OR AN INQUIRY INTO THE CONDITION OF CHILDREN IN THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. BY CAESAR MALAN, DOCTOR IN THEOLOGY.
“For me and my house, we shall serve Jehovah.”—JOSHUA xxiv. 15.
(Translated for the first time from the French.)
(Continued from page 61.)
CHAPTER V.—THE GOSPEL HAS NOT DESPOILED THE CHILDREN OF BELIEVERS.
Samuel.—”I don’t know why, I can only say that I see clearly that it is so in the case of infants. It always looks to me as if little children were under the Gospel placed differently to what they were under the economy of the Law.”
The father of the family.—”Now, I pray you, suppose that at the coming of the Saviour, the Jewish people, instead of rejecting Him, had been found, in an happy hour, submitting themselves to Him as a nation, would not the Jewish nation have thus then entered into the new covenant, and would not the promise have been fulfilled in respect of them which you have been quoting, a promise which we know will be fulfilled in respect of them some day? The Jewish nation, having thus submitted to Christ, would then have been the Lord’s spiritual people, disengaged and set free from the earthy shadows of the Law, and enjoying all the blessings of the new covenant.
“Now as to the little children of that nation, who before the people had submitted to Christ formed part of the Church under the shadows, and had thus ‘great advantages in every way,’ what would become of them, when their nation, believing the words of the prophets, should have received and adored the Son of God, and so entered into the clear light of the new covenant? What treatment would be meted out to the little children ‘under the beneficent rays of the sun of righteousness,’ children who when only the feeble star-light of the Law shone, had been even then blessed? They would be excluded from the Church, say you, for they could not yet know or pray to the Lord. But tell me, since they were blessed under the shadows of the Law, although they were then equally ignorant, why should they not be rather more blessed when the day of salvation has come to shine? Must the Gospel lessen the privileges of the election; or must the old covenant, with its rudiments of this world, show itself more large-hearted and bountiful towards little children than the perfect law of love? What think you? If I had been the father of a family under the Levitical economy, and that with all my dear children I was in covenant with the Lord, would it be necessary that I should have the unhappiness of seeing all my children separated from me and of having my God no more as their God, because that I got grace to know the Messiah? My children would thus, by my conversion, have lost the most precious thing which they possessed, even the knowledge of the Lord’s covenant! As long as I was a Jewish believer, they, with me, belonged to the blessed people, to the Church of God, but now, that I have become a Christian, they have that privilege no longer, and like to the children of pagans, they have become like them, ‘without God, and without hope in the world!’ It had been better for them that their father had not known the Gospel; for Moses was, at the least, towards those of their tender age, and their feebleness, a friend and a protector, whereas this Jesus, whom their father adores, rejects them, and even despoils them of that which had been given them under the Law! Samuel! there’s your doctrine! Do you believe it true?”
Samuel.—”Truly what you say gives me pause, and I dare scarcely answer you at all. For certainly the Gospel is not more narrow than the Law.”
The father of the family.—”No, dear brother, it is not, and you could in substance have actually heard what I have just now been saying to you from the mouth of a veritable Israelite who received Christian baptism but a few days since. For after that he himself had been baptised, he presented his little child for the same baptism, saying that since the promise was to him and to his little child, the child also ought to receive the seal thereof. Now a Baptist pastor had formally said to him before then that he ought to put off baptising his son until that son knew and confessed the Lord Jesus, but this Israelitish believer replied to the pastor: ‘How so, my brother! My little child, whom I circumcised when still younger, has already on him the seal of the covenant, and now that he has entered with me into the Christian Church, should I deny him the privileges attaching thereto?'”
Samuel.—”I understand that father, speaking so. It was in effect the promise of the Gospel which he was reclaiming.”
The father of the family.—”Certainly, and it is of that same Gospel that Isaiah, although living under the Law, prophesied, when Jehovah said by him, referring to the time when the old things belonging to the ancient covenant should have passed away: ‘Behold I create Jerusalem a rejoicing, and her people a joy . . . for they are the seed of the blessed of Jehovah, and their offspring with them’ (Isaiah lxv. 18, 23). Dear brother, if little children are not capable of being under the new covenant, because they are not yet capable of knowing the Lord, I should like to know what the promise now quoted signifies, or to what period that promise relates?”
Samuel.—”There is in what you have quoted, I admit, something that I had not heretofore perceived, for I did not at all see that little children were, in the passage quoted, the objects of a promise.”
The father of the family.—”Ah well, search you higher yet, rise to the very source of that word. Hear the Messiah Himself, when He looked by anticipation upon His own sacrifice, and sets forth the outcome thereof: ‘I will declare thy name to my brethren,’ says He to His Father, ‘in the midst of the congregation will I praise Thee, ye that fear Jehovah, praise Him, all ye the seed of Jacob, glorify Him; and stand in awe of Him, all ye the seed of Israel.’ Then He adds: ‘All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn unto Jehovah, and all the families of the nations shall worship before thee. For the kingdom belongs to Jehovah, and he is the ruler over the nations. Also posterity shall serve him, and they shall be counted unto the Lord from age to age. They shall come and they shall declare his righteousness, unto a people that shall be born, because that he hath done it thus’ (Psalm xxii. 22, 31).
“See there, Samuel, what the Lord says. You see that as He passes from the Jewish people to the Gentile people ‘whom He saw from afar,’ He extends to both parties the one and the same benediction which is also said in respect of their families, of their race, of their posterity, from age to age. Now, take away the little children of these families, remove far the race, the posterity from the midst of those peoples, and see what signifies that prophesy, what avails that promise?”
Samuel.—”I see indeed, I assure you, that my opinion has within it an element of weakness, but I am not able to discern wherein exactly its weakness lies.”
The father of the family.—”I think that it is in this: You only wish to see the fully accomplished thing, and not at all the dispensation of God in its march and in its progress towards that thing; your mind is pre-occupied with that which God has said concerning the man who believes, and makes confession of his faith; and you set aside the man whom the Lord calls to believe, and whom He teaches and instructs by the Law. God says: ‘My name is on my people, and my people know me,’ and you conclude at once that the little child has not the name of God upon it, and that it does not yet know God.”
Samuel.—”And is not that right?”
The father of the family.—”No, because if, for example, God had said: ‘My people have eaten the passover since they have passed over the sea dry-shod,’ it would not be proper to conclude that little children were not included in that people, seeing that they could not have eaten of the roast lamb, nor marched on the foundations of the waters; for indeed that kind of reasoning would resemble that of a man who should say, under the Gospel, that little children ought not to eat, seeing that it is written: ‘If any work not, neither let him eat'” (2 Thess. iii. 10).
Samuel.—”But is my reasoning on the covenant, in respect of little children, tantamount to that?”
The father of the family.—”It seems to me to quite tally with it. For God has said: The character of the new covenant will be, that all shall know Me, because I will put My law into their hearts. Then, say you, little children are not in this covenant, for they do not know the Lord, whileas you ought to say: Then little children, if they belong to the covenant, will know the Lord, when God shall have taught them, just as you should have said, in respect of the examples quoted above: The little children would have eaten of the passover, and would have marched through the sea on foot if they had had the strength, and so also little children under the Gospel will work whensoever they are capable, and so earn their bread.”
Samuel.—”I think I understand you. You mean, don’t you, that I should look upon little children, born of Christian parents, more from the point of view of what God means to do in them, than from the point of view of that that they have actually achieved.”
The father of the family.—”Yes, my brother, otherwise we might be unjust both to them and to God.”
Samuel.—”How so, if you please?”
The father of the family.—”For example, if, starting from the unexceptionable principle that an unbeliever does not belong to the people of God, you should say that a little child therefore does not belong to the people of God, inasmuch as it does not believe, you would confound voluntary unbelief with the absence of faith and you would inculcate the little babe, that has not yet the capacity to believe in the same fault that is committed by the full-grown man who is a voluntary unbeliever. In thus doing you should be acting wrongfully against God, who, it may be, is the God of that child whom He has elected in His love; and you would also be doing a wrong to the child whom, albeit that it is quite incapable of knowing or of believing, you nevertheless charge with an impiety similar to that of one who sets himself against God.”
Samuel.—”I admit your distinction, and yet I ask if the little child can have the privileges of faith, as long as it hasn’t faith?”
The father of the family.—”The word of God says: ‘That the child is heir and lord of all, although it be yet under tutors and governors’ (Galatians iv. 1). It is just so with the elect. To every little child that is such the promises belong although he can yet neither know them nor bless God for them. I should then take good care not to confound the little child who is yet a minor as to the faith, with the grown-up child who has turned out a rebel and has been disinherited.”
Samuel.—”That distinction is just, certainly, and yet I can’t see how an infant that has not faith in fact, can be considered as belonging to the body of Christ.”
The father of the family.—”Say then, dear friend, that it does not belong to that body as active, that it does not belong to the Church that knows and serves God; but say not that it cannot belong to the body of Christ at all; no more than, when you witnessed a battle, you should say that the recruits, who were not actually engaged in the fray, did not belong to the army. They did belong to it, but they did not as yet take part in actual warfare.”
(To be continued.)
In Psalm ii., we have Christ as the Messiah, the Son of God, the inheritor of all nations; in Psalm viii., we have Christ as man, the Son of man made Lord of all; in Psalm cx., we have Christ as David’s Lord at God’s right hand, till all things are under His feet—”Thou art my Son.” Is the Sonship of Christ decretive? It is a begotten Sonship; not at the Incarnation, for then God became man, man did not become God; not at the Resurrection, for then He was declared, not constituted, Son of God with power. It is not one act or work, but eternal, timeless. . . . He ever says, “This day have I begotten thee.” A figurative Son is not a begotten Son, and figurative generation is not begetting a Son.—Dr. Duncan.