CHRIST OR CREED; WHICH? by William Warren Prescott

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Dec 10, 1896

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 22, No. 49.

CHRIST OR CREED; WHICH?

By William Warren Prescott

BY PROF. W. W. PRESCOTT.

WHEN Christ came to this world as the bearer of life and light and love from God to man, he found that the plain teachings of God's word had been obscured and even made of no effect through the teachings of those who were the leaders of the people; that religion had been made a burden upon the people; and that which God had given as a blessed means of union and communion with him had been turned into a yoke of bondage. Much of his example and teaching were directed toward changing all this. He taught the people that religion was a life and not a mere form, ceremony, or creed; and he presented the plain teaching of the Scripture as the basis of faith and the rule of all conduct, even tho it should be in open opposition to the customs and traditions of the time. He himself was the Gospel which he preached, and the Word which had already been revealed in language, now "was made flesh" and revealed in life. John 1:14. Thus Christ became the embodiment and the interpretation of all God's thought for man as set forth in the Scripture. But this brought him into continual conflict with the religious teachers of his day, who placed their own traditions above the clearest statements of the word of God.

To his disciples Christ said, "Follow me," and then he lived before them, and taught them by precept, the Scriptures which he himself had caused to be written (1 Peter 1:10, 11), "that the man of God may be perfect" (2 Tim. 3:16, 17); and when those who molded the religious sentiment of the time asked him, "Why walk not thy disciples according to the tradition of the elders?" he replied; "Full well ye reject the commandment of God, that ye may keep your own tradition, . . . making the word of God of none effect through your tradition." See Mark 7:5-13. "Why do ye also transgress the commandment of God by your tradition?" was his inquiry. Their ideas of the character of God and of religion, both in form and spirit, had become so distorted that when Jesus appeared among them, "the image of the invisible God," they persecuted him because he would not conform to their ideas of religion, and even claimed Scripture authority for putting him to death (John 19:7), yet being all the time full of zeal for their creed. The experience of Saul the Pharisee, as told by himself (Gal. 1:13, 14), shows how the true spirit of religion may be wholly disregarded in the settled determination to maintain tradition and creed.

This conflict which was waged in Christ's time and against him has been continued, in one form or another, ever since. In the Acts of the apostles we have a record of the struggle on the part of the early disciples to establish the truth of the Bible, as lived and taught by Christ, as against the most determined effort on the part of those who professed to be the people of God to maintain the traditions and creed of the church. Light was refused and the power of the Holy Ghost was resisted (Acts 7:51) in the vain effort to put man's idea of religion and man's interpretation of the Scripture in the place of "the truth as it is in Jesus." It was in vain that Paul, the Christian, said: "I continue unto this day, . . . saying none other things than those which the prophets and Moses did say should come" (Acts 26:22), "believing all things which are written in the law and the prophets" (Acts 24:14), since their zeal for their creed was so much greater than their regard for what the word of God taught.