The King’s Business
No. 2
FEBRUARY, 1914
Vol. 5
Victor Gelesnoff^Shocking Blasphemy S ome months ago we had occasion to call attention to the blasphemy that . ■ was implied in an utterance of Vietor Gelesnoff in his magazine, but in the December number of the same periodical there is not merely an implied blasphemy, but an explicitly stated blasphemy of the most shocking character. He says, “ It is self-evident that an absolutely supreme Deity must be a universally responsible Deity. God must be responsible for whatever state of things obtains, or, what is tantamount to it, responsible for that chain o f causes that lead to this state of things.” Then he goes^on to show that God is the Author of and responsible for sin. He says, To this universal responsibility, evil is no exception, but rather the. special designated feature, inasmuch as God declares Himself to be.its creator (Isa. 45:7,). By evil here, as he makes clear from what follows, he means moral evil, sin. He says further on, “When we know that evil and good are both of God, then we can be resigned to both.” By evil in this passage he means, as is as clear as day from the context, sin. He says still further on, “ Evil [and by evil he means sin as the context clearly shows] is God’s prerogative; in His ways with the creature, He acts on the principle enshrined in the adage, The end justifies the means.” ’ Still further on he says, “ The Scriptures teach that light and darkness, good and evil [by evil he means sin as the context clearly shows], are really parts of- the same Divine economy. Good and evil proceed from the same Author.” By the Author [as the capital used in beginning it and the context also proves] Mr. Gelesnoff means, God, and he plainly declares that God is the Author of sin. Blasphemy cannot go beyond this. Of course, he seeks to defend his blasphemy by the use of Isaiah 45: 7, I form the light and create darkness: I make peace and create evil. But the parallelism and the context clearly show that evil in this passage does not mean moral evil or sin The passage simply teaches that God sends men peace in heart and that God sends men disquiet of heart; or at the most, it means that God sends them sorrow or affliction. The Hebrew word which is translated evil in this passage is the general word for evil covering both moral evil, the evil which one does, and natural evil, the evil which one suffers, and m its primary use, it does not refer to moral evil but to natural evil. It is of very frequent use in the Old Testament in this sense. To interpret it in this passage as meaning moral evil shows ignorance both of the real meaning of the word used and neglect of the eontext in which it is found in this passage. Some of the meanings given to the word in one of the most modern and exact of Hebrew lexicons is “ adversity, affliction, bad, calamity.” These are the first meanings given This lexicon among all the meanings given does not give sin at all as among its meanings. The nearest it comes to it is m its last definition, “Wrong.” Mr. Gelesnoff in his article says, “ It is claimed that the Hebrew word means ' indicted evil,’ so that no moral evil is meant, but evil in the shape of calamities which overtake the peoples. A glance at a concordance shows
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