Whence? Whither tending? What our origin and destiny? Can we know? We can. Has the Creator revealed Himself? Emphatically, He has. Thus every reflecting mind interrogates itself.
When wealth palls upon the rich; when pleasures satiate the voluptuary; when ambition has o’erleaped itself and failed to satisfy the immortal spirit, then these questions clamor for answer. Law, liberty, culture, intellectualism, science, philosophy, metaphysics, art, all pursued ad libitum, have not satisfied the soul’s hunger, but have plunged the strongest into deeper despair. All these have proved illusive. The ruling rich awaken to find themselves enslaved by the grossest material masters; awaken alas, often too late disillusioned to their sense of weakness, emptiness and absence of peace.
Groping Unbelief, Agnosticism
As the serious mind seeks for the solution, it is met by the Agnostic, who says, ‘we know nothing: we have no revelation.’ He assumes not only that man is incapable, but also that God is incompetent to make Himself known.
Rationalism
Next, the Rationalist, with the boasted hegemony of the eighteenth century, now with dying taper, says, ‘I cannot find Him.’ Truly he cannot, because his intellectual pretensions are void of moral judgment, and blind to the infinite fullness of Godhead glory.
Higher Criticism
Later, comes the Higher Critic, most to be pitied because of loudest pretensions. He offers us a document mutilated beyond recognition, yet which he tacitly admits to be a fragmentary revelation.
Modernism
Last, and boldest of all we have the Modernist. He would pull out of the scrap-heap of unproved hypotheses a derelict evolution discarded as the explanation of the physical universe and would apply it to the explanation of religion and all moral phenomena. He speaks of One, Jesus, the carpenter’s son, the Man of Nazareth, but he knows not the Lord Jesus Christ in whom dwells all the fullness of Deity. Poor purblind man, enslaved by the flattery of those who pay him tribute!
The autocracy of learning is on a par with the ignorance of the rude swain in this inquiry. The theme is serious; momentously serious. Is there no path in the fog of human verbiage and pretensions? Yes, there is. We are not left as the darkened heathen groping, “if haply they might feel after him, and find him” (Acts 17:2727That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us: (Acts 17:27)). Honest historians of both sacred and secular history have acknowledged that “prophecy is history pre-written”; or, as another has put it, “miracle stereotyped.”
A Priori
Equally certain it is, that revelation is the a priori of science. Science can predicate nothing except upon ascertained facts; all else is mere hypothesis. The creature is here. Whence and how did he come? Can science tell us? It cannot. Science can neither tell us the beginning nor the end of things. Revelation which has its source outside of creation, alone can tell us.
Lord Kelvin
Lord Kelvin says that “science positively affirms creative power.” It is a postulate without which science cannot proceed.
Tyndall, Huxley
Tyndall affirms that “every attempt to generate life independent of antecedent life has utterly broken down.” But biogenesis is thought moribund. Life produced by chemical action upon protoplasm is the vogue. Alas! No proof is forthcoming.
Alfred Russel Wallace—Naturalist
Alfred Russel Wallace says: “I submit that in view of actual facts of growth and organization, as here briefly outlined, and that living protoplasm has never been chemically produced, the assertion that life is due to chemical processes alone is quite unjustified. Neither the probability of such an origin, nor its possibility, has been supported by anything which can be termed scientific facts or logical reasoning.”
Alfred Watterson Mccann
Alfred Watterson McCann in “God or Gorilla,” says: “Science can assemble every element known to exist in the grain of wheat—proteins, nucleo-proteins, lecithins, phosphotides, carbo-hydrates, fats, colloids, sulphur, phosphorus, iodine, chlorine and fluorine salts of iron, potassium, calcium, magnesium, manganese, sodium, silicon, including the extraordinary substances known as vitamins, but science can’t make the combination sprout in the ground. The influence of evolution on nutrition, by reason of its syntheticchemic standards, rejecting plan, purpose and providence, has already been disastrous in its effects upon civilization.” Without the parent stem we have nothing.
Biogenesis
The law of biogenesis has sealed the inorganic kingdom so that there can be no breaking through into the organic. These modern savants are not as honest as the wise magicians of Egypt who, when they could not produce life, frankly owned: “This is the finger of God” (Ex. 8:1919Then the magicians said unto Pharaoh, This is the finger of God: and Pharaoh's heart was hardened, and he hearkened not unto them; as the Lord had said. (Exodus 8:19)). Huxley admits that we have no knowledge of any “link between the living and the not living.” What then? GOD. This is the very threshold whence we pass into the universe of thought and action.
Revelation, then, is the first step that meets us. To assert this is not gratuitous, inasmuch as the very nature of things demands it. What can we know, except the Creator illuminate the mind He has created? Knowledge is rooted in revelation.
Revelation: The Source of Knowledge
Faith, trust, belief, the offspring of revelation, are the transmission wires of knowledge. Would I know God? “He that cometh to God must believe that he is” (Heb. 11:66But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him. (Hebrews 11:6)). Is it a question of the cosmos? Science has not and cannot explain whence the mechanism came, why it is there and whither it is going, nor yet what may be beyond it in the infinite vasts of space. It must be “through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God” (Heb. 11:33Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear. (Hebrews 11:3)). Philosophy is a proud, yet vain attempt to reach the idea of God, and shamelessly failing, has settled down complaisantly to do without Him. A little child is nearer to the path of knowledge than the philosopher. The child knows not how its eye sees or its ear hears, but it trusts sensations received. Thus all knowledge of the phenomena projected in the universe is preceded by faith in the senses. A philosopher, because he observes these phenomena, may tell us that he believes there is a God, a supreme intelligent being, but this is not to believe in Him. “I may see,” says one, “the beautiful pictures and sculptures of a great artist, but I am a stranger to him. The little child that plays with him knows his person, knows his countenance, knows his love.” This is faith passing beyond belief in a fact, to the principle of trust in a person. “Canst thou by searching find out God?” (Job 11:77Canst thou by searching find out God? canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection? (Job 11:7)). Alas, no! Unless God reveal Himself, His person remains an inscrutable mystery. But, unspeakable fact, God has broken through the darkness, “God hath spoken” (Ps. 60:6). But the god of philosophy is silent. As with the prophets of Baal, “there was no voice, nor any that answered” (1 Kings 18:2626And they took the bullock which was given them, and they dressed it, and called on the name of Baal from morning even until noon, saying, O Baal, hear us. But there was no voice, nor any that answered. And they leaped upon the altar which was made. (1 Kings 18:26)).
Innate Thirst
God has created man with a thirst insatiable at nature’s spring. Let the creature spurn, if he will, the fountain of living water, yet he cannot rid himself of this thirst. “He cannot,” says one, “divest himself of the nature with which God has endowed him; so there is still within man the same absolute and utter necessity for a revelation of God from on high. It is impossible for him to find in nature, history, or within himself that authoritative, living, and clear revelation and unfolding of the mind of God in which alone light and life can be brought to him.”
The World the Place for Issue of Moral Principles
Revelation is not measurable by the standards of science, nor is philosophy able to guess its secrets. We can interpret nothing in time, except in the light of eternity. There is not, nor can there be, in the moral universe a single question without relation to revelation, and any philosophy which ignores this is essentially worthless. “Philosophy—senseless, narrow-minded, and even essentially stupid in its arguments—would have it that the world is too small for God thus to expend Himself on an impotent being like man, on that which is but a mere point in an immense universe. Contemptible folly! As if the material extent of the theatre were the measure of the moral manifestations wrought upon it, and the war of principles which is there brought to an issue. That which takes place in this world is the spectacle that unfolds to all the intelligences of the universe the ways, and the character and the will of God.” I cannot even measure who or what in His moral being God ought to be, nor how He may make Himself known; all this is from Himself. Innate in me is that which yearns to know Him. When He created me He put it there.
Alfred Russel Wallace
“To call the spiritual nature of man a by-product is a jest too big for this little world,” says Alfred Russel Wallace.
“I Am”
I am dependent upon a divine revelation, and such must stream into my soul. This is my starting point. Yes! There is a God. One of His names is “I AM” (Ex. 3:1414And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you. (Exodus 3:14)). He must be omnipotent, otherwise something exterior must dominate Him. He must be omniscient, and so He is, for “the LORD is a God of knowledge, and by him actions are weighed” (1 Sam. 2:33Talk no more so exceeding proudly; let not arrogancy come out of your mouth: for the Lord is a God of knowledge, and by him actions are weighed. (1 Samuel 2:3)). Is the reader’s interest aroused to know such a God? Listen! “In order that I may know God—the God who has condescended to interpose in the affairs of this world—mere light is not enough.
God Must Be Known in His Ways
“He must be known, not only as He is in His nature, although that is the essential and principal thing, but as He has revealed Himself in the totality of His ways; in those details in which our little narrow hearts can learn His faithful, patient, condescending love; in those dealings which develop the abstract idea of His wisdom, so as to render it accessible to our limited intelligence, which can trace in it things which have been realized amongst men — although entirely above and beyond all their provision, but which have been declared by God, so that we know them to be of Him. Above all, God has been pleased to connect Himself in a special way with men in all these things; marvelous privilege of His feeble creature!”
Revealed Relationships of God
Nor is it sufficient that God should reveal Himself to us as our Creator. He has entered into relationship with man under a fourfold aspect, viz.:
1. El Shaddai: God Almighty, abstractedly as such — with the patriarchs, (Gen. 17).
In Exodus 6:2-32And God spake unto Moses, and said unto him, I am the Lord: 3And I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, by the name of God Almighty, but by my name JEHOVAH was I not known to them. (Exodus 6:2‑3), we read: “And Elohim (God primary — the Trinity) spake unto Moses, and said unto him, I am JEHOVAH (LORD): And I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, by the name of El Shaddai (Almighty, Able One), but by my name JEHOVAH was I not known to them.” These names with their various combinations are brought in suitably throughout Scripture in accordance with the moral relationship and responsibility contemplated.
Let us not be robbed by this arid, soul-shriveling, materialistic age of the initial postulate of all knowledge, viz.: that the Creator has revealed Himself to man, man made after His own “likeness” and “in his own image” (Gen. 1:26-2726And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. 27So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. (Genesis 1:26‑27)).
Pitiful Unbelief
Apropos to this subject of revelation, we quote from a highly spiritually illuminated mind: “The unbeliever is consoled by flattering himself that there is nothing beyond his reach, because he reduces everything to the limits of his own mind. Nothing appears to me more pitiful than this unbelief, which pretends that there is nothing in the moral and intellectual spheres beyond the thoughts of man, and which denies man’s capacity to receive light from a more exalted mind — the only thing that raises man above himself, while at the same time rendering him morally excellent, by making him humble through the sense of superiority in another. Blessed be God, that some are to be found who have profited by the grace which has communicated to man of His perfect wisdom!”