By Robert E. Speer, Secretary of The Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., New York City.
“They shall put you out of the synagogues: yea, the hour cometh, that whosoever killeth you shall think that he offereth service unto God. And these things will they do, because they have not known the Father nor me.” (John 16:2, 3.)
These words suggest to us that it is not enough for a man just to believe in God. Everything depends on what kind of a god it is in whom he believes. It is a rather striking and surprising comparison at first that our Lord institutes here between a mere belief in God and the possibly horrible moral consequences, on the one hand, and a knowledge of God in Christ and its sure moral effects, on the other. And the lesson would seem to be the inadequacy of any religious faith that does not recognize the revelation of the Father in Jesus Christ and that does not know Jesus Christ as God. It is a little hard for us to take such a great thought as this into our lives, and yet our Lord puts it in unmistakable clearness: on the one hand, the moral inadequacy of a mere belief in God; on the other hand, the moral and spiritual adequacy of a recognition of God as Father exposed in Christ as God.
THEISM NOT SUFFICIENT
In the former of these two verses our Lord makes the first of these two points unmistakably clear. He saw no adequate guarantee of moral rectitude and justice in a mere theistic faith. He suffered in His own death the possibly bitter fruits of a mere theistic faith. The men who put Him to death were ardent believers in God, and they thought they were doing a fine thing for God when they crucified the Son of God. And He told His disciples that the day would come when conscientious men would take out service of God in executing them, and that those who would put them to death would not be bad men, but men who thought that by killing them they were doing God’s will.
We see exactly the same great error in our own day. It is no sufficient protection to a man to believe in one God. There are no more rigid monotheists in the world than Mohammedans, and there are some who tell us that in India the moral conditions of the Mohammedans are even worse than the moral conditions of the polytheistic Hindus around about them. It is not so much a matter of how many gods you believe in. I would rather believe in three good gods than in one bad one. One religion is superior to another religion, not because it has less or more gods than that other religion, but because the character of its gods is superior to the character of the gods of that other religion. Our Lord understood completely that a mere faith in God was not going to make a good man, that a man might believe in God and be a murderer, or an adulterer, he might believe in God and put the very apostles of Jesus Christ to death and think that thus he was doing God a great service.
CONSCIENTIOUSNESS NOT SUFFICIENT
It seems to me that it is worthwhile to stop here for a moment incidentally to note how easy a thing it is for a man to be guilty of conscientious error and crime. It is no defence of a man’s conduct to say that he is conscientiously satisfied with what he did. I suppose that most bad things have been done in all good conscience, and that most of the sins that we commit today we commit with a perfectly clean conscience. There is such a thing as a moral color-blindness that is just as real as a physical color-blindness. I was visiting a little while ago one of our well-known girls’ schools, and had a discussion with one of the teachers, who said that she thought it did not make so much difference what a pupil believed or did, provided only she was conscientious in her belief and conduct. I told her that it must be quite easy to go to school to her if it did not matter whether you answered right or not, if only you were conscientiously honest in what you said. She might get two absolutely contrary answers to a question and mark each one of them perfect. The whole foundations of the moral universe fall out from beneath the man or the woman who will take that view of it, that there is not really any objective standard of right or wrong at all, that everything hinges on just how a person feels about it, and if they only feel comfortable over the thing it is all right. These men who were going to put the disciples of Jesus Christ to death had no qualms of conscience about it. They would think in doing it that they were doing God a service. The idea that our Lord means to bring out is this, that the standards of a man are dependent upon his conception of God, and He saw no guarantee of moral rectitude and justice in a man’s life except as that man grasped the revelation of God as Father that had been made in Jesus Christ, and himself knew Jesus Christ as God.