Second Coming of Christ # 3

Second Coming of Christ # 3

A little more than twenty years ago Mr. Moody called a convention of Christian workers to meet in Chicago and that convention was in session there in Moody's church for two months, and out of it came the great Bible institute.

The daily program was to spend the forenoon at the church in prayer and Bible study, and the afternoon and evening in doing practical Christian work.

A man who was my assistant some years ago attended that convention. He told me that one day Mr. Moody asked him to go down among the anarchists, in the hard parts of Chicago, and hold a meeting there. "Do the best you can," said Moody. "and some night I'll come down and help you."

My friend said that promise was a continual incentive to him to keep up his courage and do his very best. He didn't know when Mr. Moody would come, and so he looked for him every night, and the harder time he had, the harder he hoped and looked.

This shows how the constant expectation of the coming of Jesus will inspire and encourage us.

A great many say, "I believe the millennium will come first, then Christ will come at the end of it." What people think has nothing to do with it, but what God says has everything to do with it!

Many have missed railroad trains because they believed they would come at a time that did not correspond with the official time card. You will see God's time card if you carefully read the Bible. Not a word can be found in the Bible that gives the slightest hope for the millennium before the return of Christ - but you can find plenty of verses that tell you to look for the coming of the Lord first!

As we look back over the 2,000 years since Christ, how far we seem to be away from the time when the will of God shall be done on earth as it is in Heaven. Every edition of the press seems to make it clear that the devil is still having his way. Look at the reign of wickedness in our great cities in both high life and low. No college has ever yet made a saint or ever will. Education may improve conditions, but it can never change or cleanse the heart. Look at the luke-warmness and indifference in the Churches everywhere and see what many of them are compelled to resort to in order to keep from going under. See to what schemes and dodges and foolishness some preachers have to resort to to get anybody to go and hear them.

There can be no millennium until Jesus comes; it is His presence that makes the millennium. You might as well talk of daylight not coming until the sun goes down. The millennium cannot begin until satan has been bound in the pit. Nothing is more certain than that the glory of God shall cover the earth, but it will be after Jesus comes.

Many have an idea the world will grow better and better until the coming of the millennium, and everybody will be converted, and you hear that stuff preached, but the Bible does not teach any such trash!

On the day before the flood there was no doubt many people who were sincere in thinking that the world was growing better, and yet it was so hopelessly wicked that God had to destroy it. Some of the men who married into the family of Lot may have made the same claim for Sodom, only a day or two before its destruction; no doubt Lot's wife was of the same opinion. On the day before the crucifixion there were men in Jerusalem who undoubtedly agreed with each other that the world was growing better. The world will grow worse and worse. They did eat, they drank, they married, they were given in marriage until the day that Noah entered the ark and the flood came and destroyed them all. Likewise also as it was in the days of Lot, they did eat, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they builded. But the same day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven and destroyed them all.

"Even thus shall it be in the day when the Son of man is revealed" (Luke 17:27-30). Lawlessness, vice and crime will increase; communism, nihilism, anarchy, adultery, divorce, graft, all will continue to grow until they will finally ripen into the anti-christ.

Many think and preach that the millennium will be brought about by the increase of knowledge, culture, great discoveries, such as the gasoline engine, automobile, electricity, radium, liquefied air, wireless telegraphy, airships, etc. These have nothing to do with bringing the millennium. It is the personal reign of Christ that brings the millennium. Those who have the greatest blessing to the world were filled with this hope and preached it.

The Word of God was vitiated and neutralized by the traditions of men when Jesus first came, and that is very largely the trouble in present times. Instead of going to the Bible to find out what God says, the preacher is too apt to go to his books, to see what the great men of his church have to say about it, and all their preaching and teaching take its color from the glasses the rabbis wear, just as was the cause in the time of Jesus.

The fact that Jesus was not recognized by the high-up authorities, but was rejected and crucified as an impostor, shows what a dangerous and deadly thing it is to accept the traditions of men rather than what God says about things.

~Billy Sunday~

(continued with # 4)