“The Second Coming of Christ“
The Second Coming of Christ
Pastor and author A.W. Tozer
December 28, 1958
We read the 72nd psalm together, that great psalm that begins, Give the king thy judgment, O God, and thy righteousness unto the king’s son. He shall judge thy people with righteousness and thy poor with judgment. This we read together earlier in the service.
This psalm was written to celebrate the accession of Solomon to the throne after the death of David. It may have been written by David before he got too old and tired to write, looking forward to the installation, coronation of his son. It may have been written by Solomon himself or more likely it was written by one of the prophets or seers that gathered round David’s throne and waited in his sanctuary, God’s sanctuary.
This psalm embodies a high prophetic expectation. Noble ideals are here, ideals of what a king must be or what a king should be. But as in many of the psalms that we call messianic psalms, the immediate serves as a prefigurement of the more remote.
There are of course two ways to look at any passage such as this, three ways to look at it, two of them wrong and one of them right. The wrong way is, as some of the commentators do, to find its historic meaning and rest at that. David was dying or had died, and Solomon was now becoming king and somebody was writing a coronation psalm. That was that and that’s it. That’s one way and that’s the wrong way.
Then there is another way and that is to see nothing here but Christ, to see a prophetic truth let down like a vacuum out of heaven above without any historic background at all and that’s a wrong way to look at.
But if we see it, as we must see much of the Bible, as having both an immediate and a remote application, the immediate being its historic meaning and the remote being its prophetic meaning, I think that is the right way to look at it because here we have Solomon being brought into the throne and making his accession to the throne but we also see here most surely another and a Greater than Solomon and a greater and nobler kingdom than Solomon’s.
We must not in any wise undersell the man Solomon because Jesus referred to him as being great and said Solomon in all his glory. That was Christ’s description of Solomon. He brought Israel to the zenith of its power, and he made stones in the street to be as gold. He built cities and he gathered to himself riches from all parts of the world. Undoubtedly Israel at under the reign of Solomon was one of the great little kingdoms of the world.
But you cannot read this 72nd Psalm for any length of time with anything like careful meditation until you find language that could not apply to Solomon. Let me read it to you.
For instance, just some for instances, passage here, verses 5 and 8 and to say no more.
They shall fear thee as long as the sun and moon endure throughout all generations. That could not possibly apply to Solomon because Solomon of course has long, long been dead and his bones have long ago turned to dust.
Then there’s this passage. He shall have dominion also from sea to sea and from the river unto the ends of the earth. That also could not describe Solomon’s kingdom because the kingdom of Solomon could be drawn, its boundaries could be drawn very, very easily.
And then that passage which says in verse 17, his name shall endure forever, his name shall be continued as long as the sun and men shall be blessed in him and all nations shall call him blessed. That I say again is stretching it too far. It could not be Solomon. Language is used here which has not yet been fulfilled.
Though this psalm had its origin I repeat at the nation of Solomon, there is language here which has not yet been fulfilled. Verses 4 and 7 for instance. He shall judge the poor of the people. He shall save the children of the needy and he shall break in pieces the oppressor. Or if fulfilled it could only have been on a very local scale. Verse 7, in his days shall the righteous flourish and the abundance of peace so long as the moon endureth. That could not possibly have been fulfilled by the man Solomon.
Then there is verse 11, yea all kings shall fall down before him and all nations shall serve him and he shall deliver the needy when he crieth and the poor also in him that hath no helper. This is asking too much to believe that even Solomon in all his glory could ever have seen anything like this.
Now there is only one way to look at this psalm. That is there is only one final way and that is to realize that it has a historic background. It was written at the coronation of Solomon and a great deal of it applied to Solomon. The other is that it is prophecy and much of it could not apply to Solomon but must apply to some other King that is coming.
Now that other King that is coming and verse 6 tells us the direction from whence he shall come. He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass as showers that water the earth. There is this other King. This could not possibly apply to the man Solomon. He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass and as showers that water the earth.
He might come and he might have come and brought prosperity to the nation and so by a stretch of poetic fancy we might have said that he makes the everything to prosper like grass but that doesn’t say it here. It says he shall come down like rain upon the mown grass and as showers that water the earth. The grass is mown not growing in its green lush beauty but mown and he comes down, not the descendant of David, but he comes down like rain.
Now what King has ever done this? Would you tell me? David did not, Solomon did not and could not, none of the others ever did. All down the years and no King has ever come down and no King has ever come and found his kingdom mown lying, lying flat like a field that has been mown and has been to it such as rain might be upon such a field.
Now things are said of this King of which we have read together tonight which could only apply to the Eternal Son. And the New Testament boldly shows that this King who is to come down is none other than Jesus Christ our Lord. If you are a believer in the New Testament, if you believed even a modicum, even a trifling trace of that which we were so frantically celebrating over the last week, then you will have to admit that this man called Jesus who was born in a manger had, was in direct lineal descent from David. Not from Solomon but from David.
I heard a man say on the radio and he couldn’t have been any more wrong if he had said two times two make nine. He said that Jesus Christ was a descendant of Solomon and therefore that being a descendant of Solomon, Joseph was his supposed father and by a kind of twist of circumstance there, Jesus could be a king through the line of Joseph. My brother, I can’t understand why a man should step to a microphone and declare something until he had checked it and when he hadn’t yet checked it.
The truth is that Jesus was not a descendant of Solomon at all but a descendant of Nathan. Solomon had in his line a man by the name of Coniah and that man Coniah was such a wretched make-believe of a king, and he had so sinned against God that God said hear earth, hear the word of the Lord. No descendant of this man shall ever sit upon the throne of David.
And so, he ruled out Coniah and thus he ruled out Solomon because Solomon was the ancestor of Coniah. So, the descendant jumped from the line of Solomon to the line of Nathan, and Mary was a direct descendant from Nathan. David, Nathan and on down to Mary.
So, Jesus being a son of Mary, but not a son of Joseph, could sit upon the throne of David. But if Jesus had been a son of Joseph even by adoption he could not have sat upon the throne of David because God had thrice cursed the line of Coniah and has said no descendant of this man can ever sit on the throne and Joseph was a descendant of Coniah.
Now Christ’s spiritual kingdom, some will say yes, that psalm, that 72nd Psalm is the description of the beautiful church, the work of righteousness, the work of hospitals and all the church has done, the reign of Christ over the earth.
You know friends, it seems to me that we ought to be a bit wiser than we are. We sing what is called a Christmas song. We sing Jesus shall reign where e’er the sun. Do you know that that is not a Christmas song at all? That is a song based upon the 72nd Psalm and it has to do with the coming back of the King Jesus and not with the coming of Jesus in the first place. Nothing in that song has anything to do with Jesus’ first coming but it has to do with His second coming. It’s not a missionary song either, it is a song having to do with Christ when He comes back to the earth again.
Now, the New Testament, I say, boldly declares that Jesus is this One and that it could not be the spiritual kingdom because there are things written into this psalm, acts and deeds are attributed to this King which he must be personally present to perform. Let me just read over here just almost at random. And he shall judge the poor of the people, and he shall save the children of the needy, and shall break in pieces the oppressor. And he shall have dominion from sea to sea, and the kings of Tarshish and the Isles shall bring presents, and the kings of Sheba and Seba shall offer gifts. Yea, and all kings shall fall down before him, and all nations shall serve him. And he shall deliver the needy when he crieth, and the poor also, and him that hath no helper. And he shall redeem their soul from deceit and violence, and he shall live, and all the rest.
Now there has to be a King present for this to be fulfilled, and that King must be Jesus Christ our Lord. So since he has not yet come, then it’s reasonable to conclude that he must yet be coming. If he has not yet come, and there are predictions here that were not fulfilled in Solomon, and they were not fulfilled when the suffering Savior came to die, and they are not fulfilled in the spiritual kingdom we call the Church. And they must be and can be fulfilled only by the coming of a person to the world. Then, we must conclude that that person has not yet come.
And the Jew is right when he’s waiting for his Messiah, looking forward to the coming of another King. He’s wrong in believing that his Messiah did not come to die, but he is right in believing that the Messiah is coming to reign.
Now notice the conditions when he comes, conditions that did not prevail when Solomon was crowned as King over Israel; conditions that did not prevail when Jesus came to the world the first time, turmoil and war and threats of war, verse 3, and poverty and need abounded everywhere, and a cruel oppressor grinding the faces of men, verses 4, 12, and 13. Notice it. He shall judge the poor of the people. He shall save the children of the needy, and shall break in pieces the oppressor, and verse 12, he shall deliver the needy when he crieth on the poor also, and him that hath no helper. And he shall redeem their soul, and he shall live, and there shall be a handful of corn.
All of this did not exist at the time Christ came the first time. It has not been brought to pass during the time of the Church. This cruel oppressor, oh, there have been oppressors all right. We’ve had them all down the centuries. They have reigned a little while over a small part of the world, then they have gone like the Hitlers and the Stalins and the rest of them.
But there is pictured here a ruler or some oppressor who grinds the faces of men and rules by violence and deceit and pogroms and blood and intimidation. You find that in 4, 12, 13, and 14. And he will, by the time this new king comes, he will have reduced the world to mown grass and civilization as we know it will have passed away. My friends, we had better become realistic now about this and stop listening to the commentators and the politicians and the well-intentioned statesmen.
They are hoping to keep this country of ours from the terror of war. They’re hoping to keep it safe. There’s only been one real war ever fought on its shores and the last great wars never touched our land at all. And they’re hoping to keep it that way.
And I don’t mind telling you, selfish as it may be, that I’d like to have it kept that way while I’m around. And I’d like to have it kept that way while my family, my children are around. But it can’t be that way forever because this cruel oppressor will have reduced the world to mown grass.
Did you ever see a field standing green and lush and beautiful as a field of Timothy hay? My father used to grow it and we used to cut it. There it stands, deep, so deep and green that the rabbits can hardly get through. It’s so thick standing, so thick the rabbits can hardly get through. And then when the heads begin to bend over, full of seed, but not yet ripe enough to spoil it for food for the horses, they would come and cut it.
And when they cut that down, they would take it away and leave the field. You saw it on Monday, and it stood there deep and green and lush and thick and juicy and beautiful. You saw it on Thursday, and they had cut it and winnowed it and taken it clear away. And now there’s nothing left but stubble, stubble. And the scars where the field used to be.
And so that which we call civilization that stands today rests down upon science and investigation and research, rests upon a long tradition of learning, rests upon invention and discovery that goes back to the wheel. With this great civilization that we know, here it is, and it’s beautiful and green.
If you don’t believe it, get into an airplane and fly over our land and look down, even in the wintertime, and see the riches there. Or get into a train and start down, start toward the east and go down through East Chicago and Hammond and Gary and see those great machines there and those great tanks.
Why, we’re rich, rich beyond the dream of Midas. Civilization is rich, I tell you. And the poorest fellow that exists today has more than our fathers had. In America, we’re rich and lush like a field. But we’re told here that when He comes down, He’ll find the world like a moon field. And that civilization as we know it, now it doesn’t use the word civilization, but civilization as we know it will have passed away.
But you say, how can it be? How can that be? Listen, one man can do it, one man can do it. Wasn’t there a day when Germany was rich and way ahead in her science and strong and in her literature and art and music and all the rest? Didn’t one man come along and in ten years he had reduced Germany to rubble? And East Germany, they tell me, is yet rubble.
Did it not happen? Could it not happen? It could happen. It can happen. One man, one man, if he gets in the right place at the wrong time, can reduce a nation to rubble. And He shall come down, and when He comes, He’ll find civilization as we know it now having passed away.
You’ll have to shake your head hard to believe this, because you’re not likely to believe it. Because the optimists are everywhere abroad telling us that we’re going to soon conquer space, and that we are going to set up lines of communication with the far-off galaxies and all the rest.
My radio went out on me last night, and I didn’t hear my favorite professor talking about space. It’s kind of a verbal comic strip to me, I like to hear it. But he talks about space, the space age. And we ignore the fact that time and space and distance and stars and planets and satellites don’t count. What counts is people. What counts is people.
And if you if you had all the beautiful satellites, handmade and man-made satellites in the world circling the earth, or if you had the ability to get into a scooter and scoot to Venus or Mars or beyond that to Saturn and ride around on Saturn’s rings. If you had a population of the earth that had been reduced by an oppressor, reduced to nothing, and civilization destroyed, and all of our fine halls of learning destroyed, and our books burnt, and our art galleries destroyed, and our medicine and scientific knowledge of how to cure diseases and hold back diseases.
If that’s all destroyed, and all goes down under the impact of that great oppressor. I haven’t named him yet, that great oppressor, but you know who he’s going to be. He’s going to be that one that may yet now at this moment be living in the world.
I don’t know that he’s been born, but he could be living in this world now. He could be, I wouldn’t know where to look for him, I’m not that learned in the Scriptures, and I don’t think anybody else is, I’ll whisper that to you.
But I don’t know where to look for him, but I know that that’s the oppressor that can destroy civilization and can tear it back down. But you say if we have civilization destroyed, we couldn’t live. You say if I didn’t have my electric blanket I’d die. Yeah, you’d die. If you didn’t have your electric blanket, you’d live like your parents lived, your great-grandparents. Oh, if I didn’t have my refrigerator how could I live?
My mother used to put milk under running water and keep it that way. Used to have a spring and she’d put milk there and have it so that it was sunk just almost to the level of the lip of the crocks, they call it, and the water kept it. Why, we got along without all these things.
If I didn’t have my car, I don’t know what I’d do. Well, I’m grateful for other people’s cars. I’ll admit that. But you can get along without them, sure you can live without them. We can be reduced and everything now that we know as civilization can be destroyed.
Remember, there have been at least seven civilizations, and some of them have been perhaps not mechanically as great as ours, but you’d be surprised to know how far advanced some of them have been.
So we’re going to be reduced, my brother, and the book of Revelation pictures this mown world briefly by means of wars and plagues and massacres and natural disasters. The world will be, more than half of the earth’s population will probably be destroyed, and the cities of the world will be reduced until they’re not cities anymore but rubble, and all industry and commerce among men will be ended, and we’ll be back to bartering again, and all rule by law will have temporarily ended, and every man will do what’s right in his own eyes, and ended will be all order and system on earth, and all that’s left will be displaced persons.
You say, I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it. Well, you have less faith then than some of the politicians have, you have less faith than some of the thinkers have. H.G. Well believed it, and George Bernard Shaw believed it, and thinking men who dare to think are ready to say that the human race can’t continue the way we are, we’re going to destroy ourselves.
Will you explain to me how two nations like the United States and Russia, will you explain to me how two nations which if they were to become friendly with each other, and Russia were to lay down the idea of world conquest, America could be her best customer, and she could be a customer of ours, and we could both prosper, and by interchange of ideas.
Why, can you tell me why two nations must walk around with guns on their hips ready to draw, each one waiting to see who’s going to draw first? I tell you; how do you explain people? How do you explain men? How do you explain what’s in man? All the Russian people I know are nice people, I don’t know a mean Russian, I don’t know one Russian that isn’t decent. But something’s gone wrong over there, and certain God dishonoring, God dishonoring atheistic men turn themselves over like Judas to the, for the devil to come in.
And so, they are now busy making right to be wrong and wrong to be right, hating, and out to conquer the world. Naturally, we’ve got to be ready for them. When a man writes a book and tells you that he’s going to rob your house at 12 o’clock Thursday night, you’re not going to go to bed, you’re going to stay up with a ball bat and a gun or have a cop around the corner.
And that’s why in the United States we have to keep going as a nation, as a Gentile nation, as a nation under the Noahic covenant. We’ve got to keep our army and our navy and our rockets and all the rest up, because they’ve written books saying what they’re going to do. Old Skinhead over there, every once in a while, reminds us he’s going to bury us. You know old man Skinhead. Every once in a while, he smiles that vodka smile of his and says we’re going to bury you.
Boy, oh boy, I’ve known folks after they’ve been buried to get up and walk around again. I have a conviction that he can’t bury us, but that’s something else again. I don’t want to get into that. I’m talking about the future over there, that future that lies out ahead of us there somewhere.
Before it’s all over, we will have torn at each other’s vitals and let blood until we’re drenched in blood. And by means of bombs and various other methods of destruction, we’ll have destroyed the cities of the world, destroyed civilization, and all that’s left will be displaced persons.
Then the Scripture says He shall come down. He shall come down to the mown world. He shall come down to rejuvenate the world. That wasn’t Solomon. That wasn’t baby Jesus born of the Virgin Mary. That is the Jesus who was grown to manhood, was crucified, dead, and buried, and was raised again from the dead. And He’ll take over completely.
God will give His judgments unto the Son. For Jesus says God Himself judges no man but has given all judgment unto the Son. And He will take over completely. And He will not play along with political parties. All political parties are crooked. They lie, they deceive, they’re scurrilous. It’s scurrilous the way they lie about each other, and then shake hands when it’s over as though it didn’t matter.
He will not play along with any front, any Christian front, or any other front. He will not play along with any ideology, for ideologies are born out of the fallen brains of men. He will sweep them all aside as a woman sweeps the floor with a broom. He’ll sweep them away as selfish and bad. And He will rule. He Himself, He will rule by force, but He will rule in justice and mercy. And the strong robbers He will put down, and the humble poor He will deliver.
You see, the population of the earth won’t be destroyed. So don’t let anybody tell you that it will. I did not say that it will. I said that the cities of the world, maybe all of them, certainly many of them, probably most of them, will be destroyed. And civilization will be destroyed, as we know it now. But you can live without civilization, and believe it or not, you can live without cities. There will still be people.
Did you ever try to destroy an anthill? Did you ever take a shovel and throw it in all directions? Well, you had destroyed the anthill, but the ants were still going everywhere. And if you don’t look, you’re in trouble. They’re still there. You didn’t kill them when you destroyed their anthill.
And so, you can destroy cities and make cities impossible, untenable. We can fix it so we can’t live together housed in cities anymore because of danger. We’ll have to separate and dissipate and scatter in order to exist. The people will still exist, that is what’s left of them, and it will be a good percentage of them, maybe half of them. The people of the world will still live.
And so, He’ll find them, and He’ll rejuvenate them. And that’s strong robber that brought the world down, He will destroy, and the humble poor He will deliver.
I ask you, why does He not come now? Why does this Lord Jesus not come now? Why does the father of the house wait till the house is burning before he comes to rescue his family? Why does the general wait till the city is filled with blood before he comes to deliver it? Well, He only comes where He’s wanted, my friends. And as long as there is human hope, men do not want Him to come down.
Stand up in either house of Congress when it opens next month and say, Mr. Speaker, I’d like to say a word. Special privilege as an American, I don’t know where they’d allow that. I would get up and say, all of your laws can’t save us. The only hope is for Jesus to come back.
You know what? The sergeant at arms would lead me quietly out. He’d lead me tenderly and kindly, because he figured he had somebody on his hands, and he would signal a policeman. The policeman put his arm around my shoulder and said, come on Pop, I know he’s coming, sure, I know he’s coming. And I’d tell them the truth and they wouldn’t believe it.
Go to Buckingham Palace, go where you will, go down to Springfield, go down to City Hall and tell them. Nobody will believe it, because we don’t want Him. He would embarrass us. Jesus Christ would embarrass us.
You know, they tell that old story about the Kaiser, and I think it’s true, that the Kaiser was a Lutheran Christian, you know, something, some kind of a Christian. He’s a church man, and he used to have a great preacher come and preach to him. The preacher came and preached on the second coming of Christ, and the Kaiser said, let’s have no more of it. His coming would ruin my plans.
We ruined His plans for him, if you want to know who did it. I had the uniform on a while, too. No, it wasn’t the Civil War, it was the First World War, and it didn’t amount to much. I never got any near the front lines in Virginia.
Well, that was the Kaiser. He said, he’ll ruin my plans, and there isn’t a politician but one who would say the same thing. And if you called the great big leaders of the Democratic Party together and said, Jesus Christ will come before November 4th, 1960. Senator Kennedy would feel terrible, because he wants to run. So would this egghead brother up here, a neighbor of ours, a nice chap incidentally, brilliant. But he wants to run, and they all want to run. The coming of Jesus to the world would embarrass us.
And if you’d go to the United Nations and say, gentlemen, you’ve been at it here now for nearly twelve years, and you’ve done nothing but fight. And the language that’s come off of your debating floor, your parliamentary floor, has been more vicious and abusive and scurrilous than you could hear in a bar room. Give it up. Give it up. Jesus is coming. They’d lead you out. Nobody would believe it.
So, my friends, as long as we think we can get along, the Lord will let us get along. Just as long as the Church thinks she can get along, He’ll let her get along. That’s why I’m afraid of the churches that have so much money, and I’m afraid of the churches whose ministry is so well educated.
And I’m afraid of all these new mule barns that we’re putting up and calling them modern buildings. I’m afraid of all our crammed schools and our packed seminaries and our boys trained in psychiatry and other witchcraft. I’m afraid of all this because it means we’re a rich church, and a rich church doesn’t send for God. Methodology–we’re learning how to do things.
Grandmother used to go out and whip up something, bake it, and now it’s called methodology. Will you tell us how you do this? What is the motivation back of it? Well, she said, my family is hungry. But you can’t talk like that now. It’s all in the language of silly psychology.
So as long as the world can get along, and as long as the Church can get along, just as long as we think we’re going someplace. I’ve been running around telling people now for 20 years that evangelical Christianity is rotten from the ground up.
We’ve lost the power to worship. We’ve lost our separation. We’ve lost our sense of the presence of God. We’ve lost our yearning after holiness. We have lost our humility. We’ve lost our meekness. We’ve lost our saintliness. All we have is methods and big buildings and personalities.
I’ve been trying to tell people that, but they don’t want to listen. They send for me to come and tell them, and then they shake my hand, pat my shoulder, and say, that was wonderful, and then go back into conference and vote against everything I told them.
You know that, Bill? They do that. I could make money. I could really make money. I could make money going around conferences, preaching to preachers, constantly writing letters saying, I can’t come. They want me to come and tell them what they don’t believe and won’t accept. The evangelical Church can get along without God a while longer, and God’s just going to let her get along. But when the terror comes and the cruel oppressor reduces the world to rubble, then He’ll come down.
But you say, where is the Church in the meantime? Well, when I was growing up as a young man and preaching, we had what we called pre-tribulation theory of the coming of Christ. That meant this. It meant that there was going to be a seven-year period of tribulation which would be this reducing that I’m talking about. All prophetic believers teach this, only I’m calling it by another name. You didn’t recognize it. But that’s the tribulation.
But that just before that tribulation begins, Christ is coming and taking away all of his redeemed ones away from him. And only the unredeemed are going to be here to go through the tribulation. I’ve always believed that, and I hope it’s true, and I want to believe it still, and I’m not teaching the contrary.
But it’s a significant thing that in recent times there have been some very serious re-thinkings of this. The first time that anybody said anything to me about it was Dr. Torrey’s daughter. We were sitting together at a breakfast. I was preaching and she was there for some reason or other, I don’t remember what. Didn’t she used to teach at Wheaton? I think she was teaching at Wheaton at the time.
And we just dropped into the, she’s old and retired now, but we sat down at the breakfast table together and we began to talk, and she began to ask me questions. And she said, what do I think about it?
Well, it never occurred to me. I had been taught, you know, all my life that I didn’t have to worry about the tribulation. The Antichrist would never appear until Jesus was taking His people away. And she said, I wonder if we can prove that in Scripture.
And she went to the Word of God and jarred me terribly. I don’t know what she believes now, but I do know this, that among the fundamentalists and evangelicals everywhere, there is a strong rising of the belief that the church is going to see some of the tribulation. That’s called the post-tribulation theory. You know, if they don’t want people to know what they mean, they put words on it like pre-tribulation and post-tribulation.
Well, pre-tribulation means that you don’t have to worry. Go ahead, make your money, have your fun, fool around, live as you please, stay home as much as you want to, you’re born again, it’s all right, you got eternal life, you can’t lose it. Everything’s okay, and when the Lord will see to it that you never get into the tribulation, He’ll zip you away like a flash of light, and only the poor modernists will be down here to go through the tribulation, and the Jews.
Brothers and sisters, maybe that’s true, but you know I have a passage of Scripture that bothers me an awful lot. Take heed to yourselves, lest at any time your hearts be overcharged with surfeiting, and drunkenness, and the cares of this life, and so that day come upon you unawares. For as a snare shall it come on all them that dwell on the face of the whole earth, watch ye therefore and pray always that ye may be accounted worthy to escape all these things that shall come to pass, and to stand before the Son of Man. Pray earnestly that you might be counted worthy to escape these things and to stand before the Son of Man.
But the doctrine that I can live like the devil, and yet I’ll be taken away from the tribulation, I cannot accept.
One man said, Won’t it be a great day when the saloon, the roofs of the saloons will have holes in them, where the Saints of God went zipping through? Yeah, one man preached that. He actually did. I could tell you his name, but I’m nice. I wouldn’t do it.
He went further than that. He said some things about halfway houses and harlotry and how the Saints of God would suddenly disappear from those places. I consider that as great a heresy as Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Oh Brethren, I hope that God’s dear Church will be saved from the mowing. I hope she’ll be saved from the tribulation, and she can be if she will. For he says, pray always that ye may escape these things and stand before the Son of Man.
But I ask you now, do you actually think that the Church of Christ deserves to escape the tribulation days, or do we deserve a good trimming? Personally, I think we deserve at least a little bit of fire. I think we have it coming.
We’ve fought and we’ve been evil and we’ve lived without God. And Fundamentalism has said goodbye to the Holy Ghost and denied that he can fill men and tried to prove that he can’t. We’ve linked up with Hollywood and Broadway and big business and we’ve imitated the world, and we’ve been making ourselves over in the image of Adam all we can, and then comforting ourselves by saying, why, it’s all right. We’ll be taken away before the tribulation.
I think that’s carnality on the loose, my brother. I can only say to you, let us pray that we may be right. We may not go down under surfeiting and drunkenness and the cares of this life, so that the coming of Jesus may come upon us unawares.
But you know, I want to press this thought yet and close, that our help is coming down. After all, our hope must come down.
People say, let’s raise something. There’s hardly a church anywhere but raising something. Have you noticed that? They’re raising something. You know, the Bible says help will come down. There’s hardly a church anywhere but building something or organizing something. And you’ve got it to do, I suppose, a certain amount of it.
But I’ve got a conviction that if we knew more about God and we would put away some of our ancient, worldly traditions and would try to live like Bakht Singh and his crowd and pray through on things instead of trying to organize them, I believe we’d get further.
But God will send help down to a distraught, blood-drenched, grieving world. When Israel had been for four hundred years in bondage and now, she was at the peak of her suffering, God said to Moses, I have seen and I have heard and I am come down and I will deliver. They cried unto Him in their pain, and He heard, and they cried unto Him in their sorrow and He saw. And He sent Moses to deliver them.
If we would call unto Jesus, if the Church would call unto Jesus instead of organizing something or trying to raise something, if we would pray even so, come Lord Jesus, come, come quickly, I believe we’d get further and do more toward bringing to pass and fulfilling the Scriptures than we will by trying man’s methods.
I want you to meet me Wednesday night in that old building. We’re going to go over there where we can be close to each other and spend an hour and a half in prayer, asking God that He might do an unusual thing for us in these coming days.
Well, we needn’t run the hazard. Don’t go out now and give me a black mark and say, Tozer doesn’t believe in the pre-tribulation theory of prophecy. Yes, I think I do. Maybe it’s just downright cowardice that makes me want to believe it, because I don’t want to face up to the Antichrist.
But I think that if you would press me, I’d have to tell you this. I don’t think the Church will go through the tribulation, but I think she’ll enter into it. She won’t go through the final sorrows, but she will suffer the beginning of sorrows. The Church of the living God will know something of the anguish of the beginning of sorrows, the first terrible pains of the rebirth of a world. But the Lord will come and take her away, so she won’t have to go through it all.
So, there’s a compromise, if you please, between the post and the pre. Maybe they’re both wrong. Maybe God will have to do something to us we don’t yet know about, to prepare us for the hour when He comes again for His people.
But anyway, the King has come, and the King will settle all this problem of some having too much and others not having enough. He’ll settle this problem of trouble between unions and men who own factories, labor and capital. He’ll settle the problems, He’ll settle them all, and He’ll settle them not by sitting around the table and discussing it. He’ll settle it by sweeping the whole mess out and establishing His own kingdom and shall rule from the river to the ends of the earth. And His name shall endure forever, and His name shall be continued as long as the sun and men shall bless Him, be blessed in Him, and all nations shall call Him blessed, blessed be the Lord God of Israel, who only doeth wonders things. Amen and Amen. Let us stand.