Two Viewpoints

By REV. W. H. WETZEL
Pastor, Lemington Methodist Church

I came not to destroy, but to fulfill. Matt. 5:17.

Jesus came not to destroy but to fulfill, and it is this attitude which Christians assume towards the moral law of righteousness as it is set forth in the Old Testament Scripture. Christians have no interest in discrediting the Old Testament. It has a place beside the New Testament on the pulpit of the Christian church. Our libraries are filled with books in defense of the revelation of the Old Testament.

The Christian viewpoint is that God's revelation of Himself has been progressive and that it comes to perfection in Jesus. Writing to the Jews of his day, one of the New Testament writers says "God having of old time spoken unto the fathers in the prophets by divers portions and in divers manners hath at the end of these days spoken unto us in His Son."

The Christian has no controversy with Judaism. Judaism is the bud; Christianity is the flower. Judaism is the root; Christianity is the fruit. Judaism is the prophecy; Christianity is the fulfillment. "The law came by Moses, but grace and truth come by Jesus Christ." From this point of view let us follow through several steps of this completed revelation brought about by the Christian Gospel.

In the first place, Jesus fulfilled the Old Testament revelation of God. There is in the Old Testament clear and certain light concerning the character of God, and from the Old Testament revelation we get a marvelous conception of his unity, his holiness, his power. The fact is that our modern world gets its conception of God from the New Testament. Gradually the Old Testament prophets approach the truth, that pureness of heart and not the observance of law or ritual found favor with God. Isaiah turned away from the sacrifices with disgust, and Micah said "What doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly, to have mercy and to walk humbly with thy God."

In the second place, Jesus fulfilled the Old Testament conception of a righteous social order.

There are transcendent views of a new social order in Judaism, but they float on the horizon of prophecy.

They are prefaced with the words "In that day."

The new order that was to be is a vision and a glorious vision of hope. Constantly the Jews of Jesus' day ask Him "Wilt Thou at this time restore the kingdom of Israel?" Jesus came proclaiming not the kingdom of Israel but the kingdom of God.

If a false zeal led to the Crusades and to race prejudice, a true zeal and a true understanding of the spirit of Christ leads to a social order where there is neither Jew nor Greek, bond nor free, and to the recognition of personality as the ultimate value in society, transcending race and language and color. Sin and suffering have always pressed heavily upon our race. The Old Testament struggles for a solution and before the close there is dawn upon the horizon, but that is all. The Book of Job, marvelous in its insight, leaves the problem in a measure unsolved. The book of Ecclesiastes touches life with cynicism and dyes it deep in pessimism. Jeremiah comes nearer to an understanding, but his life goes out in obscurity and silence.

What does it mean? If God is good, why should men suffer? It is the age-long problem of all who have thought deeply about life and the only solution that meets life's enigma is the solution that is found in Christ and His cross, where we stand face to face with the conquering power of suffering love.

No one can read the 53rd chapter of Isaiah and then turn to the story of the Gospel and the cross without feeling that they belong in the same stream of history.

--Unknown date and source.

A New Book – The Bible

There are dark and mysterious things in the Bible now, but when you begin to trust Christ your eyes will be opened, and the Bible will be a new book to you. It will become the Book of books to you. — MOODY.

While the works of once famous skeptics are left to rot on book shelves, every year sees the Bible translated into some new tongue, acquire a greater influence, and receive a wider circulation. — GUTHRIE.

I haven't found the first man who ever read the Bible from back to back carefully who remained an infidel. My friends, the Bible of our mothers and fathers is true. — MOODY.

In the waters of life, the Divine Scriptures, there are shallows and there are deeps; shallows where the lamb may wade, and deeps where the elephant may swim. — HALL.

Peruse the works of our philosophers with all their pomp of diction; how contemptible they are, compared with the Scriptures! — J. J. ROUSSEAU.

If God is a reality, and the soul is a reality, and you are an immortal being, what are you doing with your Bible shut? — HERRICK JOHNSON.

There are over two hundred passages in the Old Testament which prophesied about Christ, and every one of them has come true. — MOODY.

Time can take nothing from the Bible. Like the sun, it is the same in its light and influence to man this day which it was ages ago. — CECIL.

The Bible is the most thought-suggesting book in the world. No other deals with such grand themes. — HERRICK JOHNSON.

No crisis has ever yet appeared when Christ's Word was not ready to take the van of human movement. — KER.

The Bible is a window in this prison-world through which we may look into eternity. — TIMOTHY DWIGHT.

One gem from that ocean is worth all the pebbles from earthly streams. — ROBERT McCHEYNE.

We count the Scriptures of God to be the most sublime philosophy. — SIR ISAAC NEWTON.

Liberty without the Bible is either dead or delirious. — GUTHRIE.

The Bible

What can botanists tell you of the Lily of the Valley? You must study this book for that. What can geologists tell you of the Rock of Ages, or mere astronomers about the Bright Morning Star? In those pages we find all knowledge unto salvation; here we read of the ruin of man by nature, redemption by the blood, and regeneration by the Holy Ghost. These three things run all through and through them. — MOODY.

Now, I am no prophet nor the son of a prophet, but one thing I can predict: That every one of our new converts who goes to studying his Bible, and loves this book above every other book, is sure to hold out. The world will have no charm for him; he will get the world under his feet, because in this book he will find something better than the world can give him. — MOODY.

Give the Bible the place in your families to which it is entitled; and then, through the unsearchable riches of Christ, many a household among you may hereafter realize that most blessed consummation, and appear a whole family in Heaven. — H. A. BOARDMAN.

Few books can stand three readings. But the word of God is solid; it will stand a thousand readings, and the man who has gone over it the most frequently and the most carefully is the surest of finding new wonders there. — HAMILTON.

It is the wonderful property of the Bible, though the authorship is spread over a long list of centuries, that it never withdraws any truth once advanced, and never adds new without giving fresh force to the old. — MELVILL.

The answer to the Shastas is India; the answer to Confucianism is China; the answer to the Koran is Turkey; the answer to the Bible is the Christian civilization of Protestant Europe and America. — WENDELL PHILLIPS.

Do you know a book that you are willing to put under your head for a pillow when you lie dying? Very well; that is the book you want to study while you are living. There is but one such book in the world. — JOSEPH COOK.

Scholars and the Bible

The new movement for the study of the Bible, as the finest of English classics, introducing it into colleges and seminaries of the highest grade, is full of possibilities for Christian progress and development. The marvel is that Christian scholars should ever have permitted the heathen classics to outrank the psalms of David, the visions of Isaiah and the wonderful philosophy of the four Gospels. — FRANCES E. WILLARD.

Something That Was Not a Mistake

When the modern critics, in the church and out of it, are enlarging upon the "Mistakes of Moses" and upon the historical childishness of the Bible, they should not forget to tell us that there ran through the whole Bible period a something that was no mistake, a something whose history rises up before us as real as the earth itself and as beautiful as its four seasons, as magnificent as its June. That something was worship!

Theology came and went; the laws of Moses were passed and obeyed and repealed; fables were told and forgotten; Paul and Apollos differed; James and John were unlike but in worship all seemed to meet, and the Jacob who saw angels on the night-ladder is beautifully akin to St. John and Paul. All are wonderfully akin to our age, which sings the one hymn of the whole race, "Nearer, My God, to Thee." — SWING.

New Testament Better Than the Old

"Well, after all, is the New Testament brighter than the Old? Had not the Old Testament saints a grip of something tangible and real? Had not they an advantage that we have not? Oh, if there were only an Elijah living! If there were only an Elisha living today!"

Ah, my friends, we are living, after all, under a greater dispensation. Elisha was compelled to say: "The Lord hath hid it from me." He had to confess limitation; and, says the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, these great prophets, these great priests, these great mediators of a by-gone age, were not suffered to continue by reason of death. Out of that he works the argument which I am seeking to apply now to you — the greater blessing that has come to us in our heavenly, although invisible, Prophet and Priest, the Lord Jesus Christ.

When I read this about Elisha — "the Lord hath not told it me" — I feel inclined to say to him: "Good-bye, Elisha. Great and all as you are, you will not serve my turn. Great and all as you are, I need one, after all, from whom nothing is hid — from whom nothing can be hid. Goodbye, Elisha. You are a wonderful man. You could do wonderful things; but I can bid you good-bye without a tear. I can bear to see you disappear from the stage of time, because He has come from whom nothing is hid; who is mightier than all Elijahs and Elishas and prophets put together." "Consider the Apostle and Priest of our profession."

Think of Him who stands, it may be, unknown, unperceived today in the midst of this assembly; for mole-eyed men and women, groping down in the earth, do not see Him and do not know Him. The Lord of Life and Glory, Jesus Christ, stands with us; and When we see Him, even Elisha's glory begins to dim and fade away. — McNEILL.

The Bible a Westminster Abbey

Heroism is indeed the beautiful in the soul. It is the old image of God coming to the surface again, as when, in scraping off a dingy wall in Florence, the workmen came upon the portrait of Dante. Often there come men who throw aside the rags of self, the tattered vestments of beggars, and let out the image of God within.

Into no institution of man, into no philosophy, into no school of art, has there entered such a band of heroes as is seen filing down into this book of God. It seems perfectly wonderful that each page of the Christian's book should have been composed by one of these children of heroism. The Bible is a Westminster Abbey, where none but the great sleep. — SWING.

The Four Gospels

Why was this Gospel told four times over? A good story is none the worse, perhaps, for being twice told; but it is a great deal the worse for being three times told, while it is often utterly mangled and murdered the fourth time. You know what a risk is run by this repetition. Have not critics in all ages said: "Yet that is what spoils it; that is where we get hold of it and tear it to pieces? If it had only been told once, a very large amount of critical strife and contention would have been removed; but in telling it four times, a great many discrepancies arise, and so we are able to cast doubt upon the whole thing."

Now, I think it was told four times because it was told every time by the best story-teller that ever tried it. John wanted to write a composition upon this key-note — the essential Godhead and Divinity of that Man from Nazareth. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made ..... And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory." Not that John believed this more, and others less, but that was a side of Jesus that fascinated John. "I handled God; here is the head that leaned upon the bosom of Omnipotence." And like every true musician, he ends on the key-note with which he started: "These things are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that, believing, ye might have life through His name." — McNEILL.

The Book of Job

I propose to say something of the nature of this extraordinary book — a book of which it is to say little to call it unequaled of its kind, and which will one day, perhaps, when it is allowed to stand on its own merits, be seen towering up alone, far away above all the poetry of the world. How it found its way into the canon, smiting as it does through and through the most deeply seated Jewish prejudices, is the chief difficulty about it now; to be explained only by a traditional acceptance among the sacred books, dating back from the old times of the national greatness, when the minds of the people were hewn in a larger type than was to be found among the Pharisees of the great synagogue. But its authorship, its date, and its history are alike a mystery to us. It existed at the time when the canon was composed, and this is all that we know beyond what we can gather out of the language and contents of the poem itself. — FROUDE.

The Bible a Chart

We sail upon an ocean whose farther bounds are far beyond our sight. The Bible gives every soul a course to sail by.

Follow this course, it says, and you will reach harbor; follow any other, and you will come to shipwreck. But what that harbor is, and what possibilities of rescue at the last from shipwreck there may be, it tells not. The wise father neither promises nor threatens. He leaves His children to understand that obedience brings happiness; disobedience, suffering. God governs His children as a wise father, and to all our questionings — "What pay for doing right?" "What penalty for doing wrong?" — keeps a silence that is more eloquent than speech.

The Bible contains no clear revelation respecting the nature of either eternal life or eternal death. It discloses nothing to curiosity. We can gather from its intimations some probable conclusions; but every kind of dogmatism respecting the eternal future is unscriptural. — LYMAN ABBOTT.

Importance of Studying the Bible

One thing I have noticed in studying the Word of God, and that is, when a man is filled with the Spirit he deals largely with the Word of God; whereas, the man who is filled with his own ideas refers rarely to the Word of God.

He gets along without it, and you seldom see it mentioned in his discourses. A great many use it only as a text-book. They get their text from the Bible, and go on without any further allusion to it; they ignore it. But when a man is filled with the Word, as Stephen was, he can not help speaking Scripture. You will find that Moses was constantly repeating the commandments. You will find, too, that Joshua, when he came across the Jordan with his people, stood with them while the law of the Lord was read to them; and you will find all through Scripture the men of God dealing much with His Word. Why, you will find Christ constantly referring to them, and saying: "Thus saith the Scriptures."

Now, as old Dr. Bonar of Glasgow said: "The Lord didn't tell Joshua how to use the sword, but He told him how he should meditate on the Lord day and night, and then he would have good success." When we find a man meditating on the words of God, my friends, that man is full of boldness and is successful. And the reason why we have so little success in our teaching is because we know so little of the Word of God. You must know it and have it in your heart. — MOODY.

Morality of the Bible

The morality of the Bible goes down to every root and fiber of life. In offering a salutation, in opening a door, in uttering a wish, in writing a letter, in using titles of deference, in every possible exercise of human thought and power, the moral element is present.

Phebe was to be received by the Christians at Rome "as becometh saints." A New Testament injunction is: "Be courteous." Charity itself is courteous, graceful, savored with the highest degree of refinement, and expressive of the completest reach of dignity. We have passed from the letter to the spirit; God has put within us a clean heart, so that we are no longer true, or kind, or noble, merely because of a literal direction which is guarded by solemn penalties, but because the Holy Ghost has sanctified us, made our hearts his dwelling place. Our prayer should continually be: "Create in me a clean heart, O God." — JOSEPH PARKER.

Humaneness of the Bible

Who can undervalue a Bible which speaks in a tone like this? The proverb, "Every man must take care of himself," has no place in the Book of God.

We must take care of one another. "Whoso hath this world's goods, and seeth his brother have need and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?" We hold our knowledge for the benefit of the ignorant; we are trustees of our strength that we may save the weak from oppression.

It is a coward's trick to close the eyes whilst wrong is being done, in order that we may not see it.

Christianity means nothing if it does not mean the unity of the human race, the common rights of humanity. — JOSEPH PARKER.

One Way to Study the Bible

A favorite way to study the Bible with me is, first, to take up one expression, and run through the different places where they are found. Take the "I ams" of John: "I am the bread of life"; "I am the water of life"; "I am the way, the truth and the life"; "I am the resurrection"; "I am all, and in all."

God gives to His children a blank, and on it they can write whatever they most want, and He will fill the bill. And then the promises. A Scotchman found out thirty-one thousand distinct promises in the Word of God. There is not a despondent soul but God has a promise just to suit him. — MOODY.

Heroes of the Bible

The heroes of the Bible make up such a group of pearls as never before in history were strung upon one string. Christianity is the only queen that ever wore such a collection of gems. But she wears them right along, and has thus been unapproachable for thousands of years. And she will remain matchless in the quality of soul that lay beneath her thought.

It does not seem possible that earth can ever reproduce a St. Paul or a St. John. And now, when to these beings you have added just one more, whom I need not so much as name, a being who emptied an ocean of love and hope upon the world, and who has transformed the earth, making it roll out of darkness into light, you will conclude that here in the Christian records mighty souls have passed in a strange vision before us. Here are tremendous foundations — broad, deep, vast.

And as though man might come some day in the vanity of the subsequent centuries and mock at the impulse or character of these men, they all died heroic deaths, that the feeble critics of the nineteenth century might feel their own littleness when they should behold the thrilling ending of these lives. Paul was put to death in Rome. John was tortured and sent to die an exile. James was hurled from a battlement in Jerusalem and crushed to death. Simon Zelotes was put to death in Persia, where also Jude was tortured to the death. Matthew was slain by a mob in Abyssinia. Thomas was killed in Coromandel. Philip was hanged upon a pillar in Hierapolis. Andrew was crucified at Patraca, and James the Less in Asia.

As for the one Name towering above all, He was crucified on Mount Calvary between two thieves. Into such holy hearts did God pour the truths, the hopes, the joys and sorrows of our religion. — SWING.

A World Beautiful

1902

Don't crowd your world with hate, anger, envy, regrets, fears, disorder, discord and disharmony. Every second brighten your world with love and joy and peace and hope, every minute expand your world by unfolding yourself. Every hour open your eyes wider to the grand and beautiful sights in your world; open your ears to the delightful and inspiring strains of divine music which comes of love, brotherhood, tenderness, kindness, gentleness, cheerfulness and contentment. Then from hour to hour, day by day, year by year your world will become more beautiful.

The Way to the Cross

1902

None of us can tell for what God is educating us. We fret and murmur at the narrow sound and daily task of ordinary life, not realizing that it is only thus that we can be prepared for the high and holy office which awaits us. We must descend before we can ascend. We must take the way of the cross submissively and patiently if we would tread the way of light. We must endure the polishing if we would be shafts in the quiver of Emmanuel. God's will comes to thee and me in daily circumstances, in little things usually as in great; meet them bravely; be at your best always, though the occasion be one of the very least; dignify the smallest summons by the greatness of your response. — F. B. Meyer.

Two Pictures

1902

It is related that two painters each painted a picture to illustrate his conception of rest. The first chose for his scene a still, lone lake among the far-off mountains. The second threw on his canvas a thundering waterfall, with a fragile birch tree bending over the foam. At the fork of the branch almost wet with the cataract's spray, a robin sat on its nest.

Henry Drummond, referring to the two paintings, so unlike in their make-up, said:

"The first was only 'stagnation;' the last was 'rest.' Christ's life was outwardly one of the most troubled lives that was ever lived; tempest and tumult, tumult and tempest, the waves breaking over it all the time, till the worn body was laid in the grave.

"But the inner life was a sea of glass. The great calm was always there. At any moment you might have gone to Him and found rest. And even when His enemies were dogging Him in the streets of Jerusalem He turned to His disciples and offered them, as a last legacy, 'My peace.'"

Man's Influence

1902

The only responsibility that a man cannot not evade in this life is the one he thinks of least — his personal influence. Man's conscious influence, when he is on dress parade, when he is posing to impress those around him — is woefully small. But his unconscious influence, the silent, subtle radiation of his personality, the effect of his words and acts, the trifles he never considers — is tremendous. Every moment of life he is changing to a degree the life of the whole world. Every man has an atmosphere which is affecting every other. So silently and unconsciously is this influence working that man may forget that it exists. — W. G. Jordan.

Work, Our Highest Privilege

1902

Whoever attempts to escape work avoids his best friend. We read the story of man's fall in the light of subsequent revelation, only to find that work is not a curse, but our highest privilege. The fact that the seasons end urges us on to do our best. An endless probation is simply none at all. There is no more pathetic lamentation in all literature than this. The summer is ended and we are not saved. Probation is over. The Judge enters the field and counts the sheaves. The summer ever reproduces itself. They come in their annual succession, but each holds its own place. This summer will be this but once. Another will come, but it won't be this. Nothing is ever repeated. The second resembles the first, but is not to be identified with it. The sun never greets the earth twice the same. Probation is written everywhere. — Presbyterian Journal.