“THE just shall live by faith,” but man, as a race, soon lost the knowledge of God. “His eternal power and Godhead,” revealed in nature, were caricatured in emblems of man’s debased imagination. He lived, therefore, in darkness of unrighteousness. Light, as that of the sun, compared with the twinkling of a far distant star, now shines, for the Light of the World has been here. God’s Son has shed the full-orbed radiance from the glowing heart of God; veiled indeed as it was in human form, yet unmistakable. God’s Man took His place on earth, and as the perfect law-keeper and sanctified One walked this scene, which sin had destroyed, receiving for His life of piety and good works God’s highest approbation and man’s hatred, which culminated at the cross of Calvary. But when Satan and man conspired to put to death the sinless One, they but fulfilled what God in His fore-knowledge and counsel had ordained; for the rejected and scorned Man, crucified between two malefactors, was the One who said― “Lo, I come, in the volume of the book it is written of me, I delight to do thy will, O my God.” The divinely appointed sacrifice met the divinely righteous claims of God, and made propitiation for sin, by which man is redeemed and reconciled to God.
God speaks in many ways to all men―in the animate and inanimate creation, the sidereal expanse, in voice of thunder, in fruitful seasons, in dreams upon his bed, by the mouth of His servants and in the lives of His dear children. The still small voice of the Spirit reaches men at any time and in any place. Seldom does God, however, in these days of grace and forbearance, speak out of the clouds, and use the might of heaven to confound and silence forever the boasting and impious, and thus add one more testimony to the massing evidence of His existence; nevertheless God does so speak at times, and the awful incident which we now relate bears strong witness to the fact.
An impious farmer, living in the neighborhood of Kimberley (S.A.), was so enraged at the destruction of his crops during a terrible storm, that he went out of his house, and pointing his gun to the heavens, declared with an oath that he would shoot the God of the thunder. He fired. The report rang out loud and clear, followed by a deep roll of thunder. The ball was lost in the immensity, but the answering shot was the shaft of the Almighty, for the lightning found its mark in the body of the blasphemous farmer. The shocked friends of the dead man buried his charred remains quickly, but, as if to mark the incident as more than what a caviler might term a coincidence, no sooner was the earth thrown over the coffin than another blinding flash came, and the newly filled grave had its contents wrested from it, and the dead body was thrown out on the veld. With trembling hands the terror-stricken men once more buried the corpse, this time without coffin, but again the lightning flashed, and the grave was robbed of its due. No longer could the terrified men stand the terrible strain, but fled as from the presence of divine wrath. Needless to say, the farmer’s body was left unburied, and the jackals left but the bones to whiten on the veld.
Judgment is God’s strange work―Grace His delight. Reader, you may not be like the impious farmer who was cut off in this terrible manner, but you are under like condemnation if you have net accepted God’s offer of salvation. To slight God’s offer is to slight God’s Son. All have sinned and come short of the glory of God. The wrath of God abides on him who believeth not. You must meet God in the privacy of your own soul and cast yourself on the finished work of Christ and receive the blessing of salvation, or meet God in the searchlight and glare surrounding the Great White Throne, when heaven and earth have passed away and God’s strange work has to be done. Surely, friend, you will “kiss the Son lest he be angry,” or rather, as your heart is awakened to the beauty and love of Christ, you will claim Him as your precious Saviour, your Lord, your All.
D. M. D.