THE COMING RESTITUTION.
By L. A. S.
We have reached the time of “the restitution of all things,” to which, in the eternal purpose of God, His Church was to be brought just prior to the second advent of Christ. And that this is so, should be a cause of joy to His waiting people. We should all of us earnestly desire that this purposed restitution of all things should be accomplished. We should earnestly desire that “all things” should be freed from the blight of sin and the darkness of error. We should long to see all things restored again to the state ordained by the Creator before sin began its work of destruction upon God’s handiwork. And we should rejoice that we ourselves are included in this restoration, and are to be brought back again to the perfect image of God. This condition of things which will exist when the promised restitution has taken place, is the natural, normal condition, viewed from the standpoint of righteousness. In this world we view all things from a perverted standpoint. We see nothing as it is in truth, only as we apply the principles given us by revelation in the place of the maxims and standards of men. At the best we see only “through a glass darkly.” Sin has so changed and debased the things of this world, has so perverted everything and turned it from its natural use and purpose, that we are accustomed to think that a life of sin represents man in his normal condition, while Christianity is something abnormal, and is calculated to turn an individual into a strange, unnatural sort of being. But it is sin that is the strange, unnatural thing; and Christianity is God’s means of saving a person from his sins. God wants His children to act like beings in a normal, unperverted state. He asks nothing more of us than this,—nothing extraordinary, nothing in the least degree contrary to reason or the dictates of the highest intelligence. He asks that we should love, reverence, and honor Him, our heavenly parent. We recognize the propriety of according all this to our earthly parents, and He only asks that we shall likewise recognize His parental claims, since He is our parent far more fully than it is possible for any human being to be. “It is He that hath made us,”—His power, and only His, which from the very first has wrought in us to keep us alive and cause us to grow in mind and body to the present hour. It is He who has cared for us, shielded us on the right hand and on the left, and favored us in every effort to grow up to usefulness and honor. How unnatural and abnormal a condition, then, is that in which an individual makes no acknowledgment of the parental relationship which the Creator sustains to him. And when to this is added the consideration that God is not only our Creator, but also our Redeemer, having paid an infinite price for our redemption from sin, how doubly unnatural is it to treat Him as though He were a stranger who never knew us, or as though He did not exist at all! Christianity is reasonable. Indeed, it is God’s means to save us from all that is unreasonable; to restore clear sight to the mind, so that we may discern the truth, and that our feet may walk in a straight path, and we be delivered from the evils into which sin has led us. And when Christianity shall have done for us all that it will do, we shall be restored to perfect soundness in our mental, moral, and physical being; made whole, or, as the word means, holy. Then we shall have been brought back again to man’s natural state of being,—the state ordained by man’s Creator, and experienced by God’s creatures everywhere throughout unfallen worlds. The Lord asks us simply to give up, to let go of, the monstrous, unnatural, abnormal thing called sin, which has come in to mar for a time a small part of His creation, and to take our appointed place in the great family of God who shall live on in the perfect state throughout eternity. Let us be reasonable enough to choose God’s way and co-operate with Him for the realization of His wise purpose in our creation, now. L. A. S.