By Heyman Wreford.
FIVE hundred years before Christ — that is about two thousand five hundred years ago — the voice of a Prophet of God was heard in a Godless land, and as he cried his message was: — “Your priests have violated God’s law, and you have profaned God’s holy things — you have put no difference between the holy and the profane, between the clean and the unclean.” (Ezek. 22)
If this man of God were living today, and moved about among us, his voice would proclaim a like message, for in this land of ours the same sins are committed that he denounced so long ago, and worse ones also.
The holy things of God. What are they?
The deity of the Lord Jesus.
The inspiration of the Scriptures.
The immortality of the soul.
The personality of the Holy Ghost.
The fall of man, and salvation through Christ alone.
Justification by faith.
The future punishment of the wicked.
All these “holy things” of God have been “profaned” by men. Many deny these great truths today. And there can be no salvation, according to God’s holy Word, unless these truths are accepted and held.
To violate the holiness of God’s righteous laws, and to profane the Holy Things that are in the sanctuary of His justice and His mercy, must bring His judgment on nations and on individuals. To break down the hedge that separates the “holy from the profane,” and the “clean from the unclean” is to face the flaming sword, that turns every way to keep the way of the tree of life.
The finality of God’s purposes will never be altered to suit the convenience of those, who in this compromising age, “sandwich religious addresses between comic songs.” This is violation and profanation: this is putting no difference between “the holy and the profane,” between “the clean and unclean.” And yet in God’s sight the difference between them is as the difference between heaven and hell. “It is finished.” This is the message that flames from heaven for all the world to see today. Calvary is God’s ultimatum to the world. There love shone out in surpassing radiance—the love of God in Christ — there sin reached its darkest hour when it cried, “Away with Him.”
The decrees of God are fixed and final; the same for the twentieth century as they were for the first. Man’s progress is always away from God. The way of faith is always towards God. Faith is wanted now— to believe and to accept. The weariness and helplessness of the human heart is voiced in that all-important question: “What must I do to be saved?” And the glory of the sacrifice of Christ and the completeness of His finished work, shine out in the one and only answer to the question: “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.” (Acts 16:30,31.)