“And the Lord answered me, and said, ‘Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it.” Habakkuk 2:2
Throughout the New Testament there is a dominant theme concerning how the believer in Christ is to live…it is that of waiting for His Lord to come. That coming may be the moment when the disciple goes to be with Christ. It may also be the rapture, that “snatching away” of the church. But it may be, as history and the Scriptures reveal it, a moment or period of time when the Lord by His Spirit “returns to Jerusalem,” or moves to awaken great or small numbers of people to the eternal reality of His Presence and Person, and the necessity of coming to Him for salvation, or simply for restoration and revival. These periods are extraordinary movements of the Spirit when the power of sin and death is broken, the souls of many finding eternal consolation and joy in the presence of the Lord, because they have come to Him to receive His mercy and grace.
There are other visitations of God, and these are not as wonderful in their benefit as revivals and awakenings. They are the visitations of wrath and judgment. Just as God is a God of great mercy, grace, and perfect love, so He is the God of righteousness and justice. When the Father sent His Son to this earth, declaring the very nature and goodness of God, we crucified Him. To still crucify Him is to continue to reject, not only the knowledge that He is the truth, but His saving power to cleanse, give new Life, and an eternal hope. To refuse and reject Christ is to defy God’s only provision for the lost soul to escape the inevitable judgment, when all men shall be judged by, and according to, the Lord Jesus Christ. An example of this is Sodom and Gomorrah. Christ came with two angels to visit these cities of the plain. They came to a people who had totally rejected the stretched out hand and arm of God to save them. They defied every semblance of the truth of God, embracing the baseness of the fallen human nature. There was no remedy for these cities, except in the case of Lot and part of his family. Jesus tells us that, “He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him.” (Jn. 3:36) When God comes to visit the unbelieving soul, whether at the time of their death or when He comes from heaven, there will be the inevitable, and inescapable judgment of his sin, and him as a sinner, defying God. That visitation in this life, or at the conclusion of it, is a certainty. In like manner there is another certainty, and it is that the mercy of God is available for any and all sinners to receive, to come, and repent by the grace of God. It is in that wholehearted cry of the heart, and appeal of the soul, that the certainty of salvation applied will be realized.
But what about today, as a Chrisian? What is to be our vision of His coming, and how are we to live victoriously between this moment and that blessed meeting? The first aspect of this life lived in expectancy is having the vision of things to come, the anticipation of that moment. Paul Gerhardt wrote the following stanza in a hymn: O the blessed joy of meeting, All the desert past! O the wondrous words of greeting He shall speak at last! He and I together ent’ring Those bright courts above; He and I together sharing All the Father’s love.”
Secondly, with the vision of the blessed meeting in tact, there is the constant and present responsibility of being faithful to the calling of the King. The disciple is to be “good” in all dealings with others, communicating to them the saving life of Christ by the Spirit.
Dear Father, Be Thou our vision. In Jesus’ name, Amen.