King's Business - 1922-09

T H E K I N G ' S B U S I N E S S wrong. The Man of Sin will take the name of Christ to bring glory to him­ self, and pervert the truth to further his own lie. 7. The Man of Sin will be malicious in Intent. God sent Christ, and He came that men “ should not perish,” but the Lawless One will work in Satan’s power with "all deceivableness of un­ righteousness in them that perish” (2 Thess. 2:10). His aim will be to drag his devotees down to his own level, and he will succeed, for he and they are found in the place of doomed spirits (Rev. 19:20; 20:16). - .$!£. M IS GOD SHUT OUT? It seems incomprehensible to a certain type of mind that the divine, pre-exist­ ent Spirit, who created the world and now sustains it, should intervene in that world, and for the furthering of His own wise and beneficent ends, operate at times in ways that are beyond our finite and limited comprehension. Through the dominance of merely ma­ terialistic conceptions that do not look deep enough to see the spiritual fact be­ hind every material form, some are so troubled by the thought of Nature’s in­ exorable laws that they fail to appre­ hend the divine personality behind those laws. While congratulating themselves upon their own assumed breadth of vision, such minds really are the essence of narrowness, because they reach their conclusions from premises founded upon too narrow data. God is neither an exile from His world nor a prisoner locked up in it. Deism made the mistake of thinking the former, while pantheism and modern rationalism are making the mistake of thinking the latter. A farmer was once arguing with a skeptical traveling man from the city. They were standing in the village store and quite a crowd had gathered to hear the discussion. The farmer was whit-

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tling with a large Jack-knife, and the skeptic, in the course of his argument, proclaiming the universality of natural . law and blind force, challenged the farmer by saying, “ Do you mean to tell me that if you turn that knife loose it can go in any direction except down­ ward to the floor in obedience to the law of gravitation?” The farmer an­ swered: “ Yes, I will assert that." Whereupon he turned the knife loose, giving it a little flip upward with his finger, however, as he released it, and the blade stuck in the ceiling overhead and the knife hung^ firmly there. What had he done? Had he violated the at­ traction of gravitation? By no means. If he had done that, he would have wrecked the entire solar system. By the intervention of the will resident in his personality he had simply brought into play another law which enabled him to perform what was in essence a miracle, as measured solely from the standpoint of the operation of the at­ traction of gravitation. Once more let us see it— the fundamental fact in this universe is not dead matter or blind force, or the laws through which they function, but personality expressing it­ self in finite forms in the intellect, affec­ tions and will of men, and reaching up for its full and final expression in the divine and eternal God!— St'raton. jMfc m HIGHEST COMPLIMENT To a young infidel who was scoffing at Christianity because of the miscon­ duct of soriie of its professors, the late Dr. Mason once said: “ Did you ever know an uproar to be made because an infidel went astray from the paths of moral­ ity?” The infidel admitted that he had not. “ Then, do you not see that by expecting professors of Christianity to be holy, you admit it to be a holy reli­ gion and thus pay it the highest com­ pliment in your power?”

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