James Martin Gray On Man's Desire To Be Equal With God

Wikipedia:

James Martin Gray (May 11, 1851 – September 21, 1935) was a pastor in the Reformed Episcopal Church, a Bible scholar, editor, hymn writer, and the president of Moody Bible Institute, 1904-34.

Theologically, Gray was an early fundamentalist who upheld the inspiration of the Bible and opposed a contemporary trend toward a social gospel. Gray was also a dispensationalist who believed in the premillennial, pre-tribulational return of Jesus Christ at the Rapture. Personally, Gray was conservative in dress and personal habit. A reporter remarked that he “cultivated gentlemanliness as a fine art.” Male students at Moody were required to wear coats and ties in the dining room, and during a hot spell in July 1908, Gray admonished faculty members for taking off their coats and vests in their offices.

Gray was one of the seven editors of the first Scofield Reference Bible in 1909. Gray wrote 25 books and pamphlets, some of which remain in print. He also wrote a number of hymns, perhaps the best known of which is Only a Sinner, Saved by Grace.

An excerpt from, “Great Epochs of Sacred History” By James M. Gray, Fleming H. Revell Company, 1910, Pg. 36 – 38:

Pride is the root-sin of the human heart, and its essence consists in the desire to be as God ; not indeed to be as He is in personal holiness, but in carnal knowledge, in self-importance, in freedom from restraint, and in the power to command worship.

To quote another, this is the trump card in the hand of the arch-fiend. “Sensuality might be thought to be a stronger temptation of man; but, in the long run, intellectual pride and vaulting ambition, are as much stronger as mind is superior to body.

“An eagle’s wings may be tied to the ground, and become bedraggled with the mud and soot of its surroundings, just as sensuality may ensnare a man and smut him ; yet the captive bird has ever an eye for the sun, and is impatient to mount and soar away into the heavens.

“That even sinless minds, as Adam and Eve, may be fascinated by the dazzle of self-deification is proof of its extraordinary witchery.”

We have an illustration on a national scale of man’s desire to be as God in the history of the French revolution, where only one hundred years ago, “a people in the front rank of learning and culture, with profane excitement, enthroned human reason as their god, and deified even a harlot!” And we have illustrations of it continually in individual cases, in what we know of anarchism for example.

But to come still closer home, what shall we say of the false religious teachings of the day which are so general, and which give encouragement to the same sin by elevating man in his own estimation, and exalting humanity to an equality with God?

As one of the moderns expresses it in verse :

“Men have professed their love of God, of king, Of church, of state, of friends, of family. A loftier strain than all of these I sing: I love Humanity.

“Divide not and exclude not. Build no wall. No special tie shall bind me from the Whole. Love’s garment has no rent. It clothes the All. I love the Cosmic Soul.”

Finally, when the Antichrist shall at last arise, that secular despot who shall be at the head of the nations of Christendom, the culminating act of his iniquity will be the avowed dethronement of God. He himself shall be found sitting in the temple of God, giving out that he is God. (2 Thessalonians 2.) In that day, thank God, the true Church, as distinct from Christendom, will have been translated to meet the Lord in the air, but Christendom itself will be bowing down to the Antichrist recognizing in him a kind of incarnation and hence a deification of humanity. Satan’s lie will for a time be in the ascendant.