by T. Austin-Sparks
Chapter 8 - The Coming Again Of The Lord Jesus
So we come to the last note of the octave of redemption:
The Coming Again of the Lord Jesus. No attempt has been
made to give a comprehensive presentation of any one of
these aspects of redemption, but only to provide, if
possible, a concise answer to the question asked about
every one of them: Why this...? Why that...? That is
particularly true of this last aspect. I shall not
attempt for a moment to cover all the ground of the
Lord’s second coming.
Why, then, the Coming Again of the Lord Jesus? The coming
of the Lord is most commonly thought of as an event;
something that is going to happen at a given time, as an
item in a programme; just an event that will one day take
place. Of course, so far as it goes, that is true; but it
is quite important that we should know why it
should take place—why He will come again.
Let us be clear that God could effect almost all the
things associated with Christ’s coming without
His actual coming. For instance, if it is a matter of
taking Christians to Heaven, He could do that without
Christ coming to fetch us; and there are many other
things like that that God could do directly and quite
independently. But the Scriptures show us that they are
all bound up with and centred in the personal coming
of Christ, and it is that fact which gives point to the
question. Why should it be like that? Why should it be a
matter of Christ coming back again?
The Consummation of Redemption
The answer is really found in all that we have been
saying in the foregoing studies. The coming again of the
Lord is just His own consummation of all that. To the
apostles, He said, as He went from them: “I am with
you... unto the consummation of the age” (Matt.
28:20). ‘I am with you until the summing up of the
age’: that is the meaning of the words. Then what is
it, in this age, that will be summed up at the end? It
will be all that we have been saying about Him in these
pages. Let us very hurriedly pass our eye over it, in
order to see the summation in His coming.
The first and the final coming are clearly united in
purpose and realization. The first stage of redemption
with which we were occupied was the Incarnation of
God’s Son—His coming in man-form into this
world; and we indicated that in that Incarnation there
were three purposes. One, the redemption of man by Man.
By man sin came: by Man sin must go. By man came the
consequences: by Man those consequences must be destroyed
and put away. This is the whole point of His becoming
Man. Two, the redemption of man: the re-constituting of
man, to make him the kind of man that God intended, but
which he had so grievously ceased to be. Three, the
perfecting of man for glory. Those were the three things
bound up with His coming in man-form in the first
instance.
The second phase was His earthly life. We summed this up
by saying that, being here from birth and infancy, to
full, mature manhood, through every trial and testing and
fiery ordeal, right up to the last moment on the Cross
when the fires were heated seven times, He presented to
God a body without a mark of sin, or failure, or
breakdown. “A body didst thou prepare for Me”,
He said (Heb. 10:5); and, having passed through every
possible kind of trial, He presented it back to God,
without any taint, without any loss of spiritual
character. He presented it back to God, a whole
burnt-offering (Heb. 9:14), acceptable, well-pleasing to
God. He represented the Man that God is after, from
beginning to end living a life that was absolutely
triumphant over all that which humanity has to meet; and
thus He became the pattern Man according to God’s
heart, the Man that God is after and is going to have.
“The Earth Is The Lord’s”
There was something of very great meaning in the Son
of God, as Son of Man, putting His feet upon this earth.
In an earlier study, we quoted the 24th Psalm. You notice
that it begins with: “The earth is the Lord’s,
and the fulness thereof”. That is the beginning of
the first stanza. The second stanza begins (v. 3):
“Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord?”
and the answer comes: “He that hath clean hands, and
a pure heart; Who hath not lifted up His soul unto
vanity, and hath not sworn deceitfully.” He—He
is the One! Then the third stanza (v. 7): “Lift up
your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lifted up, ye
everlasting doors: and the King of glory shall come
in” (A.S.V.) Do you see the movement? The earth is
the Lord’s: and He has put His feet on the earth, He
has actually stood on this earth. He has lived His life
here without defiled hands or heart, and therefore He,
and He alone, is the One Who is fit to ascend into the
hill of the Lord. Because He has come here and so lived
and so triumphed, the everlasting doors are flung open:
He can enter in.
Now the point is this. The earth is the Lord’s, and
He has put His feet down on this earth, and has said:
‘This earth belongs to this kind of Man, and Heaven
will attest it!’ That is the meaning of the 24th
Psalm. And that is why, when He had lived the life,
gained the victory, and risen triumphant, He said to His
disciples: ‘Go into all the world: go and put your
feet down in all the earth, and claim it. It is My
inheritance, by right of creation, by right of
redemption. You go and put your feet on it: it belongs to
Me. That is all in the course of redemption.’
The Cross was the making effective of that redemption
that was the purpose of the Incarnation— making
effective the redemption of that earth upon which He put
His feet and lived His triumphant life. By His Cross He
took the earth out of the hands of the prince of this
world, and took it back into His own rightful possession.
“Now”, said He, “shall the prince of this
world be cast out” (John 12:31).
In the Resurrection He is in possession of that, and for
forty days He is establishing the great fact that He is
alive. He is alive! He “became dead”:
He is “alive for evermore”: He has “the
keys of death and of Hades” (Rev. 1:18): and He is
establishing that in the nucleus of His Church, in their
very being, for all time.
And then He goes to glory in their presence: and the
whole thing—the Incarnation with its meaning, the
life with its glorious triumph, the Cross with its
wonderful destruction of the work of the Devil—the
whole thing is taken and put beyond the reach of anything
here, men or devil, to touch it or alter it. It is put in
Heaven. You remember what He Himself says to us about
Heaven: “where neither moth nor rust doth consume,
and where thieves do not break through nor steal”
(Matt. 6:20). It is beyond. “Your life is hid with
Christ in God” (Col. 3:3). It is up there; nothing
here can interfere with it. That is the Ascension.
The Spirit came as the Spirit of the glorified Christ in
Heaven, sent forth to bring—potentially—all
those values from Heaven to earth; to take up the work of
making them good in believers for this dispensation.
The Church was born as the vessel, the “one new
man”. Let us be careful, in this connection, that we
do not speak of the Church as being Christ incarnate
again. The Spirit came to indwell the Church: to make the
Church, as the Body of Christ, His counterpart, for
expressing all the work that He Himself had done and
taken to glory.
The Second Coming
At last He is coming again! Why? To finish it all! To complete the redemption of man! To complete all that He came to do the first time, in every realm. The eighth chapter of the letter to the Romans deals with this consummation of redemption in two respects.
First, the manifestation, the revealing, of the sons
of God (Rom. 8:19). They have been secret, they have been
hidden; only among the Persons of the Godhead is it known
who are Christ’s; but they are going to be revealed,
disclosed. That is the consummation of redemption: the
bringing out and manifesting of the sons of God; making
them known, displaying them in glory. I always think that
that is a very wonderful word of the Apostle Paul to the
Thessalonians on this very point: “When He shall
come to be glorified in His saints, and to be marvelled
at in all them that believed...” (2 Thess. 1:10).
There is the completion of the purpose of the
Incarnation: redemption, reconstitution, perfecting,
glorifying, all brought to fulness in His coming.
“Marvelled at in all them that believed”: that
phrase always fascinates me. What does it mean? Surely,
that all onlookers, all intelligences looking on, as they
look at the saints, will say: ‘Look at them!
Isn’t He marvellous?!’ “Marvelled
at in all them that believe”, “when He shall
come”. It is the consummation of the work and
purpose of the Incarnation, and the consummation in
believers of the whole meaning of His earthly life.
But then Romans 8 touches the other aspect of redemption.
‘The whole creation’, we are told, is waiting
for this “revealing of the sons of God”, and
‘groaning and travailing in pain together’ as
it does so (v. 19,22). “The creation itself”,
says the Apostle, “shall be delivered...” (v.
21). He put His feet upon the earth and said: ‘It is
Mine’. He has come to this earth, lived on it and
triumphed on it, and won the victory for it and over it;
and now at His coming it is redeemed, as the consummation
of redemption. “The creation itself” is
“delivered from the bondage of corruption”. But
it is not only the creation that is to be delivered. Our
bodies are to come into the benefit of this
consummation of redemption. “We ourselves groan
within ourselves, waiting for... the redemption of our
body” (v. 23). The physical bodies of believers are
to be “delivered from the bondage of
corruption”.
All this is what He came to do. All that He wrought in
Himself, all that was true of Him, He is now making good
in believers. I know that these words apply primarily to
His Deity, yet there is a secondary application of them:
“It was not possible that He should be holden”
of death (Acts 2:24); “Thou wilt not give Thy Holy
One to see corruption” (v. 27). Because He was the
Holy One, it was not possible that He should be held and
kept down by death, for that is the penalty of sin. As I
say, primarily that relates to Him as the Divine Son of
God, incorruptible and sinless; but now He delivers
believers from sin and corruption, and therefore from
death, and makes good in them the thing that was true in
Himself. He is not making them into Deity, but through
grace He is conferring upon them all the values of His
own triumph. And that includes physical redemption.
Do you see why the coming again? to make good all that He
came for and all that He did at His first coming. And
that is not all. In the Cross, while He was there dealing
with the whole sin question—and in Himself He dealt
with it fully and finally—He was, even more than
that, dealing with the whole Satan question. We have
sought to emphasize the fact that the real battle of the
Cross was in that cosmic realm of principalities and
powers. That is where the real battle went on; and it was
a terrific battle, with every evil, sinister, dark thing
of the kingdom of Satan. And it was there that the full
triumph of the Lord Jesus was won. His coming again is to
make that triumph absolute, final; to bring the Church
into the good of His triumph.
We are in the battle; and it is very true that, the more
you stand on the ground of Calvary, of the Cross, the
fiercer the battle becomes. Satan hates that Cross. If
you really stand in spirit on the ground of the Cross,
you are in for a battle: he will do anything to move you
off that ground. The Lord Jesus will come back just to
finish off that whole conflict for the Church as He did
it in Himself—or perhaps we should say to
finish it in the Church as He did it for the
Church. When He comes, that will wind up, once and for
all, the reign of Satan, the kingdom of darkness. That is
why He is coming.
“The Coming Of The Son Of Man”
Let me just emphasize one point again: it is the
“coming of the Son of Man” (Matt.
24:27,37,39). That is how He put it: “the coming of
the Son of Man”. I am sorry that Sankey
changed those words in that hymn of his that we sometimes
sing:
‘Oh, wondrous day! oh, glorious morning,
When the Son of God shall come’.
The Lord speaks, and the Scriptures speak, of the coming
of the Son of Man, not of the Son of God. It is
true, it is the Son of God Who is coming; but you
understand the very real point here. It was Man for man,
as Man, all the way through; and it will be that at the
end. The Incarnation has no significance, if it is not
Man for man. The earthly life has no meaning if it is not
Man for man. The Cross has no meaning if it is not Man
for man. The same of the resurrection, the same of the
ascension and enthronement: it is the Man in the glory.
“We behold... Jesus”—Jesus, that
is His human title— “crowned with glory and
honour” (Heb. 2:9). It is Man for man in Heaven. The
Church is the birth of the “one new man” by the
“Holy Spirit sent forth from heaven” (1 Pet.
1:12b). And the coming again is Man for man: it is Man
consummating this whole thing in relation to man, and man
entering into his inheritance in Christ. All this
marvellous thing is for man—for you and for me! He
is coming as the Son of Man.
There are immense things bound up with that title. It
denotes relationship to the human race: all His work for
the human race, and His representation of the human race
in Heaven. The present appeal is to men, on the basis of
all that. Oh, what a caricature of it all has come about
with ‘Christmas’! Think of it in the light of
what we have said about the Incarnation, the redemption,
the re-constituting and the glorifying of man: where does
that come in, in the common Christmas of our time? The
Devil has just switched the whole thing over, and made it
a contradiction of its real meaning. He has used it as a
means to draw out that other man, the old man, into
glutting himself for his own gratification. And so in
everything else—the thing has been given a wrong
turn. In the coming of the Lord Jesus that will all be
put right.
But, in the meantime, His appeal to us—to
man—is on the ground of this, that He came for our
redemption. He came to make us different, to reconstitute
us: He came to perfect us after His own image: He came to
glorify us. He has shown in His own life here that it can
be done. It has been done in a Man. It can be
done, for He has done it. We are told: “To this end
was the Son of God manifested, that He might destroy the
works of the devil” (1 John 3:8b). He came to
destroy the works of the Devil, and He has done it in His
Cross. He is appealing to us on a very, very large
ground. This is all redemption: redemption is a
tremendous thing. We have a great redemption, because we
have a Great Redeemer. We have been thinking of the time
when He is coming to put the last great touches to it
all, to give the final touch to this whole wonderful
redemption—of man, of the earth, of the whole
creation: “when He shall come to be glorified in
His saints” (2 Thess. 1:10).
I believe I speak for more than myself, when I say that
there seems to be something in the air that says His
coming must be near. We seem to feel that it cannot be
far off. As the Lord’s children, we “groan
within ourselves” more than ever; and there is an
increasing groan in the whole creation. The travail in
this creation is becoming almost unbearable. This earth
needs redeeming; God only knows what will happen to it,
if it is not redeemed. But however that may be, there is
something in the spirit of the true child of God which
says that His coming is drawing nigh. It is the only
hope—there is no hope in any other direction.
Everybody recognizes that, saved and unsaved alike.
Unless God Almighty intervenes, there is no hope for this
world.
Ah, but He is going to intervene! He is going to
intervene in His Son, and there is the hope. And so the
Apostle speaks of that “blessed hope”—the
“appearing of the glory of our... Saviour Jesus
Christ” (Tit. 2:13). May the Lord fill us with new
joy in the very contemplation of His near coming, to
complete all that which He has begun.
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