King's Business - 1921-07

727

T HE K I N G ’S B U S I N E S S renewed life, “Let us maintain good works” (Titus 3:14), realizing that for them the Christian will be rewarded (1 Cor. 3:13, 15) and that in the absence of them the Christian will be punished (Heb. 12:6-11). As to salvation in its completeness, let us learn that nothing we can do will add to it, for “it is not by works of righteousness which we have done but according to His mercy that He saved us, by the washing of re­ generation and the renovating of the Holy Ghost, which He shed on us abund antly through Jesus Christ our Savior’; (Titus 3:5,6). The Jewish Sabbath, commemorative of the finished creation and the day when Christ lay cold in the tomb, was a part of that Old Testament law to which we are no longer bound. The nec­ essity of the observance of “days and months and times and years” (Gal. 4:10) is a thing of the past. In this age of grace the Christian for joy, like the early Christians, worships the risen Christ on the Lord’s Day and every other day. Our Adventist friend still, with the Jew, who carried on the cere­ monies which were mere shadows, keeps the Sabbath, the day of a dead Christ, and goes about his business on the day when others are rejoicing in the fact of a risen and glorified Savior. “Consist­ ency, where art thou?” NEUTRAL MEANS NOTHING Tell me not of neutrality: it is out of the question. Ah! here is a case of neu­ trality upon record in this book; “Curse ye, Meroz!” Why?—what had they done to expose themselves to this bitter male­ diction? Had they taken up arms against Jehovah? No! Had they gone over to the enemy, and fought against the chos­ en people? No! What, then, had they done? Nothing! Their neutrality was their crime. “Because they came not up to the help of the Lord, to the help of the Lord against the mighty.”—Dr. R. Newton.

THE REALITYOF SIN TODAY i U 9 W 9 9 W gg2222222W999W999999999S?99999999yW922SZ2S!^

HAT is the spiritual signifi­ cance of the situation we find ourselves in when we have to prove to the world the reality of sin? For that is just what

the Church of Christ today is facing. A widespread and persistent denial from many quarters that sin is anything but a wrong notion, a false idea, or that “sin is missing the mark,” or really that sin­ ning is a stage of man’s evolution as he is “falling upward!” Christian Science, falsely so-called in both names, propa­ gates the doctrine that sin is not really guilt or corruption, hut only a mental error. “New Thought” sublimizes sin away into a misty dream; other new cults follow the same will-of-the-wisps in­ to the same swamps, but the most ser­ ious denial of the guilt and depravity of sin is fi^m our Unitarianizing theolog­ ians like the Bishop, who needs often to he reproved, and who at Chautauqua, New York, argued for nearly an hour that sin is only “missing the mark.” He told the people that “the Hebrew word for sin” and "the corresponding Greek word for sin” in the Bible both mean “missing the mark” and then elaborated this minimizing of sin for nearly an hour. He did not say, possibly he did not know, though he was president of a Uni­ versity of our Church, and in the schools and colleges a student for probably twen­ ty years, that there are ten or twelve more Hebrew words translated sin, ini­ quity, transgression and so on, and twelve or fourteen more Greek terms so translated. Was it by accident that he chose the weakest term in both Hebrew and Greek for sin, a sin in that case, of omission and negative in guilt as of course some sins are? Here, then, the Church faces a fatal weakening of her

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