Matthew 28:2.
A GREAT many people are thinking and speaking just now about the terrible earthquakes that have taken place within the last few months in various places, and Christians are wondering if they are those which the Lord Jesus foretold in Matthew 24:7 and two other gospels; and if they are a presage of His near coming again and “the beginning of sorrows” spoken of in verse 8 of the same chapter. And though the truest and highest incentive for the believer who is expecting his absent Lord should be, and will be, affection for Him, there can be no doubt that God in His government is speaking loudly, and in a very unmistakable way, in these things, which may be the shadow of His coming “judgments in the earth,” of which Isaiah writes (chap. 26:9), when the sinner who has despised grace will have to learn “righteousness.”
And it will indeed be an awful time for this world, and for the vast multitude professing Christ without life in Christ, when that moment comes of which Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15, “in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.” That “moment” which will bring eternal joys with Christ to those who are “ready,” and eternal misery to those who are not. Have you ever seriously thought of it, dear reader? How gracious of the blessed God to give you this solemn warning: not only “in a moment,” but, lest you should feel led to think “I shall have one moment to repent,” He adds “in the twinkling of an eye”—words which leave no thought of time at all. In “the twinkling of an eye” the door will be shut, and on which side of it will my reader be?
But the earthquake I am writing about took place some 2000 years ago, and told of life and not of death, of a risen Saviour and a life on the other side of death, because He had broken its power forever in His glorious victory over it. There had been darkness over the whole earth for three hours; even the sun was darkened, and well might it be, for the Son of God was dying, and dying for sinners. But He could not be holden of death. He held in His own hands the power of life and death. He had said, “I lay down My life that I might take it again” (John 10:17). And when He had accomplished everything that had been written of Him, even to the drinking of the vinegar (John 19:30), His words came true, as they must, and He bowed His head and yielded up His spirit to God, having uttered loudly those blessed words “It is finished”—words which tell not only of the sins of every believer put away forever, but of the accomplishment of every purpose of God, even to the bringing in of “a new heaven and a new earth,” where neither sin nor death will find a place, for God will dwell there.
And that great and glorious earthquake had already told that His grave was empty, and that the Son of God had come out of it in the power of an endless life, for death was forever conquered. It was not for Him that the sepulcher was opened. The great stone that closed it had been rolled away by the angel that others might see that Jesus was not there; the answer to the question the angels asked of those who had entered into the sepulcher: “Why seek ye the living One among the dead?”
The death-roll of the earthquakes we read of now is a heavy one indeed—many thousands hurried in a moment into eternity—and who shall say when or where the next will be? But in the earthquake that told of a risen Christ there was no death recorded at all, for it told of death conquered forever. Thank God for that earthquake indeed!
Dear reader, where are you in the light of these things? Perhaps you will say, “Oh, there will be no earthquake where I am.” Perhaps not, but there may be, and you cannot limit God; and if not, death equally sudden and unexpected may come in some other way. Men are saying “Peace and safety”; and it is then, we are told (1 Thess. 5:3), that “sudden destruction cometh upon them... and they shall not escape.” “Choose you this day,” Joshua said to Israel. “Choose you this day,” God says to you in grace; tomorrow it may be too late. “Today is the day of salvation.” A. P. G.
The End Coming. —The days speed away apace: each one bears away its own burden with it, to return no more. Both pleasures and pains that are past are gone forever. What is yet future will likewise be soon past. The end is coming. O, to realize the thought, and to judge of things now in some measure suitably to the judgment we shall form of them when we are about to leave them all! Many things which now either elate or depress us will then appear to be light as air. J. N.