Both Spurgeon and Lloyd-Jones were persuaded that the most important task of any pastor is the preaching of the Word of God. Following the thinking of the Protestant Reformers, they believed in the centrality of the pulpit in Christian worship. A meeting without a message from the Scriptures would have been unthinkable for them. Without the preaching of the Word, they would say, there is no true worship.
Speakin Preachin MULTIFORMAT
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Throughout their distinguished lives, Spurgeon and Lloyd-Jones were known in the UK and the USA; but after their deaths, their works are being read across the whole planet. And if the Lord continues reviving His people in our generation, the good news is that they will be with us for a lot more years to come. Though dead, they continue speaking (Hebrews 11:4).
The human unity with which I deal here is not to be confounded with thismodem industrial monotony and herding, which is rather a Congestion than acommunion. It is a thing to which human groups left to themselves, and evenhuman individuals left to themselves, have everywhere tended by an instinctthat may truly be called human. Like all healthy human things, it has variedvery much within the limits of a general character, for that is characteristicof everything belonging to that ancient land of liberty that lies before andaround the servile industrial town. Industrialism actually boasts that itsproducts are all of one pattern; that men in Jamaica or Japan can break thesame seal and drink the same bad whiskey, that a man at the North Pole andanother at the South might recognize the same optimistic label on the samedubious tinned salmon. But wine, the gift of gods to men, can vary with everyvalley and every vineyard, can turn into a hundred wines without any wine oncereminding us of whiskey; and cheeses can change from county to county withoutforgetting the difference between chalk and cheese. When I am speaking of thisthing, therefore, I am speaking of something that doubtless includes very widedifferences; nevertheless I will here maintain that it is one thing. I willmaintain that most of the modem botheration comes from not realizing that it isreally one thing. I will advance the thesis that before all talk aboutcomparative religion and the separate religious founders of the world, thefirst essential is to recognize this thing as a whole, as a thing almost nativeand normal to the great fellowship that we call mankind. This thing ispaganism; and I propose to show in these pages that it is the one real rival tothe Church of Christ.
In considering the elements of pagan humanity, we must begin by anattempt to describe the indescribable. Many get over the difficulty ofdescribing it by the expedient of denying it, or at least ignoring it; but thewhole point of it is that it was something that was never quite eliminated evenwhen it was ignored. They are obsessed by their evolutionary monomania thatevery great thing grows from a seed, or something smaller than itself. Theyseem to forget that every seed comes from a tree, or from something larger thanitself. Now there is very good ground for guessing that religion did notoriginally come from some detail that was forgotten because it was too small tobe traced. Much more probably it was an idea that was abandoned because it wastoo large to be managed. There is very good reason to suppose that many peopledid begin with the simple but overwhelming idea of one God who governs all andafterwards fell away into such things as demon-worship almost as a sort ofsecret dissipation. Even the test of savage beliefs, of which the folk-lorestudents are so fond, is admittedly often found to support such a view. Some ofthe very rudest savages, primitive in every sense in which anthropologists usethe word, the Australian aborigines for instance, are found to have a puremonotheism with a high moral tone. A missionary was preaching to a very wildtribe of polytheists, who had told him all their polytheistic tales, andtelling them in return of the existence of the one good God who is a spirit andjudges men by spiritual standards. And there was a sudden buzz, of excitementamong these stolid barbarians, as at somebody who was letting out a secret, andthey cried to each other, "Atahocan! He is speaking of Atahocan!'
Polytheism, therefore, was really a sort of pool; in the sense of thepagans having consented to the pooling of their pagan religions. And this pointis very important in many controversies ancient and modem. It is regarded as aliberal and en lightened thing to say that the god of the stranger may be asgood as our own; and doubtless the pagans thought themselves very liberal andenlightened when they agreed to add to the gods of the city or the hearth somewild and fantastic Dionysus coming down from the mountains or some shaggy andrustic Pan creeping out of the woods. But exactly what it lost by these largerideas is the largest idea of all. It is the idea of the fatherhood that makesthe whole world one. And the converse is also true. Doubtless those moreantiquated men of antiquity who clung to their solitary statues and theirsingle sacred names were regarded as superstitious savages benighted and leftbehind. But these superstitious savages were preserving something that is muchmore like the cosmic power as conceived by philosophy, or even as conceived byscience. This paradox by which the rude reactionary a sort of propheticprogressive has one consequence very much to the point. In a purely historicalsense and apart from any other controversies in the same connection, it throwslight, a single and a steady light, that shines from the beginning on a littleand lonely people. In this paradox as in some riddle of religion of which theanswer was sealed up for centuries, lies the mission and the meaning of theJews. It is true in this sense humanly speaking, that the world owes God to theJews. It owes that truth to much that is blamed in the Jews, possibly to muchthat is blameable in the Jews. We have already noted the nomadic position ofthe Jews amid the other pastoral peoples upon the fringe of the BabylonianEmpire, and something of that strange erratic course of theirs blazed acrossthe dark territory of extreme antiquity, as they passed from the seat ofAbraham and the shepherd princes into Egypt and doubled back into thePalestinian bills and held them against the Philistines from Crete and fellinto captivity in Babylon; and yet again returned to their mountain city by theZionist policy of the Persian conquerors; and so continued that amazing romanceof restlessness of which we have not yet seen the end. But through all theirwanderings, and especially through all their early wanderings, they did indeedcarry the fate of the world in that wooden tabernacle, that held perhaps afeatureless symbol and certainly an invisible god. We may say that one mostessential feature was that it was featureless. Much as we may prefer thatcreative liberty which the Christian culture has declared and by which it haseclipsed even the arts of antiquity, we must not underrate the determiningimportance at the time of the Hebrew inhibition of images. It is a typicalexample of one of those limitations that did in fact preserve and perpetuateenlargement, like a wall built round a wide open space. The God who could nothave a statue remained a spirit. Nor would his statue in any case have bad thedisarming dignity and grace of the Greek statues then or the Christian statuesafterwards. He was living in a land of monsters. We shall have occasion toconsider more fully what those monsters were, Moloch and Dagon and Tanit theterrible goddess. If the deity of Israel had ever had an image, he would havehad a phallic image. By merely giving him a body they would have brought in allthe worst elements of mythology; all the polygamy of polytheism; the vision ofthe harem in heaven. Ibis point about the refusal of art is the first exampleof the limitations which are often adversely criticized, only because thecritics themselves are limited. But an even stronger case can be found in theother criticism offered by the same critics. It is often said with a sneer thatthe God of Israel was only a God of Battles ' a mere barbaric Lord of Hosts'pitted in rivalry against other gods only as their envious foe. Well it is forthe world that he was a God of Battles. Well it is for us that he was to allthe rest only arrival and a foe. In the ordinary way, it would have been onlytoo easy for them to have achieved the desolate disaster of conceiving him as afriend. It would have been only too easy for them to have seen him stretchingout his hands in love and reconciliation, embracing Baal and kissing thepainted face of Astarte, feasting in fellowship with the gods; last god to sellhis crown of stars for the Soma of the Indian pantheon or the nectar of Olympusor the mead of Valhalla. It would have been easy enough for his worshippers, tofollow the enlightened course of Syncretism and the pooling of all the pagantraditions. It is obvious indeed that his followers were always sliding downthis easy slope; and it required the almost demoniac energy of certain inspireddemagogues who testified to the divine unity in words that are still like windsof inspiration and ruin. The more we really understand of the ancientconditions that contributed to the final culture of the Faith, the more weshall have a real and even a realistic reverence for the greatness of theProphets of Israel. As it was, while the whole world melted into this mass ofconfused mythology, this Deity who is called tribal and narrow, preciselybecause he was what is called tribal and narrow, preserved the primary religionof all mankind. He was tribal enough to be universal. He was as narrow as theuniverse.
The unique possession was not available or accessible to the paganworld, because it was also the possession of a jealous people. The Jews wereunpopular, partly because of this narrowness already noted in the Roman world,partly perhaps because they had already fallen into that habit of merelyhandling things for exchange instead of working to make them with their hands.It was partly also because polytheism had become a sort of jungle in whichsolitary monotheism could be lost; but it is strange to realize how completelyit really was lost. Apart from more disputed matters, there were things in thetradition of Israel which belong to all humanity now, and might have belongedto all humanity then. They had one of the colossal cornerstones of the world:the Book of Job. It obviously stands over against the Iliad and the Greektragedies; and even more than they it was an early meeting and parting ofpoetry and philosophy in the morning of the world. It is a solemn and upliftingsight to see those two eternal fools, the optimist and the pessimist, destroyedin the dawn of time. And the philosophy really perfects the pagan tragic ironyprecisely because it is more monotheistic and therefore more mystical. Indeedthe Book of Job avowedly only answers mystery with mystery. Job is comfortedwith riddles; but he is comforted. Herein is indeed a type, in the sense of aprophecy, of things speaking with authority. For when he who doubts can onlysay 'I do not understand,' it is true that he who knows can only reply orrepeat 'You do not understand. And under that rebuke there is a sudden hope inthe heart; and the sense of something that would be worth understanding. Butthis mighty monotheistic poem remained unremarked by the whole world ofantiquity, which thronged with polytheistic poetry. It is a sign of the way inwhich the Jews stood apart and kept their tradition unshaken and unshared, thatthey should have kept a thing like The Book of Job out of the wholeintellectual world of antiquity. 2ff7e9595c
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