Teaching Piety by Irreverence!
By T.
To attempt to teach piety in connection with irreverent remarks or "puns" on the word of God is to attempt an impossibility. But just such an inconsistent thing is attempted by a religious weekly that comes to us regularly, and that also tries regularly to teach that the great need in the world to-day is more power of God's Spirit in the pulpit. The pulpit is constantly admonished to seek for greater power in order that it may win souls. But, after presenting in the first part of the paper many good things that the editors design to stir the minds of the people to piety and devotion, they insert a column or more of items that they head, "Comic and Curious." A curious feature of these "comic and curious" paragraphs is that one of the most conspicuous of them is an irreverential story concerning Noah in the ark. The statements of the Bible are straightforward utterances of divine truth, designed to help the children of men in the way of salvation. The power of the Scriptures as a positive statement of definite truth is the one thing that makes it possible for these sacred words to lay hold of the minds of men and women and lift them out of the debasing ways of sin into the realm of a life of right doing and power. And for an individual, be he minister or layman, or a paper, no matter how sincerely religious an attitude may be assumed, to teach the plan of salvation one moment and turn the next to telling some funny story that makes light of Bible narrative is but to invite failure. "Thou hast magnified Thy word above all Thy name," is the language of the sacred Book. Ps. 138: 2. One of the commands of the Decalogue reads, "Thou shalt not take the name of Jehovah thy God in vain; for Jehovah will not hold him guiltless that taketh His name in vain." Ex. 20: 7. And there is the statement from the psalm that the Lord has magnified His word above all His name. Then since it is wrong to take Jehovah's NAME in vain, it is even worse to make slighting and ridiculous remarks about His WORD. For He Himself HAS MAGNIFIED HIS WORD ABOVE HIS NAME, and has told us so; and it is in His word that both His name and His person are revealed to us. Jesting about the Scripture as a whole is a thing that no conscientious and intelligent Christian would think of doing. He would shrink from such a thought with the same horror that he would have if confronted with the suggestion of blasphemy of God's name. It can do only harm to take any of the statements or stories of the word of God and make light jests concerning them. Such jesting can appear as "comic and curious" to none except the superficial or the insincere, or the very poorly instructed Christian. In this age of irreverence and disrespect for the word of God, professing Christians should not advance the evil work by speaking lightly of the word of God or of any of its portions. When jests are made in our presence concerning the Bible or any of its parts we should steadfastly fail to "see the point," and place our frown on the evil practise by refusing to laugh at the irreverent punsters.