1. The Holy Spirit’s Revelation Through the Prophets
R. A. Torrey, The Fundamental Doctrines of the Christian Faith (1918), chapter 1, “Inspiration, or to What Extent Is the Bible Inspired of God?”. Assigned excerpt. The interpretations are the author’s.
III. THE REVELATION MADE TO THE PROPHETS BY THE HOLY SPIRIT WAS INDEPENDENT OF THEIR OWN THINKING
The third thing that the Bible makes perfectly clear as to the inspiration of the Prophets and Apostles is, that the revelation made by God through His Holy Spirit to the Prophets was independent of the Prophets’ own thinking, that it was made to them by the Spirit of Christ which was in them, and that they themselves oftentimes did not thoroughly understand the full meaning of what the Spirit was saying through them, and that what they said was a subject of diligent search and inquiry to their own mind as to its meaning. This comes out very plainly in 1 Pet. 1:10-12, “Concerning which salvation the prophets sought and searched diligently, who prophesied of the grace that should come to you; searching what time, or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ which was in them did point unto, when it testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ and the glories that should follow them. Unto whom it was revealed, that not unto themselves, but unto you, did they minister these things which now have been announced unto you through them that preached the Gospel unto you by the Holy Spirit sent forth from Heaven; which things angels desire to look into.” Here again the meaning is as clear as day and inescapable. We are told that the prophets had a revelation made to them by the Holy Spirit, the meaning of which they did not thoroughly comprehend, and that they themselves “sought and searched diligently” as to the meaning of this revelation which was made to them and which they recorded. The Spirit, through them testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ (e.g. in Isa. 53:3, Ps. 22) and the glories that should follow them. They recorded what the Spirit testified, but what it meant they did not thoroughly understand. It was not merely that their minds were made keen to see things which they would not otherwise see, and which they therefore more or less accurately recorded. No, there was a very definite revelation, arising not from their own minds at all, but from the Spirit of God Who made the revelation to them and this they recorded, but it was not of themselves to that extent that they themselves wondered as to what its meaning might be. What they recorded was not at all their own thought, it was the thought of the Holy Spirit who spoke through them. How utterly different this conception is from that which is so persistently taught in many of our colleges and theological seminaries and pulpits,—how utterly different it is from the conception that was taught a week ago to-day in one of the pulpits of our own city.
IV. NO PROPHETIC UTTERANCE WAS OF THE PROPHET’S OWN WILL, BUT THE PROPHET SPOKE FROM GOD AND THE PROPHET WAS CARRIED ALONG BY THE HOLY SPIRIT AND NOT BY HIS OWN IMPULSE OR REASONING IN WHAT HE SAID
The fourth thing that the Bible makes perfectly clear is, that not one single prophetic utterance was of the prophet’s own will (i.e., it was not in any sense merely what he wished to say), but in every instance the Prophet spoke from God, and the Prophet was carried along in the prophetic utterance by the Holy Spirit, regardless of his own will or thought. We find this stated practically in so many words in 2 Pet. 1:21 where we read: “For no prophecy (literally, not a prophecy) ever came (literally, was brought) by the will of man; but men spake from God being moved (literally, carried along, or borne) by the Holy Spirit.” There can be no honest mistaking of the meaning of this language. The Prophet never thought that there was something that needed to be said and therefore said it, but God took possession of the prophet, carried him along in his utterance, by the power of the Holy Spirit, and he spake, not from his own consciousness, and not from his own reasoning, nor from his own intuition, but “from God.” As God’s messenger he spoke what God told him to say.
2. The Divine Attributes of Jesus Christ
R. A. Torrey, The Fundamental Doctrines of the Christian Faith (1918), chapter 4, “The Deity of Jesus Christ”. Assigned excerpt. The interpretations are the author’s.
II. DIVINE ATTRIBUTES
But there is a second line of proof that Jesus Christ was God, a proof equally convincing, and that is, all the five distinctively Divine attributes are ascribed to Jesus Christ, and “all the fulness of the Godhead” is said to dwell in Him. There are five distinctively Divine attributes, that is five attributes that God alone possesses. These are Omnipotence, Omniscience, Omnipresence, Eternity, and Immutability. Each one of these distinctively Divine attributes are ascribed to Jesus Christ. First of all, omnipotence is ascribed to Jesus Christ. Not only are we taught that Jesus had power over disease and death and winds and sea and demons, that they were all subject to His word, and that He is far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world but also in the world to come (Eph. 1:20-23), but in Heb. 1:3 it is said in so many words that He “Upholds all things by the word of his power.” Omniscience is also ascribed to Him. We are taught in the Bible that Jesus knew men’s lives, even their secret history (John 4:16, 19), that He knew the secret thoughts of men, knew all men, knew what was in man (Mark 2:8; Luke 5:22; John 2:24, 25) which knowledge we are distinctly told in 2 Chron. 6:30 and Jer. 17:9, 10, God only possesses, but we are told in so many words in John 16:30 that Jesus knew “all things,” and in Col. 2:3 we are told that in Him “are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” Omnipresence is also ascribed to Him. We are told in Matt. 18:20 that where two or three are gathered together in His name, that He is in the midst of them, and in Matt. 28:20 that wherever His obedient disciples should go He would be with them, even unto the end of the age, and in John 14:20 and 2 Cor. 13:5 we are told that He dwells in each believer, in all the millions of believers scattered over the earth. In Eph. 1:23 we are told in so many words that He “filleth all in all.” Eternity is also ascribed to Him. We are told in John 1:1 that “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” In John 8:57 Jesus Himself said, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, before Abraham was, I am.” Note that the Lord Jesus did not merely say that “before Abraham was I was,” but that “before Abraham was, I am,” thus declaring Himself to be the eternal “I am.” Even in the Old Testament we have a declaration of the eternity of the Christ who was to be born in Bethlehem. In Micah 5:2 we read, “But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting.” And in Isa. 9:6 we are told of the child that is to be born, “For unto us a child is born, unto us a Son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder; and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.” And in Heb. 13:8 we are told that “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever.” His immutability is also taught in the passage just quoted from Hebrews, and in the first chapter of the same book, the twelfth verse we are told that while even the heavens change, the Lord Jesus does not change. The exact words are, “They shall perish, but thou remainest: They all shall wax old as doth a garment; and as a mantle shalt thou roll them up, as a garment, and they shall be changed: but thou art the same. And thy years shall not fail.” So we see that each one of the five distinctly Divine attributes were ascribed to our Lord Jesus Christ. And in Col. 2:9 we are told in so many words, “In him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily” (i.e., in a bodily form). Here again we might rest our case, for what has been said under this head, even if taken alone, clearly proves the absolute Deity of our Lord Jesus Christ. It shows that He possessed every perfection of nature and character that God the Father possesses.
3. Forgiveness and Peace Through the Atoning Death
R. A. Torrey, The Fundamental Doctrines of the Christian Faith (1918), chapter 8, “The Atonement: God’s Doctrine of the Atonement vs. Unitarian and Christian Science Doctrines of the Atonement”. Assigned excerpt. The interpretations are the author’s.
3. By the atoning death of Jesus Christ all believers in Jesus Christ have forgiveness of all their sins. We read in Eph. 1:7, “In whom (i.e., in Jesus Christ) we have our redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace.” Because Jesus Christ died as a full satisfaction for our sins, forgiveness of sin is not something which believers are to do something to secure, it is something which the blood of Jesus Christ has already secured and which our faith has already appropriated to ourselves; “we have forgiveness,” we are forgiven. Every believer in Jesus Christ is forgiven every sin he ever committed or ever shall commit, because Jesus Christ shed His blood in his place. Through Christ’s atoning death all believers in Him, although they once “were enemies,” are now “reconciled to God by the death of His Son.” As we read in Rom. 5:10, “While we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son.” That is to say, the enmity between God and the sinner is done away with, or, as Paul puts it in Col. 1:20, Christ has “made peace through the blood of His cross,” or, as he puts it in the next verse but one, Col. 1:22, Christ “hath reconciled” believers “in the body of His flesh through death.”
The story is told of a faithful vicar in England who was told that one of his parishioners was dying. She was a good woman, but he hurried to her side to talk with her. As he sat down by the side of the dying woman he said to her very gently but solemnly, “They tell me you have not long to live.” “No,” she replied, “I know I have not.” “They tell me you will probably not live through the night.” “No,” she replied, “I do not expect to live through the night.” Then he said very earnestly, “Have you made your peace with God?” She replied, “No, I have not.” “And are you not afraid to meet God without having made your peace with Him?” “No, not at all,” she calmly replied. Again he said to her, “Do you understand what I am saying? Do you realise that you are at the point of death?” “Yes.” “Do you realise you will probably not live through the night?” “Yes.” “And you have not made your peace with God?” “No.” “And you are not afraid to meet God?” “No, not at all.” There was something about the woman’s manner that made him feel there was something back of her words, and he said to her, “What do you mean?” She replied, “I know I am dying. I know I am very near death. I know I shall not live through the night. I know I must soon meet God, and I am not at all disturbed, for I know that I did not need to make my peace with God, because Jesus Christ made peace with God for me more than eighteen hundred years ago by His death on the cross of Calvary, and I am resting in the peace that Jesus Christ has already made.” The woman was right: no man needs to make his peace with God, Jesus Christ has already made peace by His atoning death, and all we have to do is to enter into the peace which Jesus Christ has made for us, and we enter into that peace by simply believing in the One who made peace by His death upon the cross. Jesus Christ’s work was a complete and perfect work. There is nothing to be added to it. We cannot add anything to it, and we do not need to add anything to it. Jesus Christ has “made peace through the blood of His cross.”
4. How One Is Born Again
R. A. Torrey, The Fundamental Doctrines of the Christian Faith (1918), chapter 10, “The New Birth”. Assigned excerpt. The interpretations are the author’s.
2. Some one might infer from the fact that regeneration is God’s work, which He works in our hearts by His Holy Spirit, that all we have to do is to wait until God sees fit to work; but we see plainly from other passages in the Word that this is not true. We are taught the second thing about how regeneration is wrought in James 1:18, “Of His own will he brought us forth by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of first fruits of His creatures.” Here we are taught that the Word of Truth, the Word of God, is the instrument that God uses in regeneration. The same thought is found in 1 Pet. 1:23, “Having been begotten again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, through the word of God, which liveth and abideth.” And Paul gives voice to the same great thought in 1 Cor. 4:15, where he says: “For though ye should have ten thousand tutors in Christ, yet have ye not many fathers: for in Christ Jesus I begat you through the gospel.” From these passages it is evident that the New Birth is wrought by God through the instrumentality of His Word. It is God who works it through the power of His Holy Spirit, but the Holy Spirit works through the Word, and thus God begets men anew by “The Word of Truth,” or the “Word of God,” i.e., the Word which is preached by “the Gospel.” So then, if you or I wish to be born again we should get in contact with the Word of God by studying the Bible and asking God that the Holy Spirit may make that Word which we are studying a living thing in our own hearts. We should get in contact especially with that part of God’s Word which is found in the Gospel of John, for John tells us in John 20:31 that “These (i.e., these things in the Gospel of John) are written, that ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ the Son of God; and that believing ye may have life in his name.” If we wish to see others born again we should bring the Word of God to bear upon their minds and hearts either by preaching the Word, or by teaching it, or in personal work; and we should look to the Holy Spirit to quicken that Word in the hearts of men as we sow it in their hearts, and in this way the New Birth will result.
3. The third and last and decisive truth as to how we are born again is found in Gal. 3:26 and John 1:12, 13. In Gal. 3:26 we read, “For ye are all sons of God, through faith, in Christ Jesus.” This tells us plainly that we become born again through putting our faith in Christ Jesus. This is even more explicitly stated in John 1:12, 13: “But as many as received him (i.e. the Lord Jesus), to them gave He the right to become children of God, even to them that believe on His name: which were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.” Here we are told that the decisive thing in our becoming children of God is that we believe in, or receive, Jesus Christ. Any one who receives Jesus Christ as his personal Saviour and trusts God to forgive him because Jesus Christ died in his place and receives him as his Lord and King, and surrenders his thoughts to His absolute control as his Lord and his life to His absolute control as his King and confesses Jesus Christ as Lord before the world, such a one immediately becomes a child of God, is immediately born again, is immediately made a partaker of the Divine nature. The same thought is illustrated by Jesus Himself in John 3:14, 15, where our Lord Jesus is recorded as saying, “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up; that whosoever believeth in Him may have eternal life.” The reference is to the story of the Israelites in the Old Testament when they were bitten by fiery serpents. As the dying Israelite with the poison of the fiery serpent coursing through his veins, was saved by simply looking at the brazen serpent on the pole, a serpent made in the likeness of the one that had bitten him, and had new life coursing through his veins as soon as he looked, so we dying men, with the poison of sin coursing through our veins, are saved by looking at Jesus Christ “Made in the likeness of sinful flesh,” lifted up on the cross, and have new life coursing through our veins the moment we look. All we have to do with our regeneration is to receive Christ as He is presented to us in the Word, by which we are born again. Therefore, “If any man be in Christ he is a new creature (creation). The old things are passed away, behold all things are become new.”
5. The Resurrection of the Body at the Return of the Lord
R. A. Torrey, The Fundamental Doctrines of the Christian Faith (1918), chapter 12, “The Resurrection of the Body of Jesus and of Our Bodies”. Assigned excerpt. The interpretations are the author’s.
III. WHEN WILL THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY TAKE PLACE?
There remains but one question to be considered and we can deal with that very briefly. That question is, when will the resurrection of the body take place? This question is plainly answered time and again in the Bible. For example, it is answered in Phil. 3:20, 21: “For our citizenship is in heaven; from whence also we wait for a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ: Who shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation, that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, according to the working whereby he is able even to subject all things unto himself.” Here it is plainly declared that the transformation of our bodies into the likeness of the glorious body of Christ will take place when the Lord Jesus whom we are awaiting shall appear from heaven. The same thought is given in I Thess. 4:16, 17: “For the Lord Himself shall descend from heaven, with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first; then we which are alive, that are left, shall together with them be caught up in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.” The question will arise in some of our minds, what about us in the meantime if we chance to die before the coming of the Lord? This question also is plainly answered in II Cor. 5:1-8: “For we know that if the earthly house of our tabernacle (our present bodies) be dissolved (die and decay) we have a building from God, a house not made with hands (our resurrection body that we are to get at the coming of the Lord), eternal, in the heavens. For verily in this (i.e., while living in this present body) we groan, longing to be clothed upon with our habitation which is from heaven (our resurrection body) if so be that being clothed we shall not be found naked. For indeed we that are in this tabernacle (this present earthy body) do groan, being burdened; not for that we would be unclothed (i.e., not that we would merely get rid of our present bodies), but that we would be clothed upon (i.e., that we would receive our resurrection bodies) that what is mortal may be swallowed up of life. Now he that wrought us for this very thing is God, who gave unto us the earnest of the Spirit (i.e., the Holy Ghost, whom we have received as the earnest of the full redemption in our resurrection bodies which are to be obtained at the coming of the Lord). Being therefore always of good courage and knowing that, whilst we are at home in the body (i.e., while we are still in our earthly life in this present earthly body) we are absent from the Lord (for we walk by faith not by sight); we are of good courage, I say, and are willing rather to be absent from the body (i.e., to have our present earthly body die even before we get our resurrection bodies, which we shall not get until the return of the Lord), and to be at home with the Lord.” The teaching of this plainly is that if we die before the return of the Lord and therefore before we obtain our resurrection body, our spirits are unclothed, i.e., they are unclothed from this present body and not yet clothed upon with the resurrection body, but that we are “at home with the Lord” in conscious blessedness, in a condition that is far better than that that we are in in this present life (see Phil. 1:23, R. V.), but not so perfect as that condition which shall be when our redeemed spirits are clothed upon with our resurrection bodies. It will be at the return of the Lord Jesus that we get our full redemption. That is one reason why “we wait” (literally, assiduously wait) for Him (Phil. 3:20, 21, see Greek). That is one reason why we long for the return of the Lord. There are many reasons why we long for the return of our Lord. All the great problems that are confronting us at this present time in national and international life, in social, commercial and political life, will be solved when He comes, and will never be solved until He comes; and for these reasons we long for Him. But we long for Him also because while this present body serves many a useful purpose for the redeemed spirit that inhabits it, it is often a hindrance. It is often subject to aches and pains, to frailties, and it is a constant temptation to folly. But when our Lord Jesus comes again He will transform this present body of our humiliation into the likeness of His own glorious body and at that time we shall know what “full salvation” means, when we shall shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of our Father.