I Know, | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Nov 3, 1874

“I Know,”

EXTRACT FROM A SERMON BY DR. E. G. TAYLOR.

The Scripture deals in subjects which we cannot afford to have in doubt; for doubt paralyzes even in temporal affairs. It unsettles business, and if widely prevalent, produces panic and unhinges society. How exceedingly disastrous, therefore, in soul matters! The soul cannot be fed on fancies, nor can it bear to be in everlasting doubt. These problems concerning sin and salvation, life and death eternal, need to be definitely solved. We must have solid truth. We may be willing to have some incredulity in affairs of this life, but it is dreadful to rest our eternity upon a possible chimera. Hence if the Bible came to us as only a higher philosophy, giving shrewd guesses or even the most elaborate speculations, concerning the world to come, we might readily reject it as man’s work, on an equality with other theories which have been spun from his darkened brain and heart. We need to be able to say, “I know.” Tossed by the ceaseless ebb and flow, we need to have perfect repose for the soul. There is a strong yearning of our nature which can only be supplied by a sure dogmatic faith.

But these subjects on which the Bible treats, are confessedly those beyond the limits of human wisdom to reveal. None have ever seen God. None have sounded the depths of his character. None, unaided, can tell just how our sin affects him and what remedy will avail with him. None can come back from beyond death’s borders to report their reception. All questions of the future are steeped in indispensable mystery, and the profoundest minds of all ages have only been able to speculate upon them.

And they disagree in every point. There is no definite standard; and one man’s guesses are as good as another’s. They know as much about such things as a fly, from an attentive survey of the rim of the cup on which he is resting, knows about the geography and composition of the earth, the theory of the tides, or about ten thousand other things utterly beyond his field of view. A blind man cannot see through the best of telescopes; but to discover by ourselves the great world of salvation, we have neither telescope nor eyes. God must give them both.

How restful, therefore, to turn from the speculative darkness of the wise to the calm assurance of God’s own word; to know that the “wisdom of God is a mystery;” “the deep things of God” which the Spirit alone

can search out, which “none of the princes of this world knew,” are revealed unto us. The heart’s hunger for certainty is at last satisfied. After searching the ages through in vain, we hear a voice ringing from the Roman prison with a power to move the world: “I KNOW whom I have believed.” Not, indeed, is this my theory which I commend to the favorable consideration of mankind, but, “I know.” This is solid footing.

But this exclamation of Paul’s is but the one voice of all Scripture, the grand diapason, the majestic harmony of all its utterances from beginning to end. Far back of Paul a thousand years before Homer gathered the traditions and fancies of the heathen mind into a mythology filled with deities, who are but magnified mortals with magnified vices, Job, the tried friend of God, had said: “I know that my Redeemer liveth.” That is infinitely more than Homer or Hesiod could say, or any of the poets, or orators, or philosophers of Greece. Still farther back, in Exodus, we see Moses in direct communication with God and enduring, as seeing and knowing him who is invisible; and even his father-in-law declares, “I know that Jehovah is greater than all gods.” In Genesis we see Abel filled with a sweet faith, standing by his bloody altar and learning the great secret that a dead body must come between his sin and God. Even to Mary of Bethany, in our Lord’s time, was given more than the combined wisdom of the world for four thousand years, when she asserted the doctrine of the resurrection, saying: “I know that my brother shall rise again.” While the apostle John sounds upon this one string, “we know,” in the third chapter of his first epistle, a succession of melodies, more entrancing than ever came from Paganini’s one string, and sweeter indeed, than the songs of angels: “We know that he was manifested to take away our sins;” “We know that we are of the truth;” “We know that he abideth in us;” “We know that we have passed from death unto life;” “We know that when he shall appear, we shall be like him.”

And Paul chimes in again with a magnificent strain of confidence, which has dissipated the fears of many dying saints, “We know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.” Athens did not know this; Carthage did not know it; Egypt, the cradle of letters, did not know it; Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome, the great powers that successively held universal empire, in their most splendid days, did not know it. All the centers of civilization were ignorant of it. Not one man in the world’s history, the profoundest and the best, could, aside from God’s word, stand up and say, “I know,” as applied to religious truth. No man, so far as history tells the story, ever did. Man’s cisterns all had in them the fatal flaw of doubt.

Aside from the word, not one now knows a single truth connected with the future life. With all of man’s seekings in a period filled with the most brilliant achievements of the mind in all other departments, not an item of religious truth has been added to us since the days of Christ and the apostles. Little need, it would seem, had the Spirit, in closing Revelation, to warn us against adding to the things in this book, any more than to warn us against creating a new planetary system or a new world, save for the disposition to deceive himself in spiritual things.

The autobiography of the late John Stuart Mill naturally elicits much attention. One of the most intellectual and erudite men of the age, a prodigy in his very infancy, commencing the study of Greek at three years old, and thorough in the classics before boys generally begin a Latin declension, a great thinker, and logician, and an astute philosopher, he knew many things of which we may be ignorant; but he did not know as much as a Sunday-school child of six or seven years about the sure way of salvation. He says of himself: “I am one of the few examples in this country of one who has not thrown off religious belief, but never had it. I grew up in a negative state in regard to it. I looked upon modern or upon ancient religion as nothing that concerned me.” That is, Christ and the fabled Jupiter, the scheme of redemption and the rites of paganism, were to him on a par. Not atheistic in the sense of denying the existence of God,—for he seems not to have cared enough about the matter to do that,—he was atheistic in its true sense, without God. Well, rejecting the word, what has this great intellectual light to offer in its stead? Nothing, absolutely nothing.

When his wife died, to whom he was tenderly attached, and who aided him in his scholarly pursuits, he bought a cottage near her grave, and spent the greater part of each year there, and says: “Her memory was to me a religion, and her approbation was the standard by which I endeavored to regulate my life.”

Can a memory give solid basis for the soul’s eternal welfare? Can a memory blot out sin, open the gates of glory, and give a needed Saviour? Shall we hear this philosopher saying of his wife after the manner in which Paul speaks of Christ: “I know in whom I have believed, and am persuaded that her memory is able to keep what I have committed to it against that day”?

Alas! how empty the language in such a case. Yet this is an honest specimen of the vague trusts of even intellectual men who do not embrace by a living faith, the apostle’s Saviour.

You may test them by this: none can say, “I know.” They tell what they surmise or conjecture. They say: “This is my theory,” or, “I do not agree with the Bible;” “I cannot accept your doctrine.” They begin to tell us what they do not know, although that theme is inexhaustible. But where is the man to stand forth with another sure word or almighty Saviour, and say, “Listen, O world running on to ruin, I have at last found one outside of the God-man Christ, who can blot out sin, wipe away sorrow’s tears, purify the heart, and settle conclusively every inquiry—have discovered another sun more brilliant than the Christ of Nazareth, who will illuminate your way here and to glory hereafter”?

I have read the theories of unbelievers; and have heard some of them talk very boldly; I have watched with interest the reports of conventions of spiritualists and free-thinkers. They seem like dashing iconoclasts. They would shiver every cherished hope to atoms, but set up nothing in its stead. In a wild debauchery of unbelief, some of them are fond of calling the Scripture writers scoundrels, and defaming the name of Jesus. They sneer at the precious blood, they talk of the golden age in which Christianity shall be overthrown; they use swelling words about freedom from religious fables; and liberty is their watchword, with the scarcely-covered meaning of unrestrained license in morals. Surely, it is not from such we can hear the joyful “I know,” concerning the true way of life.

Rationalism, from its most degraded to its purest form, centers around this one thought: “We will not have this man [Christ] to reign over us.” In its highest development it is distinguished from Christianity, not by what it teaches, but by what it denies. It would, if possible, grind our Rock to powder, and give the soul not a hair’s breadth of its own for a foothold.

Now above this clamor of men, who, when we cry for bread, would give us a stone, we hear Jesus speaking “as one having authority;” and there comes to us the cry which the world has longed to hear, from the servant of Jesus, who, from a long experience of the joy of salvation, could say, “I know in whom I have believed.” And we know. This is our sufficient answer to every caviler; this is our sure word of hope to hearts asking for the light; this is our aggressive banner under which we march in Jesus’ name to conquer the ignorance of a perishing world.—The Standard.