What fellowship hath Christ with Belial, or believers with unbelievers? The Egyptians could have no fellowship with the Hebrews after they were told that a prophet had sprung up among them. The Hebrews told a marvellous tale about the Lord appearing to Moses in the "burning bush." They pretended to have revelation and work miracles as in the early days of Potipher and Joseph; but this pretension to angels, prophets, and miracles, speedily sundered all ties of harmony and fellowship, and it was necessary for the Hebrews to leave the country. God required it of them, and even ordered them into an unpromising wilderness, to be subject to hunger, and thirst, and many hardships.
The same spirit of opposition to miracles, prophets, and angels exists now; and the righteous can no more keep the ordinances and commandments of God now, without persecution even to death from the world, than the Hebrews could do it. For the same reason Lot gathered out of Sodom —even angels could not stop a night in Sodom without being mobbed; accordingly, the Lord commanded him to gather up so many as would go with him and flee to the mountain. His reason for the gathering in this case was, that He could not properly punish the Sodomites, unless the righteous were gathered out of the city in the first place. Likewise, when Jerusalem was about to be destroyed, Jesus instructed his disciples to flee to the mountain.
It was persecution that scattered the primitive Saints abroad in the days of Jesus. Jesus had taught Paul and Peter, that the Saints could not be preserved on the earth, and the kingdom built up, without the Saints were gathered together in one. He told them, absolutely and unequivocally, that he should gather the disciples in the day of restitution. Such was their sense of the immediateness of gathering, and of the second coming of Christ, that they were troubled when the disciples were gathered, lest the day of the Lord was at hand; but Paul disabused them, and told them that there must be a "falling away" before the notable day of the Lord should come.
Paul informed his brethren, that in the dispensation of the fulness of times, God would gather together in one, all things both in heaven and upon earth and under the earth. John speaks of the same, probably as the day of the great battle of God Almighty, Jesus signified that He would gather his people, the elect, even if he had to send his angels to the four corners of the earth to bring them, after the manner in which he sent to Sodom to bring Lot out of it to a place of safety. He declared he would gather the wheat into the garner, and the tares into bundles to be burned. The prophets, too, long before the meridian of time, saw with enrapturing vision, the sons coming from afar, and the daughters from the ends of the earth.
Isaiah says, "the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising. Lift up thine eyes round about, and see, all they gather themselves together, they come to thee; thy sons shall come from far, and thy daughters shall be nursed at thy side. Then shalt thou see and flow together, and thine heart shall fear and be enlarged, because the abundance of the sea shall be converted unto thee, the forces of the Gentiles shall come unto thee. Who are these that fly as a cloud, and as the doves to their windows? Surely the isles shall wait for me, and the ships of Tarshish first, to bring thy sons from far, their silver and their gold with them, unto the name of the Lord thy God, and to the Holy One of Israel. And the sons of strangers shall build up thy walls, and their kings shall minister unto thee, that men may bring unto thee the forces of the Gentiles. And he shall set up an ensign for the nations, and shall assemble the outcasts of Israel, and gather together the dispersed of Judah from the corners of the earth."
The gathering of Saints to one place is necessary in order to preserve their genealogies, and to secure to them those inheritances, the title to which must be substantiated by legitimate records, kept in the archives of the house of God. Whenever God has had a people. He has been careful to instruct them to keep an accurate record of marriages and the issues of marriage; from Adam to Noah, and from Noah to Abraham, and thence to David down to Jesus Christ, the genealogy must necessarily be preserved. Says David, "God setteth people in families as a flock." "He arrangeth them in families." But if these families intermarry with those who do not keep the laws of God, nor conform to his ordinances, the records of genealogy are soon obliterated from the knowledge of men, and the proof of a legitimate title to inheritance is thereby extinct; and unless Saints are gathered out from the midst of unbelievers, they are more liable to intermarry and become alienated from the ordinances and covenants of the Lord. If Isaac and Ishmael have no records of parentage, how can one claim rights of lineage above another? God will assign rewards to men according to the records of their deserts, and one great pre-requisite to the final restitution of all things, is the reviving and establishing of proper records of genealogy, and covenants, and promises, and patriarchal blessings.
In one instance God had to rescind the marriages of a numerous people, because such marriages, by their issue, would tend to frustrate the grace of God to the righteous, and entail blessings upon a strange people that God designed to curse. The ordinances of the church and institutions of God's house cannot be carried into execution in a land belonging to "aliens from the commonwealth of Israel;" because aliens from God will not have the Lord to rule over them. They consider that the laws of God set two against three, and three against two, the father-in-law against the son-in-law, &c.; and so do they have this effect, and always will have it, until the Saints are separated from their adversaries. Before there can be anything like a true, godlike, peaceful millennium, a separation must take place between the righteous and disobedient; even as a shepherd divideth the sheep from the goats, even so must God's will be done with friends and foes on earth, like as in heaven.
Had the Jews received Jesus Christ, He would have set up just such a kingdom on earth as in heaven, and the honest from all nations would have been gathered to his standard. But seeing they would pierce the Shepherd, and scatter the sheep through a long cloudy day, as it had been prophesied of Him and his followers; He, nevertheless, assured his disciples that his people should be gathered, in the latter days, as wheat into the garner. John says to the Saints in the last days, that are scattered among the confused nations of the whole earth:—"Come out of her my people, and be not partakers of her sins, that ye receive not of her plagues." Here the reason why Saints should come out of other nations is distinctly avowed—"to escape her plagues." The same reason that was assigned why Lot should go out of Sodom.
The idea prevalent that God would inflict all his judgments in one great tremendous DAY, is as absurd as the notion is universal. The famine and dearth were at the command of Elijah. The earthquake that swallowed up Dathan and the company of Abiram, was at the command of Moses. Moses also stretched out his hand as a signal to the accumulated seas to overwhelm the Egyptians, and they obeyed his mandate. But I will not multiply proofs. God will pour out his vials of wrath, and distress the nations till they will learn and practice righteousness; and his people must flee to their appointed hiding place till the indignation is overpast, otherwise they have no guaranty for their safety. The Hebrews were obliged to mark their houses, lest the destroying angel should slay both them and the Egyptians. The Lord God has decreed a consumption upon the whole earth, therefore let the righteous flee to the strongholds of Zion, that are preparing in that land that was promised to the Patriarch Joseph, while it is an accepted time, and the evil days come not.
Jesus cautioned Jerusalem saints to beware of imitating the silly and dilatory part of Lot's wife. The righteous are no more secure from approaching judgments than the wicked, except they obey the commands of God. Even a prophet was once slain by a lion, because he dared to disobey the Lord. No man should neglect any means by which he can be removed, and help to remove others, from those nations that are as inevitably doomed to destruction for rebellion, as the Canaanites of former times.