Our Mission and Message.
By Editor
THE mission of the SIGNS OF THE TIMES is to herald to the world the everlasting Gospel of God in the setting of that Gospel for this age, for these times. It is ever the same Gospel, "the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth." It is ever the Good Tidings of an Infinite Love which has spanned sin's chasm and saves the victims of transgression. It is ever based on the love of God and the sacrifice for man which love has made. It presents, as ever, justification by faith as the very basis of Christian life and character. It is the unchangeable, everlasting Gospel. It has its various settings. It was first sounded in Eden, marred by transgression, and its symbol of faith was the blood sacrifice. For one hundred and twenty years Noah gave it to the antediluvian world with the warning of the destructive deluge to come. It was a different setting, but it was the same Gospel, demanding the same faith, repentance, and acceptance of God's plan and God's setting of the plan. To Abraham came the same Good Tidings, but the setting again tested the faith of the patriarch. That faith must lay hold of a special promise and of local conditions of which Abel and Noah knew nothing. But it was the power of God unto salvation to the believers who grasped the Gospel as it came. To Israel in Egypt the same Gospel was preached, based on definite prophetic time of the deliverance of God's people, and demanding the same faith in God's word of grace and the setting which He gave it. John the Baptist brought that Gospel to the world in a new setting. The Jewish church was sunken in dead formalism and lifeless tradition. John came preaching repentance and living faith in the Saviour about to be manifested. Humanity was as the grass and its flower, frail and perishing; God's word was everything. The glory of man was laid in the dust; God's glory was exalted. John himself was content to be a voice of one crying in the wilderness, predicted seven centuries before. He knew his message and mission, knew its setting and time, and God justified his work in the salvation of souls. Soon Jesus came; the setting of the message changed, but the Gospel was still the same, potent with all the life of God to save the souls who believed. God's Message for To-day.
And God's message for to-day is that of the same everlasting Gospel. It comes to the same wicked selfish world that it saw at the deluge or first advent. Sin has often changed form, but it is still transgression of God's law, and its wages and consequences are still misery and death. The message finds a church divided into a Babylon of sects and creeds; a church clamoring for political power in the lobbies of legislative halls; a church wedded to human creed and tradition, or weakened and disintegrating by the corroding power of "Higher Criticism" and German rationalism; a church professedly Protestant and Biblical, but many of whose leaders reject the great basic facts of the Gospel—the Incarnation, the Atonement, the Resurrection. The eternal law of Jehovah is set aside by many, the coming of Christ is spiritualized away, and the basic principles of Christianity—man's utterly lost and helpless condition and God's free grace—are buried under a mass of formalism. The prophecies of God's word are ignored and despised, and professed heralds of the King are without messages, and the lost world is left to slumber in sin and drift on to everlasting ruin. Yet God has not forgotten. A setting more definite than that of John the Baptist, foretold in a multitude of prophecies predicting the current conditions of church and world to-day, is to be honored by the preaching once more of the everlasting Gospel of God, laying again the glory of man in the dust, and calling every soul to "fear God, and give GLORY to HIM; for the hour of His judgment is come; and worship [serve] Him" who created all things. Read it in Rev. 14:6-12. It comes as of old to the individual. It brings every soul face to face with his God. It tells the truth of the Babylon of churches, fallen from power because of union with the world. It warns against the unholy combinations of church and state, which seek to control conscience in the place of God. It brings those souls who believe to stand where God can say of them, "Here is the patience of the saints; here are they that keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus." Rev. 14:12. This in brief is, we believe, God's Gospel message for to-day. It is of infinite interest to every one. It is the mission of this journal to herald it to the world, and we plead with our readers to study it with us.