STUDIES IN THE BIBLE.

REVIEW.

We have endeavored thus faithfully to trace the doctrine of retribution for sin, as it is unfolded in the Scriptures, and to place it side-by-side with that other great feature of the divine administration, the purpose of redemption. And we have done this in the interest of the many sad and earnest souls who fervently believe the Bible to be the Word of God, and who yet are painfully oppressed in receiving its teachings about retribution because they have failed to see how these are balanced and explained by the other side of the divine dealings in redemption.

And yet these two sides are presented to us at the very outset of revelation On the one side Adam is sentenced to what appears to be a hopeless doom. He was to die and to return to dust. No intimation is given in the sentence that this destruction was not to be final. And yet a gleam of hope is afterwards given in the promise of a conquering Seed who should bruise the serpent's head. Later on, Abraham is called to become the father of the promised seed. And it is repeatedly declared that in him and in his seed all the families of the earth should be blessed.

We began these inquiries with the conviction that God's promises cannot mean less than they convey, and that when He says "all "He means all. Hitherto the church seems to have found no middle ground between a crude universalism, which both reason and

Scripture condemn, and the hopeless damnation of that immense proportion of mankind who have died in their sins. It has therefore been compelled to divest the future resurrectiou of this class of every element of hope. It has thus failed to recognize one of the most vital and fundamental features in God's unfolding plan, viz., that resurrection, as a recovery of man out of that death-state into which sin has cast him, is essentially redemptive. She has therefore failed to see that this provision to restore all men to another life is His way of making good His original promise to bless all mankind. This does not imply that all shall at last attain eternal life and blessedness.

But

it does mean that this is not His final administration of grace toward lost men. It means that death cannot defeat His purpose to bless all generations, but that He will bring from the land of the enemy, and within the sphere of His economy of grace and power, those whom it has not here reached, and whom His just judgments have for their sins consigned to death and hell.

These two principles, that His retributions for sin are fixed and inevitable, but that death, sin's wages, cannot snatch His creatures out of His hands nor de

feat His purposes, we have traced through the Scriptures. We have found that He is the God of the dead, as well as of the living, and that all His great promises of blessing pre-suppose, and require for their fulfilment, the resurrection of the dead.

Beginning with that profound passage, the Song of Moses (Deut. xxxii), we found that it was built up around these two principles, and that they furnish

lowest hell (vs. 22). And

the key to the "secret things" stored up among its treasures. God's providential dealings with the world of mankind, and especially with His chosen people, are there brought to view. The claims of His righteousness, which require that they, and that all nations, be adjudged to calamities and to death for their sins, are impressively set forth. The fire of His anger must burn against them to the yet He asserts His power over all the enemies who had brought them into this sad plight, and even over death. He who kills can make alive. And He who gave such fearful power to "the enemy and the avenger "must revenge Himself even against him, and bring in a salvation in which all nations should rejoice with His people. And that the "all nations" signified are not merely the nations of some future millenial period, but the nations also who had suffered these visitations of His anger, and gone down to captlvity in death, is implied in the whole tenor of the passage. This is the very hidden truth it contains, the precious secret sealed up among its treasures (vs. 34) that, although God must allow the adversary to people his realms with prisoners, and death to lead down to hell its multitude of captives, yet even these enemies should be compelled to give back their trophies, and be consumed in the wrathful fires themse.ves had kindled.

These twin facts of judgment and redemption are illustrated in all Old Testament history. They are amplified in all subsequent psalm and prophecy. All intelligent readers of the Bible confess this. But all do not see that these principles overleap the bounds of

death and govern God's administrations in the ages to come. And few see that this must necessarily be so. For otherwise His great promises must be miserably diminished and His purposes thwarted. And few see that His purpose in saving a chosen seed in this age has relation to His wider purpose to bless "all the nations of the earth" in an age to come. But with this key in hand, and with the firm conviction that death cannot defeat God nor annul the least of His promises, we have been enabled to find in the Old Testament abundant hints and suggestions and direct declarations of His purpose to bring future blessing to all mankind through their resurrection from the dead.

We have seen, on the one hand, that the Bible throughout reveals a definite penalty for sin Wicked men and nations must go down to sheol. There they are held as captives-prisoners in the pit where no water is. Many Old Testament passages view this prison as a place of silence and of gloom in which the dead lie either in an unconscious state, or at best in "the miserable consciousness of not being." It is only in the New Testament that Hades is viewed as a place of torment. But this torment seems to be but the accompaniment of that destructive process which goes on there to the destruction of even the soul in hell, until nothing of man is left but a naked spirit in the outer darkness. But many Old Testament allusions to this bondage in death imply that God's pity would not forsake them even here, although driven out to the "outmost parts of heaven" (Deut. xxx. 4). "For the Lord shall judge His people, and repent

Himself for His servants, when He seeth that their power is gone, and there is none shut up, or left" (Deut. xxxii. 36). "Even the captives of the mighty shall be taken away and the prey of the terrible shall be delivered; for I will contend with him that contendeth with thee, and I will save thy children" (Isa. xlix. 25). An extended examination of the Psalms and Prophets has shown us that the captives so often referred to as the future subjects of delivering mercy are the captives in the realms of death. All minor captivities prefigure this one. Hence these captives are often spoken of as the children of death (Ps. lxxix. 11, cii. 20). They are viewed as captives in the land of the enemy, whom the Lord should ransom from the hand of one stronger than they (Jer. xxxi. II, 16). And that unregenerate men are made the subjects of this recovery is plain from the fact that this is the very class in view in all these passages, which speak first of the sins which consigned them to this captivity, and of their subsequent release. In Hosea xiii it is manifestly the apostate Israel, whom the Lord had rejected from being His people, the Ephraim, joined to his idols, of whom He afterwards declares, "I will ransom them from the power of the grave (sheol). I will redeem them from death; O death where are thy plagues? O Sheol where is thy destruction? repentance shall be hid from mine eyes." We have found that restoration from this bondage is promised, in due time and order, to even sinful nations that debauched and oppressed Israel, and who had been destroyed under the heaviest hand of God's judgments,