RELIGIOUS FAILURE AT THE CROSS

RELIGIOUS FAILURE AT THE CROSS

Notice yet again earth's RELIGIOUS FAILURE as represented by the high priests and the Sanhedrim. What a terrible picture this is of the priestly cast. These men were rejoicing in the Cross because it had secured power to them by destroying Jesus. Is this sufficiently realized? Do we always remember why the priest encompassed the death of Christ? Watch carefully the history, and notice that their trouble was that they were losing power, and their constant question was, what shall we do? The people were slipping away from their grip, but at last they have but an end to His influence they have Him now nailed to a Cross, and by His destruction they secure their own power. O blind men, infatuated men! While they gloat over their fancied victory, God rends the veil of the temple in twain, and forever more does away with the priest. Just as they thought they had ensured their dominance of humanity by crucifying Him, He by His dying spoiled their power, rent the veil, and by abolishing the priest created the priesthood of all believers; we now being the priestly cast.

Turn for one moment and look at the Sanhedrim as rep­resented by the scribes, the elders, the rulers. How are they occupied in the presence of the Cross? They are in­dulging in diabolical pleasantry. They are laughing at the dying Man. They say, "He saved others, Himself He cannot save." (Matt. 27:42) They are making merriment over the fact that the Cross is the evidence of His madness. He Who had been saving men, and calling men to the pathway of sal­vation, is unable to save Himself. How can any really save others who are not able to save themselves? Such is the wisdom of the world, and the world's wisdom laughs at the craziness of the Cross. It has never ceased laughing at the Cross! It is doing so still! In this new century the trouble is that not the world only makes mock of the Cross. The laughter has invaded the so-called Church of Jesus. I have heard a man, claiming to be in the ministry of Jesus, who objected to sing “There is a fountain filled with blood."

What gain it would be for the Church and the world if these men would be honest and go outside the Church. The man who has lost his sense of the need of blood-cleansing from sin has no right to stand and call himself a messenger of Christ. The Sanhedrin laughed at the Cross. And yet in that Cross there is being shown forth before the gaze of heaven and in the presence of men, so sadly blinded that they cannot understand, the wisdom of God. In the foolishness of Christ's Cross there flames out the glory of the Eternal Wisdom for what man has never been able to do will be done through that Cross. And the very people who have become brutalized, and degraded, and wrapped in the grave clothes of ritualism, by the Sanhedrin and the priests; will cast aside their grave clothes, and pass into nobler life by the way of that Cross of shame.