Article December 5, 1936 Issue

Signs of the Times

Topic: Jesus and World Salvation

with contributions from Raymond C. Knox, Bruce Brown, Orien W. Fifer, L. B. Ashby, Miles Dawson, Albert Edmund Gregg, T. G. Soares

[From the New Outlook, Toronto, Ontario, Canada]

One of the most pathetic sentences that Jesus ever uttered is recorded to us in both Matthew's and Luke's Gospels. In the latter it reads: "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which killest the prophets, and stonest them that are sent unto thee; how often would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings, and ye would not!" Apparently, the thing that distressed him so greatly was the needlessness of the misery and the ruin which he saw to be coming upon his own people. It had not been intended; in fact, something so altogether different had been intended that the tragedy of destruction which he envisages is a tragedy multiplied over and over again, many times.

"I would—but ye would not"—that tells the story of it for the Jewish people in Jesus' day, and we must not forget that it comes very near to telling the story for many another people as well as for them. Where have our troubles and difficulties been coming from in these very troubled and difficult days? We do not need to look around much to find the answer to that question. They have been coming from ourselves. In our selfishness and self-seeking, our willful failure to fit into the divine designs and purposes and plans, we have been thwarting them and making them impossible. And that is the supreme tragedy in our situation: it seems so altogether unnecessary, such a stupid and a willful turning aside from the good that had been intended and that might have been realized.

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