The Supporting Cast

 

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The earth is the stage on which the tragedy of the eons is enacted, and men are merely players in the drama of reconciliation. Not all of God’s creatures are called upon to endure the harsh winds of adversity, the smashing power of evil. We learn this lesson in ourselves through sad experience, but others are allowed to learn it through us and our sorrows and afflictions. Yet we are only the supporting cast, whose duty it is to act as the foil for the great Principal, Whose might and mercy, wisdom and love are the great theme of creation and revelation. The show is already going on. But the play is progressive. The first act, now on the stage, is a display of God’s multifarious wisdom. The audience is composed of the sovereignties and authorities among the celestials. It would be a great help to us if we realized the part we play and the characters we portray. Then we also would see the wisdom, and worship the Wise One.

A.E. Knoch (1874-1965)
Every Knee Shall Bow
Unsearchable Riches Magazine, Volume 40
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He Will Finish What He Started

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Being confident of this very thing, that He Who has begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ (Philippians 1:6).

You are God’s work. He started you, and He’ll complete you. This is something about which you can be confident, because it is all of God. This is a divine process that He Himself will carry out to its completion.

Delighting in this glorious truth can settle the weary heart and bring peace to the troubled mind. Regardless of what appears to be happening in our lives, Father is in control, performing His work. Rest in that.

Clyde L. Pilkington, Jr.
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The Seeking God

 

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Jesus came to make up what was lacking in our view of God. He had much to say about God – more than about any other subject. He called God, Father:

… I ascend unto My Father, and your Father … (John 20:17).

Jesus pictures God as a compassionate Father. Such is the teaching of the parable of the Prodigal. Not the son, but the father, is the central figure of that matchless picture. Then there is the parable of the Lost Sheep. Not the sheep, but the shepherd, is the chief character of that touching drama. Put these two parables into one, and we have a God represented not only as going out to meet the lost one, but going into the mountains of the far country and seeking him with eager heart and aching arms. This is Jesus’ idea of God.

The last, the least, the lost, are ever Jesus’ favorite words.

The last shall be first.

Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren.

The Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost.

The life of Jesus is God’s invitation to man to think of Him as a Father. Everything He is and says and does beckons us God-ward.

Charles Carroll Albertson (1865-1959)
The Distinctive Ideas of Jesus (1914), pages 24-25, 30
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Is the Solution to Sin to Quarantine It?

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Christendom has this strange view of God’s solution for sin. They believe that He will quarantine it on some dark outskirt of His universe forever. He will incarcerate the overwhelming majority of His creatures in a vast and horrific torture chamber while He and a very small minority of His creatures proceed to enjoy themselves with eternal bliss. This outpost will make Hitler’s concentration camps look like child’s play at Disney World by comparison.

An amazing solution for sin, is it not? Do they really believe that this is the best God could come up with?

Is the true God of Scripture not greater than this? Is He not wiser than this? More loving than this? More responsible? Really?

Is Christendom’s presentation really God’s solution for sin? Not a chance!

The problem is not with God, or His Scriptures, but with the religion that professes to represent Him. Christendom has adapted pagan Greek mythology (e.g. Orpheus, Pythagoras, Plato, Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Inferno) as their theology, and translated their Bibles to support their creeds.

The God of Scripture is far bigger than all of man’s little imagined gods.

Where sin abounds, grace much more abounds (Romans 5:20).

Clyde L. Pilkington, Jr.