The ancient gods are dead. No Eoman despot sits on heaven's throne, Dispensing favours by his will alone; Sends some to heaven and some to lowest hell, In unprogressive woe or bliss to dwell ; Demands no horrid sacrifice of blood, Nor nails his victims to the cruel wood
In others' guilty stead.
1 G. S. Barrett
138 WHAT MUST I DO TO BE SAVED?
The ancient gods are dead. Law rules majestic in the courts above, And has no moods, but hand in hand with love, Sweeps thro' the universe, and smiling sees The spheres obedient to her vast decrees, Proclaims all men the sons not slaves of God. And breathes the message of His Fatherhood.
The true God is not dead.
(2) " But," you say, " I may not have been happy in expressing myself. Perhaps I ought to say that it is the justice of God from which I desire to be saved. This may be the better word." The justice of God ? Saved from the justice of God ? Why, our hope is that equal and exact justice will at last be done everywhere and to all men. Strange that we should want to be delivered from this attribute of God and its operations, unless we are consciously trying to outwit and defraud Him. The trouble is, we have inserted brutality and fiendishness into our conception of justice, and stand trembling before our own caricature. Justice renders to each his due at last — nothing more, nothing less. Justice meets out to each transgression and disobedience a fair recompense of reward — a "just" recompense. Saved from the justice of God? No, God's justice has been the hope of the oppressed in all ages. It is the hope of those who are trodden down to-day. It will work in this world and the next, until all wrongs are righted, till that which is crooked shall have been made straight, till the hills are levelled and the valleys exalted. We sing with Whittier —
We only know that God is just, And every wrong shall die.
We exclaim with Queen Katharine —
Heaven is above all yet ; there sits a judge That no king can corrupt.
(3) " But," you say, " perhaps I have not said what I mean. It is the penalty of sin from which I wish to be saved." Exactly so. You want to be assured that you will not suffer for your sins. You want to be told how the pain and anguish and disgrace attending sin may be removed. You want to know how the
ACTS xvi. 30, 31 139
burden of remorse shall be lifted from your conscience. You want to know how your boat may play upon the current of Niagara above the falls, without taking a plunge over the awful precipice. But this is precisely what cannot be done. There is no salvation from the penalty of sin, in itself considered. Every evil thought, every unkind word, every unmanly deed, will bring, here or hereafter, its just and equitable penalty. This is as certain as sunlight or gravitation.
ii. What Salvation is.
The salvation of Jesus Christ is a great salvation — far greater than most men have ever thought or imagined. It meant and it means a large and many-sided experience ; the highest quality and order of human life, the highest character and blessedness which men individually and collectively are capable of reaching and realizing.
T[ I do not know of anything more singular in our English versions than the liberty so deliberately taken with our Lord's use of this familiar word. Every reader of the Greek Testament knows that He used it quite indifferently of the blessed work of recovery whether of body or of soul. (Compare St. Luke vii. 50 with viii. 48, where the whole formula is exactly the same.) Every one who speaks English knows that we habitually use the word " save " for any kind of rescue — from fire, from drowning, from any danger of bodily destruction, just as much as from moral and spiritual ruin and death. Yet in the Gospels the word is regularly mistranslated "made whole," when it refers to a healing of the body. The Authorized Version, indeed, had permitted the proper word to stand in one instance, St. Luke xviii. 42, and even this one exception was invaluable for teaching purposes. Now, alas, even this lapse into accuracy has been obliterated by the Eevised Version. It is quite true that when a person is " saved " from the misery of blindness, or the torment of disease, he may almost equally well be said to be " made whole." But it is not a question of what our Lord might have said, but of what He did say. He did not, as a matter of fact, say, " Thy faith hath made thee whole" (which would have required a different Greek word), but " thy faith hath saved thee " ; and in altering His words, the translators have given a rendering which is inaccurate; and this is so unlike the authors of the Revised Version in general that one is naturally led to suppose that it was done under the pressure of some very strong theological
140 WHAT MUST I DO TO BE SAVED?
pre-possession. But these pre-possessions have no place in the work of translating the Scriptures.1