THE GREAT DILEMMA

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Mar 4, 1862

THE GREAT DILEMMA.

A well-educated and thoroughly intelligent Jew now living, related his religious history, much as follows:

'Of my nearest relatives and personal friends, the greater part were thoroughly unbelievers. They saw no God, even in their Old Testament Scriptures. But as for me, I could not rest there. When in the course of my education, I came to read the Old Testament with care, I saw the finger of God there; I could not mistake the impress of his hand. There were his footprints on Sinai; there, all along in the wilderness, were the traces of his present agency. It was of no use for men to say that God was not in that book. So far, therefore, I had a God revealed.

You are aware that no Jew, under the influence of his Jewish education, can speak of the New Testament but with horror. I was trained to this feeling against it.

'Yet I was not at rest. The more I examined my ground, the deeper my distress became.'

'What,' said our friend, 'was the matter with you? Whence your trouble?'

'In one word,' he replied, 'it was this: I could do nothing with my sins. There was nothing I could do with my sins. With a God and with sin, but with no Saviour, I was in a painful dilemma. I could not live there. My necessities at last drove me to the Christian's gospel, and there I found what I could do with my sins.'

This brief narrative seemed to us deeply significant.

A broad distinction must be supposed between modern Judaism and the Judaism of Moses, David and Isaiah. The latter has something definite to say and to show respecting salvation from sin. They had most truthful and touching words about "the broken heart" and "contrite spirit," and of God's tenderness toward all such; and they had words yet more precious, if possible, of sins "covered," "taken away," "forgiven," and "remembered no more." To give body and power to these blessed ideas, God had instituted a vast system of bloody sacrifices, in which innocent animals, put in the place of the guilty sinner, bore his sins, and he was forgiven. All these had their onward look toward the Great Sacrifice who was to come. So that the Jewish system of those times did not leave the docile Hebrew at an utter loss what to do with his sins.

But modern Judaism has not even one solitary finger-board pointing to Jesus Christ. Far from being, like the ancient Hebrew system, one vast assemblage of foretokening symbols and prophecies, all testifying of a Saviour to come, it has ignored all recognition of Jesus of Nazareth, and its whole sacrificial system is effete and dead.

This great change in the practical sense and force of Judaism is due partly to the antipathy so long cherished in Jewish hearts toward Jesus of Nazareth—the

natural effect of which must be to eliminate from their Scriptures all essentially Gospel ideas;—and partly to the judicial blindness which God has sent upon them for their stubborn rejection of his Son.

We need not wonder, therefore, that a thoughtful Jew, compelled by the moral convictions of his nature to recognize God in the Old Testament, yet restrained by his Jewish education from seeing Christ in the New, should find himself in this inextricable dilemma. His Bible gives him a holy God; his conscience brings into his view sin, his own sin, his grevious sin; but neither his Bible (as he reads it) nor his conscience give him any Saviour. He cannot see anything he can do with his sins.

“Neither is there salvation in any other; for there is none other name under heaven given among men whereby ye can be saved?” Whether for Jew or Gentile, there can be but one Jesus—no other. You have a God to hate sin and sin to be hated; a God to punish sin and sin to be punished; and nothing that you can do for relief—save as you find Jesus.—Oberlin Evangelist.