p. 1 | THE WAYS OF LIFE

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Mar 18, 1903

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 29, No. 11.

THE WAYS OF LIFE.

JEHOVAH is righteous in all His ways, and holy in all His works.” “As for God, His way is perfect.” “In the way of righteousness is life; and in the pathway thereof there is no death.” Surely, the prayer of the psalmist is equally important for us: “Show me Thy ways, O Jehovah; teach me Thy paths.”

THE one thing loved, desired, sought after, in this world, above all things else, is life. Even Satan recognized this truth when he said, “Yea, all that a man hath will he give for his life.” How many times the truth of this has been manifested! We do not see it when men and women in the plenitude of health, with physical life-forces to the full, almost forget that they are mortal. But few there are indeed of the human family who would not buy off death for a year, a month, a week, a day, with all that they have in this world. For what are all the riches of this world to any soul without life? Therefore, “what shall man be profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and forfeit his life?”

LIFE is secure only in one place, and that is the way of righteousness is life; righteousness only is life. Things and men may seem to be living that are not righteous; but the living is only seeming. In reality they are dying. The human machine is running contrary to the law of its being, and is doomed to destruction. From the time the infant is born the bones begin to grow brittle, the blood vessels to harden and thicken, and the beginning of the end is at birth. Life is fed from sunshine, plant, and animal, from earth, air, and water. But after man’s best efforts, less than twoscore years marks the average of human life. Life fed only from lower life is doomed to go out into nothingness.

It was not so designed of the Creator. It was His plan that all His rational, moral creatures should receive life direct from Him, the great source of all existence; for “with Him is the Fountain of life.” But it was also a part of the plan—in fact, it could not be otherwise—that the continuance of His life to His creature is conditioned on the continuance of that creature in righteousness.

THE choice rested with the creature, as it does to-day. God sets before all life and death, blessing and cursing, and pleads, “Choose life.” Let the heart, the soul, the mind, the entire being, be yielded to God’s ways, to do what God commands, to refrain from what He prohibits, to choose gladly His ways, whatsoever they may be, wheresoever they lead. To choose them thus is to choose life, and to place one where the great currents of God flow out full and free from the eternal Source of being. To reject God’s ways is to choose death, is to place one’s little will across God’s great currents of life, and be overwhelmed forever by their force. The beautiful brook which meanders through the meadow, giving of its life to plant and herd, is a beneficent thing; but go a little farther down where it breaks from the valley meadow through a narrow gorge, throw a dam across it, turn its waters back over the fertile meadow, and its vegetation dies. The erstwhile brook of life becomes a sea of death. Its ways of righteousness are perverted, and death follows.

GOD has made no arbitrary law, dear reader, that, if you do not do His will, He will visit you with dire punishment; and, if you do His will, He will reward you. There is punishment in not doing, dire and inevitable, but it comes by your transgression of God’s ways, your perversion of the great currents of life. He that sinneth wrongeth his own soul.

YET God, in His goodness, does not leave His creatures in death. He has made visible life-connection between the great Fountain and the sin-burdened earth. Through His Word that He has given, through the person of His Son Jesus Christ, God is pouring out His life to all who will yield the sin and accept of His ways. In other words, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” Believing is only

yielding with all the heart to His ways as set forth in His Word. “The words that I speak unto you,” says Jesus, “they are Spirit and they are life.” “He sent His Word and healed them,” is God’s record of His mercy to His people of old. He is the same to-day. His paths are the paths of life. All His ways are pleasantness; and all His paths are peace.

AND God will grant the prayer, “Show me Thy ways, O Jehovah; teach me Thy paths.” He has given the prayer that we may have courage in praying it. In the very same psalm we read: “Good and upright is Jehovah; therefore will He instruct sinners in the way. The meek will He guide in judgment; and the meek will He teach His way.” And those who thus seek God to know His way will find that “all the paths of Jehovah are loving-kindness and truth.” It is a blessed place to walk; for God will walk there with His children, even to the end of the pilgrim path, when the obscured light of life in this sinful world will burst into the glorious effulgence of everlasting day.