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In the Power of God

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Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Mar 17, 1909

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 36, No. 11.

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In the Power of God.

ONE of the glories of the apostle Paul’s preaching was in the elimination of self. He aimed to make no display of his wisdom or education or ancestry. These he counted as loss. But his message was in “demonstration of the Spirit and of power.” 1 Cor. 2:4. The Gospel of God reached hearts, set sin’s captives free, and regenerated souls. And all this was as he tells the believers “that your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.” Verse 5.
The wisdom of men fails. It led them in the early centuries to endeavor to unite pagan philosophy with the simple yet mighty truths of the Gospel, and thereout came the great apostasy. It led men to substitute for the institutions of God’s planting, heathen institutions; for the divinely ordained rites and worship day of the Bible, the elaborate rites and festivals of paganism, and therefrom came the demand upon the civil power to sustain them. It led man to assume the titles and prerogatives of God, and to do in God’s church what He never would do. Out of this came the Papacy, the Dark Ages, and all its persecutions.
The wisdom of men has no power to keep men. It may last to-day; to-morrow it is superseded by a new hypothesis, a new philosophy, a new theology. It gives no ground for faith. He who founds his belief in it to-day, suffers shipwreck of faith to-morrow.
The power of God is the Gospel of God. And therefore Paul’s ringing cry, “I am not ashamed of the Gospel: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek. For therein is revealed a righteousness of God from faith unto faith; as it is written, But the righteous shall live by faith.” Rom. 1:16, 17. To the completeness of that righteousness, grace-given, God’s eternal law bears witness. Rom. 3:21. The soul stands by faith on the verities of God, effluent of living power. Christ Jesus is his living Head, and the soul is responsible to Him. Before that creative power, that living and yet present Head, all the wisdom and philosophies and theologies and systems of men sink into insignificance. “Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men.” 1 Cor. 1:25.