Vol 19 Issue 01

MORNING SESSION Rev. P. Vis, president of the former Classis, opened the meeting with usual preliminaries. Delegations appeared from all the congregations with the exception of Bellflower. Rev. Vos is chairman of the day and Rev. Vis scribe. After extending a word of welcome to the delegates the classis gets down to its routine business. First there appears the report of the committee which was to examine the matter of correspondence with other churches. After hearing the report and weighing tire various matters involved, in such correspondence, Classis decides to table the matter indefinitely. Next the committee on travelling expenses...

There is great need in our day of emphasizing the absolute necessity of Christ’s intercession for His people in heaven. Many there are who would present it as though Christ’s work as Mediator was finished when by His suffering and death He merited a mere possibility of salvation for all men, and on His work being finished it is up to man whether or not he is willing to accept this salvation which is freely offered unto him in the preaching of the gospel. They do not emphasize or entirely ignore the fact that Christ’s intercession in heaven for those...

Reports of Missionaries We refer with this heading to two reports of missionaries who have recently returned from the Orient. These two reports are found in The Banner and in the Presbyterian Guardian respectively. In the Banner of September 11, Rev. S. A. Dykstra writes the first article about their return from Jukao, China, which belongs to that part of China now occupied by the Japanese. He speaks of the ‘‘Crises in China”, and about this last crisis he writes, “Our third return marks the greatest crisis in mission history. We were shown the door. More than 1,500 Americans were...

In times like these the question presents itself quite readily whether the times are conducive toward continuing our mission endeavors or whether it might not be advisable to discontinue them, at least for the present. The more so because of the peculiar nature of our mission work. It is true that the war has practically closed every foreign mission field, and that therefore every available means could well be applied at home, but the fact is that as yet all our effort have been restricted to a home field. We have not yet reached a stage where we were able...

The formulation of this subject suggests a book which has recently appeared, written by ex-President Hoover and the diplomat, Hugh Gibson, entitled The Problems of Lasting Peace. However, it will be at once noticed that the present formulation points more to the underlying question with which we must be concerned; it begins at the beginning and it rightly suggests that the difficulty lies not in keeping a peace once attained, but in ever getting a peace that is true to the name. Now in discussing this problem we must avoid two extremes. On the one hand is the danger of...

Having delivered the people of Israel from their Egyptian bondage, the Lord led them into a region of deserts, waterless tablelands, barren mountain chains and valleys where streams ran dry—the Sinai Peninsula. By bringing them into this trackless wilderness, the Lord took from them every natural resource and in particular bread—such bread as is the product of man’s own industry. It thus seemed as though they were doomed to perish from hunger. The carnal Israel so judged. They said, “Would to God we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by...

The Impossibility of Satisfaction The second question that must be answered in this connection is: “Can another creature, a creature that is not man, satisfy for our sin?” The Catechism answers: “God will not punish any other creature for the sin which man committed”. This will of God to punish only the creature that sinned and no other creature is not arbitrary. God’s will is always in accord with His justice, and justice and righteousness belong to His very Being. And God cannot deny Himself. And He certainly would deny Himself if He would punish another creature for man’s sin....

I am writing these editorials from Waupun, Wisconsin, where I am staying with friends during the brief period that I am appointed to labor in these parts in the interest of our mission. This time Waupun itself is not the center of our activity, although it begins to appear to me that it could very well be made a center. For many of our people that remember the past the name Waupun does not awake pleasant memories. For a little while we had a congregation here, which, however, soon revealed very morbid tendencies of which they stubbornly refused to be...

In more than one way our present times of war and destruction in the whole world shed an interesting light upon those phenomena in human life which the Christian Reformed Churches in 1924 endeavored to interpret by their theory of common grace as officially adopted in the “Three Points”. This is especially true of the phenomenon of the apparent good which the natural man performs in this present world. It is the Reformed view that man by nature is totally depraved, which, according to the Heidelberg Catechism, Lord’s Day 3, means nothing less than that he is wholly incapable of...