God’s Holiness
One of the most important of God’s attributes is His holiness. Often He is called in Scripture “The Holy One,” especially in the prophecy of Isaiah.
His holiness is very important for us. Without it no one can see God (Heb. 12:14). We must be like Him if ever we are to see Him.
What is God’s holiness? The basic idea of holiness is separation—being set apart. The Old Testament priests were holy—separated in life and calling from all others. Jerusalem was a holy city because it was set apart from all other cities in the world. Our calling to be holy includes separation from the wicked and their deeds (II Cor. 6:14-18).
Jesus, too, is holy. According to Hebrews 7:26 this means that He is “separate from sinners.” There is in Him no sin nor any possibility of sin. To deny this is to deny the holiness of Christ, upon which all our salvation rests.
God’s holiness means that He is the “high and lofty one that inhabiteth eternity” (Isa. 57:15). He is separate in glory from all others: “dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto” (I Tim. 6:16). We may never forget this.
He has revealed that holiness in His holy name (Ps. 111:9). It is separate from all other names, and we must keep it separate by never using it blasphemously or irreverently. How often this is forgotten today—not only in everyday speech, but even in prayer.
His word is holy (Rom. 1:2). Therefore it, too, must be set apart in our thoughts and in our use of it from all the words and wisdom of men.
His day, the Lord’s Day, is a holy day—separate from all other days. It, too, must be kept holy for the glory of God and of our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom it now belongs by right of resurrection.
But this separation has two sides: separation from something and separation unto something.
God’s holiness means that He is separate from all sin—too pure of eyes to behold evil (Hab. 1:13). He has no pleasure in wickedness, neither can evil dwell with Him (Ps. 5:4). It also means that He is consecrated to Himself and to His own glory (Is. 42:8). Thus, He not only separates Himself from all evil, but also resists and destroys it, revealing His glory everywhere.
If we are to be holy, therefore, we must not only be separated from sin, but also separated unto God. For example, merely separating a drunkard from his drunkenness does not make him holy; he must also be separated—consecrated—unto God. So must we be consecrated to Him in everything.
Only then will we be holy as He is holy (I Pet. 1:16). Only then shall we see Him and dwell with Him! Rev. Hanko
Love for Our Enemies (2)
“But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you …” (Luke 6:27).
We began our discussion of this verse in the last issue of the News. You will recall that the heart of the question was this: How can our Lord use the strong word for “love” (agape) when He describes our calling toward the wicked?
The question becomes urgent when we remember that “love” (agape) implies a bond of fellowship between ethically pure people. How, then, can we be called to establish such a bond of fellowship with the wicked? That is what the Lord seems to imply.
In answer to this question, we ought first of all to take note of the fact that we are not to have fellowship with wicked people. The Scriptures are quite clear on that. According to I John 2:15, we are called to “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world.” That is, we must not love wicked people, nor the things they do. This is important, for “If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.”
We are not to be unequally yoked together with unbelievers, for there is no fellowship between righteous and unrighteous, between light and darkness (II Cor. 6:14–15).
We may note in passing that this verse effectively stops the mouths of those who say that we are to love the wicked, but not their wicked deeds—that we are to love the sinner, but not his sin. II Corinthians 6:14 speaks of people: unrighteous people and righteous people. Between them there is no possibility of fellowship, and love (agape) is fellowship.
These passages seem to make the word of our Lord in Luke 6:27–28 all the more difficult to understand. Upon further consideration of His words, however, we can come to a clearer understanding of what they mean—and of their great importance for us as we walk in this world as children of our Father in heaven.
We ought to notice at the very outset that the Lord Himself explains what He means by our calling to love our enemies. We are, says the Lord, to love our enemies by doing “good to them which hate us.”
What does it mean to do good to those who hate us?
From a negative point of view, it means that we are specifically commanded not to hate in return. We may never hate others. We are to love our neighbour as ourselves. We are to bless them that curse us, and pray for them which despitefully use us. And unto him that smiteth us on the one cheek, we are to offer also the other. When one takes away our cloak, we are to give him our coat (Luke 6:28–29).
To do good to others, even to those who hate us, means that we seek the welfare of our enemies.
How, concretely, do we seek the good of others? Does it simply mean that we give food to the hungry, water to the thirsty, try to persuade a drunkard to abandon his liquor, or visit the sick in an effort to heal their illness? That is the message of the “social gospel,” which stands in complete opposition to the gospel of the kingdom.
I well recall that years ago, at a young people’s retreat, the young people were talking about how their Christian calling required them to take groceries to the ghetto so that the poor and starving could eat. I think they expected me to disagree violently. But they had to be told that they should feel perfectly free to do this, if they believed it to be their calling. They also had to remember, however, that this was not really doing good in the biblical sense of the word. To do good meant that when they brought their groceries to the hungry, they would say: “I bring these groceries to you in the name of Christ, who has shown mercy to me. Therefore, in the name of Christ, I call you to repent of your sins and believe in Him, that you may be saved.”
In other words, to do good to others is to seek their salvation. That is truly seeking their good. It is not seeking their good merely by filling their bellies with food while leaving them to go their swift way to destruction.
This does not mean that we can forget to feed them. James makes that clear in his epistle (2:15–16). But it does mean that our help in their physical need is the occasion for bringing them the truth of the gospel. Without the latter, the former means nothing.
Perhaps we ought to say at this point that it is impossible for us to feed the whole world or take the problems of the whole world upon ourselves. It is impossible to love every man in the sense in which Jesus speaks of it here.
That is why this calling is to our neighbour. Our neighbour is the man whom God puts upon our pathway—the person with whom we come into contact, the one who is right there and cannot be ignored. Or, to use the words of Jesus, we are to love our neighbour who hates us: our enemy, the one who curses us.
But this is our calling—urgent and important for our Christian life. So the question we face is an important one. Prof. Hanko
Will There Be a Secret Rapture?
In the last News we began to answer several questions about the coming of Christ and the “rapture.” They were: “Do you believe that Christ can come at any moment (the rapture)?” and “Do you believe we are living in the last days just prior to the rapture?”
In this issue we wish to deal with the matter of a secret, unexpected rapture. According to this view, those who are raptured will suddenly and mysteriously be gone from the earth, snatched away to meet Christ in the air.
We acknowledge that not all who believe in a premillennial rapture (prior to the thousand-year reign of Christ) believe in a secret rapture. Those who do, however, are in the majority.
We find no evidence in Scripture for a secret rapture. The two passages most often used to prove a premillennial rapture—I Thessalonians 4:14–18 and I Corinthians 15:51–53—speak of an event that is anything but secret. I Corinthians 15 speaks of the last trumpet (52), and I Thessalonians 4 not only speaks of a trumpet, but of the Lord descending with a shout and with the voice of the archangel (16).
That is not secret, but public! Nor, in the light of other Scriptures, can the trumpet, the shout and the voice of the archangel be anything but public announcements of this event (Matt. 24:29–31; Matt. 25:6; Rev. 19:17).
Nor does Matthew 24 say anything different. Matthew 24:31 describes the same event as I Thessalonians 4 when it says that Christ “shall gather his elect from the four winds.” Yet Matthew 24:30 also says that “all the tribes of the earth … shall see the Son of man coming in great power and glory” to do this. That is not a secret rapture of the kind described by the bumper sticker: “When the rapture comes this car will be driverless.”
What is more, the whole idea that God’s people will be taken completely unawares by the coming of Christ is unbiblical. I Thessalonians 5:1–4 says that the coming of the Lord—the “rapture” referred to in chapter 4—will be “as a thief in the night.” Yet that will be true only as far as the wicked are concerned. Verse 4 says plainly, “But ye, brethren, are not in darkness, that that day should overtake you as a thief.” This is confirmed by other passages, notably the parable of the ten virgins (Matt. 25:1–13).
If the coming of Christ described in I Thessalonians 4 were secret, we would have no calling to watch and pray—the very calling that the word of God in I Thessalonians 5:6–8 presses upon us. That is one of our chief objections to the idea of a secret rapture: it destroys every reason for us to watch for Christ’s coming.
To be sure, we do not know the day or hour of His coming, but we do know and can discern the times and seasons (I Thess. 5:1). “Therefore let us not sleep, as do others; but let us watch and be sober” (I Thess. 5:6). Let us thank God, too, that He has not left us in darkness. Rev. Hanko
