Part 37

The Church, like Enoch, will be taken away from the evil around, and the evil to come. Enoch was not left to see the world's evil rise to a head, and the judgment of God poured forth upon it. He saw not "the fountains of the great deep broken up," nor "the windows of heaven opened." He was taken away before any of these things occurred; and he stands before the eye of faith as a beautiful figure of those, "who shall not all sleep, but shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye." (1 Cor. xv. 51, 52.) Translation, not death, was the hope of Enoch; and, as to the Church's hope, it is thus briefly expressed by the apostle, "To wait for the Son from heaven." (1 Thess. i. 10.) This, the simplest and most unlettered Christian can understand and enjoy. Its power, too, he can, in some measure, experience and manifest. He may not be able to study prophecy very deeply, but he can, blessed be God, taste the blessedness, the reality, the comfort, the power, the elevating and separating virtue of that celestial hope which properly belongs to him as a member of that heavenly body, the Church; which hope is not merely to see "the Sun of righteousness," how blessed soever that may be in its place, but to see "the bright and morning star." (Rev. ii. 28.) And as, in the natural world, the morning star is seen, by those who watch for it, before the sun rises, so Christ, as the morning star, will be seen by the Church, before the remnant of Israel can behold the beams of the Sun.