Quiet Talks by Samuel Dickey: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks About Our Lord's Return: 55. God so Loved the World

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Quiet Talks by Samuel Dickey: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks About Our Lord's Return: 55. God so Loved the World



TOPIC: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks About Our Lord's Return (Other Topics in this Collection)
SUBJECT: 55. God so Loved the World

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God so Loved the World

God so loved the whole race that He gave the only Son He had, to win it back home to Himself. It was the whole race the Father was thinking of when He sent His Son down through that very low doorway in Bethlehem. It was the whole race Jesus came to, and lived for, and died for. He did not come to the Jew merely; He came through the Jew; that was the doorway; He was reaching in after the whole race. He didn't love Palestine more than the rest of the earth. It was simply used as a footing for His human feet, whence He could reach out strong arms, and clinging hands, and warm heart, to get hold of a world.

The Church is not a favourite of God's above all other men. It is simply chosen as His messenger to all men. He needed to use some messenger, and so it has been tenderly loved, and carefully trained and patiently dealt with, that it might be a true, faithful messenger. But it was a race the Master was thinking about in all this. So far as personal salvation is concerned, He did not think of the Jew differently from other men, nor does He think differently of the people of the Church. The only difference is that He thought of the Jew, and thinks of the Church, as means through which all might be reached.

It might be good to speak of some of the common impressions about this, so we can get rid of them. It has been quite commonly taken for granted that, of the ancient peoples, only the Jew had the knowledge of the true God. Without thinking into the matter at all, this is the common impression among most Christian people.

The Jew himself came to feel so, and felt it to the point of despising all others, as today he is despised. Even when the Gospel commenced its softening work, it was still supposed that certainly these poor, ignorant outsiders must become Jews as well as Christians in order to be saved. It took a thrice-repeated vision to awaken Peter up to the real truth. And then he was sharply taken to task by the members of the Jewish Christian Church at Jerusalem for being brotherly with Christian men who had not become Jews also.

It has been the general impression in the Christian Church, that there is no light at all among the non-Christian nations, except what has been taken by the Christian missionary. It is not long since the strongest missionary plea, that stirred most tremendously, was that so many tens or hundreds of thousands of heathen were daily going down into eternal night, implying thereby that all who had not heard of Christ were therefore necessarily lost. And that plea is not yet wholly gone. And the motive of fear and pity mingled has played a big part in response to these appeals.

Now the case with the heathen world is bad enough, desperate in its awful need. But it does not help matters to get the truth twisted out of shape. The non-Christian nations would be in terrible shape indeed, if their only chance of salvation, through the centuries, depended upon the response of the Church to their need of light.

If you think back through the last nineteen centuries, it does not take much thinking to conclude that if only those who have heard of Christ and accepted Him, have been saved, then heaven would be a very small place, and hell the biggest place in the universe. Some of us can remember hearing preaching that made us feel it was so, and wonder why. It is not surprising that the pendulum has swung clear over to the belief which is so common today, in the Church and outside, that there is no such place as hell. It brings the sorest grief to one's heart to remember that there must be a hell, not made by God, but made against His will, by sin and by man's choice. It must break the great heart of God with grief that it is so.

Now a bit of quiet prayerful study of God's Word will help to clear the air of inaccurate impressions. And it will, I think, help tremendously, if we yield to its tug upon our hearts, to make us more concerned than ever to take the light of the Gospel of Christ to all men.