1. Free As Sons
   
2. Does "Go Ye" Mean "Go Me?"
   
3. Are We Really Born Again?
   
4. The Sacrifices of Cain and Abel
   
5. Silence Says Something
   
6. Body Language
   
7. Repentance Before Faith
   
8. I Wonder
   
9. Can I Know?
   
10. Ultimate Logical Conclusions
    
11. Errors in Peter's Sermon
    
12. Did Timothy Need Admonition?
    
13. Jesus' Youth Sermon For Adults
    
14. Why Didn't Paul Reform?
    
15. Christmas
    
16. Let The Unmarried Marry
    
17. A Dialect of Division
    
18. Our Traditions
    
19. Adding Our Safeguards
    
20. According To The Pattern
    
21. A Creed In The Deed
    
22. Samuel Did Not Know The Lord!
    
23. Response From Our Readers
    
24. Cries Of A Troubled Church
    
25. Sharing Without Fellowship
    
26. I Joined A Church
    
27. Open Membership
    
28. Another Last Will And Testament
    
29. Sad Thoughts About Church Growth
    
30. My Four Retirement Homes
    
31. Hook's Points: A Potpourri
    

ADDING OUR SAFEGUARDS

In eagerness to prevent violation of God's law, men have been inclined to add safeguards to it. These attempts to reinforce God's laws actually reflect on the wisdom of God for omitting the safeguards in the first place. This aptitude for building fences around the law showed early and stayed late.

To Adam God said, "You shall not eat." Evidently, Adam passed this word on to his later formed wife. When Eve was questioned by the serpent, she stated that they were neither to eat nor to touch it. The prohibition against touching evidently was a safeguard added to God's law. When their addition took the weight of law, according to a Jewish story, the serpent seized upon it and, shoving her into the tree, he caused Eve to touch the fruit. By showing her that no ill effect came from touching it, she was convinced easily that no harm would come from eating. Man's "safe course" became a snare. This unfounded story raises a good point.

Where God urges us to be temperate in all things, we have been heard to add, "Don't even touch some of these things." As a safeguard against looking with lust, we are warned against looking with desire. Though holy men "became all things to all men," we are cautioned to "take the safe course" and live in a Pharisaic island of aloofness. To trust others to add self control is too risky; so we advise forsaking all that "could lead to sin," as though that were possible. Rather than exercising Christian liberty with a sympathetic eye for the weak, we demand a surrender of the liberty. Since God exhorts us not to forsake our assembling, we brace it up by adding, "Don't ever miss one." To make certain that we give according to our prosperity, we make it a duty to give at least a tithe.

In these points of illustration, we are adding safeguards to God's law, building fences around the law to make it even more restrictive. We affect a deeper piety than the Savior who turned water into wine and feign a purity more sublime than that of the groom at the wedding feast who had looked upon a woman with desire before he married her.

We imply that Jesus was an accessory to sin in his first miracle and that he was indiscreet in attending the party where his image might be tarnished by the social drinking there. Our mildest implied indictment against Jesus is that he did not "shun the appearance of evil." He simply was not taking our "safe course." And, though he "left us an example," we ought not to walk in this one!

When we add our strictures to what we think to be God's law, we constrict the gate and discourage others from entering. Our added safeguards make Christianity impractical, for who can observe all of our safety regulations? By our safeguards we add a yoke to the legal yoke, and it does not make it any easier. When the weak violate these, like Eve in the story, they are demoralized toward keeping God's real law.

Before adding our restrictions to those of God, we should lend an ear to Jesus' reprimand, "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because you shut the kingdom of heaven against men; for you neither enter yourselves, nor allow those who would enter to go in" (Matt. 23:1 3).

The Pharisees bound their safeguards with sincerity equal to ours. They got a head start, but we are in the race!