Life and Times of David. Miscellaneous Writings of C. H. Mackintosh, vol. VIMackintosh, Charles Henry
Religion
Life and Times of David. Miscellaneous Writings of C. H. Mackintosh, vol. VI
Mackintosh, Charles Henry
Theology
This is the proper hope of the Christian. Christ is coming. Are we
ready? Are we looking for Him? Do we miss Him? Do we mourn His
absence? It is impossible that we can be in the true attitude of
waiting for Him if we do not feel His absence. He is coming. He may be
here to-night. Ere another sun arises the voice of the archangel and
the blast of the trumpet may be heard in the air. And what then? Why
then the sleeping saints--all who have departed in the faith of
Christ--all the redeemed of the Lord whose ashes repose in the
graveyards and cemeteries around us or in the mighty depths of the
ocean--all these shall rise. The living saints shall be changed in a
moment, and all shall ascend up to meet the Lord in the air (1 Cor.
xv. 51-54; 1 Thess. iv. 13-v. 11).
But what of the unconverted--the unbelieving--the unrepentant--the
unprepared? What of all such? Ah! this is a question of awful
solemnity. It makes the heart sink to reflect upon the case of those
who are still in their sins--of those who have turned a deaf ear to
all the entreaties and all the warnings which God in His
long-suffering mercy has sent to them from week to week and year to
year--of those who have sat under the sound of the gospel from their
earliest days, and who have become, as we say, gospel-hardened. How
dreadful will be the condition of all such when the Lord comes to
receive His own! They shall be left behind to fall under the deep and
dark delusion which God will assuredly send upon all who have heard
and rejected the gospel. And what then? What is to follow this deep
and dark delusion? The deeper and darker damnation of the lake that
burneth with fire and brimstone.
Oh! shall we not sound a note of alarm in the ears of our
fellow-sinners? Shall we not more earnestly and solemnly warn them to
flee from the wrath to come? Shall we not seek by word and deed--by
the double testimony of the lips and the life--to set before them the
weighty fact that "the Lord is at hand"? May we feel it more deeply,
and then we shall exhibit it more faithfully. There is immense moral
power in the truth of the Lord's coming if it be really held in the
heart and not merely in the head. If Christians only lived in the
habitual expectation of the advent it would tell amazingly upon the
unconverted around them.
May the Holy Ghost revive in the hearts of all God's people the
blessed hope of their Lord's return, that they may be as men that wait
for their Lord, that when He cometh and knocketh they may open unto
Him immediately!
"THE TWO MUSTS."
In our Lord's discourse with Nicodemus He twice makes use of the word
"must"--a word of immense depth and moral power in both cases. Let us
ponder it for a few moments; for, though but a word of one syllable,
it contains a volume of most precious evangelical truth in whichever
light we view it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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