Isaac Massey Haldeman

“ As God the Son, in co-operation with God the Father and God the Spirit, he who is presented to us as the Lord Jesus Christ, took a cell from the substance of the virgin Mary, made it a mould and with generating power wrought from it a real humanity—a new and distinct humanity—and united it to his eternal personality; so that he stands forth as the eternal God endowed with a human nature—with two natures, human and divine, in one body and one person forever—the infinite God-man.
Never do the apostles present him as a mere man. They present his humanity as the background for his deity. ”

“ A tiny sparrow, flying an unnoticed speck in the distant sky, or falling ground-ward with its weary flight, was a winged witness that the Father knew and saw even the smallest details of human life. A lily in its lowliness, and yet a lily in its beauty shaming a king’s array, a lily, toiling not, but upward growing, furnished him a text from which to preach the providence of God; and a wandering beggar boy far away from home and kindred, stained with sin and dark with sorrow, gave occasion for the wondrous story of the Prodigal Son and a father’s changeless and tender love. ”

“ The process which renews the body every seven years—so far as any law in nature shows—might go on indefinitely; there is no reason in itself why it should cease, and the soul within is never conscious of the added years. No one ever thinks of asking, “Why do we live?” Always, and involuntarily, we ask, “Why do we die?” Always we are seeking to continue life, inventing something to make it immune from death. To live, therefore, is natural. Not to live is unnatural. Being unnatural, it is an interference with nature. An interference with nature is superior to nature. ”

“ Thus, this book we call the Bible comes to us with the enormous and uncompromising claim that it is not a man-made book, but a book whose real and sole author is the living and eternal God.
This claim stands face to face with human need.
Here we are from birth to death, pilgrims on the highway of time, not knowing whence we come, nor whither we go. We need a guide to lead us, a light to shine when we stand at that parting of the ways—where eternity becomes the end of time. ”

“ If he were sinless, he was absolutely holy; he was so holy that his very presence brought out the sin in others. Sinful men and women fell at his feet and confessed their sins. At sight of him demons tore their way out of the bodies they possessed and fled as clouds of darkness before the sun, crying as they fled, “Thou art the holy one of God—hast thou come to torment us before the time?” Tormented as they were even then, as sin always is when confronted by holiness; as vice is before virtue; as a lie is before the truth. ”

“ Voices in the air are crying that we have been deceived; that this book upon which our fathers pillowed their heads when at the end of life’s journey, they laid them down to die; this book we have held as a lamp to our feet and a light to our path is, after all, at its best, only the word of man and not the Word of God at all.
Every now and then resounding blows are heard as they strike against the old foundation. Those who pretend to be working in the interest of the truth bid us stand aside, lest we and our hopes be buried in the impending ruin. ”

“ It takes the guilty sinner to the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ and shows him God’s hatred of sin to be so great, that the moment his holy and spotless Son representatively takes the sinner’s place, he smites him and pours out upon him a tidal sweep of wrath in a terror of relentless judgment and indignation so immense, that the earth quivers like an aspen, rocks to and fro, reels in its orbit till the sun of day refuses to shine, and the moon of night hangs in the startled heavens like a great clot of human blood. ”

“ In the Bible, holiness is not goodness and kindness, nor even morality. Holiness as the Bible sets it before us is the correspondence of the soul with God, the soul reflecting the intent, desire and innermost character of God; so that, were God to enter into the soul, he should find himself as much at home as upon his own exalted throne.
Such a definition as that makes human perfection and all its claims to holiness seem no better than a painted wanton dressed in the garb of purity and mouthing the words of virtue and chastity. ”

“ What we need to do, as Christians, is to take care of the world in which we now live, build first-class holy cities here, see that the streets are well paved, and the sewers in order, put fit clothing on the backs of the poor, fill the mouths of the hungry with actual bread, make the hours of labor minimum, and the hours of personal culture maximum, and thus weave a garment of civic, social and individual righteousness that shall stand the test of this world or any other. In other words, we are to live the life that now is—and let that which is to come take care of itself. ”

“ The Bible teaches that in the awful cry, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” the sinner should hear the echo of his own agony, as of one forsaken of God and swept out of his presence forever; and that the only ground of approach to this righteous God is the atoning blood of his crucified Son; that he who would approach God, find forgiveness and justification, must claim that crucified Son of God as his sin-offering, his vicarious sacrifice, his personal substitute. By the hell of the cross alone can he find the heaven of forgiveness and peace. ”

“ You cannot find or know him to your heart’s content in nature.
What kind of a God does nature reveal to you?
I will answer for you—a God who puts you in this world and does not tell you whence you come, whether from the all mud or the Almighty, from an angel or a devil, from jelly or genius, from the heights of heaven or the depths of hell. A God who puts you here and fills you with questions he alone can answer and—refuses so to do. A God who calls you into the world and gives you eyes to see everything but yourself. ”

“ A God who gave you mind with seemingly infinite possibilities in thought, and gave you a body that is finite and temporary in construction. A God who gives you an intellect which grasps after eternity, and is always saying on the summit of any endeavor achieved, “What next?” and yet is limited to a few inconsequent years. A God who sets you face to face with the imminency of death, and never allows you to know at what moment you must go, and gives you no hint of the beyond—or whether there is a beyond. ”

“ While copies of the classics—Virgil, Zenophon, Cæsar, Sophocles, Pindar and Martial—are to be counted by a few thousands, and are cast aside by students as soon as they have graduated, and are forgotten in a twelvemonth, this Bible goes on printing every year millions of copies in all languages and dialects of earth; so far from casting it aside, when once read, men take it up and read it again and again, study it through life, dig into it as for hid treasure, and make it the pillow on which to lay their dying head. ”

“ What man is he who can assure himself of ten days? In that time he may die, be buried and be forgotten by the world that scarcely heard the tolling of his funeral bell, and had no time to stay and hear the falling of the grave clods upon the coffin lid.
This emphasis of brevity and uncertainty has affected men more or less from the beginning. In the hour when Christianity was born it affected them well nigh unto delirium. So brief was the vision of life, so tumultuous its incidents, so conscious were men of its uncertainty, that they played with it as gamblers throw dice. ”

“ He who in the hour and article of death can face God and eternity, and commit himself to the hand of supreme justice as a confident child to the arms of a loving father, bears witness that in his soul there is no ghastly memory of sin, no sharp, remembered pang, no fear of offended law. Such a confidence and such a committal of triumphant calm bear witness that the heart is at rest with God, and is conscious of its own good. ”

“ When we turn to the New Testament once more, we are given a vision of him, in Patmos, where he appears to that beloved John who had leaned so heavily on his heart in the days of the earthly pilgrimage. It is a vision of wonder, of glory, and divine splendor. He is seen as a man—as one who had become dead, who was now alive, who had conquered both death and the grave. ”

“ Ask any of the bond slaves of passion, men who have been gripped by every form of human desire, and whiplashed, and stung, and tortured by their gratification, and driven to fresh and maddening excess by the never satisfied and always burning lust within (ever crying like the horseleach’s daughter, “Give, give”) ; ask them how it is that to-day they are freemen and walk as kings, and they will tell you that Jesus Christ laid hold of them, and by the might of his power, the tenderness of his love, and the wealth of his grace, made them free. ”

“ Miracle and miraculous are woven into its texture from beginning to end. You cannot touch it, or handle it, or look at it from any angle of vision that it does not suggest the miraculous. The moment the miracle is out of it it is no longer the Christianity of the first century, it is not the Christianity of the New Testament—the Christianity that has a miraculous Christ for its centre and the miracle of an infinite God for its environment. ”

“ It looks into the heart and sees hate crouching there with its tiger-like fangs and readiness to spring, and says that he who hates his brother is already a murderer.
The Bible has no forgiveness for sin until it has been fully and fearfully punished. In this it simply echoes the law stamped and steeped in nature. Nature never forgives its violated law until it has punished it. The Bible demands satisfaction, complete and absolute, before it offers even the hint of forgiveness. ”

“ It told men that a man had been here who had proven himself stronger than death and mightier than the grave; a man who had burst the bars of death asunder, spurned the sepulchre wherein human hands had laid his body, had ascended up on high, and now, from heaven’s throne, had power to impart to men a life that hated sin, rejoiced in virtue, could make each moment of earth’s existence worth while, and carried within it the assurance and prophecy of eternal felicity. ”

“ If Jesus Christ were not Almighty God, he had no authority nor power to forgive your sins. NO! And if Jesus Christ were not God I know not where to bid you turn. You must carry the load of your sins all your days; and when you die, go into eternity and face a holy God who tells you by every law and fact of nature that he never forgives in a single case till he has first punished the sin and with it the sinner.
If Jesus Christ were not God, his death was not an atonement.
And this surely should be plain enough.
Only God can atone to God.
Only an infinite being can satisfy an infinite being. ”

“ It would be easy to call the roll of the princes and kings in the realm of intellect, men whose thoughts burn and flame like great quenchless lights; men whose minds are the storehouses of knowledge, and whose utterances by word and pen have moved the quickest and most forceful lives in the world. It would be easy to call the long roll of these names shining like stars and constellations in the firmament of thought—princes and kings of intellect who acknowledge that Jesus Christ is not only superior to them morally and spiritually, but intellectually. ”

“ The books of Samuel, Kings and Chronicles, take up the story of the kingdom, and the Old Testament leads us on through symbol, figure and open prophecy, to a Coming Messiah and a glorious kingdom till, when we reach the last verse in Malachi, we lean across four centuries of prophetic silence, waiting to greet that promised Christ who shall be born in Bethlehem; and who is to be called the Son of the Highest; who is to sit on the throne of his father David, “to order it, and to establish it with judgment and with justice, from henceforth even forever.” ”

“ Find the men and women who know most of God, who have the deepest consciousness of him in the soul, and who walk every day with the assurance of his real presence—to whom the unseen becomes from hour to hour the thing that is alone real—and who live as kings above their prostrate passions—and they will be those who make this book the supreme authority in their daily lives; who hear it when it speaks to them as the very voice of God.
A book which thus inspires men for God is, indeed, a book which, by every law of logic, must have been inspired by God. ”

“ Men are sinning and suffering because social conditions are all wrong. These wrong conditions fill the multitude with discouragement and depression. They are unable to breathe an inspiring life force. They cannot obtain sufficient impulse to live above low levels. The laws, the customs, the inequalities of life, hedge them like brutes in a corral. This corralling and hedging of humanity en masse, while the few pull away from the crowd and create an environment satisfactory to themselves at the expense of the crowd, is the raison d’être for all evil conditions. ”

“ He is to man’s best character as harmony is to discord, as a smile is to a frown, as love is to hate, as blessing is to cursing, as a garden of lilies to a desert of sand, as heaven is to earth, as holiness is to sin and as life to death. ”

“ Let them preach this, and with unbroken confidence repeat the exultant words of Holy Writ, the words which shall warrant all their speech, that “our Saviour Jesus Christ hath abolished death, and hath brought life and immortality to light through the Gospel”; and it will be this Gospel echoing forth with all the music of its joyful tidings that shall answer infallibly and beyond all dispute the question of the hour—“What is Christianity?” ”

“ With life so brief, so uncertain, and ending in the starless night of silence, men in one form of utterance or another are, in substance, calling to each other and saying, “Let us eat and drink—for to-morrow we die.”
Thus the contemplation of death and its impartial and unprejudiced analysis leads to a belief in materialism and a greater or less surrender to mere sensualism; for, if men cannot go up they will go down; if they cannot live in the spirit, they will grovel in the flesh. ”

“ What kind of a God is that who allows the aged to linger out in a miserable prolongation of wretched days, a burden to themselves, a burden to others, and takes away the widow’s only son—her only support? Who is the God who creates one man with all the equipment for life, and another man with all the lack of it? What kind of a God is this who looks down out of the heaven of day and the heavens of night, and sees all the sorrow, the anguish, the pain, the unspeakable tragedies, and sends no wing of angel to cleave the pitiless sky, no voice out of the silence to console, no hand to help? ”