The Only Hope by Arthur W. Spalding

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California, U.S.A. · Nov 25, 1930

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 57, No. 46.

The Only Hope

By Arthur W. Spalding

ARTHUR W. SPALDING

UPON Judea’s hills, nigh two thousand years ago, there shined a light that heralded the most stupendous event of the ages. It was the birth of a babe.

The great things of life are not perceived by the common eye. Man plunders the earth for stuff to make his monument. He chisels the mountain for stone, he digs in the bowels of the earth for metals, he hews down the forest for beams, he seizes the floods for water, he reaches into the sky for his lightnings. He combines them all; and from the wide world man has built—a house. God takes a tiny cell, within which He has hidden His life. He bids it grow; it multiplies, twofold, a hundredfold, a millionfold. And as it grows, God stoops down and whispers to it, saying to these, “You be the hands;” to those, “You be the heart,” “the brain,” “the eyes,” “the tongue,” a thousand offices and powers, intricate and infinite. And from an unseen atom God has made—a man, to rule the world.

When Jesus was born of Mary in Bethlehem, it was the fulfillment of God’s promise to the parents of the race, of a Seed that should redeem good from evil and bless the world with peace. Wherefore the angels sang: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.”

If the world as yet knows not peace, if good will has not wholly displaced strife, if the glory of God is not the chief aim of man, it is because the creation of God is in great part hidden by the world’s imperception. God’s infinity is concealed in its infinitesimal beginnings. Yet, living and growing in the womb of time, the purpose of God is being wrought; and when the days are fulfilled, it shall be born in perfectness. What hinders? and what shall hinder?

This hinders, and this alone: that every man, or any man, fail to take Jesus into his heart. Christ’s problem with the world is His problem with me. I have beheld the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, but there has been a veil before my eyes; I have heard His voice inviting me to come, and I have followed—a little way; I have felt His hand touching my infirmity, and I have been healed—to a degree; I have seen His power to cleanse the heart from sin, and I have been cleansed—in part. But, oh, I have seen dimly, I have risen slowly, I have taken but a step. Else had there been in me a transcendent power to heal the nations.

Christ’s problem with me is His problem with the world. If there be any virtue in the world, it is the result of contact with Christ. If mercy has overtopped savagery; if service has anywhere taken the place of strife; if it has been made possible for little children to laugh, for women to sing, for men to walk unafraid, it is because the world has partaken to that degree of the freely proffered spirit of Jesus. And because the world has not taken freely, it languishes and longs.

I am a Christian, and I am glad. Except for the light that shines in the face of Jesus Christ, I should have no sight and no hope. But I have hope, and I have courage, and I have certainty of faith. I know that the Seed of God is perfecting His purpose, and that in beauty and supremacy He will soon appear, when the kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdoms of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. That, too, is the hope of the world, the only means of its salvation.

Therefore I pray that in my own heart, and in the hearts of men the world over,

there may be given free course to the workings of God, that the whispers of His Spirit may be heard and minded in our members, that in the fullness of His time “we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord,” shall be “changed into the same image from glory to glory, . . . by the Spirit of the Lord.”