COMING AGAIN
COMING TO CHRIST
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tive language, by the statement to the high priest, 'Henceforth' — from this time onward — 'ye shall see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven' (Mt 26"'), as if a process of judicial and retributive manifestations of His power in human history would then begin.
S. His final coming at the end of tlie dispensa- tion He had inaugurated, to sit in judgment over all classes and nations of men, to apportion their merit and demerit, decide their destinies, over- throw all evil, and bring the kingdom of God to its supreme triumph and glory. This final and most decisive coming— which will be more fully discussed under Parousia — is described in terms that betoken the appearance of Jesus in august splendour and irresistible authority. He is to come in the glory of His Father with His angels, and reward every man according to his works (Mt 16'") ; seated on the throne of His glory. He is to gather before Him all nations, and separate them one from another as a shepherd divides His sheep from the goats (Mt 25^'- '■'-). That is to be the Last Day, the termination of the existing order of things, when all pretences will be exposed, obsti- nate unbelief and ungodliness punished, and faith- fulness crowned with its eternal reward.
That these several comings were present to the mind of Jesus, seems sufficiently evident when His recorded utterances are duly weighed. We may assume that they were regarded by Him as the forms of manifestation by which, in the future. He would give proof of His living presence and conquer- ing power. They were the varying stages in the development, after His death, of His victorious work for the establishment of righteousness and the destruction of evil. Hence they could all be conceived and predicted under one name ; but, as Beyschlag remarks, under the conditions of pro- phecy, each stage was not seen as something apart ; they were felt and described as so many phases of the whole, according to the suggestion of the moment (NT Theol. i. 202). On that account there is discernible in the predictions of Jesus an occa- sional blending of one coming with another ; at least in the reports furnished by tlie Evangelists it does not always distinctly appear to what pre- cise form of His future manifestation His words apply. Probably in the consciousness of Jesus all His future comings were wrapped up, as in a seed, in the thought of His spiritual coming, His coming in the fulness of His spiritual life and power, as an effective and abiding force on the side of God, to act on the hearts and lives of His faithful fol- lowers, and also on the general life of the world. This view makes His several comings fall into line as phases or stages of a continuous process, in which, sometimes through the qiiickened vitality of His Church, sometimes through the catastrophic action of the nioral laws and forces which lie behind the movements of human .society. His in- vincible operation should be revealed, until the final consummation is reached in the sovereign manifestation of His authority and glory at the end of the age.
It has been suggestively shown by Wendt {Teaching of Jesus, vol. ii. '297, 303) that it is on the utterances of Jesus regarding His spiritual coming in the hearts of believers that the Fourth Gospel lays the principal and almost exclusive stress; and probably it is in the light of Jesus' predictions of this spiritual or dynamical coming that we are to find the clue to what He meant in His sayings respecting the historical coming or comings, and the great apocalyptic coining, which the Synoptics report witli ^^iiciiia fulness and detail. The coming again of .Icsns may thus be conceived as a series of manifest atioiis of His
living presence and activity in the world, cul- mihating in a glorious triumph at the Last Day, when He shall sit as Judge of all.
G. M'Hakuy. COMING TO CHRIST.-Under this beading we bring together a number of passages, all sayings of Jesus, most of them in the Fourth Gospel, which express at once His widest invitation to men and His strongest claims upon them. Outside these there is a much larger group of passages, occurring in all the Gospels, many of which are intimately connected with the inner group. The expression thus freqiiently occurring, and used in the few passages first mentioned to convey the deepest truths of the gospel, is based on the everyday events of our Lord's ministry and of ordinary life. In its literal meaning it occurs constantly through- out the Gospel narrative. We may here disregard this widest class of passages, which speak of the multitudes who, from very various motives, ' came to Christ' to see and to hear Him, and fix our attention on those which have a moral and spiritual significance. The latter, bearing directly on the proclamation of the Kingdom of God and on the conditions of membership in it, are of supreme importance.
Tl\e coristruction.s used in these jjroups of passages may here be noticed. In nearly all of them we have the simple verb ipx'l^i followed by t(.o,- with the accusative. In Mt 1128 ^e have the interjectional adverb ituri with -rps! and the accusa- tive. In the kindred passage, He 7'^, the compound Tpotrtp- X'u-cti occurs with the dative. In a closely allied group of passages, which we shall have occasion to notice later, ip:c^f/Mt IS followed by »t/»-i, and the genitive. The call to the earliest disciples is iiSr, .V,™ «» (Ml, 4i», Mk 1"). In some passages (Mt 16i" igii, Jn 5«i 6« ; cf. 7^^ x S2if. 1333) the aorist of i> j:»S«, is used, the 'coming' being regarded as complete, while' in others the use of the present indicates that the 'coming' is thought of as in progress (cf. Westcott on Jn (i-"*). In Jn 637» dill with T,;»; and the accusative signifies arrival, attainment. Ill many passages of the second group, some of which will be used in illustration of the sii coming without the use of tioned.