‘Your Redemption Draweth Nigh’

Peter L. Meney | Added: Jan 01, 2024 | Category: Editorial

Whenever believers speak together it is easy for us to decry the current state of the world. We lament the passing of what we imagine to be lost times and better days for the church. Most of us would say there is little on the horizon to make us think much improvement in morals or increase in spiritual interest is likely soon. Nevertheless, we should not be discouraged; God is still on His throne!

Let us be careful about how we talk. We ought to bite our lip rather than indulge a pessimism unbecoming God’s people who believe in the sovereign Lord. When we read articles and magazines of past generations of the Lord’s people we often note an air of despondency in their writing, too. We find them in their own day denouncing ‘modern trends’ and lost innocence. One wonders when the best times actually were.

And yet, here we are. Despite generations of decline the gospel is preached, the elect are being preserved, the church is intact, though small, and our hope of glory is strong and bright. It has always been thus. The elect are a remnant people, a little flock. The world in which we live, with its anti-Christ ethos, has never been a place at peace with the Lord’s church. Victorian morality was not Christian spirituality. 

When the Lord Jesus warned His disciples about the approaching calamities of the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 and the persecutions that would follow, He spoke of false religion, tribulation, distress, perplexity and fear. However, the rise of such conditions were to be met with a different attitude by believers. Jesus says, ‘when these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh’ (Luke 21:28).

Every piece of contrary news, every deviation from God’s truth is a call to the Lord’s people to ‘lift up your heads’. The Lord will not have His people wander around with our faces to the dirt. We are to lift our heads and look toward heaven. We are to stretch our necks and look for signs of our deliverance. Redemption in this sense is not our salvation at the cross, nor our experience of it in conversion. It is not the redemption of our bodies in the last day. It is the daily protection and safeguarding of Christ’s church and His gospel despite the worst this world can do. 

Our Lord Jesus is still delivering His people and faith is seeing every negative experience of sin as an occasion and opportunity for redemption. We do ourselves no good and give the Lord no honour in being depressed and disheartened at the sin that abounds. The Lord is not failing. His church is not failing. His gospel is not failing. Everything is going exactly to plan and we ought to thank the Lord for it. The evidence of Christ’s love and care for His elect is the preservation of His people despite the troubles all around. Man’s rebellion and the continuing descent of this world into sin is our evidence of Christ’s ongoing redemption and the glory that must follow. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.

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