Page:The Judgment Day.pdf/184

 judgment, many of the prophets of the Old Testament clearly refer. Their predictions respecting the Coming of the Lord into the world, are frequently connected with the announcement of a judgment then to be performed by him.—They even represent the execution of such a judgment as inseparable from that work of redemption which all acknowledge that he came to accomplish; for without the removal thereby of evil spirits from the immediate influence which they then exercised upon the world, there could have been no salvation for the human race. Not to make an important assertion without proving it, I offer the following as a few samples of the predictions, in the Old Testament, of a judgment to be performed by the Lord at his advent in the flesh.

To what else can these words of Isaiah be worthily refer reffered? "Behold, the day of the Lord cometh, cruel both with wrath and fierce anger, to lay the land desolate; and he shall destroy the sinners thereof out of it. For the stars of heaven and the constellations thereof shall not give their light: the sun shall be darkened in his going forth, and the moon shall not cause her light to shine. And I will punish the world for their evil, and the wicked for their iniquity; and I will cause the arrogancy of the proud to cease, and will lay low the haughtiness of the terrible. I will make a man more precious than fine gold, even a man than the golden wedge of Ophir. Therefore I will shake the heavens, and the earth shall remove out of her place, in the wrath of the Lord of hosts, and in the day of his fierce anger." (Isa. xiii. 9–13.) Now though this, in its literal sense, refers to the destruction of Babylon, who can doubt that it refers also to the destruction, at the judgment to be performed by the Lord at his coming into the world, of those who are spiritually meant by Babylon throughout the Word of God,—that is, of those who profane religion by applying its sanctities to the purpose of self-exaltation? Hence it is said of Babylon personified under the name of Lucifer, in the next chapter, "How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cast down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!" words which, as the whole context shows, are not spoken of any casting down of Lucifer then past, but of an event then to come, and of which the ruin of the Babylonian empire, which also did not happen till two hundred years after the delivery of this prophecy, was a type. "Behold your God will come with vengeance, even God with a recompense; he will come and save you," (Ch. xxxv. 4.)—Here the judgment to be performed by the Lord, when in the world, is spoken of, as necessary to the salvation of the hu-