Our privilege in having been permitted to know the truth is greater than we can continually realise. No man adequately estimates any privilege of which he has been long in possession. He can only get to know its value by contrast or by deprivation. It is not by deprivation that we can have our apprehensions refreshed in this case; for no man can take the truth from us. Truly, we may sell the “right” which God has given us to the tree of Life (Rev. 22:14). We may sell it, as Esau sold his birthright, by bartering it for the temporary conveniences of the present vain life; we cannot otherwise lose it. It is not like some position of worldly advantage, which may be ours today and lost tomorrow. “The word of the Lord endureth forever,” and it is no less a foundation than the confirmed authentic pledge and undertaking of the Creator of heaven and earth that our confidence of hope is built.

By contrast only can we fully renew our appreciation of the great position to which we have been introduced by the knowledge of the truth delivered from the fogs and darkness of the dreadful ecclesiastical centuries of the past. How do we make this contrast? There are two ways. We can look back to the time when creation was in a haze to our eyes, and life a mysterious thing of fretful impulse and vain desire. If we can feel over again what we felt in those days of moral and intellectual abortion, we shall rejoice with unspeakable thankfulness for an emancipation which has cleared heaven and earth of all darkness, and redeemed life from its fatuity and gloom, and given us an exhilarating policy which changes the “vanity and spirit-vexation” of natural life into the light, beauty, and gladness of the perennial wisdom of God.

But it is not easy at all times to perform this feat of subjective comparison. We get at the result easier by looking out into the darkness that is in the world. We are coming into contact with this everyday in some shape or form. I heard the other day a conversation in the saloon of an Atlantic steamer which gave me a glimpse of the sort I am referring to. The speakers were two gray-headed gentlemen of considerable apparent culture and experience. They were speaking of the wonderful advances that the world was making in all matters of travel and the supply of instant information from the remotest points of the earth. They said it seemed to them as if the time must come when all interest in life would be taken away by no effort being necessary to get or learn. The more thoughtful of them said that it was a fund of knowledge which would always be a source of inexhaustible interest if men could only know how to get at it. He was convinced that there was in religion a perfect satisfaction for the human mind, but the misfortune was that it received such a low place in the studies of men that it was scarcely possible for anyone to reach the right attainment. Knowledge was so superficial and indifference so great that men were starving and seemed as if they must starve in the most important matter. Something occurred to break the conversation, and it was not pursued, but the little snatch I heard was sufficient to fill me with a yearning sense, both of personal gratitude and of commiseration for the unhappy state of man.

Here we are with the key to the problem of existence in our hands. How great that problem is has appeared to many a capable groping intellect. It is the problem which David summarises when he asks,

“O Lord, wherefore hast thou made all men in vain?”

It seems as we look upon the endless procession of human generation upon the earth as if it were all in vain. Men are born, grow, hope, strive, are disappointed, get weary of the struggle and die, and their children come after them with the same hopes and the same endeavour and the same end. Yet behind all, there is a kind of radiance of promise as of far distant sunlight on the horizon. The mind cannot but see boundless power and wisdom in the universe, and cannot but argue, however dimly, that there must be possibilities of life as much above present experience as heaven is high above the earth. Yet the argument does not avail much, in the absence of knowledge. Thinkers and poets languish in their measurements and assessments of the magnitude, beauties, and problems with which the universe overwhelms the understanding. Things are great; things are wise; things are beautiful; yet things are dreadful. And in all the contemplation of the greatness and the wisdom of the beauty-whether in the vastitudes of the starry expanse, or the invisible and minute world which the microscope reveals, -there comes forth no answer to the question, What is man?! No solution to the problem, What is he living for? No alleviation of the apparently pitiless and calamitous vanity in which his lot in all countries is involved. If the mind have no higher information than nature can yield, it sinks back at last into a species of stoical despair, in which all the finer capabilities of the human mind are blighted.

Oh, men, on land and sea; ye are wandering far from the fountain of living waters. Ye have eyes on one another only. Ye seek good in your merely animal wants or intellectual gratifications. You cannot get satisfaction there. All these things have a place in the economy of things. We must eat and sleep, and clothe and associate and consider and serve one another, but there is a topmost range, towering high above all these, where alone peace is to be found, and which when found, makes all the others holy and satisfying. Consider your own constitution and it will tell you. Look at the configuration of the human brain and it will advise you. Are there not in it a clustering condensation of powers and capacities of which the highest, highest in mechanical position, highest in mental scope-the very crown of our being-is the reaching upwards and opening outwards to the SUPREME? What if this is scarcely to be met with in a full or enlightened form? What if the vast mass of the population show it only in a degraded and futile way? What if its indication in most cases is so obscure and uncertain that it can scarcely be read? Is it not there? And does it not point to the loadstar of existence, even though universal cloud on earth for a time conceal its shining? The North Pole was a fact when the trembling needle of the compass had not as yet been poised on the disc that should enable mariners to navigate the ocean. The sublimities of music were latent and possible when as yet the only sounds to be heard were the clattering of bones, the beating of gongs, or the harsh blast of the horn. The splendid movements of the universe had been for ages showing the presence of a Master Mind when as yet our untutored forefathers scarcely noticed the twinkling glory of the heavens at night. So though “the world hath not known the Eternal Father”-“the natural mind is enmity against God” though the Eternal Father is THERE, and it is eternal life to know him and Jesus Christ whom he hath sent, though there were not upon earth a single Noah, Daniel, or Job, to apprehend and rejoice and faithfully championise the glorious fact.

Nothing is more melancholy in assemblies of educated Gentiles than to see this most glorious of topics ignored. What does it mean? They profess to be religious; and their profession means that religion is the transcendently highest concern of life, and yet everything is honoured and provided for but this. Consequently, in association they are a mere collection of icicles, who if they do stick together occasionally, do so by freezing, that is, by the action of identical selfish interest and not by the affinity arising from a common submission to the will of God. Their abject timidity in divine directions is a shame to them. Benighted Mohammedans put them to the blush by their hearty and courageous devotion at all times and places. But, alas, there is a sadder interpretation. It is not that they are ashamed of God; it is that they are unbelieving. They have most of them reached the pitiful death of believing in their hearts with David’s fool there is no God. Oh, where are men’s eyes? Have they none? Can they look at nature’s exquisite workmanship in things great and small; can they contemplate the mysterious all-prevalent energy that lies at the root of every form of substance animate and inanimate-can they think of the history of man upon the earth-the nature of the Bible-the character of Christ-the fulfilment of prophecy, and not perceive the traces of eternal power and wisdom? It seems they can. Sad day of darkness! How great the privilege-how great the responsibility of being called to the position of children of light.

How great is that light-how noble and true. It is not an empirical-it is not an imagined-it is not a questionable thing. It is not like the inebriation of the so-called religious world-and enthusiasm wrought up into the froth of idea-less excitement, and expending itself in egoistic ignobleness. It is not like the un-identifiable and unprovable illumination of the theological sects-resting upon an experience which is purely subjective and necessarily limited to individual feeling-which they assume to be the action of the Holy Spirit, but which may be the action of something else, and which a comparison with the authentic deliverances of the Holy Spirit, in the Scriptures, shows to be something else. It is a definable, a palpable, a provable thing. It rests upon the basis of accomplished facts. The most general and comprehensive of these facts is the one stated by Paul in our readings of the last week, that “God has spoken.” This speaking was not in any occult or obscure manner, requiring the refinements of human wisdom for its recognition and understanding. It was “at sundry times and divers manners,” as Paul observes. Of these we are enabled to judge because of our actual relation to one of them. ‘One’ of the ‘manners’ was by writing. God commanded the men to whom he spake to write what he said (Num. 33:2). He qualified them to do in a way that placed the writing beyond the infirmities of human will (2 Pet. 1:21; 2 Tim. 3:16) the writing so produced we have. It has come down to us in a manner that excludes doubt as to whether the Bible is it. No man could have substituted a false Koran for the writing of Mahomet among the millions of Mohammedans who from the beginning have received and revered it. So no man could have substituted other than the real writings of Moses and the prophets among the many generations of Jews who have handed them down to our own day in an unbroken line of transmission; or other than the real writings of the apostles among the communities founded by their labours in the first century, and historically continued, though in a corrupted form, from that day to this. We look into the Bible and we find it corresponds with this account of its origin. It is as different from human writing as the eternal is from the temporary. It is its own witness. It is impossible for a capable and a humble mind to read it without feeling this.

Then, as we read, we find it contains the very guidance which distracted human life requires. It tells why we are here, and how circumstances came into their present unhappy form. It tells us that God made the earth for man and man for God, but that early after the appearance of man upon the earth, man set God aside, and sought to live for man himself alone, in consequence of which God hid his face from man, gave him over to the dominion of death, and scattered him all abroad on the earth to look after himself for a while till the situation should be ripe for God to realise his purpose in placing man upon the earth. It shows us that as a step in the direction of the accomplishment of this purpose, God called Abraham, and established His covenant with him, and chose his descendants and formed them into a nation, manifesting Himself to them in their deliverance from Egypt, and in the promulgation to them of a law by Moses which the Jews hold in their hand unaltered to this day, after a lapse of 3,000 years, and which on study is found to be the paragon of political constitutions. It shows us the history of this nation-for a thousand years-a history in the main of disobedience and punishment. Interwoven with this history, as its most material feature, it presents the records of the messages of reproof, instruction and promise sent to them direct from God by the prophets; and last of all, the narrative of the sending of His Son, and what he did, and how his life ended, and what ends were associated with his whole work. These messages and that narrative contain what is to be found in no other document under the sun, -the foretelling of God’s final purpose with the earth and man, and the full revelation of what God desires at the hands of men now in this present time.

The reading of such a book is found experimentally to lead to those results which the Apostle Paul said it was given for. He says it was ‘able to make wise unto salvation,’ and was ‘profitable for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness’ (2 Tim. 3:15). How profitable it is we can all testify who have taken any pains to make ourselves acquainted with it, first in the elementary knowledge of its contents, at the beginning, and then in that daily intimacy which it calls for. It must be so. Men are governed, and the mind is moulded by ideas. Here we have ideas the most potent under the sun. What idea is so ennobling as the revelation that the idea in which all things subsist is an Eternal Person, embracing the universe in the effluence of his uncreated Spirit, and working all things after the counsel of His own will? What so calming and purifying as the fact that no distance can separate us from Him, but that in the subtle energy of His presence, “all things are naked and open, and no creature is hid from His sight?” What philosophy of man’s evil state at once so rational and satisfactory as the dogmatic teaching of the Divine Spirit that death reigns because of sin and that the affliction of man is due to the turning away of the countenance of the Almighty because of human insubordination? What solatium in the midst of the evil, so great as the assurance that God himself will apply a remedy, wipe tears from every eye and fill the earth with his glory? What tranquillity of mind, in the presence of the distracted problems of human state and history that press themselves on every thoughtful mind that looks beyond the horizon of his immediate experience, can come from any source, like that which is imparted by the conviction that God has a plan which is being slowly worked out in the course of the ages, and which will culminate in the reappearance of Christ upon the earth to take the government with power, and bring all things into subjection to God? What comfort of anticipation, what interest in life, what incentive to conformity with the ways of righteousness can compare with that which springs from the assurance that Christ will judge the living and the dead, and confer glory, honour, and immortality on all who please him by their faith and obedience? What prospect so attractive as that which the Word of God opens out to us, of God becoming known and loved and praised in all the earth, with the fervour of David, and every heart filled with gladness, every life ennobled with heavenly gift? What satisfaction so perfect as that which springs from the fact of forgiveness and reconciliation to God through Christ, and the certain hope of ascending from the weak and grovelling and decaying nature we now possess to a nature pure, incorruptible, capable, joyous and everlasting?

All these are the teachings of the Spirit of God in the Holy Scriptures. Their infinite superiority to all ideas of man is manifest on even a superficial comparison of their effects with those produced by the philosophy which is bounded by the horizon of human life as it now is. There is something sterile and unsatisfying in the highest of merely human thoughts and attainments. It is not in the nature of life as it now is, to satisfy the mind. The mind is so constituted that nothing short of the infinite can satisfy. In all merely human projects, it matters not in what direction, riches, power, fame, art, science, there is an end, which when once reached, becomes the grave of enterprise and the seed bed of discontent. There is nothing satisfying in what man proposes for himself. He cannot find peace in that boundless mental action which lays hold of God for its delight and stay; Christ as the ideal of its affection, and an endless futurity of perfection as the vista of its anticipations.

This, dear brethren and sisters, is what the understanding of the truth has brought to us. It has conferred upon us entire liberty. What remains for us but to stand fast in it? It is a position we may lose if we neglect the conditions of its preservation. We must beware of the enticements suggested to us in the spectacle of cultured men and women “without God and without hope in the world.” They are interesting in the present desolation, but it is a mere picture-a mere appearance-hollow if we penetrate it-absolutely ephemeral if we follow it to its close. We must beware of the zests and honours and emulations connected with society as it now is. It is a society that is not the friend of God, however amiable and attractive. We must not surrender to its seductions, or accept its embraces. It is written,

“The friendship of the world is enmity with God.”

We must beware of the faintness of mind that is liable to overtake the patient continuance in godliness. It is not in vain that we addict ourselves to the ways and the studies of godliness, and decline the leeks and garlic of the Egyptians. The issue of things will justify the choice of wisdom, and reward beyond what tongue can utter or heart conceive, the faithful endurance of the monotonies and self-denials of this time of probation. “Yet a little while, and he that shall come will come,” from whose bright presence will fly all clouds and darkness forever.

Taken from: - “More Seasons of Comfort” No. 105

Pages 1-6

By Bro. Robert Roberts

Berean Home Page