Pastor David B. Curtis
Pastor David B. Curtis
"The common translation 'the end of the world' has been a delusion to many readers of the English Bible, and this could hardly have been otherwise. But it is very strange that so many learned writers, who have property translated and explained the consummation of the age, should have paid so little regard to the question, What age is intended? They generally assume without question that the Gospel or Messianic age is meant. But, according to the whole trend of Gospel teaching, that age had not come when Jesus uttered this prophecy. It was only 'near' or 'at hand.' Now the uniform teaching of the
New Testament is that Christ's whole ministry fell in the end of the days, or last days of an age,. But surely it was not in the end of the Messianic age; that age still stretches on into the indefinite future. It was toward the close of the Mosaic, Jewish or pre-Messianic eon, and near the beginning of the Christian eon, that God brought life and immortality to light by the Gospel revelation. If, now Christ and His apostles lived and labored near the close of an eon, it is obviously an error to represent them as living in an eon which had not yet fully opened in their day, and which they spoke of as about to come.
"Here, then, arises a most important question in this discussion; namely: What was the. end of the age of which Jesus spoke ? The age itself was the pre-Messianic ; for the New Testament writers never represent themselves as in the first days, or the beginning of the age, but in its last days. At what point, then, are we to understand 'the end' ? Some have said ,at the crucifixion, when Jesus said, It is finished; others designate the resurrection of Jesus ; a few fix upon His ascension. But many teach that the day of Pentecost was the transition point where we must fix the end of the old dispensation and the beginning of the new. To all these theories alike there are two fatal objections. (1) That they are irreconcilable with the statement of Jesus that the Gospel must be first preached unto all the nations before the and. (2) That the apostles, long after the day of Pentecost, represent themselves living in the last days, and near the end of the age. It is a begging of the whole question, and a dogmatic assumption, to say as Stuart does that the 'last days ' in the New Testament denote the period of the Christian dispensation. Such a. misuse of the phrase has no warrant in the New Testament. The disciples recognised themselves its in the last times of an eon that was to be succeeded by the kingdom and glory of their Lord.. At what point, then, shall we understand the end? Was there any great crisis to mark such a, consummation or any notable sign by which the end of the pre-Messianic age might be known?
"Is it not strange that any careful student of our Lord's words should fail to understand His answer to this very question? The disciples asked, When shall it be? Jesus proceeded to foretell a variety of things which they would live to see. He also foretold the horrors of the siege of Jerusalem which we know to have been most accurately fulfilled; no prophecy of the downfall of the Jewish temple and metropolis could have been more explicit. But having told them of all these things, He added: 'When ye see these things coming to pass, know ye that it [or He] is nigh-at the door. Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass away until all these things be accomplished.' The ruin of the temple and its cultus was the great sign which marked the end of the pre-Messianic age."
Dr. M.S. Terry,
Methodist Review, 1887.
Sir Edwin Arnold on the Imperfection of Man's Ordinary Powers of Perception.
"The undeveloped cannot know the developed, though it may presage and expect it. Bisulphide of Carbon is aware of actinic rays invisible to us. Selenium swells to light which is not felt by our organization. A sensitised film at the end of the telescope photographs a million stars we did not see. The magnetic needle knows and obeys forces to which our most delicate nerves are absolutely dull.
"Birth gave to each of us much, death may give very much more, in the way of subtler senses to behold colours we cannot here see, to catch sounds we do not now hear, and to be aware of bodies and objects impalpable at present to us, but perfectly real, intelligibly constructed, and constituting an organised society and a governed, multiformed state. Where does nature show signs of breaking off her magic, that she should stop at the five organs and the sixty or seventy elements?
"As the babe's eyes opened from the darkness of maternal safeguard to strange sunlight on this globe, so may the eyes of the dead lift glad and surprised lids to 'a light that never was on sea or land'; and so may his delighted ears hear speech and music proper to the spheres beyond, while he smiles contentedly to find how touch and taste and smell had all been forecasts of faculties accurately following upon the lowly lessons of this earthly nursery.'
"Physical science is nothing more than the perceptions of our five bodily senses registered and methodised. But what are these five senses ? According to physical science itself, nerves in a certain stage of evolution. Why then should it be assumed that their account of the universe or of our relations to it is exhaustive and final ? Why should it be assumed that these are the only possible organs of perception, and that no other faculties or means of communication with the universe can ever in the course of evolution be developed in man ? Around us are animals absolutely unconscious, so far as we can discern, of that universe which science has revealed to us. A sea anemone, if it can reflect, probably feels as confident that it perceives everything capable of being perceived as the man of science. The reasonable supposition, surely, is that though science, so far as it goes, is real, and the guide of our present life, its relation to the sum of things is not much more considerable than that of the perceptions of the lower order of animals.
"We are enjoined, sometimes with a vehemence approaching that of ecclesiastical anathema to refuse to consider anything that lies beyond the range of experience. By experience is meant the perceptions of our bodily senses, the absolute completeness and finality of which, we must repeat, is an assumption, the warrant for which must at all events be produced from other authority than that of the senses themselves." DEATH-AND AFTERWARDS, pp. 31, 35, 37, 51. [The last two paragraphs are quotations from Prof. Goldwin. Smith's Lectures and Essays.]
On the phrase 'The Lord's Day.'
"After the fullest consideration of the remarkable expression in Rev. i. 10, we are satisfied that it cannot refer to the first day of the week, but that those interpreters are right who understand it to refer to the period called elsewhere 'the day of the Lord.' There is no example in the New Testament of the first day of the week [ Sunday] being called 'the Lord's day,' or 'the day of the Lord.' But the latter phrase is appropriated and restricted by usage to the great judical period which is constantly represented in Scripture as associated with the Parousia. Nothing could be more violent than to refer the one, phrase to one period or day, and the other to a totally different one. The phrase 'the day of the Lord' had a fixed and definite meaning in the apostolic churches. (See 1 Cor. i. 8; v. 5; 2 Cor. i. 14 ; 2 Thess. ii. 2; 2 Peter iii. 10.) On the score of the grammar we prefer the construction, 'I was in spirit in the day of the Lord.' That is to say, the Parousia, is the standpoint of the Seer in the Apocalypse : a fact which is amply borne out by the contents."
DR. STUART RUSSELL, The Parousia, p 372.
(See page xix of the Preface.)
The Fragmentary Character of History.
Very striking are the words which Goethe puts into the mouth of Faust on this Subject:
To us, my friend, the times that are gone by
Are a mysterious book, sealed with seven seals.
That which you call the spirit of ages past
Is but, in truth, the spirit of some few authors
In which those ages are beheld reflected,
With what distortion strange, Heaven only knows.
0h, often what a toilsome thing it is
This study of thine I At the first glance we fly it.
A mass of things confusedly heaped together;
A lumber-room of dusty documents,
Furnished with all-approved court-precedents,
And old, traditional maxims I History !
Facts dramatized, say rather-action-plot-
Sentiment-every thing the writer's own,
As best befits the web-work of his story;
With here and there a solitary fact
Of consequence, by those grave chroniclers.
Pointed with many a moral apoplathegm,
And wise old saws, learned at the puppet-shows."
-Faust (Anster's Translation).
And Mr. J. A. Froude has somewhere said, "It often seems to me as if History was like a child's box of letters with which we can spell any word we please. We have only to pick out such letters as we want, arrange them as we like, and say nothing about those which do not suit our purpose."
(See page 11.)
"The Kingdom of God."
The Power and Spiritual Kingship which come to us through absolute Self-Surrender to Christ and God
There are those to whom Jesus Christ is a great Teacher, a splendid Example, a kind Friend, and a merciful Saviour, but not quite their King-the Lord and Ruler of their lives-to whose authority and will they are prepared at all times to yield submission and obedience. He has a worthy place in their hearts, but their religion is as yet a poor, imperfect thing, because (after all) that place is not the supreme place which is His by divine right. In other words, they keep back something from Him. They love Him, not a little, it may be, but they love friends or home, money or ease, knowledge or fame, music or art, yet more. And unknown, perhaps, to themselves, this is a continual source of secret weakness and misery to them. "The Holy Spirit," in the full New Testament sense of the words-that Spirit who brings into human nature the very life of God Himself-has not yet been given them, because Jesus has not yet been glorified in their experience (John vii. 39). But a perfect surrender to Christ and God is always followed by a wonderful accession of spiritual strength to the man who makes it. He gains new power with God in prayer, new power for enduring pain and conquering adverse circumstances and ruling his own earthly nature, and he gains a vastly increased influence for good over others. The Kingdom of God means pre-eminence in goodness and usefulness, and by the act of faith and Selfsacrifice by which we make Christ in very deed the Lord and Ruler of our lives we even here and now enter that Kingdom and become kings along with Him.
(See page 165.)
Prayer and the Holy Spirit.
The prayers of a man who is filled with the Holy Spirit cannot possibly fail. For his will necessarily moves along the same lines as the divine, almighty will.