"What is Man?"
"When I consider
Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon
and the stars, which Thou hast ordained, what is
man, that Thou art mindful of him, and the son of
man, that Thou visitest him? for Thou hast made
him a little lower than the angels, and hast
crowned him with glory and honor; Thou madest him
to have dominion over the work of Thy hands; Thou
hast put all things under his feet; all sheep and
oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field, the fowl
of the air, and the fish of the sea, and
whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas;
O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is Thy name in
all the earth!"--Psalm 8:3-9.
THE
SUGGESTION of the Prophet respecting man is one
which we believe has occurred to every
intelligent being. As one upon the deep looks out
upon the vast expanse of water and the riding of
the vessel upon it, he thinks, How little is
man! How small a speck in the Universe! When we
look up into the heavens and realize that they
represent so much more of Divine power, we
are still more surprised. When we consider
the heavens, and realize that all these stars,
except the planets which belong to our own
system, are really suns, and that around
each of these suns revolve planets, as our earth
revolves around our sun, and when we think of the
number of these suns and their planets, we are amazed,
and we feel our own littleness all the more!
We ask
astronomers as to the number of these
suns, and they tell us that there are a hundred
millions of them in sight. And if we would
average the planets around these hundred million
suns at ten, it would be ten hundred millions of
planets. And then they tell us, further, that if
we could take our stand upon the very farthermost
one of these we would see still beyond us as many
more, and as many more.
Our minds
are appalled as we begin to think of the heavens,
the work of God's fingers, and then consider man,
how small a work in God's sight! We have an
appreciation then of what the Scriptures say man
is like in God's sight--as "the dust in the
balance," that is not worthy to be taken
into account. We have all been in the grocer's
shop and noticed that he pays no attention to the
dust in the scoop of his scale. So man is so
small in the sight of the great Creator that we
wonder that God should have any interest at all
in humanity.
"THOU MADEST HIM TO
HAVE DOMINION"
Except
for the Bible we should have no knowledge of
God's interest in us, and we might think that God
is so great that He would pay no heed to us. But,
when God reveals Himself to us in the Bible, we
begin to see that there is not only Divine power
exercised and manifested in the creation of all
these worlds, but we see also this Divine power
manifested in God's dealings with us, and also
the love of God, which the Scriptures
state "passeth all understanding." What
wonderful condescension on the part of the
Creator that He should give heed to us!
But our
text goes on to give us further information on
this subject: "What is man that Thou art
mindful of him, and the son of man that Thou
visitest him? for Thou hast made him a little
lower than the angels." Only a little
lower is the thought! Of the holy angels the
Scriptures give us to understand there are
various ranks, some higher and some lower, but
all perfect. Then in the world we have various
orders of animal life--the beast of the field,
the fish of the sea, the fowl of the air--and
man, as the highest of these earthly beings; and
he stands related to all these lower creatures as
God does to the entire Universe; and this is the
honor with which our great Creator endowed His
human creatures!
So we are
told in this Psalm, "Thou madest him to have
dominion over the works of Thy hands; Thou hast
put all things under his feet." What a
wonderful creature man is, then, from this
standpoint! While he is a little lower than the
angels, so far as his nature in connection with
the earth is concerned, and whereas the angels
are more excellent so far as their natures are
concerned, this Psalm speaks of man as being
superior in that he has a dominion. The angels do
not have dominion over other angels, but all are
subject to the great Creator, God.
But man,
in the likeness of his Creator, has been given a
dominion over the lower creatures, and in this
respect it is a wonderful honor with which he has
been crowned --"Thou crownedst him with
glory and honor, and hast set him over the works
of Thy hands."
It might
be asked with great propriety, If God is thus
careful of humanity and has so highly honored His
human creatures, why should He not have made a
still better preparation for them in the world?
Why is it that they are subject to the
unfavorable conditions under which they now
exist? Why are there sorrow, pain, sighing,
crying and dying? Why are there tempests, storms,
cyclones and tornadoes, famine, drought and
pestilence-- why all these things if God is so
careful of us as His creatures?
We would
have no answer for all these questions were it
not provided in the Bible. In this wonderful Book
of all books, we have the key to the matter, the
explanation, and that is: God provided originally
that man should be subject to none of these
difficulties and disasters. Man was made perfect
and placed in favorable and perfect surroundings,
in a perfect garden, eastward in Eden, with
everything necessary for his welfare--no storms,
no sickness, no tempests, no difficulties--and he
might have lived forever. Such was the wonderful
dominion of this human son of God.
Why,
then, the change? This wonderful Book answers
that the change all came about because of sin.
And so we read: "By one man's disobedience
sin entered into the world (there was no sin in
the world before), and death as a result of
sin." (Rom. 5:12.) There was no dying on the
part of man until sin came. So all the aches,
pains, sorrows and sicknesses which we experience
are parts of this dying process. And so the
difficulty with us all is that by nature we are
"children of wrath."
Is Divine
wrath eternal torture? No, indeed! That teaching
was handed down to us, perhaps, by our
well-meaning forefathers. The wrath of God, we
see on every hand; as the Apostle Paul declares,
"The wrath of God is revealed"--in our
own bodies, our aches and pains, mental
imperfections, physical imperfections and moral
imperfections--these are all parts of this great
penalty for sin. We read that when man became a
transgressor God sent a holy angel to drive our
first parents out from the Garden of Eden, away
from the trees of life that were to sustain them
in perfection, out into the unfinished earth.
While the
whole earth could just as easily have been made
perfect, God left it unfinished, unprepared for
man, and merely "prepared a garden eastward
in Eden" for the trial of our first parents,
because Divine wisdom foresaw that man would sin;
and instead of making the whole earth perfect,
God left it in an imperfect condition, except the
Garden of Eden. So we read that when God thrust
our first parents out of the Garden of Eden, He
said, "Cursed is the earth [not I will it
unfit, but it is already] for thy sake,
thorns and thistles shall it bring forth, and in
the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread until
thou return to the ground; for out of it wast
thou taken, for dust thou art, and unto dust
shalt thou return." In other words, the
great penalty against our race is a death
penalty--"Dying, thou shalt die."
(Gen. 2:17.) This has been upon our race for six
thousand years, from the time that sin entered
into the world. So all the pages of history from
Adam's day to this are marked with sin and
sorrow, pain and sighing, because we are all
sinners; and because we are sinners, God
is treating us according to His own purpose,
"Dying, thou shalt die." But
this is the sad side of the matter. Is there no
other side, is there no hope for us? The
same blessed Book--the Bible--tells us. The
Gospel Message, which signifies "good
tidings," declares that God has some good
message for those whom He condemned to death.
THE GOSPEL MESSAGE?
We
inquire, What is this good message? The
Scriptures answer that the good message is that
He who condemned us as unfit for eternal life has
provided for our redemption; that His Son became
our Redeemer; that Christ died, the "Just
for the unjust," that He might bring all
back into harmony with God. O, some may say, but
did not Jesus die eighteen hundred or more years
ago? Yes, truly. And have we not the same reign
of sin and death as then? Yes. Where, then, is
the blessing which was to come through Jesus?
Well, we answer, a two-fold blessing has been
provided. First of all, there is a blessing of
hope, which some of God's people enjoy, a
blessing of knowledge, that in God's "due
time" He will bring in the wonderful things
of which this Gospel Message tells.
God
having provided a Redeemer, there will be a
resurrection of the dead; they shall not remain
dead, but come forth. There shall be a New
Dispensation, a glorious morning, in which all
sin and sorrow will be done away. So the
Scriptures assure us of that time that there
shall be no more sighing, no more crying, no more
dying, because all the former things, all the
things of sin, the things of death, will have
passed away.
HE
CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION"
And, we
inquire, who is so powerful as to overthrow sin
and death, and lift up humanity and bring them
back from sin and weakness and imperfection and
death? The Bible answers this question, that the
One who will do this is the Great One who sits
upon the Throne of God; as we read, "He that
sitteth upon the Throne said, Behold, I make all
things new!"
But who
is this? O, the very same One, who, by the grace
of God, became our Redeemer--Jesus. He is to be
the great King of kings and Lord of lords, and is
to "reign from sea to sea, and from the
river to the ends of the earth." And under
the blessed influence of that Kingdom the full
blessing of God will come to the earth again!
"All the blind eyes shall be opened, and all
the deaf ears shall be unstopped." "The
glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh
shall see it together." These are words of
the Prophets given to us for our hope and the
strengthening of our hearts, that we might turn
from sin and become more and more the children of
God.
We have
referred to the world and how it is to be blessed
by the Messianic Kingdom, the Kingdom of God's
dear Son, the Kingdom for which Jesus taught us
to pray, "Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done
on earth as it is done in heaven." But we
see not all these things accomplished yet. We see
not mankind brought back to perfection, nor the
promise of the good tidings fulfilled amongst
men. But we have a word from the Apostle upon
this subject. He said, "But we see not yet
all things put under man"; they are still
out of harmony. But, says the Apostle, we see a
beginning of God's work; we see Jesus, who,
"by the grace of God, has tasted death for
every man." We see more than that. More than
eighteen hundred years have passed. Not only has
Jesus tasted death, but a great many have been
going into death, in answer to the call to be of
the Bride of Christ, the Church of the
First-born, to be associated with our Lord. This
is the Church we sing about in our hymn:--
"The
Church's one Foundation,
Is Jesus Christ her Lord;
She is His New Creation
By water and the Word.
From heaven He came and sought her
To be His holy Bride;
With His own blood He bought her,
And for her life He died."
This,
then, is the first work of God in the redemption
of mankind--the gathering of the Bride of Christ,
the Church, to share in His glory, honor and
immortality. We hope to be of this class; and to
this class belong the great promises that they
shall share with Him in the First Resurrection,
and then bless all the families of the earth with
restitution. The world of mankind is to be
restored to all that Adam had and lost, for all
of which Jesus died at Calvary; and associated
with Him will be the Church, called out of the
world, a saintly class who have been walking in
the footsteps of Jesus; as we read again,
"Blessed and holy are they who have part in
the First Resurrection, on such the Second Death
hath no power; they shall be priests of God and
of Christ, and shall reign with Him a thousand
years."--Rev. 20:6.
This will
be the thousand years of Messiah's reign, the
thousand years of the world's uplift, the
thousand years in which Satan will be bound, the
thousand years in which knowledge shall fill the
whole earth, the thousand years in which the
earth shall be brought to the Paradisaic
condition, which was symbolically represented in
the Garden of Eden--and when every creature in
heaven and earth and under the earth shall be
brought to that glorious condition where they
will sing praises to God that sitteth upon the
Throne, and to the Lamb, for ever and ever.
And yet
there is another side; for the same Scriptures
which tell of the exaltation of the Church to
glory and the blessings of the world through the
Kingdom of Messiah, which tell that the earth
will be the Paradise of God--these Scriptures
also tell us of a class of incorrigibles who will
be punished. After this class shall have been
brought to a full knowledge of God and shall
wilfully sin against Divine light and blessings,
the punishment against these will be, not eternal
torment, but struction from the presence
of the Lord and the glory of His power. --I
Thess. 1:9.
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