NOT BREAD ALONE.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20870, 9 November 1929, Page 27

NOT BREAD ALONE.

Written for the Otago Daily Times By the Rev. D. Gardner Miller. One of the simplest and yet one of the most profound statements ever made was the reply of Jesus when He was tempted to perform a miracle on His own behalf and turn the flat stones that lay around Him into bread. With perfect calmness He said, “ Man shall not live by bread alone.” Jesus had the disconcerting faculty of getting at the roots of things, and He never hesitated to state what He believed to be true, no matter how it was received. He was both daring and s.ane. How daring He was we are just beginning to realise. How sane we are becoming gropingly aware, when we have tried most things to heal the world’s hurt and found them but mere palliatives. _ When He said that “ man shall not live by, bread alone ” He touched the nerve of a profound truth. Of course, the thought was not new, but He made it startingly, effective by living it out to its fullest implications as no man had, or has, ever done. If Jesus had succumbed to the temptation and had made bread for Himself, in His time of need, then the most that could be said about Him is that He was a great miracle worker. , There are two incidents recorded when He multiplied food (not created it) to feed the hungry. But that is a different thing altogether from changing stones into bread. • There were thousands of people in Palestine in the day of Jesus who needed bread, and surely if Jesus had the power to create bread out of stones, and thus met and satisfied a crying social need, he would have preached a very practical Gospel which would, in time, eliminate poverty altogether. No one would minimise for one moment the demand that the teaching of Jesus should be practical. But meeting and satisfying physical needs is not the primary object of Christ. To do so was to establish faith in God, and, when that is accomplished, then life begins to transform itself, To demand miracles of God evidences a low average of spirituality; to have faith in God and to believe that man is first spiritual and then physical, is to take the first step in the understanding of the mighty truth that the universe is spiritual. It needed a Christ to show the world that the satisfying. of the physical side of life ends in moral blindness. Man is something more than physical. It is THE PLUS ELEMENT in human life that makes man yearn for something more than bread, that makes him for ever dissatisfied Vith himself. Work, play, meat and drink are all needed for the, sustaining of physical life, hut when we have had them all we are still but a little better than the beasts that perish. The difference between the beast and man is the “plus” element, that which the material can never satisfy. The “ plus ” element is the soul. I am not for the moment concerned about defining the soul—even if I could. I am concerned only with emphasising the fact that in the “ make-up ” of man there is a something that reaches out beyond -the things of time and sense. The history of man proves this. Man is the latest created being, and his time on the earth (remembering the millions of years that the evolution of this planet must have taken) has been very short. The difference between men now and what ho was, say a thousand years ago, is so great as to stagger the imagination, That difference was not the result of developing bone and muscle by material things, but by the divine discontent within him that made him master his environment and seek new worlds to conquer. What the difference will be between the man of 100 years ahead and what ho is now, is something upon which even the most philosophical scientist would ■not dare to dogmatise- And again, that difference will not be,the result of the undoubted fact that be has wrested from Nature many secrets for- the betterment of his physical and material well-being but it will be inevitably. the result of what inner urge, that, “plus ” element, that makes him long to,grasp the heavens with a span. In other words, Jesus made it clear that the most important thing about man was not his physical lift but his spiritual life. Between God and man there is A LINK. ; Instead of wasting reams of paper and spilling gallons of ink in printing and talking one’s head off, about the socalled “ missing link ” that is supposed to bridge the gulf between the animal and man, wo would serve a better purpose and certainly be nearer the truth, if we emphasised the truth that there is a ‘ link ” between the human and the divine. Man was made for God, That is the teaching of. Jesus. And whatever materialists and agnostics say, I am content to take Jesus as my authority on this and on any other matter that affects mankind. A mixture of dust and divinity, man is on the upward grade, not on the downward. He cannot live by bread alone. His soul demands other food. How penetratin'* and _true are the words of Jesus, “ Seek ye first the Kingdom of God over all these things ’ (the necessary things- of physical life) “shall be added unto you. It was not for an animal that Jesus died, but for man, who bears the jmpnnt, though blurred, of the fingers of God upon his soul. Jesus came to give man “life,” not to make it easy tor him to get mere bread. The world says, “ Get .gold, personal emolument, pleasure—let us eat, and drink and be merry.” Cnrist says, ocek ye first the Kingdom of God,” for man can live, in the truest sense only by every word that proceeded out of the mouth of God.” To Tolstoy there r llß *^ a of illumination which for ever altered his life. It was to know God and to live as one. Live to seek God and life will not be without God. And that is just another way of saying, “Man shall not live by bread alone.” J