Christ, Christianity and the Bible

by Isaac Massey Haldeman

He was holy.

His sinlessness and holiness cannot be accounted for on natural grounds.

All his natural ancestry were sinful.

His sinlessness cannot be accounted for unless he were God; for, sinlessness and holiness come alone from God and, as essential qualities, take their rise alone in God.

His power over nature proved him God.

His look changed water into wine, his word gave sight to the blind, healing to the deaf, speech to the dumb. At his word the lame man leaped as a hart, the leper was cleansed. He said, “Peace, be still,” and the wild tempest of the sea was hushed, and there was a great calm, a calm like unto the stillness of the unruffled rest of God.

For two thousand years his regenerative power in a world of sin has been the proof that he was God.

For two thousand years, in every age, in every clime, among all classes of men, from the refined infidel to the vilest sinner, from the cold atheist to the brutal idolater, men have been changed—transformed. Men who have been the bond slaves of passion, whose daily lives have been the output of iniquity, whose deeds have been for destruction, whose words have been poison, and whose inmost thoughts have been as the vapors of miasma—these all—have been transformed into fountains of purity, into angels of mercy, or as illuminated missals have been written full of the name and the glory of God; men whose every fibre was as the coarse and tangled threads of a brutal unrefinement have become men whose every line of character was as the woven gold of Ophir—and the speech that once smote with discord the ears that heard it has become as the sound of singing across silent waters and under listening stars. And you ask these transfigured human beings, as you find them travelling along the highway of twenty noteful centuries, what it was that so changed them, put such new force and impetus in them, making them to be as men new created, and they will tell you that Jesus Christ came along that way, they saw in his face the stain of blood, the marks of nails were in his hands and feet, he had the appearance of one who had been cruelly slain. He stopped, looked at them and said: “Come unto me.” They obeyed, they fell at his feet. He touched them, a strange, keen sense thrilled through them. He said to them, “Arise.” They arose and found themselves new men—men twice begotten.

Ask the drunkard who tried to be sober, broke every pledge and drank in his cup the very life blood of those he loved and who loved him—how at last he found strength to say a final “no,” turn from the accursed thing, and enter a world all new in which to live, a freeman and no more a slave—he will tell you, “Jesus Christ did it all.”

Ask any of the bond slaves of passion, men who have been gripped by every form of human desire, and whiplashed, and stung, and tortured by their gratification, and driven to fresh and maddening excess by the never satisfied and always burning lust within (ever crying like the horseleach’s daughter, “Give, give”); ask them how it is that to-day they are freemen and walk as kings, and they will tell you that Jesus Christ laid hold of them, and by the might of his power, the tenderness of his love, and the wealth of his grace, made them free.