A Highway Ahead 1/17/43

Scripture: Isaiah 40: 1-10

Text: Isaiah 40: 3b “Make straight in the desert a highway for our God.”

One of the important dramas in the literature of recent years had to do with the life of people in a dead-end street in New York City. There are a good many seeming dead ends in the world of today. (1) A depression which led to unemployment and appalling lack of security seemed a dead end street to thousands of people. (2) Most of the world is now at war, with other nations still joining in. The latest, Iraq, just entered, formally, during the past couple of days. War seems a terrible dead end street in a world much of which believes that it is possible for people to live in constructive progress. (3) There are great extremes of wealth and poverty in our land and in other lands - perhaps most stubbornly notable in India. (4) There is bitterness of class, bitterness of race and bitterness of religion. I, for one, view with great concern the reported growth of anti-Jewish feeling in our own country. Any fellowship that can bring about better understanding between Jew and Gentile is worthy of our hearty participation.

These symptoms remind historians vividly of some of the characteristics of ancient nations in their decline. In the ancient Graeco-Roman world the intermittent wars of four hundred years were followed by exhaustion and debt. The middle class of people was wiped out. There was mounting tension between extremes of society. Large sections of people had nothing to lose and much to gain by change, and hence were ready for any sort of revolution.

If the history of our time were to degenerate into frequent world wars followed by world depressions every 25 years, we should have good reason to be pessimistic. Living in temporary enjoyment of the wealth and power of America might be like sitting at “the captain’s dinner on a sinking ship with mutiny in the hold.”

There is that which may make it seem to youth that no pathway really leads anywhere. Some melancholy mind has remarked that there are more suicides in New York City than anywhere else because every street ends at the water’s edge. To some, in our day, it may seem that every possible path ends at the water’s edge.

There are the roads of peace and war. A student editorial in a university newspaper looks at alternative ways in these words: “We have been schooled to distrust force, appeals to emotion, and the catchwords of easy patriotism. We have been impregnated with the knowledge that war is the enemy of democracy. With stunning suddenness, the signals have been switched. Within a year, gunpowder and shells are urged upon us as a panacea for the ills of mankind .... The result has been confusion .....”

Most of us have been enthusiastic about the path of scientific progress. Yet it has been scarcely forty years from the time man found a practical way to fly until he has turned his wings to such violent destruction that in 7.5 minutes in a single city 30,000 persons are reported killed and 70,000 more wounded. Must our scientific achievements end in dead ends such as this?

A novelist describes Irish peasants who have been set to work, just to keep them busy, at building roads which end in bogs. The author writes: “The road which leads nowhere is difficult to make, even though starving men are employed upon it; for a man to work well there must be an end in view.” For a man to live well, there must be an end in view.

There have been, of course, in every age, philosophers who have supposed that all human life is doomed to disillusionment. Epicureans have advised that there is nothing good for man but to “eat, drink and be merry.” No wonder that psychologists and psychiatrists have their files full of cases suffering from nothing but the senselessness and emptiness of their own lives.

To everyone who sees, or thinks he sees, his roads all running to the water’s edge, the amazing Bible has a direct word to be heard. “A highway shall be there, and a way, and it shall be called the way of holiness.” (Isaiah 35: 8) A highway! That is where great moments of history have been found - not at the end of some blind alley.

There was a highway out of the land of Egypt. It wasn’t easy on the feet. It was not built of concrete nor was it motor-traversed. It was simply rough escape into wilderness. It was more soul than soil. It was for Israelite people who had nothing - no substance, no freedom, no hope in the land. But they believed in God. There was their highway. A great leader, who could have enjoyed the pleasures of the mighty Pharaoh’s court without even the effort of choosing it, did choose rather to suffer danger, affliction and privation with his people. Their highway led out across a wilderness so hot and barren and waterless that, to this day, few people travel there. Forty years those people wandered there. But it was a highway from slavery to deliverance, and the Jews have never forgotten it.

Again, in the Babylonian captivity, a prophet cries out “Make straight in the desert a highway for our God.”

Much later, there is another place in the Bible where there is talk about a highway. People were suffering again, under the oppression of Rome. And Mark tells us that as Jesus came into that world, there was a voice crying in the desert, in the spirit of Isaiah, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” Thus John the Baptist paved the way for Jesus Christ to come walking up a new highway. It seemed a rough, rocky way and it looked like a dead end on a cross-studded hill. But it turned out to be a highway, level and straight stretching eternally ahead.

From these texts about, or references to, highways, a teacher, Jack Finegan draws three conclusions. Here they are:

(1) First, “no matter how hopeless a situation may be, there can be a highway.” When Christianity was bottled up in the western world by the fall of Constantinople to the Mohammedans, it may have looked like the beginning of the end for Western civilization. But it was really only the end of the Middle Ages. For there was an unknown highway, yet to be discovered, across the Atlantic, and in only a few years, Columbus was pioneering it.

The 1890 U.S. Federal Census Bureau announced that the American frontier had disappeared. It seems that the frontiers of the last great, new country in the world were settled. The days of the pioneer were then past. It would seem possible that this is not necessarily the case, geographically speaking, (considering more recent developments in Alaska, etc.) But even if it were true, see the other amazing frontiers which were opened to mankind within the next ten years. Henry Ford made an automobile in 1893. The x-ray was discovered in 1895. In 1896 Marconi invented wireless telegraphy. The Curies discovered radium in 1898. The frontiers closed? There can yet be a highway; there is a highway for those who will still be pioneers.

Dr. Royal Chapman, scientist, educator and enthusiastic churchman, might have become the president of the University of Minnesota had not sudden death cut short a distinguished career. About 3 1/2 years ago I heard him tell a class which was being graduated from the University of Hawaii that the work of pioneers is not done, even though geographical frontiers do seem to be settled. “If I were a young man who wanted to do pioneering work,” he said, “I would give serious attention to the field of plastics. It is a coming field.” And so it proves to be.

Is there no highway? A boy was born in Kansas, more than 30 years ago, who was terribly hurt when his school house burned down. He was still a small boy. At first the doctor said, “He will never walk again.” Later the doctor said, “He will never walk unless there is a miracle.” But the boy was not stopping at any dead end. At first he struggled about on crutches, then on a cane. Then he followed the plow across the field, walking by leaning on its handles. Then he began to run, a little at a time, to test the strength of his legs.

For this boy who was never to walk again, there opened a highway - a race track! Four years ago at Dartmouth, that boy, Glenn Cunningham, ran the fastest mile in all racing history! Life does not have to be a “dead end street.” “There can be a highway.”

(2) In the second place, Jack Finegan insists that “We have the very best chance of finding a highway if was are following Jesus Christ.” A thoroughgoing modern scholar [Kenneth Scott Latourette] suggests that all pioneering and exploring work is “in part the confidence and the emancipation of the human spirit which are from the legacy of Jesus.” The probable truth of this assertion is thrown into bolder relief in the light of a modern enemy philosophy which contends that man has no significance apart from the mass which makes up the state.

John McMurray says in his book, The Clue to History, “Science, in its own field, is the product of Christianity, and its most adequate expression so far.” This suggests that he means that science really carries out the idea of Jesus’ words, “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” [John 8: 32]. What we need, to prevent the destructive results of science, is more of the guidance of Jesus on the pathway of science.

Sorokin [Pitirim A Sorokin] writes: “Now when our Sensate culture is in agony; when its product is poison gas rather than fresh air; when through its achievements it has given into man’s hands terrific power over nature and the social and cultural world, without providing him with self-control, -- it is becoming increasingly dangerous to mankind itself and to all its values. And for the same reasons for which a bomb or gun in the hands of a child or an imbecile is dangerous for himself and for others. The most urgent need of our time is the man who can control himself and his lusts, who is compassionate to all his fellow men; who can see and seek for the eternal values of culture and society, and who deeply feels his unique responsibility in this universe.” We need, not less but more of the guidance of Jesus Christ.

(3) Jack Finegan’s third conclusion is that “we should choose carefully the road on which we are starting, looking toward the end to which it leads.” It is perfectly true that a host of pathways end in disillusionment. There are many dead end streets ---- and some thoroughfares, in this universe. Jesus even told us that it is easier to get on the dead end street (wide as it seems at first) than to find the highway. “Wide is the gate, and broad the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat,” said he. But, “strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.” [Matthew 7: 13, 14].

In the first year of Hitler’s power one who knew Martin Niemoeller knew then that the pastor recognized the insidious threat to the Christian faith that he preached and loved. In the spirit of another Martin - Martin Luther - Niemoeller was beginning to say, “Here I stand, I can do no other.” A few years went by and the Nazi fury swept him into a concentration camp, where he doubtless remains, if still alive. When Martin went to camp, his aged father, Heinrich Niemoeller, a pastor before him, came out of retirement and began preaching again across Germany. Because of his age, and his carefully chosen words, he was able to continue preaching unmolested until he died several months ago. During this time, he preached an especially famous sermon on the subject, “It Depends upon the End.” In that sermon, he told a story of Napoleon’s mother who once said to him, “Son, you think you are Napoleon, the world conqueror. But you have an anxious mother who asks you where you will end up, what will your outcome be?” Before Heinrich Niemoeller died, he said to a friend, “Yes, it is a terrible thing to have a son in a concentration camp --- But there would be something more terrible for us; if God had needed a faithful martyr and our Martin had been unwilling.”

It is possible to sweep down a broad way in arrogance, ruthlessness and might, but to leave behind an anxious mother and find ahead a dead end street.

It is possible to choose a far narrower road, one straightened even to the point of cross or concentration camp, and leave behind a proud father and mother and to find ahead a mighty Master and a great vindication.

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dates and places delivered:

Wisconsin Rapids, January 17, 1943