ming; dead bodies
sprang to life when he touched them or spoke to them. His coming is not
death; he is the resurrection and the life, when he sets up his kingdom
there is to be no death, but life forevermore.

There is another mistake, as you will find if you read your Bible
carefully. Some people think that at the coming of Christ everything is
to be done up in a few minutes; but I do not so understand it. The first
thing he is to do is to take his Church out of the world. He calls the
Church his bride, and he says he is going to prepare a place for her. We
may judge, says one, what a glorious place it will be from the length of
time he is in preparing it, and when the place is ready he will come and
take the church to himself.

In the closing verses of the fourth chapter of 1 Thessalonians, Paul
says: "If we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so also them
which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him.... We which are alive and
remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent them which are
asleep. For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout,
with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God, and the dead
in Christ shall rise first. Then we which are alive and remain shall be
caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air,
and so shall we ever be with the Lord. Wherefore, comfort one another
with these words." That is the comfort of the church. There was a time
when I used to mourn that I should not be alive in the millennium; but
now I expect to be in the millennium. Dean Alford says--and almost
everybody bows to him in the matter of interpretation--that he must
insist that this coming of Christ to take his church to himself in the
clouds is not the same event us that to judge the world at the last day.
The deliverance of the church is one thing, judgment is another. Now, I
cannot find any place in the Bible where it tells me to wait for signs
of the coming of the millennium, as the return of the Jews, and such
like; but it tells me to look for the coming of the Lord; to watch for
it; to be ready at midnight to meet him, like those five wise virgins.
The trump of God may be sounded, for anything we know, before I finish
this sermon--at any rate we are told that he will come as a thief in the
night, and at an hour when many look not for him.

Some of you may shake your heads and say, "Oh, well, that is too deep
for the most of us; such things ought not to