OF UTMOST WORTH | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Oct 5, 1904

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 30, No. 39.

OF UTMOST WORTH.

ONE of the greatest lessons that Christ taught on earth was that concerning the value of character. There is nothing of greater consequence in human life than the character in which that life finds expression. A righteous character is of more consequence than the most stately temples, and far more enduring.

The Jews looked upon their magnificent temple as the greatest thing in the world; but when Jesus had taken up His mission, He declared, “One greater than the temple is here.” That was one of the many things in the mission of Jesus that the Jews as a people could not see. A grand temple, beautiful porticos, ceremonies and ordinances whose meaning they had forgotten, were more to them than anything which the Redeemer of men could offer them. They were unable to yield themselves to this truth, because of their love of tradition and display. So firmly was this trait imbedded in their character that there came a time when their temple service became a thing so dead that God could no longer recognize it as His house. Having rejected Him to their own undoing, having cast Him aside as a thing of less consequence than the dead forms to which they clung, there remained nothing for them but the thing they had chosen. So the voice was heard, when the Redeemer had been crucified, “Your house is left unto you desolate.” The veil that had separated the “holy” from the “most holy” was rent from top to bottom to show them that God no longer recognized their “most holy place” as His dwelling-place. He speaks of it now, not as “My house,” or “My temple,” but as “your house;” and now holding nothing but dead ritualism and display, the substance gone and only the shadow remaining, it is indeed desolate.

This is the lesson for every soul in the building of the human temple. Christ declared to one company of His hearers that they were “whited sepulchers,” painted upon the outside to represent pureness, but on the inside full of corruption and dead men’s bones. It was His mission in this world to provide a way whereby souls, of whom even that terrible statement could be made, might be transformed into living temples of the Holy Spirit. Of those who have surrendered themselves to Christ to be moulded and fashioned after His likeness, it is said, “Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost?” Such temples are not “desolate,” as the temple of Jerusalem was finally declared to be. The selfish hearts that have been wishing ill to others while they maintained fair exteriors have been making sepulchers of themselves. The entrance of Christ will cleanse these death-breeding places, these habitations of evil, remove the last taint of that defilement which had polluted them, and make them temples which He will recognize as His. There could be no greater transformation. It is the grand triumph of the Gospel work.

It is upon such transformed characters that Heaven at last sets the seal of immortality. To persons bearing such characters there is at last given that “new name” which only God and the recipient know. “To him that overcometh, to him will I give of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, and upon the stone a new name written, which no one knoweth but he that receiveth it.” Rev. 2: 17. Again: “He that overcometh, I will make him a pillar in the temple of My God, and he shall go out thence no more: and I will write upon him the name of My God, and the name of the city of My God, the New Jerusalem, which cometh down out of heaven from My God, and Mine own new name.” Rev. 3: 12.

Those who have let sin triumph over them and bind them to the things of this earth, who in the choice they make, make it necessary for God to withdraw from them and leave their house unto them desolate, have no part nor lot in the plans of God for eternity. They are cut off as profitless branches, destroyed by the brightness of His coming, they perish as the chaff. That which is of utmost worth they have not chosen. God would have made them “more precious than the golden wedge of Ophir,” more enduring than the pyramids. Instead, they have become as the chaff and the stubble, the dew upon the grass, and the clouds of the summer sky. God wants character. It is the only thing that can stand the test of time, the only thing worthy of perpetuation through eternity; and when we have chosen that and possess that, God sets upon that His seal of endurance. We may have the jewels or the stubble. We may choose that which is of least value and perish with it; or we may choose that which is of the utmost worth and endure with it in the presence of God throughout eternity. We are making our choice every day which it shall be.