vividly before our minds, than it was before theirs. But it is no reason why it should have dropped out altogether; none, why we should almost universally neglect the revelations of Scripture respecting the manner and details of His coming, and confuse them altogether in a vague popular idea of the judgment day; none, why we should forget the mention of the landmarks which He Himself has pointed out along the wilderness journey of His Church,—and so, as far as in us lies, provide for her being unprepared when He appears.

The end of the state of waiting of the blessed dead, the end of our present state of waiting will be, that day of His appearing. Let us fix this well in our minds; and do not let us be kept from doing so by being told that there is danger in allowing the fancy to exercise itself on the unfulfilled prophecies. No doubt there is. But I am not exhorting you to exercise your fancy on them. Faith and fancy are two wholly distinct things. To my mind, there can be hardly anything more detrimental to the faith of the Church, than always to be fitting together history and prophecy, magnifying insignificant present or past events into fulfilments of prophetic announcements. They who do this are for ever being refuted by the course of things; and then they shift their ground, and come out as confidently with a new scheme, as they did before with their old one. Nothing can more tend to throw discredit on God’s prophetic word altogether; and it is no doubt in part owing to such speculations, that faith in the Lord’s coming has become weakened among us. He Himself has told us the great use of His announcements of the future. “These things have I told you, that, when the time is come, ye may remember that I told you of them.” When and as each prophecy comes to its time to be fulfilled, just as the years of the captivity predicted by Jeremiah were interpreted by the Church in Babylon, so the Lord’s predictions, and the predictions of His apostles, will fall each into its place; and the Church, if she endure in faith and watchfulness, will stand on her look-out, and be prepared for the sign of His coming.

Let us, my brethren, with regard to those who have left us in the Lord,—let us, with regard to ourselves and our own future, be ever looking for and hasting to that day of God; the day when that better thing which God hath provided for us shall be manifested, and they with us shall be complete, who without us were not perfect.

And let us not be discouraged by unpromising signs, or by prevalent unbelief. Remember what our Master has said to us in the services of this day, “Heaven and earth shall pass away; but My words shall not pass away.”

III.

We have traced the condition of the blessed dead, from their departure and being with Christ, to the glorious day of the resurrection. Their spirits are safe in His keeping, till that day when He shall call their bodies out of the graves, and they shall be once more complete in manhood, body, soul, and spirit. And our present consideration is, What, on that resurrection, is the next thing which shall befall them? Now the best, because the most general text on this matter, is that in Heb. ix. 27, “It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this, the judgment.”

You will see that here is enounced something common to our nature. We are all to die; we are all to be judged after death. And that this is really true of all, and not merely stated generally, to be met afterwards by special exceptions, St. Paul shows, when he, speaking of things belonging entirely to his own practice, and his own justification before God, says, in 1 Cor. v., “We labour, that whether present in the body or absent from the body, we may be accepted with Him. For we must all be made manifest (there is nothing about standing in the original) before the judgment seat of Christ, that every one may receive the things done in his body, according to that which he did, whether it be good or bad.” You will see that here he expressly includes himself among those who are to be made manifest before the judgment seat of Christ.

Now perhaps you are wondering why I am accumulating this Scripture evidence to show a matter which seems to all so plain. But I have a sufficient reason. And that reason is, because in other passages of Scripture the blessed dead, or rather the believers in Christ, whether living or dead at that day, are spoken of as if they were not subjected to the general judgment of all, but passed into the glorious life without undergoing that judgment. Thus our Blessed Lord Himself; in John v. 24, says, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth My word, and believeth on Him that sent Me, hath eternal life, and cometh not into judgment” (for that, and not “condemnation,” is the word used by our Lord),—“cometh not into judgment, but hath passed out of death into life.” That would seem to mean that the faithful man has already passed over out of death, and all that belongs to death, sin, and guilt, and judgment, into life; and therefore when the judgment comes he can have no part in it, cannot come into it at all, because he is acquitted already through the faith in Him who bore his guilt and took away his sin. And similarly, again, a few verses further on, ver. 29, our Lord says, “An hour cometh in which all that are in the graves shall hear the voice of the Son of man, and shall come forth: they that have done good unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil unto the resurrection of judgment.” That is, I suppose, the one shall rise into eternal life,—into the full bliss of the heavenly state, and the others into the condition, whatever it be, which the judgment shall decide. Of course I am fully aware that I have not quoted these texts as they are read in our English Bibles. The matter stands thus: the word which I have rendered “judgment” is the word always meaning judgment—the word occurring in the very next verse where our Lord says, “As I hear, I judge, and My judgment is just;” the word used also above in ver. 22, where He says, “The Father committed all judgment unto the Son.” In those two places, because there was no difficulty, our translators kept the word “judgment.” But in these other two which I have quoted, because there was an apparent difficulty, they changed “judgment” in one verse into “condemnation,” and in the other into “damnation,” without any reason or right soever. Indeed, in the latter of the two passages, not only is this so, but the whole sense is broken up by their unfaithfulness. Our Lord having mentioned the resurrection of judgment, proceeds to vindicate the justice of that judgment: “As I hear, I judge: and My judgment is just, because I seek not Mine own will, but the will of Him that sent Me.” So that the difficulty, which man’s meddling with the Bible has tried to remove, does exist in the Bible as it came from God. And we must try to see through it, not to hush it up by being unfaithful to the plain language of our Lord.

Nor does it exist here only. Our Lord Himself has given us one great description of the final day of judgment, in His own discourses; and another by the pen of His beloved apostle. We will take the latter first, as being, for our present purpose, the fuller of the two: and we will show in what remarkable point the two agree. In Rev. xx. 4, a passage to which we made reference last Sunday, we find the first resurrection taking place, and the faithful dead rising to reign with Christ during a period known as a thousand years. And it is expressly said, “The rest of the dead lived not till the thousand years were finished.” Now, I am not here taking upon me to explain the meaning of this, but merely to insist on the fact