February 1932
T h e
K i n g ’ s
B u s i n e s s
54
T he E yes of the J ew B egin to O pen But, behold, as apostate Gentiles depart and join hands with age-old infidelity for the destruction of the Christ who came from the eternal Godhead into the world by the way of the virgin womb, to die in the sinner’s stead, and to rise and enter the holy of holies as the sinner’s Mediator—be hold, the blinded Jew is beginning to see ! As yet, he may “ see men as trees walking,” but the important fact is that the incurably blind man of the. centuries sees ! All Israel is yet far from beholding her God. But the point of tre mendous significance is that every sign of the times indi cates that the heart of the Jew grows, warm toward Jesus, the Christ, while the heart of the Gentile grows cold— that the Jew is drifting back! The Gentile drifts away ! For nearly twenty centuries, the Jew has had nothing but utter contempt for the Lord Jesus Christ. His very name was taboo in all his house. When pronounced in his presence, among Gentiles, could he do no more, he could spit on the ground. But now, what a sudden and amazing change of attitude ! The age-old hatred disappears. The stubborn “ fig tree” buds. The utterances of the most prom inent rabbis and the most influential of Jewish scholars have been creating consternation in the ranks of the ortho dox. Heartbreaking as it may be to the orthodox, hun dreds of thousands of Jewish youth are listening, wonder ing, questioning. Mr. Solomon Shwayder, a Jew of Den ver, sometime ago advanced a proposition to convene the Sanhedrin, and to reconsider the attitude the Jew should take toward Christ. That proposition met with favor on the part of many rabbis. Mr. Shwayder says : Christ is the greatest Jew that ever lived, and the Jew has lost considerably by refusing the teaching o f Jesus Christ. We cannot get away from Jesus. In years gone by, if we were asked by our children who Jesus was, we could hush them up and say He was the great enemy of our peo ple, but we cannot shut them up now. The name o f Jesus is coming into all our homes over the radio, and the sweet ness and the beauty of it all is appealing to them. When they ask who is Jesus that teaches people to love one another, and that died for sins, we must have an answer. . . . . Could it be possible that our fathers made a tre- , mendous mistake when they rejected Him? Several years ago, Rabbi Wise delivered a sermon in the Free Synagogue of New York, urging all Jews to accept Jesus as their own Prophet. “ We regard Him,” the famous rabbi said to the Christian, “ as not yours only, but ours. He was the greatest Jew that ever lived. We want to venerate Him ; we do venerate Him.” It is a far reach from such an acknowledgment to an acknowledgment that Jesus Christ is Immanuel, “ God with us,” but it is a far ther reach from that position back to where the very name of Jesus was banned with a curse. Dr. Max Nordau says : “ Jesus is the soul of our soul, flesh of our flesh. Who, then, would think of excluding Him from the people of Israel? St. Peter will remain the only Jew who said of the Son of David, ‘I know not the man.’ ” Dr. Isidor Singer, editor of the Jewish Encyclo paedia, asserted: “ I regard Jesus of Nazareth as a Jew of the Jews, One whom all Jewish people are learning to love.” An epoch-making book was published back in 1925, by Dr. Joseph Klausner, the foremost orthodox Hebrew scholar in the world. It is entitled: “ Jesus of Nazareth: His Life, Times, and Teaching.” It thrilled the world of Jewry. No wonder ! For, as the Jewish World said : “ For the first time in 1900 years, a rabbinical Jew discourses on thé life o f Jesus without prejudice, and represents the founder of Christianity as the embodiment of religious and ethical idealism.” Israel Zangwell admitted that: “ Jesus [Continued on page 66]
“ The dark ages” may have been days of darker deeds. There may have been fewer true believers in past days than now. Infidelity may have been more rife. But never before, on the part of the church, has there been such utter abandonment of the great basic doctrines of “ the faith once for all delivered unto the saints”—doctrines that for cen turies were universally accepted by the Christian church. Dark as were the ages, tremendous as were the moral lapses of professed believers, yet as long as the church did not deny faith in an inspired message from God, a virgin- born body for her Saviour, an incarnate God, His sub stitutional death upon a cross, and a resurrected body of flesh and bone from the tomb— just so long there was a firm foundation for a revival, just so long there was hope! But “ if the foundations be destroyed, what can the right eous do?” (Psa. 11:3). It can only mean that “ the ful ness of the Gentiles” is at hand, and that an apostate church is ripening for the same “ severity of God” that overtook an apostate Israel. It is. worthy of note that it was not because of a moral lapse (bad as such a lapse ever is) on the part of Israel that “ the severity of God” fell upon her. Jesus said to the Jews, “ I f ye believe not that I am he, ye shall die in your sins” (John 8:24 ). To the most moral men of His day, Jesus said: “ Verily I say unto you, that the publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you.” Why ? Because “ ye believed him not: but the publicans and the harlots believed him” (Matt. 21:31, 32). It matters not that the modernism that is permeating the eptire church today fawns about the person of our Lord, calling Him great, and good, and lovely, and exemplary—a teacher, a prophet, a priest—the Jews were not loath to acknowledge Him to be all that. His claim to deity was the rock of offense oh which they stumbled. For that “ blasphemy,” they crucified H im ! “ For a good work we stone thee not; but for blasphemy; and because that thou, being a man, makest thyself God” (John 10:33). As it was then with the Jew, so it is now with the Gentile— it is not Christ the man, but Christ the God, that is being rejected. The development of apo’stasy did not begin in “ the dark ages,” but with the rise of the so-called “ higher criticism” at the close of the eighteenth and in the early days of the nineteenth centuries. It began with a subtle undermining of faith in the inspiration of the Holy Scriptures. In “ the dark ages,” the Holy Scriptures may have been denied to the common people; but their inspiration, as originally given, was not denied even by the wicked Church of Rome. Following the denial of the inspiration of the Bible, natur ally there ,came unbelief in the deity of Christ, in the total depravity of fallen man, in the need of redemption through atoning blood, in the resurrection of the body from the dead, in the future punishment of the wicked, and even in the eternal dwelling place of the righteous in the city of God. The professed church today is almost completely leavened with the doctrine of natural growth rather than regeneration; human education rather than the sanctifica tion of the Spirit; natural morality rather than divine grace; a human example on the cross rather than a divine substitution on the cross; the divinity of Jesus rather than the deity of Jesus—the divinity of Jesus, but also the divinity of man. Satan, indeed, fashions himself as an angel of light, seeks ordination and appointment; and, par adoxical as it may seem, he exalts Christ as he degrades Him. It is the same Satan who once entered into Judas, that, by kissing Christ, he might murder Him. The angelic talk of modernists about “ the loveliness of Christ as our example” deceives none but the dupes of Satan.
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