CHAPTER III — Steadfastness
CHAPTER III --- Steadfastness III. STEADFASTNESS
By R. C. BELL A glance over history reveals mankind, on the whole, to be unstable and unsatisfied. Various races of men have struggled to dominion only to sink into oblivion. The book of time has myriads of wars and innumerable bloody pictures of many kinds to show. Human prosperity has been, for the most part, much like a huge merry-go-round, making no progress at all commensurate with its ceaseless activities. Even now, near the middle of the twentieth Christian century, there are in all lands a deep sense of present and impending evil, and an avid search for deliverance and security. “Men are fighting for fear and for expectation of the things which are coming on the earth.” A great dread clutches their hearts lest their own scientific enginery should turn Frankenstein and destroy them. What man can feel satisfaction, much less pride, in the record which the children of men have made thus far on the good earth that Jehovah their God has given them? And what of God’s feelings, as He has beheld the pitiful spectacle of sordid history, throughout the millenniums of man’s tenure of the earth? The Flood and the Cross tell His feelings better than words can. What could be the cause of this world-long frightful failure and whelming loss and ruin?
UNIQUE CONTRADICTION IN MAN
The great disparity between man’s large abilities and his small accomplishments affords high probability that some grave misfortune has befallen him. Indeed, there is a vast gulf between what man is and does and what he feels he is capable of being and doing. Certainly, man’s reach far exceeds his grasp. He has never fulfilled himself and is not fulfilling himself now. Much music remains in him unsung. This contradiction between promise and fulfillment in man and his consciousness of it, neither of which is found in any other creature of earth, has always challenged and puzzled materialistic thinkers. But to students who believe in a realm of spirit, the fact that no other creature of earth has a sense of having marred in the making is ample evidence, not only of the existence and nobility of man’s moral being, but also of the fact that man has lived and is living a defeated and dwarfed life, far beneath his potentialities. Such a student is convinced that, as a modern tourist viewing the fallen towers and crumbling walls of an ancient castle, though he sees splendid ruins, can get but a faint idea of the splendor of the former structure, so he, from historic man, can get but an unworthy conception of the perfections of man as God made him in the beginning.
MAN’S NATURE AND CONSTITUTION
What is man, if, after falling into ruin, he is still impressive and capable of many marvelous achievements? What is his constitution and nature? What his history?
Alexander Pope, some two centuries ago, characterized man:
Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet prey to all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled:
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world! Is not Pope’s characterization correct? Man by creation is a dual being, composed of flesh and spirit. By his flesh he is allied to animals and by his spirit to God. Mere animals, having no moral nature, can neither rise nor fall morally. If on one hand, they are below any moral change, on the other hand, God is above it, forever unchangeably the same. Neither animals nor God can be tempted to evil or be put on moral probation. But man, partaking of both animal and divine nature, therefore capable of gravitating toward either, was left free to choose his own course. Browning’s line, “A brute I might have been, but would not sink in the scale,” carries the same thought. Does not the fact that Adam fell below his original state when he made the wrong choice imply that, had he made the right choice, he would have risen above it? Furthermore, does it seem morally reasonable that the life of a glorified saint, spent in eternal communion with God, who is full-orbed light, life, and love, should be, not progressive, but forever static? He who can declare what man, created in the image and likeness of God, may not be when he is fully made needs must be omniscient. Does this thought throw any light upon Paul's big, puzzling question to the church in Corinth, “Know ye not that we shall judge angels?” Does the Bible suggest that man’s capacity for development is unlimited and endless? What incentive' and inspiration in the very thought for heroic, lofty striving! For man to build beneath the.stars is for man to build too low.
God made man morally mobile, with freedom to choose within, the framework fashioned by his Maker. He could choose either loyalty or rebellion to God, but the result of this crucial first choice was fixed beyond his control. If he chose to walk with .God, nothing could ever go wrong. If, on the other hand, he chose to desert God, nothing could ever go right again. Thus it is that the state and life of man is conditioned by his attitude toward and his relationship to God. And herein is the key to the steadfastness and security of mankind. Man, the creature, was so made that he could not live a self-centered life, independent of God, the Creator. Divorced from God, the only changeless thing about man is that he is erratic and undergoes constant change. Only by walking with God and by cleaving to Christ; only by contacting these energizing persons through vital faith can weak and unstable men ever be partakers of God’s everlasting steadfastness. This is the way God made them to work, and they will not work in any other way. Such is the eternal, immutable constitution of God’s fixed moral government, which man violates to his frustration and destruction. As when a great railway locomotive, designed to run only on steel rails, comes to disaster if an attempt is made to run it some other way, so man comes to disaster when he attempts to live some other way than in dependence upon God. “O Jehovah, I know that the way of man is not in himself; it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps” (Jeremiah 10:23). That human beings live in dependence upon the Divine Being is necessitated by the very constitution and nature of things. They just simply will not work otherwise. Men must have moral anchorage outside of themselves. They cannot break moral law without breaking themselves. The world is irrevocably moral. God is not a luxury, but a necessity.
MAN CHANGED KINGS
Satan is only a creature, but he is no joke. Throughout the Bible he is taken most seriously as a capable, powerful, dangerous adversary, who fears not to challenge Deity and dares to cross swords with God and Christ. The issue between him and God, insofar as man is concerned, is always the same, namely, Which shall be King of men and “God of this world”? This was the question when Eve was tempted in the Garden, and this was the question when Christ was tempted thousands of years later in the Wilderness. In the first battle of this long war, Satan by base falsehood, foul slander, skillful strategy, and consummate understanding of human nature; by appealing to such human traits as vanity, curiosity, and pride, persuaded Eve that, since God was underestimating her capacity for self-direction and sup-pressing her self-expression by telling her what she could not do and by frightening her with a threat of death if she disobeyed, the only reasonable thing to do was declare her independence, rebel against such an arbitrary Tyrant and take him, who promised fearless freedom as her king. (Note the modernism of all this.) Satan, “a liar and the father thereof,” first told the supreme, the world-old lie, that man can disobey God and live. Thus reasoned the sly old Serpent, and poor Eve, foolish Eve, flattered, beguiled, and recklessly fearless of sin, ventured to exchange God for Satan as her King. Adam acquiesced in Eve’s transfer of her allegiance to the daring Usurper, and Satan began his long wicked reign as “Prince of this world,” which must continue until the Lord’s return. Satan’s speech to Eve is already the worst and longest sermon that has ever been preached, and the end is not yet.
EXCHANGE OF KINGS PERVERTED NATURE
The world in transition from God’s to Satan’s sovereignty passed from natural to unnatural; from normal to abnormal. This deep, elemental, constitutional change left nothing the same. Penalties for man’s high treason against his Maker were inflicted upon the ground, upon the serpent, and upon man himself. Man’s threefold nature suffered, inasmuch as pain and death for his body, error for his mind, and sin for his spirit invaded his life. All these curses came because the original order was perverted; therefore they were unnatural and abnormal. They never would have been had man maintained his fellowship with God.
Satan, who must have been a proud, malicious rebel against God when he entered human history, exploited his victory over man with great success. Fratricide appeared in the second generation, and with the increase of men upon the earth wickedness more and more abounded. About seven or eight centuries after the death of Adam, God, unable to tolerate the all-but-universal evil of Satan’s world longer, destroyed it, all except Noah and his family, by flood. Just a few hundred years after the flood, men again became so sinful under the rule of Satan that God called the Hebrews from among all other peoples of the earth for His own possession. But because they, too, worshiped idols, who were Satan’s representatives, and partook of the abominations of the heathen, God sent them into captivity under heathen kings, who were Satan’s vicegerents, after some fourteen centuries. When Christ came to the earth about four thousand years after Adam, Jew and Gentile alike, having “exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped the creature rather than the Creator,” were in wretched misery and hopeless despair. This all-too-brief summary of human history from Adam to Christ is sufficient, however, to show from the suffering and defeat of Satan’s subjects what kind of a world ruler he is; and to show, moreover, that man without moral dependence upon God is unstable in all his ways, “boiling over as water,” and utterly unable to achieve steadfastness and enduring prosperity. Can we probe a little deeper into just what happened to man in this exchange of kings? As God made him, he was “very good,” and some radical change must have occurred in his irimost parts before he could become so very bad. The two major elements in human nature are the intellectual and the emotional faculties, commonly called the head and the heart, respectively. In a normal person, they, being mutually supporting, merge into a balanced, united personality. Love and feeling must increase as reason and intelligence do. If a man’s head dominate him, he becomes hard and cruel. If his heart dominate him, he becomes sentimental and effeminate. Jesus taught that a man must love God with all of both his head and his heart; that is with a love that is both intellectual and emotional. When either head or heart gets out of proportion to the other, the balance of the personality is so upset that it cannot function naturally, just as an engine out of mechanical balance cannot run properly. Satan destroyed this deep, constitutional balance and unity in Adam by seducing him from the presence of God, who is their source. After this seduction, Adam, living in fellowship with Satan, who is the source of all disorder and confusion, fell into Satanic disorder and confusion himself. Thus man’s natural, God-imbued state became an unnatural, Satan-imbued one.
Note carefully Satan’s method of wrecking man’s perfectly made and adjusted nature. The ancient post-mortem enquiry, recorded in the third chapter of Genesis, sheds light on this matter. Satan told Eve that she, by eating of the forbidden fruit, would acquire better food and education; that she would even “be as God, knowing good and evil.” And when she believed that the fruit would “make one wise;’ she ate. He convinced her that gratifying the flesh and striving after intellectual attainments within themselves, without correspondingly increasing emotional attainments, would bring her prosperity and happiness. In short, he convinced her that loveless knowledge, godless wisdom, and mere in- tellectualism were true wisdom and life. With this subtle, bewitching falsehood, the old Traducer began his long, long career of sowing tares among the wheat. This sin against God and man of making mere material and intellectual achieve-ment the ultimate objective of human ambition and endeavor, which Satan, who is himself the best example of such a wrecked personality, so long ago committed against the federal head of mankind, though it so fatally wrecks human beings for all good as they become Satan’s duplicates, is still at work among men. Modern scientific humanism has nothing but disdain for feelings. To it, emotional expression and enthusiasm are relics of an ignorant, superstitious past, and are, therefore, not to be countenanced among educated, cultured folk. It makes learning, unaccompanied by love, the key to the temple of life. This one-sided development, though "admired of many,” is a monstrous delusion and scourge. It never has made and it never can make, or even permit, a good social order, for it makes men selfish, loveless, despotic, and unfit to live with others. "Knowledge puffeth up, but love buildeth up.” Unsanctified learning is Satan’s best tool to ruin God’s order. If the heart is savage, any learning is dangerous; the more learning, the more danger, just as a B-29 is more dangerous than a bow and arrow. Sin makes knowledge perilous. Knowledge is important, but when not counterbalanced by love it is fatal. Verily, science has proved to be a false messiah and has set up a god of its own making, whose name is Man. Modern man does not worship the great goddess Diana of the Ephesians, but the Great God Self. He does not need images in his idolatry. Although Scientific Humanism is today fundamentally bankrupt as a builder of even a tolerable world-order, still many men fail to see anything superhuman in the universe. The fatal limitation and defect of science is that it cannot say whether its marvelous enginery WILE bless or curse men.
Satan’s ingenious plot that blasted humanity in its cradle and initiated the weary, running centuries of earth’s wrongs, sorrows, and horrors under his reign is his masterpiece of sagacity and infamy. Who but a fallen, vengeful archangel could have been wise and wicked enough at once to do such a heinous thing! With the exception of man’s creation, the fatal wrecking of the unity, symmetry, beauty, and perfection of his nature is the most momentous and far-reaching event in human history. It is the fountain head of all the subsequent history of earth. All the Bible, except its first two and last two chapters, deals with God’s purpose and way of rescuing the broken, deflowered children of men from Satan’s baneful, usurping rule and of restoring them to His own pristine, gracious rule.
CRISIS BETWEEN GOD AND SATAN
According to Genesis 3:15, God’s purpose to restore human nature to its original perfection is coeval with Satan's distortion of it. This verse contains the first dim picture of the God, who, in order to counterwork Satan’s devastating deed and reign over men, would himself become man. This picture becomes progressively more distinct as God continues to develop it until, at last the Christ, the romantic Hero of the entire Bible, stands life-like and life-size. After this finished portrait had stood some four centuries on the pages of the Old Testament, its eternal Original, mystically annexing humanity to His Deity by being born of a human mother, came bodily to live a Man among men. As Christ appears in the Gospels, His complete fulfillment of and likeness to the old prophetic portrait is the perfect intellectual argument to prove that God’s ancient purpose to rescue mankind from Satan was proceeding according to His program. The crisis in the long struggle between God and Satan for control of the world was Christ’s coming to earth to “bruise” Satan’s head, to retrieve humanity from his illegal dominion, and to restore all things. As Christ neared the cross, He said, “Now is the judgment of this world: now shall the prince of this world be cast out. And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto myself” (John 12:31-32). Satan was under no illusion about this matter, for he knew that God and he were mutual enemies from of old. When Christ became a baby without human father, he, knowing that his long sway over the earth was at last being aggressively challenged, made the best defense he could. After Herod, his ready human tool, failed in his attempt to murder the unique Baby, he himself, when Christ thirty years later began to make definite preparations to recapture mankind, was forced into a personal duel with Him. Failing- in his audacious venture to persuade Christ to acknowledge his right to the earth, he had to retreat (Matthew 4:1-11). But, though he lost that battle, he was not conquered and continued the war. He implemented the Jews (John 8:44), entered into Judas (John 13:27), sifted Peter as wheat (Luke 22:31), and finally, though not till the divine clock struck the hour, succeeded in getting Christ crucified. But his victory (?), since God overrules those whom He cannot rule and makes the wrath of man praise Him, was turned into utter defeat and confusion with Christ’s resurrection. Christ, refusing to die, became man’s eternal contemporary and inaugurated, on Pentecost, His universal Kingdom that cannot be shaken. Truly, Christ was living and more able than before He was killed to rescue man and despoil Satan. The crisis was safely passed.
SATAN AND THE CHURCH
Though Christ’s resurrection forever settled Satan’s doom and brought him “to nought” (Hebrews 2:14), he was permitted to transfer his war against Christ to war against Christ’s church, which was to continue the total war, as Christ Himself had so steadfastly and successfully done. Peter’s, “Your adversary, the Devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about seeking whom he may devour” shows some of Satan’s activities during the Christian dispensation. May his condition not be described as that of a convicted criminal at large under a suspended sentence, which must be executed, however, at the fixed divine time? And since the church was not able, in its own strength, to cope with the skill and might of its superhuman adversary, Christ proposed to dwell in its members, through the Holy Spirit and their faith, to empower them for the otherwise hopeless struggle. Their willingness and obedience with His wisdom and power, without the written word, brought the church victory for some twenty years. But with the next generation men needed the Gospel in literary form, in order that they might continue to be fit soldiers for Christ in His warfare against Satan. Hence, the New Testament was written. Instead of being a substitute for Christ, this written word was to aid men in getting to Christ and appropriating Him (John 5:39-40). Christians need to be on their guard perpetually lest “holding a form of godliness, but having denied the power thereof,” they become tradition-ridden, sense-bound legalists with blind spots for some great spiritual truths. In his war against the church, Satan soon employed the same Jews, whom he had used in crucifying Christ, to arrest, threaten, and beat the leaders of the church in Jerusalem. Defeated in this attack from without, he invaded the church, entered into the hearts of two members, and made lying hypocrites of them. But, since that congregation was the embodiment of the living, indwelling Christ, it continued to fight and to grow (Acts 5:1-14). Later, when Christians left Jerusalem and began to carry the church to other places, Satan by using willing, evil men and women executed “tactical delaying actions” before the expanding kingdom, as attest Cypress (Acts 13:6-12), Philippi (Acts 16:16-18), and Ephesus (Acts 19:13-20). Still later, Paul reminded Christians that, since their warfare was essential against powerful superhuman foes, “against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12), they would need all the armor of God. And everywhere, since Satan knew that to the very extent God’s original, natural order was being restored among men, to that same extent his own unnatural, doomed order was being rooted up, he stubbornly contested every foot of ground.
LOVE RESTORED
It is abundantly taught throughout the Bible that Christ is the Mediator of the restoration that God promised from ancient time (Acts (3:21). Now, since Satan destroyed Eve’s capacity for proper living by beguiling her into thinking that she did not need her emotional faculties, the restoration should counterwork this fatal error by restoring love to its original place, thus renewing the primitive balance and perfection of the constitutional nature of her posterity. And this is just exactly what Christ does. When a lawyer asked Christ which commandment was greatest, the answer was: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second like unto it is this, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments the whole law hangeth, and the prophets’’ (Matthew 22:37-40). This twofold love, love for God and love for man, Christ makes the twin pillars of human society. His social order does not make headway head first as does Satan’s. Truth intellectually recognized must penetrate the feelings, if it advances beyond pious platitude and dead dogma, and acquires mastery over conduct. Without a loving heart, the head cannot think straight and be truly wise. Unimpassioned knowledge is Bacon’s “Dry light.” What a man loves influences his life and destiny more than what he thinks; what he feels more than what he knows. May it not be said that men think with their emotions? In the Upper Room just before Christ went forth to Gethsemane, He said to His disciples: “A new commandment I give unto you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another” (John 13:34-35). Was not Christ saying that His way of restoring love to its rightful place, inasmuch as it assured better religious and ethical conduct than the negative decalogue could assure, might be called another Decalogue, or “A New Commandment”? That His Way, making law as law unnecessary, was to be a new covenant and a new kingdom? Does not Paul teach just this? “Owe no man anything, save to love one another: for he that loveth his neighbor hath fulfilled the law” (Romans 13:8). Thus, commandments become mere directives that show men how to practice love. It is very significant that Paul, who had the best head among the apostles most clearly of them all discerned the right of the heart. As a motive power to produce Christian living, both Christ and Paul give the position of dominant centrality to love and make it the distinguishing characteristic between disciples of Christ and disciples of Satan. According to this, love separates men into the dichotomy, Christian and non-Christian, and is, on the human side, the ground swell that gives to Christianity its driving and lifting power.
Upon one of the occasions of Christ’s appearances after His resurrection in an interview with Peter, He again showed how important He considered love. Three times He asked Peter, “Lovest thou me,” and three times Peter replied, “I love Thee.” Christ followed Peter’s avowals of love with “Feed my lambs,” “Tend my sheep,” and “Feed my sheep,” respectively (John 21:15-17). Christ is licensing a preacher, so to speak, and it all amounts to, “If you love me, Peter, go to preaching.” As simple and natural as that. When it is remembered that not long before this interview Peter had denied Christ three times, one might wonder why Christ did not ask him how much he had fasted, prayed and wept since, how sorrowful and penitent he was, and if he would promise never to do it again. But all such was unnecessary and inadequate. Christ’s simple, “Peter, if you love me, I can trust you to shepherd my flock” was best. For certain it is that one cannot love without serving and giving. And equally certain it is that serving and giving without love are worthless (1 Corinthians 13:1-3). All else, without love, leaves men “faultily faultless, icily regular, and splendidly null.” He who loves not, lives not; and he who loves most, lives most. Put the emphasis upon anything whatsoever other than love and Christianity is so distorted and defaced that it is no longer Christianity.
MAN RENEWED
Man is the only creature throughout the whole range of earthly existence that has to struggle to be lawful. All other things fulfill themselves by living according to the law of their respective natures. They can all be lawful and righteous without trying to be so. An acorn makes a giant oak and a mocking bird lives a songful life simply by each being true to itself. Man is the only exception. He dare not administer his life on that principle and be what is his impulse to be. Before his Fall in Eden, man was not an exception. And from his fall, God began to work out His sublime, glorious Way of getting him back whence he fell. The Way was to love him back. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have eternal life.” Man’s redemption began, then, in God’s heart rather than in His head. So to speak, God’s love was to cast a spell over man. When a piano gets out of tune, no amount of pounding upon the keys can produce harmony from its jangled wires. But after the instrument itself has been tuned and made musical, it will discourse sweet music again. Man’s nature under Satan’s long, loveless, wreckful rule had fallen into such discord that no amount of his own moral striving could make him tuneful again. The best description of the utter futility of such slavish labor is Paul’s magnificent, but wretched, hero of the seventh chapter of Romans, who, though he strove with all his human might, being “by nature a child of wrath even as the rest,” just simply could not live right. Man cannot compose the dissonance within his ruined nature and have his head and heart “according well, make one music as before.” He needs to be taken out of the category of the exceptionable and become like other things that can live lawfully without having to struggle to do so. And because he cannot bear fruit out of harmony with his nature any more than a tree can, if he is ever to live right again, his nature must be renewed. But only God is wise, powerful, and good enough to counterwork Satan and do such a marvelous thing. Therefore, He “so Loved” man as to rekindle his love, renew his lapsed nature, and restore him to his original perfection. “But when the kindness of God our Saviour, and his love toward man, appeared, not by works done in righteousness, which we did ourselves, but according to his mercy he saved us, through the washing of regeneration and reneiving of the Holy Spirit, which he poured out upon us richly, through Jesus Christ our Savior: that, being justified by his grace, we might be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life” (Titus 3:4-7).
Now here is a Gospel that is worth possessing and preaching the globe around. Man desperately needs this religion that can renew him. Under it, men are “born of water and the Spirit” (John 3:5) again from above and become new creatures. It creates a “clean heart” and renews a “right spirit” within them so that they are no longer exceptional, but like all God's other creatures may live after their renewed nature and be righteous without perspiring effort and moral drudgery. It becomes natural again for men “through the renewing of the Holy Spirit,” to be noble, generous, loving, and pure in all relationships for they themselves are noble, generous, loving and pure. This is Paul’s “For freedom did Christ set us free.” Christianity recreates men and impassions them, not merely to do God’s will, but to love to do it. They may do as they please, for it is a delight to please God. A gracious, loving God, seeking and pursuing men relentlessly down the ages, who will not let them go, but becomes Fellowman and dies for them; then lives in them and together with them works out their problems and destiny makes men morally right as nothing else whatsoever could do. Such love is redemptive and creative.
In the commerce of love, it captivates and wins love. It gives men ample inducement to love God back with all their per-sonality and strength. It creates “a soul under the ribs of death.” “We love him, because he first loved us.” The Gospel does not abolish law, but gives, to willing men, adequate motive and aid to practice law. Instead of taking man out of the reign of God’s eternal, immutable, moral law it enables him to live and obey it. Moral principle is as changeless as God Himself. It will not change until there is another God. The Christian appeal to the heart of man as the means to make him lawful is the great superiority of the New Covenant. It best reveals the love and “manifold wisdom of God.” It does something superhuman to a man as sowing wheat produces a mystically superhuman harvest, for man “knows not how. The earth beareth fruit of herself.” Often Christ says His Kingdom is like nature (Mark 4:26-28).
GOD MARCHING ON
Paul says, though the dominion which God designed for man at the beginning was not evident when he wrote Hebrews, that man, through the mediation of Christ, would finally be fully redeemed from his ruin and God’s original design realized (Hebrews 2:5-10). Paul’s prophecy still awaits fulfillment.
Christ’s first church, which was in Jerusalem, may be called the parent call of the organism, or world-order (Kingdom of God), that was to rescue man from Satan’s rule. This church was adequate for all the needs, bodily, socially, and religiously, of its members. It, being the only way human society will work, was by its very nature mutually antagonistic and exclusive of every other way. With its cooperative, rather than competitive, social order, it was so revolutionary that the shrewd Jews soon called its leaders “These that have turned the world upside down” (Acts 17:6). One, after making due allowance for the prejudice and wickedness of the Jews, still may wonder what would happen to the world, religiously, educationally, economically, and socially today, were Christianity to become the Federal World Government; what would happen among men were the prayer “Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on earth” answered; what kind of UNO Christianity would make; and, finally, how many of the advocates of Christianity understand its true nature and workings as well as its first foes did. Does not Christ expect His “Holy nation, a peculiar people,” to be His willing, working instruments as He roots up every plant which His Father has not planted? The enemies of Christ’s Kingdom, Jews first and Gentiles later, seeing this exclusive and imperial nature of the new world-order, decided to crush it rather than be crushed by it. If in this inevitable, bitter clash between Christ and Satan any weakness developed on Christ’s side, it would be not in Him, of course, but in His followers, in the human, not the divine element of the church. And the fact that the church under persistent, bloody persecution wavered, modified its terms of unconditional surrender, compromised and made negotiated peace with Satan, the very thing which Christ in His personal duel so resolutely refused to do, is the tragedy of Christian history. “Howbeit the firm foundation of God standeth,” and His “Kingdom that cannot be shaken . . . shall break in pieces” all other kingdoms and “stand forever” (Daniel 2:44). The only way for unsatisfied, unstable man, who is dependent upon his Creator by natural constitution, ever to have steadfastness, happiness, and security is to become articulate with his God, who changes not, and march on with Him in readiness for “One far-off divine event, to which the whole creation moves” (Romans 8:8-25; 2 Peter 3:8-13; Revelation 21:1-8). In God’s own time and way, Paul’s prophecy in the second chapter of Hebrews will yet come to pass. Give God time to work out His sublime, glorious, eternal purposes. Faith can watch, work, and wait.