Original hymn by Charles Wesley.

Now redemption, long expected,
See in solemn pomp appear;
All His saints, by man rejected,
Now shall meet Him in the air:
Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!
See the day of God appear!

Redemption in the sense that this verse employs refers to the resurrection of the dead and transformation of the living saints at Christ’s coming. They will receive bodies like Christ’s own resurrection body; these will be glorious, not subject to decay and capable of things our earthly bodies cannot do of themselves. Christ comes with a triumphal procession worthy of His standing as God, Saviour, and King. He possesses His own objective glory, which can overawe the impenitent, but those who love Him render glory to Him of their own volition as a sign of their recognition of who He is and what He has done. The followers of Christ in this age are largely the “little people” of this world, twice rejected: rejected because they are not glorious by the world’s standards, rejected because they have dared to swear allegiance to Christ in defiance of the Devil, the Dark Powers, and human sin. Those who love Him will be gathered by His angels to greet Him in the air, just as conquerors were greeted by those loyal to them outside the city they were about to enter. For those who love Christ, who love righteousness, His return will be a day of joy.

Answer Thine own bride and Spirit,
Hasten, Lord, the general doom!
The new Heav’n and earth t’inherit,
Take Thy pining exiles home:
All creation, all creation, all creation,
Travails! groans! and bids Thee come!

The Bride is the body of human believers in Christ. This is a development of the prophetic metaphor applied to Israel in the Old Testament, viz. the Wife of YHWH. The idea behind this metaphor is that we are to be completely loyal to our Lord. In other words, we must not have dealings with other spiritual forces by taking part in other religions, be it mixing them with Christianity or leaving Christianity altogether (apostasy). The “adultery” referred to by the prophets was the worship of other gods, such as Baal. Those who love the Lord long for Him to finally take the earth, to renew it, cleansing it of physical, spiritual, and moral evil. It is iniquitous for good people to be forever subject to evil laws and evil rulers. When Christ returns to rule from Jerusalem and inherit the earth, He will do away with such things, that the righteous may dwell on earth in peace and prosperity. Until that day we are exiles, sojourners on this earth, not at home with evil rule and evil culture.

The dear tokens of His passion
Still His dazzling body bears;
Cause of endless exultation
To His ransomed worshippers;
With what rapture, with what rapture, with what rapture
Gaze we on those glorious scars!

We love Christ because He first loved us. Contemplation of Christ’s incarnation, passion, and resurrection, should be at the heart of our relationship with Him. His scars show us His perfect righteousness and His perfect justice. That He eternally bears these wounds is a testament to the eternal and perfect nature of His love for us. He is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world (agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi). The term “rapture” here refers not to our greeting the Lord in the air, previously mentioned in this hymn, but to the joy, the euphoria, the ecstasy we shall have at seeing our Saviour and being struck by His beauty as we catch a glimpse of those scars. He has transformed the ugly into the beautiful; He has turned sinners into saints. Only with God is this possible.

Yea, Amen! let all adore Thee,
High on Thine eternal throne;
Savior, take the power and glory,
Claim the kingdom for Thine own;
O come quickly! O come quickly! O come quickly!
Everlasting God, come down!

Original hymn by Charles Wesley.

Lo! He comes with clouds descending,
Once for favored sinners slain;
Thousand thousand saints attending,
Swell the triumph of His train:
Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!
God appears on earth to reign.

Riding on the Clouds was a sign of divinity in Old Testament times. This verse draws on the descriptions of Jesus Christ’s return found in Daniel 7:13, Matthew 24:30, and Revelation 14:14. Christ is God the Son, the Cloud Rider. He will come again in glory, attended by angels, and greeted by His human saints when they have been raised from the dead. When Christ comes again, He will establish His rule on earth at Mount Zion. He will reign with His saints (Revelation 20:6), and the world will know justice. His human saints love Him, because He was slain for them. He willingly died for us to take away our sin and to bring us to God, granting believers an inheritance with Him in His Messianic kingdom.

Every eye shall now behold Him
Robed in dreadful majesty;
Those who set at naught and sold Him,
Pierced and nailed Him to the tree,
Deeply wailing, deeply wailing, deeply wailing,
Shall the true Messiah see.

There will be no ambiguity when the true Christ comes. In this present age there are imposters – but imposters can (and should) be doubted. Those who deny He is the true Christ will be in deep denial and without excuse. The unrepentant will mourn because they know their doom is at hand. Repenting Israel will mourn when their eyes are opened to who Christ is and they think upon all those years they have waited to see the Kingdom restored. All are guilty of His crucifixion, Gentile and Jew alike: all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23); Romans crucified Him on the urging of the Sanhedrin.

Every island, sea, and mountain,
Heav’n and earth, shall flee away;
All who hate Him must, confounded,
Hear the trump proclaim the day:
Come to judgment! Come to judgment! Come to judgment!
Come to judgment! Come away!

The world will not be the same when Christ returns. Scarred by wars and the judgment of God, there will be a great need for restoration. It will also be a time of reversals: “for the last shall be first, and the first last” (Luke 13:30). Individuals and nations that were honoured in this age may find themselves humbled, and the humble raised up to God’s council. Imagine a world where work is rewarded according to its true value as measured in the Kingdom, and not by the subjective selfish standards of our fallen nature. Those nations and individuals who resist righteousness will be chastised – but if they repent, they will be restored. No one will escape the justice of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?

-John 14:9, ESV

John’s Gospel tells us that Jesus is the Word, the Memra, the second Yahweh figure who was visible to the Israelites during the events of the Old Testament. This Gospel was incredibly important to me when I became a Christian, struggling with the question of who Jesus is. I walked something like the Romans Road to salvation, aware of my sin and my inability to meet the standard of righteousness required by God. The prevailing feeling at that time was fear. “Sinners in the hands of an angry God.”

Luke’s Gospel, which I was studying at the time in school as part of my Religious Studies course, emphasised Jesus as the Son of God. Little was provided to help us understand what that meant. I was also studying Latin and Ancient Greek at the time, so I had the Greco-Roman concepts attached to this phrase, but they seemed inappropriate to the monotheism of Judaism. Luke’s Gospel also impressed upon me the same sense of dread I was feeling in Romans, because it features the preaching of John the Baptist before the Temptation in the Wilderness and the beginning of the Galilean Ministry. John the Baptist struck me as a “fire and brimstone” sort of preacher – scary.

Then I turned to John’s Gospel, and found some of the confusion and fear I was experiencing lifted. John told me that Jesus is God. This answered the deep, searching question within me about who Jesus is. But it went further than that. John’s Gospel told me what God wanted of us in the simplest of terms: to be believe on Jesus Christ whom He has sent. Jesus promised never to turn away anyone who came to Him, and He promised that He would raise up on the last day all those who died believing in Him.

John’s Gospel allowed me to see God in Jesus, just as Paul calls Jesus “the image of the invisible God”. In Jesus I saw a God who cared about righteousness as I had seen in Romans and Luke, but I also saw a God who was compassionate on the sinner, who understood our weaknesses and who loved us nonetheless. I saw a God who was willing to do whatever was necessary – and more – to save us and to show His love to us. In that sense, I saw two glories – the glory of Jesus as Yahweh, the Creator, but also the simple glory of Jesus as Love, as Kindness.

Jesus is the Word of the Father: He is the Father’s message to mankind. If you want to know what God is saying to us, look at Jesus.

Photo by Anastasia Zhenina on Pexels.com

https://theorangemailmanmyblog.wordpress.com/2011/06/27/the-restrainer-of-lawlessness/

At that time shall arise Michael, the great prince who has charge of your people. And there shall be a time of trouble, such as never has been since there was a nation till that time. But at that time your people shall be delivered, everyone whose name shall be found written in the book. And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.

-Daniel 12:1-2, ESV

Then the woman fled into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared by God, that they should feed her there one thousand two hundred and sixty days. And war broke out in heaven: Michael and his angels fought with the dragon; and the dragon and his angels fought, but they did not prevail, nor was a place found for them in heaven any longer. So the great dragon was cast out, that serpent of old, called the Devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world; he was cast to the earth, and his angels were cast out with him…Woe to the inhabitants of the earth and the sea! For the devil has come down to you, having great wrath, because he knows that he has a short time…Now the beast which I saw was like a leopard, his feet were like the feet of a bear, and his mouth like the mouth of a lion. The dragon gave him his power, his throne, and great authority.

-Revelation 12:6-9, 12; 13:2, NKJV

The Daniel passage above shows that when Michael the Archangel, the angelic prince of Israel, “arises” at the time of the end, the Great Tribulation begins. The passage in Revelation above expands on this, showing that Michael will cast the Devil out of heaven once and for all, and that when he does, the Devil’s wrath against humanity will be great, because he knows that his end is only a short way off. This is a kind of desperation, what one might call a mad panic: the Devil knows that he will only have three and a half years to roam the earth after he is cast down by Michael, and then Christ will appear.

Michael and the angels who have charge over nations act as restraining force against evil in the present age. Governments are instituted by God to prevent the worst excesses of man: they are a force for order, and are used to suppress lawlessness. This is true both domestically and in foreign relations. A domestic law imposing the death penalty for murder acts as a deterrent and also as retributive justice. A nation going to war against the evil government of another nation is an instrument to bring peace and justice to the world: the righteous fight of the Allies against the Axis powers in World War 2 is an example of this.

As we get closer to the end, however, the forces of restraint are weakening. 2 Thessalonians 2 tells us that when the restrain ends, the “apostasy” will begin and the Man of Sin will be revealed. Apostasy means rebellion (stasis means civil war and civil unrest). This may be rebellion in general or people leaving true Christianity or both.

The signs of chaos in our own time should give us pause to consider whether the restraint exercised by Michael and human government is coming to an end. For that short space, the reign of the Beast, there will be unparalleled evil on the earth before the return of Christ. Consider this hard language from the Scriptures:

And there shall be a time of trouble, such as never has been since there was a nation till that time.

-Daniel 12:1, ESV

For then there will be great tribulation, such as has not been from the beginning of the world until now, no, and never will be. And if those days had not been cut short, no human being would be saved.

-Matthew 24:21-22, ESV

…since indeed God considers it just to repay with affliction those who afflict you, and to grant relief to you who are afflicted as well as to us, when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels…

-2 Thessalonians 1:6-7

We are seeing chaos at the present time in the form of wars, but also intellectually. Great swathes of society have been taken away by, as it were, a flood of demonic deception: relativism, nihilism, existentialism, materialism, political correctness. The laws of our lands have become instruments of evil.

Shall the throne of iniquity, which devises evil by law, have fellowship with You?

-Psalm 94, NKJV

Israel is back in the land, and hatred is rising against her from the House of Islam and the political Left. Now is a time to consider whether 2 Thessalonians 2 is far off.

Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it?

-Luke 14:28, NIV

Everything has a cost. It seems obvious, but sometimes it bears repeating. Everything has a cost. Austrian economists who follow the Kantian principles of von Mises understand economics to be the science of human action and human action to be predicated on choice. Choice is transactional by nature: in selecting one option, one must forego another, even if only temporarily. The cost of doing one thing involves the expenditure of energy and resources to achieve it, but also the loss of doing something else instead.

Sacrifice can be understood in these terms. The pain one endures in order to achieve some noble end is the price paid for it. Such pain can be physical, psychological, or spiritual. In many circumstances there is no clear party to whom the pain is given; it is simply a facet of acquiring the desired end. Many pagan religions, however, saw their gods as the parties to whom payment was rendered in order to obtain supernatural aid. “Do ut des” was the terse Latin expression of this sentiment: “I give so that you may give.”

Grace, defined as unmerited favour, is not a part of this picture. In its purest form, it is selfless giving with no thought of recompense, no obligation attached to the gift in and of itself. Giving that responds to such grace can come from a number of motivations: a desire to acknowledge and show gratitude or a desire to be in no man’s debt. The latter view does not accept grace for what it is, but sees it as an obligation, a chain from which release cannot be gained except by repayment.

Pondering on where we as individuals are and where the Church is as a whole, I find myself seeing both grace and cost as parts of the journey from where we are to where we need to be. God sheds grace on us in order to empower us to do His will on earth, the centre of which is the preach the good news of Jesus Christ to those who have not heard. But answering God’s call involves a cost, if only from the perspective of our old, fleshly selves. One such cost is this: the Gospel is offensive; in preaching it we may lose friends and make enemies. We may lose the respect of those to whom it is the odour of death, even as we gain the love of those to whom it is the pleasant aroma of salvation.

Archbishop Cranmer is on form today. He has posted a piece on the “Human Ken Doll”, Rodrigo Alves, and contemporary culture’s worship of youth, physical perfection, and superficial thought. In his characteristic concern for our souls, His Grace reminds us all that we are made in the image of God, that God has called us to exercise righteous judgment in the earth. Judgment is a facet of the law, and Christ and Paul taught us that the way to fulfil the law is to practice godly love. The Greek term is agape, translated into Latin as caritas, in contrast to the normal Latin word for love, amor, which is nearly equivalent to the Greek term eros.

Humans are social creatures – we so want to be connected with one another, to love and be loved (not necessarily in that order) by one another. This is natural: to be made in the image of God means to live in community, extending God’s rule from heaven to the earth. We were always meant to function collaboratively with God and with each other. But God’s ways have been perverted on the earth through the agency of Satan and the Watchers and through the agency of man. Pride demands worship from others and loneliness demands company. When company has rules for admission, in our desperation we bend to those rules: thus the cult of beauty enforces its will through peer pressure. The call from the cult: “Join us or die in the wilderness.”

Nor is the Church immune to this disease; the Church is composed of sinners on the path to holiness – at any given stage before perfection, the old temptations have some traction. The Scriptures do not say that accepting Christ means losing the lust of our hearts; James the Apostle tells us to “resist the Devil”. This is an active task: it requires will and perseverance and the moral cognisance to recognise what is evil and to reject it.

When the Scripture tells us that the old man has been crucified with Christ but that we must daily be crucified, it describes vividly the feeling of loss involved in resisting sin. In saying no to some action or attitude we are letting something go, letting it slide into the category of things that never were. That is a kind of death. Because we want sinful things – even when we know we should not -that death is painful; it causes us – foolishly – to mourn. In another vivid image, the author of Hebrews describes this process as chastisement and says rather bluntly and obviously that no one enjoys chastisement, but that it is good for us. The joy comes afterward in the moment of victory and rest when we can see what chastisement has wrought and no longer feel the draw of sin, no longer believing its lies.

Chastisement is a part of growth. The chastisement that the Church is experiencing as a whole now is to teach it valuable lessons. The shaking of the current order is meant to call sinners to repentance, to cause the Church to remember that God – not the world – is our end, and to wake us up, creating renewed zeal to preach the Gospel. Those who will be most effective in that task are those who have rejected the world’s falsehoods, including the cult of beauty, and who have given themselves wholly to God and His service. These are the consecrated, the holy ones.

Over the past few weeks I have been thinking about the direction of my spiritual life and the direction of the Church, a process sharpened by the news of the scandals in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh. Having a little experience among Charismatics and Pentecostals, I also scan material labelled as “prophetic” on a regular basis. That is not to say that I accept everything I read; but neither do I reject revelations out of hand. Recently, I have also taken to listening to the “Anglican Unscripted” series on YouTube, which focusses on problems in the Anglican Communion. My overall sense is that this is a time of change for all denominations.

The widespread endorsement of the modern -isms among the Anglican hierarchy puts me at odds with the establishment. For that reason, I am in sympathy with the GAFCON movement, but I see little chance of it making inroads in the UK. So many Anglicans have already left the Church of England, many becoming Catholics, others joining Orthodoxy, and a few have gone to the dissenting Protestant churches. Lutheranism has little presence in the UK, so there is no real liturgical Protestant option for those who want that experience outside of the Church of England.

I genuinely believe that God will do a great work of reformation in this country, but what the end results will be is hard to say. “Come out of her My people!” The meaning of this verse in its original context may be quite different from its use as a rallying cry for independent churches – nevertheless, that rallying cry has an effect. Unity is important in the Church, and while there are advantages to having clear denominations, centred on specific doctrinal positions, the overall appearance of a divided Church is a source of sadness for Christians and scorn among outsiders.

I very much believe in building the content of faith from the ground up. The chains of tradition can be a hindrance to this position, and that is why I will never formally join a church that takes an ultra-traditionalist line. Reformation is a way of life for me, not merely a point in Church history. While I disagree with individual conclusions of particular Reformers, I take their spirit with me. This should not be confused with the idea of change for the sake of change; rather, I believe it to be an intellectual virtue. We should be always seeking for Truth and willing to let things go that hinder us on the road. I remain a Protestant not because I am specifically Anglican, Baptist, Lutheran, or Reformed, but simply because I cannot conform myself to the fundamental positions of Catholicism and Orthodoxy.

Going forward, I believe all Christians will need to examine their fundamental positions in the light of what they are hearing from hierarchies in the various churches. A valuable lesson I have taken from the work of Von Mises, the Austrian economist, is that everything is a choice. Those who hold the traditionalist line against the Vatican establishment, those who hold Benedict XVI to be the true Pope, are making intellectual choices. We must all choose.