J. Vernon McGee, Lion and the Lamb
Listen to what he says after he reads the changed Isaiah 11:6 verse.
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Is it not evident, therefore, that imperfection belongs to the present dispensation of God’s grace, and that under it the human family cannot attain to that state of exalted glory and perfect enjoyment which is declared in the scripture to belong to the millennial period, when the savage nature of the beasts of prey shall be destroyed, and the poisonous fangs of the serpent be rendered harmless; for the lion shall lie down with the lamb, and the child shall put his hand upon the cockatrice’s den: when the inhabitant shall not say I am sick: when there shall be no more curse, either of barrenness or toil, contention or war, ignorance or idolatry, sorrow or sighing, sickness or death ; in fine, nothing to hurt or destroy in all God’s holy mountain. Is not such a state of things utterly unattainable by the greatest efficiency that can be given to the present means of grace.
Here a question arises, and a very important one it is, and one which we desire to give a candid examination ; viz. Cannot all these results be attained without a change of the present dispensation? Cannot all mankind be enlightened and sanctified, as some are, by extensive and powerful outpourings of the Holy Spirit, and then Satan be cast out and all the physical evils we have enumerated be expelled from creation by a simple act of omnipotence from above, without the personal appearing and return of Christ to the earth? Has not God power to accomplish all these results in this way? and if so, whence the necessity of Christ’s personal return and reign on the earth to the perfection of the happiness of the human family, and to the accomplishment of all the glorious promises of Paradisaical blessedness? A question of this kind, originating in honest doubt, and prompted by pious feeling, we desire to treat with the greatest respect, and in reply to it would observe,
