p. 94Our business this time is to consider those features of Bible revelation which you indicated last month as interfering with your acceptance of the truth.—That is how I understand the programme.
The best plan I think will be to make them the subject of colloquy. I always find we get quicker to the marrow of a difficulty by questioning the man who feels the difficulty, than by any amount of set argument.—If you think so, I have no objection, though I confess it would give me entire pleasure to listen to exposition.
You mentioned the “tribal” aspect of the Divine procedure exhibited in the Bible. By this, I suppose you mean the limitation of the word and work of revelation to the Jewish race?—Yes, and not merely revelation, but redemption itself as I understand it. The Jews are spoken of as the chosen people, and all other races as heathen and alien, having nothing to p. 95 do with the plan of things that God is working out in the earth.
It is true that matters stand in that way. Moses told Israel when he brought them out of Egypt, that God had “chosen them to be a special people unto Himself above all people that were upon the face of the earth” (Deut. vii. 6). And God Himself says by Amos: “You only have I known of all the families of the earth” (Amos iii. 2). As concerning other nations, it said: “Thou never barest rule over them; they were not called by Thy name” (Is. lxiii. 19). “He hath suffered all nations to walk in their own ways” (Acts xiv. 16).—It is that which staggers me.
Why should it stagger you?—I should have thought that all men would be of equal value to God, and that every race would have received alike of His beneficent attention.
Why should you think so? May not the beginning of your difficulty be in a wrong thought on this point?—It seems to me so much a matter of course. We have all been taught this doctrine from infancy.
What if the doctrine be false?—It would surprise me very much that such a doctrine should be false.
Is it true that all men or any men are of value to God as such? This is the first question to settle How can we settle it except by God’s own declaration? No man can know how things appear to God. God must tell us: He has told us by word and deed. Take the deeds first, as they are louder than words. In the beginning He sentenced Adam and Eve to death, and drove them out of Eden for their want of submission to His will. In the days of Noah, He destroyed the world’s entire population by a flood, because “all flesh had corrupted His way.” p. 96 In the days of Abraham, for a similar reason, He destroyed the most beautiful part of Palestine by fire, and the inhabitants with it. In the days of Moses, He destroyed the firstborn of Egypt and drowned an whole Egyptian army in the Red Sea. Shortly afterwards, He sentenced the whole congregation of Israel, His own people, to die in the wilderness for their unbelief and disobedience. For a thousand years, He afflicted them much for their non-conformity with His requirements, and at last fulfilled the terrible threat that He would gather them into the midst of Jerusalem as they gather silver and brass and iron and lead and tin into the midst of the furnace, and would blow upon them in the fire of His wrath until they were melted in the midst of it (Ezek. xxii. 19-21). These dispensations of His judgment shew us of how little value flesh and blood is to Him when out of harmony with Him. Consider now how they harmonize with His declarations: “All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field . . . . all nations before Him are as nothing: and they are counted to him less than nothing and vanity” (Is. xl. 6, 17); “God looked down from heaven upon the children of men to see if there were any that did understand that did seek God. Every one of them is gone back: they are altogether become filthy. There is none that doeth good, no not one” (Psalm liii. 2); “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God” (Rom. iii. 23); “The whole world lieth in wickedness” (1 John v. 19); “What is man that Thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that Thou visitest him?” (Ps. viii. 4). If these things are true, is it not a mistake to speak of man’s value or importance to God?—Of course, p. 97 we all understand that man is finite and of little account in comparison with the Eternal; but I don’t see that that disposes of my difficulty, because if mankind in general are of little account, so are Jews, and the question would still remain, “Why did God limit his operations to the Jews?”—If you realize that the human race as a whole is of small importance, one great difficulty will be out of the way, because the question would then be, not “Why did God leave mankind in general without notice?” but, “How came He to condescend to have dealings with any part of the race at all?” The difficulty that lurks in your mind is due to the common assumption that man is immortal, and must live either happy or miserably in the state to which it is supposed death introduces him. Admit that man is mortal and sinful and ephemeral, and you will find that the difficulty about God working in a limited circle is gone.
I do not quite see that: because, suppose I grant man is mortal, and that the race is perishing generation after generation like the vegetation that decays season after season, I would have to assume that all wanted saving as much as any part: and why then this tribal limitation?—“Wanted saving”: the fallacy would lie there. You have too narrow a view of that phrase. A man who is dead does not “want saving” in the same way as we think of a living person wanting saving who is in any peril. He exists not, and is therefore not the subject of anything he requires to be saved from. It is a question of his reproduction: and this is entirely governed by the other question of God’s objects in the case. Will it serve His purpose to bring him back? This depends upon His purpose. He has declared His purpose concerning the earth p. 98 to be, to fill it at last with His glory, in the sense of peopling it with a race who shall glorify and serve Him in the perfection of a trained submission and an incorruptible nature. It would not be compatible with this purpose to re-produce generations of men who know and obey Him not. Therefore you cannot speak of them “wanting saving”: because their re-production is not wanted either by the fitness of the Divine purpose, or by their own desires, which when dead have no existence, and when living have no affinity for the Divine service.
I begin to see my notions are somewhat crude.—There wants but another ingredient in the case to banish the tribal difficulty. Concede that God knows His own purpose, and that He knows best how to aaccomplish it, you can have no difficulty in granting that the course adopted is the best. It is the declaration of the Scriptures that “He worketh all things after the counsel of His own will, none staying His hand, or saying unto Him, ‘What does thou?’” My friend, it must be so. His own question is unanswerable: “With whom took He counsel? Who instructed Him and taught Him the path of judgment, or taught Him knowledge, or shewed to Him the way of understanding?”
I must, of course, admit that Eternal Wisdom can have had no teacher. At the same time, I desire to be able to ee the wisdom of the Eternal ways.—That is legitimate; but the same cannot quite be said of the criticism of the Eternal ways. Wherein this criticism is due to ignorance, it must disappear before knowledge. Wherein it is due to incapacity of discernment, it is presumptuous and hopeless, and must be left to itself.
I hope I am not presumptuous.—I am far p. 99 from suggesting it. Yet I pray you to help yourself by taking the modest attitude of a created being. God has been pleased to select a man and his posterity a the basis and centre of His operations in working out the purpose of His beneficence upon the earth; and it is not for us to stand apart in grandiliquent remark and surmise (like the wise of this world), as if it were possible for mortal men to improve upon the ways of the Eternal. Our part is to come close to His way, and unite with it, and rejoice with, and keep it, so far as it is permitted to man to do so. The very “tribalism” will then be a thing to glory in, instead of to stumble at, as the method by which it has pleased God to proceed in accomplishing His final purpose with the magnificent globe in which we dwell, from whose face the disobedient and presumptuous are destined to disappear as entirely as the extinct animals, while the enlightened and the docile and obedient will live for ever in the full enjoyment of perfect life and well-being.