The eminent G. Campbell Morgan, the English preacher and Bible expositor, was invited to America for a series of public services. They were advertised, located in a large and commodious auditorium, and well attended. Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who became president of the United States, was invited to attend a service. She did so. Morgan was clear about the biblical plan of salvation. After the service, when her host asked about her response to the sermon she replied, in essence: I believe there is a God. If there were not, this whole performance of man would have no meaning. But, I do not feel the matter of redemption is for my understanding and experience. Her observation seems to me to be the inner feeling of masses of sophisticated persons who can’t write off mankind as an accident of the explosion of matter and life in the cosmos, but can’t believe that a personal God is in the process of correcting the mortality of it. Unacceptable faults are summarized as sins, generated from a depravity (unacceptable) condition. Reverie is found in salvation for us, an adjustment to meet the holy nature of God. Our adjustment comes from the perfect holiness of God. Righteousness is man’s common term for mankind to prove our relationship to God’s Kingdom. We need a make-over that is provided in Christ.
The general creation is another matter. It is to be replaced. Scholars do acknowledge that the natural world will end, but they have no definite clue of what follows, if anything. The prophetic message of Scripture is positive. All will be well. That does not mean everyone will benefit by the new creation. The last chapter of Isaiah’s prophecy makes clear that for many, the loss will be extensive, but God’s will and nature survive. These factors will never again be violated. All this is beyond human intellect to manage fully. It is offered in a scenario that provides idealistic change, and that mankind can be included, if we follow the pattern revealed for survival of a final holocaust. We rest it there: we have nothing else.
In the standard pattern of Scripture, there is offered a word picture by Isaiah (66:1) to suggest the difference between God’s context and mankind’s. God has a throne (center) but the earth is his footstool (real, but secondary). The difference is extensive in the scheme of life and events of context. The point is emphasized that all this belongs to God. Something went wrong, and there entered a usurper. Some of the creation turned to the usurper, and some to God. It is interesting that, in the chapter, God argues for the use of time in the process of correction. (An analogy of David’s short digression during the disloyalty of his son Absalom might serve as a parable here.) The correction under Christ will not occur without a length of time until God activates his will and procedure in meeting conditions he will or will not accept. He can’t accept some proposals because of his own perfection. To accept less would be to deny himself, something he can’t do. Man has difficulty in processing that God can stand the horror to be engaged to straighten the creation by the infusion of something new. Of all the violence of the end story, human beings struggle with the concept: How could a good God let it happen as it did? He made it rightly, and he could preserve it as he made it. What went wrong? We are confronted with a mystery. We are reminded in Scripture that the clay does not inform the potter. The potter informs the clay, or rejects it – which is also information. If the clay is good (responsive to the potter’s expectations) the potter proceeds and makes the vessel he has in mind. If the clay is of inferior quality, the potter rejects it. There is something in the clay that is either given or intrinsic that makes it acceptable, or absent makes it unsatisfactory. If I were forced to give an answer for the mystery I would say that God, desiring relationship of fully free persons in his image, created mankind. From the process there remain those who in their freedom accept adoption as God’s children, to a new freedom, under God, that relates to love and peace and immortality. That sometimes takes some doing, what with human limitations. The closer one is to the ideal the greater the desire to take on the character of the ideal. In this there may be a clue to mystery. A study found that the Afro-Americans, as they were experiencing the narrowing of the differences in the freedom culture with Caucasians became even more stern and insistent on equality than when differentials in society were greater. This may offer a clue about spiritual patterns. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020