September 9, 1902

“Real and Unreal” The Advent Review and Sabbath Herald 79, 36.

EJW

E. J. Waggoner

The one great lesson for people in this world to learn, is the reality of things. The world is so taken up with the unreal, with fiction and mere play-acting, that they have almost lost the power to grasp the real. Even what is called “realism,” is only a poor picture of things which, just because they are dramatized, people do not really believe actually exist. The material things which they handle are virtually unreal, because the end for which they use them is unsubstantial. Everything which has for its object this world only, is unreal; “for the world passeth away, and the lust thereof.”ARSH September 9, 1902, page 9.1

This spirit of the world has also seized professed Christians, so much so that the promises and the work of God are to the most of them unreal. They read the Bible too much as though its characters were the mystical inhabitants of the moon, instead of real flesh and blood. To many, the thrilling narratives of Scripture, even of the life and miracles of Christ, and especially of the experiences of ancient Israel, are, unconsciously to themselves, read as though they were pages of a novel. They are to them at best but a “true story,” or “a story founded on fact.” That is to say, we all of us too often fail to live in the events of the Bible history, and to realize that “whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning,” and that the same God still lives to do the same things for His people,-that the experiences of God’s people in past ages may and should be the experiences of His people to-day.ARSH September 9, 1902, page 9.2

We should know not only that the things which are recorded in the Bible are real occurrences, but that they are not unique, exceptional instances, but illustrations of God’s ordinary working. God does not produce “monstrosities.” The Bible records the faith of Enoch and Abraham, the meekness of Moses, the patience of Job, the wisdom of Solomon, the strength of Samson, the miraculous things among ancient Israel and in the early church, to show the power that all God’s people ought to possess, for “there is no respect of persons with God.”ARSH September 9, 1902, page 9.3