What Is The True Christian Religion?/Chapter 8
CHAPTER VIII
WHY CHRISTIANITY FAILS
Is it any wonder that Christianity taught after this manner has failed to save the world from its evils? Jesus tells us that when we see the Abomination which makes desolate standing in the Holy Place,—and what other belief equals this in making desolate the Christian life, denying the possibility of our living well and crouching under the substitution of the innocent for the guilty—we should flee to the mountains. The holding of such a desolating belief marks the end of the First Christian Age. A New Age is indispensable to bring us back to the true teachings of Jesus.
When Christians sing: "Jesus paid it all, All to Him I owe; Sin had left a crimson stain; He washed it white as snow;" they forget that the Lord says that the return to the Lord, the shunning of our evils of life, and the keeping of His commandments, is the thing that saves us. It is precisely this changed life, lived in the strength of the Lord, which is said to wash away our sins. The Lord points out that if we do these indispensable things of repentance and living well, "though our sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool." Mark it well: It is not our belief in the Plan of Salvation which accomplishes this end, but repentance and reform.
It is perfectly true that we are saved by faith in the Son of God, but that mans that we are saved as we come into the realization or perception of Jesus as God come forth to view, and accept His help to live the Christ-like life, thus are saved by our co-operation,—our free choice of the good and the rejection of the evil.—which mans our coming into the new life of God in the soul. That is the faith in the Son of God. We are not as sticks and stones, unable to choose the good and reject the evil; else the invitation would not be given us, "Whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely."
The "works of the law" which do net save are the acts of ritualism and piety done in our own strength tainted by selfish ends. In the Jewish dispensation they were the performance of the rituals of the ceremonial law, not the eternal basis of the Ten Commandments, which are forever necessary. "He that hath my commandments. and keepeth them, he is that loveth me."
But that the Lord rejected the sacrificial system as anything but a symbolism of true religion is conclusively shown by the following passage from Micah 6th chapter: "Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before the high God? Shall I come before Him with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my first born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He hath shown thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?"
Can we imagine a more complete repudiation of the efficacy of the sacrificial system to save mankind. Even if Jewish symbolists tried to interpret the Christian religion in its terms, does it not show rather their inability to grasp the fact of the changed life as the true religion of Jesus?