Hold Fast! # 1

Hold Fast! # 1

"Hold fast for that which is good" (1 Thessalonians 5:21).

My trumpet ought to give no uncertain sound. With abounding temporal prosperity, we seem, as a nation, to be sitting on the edge of a volcano, and at any time may be blown to pieces, and become a wreck and a ruin.

Worst of all, the air seems filled with vague agnosticism and unbelief. Faith languishes and dwindles everywhere, and looks ready to die. The immense majority of men, from the highest to the lowest, appear to think that nothing is certain in religion, and that it does not signify much what you believe. Even in our universities, the tendency to multiply the doubtful things of Christianity, and to diminish the essentials, appears to grow and increase every year. All the foundations of faith are out of course.

In times like these, I shall make no apology for charging you to  beware of losing, insensibly, your grasp of Christian truth, and holding it with slippery and trembling fingers, I ask you, therefore, to hear me patiently this day, while I try to set before them a list of cardinal points on which I think it of essential importance to "hold fast that which is good." Of  course I do not expect you all to agree with some of the things I am going to say. Far from it! I lay no claim to infallibility. But at any rate you will not be left in ignorance of my opinions.

1. First and foremost, let me charge you to hold fast the great principle that Christianity is entirely true, and the only religion which God has revealed to mankind.

In reviews, magazines, newspapers, lectures, essays, novels, and sometimes even in sermons, scores of clever writers are incessantly waging war against the very foundations of Christianity. Reason, science, geology, anthropology, modern discoveries, free thought, are all boldly asserted to be on their side. No educated person, we are constantly told nowadays, can really believe supernatural religion, or the plenary inspiration of the Bible, or the possibility of miracles. Such ancient doctrines as the Trinity, the Divinity of Christ, the Personality of the Holy Spirit, the Atonement, the obligation of the Sabbath, the necessity and efficacy of prayer, the existence of the devil, and the reality of future punishment, are quietly put on the shelf by many professing leaders of modern thought, as useless old almanacs, or contemptuously thrown overboard as lumber! And all this is done so cleverly, and with such an appearance of candor and liberality, and with such compliments to the capacity and nobility of human nature, that multitudes of unstable Christians are carried away as by a flood, and become partially unsettled, if they do not make complete shipwreck of faith.

The existence of this plague of unbelief must not surprise us for a moment. It is only an old enemy in a new dress, an old disease in a new form. Since the day when Adam and Eve fell, the devil has never ceased to tempt men not to believe God, and has said, directly or indirectly, "You shall not die, even if you do not believe." In the latter days especially, we have warrant of Scripture for expecting an abundant crop of unbelief - "When the Son of Man comes, shall He find faith on the earth?" Evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse. There shall come in the last days scoffers (Luke 18:8; 2 Tim. 3:13; 2 Peter 3:3). Here in England skepticism is that natural rebound from semi-popery and superstition, which many wise men have long predicted and expected. It is precisely that swing of the pendulum which far-sighted students of human nature looked for, and it has come.

But, as I tell you not to be surprised at the widespread skepticism of the times, so also I must urge you not to be shaken in mind by it, or moved from your steadfastness. There is no real cause for alarm. The ark of God is not in danger, though the oxen seem to shake it. Christianity has survived the attacks of Hume and Hobbs and Tindal; of Collins and Woolston and Bolingbroke and Chubb; of Voltaire and Paine and Holyoake. These men produced no more real effect than idle travelers produce by scratching their names on the great Pyramid of Egypt. Depend on it, Christianity in like manner will survive the attacks of the clever writers of these times. The startling novelty of many modern objections to revelation, no doubt, makes them seem more weighty than they really are. It does not follow, however, that hard knots cannot be untied, because our fingers cannot untie them, or that formidable difficulties cannot be explained, because our eyes cannot see through or explain them. When you cannot answer a skeptic, be content to wait for more light; but never forsake a great principle. In religion, as in many scientific questions, said Faraday, the famous chemist, "the highest wisdom is often a judicious suspension of judgment."

When skeptics and infidels have said all they can, we must not forget that there are three great broad facts which they have never explained away; and I am convinced they never can, and never will. Let me tell you briefly what they are. They are very simple facts, and any plain man can understand them.

A. The first fact is Jesus Christ Himself. If Christianity is a mere invention of man, and the Bible is not from God - how can infidels explain Jesus Christ? His existence in history they cannot deny. How is it that without force or bribery, without arms or money, without flattering man's pride of reason, without granting any indulgence to man's lusts and passions - He has made such an immensely deep mark on the world? Who was He? What was He? Where did He come from? How is it that there has never been one like Him, neither before nor after, since the beginning of time? They cannot explain it. Nothing can explain it but the great foundation-principle of revealed religion, that Jesus Christ is truly God, and that His Gospel is all true.

B. The second fact is the Bible itself. If Christianity is a mere invention of man, and the Bible is of no more authority than any other uninspired volume, how is it that the book is what it is? How is it that a book written by a few Jews in a remote part of the earth, written at distant and various periods without concert or collusion among the writers; written by members of a nation which, compared to Greece and Rome, did nothing for literature - how is it that this book stands entirely alone, and that there is nothing that even approaches it, for high views of God, for true views of man, for solemnity of thought, for grandeur of doctrine, and for purity of morality? What account can the infidel give of this book, so deep, so simple, so wise, so free from defects? He cannot explain its existence and its nature on his principles. We only can do that - who hold that the book is supernatural, and is the book of God!

~J. C. Ryle~

(continued with # 2)