God In The Trenches

“Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered: let them also that hate him flee before him.” —Psalm 68:1

The world has reached the place where a great many people have the feeling that if God ever did care about the earth, He has ceased to care; many feel that if He ever did have any pity, His pity has gone from Him; that if His eye ever did watch the sparrow in its fall, that eye is closed; that if He ever did count the hairs of men’s heads, the millions of headless in this war [World War I] have made Him forget; that he has withdrawn Himself and hidden Himself away.

Men have had a habit down through the years of hiding God and then hunting for Him. They always put Him off so far before they hunt for Him. They hide Him in an image instead of feeling his nearness in their own being. They believe He is not interested in the little things and the near things, because they do not look for Him and His program in His own Word. Because things do not fit man’s program and man’s way, they assign God to some far distant realm, and move on with their own program. When their own program runs amuck, then they wonder why it is that God has not carried out a program.

Soul Atmosphere

It is easy enough to put God far away in our thinking. It is mighty easy to even doubt God. Doubting has always been easy, especially in the atmosphere that man creates. You know it is very necessary to have atmosphere (that is temperature) to produce life. Men must believe God if they are going to get life out of God. Those that come to Him “must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him;” otherwise they very doubt of their hearts and the very unbelieving cry of their prayer only puts God further away.

The devil’s great trick in life is to put doubting in the hearts of men. That is his theology. He creates an atmosphere of doubt, which of course means death.

You can readily see that you cannot [sic] hatch an egg in an incubator. An egg laid in an ice chest will never have anything happen to the shell unless someone steps on it; but if the same egg is left in the proper atmosphere there will come out of it the most wonderful kind of a little creature covered with downy fluff. That fluff will change to iridescent feathers that sparkle in the sunlight.

The men or women that want to doubt God will find themselves like an egg in an ice chest. They will wonder what is wrong with the world and why there is no manifestation of God’s life, and why life is so cruel and hard; but to the man or woman who dares to trust, God reveals Himself. I say dares because it takes courage to trust. There comes the hour when you cannot depend on reasoning, you must venture out.

About six years ago, when the Holy Ghost came into my life and I began to live by faith and to trust in God, the devil would come to me with the old doubts. I sucked them up in the colleges. All kinds of doubts were within me, and when any emotional experience would come, the devil would try to explain it by the rules of psychology and the laws of my personality, and of the family through which I came. He would come to my heart and say, “Your great grandfather and your grandfather and your father were religious people, and you are born with religious tendencies, and if you have any religious emotions you have them for the same reason that a racehorse wants to run.” He would try to explain it on such grounds and put God far away.

The devil can always find plenty of doubt; but in such an hour as I have spoken of, the heart in loyal faith must learn to say, “Lord, I believe, I believe, I believe you, I will not believe the devil. I have taken sides with God and I refuse to believe the devil.”

A Crisis Time

Now there has come a time in the thinking of men reading life in letters of blood today, when they almost throw up their hands in despair and say, “We have lifted, lo, these many years to get civilization to a high pinnacle, and now the thing topples under our hand.”

In such an hour, men should look away to God. But they care not to look away to God; they only look into the wreck and ruin and try to create some new schemes and some sort of new philosophy.

Now let me say this, that if, in this crisis hour in which we are living, men do not come forth that know Jesus Christ, and know this Book, and if the Christian church of our day does not state the hope in the blood of Calvary shed for sinners, and the resurrected Christ, as it has never stated it before in the history of the world, then, at the close of this war, we will be in the greatest period of infidelity the world has ever known.

Now is our time; now is our opportunity; now is our chance to tell men and women about God; to tell them about “the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world.” Because of the greatness of the crisis, men are looking for some great and complex scheme of salvation.

All of God’s mighty working is simple—it is very simple. It comes up as easily as the sun in the morning. Salvation in Christ Jesus is simple. Men see growing out of a dung heap a lily, and it grows so quietly, and so beautifully, that men never think of it as great. “Sinners saved by the old Gospel story” does not appeal to men who are thinking of millions today.

All artists do things easily. The great struggle is never artistic. The man who really can play a violin does not look as if it is hurting him. The man who really knows how to touch the ivory keys and make them respond does it with such ease and such delicacy that you are not even conscious that He is working the keys, it seems to be such exuberant joy for him to do it. God’s great things are done so easily that if you are not careful you will overlook them; God has to stop us and shock us and let us know it is His working. The world is reeling today because it has refused the simple Gospel method.

God Not Too Great To Reveal Himself

Always God has been trying to let men see Himself. The hardest thing for God to do is for Him to get men and women to see Himself. They will see His lily and His sun, but they do not see him behind it all. Men put Him away off as far as they can from their problems.

If you took an airship today, and sailed out into the blue, you would find out that the earth recedes and becomes a smaller place than you ever thought it was. Down at a southern camp, [a] week before last, it was my privilege to go to the Flying Squadron Grounds.

We viewed their hangars, built something like this tabernacle, stretching fifteen along in a great field. They bordered on a great leveled field that looked to me as if for twenty-five miles there was a great football arena, with not a tree, nor a twig, nor anything growing; but they had harrowed and leveled and rolled it so these flying machines could get started, and the boys could practice without obstacle danger.

Inside each one of these hangars was a squad of flying machines. There was an instructor standing beside each one, and the flyer looking on. At a given signal a certain thing was done to the machine and they explained the working to the boys looking on. Then the men got into their machines and ran them out and began to fly, and you would think that suddenly young eagles had hatched. They circled around over this parade ground as easily as the seagulls circle a boat.

You could take a flying machine and go up above the clouds. One of the boys one night down there came to Mr. Norris’ meeting and was gloriously saved. He was a splendid flyer. He gave his testimony to salvation and returned to the camp.

The next morning at 10:15, he went up, and at four thousand feet, he poised in the air above the hangars. All of a sudden something happened—no one knew what—and he came as straight as a dive to the ground. They picked him up; but the night before Jesus had picked him up, and it didn’t make much difference where the body was, the soul had already found its way back to God.

At a funeral service once, the preacher started out like this, “You folks have come to the funeral of what you think is a dead man. There is nobody dead here except you folks sitting around here outside of Jesus Christ.”

Sail away above the blue, going up thousands of feet into the air. Look back down on the earth, and the spot you left, that you thought was so valuable. Now what is it worth? It seems a little tiny speck. You sail on up into the blue and into the blue, and say, “We have left Chicago. Where is it? Oh yes, see that little black spot there by the big body of water? That little spot down there on the western side of that great body of water is Chicago. Yes that is Lake Michigan, and the little spot beside it is Chicago.”

“You don’t say!”

You are going up all the time, higher and higher and higher, and after a while you just see a little tiny lake and a very wee spot.

You go up and up, until all the spots have faded away, and you only see a little lighted ball. You call it “the earth.” You go up and up and up until after you have ascended for hours and hours, you look around and say, “Which way is down?”

“We have come from that direction,” you answer.

“Which way is the earth?”

“We just passed the Milky Way. Can’t you see millions and millions of stars?”

“Where is the earth?”

“Way down the other side of the Mily Way somewhere.”

“What is up above us?”

“Another Milky way.”

It is a wonderful big universe in which God dwells. Earth thinking thus grows kind of little. God recedes into awful distance. That is the way men have of making God big; but that is not the way God has of making Himself big. He does not make Himself big by withdrawing Himself, but by coming and revealing Himself to you.

God Must Be Known

All the philosophies of our time want to make God big by calling Him “intelligence” and putting Him away behind everything, and saying, “You have this force and that force and the other force, and then you have a big intelligence away behind all force; but you cannot get through these forces to that intelligence. He is the unknown, the unseen, you never can know Him at all”; and yet God tells us in His own Word, “whom to know aright is life eternal.”

The chemist says, “Surely, if it took me four years to learn chemistry, it would take me four million years to learn the God that made it.”

No, that is not God’s way of revealing Himself to men, and revealing Himself to the human heart. Men do not have to study and sweat and go through all sorts of study to know God. God reveals Himself. That is the joy of God,—God coming close to speak to us. We were made for His glory,—not to know Him by our brains or our bodies alone, but by our souls and our spirits,—to know God. He has revealed Himself. “God was in Christ Jesus reconciling the world unto Himself.”

Now when men do not want to put God in their thinking, God must force Himself into it and come through force, and through pain, and through suffering and agony, that men might know His sovereign power and place. If men choose to put God away off, God chooses to come close Himself, and if men will not listen through kindness and mercy, then God as a Father must give punishment and judgment. You may love your children devotedly, but you surely do not love them so much that you call it “love” when you let them run over you. God must come in chastening. The hard, and the terrific hour is come to let men know of His sovereign power.

God must be known or life is blank. What is the use of an intelligence way out there that I shall never know? To know God is life. “This is life eternal, that they might know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent.”

The Voice Of God

God does not pull Himself away (man sinned and pulled himself away), but God came down to talk to Adam and Eve. He walked in the garden in the cool of the day. God came down and talked to Noah. God talked with all the human race through the flood. God spoke in a mighty wonderous tone to all the world, in the roaring and the leaping of the waves, and the black clouds and the spurting waters. God spoke, and spoke in a terrible way, talking about sin. God spoke at the tower of Babel. God spoke to Abraham and God made a covenant with Abraham, a marvelous covenant with Abraham.

Now Abraham had a peculiar custom when he made a covenant with a man. Abraham many a time had done a thing like this. He had taken a lamb and cut it in two, and then with his friend walked in between those two pieces thus making a binding covenant, with death on either side. They had made brothers’ covenant with each other to do a certain thing. But all depended on whether or not those two fellows could keep the covenant.

God so loved us and so wanted to help us that He made a covenant with us. But knowing our sin and our weakness. He made Himself responsible alone for the keeping of this new covenant on Calvary. He said, “I will make the covenant. I will keep it. I am the one that does it,” and He became our righteousness. “God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son.” He does not ask anything of you, but to take the covenant that God has made with humanity. He walked alone in the sacrifice.

Men cannot look at the cross of Calvary without seeing that God is for us. God is not holding men up and saying, “You do this,” but God is saying, “Take this. I want to help you; I want to come to you.” God is trying to beat through every avenue and every door of life, and let men know Him and understand Him, and understand His heart. “God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

So Jesus walked up and down in the sacrifice alone. He trod the wine press alone. He did not ask you and me to come in and die with Him, but He said, “I died alone, and in the dark,” and God was making a covenant with humanity, and saying, “I will keep it, and I will keep it forever,” and this morning that covenant hangs high over all God’s plan, and “whosoever will, let him come and take” of this covenant freely.

Service Star In The Heavens Blue Is The Greatest Of Them All

A small boy and his father were out together after nightfall. On the western horizon the evening star shone with brilliancy that dimmed the lesser lights.

“Look, daddy,” said the boy, “God has hung out His service flag. He must have a Son in the war!”

Yes, and since His Son went unto death and conquered, no other need ever go in again. The soldiers are hearing God’s voice, not hearing the roar of guns alone, or seeing simply the spray that is left behind the mighty navies that plow the sea, but these men are hearing God speak.

The generals of the British army, it is reported, had gathered in convention to talk about some of the issues of the war. At the same time, some ministers of London gathered together. The ministers sent a wire to the generals, saying, “What can we do for England?” The generals telegraphed back, “Make England spiritual.”

Men who were dealing with shot and shell, and blood and mud, and war, telegraphed back to a lot of preachers, “Make England spiritual.” Why? I will tell you, they have gone far enough to see that unless God intervenes, there isn’t any outcome. God must be reckoned on; God must be counted in.

I want to say this morning, that unless the United States get to her knees, we will have some of the awfulest days the world has ever known. God is calling. We have to hear. The hand of God is shaking the earth this morning, that men might know that He is God. He must be known, and He is speaking in mighty tones.

Soldiers Serious

The citizens of these days do not realize what the soldier boys realize. The average soldier’s thinking is worlds higher than the average citizen’s. You need not think for a minute but what those soldiers, though they may seem gay and hearty and careless and indifferent, are not thinking. They are trying to put on the bluff and bravado, but when you carry the Gospel of Jesus Christ to them straight, you will find out they are prepared to see its value.

Most evangelists, when they put the message straight out and give the invitation, have given it over again, because they did not believe the men who responded so fast understood the question, then said, “Sit down. Do you understand what I said? This is the proposition. Now how many will rise?” And instead of that same crowd getting up, that group gets up and a hundred more.

“Wait a minute,” the evangelist will cry, “Do you understand?”

Sure they understand and they know where they are going. When they go into their rooms and take off all their citizen’s clothes and pull on the khaki, they look themselves in the face in the mirror and say, “I have pulled on a casket. If I ever get out it will only be God that lets me out. I am in, I am in for life.” When they told their loved ones goodbye, life changed.

Other people passing by clap their hands and cheer and yell. The boys smile and cheer but they know. One fellow said to me, “Rader, when I got inside one of the trains and moved out after 11:30 when the cheering had stopped and mother’s tears were back there, I looked down the aisle and one-half the fellows were looking out of the windows. Their faces close to the glass, they were doing what I was doing. I was bawling, and the tears [were] rolling down my cheeks. Some fellows were yelling and singing, but half of them were looking out into the night crying it out. They settled it alone, and said, ‘We know what we are up against.’”

When you have a bunch of men offered life straight from the hand of God, they want it. They have settled things, and the citizens have not settled yet. They have left all. They want to know about a life after death.

A young crippled boy that had come back from France was in one of the southern towns, and I said to him, “It is wonderful how you are doing personal work in the town.” His arm was injured and one of his ribs taken out. He was going around talking with other fellows about Jesus. I said, “Where did you get that kind of courage to do personal work?”

“Why listen. When I first went into the army, I thought the fellows would not want to hear about it, and kept my mouth shut. Finally we went to the trenches, and I began to pray in quiet and in secret, and read my Bible. I went into the trench and I pulled out my little book and began to read. One of the fellows down the line looked up and said, ‘Hi there C­——, it looks to us as if you are mighty stingy with something you have.’”

“I looked up and said, ‘Do you fellows want me to read out of this?’”

“‘Good God, man,’ came the answer, ‘do we want it? Don’t it fit in good here?’”

“I read a passage, and like the eunuch, somebody stopped me and said, ‘Who does it mean? Who is he talking about?’”

“‘He is talking about Jesus. He went over the top and died that we might have life. Gave His own life in order that we might have life.’ I explained it to them, and said, ‘Fellows, I always pray after I read this.’ ‘Well, all right.’ ‘Before I pray, you fellows pray.’ ‘Won’t you pray for us?’ ‘Certainly, I will be glad to, but you pray for yourselves too.’”

“There we were praying. I had heard them cuss and argue against it all, but there they were down on their knees in the trench.

“The first thing you know, the boy next to me was saying, ‘I see it; I see it fellows,’ and they began saying ‘I see it.’ I prayed for the crowd. I was in the middle of my prayer when the order came. It was time to go over. Every fellow reached for his foothold and went over. I came back, and the first fellow over came back, but I came back without this and without this,” pointing to his sleeve and rib.

“From that day to this, the biggest thing in my life is to tell somebody about Jesus.”

Lonely Hearts Touched

I tell you this is a serious hour, a serious day, and men want to know about God. We are past the folderols and the boys are out there, forty million men under color today. Tell me they don’t want to know God!

No man between the ages of seventeen and forty dares to walk down the streets of London, I understand, today, unless he has something on his arm to show he is serving. No excuse will go.

America is going to wake up before long to the fact that we are in war, and that the young men are going out to die. If ever there was an opportunity for men and women to tell folks about Jesus, this is the day, this is the hour when men want to know the truth.

I walked down a few weeks ago, before Christmas, to exchange something at a large department store. I was introduced to a man in the office, and shook hands with him, and we talked for a while. I had seen him three or four times before, and he always had a sort of smile on his face. I looked at him and said, “you are looking downhearted today. Is there any trouble? Can I help you? That is my business, you know.”

He looked up and said, “Yes, you may. I will tell you, Mr. Rader, starting next Sunday, myself and my wife are going to church somewhere.”

“Will you come to our shavings and sit on the pine boards?”

“Yes, I will gladly come. I haven’t been in church for nineteen years. I didn’t care anything about immortality or about religion. Guess I got hardened when I was a young fellow. Have kept it clear out of my life.”

“Why?” I asked. “Why are you going to start next Sunday?”

“Mr. Rader,” he said, “I only have one boy. He is in France, and he is in the trenches. I go home at night and sit down to the table, and my wife sits down on the other side. The girl brings in the food and puts it down. I take a nibble and she takes a nibble. She looks at me and I look at her, and then we get up and go into the parlor and sit there and look at each other. I start up the stairs and sit down in his room, looking at his pictures and all the things he left behind, and she comes and sits beside me, and we sit there, and I said, ‘I guess it’s time to go to bed.’ We get up and go through breakfast the same way. My God, Mr. Rader, everything is gone. What is the use of making money? We haven’t got anything. He is gone. If you know anything in God’s name that will ever let me meet that boy in eternity, will you tell me?”

“I certainly will. Will you let me tell you now?”

I began to lead him to the Lord. I had only said a thing or two when he said, “Just wait a minute.”

“Why?”

“Can you tell me this stuff before a stenographer? Can you talk before a stenographer?”

“I can talk about this before a buzzsaw.”

The stenographer came in.

She sat down in one corner and I began to tell him about the Lord, and showed him how Jesus died, and how much God wanted him, and how He loved him and had prepared eternal life, the gift of God, eternal life. I thought I would have to argue with him, but he stood and shook his head up and down, with that stern pair of brown eyes looking me straight in the eye. I said, “Will you take it?”

“Sure, sure, sure.”

You know why he wanted the stenographer? He sat down and wrote a letter on the end and said to the boy, “This is the way I got in.”

He took a copy home to her, and she came in, and they both wrote and said, “Now boy, you come in.” “I am the door,” says Jesus.

Men may not think of immortality in other days, but God is speaking from the trenches today like He never talked before to men and women.

Spiritualism Gaining

I want to say to you, that unless men tell about Jesus Christ and His love and the power of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, we are going to have the awfulest outbreak of spiritualism the world has ever known. We are on the borders of it now.

I reviewed a book a short time ago, The Comrade in White, and sent it on to my friend, Mr. Trumbull of the Sunday School Times, and that book makes Jesus Christ come and talk to men without any qualms of conscience, without any recognition of sin. The whole trend of that book, and of much of our literature today, is to try to make out that men, because they fight for their country, are saved; that because they shed their blood, they are saved.

Friends, we are either going to preach the Gospel and show that by [the] shedding of the blood of Jesus Christ, they are saved, or else we are going to delude the world in the lie of the devil. It is easy, when hearts are tender, and widows are about and orphans, and husbands have been taken from their wives, and sons from their mothers, for us to talk about their being in glory; but we know “there is none other names under heaven, given among men, whereby we must be saved,” but Christ Jesus, and this is no hour to pass out any kind of tommyrot, but to tell the truth as it is in Christ Jesus to men.

This is not a time to lie about it. Let us tell the truth to the patient, and tell the cure for the disease of sin, and don’t smear it over. A real physician will look folks in the eye and tell the parents the truth about the patient; and if we know the truth, let us get it out to the world; otherwise they will go to the spiritualist medium and let the devil through table rappings, lead them into delusion. In London, the spiritualistic mediums, I understand, have increased seven-fold. So many people are going to find out about their loved ones, thinking they are talking to them, because of those devil appearances. Because the world will not believe the Gospel, they have gone to a delusion and a lie.

Pick up some of your latest magazines, and see if you cannot find a story with spiritualism in it. In leading magazines and books, put out by so-called religious publication societies, a bloodless theology is going around. God help us to see that it is our time and privilege to carry the blood of Jesus Christ to dying men, and see to it that it is the truth they get.

Praise God for the old Gospel of Jesus Christ. Men out there are glad to take it when you offer it to them. They don’t want any of the other thing. This spiritualism is not among the soldiers. The soldier don’t believe it. He knows differently. He don’t want that stuff, and he won’t come near it. He would rather spend his time in entertainment and pass up the whole religious bunk of that kind of stuff. He doesn’t want any perfume. He knows he is going to face the music, and that stuff is passed to others weeping about their lost ones; but the boys want to know the truth and say, “If you know it, tell us about it.”

They come out straight for Jesus Christ when they have the opportunity. If we do not pass out the Gospel, they will come back to us and say, “In the great hour of crisis and opportunity, when you could have slipped us life, you did not do it.”

Preach The Gospel

God help the Christian church of our day to pray and to work and do what we can to get the Gospel to those men dying by the countless thousands. It is our business to get the Gospel out to them. Oh how hungry they are for it.

One fellow went along after a great battle, picking up a hand here, and a foot there and putting a little dirt over them, and he picked up some letters and took them back to the trench and began to read them. There was one from a wife to her husband, with kisses from the children marked in little crosses underneath, and a scrawl made by baby fingers. On it there was written, “We know you will be home for Christmas. We are looking for you, and the children will be waiting.”

He will never come back. These are no days to fool with men and women. Here is a letter to a young fellow from his sweetheart, saying, “We will be married when you come back. Here is love, and here is a kiss.” But he is dead and cold on the battlefield.

These are no days to be fooling, these are days if you know how to give men life, you ought to give it. What bigger business can we have than that kind of business. What greater thing could we offer than in such an hour of wholesale death, in such a short time with nine millions gone into eternity—Lord help us get down to business, and down to prayer, and to walking softly before God.

I know you will forgive me for going away from you, and stand by and pray for the work. I hate to leave, and would not do it for anything in the world, if the Lord did not seem to be leading me into this work of raising money to send the Gospel to the trenches.

Philanthropy Not Enough

Since I have seen you, I have gone down into the South, and in one wealthy town they told me I could not take up an offering for the Salvation Army, that they had just been bled to death, and had given and given and given until they could not give any more. Finally, I went to see a man at the bank, and put the proposition up to the him, and said, “Here is a crowd of men in the Salvation Army, with 180 huts all ready, preaching salvation every night, and their officers and workers do not receive a cent of salary, only their clothes on their back and enough to keep them alive, don’t even get as much as the soldiers. They are out in the trenches working night and day, and in the huts, passing out salvation.”

As I began putting the salvation side up to that fellow, he said, “Well, we didn’t know that was what you were going to talk about. We thought you were talking about some kind of philanthropy.”

“No sir, talking about getting salvation to those fellows.”

“Well, that means business,” he said.

“You’re right, it means business.”

“Sacrifice money can come in on that.”

“You’re right it can. If you only had a dollar you ought to pass it out.”

“That’s right.”

“Can’t I talk to the directors of this bank about this proposition? Do I have to be ruled out of town and not get the money to pass salvation out? Salvation is worth more than bandages in this war. God is in this business, and if we don’t do what we ought to before God, we will never be let off guiltless.”

“All right,” he said, and he got the directors together in twenty minutes. We sat there and talked together, and they said, “Will you stay another day? If you do, we will put you before the businessmen of this city.”

“All right,” I said, “I will stay another day.”

I walked in before a bunch of business men and talked to them about Jesus straight out, and a preacher came and said, “I am a member of this organization. I am going home and ask God to forgive me. I have been a member of this organization four years and have never talked to these men or mentioned the name of Jesus, and they have sat here and wept with you, and are willing to pledge you anything to take the Gospel of Jesus to the soldiers.”

Their war committee said to me, “you don’t have to leave an organization or spend a cent on this. How much do you want?”

“Ten thousand dollars.”

“Goodbye, we will get you twenty thousand.”

When businessmen that are not professed Christians at all will say, “That is business. We will do it,” it means that God is working.

At the close of the lunch, a big curly-headed fellow came up, tears in his eyes. He put up two fingers. Finally, he got these words out, “Rader, I wish you would write to my two boys. I have two of them over there.”

“Will you send it?” I asked.

“Yes.”

We went to his office and wrote the letter, and he gave his heart to Jesus Christ and wrote underneath the letter, and it has gone off, and you pray that when it gets there it will do the business,—a big square businessman, but he saw the value of a soul when it was his boy’s soul.

Let us continue to pray that God will use the empty chairs at the table to bring fathers and mothers to Himself.