THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD by Thaddeus L. Waters

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Dec 25, 1901

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 27, No. 52.

THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD.

By Thaddeus L. Waters

Jewish Sects.

(Concluded.)

Among the Jews, previous to the birth of the Messiah, there were a variety of opinions and sects. They imbibed many of the opinions of the philosophers, together with some of the superstitious notions of the Egyptians, Babylonians, and Persians, to whom they had been in bondage. Especially was this true in regard to the immortality of the soul and the heathen dogma of Hades. Says the historian Gibbon:—

It is incumbent on us to adore the mysterious dispensations of Providence, when we discover that the doctrine of the immortality of the soul is omitted in the law of Moses; it is but darkly insinuated by the prophets; and during the long period which elapsed between the Egyptian and Babylonian servitudes, the hopes as well as the fears of the Jews appear to have been confined within the narrow compass of the present life. After Cyrus had permitted the exiled nation to return into the promised land, and after Ezra had restored the ancient records of their religion, two cultivated sects, the Sadducees and the Pharisees, insensibly arose at Jerusalem. The former, selected from the more opulent and distinguished ranks of society, were strictly attached to the literal sense of the Mosaic law; and they piously rejected the immortality of the soul as an opinion that received no countenance from the Divine Book, which they revered as the only rule of their faith. To the authority of Scripture, the Pharisees added that of tradition; and they accepted, under the name of traditions, several speculative tenets from the philosophy or religion of the Eastern nations. The doctrine of fate, or predestination, of spirits, and of a state of future rewards and punishments (the Greek, Hades) were in the number of these new articles of belief; and as the Pharisees, by the austerity of their manners, had drawn into their party the body of the Jewish people, the immortality of the soul became the prevailing sentiment of the synagogue under the reign of the Asmonean princes and pontiffs.—Decline and Fall, vol. I, ch. 15, par. 2.

With this understanding of their belief in Hades as the place of departed souls, with all its fantastic imagery—the three-headed dog Cerberus at the gate; the river Lethe; the lake Avernus, with the ferryman Charon to ferry the souls across; the Elysian fields, or Abraham’s bosom, for the good, the impassable Lethe, and beyond it hell with its three Furies, the hair of whose heads was snakes, and who chased the wicked souls into the lurid flames—it is easy to understand the parable of Dives, the rich man, and Lazarus, the beggar (Luke 16:19-31), spoken against them by Jesus upon their own belief, without questioning whether that belief was right or wrong.

Another sect was the Essenes. They taught—

that religion consisted wholly in contemplation and silence. They practised the most rigorous abstinence; many of them lived in celibacy, and observed a variety of penitential exercises and mortifications borrowed from Egypt, where many of them dwelt. They viewed the law as an allegorical system of spiritual and mysterious truths, and renounced all regard to its letter in the explanation of it. They held to absolute predestination, and that only the soul would be punished in a future state.

Such were the leading philosophical sects when Jesus Christ was born. Thus He found the world in respect to religious opinions; and as respects the worship of idols, a volume could do no more than give their names. Suffice it to say that in Athens alone 30,000 were worshiped; and lest there might be one they had never heard of, and he might happen to come to their city, and, finding neither statue, altar, nor temple dedicated to him, might in revenge destroy their city, they erected an altar and inscribed it—“To the unknown God.” Acts 17:23.

At the first advent of Jesus, science had proved itself systematic folly; philosophy, falsely called moral, had exhibited its utter incompetency to illuminate the understanding, purify the heart, control the passions, curb the appetites, or restrain the vices of the world. A skepticism that left nothing certain, a voluptuousness that knew no restraint, a lasciviousness that recognized no law, a selfishness that proscribed every relation, an idolatry that deified every reptile, and a barbarity that brutalized every feeling, had generally overwhelmed the world, and had grouped those assimilated in vice under particular names characteristic of every species of crime. Canon Farrar says:—

The epoch which witnessed the early growth of Christianity, was an epoch of which the horror and degradation have rarely been equaled, and perhaps never exceeded, in the annals of mankind. Were we to form our sole estimate of it from the lurid picture of its wickedness which St. Paul in more than one passage has painted with a few powerful strokes, we might suppose we were judging it from too lofty a standpoint. We might be accused of throwing too dark a shadow upon the crimes of paganism, when we set it as a foil to the luster of an ideal holiness. But even if St. Paul had never paused amid his sacred reasonings to affix his terrible brand upon the pride of heathenism, there would still have been abundant proofs of the abnormal wickedness which accompanied the decadence of ancient civilization. They are stamped upon its coinage, cut on its gems, painted upon its chamber walls, and sown broad-cast over the pages of its poets, satirists, and historians. “Out of thine own mouth will I judge thee, thou wicked servant.”—Early Days of Christianity, vol. I, p. 1.

“I Am the Light of the World.”

Amidst the uncertainty, darkness, and vice that overspread the earth, Jesus Christ appeared and laid the foundation of hope, of true religion, and of a religious union and brotherhood, unknown, unheard of, and unexpected among men. The Jews were united by consanguinity and by agreement in a ponderous ritual. The Gentiles rallied under every opinion, and were grouped like filings of steel around a magnet under every possible shade of difference of thought concerning their mythology. When there burst upon the world a religion based upon our relations to God, systems of religion consisting of opinions and speculations upon matter and mind, upon virtue and vice, with natural or inherent immortality as the basis of them all, had been adapted, improved, reformed, and exploded, time after time. That there was always something superfluous, something defective and wrong, something that could be improved, was generally felt and acknowledged. What that something was the philosophers could not divine.

Christ said, “I am the light of the world; he that followeth Me ‘shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.” John 8:12.

Century after century had rolled by, and the only light of life known to heathenism was the perverted light of the immortality of the soul; now “the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” John 1:5. And from that day to this has this light been shining, and still the words of the apostle are as true to-day as they were then.

In the natural world there is starlight, moonlight, the morning twilight, and the splendor of the noonday sun. Precisely so in the moral and religious world. There was the starlight of patriarchal times, when life through Jesus Christ was dimly seen in the sacrificial lamb; the moonlight of the Jewish age, when the light of life reflected from heaven’s sanctuary through a ponderous ritual, cast its cold and lifeless rays upon a wicked world. For we are told, “For the law ‘having a shadow of good things to come, and not the very image of ‘the things, can never with those sacrifices which they offered year by ‘year continually make the comers thereunto perfect.” Heb. 10:1.

There is the twilight of the Gospel—the Sun of Righteousness arising with healing in His rays—the absolute forgiveness of sins, the gift of the Holy Spirit, the peace that passeth understanding, and the brotherhood and fellowship of the saints of God. And there will be the splendor of the noonday, when every creature in heaven and in earth shall praise God, saying, “Blessing, and honor, and glory, and ‘power, be unto Him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb ‘forever and ever.” Rev. 5:13. “I Am the Light of the World.” “He that believeth on the Son of God hath the witness in Him [this ‘the heathen did not and could not have]; he that believeth not God ‘hath made Him a liar; because he hath not believed in the witness ‘that God hath borne concerning His Son. And the witness is this, ‘that God gave unto us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. He ‘that hath the Son hath the life; he that hath not the Son of God hath ‘not the life.” 1 John 5:10-12, R.V.

Coalgate, I. T.

THADDEUS L. WATERS.