Our Standard
Our Standard
There was a day when men were not worried if weights and measures were only approximate. The inch was the measure of the large joint of the king's thumb. The foot was the length of the royal foot and the yard was the distance between the king's nose when he was looking straight front, and the end of his thumb when his arm was extended to the side.
Of course these standards are now much more exact than they used to be. In 1926, when Mr. John E. Sears was the leading British authority on metrology, he reported to the Royal Institute of Great Britain that the standard yard of Queen Elizabeth's reign had still been in use as the standard in 1824. During the interval it had been broken and "crudely repaired by dowelling and binding the two pieces together with two strips of sheet brass and copper wire." This is enough to make any self-respecting scientist's hair turn!
Is it not astonishing then, that when men are willing to spend vast sums of money and great time and energy to measure the millionth part of the width of a hair, that they are so lax in their desire for moral and spiritual measure? Yet God has given us standards more exact than any yet devised by man. The Book and the Man do not vary the decillionth part of a millimeter in their unchanging standards.
Do you wish to know what God requires of you? The law will measure you to show how far short you fall. Do you want to learn what God's possibility of manhood really is? The matchless Lord Jesus will reveal every shade of this perfection. Do you want to know the cost of bridging the distance between your fallen heart and the white holiness of God? The cross will measure it to the last infinite cent. Do you want to know the speed with which God can bring you from the infinite depth of sin to the infinite height of the glorious position of the sons of God? The justifying grace of the loving Father can be the measure of that infinitesimal moment that brings you out of death and into life.
It took an expedition of French scientists more than a year to find the length of the meter. They described it as one forty-millionth of the earth's circumference measured on the equator at sea level. When they returned to Paris with their results, they were challenged by some scientists who said that the meter could not be exact because of contraction due to the change of temperature, and by others who said that the equator was a circle, and a section of an arc could not be as exact as the section of a straight line.
No one can question our divine measures, however, for Christ never faileth: "but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away . . . And now abideth faith, hope," . . . and Christ, but the greatest of these is Christ. His expedition to earth to confirm the divine measures can never be called into question.
1. If the scriptures are to illustrate how great my sin is and how great Christ is, how should we come to the book of Leviticus or Deuteronomy?
2. If God’s standards are so precise and perfect how than are we to implement the Law, commands, standards, and precepts of the Lord into all of our lives?
3. Is there any area that we should omit this standard?
