The Blessed Hope
One powerful incentive, of which not only the Acts of the Apostles but the whole New Testament is full, is, we fear, far less prominent in the thoughts of the modern Church — we refer to the blessed hope of our Lord’s Return.
This was, no doubt, the foremost of all motives, hopes and incentives, which moved early disciples to zeal and activity in missions; and to revive this hope — to make it practically the mighty motor to us that it was to them, is to provide a new impulse and impetus in the work of a world’s evangelization. This motive, though so old, is an ever new incentive. Hope is the one impulse that never loses its youth, and above all, tJiis hope. It never falls behind, but always goes before, onward, upward, finding in the goal of yesterday its starting point to-day, and in its goal of to-day only its starting point to-morrow.
The incentive, drawn from our Lord’s promised Return, He Himself has forever connected with our duty to a lost world. He says, *’ Occupy till I come.’’ Mistaken notions, associated with His second advent, have so marred its visage as to make it even repulsive and distasteful to some disciples, so that, what to the Apostolic Church was the main help, has been spoken of as a hindrance, to missions. Out of the dust of neglect and contempt let us lift this standard of the mission host, and once more make it the banner which leads us on to victory!
Our Lord’s Coming is represented as always imminent, and thus it quickens our activity. Imminence is the combination of certainty with uncertainty — certainty at so7ne time, uncertainty at what time; and hence its perpetual warning: “Be ye always ready, for in such an hour as ye think not, the Son of Man Cometh!”
The uniform teaching of the New Testament is that the Lord is ever at hand.” Behold the Judge standeth before the door,” His hand on the latch! When He will open and enter, no man nor angel knoweth; but when He does, it will be suddenly, without knocking; and because we “know not when the time is,” He bids us “Watch and pray.” Such a sense of the imminence of His coming must inspire, quicken, stimulate, missionary activity.
As the Son of Man went into the far-off country to receive for Himself a kingdom, and to return. He committed to His servants, as stewards, the whole world as a mission field, saying: “Occupy till I come,” giving no hint of the time of His return, that there may be constant alertness and watchfulness. And the natural consequence with every faithful servant is that he hastens to invest in trade what talents are left him in trust, that at his Master’s Coming he may be found faithful and his gifts fruitful.
Such is the philosophy of this Hope. What is the fact? There are two immutable things in which it is impossible for history to lie, namely: first, the early Christians felt our Lord’s Coming to be imminent; second, the early Church was conspicuous for missionary zeal. So vividly was the second advent at hand, to Thessalonian disciples, that they gave too little heed to those events which must first occur; and yet, when was any Church so permeated and penetrated with missionary enthusiasm! Paul sounds the keynote of their whole fidelity: serving the living God, and waiting for His Son from heaven!
Early Christians looked for the King’s Return, at any time. He had entrusted them with a commission, and the King’s business required haste. They tarried not, save for that enduement which was their equipment. Then to the bounds of Judea, Samaria, Galilee; to Antioch, Athens, Ephesus, Rome, they sped with the message. Peter went eastward to the elect dispersion; Paul swept, like a flame, westward, across Asia Minor, and into Europe, till he touched Italy, perhaps Spain and Britain. Within one generation, the Cross overtook the Roman Eagle, and the priests of false fanes feared lest their work was at an end. Such will ever be the powxr of this Hope over those who are by it held in constant expectancy of the Lord’s advent.
On the contrary, so soon as we lose sight of its imminence and say, “My Lord delayeth His coming,” we are tempted to indolence, self-indulgence, and controversy on minor matters. When disciples felt the time to be short and the duty to be urgent, they were “all at it and always at it;” self-denial was an easy yoke and petty jealousies were scorned as trifles. So soon and so long as that hope was dim, and Christ’s Coming was pushed into the far-off future, the Church began leisurely working, then flippantly playing at missions, as though vast cycles of time lay before us in which to witness to the world. Revive this hope of the Lord’s Coming and it begets hourly watching, ceaseless praying, tireless toiling, patient waiting.
Moreover this blessed hope is forever linked with the glorious compensation for all service and sacrifice for Christ. “Behold I come quickly, and my reward is with me, to give every man according as his work shall be.”
His Coming then, not our death, opens the door to the wedding feast, and the ‘’ Joy of the Lord. “Then the prize awaits the successful runner. Then the ‘’crowns” are to be given — the “crown of life” to martyrs faithful unto death, the “crown of righteousness” to all who love His appearing, the “crown of glory” to shepherds who “feed the flock,” the “crown of rejoicing” to those who win souls, the “crown incorruptible” to those who keep the bodyunder and bring it into subjection.
Is it strange that the soldier of Christ endures hardness, fights the good fight of faith, carries the cross at all risks to plant it on Satan’s strongholds, while he is looking daily for the coming of the Captain of his salvation, and knows not how soon he may lay down his warrior’s armour for the crown of victory? Paul forgot all his losses in such gains — and counted all but refuse, for the sake of the resurrection hope. Fellowship with Christ in suffering brings fellowship in glory; and to die with Him as a malefactor is to be exalted with Him as a benefactor.
With many disciples, the eyes are yet blinded to this mystery of rewards, which is one of the open mysteries of the Word, and some cannot see how rewards can have any place in an economy of grace. But we must not confound salvation and recompense. It must be an imputed righteousness, — exceeding far that of the most proper Pharisee — whereby we enter the Kingdom of Heaven; but, having thus entered by faitJi our works determine our relative rank, place, reward, in that Kingdom. Eternal life is God’s gift to be had for the asking; but he who receives the gift, and does work, sowing and reaping for God, receiveth also wages and gathereth fruit unto life eternal. Gifts are bestowed; wages earned. Sinners become saved saints only by grace; but saints are rewarded for service. And so Paul warns Corinthian Christians that even he who is saved, may be saved as by fire and suffer loss in the burning up of his worthless work; or he may both be saved and have a reward in an abiding work.*
We shall never have Apostolic missions till this Apostolic Hope claims again its rightful place. Daily dying — so that in the body one bears the marks of the Lord Jesuswill be easy only to him who feels redemption drawing nigh; and who follows the Son
* Cor. iii. 12-15.
of Man in His humiliation, as one who is to sit with Him on the Throne of His glory. His expected appearing is His saints’ avenging and rewarding. It is the righting of the wrongs of the ages. Unrecompensed toil receives its wages, and long waiting martyrs reach their coronation. Then, however dark the discipline and dismal the failure of mission work, faithfulness and not success will be the standard and measure of reward. We must have our work always dojie, ready for His scrutiny.
This hope weans its from the world, and by loosening the hold and lessening the worth of all present things makes stronger the powers of the age to come. The steward whose Master may at once come and call him to account, cannot hoard treasures of mammon or quaff pleasure’s intoxicating cup. He cannot bury his ‘’poimds” in houses and lands, costly plate and gems, stocks and stores; it must be turned into currency — current coin, passing from hand to hand, like streams that swell as they flow. The time is short, but eternity is long; and, therefore, there is nothing that is ‘’worth while,” but to push our lines of labour to the ends of earth, and keep our witness constant and clear to the end of time, that the eternal may sway us rather than the temporal.
Thus this blessed Hope both loosens the hold we have on this world and the hold this world has on us. A true belief in the testimony of our Lord that in such an hour as we think not He cometh, and that we must watch and pray because we know not when the time is — makes impossible all plans for a soft nest and an easy life of indulgence and indolence, for the end of all things is at hand, and the midnight cry may soon be heard. What have we to do with any pursuits or pleasures which His coming could interrupt or condemn, bring into contempt or bring to naught! If we are to build Heaven here, we may be justified in laying deep and firm foundations; but if all these things are to be dissolved, if all work not done for God is to be burned up as wood, hay, stubble, and the work done for God is to be tried by fire — then what folly to spend our faculty and vital force upon what is to be turned to ashes! Let us walk with God and work with God, and so prepare a structure of character and of service which shall survive the fiery ordeal.
Perhaps at no one point does the hope of our Lord’s Return touch our need so closely and vitally as in this — that it incites to unselfish service. Missions appeal more than any other form of service to the unworldly and unselfish spirit, and find only in such spirit their support, nay their practical basis. Much that goes by the name of “Christian work” is leavened with self-love, is prosecuted in the energy of the flesh, and finds its real though unconscious incentive in the worldly hope of rich returns of temporal advantage. A railway corporation might, on commercial principles, help to build schools and churches along its lines, for these form a nucleus for population, and so for ultimate dividends to stockholders; much that men call benevolence is but the cloak that hides the shrewd Shylock, who has an eye to business.
The modern outcry that ‘’missions do not pay,” comes of this selfish, calculating spirit that demands prompt payments of interest on every investment. Cut to the core the apathy that exists as to work among the heathen, and you find simple selfishness. This work in the regions beyond, by its very nature forbids such returns: these distant, destitute souls cannot recompense us. The most passionate appeals for perishing millions along the Congo, beneath the shadows of the Himalayas or in the Corean valleys, will be unheeded by hearts electroplated with greed or petrified by selfishness. Of course missions ‘’do not pay,” if “pay” means any form of temporal recompense. Missions are not a mint for coining sovereigns, but a means of saving souls and witnessing to Christ.
To give money and send men and women to the ends of the earth to sacrifice themselves for cannibals and Hottentots, half brutal and half idiotic savages, ^’ human baboons” and stupid barbarians, is putting money into a bag with holes and burying pearls in rubbish, — so say the worldly-minded. And we join no issue with such. Missions to the heathen yield slow returns, and seldom justify to human judgment the costly outlay. God, perhaps, does not mean they shall. He gives us this work as nearest in motive and spirit to that which brought Jesus to the cross, as the most unselfish work in which we can engage; and, because its essence lies in self-oblivion, the spirit of missions is the spirit of Christ. To be a true missionary we must be emptied of self — give to those from whom we cannot hope to receive, and bid to the feast those who are not likely to have any feast to invite us to; and so the miser dies when the missionary is born; the carnal is cast out if the spiritual is to come in; only he who loses himself can save others.
But just here the hope of the Lord’s Coming supplies exactly what is needed. It gives us a loftier level than this world affords, from which to take our survey. Once let this conviction, this consciousness flood the soul of the believer, that the Risen Lord is himself coming back, and may at any time turn His promise into His presence — and this outpouring of consecrated gifts and devoted lives for the sake of the lost, becomes a breaking of the alabaster flask upon Jesus’ feet, and there is “purpose” in this ‘’waste.” John may solve what to Judas is a mystery.
The blessed Hope, which our Lord would have us to restore to its former and deserved prominence, has a subtle influence in refining character of selfishness, and this makes it the very matrix and mould of missions. Its whole tendency is to turn our thoughts awy from self to Him, to relax our hold upon all else, and remould us after the power of an endless life. It makes all time seem short and the whole world seem small, dwarfs the present age into insignificance, and lifts the age to come like a towering peak that leaves all else far below.
In those seven epistles to the Churches which open the Apocalypse, our Lord uses His imminent Coming as a perpetual hope, motive, incentive; and this is enough to make it a sin, if not a crime, to lose sight of it. It was because His Coming was ever at hand when trials were to end and triumphs to begin, that the Ephesians must bear, have patience, and not faint; the Smyrnese endure the ten days of tribulation; the Pergamoans hold fast His name and not deny the faith; the Thyatirans resist Jezebel’s seductions; the Sardians keep up their watch and keep white their garments; the Philadelphians keep the Word of His Patience, and the Laodiceans abandon lukewarmness for ardour and fervour.
This blessed Hope is the crown of all other hopes, and suggests to us an expectation that will be realized.
Much of the discouragement felt in connection with missions results from a mistaken notion as to what is to be their proper outcome; and it is so vital to both our true work and our true joy that we understand our Lord’s plan, that it may be well for us to go back to the rudiments and begin anew, lest we have built into our missionary conceptions some elements not warranted by the Word.
There are many who understand by our Lord’s parables of the mustard seed and leaven, a gradual growth and extension of the kingdom, during the present dispensation, until the world is transformed into one great believing brotherhood. In this view the gospel is a seed set in the soil of society, to take root and grow until the earth is filled with its far-reaching branches; or it is a leaven, hid in the three measures of meal — the world, the flesh and the devil! — to leaven the lump, modifying the evil it touches, until the world is changed into the Church, the flesh into the spirit, and the devil is driven out altogether, like the gases that escape from the fermentingdough.
Does the Scripture teaching justify us in looking for the ‘’ conversion of the world “during the present dispensation, or is this the period of the outgathering of the Church from all nations? This is not a question of mere curiosity or speculation; it concerns the whole work of missions. For what are we to labour, and what is to be our rational scriptural hope? James bade the first council at Jerusalem hearken unto him as he reminded them of God’s purpose as declared by Simeon, visiting the gentiles “to take out of them a people for His name.”
That is not only uniformly declared to be the ex’aet pirpose of gospel witness during these times of the gentiles, but it has been the actual result of these nearly two thousand years of such witness. At this advanced age history is interpreting prophecy and expounding Scripture, if we will but hear it. We see good growths and rich harvests from the seed of the kingdom; but the tares are growing side by side with the wheat, and we are divinely told that they will so continue until the end of the age. Our highest ‘Christian civilization” is an amalgamation of the Church and the world; and the leaven of the world is as surely in the Church, as the influence of the Church is in the world. No doubt the world is more churchly, but there is as little doubt that the Church is more worldly. The dialect of Ashdod corrupts the language of Canaan. The strait gate is wider and the narrow way is broader than of old; and those who would come into the kingdom find an easy entrance and an attractive avenue, smooth-paved and bordered with flowers. How few even profess self-denial in cross bearing! If the schools have found no royal road to learning, the Church has built one to Heaven.
The proofs are sadly at hand of that conformity to the world which is so positively forbidden. For ages the slime of the serpent has been upon certain worldly amusements which, whatever be their inherent quality, bear the stamp of Satan’s ownership and use. And yet Church members sit till midnight over “progressive euchre,” enter their thoroughbreds on the race-course, tipple over the wine cup, whirl through the giddy dance, sanction the theatre and use its flavour to give relish to church socials. Church life is honeycombed with worldliness, and practical separation is reduced to a minimum. The great body of disciples are only nominally such, either wholly worldly or worldly holy; at the door of frivolous gaiety they drop their Christian consistency, as an oriental guest shuffles off his sandals, and mix freely with the idolaters of folly and fashion. The Church is to-day in danger of the moral putrefaction that loses all godly savour, and the moral petrifaction that loses all godly sensibility. Apostolic piety scarcely survives in the Church at large. Disciples rarely keep themselves unspotted from the world; and, instead of the isolation and insulation necessary for receiving and conveying spiritual power, it is only here and there that we find a few who seem to be filled with the Spirit.
As to the condition of the world, even in this boasted nineteenth century, it is as far from ‘* conversion,” say the most sagacious students of history, as in the days of Augustus. When the glamour and halo of all this deceptive glory is penetrated, what do we find? An era of inventive genius and worldly enterprise, but God-denying and God-defying infidelity and anarchy. Giant sons of Anak go about breaking down faith in God and the Bible. Philosophy blooms into pantheism and materialism, rationalism and agnosticism. Some who have drawn their very life from Christianity now turn to curse the dam that nursed, and wound the breast that fed, them.
The ripeness of modern civihzation borders on rottenness, and while men boast of society, its foundations sink; and the anarchy, which is the natural end of atheism, threatens all with wreck. Science itself has furnished the lawless with weapons which are equally mighty against ballot or bullet; and Germany and Russia, France and Britain, and the great Republic, are to-day at the mercy of the dynamite fiend!
Notwithstanding such signs of the times, there are some who regard the outlook as so hopeful that they think the recent “Parliament of Religions” was the inauguration of the millennium. What enviable sleight of mind that can turn everything into signs of progress! Popular education and swift locomotion answer to the prediction: ‘’Many shall run to and fro in the earth, and knowledge shall be increased.” In the triumphs of electric telegraph and telephone, the ‘’lightning cometh from the east and shineth unto the west.” Irrigation and agriculture make “glad the wilderness and solitary place, and make the desert to rejoice and blossom as the rose.” The ocean cables and swift steamships have so joined the continents that there is “no more sea;” and in peace societies and courts of arbitration, nations “learn war no more.” By wide dispersion of God’s word and witnesses, the earth is” full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.” In the sympathy and unity of believers our Lord’s piayer is fulfilled, that they “all may be one.” Rude and barbarous tribes are enlightened — “the cow and the bear feed;” and in converted cannibals, the lion eats “straw like the ox;” the savages, rapacious like the wolf, ferocious like the leopard, become, by civilization, the gentle lamb and harmless kid. Those who, with this singular ease, find fulfilment of prediction, have sometimes gone further, and suggested that in Britain we have the ‘Mion,” and in Russia the ‘’ bear,” and in the young Republic beneath the setting sun, the ‘’little child” that leads them! and that China may be the ‘’red dragon,” whose tail draws after it a third part of the race, yet in the contest with Christian England “prevailed not!”
From all such frivolous methods of dealing with the Scripture and Vvith facts, we turn candidly to ask what does the New Testament encourage us to hope for as the outcome of our missionary work?
If we read aright, the teaching of our Lord is plain. God’s present purpose is that the gospel shall everywhere be preached for a witness unto the nations and for the outgathering of the Ecclcsia; and then shall the end come, and the Lord Himself return and possess the kingdom, and carry its triumphs to completion. It is true that, after nineteen centuries of Christian history, and at the close of this great missionary century, the gospel net encloses all sorts of fish, both good and bad — swordfish and toadfish, mansharks as well as blood-tinged salmon and delicious cod — devilfish as well as angelfish, — it is true that the tares still grow as vigorously as the wheat and defy uprooting. And yet this is exactly what the Lord foretold as the outcome of this dispensation; and to see this gives power to the faint and courage to the desponding. Instead of being dismayed at the parallel progress of good and evil, we expect it and are not disappointed. Hope is not crushed, for we have not attempted impossibilities. Signs of continued rejection of the message and abounding iniquity in the world, or of love waxing cold in the Church, do not overwhelm the true missionary with a sense of defeat. God is working out His plan just as He forecast it, notwithstanding. The devil’s great wrath may only be due to the shortness of his time; and the ripeness of the tares may only hint the nearness of the harvest.
The prominence given to this blessed hope of our Lord’s Return, in Scripture, justifies the prominence given to it in this treatment of the subject of missions, for it is vitally related to our courage and confidence in carrying on our work.
Hope defeated, or even deferred, makes the heart sick, and heart-sickness is fatal to successful service. There is a hope that banishes such a malady and in its place gives ever new vigour and strength for serving and suffering; and that is a hope founded on a distinct promise, and actually fulfilling before our eyes. If we are discouraged or despairing, our need and remedy is, perhaps, a laying hold of the hope set before us in the gospel. As the Scriptures warrant no expectation of the world’s conversion in this age of witness, so far as we look for such result we work on the zvrong basis, and will either be disappointed or deceived in the outcome.
The soldier who misconceives the object of a campaign, may falsely construe all the movements of the army. If he thinks the whole force of the foe is to be captured, the seizure of a few leading strongholds seems only next to absolute defeat. But, if he knows that this is exactly according to orders from headquarters, and that the plan of his great commander is thus carried out, seizing and holding certain strategic points, and waiting for him to arrive with reinforcements, what would otherwise have seemed defeat, now becomes success.
Does it matter nothing whether, in our work of missions, we are hoping for results which are moving on toward fruition or not? Let the disciple once get firmly planted upon this rock basis, that we are sent forth not to accomplish a world’s conversion, but only its evangelization, and victory springs up out of defeat. Hope that had lost wings, plumes herself for a new flight, and over the grave of buried expectation rises with the song of a lark. Satan has gained no unforeseen advantage, and even his movements are all comprehended in God’s wider plans. Every backward movement in history is like the receding wave, the preparation for a forward advance to a higher floodmark.