7. Before the holy God

7. Before the holy God

In the emphatic mentioning of the holiness of God in the Vow is included the reminding of the warnings in this regard in the Bible, e.g. in Ecclesiastics 5: “Better is it that thou shouldest not vow, than thou shouldest vow and not pay. Suffer not thy mouth to cause thy flesh to sin . . . ”; do not later come with the excuse “it was an error”; but especially the elucidating admonition: “...for God is in heaven, and thou upon the earth: therefore let thy words (and what you do before his countenance) be few.”

In this the deepest significance of the Biblical idea, holy, comes to the fore, namely the distance between God and what is his on the one side, and man and what belongs to him, on the other side. When St. Peter lost sight of this, the Lord Jesus called him Satan (Matthew 16:23).

In a very sharp awareness of this, every one of those 470 men also days before, namely already from 2 December 1838, was informed and consulted personally on the making of the contents and the complications of the Vow to the Lord. According to Cilliers he at the daily repetition from 9 to 15 December also added: If anyone has any objection to this, “that he then must depart from this place.” Such one was then advised to withdraw. He would not belong here.

In this light the People of the Vow must up to this day realise that it is totally senseless to struggle and to argue on the fulfilment of the Vow with people who are no Bible Believers, for whom the holiness of the God to Whom the Vow was made, means nothing.

Disbelievers can have neither any interest at, nor any understanding of, nor any sensible meaning on the Vow.
Still, more important is rather: he who thinks what has happened on 16 December 1838 is only man’s work, either has no understanding of what happened there, or estimates the generalship of Pretorius and the heroism of those 470 men hopelessly too high. The holy God disposes there . . . and justly for Christianity and civilization at the south end of Africa.