The Jewish lad sat on the floor listening as his elders talked about solemn things. Why have the Jews been disappointed about their Messiah? God promised Him, they wailed; but why has He never come?
One day, the name of Jesus of Nazareth came up. Little Joseph asked innocently, “Who was He?”
“A Jew of the greatest talent,” was the answer, “but He falsely claimed to be the Messiah, so the Jewish tribunal asked the Romans to put Him to death.”
But the boy had questions. “Why is Jerusalem destroyed, and why are we [Jews] in captivity?”
This time his father answered: “Alas! because the Jews murdered the prophets!”
Immediately “2 + 2 = 4” flashed through the boy’s mind: “Perhaps Jesus was also a prophet, and they killed Him when He was innocent.”
A child leads the way
The boy was forbidden to go to a Christian church, but this conviction was so strong that he would linger outside just to hear the preaching through the windows. When he was only seven, he was boasting to a Christian neighbor of the future triumph of the Jews at the coming of the Messiah. The old man interrupted him: “Dear boy, the real Messiah was Jesus of Nazareth. But your ancestors rejected and crucified Him, as they did the prophets. Go home, read Isaiah 53, and you will see that Jesus is the Son of God.”Joseph did so, young as he was. It fit perfectly. He asked his father to explain it.
But his father disliked even thinking about Isaiah 53; he was stern. Joseph never asked again, but truth moved him when he grew up to be a Christian missionary proclaiming the second coming of Jesus.
Steeped in Jewish unbelief, father and the elders stayed behind. They kept on praying the God of Abraham to send their Messiah while they refused to see He had already done so in Jesus of Nazareth. Another thousand years of those prayers would still be unanswered.
Now we must come to our story as Seventhday Adventists
If God should give us a “most precious” gift and we should sinfully refuse to accept it, does He meekly send it again and again for centuries more? He has more divine self-respect than that. The Jews will never get their Messiah until they back up and receive the One heaven already sent them. God has a very healthy self-respect; He doesn’t let you walk all over Him for millennia.We are in a similar quandary. How can we today explain to an innocent child why Jesus has not come back a second time when our pioneers proclaimed His “soon” coming nearly two centuries ago? And we’ve been doing it ever since. Does “soon” mean nothing?
Daniel and Revelation pinpoint where we are in time. Our pioneers expected to see Jesus come in their lifetime, and heaven gave Ellen White a vision in May 1856 wherein an “angel” assured them that Christ would come within the physical lifetime of some of them. Then she added, “Solemn words these, spoken by the angel.”
But we’re still here. (All of that generation, of course, have gone to their rest.)
God expects us to ask “Why the delay?”
We believe what we claim, yes, we “love His appearing.” That means we will be concerned. Why this failure of the heavenly angel’s promise of 1856? Without history’s answer, the question is left begging over parts of three centuries, one of them a complete one. Must it be so for centuries more?Joseph Wolff’s elders were praying for something that had already happened. Now, God has promised to send the “latter” rain of His Spirit before Christ can come the second time. As Joseph Wolff found in his Bible evidence that the Lord had already sent their Messiah in Jesus, so we find that heaven has already sent “us” the “beginning” of the latter rain of the Holy Spirit that we had prayed for so much: “The Lord in His great mercy sent a most precious message to His people” that was “the beginning” both of the “loud cry” of Revelation 18 and of “showers from heaven of the latter rain.” Then, adds Ellen White some hundred times, we disdained it “just like the Jews.”
We have deprived the world of blessings God designed they should have had. In her understanding, there has never been a greater mistake made by the Lord’s true church (“His own,” John 1:11) since what the Jews did two millennia ago. Unlike any other church in these two millennia, we have in a special way played “Calvary” a second time.
What is the “latter rain”?
A special gift in the form of a message. It is to prepare God’s people for meeting Jesus, and being changed at His coming without suffering death. It’s “translation,” which Enoch experienced (Heb. 11:5). The latter rain “ripens the grain for the harvest,” that is, it woos God’s people away from their idolatry and love of the world so that they want the kingdom of Christ to come. It awakens a zeal like those had who waited for Him in the autumn of 1844. It’s not something foggy like emotionalism; it’s biblical truth that had never been so clearly understood.This means a shift in Christian experience from Old Covenant to New Covenant thinking. It was the principal issue that impacted the reception of “1888.” It demonstrated that there is “light” in the gospel that is greater than the popular Sunday-keeping churches are able to see, sincere as they are. Justification by faith in the Day of Atonement is something beyond Luther’s, Calvin’s, or the Evangelicals’ possible understanding.
Old Covenant thinking sees God’s holy law as ten stern commandments, difficult to keep, and fear-inducing. New Covenant thinking sees them as ten divine promises to anyone who believes the Preamble—that God has already delivered you from Egyptian darkness and “bondage.”
We see this shift in Revelation 19: “The marriage of the Lamb is come, and His wife has made herself ready” (vs. 7). She once was a flower girl at the wedding, delightful in her innocence. But “she” has to grow up. She becomes a bride who understands and loves her Bridegroom. Concern for Him becomes greater than her former egocentric concern for her own security and salvation.
We have learned to think of the latter rain as “a message of Christ’s righteousness,” a clearer grasp of practical godliness—all by faith. The idea is in the next verse: “And to her [the bride] was granted that she should be arrayed in fine linen, clean and white: for the fine linen is the righteousness of saints.”
At last when this happens the latter rain is welcomed, no longer resisted. Now it is received when God’s people have taken the step that concludes the message from the true Witness—they have “overcome even as [He] overcame” (3:21). Their faith has matured under the refreshing “showers of the latter rain” received, not rejected.
According to Ellen White’s testimony, all this should have come over a century ago, yes, within the lifetime of people living in 1856. When the latter rain is received, it prepares for a grand “harvest” of human souls who will respond to a final “lifting up” of Christ and Him crucified. It will be a revelation of the cross that the world has never seen so clearly. The “most precious message” will penetrate to every honest heart on earth:
The message will be carried not so much by argument as by the deep convictions of the Spirit of God. The arguments have been presented. The seed has been sown, and now it will spring up and bear fruit. … Now the rays of light penetrate everywhere, the truth is seen in its clearness, and the honest children of God sever the bands which have held them. Family connections, church relations, are powerless to stay them now. Truth is more precious than all besides. Notwithstanding the agencies combined against the truth, a large number take their stand upon the Lord’s side.
Over a hundred times the Lord’s servant was forced to declare that “our” reaction to this gift was “just like the Jews’” reaction to Jesus when He came!
What do we need to do?
Recover what we lost is the simple answer. The Lord loves us too much to want to humiliate us; repentance will never do that to the repentant sinner. We will humble ourselves, yes; but our Savior puts His arms around us warmly. The innocent child Joseph Wolff saw what his people needed to do—recover what they had lost.To resolve our quandary is easy; just give to the world church the message which “we” “in a great degree” rejected, according to the Lord’s messenger. The problem is simple: the world needs that special Good News that God wanted to give them. How can we dare withhold it, century after century?
Give it to them!
A Question Naturally Arises
“Can God do something to force the sleeping ‘bride’of the 21st century to ‘make herself ready?’”God’s omnipotence must be restrained: never has a bridegroom dressed his bride for the wedding. That’s her job, to “make herself ready.”
The Lord has given us an excellent church organization, but He has wisely left this to us. Prayer is good, but not good enough; it must be augmented by a response from us—“be zealous therefore, and repent.” Praying for the latter rain could drag on for another century, and praying without recovering what we lost has to be a vain exercise that only confuses people. No bridegroom in his right mind can coerce his bride to say “I do.” Neither can Christ.
He cherishes in His heart a confidence that His people are basically honest. (We wouldn’t believe our “28 doctrines” unless we were!) This conviction that Christ cherishes, requires that we “overcome” where Joseph Wolff’s elders failed. Creating or joining an offshoot is not the solution. Repentance within the “body” of believers is the solution.