ONE of the clearest revealed purposes of God in the Bible is that His Son in all things should have the pre-eminence. Towards that goal all the purposes of God, alike in providence and grace, are working. But over against them we need no keen discernment to detect mighty influences at work which make no hiding of the fact that they are out to oppose to the uttermost the decree that God has announced in His own Word that the Lord Jesus is to reign. These powers time and again bid for supremacy and in their overthrow we ought to recognise the fulfilment of God’s purposes in respect to His Son. The supreme authority of Jesus Christ is flouted and ignored alike by the leaders of nations and by many of the leaders of the professing Church of Christ.
When the Lord was about to leave His disciples He announced to them that all power in heaven and in earth was given to Him. The fact that such power was committed to Him and the plainness with which He announces it ought to have impressed the statesmen and rulers of all professedly Christian nations and to have influenced them in their policy. But when we turn to our own nation, do we find that our statesmen are willing to give Christ in all things the pre-eminence? Are there indications in our home and foreign policy that those in authority are conscious that all power in heaven and earth has been given to Him? We have had peace conferences and much foolish talk by men who are supposed to be experts in statescraft, telling a war-weary world that there was to be no more war. And to add to this folly our statesmen perpetrated others by entering into league with nations that spurn the claims of Jesus Christ. This folly will bear fruit some day, for nations that will not acknowledge Him, however mighty they may be, are only as fragile as a potter’s vessel when He takes the iron rod in His hand. Kings of the earth are counselled to be wise and to be reconciled to Him, and if they will not submit He has His own methods of bringing them low. Our foreign policy with the Vatican in Constantinople has been anything but what one would expect from a nation which was willing to give the Lord Jesus the place given Him by God. In touching on these matters we refrain from interfering with questions purely political, but there is no denying the fact that issues of tremendous significance are intimately bound up in the policy of Great Britain adopted in recent years in regard to Roman Catholicism and Islamism. No doubt it may be said that statesmen and rulers have only to deal with nations as nations and have nothing to do with the religious issues following from their political policy. This excuse, however, will not hold, and there can be no doubt that our national attitude to Roman Catholicism and Islamism has done much to foster the increasing aggressiveness of the one and the impudent domineering tone of the other. The followers of the Man of Sin and the False Prophet, while not likely to work in unison, are sufficiently strong to prove a powerful foe, on the one hand, to our dearly bought religious and civil liberty, and, on the other hand, a menace to the very existence of our holy religion. The millions who acknowledge the False Prophet can be roused to a frenzy that would make them a terror to Christendom if God would not hold them in check. Recent events in the Near East have shown in a rather disturbing manner how near the Western nations, and particularly our own, may be to a fire that will burn with a fierceness unparalleled in the history of the world. There has been too much pampering of the Turkish nation, whose hands are deeply dyed with human blood, and we, as a people, having the boast that we are the mightiest nation that ever existed, have looked on helplessly to stay the atrocities that have shocked the civilized world time and again. During the Great War it ought not to be forgotten that the greatest humiliations we suffered were at the hands of the Turk in Mesopotamia and at the Dardanelles, though afterwards, through the mercy of God, our arms were victorious.
When we turn to the professing Church one would naturally expect that the Master would be honoured in His own house, but do we find that it is so? His disciples were commanded to teach those who received the truth to observe whatsoever He had commanded them. This was to be rule of His house, but how many things are there in thousands of churches which He never commanded. No amount of lip profession to His authority will be acceptable when the practices of professed Christians deny it. One of the most serious instances of the open ignoring of the Lord’s authority in modern times is the daring questioning of the binding nature of His testimony to the authenticity of the Old Testament. An irreverent scholarship has handled this question with a light-heartedness that is only equalled by its daring. But here as in every other field His testimony must have the pre-eminence, and it is too seriously damaging to the results of the Higher Criticism, for any Christian ever to join hands with scholars who hold such views and to wish them God speed.
In our time there is a widespread movement to get rid of the doctrine of eternal punishment. Men with a zeal worthy of a better cause are going up and down the country trying to make their fellow-men believe there is no such doctrine in Scripture. One cannot help marvelling at their bold ignorance in view of the plain and solemn declaration of Jesus Christ on this awful subject. Let any man in possession of ordinary intelligence sit down and read the Gospels seriously and then ask himself the question—Does Jesus Christ teach the doctrine of eternal punishment? And unless he is swayed by a perverted judgment we have no doubt of the answer he will be forced to give. No amount of wresting of the plain declaration of Scripture can eliminate this solemn and awful truth from the body of doctrine taught in the Bible and sealed with the supreme authority of the Lord Jesus.