A New Man for a New World
An Address by Heyman Wreford
(Read Rom. 3 and Col. 1.)
I WAS led some little time ago to speak and to write on this subject, and it seems to me the time has come to reprint it again. Politicians are planning how to make a new world out of the ruins of the old one. The ghastly tragedy of the Great War has seen, not only hundreds of cities wholly destroyed — not only thousands of miles of populous countryside’s ruined — not only millions of souls sent into eternity — but it has seen the upheaval of unchecked and misdirected democracy sinning in its wild destructiveness against every law, human, moral and Divine. Mad anarchy and mad agnosticism is making the earth a very playground for the devil.
Men are striving for a millennium without Christ — to reconstruct a “world fit for heroes to live in.” A world stained with the blood of God’s beloved Son — a world that “lieth in the wicked one” — a world inhabited by men and women whose natural characters and characteristics are written in large hand in the Word of God. Will my readers take their Bibles and read with me what God says of the heroes, and all men, the reconstructed world is to be fitted for, Rom. 3:10-18:―
“As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one! There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God. They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one. Their throat is an open sepulcher; with their tongues they have used deceit; the poison of asps is under their lips! Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness; their feet are swift to shed blood; destruction and misery are in their ways; and the way of peace have they not known; there is no fear of God before their eyes.”
This is God’s estimate of the heroes for which the new world is to be made fit for them to live in. God made the world beautiful and placed man in innocence there — man fouled God’s world by his terrible sinning. There has never been any heroism in main naturally since the fall of man in Eden. “God is no respecter of persons,” and therefore we have this comprehensive statement about the whole human race, “There is none that doeth good, no, not one.” (Rom. 3:11What advantage then hath the Jew? or what profit is there of circumcision? (Romans 3:1)2Th verse.)
This stern condemnation of man in his natural condition has been sought by man to be set aside in all the ages. The absolute depravity of man, his total departure from God, his profitless existence, and his utter inability to be good, or to do good in his natural condition, has called forth all the sophistry of hell to palliate this sweeping denunciation. Man believes in his fellow-man, and makes a hero of him, but God will not allow that there is anything but evil in him. Man has many names for his chosen heroes, God has one name for all the human race — sinner. Man sinned in innocence, he has sinned under law, and he has sinned under grace. He is “born in sin and shapen in iniquity.” Jew and Gentile, all under sin. All the world guilty before God.
It is not a question of degrees of guilt, for sin is sin in God’s sight. We measure men by our standards of right and wrong; we say, “he is a good man,” or “he is a bad man,” but God says, “All have sinned.”
Your sins, my reader, have crucified the Sinless One! and that holy blood, shed on Calvary, will either be your salvation or damnation. Think of this in the presence of God now. The daily destruction of the sinner’s life goes on; the breaking up of God’s commandments, day by day, and hour by hour; the mental and physical deterioration caused by natural and Satanic influence swaying the life; the barque of life with the devil at the helm, churning the billows of sin and shame straight for the tempest that broods upon the deep, and the awful shipwreck of a lost soul. “The destruction that wasteth at noonday.” The awful expenditure of human life, millions perishing in the ways of death, other millions treading in their footsteps, “hell enlarging herself.” Stern laws scarcely restraining the unhallowed impulses of sinners on every hand. Oh, God! what shipwrecks strew the sands of time! What a ghastly hecatomb of death this poor world is! Oh! the misery of it all! “The way of peace they have not known.” There can be no peace apart from a Knowledge of God in Christ. “He is our peace,” and apart from Him there can be none. The belittling of the Lord Jesus is going on all over Christendom today. There is no fear of God before the eyes of men and women in their sins today. It is a fearfully solemn reality, and as inconceivable as it is solemn, that men have “no fear of God before their eyes.” Within the limits of his human life man fears a thousand things, but the fear of God does not trouble him. He will fear the darkness of the night, and fly from peril in the day; but the overwhelming thought of God never troubles him at all. In his anger he will curse his God, and blaspheme the Saviour. He will make a mockery of the most sacred mysteries of salvation, and challenge the very demons in his unbelief.
On every page of the world’s history today we can read, between the lines, the moving of the human race, devil led, towards the final cataclysm of destruction. The Materialist believes in the stability of the world in which he lives; in the progress of the human race, by its own inherent power, to the goal of ultimate perfection. “This old world is good enough for me,” he tells us. “I shall find all the heaven I want here, let the future take care of itself.” The future will take care of itself, and of him as well. He cannot escape from God, and if he is not “moved with fear” now to seek salvation from his Maker, he will be moved with awful and unending terror by and by, when he will be driven from the presence of God forever, and condemned to eternal death.
The natural mind does not understand the things of God, and so is at enmity with God. The infidel disbelieves because he does not understand; philosophers and men of science cavil, because they have no capacity to comprehend the deep things of God.
Man’s thought never rises above a human level: “My thoughts are not your thoughts,” God says to the unbeliever. Man in a vain seeking to make God as one of themselves, sins against all His attributes. “On earth there is nothing great but man” was man’s proud assertion in the middle ages — this blasphemy is current in full force today. In this reasoning age man pits his wisdom against the knowledge of the Almighty. “Why reason ye in your hearts?”was the question of God, manifest in flesh, to His cavilers. The finality of God, and the slow but sure accomplishment of all His purposes, goes on in spite of all man’s puny efforts to underrate the eternal strength of Omnipotence.
A New Man in a New World.
God is willing to reason with man. He says to the human race, “Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson they shall be as wool.” (Isa. 1:1818Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. (Isaiah 1:18).) But man must take the lowest place, as “dust in the balance,” before he can reason with his Maker — and the reasoning must be about his sins — the last thing man would seek to talk about. But the wonderful insistence of grace makes it easy for the contrite sinner to do this — “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.” This is Divine reconstruction — not the making of a new world fit for heroes to live in, but the making of a new man, “made meet to be a partaker of the inheritance of the saints in light,” (Col. 1:11Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God, and Timotheus our brother, (Colossians 1:1)2Th verse.)
The making of a new world will be the act of God alone in a future day, but the regeneration of sinners through the operation of the Spirit of God is a present thing. The passing of a sinner from “death unto life,” and from “darkness to light,” is only possible when repentance towards God and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ lead a man to say, “I have sinned” — thus losing all faith in himself, and “I believe,” proving he has faith in Another. The heart cry, “God be merciful to me a sinner,” and “Lord I believe, help Thou my unbelief,” give the grace to the life that brings salvation through faith, and fills the heart with the Spirit of the Son of God, so that in the new world into which man enters, he will find that “by grace he was saved through faith,” and that his salvation has brought glory to his Gad, and untold and complete happiness to his own life.