Sermon Tone Analysis

By Pastor Glenn Pease

Joanna Baillie, and English dramatic poet of the last century, told the touching tale of a maiden whose lover had gone off to the Holy Land.

The report had come back that he had been slain.

She refused to believe he would not return to her, and so every night she kindled a fire on the shore of the Mediterranean and watched for his return to take her to be his bride.

The story is a parable of the church and her lover, the Lord Jesus Christ.

He too has gone away, but He promised to return, so the church waits in expectation for that day when the shout will be heard, "Behold the Bridegroom cometh," and she will be taken as a glorious bride to His mansion in the sky.

This theme of waiting for the return of one's lover is an ancient one.

Homer in the Odyssey tells of the hero Ulysses who went off to the war of Troy, and spent ten adventurous years trying to get back home to his waiting wife.

She was wealthy and the result was many men wanted to marry her.

They insisted that her husband was dead, and that she was foolish to wait.

She had to endure enormous pressure, but she remained faithful to her husband, and finally he did return to wreak vengeance upon those wicked men who sought to take advantage of his wife.

Again we see a parallel of what the church must endure as it waits for the return of Christ.

The world says forget this Jesus you wait for, and come make love with us.

He is gone, and you are foolish to wait for Him, and miss the love of the world.

Peter warned the early Christians about the world's attack on the hope of the second coming.

In II Pet.

3:3-4 he writes, "First of all you must understand this, that scoffers will come in the last days with scoffing, following their own passions and saying, "Where is the promise of His coming?

For ever since the father's fell asleep, all things have continued as they were from the beginning of creation."

By their scoffing they hoped to cause the Christians to give up their hope.

The Lord will return and wreak vengeance upon those who seek to entice His bride away.

Those who try to lure the bride of Christ into the arms of the world need to hear the warning of the Word, for their will be hell to pay when the Bridegroom comes.

II Thess.

1:6-10 says, "...God deems it just to repay with affliction those who afflict you, and to grant rest with us to you who are afflicted, when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with His mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance upon those who do not know God and upon those who do not obey the Gospel of our Lord Jesus.

They shall suffer the punishment of eternal destruction and exclusion from the presence of the Lord and the glory of His might, when He come on that day to be gloried in His saints, and to be marveled at in all who have believed."

The second coming will be both a day of great joy, and a day of great judgment.

The Bible alternates between these two pictures depending upon whose point of view by which it is seen-the Bride or the world.

Christians are warned over and over again to watch for the coming of their Lord, for carelessness in this area can lead them to get so involved with the world that that day will come upon them like a thief in the night, and they will be caught naked and ashamed at His coming.

In other words, if the Bridegroom comes and finds His bride flirting with the world and embracing another lover, it will be a day of judgment rather than joy even for those believers who are not found faithful.

But Jesus says in Luke 21:37, "Blessed are those servants whom the Lord when He cometh shall find watching."

In order to motivate us to watch, we want to focus on this great text where John emphasizes these two aspects of the second coming.

First we see-

I. THE REALITY OF HIS RETURN.

Behold He is coming says John.

The faithful bride never questions the promise of her bridegroom to return and receive her unto Himself that where He is she might be also.

He'll come again,

And prove our hope not vain.

We wait the moment, Oh, so fair;

To rise and meet Him in the air,

His heart, His home, His throne to share,

O wondrous love!

Author unknown

This has been the blessed hope of the church from the day of its birth.

This is the goal of history.

It is the final leg of the tripod of history: Creation, crucifixion, and coming again.

The prophets predicted it; the Lord Himself promised it, and the Apostles fervently preached it.

The New Testament refers to the second coming 318 times.

Everybody who truly believes the Bible believes in the second coming, for to deny its reality is to deny the validity of Biblical revelation.

Christians in every denomination, and people in every cult that studies the Bible, believe in the reality of Christ's return.

You would have a very difficult time finding anyone who rejects the second coming, except those who do not believe the Bible.

The problem today is not unbelief, but too much belief.

Modern Christians have developed so many different ways of looking at the second coming that it gets very confusing, not just to laymen, but even to the scholars.

I have known pastors who became nervous wrecks over the doctrine of the second coming because there was so much truth in different systems in interpreting it.

All the different views are held by outstanding leaders of the evangelical church.

A whole new phenomenon is taking place.

New books are coming out all the time with all of the views being presented by well known authors in the same book.

This is a clear sign that Christians are finally becoming aware that it is likely that no one view has all the answers, but that there are values and insights in all of them that need to be considered by the whole body.

Charles Erdman in Remember Jesus Christ wrote, "...while there should be no doubt as to the reality of the personal glorious return of Christ, much diversity of views, regarding details and circumstances must be allowed."

Those who go on dogmatically insisting that their view is the only true one only reveal their own intellectual dishonesty.

I have studied all of the views and find Biblical values in each of them, and find that none of them is complete and without problems.

There are so many passages in the Bible that deal with the Rapture, the Resurrection, and the Return from the point of view of the world, the church, and Israel, that nobody has ever been able to put them all together into a simple chart that explains them clearly.

So many things, both good and bad, are going to happen when Jesus returns that it is futile to try and get all of the events organized.

Those who think they have done it only aggravate those who know the complexity of the second coming is beyond the charting of the human mind.

Listen to the greatest Baptist preacher of all time, who read more widely possibly than any man who ever lived-Charles Haddon Spurgeon.

"As for the Lord's second coming, we know not when it

shall be.

Shall the world grow darker and darker till

He comes?

It may be so.

There are passage of Scripture

and signs of the times which may be taken to indicate it.

On the other hand, shall the age grow brighter and brighter

until He appears to bring the perfect day?

Through the

preaching of the Gospel shall there be periods in which

multitudes shall be converted, and whole nations saved?

I do not know: there are texts that seem to look that way,

and many a brave worker hopes as much.

There are

brethren who can map out unfulfilled prophecy with great

distinctness; but I confess my inability to do so.

They get

a shilling box of mathematical instruments.

They stick

down one leg of the compasses and describe a circle here

and a circle there, and they draw two or three lines, and

there it is.

Can you not see it plainly?

I am sick of diagrams;

I have seen enough to make another volume of Euclid.

My

impression is that very little is learned from the major part

of these interpretations."

We could quote hundreds of the greatest minds of Christiandom who stand with Spurgeon.

They recognize there is probably an aspect of truth in almost everything that can be said about the second coming, and that is why they reject any narrow and limited man made scheme that pretends to lock Christ into a specific schedule.

Some of the old prophetic preachers were very bold and dogmatic, but the wiser modern prophets have learned they cannot program God to do things their way, and so if you read their books today you will read a lot of maybe this could be, or possibly this could mean, or probably this indicates.

There is a great caution today because too many godly men have made too many wild guesses in the past and have been wrong.

Our blessed hope is not a hope of producing a perfect chart and schedule of the events of His coming.

Our blessed hope is the reality of His coming.

Behold He is coming says John.

II.