LETTER TO A YOUNG CURATE

By F. C. Hocking

Dear Mr _

As I told you last Sunday night, when leaving St _ Church, I have been going to write to you about your sermon given there at Matins two weeks previously but have been rather pushed for time.

First, though, let me say that I would like to congratulate you on your courage in taking up a position in the Church ministry, despite the continuous decline in interest in the Word of God and the low material prospects in your profession. That is unselfishness indeed.

As a lay person it would be impertinent to question views given by a member of any profession other than the Church. But this matter is different. It will be no use blaming a teacher for one’s having accepted doctrinal errors when one is confronted by the Almighty, for He provided the Bible for all who care to read it, to do so with faith and with all the intelligence with which He has endowed them. Accordingly I want to comment on two points which you mentioned in the sermon in question.

The first is the widely-accepted story that Moses brought the ‘Jewish’ people out of Egypt. But that cannot be true. The Jews are not mentioned in the Bible until the report on the incident at Elath,(1) and that, according to Ussher, was about 750 years after the Exodus. That error is the beginning of the misunderstanding of God’s plan for mankind.

The second is the also widely-held view that Israel failed and that God appointed the Church to take over its task. I have read this story in the Report on The Lambeth Conference 1958.(2) But that cannot be accepted as being true either, if we believe God.

The word ‘Jews’, in the last few centuries B.C., was the name of the few people of the Kingdom of Judah who had returned from Babylon, when freed from their captivity there, and had become racially adulterated with the descendants of their age-old enemy, Esau, at that time called Idumeans.(3) Herod, their king, was of this mixture(4) and Caiaphas, their high priest, was a Sadducee.(5) The latter and the chief priests, a politically-minded(6) gang, persuaded what must have been a very small group of those racially-mixed people to demand the crucifixion of Jesus but that is no defensible reason for saying that the whole Israel race failed. The preponderance of them were then far too far away(7) to have been the least bit implicated.

So much for the historical facts – what about the spiritual truth? God claimed to be able to declare the end from the beginning.(8)  Having that preview, would He have chosen a race, later predicted by Him in most emphatic terms, with its royal house, to be everlasting(9) (though warned of punishment for any possible transgression of His laws(10)), knowing that it would fail and have to be set aside for another body to fulfil its appointed task? If I believed that I should be trembling at the prospect of the heart-to-heart talk with the Almighty, which will inevitably come one’s way in due course, knowing that His Mind would read the unspoken question in mine – ‘Why ever, with His eyes wide open to the whole future, did He make such a blunder?’ And how appallingly inconsistent it would be to rely on the same allegedly unreliable Being to give us everlasting life!(11)

Furthermore, as it is possible to redeem only what was once one’s own, for what people did our Lord suffer death to redeem if it were not the Israel race? He spoke of them one hundred and eighty-one times in the Old Testament as ‘My people’ and said to them, “You only have I known of all the families of the earth”(12) yet theologians seem to have spirited the main body of them away into oblivion, leaving spotlighted in history the tiny, condemned, minority – the Jews.

I have no doubt as to who the modern descendants of the main body are, as you will see in my enclosed leaflet (now somewhat out of date) but the very first fact one needs to establish is that God did not blunder. Consequently Israel will complete its task. In spite of His lament in the verses which follow it, there are no ‘ifs’ or ‘buts’ limiting His definite statement, ‘This people have I formed for myself; they shall shew forth my praise’.(13)

I have no desire to persuade you to agree with me if you are not so inclined. I write only to draw your attention to my disagreement with you on your two views which I have mentioned, knowing that at the end of this age (now probably not too far distant, judging by the apparent current fulfilment of our Lord’s relevant warnings(14)), after the second advent of Jesus Christ, we shall all be called to account for our decisions as to the confidence which we have been prepared to place in God’s statements.

Yours sincerely,

(Signed) F. C. Hocking.

(1) 2 Kings 16:6.

(2) Page 2:12, para. 3.

(3) Bible Research Handbook, Covenant Publishing Co. Ltd. Serial 40.

(4) Bible Research Handbook, Covenant Publishing Co. Ltd. Serial 40, Point 1.

(5) Bible Research Handbook, Covenant Publishing Co. Ltd. Serial 40a, Point 5

(6) Hastings Dictionary of the Bible, page 818,’Sadducees’, para. 2.

(7) 2Esdrasl3:40-46. Antiquities of the Jews, Josephus Book XI ,ch.V para. 2.

(8) Isaiah 46:9,10.

(9) 1 Chronicles 17:7-14; Jeremiah 31:35-37,33:24-26; Psalm 89:20-29,33-37.

(10) Psalm 89: 30-32.

(11) John 3:16.

(12) Amos 3:2.

(13) Isaiah 43:21.

(14) Matthew ch. 24; Mark ch. 13; Luke ch. 21.