Basic HTML Version
184
From Here to Forever
man be.” “The Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy
angels with him.” “And he shall send his angels with a great sound of
a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect.”
1 Thessalonians
4:16, 17
;
Matthew 24:30, 27
;
25:31
;
24:31
.
At His coming the righteous dead will be raised and the righteous
living changed. “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,
in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the
trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and
we shall be changed. For this corruptible must put on incorrup-
tion, and this mortal must put on immortality.” “The dead in Christ
shall rise first: then we which are alive and remain shall be caught
up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air:
and so shall we ever be with the Lord.”
1 Corinthians 15:51-53
;
1
[202]
Thessalonians 4:16, 17
.
Man in his present state is mortal, corruptible; but the kingdom
of God will be incorruptible. Therefore man in his present state
cannot enter into the kingdom of God. When Jesus comes, He
confers immortality upon His people, and then calls them to inherit
the kingdom of which they have hitherto been only heirs.
Scripture and Chronology
These and other scriptures clearly proved to Miller that the uni-
versal reign of peace and the setting up of the kingdom of God upon
the earth were subsequent to the second advent. Furthermore, the
condition of the world corresponded to the prophetic description
of the last days. He was forced to the conclusion that the period
allotted for the earth in its present state was about to close.
“Another kind of evidence that vitally affected my mind,” he says,
“was the chronology of the Scriptures. ... I found that predicted
events, which had been fulfilled in the past, often occurred within
a given time. ... Events ... once only a matter of prophecy, ... were
fulfilled in accordance with the predictions.
When he found chronological periods that extended to the second
coming of Christ, he could not but regard them as the “times before
appointed” which God had revealed unto His servants. “Those things
which are revealed belong unto us and to our children forever.” The
2
Ibid., pp. 74, 75.