Scriptural Sanctification - Media Sabda Org

SCRIPTURAL SANCTIFICATION:
An
Attempted Solution of the Holiness Problem
By The
Rev. John R. Brooks, D.D.
ENDNOTES
1 The leading idea of this and the next chapter was presented in a sermon preached at the Virginia
Conference in 1893 and elsewhere.
2 Let no one conclude that, because the heathen have a possibility of salvation without the written
or preached gospel, therefore it is not so important to send the latter to them. God thought it so
important that Cornelius, an enlightened and accepted heathen, should have a fuller gospel that he
sent an angel to tell him where to find a preacher to bring it to him. And he brought special
influences to bear upon Peter to have him go as a missionary to Cornelius and his friends. And Paul
so felt the importance of this matter, and so well understood the purport of his Lord's commission,
that he went to the most intelligent and cultured heathen of his day, notably to Athens, to convert the
already existing possibility of their salvation into a probability or approximate certainty. And we
spend much more money at home to accomplish the same object for our people than we give to
foreign missions. For, what we contribute to Sunday schools, the support of the ministry, the
building of churches, etc., at home is to make the salvation, that is already possible to them, probable
or certain. The heathen in their condition need this work much more than they. And then there is
God's imperative command, from which there is no appeal, and which Paul understood to require
that he carry this light to those who already had enough knowledge to make them "without excuse"
if they fail to improve it.
3 Dr. Broadus and some other critics incline to the opinion that the figures of "fire," "fan," "ax," and
"furnace," used by Malachi and John, refer to the purification of nations by destroying the wicked
in them and leaving a pure nation. But many others, including Calvin, Olshausen, Godet, and Clark,
think they refer to the purifying work of the Spirit on individuals, consuming their faults, or vices,
or impurities. May they not, in some sense, refer to both? The ax and fan and furnace may refer to
the judgments that God brought on the Jewish nation, while the fire of the Holy Ghost and the
furnace of affliction may refer to individuals. The "tongue of fire," sign of the fulfillment of the
prophecy, set on each individual, indicating that the work of purification was personal and not
national.
4 Let the reader suspend judgment as to the interpretation of the parable of the sower, suggested
above, until he considers fuller discussion of the matter found in Chapter 22.
5 Tauler was a most devout Mystic of the fourteenth century.
6 The Gnostics, according to well-informed writers, believed that the soul is naturally pure, and is
not contaminated by such sins of the body as gluttony, impurity, drunkenness, etc. -- that the soul
is as "a golden jewel in a dunghill, the gold being in no way alloyed or defiled by the encompassing