Christ, Christianity and the Bible Part 12

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 _pa.s.sed_ (literally, pa.s.sed _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 G.o.d--the partic.i.p.ants 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 G.o.d, outside the orbit of divine grace, love and life--a hopeless, an eternally hopeless--human derelict, upon the measureless sea of night and s.p.a.ce.

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 G.o.d 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 s.h.i.+vers 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 l.u.s.t hiding there in all its lecherous deformity and says, he who exercises it solely in his mind is as guilty in G.o.d'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 G.o.d'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...o...b..t till the sun of day refuses to s.h.i.+ne, 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 G.o.d on the cross and the subst.i.tutional agony of the Son of G.o.d as the punishment he himself so justly deserves.

The Bible teaches that in the awful cry, "My G.o.d, my G.o.d, why hast thou forsaken me?" the sinner should hear the echo of his own agony, as of one forsaken of G.o.d and swept out of his presence forever; and that the only ground of approach to this righteous G.o.d is the atoning blood of his crucified Son; that he who would approach G.o.d, find forgiveness and justification, must claim that crucified Son of G.o.d as his sin-offering, his vicarious sacrifice, his personal subst.i.tute. By the h.e.l.l of the cross alone can he find the heaven of forgiveness and peace.

Is this man's att.i.tude 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 G.o.d, the soul reflecting the intent, desire and innermost character of G.o.d; so that, were G.o.d 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 chast.i.ty.

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 quant.i.ty?

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 fas.h.i.+on 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 exact.i.tude 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 G.o.d did not create the earth without form and void--G.o.d 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 s.h.i.+fted 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 thres.h.i.+ng 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 s.p.a.ces of the silent sky, so mult.i.tudinously 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 gla.s.ses; 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 s.p.a.ce where no star does s.h.i.+ne --a dark abyss of fathomless night--as if, suddenly, the universe of worlds had come to an end?