1. Sin: Why Does God Allow Sin?
How often has this question been asked! And as long as the world stands the question will be asked. Sometimes it is asked fiercely and arrogantly by the bitter sceptic, who imagines that he has asked a question that must annihilate Christianity for ever. But Christianity still exists. It is the old story of the anvil wearing out the hammers. But sometimes it is asked timidly and wistfully by the troubled Christian.
There is only one answer to be given. God is not the author of evil, but He has allowed sin for His own glory. He did not create creatures who were incapable of choosing between good and evil, else He would have created mere machines—infinitely more wonderful than motor cars and aeroplanes, but yet on the same level.
And whilst we give this answer—the only answer that can be given—we are still left with incomplete knowledge on the subject. And this incomplete knowledge will continue as long as we remain on this earth. We may exclaim with the poet,
“Believing where we cannot prove,”
and again, taking in the whole story,
“’Tis darkness to my intellect,
But sunshine to my heart.”
We must begin with God. God is good. Manifested by His beloved Son, we see in the tenderness, love, compassion, yet righteousness and holiness of Jesus what God is. In the light of that manifestation, and especially in the supreme manifestation of Golgotha’s tree, we know that “God is love,” and “God is light.”
Could such a Being be the Author of sin? Assuredly not. But Scripture does not enlighten us as to how sin came into existence. We have the history of its first appearance, but we are not enlightened as to the why and wherefore.
Its first intrusion into God’s universe was through Satan. Pride evidently was his sin. We glean this from 1 Timothy 3:6, where the bishop or overseer in the early church was not to be a novice, lest, being lifted up with pride, he should “fall into the condemnation of the devil.”
PRIDE was the first sin that caused untold sorrow and catastrophe. Ezekiel 28:11-19 seems to hint at the fall of Satan, under the title of the King of Tyrus. The language goes beyond what could be applied to an earthly king.
From other Scriptures we gather that he carried with him in his revolt an immense number of followers of the angelic hosts. These appear to be: (1) Principalities, powers, the rulers of the darkness of this world (Eph. 6:12). (2) Perhaps the fallen angels “reserved in everlasting chains under darkness to the judgment of the great day” (Jude 6, and 2 Peter 2:4). (3) Fallen angels, called in the Old Testament “familiar spirits,” and in the New Testament “demons.”*
{*Wherever the word “devil” or “devils” occurs in the New Testament, not referring to Satan himself, the translation should be “demon” or “demons.” There is only one devil, that is Satan himself.}
Intercourse with such in the Old Testament is sternly forbidden; whilst the activities of demons are outlined in the Gospels as seeking to gain possession of the bodies of men for the destruction of their souls; as bitterly opposed to the Lord Jesus, but yet subject to His commands, whilst the latter-day revival of their activities is prophesied in 1 Timothy 4:1-3, which is clearly seen today in the intensive propaganda of spiritism. Spiritism is purely Satanic and anti-Christian.
Satan, filled with ungovernable hatred against God, lost no time in tempting our first parents. Pride was his fall, and he skilfully appealed to that, which was his own undoing, when he boldly said to Eve, “Ye shall be as Gods, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5). Satan, the highest creature of God, aspired to more than a creature’s place and he fell. Now he tempts our first parents with the same lure, and they fall.
Alas! men are trying today to deny the fall. Evolution, the popular idol of the twentieth-century mind, teaches that man has not fallen, but is rising little by little to perfection. The man of sin—Antichrist—will be the apotheosis of this idea—a terrible consummation surely. Those who teach this are living in an unreal world—in a fool’s paradise—shutting their eyes and ears to the real meaning of all the sorrow and sin around them.
Our first parents fell. The blue sky of innocence was obscured. The cloud of death like a funeral pall hung over their spirits. Driven out to a cursed earth, to thorns and thistles, to the sweat of the face, to sorrow in a conception and in childbirth, and to death, sin was indeed a terrible reality.
It has cursed, sterilized, and blighted the whole scene from that day to this. The world is one great graveyard, full of disease, pain, sorrow, anguish, tears, and death. But is God defeated? Is Satan triumphant? Assuredly not. Here comes the wonderful story, and we begin to see how sin can be allowed by God for His glory. There is only one word in Hebrew for sin and sin-offering.
In this is enshrined a great thought, that of the wisdom of God in turning man’s sin to His own glory. We get the fulfilment of it set forth in one of the most blessed yet most solemn verses in the Bible: “For He has made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him” (2 Cor. 5:21).
It is passing wonderful that the Eternal Word, the Son of God, should become Man, on purpose that He might undo the works of the devil, make atonement for sin by taking the place of the guilty sinner and satisfying to the full the righteous claims of Divine righteousness. How close is the connection between sin and the sin-offering, that the same word is employed for both, and yet it is just because the One who could become the Sin-offering was perfectly sinless, that He could take the sinner’s place and receive all the judgment that sin deserved.
And now that blessed Saviour is risen and ascended, and the ground is laid for the universe to be cleared of sin. “Behold the Lamb of God, which takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29).
True, there will be the everlasting doom of the unsaved in the lake of fire, but there shall yet rise a new heaven and new earth where there shall be no more sorrow or sin or pain, or crying or death, “where the former things are passed away” (Rev. 21:4).
We have very briefly indeed indicated how sin came into the world, bow it has been met by the death of Christ and how God will triumph. A few words as to the nature of sin are necessary.
Sin is lawlesness. So the real translation of 1 John 3:4 tells us—“Everyone that practises sin practises also lawlessness, and sin is lawlessness” (NT). It is most unfortunate that this verse is so badly translated, for the right definition of sin is most important. Everything that comes from the hand of God is under law. The planets must keep to their orbits, apple trees must bear apples, and apes beget apes, and so on throughout the length and breadth of creation.
But man in the realm of action has some choice. He may conform fully to God’s laws for him, or he may not. When he diverges from the will of God and exerts his own will it is sin, and “sin is lawlessness.” Sin is missing the mark. Transgression is trespass, or overstepping the mark, breaking a positive command. Iniquity is perverseness, a deeper shade of guilt.
Then we have certain terms used in Scripture—“sin,” “the flesh,” “the old man.”
“Sin” is used in two ways. First as an actual act, and second as the sinful nature from which the act springs. In the second sense we read of the believer, “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8). Conversion does not remove from us the sinful nature.
“The flesh” is used in two senses. First, as descriptive of our bodily condition, and in that sense it could refer to our blessed Lord. “In the days of His flesh” (Heb. 5:7). Second, as describing what is moral, what is irremediably bad “They that are in the flesh cannot please God” (Rom. 8:8). It is a condition that describes fallen sinful man. “But ye [believers] are not in the flesh but in the Spirit” (Rom. 8:9).
“The old man” is that which the believer puts off. Ephesians 4:22 reads, “Having put off according to the former conversation [manner of life] the old man corrupt according to the deceitful lusts.” The old man is the sum total of all the activities and habits of the sinner as such.
“Sin” is like the spirit; “the flesh” like the body in which it is clothed, and “the old man” like the clothes which are worn. One person is not sufficient to set forth in entirety the old man, it takes the whole human race to do so.
The Christian is warned against lying, pride, corrupt communication, bitterness, wrath, anger, clamour, evil speaking, adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, emulations, strife, seditious, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, etc. What a list! And each one the Christian, if not watchful, is capable of committing.
How serious is sin in the believer! He sins against the light and grieves the indwelling Holy Spirit. If unjudged he will surely come under the chastening hand of God. “Judgment must begin at the house of God” (2 Peter 4:17).
But if we would avoid the chastening of the Lord, self-judgment is the way. “If we would judge ourselves we should not be judged” (1 Cor. 11:31). But if we are chastened it is in righteous love for our good, for the Scripture just quoted continues, “But when we are judged, we are chastened of the Lord, that we should not be condemned with the world” (v. 32).
That the sinning saint should be brought to repentance and confession we believe the Lord exercises His advocacy, as outlined in 1 John 1:8-10, 2:1-2. The word for Advocate is also used for the Comforter, and means “one called alongside to help,” and is sometimes called Paraclete.
2. Death
Death needs no explanation. Its activities and ravages are too sadly familiar to everyone. Yet there is only one book in the world that boldly reveals to us its origin, and that book is the Holy Scriptures. Every other ancient book is dumb as to this, and there are not wanting present-day efforts to explain it away. The Spiritist hides its true character by calling it a new birth into a larger life. The Christian Scientist evades the point at issue by teaching that there is no such thing as matter, or disease, or pain, or sin or death—that these things are pure imagination; whilst “the man in the street,” indifferent to eternal things, will call it “the debt of nature”—all these are the lies of Satan to do away with the real point at issue.
But the Bible describes death as “the wages of sin” (Rom. 6:23), and tells us that “the sting of death is sin” (1 Cor. 15:56). Death came into this world by sin, so we read, “By one man (Adam) sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned” (Rom. 6:12).
Our first parents took of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and thus disobeyed God’s prohibition. The penalty was death—“in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (Gen. 2:17). The marginal reading is “HEB. dying thou shalt die,” that is to say, the process of death began the moment sin was committed, just as if you plucked a flower in your garden, that moment it begins to die. You may put it in water and retard the process, but it is true of that flower “dying it shall die”—surely and slowly, death ensues.
Now death ensues in three stages:
(1) Spiritual Death.
(2) Physical Death.
(3) The Second Death.
Spiritual death is the most important of the three, for the other two are the consequences of the first.
When our first parents sinned, they broke away from God, the source of life; it was like the plucking of a leaf from its stem, and death was the penalty of that act of disobedience, and its process began there and then. Man, as created by God, must surely have been a magnificent creature. He had no inherited weaknesses as we have today, after the world’s history of six thousand years of sin. Adam lived to be 930 years, but he died.
How serious is spiritual death. Many speak ignorantly of a Divine spark in every man that only needs to be fanned into a flame, but the Bible speaks of the sinner as “DEAD in trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1), of “being alienated from the life of God” (Eph. 4:18), and presses even upon a religious man like Nicodemus the necessity of the new birth, even as the Apostle Paul speaks of the believers being quickened with Christ. Doubtless the latter is a more advanced thought than the former, but evidently both lie in the domain of God’s sovereignty, for a man can no more produce his second and spiritual birth than the first and natural birth, and no man can quicken himself. The power of producing life lies alone with God.
But spiritual death led to physical death, and we all naturally shrink from physical death. It comes to all alike. We need not linger on this point, for all are familiar, sadly so, with physical death. The moment the breath leaves the body we make arrangements to have it removed and put out of sight—an empty casket hastening to corruption. It is well to recognize, however, the real meaning of physical death.
Man stands in contradistinction to the beast in many ways, and in none more than in his knowledge of his approaching death. Why is this? The animals do not need this knowledge, for they are not morally responsible and die outright when they die! They cease to exist.
But man knows that he must die, for it is the fixing of his sin upon him and with it the knowledge of existence beyond death. These two pieces of knowledge are universal. Heathen tribes, who have had no Bible or gospel preaching—tribes in absolute unalloyed heathen darkness—are found to have this knowledge. For instance, the Chinese have the worship of their ancestors and the Red Indians the belief in their happy hunting grounds in the next world.
Why, we ask, is this knowledge intuitive in all races of mankind? Why should there be the knowledge of impending death, the shrinking from it, and the belief in the fact that the soul does not die? It is reserved only for the present-day apostates of Christendom to deny that the soul does not die. Why then is this belief in immortality universal, even among heathen tribes? We hold that this belief is implanted by God.
And why should God implant this knowledge? For two reasons: (1) to convict men of their sinful condition by fixing responsibility upon them, and (2) surely to show His own nature—love—in the way of repentance and remission of sins, that the gospel proclaims, and of the offer of eternal life that it makes.
The second death is revealed in the Scriptures as consequent on the resurrection of the mortal body and its being re-united to the never-dying soul, and the future of the unrepentant, unbelieving sinner is clearly laid down in the Scriptures as being doomed to an eternal existence under the wrath of God. “These shall go away with eternal punishment” (Matt. 26:46), and “death and hell [hades] were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death” (Rev. 20:1). The resurrected persons, whose bodies before resurrection were held by death, and whose disembodied souls were held in hades, with that entire condition and bondage, are cast into the lake of fire. The second death is not annihilation any more than the first.
Why does God hold back the veil and disclose to us the far end of sin? Why did He pronounce the penalty of death on our first parents in the Old Testament so as to indicate spiritual and physical death; and draw back the veil in the New Testament to tell us in warning language of the second death?
Surely it is to prepare us for the disclosure of His own love in the gospel. It were meaningless to give man the knowledge of his future doom, if there were no escape from it; it is mercy to give him that knowledge if only it will prepare his mind to receive the gospel.
What, then, is the gospel? In presenting it the Apostle Paul wrote, “I delivered to you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ DIED for our sins according to the Scriptures” (1 Cor. 15:3). It is the meaning and the results of the death of Christ that constitute the gospel.
It is surely the turning of the tables, when death meets and conquers death. Death is the penalty of sin. Death meets the penalty of sin. In the nature of things it can be seen at a glance that a forfeited life could not take up the penalty of a forfeited life through sin. It is the laying down of a life upon which death had no claim that could meet the claims of death, and this is just what has happened in the death of our Lord Jesus Christ. Now we see the why and wherefore of God making man intelligent as to the penalty of his sin, its consequences in this world and in eternity. It was surely to prepare him for the reception of the good news—of the gospel.
True it is that the preaching of the Cross is to them that perish foolishness, but so long as there is conviction of sin, so long will there be the perception of the meaning of the atonement and its acceptance.
No wonder, that the Apostle Paul, writing in 1 Corinthians 3:22, could triumphantly assert that “death is ours.”
The acceptance of Christ as our Saviour has turned our worst enemy into our best friend. We owe all our sorrows to sin—death and all that lies in its train, we owe all our blessings to death, even the death of our Lord Jesus Christ. Death is now for the Christian “mors, janua vitæ”—the gate into life. Christ could claim to be “the Resurrection and the Life” (John 11:25). “In this was manifested the love of God towards, us, because that God sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might LIVE through Him” (1 John 4:9).
What a different complexion the death of Christ has put upon everything for the believer. “To die is gain” (Phil. 1:21) wrote the Apostle Paul. What a reversal of things! “The sting of death is sin” (1 Cor. 15:56), but the sting is gone for the believer. Death is henceforth the messenger of the Father to His child, summoning him to the “far better” (Phil. 1:23) portion.
Finally, “the last enemy that shall be destroyed is death” (1 Cor. 15:26), and that by Him “who has abolished death, and has brought life and immortality [incorruptibility—N.T] to light through the gospel” (2 Tim. 1:10).
What a story of man’s sin, of God’s love, of Christ’s work, of the believers’ deliverance, of final triumph!
3. Hades
The present is a grossly materialistic age. The masses are bent on pleasure and money-making, and are careless to an incredible degree as to their souls or their eternal future. Religiously, the trend is likewise in the direction of materialism. God, having created all things, is judged to be tied by His own laws, and unable to do anything out of the common. Hence miracles are denied, even to the length of denying Christ’s resurrection—that great miracle on which broad-based the whole fabric of Christianity rests.
And yet, in spite of all this there is an unquenchable desire on the part of men to know what lies in the great beyond. Gross materialism cannot altogether silence the imperious questioning of the soul, demanding to know what lies before it when the present life is done. Every now and again something comes along to stir men’s minds to inquiry.
To meet this strong desire to know what lies beyond the veil spiritualism makes a big bid, and many are drawn into this terrible snare of the devil. The right name for spiritualism is Demonism. Satan transforms himself into “an angel of light” (2 Cor. 11:14). He is too crafty to present himself in his true character of that old serpent, a liar and murderer from the beginning.
The sum total of the claims of spiritualism is to prove—
1. A life beyond.
2. The life here fits for the life there.
3. Progress there is made from happiness to still greater happiness.
As to No. 1 the Bible has all along affirmed that there is a life beyond. That is nothing new. Spiritualism has made no discovery in this respect.
As to Nos. 2 and 3, they sound attractive to the man in the flesh, and present what he would like to believe, but they are exactly the opposite of the truth, and are as false as the person such lies emanate from, the father of lies.
A short inquiry as to the scriptural meaning of Hades will help to nail these lies to the counter.
Sheol (Hebrew) in the Old Testament and Hades (Greek) in the New Testament mean exactly the same thing. In the Septuagint version of the Old Testament—the learned translation by Jews from the Hebrew to the Greek—the scriptures from which our Lord quoted when here on earth—Sheol is always translated Hades, so that what applies to Hades applies equally to Sheol.
Hades is a CONDITION and is not a place; just as death is a condition and not a place. We must be clear on this point. Most writers speak of Hades as a place, but a little reflection will prove this to be quite erroneous. Such writers are misled by misunderstanding such a verse as “In hell [hades] he lift up his eyes, being in torments” (Luke 16:23). They say “IN hades” surely means a place.
We answer, does “IN death” mean a place, or is it a condition? You can be in a condition as well as in a place. You can be in a temper, or in an ecstasy, or in trouble, and these are conditions, and not places.
IN death is the condition of the body without the soul.
IN hades is the condition of the soul without the body.*
{*Question: “Hades” is described as a condition, which is no doubt correct. But in Luke 16:28, we have the words “this place of torment.” It appears that in that passage Paradise is very distinctly a place and that separated from the other by a great gulf. I would welcome further help on this very important subject.
It is clear that the soul of the rich man in the parable in Luke 16 is viewed as in a CONDITION—hades. Careful examination of the word hades, as presented in Scripture, makes it plainly a condition. But the condition of the rich man (an unbeliever) carries with it torment of mind, and it is clear his soul must be in some locality, and this he describes as “this place of torment,” some place where the souls of unbelievers are confined till the judgment day and their final and irrevocable doom in the lake of fire.
Between “this place of torment” and “Abraham’s bosom,” a great gulf was fixed. Doubtless “Abraham’s bosom” was a picturesque way of naming Paradise, and one very appealing to a Jew. That Paradise is a place is clearly proved in 2 Corinthians 12:2-4, where Paradise is identified as the third heaven—the first heaven being the atmospheric heaven, which belts our earth, and where the clouds are; the second heaven being the vast spaces in which the millions of stars are; the third heaven setting forth the dwelling place of God and the angels. “The great gulf fixed” is a solemn symbolism setting forth the eternal separation between believer and unbeliever, good and evil, spiritual light and spiritual darkness. - A.J.P.}
The one is the counterpart—the correlative—of the other.
An examination of Revelation 20:14 will amply prove this. We read: “And death and hell [hades] were cast into the lake of fire [= gehenna]. This is the second death.” Now to make death a condition and hades a place, and the lake of fire also a place (as this most certainly is), is to exhibit clumsy and illogical thought. But the true explanation fits perfectly to the circumstances, as the wards of an intricate lock do to the key.
Revelation 20:12 speaks of the second resurrection,—“the resurrection of damnation” (John 5:29)—the resurrection of the wicked dead.
When God’s mighty voice of power summons all the unbelieving dead from their graves, or wherever their bodies may have found their last resting-place, or whatever they may have become, dust thrown to the four quarters of heaven it may be, then every dead body will be re-united to the long-severed soul.
Every dead body which constituted the condition of death and every disembodied soul which constituted the condition of hades, in the persons of the resurrected ones, represent death and hades, and in consigning the wicked dead to their eternal doom it can be said that “death and hell [hades] were cast into the lake of fire.”
This leads us to the inquiry as to what the condition of hades is for the departed, whether believers or unbelievers.
Peter, on the day of Pentecost, quotes from Psalm 16:10, “He [David] seeing this before spake of the resurrection of Christ, that His soul was not left in hell [hades], neither his flesh did see corruption” (Acts 2:31).
It is evident that our Lord could not go to a place of torment, but it is evident that His soul was disembodied whilst His precious incorruptible body lay in the grave those memorable three days. Seeing the Lord was perfectly sinless, we can understand how His blessed holy body saw no corruption, for corruption is the effect of sin. Seeing that the blessed Lord had effected the full settlement of the question of sin by his atoning death on the cross, death could have no further claim upon Him. When sinful bodies die, death holds its sway and the process of corruption sets in at once.
In the verse before us the incorruptible body and the disembodied soul of our Lord were not to be left in the conditions of death and hades, but body and soul being re-united the third day the glorious resurrection of our Lord took place—the proof of the completeness of the finished work of redemption.
Where, then, was the soul of the Lord when in hades condition? We are left in no doubt, for He said emphatically to the dying penitent thief, “Today shalt thou be with Me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43).
Some writers believe that Paradise is in the heart of the earth and has two compartments, one for believers and the other for unbelievers. This idea has no foundation in Scripture. 2 Corinthians 12:2 and 4 identifies Paradise with “the third heaven”—the immediate dwelling place of God, whilst Revelation 2:7 speaks of it as “the Paradise OF GOD,” where the tree of life is.
Now what is hades for the believer? Scripture tells us that whilst we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord, and when the believer is absent from the body he is at home with the Lord. The thief went the day he died into companionship with Jesus. There is no such thing as soul-sleep, but death is gain, and introduces the believer to the “far better” portion. The moment the breath leaves the body of the believer his spirit, conscious and happy, goes to be with His Saviour, there to await the resurrection day, which will end for his soul the condition of hades, as it will end the condition of death for his body.
How happy is the triumph of the gospel.” How cheering the teaching of Scripture in this respect! How immeasurably superior to Raymond’s supposed message from beyond the veil to his father, Sir Oliver Lodge, telling him of the possibility of whisky and cigars beyond death. Can any sensible man be duped by these lies of the enemy of our souls?
And what about hades for the unbeliever? Luke 16 tells us that it is a condition of torment, the lost soul conscious of his approaching inevitable and inexorable doom. We are not told where these lost souls are, there is no need to satisfy curiosity on this point. No good would accrue to any from this knowledge, but we know the resurrection day will end the conditions of hades and death for each unbeliever, and then the lake of fire must be his eternal doom. Oh! may God stir us all up to more zeal in the gospel, to more fervent prayer, to more earnest diligence in seeking the salvation of the lost, for “behold, now is the accepted time; behold now is the day of salvation” (2 Cor. 6:2).
4. “Spirit, Soul and Body”
Apart from the Scriptures man would never have known that he possesses a tripartite being—“spirit, soul and body.”
It is true that men have differentiated between the material body and the animating principle indwelling the body. To see the breath leave the body, a moment before alive and conscious, and behold! it becomes lifeless, all knowledge departed, all functions suspended, corruption immediately setting in, is patent to all. Even where the gospel has never penetrated this difference has ever been recognized, and more than that it is deeply engraved on men’s minds that this animating principle, call it spirit or soul, survives the death of the body, as witness the North American Indians’ belief that the dead brave has departed to the happy hunting grounds of his forefathers.
There is one great text of Scripture that settles for the Christian the truth of man’s tripartite nature—“And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless to the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thess. 5:23).
It will be well to give the words in the originals for spirit, soul and body, with their meanings
Spirit = (Hebrew) ruach, spirit, wind; (Greek) pneuma, spirit.
Soul = (Hebrew) nephesh, animal soul; (Greek) psuche, animal soul.
Body = (Hebrew) beten, belly; geviyyah, back; (Greek) soma, body.
The late F. W. Grant points out that ruach and pneuma, equally with nephesh and psuche, are derived from words which both signify “to breathe.”
There must ever be mysteries unsolvable by us on this subject, as there are in all God’s works. We do well, however, to glean what information Scripture gives us on the subject, for God has given us in His Word sufficient information for our guidance and well-being. Beyond this we have no right nor ability to go.
Evidently the soul is like a liaison officer in an army. For instance, the French and British armies were fighting on one front in the late great war. Britishers, who knew no French, and Frenchmen, who knew no English, would find themselves in an impossible position for intelligent co-ordination. But there were officers appointed—British officers who knew French well, and French officers who knew English—who acted as intermediaries, passing on orders, instructions, information, as needed. The liaison officer was in that way connected with and indispensable to both armies.
This may serve in some measure as an illustration of the soul as the connecting link between the spirit and the body. The soul is the animating principle of both man and beast. When the beast dies it ceases to exist—soul and body. When man dies, his body dies, but the soul survives.
Evidently the arresting act of God in the creation of man conveys this thought. We read, “The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life [literally lives, plural] and man became a living soul.” It is true that beasts are living souls, for it is predicated of “every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creeps upon the earth,” that “there is life” [margin, there is a living soul] (Gen. 1:30). But it is never said that God breathed into the animals’ nostrils the breath of lives, but that they became living souls.
It may be pointed out that Solomon wrote of the spirit of the beast: “Who knows the spirit of man that goes upward, and the spirit of the beast that goes downward?” (Eccl. 3:21). This is the only passage in the Bible where spirit is attributed to the beast, but when we read the whole passage we find Solomon, the wisest of men, unable by his wisdom to penetrate the mysteries of the future life, and coming clearly to the erroneous conclusion that man has no pre-eminence over the beast.
Yet even in this passage Solomon speaks of man’s spirit going upward, as in chapter 12:7 he distinctly believes that the spirit will return to God who gave it, and on the other hand avers that the beast’s spirit goes downward to the earth, that is, to extinction.
The Divine mind superintended the placing of Ecclesiastes in the sacred Canon. The book is deeply instructive as setting forth the conclusions of a wise man in his attempt to gain satisfaction “under the sun.” We must not confound Solomon’s groping after the light with God’s revelation. Scripture nowhere as God’s revelation affirms that the beast has a spirit
To return to our illustration of the soul being like the liaison officer in the army, it is clear that the soul and body are closely connected. That needs no elaboration. The soul consists of the feelings, emotions, desires, affections that animate the body. Man has fallen, and these feelings, emotions, desires and affections are poisoned. Man is a sinner, and governed by his soul he is led to many excesses and wrong-doings.
The passage that shows the intimate connection between the soul and spirit is Hebrews 4:12, where we read that “The Word of God is quick and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit.”
The spirit is the highest part of man, distinguishing him from the beast. It connects itself with reasoning powers, conscience, discernment, judgment, reflection, and the like. So we read, “The spirit of man is the candle of the LORD, searching all the inward parts of the belly” (Prov. 20:27), that is, of the soulish desires. It stands in the position of mentor to the soul. In unconverted man the spirit is clouded by the fall, but in converted men it recovers its place and power as instructed and illuminated by the Word of God, and empowered by the Spirit of God.
Have we not all at times been sensible of a contest between our spirit and our soul? The latter has led us in desire in certain directions, and the spirit has stepped in, and, with conscience at work and by the illumination of Scripture, forbidden the soulish desire. Whenever the soul governs, there is disaster and a low level of conduct. Whenever the spirit controls, the soul is kept within bounds.
The soul of the beast carries out its desires through its body without any check. It shows itself in the gratification of its desires and well-being without any thought of all else. The beast is incapable of the thought of God, of the knowledge of right and wrong as right and wrong; it lives for itself and its offspring, instinct being strong in this direction. But fallen man’s soul renders him the prey of many sinful desires. Abstractly not all the soul’s desires are wrong. For instance, “natural affection” is a right emotion, yet sin has come in and poisoned everything. Yet the spirit in man is ever in the place of mentor and conscience, and checks soulish excesses if listened to.
Scripture speaks of God as “The Father of spirits” (Heb. 12:9), never of souls. Angels are called “spirits”—“Are they not all ministering spirits. … .” (Heb. 1:14)—never souls, and demons are constantly spoken of as “unclean spirits” (Mark 3:11)—never souls.
Man in Scripture is spoken of as having a soul and being a soul. The context proves in which way the word is used. For instance, we read, “All the souls of the house of Jacob, which came into Egypt, were three score and ten” (Gen. 46:27), meaning seventy persons. We use the word in common language when we say that a certain vessel foundered at sea and every soul perished.
That the soul is distinct from the body is clearly seen in Matthew 10:28, which tells us that man can kill the body and not the soul, that God alone is able to destroy both body and soul in hell. Note, too, the word kill is applied to the body and not to the soul, whilst the word destroy is applied to both body and soul. But destroy does not mean to kill—it does not mean annihilation, but the thing destroyed ceasing to exist for the purpose for which it was made. For instance, the same word is used in the following passages: “Found My sheep which was lost” (Luke 15:6). If the sheep had been annihilated it could not have been found. Again: “The bottles shall perish” (Luke 5:37), that is, the new wine should burst the old bottles, and they were rendered useless for the purpose for which they were made. Again “The world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished” (2 Peter 3:6). The world certainly was not annihilated.
Then again the question is often discussed, “Is the soul immortal?” and there is no verse in the Bible that affirms it in just those words, though Matthew 10:28, mentioned above, asserts it in other words. Clearly, however, the Scriptures take for granted that the soul exists for ever, and in that sense is immortal. But, says the objector, does not 1 Timothy 6:16 tell us that God “only has immortality”? Yes, that is so, God only has immortality inherently, it belongs to Him in His nature. J. N. Darby has a fine sentence in this connection: “It is God in the abstraction of His essence, in the proper immutability of His being, in the rights of His majesty, veiled to all men” (Synopsis, Vol. V p. 158). But this does not and cannot hinder God from conferring immortality, that is, conferring life that is for ever, as His gift and sustainment. If this passage is pressed, “Who only has immortality,” as some press it, it would perforce make the angels mortal, and deny to the believer the gift of eternal life. It would prove too much. God would be left in absolute solitude.
Whilst Scripture in so many words does not affirm that the soul is immortal, it certainly does not affirm that it is mortal. We can point to passages that declare that the body is mortal, but there is none that declares the soul to be mortal. Man is able to kill the body because it is mortal; but he cannot kill the soul, and Scripture is careful not to suggest that God will kill the soul, but uses the word “destroy,” which, as we have seen, does not mean annihilation.
We read of “the souls … that were slain for the Word of God, and for the testimony which they held” (Rev. 6:9), yet evidently the bodies were beheaded, for men cannot kill the soul; and their souls survived, for they cried out with a loud voice and were bidden to wait for God’s time for judgment to be meted out upon their enemies.
It remains now to quote one or two Scriptures which will clearly indicate that the soul is connected with desires exercised through the body. Though the soul of man is greater than the soul of the beast, yet man and beast have souls in common; whilst spirit, which the beast has not and distinguishes man from the beast, connotes higher qualities, and links man up with God, so as to have a sense of God and what is suitable to Him.
Hear the longing of Lot, pleading to be allowed to go to Zoar: “Oh, let me escape thither (is it not a little one?) and my soul shall live” (Gen. 19:20).
Evidently his soul desired what was a small edition of what he had lost in Sodom, and was a mere soulish desire and not for his good. What a contrast to Mary, who said, “My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit has rejoiced in God my Saviour” (Luke 1:46-47). Do we not see how soul and spirit act in unison in connection with a saint of God, and the aspirations and emotions Godward, lofty and pure?
Of course it is the general way in which soul and spirit are used that helps us to a right conclusion. It is impossible to separate spirit and soul in every case, they are so intimately connected, but we can distinguish in this general way.
Enough has been said for a brief article, but the earnest reader can search the Scriptures on the lines indicated, and their perusal will amply repay for the labour expended.
5. Proverbs
When we sit down to consider how the Scriptures are put together, we cannot but be greatly struck by the Divine wisdom with which this has been done, so that “the man of God may be throughly furnished to all good works” (2 Tim. 3:17).
One way of considering this is to imagine the Bible minus a certain book, say the Book of Proverbs.
What a miss it would be! What a guide it is to the Christian man of business! No other part of the Bible covers the same ground. A Christian man is getting immersed, swamped in business, or a young man is starting in life and has certain temptations to face; such will find the reading of the Book of Proverbs a real tonic. Or Christians in danger of getting into trouble in the use of their tongue will find the study of Proverbs very safeguarding.
We have heard of business men, who read a chapter of the Book of Proverbs every morning before going to business and find it helpful. There are thirty one chapters in the Book, and thirty-one days in the longest months in the year, so the book is practically read once a month by this method.
With the exception of the last two chapters, the Proverbs are by Solomon, King of Israel. When he succeeded to the throne he was a young man; in his own words and in view of the greatness of the task, he was called upon to shoulder in governing Israel, he said, “I am but a little child: I know not how to go out or come in” (1 Kings 3:7). We are told that “Solomon loved the Lord”; and God appearing to him in a dream said to the youthful monarch, “Ask what I shall give thee” (1 Kings 3:5).
Solomon chose wisdom, and so pleased was God at his sagacious choice that he not only gave him wisdom, but also riches, and honour. Solomon was the wisest of men, yet his life only emphasizes the message that he himself gives: “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not to thine own understanding” (Prov. 3:5). Wise as he was; wonderful as his judgment was in the matter of the babe and the two mothers, who each claimed it; wonderful as was his erection of the temple, that most gorgeous building the world has ever seen, yet at the close of his days how be stands like a beacon warning us not to lean to our own understanding.
We find Solomon importing horses for warlike purposes from Egypt, and multiplying wives, till he had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines, and his wives turned away his heart” (1 Kings 10:28 – 11:3), spite of the prohibition in Deuteronomy 17:16, “He [the King of Israel] shall not multiply horses to himself, nor cause the people to return to Egypt, to the end that he should multiply horses … neither shall he multiply wives to himself, that his heart turn not away.” Wisdom did not keep Solomon, nor will it keep any one of us, but cleaving to the Lord will.
Nevertheless wisdom is greatly to be desired, and the reason why Solomon wrote down his proverbs was “to know wisdom and instruction, to perceive the words of understanding” (Prov. 1:2). And what is wisdom? It is the right application of knowledge, without which knowledge is a dangerous thing.
In this book wisdom cries aloud, we are exhorted to incline our ear to wisdom, that the man is happy who finds it, that wisdom is better than gold, that the rod and reproof give wisdom. How important all this is.
Yet we are told to “cease from thine own wisdom,” which means that wisdom cannot be rightly used save as you “trust in the Lord with all thine heart”—wisdom must not be divorced from real communion with and dependence upon the Lord.
In chapter 1 Solomon addresses his son. How sadly that son needed the exhortation and how little he paid heed to it, is emphasized in the conduct of Rehoboam, whose utterly foolish conduct at the beginning of his reign, costing him the break-up of his kingdom, stands in vivid contrast to the wise conduct of Solomon, his father, at the beginning of his reign.
Is this not a word to Christian young men to pay heed to what Solomon said, even if they do not find wisdom with their own fathers? The tendency of young people is to belittle the wisdom of their parents and think that they themselves know.
The great lesson of chapter 1 is to exhort young people to have the courage to say “No.” “My son, if sinners entice thee, consent thou not” (Prov. 1:10). How vastly important this is, as testified to by the wrecked lives of countless young men, who had not the courage to say “No.”
Then Solomon exhorts his son to receive his father’s commandments, and to earnestness in the pursuit of understanding. He holds out the blessing of long life to those who keep the commandments to go not in the way of evil men, etc., etc. Indeed every verse is worth commenting upon, but space forbids.
Again and again, and yet again, in solemn and earnest language Solomon warns his son against strange women, warns him of their allurements, and shows plainly how utterly ruined a man is if he fall. How descriptive, how graphic is the language, “He goes after her straightway as an ox goes to the slaughter, or as a fool to the correction of the stocks till a dart strike through his liver; as a bird hastes to the snare, and knows not that it is for his life” (Prov. 7:22-23).
It describes faithfully what has been the sad fate of many a young man, “And thou mourn at the last, when thy flesh and thy body are consumed” (Prov. 5:11).
And when one recalls the number of families, Christian families, too, who have had to experience the bitter shame of one of their members not paying heed to Solomon’s warning, pressed again and again upon his son, one cannot well pass it over. To enter into a conspiracy of silence on these delicate subjects is not wise, and is certainly not what the Bible does.
Then Solomon warns his son against going surety for his friend or striking a bargain with a stranger. “He that hates suretiship is sure” (Prov. 11:15). How many business men have smarted by not paying heed to this injunction.
Then we are warned against sloth, lying in bed unduly and laziness. Some men can never prosper on this account. A lazy man no one cares to employ either as master or servant. Laziness is in their very bones, and shame will not drive them from it.
Pride is denounced. What room is there for this! We are nothing and have nothing save as it comes from God. If we happen to have better brains than our fellows, it only imposes upon us the responsibility to help those less favoured than we are in this respect. Have we possessions? We are but stewards for the Lord of all that we have. “The pride of life is not of the Father, but is of the world” (1 John 2:16). It was pride that first brought sin into the universe when Satan attempted to snatch Divine honours from the eternal throne.
The gracious woman, the virtuous woman is extolled, truthfulness and uprightness and the use of a just weight insisted upon, whilst hypocrisy, tale-bearing, slander, flattery are sternly denounced.
We need to remind ourselves of these things again and again. The flesh is still in the believer and he is capable of every sin we are so earnestly warned against in the Proverbs. Pride marks us all, alas! more or less, and there is always the tendency to drop into the slack ways of the world as to strict truthfulness and honesty. Alas! Christians often give occasion for stumbling by failure to attend to these exhortations.
Then we are exhorted to be “slow to wrath,” to give “a soft answer” to an angry man. “He that is slow to wrath is of great understanding” (Prov. 14:29). How necessary this is. It is not always wise to say things which in themselves may be quite true. What we say may rankle for years in a man’s mind and fester mentally like a bad case of blood-poisoning.
And what a place is given in the book to warnings against a misuse of the tongue. The judicial James tells us, “If a man offend not in word, the same is a perfect man, and able also to bridle the whole body” (James 3:2); whilst he speaks of the wrong use of the tongue and says that “it is set on fire of hell [gehenna]”; the only time the word, gehenna, is employed in the Scriptures, other than by the Lord Himself. This is most significant.
We read in Proverbs that “God hates … a lying tongue”; He denounces “the flattery of the tongue”; “a wholesome tongue is a tree of life”; “a liar gives heed to a naughty tongue”—a good man would refuse to listen; “a perverse tongue falls into mischief”; “death and life are in the power of the tongue”; “a back-biting tongue” is denounced, etc., etc. “Whoso keeps his mouth and his tongue keeps his soul from troubles” (Prov. 21:23). May we take solemn warning by all this. We all need it, or else it would not have held a place in the inspired Word.
We are exhorted to generous giving. The liberal soul shall be “made fat” (Prov. 11:25). We are forbidden to make a corner in commodities, forcing prices up, and gathering a fortune out of other people’s misfortunes. “He that withholds corn, the people shall curse him.”
We are warned against the free use of stimulants. “Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise” (Prov. 20:1).
Then further, “Let another man praise thee, and not thine own mouth: a stranger and not thine own lips” (Prov. 27:2). We are not to blow our own trumpets. An egotistical man is nearly always an empty man. True greatness and conceit do not run together. Colossal conceit is a mark of a disordered brain. Lunatics imagine themselves to be emperors.
If the book begins with solemn warnings against the pestilential woman, it ends beautifully with “the words of King Lemuel, the prophecy that his mother taught him” (Prov. 31:1).
He is warned against lust and drink, and then comes a wonderful description of a virtuous woman. Her husband’s heart trusts her. She is industrious. She is farseeing. She rises early and retires late, so great is her energy. “Strength and honour are her clothing.” Her speech is wise and kind. Her children rise up and call her blessed, Her own works praise her in the gates.
What a wonderful book! Where every verse is a gem, we can only give a very bare and scanty outline, but if our readers are thereby persuaded to give more time to the reading of it, especially business men and young men, the writing of this article will be well rewarded.
6. Love
Love has been said to be the greatest thing in the world, and this is doubtless true, for “God is love” (1 John 4:16). But we cannot reverse the statement as many seek to do, and say “Love is God,” that is to deify love, practically the glorification of that lie of the bottomless pit—Unitarianism—making everything of love till government is dethroned and God cannot punish sin, but all is love, love, love, and nothing else; in reality pseudo-love, not the real article at all. The appeal to the sentiment or poor fallen nature is vastly powerful; how can a God of love condemn sinners to an endless hell?
But surely the death of the Lord Jesus nails this lie to the counter, Yes, “God is love,” glorious truth, but “God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). Righteousness must be vindicated in face of a race of sinners. Every death cries aloud that God must and does punish sin. “The wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23).
There is one death, however, that is absolutely unique. The wise man wrote, “There is no man that has power over the spirit to retain the spirit, neither has he power in the day of death” (Ecc. 8:8), yet we read of One who could say, “I lay down My life that I might take it again… I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again” (John 10:17-18). When Solomon wrote there was not one single person but what was under the sentence of death, and when death claimed the victim, willing or unwilling, he had to yield.
But here we have One, the Lord Jesus, whose death is absolutely unique. Death had no possible claim over Him. Why then did He die? What was the necessity? It was this. If Divine love was to be shown to sinners righteousness must be met, hence the amazing death of the Son of God, for if anything is plain in Scripture His death was an atoning death; and His person, God and man, the Eternal Word becoming a real man, gave character to His death.
So we see LOVE—Divine love—at the Cross expressed in all its fulness, and yet righteousness upheld, as it must ever be if love is really Divine.
Theologians, who are unsound, Modernists, Higher Critics and the like, have lost their grip upon the central facts of Christianity, the deity and true manhood of Christ, and atoning character of His death; and we shall have perverted ideas of the love of God unless we maintain a grip on these central truths. Otherwise we shall drag down Divine love to the level of what is merely human, and lose that which Divinely elevates.
It is only as we understand the meaning of the cross of Christ that we shall rightly understand that God is love.
There must be a broad distinction made between Divine love and human love. Human love is the greatest gift of the Creator, surviving the fall, yet vitiated by it. It is the one bit of cement that, as far as this life is concerned, keeps society together. Without it we should have the very pandemonium of hell about our ears. “Without natural affection” (2 Tim. 3:3) is one of the signs of the last times, classed with blasphemy, disobedience to parents, treachery, etc., and all this under the cover of “a form of godliness” (v. 5).
Human affection is at the bottom selfish. We love because we like. We love those that belong to us. It is my mother, my wife, my children, my home, my friend, my country.
If the Titanic goes down with hundreds of lives it sends a thrill of horror through us, but if my son, going out in a little rowing boat, is capsized and drowned, this is a far greater sorrow. And yet put one young life against the hundreds lost in the Titanic, and see where the true proportion lies.
The Lord’s people should be marked by natural affection, and they can count on the support of the Holy Spirit in the carrying out of natural relationships as is seen in Ephesians 5 and 6 and Colossians 3 and 4, whether as wife or husband, children or fathers, servants or masters.
But the believer has the Divine nature, and its most characteristic feature is love. Was it not a saying in the heathen world in the early days of Christianity, “See how the Christians love each other”? It is easy to love those that are lovable, those whose qualities please us and draw forth affection, but with Divine love with God it had its propulsive energy in His own nature. There was nothing in man to draw it forth; indeed everything to drive it back.
Moses said to Israel, “The Lord did not set His love upon you, nor choose you, because ye were more in number than any people; for ye were the fewest of all people; but because the Lord loved you” (Deut. 7:7-8). He could furnish no reason save what God was in Himself. This is a great comfort, for it puts the love of God on a basis that can never break down.
If we set our affection on an object we think worthy, and find we have been mistaken, our love is likely to evaporate. What a comfort that God expects nothing from us, is thereby never disappointed at not finding what He does not look for. Love is in the fount of His own being, and it is as we grasp this great fact, that we shall see how we ought to love even when there is nothing to draw love out.
Is this the meaning of 2 Peter 1:7, “Add to brotherly kindness charity [love]”? Is it that brotherly kindness is shown to brothers we like, but that something higher is our privilege, viz, to show Divine love? Did not the Apostle Paul know something of this when he wrote his second letter to the Corinthian assembly, “I will very gladly spend and be spent for you, though the more abundantly I love, the less I be loved” (chap 12:15)? Note the strength of the language, the superlative he uses—“very gladly spend and be spent.” He did not love because he was loved, but loved because he was strong in the Divine nature.
Again, how the apostle was concerned even about the saints that “had not seen his face in the flesh” (see Col. 2:1). Was this not the overflowing of Divine love, unquenchable and fervent?
Alas! how easily it is otherwise with us! I recall with amusement the delineation of a lady’s handwriting, “Temper, good if not crossed.” Yes, we can all behave ourselves when we are not crossed, when we get our own way.
But how many can be crossed, and yet love? How many of us can walk in relation to our fellow Christians, “With all lowliness and meekness, with long-suffering, forbearing one another IN LOVE”? (Eph. 4:2).
1 Corinthians 13 is the chapter par excellence on love. It shows how it is possible for a Christian to give the most wonderful addresses, speak with tongue of men and angels, and yet if love is wanting it is only empty sound. Love will give Divine warmth to the speech, it will anoint the lips with Divine fervour. Again, a brother may be a perfect walking encyclopædia of biblical knowledge, may indeed be gifted with the prophetic gift, be able to unravel all mysteries and be lacking in no knowledge, be filled with faith, and yet if he have not love he is nothing, he has no spiritual stature at all.
He may even go to the extent of stripping himself of all he possesses, even to the length of giving his body to be burned, and yet there is no profit in it if Divine love is not the spring of his self-denial and self-abnegation.
Love is ready to suffer, not for a day or a week merely, but indefinitely, and be kind.
Love does not envy another’s gifts. If Barnabas began as an older servant of the Lord in taking the lead before Paul, the young and freshly converted servant of the Lord, and ended by having to take a second place in relation to one younger in years and in spiritual history, if Barnabas, we repeat, were governed by Divine love he would rejoice. What a test this is, every servant of Christ knows in some greater or smaller measure. Envy is as cruel as the grave.
Then Divine love does not blow its own trumpet. It looks upon the affairs of others. Divine love is no egotist, but its very breath is to express itself in relation to others.
Love is not selfish, quarrelsome or suspicious. It will always put the best construction on any action.
Prophecies will cease, but Divine love is eternal. There will by-and-by be no need for prophecies, but Divine love never had a beginning and will never have an end.
Likewise tongues, originally the result of man’s sin at Babel, will cease for Divine love will triumph, and only one tongue will be its vehicle in eternity.
Knowledge, too, will pass away, for when there is the realization of Divine love we shall know no longer in part, and when all know fully knowledge will have vanished away in the sense of being comparative.
There are the three graces, pre-eminent in the Christian life: faith, hope, love, “but the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor. 13:13). One glad day, and that soon, faith will cease and give place to sight, hope, the buoyer up of our “sure and steadfast” expectations, will give place to happy realization; but love, Divine love, drawn from the eternal fount of God’s own nature, will endure for ever in undimmed splendour.
Faith and hope and love may walk with us right up to the golden gate, but faith and hope will drop back, whilst sight and realization will greet our wondering gaze; but love, which sought and found us and held our hands all along life’s devious paths, will pass on with us triumphant, for eternity.
Lastly, there is the assembly character of love. “Christ … loved the church” (Eph 5:25). “But speaking [literally holding, N.T.] the truth in love, may grow up into Him in all things, which is the Head, even Christ, from whom the whole body fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplies, according to the effectual working in the measure of every part, makes increase of the body to the edifying of itself in love” (Eph. 4:15-16).
7. Faith
There are two senses in which the word ‘faith’ is used in the Holy Scriptures.
1. As designating all the truths which we connect with Christianity, and which are intended in their collective bearing to set the believer in relation to it and to form him in accordance with it.
2. That quality which enables the soul to accept the Divine revelation, especially in accepting Christ as a personal Saviour and entering into definite relation with Him.
One or two Scriptures will serve to illustrate the former meaning:
“One Lord, one faith, one baptism” (Eph. 4:5).
“Stand fast in the faith” (1 Cor. 16:13).
“Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith” (2 Cor. 13:5).
“Wherefore rebuke them sharply, that they may be sound in the faith” (Titus 1:13).
“Thou holdest fast My Name, and hast not denied My faith” (Rev. 2:13).
The use of faith in this sense shows how necessary it is for the believer to study the Word of God, and not allow any part of the Christian faith to be a dead letter, but to receive it in all its parts, and to be exercised about the practice corresponding to it. If this were so, what a difference it would make to many of us.
There are certain great lines to consider in connection with the faith.
There is, to begin with, the truth as to what the atoning death of Christ has effected for the believer in the way of meeting his deep need as a sinner. We read, “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10).
Secondly, there is the deeper question of our state. Not only have sins been atoned for at the Cross, but sin—the root—has been judged and condemned. “God sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh” (Rom. 8:3). Running all through the Epistles we get this line, pre-eminently in Romans and Galatians, but seen in Colossians, where it speaks of “the circumcision made without hands” and being buried “with Him (Christ) in baptism.”
This line is of the utmost importance, for until the believer walks in the judgment of the flesh and the recognition of the new creation line of things, he is not able to take up rightly what we call church truth. How can I walk rightly towards others until I have a right judgment of sin in its nature, and how God is working on new lines altogether in Christ, and applying these things to myself?
Thirdly, there is dispensational truth, without which the believer will never clearly see the distinctive place of the church, nor his place as separate from this world.
Fourthly, there is the truth as to the church, without which we shall never see our right relation to Christ in glory, the great Head of the church, His body, and necessarily our right relation to our fellow-believers.
Allied with this are practical teachings as to the house of God and the assembly.
Then we have the grand truth as to the Lord’s coming for and with His saints, the believer’s association with Christ in His coming reign, the judgment seat of Christ determining the place of reward each believer shall have, and finally we have the truth concerning the great white throne and the blissful eternal state for the believer—the ending up of this world’s history.
This is but a very fragmentary sketch of the faith. The believer can fill it in—the priesthood and advocacy of our Lord Jesus Christ and many other things will come to mind.
Nor is it that we learn one truth thoroughly before we begin to learn another. We often learn them all together, and the believer does not wait necessarily till he has advanced to a mature state before he is eligible to have full Christian privileges. Indeed it is in the inside place that we learn the most quickly and happily.
May God grant us each exercise that we may be “sound in the faith.”
We would now draw attention to faith as a quality, which enables the soul to accept the Divine revelation, and which should be a governing force in the believer’s life.
Many people think that Hebrews 11:1 gives us a definition of faith. We read, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,” or as another translation renders it, “Now faith is [the] substantiating of things hoped for, [the] conviction of things not seen” (J.N.D.).
It is evident that this is not a definition of faith but of the effect of faith—that faith makes real to us things hoped for, gives the firm conviction that they shall surely be ours, just as if we already were in possession.
No one can explain the mystery of faith, any more than the mystery of life, or light, or love, or a thousand and one things. God brings these things into existence, and alone knows their secret. Those of us who have faith can mark its effects, its powers, what it feeds upon, what it aspires to: but as to the thing itself, no one knows. No one knows the secret of life, yet we live and enjoy life. So with faith.
We are told it is the gift of God, as everything that is worth having is.
By grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God” (Eph. 2:8).
That it is a necessity is very evident, for we read, “Without faith it is impossible to please Him [God]” (Heb. 11:6).
Faith is mentioned 37 times in Romans, 22 times in Galatians, and 31 times in Hebrews, besides about 150 times in the rest of the New Testament—so important is the subject. We read, “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God” (Rom. 10:17).
Hearing is by the Word of God—the Word of God is the only Book that brings a positive revelation of God and His truth, and hearing comes by it, not merely the physical act of responding to sounds, to articulate speech, but the real hearing of the Word, the receiving of it into the soul. And if hearing is by the Word of God, faith comes by hearing—that mysterious something that gives a link of the soul with God, that sets the soul at a different angle and in different relation to everything it was formerly in relation to.
What a wonderful thing faith is! But one verse (Gen. 1:1) gives us the original creation of the universe; two short chapters its reconstruction when cosmos was evolved out of chaos, and the central place that man has in it all; but no less than fifteen chapters are more or less taken up with the history of one man—Abraham, and he stands pre-eminently as the prototype of faith.
Hebrews 11 is the art gallery of faith, in which the great “cloud of witnesses” exhibit by their lives faith in different ways, leading us in chapter 13 to the contemplation of Him who is “the Author and Finisher of … faith” (v. 1), and thus, looking to Him, and encouraged by the review of the faith-worthies of the Old Testament, the believer today is encouraged to run the race of faith with patience.
First there is faith as to God—“through faith we understand that the worlds [the æons] were framed by the Word of God.” It is not merely the assent that there must be a Supreme Being, but definite faith in God, for the worlds were framed by His Word.
Then we have Abel’s faith—typical of faith in Christ and His atoning death, faith lying at the very threshold of our Christian life.
Next Enoch comes in review—typical doubtless of the rapture of the Church. Abel gives us the first expression of faith as to the start of the Christian life, Enoch gives us the end, even the coming of the Lord, for he was translated, even as the church will be one day and that, we believe, soon.
How these two expressions of faith must govern the life, where they are found.
Noah prepared the ark—surely a condemnation of the scene in which he found himself, and a witness to the approaching doom that hung over the world. Faith in this respect is the antitype of the faith that must walk apart from a doomed world, whose every principle is the negation of God and His truth, and whose greatest crime was the murder of the Son of God.
This leads necessarily to Abraham the sojourner in a strange land, the pilgrim. Faith in that land to which the Christian belongs must ever make him a stranger in this world and a pilgrim bound for the heavenly country, as 1 Peter 2:11 describes the Christian.
Finally, we have Sara, whose faith was exercised in the birth of Isaac, an event outside the power of nature, but which lay in the faithfulness of Him who promised. Miracle lies at the bottom of everything for the Christian, and we see it in the antitype of Isaac—even our Lord Jesus Christ, begotten of a virgin at the beginning of His life and raised from the dead at the end of it. Here we get the soil into which faith can push its strong roots, and so well rooted can spring up and bear the fairest flowers to be seen in human life.
We may well ask, “And what shall I more say? for the time would fail to tell of Gideon and of Barak, and of Samson, and of Jephthae; of David also, and Samuel, and of the prophets” (Heb. 11:33). The theme is indeed inexhaustible. Perhaps enough has been written to excite the reader to study this entrancing theme.
Remember, “Without faith it is impossible to please Him [God].”
8. Hope
Hope in connection with natural matters is synonymous with uncertainty. For a man to say, “I have strong hopes of a certain thing happening,” is tantamount to saying, “I have some doubts of a certain thing happening.” This element of uncertainty often brings about a feverish state of mind, and that in proportion to the stake that is in question and the nearness of the matter being decided, or on the other hand the vagueness of it.
For instance, a man runs as a candidate for some place of honour. The votes are being counted, and soon he will hear whether he is elected or not. What a state of tension and feverish excitement is induced!
It is not so with Divine hope. There is no element of uncertainty as to it. An example of the contrast between natural and Divine hopes is given in Romans 4:18. Writing of Abraham, we read, “who against hope believed in hope, that he might become the father of many nations, according to that which was spoken, so shall thy seed be.”
Abraham was old and well stricken in years. As far as any hope of posterity was concerned his own body was dead, and so, too, was Sarah’s womb. He had no natural hope. But God came in and promised that in his seed all the nations of the earth should be blessed. Now he gets a Divinely given hope. And so against hope he believes in hope, against natural impossibility he became Divinely certain, and that on the sure ground of “that which was spoken”—the sure word of God.
Romans 8:24-25 tells us, “We are saved by [in] hope; but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man sees, why does he yet hope for? But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it.” Hebrews 6:18-19 speaks of those who fled for refuge, laying hold on the proffered hope, “In hope,” we are Divinely told, “we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast, and which enters into that which is within the veil.”
Here we have Divine hope, and the ability to wait with patience—a patience begotten of certainty—and not with the fever of impatience and uncertainty that ever surrounds natural hope.
Here we are told the hope is “SURE and STEADFAST,” and it is likened to an anchor. An anchor is an instrument to enable a ship to ride safely through the storm. There are two things that may render an anchor insecure and ineffective. Firstly, the anchor itself or its cable may be defective and under strain break. There may be a flaw in its manufacture and it may yield at some point. Secondly, the holding ground of the anchor may not be strong enough, and the anchor may drag and become ineffective.
What, then, is the anchor of hope? Surely, the word of God. In that very chapter from which we have just quoted, we are told of “two immutable”—unchangeable—“things in which it was impossible for God to lie” (Heb. 6:18), showing the reliability of God’s word. The Divine anchor then—the Word of God itself—has no flaw in it—it cannot snap or break or be defective in any way.
And what of the holding ground? The anchor is dropped “inside the veil; whither the Forerunner is for us entered, even Jesus” (Heb. 6:19-20). The place where our Lord Jesus is affords the proof that He performed His atoning work entirely to God’s satisfaction. The resurrection proved it. “God raised Him from the dead” (Acts 13:30). The ascension proved it. “When He had by Himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high” (Heb. 1:3). What a holding ground—the redemptive work of the Lord Jesus, the vacant cross and the empty tomb and the filled throne proving it. Well may our anchor be cast inside the veil, where Jesus is.
Suppose you were a passenger sailing from Liverpool to New York, and were told that before your steamer had left the Mersey the anchor was dropped in New York Harbour—the place of your destination. You could never believe such an impossible statement. But what would be impossible in natural things is not only possible but is a blessed incontrovertible fact in spiritual things. The believer, in putting his trust in the Lord and His word, has not only an anchor that cannot fail him, but a holding ground in the very place where Jesus has gone. In Him we have an indissoluble link with heaven itself. Already our anchor is dropped in the heavenly port.
This brings us to the fountain head of our subject. We have been tracing the streams flowing from the fountain head, if we may change the metaphor, and streams of refreshing blessing they are to our thirsty souls. We read, “Now the God of hope fill you with all peace and joy in believing, that ye may abound in hope, through the power of the Holy Ghost” (Rom. 15:13). Here we get “the God of hope” causing the believer to “abound in hope.” He is the blessed Spring and Source of all our blessing.
Hebrews 6:17 tells us of “two immutable [unchanging] things in which it was impossible to lie”:
(1) The immutability of His counsel;
(2) The confirmation of His oath.
How wise God is! We may well ask, “For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been His counsellor?” (Rom. 11:4). His counsel will stand, firm based, as it is, upon the righteous basis of the atoning death of the Lord Jesus Christ. Everything springs from the heart of God and all planned according to His wisdom and prudence.
And if God confirmed His counsel by an oath, “SURELY blessing I will bless thee” (Heb. 6:14), He gives us a double oath when our Lord said, “VERILY, VERILY, I say to you” (John 5:24).
If a rich man made me a promise I could not be sure of it, for he might change his mind and refuse to carry it out, or become unexpectedly very poor and be unable to carry it out, or he might die, and with death the matter would be out of his hands. So natural hope is full of uncertainty.
But God will not change His mind, nor can He be bankrupt, nor can He die, so the believer’s hopes are as sure as his possessions—the believer is as sure of being in heaven as he is of the forgiveness of his sins. So now the believer can “rejoice in hope [a sure and certain hope] of the glory of God” (Rom. 5:2). “We through the Spirit wait for the hope of righteousness by faith” (Gal. 5:5). Our hope is founded on righteousness.
“Ye are called in one hope of your calling” (Eph. 4:4), the Apostle Paul wrote to the Ephesian believers, that is to be with Christ and like Christ in glory, His bride in the hour of His holy triumph. And “the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles” is “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Col. 1:27), so that the presence of the Holy Ghost in the believer, in the church, gives us the subjective side of this great hope.
So the believer should be “ready always to give an answer to every man that asks … a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear” (1 Peter 3:15).
Great emphasis is laid on the three great graces—faith, hope and love. Prophecies shall fail. When all prophecies are fulfilled they will cease in the full perfection of all God’s ways. Tongues shall cease in that day when nationalities shall cease, racial divisions no longer exist, the reason for the confusing of man’s speech since the days of the Tower of Babel—when all shall speak one tongue and one language—shall be no longer operative. Knowledge shall vanish in the fulness of knowledge that each shall enjoy, when we shall know even as we are known.
But in sharp contrast to all this we read, “And NOW ABIDES faith, hope, charity [literally love], these three; but the greatest of these is charity [literally love]” (1 Cor. 13:13).
Surely the greatest is love, for “God is love,” and love, not faith and hope will be the grand characteristic of the eternal state. Faith will be largely turned into sight, and hope into glad realization, yet even in heaven the believer will have full faith and happy hope in the everlasting continuance of the scene of ineffable love.
9. Prayer
The Christian is exhorted to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17), and that being so, prayer has a very important place in the Christian life.
There are twelve different words used for prayer in the Old Testament and eight in the New Testament, with various shades of meaning, but we do not propose to go into details, but take the subject up in its broad outline.
The first time that prayer is alluded to in the Scriptures, we believe, is to be found in Genesis 4:26, “And to Seth, to him also there was born a son; and he called his name Enos: then began men to call upon the name of the Lord.”
There seems a connection between the name Enos, or Enosh, given by Seth to his son, and calling on the name of the Lord.
Both the names Adam and Enosh are Hebrew words for man—the former derived, it is said, from Adamah, red earth, signifying that God formed man out of the dust of the earth; whereas the latter—Enos—means frail, sinful, mortal man, soon passing away; and Seth, in giving this significant name to his son, acknowledged the condition in which sin had brought man, hence his need of prayer. Prayer is the vehicle of communicating our needs and wants to God.
It has often been asked if prayer can turn aside the forces of nature or the onrush of disease. Increasingly this has been denied in this materialistic and infidel age. It is fashionable to scout the existence of miracles. We know who is at the bottom of all this, for if miracles are impossible, then the virgin birth and resurrection of our Lord were impossible. Christianity stands or falls by miracles.
Infidel scientists may grudgingly acknowledge an unknowable First Cause, who has brought everything round us into existence, but who, having given laws to nature, they treat as having entirely retired, and bound hand and foot by His own laws, so that they may not be set aside. Hence they deny that there is such a thing as a miracle.
But is this so? Scripture gives us striking instances to the contrary. Take, for instance, Elijah praying for a drought, lasting three and a half years, and then praying for the drought to terminate; Elisha’s praying that the young man’s eyes might be opened to see what ordinary mortal eyes might never see, viz., the mountain full of horses and chariots and fire—heavenly visitants for the defence of His servants against the host of Syria; the Syrians’ smitten with blindness and their power broken; Hannah praying for a son and becoming the mother of Samuel in distinct answer to prayer; King Hezekiah, “sick to death,” praying for his life and having fifteen years given to him, in distinct response—these and many more instances can be adduced that God can and does set aside natural laws for the moment in answer to prayer. How blessed to know that we can come to God as One who, knowing all our needs and circumstances, sympathizes and answers prayer.
Not every prayer is answered in the way we wish. God sometimes shows His love and wisdom just as much in withholding an answer as in giving it. Sometimes He may keep us long years before the answer is given.
Even as parents we often have to refuse the requests of our children. A little lad of four asks his mother for his father’s razor to play with. Will she answer his prayer? And often we ask God for razors whereby we might injure ourselves.
The writer, and I am sure many of his readers, can witness to wonderful answers to prayer, when only by a remarkable combination of circumstances as to time and place, etc., could the answer be possible—a combination quite beyond the range of chance or happy coincidence, but an answer clearly planned by Divine intelligence and carried out by Divine power—in short, an answer given by God Himself.
It is one of the distinguishing features of God that whilst caring and arranging for great things, such as the ordering of the solar system, or the sequence of the seasons, yet He can provide for the small things, such as marking the fall of the sparrow, or numbering the hairs of the heads of His saints. The great men of the earth are too small to look after small things—they are not big enough. How different is our God—great enough to sustain the universe, great enough to descend in fullest sympathy to the wants and woes of His meanest creature.
Surely the most deeply touching example of prayer is given in the life of our Lord Jesus Christ on this earth. Here we stand in the presence of an inscrutable mystery. He, who was God, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, the Creator and Sustainer of all things, and never ceasing to be this, became a true Man, dependent and prayerful, doing the will of His Father in heaven.
How true was His manhood when we find Him, so truly marked by prayer! We read again and again of an all-night vigil in prayer on the mountain side. Is there anything more touching in the whole range of prayer than seeing our Lord offering up “prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears to Him that was able to save Him from death, and was heard in that He feared”! (Heb. 5:7).
In all the great events of our Lord’s life we find Him praying—at His baptism (Luke 3:21); when choosing His disciples (Luke 6:12); on the Mount of Transfiguration (Luke 9:28); on the cross (Luke 23:34); and, above all, in what is pre-eminently the Lord’s prayer (John 17), when He departs from the usual word for prayer, using a stronger word, having the force of demanding.
What a wondrous example! If the blessed Son of God was marked by prayer—prayer of an extensive and intensive nature, too—surely it becomes us in all our weakness and infirmity to be men and women of prayer.
The gospel was first introduced into Europe in connection with a band of praying women at the river side of Philippi. Paul, the servant who received the vision calling him into Macedonia, was a great man of prayer. The intensity of his prayers for the saints who had not seen his face in the flesh he could only characterize as “conflict,” or combat (Col. 2:1). “Praying always for you” (Col. 1:3) shows his steady perseverance in this matter.
Well does the writer remember in 1893 the venerable C.H.M., in his room in Dublin, putting his hand on his knee, and saying in never-to-beforgotten, affectionate tones, “Here is a verse for you and me: ‘We will give ourselves continually to prayer and to the ministry of the word’” (Acts 6:4). “Continually to prayer”—what a word is this, what a challenge! The Lord stir up our hearts
There are two great departments in prayer—one concerning our own interests, the other concerning the Lord’s. The former is more prominent in private prayer, the latter more prominent in public prayer. In private prayer we may suitably pray for our personal and family needs, and be encouraged of the Lord to bring all our troubles, trials and perplexities to Him. But we should be self-centred indeed if we limited our prayers to our own needs. Whether in our own closets or in the public prayer meeting, there is the range of the Lord’s interests in this world.
Take 1 Timothy 2:1-2, “I exhort therefore, that, first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men; for kings, and for all that are in authority; that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty.” We are exhorted to pray “for all men.” God restrains men on behalf of His people. He does not allow Satan to go as far as he would like. Though on the one hand Satan is “the god of this world” (2 Cor. 4:4), yet “the powers that be are ordained of God” (Rom. 13:1).
And yet on the human side men can so easily rise and refuse to obey their rulers. The millions that compose the masses can in a moment alter the constitution. So prayer is to be made for them for two things, that they may submit to constitutional authority, so that “a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty” may be the portion of the believers. We must ever remember that the church of God is one, and that whilst believers in Great Britain may be blessed by quietness and tranquillity, it is far otherwise in other parts of the world, such as Russia and China. Secondly, we have to pray for the conversion of men to God.
Then for kings and those in authority we have to pray for two things. First, that they may govern wisely and justly; and, secondly, that they too may be converted.
The prayers of Christians alter things. The writer remembers a lady urging him to vote at a general election, saying that if he failed to do so he would be lacking in his duty. He replied that he probably did more than her husband. Did he vote? Yes! Did he pray about it? No! Well, the writer had prayed, and the prayer is all the more efficacious when we remember the words of the Lord Jesus in relation to the believers, “They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world” (John 17:16), which would keep the believer from voting and taking part in the politics of the world.
Note, too, the various terms used—supplications, speaking of intensity; prayers, that which is general; intercession, that is, praying for others as a privileged person might intercede for another less privileged; thanksgiving, not forgetting grateful acknowledgment to God for His answers to our prayers. At the beginning of the Christian era we read, “They continued steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers” (Acts 2:42). Here we have collective prayer—assembly prayer. What scope there is for prayer for success in the gospel, for the deepening of the souls of the Lord’s people in the things of God. We have already alluded to Paul’s “conflict” in prayer that the believers “hearts might be comforted, being knit together in love, and to all riches of the full assurance of understanding, to the acknowledgment of the mystery of God” (Col. 2:2). Read also the apostle’s prayer in Ephesians 3:14-21, and you will see what is pressing on the mind of the Spirit of God.
We need more prayer for the gospel and more for the church—more prayer all round. The pulse of any meeting of Christians is measured by the prayer meeting—each one, brother and sister, young and old, is privileged to show his or her true interest in the Lord’s things specially there.
We have only skimmed the very surface of this immense subject. We end with the text we began with—“Pray without ceasing.” We believe that, whilst we are not able to be always on our knees, yet we may use every opportunity, and be found in a continual spirit of prayer.
Whether we should pray to God the Father, or to the Lord Jesus, or both, has often been a great question. Prayer in Old Testament times was always to God, but an added thought comes out in the New Testament. Christians can pray to God the Father, and in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. That we can pray to the Lord as well as the Father is evidenced by Paul beseeching the Lord thrice that the thorn in the flesh might be removed. This leads us to believe that in matters of service especially the Lord might be addressed in prayer.
10. Sanctification
There is a very important principle we gather from the Holy Scriptures, viz.:
God never asks us to work up to any position, but puts us into the position, and then, giving us the necessary power, asks us to be true to it.
The Scriptures are full of positive statements, describing the Christian’s blessings, and then of exhortations following, bidding us to be true to these blessings.
For instance, we read, “Ye are all the children (literally sons) of God by faith in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:6). Then follow many exhortations. Take one out of many, “This I say then, Walk in the Spirit” (chap. 5:16). We are not called upon to “walk in the Spirit” in order to become sons, but being sons we are called upon thus to walk. Again we read that God “hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ” (Eph. 1:3), and then the Apostle beseeches the saints to “walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called” (chap. 4:1).
It is a great matter to realize that we are given a place of blessing first—given to us in absolute perpetuity, given, never to be recalled—and then there is the exhortation, coupled with the desire, and the power to carry that desire into effect.
Thus sanctification is in one aspect absolute. This can be easily proved from Scripture.
First of all let us be clear about the meaning of the word “sanctification.” In itself it means separated for a given purpose. It does not necessarily mean holiness or being made holy. For instance, “God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it” (Gen. 2:2). The seventh day did not need to be made holy. Sin had not come into the world, nor could a day—a measure of time—be charged with sin. It simply means that God set the day apart for a given purpose—rest.
Again, the Lord Himself in His prayer to His Father, speaking of His disciples, said, “For their sakes I sanctify Myself” (John 17:19). Surely the Lord did not need to make Himself holy—that were blasphemy for such a thought to cross the mind. No, He set Himself apart for a given purpose, viz., to sanctify His own through the truth.
Again, in Isaiah 66:17, we read of sinners who sanctified themselves to do abominable things. They set themselves apart for a given purpose, viz., to do evil.
We see, then, the thought of sanctification is setting apart for a given purpose, whether it be for good or evil.
The sanctification of believers, which we are now enquiring into, falls, then, under two heads:
1. The position given, and
2. The practice suitable to that position;
or, to put it into other words:
1. Positional sanctification;
2. Practical sanctification.
In the former it is absolute, brought about outside of ourselves altogether, absolute, irrevocable; though accompanied by a work of God within us. In the latter it is progressive, progress secured by our exercises in answering to the Word of God as we grow in grace, and the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
Let us look at the former.
In this aspect it may surprise the reader that sanctification takes place through the agency of the Holy Spirit before justification.
Positional sanctification comes before justification.
Practical sanctification comes after justification.
Let us give Scripture proof of our statement.
Writing to the Thessalonian believers, the Apostle Paul says, “God has from the beginning chosen you to salvation through sanctification of the Spirit and belief of the truth” (2 Thess. 2:13). Here we have sanctification put in order first and denoting its origin, it is said to be “of the Spirit,” followed by “belief of the truth.”
Again, the Apostle Peter writes, “Elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through sanctification of the Spirit, to obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 1:2). Here again sanctification is placed fist and it is “of the Spirit” and “to” a given purpose, that is, to obey as Christ obeyed, the sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ emphasizing the claim of the death of Christ to whole-hearted response.
1 Corinthians 6:11 says, “But ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God.” Here sanctification is clearly put before justification. The washing mentioned first refers to, I judge, the cleansing by new birth, “born of water and of the Spirit” (John 3:5).
It is very evident that sanctification must be first an absolute idea in the mind of the Holy Spirit. What idea can the sinner have of what is suitable for God, as being set apart for Himself? It is only as God teaches us by His Word and works it in our souls by His Holy Spirit, and helps it on by His holy discipline, that we can answer in practice in any little measure to our position.
Sanctification, then, is absolute, a sovereign act of the Spirit of God, definite, irrevocable, final. Seeing it is a sovereign act of the Spirit of God, it follows that nothing can set it aside.
But once that sanctification has been accorded us in the mind of the Holy Spirit, it is His desire that we should answer to it in practice. It is the character of the One we are separated to that determines the character of our sanctification.
So we read, “As He which has called you is holy, so be ye holy in all manner of conversation (literally, manner of life)” (1 Peter 1:15). The next verse goes on to say, “Because it is written, Be ye holy; for I am, holy.” The quotation is from Leviticus 11:44, “I am the Lord your God; ye shall therefore sanctify yourselves, and ye shall be holy; for I am holy.”
Thus we see plainly what God expects of us, giving us those desires, which long to respond to Him.
The Israelites were nationally and outwardly separated to God, and God called upon them to abstain from idolatry and the evil practices of the heathen—God thus providing us, far back in His dealings with His earthly people, an illustration of what should be true of us, who are believers on the Lord Jesus Christ, only in our case individually and inwardly and in a far higher way than was ever expected of Israel.
So believers are exhorted to “present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God” (Rom. 12:1). If it is a question of God’s dwelling among His people, we read, “The temple of God is holy, which temple ye are” (1 Cor. 3:17). We are told that God “hath saved us and called us with a holy calling” (2 Tim. 1:9).
In short, the claim on the believer is to be as holy as God is holy, a sufficiently high standard, for none could be higher. We are told to be “followers (imitators, N.T.) of God, as dear children” (Eph. 5:1). And further, we are exhorted to “follow … holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord” (Heb. 12:14).
We may say that God will never rest till He has His own practically what He has made them positionally by His Spirit, in other words, till we answer fully to what He has made us by His grace.
We have, therefore, the very person and character of God as the model for our holiness; we have the blessed Lord saying to His Father, “For their sakes (viz., His own) I sanctify Myself, that they also might be sanctified through the truth” (John 17:19), thus giving His position on high as being for this end. Surely His high priestly grace and unfailing advocacy are all for this end. Finally, He prays, “Sanctify them through Thy truth, Thy Word is truth” (John 17:17), putting before us the Word of God as the purifying agent, as we read the question and answer of old, “Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse His way? by taking heed thereto according to Thy Word” (Ps. 119:9).
Two verses seem to stand out in great vividness in this connection:
“Be ye holy; for I am holy.”
“Holiness, without which no man can see the Lord.”
May they be worked out in our lives, for His Name’s sake.
11. The Two Natures
Man, as fallen, acquired a sinful nature, incapable of producing fruit for God.
This is a simple sentence to write, but it is the failure to wholeheartedly believe it on the part of Christendom at large that accounts for a great deal of error in its teachings and failure and disappointment in practice.
Men naturally cling to the belief that there is some good in man, a vital spark in every breast that may be fanned into a flame. Such beliefs naturally lead to cultivating, with the best of intentions, the wrong nature, with deplorable results.
Genesis 6:5, describing the antediluvian world, says, “God saw… that every imagination of man’s heart was only evil continually.” What could be more sweeping than that? Man is unchanged, and God sees the same in the unregenerate today. “Every imagination” without exception, “only evil” without any co-mingling of good, “continually” without cessation. What a picture!
The Apostle Paul, in summing up the whole human race, reviewing first the heathen, then the civilized pagan, and lastly the religious Jew with all his God-given advantages, is equally sweeping. “There is none righteous, no, not one.” “There is none that understands, there is none that seeks after God.” “They are all gone out of the way.” “They are together become unprofitable.” “There is none that does good, no, not one.” So the summing up of Romans 3 runs, and in the main made up of skilfully chosen quotations from the Old Testament Scriptures, outwardly received and revered by the Jewish race. Paul testified to nothing new. How could the Jew stand up and deny his own Scriptures?
The Apostle John goes to the very root of things—nature—when he says, “That which is born of the flesh is flesh” (John 3:6)—flesh describing here the fallen sinful, nature of man. “Flesh” in Scripture sometimes means the physical body, such as “flesh and bones.” In this use of it, it includes reference to the Lord Himself, but mostly the word refers to our fallen sinful nature, in which the blessed Lord had no part surely, or else He were as one of ourselves and no Saviour.
So in the sense of sinful nature the nature can only produce what is its nature. Thus Matthew 7:16–20 tells us that we cannot expect grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles, nor good fruit from a corrupt tree.
So if man seeks to cultivate the flesh, even in its fairest forms, he is doomed to disappointment. If I cultivate a thorn-bush under the illusion that it is a vine, I shall only increase the size and number of the thorns and not succeed in getting one grape. No one would be so foolish as to mistake a thorn-bush for a vine, but alas! in the realm of the moral and spiritual, even leaders in Christendom are making a worse mistake with graver consequences.
To set a man working on his own salvation, with the idea that there is naturally good in him, that only needs diligent encouragement and education and a suitable environment, you put that man on the clean side of the broad road to destruction, as John Bunyan quaintly described it, and make it harder for him to come in his true colours to God as a hell-deserving sinner needing redemption through the atoning work of Christ.
So the sentence we penned at the beginning is really a big sentence, needing much thought to grasp its real significance. It may seem very elementary, but as a matter of fact no one can build well save on a good foundation. A good foundation is of supreme importance.
I remember seeing a large ecclesiastical building, evidently an ancient structure, and yet the massive tower was left half-finished. On enquiry I was informed that the foundation would not stand the strain of the superstructure that the architect designed. Hence the disfigurement of a half-built tower.
So with divine things. There must be the foundation, well and deeply laid in our souls, before we are ready to advance to other and higher truths.
Thank God, believers have a new nature, and it is this divine nature that God alone recognizes. Death, mortification of our fleshly members, is the alone divine treatment meted out to the old nature. This can only be effected in the life of the new nature, as empowered by the Holy Spirit of God.
Not only does propitiation come through the death of Christ as the manifestation of God’s love, but also life—and put in the order of …
LIFE AND PROPITIATION …
(see 1 John 4:9-10), what would it avail if a sinner were cleansed from his sins and he were left untouched as to his nature? What would it avail if a crab-apple tree were stripped of its crop of fruit, and its nature were left untouched? Nature can only express itself and a crab-apple tree can only bear crabs.
So propitiation of our sins alone would not meet our case indeed, propitiation without life or life without propitiation would be equally impossible.
Thank God, the believer in the Lord Jesus has a new nature—a nature that is at home in the presence of God—a nature that loves holiness and shrinks from evil. Equally emphatic is Scripture as to the consistent character of the new nature. We read, “That which is born of the Spirit is spirit” (John 3:6). Again, “Whosoever is born of God doth not commit [practise] sin; for his seed remains in him: and he cannot sin, because he is born of God” (1 John 3:9). “He cannot sin” is a strong statement, but the inspired writer is looking at the believer abstractly as identified altogether and only with the divine nature. Just as you might say that a vine cannot bear thorns, or a fig tree thistles, and only and altogether and absolutely the fruit expressive of its nature, so it is with the divine nature—it must express itself; it cannot sin.
Again we read, “We know that whosoever is born of God sins not; but he that is begotten of God keeps himself, and that the wicked one touches him not” (1 John 5:18). How sweet and comforting it is to read these absolute statements, which are definitely and wholly true. But the reader may say, “But that does not tally with my experience,” and ask, “What is the solution of all my strivings after holiness and victory, and my constant disappointments?”
We propose to answer these questions in the next article.
But we have gained something if we have received a clear idea from Scripture as to the two natures—one wholly and irremediably bad, that can never by mistake bear fruit for God; the other wholly and absolutely good, incapable of sin. To be delivered from such before God, and the attempt to cultivate that which God has condemned by the cross, is a great gain, leaving us free to be occupied with the new, and that which is of God. May this be our happy occupation.
12. Deliverance
We come now to a matter of intense and practical interest to the earnest Christian. How often in the first flush of the joy of conversion has the young convert believed that never again would he sin, never again would he lose his temper, or be swept by gusts of passion.
What a disappointment is the awakening from this illusion, and to find that the flesh is the flesh still, and that the Christian life often seems more marked by defeat than victory.
An earnest Christian, however, will not be content with clear theological explanations alone. He wants to live the victorious life, and won’t be content till he has learned wherein lies its secret.
It may be that the following incident may bring a little comfort to the mind of such. An infidel American judge was being driven by his coloured Christian coachman to a place where he could indulge in the sport of duck-shooting.
As they rode along the judge said, “Sambo, I can’t understand your Christianity. Here am I an infidel, who does not believe in heaven or hell or the Bible or Christ, and yet I am happy and content. You profess to be a Christian and yet you are constantly complaining of the devil tempting you, and of your difficulties and trials. It appears to me that I am happier than you are, and yet you profess to be a Christian.”
Sambo was puzzled, and did not know how to reply, and said so.
At length they got to the shooting. The judge’s gun shot more than one duck. Sambo went off to get the spoils. As he did so, the judge cried out, “Sambo, don’t trouble about the dead ducks. They’ll wait for you. Go after the wounded ducks, and secure them.”
Sambo carried out his master’s instructions, and on bringing the ducks to the carriage, said, “Massa, I can answer your question now. The difference between you and me is this. You are the dead duck, and the devil doesn’t trouble you. He can get you when he likes. I am the wounded duck and he comes after me, and that’s why I am troubled.”
There is a good deal of sound philosophy in this. When a man is unconverted, where there is only the flesh, there is no conflict.
But the fact that there is conflict, that there is distress, has this element of comfort in it, that the one so troubled has clearly the new nature as well as the old nature. These two cannot mix any more than oil and water—the flesh cannot be educated or improved by environment, and cannot be brought into accord in any shape or form with the new nature.
The road to deliverance lies, first in the recognition that there are two natures, and second in the irreconcilable and unimprovable nature of the flesh. This will lead to all attempts to cultivate and improve it being given up. Death—death only is the way to deal with it. “Mortify [= put to death] your members which are upon the earth: fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence and covetousness, which is idolatry” (Col. 3:5). How outspoken Scripture is! How it puts its finger on the spot! How often in Scripture does it put together the two glaring sins that generally mark the flesh—viz., the unbridled passions of the body and the love of gain.
Then follows another list equally straight and to the point and wonderfully comprehensive. “But now ye also put off these; anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy communication out of your mouth. Lie not one to another, seeing ye have put off the old man with his deeds; and have put on the new man, which is created in knowledge after the image of Him that created him” (Col. 3:8–10).
But now we come to the question: How can this be accomplished? The answer is found in Romans 7 and 8.
It is one of the signs of the last days, of the superficial character of Christians generally, that one rarely ever hears anything about Romans 7.
In that chapter we get a description of a man who finds two natures at work, two natures exactly opposite to each other, two that cannot blend. Neither nature can be improved—one so bad that it cannot be improved; the other so good that it cannot be improved.
We suppose it is an inspired record of the Apostle Paul’s own exercises before he got into the liberty of the gospel, for the Holy Ghost, the Seal upon those who have received the gospel of their salvation (Eph. 1:13), is not once mentioned in the chapter, whereas in chapter 8 the Holy Spirit is mentioned very often and in great fulness.
Romans 7 describes a man, whose new nature leads him to desire to do certain things, but the evil nature within refuses him the carrying out of his desires; whilst on the contrary the things the new nature shrinks from, the evil nature leads him to do, so that he describes in simple yet pathetic and profound language, “For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I” (v. 15).
Lamentable condition to be in—to do that which his renewed nature tells him is wrong; that knowing the right to do he does it not, and knowing what is wrong yet he does it. Could anything be more terrible?
And so he learns to distinguish between the three I’s—the responsible I—that is the man who lives the life, and who is surely responsible; the new I, that is the new nature, which ought to alone characterize and control his life; and the old I, that is the flesh, the sinful nature, the source of all the trouble and defeat.
So he says, “For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) dwells no good thing” (v. 18). Here the writer identifies himself for the moment with the old I—the flesh—and by bitter experience learns its irremedial and unimprovable nature. Here is a great advance—he will cease to cultivate the flesh or expect any good from it.
All down the chapter the writer is marked by self-occupation, necessarily so, if on the road to deliverance; but the sooner he learns his lesson the better, and the sooner would he be delivered from self-occupation.
Self-occupation, I, I, I, I, I, ad nauseam, at last leads him to despair as to himself, and he cries out, “O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” (v. 24).
Now we come to the point where deliverance may be known. It is not that deliverance can be accepted from the Deliverer once and for ever, or that the delivered one will never again sin or fail, but we get the secret of deliverance.
Note, the writer calls not for deliverance but a Deliverer. This must be so, for he cannot bring about his own deliverance in the smallest way. He needs outside help.
So this chapter does not put deliverance before the soul, so much as a Deliverer. If it put deliverance before us, we should immediately ask the question, am I delivered? Note “I” is the middle word of the sentence—proof of self-occupation, not of deliverance. If we answered in the affirmative it would prove we had not learned our lesson, for deliverance is not something we get once and for ever, but something to be worked out daily as we keep in touch with the Deliverer and walk in the power of the Holy Spirit. If we answered in the negative we might well be depressed. But we do not ask, are we delivered? But we can joyfully say, “We have got a Deliverer.”
It is said the expression, “Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” refers to a punishment in vogue in the Roman army. When a soldier had transgressed very seriously, he was tied to a corpse, and allowed to die in that condition. The living man would grow weaker and weaker as he was left without food and water, the corpse would become more repulsive each day. Could any condition be more terrible?
And using this as a graphic illustration of his condition, the man cries out for a Deliverer, and finds him in the Lord Jesus Christ Himself—One he can turn to at any moment and get the help he needs at any time.
Deliverance is only to be known as one keeps in touch with the Deliverer. So that whilst the writer can fervently thank God for His Deliverer—“I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord” he has to immediately add, “So then with the mind I myself serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin” (v. 25). The circumstances are unchanged as long as we are down here, but we have a Deliverer who can and does deliver us as long as we are looking to Him.
Did not Peter begin to sink in the water when he looked at the wind and waves; but crying, “Lord, save me” he was delivered from his danger? When we get to Romans 8 we find if Christ is the Deliverer that the Holy Spirit is the Power of the Christian’s walk.
To sum up. To know deliverance from sin and self there must be
1. Recognition of the two natures.
2. Recognition that the old nature is unimprovable and irremedial.
3. Recognition that the only help is in a Deliverer.
4. Recognition that we do not get deliverance apart from the Deliverer, nor do we get it once and for all, but stand in daily and hourly need of it.
5. Recognition that the Lord Jesus Christ is the Deliverer—the objective power of deliverance.
6. Recognition that the Holy Spirit is the subjective power of deliverance.
We are thus delivered from ourselves, from self-occupation, and become occupied with the Lord and walk in the power of the Spirit of God.
If each reader would try to live twenty-four hours without talking of good self, or bad self, or self in any shape or form, he would be astonished to find out how much self-occupied and how self-centred he is.
May the Lord help us out of self-complacency, self-occupation, self-seeking, self in every shape and form by occupation of heart with the Lord Jesus Christ, who has left us an example that we should follow in His steps (1 Peter 2:20).