason—and in many cases we know what that reason is—for every difference in form, in size, and in colour; for every bone and every feather, almost for every hair.” “We can now see precisely,” says the Christian World, “where the old opinion differs from the new. The modern biologist professes to understand better than his predecessors those forces or processes by which birds have become different from reptiles, and animals that suckle their young different from both. To put it still more pointedly, the modern doctrine affirms that, leaving out of consideration the unknown beginning (of which science takes no account), nature in the world of life, animal and vegetable, has always worked with the means and methods employed at this hour. Elephants and alligators, sharks, kangaroos, and humming-birds are blood relations.” Again a writer in the same journal says: “The two chief springs of that inspiration with which Christianity has quickened the cold, dead heart of humanity, are, without question, the love of God, and the boundless possibilities of that future which the Gospel opens to man. It is an inspiration which it seems that in these days our wise ones are doing their very utmost to destroy. Of God they tell us that we know nothing, and can know nothing; while of ‘the things which are before us’ we know as little. God’s love, we are now taught, is no more than the mere yearning of the sad human heart to find a living expression in that awful world-system which surrounds us, and whose cruel sternness drives great nations of our fellow-men to long for annihilation, as the supreme benediction which the universe can offer to its intelligent child; while the hope of immortality, by the same rule, is the vain effort of that faculty of our nature which ‘looks before and after,’ to construct a future which may soothe its imagination, but which is baseless and fruitless as its idlest dreams. It is without doubt,” the writer goes on to say, “a very dread aspect of these times, especially for the young who are nursed, as it were, in its atmosphere. But instead of wild denunciations of it, it is wiser for us to study the way in which it comes to be; how it is possible that this ghastly creed could have grown up in the heart of Christendom, in the very age and region in which the triumph of Christian truth and civilisation ought to be most complete.… The saddest result of this theological abuse of the world-system—we can call it nothing else—is to make men believe that it has no meaning or method that man can discover; that all its movements are all mechanical, and that man is but the most highly-finished part of the machinery; like the rest of it, sprung from and returning to the dust. The idea that the universe is guided by a living Intelligence, and that the development of man’s life is an object which the Intelligence that guides the universe has ever in sight, would be banished to the limbo of worn-out superstitions, effete idolatries, if some of our keen thinkers had their way.”
3. The duty of working as well as waiting. Daniel was told to go his way till the end be. It is said of him that, after his recovering from the fainting and sickness consequent on a former vision, he “rose and attended to the king’s business” (chap. Daniel 8:27). Although now considerably older, he might still be able to do the same. At the beginning of the present vision we find that he had been engaged for three full weeks in special prayer and fasting. Whatever he might be able to do in the business of his earthly master, he was still in a condition to serve his heavenly one. Whatever his hand found to do in that service, he was to go and do it with his might, before he was called to rest from his labour; whether that work might be in comforting his brethren with the consolation wherewith he himself was comforted of God, communicating to them the knowledge which he himself had just received, or exhorting them to a steadfast faith themselves and fidelity in strengthening the faith of others in the prospect of the trials that were yet before them. Daniel was to wait, but, so long as the Lord gave him strength, he was also to work, showing God’s strength unto that generation, and His saving power to every one that was to come (Psalms 71:18). The “waiting” in the text is not to be an idle, indolent one. Looking for the blessed hope and the glorious appearing of the great God our Saviour, is associated by the Apostle with the denying ourselves to all ungodliness and worldly lust, and living soberly, righteously, and godly in the present world (Titus 2:12-13). On the ground of the same hope, Paul exhorts the Corinthian believers to be “steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that our labour is not in vain in the Lord” (1 Corinthians 15:58). While “looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life,” we are to “have compassion” on others, and to seek to “save some with fear, pulling them out of the fire” (Jude 1:21-23). To be waiting for the Master’s return will naturally move us to diligence in doing the Master’s work. It is the servant who says in his heart, My lord delayeth his coming, that begins to “beat his fellow-servants, and to eat and drink with the drunken” (Luke 12:45-46). The use to be made of the study of the prophetic word, is, with the eunuch, to go on our way rejoicing in the blessed hope that it has set before us. That hope is one of a bright hereafter, not only for ourselves as faithful believers, but for the Church and the world. Like Daniel, we are to be attending diligently to “the king’s business,” till we also shall be called away from the field, as so many before us have been, to hear from the Master’s lips that blessed plaudit, “Well done, good and faithful servant! thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee faithful over many things; enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.”[374]
[374] “Let us,” says Auberlen, “who love the word of prophecy, not forget the present, and what has been given us already in thinking of the things we hope for; lest our study of prophecy degenerate to a mere favourite pursuit of our infancy, and unspiritual excitement. Let this hope of the kingdom take the same place in our heart as is assigned to it in the Divine Word; and let us not change the proportion in which Holy Scripture has placed it to the fundamental truths of Christianity. Let the apostolic word be our motto: “For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared unto all men; teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world; looking for the blessed hope, the glorious appearing of the great God even our Saviour Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:11-13). All Christians of the present day find it difficult to lay to heart the words which apply to our days, as well as to the days of Isaiah: “In quietness and confidence shall be your strength.” But let us remember that we are living in a time when judgments are preparing; and our only duty is to be ever watchful and prayerful witnesses of the coming of the Lord. We are, for this reason, not slothful; we do not fold our hands; only we do not cherish illusive hopes and expectations from our work. Let us be faithful in the little things intrusted to us; as for the great things, we cannot take them to ourselves; but we wait till the Lord will bring them to us.… What our generation wants is, witnesses who can lift up their voice in the spirit and power of the prophets; men who can stand in the breach in the hour of temptation which is coming over the whole earth. In that hour we need to be “strong in the Lord and in the power of His might,” so that we may achieve the victory; then we must lift up our heads in blessed hope and joy, knowing that “our redemption draweth nigh.” May our merciful God prepare us for that hour, by teaching us to understand aright and to practise faithfully the word of the Apocalypse: “Here is the patience and the faith of the saints.”