it, ‘accursed,’ or as it ought rather to be rendered, ‘devoted,’ or ‘put under a ban.’  And this ‘devotion’ was of such a sort as that the things or persons devoted were doomed to destruction.  All the dreadful things that were done in the 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 stands stamped on every line.  It colours all the New Testament views of life.  It is used as a motive for every duty, and as a magnet to draw men to Jesus Christ by salutary dread.  There is no hint in my text about the time of the Lord’s coming, no disturbing of the solemnity of the thought by non-essential details of chronology, so we may dismiss these from our minds.  The fact is the same, and has the same force as a motive for life, whether it is to be fulfilled in the next moment or thousands of years hence, provided only that you and I are to be there when He comes.