Now, without the slightest hesitation or disguise, I fully and frankly admit that there are very serious difficulties in the revelation of God, and difficulties which I believe it is not in the power of the human intellect to solve. When, therefore, a person says that he cannot understand all that is revealed, I agree with him. If he add that on that account he cannot believe, I altogether dissent from his conclusion; but as to the existence of difficulties he is undoubtedly right. We, who believe, know perfectly well, and fully admit, that there are things in divine revelation which we are altogether unable either to explain or understand.
Think, for example, of the divinity of our blessed Lord and Saviour, and the perfect union of a divine and human nature in His one sacred person. I am not afraid to state plainly my firm conviction that no human intellect can explain it. If He were only an appearance of God Himself that would be intelligible; or if He were only man endued with very high qualifications, that again would be within our reach; but that He should be in His one person both perfect God and perfect man, or, in other words, both infinite and finite, that I believe to be far beyond the reach of _human_ explanation.
It is the same with the doctrine of election, and its union with human responsibility. The two appear to be opposed to each other, but, notwithstanding that, they are both found in the Gospel. How can it be explained? How can it be? I cannot tell. Some people meet the difficulty by cutting out one side, and some by cutting out the other; but neither one process of excision nor the other can satisfy a really thinking mind. And the difficulty remains, for we find both sides in Scripture.
Who, again, can explain a resurrection? We see in spring that wonderful revival of life which is a type of it. But who can explain the thing itself? What physician, or what scientific philosopher, can explain how the dead shall be made alive? Whenever it is done it must be done by some power of which man knows nothing, so that the resurrection of the dead is something which, _to the knowledge of man_, appears impossible.
Then again, in conclusion, look around on all the sin and misery of the world. We know that it is explained in the Scriptural account of the fall, and that there is a remedy provided in Christ Jesus. But there is something inexpressibly appalling in the facts. Here is this beautiful world, that appears to have been created as a happy home for holy inhabitants, filled with sin, misery, ruin, pain, anguish, remorse, strife, sickness, and ultimately death. And when we think of the words, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,” and when we contrast the Creator with the present condition of creation, there is enough to fill the heart with amazement, and to make the thoughtful man exclaim, “How can these things be?”