YOU ARE ABOUT TO GO FORTH to preach Jesus Christ and him crucified. At the same time you will preach Jesus and the resurrection. In this you are following in the footsteps of Paul the Apostle. And following his admonition, you aim to be steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord.
You are anxious to begin your work. Your are full of zeal and enthusiasm to build up the church in the most holy faith and to bring the Saviour to a dying world. What else can we as a faculty do at this moment, but wish you godspeed on this your way, which is surely the way of Indeed, there is nothing more we can do. Yet permit us to say once more, briefly and solemnly, what you already have heard from us many times.
Your Message
You are going to preach Jesus Christ and him crucified. You wish to know nothing else among men. You are going to proclaim Jesus and the resurrection. But where did you learn about this Jesus Christ? Who is this Christ? Why are you so anxious to tell men about him? Your reply may well be in the words of Paul: “For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the Scriptures.”
You will tell men that they are sinners, according to the Scriptures. You will tell them that they bear God’s image, that they have the stamp of their origin engraved in their very constitution, that the heavens declare the glory of their Maker and that the whole universe is God's handiwork. But you will add that in Adam men have rebelled against God and that they daily add to their sins; therefore they cannot be saved from this their sin by their own good works, or by any form of suffering or punishment that they might endure, but only through the death of Christ upon the cross.
Then you will bring the good glad tidings that Christ Jesus died upon the cross that sinners might be saved from this their folly and their sin. In the words of Ezekiel, you will say for the Lord: "Have I any pleasure at all that the wicked should die? saith the Lord God, and not that he should return from his ways and live… As I live, saith the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live; turn ye, turn ye from your evil ways, for why will ye die, O House of Israel?” Or in the words of Isaiah, "Come unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth: for I am God, and there is none else." Or again, in the words of Peter, "The Lord is not slack concerning his promise as some men count slackness, but is longsuffering to usward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.”
The First Response
What will be the response to this your preaching? The first response will perhaps be favorable to you and to your message. Both in the church and in the community you will be welcomed. People will like your enthusiasm, your manifest devotion to the work. They will think well of your labors—do not we all need Christ, they will say. We have learned much from science, but science does not cover the whole of life. There is the realm of morality about which science has nothing to say. In fact, it looks as though science might get us into trouble unless we get our morality adjusted. Have not some of our political leaders acknowledged that the main problem of our survival is not material but moral?
And does not morality have something to do with religion? Have not some of our great scientists told us that there is mystery in reality over which science has no control? And have not some of the greatest of our philosophers spoken of the Jews as a race with religious genius, "with a feeling for the law as proceeding from a holy God?” Surely we all need authority in the field of religion. And no doubt Jesus was the greatest religious authority that ever lived.
Hence why should not this young preacher preach to us of Jesus and him crucified for our sins? Has not modern psychology taught that deep in our subconsciousness there are instincts and drives which we cannot control through our reason? Why should we not seek supernatural aid for the solution of the personality conflicts and tensions common in our day?
As for the resurrection, do we not all rejoice at Easter season in the return to life of a nature that seemed dead? Is not this a symbol of what may take place in the realm of personality also? Of course the law of decay reigns in the realm of bodily existence. But is there not the realm of the spirit, and is not Jesus the symbol of those who with him rise from the dead into newness of life?
So we rejoice that this young man is preaching Jesus Christ and him crucified, and the resurrection. We rejoice that he calls us image bearers of God. Most of all we rejoice that he offers us a remedy for our personality conflicts and failures in the victory through Jesus Christ the son of God and son of man. Through and in him the forces of divinity are let loose within us and within the world so that all will be well in the end—if not fully in this life then at least in some far off divine event.
If now you meditate on this first reaction to your preaching of Christ and him crucified, of Jesus and the resurrection, you realize that there has been a basic misunderstanding of your message. Men have not understood what you meant by the Scriptures. Hence they have not understood what you meant by the Christ of the Scriptures.
They have not taken Scripture to be the actual, direct, clear revelation from God to men. They have taken it to be a body of religious literature, written by men who themselves had no more than a feeling as to what lies beyond the world of time and space. And they have done this because, with modern thought in general, they do not take God to be the Creator and controller of the world. For all their interest in the "supernatural," in the feeling for the "wholly other," and with all their respect for the minister as an expert in dealing with the unknown, they keep thinking that after all he too has no information about what may take place after men pass from this world's scene. So "Jesus" is to them, and they think to the preacher also, nothing more than a high and noble ideal, a pattern after which men may well mould their lives, since they feel that somehow it is better to live moral than immoral lives.
Discouragement
Note well, I am not saying that there will not be those who from the beginning will understand what you mean and will rejoice in what you preach because it is the truth about God and man. But I am thinking now of the reaction you are likely to get in much of the church and in all of the community, except for those who through the regenerating grace of God have seen themselves to be saved by the atoning blood of Christ, who know themselves to be the children of the resurrection and to have been justified and adopted into the family of the redeemed of God.
So discouragement is likely to come when you begin to realize that there has been this deep misunderstanding. Perhaps you will feel that the fault has been in part if not largely with yourself. You plan to make more plain, more simple and more inescapable the picture of Christ according to the Scripture. You seek to make more explicit why it is that you take Scripture to be what it claims to be in the original, the very Word of God. You show men how Christ himself took himself and his work to be that which it was pictured as being according to the Scripture.
Jesus himself took this Scripture, this Old Testament, to be the direct and clear revelation of God about man in his relation to his Maker. And you show how the Christ of Scripture himself spoke through Scripture, explaining to his people who he is and what is the nature of his work for their redemption. How could we know who Christ is and what we ourselves are, what it means that we are the creatures of God made in his image, and what it means that we are sinners, unless God himself tells us these things? Are we to know all this from experience? In the nature of the case that is impossible. It is the great physician who must diagnose our sickness. We ourselves will not admit that sin is sin against the holy God in the sense in which Scripture teaches. How could we know this as long as we take for granted that we cannot really know anything of God at all? If God is for us by definition that which is "wholly other,” wholly unknown and unknowable, then sin is not sin against God. Sin is meaningless if it is something in relation to a God of whom one can know nothing at all.
So then you may tend to become discouraged and disheartened. You find that in all the words you use men tend to put different meanings. You seem to have lost communication with men. The situation appears like that at the tower of Babel. You speak of God as the creator of men; they understand you to mean God as a higher aspect of the universe out of reach of human knowledge. You speak of the mind of man being darkened because of the fall so that as a sinner man cannot see things as they are apart from the grace of God. They understand you to mean something like that which Plato meant when he spoke of men being, as it were, because of their finitude, in a cave seeing only a glimmer of light. You say that because of sin men's wills are obdurate and opposed to God, and that their disposition, except for the grace of God, is to hate God and their fellowman. They understand you to mean that man has leftovers of his animal ancestry remaining as he emerges from the past. You say, in short, that man is dead in trespasses and sins and that except Jesus bear for them the punishment due them for their guilt they will be eternally lost, cast into outer darkness. They take this to be a symbol of the fact that the human individual and the race collectively must realize more deeply than is ordinarily done that it takes a great struggle for a man to become what he ought to become according to the ideals of the greatest of the race,—especially to become what that greatest of all, Jesus, has told us we ought to become. To become well-integrated personalities, and to have a really orderly society, more attention must be given than has ever been given before to the renovation of the internal motifs of human personality. In short, they have understood your preaching about God not wishing the death of the sinner, and about Christ weeping over Jerusalem and desiring that her children might be gathered together as a hen gathereth her chicks, to mean, that God and Christ, and particularly the Christ of the Cross and the Resurrection, will do all they can to help you realize the potentialities toward divinity that are latent in every man.
Your Renewed Attempt
In view of this misunderstanding you seek more earnestly to preach the Christ of the Scriptures. You delineate him even more sharply than you did before. You stress the fact that when the Scriptures say that God has no delight in the death of the wicked, this does not mean God will not punish sinners who do not repent. You recall instead the words, "these shall go away into everlasting punishment; but the righteous into eternal life.”
And how shall a man be righteous and thus enter into eternal life? Only he that hath part in the Christ—”He that eaterh my flesh and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me and I in him, As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father; so he that eateth me, even he shall live by me.”
Perhaps also you will preach on the words of Jesus, that no one can come unto him except the Father draw him. You will point out that all men because of sin deserve eternal punishment, that none are able of themselves even to believe in Christ and repent of their sins; but that it is by sovereign grace alone that they must be enabled to do what of themselves they cannot do.
Second Response
Then, so far as there is understanding of your meaning, there will be opposition to the message that you bring. To be sure, men have sufficient ingenuity to turn the very gospel of sovereign grace into its opposite so that to them it means that somehow all unrighteousness of men will be forgiven and all men taken into the presence of God. They will justify to themselves such a view by saying that surely nothing that is done in this world can be of such importance as to determine that men shall be eternally separated from God. In particular do they argue that no sin in this world, in which all is dark and no one can really see what is right and wrong, can be so great that it deserves to be punished for all eternity. In short the whole point will be that God’s righteousness is placed below his love. God is said ultimately to love the world and all men in it despite what they do; he may chastise them as a father chastises his child, but he will by that means only bring into effect his purpose of grace for them.
So when you preach the sovereign grace of God in all its simplicity, when you preach the Christ of the Scriptures in sharp distinction from all such man-made gospels, then there will be indifference, hard looks, empty pews, less salary, a final liquidation from the place to which you had been called. And all this will be in the name of high morality and religion. All religion will be tolerated and extolled except the religion of the free grace of God through the Christ of the Scriptures, and preached on the authority of the Scriptures.
Final Response
Perhaps you will then become despondent and will seek to escape into some other profession. "When the Son of man shall come, will he find faith on the earth?" Will he find true faith among all this display of false faith? Will there be among those who bow each Sabbath day before the blank and the void any who still bow before the living God whom they know through the Scriptures?
The Christ of the Scripture has himself provided the remedy for this your time of despair. When he himself saw the crowds disappear as with increasing sharpness of delineation he corralled them to a direct confrontation with his broken body and shed blood which, on his own absolute authority, he presented to them for their acceptance, he said to his disciples: "Will ye also go away?" Will you go away from this task of preaching and teaching the Christ of the Scriptures? When you think on this, then your answer will be, with the apostles, “Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life. And we believe and are sure that thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
And when you are told not to pray for this people because of their unbelief and hardness of heart, you will realize that this is not God's final command. So with the prophet Jeremiah you will lift your heart to God and say, “Do not abhor us, for thy name's sake, do not disgrace the throne of thy glory: remember, break not thy covenant with us." And your prayer will be heard, for it is uttered in the name of him who prayed, "Father, I will that they also, whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am, that they may behold my glory, which thou hast given me; for thou lovest me before the foundation of the world. O righteous Father, the world hath now known thee: but I have known thee, and these have known that thou hast sent me. And I have declared unto them thy name, and will declare it; that the love wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in them.”
There can be therefore no doubt of the ultimate success of your labor. The grace of God cannot be of no avail The Son of Man has established faith in him within the hearts of men who of themselves rebelled. The Holy Spirit, the Spirit sent by Christ himself to witness to the Christ of the Scriptures enveloped Saul the persecutor and made of him Paul the apostle. He took a youth of North Africa out of doubt and sin and made him the greatest teacher of the ancient church. The grace of God cannot be in vain. The Christ of the Scripture is victor over Satan and his host. Of his kingdom there shall be no end. It is your glorious task to labor for him and in his name. You preach the Christ of the Scripture in terms of me Scripture and therefore on the authority of God. And so the God who made man and in whose hand are the hearts of men and kings as water-courses will yet give abundant reward to those who work for him. So then the words of the admonition of the apostle Paul which you have recently heard ring once more in your ears,
“Therefore be ye steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labor is not in vain in the Lord.”