WHEN
THE LAST DAY DAWNS
A Sermon by
Dr. Walter A. Maier
“The Lord Himself shall descend from heaven
with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of
God; and the dead in Christ shall rise first. Then we which are alive
and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet
the Lord in the air; and so shall we ever be with the Lord. Wherefore
comfort one another with these words.... The day of the Lord so cometh
as a thief in the night. For when they shall say, Peace and safety,
then sudden destruction cometh upon them.” 1Thessalonians 4:16-18; 5:2-8
Precious savior, who wilt soon return
to us, as thou hast promised: All the signs of Thy second coming are
being fulfilled before our eyes as never before. A score of warnings,
each foretold in Thy Word, cry out, “The Lord is coming.” Therefore
send Thy Holy Spirit to keep us watchful and waiting for Thine advent
and to prevent us from being misled by those why cry, “Peace and
safety!” Help us testify to unbelievers that the time of Thy return
brings the hour of judgement, when they will be sentenced for rejecting
their Redeemer, and so empower our words that as we proclaim Thy
Gospel, they may be drawn to Thee, their Deliverer from eternal
destruction! Enable our thoughts and desires to recognize that since
this world will end, we must not trust in perishable and passing
attractions, but rivet our mind on the eternal, unchanging glories of
Thy grace! Give us a deep personal sense of repentance over our sins,
but a stronger realization of the death-destroying truth that Thou
didst bear the guilt and punishment of our transgressions in Thine own
body to free us from their curse! Comfort the sorrowing and bereaved
with the guarantee of Thy return! Show us today anew the marvelous
mercy that if we live and die in reliance on Thine atoning love, we
shall ever be with Thee in heaven! Bless the efforts to promote peace,
and heal the wounds of war, but give us in an age of unbelief Thine own
Cross-purchased peace that passeth all understanding! Amen!
The morning of May 8, 1902, broke bright and
promising over the island of Martinique in the West Indies. For many of
the 40,000 people in Saint Pierre, its capital, with its hellholes of
blasphemy and vice, it was just another day to practice voodoo
atrocities, devil worship, and obscene ridicule of the redeeming
Christ. What if the crater of Mt. Pelee, the volcano in close vicinity,
was belching smoke and rumbling more Loudly than usual? It had fumed
and spewed before. Besides, had not a group of the city’s best-known
citizens climbed to the edge of the crater, peered into its depths, and
returned to report: “Don’t be alarmed! There is no need to worry”? What
if some charcoal burners on the slopes had brought the strange tale
that animals seemed to flee from Mt. Pelee and that even birds were
deserting their nests in its foliage? They were only dumb, doleful
creatures, while Saint Pierre had men and women courageous enough to
defy any god or his lumbering volcano. Why, that very night some of the
brazen leaders were planning to repeat their challenge to Christ: they
were going to crucify another pig and in sensual orgies prove their
utter disdain of the Bible and its Savior.
That night never arrived for the people of Saint
Pierre. Suddenly the crater of Mt. Pelee became a blazing inferno.
Flames shot hundreds of feet high into the air, and from within the
mountain itself came a roar terrorizing every heart. Then, while fire
and ashes fell on the city, the volcano erupted in its full, frightful
force, pushing deadly lava, millions of tons of molten stone and metal,
down the mountain slopes. Furiously these rivers of ruin, floods of
divine vengeance, rushed into the city, sweeping through streets which
leaped into flame at its approach, blistering, burning, baking the
trapped victims. Tin roofs on housetops, iron and steel utensils in
kitchens, melted and ran through the gutters like liquid wax — so close
were these horrors to hell on earth!
Yes, I said “hell.” Before nightfall, Saint Pierre
was no more, its 40,000 inhabitants — a hundred times more than those
who perished in the Texas City fire — were destroyed. Yet one man in
the doomed city — and for some time he was thought to be the only one —
escaped the fiery fate of his fellow citizens. He was Joseph Ludger,
and when the disaster struck, he was locked in the solitary confinement
cell of the Saint Pierre prison. Cut off from the rest of the world, he
heard what he called “the immense and terrible uproar”; he felt the
heat so searing that his skin began to blister, his knees burned when
he knelt on the floor to pray, and his hands sizzled as they touched
the red-hot bars. He saw the roof of his cell split, and through the
opening he could watch clouds of fire and ashes sweep over the city.
Two members of a mercy squad who had rushed into Saint Pierre after the
fury of the volcano subsided heard his faint moaning, the only human
sound that reached their ears. They rescued Ludger and carried him to a
hospital in a near-by city. After eighty-one days’ treatment he was
pronounced healed and could go into the world to tell his fellow men of
his awful experiences when divine justice wrote this inscription over
the charred city and its 40,000 graves: “Be not deceived; God is not
mocked’
In this Advent season, set aside also to remind us
of our blessed Redeemer’s return, I call your attention to the truth
that this sin-saturated world faces a final fire, in comparison with
which that Martinique misery will seem only a Fourth of July sparkler.
This will be the end of our globe, when, the earth consumed by flames,
on the day of Christ’s Second Coming, and His judgment of “the quick
and the dead,” every man, both living and dead, will face either the
most crushing of agonies or the most radiant of blessings. What will
actually happen on that Last Day, when this crime-cursed world with
everything in it passes away? You cannot hope to escape and outlive
this fiery finale, as Joseph Ludger was spared when Mt. Pelee spilled
its lava-laden ruin; for it is written with divine truth and
unavoidable finality, “We must all appear before the judgment seat of
Christ.” Even if we could remain as he, the last to leave, the sequence
of sorrows for the godless on Judgment Day and its schedule of supreme
glory for those in Christ are so far above our human grasp that we
would be hopelessly baffled. Thank God with me, then, that we have
Scripture to foresee and foretell the end of the world and the
beginning of our heavenly happiness with Jesus Christ. As I discuss
with you today the startling events
WHEN THE LAST DAY DAWNS,
May the Holy Spirit help us learn and believe that
earth’s end brings sin’s destruction to an unbelieving world, but our
Savior’s eternal deliverance to all the faithful. This is the double
lesson taught by our text (the words of First Thessalonians, chapter
four, verses sixteen to eighteen, and chapter five, verses two and
three): “The Lord Himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with
the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God; and the dead in
Christ shall rise first. Then we which are alive and remain shall be
caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the
air; and so shall we ever be with the Lord. Wherefore comfort one
another with these words. . . . The day of the Lord so cometh as a
thief in the night. For when they shall say, Peace and safety, then
sudden destruction cometh upon them.”
1- IT WILL BRING DESTRUCTION TO THE SINNER
This world will not go on forever; it must end. A
date, unknown to us, is marked on God’s calendar when the Almighty will
decree: This is the earth’s last day. Even in their limited mental
powers, men of themselves have come to the definite conclusion that
this globe, far from being eternal, grown weak and feeble, robbed of
its resources, resembles an old, senile, decrepit person. With a
frequency not previously known, scientists, authors, and leaders in
human affairs speak and write of the world’s end.
Yet for absolute assurance on this question you need
the Bible, not biology; Christ, not chemistry; faith, not physics;
theology, not geology. Turn to the thirteenth chapter of Saint Matthew,
and you will find that our Savior, whose Word is always sure and
certain, three times in this one chapter mentions the final moments of
mundane history. When our Lord speaks once, that is eternal truth; and
when in a few verses He thrice restates this fact, which He otherwise
frequently emphasizes and which the writers of sacred Scripture often
repeat, then, no matter how frantically proud unbelievers, afraid of
God’s judgment, claim that the human race will never stop, “the end of
all things” must come. Iniquity cannot continue forever; and because
this globe is sin-soaked and sin-cursed, it will be wiped out. Despite
the pleasant but perverted claims that the world is getting better, we
who view international events in the light of Scripture are convinced
that the world is getting worse. Herod destroyed — at the most — a few
dozen babies in Bethlehem; but our blockbusters have crushed thousands
of infants to death. Nero had scores of Christian martyrs massacred in
his blood-stained arenas, but our age has exceeded him in killing those
loyal to the Lord Jesus. Figures recently published in American
newspapers reported that the Red rebellion against the Almighty has
exiled or murdered more than 255,000 members of the clergy and
religious orders, destroyed or closed more than 88,000 religious
buildings.
Assyrians and Babylonians, cruel pagans that they
were, were branded as history’s most brutal fiends, because of the
atrocities they inflicted on their captives. Yet our era has gone far
beyond even their mania for genocide. An investigating commission
claims that in four Polish concentration camps the Nazis put 130,000
prisoners to death.
A maniac like Genghis Khan mowed down his ten
thousands in cold blood; but we have outstripped his gory gruesomeness.
We bombed to death 250,000 civilians, women, children, invalids, in our
attacks on Dresden.
Scourges of Satan, like Tamerlane, laid great areas
of productive land waste; on one occasion, it is said, he wiped out
100,000 prisoners; but he could not complete his devastation as quickly
and thoroughly as we do now, when a single bomb dropped by an American
plane — may God forgive us! — destroyed 78,000 Japanese in Hiroshima.
In short, the present generation has out-massacred
the bloodiest ages in the annals of humanity, as mankind becomes more
brutalized than ever before. Such widespread, wanton wickedness cannot
continue indefinitely to maintain its increasing violence, especially
not when we are being pushed toward a new world war, which from every
known point of comparison will make the two past global conflicts seem
small. The Almighty is too just and holy to permit a race of rebellious
men to live on indefinitely, and He may be too merciful — pray that He
is! — to permit the fulfillment of the two warnings recently spoken by
Dr. Harold C. Urey, vice-chairman of the Emergency Committee of
American Scientists, first, that twenty atomic bombs of the type soon
to be made, dropped on our country, “would destroy every living thing
on the American continent,” and, second, that there can never be a
defense against such a bomb “a thousand times more powerful than any
used so far.”
Our text, in common with many other portions of
Scripture, calls the time of this end “the Day of the Lord,” when God
manifests His awful power, and it predicts that “sudden destruction”
will come. Believe that if the Bible says “destruction,” it means
final, complete annihilation! In these last years scientists who never
before spoke of the world’s end have frequently claimed that with
atomic fission at their disposal, men could destroy the entire race
themselves. Experts have asserted that a hundred atomic bombs dropped
on the cold wastes of Siberia would ultimately kill every human being
in the northern hemisphere. Similar ruin rained on the heart of Africa
would correspondingly wipe out the southern hemisphere, since
radioactive particles, spreading over the surface of the earth, would
annihilate even those at immense distances. Nevertheless newspaper
headlines like “Atom Bomb Could End World, Scientists Say” are
exaggerations. The Lord says that He — not men — will destroy the
globe; and, I repeat, when God’s Word says “destruction,” He means not
only that mens’ lives will be taken, but also that the entire earth
will be no more. The attack on Hiroshima could take many thousand
lives, but Hiroshima still exists. Hundreds of these hideous bombs
could produce unspeakable agony in our country, but no amount of such
man-made devastation could ever reduce the United States, its prairies,
mountains, lakes, and rivers, to nothingness. After the “Day of the
Lord” dawns, however, with its “destruction,” there will be no more
United States, no more North America, no more Western Hemisphere, no
more world.
Plainly Scripture tells us how this “destruction” is
to come. Peter writes to the believers in the first church, and to us,
that on the Last Day “the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the
earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.” Here,
too, the advance of science has rebuked those who contradict God’s
Word, denying that our sphere will disappear in fiery flames. We know,
first, that the globe consists largely of highly inflammable material
and that most of the ninety-six elements which Peter emphasizes and of
which the world and everything in it are composed, can burn with a
consuming heat; second, that an immense fire, flaming at a high,
sustained temperature, never otherwise witnessed by men, flares within
the center of the earth; third, that the destruction which marks the
end may be seen repeatedly in the heavens, when observatory telescopes
reveal that starry bodies, far larger than our planet, explode and
disappear in flames. Above this endorsement of science, the Bible
stands supreme and final — the fiercest fire men or angels have ever
witnessed will consume the entire globe and leave not even ashes.
That Last Day will mark Christ’s return to judge the
living and the dead. Our text reports, “The Lord Himself shall descend
from heaven,” not as He came in the humiliation and lowliness of His
first Advent, but in divine majesty, as the “King of Kings.” We are
further told that He will come back “with a shout, with the voice of
the archangel, and with the trump of God.” No sound that human ears
have ever heard will even approach the glory “cry” of the celestial
choir which comes with Jesus at His Second Advent. No acclaim to which
men have hearkened will be more than a dull whisper beside “the voice
of the archangel” who leads the legions of the heavenly hosts, as they
appear, not to announce the Christ Child’s birth to a few shepherds on
Bethlehem’s plain, but the Lord’s approach for judgment on all the
world. No fanfare ever raised to welcome an earthly ruler should be
mentioned together with “the trump of God,” which will resound
throughout the universe, proclaiming to all: The Judge of all mankind
has come!
“The dead in Christ shall rise first,” the text
explains, in the heavenly priority their faith gives them; but all men,
dead and decayed in their graves, shall appear for judgment. Saint John
writes in his Revelation, “I saw the dead, small and great, stand
before God.” At the blast of that, trumpet the billions who lived and
died in all past centuries and in ages still to come will be
resurrected, no matter how they have been buried, however long ago
their remains were dust. Their bodies may have been cremated into ashes
or crushed beneath the weight of oceans; nevertheless, they shall be
revived for judgement. Often mighty leaders have been laid to rest in
secret spots, so that their graves could not be rifled; but God knows
the place of their burial. Attila, ruthless conqueror of millions in
many countries, died in a drunken spasm. To prevent future vandals from
discovering and desecrating his tomb, his body was first laid into a
golden casket; this was surrounded by a second, larger, silver casket,
and the whole thing was enclosed by a third, iron casket. Slaves then
dug the large grave on a desolate plain in Hungary. They lowered the
triple coffin into its depths, covered it first with a thick blanket of
costly spoils taken from defeated enemies, and then sealed the grave
with tons of soil. To keep the burial spot of the ruthless conqueror
secret, the slaves who had prepared the hidden sepulcher were murdered;
but the Almighty knows where Attila’s remnants lie, and on the Last Day
that hidden grave will yield its dead despot; for as Jude records,
“Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of His saints, to execute
judgment upon all.”
That celestial court procedure, entirely different
from other trials, first of all will embrace the entire race of men,
yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Second, this judgement is inevitable,
unavoidable. Money, position, influence, can sometimes keep criminals
out of court today; but nothing can exempt us from appearing before
God’s tribunal. However people may differ in life, they are all equal
in this, that on the Last Day they must give account of themselves
before Christ. Third, this investigation cannot be postponed. Clever
attorneys can secure one delay after the other for their clients and
drag their hearings through long years; but the Almighty has
unchangeably set the Last Day. Fourth, the verdict in this judgment
will be based on truth. Today, perjury and dishonesty often combine to
sentence the innocent and acquit the guilty; but our God is
all-knowing; He sees even the hidden thoughts of the heart, and He
knows when people practice hypocrisy, cheat their fellow men, and
deceive even their husbands or wives. Fifth, this is a final judgment,
with no second chance, no possibility of a new trial, no opportunity
for reversing the decision. When Christ, the Judge, gives His verdict,
the issue is settled for eternity; it can never be appealed. Sixth, the
evidence on which your eternal destiny rests is clear, and no expert
attorney is required to explain the issue. Jesus Himself made it plain
when He said, “Whosoever shall confess Me before men, him will I
confess also before My Father which is in heaven. But whosoever shall
deny Me before men, him will I also deny before My Father which is in
heaven.” Your faith in the Savior or your rejection of His mercy, as
well as the evidence of either the trust or the unbelief you show by
your willingness or refusal to feed the hungry, satisfy the thirsty,
receive strangers, clothe the naked, visit the sick and imprisoned,
decide your destiny for eternity. Seventh, this is the most important
of judgments for both God and man. Mighty meetings are in progress now
which will help direct our future course toward peace or war, send
millions into battle or keep them in constructive enterprise; yet the
most vital issues of this day are not to be compared with the verdict
which Jesus, the Judge of all nations, pronounces on your soul. For you
it is either heaven or hell; there is no third place after death —
either indescribable blessedness with Christ or immeasurable damnation
and agony without Christ.
The Holy Spirit grant that you understand the horror
of hell! Do not think for a moment that we delight in mentioning this
shocking punishment; but we cannot be true to the privileges and
responsibilities God gives us unless we warn you that hell is as real
as heaven, as real as this earth, as real as sin itself; that it is a
place of penalty and pain, appalling beyond all understanding, marked,
as the Bible emphasizes in these very terms, by “flame,” “weeping,”
“wailing,” “gnashing of teeth,” “darkness,” “fire,” “furnace of fire,”
“unquenchable fire,” “anguish,” “torment” — only ten among many other
Scriptural expressions which paint the awful doom of the damned. Hell
is the place of remorse and rejection for the faithless to whom Jesus
has said, “Depart from Me,” and who are therefore banished from that
most glorious of privileges which angels desire, beholding the blessed
Redeemer face to face. Hell means the unbeliever’s separation from his
loved ones who die in the faith. What a crushing catastrophe some of
you Christless husbands will suffer when you are torn away forever from
your Christ-exalting wives! How altogether terrifying for some of you
young folks to realize that unless you repent and return to the
Almighty, you will never enter heaven to see your God-fearing parents!
Finally, hell means everlasting punishment, the unchangeable, in-
commutable, unpardonable sentence imposed by Christ Himself in
fulfillment of His decree, “He that believeth not shall be damned.”
May the Holy Spirit open your eyes to the horror of
hell before it is too late and you, with your unforgiven sins must face
the just and righteous God! In the brevity and uncertainty of life
today, you may suddenly be snatched out of existence; and if your soul
is still stained by sin, how can you hope to escape this ultimatum of
His unbreakable Word: “The soul that sinneth, it shall die”? Back in
1942 a Boston physician made a ten-dollar bet with one of his patients
that he, the sick man, would live five years more. A few days ago, the
five years completed, the patient signed a ten-dollar check in payment
of his wager, wrote the doctor that he was happy to lose, and then,
having mailed the letter with the money, returned to his room, where he
died of a heart attack. Who knows whether you will have five years,
five months, five days, five hours, or five minutes longer? While you
still have the chance, before death closes the door of hope, before the
day dawns when there is no more grace for you, come humbly, contritely,
but confidently to your God! Come the only way you can, not the way of
good works, not the way of good intentions, not the way of good
emotions, but by the Savior, who is “the Way”! Come not merely with a
religious faith, with a lip faith, with a head faith, but with a soul-
and-heart faith, which trusts Him as the sin-atoning Deliverer from
death! You have sinned repeatedly, disgracefully, and damnably, but
Jesus loves you, He wants you, He cherishes you more than His own life.
The newspapers have been telling us of the pretty young Iowa secretary
at the United States Leprosarium in Carlyle, Louisiana, who loves a
young man there afflicted with leprosy, and wants to marry him, yet who
must wait months, perhaps years, before the ceremony can be performed.
The Savior loved you, afflicted with the incomparably worse leprosy of
the soul; yet He did not wait months or years to cure you of that dread
disease; rather did He give Himself as the Cure, and shed His own blood
to cleanse you from its curse. Christ wants you to escape the horrors
of hell; He gave Himself to take away your transgressions and free you
from their guilt; He pleads with you that you accept His mercy and find
rescue from ruin for eternity. The Holy Spirit grant that, after I have
shown you the terror-filled sentence of divine judgment which the
merciful but just Son of God pronounces on all unbelievers when the
Last Day comes, you will turn to Him with repentance for your
transgressions, but with firm reliance on His sin-destroying mercy!
2- IT WILL BRING DELIVERANCE TO THE BELIEVER
Thank the Lord with me that while the Last Day
brings destruction to those who reject Jesus, it grants those who
receive Him eternal deliverance, heaven and its endless joy. When “the
trump of God” sounds, “the dead in Christ shall rise first.” Take
comfort in this sacred reassurance of the resurrection, you the
bereaved who have recently laid to rest a loved one, asleep in Jesus;
you gold-star parents, to whom December 7 recalls this very Sunday only
a few years ago when the war began which snatched your son from the
land of the living! The Word of truth triumphantly promises, “Blessed
are the dead which die in the Lord,” blessed, because their sorrows and
sufferings are over, because they are translated into the Savior’s
presence, and because they await “the trump of God,” which will summon
them from their graves, to resurrect them in divine perfection.
What about those who are alive when Jesus returns?
Saint Paul answers this question gloriously when he explains, “Behold,
I show you a mystery: We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be
changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump.”
Someone has measured the time “in the twinkling of an eye” and found it
to be seven one-hundredths of a second. In that almost inconceivably
short fraction of a moment, a marvel of unequaled magnificence will be
completed, a radiant transformation which all the laboratories and
factories in the world could not produce in ten thousand years:
our whole existence will be changed. We who are the
Lord’s will be given a new body, spiritual, holy, faultless, like
Christ’s resurrection form, with no more marks of sin and sickness,
disease and ache, age, and disaster. With such divine swiftness we who
are creatures of clay and corruption become children of God, with our
Savior’s incorruptible glory. You see, then, the Almighty can operate
in small fractions of a second; and if your afflictions and adversities
take longer and drag on over years, this is not because the Lord needs
so much time, but because you do.
Now, when “the trump of God” sounds and the
believers, living and dead, are changed in that twinkling of triumph,
“then,” Saint Paul assures us today, “we which are alive and remain
shall be caught up together with them [who have died in Jesus] in the
clouds, to meet the Lord in the air.” In these new, marvelous
resurrection bodies, which defy the law of gravity and, like the living
Savior’s form and features, are not limited by barriers of space or
time, the faithful who are living when the Last Day dawns, together
with those who have died in Jesus, shall be radiantly raised high over
the earth to welcome the Son of God on His return in the clouds.
Never has there been a meeting like this, Christ,
the Bridegroom, coming to meet His bride, the Church of His redeemed. A
husband returning to his wife after a long absence; children running to
embrace their long-lost parents; the oppressed welcoming their
liberator; slaves acclaiming the hero who broke their shackles and
lifted their yoke; the suffering and diseased praising physicians who
bring cures for their afflictions — these are pictures — though weak
and unworthy — of the glorious gathering “in the air.” That will be the
fulfillment of a hundred hallowed promises in Scripture; it will be the
reunion of our blessed Redeemer with those who accept His sacrifice on
the cross of blood and shame — not one of them lost. It will be the
beginning of a heavenly, radiant, all- glorious life, far too
magnificent for our earth-bound minds to understand.
For those who “die in the Lord” the judgment which
follows will seal their eternal pardon and peace in Christ. They have
been saved in the only way men can be saved, by faith in the
sin-removing love of God’s Son. They will realize Scripture’s many
magnificent pledges of mercy, like: “He that heareth My Word and
believeth on Him that sent Me hath everlasting life and shall not come
into condemnation.” Or, “There is therefore now no condemnation to them
which are in Christ Jesus.” On the Last Day, and before the Judge of
eternity, you will remember your own sins and transgressions; but
relying on your Redeemer you will recall His greater grace: “If any man
sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, the Righteous.”
Then, when it is either heaven or hell for you, the Son of God, your
Defense Attorney, will rise to plead your cause and declare as He
points to you: “Father, I was wounded for his transgressions, I was
crucified for his iniquities. I paid the full punishment of his
rebellion against Thy will; I died in his stead, to destroy the curse
on his life. Therefore, Father, be is free, forgiven, faultless.” Then
Christ will turn to those who clung to Him as their Deliverer and
pronounce this peerless pardon: “Come, ye blessed of My Father, inherit
the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.”
“So,” our text summarizes in words of golden grace,
which I give to you as this Sunday’s memory verse, “so shell we ever be
with the Lord.” Forever with Jesus, in new, perfect, heavenly bodies!
Forever with Jesus, all sin and evil overcome! Forever with Jesus,
earth’s tears and toils ended! Forever with Jesus, in radiance and
rejoicing, in light and love, in happiness and harmony! Face to face
with Jesus, who loved us and gave Himself for us, and rose from the
grave to prepare a place for us in heavenly bliss! All this, instead of
hell’s horror; all this, mercifully, by trusting faith in the Savior’s
redemption; all this, eternally, without interruption or end; and all
this, yours today, through Christ!
No wonder Saint Paul draws abiding consolation from
the Second Coming and tells us, “Wherefore comfort one another with
these words”! Are you soul-burdened, grief- stricken, heartbroken over
any of the hundred hardships with which sin and men’s cruelty have
burdened you? Then “comfort one another with these words”: “We shall
‘ever be with the Lord.’” Do you suffer from desertion and disaster?
Are you disappointed and deceived by those whom you trusted most? Have
you been deprived or defrauded of that which is rightfully yours?
“Comfort one another with these words”: “The sufferings of this present
time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be
revealed in us”! Whatever the anguish may be under which you stagger,
look to the heavens Jesus opened, see the Son of God sitting at the
right hand of His Father and, preparing for His imminent return, when
He comes to take all believers to their eternal home, believe surely
that “earth hath no sorrow that Heaven cannot heal”!
Beloved, “the Day of the Lord,” which “cometh as a
thief in the night,” is at hand. The time preceding its coming is the
present day when, as our text predicts, statesmen cry, “Peace and
safety,” promise a glittering, golden age, as international conference
leaders repeatedly have, during these very days, yet are blind to the
fact that unless men repent and return humbly to the Almighty, in
Christ, the world may be punished with even more brutal bloodshed, in
fulfillment of the Savior’s prediction that “wars and rumors of wars”
will precede His return to judgment. Each of the many signs listed as
evidence of the Second Coming is fulfilled now more clearly than ever
before. Jesus Himself foretold that days like those of Noah are upon
us, and as before the flood, corruption, violence, sensuality in
marriage and family life, disfigured the race, so the same sins, in
unprecedented number, indicate the Lord’s quick return.
Jesus is coming! He is coming soon! He is coming for
you! On this Advent Sunday, after I have warned you that you must face
the final judgment and shown you how you can be assured of pardon and
heaven, through faith in Christ, I plead with you, in the name of that
Savior, your coming King, listen, as the Advent cry re-echoes more
clearly than at any time in the past, “Lo, I come!” Behold and believe
your Redeemer, as He stretches His arms wide to welcome you with the
plea, “Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will
give you rest!” Then, with triumphant, exultant faith, prepare now for
victory, peace, and heaven’s glory, by falling on your knees before
Christ and pledging:
Just as I am, without one plea
But that Thy blood was shed for me
And that Thou bidd’st me come to Thee,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come.
The Holy Spirit give all of you this day the
glorious guarantee of His grace for the Last Day, through Jesus Christ,
the Savior and Sovereign of our souls! Amen!
Note: The preceding
Lutheran Hour
sermon first aired in December 1947. (From the book “One Thousand Radio
Voices for Christ”.)