Hebrews 7:2. Righteousness First, Peace Second
‘First being, by interpretation,
King of righteousness, and after that also King Salem, which is, King of
peace.’ — Hebrews 7:2.
THAT mysterious, shadowy figure of the
priest-king Melchizedec has been singularly illuminated and solidi-fled by
recent discovery. You can see now in Berlin and London, letters written
fourteen centuries before Christ, by a king of Jerusalem who describes
himself almost in the very words which the Old and the New Testaments apply
to Melchizedec. He says that he is a royal priest or a priestly king. He
says that he derived his royalty neither from father nor mother, nor by
genealogical descent; and he says that he owes it to ‘the great King’ —
possibly an equivalent to the ‘Most High God’; of whom Melchizedec is in
Scripture said to have been a worshipper. The name of the letter-writer is
not Melehizedec, but the fact that his royalty was not hereditary, like a
Pharaoh’s, may explain how each monarch bore his own personal appellation,
and not one common to successive members of a dynasty.
And are not the names of King and city significant — ‘King of
righteousness... King of peace’? It sounds like a yearning, springing up
untimely in those dim ages of oppression and strife, for a royalty founded
on something better than the sword, and wielded for something higher than
personal ambition. Such an ideal at such a date is like a summer day that
has wandered into a cold March.
But the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews imposes a meaning not only on
the titles, but on their sequence, of course therein he is letting a
sanctified imagination play round a fact, and giving to it a meaning which
is not in it. None the less in that emphatic expression ‘first King of
righteousness, and after that also King of peace,’ he penetrated very deeply
into the heart of Christ’s reign and work, and echoed a sentiment that runs
all through Scripture. Hearken to one psalmist: ‘The mountains shall bring
peace to the people, and the little hills, by righteousness.’ Hearken to
another: ‘Righteousness and peace have kissed each other.’ Hearken to a
prophet: ‘The work of righteousness shall be peace; and the effect of
righteousness, quietness and assurance for ever.’ Hearken to the most
Hebraistic of New Testament writers: ‘The fruit of righteousness is sown in
peace.’ Hearken to the central teaching of the most Evangelical, if I may so
say, of New Testament writers: ‘Being justified’ — made righteous ‘by faith,
we have peace with God.’ So the ‘first’ and the ‘after that’ reveal to us
the very depth of Christ’s work, and carry in them not only important
teaching as to that, but equally important directions and guides for
Christian conduct; and it is to this aspect of my text, and this only, that
I ask your attention now.
The order which we have here, ‘first of all King of righteousness, and after
that King of peace,’ is the order which I shall try to illustrate in two
ways. First, in reference to Christ’s work on the individual soul; second,
in reference to Christ’s work on society and communities.
First, then, here we have laid down the sequence in which
I. Christ comes with His operations and His gifts to the soul that clings
to Him.
First ‘righteousness... after... peace.’ Now I need not do more than in a
sentence remind you of the basis upon which the thoughts in the text, and
all right understanding of Christ’s work on an individual, repose, and that
is that without righteousness no man can either be at peace with God or with
himself. Not with God — for however shallow experience may talk effusively
and gushingly about a God who is all mercy, and who loves and takes to His
heart the sinner and the saint alike; such a God drapes the universe in
darkness, and if there are no moral distinctions which determine whether a
man is in amity or hostility with God, then ‘the pillared firmament itself
is rottenness, and earth’s base built on stubble.’ No, no, brethren; it
sounds very tender and kindly; at bottom it is the cruellest thing that you
can say, to say that without righteousness a man can please God. The sun is
in the heavens, and whether there be mist and fog down here, or the bluest
of summer skies, the sun is above. But its rays coming through the ethereal
blue are warmth and blessedness, and its rays cut off by mists are dim, and
itself turned into a lurid ball of fire. It cannot be — and thank God that
it cannot — that it is all the same to Him whether a man is saint
or sinner.
I do not need to remind you that in like manner righteousness must underlie
peace with oneself. For it is true to-day, as it was long generations ago,
according to the prophet, that ‘the wicked is like the troubled sea which
cannot rest, whose waters throw up mire and dirt,’ and, on the other hand,
the promise is true still and for ever; ‘O that thou hadst hearkened unto
me, then had thy peace been like a river,’ because ‘thy righteousness’ will
be ‘like the waves of the sea.’ For ever and ever it stands true that for
peace with God, and for a quiet heart, and a nature at harmony with itself,
there must be righteousness.
Well, then, Jesus Christ comes to bring to a man the righteousness without
which there can he no peace in his life. And that is the meaning of the
great word which, having been taken for a shibboleth and ‘test of a falling
or a standing Church,’ has been far too much ossified into a mere
theological dogma, and has been weakened and misunderstood in the process.
Justification by faith; that is the battle-cry of Protestant communities.
And what does it mean? That I shall be treated as righteous, not being sop
That I shall be forgiven and acquitted? Yes, thank God! But is that all that
it means, or is that the main thing that it means? No, thank God! for the
very heart of the Christian doctrine of righteousness is this, that if, and
as soon as, a man puts his trembling trust in Jesus Christ as his Saviour,
then he receives not merely pardon, which is the uninterrupted flow of the
divine love in spite of his sin, nor an accrediting him with a righteousness
which does not belong to him, but an imparting to him of that new life, a
spark from the central fire of Christ’s life, ‘the new man which, after God,
is created in righteousness and true holiness.’ Do not suppose that the
great message of the gospel is merely forgiveness. Do not suppose that its
blessed gift is only that a man is acquitted because Christ has died. All
that is true. But there is something more than that which is the basis of
that other, and that is that by faith in Jesus Christ, I am so knit to Him —
‘He that is joined to the Lord’ being ‘one spirit’ — as that there passes
into me, by His gift, a life which is created after His life, and is in fact
cognate and kindred with it.
No doubt it is a mere germ, no doubt it needs cultivating, development,
carefully guarding against gnawing insects and blighting frosts. But the
seed which is implanted, though it be less than the least of all seeds, has
in itself the promise and the potency of triumphant growth, when it will
tower above all the poisonous shrubs and undergrowth of the forest, and have
the light of heaven resting on its aspiring top. Here is the great blessing
and distinctive characteristic of Christian morality, that it does not say
to a man: ‘First aim after good deeds and so grow up into goodness,’ but it
starts with a gift, and says,’ Work from that, and by the power of that. "I
make the tree good,"‘ says Jesus to us, ‘do you see to it that the fruit is
good.’ No doubt the vegetable metaphor is inadequate, because the leaf is
wooed from out the bud, and ‘grows green and broad, and takes no care,’ but
that effortless growth is not how righteousness increases in men. The germ
is given them, and they have to cultivate it. First, there must be the
impartation of righteousness, and then there comes to the man’s heart the
sweet assurance of peace with God, and he has within him ‘a conscience like
a sea at rest, imaginations calm and fair.’ ‘First, King of righteousness;
after that, King of peace.’
Now if we keep firm hold of this sequence, a great many of the popular
objections to the gospel, as if it were merely a means of forgiveness and
escape, and a system of reconciliation by some kind of forensic expedient,
fall away of themselves, and a great many of the popular blunders that
Christian people make fall away too. For there are good folks to whom the
great truth that ‘God is in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not
imputing to them their trespasses,’ and welcoming them to all the fulness of
an overflowing love, has obscured the other truth that there is no peace for
a Christian man continuous through his life, unless equally continuous
through his life are his efforts to work out in acts the new nature which he
has received.
Thus my text, by the order in which it
places righteousness and peace, not only illuminates the work of Christ upon
each individual soul, but comes with a very weighty and clear direction to
Christian people as to their course of conduct. Are you looking for comfort?
Is what you want to get out of your religion mainly the assurance that you
will not go to hell? Is the great blessing that Christ brings to you only
the blessing of pardon, which you degrade to mean immunity from punishment?
You are wrong. ‘First of all, King of righteousness’ — let that which is
first of all in His gifts be first of all in your efforts too; and do not
seek so much for comfort as for grace to know and to do your duty, and
strength to ‘cast off the unfruitful works of darkness,’ and to ‘put on the
armour of light.’ The order which is laid down in my text was laid down with
a different application, by our Lord Himself, and ought to be in both forms
the motto for all Christian people.
‘Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and
His righteousness, and all these things’ — comfort, sense of reconciliation,
assurance of forgiveness, joyful hope, and the like, as well as needful
material good — ‘shall be added unto you.’
And now, secondly, my text gives the order of.
II. Christ’s work in the world, and of His servant’s work after Him.
Of course, our Lord’s work in the world is simply the aggregate of HIS work
on individual souls. But for the sake of clearness we may consider these two
aspects of it somewhat apart. In regard to this second part of my subject, I
would begin, as I began in the former section, by reminding you that the
only basis on which harmonious relations between men in communities, great
or small, can be built, is righteousness, in the narrowest sense of the
word, meaning thereby justice, equal dealing as between man and man, without
partiality or class favouritism. Wherever you get an unjustly treated
section or order of men, there you get the beginnings of war and strife. A
social order built upon injustice, just in the measure in which it is so
built, is based upon a quicksand which will suck it down, or on a volcano
which will blow it to pieces. Injustice is the grit in the machine; you may
oil it as much as you like with philanthropy and benevolence, but until you
get the grit out, it will not work smoothly.
There is no harmony amongst men unless
their association is based and bottomed upon righteousness.
Jesus Christ comes into the world to bring peace at the far end, but
righteousness at the near end, and therefore strife. The herald angels sang
peace upon earth. They were looking to the deepest and ultimate issues of
His mission, but when He contemplated its immediate results He had to say,
‘Suppose ye that I bring peace on earth? I tell you nay, but rather
division.’ He rode into Jerusalem ‘the King, meek, and having salvation,’
throned upon the beast of burden which symbolised peace. But He will come
forth in the last fight, as He has been coming forth through all the ages,
mounted on the white horse, with the sword girt upon His thigh in behalf of
meekness and righteousness and truth. Christ, and Christianity when it keeps
close to Christ, is a ferment, not an emollient. The full and honest
application of Christ’s teaching and principles to any society on the face
of the earth at this day is bound to result in agitation and strife. There
is no help for it. When a pure jet of water is discharged into a foul ditch,
there will be much uprising of mud. Effervescence will always follow when
Christ’s principles are applied to existing institutions. And so it comes to
pass that Christian men, in the measure in which they are true to their
Master, turn the world upside down. There will follow, of course, the
tranquillity that does follow on righteousness; but that is far ahead, and
there is many a weary mile to be trod, and many a sore struggle to be
undertaken, before the kingdoms of this world become the Kingdom of our Lord
and of His Christ, and strife ends for ever.
Now, if this be so, then in this necessary characteristic of Christ’s
operation on the world, viz., disturbance arising from the endeavour to
enthrone righteousness where its opposite has ruled ‘there results very
plainly important teaching as to the duties of Christ’s servants to take
their full share in the fight, to be the knights of the Holy Ghost, the
champions of righteousness. The Church ought to lead in the van of all
assaults on hoary wrongs or modern forms of unrighteousness in municipal,
political, national life. And it is the disgrace of the Church that so
largely it leaves that contest to be waged by men who make no pretence to be
Christians. There is, unfortunately, a type of Christian thinking and life,
of which in many respects one would speak with all sympathy and admiration,
which warns the Christian Church against casting itself into this contest,
in the alleged interest of a superior spirituality and a loftier conception
of Evangelical truth. I believe, as heartily as any man can — and I venture
to appeal to those who hear me Sunday by Sunday, and from year to year,
whether it is not so — that the preaching of Jesus Christ is the cure for
all the world’s miseries, and the banishment of all the world’s
unrighteousness; but am I to be told that the endeavour to apply the person
and the principles of Jesus Christ, in His life and death, to existing
institutions and evils, is not preaching Christ? I believe that it is, and
that the one thing that the Church wants to-day is not less of holding up
the Cross and the Sacrifice, but more of pointing to the Cross and the
Sacrifice as the cure of all the world’s evils, and the pattern for all
righteousness.
It is difficult to do, it is made difficult by our own desire to be what the
prophet did not think a very reputable position, ‘at ease in Zion.’ It is
also made difficult by the way in which, as is most natural, the world,
meaning thereby godless, organised society, regards an active Church that
desires to bring its practices to the test of Christ’s word- Muzzled
watchdogs that can neither bark nor bite are much admired by burglars. And a
Church that confines itself to theory, to what it calls religion, and leaves
the world to go to the devil as it likes, suits both the world and the
devil. There was once a Prime Minister of England who came out of church one
Sunday morning in a state of towering indignation because the clergyman had
spoken about conduct. And that is exactly how the world feels about an
intrusive Church that will push its finger into all social arrangements, and
say about each of them, ‘This must be as Christ commanded.’
Brethren! would God that all Christian men deserved the name of ‘troublers
of Israel.’ There was once a prophet to whom the men of his day indignantly
said, ‘O sword of the Lord, how long will it be ere thou be quiet? Put up
thyself in thy scabbard, rest and be still.’ And the answer was the only
possible one, ‘How can it be quiet, seeing that the Lord hath appointed it?’
If you and I are Christ’s servants, we shall follow the sequence of His
operations, and seek to establish righteousness first and then peace. The
true Salem is above.
‘My soul, there is a
country
Afar beyond the stars.’
There ‘sweet peace sits crowned with
smiles.’ The swords will then be wreathed with laurel and men ‘shall learn
war no more,’ for the King has fought the great fight, ‘and of the increase
of His government and peace there shall be no end... in righteousness and
justice, from henceforth even for ever.’ Let us take Him for ‘the Lord our
righteousness,’ and we shall blessedly find that ‘this Man is our peace.’
Let us take arms in the Holy War which He wages, and we shall have peace in
our hearts whilst the fight is sorest. Let us labour to ‘be found in Him...
having the righteousness which is of God by faith,’ and then we shall ‘be
found in Him in peace, without spot, blameless.’
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Hebrews 7:26 The Priest Whom We Need
‘Such an high priest became us, who
is holy, harmless, undefiled, separate sinners, and made higher than the
heavens.’ — Hebrews 7:26
‘IT became Him to make the Captain of
our salvation perfect through sufferings.’ ‘In all things it behoved Him to
be made like unto His brethren.’ ‘Such an High Priest became us.’ In these
three sayings Of this Epistle the historical facts of the gospel are
considered as corresponding to or in accordance and congruity with,
respectively, the divine nature; Christ’s character and purpose; and man’s
need. I have considered the two former texts in previous sermons, and now I
desire to deal with this latter. It asserts that Jesus Christ, regarded as
the High Priest, meets the deepest wants of every heart, and fits human
necessity as the glove does the hand. He is the answer to all our questions,
the satisfaction of all our wants, the bread for our hunger, the light for
our darkness, the strength for our weakness, the medicine for our. sickness,
the life for our death. ‘Such a High Priest became us.’
But the other side is quite as true. Christianity is in full accordance with
men’s wants, Christianity is in sharp antagonism with a great deal which men
suppose to be their wants. Men’s wishes, desires, readings of their
necessities and conceptions of what is in accordance with the divine nature,
are not to be taken without more ado as being the guides of what a
revelation from God ought to be. The two characteristics of correspondence
and opposition must both unite, in all that comes to us certified as being
from God. There is an ‘offence of the Cross’; and Christ, for all His
correspondence with the deepest necessities of human nature, and I might
even say just by reason of that correspondence, will be ‘to the Jews a
stumbling-block and to the Greeks foolishness.’ If a message professing to
be from God had not the discord between man’s expectations and its facts, a
message so like a man’s would bear upon its front the evidence that it was
of man. It a message professing to be from God had not the correspondence
with man’s deepest wants, a message so unlike
men would bear upon its front the evidence that it was not of God.
So then, remembering the necessary complementary thought to this of my text
that ‘such a high priest became us,’ there are two or three considerations
springing from the words that I desire to suggest.
I. The first of them is this — we all need a priest, and we have the
priest we need in Jesus Christ.
The outstanding fact in reference to human nature in this connection is that
it is a sinful nature. We have all departed from the path of rectitude and
have nourished desires and tastes and purposes which do not rend us apart
from God, and between us and Him do interpose a great barrier. Our
consciences need a priest, or rather they say ‘Amen’ to the necessity born
of our sins, that there shall stand between us and God ‘a great High
Priest.’ I need not elaborate or enlarge upon this matter. The necessity of
Christ’s sacerdotal character, and the adaptation of that character to men’s
deepest wants, are not only to be argued about, but we have to appeal to
men’s consciences, and try to waken them to an adequate and profound sense
of the reality and significance of the fact of transgression. If once a man
comes to feel, what is true about him, that he is in God’s sight a sinful
man; to regard that fact in all its breadth, in all its consequences, in all
its depth, there will not want any more arguing to make him see that a
gospel which deals primarily with the fact of sin, and proclaims a priest
whose great work is to offer a sacrifice, is the gospel that he needs.
In fair weather, when the summer seas are sunny and smooth, and all the
winds are sleeping in their caves, the life-belts on the deck of a steamer
may be thought to be unnecessary, but when she strikes on the black- toothed
rocks, and all about is a hell of noise and despair, then the meaning of
them is understood, When you are amongst the breakers you will need a
life-buoy. When the flames are flickering round you, you will understand the
use and worth of a fire-escape, and when you have learned what sort of a man
you are, and what that involves in regard of your relations to God, then the
mysteries which surround the thought of the high priesthood and sacrifice of
Jesus Christ will be accepted as mysteries, and left where they are, and the
fact will be grasped with all the tendrils of your soul as the one hope for
you in life and in death.
I do not care to argue a man out of his imperfect apprehensions, if he have
them, of the mission and work of Jesus Christ. But oh, dear friends! you for
whose blood I am in some sense responsible, let me plead with you this one
thought — you have not taken the point of view from which to judge of the
gospel until you have stood in the perfect rectitude of heaven and
contrasted your blackness with its stainless purity, and its solemn
requirements; and have looked all round the horizon to see if anywhere there
is a means by which a sinful soul can be liberated from the dragon’s sting
of conscience, and from the crushing burden of guilt, and set upon a rock,
emancipated and cleansed. We need a priest because we are sinful men, and
sin means separation in fact and alienation in spirit, and the entail of
dreadful consequences, which, as far as Nature is concerned, cannot be
prevented from coming. And so sin means that if men are to be brought again
into the fellowship and the family of God, it must be through One who, being
a true priest, offers a real sacrifice for the sins of the whole world.
The new science of comparative religion has been made by some of its adepts
to bear witness unfavorably to the claims of Christianity. A far truer use
of it would be this — Wherever men have worshipped, they have worshipped at
an altar, there has been on it a sacrifice offered by a purged hand that
symbol seal moral purity. And all these are witnesses that humanity
recognises the necessity which my text Affirms has been met in Christ. Some
people would say ‘Yes! and your doctrine of a Christ who is sacrifice and
priest, has precisely the same origin as those altars, many smoking with
sacrifices to tyrannical gods.’ But to me the relation between the faiths of
the world and the gospel of Christ, in reference to this matter, is much
rather this, that they proclaim a want, and that Christ brings the
satisfaction of it; that they with one voice cry, ‘Oh! that I knew where I
might find Him! How shall a man be just with God?’ and that the Cross of
Christ answers their longings, and offers the means by which we may draw
nigh to God. ‘Such a High Priest became us.’
II. We may take another consideration from these words, viz. — We need
for a priest a perfect man, and we have the perfect priest whom we need, in
Jesus Christ.
The writer goes on to enumerate a series of qualifies by which our Lord is
constituted the priest we need. Of these five qualities which follow in my
text, the three former are those to which I now refer. ‘He is holy,
harmless, undefiled.’
Now I do not need to spend time in discussing the precise meaning of these
words, but a remark or two about each of them may perhaps .be admissible.
Taken generally, these three characteristics refer to the priest’s relation
to God, to other men, and to the law of purity. ‘He is holy’; that is to
say, not so much morally free from guilt as standing in a certain relation
to God. The word here used for ‘holy’ has a special meaning. It is the
representative of an old Testament word, which seems to mean ‘Devoted to God
in love.’ And it expresses not merely the fact of consecration, but the
motive and the means of that consecration, as being the result of God’s love
or mercy which kindles self-surrendering love in the recipient. Such is the
first qualification for a priest, that he shall be knit to God by loving
devotion, and have a heart throbbing in unison with the divine heart in all
its tenderness of pity and in all its nobleness and loftiness of purity.
And, besides being thus the earthly echo and representative of the whole
sweetness of the divine nature, so, in the next place, the priest we need
must, in relation to men, be harmless — without malice, guile, unkindness; a
Lamb of God, with neither horns to butt, nor teeth to tear, nor claws to
wound, but gentle and gracious, sweet and compassionate; or, as we read in
another place in this same letter, ‘a merciful High Priest in things
pertaining to God.’ And the priest that we need to bridge over the gulf
between us sinful and alienated men and God, must not only be one knit to
God in all sympathy, and representing His purity and tenderness amongst us;
nor must the priest that we need by reason of our miseries, our sorrows, our
weaknesses, our bleeding wounds, our broken hearts, be only a priest filled
with compassion and merciful, who can lay a gentle hand upon our sore and
sensitive spirits, but the priest that we men, spattered and befouled with
the mire and filth of sin, which has left deep stains upon our whole nature,
need, must be one ‘undefiled,’ on whose white garments there shall be no
speck; on the virgin purity of whose nature there shall be no stain; who
shall stand above us, though He be one of us, and whilst ‘ it behoves Him to
be made in all points like unto His brethren,’ shall yet be ‘without blemish
and without spot.’
‘It behoved Him to be made like unto HIS brethren.’ The priest of the world
must be like the world. My text says, ‘Yes! and He must be absolutely unlike
the world.’ Now, is this not a strange thing — this is a disgression, but it
may be allowed for one moment — is it not a strange thing that in these four
little tracts which we call gospels, that might all be printed upon two
sides of a penny newspaper, you get drawn; with such few strokes, a picture
which harmonises, in a possible person, these two opposite requirements, the
absolute unlikeness and the perfect likeness? Think of how difficult it
would be if it was not a copy from life, to draw a figure with these two
characteristics harmonised. What geniuses the men must have been that wrote
the gospels, if they were not something much simpler than that, honest
witnesses who told exactly what they saw! The fact that the life and death
of Jesus Christ, as recorded in Scripture, present this strange combination
of two opposite requirements in the most perfect harmony and beauty, is in
my eyes no contemptible proof of the historical veracity of the picture
which is presented to us. If the life was not lived I, for one, do not
believe that it ever could have been invented.
But that, as I said, has nothing to do with my present subject. And so I
pass on just to notice, in a word, how this assemblage of qualifications
which, taken together, make up the idea of a perfect man, is found in Jesus
Christ for a certain purpose, and a purpose beyond that which some of you, I
am afraid, are accustomed to regard. Why this innocence; this God-
devotedness; this blamelessness; this absence of all selfish antagonism?
Why this life, so sweet, so pure, so
gentle, so running over with untainted and ungrudging compassion, so
conscious of unbroken and perfect communion and sympathy with God? Why? That
He might, ‘through the Eternal Spirit, offer Himself without spot unto God’;
and that by His one offering He might perfect for ever all them that put
their trust in Him.
Oh, brother! you do not understand the meaning of Christ’s innocence unless
you see in it the condition of efficiency of His sacrifice. It is that He
might be the priest of the world that He wears this fine linen clean and
white, the righteousness of a pure and perfect soul.
I beseech you, then, ponder for yourselves the meaning of this admitted
fact. We all acknowledge His purity. We all adore, in some sense of the
word, His perfect manhood. If the one stainless and sinless man that the
world has ever seen had such a life and such a death as is told in these
gospels, they are no gospels, except on one supposition. But for it they are
the most despairing proclamation of the old miserable fact that
righteousness suffers in the world. The life of Christ, if He be the pure
and perfect man that we believe Him to be, and not the perfect priest
offering up a pure sacrifice for the sins of the whole world, is the most
damning indictment that was ever drawn up against the blunders of a
Providence that so misgoverns the world.
‘He did no sin, neither was guile
found in His mouth.’ And, therefore, when we look upon His sufferings, in
life and in death, we can only understand them and the relation of His
innocence to the divine heart when we say: ‘Yet it pleased the Lord to
bruise Him. He hath put Him to grief,’ ‘by His stripes we are healed. Such a
priest became us, who is holy, harmless, undefiled’; the sacrificial Lamb,
without blemish and without spot.
III. Lastly, my text suggests that we need a priest in the heavens, and
we have in Christ the heavenly priest whom we need.
The two last qualifications for the priestly office included in my text are,
‘separate from sinners; made higher than the heavens.’ Now, the ‘separation’
intended, is not, as I suppose, Christ’s moral distance from evil-doers, but
has what I may call a kind of half-local signification, and is explained by
the next clause. He is ‘separate from sinners’ not because He is pure and
they foul, but because having offered His sacrifice He has ascended up on
high.
He is ‘made higher than the heavens.’ Scripture sometimes speaks of the
living Christ as at present in the heavens, and at others as having ‘passed
through’ and being ‘high above all heavens’; in the former ease simply
giving the more general idea of exaltation, in the latter the thought that
He is lifted, in His manhood and as our priest, above the bounds of the
material and visible creation, and ‘set at the right hand of the Majesty on
high.’
Such a priest we need. His elevation and separation from us upon earth is
essential to that great and continual work of His which we call, for want of
any more definite name, His intercession. The High Priest in the heavens
presents His sacrifice there for ever. The past fact of His death on the
Cross for the sins of the whole world is ever present as an element
determining the direction of the divine dealings with all them that put
their trust in Him. That sacrifice was not once only offered upon the Cross,
but is ever, in the symbolical language of Scripture, presented anew in the
heavens by Him. No time avails to corrupt or weaken the efficacy of that
blood; and He has offered one sacrifice for Sins for ever. Such a priest we
need, to-day, presenting the sacrifice which, today, in our weakness and
sinfulness, we require.
We need a priest who in the heavens bears us in His heart. As His type in
the Old Testament economy entered within the veil with the blood; and when
he passed within the curtain and stood before the Light of the Shekinah, had
on his breast and on his shoulders, — the home of love, the seat of strength
— the names of the tribes, graven on flashing stones, so our priest within
the veil has your name and mine, if we love Him, close by His heart,
governing the flow of His love, and written on His shoulders, and on the
palms of His pierced hands, that all His strength may be granted to us.
‘Such a priest became us.’
And we need a priest separated from the world, lifted above the limitations
of earth and time, wielding the powers of divinity in the hands that once
were laid in blessing on the little children’s heads. And such a priest we
have. We need a priest in the heavens, whose presence there makes that
strange country our home; and by whose footstep, passing through the gates
and on to the golden pavements, the gate is open for us, and our faltering
poor feet can tread there. And such a priest we have, passed within the
veil, that to-day, in aspiration and prayer; and to-morrow in reality and
person, where He is, there we may be also. ‘Such a priest became us.’
We need no other; we do need .Him. Oh, friend! are you resting on that
sacrifice? Have you given Tour cause into His hands to plead? Then the great
High Priest will make you too His priest to offer a thank-offering, and
Himself will present for ever the sacrifice that takes away your sin and
brings you near to God. ‘It is Christ that died, yea I rather, that is risen
again’; and whose death and resurrection alike led on to His ascension to
the right hand of God, where for ever ‘He maketh intercession for us.’
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Hebrews 8:1, 2 The Enthroned Servant Christ
‘We have such an high priest, who
is set on the right hand of the throne of the
Majesty in the heavens; 2. A minister of the sanctuary.’ — Hebrews 8:1, 2
A LITTLE consideration will show that
we have in these words two. strikingly different representations of our
Lord’s heavenly state. In the one He is regarded as seated ‘on the right
hand of the throne of the Majesty.’ In the other He is regarded as being,
notwithstanding that session, a ‘minister of the sanctuary’; performing
priestly functions there. This combination of two such opposite ideas is the
very emphasis and force of the passage. The writer would have us think of
the royal repose of Jesus as full of activity for us; and of His heavenly
activity as consistent with deepest repose. Resting He works; working He
rests. Reigning He serves; serving He reigns. So my purpose is simply to
deal with these two representations, and to seek to draw from them and from
their union the lessons that they teach.
I. Note, then, first, the seated Christ.
‘We have a high priest who’ — to translate a little more closely — ‘has
taken His seat on the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the
heavens.’ ‘Majesty’ is a singular expression or periphrasis for God. It is
used once again in this letter, and seems probably to have been derived by
the writer from the Rabbinical usage of his times, when, as we know, a
certain misplaced, and yet most natural, reverential or perhaps
superstitious awe, made men unwilling to name the mighty name, and inclined
rather to fall back upon other forms of speech to express it.
So the writer here, addressing Hebrews, steeped in Rabbinical thought, takes
one of their own words and speaks of God as the ‘Majesty in the heavens’;
emphasising the idea of sovereignty, power, illimitable magnificence. ‘At
the right hand’ of this throned personal abstraction, ‘the Majesty,’ sits
the Man Christ Jesus.
Now the teaching, both of this Epistle to the Hebrews and of the whole New
Testament, in reference to the state of our exalted Lord, is that His
manhood is elevated to this supreme dignity. The Eternal Word who was with
the Father in the beginning, before all the worlds, went back to ‘the glory
which He had with the Father.’ But the new thing was that there went, too,
that human nature which Jesus Christ indissolubly united with divinity in
the mystery of the lowliness of His earthly life. An ancient prophet
foretold that ‘in the Messianic times there should spring from the cut-down
stump of the royal house of Israel a sucker which, feeble at first, and in
strange contrast with the venerable ruin from which it arose, should grow so
swiftly, so tall and strong, that it should become an ensign for the nations
of the world; and then, he adds, ‘and His resting-place shall be glory.’
There was a deeper meaning in the words, I suppose, than the prophet knew,
and we shall not be chargeable with forcing New Testament ideas upon Old
Testament words which are a world too narrow for them, if we say that there
is at least shadowed the great thought that the lowly manhood, sprung from
the humbled royal stock, shall grow up as a root out of a dry ground,
without form or comeliness, and be lifted to find its rest and
dwelling-place in the very central blaze of the divine glory. We have a High
Priest who, in His manhood, in which He is knit to us, hath taken His seat
on the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens.
Then, again, remember that whilst in such representations as this we have to
do with realities set forth under the symbols of time and place, there is
yet a profound sense in which that session of Jesus Christ at the right hand
of God proclaims both the localisation of His present corporeal humanity and
the ubiquity of His presence. For what is ‘the right hand of God’? What is
it but the manifestation of His energies, the forthputting of His power? And
where is that but everywhere, where He makes Himself known? Wheresoever
divine activity is manifested, there is Jesus Christ. But yet, though this
be true, and though it may be difficult for us to hold the balance and mark
the dividing line between symbol and reality, we are not to forget that the
facts of Christ’s wearing now a real though glorified body, and of His
visible corporeal ascension, and the promise of a similar visible corporeal
return to earth at the end of the days seem to require the belief that,
above all the heavens, and filling all things, as that exalted manhood is,
there is yet what we must call a place, wherein that glorified body now
abides. And thus both the awful majestic idea of omnipresence, and the no
less majestic idea of the present localisation in place of the glorified
Christ, are taught us in the text.
And what is the deepest meaning of it all? What means that majestic session
at ‘the right hand of the throne’? Before that throne ‘angels veil their
faces.’ If in action, they stand; if in adoration, they fall before Him.
Creatures bow prostrate. Who is He that, claiming and exercising a power
which in a creature is blasphemy and madness, takes His seat in that awful
presence? Other words of Scripture represent the same idea in a still more
wonderful form when they speak of ‘the throne of God and of the Lamb,’ and
when He Himself speaks from heaven of Himself as ‘set down with My Father on
His throne.’
If we translate the symbol into colder words, it means that deep repose,
which, like the divine rest after creation, is not for recuperation of
exhausted powers, but is the sign of an accomplished purpose and achieved
task, a share in the sovereignty of heaven, and the wielding of the energies
of deity — rest, royalty, and power belong now to the Man sitting at the
right hand of the throne of God.
II. Note, secondly, the servant Christ.
A minister of the sanctuary; says my text. Now the word employed here for
‘minister,’ and which I have ventured variously to translate servant, means
one who discharges some public official act of service either to God or man,
and it is especially, though by no mean, exclusively, employed in reference
to the service of a ministering priest.
The allusion in the second portion of my text is plainly enough to the
ritual of the great day of atonement, on which the high priest once a year
went into the holy place; and there, in the presence of God throned between
the cherubim, made atonement for the sins of the people, by the offering of
the blood of the sacrifice. Thus, says our writer, that throned and
sovereign Man who, in token of His accomplished work, and in the
participation of deity, sits hard by the throne of God, is yet ministering
at one and the same time within the veil, and presenting the might of His
own sacrifice.
Put away the metaphor and we just come to this, a truth which is far too
little dwelt upon in this generation, that the work which Jesus Christ
accomplished on the Cross, all sufficient and eternal as it was in the range
and duration of its efficacy, is not all His work. The past, glorious as it
is, needs to be supplemented by the present, no less wonderful and glorious,
in which Jesus Christ within the veil, in manners all unknown to us, by His
presence there in the power of the sacrifice that He has made, brings down
upon men the blessings that flow from that sacrifice. It is not enough that
the offering should be made. The deep teaching, the whole reasonableness of
which it does not belong to us here and now to apprehend, but which faith
will gladly grasp as a fact, though reason may not be able to answer the
question of the why or how, tells us that the interceding Christ must
necessarily take up the work of the suffering Christ. Dear brethren, our
salvation is not so secured by the death upon the Cross as to make needless
the life beside the throne. Jesus that died is the Christ ‘that is risen
again, who is even at, the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession
for
us.’
But, beyond that, may I remind you that my text, though not in its direct
bearing, yet in its implication, suggests to us other ways in which the rest
of Christ is full of activity. ‘I am among you as He that serveth’ is true
for the heavenly glory of the exalted Lord quite as much as for the lowly
humiliation of His life upon earth. And no more really did He stoop to serve
when, laying aside His garments, He girded Himself with the towel, and wiped
the disciples’ feet, than He does to-day when, having resumed the garments
of His glorious divinity, and having seated Himself in His place of
authority above us, He comes forth, according to the wonderful condescension
of His own parable, to serve His servants who have entered into rest, and
those also who still toil. The glorified Christ is a ministering Christ. In
us, on us, for us He works, in all the activities of His exalted repose, as
truly and more mightily than He did when here He helped the weaknesses and
healed the sicknesses, and soothed the sorrows and supplied the wants, and
washed the feet, of a handful of poor men.
He has gone up on high, hut in His rest He works. He is on the throne, but
in His royalty He serves. He is absent from us, but His power is with us.
The world’s salvation was accomplished when He cried, ‘It is finished’! But
‘My Father worketh hitherto, and I work,’ and they who saw Him ascend into
the heavens, and longingly followed the diminishing form as it moved slowly
upward, with hands extended in benediction, as they turned away, when there
was nothing more to be seen but the cloud, ‘went everywhere, the Lord
working with them, and confirming the word with signs following.’
So then, let us ever hold fast, inextricably braided together, the rest and
the activity, the royalty and the service, of the glorified Son of Man.
III. And now, in the last place, let me point to one or two of the
practical lessons of such thoughts as these.
They have a bearing on the three categories of past, present, future. For
the past a seal, for the present a strength, for the future a prophecy.
For the past a seal. If it be true — and there are few historical facts the
evidence for which is more solid or valid — that Jesus Christ really went up
into the heavens, and abode there, then that is God’s last and most emphatic
declaration, ‘This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.’ The trail
of light that He leaves behind Him, as He is borne onwards, falls on the
Cross, and tells us that it is the centre of the world’s history. For what
can be greater, what can afford a firmer foundation for us sinful men to
rest our confidence upon, than the death of which the recompense was that
the Man who died sits on the throne of the universe? Brethren! an ascended
Christ forces us to believe in an atoning Christ. No words can exaggerate,
nor can any faith exalt too highly, or trust too completely, the sacrifice
which led straight to that exaltation. Read the Cross by the light of the
throne. Let Olivet interpret Calvary, and we shall understand what Calvary
means.
Again, this double representation of my text is a strength for the present.
I know of nothing that is mighty enough to draw men’s desires and fix solid
reasonable thought and love upon that awful future, except the belief that
Christ is there. I think that the men who have most deeply realised what a
solemn, and yet what a vague and impalpable thing the conception of immortal
life beyond the grave is, will be most ready to admit that the thought is
cold, cheerless, full of blank misgivings and of waste places, in which the
speculative spirit feels itself very much a foreigner. There is but one
thought that flashes warmth into the coldness, and turns the awfulness and
the terror of the chilling magnificence into attractiveness and homelikeness
and sweetness, and that is that Christ is there sitting at the right hand of
God. Foreign lands are changed in their aspect to us when we have brothers
and sisters there; and our Brother has gone whither we too, when we send our
thoughts after Him, can feel that our home is, because there He is. The
weariness of existence here is only perpetuated and intensified when we
think of it as prolonged for ever. But with Christ in the heavens, the
heavens become the home of our hearts.
In like manner, if we only lay upon our spirits as a solid reality, and keep
ever clear before us, as a plain fact, the present glory of Jesus Christ and
His activity for us, oh! then life becomes a different thing, sorrows lose
their poison and their barb, cares become trivial, anxieties less gnawing,
the weights of duty or of suffering less burdensome; and all things have a
new aspect and a new aim. If you and I, dear friends, can sea the heavens
opened, and Jesus on the throne, how petty, how unworthy to fix our desires,
or to compel our griefs, will all the things hare below seem. We then have
the true standard, and the littlenesses that swell themselves into magnitude
when there is nothing to compare them with will shrink into their
insignificance. Lift the mists and let the Himalayas shine out; and what
then about the little molehills in the foreground, that looked so big whilst
the great white mass was invisible? See Christ, and He interprets, dwindles,
and yet ennobles the world and life.
Lastly, such a vision gives us a prophecy for the future. There is the
measure of the possibilities of human nature. A somewhat arrogant saying
affirms, ‘Whatever a man has done, a man can do.’ Whatever that Man is, I
may be. It is possible that humanity may be received into the closest union
with divinity, and it is certain that if we knit ourselves to Jesus Christ
by simple faith and lowly, obedient love, whatever He is He will give to us
to share. ‘Even as I also overcame, and am set down with My Father on His
throne,’ is His own measure of what He will do for the men who are faithful
and obedient to Him.
I do not say that there is no other adequate proof of immortality than the
facts of the resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ. I do not know that
I should be far wrong if I ventured even on that assertion. But I do say
that there is no means by which a poor sinful soul will reach the
realisation of the possibilities that open to it, except faith in Jesus
Christ. If we love Him, anything unreasonable and impossible is more
reasonable and possible than that the Head shall be glorified and the
members Left to see corruption. If I am wedded to Jesus Christ, as you all
may be if you will trust your souls to Him and love Him, then God will take
us and Him as one into the glory of His presence, where we may dwell with
and in Christ, in indissoluble union through the ages of eternity.
My text is the answer to all doubts and fears for ourselves. It shows us
what the true conception of a perfect heaven is, the perfection of rest and
the perfection of service. As Christ’s heaven is the fulness of repose and
of activity, so shall that of His servants he. ‘His servants shall serve Him
‘ — there is the activity — ‘and see His face’ — there is the restful
contemplation — ‘and His name shall be in their foreheads’ — there is the
full participation in His character and glory.
And so, dear brethren, for the world
and for ourselves, hope is duty and despair is sin. Here is the answer to
the question, Can I ever enter that blessed land? Here is the answer to the
question, Is the dream of perfected manhood ever to be more than a dream?
‘We see not yet all things put under Him, but we see Jesus,’ and, seeing
Him, no hope is absurd, and anything but hope is falling beneath our
privileges. Then, dear friends, let us look unto Him who, ‘for the joy that
was set before Him, endured the Cross, despising the shame, and is now set
down at the right hand of the Throne of God.’
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Hebrews 8:5 The True Ideal
‘See (saith He) that thou make all
things according to the pattern shewed to thee in the mount.’ — Hebrews 8:5
I DO not intend to deal with the
original bearing of these words, nor with the use made of them by the writer
of Hebrews. Primarily they refer to the directions as to the Tabernacle and
its furniture, which are given at such length, and with such minuteness, in
Leviticus, and are there said to have been received by Moses on Sinai. The
author of this Epistle attaches an even loftier significance to them, as
supporting his contention that the whole ceremonial worship, as well as the
Temple and its equipment, was a copy of heavenly realities, the heavenly
sanctuary and its altar and priest. I wish to take a much humbler view of
the injunction, and to apply it, with permissible violence, as a maxim for
conduct and the great rule for the ordering of our lives. ‘See that thou,’
in thy shop and office, and wherever thou mayst be, ‘make all things
according to the pattern shewed to thee in the mount.’ A far-reaching,
high-soaring commandment, not to be obeyed without much effort, and able to
revolutionise the lives of most of us. There are three points in it: the
pattern, its universal applicability, and the place where we get to see it.
I. The pattern.
The difference between noble and
ignoble lives is very largely that the one has — and seeks, however
partially and interruptedly, to follow — an ideal and the other has not. Or,
to put it into plainer words, the one man regulates his life according to
momentary inclinations and the obvious calls of sense, business and the
like, and the other man has, far ahead and high up, a great light burning,
to which he is ever striving to attain. The one has an aim to which he can
only approximate, and the other largely lives from hand to mouth, as
circumstances and sense, and the recurring calls of material necessities, or
temptations that are put in his way every day, may dictate. And so, the one
turns out a poor creature, and the other — God helping him — may turn out a
saint. Which are you? Which we are depends very largely on the clearness
with which we keep before us — like some great mountain summit rising above
the mists, and stirring the ambition of every climber to reach the peak,
where foot has never trod — the ideal, to use modern language, or to fall
back upon the good old- fashioned Bible words, ‘the pattern shewed to us.’
You know that in mountain districts the mists are apt to gather their white
folds round the summits, and that often for many days the dwellers in the
plains have to plod along on their low levels, without a glimpse of the calm
peak. And so it is with our highest ideal. Earth-born mists from the
undrained swamps in our own hearts hide it too often from our eyes, and even
when that is not the case, we are like many a mountaineer, who never lifts
an eye to the sacred summit overhead, nor looks higher than his own fields
and cattle-sheds. So it needs an effort to keep clear before us the pattern
that is high above us, and to make very plain to ourselves, and very
substantial in our thoughts, the unattained and untrodden heights. ‘Not in
vain the distance’ should ‘beckon.’ ‘Forward, forward, let us range,’ should
always be our word. ‘See that thou make all things after the pattern,’ and
do not rule your lives according to whim, or fancy, or inclination, or the
temptations of sense and circumstances.
To aim at the unreached is the secret of perpetual youth. No man is old as
long as he aspires. It is the secret of perpetual growth. No man stagnates
till he has ceased to see, or to believe in great dim possibilities for
character, as yet unrealised. It is the secret of perpetual blessedness. No
man can be desolate who has for his companion the unreached self that he may
become. And so artist, poet, painter, all live nobler lives than they
otherwise would, because they live, not so much with the commonplace
realities round them, as with noble ideals, be they of melody or of beauty,
or of musical words and great thoughts. There should be the same life with,
and directed towards, attaining the unstrained in the moralist, and above
all in the Christian.
But then, do not let us forget that we are not here in our text, as I am
using it in this sermon, relegated to a pattern which takes its origin,
after all, in our own thoughts and imaginations The poet’s ideal, the
painter’s ideal, varies according to his genius. Ours has taken solidity and
substance and a human form, and stands before us, and says: ‘If any man
serve Me, let him follow Me.’ ‘See that thou make all things according to
the pattern,’ and be thankful that we are not left to our own thoughts, or
to our brethren’s teachings, or to abstract ideas of the true and the
beautiful and the good for our pattern and mould of life, but that we have
the law embodied in a Person, and the ideal made actual, in our Brother and
our Saviour. There is the joy and the blessedness of the Christian aim after
Christian perfection. There is something unsubstantial, misty, shadowy, in
an ideal which is embodied nowhere. It is ghost-like, and has little power
to move or to attract. But for Christians the pattern is all gathered into
the one sweet, heart. compelling form of Jesus, and whatever is remote and
sometimes cold in the thought of an unattained aim, changes when we make it
our supreme purpose to be like Jesus Christ. Our goal is no cold, solitary
mountain top. It is the warm, loving heart, and companionable purity and
perfectness of our Brother, and when we can, even in a measure, reach that
sweet resting-place, we are wrapped in the soft atmosphere of His love.
We shall be like Him when we see Him
as He is; we grow like Him here, in the measure in which we do see Him, even
darkly. We reach Him most surely by loving Him, and we become like Him most
surely by loving Him, for love breeds likeness, and they who live near the
light are drenched with the light, and become lights in their turn.
There is another point here that I would suggest, and that is
II. The universal applicability of the pattern — ‘See that thou make all
things.’
Let us go back to Leviticus There you
will find page after page that reads like an architect’s specification. The
words that I have taken as my text are given in immediate connection with
the directions for making the seven-branched candlestick, which are so
minute and specific and detailed, that any brass-founder in Europe could
make one to-day ‘after the pattern.’ So many bowls, so many knops, so many
branches; such and such a distance between each of them; and all the rest of
it — there it is, in most prosaic minuteness. Similarly, we read how many
threads and fringes, and how many bells on the high priest’s robe. Verse
after verse is full of these details; and then, on the back of them all,
comes, ‘See that thou make all things according to the pattern.’ Which
things are a parable — and just come to this, that the minutest pieces of
daily life, the most commonplace and trivial incidents, may all be moulded
after that great example, the life of Jesus Christ.
It is one of the miracles of revelation that it should be so. The life of
Jesus Christ, in the fragmentary records of it in these four Gospels,
although it only covered a few years, and is very imperfectly recorded, and
in outward form was passed under conditions most remote from the strange
complex conditions of our civilisation, yet fits as closely as a glove does
to the hand, to all the necessities of our daily lives. Men and women, young
men and maidens, old men and children, professional men and students, women
in their houses, men of business, merchants, and they that sail the sea and
they that dig in the mine; they may all find directions for everything that
they have to do, in that one life.
And here is the centre and secret of it. ‘Except a corn of wheat fall into
the ground and die, it abideth alone.’ Therefore that which is the law for
Jesus is the law for us, and the next verse goes on; ‘he that loveth hie
life shall lose it,’ and the next verse hammers the nail farther in: ‘If any
man serve Me, let him follow Me.’ — Take that injunction and apply it, in
all the details of daily life, and you will be on the road to reproduce the
pattern. But remember the ‘all things.’ It is for us, if we are Christian
people, to bring the greatest principles to bear on the smallest duties,
‘Small duties?’ ‘ Great’ and ‘small’ are adjectives that ought never to be
tacked on to ‘ duty.’ For all duties are of one size, and while we may
speak, and often do speak, very mistakenly about things which we vulgarly
consider ‘great,’ or superciliously treat as ‘small,’ the fact is that no
man can tell what is a great thing, and what is a small one. For the most
important crises in a man’s life have a strange knack of leaping up out of
the smallest incidents; just as a whisper may start an avalanche, and so
nobody can tell what are the great things and what the small ones. The
tiniest pin in a machine drops out, and all the great wheels stop. The small
things are the things that for the most part make up life. You can apply
Christ’s example to the least of them, and there is very small chance of
your applying it to the great things if you have not been in the way of
applying it to the small ones. For the small things make the habits which
the great ones test and require.
So ‘thorough’ is the word. ‘See that thou make all things according to the
pattern.’
I remember once going up to the roof of Milan Cathedral, and finding there
stowed away behind a buttress — where I suppose one man in fifty years might
notice it, a little statuette, as completely chiselled, as perfectly
polished, as if it had been of giant size, and set in the facade for all the
people in the piazza to see. That is the sort of way in which Christian men
should carve out their lives. Finish off the unseen bits perfectly, and then
you may be quite sure that the seen bits will take care of themselves. ‘See
that thou make all things’ — and begin with the small ones — ‘according to
the pattern.’
Lastly,
III. Where we are to see the
pattern. — ‘Shewed to thee in the mount.’
Ay, that is where we have to go if we
are to see it. The difference between Christian men’s convictions of duty
depends largely on the difference in the distance that they have climbed up
the hill. The higher you go, the better you see the He of the land. The
higher you go, the purer and more wholesome the atmosphere. And many a thing
which a Christian man on the low levels thought to be perfectly in
accordance with ‘the pattern,’ when he goes up a little higher, he finds to
be hopelessly at variance with it. It is of no use to lay down a multitude
of minute, red-tape regulations as to what Christian morality requires from
people in given circumstances. Go up the hill, and you will see for
yourselves.
Our elevation determines our range of vision. And the nearer, and the
closer, and the deeper is our habitual fellowship with God in Christ, the
more lofty will be our conceptions of what we ought to be and do. The reason
for inconsistent lives is imperfect communion, mad the higher we go on the
mountain of vision, the dearer will be our vision. On the other hand, whilst
we see ‘the pattern’ in the mount, we have to come down into the valley to
‘make’ the ‘things.’ The clay and the potter’s wheels are down in Hinnom,
and the mountain top is above. You have to carry your pattern- book down,
and set to work with it before you. Therefore, whilst the way to see the
pattern is to climb, the way to copy it is to descend. And having faithfully
copied what you saw on the Mount of Vision, you will see more the next time
you go back; for ‘to him that hath shall be given.’
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Hebrews 8:10 The Articles of the New Covenant: God's
Welting on the Heart
‘I will put My laws into their
mind, and write them in their hearts.’ —Hebrews 8:10
WE can scarcely estimate the shock to
a primitive Hebrew Christian when he discovered that Judaism was to fade
away. Such an earthquake might seem to leave nothing standing. Now, the
great object of this Epistle is to insist on that truth, and to calm the
early Hebrew Christians under it, by showing them that the disappearance of
the older system left them no poorer but infinitely richer, inasmuch as all
that was in it was more perfectly in Christ’s gospel. The writer has
accordingly been giving his strength to showing that, all along the line,
Christianity is the perfecting of Judaism, in its Founder, in its
priesthood, in its ceremonies, in its Sabbath. Here he touches the great
central thought of the covenant between God and man, and he fall back upon
the strange words of one of the old prophets. Jeremiah had declared as
emphatically as he, the writer, has been declaring, that the ancient system
was to melt away and be absorbed in a new covenant between God and man. Is
there any other instance of a religion which, on the one side, proclaims its
own eternal duration — ‘the Word of the Lord endureth for ever’ — and on the
other side declares that it is to be abrogated, antiquated, and done away?
The writer of the Epistle had learned from sacreder lips than Jeremiah’s the
same lesson, for the Master said at the most solemn hour of His career,
‘This is the blood of the New Covenant, which is shed for many for the
remission of sins.’
These articles of the New Covenant go very deep into the essence of
Christianity, and may well be thought. fully pondered by us all, if we wish
to know what the specific differences between the ultimate revelation in
Jesus Christ, and all other systems are. The words I have read for my text
are the first of these articles.
I. Let us try to ascertain what exactly is the meaning of this great
promise.
Now it seems to me that the two
clauses which I have read for my text are not precisely parallel, but
parallel with a difference. I take it, that ‘mind’ here means very much what
we make it mean in our popular phraseology, a kind of synonym for the
understanding, or the intellectual part of a man’s nature; and that ‘heart,’
on the other hand, means something a little wider than it does in our
popular phraseology, and indicates not only the affections, but the centre
of personality in the human will, as well as the seat of love. So these two
clauses will mean, you see, if we carry that distinction with us, two things
— the clear perception of the will of God, and the coincidence of that will
with our inclinations and desires.’ In men’s natural consciences, there is
the law written on their minds, but alas! we all know that there is an awful
chasm between perception and inclination, and that it is one thing to know
our duty, and quite another to wish to do it. So the heart of this great
promise of my text is that these two things shall coincide in a Christian
man, shall cover precisely the same ground; as two of Euclid’s triangles
having the same angles will, if laid upon each other, coincide line for line
and angle for angle. Thus, says this great promise, it is possible — and, if
we observe the conditions, it will be actual in us — that knowledge and will
shall cover absolutely and exactly the same ground. Inclination will be
duty, and duty will be inclination and delight. Nothing short of such a
thought lies here.
And how is that wonderful change upon men to be accomplished? ‘I will put, I
will write.’ Only He can do it. We all know, by our own experience, the
schism that gapes between the two things. Every man in the world knows a
vast deal more of duty than any man in the world does. The worst of us has a
standard that rebukes his evil, and the best of us has a standard that
transcends his goodness, and, alas! often transcends his inclination.
But the gospel of our Lord and Saviour
comes armed with sufficient power to make this miracle an actuality for us
all.
For it comes, does it not, to substitute for all other motives to obedience,
the one motive of love? They but half understand the gospel who dwell upon
its sanctions of reward and punishment, and would seek to frighten men into
goodness by brandishing the whip of law before them, and uncovering the lid
that shuts in the smoke of a hell And they misinterpret it almost as much,
if there be any such, who find the chief motive for Christian obedience in
the glories of the heavenly state. These are subordinate and legitimate in
their secondary place, but the gospel appeals to men, not merely nor chiefly
on the ground of self-interest, but it comes to them with the one appeal,
‘If ye love Me, keep My commandments.’ That is how the law is written on the
heart. Wherever there is love, there is a supreme delight in divining and in
satisfying the wish and will of the beloved. His lightest word is law to the
loving heart; his looks are spells and commandments. And if it is so in
regard of our poor, imperfect, human loves, how infinitely more so is it
where the heart is touched by true affection for His own infinite love’s
sake, of that ‘Jesus’ who is ‘most desired!’ The secret of Christian
morality is that duty is changed into choice, because love is made the
motive for obedience.
And, still further, let me remind you how this great promise is fulfilled in
the Christian life, because to have Christ shrined in the heart is the heart
of Christianity, and Christ Himself is our law. So, in another sense than
that which I have been already touching, the law is written on the heart on
which, by faith and self-surrender, the name of Christ is written. And when
it becomes our whole duty to become like Him, then He being throned in our
hearts, our law is within, and Himself to His ‘darlings’ shall be, as the
poet has it about another matter, ‘both law and impulse.’ Write His name
upon your hearts, and your law of life is thereby written there.
And, still further, let me remind you that this great promise is fulfilled,
because the very specific gift of Christianity to men is the gift of a new
nature which is ‘created in righteousness and holiness that flows from
truth.’ The communication of a divine life kindred with, and percipient of,
and submissive to, the divine will is the gift that Christianity — or,
rather, let us put away the abstraction and say that Christ — offers . to us
all, and gives to every man who will accept it.
And thus, and in other ways on which I cannot dwell now, this great article
of the New Covenant lies at the very foundation of the Christian life, and
gives its peculiar tinge and cast to all Christian morality, commandment,
and obligation.
But let me remind you how this great truth has to be held with caution. The
evidence of this letter itself shows that, whilst the writer regarded it as
a distinctive characteristic of the gospel, that by it men’s wills were
stamped with a delight in the law of God, and a transcript thereof, he still
regarded these wills as unstable, as capable of losing the sharp lettering,
of having the writing of God obliterated, and still regarded it as possible
that there should be apostasy and departure.
So there is nothing in this promise which suspends the need for effort and
for conflict. Still ‘the flesh lusteth against the spirit.’ Still there are
parts of the nature on which that law is not written. It is the final
triumph, that the whole man, body, soul, and spirit is, through and through,
penetrated with, and joyfully obedient to, the commandments of the Lord.
There is need, too, not only for continuous progress, effort, conflict, in
order to keep our hearts open for His handwriting, but also for much
caution, lest at any time we should mistake our own self-will for the
utterance of the divine voice.
‘Love, and do what thou wilt,’ said a
great Christian teacher. It is an unguarded statement, but profoundly true
as in some respects it is, it is only absolutely true if we have made sure
that the ‘thou’ which ‘wills’ is the heart on which God has written His law.
Only God can do this for us. The Israelites of old were bidden ‘these things
which I command thee this day shall be on thy heart,’ and they were to write
them on their hand, and on the frontlet between their eyes, and on their
doorposts. The latter commands were obeyed, having been hardened into a
form; and phylacteries on the arm, and scrolls on the lintel, were the
miserable obedience which was given to them. But the complete writing on the
heart was beyond the power of unaided man. A psalmist said, ‘I delight to do
Thy will, and Thy law is within my heart.’ But a verse or two after, in the
same psalm, he wailed, ‘Mine iniquities have taken hold upon me, so that I
am not able to look up. They are more than the hairs of my head. Therefore
my heart faileth me.’ One Man has transcribed the divine will on His will,
without blurring a letter, or omitting a clause. One Man has been able to
say, in the presence of the most fearful temptations, ‘Not My will, but
Thine, be done.’ One Man has so completely written, perceived, and obeyed
the law of His Father, that, looking back on all His life, He was conscious
of no defect or divergence, either in motive or in act, and could affirm on
the Cross, ‘It is finished.’ He who thus perfectly kept that divine law will
give to us, if we ask Him, His spirit, to write it upon our hearts, and ‘the
law of the spirit of life which was in Christ Jesus shall make us free from
the law of sin and death.’
II. Now, secondly, note the impassable gulf which this fulfilled promise
makes between Christianity and all other systems.
It is a new covenant, undoubtedly-an altogether new thing in the world. For
whatever other laws have been promulgated among men have had this in common,
that they have stood over against the Will with a whip in one hand, and a
box of sweets in the other, and have tried to influence desires and
inclinations, first by the setting forth of duty, then by threatening, and
then by promises to obedience. There is the inherent weakness of all which
is merely law. You do not make men good by telling them in what goodness
consists, nor yet by setting forth the bitter consequences that may result
from wrong-doing. All that is surface work. But there is a power which says
that it deals with the will as from within, and moves, and moulds, and
revolutionises it. ‘You cannot make men sober by act of parliament,’ people
say. Well! I do not believe the conclusion which is generally drawn from
that statement, but it is perfectly true in itself. To tell a man what he
ought to do is very, very little help towards his doing it. I do not
under-estimate the value of a clear perception of duty, but I say that,
apart from Christianity, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, that clear
perception of duty is like a clear opening of a great gulf between a man and
safety, which only makes him recoil in despair with the thought, ‘how can I
ever leap across that?’ But the peculiarity of the gospel is that it gives
both the knowledge of what we ought to be; and with and in the knowledge,
the desire, and with and in the knowledge and the desire, the power to be
what God would have us to be.
All other systems, whether the laws of a nation, or the principles of a
scientific morality, or the solemn voice that speaks in our minds
proclaiming some version of God’s law to every man- all these are
comparatively impotent. They are like bill-stickers going about a rebellious
province posting the king’s proclamation. Unless they have soldiers at their
back, the proclamation is not worth the paper it is printed upon. But
Christianity comes, and gives us that which it requires from us. So, in his
epigrammatic way, St. Augustine penetrated to the very heart of this article
when he prayed, ‘Give what Thou commandest, and command what Thou wilt.’
III. Note the freedom and blessedness of this fulfilled promise.
Not to do wrong may be the mark of a slave’s timid obedience. Not to
wish to do wrong is the charter of a son’s free and blessed service. There
is a higher possibility yet, reserved for heaven — not to be able to do
wrong. Freedom does not consist in doing what I like — that turns out, in
the long run, to be the most abject slavery, under the severest tyrants. But
it consists in liking to do what I ought. When my wishes and God’s will are
absolutely coincident, then and only then, am I free. That is no prison, out
of which we do not wish to go. Not to be confined against our wills, but
voluntarily to elect to move only within the sacred, charmed, sweet circle
of the discerned will of God, is the service and liberty of the sons of God.
Alas! there are a great many Christians, so-called, who know very little
about such blessedness. To many of us religion is a burden. It consists of a
number of prohibitions and restrictions and commandments equally unwelcome.
‘Do not do this,’ and all the while I would like to do it. ‘Do that,’ and
all the while I do not want to do it. ‘Pray, because it is your duty; go to
chapel, because you think it is God’s will; give money that you would much
rather keep in your pockets: abstain from certain things that you hunger
for; do other things that you do not at all desire to do, nor find any
pleasure in doing.’ That is the religion of hosts of people. They have need
to ask themselves whether their religion is Christ’s religion. Ah! brethren!
— ‘My yoke is easy and My burden light; not because the things that He bids
and forbids are less or lighter than those which the world’s morality
requires of its followers, but because, so to speak, the yoke is padded with
the velvet of love, and inclination coincides, in the measure of our true
religion, with the discerned will of God.
IV. Lastly, one word about the condition of the fulfilment of this
promise to us.
As I have been saying, it is sadly far ahead of the experience of crowds of
so-called Christians. There are still great numbers of professing
Christians, and I doubt not that I speak to some such, on whose hearts only
a very few of the syllables of God’s will are written, and these very
faintly and blotted. But remember that the fundamental idea of this whole
context is that of a covenant, and a covenant implies two parties, and
duties and obligations on the part of each. If God is in covenant with you,
you are in covenant with God. If He makes a promise, there is something for
you to do in order that that promise may be fulfilled to you.
What is there to do? First, and last, and midst, keep close to Jesus Christ.
In the measure in which we keep ourselves in continual touch with Him, will
His law be written upon our hearts. If we are for ever twitching away the
paper; if we are for ever flinging blots and mud upon it, how can we expect
the transcript to be clear and legible? We must keep still that God may
write. We must wait habitually in His presence. When the astronomer wishes
to get the image of some far-off star, invisible to the eye of sense, he
regulates the motion of his sensitive plate, so that for hours it shall
continue right beneath the unseen Beam. So we have to still our hearts, and
keep their plates — the fleshy tables of them — exposed to the heavens. Then
the likeness of God will be stamped there.
Be faithful to what is written there, which is the Christian shape of the
heathen commandment — ‘Do the duty that lies nearest thee; so shall the next
become plainer.’ Be faithful to the line that is ‘written,’ and there will
be more on the tablet to-morrow.
Now this is a promise for us all However blotted and blurred and defaced by
crooked, scrawling letters, like a child’s copy-book, with its first pot-
hooks and hangers, our hearts may be, there is no need for any of us to say
despairingly, as we look on the smeared page, ‘What I have written I have
written.’ He is able to blot it all out, to ‘take away the hand-writing’ —
our own — ‘that is against us, nailing it to His Cross,’ and to give us, in
our inmost spirits, a better knowledge of, and a glad obedience to, His
discerned and holy will. So that each of us, if we choose, and will observe
the conditions, may be able to say with all humility, ‘Lo! I come, in the
volume of the book it is written of me, I delight to do Thy will, yea! Thy
law is within my heart.’
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Hebrews 8:11 - III. 'All Shall Know Me'
‘They shall not teach every man his
neighbour, and every man his brother saying, Know the Lord: for all shall
know Me, from the least to the greatest.’— Hebrews 8:11
IN former sermons I have tried to
bring out the force of the preceding two articles of ‘the New Covenant’
These two were the substitution of inward inclination and impulse for the
rigid bonds of an external commandment, and the substitution of a real,
spiritual, mutual possession of God and His people for the mere outward
relationship that existed between Israel and Jehovah-My text is the third
article of the New Covenant, It lays hold, like the other two, of something
that characterised the ancient dispensation, declares its imperfection,
recognises its prophetic aspect, and asserts that all which the former
merely shadowed and foretold is accomplished in Jesus Christ.
In old days there had been some direct communication between God and a
chosen few, the spiritual aristocracy of the nation, and they spake the
things that they had heard of God to the multitude who had had no such
communication. My text says that all this is swept away, and that the
prerogative of every Christian man is direct access to, communication with,
and instruction from, God Himself. The text has two things in it; the
promise, which is the essence of it, and a consequence which is deduced from
that promise, and sets forth its results in a graphic manner. ‘They all
shall know Me, from the least to the greatest’; that is the real promise.
‘They shall no more teach every man his neighbour saying, ‘Know the
Lord,’ is but a result thereof.
I. Now, I ask you to look with me at what this great promise means.
‘They shall know Me.’ Perhaps I can best explain what I take it to mean by
commencing with an analogy or two which may help us to apprehend what is the
significance of these words. We all know the difference between hearsay and
sight. We may have read books of travel, and tell of some scene of great
natural beauty or historic interest, and may think that we understand all
about it, but it is always an epoch when our own eyes look for the first
time at the snowy summit of an Alp, or for the first time at the Parthenon
on its rocky height. We all know the difference between hearsay and
experience. We read books of the poets that portray love and sorrow, and the
other emotions that make up our throbbing, changeful life; but we need to go
through the mill ourselves before we understand what the grip of the iron
teeth of the harrow of affliction is, and we need to have had our own hearts
dilated By a true and blessed affection, before we know the sweetness of
love. Men may tell us about it, but we have to feel it ourselves before we
know.
To come still closer to the force of my text, we all know the difference
between hearing about a man and making his acquaintance. We may have been
told much about him, and be familiar with his character, as we think, but,
when we come face to face with him, and actually for ourselves experience
the magnetism of his presence, or fall under the direct influence of his
character, then we know that our former acquaintance with him, by means of
hearsay, was but superficial and shadowy. ‘I have heard of thee by the
hearing of the ear, but now mine eyes see thee.’ Can you say that? If so,
you understand my text — ‘They shall no more teach every man... his brother,
saying, Know the Lord, and make acquaintance with Him’ as if He were a
stranger — for ‘all shall know Me, from the least to the greatest.’ There is
all the difference between knowing about God and knowing God; just the
difference .that there is between dogma and life, between theology and
religion. We may have all articles of the Christian creed clear in our
understandings, and may owe our possession of them to other people’s
teaching; we may even, in a sense, believe them, and yet they may be
absolutely outside of our lives, and it is only when they pass into the very
substance of our being, and influence the springs of our conduct — it is
only then that we know God.
Now, I maintain that this acquaintance with Him is what is meant in our
text. It may not include any more intellectual propositions about Him than a
man had before he knew Him, but it has turned doctrines into fact, and
instead of the mere hearsay and traditional religion, which is the only
religion of millions, it has brought the true heart-grasp of Him, which is
the only thing worth calling a knowledge of God. For let me remind you that,
whilst we may know a science or proposition by the exercise of our
understandings in appropriate ways, that is not how we know people. And God
is a person, and to know Him does not mean to understand about Him, but to
be on speaking terms with Him, to have a familiar acquaintance with Him, to
‘summer and winter’ with Him, and so, by experience, to verify the things
that before were mere doctrines. Now, at least the large majority of you
call yourselves believers in Christianity. I want you to ask yourselves, and
I would ask myself, whether my religion is knowing about God or knowing Him;
whether it is all made up of a set of truths which I assent to, mainly
because I am not sufficiently interested in them to contradict them, or
whether these truths have become the very substance of my life. I do not
believe in a religion without a dogma — I was going to say, I believe still
less in a dogma without religion; and that is the Christianity of hosts of
professing Christians. It is as useless as are the dried seeds that rattle
in the withered head of a poppy in the autumn, or as the shrivelled kernel
that sounds in the hollowness of a half-empty nut. Remember, dear brethren,
that to know God is to become acquainted with Him, and that only on the path
of such familiar, friendly, loving intercourse and communion with Him, can
men find the confirmation of the truths about Him which make up the eternal
revelation of Him in the gospel. ‘We know’ — that is a valid certainty,
arising from experience, and it has as good a right to call itself knowledge
as have the processes by which men come to be sure about the physical facts
of this material universe. Nay! I would even go further, and say that the
fact that such a continual stream of witnesses, through all the generations,
have been able to say, ‘I have tasted and I have seen that God is good,’ is
to be taken into account by all impartial searchers after truth. And if men
want to square their creeds with all the facts of humanity, let them not
omit, in their consideration of the claims of Christian evidence, this fact,
that from generation to generation men have said, and their lives have
witnessed to its truths, ‘We know in whom we have believed, and that He is
able to keep us. We know that we are of God. Dear brethren! the whole case
for Christianity cannot be appreciated from outside. ‘Taste and see.’ My
text shows us the more true way. If we will accept that covenant we shall
know the Lord in the depths of our hearts.
II. Notice how far this promise extends.
They all, from the least to the greatest, shall know; There is to be no
distinction of rank or age, or endowment, which shall result in some of the
people of God having a position from which any of the others are altogether
shut out.
The writer is, of course, contrasting in his mind, though he does not
express the contrast, the condition of things of old, when, as I said, the
spiritual aristocracy of the nation received communications which they then
imparted to their fellows. In the morning dawn the highest summits catch the
rays first, but as the sun rises it floods the lower levels, and at mid-day
shines right down into the depths of the cavities. So the world is now
flooded with the light of Christ; and all Christian men and women, by virtue
of their Christian character, do possess the unction from the Holy One, in
which lie the potency and the promise of the knowledge of all things that
are needful to be known for life and godliness. This is the true democracy
of the gospel-the universal possession of the life of Christ through the
Spirit.
Now, if that be so, then it is by no means a truth to be kept simply for the
purpose of fighting against ecclesiastical or sacerdotal encroachments and
denials of it, but it ought to be taken as the candle of the Lord, by each
of us, and in the light of it we ought to search very rigidly, and very
often, our own Christian character and experiences. You, dear brethren, with
whom I am most closely associated here, you professing Christians of this
congregation — do you know anything about that inward knowledge of God which
comes from friendship with Him, and speaks irrefragable certainties in the
heart which receives it? ‘If any man have not the spirit of Christ, he is
none of His.’ If you owe all your knowledge of, and your faith in, the great
verities of the gospel, and the loving personality of God, to the mere
report of others, if you cannot verify these by your own experience, if you
cannot say, ‘Many things I know not; you can easily puzzle me with critical
and philosophical subtleties, but this one thing I do know, that whereas I
was blind, now I see’ — if you cannot say that, I pray you, bethink
yourselves whether your religion is not mainly a form, and how far it has
any life in it at all.
But whilst thus the great promise of my text, in its very blessedness and
fulness, does carry with it soma solemn suggestions for searching self-
examination, it also points in another direction. For consider what it
excludes and what it permits, in the way of brotherly help and guidance. It
certainly excludes on the one hand, all assumption of authority over the
consciences and the understandings of Christian people, on the part either
of churches or individuals, and, it makes short work of all claims that
there continues a class of persons officially distinguished from their
brethren, and having closer access to God than they. The true understanding
of these words of my text, the recognition of the universality of the
knowledge of God in all Christian people, has great revolutionary work yet
to do amongst the churches of Christendom. For I do not know that there are
any of them that have sufficiently recognised this principle. Not only in a
church whore there is a priesthood and an infallible head of the Church on
earth, nor only in churches that are bound by human creeds imposed on them
by men, but also in churches like ours, where there is no formal recognition
of either of these two errors, the practical contradiction of this article
of the New Covenant is apt to creep in. It is a great deal more the fault of
the people than of the priest, a great deal more the fault of the
congregation than of the pastor, when they are lazily contented to take all
their religion at second-hand from him, and to shuffle all the
responsibility off their own shoulders on to his. If my text obliges me, and
all men who stand in my position, to say with the Apostle, ‘Not for that we
have dominion over your faith, but are helpers of your joy,’ it obliges you,
dear brethren, to take nothing from me, or any man, on our bare words, nor
to exalt any of us into a position which would contradict the great
principle of my text, but yourselves, at first hand, to go to God, and get
straight from Him the teaching which He only can give. Dominion and
subjection, authority and submission to men, in any part of the church are
shut out by such words as these.
But brotherly help is not shut out. If a party of men are climbing a hill,
and one is in advance of his fellows, when he reaches the summit he may look
down and call to those below, and tell them how fair and wide the view is,
and beckon them to come and give them a he
