JUDGMENT to come is a solemn reality: it is awful to contemplate in the light of the love of God at Calvary, where Jesus died for sins. No wonder one of old said, “And enter not into judgment with thy servant: for in thy sight shall no man living be justified” (Psa. 143:22And enter not into judgment with thy servant: for in thy sight shall no man living be justified. (Psalm 143:2)).
The cross of Christ reveals the terrible fact that “it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” While it manifests the love of His heart for sinners, it also reveals His holy hatred of sin, and the just deserts of sin at His righteous hand.
The effects of Paul’s reasoning with Felix, the Roman judge, on this subject, was to make him tremble. The force of the Greek is that it terrified him. His trembling arose from the terror struck into him because of his sinful life. The spiritual darts thrust into his conscience and heart evidently were not without effect. He would carry the memory of it to the other world with him. It would help to augment his misery there. It would justify God, who gave him a chance to be saved.
Some we have known have been affected in a similar way, and, like Felix, have put it away from them until a more convenient season, which may never come.
It never came to Felix that we read of. Seldom does it come to any man after a blank refusal has been given to the grace of God, which was brought within the reach of Felix through such a notable vessel as the great apostle.
“Time enough yet” is the devil’s gospel. No other matter is treated by men with such apparent carelessness and slackness. No other matter requires such promptitude and diligent concern. It is for eternity—for the ages of ages. Our divine Lord, who knew the future and compassionated the souls of men as none ever did, said, “What is a man advantaged if he should gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”
There was something at the bottom of the heart of Felix which overcame the efforts of Paul’s fiery, persuasive, spiritual eloquence and masterly reasoning―the love of money. “He hoped that money would be given unto him.” Corrupt man to occupy the judgment seat. He would sacrifice justice to money, as his fellow-judge, Pilate, had sacrificed justice to popularity in the case of our Lord. What a terrible hell theirs will be.
Paul’s theme was “righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come.” Righteousness is the doing of what is right, both to God and our fellows. All that is not right or just to God and our fellows is wrongdoing, and constitutes us unjust or unrighteous persons in the sight of God and our fellows.
“All unrighteousness is sin,” so by our injustice we are sinners against God. “Against thee and thee only have I sinned and done this evil in thy sight.” That was a true confession from a penitent broken-hearted man, who had acted with the grossest injustice both to God and his fellows. “The Lord also hath put away thy sin” was the answer to the honest confession.
Temperance is the controlling of our passions in the sight of God and our fellows, so that we do not act unjustly either toward God or man. Paul not only preached it, but he practiced it when he said, “I keep under my body and bring it into subjection, lest I myself having preached to others should become a castaway” ―or be treated as reprobate silver.
As Paul, through the power of the Spirit, brought the light of future judgment upon Felix’s unjust, intemperate, self-indulgent life―a life evidently controlled by the love of gain, which is the root of all evil-he shook from the scalp to the heel. If death would have ended all, does anyone in his senses believe that Felix would have been so terrified? In all likelihood many a man Felix himself bad sentenced to death, and the man so sentenced trembled not. Some men are so miserable that, were there no hereafter, death would be relief instead of punishment.
Death does not end all. Extinction of the spirit is a dream, an imagination of man’s corrupt brain and heart, invented by the devil to deceive souls. The spirit of man is the God-like part of man, in contrast to beasts who have not intelligent spirits. “God is a spirit.” Angels are spirits. The devil is a spirit, and he shall be tormented day and night for the ages of ages. Torment for the ages of ages is not the extinction of Satan. Everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels will be the portion of the lost―the finally lost.
There are the spirits of just men made perfect. There are the spirits of Noah’s day in prison. The corn of wheat does not become extinct though it dies, If it did not die, life would not spring up from the grain sown in the ground. If it became extinct that would be the end of it.
Death in Scripture is never regarded as extinction. It is a state of separation from God. Destruction in Scripture is never regarded as extinction of being, but refers to man losing the place of moral supremacy in which God set him.
Take one passage out of many, “O Israel, thou hast destroyed thyself; but in me is thine help.” Does that mean that Israel ceases to exist? They have been ruined or destroyed nationally, and hence have lost their place of supremacy and distinction amongst the nations, through their sins and willful disobedience; but they are by no means extinct They shall live again in resurrection power, and in millennial days; shall have a greater place on the earth than in the palmy days of King Solomon.
When they in repentance turn to the God they have sinned against, whose laws they have broken, whose prophets they have stoned, whose religious institutions they have corrupted, whose mercy they have slighted, whose grace they have abused, whom Son they have murdered, whose Spirit they have resisted, whose apostles and saints they have imprisoned and stoned, He will receive them graciously and pardon all their guilty past, and write His laws on their hearts and minds, so that they might know Him in truth and reality, from the least of them to the greatest.
In Me Is Thine Help.
Reader, though thou, like them, hast ruined thyself, there is forgiveness and healing for thee. All thy sins shall be forgiven, and all thy sores and wounds healed by the loving hand of a Saviour-God. Do not let thy dark, black past hinder thee from proving the love of His heart. It is thy very past that has been the occasion for God to show His love to thee, by sending His Son to redeem thee from its terrible power.
If justice must punish sin, mercy can now forgive us all our sins, because love divine has met and satisfied justice to the fullest extent, by bearing our injustice in the deepest suffering on the accursed tree. “Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God.”
What a Saviour God is! Such a scheme of salvation is worthy of Him, and it is worthy of the acceptation of all. “It is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief.” Noble words, how pregnant with meaning from the lips of the mighty converted Paul.
Death and Destruction.
“The Son of man is come to seek and save that which was lost.” Lost is usually the same word in the Greek as destroy or perish. If lost, or perishing, or destroyed, meant extinction of being, the mission of Christ had been in vain. But He came to save those who were not extinct and never will be extinct, though they refuse to be saved by Him, obey not the gospel, and are finally destroyed “with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his power.”
They are lost to God, and hence to the enjoyment of God, as His creatures that He made for His satisfaction and pleasure. Christ came to suffer and die to save them out of this lost or perishing condition, and bring them back to God, as the verse in Peter already quoted says, “that he might bring us to God.” It implies that we were lost to God, and hence away from Him, in our perishing condition, “All we like sheep have gone astray.”
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” When a man receives Christ as His Saviour and Lord, and as God’s great love-gift to Him, he gets eternal life, and will never perish. It is a life in Christ risen from the dead, which death can never touch, nor Satan with all his craft and subtlety ever destroy. “I give unto my sheep eternal life, and they shall never perish, neither shall any one pluck them out of my hand” (John 10:2828And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand. (John 10:28)).
Think of how the true deity of Christ shines out in these words, “I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.” No one but God could speak of Himself as the giver of life, and hence its source. This proves beyond controversy that though He is truly man, yet was He ever none less than “God over all, blessed forever.”
Reader, think on the wondrous love of God coming out to all mankind thus. You and I were by nature lost and perishing, and by practice sinners: yet He gave His Son that we might be redeemed from, our sins, and have eternal life in Him, the risen One, and never taste the bitterness of death. If the body of the believer falls into the grave to await the resurrection power of Christ’s almighty voice, his spirit departs to be “with Christ, which is far better.” “Absent from the body, present (or at home) with the Lord.”
Does not such love excite astonishment in you, as you look at the dark background of your willful history and sins against God? Does it not lead you to appreciate it, and then to appropriate it to yourself? Does it not fill your heart with the deepest gratitude, and your lips with the sweetest praise? Does it not lead you, as it has thousands, to tell it out in all its vast and boundless character and extent, both by life and lip? Does it not so touch you and thrill your heart, that you are led to put your hand into your pocket that it might be proclaimed amongst the teeming millions of seething humanity, living in the darkness of heathendom? Does it not lead you even to deny yourself some earthly luxuries that you might be able to give to Him who made His love known by sacrificing His life to save and enlighten you? Does it not lead you to scatter the printed page of the gospel in such magazines as the Gospel Messenger, which, to my knowledge, God has blessed to hundreds (if not to thousands we have never heard of), if thereby some dark heart might be brought into the light and joy which, you profess to believe, has done more for you than all besides? Does it not lead you to your knees in much prayer?
You say you have not the gift nor yet the courage to preach. That may be. All are not called to that blessed work. But can you not yield your time, your money, or even all you possess for Him who left the highest glory, and was born in a stable, cradled in a manger, had nowhere to lay His head in life, and hung between two felons at His death, to save you from eternal dungeons and bring you to eternal rest and joy?
If not, may God give you to stand and gaze on Jesus in all His sacrificial love, expressive of all God’s great love for a lost and ruined world, and yourself amongst that number, until you get so fired by His love, that you must go forth and do what you can to make it known, if, by any means, you might save some from the impending crash of this world’s awful doom.
“Souls are perishing before thee,
Save, save one.
It may be thy crown of glory,
Save, save one.
From the waves that would devour,
From destruction’s fiery shower,
From the raging lion’s power,
Save, save one.”
Why not many?
P. W.
MANY a saint of God feels, I am fit for heaven, but not fit for earth, because I am not sufficiently with the Lord to be equal to the occasions that arise as I pass through this scene. We feel our impotence and folly, feel how we have broken down as witnesses for Christ. It is only as Christ becomes better known that there is a fitness to pass through this scene. W. T. P. W.