1. The Need
Ever since man fell he has been working to gain a golden age. The circumstances surrounding a fallen race are sad indeed. Men would like to banish disease and death, they would like to get rid of pain and sorrow.
Legislation on the one hand and religion on the other attempt to improve things, and enthusiasts and visionaries will tell you that their efforts will in the end bring in a golden age of peace and prosperity. If improved sanitation lengthens the age of man it is at once hailed with a chorus of approval. Men will be inoculated with the thyroid gland of the monkey in the hope of having restored to them their lost juvenility, and do a thousand things to bring about what they aim at.
These efforts are pathetic in the extreme. One cannot but feel a sympathy for them, yet we regret the inability of the men of this world to understand where their fundamental error lies, and to realize how hopeless are their efforts, save in very partial measure.
What we mean is, for instance, improved sanitation, medical and surgical skill, have undoubtedly prolonged the life of the community, but how very partial and temporary this advantage is. Lengthen a man’s life by ten years, and what is that? Death comes. Eternity comes. The great fundamental question has not been touched at all.
Again, philanthropists will say, Look at the way the poor are herded together in the East End of London. Decency is thrown to the winds. Married couples, young men and women, boys and girls, and infants—all herded into one sleeping-room. Give them proper housing conditions, give them bathrooms, give them garden cities, and see what an improvement will take place.
Doubtless, and every right-minded person would rejoice at the efforts made for the better housing of the poor, the amelioration of their lot, the benefit which would accrue from such efforts; but again the benefit is but temporary and partial. It lasts for each individual for a few years, and then—death comes.
Moreover if better houses, bathrooms and gardens would suffice to make things right, one would expect the West End of London to be free from vice. But is it? No, the very luxuries that men have only make it easier for them to sin.
The fact is, environment will not put things right. The kind of cage in which you put a tiger will not affect its blood-thirsty tendencies, The cage’s size and sanitation may make it more healthy and prolong the life of the animal, but they will not alter its propensities.
Every now and again a disillusionized politician or theologian lets out the truth when he says the problem is not one of environment or better circumstances, but of the man himself. I read a trite saying the other day, “The heart of every problem is the problem of the human heart.” How true that is! There you touch the crucial spat.
There is nothing wrong with our head, and hands and feet, for we are exhorted to yield our “members as instruments of righteousness to God” (Rom. 6:13)—what is wrong is the utterly depraved fallen nature of man—“the flesh” as Scripture so often calls it. Was there ever a more sweeping condemnation than Genesis 6:5, “Every imagination of the thoughts of his [man’s] heart was only evil continually”? A more deadly description, allowing no loophole of escape, so precise is the language, could not be framed.
Nor is the summing up of Romans 3 less sweeping. Sentence after sentence, a veritable mosaic of Old Testament quotations, strikes at the root of things. None understanding, none good, none righteous, all become unprofitable—“all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23).
No wonder that new creation is the only solution of the problem. Man must have a different constitution. With one stroke the Lord cut the ground from under the feet of Nicodemus. Nicodemus, as men speak, was a good man, a teacher of the law in the synagogue, a man with a reputable character, yet the Lord said to him, “Ye must be born again” (John 3:7). And again, “Except a man be born of water [meaning by the word of God] and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God” (v. 5). Thus the Apostle John presents this radical truth.
The Apostle Peter puts it in his way: “Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which lives and abides for ever” (1 Peter 1:23)
The Apostle Paul puts it in his way: “But God, who is rich in mercy, for His great love wherewith He loved us, even when we were dead in sins, has quickened us together with Christ” (Eph. 2:4-5).
When we say the Apostles John, Peter and Paul put things in their way, we wish to guard against the thought that their writings put forth their own ideas. On the contrary they were equally and fully inspired, and their writings have all the authority of God behind them. The Spirit of God uses each to put forth from different points of view the great radical truth that there must be a new creation if we are to be pleasing to God, and that the old creation must pass away in all its features, whether physical or moral, whether the material earth or man upon it.
It is the failure to grasp this fundamental fact that leads men to live in a fool’s paradise, to pursue the will o’ the wisp, the painted bubble of improving the old creation in view of the arrival of the golden age.
Men have set their hearts upon this, but it can only come in God’s way, and unless it comes in God’s way it can have no sure foundation.
We have gained much if we clearly see that nothing but new creation will do for God. This will save us from cultivating the wrong man and set us on right lines, which will help us in our judgment of this great world system around us, and set us free to use all our spiritual activities in the right direction.
2. All Things Headed up in Christ
God is the supreme Originator of the universe, and two things must be true of Him.
First—He is the supreme Ruler. No one can dethrone Him. No one can successfully challenge Him. As Job said, “He is not a man, as I am, that I should answer Him, and we should come together in judgment” (Job 9, 32).
Second—He is the only Being to whom worship can be rightly given.
God being what He is, we can only exclaim with the Apostle Paul, “For of Him, and through Him, and to Him are all things: to whom be glory for ever. Amen” (Rom. 11:36).
Surely the will of God is that which is vitally important for the creature to know. We are entirely in His power. There can be no appeal from Him. He can do what He likes, He is accountable to none.
When we are in the power of an absolute autocrat it is a matter of the highest importance to know what his character is. For instance, the character of Nero—tyrannical, capricious, murderous, lustful, vindictive—made it a fearful thing to be in his power, as witness the Christians, swathed in waxed cerements, lighted as torches to illuminate the pagan festivities, or thrown to the lions in the Colosseum,
“… butchered
To make a Roman holiday.”
But the supreme value of revelation is that God in His nature and being has been expressed to us. The ancient Philosophers, like Socrates, in vain searched for God. Well might Job ask the question, “Canst thou by searching find out God? Canst thou find out the Almighty to perfection? It is as high as heaven; what canst thou do? deeper than hell; what canst thou know? The measure thereof is longer than the earth, and broader than the sea” (Job 11:7-9).
Revelation, and revelation alone can reveal what God is. In all the heathen writings there is not one sentence that can compare with the sublime words of inspiration: “GOD IS LOVE.”
If there were no other sentence in the Bible than that, it would prove its inspiration, for not all the deep thinking of the massive intellects of the ante-Christian philosophers ever reached to such a sublime height. Revelation, and revelation alone, has brought to us this great truth.
What, then, is God’s will? Is that revealed to us in Scripture? Ephesians 1:9-10, gives us the answer: “Having made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His good pleasure which He has purposed in Himself: that in the dispensation of the fulness of times He might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are in earth; even in Him,” or as another translation words it, “to head up all things in the Christ, the things in the heavens and the things upon the earth” (N.Tr.).
God has revealed His will to us. We know to what goal He is directing His energies. And this is a great matter for us. It will save us, if rightly understood, from putting our energies in the wrong direction, for God graciously uses His people to help to bring about the end He has in view. For instance, many earnest and sincere Christians think that Christ came here to lift up and become the Head of improved humanity. They seek to attach Christ to a fallen race, to recover it, to become its topstone. They try to fit Christ into an earthly scheme of things.
But “in Christ,” as we hope to show in another article, connotes new creation. The old is set aside. It is condemned, root and branch, at the cross of Christ. God begins anew and He begins “in Christ.”
It must have been an amazing revelation to Nicodemus when our Lord said to him, “Ye must be born again” (John 3:7). “What!” he might have exclaimed, “is there nothing in me that can be acceptable to God? Am I condemned root and branch, centre and circumference, inside and out? I, with all my religiousness, my position in the synagogue, my zealous observance of the law, is that all to go for nothing?” And yet that was just the meaning of the reply of the Lord Jesus, “Ye must be born again.”
The first head, Adam, fell, involving in inextricable ruin the first creation. The second Head, Christ, founds His Headship in His death. His atoning death has propitiated God about the whole question of sin, setting God righteously free, so that it can be said of us, “quickened us together with Christ” (Col. 2:5), And not only so, but “hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (v. 6).
We have a glorious perfect Head, Who has communicated to us a life to which sin never could attach and has introduced us to a new creation order of things, sinless, stainless, glorious, in which there will be no breakdown.
Doubtless “the fulness of times” brings us to the millennium. Man’s efforts only result in a monster of wickedness—the Antichrist, the antithesis of all that Christ is. That will be the result of man’s best. Melancholy thought! Not till the millennium comes will peace and righteousness reign. The true Melchisedec (King of righteousness) will truly be King of Salem (King of peace). What a day that will be! Instead of the Kingdom of God being in mystery it will be in glorious manifestation.
But even then there will be failure, such is the ineradicable sin of man’s heart. At the beginning there will be the heavenly saints and the earthly saints; on the heavenly side the church, the Old Testament saints, the friends of the Bridegroom; on the earthly side the saved remnant of Israel and the sheep, the nations who have bowed to the gospel of the Kingdom (Matt. 25:31-46). But there will be those who yield only feigned obedience (see Ps. 18:44, marginal note) and multitudes born during the millennium in whom no change of heart will take place. These will be tested, and when the presence of the Lord is withdrawn and Satan loosed from the bottomless pit, their true character will assert itself. They will fall an easy prey to Satan’s machinations, and rise in their last mad revolt against God, and fire shall come down from God out of heaven and devour them (see Rev. 20:9).
Then the heavens and the earth will flee from the face of Him who sits on the great white throne; the second resurrection, that of the wicked dead, will take place; the books will be opened and the final phase of judgment will be carried through; the new heaven and the new earth will appear in all their new creation beauty at His word—the old order of things will have passed away for ever. He who will sit upon the earth will say, “Behold, I make all things new” (Rev. 21:5). Then all things in heaven and on earth will be literally and absolutely headed up in Christ—a blissful eternal state, a scene of new creation, in which there will be—
“No thorns to wound, no toil to mar our rest.”
Then “when all things shall be subdued to Him; then shall the Son also Himself be subject to Him that put all things under Him, that “GOD MAY BE ALL IN ALL” (Rom. 1:28).
Hallelujah! God will triumph! Good will triumph!
Here we can rest content and praise and worship.