[To Our Inquirers.—(1) The name and address of all who ask questions must accompany questions, not necessarily for publication, in token of good faith, and that we may reply by letter if thought best. All communications will be considered confidential if so desired, and no name will be published unless requested. But we have no time to give to anonymous or unsigned epistles or articles. (2) Let the questions be to the point. Do not say, “Explain Josh. 7:1-8,” but state the thing upon which help is desired. (3) Questions can not be answered immediately in this department. Sometimes it will mean a month or more of waiting. We can not reply to the same question frequently. Read answers to other questions; you may find reply to yours. (4) Members of the Bible Band will kindly enclose stamp if answer is desired by letter. Others will please enclose ten cents. This does not begin to meet expenses oftentimes. (5) “Foolish . . . questions avoid.”]
The passage in question is “to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.” It is a part of the message which Jesus tells us He was set to proclaim. We read in Mark 1:14 that at this time Jesus was “preaching the Gospel of God.” This was a part of His Gospel. He declared: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He anointed Me to preach good tidings [the Gospel] to the poor: He hath sent Me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.” The apostle Paul tells us when this acceptable time is. 2 Cor. 6:2: “At an acceptable time I hearkened unto thee, and in a day of salvation did I succor thee: behold, now is the acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation.”
And that was what Jesus was then preaching to that Jewish people. Their acceptable time pre-eminently above all others came when the very Son of God Himself was made flesh in order to save them. The thought is that it was time when God came especially near to them with an abundance of grace. So Jesus declares in another place: “I came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly.” John 10:10.
It will be noticed that our Lord gave His message from the prophecy of Isaiah 61. He did not complete all that Isaiah there spoke. Following “the acceptable year of the Lord” in Isaiah comes “the day of vengeance of our God.” Jesus did not proclaim that in His day. That is left for His followers who include in the great Gospel message the second coming of our Lord.
Please harmonize Romans 14, especially the 14th verse, with “flesh-eating.”
A READER.
Romans 14 is not in any sense a dietetic treatise or rule as to the kind of food that we should eat. If we will but understand the reason of the giving of that passage of Scripture, we will have very much less trouble with the diet of neighbors and brethren. God did not give Romans 14 to tell us what we should eat or what we should drink, nor what our neighbors should eat, or what our neighbors should drink. The very key-word of the whole chapter is found in verses 12 and 13, “So then every one of us shall give account of himself to God. Let us not therefore judge one another any more: but judge this rather, that no man put a stumbling-block or an occasion to fall in his brother’s way.”
God has given very explicit directions to His children in the chapter previous. Any division of chapters is all man’s work. He has told us how temperately we ought to live in verses 12 and 13. In verse 14 He has told us that we should not make provision for the flesh to fulfil the lusts thereof. We should not eat and drink simply because our appetites crave this or that. There is but one thing we should do, and that is to put on the Lord Jesus Christ and glorify Him, but in our doing that we will meet some who are weak in the faith; we will be associated with brethren who can not do just as we do, therefore, “Let not him that eateth despise him that eateth not; and let not him that eateth not judge him that eateth: for God hath received him. Who art thou that judgest another man’s servant? to his own master he standeth or falleth.”
These conditions were pre-eminently true in the apostle’s day among the Gentile and Jewish converts. Some of the Jews esteemed days. The Passover was kept by some for years, needlessly, of course, because Christ our Passover had been sacrificed, and yet men were not to be judged regarding this. That belonged to the Lord; and yet He would have us take home to our hearts also that we should not set an example which would lead weak brethren away. “For none of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself.” Our example should therefore be right before God. The one dietetic rule which God has given us above all others is 1 Cor. 10:31: “Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God.”
In Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 God has clearly shown a preference between different kinds of flesh foods. Some He has designated as clean; others as unclean, an abomination, unfit to eat. The same unfitness then would make them unfit now. And yet He knew in His great wisdom that there would be thousands of believers scattered here and there throughout the world who could not follow the dietetic rules which He gave to His own people, and He would not place a handicap upon them in that way; therefore, those special Jewish laws regarding diet were abolished and were not binding as laws upon Gentile believers; but the principles upon which those laws are based, the great facts of the nature of the animals, are just as true now as they were then. More than that: there are passages in the Bible which would indicate that God will bring His people back to the ideal diet, to that given to Adam in the very beginning, entirely free from flesh meats. When He called His people out of Egypt, He gave them the ideal diet in the manna, a non-flesh diet. He is setting His hand to “gather” His people “the second time” from all the various parts of the earth.
In this age animal food is becoming diseased more and more. The conditions under which animals are fatted, the increasing diseased conditions among them, the way in which the meats are killed, and kept and stored, all are tremendous arguments against a flesh diet. While on the other hand those who have adopted a non-flesh diet are better in health, clearer in brain, more sensitive in conscience and are helped and blessed generally. That standard of diet, of grains, and fruits and vegetables, we would advise our readers to adopt. We are sure they will find a blessing in it.
2908.— Nailed to the Cross.
Will you please explain Col. 2:14? Does it teach that the Lord’s Supper is not to be observed and that baptism is done away? That all these were nailed to the cross?
B.
The apostle is speaking of only those things which are against us which are nailed to the cross. In the eighth verse he tells us: “Take heed lest there shall be any one that maketh spoil of you through his philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.” Those things that are of the world, those things that are of men, are not the things by which we are saved. They are the things that are to be put away. They are the things which have brought us into bondage. In Christ dwelleth all fulness; in Him is true circumcision, the cutting off of sin. In Him we are baptized (verse 12), and we show our faith in Him by baptism, and by that baptism show to the world that we have “put off the old man” with all his workings. By His power we are raised, or made to walk in “newness of life,” and we can rejoice in the fact that He has blotted out all those things which would bring us into bondage, and nailed them to His cross forever; and He has wrought all this in order that we may obey Him in perfect freedom of Spirit, keeping the things which He Himself has given instead of being bound about by the rules and ordinances of men. That would include not only the traditions of men, but it would include all those Jewish types and shadows and traditions which were done away when Christ came.
2909.— Prophetic Time.
Will you please explain Dan. 12:12: “Blessed is he that waiteth, and cometh to the thousand, three hundred and five and thirty days.” When do these days begin, and when end?
K.
They evidently begin when the 1,290 days of the 11th verse begin. The 1,290 days began in 508 A.D. when true Christianity was utterly perverted and the apostasy placed man in the place of God, and the Papacy was established. The 1,290 days end in 1798, and the 1,335 days in 1843.
It is impossible in the space of this department to give adequate explanation of what is involved in these verses. We refer our inquirer to “Daniel and the Revelation,” by Uriah Smith. If you will wait a few months longer, the subject will be more fully considered in the SIGNS OF THE TIMES.
