The New Times and Seasons

The work of a master hand is seen in the mutual fitness of all its parts. There are a few phrases which God meant should be the watchwords of missions. They are trumpet tongued, they are fit signals for advance, whose clarion call should peal all along the lines; and when heard by obedient souls, they have an electrifying power to arouse to action. Among them this is worthy to ring out like the blast of Gabriel’s trump:

The Fulness and Fitness of Times,

Here is the hiding of a divine idea. In Abraham’s day, judgment waited, because the iniquity of the Amorites was not yet full. The vividness of the metaphor is startling. We see the cup slowly filling, and then running over with the blood-red wine of sin. Judgment calmly waits until the scarlet flood reaches the brim and overflows the iron chalice, and then He who is patient because He is eternal, empties the phial of His righteous wrath, and war, pestilence, famine, earthquake, pour their woes upon the earth. So oftentimes in human history, retribution waited for the fit and full season of judgment.

For blessing, as well as cursing, there is a fitness and fulness of timss. The advent of Messiah waited till the world was made ready, and the fit and full time had come for Christ to be born. The obelisks of prophecy had for hundreds of years stood unread, waiting for the Champollion of history to interpret their hieroglyphs, and give meaning to their mysteries. All false faiths, weighed in the balances, had been found wanting. Persian civilization with its sun adoration, Greek civilization with its wisdom and art, Roman civilization with its law and valor, Indian civilization with its philosophy of contemplation, Chinese civilization with its ancestral worship — all these had utterly and confessedly failed to arrest decay; and even Judaism was but a skeleton-leaf of forms, whence the sap of piety had fled. There was a felt need of some great religious reform.

There was preparation positive as well as negative. Roman roads had run a highway from the golden mile-stone in the Forum to the ends of the earth; and the Greek dialect had even in Syria forged swift wheels for the Gospel chariot to speed along the highway. Universal peace reigned, and war no longer set nations at variance, locking their gates and shutting their ports. The common and conscious want of a more satisfying faith was the prophecy of a new teacher and deliverer; and in every land there were seers who watched for the star that heralded the advent of “The Desire of All Nations.”

Just at this time, the first and only point in the annals of the race where such converging lines met, while so many facts hinted one grand issue, and so many voices blended in one loud appeal, a virgin of Bethlehem felt in her womb the quickening of the Holy Spirit, and the greatest birth of the ages gave to man Jesus, the world’s Saviour. When the fulness of time was come God sent forth His Son, to bring fulfilment to prediction and redemption to humanity. The advent of the long-promised seed of the woman had awaited its full hour. Both His cradle and His cross were ready; the believer and the betrayer were both at hand. Never before, as never since, had God’s clock of the ages struck an hour so awfully meet for the crisis of history.

Here was another of what Dr. Croly, half a century ago, called “the birth hours” of the race. Man’s advent was the first; the advent of Christ, another; and the period of the great Reformation was another.

That religious revolution whose leaders were John de Wyclif and John Bunyan in England, John Knox in Scotland, John Huss in Bohemia, John Calvin in Switzerland, Luther in Germany, Savonarola in Italy, was, if not a new birth hour, at least a resurrection morn, to the long-buried Apostolic faith. After a thousand years in the sepulchre of the dark ages, rolling away the stone of sacerdotalism, bursting the cerements of formalism and traditionalism, breaking the scarlet seal of Papal infallibility and inviolability, behold, coming forth into new life, the imperial truth of justification by faith!

When, one hundred years ago, the hand of William Carey rung out from the belfry of the ages, the signal for a new crusade of missions, a fourth birth hour of history struck; and even yet we are but half awake to the full significance of this new signal. It may be well for us to stop and ask how we are to recognize God’s plan in our generation, and fall into line with His majestic march — in other words, what are the signs that God’s fitness and fulness of times has come?

Our Lord rebuked the Pharisees and Sadducees when they demanded a sign from heaven, because they were keener observers and safer interpreters of the weather signals than of the signs of the times. In the red and glowing sky of sunset, in the lurid and lowering sky of sunrise, they saw the forecast of the fair or foul day succeeding; but to God’s signals that flame and flash on the prophetic and historic horizon, they were blind.

Behind this rebuke hides an indirect hint that to the devout watcher history becomes prophecy. The morning forecasts the evening; and to-day, to-morrow. God gives us premonitory and preparatory signs of His providential purpose, and we should be on the alert to detect them.

The undevout historian is mad. Only the fool says in his heart there is no God in history. Of the world of events as of the world of matter, it is true that ‘’every house is builded by some builder; and He who built all is God.” History is not a heap of ‘’’’disjecta membra’’ but an articulated body, made upon a plan, and with joints and bands compacted. In God’s book all coming events were written, when as yet there was none of them, in continuance to be fashioned as His eternal purpose should be wrought into form. Weather forecasts may fail, but God’s signs and signals are sure.

Because the present, rightly read, predicts the future, because God’s fit, full time gives prophetic and providential indications of its approach, of what immense importance is it for us to get a proper point from which to view the horizon, and then to keep up our watch! The golden chalice which is filling is God’s purpose; its flood is man’s opportunity. And whenever God’s full time comes, the angel whose stride spans sea and land declares: “There shall no longer be delay!” Then, or never, we fall into line with God’s movement. His times and tides wait for no man. Swiftly His plan sweeps on to its goal, leaving behind the sluggard and the idler. Ye watchers, be ready, and when the full hour is come for the work and war of the ages, stand in your lot and be not found faithless!

How then are we to read God’s signals, and what are the signs on our horizon?

To him who, in the study of current events would read the immediate future, God gives two guides: inspired prophecy and converging providence. When the two combine, practical certainty results; for when prediction nears fulfilment, and providential events converge toward the same centre, the true seer finds clear foretokens of what is at hand.

Let us apply these criteria to the great birth hours already noted. Christ’s Incarnation did not surprise such devout seers as Simeon and Anna. They knew that the seventy heptades of years which were to elapse before the coming of Messiah the Prince, were about complete, and as students of the prophetic word, they were on the watch-tower looking toward Bethlehem. The universal exhaustion of man’s resources, the wide prevalence of peace, the common expectation of a coming Deliverer, were fingers all pointing in the same direction, and so prophecy and providence confirmed each other’s witness to the nearness of the Advent of Immanuel; and so that ‘’just and devout man” who was “waiting for the consolation of Israel” was not found staggering in unbelief when the infant Jesus was laid in his arms; and that aged prophetess who came into the temple at that same instant, was prepared both to accept the Messiah in His swaddling clothes, and speak of Him to others who “looked for redemption, in Jerusalem.” To God’s watchers, like them, the Advent was the crown of expectation and anticipation.

The Reformation era came not without horizon signals. Long before, in parables, vivid as panoramic pictures, Christ had hinted the history and” mystery of the Kingdom of Heaven,” the sowing of the seed and the growing of the plant; the tares of hypocrisy and the leaven of heresy; the period of apparent decay, when the precious treasure was buried in the field or sunk in the sea, to be dug up and dived after. Such figures seem meant to forecast the accession of Constantine, with the inroads of formalism, secularism and scepticism, and the thousand years of night-shade when evangelical truth was buried beneath the rubbish of forms and falsehood. The next two scenes in this parabolic series hint the finding of the hid treasure and the recovery of the priceless pearl.

But if the forecast of prophecy was dim, converging providences lit up the horizon with clearer rays that told of a new dawn after the dark ages. The marshalling of events was signally significant. In the middle of the fifteenth century the fall of Constantinople had started the revival of learning. Greek scholars, dispersed over Europe with their manuscripts of the New Testament, opened the door and paved the way for the translation of the Word into other tongues and its wide dissemination among the people. In the last decade of that century, a new route to the Indies linked Protestant Britain with the heart of Oriental heathenism; also a new world was unveiled toward the sunset. This was likewise the period of the fall of feudalism, and of the assertion of individualism with its doctrine of human rights and personal liberty.

The theology of inventions found grand illustration. The reformation in philosophy ushered in a revolution in science. The mariner’s compass then first coming into common use, began to act as a pilot over unknown seas. The printing-press in 1450 issued its first book, and that, a Latin Bible. The steam engine, too, between the meridian hours of that century and the next, supplied man with a new motive power. And so, just as Luther’s hammer was heard nailing his theses to “All Saints’” door, God was loudly calling all saints to rally about the reformed standard, give the Bible to the common folk, and vindicate their right to read and interpret it for themselves; and to go on swift keels and wheels to the very bounds of the globe with the message of the Reformed Faith.

We take one more illustration of the signs of the times, nearer to our day and pertinent to our duty.

That any of God’s watchers could misread the signs of the times, in William Carey’s day, is to us now a marvel. In all prophecy an age of world-wide evangelism is foretold; and in that prophetic panorama in the thirteenth of Matthew, the recovery of the treasure and the pearl is followed by the casting of the drag-net into the sea, and by great hauls of fish. All prediction treads toward one goal. Abram had the promise of a blessing to come through him to “all the families of the earth;” and all down the ages, with voices growing ever louder and clearer, prophets had told of a day of world-wide missions. Christ plainly taught that before the end of the age the Gospel must first be preached as a witness among all nations.

Many fingers pointed to the close of the last century as God’s time for the new era of missions. While the former half of the century witnessed an awful decline which threatened complete apostasy, the latter half was the most remarkable era of revived piety and evangelistic preaching since the days of Paul. Jonathan Edwards, John Wesley and Charles Wesley, George Whitefield, Walker of Truro and Fletcher of Madeley, William Grimshaw and William Romaine, Daniel Rowlands and Rowland Hill, John Berridge and Henry Venn, James Hervey and Augustus Toplady, and others like-minded, began as the evangelists of a new era to stir a half dead Church to proclaim the Gospel to the poor and outcast classes. The two Northamptons answered to each other across the sea, and Carey, whose cobbler’s bench was a watch-tower, saw that for missions to the heathen God’s fit and full time was come. For ten years he bore the brunt of sneer and taunt, and the worse hostility of inertia and indifference; felt the keen sting of Sydney Smith’s wit and the sharp rebuke of John Ryland’s h3”per-calvinism. But when God lets loose a thinker and a seer — when a saint gets on his knees watching the dawn, and sees God’s signals flashing — floods and flames cannot stay his progress. Between the Scylla of apathy and the Charybdis of antipathy, Carey boldly steered for India. While others slept he had been on the watch. He had seen God’s signs and heard God’s step, and he dared not falter or delay; he must move, though he moved alone.

Another birth hour of history has now come, and blessed are the sages who see the star that guides to the cradle of the new age of missions. Even yet, not every eye sees the vision of God or catches its full meaning. One of the wisest thinkers of the age says, that” nothing but deep initiation into the Spirit of the Bible can enable us to form the faintest idea as to what historical events belong most to the divine plan, or have most relation to the Kingdom of the Eternities.” If there be any defect in these words, it IS in lack, not excess, of emphasis.

There was One who was ’ in the world, and the world was made by Him and the world knew Him not. He came to His own possessions and His own people received Him not. This is the one parable and paradox of all ages. There is One who is in history, and all history is His curious handiwork, and yet even historians recognize Him not. He comes to the age which is of His own framing and moves amid events which unfold His own eternal plan, and yet His own people too often receive Him not. But to as many as receive Him, recognize His majestic presence and beneficent providence, to them He gives authority to become co-workers with God, sharers in the glory of divine achievement.

The conviction grows upon us that the birth hour, now fully come, is in some aspects the most important crisis of all history. It marks the nativity of twin offspring. Time has brought forth two giants: Opportunity and Responsibility. And as might be expected, never before has there been such combination and concentration of world-wide signals. The whole horizon is aflame with aurora borealis lights — fingers of fire which reach toward the zenith as if to point man’s gaze upward to God. Our risk is not so much that we shall not see these signs, as that we shall not feel their force and read their lesson. Marvels are so common that they cease to be startling. The blare of God’s trumpets dulls our ears by its peal, and the flare and glare of His flash-lights dims our eyes by its glory.

This is no exaggeration of rhetoric or outburst of enthusiasm. The half of the wonders of this age have never been told, and their full meaning yet awaits an interpreter. Let any devout student of history, any sagacious seer of God who reads the signs of the times, tell us what is the forecast of the future. Behind the developments of our day is a divine directing power. A man’s hand writes on the wall; but the writing is a decree of God, telling of world powers and of false faiths, weighed in the balances and found wanting; and of a Conqueror about to receive the Kingdom which human monarchs are unworthy to administer.