Did the Apostles expect the Second Advent in their Day ? The simple facts on this subject are : (1.) That the coming of the Messiah and the establishment of his kingdom was the great object of expectation and desire for the people of God from the beginning of the world. It was the great subject of prophecy and promise under the old dispensation. The ancient saints are described (as Christians now are) as those who were constantly hoping for the coming of the Lord. (Eph. ii. 12 ; Acts xxvi. 6, 7.) The dying thief said : " Lord, remember me, when thou comest into thy kingdom." The last question put to our Lord by his disciples was : " Lord wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel." (2.) As the Messiah came at first as a man of sorrows, to make Himself a sacrifice for sin, He promised to come a second time without sin unto salvation, to raise the dead and to gather all his people into his everlasting home. His second coming therefore was to Christians what his first coming was to the Old Testament saints ; the constant object of expecta- tion and desire. (3.) As the time of the second advent was unrevealed either to men or angels, the early Christians hoped it might occur in their day. The Apostles themselves no doubt at first cherished that expectation. (4.) To the Apostle Paul, how- ever, it was revealed that the day of the Lord was not to come until a great apostasy had occurred. (5.) Nevertheless as the Apostolic Christians did not know how long that apostasy was to continue, their constant prayer was, O Lord come quickly. The Apostles continued to hold up the second advent as an impending event, the moral impression of which ought to be to raise the affections of the people from the world and fix them on the things unseen and eternal. Those who urge the fact that the New Testament writers speak of the day of the Lord as at hand, and exhort believers to watch and pray for his advent, as a proof that the Apostles believed that it might occur at once, that no events then future must come to pass before Christ came, forget that what inspired men said God said. If God, who knew that Christ was not to come for at least eighteen centuries after his ascension, could say to his people : " The day of the Lord is at hand." "Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of Man cometh," then that language was appro- priate even on the assumption that those who used it knew that the second advent was not to occur for thousands of years ; for a thousand years are with God as one day, and one day as a thousand
868 PART IV. Ch. IV.— THE SECOND ADVENT.
years. The Church waited four thousand years for the first advent ; we may be content to wait God's time for the second.1
§ 6. Future Punishment.
Our Lord in his account of the final judgment says, that the wicked shall go away into everlasting punishment ; but the righteous into life eternal.
The sufferings of the finally impenitent, according to the Scrip- tures, arise : (1.) From the loss of all earthly good. (2.) From exclusion from the presence and favour of God. (3.) From utter reprobation, or the final withdrawal from them of the Holy Spirit. (4.) From the consequent unrestrained dominion of sin and sinful passions. (5.) From the operations of conscience. (6.) From despair. (7.) From their evil associates. (8.) From their external circumstances ; that is, future suffering is not ex- clusively the natural consequences of sin, but also includes posi- tive inflictions. (9.) From their perpetuity.
There seems to be no more reason for supposing that the fire spoken of in Scripture is to be literal fire, than that the worm that never dies is literally a worm. The devil and his angels who are to suffer the vengeance of eternal fire, and whose doom the finally impenitent are to share, have no material bodies to be acted upon by elemental fire. As there are to be degrees in the glory and blessedness of heaven, as our Lord teaches us in the parable of the ten talents, so there will be differences as to degree in the sufferings of the lost : some will be beaten with few stripes, some with many.
The Duration of Future Punishment. On this subject the following opinions have been held : — 1. It is assumed that the design of punishment is reformation, and that it is effective to that end. The time will, therefore, come when all sinful creatures, whether men or angels, shall be purged from all corruption, and restored to the image and favour of God. This was the doctrine of Origen in the early Church.
1 Millennarians are not consistent in urging the objection considered in the text, as some at least of their own number teach that important events yet future must occur before the establishment of Christ's kingdom. For example, Rev. John Cox, Minister of the Gospel, Woolwich, in his Thoughts on the Coming and Kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ, devotes the third chapter of that work to prove tnat the entire destruction of the Papacy, of Mohammedanism, and of the tyrannical kingdoms of the world, and the restoration of the Jews to their own land, must precede the kingdom of Christ. See The Literalist, vol. v, p. 26 ff. The Literalist is a collection, in five octavo volumes, of the publications of the leading English pre-millennarians. Published by Orrin Rogers, Philadelphia, 1840 and 1841.