Dear Brother in the Lord,
Will you kindly allow me space to state some difficulties I have as to accepting several statements in the article on “Sonship and Eternal Life,” in your last issue?
The writer says, speaking of O.T. saints— “Such therefore had life from the Word, but life without an external object, who was the Life-giver, and consequently without that subjective consciousness and intelligence which those born of God have now.” Where does our brother get scripture for this statement? Has he not mistaken the reason of that lack of “subjective consciousness and intelligence,” as he terms it? Surely it arose, not from the absence of “an external object,” but from the fact that O.T. saints had rather the fall revelation of God or of His mind in Christ which saints now have, nor the Anointing by which we “know all things,” nor the Spirit of adoption by which we cry Abba, Father. These most wondrous and blessed privileges, which they had not, fully account for it, without asking us to believe, for instance, that Enoch, who “walked with God,” and had the testimony that he pleased God,” had not the Life-giver as an object—nay, as the object before his soul. Was not God Abraham's object—his “exceeding great reward”? Had Moses no object when he “endured as seeing Him who is invisible”? Or the Psalmist when he said, “I have set the Lord always before me”?
Again, still speaking of O.T. saints, he says” They had plainly been the sons of God as mere men—they may [does he then doubt that they were born again? or what?] have been sons of God in the yet higher sense of regeneration; but they were not the sons of God in the highest sense, the sense of John 1:1212But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: (John 1:12), 1 John 3:11Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God: therefore the world knoweth us not, because it knew him not. (1 John 3:1), or in the sense of Gal. 3:2626For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:26).” What can all this mean? John 1:1212But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: (John 1:12) and 1 John 3:11Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God: therefore the world knoweth us not, because it knew him not. (1 John 3:1) speak, not of “sons of God in the highest sense,” or in any sense, but of “children of God,” —that is, the nearness of relationship as “born of God,” and not the dignity of, sonship— “which were born not of blood, nor of flesh's will, nor of man's will, but of God:” (John 1:1313Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. (John 1:13)) “every one who practices righteousness is born of Him” (1 John 2:2929If ye know that he is righteous, ye know that every one that doeth righteousness is born of him. (1 John 2:29)). And in what “higher” sense can any mere creature be a child of God than as “born of God”? And is not this true of O.T. saints as well as of saints now? That they had not the enjoyment or consciousness of it, all admit, for they had not the Spirit of adoption; and that the child whilst under tutors and governors has not the dignity and place of the son come of full age is plain enough to the simplest reader of the fourth of Galatians, though the life he has as son be the same as he had when a child.
Our brother need not have thought that your readers require to be informed that the life a saint possesses is not the same as that which Adam had before he fell; or that immortality, as possessed by men and angels, is not called eternal life in scripture or that the character of life possessed by men and angels differs. Indeed one is at a loss to discover the object of a great part of the paper; but I am slow to believe that our brother really means to teach what at times seems implied, viz., that there are two kinds of divine life: one which O.T. saints had which made them partakers of the divine nature; and a “higher” kind of life now, which makes as sons.
The Lord once said to some of old who denied the doctrine of the resurrection (though the word be not found in O.T. scriptures) “Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures,” for the doctrine was there, though the word was not. And our Lord's rebuke might perhaps apply to any who assert that O.T. saints had not eternal life because of a certain characteristic way in which the term is used in the New Testament. For we must not forget that in O.T. days, even as now, men were by nature dead in trespasses and sins, and that God, in His sovereign grace, quickened souls then as now out of that dead state. Quite true that then the full extent of man's lost state as a dead sinner was not known to him because not revealed, and that now it is. But this ignorance of it did not lessen or in any way alter the fact of their dead condition. Quite true, too, that then the full extent of God's love and grace was not revealed, the Father was not manifested, the Holy Ghost was not come, nor was life and incorruptibility brought to light. But it is well that saints should clearly see that all this change in dispensation—vast and important as it is—does not at all touch the life which God from the first imparted to all who were born of Him. That life—divine and eternal as it was, is, and ever must be—blessed be God—changes not with changing dispensations. Yours affectionately in Christ, T.W.
Dublin, April 5th, 1886.
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