TWO WAYS by F. S. Hiddleson

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Apr 30, 1901

TWO WAYS

By F. S. Hiddleson

F. S. HIDDLESON (Brooklyn, N. Y.)

“THERE is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.” Because a way seems right, does not argue that it is right. Many times when traveling in a strange country, a certain direction seemed east, but when the sun came peeping over the hills the next morning, we found we were wrong. The direction seemed clear. To the majority of men the great suspension bridge seems to run north and south; but if you take the compass, you will find that it runs southeast and northwest. So it is in this world,—many things seem to be what they are not. As the sun and the compass are the criterions by which we may determine the directions on the earth’s surface, so God has given us a chart and compass by which we may determine the right way. If man were left to choose his way, he would make a mistake, for he would be guided by appearances; but God, in His great love, has said: “This is the way, walk ye in it.” This way of God is the way of life. It is “the way of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace.” “As for God, His way is perfect.” And Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” In God’s way there is truth and life, but in man’s way there is death.

The truthfulness of this is daily verified. People who take their own way are continually testifying, unwillingly though it may be, to this mighty and everlasting truth. They are reeling under the weight of woe and sorrow that has come to them through having taken and pursued their own way, instead of that which God has marked out. They are living witnesses to the fact that “the way of transgressors is hard.” “O that thou hadst hearkened to my commandments! then had thy peace been as a river, and thy righteousness as the waves of the sea.”

The child that sets himself against the way of the parent, ignoring the latter’s advice, because his own way is crossed, and ends in the hovel or morgue, is on a par with those of maturer years who continue to trample under their feet God’s precepts because the old way “seemeth right.”

Of the untold millions that to-day throng the way to hell, I have no doubt that a personal examination of each would reveal the fact that they have reached that broad way through the door of their own desires and inclinations, through the “way which seemeth right unto a man.”

Into the Brooklyn Mission there came one day a poor storm-beaten soul who was under the influence of the demon of drink. In his more sober moments, which seemed to come to him like flashes of light from a friendly window to the belated traveler, he would wring his hands and bemoan his condition, only to plunge a little later into darkness, and plead for more drink. Once he had been a Christian, and had known God’s way, and the sunshine that comes to the child of obedience; but, yielding to appetite, Satan had wound about him the cords of sin until he was bound hand and foot, a most pitiable object lesson of the result of abject slavery. Another, in his delirium, heard the footsteps of his friend on the stairs, but, imagining that an enemy was approaching, threw himself from the third-story window, breaking his limb on the pavement below. Such is the wages of sin.

Why will men not learn from the experience of others? Why?—Because they are determined to have their own way; because they trust not in God, but lean to their own understanding; because they are blinded by the god of this world, and their hearts are in rebellion against God and God’s way. Jesus says, “Ye will not come to me, that ye might have life.” Man rolls his stubborn will against the door of his heart, and thus bars it against Christ. In his haughty pride, man says, “I know a better way than the way of

the cross, a more reasonable way;” and he builds a ladder to climb up some other way, but Jesus declares that all such are “thieves and robbers.”

Dear reader, will you not surrender your will to that of your Heavenly Father. “My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.” Isa. 55:8.