p. 16 | Studying Men or God

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Oct 29, 1902

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 28, No. 44.

Studying Men or God.

If your ambition is to use men in this world for this world, study men. Politicians do, and they nearly always fall to the low level of policy men. The shrewd diplomat, the wily, scheming capitalist, the political “boss,” studies men, notes their foibles, their weaknesses, their strong points, and works them accordingly. If the strong points are not favorable to his work, he plays one strong man against another; he uses weakness to undermine strength; by the overmastering foibles and desires of men he leads them to do his will, deceiving them into believing, when necessary, that they are leading and he is following. He is successful—for a time, only for a time, until he meets his master; some one else has been studying him. If he does not fall before a human, he falls before the policy-loving human’s master, Satan.—Do you wish eternal success? Study God instead of men. In studying Him and His Word you learn men as you can learn them nowhere else. You there learn their utter weakness. Having no desire to use that weakness to your own profit, you do not care to study its various phases. Your desire is to save the man from his weakness by getting him to see God, to know himself in the light of God, and then to hide in the strength of God. And the wisdom, the knowledge, the power which you will bring will not be that of man, but of God.—Will such make a success?—Ask of Moses, after his forty-years’ sojourn in the land of Midian, largely alone with God. He had met the Majesty of Heaven; he could face the Pharaoh of Egypt without quailing. Ask of Elijah, who springs a stalwart figure from the seclusion of the mountains of Gilead before the apostate and genteel royalty of Israel. He stood in the presence of Jehovah—what were kings of earth to him? Ask of John the Baptist, who comes unbidden of men from the deserts of Jordan even to the court of King Herod. He came not with the pretensions of the schools, he came not with the effeminate manners and the soft raiment of courts; but he swayed the multitudes with the power of a living message from God. He had not spent his time among men studying men, but he knew in the knowing of God that many of them were in character the “offspring of vipers.”—“Now we are not decrying polish or culture, if men will not depend upon it. It alone is the mere fluffiness which covers the body within. Sometimes it hides mere death and corruption. To hope for permanent success from it would be like expecting to sustain life and maintain power by feeding upon painted eggshells, despoiled of the nutriment within. Study God, know God, and in His light and for His glory study and win men.