Behold
Your God by Fred T.
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must be anticipated that He would say, “I destroyed Jerusalem
and killed those murderers.” This is just how He did describe that terrible
destruction.
In Matthew 22, there
is a parable which, in its initial application, sets out the two final calls
given to the Jewish people and their rejections of those calls. When the
second call is complete and as completely rejected, the king’s reaction is
described in these words:
“But when the king
heard thereof, he was wroth: and he sent forth his armies, and destroyed
those murderers, and burned up their city. Matthew 22:7.
This verse is
couched in symbolic language. God the Father was the king; the armies were
the Romans under Titus; the murderers were the Jews who crucified Christ; and
the city was Jerusalem. The fulfillment of this fearful prophecy came in A.D.
70 as verified in Christ’s Object
Lessons, 309, where this verse is quoted, followed by the words: “The judgment
pronounced came upon the Jews in the destruction of Jerusalem and the
scattering of the nation.”
If we substitute
for the symbolic words, the things symbolized, the verse must read as
follows: “But when God heard thereof, God was wroth: and God sent forth His
armies, the Romans, and God destroyed the Jews and God burned up Jerusalem.”
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If these words are
interpreted according to normal dictionary definitions the only possible
picture of God would be identical to earthly despots. But, the inspired word
quoted from The Great Controversy,
confirms that an altogether different understanding is to be obtained from
these verses. Therefore, the position adopted depends directly on the way in
which the words are understood. The choice lies between accepting a meaning
according to human or Scriptural language [private interpretation versus God’s interpretation. rb]. The
former is acquired by reference to a standard dictionary, the latter by the
Scriptures themselves.
As in the case of King
Saul so in this second witness; the same type of description is explained in
an identical way. God is said to destroy the sinner when He accepts the
sinner’s demands that he be left to himself. The fate which befalls him is
not by either God’s election or administration. It is the inevitable
outworking of the transgressor’s course.
The two witnesses
already given are in perfect harmony. They support each other and go a long
way toward confirming the truth of God’s Word. However, we will not rest with
only two.
The third witness
will also be drawn from Israel’s history. There was the occasion when the
Israelites were travelling through the wilderness and once again murmured
about God and Moses. Unknown to them, they were travelling through an area
infested with deadly serpents and other terrors. Because of God’s protecting
care, they had passed through this area unharmed until that time when they
drove away His protection through their own ingratitude and sinfulness. The
shield removed, there was nothing to hold back the invasion of those reptiles
with the result that many of the people died a terrible death.
Here is the
description of what happened and of what God did. It needs but little comment
after the two already studied, for, once again it will be seen that the Lord
simply left them to what they wanted. He did not decree the particular
punishment. It was lurking there all the time only awaiting the opportunity
to destroy them. Notice the consistent way in which God related Himself to the
sinner in each case. In all three illustrations given, God is revealed as One
with Whom there is no variableness neither shadow of turning.
“As the Israelites
indulged the spirit of discontent, they were disposed to find fault even with
their blessings. ‘And the people spake against God and against Moses,
Wherefore have ye brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For
there is no bread, neither is there any water; and our soul loatheth this
light bread.’
“Moses faithfully
set before the people their great sin. It was God’s power alone that had
preserved them in ‘that great and terrible wilderness, wherein were fiery
serpents, and scorpions, and drought, where there was no water.’ Every day of
their travels they had been kept by a miracle of divine mercy. In all the way
of God’s leading, they had found water to refresh the thirsty, bread from
heaven to satisfy their hunger, and peace
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and safety under the shadowy cloud by day and the pillar of
fire by night. Angels had ministered to them as they climbed the rocky
heights or threaded the rugged paths of the wilderness. Notwithstanding the
hardships they had endured, there was not a feeble one in all their ranks.
Their feet had not swollen in their long journeys, neither had their clothes
grown old. God had subdued before them the fierce beasts of prey and the
venomous reptiles of the forest and the desert. If with all these tokens of
His love the people still continued to complain, the Lord would withdraw His protection until they
should be led to appreciate His merciful care, and return to Him with
repentance and humiliation.
“Because they had
been shielded by divine power, they had not realized the countless dangers by
which they were continually surrounded. In their ingratitude and unbelief
they had anticipated death, and now the Lord permitted death to come upon them. The poisonous serpents that
infested the wilderness were called fiery serpents, on account of the
terrible effects produced by their sting, it causing violent inflammation and
speedy death. As the protecting hand of
God was removed from Israel, great numbers of the people were attacked by
these venomous creatures.” Patriarchs
and Prophets, 428, 429.
As in the previous
illustrations, a comparison will be made between what the Lord is described
as doing, and His own statement of what he did. If God is consistent, and we
know He is, then He will describe this in the same way as He spoke of the
previous two. Again the consistency of God stands forth without variableness
neither shadow of turning.
“And the Lord sent
fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people; and much people of
Israel died.” Numbers 21:6.
For those who want still
further confirmation of the truths revealed in this use of the Bible as its
own dictionary, referral is made to the experience of the patriarch Job.
Satan demanded the right to destroy him. God withdrew and left him to the
power of the devil with one restriction—that he could not take his life.
Everything that happened to Job was at the hands of Satan, not God. The
picture of God’s behavior was the same as previously shown except for this
difference. Whereas in each of the other cases, it was the sinfulness of the
rejecters of His mercy which had driven God and His protection away, Job was
“a perfect and an upright man.” Therefore, God’s withdrawal from him was not the result of Job’s sinfulness.
On what grounds,
then, could the Lord leave Job to suffer at the devil’s hands? This is a good
question which finds its answer in the following principle. Every true child
of God has given his life into God’s hands to be sacrificed in His cause if
thereby the work will be advanced. This is a privilege, and the Lord will
never deny that privilege to any one of His children when the hour comes. The
hour came for Job and the Lord did not stand in the way of his offering.
Thus there are two
ways in which the Lord will remove from a person and leave him to the
destroyer. One is by man’s sinfulness driving off the
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Spirit of God and the other is by the individual offering
himself as a sacrifice for the cause of truth, a thing which every child of
God does.
When the Lord came
down to personally describe what He had done to Job, He again used the same
language as previously noted. “Hast thou considered My servant Job, that
there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that
feareth God, and escheweth evil? And still he holdeth fast his integrity,
although thou movedst Me against him, to destroy him without cause.” Job 2:3.
Once again this is
not the way we would use those words according to everyday usage. Our use of
them would convey a meaning quite opposite from what God intended when He
used those words.
It would be
impossible to arrive at the meanings of the words, according to God’s usage
of them, without the guidance of the Word of God. Only from there could such
an interpretation be obtained. That is, it is the only dictionary which does
give this definition of these words.
It may take some
time to train our minds to carry these double definitions for the same words.
Conscious effort must be made until it is just as natural to think of the new
definition as of the old. It must become second nature to ascribe one meaning
to the words when they describe divine conduct and another when they deal
with the human. Here is a comparison between the two.
When man destroys,
he moves toward the victim with deliberate intention to kill.
When God destroys,
He moves away from the subject with no intention of killing.
When man destroys,
he carries the weapons of death in his hands.
When God destroys,
He carries no weapons but lays down control of the destructive powers.
When man destroys,
he guides the sword on to its target.
When God destroys,
there is no personal administration of punishment. Whatever comes upon the
sinner is the outworking of the forces of death which he himself has set in
motion.
At this point two
questions are apt to arise. The first is: After all, what is the essential
difference between the direct act of destroying, or that of departing to
leave the person to die? In both cases it is God’s action which brings about
the destruction and therefore, in each case, He is a destroyer.
This would be true
if God’s withdrawal was His own act, but it is not. The fact is that He is
driven away. Think of the way in which Christ went to Calvary. He was taken
there forcibly. This shows in its clearest terms man’s reaction toward the
loving appeals of God. Man drives God away, depriving Him of any possibility
of remaining unless He forces His presence, which the Lord will never do.
For those who are
prepared to believe that God never puts forth His hands to destroy, yet
consider that His act of withdrawing in the full
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knowledge of what that will mean, makes Him a destroyer just
the same, the following illustration is given. This will show the distinct
difference between merely withdrawing and being forced to withdraw. It will
show that even in His withdrawing it is not God who is responsible for the
disasters which follow.
Let us suppose that
there is an atomic power plant located in the midst of a small township of
two thousand people. The nature of this power plant is such that an operator
must continually be in the control room to monitor the controls. Should this
post be left unattended for several hours or more, the nuclear fission will
run out of control and blossom into a holocaust of destruction.
The situation
arises where every technician but one is taken away and the full
responsibility rests upon this man. No one else in the whole area has the
training, knowledge, or skill, to operate this volatile equipment.
This creates no
special problem, for the man is healthy, very conscientious, and does his
work with great faithfulness day and night. He is able to take sufficient
rest between check times to enable him to carry on indefinitely.
But there enters
the area an archenemy of the technician who determines to run him out of
town. To accomplish this, he circulates lying reports until a hate complex is
generated among the villagers. They begin to persecute the technician in
every imaginable way with increasing intensity. For a very long time he
patiently endures the attacks in the hope that they will subside and with the
realization that if he does forsake his post it will be disastrous for the
village.
Finally his patience
runs out. “I have had enough of this,” he cries, “I have gone the second, and
the third mile. These people have shown that they do not deserve to live. I
am leaving.”
Whereupon he walks
out of the control room and drives far away. Several hours elapse and he is
safe beyond the reach of the explosion when it occurs. The village and all in it are utterly
destroyed.
While it is true
that in a certain sense the villagers destroyed themselves, it is equally
true that this technician destroyed them for he left them knowing that his
departure would bring those sure and certain results. This is the picture
which many have of God.
The situation faced
by this man is the same as that faced by God. He is the great “Technician”
who is in charge of the power house of nature. When He lets go of those
powers, there is no one else who can control them and keep them from
exploding in a horror of destruction. An enemy has come in and a hate complex
has been generated against God.
Many believe this truth
and then see God coming to the end of His patience, as in our illustration,
and voluntarily withdrawing to leave men to perish in the cataclysm of
destruction which inevitably follows.
If this is the true
picture of God, then, unquestionably, we would have to agree that He is,
after all, a destroyer.
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But it is not. God
is a very different person from this.
Let us retell the
story, as it would provide a true picture of God’s character.
Here is the same
technician, the same control room, the same situation, the same village, and
the same enemy stirring up trouble.
This time the
technician never thinks of leaving. No matter what they do to him, all he can
see is their situation. He knows
that if he leaves them, they will all be dead men so he stays on. His
patience is not in question for he is not thinking of himself at all.
But the persecution
becomes more and more intense until the people begin to demand that he go. He
protests that if he does, they will perish and for their sakes, not his own,
he desires to stay. They, in their hateful blindness, being ignorant of their
real danger and overconfident of their own ability to handle the control room
anyway, laugh derisively at him and shout for his departure.
With deepest
concern for them he holds on and fulfils his work as faithfully as ever.
Every time he thinks of them, a pang of fear and pain sweeps through him, and
he considers most earnestly how he can win their love and confidence so that
he might preserve them alive. Not
one thought is for himself—every thought is for them and their need.
But every day they
become more hateful and violent until they invade the control room and
angrily shout at him to leave. They jostle him out through the door and down
to his car. They put him into it and direct him to drive away. There is no
choice left. Slowly, he drives out of the village and mounts the first hill
beyond. He stops the car, climbs out and looks back toward the angry knot of
people gathered to witness that he is truly gone. He spreads his hands in one
last loving appeal. The instant response is agitated signals conveying to him
their unchanged demand that he go.
What more can he do?
Nothing! Every
possible source open to him to save those people is exhausted, and with the
heaviest of hearts he turns his car into the distance and is gone forever.
Several hours pass and then the atomic fireball blasts the village and the
villagers out of existence.
No one can say that
this man is a destroyer. He acted out the character of a saviour only. He
could not and did not save them because they would not let him. [If he as God, FORCED his way, he would
violate their freedom of CHOICE, and He will never do this. Satan is the one
who uses FORCE and takes away our power of choice. We see this manifested
through the cruel dictators on the earth. rb]
This is the true picture of the character of
God.
The truth of this
is stated in a paragraph from Prophets
and Kings, 176. “Christ will never
abandon those for whom He has died. We may leave Him and be overwhelmed
with temptation, but Christ can never turn from one for whom He has paid the
ransom of His own life.”
In view of the fact
that Christ died for all men, this statement is saying that it is impossible
for Christ to turn away from anyone. Men turn away from God. God cannot turn
away from men. That is impossible.
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The second question
is this: If God does not in fact destroy, then why does He use this word to
describe His actions? Does this not tend to make the Scriptures confusing?
Again this is an
excellent question, in answer to which it must be said that this is the right
word to use in describing God’s actions, for there is a deep and important
sense in which it is true that He does destroy.
As the evidences
gathered here unfold, it will be seen that God comes to man in one role only,
which is as a Saviour. But the effect
of that effort is not always a saving one. With the majority, the effect is
to harden them in rebellion and to cause them to withdraw themselves from the
voice of loving entreaty. Thus, God destroys by trying to save. The more He
exerts His saving power, the more men are driven by their rejection of it to
destruction. It is in this sense that He destroys.
This principle of
truth is spelled out with great clarity in the statement: “It is not God that
blinds the eyes of men or hardens their hearts. He sends them light to
correct their errors, and to lead them in safe paths; it is by the rejection
of this light that the eyes are blinded and the heart hardened. Often the
process is gradual, and almost imperceptible. Light comes to the soul through
God’s word, through His servants, or by the direct agency of His Spirit; but
when one ray of light is disregarded, there is a partial benumbing of the
spiritual perceptions, and the second revealing of light is less clearly
discerned. So the darkness increases, until it is night in the soul. Thus it
had been with these Jewish leaders. They were convinced that a divine power
attended Christ, but in order to resist the truth, they attributed the work
of the Holy Spirit to Satan. In doing this they deliberately chose deception;
they yielded themselves to Satan, and henceforth they were controlled by his
power.” The Desire of Ages, 322,
323.
“It is not God that
puts the blinder before the eyes of men or makes their hears hard; it is the light
which God sends to His people, to correct their errors, to lead them in safe
paths, but which they refuse to accept,--it is this that blinds their minds
and hardens their hearts.” Review and
Herald, October 21, 1890.
The outstanding
example of this outworking is the history of Pharaoh of Egypt. The Scripture
says, “And I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and multiply My signs and wonders
in the land of Egypt.” Exodus 7:3.
To harden is to
destroy. It is not physical destruction but spiritual. This spiritual
destruction is the prelude to the physical which must inevitably follow. The
Scriptures plainly say that it was God who did it and He did, but every
reference which throws light on what God did, shows that His action was to
send spiritual light, and loving appeals to Pharaoh. These were designed to
soften and save, not to harden him, but that which was sent to save,
destroyed him instead, because he rejected it. Note carefully that it was not
the light, but his rejection of it that hardened and destroyed him.
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“Pharaoh saw the
mighty working of the Spirit of God; he saw the miracles which the Lord
performed by His servant; but he refused obedience to God’s command. The
rebellious king had proudly enquired, ‘Who is the Lord, that I should obey
His voice to let Israel go? . . . (Exodus
5:2).’ And as the judgments of God fell more and more heavily upon him, he
persisted in stubborn resistance. By
rejecting light from heaven, he became hard and unimpressible. The
providence of God was revealing His power, and these manifestations,
unacknowledged, were the means of hardening Pharaoh’s heart against greater
light. Those who exalt their own ideas above the plainly specified will of
God, are saying as did Pharaoh ‘Who is the Lord, that I should obey His
voice?’ Every rejection of light hardens the heart and darkens the
understanding; and thus men find it more and more difficult to distinguish
between right and wrong, and they become bolder in resisting the will of
God.” SDA Bible Commentary, 1:1100.
“Every additional
evidence of the power of God that the Egyptian monarch resisted, carried him
on to a stranger and more persistent defiance of God. Thus the work went on,
finite man warring against the expressed will of an infinite God. This case
is a clear illustration of the sin against the Holy Ghost. ‘Whatsoever a man
soweth, that shall he also reap.’ Gradually the Lord withdrew His Spirit.
Removing His restraining power, He gave the king into the hands of the worst
of all tyrants.” The Review and Herald,
July 27, 1897.
“The patience and
long-suffering of God, which should soften and subdue the soul, has an
altogether different influence upon the careless and sinful. It leads them to
cast off restraint, and strengthens them in resistance.” The Review and Herald, August 14, 1900.
The truth laid out
in these statements is a very important one. When it is truly appreciated,
there will be no careless attitude toward the revelations which are brought
to us. There will be a conscious fear that a terrible mistake could be made
by rejecting light which, because it touches our flesh or some preconceived
idea and opinion, we desire to reject. There will be the dread of having the
heart hardened and the spiritual sense benumbed. “Let ministers and people
remember that gospel truth ruins if it
does not save. The soul that refuses to listen to the invitations of
mercy from day to day can soon listen
to the most urgent appeals without an emotion stirring his soul.” Testimonies 5:134.
We must clearly
understand that the only effort God puts forth, is to save. That effort can
and does produce two opposite effects. In the hearts and lives of those who
accept God’s work, it achieves its intended result. It softens, changes,
cleanses, and restores. It is unto life eternal.
But in the lives of
those who reject that saving ministry, there is a terrible work of
destruction going forward. It is a destroying work which firstly breaks down
every spiritual response within, then hardens the heart in
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rebellion, develops every sinful trait, and compels the Spirit
of God to withdraw His presence and His protection. This leaves the
individual to the choice he has made; to a position where there is no
protection whatsoever from the destructive malice of Satan and sin.
God destroys, but not as man destroys.
Every effort on God’s part is to save, but it has an altogether different
result in the lives of those who reject that saving power. Therefore we can
know that, in fact, God is a Saviour and
a Saviour only. He destroys by trying to save so that the more His saving
power is manifest in the world and that power is rejected, the more swiftly
and terribly are the rejecters destroyed by the simple outworking of the
forces involved.
This principle will
come through with greater clarity and force as the individual cases of the
flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, the plagues of Egypt, the crucifixion of Christ,
the seven last plagues, and the final judgment are studied. These will be
taken up progressively, For now it is sufficient to establish the principle
that the way in which the Lord destroys is by seeking to save. Thus His way
of destroying is entirely different from man’s way. Once this is clearly
comprehended, it will be possible to view all God’s actions in a new and
enlightened way. As a result, the whole of Scripture will emerge as one great
harmonious truth.
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