Expositions of Holy Scripture: the ActsMaclaren, Alexander
Religion
Expositions of Holy Scripture: the Acts
Maclaren, Alexander
Bible. Acts -- Commentaries
And if, further, we consider the difference between the dim
'peradventures,' the doubts and fears, the uncertain conclusions drawn
from questionable, and often partial, premises, which confessedly never
amount to demonstration, if we consider the contrast between these and
the daylight of fact which we meet in Jesus Christ, His love, life, and
death, then we can feel how superior in certitude, as in substance, the
revelation of God in Jesus is to all these hopes, longings, doubts, and
how it alone is worthy to be called the knowledge of God, or is solid
enough to abide comparison with the certainties of the most arrogant
physical science.
There never was a time in the history of the world when, so clearly and
unmistakably, every thinking soul amongst cultivated nations was being
brought up to this alternative--Christ, the Revealer of God, or no
knowledge of God at all. The old dreams of heathenism are impossible
for us; modern agnosticism will make very quick work of a deism which
does not cling to the Christ as the Revealer of the Godhead. And I, for
my part, believe that there is one thing, and one thing only, which
will save modern Europe from absolute godlessness, and that is the
coming back to the old truth, 'No man hath seen God' by sense, or
intuition, or reason, or conscience, 'at any time. The only begotten
Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him.'
But it is not merely as bringing to us the only certain knowledge of
our Father God that Christianity is 'the way,' but it is also because
by it alone we come into fellowship with the God whom it reveals to us.
If there rises up before your mind the thought of Him in the Heavens,
there will rise up also in your consciousness the sense of your own
sin. And that is no delusion nor fancy; it is the most patent fact,
that between you and your Father in Heaven, howsoever loving, tender,
compassionate, and forgiving, there lies a great gulf. You cannot go to
God, my brother, with all that guilt heaped upon your conscience; you
cannot come near to Him with all that mass of evil which you know is
there, working in your soul. How shall a sinful soul come to a holy
God? And there is only one answer--that great Lord, by His blessed
death upon the Cross, has cleared away all the mountains of guilt and
sin that rise up frowning between each single soul and the Father in
Heaven; and through Him, by a new and living way, which He hath opened
for us, we have entrance to God, and dwell with Him.
And it is not only that He brings to us the knowledge of God, and that
He clears away all obstacles, and makes fellowship between God and us
possible for the most polluted and sinful of spirits, but it is also
that, by the knowledge of His great love to us, love is kindled in our
hearts, and we are drawn into that path which, as a matter of fact, we
shall not tread unless we yield to the magnetic attraction of the love
of God as revealed 'in the face of Jesus Christ.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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