JUDGEMENT PROPHECIES
By
D. M. PANTON, B. A.
Jeremiah
is becoming extraordinarily alive. All faithfulness to-day is heading
up into a lonely witness, confronted by the frown of both the religious and
the civil power; and all opposition to God is heading up into a union of priest
and prophet and prince and people, united on the one point of the suppression
of the prophesied judgments.
THE COMMAND
Now
the command to Jeremiah (26: 2) is exactly
ours. "Speak all the words that I
command thee to speak unto them; KEEP NOT BACK A WORD."
God had committed into the hands of Jeremiah, exactly as He has committed into
ours, explicit warnings of coming judgment both
on the People of God and on the world, coupled with the clearest statement
of amnesty, a stay of execution, on
repentance and an amended life; and the situation is so critical, so many
millions of destinies are hanging in the balance, so inexorable is the welding
together of sin and judgment for every human soul, that there is peril in
the alteration - much more in the suppression - of a single word.
"Keep not
back a word!" To soften the severity may be to lose
the repentance. Jeremiah was to yield neither to affaction nor to fear; he was to soften no expression,
alter none, put no smooth word for a rough one; change no accent, diminish no
emphasis, mutilate no figure: the thing we are handling is Divine, and must be
discharged whole in the hearing of men.
THE CONTROVERSY
The
modernity of Jeremiah’s controversy is startling. At a vast gathering in
the
THE DEFENCE
Jeremiah’s
defence is our model. A summary will reveal its beauty. He repeats every word that he had said: he
asserts that every word which he had passed on is the word of God, verbally,
infallibly inspired: he stresses, with tender emphasis, that God’s object was
their good, and their salvation: he appeals to them to hear and live: he
shows that all judgment prophecy can be cancelled by repentance, and is
uttered mainly in order that it may never come to pass: he submits to their
God-ordained he unfalteringly maintains that the
spiritual consecration of God’s people is not inalienable, and that God’s
people can become, and are becoming, apostate: he submits to
their God-ordained authority over his own life, he tells them they may do what
they chose with him - but warns them of the peril of blood-guiltiness. It
is an exquisite model for ourselves. Few
things in the world are so safeguarding as having to
stand for unpopular truth: it not only tends to kill pride, but the
consequent isolation shuts up the soul to the unseen, and casts it wholly on
God. Jeremiah’s task seems, on the whole, to have been (manward) a
fairly complete failure.
THE DENIAL
The
Roll of Jeremiah is the first book of the Bible of which, as such, we have any
record; and in it we have a disclosure of the Bible’s ultimate fate among
men. Nothing tests like the truth; it touches us on the raw;
and then one of two things happens - either we get rid of the sin, or else we
get rid of the truth. "When Jehudi had read three of four leaves, the King [Jehoiakim] cut it with a penknife,
and cast it into the fire that was in the brazier, until all the roll was
consumed" (Jer. 36: 23). "I
once saw a man in a railway carriage," says Dr. G. F. Pentecost,
"to whom a leaf of the New Testament had been
given, crumple it up in his hand, fling it on the floor, spit on it, and grind
it under his heel." Countless millions [of regenerate Christians,]
do this intellectually. A leading religious journal (Christian
World, May 14, 1936) says :- "The ‘Advent’ view of prophecy is entirely discredited.
The people who tell you that ‘God will show His terrible judgments and that
there will be a fearful cataclysm’ are at the mercy of an obsolete conception
of what history is. The cataclysmic view of history has long since been
abandoned. For the most part Prophecy was not fulfilled and cannot now be
fulfilled. Prophecy has proved to be an illusion." Thus
the whole of the prophecies, foretelling the judgments coming upon both Church
and world, are cast bodily into the burning brazier.
THE DESTRUCTION
Now
it is revealed why to destroy a Sacred Canon is to sign our own
death-warrant. The peril is so dread that the Holy Spirit at once adds:- "And they were not
afraid, nor rent their garments." What is the peril if
destroying the Book? The announcement of doom had this marvellous
quality, that it carried a pardon in the heart of it (36:
3):- "that I may forgive
their iniquity and their sin." Prophecies of evil are given to falsify
themselves: Hell is revealed in order that none may enter: prophecy is not a
diagnosis of certain death, but an antitoxin to cure the dying. All
that God has to do to consummate the world’s ruin is to be silent, and to
suffer the noiseless and automatic approach of the penalties of iniquity.
But the roll of judgment is issued by a God of love; and coming wrath is
announced in order that it may never fall; the most fearful prophecies are sent
to save.
PROPHETIC CHARACTER
An
exquisite and exceeding critical lesson for us lies in the character of
Jeremiah. Such a work, one would have imagined, required a man of iron,
unbending, unemotional, unsympathetic: it is
wonderfully encouraging to the most timid among us that God’s choice was
utterly different. By nature Jeremiah’s was a mild and timid disposition, that shrank inexpressibly from being a prophet
of woe. "Woe
is me, my mother," he cries, "that
thou hast borne me a man of strife and a man of contention to the whole earth!"
(Jer. 15: 10). The role of censor to the people
of God pained him deeply; and his sympathy was so intense that he felt their
sins and sufferings as his own. "Oh, that my
head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and
night for the slain of the daughter of my people!" (Jer. 9: 18). The utter pessimist, the man of
the black outlook, the constant prophet of judgment which the very word
‘Jeremiah’ has come to mean is the man who - more than any Old Testament
prophet - embodies the New Covenant of Grace.
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SHAKEN AWAKE
That
many earnest Christian people are thinking these thoughts and putting them into
their prayers is borne in upon me just now from what I read and hear. A
few hours ago I was conversing with an old and valued friend who rather
startled me by asking whether I did not deem it possible that the ancient
Christian belief in a reign of antichrist might be coming literally true.
I sat silent, pondering the interrogatory, and my friend continued to speak
somewhat in these terms:- "there would seem to be a gathering up and concentration of
the forces of evil in the world to-day, an
open and disguised trial of strength between the powers of light and the powers
of darkness, between Christ and the Man of Sin, between titanic spiritual
realities in the visible and invisible worlds with humanity as the
battleground? The wicked and unscrupulous men of blood who keep millions
upon millions of human beings in chains, wrath, and agony may be but the
puppets and emissaries of what both our Lord and His apostles spoke of as the
prince of this world and by other titles, a tremendous and spiritual power
contending against God. Is the present hour a specially critical one in
human history whose outcome will either be a new manifestation of Christ and a
fresh start for civilization upon new and better lines or a period of woe and
destruction such as has never been known since the fall of the Roman empire and
attended by an influx of such miseries as imagination staggers to contemplate?"
I have a misgiving that my dear old friend is right and that civilization is at
a new parting of the ways: victory in the balance - a set-back for all that the
name of Christ stands for, or such a revival of vital
religion as mankind has ever known. There will be a final glorious
advent, a complete ending of the present dispensation. Of course there
will be; the Church has never surrendered ¹
that expectation nor can she do so and remain faithful to her divine commission.
-
R. J. CAMPBELL,
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FOOTNOTE.
[1. Many people of God (mainly Anti- Millennialists), are
now assisting the ‘power contending against God.’ They are openly
denying His prophecies, and destroying the sense and meaning of
His inspired Word, by a spiritualizing and allegorizing process of
interpretation.
Both
Old and New Testament Scriptures (too many to list )
are pregnant with plain statements to the contrary. If there will be no
First Resurrection or Millennium, then words have no meaning and there will be no
Kingdom to deliver up to God! (1 Cor. 15: 24).
"Wherefore, my beloved brethren, be ye steadfast, unmovable,
always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know" -
or should know, unless deceived by false teachers - "that your labour is not in vain
in the Lord" (1 Cor.
15: 58, R.V.).]
ADVENT DENIAL
Denial
of the Advent presents a truncated Christianity made violently inconsistent
with itself, and in violent collision with facts
around it, by the withdrawal of half its revelations and the substitution of a
wholly imaginary horoscope. For example, Dr. T. R. Glover says :- "The message of Jesus
is that things are going to get better and better." Who is
the ‘Jesus’ of whom Dr. Glover is speaking? It can hardly be the Lord
Jesus Christ, who foretells a time of tribulation on earth without parallel in
history, or repetition in eternity (Matt. 24: 21);
who reveals this entire generation as culminating in a wickedness sevenfold
greater (Matt. 12: 45); who challenges
whether there will be "the faith" on
earth at His return (Luke 18: 8); and who
discloses even the people of God as in deadly peril from the last miracles of
Hell (Matt. 24: 24). Or if Dr. Glover
means that our Lord unfolds a ‘better and better’
after His Advent, then he
admits the doctrine that he derides.
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