A NEARING
CRISIS IN HEAVEN AND EARTH
By
D. M. PANTON,
B.A.
A
tense, extraordinarily pregnant crisis, involving the vastest issues,
balances
two hostile forces in the unseen. Jerusalem - a ‘woman’,
in the Apocalypse, always symbolizes a city - sums up God’s redeemed of
all
dispensations, for one City has been the mother of them all, from
Melchizedek
to Christ - twelve stars - the Patriarchs - around her head, the moon -
the Law
- under her feet, and the sun - Christ, clothing her; and she is on the
brink
of giving birth. Watching
her with
concentrated venom is a Serpent, a red Dragon, for he is responsible
for the
blood of all the martyrs; and his passionate concentration is on the
destruction of the ‘child’
about to be born. It
seems exceedingly probable that this is the
exact situation at the present moment, though no man living can tell
how
prolonged the period may be during which Satan watches in intense
anxiety.
THE CHRISTIAN
ESCAPE
Suddenly
the Child is born. That
this ‘child’ is a
body of saints is obvious from the words
in which (verse 11)
the Angels describe it:- "they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb";*
and the birth, like our Lord’s (Heb.
1: 5), is a birth out of the tomb.* It
is a rapture in which these saints are
caught up to God and His Throne. The
holy angels hail with joy their arrival in Heaven: the evil angels draw
the
sword for the first and last time to prevent it. They are very
definitely and
sharply defined as fellow-kings with our Lord in His coming Reign, for
it is "a man child, who is to
rule all the nations with
a rod of iron";
and they are ‘overcomers’
- "they overcame
him,"
thus falling exactly under our Lord’s words
to Thyatira (Rev. 2: 26)
- "He that overcometh,
and he that keepeth my works unto the end, to him will I give
authority
over the nations, and he shall
rule them with a rod of
iron."
[* The fact that the ‘birth’ ushers in the final three and a half
years of Satan’s
activity alone makes it impossible that the ‘child’ is Christ. Christ, unlike this
Child, was the first-born of His
mother, nor did evil angels dispute His
ascent, only His exit from the tomb (Col.
2: 15).]
[**
There is no mention
of any resurrection of the dead
‘out
of the tombs’
until the Great
Tribulation has ended, and Christ returns to establish His millennial
kingdom. The
rapture here is of living
saints who “prevail
to escape”
the Tribulation. 1
Thess. 4: 16; Luke 21: 36.]
THE
This
sudden ascent of overcomers precipitates an immediate war in heaven, a
desperate conflict between the angelic powers, Satan disputes the
ascent; his supplanters,
who will supplant him both in heavenly
standing and in power over the on earth, he stakes all to block; and
the fierce
struggle of the Satanic hosts with the holy angels involves his final
fall. But he is not
yet cast into the
THE JEWISH
ESCAPE
So
now the Great Tribulation opens, and the second great escape, the
escape into
the wilderness, occurs. Satan, "having great wrath,
knowing that he hath but a short time"
- therefore he believes God’s prophecies, for in no other way could he
know the
brevity of the time left him: "the demons also believe
and shudder"
(Jas. 2: 19) -
first concentrates on that with
which the world is already seething - the attempted extermination of
the Jew. The Woman
- the godly in Jerusalem - obeying
the word of Christ, "When ye see the abomination of desolation" - Antichrist’s image - "standing in the holy place"
- set up in the
Temple precincts - "let them that are in
Judea flee unto the mountains" (Matt. 25: 15)
- is in instant flight. Any
Israelite
who breaks the condition of the earthly escape - immediate flight - is
doomed;
but the armies sent in pursuit of the Woman the earth - as millenniums
before,
the Red Sea - opens and engulfs; and in the desert, earth's only spot
of safety
because of its very famine of all food, God’s earthly saints are again
fed by
manna or equivalent food from Heaven.
REMNANTS
After
both escapes are accomplished, so far from earth now being emptied of
the
godly, the enraged Dragon concentrates on both the groups who
broke the
conditions of escape, and so failed to disappear. "The
dragon made
war with THE REMNANTS of her seed" - ‘remnants,’ that is,
sections identical with those
escaped, but who are left;* and
there are two of these remnants - (1) "which
keep
the commandments of God, and (2) which hold the
testimony of Jesus."
Keepers
of ‘the
commandments of God’, the Law, are a definition of Israel:
they who hold
- that is, those in whose keeping is - ‘the
testimony
of Jesus’ **
is a
description impossible of any but a Christian; it has been a definition
of
Christians for nineteen centuries; it is the only name given to
Christians
throughout the eighteen prophetic chapters of the Apocalypse, and
describes
even the Apostle John himself (Rev. 1: 9).
The Dragon impales these two groups on his Ten Horns - that is, he
persecutes
them by means of the Ten Dictators who are masters of earth’s chief
nations; and
as the Divine plan is a prior escape, God
withdraws protection from those that are
left, who flouted His design. Two-thirds
of
[*
That is, “left
unto the coming
(‘presence’)
of
the Lord”
after others were
previously rapt into heaven. See
1
Thess. 4: 15.]
[** Apparently the Ten Dictators (or the
majority of them) at
first collaborate with the Roman Beast in support of the Harlot, so
that she
can and does become drunk with the blood of the saints; but on Satan’s
descent,
and manipulated by him, what happened in Spain [some years ago] - the
destruction of more than 1,000 Catholic churches - becomes universal,
and
includes every Christian group. We can readily imagine how the great
apostasy
from the Christian Faith now occurs.]
HINDRANCES TO
ESCAPE
Now
since it is probable that the birth of the Child may occur at any
moment [prior
to the last three and a half years of the Great Tribulation],
it is wise that we should keep
in our minds as vivid as lightning, the hindrances that block the way
to
escape; because, that the Israelite is godly, or that the
believer is
regenerate, will deliver neither from the consequences of disobedience.
(1)
The hour coming "is
to come upon the whole inhabited earth" (Rev. 3: 10),
our Lord says, and therefore the only possible earthly escape is the
Wilderness, the uninhabited
earth; and the flight is to be
so instantaneous - if a Jew in the field has left his cloak in house,
he has no
time (the Lord says) to fetch it (Matt.
24: 18)
- that disobedience in rapidity forfeits escape. So to
the Church our Lord's words - for both critical commands are
from the Son
of God to each group - could not be more explicit :- "Watch ye and pray always that ye may be accounted
worthy to escape all these things
that shall come to pass
and to stand before the Son of man" (Luke 21: 36). The
escape of God's earthly people [Israel]
is physical, and therefore turns on instantaneousness of flight; but
the escape
of His heavenly [regenerate]
people
is moral - passive and static: to be set before the Son of Man - and
therefore
turns on prayerful vigilance: and failure to watch and pray will be as
fatal to
the one as failure in instant
flight will be to the other.*
[* It is pregnant with meaning that
neither the rapt nor the
left are said to be the Church: for those who ascend are not the Church
but a
section of it; and those who remain are not the Church, for
church-standing
ceases with the arrival of the Day of the Lord. Thus it is unscriptural
to say
either that the Church escapes
the Tribulation, or that the
Church passes through it: the Church
does neither; and
therefore no 'church’ is named throughout the prophetic
portion of the
Apocalypse.]
CONDITIONS OF
RAPTURE
So
we are shown, by Heaven itself, the exceedingly high standard of the
upward
escape. (1) "They
overcame him because of the blood of the Lamb:"
not only the fundamental cleansing in [initial] salvation, but a
constant confession and
abandonment of known sin which re-invokes the Blood. "They washed their
robes"
- their own conduct: Christ’s robe, the
robe of imputed righteousness, needs no cleansing - "and made them white in the blood of
the Lamb: therefore are they before the throne"
(Rev. 7: 14).
(2) "Because of the word of their testimony." The truths
of God they stand for are the
platform on which they ascend: an abandoned testimony is a collapsed
platform. Or,
to borrow Paul’s figure, the ‘blood’
is the foundation, and the ‘testimony’
is the superstructure of gold, silver,
costly stones which they erect upon it. (3)
"And they loved not
their life even unto death."
It does
not say that they are all
martyrs; but they were, to a man, ready
to be martyred: they never
compromised, ever to save their
life. What
a standard! Yet it is
a standard perfectly possible for every one of us to achieve.
THE UNRAPT
That
what remains on earth is a ‘remnant’
- the rest, the remainder - from
those
who have gone is proof wholly decisive that it is Christians who
remain; but if
any reader still doubts it, let him ponder a recent revival scene (World
Dominion,
Oct., 1936) on the Congo; and let him ask himself - Were
these Christians
that were ‘revived’? and
if so, how does their
pre-revival condition fit Heaven’s description (ver. 11)
of the rapt? "Judgment began at
the house of God.
Christians were
awakened to a deep
distress for sin. Sometimes
the
revelation was so overwhelming that people under conviction cried out
in
anguish, and trembled, or even fell to the ground. It
was the sham and secrecy of Church members
in former times that determined the early character of the revival, for
it came
naturally to be felt that men who had
preached and taught in Christ’s name while cluttered up with all manner
of sin
must make public confession. In the eyes of the heathen, all
that had
veiled the face of Christ must openly be renounced. For
weeks and weeks there was a constant
stream of men waiting their turn to make
public avowal of the sins that had besmirched their lives and betrayed
Christ’s
cause. Time
fails to tell even a
fraction of the stories that broken hearted men and women poured into
our ears
during these amazing weeks when judgment had begun at the house of God.
Through a valley of
humiliation like this all
our leading men passed save one." *
[*
Both ‘remnants’
are purged as is the
Israelitish:- "I
will bring the third
part through the fire, and will refine them"
(Zech.
13: 9).
Both were warned to
remember
If Christ had
come a week before the revival, would these have been
rapt? and if so, what
becomes of Heaven's summary of their
life and character before removal? and
will anyone say
that no such believers will be on earth when the Lord does come? Let it be
carefully pondered that this is no mere detail
of a disputed prophecy, but a fearful practical urgency for us all; for
all
will agree that if rapture turns on fidelity, he who
influences others to
believe that escape is safe for an unsanctified life not only makes a
most
painful blunder for himself, but, in a moment of intensest crisis,
does
a grave disservice to the whole church of God.
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