I WILL make my address very short, dear friends, and give you time to get back from your suppers. I have in mind a subject that might be appropriate to us for a few moments of consideration. What is it that the Lord specially expects of you and of me? What is the testing matter in God's sight? We might view the subject from various standpoints, and something might be said from them all, but to my understanding, there is just the one thing that covers all. We might say that God desires us to have a great deal of meekness, a great deal of gentleness, a great deal of patience, a great deal of longsuffering, a great deal of brotherly kindness, and a great deal of love in general. And we might lay stress upon one or another of those, and they are all very properly to be emphasized when thinking of a Christian's duty and a Christian's privilege; but when we think of what God is requiring of the Church, there is one thing that I believe covers the entire matter, and if you and I see that one thing it will help us in all that we do and all our thinking along those lines.
We ask ourselves what was it that Jesus specially did, what quality was it that Jesus specially developed? What was it that the Father saw in him that was well pleasing? By what process did he gain a great prize and come off a conqueror? What was it that he did? What was it in all his experiences that he learned? The Bible answers that he learned Obedience by the things which he suffered. And I understand, dear brothers and sisters, what we have specially to learn is Obedience. Now I would like to impress that thought in my mind and in the minds of all who are present. God looks for obedience. When Jesus came, you remember, and was thirty years of age, and presented himself at Jordan in consecration to do the Father's will, what did he say? Lo, I come to do thy will, O God – I have come here to be obedient to your will, whatever your will is, in things great or small, difficult or easy – your will is that which I am here to do. And that should be your attitude and mine, dear brethren and sisters. This is the only proper attitude. I have found some dear Christian brethren and sisters who seem to have a different thought. They seem to think, now God wants me to make some sacrifice, and I will make a particular sacrifice of my own. Jesus did not so say. Jesus did not say, I am going to make a great big sacrifice of my own. He says, I just want to do whatever the Father wants to have done, nothing more, nothing less. And so it is with you and me. We are not to pick out something, and say, Now how can I scheme something and work up something and do something that will be novel, and God will say, What a wonderful thing you have done. We are not able to surprise God, dear friends, by any wonderful things we can do, and every time we think we are going to do some wonderful thing, by the time we get through with it we will find it is a very foolish thing – sure to be so. And just the right attitude, then, is Father, what is thy will? What sayest thou for me to do? All of Jesus' ministry was spent in this way. You remember he began thus at the very beginning of his ministry and said, Lo, I come, as in the volume of the Book it is written of me, to do thy will – everything that is written in the Book; everything that is in the Bible. Everything that God has been telling for all of these previous centuries what the Messiah would do, I am here, Father, to do any and everything you would have for me to do. To my understanding, our Lord Jesus did not at first comprehend all that he was to do. Those things written in the Book were still hidden from him. When he made his consecration, you remember he had not yet been begotten of the Holy Spirit. It was after he had made his consecration, and after he had gone down into the water, and symbolized his consecration by baptism, that the Holy Spirit came on him, and the higher things, the heavens – were opened unto him and he began to see deep spiritual truth, began to understand those things of which he had knowledge previously but not an understanding. Just the same as you and I at one time had some knowledge of what was written in the Law and in [CR146] the Prophets, but we did not have an understanding of it. We knew the Scriptures stated this and stated that, but what did that mean, and what did this mean? So it was with our Lord, before he was begotten of the Spirit. He knew those things were written there; he knew those things written in parables and dark sayings; he knew God had that all covered up, and he knew he had come to be the Messiah, he knew the Messiah was to fulfill all those various things; but now, what was he to do? He did not see how those things could be fulfilled, for he did not know what they meant. There he saw the bullock of the Sin-offering and the goat of the Sin-offering, and the scape-goat, and the sprinkling of the blood – what do they mean? And he saw the typical Pass-over lamb, saw the killing of the lamb, and the eating of its flesh, and the sprinkling of the blood, and the eating of the unleavened bread, herbs, etc. – but what did they mean? He saw the first-born of Israel were passed over and he saw that they became the Priests and Levites of the future – but what did it mean? Just as soon as he received the Holy Spirit, those things began to be opened up to him, he began to understand them. Then what did it mean? Oh, then he saw that he had already contracted to do the things that he now came to understand fully. That is to say, he began to see that the bullock represented himself and his sacrifice; he began to see that the copper serpent on the pole was merely a type of himself; that as Moses raised up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the son of Man be lifted up; and that as people looked to the serpent and were healed of the bite of the fiery serpents, so humanity is to look up to him as the great sin-bearer, and have their sins and their pains, etc., which are the result of sin, healed of the bite of the serpent.
But the whole lesson for Jesus was, first, would he, without understanding all the terms, agree to do God's will, at any cost? He did that when he left the heavenly glory. He said, Father, if you have a glorious plan, and if you have intended me to be the instrument of that plan, although you have not told me how it is to be worked out yet, nevertheless I am ready; I will lay aside the heavenly glory, and I will assume the earthly condition – you see that is a necessary step. And that is all I ask, just let me see one step and I will take that step. So he found himself in fashion as a man. Now he said, Father, what is the next step – I delight to do thy will – everything that is written in that Book. Then the Father showed him the things written in the Book. Then you see how the remainder of his life was filled up with doing all the things that he could find were written in the Book. Now what was all of that? Obedience – the spirit of obedience. It was the spirit of obedience from the beginning that prompted him to lay aside the heavenly glory and assume the human nature. It was the spirit of obedience then that led him to say, Now, Father, here I am; for this purpose I have come into the world, now here I give myself away. Obedience. Then after he began to see more and to understand better, obedience still came in, and he said, this is the thing to be done, and that is to be done next, and the other is to be done afterwards, so step by step our Lord's pathway was a pathway of obedience and an obedience that cost him something. Every step that he took cost him something.
Now dear friends, you and I are invited to walk in his footsteps – in his steps of obedience. It is the obedience that God is counting. It is the obedience that is going to make you acceptable in God's sight. Obedience to the Commander means loyalty. Suppose a soldier in the army who would say, Did the general issue that order?
Well, I don't understand what that means, I am not going to do it until I understand more about it. As soon as I know where the thing ends, then I will begin to be obedient.
That man would not be a loyal soldier. The business of a soldier is to be obedient. He knows that when he enlists. So when you and I have enlisted to be soldiers of the cross, it means obedience, whatever the Lord's providence brings to us, whatever the Lord's words shall indicate to us, to do not only his will, but to do it with delight.
We mentioned this morning how some have had a hesitancy saying, "Now is it necessary to be baptized?" – a wrong spirit entirely, you see, to be enquiring as to it being necessary – as though it were compulsion. There is no delight in that. The thing that will bring divine blessing is to delight to do God's will. Father, what is thy will? Show me what it is, make it plain to me, I am ready, willing, anxious to do everything that is written in your Book – all that you have marked out for this elect class.
Jesus has gone before. He has set us an example, and we are walking in his steps of obedience. They have led us thus far, and a blessing has come with every step of obedience we have taken, if we have taken it with the right condition of heart, and a blessing awaits every future step you and I will take if we simply take the future steps with loyalty to God and delight and pleasure in doing the will of our heavenly Father. And thus right down to the end of the journey, all the steps will be blessed of the Lord, and all who thus follow in the footsteps of Jesus, in the footsteps of obedience, thankful obedience, will all find themselves shortly, dear friends, in the kingdom.
UP, up, my soul, the long-spent time redeeming;
Sow thou the seeds of better deed and thought;
Light other lamps, while yet the light is beaming;
The time, the time is short.
Think of the eyes that often weep in sadness,
Seeing not the truth that God to thee hath taught;
O bear to them this light and joy and gladness;
The time, the time is short.
Think of the feet that stray from misdirection,
And into snares of error's doctrine brought:
Bear then to them these tidings of salvation;
The time, the time is short.
The time is short. Then be thy heart a brother's
To every heart that needs thy help in aught.
How much they need the sympathy of others!
The time, the time is short.
I HAVE in mind, dear friends, the words of our Great Master and Teacher, just before he died. "Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid." It seems to me that sounds the very beginning of man's experience in sin. Fear has been one of the terrible scourges through which he has afflicted himself, in a great measure. Father Adam and mother Eve were afraid after they had sinned. They went and hid themselves. And so there is a general tendency on the part of mankind to hide from God, realizing that we are sinners, realizing that we are imperfect, realizing that God is perfect, realizing that his law is perfect. Realizing that there is a penalty attached to his law, man has feared the worst and apparently the great adversary has taken advantage of this element of fear in our natures to endeavor to drive us still further from God.
If the world could but put away the fear it has, if the world could draw nigh to God, how assured we are in God's Word that he would be pleased to draw nigh also to the world – to every one of his creatures. But this element of fear entering in has destroyed our conception of the Almighty and has made man to consider the heavenly Father as the greatest of all evil beings, in a certain sense of the word, the one he should most dread, the one he should most fear. And so we find today, looking all over the world, that the heathen are in great fear and great trepidation, and they indeed worship no other God than a demon and have no other sensibility on the subject except that of fear. The element of love seems not to enter into any other religion than the religion of the Lord, our God, as presented to us in the Bible. No other religion I know of inculcates love for the Creator, or tells about the Creator having love for his creatures, but as heathen mind has thus turned against God through fear, we believe the Scriptures to indicate that they are turned through doctrines of demons, misrepresenting the Almighty, misrepresenting the divine plan, giving them all sorts of terrible thoughts respecting the future; so it has been to a large extent that the same prince of demons, and the same demons, have operated to some extent amongst Christian people, so that all of our creeds have taken on the coloring of the heathen religion; and as many of the people came from the heathen religion, it was a very easy matter for them to bring with them their misconception of the Almighty. And apparently, although the Bible teems with declarations of God's goodness, God's mercy, and God's love, yet this seems to be the thing that is very difficult for those who are out of harmony with God to understand, and the more they turn away from God, the more they delve into sin, the further they feel they are from him, and the more they feel that his anger should properly be against them.
It was not until we became Christians in the true sense of the word that we began to know something about God's real character, and began to trust him as a God and be able to look to him as our Father. The first good lesson for us that we learned at the very beginning of our Christian experience was that God had mercy upon us, and that he sent his son, and that Jesus died, the just for the unjust. We were so mistaught respecting the heavenly Father that perhaps many of you, like myself as a child, were inclined to reverence Jesus as the personification of love, and to think of the heavenly Father as the personification of anger and severity; and you would come to the Father through Jesus, hiding behind Jesus. And this thought was so thoroughly instilled in our minds that it was a difficult thing when we came to know the Lord better to fully get rid of all those thoughts of fear.
I saw recently a statement in the newspapers respecting a Sunday School Superintendent. He said to the children, "What do you think you would do first when you would get to heaven?" One little girl held up her hand.
"Well, tell us what you would do?"
She says, "I would hide from God behind Jesus."
There it is, my dear friends – run and hide from God behind Jesus. So this is what we have been doing all along. This is what the whole world has been doing – hiding from God. And it is fortunate for us, for to some extent we learned, even if it was indirectly, of the love of God through our Lord Jesus Christ; but we have to remember, and we do remember as children of older growth, that the Bible everywhere tells that it was God's love who planned the whole arrangement for our salvation, that it was the Father who arranged for the Lamb to be slain from before the foundation of the world; and it was the Father that sent, in due time, his Son into the world that he might redeem the world; and it is the Father who declares that he is the redeemer and the Savior and besides him there is none other; that is to say, while Jesus is the active person in this work of redeeming and saving, our Lord Jesus is merely carrying out the program of the heavenly Father, whose love we have in the past so much doubted. But now as Bible students, as we have come to study the Word of God more fully, we have come nearer to God, we have heard his message, "Draw nigh unto me and I will draw nigh unto you," and then the Lord Jesus revealed the Father as he said. He was revealing the Father more than he was revealing himself. He came that he might show forth the Father's character; he came as the exemplification of the Father's character and plan; he came telling us he was not doing anything of his own volition, but entirely according to the Father's gracious program. And so in this verse, "Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid," then another verse, "Let not your hearts be troubled; Ye believe in God, believe also in me." The Jews had been believing in their heavenly Father, but had not been able to fully grasp the greatness of God and his mercy and love, but now they were to see in Jesus an exemplification of mercy and love, and they were to associate these in their minds. The Father is in the Son, and the Son is related to the Father, and there is one God and one plan – one God and Father of all, and one Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
Then the message of God to you and to me, in our Savior's words is, "Let not our hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid." Fear hath torment. There is ground for fear with sinners, but there is a ground then again for losing that fear – we have been redeemed with the precious blood. Something has been accomplished by our Savior. There is the opening of a reconciliation through the merit of his sacrifice. At one time we but vaguely comprehended what this great transaction is which our Lord Jesus accomplished. Now, by the grace of God, the due time seems to be here when his true people may see more clearly than ever in the past something of the length and breadth and the height and the depth of God's love, and the method by which God is working all things in harmony with his own justice, his own love, his own wisdom and his own power.
The first lesson we learn, then, is that we are sinners, that God is just and that he has pronounced a just penalty against sin. And it helps us so much when we begin to see what divine justice called for – that it did not call for eternal torment, but it did call for the life of the sinner. When we got that fact clearly before our mind, it was very helpful to every one of us, I am sure. After we saw clearly that he who gave life to mankind had a perfect right to determine that if that life would not be used in harmony with the divine law for God, for righteousness, in harmony with God, then that life should be forfeited, should be canceled, it helped us to see the next point plainly, that God having declared human life forfeited by Adam and his race, had provided also a way by which that sentence might be set aside, namely; that he would send his Son and that his Son would pay the price of redemption, and through the merit of the sacrifice of Jesus, the just for the unjust, there would be a reconciliation opened up whereby man could be recovered from the death sentence. Then the beauty of God's plan was thoroughly seen by us when we perceived that Jesus paid this very death sentence, that he did not go to eternal torment for us, or to purgatory for us, but he went into sheol, he went into hades, he went into the tomb, he went into the state of death – he died that he might recover us to God. Now the matter seemed quite clear to our minds, death the wages of sin, and Jesus dying and paying that very penalty.
Then the next thing in order would be the application of that penalty. When we say that Jesus paid the penalty we are using the word "Pay" in an accommodated sense; that is to say, it cost him so much, and that cost to him when he was thirty years of age, and for three and a half years when he was laying down his life and finished laying it down at Calvary, that was the cost to our Lord Jesus for our recovery. But while that was what it cost him, and that, therefore, was what he paid, in the sense of laying down life for our purchase, that was merely getting ready the purchase price. After the purchase price was thus in the divine hands, after Jesus had died and his death was a sufficiency for the sins of the whole world, it was in the hands of justice, but not yet applied to anybody. Then came the next step in the [CR148] program – the application of the merit of Christ. And what a wonderful philosophy opens up before our minds when we see how God is working in such a philosophical manner – much more so than anything we ever dreamed of! I tell you I get more in love with the heavenly Father's gracious character, and all the various details of it, the more I see of his gracious plan. How could we help but admire and love him, one who is so just on the one hand and so loving on the other, and one who is so fair in all his dealings – absolutely fair.
When we saw that God did not begin to deal with the world, although Jesus had died for the world, we saw the object. He tasted death for the man; it was not merely tasting death for the church. He was the satisfaction for the Church's sins, but not for the Church's only, but also for the sins of the whole world. Then we say, "When did he apply his merit for the world?" The answer is, "He has not yet applied his merit for the world." Is that the reason that the world is not reconciled to God? Yes, that is the reason the world still lies in the wicked one, as the Scriptures declare. Had the merit of Christ been applied to the world, and had the world been taken out of the hands of the wicked one, then the world would not be in the hands of the wicked one now; but the fact that the world still lies in the hands of the wicked one, that the world are still the children of wrath, as the Apostle said, is the evidence that Christ did not apply his merit to the world. Well then, what did he do? Did he do nothing? Oh, he did something, my dear friends; he did something of importance to you and to me. He did the first part of his great work. What was that? He ascended up on high and there appeared in the presence of God. For whom? For us. Who do you mean by "us"? "Us" who believe. "To us who believe he is precious" – to all who believe he is precious – to all who believe in the forgiveness of sins and reconciliation through his blood. Only those who believe, not to another soul. Not to an unbelieving soul has he ever granted any share in the merit of his sacrifice, but only to us who believe. And how did he apply it to us? The Scriptures say that he imputes it to us. Now what does "impute" mean? Impute signifies to make an indirect application.
Let me give you an illustration: Suppose I needed a thousand dollars and I went to you and said, "I would like to have a thousand dollars." And you would say, "I will neither give you nor lend you a thousand dollars, but I will endorse a note for you for a thousand dollars." Now then, if your endorsement is satisfactory, and will bring me the money, your endorsement is an imputation of a thousand dollars to my credit at the bank. So in case of the Church, Christ does not give to the church the value of his death; the value of his death is restitution only; he does not give us restitution. He does not wish us to have restitution; he has some better things in store for us. The heavenly Father has proposed that this class that is now being called may become heirs of God and joint heirs with Jesus Christ. And since he is on the heavenly plane we also hope and trust we will be with him and see him as he is and share his glory on the heavenly plane. If so, we do not want restitution; we do not want the earthly life-rights of Jesus. We want merely what our God has provided. You need the present life and present body you have, as far as it will go, and you want an imputation of the merit of Christ to cover all the blemishes of your body, every blemish you have through sin, you need an imputation of Christ's merit covering all that imperfection. Why so? Because the call of this Gospel age is for you to present your body a living sacrifice, and you could sacrifice what you have, you could offer it to God, but God could not justly and consistently accept it as a sacrifice because it is blemished. Therefore it needs to have the imputation of the merit of Christ added to it, covering its blemishes and imperfections, and just as soon as that point is attained, satisfaction is there and God is ready to receive your offering as long as this Day of Atonement continues.
Bear in mind that this Day of Atonement lasts for more than 1800 years. The beginning of the Day of Atonement was in the days of our Lord's flesh, and his was the first great offering, and God accepted it because he was holy, harmless, undefiled and separate from sinners. Then after he ascended up on high, he gave an imputation of his merit, he endorsed, for all of those who would come unto the Father through him, and who would take up the cross and follow him – he became endorser for all of these, he imputed his merit to their contract so they could be acceptable in the sight of justice; and forthwith those who were waiting on the day of Pentecost, you remember, were immediately accepted as the holy Spirit came upon them, indicating that God had accepted their sacrifices, and God there begot them of the holy Spirit that they should be New Creatures in Christ, heirs of God and joint-heirs with Jesus Christ, their Lord. And the same imputation made at that time has stood good for all the Lord's people of this class all the way down through this antitypical Day of Atonement, and still stands good and will stand good down until the last member of the elect shall have availed himself of this privilege and shall have presented his body a living sacrifice. And just as soon as the last member of the elect company shall have finished his course, all that part will be at an end, for thus it is written of this time. Now is the acceptable time, now is the day of salvation. That is to say, now is the special time of this special salvation as members of the Body of Christ; now is the acceptable time in which God is willing to accept the sacrifices of those who choose to come in and walk in the footsteps of the Savior, and take up their cross and follow him, laying down their lives in the service of God and of righteousness and on behalf of the brethren.
Do we then, dear friends, have clearly in mind what constitutes this presentation, or imputation of merit on our behalf? And do we see this, that if some of that merit was applied to Saint Paul and Saint Peter and others of the early church way back there when they died, they needed no further imputation; they were through with the imputation; they merely needed the imputation so that the sacrifice could be offered, and when the sacrifice was complete the imputation was at an end; and so this imputation or loaning of the merit of Christ to the various members of his Body continues down through the age; and when the last of these notes which he endorses shall have been paid, when your life shall go out, when your contract shall be finished, then by the grace of God, the matter will be at an end and all the merit that was imputed to you and to me and to all those who believe, and who take up their cross to follow him – all of that merit will be back again in the hands of justice, ready to be applied, not in the same manner, but in a different manner, to the world. Well, how will it be applied to the world? "How could it be differently applied to the world," says one? Why, very easily. It would not do the world much good to merely impute Christ's merit to them. Why not? Because whenever the imputation would be at an end the merit would no longer be there and all the right to life would be gone. What Christ wishes to do for the world is to give to it that which it lost and which he laid down, namely; the right to earthly life and the right to earthly dominion that Adam had at first, that Adam forfeited through disobedience, and that Christ won for himself by his obedience, and it is now his estate to give away to mankind.
So during the Millennial age, under the new Covenant which Christ will inaugurate at the beginning of that age, all the world of mankind will become his; they will no longer be children of wrath. Why not? Because of the merit of Christ applied to the sealing of that New Covenant on their behalf. God says to them, "Your sins and your iniquities I will remember no more." So then the whole worlds' sins and iniquities will be blotted out as far as God is concerned, and the whole world will be turned over to Jesus. They will not be perfect; they will not be worthy of eternal life; and if they were to fall into the hands of God immediately their imperfection would lead them to commit sin again; but they are not allowed to fall into the hands of justice; the great Mediator keeps them in his own control. Having purchased them with his blood, he holds them in his control; he stands between mankind and divine justice, and there as a Mediator between God and man he deals with mankind to lift them up and bring them to full human perfection, giving them all the good blessings of restitution which they need. So as many as are willing by the end of that Millennial reign of Christ will be back again to all that was lost in Adam, all that was redeemed on Calvary, and then all those unwilling to make progress, undesirous of coming back to God, will have died the second death, from which there will be no recovery. Then the Mediator will step from between and he will turn over the restored world of mankind and the restored Eden with it to God, and divine justice will then deal with the perfect race, because all will be able to stand the test of divine justice; all should be, because they will all be perfect and God does not propose that mercy shall intervene between divine justice and any perfect individual. If the individual is perfect, God's law is not too severe for the perfect individual to observe, and to have eternal life under it; and if he will not come into line with the divine law, he shall not have everlasting life.
But now this class that has come to know the Lord, after they have become members of the Body of Christ, it is for these to learn more and more to have confidence in God; and it is to this class that the word of God is applicable, all things shall work [CR149] together for good. To whom? To you who have accepted the Lord Jesus, to you who have become new creatures in Christ, you who have become related to the heavenly Father through his Son; all things shall work together for good to them that love him more than they love houses, more than they love land, more than they love parents or children, wife or husband, more than they love themselves. I believe that with the majority of people, self-love is the great difficulty that stands in the way – self-love, self-gratification. It is easier to deny everything else than to deny yourself – but that is exactly the condition Jesus laid down, "If any man will be my disciple, let him deny himself" – self-denial.
Well, my dear friends, if we have come into this blessed relationship to the Lord, if we have made a thorough covenant, if we are seeking to walk in the footsteps of Jesus to the best of our ability, if we are trusting in the merit of his blood for our continued acceptance with the Father, then our text is true and applicable to us, "Let not your hearts be troubled about anything, neither let it be afraid." There is nothing to fear. As Saint Paul says, "If God be for us, who could be against us." What would it amount to if they were against us? They will be against us sure enough, but if God be for us, what will it amount to if the whole world be against us? One with God is a majority, someone has well said. That is the right thought. Let not your heart then be troubled, you have a great friend; the King of Glory is your friend, your Father.
One of the brethren was speaking of one of the pilgrims to an outsider and the outsider was not very well able to understand how the work was carried on without collections, and the brother said, "Well, he has a rich Father." He did not explain which father it was that was rich, but I know which one he meant. It is a rich Father we all have. How could we be poor? And besides this rich Father has sent us word that we are his heirs. He says, "If you are my children, then are you my heirs," heirs of God and joint heirs with Jesus Christ our Lord to an inheritance incorruptible, undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven for you who are kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation, ready to be revealed in the last time – in the end of the age. Now I believe that it is very nearly ready to be revealed. I believe we are down very near to the end of this age. I am hoping that very soon you and I and all of God's faithful ones shall be inheritors of all things; for, as the Apostle says, "All things are yours because you are Christ's, and Christ is God's."
Now then, why let your heart be troubled, or be afraid? The only thing that should trouble your hearts or mine, or which should make us fearful in any sense of the word, would be not what men might do, nor what men might say, but what might be done by ourselves as expressed by the poet when he said in that beautiful verse,
"O let no earth-born cloud arise,
To hide thee from thy servant's eyes."
That is the only thing to fear, that is the only thing to trouble your soul, and that is the only thing that troubled the soul of our dear Redeemer. Nothing that the Jews or Gentiles ever did or suggested worried him at all. He was not troubled about any of those things. The only trouble that we see he ever had was in the Garden of Gethsemane. There he was in trouble – "Now is my soul troubled, and exceeding sorrowful, even unto death." Why? Well, he was wondering whether or not he who represented so many important issues, he who had undertaken such a great and wonderful work, not only wonderful in respect to himself in that he had left the glory of the heavenly plane and became a human being for the suffering of death and the redemption of mankind, and the pleasing of the Father, but he was wondering whether or not he had done everything that he could have done and had done it perfectly to the Father's pleasement. That was the source of his agony in the Garden. And so Saint Paul tells us, you remember, when he had offered up strong crying and tears unto him who was able to save him out of death, he was heard in respect to the things which he feared. He feared that he might possibly have made some slight error, and since he stood alone as a representative of the whole issue, one slight infraction of the divine law, one slight infraction of his covenant would have dashed the whole matter. No wonder, as the hours were few between the time of his praying and the time of his crucifixion that he wanted to make sure there was no earth-born cloud between his soul and the Father's, and he was heard. Although the statement is not found in our common version in respect to the angel appearing and comforting him, I think it must have been so, and perhaps some still older version may be found in which that will be recorded. I believe some messenger from the Lord must have come in there, because there was such a wonderful change in our Master's demeanor; just as soon as he had reached this climax of sorrow and wonder and perplexity, and prayer, something came to him, and the most likely thing I can think of is the thing recorded in our Gospel that the angel of our Lord came and gave him a satisfactory message that he had done his work nobly and faithfully, and the Father was well pleased with him. Then he was calm again, the calmest of all the calm on that wonderful day in which he was lead as a lamb to the slaughter. Not a word was said, and not a thing was done to oppose the things done by the shearers. And so if our hearts are in tune with the infinite one, then all is well, all is peace within.
As our dear Master was tested on the particular point of obedience, that is the particular point for you and for me to learn – loyalty to God, because obedience means loyalty. The soldier who on the field of battle is obedient to the orders of his general, is accounted loyal; and if he were to say, "I do not see the meaning of that order or that command or why we should march in this direction under the hot sun," he would be disloyal and in rebellion against the law under which he is a soldier. So you and I are soldiers of the cross; we are under the eye of the Captain and under the direction of the great heavenly Father, and in the battle that he has for us we are not to be the judges, but we are under his direction, and he assures us that all things shall ultimately work together for good. It is for us to trust and to be obedient.
So then, dear soldiers of the cross, let us go on with strong hearts. Faithful is he who called us, who also will do for us exceedingly abundantly more than we could have asked or thought, according to the riches of his grace and his loving kindness in Christ Jesus our Lord.
THE text that is before my mind at present, dear friends, reads, "To us who believe, he is precious." To me this carries with it a great deal of weight. It appeals to my mind as very true in my case. The more I believed the more precious the Lord became to me, and I believe that it is so with all of God's people; the more we have learned to know about the Lord, the more we came into real touch with him by faith and obedience, the more precious he becomes to us. And here we see the relationship between faith and knowledge, and we perceive that many of us in the past have greatly erred in that we have failed to see the importance of knowledge. Knowledge of itself, as the apostle suggested, might puff us up, but love would build us up, and yet we could not have any love if we did not have some knowledge; because, how could you love that of which you knew nothing? Hence the Scriptures seem to put these two matters in relationship one to the other – faith and obedience, faith and love. As we progress in knowledge we may progress in faith built upon that knowledge, and as we progress in faith and knowledge we must come to the point of obedience; otherwise the faith will begin to wane and we will not be able to take on further knowledge. Has it not been so with every one of us here present this afternoon? As Christian people have we not [CR150] found that it was necessary for us to feed on the Word of God, that it constitutes the bread to our new natures? In proportion as we got the knowledge and mixed it with obedience and with faith, in that proportion our love for the Lord and our progress as new creatures was manifest.
And what about believing? I think we have had very lax ideas on this subject of believing.
Perhaps we have even given slack thoughts to others which were not helpful to them, the ordinary thought in the human mind that all who are not believers are lost and that "lost" means to go to an eternity of suffering. It would have been a hard-hearted person who would tell his friend or neighbor, "You are not a believer; you, therefore, are lost; you are going to eternal torment." That would have been a difficult message to give with our misconception of the divine arrangement. But when we come to see what God's real plan is, namely; that his purpose and arrangement for dealing with the world is all future, that the present time is merely the time for dealing with believers, and believers only, then it makes the matter entirely different. We see that these believers are called to be the elect of God, called to the great high calling of joint-heirship with Christ, called to the new nature, called to all of those wonderful things which eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of the natural man. And we see, then, dear friends, that since this calling is for the believers, it does not imply that the unbelievers will lose everything, but they will lose this high calling, this special privilege, this special opportunity; but they will still have in God's gracious arrangement the opportunity that God has arranged shall come to the world in due time – the opportunity for attaining earthly perfection, the earthly Eden, and all of those things will still belong to them.
This brings us, then, to the thought, What constitutes a believer? We must take the Scriptural proposition and say that a believer, from God's standpoint, is not one who merely believes with the mind, but as the Scriptures say, "With the heart man believeth unto Salvation." It is a heart matter, not merely a mental matter. The Scriptures also say to us, you remember, that devils believe and tremble. Believing merely that the Lord Jesus Christ came into the world, merely believing he is the Son of God, merely believing he died for human sins, merely believing he arose from the dead to be the justifier of those who believe would not constitute us believers in the Scriptural sense. To believe with the heart is what our Lord Jesus referred to when he said to the disciples, "If you believe, if you will be my disciples, if you will come in with me, deny yourselves, take up your cross and follow me." Those who thus take up their cross and become followers of Christ are the believers, those are the ones to whom he is precious; those are the ones that are precious to him. We are to make this clear-cut, and I think perhaps sometimes in talking to some of our neighbors and friends we have not gotten the matter as clear-cut as we might have done.
Not long ago I was speaking to a lady and she said, "I believe in Christ."
I said, "You have never given your heart to him?"
"Well," I said, "why then do you call yourself a believer?"
"Oh," she said, "I believe Jesus died, and I believe he gave the ransom price, too."
"Well," I said, "That amounts to nothing. You have not become a believer in the Scriptural sense of the word."
"Why," she said, "is that true?"
"Then have I not come into divine care and providence at all?"
"Not at all, not any more than a heathen has. The fact that you have lived where you had an opportunity did not make you any better than the heathen, but it was rather worse on your part; you have had the opportunity, you have had the knowledge and the heathen man never had opportunity and knowledge, and his responsibility in God's sight is less than yours."
"Yes," she said, "I do believe."
"But you do not believe in the Scriptural way. Suppose I should tell you over in a certain place was a million dollars, and it would be yours if you would go there immediately, and before anyone else would get there: you would go there quickly, if you believed. If you did not go there it would be because you did not believe it, because you would have an interest in getting a million dollars, and what you could do with it. Now God has offered us something with which a million dollars is no comparison in value at all, not worthy even to be mentioned. This great gift of God, through Jesus Christ our Lord, that we might become heirs of God and joint-heirs with Jesus Christ our Lord, is beyond comparison with a million dollars. Whoever, therefore, says he believes and yet neglects to take the proper steps whereby he will get his share of that great blessing belies his own testimony. In that case he does not really believe that there is such a prize, that there is such an opportunity, that there is such a proposition on God's part."
"Well," this lady said, "why, Brother Russell, do you mean to tell me then that my prayers to God are of no avail? I pray regularly to God, and have done so all my life."
"I mean to tell you that your prayers do not come up before God at all. I mean to tell you that you have no standing before God at all."
Perhaps this is what I should say, for all I know, to someone here present this afternoon; I would at least discharge my duty. The person who does not come to the Father through Jesus does not get connection with the Father at all, neither in prayer, nor in any other way. And there is no way of coming to the Father except through him as our advocate. There will be by and by a way in which the whole world will come to God through the great Mediator, through the mediatorial kingdom, through the great work which Christ as Mediator will accomplish for a thousand years, of instructing, and chastening, and helping mankind – all the world will have a chance in that.
Then this lady said to me, "If then my prayers are not heard, and as you say God has no interest in me, am I to understand, if that is really the case, that God has no interest in me?"
"You are to understand that exactly, that God is not taking any interest in you any more than he is taking interest in all the remainder of mankind. He has taken that much interest in you and in all the remainder of mankind, that he has provided a glorious opportunity in the millennial age in which every one, even all the remainder of Adam's race, will have a glorious opportunity; but God is not taking any particular interest in you as an individual, because you are spurning God's arrangement and God's offer of the present time, and he has only the one offer now. It is my duty to tell you this matter very plainly. There is no other door, no other way, no other arrangement by which you can now draw near to God except under the call he is now issuing. He has only the one call and one blessing now – 'Ye are called in one hope of your calling.'"
This lady, however, was familiar with the Scriptures, and she said, "I have relied upon the Scripture that said, 'Ask and ye shall receive, knock and it shall be opened unto you.'"
But I answered, "It says, 'Ask and ye shall receive, knock and it shall be opened unto you', but you have never joined the 'Ye' class, you have never joined the 'You' class. You must join the class referred to, or else the promise is not yours."
She then said, "Would you advise that I would not go to prayer at all?"
"That would be my advice, that you do not pray to God at all, if you have no interest in him, and he has taken no interest in you. If there is no arrangement by which you draw nigh to God, you have no confidence whatever and the sooner you find it out, the better."
So then, dear friends, this text means something – to us who believe he is precious. If he were sufficiently precious to all and they knew about him they would be believers in this Scriptural sense, in the sense of acting upon their faith. Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness; but he showed his belief by his conduct, by his obedience to the divine proposition. And so you and I, if we believe that Christ died, if we believe he rose again, let us then act upon the proposition that God has made through him, that he is willing to receive us as his children, that he is willing to give us his Holy Spirit, that he is willing that we should come in under his love.
I was not at all surprised to hear that lady say at one time that her heart was quite unsettled, and she knew not what to think. And I said to her, "That is your condition: You need the settling power of the Lord; you cannot be happy in the sense you would like to be happy until you have accepted God's terms, for God has no other arrangement by which permanent and proper happiness can enter into human life except through relationship with him, and this relationship is through faith and obedience of faith. It is a reasonable service. How could we offer less?" The more that you and I understand the matter, the more we are persuaded that if we had a thousand tongues, if we had a thousand lives, as the poet has said, "It would be an offering far too small to offer to the Lord." [CR151]
Very well do I remember how as a child this matter appealed to my own mind. When I was about fifteen years old, I said to myself, See here, you understand that God has permitted you to pray to him as a child because your parents were God's children, and because the believing parent had a sanctifying influence and effect over the child from the standpoint of divine providence. So I said to myself that evidently it was all right that as a child I should pray to the Lord; coming through my parents I was acceptable to the Father; this is indicated in the Scripture. But now I am going to be fifteen years of age, and I am thinking about other matters, is it not about time I was thinking some about my relationship to God as a personal matter? Wouldn't God be offended at me more or less, and would not his love and favor and care to some extent depart from me if now I begin to have a reasoning mind, and a thoughtful mind, and if I should reject his favor and say, Oh, well, I care nothing for this blessed relationship with God, and now I will let it lapse? I have the opportunity of making it for myself, I have been under divine favor as a child, and have realized divine protecting care, and have gone to the heavenly Father in prayer regularly, and have known something about the comfort and peace, even as a child, but now I am at about the time I do not want to let the matter go too long. Then I thought of the fact that Jesus was thirty years of age when he was accepted, when he made his consecration. I said, Yes, but evidently that was under the law, and now I am not under the law; I am not limited, therefore, that I must wait until I am thirty. Now I have the mind, the faith, to know and appreciate, and am I not to understand that God will be willing to accept my heart now? So I said to the Lord, I will go and I will be very glad indeed he has given me this precious privilege of giving my heart to him. And I knelt down and just as quietly as we are talking at this very moment I told the Lord that I wished to be his child, that I was glad of the opportunity that he had left open through the precious merit of our Savior, that I might come near unto him in a personal way, that I very much appreciated the privileges that I had enjoyed in childhood years and days, now I would accept for myself the gracious arrangement and consecrate my life wholly to him.
I have never regretted it, dear friends. He was precious at that time, as I saw that without the merit of his sacrifice I would have no hope of a future life at all; he was precious when I understood that through faith in his blood the Father counted all my imperfections covered with the robe of his righteousness; he was precious as I came to understand more and more of the details of the philosophy of the atonement work; and every day, every hour, I feel the cleansing power as we sometimes sing; every day and every hour he becomes more precious to me. And I think I am merely expressing the sentiments of all Christian brothers and sisters; I believe that it has been the very same with you.
I am merely telling this story that day by day as you seek to walk in the footsteps of the Master, and to lay aside every weight and every besetting sin and to run with patience the race, and realize more and more what the length and breadth and height and depth of God's love is, the more and more precious may the Redeemer become to you.
He was first of all our Savior, and we realized we might have a future life; and then after that the preciousness of our high calling, that he was our bridegroom and we were his bride class in process of selection, then the relationship became still more dear. Every day he becomes more precious to us who believe.
Now, my dear brothers and sisters, we have been seeing how the Lord becomes more precious to us. Shall I say on the other hand that we become more precious to him also? Well, I believe that is true. I believe that the Lord loves most those who have been most fully developed in his character-likeness. In other words, he loved us in one sense of the word while we were yet sinners, then he loved us with a special love when we turned from sin to serve the living God, and when we gave our hearts entirely to him, he tells us of his love, and the love of the Lord for the church I believe continues to increase in proportion as we grow in grace, grow in knowledge, and grow in his character-likeness.
Let me remind you of something we have in the Scriptures along this very line. We read that Jesus loved all of his disciples. You remember the words, "Having loved his own, he loved them to the end" – no waning of his love, not even when on that last night they all forsook him and fled; his love for them never decreased. That love was more intense for some of the disciples than for others. You remember those three disciples mentioned so particularly and so frequently, Peter, James and John. These three we remember went with him on some of his special missions; as, for instance, when he went to Jairus' home. Jairus' little daughter lay dead, and Jesus took with him Peter, James and John and went in and the others were all excluded while he with these and the father of the little girl were present in the chamber of death; and Jesus called the maid from the sleep of death.
Again, it was the same three disciples, Peter, James and John that he took with him into the high mountain and was transfigured before them, and he left the other nine disciples down at the foot of the mountain.
Again, it was this same three, Peter, James and John, on the last night on which he was betrayed, that Jesus had come with him a little farther. Judas having gone to sell his Master, Jesus left the eight behind in the garden and went a little farther with the three, Peter, James and John, and then he left them and went a little farther by himself. But notice that these three were especially dear to the Master all the time. Is there not a lesson to us in this? Must there not have been a reason for it? Could you imagine that Jesus would especially love these three disciples without some special reason? There was surely a reason, and we have no doubt the reason was their zeal, their love for him. Note that these were the three disciples who were always near to the Lord. I remind you, for instance, that it was two of these, James and John, who went to a city of Samaria to buy some food for the Lord and the other disciples, and how indignant they were when the people of that city refused to sell them any food, and said, "If your Master will not come here and heal our Samaritan sick the way he heals the Jewish sick, then we will not sell you any food – to the Jews and buy your food." James and John thought, "Now here is the Master, here is the anointed of God, and to think that we should be so treated, and that we who are to be with him in his throne, and to be his associates in his kingdom, shall be treated so also." They came to Jesus and said, "Lord, what shall we do? We have been insulted. Shall we command fire to come down from God out of heaven and consume these men and their city?" And Jesus loved the zeal they had, but he said, "My disciples, you do not understand the spirit you have; you want to be my disciples, you have a holiness of spirit, you have an earnestness of heart, but you have not gotten the right conception. The Son of Man did not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them. Let the poor Samaritans alone."
And you remember on another occasion when Jesus said, "Whom do men say that I am?" Peter spoke up and said, "Some say this, and some say that."
Simon Peter answered, "Thou art the Messiah, the Son of the living God."
He was the one who had the courage of conviction to speak out his mind. And Jesus said to him, "Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona, flesh and blood has not revealed this to thee, but my Father."
And so, dear friends, on many occasions, these three showed their special zeal and earnestness in respect to the Master, and the Master showed special interest in them. What does that teach us? It teaches us this: That there will be differences in the Church of Christ, even amongst those who will be accounted worthy to sit with him in his throne; the Lord will love all of them, and the Lord will bless all of the faithful ones, who will be more than conquerors, and the Lord will have some who will be specially near to him. You remember how James and John suggested to the Master, "Lord, the others would not appreciate it so much as we do, but will you grant us the special privilege, we would like to be just next to you, we love you so much; grant, or permit, when we come to your kingdom, that we may sit one on your right hand, and the other on your left hand."
"Oh," said Jesus, "do you know what it costs to get on the throne at all? Are you able, are you willing, to pay the cost of getting on to the throne? Are you willing to be baptized with me in my baptism into death? Are you willing to drink with me of my cup of suffering and ignominy?"
They said, "Yes, Lord, we are willing for anything" – the thought paraphrased would be, "With your assistance, and divine assistance we will go through anything to be with you; we love you and we want to be with you." "Very well," said Jesus, "That being your heart condition, I assure you that if you maintain that condition" – I am paraphrasing, dear friends, not using the words of the text, merely, – "if that be your heart condition, I will guarantee that you will be somewhere in my throne, for that is the very class the Father is calling, that is the very class to whom the throne will be given, but as to who shall sit next to me, on the right hand, and on the left, is not mine to give. That position will be given according to the principles of justice. My Father, who is the representative of Justice, will determine who [CR152] shall be at the right hand and who at the left hand; that is not for me to decide; that is for divine justice to apportion out amongst the loyal and faithful ones."
So all the Scriptures you remember draw our attention to this great fact, that as star differeth from star in glory, so also is the resurrection – the chief resurrection, the resurrection in which you and I hope to have a part. So if we are of the Lord's people, if we have entered into this blessed relationship with him as true believers, as believers who have given their little all and who have been accepted in the Beloved – if this be our condition still that is not enough; we must go on to perfection, we must go along to the end of the journey; we must not only make the consecration, but we must live the consecration; and not only so, but the zeal with which we show our love, our consecration, will determine whether or not we shall be of the little flock or of the great company. And, further, even if we have the zeal, that will bring us into the little flock, still there is a further zeal which will determine how near we may be to the Master in the throne. With that thought before our minds, and with the thought that he becomes more precious to us every day, and every hour, as we come to see more of the deep things of God, and the length and breadth and height and depth, we have that thought I suggest to you, that he becomes more and more precious to us, that we show to him more and more of our zeal, more and more of our love, that we count not our lives dear unto ourselves: do not think of your life as a very precious thing. If you do you will hold on to it so tightly that you will never make a sacrifice of it; we must be of those who love not their lives, but are willing to lay down their lives; that is our consecration, that is our engagement with the Lord, and he leaves us with a free hand as to that, with a loose rein as it were, and that is the reason that all through the New Testament there is nothing of law set forth or commanded. The Lord leaves us to ourselves largely to see with what degree of zeal we will carry out that proposition, and how much we will sacrifice, and how free and with what loving zeal we will sacrifice.
So, then, dear friends, I will not detain you longer at this time but emphasize the text before us, "To us who believe he is precious." Let this preciousness continue, let it increase until by and by we may be awakened in his likeness, and share in his glory, and all the blessings which God has in reservation for the faithful ones who love him more than they love houses, or lands, or parents, or children, or husband, or wife, or self, or any other thing.
Text: "If ye do these things ye shall never fail, but an entrance shall be ministered unto you abundantly into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ."
WE HAVE been hearing with a great deal of interest respecting these things that are so necessary to us as new creatures in the Lord; these things that are to constitute us conquerors; these things whereby we become copies of God's dear Son, our Redeemer. And now it is not merely that we believe these things: it is not merely if we profess that we will do them, but the apostle says, if we do them. You see there is a difference between believing these things, professing these things, and doing these things.
When I heard the dear brethren point out with a great deal of care and earnestness how much is signified by meekness and gentleness, and by patience, and by long-suffering, and by loving kindness, and by love, I said to myself, "I wonder when I look into the audience how many I would find that seemed as though they were doing all of these things to the full extent that the dear brethren have been setting them forth. And I doubt, my dear friends, if there is one in the house. Is that right? And I was afraid that there might be a danger of some humble meek, gentle, mind, not thinking too highly of itself, saying, "Well, there is no hope for me then; I have not all of these qualities and graces in that full development you have been telling about."
How may we understand this matter, then, since it is not merely believing, and it is not merely consecrating, but the Apostle says, "If ye do things." Well, the truth of the matter, I think, is this: That the Lord does not expect perfect doing on your part or on mine; he expects doing, but he does not expect perfect doing, because he remembers our frame, he knows that we are dust; he knows that with the very strongest desire of heart along all of these lines, as the Apostle Paul has declared, we cannot do the things which we would. How then are we judged by the Lord? He will not judge us merely according to believing? No, that is a different question. Believing is good, knowing these things is important, and fully trusting in the whole matter is very essential, or we would not go on; and consecration is good – very important; no man or woman can run in this race unless he enters the race; the entrance of the race is the first thing; but the entrance of the race is not the last thing. The entrance of the race is of importance at the time, but after the entrance of the race, it is all important to run, and, to run and keep on running until we have reached the end of the course. So then the doing is important because God is going to look to see how much we do – not merely how much we profess, or according to the last illustration of the vine given us, he is not going to merely look at the leaves, not merely at the branch, and the thrifty-looking sort of growth; he will not merely look at the bud of promise that represents the bunch of grapes, but he will wait to see the development of the grapes – he will wait to see the growth of the Spirit of the Lord in each one of us as a child of God. The thought in my mind is, that the amount of doing God expects from you and from me is each according to his respective ability. Now that suits us all. God expects you to make a full consecration of your heart, and he expects you to do all in your power – let me emphasize the word do – do all in your power, and he does not expect you to do one thing more than that. Is not that happifying to us? Is it not that a source of consolation to us to know that while we see all of these things, all of these beautiful graces and fruits of the Spirit manifest in our Lord, and testified to by the apostles, yet what the Lord will require of us is, "Have we done what we could?"
Sometimes I have heard some of the brothers and sisters saying in testimony meetings, "Well, I am not perfect, but I do the very best I can." And I think if that dear brother or sister is doing the best he or she can, he or she is a saint surely, and the Lord will have them in the kingdom without any doubt. That is all that is necessary, to do the very best that I can – nothing more. So let us bear in mind, then, that what God is looking for in us is not absolute perfection but relative perfection – that perfection which gives to him the very best of our ability.
Now, if we do these things we shall never fail. "Oh, well," says one, "I have made a good many failures; I have failed many times, and the Lord says, 'If you do these things you shall never fail.'" My dear brother, if you would do all of these things perfectly I presume you would never fail, you would never make a mistake. If you had meekness perfect, and gentleness perfect, and long-suffering perfect, and brotherly kindness perfect, and love complete, how could you fail? You could not fail. But that is not the apostle's thought. The apostle knew who he was talking to; he knew he was talking to imperfect beings like himself, and like you and me, and he was not putting up some impossible proposition like the law that no one could keep; he was putting up the proposition to those who were called by the Lord's grace and who are making their calling and election sure, If ye do these things, if you are adding to, and if you are modifying, and growing in grace – if this is your attitude of mind, if this is your heart's desire, if you are doing the best you are able along this direction, God will see to it that you will never fail. How fail? Why that you do not come out a failure. You will stumble, but stumbling is not failing. We do not want [CR153] to stumble, even; we do not want to feel discouraged if we stumble, but if we do stumble we want to learn a lesson from stumbling, that our experience may teach us to be more careful through all the remainder of the race course. Some of the noblest characters you have ever known in the race course have made failures at times; that is, they have stumbled; but the Scriptures say, "Though you stumble yet you shall not be utterly cast down."
You see the difference between stumbling and being utterly cast down. One who is utterly cast down is one who will go into the second death; he has failed; he has absolutely come short.
Then among those who shall do these things and gain the kingdom, doing the things they are able, fight the good fight of faith as they are able, running the race with patience to the extent of their ability, looking unto Jesus the author of their faith, until he shall be the finisher – among them will be some who will miss the kingdom, and yet not so utterly fail as to go into the second death. There is the great company class. How sorry we feel for them, in one sense of the word, that they should have had the privileges of the race course, the privilege of the high calling, and yet have failed to make their calling and election sure. We feel sorry for them, and yet we feel glad in another sense of the word that our heavenly Father is so loving, and kind, and gentle, and so long-suffering that he would not, merely because they had not run up to the extent of their ability, cut them off entirely, but he will provide a way in which they shall receive chastisement and correction, that they might ultimately come off conquerors, though they would fail to come off more than conquerors.
If we do these things we will not fail. Be of good courage, as the apostle says; if you have endured something look back and take encouragement from what you may have endured in the past. You remember the apostle in his letter to the Hebrews calls their attention to a certain time and place, and says, "Call to mind the former things, and how you all endured a great fight of afflictions." Have you anything of that kind now going on? Someone might say, "No, I have not any fight of afflictions." What is the matter, my dear brother, if you have not any fight of afflictions? There may be a reason. Look carefully. Have you joined the enemy's ranks? How is it there is no fighting being done? Has Satan turned around, and is he fighting for righteousness? How is it you have nothing to fight for? If you have not anything to fight for now, can you look back and see any time when you endured a great fight of afflictions? If you can, take good courage from that, and say, "Well, the Lord helped me before in that fight, and he is still on my side, and he will still be with me." Then another thing; the soldiers are not always fighting; they are not always having afflictions. Our gracious leader leads us sometimes in green pastures and beside the still waters, and he sometimes gives us a convention trip, or a feast, or something, and we do not have perhaps the same amount of fighting under those circumstances.
This reminds me of a sister who came once to me and said, "Brother Russell, I am afraid that the Lord is not on my side. I am afraid he has not accepted my consecration."
"Well," she said, "Brother Russell, I know it says in the Scriptures that through much tribulation ye shall enter the kingdom, and I am not having any tribulation, and I am just afraid that the Lord has never accepted my sacrifice."
I said, "Sister, that would of course be a very serious condition, because the Lord says that whosoever will live godly shall suffer persecution. So to be without persecution is rather a suspicious sign. But let me encourage you a little to say that perhaps you are so full of joy and faith and love and devotion to the Lord, that you count it all joy and do not notice that you are having affliction – perhaps that is it."
"Well," she said, "you do not know how glad I would be if I could think that that were true. I am sure that it is not true. I would indeed rejoice in some tribulation for the Lord's sake, and the truth's sake, but I am afraid that is not true in my case."
"Well, now," I said, "I am not competent to say, but I suggest to you then that perhaps the Lord is giving you a little time since you have come to the knowledge of the truth in order to strike down your roots into the ground firmly and get well rooted and grounded and built up in the Lord, and in the love of the truth, and in your faithfulness to the Lord – perhaps that is why he is giving you a quiet time. Perhaps he is going to let the storm fall over you, and all around you, by and by, and now he is giving you a little quiet space. Are you using it well?"
"Well," she said, "I am glad of the suggestion; I will try to use it so I will have the roots well grounded and well fastened to the Lord and to the truth, and well sustained, so that if by and by the storms shall come I will be able to stand them."
I think that is the way with the Lord's people generally. They will have a blessed time, and frequently the dear friends realize that after a quiet time, a good time at the convention, for instance, then they have a very severe time, perhaps a stormy time afterwards, and all kinds of trial of faith, and patience, and brotherly kindness, and of meekness, and of gentleness, and of love – all sorts of things come.
"The Lord your God doth prove you whether ye love the Lord your God." Those who know about such matters tell us that plants that have no storms would take very little root, and that really the shaking of the plant in the wind helps to make it root down more deeply. I am not skilled in that line to speak of the matter myself, but I do know that in the Christian experience it is true that only those who have passed through trials and difficulties, much tribulation, will be ready for the kingdom. So then are you getting ready for the kingdom? Do you expect tribulation? How are you standing it now? If your tribulation has not yet come, do not forget that it must come; it is not merely the tribulation class that will pass through tribulation but the saints who get into the kingdom will suffer tribulations. The main difference between those who will get into the kingdom class through much tribulation, and those who will come up on the plane of the great company and through great tribulation, will be the way in which they have received the tribulation – how it comes to them. The little class is to have the tribulation because of their loyalty to the truth, because of their courage, because of their faithfulness in praising him, and lifting high the royal banner, and in showing forth the praises of him who called them out of darkness into his marvelous light.
As the Apostle says of that class, they will take their tribulation joyfully, glad to suffer tribulation, rejoicing in tribulation, and in everything giving thanks; and the great tribulation class that will pass through tribulation, washing their robes, are those who will have avoided the taking of the tribulation, and will have avoided the standing up for the truth for fear of the death, for fear of the shame, for fear of the contempt of those around them. Therefore, theirs will not be tribulation in joy but tribulation in sorrow. Let us, then, be of those who have the tribulation joyfully, counting it all joy that we might be accounted worthy to suffer for the name of Christ. As the apostle says, "The spirit of glory and the spirit of God shall rest on you." We should have that testimony that we are God's children, that we are following in the footsteps of him who set us the example that we should walk in his steps.
Now, if ye do these things, ye shall never fail. God is not going to have in his kingdom class any who have not meekness, gentleness, patience, long-suffering, brotherly kindness, love – and how short a time there apparently is in which we have to prepare for this! We, of course, are not qualified to say whether it will be a day, or an hour, or a year, or two years, or more; it is not for us to decide that; but we may be sure that the right spirit in us would lead us to be so earnest and energetic that we would want to have Christ's likeness formed in us just as quickly as possible.
And do not think of these things of the Spirit as having to be cultivated in their order; that you must first get meekness, and then next get another, and so on, but you are getting a little more of this, and of that, and of the other, day by day; you are cultivating all along the line. Just the same as in school; the child in school does not merely study spelling and reading first, and then take a course in arithmetic, and then take a course in writing. There is a partial lesson in the subject of reading, arithmetic, writing, etc., each day. So it is in the school of Christ. The Lord wants us to learn all along the line every day. And we have such a splendid Teacher, and he has set us such a beautiful example, and we have given our hearts to him, and have pledged our lives, and he has given us the earnest of our inheritance, the first fruits of the Spirit, that it might be in us and abide with us, and enable us to come off conquerors. Only as we have this glorious hope, only as we have this glorious promise, only as we have this glorious example – only thus can we have the courage for the difficulties by the way, that we may indeed come off more than conquerors through him who loved us and bought us with his precious blood – to whom be glory and praise forever! Amen.
The Scriptures give us the thought that it is not displeasing to our heavenly Father, but rather pleasing to him, that parents should consecrate to him the fruit of their bodies. Very early in Bible history we have an account of how the parents of Samuel presented him in an especial manner to the Lord, to be an especial servant of the Lord. Also in our Lord's day many of the parents brought their children and desired that they might have some kind of a blessing, or some kind of a consecration, to the Lord. And the disciples were disposed to say, Not so, and to tell the people that our Lord's ministry was not for children, but for grown folks. The Master intervened, and said, "Suffer, little children to come unto me; forbid them not, for of such like is the kingdom of heaven." And he instructed us that unless we should become like little children we would not be fit for the kingdom. The thought seems to be, that the Lord would inculcate simplicity, purity, honesty, sincerity, such as we find in the mind of a little child – trustfulness in the Father and trustfulness in those with whom we have to do. So we as God's children are to become humble-minded as little children. I presume you have all noticed that a little child has absolute confidence in its own parents, unless something shall have occurred to break that confidence; its father is the greatest man on earth; its mother is the grandest woman on earth – "My mamma said so", "My papa said so." The little child is willing and ready to believe everything from its parents. So we as children of older growth and begotten of the Holy Spirit, are to have such faith and trust in our Father in heaven that we have absolute confidence in him as a little child, fully trusting that all things that he has promised he is able and willing to perform.
It might be asked by some, "In what way will this matter profit either the parents or the children?" I cannot answer that. I would say, however, at the very outset, that nothing in God's Word puts this as a matter of obligation upon any parent. It would be just as well to have the matter clear before our minds – it is not an obligation. Those who come asking a blessing upon their children do not come because the Lord sent for them, or because he commanded them so to do. Indeed it would not be an offering upon a part of the parents if it were a command. You cannot make a sacrifice of that which is commanded. But it is a privilege.
Very many Christian people have had this same thought respecting consecration, and their minds have been satisfied in a large measure by the usual custom in the nominal churches of baptism of infants – sprinkling them, as it is called, and to the Episcopalians and Lutherans it means very much more than it means to the others. To these it means generally an escape from hell by getting the child into the church. We are sure that this is the understanding of the Catholics, for they say so, and many of our Lutheran friends have the same idea exactly, and some Episcopalians seem to attach some significance to the matter of sprinkling of infants. However, many Protestants have gotten away from this idea, and merely view the matter as a consecration of their children to the Lord. They say, as in olden times it was the custom amongst the Jews to circumcise their male children, so now, instead of that, we have this matter of sprinkling or christening the child; and sometimes they have a thought of consecration. Of course, we would not think of sprinkling a child and calling it "baptism," because to our understanding it would be contrary to God's Word, contrary to anything that the Lord or the apostles taught. We, therefore, could not go that extent.
It has been frequently brought to my notice how many parents feel they would like to do something with their children; they would like in some manner to say to the Lord, "Lord, we give you this child," and they would like to say it in some public manner; they would like to make it definite. They would like to give the child something it could remember in after days; they would like for the child to be able to look back and say, "I was consecrated to the Lord in my childhood." And indeed, my dear friends, that is my own experience. My parents told me that I was duly christened in the Presbyterian church. They supposed that was baptism according to the Scriptures, and I have only kind feelings toward them for their very good intention in that connection. While I understand it was not baptism, yet I do appreciate the fact they were willing and glad to give me to the Lord, and invoke a divine blessing upon my life. And I remember very well my mother saying to me one day when I was about seven years of age, "Charles, when you were an infant I consecrated you to the Lord, and I asked him that if it were possible you might become a minister of the gospel."
I remember what I answered. I said, "Ma, I think that is very nice, but it seems to me that I would rather be a missionary to the poor heathen than to be a minister here in a civilized land; it seems to me there are so many churches and so many preachers here, and that the poor heathen have so little opportunity of coming to the knowledge of the Lord, that I would rather be a missionary."
My mother said nothing on the subject further; she left it there; but I have been thinking over it lately, dear friends, and I think, perhaps, the Lord is going to fulfill both of these wishes; that in the present time I have the opportunity of ministering the truth, the gospel of the grace of God, to many people in civilized lands, and if it pleases the Lord, by and by that I shall be associated with the Lord Jesus in his kingdom in the work of blessings all the heathen, all the families of the earth; so I am preparing to be a missionary, you see, even in heathen lands.
With these remarks, dear friends, calculated to arouse thoughts in all our minds, and put away any suggestions to the effect that there is any thing obligatory about such matters, we now accept those who are here today, and ask the Lord that he will bless them.
The blessing of the children by Brother Russell was very impressive. Brother Russell placed his hand upon the head of each child, then addressing it by its Christian name, used words about as follows: "May the Lord bless you and keep you, and give your parents wisdom as they seek to guide you in the ways of the Lord."
THE text that is in my mind for this occasion is found in the prophecy of Isaiah: "Lord, who hath believed our report, and unto whom is the arm of Jehovah revealed?"
We might apply this text in some degree to the meeting this afternoon. We delivered a report. The word 'report' in this text signifies message, proclamation. For who hath believed the message – proclamation of truth? Who has discerned the arm, the power of the Lord, as revealed in the Gospel, and God's great provision for man's needs? In the audience of somewhere near a thousand people, how many we wonder, had a hearing ear, that they could hear? How many understood something of the length and the breadth and the height and the depth of the love of God, which passes all understanding? We might perhaps have been inclined to think, "How could anyone do otherwise than be impressed by the simplicity of God's message, and yet we remember that the Scriptures [CR155] show us, and the facts prove to us that it has been so during the eighteen hundred years since the message of the Lord has been given, that it has been proclaimed here and there, and very few have believed the report. Look out all over the world today and see how few there are who believe the message of God in respect to his great plan. The great majority seem to be blinded by the adversary, the God of this world who blinds the minds of those who believe him not, lest the light of the goodness of God should shine into their hearts. The apostle's words imply that the great adversary is the one who is especially interested in beclouding the mind, and that God's truth is the special thing intended to enlighten the mind, and that not everybody is in condition of mind to be profited by this great light that would shine forth.
The question asked by the prophet implies that only a few would hear the report, would hear the message, would hear the Gospel, only a few would give heed to it. When we view the matter in the light of the eighteen centuries, and then think of how little faith there is today, we can well understand God's standpoint in speaking through the prophet and saying, "Who is it that has believed?" Practically nobody. We indeed see great churches, and sometimes fine buildings, and sometimes large congregations and yet if we would inquire for the faith once delivered to the Saints, if we inquire for an intelligent understanding of God's great plan, how few would you find who have that understanding, who have delivered the message, who have accepted it, and who are walking in the footsteps of Jesus.
Some might say to us, "Brother Russell that is a wrong view, why everybody believes the report. Here in this city, it is named after a saint, and there are other cities along the coast all named after saints practically, and all through the land are churches of various denominations, and they have all believed Jesus, they have all believed the report." But we cannot so think; we must agree with the Lord's message through the prophet to the effect that a very few have believed the message. Quite a good many have believed the mixed messages that have gone forth; the message, for instance, of our Catholic friends that if they belong to the Catholic church they will be pulled through purgatory and finally get to heaven. A considerable number believe that in some measure, but is that the message once delivered to the saints? We say not. It has little of it, but very little – not enough to call it good tidings of great joy. Then some others have believed our Presbyterian friends, that God is electing some, and they hope they belong to the elected company. But is that the full message, or is it only a little of the message? Surely the latter. It is only a little of the message and not the report of God's grace toward all mankind, and not merely toward the church. Who hath believed the message that God sent?
Then our Baptist friends also limit the matter, saying that it is by election, and then additionally it is by the water route after you have the election – the election and the water route both. There are dear, good friends amongst the Baptists, but very few of them believe the message.
But we are not wishing to lay too much stress on these various features of the divine plan. Our thought would be that God very graciously has a message that even the poor and the ignorant in considerable degree can accept and lay hold on. Who hath believed the report – not doctrinally, as theologians, but in a general way the message that all mankind have heard – at least all of the civilized lands that had an opportunity of hearing the message – that God is willing to forgive our sins, God is willing to receive us as his children, that God has made a way and he invites us to walk in it? Now put it in the very simplest form, and how many have believed that? Oh, says someone, "Why a great many believe that." I doubt it. Remember the Scriptures say, "With the heart man believes." What is it to believe this message of the narrow way, and the privilege of reconciliation with God, with the heart? I think that we will all agree that to believe that message with the heart would mean that it would thoroughly enter into us that we would believe it with all our minds and all our strength, to be thoroughly convinced by it, to have no doubt about it. If they believed the message of God's love and favor, and of reconciliation to him, and of becoming joint-heirs with Christ in the heavenly kingdom, would they not forsake everything that they might take up with that message? Can you imagine anybody in the world really believing that God would sentence our race to death – not to put the worst construction on the sentence, but simply put it as the Bible does – and that he did it justly, and then that he had also made a provision in Christ, our Lord, whereby we might return to his love and favor, and that he would receive us again as children, forgive all our trespasses, all our sins that are past and bring us back right into his own favor, and be our Father and we should be his children, and he would take care of all our interests, and all things would work together for good to us, and if we had passed through certain trials we should have his assistance, then by and by in only a little while, a few short years, he would take us to himself in the heavenly kingdom and make us associates with our Lord Jesus Christ on the spiritual plane – who could believe this with the heart and not be exercised by it? Who could possibly say, "I do not care for that, I really believe it is so, but I do not think it worthy of any of my attention?" I think that very few would really believe that message, even in the very simplest form in which we could put it – in the form that all people who have any knowledge whatever of the Gospel could understand it, even if they had a certain admixture of error – even allowing for all of these errors of doctrine being mixed with the matter, to just know this simple fact that God is willing to receive us back as his children, to forgive us our sins, and care for us, and bring off eventually conquerors with Jesus whoever believes that with the heart would, I think be sure to accept the terms, because they are so very favorable. Then the fact that so very few people do give their hearts to the Lord, or give their hearts to Jesus, and do give up all the little they have, proves that only a few believe. Others may believe with the head merely, a sort of general assent – I think that Jesus died; I believe he was a good man; or, I believe he was the Lord – or whatever it might be; but it is merely a head acceptance, and it does not enter into their hearts. With the heart man believeth unto salvation. That is the kind of believing that counts for something. When it goes down into their hearts, it goes right down into their hands also, and they want to use their hands for the Lord; it goes down into their feet, and they want to use their feet for the Lord; it goes down into their pocketbooks, and they want to use that for the Lord. And so it effects anything and everything they have; it affects all the affairs of life.
Now I am addressing those especially this evening who believe, who have made consecration, those who with the heart have believed. How precious is our possession, dear brothers and sisters? How precious is the Lord to us – to us who believe with the heart he is precious. All the teachings of the Lord's great plan are revealed to this class. How favored we are that by God's grace we have heard, and that our hearts have been responsive, and that we have accepted the great proposition of the Lord to become his children! Now is the acceptable time in which God is willing to accept our little offering, and to let us count it in as a part of Jesus' sacrifice, that we may be sharers with him in the suffering of this present time in order that we may also be sharers with him in the glory that shall follow.
So I rejoice with you that we have heard the report, that we have heard the message, that to us the arm of the Lord, the power of the Lord, has been revealed – not to the world; they do not know the power of God. You and I are only learning about it; we have only begun to see the arm of the Lord. The arm, you know, in symbol stands for power. God has revealed the power. Now the world has not seen the power, nor has the world seen the arm of the Lord. You and I see that the Lord is the arm that our heavenly Father puts down to grasp the poor human family and to lift it up. At one time we saw in a measure this matter, and saw that Jesus was the arm of Jehovah, but we thought he was only going to lift up the saintly people; and that was good; that was a glorious message; but now we have seen further, and we have believed further, and the message has gone out further, that the arm of Jehovah not merely will lift up the saintly few, but that saintly few will become a part of the arm of Jehovah, so to speak, and that arm of Jehovah shall during the thousand years of Christ's reign bless mankind and lift them up.
Now at the close of this little session of today our hearts, I trust, are going out to the Lord with gratitude for all the privileges we have enjoyed in connection with the service. Some of you here have been laboring to make a success of the meeting today, and I praise God on your behalf and rejoice with you that you had such a very enjoyable experience. You worked hard I am sure to bring such results for a weekly afternoon. And those of us who will go farther on will have you kindly in our remembrance as some who have been faithful to your opportunities. As I looked at the audience today it seemed to me I saw some that looked as though they were saintly people, and who had already believed God's report respecting his Son, and now let us hope they saw and heard a little more clearly today, and that henceforth they may, by reason of what they have heard [CR156] be brought into further grace and nearer to the Lord. And those of you who remain here – what an opportunity you will have to continue to witness of the Lord! And not merely witness by tongue, but remember there is one way in which we are all witnesses, whether we wish to be or not, and that is by our daily life – our conduct, our work, our actions. Are we, then, living epistles of the Lord, known and read of all men? If so, as the apostle says, Let us walk circumspectly, carefully, looking around, guarding our thoughts and words and deeds, showing forth the praises of him who hath called us out of darkness into this marvelous light, commending the truth to others by the consistency of our lives and our faithfulness to the principles of righteousness. This is one of the witnesses we can all surely give, and one that I trust the dear friends residing here will find it their privilege to give. And others, knowing that you are advocating these things, and having heard what a high standard we believe God has established, namely; a standard of saintship, no doubt the people of this city will look at you still more careful with examination than ever before. They will say, "These are some of those who claim that only the saints at the present time are going to have everlasting glory, and heaven. I wonder if he is a saint; I wonder if she is a saint." And so you will be put on exhibition, so to speak; you will be under scrutiny. How carefully then will you walk before the Lord? How careful will you be to show forth the praise of the great King? Then some of you may have other opportunities in your meetings to present the truth. How wise you should be as ambassadors for God to present it as of the Lord Jesus Christ. Remember what Jesus said on this subject, "Be ye wise as serpents and harmless as doves." As one of our good German sisters once expressed it a very forcible way, bringing it down to some language of our day, "The Lord says we should be as wise as snakes and harmless as pigeons." That gives the thought, dear friends. How wisely we want to use our opportunities! We are all, I believe, learning more and more every day that wisdom is to be exercised in the presentation of the Lord's Word. I presume that every one of us who is a child of the Lord, and somewhat experienced in the truth, and who has endeavored to present it to others, has made certain mistakes, being too harsh, perhaps, or presenting the truth in a too rigid form, not sufficiently kindly in manner, with kindly words, and with consideration for others. We are to remember that those who catch fish never do so by beating the water with the fish rod; that drives the fish away. And so if we would be wise in this, fishers of men, it behooves us to consider how carefully we are to deal with those who are giving some attention to the truth. The truth is to be the bait, and we are to dangle the truth before them so as not to do them injury, not to do them harm, but to bless them and get them into the Gospel net, and to get them into better and fuller relationship to the Lord.
So then, my parting word to the dear friends of Santa Crus is that we pray God for a continuance of his blessing, and we rejoice with you that we have had a blessing so far, that your efforts to praise the Lord have been blessed so far, and we ask on your behalf continued and increasing wisdom to show forth his praise, and to help those with whom we come in contact.
SPEAKING from the text, "The law shall go forth from Mount Zion and the Word of the Lord from Jerusalem" (Isaiah 2:3), Pastor Russell declared that Christians have inadvertently misappropriated to themselves many promises of the Scriptures which are not wholly theirs. Christian creeds and theories have surmised that through the rejection of Jesus, all Jews dying in unbelief of Messiah were foreordained to an eternity of torture because of that unbelief in the Only Name.
A more careful study of the Bible, he declared, is showing Bible students the error of this position. Jews who do not accept Jesus as their Savior and who do not become followers in his steps in the "narrow way" will indeed fail of attaining a place with Jesus in his throne of glory. They will fail to become joint-heirs with him in his glorious Messianic kingdom. They will fail to become members of the spiritual seed of Abraham, respecting whom Saint Paul said, "If ye be Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed and heirs according to the promise" (Galatians 3:29). "In thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed."
But, asked the pastor, are there not many besides Jews who will fail of making their calling and election sure to that heavenly portion – to membership in the Messianic body or kingdom? His own conviction is that there will be found as many Jews as of any other nationality in that spiritual company which, the Scriptures declare, will, all told, be but a "little flock." Indeed, there are strong reasons for believing that the whole number of the elect company, this royal priesthood, this spiritual seed of Abraham, this Messiah of glory, long promised, will be only "a hundred and forty-four thousand." (Revelation 14:1).
If the church of glory, the body of Christ, be but a small company out of the millions of Christendom, what becomes of the remainder of Christendom as well as the Jews? If only the elect gain the kingdom, if only the few make their calling and election sure – what will become of the great mass of the non-elect, both Jews and Gentiles, and the heathen myriads? Pastor Russell declared that very foolish and unscriptural conclusions have been reached in respect to elect and non-elect.
The apostle declares that all non-elect are to be blessed by the elect as soon as the election is completed. But we, following the teachings of a darker time and a less convenient Bible, have declared that when God predestinated to elect the church, he equally predestinated to damn to eternal torment all others. But not a word of authority could be found for such a view in the Bible. Saint Paul's statement is wholly respecting the church, not the world, when he declares, "Whom he did foreknow, them he also did predestinate that they should be conformed to the image of his Son." Such a predestination on God's part, all can heartily endorse. Who can say that it would be right on God's part to accept any membership in the glorious Messianic body, of which Jesus is the head, except such as are pure in heart, saintly, and so demonstrated even by fiery trials and disciplines!
God kept secret this mystery, Saint Paul declares – the mystery that he is now selecting a favored class to be associates with Messiah in the kingdom of God, for which we have been praying and through which the whole world of mankind will shortly be blessed. Now the church's election is about completed, the pastor believes; and therefore now is the time for more light to shine out, that God's further gracious purposes toward natural Israel and the world may be more clearly seen.
The Zionism of the past eighteen centuries has been of the heavenly kind. It has been calling and inspiring to loving zeal, obedience and activity such as have the "hearing ear" for the heavenly calling to joint-heirship with Messiah. This glorious privilege is about to end because the full number predestinated of the Lord will soon have been completed. Meantime, the pastor and others of God's consecrated people should be Zionists in the highest sense of the word, and, laying aside every weight and every besetting sin, each should strive to make his calling and election sure to a place in the heavenly Zion – the kingdom of Messiah.
It will be from this Mount Zion, the spiritual kingdom of Messiah, that the law will go forth during the thousand years of the Messianic reign; the great judge and lawgiver of the world will be the glorified Redeemer; and his associates, in his various [CR157] offices of prophet, priest, king, judge and mediator, will be the faithful zionists of the present time who follow in the steps of their Redeemer, delighting to lay down their lives for the truth's sake and for the brethren's sake, in co-operation with the great captain of their salvation, through the merit of his imputed righteousness.
As soon as Mount Zion, the kingdom, shall be completed by the glorification of the last member of the church, it will be time for the law to go forth therefrom for the correction in righteousness of the world's affairs – for the overthrow of every form of iniquity and everything contrary to the golden rule. In other words, when the kingdom class shall have been completed by the elective process, which is the divine arrangement of this age, forthwith that kingdom will come into power and the reign of righteousness will begin.
But God has a time and order and arrangement in respect to every feature of his program. In the remote past, before Jesus came and became the head and leader of the church to glory, God was in covenant relationship with Abraham and his natural seed. The Scriptures assure us that a considerable number were so full of faith and loyal obedience to God that even though they lived at a time before the calling to the church began they, nevertheless, were marked by the Lord for special blessing and a special share in the kingdom work when the time should come for Messiah to take his great power and reign.
Reference is made to these ancient worthies by Saint Paul in Hebrews 11:38,40. He says, "These all died in faith, not having received the things promised them (the earthly promises) God having provided some better thing for us (the church) that they, without us, should not be made perfect" – should not enter into the earthly blessing which belongs to them.
Accordingly, the Scriptures tell us that one of the first operations of Messiah's kingdom, after the binding of satan, will be the resurrection of the ancient worthies of the Jewish race. These, the inspired Word tells us, will be made princes in all the earth – representatives of the spiritual and invisible Messianic kingdom. These will constitute the earthly Jerusalem, the capital of the new dispensation. While the law will proceed from the invisible and all-powerful spiritual Messiah, it will come through these resurrected, perfect and approved earthly representatives; and from them it will go forth gradually, as the divine message and rule, to every nation, people, kindred and tongue.
Even if nothing were said in the Scriptures respecting God's special blessing to natural Israel, it might be inferred that they would most quickly fall into line with the leaders of their own race, particularly as this would be in harmony with the traditions of their race for the past thirty-five hundred years. Besides, the law given to Israel, and represented on the two tables of stone, will be the same that will go into force again as the law of the kingdom, the Gospel call being an appendage. The difference between the old law covenant and the new law covenant (Jeremiah 31:31) is that Israel's new covenant will have a greater and more powerful mediator than Moses, the antitype of Moses, Jesus the head and the church, his body (Acts 3:22,23). Besides all coming under that new covenant by devotion to righteousness, will have their past sins so fully forgiven that the Lord will not remember them any more – the basis for this full forgiveness being the merit of Jesus' sacrifice.
Few have realized how clearly the Scriptures set forth that the new covenant will be Israelitish, if the promise respecting it be carefully read and noted. Christ is the mediator of that new covenant and its "better sacrifices" have been in progress during this Gospel age. It will be instituted with the ancient worthies first, then gradually with all the Israelites who flock to the standard then lifted up amongst the people. As the blessings of restitution, earthly prosperity, health, strength, etc., begin to be manifested among those living under that covenant arrangement, other nations, the Bible tells us, will also desire to enter into its blessings; and they will be permitted so to do. By individually renouncing sin and accepting the covenant and its mediator they will become "proselytes of the gate." Hearken! "Many nations shall come and say, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord's house, for he will teach us of his ways and we will walk in his paths."
It has escaped Christendom in general until recently that the divine promise to Abraham is to be fulfilled through two seeds – one a heavenly class, the other an earthly class, with Messiah the head over all (Romans 4:16). For eighteen centuries God favored the seed of Abraham, the nation of Israel.
That period of favor, explain it how we may, began to wane about the time of Jesus' death. It was completely removed from them in the desolation of their land by the Roman army A.D. 70. Now a parallel time has been reached, hence it is time for the return of God's favor, as shown on previous occasions. The favor is already returning.
The Jew has not been so comfortable, nor so favorably fixed, as he is today, in more than eighteen centuries. But his blessing is only beginning. Shortly divine favor, in God's due time, will accomplish for his chosen people all the precious promises of the law and of the prophets. Already the Jew is awakening to a realization of this great truth.
A voice is sounding from the wilderness, and the Jews everywhere are harkening to it. It does not call them to become Christians, but to remain Jews and to realize, as Jews, the ideals set before them by the Lord in the Law and in the prophets. To all those exercised thereby a great blessing is near, which will more than compensate for the sorrows of the past. Neither by swords nor guns nor dreadnoughts, neither by flying airships nor torpedoes will Israel's great victory be gained; neither by money power and worshiping of the golden calf of finance nor by trusting in the arm of flesh, but by looking to the Lord, from whom will come their help.
Messiah's spiritual empire, about to be established, will bind satan, restrain every evil and lift up a standard for the people, blessing Israel and establishing with them the new law covenant instead of the old law covenant, under the better mediator still more capable than the great Moses, under the greater king still more wise than Solomon and still more beloved of God than David. This great celestial empire will be established with great authority in the world by a time of trouble, a time of earthly distress, which the prophecies picture as terrible.
The perplexing thought with our Jewish friends, as well as with Christians, is: If these things be so, if Messiah's kingdom is yet to be established, as the Jews contemplated, only on a spiritual plane instead of an earthly one; and if God's purpose is to use those anciently favored people as the channels of his blessing in the future, why has there been so long delay?
We answer: This is what the Scriptures term the mystery, the matter which God did not reveal directly, either to Abraham or through any of the prophets. Indirectly he hinted at it, saying to Abraham, "Thy seed shall be as the stars of heaven, and as the sand of the seashore for multitude."
But Abraham did not discern, nor did others, that these two illustrations belonged not to the same people, but to two different Israels – the heavenly and the earthly, the stars representing the heavenly seed and the sand of the seashore the earthly seed.
The restitution privileges soon to be opened, first to Israel, will, later on, be thrown open to all nations, peoples, kindreds and tongues, that they may press in also under the same glorious terms of Israel's new covenant, because "Israelites indeed," without guile and sharers in all the blessings of God supplied through the great Mediator of the new covenant and his earthly instrumentalities.
Zionism, amongst the Jews today, we believe the Lord is stirring up, a preparation of natural Israel for the great blessing which so soon will be at their door. As they begin to really appreciate the land of promise, the rich promises in connection with that land must become theirs, and the inspiration of those promises' end will lead the feet of a reverential, representative number of them back to the land itself, to which the Lord declared he would bring them; and that from thence they should be plucked up no more. Remember, in this connection, Saint Paul's reference to the new covenant and the time when it will go into force with Israel, as recorded in Romans 11:27. The pastor rejoiced in any opportunity he had of stimulating Zionism, both spiritual and earthly, for both are vitally connected with the salvation of the world of mankind in general.
DEAR FRIENDS, I will not speak to you very long. It is a warm afternoon to sit so constantly. My mind was running along the lines of the words of Moses. When the Lord directed him to lead the children of Israel out of Egypt up to the promise land, Moses answered, "Unless thou go with us, send us not up hence." The Lord replied, "My presence shall go with thee; I will give thee peace." I was thinking that this represented to a considerable degree the sentiment we all have, that we all ought to have, in respect to the great transactions that we are now engaged in. We are going up out of Egypt; we are going up to the promise land, and the heavenly Father sent us word that he will give us the heavenly Canaan – "go up and possess the land." And it sounds very easy to us, "Go up and possess the land," and I presume Moses was the only one of all the Israelites that really felt any hesitation about leaving Egypt. But Moses was able to see that a considerable amount of difficulty lay before them. What is it going to cost before we get into the glorious land? How many difficulties will there be in the way? How much will be the travail of soul before we shall enter into these glorious things? Then these words of Moses, "Unless thou go with us, send us not up." I think that you and I feel that same way; that unless God is with us it would be in vain if he should tell us, "Come out from amongst mankind, and be a separate and peculiar people, and take up our cross and follow the dear Redeemer," to accept him as our leader and the Captain of our salvation, to go on in this narrow way from grace to grace and from knowledge to knowledge, and from faith to faith, until we shall enter into all the glorious things which God has in reservation for those that love him – "Unless thou go with us, send us not up hence;" let us stay in the world unless we would have the Lord's blessing and assistance. How could we ever expect to reach these glorious things unless we had the dear Master for our guide, and counselor, and assistant all the way? What a precious comfort it is that the heavenly Father gives us this same assurance he gave to Moses – "My presence shall go with thee, and I will give thee peace."
And now dear friends we have found it so. Those of us who with earnestness of heart left the world behind, left the antitypical Egypt, and are going up, following the Captain of our salvation, have found that the presence of the Lord goes with us; we have found that he gives us the peace; we find in him the peace of God that passeth all understanding, and is ruling more and more in our hearts – not having attained the full rule there yet perhaps; we have not reached the glorious Canaan, and have not entered in to all the glorious things in reservation, the things God has promised us, but we are on our journey and faithful is he who called us, the one who gave us the invitation, the one who said, "Go forth now and possess the glorious things;" faithful is he who called us, who also will do for us exceedingly, abundantly more than we could ever ask or could ever have thought.
Our heavenly Father, when he marked out the narrow way in which our dear Redeemer walked, knew the trials and difficulties of the way. Our dear Redeemer knew not the way he would take, as the Psalmist says, "Thou wilt make known to me the path of life," and God made known to him step by step the path that would lead to the glorious consummation – glory, honor, immortality, the divine nature; and he was faithful in taking all of these steps. And then the Father through him, and through the apostles, by the Holy Spirit, made known the steps that we should take. He shall show us the path of life. He will make us know the steps that will lead us to glory, honor, immortality; he knows the way we shall take. How comforting that is! And to know he is our Father, and that he is not cold and indifferent, and looking on to say, "Well if you do it then I will give you the prize, but I have no care whether you get it or not." Not that mind, but like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that reverence him; and he has adopted us into his family, and we are his children, and he says, I have been watching you all the journey long, and I know the way you will take, and I know the difficulties and trials; I have planned them all; I want you to have trials; you must have these conditions; you can never have the development of character unless you do have the opposition of the world, and the flesh, and the devil; these are necessary to prove you. "The Lord, your God, doth prove you." What does he prove us for? "Whether ye love the Lord, your God, with all your heart," etc. What does he expect of us? He expects of us obedience. Our dear Master learned obedience by the things which he suffered. Obedience means, to my mind, loyalty to God, absolute loyalty to God under all circumstances and under all conditions – in the light, and in the dark, when we can see what his leading is, and when we cannot see the leading of the Lord – to be faithful, faithful when all seems unfavorable; faithful when the sun is shining on our way, and faithful when it is dark sometimes, and when the rain comes down, and when the sorrows of life overtake us. Be thou faithful, loyal to God, obedient to him. So Jesus says, "Be thou faithful." How long, Lord, must we be faithful? Can we finish it today? No. How long must we be faithful? "Be thou faithful unto death and I will give thee the crown of life."
Then the Lord has sent us forth, and the apostle says he is able to do for us better than we could ask or think, and we have assurance on the way that all things shall work together for good. Sometimes we can see them to be working for good, and sometimes they seem to be working ill, but we are to know and be assured that he knows the way, and he is interested in us, he is our Father, and we have his love; that he makes all the provisions necessary, that nothing can in any wise harm those that are trusting him. "Unless thou go with us, send us not up hence." Let us not even love the world; we had better stay right with the world unless we have the assurance of God's Word that he will carry us through. But he has given us that assurance. "My presence shall go with you." Has it been so with us? Have not we found it just as the Lord told us? We have had his presence on the journey. "In all their afflictions, he was afflicted." We read of the Israelites, as they passed through the afflictions on the way to Canaan – in all their experiences he was afflicted. So we say in all our difficulties and trials our elder Brother, our heavenly Bridegroom, is interested deeply, and he is able as well as willing to provide for all the little incidents of the way. And he would have us learn the lessons of faith and patience, and obedience, and loyalty, and all these various graces about which the brethren have talked this afternoon. Are we learning them dear friends? I trust we are, and I trust that the Lord's grace is going with us, that his presence is with us, and he will give us peace – not only that he will give us peace when we get to the end of the journey, and we shall enter into the joys of the Lord, and enter into all the glorious things which he has in reservation, but I trust he is giving us peace now. It is our privilege; as the apostle says, "We who believe do enter into rest." There is no doubt that there is a still more perfect and complete rest for the people of God, for God has promised and he assures us now, that we who believe enter into rest. Are you getting your share? You are not getting your share unless you are exercising faith, and exercising it not merely as an abstract principle, but a faith that manifests itself by works, a faith that works with zeal.
I will close my remarks on this occasion by saying that the dear friends here and on all our journey along, and indeed wherever I go, have, I believe a great blessing whether the worldly and nominal church get any blessing or not; the faith and works come right home to the door, and there is necessity for work; and if we do not have the faith we do not have the works. So the faith and works come right along. One dear brother said to me on one occasion as I got off the train on Sunday morning, "Brother Russell, it is a very unfavorable morning I will admit, but I want to tell you I already have a blessing. I never did have anything special to do with any meetings before today, but the responsibility fell on me, and there were not many to help, and I had to take care of it myself, and it was awfully hard, I was so inexperienced in such matters, it was such a new experience to go out and distribute tracts, and it was hard at first, but I said to myself, 'Here now, you are going to shirk your duty in serving the Lord; you said you would like something to do, now he has given you something to do, are you going to do it?' I said, 'No I will not shirk it, Lord; help me.' The Lord helped me, and I have gotten such a blessing. I am happier than I have ever been before; if the convention does not amount to anything to the others of this city, I have gotten a blessing in my heart." So I think it is everywhere that all of those that love the Lord, who serve him, who have faith in him, and are trusting in him, and are having the faith that works by love – not which works in a combative way that hurts people; we do not want to have that, [CR159] but the faith that works by love, let us get that kind, dear friends. I have had many experiences in having fights, but I have found that there is very little good results come from having battles with people. The love and kindness and tender mercy, of our God appeals especially to our hearts, and as we exemplify the same loving kindness and mercy of God in presenting this glorious plan to others we have his blessing.
So then, we are on our way, we are still going up, and when we started we said, Lord unless you go with us we will not go up. The Lord said, "My presence shall go with you, I will give you peace." And has it not been so? The Lord's presence has been with his people – "Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age." So in all our experiences let us look to the Captain; let us remember, too, that the Captain of our salvation is also our Counselor and tells us what to do.
One of the speakers this afternoon referred to the fact that the general in the army laid out the work and told the others what to do. And so it is with our great General. You and I are not competent to lay out our work; we have all the confidence in the great Captain of our salvation. So it is not for you nor for me, nor for any other brother or sister to attempt to tell the Lord to push and pull things out of his way, but simply to seek to find out what is the Lord's way, what is the Lord's will. The Captain of our salvation is ordering the battle and he knows the results will be all right. And if he is not giving us all the opportunities we think we ought to have, we ought to have confidence that he knows how to manage his own battle, and if our hearts are fully submitted to him we will more likely be called upon for more service.
I am very pleased to congratulate the dear ones of the convention company who have come on the train, and the dear friends who came from Los Angeles, Oakland and San Francisco, and finally the dear ones of Sacramento, and the blessings of the Lord have been with us richly and abounding. How grateful we are to him, the giver of all things! We rejoice with the dear friends here in Sacramento that they have made such kind arrangements for our entertainment, and for our meeting here in this hall, and for the evening meeting. I am glad that they have so cheerful and happy a company here, and that this shall be an occasion long to be remembered.
No doubt when we get into the great convention, the general assembly of the church of the first-born, whose names are written in heaven, we will talk about the different conventions – I remember seeing you at this one, and that one, and what a time we had at the other place – do you remember the little speech I tried to make? We will have a good time, dear friends, all of those who love the King. The Lord has a blessing for all those who seek to do anything in his name, and to help the brethren, or to cooperate in his service. He is able to do for us exceedingly and abundantly more than we could ask of him, according to the riches of his grace.
I REJOICE this morning, dear friends, to find myself with you. I remember very well my previous visit to your city. From the Watch Tower list I know that the numbers here are increasing, and from other sources I have reason to believe that you are not only increasing in numbers, but also in spirituality; this is the real desire of our hearts. What would numbers amount to if we did not have the spirit of the Lord? What is the object of this long selection that God is making during the present time, except to take out a people for his name, people that are to be heart-loyal to him. We are all aware that we have imperfections of the flesh, that there is none righteous, no, not one, but we are glad to know that God looketh not on the outward appearance, but on the heart, and we are glad to believe that in heart we are growing more and more in the likeness of our dear Saviour, the likeness therefore of our heavenly Father, because he was the express image of the Father's person in every sense of the word.
The text which we have for consideration this morning is one that I think is very precious – "The secret of the Lord is with them that reverence him, and he will show them his covenant." And who are those that reverence the Lord, and how may we show the Lord our reverence? The Lord answers the question by telling that if we do the Father's will, that will be the evidence that we are his disciples. If you love me you will keep my commandments – my directions; and the apostle says that we have an additional command, in that we not only keep the Lord's commandments, but they are not grievous to us; for, as our Lord said, "Father, I delight to do thy will." It is one thing to not wish to do God's will at all, and to wish to do our own will; and it makes quite a step when we surrender our own wills and accept the will of the Lord; and even then sometimes after accepting the Lord's will there is quite a battle with many as to how they shall surrender themselves and keep the surrender before the Lord so they do not take back anything they have consecrated to him; it is quite a fight many have along that very line. When we not only have made a consecration of our wills, but when we find ourselves so in sympathy with God and his wonderful arrangement, his divine plan, and the purposes revealed in his Word, and the elements of divine character – justice, wisdom, love, power – made known to us in the Word of God – when we are in harmony with this, then we are close to the Lord; then we delight to do his will – not merely will do it, and say, "Lord it is very hard; I am sorry you asked me to do anything so hard;" but, on the contrary, to say, "Heavenly Father, here is your will, I am glad to know it; I did not know it before, but now that I do know it, I am so pleased that I may do your will." That is the attitude of heart we all wish to attain more and more. It is not an attitude of heart that we could expect to reach at once; but it is the mark before us. So that starting in, and having great battles with ourselves, and hard work to keep ourselves submissive, and saying, "amen" to the divine propositions as they come to us, we gradually get to looking to see what is God's will, and to prefer God's will to anything of our own, or anything that anybody else could give us. That is the real attainment. It is that class that is referred to in our text, "The secret of the Lord is with them that reverence him," that love him, that love his will and his way more than anybody else's will, more than anybody else's way, and more than their own will, and more than their own way. He will show them his secret. You have found it so, and I have found it so, that the Lord makes known his secrets in proportion as we get in that right attitude of heart where we can properly appreciate them and enjoy them. Now the other, the worldly class, do not understand God's secrets; he does not wish them to understand; they are not in a condition to understand. Even some who have taken the name of the Lord and have made even an outward consecration to him, are not in position to understand the secrets of the Lord. Why? They would not make proper use of them if they did know them; they would do themselves further injury if they did know the Lord's secrets; they might seek to oppose him, which would be a terrible condition. And so, the Scriptures tell us that none of the wicked will understand. How glad we are that the wicked cannot understand God's plan! If they did, it would be injurious to themselves, and would interfere with God's plan, in a measure; therefore, God wisely and lovingly keeps his plan hid except from the proper class. "To you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven" said Jesus, but to all outsiders, these things are spoken in parables and dark sayings, that, hearing, they may hear and not understand, and seeing, they might see and not believe. Is not that wonderful, dear friends? It is God's way. His ways are always marvelous to us; the more we get to understand them, the more wonderful they appear. Who would have been God's counselor, to have told him how to do this matter? The apostle was certainly [CR160] right in suggesting that not a creature could ever have suggested to our heavenly Father how to carry on his great and wonderful plan that he has arranged. He needs no counsellor; he is the all-wise one. We are children of his, taught in the school of Christ, our elder Brother, who has gone before, who has trodden the pathway in advance, and who is now our instructor, that he may bring many sons to glory, honor, immortality, joint-heirship, with him in the kingdom. How glad we are!
I remember one expression our dear Master made use of that seemed at one time a very peculiar expression. It must still seem very peculiar to all except those who know something about the divine plan of the ages, and that expression was this: He said, "Father, I thank thee that thou has hidden these things from the wise and the prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes. Even so, Father, for thus it seemed good in thy sight." Now, it seems so strange we had the thought that anyone who could not see these things would go to eternal torment! It seems so strange that the dear Redeemer who came into the world to save sinners should say, "Father, I thank you that you have hidden these things from all the masses of mankind, so they cannot see them, and cannot understand them." Could Jesus want the mass of mankind to be kept in ignorance so they would not understand, and so, they would go to eternal torment? Oh, no, my dear friends, it is altogether different from that. He loved them all, and he has a gracious plan, the Father's plan. But he knew the Father was selecting a special class, a little flock, to be joint-heirs in the kingdom, and he saw them and recognized them, and in prayer owned the Father's wisdom in the method adopted, that these things should be obscured from the masses of mankind then and ever since.
So then, let us not boast ourselves of greatness, of wisdom, nor of the things that the world is boasting. If we boast, let our boasting be of the Lord, his wonderful love and grace toward us, that while we were yet sinners, God had compassion on us and provided a Redeemer; and then in his providence we were humbly born, or in some other way favored so that his grace has reached our ears, and so that our hearts were not so proud they would not receive the message, or not so hard that they would be opposed to the message, but it is by the grace we are what we are, that our ears heard and our hearts rejoiced, and we are going over, as our dear brother Read sang a little while ago, "Our Friends are Passing Over." Soon we will all have crossed over, and those before on the other shore are almost now in sight. Thank God for our wonderful privileges. I congratulate you all this morning on our having this opportunity of meeting again, and thinking of our heavenly Father's plan; and we who have come from a distance are glad to meet you of Portland and vicinity, and you of Portland and vicinity, I am sure, are glad to meet all of those dear ones who have come a long journey, to see you, and so our hearts and our prayers and hymns are ascending up – not in any merit of ourselves, but from the censer of our glorious Lord, the great High Priest; and they ascend as a sweet incense before our heavenly Father, and we have his blessing with us this morning, and this causes all our hearts to rejoice.
And while our hearts are rejoicing and blossoming in the desert places of the heart, we are becoming more and more glad, and are bringing forth, I trust, more and more fruitage to the great Master's glory. I remind you and myself at the same time that we are now in a land which not a great while ago was a desert land, and here is the beginning, as it were, of some of those glorious promises in Scripture which tell us that the wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad, and that springs shall come forth, and wonderful blessing shall result. Now, in your land, as I know from previous visits, we are seeing a beginning of Millennial age blessings. As we passed the desert places we saw evidences of fruitfulness that will come from the application of water, and you are raising wonderful orchards of plums and apples, and they are famous now throughout the world; they are going to nearly all our eastern cities. Your prunes are to be had in our markets in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, and everywhere, and your apples are famed the world over. The Oregon apple is known in Great Britain. Some of our Scotch friends who are with us have probably eaten Oregon apples in Scotland. And we have heard about the laws you have framed here – all, we believe, under providence. So what there is going on today my dear friends, that you and I may not see something of God's overruling providence? Think of your wonderful law, specifying that your orchards must be almost up to the standard of Eden, not an apple that is specked or wormy shall be shipped from the State. So some of your Edenic fruits are going out, and are lessons to the whole civilized world of what is best in this world. When some of us think of the poor, scrawny apples we sometimes ate, and the worm-holes we had to cut out and bite out, we are thankful that there are good laws in Oregon covering such matters, and bringing nature up to her best. Now, from the world's standpoint all of this they call evolution, and from our standpoint all of this we call merely the beginning of restitution, because God has declared that this Edenic condition which he gave a sample of to our first parents in Eden, is to become a world-wide condition, and that Messiah's glorious kingdom shall bring the whole earth into Edenic perfection, and all that was lost through sin and through death is to be brought back. If we see, then, the beginnings of restitution in the light, and intelligence, and in the wonderful inventions that are coming to the world in our day, and in the fruit, and in the control of the world, and in the knowledge of chemistry, which enables mankind to cope with the various difficulties of earth today – and remember that we are still under the curse – the thorns and the briars, and all the insect pests, are part of that curse – we look down to the future and say, "What a glorious home God will have for mankind when Messiah's kingdom shall bring the earth to full perfection, and bring mankind up out of all this sin and degradation and meanness, back to all that was lost in the first man, and redeemed by the second man, our Lord."
How glad we are, then, dear friends, to see that we are living in the very beginning of the glorious day to which the whole world has been looking forward! How it cheers us, how it comforts us; and while we are not expecting the blessings for ourselves, but are hoping to attain something still better – exceedingly abundantly more than we could have asked or thought – yet we are glad of these blessings for mankind, and we are glad to see these things come to pass in our day as further additional evidences that we are in the dawning of the new dispensation, and the time is at hand for God's blessing and the outflow of truth, which is symbolized by the water which is making your desert blossom as the rose.
But now with all of this feasting, with the opportunities for service that will come, and which I believe we wish to use loyally and faithfully, showing the Lord our zeal and love – with all this doubtless you will have trials and difficulties, and you must be ready for these. I do not mean to sound an alarm, or for anybody to be looking for trouble; we generally get plenty of trouble without looking for it particularly, but we are to be on our guard, watch and pray – not merely pray, not merely watch, but watch and pray – and see that our lamps are trimmed and burning, and see that our hearts are in the right attitude toward the Lord.
And now to keep our hearts in the right attitude so we are thus able to enjoy our blessings, and then be able to render service and withstand temptation and trials, my experience is this: That we want to have obedient hearts, and we want to have grateful hearts, and we want to appreciate the great blessings that God has granted us. There is one hymn we sometimes use, "Give me a thankful heart," etc. That to me is a good thought. I always like to feel grateful to my Lord; my intellect tells me I owe him so much, and I feel as though I want my heart to keep pace with my intellect. My intellect says I owe the Lord a great deal, and my heart says, I want to be very thankful, and tell him so, and show him so by my words and thoughts and doings.
And another point is this, that we want to keep very close reckonings with the Lord. You cannot afford to run long accounts with the Lord. You want to go to him every day at least twice, and then perhaps a good many times during the day if you find special cause for thankfulness. The apostle's thought is thus carried out in our lives. He says, "Pray without ceasing, and in everything give thanks." Our whole lives are to be prayerful in the sense that we will always be considering what is the Lord's will respecting us, and in the sense of being thankful for everything that comes to us, both of joy and sorrow; it is always to be with thankful, grateful hearts. Our going to the Lord would always include an acknowledgement of our imperfections; otherwise we might get puffed up. We want to watch every day to see that we have imperfections. The man or woman who does not know of his or her own imperfections, will come short. Our Lord intimated this, you remember, in the prayer he taught us, saying, Pray ye, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. That implies that you and I come short, and we will continually need to pray. These are not the trespasses of original sin; these are the trespasses that are ours as new creatures when we are desiring to do the Lord's will, and as new creatures we are seeking to walk in his path, but find we have imperfections of the flesh and that we make failure to some extent, perhaps coming short of all our opportunities. Perhaps we have an opportunity of serving the Lord and laying down a little inch of our lives, and fail to properly appreciate it at the moment, and after this we think of what we might have done and how we would do better the next time. It would be very proper to tell the Lord about the whole matter, and thus to acknowledge our trespasses and shortcomings; and thus to keep, in that sense of the word, short accounts with the Lord – seeing that every night before we retire that everything between our hearts and the Lord is without a cloud, without a single unsettled item, that we have taken everything to the Lord, and have confessed everything that was in our own judgment imperfect in our conduct, and have sought his forgiveness and have made resolutions to follow more closely still in the narrow way, in the footsteps of our Master. And thus progressing, we are coming up Zion's hill, and we are very near to the end of the journey, when we hope to be with our Master, and the great convention will begin. We are all getting ready, I hope, and waiting for it, and praying for it, and delighting in it in advance.
Text. – "So Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many; and unto them that look for him shall he appear the second time without sin unto salvation." – Heb. 9:28.
THIS brief statement by the apostle is really a summary of centuries of accomplishment. The suffering of Christ began with our Lord, began with the time when he made a consecration of himself, presented himself to the Father when he was thirty years of age. The sufferings of Christ continued during the three and a half years of his ministry, and the sufferings of Christ have continued all of these eighteen hundred years since, and we are finding that this is the key which very many of God's dear people have overlooked, and therefore have been in considerable quandary as to how to understand the divine dealings. The apostles understood the matter very clearly. They understood they were to suffer with the Lord as members of his body; they understood that these sufferings of the body of Christ must be complete before the glory should follow; but this thought has been lost sight of during the dark ages, and instead of this proper thought that the church has a share in the sufferings of Christ and in the glory to follow – instead of that thought coming with joyous emphasis by our Catholic friends in their organization, their church was organized with the thought and with the understanding that the sufferings of Christ did not extend to the church; that the sufferings of Christ were accomplished in his own person; in one sense of the word then they have a peculiar arrangement by which they repeat the sufferings of Christ in the sacrifice of the mass. And they do this repeatedly for the sins of the individual and sins of congregations, and low mass in a general way, and high mass for particular sins. And so they have this as the carrying out of the further sacrifice of Christ, instead of seeing that all the church is to suffer with him. And so they have exalted the Pope to be the vicegerent of Christ, to be the representative of the Messiah, that he should reign, and that in his reign should be fulfilled all the glorious promises that God made respecting his kingdom, and the glorious blessings that would flow from Messiah's reign. How much disappointed they would feel if they were to get a proper view of the situation! Instead of having accomplished anything great in the world, we find the world today in as bad a condition in many senses of the word as it was a thousand years ago, and yet our Catholic friends claim that the thousand years of the reign of Christ were in the past, and that the Pope and those associated with him are reigning in glory, and that practically the work of Messiah as the great king of earth under the whole heavens to bless all the families of the earth must practically be considered as accomplished; and yet today, even according to the most liberal calculation at least two-thirds of the human family are ignorant of the Lord entirely, having no knowledge of God or of his Son. This great mistake which our Catholic friends fell into has descended also to Protestants. While the Protestants repudiated some of the Catholic doctrines they did not know what to do with other features, so they carried these on, and our Protestant friends really are claiming, "Yes we are living in the reign of Christ."
"How long has he been reigning?"
"Oh, we don't know how long." [CR162]
"Well, none of us know; the Catholics say they know when it began, but we Protestants believe that the Catholics are all confused, and that they are the anti-Christ, but somehow we believe anyway that the kingdom of Christ has been going on."
Well, where are the fruits of Christ's kingdom? They cannot tell us, except that they hope against hope that shortly, perhaps pretty soon, they don't know how long, they will conquer the world for Jesus. And it is really pathetic to see sometimes the zeal of some of the Christian Endeavor friends as they will pray and sing "All the world for Jesus," and then hear their statements that they will raise thirty millions of dollars and convert the whole heathen world instanter. It seems really pathetic that intelligent people should make such statements, or entertain such thoughts for humanity, when we know from the statistics of the United States governments that there are twice as many heathen today as there were a century ago – six hundred million a century ago and twelve hundred million today. And even if they did storm the world for Jesus, and bring the whole world into the blessed condition you have in Tacoma, you would have hard work leaving anything out of doors that you wanted to protect and save. God's will is nearly as far from being done in Tacoma as it is in Tokyo – very little difference. We have more saints, I presume, in Tacoma than we have in Tokyo, but as far as the world is concerned, the world in Tokyo, and the world in Tacoma, and the world in Brooklyn, are all practically as the apostle says "The world by its wisdom knows not God," but it seems to be getting in some respects further away from God than it was before. I am not speaking of the benevolent institutions of the world; I am finding no fault with those; I am glad we have good benevolent institutions. Even though there should be more or less of graft and corruption in connection with nearly all the operations of them, they are well intended, and there is a good thought behind them, and we are glad of that.
But the point that we wish to notice is that we have not God's kingdom in the world, and there is no sign of it, no tangible evidence that we could storm the world any more than we could storm Tokyo, or Tacoma, or Brooklyn for Christ, and yet there are the masses of intelligent people, some of them saying that Messiah's reign is ended, and we are in the times mentioned in the twentieth chapter of Revelation, when the devil is loosed for a little season, and the devil is a protestant; and shortly everything will be wound up. And then our Protestant views that we don't know where we are, but Christ has been reigning and making about as poor a job of it as could be – that is what they are claiming.
Now the Bible has such a fine presentation of the matter, and how glad we are we can see in God's Word that which is satisfactory to our reason, and which will ultimately be satisfactory to the whole world of mankind. We see from the Bible why there has been a delay. Failing to see this is what has led our Christian friends into all of their difficulties. If they had clearly understood the "mystery" as the apostle calls it, it would have solved the whole matter, but evidently our heavenly Father did not wish the mystery to be completely solved until the beginning of the seventh trumpet; so it is written that when the seventh angel shall begin to sound, the mystery of God which he has kept secret from the foundation of the world should be finished. When God keeps anything secret, and wishes to do so, let us not be surprised that nobody finds it out. This mystery that the apostle mentions is Christ in you, and it is stated plainly enough even though we were blinded to it for quite a while. This great mystery that the church was the body of Christ was buried under the traditions and superstitions of centuries; from the time the apostles fell asleep the church lost sight of the fact that if she would reign with him in the future she must suffer with him in the present. And when she got the idea she was already reigning, of course she got the idea that her time of suffering had passed, and pride and vain glory took the place of humility and a desire to suffer with the Lord.
But we are glad in God's providence that we have been awakened and that we begin to see these things; if we were stupid and asleep at one time we have gotten aroused, and we have been seeing more and more clearly, and now as we go back from our present standpoint we see the length, and the breadth, and the height, and depth of divine wisdom, justice, love, and power, such as we never dreamed of before. And this becomes to us a wonderful proof, positive proof, not only that there is a God, but that the Bible is his Word, and it equally proves to us that the various denominations are not in line with it.
I think of one infidel who said to me that he would not believe the Bible. I said, "Why? Where do you think the Bible came from?"
He smiled and said, "Priests and knaves."
"Oh, you think that the priests and knaves made the Bible?"
I said, "which priests and which knaves made the Bible?"
Well he had not expected that question. I said, "Did the Presbyterian priests and knaves, or the Baptist priests and knaves make the Bible?"
He hadn't thought of it. "Perhaps you would say, they were not old enough, that the Bible was made by the Catholics?"
"Oh yes," he said, "the Catholics – that is it, the Catholic priests and knaves."
"Well," I said, "my dear friend, it is rather remarkable is it not? They ought to be called also fools, for they made a Bible that does not suit them. If a man does a forgery at all he would do so for some purpose, he would have some object in view, but to commit a forgery and not have that forgery what he wants it to be would indicate that he is a fool."
I said, "If the Catholics made the Bible they made one that does not suit them. It has in it a great many things they do not believe and they wish were not there, and it does not contain a great many things they would like to have there. They would like to have the Bible corroborate them and say that Mary was the mother of God, but it does not say so. They would like to have the Bible tell them that Mary was born immaculate, as they claim. They would like to have the Bible tell something about beads, and praying with beads, and have the Bible tell them something about praying to the saints, and praying to a lower saint and then to a higher saint, and finally get to Mary, then to Jesus, then to the Father – gradually stepping up. They would like something in the Bible to corroborate their teachings. You see if they forged the Bible, they made a poor forgery. Then they would like to have something in the Bible authorizing them to have their sacrifice of the mass. They would have something in the Bible about the holy water and the sprinkling of it. They would like to have something in the Bible to tell about the holy candles, and consecrated burying ground, and about hearing of confessions. They would like to have something in the Bible about purgatory, something about the sprinkling of infants, and something about keeping Sunday, and something about the holy Trinity. There are a whole lot of things they wish they could have in the Bible that they do not have there. They have a whole lot of things in the Bible they do not know what to do with, and they wish they were not there. They have no use for the resurrection when every one is more alive than even before he died." "Now," I said, "my infidel friend, if you think the Catholic priests and knaves made the Bible, you must think they are a set of fools. But they would not make the Bible like that. And" I said, "for the same reasons the Presbyterians would not have made it even if they had lived in the time. The Bible does not suit them. It has something about election, but it also has something about free grace that they do not know what to do with. And so our Methodist friends would have in the free grace and would leave out the election altogether, as they do not know what to do with that. And so with all denominations. They would all put in something more and all would leave out something else. As far as I know we are the only people in the whole world that the Bible suits; it suits us exactly the way it is."
And because of God's providence we are getting the true light on the Word, which shows the true condition as God intended it to be understood. It is all rational and sure from God's standpoint; it is all reasonable and all beautiful, and we are surely finding that out. It has been just as beautiful all these centuries; it has had all of these teachings for these hundreds of years; we are merely finding out the lengths and the breadths and the heights and the depths of the love of God which passeth all understanding, and how this love of God is clearly presented in his Word. And it explains our text that now we must suffer with him if we would reign with him, and that these sufferings of Christ belong to this present time, and that Christ cannot come to give the great blessings to the world of mankind until the church which is his body is completed. And so instead of hastening the Lord we should be doing exactly what the Lord said to do. The bride is to make herself ready – never mind about hurrying the bridegroom, the bridegroom is ready now and has been all of this time; it is the bride that is to be made ready; the bridegroom has been sitting at the right hand of the Majesty on high, as the apostle says, waiting for the time to come for the divine arrangement to be fulfilled, and the whole thing given to you and to me [CR163] is to be ambassadors, to be mouthpieces of God in inviting and calling and drawing, in the name of the Father, and in the name of our Lord, all of those who have an ear to hear his message. We do this not merely orally, not merely from the platform, but also in our daily lives. So let our daily lives express the lessons of true holiness. Let all our actions show the power of God, and the hope that is within us, that all may see that we are his, that all might take notice of us that we have been with Jesus and learned of him, and we are being exercised by the exceedingly great and precious promises that our Father has given us, and which were intended to work in us to will and to do his good pleasure – not only for ourselves but also for each other, for the apostle, you remember, tells us this was the very object in giving the Holy Spirit. He says, God poured out the Spirit on our Lord Jesus, and he gave some prophets, some evangelists, some teachers, etc., for the work of the ministry, for the work of service. What service? For the work of developing the body of Christ, not for the work of converting the world, but for the work of the ministry, developing the body of Christ, until they all come to the full stature of a man – adding on the different members of the body, until we as a whole Church shall come to the full stature of a man, of which great man Jesus is the head. This is the great prophet, the great king, the great judge, the great lifegiver, the great mediator between God and man.
Now our dear Master suffered and entered into glory, so all the Body of Christ must suffer. There are two ways in which we stand related to Christ. We stand related to him, our head, as new creatures, that is the figure of the priest, prophet, King; it is the new creature that stands related to Christ also on the fleshly plane; your flesh is related to Christ, and my flesh is related to Christ. In what way? In this way: that as Jesus' flesh suffered, so you and I and all his faithful consecrated ones are counted in as part of his flesh. How so? Why in all your afflictions. "In all their afflictions, he was afflicted." All your afflictions are the afflictions of Christ, all the sufferings of the church in the flesh. You are not suffering as new creatures, you are suffering in the flesh. You remember how the Lord spoke to Saul of Tarsus on this subject. Saul had been persecuting Stephen and others, and the Lord appeared unto him on the way to Damascus, and said to him, "Saul, Saul why persecutest thou me?"
"Why, Lord, am I persecuting you? I never persecuted you. Who are you? How do I persecute you?"
"I am Jesus, whom thou persecutest."
Whenever Saul did anything against Stephen, he was doing that against Jesus; whenever he did anything against any of the other saints who were counted in as members of the body of Christ, their flesh was like that of Jesus in the world. Whoever harms one of you, the least of these my little ones, is harming the body of Christ; and so all the body of Christ is suffering together. Thus we are sharing in the sufferings of Christ, and we are filling up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ. As he was afflicted, so are we; as he was opposed by the world, and the flesh, and the adversary, so we are to expect the same. The Lord himself says, "Think it not strange concerning these experiences;" and St. Peter says, "Think it not strange concerning these fiery trials." Jesus says, "If they have called the Master of the house Beelzebub, what will they say about you? If they say all manner of evil against him, what must you expect?" We must not expect that we will be superior to our Lord. We must not expect that the world will be friendly to us if they were not so to him.
Then the apostle says, we are to rejoice in this. Of course he proceeds to say that no tribulation for the time being seems joyous, but rather grievous, nevertheless it yields the peaceable proof of righteousness. And so when you and I become more and more developed in Christian character, in the likeness and mind of our Lord, it enables us to see that these various things that might mean harm to our flesh, as various trials and difficulties, are all so many blessings. If you receive them properly – the if is there – let us make sure the if is applicable to us – if we endure these things joyfully, then the Spirit of glory and of God resteth on us. How glad we are! Of course that gives us rejoicing.
I think of one old gentleman who came to see me one day. He inquired for me at the office, and hearing him I went to the door, and I said, "How do you do, Mr. __________."
I said, "I ought to know you, you have been around Pittsburgh for twenty years or so; of course, I know you."
He was about seventy-five years of age. He looked very much abashed.
He said, "Have you a back room?"
"I wish you would take me back there and kick me."
I said, "Mr. __________, I have no feeling like that towards you."
He said, "It would be a good thing."
"Oh," I said, "I have nothing against you; you have not done me any harm."
He said, "Oh, yes, I have done you harm. I said everything about you, and I thought worse."
"Well, well," I said, "never mind it now; we will let that go; you seem to be in a different frame of mind anyway. Let that all go."
"Well, it makes me feel worse that you take it so kindly."
Then he began to tell me how he had come under the influence of the truth; how a friend had loaned him Volume III. of Dawn, in order that he might read about the great pyramid. It was handed to him wrapped up, and when he got home and found it was Millennial Dawn he was angry and did not want the book in his house. He said he could not sleep comfortably with that book in the house. He wanted to burn it, but it was not his book. He wanted to take it back to that man who gave it to him, but that would be an improper act, and he had promised to read that chapter; he did not want to read it, did not want to open the book, did not want to look at it, but finally concluded the least he could do would be to read that chapter in a rather cursory manner, and take it back wrapped up, and when he would meet the party, just say, "Thank you, very much." But if the party should say, "What do you think of it?" – well – not say much about it, not get into any controversy. But he said, "Brother Russell, after I read that chapter, and I did not read it in a cursory manner after I got started, I could not read it any way but carefully, then I began at the beginning and read all the remainder of the book, and now I have come here, and from the young man out in the office I have gotten the other two volumes, and I will tell you in advance that I am more than half convinced that I am going to believe every word that is in them."
I said, "All right, Brother, we are very glad."
So I have found sometimes that those who are our greatest enemies, and those who are most opposed, have real good and honest hearts, and it is because they have honesty underneath that they want to fight the truth, because they truly believe it is contrary to God's word. So when I find anybody fighting real hard, I have come to wonder if he will not get converted to the truth. No man has ever tackled the truth successfully that I know of, they nearly always have done themselves harm, but any way we are content whether we shall ever see any fruits to our labors or not – though we are not satisfied. You know there is a difference: we are content every day, but wholly dissatisfied all the time. That is to say, we will not be satisfied until we get what the Lord has promised, and all the glorious things he has in reservation. We will be satisfied when we are awakened in his likeness, and after his glorious plan shall have reached its consummation, then all God's people will be thoroughly satisfied, but now we are contented. We do not know all his plan may call for; we are simply soldiers. He is the great captain. If he says march to the left, we will march to the left; if he says march "right flank," we turn to the right. So we are under orders now, not knowing all the purposes of the great Captain of our salvation, but he is now showing us a great deal of his plan.
As a child I used to think about the heathen; I was always interested to give my little mite to the work of missionary endeavor. I think of the time when I was about ten, perhaps, and a boat by the name of the "Morning Star" was being built for work in foreign lands; I do not remember now just what islands they were, but one of the vessels used in missionary work had been destroyed in some manner, and they started to build another one. She was to be called the "Morning Star." All the Sunday School had the opportunity of subscribing for shares in some amount for the "Morning Star," and I wanted to get some shares. I did not expect it would ever pay any dividends, but I wanted to have some money in that boat. As a boy of ten I had not any money, nor any way of getting any money; I did not think of any way I had. I was not allowed to sell papers, and I did not know of any other way I could get money. Finally, I thought of a way. I said, "Father, which article on our table is the most expensive."
He said, "That is a very strange question." Finally, we concluded that butter, which was then selling at one dollar and twenty-five cents a pound – that was during war time – was the most expensive article, and I figured out about how much butter I ate in a week, and what my share would come to, and asked him if I could have that much money instead of the butter, for a week or two weeks – I don't remember just how long, but for the time the missionary sum was made up. [CR164]
"Well," he said, "what do you want it for?"
"Well, I wanted to get some interest in that Morning Star boat."
"Well, well," he said, "you need not mind doing without butter; I will see that you have some money to get some shares in that."
"Oh, no," I said, "you can take what you like, but I want to have some of my own." I wanted something I had paid for in some way – something that had cost me something.
So I have always had a deep interest in the poor heathen. I was talking to a sister in the train who had once been a missionary in China, and we could touch in sympathy readily. Her sympathy had been with the heathen, and she was working for them in China. We were saying to each other what a wonderful blessing was coming to the poor heathen, so much better than we had thought for. What would all the Morning Star boats you and I could build amount to in comparison to the great morning star that God is going to let shine out? And it will only be the precursor to the great sun. The morning star goes first, and the sun comes right along afterward, and the whole earth shall be full of the knowledge of the glory of God. The heathen will see the Sun of Righteousness and will all get a share of the blessings.
But our text goes on to say that to them that look for him, he will appear unto salvation. This first seeing will be when the whole world will see the Lord from the standpoint of one who is displeased with the present arrangement, and who is about to bring on civilization a certain chastisement, which the Bible foretells, for the judgment of the Lord will be abroad, and the fire of God's anger, the fire of God's jealousy, shall burn, as the prophet says. They will first have that experience. Everybody will more or less see that the Lord is displeased, and that sin has brought a certain amount of wreck and ruin in its wake. Then what? Then they will be looking for something better, and they will gradually begin to look for what? For the Redeemer, for the Saviour, for the Deliverer, to bless them, and lift them up and help them. Do the Scriptures tell us about the Jews? What will they do? Will they look? Yes, they shall look unto him whom they pierced. I am glad they will look. The time of trouble God will permit to come on the world will make men's hearts look over the transitory things of the present time, and make them look towards the Lord – they shall look to him whom they have pierced. What then? They will mourn; they will be sorry. I am glad they will be sorry. They will be cut to the heart. As I remember, one of the pictures of David's psalm represents that Christ shall ride forth as a great conqueror. "Gird thy sword upon thy thigh, and ride forth prosperously," is a cry prophetical of Jesus in his glorified condition. "Thy right hand (thy power) shall teach thee terrible things." Yes, there will be a terrible time of trouble. "Thine arrows shall be sharp in the hearts of the king's enemies, by which they shall be made to fall." How many in the world are enemies of Christ? How many in the world are enemies of the Lord in the sense of not being his servants, not being in harmony with him? They are all going to fall under these arrows. The Lord is going to shoot out these arrows at them all. They will be the same kind of arrows St. Peter shot out on the day of Pentecost. He was talking to some of the Jews, and we read that they were cut to the heart. What cut them? His words cut them. They cried out, "Men and brethren, what must we do?" So I will be glad when the whole world gets cut to the heart, and when some of the Lord's arrows, the declarations of his Word, shall enter in and show them just where they are, and shall cut them to the heart. It will be a happy day for them. Their eyes will open then to see what the love of God really is. And that is what the prophet says the world shall know – the knowledge of the glory of God will fill the whole earth. That is what is going to bless them all. They have been hearing bad tidings of great misery, which has misrepresented our Lord and the heavenly Father for all of these centuries; they are going to hear something of the good tidings which shall be unto great joy – they are going to have a blessing.
Now, the Jews will be amongst the first that will look unto him; he shall appear to them that look for him; and then the whole world as they begin to see the blessings of the new covenant coming to the Jew will awaken to the fact and say, "Here is the beginning of the Lord's blessings. See the Jews in prosperity. See the blessings the Lord has poured out on them." And they will want some of those blessings, and they will see that those blessings could only be obtained along the pathway of righteousness. And then they will say, "Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord's house, and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths. The Jews are getting these blessings, and we will go in those paths, and he will give us some of those blessings." And gradually they shall all come to see him. God will arrange it so that the whole world will need to look for the blessings, he intends to give them; and looking for those blessings and desiring those blessings, and praying for them, and getting into the condition of mind to receive them, will mean the blessed things that will be exercised amongst mankind during that thousand years which will help them up, step by step, out of their weaknesses and imperfections. And as they come to appreciate the Lord, they will see him more and more. Just the same as you and I have been seeing him more. The apostle says, you are looking unto Jesus. Are you looking unto Jesus? Yes. As you look unto Jesus, you see him more clearly today than you did a year ago? I hope so. So do I. We are all seeing him more clearly. His glorious character and plan and arrangements are all more glorious in our sight than ever before. So will the world look for him. To them that look for him he shall appear unto salvation. And the more they look, the more they will see; and the more they look and see, the more blessings they will get, until, at the end of the thousand years their eyes will be fully opened; for it is written all the blind eyes shall be opened, and all the deaf ears shall be unstopped, and the blessings of the Lord will be with them.
Within the past fifty years, under the blighting influence of the evolution theory and the destructive higher criticism of the Bible, these parallels have been lost sight of. Indeed, aside from international Sunday school lessons, Bible study has been very largely neglected, even in theological seminaries. And Sunday school lessons, under guidance of worldly wisdom, have sought to avoid everything except the "milk of the Word" (the simple doctrines) to avoid controversies.
Only very recently is true Bible study being revived in conjunction with the International Bible Students' Association, a branch of which I have the honor to address today. We may well congratulate each other, dear friends, that in God's providence we have escaped the faith-destroying influence of higher criticism and evolution. We may well congratulate ourselves also on the degree of liberty we have attained in the study of God's Word – freedom from the confusion creeds manufactured for us in a darker age – freedom from some of the rank superstitions and false theories which, for a time, fettered our reason and made the divine plan to appear ignoble – unworthy of a just and loving man, much more of an all-wise, just and loving Creator. [CR165]
Briefly we remind you that ancient Babylon was built on the river Euphrates; that she had impregnable walls; that the river ran through the midst of the city, and the great gates of brass spanned the river as a protection against assaults of an enemy from that quarter. The name of the city was attached to a large area of country outside of it, for which it served as the capital. Indeed, at its zenith Babylon was mistress of the then civilized world – the first universal empire.
We remind you of the captivity, first of the ten tribes of Israel, and later on of the remaining two tribes or kingdom called Judah. The method of Babylon was to scatter the Israelites among the Babylonians, and through their earthly interests to amalgamate them as part and parcel of Babylonia. This condition of things lasted until the fall of Babylon before its conqueror, Cyrus.
The general gained his victory in a remarkable manner, while the Babylonians, assured of their security, were reveling at a banquet. Although the crisis came suddenly, the preparation had been long in progress. The soldiers of Cyrus, under his direction had digged a canal of considerable depth ready to drain off the water of the river as soon as the necessary connection was made. When the canal was in readiness the connection with the river was speedily made and the water flowed rapidly into the new channel, leaving the bed of the river under the great brazen gates, on both sides of the city, an open roadway, through which marched the army of Cyrus. Suddenly, at an unexpected moment, the boastful city, the proud Babylon, was captured.
Then it was that Cyrus, the victorious general, gave the command which granted liberty to every Israelite carried captive thither, to return to his own land. Additionally, assistance was rendered to all who desired to return, and the golden vessels pertaining to the worship of God in the temple were sent back. But strange to say out of all the millions who had constituted Israel and Judah before the captivity, only about fifty-three thousand of all the tribes were anxious to avail themselves of the privilege of returning to the land of promise.
The Book of Revelation, the book of symbols, the last message of our ascended Redeemer to his church through the apostle John, was written long centuries after literal Babylon perished. Its references to Babylon, therefore, can be viewed only in the light of symbolism. As already suggested, many of the prophetic utterances seem far too strong to be applied to literal Babylon and her fall.
Indeed, while speaking directly of Babylon and her fall at the hands of the Medes and Persians under Cyrus, the prophecies speak of the end of this age and of world-wide calamities incidental to the overthrow of every institution contrary to the divine will, preparatory to the inauguration of Messiah's kingdom.
I request that at your convenience you read Isaiah 13:1-19, in confirmation of what I have said. I recommend further that you compare Jeremiah 1:15-29 [50:15-29? site Editor], with Revelation 18:6, and Jeremiah 1:38 [50:38? site Editor], with Revelation 16:12, and the forty-sixth verse with Revelation 18:9. Compare also Jeremiah 51:6-9, with Revelation 18:4, and verse thirteen of Jeremiah 51 with Revelation 17:1-5, and verses thirty-seven, sixty-three and sixty-four with Revelation 18:2-4, 21.
No one can make these comparisons, I believe, and not feel fully convinced that the Holy Spirit dictating through Isaiah and Jeremiah was the same Holy Spirit which guided St. John through the apocalyptic vision. Nor can such students escape the conclusion that the force of the prophecies apply specially to mystic Babylon rather than to the literal city and country. As one section of literal Babylon fell before another, so Revelation predicts it will be with mystic Babylon. As literal Babylon ruled over the whole world, so mystic Babylon is represented as ruling the civilized world, and hence the entire world.
As the lords of Babylon were made drunk by wine which they drank from the golden vessels captured from the temple at Jerusalem, so mystic Babylon, represented by a woman, is said to make all nations drunk with the wine, or doctrine, which she gives them out of the golden cup which she holds in her hand. As literal Babylon fell by the drying up of the waters of the Euphrates, so Revelation tells us that mystic Babylon sits upon the symbolic Euphrates, and that the way of the kings of the East shall be prepared by the drying up of those waters (Revelation 16:12).
Similarly, we are assured, mystic Babylon's end shall come suddenly, "in one hour." Like a great millstone she shall be cast into the sea to rise no more. As the literal Israelites were invited to leave Babylon the literal and were helped so to do, but only a few responded, so spiritual Israelites are urged to leave mystic Babylon in which they have been in captivity, but only a comparatively small number have a sufficiency of courage, love and zeal to respond at the first – others will be delivered after her collapse. Now, however, the message is, "Babylon is fallen, is fallen (sentenced to fall). Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues." (Revelation 18:2-5).
No student can examine the records without astonishment and a realization that mystic Babylon must be some great, influential system of great power in the world during this Gospel age, and especially at its close. The very prominence given to Babylon, both in prophecy and in revelation, warns God's people that if they have not yet found Babylon they should seek for her. For so great an institution as made all nations drunk with her false doctrine must be very prominent, indeed, to those who were made so under the influence of the stupefying draft from her cup.
Indeed, the intimation is that the whole civilized world will be so intoxicated with the false teaching of Babylon as to be completely under her influence. And when she falls it is particularly explained that all the great, the rich, the mighty, the influential of earth will mourn the catastrophe of her fall. Only the saintly few will recognize its true import and rejoice, as we read, "Alas! that great city that was clothed in fine linen and purple and scarlet, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls! For in one hour so great riches is come to naught....What city is like unto this great city! And they cast dust on their heads and cried, weeping, and wailing, saying: Alas, alas, that great city!" (Revelation 18:16-19).
But, on the contrary, another class rejoices, as we read:
"Rejoice over her, thou heaven, and ye holy apostles and prophets, for God hath avenged you on her. And I heard a voice of much people in heaven, saying, "Alleluia! Salvation, and glory, and honor, and power, unto the Lord our God, for true and righteous are his judgments, for he hath judged the great harlot which did corrupt the earth with her fornication, and hath avenged the blood of his servants at her hand." (Revelation 18:20 and 19:1-2).
It seems very clear, my dear brethren, that many of us were once a part and parcel of this great Babylon – this great system of confusion, by which the divine character has been so traduced through misinterpretations of the divine Word. I am aware that Catholics declare that Protestants are this Babylon system, and I am aware that Protestants claim that Catholics are this Babylon system.
To my understanding of the divine Word, both are right! Babylon is the mother system and the various sects of Protestants are the daughters, and the name Babylon is a family name. It belongs to the mother system first, and to all the daughters of the system now, as well. Improper association with the world, its governments and systems, is a crime to which they are parties. The "daughters" have followed the example of the "mother," and more or less are coming back into sympathy with her in all particulars. None of them have maintained the proper attitude of virginity and separateness from the world.
Do not misunderstand me. I believe that there are true saints of God in all the various parts of Christendom – mother and daughters. I do not even charge nor believe that those who have upheld and are upholding the various sections of Babylon have an evil intention. I believe that they are thoroughly "drunk," intoxicated with their own erroneous theories. The fall of their present institutions will be a startling blow to them, for they verily believe them to be Christ's kingdom – and style them such – Christendom.
The fall of Babylon will astonish the entire world, so complete is the illusion that Christendom represents the throne and government of Messiah among men. And, be it remembered, the vast majority in all the various sects and denominations of Christendom are worldly people who have no conception whatever of the true church and her cause. Their ambition is to approximate righteousness and a form of godliness, but no more than this seems to them necessary, since they have not been begotten of the Holy Spirit and therefore cannot appreciate things from the divine standpoint.
To them the fall of Babylon at first is astounding, a perplexity, but will work no real injury, because the reign of Babylon over the earth will be superseded by the reign of the New Jerusalem – the kingdom of God's dear Son. The most saintly of God's people will hear the voice of divine command, "Come out of her, my people," and will obey it before the fall comes, but a large [CR166] number, even of the Lord's people, lacking courage, will share with Babylon the troubles of that hour.
Subsequently, however, they will rejoice and be glad when they realize the justice of the divine execution against Babylon, and to them will come, as an inferior company, an invitation to attend the "marriage supper of the Lamb." Their honorable position will be that of bridesmaids to the still more faithful and courageous "little flock," who will be accounted worthy to be the bride class and to sit with the Redeemer in his throne. Then speedily will follow the long-promised times of restitution to the world of mankind, for which we pray. "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth, as it is done in heaven."
As God and his glory and honor are to be first in the minds of his children, so their next thought should be for the glorious kingdom, which he has promised shall bless the world. However much our personal interests and affairs may be pressing upon us, and however much we may desire to have the Lord's blessing and guidance our appreciation of his beneficent arrangements which he has so clearly promised in his Word, we are to remember that the kingdom, when it shall come, will be a panacea for every ill and every trouble, not only for us, but for the whole world of mankind. We are not, therefore, to permit our own personal needs to be too prominent, but are to remember that the whole creation is groaning and travailing in pain together, waiting for this glorious kingdom and the blessing upon all the families of the earth, which our heavenly Father has promised shall yet come through the seed of Abraham.
This thought respecting the kingdom, its necessity, and the blessings that it will bring will keep prominently before our minds our own high calling to joint-heirship with our Lord in this kingdom. And in proportion as that hope is clearly before our minds it will be, as the apostle explains, as "an anchor to our souls, sure and steadfast, entering into that which is within the vail." This anchorage of hope in the future, in the kingdom, will enable us to pass safely, and with comparative quiet, through the trials and storms and difficulties of this present evil world. More than this, our thoughts respecting the kingdom will remind us that if we are to be heirs of the kingdom it will be necessary that we have the appropriate discipline and training.
This petition offered from the heart implies that the one offering it has made a full consecration of his will, his heart, to the Lord, and that as he hopes for the kingdom by and by to come and subdue all unrighteousness and to establish the divine will from sea to sea, and from pole to pole, so now, the petitioner, being thus in accord with the Lord's will, and thus wishing that it might be universally in control, will see to it that this will is ruling in his own heart – that in his own affairs God's will is done to the best of his ability in his earthly condition, even as he hopes to have it perfected in the kingdom. No one can intelligently and honestly offer this petition and not desire and endeavor to have the Lord's will done in himself while on earth. Thus a blessing comes to the one who offers this petition before he has asked any special blessing upon himself or others. The mere thought of the divine arrangement brings a blessing, a peace, a rest, a sanctification of heart.
IT IS often with the Lord's people a question whether they may count themselves as new creatures, whether they may know that they passed from death unto life. The apostle seems to anticipate this very question, and in our text tells us how we may know, and states that the love of the brethren is the proof. It seems a very strange statement, too. One might say rightly enough "Love the brethren? I should think we all have no trouble in doing that; no trouble in loving the brethren."
Oh, but that is the proof of having passed from death unto life. Why, that is the easiest thing in the world to love the brethren. Well, some of the brothers and some of the sisters are always easy to love, and yet there are some whom it is difficult to love, and I believe that is what the apostle meant, or what the Lord had in mind when he directed the apostle so to write. That this would be a proof not that we loved a certain clique of the brethren, or a few of the brethren, or those that are good looking, well educated, talented or witty in their conversation. Oh no, we can find all of these people in the world without being brethren at all! You might find them witty and bright and honorable and very fine people in many respects, but there is evidently something in this text that is deeper than all this. The love of the brethren means to love them because they are brethren; to love them, even if they have not all of the lovable qualities, to love them because our heavenly Father loves them. Because he loved them enough to beget them of his Holy Spirit, and take them into his family, is a good reason why you should love them if you wish to be in harmony with him.
Now ordinarily we are not specially to approve of anything selfish, in the way for instance, of a special family love, and say, simply because these are my kith and kin, I will love them, and others equally as good I will not have any feeling for at all; that is rather a selfish spirit – "God bless me and my wife, and my son John and his wife, us four and no more." We are not to cultivate that spirit; we do not understand that to be the spirit of the Lord, but the Lord lays out a certain family line and to love within that line is really a necessity; that unless we have that love for the brethren we have not the spirit of the Lord. As, for instance, Jesus said, "A new commandment I give unto you, that ye should love one another." He did not say you should love everybody. He did not say, "I give you a commandment that you shall love your enemies just as much as you love the brethren." He did say we are to love our enemies. Yes, we are to do good unto all men, but we are to love the brethren. And as we said before, some of the brethren have amiable qualities that anybody might love, and some of the sisters also, and there would be no difference in their case. The test evidently is whether or not we love all the brethren because they are his. Whosoever shall do an act of kindness to you, because you are his, shall in no wise lose his reward. But it should be done because you are his, not because you are so desirable, and so amiable, etc. Now let no one misunderstand me as putting a premium upon disagreeability. We are all to be as amiable as we can, if we have sourness in our disposition by nature, we are to put in as much of the sweetness of life as possible.
I remind you of what the old lady said about her pies, when they said unto her, "Won't you tell us why your pies are always so good?"
"Well," she said, "I do not know, unless it is this; that I put in more sugar perhaps than some."
"How much sugar do you put in?"
"Oh," she says, "I put in all my conscience will allow, then I shut my eyes and put in another large spoonful."
So, dear friends, let the sugar represent the love, and when you and I are trying to sweeten up a little, we will put in all the sweetening our conscience will allow, and then shut our eyes and put a little more in. That is the way we get more sweet, more loving, more kind, more gentle, more like our blessed Master, and more helpful one to another. But as long as we are in the flesh, we will have the kinks and twists and corners and rough places to some extent with which we were born. You were born with some, and I was born with some; we are all born with some. You might ask why the Lord did not pick out those who did not have any rough corners and bumps. Why he did not pick out [CR167] the nice and smooth ones? I answer, he could have picked out a lot of angels, and passed us all by, could he not? But I am glad he did not. If he had intended to pick out only perfect ones, he would have left our poor race go by, and we would not have had any prize of the high calling to run for. He would have said, "Here are angels who excel in every respect, and they never have at any time transgressed the law, they are perfect in all their qualities and attributes, they are in the image of their Creator, and have never lost that image, why should I stoop down and take some of the poor fallen children of Adam, and lift them up out of the mire of sin and imperfection, and polish them and make them my jewels? Why not take some of these others?" I am so glad our heavenly Father did what he did do. In fact, every day, as I come to better understand just what his divine purpose is, I am more pleased with it if possible than the previous day. And so, with the old book, the Bible, which other people want to throw away because it does not suit their changed ideas. We are getting our ideas changed every day just by the book, and it is getting better to us. Why? Because we are allowing the Book to change us, instead of trying to change the book; we are allowing the Word of God to have the transforming influence.
Well now, admitting that the whole world of mankind are fallen and imperfect, why did not God pick out the best he could out of the whole rubbish pile, and say? "I will not bother with those poor crooked and gnarled ones." Why did he not say? "I am going to make my selection for the bride of Christ from amongst the world of mankind; they are all fallen, but I will pick the best there are." Did he do that? No, the apostle says, on the contrary, not many good, not many wise, not many rich, not many noble – Oh, that last one hits the worst of all – not many noble! And then he goes on as though he were trying to push the matter down on us and says, "God has chosen the mean things." That is very hard on us to say that we are the mean things – out of the whole mean lot, the whole mean world, that God has picked out the meanest of the mean! Is not that now pretty hard? It is. And people that have much self-esteem are apt to go off and say, "I will not have anything to do with that mean set at all; I hold myself above the average riff raff of this world, and I will not get down to their level, and if that is the kind God is picking out, he can pick without me." And God does pick without them. They are not going to have a share in the matter. God says he will do all these things himself. How does it come, then, that God is taking the mean things of this world? Is it not altogether contrary to anything that you and I would do? It seems almost as though the apostle must have made a mistake and that God is not choosing the mean things, for surely those whom you and I know amongst the Lord's people are not the meanest of the mean are they? Did the apostle make a mistake? No, I think not. Let me tell you how it is: He did not say that there were none noble amongst those whom the Lord is drawing; he did not say, there were none educated; he did not say there were none rich; but he said there were not many of those classes, but chiefly the mean things of this world. Now how does it come that God so chooses? Well, my understanding of the matter is this: God is calling for a certain humility of heart, and that humility of heart requires, first of all, that we realize that we are sinners; and if we do not realize that we are sinners, how would we ever apply to God for permission to become his children through faith in the sacrifice of another? We would not do it. I think of a gentleman to whom I was talking – a business acquaintance, and something or other came up in connection with this subject, and he said, "Well I never had any requests to make of the Creator to forgive my sins for me, he just punishes me as much as he thinks I ought to have, and I will not ask anybody to bear my sins for me."
Now that is the spirit of pride, the spirit of self-sufficiency, and the Lord is passing by those, no matter how bright they may be. I think that man was rather an honorable man in his general dealings, perhaps above the average of his general cast of mind, and general spirit of fair dealing in the world, and yet God passes him by and takes someone who is meaner than he. Why? Because that meaner one came in through the right door. The right door is an acknowledgement of sin and imperfection, and the realization of the need of a Savior. "No man cometh unto the Father except by me," said Jesus. How true that is! There was a man who would not come to the Father, because he would not come to Jesus. There are plenty in the world who, in their general conversation, would say to you, "Well, I know there are people who need a Savior, I believe there are people who need salvation." They usually have a wrong conception of the word salvation. By salvation, they mean to be lifted up out of the dung-hill, as it were, and to be set on their feet, and to be lifted out of some very degraded habits, and so they say, "Oh I believe there are some people that need a Savior, that are pretty much fallen down." They would say, "Look at that poor devil, indeed he does need a Savior; I think he does need something." That is quite true; but he has not realized that there are none righteous, no not one, in God's sight, and that from God's standpoint, each one of our fallen race needs a Savior – one able to save to the uttermost.
So then, I take it, this is the particular reason why God is passing by some of the great, rich, noble, some of the very fine characters of the world. His message is grace; we were singing about it – "Of grace divine, the half was never told." God's message of grace and favor is, "I will forgive you, I am ready to receive you." Those who are well to do, those who are rich in various talents and opportunities and are not so very fallen are very apt to say, "Well that does not have any particular attraction for me. I never did claim to one of those low down people. I think that if God wanted to save anybody, he would want to save me."
Mr. Ingersoll, the great infidel, intimated that if there is a God, and if there is a future, God would just want somebody like him to make a good sample on top of the basket, as it were. There were plenty of mean people, and he thought he was a pretty noble and strong character in many respects. Perhaps he was; I will not dispute that. But he felt himself quite great, and he thought God would be glad to have him; he had been doing very well in this world, and thought God would like to have just such a grand character as he was. He did not realize that he owed whatever degree of fineness there was in his character to God's grace. The story is told that his father was a minister, and for aught we know, a sincere believer in the Lord. But the whole world has been benefited by the grace of the Lord and the enlightening influence that has gone out, and so you and I, born in a Christian land have been profited by the fact, even though all of those around us are of the class of merely nominal Christians. Nevertheless, even upon the nominal Christians, the grace of God has been such as to give them a better and broader view, and their children therefore would be better born. So Mr. Ingersoll did not perhaps realize to what extent he owed his own good qualities of mind to the fact that he was not born of heathen parents, in a heathen land.
So, while giving God thanks for all we have and are, and seeking to estimate ourselves as nearly as possible by the proper measure, we all feel that we have everything to be thankful, to be grateful for. The grace of the Lord has done much for us. The grace of God appeals particularly to those who have little. The man of little learning feels his littleness of learning, and he is more humble-minded, more teachable, more apt to say, "I wish God would show me the truth along this matter." A man who has passed through college, and thinks he has found out that Isaiah never wrote the book of Isaiah, and the whole Bible is a fraud, is not very apt to ask God to teach him anything. He says, "No, if there is a God, we of the colleges ought to be able to tell the people, and to write a Bible better than anybody else. Those prophets of old knew little in comparison with us." The very knowledge he has stands in his way, and hinders him from becoming a disciple of Christ, hinders him from seeing the beauty of God's Word. He is not even willing to investigate the Bible from the standpoint we see its beauty; he is not willing to look for the internal evidence; he sees enough examining the external and says, "I see the fallacy from the external standpoint, and it is not worth my while, I would not waste the time looking into it from the internal standpoint." We see the very reverse of that. From the internal, we see the beauty of the divine plan, and thus we see that none but God could ever have made that book, wherever he came from. But then it is the same way with respect to wealth. Such a one is very apt to say, "Oh well, I know I made this, I earned that, and I was fortunate. It is a matter of luck, you know, or it is a matter of ability. I have the ability to make money, and some people think God gives it to them, but I know that I made it." Well, he is in great danger; he is not rightly appreciating the giver of every gift. He is not apt to think of his wealth as being a stewardship from the Lord, he is apt to think of it as being his own, instead of thinking of it as being something that belongs to the Lord, and he is not apt to become a follower of the Lord.
So we have gone all around the line and see that there are obstacles in the way of those who are seeking to come to God. Now, how should we come? Well, by the grace of God we are here, and we are thankful we are here. By the grace of God we realize ourselves sinners, and by the grace of God we have harkened unto his Word, and our minds were not attuned for some [CR168] earthly message, but for the message of the grace of the Lord, and we have accepted of the Lord Jesus, and believed in him as the Redeemer from sin, and have heard that he is willing to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all iniquities, and our hearts are glad because of the simplicity of our trust, and the simplicity of our faith, and we know that if we do not have the simple faith, we would lose all that we did have. It is only those that get the simple faith as a little child. God says his people are like a little child. As little children we have all confidence when our heavenly Father says there shall be a resurrection of the dead, both of the just and of the unjust; we are simple enough to believe it, and the worldly people are foolish enough not to believe it. He says all the silver and gold in the country are his; but as the world would say, we are foolish enough to believe it. Does he say he has prepared things for us beyond the sight of the eye and range of ear? Yes, and we are simple enough to believe it, and the world says, "You are foolish, watch out for the things of this life. You do not know whether there is any future life or not. See that you get your share now, and take a good stand for the present things, and let the next world look out for itself." But on the contrary, the Lord says he is choosing those who have such faith, such confidence, in him that they are willing to sacrifice all the earthly interests; those that have such faith in those things not seen – things which eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man – such faith that they are willing to sacrifice all the things of this present time that they may gain these things. And the world looks on with astonishment and says, "Little soft in the head – no, any business man would know better than that; there is a man risking everything on things he has not seen; that is like gambling." That is from the worldly standpoint, for they say that in the first place, you do not know that there is a future life; and, secondly, you do not know that there would be anything better for you in that future life. So you see, our viewpoint is altogether different from that of the world; and it is the very class that can exercise faith that God can call now; he is not calling the others. He is not letting them slip down into eternal torment – Oh no, we are glad he is not! But he is not calling them to be the Bride class. He is calling those who have an ear to hear; those who will hear the message he has given, those whose hearts are touched with his message of love and grace divine, and now then, the message which he gives to us is the message that we should love one another. And the peculiarity of this text is, it implies that it is a difficult thing to do; so difficult a thing to love all the brethren that, if we reach the point where you can truthfully say, "I love every child of God," you may also say, "Well that is a proof that I have passed from death unto life." Is not that wonderful? To me it is very wonderful. Now I know some of the brethren who are not just what I would make them if I had the chance – and if they had the chance of making me, I suppose they would make me different. So we are not to make each other over – it is not in our power, and we are not so authorized. I guess if we were to undertake it we would find it quite a job. We are to love each other because God has accepted us. If God has given us an indication, and some evidence, that one is a brother in Christ, that the Lord has given him of his holy Spirit, we are to love him because he is the Lord's; we must not allow ourselves to do anything else than love him; and if we love him we must seek to show that love, for you cannot have that love and seek to hide it; it is bound to be manifest in the character. Some of those ungainly qualities become the trial of your patience, perseverance, longsuffering, kindness and love. If there were not any such things in the church, we would have no proof at all that we were the Lord's brethren; but having these tests in the church amongst the brethren, it behooves us to see to it that we are learning our lesson. Never mind about the other brother, and say, "Well, he has a lesson, I want to help him to learn it." Never mind, the Lord says for you to learn the lesson yourself. Here is where my chief concern must come in, in my own heart that I should seek to learn to love the brethren, not that I must teach the brethren to love me, or I must teach them to love each other. That may be done in a general way through the Lord's Word, and through the exposition of the Scriptures; but my chief concern, my responsibility is for myself, and yours is for yourself. God will hold you responsible for the way you have striven, and me for the way in which I have striven.
There is one way of looking at these peculiarities of the brethren that I believe may be helpful to us, and one peculiarity of those who are the Lord's people whom he especially draws, and honors, and who make any special progress which is, that they have real character; there is something real firm there; others do not often get very far in the school of Christ, if they even come to the point of making a consecration. They generally take everything just like putty; you make a dent in a piece of putty, and it stays there; there is no individuality about the putty, or about the clay, it is just something to be shapen. But real Christian character, and the kind the Lord is looking for, is that which has an individuality, and which has a will. There must be a positiveness of personality; and if that person should acquire certain character, then all of that will is behind all of those acquired traits, and he is all the harder customer to handle. Indeed I do not know any worse ones to handle than some of the brethren would be, because any thing they have that is of a cantankerous disposition, they have that firmness and positiveness of character that forces that cantankerous quality right to the front, so that it may become a real trial to love the brother, to be patient with him, to be kind, and longsuffering and gentle with him. I tell you God knew how to make the school in which to give you and me the polishing. Perhaps he chose you and me to polish somebody else too. We must not look at all the bumps on the other men and women, but suppose that we have our share too, and they have to be prepared to take our bumps and knocks.
It reminds me of the way in which they polish diamonds. We all know that diamonds are very precious, and that the preciousness of the diamond does not only consist of its pureness and absolute clearness, but its value also consists in the fact that it is very hard, almost impossible to cut it, for you can cut almost anything else with a diamond. Now that is what the Lord seems to be implying in connection with his church. He calls us his jewels, and all of these jewels are jewels because of this quality of hardness. You can take a piece of gelatine and it may look as pretty as a ruby, but it has not the firmness or solidity of a ruby. If you could get rubies of the same size that you can get blocks of gelatine, you would have something very wonderful. But the gelatine has no particular value in comparison with the ruby, because it has not the firmness or hardness. So you can get a piece of ice that is just as clear as a diamond, and hard too, but it will not stand the heat; it will melt and go to pieces, and you could not put it in your shirt-bosom, or in your hair, for it would only melt down. Now when you get the quality of hardness you have difficulty in dealing with it. And the diamond is correspondingly the hardest stone in the whole world to shape and polish and bring into the proper condition so that it will refract the rays of light, and give forth a beautiful appearance.
Now that is what God explains he is doing. He is taking you and me in the rough, right out of the earth, and putting us into the School of Christ, and he puts us in there that we may be polished, and in order that he may put on us the different facets; one would be meekness, another patience, another long-suffering, another brotherly kindness, another love; and so we need all of these qualities put upon us as precious jewels before we will be able to refract the light of the divine character. Now then, this is the arrangement God has made, and if you and I were to change it just a little, we would upset things; and he will not allow us to change it; he has fixed it and he will keep it so. It has been so for eighteen hundred years that he has been polishing us, or as the Scriptures express it, the bride makes herself ready. Is not that the way the bride makes herself ready? I think so. So then, dear brethren, if there is an awkward one in the class here, there or anywhere, be sure you do not put the awkward one out. It might be that the Lord wishes to give you your polishing that way. The polishing must come or you will not be ready for the kingdom. It would not do, of course, for the awkward one to be allowed to spoil the class or spoil the arrangements; while dealing with this one it might be necessary to use firmness, or something, but you get the point, that we are not to disfellowship anyone on account of differences of viewpoint, or something of that kind, but rather, if we are all brethren in the Lord, we must love one another and endure from one another all things, "Love endureth all things." You will remember how the apostle brought these things out and indicated that it was necessary for us daily, as you and I continue daily in the School of Christ, to have these things to perfect us in the character-likeness of our dear Redeemer. "Hereby we know we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren." Love worketh no ill to his neighbor; you not only love him, but you will want to do all the good toward him that you can. That does not mean that you must take him in hand and teach him a lesson, as I have heard some brethren talk of others. The Lord does not want you to take him in hand any more than the Lord wants him to take you in hand and give you a lesson. We must not run and do some job the great Master had not told us, we must wait for the Lord, "Wait ye upon me, saith the Lord." Not only would he have us wait on him with respect to earthly [CR169] things, but in respect also to things in the Church, and use more patience, and allow the perfecting process of the truth to polish us all. That does not mean that we should let anybody run away with the class, or teach something wrong, or do something wrong, but stand up for the truth, and whatever we say should be said from the standpoint of love, as should everything we do, speaking the truth in love; do not hold back the truth and say, "Now for love's sake I will not speak the truth." That would be wrong on the other side; that would show you did not have enough character of your own. You must have enough backbone so that when the truth is in jeopardy you will speak for it. You see the two qualities go together. We learned a little yesterday, and we learned a little today, and we hope to learn a little tomorrow; continuing in the School of Christ, and he is the great teacher.
So the polishing and preparation that God is giving to you ought to be making you a wiser husband, a better husband, a wiser and a better wife, and a wiser father and mother, or wiser and better children, as the case may be. I believe the spirit of the Lord enters into all of life's affairs, and that we cannot be leaning in one direction and be making progress in another direction. I believe we are so constituted that whatever way we are going we are progressing along that line. And we want the spirit of the Lord in us. And that means what? That means we will be watching particularly our own character development. I will tell you something, you may not think it a secret, but it is this: I am more interested in my own character development than I am in the character development of any one of you. God gave me that specially, and my everlasting condition depends upon my own progress, therefore if I would be making progress, it behooves me that I should not wait until you should point out something to me, but it behooves me to be watching all the little leadings of providence, and learning the little weak points I have, and strengthening the things which remain, and bringing everything into proper shape, into alignment with the Lord's Word and character – meekness, gentleness, patience, long-suffering, brotherly kindness, love – that his Word tells about. I not only want to have it theoretically in my head, but I want to work it out. I do not always succeed, you know, I frequently have to take myself in hand and give myself a lecture, and it is generally after I go to bed that I lecture myself, if I have not been as patient on some occasions as I think I might have been. I am much interested in keeping my mind in the right attitude. Do not let your mind go and say, "Oh, I cannot change it now." It is better to change it and give yourself the lecture, give yourself the chastisement in your own mind. The apostle says that if we judge, or punish, ourselves, we do not need to be punished and judged, or whipped, of the Lord. He is not looking for children that need to be punished all the time; He will put them doubtless in the second company if he puts them in the clear at all. He is wanting especially those who so love him, and who are so in sympathy with the divine purposes and arrangements that they delight to do his will. If we delight to do the Lord's will, then we will feel sorry for anything in which we have come short. And if we have come short on some point we will correct ourselves, and give ourselves a good talking to, and ask the Lord's grace whereby we may be strengthened in character along that line. Then you have fortified a weak place in your character, and you are better ready for the next time when temptation comes along.
So then, dear brethren and sisters, hereby we know – hereby we may know that we have passed from death unto life because we love the brethren. If we love the brethren, let us see to it that we shall show that we do love them. Somebody has said, "Do not keep all the flowers until I am dead, and put them on my coffin. Give me some of them while I am alive." That is a good idea. I am not speaking of literal flowers, but we have flowers of words and kind actions, and little tender notices in which we may show our love for the brethren. And that is really a very distinguishing feature I think amongst the Lord's people at this time, there is so much love amongst them. People have mentioned this to me when they first came in contact with the truth. They said, "Why I came into the meeting and I was just surprised to see what a spirit of love and fellowship there is among these people." I said, "Yes, wherever the Lord's spirit is there is bound to be a manifestation of it." We could not have his spirit and not manifest it some way. There are certainly plenty of opportunities to manifest it; it is the manifestation of the spirit of love and tenderness to somebody that is in trouble, and the more trouble they are in the more they need it, so we have plenty of opportunities. Dear friends, let us be alert to use these opportunities, and have the proof that we are acceptable to the Lord.
The evening service was for the public and was addressed by Brother Russell, on the subject: "The Hereafter." One of the prominent officials of the city introduced Brother Russell. The hall was crowded, and the audience listened to the entire discourse which lasted for nearly two hours.
Pastor Russell replies to Bishop MacDonald, Victoria Daily Colonist, Tuesday, August 15, 1911.
PASTOR RUSSELL'S REPLY
Sir: – Returning from my trans-continental tour, your issue of July 11th has my attention. Victoria friends consider that Bishop MacDonald's sermon on the Hereafter published in your columns was intended as a reply to my discourse on the same topic in your city a few days ago. In reply to their request, will you permit a few kindly intended words of reply, which I herewith enclose?
You report Bishop MacDonald as saying that in speaking of the "Hereafter," it seemed needful to set down two things by way of preamble. The first was that the soul is immortal. Man dies, but his soul dies not. The soul has a life of its own which it does not share with the body. It follows that, as the soul is a form of life that thinks and wills, the soul can live after the body has gone back to kindred dust. Even the pagans of old reasoned out for themselves this great truth – Cicero, Plato, Aristotle.
It is very remarkable that a bishop well versed in the Bible neglected to quote the Bible or any of its writers, and instead, quoted some heathen philosophers who possessed not the light of Christ and whom St. Paul declared were without God and had no hope in the world.
Of course "There is a reason" for the Bishop's course. The reason is that the Bishop knew that his Bible contained nothing in support of his statements – not a word, not a text of Scripture either in or out of its connection.
The Bible does teach a future life. The Bible does teach that death does not end all. But the Bible does not teach a continuance of human life in death. On the contrary, it bases all hope of a future life on a doctrine wholly unknown amongst the ancients and very little known amongst moderns, but everywhere in evidence in the Bible – the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead. Nor can we honestly twist these words to mean resurrection of the living, for that which is alive and perfect needs no resurrection. Had there been no death there could have been no resurrection promise. And a resurrection promise confirms the thought that the dead are really dead.
The learned Bishop tells us in the above quotation that the soul does not die, that it has a life of its own. The Bishop, of course, would not claim a personal knowledge on the subject. His education in this matter he derives from the great teachers, Cicero, Plato and Aristotle, but not from Christ nor from the apostles and prophets, for they teach the contrary, that the soul can die. Let me cite a few Scripture passages: "The soul that sinneth, it shall die." (Ezek. 18:4). "God is able to destroy both soul and body." (Matt. 10:28). "Christ poured out his soul unto death; he made his soul an offering for sin." (Isa. 53:10-12). St. Peter proving the resurrection of Jesus, declared that it was foretold by the prophet, saying, Thou wilt not leave my soul in hades, sheol, the tomb, the state of death; and that this prophecy was fulfilled in our Lord's resurrection from the dead. His soul was not left in hades.
We could wish that the learned Bishop had given us a quotation from Plato, Cicero or Aristotle respecting what the soul is. No doubt the definition would be as amusing as one proffered by a Methodist bishop in these words: "The soul is without interior or exterior; without body, shape or parts, and you could put a million of them in a nutshell." No doubt this good bishop was making sport of his audience in the description he gives of nothing. Of course you could put a million nothing in a nutshell, or twenty millions, or more, just as easily. Even a microbe would not come under the definition for, small as it is, it has a body and shape, interior and exterior.
Permit me briefly to set forth the teachings of the Bible respecting the soul and its future. I stand committed to its presentation as the only sane and logical one in the world. I back the Bible presentation although I well know that it is discredited today by nearly all of the great and learned bishops and doctors of Christendom. [CR170]
The Bible teaches, not that a man has a soul, but that he is a soul. And there is just as much difference in this as a man's having a cow and being a cow. The death sentence upon Father Adam was not upon his body but upon his soul. It was not his hand that sinned in plucking the fruit, nor his teeth that sinned in biting the apple – it was his soul, his intelligent will, that sinned and that was sentenced to death under the general law of God: "The soul that sinneth, it shall die."
God's creation of Adam, a man-soul, is described in Genesis. He formed a body and brain, everything necessary; but this was not soul. He had no life, no animation, no knowledge, no will. Into that body God breathed the breath of lives. Nephesh chai. This is the same breath of lives common to all breathing animals. The difference between man and the lower breathing animals is one of organism – genera. They eat similar foods, drink similar water and draw oxygen from the same air. In the Bible use of the word soul all breathing animals are souls, as truly as man is a soul. They are inferior souls because they have inferior organisms or bodies. Thus we read that when the flood of waters were upon the earth in Noah's day every living soul in whose nostrils was the breath of lives perished. – Genesis 7:22.
Not only the learned Bishop, but all the unlearned of humanity know that the shape of a man's head indicates the qualities of the soul, just as truly as the shape of a dog's head indicates his peculiar traits – setter, terrier, bulldog, etc. A person of practically no forehead we call an idiot or irrational. He is irrational because he lacks that part of the brain organism which reflects, compares and reasons. Who cannot tell the difference between a mean man and a truly noble one by the shape of his head? The noble soul must have the mental organism favorable to nobility of sentiment, benevolence, kindness, reverence, spirituality, conscience, love. These organs of the brain and body have everything to do with the character of the soul.
As before stated, the soul is not the body, nor is it the vital spark of life called the spirit of life, which animates the body. The soul is a third thing, the result of the first two in active, harmonious co-operation. The spark of life animated the body of clay which God had formed, the body, and vitality surged to every part of that body. The nerves quickened it to intelligence. Those in the fingers touched; those in the ears heard; those in the eyes saw. These various senses acting directly upon the brain inspired thought, comparison, reason, will. Then and not until then was Adam a living soul, that is, a living person, individual, being. That living soul continued for nine hundred and thirty years until, through wear and tear of the organism, dissolution, death came – the spark of life, ruach, spirit, fled from the body. That instant, Adam the man-soul, a living being, the personality, ceased. The body began to return to dust. The spirit of life or spark of life, which God had given on condition of obedience and which was forfeited by disobedience, no longer belonged to Adam. It had been given to him, and might have been maintained forever, had he been obedient.
As with Adam, so with his children, with certain exceptions. Adam's children are not created by God as he was, but are his posterity. He transmitted to Mother Eve a spark of the impaired life while still he possessed it. Mother Eve furnished the body in which that spark of life was generated to birth, when it became Adam's son, Seth. He, in turn transmitted a spark of the same original life to his children and he died. Thus the process of soul-making has progressed for six thousand years; likewise the process of soul-destruction or death – closely kept pace.
The prophet Job briefly explains the effect of the divine sentence of death and the subsequent promise of divine mercy and rescue from death by resurrection. He says: "Thou turnest man to destruction. Thou sayest, Return, ye children of men." In other words, he who sentenced Adam to death as unworthy of life promised a redemption from that death sentence – not a redemption of the body, but a redemption of the soul, the man, the intelligent person who sinned, and who was sentenced to death.
The ashes of our race are scattered over the earth; some burned in the fire; some eaten by fish; some dissolved into gases by natural processes; some, buried, fertilized oaks and apple trees whose fruits have been eaten by swine, and the swine in turn shipped to all parts of the earth and eaten by humanity, etc. The resurrection of Adam's body and the resurrection of the bodies of all of his children is not only an unthinkable thing, but an unscriptural proposition. The creeds do, indeed, speak of the "resurrection of the body," but not so the Bible. The Bible tells of the resurrection of the soul and that in the resurrection God will give it, the soul, a body as it hath pleased him. Some souls (the church of the first borns) will get spirit bodies in the resurrection. The remainder of mankind will get human bodies. This St. Paul most clearly sets forth. In the same chapter he assures us that if there be no resurrection of the dead, our faith is vain, our preaching is vain, all hope is vain. We might as well abandon any expectation of a future life unless there be a resurrection of the dead. – 1 Cor. 15:42-44.
It was because one man-soul sinned and was sentenced to death that all the human souls which came out of his loins shared death by heredity. (Exodus 1:5). The divine arrangement thus ignored any except the first man-soul so far as sentence was concerned. In due time Jesus came into the world to be the Saviour of men – to save or recover them from sin and from the penalty of sin, death. In order to do this he must satisfy the divine sentence of death against the first human soul, Adam; hence the Logos was made flesh: he also became a man-soul, a special body being prepared for him. The penalty which he paid corresponded exactly to that imposed upon Adam, because it was by the divine intention that he gave himself a ransom, a corresponding price, for all. Hence he poured out his soul unto death; he made his soul an offering for sin – in offset to Father Adam's soul, being or personality, sentenced to death. Afterward God raised his anointed one from the dead in fulfillment of the Scripture, "Thou wilt not leave my soul in hades, sheol, the tomb, nor suffer thine Holy One to see corruption." He was put to death in the flesh, but quickened, made alive, resurrected, in spirit – a spirit-being, a spirit-soul.
The exalted Redeemer is carrying out the Father's programme. During this Gospel age he is inviting a saintly, willing class to take up their cross and follow in his steps, and to have share with him on the spirit plane as spirit-souls, spirit-beings – like unto the angels, but higher. As soon as the divine "election" of the royal priesthood shall be completed, the glorified Messiah and his bride, the church, will inaugurate the long-promised kingdom of heaven amongst men, and by instruction and correction in righteousness will lift up the willing and obedient out of sin and death condition, making perfect man-souls of every one of them, if they will. And all the unwilling and rebellious will be destroyed in the second death, without hope, without remedy. This resurrection to perfection not only will appertain to those living at the time the kingdom will be established, but it also will include, according to the Bible, "All that are in their graves" – the human family in general, "every man in his own order."
Thanking you, Mr. Editor, for the courtesy of the publication of this further explanation of my view of the "Hereafter."
IT affords me great pleasure to be with you this morning – my first visit to Vancouver. There is one thing I notice in respect to the Bible students all over the world, and that is that they have one mind, one spirit. And this is in accordance with what the apostle intimated; we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body. How much of oneness there is expressed in the Bible! How much we are coming to see that this is the divine arrangement – one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, one church of the living God. On the contrary we find many that have had conflicting views, many different views of baptism, many views respecting the Lord, and there are a great variety of denominations claiming to be the body of Christ. How glad we are that we are coming to see just what the heavenly arrangement is.
Now we are all baptized by one Spirit into one body. What is this baptism of the one Spirit? What kind of a spirit is it? What kind of a baptism is it? Our dear Baptist friends recognize in part that baptism is an important question, and so do we; so do all Christian people. Yet there are a variety of views respecting baptism. But there is one baptism according to the Bible. That one baptism brings us into the one body. "Yes," say our disciple friends, "that is exactly what we claim, and we have that one baptism, and our church is the one body." It looks as if that were a correct application of the matter. It has the appearance on the surface, as though water baptism brings them into the Baptist church, makes them the one body, the one church; and yet you and I see very clearly that would leave out a great many good people; there are a great many good people that are not in the body of the Baptist church; there are a great many saintly people that have never been immersed, and that would leave all of them out; one baptism into the one body would leave all the good Episcopalians out; it would also leave all of the good Roman Catholics out, and all the good Methodists, and all the good Presbyterians, and all the good Lutherans, and it would only have the good of the Baptist church in. And then that one body would not be one either, because if we ask our Baptist friends, "Are you one body."
"Well, no, some of us have a different spirit. Some of us have a better spirit, and some not so good a spirit; some are fully consecrated to the Lord and are saintly, and others are not."
Now what is the one baptism by which we are all immersed into the one body? What is that one body? The one body is the body of Christ, composed of many members, and into that one body comes all the saintly, wherever they are; the Lord knows them that are his; and all of those that belong to that one body are to have – what? Glory, honor, immortality, which eye hath not seen nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man the things which God has in reservation for those who love him – who love him more than they love houses, or lands, or parents or children – more than they love any other creature, even themselves. He has it in reservation for them. It is the saintly kind he is calling for, and that is the invitation he sent out – "Gather together my saints unto me, saith the Lord." What saints are these, Lord, of yours? Those who have made a covenant with me by sacrifice. Are any others the saintly class according to this invitation? No. Only those who have made a covenant with God by sacrifice by a full consecration of their whole hearts, and all that they have and are, are begotten of the Lord's Holy Spirit. These are the Lord's jewels. These are the Lord's saints, whether they are Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Disciples or whatever they may be.
Now we are beginning to get what we recognize as right. We all wondered once how it could be that there was only one church, and that must be ours, and could not be the other brother's. Now we come to see that none of these earthly systems that have been called churches are not the church, but the Lord has his own church, and a way of joining his own church, and he keeps the records; and so it is written that all of these have their names written in heaven.
And how did they get in? Oh, they were baptized in. We are baptized by that same Spirit into the one body, into the body of Christ, and we become members of his body. Have you his spirit, my dear brother? That is the question with you and with me. Have we the Spirit of Christ? If any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his, even if he were baptized in a whole ocean full of water; that would not make him one of his, to be baptized in an ocean. There is only one way to be baptized into Christ, and St. Paul tells us about that one way. He says, so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ, into the body of Christ, into that company of which he is the head, and of which we are privileged to become members – reckoned members already, and, if faithful, we will be made members in the full sense of the word by the glorious resurrection change in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye – so many of us as were baptized into this body, then, of which Jesus is the head and the church is his body, all of us who were baptized into the one body, were baptized into – water. Is that the way it reads? No, that is not the way it reads. So many of us were baptized into Jesus Christ, into this one body of which he is the Head, were baptized into his death. It is a very different thing to be baptized into death with Jesus, and to be baptized into water with him. And whoever mistakes this point is mistaking one of the most important things in the Bible, and he cannot go any further unless he sees this. Water baptism is merely the symbol or picture of that which has already been accomplished when baptized by the one Spirit, by the consecration of our hearts, by having the same mind that Christ had when he made his consecration unto death; to be dead with him, baptized into his death.
So many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death. What does that signify? What is his death? Was his death any different from that of any other person's death? Why should the apostles say, be baptized into his death? How could we get into his death any more than the world is in his death?
Well, there is a deep truth lies there, and it is this: that by nature you and I were children of wrath, even as others; we belonged to Adam and his race; we did not need to be baptized into Adam, to get into his death; we were in his death by natural processes. We were born under the sentence of death, with the whole world. Our Lord Jesus was not so. The Scriptures specifically tell us that God in his divine wisdom had made it necessary that before the world be rescued from sin and death it was necessary that a just one should die for the unjust, and there was no just one in the world to die for his friend. No man could redeem himself. Our Redeemer was wholly harmless, undefiled and separate from sinners, and he left the glory he had with the Father, humbled himself, became a man, and he was the man Christ Jesus. And being found in fashion as a man he humbled himself then, even unto death. Then as a reward for his obedience unto death the Father highly exalted him.
Now then Jesus allowed his life to be taken from him, not by the Father, but by man. Men with wicked hands crucified him, and he did not resist. He had the power to resist, and he might have called for legions of angels to defend him. There would be no reason why he must have given himself over, or must have died. Instead of consecrating himself thus to a sacrificial death, he might have said, "I have done nothing amiss; I have kept the divine law. I can therefore call on my heavenly Father to defend my life that I be not delivered to you, that I be not allowed to die for any reason." And it would have been so. But he had at the beginning of his ministry, at thirty years of age, made his consecration unto death – I have come to do thy will, O my God, all that is written in the book. I will be glad to do your will at any cost, even of life itself. And this was all symbolized by our Lord when he went down into the water. He pictured there his full consecration of all he had to the Father's will, and when he arose from the water he went about doing that very same thing. He still had the spirit of obedience, and all through the three and a half years he was laying his life down, he was using it up. He was dying daily, as the apostle Paul would express it. And when was it finished? It was finished on Calvary? How do we know? His dying words were, "It is finished." What was finished? His baptism unto death was finished.
Now we are invited to take up our cross and follow him and to walk in his footsteps as he set us an example. Oh, you say, Brother Russell, we could not do that, could we? Yes, that is what the Bible says. It would not say walk in his steps if you could not walk in them; it would not say, take up your cross and follow him, if you could not do so. The Bible is a reasonable [CR172] proposition. It declares that it is possible for you and for me to follow in the footsteps of Jesus. The apostle says that when we are baptized into his death we participate with him in his death, sharing with him in his death. Now how can we share his death, since his was a sacrificial one, and since we belong to the race that is under condemnation? The Bible answers. It declares that he stands for them, to be the advocate of a certain class that the Father is now calling. "Gather my saints together unto me." These are very few, because there are not many who want to be saints. One gentleman said to me the other day, "I read the Scripture Studies when I was sixteen years of age, but every time I would come near anything about consecration I would just skip over that part very easily. If I knew just where it was, I would avoid it. I knew somehow there was something in there I was not ready for, and I just skipped over that."
Now the Lord is not looking for those who skip over. If you want to skip over, you can skip over all the consecration; you can pass by the narrow way altogether. It is a favor to know about the narrow way, it is a favor to be permitted to walk in the narrow way, a great privilege to be a follower of Jesus; it is a great honor to be permitted to be dead with him, and suffer with him. If we suffer with him we shall also reign with him; if we be dead with him, we shall also live with him. To live with him means to participate with him in glory, honor and immortality.
Now what are the conditions? Why you must walk in his steps, if you want to be with him. How did he reach that glorious exaltation? On what condition did the Father highly exalt him? Because he was faithful – faithful to make a covenant, and faithful to keep the covenant. On what condition can you and I be with him and share his glory? We may make the same covenant, and we must keep the same covenant to the extent of our ability. How can we make such a covenant? How could God make a covenant with us? We answer that God gave his Son to redeem the world, not merely the handful of the church, the saintly few, but he who is the world's Redeemer, before he makes that application of merit on behalf of the world to satisfy justice for the sins of the whole world, he imputes a measure of his merit to you and to me, and to all of those who desire to take up their cross and follow him. He does not give it to you. He will give that merit to the world by and by. When he gives it to them, it will mean to them earthly life, earthly restitution, and earthly blessing, just the very things that he sacrificed. Did he sacrifice the earthly things? Yes. Did he sacrifice the heavenly things? No. Well what did he sacrifice? Why he sacrificed his perfect manhood, and he sacrificed all the rights he had as the successor of Adam who was the father of the race, and to whom belonged the earth and the fullness thereof. As a perfect man he never failed to keep God's law, and he had a right to the earth and the fullness thereof, and all of this he laid down, or surrendered, in harmony with the Father's will, that these might in God's due time go to mankind – to Adam and all his children who would come in harmony with God, and God gave our Lord Jesus the higher nature, the divine nature, as a reward for his obedience unto death, even the death of the cross; wherefore, also, God has highly exalted him. On that account God exalted him, the apostle says.
Now the time is coming when the whole world will come under the blessings of the new covenant through Israel and through the arrangement then to be made; the blessings of the Lord will fill the whole earth, and all will have a great blessing. But he is not calling you and me to earthly relationship. He is inviting us to the heavenly calling, the Apostle says, to be with him and share his glory, to be the bride and joint-heir of the great King of kings, and Lord of lords. And the invitation he gives us is that we shall share with him in laying down our lives.
Now what is it we are doing, then? What is this narrow way? What is this journey? Do not forget our text. Ye are baptized by baptism into his death. How is it his death? Why you have been counted in as a member of his body, and I have been counted in as a member of his body, and, so to speak, Jesus has been dying in the world for more than 1800 years. We are sharing in the sufferings of Christ. The Apostle says, "I fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ." Whoever gets a large share of the afflictions and sufferings of Christ, is going to have a large share in the glory that shall follow. So we find the Apostle very anxious that he might have a good share in the afflictions of Christ, and he intimates in one of his epistles that some of the dear brethren had missed some opportunities, but that where they came short it gave him all the more opportunity to suffer for Christ's sake.
Let us then dear brethren and sisters, assembled here as Bible students from all parts of the country, and various parts of the world, give our hearts more fully than ever to our dear Lord that he may more and more fashion them, and with our feet in the right way, so we may perform through him the obedient sacrifice, even unto death, and then with him share the eternal glory. And I trust we will all thus meet in the great convention the Apostle mentions in the twelfth chapter of his letter to the Hebrews, where he says that we shall come to the general assembly of the church of the first-born, whose names are written in Heaven.
Text: – "If, then, ye be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth at the right hand of God; set your affection on things above, and not on things on the earth."
THIS is not a general advice, dear friends. The apostle is not advising everybody to do this. It is only a very particular, special class. The class is indicated by the word "if." "If ye then be risen with Christ." To the remainder of the world it would be foolishness to suggest the seeking of the things which are above. The things that are above are not intended for them, but the earthly things, the restitution blessings are for them. In times past we have not always seen this clearly, that God has two different blessings; that the great blessing he designs to give to the world of mankind is restitution, to bring them from the condition of sin, and meanness, and wickedness, back to holiness, back to full fellowship with God as Adam enjoyed at the beginning. It does not mean that they shall have heavenly blessings, because Adam had no heavenly blessings, and Adam lost no heavenly blessings. He never had a spiritual nature, and never lost a spiritual nature, and his home was of the earthly kind. The Garden of Eden was merely a sample of what the earth was, and Adam himself was merely a sample of what perfect mankind was to be. When man shall be brought back to perfection, the whole earth shall be filled with the knowledge and glory of God, and every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess to the glory of God. That will be a grand consummation of the plan of God for mankind. And they shall build houses and inhabit them, and they shall plant vineyards and eat the fruit of them; they shall not plant and another eat; they shall not build and another inhabit, but they shall long enjoy the work of their hands; and the earth shall yield her increase, and the wilderness shall blossom as the rose, the solitary place shall be glad, and streams shall come forth from the desert. Are not these good things? They are all of the earth earthy. And yet the apostle in the text, speaking to the class he is addressing, says, "Set your affection on things above, and not on the things of the earth." Here is a difference, here is a distinction. Some are to set their affection on earthly things and long enjoy the work of their hands as perfect men, having been brought back from the fallen condition, back to all that was lost in Adam, and to all that was redeemed by the Lord Jesus Christ, back to all the fullness of human perfection like Adam was at the beginning, with the addition
[CR173]
of the experience gained not only by evil and sin, but also blessed by experiences in rising up out of sin and degradation and coming back to the Father's house. In that condition, the perfect man will be as described in the eighth psalm: "What is man, that thou art mindful of him? And the son of man that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honor. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands." What works of God's hands? Was he set over the angels? Was he set over heavenly things? Nay, verily. What glory did he possess? Was it heavenly glory? Nay, verily. "Thou hast put all things under his feet; all sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field, the fowls of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas." He was the king of earth. It was from this glorious position of kingship that father Adam fell. It was to all of these things he lost that he was redeemed; as we read, "I have come to seek and to save that which was lost." Eden was lost; Eden is to be recovered; Paradise is to be restored. Harmony with God and communion were lost, and these are to be restored through Messiah's glorious kingdom. Human perfection was lost; it is to be restored through Messiah's kingdom. Everlasting life as a man was lost; it is to be restored to all who are willing to accept it at the great Redeemer's hand.
But it is not respecting the restitution class that are to get the earthly blessings, and have these Millennial age favors that the apostle is speaking in our text; he is writing to a special class, a peculiar people, a little flock, a saintly few, some who have been called out of the world. God has seen fit in his great wisdom to provide a little flock to be joint-heirs with his Son in his great and glorious kingdom, so long promised, which is to bring these blessings to the earth and to the natural man. Now the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, neither can he know them because they are spiritually discerned. The natural man cannot appreciate the heavenly things of which he is speaking in our text. The natural man can only appreciate the natural things, the earthly things, and as the natural man looks at the earthly things, and hears the description of the Eden that is to be established under the whole heavens, his heart is full and satisfied, and he says, "That is the very best I ever dreamed of – yea, better than I ever dreamed of; I never knew that God would provide things so glorious and so desirable." But then this other class is begotten of the Holy Spirit to a new nature, to which they will be born in the resurrection – begotten of the Spirit, then born of the Spirit, just as we are now begotten of the flesh and then born of the flesh. The new birth in its fullness will consist of these two parts, just the same as the natural birth consists of two parts, first begetting, and then birth. Our Lord was the first-born from the dead, the first-born of every creature that he should be the first that should rise from the dead.
But the apostle is not speaking of that actual resurrection in our text; he is speaking of the beginning of it in this sense that we should now experience the change of nature, the begetting of the Holy Spirit, and we become, from the divine standpoint, new creatures; old things have passed away, all things have become new. To us the things of the earth are not as grand as those better things which we are anticipating, which eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man the things which God hath in reservation for those that love him – who love him supremely, more than they love houses and lands, more than they love parents and children, more than they love husbands and wives, more than they love their own selves. He has these things in reservation for those peculiar people, which we will admit are few, and peculiar. There are not many of this class, there are only a few who have received the begetting of the Holy Spirit, and in this sense of the word only a few have started in this new life, or, figuratively speaking, few have risen with Christ to walk with him in newness of life.
"If ye then be risen with Christ" – what do you mean by being risen with Christ? We could not rise with Christ unless we be first dead with him. It was necessary that Jesus should first die. What way did he die? He did not die with Adam. He died, the just one for the unjust one; he gave a sacrificial life, it was a sacrificial offering of himself that he gave. Now then, you and I are to be dead with him – and then what? Then yours will have to be, and mine will have to be, a sacrificial death, as his was; if we would be dead with him we must sacrifice our life with him. But, you say, "How could this be done?" We see plainly that our lives were bound up with Father Adam; we were involved in death with him. How could we then die with Jesus, since we were already by nature children of wrath, and bound up with Father Adam in his death? How could we get out of the Adamic death and into death with Christ? That is a question the Bible answers so beautifully, and tells us that we who desire to come into membership into the Body of Christ, as New Creatures in him, have this great privilege of participating in death with him, that God will accept our sacrifice. But now, how do we know that God will accept our sacrifice? The Apostle says, in Romans 12:1, "I beseech you brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God." But how can it be? Jesus could not offer his body holy and acceptable without being perfect, how could we offer our bodies holy and acceptable without their being perfect? That brings us to the connecting link, and that is this: that Jesus stands as the great Advocate for all those who thus desire to come in as members of his Body, or in the other figure, as members of the Bride, the Lamb's Wife. He stands as their Advocate. And what does he do? He imputes something to them – he does not give to them earthly nature, he is keeping all of that for the world; the world is to get the earthly nature which he laid down, but now he is proposing that the saints shall not be of the world, and says, "Ye are not of the world even as I am not of the world, because I have chosen you out of the world." Now these whom he has chosen out of the world are those who desire to be footstep followers of the Lord, to be joint-heirs in the kingdom, and to accept the spiritual things instead of the earthly things. This is the class which he stands for. He will be their advocate. And what will the Advocate do for us? He will justify us freely from all things. How? Well, he does not do the justifying, but the Father does the justifying, as the Scriptures declare, "It is God that justifieth." On what account does the Father justify? Through the merit of the Advocate Jesus Christ the righteous. We have to have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. And who are we that have this Advocate? We who have turned our back on sin, we who have accepted God's gracious promise and invitation, we who have presented our bodies living sacrifices, and thus have done all in our power. Then comes the Advocate and imputes a sufficiency of his merit to make up the deficiency of our offering, and forthwith the Heavenly Father can justly accept our offering, as he justly accepted the offering of our Lord and Redeemer. He justified us, and from the moment we are justified we are acceptable with God, as living sacrifices.
So now, that is the way we come to be in Christ. If we make this consecration to suffer with him, then we become dead with him. "And if we be dead with him, we shall also live with him." "If we suffer with him we shall also reign with him." How well the Scriptures fit together!
The Apostle is speaking of this class who have been justified in Christ, the class who have thus died with Christ, died a sacrificial death – not merely that they will suffer rather than sin. Oh no, more than that! Jesus did not suffer merely rather than sin; he suffered sacrificially; he suffered when he was doing right; and so that is what the Church is doing – suffering for righteousness sake. And so, Peter says, If any man suffer as an evil doer, let him be ashamed; if he is an evil doer or a busy body in other men's matters, and he suffers for it, he is not to thank God for it. If he suffers for righteousness sake, the spirit of glory and of God rests upon him. The Master suffered for righteousness, and so we are to follow in his steps as he has set us an example. So we have the thought that we are dying with Christ, that the whole Church is called to die with him, that is the contract all the sanctified in Christ Jesus have made, and that there is no other way to get into the Body of Christ, which is the Church.
Now then, to be dead with him is not enough. If Jesus had merely died and had not arisen, where would have been the advantage? So the resurrection of Christ was just as important, in this sense, as the death of Christ, and these two points are linked together in the Scriptures. And so with you and me. It is not only important that we should be dead to sin, that we should become sacrificially dead by consecration to walk with our Master, but it is also necessary that we should reckon ourselves alive from the dead, to walk with him in newness of life. Why necessary? Because we all need to have our instruction as New Creatures. When did our instruction as New Creatures begin? When we became New Creatures. What we know as Old Creatures was not part of our instruction. Whatever we had in the old body, before it was consecrated to the Lord and accepted by him has been a good or a poor asset as the case may be. Some had an asset of bad temper, and others had an asset of strong will; others had some good and some bad. All of these assets belonged to our mortal bodies, but when we made our consecration to the Lord these all became assets of the New Creature, and the New Creature is transforming and bringing them into usefulness as servants of the New Creature. The Apostle, you remember, explains in the 6th chapter of Romans how we are risen with Christ; [CR174] that the power of the Holy Spirit which raised up Jesus from the dead if it dwell in you; will quicken your mortal body. He is not here speaking of the resurrection actually, but of the quickening influence of the Holy Spirit in our bodies before we get our immortal bodies. This body was mine originally, and when I made my consecration to the Lord he accepted it, and it was justified, and he begot me with the Holy Spirit to be a New Creature. I, as a New Creature, had this body to do with the best I could. The Father said, I will not give you the new body until the actual resurrection, then you will be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. It is sown in corruption, then it shall be raised in incorruption; it is sown a natural body, then it shall be raised a spiritual body. It is not the time now to give it to you, the Lord says, but now I will give you the control and responsibility of this mortal body that you have had right along. It is yours; it belongs to you. There is a difference between being a cow and owning a cow. I am a New Creature now, but I own this mortal body. The Apostle says, "It is not I, yet I control this outward 'I'." So then, I am to bring this mortal body into subjection to the will of God in Christ. That is the whole duty, the whole work of the New Creature. And God gives the New Creature the opportunities for work on this old body for its development, bringing in the thoughts, and words, and deeds of the mortal body into subjection to the divine will. And as he studies what the divine will is, he grows strong in the Lord and in the power of his might as a New Creature of Christ. He is growing as a New Creature, and the Apostle says as New Creatures we grow strong while according to the flesh, we die, we perish; that there is a warfare between the old nature that was us, and the new nature that is us since we have been accepted of the Lord and have been begotten as New Creatures. We are to walk in Jesus' steps, we are to enter into the same covenant of sacrifice that he entered in to, being justified freely through his merit, all of our imperfections being made up out of the merit of the Beloved One, and ours is a covenant by sacrifice to be dead with him. Yes, we are also risen with him. And if we are risen with him, it is our duty and pleasure to seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. To seek them, how? To seek to have a share in them, to avail ourselves of the glorious opportunity and invitation to become sharers in his throne. "To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with me in my throne." All of God's people who are risen with Christ should understand what they are doing, that they are seeking those earthly things which are above, where Christ sitteth at the right hand of God, that they may be his Bride class, that they may be his joint-heirs in his Kingdom, that they may sit with him on his throne. And we are not seeking the earthly things, and that means that we are, so far as possible, to cut off every earthly tie – or at least be willing when the Lord shall bring circumstances and trials and difficulties which shall lop off these earthly ties, and which will separate us more and more from the world, and attach us to the heavenly things.
Now the point I wish to make is, that as there was a harvest then so the parallel shows a harvest there. As God had an age dealing with the Jews, bringing them up to the harvest time, so in the end of this age he has a harvest in which he will gather the ripe wheat of this age. So then it has not been true as we have often heard that there has been a harvesting going on all the time. Not at all. The harvest is the end of the age. Now our thought is not taking time now to prove this thought that we are now living in this harvest period, in the harvest of this age, and that in this very day God is gathering the ripe wheat of this Gospel age; just as in the days of Jesus and the apostles, he and his disciples gathered the ripe fruitage of the Jewish nation. What a wonderful thought that is! How impressive is that thought, that we are indeed living in the time of special favor! Look out all over the world and see what you think of it; and ask even the worldly people what they think of our day. Well, they will say, ours is a wonderful day, but they do not know what to make of it. The difference is just this: We also know that it is a wonderful day, and we do know what to make of it. We do know that it is a wonderful day because it is the harvest time; it is the time in which the Chief Reaper is here; it is the time in which the great work of God is being accomplished. The masses of the world do not know what is going on, just as the masses of the Jews did not know what was going on in their day. Did the Jews know indeed that Jesus and the apostles were gathering out the ripe wheat from their nation? Nay, verily; they laughed at them; they commented on some of them that they were ignorant and unlearned. They had all kinds of derision for them, and they crucified the Master himself. Why? Because, as the Scriptures say, they knew not the time of their visitation. They did not realize that they were being specially favored of God. They did not realize they were in the harvest time. But why didn't they? How could some know and others could not? Oh, my dear friends, the Bible tells us why! The Bible tells us that none will know, none will understand the divine arrangements, except those who live close to the Lord, and the trouble with the people of that time was that not very many of them were living very close to the Lord; they were hypocritical; they had a great deal to do with pharisaical arrangements, vestments, public prayers, and much outward form of religion, and very little of the real sincere thing. Jesus says so. We would not be competent to judge of that, but Jesus tells us that there was a great deal of formality there. And so amongst his disciples not many of the pharisees, not many of the rich, not many of the great, not many of the learned, not many of the wise, were found, but chiefly the poor of this world, rich in faith, heirs of the kingdom.
Now why did not they know? Because they did not live near enough to the Lord. You and I remember very well how it is written in the Scriptures. "The secret of the Lord is with them that reverence him, and he will show them his covenant." He does not say that he will show his secret and make known his covenant to everybody. He does not want everybody to know all about his plans; it would not be to their good or to his glory. It is far better that the world should not know about the various features of the divine plan; they would not appreciate them, and they might harm themselves with those things which are real blessings; but the Lord is prepared to make them known to those who live near to himself. I trust you and I are keeping this in mind, and that unless we abide under the shadow of the Almighty, we will not clearly and distinctly hear his voice in all the features of his plan. So the nearer you and I can abide under the shadow of the Lord, close to him, the more we may expect to know, and understand, and enjoy, and profit, by the various features of his plan as they become due. I will not attempt to prove to you what we have already put into print, and what is familiar to nearly all of this audience, and perhaps all of you, namely: that we have been in this harvest time since the fall of 1874. This, to our understanding, was the marking, according to the Bible, of the time when the harvest period began, and this harvest period is to continue forty years, just as it continued for forty years with the Jews, – they were a typical people, and we are the antitypical Israel; the things that were done by them were foreshadowings of the greater things that are to take place with us. In other words, remarkable as it may seem, the harvest work of this age is in many respects a still more prominent and greater matter than it was with the Jews in their day. How much greater? Oh, it is much greater; it was only one little nation, in size somewhere about the size of the State of Pennsylvania, or less, one little nation, one little country, and today the harvest work is world-wide. Wherever there are people, there is a possibility that there are children of God, and if there are children of God, then the harvest message and the harvest experiences belong to them.
It is just here I am reminded of a letter I got yesterday from a brother in India. We have already published some letters from that brother telling of the interest of the people in India, and that in one district the poor people are much interested in the Gospel message; so much they cannot send out the native teachers fast enough. There are little groups varying from thirty to one hundred and fifty people, constituting the congregations. And as fast as these native teachers can be instructed about the things of the kingdom, and that our God is a great God, and a loving God, and a wise God, and that he is gathering the bride class, and that after the bride class is completed he will use these to bless the world, and they shall constitute the bride, the Lamb's wife, and be joint-heirs of our Lord Jesus in his kingdom, and that the power and sway of that kingdom shall extend to all the families of the earth, they are sent out. As the poor people of that district never heard much if anything of a good time coming they write that their hearts overflow with gratitude to God; they could not have expected anything so great and so good. Within the last few months they tell me that the work has nearly doubled. They sent me a photograph of fourteen of the native brethren who are teaching the Word and going about into different districts, and taking these in turn to some extent – going one here, and then another place, making circuits all over that community – and the people are hearing gladly and rejoicing. Of course, there would be, naturally, some opposition, and they sent a clipping from an India paper, copied from an American paper, three columns long, in which the writer was trying to say something derogatory to the Studies in the Scriptures; they had three columns of it and they published it over in India, and instead of working harm, it worked a lot of good; people began to inquire for those books, and the friends sold a lot of books, and gave away a lot of tracts as a result. So the Lord knows how to bless all kinds of efforts – those that are made against us and those that are in our favor. He is able to overrule all things for good to those who love him, and you and I are coming to have more and more confidence that nothing is able to pluck any out of the hands of the Lord, and that he is able to bless the harvest work and everything pertaining to it. It is for us to use all the wisdom we can, and all the grace we possess, and to strive for more, and to realize that the real management of the harvest work is in the hands of him whom we serve, and we are glad that it is, and that he is the great Harvester. He was the harvester at the first advent and directed all the reapers, and so, my dearly beloved, surely he is still as such interested in the harvest time now and directing the course of the reapers. Otherwise how sad we would be at times! But when we know that he is at the helm and directing all things, our hearts can rejoice.
Another thing this letter said was this: that as the people came to understand there were certain blessings for Christians, and then that God was going to give a blessing to the Jews in the future, they say that the Mohammedans come around and inquire, Why does not Pastor Russell write something for us Mohammedans, showing where we come in? We are the children of Abraham by Ishmael; we are following that line; where does our share come in? So, the writer said, I do not know what to tell them, but told them I would report. So we will have to tell the Mohammedans something about what God has for them. How glad we are that we have a heavenly Father who is so rich. He can give crowns and fortunes to his saintly ones, his children, and he still has other fortunes to give to those who during the next age will come forward and be in line to receive them. Oh, the riches of his grace and loving kindness in Christ Jesus toward us!
Now I must not deal too long with these generalities, just a thought respecting the fact that we are in the harvest time, and that a great harvest work is going on. The next thought is this: Who are the reapers? Who were the reapers at the first advent? [CR176] There is the pattern. Who did Jesus use there? We answer, he took those Jews who were ripe and ready to be used, and used them as the reaper under his own direction, and it was these very ones he sent out two and two to tell the people. And so we have reason to expect that this would be the way now. The Lord could indeed use the angels now and do a reaping work with them, and he could do without us altogether, but this has not been his plan. It has pleased God to use these poor creatures of the dust, you and I and all of his people, wherever they may be, all who are sincere, all who are washed in the precious blood of Christ, all who are begotten of the holy Spirit. It has pleased the Father to make us ambassadors for God; in his name we present the petition; in God's name we tell the good tidings. What an honor to be co-laborers with God! Was there ever such honor given to mankind? Why if we had read in some fable story of old that the gods had come down and made use of humanity in such a way, we would have said, "Oh, it is just a fable!" Dear friends, this is something that we know. We know in whom we have believed, and we know what he has stated to us. We know it is God's plan to make use of us, his poor creatures, servants of God – sons of God in disguise, if you please – that we may have this great privilege of doing this harvest work. And this harvest work will soon be completed – by October, 1914, so far as we know; we do not claim infallibility, but so far as we understand the Scriptures by October, 1914, the harvest will be completed. The forty years of harvest will be sufficient. Now see how God has arranged for this entire matter. When there was only a little Jewish nation to be dealt with in forty years, it did not need any steamboats, did not need any steam cars, did not need any electric cars, did not need any automobiles, did not need any telegraph, telephones, printing presses, etc. They got it all through in forty years. But you never could do it now with twelve men, or one hundred and forty-four thousand men, walking around as they did, and riding on a camel occasionally, as they did, or sometimes on a boat that took six months to get any place. It could not be done today, all over the civilized world; it would be impossible. So our God, equal to the occasion, has brought in the enlightenment of the world, making all the various features of the great plan to work together. These things are merely the beginnings of the blessings that are coming to the world anyway, and now they can come in a little sooner so that we can use the railroads, and telegraphs, and printing presses, and everything, so that the harvest message can go to the ends of the earth and the millions of people on the opposite side of the globe, over in India, can have the same message, and within a very short time after we have it here. Is not that wonderful! Now these miracles have become so common with us that there is danger of our forgetting that they are miracles; we are living surrounded by miracles; the whole matter is a miracle. The miracle is this: that God has so overruled matters in connection with the Gospel message, that although many have misunderstood, many have slandered, many have abused, and many have misrepresented, some intentionally and some unintentionally, yet notwithstanding all, it goes right forward and with increasing momentum. Nothing can stop it until God's time shall come. And when God's time shall come we want him to stop it – don't we? Of course we do. Nothing could stop it sooner.
As Jesus used the disciples, and all the believers during that Jewish harvest, and made them instruments for carrying the message to all the brethren, so now as fast as you and I come to receive a knowledge of his grace, and realize where we are, we get the message and pass it on, it is our privilege to carry it on to someone else, and so it is spreading all over the world, and nearly always through the consecrated. But you also know that God makes the wrath of man to praise him at the same time. In that paper, the publication of three columns, intended to do injury to the work, it simply stirred the people up to read about the truth. So the Lord is able to overrule all kinds of efforts, and we believe he will do so, and it is not ours to interfere. It is ours to find out what the Lord will have us to do and pay strict attention to our part and let the great captain look out for the general interests of the work. He is able to do that and we are not. We are therefore safe when we fully trust him, come what will, and to simply watch our own part and make sure that our lives, our work, and our privileges are not being wasted, but are being put in the proper direction according to our understanding of his will.
Now the Lord has many varieties of instrumentalities in this harvest time, just as we should expect; it is really wonderful how he has raised up one after another of these, how much each one seems to have been ordered of the Lord. I remind you, for instance, of the pilgrim work, and how the Lord has blessed that pilgrim work, so that it has been a very essential service. The dear pilgrims go from place to place and meet with the little classes – not to take the place of the little classes or be "popes" of the classes but to be there as mouthpieces of the Lord, speaking forth the truth and seeking to guide the dear ones in the right ways of studying his Word, and then they go to another place, and to another place and these various ones going all over the world are having a good effect – much better than if we could place one of these brethren in each town. If they could stop in your town for a while they would get in some kind of a rut possibly, while if they keep going and are entirely independent, and carry the message here and there, and then another one comes to you, you get a greater variety, and they get a greater variety, and the whole work is accomplished in a way that is really peculiar; and so far as we know has never been duplicated any time during this gospel age. Where did it come from? From the Lord, I believe.
Then take the tract distribution, the volunteer work, what a wonderful work that is! Now when I mention the word millions, not one person in a hundred knows what a million is. You know what a hundred is, and ten hundred make a thousand, and then a hundred thousand and then ten hundred thousand and you begin to get the size of a million – ten hundred thousand – a thousand thousand. Now then these tracts are printed and shipped to all parts of the world and are being circulated. Everybody has a glorious opportunity, a wonderful privilege. Those who cannot preach orally, cannot say, "I have no way of preaching, I have no gift of the tongue." Here is something you can do where you do not have to use your tongue at all. I know of some brethren who can preach a thousand sermons in a few days, preach to a thousand people, leaving them two or three sermons each time. What a wonderful privilege that is! How much we ought to appreciate that privilege! Where did that privilege come from? There is nothing like it in the world. You do not know of anything else of the kind. We have large tract societies which are undoubtedly trying to do good, but they do not circulate any tracts at all in comparison with what we are circulating; you hardly ever see one, while they are going out here by the millions. I do not have the exact figures for this year, but I think over ten million surely. But this year they will have in Great Britain alone four and a half millions, and I am sure ours here will come to at least eight millions; that will make twelve millions – twelve million copies, three sermons each thirty-six million sermons going out! They ought to reach somebody. And they are in various languages – Dutch, French, Hollandish, Danish, Norwegian, German, Swedish, Syrian, etc. Who is doing that? The great Chief Reaper, I believe, dear friends. We are simply trying to follow his leadings; he is the one who is directing here and there all the various steps of the harvest work. We simply try to follow what seems to be the indications of divine providence, and it goes grandly on; no human wisdom deserves credit for it; we are accrediting it all to the wisdom and grace divine.
Then there is the newspaper work. What a wonderful work that is! Think of it, there are estimated to be every week ten millions of readers. They are not all read of course. If one in ten reads them that would be a million readers. Suppose only one in a hundred reads; that would still be a good many. Suppose only one in a thousand reads; that would still be a good many. Now the Lord seems to have opened up all these ways. His ways are wonderful. The harvest message is going out far and near. It is only about a year since there was no publication of the sermons of Great Britain, but I understand that, including the sermons and Bible studies, there are now two hundred and sixty-five papers in Great Britain publishing them. There never was such a thing known in Great Britain before. All the centuries there were Christian people there, they never had that many sermons published – not a tenth of them. I am merely mentioning that as another evidence of the Lord's providential leading. Now it is for you and me, and for everyone who belongs to the Lord, not simply to look on and see these different things, and see that they are prospering. They are indeed, but you have certain responsibilities, certain opportunities, certain privileges. It is yours to use these, or, failing to use them, you fail to do your part of the reaping work. All of these matters go, as far as the world can see, and as far as any of us can see, in a natural way; there is no money that rains down in the office of the Watch Tower, or anywhere else; no miracles worked in financial matters any more than anywhere else – it comes from you and from others. There are never any collections taken up, never any money solicited – you know that. It all comes; no miracle at all. [CR177]
A minister asked me not a great while ago, "Brother Russell, what is the explanation, you do not take up collections?"
"Where does the money come from?"
"Well now," I said, "I am afraid if I were to tell you, you would think I was trying to hoax you; but I will tell you; the candid truth is this: when people become interested in these things, they come with their money and say, 'Cannot I get some money into that? I want to get a little money in; even if it is only a little, I want to get that money in.'"
He looked at me; he evidently had never had any experience like that. He had always been used to raking and scraping and pulling and hammering, and taking them by the feet and shaking them until the money would come out of their pockets. What is the reason, my dear friends? Are those in the truth more wealthy than others? Nay, verily. There are very few wealthy people in the truth. The secret of the matter is this, that when you properly touch a man's heart, you touch his pocket-book, because his pocket-book belongs to his heart. The new creature has charge of the pocket-book as well as of the tongue. There is the secret of it all. That is the explanation of the whole matter. When persons are reached by the truth, and sanctified by the truth, it will effect every act of their lives, every thought of their lives, everything that they do. It must all come under this direct supervision of the great head of the church, and they all say, "If by any means I may serve the Lord and do something to forward his cause and to honor his name." That is the spirit; and is not that the very spirit we ought to expect? It certainly is. It is another evidence of the Lord's blessing in connection with his whole harvest work, that there has never been even one collection taken up at any time, and we never expect to take up a collection. If in the Lord's providence, the money stops, so that the work will have to stop then we will say, "Lord, thy will be done."
What is this message that was preached in the end of the Jewish age? What was the harvest message back there? What is the harvest message here? I remind you that the harvest message is as Jesus said, the Gospel of the kingdom. Well is it any different gospel? It is the same Bible, but we used to use the word kingdom in such an awkward way. We thought somehow the kingdom was everything else than what it is to be. We had such confused ideas; we were trying to put things together in a jumbled-up way; we did not read our Bibles sanely. We would read the Lord's prayer, "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is done in heaven," and we did not believe it; we did not know enough to; we were so mistaught as to have false expectations all along the line, and not know that the Lord is about to set up the kingdom, a kingdom that is to be a mighty kingdom, a kingdom that is to put down all other kingdoms, and cause every knee to bow, every tongue to confess. We did not realize it, but now we are beginning to get our eyes open, and this is the very message the Lord is using as a harvest message – just as he used that same message in the harvest of the Jewish age.
Now you will say, Brother Russell, you have not said anything about the colporteurs; many of us are colporteurs. We have not forgotten you either; I am just leaving this for the last. That is the way we always do at dinner; we have the dessert last; we have been keeping this colporteur matter for the last. I am not saying a word against all the other methods; I appreciate highly the work of the Pilgrims, I appreciate greatly the volunteer work; they are grand; they are of the Lord, and I think that all who can should participate in some kind of service for the great King. If he does not do so, it indicates that he has not the proper warmth, and the proper interest in the Lord's cause, and he will not be an overcomer. If he has opportunity to serve and does not serve now under these conditions, he will not be allowed to serve under the glorious conditions. It will be those who are glad to walk in the footsteps of Jesus and to suffer with him, and preach the Gospel he preached who will have a share with him in the glory by and by.
Coming then to the colporteur work – of all the different parts of the work it seems to me to be one of the most important, if not the very most important. It is hard to say, of course, just which is the most important; there are sales that do not amount to anything, where people buy a set of books and put them on the shelf and never look at them. That accomplishes very little in the present time anyway. Somebody might buy a set of these books which they never look at, and a visitor may come in, as it has happened many a time, and become interested. But, in one sense of the word, there might be much seed lost in that way. As the Lord indicated in the parable, some would fall by the wayside and do no good; some would fall on stony ground and do no good; some would fall in thorny ground and do no good; it is only that which falls in the good ground that brings forth fruitage; so we expect a certain amount of it will bring forth no particular fruitage; but while it is not ours to determine which part of the Lord's harvest work is the most important, and it is not ours indeed to say anything much upon this subject at all, but are rather to say if the great King opens up various ways, if the great Reaper has various instrumentalities in the harvest field, let us bring them all in. But so far as my observation goes, one of the most important features of the whole harvest work is the colporteur feature. I am glad to notice from the badges before me that a great many of those here present today in the front row at least, are colporteurs, and that is not casting any reflection on others who are not colporteurs, because some of us, like myself, cannot do everything. We cannot be colporteurs, much as we would like to be. And so with some who are not out in any kind of public service; they have not the opportunity perhaps. Perhaps the mother has a child to take care of; perhaps all she can do is to take a few minutes occasionally to talk to a friend or write a note to Cousin Lizzie or to Aunt Mary, or to somebody else, about the truth, and to call their attention to this, that or the other. And the Lord even uses such endeavourers to his praise, and the finding of grains of wheat. And I am sure a blessing always goes with such an effort. It shows the Lord what you would like to do if you did not have a child or family to care for. And the Lord would say, so to speak, "Well, there is a child of mine; if she were differently situated she would do just as well as any others." So the Lord takes note of the spirit and not merely of the outward success that we may have in some particular part of the work. So with some of the brethren. Some have family responsibilities, obligations to wives and to children, and it would not be the Lord's will for these to go out to serve in the harvest work and leave responsible duties unattended to. No, no; the Scriptures very clearly indicate that these are mortgages they must watch and attend to; the interest must be paid on them; however much you would like to serve, you must keep these obligations settled.
And then, let us say right in that connection that there is such a thing as keeping a watch upon the moments, a watch upon the hours, lest they slip away from you. How easy it is for some people to lose a few minutes! How easy to wait half an hour, either doing nothing, or doing something that is not worthy of your time, or thought, or attention, or reading something that is not profitable, but rather injurious – perhaps filling the mind with chips instead of with apples! The Lord tells us through the apostles that one of the things we can do is to show our love and zeal and energy by – what? Redeeming the time! What do you mean by redeeming the time? Buying it back, purchasing it away from other things. You would have pleasure in fixing ornaments on the mantel, perhaps, and having a lot of bric-a-brac, or you would have pleasure perhaps having your family on a larger scale, and more elaborate arrangements for them, and take all of your time to keep things clean and in order; but you may redeem some time here maybe. It is not for me to tell you where, it is not for anybody else, perhaps, to tell you where; the husband might tell the wife, or the wife might tell the husband, or they might confer together, but it is not for any stranger to enter in and mind their business at all. So do not understand that I am doing so. It is for you to consider in what way you can redeem some time for the service of the Lord, the service of the brethren, for the service of the truth, and to show forth the praises of him who called us out of darkness into his marvelous light. It is for you to watch your own hours, watch your own moments, and it is for me to watch mine. I could waste some time too – every one of us could do some of this, but we want every moment to count.
But you say that is getting it down pretty hard on the "old man." Yes, my dear brother, the old man has got to have it pretty hard; that is your contract with the Lord, that the old nature is to perish as the new nature survives and flourishes. And that is the Lord's contract with you. You have agreed to give up the old man with his desires and preferences, and have agreed to live as new creatures in Christ Jesus, not according to the flesh, not according to worldly standards, not according to those things that would be pleasing to you and pleasing to the eye, and pleasing to the world. It does not mean you must have unpleasing objects around you, but that you shall make all things, especially all affairs of your lives, God first. The Lord Jesus, the great Reaper, and the work of the harvest, the privilege of sharing the Lord's work – these things are to be right at the top and to govern and regulate every little affair of life – the home, the office, the business.
I think of one dear brother who said to me not long ago, [CR178] "Brother Russell, I have a situation offered me, it is an advanced position from the one I now have, but where I now am I can serve the truth more, and have more time for study, and more time for attending evening meetings, and they want me to take the management of a certain department, and offer to double my salary. What do you think?" I said, "Brother, do not take it; you have far better use for your time. It is necessary for you to labor for your family, but you are supporting them now, and have things comfortable now, and you are able to do this and have some time to devote to the better work; do not allow the adversary to get all your time and all your talents into business, and sell it out for double the number of dollars. What will dollars be worth to you? What will the Lord's approval be worth to you in comparison with dollars?
Another brother who had a high position, asked me respecting the matter, and I counseled him to leave the higher position and go to a lower one, less salary and less responsibility, where he would have more time to serve the Lord. That is the chief object of our lives. What else are we here for? You are a new creature. Does the new creature have anything to do with earthly things, except merely to provide for necessities of the flesh? That is all the new creature is to strive for – blessings and prosperity along the lines of the new creature, along the lines of the spiritual work; this is our work, this is the great work of God which he has committed to us, and as ambassadors for God we dare not take on other business more than is absolutely necessary to provide things decent, honest, and needful. These terms do not mean extravagance or luxury. You must pay your debts, and you ought to be decent as a representative of God.
Well now, after all, it is opportunities we all have. Here are some of us who are especially privileged by being engaged in the harvest work as colporteurs, going about generally, we advise, as they did in olden times, as the Lord first sent out the twelve, then we read he sent out seventy additional ones, two by two, two by two, to various cities. And so these dear colporteurs are going out generally two by two; and I think that is usually the best, unless the Lord's providence seems to intercept it in some way. Two by two they are going to the various cities, counties, towns, villages; two by two they are preaching the Gospel here and there; two by two they are witnessing that the kingdom of God is at hand; two by two they are telling the people the good message in a few words, leaving them something that will furnish them a very complete knowledge of the divine plan and arrangement and be helpful to them through all the remainder of the present life, and also in that which is to come. Can you think how any ordinary people, or people of ordinary talents, could ever expect to do more than that? I cannot. Just see the privilege of these colporteurs! The ministers of a city have those who come to hear them, and as one gentleman said to me not long ago, remarking on how many attended the meetings at Boston, that there were four thousand people there to hear Pastor Russell, and he said he did not understand it; they sat there so long on a hot day, and he says, there in Boston there are great ministers, and some had only twenty, some forty, and some possible fifty or sixty of a congregation this summer weather; and they feel as though they had a pretty fair attendance when they have from forty to sixty; they think they are doing pretty well. How does it come four thousand people leave the seashore and leave the mountains, and leave the piazzas and shade, and leave their beds, and come and sit for two hours in a Boston theatre in June weather?
I said, "Brother, I think the secret may be known perhaps from the Word of the Lord. The Lord I think was speaking of our time when he said, 'There shall be a famine in the land, saith the Lord, not a famine for bread, neither a famine for water, but a famine for hearing the words of the Lord!'"
"Now," I said, "I rather think that forms some explanation; these people were hungry; they have gotten too far along to be interested in any of those doctrines of the dark ages which told them that all except a saintly few would be roasted through all eternity; they cannot believe it any longer. And then instead of that all the learned men, or the learned pulpits, are telling them the new idea of evolution, that man was created a cousin of a monkey, and that their forefathers were all monkeys, and they are getting along first rate, and since they did not fall downward but have been falling upward they do not need a Savior, and they have not got a Savior, and that Jesus did not redeem them. Now this is what is being preached as Gospel. No wonder the poor people are not satisfied. Is there anything in that message that would satisfy a hungry soul? Is there anything that would satisfy the longing soul? No. No man is benefited or satisfied by being told that his great-grandfather was a monkey. There is no Gospel in that at all. Yet that is what the doctrine of evolution and higher criticism amounts to. They say the Bible is not reliable, that higher critics find there is nothing in it, and they say, We will tell you, the real Gospel is what we have, that our forefathers were monkeys, and we are going to get out of monkeydom into higher conditions by and by; it may be centuries and centuries, you will never see it, nor we, but our children will sometime grow up to be like angels. Is there anything there to satisfy anybody? No sir. But in the message God has given us, in the message of the Bible, in the message of God's redeeming love, in the message that God once so loved the world that he provided a Redeemer for it, and provided a Bride for his Son, and that the King and Queen shall bless the world, and regenerate the world – in that message there is a blessing; there is something that is soul satisfying, a comfort to all of those who have ears to hear. And even those who hear a little bit know that it sounds good. They cannot understand the deep things unless they are spirit-begotten, but even the little on the surface that they can hear sounds good and rational to them, and they say so."
Now these colporteurs going around from house to house have an opportunity of coming right into contact with the people. The preacher only gets a few that come out to hear him. The great masses, they tell us, are not going to them; they are complaining that very few are coming to church. Why don't they come to church? A faint suggestion is held out that a law must be passed compelling people to go to church, the same as they used to do. I don't think that law will keep very long; the people are not living on that plane today.
But here is God's arrangement – this colporteur work. Was there ever anything like it before in the world? Never, never anything like it before. Where did it come from? Who made it up? Divine providence guided. Here are the colporteurs going to all those homes and finding the people and telling them the old, old story.
Let me tell you just about one; perhaps I have told some of you before, but I will tell it again. A lady approached by a colporteur said, "No, I don't want the book; go take it to that saloon-keeper across the street; I would not have your book." And the colporteur thought it very strange that she should say, "Take it to that saloon-keeper across the street," because colporteurs very rarely call on saloon-keepers; they are not supposed to be much interested in religion, and they are trying to confine themselves to those who are interested in the Bible. But this lady said she did not care for it at all, take it to the saloon-keeper. The colporteur thought that was a peculiar statement, and said to herself, "I am going over to see that saloon-keeper anyway; I will just try it." She went over to the saloon-keeper and he said, "No, I do not want the book; I do not think very much of God; I cannot love God; he has been very cruel to me."
"Oh, God sent my two little children to hell, my two little girls; I loved them so much; they were nice little girls, and I did not have them baptized, and they both died of scarlet fever, and I sent word to the priest and he said they had gone to hell, I had not had them baptized. He would not even put them in decent burying ground with other Catholics; they had no hope at all. I think it was awfully cruel of God to do that to my little girls because I did not attend to having them baptized."
Poor man! Thoroughly under the power of superstition! Thoroughly bound hand and foot and mind and everything else!
And so the colporteur had an opportunity. "Oh," she said, "you have not understood the Bible; the Bible does not say anything of that kind. The Bible says your children are simply dead; they are asleep now, and that God by and by will wake them up. Jesus at his second coming will awaken all the dead; your little girls will come back."
"Yes, all the children are coming back, and everybody is coming back; they have all gone down into the tomb, and Jesus died for them to redeem them from the tomb and make their resurrection possible. If Jesus had not died then they would have been dead, as a dog is dead, never to have any future life; but Jesus died for them, and that secures a resurrection from the dead, and an opportunity of coming back to perfection and harmony with God?"
That man became astonished. He wondered, could it be true? He said, "You tell me that these books tell that?"
"Yes, these books tell all about that."
"I want those books; I will take those books."
He bought the books, and he started immediately to read them. And the way I came to know about it is, I was in that city probably a month after that, and they told me this, and said that he had [CR179] not seen as yet that he should give up the whiskey business, he is still keeping the saloon and keeping the Truth. And he thinks it is all right to sell whiskey and beer. I said, "Have any of you given him a hint?"
"Yes, we tried to give him a hint, not too hard, but we thought we had better not push it too fast."
I said, "That is right, let him read, let him study, let him understand. But I think we had better give him a little hint, he is seeing something." So they said "He is at meeting today." They pointed him out to me, "That is him, that red-faced man; he keeps a saloon; it is his children that died; he is the one; he is becoming quite interested; he comes to all the meetings, he is always regular at meetings, and is anxious to know and understand."
So I went on to another city and I thought I saw the man there. I said, "Did I see that man there?"
"Yes, he was there, he came along."
Then by and by I went to another city, and I saw a man that looked like him again, and I said, "Is that that man?"
"Yes, that is the same man; he came along again."
I guess that man went at least a journey of six hundred miles to hear more of the good tidings of great joy that shall be to all people. His ears are getting open a little.
Now how long do you suppose any one might have preached in a church with a steeple in that town without that man ever getting to know the Truth?
They might have preached for centuries as far as he would be concerned. Yet there was the way that God used, you see, in taking the message right to the home, right to the individual, putting it like salve right to the poor heart. It is the only salve there is; there is no other salve in the world, my dear friends, that would have healed that poor man's heart, is there? No indeed; God has the only salve, and he has given you and me the privilege of carrying it around to those who have wounded hearts, and binding up the broken-hearted. That is what he told us to do. Some other people seem to think it is our commission to take a hammer and break other people's hearts. The Lord never told us that. We do not find it in the Bible, do we? But we read this, "The spirit of the Lord God is upon me; because the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings to the meek. He hath sent me to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound." Oh, that is it! Hunt out the broken-hearted, they are the ones that are ready for the Truth. Whoever has had suffering, sorrow, pain, trouble, and the plow-share has gone deep into the heart, hunt them up, take them the balm of Gilead, take them that which will heal, take them that which will help and refresh them more than anything else in the world.
Now this, I think, is the wonderful privilege you enjoy as colporteurs! And I want to suggest to those who are not colporteurs, that they should not do anything rash and unreasonable and throw away their property and go into the colporteur work – not that. Nor that they should abandon their wives, or husbands, or children – not at all. Do not think of me as saying a word of that kind. That would all be insane. The Gospel message of the Lord is according to the spirit of a sound mind, which recognizes the right principles of justice in all of our dealings towards husbands and wives and children and everybody else. But there are a great many who have favorable opportunities, a great many who have no special thing to hinder or tie them down, or prevent them from engaging in this wonderful service. They may be doing volunteer work, and we are very glad of it; or they may be doing some other work, and it is very good; but those who can ought, as far as possible, I think, engage in this colporteur work. I am not wishing to urge anybody against his conscience, or inclination; it would not be his sacrifice if it was because I merely urged it, and it fails to be your voluntary act. But you have my word for it that I believe a great many will come by and by on the other side of the vail to the place where they may say, "I wish I had taken a more earnest view of matters then; it does seem to me as though I had been rather asleep – just in a kind of a stupor, and I did not realize the harvest work was going on, that the reapers were gathering out the grains of wheat, and the Master was the general director who was telling us to pray for laborers, and I prayed for laborers, and forgot to answer my own prayer and go out and do some reaping myself." That would be a sorry day for us, even if we got into the Kingdom, to have to look back and see where we failed to show proper loyalty to the King. But I rather think if we have opportunities and do not use them it would indicate that there was in some way a lack of loyalty; and those who lack loyalty we know will not be in the "little flock;" they may be in the "great company." We might also remind you that even amongst those who will get a position in the "little flock," there will be different grades and stations; as the apostle says, "As star differeth from star in glory, so also is the resurrection of the dead." That means that the church class will vary in their degrees of brilliancy, of honor, of glory, and of association with the Master. Just as the Master again intimated to the two disciples. They said, "Lord, grant that we may sit one on thy right hand and the other on thy left hand in the kingdom." "Well," said Jesus, "if you are faithful, you may get into the kingdom, but as to who shall sit next to me, and as to what place they shall have, it is not mine to give." This will be given to those whom the Father ordains; and the Father represents justice in all his dealings, and the ones that should be there will be there; there will be no preference shown in the matter; it will be the most loyal one who will be next to the Master. Just as Jesus himself was the most loyal of all, and will occupy the central position to all eternity, so you and I may get near to the Master in the future glory in proportion as we come near to him now in the spirit of our minds, in our hearts, in our energies, in our zeal for God and for truth and for the brethren. Is not that so? Surely we all agree it is. Therefore, seeing that we know these things, let us make fresh resolutions today – nothing rash, but as Jesus said, sit down and count the cost, then do according to your love and according to your zeal, and ask the Lord's guidance and blessing and help.
Before I sit down I want to call your attention to the fact that we have prepared what we believe will be a pleasant surprise to you all. The Scripture Studies as we have now had them for some years are very attractive books; I think all agree to that; but we have the thought of making them still more attractive, and so we have gotten them out in this style (exhibiting sample copy). This happens to be the first volume. On the side is stamped "The Divine Plan of the Ages." Then, underneath, in gold letters, "A Helping Hand for Bible Students." On the backbone, "Studies in the Scriptures – Series First." And at the bottom, "London," then a dash line, then "Bible and Tract Society." Then a dash line and, "Brooklyn." It makes a very attractive volume, I think.
Then we have here also illustrations of the size of the different volumes, which is very attractive; that shows the first three. Turning it over we have the other three. It is very convenient to carry, you see. You can have that right in your book, and it forms a very small package indeed, very little more than the book itself; it can be carried in that way and the whole six can be shown as a complete set. If it be impossible to sell six, then the three can be suggested.
There is perhaps a possibility of selling more Scripture Studies today than ever before. It has not been so that we have sold more this year, or more last year. The last two years have not been so good, but we think there has been some fault somewhere; we do not know where it is; but those who are in the work, and who are using the best methods, are succeeding in selling more books today than they ever sold in their lives before, and we believe there is better territory. That is to say, the territory that has been gone over once or twice, or even three times, is not spoiled at all. The ones you see at one time you may not see at another time; some are always out. Especially it is advantageous usually if a brother has canvassed the city before that a sister should follow; or if a sister canvassed it the first time, or the second time, that a brother should follow. Thus there is a little variety given to the style of contact. It is very rarely advantageous that the same individual go over the same ground again, although we have known cases in which that has been successful. One brother I know of, who is here present in the meeting today, wrote me to the effect he had found that, going over his same territory again after he had done it thoroughly as he thought, he was very successful the second time also, after previously being done by somebody else.
I think the books are now in a very much nicer style than before, and I hope you will all be pleased with them. This cloth is not made in this country; it is a peculiar style of cloth, but one we preferred to anything we found here; so it is all being imported from Great Britain. We would prefer to patronize American cloth, if we could, and if they ever know enough to make it right we will be glad to buy it here; but we will get what we want, if we have to get it from our English cousins. They are ahead of us on some things, you know, and we are glad of it. We have to acknowledge the truth sometimes. We are ahead of them on some things; we are ahead of them on the numbers of population anyway, and we have a larger field, and the work, so far, is greater here than in Great Britain, and the people here are more ready to buy books than in Great Britain, and a great
[CR180]
many more books are sold here than there. But they write me that since the trouble has begun in Liverpool, and Manchester, and London, and several other cities, and even in Scotland, that the colporteurs are having better success. People are waking up to the fact that they are living in peculiar times, and the colporteurs wisely call attention to the fact that this is merely a foreshadowing of the great time of trouble, etc., and thus the people see something. They say, "Well, I want to know more about that. If the Bible tells about this trouble we want to know what it is." And there is a good religious basis there, a good basis on which to work. And we believe the Lord has much people in Great Britain, and we have very great hopes for success. As the sermons now are being published in 265 papers, we believe it is going to make quite an impression there, and people will soon begin to inquire for the books; they are already inquiring to some extent. In our Master's day, the Pharisees, the teachers of the Bible, were the very ones who wanted to take our Lord's life; so, strange to say, some of our dear Christian friends over there now are very angry; they are trying to do what they can to oppose the colporteurs, and to oppose the sermons, but God has to do with the matter; we are to do our part and leave all the rest to him. In many cases it works out for good; in many cases people are more stirred up to buy the books and read them than if they had never heard the slanderous misstatements. And when they read and find out how much they were mistold on the subject, then they become suspicious forever after that of all these people who have had anything to say; they begin to think, Well, there must have been some object in trying to keep us from reading these books. And the real secret of the matter is this: That the people know more about the Bible after they have read these books than the preachers do, and the preachers do not like to have the pews get ahead of them, and they do not like to have questions along Bible subjects which they cannot answer; and so we can have a sympathy for these preachers. But this is not the right way to take it, my dear friends. The ministers, above all others, ought to be honest; they ought to say, "We find the religion we have been preaching is not satisfactory to ourselves; it has not been satisfactory to our hearts these many years; we know it. If we can now find something more satisfactory and have a better understanding of God's Word, it will bring harmony instead of confusion; God bless the light, we want it all, and we will sing as one of the Methodist hymn books had it:
"'Send out thy light and truth, O God!
Let them our leaders be,
To guide us to thy holy will,
That we may worship thee.'"
We want to get rid of worshipping parties and sects, and worship God, and him only serve. Let that be the echo of all our hearts, dear friends, and then use all the opportunities we can to help ourselves and to help each other.
There is another point about helping yourselves. The colporteur will dry up, as far as religious things are concerned, unless he reads, as well as others. It is foolish to advise other people to read and then fail to read yourself. My experience is that nearly all of those who have left the Truth are those who have never made a thorough study of the Scripture Studies. What is the lesson to us? This, I think you will all agree: that if this is really a re-statement of the Word of God, the study of these volumes is not a study of something else, but the study of God's plan, in an arranged and consecutive way. It is a selection of Bible studies on one subject gathered together from the different parts of the Bible. So with each of the Studies, it is merely the Bible – references, citations and quotations all through. So you are reading the Bible and reading it in an orderly way. Now does this bring you blessings? Yes. Does it bring blessings to all who are of an honest heart, who study it? Yes. And how much can you afford to do without? Well, we find this continually, dear friends: Some brother will send in some question, and just as soon as the question comes we know he has not been reading, or if he ever read that volume in which it is answered he had forgotten what he read. That does not say he is a bad brother; it does not say we do not love him – not at all; but it does indicate that he is not living up to his privileges, or he would know how to answer his own questions, and not only to answer his own questions but to help other people answer their questions. Now you all want, as colporteurs, if you are going forth to help people to the Truth, to be thoroughly furnished; as the apostle says, "That the man of God may be thoroughly furnished unto every good work." That is what you want to be. That is what I want to be. That is what we all want to be. But colporteurs and pilgrims, especially, ought to know the Bible from first to last; they ought to have all the divine plan well in their minds and be able to answer every question as far as possible. We all have leaky vessels; we may all forget something sometime; it is no dishonor to a person if he has forgotten something. But seeing we have these earthen vessels, and they are leaky, let us use every means to keep the flow of Truth coming into them constantly, so we may be continually full, because we are always near to the fountain of grace.
I do not know that it is of especial interest to the colporteurs but the India paper volumes are now gotten up in a little leather case. There is no profit on these to anybody, so that the colporteurs will hardly be interested in selling them. But you will merely know they are to be had. They are five dollars and fifty cents with the little case and all complete. There is no profit in it anyway, therefore nothing to allow the colporteur. The only way you could do would be to add on a Watch Tower and make it $6.50, for the Watch Tower for one year and the set, and that would leave the colporteur fifty cents on the Watch Tower.
I was telling you how some of the friends were successful in selling the sets of six volumes. We have found that with the proper canvass they can sell six volumes just about as easy as they can sell one. That is remarkable. We are going to have them in a little paper box, about the color of the books, maroon color, and they look very nice, and the whole six books and the Watch Tower for a year for $2.65, which is only about the price of one religious book; for one doctrinal book, the price is usually about $2.50, were you to go to any book store to buy it; and here are a set of six of them, over three thousand pages, all in nice binding and put up in a little box, including the Watch Tower, for one year, all for $2.65. So that becomes a very nice proposition for a great many. They look nice in a library, and are remarkably cheap. And they get that paper for a year. And so they get a blessing, because sometimes the Watch Tower has been found to bring attention back to the books, when they might have neglected the books on the shelf. The reading of the Watch Tower draws their mind to the books again, and they go to the books. And thus the one helps the other.
In quiet drowse of summer day,[CR181]
The sleepy country village lay;
In mill and smithy, field and home,
The dull routine of work went on,
And no one dreamed that summer day
God's messengers had passed that way.
Nor heeded two who meekly came,
And in their blessed Master's name
Knocked at each door and spoke this word,
"If you care aught for our dear Lord,
Behold a message here we bring
To those who long to see their King."
"He says to all his virgins dear,
'Prepare yourselves, the Lord is near.'"
See here are jewels, which he sends
To all his lovers and his friends;
Love tokens which he bids them wear,
That they may daily grow more fair.
"This daily manna he provides for
All who would become his bride,
It gives them courage every day
To pass along the narrow way;
And here we offer other food,
All strengthening and very good."
"Which if you want and cannot buy,
We'll gladly send a free supply."
"Oh, yes, I love the Lord," some said,
"But I don't eat that kind of bread,"
And sniffed and sniffed and looked askance,
"Your bread smells like the second chance."
Still others said, "O, no indeed,
We have our church, our books, our creed."
While others had so many cares
They'd scarcely time to say their prayers;
One said she scarcely read a book,
She'd rather wash, or sew or cook.
To some the message sounded good,
They seemed to be in hungry mood,
They listened in an earnest way
To all the strangers had to say;
And as they watched them out of sight,
They wondered if their words were right.
As noon came on, with tired feet
They reached another village street,
And coming to a village store,
They stepped within the open door,
And to the waiting clerk they said,
"Where could we buy a piece of bread."
"And cup of tea, we weary are,
The day is hot, we've traveled far."
He shook his head, "Not in this town
Is restaurant or bake shop found."
Then after some persuasion he
Found one kind soul who made them tea.
They purchased cakes, and when he brought
The fragrant beverage, piping hot,
Down there upon the bench they sat,
With tea and cakes upon their lap;
And as they ate and rested there
From grateful hearts arose a prayer.
That God would still their footsteps guide,
And bless the hearts that did provide,
And that the cup of water given,
Be written in his book in heaven.
Then strengthened they went forth once more
To bear the Truth from door to door.
They found that few had any ear
For those grand truths to them so dear;
One said, "I'm Lutheran through and through,
No other food for me will do."
Some said, "It may be all you say,
But I don't believe I'll buy today."
Some shut the doors and locked them tight
Until the two were out of sight.
"No time to bother with such stuff,
Of reading matter I've enough,"
Said others with indifferent air,
And turned about and left them there.
So they passed on, their errand done,
And no one cared when they had gone,
And no one knew that in disguise
God's angels passed before their eyes;
But all God's secrets are his own,
And in due time he'll make them known.–Rebecca Doney