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Title: Christ, Christianity and the Bible
Author: I. M. Haldeman
Release Date: October 2, 2009 [EBook #30160]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHRIST, CHRISTIANITY AND THE BIBLE ***
Produced by Keith G. Richardson
Christ, Christianity and the Bible
BY
I. M. HALDEMAN, D.D.
Pastor First Baptist Church, New York City
_Author of_
How to Study the Bible, The Coming of Christ, The Signs of the
Times, Christian Science in the Light of Holy Scripture, etc., etc.
NEW YORK
CHARLES C. COOK
150 Nassau Street
Copyright, 1912,
By Charles C. Cook
CONTENTS
Christ
Christianity
The Bible
Christ
IF NOT GOD--NOT GOOD
BY I. M. HALDEMAN, D.D.
"Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is God"
(Matthew 9:17).
THE world has accepted Jesus Christ as a good man.
The evidences of his goodness are manifold.
He was full of compassion.
He never looked upon the people as a crowd. He never thought of them
as a mass. He saw them always as individuals. His heart went out to
them. All his impulses were to pity them, sympathize with, and help
them.
He went among them. He entered into all conditions, accepted all
situations. He was present at a wedding, he ate with publicans and
sinners and, anon, was guest at a rich man's table.
He saw the ravages of disease, the shame of sin, the tragedies in
life.
He knew there was torture in body and anguish in spirit.
He took the mystery of pain and laid it upon his heart, until tears
were his meat and his drink, by day and by night. He became a man of
sorrows and an expert in grief. He took upon him the woes of the
world till he was bowed and bent, as with the weight of years. The
tears of sympathy grooved his cheeks, as when streams carve their
way down mountain sides. Because of this men looked at him and saw
neither form nor comeliness; neither was there any beauty in him
that they should desire him.
He was a beneficent man.
Multitudes of men are benevolent, but not beneficent.
Benevolence is well wishing. Beneficence is well doing. He was
always well doing, giving sight to the blind, healing the sick,
cleansing the leper, feeding the hungry, raising the dead, unloosing
the bonds of Satan--unwinding the serpent's coil.
He was absolutely unselfish.
He emptied himself and made room in his soul for other lives. He had
no office hours and never interposed secretaries or major-domos
between himself and the people. He received all who came unto him--
ministering without money and without price.
There is one scene that might well be painted by a master hand.
It is evening. The western sky is all aglow with the glory of the
setting sun. Far up in the dome of the infinite blue, the evening
star swings golden, like a slow descending lamp let down by
invisible hands. The street is in half-tone. It is packed by the
strangest of throngs, by the blind, the lame, the halt, the
paralyzed and the leper-derelicts of humanity--borne thither on a
surging tide of life in which every wave is an accent of pain; they
are driven and piled up in great, quivering heaps against a door
which is partly shut, as in self-defence, by the sweltering crowd
within.
Jesus of Nazareth is in that house.
He is healing the sick. He is giving health, and strength, and peace
to all who seek him. He turns no one away. Compassion, sympathy,
beneficence, the tenderness of a mother for her helpless babe--these
are the characteristics which his daily ministry revealed.
No one ever brought a charge of evil doing or evil speaking against
him.
The people who followed him said, "He hath done all things well."
Police officers sent to arrest him as a disturber of the peace found
him in the midst of the people, speaking words that hushed their
tumult, quieted their murmurings and gave them rest; and the
officers returning to them who sent them, said, "Never man spake
like this man."
Pilate's wife dreamed a troubled dream of him, and sent word to her
husband not to lay hands on him--seeing that he was a just man.
Thrice before heaven and earth--in a testimony that still echoes
through infinite spaces, and is heard by listening worlds--Pilate
himself proclaimed, "I find no fault in this man."
He lifted up his voice against sin and unrighteousness.
Against nothing did he so much speak as against religious hypocrisy.
Nowhere, in any record, is language so terrible, so penetrating, so
hot, so full of the flame of fire and scorching analysis, scorching
and burning in its denunciation of those who on the outside (in
their religious profession) were like whitened sepulchres, but on
the inside (in their actual lives) were full of dead men's bones and
corruption--nowhere, outside the twenty-third chapter of Matthew,
does language fall with such tremendous vibration of thunderous
indignation, and the accent of aroused and fully angered justice.
"Ye serpents," "ye generation of vipers," are some of the phrases;
and the words, "fools," "blind hypocrites," mingle again and again
with the far-sounding, judicial menace, "Woe, woe unto you."
He seemed to be dominated and controlled by one idea--the idea of
God. The God thought held and moved him. He could not go anywhere,
or see anything, or utter the shortest discourse, that he did not,
in some fashion, connect it with the infinite Father. Was a sower
sowing seed, he saw in that incident an illustration of the fact
that the true seed is the Word of God, and the true sower he who
casts it into the mightier ground of the human heart. Did a flock of
sheep lie at rest upon the hillside, guarded by a shepherd's care,
at once he would unfold the shepherding of a Father's love. A tiny
sparrow, flying an unnoticed speck in the distant sky, or falling
ground-ward with its weary flight, was a winged witness that the
Father knew and saw even the smallest details of human life. A lily
in its lowliness, and yet a lily in its beauty shaming a king's
array, a lily, toiling not, but upward growing, furnished him a text
from which to preach the providence of God; and a wandering beggar
boy far away from home and kindred, stained with sin and dark with
sorrow, gave occasion for the wondrous story of the Prodigal Son and
a father's changeless and tender love.
God! God! God! this was the supreme note of his life.
On the cross he gave utterance to words which reveal the inner
character of his soul.
When a man has been lied about, falsified, his good evil spoken of
and his reputation assailed (as was his before the Sanhedrin--in the
mock trial given him there), when such a man has been hounded from
one end of the town to the other, spit upon and jibed at and,
finally, nailed through hands and feet to a torturing cross; when
such a man with his heart bursting (because of the impeded
circulation, driving the surging, tumultuous blood back upon it),
with the sun scorching his bare temples, a crown of thorns stabbing
him at every helpless turn of his restless head; when such a man,
under such circumstances, can rise above the wickedness, cowardice
and cheap treason that have nailed him to the cross, and pray (and
pray sincerely) that his guilty murderers, villainous detractors and
unscrupulous slanderers may be forgiven, that man bears witness that
he has, at least, a heart of good.
And it was just such a prayer which came from the parched, dry,
cracked lips of this man of Nazareth as he hung upon the cross and
cried out,
"Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."
Again he spoke from the cross.
There was standing near, a woman who had been chosen of God to give
him birth. She was sobbing convulsively. She was realizing what had
been foretold of her more than thirty years before--"a sword shall
pierce through thy own soul, also." Mary, the mother of Jesus, stood
there, brokenhearted. Jesus turned his head and looked at John, his
cousin, bidding him take that weeping mother to his home, his heart
and care, and be unto her henceforth a loving son.
O the man who, in the hour of his own agony, shall remember his
mother, and crown her, make her the queen of his life, and ordain
that others shall love and reverence her, proclaims for himself the
lustre of a manhood without spot.
Once more he spoke from the place of anguish--that moment on the
edge of death. There his soul, rising from the depths of the
overwhelming waves of agony, cries:
"Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit."
He who in the hour and article of death can face God and eternity,
and commit himself to the hand of supreme justice as a confident
child to the arms of a loving father, bears witness that in his soul
there is no ghastly memory of sin, no sharp, remembered pang, no
fear of offended law. Such a confidence and such a committal of
triumphant calm bear witness that the heart is at rest with God, and
is conscious of its own good.
For two thousand years the world, without a dissenting voice, has
borne witness that he is the one man who came into the earth and
walked through it superlatively good.
Among the voices in the common consent of the world that Jesus
Christ was a good man, there are those who with equal insistence
deny that he was Almighty God.
They agree that he had the spirit of God; that he had it in measure
such as no other man before or since. They announce their belief
that he is the mightiest advance on humanity ever known; that all
other religious teachers pale before him as the stars before the
sun. They speak of his spotless life with fervent admiration, and
draw special attention to his discourses as models of exhortation to
righteousness and truth. To them the sermon on the mount is a _chef
d'oeuvre_. Out of that sermon they take the maxim about doing unto
others as you would they should do unto you. They take that maxim
and frame it about and make it the "Golden Rule" of human life. They
exalt Jesus as the perfect example, telling us that if we shall
govern our life by him, make him our constant copy, imitate him, we
shall fill our daily existence with righteousness and truth. In
fact, if we seek a panegyric on the humanity of Christ; if we desire
to see his goodness exalted to the heavens, and his humanity put
beyond compare with the sons of men--we must needs go to the
Socinian, the Arian and the Unitarian--those who deny the deity of
Christ. But this exaltation of the human Christ is simply setting up
a man of straw that with one blow of deific discount he may be
knocked down again. He is set up as man that he may be cast down as
God.
They will not accept him as God.
God Almighty (we are told) cannot be confined or shut up in any one
man. Man as man and, therefore, every individual man in his part, is
the avatar of God. Each man is in some sense the incarnation of God.
God is more or less enthroned in all men. God is to be found in all
men as he is to be found in all nature.
A good man--call Jesus a good man--set him up as high as you please,
build as lofty a pedestal for him as you will, but Almighty God--
_Never!_
Over against this exaltation of Christ as a merely good man, and the
persistent denial that he was God, stands the unmistakable claim
which Jesus Christ himself made--that he was God.
He made that claim in many ways.
He claimed it by declaring his power and authority to forgive sin.
That was a striking moment when he proclaimed it for the first time.
Four men had brought a paralytic to the house where he was
preaching. When they could not get in because of the crowd, they
climbed up on the roof, took off some of the tiling, and by means of
ropes or corners of the mattress let the man down to the very feet
of Jesus. When he saw _their_ faith, he turned to the sick man and
said, "Son (son of Abraham), thy sins are forgiven thee."
At once there was an uproar. The leading men, sitting round and
watching him, burst out with a protest, charging him with blasphemy,
saying that God only could forgive sin.
And they were right.
No mere man can forgive sin. Again and again the Scriptures teach us
that forgiveness is with God that he may be feared.
In announcing the man's sins forgiven, Jesus clearly claimed the
prerogative, power and authority, which belong to God.
He claimed this equality by declaring himself to be the Son of God.
To the Jews, "Son of God" was equivalent to "God the Son." It meant
to them, the moment he styled himself by that name, an unqualified
claim to essential equality with the Father. Because of this they
raged against him and would have killed him, crying out that he had
made himself equal with God.
He made this claim in terms which admit of no misunderstanding. He
said:
"I and my Father are one."
When Philip said, "Shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us," he
answered and said:
"Hast thou been with me so long time and hast thou not known me,
Philip? From henceforth ye know him and have seen him."
To Philip he had also said:
"I am the way and the truth and the life--no man cometh unto the
Father but by me."
By this statement he deliberately shut out all other men as the
ground and means of approach to God. He declares that God, the
Father, can be found in and through him alone; that he is the
supreme way, the very truth and the very life; not that he knows
some truth and has a measure of life in common with men, but that he
is _the_ truth--the _absolute_ life. Such attitude, such claimed
rights, privileges and powers, belong alone to God.
But he goes beyond this.
He testifies that he has been from all eternity the manifestation of
the very selfhood of the Father. Hear what he says:
"And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self, with the
glory which I had with thee before the world was."
He traces his personality backward beyond the hour when the world
was launched into space, before the stellar systems were created. He
goes beyond time, he takes us into eternity, and in that unbegun and
measureless distance declares with all the calm assurance of
accustomed truthfulness that he had the glory, the visibility, the
outward manifestation and splendor of the Father's own essential
selfhood; that his relation to him was that of one who was from all
eternity his determination, definition and utterance.
Such claims as these are the claims of one who declares himself to
be, and without restraint, nothing less than Almighty God.
On one occasion when talking to the Jews he said that Abraham had
rejoiced to see his day, had seen it and was glad. They turned upon
him and reminded him that he was not yet fifty years old, how then
could he have seen Abraham, or Abraham him--that Abraham who had
been dead nearly two thousand years?
He faced them and said:
"Verily, verily I say unto you, before Abraham was, I am."
The striking thing in the statement is not the claim of pre
-existence--great as that is--not that he claimed to have been in
existence already--not fifty years merely, but two thousand--no! all
these utterances are remarkable enough, but these are not the
astounding thing he said. The astounding, the unspeakably
extraordinary thing he said is found in just two words:
"I am."
There is one place in Holy Scripture where this phrase is supremely
used. In the third chapter of the book of Exodus it is recorded that
God manifested himself to Moses at the burning bush, and there
declared himself to be the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the
God of Jacob. He commanded Moses to return to Egypt, appear before
Pharaoh and demand the release of the Children of Israel from their
cruel bondage; and when Moses inquired by what name he should speak
to the people, he answered:
"Say unto them, I AM hath sent me unto you."
"I AM."
To the Jew these two words set forth the supreme name and title of
the eternal God.
In saying, therefore, "Before Abraham was--I AM," Jesus announced
himself to be the eternal, self-centred, supreme being, Almighty
God. When he said this, and because they understood him, because
they knew exactly what he meant by these words, the Jews took up
stones to stone him.
If I were seeking to demonstrate by object lesson, and in a fashion
that would admit of no reply, that Jesus claimed to be Almighty God,
I would summon the mightiest and most masterful artist the world
knows to come and paint for me the scene which takes place a little
later as a consequence of that moment when he emphasizes his claim
by saying:
"I and my Father are ONE."
The picture would represent a great crowd of scowling, fierce, angry
Jews, their hands filled with stones--some of them drawn back, the
whole figure intense with readiness to cast the fatal stone--and
Jesus, standing a little distance apart, looking calmly on.
Underneath the picture I would have written in great golden letters
(letters so artistic, so startling, so wonderful in form, that at
the risk of art itself--almost at the risk of minimizing the picture
at the first glance, subordinating it to interest in the letters and
dividing the mind of the onlooker between the actual scene and the
letters themselves)--I would have written in letters that should
smite the eye and the innermost thinking of the beholder, the words
recorded in the tenth chapter of John's Gospel, given by the Jews in
reply to the demand of Jesus when, speaking with amazement, he asks,
"For what good work do ye stone me?" I would have every gazer at the
picture read these words till they rose up in vastness against him,
smiting his attention as the very stones in the hands of the Jews--
these words:
"For a good work we stone thee not but for blasphemy; and because
that thou BEING A MAN MAKEST THYSELF GOD."
The Jews were not deceived.
They knew what he had done.
They knew that he claimed to be no less than very God himself.
There can be no doubt that he claimed to be God.
There need be, really, no discussion about it.
The New Testament records the claim.
I am not making any issue as to whether the New Testament is true,
or reliable. I am saying thus far, only, that the New Testament (the
Gospels of the New Testament), in language concerning which there
can be no possible mistake or even ground for misinterpretation,
records the fact that Jesus Christ did claim to be Almighty God.
If Jesus Christ were not Almighty God (as he claimed to be) he was
not a good man (as it is said he was).
The proposition ought to be self-evident.
No mere man can claim to be God and be good.
He who, as mere man, claims to be God, robs God of the glory that is
exclusively his.
He who thus claims to be God, and bids men go into eternity trusting
him as God, is a deceiver.
No man who robs God of equality, and who deceives men into believing
that he is God, can be good--he is a wicked and blasphemous
deceiver.
There is only one way in which the character of Jesus Christ can be
saved on this claim of his to be God--if that claim were not true.
It can be saved only by assuming that he was self-deceived; that he
sincerely believed himself to be God, but was blinded and held fast
by his own mistaken concept.
But the man who claims to be Almighty God, and claims it as he did,
can be self-deceived only when he is a mental weakling, unbalanced
in mind, or absolutely insane.
None of these things can be predicated of Jesus Christ.
On the contrary, he was the most intellectual man the world has ever
known.
Mark how he met the wisdom and the genius of the men who surrounded
him. Again and again they came to him with crafty and perplexing
questions. With a word he solved their problems, flashed truth into
their shame-smitten faces, and silenced them. In all the universe
there is no soul meaner, more contemptible, more cowardly, and
utterly lost to every sense of decent manhood than the man who, for
the sake of entangling a good man in his speech, asks him questions
in public, before an audience ready at every turn to misquote and
misinterpret his slightest utterance; and that is what they did.
They came to him, not with the desire to know the truth, but to
confound him, cast him down and destroy his prestige with the
people. To every question he gave an answer having in it spiritual
truth, but bearing the unmistakable stamp of rare wisdom and
intellectual superiority.
His words, the simple speech he used in the midst of them, or alone
with his disciples, have been the impulse of the mightiest
intellectual activity the world has ever known. Out of his words
have grown systems of theology that may well call for all there is
of brain power and capacity in those who study them. Here are to be
found the keenest speculations and the farthest outreach of
metaphysical suggestion and the most detailed analysis of which the
human mind is capable. Book after book, treatise after treatise,
discourse after discourse, have been produced out of the simplest
and most detached things he said. No man can read his speeches and
not find the mind stimulated, shocked, quickened and impelled
forward even upon the most daring lines of thought.
It would be easy to call the roll of the princes and kings in the
realm of intellect, men whose thoughts burn and flame like great
quenchless lights; men whose minds are the storehouses of knowledge,
and whose utterances by word and pen have moved the quickest and
most forceful lives in the world. It would be easy to call the long
roll of these names shining like stars and constellations in the
firmament of thought--princes and kings of intellect who acknowledge
that Jesus Christ is not only superior to them morally and
spiritually, but intellectually.
What man is there to-day with any degree of mental self-respect who
would dare to stand up and assert himself the equal of Jesus Christ
intellectually?
Without necessity of demonstration, it ought to be a truth beyond
question that Jesus Christ was the most intellectual man the world
has ever known.
Such a man as that could not be self-deceived.
If he were not Almighty God he knew it.
He knew it as well as these good Unitarians, and these wondrously
advanced scholars who cannot get beyond the glamour of his humanity.
He knew it at first hands.
If he were not Almighty God--if he were only a man--he knew it, knew
it through and through, in every fibre of his being.
There is no possibility then whatever for him to have been deceived.
If he were not deceived, if he knew he was not God, then--
HE WAS NOT A GOOD MAN.
This is his own argument:
A young man came to him and said, "Good Master, what good thing
shall I do, that I may inherit eternal life? and he said unto him,
Why callest thou me good? there is none good _but one, that is
God_."
The argument is simple enough.
"You call me good. God alone is good. If I am not God, I am not
good."
Not good!
Nay! If he were not God, he was the most wantonly wicked man of whom
I ever heard.
If he were not God, not only does disaster fall upon himself in the
total destruction of his character, and in the consequent and final
driving of him from the suffrage and consideration of men, but the
disaster falls upon all who have put their faith in him.
If Jesus Christ were not God, then he never forgave the sins of a
single soul, and all those throughout the two thousand years who
have gone into eternity trusting in his name have gone into that
eternity unforgiven and unshrived of God.
If Jesus Christ were not God, then he has not forgiven the sin of a
single human being alive to-day.
You had sinned! There were memories of the sins you had committed.
They allowed you no rest. They gave you anguish of mind. Others
could not forgive you. You could not forgive yourself. The
consciousness that you stood naked before the all-seeing eye of a
holy God; that he knew the circumstances and every detail thereof,
down to the very intents and purposes lying behind your deeds, and
even your thoughts; that he looked into and saw all that was in your
heart; in the consciousness growing clearer and stronger and more
terrible each day that you had no excuse, no place that you could
hold for a moment; that if he summoned you to his presence, you
would stand in the white light of his unmixed holiness, and the
inexorable and unrelenting wrath of his essential antagonism and
just hatred against sin; all this consciousness taking voice in you
and through you, cried out in your soul, "I am guilty and undone."
And this filled you with a horror of great darkness and the utter
blackness of a hopeless despair. Then you heard the voice of Jesus
Christ saying, "Come unto me." "Him that cometh unto me I will in no
wise cast out." You came. You fell at his feet. You owned his death
as your atoning sacrifice. You claimed him as your substitute. You
claimed forgiveness through his blood. He said to you, as he said to
the paralytic, "Thy sins are forgiven thee." You rose and went away
as when one is released from a galling chain; as when a burden that
was crushing to earth has been lifted from the sore, bleeding
shoulder; as when one who has been tossed on a midnight sea enters
the haven while the dawn is breaking, casts anchor and touches
shore. For years you have had peace. The memory of your sins are
there (for though God when he forgives forgets them, you cannot).
Like David, perhaps, you cry, "My sin is ever before me!" The sin
marks are there as the nail holes in the wall, but you have been
able to look at them and have peace because you have said to
yourself, "I am not an unwhipped of justice, my sins have been
punished in my substitute; they have been fully answered for in his
blood. He has forgiven me and justified me and made me clean. In him
I stand clothed in the very 'righteousness of God.' I hate my sin
and despise it for what it is in itself, for what it made him, my
redeemer, to endure, but I have peace because he has fully satisfied
in my behalf. I have actually satisfied in him and am delivered
before God's court of holiness both from the guilt and the demerit
of sin. I have, in short, _gone through the judgment with Christ on
the cross_. He has pronounced forgiveness--absolution--upon me, and
he has done so by virtue of his power and authority as the living
one in whom dwelleth all the fulness of the godhead bodily--as my
saviour and my God he has forgiven me and I am at peace."
All this you have said within yourself and testified.
But I ask you now to face the terrible fact--if Jesus Christ were
not God--this terrible fact--that you have been deceived.
You have had a false peace.
You have been living in a fool's paradise.
You are before God an unpardoned and as yet unpunished criminal
awaiting your doom. All this is absolutely your state--
IF--
If Jesus Christ were not Almighty God.
If Jesus Christ were not Almighty God, he had no authority nor power
to forgive your sins. NO! And if Jesus Christ were not God I know
not where to bid you turn. You must carry the load of your sins all
your days; and when you die, go into eternity and face a holy God
who tells you by every law and fact of nature that he never forgives
in a single case till he has first punished the sin and with it the
sinner.
If Jesus Christ were not God, his death was not an atonement.
And this surely should be plain enough.
Only God can atone to God.
Only an infinite being can satisfy an infinite being.
If Jesus Christ were not God he could not make an atonement.
If he did not make an atonement, then the world has never been
reconciled to God nor brought up on mercy ground. Instead of being
lifted up to the plane of grace and mercy, the world is still under
the condemnation and judgment of God, no longer under a suspended
sentence, but sheer and defenceless, with nothing to hinder the
crash of doom at any moment.
There is no hope. There is no daysman. There is no one to offer unto
God what he demands, and unto man what he needs. There is no
mediator between a holy God and a sinful man.
If Jesus Christ were not God, then he did not rise from the dead. He
did not bring life and immortality to light, and, as for me, the
preacher, I have no light to hold out to you in the all-embracing
gloom and night of death.
There is no hope.
If a man shall tell me there is no hereafter, that death ends all, I
shall take up the law of induction and argue him to a standstill
along the line of unfathomable mysteries and inexplicable
psychological phenomena in the constitution of man, and the
inexplicable absence of the phenomena in the state of death,
inexplicable upon any known materialistic ground, and I shall laugh
at his inability to maintain his thesis beyond the poor shred of a
hypothesis. If a man shall tell me as the result of pure reasoning
that he concludes for the endless existence of the soul after death,
and shall do this even upon the plane of induction, I shall turn and
tell him that all his argument is based upon inference and not fact,
finding its largest emphasis in the region of the unknowable and
guessable--in the things he cannot explain, where certain
conclusions can neither be successfully affirmed, nor successfully
denied, and where, by consequence, he may console himself, if he
wish, with his side of the guess; and I shall feel a keen sense of
sorrow at his inability to hold his premise in the final region of
the sure.
And what does all this mean?
Is it playing fast and loose with the mind? Am I turning in upon
myself and playing the mere harlequin in the arena of mental
gymnastics?
No! there is sane meaning to this double method--it is this: _as
much may be said along one line of reasoning as the other_. Each is
a _non-sequitur_ to the other. Each negatives the other and leaves
us with reason's torch inverted--the light out, the darkness deeper
than ever; and standing on the threshold of the grave we are forced
to cry out in the sharp agony of a continual self-smiting
perplexity:
"To be or not to be--_that is the question_."
Question it is--always a question--always coming back from the side
of every dead body--always coming back from the clod-filled grave--
coming down from age to age, coming back a question no man, not the
wisest mere man who ever lived, could answer, or any living wise man
can answer to-day.
If Jesus Christ were not God it cannot be answered; for if Jesus
Christ were not God, he did not rise from the dead and by divine
power carry himself out of the region of death forever.
If Jesus Christ were not God, you may go and sit by the tomb of your
dead and weep bitter (because hopeless) tears.
If Jesus Christ were not God, then he was not a redeemer and
saviour. All the beautiful things that have been taught about him as
such are false. All the hopes of heaven, the beauty of the celestial
city, the tree of life, the river of crystal, the company of the
saints, the arch-angelic song, the meeting and the knowing of those
who long ago have left us--none of these things are so.
If he were not God, then it is not true that he sits upon the
throne, high and lifted up, listening to the plaints of the weakest
heart that shall trust him, and hearing the sound of every falling
tear.
If Jesus Christ be not God, then the whole system of Christianity
built upon his person and work falls to the ground, is broken into
fragments, and like wind-swept dust can never be gathered.
If Jesus Christ be not God, the New Testament record of him is
untrue. The New Testament impeached in its prime particular becomes
a worthless book--a book full of exhortations to holiness and truth,
in the name of him who is proven to be (if he ever lived at all) a
blasphemer, a deceiver of men and the concrete of human wickedness.
If the New Testament is not true, neither is the Old; for the Old
Testament finds its meaning and value only in the Christ of the New
Testament. Take Jesus Christ out of the Old Testament (which you
must do if you set aside the New; for he alone fulfils the types,
the symbols and the prophecies of the Old Testament; he alone makes
its testimony and history intelligible; he alone gives unity,
harmony and authoritative meaning to its exhortations)--take Christ
out of the Old Testament and you take away its one and only key.
And mark you--when _Christ goes out of the Bible as God--God goes
out of the Bible_. The deity which has preserved it, the power which
has made it living and unchangeable in the midst of change and
death, will have been dethroned.
Without Christ as God you are without any sane and satisfying
knowledge of God.
Where will you turn to find God and know him to your comfort? You
might as well look into the bottomless pit as into your own heart.
No more satisfactory will it be to look into the heart of others. We
are all built on the same plan.
The difference is only in degree or extension.
The basilar fact is, God cannot be found in any natural man.
You cannot find or know him to your heart's content in nature.
What kind of a God does nature reveal to you?
I will answer for you--a God who puts you in this world and does not
tell you whence you come, whether from the all mud or the Almighty,
from an angel or a devil, from jelly or genius, from the heights of
heaven or the depths of hell. A God who puts you here and fills you
with questions he alone can answer and--refuses so to do. A God who
calls you into the world and gives you eyes to see everything but
yourself. A God who hides you from yourself, so that you do not know
whether you are a function or a soul; whether you are matter or
spirit; whether you are a personality or a cellular part of a
general whole--called man. A God who gave you mind with seemingly
infinite possibilities in thought, and gave you a body that is
finite and temporary in construction. A God who gives you an
intellect which grasps after eternity, and is always saying on the
summit of any endeavor achieved, "What next?" and yet is limited to
a few inconsequent years. A God who sets you face to face with the
imminency of death, and never allows you to know at what moment you
must go, and gives you no hint of the beyond--or whether there is a
beyond.
In France they do not tell the man who is to be guillotined till a
few moments before the fatal hour. He is sleeping on his couch. He
is dreaming of pleasant fields, of running streams, of boyhood's
days, of to-morrows that shall be better--a heavy hand is laid on
his shoulder--he starts up in bed--the gray light of early morning
is filtering in through the barred window of his cell--stern-faced
men are standing before him--they say, "Your hour is come; follow
us."
It is terrific.
But this is the case of every human being.
No one can tell when the summons may come--or where.
A man was sitting in his room at close of day. It had been (so he
said) the best day of his life. He had said to his wife that he
never loved her more than he did then (and they had been married
many years), never did he feel more content that they had chosen to
walk together through life than then. He was full of plans for
himself and for her (saying with great earnestness that their last
days should be their best days). She answered back that she was glad
with a great gladness that it was so. She turned away for a moment
to glance in another direction, still speaking to him. When she
looked back he was gone--gone while the love words and the hope
words were still on his lips--the finger of death had touched his
heart--a voice had whispered in his ear, "Come." There was only a
lifeless bit of clay where a moment before had been a body pulsing
with life, with love, with hope.
It is terrific--doomed--and not knowing how soon the bolt will
strike. What sort of a God is this who laces your body with a
network of laws, the breaking of the slightest of which--all unknown
to you--may send you forth upon a path of diseased and tortured
existence--in which the body from whence you cannot escape shall be
to you as a chamber of horrors--a place of the thumbscrew, the rack
and the fagot. What kind of a God is that who allows the aged to
linger out in a miserable prolongation of wretched days, a burden to
themselves, a burden to others, and takes away the widow's only son
--her only support? Who is the God who creates one man with all the
equipment for life, and another man with all the lack of it? What
kind of a God is this who looks down out of the heaven of day and
the heavens of night, and sees all the sorrow, the anguish, the
pain, the unspeakable tragedies, and sends no wing of angel to
cleave the pitiless sky, no voice out of the silence to console, no
hand to help?
What man is there of you, if he had the power, would not banish
sickness, sorrow, pain and death?
What man is there of you who, if he could, would not make every
human being well and happy?
What then? What is the conclusion of the matter concerning you?
Simple enough--you have _the heart to do it, but not the power_.
What is the conclusion concerning this God of nature? _He has the
power--but does not manifest the heart_.
What will you say of this God of nature in such a scheme?
What can you say but that your heart is better than the heart of the
God which nature reveals?
Can you hear, understand and love a God like that?
Can you climb through nature up to nature's God and say, "I have
found him, I know him?"
You can climb up, but where will you find him?
You will find him wrapped in the black thundercloud or girded with
the robe of the lightnings: You will find him the God who splits the
earth in twain with the earthquake's riving blow, loosens the bands
of the sea, sends tidal waves in surges of destruction, pours out
the lava streams from the volcano's cone, as kings pour wine from an
earthen cup, spilling the wine and breaking the cup; the God who
turns an earthly paradise (like Messina) into a fire-smitten desert,
and a city of the living into a cemetery of the unburied dead.
When your heart aches, will such a God care for you? Will his
thunders console you? When your soul is dark, will his lightnings
illumine it? When you yearn for love, will his inexorable law supply
it?
Ah, sirs, without Christ you are without a God whom you can love,
whom you can trust, to whom you can go, and in whose strength you
can lie down and--at last--be folded in peace.
If Jesus Christ is not God, if the only God to whom you can go is
the God of nature, then you might as well fall down in the sand at
the base of the far Egyptian sphinx, open your eyes for a moment to
the blue sky that spreads away to the horizon before its staring
face, its cold, chiselled, inscrutable smile, and the next moment
shut your eyes against the pelting dust the idle winds blow thither.
Ah! Nature is a sand-dune--and the God of nature is a Sphynx.
Do you care to kneel and worship there?
If Jesus Christ be not God the disaster is not alone to him, but to
you--to me.
If he were not God, then we are in a world where the very day is no
better or brighter than a starless midnight.
If Jesus Christ were a good man, a supremely good man and a
supremely intellectual man, then he was and is (as he claimed)
Almighty God.
The New Testament says he was a supremely good, and a supremely
intellectual man.
For two thousand years the most brilliant men in the world have
corroborated this record by freely testifying that Jesus Christ was
a supremely good and a supremely intellectual man; all this being
so, I change the conditional form of the proposition to the
indicative and declarative and now say:
Since Jesus Christ was a supremely good and a supremely intellectual
man, he was, therefore (as he claimed), Almighty God.
He could not be a supremely good and a supremely intellectual man
and claim to be God unless he were God.
Since he claimed to be God, therefore, he was God.
Yes; he was God.
The evidences are manifold.
He was _sinless_.
He said:
"Which of you convinceth me of sin?"
For two thousand years he has been in the concentrated light of a
hostile world's merciless investigation. The light has been turned
on the land in which he lived. Every rod of ground over which he
travelled has been dug up, or surveyed, or trodden. His words have
been weighed, balanced to a nicety against any probability of error,
mistake, imagination, fancy or misquotation. His words have been
split open as men break open rocks. All the contents of his words
have been put in the crucible of criticism. Every thought has been
insistently and unsentimentally assayed for, even, the suspicion or
the slightest hint of an alloy. His teachings have been chemically
dissolved and turned into their component parts. The saline base of
truth has been sought for at any risk to the compounded speech he
made.
And after all! not one self-respecting, authoritative lip has
uttered a charge against him.
In the hush of a world that cannot even murmur, he steps forward and
once more rings down his challenge:
"Which of you convinceth me of sin?"
He stands out among his fellows as a white shaft under a starless
midnight. He rises above the passions of men as an unshaken rock in
the midst of a wild, lashed sea. He is to man's best character as
harmony is to discord, as a smile is to a frown, as love is to hate,
as blessing is to cursing, as a garden of lilies to a desert of
sand, as heaven is to earth, as holiness is to sin and as life to
death.
If he were sinless, he was _absolutely holy_; he was so holy that
his very presence brought out the sin in others. Sinful men and
women fell at his feet and confessed their sins. At sight of him
demons tore their way out of the bodies they possessed and fled as
clouds of darkness before the sun, crying as they fled, "Thou art
the holy one of God--hast thou come to torment us before the time?"
Tormented as they were even then, as sin always is when confronted
by holiness; as vice is before virtue; as a lie is before the truth.
He was sinless.
He was holy.
His sinlessness and holiness cannot be accounted for on natural
grounds.
All his natural ancestry were sinful.
His sinlessness cannot be accounted for unless he were God; for,
sinlessness and holiness come alone from God and, as essential
qualities, take their rise alone in God.
His power over nature proved him God.
His look changed water into wine, his word gave sight to the blind,
healing to the deaf, speech to the dumb. At his word the lame man
leaped as a hart, the leper was cleansed. He said, "Peace, be
still," and the wild tempest of the sea was hushed, and there was a
great calm, a calm like unto the stillness of the unruffled rest of
God.
For two thousand years his regenerative power in a world of sin has
been the proof that he was God.
For two thousand years, in every age, in every clime, among all
classes of men, from the refined infidel to the vilest sinner, from
the cold atheist to the brutal idolater, men have been changed--
transformed. Men who have been the bond slaves of passion, whose
daily lives have been the output of iniquity, whose deeds have been
for destruction, whose words have been poison, and whose inmost
thoughts have been as the vapors of miasma--these all--have been
transformed into fountains of purity, into angels of mercy, or as
illuminated missals have been written full of the name and the glory
of God; men whose every fibre was as the coarse and tangled threads
of a brutal unrefinement have become men whose every line of
character was as the woven gold of Ophir--and the speech that once
smote with discord the ears that heard it has become as the sound of
singing across silent waters and under listening stars. And you ask
these transfigured human beings, as you find them travelling along
the highway of twenty noteful centuries, what it was that so changed
them, put such new force and impetus in them, making them to be as
men new created, and they will tell you that Jesus Christ came along
that way, they saw in his face the stain of blood, the marks of
nails were in his hands and feet, he had the appearance of one who
had been cruelly slain. He stopped, looked at them and said: "Come
unto me." They obeyed, they fell at his feet. He touched them, a
strange, keen sense thrilled through them. He said to them, "Arise."
They arose and found themselves new men--men _twice begotten_.
Ask the drunkard who tried to be sober, broke every pledge and drank
in his cup the very life blood of those he loved and who loved him--
how at last he found strength to say a final "no," turn from the
accursed thing, and enter a world all new in which to live, a
freeman and no more a slave--he will tell you, "Jesus Christ did it
all."
Ask any of the bond slaves of passion, men who have been gripped by
every form of human desire, and whiplashed, and stung, and tortured
by their gratification, and driven to fresh and maddening excess by
the never satisfied and always burning lust within (ever crying like
the horseleach's daughter, "Give, give"); ask them how it is that
to-day they are freemen and walk as kings, and they will tell you
that Jesus Christ laid hold of them, and by the might of his power,
the tenderness of his love, and the wealth of his grace, made them
free.
And this has been going on for two thousand years.
The story has recently been told of a great thinker lecturing one
day before a large audience of medical students--some eighteen
hundred men who pressed in to hear him. He took from his desk a
letter, and holding it up before him, said something to this effect:
"Gentlemen! I have here a letter from one of your number, in which
he tells the story of his life--a record of shame, of sinful
indulgence, that makes me shudder even to look at the letter. At the
close of this fearful confession he asks, 'Can your God save such an
one as I am?'"
Stopping for a moment and surveying his audience, the speaker said:
"When I came to the city this afternoon (it was the city of
Edinburgh) there was a beautiful, fleecy cloud spreading itself like
a thing of glory in the upper sky, and I said, 'O cloud, where do
you come from?' and the cloud answered me and said, 'come from the
slums and the low, vile places of the city. The sun of heaven
reached down and lifted me up and transfigured me with his
shining.'"
Looking about upon the now deeply impressed throng, the speaker,
after a solemn pause, said:
"I do not know whether this young man is here or not, but if he is,
I can say to him that my Saviour and my Master, Jesus Christ, he who
is our great God and Saviour, he can reach down from the highest
heaven to the lowest depths into which a human soul can sink, and
can lift you, and lift you up and up, till he shines in you and
through you, and transfigures you with the light of his love and
glory."
He can.
He does.
He is doing it now.
And who is he who can do this but the living God alone?
That Jesus Christ was God is the testimony of the men who lived in
intimate communion with him and knew him best.
John leaned on his breast at supper. John heard and knew the beating
of the Master's heart, and John says:
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the
Word was God (God was the Word). The same was in the beginning with
God. All things were made by him; and without him was not anything
made that was made. . . . And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt
among us (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten
of the Father) full of grace and truth."
Again this same John writes:
"Jesus Christ . . . THIS IS THE TRUE GOD."
Writing to the Philippians, Paul declares, that Jesus Christ was in
the "form of God," laid aside his glory as such, took upon him the
"form" of sinful man, became obedient unto death, even the death of
the cross, carried his humanity through hades and the grave, rose
out from among the dead, and took that humanity to the throne of the
highest. There God the Father reclothed him with the unbegun and
uncreated glory which he had laid aside, gave him a name which is
above every name, even the name of Jesus, and has highly and
eternally ordained that every knee in the wide extended universe
shall bow, and every tongue confess, that he is Lord to the glory of
God the Father.
In his epistle to the Colossians, the Apostle Paul announces that
this "same Jesus" is the "image of the invisible God; by him were
all things created that are in heaven, and that are in earth,
visible and invisible, whether they be thrones or dominions, or
principalities or powers; _all things were created by him_, and for
him."
To the same Colossians he further writes:
"In him dwelleth all the fulness of the _Godhead bodily_."
To the Hebrews he says: "He is the brightness of the Father's glory,
and the _express image of his person_" (the word "image" is
charakter and signifies an "engraving," the very engraving of God in
the flesh, _the engraving of God in humanity_) and upholding all
things by the word of his power. "Upholding all things!" this earth
in its orbit about the sun; the sun in its orbit about some other
sun; all suns and systems in their orbits of splendor, whirling
onward in ever-widening distances over highways of infinite spaces,
through extensions that are measureless, and where time does not
count. In that unmeasured expansion where the points of the compass
are lost and "dimension" is a meaningless term; in that
incomprehensible and indefinable vastness, filled with the might and
the majesty of form, of weight, of motion and limitless power--all
things--are hanging on his word and obeying his will.
Not only does the New Testament proclaim him God--the Old Testament
does likewise, and with unmistakable speech.
The prophet Isaiah says:
"Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and the government
shall be upon his shoulder; and his name shall be called Wonderful,
Counsellor, _the mighty God, the everlasting Father_."
Micah, the prophet, glorifies the little town of Bethlehem, least as
it is among the thousands of Judah, and foretells that he who shall
be born there, and is to be ruler in Israel, is he "_whose goings
forth have been from old, from everlasting_." He who has been the
outgoing and the forth-putting of the invisible God; and who is, and
who alone can be, the _visibility of God_.
When we turn to the New Testament once more, we are given a vision
of him, in Patmos, where he appears to that beloved John who had
leaned so heavily on his heart in the days of the earthly
pilgrimage. It is a vision of wonder, of glory, and divine splendor.
He is seen as a man--as one who had _become_ dead, who was now
alive, who had conquered both death and the grave. His face shone
with the light of the noonday sun, his eye glances were as a flame
of fire, and when he spoke, his voice was as the sound of many
waters; and this is what he said for himself:
"I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord,
which is, and which was, and which is to come, _the Almighty_."
This is the climax.
He claimed to be Almighty God while on earth.
He claims it from heaven.
He says I am God--he says that because he declares himself as
embracing the whole extent of being.
Listen:
"I am he that _is_"--that is to say, the self-existing one; for the
statement is the cognate of that, "I am that I am," which is the
pre-eminent appelative of deity.
"I am he which _was_"--and this extends being into the past; that
past he himself defines. He does not say I am in the beginning, but
I am _the_ beginning--_beginning itself_--the _origin_ of things
and, therefore, himself unbegun, eternal, from _everlasting_. It is
the echo of that far-flung phrase of old: Even "_from everlasting to
everlasting thou art God_."
"I am he which is _to come_"--this includes eternity future--the
unendingness which stretches without a horizon beyond the present.
Here is fulness--and the fulness of the Godhead _bodily_.
In saying these words upon Patmos, then, our Lord Jesus Christ says:
"I am God--I am Almighty God."
Nor is this a mere conclusion from the premise here!
He says it directly, plainly and squarely himself.
He says not only that he _is_, and _was_, and _is to come_--but he
says--
"I AM THE ALMIGHTY."
And Paul, the special apostle of the Church, unites with Thomas (the
believing, but material evidence demanding representative of the
elect remnant in Israel) in proclaiming the deity of God's Christ.
Thomas falls at his feet and cries:
"My Lord and _My God_."
Paul bows his head in adoration before him and writes:
"_Our great God_ and Saviour--_Jesus Christ_."
Upon the august throne of the universe he is seated.
He who lay a babe upon a woman's breast; who, although he was
infinite, became an infant; who being in the form of God, did not
hesitate to put off the divine glory and put on mortal humanity that
(as an infinite person) he might, through the "prepared" body of his
mortality, offer an infinite sacrifice for men; who died under a
malefactor's doom, but with his nailed hands, in the hour of his
agony, saved a thief from hell--opening to him the gates of
Paradise; he who refused the deliverance of angels when they bent
above his cross, that by his cross he might give to men the
deliverance angels could not give; lie who was buried in a borrowed
grave; who rose as an immortal man, ascended as the _Second Adam_--
the _New Head of Humanity_--the _Life Giver_ to a world, and took
his seat on the _Father's_ throne, as witness of redemption achieved
and salvation secured--he sits there now, and having taken to
himself the glory which he had with the Father before all worlds
were, having clothed his _immortal_ humanity with that "_form of
God_" which ever was his, now sits the centre of a world's adoration
and heaven's amaze, as the GOD MAN--the highest form of God and the
ultimate form of man; the proclamation that man in Christ is the
archetype of God and God in Christ the archetype of man.
As we thus gaze upon him in whom dwelleth all the fulness of the
Godhead bodily; as we meditate upon him, seek to reason about him,
are touched by his love, held by his power, and filled with his
life, we say with the inspired apostle: "Without controversy, great
is the mystery of godliness: _God was manifest in the flesh_."
"_Our great God_," repeats Paul, and he adds, to balance the wonder
of it, "and _our Saviour Jesus Christ_;" he who, in some glad day
nearer than we think, is coming back to this old, sin-stained,
grave-digged world--to be owned and saluted by all nations, peoples,
kindred and tongues as--
"THE GOD OF THE WHOLE EARTH."
With all this glory and this wonder he is, as the angels said, (who
spoke of his ascension, session and Second Coming), "THIS SAME
JESUS," full of tender mercy, and loving compassion; by virtue of
his perfect sacrifice able to save unto the uttermost all who come
unto God the Father by him; saying from heaven as he once said on
earth: "Him that cometh unto me, I will in no wise cast out"; but
saying at the same time, and with unfailing faithfulness: "No man
cometh into the Father _but by me_"; saying it faithfully because,
of a truth, only in the _Son_ can the _Father_ be found.
Let me exhort all who may read these lines, if you have not already
done so, to fall down at his pierced feet, and with deep contrition
for all your transgressions and for your very _nature_ of sin which
helped to nail him to the accursed tree, say with voice of unfailing
love and unfaltering faith:
"My _Saviour_ and my _God_."
If you have already owned him as your Saviour, then, as Thomas of
old, with the voice of deep devotion say:
"My _Lord_ and my _God_."
To those of you (if there be such) who still deny his deity and
persist in calling him good, he, himself, is asking you from heaven
as he asked it aforetime upon earth:
"_Why_ callest thou me _good?_"
In asking you that he is putting upon you the responsibility of the
terrible conclusion of your own premise:
IF NOT GOD--NOT GOOD!
Are you willing to face him in eternity with that inexorable
alternative:
"IF NOT GOD--NOT GOOD?"
Christianity
WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY?
WHAT is Christianity?
The question seems a belated one.
It never was more pertinent than now. Its pertinency rests upon two
facts.
First: the modern drift in Christianity and its absolute failure.
Second: the phenomenal triumph of primitive Christianity.
The modern drift is antagonistic to doctrine and repudiates the
miraculous.
It sets aside the virgin birth, has no toleration for atonement by
sacrificial death, and positively refuses to accept the bodily
resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.
It holds that God is the Father of all men. Each man is inherently a
son of God. He has in him all the elements of the divine lineage.
Exercise and culture are alone needed to reveal these elements and
demonstrate this lineage. Salvation is not the redemption of a child
of the Devil, but recovery of a child of God from the hands of the
Devil. Salvation is the restoration of the individual to the
consciousness of this relationship; but salvation is effectively
individual only as it is primarily social. The time has passed (so
we are told) when the individual may be discussed and his social
condition ignored. To seek out an individual here and there and
endeavor to redeem or recover him while the environment remains
unchanged, is a waste of force: as foolish as it would be to spend
millions on remedies for people sick with malaria in a pestilential
and malarial district, and ignore the condition of the district.
True wisdom would demand first of all that the district be purged,
the environment made healthy, the cause of malaria destroyed.
Human beings are neither sinning nor suffering because a possible
first man away back somewhere ate forbidden fruit at the insistent
appeal of his too persistent wife. Men are sinning and suffering
because social conditions are all wrong. These wrong conditions fill
the multitude with discouragement and depression. They are unable to
breathe an inspiring life force. They cannot obtain sufficient
impulse to live above low levels. The laws, the customs, the
inequalities of life, hedge them like brutes in a corral. This
corralling and hedging of humanity _en masse_, while the few pull
away from the crowd and create an environment satisfactory to
themselves at the expense of the crowd, is the _raison d'etre_ for
all evil conditions. Let us have right legislation. Let us make
right laws. The moment the social condition enables a man to
discover the divine things in him, he will live right by preference.
We are no longer to spend eloquence, prayer and time on revivals,
and now and then, here and there, get an individual to live fairly
right in spite of hindering conditions. The sermon of the preacher
should appeal to the law-maker rather than to the law-breaker; it
should arouse men, not to the danger of a hell far off, but to a
hell near at hand, the hell of unjust laws, of sanitary neglect, of
oppression of man by man.
Social redemption! that is the watchword.
Social salvation! that is the crying need.
All this (we are told) is to be accomplished by appealing to the
divine in man, to his hitherto ignored resources. This appeal can be
made of avail only by setting up some human figure in which this
divine life has been fully proved and clearly portrayed. In the
nature of the case, for a modernist Christian, such a person is to
be found alone in our Lord Jesus Christ. By such he is now hailed,
and continually announced, as the advanced man, the quintessent
demonstration of evolution as applied to humanity, the way-shower,
the exemplar and true copy. He is incarnate altruism. His whole life
was self-denial. His daily interest was in social conditions. To him
society was the objective, the individual an incident. His
teachings, when fairly construed, involve the overthrow of the old,
and the bringing in of a radically new society, in which the divine
life in man may have an opportunity to unfold. His doctrines, when
analyzed, are explosive; if practically carried out would be
revolutionary. He is, in short, the true socialist. If we follow him
as such, if we work out his intent, we shall have individual
salvation, but we shall have it as a consequent of social
redemption.
There may be shining worlds beyond this. There may be holy cities
with golden streets. There may be robes of righteousness and trees
of life. What we need to do, as Christians, is to take care of the
world in which we now live, build first-class holy cities here, see
that the streets are well paved, and the sewers in order, put fit
clothing on the backs of the poor, fill the mouths of the hungry
with actual bread, make the hours of labor minimum, and the hours of
personal culture maximum, and thus weave a garment of civic, social
and individual righteousness that shall stand the test of this world
or any other. In other words, we are to live the life that now is--
and let that which is to come take care of itself.
This is the trend of the modern drift.
It is an endeavor to bring the church down out of the clouds, place
it on the level of human experience, meet present human needs in
practical ways, and establish a system of natural, rational and
universal ethics.
And yet--in spite of this widely heralded liberalism; in spite of
the effort to accommodate itself to the rationalism, the unbelief
and downright infidelity of the hour; in spite of the determination
to cut loose from the primaries of the first century and ally itself
with the fast-going advance of the twentieth, this movement in the
name of Christianity has not succeeded in winning and holding the
multitude either to a personal and modified Christ, or to a
reorganized and elastic church.
The churches in which it flourishes; the churches which have
renounced faith in the supernatural and miraculous; the churches
which have swung the doors wide open on the hinges of worldly wisdom
and easy tolerance; the churches which have substituted natural
generation for supernatural regeneration, evolution instead of
revolution, the working out of human life, instead of the coming in
of divine life; the churches which teach that man is to go up and
take hold of God, instead of God coming down to take hold on man;
the churches which are broad enough to allow men of all faiths, and
men of no faith at all, to occupy their pulpits, are not
overcrowded, nor have righteousness and holiness extraordinarily
increased in their neighborhood.
On the contrary, in face of every effort to conciliate the
naturalism in man, men look upon these churches, and the
Christianity they advocate, with suspicion. They see these churches
have their goods still marked with the words, "supernatural,"
"miraculous." It is true, these churches may practically put such
goods out of sight; even then, men will not be attracted beyond the
expression of a condescending tolerance; and while admitting, as
they will, that the church is earnestly endeavoring to get rid of
its ancient incubus of theology, free its hands and take hold of the
plow handle of progress, ready, if needs be, to drive a furrow deep
enough to bury all memories of primitive faith, yet will they turn
away from that kind of a church and that sort of Christianity, with
the feeling that all this action on the part of the church is but
another feeble effort at competitive morality. They will turn from
it and seek their own organizations wherein no issue of the
supernatural has ever been raised; where the quasi personality and
questionable existence of an unseen God are not at all discussed;
and where man and his present life are the only subjects deemed
worthy of consideration.
If this drift as thus indicated shall continue another ten years,
and enlist the support and open advocacy of leading and
representative thinkers in the church; if the theological seminaries
shall continue to turn out on graduation day, with their all too
mechanical regularity, men who do not believe in the virgin birth,
who find no real reason why our Lord Jesus Christ should have died
at all, except the fatality of his genius that he was too far ahead
of his time and was "caught by the whirling wheel of the world's
evil and torn in pieces"; if the repudiation of the Bible as the
final and inerrant revelation of God for this age shall continue so
short a space as a decade, by that time, at the present rate of
development, we shall have not only a very modern Christianity, a
Christianity without miracles, without even a hint of the
supernatural, but a Christianity without spiritual power or moral
authority, standing as a delinquent on the street corners, and amid
the hurry and rush of more vital things, begging permission simply
to exist.
Over against this modern drift and its amplitude of failure stands
the phenomenal success of original and primitive Christianity.
And yet, the conditions which confronted this nascent faith were
appalling.
It was the era of materialism. Force was the prime minister, self
-gratification the supreme legislator. Exaggerated superstition was
balanced by decaying faith. It was a time of coordinately high
mental activity, an intellectuality that cynically rejoiced at its
own failure to solve the riddle of the universe, maliciously
suggested new difficulties, raised barriers against its own
research, and prostrating itself in the name of mere brutism,
worshipped nature as the ready panderer to its worst passions, while
owning it as a cruelly smiling and pitiless sphinx.
The one hundred and twenty men and women who faced the Roman world
with the determination to impinge their faith upon it, seemed the
most audaciously unwise of all forlorn and hopeless fanatics. They
had neither wealth nor social standing. Their culture was at zero,
their knowledge indifferent. Localism and tradition environed them,
and the story they had to tell was not only an affront to the course
of nature, but a direct repudiation of old faiths and cherished
religions. Itself a _religio illicita_, Christianity challenged
governmental law and invoked, logically, the keenest persecution.
The mountains which surrounded Jerusalem were not so high, nor so
difficult of ascent, as the prejudice far and near over which they
needs must climb, even if they would gain but a tolerated hearing.
Yet they went forth! and so preached, that they not only saved and
transfigured individuals, but so molded and transformed society,
that in its every-day achievements, Christianity itself seemed like
a miracle to astonished and silenced onlookers.
Startlingly enough this moulding of society, this overturning of old
conditions--this bringing in of the radically new, so that their
enemies said of them they had "turned the world upside down"; this
repudiation of brutality and the exaltation of unselfishness; this
building up of a condition in which a community now judged itself by
the standards of chastity, righteousness and neighborly kindness;
this renovation of whole centres of life till the erstwhile deserts
wherein not a flower of gentleness had bloomed, now blossomed as
gardens of delight, watered with never-ceasing streams of brotherly
love--were produced, not by an appeal to society itself, not by
denunciation of laws and customs, however bad, but by laying hold of
a human soul, estimating it in value by the weight of a whole world,
and changing the individual life.
This was the triumph of original and primitive Christianity.
In view of such a triumph and the unqualified failure of the modern
drift which claims the name of Christianity, it should seem a
perfectly legitimate and altogether pertinent question to ask,
"What is Christianity?"
The answer is given by the apostle Paul in his second letter to
Timothy, his son in the faith, the preacher of his own ordination.
He says:
"Our Saviour Jesus Christ . . . has abolished death and brought life
and immortality to light through the Gospel." (2 Timothy 1:10.)
According to this declaration, the Gospel is the good news that our
Lord Jesus Christ came into the world to accomplish three things--
abolish death, bring in a new life and reveal immortality. As the
Gospel is the heart beat of Christianity, then the three things
which proclaim its constituent and objective characteristic are:
The abolition of death.
The gift of a new life.
Immortality.
First--The abolition of death.
Death is a black fact. It is the shadow the sun never penetrates,
the robber who steals the treasure more precious than gold, the
guest who never waits to be invited, the intruder who feels at home
whether in palace or in cot, has no respect of persons, and lays his
hand with equal familiarity on the king upon his throne, or the
tramp by the wayside, saying "come" to the sick, "tarry not" to the
well, is sure of the old, and revels like a reaper in the harvest of
the young. It breaks the plans and disorganizes the relations of
life; and then, like a coarse comedian or a heartless satirist,
compels those who survive to turn away from the memory of their
dead, reorganize their lives and live on as though those who once
lived with them and formed an intimate part of their daily
experience had never existed.
Unless God himself shall intervene, death is the certain end of the
longest life.
Side by side with the certainty of death are two things which give
it emphasis: the brevity of life and its uncertainty.
How brief it is! what are sixty or seventy years as measured by
hopes and fears, by splendor of genius, by forecasts that outreach
the ages, by thoughts that climb and climb with ease to the
infinite, by energy of mind, which, rising superior to the combined
hindrances of every day, is always peering beyond the last endeavor,
and stretching itself towards unbroken continuance, cries, "What
next?" Extract from the allotted time of three score years and ten,
the puling days of infancy, the immature years of youth, the hours
of indecision as to the route to take, the right profession to
follow; take the hours given to eating and drinking (that eating and
drinking which in spite of the glamor we throw about it is simply
repairing the mechanical waste and renewing the chemical energy that
will enable us to go on a little while and a little way farther);
take out the time spent in sleep--in practical nonentity--and the
remainder is a pitiful handful of years, so few, that to number them
seems like a mathematical mockery, like numerical trifling.
And the uncertainty of life! What man is he who can assure himself
of ten days? In that time he may die, be buried and be forgotten by
the world that scarcely heard the tolling of his funeral bell, and
had no time to stay and hear the falling of the grave clods upon the
coffin lid.
This emphasis of brevity and uncertainty has affected men more or
less from the beginning. In the hour when Christianity was born it
affected them well nigh unto delirium. So brief was the vision of
life, so tumultuous its incidents, so conscious were men of its
uncertainty, that they played with it as gamblers throw dice. It
became cheap, cheaper than the ground in which their bodies were so
soon to be laid; and in derision of its cheapness they built great
monuments to hold their scattered dust, monuments that should
outlast by centuries their latest breath; with light laughter they
rode past these chiselled tombs and scorned themselves as the
builders of a longevity their own being could never know.
This fact of death is impressing men now.
In proportion as life increases in knowledge; in proportion as men
become masters of nature's forces; in proportion as they measure the
universe, make daily incursions therein, and bring back always some
conquered thing, some new discovery as a tribute to the
limitlessness of mind, in this proportion the unequal brevity and
the disintegrating uncertainty of life, lead men to ask with more
and more insistence, whether, after all, it is worth while. Is it
worth while to carry burdens which force us to look down into the
dust of the highway, and not up and out to the wider landscape? Is
it worth while to put so much force of soul and spirit, brain and
heart into things from which we may be summoned without a moment's
notice? Is it worth while to live, and then go to pieces through the
effort at living, live on day after day like a machine out of gear
(held together oftentimes only by the surgeon's skill), then break
down completely, give a final sigh and be hurried away to add a lot
of useless fragments to the already accumulated scrap heap of the
still more useless graveyard?
Into this emphasis of brevity and uncertainty, there enters another
element which increasingly raises the question--"Is it worth while?"
That added element is the silence of the grave.
The grave is terribly silent.
You can hear the gravel rattling out of the grave digger's shovel
with a thud upon the coffin lid; or, you can hear the crunching,
jarring sound as the casket is slid into its place in the receiving
vault, and you can hear the turn of the key and the snap of the bolt
as the gate or door of the sepulchre is shut and locked.
You may stand above the simple mound of the churchyard, in front of
some monumental shaft, or before the sculptured urn; it may be the
dust of a king, a scholar, or some nameless beggar which is heaped
within--the silence will be unbroken--except by the sound of your
own voice as you ask:
"Where are they? What are they? ARE they?"
Although the sun may be shining in full splendor over row after row
of graves, no light will be there in which to read the answer to
your questions.
Instead of light there will be thick darkness upon the graves, and
gross darkness within.
Men peer into this darkness. There is no vision--no speech--and they
ask: "Is it worth while to toil, to labor, to accumulate, to make
great advance in knowledge, to build higher every day the conning
towers of science, and then leaving these high points of
achievement, enter into that realm where no surveyor's chain has
ever measured the extent, where no geographer has ever named a
headland, and where the one supreme fact that meets us on the
threshold is ignorance--a black, blinding, all-pervading ignorance
as to the next moment after death; so that at the end of our
reasoning, deduction and amplification, the one thing remaining to
the scholar and the fool alike concerning death is a guess, a guess
in which the wish of existence is father to the thought, but where
the hope of to-morrow is, easily, the despair of to-day."
With life so brief, so uncertain, and ending in the starless night
of silence, men in one form of utterance or another are, in
substance, calling to each other and saying, "Let us eat and drink--
for to-morrow we die."
Thus the contemplation of death and its impartial and unprejudiced
analysis leads to a belief in materialism and a greater or less
surrender to mere sensualism; for, if men cannot go up they will go
down; if they cannot live in the spirit, they will grovel in the
flesh.
What then shall we say concerning this fact of death?
Shall we say it is a part of nature's economy--as legitimate as
birth? Because we know nothing of any pre-existent state and are
content to go forward in life, shall we now balk and hesitate to
discharge our functions or meet our opportunities, because we have
no evidence of an after existence?
Is death really natural?
Absolutely it is not!
The whole being of man revolts against it, morally, intellectually
and organically. Every law of nature in man is against it. Pain and
suffering are its protest. To say that it is as natural as birth is
to be guilty of pure bathos; even the worm crushed and quivering
denies the sentiment. Schwann, the author of the cellular theory,
says: "I really do not know why we die."
There is no reason in nature.
The process which renews the body every seven years--so far as any
law in nature shows--might go on indefinitely; there is no reason in
itself why it should cease, and the soul within is never conscious
of the added years. No one ever thinks of asking, "Why do we live?"
Always, and involuntarily, we ask, "Why do we die?" Always we are
seeking to continue life, inventing something to make it immune from
death. To live, therefore, is natural. Not to live is unnatural.
Being unnatural, it is an interference with nature. An interference
with nature is superior to nature. That which is an interference of
and superior to nature is a direct imposition upon nature. An
imposition upon nature could not be possible without the permission
and will of God. If God allows and wills it, then the imposition is
for cause; being such, it is a judicial act, a judgment, and
becomes, necessarily, a penalty. Penalty stands for violated law.
Violated law is transgression. Transgression is sin. Sin, in final
analysis, is lawlessness, and lawlessness is treason against
Jehovah. Death is, therefore, an imposition of God, and is his
penalty against the treason of sin.
This, then, is the explanation of death--it is the penalty of sin.
This is the definition which Christianity gives--as it is written:
"By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so
death passed upon all men." (Romans 5:12.)
Again it is written:
"It is _appointed_ unto men once to die." (Hebrews 9:27.)
In thus determining and defining death, Christianity reveals both
its essence and its mission; for, through its Gospel, Christianity
brings the good news that the issue of sin and death as between God
and man has been settled by our Lord Jesus Christ; that he has
settled it perfectly and forever according to the terms of divine
righteousness by dying as a sacrifice for sin and as a substitute
for sinners.
In order to be a substitute it was necessary that our Lord Jesus
Christ should be a sinless man; otherwise, his death would be only
his own execution under the penalty of sin, and could not avail
either for himself or others. None of Adam's race is sinless; a
sinless person must be of another race. To be of another race and be
human would require a new creation and would be a new and distinct
humanity.
Our Lord Jesus Christ was sinless. He was, therefore, of a new and
distinct humanity. In incarnation, God did not take the humanity of
Adam into union with himself, the humanity of our Lord Jesus Christ
was the repudiation of the humanity of Adam. By that incarnation God
was saying: "I have tried the old humanity. I find nothing in it
that responds to my claims. At its best it is sinful, only sinful
and fit for judgment--the end of all flesh is come before me--and
that end is death."
The humanity of Christ is, therefore, not an evolution, but a new
creation; it is not an invitation to the natural man, but a
condemnation of him. It does not say to him, "Follow me, imitate me
and you will be like me"; it says: "I am from above, ye are from
below. I am from heaven and God--ye are from the earth. My humanity
is as distinct from yours as the heavens are from the earth."
Such a man is not an example, a copy to be set before men.
And never, not once, do the apostles so set him before the natural
man. Always they set him before the natural man as the man who came
into the world--not to live as an example--but to die as a sacrifice
for men; as one who was fit to die because he was free from the
stain and penalty of sin.
But in order that the death of Christ should be of infinite value,
he must himself be an infinite person. The value of a deed depends
upon the person who does it. The quality resides not alone in the
act, but in the actor. The value of the death of our Lord Jesus
Christ is not to be measured by its duration, but by himself--by
what he was in himself; it does not depend upon the length of time
in which as a substitute he suffered the punishment of those whose
place he was taking, but the essential quality of his person. Did
our Lord suffer but a moment of time on the cross, the value of his
suffering as a satisfaction to the law, government and being of God
would be infinite.
An infinite person is God.
Always as such do the apostles present our Lord Jesus Christ. Their
testimony to his deity rings out like the blast of far-sounding
trumpets. In terms that are precise, and so strong and clear that he
who runs may read, they proclaim that he is God of God, very God of
very God.
As God the Son, in co-operation with God the Father and God the
Spirit, he who is presented to us as the Lord Jesus Christ, took a
cell from the substance of the virgin Mary, made it a mould and with
generating power wrought from it a real humanity--a new and distinct
humanity--and united it to his eternal personality; so that he
stands forth as the eternal God endowed with a human nature--with
two natures, human and divine, in one body and one person forever--
the infinite God-man.
Never do the apostles present him as a mere man. They present his
humanity as the background for his deity. His humanity in its most
literal revelation is always declared by them to be the revelation
and the manifestation of God. Never do the apostles attempt to
reason about the incarnation, with superb affirmation and sublime
dignity they declare, "Without controversy, great is the mystery of
godliness; God was manifest in the flesh."
And it is this God whom Christianity presents as coming down from
the heaven of glory, and clothing himself with a new, a distinct,
but a mortal humanity in which to die as an infinite substitute for
guilty men, that through death, he might abolish death for men.
Having died as a sacrificial substitute, death considered as a
penalty, and the guilt and demerit of sin which induced the penalty,
have been set aside for all for whom his substitution avails.
Nor does Christianity leave us long in doubt as to those for whom
the substitution obtains. In full and precise statement of doctrine
it tells us that this substitution is on the behalf of, and for, all
who individually claim our Lord Jesus Christ on the cross as a
personal sacrifice for sin, and who by faith offer him to God as the
sacrifice and sin offering which God himself has provided.
Thus it follows, that for every believer--death as a penalty has
been abolished, brought to nought.
This is the first great and joyous proclamation of Christianity,
_Death has been abolished as a penalty for every believer_.
It has been abolished _de jure_, not yet _de facto_.
The Christian still dies, but his death is no longer penal, it is
providential and provisional.
In the hour of death the Christian is not seized as a culprit and
hurried away to execution. On the contrary, when the hour of death
sounds for him, a voice inspired from heaven assures him that he has
reached the threshold of the "far better"; he arises and "departs,"
that he may be "absent from his home in this body and present at his
home with the Lord." His death is not a defeat, but a begun victory,
and, inasmuch as both soul and spirit are delivered from the
underworld and the shades of death, he has the assurance that the
penalty will yet be completely abolished concerning his body: it is
both the assurance and the prophecy of it.
Christianity is, then, primarily, the good news, and the doctrinal
demonstration, that death as a judicial sentence has been abolished
for the Christian.
But Christianity is something more than the abolition of death--it
is--
Second--The bringing in and revelation of life.
Through the Gospel, we are told, life has been brought to light.
In the nature of the case this cannot mean natural life.
There was no necessity that it should be brought into light.
It has never been in darkness.
It is manifest everywhere. Light and life are synonymous.
There is not a condition in which in some form or other it does not
exist. While one class of life may not live in a certain
environment, there are other forms to which this environment would
be as a hotbed for their production. Life is, indeed, universal, and
may be said to be omnipresent. You will find it in the deepest
depths of earth, and in the highest reaches of air. It expands on
the mountain top, it dwells in the sea; it is organized in the
infusoria, it exists in the infinitesimal, and reveals itself at
last, in the beauty of woman and the strength of man.
As natural life has always thus been in evidence; as it has never
been in the dark at all, then the life which our Lord Jesus Christ
has brought to light is not natural life--it is new life--a life
unknown to the world before.
It does not come from the natural man. It is not produced by natural
generation. It comes from our Lord Jesus Christ and by supernatural
generation. It did not come from him while he walked the earth. At
no time during his earthly career did a human being receive it. The
disciples who followed him--he who leaned upon his breast at supper
and was the disciple whom Jesus loved--knew nothing of it. This new
and unique life was brought into the light only when that light
shone from his empty grave. He gave it forth and communicated it to
men only when, as the risen man, he ascended up on high. It comes
from him as the second man, as the last Adam, that Adam to whom the
first was only as the clay model to the completed statue, as concept
is to consummation. It comes from him who is both God and man, in
one body and one person forever; and who, as such, is the head and
beginning of the new creation of God.
By him it is communicated to those who own him as their atoning
sacrifice.
The instrument is the word of the Gospel.
The agent is the Holy Spirit.
The Word is preached--it falls into the heart of the believer as
seed into the ground.
The Spirit quickens it--the new life is germinated.
That new life is the life and nature of the risen one, our great God
and Saviour Jesus Christ, the man in the glory; it is the mind of
him who is called Christ, and it is, therefore, in final term--"the
mind of Christ."
It is wrought, not in the soul, but in the spirit of the believer.
By no slow process does it enter--this life of the risen Lord--but
by absolute fiat--the fiat of him who said--"Lazarus, come forth."
It is fiat life.
Its entrance into a human being is as light flashes into darkness.
It is as instantaneous as when God of old said, "Let there be
light," and light burst over a world cataclysmically fallen into
chaos.
It is as transforming as when morning awakens the sleeping earth and
hill and dale, river and sea, shine forth in their beauty.
It is as startling as when Lazarus himself, obeying the voice of his
Lord, rose from the dead and came forth.
Behold the illustration of it.
Here is a man who grovelled in the lowest animalism.
He was a husband and father. What a husband! and what a father!
She who was his wife fled oftentimes at the very sound of his
footsteps, shivering with the same fear, as though he who had
solemnly sworn to love and protect her, were a mad brute intent on
gratifying his own fierce lust, and ready with unchecked sensualism
to trample her in the mire of his bestiality. A father, whose very
name made the cheeks of the children grow white and their pulses
almost to cease with terror. A drunkard, who drowned in his cup, not
only wife and children and home and all outward decency, but every
characteristic of truth and honesty and manhood of his own soul. A
man, who through self-indulgence and the incessant yielding to
unspeakable desires, had become little better than a human sewer,
through whom the slime and indescribable filth of fallen and
degraded humanity found its unhindered course. A human being, who
had become a lazar spot, a walking pest, whose inmost thought rotted
and putrified his own mind; and whose words without license were a
poison and contagion to every one whose ears caught their unwelcome
sound.
Mark the change in that man!
The wife now watches at the door with a gladsome smile to greet his
return. The children, who once in their rags trembled with fear, now
clean and wholesomely clad, and gay with laughter, gather at his
knee, the moment he enters his home. He is himself well dressed. He
holds his head erect, his eyes, no longer bloodshot, meet your gaze
with frank and open glance. His tones are soft and modulated, his
speech gentle. The Bible, the one book he always hated, is his
constant study. His mouth once filled with cursings that might well
have chilled the blood to hear, now give utterance to the voice of
prayer and earnest thanksgiving. The church he never entered and
always avoided has become the centre around which the best
activities of his life are continuously moving. He who was once
shunned, despised and feared, is now honored and respected of all.
The man has been transformed.
Those who saw him in former days and see him now might in all reason
ask, "Is this he, or some other man?"
It is both he and yet another man. The same person, but possessing
another character.
What is the secret of it all?
Let the answer be graven on every heart. He has received a new life,
a new, a pure, a holy and spiritual life. He has received that life
from above, from the second Adam, the Lord in heaven. He is now a
twice-begotten man.
And herein is the glorious, distinctive feature of Christianity in
so far as it touches a human soul.
To that soul it brings the good news that a new generation is
possible; the good news that any human being may start over. The
good news that, no matter how much you may be handicapped by your
original genesis; no matter what the terrific law of heredity may
have transmitted to you, you may be generated again. In a moment, in
the twinkling of an eye, you may have a genealogy that shall carry
your name above the proudest of earth; a genealogy by the side of
which the bluest blood of most ancient kings shall be as the palest
and poorest of plebeian stuff. This Gospel of Christianity brings
the good news that you may receive from the throne of God life from
God, as directly as did Adam when God breathed into his nostrils the
breath of life and man became a living soul. In an instant you may
be recreated morally and spiritually, and have in you all the assets
which, when fully capitalized by the grace of God, shall insure your
sonship with God here, making you master over every disturbing and
disquieting passion, and guaranteeing to you an eternal entrance
into the endless inheritance of God, wherein you shall be, indeed,
the heir of God and joint heir with our Lord Jesus Christ. In short,
you may have the bequeathed ability to glorify God and enjoy him
forever.
This is the life which our Lord Jesus Christ has brought to light.
The Gospel is the good news of this life of which the life giver
himself has said, "I came that ye might have life, and that ye might
have it more abundantly." That is to say: "I came that ye might have
this spiritual life and have it without limit here."
And this Gospel of the new life brought to light by and through the
death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ is one of the
elemental facts and forces which definitely answers the question--
"What is Christianity?"
But Christianity is something more than the abolition of death as a
penalty and the bringing in of a new and spiritual life.
Christianity is through its Gospel--the good news that--
Third--Immortality has been brought to light.
The word here translated "immortality" is "incorruption"; but it
signifies in final terms the fact of immortality; for, as mortality
is identified with corruption and is its consequent, so immortality,
which is the opposite of mortality, is the consequence of
incorruption and is inseparable from it.
This word "immortality" is greatly misunderstood, and almost always
misapplied.
It is continually applied to the soul. It is a common thing to hear
or read the expression, "immortal soul."
The truth is, that phrase cannot be found in Holy Scripture. The
terms are misleading--their conjunction is false. Applied to the
soul, the word "immortal" is a misnomer. Throughout Scripture the
original word and idea relate to the body--never otherwise. The word
"mortal" is never used of the soul; you never read in Scripture the
expression, "mortal soul." You will find the words "mortal body." A
mortal body has for its opposite an "immortal body." A mortal body
is subject to corruption and death. An immortal body is
incorruptible and not subject to death--an immortal body can never
die.
The mortal body is the scandal of the race and the open label of
sin. A mortal body puts us in the category of condemned criminals
awaiting execution. The scandal is not only moral, but organic. To
be filled with disease, with pestilence, with fever, and then die
and the body turned back to its component parts--this is a scandal
in construction; as much a scandal as when a house not properly
built falls down; a dead body, whether of man or dog, is the most
shameful blot on the face of the earth, and with the gaping mouth of
the graveyard, justifies the estimate and the declaration of the
living God, that death is an "_enemy_," not a welcome thing like
birth and life--_but an enemy_. Such a scandal is it, indeed, that
when our Lord Jesus Christ came to the grave of Lazarus, he was
himself moved with indignation; for the words, "groaning within
himself," miss the true force. The Greek verb used signifies that he
was inwardly filled with indignation and a sense of outrage at the
sight of the grave and the announcement that the body of Lazarus was
already corrupt. Whatever groaning came from his lips and whatever
tears fell from his eyes as he wept--these were his protests against
death and the grave; for he recognized this dead body not only as
due to the penalty of sin, but as the work of him "who had the power
of death, that is, the devil." (Hebrews 2:14.)
Even though the Christian as to soul and spirit be delivered from
death; even though he does not go down to Hades, but at death is
safely housed and at home with God in heaven--yet the fact that this
body, which was not only the dwelling place of his soul, but the
temple and shrine of the Holy Spirit, should become a banquet for
worms, a thing of repulsive decay, a residuum of forgotten dust, is
a scandal, even to the Christian, and gives emphasis to the shame of
death.
The Son of God came into the world to remove this scandal.
He died and rose again, not only that he might have power and
authority to give a new and spiritual life to men, a character
befitting them for the high things of God, he died and rose again
that he might have power and authority to give an immortal body to
all who would receive from him this new and spiritual life.
He brought this immortality to light when he rose from the dead.
He brought it to light by rising from the dead in the body in which
he had died.
If our Lord Jesus Christ did not rise from the dead in the body in
which he died, then immortality in the New Testament sense of the
word has never been brought to light.
But he did so rise.
He made that clear on the first Sunday night after his resurrection.
The disciples were gathered together in the room.
The supper table was spread.
No one cared to eat.
The story had been going all day that Jesus had risen.
The women said so. They persisted that they had seen and talked with
him.
Two men claimed, also, to have seen him, walked, talked and broken
bread with him, that very afternoon.
The disciples did not believe it.
They were afraid to believe it lest it should prove to be untrue.
Then, suddenly, he stood in the midst.
They thought it was his ghost.
This was a proof to them that he had not risen; for a ghost is a
disembodied thing.
He was a ghost--he was disembodied--therefore he had not risen.
So they felt--each one of them.
They did not say it--but they thought it.
He knew their thoughts.
He asks them why these thoughts arise in their hearts. He upbraids
them for their unbelief.
He tells them plainly, a ghost does not have flesh and bones.
He says, "I have flesh and bones."
They are still silent.
Then he stretches out his hands towards them. He shows them his
feet.
There are great marks in them--there is around these marks as the
stain of blood, or of wounds whence blood had flowed.
Still they do not speak. They are afraid to believe; it is too good
to be true.
He says to them, "Handle me and see--take hold of my feet--feel me--
examine me for yourselves."
They are as immovable and speechless as men changed into stone.
He turns upon them quickly and says, "Have you anything to eat?"
They point to the untasted supper.
Then comes the climax.
He goes to the table.
He sits down.
He eats before them.
It is of record that he did eat _broiled fish_ and an _honeycomb_.
Either this is the worst fable ever palmed off on the church of
Christ--on the credulity of aching human hearts--or it is the truth
of God.
Call it the truth of God--then the body in which our Lord Jesus
Christ rose was the body in which he died.
That body, stamped and sealed with the stigmata of the cross, is the
living, quivering definition, and indisputable demonstration of
immortality. Immortality is the living again in a body which was
dead and dieth no more; or, it is the change of the body in which we
now live into an incorruptible, glorious body which shall never die.
In that body which he raised from the dead, and which never saw
corruption, our Lord Jesus Christ now sitteth at the right hand of
God.
He is there as the vision and standard of immortality.
He is there as the forerunner, the prototype, the sample and
prophecy of immortality for the Christian.
Until the Christian is made immortal his redemption is not complete.
The Christian who dies is transported to heaven.
His estate there as compared to this is "far better."
But "far better" is not the "best." It is only a comparative.
The superlative requires that the Christian shall have a body.
Without a body the Christian is neither a complete human being nor a
perfect son of God.
The divine ordination is "_spirit, soul, and body_."
Unless the Christian receives an immortal body the victory of our
Lord Jesus Christ over death and over him who has the power of death
(that is the Devil) is not complete.
Satan as the strong man armed holds the goods and keeps them secure
within his house.
The instrument with which he is armed is the law. That law which
requires that it shall be "appointed unto men once to die." The
goods are the bodies of the saints, and the house is the dark and
dismal grave.
O the pitifulness of it! that our Lord Jesus Christ should possess
the Christian as a ghost in heaven, and the Devil hold his blood
-bought and spirit-sealed body in the grave.
A risen Christ in an immortal body, surrounded by disembodied
Christian ghosts in heaven forever--that is a concept too hideously
grotesque to consider.
An immortal Christ who redeemed his own body from the power of the
grave, but is unable to deliver the bodies of those for whom he
died--to think it is blasphemy! to believe it--impossible!
If the Devil be the strong man armed, the risen Lord is the one
"stronger than he," who has met and equalled all the demands of the
law, and by his death nullified its ultimate power over the bodies
of those for whom he died.
In the very nature of the case, then, full redemption requires that
the body of every Christian shall be delivered from the grave, and
that every Christian, whether living or dead, shall be clothed
finally with an immortal body.
This is the great objective of salvation--not just to save men from
vice and immorality here; not just to fit them with an antidote
against the poison of sin; or give them an impetus to holiness and
truth for a few brief years in this mortal body, then let them die
under various circumstances of suffering and pain and be carried
away to heaven to live there as attenuated, invisible ghosts
forever!
O no! it is not that!
It is true men are to be saved here and now in such moral and
spiritual fashion as that each saved person should make the world
sweeter and better and nearer to God for living in it. All that is
true, but it is only a part of the glorious truth. The supreme
objective--the _ultima thule_ of redemption--is--
_Immortality_--the Christian eternally and incorruptibly embodied.
And this immortality, this eternal embodiment, is to be accomplished
for every Christian. The fact that death has been abolished
officially as a penalty for the Christian is a demonstration that
abolition of death means abolition for the whole Christian; as a
whole or complete Christian must have a body, then the abolition of
death for the Christian means abolition of death from the body. The
abolition of death from the body is immortality; by virtue, then, of
the abolition of death, immortality is assured to every Christian.
Not one will be forgotten even though centuries may have broken into
dust above his grave.
This immortality will be brought to pass by him who is the
Resurrection and the Life.
It will be brought to pass at the Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
He is coming to this world again. By every law of necessity he
_must_ come. He is coming to complete redemption, to bring on the
capstone amid shoutings of "grace, grace unto it."
He will raise the dead who have fallen asleep in his name. He will
change the living ones who are his at his coming. He will make the
body of each incorruptible, deathless, immortal, like unto his own
glorious body, as it is written:
"We shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is." (1 John 3:2.)
And again it is written:
"We are citizens of a country which is in heaven; from whence also
we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ; who shall change the
body of our humiliation, that it may be fashioned like unto the body
of his glory, according to the working whereby he is able even to
subdue all things unto himself." (Philippians 3:20, 21.)
At the last he will regenerate the earth. He will make it over. He
will make all things new. He will set this race of redeemed
immortals within it. Perfectly recovered from the spoliation of sin
and death, they shall inhabit it forever. God shall get his own
world again.
Paradise lost shall become paradise regained, and God's purpose to
make man his constitutional, governmental, moral and spiritual image
shall be fulfilled. Man shall be God incarnate, and incarnation
shall be seen to be the beginning and the ending of the purpose of
God.
This is the consummation to which Christianity leads us--a perfect
race of immortal beings in a perfect world, a perfect world in which
no man shall say, "I am sick"; where sin is unknown; where the
funeral bell does not toll, and a grave is never dug. Where God is
all in all.
This is the hope and the ultimate Christianity sets before us. Not
once in all its record does it offer us heaven or bid us prepare for
it as the ultimate, but always it exhorts us to look for and wait
patiently for immortality and glory at the Coming of our Lord Jesus
Christ.
This is the Christianity of the primitive centuries.
This is the Christianity of the New Testament.
It is the Christianity that fully met the needs of men.
It met the needs of men who gave themselves up to unrestrained
passion, to the gluttony of every appetite; who lounged away their
day in cool marble halls, or leaned half drunken from the cushioned
seats of the amphitheatre, while the sands of the arena were
reddened with human blood to give them a holiday. Look at them
there. They passed their unsatisfying hours in idle jest, wreathed
themselves with freshly plucked, but swiftly fading flowers, drowned
their senses from moment to moment, still deeper in the spiced and
maddening wines, gave unbridled freedom to their lust; and then, at
close of day, in the splendor of the sinking sun, went forth to cool
their fevered brows in the Campagna's freshening but deadly air, and
drove with furious pace and brutal laughter along the Appian way
between rows of monumental tombs whose chiselled epitaphs told the
hopeless end of human life; then back again they drove with still
more reckless haste to spend the night in wild debauch and meet the
gray dawning of another day with its mocking routine and disgust.
Loathing their very joys, revolting at their own gratification,
these men asked: "Is there nothing better than this, that we drain
the cup of pleasure to the dregs, open our veins, watch the life
blood ebb away, and laugh, and mingle our laughter with curses that
so cheap and easy an ending should have cost so much to reach?"
O the woe, the horror, the emptiness, and the crying, agonizing need
of lives like these.
And Christianity fully and richly met the need of lives like these.
It met the needs of men who in the midst of an environment of the
flesh, with the wild beast of appetite struggling within, now and
then had longings for a power that should enable them to put their
feet upon the neck of passion.
It met the needs of men who, standing above their dead, asked again
the old and oft-repeated question of Job, "If a man die, shall he
live again?"
Christianity met all these needs.
Through crowded streets of populous towns and lonely lanes of silent
villages, in lordly palace and before straw-thatched hovels, to
listening throngs and wayside hearers, it rang forth its wondrous
proclamation.
It told men that a man had been here who had proven himself stronger
than death and mightier than the grave; a man who had burst the bars
of death asunder, spurned the sepulchre wherein human hands had laid
his body, had ascended up on high, and now, from heaven's throne,
had power to impart to men a life that hated sin, rejoiced in
virtue, could make each moment of earth's existence worth while, and
carried within it the assurance and prophecy of eternal felicity.
Far and wide, over land and sea, it rang the tidings that this
perfect life might be had by king or cotter, by freeman or slave,
without money and without price, for so simple a thing as genuine
faith in, and open confession of, him who had died and risen again.
With rich, exultant note it announced that he who as very God had
clothed himself with a new and distinct humanity, who had loved men
unto death and died for them, had not forgotten the earth wherein he
had suffered, his own grave from whence he had so triumphantly
risen, nor yet the graves of those who had confessed his name; but,
on the contrary, was coming back in personal glory and with
limitless power to raise the dead, transfigure the living, make them
immortal, and so change this earth that it should no longer be a
swinging cemetery of the hopeless dead, but the abiding home of the
eternally living sons of God.
Men held like Laocoon in the winding coils of sinuous and persistent
sin, and who vainly sought to escape from its slowly crushing
embrace, heard the good news and turned their faces towards the
rising hope of present deliverance.
Men standing in the shadow of the tombs and waiting their turn
smiled until their smiles turned into joyous laughter as they said:
"If we die, we shall live again--the grave shall not always win its
victory over us."
Do you wonder the world stopped, listened, and that multitudes
turned and followed after?
Do you wonder that this Christianity of the primitive centuries
triumphed so phenomenally?
This is the Christianity we need to preach today.
It is full of a great body of doctrine.
It is full of the supernatural.
Miracle and miraculous are woven into its texture from beginning to
end. You cannot touch it, or handle it, or look at it from any angle
of vision that it does not suggest the miraculous. The moment the
miracle is out of it it is no longer the Christianity of the first
century, it is not the Christianity of the New Testament--the
Christianity that has a miraculous Christ for its centre and the
miracle of an infinite God for its environment.
A Christianity of doctrine!
A Christianity of miracle!
And why not?
It is as superior to the Christianity, so called, that sets aside
miracle and doctrine, turns its back on the hereafter, makes its
appeal in behalf of the present alone, and grounds its claim to
authority, not on a "thus saith the Lord," but on a "thus saith
science and reason"; a Christianity that owns the law of evolution
as its present force and defining motive; it is as superior to that
sort of Christianity and as high above it as the heavens are above
the earth.
One night this summer I stood upon a mountain ridge and watched the
revelation of the starry sky. The great constellations, like silver
squadrons, were sailing slowly and majestically to their appointed
havens; from north to south and from south to north again, the Milky
Way swept upward from its double horizon to the zenith like a
highway paved and set with diamonds--a highway over which the wheels
of the king's chariot had sped, leaving behind that cloud of dust in
which every gleaming particle was a burnished sun. I gazed
spellbound until it was as the vision of an unfathomed sea, an ocean
tide of light, where the shimmering foam was the rise and fall of
single and multiple systems, the surf beat breaking on the shores of
converging universes. I gazed on this wealth and congeries of far
-flung worlds, in which some that appeared the most insignificant and
twinkled and trembled as though each glimmer would be the last, were
actually so great that beside them our own poor little world was but
as a mole hill to earth's Himalayas; as I gazed I thought of the
distance from world to world--measured as light travels--till the
count of years fell away, and there were no more numbers with which
to count, and I knew that at the end of this calculation I had but
entered the suburbs of that realm for which we have but one word,
whose inadequacy we all confess--the Infinite. I listened, the
silence seemed to utter forth majesty and might and honor and
omnipotence, the air had in it the breath of sacred and adoring
things, and unwittingly I cried out, alone in the night there, "The
heavens, O God, declare thy glory and the firmament showeth thy
handiwork."
And when I look at this Christianity set forth in the New Testament,
and anticipated in the Old, the constellations of doctrine, this Via
Lactea of truth in which every statement is a sun of splendor; when
I begin to get the sweep of the divine purpose coming up from the
opening pages of Genesis and culminating in the book of the
Revelation; when I see that Christianity is the presentation to us
of the ways and means whereby the original thought of incarnation
(and this was the very first thought stamped upon the first pages of
the Genesis record of the creation of man; for incarnation is
conceived in Eden before it is brought to the birth in Bethlehem)--
when I see this original thought of incarnation, in spite of sin and
failure, and the world's captivity to the Devil and his angels; when
I see this high purpose of God at last realized, and realized so
completely that each redeemed soul is in final terms the glorious
enthronement of God in humanity, and that God in Christ and in the
Christian, gets his own world again, I cry out with full tribute of
heart and intellect: "O Lord, this is the Christianity which thou
hast wrought, thy name is written in every doctrine, every line
justifies, as it proclaims thee, the infinite and gracious author."
This is the Christianity to preach.
Let the preacher preach a Christianity of doctrine.
There are three important things every preacher should preach. The
first thing is doctrine. The second thing is doctrine. The third and
pre-eminent thing is doctrine. The church is starving to death for
the want of it, the preachers are becoming emasculated apologists
for lack of it, and the world, looking on, is laughing at a limp,
genuflecting thing calling itself modern Christianity and for want
of vertebrate strength, unable to stand alone.
It was doctrine believed in and preached which sustained the martyrs
and gave courage to missionaries. He who believed in the sovereignty
of a redeeming God, the certainty that God would get his elect, the
Coming of Christ, the millennial triumph, and a rebel world
surrendered at the feet of God, could endure the agony of the stake,
the privation of the wilderness, and all the discomforts and all the
discouragements of fields of endeavor well sowed but scantily
reaped.
Let the preacher preach the supernatural--the things that are
miraculous, and be unafraid.
He need not be afraid. The world wants that sort of preaching. It is
growing tired at heart of mere machinery and this eternally running
up against a formula of the laboratory or a mathematical calculation
and analyzed force, as explanatory of everything in heaven and in
earth. It would like, if it were possible, to believe in something a
little beyond the length of its eyelashes and the touch of its
finger tips; something that cannot be summed up always in
avoirdupois; something, indeed, beyond the ability of man.
Let the church get back to the old-fashioned doctrinal,
supernatural, miraculous Christianity that underwrites itself with
the name of God. Let it be boldly proclaimed that Christianity is
miraculous, because it is, first and last, the Christianity of that
God who is himself--the eternal miracle.
The very salvation of the church as a church depends upon this
retrograde.
If the church hesitates, compromises, seeks to accommodate its
formulas to modern nomenclature. If it is willing to carry its
baggage at half weight; if it is willing to make its proclamation a
continual denial of all that it has heretofore professed as
fundamental; if it believes the twentieth century has the call on
the first, and that modernism outranks primitivism; if, in short, it
looks upon primitive and apostolic Christianity as the feeble hint
which the modern thinker has known how to modify and improve, then,
as already suggested, the days of its spiritual and moral bankruptcy
are in sight, and the sooner good business arrangements are made to
hire out its meeting houses for ethical and social culture the
better.
Let the church persevere in turning its back upon the hereafter; let
it continue the folly of ignoring the eschatological emphasis of
Christianity; let it keep on giving to men the anodynes of mere
moral maxims; let it direct all its energies to improving and
perfecting a society which God has already judged and condemned at
its best, and presently these drugged and befooled people will
awake, the drugs will no longer be effective, and they will turn in
indignation upon a Christianity which began by professing to be a
revelation from God and ends by confessing to be nothing more than
an evolution from man.
It is time for preachers to arouse if they would have the hearing,
and not the indifferent ears.
Let them refuse to apologize or defend.
Let them have the courage of divine conviction.
Let them refuse to admit into their fellowship men who are willing
that a bar-sinister shall be stained across the birth hour of the
Christ; who are ready to smile away such a title as "the Blessed
Virgin"; who can read no deeper meaning in the cross than a brutal
murder, and who do not yet know that in the garden of Arimathea
there is still an empty tomb. Let them refuse ministerial ordination
and partnership with men who, bearing the university brand, claim
the authority of a self-elected scholarship to make the Word of God
secondary to the word of man. Let them go forth and proclaim to the
world with the voice of assurance which permits of no debate and
will accept no recall, the Christianity that is summed up, is
perfectly defined and holds inclusively all its splendor of doctrine
in the three immense facts which its Gospel proclaims:
The abolition of death, the gift of a new and spiritual life, and
the guaranty to every believer of a resplendent immortality like
unto his who sits on yonder throne--both eternal God and immortal
man--Coming Bridegroom and Triumphant King.
Let them preach this. Let them tell the guilty sinner that the blood
of Our Lord Jesus Christ meets his case and can make the foulest
clean; let them tell the slave-bound sinner that in a moment, in the
flash of an eye glance, a risen Saviour can deliver him and set him
free; let them tell the dying that death has lost its sting, and at
death a convoy of heaven's host shall bear him away from his home in
this mortal body to be at home in heaven with his ascended Lord; let
them cry above every Christian grave, louder than the sound of any
falling tear: "Jesus is coming to raise your dead and change the
living and clothe each saint with immortal beauty"; let them look
abroad upon a world full of the storm of sin, the tumult of high
passion and long rebellion against our God, and shout aloud that
victory cometh in the end; that Christ is God as well as man; that
the days of his glory are at hand, when the "God of the whole earth"
shall he be called; and when all beneath a perfect heaven in a
perfect world shall know him as Lord and God from the least to the
greatest. Let them preach this, and with unbroken confidence repeat
the exultant words of Holy Writ, the words which shall warrant all
their speech, that "our Saviour Jesus Christ hath abolished death,
and hath brought life and immortality to light through the Gospel";
and it will be this Gospel echoing forth with all the music of its
joyful tidings that shall answer infallibly and beyond all dispute
the question of the hour--"_What is Christianity?_"
The Bible
THE WORD OF GOD
"When ye received the word of God which ye heard of us, ye received
it not as the word of man, but as it is in truth, the word of God."
(1 Thessalonians 2:13.)
THE Apostle here testifies that he believes himself to be the bearer
of a revelation direct from God; that the words he speaks and the
words he writes are not the words of man, but the Word of God, warm
with his breath, filled with his thoughts, and stamped with his
will.
In this same epistle he writes:
"For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord." (1 Thessalonians
4:15.)
The preposition "by" is the dative of investiture as well as means,
and is Paul's declaration that what he is writing to the
Thessalonians are not his ideas, clothed in his own language, but
ideas and thoughts whose investiture, whose very clothing, is no
less than the word of the ascended Lord--he who is none other than
the "Word of God."
Writing to the Corinthians he says:
"Which things we speak, _not in the words_ which man's wisdom
teacheth, _but_ (and grammar requires us to understand) _in the
words_ which the Holy Ghost teacheth." (1 Corinthians 2:13.)
According to Paul's testimony, therefore, the fourteen epistles
which he wrote to the churches are not letters written by a mortal
man, giving expression to the ideas and thoughts of man, but are the
very words of the infinite God, giving utterance by the Holy Ghost
to the thoughts of God.
An examination of the other epistles of the New Testament will show
the same high and unqualified pretension. The apostles write (all of
them) not as men who are giving an opinion of their own, but as men
who know themselves under the domination of the Spirit, and as
giving authoritative expression to the mind and will of God.
Nor is this peculiar to the writers of the New Testament.
Constantly, the writers of the Old Testament introduce their message
with the tremendous sentence: "Thus saith the Lord." Again and again
they declare the Lord has spoken "by" them. David says: "The words
of the Lord were in my tongue." Jeremiah says the Word of the Lord
came to him and the Lord said: "Take a roll of a book and write
therein all the words that I have spoken to thee." Then we are told
that "Jeremiah called Baruch, the son of Neriah; and Baruch wrote
from the mouth of Jeremiah all the words of the Lord, which he had
spoken unto him, upon a roll of a book."
After these words had been read to the princes of Israel, they asked
Baruch, saying, "Tell us now, how didst thou write all these words
at his mouth?" Then Baruch answered them, "He pronounced all these
words unto me with his mouth, and I wrote them with ink in the
book."
The process is clear enough. The Lord spake his words in Jeremiah.
Jeremiah received the words direct from the Lord, dictated them word
for word to Baruch, Baruch wrote them as they were pronounced in a
book; and when written, the words were the written words of God.
Ezekiel declares when the Lord commanded him to speak to the
children of Israel, he said to him: "Speak with _my words_ unto
them." Ezekiel not only speaks them, he writes them in the book of
his prophecy. Ezekiel gives an account of how the Lord spake to him
and inspired the book which bears his name. He says: "The Spirit
entered into me when he spoke to me; . . . the spirit entered into
me and spake with me." The Spirit said unto him: "When I speak with
thee, I will open thy mouth, and thou shalt say unto them, thus
saith the Lord."
The Apostle Paul, speaking in commendation of Timothy because from a
child he had known the Holy Scriptures (and by Holy Scriptures the
Apostle meant the Old Testament from Genesis to Malachi--these were
the Scriptures Timothy as well as every Jew knew as such), tells him
that all Scripture (and of course any decent exegesis of the passage
with its weight of context would recognize that the Apostle was
referring to the Scriptures Timothy had known from childhood, the
Scriptures as we have them to-day from Genesis to Malachi)--Paul
tells Timothy in the most precise terms that all these writings are
inspired of God.
The Apostle Peter, corroboratively speaking of these very Scriptures
of the Old Testament, says they came not "by the will of man, but
holy men of old spake as they were moved (literally, carried along)
by the Holy Ghost."
Thus, this book we call the Bible comes to us with the enormous and
uncompromising claim that it is not a man-made book, but a book
whose real and sole author is the living and eternal God.
This claim stands face to face with human need.
Here we are from birth to death, pilgrims on the highway of time,
not knowing whence we come, nor whither we go. We need a guide to
lead us, a light to shine when we stand at that parting of the ways
--where eternity becomes the end of time.
This book meets us and claims to be all that--a guide through time,
a light to shine upon the road that leads to God and to be, in every
line and accent, the inspired, incorruptible, infallible Word of
God.
How may we know it is all it claims to be?
Never more than now did we need to know it.
Voices in the air are crying that we have been deceived; that this
book upon which our fathers pillowed their heads when at the end of
life's journey, they laid them down to die; this book we have held
as a lamp to our feet and a light to our path is, after all, at its
best, only the word of man and not the Word of God at all.
Every now and then resounding blows are heard as they strike against
the old foundation. Those who pretend to be working in the interest
of the truth bid us stand aside, lest we and our hopes be buried in
the impending ruin.
We need to know at any cost whether this splendid and sustaining
faith has deceived us; whether this book we have looked upon as holy
and divine is nothing more than the word of man, spoken with his
stammering tongue and written with his stumbling pen.
We must know, and know for a certainty that will leave no
peradventure to arise as a troubling after-ghost, whether this Bible
is, as Paul says it is, in truth, the Word of God; and the question
will insistently repeat itself:
"How may we know the Bible _is_ the Word of God?"
The question need not make us tremble.
The answers are at hand.
The evidence is so great, its very wealth is an embarrassment.
That evidence stated, detailed, analyzed and elaborated, would
require--not a few pages--but whole libraries.
One broad and general proposition may be laid down.
It is this:
The Bible is proved to BE the Word of God when it is shown to be NOT
the word of man; and it is proved to be not the word of man when it
is shown to be--not such a book as a man WOULD write if he COULD;
nor such a book as a man COULD write if he WOULD.
That it is not the word of man--not such a book as a man _would_
write if he could, is made clear enough by the picture it paints of
the natural man.
This picture is so sharply drawn, the figures stand out in such
living and apt delineation, that no one can mistake the import.
According to the Bible, man came direct from the hand of God. God
created him body, soul and spirit--a tripartite being. The soul was
the person, the seat of appetite and passions. The spirit was the
seat of the mind, the centre of reflection. Spirit and body were the
distinct agents of the soul. The spirit, the agent to connect the
soul with God--the body, the medium of the soul's manifestation or
materialization in this world, and the instrument for its use and
enjoyment. The mind, seated in the spirit, was intended, under the
influence of the spirit, to be the governor and regulator of the
soul--enabling the soul rightly to use its appetite and legitimately
to satisfy its passions.
Thus organized, God set man up in the world to be his
constitutional, moral, spiritual and governmental image--his
likeness morally--his image (his representative) administratively.
Man turned his back on God, listened to the appetite of his soul,
and surrendered to the demands of sensual hunger.
The soul, at once, sank down into the environment of the body. The
mind sank down into the environment of the soul and became,
henceforth, not a spiritual mind, but a mind "sensual," "devilish,"
a mind continually suggesting to the soul fresh and unlimited
gratification of its desires. With the breakdown of soul and mind,
the spirit lost its vital relationship to God, lost its function as
a connecting link with, and a transmitter of, the mind and will of
God; so that it could no longer enable man to know and understand
God; and feeling the influence of the mind, instead of influencing
it, followed it in its downward course into the environment of the
soul.
Out of this dislocation the soul came forth dominant over mind and
spirit. Soul appetite and soul desires became supreme; the body, the
willing and active agent thereof. From this period on, man was no
longer a possible spiritual being, but a "natural" man. The word
"natural" is "soulical." In Scripture it is twice translated
"sensual." The much-used word "psychological" is a derivation of it.
In the Bible sense of the word, a psychological person is just the
opposite of a pneumatical or spiritual person.
Man was now psychological, soulical, sensual. He had been
transformed into a being no better than an _intellectual_ animal,
and the slave of his physical functions. Instead of being the master
of his appetites, he was mastered by them. His passions intended,
under right use, to be blessings, became curses; instead of angels,
they became as demons. Instead of dwelling in the midst of his
endowment in harmony with it and able to direct it, he found himself
at its mercy, incessantly smitten by it and suffering his own
equipment. Repudiating faith, walking by sight, talking of reason
and governed by his senses, he threw himself open to invasion by the
world, the flesh and the Devil.
As a result of his fall, man has become a degenerate, full of the
germs of evil, "every imagination of the thoughts of the heart only
evil continually"--an incurable self-corrupter.
In him there is not one thing that commends him to a holy God; and
even should he succeed in living a life of perfect morality, his
best righteousness in the sight of God would be no better than a
bundle of filthy and contagious rags.
There is no power within him by which he can change the essential
character and determined trend of his life. Men do not gather grapes
of thorns, nor figs of thistles. All the effort that the most
devoted and laborious of men might give to the culture of a hedgerow
of thorns would not succeed in producing one grape. Though men spent
life and fortune in cultivating a field of thistles, they would not
gather a single fig. No sooner (says the Bible) can the natural man
bring forth the fruit of righteousness unto God. The Ethiopian may
change his skin, the leopard his spots, before a natural man can
change himself into a spiritual man. "The carnal mind is enmity with
God; for it is not subject to the law of God, _neither indeed can
be_." "The natural man (the word 'natural' is psuchikos, soulical)
receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are
foolishness unto him: _neither can he know them_, because they are
spiritually (pneumatikos, _pneumatically_) discerned." "The heart is
deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know
it?" meaning thereby that God alone can sound the depths of its
measureless capacity for sin and iniquity; therefore, he says: "I
the Lord search the heart, I try the reins."
The end of man is to die.
Such an end is not natural.
It is unnatural.
It is violent.
It is penal.
It is an appointed punishment: as it is written: "It is _appointed_
unto men once to die." "By _one_ man sin entered into the world, and
death _by sin_; and _so_ death _passed_ (literally, passed _through,
pierced_ man;" the seeds of death entered him for himself and all
his posterity). When he dies, therefore, be he never so moral and
upright, his death is judicial, his taking off is the execution of a
criminal.
He is to be raised from the dead as to his body (in the meantime,
his soul is "dragged" downward to the prison of the underworld,
where in conscious suffering he awaits the second resurrection and
the judgment hour), he will be raised, judged, found guilty and cast
forth into the lake of fire (which is the second death), from whence
there will be no resurrection of the body (the body will perish in
the fire--for an immortal body belongs only to the sons of God--the
participants in the First Resurrection); then, as a disembodied
spirit--a ghost--he will go forth with an inward, deathless worm,
and an inward, quenchless fire, to be like "a wandering star unto
whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever," an exile from
God, outside the orbit of divine grace, love and life--a hopeless,
an eternally hopeless--human derelict, upon the measureless sea of
night and space.
That is the Bible picture of the natural man.
Is that the picture the natural man paints of himself?
I trow not!
Man looks upon himself as a son of God by nature, having in himself
all the elements of divinity, and all the forces necessary to shape
his life aright. He is proud of himself, and talks of the dignity of
human nature. He describes himself in panegyric, magnifies his
virtue and minimizes his vice.
He flatters himself in his own eyes.
The two concepts--that of the Bible and that of the natural man--are
as far apart from each other as the heavens are from the earth.
To man, the Bible concept is false, belittling, wholly disastrous
and degrading, the death knell to any possible inspiration for human
effort and attainment. It is a concept against which he revolts with
all the nature in him, and hates with an exceeding great hatred.
In the very nature of the case, then, the Bible concept of man is
not due to man; it is not such a concept that he _would_ write if he
_could_.
The picture which the Bible paints of sin is not such a picture as
the natural man has ever painted.
The Bible declares that sin is something more than fever or disease
or weakness, it is high treason against Jehovah, it is a blow at his
integrity, a rebellion against his government, a discord to his
being and a movement whose final tendency would be to dislodge him
from his throne.
The Bible hates sin and has no mercy for it.
The very leaves of the book seem to curl and grow crisp under the
fire of its hatred. So fearful is its denunciation that the sinner
shivers and hastens to turn away from a book whose lightest
denunciation of sin has in it the menace of eternal judgment. Like a
great fiery eye it looks into the very recesses of the heart and
reveals its intents and purposes. It sees lust hiding there in all
its lecherous deformity and says, he who exercises it solely in his
mind is as guilty in God's sight as though he had committed the act.
It looks into the heart and sees hate crouching there with its
tiger-like fangs and readiness to spring, and says that he who hates
his brother is already a murderer.
The Bible has no forgiveness for sin until it has been fully and
fearfully punished. In this it simply echoes the law stamped and
steeped in nature. Nature never forgives its violated law until it
has punished it. The Bible demands satisfaction, complete and
absolute, before it offers even the hint of forgiveness. It takes
the guilty sinner to the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ and shows
him God's hatred of sin to be so great, that the moment his holy and
spotless Son representatively takes the sinner's place, he smites
him and pours out upon him a tidal sweep of wrath in a terror of
relentless judgment and indignation so immense, that the earth
quivers like an aspen, rocks to and fro, reels in its orbit till the
sun of day refuses to shine, and the moon of night hangs in the
startled heavens like a great clot of human blood.
The Bible declares that forgiveness of sin can come to the sinner
only by way of the anguish and punishment of the cross; and that no
sinner can be forgiven till he has accepted the downpour of the
wrath of God on the cross and the substitutional agony of the Son of
God as the punishment he himself so justly deserves.
The Bible teaches that in the awful cry, "My God, my God, why hast
thou forsaken me?" the sinner should hear the echo of his own agony,
as of one forsaken of God and swept out of his presence forever; and
that the only ground of approach to this righteous God is the
atoning blood of his crucified Son; that he who would approach God,
find forgiveness and justification, must claim that crucified Son of
God as his sin-offering, his vicarious sacrifice, his personal
substitute. By the hell of the cross alone can he find the heaven of
forgiveness and peace.
Is this man's attitude to, and definition of, forgiveness and peace?
It is not.
Man does not hate sin. He loves it. He rolls it as a sweet morsel
under his tongue. He condones it in its worst form. To him it is
genital weakness or an overplus of animal life--an exuberance of the
spirit. It is a racial inheritance and not an individual fault. It
is temperamental and not criminal.
The Bible concept and the natural concept of sin contradict each
other; both, therefore, cannot have the same author.
The Bible concept of holiness is not the concept of the natural man.
In the Bible, holiness is not goodness and kindness, nor even
morality. Holiness as the Bible sets it before us is the
correspondence of the soul with God, the soul reflecting the intent,
desire and innermost character of God; so that, were God to enter
into the soul, he should find himself as much at home as upon his
own exalted throne.
Such a definition as that makes human perfection and all its claims
to holiness seem no better than a painted wanton dressed in the garb
of purity and mouthing the words of virtue and chastity.
Whence comes this wisdom of holiness which makes the loftiest ideal
of man no higher than the dust of the roadway, his best
righteousness criticizable goodness and altogether a negligible
quantity?
If it is from man, it must arise from two sources--human experience
or human imagination.
It cannot come from human experience! no natural man in the past has
experienced it--none today experience it.
It cannot come from imagination; for a man cannot imagine what he
has not seen, known or experienced. As he has not experienced
holiness he cannot imagine it.
In the nature of the case--the Bible concept of holiness did not
originate with man, and that much of the Bible, evidently, is not of
man.
That the Bible is not the word of man is shown by its statements of
accurate science, written before men became scientific, and while as
yet natural science did not exist.
The record of creation is given in the opening verses of Genesis.
Whence came the wisdom which enabled the writer in a pre-scientific
age to set forth a cosmogony in such a fashion that it does not
contradict the latest findings of the geologist?
The Bible says the earth was without form and void.
Science says the same thing. Over a hot granite crust, an ocean of
fire, and beyond that an impenetrable atmosphere loaded with
carbonic acid gas.
Cuvier, the founder of paleontology, says in his discourse on the
revolutions of the globe, "Moses has left us a cosmogony, the
exactitude of which is most wonderfully confirmed every day."
Quensted says, "Moses was a great geologist, wherever he may have
obtained his knowledge." Again he says, "The venerable Moses, who
makes the plants appear first, has not yet been proven at fault; for
there are marine plants in the very lowest deposit."
Dana, of Yale College, has said that the record of creation given by
Moses and that written in the rocks are the same in all general
features.
Whence came the wisdom which kept Moses from hopelessly blundering?
Moses places the account of the original creation in the first
verse. In the second, he states the earth fell into chaos. "It
_became_ (not _was_) without form, and void."
Isaiah, the prophet, declares definitely that God did not create the
earth without form and void--God never was the author of chaos--he
made the earth habitable from the beginning.
The first verse of Genesis records the creation of this original and
habitable earth. The second verse shows, as the result of some
mighty cataclysm, that the original earth fell into a state of
chaos. The second verse, and the verses following, are the record of
the making over of the earth after it had fallen into a state of
chaos.
Whence the wisdom which taught Moses what science in our day is only
beginning to spell out, that the present earth is not an original
creation, but a remaking; that the original creation goes back
beyond the time of shifted crust, of tilted rock, of ice and fire
and mist and formless chaos?
Whence came the wisdom and knowledge which led Job to say that it is
impossible to count the stars for number, when it _was_ possible in
his day, and is equally possible in our day, to count them with the
naked eye?
How did he know, what the telescope alone reveals, that the number
of the stars as flashed forth in the field of these telescopes is
utterly beyond our computation; and that in the attempt to number
them, figures break, fall into dust, and are swept away as the chaff
of the summer's threshing floor.
How did he, looking up with that naked eye of his, how did he know
that in the Milky Way there are countless thousands of suns--and
these the centres of other systems? How did he know that world
-on-world ranges in the upper spaces of the silent sky, so
multitudinously that each increase of the power of the telescope
only adds unaccountable myriads until, looking from the rim of those
nightly searchers, the eye beholds reach on reach of luminous
clouds, and learns with awe profound, that these clouds are stars,
are suns and systems--but so far away from us and from one another
that they cannot be separated and distinguished by the most powerful
glasses; and that these clouds, if we really could separate them and
bring them within the field of our particular vision, would reveal
themselves as suns and systems so numerous, that only, the Creator
himself could number them?
How did Job know all this in that far day when he sat at his tent
door in the beauty of the cloudless sky and without a telescope? How
did he know all this so that he could tell us with absolute
certainty what we now know only by the aid of modern science--that
the stars _cannot_ be counted for number?
How did he know what only the modern telescope reveals, that the
North is stretched out over the empty place? How did he know that
there in the Northern sky there is a space where no star does shine
--a dark abyss of fathomless night--as if, suddenly, the universe of
worlds had come to an end?
How did he know, at the moment when the wise men of his day were
saying that the earth was supported on the shoulders of a giant,
that the giant stood on a platform made of the backs of elephants;
that the elephants stood on the back of a mighty tortoise, but where
the tortoise stood none of them said; how did he dare at that time
to write that God hangeth the earth on nothing?
How did Isaiah know that the world is round? How did he learn to
speak of "the circle of the earth," at the time when the scientific
men of his day said that it was four square and flat?
How did he know of that imponderable ether in which the stellar
universe is said to float? Who taught him to say that God spread out
the heavens as "thinness," when the wise men of that hour were
teaching they were a solid vault? How is it that he made use of the
most scientific term when he speaks of the heavens as "thinness"? It
is true in our English version he is made to say that God spread out
the heavens as a "tent"; but the word "tent" in the Hebrew is (doq)
and its root meaning signifies a thing that has been beaten out or
stretched into thinness--an elastic thinness; it is a word
accurately describing the ether which scientific men tell us is so
thin that a teacup full of it may be blown out into a transparent
bubble as large as the earth, and, even then, its attenuation would
seem no greater than at the beginning.
How did Isaiah know all this?
Evidently his knowledge and wisdom did not come from the knowledge
and wisdom of his day.
That the Bible did not come from man is seen in the fact of
fulfilled prohpecy.
Page after page of this book is filled with prophetic announcements.
History and human experience record their amazing fulfilment.
The prophet Daniel gives the history of four great world empires,
Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece and Rome.
The rise and fall of these empires are foretold centuries ahead.
The total ruin and perpetual desolation of Babylon were announced
when the city shone forth in the zenith of its splendor.
Daniel writes an account of Alexander the Great two hundred and
fifty years before he is born, calls him the first king of Greece,
describes his march for the conquest of the East, the battle of the
Grannicus, his sudden death at Babylon, and the division of the
empire among his four generals.
At the hour when Rome was practically passing through her travail
pains of national birth, Daniel foretold its ascension to power, and
described it as a wild beast, trampling down the nations, absorbing
into itself the three kingdoms which preceded it, occupying the
territory once possessed by them, and becoming the supreme
governmental power of the earth. Centuries before it took place he
foretold the division of the Roman Empire into two equal parts. He
announced, also, that it should be the last universal political
power till Christ the Lord should come to set up his worldwide
kingdom. Centuries have passed since Rome ruled the world. From that
day to this it has remained the last supreme world-power. The
territory once ruled by it is filled with mighty nations--not one of
them, great as it may be, is a universal world-power.
Where did Daniel get the foresight which enabled him to look on down
through two thousand years of human history and, in the face of
battle, intrigue and change, declare, what so far has come to pass,
that Rome should be the last universal empire till Christ came?
Ezekiel, the prophet, said that the great and populous city of Tyre
should be taken, cast down, and never rebuilt; and that the Lord
would make it to be like the top of a scraped rock to spread nets
upon.
The city was taken and destroyed. The people moved to an island just
off the mainland and there built a new city. Two hundred and fifty
years after Ezekiel made his prophecy, Alexander came, besieged the
new city; and, in order to take it, built a causeway from the
mainland. In doing this he tore down and utterly demolished the
ruins of the old city; took its stones and timber and cast them into
the sea; and then, actually, set his soldiers to work to scrape the
very dust that he might empty it into the waters. From the hour when
it was overthrown to this, the city has never been rebuilt; and for
centuries it has been, and is to-day, like _the top of a scraped
rock_--a place where _fishermen spread their nets_.
Where did Ezekiel get this knowledge?
Certainly not from man.
It will not do to say he guessed it!
Egypt was a land of cities and temples. The cities were populous,
the temples and monuments colossal. Avenues of gigantic sphynx led
to gateways whose immense thresholds opened into pillared halls,
where the carved columns seemed like a forest of stone. Pyramids
rose as mountains, and their alabaster-covered sides flashed back
the splendor of the cloudless skies. The land bloomed as a garden.
The papyrus grew by the banks of the Nile. The fisheries of the
mighty river filled the treasury of kings with a ceaseless income.
Art, literature, knowledge and culture were enthroned supreme--yet
was it a land of false gods and a people given over to their
worship.
Speaking in the name of God the prophet announced the coming
desolation of Egypt. It should be cast down. Its fisheries should be
destroyed, its papyrus withered, its cities and temples overthrown
and the ruins scattered over the plain, no native prince should ever
again sit upon its throne, it should become the basest of kingdoms.
It has become such.
Its cities are destroyed. Its temples are roofless, its columns
fallen, the statues of its kings lie face downward in the dust, the
pyramids, stripped and bare, stand scarred and silent in the sun.
The singing Memnon are as songless from their chiselled lips as the
tongueless Sphynx half buried in the yellow sand. The fisheries are
gone, the papyrus has withered; for centuries no native prince has
been seated on the throne. It is a land of the dead. The dead are
everywhere. At every step you stumble over a mummy, the mummy of a
dead cat, a dead dog, or a dead and shrivelled Pharaoh. Its greatest
asset is its departed glory, and every grain of sand blown from the
mighty desert, and every wave of reflected light flung back from the
Lybian hills, proclaims the terrific fulfilment of the prophet's
words.
The prophets foretold the final siege and destruction of Jerusalem.
It should be trodden down of the Gentiles. The people should be
carried away captive and sold into all lands. They should be
scattered from one end of the earth to the other. All nations should
despise them. They should become a by-word, a hissing and a scorn.
They should be hunted, hounded and persecuted. Their sufferings
should be unparalleled, horrible, unspeakable. The sound of a shaken
leaf should startle them. They were to become the people of the
trembling heart and the wandering foot.
The prophecies have been singularly fulfilled.
Jerusalem was besieged by the Romans. The city was taken. The city
and temple were destroyed. Hundreds of thousands perished by famine,
by fever, by fire and by sword. Titus, the Roman conqueror, drove a
ploughshare over its smoking ruins. The people who remained alive
after the general slaughter were carried away captive. They were
scattered from one end of the earth to the other. They have found
their dwelling place among all nations. They dwell everywhere and
are at home nowhere. They have been a by-word, a hissing and a
scorn. Every hand has been turned against them. They have been
hunted on the mountains. They have been chased through the valleys.
They have been walled up in the narrow and filthy ghettos of cities.
Their goods have been stolen. Their wives and daughters have been
ravished. They have been whipped and racked and tortured. They have
been broken on the wheel, burned at the stake, buried alive, and
sent to sea, thousands of them, in sinking ships. Every cruelty that
the ingenuity of man and the inspiration of fiends could suggest has
been practised upon them, until the heart revolts and the soul
sickens at the mere recital of their blood and woe; and to this
hour, through twenty long centuries, Jerusalem, as announced, has
been trodden down of the Gentiles; all nations have tramped through
her streets, overridden her people and torn down her walls.
The prophets said God would make a full end of the nation which
persecuted them; but he would not make a full end of them, he would
preserve and multiply them.
The promises have been kept.
Rome has become a past tense. With thoughtful steps we pause amid
her ruins, painfully locate the palace of her kings, the arenas of
her pleasure, the abodes of her vice; on fallen column or broken
tablet, we read the story of her past victories, her mighty
conquests, and standing beneath a crumbling triumphal arch, gaze on
the sculptured figures of Jewish captives who once followed in an
emperor's triumphal train, more enduring to-day with their stony
faces than the ruined city which lies prostrate at their feet; for
while Rome has passed away, the Jew still lives, he has been
preserved and has multiplied. The Jews to-day number twelve millions
of people; and these represent but two tribes out of the twelve; so
that the two are four times as numerous as the whole nation when it
came out of Egypt under Moses. Their vitality is phenomenal--it is
miraculous--their multiplication is against all the laws and
precedents of history. Persecution and trial have but increased
their fecundity. Like the burning bush ever burning but never
consumed, they continue to exist; and when you draw nigh and
consider their strange story, out of the midst, as of old out of the
bush, the voice of him who is the "I am, that I am" is heard saying
--"These are my disobedient but covenant people, whom I have sworn
shall be to me as the 'apple of mine eye'"; saying, "Whosoever
toucheth them toucheth me."
It was foretold that in the closing hours of this age and as a
prelude to their final restoration, they should bud and blossom and
fill the face of the whole world with fruit.
If to-day you seek a representative person in every department of
human genius and achievement, you will find that representative in a
Jew.
The Bible testifies, and testified it centuries ago, that in the
closing hours of this age, the Jews should turn their faces towards
Palestine and ask (or plead) their way to Zion.
The prophecy has been, and is being, fulfilled to the letter. The
faces of thousands of Jews are being turned towards Palestine;
thousands of Jews are asking how is it possible to return to Zion.
Zionism has passed from the realm of dreams to the solid ground of
fact. Everywhere over the earth societies are formed among the Jews
to emphasize the return to Zion and the setting up of the Jewish
State.
It was further foretold that many should return thither in radical
unbelief and open materialism; that at the entering in of the gates
of Jerusalem land should be bought and sold and speculation become
rife.
To-day there are more Jews in Palestine than at any time since the
return from Babylon. Land is bought and sold at the gates of the
city, and speculation in real estate values is running high. There
is the hum of expectation in the sacred city. Palestine is being
colonized by Jews. The Turkish government has taken off the ban, the
Jew is owned as a citizen and may become a representative in its
administration. The deserted cities are being occupied. Millions of
Mulberry trees are being planted, the desert and the waste places
cultivated. The lowing of cattle and the bleating of sheep are heard
once more. In Jerusalem, the wailing place of the Jews is more
crowded than ever. The penitential psalms are recited, tears are
shed and the cry goes up with keener lamentation that the city,
beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth, has become the
prey of the Gentiles; that the walls are broken down, the holy
places laid waste, "our holy and beautiful house," they cry, "where
our fathers praised thee, is burned up with fire: and all our
pleasant things are laid waste. Wilt thou refrain thyself for these
things, O Lord? Wilt thou hold thy peace, and afflict us very sore?"
And the prayer ascends with ever-increasing supplication that
Jehovah will again make bare his arm in the sight of the Gentiles,
build up the place of the holy assemblies, beautify Jerusalem and
establish his people. Synagogues are built within the shadow of the
sacred rock, the one-time threshing floor of Ornan, which David
bought and whereon the holy temple stood. The latter as well as the
former rains are falling. Everywhere it is evident that the land is
reviving, and the thought of Judah as a kingdom and power among
nations, finding utterance on the lips--both of Gentile and Jew.
And all this activity and Zionward movement taking place with the
Jew in a condition of spiritual blindness, unbelief and godless
materialism--as foretold. The very leaders of Zionism (some of them)
the most outspoken in their repudiation of our Lord Jesus Christ as
Messiah of Israel.
The Bible foretold that the Jews as a people would never receive the
Gospel: "As concerning the gospel they are enemies for your sakes"
(the Gentiles). On the other hand, it was announced that the
Gentiles, who despise the Jews, should receive the Gospel, accept a
rejected and crucified Jew as Israel's king, and own and acknowledge
him as the redeemer and saviour provided for themselves.
This prophecy has been fulfilled.
For nineteen hundred years the Jew--as a Jew--has steadily rejected
a crucified Christ. Here and there an individual, paying the penalty
of scorn and contumely from his own people, has believed the Gospel
and owned the crucified and despised man of Nazareth as his very
Lord and God. He has done so according to that election of grace
which the Bible foretells (an elect remnant is seen through all the
ages, under one dispensation or another, responding to the call of
God--like the seven thousand who would not bow the knee to Baal; and
belonging to that election of grace the believing Jew stands out
marked and sealed of God) but the Jew as a nation with unbroken
solidarity refuses to-day the only Jew who can establish him in the
land of his fathers and fulfil the covenant promises.
Equally fulfilled is the other side of the prophecy.
The Gentiles, who, racially considered, despise the Jew and
everything of the Jew, to-day own and accept this rejected and
crucified Jew of Calvary, not only as Israel's Messiah and king, but
as the redeemer and saviour provided of God for Gentiles; so that
the Gentile world now worships and adores him as very God, holding
up the cross of his shame and death as the symbol of highest honor
and most radiant glory.
The Bible has predicted the final characteristics of the present age
in terms precise and clear.
By type, figure and direct prophecy it announces that the last
_form_ of government among the nations just previous to the Coming
of our Lord Jesus Christ will be _democracy_--the rule of the
people: "The government of the people, by the people, and for the
people."
That prophecy practically has been fulfilled.
Democracy is, nearly, the universal mode of government. England in
some respects is more democratic than the United States. France,
Portugal and Switzerland are republics. Spain, Italy and Greece are
constitutional monarchies; that is to say, the people are recognized
as the ultimate authority. The Northern nations, Norway, Sweden,
Denmark, Holland and Belgium, are liberal kingdoms. The monarchy is
simply a fashion--the people are the rulers. Germany is a military
nation. The Kaiser, speaking at times as the war lord, gives the
impression that he is absolute emperor. He is far from it. The
socialists count their votes by millions, and while the German
people accept the empire, they do so because it is the most
satisfactory agent for their business and prosperity. The German
people behind the throne are the absolute power; and the voice of
democracy makes no more radical utterance and demand than in the
German _kaiserreich_. Recently, in a public interview, the Kaiser is
reported to have said, he expected his son to be the last emperor of
Germany, as within fifty years the whole world would become
democratic. Austria is still more or less under the influence of
Caesarism, but beneath the surface, the various peoples and
nationalities constituting that empire are restless, feverish, and
full of democratic ideas. Turkey has been shaken by a revolt of "The
Young Turks," and the demand for more popular government. Japan has
broken loose from the customs and traditions of centuries--her flag
is the symbol of the rising sun, and indicates that she is seeking
to take her place in the new dawn of popular sovereignty. China, the
oldest civilization and the mightiest population, has become a
republic, her young men returning from the universities of Europe
and America having sown broadcast the seed of democracy and the
claim of the people. Russia, alone, remains absolute in name, but
the absolute has been shattered even there--it is supported only by
bayonets and drawn swords. Every now and then a sullen sound is
heard, dying away to be renewed in deeper tones; it is the voice of
the people, in spite of the knout, the prison and Siberian exile,
calling for what they claim to be their "rights."
Everywhere the evidence is manifest that the prophecy of Daniel
announcing the rise of the "_clay_" (Daniel's symbol of the people)
and the warning of Isaiah that "the nations should rush like the
rushing of many waters," and "make a noise like the noise of the
seas," are being fulfilled.
After "Clay," or Democracy, there remains only anarchy, or power in
the hands of an absolute ruler. That absolute, world-wide ruler is
declared by all the prophets to be the Son of God, and his kingdom
is symbolized by a _stone_--a stone is the very opposite of clay.
THE CLAY IS HERE!
Centuries ago the Bible declared that in the closing hours of this
age the whole world would be under arms, preparing for a gigantic
and final war; that each nation would turn itself into a vast army,
and that the whole earth would become a military camp and field of
manoeuvre.
This prophecy is being fulfilled.
A universal preparation for war is going on with maddening haste.
Nations are seeking to outdo each other in their colossal
preparation for the approaching strife. Armies are no longer mere
levies or hired cohorts, every man in the nation capable of bearing
arms or in any wise doing military duty is enrolled, and must take
his place as a soldier. During the summer immense armies move out of
their barracks and play seriously the game of war. Each nation has
its field manoeuvres and theme of attack and defence. On every side
is heard the tramp of marching feet, the sound of bugle call, the
rumble of artillery, the sharp word of command.
Nations are vying with each other in the endeavor to cover the sea
with the swiftest and most powerful battleships. Millions are being
put into guns and ammunition. The money of the people is being
poured out like water to obtain war material. Forges and foundries
are working to turn out the most destructive implements. The
arsenals are being gorged with cannon, with shot and shell. Enormous
sums of money in gold are stored away in impregnable fortresses
that, as the sinew of war, it may be ready to respond at a moment's
notice. Never before in the history of the world has there been such
a spectacle.
On land and sea men are silently, ceaselessly preparing for the
irrepressible and impending conflict. Each nation feels its
existence is at stake; not a thinking statesman who does not feel
assured that, sooner or later, the clash will come. All feel it will
be fierce, titanic, fateful and final.
The Bible foretold the great apostasy as manifested in the Roman
Catholic Church, the rise of Protestantism, its ultimate breakdown
in rationalism and open infidelity (that condition of which it
should be said, "they will not endure sound doctrine"). It foretold
the rising again of Romanism into the place of power and authority
(as we see it to-day in the United States, where it holds the
balance of political power and is fast becoming a social triumph).
Who would have had the hardihood to prophesy in the hour when
Protestantism was delivering its terrible blows against Romanism,
overturning the tables of the priests, who sold their infamous wares
of papal indulgences, breaking idols and images in the churches, and
driving the church of the priesthood, the mass and auricular
confession swiftly downwards to the waters of the Mediterranean and,
while it was repudiating this apostate church (which set up saints
and images in the place of the Son of God, exalted works of merit
instead of the cleansing power of the blood) continually cried aloud
the glorious doctrine of justification by faith, and whose supreme
watchword was--"The Bible and nothing but the Bible"; who, under
such conditions as these, would have had the courage to proclaim
that in the closing hours of this age, this aggressive and biblical
Protestantism should break up by self-division, become fragmentary,
its leading thinkers and teachers repudiating the Bible as the
infallible Word of God? Who would have dared to say that Rome would
come back, ascend into the place of authority, sit upon the throne
of the world's respect and receive its honors? Who would have said
that this church which has set itself up above the Bible, claimed
the right to change times and seasons in defiance of a "thus saith
the Lord," and has burned men at the stake for their love and
devotion to this very Bible, should, at the last, by reason of the
infidelity of Protestantism, its recognition of divorce and its
indifference to a "thus saith the Lord," come forth as the defender
of the Bible, the champion of the home and the guardian of the
sacredness of marriage, concentrating all its thunders against the
shame and indecency of divorce?
Yet these prophecies are written on page after page of this book,
and their complete and amazing fulfilment looks us in the face.
What a picture is painted for us in the words that follow:
"This know, also, that in the last days perilous times shall come.
For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters,
proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy,
without natural affection, truce breakers, false accusers,
incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, traitors,
heady, high minded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God,
having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof."
"The time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine: but
after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having
itching ears; and they shall turn away their ears from the truth,
and shall be turned to fables."
It is a picture which finds its counterpart in the Protestantism of
to-day--a Protestantism full of worldliness, having a form of
godliness, a great religious profession, but denying its only power
(the Holy Ghost), repudiating doctrine and listening to every fable
of rationalistic philosophy sooner than to the truth of God.
In the letter to the church at Thyatira it is written:
"That woman Jezebel which calleth herself a prophetess (a teacher)
to teach and seduce my servants to commit fornication (fornication
in the book of Revelation signifies idolatry--image worship and,
also, union with the principles and ways of the world) and to eat
things sacrificed unto idols."
Jezebel was the Pagan wife of Ahab, king of Israel. Jezebel stands
for the union of Paganism and Judaism. But Jezebel here represents a
professed church of Christ. In Jezebel, therefore, you have a
professed church of Christ in which there is a combination of
Paganism and Judaism. This symbolic Jezebel teaches the servants of
Christ to commit fornication--that is, not only identification with
the world, but idolatry (image worship).
In its full detail, then, we have a professed church of Christ in
which may be found a mixture of Paganism and Judaism. A church where
the professed followers of Christ are taught to worship by means of
images.
Could you find a better, more accurate delineation of the apostate
Church of Rome--a Church which borrows the priesthood of Judaism and
the idolatry and image worship of Paganism?
In this book of the Revelation there is still another picture.
In the seventeenth chapter a woman is seen seated upon a scarlet
colored beast. She is arrayed in purple and scarlet. She is decked
with precious stones and pearls, and in her hand holds a golden cup
full of the abomination and filthiness of her fornication
(idolatry). She is seen to be drunken with the blood of the martyrs
of Jesus. The woman is, also, said to be seated on seven mountains
and is, finally, spoken of as that great city which rules over the
kings (nations) of the earth.
The woman is called "MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF
HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH."
In the twenty-fifth chapter of the book, the BRIDE OF THE LAMB, the
true church of Christ, is symbolized by a city--THE NEW JERUSALEM.
Babylon and Jerusalem stand always opposed to each other. Babylon is
the centre of Satanic power and testimony--its name signifies
mixture, confusion. Jerusalem is the centre of God's dealings and
testimony--it signifies peace and righteousness. If, therefore, the
city of New Jerusalem is a symbol of the true church of Christ and
the church of Christ is called a "mystery," then this woman called
Babylon, said to be a City and also called a "mystery," is a symbol
of the _false_ church of Christ; and, being a harlot, and the mother
of harlots, or churches like herself (and thus the _Mother Church_),
and harlot signifying fornication, and fornication, idolatry--image
worship--then a professed Church of Christ, which teaches and
practises image worship.
The great city ruling over the kings of the earth in John's day and
situated on seven mountains, or "mounts," is ROME; as the city
represents the woman Babylon who is the symbol of the false Church
of Christ, then you have a false church of Christ seated (and
remember, the word is "_seated_") in Rome. A Church seated in Rome
is a _Roman Church_; and as the city rules over the earth, over the
world; and a world-wide rule is a universal rule; and the word for
universal, worldwide, is, also, "catholic," you have a catholic
church; and, _seated_ in Rome (Rome its capital centre), THE ROMAN
CATHOLIC CHURCH.
This Church is said to be drunken with the blood of the martyrs of
Jesus; and the pages of history glued together with the blood of
these same martyrs, and the burning, blistering record of the "Holy
Inquisition," affirm that the astounding picture is true in all its
crimson and scarlet details.
But the striking feature in the picture, and the one that is first
presented to us, is that the woman (the Church) is carried by a
beast. This beast is a symbol of government and teaches that the
Church "rules" over the governments of the world, is sustained by
the State, has attained to "temporal power." As the picture occurs
in the _third division_ of the book, and that division relates to
things still future, we have here a distinct prophecy that this
Apostate Roman Church shall again attain to temporal power, become a
State Church, supported and carried officially by the nations of the
earth.
The exactitude with which the picture has been painted, and that,
too, at a time when Rome had not yet come into the place of full
-blown apostasy and power; the startling way in which, step by step,
the prophetic outlines have been fulfilled even in our day, are
tremendously suggestive concerning the possibility of its complete
and final fulfilment; and bid us ask most earnestly--whence came the
mental eyesight which enabled the writer of the book to sketch out
for us centuries ahead of time, that which the page of after history
reveals to us as facts?
The social, financial, governmental, religious and moral condition
of the present time have been portrayed in the book we call the
Bible. The coming of a special class called "rich" men as a
particular characteristic of this age, the revolt of labor, and its
cry against the wrongs of capital, were all set forth in the epistle
of James, nigh two thousand years ago, with an accuracy that is not
to be explained on natural grounds. So absolutely unnatural is it,
that it is perfectly safe to say--these things are not such as a man
_could_ write if he _would_.
That the book is not to be explained on natural grounds is evident
from the fact that it is not a CONSTRUCTION, but a GROWTH; not an
ORGANIZATION, but an ORGANISM, growing up from Genesis to Revelation
like a tree from root through trunk and branch to leaf and fruit.
Each book of the Bible will be found on examination to stand related
organically to one another; and that each occupies its necessary and
sequential order.
In _Genesis_, you have the beginning of things, the germ and outline
of everything afterwards revealed.
_Exodus_ gives the redemption by blood of a people foreseen and
covenanted in Genesis, their deliverance by the hand of God from the
power of the king and the dangers of the land.
In _Leviticus_, the redeemed people draw nigh to God by virtue of
the blood of sacrifice and find access to the presence of God
through the intercession of a priest.
In _Numbers_, this blood-redeemed people are seen on their journey
to the better land; we read of their trials, their temptations,
their unbelief, their backslidings and continual moral failure by
the way, and the never-failing grace and love of a covenant-keeping
God who leads them in a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night.
In _Deuteronomy_, the people have the way over which they have come,
and the dealings of God, rehearsed to them, and are instructed and
prepared for the land whither they go.
In _Joshua_, the _second_ generation (which stands always for
regeneration) gets into the promised land.
_Judges_ tells how, after being blessed with all covenant blessings
in the covenant land, the people fell into a state where every man
did that which was right "in his own eyes."
_Ruth_, the Gentile woman, becomes the bride of a Hebrew Lord; and
the covenant promise of God concerning Israel goes straightway down
from a Gentile mother and a Hebrew father towards the throne which
is set up in David and owned of God as the throne of Christ.
The books of _Samuel, Kings_ and _Chronicles_, take up the story of
the kingdom, and the Old Testament leads us on through symbol,
figure and open prophecy, to a Coming Messiah and a glorious kingdom
till, when we reach the last verse in Malachi, we lean across four
centuries of prophetic silence, waiting to greet that promised
Christ who shall be born in Bethlehem; and who is to be called the
Son of the Highest; who is to sit on the throne of his father David,
"to order it, and to establish it with judgment and with justice,
from henceforth even forever."
We listen for the angelic song and the salutation to men of good
will; and we are expecting, later on, to see Zion's king riding up
the slopes to the Holy City and all the people coming forth to cry,
"Hosanna to the Son of David," and "Blessed be he that cometh in the
name of the Lord."
When you open the New Testament you find four books--Matthew, Mark,
Luke and John.
The order of these books is fixed--it cannot be changed.
If _Mark_ be substituted for _Matthew_, then the New Testament
begins without an account of the birth or genealogy of our Lord
Jesus Christ; no intimation is given that he is born king of the
Jews, and is the expected Messiah.
If _Luke_ be given the place of _Matthew_, little mention will be
found of the Jewish kingdom of heaven; and our Lord will be seen
with a leaning towards the Gentiles.
If the Gospel of _John_ begin the New Testament instead of
_Matthew_, then we shall read of him who is Son of God rather than
King of the Jews, and the expectation raised by Malachi will seem
unfulfilled.
But the moment the order named is followed all is perfect, all is
harmony.
_Matthew_ presents our Lord Jesus Christ as the Son of _Abraham_ and
Son of _David_; heir of the covenant _land_, and the covenant
_throne_, and at once links the New Testament with the Old.
_Mark_ announces that this King of the Jews came into the world to
be the _Servant_ of God and a blessing in his service to men.
_Luke_, although he announces our Lord Jesus Christ as King, sets
him forth pre-eminently as _The Man_, going among men, eating and
drinking with them, and speaking in such plain and simple terms that
the "common people heard him gladly."
In _John_, this Jewish King, this Servant of God and men, this Man
among men, who received sinners and ate with them, is revealed as
the Mighty God, the eternal _Word_, the Holy One of Israel, who came
down to visit his people, was made flesh and "tabernacled" among
them, as of old he dwelt in the tabernacle of the wilderness in the
Shekinal glory above the Mercy Seat and between the outstretched
wings of the golden Cherubim.
Take away the book of _Acts_, and nothing can be known of the origin
of the church and its apostolic history. Without the book of Acts
the epistles are wholly unintelligible when they refer to the
Church.
Do without the _Second_ epistle to the _Corinthians_, and you have
no revelation of the state of the Christian dead either as to their
location or condition.
Without the _Second_ epistle to the _Thessalonians_ you cannot fix
the identity of the Antichrist.
Leave out the epistle to the _Hebrews_ and there is no key to
_Leviticus_.
Without the book of _Daniel_ it is impossible fully to understand
the book of _Revelation_.
No matter at what period the book of _Revelation_ may have been
written, it can have but one place in the Bible, and that the last.
It must have this place because it shows us the foreview of Genesis
fulfilled: the seed of the woman has bruised the serpent's head,
Satan has been bound and Paradise is regained.
The Old and New Testaments stand related to each other as the two
halves of a perfect whole. In the Old Testament the New is
_concealed_; in the New Testament the Old is _revealed_.
_Genesis_ finds its key in the first chapter of _John's_ Gospel, and
identifies the creator of heaven and earth with him who was made
flesh and dwelt among us as the Son of God.
_Exodus_ is explained by the _First_ epistle to the _Corinthians_,
in which we learn that "Christ" is the "Passover sacrificed for us."
_Leviticus_ is expounded by the epistle to the _Hebrews_.
_Numbers_ has its correspondence in the book of _Acts_.
In Numbers you have the experience of the Children of Israel in
their journey through the wilderness. In Acts we get the story of
the Church in its pilgrimage through the world.
_Deuteronomy_ is to be read with _Colossians_.
In Deuteronomy the people of Israel are being prepared for an
earthly inheritance. In Colossians the Church is being prepared for
a heavenly inheritance.
_Joshua_ stands over against _Ephesians_.
In Joshua the redeemed people have to fight with flesh and blood in
order to possess the covenant land. In Ephesians "we wrestle not
against flesh and blood, but against wicked spirits in the heavenly
places."
_Judges_ may be understood by reading the _first_ chapter of the
_first_ epistle, and the _twelfth_ chapter of the _second_ epistle
to the _Corinthians_.
The book of _Ruth_ is illuminated by the _third_ and _fifth_
chapters of the _Ephesians_.
In Ruth you have the Gentile bride of a Hebrew Lord, the kinsman,
redeemer and advocate; who presents his bride to himself in the gate
before all the assembled judges.
In Ephesians, the Gentile Bride is seen to be the Church, the
kinsman, redeemer and advocate, our Lord Jesus Christ, who, having
loved the Church and given himself for it, will "present it to
himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such
thing."
The books of _Samuel_, _Kings_ and _Chronicles_, may be read with
the four _Gospels_ and the book of _Revelation_.
In Samuel, Kings and Chronicles, you have the story of David, the
anointed king, man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, triumphant
warrior, exalted king--Solomon, prince of peace, ruling over the
established kingdom and the queen of Sheba coming from the uttermost
parts of the earth to own and celebrate his glory.
In the Gospels we get the story of our Lord Jesus Christ as anointed
king and man of sorrows. In Revelation he is seen coming forth at
the head of the armies of heaven, a mighty warrior, a triumphant
king and, at the last, as Prince of Peace ruling in splendor over
his established kingdom; while the Gentiles, coming from the
uttermost parts of the earth to Jerusalem, bow the knee before him
and acknowledge his glory.
_Ezra_ may be read with the latter half of the _second_ chapter of
the _Ephesians_.
In Ezra you have the building of the material temple. In Ephesus the
building of the spiritual temple.
_Nehemiah_ can be read with the twenty-first chapter of the
_Revelation_.
Nehemiah gives us Jerusalem below. Revelation, Jerusalem above.
In the book of _Esther_ the name of God is not once mentioned; but
it shows us the unseen God acting in his secret providence to
deliver his covenant people, the Jews, from the hand of the Gentile
oppressor, and setting them in the place of authority and power over
the Gentiles.
The _eleventh_ chapter of the _Romans_ explains the book of Esther.
In the eleventh chapter Paul shows that God has not forgotten the
people whom he foreknew. The nation as such has been set aside. It
is now, as Hosea says, _Lo Ammi_, _"not my people,"_ not the people
of God.
An election according to grace is going on among the Jews. These are
being called into the Church and will form a part of the Body and
Bride. The Gentiles have come dispensationally into the place of
Israel, and God is sending his Gospel among them--calling out those
whom he has foreseen and known among the Gentiles. The nation as
such would seem to be cast aside. The people are walking in darkness
and the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, their true God and only
Saviour, is not owned among them; but while the Lord is thus denied
by them, he has not forgotten them. His providences are round about
them in their preservation and multiplication, and in his judgment
of the nations which persecute them. Their present condition
nationally is temporary. Paul warns the Gentiles that the Jews have
been cut off and set aside because of unbelief. The Gentiles have
been brought in, and stand alone by faith. It is well for them not
to be "high-minded," but "to fear"; for so surely as God spared not
the nation and set it aside because of unbelief, just so surely will
he deal with the Gentiles if the Gentiles fall into unbelief.
The Gentiles must not be wise in their own conceits. The blindness
and the setting aside of Israel will last only till the "fulness of
the Gentiles be come in," that is, till the election among them is
complete; then the Lord will take up Israel as a nation again, and
precisely as he delivered Mordecai and the Jews of Esther's and
Ahasuerus' time and made them to be accepted and feared, so, it is
written, the Lord himself will come forth in behalf of his ancient
people. "There shall come out of (unto) Sion the Deliverer," and,
"so all Israel shall be saved."
The book of Esther read in the light of the eleventh chapter of the
Romans is illuminating as to the unchanging faithfulness of God and
his unceasing love for the nation and people of his choice.
Thus book after book of the Bible may be studied; and the more they
are examined and studied, the more manifest will be the intimate
relation and marvellous correspondence between the Old and the New
Testaments.
When you realize the fact that these Old and New Testament books, so
remarkably related and inter-explanatory of each other, have been
written by different authors, without possibility of collusion or
agreed plan; that each part fits into the other; that it cannot have
one book less or one book more; that to take from it would destroy
the completeness, to add would mar the harmony; that it is perfect
in itself, having the key of each book hung up at the entrance; that
it gives but never borrows light; that it cannot be explained or
interpreted outside of itself; that to him who diligently searches
it, it will reveal itself and make him wise both for this world and
for that which is to come; when all these facts are faced, it ought
to be evident that in the Bible we have a living thing and not a
mere handiwork wrought by man; that man can no more claim to be the
actual author of it than of the mountains that are round about
Jerusalem or the heavens that are high above them.
The unity of a book demands unity of objective.
This book has a great objective--a supreme theme.
That theme is not Israel--although two-thirds of the book considered
as a whole are taken up with the history of that people. The great
theme is not the Church of Christ--although the Church in this age
is the supreme thing in the sight of God. The one great theme, the
one immense objective of this book towards which it moves through
history and prophecy, through figure and symbol, through self
-sustained prose and musical song--the one great objective is--
OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST.
It seeks to present him in his person, his work, his present office
and coming glories.
It sets him before us as,
The Child born.
The Son given.
The Counsellor.
The Mighty God.
The Prince of Peace.
The Everlasting Father.
The Lily of the valleys.
The Rose of Sharon.
The Branch.
The Lord our Righteousness.
The Lord's Fellow.
The Man of God's Right hand.
He whose Goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting.
The Burnt Offering.
The Meat Offering.
The Peace Offering.
The Sin Offering.
The Trespass Offering.
The Sum of God's Thoughts.
The Man of Sorrows and acquainted with grief.
Son of Abraham.
Son of David.
Son of Mary.
Son of Man.
God the Son.
King of the Jews.
King of Israel.
King of Kings.
Lord of Lords.
God the Creator.
God manifest in the flesh.
The Second Man.
The Last Adam.
The First and the Last.
The Beginning and the Ending.
The Way, the Truth, the Life.
The Light of the world.
The Bread of life.
The Good Shepherd, who lays down his life for the sheep.
The Great Shepherd who came again from the dead.
The Chief Shepherd, who shall appear with his flock in glory.
The Sin-bearer.
The Rock.
Our Great God and Saviour Jesus Christ.
He who is.
He who was.
He who is to come.
He who before Abraham was, is, by his own announcement, the "I am."
The Almighty.
THIS SAME JESUS.
And to these might be added more than five hundred other names and
titles, together with their cognates, to say nothing of the various
characteristics assigned him, the things predicated of him, until it
is found that he is the very warp and woof of the book.
To proclaim him, exalt him, make him known, set him forth in his
many roles, his functions, his offices and his covenant glories,
prophets recite their visions, a Psalmist sings his rarest songs,
and apostles unfold their matchless doctrines.
When you contemplate the fact of this one objective; this tremendous
unity of intention in the book, you have an overwhelming
demonstration of the unity of its inspiration. Whether the
inspiration be a true or a false one, it is beyond all question one
inspiration. A book whose construction extends over centuries,
written by men separated by time and distance from each other, with
no possibility of personal or mental relation to each other--all
writing to one objective--and that to set forth the Christ of God in
his varied relations--a book with such a unity of purpose
demonstrates in the most self-evident fashion that the writers were
moved by a common impulse and, therefore, a common inspiration.
And this unity of objective and inspiration coordinates with the
wonderful fact that the book has but ONE KEY.
The key which can alone open this book and make every line
intelligible from Genesis to Revelation is Our Lord Jesus Christ.
Take Christ out of the Bible and it is a harp without a player, a
song without a singer, a palace with all the doors locked, a
labyrinth with no Ariadne thread to guide.
Put Christ into the Bible, and the harp strings will be smitten as
with a master's hand.
Put Christ into the Bible, and the voice of song is heard as when a
lark from the midst of dew-wet grasses sings, as it soars aloft to
greet the coming dawn.
Put Christ into the Bible, and all the doors of the palace are swung
open and you may pass from room to room, down all the ivory
galleries of the King, beholding portrait and landscape, vista of
beauty and heaped-up treasures of truth, of infinite love and royal
grace.
Put Christ into the Bible, and you will have a scarlet thread--the
crimson of the blood--that will lead you through all the winding
ways of redemption and glory.
Put Christ into Genesis, into the verses of the first chapter, and
it will chime like silver bells in harmony with the wondrous notes
in the first chapter of the Gospel of John, and tell you that he who
created the heavens and the earth is he who in the beginning was the
eternal Word, the voice of the infinite silence, and who, creating
for himself a human nature, and clad in mortal flesh, walked on
earth among the sons of men as Jesus of Nazareth.
Put Christ into the twenty-second, the twenty-third and the twenty
-fourth chapters of Genesis, and you will have placed before you in
perfect type the birth of Christ, the sacrifice, the resurrection on
the morning of the third day, the setting aside of the Jewish nation
as the first wife, the coming of the Holy Spirit in the name of the
Father and the Son to find a Bride for the Son, the calling out of
the church, the endowment of the church with the gifts sent from the
Father in the name of the Son, the pilgrimage of the church under
the guidance of the Holy Spirit, the Second Coming of Christ, the
Rapture and meeting of Christ and the church in the "field" of the
air, and the marriage of the Son.
Put Christ into the dryest and dullest page of the book of Kings and
Chronicles, and it will bloom with light and glory; and if you watch
in faith, you will see the King's chariot go by, and catch a vision
of the King himself in his beauty.
Put Christ into the Tabernacle, and it will cast its treasures like
a king's largess at your feet.
You will see the brazen altar to be the cross, the brazen laver, the
bath of regeneration, even the Word of God. In the Holy Place the
table of shew bread will speak of him who once said, "I am the bread
of life." The golden candlestick will remind you that he said: "I am
the light of the world." The golden altar and the priest with his
swinging censer of burning incense standing thereat will proclaim
him as the great high priest. The beautiful veil of fine linen
embroidered with figures of the cherubim in blue, purple and scarlet
color is (according to a direct Scripture) the symbol of his flesh,
his mortal humanity while on earth. Every board and bar, every cord
and pin, the coverings, the curtains, the blue, the purple and the
scarlet color, the golden vessels as well as the furniture, each and
all, proclaim him, illustrate and illuminate him in his person, his
work, his present office and coming glories.
All these are analogies, types, pictures, are so related to Christ
that he alone explains them; the explanation is filled with such
perfection of harmony in every detail, the relation between them and
our Lord Jesus Christ as the Antitype is so strikingly self-evident,
that any discussion of it would be useless.
When you find a key and lock which fit each other, you conclude they
were intended for each other.
In the light of facts already cited, what other conclusion can be
drawn than that Christ and the Bible were intended for each other?
And when you see this Bible coming together part by part,
foretelling the Christ and explained alone by him, what sane
conclusion is possible other than the book which is opened and
explained by him who is not only the Christ but the Personal Word of
God, _must be_, and _is_, THE WRITTEN WORD OF GOD!
Let your mind dwell for a moment on the style of the book.
It is so simple that a child may understand it; so profound, that
the mightiest intellect cannot go beyond its depths. It is so
essentially rich that it turns every language into which it is
translated into a classic. At one moment it is plain narration; at
another, it is all drama and tragedy, in which cataclysmic climax
crashes against climax.
It records the birth of a babe, the flight of an angel, the death of
a king, the overthrow of an empire or the fall of a sparrow. It
notes the hyssop that groweth out of the wall and speaks of the
cedars of Lebanon. It shows us so pastoral a thing as a man sitting
at his tent door in the cool of the day, and then paints for us a
city in heaven with jasper walls, with golden streets, and where
each several gate that leadeth into the city is one vast and shining
pearl.
It is full of outlines--outlines as large and bare as mountain
peaks, and then it is crowded with details as minute as the sands of
the sea. There are times when clouds and darkness float across its
pages and we hear from within like unto the voice of him who
inhabiteth eternity; in another moment the lines blaze with light,
the revelation they give is high noon--and all the shadows are under
the feet.
It is terrible in its analysis and cold and emotionless in the hard
impact of its synthesis. It describes moments of passion in
passionless words, and states infinite conclusions without the hint
of an emphasis. It shows us a man in hell (hades) and, although it
describes sufferings more awful than mortal flesh can know, causing
the soul to shudder at the simple reading of it, it takes on no
quickened pulse, no feverish rush of added speech.
In a few colorless lines it recounts the creation of the heavens and
the earth. In language utterly barren of excitement it describes the
most exciting and soul-moving event that can occupy the imagination
--that moment when the heavens shall be on fire, the elements melted
with fervent heat, the earth and the works therein burned up, and a
new heaven and a new earth brought into view.
It is a book of prose and yet a book of sublimest poetry.
The book of Job is a poem by the side of which the hexameters of
Horace, the drama of Shakespeare, the imagination of Milton, are not
to be compared.
In all literature the book of Job alone introduces a spirit into the
scene and reports its speech without utterly breaking down into the
disaster of the commonplace.
Listen to the account which Eliphaz the Temanite gives. He says:
"In thoughts from the visions of the night, when deep sleep falleth
on men, Fear came upon me, and trembling which made all my bones to
shake."
Then a spirit passed before my face; the hair of my flesh stood up;
It stood still, but I could not discern the form thereof; an image
was before mine eyes; there was silence, and I heard a voice,
saying, "Shall mortal man be more just than God? Shall man be more
pure than his Maker?"
Here is the threshold of the unseen. Before he sees or hears
anything, the Temanite has the sense of fear--the fear of something
more than human. The unknown weighs upon him and presses him down,
all the life and energy in him are at low ebb--he feels as though
the tides of life were running out. A spirit passes before his face.
It is like a breath of scarcely moving air out of the night. The
hair of his flesh (mark the psychological and physiological fact),
the hair of his flesh stood up. It was as if a current of
electricity had passed through him. Then the spirit stands still. It
is as though this breath of air out of the night were no longer
moving. He cannot discern any form. There is nothing fixed or stable
enough for him to perceive. An image is before his eyes. He makes no
vulgar attempt to describe it--it is indescribable. There is a great
silence; then, as the margin has it, he heard a still small voice--
not a loud and jarring voice--but a voice low, soft, still; and yet!
the utterance of that voice! what immensity of self-conscious power
what authority and dignity--the dignity of infinite integrity:
"Shall mortal man be more just than God? Shall man be more pure than
his Maker?"
How the night is full of a sudden law of proportion. Mortal man and
eternal God. You feel the distance widening and widening between
them there in the stillness of the night. The justice of man! man!
the unjust--the law breaker; man, who is of yesterday and is gone
to-morrow--mortal man, more just than he of whom it is said,
"Justice and judgment are the habitation of his throne." Fallen man,
man full of iniquity, shall he be more pure than he who made him; he
who breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and made him a
living soul; he whose name is holiness and righteousness and very
truth? As the question lingers man shrivels and sinks into the dust,
and the whole night is filled with stillness--with the stillness and
immensity of the all-pervading and holy God.
Read the thirty-eighth and thirty-ninth chapters.
They record the highest reaches of human language, so great that our
own version cannot dim their splendor. Nothing ever written
surpasses them, not only in the felicity of expression, but in the
sense of deity pervading them. Each succeeding verse sustains the
other and, at the last, you feel that God, very God, indeed, has
spoken.
The Almighty answers the complaining Job.
He answers him, not out of the midst of a deep, unbroken calm, but
out of the whirlwind; and yet, from the centre of that mighty vortex
of unlimited force and energy and power, the voice comes forth with
the calmness of one who knows himself superior to the whirlwind and
the storm.
"Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?"
This is the abrupt and sudden question. It is the fitting question
of him who knoweth the end from the beginning. In the very asking of
it all the boasted knowledge, the attainment, the self-consciousness
and vanity of man fade away, and man himself is as nothing--God
alone remains upon the vision--all knowing--all wise--supreme.
This Bible is a book of history.
It will spend page after page in describing the doings of a
rebellious king, and then compress the story of twenty-five hundred
years into a few dozen lines, but will do this in such a way, by
means of exact symbols, that the twenty-five centuries thus
compressed will reveal a clearer outline and fuller vista than
thousands of ordinary volumes could set forth in detail.
Mark the providence that has guarded the book.
Kings and potentates have sought to destroy it. It has been thrown
into the flames. Volume after volume has been burned. But always,
and at the critical moment, some copy has been preserved--here in
the cottage of a devoted peasant at the risk of his life, hidden in
the crevice of a rock from the inquisitor's search, or cast aside by
a careless hand and forgotten amid a pile of swept up dust in a
neglected corner of some impregnable castle; from whence it has come
forth to be copied by slow and painful, yet loving, toil, passed
from house to house secretly as a priceless treasure, then printed
on concealed presses and at last cast forth as living and fruitful
seed.
Men have denounced it and demonstrated that it is false both in
history and science; then, unexpectedly, the stroke of a pick or the
turn of a shovel uncovers some startling witness of its exact truth
and the excuseless folly of those who deny it.
The fourteenth chapter of Genesis has been set aside by the critics
as historically worthless. The excavations in Babylon have brought
to light a tablet with the name of Arioch, the fourth king mentioned
in that chapter, stamped upon it.
The statement in Exodus that Pharaoh forced the Children of Israel
while building his treasure cities to make bricks without straw, has
been treated as a fable. The treasure chambers themselves have been
found, the rooms divided by brick partitions eight to ten feet
thick--and great quantities of these bricks _made without straw_.
Luke says that Sergius Paulus was pro-consul of Cyprus. The critics
denied it and proved thereby the fallibility of the New Testament.
The homely but truth-telling spade, and without consulting the
critic, dug up some coins in the island of Cyprus itself, and on the
coins were stamped both the image and the name of Sergius Paulus.
Luke declares that Lysannius was tetrarch of Abilene; and again the
critics denied it and more than ever discounted Luke as an
historian.
Renan, the plausible and analytical infidel, read the record carved
on the stones of Baalbeck, and announced, openly, that Luke is
correct.
From the ruins of Nineveh and Babylon, Tyre and Sidon; from the
trenches of Tel el Armana; by the key words of the Rosetta stone and
the black but speaking face of the Moabite stone; from newly
discovered papyri and parchment, and the mystic page of cracked and
crumpled palimpsest; from the rocks of earth, the depths of the sea
and the heights of heaven--and from the latest discoveries of
science, there arise amazing witnesses, which speak in tones that
cannot be hushed, with facts that cannot be denied, and bear
testimony beyond all possibility of dispute to the truth and
accuracy of the book; so much so, indeed, that such an one as Sir
John Herschell, the great astronomer, has said: "All human
discoveries seem to be made only for the purpose of confirming more
and more strongly the truths contained in the Sacred Scriptures."
Consider the vitality of the book.
In less than ten years a text-book is out of date, a cyclopedia
worthless, and a library a cemetery of dead books and dead ideas;
but this book keeps living right on--keeps abreast of the times, has
a testimony for every day, and every day borrows its youth afresh as
from the womb of the morning.
Science has laughed it out of court. Two hundred and fifty years ago
Voltaire said: "Fifty years from now the world will hear no more of
the Bible." Self-elected scholarship has pronounced it out of date
and dead. Again and again its funeral services are held. Kind and
condescending eulogiums are uttered over its past history and its
good intent. With considerate hands it is lowered into its grave.
The _resquiescat in pace_ is solemnly pronounced and lo! before the
critical mourners have returned to their homes it has risen from the
dead, passed with surprising speed the funeral coaches, and is
found--as of yore--in the busy centres of life, thundering against
evil, revealing the secrets of the heart, offering consolation to
the sorrowing, hope to the dying, and flashing forth from its
quivering, vital pages the wonders of coming glory.
While copies of the classics--Virgil, Zenophon, Caesar, Sophocles,
Pindar and Martial--are to be counted by a few thousands, and are
cast aside by students as soon as they have graduated, and are
forgotten in a twelvemonth, this Bible goes on printing every year
millions of copies in all languages and dialects of earth; so far
from casting it aside, when once read, men take it up and read it
again and again, study it through life, dig into it as for hid
treasure, and make it the pillow on which to lay their dying head.
With each succeeding year the demand for it increases and voices are
continually crying--give us _The Book_.
It is the supreme book.
It is the book we need when the fire of sin gleams in our eye and
its poison burns in our veins. It is the book we need when the heart
is sore, when our soul is troubled, and when peace is no longer a
guest in our home.
It is the book we need; for from its pages alone do we behold the
light which shines from a Saviour's empty grave; from its pages
alone do we receive assurance of the resurrection of the dead, of
immortality and the life to come; and from its pages alone do we
hear the tender and welcoming words which seek to greet us and to
comfort us while we struggle here ofttimes beneath the burden's
growing weight, those words of heavenly music: "Come unto me all ye
that labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest."
What author on earth would think his book dead and out of date if
year after year the publication of it taxed the printing presses of
the world? What author would deem his book out of date when the
voices of everywhere proclaimed it the book of books, and multitudes
unnumbered confessed that from its pages alone they found the way of
life and peace?
Such a book is neither out of date nor dead; and its throbbing
vitality tells of a life impulse and inspiration that are not of
man.
And, finally,
This book inspires men for God.
Every year books on morality and essays on conduct are written and
published. They get as far as a first edition and are never heard of
again; but this book, which binds all its parts about the person,
the work, the office and the glories of Christ, changes the life,
the character, the time and the eternity of men.
Place this book in the midst of the vilest and most abandoned
community of desperate and devilish men and, sooner or later, you
will hear a cry coming from the depths of sin and shame, bitter
cries of repentance and yearnings after God; and by and by that
community will be transformed, men will no longer be demon filled,
but possessed with a spirit of truth and love; and God will be found
to reign and rule in the midst.
Whatever there is of sweetness and truth and righteousness in the
world to-day; whatever there is that gives hope and comfort on earth
and holds men back from very madness and despair, is due directly
and indirectly to this book.
Take up a map and find the lands where sin and vice skulk in the
darkness; where virtue is honored and purity enthroned; go mark on
the map the lands where the men are the most manly and the women the
most womanly, and you will find it in those lands where the Bible is
exalted, not as the word of man, but, in deed and truth, as the Word
of God.
Find the men and women who know most of God, who have the deepest
consciousness of him in the soul, and who walk every day with the
assurance of his _real presence_--to whom the unseen becomes from
hour to hour the thing that is alone real--and who live as kings
above their prostrate passions--and they will be those who make this
book the supreme authority in their daily lives; who hear it when it
speaks to them as the very voice of God.
A book which thus inspires men _for_ God is, indeed, a book which,
by every law of logic, must have been inspired _by_ God.
From the evidence cited two things are apparent:
1. The Bible is not such a book as a man _would_ write if he
_could_.
2. The Bible is not such a book as a man _could_ write if he
_would_.
By these conclusions, therefore, the Bible is shown to be _not of
man_.
As the book is thus shown to be not of man--either by inclination or
ability; and as from the beginning to the end its object is to
glorify the unseen God in the revelation of his incarnate Son, then
this book _is of God_; and being the utterance of his mind and will,
is his Word; so that the statement of the apostle concerning it is
justified. It is to be received as he says: "Not as the word of man,
but as it is in truth, THE WORD OF GOD."
To him who so approaches it--who puts his shoes from off his feet as
on holy ground, and with the silence of expectant faith listens and
looks, it will disclose itself, speak to him, and so lay hold of the
inner recesses of the heart that he shall know he has been face to
face with God, has had glimpses of the delectable mountains and the
city foursquare that lies beyond; from henceforth he shall walk, not
as one in a vain show or in the mixing of darkness and light, but
where the night shineth as the day; where the road is no longer
paved with the stumbling stones of doubt, nor the signboards filled
with a guess, but where the way leadeth on and up--shining more and
more bright unto the perfect day.
Take up this book, O friend. Do not read it with a hurried glance.
Let thine eyes rest a while upon some single word, and if thou art
patient, it will bud and blossom and bloom and grow unto thee as a
tree of life; and the leaves shall be as medicine for the healing of
thy hurt. Take it into thy mouth and learn a lesson from the meadow
kine who chew the tender grasses, and turn them over, and chew them
again, till they have extracted sweetness and life therefrom. Chew
the words of this book over and over again (it is impossible to do
so with any other book), meditate upon the words (to meditate, to
reflect, are highest functions), mediate upon their meaning--upon
their direct and cognate meanings; let the thoughts they suggest
find full and free reaction in thy soul, and from some simple word
or phrase thou shalt draw the sweetness of divine love, and more and
more the consciousness that thou hast received into thine innermost
being very spirit and very life.
Read it on bended knee. Take up the words and breathe on them with
the warm breath of sincere desire to know their intent, and music
will come forth as from the fabled horn of old--music that shall
have in it all the hallelujahs and hosannas of the heavenly host.
If you will take this book to your heart, you will find it bread
such as kings' ovens never baked, water more crystal than that which
bursts from mountain springs, wine the like of which was never
pressed from purple grapes, meat which cattle on a thousand hills
never furnished, and fruit no man ever gathered in royal gardens--
the fruit of the Spirit. You will find it a lamp unto your feet and
a light unto your path, a hammer for breaking the flinty rocks by
the way, a fire that will burn out the stain of sin, and warm
benumbed fingers for quickened service in His Name.
Give it the first place in your life. You will want to hear from it
as the last thing when you go hence. The words of loved ones will be
sweet in your ear as you leave these mortal shores (if our Lord
Jesus Christ should not hasten his coming, you must go), but you
will want to hear its utterance above all the tones, even of those
you love, speaking the final word of hope and cheer to you.
Be very patient with it. It has great things to say to you--and you
will not always be fit to hear them. You will not always--at the
first--be able to understand them; but if you do not understand to
-day, to-morrow, or other morrows after that, it will speak to you
and you shall fully know. Perhaps it will wait till the unshed tears
are in your heart, and the moan the common ear has never heard--then
it will speak--and the words will fall into the sore place of the
soul, as though angel lips had touched it; it will wait, perhaps,
till the storm is high, and your frail craft (life's poor, frail
craft) is tossed as though it would go down in the whelming waters
(and the shore so far away), and then it will speak and say, "Peace
--be still," and in that driven life of yours shall be a great and
holy calm.
Do not attempt to cross-question it as though you hesitated to
believe all it said. To accept some parts and reject others will be
fatal to you. God does not reveal himself to those who doubt him. He
that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is the
rewarder of all them that diligently seek him. So must you approach
this book--with reverence and submissive faith; for this book, O
friend! is not the word of man, but in very truth--THE WORD OF GOD.
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