The Expositor's Bible: The Book of GenesisDods, Marcus
Religion
The Expositor's Bible: The Book of Genesis
Dods, Marcus
Bible. Genesis -- Commentaries
Now faith largely supplies the want of this imaginative foresight. It
lends substance to things future. It believes the account given of the
future by a trustworthy authority. In many ordinary matters all men are
dependent on the testimony of others for their knowledge of the result
of certain operations. The astronomer, the physiologist, the navigator,
each has his department within which his predictions are accepted as
authoritative. But for what is beyond the ken of science no faith in our
fellow-men avails. Feeling that if there is a life beyond the grave, it
must have important bearings on the present, we have yet no data by
which to calculate what will then be, or only data so difficult to use
that our calculations are but guesswork. But faith accepts the testimony
of God as unhesitatingly as that of man and gives reality to the future
He describes and promises. It believes that the life God calls us to is
a better life, and it enters upon it. It believes that there is a world
to come in which all things are new and all things eternal; and, so
believing, it cannot but feel less anxious to cling to this world's
goods. That which embitters all loss and deepens sorrow is the feeling
that this world is all; but faith makes eternity as real as time and
gives substantial existence to that new and limitless future in which we
shall have time to forget the sorrows and live past the losses of this
present world.
The radical elements of greatness are identical from age to age, and the
primal duties which no good man can evade do not vary as the world grows
older. What we admire in Abraham we feel to be incumbent on ourselves.
Indeed the uniform call of Christ to all His followers is even in form
almost identical with that which stirred Abraham, and made him the
father of the faithful. "Follow Me," says our Lord, "and every one that
forsaketh houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or
wife, or children, or lands, for My name's sake, shall receive an
hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life." And there is something
perennially edifying in the spectacle of a man who believes that God has
a place and a use for him in the world, and who puts himself at God's
disposal; who enters upon life refusing to be bound by the circumstances
of his upbringing, by the expectations of his friends, by prevailing
customs, by prospect of gain and advancement among men; and resolved to
listen to the highest voice of all, to discover what God has for him to
do upon earth and where he is likely to find most of God; who virtually
and with deepest sincerity says, Let God choose my destination: I have
good land here, but if God wishes me elsewhere, elsewhere I go: who, in
one word, believes in the call of God to himself, who admits it into the
springs of his conduct, and recognises that for him also the highest
life his conscience can suggest is the only life he can live, no matter
how cumbrous and troublesome and expensive be the changes involved in
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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