187
T h e
K i n g ’ s
B u s i n e s s
April 1930
on this earth through a powerful telescope, we would see, not our great modern world, but the battle of Water loo ! There is another point. This one is nineteen hun dred and thirty-four light-years away. From here tonight we could see the scene that transpired in Bethlehem’s manger. It will be well over forty-nine million years be fore the light of Bethlehem reaches the spot which they photographed the other day on top of Mount Wilson! . From everlasting to everlasting! Go back before all that; before these universes began to rock in the cradle of time, back beyond the first dawn of existence; and GOD is there before all. Now stretch your little thoughts as far as they can reach, beyond the time when these glorious heavens will have waxed old as does a garment, when, as a vesture, they are folded up by the Creator and changed. Eternity is still before us. And even beyond an inconceivable eternity is GOD! You can think of that until the blood bursts from your temples! G od A nswers We want to know the truth about the world we live in. We are not interested in scraping cobwebs off the Milky Way with intellectual drivel about “cosmic evolution.” We are breaking our hearts to pierce the mysteries. Frightened, we hedge ourselves about by building the bul warks of our philosophy upon the. treacherous sands of our own reason. Then we peer out into inky blackness through the gratings of mystery which imprison us, and cry, “What is the meaning of it all?” From without, no answer comes, but within, whispers a still, small voice: “Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not un derstood from the foundation of the earth? It is He that is sitting over the circle of the earth,—He that stretches out the heavens as a curtain, and spreads them out as a tent to dwell in! L ift up your .eyes on high and behold who has created these things, that brings out their host by number. ■ . “Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this world? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? Jews require a sign; Greeks seek after wisdom. But we proclaim Christ crucified the power of God and the wisdom of God!” There is your answer. Those words are from the God who some people think is in a jail where the few natural laws which we have discovered are the bars. Let the stars listen to this in wonder; let the planets grow dizzy with amazement! For the hand that hurled them in their orbits, the hand that upholds them by its power and guides them in stately march through the depths of un fathomed space—THAT HAND WAS NAILED TO A CROSS FOR ME! Please do not, however, mistake the Gospel of the Grace of God in Christ. It is not a textbook of natural science. But faith in Christ sets the heart free from dam ning sin, and the mind free from distorting prejudice, and liberates every God-given faculty for inquiry and develop ment with the highest possible conception of human pos sibility and human destiny. Here is the “great commis sion” for science:. “Be fruitful and multiply, and replen ish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing which moves upon the earth.” God will not reveal to man that which man can discover for him self; but remember, neither can man discover for him self that which God has seen it is necessary to reveal. There is a line which man can never cross with reason unaided. But oh, the joy of the quest for tru th !
perform a miracle to relieve us of common sense. The god who failed the famous Child Crusade was not the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. It was a false deity of superstition and ignorance. Search through this Book. God never promised any dividing sea for a band of foolish and deluded children. That was not faith. It was pure ignorance. Jesus Christ does not insult anyone’s intelligence. There was never a saner, kinder, more sympathetic teacher than He. And no one ever hated falsehood so intensely. But, listen to His Word: “l am the Truth!” What, Master? “1 am the Truth!” Then you are God! Or, it may be that you are a deluded fool! Socrates, you never made any such claim. You would have died before saying such words. Plato, you were breaking your heart to find truth. How you wanted to pierce beyond the sham and mysteries of this world. But you never dreamed of claiming that all truth finds its source in you! O Christ, Thou art the Truth? If that claim is false, do not mock us in our helplessness. Leave us to grope on blindly in the darkness, searching for truth and light in a universe where there is no God, a madhouse, a vast and empty gloom where the last light of intelligence flick ers and dies away in the hollow echo of our cry. But, Saviour Divine, if Thou dost not mock us, if in Thee we can find the answer to pur search, then lead us on. Give us humble faith, and grant that we may know in Thee the essence of all Truth! T hey C ry I nto T h e D arkness A short time ago, I spent a Lord’s Day at the Grand Canyon. It is acknowledged the sublimest spectacle on earth. Before me lay miles and miles of sculptured and turreted color and glory. Sheer majesty! Far, far below, a bird circled on motionless wing. It was a scene to hush the heedless voice, and to draw one’s thoughts upward to God. Suddenly a roar overhead startled me. Looking up, I saw a great tri-motored monoplane. It sailed serenely out over that limitless depth. It made one dizzy to look up at the huge metal bird defying the maw of the chasm, and then to glance back down, at that crimson gash in the breast of the earth. I felt as if I wanted to hide myself in shame for my own littleness! Is that not somewhat like the situation of the present ? We are standing on the edge of our little speck of mat ter, looking out over an infinity of space. We cry into the darkness; scarcely an echo comes back to us. In a mea sure, we have sailed, with our little knowledge, out over the chasm of mystery. But we cannot fathom the depths below. We cannPt penetrate the blue above. And we feel like hiding ourselves in shame for our own littleness. The world we live in! (I mean that whole realm of truth which we call “natural science.” ) What is it? Where did it come from? Who created it all? Or did anybody create it? Maybe it happened along out of nothing. If God made it, where did God come from? What will the end be? Will there be any end? O God, do not let us burst our tiny brains! On Mount Wilson the other day they photographed an object in this universe which is fifty million light-years away. Do you know what that means ? The light which hit the photographic plate on Mount Wilson left that nebula ages and ages and ages before man ever set foot on this earth. Look! There is a point just a short dis tance away, relatively, where, if we could see the events
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