Why I Preach the Second Coming

by Isaac Massey Haldeman

[III]

Only at the Coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ Will Redemption be Complete and the Blood of the Cross be Justified

OUR Lord Jesus Christ did not come into this world that He might go through the unspeakable horror of the cross; He did not hang on that brutal and torturing instrument of death as the criminal of the universe; He did not receive the down sweep of the essential antagonism of a holy God against the sin He represented; He did not cry the cry of the lost, “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?”; He was not flung out like a derelict thing into the black, starless night of God’s inexorable law, measureless wrath and indignation where His humanity unanchored and alone was forsaken both by God and man; He did not hang there in the torment of His body, suffering all the agony the most exquisitely wrought, nerve-centered body of the universe could suffer of physical pain and anguish; God did not make Him to be sin and treat Him as the blackest and most repulsive thing in existence; He did not lay upon Him the weight and demerit of a world’s guilt that He might suffer in His innocence, His purity and innate sinlessness on behalf of the vilest outcast this side of Gehenna, the lake of fire, just that He might keep us from lying, cheating, swearing, getting drunk, giving ourselves up to immorality, licentiousness and sensualism; He did not send Jesus Christ His only begotten and well-beloved Son to die a spectacle to heaven, to earth and hell that He might make us merely decent and right and morally correct in our relations to one another. All that is involved in the fact of redemption just as fragrance is involved and included in the rose, as harmony is expected to be a part of music and rhythm as well as metre a part of verse and song.

Cleanness and morality are involved quantities in a Christian. The moment the new life of the risen Christ is wrought in a believer and he is linked up by the Holy Ghost to the glorified body of the Son of God he has in him all the impulse and power of the highest morality, the most exalted purity, the rarest spirituality and the discernment of spiritual things. All that is self-evident—but the Son of God came into this world and went through the amazing tragedy and sacrifice of the cross to do something more than to make us merely moral and good. He came into the world, He died the foreordained death of the cross that He might deliver us from death and the grave.

Death is the blackest and most shameful blot on the face of the earth, the grave the most repulsive of scandals, drawing the trench of its corruption and stain round the girdle of the globe.

To bring a human being into the world, give him no choice of father or mother, of place, of time and circumstance, endow him with a brain to think, a heart to feel and love and then set him face to face with death, hide from him the hour of his going like a criminal who knows not the hour of his execution; to allow the old to live till they are withered, shrivelled and helpless, a burden to others and a still greater burden to themselves, cursing the fact they must live and yet afraid to die; to take a young man in the splendour of his youth, on the threshold of assured success, snatch him away without warning from the parents devoted to him, the wife who loves him and the children dependent on him; and then leave them both, the decrepit and useless old and the needed young to drop into the tongueless silence of the grave, that silence broken only by the sound of the clods as they fall on the coffin lid or the plash of tears, or the choking sob; to allow the living whose hearts are torn and twisted and smashed by the robbery that death brings upon them to stand there and strangle themselves with the unanswered and unanswerable questions: “Whence,” “What,” and “Whither,” and then say all this is the work of a good, a compassionate, a tender and loving God, and that death is as natural as birth?

Nay!

Those who say and teach that death is as natural as birth are guilty of pure unintellectualism and are unwarranted deniers of the facts.

The birth of a child is like the coming of the dawn. It is like the note of a new and joyous song. It is the revelation of a new world, a world of life, of hope, of promised and larger activities. No one who is sane and true and wise will deliberately seek to hinder birth; but death! ah! everything is against death and by right against it.

Every fibre in the body repudiates death. Pain is the protest of life against it and the scout that brings in news of its approach. The brain, the mind, the heart shiver at it, not merely because of the native fear at the unknown, but at the mockery it makes of life, the uselessness of living a time, at the longest, so brief, so full of disappointment and bitterness, a life where plans are never accomplished nor hopes fulfilled, where tears and sorrow outweigh laughter and song.