SIR ROBERT ANDERSON
Secret Service
Theologian
FORGOTTEN
TRUTHS
CHAPTER 2
ETERNAL WORD OF
GOD
"O THE depth of the riches both of the wisdom and
knowledge of God! how unsearchable are His judgments, and His ways past finding
out!"
(Romans 11:33) Such was the burst of praise that rose from the heart
of the inspired Apostle as he realized that the seeming failure of all that
Hebrew prophets had foretold of blessing upon earth at the coming of Messiah
had been made the occasion of a new revelation, which should lead up to the
fulfillment of all their God-breathed words.
"The seeming failure," I say
advisedly. For though theologians have written "The enlargement of the Church"
over such Scriptures as Isaiah 54, 60, 66, no sane and sensible person will
pretend that there exists today, or has ever existed in the past, a condition
of things on earth that could be accepted as the fulfillment of these
prophecies. And to suppose that such a condition of things will result from the
influences at work in the present economy betokens sheer blindness and folly.
The time has come for plain speaking on this subject. "Clear the decks," is the
first order given when a warship prepares for action. And the vagaries of
old-fashioned "orthodox" exegesis are top-hamper that grievously embarrasses
the defence of Holy Scripture in these days when its Divine authority is so
virulently attacked. As the inspired Apostle declared at Pentecost, "the times
of the restitution of all things" or, in other words, the times when all
things will be put right are the burden of Hebrew prophecy from Moses to
Malachi, (Acts 3:19) and the fulfillment of these prophecies awaits the return
of Christ.
The fact is plain to all who will use their brains that the
condition of Christendom, and of the world at large, differs essentially from
what is portrayed and promised in the visions of the Hebrew Seers. But these
"holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost," (2 Peter 1:21)
and no word of God can fail. No lapse of time affects it; for in His sight a
thousand years are as a forgotten yesterday, or as a watch in the night. (Psalm
90:4) Thus it is that He would teach us that time is but a law of human
thought, and that eternity is His domain.
Therefore, while unbelief
dismisses these prophecies as old-world classics, the Christian accepts them as
divine - the Word of God, "which liveth and abideth for ever." And this being
so, chronology has no bearing on the vital question here at issue. For we are
"not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand
years, and a thousand years as one day." (2 Peter 3:8) "Today is the third day
since these things were done," was the despairing lament of the disciples on
the road to Emmaus; but their unbelief brought upon them the Lords
rebuke, "O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have
spoken." And when the skeptical pundits would shake our faith by reminding us
that the prophets words are still unfulfilled after the lapse of
well-nigh three thousand years, we exclaim, "Three thousand years! Then today
is the third day since these things were spoken!"
Spiritual discernment and
ordinary intelligence are needed in the study of Holy Scripture. Spirituality
is the prime essential, for spiritual truths are spiritually discerned; but
common sense, to use the popular phrase, will generally save us from the
follies of false exegesis. And false exegesis, I repeat, affords a
vantage-ground for skeptical attacks on Scripture. To give an illustration of
this, extremely apt in the circumstances of the day, I will quote a passage
from Professor Tyndalls famous address on "Science and Man." Referring to
the "Angels Song," he exclaimed, "Look to the East at the present moment,
as a comment on the promise of peace on earth and good will toward men. The
promise is a dream ruined by the experience of eighteen centuries." The answer
to this taunt is full and clear. The great birth in Bethlehem heralded the
fulfillment of all that God had promised of blessing to the world. "The times
of the restitution of all things," to quote the Apostle Peters words
again, were to come with the advent of Christ. And now "the Coming One" had
come. Why then were not the promised blessings realized? Why, but because of
His rejection. "His own received Him not," and "the world knew Him not." The
Christ was crucified on Calvary. And when the Apostles were divinely
commissioned to proclaim to His murderers that a national repentance would
bring Him back to earth, with the fulfillment of every blessing of which their
prophets spoke, the response made by that guilty people was to persecute the
ministers of this great reconciliation and hound them to death. But it may be
asked, Has the sin of man changed the purposes of God? Most assuredly not. But,
on account of that sin, the fulfillment of the Divine purposes his been
postponed.
This then is the answer which Scripture gives to the
skeptics taunt. But very different are the conflicting answers which
"old-fashioned orthodoxy" offers. For some would have us believe that "the
millennium" will result from the preaching of the Gospel in the present
dispensation. And by others we are told that all we have to look for is "the
end of the world," when the Lord will come to take His people to Himself, and
judgment fire will engulf this sin cursed earth. The former view was popular in
the early days of the nineteenth-century revival; but in the present state of
Christendom in general, and of the Churches of the Reformation in particular,
anyone who clings to it today must be either a mystic or a fossil And if the
other view be accepted, the closing words of the 11th of Romans must be
dismissed as the wildest rhapsody; for the unsearchable judgments of Divine
wisdom and knowledge are thus made to find their realization in a pandemonium
to be followed by a bonfire.(1)
This "spiritualizing," as it is called, of
the Hebrew Scriptures has given the Jew a fair ground for rejecting the
Christians appeal to the Messianic prophecies. And thus, as Adolf Saphir
says with sorrow, "It is out of the arsenal of the orthodox that the weapons
have been taken with which the very fundamental truths of the Gospel have been
assailed." And he goes on to show how "this spiritualistic interpretation paved
the way for Rationalism and Neology."
Let us then be done with it once for
all; and rejecting absolutely the popular canon of exegesis, that Holy
Scripture never says what it means, and never means what it says, let us learn
with humility and reverence to accept all the Divine words at their face value.
When the Lord declared that not a jot or tittle of the law shall fail of its
fulfillment, He was speaking, not of the decalogue, but, as the context
indicates, of the Hebrew Scriptures as a whole. Remembering, then, that these
Scriptures are the Word of Him with whom both the past and the future are a
living present, let us read them with the settled conviction that every
promise, and every prophecy, relating to earth and the earthly people must be
fulfilled as definitely as were the seemingly unbelievable prophecies and
promises about the birth and death of Christ.
But on this subject our
theology, so far from reflecting "the wisdom and knowledge of God," partakes of
the ignorance and the errors of the Patristic theologians. Plain words, I
repeat, are needed here. For the writings of the Latin Fathers afford a
vantage-ground both for Romish attacks upon the citadel of Divine truth, and
for the insidious efforts of German skepticism to undermine its very
foundations. It is noteworthy that though the writers of the New Testament, one
and all, were men who, like Timothy, had known the Hebrew Scriptures from
infancy,1 the Patristic theologians were converts from Paganism. And having
regard to their comparative want of acquaintance with the Old Testament, it is
not strange, perhaps, that in the then condition of the Jewish people, crushed
apparently beyond hope of recovery by the judgments that had overwhelmed them,
the belief prevailed that God had "cast away His people whom He foreknew." But
it is both strange and sad that such a belief should still survive in these
enlightened days of ours. In proof that it does survive, appeal might be made
to many a standard work; but for my present purpose it will suffice to quote
the following sentence from the prolific pen of a writer of the highest repute
as a popular theologian: "The divine and steady light of history first made
clear to the Church that our Lords prophetic warnings as to His return
applied primarily to the close of the Jewish dispensation, and the winding up
of all the past, and the inauguration of the last great aeon of Gods
dealings with mankind."2
If we are to recover truth which the Church, in
its incipient apostasy, lost through following the human light of history, we
must seek it by "the Divine and steady light" of Holy Writ. And that light will
make clear to us that, like many another Scripture, the promise to Abraham has
a twofold aspect. It pointed to Christ and the redemption of Calvary; but it
still awaits its secondary fulfillment through the agency of the covenant
people. "In thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed." (Genesis
22:18.)3 The spiritually intelligent Bible student accepts that promise as the
Word of the Lord, that endureth for ever, and he knows that it will be
literally fulfilled. And he knows also, that this Christian dispensation is not
"the last great aeon of Gods dealings with mankind," but rather a
beginning of what, in His unsearchable counsels, He has in store for the
blessing of this sin-blighted world.
That glorious vista of future
blessing, which filled so large a place in the visions of the Hebrew Seers, was
but the unfolding of the prophecy of the sacred calendar. For the Passover is
only the first of the great Festivals which typify the harvest of redemption.
This present dispensation with its sheaf of the first-fruits,4 the true, the
heavenly Church, is to be followed by the Feast of Pentecost, when Israel
reunited - the two wave loaves of the typical ritual - will be restored to
Divine favour. And beyond these spring-time festivals there comes the
harvest-home of redemption upon earth, in the fulfillment of the great Feast of
Tabernacles, when unnumbered multitudes of the saved shall know and serve the
Lord. This is no "cunningly devised fable," no mere dream of a visionary; it is
a summary of what Scripture plainly teaches. And, rejecting the unworthy
figment that earth is merely a recruiting-ground for heaven, to be given up to
fire when the Church has been safely garnered, faith looks out with joy upon
this glorious vista of the future, when the Abrahamic promise shall receive
complete fulfillment, and Christ "shall see of the travail of His soul, and
shall be satisfied."
It is in this spirit and on these principles that the
present inquiry shall proceed. And the nature and scope of the inquiry may be
stated thus - "What light does Scripture throw upon the abnormal condition of
things on earth during this age, when "the people of the covenant" are in
rejection?" And what are the distinctive truths of Christianity, or, in other
words, the special "mystery" truths of the New Testament revelation? As this
word "mystery" will occur again and again in the following pages, it may be
well to explain that it is here employed in its Scriptural acceptation, as
signifying "not a thing unintelligible, but what lies hidden and secret till
made known by the revelation of God."5 Or as Dr. Sanday gives it, "something
which up to the time of the Apostles had remained secret, but had then been
made known by Divine intervention."
Chapter
Three
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