When All Unrighteousness is Truly Cleansed
(Chapter 5, Continued)
Our human problem of unconscious
motivations was understood by Ellen G. White. In 1906 she wrote an article
for the Review on the subject. She recognized that the subject is
taught all through the Bible. She discerned how Saul of Tarsus in utter
sincerity did not
know his own heart, which he confessed
was unknown to him. Notice in the gist of the article how she recognized
that this is the great problem that man faces, and how only the ministry
of Christ in the sanctuary provides the solution:
My brethren. day and night, and
especially in the night season, this matter is presented to me. "Tekel;
Thou art weighed in the balances and art found wanting" How do we
stand before God at this time? We may be sincere, and yet greatly
deceived. Saul of Tarsus was sincere when he was persecuting the church
of Christ. "I verily thought", he declared, "that I ought
to do many things contrary to the name of Jesus." He was sincere in
his ignorance. …We know that there is no one, however earnestly he may
be striving to do his best who can say, "I have no sin."…
How then are we to escape the charge. "Thou art weighed in the
balances, and art found wanting"? We are to look to Christ. At
infinite cost He has convenanted to be our representative in the
heavenly courts, our advocate before God.
… Weighed and found wanting is our
inscription by nature. … Let each one, old or young be faithful in
dealing with himself, lest he shall stumble along in darkness, making
grievous mistakes, and thus helping others to make mistakes. (Review
and Herald March 8, 1906).
The first part of the article is
practically a Bible study on the subject of the unconscious mind. She
quotes Hannah, the mother of Samuel: "… the Lord is a God of
knowledge, and by Him actions are weighed’ (1 Sam.. 2:3). Solomon
understood how self-deceived we are: "All the ways of a man are clean
in his own eyes; but the Lord weigheth the spirits" (Prov. 16:2).
David discerned the problem: "Surely men of low degree are vanity,
and men of high degree are a lie: to be laid in the balance, they are
altogether lighter than vanity" (Ps. 62:9). Then Ellen G. White adds:
It is for the eternal interest of
everyone to search his own heart and to improve every God-given faculty.
Let all remember that there is not a motive in the heart of any man that
the Lord does not clearly see. … We need a connection with divine
power, that we may have an increase of clear light and understanding of
how to reason from cause to effect. We need to have the powers of the
understanding cultivated by our being partakers of the divine nature,
having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust. …
There is not a design, however intricate, nor a motive, however
carefully hidden, that He does not clearly understand. (Ibid).
4. A striking example of hidden,
buried sin is Hazael. He
could not bring himself to believe that he was capable of doing the
unspeakable things the prophet Elisha had discerned he was capable of:
"I know the evil that thou wilt do unto the children of Israel: their
strongholds wilt thou set on fire, and their young men wilt thou slay with
the sword, and wilt dash their children, and rip up their women with
child. And Hazael said, But what is thy servant a dog, that he should do
this great thing?" (2 Kings 8:12, 13). Hazael was sincerely
unconscious of what lay buried in his own heart. In the same way, we are
sincerely unconscious of our true motivations, apart from the Holy Spirit’s
conviction. Note the following:
Had anyone told them [the faultfinders]
that notwithstanding their zeal and labor to set others right. they
would at length be found in a similar position of darkness, they would
have said, as did Hazael to the prophet "Is thy servant a dog, that
he should do this great thing? (4T 89, 90).
If when Achan yielded to temptation he
had been asked if he wished to bring defeat and death into the camp of
Israel, he would have answered. "No, no! is thy servant a dog, that
he should do this great wickedness?" But … he went farther than
he had purposed in his heart. It is exactly in this way that individual
members of the church are
imperceptibly led on to … bring the frown of God upon the church.
(Ibid., p. 492, 493).
Remember, as in the crucifixion of
Christ, it is the motivation that is unrealized, not necessarily the
outward act When we ponder how often the Lords servant likens the
unconscious sin of our brethren who rejected the beginning of the Latter
Rain at and following the 1888 Conference to the sin of those who rejected
Christ, we begin to sense how dreadful are the consequences of the unknown
sin that the True Witness would have us see. For how many decades have we
been responsible for delaying the coming of the Loud Cry? All the while we
have thought we were motivated by a desire to hasten His coming when in
reality we have been delaying it!
5. Another classic example of the
result of unknown sin is Hezekiah’s experience (2
Kings 20 and 21). He had been a good king, so good that if he had said
"Amen" to the Lords directive, "Set thine house in order;
for thou shalt die, and not live", he would probably have gone down
in sacred history as the finest king Gods people ever had. He was not
aware of the hidden, buried roots of evil latent in his unconscious heart
He prayed: "I beseech thee, 0 Lord, remember now how I have walked
before thee in truth and with a perfect heart, and have done that which is
good in Thy sight. And Hezekiah wept sore." (2 Kings 20:3). But his
heart was not perfect!, When fifteen years were added to his life, he
became the victim of unconscious selfish motivations and undid all the
good he had achieved in his former period of health. He begat and trained
wicked Manasseh.
Jeremiah passes a retrospective judgment
on the last era of his reign: Judah’s national downfall came "because
of Manasseh the son of Hezekiah king of Judah. for that which he did in
Jerusalem" (Jer. 15:4). All the evil that Hezekiah did in those last
fifteen years was already latent in his heart before his illness.
"The books of heaven record the sins that would have been committed
had there been opportunity" (5 BC 1085).
Like good King Hezekiah, we appear to
ourselves (and we try to appear to others) as if we serve the Lord
"with a perfect heart". We have so long misunderstood 1 John 1:9
that we hesitate to think of the possibility of an unconscious reservoir
of sin after we are "converted". "We have confessed our
sins", we insist, "therefore the Lord has been faithful and just
to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. There is no sin left from which we
are not cleansed." What we have failed to understand is that the Lord
cannot cleanse us from any unrighteousness that we have not as yet
understandably confessed.
In Hezekiah’s case, the Lord "left
him, to try him, that he [Hezekiah] might know all that was in his
heart" (2 Chron. 32:31). Inspiration says that it will be the same
for the saints in the last days. They will be left to "stand in the
sight of a holy God without a mediator" (GC 425 and 614). The
parallel with Hezekiah is exact. But the saints dare not repeat Hezekiah’s
folly, for if they "should prove themselves unworthy, and lose their
lives because of their own defects of character, then Gods holy name would
be reproached" (GC 619).
The vindication of God, and in
consequence the successful conclusion of the "great controversy
between Christ and Satan", depends on their succeeding where Hezekiah
failed. Would God dare to permit such a test to come before they were
ready?
Hezekiah, sleeping in his grave, is a
type of millions of "good’ people who have died. They consciously
and sincerely served the Lord as best they knew or understood. But, like
Hezekiah, no generation ever understood fully the potential of their own
hearts, the unconscious alienation from God that lay beneath the surface.
None were required to endure the unprecedented test of living "in the
sight of a holy God without an intercessor". This is because none had
received "the final atonement" which alone can heal the problem
of unrealized enmity against God. (The expression "final
atonement" should not be relegated to the Adventist attic as a
mistaken notion of naive pioneers. The expression appears rather
frequently as a meaningful phrase in Ellen White’s writings. There is
also good evidence that Scripture upholds the idea as implicit in the
magnificent concept of the cleansing of the sanctuary.)
Note, no generation of God’s
people have ever received "the final atonement". The fact that
there have been a few individuals translated such as Enoch and Elijah can
indicate that this experience may have been known by a scattered few in
every generation.
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