LUKE xxi. 27.
“Then shall ye see the Son of man coming in a cloud, with
power and great glory.”
THROUGHOUT the most solemn and prophetic series of pre-
dictions in this chapter, Christ is speaking of two distinct
events so simultaneously that it is, at times, difficult to say
of which He is speaking. Undoubtedly the destruction of
Jerusalem was a true shadow of the great day of judgment,
and our Lord’s thought appears now to have passed from
the nearer judgment upon Jerusalem to a more awful judg-
ment. It is difficult for us to realize that this judgment
will certainly take place. The imagination finds it hard to
picture to itself this tremendous collapse—this overwhelm-
ing conclusion of all that we see and are most conversant
with. The date of this judgment is in the hands of God.
It is one of those times and seasons which He has put in
His own power, and it cannot be conjectured by us without
risk of folly and disappointment. With God “one day is
as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” If
He seems to delay it is in His mercy, not in His forgetful-
ness, still less in His impotence. He is not willing that
any should perish.
The last judgment will come home to every one of us as
closely as anything possibly can. We shall all see Jesus
Christ in His true majesty and glory. We shall all see
ourselves as we truly are. The day for disguises and half
truths will be past. The ambitions, titles, stations,
positions, will be nothing to us then.
In presence of the last realities we are all of us alike on
an absolute level. Let us learn that all that belongs merely
to the things of time, and all that does not lead to God or
come from God, is but a surface incident in the history of
existence—is nothing.
Henry Parry Liddon, D.C.L.