Christ, Christianity and the Bible. Haldeman Isaac Massey

Like David, perhaps, you cry, “My sin is ever before me!” The sin marks are there as the nail holes in the wall, but you have been able to look at them and have peace because you have said to yourself, “I am not an unwhipped of justice, my sins have been punished in my substitute; they have been fully answered for in his blood. He has forgiven me and justified me and made me clean. In him I stand clothed in the very ‘righteousness of God.’ I hate my sin and despise it for what it is in itself, for what it made him, my redeemer, to endure, but I have peace because he has fully satisfied in my behalf. I have actually satisfied in him and am delivered before God’s court of holiness both from the guilt and the demerit of sin. I have, in short, gone through the judgment with Christ on the cross. He has pronounced forgiveness – absolution – upon me, and he has done so by virtue of his power and authority as the living one in whom dwelleth all the fulness of the godhead bodily – as my saviour and my God he has forgiven me and I am at peace.”

      All this you have said within yourself and testified.

      But I ask you now to face the terrible fact – if Jesus Christ were not God – this terrible fact – that you have been deceived.

      You have had a false peace.

      You have been living in a fool’s paradise.

      You are before God an unpardoned and as yet unpunished criminal awaiting your doom. All this is absolutely your state —

      IF —

      If Jesus Christ were not Almighty God.

      If Jesus Christ were not Almighty God, he had no authority nor power to forgive your sins. NO! And if Jesus Christ were not God I know not where to bid you turn. You must carry the load of your sins all your days; and when you die, go into eternity and face a holy God who tells you by every law and fact of nature that he never forgives in a single case till he has first punished the sin and with it the sinner.

      If Jesus Christ were not God, his death was not an atonement.

      And this surely should be plain enough.

      Only God can atone to God.

      Only an infinite being can satisfy an infinite being.

      If Jesus Christ were not God he could not make an atonement.

      If he did not make an atonement, then the world has never been reconciled to God nor brought up on mercy ground. Instead of being lifted up to the plane of grace and mercy, the world is still under the condemnation and judgment of God, no longer under a suspended sentence, but sheer and defenceless, with nothing to hinder the crash of doom at any moment.

      There is no hope. There is no daysman. There is no one to offer unto God what he demands, and unto man what he needs. There is no mediator between a holy God and a sinful man.

      If Jesus Christ were not God, then he did not rise from the dead. He did not bring life and immortality to light, and, as for me, the preacher, I have no light to hold out to you in the all-embracing gloom and night of death.

      There is no hope.

      If a man shall tell me there is no hereafter, that death ends all, I shall take up the law of induction and argue him to a standstill along the line of unfathomable mysteries and inexplicable psychological phenomena in the constitution of man, and the inexplicable absence of the phenomena in the state of death, inexplicable upon any known materialistic ground, and I shall laugh at his inability to maintain his thesis beyond the poor shred of a hypothesis. If a man shall tell me as the result of pure reasoning that he concludes for the endless existence of the soul after death, and shall do this even upon the plane of induction, I shall turn and tell him that all his argument is based upon inference and not fact, finding its largest emphasis in the region of the unknowable and guessable – in the things he cannot explain, where certain conclusions can neither be successfully affirmed, nor successfully denied, and where, by consequence, he may console himself, if he wish, with his side of the guess; and I shall feel a keen sense of sorrow at his inability to hold his premise in the final region of the sure.

      And what does all this mean?

      Is it playing fast and loose with the mind? Am I turning in upon myself and playing the mere harlequin in the arena of mental gymnastics?

      No! there is sane meaning to this double method – it is this: as much may be said along one line of reasoning as the other. Each is a non-sequitur to the other. Each negatives the other and leaves us with reason’s torch inverted – the light out, the darkness deeper than ever; and standing on the threshold of the grave we are forced to cry out in the sharp agony of a continual self-smiting perplexity:

      “To be or not to be —that is the question.”

      Question it is – always a question – always coming back from the side of every dead body – always coming back from the clod-filled grave – coming down from age to age, coming back a question no man, not the wisest mere man who ever lived, could answer, or any living wise man can answer to-day.

      If Jesus Christ were not God it cannot be answered; for if Jesus Christ were not God, he did not rise from the dead and by divine power carry himself out of the region of death forever.

      If Jesus Christ were not God, you may go and sit by the tomb of your dead and weep bitter (because hopeless) tears.

      If Jesus Christ were not God, then he was not a redeemer and saviour. All the beautiful things that have been taught about him as such are false. All the hopes of heaven, the beauty of the celestial city, the tree of life, the river of crystal, the company of the saints, the arch-angelic song, the meeting and the knowing of those who long ago have left us – none of these things are so.

      If he were not God, then it is not true that he sits upon the throne, high and lifted up, listening to the plaints of the weakest heart that shall trust him, and hearing the sound of every falling tear.

      If Jesus Christ be not God, then the whole system of Christianity built upon his person and work falls to the ground, is broken into fragments, and like wind-swept dust can never be gathered.

      If Jesus Christ be not God, the New Testament record of him is untrue. The New Testament impeached in its prime particular becomes a worthless book – a book full of exhortations to holiness and truth, in the name of him who is proven to be (if he ever lived at all) a blasphemer, a deceiver of men and the concrete of human wickedness. If the New Testament is not true, neither is the Old; for the Old Testament finds its meaning and value only in the Christ of the New Testament. Take Jesus Christ out of the Old Testament (which you must do if you set aside the New; for he alone fulfils the types, the symbols and the prophecies of the Old Testament; he alone makes its testimony and history intelligible; he alone gives unity, harmony and authoritative meaning to its exhortations) – take Christ out of the Old Testament and you take away its one and only key.

      And mark you – when Christ goes out of the Bible as God – God goes out of the Bible. The deity which has preserved it, the power which has made it living and unchangeable in the midst of change and death, will have been dethroned.

      Without Christ as God you are without any sane and satisfying knowledge of God.

      Where will you turn to find God and know him to your comfort? You might as well look into the bottomless pit as into your own heart.

      No more satisfactory will it be to look into the heart of others. We are all built on the same plan.

      The difference is only in degree or extension.

      The basilar fact is, God cannot be found in any natural man.

      You cannot find or know him to your heart’s content in nature.

      What kind of a God does nature reveal to you?

      I will answer for you – a God who puts you in this world and does not tell you whence you come, whether from the all mud or the Almighty, from an angel or a devil, from jelly or genius, from the heights of heaven or the depths of hell. A God who puts you here and fills you with questions he alone can answer and – refuses so to do. A God who calls you into the world and gives you eyes to see everything but yourself. A God who hides you from yourself, so that you do not know whether you are a function or a soul; whether you are matter