MY DEAR―I am truly grateful to you for your kind reception of my letter, giving the account of my conversion, though I own your comment on it much surprised me, and yet, when I remember my own wrong thoughts on these subjects, perhaps I should not wonder after all. You said, I am informed, “he must have thought me very wicked, or he would not have sent it to me.” No, dear―, I did not intend to convey the thought to you that you were, in, my opinion, an especially wicked person; on the contrary, as people go, I should have considered you decidedly above the usual level in the way of amiability and kindness; my every recollection of you leads me to this conclusion; but, while I say this, I deem it right to set before you the ruin of the whole human family, and that you, amongst the number, share its consequences. If you intelligently grasp this truth, you will understand how all distinctions of class education, and moral attainment are at an end, and the whole human family are on an equal footing in the sight of God.
As you have often read and know, the race of man takes its origin from Adam and Eve. He was formed out of the dust of the ground, she was made of hip substance, bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh. When thus created they were set to stand, for God, the center, of the first creation, the full control of which entrusted to them (Gen. 1:2828And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. (Genesis 1:28)); but, attached to their tenure of these rights for God, was one condition. The tree of knowledge of good and evil (God’s prerogative) was absolutely and definitely debarred from them. You know their subsequent history; how Satan’s craft succeeded too well ―how Eve became his victim, ― how her husband is seduced by her, and thus how the place allotted to them is forfeited and lost to them forever. Man, in his first condition, created sinless but liable to sin, fails under the primal test applied to him, and thus becomes a fallen creature, and is consequently banished from the presence of God. God is changeless in His holiness. Adam and Eve are sinners now, no longer innocent, and consequently an insuperable barrier exists between them and God, and our forefathers are driven out from before the face of their Creator. Does not this failure influence us? Do we not feel its effects Most assuredly we do. Just as when a forest tree succumbs to the strokes of the woodman’s ax; every branch and tendril, every bud or blossom, each bough and leaf, will feel the influence of its fall, and lose, of course, vitality. So with us; as yet unborn, but all foreseen according to the mind of God, the whole of Adam’s race must feel the effects of his one act of disobedience, resulting in his banishment from God. He falls, his children yet unborn fall with him. When they enter the world in infancy they find themselves shut out from God, “far off” from Him, and “dead in trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1,131And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins; (Ephesians 2:1)
13But now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ. (Ephesians 2:13)). What a solemn thought it is, and one we do well to ponder over, that all alike are thus shut out from God by nature! The infant in its mother’s arms, the full-grown man in all the vigor of his maturity, the centenarian in his gray old age, are all alike in this, their death by nature, and their natural distance from God.
This truth once clearly grasped, it sets at rest all thoughts of intrinsic goodness, natural fitness to approach to God. We are a fallen race, ‘a race in whom the poison of sin is found by nature, and as such cannot draw near a holy God, who cannot for a moment brook the presence of evil. It is, of course, quite true that cultivation and moral attainment may work wonders, but where can the man be found in whom there is not the germ, the root of evil, and, even were this so perfectly kept under by restraint and strict self government, we must admit it were enough to forever preclude him from the presence of Him who is “of purer eyes than to behold evil and cannot look upon iniquity.” We value, and justly, the amiable and the good, and prefer association with them to companionship with the violent and corrupt; but, alas! we must admit that those most gifted with the grace of nature are before the Lord as much “the lost,” as those whose walk and ways preclude us from their company. Adam and Adam’s race are doomed forever; not one exception to the rule has ever been or will ever be found.
Surely, you too, dear —, are not without your place in this general ruin―universal failure; you, too, may trace your pedigree to Adam, and discover that through his transgression you are amongst the banished from. God’s presence.
But, perhaps, it might occur to you that man in later days recovered himself and was enabled to regain his lost position, and that thus, like him, you, too, might, have a chance of earning God’s good pleasure. On the contrary, the patient study of the Scriptures will most clearly prove that, though the utmost opportunity was given to the race of man to show themselves once more the worthy objects of God’s confidence, they only sinned more grievously than before, and thereby increased, if possible, the distance that already separated Him and them, and proved, beyond all question, that root and stem alike were past improvement―like a farm that some adventurous agriculturist becomes the tenant of. He tries his utmost skill upon the land; the most approved courses of rotation, the most skillful husbandry, the various manures of the newest and best recommended kinds, but all in vain; crop after crop, year after year, results in sorrow and disappointment; so at last he gives it up reluctantly, and recommences, laboring on new soil altogether, and under different auspices.
So with the human race. They had failed under the first experiment. God begins again, and now leaves them to themselves to answer to the dictates of the conscience they had obtained through the fall, and choose the good and avoid the evil, if they could, the knowledge of which they had sought, obtained, but could not profit by. Under the light of conscience, man was left from Adam’s day to that of Moses―but the murder of Abel, the wickedness that brought in the flood, the independent action of the building Babel’s tower, with many another, are the proofs to us that Adam’s race, under this new experiment, only proved themselves more utterly unworthy than before of God’s good pleasure.
This crop has failed as well as its precursor, and now the God of patience tries a new experiment, and puts one race, a sample of the whole family, under a revealed code of instructions. What nation more favored than they, what people, therefore, better entitled to respond to all the care and culture granted to them But their ways, from first to last, reveal the utter vileness of the human heart. They had hardly got the law they had volunteered to keep, when they are found in rank defiance of its first enactment, worshipping a golden calf! Their subsequent history only shows them even more unworthy of their place as God’s witnesses on earth, God’s servants; and at last, after many a century of long-suffering and forbearance, God gives them up, and makes them the slaves of those who should have been their vassals had they been obedient to His law.
And now another plan begins, another course of testing what the heart of man is, and whether under any trial it can bear fit fruit for God. The Gentile might have said, “My Jewish neighbor I despise, and had I had his privileges I had not been found like him, so utterly regardless of the claims of God and man.” And, therefore, God takes him up next in the person of Nebuchadnezzar, Babylon’s King, and puts the scepter of power into his hands. Can he say “I have never sinned, my history records no failure?” On the contrary, scarcely had the reins of government been entrusted to him, then afraid to lose them, and without the holy fear of God that should have filled his soul, he plunges all within his realm into open idol worship. Thus the Gentiles, too, are found swelling the ranks of those whose ways are contrary on every hand to God.
But, yet again, the balances of the sanctuary are put into exercise, and the most searching test of all is now before us. “It may be,” God had said, “they will reverence my Son when they see Him.” And Jesus enters on the scene. Could there be one more in offensive, winning, gracious, gentle, one less calculated to provoke the enmity of man? He took no place when here. He interfered not with the schemes of man, and all their plans of human aggrandizement and worldly honor. But such was their natural hatred of God that the very presence of one like God aroused their wrath, and in result we find that king and ruler, priest and elder, soldier and civilian of the lower rank combined together to extirpate the only one that ever thoroughly returned good for evil, blessing in exchange for cursing. How utterly is now exposed the utter baseness of the human heart, the unreclaimable condition of the human race!
What can God do now but give it up? His tests are all exhausted. Experiments He has no more to try. He utterly repudiates man in nature from that moment, and the cross is not only the most glaring display of the corruption of the natural heart, but the evidence that man has come to an end before God, and that in the Second Adam the race of the first runs out and is no more seen.
Like an hourglass, whose sand is gradually seen to ebb as moment after moment flees away, the last grain has now passed through the narrow aperture, and the space above is vacant, while the heap below has reached its fullest measure. In Christ the Crucified the race of Adam ends forever before God, and all are laid beneath the tomb.
But now the hand of God is seen to exercise its energies, to turn the glass, and once more the sand is seen in motion; not the same, ‘tis true, though similar in many ways. Christ is raised from the dead by the glory of the Father; the Head of a new race; the Firstborn of the new creation; and from Him flows out, as formerly there came from Adam, the stream of life that widens out into the countless masses of the heavenly family. The source of the first race was corrupt and tainted, and, therefore, to every one that took his origin from it the taint was conveyed, and consequent corruption was his state.
The headspring of the new stream is infinitely pure, and, therefore, each who draws from it his source of life is like it, pure and holy, and without the chance of decay. The first life was liable to fail, and before it came to us had failed. The new existence, placed within the reach of all, can never fail. It comes from an incorruptible source; it is preserved by One who is Himself the incorruptible.
Christ is the source of this new stream of life, and all who receive Him (John 1:12, 1312But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: 13Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. (John 1:12‑13)) have part in it, and swell the waters that are fast rising to their proper level, the ocean of eternal life that’s found in heaven. The first to have consciously their part in it were those on whom the risen Saviour breathed (John 20:2222And when he had said this, he breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost: (John 20:22)), (though, centuries before, God had a people spared ‘mid the universal ruin, from Adam down to John the Baptist,) and from that day to this the stream has still been swelling on, and, by the power of God, souls “lost” through Adam’s fail have turned their eye to Christ, and thus, through faith in Him, exchanged their place in Adam for a place in him; stepped out of the ruin of the first creation to stand before God in all the liberty and blessedness of the new race that He now sees in Christ, His own beloved Son.
This was the truth that He Himself explained to Nicodemus (John 3); this was the truth the Jewish teacher found so hard to understand, “Ye must be born again.” “That which is born of the flesh is flesh,” the first creation. “That which is born of the Spirit is spirit,” the new race. But here He did not stop; He further said, “The Son of Man must be lifted up, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life,” and thus, before the astonished ruler’s eyes, was unfolded the way in which he was to be transferred from the low level of the first creation to the high platform of the new family; and, as we learn from chapter 7 and 19, he believed in Jesus, renounced himself in Adam, and became possessor of eternal life in Christ the Son of God.
As to the wondrous privileges and blessings inseparable from this life, the Scripture is not silent, as a careful study of John 14 to 20 will show clearly.
His “life” is ours as we have seen. His “Father” thus becomes our Father, His “God” our God; His “peace” is ours, His “joy,” His “love.” His “words” refresh our hearts, His “word” directs our pathway, until His “glory” becomes ours, and we become like Him, and, far more, are with Him forever. I do not dwell on these, but I would rather pause and ask you, dear—, whether it is not sadly true that you, with all the human race, are on an equal footing in the sight of God, and, therefore, need, like me, “conversion.” This is freely offered to you now. Do not refuse it, but, like me, confess your lost, your dead condition, and believe in Jesus unto everlasting life. (1 John 5:1313These things have I written unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God; that ye may know that ye have eternal life, and that ye may believe on the name of the Son of God. (1 John 5:13).)
Believe me, Ever yours affectionately, D. T. G.