SALVATION:
PREPARATION FOR ETERNITY; EARTHLY THINGS
It has been suggested here before that life, for all its apparent complexities, is at bottom very simple indeed if we could only realize it. Thank God, only a few things matter. The rest are incidental and unimportant.…
What really matters after all? My personal relation to God matters. That takes priority over everything else. A man may be born in a sanitary hospital, receive his education in progressive schools, ride in an air-conditioned car, sleep on a foam rubber mattress, wear synthetic clothing, eat vitamin-enriched food, read by fluorescent lights, speak across 12,000 miles of empty space to a friend on the other side of the world, lose his anxieties by taking tranquilizing pills, die without pain by the aid of some new drug and be laid to rest in a memorial park as lovely as a country garden; yet what will all this profit him if he must later rise to face in judgment a God who knows him not and whom he does not know? To come at last before the bar of eternal justice with no one to plead his cause and to be banished forever from the presence of the great Judge—is that man any better off than if he had died a naked savage in the hinterlands of Borneo?…
Where can a man find security? Can philosophy help him? or psychology? or science? or “progress”? or atoms or wonder drugs or vitamins? No. Only Christ can help him, and His aid is as old as man’s sin and man’s need. The naked aborigine is as near to God (and as far from Him) as the Ph.D. Nothing new can save my soul; neither can saving grace be modernized. We must each come as Abel came, by atoning blood and faith demonstrated in repentance. No new way has been discovered. The old way is the true way and there is no new way. The Lamb of God was slain “before the foundation of the world.”
Genesis 4:4; Mark 8:36–37; 2 Corinthians 5:10; Hebrews 11:4; 1 Peter 1:19–20
Born After Midnight, 88, 90, 91.