When these lines appear in print we should he about midway between the observance of Thanksgiving Day in Canada on October 8 and in the U.S. on November 22. As good a time as any then for readers of THE OUTLOOK, living on both sides of the border, to honestly ask the question: “Thankful? Thankful for what?”
A recent telephone call comes to mind as we pose this question once again. My informant was no gossip-monger but a disturbed colleague. He wanted to share with me the distressing news about a number of ministers (three or four, I think) who somehow had fallen into disgrace, the sad and sordid details of which had just as well be left unsaid. Somewhat taken aback and also depressed at the thought of what all this meant to the parties involved, to the office of the ministry, and to the honor of the church, I finally asked my caller, “Do you have any good news?” “Yes,” came the answer quick as a flash, “the Lord is still on His throne.”
And that, I think, was just what I needed after such a liberal dose of bad news as he had to give. You see, a spate of depressing reports like that reminds me once again of one of our stalwart and veteran ministers of a bygone day who must have been in a cynical mood indeed when one day he is reported to have said, “Wees getrouw, maar vertrouw niemand” (“Be trustworthy, but trust no one”).
Now you and I had better believe it, the devil makes the most of it when the news seems all bad and he will sift us as wheat to make chaff out of us, or pummel us hard to keep us down on our backs as long and as often as he can. The only cure for days and nights of gloom like that is by faith to keep in tune with the constant refrain of Scripture that the Lord God omnipotent reigneth, and that even the gates of hell cannot prevail against the believer and the church. Behold, the throne of Him whose we are and whom we serve!
“Thanksgiving Day? Thankful? Thankful for what?” says the cynic. But his is not the language of faith. Every day is sure to be Thanksgiving Day if only our days and nights have God’s throne in them. Gloom is transformed into glory, and the future becomes radiant with all the promises that are yea and amen in Christ Jesus as long as we live in this assurance that at the center of the whole universe our Lord is reigning supreme as King of kings and Lord of lords.
So, God is on His throne—yesterday, today, and forever. Well, what else do you know? We all know that. But do we really? Or do we allow dark clouds and the devil, circumstances and crises, to obscure our vision? The devil is always on the alert, looking for an opening to whisper the same gloomy and apostate counsel Job’s wife once gave her sorely afflicted husband, “Dost thou still hold fast thine integrity? Renounce God, and die.”
Our God created and redeemed us to celebrate Thanksgiving Day for ever and ever. But make no mistake about it, the devil is always lurking and scheming to turn all our days and also our eternal hereafter into infamy and cursing, rebellion and ruin, with hell as the outcome of it all. And hell is the inferno over the entrance of which Dante has written, “Give up all hope ye who enter here.”
At the time of this writing, the radio, television, and the newspapers are bursting with news—and the news is not good I Both nationally and internationally the developments arc sinister and sad, filled with dire forebodings. We hold our breath wondering what may be coming next.
Watergate with its foul and lingering stench is enough to make the Greek cynic philosopher Diogenes rise up and return to his walking around again in broad daylight with a lighted lantern looking once more for an honest man. Are there no statesmen left, have all succumbed and stooped to corruption and to the ways and wiles of crooked politicians? No wonder if the feathers of the proud U.S. eagle are drooping to an all-time low. The Watergate mess hangs like a pall over the prospect of the nation supposed to be rousing itself for another annual Thanksgiving Day.
And then Mr. Agnew – “Spiro our hero.” Those of us in the U. S. who trusted him are stung and cut to the quick to have it Bung in our faces by a well-known member of the news media, “He preached the old-fashioned virtues, and he practised the old-fashioned vices.” While we should be praying for him and others who are to carry on, a disillusioned electorate may feel like writing on politics and politicians as nothing but a kit and caboodle of “dirty tricks” that always leave John Q. Public with a red face and holding the bag.
As we in the U. S. contemplate another Thanksgiving Day we smart under the disgrace that rubs off on all of us either more or less. We are so sorely in need of something to relieve the gloom, something to rekindle gratitude in our hearts, something that even now can give us a bona-fide reason to tum our despair into confidence and our foreboding into songs of praise. Once again, the only answer: Behold, the throne!
Internationally, the savage furies of war have again been unleashed as Israel and the Arabs are once more fighting it out while the rest of the world looks on in the dreadful apprehension that this tinderbox might set off a wider war, with the U. S. and the Soviets gradually being sucked in and a holocaust too terrible to contemplate as the result.
Even if the whole word should become a battlefield plunged into the unprecedented conflagration of a total nuclear war—O my soul, even then give praise and be thankful! And what’s the secret? The Lord God omnipotent reigneth. Our Jesus is King of kings and Lord of lords! Behold, the throne!
Think of John, banished as a lonely exile to the rocky, barren isle of Patmos, somewhere far out in the Aegean Sea. And what was his crime for which the cruel, invincible Roman Empire had pitted itself against him? John was there “for the word of God and the testimony of Jesus” (Rev. 1:9).
Invincible? It appeared so and this is what his archfiend enemy the devil may have tried to ten John. Anyone with eyes to see must recognize that Rome was the last word and that Rome’s legions and iron heel were always in command. John too was human, and who knows how many doubts and fears may have come to torment him there on Patmos! Over and over again the devil may have come to tell John to curse God and die or to recant and save himself from his wretched lot.
But one day, a never-to-be-forgotten day—it was the Lord’s Day—John was in the Spirit and he received the Revelation that placed his whole topsyturvy world right side up against and his whole conglomeration of horrors was brought into the proper perspective of faith.
And what was it that John saw? “Straightway I was in the Spirit,” he tells us, “and behold, there was a throne set in heaven . . .” (Rev. 4:2). That did it! At once everything made sense for John and came into proper and blessed focus. Then and there on Patmos, mind you, John had a radiant Thanksgiving Day as never before. He beheld the throne, and he knew that all was well.
And, even so, the church today -assailed by apostasy, opposition, and the age-old attack upon the Word of our God initiated already by Satan in Paradise when he led off the new hermeneutic by saying, “Yea, hath God said . . . ?”—yes, even so Christ’s church today can thank God and take courage as she looks up by faith and says, Behold, the throne!
Thanksgiving Day without God’s throne at the center of it all is a counterfeit, only a cheap imitation of the real thing. Gratitude and praise arise only out of the knowledge and the assurance that, through all the days of our years and also world without end, our God and Savior reigns supreme as Lord of lords and King of kings.
Thankful for what?
Behold, the throne!
Note: Further consideration of last month’s editorial topic, “The Conservative’s Dilemma in a Changing Church,” will be continued in our next issue, the Lord willing.
A recent telephone call comes to mind as we pose this question once again. My informant was no gossip-monger but a disturbed colleague. He wanted to share with me the distressing news about a number of ministers (three or four, I think) who somehow had fallen into disgrace, the sad and sordid details of which had just as well be left unsaid. Somewhat taken aback and also depressed at the thought of what all this meant to the parties involved, to the office of the ministry, and to the honor of the church, I finally asked my caller, “Do you have any good news?” “Yes,” came the answer quick as a flash, “the Lord is still on His throne.”
And that, I think, was just what I needed after such a liberal dose of bad news as he had to give. You see, a spate of depressing reports like that reminds me once again of one of our stalwart and veteran ministers of a bygone day who must have been in a cynical mood indeed when one day he is reported to have said, “Wees getrouw, maar vertrouw niemand” (“Be trustworthy, but trust no one”).
Now you and I had better believe it, the devil makes the most of it when the news seems all bad and he will sift us as wheat to make chaff out of us, or pummel us hard to keep us down on our backs as long and as often as he can. The only cure for days and nights of gloom like that is by faith to keep in tune with the constant refrain of Scripture that the Lord God omnipotent reigneth, and that even the gates of hell cannot prevail against the believer and the church. Behold, the throne of Him whose we are and whom we serve!
“Thanksgiving Day? Thankful? Thankful for what?” says the cynic. But his is not the language of faith. Every day is sure to be Thanksgiving Day if only our days and nights have God’s throne in them. Gloom is transformed into glory, and the future becomes radiant with all the promises that are yea and amen in Christ Jesus as long as we live in this assurance that at the center of the whole universe our Lord is reigning supreme as King of kings and Lord of lords.
So, God is on His throne—yesterday, today, and forever. Well, what else do you know? We all know that. But do we really? Or do we allow dark clouds and the devil, circumstances and crises, to obscure our vision? The devil is always on the alert, looking for an opening to whisper the same gloomy and apostate counsel Job’s wife once gave her sorely afflicted husband, “Dost thou still hold fast thine integrity? Renounce God, and die.”
Our God created and redeemed us to celebrate Thanksgiving Day for ever and ever. But make no mistake about it, the devil is always lurking and scheming to turn all our days and also our eternal hereafter into infamy and cursing, rebellion and ruin, with hell as the outcome of it all. And hell is the inferno over the entrance of which Dante has written, “Give up all hope ye who enter here.”
At the time of this writing, the radio, television, and the newspapers are bursting with news—and the news is not good I Both nationally and internationally the developments arc sinister and sad, filled with dire forebodings. We hold our breath wondering what may be coming next.
Watergate with its foul and lingering stench is enough to make the Greek cynic philosopher Diogenes rise up and return to his walking around again in broad daylight with a lighted lantern looking once more for an honest man. Are there no statesmen left, have all succumbed and stooped to corruption and to the ways and wiles of crooked politicians? No wonder if the feathers of the proud U.S. eagle are drooping to an all-time low. The Watergate mess hangs like a pall over the prospect of the nation supposed to be rousing itself for another annual Thanksgiving Day.
And then Mr. Agnew – “Spiro our hero.” Those of us in the U. S. who trusted him are stung and cut to the quick to have it Bung in our faces by a well-known member of the news media, “He preached the old-fashioned virtues, and he practised the old-fashioned vices.” While we should be praying for him and others who are to carry on, a disillusioned electorate may feel like writing on politics and politicians as nothing but a kit and caboodle of “dirty tricks” that always leave John Q. Public with a red face and holding the bag.
As we in the U. S. contemplate another Thanksgiving Day we smart under the disgrace that rubs off on all of us either more or less. We are so sorely in need of something to relieve the gloom, something to rekindle gratitude in our hearts, something that even now can give us a bona-fide reason to tum our despair into confidence and our foreboding into songs of praise. Once again, the only answer: Behold, the throne!
Internationally, the savage furies of war have again been unleashed as Israel and the Arabs are once more fighting it out while the rest of the world looks on in the dreadful apprehension that this tinderbox might set off a wider war, with the U. S. and the Soviets gradually being sucked in and a holocaust too terrible to contemplate as the result.
Even if the whole word should become a battlefield plunged into the unprecedented conflagration of a total nuclear war—O my soul, even then give praise and be thankful! And what’s the secret? The Lord God omnipotent reigneth. Our Jesus is King of kings and Lord of lords! Behold, the throne!
Think of John, banished as a lonely exile to the rocky, barren isle of Patmos, somewhere far out in the Aegean Sea. And what was his crime for which the cruel, invincible Roman Empire had pitted itself against him? John was there “for the word of God and the testimony of Jesus” (Rev. 1:9).
Invincible? It appeared so and this is what his archfiend enemy the devil may have tried to ten John. Anyone with eyes to see must recognize that Rome was the last word and that Rome’s legions and iron heel were always in command. John too was human, and who knows how many doubts and fears may have come to torment him there on Patmos! Over and over again the devil may have come to tell John to curse God and die or to recant and save himself from his wretched lot.
But one day, a never-to-be-forgotten day—it was the Lord’s Day—John was in the Spirit and he received the Revelation that placed his whole topsyturvy world right side up against and his whole conglomeration of horrors was brought into the proper perspective of faith.
And what was it that John saw? “Straightway I was in the Spirit,” he tells us, “and behold, there was a throne set in heaven . . .” (Rev. 4:2). That did it! At once everything made sense for John and came into proper and blessed focus. Then and there on Patmos, mind you, John had a radiant Thanksgiving Day as never before. He beheld the throne, and he knew that all was well.
And, even so, the church today -assailed by apostasy, opposition, and the age-old attack upon the Word of our God initiated already by Satan in Paradise when he led off the new hermeneutic by saying, “Yea, hath God said . . . ?”—yes, even so Christ’s church today can thank God and take courage as she looks up by faith and says, Behold, the throne!
Thanksgiving Day without God’s throne at the center of it all is a counterfeit, only a cheap imitation of the real thing. Gratitude and praise arise only out of the knowledge and the assurance that, through all the days of our years and also world without end, our God and Savior reigns supreme as Lord of lords and King of kings.
Thankful for what?
Behold, the throne!
Note: Further consideration of last month’s editorial topic, “The Conservative’s Dilemma in a Changing Church,” will be continued in our next issue, the Lord willing.