Page:What Is The True Christian Religion?.pdf/23

 humanity, people who could understand only the debased and cruel.

The Lord through Isaiah tells His people that outward worship cannot take the place of obedience to His commandments. Sacrifices and ritual can never be a substitute for spiritual living. The Lord states the case frankly to a people who ought to know better: "When ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you. Yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear." Why? Because "your hands are full of blood." In other words, because of their evil living.

And yet the Christian world is taught that the bloody sacrifice,— yes, the murder of the innocent Son of God, will appease the Almighty end be a substitute for living well! This is what is involved in the so-called Plan of Salvation.

The Lord through Isaiah insists that His children shall live well, and who can question that this is the message of the Lord throughout the Bible? Did not Jesus say, "Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them?" Under the Plan of Salvation people have been told that they could not do anything that is good; all of their effort is as "filthy rags," dyed with self-merit. Then they are told that Jesus kept the Ten Commandments for us, in our place, as our substitute, that all we have to do is to "believe" that Jesus died as our substitute, that He bore the penalty of our sins and offers us a free pardon and an abundant entrance into heaven without any effort on out part, since we can do nothing whatever that is good.

A preacher once said to the writer, pointing to the Ten Commandments hanging on the wall before us: "They are an offence to me. Jesus kept them for me. I don't want to have anything to do with them." "But." I asked, "what about the Sermon on the Mount where the Lord tells us that they are to be kept not only in the letter but in the spirit? The Sermon on the Mount might be said to be a summing up of the Christian religion." "No." he answered angrily. "It belongs to the Old Testament religion. I am saved by grace and not by the works of the law. Jesus died on the cross as my substitute. He paid the penalty of my sins. All I have to do is to believe it."

In other words, he and others like him, reject the message of