(Continued from page 36)
But again observe God from the very earliest bringing in what the book of Revelation calls the “everlasting gospel.” How remarkable a phrase is this! Many a man has read and cited these words in chap. 14 of the Revelation; many have thought of them; and not a few have explained the thought unwisely, no doubt. The phrase never occurs except in this one place. Why is it called the “everlasting gospel"? There is always a propriety and a force in every word of Scripture. Let me tell you, as far as the Lord enables me. In the last book of the New Testament the Spirit of God recalls the first revelation of Christ in the Old Testament. In the garden of Eden, in the paradise that was blighted and lost by sin, God did not fail to point to the Seed of the woman—the bruised Seed of the woman, remark—that was to bruise the serpent's head. Is not this gospel? Has it not been blessed gospel from the very first? Is it not also the gospel to the very last— “everlasting gospel"? There is as yet no allusion to His being sacrificed for us. This could not be until offering or sacrifices distinctly came in. Nor was there yet a revelation of Him as Savior of His people from their sins. His people, of course, had to be called first, and their ruin shown first and last, salvation being fitly explained afterward. It is not the notion of priesthood. It is not the figure of a captain. Still less is it the truth of the head of the church. All these things were revealed in their due season. But the last book in the New Testament sends you back to the first book of the Old; and thus you hear the blessed voice of Christ, as it were, reverberating through all Scripture an “everlasting gospel.” And why so? Because God ever takes pleasure in saving souls, and, in order to save sinners, there must ever be an “everlasting gospel.”
I speak at present of those that hear the truth—of those that listen to the word of God. Infants are not now in our view. Not that there is the least doubt that God's grace does save little children, but there is a somewhat different way of course. It is wholly unscriptural that God punishes babes if they are not christened. There is not the slightest ground for a thought so unworthy of God, so harsh to man in one way, so self-exalting to him in another. You may ask how one can know. Do you know it? How do you know anything? Through Jesus—the same One brought in to prove the Bible. Jesus the Lord shows us very clearly that the God who gave the law is greater than the law itself, and that God was showing Himself in divine grace to be much greater than in judgment. The judgment of God is a solemn certainty; but the grace of God a still deeper truth. God manifest in the flesh, God present upon earth in the person of His own Son, shows us what God feels about little children. The disciples did not like to be troubled with them. They thought it was too bad to take up their great Master's time with mere children. How did the Lord answer it? He took them up in His arms and blessed them—a good lesson for the disciples. How often they need the Lord to correct their inadequate notions! If the Lord took up and blessed little children, does it not tell me what God feels about them. He does not bless little children on earth to send them dying to hell. But if they lived to rebel against His word and against His Son the Lord Jesus, if the children when grown up dare to despise Him that died on the cross, if they refuse to accept the Savior proclaimed in their ears, is there anything God resents more strongly? It is bad enough for one man to lift his hand against another; and we justly abhor the man that would lift his hand against his father or his mother. But when we think of what Father sent His Son to be a Savior how awful the wickedness of despising both, and therein of rejecting the gospel of salvation!
People pretend that they do not mean evil when they say man is but a developed monkey. But such ideas originate from the desire in man to get rid of responsibility and of God. None of that folly! You are moral beings; you have souls, you have consciences. You know very well that you are not brute beasts. You consciously have in your souls, in spite of all efforts, a dread of God, a fear of punishment for sins. A hare does not sin, nor a horse or cow; and you would be shocked at the philosopher who tried to prove that a horse, cow, or hare, had a sense of right or wrong, no less than a man. You might not be able to answer the sophistry, but you would feel that he was deceiving you.
Man is conscious of sin, and fears God; but God sent His only-begotten Son to save sinners. Hence all is changed for those that believe, and for more too. Look at the blessed change that has come over us in these very lands. Time was when our ancestors ran wild in woods, when our forefathers were stained blue, when they sacrificed their fellow creatures, and when the most shocking immorality prevailed. Elsewhere a man might marry several wives; but in this very land several men lived with one woman; and in this very land children, and even men and women, were burned in honor of their gods who were not God. What has changed all that? The name of Jesus. Even those that are not won to the True, but try to prove there is no God at all, reap incalculable benefit from the purging away of all that detestable filth and cruelty. What swept it away? Was there no cause for it? Leave that irrationalism to the infidel. But one cause adequately accounts for such effects: only the name of Jesus—indisputably His name. Before His name was known these abominations flourished. Even the Romans, with all their power, only sinned after another manner —perhaps more decently; yet were they idolatrous and unclean. Is this the case where men really believe in Jesus? Nay, is this the case outwardly where men, even without living faith in the Lord Jesus, still respect the Bible?
I was speaking to a particularly wicked skeptic the other day in London, when he said to me deliberately, “I do not believe the Bible; but if I had the power, I should have the Bible read by everyone.” How strange such homage to the Bible! He acknowledged the moral power of the word, and that there was nothing like it. Frankly, however, I do not believe he would thus use power if he possessed it: you can never trust men of this stamp; yet is his remark an unmistakeable and unwilling testimony to the power of Christ and His word.
On the other hand, people who hold the Bible only in the intellect are in danger of letting it slip altogether, and of becoming downright infidels. A tendency of that kind is at work among young men now. They begin more than ever to talk disrespectfully of those who are ministers. Now, it is not my business in any way to uphold the clergy; but still I have a horror of pulling down religion that is a reality, and I have the greatest love for many clergymen. Everything that is real, righteous or good—whether it be in what people call a state-church, or in a non-established Christian society—whatever is of God I would honor and love. And every one who is of God—every man who is a minister of Christ, not merely in word but in deed and in truth—is surely to be honored and loved. I may not agree with him; and of course he may not agree with me. You cannot expect one to uphold another if they differ rather seriously. But, then, you must remember that all other things are small compared with the word and Spirit of God, with Christ Himself and with Christ's redemption. What ecclesiastical difference is to be compared with the revelation in Christ, or of God in the Bible? Of course those differences have their due importance: and let me say that I felt them important enough to leave all that was dear to me in this way on earth. Still, we surely ought to rank Christ's person and God's word unhesitatingly above ecclesiastical questions.
And see how simple it is. The only possible means for men to know God is through His making Himself known to men. I admit that for a long time the word of God was not written. For more than two thousand years the word of God was not yet written. Men had no more than the word of God spoken, and that little word uttered in the garden of Eden—supplemented by the promises that came afterward, as well as by manifestations that God gave from time to time—was quite enough, when God had not added more, for men to live and die and go to heaven upon. Nor is it absolutely necessary that a man should read. “Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” How many had only “heard” that word, and truly looked for the coming Savior! A man's whole life is affected by this, not by deep study, but whether he rests entirely on Christ or he is trying to save himself. What a change faith in Christ effects! Receiving Him as the Son of God with my heart, and my conscience bowing to the truth which convicts me, I love Him because He first loved me. Is not this the gospel? And there in germ at least it was in Eden— “the Seed of the woman should bruise the serpent's head.” It is the everlasting gospel.
[W. K.]
(To be continued)