Foreign Missions or World Wide Evangelism 65 hold contradictory conceptions of the same God. If there be any God at all for me, He must be every other man’s God, too. And God is true. To say that He is one is merely to say that He is. To say that He is true is to begin to describe Him, and to describe Him as alone He can be. And if He is true He cannot have taught men falsehood. He will have strug gled with their ignorance in His education of mankind, but it cannot have been His will (or be His will now) that some men. should have false ideas of Him or false attitudes toward Him. A true God must will to be truly known by all men. And God is holy and pure. Nothing unholy or impure can be of Him. Anything unholy or impure must be abhorrent to Him, if in religion the more abhorrent because the more misrepre- sentative of Him, the more revolting to His nature. If any where in the world religion covers what is unclean or un worthy, there the character of God is being assailed. And God is just and good. No race and no man can have slipped through the fatherly affection of a loving God. Any inequality or unfairness or indifference in an offered god would send us seeking for the real one whom we should know was not yet found. A god who was idols in China, fate in Arabia, fetiches in Africa, and man himself with all his sin in India, would be no god anywhere. If God is one man’s father, He is or would be every man’s father. We cannot think of God, I say it reverently, without thinking of Him as a missionary God. Unless we are prepared to accept a God whose char acter carries with it the missionary obligation and idea, we must do without any real God at all. When men believe in God in Christ the argument for mis sions becomes still more clear. It is by Christ that the char acter of God is revealed to us. One of His most bold and penetrating words was His declaration, “The day will come when they shall slay you, thinking that they do service unto God, and these things will they do unto you because they have not known the Father or Me.” The best people of His day, -
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