Concluding Remarks on the Book of Leviticus

CONCLUSION.

The Israelites were chosen out of the midst of an idolatrous world to receive monotheism when all the nations of the earth had lapsed into polytheism. They were elected to conserve not only the doctrine of one God, but the doctrine of his spirituality and holiness, and to maintain a religion of the highest purity inseparably linked with a perfect morality. For this purpose, in the first stages of their religious development they received not a revelation of the moral attributes of God in the abstract, but in the concrete, enshrined in symbols and ceremonies, whereby the knowledge of God might be safely kept till the time of its manifestation in a purer and more heavenly form in the dispensation of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. The peculiarity of the Hebrews did not consist in intellectual culture after the style of the Greeks, nor in the administration of civil law like the Romans, but their distinguishing characteristic was religion. Hence their frequent festivals, their constant sacrifices, their scrupulous purifications were impressive object-lessons, teaching the Divine unity and holiness. Their wars, their heroes, and their poetry had a sacred flavour, and their national code was full of the details of public worship. Every thing in their social and family life was connected with their religion, which had not been evolved out of the Hebrew consciousness but was revealed from heaven. Their ordinary employments were suggestive of the truths thus revealed, because they were at every point touched by divinely appointed and significant ceremonies. Nor was this religious cult, like those of the Gentile world, a mysterious creed in the sole possession of a sacerdotal class, but it was the common heritage of the learned and the ignorant. It was neither a recondite philosophy which might not be communicated to the masses, nor a weak superstition sneered at by the higher classes while controlling the lower. The religion of Moses, utterly destitute of any aristocratic element, was for the use and benefit of all — the poorest peasant and the wisest rabbin.

The Crown of Life

QUESTION: What is the crown of life in Rev. 2:10, "Be thou faithful until death, and I will give thee the crown of life?"

ANSWER: Says Thayer's New Testament Greek Lexicon, used in all the theological seminaries in the English-speaking world, "The crown of life is the eternal blessedness which will be given as a prize to genuine servants of God and of Christ." The crown of life is eternal life as a crown, a wreath upon the brow of the racer who has finished his course. In grammar the crown and the life eternal are appositives, like the city of Boston.

— Steele's Answers, p. 98.

The Inward Revelation of Christ

[There is] another function of the Spirit which needs special emphasis because it is more apt to be overlooked and forgotten – the inward revelation of Christ in the consciousness of the adult believer, as distinguished from that infantile faith by which a penitent is born into the kingdom of God.

Uncertainty and doubt perplex and weaken immature Christians. Christ is to them an outside and distant person whom they endeavor with painful effort to bring near and to make real. They try to do the orthodox thing, to cherish certain beliefs about Him. But there is no warmth, no inspiration, no enthusiasm, no intense love. Their experience is much of the time dreary, and their Christian service is mechanical and constrained, not free, spontaneous and joyful.

What is lacking? Not the new birth, but a definite experience which follows regeneration. The new birth implants love divine. When this love has been tested and strengthened by obedience it is our privilege by faith to have a spiritual manifestation of Christ in our hearts. "He that hath my commandments and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me; and he that loveth me shall be loved of my father, and I will love him, and will manifest myself unto him."