---

The Church engages our thoughts both on the first and second advents of our Lord. For we, like them of old, are "waiting for the consolation of Israel." We exhibit Messiah as the desire of all nations with respect to both His advents. There are two kinds of predictions in the Holy Writings; the one anticipating a dispensation of grace and mercy, the other speaking of awful and tremendous judgments, seasons of tribulation such as the world had never before witnessed. Though our Lord was the Prince of Peace, yet through human perversity the result of His mission was a sword, the kindling of the fire of evil passions, the setting of the members of a household one against another. Whatever we expect hereafter, here we look not for the fulfilment of our hopes. Knowing the issue, the perpetual feud between the Church and the world, the weary persecutions by which the faithful have been harassed, how can the bringer-in of such a dispensation be the desire of all nations? Still less, seeing what must be the result of His future manifestation, how can He assume this character as the righteous Judge of an apostate world? The distinction may be thus made. The prophets do not say that when He appears, the desires of all nations shall be satisfied; but that He who is the desire of all nations shall come; He, that is, whom they desire by anticipation. With respect to His first coming, it is certain that, from the Fall downwards, the sons of men have ever looked for some mighty deliverer. However deeply men might err as to the object of faith, — however speculative their notions as to the nature of the:Eternal Godhead and their own nature, — however depraved their ideas how they were to propitiate the Supreme Being, — they could not avoid the conviction that, if they were to be saved at all, it must be by the advent of a Son of God in human form, as the connecting link between the Creator offended, and the creature sinning. Such foreshadowings of the truth, originally impressed upon the human mind, the sacred oracles confirm. The streams of tradition and Scripture unite in one deep channel of expectation. But how did He, in whom these anticipations centred, fulfil them? Not in the way in which the sons of men imagined He would. If, dwelling on the train of miseries which the destroyer has brought upon the earth, and unable to reconcile what they saw around and felt within them with His righteous rule whose offspring they knew themselves to be, they yet had faith to see that He in whose bands their destinies lay, ever brings good out of evil, and that every affliction happens to man as part of a discipline of love, and will one day cease altogether — if such were their thoughts, then their fulfilment in God's good time was verily assured to them. The proof that Christ's kingdom has been set up, is seen in the rescue of men from the bondage of slavery and sin; in the daily, hourly, victories gained over the powers of darkness by those in whose weakness His "strength is made perfect.." The same desires which Messiah so graciously met, so far as our necessary trial admits, at His first advent, will receive their full and complete satisfaction only at His second coming. One point more. It is to the temple of the Lord that the desire of all nations shall come: it is there that He shall take up His abode. The words of Haggai end Malachi find their primary accomplishment in the presentation of the infant Jesus. But the true temple is our humanity. We know that He is with us, whether we assemble ourselves together to worship and adore Him, to pour out the plaints of our hearts in holy litanies, to praise Him "in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs," or whether we bend our knees in the silence and privacy of our closets. Let me ask you, then, have you such desires as the Lord at His next coming will be likely to satisfy? Ye have seen what they are. They are such as earth, and the things of earth, cannot fill

(G. Huntington, M. A.)

---

---

KJV: For thus saith the LORD of hosts; Yet once, it is a little while, and I will shake the heavens, and the earth, and the sea, and the dry land;

WEB: For this is what Yahweh of Armies says: 'Yet once, it is a little while, and I will shake the heavens, the earth, the sea, and the dry land;