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FROM CENTRE TO CIRCUMFERENCE
The life which I now live in the
flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave
Himself for me.’ — Galatians 2:20.
We have a bundle of paradoxes in
this verse. First, ‘I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live.’ The
Christian life is a dying life. If we are in any real sense joined to
Christ, the power of His death makes us dead to self and sin and the
world. In that region, as in the physical, death is the gate of life; and,
inasmuch as what we die to in Christ is itself only a living death, we
live because we die, and in proportion as we die.
The next paradox is, ‘Yet not I, but
Christ liveth in me.’ The Christian life is a life in which an indwelling
Christ casts out, and therefore quickens, self. We gain ourselves when we
lose ourselves. His abiding in us does not destroy but heightens our
individuality. We then most truly live when we can say, ‘Not I, but Christ
liveth in me’; the soul of my soul and the self of myself.
And the last paradox is that of my
text, ‘The life which I live in the flesh, I live in’ (not ‘by’) ‘the
faith of the Son of God.’ The true Christian life moves in two spheres at
once. Externally and superficially it is ‘in the flesh,’ really it is ‘in
faith.’ It belongs not to the material nor is dependent upon the physical
body in which we are housed. We are strangers here, and the true region
and atmosphere of the Christian life is that invisible sphere of faith.
So, then, we have in these words of
my text a Christian man’s frank avowal of the secret of his own life. It
is like a geological cutting, it goes down from the surface, where the
grass and the flowers are, through the various strata, but it goes deeper
than these, to the fiery heart, the flaming nucleus and centre of all
things. Therefore it may do us all good to make a section of our hearts
and see whether the strata there are conformable to those that are here.
I. Let us begin with the
centre, and work to the surface. We have, first, the great central fact
named last, but round which all the Christian life is gathered.
‘The Son of God, who loved me, and
gave Himself for me.’ These two words, the ‘loving’ and the ‘giving,’ both
point backwards to some one
definite historical fact, and the only fact which they can have in view is
the great one of the death of Jesus Christ. That is His giving up of
Himself. That is the signal and highest manifestation and proof of His
love.
Notice (though I can but touch in
the briefest possible manner upon the great thoughts that gather round
these words) the three aspects of that transcendent fact, the centre and
nucleus of the whole Christian life, which come into prominence in these
words Before us. Christ’s death is a great act of self-surrender, of which
the one motive is His own pure and perfect love. No doubt in other places
of Scripture we have set forth the death of Christ as being the result of
the Father’s purpose, and we read that in that wondrous surrender there
were two givings up. The Father ‘freely gave Him up to the death for us
all.’ That divine surrender, the Apostle ventures, in another passage, to
find dimly suggested from afar, in the silent but submissive and
unreluctant surrender with which Abraham yielded his only begotten son on
the mountain top. But besides that ineffable giving up by the Father of
the Son, Jesus Christ Himself, moved only by His love, willingly yields
Himself. The whole doctrine of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ has been
marred by one-sided insisting on the truth that God sent the Son, to the
forgetting of the fact that the Son ‘came’; and that He was bound to the
Cross neither by cords of man’s weaving nor by the will of the Father, but
that He Himself bound Himself to that Cross with the ‘cords of love and
the bands of a man,’ and died from no natural necessity nor from any
imposition of the divine will upon Him unwilling, but because He would,
and that He would because He loved. ‘He loved me, and gave Himself for
me.’
Then note, further, that here, most
distinctly, that great act of self-surrendering love which culminates on
the Cross is regarded as being for man in a special and peculiar sense. I
know, of course, that from the mere wording of my text we cannot argue the
atoning and substitutionary character of the death of Christ, for the
preposition here does not necessarily mean ‘instead of,’ but ‘for the
behoof of.’ But admitting that, I have another question. If Christ’s death
is for ‘the behoof of’ men, in what conceivable sense does it benefit
them, unless it is in the place of men? The death ‘for me’ is only for me
when I understand that it is ‘instead of’ me. And practically you will
find that wherever the full-orbed faith in Christ Jesus as the death for
all the sins of the whole world, bearing the penalty and bearing it away,
has begun to falter and grow pale, men do not know what to do with
Christ’s death at all, and stop talking about it to a very large extent.
Unless He died as a sacrifice, I,
for one, fail to see in what other than a mere sentimental sense the death
of Christ is a death for men.
And lastly, about this matter,
observe how here we have brought into vivid prominence the great thought
that Jesus Christ in His death has regard to single souls. We preach that
He died for all If we believe hi that august title which is laid here as
the vindication of our faith on the one hand, and as the ground of the
possibility of the benefits of His death being world-wide on the other
viz. the Son of God — then we shall not stumble at the thought that He
died for all, because He died for each. I know that if you only regard
Jesus Christ as human I am talking utter nonsense; but I know, too, that
if we believe in the divinity of our Lord, there need be nothing to
stumble us, but the contrary, in the thought that it was not an
abstraction that He died for, that it was not a vague mass of unknown
beings, clustered together, but so far away that He could not see any of
their faces, for whom He gave His life on the Cross. That is the way in
which, and in which alone, we can embrace the whole mass of humanity — by
losing sight of the individuals. We generalise, precisely because we do
not see the individual units; but that is not God’s way, and that is not
Christ’s way, who is divine. For Him the all is broken up into its parts,
and when we say that the divine love loves all, we mean that the divine
love loves each. I believe (and I commend the thought to you) that we do
not fathom the depth of Christ’s sufferings unless we recognise that the
sins of each man were consciously adding pressure to the load beneath
Which He sank; nor picture the wonders of His love until we believe that
on the Cross it distinguished and embraced each, and, therefore,
comprehended all. Every man may say,’ He loved me, and gave Himself for
me.’
II. So much, then, for
the first central fact that is here. Now let me say a word, in the second
place, about the faith which makes that fact the foundation of my own
personal life.
‘I live by the faith of the Son of
God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me.’ I am not going to plunge into
any unnecessary dissertations about the nature of faith; but may I say
that, like all other familiar conceptions, it has got worn so smooth that
it glides over our mental palate without
roughening any of the papillas or giving any sense or savour at all? And I
do believe that dozens of people like you, who have come to church and
chapel all your lives, and fancy yourselves to be fully au fait at all the
Christian truth that you will ever hear from my lips, do not grasp with
any clearness of apprehension the meaning of that fundamental word
‘faith.’
It is a thousand pities that it is
confined by the accidents of language to our attitude in reference to
Jesus Christ. So some of you think that it is some kind of theological
juggle which has nothing to do with, and never can be seen in operation
in, common life. Suppose, instead of the threadbare, technical faith’ we
took to a new translation for a minute, and said ‘trust,’ do you think
that would freshen up the thought to you at all P It is the very same
thing which makes the sweetness of your relations to wife and husband and
friend and parent, which, transferred to Jesus Christ and glorified in the
process, becomes the seed of immortal life and the opener of the gate of
Heaven. Trust Jesus Christ. That is the living centre of the Christian
life; that is the process by which we draw the general blessing of the
Gospel into our own hearts, and make the world-wide truth, our truth.
I need not insist either, I suppose,
on the necessity, if our Christian life is to be modelled upon the
Apostolic lines, of our faith embracing the Christ in all these aspects in
which I have been speaking about His work. God forbid that I should seem
to despise rudimentary and incomplete feelings after Him in any heart
which may be unable to say ‘Amen’ to Paul’s statement here. I want to
insist very earnestly, and with special reference to the young, that the
true Christian faith is not merely the grasp of the person, but it is the
grasp of the Person who is ‘declared to be the Son of God,’ and whose
death is the voluntary self-surrender motived by His love, for the
carrying away of the sins of every single soul in the whole universe. That
is the Christ, the full Christ, cleaving to whom our faith finds somewhat
to grasp worthy of grasping. And I beseech you, be not contented with a
partial grasp of a partial Saviour; neither shut your eyes to the divinity
of His nature, nor to the efficacy of His death, but remember that the
true Gospel preaches Christ and Him crucified; and that for us, saving
faith is the faith that grasps the Son of God ‘Who loved me and gave
Himself for me.’
Note, further, that true faith is
personal faith, which appropriates, and, as it were, fences in as my very
own, the purpose and benefit of Christ’s giving of Himself. It is always
difficult for lazy people (and most of us are lazy) to transfer into their
own personal lives, and to bring into actual contact with themselves and
their own experience, wide, general truths. To assent to them, when we
keep them in their generality, is very easy and very profitless. It does
no man any good to say ‘All men are mortal’; but how different it is when
the blunt end of that generalisation is shaped into a point, and I say ‘I
have to die!’ It penetrates then, and it sticks. It is easy to say ‘All
men are sinners.’ That never yet forced anybody down on his knees. But
when we shut out on either side the lateral view and look straight on, on
the narrow line of our own lives, up to the Throne where the Lawgiver
sits, and feel ‘I am a sinful man,’ that sends us to our prayers for
pardon and purity. And in like manner nobody was ever wholesomely
terrified by the thought of a general judgment. But when you translate it
into ‘I must stand there,’ the terror of the Lord persuades men.
In like manner that great truth
which we all of us say we believe, that Christ has died for the world, is
utterly useless and profitless to us until we have translated it into
Paul’s world, ‘loved me and gave Himself for me.’ I do not say that the
essence of faith is the conversion of the general statement into the
particular application, but I do say that there is no faith which does not
realise one’s personal possession of the benefits of the death of Christ,
and that until you turn the wide word into a message for yourself alone,
you have not yet got within sight of the blessedness of the Christian
life. The whole river may flow past me, but only so much of it as I can
bring into my own garden by my own sluices, and lift in my own bucket, and
put to my own lips, is of any use to me. The death of Christ for the world
is a commonplace of superficial Christianity, which is no Christianity;
the death of Christ for myself, as if He and I were the only beings in the
universe, that is the death on which faith fastens and feeds.
And, dear brother, you have the
right to exercise it. The Christ loves each, and therefore He loves all;
that is the process in the divine mind, The converse is the process in the
revelation of that mind; the Bible says to us, Christ loves all, and
therefore we have the right to draw the inference that He loves each. You
have as much right to take every ‘whosoever’ of the New Testament as your
very own, as if on the page of your Bible that ‘whosoever’ was struck out,
and your name, John, Thomas, Mary, Elizabeth, or whatever it is, were put
in there. ‘He loved me.’ Can you say that? Have you ever passed from the
region of universality, which is vague and profitless, into the region of
personal appropriation of the person of Jesus Christ and His death?
III. And now,
lastly, notice the life which is built upon this faith.
The true Christian life is dual. It
is a life in the flesh, and it is also a life in faith. These two, as I
have said, are like two spheres, in either of which a man’s course is
passed, or, rather, the one is surface and the other is central. Here is a
great trailing spray of seaweed floating golden on the unquiet water, and
rising and falling on each wave or ripple. Aye! but its root is away deep,
deep, deep below the storms, below where there is motion, anchored upon a
hidden rock that can never move. And so my life, if it be a Christian life
at all, has its surface amidst the shifting mutabilities of earth, but its
root in the silent eternities of the centre of all things, which is Christ
in God. I live in the flesh on the outside, but if I am a Christian at
all, I live in the faith in regard of my true and proper being.
This faith, which grasps the Divine
Christ as the person whose love-moved death is my life, and who by my
faith becomes Himself the indwelling Guest in my heart; this faith, if it
Be worth anything, will mould and influence my whole being. It will give
me motive, pattern, power for all noble service and all holy living. The
one thing that stirs men to true obedience is that their hearts be touched
with the firm assurance that Christ loved them and died for them.
We sometimes used to see men
starting an engine by manual force; and what toil it was to get the great
cranks to turn, and the pistons to rise! So we set ourselves to try and
move our lives into holiness and Beauty and nobleness, and it is
dispiriting work. There is a far better, surer way than that: let the
steam in, and that will do it. That is to say — let the Christ in His
dying power and the living energy of His indwelling Spirit occupy the
heart, and activity Becomes Blessedness, and work is rest, and service is
freedom and dominion.
The life that I live in the flesh is
poor, limited, tortured with anxiety, weighed upon By sore distress,
becomes dark and gray and dreary often as we travel nearer the end, and is
always full of miseries and of pains. But if within that life in the flesh
there be a life in faith, which is the life of Christ Himself brought to
us through our faith, that life will he triumphant, quiet, patient,
aspiring, noble, hopeful, gentle, strong, Godlike, being the life of
Christ Himself within us.
So, dear friends, test your faith by
these two tests, what it grasps and what it does. If it grasps a whole
Christ, in all the glory of His nature and the blessedness of His work, it
is genuine; and it proves its genuineness if, and only if, it works in you
by love; animating all your action, bringing you ever into the conscious
presence of that dear Lord, and making Him pattern, law, motive, goal,
companion and reward. ‘To me to live is Christ.’
If so, then we live indeed; but to
live in the flesh is to die; and the death that we die when we live in
Christ is the gate and the beginning of the only real life of the soul.
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THE EVIL EYE AND THE CHARM
‘Who hath bewitched you, that ye
should not obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been
evidently set forth, crucified among you!’ —Galatians 3:1.
THE Revised Version gives a shorter,
and probably correct, form of this vehement question. It omits the two
clauses ‘ that ye should not obey the truth’ and ‘among you.’ The omission
increases the sharpness of the thrust of the interrogation, whilst it
loses nothing of the meaning.
Now, a very striking metaphor runs
through the whole of this question, which may easily be lost sight of by
ordinary readers. You know the old superstition as to the Evil Eye, almost
universal at the date of this letter and even now in the East, and
lingering still amongst ourselves. Certain persons were supposed to have
the power, by a look, to work mischief, and by fixing the gaze of their
victims, to suck the very life out of them. So Paul asks who the malign
sorcerer is who has thus fascinated the fickle Galatians, and is draining
their Christian life out of their eyes.
Very appropriately, therefore, if
there is this reference, which the word translated ‘bewitched’ carries
with it, he goes on to speak about Jesus Christ as having been displayed
before their eyes. They had seen Him. How did they come to be able to turn
away to look at anything else?
But there is another observation to be made by way of introduction, and
that is as to the full force of the expression ‘evidently set forth.’ The
word employed, as commentators tell us, is that which is used for the
display of official proclamations, or public notices, in some conspicuous
place, as the Forum or the market, that the citizens might read. So,
keeping up the metaphor, the word might be rendered, as has been suggested
by some eminent scholars, ‘placarded’ — ‘Before whose eyes Jesus Christ
has been placarded.’ The expression has acquired somewhat ignoble
associations from modern advertising, but that is no reason why we should
lose sight of its force. So, then, Paul says, ‘In my preaching, Christ was
conspicuously set forth. It is like some inexplicable enchantment that,
having seen Him, you should turn away to gaze on others.’ It is insanity
which evokes wonder, as well as sin which deserves rebuke; and the fiery
question of my text conveys both.
I. Keeping to the
metaphor, I note first the placard which Paul had displayed.
‘Jesus Christ crucified has been
conspicuously set forth before you,’ he says to these Galatians. Now, he
is referring, of course, to his own work of preaching the Gospel to them
at the beginning. And the vivid metaphor suggests very strikingly two
things. We see in it the Apostle’s notion of what He had to do. His had
been a very humble office, simply to hang up a proclamation. The one
virtue of a proclamation is that it should be brief and plain. It must be
authoritative, it must be urgent, it must be ‘writ large,’ it must be
easily intelligible. And he that makes it public has nothing to do except
to fasten it up, and make sure that it is legible. If I might venture into
modern phraseology, what Paul means is that he was neither more nor less
than a bill-sticker, that he went out with the placards and fastened them
up.
Ah! if we ministers universally
acted up to the implications of this metaphor, do you not think the pulpit
would be more frequently a centre of power than it is to-day? And if,
instead of presenting our own ingenuities and speculations, we were to
realise the fact that we have to hide ourselves behind the broad sheet
that we fasten up, there would be a new Breath over many a moribund
church, and we ,should hear less of the often warrantable sarcasms about
the inefficiency of the modern pulpit.
But I turn from Paul’s conception of
the office to his statement of his theme. ‘Jesus was displayed amongst
you.’ If I might vary the metaphor a little, the placard that Paul
fastened up was like those that modern advertising ingenuity displays upon
all our walls. It was a picture-placard, and on it was portrayed one sole
figure — Jesus, the Person. Christianity is Christ, and Christ is
Christianity; and wherever there is a pulpit or a book which deals rather
with doctrines than with Him who is the Fountain and Quarry of all
doctrine, there is divergence from the primitive form of the Gospel.
I know, of course, that doctrines —
which are only formal and orderly statements of principles involved in the
facts — must flow from the proclamation of the person, Christ. I am not
such a fool as to run amuck against theology, as some people in this day
do. But what I wish to insist upon is that the first form of Christianity
is not a theory, but a history, and that the revelation of God is the
biography of a man. We must begin with the person, Christ, and preach Him.
Would that all our preachers and all professing Christians, in their own
personal religious life, had grasped this — that, since Christianity is
not first a philosophy but a history, and its centre not an ordered
sequence of doctrines but a living person, the act that makes a man
possessor of Christianity is not the intellectual process of assimilating
certain truths, and accepting them, but the moral process of clinging,
with trust and love, to the person, Jesus.
But, further, if any of you consult
the original, you will see that the order of the sentence is such as to
throw a great weight of emphasis on that last word ‘crucified.’ It is not
merely a person that is portrayed on the placard, but it is that person
upon the Cross. Ah! brethren, Paul himself puts his finger, in the words
of my text, on what, in his conception, was the throbbing heart of all his
message, the vital point from which all its power, and all the gleam of
its benediction, poured out upon humanity — ‘Christ crucified.’ If the
placard is a picture of Christ in other attitudes and in other aspects,
without the picture of Him crucified, it is an imperfect representation of
the Gospel that Paul preached and that Christ was.
II. Now, think,
secondly, of the fascinators that draw away the eyes.
Paul’s question is not one of
ignorance, but it is a rhetorical way of rebuking, and of expressing
wonder. He knew, and the Galatians knew, well enough who it was that had
bewitched them. The whole letter is a polemic worked in fire, and not in
frost, as some argumentation is, against a very well-marked class of
teachers — viz, those emissaries of Judaism who had crept into the Church,
and took it as their special function to dog Paul’s steps amongst the
heathen communities that he had gathered together through faith in Christ,
and used every means to upset his work.
I cannot but pause for a moment upon
this original reference of my text, because it is very relevant to the
present condition of things amongst us. These men whom Paul is fighting as
if he were in a sawpit with them, in this letter, what was their teaching?
This: they did not deny that Jesus was the Christ; they did not deny that
faith knit a man to Him, but what they said was that the observance of the
external rites of Judaism was necessary in order to entrance into the
Church and to salvation. They did not in their own estimation detract from
Christ, but they added to Him. And Paul says that to add is to detract, to
say that anything is necessary except faith in Jesus Christ’s finished
work is to deny that that finished work, and faith in it, are the means of
salvation; and the whole evangelical system crumbles into nothingness if
once you admit that.
Now, is there anybody to-day who is saying the same things, with
variations consequent upon change of external conditions? Are there no
people within the limits of the Christian Church who are reiterating the
old Jewish notion that external ceremonies — baptism and the Lord’s Supper
— are necessary to salvation and to connection with the Christian Church?
And is it not true now, as it was then, that though they do not avowedly
detract, they so represent these external rites as to detract, from the
sole necessity of faith in the perfected work of Jesus Christ? The centre
is shifted from personal union with a personal Saviour by a personal faith
to participation in external ordinances.’ And I venture to think that the
lava stream which, in this Epistle to the Galatians, Paul pours on the
Judaisers of his day needs but a little deflection to pour its hot current
over, and to consume, the sacramentarian theories of this day. ‘O foolish
Galatians, who hath bewitched you?’ Is it not like some malignant sorcery,
that after the Evangelical revival of the last century and the earlier
part of this, there should spring up again this old, old error, and darken
the simplicity of the Gospel teaching, that Christ’s work, apprehended by
faith, without anything else, is the means, and the only means, of
salvation?
But I need not spend time upon that
original application. Let us rather come more closely to our own
individual lives and their weaknesses. It is a strange thing, so strange
that if one did not know it by one’s own self, one would be scarcely
disposed to believe it possible, that a man who has ‘tasted the good word
of God and the powers of the world to come,’ and has known Jesus Christ as
Saviour and Friend, should decline from Him, and turn to anything besides.
And yet, strange and sad, and like some enchantment as it is, it is the
experience at times and in a measure, of us all; and, alas! it is the
experience, in a very tragical degree, of many who have walked for a
little while behind the Master, and then have turned away and walked no
more with Him. We may well wonder; but the root of the mischief is in no
baleful glitter of a sorcerer’s eye without us, but it is in the weakness
of our own wills and the waywardness of our own hearts, and the wandering
of our own affections. We often court the coming of the evil influence,
and are willing to be fascinated and to turn our backs upon Jesus.
Mysterious it is, for why should men cast away diamonds for paste?
Mysterious it is, for we do not usually drop the substance to get the
shadow. Mysterious it is, for a man does not ordinarily empty his pockets
of gold in order to fill them with gravel. Mysterious it is, for a thirsty
man will not usually turn away from the full, bubbling, living fountain,
to see if he can find any drops still remaining, green with scum, stagnant
and odorous, at the bottom of some broken cistern. But all these follies
are sanity as compared with the folly of which we are guilty, times
without number, when, having known the sweetness of Jesus Christ, we turn
away to the fascinations of the world. Custom, the familiarity that we
have with Him, the attrition of daily cares — like the minute grains of
sand that are cemented on to paper, and make a piece of sandpaper that is
strong enough to file an inscription off iron — the seductions of worldly
delights, the pressure of our daily cares — all these are as a ring of
sorcerers that stand round about us, before whom we are as powerless as a
bird in the presence of a serpent, and they bewitch us and draw us away.
The sad fact has been verified over
and over again on a large scale in the history of the Church. After every
outburst of renewed life and elevated spirituality there is sure to come a
period of reaction when torpor and formality again assert themselves. What
followed the Reformation in Germany? A century of death. What followed
Puritanism in England? An outburst of lust and godlessness.
So it has always been, and so it is
with us individually, as we too well know. Ah, brethren! the seductions
are omnipresent, and our poor eyes are very weak, and we turn away from
the Lord to look on these misshapen monsters that are seeking by their
gaze to draw us into destruction. I wonder how many professing Christians
are in this audience who once saw Jesus Christ a great deal more clearly,
and contemplated Him a great deal more fixedly, and turned their hearts to
Him far more lovingly, than they do today? Some of the great mountain
peaks of Africa are only seen for an hour or two in the morning, and then
the clouds gather around them, and hide them for the rest of the day. It
is like the experience of many professing Christians, who see Him in the
morning of their Christian life far more vividly than they ever do after.
‘Who hath bewitched you?’ The world; but the arch-sorcerer sits safe in
our own hearts.
III. Lastly, keeping to
the metaphor, let me suggest, although my text does not touch upon it, the
Amulet.
One has seen fond mothers in Egypt
and Palestine who hang on their babies’ necks charms, to shield them from
the influence of the Evil Eye; and there is a charm that we may wear if we
will, which will keep us safe. There is no fascination in the Evil Eye if
you do not look at it.
The one object that the sorcerer has is to withdraw our gaze from Christ;
it is not illogical to say that the way to defeat the object is to keep
our gaze fixed on Christ. If you do not look at the baleful glitter of the
Evil Eye it will exercise no power over you; and if you will steadfastly
look at Him, then, and only then, you will not look at it. Like Ulysses in
the legend, bandage the eyes and put wax in the ears, if you would neither
be tempted by hearing the songs, nor by seeing the fair forms, of the
sirens on their island. To look fixedly at Jesus Christ, and with the
resolve never to turn away from Him, is the only safety against these
tempting delights around us.
But, brethren, it is the crucified
Christ, looking to whom, we are safe amidst all seductions and snares. I
doubt whether a Christ who did not die for men has power enough over men’s
hearts and minds to draw them to Himself. The cords which bind us to Him
are the assurance of His dying love which has conquered us. If only we
will, day by day, and moment by moment, as we pass through the duties and
distractions, the temptations and the trials, of this present life, by an
act of will and thought turn ourselves to Him, then all the glamour of
false attractiveness will disappear from the temptations around us, and we
shall see that the sirens, for all their fair forms, end in loathly
fishes’ tails and sit amidst dead men’s bones.
Brethren, ‘looking off unto Jesus’
is the secret of triumph over the fascinations of the world. And if we
will habitually so look, then the sweetness that we shall experience will
destroy all the seducing power of lesser and earthly sweetness, and the
blessed light of the sun will dim and all but extinguish the deceitful
gleams that tempt us into the swamps where we shall be drowned. Turn away,
then, from these things; cleave to Jesus Christ; and though in ourselves
we may be as weak as a humming-bird before a snake, or a rabbit before a
tiger, He will give us strength, and the light of His face shining down
upon us will fix our eyes and make us insensible to the fascinations of
the sorcerers. So we shall not need to dread the question, ‘Who hath
bewitched you?’ but ourselves challenge the utmost might of the
fascination with the triumphant question, ‘Who shall separate us from the
love of Christ?’
Help us, O Lord! we beseech Thee, to
live near Thee. Turn away our eyes from beholding vanity, and enable us to
set the Lord always before us that we be not moved.
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LESSONS OF EXPERIENCE
Have ye suffered go many things in
vain?’ — Galatians 3:4.
Preached on the last Sunday of
the year
This vehement question is usually
taken to Be a reminder to the fickle Galatians that their Christian faith
had brought upon them much suffering from the hands of their unbelieving
brethren, and to imply an exhortation to faithfulness to the Gospel lest
they should stultify their past brave endurance. Yielding to the Judaising
teachers, and thereby escaping the ‘offence of the Cross,’ they would make
their past sufferings vain. But it may be suggested that the word
‘suffered’ here is rather used in what is its known sense elsewhere,
namely, with the general idea of feeling, the nature of the feeling being
undefined. It is a touching proof of the preponderance of pain and sorrow
that by degrees the significance of the word has become inextricably
intertwined with the thought of sadness; still, it is possible to take it
in the text as meaning experienced or felt, and to regard the Apostle as
referring to the whole of the Galatians’ past experience, and as founding
his appeal for their steadfastness on all the joys as well as the sorrows,
which their faith had brought them.
Tatting the words in this more general sense they become a question which
it is well for us to ask ourselves at such a time as this, when the
calendar naturally invites us to look backwards and ask ourselves what we
have made of all our experiences in the past, or rather what, by the help
of them all, we have made of ourselves.
I. The duty of
retrospect.
For almost any reason it is good for
us to be delivered from our prevailing absorption in the present. Whatever
counterpoises the overwhelming weight of the present is, so far, a
blessing and a good, and whatever softens the heart and keeps up even the
lingering remembrance of early, dewy freshness and of the high aspirations
which, even for a brief space, elevated our past selves is gain amidst the
dusty commonplaces of to-day. We see things better and more clearly when
we get a little away from them, as a face is more distinctly visible at
armslength than when held close.
But our retrospects are too often almost as trivial and degrading as is
our absorption in the present, and to prevent memory from becoming a
minister of frivolity if not of sin, it is needful that such a question as
that of our text be urgently asked by each of us. Memory must be in
closest union with conscience, as all our faculties must be, or she is of
little use. There is a mere sentimental luxury of memory which finds a
pensive pleasure in the mere passing out from the hard present into the
soft light, not without illusion in its beams, of the’ days that are no
more.’ Merely to live over again our sorrows and joys without any clear
discernment of what their effects on our moral character have been, is not
the retrospect that becomes a man, however it might suit an animal. We
have to look back as a man might do escaping from the ocean on to some
frail sand-bank which ever breaks off and crumbles away at his very heels.
To remember the past mainly as it affected our joy or our sorrow is as
unworthy as to regard the present from the same point of view, and robs
both of their highest worth. To remember is only then blessed and
productive of its highest possible good in us, when the question of our
text insists on being faced, and the object of retrospect is not to try to
rekindle the cold coals of past emotions, but to ascertain what effect on
our present characters our past experiences have had. We have not to turn
back and try to gather some lingering flowers, but to look for the fruit
which has followed the fallen blossoms.
II. The true test
for the past.
The question of our text implies, as
we have already suggested, that our whole lives, with all their various
and often opposite experiences, are yet an ordered whole, having a
definite end. There is some purpose beyond the moment to be served. Our
joys and our sorrows, our gains and our losses, the bright hours and the
dark hours, and the hours that are neither eminently bright nor supremely
dark, our failures and our successes, our hopes disappointed or fulfilled,
and all. the infinite variety of condition and environment through which
our varying days and years have led us, co-operate for one end. It is life
that makes men; the infant is a bundle of possibilities, and as the years
go on, one possible avenue of development after another is blocked. The
child might have been almost anything; the man has become hardened and
fixed into one shape.
But all this variety of impulses and
complicated experiences need the co-operation of the man himself if they
are to reach their highest results in him. If he is simply recipient of
these external forces acting upon him, they will shape him indeed, but he
will be a poor creature. Life does not make men unless men take the
command of life, and he who lets circumstances and externals guide him, as
the long water weeds in a river are directed by its current, will, from
the highest point of view, have experienced the variations of a lifetime
in vain.
No doubt each of our experiences has
its own immediate and lower purpose to serve, and these purposes are
generally accomplished, but beyond these each has a further aim which is
not reached without diligent carefulness and persistent effort on our
parts. If we would be sure of what it is to suffer life’s experiences in
vain, we have but to ask ourselves what life is given us for, and we all
know that well enough to be able to judge how far we have used life to
attain the highest ends of living. We may put these ends in various ways
in our investigation of the results of our manifold experiences. Let us
begin with the lowest — we received life that we might learn truth, then
if our experience has not taught us wisdom it has been in vain. It is
deplorable to have to look round and see how little the multitude of men
are capable of forming anything like an independent and intelligent
opinion, and how they are swayed by gusts of passion, by blind prejudice,
by pretenders and quacks of all sorts. It is no less sad for us to turn
our eyes within and discover, perhaps not without surprise and shame, how
few of what we are self-complacent enough to call our opinions are due to
our own convictions.
If we ever are honest enough with
ourselves to catch a glimpse of our own unwisdom, the question our text
will press heavily upon us, and may help to make us wiser by teaching us
how foolish we are. An infinite source of wisdom is open to us, and all
the rich variety of our lives’ experiences has been lavished on us to help
us, and what have we made of it all?
But we may rise a step higher and
remember we are made moral creatures. Therefore, whatever has not
developed infant potentialities in us, and made them moral qualities, has
been experienced in vain. ‘Not enjoyment and not sorrow is our destined
end and way.’ Life is meant to make us love and do the good, and unless it
has produced that effect on us, it has failed. If this be true, the world
is full of failures, like the marred statues in a bad sculptor’s studio,
and we ourselves have earnestly to confess that the discipline of life has
too often been wasted upon us, and that of us the divine complaint from of
old has been true: ‘In vain have I smitten thy children, they have
received no correction.’
There is no sadder waste than the
waste of sorrow, and alas! we all know how impotent our afflictions have
been to make us better. But not afflictions only have failed in their
appeal to us, our joys have as often been in vain as our sorrows, and
memory, when it turns its lamp on the long past, sees so few points at
which life has taught us to love goodness, and be good, that she may well
quench her light and let the dead past bury its dead.
But we must rise still higher, and
think of men as being made for God, and as being the only creatures known
to us who are capable of religion. ‘Man’s chief end is to glorify God and
to enjoy Him for ever.’ And this chief end is in fullest harmony with the
lower ends to which we have just referred, and they will never be realised
in their fullest completeness unless that completeness is sought in this
the chief end. From of old meditative souls have known that the beginning
of wisdom is the fear of the Lord, and that that fear is as certainly the
beginning of goodness. It was not an irrelevant rebuke to the question,
‘What good thing shall I do?’ when Jesus set the eager young soul who
asked it, to justify to himself his courteous and superficial application
to Him of the abused and vulgarised title of’ Good,’ and pointed him to
God as the only Being to whom that title, in its perfectness, could be
given. If ‘there is none good but one, that is God,’ man’s goodness must
be drawn from Him, and morality without religion will in theory be
incomplete, and in practice a delusion. If, then, men are made to need
God, and capable of possessing Him, and of being possessed by Him, then
the great question for all of us is, has life, with all its rapid whirl of
changing circumstance and varying fortunes, drawn us closer to God, and
made us more fit to receive more of Him? So supreme is this chief end that
a life which has not attained it can only be regarded as ‘in vain’
whatever other successes it may have attained. So unspeakably more
important and necessary is it, that compared with it all else sinks into
nothingness; hence many lives which are dazzling successes in the eyes of
men are ghastly failures in reality.
Now, if we take these plain
principles with us in our retrospect of the past year we shall be launched
on a very serious inquiry, and brought face to face with a very penitent
answer. Some of us may have had great sorrows, and the tears may be
scarcely dry upon our cheeks: some of us may have had great gladnesses,
and our hearts may still be throbbing with the thrill: some of us may have
had great successes, and some of us heavy losses, but the question for us
to ask is not of the quality of our past experiences, but as to their
effects upon us. Has life been so used by us as to help us to become
wiser, better, more devout? And the answer to that question, if we are
honest in our scrutiny of ourselves, and if memory has not been a mere
sentimental luxury, must be that we have too often been but unfaithful
recipients alike of God’s mercies and God’s chastisements, and have
received much of the discipline of life, and remained undisciplined. The
question of our text, if asked by me, would be impertinent, but it is
asked of each of us by the stern voice of conscience, and for some of us
by the lips of dear ones whose loss has been among our chiefest
sufferings. God asks us this question, and it is hard to make believe to
Him.
III. The best
issue of the retrospect.
The world says, ‘What I have written
I have written,’ and there is a very solemn and terrible reality in the
thought of the irrevocable past. Whether life has achieved the ends for
which it was given or no, it has achieved some ends. It may have made us
into characters the very opposite of God’s intention for us, but it has
made us into certain characters which, so far as the world sees, can never
be unmade or re-made. The world harshly preaches the indelibility of
character, and proclaims that the Ethiopian may as soon be expected to
change his skin or the leopard his spots as the man accustomed to do evil
may learn to do well. That dreary fatalism which binds the effects of a
dead past on a man’s shoulders, and forbids him to hope that anything will
obliterate the marks of ‘what once hath been,’ is in violent contradiction
to the large hope brought into the world by Jesus Christ. What we have
written we have written, and we have no power to erase the lines and make
the sheet clean again, but Jesus Christ has taken away the handwriting
‘that was against us,’ nailing it to His cross. Instead of our old
sin-worn and sin-marked selves, He proffers to each of us a new self, not
the outcome of what we have been, but the image of what He is and the
prophecy of what we shall be. By the great gift of holiness for the future
by the impartation of His own life and spirit, Jesus makes all things new.
The Gospel recognises to the full how bad some who have received it were,
but it can willingly admit their past foulness, because it contrasts with
all that former filth their present cleanness, and to the most
inveterately depraved who have trusted in Christ rejoices to say, ‘Ye were
washed, ye were sanctified, ye were justified in the name of the Lord
Jesus Christ.’
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THE UNIVERSAL PRISON
‘But the Scripture hath concluded
all under sin, that the promise by faith Jesus Christ might be given to
them that believe.’ — Galatians 3:22.
THE Apostle uses here a striking and
solemn figure, which is much veiled for the English reader by the
ambiguity attaching to the word ‘concluded.’ It literally means ‘shut up,’
and is to be taken in its literal sense of confining, and not in its
secondary sense of inferring. So, then, we are to conceive of a vast
prison-house in which mankind is confined. And then, very
characteristically, the Apostle passes at once to another metaphor when he
goes on to say ‘under sin.’ What a moment before had presented itself to
his vivid imagination as a great dungeon is now represented as a heavy
weight, pressing down upon those beneath; if, indeed, we are not, perhaps,
rather to think of the low roof of the dark dungeon as weighing on the
captives.
Further, he says that Scripture has
driven men into this captivity. That, of course, cannot mean that
revelation makes us sinners, but it does mean that it makes us more
guilty, and that it declares the fact of human sinfulness as no other
voice has ever done. And then the grimness of the picture is all relieved
and explained, and the office ascribed to God’s revelation harmonised with
God’s love, by the strong, steady beam of light that falls from the last
words, which tell us that the prisoners have not been bound in chains for
despair or death, but in order that, gathered together in a common doleful
destiny, they may become recipients of a common blessed salvation, and
emerge into liberty and light through faith in Jesus Christ.
So here are three things — the
prison-house, its guardian, and its breaker. ‘The Scripture hath shut up
all under sin, in order that the promise by faith of Jesus Christ might be
given unto all them that believe.’
I. First, then,
note the universal prison-house.
Now the Apostle says two things —
and we may put away the figure and look at the facts that underlie it. The
one is that all sin is imprisonment, the other is that all men are in that
dungeon, unless they have come out of it through faith in Jesus Christ.
All sin is imprisonment. That is the
direct contrary of the notion that many people have. They say to
themselves, ‘Why should I be fettered and
confined by these antiquated restrictions of a conventional morality? Why
should I not break the Bonds, and ‘do as I like?’ And they laugh at
Christian people who recognise the limitations under which God’s law has
put them; and tell us that we are ‘cold-blooded folks who live by rule,’
and contrast their own broad ‘emancipation from narrow prejudice.’ But the
reality is the other way. The man who does wrong is a slave in the measure
in which he does it. If you want to find out — and mark this, you young
people, who may be deceived by the false contrasts between the restraints
of duty and the freedom of living a dissolute life — if you want to find
out how utterly ‘he that committeth sin is the slave of sin,’ try to break
it off, and you will find it out fast enough. We all know, alas! the
impotence of the will when it comes to hand grips with some evil to which
we have become habituated; and how we determine and determine, and try,
and fail, and determine again, with no better result. We are the slaves of
our own passions; and no man is free who is hindered by his lower self
from doing that which his better self tells him he ought to do. The
tempter comes to you, and says, ‘Come and do this thing, just for once.
You can leave off when you like, you know. There is no need to do it a
second time.’ And when you have done it, he changes his note, and says,
‘Ah! you are in, and you cannot get out. You have done it once; and in my
vocabulary once means twice, and once and twice mean always.’
Insane people are sometimes tempted
into a house of detention by being made to believe that it is a grand
mansion, where they are just going to pay a flying visit, and can come
away when they like. But once inside the walls, they never get past the
lodge gates any more. The foolish birds do not know that there is lime on
the twigs, and their little feet get fastened to the Branch, and their
wings flutter in vain. ‘He that committeth sin is the slave of sin — shut
up,’ dungeoned, ‘under sin.’
But do not forget, either, the other
metaphor in our text, in which the Apostle, with characteristic rapidity,
and to the horror of rhetorical Propriety, passes at once from the thought
of a dungeon to the thought of an impending weight, and says, ‘Shut up
under sin.’
What does that mean? It means that
we are guilty when we have done wrong; and it means that we are under
penalties which are sure to follow. No deed that we do, howsoever it may
fade from the tablets of our memory, but writes in visible characters, in
proportion to its magnitude, upon our characters and lives. All human acts
have perpetual consequences. The kick of the rifle against the shoulder of
the man that fires it is as certain as the flight of the bullet from its
muzzle. The chalk cliffs that rise above the Channel entomb and perpetuate
the relics of myriads of evanescent lives; and our fleeting deeds are
similarly preserved in our present selves. Everything that a man wills,
whether it passes into external act or not, leaves, in its measure,
ineffaceable impressions on himself. And so we are not only dungeoned in,
but weighed upon by, and lie under, the evil that we do.
Nor, dear friends, dare I pass in
silence what is too often passed in silence in the modern pulpit, the
plain fact that there is a future waiting for each of us beyond the grave,
of which the most certain characteristic, certified by our own
forebodings, required by the reasonableness of creation, and made plain by
the revelation of Scripture, is that it is a future of retribution, where
we shall have to carry our works; and as we have brewed so shall we drink;
and the beds that we have made we shall have to lie upon. ‘God shut up all
under sin.’
Note, again, the universality of the
imprisonment. Now I am not going to exaggerate, I hope. I want to keep
well within the limits of fact, and to say nothing that is not endorsed by
your own consciences, if you will be honest with yourselves. And I say
that the Bible does not charge men universally with gross transgressions.
It does not talk about the virtues that grow in the open as if they were
splendid vices; but it does say, and I ask you if our own hearts do not
tell us that it says truly, that no man is, or has been, does, or has
done, that which his own conscience tells him he should have been and
done. We are all ready to admit faults, in a general way, and to confess
that we have come short of what our own consciousness tells us we ought to
be. But I want you to take the other step, and to remember that since we
each stand in a personal relation to God, therefore all imperfections,
faults, negligences, shortcomings, and, still more, transgressions of
morality, or of the higher aspirations of our lives, are sins. Because sin
— to use fine words — is the correlative of God. Or, to put it into
plainer language, the deeds which in regard to law may be crimes, or those
which in regard to morality may be vices, or in regard to our own
convictions of duty may be shortcomings, seeing they all have some
reference to Him, assume a very much graver character, and they are all
sins.
Oh, brethren, if we realise how intimately and inseparably we are knit to
God, and how everything that we do, and do not do, but should have done,
has an aspect in reference to Him, I think we should be less unwilling to
admit, and less tinged with levity and carelessness in admitting, that all
our faults are transgressions Of His law, and we should find ourselves
more frequently on our knees before Him, with the penitent words on our
lips and in our hearts, ‘Against Thee, Thee only have I sinned, and done
this evil in Thy sight’
That was the prayer of a man who had
done a foul evil in other people’s sight; who had managed to accumulate
about as many offences to as many people in one deed as was Possible. For,
as a king he had sinned against his nation, as a friend he had sinned
against his companion, as a captain he had sinned against his brave
subordinate, as a husband he had sinned against his wife, and he had
sinned against Bathsheba. And yet, with all that tangle of offences
against all these people, he says, ‘Against Thee, Thee only.’ Yes!
Because, accurately speaking, the sin had reference to God, and to God
alone. And I wish for myself and for you to cultivate the habit of
connecting, thus, all our actions, and especially our imperfections and
our faults, with the thought of God, that we may learn how universal is
the enclosure of man in this dreadful prison-house.
II. And so, I
come, in the second place, to look at the guardian of the prison.
That is a strange phrase of my text
attributing the shutting of men up in this prison-house to the merciful
revelation of God in the Scripture. And it is made still more striking and
strange by another edition of the same expression in the Epistle to the
Romans, where Paul directly traces the ‘concluding all in disobedience’ to
God Himself.
There may be other subtle thoughts
connected with that expression which I do not need to enter upon now. But
one that I would dwell upon, for a moment, is this, that one great purpose
of Scripture is to convince us that we are sinful in God’s sight. I do not
need to remind you, I suppose, how that was, one might almost say, the
dominant intention of the whole of the ceremonial and moral law of Israel,
and explains its many else inexplicable and apparently petty commandments
and prohibitions. They were all meant to emphasise the difference between
right and wrong, obedience and disobedience, and so to drive home to men’s
hearts the consciousness that they had broken the commandments of the
living God. And although the Gospel comes with a very different guise from
that ancient order, and is primarily gift and not law, a Gospel of
forgiveness, and not the promulgation of duty or the threatening of
condemnation, yet it, too, has for one of its main purposes, which must be
accomplished in us before it can reach its highest aim in us, the kindling
in men’s hearts of the same consciousness that they are sinful men in
God’s sight.
Ah, brethren, we all need it. There
is nothing that we need more than to have driven deep into us the
penetrating point of that conviction. There must be some external standard
by which men may be convinced of their sinfulness, for they carry no such
standard within them. Your conscience is only you judging on moral
questions, and, of course, as you change, it will change too. A man’s
whole state determines the voice with which conscience shall speak to him,
and so the worse he is, and the more he needs it, the less he has it. The
rebels cut the telegraph wires. The waves break the bell that hangs on the
reef, and so the black rocks get many a wreck to gnaw with their sharp
teeth. A man makes his conscience dumb by the very sins that require a
conscience trumpet-tongued to reprehend them. And therefore it needs that
God should speak from Heaven, and say to us, ‘Thou art the man,’ or else
we pass by all these grave things that I am trying to urge upon you now,
and fall back upon our complacency and our levity and our unwillingness to
take stock of ourselves, and front the facts of our condition. And so we
build up a barrier Between ourselves and God, and God’s grace, which
nothing short of that grace and an omnipotent love and an all-powerful
Redeemer can ever pull down.
I wish to urge in a few words, yet
with much earnestness, this thought, that until we have laid to heart
God’s message about our own personal sinfulness we have not got to the
place where we can in the least understand the true meaning of His Gospel,
or the true work of His Son. May I say that I, for one, am old-fashioned
enough to look with great apprehension on certain tendencies of
present-day presentations of Christianity which, whilst they dwell much
upon the social blessings which it brings, do seem to me to be in great
peril of obscuring the central characteristic of the Gospel, that it is
addressed to sinful men, and that the only way by which individuals can
come to the possession of any of its blessings is by coming as penitent
sinners, and casting themselves on the mercy of God in Jesus Christ? The
beginning of all lies here, where Paul puts it, ‘the Scripture hath herded
all men,’ in droves, into the prison, that it might have mercy upon all.
Dear friend, as the old proverb has it, deceit lurks in generalities. I
have no doubt you are perfectly willing to admit that all are sinful. Come
a little closer to the truth, I beseech you, and say each is sinful, and I
am one of the captives.
III. And so,
lastly, the breaker of the prison-house.
I need not spend your time in
commenting on the final words of this text. Suffice it to gather their
general purport and scope. The apparently stern treatment which God by
revelation applies to the whole mass of mankind is really the tenderest
beneficence. He has shut them up in the prison-house in order that, thus
shut up, they may the more eagerly apprehend and welcome the advent of the
Deliverer. He tells us each our state, in order that we may the more long
for, and the more closely grasp, the great mercy which reverses the state.
And so how shallow and how unfair it is to talk about evangelical
Christianity as being gloomy, stern, or misanthropical! You do not call a
doctor unkind because he tells an unsuspecting patient that his disease is
far advanced, and that if it is not cured it will be fatal. No more should
a man turn away from Christianity, or think it harsh and sour, because it
speaks plain truths. The question is, are they true? not, are they
unpleasant?
If you and I, and all our fellows,
are shut up in this prison house of sin, then it is quite clear that none
of us can do anything to get ourselves out. And so the way is prepared for
that great message with which Jesus opened His ministry, and which, whilst
it has a far wider application, and reference to social as well as to
individual evils, begins with the proclamation of liberty to the captives,
and the opening of the prison to them that are bound.
There was once a Roman emperor who
wished that all his enemies had one neck, that he might slay them all at
one blow. The wish is a fact in regard to Christ and His work, for by it
all our tyrants have Been smitten to death by one stroke; and the death of
Jesus Christ has been the death of sin and death and hell — of sin in its
power, in its guilt, and in its penalty. He has come into the
prison-house, and torn the bars away, and opened the fetters, and every
man may, if he will, come out into the blessed sunshine and expatiate
there.
And if, brethren, it is true that
the universal prison-house is opened by the death of Jesus Christ, who is
the Propitiation for the sins of the whole world, and the power by which
the most polluted may become clean, then there follows, as plainly, that
the only thing which we have to do is, recognising and feeling our bound
impotence, to stretch out chained hands and take the gift that He brings.
Since all is done for each of us, and since none of us can do sufficient
for himself to break the bond, then what we should do is to trust to Him
who has broken every chain and let the oppressed go free.
Oh, dear friend, if you want to get
to the heart of the sweetness and-the blessedness and power of the Gospel,
you must begin here, with the clear and penitent consciousness that you
are a sinful man in God’s sight, and can do nothing to cleanse, help, or
liberate yourself. Is Jesus Christ the breaker of the bond for you? Do you
learn from Him what your need is? Do you trust yourself to Him for pardon,
for cleansing, for emancipation? Unless you do, you will never know His
most precious preciousness, and you have little right to call yourself a
Christian. If you do, oh, then a great light will shine in the
prison-house, and your chains will drop from your wrists, and the iron
door will open of its own accord, and you will come out into the morning
sunshine of a new day, because you have confessed and abhorred the bondage
into which you have cast yourselves, and accepted the liberty wherewith
Christ hath made you free.
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THE SON SENT
When the fulness of the time came,
God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, that He might
redeem them which were under the law, that we might receive the adoption
of sons.’ — Galatians 4:4-5
IT is generally supposed that by the
‘fulness of time’ Paul means to indicate that Christ came at the moment
when the world was especially prepared to receive Him, and no doubt that
is a true thought. The Jews had been trained by law to the conviction of
sin: heathenism had tried its utmost, had reached the full height of its
possible development, and was decaying. Rome had politically prepared the
way for the spread of the Gospel. Vague expectations of coming change
found utterance even from the lips of Roman courtier poets, and a feeling
of unrest and anticipation pervaded society; but while no doubt all this
is true and becomes more certain the more we know of the state of things
into which Christ came, it is to be noted that Paul is not thinking of the
fulness of time primarily in reference to the world which received Him,
but to the Father who sent Him. Our text immediately follows words in
which the air is described as being ‘under guardians and stewards’ until
the time appointed of His Father, and the fulness of time is therefore the
moment which God had ordained from the beginning for His coming.
He, from of old, had willed that at
that moment this Son should be born, and it is to the punctual
accomplishment of His eternal purpose that Paul here directs our thoughts.
No doubt the world’s preparedness is part of the reason for the divine
determination of the time, but it is that divine determination rather than
the world’s preparedness to which the first words of our text must be
taken to refer.
The remaining portion of our text is
so full of meaning that one shrinks from attempting to deal with it in our
narrow space, but though it opens up depths .beyond our fathoming, and
gathers into one concentrated brightness lights on which our dim eyes can
hardly look, we may venture to attempt some imperfect consideration even
of these great words. Following their course of thought we may deal with
I. The mystery of
love that sent.
The most frequent form under which the great fact of the incarnation is
represented in Scripture is that of our text — ‘God sent His Son.’ It is
familiar on the lips of Jesus, but He also says that ‘God gave His Son.’
One can feel a shade of difference in the two modes of expression. The
former bringing rather to our thoughts the representative character of the
Son as Messenger, and the latter going still deeper into the mystery of
Godhead and bringing into view the love of the Father who spared not His
Son but freely bestowed Him on men. Yet another word is used by Jesus
Himself when He says, ‘I came forth from God,’ and that expression brings
into view the perfect willingness with which the Son accepted the mission
and gave Himself, as well as was given by God. All three phases express
harmonious, though slightly differing aspects of the same fact, as the
facets of a diamond might flash into different colours, and all must be
held fast if we would understand the unspeakable gift of God, Jesus was
sent; Jesus was given; Jesus came. The mission from the Father, the love
of the Father, the glad obedience of the Son, must ever be recognised as
interpenetrating, and all present in that supreme act.
There have been many men specially
sent forth from God, whose personal existence began with their birth, and
so far as the words are concerned, Jesus might have been one of these.
There was a man sent from God whose name was John, and all through the
ages he has had many companions in his mission, but there has been only
one who ‘came’ as well as ‘was senti’ and He is the true light which
lighteth every man. To speak in theological language of the pre-existence
of the Son is cold, and may obscure the truth which it formulates in so
abstract a fashion, and may rob it of power to awe and impress. But there
can be no question that in our text, as is shown by the juxtaposition of
‘sent’ and ‘born,’ and in all the New Testament references to the subject,
the birth of Jesus is not regarded as the beginning of the being of the
Son. The one lies far back in the depths of eternity and the mystery of
the divine nature, the other is a historical fact occurring in a definite
place and at a dated moment. Before time was the Son was, delighting in
the Father, and ‘in the beginning was the word and the word was with God,’
and He who in respect of His expression of the Father’s mind and will was
the Word, was the Son in respect of the love that bound the Father and Him
in one. Into the mysteries of that love and union no eyes can penetrate,
but unless our faith lays hold of it, we know not the God whom Jesus has
declared to us. The mysteries of that divine union and communion lie
beyond our reach, but well within the grasp of
our faith and the work of the Son in the world, ever since there was a
world, is not obscurely declared to all who have eyes to see and hearts to
understand. For He has through all ages been the active energy of the
divine power, or as the Old Testament words it, ‘The Arm of the Lord,’ the
Agent of creation, the Revealer of God, the Light of the world and the
Director of Providence. ‘He was in the world and the world was made by
Him, and the world knew Him not.’
Now all this teaching that the Son was long. before Jesus was born is no
mere mysterious dogma without bearing on daily needs, but stands in the
closest connection with Christ’s work and our faith in it. It is the
guarantee of His representative character; on it depends the reliableness
of His revelation of God. Unless He is the Son in a unique sense, how
could God have spoken unto us in, Him, and how could we rely on His words?
Unless He was ‘the effulgence of His glory and the express image of His
person’: how could we be sure that the light of His countenance was light
from God and that in His person God was so presented as that he who had
seen Him had seen the Father? The completeness and veracity of His
revelation, the authoritative fulness of His law, the efficacy of His
sacrifice and the prevalence of His intercession all depend on the fact of
His divine life with God long before His human life with men. It is a
plain historical fact that a Christianity which has no place for a
pre-existent Son in the bosom of the Father has only a maimed Christ in
reference to the needs of sinful mere If our Christ were not the eternal
Son of God, He will not be the universal Saviour of men.
Nor is this truth less needful in
its bearing on modern theories which will have nothing to say to the
supernatural, and in a fatalistic fashion regard history as all the result
of an orderly evolution in which the importance of personal agents is
minimised. To it Jesus, like all other great men, is a product of His age,
and the immediate result of the conditions under which He appeared. But
when we look far beyond the manger of Bethlehem into the depths of
Eternity and see God so loving the world as to give His Son, we cannot but
recognise that He has intervened in the course of human history and that
the mightiest force in the development of man is the eternal Son whom He
sent to save the world.
II. The miracle of
lowliness that came.
The Apostle goes on from describing
the great fact which took place in heaven to set forth the great fact
which completed it on earth. The sending
of the Son took effect in the birth of Jesus, and the Apostle puts it
under two forms, both of which are plainly designed to present Christ’s
manhood as His full identification of Himself with us. The Son of God
became the son of a woman; from His mother He drew a true and complete
humanity in body and soul. The humanity which He received was sufficiently
kindred with the divinity which received it to make it possible that the
one should dwell in the other and be one person. As born of a woman the
Son of God took upon Himself all human experiences, became capable of
sharing our pure emotions, wept our tears, partook in our joys, hoped and
feared as we do, was subject to our changes, grew as we grow, and in
everything but sin, was a man amongst men.
But the Son of God could not be as
the sons of men.
Him the Father heard always. Even
when He came down from Heaven and became the Son of Man, He continued’ to
be’ The Son Of Man which is in Heaven.’ Amid all the distractions and
limitations of His earthly life, the continuity and depth of His communion
with the Father were unbroken and the completeness of His obedience
undiminished. He was a Man, but He was also the Man, the one realised
ideal of humanity that has ever walked the earth, to whom all others, even
the most complete, are fragments, the fairest foul, the most gracious
harsh. In Him and in Him only has been ‘given the world assurance of a
man.’
The other condition which is here
introduced is ‘born under the law,’ by which it may be noted that the
Apostle does not mean the Jewish law, inasmuch as he does not use the
definite article with the word. No doubt our Lord was born as a Jew and
subject to the Jewish law, but the thought here and in the subsequent
clause is extended to the general notion of law. The very heart of our
Lord’s human identification is that He too had duties imperative upon.
Him, and the language of one of the Messianic psalms was the voice of His
filial will during all His earthly life; ‘Lo! I come, in the volume of the
Book it is written of Me, I delight to do Thy will and Thy law is within
My heart.’ the very secret of His human life was discovered by the heathen
centurion, at whose faith He marvelled, who said, ‘I also am a man under
authority’; so was Jesus. The Son had ever been obedient in the sweet
communion of Heaven, but the obedience of Jesus was not less perfect,
continual and unstained. It was the man Jesus who summed up His earthly
life in ‘I do always the things that please Him’; it was the man Jesus
who, under the olives in Gethsemane, made the great surrender and yielded
up His own will to the will of the Father who sent Him.
He was under law in that the will of
God dominated His life, but He Was not so under it as we are on whom its
precepts often press as an unwelcome obligation, and who know the weight
of guilt and condemnation-If there is any one characteristic of Jesus more
conspicuous than another it is the absence in Him of any consciousness of
deficiency in His obedience to law, and yet that absence does not in the
smallest degree infringe on His claim to be ‘meek and lowly in heart.’
‘Which of you convinceth Me of sin?’ would have been from any other man a
defiance that would have provoked a crushing answer if it had not been
taken as a proof of hopeless ignorance of self, but when Christ asks the
question, the world is silent. The silence has been all but unbroken for
nineteen hundred years, and of all the busy and often unfriendly eyes that
have-been occupied with Him and the hostile pens that have been eager to
say something new about Him, none have discovered a flaw, or dared to
‘hint a fault.’ That character has stamped its own impression of
perfectness on all eyes even the most unfriendly or indifferent. In Him
there is seen the perfect union and balance of opposite characteristics;
the rest of us, at the best, are but broken arcs; Jesus is the completed
round. He is under law as fully, continuously and joyfully obedient; but
for Him it had no accusing voice, and it laid on Him no burden of broken
commandments. ‘He was born of a woman, born under law, but he lived
separate from sinners though identified with them.
III. The marvel of
exaltation that results.
Our Lord’s lowliness is described in
the two clauses which we have just been considering. They express His
identification with us from a double point of view, and that double point
of view is continued in the final clauses of our text which state the
double purpose of God in sending His Son. He became one with us that we
might become one with Him. The two elements of this double purpose are
stated in the reverse order to the two elements of Christ’s lowliness. The
redemption of them that were under law is presented as the reason for His
being born under law, and our reception of the ‘adoption of sons’ is the
purpose of the Son’s being sent and born of a woman. The order in which
Paul here deals with the two parts of the divine purpose is not to be put
down to mere rhetorical ornament, but corresponds to the order in which
these two elements are realised by men. For there must be redemption from
law before there is the adoption of sons.
We have already had occasion to
point out that’ law, here must be taken in the wide sense and not
restricted to the Jewish law. It is a world-wide redemption which the
Father’s love had in view in sending His Son, but that all-comprehending,
fatherly love could not reach its aim by the mere forth-putting of its own
energy. A process was needed if the divine heart was to accomplish its
desire, and the majestic stages in that process are set forth here by
Paul. The world was under law in a very sad fashion, and though Jesus has
come to redeem them that are under law, the crushing weight of
commandments flouted, of duties neglected, of sins done, presses heavily
upon many of us. And yet how many of us there are who do not know the
burden that we carry and have had no personal experience like that of
Bunyan’s Christian with the pack on his back all but weighing him down?
Jesus Christ has become one of us,
and in His sinless life has ‘magnified the law and made it honourable’ and
in His sinless death He endures the consequences of sin, not as due to
Himself, but because they are man’s. But we must carefully keep in view,
that as we have already pointed out, we are to think of Christ’s mission
as His coming as well as the Father’s sending, and that therefore we do
not grasp the full idea of our Lord’s enduring the consequences of sin
unless we take it as meaning His voluntary identification of Himself in
love with us sinful men. His obedience was perfect all His life long, and
His last and highest act of obedience was when He became obedient unto
death, even the death of the Cross.
This is the only means by which the
burden of law in any of its forms can be taken away from us. For a law
which is not loved will be heavy and hard however holy and just and good
it may be, and a law which we have broken will become sooner or later its
own avenger. Faithful in Pilgrim ’s Progress tells how ‘So soon as a man
overtook me he was but a word and a blow, for down he knocked me and laid
me for dead... He struck me another deadly blow on the breast and beat me
down backward, so I lay at his foot as dead as before, so when I came to
myself again I cried him "Mercy," but he said, "I know not how to show
mercy," and with that knocked me down again; he had doubtless made an end
of me but that one came by and bid him forbear .... I did not know him at
first, but as he went by I perceived the holes in his hands and in his
sides.’ He was born under law that He might redeem them that were under
law.
The slaves bought into freedom are
received into the great family. The Son has become flesh that they who
dwell in the flesh may rise to be sons, but the Son stands alone even in
the midst of His identification with us, and of the great results which
follow for us from it. He is the Son by nature; we are sons by adoption.
He became man that we might share in the possession of God. When the
burden of law is lifted off it is possible to bestow the further blessing
of sonship, but that blessing is only possible through Him in whom, and
from whom, we derive a life which is divine life. There is a profound
truth in the prophetic sentence, ‘Behold I and the children which God hath
given me!’ for, in one aspect, believers are the children of Christ, and
in another, they are sons of God.
We have been speaking of the Son’s
identification With us in His mission, and our identification with Him,
but that identification depends on ourselves and is only an accomplished
fact through our faith. When we trust in Him it is true that all His — His
righteousness, His Sonship, His union with the Father — is ours, and that
all ours — our sins, our guilt, our alienation from God and our dwelling
in the far-off land of rags and vice — is His. In His voluntary
identification with us, He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.
It is for us to determine whether we will lay on Him our iniquities, as
the Father has already laid the iniquities of us all. Are we by faith in
Him who was born of a woman, born under law, making our very own the
redemption from the law which He has wrought and the adoption of sons
which He bestows?
********************************
WHAT MAKES A CHRISTIAN:
CIRCUMCISION OR FAITH?
‘In Jesus Christ neither
circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision. but faith which
worketh by love.’ — Galatians 5:6.
IT is a Very singular instance of
imaginative misreading of plain facts that the primitive Church should be
held up as a pattern Church. The early communities had apostolic teaching;
but beyond that, they seem to have been in no respect above, and in many
respects below, the level of subsequent ages. If we may judge of their
morality by the exhortations and dehortations which they received from the
Apostle, Corinth and Thessalonica were but beginners in holiness. If we
may judge of their intelligence by the errors into which they were in
danger of falling, these first congregations had indeed need that one
should teach them which were the first principles of the oracles of God.
It could not be otherwise. They were but just rescued from heathenism, and
we need not wonder if their spirits long bore the scars of their former
bondage. If we wish to know what the apostolic churches were like, we have
but to look at the communities gathered by modern missionaries. The same
infantile simplicity, the same partial apprehensions of the truth, the
same danger of being led astray by the low morality of their heathen
kindred, the same openness to strange heresy, the same danger of blending
the old with the new, in ,opinion and in practice, beset both.
The history of the first theological
difference in the early churches is a striking confutation of the dream
that they were perfect, and a striking illustration of the dangers to
which they were exposed from the attempt, so natural to us all, to put new
wine into old bottles. The Jewish and the Gentile elements did not
coalesce. The point round which the strife was waged was not whether
Gentiles might come into the Church. That was conceded by the fiercest
Judaisers. But it was whether they could come in as Gentiles, without
first being incorporated into the Jewish nation by circumcision, and
whether they could remain in as Gentiles, without conforming to Jewish
ceremonial and law.
Those who said ‘No’ were members of
the Christian communities, and, being so, they still insisted that Judaism
was to be eternal. They demanded that the patched and stiff leathern
bottle, which had no elasticity or pliability, should still contain the
quick fermenting new wine of the kingdom. And certainly, if ever man had
excuse for clinging to what was old and formal, these Judaising Christians
held it. They held by a law written with God’s own finger, by ordinances
awful by reason of divine appointment, venerable by reason of the
generations to which they had been of absolute authority, commended by the
very example of Christ Himself. Every motive which can bind heart and
conscience to the reverence and the practice of the traditions of the
Fathers, bound them to the Law and the ordinances which had been Israel’s
treasure from Abraham to Jesus.
Those who said ‘Yes’ were mostly
Gentiles, headed and inspired by a Hebrew of the Hebrews. They believed
that Judaism was preparatory, and that its work was done. For those among
themselves who were Jews, they were willing that its laws should still be
obligatory; but they fought against the attempt to compel all Gentile
converts to enter Christ’s kingdom through the gate of circumcision.
The fight was stubborn and bitter. I
suppose it is harder to abolish forms than to change opinions. Ceremonies
stand long after the thought which they express has fled, as a dead king
may sit on his throne stiff and stark in his golden mantle, and no one
come near enough to see that the light is gone out of his eyes, and the
will departed from the hand that still clutches the sceptre. All through
Paul’s life he was dogged and tormented by this controversy. There was a
deep gulf between the churches he planted and this reactionary section of
the Christian community. Its emissaries were continually following in his
footsteps. ‘As he bitterly reproaches them, they entered upon another
man’s line of things made ready to their hand, not caring to plant
churches of circumcised Gentiles themselves, but starting up behind him as
soon as his back was turned, and spoiling his work.
This Epistle is the memorial of that
foot-to-foot feud. It is of perennial use, as the tendencies against which
it is directed are constant in human nature. Men are ever apt to confound
form and substance, to crave material embodiments of spiritual realities,
to elevate outward means into the place of the inward and real, to which
all the outward is but subsidiary. In every period of strife between the
two great opponents, this letter has been the stronghold of those who
fight for the spiritual conception of religion. With it Luther waged his
warfare, and in this day, too, its words are precious.
My text contains Paul’s condensed statement of his whole position in the
controversy. It tells us what he fought for, and why he fought, against
the attempt to suspend union to Christ on an outward rite.
I. The first grand
principle contained in ,these words is that faith working by love makes a
Christian.
The antithesis of our text appears
in somewhat varied forms in two other places in the Apostle’s writings. To
the Corinthians he says, ‘Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is
nothing, but the keeping of the commandments of God.’ His last word to the
Galatians — the gathering up into one strong sentence of his whole letter
— is, ‘In Christ Jesus, neither circumcision availeth anything, nor
uncircumcision, but a new creature.’
Now, all these assertions embody
substantially the same opposition between the conception of Christianity
as depending upon a ceremonial rite, and as being a spiritual change. And
the variations in the second member of the contrast throw light on each
other. In one, the essential thing is regarded from the divine side as
being not a rite performed on the body, but a new nature, the result of a
supernatural regeneration. In another, the essential thing is set forth as
being not an outward act, but an inward principle, which produces
appropriate effects on the whole being. In yet another the essential thing
is conceived as being not a mere ceremonial, but practical obedience, the
consequence of the active principle of faith, and the sign of the new
life. There is an evident sequence in the three sayings. They begin with
the deepest, the divine act of a new creation — and end with the
outermost, the last result and object of both the others — deeds of
conformity to God’s law.
This one process in its triple
aspects, says Paul, constitutes a man a Christian. What correspondence is
there between it, in any of its parts, and a carnal ordinance? They belong
to Wholly different categories, and it is the most preposterous confusion
to try to mix them up together. Are we to tack on to the solemn powers and
qualities,
