Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 92:365 (Jan 1935)
Article: Editorials
Author: Rollin Thomas Chafer

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Editorials

Rollin T. Chafer

Wars and Rumors of Wars

In that fateful year of our Lord, 1914, the following editorial under the title, “And Only Man Is Vile,” appeared in a New York City paper which was afterwards merged with another publication:

“The Rhine is flowing today as when the ruined castles on its heights were still unbuilt; the waters of Geneva are as blue; the black shadows on the surface of Constanz come and go as gently; the pine needle carpets of the forests of the Vosges are as soft; in the Campagna this evening the mellow light will creep over the land to the call of the Angelus as a week, a year, a century ago; the Alps stand immobile, insensate even to the music of their moving glaciers. With them it is today as it was in the beginning.

“These are the things that are permanent; the things that stand above and immune to the consequences of man’s criminality, his idiocy, his petty racial antagonisms, his outbursts of empty, thoughtless rivalries and jealousies, his insatiable appetite for empire, his futile diplomacy and the wars he summons to his own ruin.”

All the counts of this terrible indictment of man’s failure stand out on the pages of human history. It is futile to deny them. Racial antagonisms and an ungovernable imperialistic appetite drove men in the great world war to actions which resulted in wholesale murder on a scale hitherto unheard of and at a staggering money cost. It is said that the shells exploded in the English bombardment of defense at Ypres alone cost one hundred and ten million dollars.

But is it true that the natural world is immune to the sin back of all this failure of man? Uninspired writers have always failed to penetrate beyond the curtain which hides the Creator from His material universe as it is, not as originally created. By inspiration, on the other hand, chosen men,revealed the causes which explain the continuous warfare in

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nature itself-the violence of the hurricane and earthquake, the destructiveness of drouth and flood, the depredations of insect hordes, and the savage cruelty of the animal world. No one has advanced a reasonable explanation of these facts of the natural world apart from the revelation that a curse reigns over nature as a result of the introduction of sin into a perfect world (Gen 3:17, 18). Accepting this revelation, Paul, by a like inspiration, gives the promise of the ultimate removal of that curse and the freeing of groaning creation from the cause of all of its violent and cruel manifestations (Rom 8:18–22