Journal: Grace Journal
Volume: GJ 08:3 (Fall 1967)
Article: Adumbrations of Our Lord’s Return: Ecumenical Theology
Author: Raymond E. Gingrich

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GJ 8:3 (Fall 67) p. 3

Adumbrations of Our Lord’s Return: Ecumenical Theology

Raymond E. Gingrich

Professor of Bible
LeTourneau College

The Bauman Memorial Lectures for 1967
at
Grace Theological Seminary and College

Major movements in history are usually preceded by adumbrations of their approach. In secular history World War I was preceded by a century of political and military rumblings and eruptions between the time of the Congress of Vienna and that of the assassination at Sarajevo. World War II was preceded by two decades of travail between the time of the revenge at Versailles and the rape of Poland. In Biblical history the destruction of Samaria in 722 B.C. by the Assyrians was foreshadowed by more than two hundred years of apostasy, idolatry, conspiracy, and unholy alliances, from Jereboam I to Hoshea—all the subject of repeated warnings of impending judgment by a longsuffering God. The subjugation of Jerusalem in 606 B.C. by the Chaldeans did not occur until God had forewarned the rulers of the Southern Kingdom that unless they forsook their evil ways and returned to the God of their Fathers, they faced an inevitable rendevous with death.

This principle of preparation for approaching crises in history was evident in a striking fashion prior to the first advent of our Lord: an event so momentous that it became the focal point of history. “It was that toward which all that went before was moving, and from which all after-time is dated.”1 God had prepared the earth in a most remarkable way before He sent His Son into the world.

The heathen world had been prepared for His advent. Philip Schaff has emphasized the thoroughgoing inadequacy and hopelessness of its “skeptical philosophy and popular infidelity.”2 Its preparation was largely a negative preparation, demonstrating the complete inadequacy of natural religion to aid man in his struggle against himself. Although there were evidences that natural man had some yearning after God, sin went on unabated toward its morass of corruption, superstition, avarice and debauchery. The worst of which man is capable became the norm of a heathen world abandoned by God to its own degrading passions and reprobate mind. Left to itself, “the world by wisdom knew not God” (1 Cor 1:21). The dark picture which St. Paul, in addressing the Romans, draws of heathenism is fully sustained in the writings of Seneca, Tacitus, Juvenal, Persius, and other heathen writers of Rome’s literary guild, and shows the absolute need of redemption. “The world,” remarked Seneca, in a famous passage, “is full of crimes and vices. More are committed tha...

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