January 1928
26
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and executed, in the Person of our surety, Jesus Christ. It is true we shall "appear before the judgment seat of Christ” at His Second Coming for His Church (Rom. 14:10; 2 Tim. 4:8), to be rewarded for our service (1 Cor. 3:11-15); but we shall never be brought before “the great white throne,” the judgment into which all unsaved sinners will be brought at the close of the millennial age (Rev. 20:5-6, 15). Many Christians do not seem to have grasped the teaching that there is more than one judgment; that these judgments occur at different times and have entirely different objects. The notion that saved and unsaved must all have their destinies settled at a great general judgment, is unscriptural, and unreasonable as well. Believers are taught that they may have the witness of the Spirit, here and now, of their complete justification before God. There is no possibility of it being invalidated in the future. We are told that at death, the spirit of God’s child goes immediately to heaven, to await the resurrection day when he shall have a new body. Then the vast majority of believers are already in heaven. Must it yet be decided whether or not they are fit to be there ? We are taught that believers will receive their glorified bodies immediately upon Christ’s Second Coming. His coming for His Church takes place 1000 years prior to the final judgment (Rev. 20:5-6). Can it be that our destiny is to be settled after we have already had glorified bodies and reigned with Him for a thousand years? The plain teaching of Jn. 5:24 and Rom. 8:1 is that since Christ has been judged in the believer’s place and has suffered the full sentence for the sinner, no judgment remains for him, other than that of his service, when Jesus comes. A N ew P osition “Is passed from death unto life.” Here we have justifi cation. We are once for all absolved from guilt and stand as though we had never sinned, through the merits of our Savior. "Being justified by faith, we have peace with God, through our Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom. 5:1). "By Him, all that believe are justified from all things” (Acts 13 :39). Since our sins are cast behind God’s back (Isa. 38 :17 ); blotted out as a thick cloud (Isa. 44:22); separated from us as far as east is from west (Psa. 103:12); cast into the depths of the sea (Mic. 7:19), it remains that we have passed out of the state of spiritual death (Eph. 2:1) over into the state of spiritual and eternal life, so that we stand guiltless in God’s sight. What marvelous treasures of truth are locked in John 5 :24! Let us claim them and proclaim them. Centripetal Sp iritua l Power Our world has two forces: it has one tendency to run «off at a tangent from its orbit; but the sun draws it by a centripetal power, and attracts it to itself; and so between the two forces it is kept in a perpetual circle. O Chris tian ! thou wilt never walk afight, and keep in the orbit •of truth, if it be not for the influence of Christ perpetually attracting thee to the center. Thou feelest (and if thou dost not feel always, it is still there), thou feelest an attraction between thine heart and Christ;:and Christ is perpetually •drawing thee to Himself, to His likeness, to His character, to His love, to His bosom; and in that way thou art kept from thy natural tendency to fly off and to be lost in the wide fields of sin. —Spurgeon.
The Moral Reach o f Christ D R. PARKER once said: “The deity of the Son of God is, to me, not proved merely in propositions. I believe that he who believes in the Godhead of Jesus Christ has all history, all etymology, all philosophy, and all true reading of the case entirely on his side. But 1 do not look to propositions, to logical formulae, to any bare statements, however exact, for the proof and con firmation. Do you think that I build my hopes of eter nity upon some little etymological technicality? Do you suppose that my dependence is founded altogether upon the construction of a phrase or the mood and tense of a verb? We have nothing to fear from that side of the argument, so far as I have been able to collate the testi monies of competent men. “But I do not rely upon it in preaching the deity of the Son of God, and in committing myself to the great claim which Jesus makes in this text on behalf of His own na ture. What do I trust then? The moral reach, the spir itual compass, the indefinable and inexpressible sympathy of the man. When He touched my heart into life, I did not say, ‘Hand me down the Greek grammar and the Hebrew lexicon, and three volumes of the encyclopedia, to see how. this really stands,’ I did not say, ‘Let me see what the “Fathers” have said about this.’ I knew it to be a fact. Nobody ever did for me what He has done. Once I was blind, now I see. I go to other men—writers, speakers, teachers—hear what they have to say, and be hold, they are broken cisterns that can hold no water. I go to the Son of God, whose teaching is written in the New Testament, and it gets into the deep places of my life; it redeems me; it goes further than any other influ ence, and does more for me than any other attempt that ever was made to recover and bless my life. It is, there fore, in this great sweep of His, in this reply to every demand that is made upon His resources, this infinite suf ficiency of His grace, that I find the exposition and the defense of His Godhead. Some things must be felt; some things must be laid hold of by sympathy, affection, sensi bility. The heart is in some cases a greater interpreter than the understanding. There is a time when logic has to say, ‘I can do no more for you; do the best you can for yourself’ ! The love goes forward, and necessity feels i t ; and it is in that further insight and penetration that the Godhead of the Nazarene, as it appears to me, is vindi cated and glorified.” Dr. Beecher felt the same thing when he said: “As there can be no argument of chemistry in proof of odors like a present perfume itself; as the shining of the stars is a better proof of their existence than the figures of an astronomer; as the restored health of his patients is a better argument of skill in a physician than labored exam inations and certificates; as the testimony of the almanac that summer comes with June is not so convincing as is the coming of summer itself in the sky, in the air, in the fields, on hill and mountain: so the power of Christ upon the human soul is to the soul evidence of His divinity, based upon a living experience, and transcending in con clusiveness any convictions of the intellect alone, founded upon a contemplation of mere idea, however just and sound. If Christ is the wisdom of God and the power of God in the experience of those who trust and love Him, there needs be no further argument of His divinitv.”
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