For as the lightning.
The last conflagration
I. Christ’s advent shall be sudden. Unexpected by the masses; like the flash that leaps from the bosom of the black cloud, sweeps through the sky, and completes its journey in an instant.
II. Christ’s advent will be with intense and vivid splendour. The lightning fills the whole world; leaps from the east, and finds its lair only in the remote and distant west. When the searching lightning of that day shall come it will penetrate the cell of the captive, etc. What an arrest will take place. The world will be going on when Christ comes, as it does this moment. There will be signs, and symptoms, and premonitory warnings of Christ’s advent.
1. Some will say, on seeing them, “The whole thing can be explained on the principles of natural science,” etc. It may be so; but certainly these scientific objectors seem to be the successors of a class who are a sign of the times, while they say, “Where is the promise of His coming?” etc.
2. Others will meet all statements on the subject with “Wishes it may not be true,” etc.
3. God’s own people will say, “Come, Lord Jesus; we have been looking for Thee,” etc.
4. The testimony of God’s Word as to the accompaniments of this day.
5. What is the lesson from all this? “What manner of persons,” etc.
6. Seek to promote things that will survive the last fire.
7. The prospect of a dissolving world is a more practical motive force than the prospect of death. This is the apostolic motive power. (J. Cumming, D. D.)
Duty to be done in time of judgment
About sixty years ago, there was in America a universal superstition-not an enlightened belief-that the world was about to close. They believed that the world was about to end, because a total eclipse of the sun took place at noonday. There was all the darkness and the gloom of midnight. It happened that the Congress of the United States was assembled at this hour; half the members of the Congress believed that that dense night, caused by a total eclipse of the sun, was really the darkness that preceded the ushering in the judgment and another state and world. They were in great alarm, and two or three of the most agitated got up at once, and moved that the Congress do adjourn. There was a panic. In the midst of the panic, and while some were proposing an adjournment, an old and venerable Puritan, who had learned noble lessons from the Puritans of England, the salt of the country at that time, rose up and said, “Mr. Chairman, we are told that our duties are always imminent, that they are always obligatory. Some in this house are afraid that the last day is come; it may be they are right; I have some suspicion they are so; but as our duties never cease, instead of moving that the house adjourn, as we cannot see in this darkness to do business, I move that the candles be brought in, and that we proceed to the order of the day.” That man spoke like a Christian, and he lived like a Christian. And may we be found going on with the orders of the day when the light of the last day shall flash upon this world. (J. Cumming, D. D.)
The coming of the Son of Man
The Rev. Edward Irving was once preaching at Perth. The text was taken from Matthew 24:1-51., regarding the coming of the Son of Man. While he was engaged in unfolding his subject, from out of a dark cloud, which obscured the church, there came forth a bright blaze of lightning and a crash of thunder. There was deep stillness in the audience. The preacher paused; and from the stillness and the gloom, his powerful voice, clothed with increased solemnity, pronounced these words: “For as the lightning cometh out of the earth, and shineth even unto the west; so shall the coming of the Son of Man be.”
Christ’s second coming
Here are two opposite yet ever-present dangers. One is of fancying that our Saviour and our salvation are to be found in some extraordinary out-of-the-way fashion of religious manifestation: “Behold he is in the desert.” The other danger is that we shall fancy that our Saviour and our salvation are to be found in particular states of our own interior feeling: “Behold he is in the secret chambers.” The first was superstition; this is fanaticism.
I. Both Christ and his apostles speak repeatedly of a second coming of the Son of Man in such a sense as forbids us to confound the second with the first. The two are put entirely apart in time, though they are internally and morally connected with each other; the one preparing the way for the other, and each being in fact fragmentary and unintelligible without the other.
II. That coming is personal and literal. We may call signal social revolutions, reforms in government, the emancipation of slaves, or great accessions of knowledge or charity, new comings of Christ. The figure is intelligible; but they are not comings of Him. They may be comings of the impersonal power and principles of His religion-partial blessings reminding us of the one great blessing that includes them all; but He is to come. “Ye shall see the Son of Man(not His ideas, but Him) coming in power and great glory.” Nor will it do to tamper with Holy Scripture by such a theory of interpretation as that His coming means our going. The death or departure of the individual is one thing; the Bible often mentions that, meaning just what it says. The Lord’s coming is another.
III. This great coming is to be connected with a separation of the good from the bad, the believers from the deniers, the spiritually alive from the spiritually dead.
IV. There is, however, some reference to a kind of coming of Christ which was to take place in the lifetime of the generation that was on the stage while the saviour was speaking.
V. Inspired writers, apostles, signify their expectation that Christ’s second advent would take place during their own natural life. Were they mistaken, and mistaken teachers of others? A vast amount of ingenious effort has been made to break the force of this objection with out sacrificing the infallibility of the record. For the most part it has failed by taking the purely external or philological method, and without sounding spiritually the depths of the Evangelic purpose. Let us honestly take the language of honest men in its ordinary acceptation. What, then, shall we say? All difficulties are cleared by the following proposition, which is reasonable and reverential: The purpose of revelation, in this matter, was to create in Christians, not a belief that Christ would come at any particular hour in history, but a belief that He is always at hand, and that all Christians should at all times and in all places be ready, as men that stand with their lamps trimmed and burning, to meet Him personally. The date of the event was no part of the Divine communication. In proportion as we rise, in thought, toward the immensity of the life of God, and have “the mind of the Spirit,” the whole period of history shrinks, great distances dwindle, epochs are pressed together, and “a thousand years are as one day.” Besides, the highest authority in modern physical science, in astronomy, and geology, and chemistry, harmonizes singularly enough, as to the issue, with the Apostolic language. It concludes that the machinery of the material universe is wasting, its movements are slackening, its balance is slowly loosening, and that a general catastrophe is inevitable. The sneer of the scientific sceptic of the last century is silenced by the science of to-day. We may say that in the Bible predictions generally, borrowing a phrase from the fine arts, what we may call historical perspective is lost sight of. We are not told at what intervals from each other, or always in just what order, these majestic events, by which eternity seems to open down into time, shall follow on. Chronology is not the object. The facts are what we are to know, and receive, and feed upon in our hearts by faith. The moment we begin to try our petty arithmetic on them we miss the mark, and lose our way. We all know that, even with ourselves, the moments of tremendous peril, when awful events are casting their colossal shadows about us, are just the time when the ordinary measure of succession drops out of sight. We look across the great tract and see other great conjunctions, as if they were nigh at hand. Christ Jesus is not enclosed in time, but time is all in Him. (Bishop Huntington)
Christ’s second coming a revelation
The essential circumstance in this parable or analogy is not so much the suddenness of the splendour that breaks forth from the cloud, as the wide-reaching and supernatural illumination and revelation which come with it. It annihilates all the darkness of the night and of the storm. Each of all the hidden objects stands out clearly manifest. The daylight comes so slowly that we seldom think of its revealing power. Even when we pause to watch its increase, the world has ample time to grow into its old look of naturalness without any shock to us; and, ere the sun has fully risen and disclosed clearly to our sight the familiar objects around us, we have already well-nigh forgotten that the night ever hid them. But it is not so when the lightning comes. That has no twilight. Its dawn is its fullest day. It transfigures the world at once. It divides the light from the darkness somewhat as we imagine God did at the beginning-separating them perfectly, and leaving no neutral ground between them. (E. E. Johnson, M. A.)