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The Desire of Ages
our eyes. A little longer, and He will present us “faultless before the
presence of His glory with exceeding joy.”
Jude 1:24
. Wherefore,
when He gave the signs of His coming He said, “When these things
begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads; for your
redemption draweth nigh.”
But the day and the hour of His coming Christ has not revealed.
He stated plainly to His disciples that He Himself could not make
known the day or the hour of His second appearing. Had He been at
liberty to reveal this, why need He have exhorted them to maintain an
attitude of constant expectancy? There are those who claim to know
the very day and hour of our Lord’s appearing. Very earnest are they in
mapping out the future. But the Lord has warned them off the ground
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they occupy. The exact time of the second coming of the Son of man
is God’s mystery.
Christ continues, pointing out the condition of the world at His
coming: “As the days of Noah were, so shall also the coming of the
Son of man be. For as in the days that were before the Flood they were
eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day
that Noah entered into the ark, and knew not until the Flood came, and
took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.”
Christ does not here bring to view a temporal millennium, a thousand
years in which all are to prepare for eternity. He tells us that as it was
in Noah’s day, so will it be when the Son of man comes again.
How was it in Noah’s day? “God saw that the wickedness of man
was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of
his heart was only evil continually.”
Genesis 6:5
. The inhabitants of
the antediluvian world turned from Jehovah, refusing to do His holy
will. They followed their own unholy imagination and perverted ideas.
It was because of their wickedness that they were destroyed; and today
the world is following the same way. It presents no flattering signs of
millennial glory. The transgressors of God’s law are filling the earth
with wickedness. Their betting, their horse racing, their gambling,
their dissipation, their lustful practices, their untamable passions, are
fast filling the world with violence.
In the prophecy of Jerusalem’s destruction Christ said, “Because
iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold. But he that
shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved. And this gospel
of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto