The Lord will cause Jerusalem to be rebuilded "upon her own heap."

He will ordain the erection of that temple in which He shall establish the throne of His holiness.

Like David He will reign first over Judah. After that He will send Gentile messengers like "fishers" to seek out and find the descendants of the ten lost tribes. They will respond to the proclamation that will be made and to the search that will be inst.i.tuted in that eastern land and among those peoples whither they were first carried away. There will be many impostors among them; but the Lord will make them to "pa.s.s under the rod" as when the true sheep are struck with the owner's mark and as they take up their journey Zionward all who are not of Israel will be purged from their midst.

Those who are really of the covenant people will be quickened, regenerated, and when they enter the land will be welcomed by Judah and Benjamin.

They shall become one nation in the land upon the mountains of Israel. One king shall be king to them all. They shall not be two nations any more, neither shall they be divided into two kingdoms at all. The Lord will make a covenant of peace with them and multiply them and set His sanctuary in the midst of them forever. His tabernacle shall be with them. He will be their very G.o.d as He shall be the G.o.d of the whole earth. They shall be His peculiar people.

All the Gentiles shall know that He has set them apart for Himself when they behold His temple erected in their midst, the most wonderful building in all the earth.

And thus will be fulfilled the prophecy concerning Israel quoted and emphasized by the Holy Spirit through the Apostle Paul that the Deliverer should come to Zion and turn away unG.o.dliness from Jacob and that all Israel--that is--Israel united and as twelve tribes, should be saved.

It is at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, then and not till then that the solemn and covenant promises of G.o.d made to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob will be fulfilled and united, redeemed, regenerated and saved Israel set in their own land as the center and channel of blessing to the earth.

And because there can be no permanent peace in the world till Israel has been restored; and because I wish to see, not only peace among the nations and Israel reaping the blessings of the unconditional covenant of G.o.d's grace and unchanged faithfulness, but because I yearn to see the hour when the Lord shall enter upon His own inheritance and justify Himself before heaven and earth as Judah's Lord, as Israel's G.o.d and turn the accusation of His cross: "This is Jesus of Nazareth, the king of the Jews" into the pean of His coronation as such, I preach the Second Coming.

VI

Only at the Second Coming of the Christ of G.o.d Will a Government of Everlasting Righteousness and Peace be Established Upon the Earth

IT was the original purpose of G.o.d to make the people of Israel the head of nations, place them in Palestine as the geographical center of the earth, make them its political center, send His own Son to be their incarnate king, use them as a channel of earthly and spiritual blessing and make this world the most perfect and happiest spot in all the wide universe.

They failed to meet their opportunity.

Then the Lord transferred the possibility of world rulership from the Jews to the Gentiles.

He did this by handing political power and authority to Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon.

This rulership and sway of the world descended in its ordained and foretold succession down through Medo-Persia with its incorporation of Babylon, through the temporary but immensely extended empire of Greece which under Alexander included both Babylon and Medo-Persia, and after that the colossal and magic empire of Rome, swallowing up as it did the three empires or kingdoms which preceded it.

Since the division of Rome into Western and Eastern empires the rulership of the world has been maintained by the various nations composed of those people dwelling in the territory once occupied by Rome.

The world has been ruled by Turks, Spaniards, Germans, by the French and by the English.

The Gentile nations in this special and prophetic territory have been the world rulers.

It has been peculiarly Gentile rulership and in Scripture is called, "The times of the Gentiles."

Gentile times, Gentile rulership has lasted for twenty-five hundred years.

It has been an amazing rule.

It has been a rulership that has revealed the genius, the brilliance and the G.o.d-given powers of man.

It has been a rulership that has revealed the iniquity, the sin, the mad ambition and devil-inspired policies of man.

In all the twenty-five hundred years of this Gentile rule there have not been one hundred consecutive years of universal peace.

It has been twenty-five hundred years of war, of rapine, murder and measureless l.u.s.t.

Cities have been destroyed, fields have been laid waste, women have endured the last outrage. Children have been orphaned, right has been upon the scaffold and wrong upon the throne, prison chains have been for virtue, silk and velvet for vice, civilization after civilization has been destroyed, the earth has been filled with anguish beyond the power of tongue or pen to describe, and blood enough has been shed through man's inhumanity to man to float all the navies of the world, and money and treasure enough wasted to have provided a palace for every man and woman on earth.

A little less than five years ago men everywhere were talking of peace and safety.

Christianity and civilization were walking hand in hand.

Christianity or that which professed to be Christianity had accepted all the claimed benefits of civilization.

Rapid transit, the telephone, all the triumphs of applied science were announced as the by-products of the Gospel. Even though the churches were becoming more or less empty and the people were turning away to other centers of instruction or enlightenment or consolation or hope, preachers were everywhere and with great insistence announcing that the world was growing better every day and that we were rapidly approaching the purple and the gold of millennial times. The hour was not far distant when the lion and the lamb should lie down together. There was much talk about the fatherhood of G.o.d and the brotherhood of man. People were coming together and having a better and more disinterested estimate of each other. Religion was ceasing to be dogmatic and precise and becoming more and more a profession that was free from restraint.

Christian ministers in the pulpit and supposedly wise men in the counsels of the nations with optimistic utterance announced that the days of barbarism had pa.s.sed away, the brutality of war was at an end. Men and nations would no longer adjourn their differences to the field of battle. A magnificent palace of peace had been erected in that country that had for centuries been the b.l.o.o.d.y ground where Europe settled its political issues. In this splendid home of arbitration the nations were to meet as friends and brothers and calmly arrange and solve all matters that had hitherto kept them menacingly apart.

War had become so abhorrent to what was called the Christian sense of the nations that mothers were exhorted to banish from the nurseries anything that might suggest the thought of war, such as trumpets, drums or toy guns. So completely had the peace idea pervaded the mind of the people, the idea that peace had come to stay and nothing must be tolerated that would even hint at war, that a soldier or a sailor wearing the uniform of his country was no longer acceptable in a public place, were it a restaurant, a music hall or even a church.

Men who were opposed to spending a dollar to make a nation ready for the possibility of war were hailed as the advanced thinkers and the men worthy of the suffrage of the people; while those who contended human nature had not been changed, that a nation was simply the individual grown large and the jealousies, the covetousness and ambitions of governments would always make it possible for the strong to prey upon the weak and for the unprincipled under the guise of national necessity to attack their unprepared neighbours and therefore just as much as a city rests in confidence with the presence within it of a well-equipped police force, equally so the comfort and security of peace could be best maintained by a nation governed by right principles whose army and navy were ready to resist successfully any unjust a.s.sault upon its honour or integrity, were treated with pity, if not scorn, as still under the spell of benighted and barbaric days.

"Peace and safety!" these were the pleasant words that lulled a pleasure-seeking and money-making generation into self-satisfied rest and the mirage of millennial days already arrived.

Then, suddenly, like a bolt out of a clear sky, or the overflow in raging lava tide of an unsuspected volcano, the most stupendous, ghastly and brutally devilish war the world has ever known was on in all its fiendish fury, sweeping from England to the Euphrates and from the Rhine and Danube on the north to the glittering sands of Africa on the south, rolling its waves of blood and sending its sickening and indescribable horrors through those lands and among those people at one time const.i.tuting the four kingdoms to whom G.o.d had committed the rulership of the world; that region occupied by Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece and Rome and whose administration of world affairs is called "the times of the Gentiles."

To-night ten millions of the world's flower of manhood lie rotting in their graves. Six millions of women and children have been starved to death. Women have been unspeakably ruined, children mutilated and flung as helpless debris upon the charity of strangers, suffering their orphaned estate and not knowing why.

All the genius, the science and invention of man with poured out, unlimited wealth, have been drafted to produce the most terrifically destructive means of war. All the boasted progress and culture of the preceding centuries were called upon to wage the contest until it should affright even the partic.i.p.ants themselves. Clouds of poison gas filled the once sweet and vital air of spring time and summer mornings. Human beings wearing hideous masks and looking like other world monsters rushed in mad onslaught upon one another. They burrowed in holes and trenches like wild beasts concealed in their lair and waiting for the prey. Through the startled heavens winged things like huge vampires vomiting fire and blood took their way over cities, towns and unprotected hospitals, leaving behind them the dead, the dying and the tortured. Hunger with its sunken cheeks, and pestilence with its green eyes, its slavering lips have trod the earth till horror with wordless anguish has kept vigil by the blackened hearthstones of ruined homes and deserted firesides.

To-night, the fields of Flanders where the poppies grow and where the dead who died too soon and lie almost too thick to count, are as though a mighty juggernaut had rolled its fearful wheels over them, crushing both man and earth together into one monstrous pulp of hopeless ruin.

To-night France, where the lilies were wont to bloom, is torn and ripped in all the one-time beauty and fascination of her white and winding roads, poplar fringed, in the culture of her fruited gardens, her orchards and her royal forests, as though some monstrous creation of pre-Adamite days had survived and broken through all restraint of all the ages to riot and gorge himself with unlimited delight of destruction.

All this after two thousand years of professed Christianity and the constant iteration that the Church was slowly winning its way to the ruler-ship of the world; that each hour the world was growing better and more and more the principles of the Christ of G.o.d dominating the universal heart of man.

The world awoke to find its heart unchanged and war with aggressive animalism still the underlying and primal force in man.

To-night in face of all this, in face of the solemn declaration of the Son of G.o.d that during the whole time of His absence there would be war and rumours of war, and specially within the territory once occupied by Rome; that there would be distress of nations with perplexity, men's hearts failing them for fear for looking after the things that should be coming on the earth; that the people like the waves of the sea should be roaring, uttering their discordant voices in the thunder of protest and bitter discontent, breaking the bonds of old customs and lashing the times with lawlessness and unprecedented crime; in face of the warning of the Apostle Paul that in the last days, that is to say in the closing hours of this age, there should be, not peaceful but perilous times; that evil men should wax worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived; in the face of the inspired a.s.surance of the Apostle James that as this dispensation should draw to its close Capital and Labour should stand in bitter att.i.tude to each other; that the acc.u.mulated wealth of a special cla.s.s called "rich men" should be "heaped together"

that they might be spoiled and that miseries should come upon them; that on the one side should be the aggression of the profiteers and on the other the violence of those who would refuse to be exploited; in face of this a.s.surance of industrial and cla.s.s war; in face of the fact that the softest toned apostle whose pen is always transcribing the word "love," and who has reached the highest and most sublime definition of G.o.d as love; in face of the fact that this apostle affirms the hour will come when the whole world under religious, political and devilish inspiration will rush to conflict, that everywhere will be heard the tramp of armed men and the gathering of the nations for a war such as the world has not yet seen; in face of the picture which this apostle of love paints where the armies of the world are seen gathered in battle array against the Lord Christ and His right to reign; in the face of this divine warning the statesmen of the world are a.s.sembled in counsel at Paris, the world's capital of pleasure, in a palace once dedicated to l.u.s.t and wanton self-gratification, whose panelled ceiling and mirrored walls are filled with and reflect the scenes and glorification of war, that by the stroke of a pen, by a series of resolutions, they may const.i.tute a league of nations bulking so big that every threatened wave of future war may be flung back as when the d.y.k.es of Holland reject the sea.

The astonishing and suggestive thing is that in the making and remaking of the map of Europe and Asia undertaken by the framers of the league, they are, all unconsciously, restoring the outlines of the old Roman Empire and preparing the way for the final and desperate revival of Rome under the form of ten confederate nations, with its last kaiser, that dark and woful figure, the man of sin, the son of perdition, the Antichrist.

And there are Christian teachers who see in this league another herald of the millennium before Christ comes which they so sedulously preached previously to the war. They see in this league an evidence that the Lord Jesus Christ as the Prince of Peace is in reality reigning over the earth and bending the nations to His will for the reign of peace.

In the whole history of theological exegesis and interpretation I know of nothing so utterly faulty, illogical and wholly unscriptural as that exegesis which teaches the angel song at Bethlehem to be the announcement of the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ as the Prince of Peace and that as such He should establish it among the nations after His ascension to heaven and during His absence from the world.

The angels sang glory to G.o.d in the highest and on earth, peace to "men of good will."

The angel who spoke to the shepherds keeping the temple sheep for the morning and the evening sacrifice was testifying to them that there was no longer need to keep the sheep for such a purpose. The day of animal sacrifices had pa.s.sed, the living G.o.d had provided the true sacrifice, He who was born beneath the chaplet of heaven's music, the Lamb of G.o.d ordained before the foundation of the world.

He had been born into the world that He might make peace by the blood of His cross, not between man and man, not between nation and nation, but between man and G.o.d. He had been born to die and by His death reconcile a rebel world to G.o.d; on the basis of this sacrifice yet to be and when He should have risen from the dead as witness of the efficacy of His death He would bring peace to every soul that should be of good will--every soul that should surrender to the will of G.o.d by believing on Him, offering Him by faith as a sacrifice and claiming Him as a subst.i.tute. Every such soul should be at peace with, and have the peace of, G.o.d.