THE SABBATH

Waikato Times, Volume 126, Issue 21081, 6 April 1940, Page 18 (Supplement)

THE SABBATH

EASTER Say not that death is king, that night is lord, That loveliness is passing, beauty dies; Nor tell me hope’s a vain, deceptive dream Fate lends to life, a pleasing, luring gleam To light awhile the earth’s despondent skies, Till death brings swift and sure its dread reward. Say not that youth deceives, but age is true, That roses quickly pass, while cypress bides. That happiness is foolish, grief is wise, That stubborn dust shall choke our human cries. Death tells new worlds, and life immortal hides. Beyond the veil, which shall all wrongs undo. This was the tale God breathed to me at dawn When flooding sunrise told the night was gone. —Thomas Curtis Clark A DOUBLE NEED The Resurrection answered to a double need in man. It supplied an outside basis for the faith of the disciples. It gave new direction and vividness to their hope. Henceforth their faith in God sprang, not from reasonings as to the personality of the first cause, but from the evidence of the empty sepulchre; not from the probability of the Creator of man being all that man is, and more, but from the assurance, given by angels and men alike, that Jesus Christ who had died upon the Cross rose again the third day according to the Scriptures.— Preb. F. S. Webster.

MEANING OF THE CROSS . “There stands a cross and on the cross hangs the Son of God Himself. ... I am sure, as Christians from the first have been sure, that in all this ‘God was in Christ’; that that death, caused as to immediate causation, by the enmity of the Jews and the judgment of Pontius Pilate, was at the same time serving the eternal purposes of God Himself; there and then was the classic instance of the shaping of good out of the raw material of evil . . . “If ‘God was in Christ’ on Calvary, then the wrong-doing that set up that Cross, and all the wrong-doing of humanity before and since are deep and terrible wounds in the heart of eternal love. “Yet the Cross is far more than a revelation of a passive, suffering God. The whole earthly life of Jesus, culminating in that climax of self-giving, reveals God in action. God taking the initiative to bring men back into fellowship with Himself. ‘He first loved us.' . . . ‘God proves His love for us by this that Christ died for us while we were still sinners.* There, demonstrated on this earth, set forth in a human life on the plane of history so that all can see and understand is Divine Love, reaching down to estranged humanity to bless and heal and forgive and restore. . . “Once a man sees that his sin has hurt God and that nevertheless God still wants him, then the whole situation of life is changed. It is precisely this tremendous change which is effected when a man comes up against the Cross of Christ with his eyes open. As the meaning of that death dawns on my dull mind then there is quickened in me a new distaste for sin, a new desire for goodness, a new longing to respond to that seeking Love and seize that outstretched Hand. “Incredible as it may seem, He still, despite all the past believes in me, sees possibilities in me, and will lift me up to try again.”—From “Everyday Religion” (E. S. Woods. M.A.).