Magyar Egyház, 1975 (54. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1975-01-01 / 1. szám
MAGYAR EGYHÁZ 9 MAGYAR CHURCH CONFIDENCE FOR THE COMING DAYS “/ am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the beginning and the end.” —Rev. 1:8. According to the calendar we use, we are at the end of one year and the beginning of another. We don’t get greatly excited over that fact, neither are we especially thrilled at the thought of it. That is not because we have become emotional dullards with age nor because our response machinery has broken down. It is simply that we have learned, by experience, the wisdom of the Master’s words, “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” Just because we have come, in the physical arrangement of time, to the close of one twelve months and the commencement of another does not signify that we may expect any radical departures either in ourselves or the daily routines of our lives. In many respects “tomorrow will be as this day.” Yet this, also, is a fact to take account of, that iife is not a closed circuit. It is possessed of infinite possibilities and there is always the chance that some adventure may make tilings for us other than they have been. At any rate, God has strewn our world with enough virtues and valors to keep faith and hope alive. And every New Year does come with the perennial urge of the Springtime to wake within us a persuasion of better things. “Hope springs eternal in the human breast” for the reason that “God hath set eternity in the heart.” The specific New Year text we have chosen is found three times, with slight variation, in the Book of Revelation. V hether it is of any concern, it is a point of interest that we find the text recorded, in the first instance, in the eighth verse down in the first chapter and in the second instance exactly eight verses up from the close of the last chapter, not counting the benediction verse which concludes the hook. Then we find it a third time in between. This is the text: “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.” We have chosen this particular text, which is the grand pronouncement of the crowned Christ, not because it happens to contain phrases that make it adaptable to a New Year message, hut because it embodies a great confidence which we may carry with us into the coming days and draw upon for our inspiration and encouragement. Emerson writes, in one of his essays, that the living of life “drains all our cisterns dry” and that if we are to go on living in any vital way those “cisterns” must he constantly replenished from the “fountains” that never run dry. In another place he cries out of those depletions which come to every man’s soul, “Nerve us with incessant affirmations.” Such a text as the one we have chosen does both of those things. Hear it again in the light of that aspect of things—“I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.” Suppose, for the sake of being definite, that we set this text down into the midst of world conditions. Viewing those conditions, without mentioning them item by item, how can a man fare his way through this present world with its suspicions and hatreds and fears and have any confidence that mankind will ever come to a saving knowledge of the truth and ever achieve the triumph over the things of the flesh and the devil which the Spirit, alone, makes possible? It is because “the soul lias faith in the sunlight” which came in Him who is described as “the Day-spring from on high” and whose purpose is declared to be “to shine upon them that sit in darkness and tlic shadow of death and to guide our feet into the way of peace.” It is because “On Christ, the solid Rock, we stand” that we, like the Psalmist, “shalt not be afraid for the terror by night, nor the arrow that flieth by day; for the pestilence that walketh in darkness, nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.” The world is on a rampage. That’s the tragedy. But even a world on a rampage is not a world beyond hope of redemption. “God’s arm is not shortened that it cannot save, neither His ear heavy that it cannot hear.” That’s the triumph in which God’s people put their trust. “The blackest night that ever fell upon the earth,” says George Eliot, “never put out the stars.” And the Apostle Paul, experiencing things that might well tumble any man’s soul into the Sty-
