It is a deep-set belief of the human heart that there is a future life, and naturally there is a desire that it may be a blissful life. It is this yearning that is the urge, for instance, of such a system as Spiritism, utterly evil as we believe it to be. Most people, we should imagine, at some time or other in their lives ponder on the subject on the future life to which they are travelling. Many alas! dismiss the subject with a shrug of the shoulders, and occupy themselves exclusively with this world’s affairs, and let matters of the next world take care of themselves.
On the other hand there are many who think long and earnestly as to this. Socrates and Plato, living long before the Christian era, thought deeply on these subjects. Many a heathen has held out beseeching hands to God in his yearning for satisfaction in this vital matter. We are assured that beseeching hands will never be held out in vain. Let an example be given. A Hindu is reported as having presented his difficulty and desire in the following words:—
“If God is impersonal and perfect He is of no use to me. He will not hear my prayers. He will be supremely indifferent, and let Nature’s laws work. If He is personal, He is imperfect, but that is what I want Him to be. I want Him to set His law aside and forgive me. I want Him in the imperfect state.”
There are two or three things in connection with the deeply interesting and touching statement of this Hindu, groping, as he was, for the light, we should like to draw attention to.
First of all he yearned to be forgiven. This presupposes that he had become conscious of what sin is, that it was heinous in God’s sight, that it called for punishment. So far, so good. Would that multitudes had the same consciousness of sin, and the same yearning for forgiveness.
But our Hindu friend expressed a wish that, in order to forgive him, God would set aside His law. Impossible! You may ask perhaps, Cannot God do anything that He likes? Certainly, anything He LIKES. But remember, He must ever act in consonance with His own nature. He cannot do those things that are a contradiction of His nature and being. For instance, “It is impossible for God to lie” (Heb. 6:18).
Now for God to depart from His just laws in order to forgive would be in the nature of a lie. In other words He would have to set aside His own words and decrees to do such a thing as that. He would cease to be consistent. That could not possibly be.
The Hindu exclaimed, “I want Him [God] in the imperfect state.” But if God were imperfect, He would cease to be God. The Hindu cried for the unattainable. Happy for him that it is unattainable. Could he have understood the problem aright, he would have discovered that God must be perfect, or there could not be any way of blessing for man, any satisfaction for the deep yearning of his heart.
God is perfect. He is inflexibly just. He cannot depart by a hair’s breadth from absolute righteousness. We read, “God is is light, and in Him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5).
When the law was given with all its terrifying accompaniments, we read of Jehovah “keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty” (Ex. 34:7). There seems a contradiction here at first sight. Here is God declaring that He is ready to show mercy to thousands, to forgive sins, and yet declaring that He will by no means clear the guilty. How can this seeming contradiction be explained? It is just here where the Hindu needed enlightenment.
There were three things that he needed to know.
First, the nature of God, love, the Divine essence—inflexible righteousness, a Divine attribute.
Second, the penalty passed upon sin.
Third, the way that penalty has been met, so that God can express His nature, love, whilst upholding His absolute righteousness.
Thus and thus only is it possible to explain how God can forgive sins, and yet by no means clear the guilty.
FIRST, the nature of God. The Hindu thought that if God were impersonal and perfect He would not hear his prayers, that He would be supremely indifferent, and let Nature’s laws, like some awful Juggernaut car crushing its victims under its wheels, carry mankind into a frightful eternity of woe. Little did he know of God. “Canst thou by searching find out God? canst thou find out the Almighty to perfection?” (Job. 11:7).
“God is love” (1 John 4:8). God was ever love. This is His nature. Nature must ever express itself. A tiny seed has been known to drop into a minute crevice in a recumbent tombstone, and to germinate there. Consequently nature worked, and the ponderous stone was lifted into mid-air. If God gave such power to a tiny atom of His creation, surely the Creator Himself must express His own nature, whatever obstacles may stand in the way.
The Hindu inquirer wished that God might not be impersonal. What did he mean by the word, “impersonal”? Did he mean what is so commonly believed in heathen lands that the only expression of God is seen in creation, in nature, in material things; that God is in everything—mountains, rivers, animals, birds, men—in another word, pantheism? If so there could be no appeal. Nature in such a case must take its course, and the yearning of the human soul left unsatisfied.
We read, however, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” It is clear from this first verse in the Bible that God existed before the creation that He is transcendent, that is to say, as to God’s being He is supreme, beyond all limitations, distinct from all that creation which has proceeded from Him.
It is true that God is not in material form, but it is an all-pervading Spirit, “who only has immortality [that is inherently], dwelling in the light which no man can approach to; whom no man has seen, nor can see” (1 Tim. 6:16). But it is also true that God is not impersonal. He is a Person from whom everything proceeds, and by whom everything is sustained. But if we are to know God, it is clear that it can only be by revelation. All our knowledge of His nature comes through the Scriptures. Creation will tell us of His “eternal power and Godhead” (Rom. 1:20). But creation cannot reveal His heart. It cannot tell us that “God is love.” But revelation will tell us that God is perfect and yet will ever hear the real cry of need.
SECOND, the penalty passed upon sin. We can dismiss this in few words. Not that the subject is of slight importance. It concerns us all, and that very deeply and vitally. The penalty passed upon sin is death and judgment. It is appointed to men once to die, but after this the judgment” (Heb. 9:27). It is clear, if God will by no means clear the guilty, and yet desires to maintain an attitude to men of forgiveness, that death and judgment—sin’s penalty—must be met by a Substitute great enough to atone for sin, satisfy the divine claims of justice, and set God free in righteousness to show His love to guilty sinners.
THIRD, the way that penalty has been met, so that God can express His nature, love, whilst upholding His absolute righteousness. Here we must begin by speaking of a PERSON. Who is the Person, who can step into such a mighty breach? Gradually Scripture unfolds the truth as to that Person. Indeed we make bold to say that there would have been no Scriptures, if there had been no Christ.
It would have been possible for Christ to have come into this world without any preparation for His coming, He might have come as a bolt from the blue, but how difficult it would have been for men to have believed on Him. It is true that faith is “the gift of God” (Eph. 2:8), and that “the natural man receives not the things of the Spirit of God” (1 Cor. 2:14). But when a man has faith, he has in the Old Testament the material “to give an answer to every man that asks [him] a reason of the hope that is in [him] with meekness and fear” (1 Peter 3:15). Faith is not unreasonable.
So God has taken pains to meet us in our slowness of belief in the preparation He has given for the coming of the Christ. He has given us prophecies of the coming Christ, prophecies spoken by men, unknown to each other, separated from each other by centuries, living in different countries, uttering prophecies that fitted into each other, as parts of a puzzle fit into each other, and which could not possibly have come true had there not been one divine, omniscient, controlling Mind behind them. No wonder the Apostle Paul could write of “The Scripture foreseeing” (Gal. 3:8).
When the Person arrived, who had all the marks the prophecies called for, faith was found to be reasonable.
Let us take one prophet, Isaiah, and see how he prophesies of this wonderful PERSON. He tells us “Unto us a Child is born, to us a Son is given: and the government shall be upon His shoulder” (9:6). Here we are told that this wonderful Person is to be a MAN. “As one by man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one [man] shall many be made righteous” (Rom. 5:19). “There is … one Mediator between God and men, the MAN Christ Jesus” (1 Tim. 2:5).
But this is not all. Isaiah also says, “Behold a virgin shall conceive, and bear a Son (7:14). His birth was to be miraculous. The birth of Isaac was miraculous. So was that of John the Baptist. But both of them had a father and mother. But here was one to be born of a virgin, a hitherto unheard-of thing.
But even this is not all. Isaiah goes on to say, “His name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The Mighty God, The Everlasting Father” (9:6). So this wonderful Person was to be God and Man, in other words Deity was to take into its embrace holy humanity, untainted by Adam’s fall, so as to come forward and make atonement for sin, so that forgiveness of sins might be given RIGHTEOUSLY, the guilty by no means cleared, the holy Substitute stepping into the breach, and taking upon Himself the sentence of judgment and death.
So we find the prophet adds one more title to this wonderful Person, that is, “The Prince of Peace” (9:6). This involves His death, His atoning death. He made “peace through the blood of His cross” (Col. 1:20). We find this prophesied in Isaiah 53, that chapter, which the unbelieving Jew finds so difficult to explain away, for it so plainiy points to the suffering Messiah. “He was wounded for our transgressions. He was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon Him; and with His stripes we are healed” (v. 5).
Here we get the answer to the Hindu’s yearnings of heart. Had he rightly understood, he could have rejoiced that God is perfect, and been assured that He will answer true prayer, that He is love and has shown it by sending His only begotten Son into the world—God and Man, yet one blessed Person—who died an atoning death on the cross, and that God can RIGHTEOUSLY forgive sins, and yet maintain absolute justice.
Has each of our readers trusted that Saviour? A tall elderly gentleman was seen dropping papers over fences, nailing them on posts. etc. A Christian man was curious to see what was being broadcast, and discovered texts of Scripture. He went up to the gentleman and said, “I presume, sir, that you are a Christian man, seeing that you are broadcasting Scripture texts.”
Looking at the questioner for a full minute, he replied, “I am a double-barrelled believer. For forty years of my life I had THE FAITH OF ADMISSION. I admitted the Bible to be God’s book. but I had no peace in my conscience, no joy in my heart, no rest in my life, and no hope for the future. But one glad sweet night I got THE FAITH OF COMMITTAL. I committed myself to the Lord Jesus for safe keeping, and ever after I have been able to say with the great Apostle Paul:‘I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have committed to Him against that day’” (2 Tim. 1:12).
Reader, are you a double-barrelled believer? Have you solved the problem of the future blissful, life?