The Leading of God by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Aug 23, 1910

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 37, No. 33.

The Leading of God

By Editor

IT is an oft-repeated prayer of the Scriptures that God will lead. He leads by His Spirit, by providential circumstances, by His Word. And the test of circumstances, impressions, visions, and spirit, is the Word. "To the law and to the testimony" is a divine injunction. "Quench not the Spirit," and "Despise not prophesyings," are needed for these days of heart-hardening influences; but the sentence which follows immediately is not the less needed in this age of counterfeits: "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." And the standard is the law and Word of God.

Then let God lead. His truth is progressive. "The path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day." It ought to be like the rising sun growing from the dim day-dawn to the glorious noontide. But let God lead. Men may help, men may be God's teachers, but let the men be tested by the Word. They are not above it; they themselves should be led by it.

Above all things else do not be held back in the light and truth of God by dead hands. It is not a pleasant thought; but it is literally true that the church of God, or great portions of it, at least, have been held back by the hands of the dead. Men like Luther, Calvin, Knox, Augustine, Wesley, have written what they saw, what inspired their souls, and died. The writings, the teachings, the institutes, the articles of faith, the creeds, express great and good things, but they also contain error, and the truth they express is often fragmentary or incomplete. Yet some body of Christians have sworn to the creed. Light, glorious light from God's Word shines upon their pathway; but the dead hands which penned the creed reach out from a dim and cloudy past and hold in unliving, cold, unloosening grasp souls and consciences.

The great heroes of God are to be honored for their work's sake, but they are not to be enthroned as demigods. To honor them truly is not to magnify or exalt their knowledge, but to imitate their faith. Their knowledge was imperfect, but their faith grasped God and followed all the light of His Word which they saw; and their followers do them the greatest honor when they do likewise. The earnest Pilgrim, John Robinson, grasped the great thought. When he bade affectionate farewell to the little band as they left Leyden for America in the Mayflower in 1620, he said:

"I charge you before God and His blessed angels, that you follow me no farther than you have seen me follow the Lord Jesus Christ. If God reveals anything to you by another instrument, be as ready to receive it as you ever were to receive any truth by my ministry; for I am verily persuaded, I am very confident, THAT THE LORD HAS MORE TRUTH yet to break forth out of His holy Word. For my part, I can not sufficiently bewail the condition of the reformed churches, who are COME TO A PERIOD IN RELIGION, and will go at present no farther than the instruments of their reformation. The Lutherans can not be drawn to go any farther than what Luther saw; and the Calvinists, you see, stick fast where they were left by that great man of God, who yet saw not all things.

"This is a misery much to be lamented; for tho they were burning and shining lights in their time, yet they penetrated not into the whole counsel of God, but were they now living, would be as willing to embrace further light as that which they first received. I beseech you, remember it as an article of your church covenant that you be ready to receive whatever truth shall be made known to you from the written Word of God."

And we too may say that God has yet more and more light to break from His living Word.

"There are mines of truth yet to be discovered by the earnest seeker." When any branch of God's people refuse to go forward, they settle down into dead formalism or disintegrate. But progress does not mean worldliness or skepticism. It builds on eternal foundations. Liberty does not mean license. Different views for a time in the development and unfolding of the Scriptures ought not to mean envy, or enmity, or hatred, or opposition. It is a time for reverent study before God, with bared feet and bowed head and humbled heart. It is a time to press together and settle all differences by the Word of God and in all charity toward those who differ.

Not to believe that God will lead as He has always desired to lead is lack of faith. To hold that any man or men have fixed or can fix the living truth of God is unbelief. It is putting man in the place of God. It is attempting to steady the ark, jolting upon the cart of the creed. It is an attempt to limit the living, infinite truth of God to cold, dead forms of men; it is to place, in seeming times of peril, the form of the Anointed of God in a rock-hewn sepulcher. But this can not be. To those who look for God's living truth in the limitations of men God's angel declares now as he did on that far, fame-fraught morning, "He is not here; for He is risen. . . . Behold, He goeth before you." "O send Thy light and Thy truth; let them lead me."