08. The Clue That Never Fails

The Clue That Never Fails The oldest book in the world is the Bible. It claims to be a direct revelation of God sent down to man. It claims that man may of a certainty come into personal acquaintance and fellowship with God. It gives the formula by following which any man may make proof of this claim to his full satisfaction. The formula is utterly scientific, for it is the laboratory method of experiment. The One who gave the formula lived and taught on this earth nineteen hundred years ago. He claimed to be God Himself manifested to man in human form. He claimed that the Bible is the revelation of God to man. The formula is such that the truthfulness of these claims can be so tested by every one who wants honestly to know the answer, that all doubt will be forever dispelled. The formula is found in John 7:17, and reads: “If any man willeth to do his (God’s) will, he shall know the teaching, whether it be of God, or whether I speak from myself.” Nothing could be simpler nor more scientific than to follow that formula. It requires only that one find what Christ and the Bible set forth as the will of God, then what it means to do that will, and then to proceed to follow that clue with perfect honesty. And one can show that he is honest only if he is willing to stay with the test to the end, no matter at what cost to himself. To get the setting of this formula given by Christ, a company of people asked Him one day: “What shall we do that we might work the works of God?” This was simply another way of asking how they might do the will of God, for the works God desires from us originate in His will for us. So Christ answered them: “This is the work of God, that ye believe on (rely upon) him (Christ) whom he hath sent” (John 6:28-29). This is then the first step in doing the will of God, as Christ defined it for those who wanted to know how to begin doing His will. The next step is then to find how to believe on, to rely upon, Christ, who claimed to be the One God had sent. What does it mean to rely upon Christ? Let one who followed the formula answer.

Paul is the one speaking, and to Timothy—and to us—he says: “I know whom I have believed (relied upon), and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day” (the day of his passing from the earth. 2 Timothy 1:12). Paul had committed himself to Christ for time and eternity, thus relying on Him for all that a human being in sin needs from God, and this act of committal had brought him to such an infallible certainty of faith as always comes from the intimate personal knowledge of Christ which the following of that formula makes inevitable.

Any one else may thus come into just such infallible knowledge of God, for “he that believeth on the Son of God hath the witness in himself; he that believeth not God hath made him a liar, because he believeth not the record God gave of his Son. And this is the record, that God hath given unto us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He that hath the Son hath life” (1 John 5:10-12). To do the will of God is therefore to rely on Christ for eternal life; and to rely on Him is to go to God in Person, commit oneself to Him as Paul did, and accept eternal life as a gift, “for the gift of God is eternal life, through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 6:23). This done and all else follows. For the experiential evidence that one thus arrives at, not simply as to the existence of God, but of an actual personal knowledge of and acquaintance with God, is too infallible a certainty ever to be shaken. No one has ever followed this formula through to the end with honesty and sincerity, and failed to arrived at that certainty. One’s attitude toward the challenge of that formula thus becomes the test of his honesty of desire to know the facts about God. The agnostic or atheist who refuses to follow this clue is thereby confessing that his unbelief is the product of wishful thinking, not of sincere investigation. He wants to believe there is no God, that he may thus escape fear that he will some day have to give account to Him for his life of sin. But such wishful thinking will in no wise blot out the certainty that God is, nor the sinner’s dread of meeting Him.

If such a man makes any pretense, therefore, to clear thinking, he will have to think his way out of this ridiculous inconsistency. He must justify himself for claiming to be an honest thinker, while at the same time he takes that dishonest attitude in logic of assuming beforehand as untrue or impossible that which remains to be proved.

We thus have abundant ground for starting with the first truth, both self-evident, revealed to reason through nature, and possible of direct revelation to experience, that God is, which is the one final truth behind which we cannot go in thought.

We can also couple with it the truth that God is a moral Personality, out of which grows the axiom that all His relations with moral beings must be moral relations.