We are commanded by the Lord to attend to this ordinance of the breaking of bread “until he come.” Most people think it a strange thing if you speak of Christ coming again. The strange thing really is that people professing to be Christian people should think such a thing strange. It does not seem possible for ordinary intelligence to read and believe the Bible without believing in “the coming again of our Lord Jesus and our gathering together unto him.” On the very last page of the Bible, this is what we read in the very last verse but one:

Let us imagine some stranger who knew nothing of Christ and nothing of the history connected with the Bible, taking up the Bible, and reading these words. His natural enquiry would be, “Who is this Lord Jesus? And what is meant by his coming quickly? Coming to where? From where, and for what purpose?” Let us try and pursue these questions from the stranger’s point of view, and see on what a great rock is founded our hope of the return of the Lord whom we call to mind in the breaking of bread.

Supposing it was the New Testament in which our attention had been caught by the words in question: we should naturally turn backwards to ascertain who this Lord Jesus was. Going right back to the first page, we should find ourselves in the very first verse face to face with “the book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham,” and presented with a long line of ancestry traced for nearly two thousand years, from Abraham downward to the days of “Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus who is called Christ.” We should find that the child so born was the Son of God and not of Joseph, being conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit. If it struck us with wonder that there should be such a departure from the established ways of nature, we should be informed,

“Now all this was done that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Behold a virgin shall conceive,” etc.

Here we should become aware that there had been a writing before the New Testament. Our curiosity might be aroused with respect to this, especially if on glancing through the body of the New Testament we should happen to notice that the Lord Jesus said in his day,

“I am not come to destroy the Law and the Prophets but to fulfil,” and again, “all things must be fulfilled which are written in the Law of Moses and in the Prophets and in the Psalms concerning me.”

And again the statement of Peter,

“To him give all the prophets witness.”

We should be inclined to ask, “Who were those prophets? What was this Law of Moses? To whom did the prophets prophesy? To whom was the Law of Moses given?”

An enlightened friend might say to us, “If you want to know, read the Old Testament.” We might ask, “Is there an Old Testament?” The answer would be, “Oh yes, it is a much larger book than the New Testament and much more ancient, and contains full particulars on the subject of your enquiries.” So getting an Old Testament, we may imagine ourselves interestedly consulting it and finding the full and clear answer to all our questions. We should make the discovery that the birth of Jesus Christ was the end of a long line of operations commencing a long way back in the history of mankind. We should find ourselves indeed taken right away back to the beginning of things on earth. We should find information nowhere else to be found under the sun, namely, as to why it is that things are wrong with man-as to why evil rather than good, curse rather than blessing, is his portion. We should also find it revealed at the very beginning that God purposed to bring good out of the evil, and to establish blessedness in the place of curse. We should find that a foundation was laid for working out the blessing at the very start. We do not get twelve chapters into Genesis before we read-

We find the statement connected with a certain man, to whom God said, “In thee and thy seed” shall this be done. This man was Abraham, a Chaldean, to whom the word of command came:

Paul tells us: “He obeyed, not knowing whither he went;” and Stephen that “he (Abraham) came into this land wherein ye (Jews) now dwell”-1850 years ago-the land of Canaan, Palestine, the Holy Land.

Here was a very interesting-a very important man: “In thee and in thy seed shall all families of the earth be blessed”-a promise renewed to his son, Isaac; and to Isaac’s son, Jacob. Let us fix our eyes upon him-this very important man-to whom Paul informs us “the promises were made” (Gal. 3:16), by which promises he was constituted “the heir of the world” (Rom. 4:13). Here is the man through whom and his seed God declared His purpose to work out the purposed blessing. He comes into view at the very beginning of the Bible, namely in the 11^th chapter of Genesis; and we may say, he never leaves the field, for by Christ in the New Testament, he is exhibited as the leading figure in the Kingdom of God, with Isaac and Jacob (Luke 13:28), and declared by Paul to be the father of all who belong to Christ, his seed (Gal. 3:29). Indeed, you may say that the whole Bible is a history of the evolution of Abraham in the channel of God’s purpose.

For what do we find? That Abraham’s son Isaac had a son Jacob, who had twelve sons, who settled in Egypt, where they multiplied greatly for several generations, and became a community so numerous and powerful as to excite the jealous fears of the Egyptians, who sought to destroy them by persecution as the Russians are doing at the present day. From the terrible affliction ensuing, God sent Moses to deliver them, and in prolonged dealings with the Egyptians, visited them with terrible plagues, at last opening the sea for Israel’s escape, which the Egyptians trying to cross were drowned. Safe on the eastern side of the sea which had closed over the Egyptians, Israel found themselves in the desert of Sinai, where no supplies of food or water were to be had. In ordinary circumstances, a huge company of people so circumstanced must have perished; but the circumstances were not ordinary. God was making use of the posterity of Abraham His friend, in working out His purpose with the whole earth. So He sustained with bread from heaven, and water from the rock. The sustenance provided was barely sufficient to maintain life, at which Israel murmured. But Moses informed them that there was a purpose of mental discipline in it; that God might humble them and prove them, and that they might know that man was not on earth live by bread alone, but by the Word proceeding from God. Assembled at Sinai, they were permitted to see the manifested power and majesty of God; and Moses called to the top of the mount, received for them a Law for the development of their national and individual life in the land to which they were going. This Law is recorded extensively in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. When it is discerned in its aims, its completeness and its harmony, it is found to be the most beneficent Law ever established among men, as it is also the most ancient. Here it is in the hands of the Jews to the present day in the very form in which it issued from the hands of Moses. It has not been tinkered and altered as human laws have been in all ages and countries.

Armed with this Law and provided with the machinery which it required, Israel, after forty years’ disciplinary wanderings in the wilderness, crossed the Jordan under Joshua, to wage a war of extermination upon the occupants of the land. To many people this appears a shocking proceeding. All ideas of this sort disappear when it is recognised that the enterprise was by divine command, and that the wickedness of the Canaanites (illustrated in Lev. 18) assumed such an extreme form as to call for their divine destruction. There is no understanding of the Bible if the participation of God in the transactions it records is ignored. God, who creates, has the right to destroy; and He is the sole Judge of the right time. Where this is recognised, there is no difficulty about the command to Joshua, at the head of the Israelitish host, to “slay utterly (the seven nations of Canaan) old and young, man and woman; save nothing alive that breatheth.”

The work was partly done, and Israel occupied the country in their place. From this time onward Israel occupied the land with intermissions for over 1,400 years. This was the time covered by “the Law and the Prophets.” The nation lived under the Law that had been given to them through Moses, and they received messages through the prophets. Moses had told them it would be well with them if they obeyed the Law, but that if they were disobedient nothing but curse would attend them. They bitterly experienced the truth of the latter statement. Time after time they were brought very low because of their non-compliance with the Law of God, till at last His patience came to an end, and they were overwhelmed in the whirlwind of His anger and dispersed to the ends of the earth, as at this day. Before this calamity came fully upon them, God sent prophets to expostulate with them. Indeed, the whole course of their history was marked by the warnings of these messengers of God. It is beautifully expressed in the last chapter of 2 Chronicles. Having told us that the people “transgressed very much after all the abominations of the heathen,” the record adds (verse 15)-

You may remember that Jesus presents us with the same picture in his parable of the Householder who planted a vineyard and let it out to the husbandmen and went into a far country (Matt. 21:33). At the fruit season, He sent his servants to receive of the fruit, but the husbandmen “took His servants, and beat one and killed another, and stoned another.” And when He sent other servants, they did the same to them. Last of all, He sent His son, “and they caught him, and cast him out of the vineyard and slew him.” When the question was asked, “What shall the Lord of the vineyard do unto those husbandmen?” the answer was “He will miserably destroy those wicked men, and give the vineyard unto others.”

Of the messages delivered by these prophets to disobedient Israel, much was by divine command reduced to writing; and this writing it is that is so frequently referred to in the New Testament as “The Scriptures of the Prophets,” which required such and such things to happen to Christ in order that they might be “fulfilled.” From these New Testament references, we learn that the predictions of the prophets had much to do with him. Indeed, the angel who communicated the apocalypse of Christ to John in Patmos informed him that “the Lord God of the holy prophets had commissioned the revelation,” and that “the testimony of Jesus was the spirit of prophecy”-that is that Christ and the prophets were not only not separate and incompatible, but that Christ was the very kernel-the inspiring principle-of the scheme of things that had been communicated through the prophets. When we come to compare the testimony of the apostles to Christ, and the foreshadowings of him in the Prophets, we find that this is the case. There was to be a son of David manifested in the course of Israel’s future (2 Sam. 7:10-16; Psa. 89:35-37; Isa. 9:6; Jer. 23:5). He was to be born in Bethlehem (Micah 5:2): he was to be despised by the nation and rejected (Isa. 53:3); but to have a momentary triumph while he should ride into Jerusalem on an ass (Zech. 9:9), then to be smitten and insulted (Micah 5:1; Isa. 53:7), his clothes divided and he himself crucified in the company of vile men (Psa. 22:16-18; Isa. 53:9). All these things were realised in Christ, who was a descendant of David (Matt. 1:1; Rom. 1:3) born in Bethlehem (Matt. 2:1); rejected by his own nation (John 1:11), but was the subject of a transient ovation (Matt. 21:6-9), was arrested, insulted, divested of his clothes on which the soldiers cast lots, and was then crucified (Matt. 26:57; 27:28,31,35).

The prophecy did not stop there. It spoke of his being raised from the dead (Psa. 71:20; 16:10), and the fact of his resurrection is the chief feature of the apostolic testimony (Acts 4:33). It spoke also of his ascending to God’s right hand, to wait for a season in the presence of the divine glory, while God’s face should be hidden from Israel (Psa. 68:18; 110:1; Isa. 8:16-17), and nothing is more conspicuous in the apostolic testimony than the declaration that Jesus after his resurrection was “received up to the right hand of God,” “ascending to heaven itself, there to appear in the presence of God for us” (Mark 16:19; Heb. 9:24).

Now, in all these things, there is the most tangible reality. Israel was as real a nation as the British or American. The prophets were as real as any ambassador now living and their writings as real documents as any despatch transmitted to London. Christ when born, in harmony with their predictions, was as real a baby as ever appeared in a cradle. He grew up with real manhood through all the stages of real childhood and boyhood as really as any of ourselves. He was a real teacher and worker in Israel for three-and-a-half years. At last he was a real prisoner in the hands of a real mob, and stood in a real court before real bearded elderly Jews, and at last, before a real Roman official, by whose order he was taken out and really executed by the dreadful process of crucifixion.

And now on the morning of the third day, the grave into which his real dead body had been placed was really empty. The clothes in which he had been buried were there all right but not himself. Where was he himself? If nothing further was known, we should have had to say: No one can tell. But within half-an-hour of the emptying of the tomb, he was as really seen and felt as ever he had been during his ministry among the people: First to one, then to three or four, then to one, then to two, then to eleven, then to seven, then to 500, then to eleven again, during a period of six weeks, “he showed himself alive by many infallible proofs” (Acts 1:3), exhibiting the marks of crucifixion, offering himself to be handled, eating and drinking food provided for him (Luke 24:38,43; Acts 10:41).

And then at the end of the six weeks what happens? He leads the eleven to the summit of the hill standing to the east of Jerusalem, where the Russians have a monastery to mark the spot at the present day; and there he takes leave of them, saying, “Ye shall be my witnesses to the ends of the earth; but wait till ye receive power” which I shall send to enable you to give effective testimony. He had said, “I go away . . . it is needful for you that I go away,” and now he goes away.

He had said,

“If I go away, I will come again.”

And now would not our imaginary stranger, passing all these things under his review, have an answer to his question, “Who is this Lord Jesus? And what does it mean by his coming?” If any doubt lingered in his mind as to the meaning of the coming (caused perhaps by the fact that sometimes the word coming is used in a figurative sense), it would for ever be dispelled by the declaration of the angels at his ascension as to the sense in which his coming should be.

“This same Jesus who is taken from you into heaven shall so come IN LIKE MANNER AS YE HAVE SEEN HIM GO into heaven” (Acts 1:11).

He would only have to realise that his going away was personal, visible, real and literal to be persuaded that the return of Christ will be personal, visible, real and literal also. It would remain for him but to enquire the purpose for which he was coming, and the state of revelation as to the time of his coming and the signs thereof, to feel all the interest we feel while we surround this Table, and break this bread in remembrance of him “until he come.” And he would join with us in wonderment at the strange state of things in a professedly Christian community that should permit of their thinking it strange that believers in Christ should be “looking for his appearing” according to his promise.

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