Is Christianity worthy of god? - Chambers, Oswald
YMCA hut , Zeitoun, Egypt , April 10, 1917
Is Christianity worthy of god?
2 Corinthians 5:18–21
The redemption is gods battle unto death with sin.
Dr. Forsyth
There is a presentation of Christianity which is senti-mental and weak and unworthy of god; the Christianity of the new testament is something angels desire to look into. God has paid the price of redeeming a race that had become degenerate; he is not going to redeem it, he has redeemed it. The gospel is just that good news about god, that he has redeemed the human race. God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself. . . . Is the gospel, as it is popularly presented, good news about god, or is it a misrepresentation of god? It is not good news about god unless it presents the revelation that god has put the basis of human life on redemption. The redemption means a great deal more than my personal salvation and yours, that is a mere outcome; pseudo-evangelism is apt to make it the great thing. The great thing according to the new testament is not that the redemption touches me, but that it avails for the whole human race. The cross is not the cross of a martyr: it is the mirror of the nature of god focused in one point of history. If i want to know what god is like, i see it in the cross. Jesus Christ is not someone who leads me to god: either he is god, or i have none.
1. Christs cross the conscience of the human race
How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal spirit offered himself without blemish unto god, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living god? (Hebrews 9:14 RV )
If we do not take as much pains that our conscience is true, the pains we take to be true to our conscience is wasted.
Dr. Forsyth
Christianity is not consistency to conscience or to convictions; Christianity is being true to Jesus Christ. Over and over again a mans personal relationship to Jesus Christ gets into his convictions and splits them, like new wine put into old wine-skins, and if he sticks to his convictions before long he will become anti- Christ. The standard for my conscience and for the conscience of the whole human race is the cross, and if i do not take care to rectify my individual conscience by the cross i become persnickety and end in criticising god. The standard for the christian is never is this thing right or wrong? But, is it related to the blood and passion and agony of the cross of Christ? Does it identify itself with the death of self-realisation? Wherever Christianity has ceased to be vigorous it is because it has become christian ethics instead of the christian evangel. People will listen more readily to an exposition of the sermon on the mount than they will to the meaning of the cross; but they forget that to preach the sermon on the mount apart from the cross is to preach an impossibility. What is the good of telling me to love my enemies and that blessed are the pure in heart? You may talk like that to further orders, but it does not amount to anything. Jesus Christ did not come to teach men to be or do any of these things: he did not come primarily to teach, he came to make a man the possessor of his own disposition, the disposition portrayed in the sermon on the mount. The conscience of the race, i. E. , the standard whereby men are judged, is the cross. I do not make my own conscience the standard, or the sermon on the mount the standard; the cross of Christ, not his teaching, is the central thing, and what god condemns in the cross is his standard for me. My conscience may be a competitor against Jesus Christ; i may be conscientious to the backbone, as Saul of tarsus was, and be anti-Christ. (i verily thought with myself, that i ought to do many things contrary to the name of Jesus of nazareth acts 26:9. ) the conscientious objector takes as his standard, not the cross which is a cruel thing, a thing which sheds blood and blasts life but the teachings of Jesus, which have no meaning apart from his cross, consequently he is in danger of becoming a bloodless kind of individual. Immediately you come face to face with realities there has to be war to the death. It is absurd to call Christianity a system of non-resistance; the great doctrine of Christianity is resistance unto blood against sin. If a man does not resist physically it is only in order that he may resist all the more morally; where moral resistance does not tell, then physical resistance must. Take our lord himself, we read that he went into the temple and cast out them that sold and bought, overthrew the tables of the money-changers, and in a voice of thunder ordered the whole crowd out. Is he the meek and mild and gentle Jesus there? Up to the time of the war we had a Christianity that had lost the element of fight, the element of grit and judgement; the war has brought back these elements. There is something appalling about human life, and if we make our own private conscience the standard and remain in the offing on the conscientious line, we shall come under the curse of meroz who came not to the help of the lord . . . Against the mighty. My aim is not to be the saving of my own soul, getting myself put right for heaven, but battling to the death for what the cross of Christ stands for. The great thing is not the teaching of Jesus, but what he came to do for the human race, viz. , to make the way back to god. It cost him his life to do it, and the writer to the Hebrews says, consider him . . . Lest ye be wearied and faint in your minds. Ye have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin. Have i got the iron of the cross of Christ into my conscience, or am i a weak sentimentalist, kind and generous, but with nothing of the nature of the cross in me? Is there anything in me that would go to the death for Jesus Christs sake, or do i easily knuckle under because i base all on the teachings of Jesus instead of on his cross? Conscientiousness is an ingredient in human nature, but the first and foremost relationship in Christianity is the sovereign preference for Jesus Christ.
2. Christs cross the consecration of the human race
For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, god sending his own son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh. (Romans 8:3)
The process and progress of the kingdom of god in history only unfolds this final achievement of his universal person.
Dr. Forsyth
The cross of Christ consecrated the human race to god, and the human race cannot be run with success on any other line we are certain it can. It cannot be run on imperial lines or democratic lines, it can only be run on the lines on which Jesus Christ consecrated it.
Where it touches my individual life is that in the cross god condemned sin in the flesh, not sins. Sins i look after; sin god looks after. The redemption deals with sin. When the disposition of sin rules in my body it takes my organs and uses them for lust. Lust means, i will satisfy myself; whether i satisfy myself on a high or a low level makes no difference, the principle is the same. It is the exercise of my claim to my right to myself, and that has to go; in the final wind-up of the human race there wont be a strand of it left. Where we blunder is in confounding regeneration with the redemption; the experience of regeneration is rare, the majority of men dont come anywhere near it, but that does not alter the fact of the redemption. The meaning of regeneration is that in my actual life i become of some account to Jesus Christ, i become his disciple, and recognise that my body is the temple of the holy ghost. We say we can do what we like with our bodies, we cannot. If i try to satisfy any appetite on the basis of my right to myself, it means there is a spirit of antagonism to Jesus Christ at work in me; if i recognise that my body is the temple of the holy ghost, it is a sign that my life is based on the cross.
3. Christs cross the concentration of the human race
knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed. (Romans 6:6)
Man kinds acquirement of its soul is Christs moral and bloody victory worked into detail; his justice made to triumph and sin made to yield its opposite.
Dr. Forsyth
There are two mystical bodies, the body of Christ and the body of sin, both are outside me. The disposition of sin inside me, called the old man, connects me with the body of sin; when i am born from above i have the disposition of holiness imparted to me, and this connects me with the body of Christ and i go to the death of the old man and in this way the body of sin is going to be destroyed. Sanctification is not a question of being delivered from hell, but of identifying myself with the death of Christ. Am i based in the moral centre of my life on the cross of Christ? Have i ever been moved for one second by the cross? Those of us who are Christians ought to give a great deal more time to thinking on the fundamentals of our religion. Take it in your actual life, if you are not delivered from any particular element of sin, the reason is either you don’t believe god can deliver you or you don’t want him to. Immediately you want him to deliver you, the power of god is yours and it is done, not presently, but now, and the manifestation is wonderful. Let a man give up the right to himself to Jesus Christ, and the efficacy of his redemption works out instanter.