Quiet Talks by Samuel Dickey: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks on Life After Death: 31. A Painful Story

Online Resource Library

Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | Download

Quiet Talks by Samuel Dickey: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks on Life After Death: 31. A Painful Story



TOPIC: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks on Life After Death (Other Topics in this Collection)
SUBJECT: 31. A Painful Story

Other Subjects in this Topic:

A Painful Story

There are others who have died. This distressing fact, but clearly it is a fact.

This is a painful story. I shall attempt to point out the bad swings of the pendulum, both ways, and then to point out the truth lying in between. It'll be a painful thing to do.

It should be keenly noticed in the start why there are others. It is not because of anything that God does. It is because of something that some men do. And it is because, further, of something that they don't do in response to God's repeated wooing. It is by this action, and lack of other sort of action, that they constitute them-selves the others.

It was clearly never intended that there should be others. It is a break in the original plan. Man has in him the power to break God's plans so far as he himself is concerned. God gave him that power, the highest of all human power, namely, full freedom of choice and decision and action.

There are two fundamental points in the original plan; first, that man should be like God, like Him in fullest freedom of choice and action. And second, that the two, God and man, should always be, and keep, in full touch with each other.

Clearly the second hinged on the first. The full touch could be only through man's choice to have it so. God will not take away that right of free action, even though it be used to break His own heart. He is true to man, and man's highest power, clear to the endless end.

This is a hard story to tell. On one hand to tell it true and straight, and yet not be hard, nor seem hard in the telling. And, on the other hand, to let human feeling have its true full human sway, and yet be true to the man in danger,-it's a hard story to tell. It calls for a rare blend of human feeling and yet of fidelity to facts. One must be both- tender and true.

It is not at all surprising that the pendulum has had such a time of it swinging back and forth. The common teaching of the Church from, say, the fourth century up to the Protest-ant revolt was quite definite, with a natural intensifying tendency.

Loyal membership in the Church was taught as essential to salvation from hell. And there was no awed hushing of the voice in pronouncing that fearsome word nor mincing of words nor imagination in picturing its fiery terrors. No account was taken of the vast numbers who had never heard of the Church nor of Christ. One flat statement covered the subject for all.

The Protestant Movement took over the same sweeping positiveness in the teaching on the subject, with one marked outstanding exception.

The emphasis on the one essential saving thing was changed from membership in the Church to a saving faith in Christ. But much of the harshness that had characterized the common Church teaching persisted throughout the Protestant Movement, and was quite set in its hardened and ever hardening form. A common reference has been made to a certain well-known French-Swiss leader of the Protestant Movement, picturing infants burning in the flames of the lost world.

Ian Maclaren, in one of his stories of Scotland, pictures a small Scottish lad sitting in the country church listening. It was the evening service. The little church was lit with candles. A candle sputtered on the pulpit desk. The subject of eternal punishment was being discussed. All the boy remembered was the tall lean stern faced preacher, in silence, holding a piece of paper in the flame of the candle till it was quite consumed, and then in awful tones describing that as what happened to the impenitent.

And the boy, terror-stricken, shrank smaller and tighter into the corner of the hard-seated pew, trying to get away from such a God as was being pictured. That may well be reckoned an extreme instance. We'll hope so. But it points distinctly the general trend.