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Sarah Stickfort

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Ron Mills' Story - At the age of 22 I started to consider suicide as an answer to feelings of hopelessness. By the time I was 23 I would get brief periods of wondering “is this all there is to life?" I remember going to night clubs after drug use and drinking and just standing amongst hundreds of people and feeling very alone and tired of life. There had to be more to this Life (more...)

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 Baptism

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Is going to the doctor a sign of a lack of faith?

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Tom Bentley

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Does the doctrine of the Eternal Sonship of the Second Person of the Divine Trinity involve inferiority or subsequence to the Son?

It is on such strange affirmations that the deniers of the Eternal Sonship of our Lord rest their theories, and is exactly what the arch- heretic, Anus, rested on to deny the deity of the Son. But what is eternal cannot be subsequent to anything, and what is divine cannot be inferior to anything, and the Son partakes of the whole Divine Essence equally with the Father and Spirit. Really Anus was more subject to the Scriptures than the present-day deniers we refer to, for he saw that the Lord’s Sonship, as prior to His incarnation, was so clearly revealed in the Word of God that it could not be denied. His only escape from the dilemma he had manufactured for himself was then to deny the Lord’s deity. He was exceedingly exalted, but because He was clearly said to be the only-begotten Son, and that long before He came into the world, there must have been a time when He was not begotten, and therefore did not exist.

By the mercy of God the followers of Mr. J. Taylor do not, up to now, deny the deity of the Lord; therefore they must invent another loop-hole of escape: the Lord was only Son as the result of incarnation. It is really fortunate that Anus is not still in the flesh, for one would tremble for this whole company in face of his sophistries, to which they seem to have some strange affinity. It is hard to conceive of men, with any pretence to weighing the words of Scripture, being satisfied with the reasonings they allege, involving as they do the modelling of the Divine and Eternal relations in the Godhead on the human and temporary expedients of earthly relationship. The human relations of any father and son, involve, so they assert, inferiority in the son, therefore the Divine relations of Father and Son must also involve inferiority in the Son, as though anyone thought of the eternal generation of the Son in terms of the human. It is a complete reversal of the true order of things.

Sonship in its highest possible human development, that is where all thought of even a conventional inferiority of the son has passed from view, is only a faint shadow of the Eternal and Divine Sonship, where neither subsequence nor inferiority could have ever existed. When the Lord claimed in John . 17, to have worked also, as the Father (“My Father worketh hitherto and I work”), the Jews sought the more to kill Him, because such words could only mean that, by speaking of Himself in the same breath with God as His Father, He did clearly assert His equality with the Father, and our Lord accepted the inference, while asserting that such equality did not preclude subordination for mutual purposes. If the Lord was only Speaking of a relation established on the earthly plane at Bethlehem, then, according to these teachers, He would not have been equal to His Father and proves by their own showing that He was speaking of Divine relationships existing before His birth. It is surprising that any Christian teacher should fail to differentiate between eternity and the divine on the one hand and time and the human on the other, and try to import into the former, ideas attaching to the latter.

W.H,

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Why does it state in Matthew 27:28" TARGET="_blank">Matthew 27:28 that they put on our Lord “a scarlet robe” and in John 19:2" TARGET="_blank">John 19:2 “a purple robe”?

Are the references to the same garment, and if so, why are they said to be of different colours?

I do not think it is possible to evade the difficulty by maintaining that the reference is to two different robes, for in both cases we read that those who thus clothed our Lord in mockery were the soldiers present at the trial, and the circumstances are the same. But the word translated, “robe,” is not the same in the two passages. That employed by John is quite a general word, rather like our word “garment” or “clothes,” whereas the “Matthew” word is particularly used for an official military cloak. Some such old uniform might, as has been remarked, be easily found by the soldiers in the Pretoria or barracks, and would be scarlet, the usual colour worn by high Roman officials. Here the word for “scarlet” (kokkinë) is a very definite word. The word translated “purple,” on the contrary, is very indeflnite. We might almost say that the “John” word could be adequately translated “bright colour,” while the “Matthew” word gives the exact tint—scarlet. We may add that the word translated, “gorgeous,” in reference to the robe (again another word) in which Herod arrayed our Lord (Luke 23:11)," TARGET="_blank">Luke 23:11), does not specify its colour, but rather its brilliancy; it was probably made of some tissue of metallic lustre. I do not think it the least probable that this was the robe in which the soldiers dressed our Lord; it would be very unlikely that they would have access to that. It seems to have been rather a gift worthy of the acceptance of Pilate, and indeed a feeler for his friendship. Thus are the quarrels of the world patched up in a shallow and unrighteous fashion, but the hatred at the bottom of the heart remains.

W.H.

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CHRIST’S PRIESTHOOD
When did the High Priesthood of Christ begin, at the offering of Himself on the cross, or upon His sitting down at God’s right hand?

If I were to ask, at what point in the record given us in the 8th and 9th chapters of Leviticus did the high priesthood of Aaron begin, I should probably receive various replies. Some possibly would tell me that he was high priest from the very beginning of the first day of the eight mentioned in these chapters, when he was put forward, before the congregation (chap. 8. 2-5), as the one God had “called” (Hebrews 5:4)" TARGET="_blank">Hebrews 5:4) for the position. Others might say that his priesthood should be reckoned from after the bathing, and clothing, and anointing, and offering (including that of the ram of consecration) on that first day had been completed. Others still might think that only at the end of the seven “days of consecration” (chap. 8. 3) could he be called high priest; while some perhaps would suggest that his priesthood did not effectively begin until he commenced to act on the people’s behalf during the transactions of the eighth day (chap. 9. 15). If I got these replies, could I say that any of them was entirely wrong? I do not think so.

Let us then see what the Hebrews epistle has to tell us about the beginning of the High Priesthood of Christ. In Hebrews 9:11," TARGET="_blank">Hebrews 9:11, after a description of the ministry of the Old Testament high priests, we read, “But Christ having (R.V.) come a High Priest . . . entered in . . . having obtained eternal redemption.” Here the expression “having come a High Priest” seems to suggest that, right from the commencement of His Activities in connection with obtaining redemption, He was acting in priestly character; and definitely so, before He “entered in.” Then in Hebrews 2:17" TARGET="_blank">Hebrews 2:17 we get, “It behoved Him to be made like unto His brethren, that He might become (see Greek, or Newberry) a. . . High Priest . . . to make propitiation (R.V.) for the sins of the people.” In this passage His becoming High Priest is made consequent on His having been made “like unto His brethren,” and yet it was as High Priest that He made propitiation for sins. Again, in Hebrews 6:20" TARGET="_blank">Hebrews 6:20 (R.V.) we read, “Whither as a forerunner Jesus entered for us, having become a High Priest”; which appears to imply that His “entering” followed immediately upon His becoming Priest. Next, in Hebrews 5:10," TARGET="_blank">Hebrews 5:10, after having “learned obedience by the things which He suffered” (this, in light of Phil 2:8" TARGET="_blank">Phil 2:8 surely including His death), and after having thus been “made perfect”; He is then “named (R.V.) of God a High Priest after the order of Melchizedek,” probably in the sense that there was a proclamation of His Priesthood at His ascension. Lastly, in Hebrews 8:4" TARGET="_blank">Hebrews 8:4 we are told that His Priesthood is not “on earth,” and in Hebrews 7:26" TARGET="_blank">Hebrews 7:26 that it is in a sphere where He is “separated (R.V.) from sinners, and made higher than the heavens.”

In view of all this, would I be safe in setting down as wrong: (1) the person who says that when Christ offered up Himself He was Priest as well as Sacrifice; or (2) the person who tells me that His Priesthood is part of the outcome of His death; or (3) the person who states that for the exercise of His Priesthood, He required to be where He now is, in the heavenly Sanctuary? In each case, I do not think so.

W.R.

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What are we to gather from the scriptural reference to Melchizedek?

Was he a man of God of his time—a priest of the Most High, indeed, or was he actually the Son of God?

In dealing with this perennial question one wishes to recognize the views of some esteemed brethren who take a contrary view to that expressed here. They believe that this was a Theophany or appearance of the Second Person of the Godhead in a temporary human form (all such theophanies being necessarily Christophanies), and that Melchizedek was actually the Son of God. But is there nothing in the fact that he is said to have been made “like unto the Son of God”? You don’t say a man is like himself; he is himself, but he may closely resemble someone else. However, many such theophanies occur to us—the man who wrestled with Jacob at Jabbok, the man with sword in hand who appeared to Joshua, the angels who appeared to Gideon and Manoah, etc.

One thing characterises them all. At first the appearance seems only human—an ordinary man, but at the end the superhuman, nay the Divine, character of the appearance is manifested. Note this in each of the cases referred to above. This is entirely absent in the case before us. In no sense are we informed that Abraham recognised Melchizedekas Divine, but he did recognise him as a king and as a priest of the Most High God, who ministered to his bodily needs and was greater than himself, therefore able to bless him and worthy to receive tithes from him. Again, Christ might have appeared as a King, but surely not as King of a well-known place as Salem or Jerusalem. Whoever Melchizedek was, his office as priest only shews that God in calling Abraham for a certain object, had not for that left all the world in darkness, but still had notable witnesses, outside His purpose concerning His chosen people to be. Those who stand for the deity of Melchizedek rely much on the expressions used by the Spirit of him in Hebrews 7" TARGET="_blank">Hebrews 7: , and make rather “in and out” efforts to shew how each expression applies to Christ. I believe the whole effort is in vain, for these expressions if forced to apply to Christ must be interpreted either of Him in incarnation or of Him before incarnation, and this cannot be done.

As a matter of fact, I believe there is one point and only one which the Holy Ghost would emphasise by His silence in Genesis 14" TARGET="_blank">Genesis 14:  concerning the parentage, genealogy, birth and death of Melchizedek, and that is the conventIonal continuity and endless character of His priesthood. The meaning is not that this man was actually without parents nor that he is alive somewhere to-day, but that by the fact that he appears suddenly on the page of Scripture and that no mention is made of his decease, he is thus qualified to be an apt figure of Him Who is Priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek and Whose Priesthood can never pass to another.

W.H.

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