BIBLES NET. COM
Teaching
Of Jesus
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THE TEACHING OF JESUS By the Rev. George Jackson
“Whosoever goeth onward and abideth not in the teaching
of Christ, hath not God: he that abideth in the teaching, the same hath
both the Father and the Son.“–2 JOHN IX (R.V.).
PREFACE
The following chapters are the outcome of an attempt to set before a
large Sunday evening congregation–composed for the most part of working
men and women–the teaching of our Lord on certain great selected themes.
The reader will know, therefore, what to look for in these pages. If he be
a trained Biblical scholar he need go no further, for he will find nothing
here with which he is not already thoroughly familiar. On the other hand,
the book will not be wholly without value even to some of my
brother-ministers if it serve to convince them that a man may preach freely
on the greatest themes of the gospel, and yet be sure that the common
people will hear him gladly, if only he will state his message at once
seriously and simply, and with the glow that comes of personal conviction.
Indeed, one may well doubt if there is any other kind of preaching that
they really care for.
My indebtedness to other workers in the same field is manifold. As far
as possible detailed acknowledgement is made in the footnotes. Wendt’s Teaching of Jesus and Beyschlag’s New Testament Theology have
been always at my elbow, though not nearly in such continual use as
Stevens’ Theology of the New Testament, a work of which it is
impossible to speak too highly. Brace’s Kingdom of God, Stalker’s Christology of Jesus, Harnack’s What is Christianity? Horton’s Teaching of Jesus, Watson’s Mind of the Master,
Selby’s Ministry of the Lord Jesus, and Robertson’s Our Lord’s
Teaching (a truly marvellous sixpenny worth), have all been laid under
contribution, not the less freely because I have been compelled to dissent
from some of their conclusions. Like many another busy minister, I am a
daily debtor to Dr. Hastings and his great Dictionary of the Bible.
And, finally, I gladly avail myself of this opportunity of expressing once
more my unceasing obligations to the Rev. Professor James Denney, of
Glasgow. Now that Dr. Dale has gone from us, there is no one to whom we may
more confidently look for a reasonable evangelical theology which can be
both verified and preached.
It only remains to add that in these pages critical questions are for
the most part ignored, not because the pressure of the problems which they
create is unfelt, but because as yet they have no place among the
certainties which are the sole business of the preacher when he passes from
his study to his pulpit.
GEORGE JACKSON.
EDINBURGH, 1903.
CONTENTS
I
Luke xxiv. 19. “A prophet mighty in word before God and
all the people.“
John iii. 2. “A teacher come from God.”
II
John xvii. 11. “Holy Father.“
III
Matthew xvi. 15. “Who say ye that I am?”
IV
Mark x. 45. “The Son of Man came … to give His life a
ransom for many.”
V
John xiv. 16. “I will pray the Father, and He shall give
you another Comforter, that He may be with you for ever, even the Spirit of
truth.“
John xvi. 7. “It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not
away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I go away, I will send
Him unto you.”
VI
GOD
Matthew vi. 10. “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, as
in heaven, so on earth.”
VII
Luke xv. 10. “There is joy in the presence of the angels
of God over one sinner that repenteth.”
VIII
Luke xi. 2, 4. “When ye pray, say,… Forgive us our
sins.”
IX
Matthew vi. 33. “Seek ye first … His
righteousness.”
X
Matthew vii. 9-11. “What man is there of you, who, if
his son shall ask him for a loaf, will give him a stone; or if he shall ask
for a fish, will give him a serpent? If ye then, being evil, know how to
give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which
is in heaven give good things to them that ask Him?”
XI
FORGIVENESS OF INJURIES
Matthew xviii. 21, 22. “Then came Peter, and said to
Him, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him?
until seven times? Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, until seven
times; but, until seventy times seven.”
XII
Matthew vi. 25, 31, 34. “Be not anxious for your life
… nor yet for your body. … Be not anxious, saying, What shall we eat?
or, What shall we drink? … Be not anxious for the morrow.”
XIII
Luke xviii. 24, 25. “How hardly shall they that have
riches enter into the kingdom of God! For it is easier for a camel to enter
in through a needle’s eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of
God.”
XIV
ADVENT
Matthew xxiv. 30, 36. “They shall see the Son of Man
coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory…. Of that day
and hour knoweth no one, not even the angels of heaven, neither the Son,
but the Father only.“
XV
Matthew xxv. 31-33. “When the Son of Man shall come in
His glory, and all the angels with Him, then shall He sit on the throne of
His glory: and before Him shall be gathered all the nations: and He shall
separate them one from another, as the shepherd separateth the sheep from
the goats: and He shall set the sheep on His right hand, but the goats on
the left.“
XVI
Matthew vi. 20. “Where neither moth nor rust doth
consume, and where thieves do not break through nor steal.“
Mark ix. 48. “Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not
quenched.“
“O Lord and Master of us all!
Whate’er our name or sign,
We own Thy sway, we hear Thy call,
We test our lives by Thine.We faintly hear, we dimly see,
In differing phrase we pray;
But, dim or clear, we own in Thee
The Light, the Truth, the Way.”
WHITTIER.
I
INTRODUCTORY
“A prophet mighty in word before God and all the people.“–LUKE
xxiv. 19.
“A teacher come from God.“–JOHN iii. 2.
In speaking of the teaching of Jesus it is scarcely possible at the
present day to avoid at least a reference to two other closely-related
topics, viz. the relation of Christ’s teaching to the rest of the New
Testament, and the trustworthiness of the Gospels in which that teaching is
recorded. Adequate discussion of either of these questions here and now is
not possible; it must suffice to indicate very briefly the direction in
which, as it appears to the writer, the truth may be found.
First, then, as to the relation of the teaching of Jesus to the rest of
the New Testament, and especially to the Epistles of St. Paul. There can be
no doubt, largely, I suppose, through the influence of the Reformers, that
the words of Jesus have not always received the attention that has been
given to the writings of Paul. Nor is this apparent misplacing of the
accent the wholly unreasonable thing which at first sight it may seem.
After all, the most important thing in the New Testament–that which
saves–is not anything that Jesus said, but what He did; not His teaching,
but His death. This, the Gospels themselves being witness, is the
culmination and crown of Revelation; and it is this which, in the Epistles,
and pre-eminently the Epistles of Paul, fills so large a place. Moreover,
it ought plainly to be said that the Church has never been guilty of
ignoring the words of her Lord in the wholesale fashion suggested by some
popular religious writers of our day. Really, the Gospels are not a
discovery of yesterday, nor even of the day before yesterday. They have
been in the hands of the Church from the beginning, and, though she has not
always valued them according to their true and priceless worth, she has
never failed to number them with the choicest jewels in the casket of Holy
Scripture. Nevertheless, it may be freely granted that the teaching of
Jesus has not always received its due at the Church’s hands. “Theology,”
one orthodox and Evangelical divine justly complains, “has done no sort of
justice to the Ethics of Jesus.”[1] But in our endeavour to rectify one error on the
one side, let us see to it that we do not stumble into another and worse on
the other side. The doctrines of Paul are not so much theological baggage,
of which the Church would do well straightway to disencumber itself. After
all that the young science of Biblical Theology has done to reveal the
manifold variety of New Testament doctrine, the book still remains a unity;
and the attempt to play off one part of it against another–the Gospels
against the Epistles, or the Epistles against the Gospels–is to be sternly
resented and resisted. To St. Paul himself any such rivalry would have been
impossible, and, indeed, unthinkable. There was no claim which he made with
more passionate vehemence than that the message which he delivered was not
his, but Christ’s. “As touching the gospel which was preached by me,” he
says, “neither did I receive it from man, nor was I taught it, but it came
to me through revelation of Jesus Christ.” The Spirit who spoke through him
and his brother apostles was not an alien spirit, but the Spirit of Christ,
given according to the promise of Christ, to make known the things of
Christ; so that there is a very true sense in which their words may be
called “the final testimony of Jesus to Himself.” “We have the mind of
Christ,” Paul said, and both in the Epistles and the Gospels we may seek
and find the teaching of Jesus.[2]
It is, however, with the teaching of Jesus as it is recorded in the
Gospels that, in these chapters, we are mainly concerned. We come,
therefore to our second question: Can we trust the Four Gospels? And this
question must be answered in even fewer words than were given to the last.
As to the external evidence, let us hear the judgment of the great German
scholar, Harnack. Harnack is a critic who is ready to give to the winds
with both hands many things which are dear to us as life itself; yet this
is how he writes in one of his most recent works: “Sixty years ago David
Friedrich Strauss thought that he had almost entirely destroyed the
historical credibility, not only of the fourth, but also of the first three
Gospels as well. The historical criticism of two generations has succeeded
in restoring that credibility in its main outlines.”[3] When, from the external, we turn to the internal
evidence, we are on incontestable ground. The words of Jesus need no
credentials, they carry their own credentials; they authenticate
themselves. Christian men and women reading, e.g., the fourteenth of
St. John’s Gospel say within themselves that if these are not the words of
Jesus, a greater than Jesus is here; and they are right. The oft-quoted
challenge of John Stuart Mill is as unanswerable to-day as ever it was. “It
is of no use to say,” he declares, “that Christ, as exhibited in the
Gospels, is not historical, and that we know not how much of what is
admirable has been super-added by the traditions of His followers…. Who
among His disciples, or among their proselytes, was capable of inventing
the sayings ascribed to Jesus, or of imagining the life and character
revealed in the Gospels?”[4]
I
Assuming, therefore, without further discussion, the essential
trustworthiness of the Gospel records, let us pass on to consider in this
introductory chapter some general characteristics of Christ’s teaching as a
whole.
Mark at the outset Christ’s own estimate of His words: “The words that I
have spoken unto you are spirit, and are life;” “If a man keep My word he
shall never see death;” “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My words
shall not pass away;” “Every one which heareth these words of Mine and
doeth them “–with him Christ said it should be well; but “every one that
heareth these words of Mine and doeth them not”–upon him ruin should come
to the uttermost. Sayings like these are very remarkable, for this is not
the way in which human teachers are wont to speak of their own words; or,
if they do so speak, this wise world of ours knows better than to take them
at their own valuation. But the astonishing fact in the case of Jesus is
that the world has admitted His claim. Men who refuse utterly to share our
faith concerning Him and the significance of His life and death, readily
give to Him a place apart among the great teachers of mankind. I have
already quoted the judgment of John Stuart Mill. “Jesus,” says Matthew
Arnold, “as He appears in the Gospels … is in the jargon of modern
philosophy an absolute”[5]–we
cannot get beyond Him. Such, likewise, is the verdict of Goethe: “Let
intellectual and spiritual culture progress, and the human mind expand, as
much as it will; beyond the grandeur and the moral elevation of
Christianity, as it sparkles and shines in the Gospels, the human mind will
not advance.”[6] It would be easy
to multiply testimonies, but it is needless, since practically all whose
judgment is of any account are of one mind.
But now if, with these facts in our minds, and knowing nothing else
about the teaching of Jesus, we could suppose ourselves turning for the
first time to the simple record of the Gospels, probably our first feeling
would be one of surprise that Jesus the Teacher had won for Himself such an
ascendency over the minds and hearts of men. For consider some of the facts
which the Gospels reveal to us. To begin with, this Teacher, unlike most
other teachers who have influenced mankind, contented Himself from first to
last with merely oral instruction: He left no book; He never wrote, save in
the dust of the ground. Not only so, but the words of Jesus that have been
preserved by the evangelists are, comparatively speaking, extremely few.
Put them all together, they are less by one-half or two-thirds than the
words which it will be necessary for me to use in order to set forth His
teaching in this little book. And further, the little we have is, for the
most part, so casual, so unpremeditated, so unsystematic in its character.
Once and again, it is true, we get from the Evangelists something
approaching what may be called a set discourse; but more often what they
give us is reports of conversations–conversations with His disciples, with
chance acquaintances, or with His enemies. Sometimes we find Him speaking
in the synagogues; but He is quite as ready to teach reclining at the
dinner-table; and, best of all, He loved to speak in the open air, by the
wayside, or the lake shore. Once, as He stood by the lake of Gennesaret,
the multitude was so great that it pressed upon Him. Near at hand were two
little fishing-boats drawn up upon the beach, for the fishermen had gone
out of them, and were washing their nets. “And He entered into one of the
boats, which was Simon’s, and asked him to put out a little from the land.
And He sat down and taught the multitudes out of the boat.” It is all so
different from what we should have expected; there is about it such an air
of artless, homely simplicity. Finally, we cannot forget that Jesus was a
Jew speaking to Jews. Son of God though He was, He was the son of a Jewish
mother, trained in a Jewish home, in all things the child of His own time
and race. Whatever else His message may have been, it was, first of all, a
message to the men of His own day; therefore, of necessity, it was their
language He used, it was to their needs He ministered, it was their sins He
condemned. The mould, the tone, the colouring of His teaching were all
largely determined by the life of His country and His time.
Yet this is He concerning whom all ages cry aloud, “Never man spake like
this man.” This is He before whom the greatest and the wisest bow down,
saying, “Lord” and “Master.” How are we to explain it? Much of the
explanation lies outside of the scope of our present subject; but if we
will turn back to the Gospels again we may find at least a partial answer
to our question.
II
(I) I said just now that Christ’s teaching was addressed in the first
place to the Jews of His own day. Yet the note of universality is as
unmistakable as are the local tone and colouring. Christ may speak as the
moment suggests, but His words are never for the moment only, but for all
time. He refused almost sternly to go unto any save unto the lost sheep of
the house of Israel; yet the Gospels make it abundantly plain that in His
own thoughts His mission was never limited to the tiny stage within which,
during His earthly years, He confined Himself. “I am the light of the
world,” He said; and in His last great commission to His disciples He bade
them carry that light unto the uttermost parts of the earth. In the great
High-Priestly prayer He intercedes not only for His disciples, but for
those who through their word should believe on Him. “I will build My
church,” He declared, “and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against
it.”
(2) So, again, too, in regard to the form of Christ’s sayings; to speak
of their artlessness and homely simplicity is to tell only a small part of
the truth concerning them. They are, indeed and especially those spoken in
Galilee, and reported for the most part in the Synoptists, the perfection
of popular speech. How the short, pithy, sententious sayings cling to the
memory like burs! Let almost any of them be commenced, and as Dr. Stalker
says, the ordinary hearer can without difficulty finish the sentence.
Christ was not afraid of a paradox. When, e.g., He said, “Whosoever
smiteth thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also,” He was ready
to risk the possibility of being misunderstood by some prosaic hearer, that
He might the more effectually arouse men to a neglected duty. His language
was concrete, not abstract; He taught by example and illustration; He
thought, and taught others to think, in pictures. How often is the phrase,
“The kingdom of heaven is like unto—-” on His lips! Moreover, His
illustrations were always such as common folk could best appreciate. The
birds of the air, the lilies of the field, the lamp on the lamp-stand, the
hen with her chickens under her wings, the servant following the plough,
the shepherd tending his sheep, the fisherman drawing his net, the sower
casting his seed into the furrow, the housewife baking her bread or
sweeping her house,–it was through panes of common window-glass like these
that Christ let in the light upon the heaped-up treasures of the kingdom of
God. No wonder “the common people heard Him gladly”; no wonder they “all
hung upon Him listening”; or that they “came early in the morning to Him in
the temple to hear Him”! Yet, even in the eyes of the multitude the plain
homespun of Christ’s speech was shot with gleams of more than earthly
lustre. There mingled–to use another figure–with the sweet music of those
simple sayings a new deep note their ears had never heard before: “the
multitudes were astonished at His teaching; for He taught them as one
having authority, and not as their scribes.” It was not the authority of
powerful reasoning over the intellect, reasoning which we cannot choose but
obey; it was the authority of perfect spiritual intuition. Christ never
speaks as one giving the results of long and painful gropings after truth,
but rather as one who is at home in the world to which God and the things
of the spirit belong. He asserts that which He knows, He declares that
which He has seen.
(3) Another quality of Christ’s words which helps us to understand their
world-wide influence is their winnowedness, their freedom from the chaff
which, in the words of others, mingles with the wholesome grain. The
attempt is sometimes made to destroy, or, at least, to weaken, our claim
for Christ as the supreme teacher by placing a few selected sayings of His
side by side with the words of some other ancient thinker or teacher. And
if they who make such comparisons would put into their parallel columns all
the words of Jesus and all the words of those with whom the comparison is
made, we should have neither right to complain nor reason to fear.
Wellhausen puts the truth very neatly when he says, “The Jewish scholars
say, ‘All that Jesus said is also to be found in the Talmud.’ Yes, all, and
a great deal besides.”[7] The
late Professor G.J. Romanes has pointed out the contrast in two respects
between Christ and Plato. He speaks of Plato as “the greatest
representative of human reason in the direction of spirituality”; yet he
says “Plato is nowhere in this respect as compared with Christ.” While in
Plato there are errors of all kinds, “reaching even to absurdity in respect
of reason, and to sayings shocking to the moral sense,” there is, he
declares, in literal truth no reason why any of Christ’s words should ever
pass away in the sense of becoming obsolete. And it is this absence from
the biography of Christ of any doctrines which the subsequent growth of
human knowledge–whether in natural science, ethics, political economy, or
elsewhere–has had to discount which seems to him one of the strongest
arguments in favour of Christianity.[8]
(4) One other quality of Christ’s words, which specially caught the
attention of His hearers in the synagogue at Nazareth, should not be
overlooked: “All bare Him witness, and wondered at the words of grace which
proceeded out of His mouth.” The reference is, as Dr. Bruce says,[9] rather to the substance of the
discourse than to the manner. That there was a peculiar charm in the
Teacher’s manner is undoubted, but it was what He said, rather than the way
in which He said it–the message of grace, rather than the graciousness of
the Messenger–which caused the eyes of all in the synagogue to be fastened
on Him. He had just read the great passage from the Book of the prophet
Isaiah:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me,
Because He anointed Me to preach good tidings to the poor.
He hath sent Me to proclaim release to the captives,
And recovery of sight to the blind,
To set at liberty them that are bruised,
To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.”Then, when the reading was finished, and He had given back the roll to
the attendant, and was sat down, He began to say unto them, “To-day hath
this Scripture been fulfilled in your ears.” This was His own programme;
this was what He had come into the world to do–to bear the burden of the
weary and the heavy-laden, to give rest unto all who would learn of
Him.
This, then, is the Teacher whose words we are to study together in these
pages. He Himself is saying to us again, “He that hath ears to hear let him
hear.” See that ye refuse not Him that speaketh. And again He says, “Take
heed how ye hear.” Gracious as He is, this Teacher can be also very stern.
“If any man,” He says, “hear My sayings and keep them not, I judge him not.
… He that receiveth not My sayings hath one that judgeth him; the word
that I speak, the same shall judge him in the last day.” We read of some to
whom “good tidings” were preached, whom the word did not profit. Let us
pray that to writer and readers alike it may prove the word of eternal
life.
CONCERNING GOD
“Our Father, who art in Heaven.
What meaneth these words?God lovingly inviteth us, in this little preface, truly to
believe in Him, that He is our true Father, and that we are truly His
children; so that full of confidence we may more boldly call upon His name,
even as we see children with a kind of confidence ask anything of their
parents.”–LUTHER’S CATECHISM.
II
CONCERNING GOD
“Holy Father.”–JOHN xvii. 11.
It is natural and fitting in an attempt to understand the teaching of
Jesus that we should begin with His doctrine of God. For a man’s idea of
God is fundamental, regulative of all his religious thinking. As is his
God, so will his religion be. Given the arc we can complete the circle;
given a man’s conception of God, from that we can construct the main
outlines of his creed. What, then, was the teaching of Jesus concerning
God?
I
In harmony with what has been already said in the previous chapter,
concerning Christ’s manner and method as a teacher, we shall find little or
nothing defined, formal, systematic in Christ’s teaching on this subject.
In those theological handbooks which piloted some of us through the
troublous waters of our early theological thinking, one chapter is always
occupied with proofs, more or less elaborate, of the existence of God, and
another with a discussion of what are termed the Divine “attributes.” And
for the purposes of a theological handbook doubtless this is the right
course to take. But this was not Christ’s way. Search the four Gospels
through, and probably not one verse can be found which by itself would
serve as a suitable definition for any religious catechism or theological
textbook. Christ, we must remember, did not, in His teaching, begin de
novo. He never forgot that He was speaking to a people whose were the
law and the prophets and the fathers; throughout He assumed and built upon
the accepted truths of Old Testament revelation. To have addressed
elaborate arguments in proof of the existence of God to the Jews would have
been a mere waste of words; for that faith was the very foundation of their
national life. Nor did Christ speak about the “attributes” of God. Again
that was not His way. He chose to speak in the concrete rather than in the
abstract, and, therefore, instead of defining God, He shows us how He acts.
In parable, in story, and in His own life He sets God before us, that so we
may learn what He is, and how He feels toward us.
Christ, I say, built upon the foundation of the Old Testament. To
understand, therefore, the true significance of His teaching about God, we
must first of all put ourselves at the point of view of a devout Jew of His
day, and see how far he had been brought by that earlier revelation which
Christ took up and carried to completion. What, then, did the Jews know of
God before Christ came?
They knew that God is One, Only, Sovereign: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord
our God is one God.” It had been a hard lesson for Israel to learn.
Centuries had passed before the nation had been purged of its idolatries.
But the cleansing fires had done their work at last, and perhaps the world
has never seen sterner monotheists than were the Pharisees of the time of
Christ.[10] And He whom thus
they worshipped as Sovereign they knew also to be holy: “The Holy One of
Israel,” “exalted in righteousness.” True, Pharisaism had degraded the
lofty conceptions of the great Hebrew prophets; it had taught men to think
of God as caring more for the tithing of mint, and anise, and cumin than
for the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith, making
morality merely an affair of ceremonies, instead of the concern of the
heart and the life. But, however Jewish teachers might blind themselves and
deceive their disciples, the Jewish Scriptures still remained to testify of
God and righteousness, and of the claims which a righteous God makes upon
His people: “Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings
from before Mine eyes; cease to do evil; learn to do well.” Nor, accustomed
though we are to think of the God of the Old Testament as stern rather than
kind, were the tenderer elements wanting from the Jewish conception of
Deity. Illustration is not now possible, but a very little thought will
remind us that it is to the Hebrew psalmists and prophets that we owe some
of the most gracious and tender imagery of the Divine love with which the
language of devotion has ever been enriched.
Nevertheless, with every desire to do justice to a faith which has not
always received its due, even at Christian hands, it is impossible for us,
looking back from our loftier vantage-ground, to ignore its serious defects
and limitations. It was an exclusive faith. It magnified the privileges of
the Jews, but it shut out the Gentiles. God might be a Father to Israel,
but to no other nation under heaven did He stand in any such relation. It
was the refusal of Christ to recognize the barriers which the pride of race
had set up which more than anything else brought Him into conflict with the
authorities at Jerusalem. And when once from the mind and heart of the
Early Church the irrevocable word had gone forth, “God is no respecter of
persons; but in every nation he that feareth Him, and worketh
righteousness, is acceptable to Him,” the final breach was made; no longer
could the new faith live with the old. And even within the privileged
circle of Judaism itself men’s best thoughts of God and of His relation to
them were maimed and imperfect. He was the God of the nation, not of the
individual. Here and there elect souls like the psalmists climbed the
heights whereon man holds fellowship with God, and spake with Him face to
face, as a man with his friend. But with the people as a whole, even as
with their greatest prophets, not the individual, but the nation, was the
religious unit.
Such was the Old Testament idea of God. Now let us return to the
teaching of Jesus. And at once we discover that Christ let go nothing of
that earlier doctrine which was of real and abiding worth. The God of Jesus
Christ is as holy, as sovereign–or, to use the modern term–as
transcendent as the God of the psalmists and the prophets. Their favourite
name for God was “King,” and Christ spake much of the “kingdom of God.” To
them God’s people were His servants, owing to Him allegiance and service to
the uttermost; we also, Christ says, are the servants of God, to every one
of whom He has appointed his task, and with whom one day He will make a
reckoning. But if nothing is lost, how much is gained! It is not merely
that in Christ’s teaching we have the Old Testament of God over again with
a plus, the new which is added has so transformed and transfigured
the old that all is become new. To Jesus Christ, and to us through Him, God
is “the Father.”
It is, of course, well known that Christ was not the first to apply this
name to God. There is no religion, says Max Müller,[11] which is sufficiently recorded to
be understood that does not, in some sense or other, apply the term Father
to its Deity. Yet this need not concern us, for though the name be the same
the meaning is wholly different. There is no true comparison even between
the occasional use of the word in the Old Testament and its use by Christ.
For, though in the Old Testament God is spoken of as the Father of Israel,
it is as the Father of the nation, not of the individual, and of that
nation only. Even in a great saying like that of the Psalmist:
“Like as a father pitieth his children,
So the Lord pitieth them that fear Him,”it is still only Israel that the writer has in view, though we rightly
give to the words a wider application. But there is no need of argument.
Every reader of the Old Testament knows that its central, ruling idea of
God is not Fatherhood, but Kingship: “The Lord reigneth.” Even in the
Psalms, in which the religious aspiration and worship of the ages before
Christ find their finest and noblest expression, never once is God
addressed as Father. But when we turn to the Gospels, how great is the
contrast! Though not even a single psalmist dare look up and say, “Father,”
in St. Matthew’s Gospel alone the name is used of God more than forty
times. Fatherhood now is no longer one attribute among many; it is the
central, determining idea in whose revealing light all other names of
God–Creator, Sovereign, Judge–must be read and interpreted. And the God
of Jesus Christ is the Father, not of one race only, but of mankind; not of
mankind only, but of men.
II
It was indeed a great and wonderful gospel which Christ proclaimed–so
great and wonderful that all our poor words tremble and sink down under the
weight of the truth they vainly seek to express. By what means has Christ
put us into possession of such a truth? How have we come to the full
assurance of faith concerning the Divine Fatherhood? In two ways: by His
teaching and by His life; by what He said and by what He did. And once more
a paragraph must perforce do, as best it can, the work of an essay.
To the ear and heart of Christ all nature spoke of the love and care of
God. “Behold the birds of the heaven,” He said; “they sow not, neither do
they reap, nor gather into barns; and your heavenly Father feedeth them.
Are not ye of much more value than they?” And again He said, “Consider the
lilies of the field”–not the pale, delicate blossom we know so well, but
“the scarlet martagon” which “decks herself in red and gold to meet the
step of summer”–“Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they
toil not, neither do they spin; yet I say unto you that even Solomon, in
all his glory, was not arrayed like one of these. But if God doth so clothe
the grass of the field, which to-day is, and to-morrow is cast into the
oven, shall He not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?” Or, He bade
men look into their own hearts and learn. “God’s possible is taught by His
world’s loving;” from what is best within ourselves we may learn what God
Himself is like. Once Christ spoke to shepherds: “What man of you, having a
hundred sheep, and having lost one of them”–how the faces in the little
crowd would light up, and their ears drink in the gracious argument! You
care for your sheep, but how much better is a man than a sheep? If you
would do so much for them, will God do less for you? And once the word went
deeper still, as He spoke to fathers: “What man is there of you, who, if
his son shall ask him for a loaf, will give him a stone; or if he shall ask
for a fish will give him a serpent? If ye then, being evil, know how to
give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which
is in heaven give good things to them that ask Him?” Why, Christ asks, why
do you not let your own hearts teach you? If love will not let you mock
your child, think you, will God be less good than you yourselves are?
But more even than by His words did Christ by His life reveal to us the
Father. “He that hath seen Me,” He said to Philip, “hath seen the Father.”
In what He was and did, in His life and in His death, we read what God is.
We follow Him from Bethlehem to Nazareth, from Nazareth to Gennesaret, from
Gennesaret to Jerusalem, to the Upper Room, to Gethsemane, and to Calvary,
and at every step of the way He says to us, “He that hath seen Me hath seen
the Father.” We are with Him at the marriage feast at Cana of Galilee, and
in the midst of the mourners by the city gate at Nain; we see Him as He
takes the little children into His arms and lays His hands upon them and
blesses them; we hear His word to her that was a sinner in the house of
Simon the Pharisee; we stand with John and with Mary under the shadow of
the Cross; and still, always and everywhere, He is saying to us, “He that
hath seen Me hath seen the Father; if ye had known Me ye should have known
my Father also.” Within the sweep of this great word the whole life of
Jesus lies; there is nothing that He said or did that does not more fully
declare Him whom no man hath seen at any time. To read “that sweet story of
old” is to put our hand on the heart of God; it is to know the Father.
III
“Yes,” says some one, “it is a beautiful creed–if only one could
believe it.” Christ took the birds and the flowers for His text, and
preached of the love of God for man, but is that the only sermon the birds
and flowers preach to us? Does not “nature, red in tooth and claw with
ravine,” shriek against our creed? And when we turn to human life the
tragedy deepens. Why, if Love be law, is the world so full of pain? Why do
the innocent suffer? Why are our hearts made to sicken every day when we
take up our morning paper? Why does not God end the haunting horror of our
social ills? They are old-world questions which no man can answer. Yet will
I not give up my faith, and I will tell you why. “I cannot see,” Huxley
once wrote to Charles Kingsley, “one shadow or tittle of evidence that the
great unknown underlying the phenomena of the universe, stands to us in the
relation of a Father–loves us, and cares for us as Christianity asserts.”
And, perhaps, if I looked for evidence only where Huxley looked, I should
say the same; but I have seen Jesus, and that has made all the difference.
It is He, and He alone, who has made me sure of God. He felt, as I have
never felt, the horrid jangle and discord of this world’s life; sin and
suffering tore His soul as no soul of man was ever torn; He both saw
suffering innocence and Himself suffered being innocent, and yet to the end
He knew that love was through all and over all, and died with the name
“Father” upon His lips. And, therefore, though the griefs and graves of men
must often make me dumb, I will still dare to believe with Jesus that God
is good and “Love creation’s final law.”
But while thus, on the one hand, we use Christ’s doctrine of God to our
comfort, let us take care lest, on the other hand, we abuse it to our hurt
and undoing. There has scarcely ever been a time when the Church has not
suffered through “disproportioned thoughts” of God. To-day our peril is
lest, in emphasizing the Divine Fatherhood, we ignore the Divine
Sovereignty, and make of God a weak, indulgent Eli, without either purpose
or power to chastise His wilful and disobedient children. “God is good; God
is love; why then should we fear? Will He not deal tenderly with us and
with all men, forgiving us even unto seventy times seven?” The argument is
true–and it is false. As an assurance to the penitent and to the broken in
heart, it is true, blessedly true; in any other sense it is false as hell.
He whom Christ called, and taught us to call “Father,” He also called “Holy
Father” and “Righteous Father.” Have we forgotten Peter’s warning–we do
not need to ask at whose lips he learned it–“If ye call on Him as Father
… pass the time of your sojourning in fear.” This is no contradiction of
the doctrine of Fatherhood; strictly speaking, it is not even a
modification of it; rather is it an essential part of any true and complete
statement of it. Peter does not mean God is a Father, and He is also to be
feared; that is to miss the whole point of his words; what he means is, God
is a Father, and, therefore, He is to be feared; the fear follows
necessarily on the true idea of Fatherhood. Ah, brethren, if we understood
Peter and Peter’s Lord aright, we should be not the less, but the more
anxious about our sins, because we have learnt to call God “Father.”
“Evil,” it has been well said, “is a more terrible thing to the family than
to the state.”[12] Acts which
the law takes no cognizance of a father dare not, and cannot, pass by; what
the magistrate may dismiss with light censure he must search out to its
depths. The judgment of a father–there is no judgment like that. And if it
is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God, for him who
all his life through has set himself against the Divine law and love, it is
a still more fearful thing because those hands are the hands of a
Father.
But this is not the note on which to close a sermon on the Fatherhood of
God. Let us go back to a chapter from which, though I have only once quoted
its words, we have never been far away–the fifteenth of St. Luke, with its
three-fold revelation of the seeking love of God. The parables of the
chapter are companion pictures, and should be studied together in the light
of the circumstances which were their common origin. “The Pharisees and the
scribes murmured, saying, This man receiveth sinners and eateth with them.”
These parables are Christ’s answer. Mark how He justifies Himself. He might
have pleaded the need of those whom the Pharisees and scribes had left
alone in their wretchedness and sin, but of this He says nothing; His
thoughts are all of the need of God. The central thought in each parable is
not what man loses by his sin, but what God loses. As the shepherd misses
his lost sheep, and the woman her lost coin, and the father his lost son,
so, Christ says, we are all missed by God until, with our heart’s love, we
satisfy the hunger of His. The genius of a prose poet shall tell us the
rest. We have all read of Lachlan Campbell and his daughter Flora, how she
went into the far country, and what brought her home again. “It iss weary
to be in London”–this was Flora’s story as she told it to Marget Howe when
she was back again in the glen–“it iss weary to be in London and no one to
speak a kind word to you, and I will be looking at the crowd that is always
passing, and I will not see one kent face, and when I looked in at the
lighted windows the people were all sitting round the table, but there was
no place for me. Millions and millions of people, and not one to say
‘Flora,’ and not one sore heart if I died that night.” Then one night she
crept into a church as the people were singing. “The sermon wass on the
Prodigal Son, but there is only one word I remember. ‘You are not forgotten
or cast off,’ the preacher said: ‘you are missed.’ Sometimes he will say,
‘If you had a plant, and you had taken great care of it, and it was stolen,
would you not miss it?’ And I will be thinking of my geraniums, and saying
‘Yes’ in my heart. And then he will go on, ‘If a shepherd wass counting his
sheep, and there wass one short, does he not go out to the hill to seek for
it?’ and I will see my father coming back with that lamb that lost its
mother. My heart wass melting within me, but he will still be pleading, ‘If
a father had a child, and she left her home and lost herself in the wicked
city, she will still be remembered in the old house, and her chair will be
there,’ and I will be seeing my father all alone with the Bible before him,
and the dogs will lay their heads on his knee, but there iss no Flora. So I
slipped out into the darkness and cried, ‘Father,’ but I could not go back,
and I knew not what to do. But this wass ever in my ear, ‘missed,'”–and
this was the word that brought her back to home and God.[13]
CONCERNING HIMSELF
“Christ either deceived mankind by conscious fraud, or He
was Himself deluded and self-deceived, or He was Divine. There is no
getting out of this trilemma. It is inexorable.”
JOHN DUNCAN, Colloquia
Peripatetica.
III
CONCERNING HIMSELF
“Who say ye that I am?”–MATT. xvi. 15.
I
This was our Lord’s question to His first disciples; and this, by the
mouth of Simon Peter, was their answer: “Thou art the Christ, the Son of
the living God.” And in all ages this has been the answer of the Holy
Catholic Church throughout all the world. In the days of New Testament
Christianity no other answer was known or heard. The Church of the apostles
had its controversies, as we know, controversies in which the very life of
the Church was at stake. Division crept in even among the apostles
themselves. But concerning Christ they spoke with one voice, they
proclaimed one faith. The early centuries of the Christian era were
centuries of keen discussion concerning the Person of our Lord; but the
discussions sprang for the most part from the difficulty of rightly
defining the true relations of the Divine and the human in the one Person,
rather than from the denial of His Divinity; and, as Mr. Gladstone once
pointed out, since the fourth century the Christian conception of Christ
has remained practically unchanged. Amid the fierce and almost ceaseless
controversies which have divided and sometimes desolated Christendom, and
which, alas! still continue to divide it, the Church’s testimony concerning
Christ has never wavered. The Greek Church, the Roman Catholic Church, the
various Protestant Churches, Lutherans, Anglicans, Presbyterians,
Congregationalists, Methodists, Christian men and women out of every tribe
and tongue and people and nation,–all unite to confess the glory of Christ
in the words of the ancient Creed: “I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the
only-begotten Son of God, begotten of His Father before all worlds, God of
God, Light of Light, Very God of very God.”
This, beyond all doubt, has been and is the Christian way of thinking
about Christ. But now the question arises, Was this Christ’s way of
thinking about Himself? Did He Himself claim to be one with God? or, is it
only we, His adoring disciples, who have crowned Him with glory and honour,
and given Him a name that is above every name? To those of us who have been
familiar with the New Testament ever since we could read, the question may
appear so simple as to be almost superfluous. Half-a-dozen texts leap to
our lips in a moment by way of answer. Did He not claim to be the Messiah
in whom Old Testament history and prophecy found their fulfilment and
consummation? Did He not call Himself the Son of God, saying, “The Father
hath given all judgment unto the Son; that all may honour the Son, even as
they honour the Father”? Did He not declare, “I and My Father are one”? and
again, “All things have been delivered unto Me of My Father: and no one
knoweth the Son, save the Father; neither doth any know the Father, save
the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal Him”? And when one
of the Twelve bowed down before Him, saying, “My Lord and my God,” did He
not accept the homage as though it were His by right? What further need,
then, have we of witnesses? Is it not manifest that the explanation of all
that has been claimed for Christ, from the days of the apostles until now,
is to be found in what Christ claimed for Himself?
This is true; nevertheless it may be well to remind ourselves that
Christ Himself did not thrust the evidence on His disciples in quite this
wholesale, summary fashion. It is an easy thing for us to scour the New
Testament for “proof-texts,” and then, when they are heaped together at our
feet like a load of bricks, to begin to build our theological systems. But
Peter and Thomas and the other disciples could not do this. The revelation
which we possess in its completeness was given to them little by little as
they were able to receive it. And the moment we begin to study the life of
Jesus, not in isolated texts, but as day by day it passed before the eyes
of the Twelve, we cannot fail to observe the remarkable reserve which,
during the greater part of His ministry, He exercised concerning Himself.
When first His disciples heard His call and followed Him, He was to them
but a humble peasant teacher, who had flung about their lives a wondrous
spell which they could no more explain than they could resist. Indeed,
there is good reason to believe, as Dr. Dale has pointed out,[14] that the full discovery of
Christ’s Divinity only came to the apostles after His Resurrection from the
dead. At first, and for long, Christ was content to leave them with their
poor, imperfect thoughts. He never sought to carry their reason by storm;
rather He set Himself to win them–mind, heart, and will–by slow siege. He
lived before them and with them, saying little directly about Himself, and
yet always revealing Himself, day by day training them, often perhaps
unconsciously to themselves, “to trust Him with the sort of trust which can
be legitimately given to God only.”[15] And when at last the truth was clear, and they
knew that it was the incarnate Son of God who had companied with them,
their faith was the result not of this or that high claim which He had made
for Himself, but rather of “the sum-total of all His words and works, the
united and accumulated impression of all He was and did” upon their sincere
and receptive souls.[16]
Are there not many of us to-day who would do well to seek the same goal
by the same path? We have listened, perhaps, to other men’s arguments
concerning the Divinity of our Lord, conscious the while how little they
were doing for us. Let us listen to Christ Himself. Let us put ourselves to
school with Him, as these first disciples did, and suffer Him to make His
own impression upon us. And if ours be sincere and receptive souls as were
theirs, from us also He shall win the adoring cry, “My Lord and my God.”
Let us note, then, some of the many ways in which Christ bears witness
concerning Himself. In a very true sense all His sayings are
“self-portraitures.” Be the subject of His teaching what it may, He cannot
speak of it without, in some measure at least, revealing His thoughts
concerning Himself; and it is this indirect testimony whose significance I
wish now carefully to consider.
II
Observe, in the first place, how Christ speaks of God and of His own
relation to Him. He called Himself, as we have already noted, “the Son of
God.” Now, there is a sense in which all men are the sons of God, for it is
to God that all men owe their life. And there is, further, as the New
Testament has taught us, another and deeper sense in which men who are not
may “become” the sons of God, through faith in Christ. But Christ’s
consciousness of Sonship is distinct from both of these, and cannot be
explained in terms of either. He is not “a son of God”–one among
many—He is “the son of God,” standing to God in a relationship
which is His alone. Hence we find–and we shall do well to mark the
marvellous accuracy and self-consistency of the Gospels in this
matter–that while Jesus sometimes speaks of “the Father,” and
sometimes of “My Father,” and sometimes, again, in addressing His
disciples, of “your Father,” never does He link Himself with them so
as to call God “our Father.” Nowhere does the distinction, always
present to the mind of Christ, find more striking expression than in that
touching scene in the garden in which the Risen Lord bids Mary go unto His
brethren and say unto them, “I ascend unto My Father and your Father, and
My God and your God.”
This sense of separateness is emphasized when we turn to the prayers of
Christ. And in this connection it is worthy of note that though Christ has
much to say concerning the duty and blessedness of prayer, and Himself
spent much time in prayer, yet never, so far as we know, did He ask for the
prayers of others. “Simon, Simon, behold, Satan asked to have you, that he
might sift you as wheat: but I made supplication for thee, that thy faith
fail not.” So did Jesus pray for His disciples; but we never read that they
prayed for Him, or that He asked for Himself a place in their prayers. How
significant the silence is we learn when we turn to the Epistles of St.
Paul and to the experience of the saints. “Brethren, pray for us”–this is
the token in almost every Epistle. In the long, lone fight of life even the
apostle’s heart would have failed him had not the prayers of unknown
friends upheld him as with unseen hands. There is no stronger instinct of
the Christian heart than the plea for remembrance at the throne of God.
“Pray for me, will you?” we cry, when man’s best aid seems as a rope too
short to help, yet long enough to mock imprisoned miners in their living
tomb. But the cry which is so often ours was never Christ’s.
It has further been remarked that, intimate as was Christ’s intercourse
with His disciples, He never joined in prayer with them.[17] He prayed in their presence, He
prayed for them, but never with them. “It came to pass, as He was praying
in a certain place, that when He ceased, one of His disciples said unto
Him, Lord, teach us to pray, even as John also taught his disciples. And He
said unto them, When ye pray, say—-.” Then follows what we call “The
Lord’s Prayer.” But, properly speaking, this was not the Lord’s prayer; it
was the disciples’ prayer: “When ye pray, say——.” And when we
read the prayer again, we see why it could not be His. How could He who
knew no sin pray, saying, “Forgive us our sins”? The true “Lord’s Prayer”
is to be found in the seventeenth chapter of St. John’s Gospel. And
throughout that prayer the holy Suppliant has nothing to confess, nothing
to regret. He knows that the end is nigh, but there are no shadows in His
retrospect; of all that is done there is nothing He could wish undone or
done otherwise. “I glorified Thee on the earth, having accomplished the
work which Thou hast given Me to do.” It is so when He comes to die. Among
the Seven Words from the Cross we are struck by one significant omission:
the dying Sufferer utters a cry of physical weakness–“I thirst”–but He
makes no acknowledgement of sin; He prays for the forgiveness of
others–“Father, forgive them: for they know not what they do”–He asks
none for Himself. The great Augustine died with the penitential Psalms hung
round his bed. Fifty or sixty times, it is said, did sweet St. Catharine of
Siena cry upon her deathbed, Peccavi, Domine miserere mei, “Lord, I
have sinned: have mercy on me.” But in all the prayers of Jesus, whether in
life or in death, He has no pardon to ask, no sins to confess.
We are thus brought to the fact upon which of recent years so much
emphasis has been justly laid, namely, that nowhere throughout the Gospels
does Christ betray any consciousness of sin. “Which of you,” He said,
“convicteth Me of sin?” And no man was able, nor is any man now able, to
answer Him a word. But the all-important fact is not so much that they
could not convict Him of sin; He could not convict Himself. Yet it
could not be that He was self-deceived. “He knew what was in man;” He read
the hearts of others till, like the Samaritan woman, they felt as though He
knew all things that ever they had done. Was it possible, then, that He did
not know Himself? Not only so, but the law by which He judged Himself was
not theirs, but His. And what that was, how high, how searching, how
different from the low, conventional standards which satisfied them, we who
have read His words and His judgments know full well. Nevertheless, He knew
nothing against Himself; as no man could condemn Him neither could He
condemn Himself. Looking up to heaven, He could say, “I do always the
things that are pleasing to Him.”[18] This is not the language of sinful men; it is
not the language of even the best and holiest of men. Christ is as separate
from “saints” as He is from “sinners.” The greatest of Hebrew prophets
cries, “Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and
I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips.” The greatest of
Christian apostles laments, “O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me
out of the body of this death?” Even the holy John confesses, “If we say
that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” It
is one of the commonplaces of Christian experience that the holier men
become the more intense and poignant becomes the sense of personal
shortcoming. “We have done those things which we ought not to have done; we
have left undone those things which we ought to have done:” among all the
sons of men there is none, who truly knows himself, who dare be silent when
the great confession is made–none save the Son of Man; for He, it has well
been said, was not the one thing which we all are; He was not a sinner.
This consciousness of separateness runs through all that the evangelists
have told us concerning Christ. When e.g. He is preaching He never
associates Himself, as other preachers do, with His hearers; He never
assumes, as other preachers must, that His words are applicable to Himself
equally with them. We exhort; He commands. We say, like the writer of the
Epistle to the Hebrews, “Let us go on unto perfection”; He says, “Ye shall
be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” We speak as sinful men to
sinful men, standing by their side; He speaks as from a height, as one who
has already attained and is already made perfect. Or, the contrast may be
pointed in another way. We all know what it is to be haunted by misgivings
as to the wisdom of some course which, under certain trying circumstances,
we have taken. We had some difficult task to perform–to withstand (let us
say) a fellow-Christian to his face, as Paul withstood Peter at Antioch;
and we did the unpleasant duty as best we knew how, honestly striving not
only to speak the truth but to speak it in love. And yet when all was over
we could not get rid of the fear that we had not been as firm or as kindly
as we should have been, that, if only something had been which was not, our
brother might have been won. There is a verse in Paul’s second letter to
the Church at Corinth which illustrates exactly this familiar kind of
internal conflict. Referring to the former letter which he had sent to the
Corinthians, and in which he had sharply rebuked them for their
wrong-doing, he says, “Though I made you sorry with my epistle, I do not
regret it, though I did regret”–a simple, human touch we can all
understand. Yes; but when did Jesus hesitate and, as it were, go back upon
Himself after this fashion? He passed judgment upon men and their ways with
the utmost freedom and confidence; some, such as the Pharisees, He
condemned with a severity which almost startles us; towards others, such as
she “that was a sinner,” He was all love and tenderness. Yet never does He
speak as one who fears lest either in His tenderness or His severity He has
gone too far. His path is always clear; He enters upon it without doubt; He
looks back upon it without misgiving.
This contrast between Christ and all other men, as it presented itself
to His own consciousness, may be illustrated almost indefinitely. His
forerunners the prophets were the servants of God; He is His Son. All other
men are weary and in need of rest; He has rest and can give it. All others
are lost; He is not lost, He is the shepherd sent to seek the lost. All
others are sick; He is not sick, He is the physician sent to heal the sick.
All others will one day stand at the bar of God; but He will be on the
throne to be their Judge. All others are sinners–this is the great, final
distinction into which all others run up–He is the Saviour. When at the
Last Supper He said, “This is My blood of the covenant which is shed for
many unto remission of sins”; and again, when He said, “The Son of Man came
to give His life a ransom for many,” He set Himself over against all
others, the one sinless sacrifice for a sinful world.
There is in Edinburgh a Unitarian church which bears carved on its front
these words of St. Paul. “There is one God, and one mediator between God
and man, the man Christ Jesus.” I say nothing as to the fitness of any of
Paul’s words for such a place–perhaps we can imagine what he would have
said; I pass over any questions of interpretation that might very justly be
raised; I have only one question to ask: Why was the quotation not
finished? Paul only put a comma where they have put a full stop; the next
words are: “Who gave Himself a ransom for all.” But how could He do
that if He was only “the man Christ Jesus”?
“No man can save his brother’s soul,
Nor pay his brother’s debt,”and how could He, how dare He, think of His life as the ransom for our
forfeited lives, if He were only one like unto ourselves? There is but one
explanation which does really explain all that Christ thought and taught
concerning Himself; it is that given by the first disciples and re-echoed
by every succeeding generation of Christians–
“THOU ART THE KING OF GLORY, O CHRIST.
THOU ART THE EVERLASTING SON OF THEFATHER.”
CONCERNING HIS OWN DEATH
“While there is life in thee, in this death alone place thy
trust, confide in nothing else besides; to this death commit thyself
altogether; with this shelter thy whole self; with this death array thyself
from head to foot. And if the Lord thy God will judge thee, say, Lord,
between Thy judgment and me I cast the death of our Lord Jesus Christ; no
otherwise can I contend with Thee. And if He say to thee, Thou art a
sinner, say, Lord, I stretch forth the death of our Lord Jesus Christ
between my sins and Thee. If He say, Thou art worthy of condemnation, say,
Lord, I set the death of our Lord Jesus Christ between my evil deserts and
Thee, and His merits I offer for those merits which I ought to have, but
have not of my own. If He say that He is wroth with thee, say, Lord, I lift
up the death of our Lord Jesus Christ between Thy wrath and me.”–ANSELM.
IV
CONCERNING HIS OWN DEATH
“The Son of Man came … to give His life a ransom for
many.”–MARK X. 45.
The death of Jesus Christ has always held the foremost place in the
thought and teaching of the Church. When St. Paul writes to the
Corinthians, “I delivered unto you first of all that which also I received,
how that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures,” he is the
spokesman of every Christian preacher and teacher, of the missionary of the
twentieth century no less than of the first. It is with some surprise,
therefore, we discover when we turn to the teaching of Jesus Himself, that
He had so little to say concerning a subject of which His disciples have
said so much. It is true that the Gospels, without exception, relate the
story of Christ’s death with a fullness and detail which, in any other
biography, would be judged absurdly out of proportion. But this, it is
said, reveals the mind of the evangelists rather than the mind of Christ.
And those who love that false comparison between the Gospels and the
Epistles of which so much is heard to-day, have not been slow to seize upon
this apparent discrepancy as another example of the way in which the Church
has misunderstood and misinterpreted the simple message of the Galilean
Prophet.
But, in the first place, as I will show in a moment, the contrast
between the Gospels and Epistles in this matter is by no means so sharply
defined as is often supposed. And further, granting that there is a
contrast–that what in the Gospels is only a hint or suggestion, becomes in
the Epistles a definite and formal statement–it is one which admits of a
simple and immediate explanation. Christ–this was Dr. Dale’s way of
putting it–did not come to preach the gospel; He came that there might be
a gospel to preach. This must not be pressed so far as to imply that it is
only the death and not also the life of Christ that has any significance
for us to-day; but if that death had any significance in it at all, if it
was anything more to Him than death is to us, if it stood in any sort of
relation to us men and our salvation, manifestly the teaching which should
make this plain would more fittingly follow than precede the death. And
they at least who accept Christ’s words, “I have yet many things to say
unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit when He, the Spirit of
truth, is come, He shall guide you into all truth”–they, I say, who accept
these words can find no difficulty in believing that part of the revelation
which it was the good pleasure of the Father to give to us in His Son, came
through the lips of men who spake as they were moved by the Holy Spirit.
Moreover, when we turn to the Gospels we see at once that the
interpretation of Christ’s death was just one of those things which the
disciples as yet were unable to bear. The point is so important that it is
worth while dwelling upon it for a moment. So far were the Twelve from
being able to understand their Lord’s death, that they would not even
believe that He was going to die. “Be it far from Thee, Lord,” cried Peter,
when Christ first distinctly foretold His approaching end; “this shall
never be unto Thee.” When, at another time, He said unto His disciples,
“Let these words sink into your ears; for the Son of Man shall be delivered
up into the hands of men,” St. Luke adds, “But they understood not this
saying.” And again, after another and similar prophecy, the evangelist
writes with significant reiteration, “They understood none of these things;
and this saying was hid from them, and they perceived not the things that
were said.” So was it all through those last months of our Lord’s life. His
thoughts were not their thoughts, neither were His ways their ways. They
followed Him as He pressed along the highway, His face steadfastly set to
go up to Jerusalem, but they could not understand Him. Why, if as He had
said, death waited Him there, did He go to seek it? Think what utter
powerlessness to enter even a little way into His thoughts is revealed in a
scene like this: Two of His disciples, James and John, came to Him to ask
Him that they might sit, one on His right hand, and one on His left hand,
in His glory. Jesus said unto them, “Ye know not what ye ask. Are ye able
to drink the cup that I drink? or to be baptized with the baptism that I am
baptized with?” And they said unto Him, “We are able.” What could Jesus do
with ignorance like this–ignorance that knew not its own ignorance? He
could be “sorry for their childishness”; but how could He show them the
mystery of His Passion? What could He do but wait until the Cross, and the
empty grave, and the gift of Pentecost had done their revealing and
enlightening work?
At the same time, as I have already pointed out, it is altogether a
mistake to suppose that Christ has left us on this subject wholly to the
guidance of others. From the very beginning of His ministry the end was
before Him, and as it drew nearer He spoke of it continually. At first He
was content to refer to it in language purposely vague and mysterious. Just
as a mother who knows herself smitten with a sickness which is unto death,
will sometimes try by shadowed hints to prepare her children for what is
coming, while yet she veils its naked horror from their eyes, so did Jesus
with His disciples. “Can the sons of the bride-chamber fast,” He asked
once, “while the bridegroom is with them? … But the days will come, when
the bridegroom shall be taken away from them, and then will they fast in
that day.” But from the time of Peter’s great confession at Cæsarea
Philippi all reserve was laid aside, and Christ told His disciples plainly
of the things which were to come to pass: “From that time began Jesus to
show unto His disciples, how that He must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer
many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and
the third day be raised up.” And if we will turn to any one of the first
three Gospels, we shall find, as Dr. Denney says, that that which
“characterized the last months of our Lord’s life was a deliberate and
thrice-repeated attempt to teach His disciples something about His
death.”[19] Let me try, very
briefly, to set forth some of the things which He said.
I
First of all, then, Christ died as a faithful witness to the
truth. Like the prophets and the Baptist before Him, whose work and
whose end were so often in His thoughts, He preached righteousness to an
unrighteous world, and paid with His life the penalty of His daring. That
is the very lowest view which can be taken of His death. No Unitarian, no
unbeliever, will deny that Jesus died as a good man, choosing rather the
shame of the Cross than the deeper shame of treason to the truth. And thus
far Christ is an example to all who follow Him. In one sense His
cross-bearing was all His own, a mystery of suffering and death into which
no man can enter. But in another sense, as St. Peter tells us, He has left
us by His sufferings an example that we should follow His steps. It is
surely a significant fact that the words which immediately follow Christ’s
first distinct declaration of His death are these, “If any man would come
after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me.” His
death was the supreme illustration of a law which binds us, the servants,
even as it bound Him, the Master. In the path of every true man there
stands the cross which he must bear, or be true no more. Let no one grow
impatient and say this is no more than the fringe of Christ’s thoughts
about His death; even the fringe is part of the robe, and if, as the words
I have quoted seem clearly to indicate, Christ thought of His death as in
any sense at all a pattern for us, let us not miss this, the first and
simplest lesson of the Cross.
There are few more impressive scenes in the history of the Christian
pulpit than that in which Robertson of Brighton, preaching the Assize
Sermon at Lewes, turned as he closed to the judges, and counsel, and jury,
and bade them remember, by “the trial hour of Christ,” by “the Cross of the
Son of God,” the sacred claims of truth: “The first lesson of the Christian
life is this, Be true; and the second this, Be true; and the third this, Be
true.”
II
But though this be our starting-point, it is no more than a
starting-point. If Jesus was only a brave man, paying with His life the
penalty of His bravery in the streets of Jerusalem, it is wasting words to
call Him “the Saviour of the world.” If His death were only a martyrdom,
then, though we may honour Him as we honour Socrates, and many another name
in the long roll of “the noble army of martyrs,” yet He can no more be our
Redeemer than can any one of them. But it was not so that Christ thought of
His death. The martyr dies because he must; Christ died because He would.
The strong hands of violent men snatch away the martyr’s life from him; but
no man had power to take away Christ’s life from Him: “I lay it down of
Myself,” He said. The Son of Man gave His life. He was not dragged
as an unwilling victim to the sacrifice and bound upon the altar. He was
both Priest and Victim; as the apostle puts it, “He gave Himself up.” True,
the element of necessity was there–“the Son of Man must be lifted
up”; but it was the “must” of His own love, not of another’s constraint.
Not Roman nails or Roman thongs held Him to the Cross, but His own loving
will. It is important to emphasize this fact of the voluntariness of
our Lord’s death, because at once it sets the Cross in a clearer light. It
changes martyrdom into sacrifice; and Christ’s death, instead of being
merely a fate which He suffered, becomes now, as Principal Fairbairn says,
a work which He achieved–the work which He came into the world to
do: “The Son of Man came … to give His life.”[20]
III
Again, Christ taught us that His death was the crowning revelation of
the love of God for man. And it is well to remind ourselves of our need
of such a revelation. We speak sometimes as though the love of God was a
self-evident truth altogether independent of the facts of New Testament
history. “God is love”–of course, we say; this at least we are sure of,
whatever becomes of the history. But this jaunty assurance will not bear
looking into. The truth is that, apart from Christ, we have no certainty of
the love of God. A man may cry aloud in our ears, “God is love, God is
love”; but if he have no more to say than that, the most emphatic
reiteration will avail us nothing. But if he can say, “God is love, and He
so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son”; if, that is to say,
he can point us to the Divine love made manifest in life, then he is
proclaiming a gospel indeed. But let us not deceive ourselves and imagine
that we can have Christ’s gospel apart from Christ.
Now, according to the teaching of the Gospels, all Christ’s life–all He
was and said and did–is a revelation of the love of God. But the crown of
the revelation was given in His death. It is the Cross which was, in a
special and peculiar sense, as Christ Himself declared,[21] the glory both of the Father and the Son. And
the apostles, with a unanimity which can only be explained as the result of
His own teaching, always associate God’s love with Christ’s death in a way
in which they never associate God’s love with Christ’s life. “God,” says
St. Paul, “commendeth His own love toward us, in that … Christ died for
us.”
Christ’s death, then, we say, establishes the love of God. But how does
this come to pass? How does the death of one prove the love of another?
If–to use a very simple illustration–I am in danger of drowning, and
another man, at the cost of his own life, saves mine, his act undoubtedly
proves his own love; but how does it prove anything concerning God’s love?
If the apostle had said, “Christ commendeth His own love towards us,
in that He died for us,” we could have understood him; but how, I ask
again, does Christ’s death prove God’s love? The question is
answerable, as indeed the whole of the New Testament is intelligible, only
on the assumption of the Trinitarian doctrine of Christ. If Christ were
indeed the Son of God, standing to God in such a relation that what He did
was likewise the doing of God the Father, we can understand the apostle’s
meaning. On any other hypothesis his language is a riddle of which the key
has been lost. A further question still remains to be answered. I said just
now that if St. Paul had written, “Christ commendeth His own love
towards us, in that He died for us,” we could have understood Him. But
here, also, something is implicit which requires to be made explicit. How
does Christ in His death prove His love for us? Obviously, only in one way:
by bearing responsibilities which must otherwise have fallen upon us. There
must be, as Dr. Denney rightly argues, some rational relation between our
necessities and what Christ has done before we can speak of His act as a
proof of His love. If, to borrow the same writer’s illustration, a man lose
his own life in saving me from drowning, this is love to the uttermost; but
if, when I was in no peril, he had thrown himself into the water and got
drowned “to prove his love for me,” the deed and its explanation would be
alike unintelligible. We must take care when we speak of the death of
Christ that we do not make it equally meaningless. How Christ Himself
thought of it as related to the necessities of sinful men, the next and
last division of this chapter will, I hope, make plain.
IV
“The Son of Man came to give His life a ransom for many;” “This is My
blood of the covenant which is shed for many unto remission of sins.” These are the two great texts which reveal to us the mind of Christ
concerning the significance of His death. There has been much discussion of
their meaning into which it is impossible here to enter. But whatever
questions modern scholarship may raise, there can be little doubt as to the
sense in which Christ’s words were understood by the first disciples. “His
own self,” said Peter, “bare our sins in His body upon the tree.” “Herein
is love,” said John, “not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent
His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” He “loved me,” said Paul,
“and gave Himself for me.” It is open, doubtless, to question the
legitimacy of these apostolic deductions, and to fall back upon Matthew
Arnold’s Aberglaube; but who, it has been well said, “are most
likely to have correctly apprehended the significance which Jesus attached
to His death, men like John and Peter and Paul, or an equal number of
scholars in our time, however discerning and candid, who undertake to
reconstruct the thoughts of Jesus, and to disentangle them from the
supposed subjective reflections of His disciples? Where is the subjectivity
likely to be the greatest–in the interpretations of the eye and ear
witness, or in the reconstructions of the moderns?”[22]
Christ gave His life “a ransom for many.” The truth cannot be put too
simply: “God forgives our sins because Christ died for them;” “in that
death of Christ our condemnation came upon Him, that for us there might be
condemnation no more;” “the forfeiting of His free life has freed our
forfeited lives.”[23]
“Bearing shame and scoffing rude,
In my place condemned He stood;
Sealed my pardon with His blood;
Alleluia! what aSaviour!”
If this is true, the New Testament has a meaning, and, what is more, we
sinful men have a gospel. If it is not true, it is difficult to know why
the New Testament was written, and still more difficult to know what we
must do to be saved. It does not help to point us to the parable of the
Prodigal Son, and tell us that there is a story of salvation without an
atonement. The whole gospel cannot be put into a parable, not even into
such a parable as this. Besides, if the argument proves anything, it proves
too much. The parable is not only a story of salvation without an
atonement, it is a story of salvation without Christ; and if no more is
needed than what is given here, Christ Himself is no part of His own
gospel, forgiveness can be had with no reference to Him. But it is not so
the redeemed have learned Christ; it is not thus they have received
forgiveness. They know that it is “in Him” they have their
redemption, through His blood; and apart from Him there is no salvation and
no gospel.
It is time to bring our reasonings to an end. We are under the shadow of
the Cross; let us worship and adore. When Christ died on the tree nineteen
hundred years ago, there were some that mocked, and some that watched and
yet saw nothing–nothing but a miserable criminal’s miserable end; a few
there were that wept, and one there was who cried, with lips already white
with death, “Jesus, remember me when Thou comest in Thy kingdom.” And still
does that Cross divide men. Where is our place, and with whom are we? Not,
I think, with them that mock; for these to-day are a broken and discredited
few. We choose rather the centurion’s cry, “Certainly this was a righteous
man.” But is this all we have to say? He who gave His life-blood for us,
shall He have no more than this–the little penny-pieces of our respect? If
we owe Him aught we owe Him all; and if we give Him aught let us give Him
all–not our thanks but our souls. “He loved me, and gave Himself up
for me“–there is the secret of the Cross which no man knows save he
who cannot speak of it without the personal pronouns. Until then we are but
as blind watchers that look and see not. “Jesus, remember me”–this is the
word that becomes us best. Let us cry unto Him now, and He who heard the
robber’s prayer on the Cross will hear and save us.
CONCERNING THE HOLY
SPIRIT
“Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire,
And lighten with celestial fire;
Thou the Anointing Spirit art,
Who dost Thy sevenfold gifts impart.
Thy blessed unction from above
Is comfort, life, and fire of love:
Enable with perpetual light
The dullness of our blinded sight;
Anoint and cheer our soiled face
With the abundance of Thy grace;
Keep far our foes; give peace at home;
Where Thou art guide no ill can come;
Teach us to know the Father, Son,
And Thee of Both, to be but One:
That, through the ages all along,
This, this may be our endless song,
‘Praise to Thy eternalmerit,
Father, Son, and HolySpirit!'”
Amen!
BISHOP JOHN COSIN.
V
CONCERNING THE HOLY SPIRIT
“I will pray the Father, and He shall give you another
Comforter, that He may be with you for ever, even the Spirit of
truth.”–JOHN xiv. 16.
“It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the
Comforter will not come unto you; but if I go, I will send Him unto
you.”–JOHN xvi. 7.
It was the night in which He was betrayed. Jesus and His disciples were
spending their last hours together before His death. For Him the morrow
could bring with it no surprise. He knew that His hour was come–the hour
to which all other hours of His past had pointed; and He was ready. Before
He left that Upper Room, He lifted up His eyes to heaven and said, “Father,
the hour is come; glorify Thy Son.” But to the disciples that night was a
night of darkness, and terror, and confusion. They remembered how He had
told them He must die; they knew the bloodhounds in Jerusalem were on His
track; they could see the shadow’s black edge creeping nearer and nearer;
and yet they could do nothing; they could not even persuade Him that
anything needed to be done. Nay, it almost seemed as if He were taking part
with His enemies against them. “It is expedient for you,” He said, “that I
go away”–veiling in His pity the horror of His going. “Expedient” for
them? How could He speak like that? Was He not everything to them? If He
went away, what was to befall them? They would be as sheep in the midst of
wolves, as orphans in an unkindly world. Is it any wonder that sorrow
filled their hearts?
And not only to these His first disciples, but to many of His followers
in later days, this word of Jesus has proved a hard saying. If only, we
think, He were with us as He was with Peter and James and John; if only we
could hear Him teach in our streets, or in our church, as once He taught in
the streets of Jerusalem and the synagogue at Nazareth; if only He could
enter our homes, as once He entered the home at Bethany, how easy it would
be to believe! But, now He is no longer here, the air is filled with
doubting voices, and faith is very hard.
So sometimes we speak. But, have we noticed, this is never the language
of the New Testament. To begin with, it is not the language of Christ.
There is an unmistakable emphasis in His words: “Because I have spoken
these things unto you, sorrow hath filled your heart. Nevertheless, I tell
you the truth: it is expedient for you that I go away.” When Paul was a
prisoner in Rome, he wrote to the Philippians, saying, “I am in a strait
betwixt the two, having the desire to depart and be with Christ; for it is
very far better; yet to abide in the flesh is more needful for your sake.”
That is how a good man, in the prospect of death, naturally feels towards
those who are in any way dependent on him. But Christ’s language is the
very opposite of this; He says, not that it is needful to abide, but that
it is expedient to depart. And in every reference to Christ by the apostles
after His Ascension, the same note is struck. It is hardly too much to say,
as one writer does, “that no apostle, no New Testament writer, ever remembered Christ.”[24] They thought of Him as belonging, not to the past, but to the present; He
was the object, not of memory, but of faith. Never do they wish Him back in
their midst; never do they mourn for Him as for a friend whom they have
lost. On the contrary, they felt that Christ was with them now in a sense
in which He had never been. There is no hint that any even of the Twelve
would have gone back to the old days had it been possible. They had lost,
but they had also gained, and their gain was greater than their loss. “Even
though we have known Christ after the flesh,” they also would have said,
“yet now we know Him so no more.” Read over again St. Luke’s account of our
Lord’s Ascension: “He led them out until they were over against Bethany;
and He lifted up His hands and blessed them. And it came to pass, while He
blessed them, He parted from them, and was carried up into heaven. And they
worshipped Him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and were
continually in the temple, blessing God.” Christ had gone from them a
second time, no more to return as before He had returned from the tomb; yet
now it is not despair but joy which fills their hearts: “They returned to
Jerusalem with great joy.” When in the Upper Room, Christ had said, “It is
expedient for you that I go away,” sorrow had filled their hearts; but, now
that He is gone, their sorrow is turned into joy. How shall we explain this
strange reversal?
I
It is to be explained in part, of course, by the Resurrection of Christ
from the dead, but mainly–and this is the fact with which just now we are
concerned–by the gift of the Holy Spirit whom Christ had promised to His
disciples to abide with them for ever. But now, what do we mean when we
speak of the gift of the Holy Spirit? What is the Holy Spirit, and what is
it that He does for us? Many of us, I think, must have felt how extremely
unreal, and therefore unsatisfying, the discussions of this great subject
often are. The doctrine somehow fails to find a place among the proved
realities of our Christian experience. It remains, so to speak, outside of
us, a foreign substance which life has not assimilated. And hence it has
come to pass that there is no small danger to-day lest New Testament
phrases about being filled with the Spirit, baptized with the Spirit, and
so forth, become the mere jargon of a school which wholly fails to
interpret the mind of Christ. Doubtless there are faults on both sides, the
faults of neglect and the faults of false emphasis, and for both the true
remedy is a more careful study of the teaching of Jesus.
What, then, is the Holy Spirit, and what is it He does for us? “I will
pray the Father,” Christ said, “and He shall give you another Comforter,”
or “another Paraclete.” The word translated “Comforter,” which occurs so
often in this discourse of our Lord, is found nowhere else in the New
Testament except in the First Epistle of St. John, where it is rendered
“Advocate”; “If any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus
Christ, the righteous.” And this, without doubt, is a more faithful
rendering of the word which Christ used than the more familiar “Comforter.”
An advocate is one who is called to our side to be our friend and helper,
more especially to plead our cause in a court of justice; and this also is
the meaning of the word “Paraclete.” Perhaps, however, the word “Comforter”
may be retained without loss, if only we remember to give it its full and
original meaning. To “comfort” is not primarily and originally to console,
but to strengthen, to fortify; and the “Comforter” whom Christ
promised to His disciples was not only one who should soothe them in their
sorrows, but should stand by them in all their conflicts, their unfailing
friend and helper.
Further, Christ said God “shall give you another Comforter.” That
is to say, Christ Himself was a Comforter, and all that He had been to His
disciples the Holy Spirit should be also. And, if we examine the three
chapters of this Gospel which contain this great discourse of our Lord, we
shall find this idea taken up, and repeated, and developed in passage after
passage. The Holy Spirit was to come in Christ’s name, as Christ’s
representative and interpreter. “He shall not speak from Himself,” Christ
said; “He shall bear witness of Me. He shall glorify Me; for He shall take
of Mine, and shall declare it unto you.” In the presence of the Spirit
Christ Himself would be present: “I will not leave you desolate,” He said;
“I come unto you;” “I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice.”
And, for the sake of such a presence, a presence which was to be not for a
little while but for ever, it was best for His friends that He should leave
them.[25]
It is in these words, I believe, that we have the key to the New
Testament doctrine of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is the Spirit of Christ;
He is sent by Christ; He comes to continue the work of Christ. He is, as
one writer has it, Christ’s alter ego, or, as it was said long ago,
Christ’s “Vicar,” or substitute, on the earth.[26] When, therefore, we speak of the presence of
the Spirit, what we mean, or what we ought to mean, is the spiritual
presence of Christ. In the Holy Spirit Christ Himself is present, wherever,
as He said, two or three are gathered together in His name. In the Holy
Spirit, given to be with us for ever, He makes good to His disciples the
great word of His promise, “Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of
the world.” This is the fact continually to be kept in mind–the Spirit is
the Spirit of Christ; for, if this be forgotten, then, as all experience
shows, either the doctrine is wholly ignored, or it is made the subject of
that vague, unreal way of speaking, which, alas! is so often the bane of
spiritual truth.
At the same time, what has been said must not be interpreted so as to
suggest that the Holy Spirit is merely an impersonal influence. On the
contrary, the words of our Lord quoted above distinctly imply what we call
“personality,” and a personality separate from His own. If all that Jesus
really meant to teach was that He would manifest His own invisible presence
to His disciples by spiritual influences, we can only conclude that His
words have been tampered with; as they stand, it is impossible that this
should exhaust their meaning. To teach, to bear witness, to guide, to bring
to remembrance, to declare the things that are to come,–these are the
acts, not of a Power, but of a Person; and all these things, Christ said,
the Holy Spirit should do. Indeed, it is not easy to see how language could
have been framed to set forth the idea of a Divine Person, separate alike
from the Father and the Son, more explicitly than we find it in these
chapters.[27]
II
We turn now to the second part of our question: What is it that the Holy
Spirit does for us? Christ’s teaching on the work of the Spirit may be
gathered up under two heads: (1) His work in the Church; (2) His work in
the world.
(1) When we speak of the Spirit’s work in the Church, it must be
understood that the reference is to no particular ecclesiastical
organization, but to the people of Christ generally, “the men and women in
whom the spiritual work of Christ is going forward.” And among these the
Holy Spirit works in two ways.
(a) He is the Spirit of truth, the Divine Remembrancer: “He shall
guide you into all the truth;” “He shall take of Mine, and shall declare it
unto you;” “He shall teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance
all that I said unto you.” It is not, it will be observed, all truth, but
all the truth of Christ, with which the Spirit deals–the truth concerning
Him, and the truth which He taught. Nor is it a new revelation which the
Spirit gives, but rather a more perfect understanding of that which has
been already given in Christ. Here, then, is the test by which to try all
that claims the authority of spiritual truth. Does it “glorify” Christ?
Does it lead us into a fuller knowledge of Him “in whom are all the
treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden”? “Whosoever goeth onward,” says
St. John, in a remarkable passage, for which English readers are indebted
to the Revised Version, “and abideth not in the teaching of Christ, hath
not God.” In other words, no true progress is possible except as we abide
in Christ. If He be ignored and left behind, though we still keep the name
and boast ourselves “progressives,” we have lost the reality. On the other
hand, every new discovery, every movement in the life of men, every
intellectual and spiritual awakening which serves to make manifest the
glory of Christ as Creator, or Revealer, or Redeemer, is a fresh fulfilment
of His promise concerning the guiding Spirit of truth. Perhaps our best
commentary is the history of the Church. In the New Testament itself we
have the first-fruits of the Spirit’s work. There we may see, in Gospels
and Epistles, how the Spirit took of the things of Christ and showed them
unto His disciples. And all through the varied history of the Church’s long
past, that same Divine Remembrancer has been at work, calling us through
the lips of an Augustine, a Luther, or a Wesley, into the fullness of the
inheritance of truth which is ours in Christ Jesus.
(b) The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of power. “Behold,” said the
ascending Christ, “I send forth the promise of My Father upon you; but
tarry ye in the city until ye be clothed with power from on high.” And,
again, “Ye shall receive power, when the Holy Ghost is come upon you.” Of
Jesus Himself it was said by one of His disciples “that God anointed Him
with the Holy Ghost and with power”; and of His disciples Jesus said: “He
that believeth on Me, the works that I do shall He do also; and greater
works than these shall he do; because I go unto the Father.” Here, again,
our best commentary is the history of the Church, and especially the first
chapter of that history as it is written in the Acts of the Apostles. This
was the promise, “Ye shall receive power,” and this, in brief, the story of
its fulfilment, “With great power gave the apostles their witness of the
resurrection of the Lord Jesus.” Let any one read the early chapters of St.
Luke’s narrative; let him mark the utter disparity between the “acts” and
the “apostles”–between the things done and the men by whom they were
done–and then let him ask if there is any explanation which does really
bridge the gulf short of this, that behind Peter and John and the rest
there stood Another, speaking through their lips, working through their
hands, Himself the real Doer in all those wondrous “acts”? When D.L. Moody
was holding in Birmingham one of those remarkable series of meetings which
so deeply stirred our country in the early ‘seventies, Dr. Dale, who
followed the work with the keenest sympathy, and yet not without a feeling
akin to stupefaction at the amazing results which it produced, once told
Moody that the work was most plainly of God, for he could see no real
relation between him and what he had done. Is not this disparity the very
sign-manual of the Holy Spirit’s presence? “Why,” asked Peter, when the
multitude were filled with wonder and amazement at the healing of the lame
man, “Why fasten ye your eyes on us as though by our own power or godliness
we had made him to walk?” Work that is really of God can never be accounted
for in that fashion. There is always a something in the effects which
cannot be traced back to a human cause. Let “our own power and godliness”
be what they may–and they can never be too great–they are all vain and
helpless apart from the power of God. “I planted, Apollos watered; God gave
the increase.” Wherefore let the Church trust neither in him that planteth
nor in him that watereth, but in God who giveth the increase.
(2) We come now to the Holy Spirit’s work in the world. And, just as in
speaking of the “Church” it was not any visible organization which we had
in mind, so now by the “world” is not meant merely the persons who are
outside all such organizations. There is, as we are often reminded
nowadays, a Church outside the Churches; and, on the other hand, not a
little of what Christ meant by the “world” is often to be found inside what
we mean by the “Church.” The “world,” then, is simply the mass of men,
wherever they are to be found, who are living apart from God. Now, of this
world Christ said it “cannot receive” the Spirit of truth; “it beholdeth
Him not, neither knoweth Him.” If, therefore, there is a ministry of the
Spirit in the world, it must be wholly different in kind from that spoken
of above. And this is what we learn from Christ’s teaching: “He, when He is
come, will convict the world in respect of sin, and of righteousness, and
of judgment.” There is a ring of judicial sternness in the words; they call
up to our minds the solemnities of a court of justice–the indictment, the
conviction, the condemnation. And yet one can well believe that there were
hours in the after life of the apostles when, of all the comforting,
reassuring words which Christ had spoken to them in that Upper Room, there
were none more helpful than these. For they knew now that, when they stood
up to bear their witness before a hostile world, they had a fellow-witness
in men’s hearts. They could go nowhere–in Jerusalem, Judæa, Samaria,
or the uttermost parts of the earth–where the gracious ministries of the
Spirit had not preceded them. He, the Paraclete, was not only with them,
their “strong-siding Champion,” He was in the world also, in the hearts
even of them who set themselves most stoutly against the Lord and against
His Anointed, subduing their rebelliousness and reconciling them to God. We
who teach and preach to-day, do we think of these things as we ought? Does
not our message sometimes win a response which is at once a surprise and a
rebuke to us? We knew that the seed which we cast into the ground was the
word of God; but the soil seemed so poor and thin we scarce had looked for
any harvest; yet the seed sprang up and grew, we knew not how. We had
forgotten that over all that wide field which is the world the Divine
Husbandman is ever at work, at work while men sleep, breaking up the fallow
ground, and making ready the soil for the seed. We need to learn to count
more on God, to grasp more fully the glorious breadth of promise which He
has given us in His Spirit, to remember that, not only in the Church, but
in the world–which is His world–that Spirit is always present to testify
of God, to convict men of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment.
And yet, while we encourage ourselves with thoughts like these, we dare
not forget that men may resist, they may grieve, they may quench the Holy
Spirit. He is grieved whensoever He is resisted; He may be resisted until
He is quenched. It was Christ Himself who spoke of a sin against the Holy
Spirit which “hath never forgiveness.” Is there any more painful,
perplexing, and yet more certain fact in life than this, that man can
resist God? Is there any that has bound up with it more terrible and
inevitable issues? “Ye stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears,”
cried the martyr Stephen to his judges, “ye do always resist the Holy
Ghost: as your fathers did, so do ye.” And the end for their fathers and
for them we know. Wherefore the Holy Spirit saith: “To-day, if ye shall
hear His voice, harden not your hearts.”
CONCERNING THE KINGDOM OF
GOD
“The kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but
righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost.”–ST. PAUL.
VI
CONCERNING THE KINGDOM OF GOD
“Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on
earth.“–MATT. vi. 10.
I
One of the most obvious features of the teaching of Jesus is the
prominence which it gives to what is called “the kingdom of heaven,” or,
“the kingdom of God.” And this prominence becomes the more striking when we
turn from the Gospels to the Epistles where the phrase is only rarely to be
found. With Jesus the kingdom was a kind of watchword which was continually
on His lips. Thus, e.g., St. Mark begins his account of the
preaching of Jesus in these words: “After that John was delivered up, Jesus
came into Galilee, preaching the Gospel of God and saying, The time is
fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe in the
Gospel.” In like manner, St. Matthew tells us that “Jesus went about in all
Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the
kingdom.” Parable after parable opens with the formula “The kingdom of
heaven is like unto–,” or, “So is the kingdom of God as if–,” or, “How
shall we liken the kingdom of God?” When Christ sent forth the Twelve, this
was His command, “Go … and as ye go, preach, saying, The kingdom of
heaven is at hand.” Again, when He sent forth the Seventy, He said, “Into
whatsoever city ye enter … say unto them, The kingdom of God is come nigh
unto you.” And in the great Forty Days, before He was received up, it was
still of “the things concerning the kingdom of God” that He spake unto His
disciples. Every time a little child is baptized we call to mind His words,
“For of such is the kingdom of God.” Every time we repeat the prayer He
taught His disciples to pray we say, “Thy kingdom come.” In all, it is
said, there are no less than one hundred and twelve references to the
kingdom to be found in the Gospels.
When, however, we turn to the Epistles what do we find? In the whole of
St. Paul’s Epistles the kingdom is not named as often as in the briefest of
the four Gospels. It is mentioned only once by St. Peter, once by St.
James, once by the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, and not at all in
the three Epistles of St. John. Not only so, but at least until quite
recent times, the Church of Christ has in the main followed the lead of the
apostles, and has said but little of the kingdom of God. How is this to be
explained? Does it mean that the whole Church of Christ, including the
Church of the apostles, has failed to understand the mind of the Master,
and has let slip an essential element of His teaching? So some recent
writers do not hesitate to declare. Burke once said that he did not know
how to draw up an indictment against a whole people; but these, apparently,
have no difficulty in drawing up an indictment against the whole Church.
“With all respect to the great Apostle,” writes one of them, “one may be
allowed to express his regret that St. Paul has not said less about the
Church and more about the Kingdom.”[28] To which I hope one may be forgiven if he is
tempted to retort that the great apostle probably knew what he was about as
well as his modern critic can tell him. We shall do well to pause, and
pause again, before we accept any interpretation of the facts of the New
Testament which implies that we to-day have a better understanding of the
mind of Christ than the apostles had. For my own part, whenever I come
across any writer who tries to correct Paul by Jesus, I find it safest to
assume that he has misread Paul, or Jesus, or both. Moreover, though we
need make no claim of infallibility for the Church, yet, if we believe in a
Holy Spirit given to guide the disciples of Christ into all the truth of
Christ, we shall find it difficult to believe at the same time that the
whole Church has from the beginning missed the right way, and in a matter
so important as this, failed to apprehend the thought of Christ.
We are not, however, shut up to any such unworthy conclusions. There is
another and sufficient explanation of the facts to which reference has been
made. It was natural that Jesus, speaking in the first instance to Jews,
should move as far as possible within the circle of ideas with which they
were already familiar. Now, no phrase had a more thoroughly familiar sound
to Jewish ears than this of the kingdom of God. It needed, of course, to be
purified and enlarged before it could be made the vehicle of the loftier
ideas of Jesus. Still, the idea was there, “a point of attachment,” as one
writer says, in the minds of his hearers to which Jesus could fasten what
He wished to say. But after our Lord’s Resurrection and Ascension, and
especially after the fall of Jerusalem, the whole condition of things was
changed. A phrase which in the synagogues of the Jews proved helpful and
illumining, might easily become, among the populations of Asia Minor, of
Greece, and of Italy, to whom the gospel was now preached, useless, and
even misleading. Is it any wonder, therefore, if the first Christian
missionaries quietly dropped the old phrase and found others to take its
place? Men who knew themselves guided by the Spirit of Jesus would not feel
compelled to quote the words of Jesus, if, under altered circumstances,
other words more fittingly expressed His thoughts.[29]
II
What did Jesus mean when He spoke of the kingdom of God? The idea as set
forth in the Gospels is so complex, the phrase is used to cover so many and
different conceptions, that it is practically impossible to frame a
definition within which all the sayings of Jesus concerning the kingdom can
be included. The nearest approach to a definition which it is necessary to
attempt is suggested by the two petitions in the Lord’s Prayer which are
quoted above. The second petition explains the first: the kingdom comes in
proportion as men do on earth the will of God. For our present purpose,
therefore, we may think of the kingdom as a spiritual commonwealth
embracing all who do God’s will. To much that Christ taught concerning the
kingdom–its Head, its numbers, its growth and development–it is
impossible, in one brief discourse, even to refer. Here again, it must
suffice to single out one or two points for special emphasis:
(1) In the doctrine of the kingdom of God, we have set before us the
social aspect of Christ’s teaching; it reminds us of what we owe, not only
to Him who is its King, but to those who are our fellow-subjects. Of
particular duties it is impossible to speak, though these, as we know, fill
a large place in the teaching of Jesus. But let us at least bring home to
ourselves the thought of obligation, obligation involved in and springing
out of our common relationship as members of the kingdom of God. The
obligation is writ large on every page of the New Testament–in the
Gospels, in the doctrine of the kingdom; in the Epistles, in the
corresponding doctrine of the Church. It can hardly be said too often,
that, according to the New Testament ideal, there are no unattached
Christians. The apostles never conceive of religion as merely a private
matter between the soul and God. All true religion, as John Wesley used to
say, is not solitary but social. Its starting-point is the individual, but
its goal is a kingdom. Christ came to save men and women in order that
through them He might build up a redeemed society in which the will of God
should be done. We do, indeed, often hear of Christians whose religion
begins and ends with getting their own souls saved. This simply means that
so far as it is true they are not yet Christian. To think only of oneself
is to deny one of the first principles of the kingdom. Wesley taught the
early Methodists to sing–
“A charge to keep I have.
A God to glorify;
A never-dying soul to save,
And fit it for the sky;”and some of his followers, both early and later, seem to have thought
that this was the whole of the hymn; but the verse goes on without a full
stop–
“To serve the present age,
My calling to fulfil;
O may it all my powers engage
To do my Master’s will!”And until we who profess and call ourselves Christians have learned this
lesson of service, and have entered into Christ’s thought of the kingdom,
with its interlacing network of obligations, we have still need that some
one teach us again the rudiments of the first principles of the oracles of
God.
(2) Again, the kingdom of God, Christ taught, is present; it is
not of, but it is in, this world, set up in the midst of the existing order
of things. There are, it is true, passages in which Christ speaks of the
kingdom as in the future, and to come. Thus, e.g., He speaks of a
time when men “shall come from the east and west, and from the north and
south, and shall sit down in the kingdom of God”; when “the righteous shall
shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father”; when they shall
“inherit the kingdom prepared for” them “from the foundation of the world”;
and so forth. But there is no real contradiction between this and what has
been already said. The kingdom is a growth, a movement working itself out
in history, and therefore it may be said to be past, present, or future,
according to our point of view. In the sense that it has not yet fully
come, that its final consummation is still waited for, it is future; and so
sometimes Christ speaks of it. But it is simply impossible to do justice to
all His sayings and deny that in His thought the kingdom is also present.
Its consummation may belong to the future, its beginnings are here already.
When Christ calls it the kingdom of heaven, it is rather its origin
and character that are suggested than the sphere of its realization. In
parable after parable He speaks of it as a secret silent energy already at
work in the world. He called on men here and now to seek it, and to enter
it. So eagerly were the lost and the perishing pressing into it that once
He declared that from the days of John the Baptist the kingdom of heaven
suffered violence. Not in some future heaven but here “on earth” He bade
His disciples pray that God’s will might be done. “When Jesus said the
kingdom of heaven, be sure He did not mean an unseen refuge, whither a
handful might one day escape, like persecuted and disheartened Puritans
fleeing from a hopeless England, but He intended what might be and then was
in Galilee, what should be and now is in England.”[30] “Thy kingdom come”–it is here on earth we must
look for the answer to our prayer. And every man who himself does, and in
every possible way strives to get done, God’s will among men, is Christ’s
co-worker and fellow-builder.
“I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasantland.”
That is the spirit of all the true servants of Jesus.
(3) But the most important fact concerning the kingdom in Christ’s view
of it is that it is spiritual. And, because it is spiritual, it
failed wholly to satisfy the earth-bound ambitions of the Jews. For
generations they had fed their national pride with visions of a world
obedient to Israel’s sway, and when one who claimed to be the Messiah
nevertheless told them plainly that His kingdom was not of this world, they
turned from Him as from one that mocked. He and they both spoke of a
kingdom of God, but while they emphasized the “kingdom” He emphasized
“God.” So wholly did men fail to enter into His mind that on one occasion
two of His own disciples came to Him asking that they might sit, one on the
right hand, and one on the left hand in His glory. And even when He was
just about to leave them, and to return to His Father, the old ambitions
still made themselves heard. “Lord,” said they, “dost Thou at this time
restore again the kingdom to Israel?” But with all such dreams of temporal
sovereignty Christ would have nothing to do; He had put them from Him,
definitely and for ever, in the Temptation in the wilderness. He completely
reversed the current notions concerning the kingdom. “Being asked by the
Pharisees when the kingdom of God cometh, He answered them and said, The
kingdom of God cometh not with observation; neither shall they say, Lo,
here! or, There! for lo, the kingdom of God is within you.” And when
self-complacent religious leaders flattered themselves that, of course, the
first places in the kingdom would be theirs, He sternly warned them that
they might find themselves altogether shut out while the publicans and
harlots whom they despised were admitted. Through all His teaching Christ
laid the emphasis on character. Pride, and love of power, and sordid
ambitions, and all self-seeking–for these things, and for them that
cherished these things, the kingdom had no place. “Blessed,” Christ said,
“are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” “Except ye
turn, and become as little children, ye shall in no wise enter into the
kingdom of heaven.” “Whosoever would become great among you, shall be your
minister; and whosoever would be first among you shall be servant of
all”–these are they that are accounted worthy of the kingdom of God.
The earliest account of Christ’s preaching which has already been
quoted, gives us the right point of view for the interpretation of Christ’s
idea of the kingdom as spiritual: “Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the
gospel of God, and saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is
at hand: Repent ye, and believe in the gospel.” He had come to establish a
kingdom whose dominion should be for ever, against which the gates of hell
should not prevail, and the foundation of it He laid in the penitent and
obedient hearts of men. This explains why Christ had so little to do with
programmes, and so much to do with men. If a man’s right to the title of
reformer be judged by the magnitude of the revolution which he has
effected, it is but bare justice to call Him the greatest reformer who ever
lived. Yet He put out no programme; He made Himself the spokesman of no
party, the advocate of no social or political reform. To the disappointment
of His friends, as much as to the confusion of His enemies, He absolutely
refused to take sides on the vexed political questions of the hour. “Unto
Caesar,” He said, “render the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the
things that are God’s.” But on individuals He spent Himself to the
uttermost. “He is not only indifferent to numbers, but often seems
disinclined to deal with numbers. He sends the multitude away; He goes
apart into a mountain with His chosen disciples; He withdraws Himself from
the throng in Jerusalem to the quiet home in Bethany; He discourses of the
profoundest purposes of His mission with the Twelve in an upper room; He
opens the treasures of His wisdom before one Pharisee at night, and one
unresponsive woman by the well.”[31] Always His work is done not by “external
organization or mass-movements or force of numbers,” but from within:
“Repent ye and believe in the gospel.”
Now, this was the vary last kind of message that the Pharisees of
Christ’s day were looking for. They wanted the world put right–according
to their own ideas of right–it is true; but to be told that they must
begin with themselves was not at all what they wanted. Are not many of us
in the same case to-day? We are all eager for reforms, at least so long as
they are from without. We have a touching faith in the power of machinery
and organization. We are quite sure that if Parliament would only pass
this, that, and the other bit of legislative reform, on which our hearts
are set, the millennium would be here, if not by the morning post, at least
by the session’s end. And there is much, undoubtedly, that Parliament can
and ought to do for us. Nevertheless, was not Christ right? Instead of the
old prayer, “Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit
within me,” some of us, as one writer says, would rather pray, “Create a
better social order, O God; and renew a right relation between various
classes of men.” We are ready to begin anywhere rather than with ourselves,
at any point in the big circumference rather than at the centre. “I don’t
deny, my friends,” wrote Charles Kingsley to the Chartists, “it is much
cheaper and pleasanter to be reformed by the devil than by God; for God
will only reform society on the condition of our reforming every man his
own self, while the devil is quite ready to help us to mend the laws and
the Parliament, earth and heaven, without ever starting such an impertinent
and ‘personal’ request as that a man should mend himself.” Yet without
self-reform nothing is possible. “The character of the aggregate,” says
Herbert Spencer, “is determined by the characters of the units.” And he
illustrates thus: Suppose a man building with good, square, well-burnt
bricks; without the use of mortar he may build a wall of a certain height
and stability. But if his bricks are warped and cracked or broken, the wall
cannot be of the same height and stability. If again, instead of bricks he
use cannon-balls then he cannot build a wall at all; at most, something in
the form of a pyramid with a square or rectangular base. And if, once more,
for cannon-balls we substitute rough, unhewn boulders, no definite stable
form is possible. “The character of the aggregate is, determined by the
characters of the units.” Every attempt to reconstruct society which leaves
out of account the character of the men and women who constitute society is
foredoomed to failure. Behind every social problem stands the greater
problem of the individual, the redemption of character. We may get, as
assuredly we ought to get, better houses for the working-classes; but
unless we also get better working-classes for the houses, we shall not have
greatly mended matters. And no turn of the Parliamentary machine will
produce these for us. We can pass new laws; only the grace of God can make
new men. “For my part,” says Kingsley once more, speaking through the lips
of his tailor-poet, “I seem to have learnt that the only thing to
regenerate the world is not more of any system, good or bad; but simply
more of the Spirit of God.” “Except a man be born anew, he cannot see
the kingdom of God.“
CONCERNING MAN
“Tho’ world on world in myriad myriads roll
Round us, each with different powers,
And other forms of life than ours,
What know we greater than the soul?”
TENNYSON.
VII
CONCERNING MAN
“There is joy in the presence of the angels of God over
one sinner that repenteth.“–LUKE XV. 10.
This is one of many sayings of our Lord which reveal His sense of the
infinite worth of the human soul, which is the central fact in His teaching
about man, and the only one with which in the present chapter we shall be
concerned. Other aspects of the truth will come into view in the following
chapter, when we come to consider Christ’s teaching about sin.
I
“The infinite worth of the human soul”–this is a discovery the glory of
which, it is no exaggeration to say, belongs wholly to Christ. It is said
that one of the most magnificent diamonds in Europe, which to-day blazes in
a king’s crown, once lay for months on a stall in a piazza at Rome
labelled, “Rock-crystal, price one franc.” And it was thus that for ages
the priceless jewel of the soul lay unheeded and despised of men. Before
Christ came, men honoured the rich, and the great, and the wise, as we
honour them now; but man as man was of little or no account. If one had, or
could get, a pedestal by which to lift himself above the common crowd, he
might count for something; but if he had nothing save his own feet to stand
upon, he was a mere nobody, for whom nobody cared. We turn to the teaching
of Jesus, and what a contrast! “Of how much more value,” He said, “are ye
than the birds!” “How much then is a man”–not a rich man, not a wise man,
not a Pharisee, but a man–“of more value than a sheep!” “What shall it
profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? Or
what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?” It was by
thought-provoking questions such as these that Jesus revealed His own
thoughts concerning man. And, of course, when He spoke in this way about
the soul, when He said that a man might gain the whole world, but that if
the price he paid for it were his soul, he was the loser, He was not
speaking of the souls of a select few, but of the souls of all. Every man,
every woman, every little child–all were precious in His sight. It is man
as man, Christ taught, that is of worth to God.
Consider how much is involved in the bare fact that Christ came into the
world the son of a poor mother, and lived in it a poor man. “A man’s life,”
He said, “consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he
possesseth.” And the best commentary on the saying is just His own life;
for He had nothing. There is something very suggestive in Christ’s use of
the little possessive pronoun “My.” We know how we use the word. Listen to
the rich man in the parable: “My fruits,” “my barns,” “my corn,” “my
goods.” Now listen to Christ. He says: “My Father,” “My Church,” “My
friends,” “My disciples”; but He never says “My house,” “My lands,” “My
books.” The one perfect life this earth has seen was the life of One who
owned nothing, and left behind Him nothing but the clothes He wore. And not
only was Christ poor Himself, He spent His life among the poor. “To believe
that a man with £60 a year,” Canon Liddon once said, “is just as much
worthy of respect as a man with £6000, you must be seriously a
Christian.” You must indeed. Yet that which is for us so hard never seems
to have cost Christ a struggle. We cannot so much as think of mere money,
more or less, counting for anything in His sight. The little artificial
distinctions of society were to Him nothing, and less than nothing. He went
to be guest with a man that was a sinner. A woman that was a harlot He
suffered to wash His feet with her tears, and to wipe them with her hair.
“This man,” said His enemies, with scorn vibrant in every word, “receiveth
sinners and eateth with them.” And they were right; but what they counted
His deepest shame was in reality His chiefest glory.
Now, what does all this mean but simply this, that it was for man as man
that Christ cared? Observe the difference in the point at which He and we
become interested in men. We are interested in them, for the most part,
when, by their work, or their wealth, or their fame, they have added
something to themselves; in other words, we become interested when they
become interesting. But that which gave worth to man in Christ’s eyes lay
beneath all these merely adventitious circumstances of his life, in his
naked humanity, in what he was, or might be, in himself. This is why to Him
all souls were dear. We love them that love us, the loving and the lovable;
Christ loved the unloving and the unlovable. He was named, and rightly
named, “Friend of publicans and sinners.” Then were bad men of worth to
Christ? They were; for, as Tennyson says, “If there be a devil in man,
there is an angel too.” Christ saw the possible angel in the actual devil.
He knew that the lost might be found, and the bad become good, and the
prodigal return home; and He loved men, not only for what they were, but
for what they might be.
It would be easy to show that this high doctrine of man underlies, and
is involved in, the whole life and work and teaching of Jesus. It is
involved in the doctrine of God. Indeed, as Dr. Dale says, the Christian
doctrine of man is really a part of the Christian doctrine of God.[32] Because God is a Father, every man
is a son of God, or, rather, every man has within him the capacity for
sonship. It is involved in the doctrine of the Incarnation; that stupendous
fact reveals not only the condescension of God but the glory and exaltation
of man. If God could become man, there must be a certain kinship between
God and man; since God has become man, our poor human nature has been
thereby lifted up and glorified. The same great doctrine is implied in the
truth of Christ’s atonement. When He who knew Himself to be the eternal Son
of God spoke of His own life as the “ransom” for the forfeited lives of
men, He revealed once more how infinite is the worth of that which could be
redeemed only at such tremendous cost.
Such, then, is Christ’s teaching about man. And, as I have already said,
it was a new thing in human history. Nowhere is the line which divides the
world B.C. from the world A.D. more sharply defined than here. Before
Christ came, no one dared to say, for no one believed, that the soul of
every man, and still less the soul of every woman and child, was of worth
to God, that even a slave might become a son of the Most High. But Christ
believed it, and Christ said it, and when He said it, the new world, the
world in which we live, began to be. The great difference between ancient
and modern civilizations, one eminent historian has said, is to be found
here, that while ancient civilization cared only for the welfare of the
favoured few, modern civilization seeks the welfare of all. And when we ask
further what has made the difference, history sends us back for answer to
the four Gospels and the teaching of Jesus concerning the infinite worth of
the soul of man.
II
And now, to bring matters to a practical issue, have we who profess the
faith of Christ learnt to set, either upon others or upon ourselves, the
value which Christ put upon all men? Far as we have travelled from ancient
Greece and Rome, are we not still, in our thoughts about men, often pagan
rather than Christian? Our very speech bewrayeth us, and shows how little
even yet we have learnt to think Christ’s thoughts after Him. He declared,
in words which have already been quoted, that “a man’s life consisteth not
in the abundance of the things which he possesseth.” Nevertheless, in our
daily speech we persist in measuring men by this very standard; we say that
a man “is worth” so much, though, of course, all that we mean is that he
has so much. Again, we allow ourselves to speak about the “hands” in a
factory, as if with the hand there went neither head nor heart. If we must
put a part for the whole, why should it not be after the fashion of the New
Testament? “And there were added unto them in that day”–so it is written
in one place–“about three thousand souls”–“souls,” not “hands.”[33] And we may depend upon it there
would be less soulless labour in the world, and fewer men and women in
danger of degenerating into mere “hands,” if we would learn to think of
them in Christ’s higher and worthier way.
Let me try to show, by two or three examples, how Christ’s teaching
about man is needed through all our life.
(1) There was, perhaps, never a time when so many were striving to
fulfil the apostle’s injunction, and, as they have opportunity, to do good
unto all men. More and more we busy ourselves to-day with the good works of
philanthropy and Christian charity. And what we must remember is that our
philanthropy needs our theology to sustain it. They only will continue
Christ’s work for man who cherish Christ’s thoughts about man. Sever
philanthropy from the great Christian ideas which have created and
sustained it, and it will very speedily come to an end of its resources.
All experience shows that philanthropy cut off from Christ has not capital
enough on which to do its business. And the reason is not far to seek. They
who strive to save their fellows, they who go down into the depths that
they may lift men up, see so much of the darkened under-side of human life,
they are brought so close up to the ugly facts of human baseness, human
trickery, human ingratitude, that, unless there be behind them the staying,
steadying power of the faith and love of Christ, they cannot long endure
the strain; they grow weary in well-doing, perchance even they grow bitter
and contemptuous, and in a little while the tasks they have taken up fall
unfinished from their hands. “Society” takes to “slumming” for a
season–just as for another season it may take to ping-pong–but the fit
does not last; and only they keep on through the long, grey days, when
neither sun nor stars are seen, who have learnt to look on men with the
eyes, and to feel toward them with the heart, of Jesus the Man of
Nazareth.
(2) “Whoso shall cause one of these little ones that believe on Me to
stumble, it is profitable for him that a great mill-stone should be hanged
about his neck, and that he should be sunk in the depth of the sea.” Once
more is revealed Christ’s thought of the worth of the soul. How the holy
passion against him who would hurt “one of these little ones” glows and
scorches in His words! Is this a word for any of us? Is there one among us
who is tempting a brother man to dishonesty, to drink, to lust; who is
pushing some thoughtless girl down the steep and slippery slope which
ends–we know where? Then let him stop and listen, not to me, but to
Christ. Never, I think, did He speak with such solemn, heart-shaking
emphasis, and He says that it were better a man should die, that he should
die this night, die the most miserable and shameful death, than that he
should bring the blood of another’s soul upon his head. It must needs be
that occasions of stumbling come, but woe, woe to that man by whom they
come, when he and the slain soul’s Saviour shall stand face to face! Oh, if
there be one among us who is playing the tempter, and doing the devil’s
work, let him get to his knees, and cry with the conscience-smitten
Psalmist, “Deliver me from blood-guiltiness, O God, Thou God of my
salvation”; and peradventure even yet He may hear and have mercy.
(3) Let fathers and mothers ponder what this teaching of Jesus
concerning man means for them in relation to their children. There came
into your home a while ago a little child, a gift from God, just such a
babe as Jesus Himself was in His mother’s arms in Bethlehem. The child is
yours, bone of your bone, flesh of your flesh, and it bears your likeness
and image; but it is also God’s child, and it bears His image. What
difference is the coming of the little stranger making in you? I do not ask
what difference is it making to you, for the answer would be ready
in a moment, “Much, every way”; but, what difference is it making in you? Does it never occur to you that you ought to be a different man–a
better man–that you ought to be a different woman–a better woman–for the
sake of the little one lying in the cradle? Do you know that of all the
things God ever made and owns, in this or all His worlds, there is nothing
more dear to Him than the soul of the little child He has committed to your
hands? What hands those should be that bear a gift like that! Perhaps we
never thought of it in that way before. But it is true, whether we think of
it or not. Is it not time to begin to think of it? This night, as we stand
over our sleeping child, let us promise to God, for the child’s sake, that
we will be His.
(4) Last of all, we must learn to set Christ’s value upon ourselves.
This is the tragedy of life, that we hold ourselves so cheap. We are sprung
of heaven’s first blood, have titles manifold, and yet, when the crown is
offered us, we choose rather, like the man with the muck-rake, in Bunyan’s
great allegory, to grub among the dust and sticks and straws of the floor.
In the times of the French Revolution, French soldiers, it is said, stabled
their horses in some of the magnificent cathedrals of France; but some of
us are guilty of a far worse sacrilege in that holy of holies which we call
the soul. “Ye were redeemed, not with corruptible things, with silver or
gold,” but with blood, precious blood, even the blood of Christ. And the
soul which cost that, we are ready to sell any day in the open market for a
little more pleasure or a little more pelf. The birthright is bartered for
the sorriest mess of pottage, and the jewel which the King covets to wear
in His crown our own feet trample in the mire of the streets. The pity of
it, the pity of it!
In one of Dora Greenwell’s simple and beautiful Songs of
Salvation, a pitman tells to his wife the story of his conversion. He
had got a word like a fire in his heart that would not let him be, “Jesus,
the Son of God, who loved, and who gave Himself for me.”
“It was for me that Jesus died! for me, and a world of men,
Just as sinful, and just as slow to give back His love again;
And He didn’t wait till I came to Him, but He loved me at my worst;
He needn’t ever have died for me if I could have loved Him first.”And then he continues:–
“And could’st Thou love such a man as me, my Saviour! Then I’ll take
More heed to this wand’ring soul of mine, if it’s only for Thy sake.”Yes, we are all of worth to God, but we must needs go to the Cross to
learn how great is our worth; and, as we bow in its sacred shadow, may we
learn to say: “For Thy sake, O Christ, for Thy sake, I’ll take more heed to
this wandering soul of mine.”[34]
CONCERNING SIN
“O man, strange composite of heaven and earth!
Majesty dwarfed to baseness! fragrant flower
Running to poisonous seed! and seeming worth
Choking corruption! weakness mastering power!
Who never art so near to crime and shame,
As when thou hast achieved some deed of name.”
NEWMAN.
VIII
CONCERNING SIN
“When ye pray, say…. Forgive us our sins.“–LUKE
xi. 2, 4.
A recent writer has pointed out that sin, like death, is not seriously
realized except as a personal fact. We really know it only when we know it
about ourselves. The word “sin” has no serious meaning to a man, except
when it means that he himself is a sinful man. And hence it comes to pass
that we can still turn to the penitential Psalms, to the seventh chapter of
Romans, to the Confessions of St. Augustine, or to the Grace
Abounding of John Bunyan, and make their words the language of our own
broken and contrite hearts. For when Bunyan and Augustine and Paul and the
psalmists spoke of sin, they spoke not the thoughts of others, but their
knowledge of themselves; they looked into their own hearts and wrote. That
is why their words “find” us to-day. Nevertheless, paradox though it may
seem, our greatest Teacher concerning sin, Himself “knew no sin.” Born
without sin, living and dying without sin, Christ yet “knew what was in
man,” knew the sin that was in man, and from His own sinless height once
for all revealed and judged and condemned it. Let us seek, then, to learn
the mind of Christ on this great matter.
And once more, as I have had occasion to point out in a previous
chapter, we must not look for anything formal, defined, systematic in
Christ’s teaching. We cannot open the Gospels, as we might some modern
theological treatise, and read out from them a scientific exposition of
sin–its origin, its nature, its treatment. The New Testament is not like a
museum, where the flowers are dried and pressed, and the fossils lie
carefully arranged within glass cases, and everything is duly classified
and labelled. Rather it is like nature itself, where the flowers grow wild
at our feet, and the rocks lie as the Creator’s hand left them, and where
each man must do the classifying and labelling for himself. Museums have
their uses, and there will always be those who prefer them–they save so
much trouble. But since Christ’s aim was not to save us trouble, but to
teach us to see things with our own eyes, to see them as He saw them, and
to think of them as He thinks, it is no wonder that He has chosen rather to
put us down in the midst of a world of living truths than in a museum of
assorted and dead facts.
I
What, then, is the teaching of Jesus concerning sin? His tone is at once
severe and hopeful. Sometimes His words are words that shake our hearts
with fear; sometimes they surprise us with their overflowing tenderness and
pity. But however He may deal with the sinner, we are always made to feel
that to Jesus sin is a serious thing, a problem not to be slurred over and
made light of, but to be faced, and met, and grappled with. Christ’s sense
of the gravity of sin comes out in many ways.
(1) It is involved in His doctrine of man. He who made so much of man
could not make light of man’s sin. It is because man is so great that his
sin is so grave. No one can understand the New Testament doctrine of sin
who does not read it in the light of the New Testament doctrine of man.
When we think of man as Christ thought of him, when we see in him the
possibilities which Christ saw, the Scripture language concerning sin
becomes intelligible enough; until then it may easily seem exaggerated and
unreal. It is the height for which man was made and meant which measures
the fall which is involved in his sin.
(2) Call to mind the language in which Christ set forth the effects of
sin. He spoke of men as blind, as sick, as dead; He said they were as sheep
gone astray, as sons that are lost, as men in debt which they can never
pay, in bondage from which they can never free themselves. The very
accumulation of metaphors bears witness to Christ’s sense of the havoc
wrought by sin. Nor are they metaphors merely; they are His reading of the
facts of life as it lay before Him. Let me refer briefly to two of them,
(a) Christ spoke of men as in bondage through their sin. “If,” He
said once, “ye abide in My word … ye shall know the truth, and the truth
shall make you free.” And straightway jealous Jewish ears caught at that
word “free.” “Free?” they cried, “Free? we be Abraham’s seed, and have
never yet been in bondage to any man: how sayest Thou, Ye shall be made
free?” Yet even as they lift their hands in protest Christ hears the clink
of their fetters: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, every one that
committeth sin is the bond-servant–the slave–of sin.” “To whom ye present
yourselves as servants unto obedience, his servants–his slaves–ye are
whom ye obey; whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto
righteousness.” Apostle and Lord mean the same thing, true of us as it was
true of the Jews: “Every one that committeth sin is the slave of sin.”
(b) Further, Christ says, men are in debt through their sin. In one
parable He tells us of a certain lender who had two debtors; the one owed
five hundred pence, and the other fifty; but neither had wherewith to pay.
In another parable we hear of a servant who owed his lord ten thousand
talents–a gigantic sum, vague in its vastness, “millions” as we might
say–and he likewise had not wherewith to pay. Further, in the application
of each parable, it is God to whom this unpayable debt is due. Now, it is
just at this point that our sense of sin to-day is weakest. The scientist,
the dramatist, the novelist are all proclaiming our responsibility toward
them that come after us; with pitiless insistence they are telling us that
the evil that men do lives after them, that it is not done with when it is
done. Yet, with all this, there may be no thought of God. It is the
consciousness not merely of responsibility, but of responsibility God-ward,
which needs to be strengthened. When we sin we may wrong others much, we
may wrong ourselves more, but we wrong God most of all; and we shall never
recover Christ’s thought of sin until, like the psalmist and the prodigal,
we have learned to cry to Him, “Against Thee have I sinned, and done that
which is evil in Thy sight.”
(3) But sin, in Christ’s view of it, is not merely something a man does,
it is what he is. Go through Paul’s long and dismal catalogue of “the works
of the flesh”: “Fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry,
sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousies, wraths, factions, divisions,
heresies, envyings, drunkenness, revellings, and such like.” Yet even this
is not the whole of the matter. Sin is more than the sum-total of man’s
sins. The fruits are corrupt because the tree which yields them is corrupt;
the stream is tainted because the fountain whence it flows is impure; man
commits sin because he is sinful. It was just here that Christ broke, and
broke decisively, with the traditional religion of His time. To the average
Jew of that day righteousness and sin meant nothing more than the
observance or the non-observance of certain religious traditions. “For the
Pharisees, and all the Jews, except they wash their hands diligently, eat
not, holding the tradition of the elders: and when they come from the
market-place, except they wash themselves, they eat not; and many other
things there be which they have received to hold, washings of cups, and
pots, and brazen vessels.” “Nay,” said Jesus, “you are beginning at the
wrong end, you are concerned about the wrong things, for from within, out
of the heart of men, evil thoughts proceed, fornications, thefts, murders,
adulteries, covetings, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye,
railing, pride, foolishness: all these evil things proceed from within.”
Deep in the heart of man evil has its seat, and until that is touched
nothing is done.
(4) And, lastly, Christ says all men are sinful. Of course, He did not
say, nor did He imply that all are equally sinful. On the contrary, He said
plainly that whereas the debt of some is as fifty pence, the debt of others
is as five hundred pence. Neither did Christ teach that man is wholly
sinful, in the sense that there is in man nothing that is good, or that
every man is by nature as bad as he can be. Nor, let it be said in passing,
is this what theology means when it speaks, as it still sometimes does,
about the “total depravity” of human nature. What is meant is, as Dr.
Denney says, that the depravity which sin has produced in human nature
extends to the whole of it.[35] If I poison my finger, it is not only the finger that is poisoned; the
poison is in the blood, and, unless it be got rid of, not my finger merely,
but my life is in peril. And in like manner the sin which taints my nature
taints my whole nature, perverting the conscience, enfeebling the will, and
darkening the understanding. But with whatever qualifications Christ’s
indictment is against the whole human race. He never discusses the origin
of sin, but He always assumes its presence. No matter how His hearers might
vary, this factor remained constant. “If ye, being evil” that mournful
presupposition could be made everywhere. He spoke of men as “lost,” and
said that He had come to seek and save them. He summoned men, without
distinction, to repentance. He spoke of His blood as “shed for many unto
remission of sins.” The gospel which, in His name, was to be preached unto
all the nations was concerning “repentance and remission of sins.” Even His
own disciples He taught, as they prayed, to say, “Forgive us our sins.” And
though it is true He said once that He had not come to call the righteous
but sinners to repentance, He did not thereby mean to suggest that there
really are some righteous persons who have no need of repentance; rather
was He seeking by the keenness of His Divine irony to pierce the hard
self-satisfaction of men whose need was greater just because it was
unfelt.
“All have sinned;” but once more let us remind ourselves, sin is not
seriously realized except as a personal fact. The truth must come home as a
truth about ourselves. The accusing finger singles men out and fastens the
charge on each several conscience: “Thou art the man!” And as the
accusation is individual, so, likewise, must the acknowledgement be. It is
not enough that in church we cry in company, “Lord have mercy upon us,
miserable offenders”; each must learn to pray for himself, “God be merciful
to me a sinner.” Then comes the word of pardon, personal and individual as
the condemnation, “The Lord also hath put away thy sin.”
II
In what has been said thus far I have dwelt, for the most part, on the
sterner and darker aspects of Christ’s teaching about sin. And, as every
student of contemporary literature knows, there are voices all around us
to-day ready to take up and emphasize every word of His concerning the
mischief wrought by moral evil. Take, e.g., a passage like this from
Thomas Hardy’s powerful but sombre story, Tess:–
“Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?”
“Yes.”
“All like ours?”
“I don’t know; but I think so. They sometimes seem to me like the apples
on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound–a few blighted.”
“Which do we live on–a splendid one, or a blighted one?”
“A blighted one.”
Or, turn to the works of George Eliot. No prophet of righteousness ever
bound sin and its consequences more firmly together, or proclaimed with
more solemn emphasis the certainty of the evil-doer’s doom. “Our deeds are
like children that are born to us,” she says; “nay, children may be
strangled, but deeds never”–this is the note one hears through all her
books. If we have done wrong, it is in vain we cry for mercy. We are taken
by the throat and delivered over to the tormentors until we have paid the
uttermost farthing.
“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.”And this is all that writers such as these have to say to us.
Retribution they know, but not Redemption. “There are no arresting angels
in the path”–only the Angel of Justice with the drawn sword.
But this is not the teaching of Jesus concerning sin. He is not blind,
and if we give ear to Him He will not suffer us to be blind, either to its
character or its consequences; but He says that sin can be forgiven, and
its iron bondage broken. Jesus believed in the recoverability of man at his
worst. It is a fact significant of much that the first mention of sin in
the New Testament is in a prophecy of its destruction: “Thou shalt call His
name Jesus; for it is He that shall save His people from their sins.” And
throughout the first three Gospels sin is named almost exclusively in
connection with its forgiveness.[36] What Christ hath joined together let no man put
asunder. Herein is the very gospel of God, that Christ came not to condemn
the world, but that the world, through Him, might be saved. “Do you know
what Christ would say to you, my girl?” said a missionary to a poor girl
dying. “He would say, ‘Thy sins are forgiven thee.'” “Would He, though,
would He?” she cried, starting up; “take me to Him, take me to Him.” Yes,
thank God, we know what to do with our sin; we know what we must do to be
saved.
Let us go back again for a moment over the ground we have already
travelled. We are in debt, with nothing to pay; but Christ has taken the
long account, and has crossed it through and through. We are in bondage,
with no power to set ourselves free; but Christ has come to rend the iron
chain and proclaim deliverance to the captives. We are wrong, wrong within,
wrong at the core; but again He is equal to our need, for concerning Him it
is written that He shall take away not only the “sins” but the “sin” of the
world. Is anything too hard for Him? Just as a lover of pictures will
sometimes discover a portrait, the work of an old master, marred and
disfigured by the dirt and neglect of years, and will patiently cleanse and
retouch it, till the lips seem to speak again, and the old light shines in
the eyes, and all its hidden glory is revealed once more, so does Christ
bring out the Divine image, hidden but never lost, in the sinful souls of
men. And all this He can do for all men; for Christ knows no hopeless
ones.
One of the saddest sights in a great city is its hospital for
incurables. Who can think but with a pang of pity and of pain of these–old
men and little children joined in one sad fellowship–for whom the
physician’s skill has done its best and failed, for whom now nothing
remains save to suffer and to die? But in the world’s great hospital of
ailing souls, where every day the Good Physician walks, there is no
incurable ward. He lays His hands on the sick, and they are healed; He
touches the eyes of the blind, and they see; unto the leper as white as
snow his flesh comes again as the flesh of a little child; even souls that
are dead through their trespasses and sins He restores to life. But never,
never does He turn away from any, saying, “Thou art too far gone; there is
nothing that I can do for thee.” “I spake to Thy disciples,” cried the
father of the child which had a dumb spirit, “I spake to Thy disciples that
they should cast it out; and they were not able.” “Bring him unto Me,” said
Jesus. Then He rebuked the unclean spirit, saying unto him, “Thou dumb and
deaf spirit, I command thee, come out of him and enter no more into him.”
Verily, with authority He commandeth even the unclean spirits and they obey
Him.
Therefore let us despair of no man; therefore let no man despair of
himself. If we will, we can; we can, because Christ will. “I was before,”
says St. Paul, “a blasphemer, and a persecutor, and injurious; howbeit I
obtained mercy.” “I am a wretched captive of sin,” cries Samuel Rutherford,
“yet my Lord can hew heaven out of worse timber.” There is no unpardonable
sin–none, at least, save the sin of refusing the pardon which avails for
all sin. “‘Mine iniquity is greater than can be forgiven.’[37] No, Cain, thou errest; God’s mercy
is far greater, couldst thou ask mercy. Men cannot be more sinful than God
is merciful if, with penitent hearts, they will call upon Him.”
We have all read of the passing of William MacLure in Ian Maclaren’s
touching idyll. “A’m gettin’ drowsy,” said the doctor to Drumsheugh, “read
a bit tae me.” Then Drumsheugh put on his spectacles, and searched for some
comfortable Scripture. Presently he began to read: “In My Father’s house
are many mansions;” but MacLure stopped him. “It’s a bonnie word,” he said,
“but it’s no’ for the like o’ me. It’s ower guid; a’ daurna tak’ it.” Then
he bid Drumsheugh shut the book and let it open of itself, and he would
find the place where he had been reading every night for the last month.
Drumsheugh did as he was bidden, and the book opened at the parable wherein
the Master tells what God thinks of a Pharisee and a penitent sinner. And
when he came to the words, “And the publican, standing afar off, would not
lift up so much as his eyes to heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying,
God be merciful to me a sinner,” once more the dying man stopped him: “That
micht hae been written for me, Paitrick, or ony ither auld sinner that hes
feenished his life, an’ hes naething tae say for himsel.”
Nothing to say for ourselves–that is what it comes to, when we know the
truth about ourselves. And when at last our mouth is stopped, when our last
poor plea is silenced, when with penitent and obedient hearts we seek the
mercy to which from the first we have been utterly shut up, then indeed
we
“have found the ground wherein
Sure our soul’s anchor may remain.”“Not by works done in righteousness, which we did ourselves, but
according to His mercy He saved us.”
CONCERNING RIGHTEOUSNESS
“I spend my whole life in going about and persuading you
all to give your first and chiefest care to the perfection of your souls,
and not till you have done that to think of your bodies, or your wealth;
and telling you that virtue does not come from wealth, but that wealth, and
every other good thing which men have, whether in public, or in private,
comes from virtue.”–SOCRATES.
IX
CONCERNING RIGHTEOUSNESS
“Seek ye first … His righteousness.“–MATT. vi. 33.
Righteousness, as it was understood and taught by Christ, includes the
two things which we often distinguish as religion and morality. It is
right-doing, not only as between man and man, but as between man and God.
The Lawgiver of the New Testament, like the lawgiver of the Old, has given
to us two tables of stone. On the one He has written, “Thou shalt love the
Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy
mind “; and on the other, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” In
these two commandments the whole law is summed up, the whole duty of man is
made known. It is well to emphasize this two-fold aspect of the truth at a
time when we are often tempted to define religion wholly in the terms of
morality, and, while insisting on the duties which we owe to each other, to
forget those which we owe to God. If there be a God righteousness must
surely have a meaning in relation to Him; it cannot be simply another name
for philanthropy. Christ at least will not call that man just and good who
does right to all except his Maker. In the Christian doctrine of the good
life room must be found for God. At the present moment, however, it is the
subject in its man-ward aspect that I wish specially to keep in view,
partly because some limitation is obviously necessary, and partly also
because it is this of which Christ Himself had most to say.
I
What, then, is Christ’s idea of righteousness? In other words, what did
He teach concerning the good life? Now here also, as in His teaching about
God, Christ did not need to begin de novo. Those to whom He spoke
had already their own ideals of duty and holiness. True, these were sadly
in need of revision and correction. Nevertheless, such as they were, they
were there, and Christ could use them as His starting-point. Consequently,
therefore, we find His ideas of righteousness defined largely by contrast
with existing ideas. “It was said to them of old time … but I say unto you.” This is the note heard all through the Sermon on the Mount.
The contrast may be stated in two ways.
(1) In the first place, Christ said that the righteousness of His
disciples must exceed that of publicans and heathen: “If ye love them that
love you, what reward have ye? Do not even the publicans the same? And if
ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? Do not even the
Gentiles the same?” There are virtues exhibited in the lives of even wholly
irreligious men. There are rudimentary moral principles which they that
know not God nevertheless acknowledge and obey. It was so in Christ’s time;
it is so still. The popular American ballad, “Jim Bludso,” and Ian
Maclaren’s touching story of the Drumtochty postman, are familiar
illustrations of self-sacrificing virtues revealed by men of coarse and
vicious lives. Nor ought we to deny the reality of such virtues; still less
ought we to follow the bad example of St. Augustine and call them “splendid
vices.” Such was not Christ’s way. He assumed the existence and reality of
this “natural goodness,” and with familiar illustrations of it on His
tongue turned upon His disciples with the question, “What do ye more?”
“What do ye more?” Yet in some respects, it is to be feared, the
morality of the Church sometimes falls behind that of the world. One of the
most painful passages in St. Paul’s epistles is that in which he tells the
Corinthian Christians that one of their own number had been guilty of
immorality such as would have shocked even the conscience of an unbelieving
Gentile. And it was but the other day that I came across this sentence from
the pen of an observant and friendly critic of contemporary religious life:
“I am afraid,” he said, “it must be admitted that the idea of honour,
though in itself an essential part of Christian ethics, is much stronger
outside the Churches than within them.” How far facts justify the criticism
I will not stay to inquire; but the very fact that a charge like this can
be made should prove a sharp reminder to us of the stringency of the
demands which Jesus Christ makes upon us. There is no kind of sound moral
fruit which is to be found anywhere in the wide fields of the world which
He does not look for in richer and riper abundance within the garden of His
Church.
A great Christian preacher has given an admirable illustration of one
way in which we may examine ourselves in this matter. He has grouped
together a number of precepts from the writings of some of the great
heathen moralists, such as Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, and then has
urged the question how far we who profess to be the disciples of a loftier
faith are true even to these ancient heathen ideals.[38] Perhaps, however, this is not a method of
self-examination which is open to us all. But this, at least, we can do: we
can test ourselves by that moral law, which God gave to the Jews by Moses,
and which Christ reinterpreted in the Sermon on the Mount. “Thou shalt not
kill, thou shalt not commit adultery”–all these commandments in their
literal meaning we must observe; yet this is not enough; “do not even the
publicans the same?” and Christ’s demand is, “What do ye more than others?”
The murderous thought, Christ says, that is murder; the lustful look, that
is adultery. “Ye have heard that it was said, Thou shalt love thy
neighbour, and hate thine enemy: but I say unto you, Love your enemies, and
pray for them that persecute you.” As we listen to words like these must
not we also confess, “Either these sayings are not Christ’s, or we are not
Christians”?
(2) Christ’s idea of righteousness is further defined by contrast with
that of the Pharisees: “Except your righteousness shall exceed the
righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no wise enter into
the kingdom of heaven.” What was the Pharisees’ idea of religion? Let us
take the words which Christ Himself put into the lips of a representative
of his class: “God, I thank Thee, that I am not as the rest of men,
extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican. I fast twice in
the week; I give tithes of all that I get.” This is a full-length portrait
of the finished Pharisee. Religion to him was a round of prescribed ritual,
a barren externalism, a subjection to the dominion of the letter, which
never touched the heart, nor bowed the spirit down in penitence and
humility before God. The Pharisee’s whole concern was with externals; but
Christ declared that he who is only right outwardly is not right at all.
There is no such thing, He said, as goodness which is not from within. The
alms-deeds, the prayer, the fasting of the Pharisee were all done before
men, to be seen of them; and so long as that which men saw was right and
seemly, he was satisfied. But Christ went back behind the outward act to
the heart. A man is really, He said, what he is there. You may hang grapes
on a thorn-bush, that will not make it a vine; you may put a sheep’s fleece
on a wolf’s back, but that will not change its wolfish heart. And men are
what they are within. Just as to get good fruit you must first of all make
the tree good, so to secure good deeds you must first make good men. This
was the truth which Pharisaism ignored; with what results all the world
knows. In the long history of man, it remains, perhaps, the supreme
illustration of the fatal facility with which religion and morality are
divorced when once the emphasis is laid upon the outward and ceremonial
instead of the inward and spiritual. All experience helps us to understand
how the system works. There is no deliberate intention of setting ritual
above righteousness, but it is so much easier to count one’s beads than to
curb one’s temper, so much easier to fast in Lent than to be unswervingly
just, that if once the easier thing gets attached to it an exaggerated
importance, fidelity in it is allowed to atone for laxity in greater
things, and the last result is Pharisaism, where we see conscience
concerned about the tithing of garden herbs, but with no power over the
life, and religion not merely tolerating but actually ministering to moral
evil. It was in the name of religion that the Pharisees suffered a man to
violate even the sanctities of the Fifth Commandment, and to do dishonour
to his father and mother. The righteous man in their eyes was not he who
loved mercy, and did justly, and walked humbly with his God, but he who
observed the traditions of the elders. So that, as Professor Bruce
says,[39] it was possible for a
man to comply with all the requirements of the Rabbis and yet remain in
heart and life an utter miscreant. “Outwardly,” said Christ, “ye appear
righteous unto men, but inwardly ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.” Is
it any wonder that He should call down fire from heaven to consume a system
which had yielded such bitter, poisonous fruits as these?
But let us remember, as Mozley well says,[40] there are no extinct species in the world of
evil. The value for us of Christ’s condemnation lies in this, that it is a
permanent tendency of human nature which He is condemning. Pharisaism is
not dead. Have I not seen the Pharisee dressed in good broad-cloth and
going to church with his Bible under his arm? And have I not seen him
sitting in church and reading the twenty-third chapter of St. Matthew’s
Gospel, and thinking to himself what shockingly wicked people these men
must have been of whom Christ spoke such terrible words, and never once
supposing that there is anything in the chapter that concerns him? No,
Pharisaism is not dead; and when we read of those who devoured widows’
houses and for a pretence made long prayers, using their religion as a
cloak for their villainy, let us remember that Christ says to His disciples
to-day, even as He said to them centuries ago, “Except your righteousness
shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no
wise enter into the kingdom of heaven.”
II
Thus far we have considered Christ’s idea of righteousness only in
contrast with other ideas. When we seek to define it in itself we fall back
naturally on the words of the two great commandments which have already
been quoted: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with
all thy soul, and with all thy mind;” and “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as
thyself.” Righteousness, Christ says, is love, love to God and love to
man.
But to them of old time it was said, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour.”
Where, then, is the difference between the old commandment and the new? It
lies in the new definition of “neighbour.” The old law which said, “Thou
shalt love thy neighbour,” said also, “and hate thine enemy”; which meant
that some are and some are not our neighbours, and that toward those who
are not love has no obligations. But Christ broke down for ever the middle
wall of partition, and declared the old distinction null and void. In His
parable of the Good Samaritan He taught that every man is our neighbour who
has need of us, and to whom it is possible for us to prove ourselves a
friend. As we have opportunity we are to do good unto all men. The same
lesson with, if possible, still greater emphasis, Christ taught in the
Upper Room: “A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another;
even as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.” A love that goes
all the way with human need, that gives not itself by measure, that is not
chilled by indifference, nor thwarted by ingratitude, that fights against
evil until it overcomes it–such was the love He gave, and such is the love
He asks. And in that command all other commands are comprehended. Christ
might have made His own the daring word of St. Augustine, “Love, and do
what you like.”
When first men heard this law of the heavenly righteousness how wondrous
simple it must have seemed in contrast with the elaborate scribe-made law
which their Rabbis laid upon them. Pharisaism had reduced religion to a
branch of mechanics, a vast network of rules which closed in the life of
man on every side, a burden grievous and heavy to be borne, which crushed
the soul under its weary load. This was the yoke of which Peter said that
neither they nor their fathers were able to bear it. Was it any marvel that
from such a system men should turn to Him who cried, “Take My yoke upon
you, and learn of Me; for My yoke is easy, and My burden is light”? But if
Christ’s law of love is simpler it is also far more exacting than the old
law which it superseded. It has meshes far finer than any that Pharisaic
ingenuity could weave. Rabbinical law can secure the tithing of mint and
anise and cumin, the washing of cups and pots, and many such like things;
it can regulate the life of ritual and outward observance; and after that
it has no more that it can do. But Christ’s law of love is a mentor that
searches out the deep things of man. The inside of the cup and platter, the
things that are within, the hidden man of the heart–it is on these its
eyes are fixed. It gives heed both to the words of the mouth and the
meditations of the heart. And, sometimes, when the lips are speaking fair,
suddenly it will fling open the heart’s door and show us where, in some
secret chamber, Greed and Pride and Envy and Hate sit side by side in
unblest fellowship. Verily this law of love is living and active, sharper
than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing of soul and spirit,
of both joints and marrow, quick to discern the thoughts and intents of the
heart.
There is no room to do more than mention the fact which crowns the
revelation of this new law of righteousness. Christ’s words about goodness
do not come to us alone; they come united with a life which is their best
exposition. Christ is all His followers are to be; in Him the righteousness
of the kingdom is incarnate. From henceforth the righteous man is the
Christ-like man. The standard of human life is no longer a code but a
character; for the gospel does not put us into subjection to fresh laws; it
calls us to “the study of a living Person, and the following of a living
Mind.”[41] And when to Jesus we
bring the old question, “Good Master, what shall I do that I may inherit
eternal life?” He does not now repeat the commandments, but He says, “If
thou wouldest be perfect, follow Me, learn of Me, do as I have done to you,
love as I have loved you.”
III
Such, then, is the good life which Christ reveals, and to which He calls
us. To say that to Him we owe our highest ideal of righteousness, is only
to affirm what no one now seriously denies. John Stuart Mill has, it is
true, alleged certain defects against Christianity as an ethical system,
yet Mill himself has frankly admitted that “it would not be easy now, even
for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule of virtue from
the abstract to the concrete, than to endeavour so to live that Christ
would approve our life.” If Christ be not our one Master in the moral
world, it will at least be soon enough to discuss a rival’s claims when he
appears; as yet there is no sign of him. But the point I am most anxious to
emphasize just now is not simply that Jesus has put before us an ideal, the
highest of its kind in the world, but that there is nothing of any kind to
be desired before it. To be good as Christ was good, here in very truth is
the summum bonum of life, the greatest thing in the world, that
which, before all other things, a man should seek to make his own, There
are times, perhaps, in the lives of all of us when we are tempted to doubt
it–times when the kingdoms of this world, the kingdoms of wealth and power
and knowledge lie stretched at our feet, and the whispering fiend at our
elbow bids us bow and enter in. But once again, if we be true men, the
moment comes,
“When the spirit’s true endowments
Stand out plainly from its false ones,”when the sacred, saving faith in righteousness returns, and we know that
Christ was right, that for ever and for ever it is true that better than to
be rich, or to be clever, or to be famous, is it to be true, to be pure, to
be good.
Yes, goodness is the principal thing; therefore get goodness, and with
all thy getting–at the price of all that thou hast gotten (such is the
true meaning of the words)[42]–get righteousness. Is this what we are doing?
Goodness is the first thing; are we putting it first? Day by day are we
saying to it, “Sit thou on my right hand,” while we put all other things
under our feet? “Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I remember
thee not; if I prefer not thee above my chief joy”–is this the kind of
honour that we are paying to it? “We make it our ambition,” said St Paul,
“to be well pleasing unto Him.”[43] Where this is the master ambition, all other
lawful ambitions may be safely cherished and given their place. But if some
lesser power rule, whose right it is not to reign over us, the end is chaos
and night. “Seek ye first His righteousness;” we subvert Christ’s order at
our peril. And this righteousness must be sought. As men seek wealth, as
men seek knowledge, as men seek power, so must we seek goodness. “Wherefore
giving all diligence”–in no other way can the pearl of great price be
secured; it does not lie by the roadside for any lounger to pick up. “With
toil of heart and knees and hands,” so only can the “path upward” and the
prize be won. “Blessed,” said Jesus, “are they that hunger and thirst after
righteousness.” Blessed, He meant, are they who long more than anything
else to be good; for all such longing shall be abundantly satisfied. Exalt
righteousness, and she shall promote thee; she shall bring thee to honour
when thou dost embrace her. She shall give to thine head a chaplet of
grace; a crown of beauty shall she deliver to thee.
It is fitting that a chapter on righteousness should follow one on sin,
for this may find some to whom the other made no appeal. At a meeting of
Christian workers held some years ago in Glasgow, the chairman invited the
late Professor Henry Drummond, who was present, though his name was not on
the programme, to say a few words. He accepted the invitation, but said he
would do no more than state a fact and ask a question. The fact was this,
that in recent revival movements, in which he had had large experience,
there were few indications of that deep and overwhelming conviction of sin
which had been so characteristic a feature of similar revivals in past
days. And this was the question, Did it mean that the Holy Spirit was in
any way modifying the method of His operation? What answer the wise men of
the meeting gave to the Professor’s question I do not know. But fact and
question alike deserve to be carefully pondered. The Spirit, when He is
come, Christ said, “will convict the world in respect of sin, and of
righteousness, and of judgment.” “Will convict the world of
righteousness”–have we not sometimes forgotten this? Have we not put the
full stop at “sin,” as though the Holy Spirit’s convicting work ended
there? Nevertheless, there are many to-day whose religious life begins, not
so much in a sense of their own sin and guilt and need, as rather in the
consciousness of the glory and honour of Christ. It is what they find
within themselves which brings some men to Christ; it is what they find in
Him which brings others. Some are driven by the strong hands of stern
necessity; some are wooed by the sweet constraint of the sinless Son of
God. Some are crushed and broken and humbled to the dust, and their first
cry is “God be merciful to me a sinner”; some when they hear the call of
Christ leap up to greet Him with a new light in their eyes and the glad
confession on their lips, “Lord I will follow Thee whithersoever Thou
goest.”
What, then, shall we say to these things? What but this, “There are
diversities of workings, but the same God, who worketh all things in all.”
Travellers to the same country do not always journey by the same route; and
for some of the heavenly pilgrims the Slough of Despond lies on the other
side of the Wicket Gate. After all, it is of small moment what brings a man
forth from the City of Destruction; enough if he have come out and if now
his face is set toward the city which hath the foundations, whose builder
and maker is God.
CONCERNING PRAYER
“Who seeketh finds: what shall be his relief
Who hath no power to seek, no heart to pray,
No sense of God, but bears as best he may,
A lonely incommunicable grief?
What shall he do? One only thing he knows,
That his life flits a frail uneasy spark
In the great vast of universal dark,
And that the grave may not be all repose.
Be still, sad soul! lift thou no passionate cry,
But spread the desert of thy being bare
To the full searching of the All-seeing eye:
Wait–and through dark misgiving, blank despair,
God will come down in pity, and fill the dry
Dead plain with light, and life, and vernal air.”
J.C. SHAIRP.
X
CONCERNING PRAYER
“What man is there of you, who, if his son shall ask him
for a loaf, will give him a stone; or if he shall ask for a fish, will give
him a serpent? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto
your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good
things to them that ask Him?”–MATT. vii. 9-11.
There has been in our day much painful disputation concerning prayer and
the laws of nature. Whole volumes have been written to prove that it is
possible, or that it is impossible, for God to answer prayer. I am not
going to thresh out again this dry straw just now. Discussions of this kind
have, undoubtedly, their place; indeed, whether we will or no, they are
often forced upon us by the conditions of the hour; but they had no place
in the teaching of Jesus, and I do not propose to say anything about them
now. I wish rather, imitating as far as may be the gracious simplicity and
directness of the argument of Jesus which we have just read, to gather up
some of the practical suggestions touching this great matter which are
strewn throughout the Gospels alike in the precepts and practice of our
Lord.
I
First of all, then, let us get fixed in our minds the saying of Jesus
that “men ought always to pray and not to faint.” The very form of the
saying suggests that Christ knew how easy it is for us to faint and grow
weary in our prayers. Men cease from prayer on many grounds. Some there are
in whom the questioning, doubting spirit has grown so strong that for a
time it has silenced even the cry of the heart for God. Some there are who
are so busy, they tell us, that they have no time for prayer; and after
all, they ask, Is not honest work the highest kind of prayer? And some
there are who have ceased to pray, because they have been disappointed,
because nothing seemed to come of their prayers. They asked but they did
not receive, they sought but they did not find, they knocked but no door
was opened to them; there was neither voice, nor any to answer, nor any
that regarded; and now they ask, they seek, they knock no more. And some of
us there are who do not pray because, as one of the psalmists says, our
soul “cleaveth unto the dust.” The things of God, the things of the soul,
the things of eternity–what Paul calls “the things that are above”–are of
no concern to us; we have sold ourselves to work, to think, to live, for
the things of the earth and the dust.
Nevertheless, be the cause of our prayerlessness what it may, Christ’s
word remains true. Man made in the image of God ought always to pray and
not to faint. And even more than by His words does Christ by His example
prompt us to prayer. Turn, e.g., to the third Gospel. All the
Evangelists show us Jesus at prayer; but it is to Luke that we owe almost
all our pictures of the kneeling Christ. Let us glance at them as they pass
in quick succession before our eyes:
“Jesus having been baptized, and praying, the heaven was opened” (iii.
21).
“He withdrew Himself in the deserts, and prayed” (v. 16).
“It came to pass in these days, that He went out into the mountain to
pray; and He continued all night in prayer to God”. (vi. 12).
“It came to pass, as He was praying alone, the disciples were with Him”
(ix. 18).
“It came to pass about eight days after these sayings, He took with Him
Peter and John and James and went up into the mountain to pray. And as He
was praying the fashion of His countenance was altered, and His raiment
became white and dazzling” (ix. 28, 29).
“It came to pass, as He was praying in a certain place, that when He
ceased, one of the disciples said unto Him, Lord, teach us to pray, even as
John also taught his disciples” (xi. 1).
“Simon, Simon, behold, Satan asked to have you, that he might sift you
as wheat; but I made supplication for thee, that thy faith fail not” (xxii.
32).
“And He kneeled down and prayed, saying, Father, if Thou be willing,
remove this cup from Me: nevertheless not My will, but Thine be done….
And being in an agony He prayed more earnestly, and His sweat became as it
were great drops of blood falling down upon the ground” (xxii. 41, 44).
“And Jesus said, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do”
(xxiii. 34).
And if thus He, the Redeemer, prayed, how much greater need have we, the
redeemed, always to pray and not to faint?
“But we are so busy, we have no time.” Then let us look at another
picture. This time it is Mark who is the painter. He has chosen as his
subject our Lord’s first Sabbath in Capernaum. The day begins with
teaching: “He entered into the synagogue and taught.” After teaching comes
healing: “There was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit;” him,
straightway, Jesus healed. Then, “straightway, when they were come out of
the synagogue, they came into the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and
John. Now Simon’s wife’s mother lay sick of a fever, and straightway they
tell Him of her; and He came and took her by the hand, and raised her up.”
So the day wore on toward evening and sunset, when “they brought unto Him
all that were sick, and them that were possessed with devils. And all the
city was gathered together at the door. And He healed many that were sick
with divers diseases and cast out many devils.” So closed at last the long
day’s busy toil. “And in the morning, a great while before day, He rose
up and went out and departed into a desert place, and there prayed;” as
if just because He was so much with men the more did He need to be with
God. Laborare est orare, we say, “work is prayer.” And, undoubtedly,
“work may be prayer”; but we are deceiving ourselves and hurting our own
souls, if we think that work can take the place of prayer. And if there is
one lesson that these earthly years of the Son of Man–busy as they were
prayerful, prayerful as they were busy–can teach us, it is surely this,
that just because our activities are so abounding, the more need have we to
make a space around the soul wherein it may be able to think, and pray, and
aspire.
One of the best-known pictures of the last half century is Millet’s
“Angelus.” The scene is a potato-field, in the midst of which, and
occupying the foreground of the picture, are two figures, a young man and a
young woman. Against the distant sky-line is the steeple of a church. It is
the evening hour, and as the bell rings which calls the villagers to
worship, the workers in the field lay aside the implements of their toil,
and with folded hands and bowed heads, stand for a moment in silent prayer.
It is a picture of what every life should be, of what every life must be,
which has taken as its pattern the Perfect Life in which work and prayer
are blent like bells of sweet accord.
II
Another saying of Christ’s concerning prayer, not less fundamental is
this: “When ye pray, say, Our Father, which art in heaven.” How essential
to prayer is a right thought of God it can hardly be necessary to point
out. “When ye pray say —-” what? All depends on how we fill in the blank.
Our thought of God determines the character of all our intercourse with
Him. If “God” is only the name which we give to the vast, unknown Power
which lies behind the visible phenomena of the universe, if He is only a
dim shadow projected by our own minds, or a collection of attributes whose
names we have learned from the Catechism, our prayers will soon come to an
end. When Jesus prayed He said always “Father”; and the Father to whom He
prayed, and whom He revealed, He it is to whom our prayers should be
offered.
This is a matter the practical importance of which it would be hard to
exaggerate. Think, e.g., of the questions concerning prayer which
would be answered straightway, had we but made our own Christ’s thought of
God. We are all familiar with the little problems about prayer with which
some good people are wont to tease themselves and their friends and their
ministers: Is it right to pray for rain, for fine weather for the recovery
of health, for the success of some temporal enterprize, and so forth? How
shall we meet questions of this sort? Shall we draw a line and say, all
things on this side of the line we may pray about, all things on that side
of the line we may not pray about? This will not help us. Rather we must
keep Christ’s great word before us: “When ye pray, say, Father.” There or
nowhere is the answer to be found. Just as every wise father seeks to train
his child to make of him his confidant, to have no secrets from him, to
trust him utterly, and in everything, so would God have us feel towards
Him; as free, as frank, as unfettered, should our fellowship with Him be.
To put it under constraint, to fence it about with rules, would be to rob
it of all that gives it worth, And, therefore, I cannot tell any man, and I
do not want any man to tell me, what we may pray for, or what we may not
pray for. “When ye pray, say, Father;” and for the rest let your own heart
teach you. But if we are left thus free shall we not ask many things which
we have no right to ask, which God cannot grant? Undoubtedly we shall, just
as a boy of five will ask many things that his father, because he loves
him, must refuse. Nevertheless, no wise father would wish to check the
childish prattle. There is nothing that he values more than just these
frank, uncalculating confidences, for he knows that it is by means of them
that the shaping hands of love can do their perfect work. And the remedy
for our mistakes in prayer is not a set of little man-made rules, telling
us what to pray for and what not to pray for, but rather a deeper insight
into, and a fuller understanding of, the glory and blessedness of the
Divine Fatherhood.
III
Passing now from these preliminary counsels concerning prayer, let us
note how great is the importance which, both by His precepts and His
example, Christ attaches to the duty of intercessory prayer. I have been
much struck of late in reading several books on this subject, to note how
one writer after another judges it needful to warn his readers against the
idea that prayer is no more than petition. What they say is, of course,
true; prayer is much more than petition. But, unless I misread the signs of
the times, this is not the warning which just now we most need to hear.
Rather do we need to be told that prayer is more than communion, that
petition, simple asking that we may obtain, is a part, and a very large
part of prayer. “Who rises from prayer a better man,” says George Meredith,
“his prayer is answered.” This is true, but it is far from being the whole
truth. The duty of intercession, of prayer for others, is writ large on
every page of the New Testament; but intercession has simply no meaning at
all unless we believe that God will grant our requests as may be most
expedient for us and for them for whom we pray. Let me illustrate the
wealth of Christ’s teaching on this matter by two or three examples.
(1) We have all read Tennyson’s question–
“What are men better than sheep or goats
That nourish a blind life within the brain,
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer
Both for themselves and those who call them friends?”For themselves and those who call them friends–but Christ will not
suffer us to stop there. “Bless them that curse you,” He said; “pray for
them that despitefully use you.” So He spoke, and on the Cross He made the
great word luminous for ever by His own prayer for His murderers: “Father,
forgive them; for they know not what they do.”
(2) Christ prayed for His disciples and for His Church: “I pray for them
… neither for these only do I pray, but for them also that believe on Me
through their word.” “I will pray the Father and He shall give you —-.”
Only once are the actual words recorded, but they cover, we are sure, great
stretches of Christ’s intercourse with God. And when once in their work for
Him they had failed, He puts His finger on the secret of their failure
thus: “This kind can come out by nothing save by prayer.” Do we pray for
our Church? We find fault with it; but do we pray for it? We blame its
office–bearers and criticize its ministers; but do we pray for them? We go
to the house of God on the Sabbath day; but no fire is burning on the
altar, the minister has no message for us, we come away no whit better than
we went. Whose is the blame? Let the man in the pulpit take his share; but
is it all his? Must not some of it be laid at the door of his people? How
many of them during the week had prayed for him, that his eyes might be
opened and his heart touched, that as he sat and worked in his study he
might get from God to give to them? Dr. Dale used to say that if ever he
preached a good sermon, a sermon that really helped men, it was due to the
prayers of his people as much as to anything he had done himself. If in all
our churches we would but proclaim a truce to our bickerings and
fault-findings, and try what prayer can do!
(3) Christ prayed for the children: “Then were there brought unto Him
little children that He should lay His hands on them, and pray…. And He
took them in His arms, and blessed them, laying His hands upon them.” It is
surely needless to dwell on this. What man is there who, if he have a
child, will not speak to God in his behalf? “And all the people said unto
Samuel, Pray for thy servants unto the Lord thy God that we die not…. And
Samuel said unto the people, God forbid that I should sin against the Lord
in ceasing to pray for you.” God have mercy on him who has little children
who bear his name, but who never cries to heaven in their behalf! “He
blessed them,” i.e. He invoked a blessing, God’s blessing, upon
them. And we are sure the prayer was heard, and the little ones were
blessed. And will not God hear our prayers for our children? When Monica,
the saintly mother of Augustine, besought an African bishop once and again
to help her with her wilful, profligate son, the good man answered her,
“Woman, go in peace; it cannot be that the child of such tears should be
lost.” “God’s seed,” wrote Samuel Rutherford to Marion M’Naught about her
daughter Grizel, “shall come to God’s harvest.” It shall, for the promise
holds, and what we have sown we shall also reap.
(4) And, lastly, Christ prayed for individuals: “Simon, Simon, behold,
Satan asked to have you,–all of you,” that is; the pronoun is
plural–“that he might sift you as wheat; but I made supplication for
thee”–“thee, Peter”; now the singular pronoun is used–“that thy faith
fail not.” The words point to a definite crisis in the experience of Peter,
when the onset of the Tempter was met by the intercession of the Saviour.
To me Gethsemane itself is not more wonderful than this picture of Christ
on His knees before God, naming His loved disciple by name, and praying
that, in this supreme hour of his life, his faith should not utterly break
down. “Making mention of thee in my prayers”–does this not bring us near
to the secret of prevailing prayer? We are afraid to be individual and
particular; we lose ourselves in large generalities, until our prayers die
of very vagueness. There is surely a more excellent way. “My God,” Paul
wrote to the Philippians, “shall fulfil”–not merely “all your need,” as
the Authorized Version has it, but–“every need of yours.” There is a fine
discrimination in the Divine love which sifts and sorts men’s needs, and
applies itself to them one by one, just as the need may be. And when in
prayer we speak to God, let it be not only of “all our need,” flung in one
great, careless heap before Him, but of “every need of ours,” each one
named by its name, and all spread out in order before Him.
IV
And as Christ teaches us to pray for others, so also does He teach us to
pray for ourselves. Two points only in this connection can be noted.
(1) Let us pray when we enter into our Gethsemane; for every life has
its Gethsemane. Some there are who have not yet entered it; they are young,
and their way thus far has teen among the roses and lilies of life. But for
them, too, the path leads to Gethsemane, and some day they also will lie
prostrate in an agony, under the darkening olive trees. And some there are
to whom life seems but one long Gethsemane. In that dread agony God help us
to pray! Nay, what else then can a man do but, as Browning says, catch at
God’s skirts and pray? But that he can do. Death may build its dividing
walls great and high, such as our feet can never scale; it cannot roof them
over and shut us out from God. We remember how it was with Enoch Arden,
stranded on an isle, “the loneliest in a lonely sea”:–
“Had not his poor heart
Spoken with That, which being everywhere
Lets none, who speaks with Him, seem all alone,
Surely the man had died of solitude.”Were it not for the doors opened in heaven what should man that is born
of a woman do? But when in our Gethsemane we offer up “prayers and
supplications, with strong crying and tears,” it is after Christ’s manner
that we must pray. I said just now that there are some to whom life seems
one long Gethsemane. Can it be because hitherto they have only prayed, “O
my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass away from me”? Not until
with Christ we bow our heads and say, “Nevertheless, not as I will, but as
Thou wilt,” will the iron gates unfold and the shadows of the Garden lie
behind us.
(2) “Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation.” And if there be
some to whom my last word had little or no meaning, here, at least, Christ
speaks to all. And this time I have nothing of my own to add by way of
comment; but I copy out this passage from Charles Kingsley’s Yeast,
for every young man who reads these words to lay to heart: “I am no saint,”
says Colonel Bracebridge, “and God only knows how much less of one I may
become; but mark my words–if you are ever tempted by passion, and vanity,
and fine ladies, to form liaisons, as the Jezebels call them, snares, and
nets and labyrinths of blind ditches, to keep you down through life,
stumbling and grovelling, hating yourself and hating the chain to which you
cling–in that hour pray–pray as if the devil had you by the throat–to
Almighty God, to help you out of that cursed slough! There is nothing else
for it!–pray, I tell you!”
CONCERNING THE
FORGIVENESS OF INJURIES
“She, who kept a tender Christian hope,
Haunting a holy text, and still to that
Returning, as the bird returns, at night,
‘Let not the sun go down upon your wrath,’
Said, ‘Love, forgive him:’ but he did not speak;
And silenced by that silence lay the wife,
Remembering her dear Lord who died for all,
And musing on the little lives of men,
And how they mar this little by their feuds.”
TENNYSON.
XI
CONCERNING THE FORGIVENESS OF INJURIES
“Then came Peter, and said to Him, Lord, how oft shall
my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? until seven times? Jesus
saith unto him, I say not unto thee, until seven times; but, until seventy
times seven.“–MATT, xviii. 21, 22.
This would seem to be plain enough, even though we had nothing more from
the lips of Jesus concerning the duty of forgiveness. In point of fact,
however, the lesson of these words is repeated a full half-dozen times
throughout the Gospels. It may be well, therefore, to begin by bringing
together our Lord’s sayings on the subject.
I
We turn first to the Sermon on the Mount: “Ye have heard that it was
said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy; but I say unto
you, Love your enemies, and pray for them that persecute you.” Then, in the
Lord’s Prayer we have the familiar petition, “Forgive us our trespasses as
we forgive them that trespass against us.” And it is surely a fact full of
significance that at the close of the prayer our Lord should single out
this one petition from the rest with this emphatic comment: “For if ye
forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.
But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father
forgive your trespasses.” The words quoted thus far are taken from the
first Gospel. Similar teaching is found in the second and third. Thus, in
Mark, we read: “And whensoever ye stand praying, forgive, if ye have aught
against any one; that your Father also which is in heaven may forgive you
your trespasses;” and in Luke: “If thy brother sin, rebuke him, and if he
repent, forgive him. And if he sin against thee seven times in the day, and
seven times turn again to thee, saying, I repent; thou shalt forgive him.”
Again, we have the teaching recorded by Matthew, out of which Peter’s
question sprang–“If thy brother sin against thee, go, show him his fault
between thee and him alone; if he hear thee, thou hast gained thy
brother”–followed by the parable of the Unforgiving Servant, with its
solemn warning of inimitable doom: “So shall also My heavenly Father do
unto you, if ye forgive not every one his brother from your hearts.” And,
finally, all these words are made fast for ever in the minds and
consciences of men, by the great act on the Cross when the dying Redeemer
prayed for the men who slew Him: “Father, forgive them; for they know not
what they do.”
The meaning of all this is unmistakable. No child could miss the point
of the solemn parable to which I have referred. At the same time, it may
not be out of place to point out that there are not a few instances in
which people may feel themselves wronged, which, nevertheless, do not come
within the scope of Christ’s teaching about forgiveness. An illustration
will best explain my meaning. It sometimes happens, both in business life
and in the Church, that two men, equally honourable and true, but with
almost nothing else in common, are often thrown into each other’s company.
They have to deal with the same facts, but they look upon them with wholly
different eyes, they approach them from wholly different points of view.
The results are obvious. There are not only widely differing opinions, but
occasional misunderstandings, and sometimes sharper words than ought ever
to pass between Christian men. Now, to say broadly that one is right and
the other wrong, that the one owes confession and the other forgiveness, is
simply not true; what is true is that the men are different, different in
temperament, different in training, different in their whole habits of
thought and life. And what is needed is that each should learn frankly to
recognize the fact. This is not a case for rebuking, and repenting, and
forgiving, but for mutual forbearance. There are multitudes of good people,
people whose goodness no one who knows them would ever question, whom yet
we cannot take to our bosoms, and treat as intimate personal friends. Even
religion does not all at once straighten out all the twists in human
nature, nor rub down all its hard angularities. And, as I say, it is our
simple, common-sense duty to recognize the fact; and if sometimes we find
even our fellow–Christians “very trying,” well, we must learn to bear and
forbear, always remembering that others probably find us no less trying
than we sometimes find them. But where grave and undeniable injury has been
done, immediately Christ’s teaching comes into operation. The injured one
must banish all thought of revenge. Never must we say, “I will do so to him
as he hath done to me; I will render to the man according to his work.”
Rather must we strive to overcome evil by good, and by the manifestation of
a forgiving spirit to win the wrong-doer to repentance and amendment.
II
When, now, we take these precepts of Jesus and lay them side by side
with the life of the world, or even with the life of the Church, as day by
day it passes before our eyes, our first thought must be, how little yet do
men heed the words of Jesus, how much mightier is the pagan spirit of
revenge than the Christian spirit of forgiveness. Indeed, of all the
virtues which Christ inculcated, this, perhaps, is the most difficult. True
forgiveness–I do not speak of the poor, bloodless phantom which sometimes
passes by the name:
“Forgive! How many will say ‘forgive,’ and find
A sort of absolution in the sound
To hate a little longer,”–not of such do I speak, but of true forgiveness, and this, I say, can
never for us men be an easy thing. Perhaps a frank consideration of some of
the difficulties may contribute to their removal.
(1) One chief reason why Christ’s command remains so largely a dead
letter is to be found in our unwillingness to acknowledge that we have
committed an injury. That another should have wronged us we find no
difficulty in believing; that we have wronged another is very hard to
believe. Look at the very form of Peter’s question: “How oft shall my
brother sin against me, and I forgive him?” “My brother” the wrong-doer,
myself the wronged–that is what we are all ready to assume. But what if it
is I who have need to be forgiven? But this is what our pride will not
suffer us to believe. That “bold villain” Shame, who plucked Faithful by
the elbow in the Valley of Humiliation, and sought to persuade him that it
is a shame to ask one’s neighbour forgiveness for petty faults, or to make
restitution where we have taken from any, is always quick to seize his
opportunity. And he is especially quick when acknowledgement is due to one
who is socially our inferior. If an employee be guilty of some gross
discourtesy towards his master, or a servant towards her mistress, the
master or mistress may demand a prompt apology on pain of instant
dismissal. But when it is the servant or employee who is the injured person
he has no such remedy; yet surely, in Christ’s eyes, his very dependence
makes the duty of confession doubly imperative. “If,” Christ said, “thou
art offering thy gift at the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother
hath aught against thee”–note exactly Christ’s words; He did not say, “If
thou rememberest that thou hast aught against thy brother”; alas, it is
very easy for most of us to do that; what He said was, “If thou rememberest
that thy brother hath aught against thee.” Whom did I overreach in business
yesterday? Whose good name did I drag through the mire? What heart did I
stab with my cruel words? “If thou rememberest that thy brother hath aught
against thee, leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way, first
be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift.”
(2) If the difficulties are great when we have committed the wrong, they
are hardly less when we have suffered it. Thomas Fuller tells how once he
saw a mother threatening to beat her little child for not rightly
pronouncing the petition in the Lord’s Prayer, “Forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive them that trespass against us.” The child tried its best, but
could get no nearer than “tepasses,” and “trepasses.” “Alas!” says Fuller,
it is a shibboleth to a child’s tongue wherein there is a confluence of
hard consonants together; and then he continues, “What the child could not
pronounce the parents do not practise. O how lispingly and imperfectly do
we perform the close of this petition: As we forgive them that trespass
against us.” In the old Greek and Roman world, we have been told, people
not only did not forgive their enemies, but did not wish to do so, nor
think better of themselves for having done so. That man considered himself
fortunate who, on his deathbed, could say, on reviewing his past life, that
no one had done more good to his friends or more mischief to his enemies.
And though we profess and call ourselves Christians, how strong in many of
us still is the old heathen desire to be “even with” one who has wronged
us, and to make him smart for it. Many of us, as Dr. Dale says,[44] have given a new turn to an old
text. In our own private Revised Version of the New Testament we read:
“Whosoever speaketh a word or committeth a wrong against God, it shall be
forgiven him; but whosoever speaketh a word or committeth a wrong against
me, it shall not be forgiven him; certainly not in this world, even if it
is forgiven in the world to come.” Resentment against moral evil every good
man must feel; but when with the clear, bright flame of a holy wrath there
mingle the dark fumes of personal vindictiveness, we do wrong, we sin
against God.
Nowhere in Scripture, perhaps, have we such a lesson on the difficulty
of forgiveness as in the reference to Alexander the coppersmith, in St.
Paul’s last letter to Timothy. Even if we read his words in the modified
and undoubtedly accurate form in which they are found in the Revised
Version, we still feel how far short they come of the standard of Christ.
“Paul,” says Dr. Whyte, “was put by Alexander to the last trial and sorest
temptation of an apostolic and a sanctified heart.”[45] And with all the greatness of our regard for
the great apostle, we dare not say that he came out of the trial wholly
unscathed. Did ever any man come out of such a fire unhurt–any save One?
Yet it is not for me to sit in judgment on St. Paul; only let us remember
we have no warrant from God to hate any man and to hand him over to eternal
judgment even though, like Alexander, he heap insult and injury, not only
upon ourselves, but upon the cause and Church of Christ.
(3) And then to this native, inborn unwillingness to forgive there comes
in to strengthen it our knowledge of the fact that forgiveness is sometimes
mistaken for, and does, in fact, sometimes degenerate into, the moral
weakness which slurs over a fault, and refuses to strike only because it
dare not. Nevertheless, though there be counterfeits current, there is a
reality; there is a forgiving spirit which has no kinship with cowardice or
weakness or mere mushiness of character, but which is the offspring of
strength and goodness and mercy, in short, of all in man that is likest
God. And it is this not that which God bids us make our own; and not
the less so because in the rough ways of the world that so often passes for
this.
III
It would be easy to go on enumerating difficulties, but long as the
enumeration might be, Christ’s command would still remain in all its
explicitness, the Divine obligation would be in no way weakened. We must
forgive; we must forgive from our hearts; and there must be no limit to our
forgiveness. Nor is this all. The whole law of forgiveness is not fulfilled
when one who has done us an injury has come humbly making confession, and
we have accepted the confession and agreed to let bygones be bygones. We
should be heartless wretches indeed, if, under such circumstances, we were
not willing to do as much as that. But we must do more: “If thy brother sin
against thee, go, show him his fault between thee and him alone; if he hear
thee, thou hast gained thy brother.” We, we who have been wronged, must
take the first step. We must not wait for the wrong-doer to come to us; we
must go to him. We must lay aside our vindictiveness, and earnestly,
patiently, making our appeal to his better self, by every art and device
which love can suggest, we must help him to take sides against the wrong
which he has done, until at last forgiving love has led him captive, and
our brother is won. This is the teaching of Jesus. Let me suggest, in
conclusion, a three-fold reason why we should give heed to it.
Let us forgive for our own sake. A man of an unforgiving spirit
is always his own worst enemy. He “that studieth revenge,” says Bacon,
“keeps his own wounds green, which otherwise would heal and do well.” “If
thou hast not mercy for others,” says Sir Thomas Browne, “yet be not cruel
unto thyself; to ruminate upon evils, to make critical notes upon injuries,
is to add unto our own tortures, to feather the arrows of our enemies.”
There is no misery worse than that of a mind which broods continually over
its own wrongs, be they real or only fancied. There is no gloom so deep and
dark as that which settles on a hard and unrelenting soul. And, on the
other hand, there is no joy so pure, there is none so rewarding, as that of
one who, from his heart, has learned to say, “I forgive.” He has tasted the
very joy of God, the joy of Him of whom it is written that He delighteth in
mercy. Just as when a sea-worm perforates the shell of an oyster, the
oyster straightway closes the wound with a pearl, so does a forgiving
spirit heal the hidden hurt of the heart, and win for itself a boon even at
the hands of its foe.
Let us forgive for our brother’s sake. “What,” asks George
MacDonald, “am I brother for, but to forgive?” And how much for my brother
my forgiveness may do! All love, not Christ’s love only, has within it a
strange redemptive power. We often profess ourselves puzzled by that hard
saying of Jesus concerning the binding and loosing of men’s sins. Yet this
is just what human love, or the want of it, is doing every day. When we
forgive men their sins, we so far loose them from them; we help them to
believe in the power and reality of the Divine forgiveness. When we refuse
to forgive, we bind their sins to them, we make them doubt the love and
mercy of God. Have we forgotten the part which Ananias played in the
conversion of Saul of Tarsus? St. Augustine used to say that the Church
owed Paul to the prayers of Stephen. Might he not have said, with equal
truth, that the Church owed Paul to the forgiveness of Ananias? For three
days, without sight, and without food or drink, Saul waited in Damascus,
pondering the meaning of the heavenly vision. Then came unto him, sent by
God, the man whose life he had meant to take: “Ananias entered into the
house; and, laying his hands on him, said, Brother Saul, the Lord, even
Jesus, who appeared unto thee in the way which thou earnest, hath sent me.”
“Brother Saul”–how his heart must have leapt within him at the
sound of the word! It was a voice from without confirming the voice within;
it was the love and forgiveness of man sealing and making sure the love and
forgiveness of God. Wherefore, let us take heed lest, by our sullen refusal
to forgive, we be thrusting some penitent soul back into the miry depths,
whence, slowly and painfully, it is winning its way into the light and love
of God.
Let us forgive for Christ’s sake, because of that which God
through Him has done for us. When, day by day, we pray, “Forgive us our
trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us,” what we are asking
is, that God will deal with us as we are dealing with others. Do we mean
what we say? Are we showing a mercy as large as we need? Chrysostom tells
us that many people in his day used to omit the words, “As we forgive them
that trespass against us.” They did not dare to ask God to deal with their
sins as they were dealing with the sins of those who had wronged them, lest
they brought upon themselves not a blessing but a curse. And would it not
go hardly with some of us, if, with the measure we mete, God should measure
to us again? Yet there is no mistaking Christ’s words: “If ye forgive not
men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”
Therefore, let me think of myself, of my own sin, of the forgiveness even
unto seventy times seven which I need; and then let me ask, can I, whose
need is so great, dole out my forgiveness with a grudging hand, counting
till a poor “seven times” be reached, and then staying my hand? Rather, let
me pray, Lord,
“Make my forgiveness downright–such as I
Should perish if I did not have from Thee.”“Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and railing, be
put away from you, with all malice; and be ye kind one to another,
tenderhearted, forgiving each other, even as God also in Christ forgave
you.”
“O man, forgive thy mortal foe,
Nor ever strike him blow for blow;
For all the souls on earth that live
To be forgiven must forgive,
Forgive him seventy times and seven:
For all the blessed souls in Heaven
Are both forgivers and forgiven.”
CONCERNING CARE
“My spirit on Thy care,
Blest Saviour, I recline;
Thou wilt not leave me in despair,
For Thou art Love Divine.In Thee I place my trust,
On Thee I calmly rest;
I know Thee good, I know Thee just,
And count Thy choice the best.Whate’er events betide,
Thy will they all perform;
Safe in Thy breast my head I hide,
Nor fear the coming storm.Let good or ill befall,
It must be good for me,
Secure of having Thee in all,
Of having all in Thee.”
H.F. LYTH.
XII
CONCERNING CARE
“Be not anxious for your life … nor yet for
your body…. Be not anxious, saying, What shall we eat? or, What
shall we drink? … Be not anxious for the morrow.“–MATT. vi. 25, 31,
34.
I
“Take no thought for your life” is the more familiar rendering of
the Authorized Version. And if the words conveyed the same meaning to us
to-day as they did to all English-speaking people in the year 1611, there
would have been no need for a change. A great student of words, the late
Archbishop Trench, tells us that “thought” was then constantly used as
equivalent to anxiety or solicitous care; and he gives three illustrations
of this use of the word from writers of the Elizabethan age. Thus Bacon
writes: “Harris, an alderman in London, was put in trouble, and died with thought and anxiety before his business came to an end.” Again, in
one of the Somer’s Tracts, we read, “Queen Katharine Parr died of
thought“; and in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, “Take
thought and die for Caesar,” where “to take thought” is to take a
matter so seriously to heart that death ensues.[46] In 1611, therefore, the old translation did
accurately reproduce Christ’s thought. To-day, however, it is altogether
inadequate, and sometimes, it is to be feared, positively misleading. For
neither in this chapter nor anywhere in Christ’s teaching is there one word
against what we call forethought, and they who would find in the words of
Jesus any encouragement to thriftlessness are but misrepresenting Him and
deceiving themselves. Every man, who is not either a rogue or a fool, must
take thought for the morrow; at least, if he does not, some one must for
him, or the morrow will avenge itself upon him without mercy. What our Lord
forbids is not prudent foresight, but worry: “Be ye not anxious!”
The word which Christ uses
(μεριμνατε) is a very
suggestive one; it describes the state of mind of one who is drawn in
different directions, torn by internal conflict, “distracted,” as we say,
where precisely the same figure of speech occurs. A similar counsel is to
be found in another and still more striking word which only Luke has
recorded, and which is rendered, “Neither be ye of doubtful mind.” There is
a picture in the word
(μετεωρἱζεσθε)
the picture of a vessel vexed by contrary winds, now uplifted on the crest
of some huge wave, now labouring in the trough of the sea. “Be ye not
thus,” Christ says to His disciples, “the sport of your cares, driven by
the wind and tossed; but let the peace of God rule in your hearts, and be
ye not of doubtful mind.”
It cannot surprise us that Jesus should speak thus; rather should we
have been surprised if it had been otherwise. How could He speak to men at
all and yet be silent about their cares? For how full of care the lives of
most men are! One is anxious about his health, and another about his
business; one is concerned because for weeks he has been without work, and
another because his investments are turning out badly; some are troubled
about their children, and some there are who are making a care even of
their religion, and instead of letting it carry them are trying to carry
it; until, with burdens of one kind or another, we are like a string of
Swiss pack-horses, such as one may sometimes see, toiling and straining up
some steep Alpine pass under a blazing July sun. Poor Martha, with her sad,
tired face, and nervous, fretful ways, “anxious and troubled about many
things,” is everywhere to-day. Nor is it the poor only whose lives are full
of care. It was not a poor man amid his poverty, but a rich man amid his
riches, who, in Christ’s parable, put to himself the question, “What shall
I do?” The birds of care build their nests amid the turrets of a palace as
readily as in the thatched roof of a cottage. The cruel thorns–“the cares
of this life,” as Jesus calls them–which choke the good seed, sometimes
spring up more easily within the carefully fenced enclosure of my lord’s
park than in the little garden plot of the keeper of his lodge. On the
whole, perhaps, and in proportion to their number, there is less harassing,
wearing anxiety in the homes of the poor than in those of the wealthy. And
what harsh taskmasters our cares can be! How they will lord it over us!
Give them the saddle and the reins, and they will ride us to death. Seat
them on the throne, and they will chastise us not only with whips but with
scorpions. It is no wonder that Christ should set Himself to free men from
this grinding tyranny. He is no true deliverer for us who cannot break the
cruel bondage of our cares.
II
Let us listen, then, to Christ’s gracious argument and wise
remonstrances. What, He asks, is the good of our anxiety? What can it do
for us? “Which of you by being anxious can add one cubit unto his stature?
If, then, ye are not able to do that which is least, why are ye anxious
concerning the rest?” “But, the morrow! the morrow!” we cry. “Let the
morrow,” Christ answers, “take care of itself; sufficient unto the day is
the evil thereof; learn thou to live a day at a time.” “Our earliest duty,”
says a great writer of our day, “is to cultivate the habit of not looking
round the corner;” which is but another version of Christ’s simple precept.
And the saying, simple and obvious as it may seem, never fails to justify
itself. For one thing, the morrow rarely turns out as our fears imagined
it. Our very anxiety blurs our vision, and throws our judgment out of
focus. We see things through an atmosphere which both magnifies and
distorts. We remember how it was with Mr. Fearing: “When he was come to the
entrance of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I thought”–it is Greatheart
who tells the story–“I should have lost my man: not for that he had any
inclination to go back,–that he always abhorred; but he was ready to die
for fear. Oh, the hobgoblins will have me! the hobgoblins will have me!
cried he; and I could not beat him out on’t.” Yet see how matters fell out.
“This I took very great notice of,” goes on Greatheart, “that this valley
was as quiet while he went through it as ever I knew it before or since.”
And again, when Mr. Fearing “was come at the river where was no bridge,
there again he was in a heavy case. Now, now, he said, he should be drowned
for ever, and so never see that face with comfort, that he had come so many
miles to behold.” But once more his fears were put to shame: “Here, also, I
took notice of what was very remarkable: the water of that river was lower
at this time than ever I saw it in all my life. So he went over at last,
not much above wet-shod.”
And even though the morrow should prove as bad as our fears, Christ’s
precept is still justified, for the worst kind of preparation for such a
day is worry. Worry, like the undue clatter of machinery, means waste,
waste of power. Anxiety, it has been well said, does not empty to-morrow of
its sorrows, but it does empty to-day of its strength. Therefore, let us
not be anxious. Let us climb our hills when we come to them. God gives each
day strength for the day; but when, to the responsibilities of to-day we
add the burdens of to-morrow, and try to do the work of two days in the
strength of one, we are making straight paths for the feet of failure and
disappointment. All the many voices of reason and experience are on
Christ’s side when He bids us, “Be not anxious.”
Yet, true as all this is, how inadequate it is! When the tides of care
are at the flood they will overrun and submerge all such counsels as these,
as the waves wash away the little sand-hills which children build by the
sea-shore. “We know it is no good to worry,” people will tell us,
half-petulantly, when we remonstrate with them; “but we cannot help
ourselves, and if you have no more to say to us than this, you cannot help
us either.” And they are right. Care is the cancer of the heart, and if our
words can go no deeper than they have yet gone, it can never be cured. It
is an inward spiritual derangement, which calls for something more than
little bits of good advice in order to put it right. And if, again, we turn
to the words of Jesus, we shall find the needed something more is given.
The care-worn soul, for its cure, must be taken out of itself. “Oh the
bliss of waking,” says some one, “with all one’s thoughts turned outward!”
It is the power to do that, to turn, and to keep turned, one’s thoughts
outwards that the care-ridden need; and Christ will show us how it may be
ours.
“Be not anxious,” says Jesus; and then side by side with this negative
precept He lays this positive one: “Seek ye first the kingdom of God.”
Christ came to establish a kingdom in which “all men’s good” should be
“each man’s rule,” and love the universal law. When, therefore, He bids the
anxious seek the kingdom, what He means is that they are to find an escape
from self and self-consuming cares in service. “When you find yourself
overpowered by melancholy,” said John Keble, “the best way is to go out and
do something kind to somebody or other.” And thousands who are sitting
daily in the gloom of a self-created misery, with all the blinds of the
spirit drawn, if they would but “go out” and begin to care for others,
would speedily cease their miserable care for themselves. “When I dig a man
out of trouble,” some one quaintly writes, “the hole he leaves behind him
is the grave in which I bury my own trouble.”[47] This is not the whole cure for care; but if the
mind is to be kept from burrowing in the dark of its own fears and
anxieties, it must be set resolutely and constantly on those nobler ends to
which Christ in His gospel summons us all.
The care-worn, Christ says, must think of others; and, most of all, they
must think of God. “Let not your heart be troubled … believe.” This is
the great argument into which all other arguments run up. This is the
larger truth, within whose wide circumference lie all Christ’s words
concerning care. We are not to care because we are cared for, cared for by
God. There is, Christ teaches us, a distribution of duties between
ourselves and God. We, on our part, make it our daily business to get God’s
will done on earth as it is done in heaven; He, on His, undertakes that we
shall not want.
“Make you His service your delight,
He’ll make your wants His care.”Once more we see how fundamental is Christ’s doctrine of the Divine
Fatherhood. It is not so much because our anxiety is useless, or because it
unfits us for service, but because God is what He is, that our worry is at
once a blunder and a sin. It is mistrust of the heavenly love that cares
for us. The sovereign cure for care is–God.
III
But now a difficulty arises. Christ’s doctrine of the Divine Fatherhood
is, without doubt, fundamental; but is it true? A God who clothes the
blowing lilies with their silent beauty, without whom no sparrow falleth to
the ground, who numbers the very hairs of our head–it is a glorious faith,
if one could but receive it. But can we? It was possible once, we think, in
the childhood of the world; but that time has gone, and we are the children
of a new day, whose thoughts we cannot choose but think. So long as men
thought of our earth as the centre of the universe, it was not difficult to
believe that its inhabitants were the peculiar care of their Creator. But
astronomy has changed all that; and what once we thought so great, we know
now to be but a speck amid infinite systems of worlds. The old question
challenges us with a force the Psalmist could not feel: “When I consider
Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars which Thou
hast ordained; what is man that Thou are mindful of him? and the son of man
that Thou visitest him?” The infinity of God, the nothingness of man: the
poor brain reels before the contrast. Is it thinkable, we ask, that He
whose dwelling-place is eternity should care for us even as we care for our
children? So the question is often urged upon us to-day. But arguments of
this kind, it has been well said, are simply an attempt to terrorize the
imagination, and are not to be yielded to. As a recent writer admirably
says: “We know little or nothing of the rest of the universe, and it may
very well be that in no other planet but this is there intelligent and
moral life; and, if that be so, then this world, despite its material
insignificance, would remain the real summit of creation. But even if this
be not so, still man remains man–a spiritual being, capable of knowing,
loving, and glorifying God. Man is that, be there what myriads of worlds
there may, and is not less than that, though in other worlds were also
beings like him…. No conception of God is less imposing than that which
represents Him as a kind of millionaire in worlds, so materialized by the
immensity of His possessions as to have lost the sense of the incalculably
greater worth of the spiritual interests of even the smallest part of
them.”[48]
But this is not the only difficulty; for some it is not the chief
difficulty. We have no theories of God and the universe which bar the
possibility of His intervention in the little lives of men. There is
nothing incredible to us in the doctrine of a particular Providence. But
where, we ask, is the proof of it? We would fain believe, but the facts of
experience seem too strong for us. A hundred thousand Armenians butchered
at the will of an inhuman despot, a whole city buried under a volcano’s
fiery hail, countless multitudes suffering the slow torture of death by
famine–can such things be and God really care? Nor is it only great world
tragedies like these which challenge our faith. The question is pressed
upon us, often with sickening keenness, by the commonplace ills of our own
commonplace lives: the cruel wrong of another’s sin, the long, wasting
pain, the empty cradle, the broken heart. How can we look on these things
and yet believe that Eternal Love is on the throne?
Except we believe in Jesus we cannot; if we do, we must. For remember,
Jesus was no shallow optimist; He did not go through life seeing only its
pleasant things; He was at Cana of Galilee, but He was also at Nain; over
all His life there lay a shadow, the shadow of the Cross; He died in the
dark, betrayed of man, forsaken of God; surely He hath borne our griefs and
carried our sorrows. And yet through all, His faith in God never wavered.
He prayed, and He taught others to pray. When He lifted His eyes towards
heaven, it was with the word “Father” upon His lips; and in like manner He
bade His disciples, “When ye pray, say ‘Father.'” He took the trembling
hands of men within His own, and looking into their eyes, filled as they
were with a thousand nameless fears, “Fear not,” He said, “our heavenly
Father knoweth; let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be
afraid.”
“Learn of Me … and ye shall find rest unto your souls;” herein is the
secret of peace. But it is not enough that we give ear to the words of
Christ; we must make our own the whole meaning of the fact of Christ.
“God’s in His heaven,” sings Browning; “all’s right with the world.” But if
God is only in His heaven, all is not right with the world. In
Christ we learn that God has come from out His heaven to earth; and in the
Cross of Christ we find the eternal love which meets and answers all our
fears. Fear not,
“Or if you fear,
Cast all your cares on God; that anchor holds.”“Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.”
CONCERNING MONEY
“Now I saw in my dream, that at the further side of that
plain was a little hill called Lucre, and in that hill a silver-mine, which
some of them that had formerly gone that way, because of the rarity of it,
had turned aside to see; but going too near the brink of the pit, the
ground being deceitful under them, broke, and they were slain;-some also
had been maimed there, and could not to their dying day be their own men
again.”–JOHN BUNYAN.
XIII
CONCERNING MONEY
“How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the
kingdom of God! For it is easier for a camel to enter in through a needle’s
eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.“–LUKE
xviii. 24, 25.
I
The most significant thing in the teaching of Jesus concerning money is
the large place which it fills in the records of our Lord’s public
ministry. How large that place is few of us, perhaps, realize. Even
religious writers who take in hand to set forth Christ’s teaching in
detail, for the most part, pass over this subject in silence. In Hastings’
great Dictionary of the Bible we find, under “Money,” a most
elaborate article, extending to nearly twenty pages, and discussing with
great fullness and learning the coinage of various Biblical periods; but
when we seek to know what the New Testament has to say concerning the use
and perils of wealth, the whole subject is dismissed in some nine
lines.
Very different is the impression which we receive from the Gospels
themselves. It is not possible here to bring together all Christ’s words
about money, but we may take the third Gospel (in which the references to
the subject are most numerous) and note Christ’s more striking sayings in
the order in which they occur. In the parable of the sower, in the eighth
chapter, the thorns which choke the good seed are the “cares and riches and
pleasures of this life.” Chapter twelve contains a warning against
covetousness, enforced by the parable of the rich fool and its
sharp-pointed application, “So is he that layeth up treasure for himself,
and is not rich toward God.” The fourteenth chapter sheds a new light on
the law of hospitality: “When thou makest a dinner or a supper, call not
thy friends, nor thy brethren, nor thy kinsmen, nor rich neighbours … but
when thou makest a feast, bid the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind;
and thou shalt be blessed.” Chapter fifteen tells how a certain son wasted
his substance with riotous living. Chapter sixteen opens with the parable
of the unjust steward; then follow weighty words touching the right use of
“the mammon of unrighteousness.” But the Pharisees, who were lovers of
money, when they heard these things, “scoffed at Him.” Christ’s answer is
the parable of Dives and Lazarus, with which the chapter closes. Chapter
eighteen tells of a rich young ruler’s choice, and of Christ’s sorrowful
comment thereon: “How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the
kingdom of God.” And then, lastly, in the nineteenth chapter, we hear
Zacchæus, into whose home and heart Christ had entered, resolving on
the threshold of his new life that henceforth the half of his goods he
would give to the poor, and that where he had wrongfully exacted aught of
any man he would restore four-fold. It is indeed a remarkable fact, the
full significance of which few Christians have yet realized, that, as John
Ruskin says, the subject which we might have expected a Divine Teacher
would have been content to leave to others is the very one He singles out
on which to speak parables for all men’s memory.[49]
II
The question is sometimes asked how the teaching of Jesus concerning
money is related to that strange product of civilization, the modern
millionaire. The present writer, at least, cannot hold with those who think
that Christ was a communist, or that He regarded the possession of wealth
as in itself a sin. Nevertheless, it is impossible not to sympathize with
the feeling that the accumulation of huge fortunes in the hands of
individuals is not according to the will of Christ. Mr. Andrew Carnegie is
reported to have said that a man who dies a millionaire dies disgraced; and
few persons who take their New Testament seriously will be disposed to
contradict him. But, inasmuch as all millionaires are not prepared like Mr.
Carnegie to save themselves from disgrace, the question is beginning to
arise in the minds of many, whether society itself should not come to the
rescue–its own and the rich man’s. No man, it may be pretty confidently
affirmed, can possibly earn a million; he may obtain it, he may
obtain it by methods which are not technically unjust, but he has not
earned it. Be a man’s powers what they may, it is impossible that his share
of the wealth which he has helped to create can be fairly represented by a
sum so vast. If he receives it, others may reasonably complain that there
is something wrong in the principle of distribution. And unless, both by a
larger justice to his employees, and by generous benefactions to the
public, he do something to correct the defects in his title, he must not be
surprised if some who feel themselves disinherited are driven to ask
ominous and inconvenient questions.
This, however, is a matter which it is impossible now to discuss
further. Turning again to Christ’s sayings about money, we may summarize
them in this fashion: Christ says nothing about the making of money, He
says much about the use of it, and still more about its perils and the need
there is for a revised estimate of its worth. Following the example of
Christ, it is the last point of which I wish more especially to speak. But
before coming to that, it may be well briefly to recall some of the things
which Christ has said touching the use of wealth. Wealth, He declares, is a
trust, for our use of which we must give account unto God. In our relation
to others we may be proprietors; before God there are no proprietors, but
all are stewards. And in the Gospels there are indicated some of the ways
in which our stewardship may be fulfilled. I will mention two of them.
(1) “When thou doest alms”–Christ, you will observe, took for granted
that His disciples would give alms, as He took for granted that they would
pray. He prescribes no form which our charity must take; we have to
exercise our judgment in this, as in other matters. Obedience is left the
largest liberty, but not the liberty of disobedience; and they who open
their ears greedily to take in all that the political economist and others
tell us of the evils of indiscriminate charity, only that they may the more
tightly button up their pockets against the claims of the needy, are
plainly disregarding the will of Christ. If what we are told is true, the
more binding is the obligation to discover some other way in which our
alms-giving may become more effective. The duty itself no man can escape
who calls Christ Jesus Lord and Master.
(2) But wealth, Christ tells us, may minister not merely to the physical
necessities, but to the beauty and happiness of life. When Christ was
invited to the marriage-feast at Cana of Galilee, when Matthew the publican
made for Him a feast in His own house, He did not churlishly refuse, saying
that such expenditure was wasteful and wicked excess. When in the house of
Simon the leper Mary “took a pound of ointment of spikenard, very precious,
and anointed the feet of Jesus,” and they that sat by murmured, saying, “To
what purpose is this waste? for this ointment might have been sold for
above three hundred pence and given to the poor,” Jesus threw His shield
about this woman and her deed of love: “Let her alone; why trouble ye her?
She hath wrought a good work on Me.” These words, it has been well said,
are “the charter of all undertakings which propose, in the name of Christ,
to feed the mind, to stir the imagination, to quicken the emotions, to make
life less meagre, less animal, less dull.”[50] Do not let us speak as though the only friends
of the poor were those who gave them oatmeal at Christmas, or who secure
for them alms-houses in their old age. There is a life which is more than
meat, and all heavenly charity is not to be bound up in bags of flour. He
who strives to bring into the grey, monotonous lives of the toilers of our
great cities the sweet, refining influences of art, and music and
literature, he who helps his fellows to see and to love the true and the
beautiful and the good, is not one whit less a benefactor of his kind than
he who obtains for them better food and better homes. Man shall not live by
bread alone, and they who use their wealth to minister to a higher life
serve us not less really than they who provide for our physical needs.
III
Much, however, as Christ has to say concerning the noble uses to which
wealth may be put, it is not here, as every reader of the Gospels must
feel, that the full emphasis of His words comes. It is when He goes on to
speak of the perils of the rich, and of our wrong estimates of the worth of
wealth, that His solemn warnings pierce to the quick. Christ did not live,
nor does He call us to live, in an unreal world, though perhaps there are
few subjects concerning which more unreal words have been spoken than this.
The power of wealth is great, the power of consecrated wealth is
incalculably great; and this the New Testament freely recognizes; but
wealth is not the great, necessary, all-sufficing thing that
ninety-nine out of a hundred of us believe it to be. And when we put it
first, and make it the standard by which all things else are to be judged,
Christ tells us plainly that we are falling into a temptation and a snare,
and into many foolish and hurtful lusts; we are piercing ourselves through
with many sorrows. For once at least, then, let us try to look at money
with His eyes and to weigh it in His balances.
Christ was Himself a poor man. His mother was what to-day we should call
a working-man’s wife, and probably also the mother of a large family. When,
as an infant, Jesus was presented in the Temple, the offering which His
parents brought was that which the law prescribed in the case of the poor:
“a pair of turtle doves or two young pigeons.” When He came to manhood, and
entered on His public ministry, He had no home He could call His own. In
His Father’s house, He said, were many mansions; but on earth He had not
where to lay His head. Women ministered unto Him of their substance. We
never read that He had any money at all. When once He wanted to use a coin
as an illustration, He borrowed it; when, at another time, He needed one
with which to pay a tax, He wrought a miracle in order to procure it. As He
was dying, the soldiers, we are told, parted His garments among them–that
was all there was to divide. When He was dead, men buried Him in another’s
tomb. More literally true than perhaps we always realize was the apostle’s
saying, “He became poor.”
Who, then, will deny that a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance
of the things which he possesseth? Yet how strangely materialized our
thoughts have become! Our very language has been dragged down and made a
partner with us in our fall. When, for example, our Authorized Version was
written in 1611, the translators could write, without fear of being
misunderstood, “Let no man seek his own, but every man another’s wealth” (i Cor. x. 24).[51] But though the nobler meaning of the word still
survives in “well” and “weal,” “wealth” to-day is rarely used save to
indicate abundance of material good. When Thackeray makes “Becky Sharp” say
that she could be good if she had £4000 a year, and when. Mr. Keir
Hardie asks if it is possible for a man to be a Christian on a pound a
week, the thoughts of many hearts are revealed. There is nothing to be done
without money, we think; money is the golden key which unlocks all doors;
money is the lever which removes all difficulties. This is what many of us
are saying, and what most of us in our hearts are thinking. But clean
across these spoken and unspoken thoughts of ours, there comes the life of
Jesus, the man of Nazareth, to rebuke, and shame, and silence us. Who in
His presence dare speak any more of the sovereign might of money?
This is the lesson of the life of the Best. Is it not also the lesson of
the lives of the good in all ages? The greatest name in the great world of
Greece is Socrates; and Socrates was a poor man. The greatest name in the
first century of the Christian era is Paul; and Paul was a working-man and
sometimes in want. It was Calvinism, Mark Pattison said, that in the
sixteenth century saved Europe, and Calvin’s strength, a Pope once
declared, lay in this, that money had no charm for him. John Wesley
re-created modern England and left behind him “two silver teaspoons and the
Methodist Church.” The “Poets’ Corner” in Westminster Abbey, it has been
said, commemorates a glorious company of paupers. And even in America, the
land of the millionaire and multi-millionaire, the names that are graven on
the nation’s heart, and which men delight to honour, are not its
Vanderbilts, or its Jay Goulds, but Lincoln, and Grant, and Garfield, and
Webster, and Clay.
This is not mere “curb-stone rhetoric”; I speak the words of soberness
and truth. Would that they in whose blood the “narrowing lust of gold” has
begun to burn might be sobered by them! In the name of Jesus of Nazareth,
and of all the noblest of the sons of men, let us deny and defy the sordid
traditions of mammon; let us make it plain that we at least do not believe
“the wealthiest man among us is the best.” “Godliness with contentment,”
said the apostle, “is great gain;” and though these are not the only worthy
ends of human effort, yet he who has made them his has secured for himself
a treasure which faileth not, which will endure when the gilded toys for
which men strive and sweat are dust and ashes.
It is further worthy of note that it was always the rich rather than the
poor whom Christ pitied. He was sorry for Lazarus; He was still more sorry
for Dives. “Blessed are ye poor…. Woe unto you that are rich.” This
two-fold note sounds through all Christ’s teaching. And the reason is not
far to seek. As Jesus looked on life, He saw how the passionate quest for
gold was starving all the higher ideals of life. Men were concentrating
their souls on pence till they could think of nothing else. For mammon’s
sake they were turning away from the kingdom of heaven. The spirit of
covetousness was breaking the peace of households, setting brother against
brother, making men hard and fierce and relentless. Under its hot breath
the fairest growths of the spirit were drooping and ready to die. The
familiar “poor but pious” which meets us so often in a certain type of
biography could never have found a place on the lips of Jesus. “Rich but
pious” would have been far truer to the facts of life as He saw them. “The
ground of a certain rich man brought forth plentifully,” and after that he
could think of nothing but barns: there was no room for God in his life.
“The Pharisees who were lovers of money heard these things; and they
scoffed at Him;” of course, what could their jaundiced eyes see in Jesus?
And even to one of whom it is written that Jesus, “looking upon him loved
him,” his great possessions proved a magnet stronger than the call of
Christ. It was Emerson, I think, who said that the worst thing about money
is that it so often costs so much. To take heed that we do not pay too
dearly for it, is the warning which comes to us from every page of the life
of Jesus. Are there none of us who need the warning? “Ye cannot serve God
and mammon;” we know it, and that we may the better serve mammon, we are
sacrificing God and conscience on mammon’s unholy altars. And to-day,
perhaps, we are content that it should be so. But will our satisfaction
last? Shall we be as pleased with the bargain to-morrow and the day after
as we think we are to-day? And when our last day comes–what? “Forefancy
your deathbed,” said Samuel Rutherford; and though the counsel ill fits the
mood of men in their youth and strength, it is surely well sometimes to
look forward and ask how life will bear hereafter the long look back. “This
night is thy soul required of thee; and the things which thou hast prepared
whose shall they be?”–not his, and he had nothing else. He had laid up
treasure for himself, but it was all of this world’s coinage; of the
currency of the land whither he went he had none. In one of Lowell’s most
striking poems he pictures the sad retrospect of one who, through fourscore
years, had wasted on ignoble ends God’s gift of life; his hands had
“plucked the world’s coarse
gains
As erst they plucked the flowers of May;”but what now, in life’s last hours, are gains like these?
“God bends from out the deep and says,
‘I gave thee the great gift of life;
Wast thou not called in many ways?
Are not My earth and heaven at strife?
I gave thee of My seed to sow,
Bringest thou Me My hundred-fold?’
Can I look up with face aglow,
And answer, ‘Father, here is gold’?”And the end of the poem is a wail:
“I hear the reapers singing go
Into God’s harvest; I, that might
With them have chosen, here below
Grope shuddering at the gates of night.”Wherefore let us set not our minds on the things that are upon earth;
let us covet earnestly the best gifts; let us seek first the kingdom of
God; and all other things in due season and in due measure shall be added
unto us.[52]
CONCERNING THE SECOND
ADVENT
“Lo as some venturer, from his stars receiving
Promise and presage of sublime emprise,
Wears evermore the seal of his believing
Deep in the dark of solitary eyes,Yea to the end, in palace or in prison,
Fashions his fancies of the realm to be,
Fallen from the height or from the deeps arisen,
Ringed with the rocks and sundered of the sea;–So even I, and with a heart more burning,
So even I, and with a hope more sweet,
Groan for the hour, O Christ! of Thy returning,
Faint for the flaming of Thine advent feet.”
F.W.H. MYERS, Saint Paul.
XIV
CONCERNING THE SECOND ADVENT
“They shall see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of
heaven with power and great glory…. Of that day and hour knoweth no one,
not even the angels of heaven, neither the Son, but the Father
only.”–MATT. xxiv. 30, 36.
The doctrine of our Lord’s Second Coming occupies at the present moment
a curiously equivocal position in the thought of the Christian Church. On
the one hand by many it is wholly ignored. There is no conscious disloyalty
on their part to the word of God; but the subject makes no appeal to them,
it fails to “find” them. Ours is a sternly practical age, and any truth
which does not readily link itself on to the necessities of life is liable
speedily to be put on one side and forgotten. This is what has happened
with this particular doctrine in the case of multitudes; it is not denied,
but it is banished to what Mr. Lecky calls “the land of the unrealized and
the inoperative.” But if, on the one hand, the doctrine has suffered from
neglect, on the other it has suffered hardly less from undue attention.
Indeed of late years the whole subject of the “Last Things” has been turned
into a kind of happy hunting-ground for little sects, who carry on a
ceaseless wordy warfare both with themselves and the rest of the Christian
world. Men and women without another theological interest in the world are
yet keen to argue about Millenarianism, and to try their ‘prentice hands on
the interpretation of the imagery of the apocalyptic literature of both the
Old Testament and the New. As Spurgeon used to say, they are so taken up
with the second coming of our Lord that they forget to preach the first So
that one hardly knows which to regret more, the neglect and indifference of
the one class, or the unhealthy, feverish absorption of the other.
As very often happens in cases of this kind each extreme is largely
responsible for the other. Neglect prepares the way for exaggeration;
exaggeration leads to further neglect. Moreover, in the case before us,
both tendencies are strengthened by the very difficulty in which the
subject is involved. Vagueness, uncertainty, mystery, attract some minds as
powerfully as they repel others. And, assuredly, the element of uncertainty
is not wanting here. In the first place, this is a subject for all our
knowledge of which we are wholly dependent upon revelation. Much that
Christ and His apostles have taught us we can bring to the test of
experience and verify for ourselves. But this doctrine we must receive, if
we receive it at all, wholly on the authority of One whom, on other
grounds, we have learned to trust. Verification, in the nature of the case,
is impossible. Further, we have gone but a little way when revelation
itself becomes silent; and, as I have said, when that guide leaves us, we
enter at once the dark forest where instantly the track is lost.
Let us seek to learn, then, what Christ has revealed, and what He has
left unrevealed, concerning His coming again.
I
As to the fact of Christ’s coming we are left in no doubt. Our
Lord’s own declarations are as explicit as language can make them. Thus, in
Matthew xvi. 27 we read that “the Son of Man shall come in the glory of His
Father with His angels; and then shall He render unto every man according
to his deeds.” In the great discourse on the Last Things, recorded by all
the Synoptists, after speaking of the fall of Jerusalem, Christ goes on,
“Then shall appear the sign of the Son of Man in heaven; and then shall all
the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of Man coming on
the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.” And again, in the Upper
Room, He said to His disciples, “I go to prepare a place for you. And if I
go and prepare a place for you, I come again, and will receive you unto
Myself; that where I am ye may be also.” The hope of that return shines on
every page of the New Testament: “This Jesus,” said the angels to the
watching disciples, “which was received up from you into heaven, shall so
come in like manner as ye beheld Him going into heaven.” The early
Christians were wont to speak, without further definition, of “that day.”
St. Paul reminds the Thessalonians how that they had “turned unto God from
idols, to serve a living and true God, and to wait for His Son from
heaven.” Maran atha–“our Lord cometh”–was the great watchword of
the waiting Church. When, at the table of the Lord, they ate the bread and
drank the cup, they proclaimed His death “till He come.” “Amen; come, Lord
Jesus,” is the passionate cry with which our English Scriptures close.
For all those, then, to whom the New Testament speaks with authority,
the fact of Christ’s return is established beyond all controversy. But what
will be the nature of His coming? Will it be visible and personal, or
spiritual and unseen? Will it be once and never again, or repeated? Will
Christ come at the end of history, or is He continually coming in those
great crises which mark the world’s progress towards its appointed end?
These questions have been answered with such admirable simplicity and
scriptural truth by Dr. Denney that I cannot do better than quote his
words: “It may be frankly admitted,” he says, “that the return of Christ to
His disciples is capable of different interpretations. He came again,
though it were but intermittently, when He appeared to them after His
resurrection. He came again, to abide with them permanently, when His
Spirit was given to the Church at Pentecost. He came, they would all feel
who lived to see it, signally in the destruction of Jerusalem, when God
executed judgment historically on the race which had rejected Him, and when
the Christian Church was finally and decisively liberated from the very
possibility of dependence on the Jewish. He comes still, as His own words
to the High Priest suggest–From this time on ye shall see the Son of Man
coming–in the great crises of history, when the old order changes,
yielding place to the new; when God brings a whole age, as it were, into
judgment, and gives the world a fresh start. But all these admissions,
giving them the widest possible application, do not enable us to call in
question what stands so plainly in the pages of the New Testament,–what
filled so exclusively the minds of the first Christians–the idea of a
personal return of Christ at the end of the world. We need lay no stress on
the scenery of New Testament prophecy, any more than on the similar element
of Old Testament prophecy; the voice of the archangel and the trump of God
are like the turning of the sun into darkness and the moon into blood; but
if we are to retain any relation to the New Testament at all, we must
assert the personal return of Christ as Judge of all.”[53]
So far I think is clear. It is when we come to speak of the time of our
Lord’s return that our difficulties begin. It appears to me impossible to
doubt that the first Christians were looking for the immediate return of
our Lord to the earth. At one time even St. Paul seems to have expected Him
within his own life-time. Nor does this fact in itself cause us any serious
perplexity. What does perplex us is to find in the Gospels language
attributed to Christ which apparently makes Him a supporter of this
mistaken view. E.g., we have these three separate sayings, recorded
in St. Matthew’s Gospel: “But when they persecute you in this city, flee
into the next; for verily I say unto you, Ye shall not have gone through
the cities of Israel, till the Son of Man be come” (x. 23); “Verily I say
unto you, There be some of them that stand here, which shall in no wise
taste of death, till they see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom” (xvi.
28); “Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass away, till all
these things be accomplished” (xxiv. 34). This seems plain enough; and if
we are to take the words as they stand, we seem to be shut up to the
conclusion that our Lord was mistaken, that He ventured on a prediction
which events have falsified. Let us see if this really be so. I leave, for
the moment, the words I have quoted in order to cite other words which
point in a quite different direction.
To begin with, we have the emphatic statement: “But of that day and hour
knoweth no one, not even the angels in heaven, neither the Son, but the
Father only.” We remember also Christ’s words to His disciples, on the eve
of the Ascension, “It is not for you to know times or seasons, which the
Father hath set within His own authority.” There is, further, a whole class
of sayings, exhortations, and parables, which seem plainly to involve a
prolonged Christian era, and, consequently, the postponement to a far
distant time, of the day of Christ’s return. Thus, there are the passages
which speak of the preaching of the gospel to the nations beyond:
“Wheresoever the gospel shall be preached throughout the whole world, that
also which this woman hath done shall be spoken of for a memorial of her”
(Mark xiv. 9); “This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole
world for a testimony unto all the nations; and then shall the end come”
(Matt. xxiv. 14). There is the parable which tells of the tarrying of the
bridegroom till even the wise virgins slumbered and slept. “After a long
time,” we read in another parable, “the Lord of those servants cometh and
maketh a reckoning with them.” What is the significance of the parable of
the leaven hid in three measures of meal, and still more, of that group of
parables which depict the growth of the kingdom–the parables of the sower,
the wheat and tares, the mustard-seed, and the seed growing gradually? Does
not all this point not to a great catastrophe nigh at hand, which should
bring to an end the existing order of things, but rather to just such a
future for the kingdom of God on earth as the actual course of history
reveals? And this, and no other, was, I believe, the impression which
Christ desired to leave on the minds of His disciples.
What, then, are we to make of those other and apparently contrary words
which I have quoted, but meanwhile have left unexplained? They constitute,
without doubt, one of the most perplexing problems which the interpreter of
the New Testament has to face,[54] and any suggestion for meeting the difficulty
must be made with becoming caution. I can but briefly indicate the
direction in which the probable solution may be found. Our Lord, as we have
already seen, spoke of His coming again, not only at the end of the world,
but in the course of it: in the power of His Spirit, at the fall of
Jerusalem, in the coming of His kingdom among men. But the minds of the
disciples were full of the thought of His final coming, which would
establish for ever the glory of His Messianic kingdom; and it would seem
that this fact has determined both the form and the setting of some of
Christ’s sayings which they have preserved for us. Words which He meant to
refer to Israel’s coming judgment-day they, in the ardour of their
expectation, referred to the last great day. In the first Gospel,
especially, we may trace some such influence at work. When, e.g.,
Matthew represents our Lord as saying, “There be some of them that stand
here which shall in no wise taste of death till they see the Son of Man
coming in His kingdom,” it is evident, both from the words themselves and
from the context, that he understood them to refer to the final return.
Luke, however, speaks only of seeing “the kingdom of God,” and Mark of
seeing “the kingdom of God come in power.” And if these words were our only
version of the prophecy they would present no difficulty; we should feel
that they had received adequate fulfilment in the events of the great day
of Pentecost. We conclude, therefore, “that of the three reports before us
the second and third, which are practically the same, reproduce more
correctly the words actually spoken by Christ; and that the account given
in the first Gospel was coloured by the eager hope of the early followers
of Christ for their Master’s speedy return.[55]
To sum up in a sentence the results of this brief inquiry: Christ’s
teaching concerning His return leaves us both in a state of certainty and
uncertainty. “We believe that Thou shalt come to be our Judge”–that is our
certainty; “Of that day and hour knoweth no one”–that is our uncertainty.
And each of these carries with it its own lesson.
II
“Of that day and hour knoweth no one;” and we must be content not to
know. There are things that are “revealed”; and they belong to us and to
our children. And there are “secret things,” which belong neither to us,
nor to our children, but to God. Just as a visitor to Holyrood Palace finds
some rooms open and free, through which he may wander at will, while from
others he is strictly excluded, so in God’s world there are locked doors
through which it is not lawful for any man to enter. And it is our duty to
be faithful to our ignorance as well as to our knowledge. There is a
Christian as well as an anti-Christian agnosticism. To pry into the secret
things of God is no less a sin than wilfully to remain ignorant of what He
has been pleased to make known. The idly inquisitive spirit which is never
at rest save when it is poking into forbidden corners, Christ always checks
and condemns. “Lord,” asked one, “are there few that be saved?” But He
would give no answer save this: “Strive to enter in by the narrow door.”
“Lord, and this man what?” said Peter, curious concerning the unrevealed
future of his brother apostle. But again idle curiosity must go
unsatisfied: “If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?
Follow thou Me.” “Lord dost Thou at this time restore the kingdom to
Israel?” But once more He will give no answer: “It is not for you to know
the times or seasons which the Father hath set within His own authority.”
And yet, strangely enough, that which Christ has seen good to leave untold
is the one thing concerning His coming on which the minds of multitudes
have fastened. It says little, either for our religion or our common-sense,
that one of the most widely circulated religious newspapers of our day is
one which fills its columns with absurd guesses and forecasts concerning
those very “times” and “seasons” of which Christ has told us that it is not
for us to know. Christ has given us no detailed map of the future, and when
foolish persons pester us with little maps of their own making, let us to
see to it that they get no encouragement from us. Let us dare always to be
faithful to our ignorance.
But if there is much we do not know, this we do know: the Lord will
come. And, alike on the ground of what we know and of what we do not know,
our duty is clear: we must “watch,” so that whether He come at even, or at
midnight, or at cock-crowing, or in the morning, He shall find us ready.
Christ’s solemn injunction left an indelible mark on the mind of the Early
Church. “Yourselves know perfectly,” St. Paul writes in the first of his
apostolic letters, “that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the
night … so then let us not sleep, as do the rest, but let us watch and be
sober.” As St. Augustine says, “The last day is hidden that every day maybe
regarded.” But what, exactly, is the meaning of the command to “watch”? It
cannot be that we are to be always “on the watch.” That would simply end in
the feverish excitement and unrest which troubled the peace of the Church
of Thessalonica. The true meaning is given us, I think, in the parable of
the Ten Virgins. Five were wise, not because they watched all night for the
bridegroom, for it is written “they all slumbered and slept,” but
because they were prepared; and five were foolish, not because they did not
watch, but because they were unprepared. “The fisherman’s wife who spends
her time on the pier-head watching for the boats, cannot be so well
prepared to give her husband a comfortable reception as the woman who is
busy about her household work, and only now and again turns a longing look
seaward.”[56] So Christ’s
command to “watch” means, not “Be ye always on the watch,” but, “Be ye
always ready.”
Spurgeon once said, with characteristic humour and good sense, that
there were friends of his to whom he would like to say, “Ye men of
Plymouth, why stand ye gazing up into heaven? Go on with your work.” He who
in a world like ours can sit and gaze with idly folded hands–let not that
man think he shall receive anything of the Lord. A lady once asked John
Wesley, “Suppose that you knew you were to die at twelve o’clock to-morrow
night, how would you spend the intervening time?” “How, Madam?” he replied;
“why just as I intend to spend it now. I should preach this night at
Gloucester, and again at five to-morrow morning. After that I should ride
to Tewkesbury, preach in the afternoon, and meet the societies in the
evening. I should then repair to friend Martin’s house, who expects to
entertain me, converse and pray with the family as usual, retire to my room
at ten o’clock, commend myself to my heavenly Father, lie down to rest, and
wake up in glory.” This is the right attitude for the Christian. The old
cry must not fade from our lips, nor the old hope from our heart: Maran
atha, “our Lord cometh.” But meanwhile He hath given to every man his
work; and we may be sure there is no preparation for His coming like the
faithful doing of the appointed task. “Blessed is that servant whom His
Lord when He cometh shall find so doing.”
CONCERNING THE JUDGMENT
“I often have a kind of waking dream; up one road the image
of a man decked and adorned as if for a triumph, carried up by rejoicing
and exulting friends, who praise his goodness and achievements; and, on the
other road, turned back to back to it, there is the very man himself, in
sordid and squalid apparel, surrounded not by friends but by ministers of
justice, and going on, while his friends are exulting, to his certain and
perhaps awful judgment.”–R.W. CHURCH.
XV
CONCERNING THE JUDGMENT
“When the Son of Man shall come in His glory, and all
the angels with Him, then shall He sit on the throne of His glory: and
before Him shall be gathered all the nations: and He shall separate them
one from another, as the shepherd separateth the sheep from the goats: and
He shall set the sheep on His right hand, but the goats on the
left.“–MATT. XXV. 31-33.
He, the speaker, will do this. It is the most stupendous claim that ever
fell from human lips. A young Jewish carpenter whose brief career, as He
Himself well knew, was just about to end in a violent and shameful death,
tells the little, fearful band which still clung to Him, that a day is
coming when before Him all the nations shall be gathered, and by Him be
separated as a shepherd separateth the sheep from the goats. In the world’s
long history there is nothing like it.
That Jesus did really claim to be the Judge of all men, it is, I
believe, impossible to doubt. The passage just quoted is by no means our
only evidence. In the Sermon on the Mount, which foolish persons who love
to depreciate theology sometimes speak of as though it were the pith and
marrow of the Christian gospel, Christ says, “Many will say to Me in that
day, Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy by Thy name, and by Thy name cast out
devils, and by Thy name do many mighty works? And then will I profess unto
them, I never knew you: depart from Me, ye that work iniquity.” Again, He
says, “Whosoever shall be ashamed of Me and of My words in this adulterous
and sinful generation, the Son of Man also shall be ashamed of Him when He
cometh in the glory of His Father with the holy angels;” and again, “The
Son of Man shall come in the glory of His Father with His angels; and then
shall He render unto every man according to His deeds.” The fourth Gospel
also represents Him as saying, “Neither doth the Father judge any man, but
He hath given all judgment to the Son … and He gave Him authority to
execute judgment because He is the Son of Man.” And if still further
evidence be necessary it would be easy to show both from the Acts and the
Epistles that from the very beginning all the disciples of Jesus believed
and taught that He would come again to be their Judge.
Consider what this means. Reference has already been made in an earlier
chapter to Christ’s witness concerning Himself, to His deep and unwavering
consciousness of separateness from all others. But more striking, perhaps,
than any illustration mentioned there is that furnished by the fact before
us now. What must His thoughts about Himself have been who could speak of
Himself in relation to all others as Christ does here? When men write about
Jesus as though He were merely a gentle, trustful, religious genius,
preaching a sweet gospel of the love of God to the multitudes of Galilee,
they are but shutting their eyes to one half of the facts which it is their
duty to explain. Speaking generally, we do well to distrust the dilemma as
a form of argument; but in this case there need be no hesitation in putting
the alternative with all possible bluntness: either Christ was God, or He
was not good. That Jesus, if He were merely a good man, with a good man’s
consciousness of and sensitiveness to His own weakness and limitations,
could yet have arrogated to Himself the right to be the supreme judge and
final arbiter of the destinies of mankind, is simply not thinkable. And the
more we ponder the stupendous claim which Christ makes, the more must we
feel that it is either superhuman authority which speaks to us here or
superhuman arrogance. Either Christ spoke out of the depths of His own
Divine consciousness, knowing that the Father had committed all judgment
unto the Son; or He made use of words and put forth claims which were, and
which He must have known to have been, empty, false, and blasphemous.
Such is the significance of Christ’s words in their relation to Himself.
It is, however, with their relation to ourselves that we are primarily
concerned now. Of the wholly unimaginable circumstances of that day when
the Son of Man shall come in His glory and all the nations be gathered
before Him I shall not attempt to speak. As Dean Church has well
said,[57] no vision framed with
the materials of our present experience could adequately represent the
truth, and, indeed, it is well that our minds should be diverted from
matters which lie wholly beyond our reach, that they may dwell upon the
solemn certainties which Christ has revealed. Let us think, first of the
fact, and secondly of the issues, of Judgment.
I
The persistent definiteness with which the fact of judgment is affirmed
by the New Testament we have already seen. Nor is the New Testament our
only witness. The belief in a higher tribunal before which the judgments of
time are to be revised, and in many cases reversed, may be said to be part
of the creed of the race. Plato had his vision of judgment as well as
Jesus. And in the Old Testament, and especially in the Book of Psalms, the
same faith finds repeated and magnificent utterance: “Our God shall come,
and shall not keep silence; a fire shall devour before Him, and it shall be
very tempestuous round about Him. He shall call to the heavens above, and
to the earth, that He may judge His people;” and again, “For He cometh, for
He cometh to judge the earth: He shall judge the world with righteousness
and the peoples with His truth.”
Here, then, is the fact which demands a place in the thoughts of each of
us–we are all to be judged. Life is not to be folded up, like a piece of
finished work, and then laid aside and forgotten; it is to be gone over
again and examined by the hand and eyes of Perfect Wisdom and Perfect Love.
Each day we are writing, and often when the leaf is turned that which has
been written passes from our mind and is remembered no more; but it is
there, and one day the books–the Book of Life, of our life–will be
opened, and the true meaning of the record revealed. Life brings to us many
gifts of many kinds, and as it lays them in our hands, for our use and for
our blessing, it is always, had we but ears to hear, with the warning word,
“Know thou, that for all these things, God will bring thee into
judgment.”
It is, indeed, a tremendous thought. When Daniel Webster was once asked
what was the greatest thought that had ever occupied his mind, he answered,
“the fact of my personal accountability to God.” And no man can give to
such a fact its due place without feeling its steadying, sobering influence
through all his life. Lament is often made to-day, and not without reason,
of our failing sense of the seriousness of life. A plague of frivolity,
more deadly than the locusts of Egypt, has fallen upon us, and is smiting
all our green places with barrenness. Somehow, and at all costs, we must
get back our lost sense of responsibility. If we would remember that God
has a right hand and a left hand; if we would put to ourselves Browning’s
question, “But what will God say?” if sometimes we would pull ourselves up
sharp, and ask–this that I am doing, how will it look then, in that day
when “Each shall stand full-face with all he did below”? if, I say, we
would do this, could life continue to be the thing of shows and
make-believe it so often is? It was said of the late Dean Church by one who
knew him well: “He seemed to live in the constant recollection of something
which is awful, even dreadful to remember–something which bears with
searching force on all men’s ways and hopes and plans–something before
which he knew himself to be as it were continually arraigned–something
which it was strange and pathetic to find so little recognized among other
men.” But, alas! this is how we refuse to live. We thrust the thought of
judgment from us; we treat it as an unwelcome intruder, a disturber of our
peace; we block up every approach by which it might gain access to our
minds. We do not deny that there is a judgment to come; but our habitual
disregard of it is verily amazing. “Judge not,” said Christ, “that ye be
not judged;” yet every day we let fly our random arrows, careless in whose
hearts they may lodge. “Every idle word that men shall speak, they shall
give account thereof in the day of judgment;” yet with what superb
recklessness do we abuse God’s great gift of speech! “We shall all stand
before the judgment-seat of God;” yes, we know it; but when do we think of
it? What difference does it make to us?
What can indifference such as this say for itself? How can it justify
itself before the bar of reason? Do we realize that our neglect has Christ
to reckon with? These things of which I have spoken are not the gossamer
threads of human speculation; they are the strong cords of Divine truth and
they cannot be broken. “You seem, sir,” said Mrs. Adams to Dr. Johnson, in
one of his despondent hours, when the fear of death and judgment lay heavy
on him, “to forget the merits of our Redeemer.” “Madam,” said the honest
old man, “I do not forget the merits of my Redeemer; but my Redeemer has
said that He will set some on His right hand and some on His left.” Yes, it
is the words of Christ with which we have to do; and if we are wise, if we
know the things which belong unto our peace, we shall find for them a place
within our hearts.
II
The issues of the Judgment may be summed up in a single
word–separation: “He shall set the sheep on His right hand, but the goats
on the left.” Stated thus broadly, the issue of the Judgment satisfies our
sense of justice. If there is to be judgment at all, separation must be the
outcome. And in that separation is vindicated one of man’s most deep-seated
convictions. As right is right and wrong is wrong, and right and wrong are
not the same, so neither can their issues be the same. “We have a robust
common-sense of morality which refuses to believe that it does not matter
whether a man has lived like the Apostle Paul or the Emperor Nero.” We can
never crush out the conviction that there must be one place for St. John,
who was Jesus’ friend, and another for Judas Iscariot, who was His
betrayer.”[58] This must
be,
“Else earth is darkness at
the core,
And dust and ashes all that is.”We must be sure that God has a right hand and a left, that good and evil
are distinct, and will for ever remain so, that each will go to his own
place, the place for which he is prepared, for which he has prepared
himself, or our day would be turned into night and our whole life put to
confusion.
So far, Christ’s words present no difficulty. To many, however, it is a
serious perplexity to find that Christ speaks of but two classes into which
by the Judgment men are divided. There are the sheep and the goats, the
good and the bad, and there are no others. To us it seems impossible to
divide men thus. They are not, we think, good or bad, but good and bad. “I can understand,” some one has said, “what is to become
of the sheep, and I can understand what is to become of the goats, but how
are the alpacas to be dealt with?”[59] The alpaca, it should be said, is an animal
possessing some of the characteristics both of the sheep and the goat, and
the meaning of the question is, of course, what is to become of that vast
middle class in whose lives sometimes good and sometimes evil seems to
rule?
Now it is a remarkable fact that Scripture knows nothing of any such
middle class. Some men it calls good, others it calls evil, but it has no
middle term. Note, e.g., this typical contrast from the Book of
Proverbs: “The path of the righteous is as the light of dawn, that shineth
more and more unto the noon-tide of the day. The way of the wicked is as
darkness; they know not at what they stumble.” Or listen to Peter’s
question: “If the righteous is scarcely saved, where shall the ungodly and
sinner appear?” In both instances the assumption is the same: there, on the
one hand, are the righteous; and there, on the other, are the wicked; and
beside these there are no others. The same classification is constant
throughout the teaching of Jesus. He speaks of two gates, and two ways, and
two ends. There are the guests who accept the King’s invitation and sit
down in His banqueting hall, and there are those who refuse it and remain
without. In the parable of the net full of fishes the good are gathered
into vessels, but the bad are cast away. The wheat and the tares grow
together until the harvest; then the wheat is gathered into the barn, and
the tares are cast into the fire. The sheep are set on the right hand, and
the goats on the left hand; and there is no hint or suggestion that any
other kind of classification is necessary in order that all men may be
truly and justly dealt with.
All this may seem very arbitrary and impossible until we remember that
the classification is not ours but God’s. It is not we who have to divide
men, setting one on the right hand and another on the left; that is God’s
work; and it is well to remind ourselves that He invites none of us to
share His judgment-throne with Him, or, by any verdict of ours, to
anticipate the findings of the last great day. And because to us such a
division is impossible, it does not therefore follow that it should be so
to Him before whom all hearts are open and all desires known. We cannot separate men thus because human character is so complex. But
complexity is a relative term; it depends on the eyes which behold it; and
our naming a thing complex may be but another way of declaring our
ignorance concerning it. We all know how a character, a life, a course of
events, which, on first view, seemed but a tangled, twisted skein, on
closer acquaintance often smooths itself out into perfect simplicity. And
there is surely no difficulty in believing that it should be so with human
life when it is judged by the perfect knowledge of God. Life is like a
great tree which casts forth on every side its far-spreading branches. Yet
all that moving, breathing mystery of twig and branch and foliage springs
from a single root. To us the mystery is baffling in its complexity: we
have looked at the branches. To God it is simple, clear: He sees the hidden
root from which it springs. So that, to go back to our former illustration,
it is only our ignorance which compels us to speak of “alpacas” in the
moral world. To perfect knowledge they will prove to be, as Mr. Selby says,
either slightly-disguised sheep or slightly-disguised goats.
There is a further fact also to be taken into account in considering
Christ’s two-fold classification. Since it is the work of infinite
knowledge and justice it will have regard to all the facts of our life. God
looks not only at the narrow present, but back into the past, and forward
into the future. He marks the trend of the life, the bent and bias of the
soul. He chalks down no line saying, “Reach this or you are undone for
ever.” He sets up no absolute standard to which if a man attain he is a
saint, or falling short of which he is a sinner. And when He calls one man
righteous and another wicked, He means very much more than that one has
done so many good deeds, and another so many evil deeds; “righteous” and
“wicked” describe what each is in himself, what each will decisively reveal
himself to be, when present tendencies have fully worked themselves out.
There are two twilights, the twilight of evening and the twilight of
morning; and therefore God’s question to us is not, how much light have we?
but, which way do we face? to the night or to the day? Not “What art thou?”
but “What wilt thou?” is the supreme question; it is the answer to this
which sets some on the right hand and some on the left.
Let us close as we began, remembering that it is Christ who is to be our
Judge. Therefore will the judgment be according to perfect truth. We know
how He judged men when He was here on earth–without respect of persons,
undeceived by appearances, seeing things always as they are, calling them
always by their true names. And such will His judgment be hereafter. On the
walls of the famous Rock Tombs of Thebes, there is a group of figures
representing the judging of the departed spirit before Osiris, the
presiding deity of the dead. In one hand he holds a shepherd’s crook, in
the other a scourge; before him are the scales of justice; that which is
weighed is the heart of the dead king upon whose lot the deity is called to
decide. The pictured symbol is a dim foreshadowing of that perfect judgment
which He who looketh not at the outward appearance but at the heart will
one day pass on all the lives of men. And yet an apostle has dared to write
of “boldness in the day of Judgment”! Surely St. John is very bold; yet was
his boldness well-based. He remembered the saying of his own Gospel: “The
Father hath given all judgment unto the Son … because He is the Son of
Man.” Yes; He who will come to be our Judge is He who once for us men, and
for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was made man, and upon the
Cross did suffer death for our redemption. Herein is the secret of the
“boldness” of the redeemed.
“Jesus, Thy blood and righteousness
My beauty are, my glorious dress;
‘Midst flaming worlds in these arrayed,
With joy shall I lift up my head.Bold shall I stand in that great day,
For who aught to my charge shall lay?
Fully absolved through these I am,
From sin and fear, from guilt and shame.”
CONCERNING THE FUTURE
LIFE
“My knowledge of that life is small,
The eye of faith is dim;
But ’tis enough that Christ knows all,
And I shall be with Him.”
RICHARD BAXTER.
XVI
CONCERNING THE FUTURE LIFE
“Where neither moth nor rust doth consume, and where thieves
do not break through nor steal.“–MATT. vi. 20.“Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.“–MARK
ix. 48.
These are both sayings of Christ, and each has reference to the life
beyond death; together they illustrate the two-fold thought of the future
which finds a place in all the records of our Lord’s teaching.
Popular theology, it is sometimes said, seriously misunderstands and
misinterprets Jesus. And so far as the theology of the future life is
concerned there need be no hesitation in admitting that, not unfrequently,
it has been disfigured by an almost grotesque literalism. The pulpit has
often forgotten that over-statement is always a blunder, and that any
attempt to imagine the wholly unimaginable is most likely to end in
defeating our own intentions and in dissipating, rather than reinforcing,
our sense of the tremendous realities of which Christ spoke. Nevertheless,
much as theology may have erred in the form of its teaching concerning the
future, its great central ideas have always been derived direct from
Christ. It has not, we know, always made its appeal to what is highest in
man; it has sometimes spoken of “heaven” and “hell” in a fashion that has
left heart and conscience wholly untouched; nevertheless, the time has not
yet come–until men cease to believe in Christ, the time never will have
come–for banishing these words from our vocabulary. Unless Christ were
both a deceiver and deceived, they represent realities as abiding as God
and the soul, realities towards which it behoves every man of us to
discover how he stands. In the teaching of Jesus, no less than in the
teaching of popular theology, the future has a bright side and it has a
dark side; there is a heaven and there is a hell.
I
That there is a life beyond this life, that death does not end all, is
of course always assumed in the teaching of Jesus. But it is much more than
this that we desire to know. What kind of a life is it? What are its
conditions? How is it related to the present life? What is the “glory” into
which, as we believe, “the souls of believers at their death do immediately
pass”? Perhaps our first impression, as we search the New Testament for an
answer to our questions, is one of disappointment; there is so much that
still remains unrevealed. We do indeed read of dead men raised to life
again by the power of God, but of the awful and unimaginable experiences
through which they passed not a word is told.
“‘Where wert thou, brother, those four days?’
There lives no record ofreply.
. . . . .
Behold a man raised up by Christ!
The rest remainethunreveal’d;
He told it not; orsomething seal’d
The lips of that Evangelist.”How much even Christ Himself has left untold! At His incarnation, and
again at His resurrection, He came forth from that world into which we all
must pass; yet how few were His words concerning it, how little able we
still are to picture it! Nevertheless, if He has not told us all, He has
told us enough. Let us recall some of His words.
He spoke of “everlasting habitations”–“eternal tabernacles”–into which
men should be received. Here we are as pilgrims and sojourners, dwelling in
a land not our own.
“Earth’s but a sorry tent,
Pitched but a few frail days;”and the chances and changes of this mortal life often bear heavily upon
us. But there these things have no place. Moth and rust, change and decay,
sorrow and death cannot enter there.
“The day’s aye fair
I’ the land o’ the leal.”Again, Christ said, “I go to prepare a place for you.” Just as when a
little child is born into the world it comes to a place made ready for it
by the thousand little tendernesses of a mother’s love, so does death lead
us, not into the bleak, inhospitable night, but into the “Father’s house,”
to a place which love has made ready for our coming. “Father, into Thy
hands I commend My spirit.” Into Thy hands–thither Jesus passed
from the Cross and the cruel hands of men; thither have passed the lost
ones of our love; thither, too, we in our turn shall pass. Why, then, if we
believe in Jesus should we be afraid? “Having death for my friend,” says an
unknown Greek writer, “I tremble not at shadows.” Having Jesus for our
friend we tremble not at death.
Further, Christ taught us, the heavenly life is a life of service. Every
one knows how largely the idea of rest has entered into our common
conceptions of the future. It is indeed a pathetic commentary on the
weariness and restlessness of life that with so many rest should almost
have come to be a synonym for blessedness. But rest is far from being the
final word of Scripture concerning the life to come. Surely life, with its
thousandfold activities, is not meant as a preparation for a Paradise of
inaction. What can be the meaning and purpose of the life which we are
called to pass through here, if our hereafter is to be but one prolonged
act of adoration? We shall carry with us into the future not character only
but capacity; and can it be that God will lay aside as useless there that
which with so great pains He has sought to perfect here? It is not so that
Christ has taught us to think: “He that received the five talents came and
brought other five talents, saying, Lord, thou deliverest unto me five
talents: lo, I have gained other five talents. His lord said unto him, Well
done, good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things,
I will set thee over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.” God
will not take the tools out of the workman’s hands just when he has learned
how to handle them; He will not “pension off” His servants just when they
are best able to serve Him. The reward of work well done is more work;
faithfulness in few things brings lordship over many. Have we not here a
ray of light on the mystery of unfinished lives? We do not murmur when the
old and tired are gathered to their rest; but when little children die,
when youth falls in life’s morning, when the strong man is cut off in his
strength, we know not what to say. But do not “His servants serve Him”
there as well as here? Their work is not done; in ways beyond our thoughts
it is going forward still. [60]
One other question concerning the future with which, as by an instinct,
we turn to Christ for answer is suggested by the following touching little
poem:
“I can recall so well how she would look–
How at the very murmur of her dress
On entering the room, the whole room took
Anair of gentleness.
That was so long ago, and yet his eyes
Had always afterwards the look that waits
And yearns, and waits again, nor can disguise
Something it contemplates.May we imagine it? The sob, the tears,
The long, sweet, shuddering breath; then on her breast
The great, full, flooding sense of endless years,
Ofheaven, and her, and rest.”
Can we quote the authority of Jesus for thoughts like these? The point
is, let it be noted, not whether we shall know each other again beyond
death, but whether we shall be to each other what we were here. At the foot
of the white marble cross which his wife placed upon the grave of Charles
Kingsley are graven these three words: Amavimus, Amamus, Amabimus (“We have loved, we love, we shall love”). After Mrs. Browning’s death her
husband wrote these lines from Dante in her Testament: “Thus I believe,
thus I affirm, thus I am certain it is, that from this life I shall pass to
another better, there, where that lady lives, of whom my soul was
enamoured.” Will Christ counter-sign a hope like this? I do not know any
“proof-text” that can be quoted, yet it were profanation to think
otherwise. There are many flowers of time, we know, which cannot be
transplanted; but “love never faileth,” love is the true immortelle.
And whatever changes death may bring, those who have been our nearest here
shall be our nearest there. And though, as I say, we can quote no
“proof-text,” our faith may find its guarantee in the great word of Jesus:
“If it were not so, I would have told you.” This is one of the instincts of
the Christian heart, as pure and good as it is firm and strong. Since
Christ let it pass unchallenged, may we not claim His sanction for it? If
it were not so, He would have told us.
II
I turn now to the reverse side of Christ’s teaching concerning the
future. And let us not seek to hide from ourselves the fact that there is a reverse side. For, ignore it as we may, the fact remains: those
same holy lips which spoke of a place, “where neither moth nor rust doth
consume,” spoke likewise of another place, “where their worm dieth not, and
the fire is not quenched.”
In considering this solemn matter we must learn to keep wholly separate
from it a number of difficult questions which have really nothing to do
with it–with which, indeed, we have nothing to do–and the introduction of
which can only lead to mischievous confusion and error. What is to become
of the countless multitudes in heathen lands who die without having so much
as heard of Christ? How will God deal with those even in our own Christian
land to whom, at least as it seems to us, this life has brought no adequate
opportunity of salvation? What will happen in that dim twilight land
betwixt death and judgment which men call “the intermediate state”? Will
they be few or many who at last will be for ever outcasts from the presence
of God? These are questions men will persist in asking, but the answer to
which no man knows. Strictly speaking, they are matters with which we have
nothing to do, which we must be content to leave with God, confident that
the Judge of all the earth will do right, even though He does not show us
how. What we have to do with, what does concern us, is the warning of
Jesus, emphatic and reiterated, that sin will be visited with punishment,
that retribution, just, awful, inexorable, will fall on all them that love
and work iniquity.
“But why,” it may be asked, “why dwell upon these things? Is there not
something coarse and vulgar in this appeal to men’s fears? And, after all,
to what purpose is it? If men are not won by the love of God, of what avail
is it to speak to them of His wrath?” But fear is as real an element in
human nature as love, and when our aim is by all means to save men, it is
surely legitimate to make our appeal to the whole man, to lay our fingers
on every note–the lower notes no less than the higher–in the wide gamut
of human life. The preacher of the gospel, moreover, is left without choice
in the matter. It is no part of his business to ask what is the use of this
or of that in the message given to him to deliver; it is for him to declare
“the whole counsel of God,” to keep back nothing that has been revealed.
And the really decisive consideration is this–that this is a matter on
which Christ Himself has spoken, and spoken with unmistakable clearness and
emphasis. Shall, then, the ambassador hesitate when the will of the King is
made known? More often–five times more often, it is said[61]–than Jesus spoke of future
blessedness did He speak of future retribution. The New Testament is a very
tender book; but it is also a very stern book, and its sternest words are
words of Jesus. “For the sins of the miserable, the forlorn, the
friendless, He has pity and compassion; but for the sins of the
well-taught, the high-placed, the rich, the self-indulgent, for obstinate
and malignant sin, the sin of those who hate, and deceive, and corrupt, and
betray, His wrath is terrible, its expression is unrestrained.”[62] “Jesu, Thou art all compassion,”
we sometimes sing; but is it really so? St. Paul writes of “the meekness
and gentleness of Christ”; and for many of the chapters of Christ’s life
that is the right headline; but there are other chapters which by no
possible manipulation can be brought under that heading, and they also are
part of the story. It was Jesus who said that in the day of judgment it
should be more tolerable for even Tyre and Sidon than for Bethsaida and
Chorazin; it was Jesus who uttered that terrible twenty-third chapter of
St. Matthew’s Gospel, with its seven times repeated “Woe unto you, scribes
and Pharisees, hypocrites!” it was Jesus who spoke of the shut door and the
outer darkness, of the worm that dieth not, and the fire that is not
quenched, of the sin which hath never forgiveness, neither in this world,
nor in that which is to come, and of that day when He who wept over
Jerusalem and prayed for His murderers and died for the world will say unto
them on His left hand, “Depart from Me, ye cursed, into the eternal fire
which is prepared for the devil and his angels.” These are His words, and it is because they are His they make us tremble. He is “gentle Jesus, meek and mild”; that is why His sternness is so
terrible.
These things are not said in order to defend any particular theory of
future punishment–on that dread subject, indeed, the present writer has no
“theory” to defend; he frankly confesses himself an agnostic–but rather to
claim for the solemn fact of retribution a place in our minds akin to that
which it held in the teaching of our Lord. We need have no further concern
than to be loyal to Him. Does, then, such loyalty admit of a belief in
universal salvation? Is it open to us to assert that in Christ the whole
race is predestined to “glory, honour, and immortality”? The “larger hope”
of the universalist–
“that good shall fall
At last–far off–at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring”–is, indeed, one to which no Christian heart can be a stranger; yearnings
such as these spring up within us unbidden and uncondemned. But when it is
definitely and positively asserted that “God has destined all men to
eternal glory, irrespective of their faith and conduct,” “that no
antagonism to the Divine authority, no insensibility to the Divine love,
can prevent the eternal decree from being accomplished,” we shall do well
to pause, and pause again. The old doctrine of an assured salvation for an
elect few we reject without hesitation. But, as Dr. Dale has pointed
out,[63] the difference between
the old doctrine and the new is merely an arithmetical, not a moral
difference: where the old put “some,” the new puts “all”; and the moral
objections which are valid against the one are not less valid against the
other also. I dare not say to myself, and therefore I dare not say to
others, that, let a man live as he may, it yet shall be well with him in
the end. The facts of experience are against it; the words of Christ are
against it. “The very conception of human freedom involves the possibility
of its permanent misuse, of what our Lord Himself calls ‘eternal sin.'” If
a man can go on successfully resisting Divine grace in this life, what
reason have we for supposing that it would suddenly become irresistible in
another life? Build what we may on the unrevealed mercies of the future for
them that live and die in the darkness of ignorance, let us build nothing
for ourselves who are shutting our eyes and closing our hearts to the
Divine light and love which are already ours.
“Behold, then, the goodness and severity of God;” and may His goodness
lead us to repentance, that His severity we may never know. This is,
indeed, His will for every one of us: He has “appointed us not unto wrath,
but unto the obtaining of salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ.” If we
are lost we are suicides.
THE END
1. J. Stalker, The Christology of
Jesus, p. 23, footnote.
2. “The sources for our knowledge of
the actual teaching of Jesus do not lie merely in the Gospel accounts, but
also in the literature of the apostolic age, especially in the Epistles of
Paul…. Even had no direct accounts about Jesus been handed down to us, we
should still possess, in the apostolic literature, a perfectly valid
testimony to the historical existence and epoch-making significance of
Jesus as a teacher.”–H.H. Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, vol. i, p.
28.
3. What is Christianity? p.
20.
4. Three Essays on Religion, p.
253.
5. Literature and Dogma, p.
10.
6. See Harnack’s What is
Christianity? p. 4.
7. See A.S. Peake’s Guide to
Biblical Study, p. 244.
8. Thoughts on Religion, p.
157.
9. The Kingdom of God, p.
50.
10. “Christian apologists,” says Dr.
Sanday, “have often done scant justice to the intensity of this
[monotheistic] faith, which was utterly disinterested and capable of
magnificent self-sacrifice.”–Art. “God,” Hastings’ Dictionary of the
Bible, vol. ii, p. 205.
11. See R.F. Horton’s Teaching of
Jesus, p. 59.
12. A.M. Fairbairn, Christ in
Modern Theology, p. 244.
13. On the subject of this chapter
see especially G.B. Stevens’ Theology of the New Testament, chap.
vi.
14. Christian Doctrine, p.
77.
15. Bishop Gore, Bampton
Lectures, 1891, p. 13.
16. J. Denney, Studies in
Theology, p. 25.
17. For an admirable statement of the
argument of this paragraph see D.W. Forrest’s Christ of History and
experience, chap. i. and note 4, p. 385.
18. Cp. Denney’s note on St. Paul’s
description of Christ, “Him who knew no sin,” in 2 Cor. v. 21: “The Greek
negative (mae), as Schmiedel remarks, implies that this is regarded as the
verdict of some one else than the writer. It was Christ’s own verdict upon
Himself.”
19. The Death of Christ, p.
28.
20. The Philosophy of the
Christian Religion, p. 408.
21. John xii. 27, 28; xiii. 31; xvii.
1.
22. G.B. Stevens, Theology of the
New Testament, p. 133.
23. I quote once more from Dr.
Denney.
24. J. Denney, Studies in
Theology, p. 154.
25. See W.N. Clarke’s Outlines of
Christian Theology, p. 373.
26. “It is the Holy Spirit who
supplies the bodily presence of Christ, and by Him doth He
accomplish all His promises to the Church. Hence, some of the ancients call
Him ‘Vicarium Christi,’ ‘The Vicar of Christ,’ or Him who represents His
person and dischargeth His promised work: Operam navat Christo
vicariam.”–Owen, Works, vol. iii. p. 193.
27. “Our sources with the utmost
possible uniformity refer to the Spirit in terms implying
personality.”–Stevens, Theology of the New Testament (p. 215),
where the whole question is discussed with great fullness and fairness.
28. John Watson, The Mind of the
Master, p. 321. May we remind Dr. Watson of what he has himself written
on the first page of his Doctrines of Grace: “It was the mission of
St. Paul to declare the gospel of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to the
nations, and none of his successors in this high office has spoken with
such persuasive power. Any one differs from St. Paul at his intellectual
peril, and every one may imitate him with spiritual profit.”
29. See, in confirmation of the
argument of this paragraph, Orr’s Christian View of God and the
World, p. 401 ff., and Art. “The Kingdom of God,” in Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible; Denney’s Studies in Theology, Lect.
VIII.
30. J. Watson, The Mind of the
Master, p. 323.
31. F.G. Peabody, Jesus Christ and
the Social Question, pp. 88, 89.
32. Fellowship with Christ, p.
157.
33. See Trench’s Study of
Words, p. 100.
34. The chapter entitled “Christ’s
Doctrine of Man” is one of the most suggestive chapters in Dr. Bruce’s
admirable work The Kingdom of God.
35. Studies in Theology, p.
83.
36. See Hastings’ Dictionary of
the Bible, Art. “Sin,” vol. iii. p. 533.
37. This is the R.V. marginal
rendering of Gen. iv. 13.
38. R.W. Dale, Evangelical Revival
and other Sermons, p. 66 ff.
39. The Kingdom of God, p.
203.
40. In his famous sermon on the
Pharisees, University Sermons, p. 32.
41. R.W. Church, Gifts of
Civilisation, p. 71.
42. Prov. iv. 7: “Get wisdom; and
with all thy getting get understanding,” which does not mean simply,
“Whatever else you get, be sure to get understanding.” The marginal
reference is to Matt. xiii. 44: wisdom, like the pearl of great price, is
to be secured with, i.e. at the cost and sacrifice of, everything
else that can be gotten. (See J.R. Lumby on “Shortcomings of Translation,” Expositor, second series, vol. iii. p. 203.)
43. 2 Cor. v. 9 R.V. margin.
44. Laws of Christ for Common
Life, p. 59.
45. Bible Characters: Stephen to
Timothy, p. 95.
46. On the Authorized Version of
the New Testament, p. 14.
47. I am indebted for these two
quotations to Bishop Paget’s Spirit of Discipline, p. 66.
48. P. Carnegie Simpson, The Fact
of Christ, pp. 116, 117.
49. Time and Tide, p. 224.
50. F.G. Peabody, Jesus Christ and
the Social Problem, p. 219.
51. Emerson had surely overlooked
this nobler meaning of the word when he wrote, “They [the English] put up
no Socratic prayer, much less any saintly prayer, for the queen’s mind; ask
neither for light nor right, but say bluntly, ‘grant her in health and
wealth long to live'” (English Traits).
52. To those who are interested in
the subject of this chapter Prof. Peabody’s book already referred to, and
an article entitled “The Teaching of Christ concerning the Use of Money” (Expositor, third series, vol. viii. p. 100 ff.) may be
recommended.
53. Studies in Theology, p.
239.
54. “There is no subject on which it
is more difficult to ascertain the teaching of Christ than that which
relates to the future of the kingdom.”–A.B. Bruce, The Kingdom of
God, p. 273.
55. J. Agar Beet, The Last
Things, p. 46.
56. Marcus Dods, The Parables of
our Lord (first series), p. 238.
57. Cathedral and University
Sermons, p. 10.
58. John Watson, The Mind of the
Master, pp. 203, 204.
59. See T.G. Selby’s Imperfect
Angel and other Sermons, p. 211. Cf. Zachariah Coleman in “Mark
Rutherford’s” Revolution in Tanners Lane: “That is a passage that I
never could quite understand. I never hardly see a pure breed, either of
goat or sheep. I never see anybody who deserves to go straight to heaven or
who deserves to go straight to hell. When the Judgment Day comes it will be
a difficult task.”
60. See the very striking and
beautiful chapter entitled “The Continuity of Life” in Watson’s Mind of
the Master.
61. See T.G. Selby’s Ministry of
the Lord Jesus, p. 279.
62. R.W. Church, Human Life and
its Conditions, p. 103.
63. In a striking article entitled
“The Old Antinomianism and the New” (Congregational Review, Jan.
1887).
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