QUESTION CORNER by Milton C. Wilcox

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Nov 2, 1915

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 42, No. 43.

QUESTION CORNER

By Milton C. Wilcox

CONDUCTED BY MILTON C. WILCOX, MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIFORNIA

Note.—This department is for the purpose of helping Bible students. Answers must of necessity be brief, often only suggestive, never exhaustive, never infallible, only as they agree with the infallible Word. Such questions only will be answered as seem to the editors to minister to the mission of the paper. Questions of the same import cannot be answered repeatedly in the same volume. Name and address must be given, not for publication, but as evidence of good faith and to insure reply by letter if thought best. It is well always to inclose stamp, not stamped envelope, unless answer is desired by letter alone.

187 — OLD AND NEW COVENANT AND THE LAW

I have been told that we are now under a new dispensation, a new covenant; that the Ten Commandments were the old covenant. Now what is the new? If the new covenant affected the commandments, and we should keep them, why are they not in the New Testament?

J. W. S.

First of all, the Ten Commandments are not the old covenant. That is shown in both accounts in which the covenants are mentioned together. See Jer. 31: 31-33; Heb. 8: 8-10. The old covenant was a covenant made between God and the Hebrews, or between God and the nation of Israel. Its making is recorded in Ex. 19: 5; and its sealing, or approval, finishing, in Ex. 24: 3-8. In that covenant between God and Israel, God Himself promised that He would be a God to His people, and that He would do great things by them, if they were faithful and obedient. The obedience was a condition of that covenant. It reads:

“Now therefore, if ye will obey My voice indeed, and keep My covenant, then ye shall be Mine own possession from among all peoples: for all the earth is Mine: and ye shall be unto Me a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation. These are the words which thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel.”

Israel agreed to those words, knew that they were to keep God’s covenant as a condition. The Ten Commandments may be called His covenant—God’s covenant which He commanded. See Deut. 4: 13: “And He declared unto you His covenant, which He commanded you to perform, even the Ten Commandments; and He wrote them upon two tables of stone.”

This is what God means by the covenant which He made with the children of Israel, by “My covenant” and “My voice.” The children of Israel again and again failed to keep that covenant. That is, they broke God’s commandments. But that did not affect the commandments. A foreigner comes to America; he takes upon himself citizenship here; he agrees to obey the laws, and takes the oath of allegiance to do that. But he fails. Does that do away with the law of the country? Of course we know that it does not change the law in the least. It simply makes the man who failed to keep it a criminal. So it was with the old covenant. God’s law stands just the same, forever, perpetually binding upon all mankind. The children of Israel promised to keep that in their own strength, and failed.

Under the new covenant, the Lord declares that He will write that law in their minds and upon the tables of their hearts. His power is to be wrought in mankind; comes home to each individual heart, in living connection with God. But you will notice, in the promise given of that in Jeremiah 31, that the law is the same. There is to be no change regarding the law; the change is simply between not observing that law and observing it. Of man, no promise could avail. The new covenant, by putting the law into man’s heart, places him where he can observe the law. The New Testament is not a book of laws. There is no reason why God should repeat the law which He had Himself spoken from heaven. The New Testament is the good tidings of that gospel which is able to write God’s law in the hearts of all mankind.

The covenant question is a very simple question. God’s government is eternal, and His law is eternal. And His great, everlasting gospel, if received, will so change man’s heart as to make the keeping of the law a delight. Ps. 119: 97; 1 John 5: 3.

188 — GEHENNA

You state that the Greek word “Gehenna,” in Mark 9: 43, 44, is an allusion to a fire kept burning in the Valley of Hinnom, to consume the offal of the city—Jerusalem. Now as I have never succeeded in finding any evidence or proof of the fact of such a fire, I will be greatly favored if you will tell me where that proof is to be found.

A. H. S.

We think our querist is mistaken in saying that this word apparently implies that there is a constant fire burning there which seems to be of a supernatural character. The thought is that constant fires were kept burning by those who had charge of Jerusalem. The “Popular and Critical Bible Encyclopedia,” published by the Howard-Severance Company, edited by the Rt. Rev. Samuel Fallows, A. M., D. D., LL. D., under the term “Gehenna,” the Greek for the Valley of Hinnom, refers for explanation to the Valley of Hinnom; and under “Hinnom” it gives us these definitions:

“1. An unknown person, whose name is given to the ‘Valley of Hinnom’ (Joshua 18: 16; Neh. 11: 30).”

“2. The valley which bounds Jerusalem on the south, below Mount Zion, and which in Scripture is often mentioned in connection with the horrid rites of Moloch, which under idolatrous kings were there celebrated (Joshua 15: 8; 18: 16; Neh. 11: 30; Jer. 7: 31; 19: 2). When Josiah overthrew this idolatry, he defiled the valley by casting into it the bones of the dead, the greatest of all pollutions among the Hebrews; and from that time it became the common refuse of Jerusalem, into which all refuse of the city was cast, and where the combustible portions of that refuse were consumed by fire. Hence it came to be regarded as a sort of type of hell, the Gehenna of the New Testament being no other than the name of this Valley of Hinnom (Ge-Hinnom); see Matt. 5: 22, sq.; Mark 9: 43.”

“The Standard Bible Dictionary” says: “Hinnom was the place where children were sacrificed to the god Moloch (q. v.), according to 2 Kings 23: 10; Jer. 2: 23; 7: 31; 19: 2, 6; 32: 35. Later Jewish abhorrence of this practice caused the name Gehenna, or Valley of Hinnom, to be used as a name for hell.”

All that is implied in the type is that the dead carcasses that were cast in that valley, the worm preyed upon continually; and what the worm could not consume, constant fires that were kept burning by the authorities did consume. In other words, it was fire unquenchable and worm undying until their work was done. All that is meant in the Scripture, by “unquenchable fire,” is the fire which does its work. “He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.” So the fire that was kindled in Jerusalem by the Babylonians, in the burning up of the temple and the various buildings, was fire that should not be quenched. And that was true. It was not quenched till it accomplished its work. Other authorities give the same idea.

“The International Bible Dictionary,” by the John C. Winston Company, says of that valley: “In it was probably burned all the refuse of the city, including the dead bodies of men and animals. From its ceremonial defilement, and from the detested and abominable fire of Moloch, if not from the supposed ever-burning funeral piles, the later Jews applied the name of this valley—Ge Hinnom, Ge-henna (land of Hinnom)—to denote the place of eternal torment.”

189 — ARE GOD’S PEOPLE GODS?

Please explain John 10: 34; Ps. 82: 6; Ex. 22: 28. Do these texts teach that God’s people are gods?

C. E. G.

The passage in Ex. 22: 28 doubtless refers to rulers among the Jews. The marginal reading of the Revised Version is, “Thou shalt not revile the judges.” Ps. 82: 6 simply speaks of the children of God as gods because they are His sons. “I said, Ye are gods, and all of you sons of the Most High.” And yet the psalmist tells us that these are mortal people. “Nevertheless ye shall die like men.” Verse 7. Jesus quotes this in John 10: 34 to justify Him in calling Himself the Son of God. His argument is that if the Lord called people gods to whom His word came, certainly He was not perverting God’s truth by calling Himself the Son of God. This is simply another way of speaking of God’s children.

190 — BIBLE DATES

In my Bible, the date of Christ’s birth is given in the margin as B. C. 5; His anointing, 26 or 27 A. D.; His crucifixion and resurrection, A. D. 32. Wherein is the error? This makes Christ thirty-six years of age at His death.

R. R. M.

The marginal chronology of the Bible is not the most definite thing in the world, and that is especially true in the chronology commonly followed by Bible teachers; namely, Usher’s chronology. It gives us a fairly good working basis. It is practically correct in the anointing of our Lord, but not in the crucifixion. According to Hales’s chronology, the crucifixion occurred in the spring of A. D. 31. We have not space to explain that here. It will be found in “Christ Our Advocate,” B. S. L. No. 128, price ten cents; in “The Sanctuary and the Twenty-Three Hundred Days,” by Uriah Smith—a book now out of print—and its later revision, “Looking unto Jesus.” Paper covers, 25 cents.

In response to the question, “When did Stephen’s death occur?” it is generally given as 34 A. D.