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2473.—Justice and Love of God.
We believe that God is too wise to err and too good to be unkind, and that all things belong to Him, and He has a right to do as He will, as He in His own wisdom sees fit; yet it seems to us unjust to bring such awful destruction upon all those nations in Canaan in order to bestow that country upon the Israelites.
There are some things that will seem strange to our poor, human vision, because we know so little; at the very best we get such narrow views. God gives us sufficient evidence of His kindness and goodness so that we may trust Him for the things we can not understand; and yet there are considerations in His dealings with the inhabitants of Canaan which make His dealing with them perfectly consistent with God’s goodness and mercy. He had done all that He could, evidently, to help those peoples in Canaan. They had been warned and entreated until nothing more could be done. Holy men like Melchizedek, king of Salem, lived among them. God sent His own servant Abraham, who sojourned in different parts of that land, and always wherever he went preaching the Gospel, erecting his altars to the true God; a man whose very prosperity and dignity of character would call the attention of men to him. But He would not then let Abraham have the land because the iniquity of the land was not yet full; they had not yet come to that place where their case was hopeless. See Gen. 15: 16. After Abraham died, another holy man, Isaac, with whom was so much of the blessing of God that the Philistines felt that they must make a league with him; and after him, Jacob; and during the 215 years of Israel’s time in Egypt, God left those nations to develop among themselves until they had utterly given themselves up to the blackness and darkness of iniquity. God could have allowed them to go on still, but that would have meant the multiplying of souls doomed to destruction. It was the goodness and mercy of God which decided that it was better for even the devoted people themselves to be destroyed—a greater mercy to the world—to prevent them from bringing other souls into existence under such conditions, than it would be to allow them to live. Looking at it from this viewpoint, we can see that there was mercy in the destruction of the inhabitants of the land of Canaan. On the other hand, God’s wisdom is shown by the failure of Israel to do as the Lord told them, for wherever these wicked nations were left in the land, they invariably led Israel into idolatry; nor did they repent themselves.
2474.—Breaking Bread and Taking Collections on the Sabbath Day.
Is it right to break bread on the Sabbath day, or take collections on that day for Sabbath-school purposes?
The Sabbath law prohibits our own work. Works of charity or necessity are not condemned by the Sabbath precept. The Lord has Himself given us an inspired commentary on its meaning: “If thou turn away thy foot from the Sabbath, from doing thy pleasure on My holy day; and call the Sabbath a delight, and the holy of Jehovah, honorable; and shalt honor Him, not doing thine own ways, nor finding thine own pleasure, nor speaking thine own words: then shalt thou delight thyself in Jehovah.” The Sabbath is not designed to be a day of idleness, but a day of spiritual rest in God—a day in which it is proper to do good service for Him. The priests in the temple did work on that day, offering double offerings on the Sabbath. So if the collections which we take on that day are designed to further God’s cause, to help us to make the Sabbath more profitable, we see no reason in the world why they should not be taken on that day. “Bring an offering, and come into His courts,” sings the psalmist. This of course would pertain to His worship on that day.
So in the breaking of bread. In Acts 2: 46 we read that the disciples broke bread daily. There is nothing in the institution of the Lord’s Supper which would indicate that it must be at a certain stated season. The apostle puts it, “As often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do show the Lord’s death till He come.” “As often as ye do this” indicates that it was perfectly proper to do it very frequently, as well as otherwise, resting entirely with the Lord’s own children. See 1 Cor. 11: 26.
2475.—The True Doctrine.
Will you please explain the following passage: 2 John 9-11?
It seems to us that the verses are very plain indeed. We quote from the American Revised Version: “Whosoever goeth onward [margin, “taketh the lead”] and abideth not in the teaching of Christ, hath not God: he that abideth in the teaching, the same hath both the Father and the Son.” So reads verse 9. Surely this is very clear; the Father and the Son are one. He who does not abide in the teachings of Christ certainly does not know the Father. To profess to know God, and yet depart from the essentials of Christ’s teachings, is certainly perverse of all truth, and therefore the apostle continues: “If any one cometh unto you, and bringeth not this teaching, receive him not into your house, and give him no greeting: for he that giveth him greeting partaketh in his evil works.” We do not understand that this means that we should not help one who is needy, but that we should not receive such a one as the teacher of the truths of God, should not help him in his work of perverting the Gospel. Consistency would require this; loyalty to Christ surely demands it.
2476.—Progress in Christian Life.
Will you please explain Acts 19:2, 3? Some persons believe that this means a second blessing.
Read the context. When Paul came to Ephesus, he found certain disciples, “and he said unto them, Did ye receive the Holy Spirit when ye believed? And they said unto him, Nay, we did not so much as hear whether the Holy Spirit was given. And he said, Into what then were ye baptized? And they said, Into John’s baptism.” A.R.V. The record goes on to state that Paul told them John’s baptism was the baptism of repentance, saying to the people that they should believe on Jesus who was coming after; and that after Paul instructed them, they were baptized into the name of the Lord Jesus. His hands were laid upon them, and they spake with tongues and prophesied.
It would seem as tho it would be clear to any reader, if he did not have a theory to maintain, that to these disciples, as to many other believers at different times in the history of the world, there had come additional light. Apollos was a disciple of John the Baptist. He did not understand all about the Gospel. He had been baptized with John’s baptism; was looking for a Saviour to come of whom John was the herald. He did not understand the teachings of Christ, knew nothing of the promises concerning the Spirit; therefore when Paul told him that Jesus had come, that the predictions of John had been fulfilled, that John in and of himself could do nothing, but that Jesus did bestow life and power thru the Spirit, a great flood of new light came to him. He with the others yielded his heart to the message; or in other words, they walked in the light. That of course came at one particular time in their experience, and was a greater step than would be noted every day; yet to every soul there comes day by day and week by week new light and new duties, and it is the duty as well as the privilege of the soul to go forward in that light. “The path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day.” God has second blessing, and third blessing, and fourth blessing, and so on until the blessing becomes complete in immortality. This idea of going thru certain forms or doing certain things in order to obtain a second blessing upon which to place our hope or hold us back to a past experience is unscriptural. God gives the righteousness of His Gospel from faith unto faith to the perfect day.
2477.—Purgatory.
—E. L. W.—There is nothing in the scriptures, Matt. 5:26; 12:32, nor 1 Cor. 3: 15, which would establish the doctrine of a purgatory. The first one is simply an illustration of what would be done to a debtor in the days of the Saviour if he refused to pay the debt. He would be delivered to the judge, cast into prison, and kept there until his debt was paid. That, of course, was the fact as regards earthly matters. The great spiritual fact is this, however, that “the wages of sin is death;” and the man who does not repent of his sins must die. The force of the illustration is not as regards the kind of punishment, but the fact that the law demands the full punishment, just the same as the civil law demands the full civil penalty of crime. The full penalty of sin is death. Read Matt. 12: 32 in the light of the parallel passage in Mark, “hath never forgiveness.” That is the force of the passage. 1 Cor. 3: 15 simply intimates that while a man may do ineffectual work for God, yet he himself may be saved. The thought is that there will not be an abundant entrance, not a crown full of stars in winning souls; yet he will be saved, because he has had a heart devoted to God. If purgatory were true, why would not the wood, hay, and stubble, pass thru the fire and be saved? The gold, the silver, the precious stones, represent the souls built on the true foundation; the wood, the hay, the stubble, represent those who have not made a success of character-building; such are utterly destroyed.
We can understand 1 Cor. 15:29 only by reading the whole chapter, keeping the very point of the chapter in mind all the way thru. The one subject above all others in that chapter is the resurrection of the dead. Christ died for us. Christ was raised for us. In His death only we have hope. All the preaching of the apostle, all the faith of Jesus, centers in that great fact of the resurrection, and now if that resurrection is nothing, “our faith is vain.” Dead men we are without Christ. By faith, if Christians, we are “baptized into His death,” and are risen again with Him in a new life. We are baptized with reference to the dead and the resurrection from the dead. “Else what shall they do that are baptized for the dead,” in the faith of Him who died for us, and who lives again for our justification?
2479.—V. S.
—The Seventy Elders of Ex. 24: 1 are not parallel with the elders of Rev. 4:4. The elders of Rev. 4:4 find their type in 1 Chron. 24: 1-18, in the twenty-four courses of priests which served in the temple. The seventy elders of Moses’ time were administrative officers in the commonwealth of Israel. The elders of Rev. 4:4 are those who assist our Lord in His priestly work, typified by the twenty-four courses of priests, as before mentioned.
2480.—E. L. L.
—The word “Jesus” is not found in the Old Testament in English. In the Septuagint, or Greek Version, the word “Joshua” is called “Jesus.” “Joshua” is the Hebrew word; “Jesus” is the Greek translation. Heb. 4:8 means Joshua instead of Jesus the Christ. So also in Acts 7:45. In both of these cases the American Revised has corrected the thought, and given us the Old Testament names.