Robert A. Laidlaw – New Zealand author Founder of Farmers

Written by the Proprietor of a Business to the Members of His Staff

Suppose that a man should send his young lady a diamond ring costing him five thousand dollars, and place it in a little velvet case which the jeweler threw in for nothing. Would he not think it strange if, on meeting her a few days later, she would say, Oh, that was a lovely little velvet box you sent me. I am going to take every care of it. I promise to keep it wrapped up in a safe place so that no harm shall come to it.

Such a thing is too ridiculous to be thought possible, yet is it not just as foolish for men and women to be spending all their time and thought on their bodies, which are but caskets containing the real self, the soul, that the Bible tells us will persist long after our bodies have crumbled to dust?

In Revelation 6:9 we read, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the witness they had borne.

Longfellow puts it thus:

Tell me not in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream,
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real, life is earnest,
And the grave is not its goal,
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Indeed it was not, for in Mark 8:36 our Lord Himself asks, For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his life?

So, in Christs estimate, mans soul is some-thing incomparably more valuable than the whole world. My purpose is, therefore, to discuss with you some of the basic things that relate to your most valuable possession, your soul. For instance:

Is there a God?
Is the Bible true?
Is man accountable?
Is there divine forgiveness?

And a number of other problems that seem to perplex many when they turn from the transient things of life to face its eternal truths. So let us consider our first problem

How may we know there is a God?

As far as I myself am concerned, my most convincing reason for believing there is a God is that I know Him personally. According to 1 Thessalonians 5:23 I, like you, am spirit, soul and body. My spirit makes it possible for me to be God-conscious as stated in Rom. 8:16: The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God. That is, when we turn to God through accepting Christ as our Savior, we are born of the Holy Spirit into Gods family, and naturally we come to know God intimately as Father.

My soul makes me self-conscious, as seen in Psalm 13:2 where we read, How long must I take counsel in my soul, or, how long shall I talk things over with myself.

This strange capacity, sometimes called the awareness of the ego, enables us to stand off from ourselves and talk to ourselves; and, by the way, we sometimes say some pretty straight things to ourselves that we would not take from anyone else.

And lastly, my body through its five senses makes me world-conscious. If all my senses were taken away I would cease to be conscious of the material world about me to any degree, exactly as when I am under an anesthetic. So when a man says to me, How do you know there is a God? I say to him, How do you know there is a you? Why, he says, I dont need myself demonstrated mathematically or philosophically; I am a self-conscious being, and therefore I know that I am. That, my friend, I reply, is exactly how I know there is a God. Being spirit as well as soul, I am God-conscious as well as self-conscious; I know God is as surely as I know I am.

But to me the problems of unbelief in God are greater than the problems of belief. To believe that dead matter unaided produced life, that living matter produced mind, that mind produced conscience, and that the chaos of chance produced the cosmos of order as we see it in nature, to me would call not for faith, but for credulity.

The President of the New York Scientific Society, as recorded in the Readers Digest, gave eight reasons why he believed there was a God. The first reason is as follows. Take ten identical coins and mark them one to ten, place them in your pocket, and take one out. There is one chance in ten that you will get number one. Now replace it, and the chances that number two will follow number one are not one in ten, but one in one hundred, and so on, mounting ten each time, so that the chances of number ten following number nine are one chance in 10,000,000,000 (ten billion). It seemed so unbelievable to me that I immediately took pencil and paper and very quickly discovered he was right. Try it yourself.

That is why George Gallup, the American statistician, said: I could prove God statistically. Take the human body alonethe chance that all the functions of the individual would just happen is a statistical monstrosity.

Surely no thoughtful person would wish to base his eternal future on a statistical monstrosity. Perhaps that is why the Bible says in Psalm 14:1, The fool says in his heart, There is no God. But let us consider the problem from another viewpoint.

We stand together on the wharf as a big ocean liner draws alongside, and I say to you, A lot of people think that ship is the result of someones carefully designed plans, but I know better. There was really no intelligence at work on it at all; the iron, by some mysterious process, gradually came out of the ground and fashioned itself into plates; slowly holes were formed in the edges of these plates, and rivets appeared, flattened themselves out on either side, and after a great time, by this same evolutionary process, the engines were in place, and one day some men on the seashore found her floating quietly in a sheltered cove.

You would probably consider me a lunatic and move further into the crowd to escape my senseless chatter. You know that where there is a design there must be a designer. And, having seen other productions of the human mind just like the steamer in question, you would refuse to believe that it was not planned by human intelligence and built by human skill.

Yet, there are men not considered fools who tell us that the solar system evolved from its nebulous state by chance, that in some mysterious way it came into beingthat there was really no higher intelligence at work on it; they tell us they know no God but nature. On the other hand, there are many thoughtful men who believe that God is transcendentthat is, while He reveals Himself in nature, in that its laws and principles are expressions of His power and wisdom, He Himself is essentially more than the sum of them all. Atheists offer us the anomaly of design without a designer, of creation without a Creator, of effect without cause, and to escape from this dilemma ask: If God be considered the first great cause, account for Him. Who made God? Now, such a question contradicts itself, for it is evident no cause could make the first cause, or the first cause would become also the second cause, which is a mathematical absurdity.

Every thoughtful person believes in a series of causes and effects in nature, each effect becoming the cause of some other effect. Now the acceptance of this as fact logically compels one to admit that there must be a beginning to any seriesthat is, there could never have been a first effect if there had not been a First Cause. This First Cause to me is Deity, and I cannot tell where God came from is not a satisfactory reason for denying that He exists, else I might as well deny the existence of the millionth effect which, for the sake of argument, might happen to be this world. You see, if I admit one cause as ever having existed, I am bound eventually by induction to arrive at the First Cause.

Although men have discovered many of the laws that govern it, the greatest scientists cannot really define electricity. Then why do we believe it exists? Because we see the manifestation of its existence in our homes and our factories and our streets. Though I do not know where God came from, I must believe He exists, because I see the manifestations of Him everywhere around me.

Professor Drummond says inThe Ascent of Man: Instead of abolishing a Creative Hand, evolution demands it. Instead of being opposed to Creation, all theories begin by assuming it.

Lesis Fiske, LL.D., says, As to some things, we may be in doubt: as to God there can be no uncertainty. He is the Infinite, the Absolute, the Unconditioned, the Eternal, the First Cause. He is not unknowable, yet He is the incomprehensible. We find Him, but we cannot grasp Him. The infinite depth of His being we cannot fathom, but reason declares Him to be the creating life of all dependent reality. And we reach the highest range of thought in conceiving and knowing Him. We do and must hang everything on the will of the infinitely intelligent Creator.

Being convinced there is a God, we take the next step forward.

I cannot conceive of an intelligent man making anything without a purposeif he makes shoes, they are to wear or sell; if he bakes bread, it is for himself or someone else to eat. Behind every action there must be a motive. When I thought of this, it seemed to me quite reasonable that God should have a purpose in view when He brought in Creation.

Of all the many books this world contains there is one only that claims to be a direct revelation from God, telling us of Himself and His purposes in us. Being a claim of such moment, it is surely worthy of thoughtful investigation; so with the advice of Francis Bacon neither to accept nor reject, but to weigh and consider, we approach this Book with its strange claims.

But to be just to ourselves and the Bible, we should read it through. As a judge must not make his decision when the case is half heard, neither must we. But, like the judge, we should compare the evidence of the witnesses, and weigh and consider every word, seeking deeply for its hidden significance rather than accepting its surface meaning. Surely the importance of its claims justifies spending the necessary time on its study66 books written by at least 40 different writers, some educated, some illiterate, some kings, some peasants, over a period of 1,600 years in places separated as far as Babylon in Asia and Rome in Europe. Expecting with such authorship to find a heterogeneous collection of contradictory statements, it strikes one as the more strange that such a Book should have a oneness about it that makes each contribution the complement of the others. Slowly the truth of 2 Peter 1:21 came home to me. There was no other reasonable explanation. Men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. This belief was confirmed as I read prophecy after prophecy in the Old Testament that found its fulfillment, even to the letter, hundreds of years after, as in Isaiah 53, which foretold the death of Christ with such minute accuracy more than 700 years before His crucifixion. Yes, the difficulties in the way of doubting the Book seemed to me greater than those in the way of believing it. I had to be honest with myself and admit that the hazard was all on the side of unbelief. I even went further and said, I believe this Book to be the Word of the living God. I can account for it in no other way.

But such an admission brought me face to face with a grave difficulty, for this Bible set a standard of righteousness that I had not attained, and judged all short of its standard to be sin. Remembering that God knows every secret thought you have ever entertained, just measure yourself alongside the standard: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment (Matt. 22:3738).

Confronted with such a standard, can you claim to have lived up to it throughout your life, to have put God first in everything? Just read it again: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. If you can, there is no need for you to read the rest of these pages, for however vital the interest they hold for those of us who have fallen short of Gods standard, they can be of no importance to you.

But think hardreconsider, for God says in Romans 3:23: All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. And in verse 10: None is righteous, no, not one. All have failed to reach Gods standard.

After addressing a meeting on one occasion, a young man asked me, Do you think it fair of God to set the standard of holiness so high that we cannot reach it, and then judge us for falling short? I replied, God has not set an arbitrary standard of holiness. He has not really set a standard at all; He is the standard. He is holiness in the absoluteholiness personifiedand to preserve His own character, He must maintain that absolute standard in all His dealings with man, irrespective of the tremendous problems it creates for both Him and us.

My conscience and my common sense compelled me to admit I had fallen short, as far as I was concerned, of Gods standard of absolute holiness and that therefore I was a sinner in His sight.

Quick on my admission of having sinned came Gods condemnation in Ezekiel 18:4: The soul who sins shall die.

Thus, as far as Gods standard was concerned, I was lost, and as Gods standard was the only one by which I was to be judged in Eternity, I was hopelessly lost. I began to see that it didnt matter at all what I thought, or what my friends told me; the judgment would be on what God had said. Moreover, because in His judgment we had all sinned, there was no use in looking to my fellows for help, for they were under the same condemnation as myself.

Is Jesus the Son of God?

But this same Bible told me of One, Jesus Christ, who claimed to be the Son of God.

He, too, saw that men were lost, that they had forfeited their lives to sin; so He said to His Father, Father, I have not forfeited My life; I am pure, sinless, spotless; My life is My own; let Me give My pure life in place of mans sinful life, that he may go free. And God said, Go. Christ tells us in John 3:16 that God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. If Jesus Christ is the Son of God, then we have indeed the assurance of salvation; but the difficulty faces us: Is Jesus Christ really the Son of God?

He could be only one of threethe Son of God, a deceiver, or an honest man Himself under a hallucination. But when we find Him meeting some of the cleverest men of His day who were purposely sent to catch Him in His words, and so silencing them that they dared not ask Him any more questions (Matthew 22:46), and ourselves considering even from an intellectual standpoint the wisdom of His statements, we may dismiss the last of these suppositions absolutely. Was His wisdom so great that He was using it to deceive the people? Have you ever heard of a young man associating with swindlers and rogues and because of that association becoming ennobled, pure and honest? No! You admit you have not heard of such a case; but I know a young man who, by the reception of Christ into his life, has been lifted from the basest desires to the noblest manhood, and I simply cant believe that the reception of a deceiver into ones life could so transform it for good.

The other day I heard a man say, I owe it to Jesus Christ that I can walk down the street with my head held erect and my shoulders squared to the world. I owe it to Him that I can look a pure woman in the face and grip an honest man by the hand.

I call to witness the opinion of the whole civilized world that Jesus Christ was at least a good man. If so, then an honest man, and if honest He must have been what He claimed to be, the Son of God, sent to lay down His sinless life in place of your sinful life and mine.

Full-orbed humanity
Crowned with Deity.

Ecce Homo, Behold the man
Ecce Deus, Behold thy God.

Veiled in flesh the Godhead see
Hail incarnate Deity.

At His feet we humbly fall
Crown Him, crown Him Lord of all.

Convinced that the Scriptures are true, that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, believing that He willingly came, and God so loved me that He has willingly sent Him to suffer the full penalty of my sins that I might go free, if I would retain my self-respect, I must accept Jesus Christ as my Savior, and crown Him Lord of my life.

But I do not ask you to accept Him as yours. Possibly you admit the Bible is true, but ask, have I interpreted it correctly? Are not the views of others worthy of consideration? Surely they are.

On telling my conclusion to a friend, he replied: You are all right, but so am I, although I dont see things as you do. It seems to me that it doesnt matter so much what a man believes, so long as he is sincere in his belief.

Let us test that. Not far from where I live a shopkeeper, one fine Sunday morning, said to his wife and family, Lets take our little delivery van and go for a picnic. Traveling north, they came to a level crossing on a branch railway line and, sincerely believing there would be no train on a Sunday morning, he attempted to drive straight overCrash, an engine struck him. He was killed on the spot, one son had an arm broken, and his little daughter was in a plaster cast for months. Did his sincere belief that all was clear save him? No, it did not.

I know a nurse who, on night duty, sincerely believed she held the right medicine in her hand. But it wasnt, and in twenty minutes her patient was dead in spite of frantic efforts to save him.

Of course we need sincerity, but we must sincerely believe truth, not error. In fact, having sincere belief in error can be the very means of luring us on to destruction.

The Bible leaves no room for doubt. In John 14:6, Christ says: I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. Acts 4:12 says: There is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved. If you can get to heaven any other way you will be a standing witness throughout all eternity to the ignorance of Gods Son, or to the fact that He spoke falsely when He said there was no other way. I ask in the deepest earnestness, is it not folly to attempt coming to God by any other way than through Christ Himself, Gods appointed way?

The real reason we want some other way is because the way of the Cross is a humbling way and we are proud at heart, but let us remember the way of the Cross was a humbling way for Christ also, as we read in Philippians 2, verses 5 to 8: Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

Why not turn over a new leaf, says Mr. Reformer, and live an absolutely holy life, and you will be all right for eternity. That sounds reasonable, doesnt it? However, before we accept it, lets put it to a simple test. If a man could become absolutely holy, would he be better than he ought to be? No, of course he wouldnt. If a man were perfect he would be only what he ought to be. Then, in a strictly logical sense, he couldnt retrieve any of his past shortcomings. For instance, the manager of a business goes to his head clerk and finds that his firm owes $50,000 to manufacturers and other merchants. He says: Write letters to all our creditors and tell them that we are not going to worry about the past, that we have turned over new leaves in our ledger and while we propose to forget the past, we promise to pay 100 cents on the dollar on all future business. The clerk would think his employer had gone mad and would refuse to put such a proposition to their creditors; yet thousands of otherwise sensible people are trying to get to heaven by just such a proposal, offering to meet their obligations toward God for the future, but they are not going to worry about the past at all. Yet in Ecclesiastes 3:15, we read: God seeks what has been driven away. No, Gods righteousness demands that no past account shall be considered settled till it has been paid to the uttermost and every claim of justice met. The murderer may cover his sin and live the life of a model citizen for ten years after his crime, but mans law, when he is discovered, condemns him, though he has murdered no one for ten long yearsit judges him still a murderer. To hide past sin, either thoughts, words, or deeds, by what seems to be an absolutely perfect life, still leaves me a sinner in the sight of Him to whom the past and future are as open as the present. According to Gods standards of holiness, we all have sinnedthen let us bring that sin out into the open and have it dealt with righteously so that we need fear it no more forever.

To meet that past myself would have meant to me eternal loss, but the Lord Jesus Christ gave up His life in place of mine that I might go free. My past sin is expiated, and God, against whom I had sinned, has given me His receipt, showing His satisfaction with the completed work of Christ on the Cross in that He raised Him from the dead. Christ once crucified is now my living Savior. He died to save me from the penalty of sin, and now He lives to deliver me from the power of sin.

But why did Christ need to die?

Could not He have saved us without that? You and I had broken Gods law, and the penalty was death. How could Christ righteously deliver us without meeting our full penalty? Do you not see, if He paid anything less than the full price, there would still be judgment for us to meet? But it is evident that because He died, the law we had broken can judge us no more.

The Bible says in Romans 8:1, There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

On one occasion a Supreme Court case extended into the next day, and, as is the usual practice, so that no outside influence could be brought to bear on the jury members, they were kept in custody overnight. On entering the court the next morning, the judge, addressing the jury, said, Ladies and gentlemen, the case is dismissed; the prisoner has been called to a higher bar. The culprit had died in his cell during the night, and there was no use going on with the case, as the law cannot judge a dead man. Again, if a man should murder one person he is put to death, but if he should murder six people he is still just put to death, because this is the utmost penalty of the law, and no matter what a mans sins may be, the law knows no greater penalty than to take his life.

Then, says Mr. Largehope, if Christ died for all, we must all be saved. But God does not say so. He says there is salvation for all, but not that all are saved.

For instance, it is a bitterly cold winter, and unemployment is rampant in one of our great cities with many in dire need. The municipal authorities are giving out free meals. You meet a poor fellow on the street, who says he is starving, and, naturally, you ask if he does not believe the notices that are up all over the city, that there is enough free food for everyone. Yes, he replies, I believe that is true in a general sort of way, but I am still hungry. And, you say, you are likely to remain hungry in spite of the provisions unless you partake personally of what is provided for all. Just so, although the death of Christ provides salvation for whoever will, only those are saved who personally accept Christ and believe that He died in their place. I must appreciate and appropriate Christ as my Savior, or His death will avail me nothingjust as a man could die of thirst alongside a spring of water if he refused to make its lifegiving stream his own by partaking of it for himself.

That is all very true, says Mr. Thoughtful, but how could the Lord Jesus Christs one life be considered the substitute for the lives of so many, so that God offers salvation to whomever repents and believes in Christ? That seems a fair questiona problem in arithmetic that can be demonstrated on paper. Christ was God manifest in the fleshDivinity in humanityso that the life He gave was an infinite life, which can meet the needs of any number of finite lives. Get a sheet of paper and write down all the big figures you can think ofmillions or moreadd them up. Now you have a big number; then multiply it by 10100by a million if you likecover sheets of paper, and after all you still have a finite numbera number that has bounds set about itit has a beginning and an end, however far it may extend. No, by adding finite things together no man has ever been able to make that which is infinite. The infinite life of Christ given for sinners is more than sufficient to save all who accept Him as the One who died in their place.

But how could Christ suffer for my sins when they were not committed until 2,000 years after He died? At first this seems a problem to a thoughtful person, but the more thoughtful you are, the more readily you will see the solution. God is omniscient (that is, He knows all things), and God is eternal. In Exodus 3:14, God calls himself I AM (present tense), and Christ says in John 8:58, before Abraham was, I am (present tense). In other words, to one who knows all things and is eternal, there is, as it were, neither past nor future, but one eternal present. Events yet to take place 200 years ahead must be as clear to Him as events which happened 2,000 years ago, and both must of necessity be just as clear to God as events happening now.

But why didnt God make man incapable of disobeying His will and therefore incapable of sinning? Such a question is like asking, why doesnt God draw a crooked straight line or a round square, or make an object pitch black all over and pure white all over at one and the same time? Man is a creature with the power of intelligent choice, so that the question really is: Why didnt God make a creature with the power of intelligent choice and yet without the power of intelligent choice at once?

If I had the power of hypnotism, it would be possible to put my children into a semi-somnambulistic hypnotic state, thus robbing them of the power of intelligent choice, and then say, Sit on those chairs till I return or Kiss me goodnight, and unfeeling arms would go around my neck, and unresponsive lips would be pressed to my cheek. I would have prompt and perfect obedience to my every behest, but would I find satisfaction in it? None.

I want children with free wills and therefore capable of disobeying me, but who, of their own volition, choose to carry out my instructions which are the outcome of my love for them and are given for their own good. Thus I cannot conceive of God, who put these desires in my heart and yours, being satisfied with anything less.

God does not want marionettes who jump in a given direction according to the wire that is pulled, nor does He want automatons in the form of people who mechanically and absolutely obey His will as do the planets that whirl through space. God can find satisfaction in nothing less than the spontaneous love of our hearts and our free-will decisions to walk in paths that please and honor Him. Although, it is obvious that this same power of free action enables us to defy and dishonor Him if we so choose.

Man is truly a magnificent creature, far above the brute creation around Him. There is no missing link, but a great gulf fixed between the highest beast and man, for God has imbued man with the awesome power of being able to say an effective NO to God as well as an effective YES. In your own interests, may I graciously ask, which are you saying to God now as you read this booklet?

But why should God care at all about man, who is as a grain of sand in comparison with the rest of the universe?

A certain astronomer put an article in one of our important daily papers describing the wonders of the heavens as revealed by the 200-inch lens of the telescope at Palomar, Southern California, and after writing on the limitless distances and the millions of new galaxies discovered, he ended his article with the question, Astronomically speaking, what is man? Two days later in the correspondence column a reply appeared saying, Astronomically speaking, man is the astronomer. It matters not how vast the universe is proved to be, the universe cannot comprehend man in any degree whatsoever, but man can comprehend it in some degree, so that the greatness of the universe does not minimize, but magnifies the greatness of man.

But is faith logical? Yes, it is logical. It is a mistake to think that faith is opposed to reason. Faith and reason go hand in hand, but faith goes on when reason can get no further. Reason, to a great extent, is dependent on faith, for without knowledge it is impossible to reason, and knowledge is very largely a matter of faith in human testimony. For instance, I believe strychnine administered in a large enough dose will poison a human being, but I have never seen the experiment performed. Yet I have such faith in the written testimony of men that I would not take a large dose of strychnine for anything.

If you check up carefully, you will find that nine-tenths of the things you know are a matter of faith in human testimony, written or spoken, for you have not verified them for yourself. Therefore, having accepted the testimony of other men so freely, will you not accept the testimony of thousands of Christians when they affirm that they have verified the things written in Gods Word and proved them to be true?

But why should God judge my sin as worthy of death? I would suggest that because of His infinite holiness no sin could exist in His presence. In Central Africa a native chief may club his wife to death on slight provocation without falling in the slightest degree in the estimation of his people, while the same act in our land would have to be paid for by the life of the murderer. The act is the same in both lands, but in one instance no judgment, in the other, quick retribution; and the difference is simply the result of our enlightenment. If a sin in Central Africa which is considered as nothing would lose a man his life in our land, think, if you can, what a sin which appears to us as nothing must look like to an infinitely holy Godfor God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. (1 John 1:5).

It may be just, but is it merciful of God not to take us all to heaven even if we reject Christ as our sin-bearer? Yes, it is both just and merciful. Tell me: Would it be any kindness to transfer a poor, ragged beggar into the glare of a beautiful palace room? Would he not do his best to escape again to the dark street from whence he came? He would be infinitely happier there. Would it be kindness and mercy on Gods part to bring a man in his sins into the holy light of heaven, that man having rejected Gods offer of the only cleansing power there is? If you and I would not be very happy if our friends could see right inside our minds and read all the thoughts that have ever been there (and our friends standards are perhaps not any higher than our own), what would it be like to stand before God, whose absolute holiness would make our sin appear in all its awfulness to us and everyone else?

In Revelation 6:16, God tells us how those will feel who refuse now to accept Jesus Christ as their Savior and persist in going into eternity in their sins. They call on the mountains and the rocks to fall on them and hide them from the face of Him who sits on the throne, and yet it is the presence of this same Christ that will make heaven for those who have accepted Him as Savior and Lord.

You see the absurdity of talking about God taking us all to heavenheaven is a condition as well as a place. The presence of the Lord Jesus Christ will constitute heaven to those who are cleansed from their sins, while the same presence would make a hell of remorse in the hearts of any who, still in their sins, should stand in the infinite light of His holiness.