Conquest
were the consequences of the persons that endured them being thus
'consecrated,' in a very dreadful sense, or set apart for God. The
underlying idea was that evil things brought into contact with Him
were necessarily destroyed with a swift destruction. That being the
meaning of the word, it is clear that its use in my text is
distinctly metaphorical, and that it suggests to us that the
unloving, like those cities full of uncleanness, when they are
brought into contact with the infinite love of the coming Judge,
shrivel up and are destroyed.

The other word 'Maran-atha,' as I said, is to be taken as a separate
sentence. It belongs to the dialect, which was probably the
vernacular of Palestine in the time of Paul, and to which belong, for
the most part, the other untranslated words that are scattered up and
down the Gospels, such as 'Aceldama,' 'Ephphatha,' and the like. It
means 'our Lord comes.' Why Paul chose to use that untranslated scrap
of another tongue in a letter to a Gentile Church we cannot tell.
Perhaps it had come to be a kind of watchword amongst the early
Jewish Christians, which came naturally to his lips. But, at any
rate, the use of it here is distinctly to confirm the warning of the
previous clause, by pointing to the time at which that warning shall
be fulfilled. 'If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be
devoted and destroyed. Our Lord comes.' The only other thing to be
noticed by way of introduction is that this first clause is not an
imprecation, nor any wish on the part of the Apostle, but is a solemn
prophetic warning (acquiesced in by every righteous heart) of that
which will certainly come. The significance of the whole may be
gathered into one simple sentence--The coming of the Lord of Love is
the destruction of the unloving.

'Our Lord comes.' Paul's Christianity gathered round two facts and
moments--one in the past, Christ has come; one in the future, Christ
will come. For memory, the coming by the cradle and the Cross; for
hope, the coming on His throne in glory; and between these two
moments, like the solid piers of a suspension bridge, the frail
structure of the Present hangs swinging. In this day men have lost
their expectation of the one, and to a large extent their faith in
the other. But we shall not understand Scripture unless we seek to
make as prominent in our thoughts as on its pages that second coming
as the complement and necessary issue of the first. It