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Be Ye Reconciled

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Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Aug 10, 1911

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 88, No. 32.

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Be Ye Reconciled

By C. M. S.

THE ministry of Christ and his followers in this world is primarily a ministry of reconciliation. Satan’s work misrepresented God before all his creatures, and they who harbored the misrepresentation were bound to become estranged from God. If angels in heaven went down into doubt and disloyalty under the fire of Satan’s accusations, it is not surprising that human beings should fall before the same onslaught. Angels fell, and men fell; sin was born in earth as well as in heaven, and its progeny has peopled every corner of the globe.
Sin has so wrought upon the spiritual eyesight of mankind as to produce true spiritual myopia, and man sees God and his dealings and purposes as the near-sighted individual sees distant objects with the natural eye—blurred, indistinct, and distorted. When the eye distorts the image of the object looked at, the individual is unable rightly to judge the object, or to form a correct conception of its characteristics. A veil is virtually hung between the eye and the object, and the vision is never clear.
That is what sin has done for man. His vision of God and his character is a blurred and distorted one. It misrepresents God to him, and he misrepresents God to others. He sees things which he regards as unlovely and hateful. He feels that he can not love what he sees, and he turns from it to look upon something nearer at hand, something that is made to appear to him better than it is. That is self and its immediate interests; and Satan holds self so close to man’s eyes that he can see nothing else that looks so beautiful, for he sees everything else distorted and out of proportion.
That spiritual myopia is the result of sin, and the misrepresentation of God and his attributes follows as a natural result; and the natural result of that again is alienation from God. That must go on until the universe is wrecked, unless a remedy is found. The remedy was found—a ministry of reconciliation through humiliation and sacrifice. The principles in that warfare are sharply contrasted. On the one hand, it is self and its apparent interests against everything visible and invisible, even the perpetuity of the kingdom of the omnipotent and all-righteous One. On the other hand, it is the utter and complete forgetting and sacrificing of self for the good of that kingdom and each and all of its subjects. The one is the ministry of self, dissension, and hatred; the other is the ministry of sacrifice, reconciliation, and love. Jesus Christ came as that sacrifice, that minister of reconciliation, that exemplification of the love of God. To the eyes blurred by sin, he would give that divine eye-salve which would enable them to see the loveliness of the character of God. To those who had learned to hate and to distrust the purposes of God, he would bring a revelation of God that would win the hearts of many, and leave all without excuse for continuing to hate and distrust, for refusing to be reconciled to the Author of their being. And his life of sacrifice—sacrifice of all that could be sacrificed, even life itself—was to be a perpetual example to his followers in their ministry, and a perpetual object-lesson to the world of the contrast between the principles of the kingdom of light and the principles of the kingdom of darkness.
The principles of the kingdom of darkness brought in selfishness; selfishness engendered strife, hatred, murder, and every other evil thing. How appropriate, then, that when the angels announced the birth of the One who was to be the great Reconciler, they should also have announced, “On earth peace, good will to men”! The principles of the kingdom of light bring peace to displace the discords and strifes of this world; and it was the business of Christ, and is the business of the Christian, so to represent God to the world that men will understand that God’s thoughts toward them are thoughts of good, and not of evil. “Good will to men” expresses the attitude of heaven toward humanity. That fact was demonstrated for all time when heaven sent its representative to earth to live a life of service for humanity, and to die in man’s place that man might be freed from the condemnation of the broken law.
“Be ye reconciled to God,” has been the message from the time of Adam to our time, and will be the major cord in the message to the last generation of men upon this earth. “Turn ye, turn ye from your evil ways; for why will ye die?”
C. M. S.