How near could the second coming of Christ be? Someone will say (rightly) that it is as near as our finishing the preaching the gospel in all the world. “This gospel shall be preached in all the world, ... then shall the end come” (Matt. 24:14). But who knows how far it really has gone? Jesus told us to be careful how we estimate what’s happening: “The kingdom of God cometh not with observation” (Luke 17:20). He said it’s like hiding “leaven” in flour for breadmaking. The leaven works silently, unobserved (see Luke 13: 20, 21). Even so it will be with the work of God on the earth.
We are capable of wild guesswork. It’s not always the work that looks the largest or most spectacularly successful. No one can know how rapidly the work of God is progressing on earth. Even those who seek to be doing the work are unconscious of the greater part of it. The kingdom of glory will be ushered in at a time when even Christ’s most faithful workers will think that much remains to be done. They cannot know what hidden agencies God has at work.
And we may misunderstand what the Lord will reckon as the attainment of His goal. The “144,000” of Revelation 14:4, 5 may be people that none of us recognizes as yet. Victories may be won day by day that we know nothing of, because the media (secular or religious) just aren’t tuned in to the work of Christ in the Most Holy Apartment.
This should serve to admonish us never to think that the coming of the Lord is far off, since we can see comparatively little being done. Let us be content to work in quietness and obscurity. Although some may think superficially that our work is effective, and even though we ourselves may think it is ineffective, we have the assurance that our “Father … seeth in secret” (Matt. 6:4).
All the warnings that Jesus gave us about His second coming, to “watch … lest coming suddenly He find you sleeping,” are valid (Mark 13:35, 36). They still are “present truth.”
From the "Dial Daily Bread" Archive: May 8, 2004.Copyright © 2011 by Robert J. Wieland.
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