p. 6 | With Our Inquirers by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Nov 11, 1908

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 35, No. 15.

With Our Inquirers

By Editor

"If ye will inquire, inquire ye."

[All questions to this department will be answered which to the editors will seem to minister to the good of the readers and to the mission of the paper. The same question can not be answered repeatedly in the same volume. The name and address must accompany question, not for publication, but as an evidence of good faith, and that answer may be made by letter if deemed advisable. It is well always to enclose a stamp for reply.]

2648.— Heb. 9: 9, 10, and the Types.

Heb. 9:9, 10 refers to sacrifices which pointed to the Crucifixion, but not to the seventh year, nor to the year of jubilee, which pointed to eternity. Are these fulfilled? K.

They are all, in Christ Jesus. "It pleased the Father that in Him should all the fulness dwell." Col. 1:19. Every moral and every typical truth finds in Him its fulfilment. Every moral truth of which we come in actual possession must come through the righteousness of God in Him. In His work is the fulfilment of every type. He gives us the earnest of the jubilee in our experience of freedom from sin now; He will give us the fulness when we enter upon our eternal inheritance. But all were potentially in Him when He rose a victor from the grave.

2649.— The Extent of the Gospel Message.

How far has the Gospel message been preached? S. W. H.

We do not know. Practically every nation has been reached. There are a few places still where the Gospel missionary has never gone. The statement quoted from the Christian Herald is doubtless correct, so far as we know; but God often carries His work beyond the visible sight of man, so that these unreached places may have some natives who are preaching this Gospel. We can not measure or estimate God's word and work by our worldly senses.

2650.— The Levitical Law.

Is all the Levitical law done away? If so, how can we teach health reform or tithing from the Bible, since where there is no law, there is no sin? Were not the laws of clean and unclean beasts and the laws of tithing a part of the Levitical law? And are these laws done away? C. M. M., M.D.

The Levitical law is done away. It was given to the Jewish nation and the Levitical priesthood. Many of its civil and statute laws were based upon eternal principles which shall exist as long as the things to which they apply exist. They are founded in the relationship between the creature and his Maker, between sinful man and his Redeemer. The Levitical precept is gone, but the principle abides, and is obligatory now. Clean and unclean beasts existed before the Levitical laws were given. They were recognized in Holy Writ as early as the Deluge. So also the law of tithing, or rather man's duty to acknowledge God's sovereignty and ownership antedated the time of Moses. It was recognized by Abraham and Jacob and doubtless by all the holy men of God. God tests His people on the matter of time by His Sabbath; on the matter of means by the tithe. Both antedated the Levitical law; both survived it. All the moral law was interwoven with the Levitical laws. All survives. Jesus indorsed the duty of tithing even in small things (Luke 11:42), and Paul tells us that those who minister in spiritual things should partake of the things of the altar, "even so" as did the priests of old; namely, by the tithes (1 Cor. 9:13, 14).

The matter of diet is not a matter alone of clean and unclean beasts. Some are in their very natures unclean and unwholesome, and ever will be, law or no law. God has clearly taught this, and the soul who transgresses sins against his own body. Our God did not say that certain animals were clean and unclean arbitrarily, but because they were so in very nature. In these days even the clean animals are becoming frightfully diseased. Better to know the higher teaching of the word and go back to the non-flesh diet. The best diet law in the world is 1 Cor. 10:31.

2651.— Gold and Silver. Job 28:1.

Please explain Job 28: 1. Is gold not in veins as well as silver? Was there any difference in the old time? W. J. M.

Please read the text as in the Revised Version: "Surely there is a mine for the silver, and a place for gold which they refine." See also the margin of our Common Version; "a mine" instead of "a vein." That is a beautiful and poetical way of expressing it, that there is a place for these things which men themselves find, and they find everything but wisdom. Silver is found in the mine, gold is found in its place; men gather it from these places and refine it. That is the thought of the text. As Boothroyd translates: "Truly there is a mine for silver, and a place for gold which men refine." Then, too, in most of the gold-mining of the past has not the gold been found in pockets, or in placers?