Men in every age have been impressed by power, for with it go kingdom and glory. It is especially appropriate, therefore, in an atomic age when men believe that mountains are moved by nuclear energy rather than by faith, to proclaim the presence of that greatest power of all—the power that raised Jesus Christ from the dead.
Contemplating that awesome power, the Apostle Paul was willing to forfeit all his own forms of power and glory, count all his spiritual values but refuse, and enter into the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings, if by any means he might “know him, and the power of his resurrection.”
This power is experienced not by those who merely know about Christ but by those who “know him”—not by those who know merely the fact but by those who know “the power of his resurrection.” A religion that is impersonal is only conventional. But Christianity is not conventional, though men are constantly tempted to make it so. The personal knowledge of Christ and of that power that brought him from the dead is no conventional experience. It is one that radically transforms all one’s life—indeed, one’s very being. No conventional religion could have prompted the deeply religious Paul to give up all the religious values he treasured most. Confronted with the possible gain of Christ himself and his resurrection power, Paul was ready for the transaction that called for the unconventional price of “by any means.”
It is a superficial judgment that men in our time are pleasure-motivated and pleasure-mad. The stock evidence that many people spend much time and much money at gaming tables, race tracks, bars, and other places of entertainment is less than convincing. First, because the habitués of these places give few signs of the happiness they pursue; they rather support the thesis of Walter Kerr’s book, The Loss of Pleasure. Secondly, because a look beneath the surface reveals that this is an inverted form of the pursuit of pleasure. It is a pursuit driven by the gnawing belief that no matter how one plays the game of life, the final score is always zero. What is called pleasure is but a pleasure-coated cynicism whose creed is that life is not worth the candle. People in our time pursue pleasure with that insight peculiar to the mad who know that while philosophers may counsel lighting a candle against the darkness, it will be no less dark when the taper flickers and the light goes out. They partake of their pleasures with the joyless satisfaction of the condemned prisoner who eats his better-than-usual dinner, knowing it will be his last. Called pleasure-mad by the conventional and prudent, these people possess that clarity of unrelieved realism expressed by George Bernard Shaw’s statement that life’s ultimate statistic is the same for all men: One out of one dies.
If death is normal, then the bitter cynical realism of these “pleasure-mad” people is valid. Life is indeed a bucket of ashes; and if there be a God, his creation of us is an infinitely dirty trick. If there be neither God nor devil, Cross nor Resurrection, if life is adequately defined by the contents of our daily newspapers, needing no resurrection from the dead, then life is tragic indeed, and more truth is uttered about life in bars and gambling casinos than in the sophisticated salons of shallow social convention.
Even godly men in moments of faithless despondency have seen life as unredeemed and have cursed the day they were born. One of the greatest Old Testament prophets had his moment when he wished he had never seen the light of day and that his mother’s womb had been his grave.
Every man needs to know Christ and the power of His resurrection if he is to escape the cynicism that must come to every thoughtful man apart from Christ, if he is to find his life transformed into something he can accept with joy and live with gladness.
This power is in the world. It returned when the Holy Spirit came on the day of Pentecost. He is the Spirit of the resurrected Christ, and with him there is present, not a similar power, but precisely that same power which raised Christ from the dead. It is this same power that regenerates men, making them new creatures in Christ, participants in life eternal. It is the same power that changed the dead into the living Christ, that gives men that unconventional outlook of faith which overcomes the world, its every hurt, disappointment, even its sin and death. It is this power—and none other—that moved a beleaguered Job to say that though worms should destroy his flesh, “I know that my redeemer liveth”; though God should slay him, “yet will I trust in him.”
This is the kingdom, the power, and the glory that are not of this world but are in it and have been since the day of Pentecost.
The New Immorality
Some years ago on the streets of Havana a sleazy-looking person approached us and asked whether we wanted to see and buy some “feelthy pictures.” We had the same experience several times in Shanghai, the purveyor being a dirty urchin, acting for his master, who revealed just a portion of a suggestive picture with the come-on, “Buy pretty picture?”
At the crossroads of the world these depraved persons pander to the basest instincts of man. In most cases they are to be pitied, not condemned, for they know nothing better. But what raises our indignation to white heat is those who, from a vantage point within the Church, advocate a “new morality” that is sheer sexual license contrary to God’s holy laws. Misinterpreting “love” and rejecting “law,” they give the young people of today an excuse for going the limit with the apparent blessing of the Church.
In regard to a recent gathering of 900 clergymen and students at which some champions of the new immorality had a platform, Time magazine remarked that the notion that we are free to violate all rules as long as we display love for neighbor is “a long thought for an eighteen-year-old during a passionate moment in the back seat of a car.”
Cannot these advocates of the new immorality realize that in rejecting the divine laws of sex they are opening the floodgates to vice never imagined before—an immorality having the stamp of approval of the Christian Church? In the name of agape they are opening wide the door for eros. Having abandoned the Word of God they become a stumbling block to young people who need more guidance in such matters than any previous generation.
This is a time for a burning moral indignation that will at least deliver the Christian Church from the perversion of her message.
How? By repudiating in unmistakable terms any “morality” that conflicts with the clear teachings of divine revelation.
