October,.1942
T H E K I N G ’;S B U S I N E S S
363
Significance of the New s By DAN GILBERT Washington, D. C., and San Diego, California *
" I Will Come Again" By R. E. NEIGHBOUR He said, "And, if I go, I'U come again"; And so— I echo back a loud Amenl And say— Lord, quickly come. And catch away Thine own! The hour, dear Lord, is growing late; The world reels on in war and hate; How long, O Lord, how long? Must we march on, Apd look, and watch, and wait, • Till Thou dost open heaven's gate? Let not the din Of sword and shield and sin Forever blast the air I The blare Of bursting bomb and cannon Ev'rywhere Is wreaking vengeance. Rend the heavens! Lord, arise! Break through, and bend the vaulted slqes; And quickly come! Come, catch Thy ratisomed to Thy home! Now, let Thy judgments earth enthrall. Till men shall tremble And shall call For Thy salvation; Till thqy be Prepared to welcome and to follow Thee. O Lord, the Jews are praying yet For their Messiah; Come to Olivet! O take Thy throne and reign! Take Thou from off the earth Its desert wastes, its dearth. Its sorrows' and its pain; Let wars and famines ever cease. O come. Thou God eternal. Prince of Peace. DEMOCRACY OF THE SPIRIT: • Our Lord Jesus Christ thanked His Father in heaven for hiding heavenly truth from the wise and prudent, while revealing it to babes. “Not many wise men after the flesh,” not many mastei minds, not many giant intellects, are chosen to enter into a knowledge of the things of God. But God has re vealed His truth to every pure and humble heart, every trusting and be lieving soul, who comes to Him in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. The meek .of mind are rewarded with an understanding of divine truth which is hidden from the big of brain and haughty of spirit. There are illiter ate scrubwomen who know more abou’ God than , does the greatest thinker who ever denied the deity of Christ. There are country preachers who haVe [ Continued on Page 367] Lord, hasten down Thy saints to crown;
THE GOD OF DEMOCRACY: • The religion of the Bible, the Christian faith, is the only religious basis our democratic people ever did have, or ever could have. When the common people, in America or any where else on earth, are robbed of their faith in the Bible and the God of the Bible, they are divested of all religious motivation, made dead to all spiritual appeals, made indifferent to all religious values. For the masses of men, there can be no substitute for Bible Christianity. They will—they must—believe the Bible or believe nothing. They will— they must—worship the God of the Bible or 9hey will worship no god at all. ROBBING THE COMMON PEOPLE OF FAITH: • The tendency in this scientific age is to rob man of the God who walked with our fathers, who answered their prayers, who carried their burdens, who was their Friend, Companion, and heavenly Father. The common man— like many of his leaders^—has been stripped of an all-sufficient faith in the God of the Bible—whom all men of faith can know and love. He has been denied the one God who is real to him. In His place, he has been of fered a god wh'o is unreal, unlovable, and unknowable. Even such a thinker as Walter Lipp- mann has confessed that many of the “modern concepts of God” are hope lessly incomprehensible to him. The average man will bonder whether even Professor Whitehead can grasp the meaning of his own definition of God: “God is a Factor of Limitation or Determination which makes it possible for the blind abstract flux of ‘creativity’ and the unchanging but transcendent ‘eternal objects’ to unite and give us the actuality of our concrete world.” The masses of men are intellectually incapable of believing in the “new Tods” of the scientific age. The highly Nationalized “faith” concocted in the ?ducational world makes no appeal to ‘hem. When the men of our time were iobbed of their faith in the God of the Bible, the ‘vast majority, of them were left without any faith at all. They did not have even the artificial and man-made “faith” which human ism offers. When the common stream of humanity was shut off from the
Scriptural Source of spiritual re sources, the milk of human kindness began to dry up in the breast of “ordi nary” humanity. Decency, honesty, love, brotherhood began to lose their meaning for the average man. Self- discipline and moral restraint became rare phenomena. CHALLENGE TO DEMOCRACY: • Communism, Nazism, and Fascism represent the system of “mobocracy,” as opposed to democracy. These isms have made their appearance every where that men have been divested of their faith in Bible Christianity and have been abandoned spiritually to starve. Social scientists have described this subversive process, as “the revolt of the masses.” THE BETRAYAL OF THE PEOPLE: • As* we survey what has happened to the masses of men in Europe, and what threatens to happen to them in our own. countfy, we can paraphrase the words of Edwin Markham: “Who made him dead to-rapture and despair, A thing that grieves not and that never hopes, Stolid and shunned, a brother to the ox?” • Who made the masses of men dead to the things of the spirit and blind to moral values? The answer is clear: those who took Christ out of the com mon man’s heart; those who deprived him of the Bible, the only Book which could ever uplift and ennoble him. Who made the common man a prey to the propagandists of hatred and strife? Who led him to believe that he can do as ,he pleases, that he can rob and steal and kill? Who made him pleasure mad? The answer is clear: those who taught him to turn his back upon the Word of God; those who led him to scorn the authority of the Scriptures over thought and conduct. THE COMMON PEOPLE'S FAITH: • The Bible is the only Book in th^ wo#ld that is written in such a mar velous and miraculous way that its truth is made available to the intel lectually lowly on an equal basis with the mentally mighty. That is one of the proofs that the Bible is the product of supernatural power. Only Infinite Wisdom Himself could write a Book which can impart His own wis dom to finite beings of the most lim ited intelligence.
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