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darkly" will then give place to "knowing as we are known". God's ways and times are
governed by infallible wisdom and unerring love. In the fullness of time, Christ, the
Great Analogy of God, came into the world, and we are now able to see the glory of God
in the face of Jesus Christ. Moreover, we must never forget that the gift of human
language, and the fact that the revelation of God is couched in this language, obeying the
laws of grammar, and adopting the figures and imagery with which the human mind is
familiar, that all this part of the divine condescension, just as surely as is the fact of the
Word "becoming flesh" and the "form of God" being exchanged for the "form of a
servant".
In all this we have been speaking primarily of man as originally created and
constituted. We do not forget that redemption and newness of life have, through grace,
entered this present sphere, and that the believe, being united with Christ, and having the
Holy Spirit of God, already in measure anticipates that new creation, in which the
knowledge of the Lord shall cover the earth, "as the waters cover the sea". So we find
the Apostle writing in his Epistle to the Corinthians:
"Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the
things which God hath prepared for them that love Him, but God hath revealed them unto
us by His Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. For what
man knoweth the things of man, save the spirit of man which is in him? Even so the
things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God . . . . . we have the mind of Christ"
(I Cor. 2: 9-11, 13, 16).
#15.
The Problem of Evil, and the Lesson of Gen. 1: - 3:
pp. 128 - 134
Is there any one, in possession of his faculties, who has not been exercised, at some
time and in some degree, by the "problem of evil"? It has engaged the minds of the
greatest philosophers, thinkers and theologians, since the beginning of history. The Book
of Job is but an exposition of one of the many aspects of the problem, and what is the
Book of Ecclesiastes but a record of the searchings of the mind into the same profound
subject? What is the conflict of the ages but the conflict of good and evil? What is the
theme of Genesis and Revelation but this same problem? And what is the very gospel of
the grace of God but the solution, by Divine love, of the problem of good and evil? It
should be noticed, however, that, while men of all times and opinions have had their
"problems" concerning the origin, nature and end of evil, there is no such "problem" of
good. It is true that the subject of "good", its character, nature and fruit, has been a
perennial theme for student, philosopher and preacher alike, but there is no problem
about good, as there is about evil. Opinions concerning "evil" range from that which
regards God as the Creator of "all things" and the Author of evil--not merely evil as a
penalty for sin, but evil in its moral aspects--to the other extreme of the total denial that
evil has any existence at all.