Friday, June 01, 2007

The More Things Change ...


Wherever He went He said, “Repent,” which meant, Change your mind, your thinking is wrong, your action is wrong, you have departed from the center of things, your measurements are false, your balances are evil, your judgments are perverted! He flung against the materialized age the force of His spiritual conception. He made heaven’s light break upon earth’s darkness. The Voice of God sounded again in the deeps of human nature, and o’re all the region as He passed, men felt the atmosphere of heaven enwrapping them, and they hurried after Him, for never Man spake as He spake. That is the deeper secret in the ministry of Jesus. He was a voice from God, nay, the very Word of God incarnate, speaking in the syllables of human speech, and yet with all the force of infinite truth. What are men to do with that truth? My brethren, then as today, men standing in the presence of Christ have but one alternative. They must do one of two things. They must either crown Him or crucify Him. There is no middle course. And if you ask me why they crucified Christ, I tell you it was because they declined to submit themselves to the spiritual conceptions which He proclaimed, because they would have none of his views of things, because in their deepest heart, notwithstanding all their religiousness, they were godless. And when they silenced that voice, they silenced the voice of the infinite. When they took that Man to the cross, they flung out the One Who had offended them by revealing the fact that all their thinking and all their life were false.

And yet again. The Cross of Jesus viewed from the Divine side was the logical issue of His own teaching. He Who might have summoned the legions of heaven to His side submitted to the Cross, and so by a mystery of healing love transformed the world’s curse into God’s benediction.


The very spear that pierced His side
Drew forth the blood to save.


All this was utterly beyond their comprehension. All this they could not answer, nor did they see the faintest gleam of it’s light. They were scandalized in Him, and crucified Him; and the Cross became the stumbling block, the offense, the scandal of the age.

Men are still enslaved, waste and want abound on every hand. I need not stay with it's description. What I want to say is this, that everything Jesus stood for, and everything that the cross really means as to deep underlying principle, is as unpopular today as when Jesus was crucified. The age is not Christianized. The thinking of the age, the planning of the age, the policy of the age are not Christian, and the scandal of the Cross has not ceased. This living Christ of God, dying on the Cross, is as much crucified in our midst today as He was of old.
--G. Campbell Morgan

Yeah, this was G. Campbell Morgan day. I'm reading through his works now, don't be surprised to see more of it.

And He said to me, Son of man, all My Words which I speak to you, receive into your heart, and hear with your ears. Ezekiel 3:10

Son of man, you dwell in the midst of a rebellious house. They have eyes to see, but they do not see; they have ears to hear, but they do not hear; for they are a rebellious house. Ezekiel 12:2

The one having ears to hear, let him hear.Matthew 11:15

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