Christ is coming and he will not delay. He is coming to relieve the oppressed. He is longing for that day with great anticipation, the time when he can reward his people and end their waiting. But while the waiting continues and the patience is still required, they must watch and they must keep themselves. They must keep themselves even though they are sorely pressed. They must continue to walk uprightly even though they face the extra burden of the devil’s ferocious final attack upon them. They must not deny Christ’s name. Persecutors of the church have not been slow to point out to believers that if they were to deny the Lord, they could be free from all further distress. But this is a price that every believer knows is too high to pay. The world receives its good things now; our reward comes later. Now we must be faithful unto death and remember those promises which can keep us in the day of trial.
The Lord comes as a thief. A thief does not announce his arrival, but relies on coming unexpectedly. This is a most surprising comparison for the Lord to make, but he does so because one aspect of the way a thief operates is so apt as a description of his own final coming. If it were possible to be ready for the thief when he came, then the harm that he intended would be guarded against. His success depends on his unexpected arrival. Christ also comes as a thief in this respect. Of course he does not come to take what does not belong to him, for all things are his, even the things which we are permitted to call our own in this world. But he comes to take away the souls of those who do not know him, and they will certainly lose all that they value. In this respect then, he is a thief more thorough than any thief on earth. They can only take away our earthly goods, but Christ will take away all that a man has, even his own eternal soul.
Can we be prepared against this calamity? Yes, by turning to him who in another guise is our greatest possible friend, the Saviour of our souls, and our divine Protector. In this way we can prepare for that last day and his unexpected coming. We may not know precisely when that day will come, but it will not take us by surprise in the sense that we are not expecting it at all. We are, if we have trusted in Christ as our only Saviour, ready for that day whenever it should come.
How may we keep ourselves ready for that day, whenever it may arrive? By watching. How clearly the Lord said this to his disciples just before his earthly departure and this summary refers us back to all his teaching in Matthew 24 and 25. We do not watch in the sense that we are ever speculating about when his return will be. That, he has already warned us, is something that we can never be sure about. Those who become obsessed with predicting the moment have missed the real point of this teaching. We watch in the sense that we are on our guard against all the manifold strategies of the devil for bringing us down.