*"Now if there is one message needed more than any other in this modern world of ours, it is just this. The basic trouble with the world and with this generation is that it has forgotten the unseen. This is the age of materialism, the affluent society which has never had it so good. This is the age of prosperity, the age of machinery, and gadgets, the age of comfort and of amenities. This is an age entirely earthbound with science and its discoveries, science and its insistence upon the visible, the tangible, and the measurable. That is the realm of science, but what has happened is that science has turned itself into philosophy and tells us that there is nothing apart from what can be seen, handled and measured. *In other words, man has become the measure of everything. Only what people can understand, know, discover, and sanction can be believed. That alone is real-what belongs to this world of time. All else is poetry and imagination. If you are presented with anything that people cannot encompass with their minds, it is ridiculed and dismissed as fantasy. All right, they say, you can read a novel or read your Bible now and again-it does not matter which. They are the same sort of thing, and you will get temporary relief. But, of course the Bible and novels are not real and true; you still have to come back and live in this same old world. Some psychologists say that children must not be taught Scripture, and you must not teach them religion, therefore, because it does violence to them. Others say that religion disturbs a person’s emotional balance. The unseen world is actively and militantly denied and dismissed. *Above anything else, the modern world needs to be told that is central fallacy is its denial of the unseen and the spiritual. Will they take it, I wonder, from Shakespeare if they will not take it from the Bible? “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your Philosophy.” -Hamlet *The unseen real, in a sense, is the great message of the Bible, though it has a better way of putting it. Furthermore, as a consequence, the modern world does not even understand the nature of its problem. Modern men and women are more bewildered as to the nature of their problem than they are with regard to anything else. They falsify everything because they believe, they really do believe and have done so for a long time, that if you only educate people and train them and give them knowledge and understanding, their problems will be dealth with. But we have done all that, and the difficulties are greater than ever. If people do not understand the nature of the problem, how could they possibly hope to find any solution? I repeat that this failure in diagnosis is entirely due to the fact that people have forgotten the supernatural and have banished everything outside human comprehension. *But the business of the Bible is to asset the reality of the unseen. Not only that, the Bible assets the primacy, the all-importance, of the unseen. “The things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal (2 Cor 4:18).” What we see around is not the real world this is the passing phantom. The other world is the real one, the absolute. This world is the appearance; that world, says the Bible, is the great reality. There is no greater blunder than to confuse the appearance with the reality or the temporary with the permanent. So here is the basic postulate of the Bible, and it is put before us in this story in a striking manner that I trust we shall never, any of us, ever forget again. *Now the unseen is all-important, for we are in its hand. The Bible puts this before us in many ways. It is there in Genesis: “In the beginning God,” and in all the subsequent Old Testament History. Shakespeare and other feel after this, but they never quite get there. “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will.” –Hamlet *The author of those lines is a man beginning to think profoundly and seriously. It takes a long time to bring people to that. All they are aware of is what some have called “fate.” When the ancients had drawn up their philosophies and plans, they always saw a further element-fate, “kismet”-that guides our destiny and of which we are but playthings. There are other powers. The world has come very near to this truth, feeling after it. People have a vague awareness of how small we are, how little we know, and how great are these forces above us and beyond us and around us. The message of the Bible, the teaching of biblical history, is the all-importance of the unseen reality that controls our lives. *The reality of the unseen world is particularly taught in the prophetic books of the Bible. There is no other explanation. The prophets were able to forecast eight hundered years or so before the time things that later happened. How did they do it? Poetic imagination is a wonderful thing, but no poet has ever been able to imagine or foretell history in the minute detail that we find in the Old Testament prophecies. No, there must be another source that gives the knowledge, the revelation. Men mutst have been in touch with the unseen and the eternal, the real, the true, and the everlasting. *Above all, in the coming of our Lord into this world, we see the breaking of the eternal into time. He is the unseen and the invisible become visible; He is the Word made flesh and dwelling among us; He is God manifest in the flesh. We see it in His birth; we see it in the manifestation of His miraculous powers; He said it himself. One day when the people were saying that He was casting our devils by the power of Beelzebub, He refuted the argument and then said, “But if I with the finger of God cast out devils (Luke 11:20).” People were amazed and said that they had seen strange things. They were aware of the supernatural and the eternal-the finger of God. *The power of the eternal is seen above all in our Lord’s resurrection when all the laws of nature were broken. Of course, clever, modern people, even those calling themselves Christians and leader in the Christian church deny a physical resurrection. “You cannot expect modern people to believe that,” they say. I do not expect them to believe it, but I am telling them that if they do not, there is only one end for them. *I do not expect anybody to believe these things. As a natural man, I myself do not believe them. “The natural man receives not the things of the Spirit of God (1 Cor 2:14).” Why not? Because he is a natural man. That is his whole trouble. He is blind, How man a mortal man understand and receive the spiritual unseen and eternal? It cannot be done. Yet the Bible asserts that it has been done: “God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit (1 Cor 2:10).” This is the history that the Bible puts before us. A Gospel that the modern person can accept is, by definition, not a gospel at all; it is politics or sociology or whatever. The very basis of God’s Gospel is that it baffles us, and we can only stand back with Paul and say, “Great is the mystery of godliness (1 Tim 3:16).” We bow down before God in humble worship and praise and adoration.” MLJ--Exposition at ITS FINEST!! ~ (Thank You Kevin Conway )
Posted on: Wed, 24 Jul 2013 20:02:52 +0000
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