Hebrews 10:30 How to Own Ourselves
‘Them that believe to the saving of
the soul.’ — Hebrews 10:30
THE writer uses a somewhat uncommon
word in this clause, which is not altogether adequately represented by the
translation ‘saving.’ Its true force will be apparent by comparing one or
two of the few instances in which it occurs in the New Testament. For
example, it is twice employed in the Epistles to the Thessalonians; in one
case being rendered, ‘God hath not appointed us to wrath, but to obtain’
(or, more correctly, to the obtaining of) ‘salvation by our Lord Jesus
Christ’; and in another, ‘called to the obtaining of glory through Jesus
Christ.’ It is employed twice besides in two other places of Scripture, and
in both of these it means ‘possession.’ So that, though practically
equivalent to the idea of salvation, there is a very beautiful shade of
difference which is well worth noticing.
The thought of the text is substantially this — those who believe win their
souls; they acquire them for their possession. We talk colloquially about
‘people that cannot call their souls their own.’ That is a very true
description of all men who are not lords of themselves through faith in
Jesus Christ. ‘They who believe to the gaining of their own souls’ is the
meaning of the writer here.
And I almost think that we may trace in this peculiar expression an
allusion, somewhat veiled but real, to similar words of our Lord’s. For He
said, when, like the writer in the present context, He was encouraging His
disciples to steadfastness in the face of difficulties and persecutions, ‘In
your patience’ — in your persistent adherence to Me, whatever might draw you
away, — ‘ye shall win’ — not merely possess, as our Bible has it, and not a
commandment, but a promise — ‘in your patience ye shall win your souls.’
Whether that allusion be sustainable or no matters comparatively little; it
is the significant and beautiful thought which underlies the word to which I
wish to turn, and to present you with some illustrations of it.
I. First, then, if we lose ourselves we win ourselves.
All men admit in theory that a
self-centred life is a blunder. Jesus Christ has all moralists and all
thoughtful men wholly with Him when He says, ‘He that loveth his life shall
lose it; and he that loseth his life shall find it.’ There is no such way of
filling a soul with enlargement and blessedness and of evolving new powers
and capacities as self-oblivion for some great cause, for some great love,
for some great enthusiasm. Many a woman has found herself when she held her
child in her arms, and in the self-oblivion which comes from maternal
affections and cares has sprung into a loftier new life. Many a heart, of
husband and wife, can set its seal to this truth, that the blessedness of
love is that it decentralises the soul, and substitutes another aim for the
wretched and narrow one that is involved in self-seeking. And even if we do
not refer to these sacred heights of maternal or of wedded love, there are
many other noble counterpoises to the do-grading influence of self-
absorption, which all men recognise and some men practise. Whoever has once
tasted the joy and rapture of flinging himself into some great enthusiasm,
and has known how much fuller life is when so inspired than in its ordinary
forms, needs no words to convince him that the secret of blessedness,
elevation, and power, if it is to be put into one great word, must be put
into this one, ‘self-oblivion.’
But whilst all these counterpoises to the love of self are, in their measure
and degree, great and noble and blessed, not one of them, nor all of them
put together, will so break the fetters from off a prisoned soul and let it
out into the large place of utter and glad self-oblivion as the course which
our text enjoins upon us when it says: If you wish to forget yourselves, to
abandon and lose yourselves, fling yourselves into Christ’s arms, and by
faith yield your whole being, will, trust, purposes, aims, everything —
yield them all to Him; and when you can say, ‘We are not our own,’ then
first will you belong to yourselves and have won your own souls.
There is nothing except that absolute departure from all reliance upon our
own poor powers, and from all making of ourselves our centre and aim in
life, which gives us true possession of ourselves. Nothing else is
comparable to the talismanic power of trust in Jesus Christ. When thus we
lose ourselves in Him we find ourselves, and find Him in ourselves.
I believe that, at bottom, a life must either spin round on its own axis,
self- centred and self-moved, or else it must be drawn by the mass and
weight and mystical attractiveness of the great central sun, and swept clean
out of its own little path to become a satellite round Him. Then only will
it move in music and beauty, and flash back the lustre of an unfading light.
Self or God, one or other will be the centre of every human life.
It is well to be touched with lofty enthusiasms; it is well to conquer self
in the eager pursuit of some great thought or large subject of study; it is
well to conquer self in the sweetness of domestic love; but through all
these there may run a perverting and polluting reference to myself.
Affection may become but a subtle prolongation of myself, and study and
thought may likewise be tainted, and even in the enthusiasm for a great
cause there may mingle much of self-regard; and on the whole there is
nothing that will sweep out, and keep out, the seven devils of selfishness
except to yield yourselves to God, drawn by His mercies, and say, ‘I am not
my own; I am bought with a price.’ Then, and only then, will you belong to
yourselves. II. Secondly it we will take Christ for our Lord we shall be
lords of our own souls.
I have said that self-surrender is
self-possession. It is equally true that self- control is self-possession;
and it is as true about this application of my text as it was about the
former, that Christianity only says more emphatically what moralists say,
and suggests and supplies a more efficient means of accomplishing the end
which they all recognise as good. For everybody knows that the man who is a
slave to his own passions, lusts, or desire is not his own master. And
everybody knows that the man who is the sport of circumstance, and yields to
every temptation that comes sweeping round him, as bamboos bend before every
blast; or the man who is guided by fashion, conventionality, custom, and the
influence of the men amongst whom he lives, and whom he calls ‘the world,’
is not his own master. He ‘dare not call his soul his own.’
What do we mean by being self-possessed, except this, that we can so rule
our more fluctuating and sensitive parts as that, notwithstanding appeals
made to them By external circumstances, they do not necessarily yield to
these? He possesses himself who, in the face of antagonism, can do what is
right; who, in the face of temptation, will not do what is wrong; who can
dare to be in the right with one or two; and who is not moulded By
circumstances, howsoever they may influence him, but reacts upon them as a
hammer, and is not as an anvil. And this superiority over the parts of my
nature which are meant to be kept down, and this assertion of independent
power in the face of circumstances, and this freedom from the dominion of
cliques and parties and organs of opinion and loud voices round us, this is
best secured in its fulness and completeness by the path which my text
suggests.
Trust in Jesus Christ, and let Him be your Commander-in-chief, and you have
won your souls. Let Him dominate them, and you can dominate them. If you
will give your wills into His hands, He will give them back to you and make
you able to subdue your passions and desires. Put the reins into Christ’s
hands and say, ‘Here, O Lord, guide Thou the horses and the chariot, for I
cannot coerce them, but Thou canst.’ Then He will come and bring a new ally
in the field, and cast a new weight into the scale, and you will no longer
be the slave of the servile and inferior parts of your nature; nor be kicked
about, the football of circumstances; nor be the echo of some other body’s
views, but you will have a voice of your own, and a will of your own, and a
soul of your own, because you have given them to Christ, and He will help
you to control them. Such a man — and I verily believe, from the bottom of
my heart, such a man only — in the fullest sense, is
‘Free from slavish
bands,
Of hope to rise, or fear to fall;
Lord of himself, though not of lands;
And having nothing, yet hath all.’
What does some little rajah, on the
edge of our great Indian Empire, do when troubled with rebels whom he cannot
subdue? He goes and makes himself a feudatory of the great central power at
Calcutta, and then down comes a regiment or two, and makes very short work
of the rebellion that the little kinglet could do nothing with. If you go to
Christ and say to Him, ‘Dear Lord, I take my crown from my head and lay it
at Thy feet. Come Thou to help me to rule this anarchic realm of my own
soul,’ you will win yourself.
III. Thirdly, if we have faith in Christ we acquire a better self.
The thing that most thoughtful men and women feel, after they have gone a
little way into life, is not so much that they want to possess themselves,
as that they want to get rid of themselves — of all the failures and shame
and disappointment and futility of their lives. That desire may be
accomplished. We cannot strip ourselves of ourselves by any effort. The
bitter old past keeps living on, and leaves with us seeds of weakness and
memories that sometimes corrupt, and always enfeeble: memories that seem to
limit the possibilities of the future in a tragic fashion. Ah, brethren! we
can get rid of ourselves; and, instead of continuing the poor, sin-laden,
feeble creatures that we are, we can have pouring into our souls the gift
most real —though people nowadays, in their shallow religion, call it
mystical — of a new impulse and a new life. The old individuality will
remain, but new tastes, new aspirations, aversions, hopes, and capacities to
realise them may all be ours, so that ‘if any man be in Christ he is a new
creature’; and in barter for the old garment he receives the robe of
righteousness. You can lose yourselves, in a very deep and earnest sense,
if, trusting in Jesus Christ, you open the door of the heart to the influx
of that new life which is His best gift. Faith wins a better self, and we
may each experience, in all its fulness and Blessedness, the paradox of the
apostle when he said, ‘I live’ now, at last, in triumphant possession of
this better life: ‘I live’ now — I only existed before — ‘yet not I, but
Christ liveth in me.’ And with Christ in me I first find myself.
IV. Lastly, if by faith we win our souls here, we save them from
destruction hereafter.
I have said that the word of my text is substantially equivalent to the more
frequent and common expression ‘salvation’; though with a shade of
difference, which I have been trying to bring Out. And this substantial
equivalence is more obvious if you will note that the text is the second
member of an antithesis of which the first is, ‘we are not of them which
draw back into perdition.’
So, then, the writer sets up, as exact opposites of one another, these two
ideas — perdition or destruction on the one hand, and the saving or winning
of the soul on the other. Therefore, whilst we must give due eight to the
considerations which I have already been suggesting, we shall not grasp the
whole of the writer’s meaning unless we admit also the thought of the
future. And that the same blending of the two ideas, of possession and
salvation in the more usual sense of the word, was implied in the Lord’s
saying, of which I have suggested there may be an echo here, is plain if you
observe that the version in St. Luke gives the text which I have already
quoted: ‘In your patience ye shall win your souls’; and that of St. Matthew,
in the same connection, gives, instead, the saying, ‘he that endureth’ —
which corresponds with patience — ‘he that endureth to the end, the same
shall be saved.’
So, then, brethren, you cannot be said to have won your souls if you are
only keeping them for destruction, and such destruction is clearly laid down
here as the fate of those who turn away from Jesus Christ.
Now, it seems to me that no fair interpretation can eject from that word
‘perdition,’ or ‘destruction,’ an element of awe and terror. However you may
interpret the ruin, it is ruin utter of which it speaks. And I am very much
afraid that in this generation eager discussions about the duration of
punishment, and the final condition of those who die impenitent, have had a
disastrous influence on a great many minds and consciences in reference to
this whole subject, by making it rather a subject of controversy than a
solemn truth to be pondered. However the controversies be settled, there is
terror enough left in that word to make us all bethink ourselves.
I lay it on your hearts, dear friends — it is no business of mine to say
much about it, but I lay it on your hearts and on my own; and I beseech you
to ponder it. Do not mix it up with wholly independent questions as to what
is to become of people who never heard about Jesus Christ. ‘The Judge of all
the earth will do right.’ What this verse says applies to people that have
heard about Him — that is, to you and me — and to people that do not accept
Him — and that is some of us; and about them it says that they ‘draw back
unto perdition.’
Now, remember, the alternative applies to each of us. It is a case of
‘either— or’ in regard to us all. If we have taken Christ for our Saviour,
and, as I said, put the reins into His hands and given ourselves to Him by
love and submission and confidence, then we own our souls, because we have
given them to Him to keep, ‘and He is able to keep that which is committed
to Him against that day.’
But I am bound to tell you, in the plainest words I can command, that if you
have not thus surrendered yourself to Jesus Christ, His sacrifice, His
intercession, His quickening Spirit, then I know not where you are to find
one foothold of hope that upon you there will not come down the overwhelming
fate that is darkly portrayed in that one solemn word.
Oh, brethren! let us all ponder the question, ‘ What shall it profit a man
if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’
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Hebrews 10:34 A Better and an Enduring Substance
Knowing in yourselves that ye have
in heaven a better and an enduring substance.’ — Hebrews 10:34
THE words ‘in heaven’ are probably no
part of the original text, but have somehow or other crept in, in order to
make more plain what some one supposed to be the reference of these words to
the future inheritance of the saints. They, however, rather disturb than
help the writer’s thought. He is speaking of a present and not of a future
possession. ‘Ye have,’ and not ‘ye shall have,’ a better and an ‘enduring
possession,’ not in heaven, but here and now.
But even if these words be expelled from the text as disturbing the writer’s
thought, there still remains a variation in the reading of some importance.
It is a very slight difference of form in the original, but the two meanings
between which we have to choose are these: ‘Knowing that ye have yourselves
as a better and an enduring possession’; or, ‘a better and an enduring
possession for yourselves.’ I am inclined rather to the former of the two,
both from external authority and internal congruity, though the choice
between them is difficult. But, if we accept this as the meaning of these
words, we can gather from them important lessons, of which I ask your
consideration.
I. The true possession.
If we adopt the other reading, and take the words to mean that, in so far as
we are truly resting on Jesus, we have for ourselves an inheritance or
possession better than all external ones, the text will then be pointing to
the old thought that God is the true joy and treasure of a man’s soul. If,
on the other hand, we may venture to adopt the other meaning, there is great
depth and beauty in it, representing, as it does, the Christian as having
himself as a treasure. It may strike one as strange, but a little
consideration will show its truth and perfect harmony with the other
thought, that God is the treasure of every soul which is not poor and in
need of all things. ‘A good man shall be satisfied from himself, says the
Book of Proverbs, and that is no arrogant denial of the need for God, but
completely accords with the devout acknowledgment, ‘All my springs are in
Thee.’ In the very same chapter as our text we read: ‘We are not of them who
draw back unto perdition; but of them that believe to the saving of their
souls,’ which might be more accurately rendered, ‘to the acquisition as
their own of their souls.’ Remember, too, our Lord’s words: ‘In your
patience ye shall acquire possession of your souls.’ If we take these
sayings into account, we need not hesitate to admit that, at all events,
there is a great deal to be said for the somewhat remarkable expression in
the text.
It just comes to this. No man possesses himself until he has given up
himself. We only own ourselves when we have parted with ourselves. Until we
have yielded ourselves in acts of dependent faith and rejoicing love and
docile obedience unto God, we have no real possession of ourselves. He, and
only he, who says, ‘I give myself away to Thee,’ gets himself back again
sanctified, gladdened, ennobled, and on the way to be perfected by his
surrender and God’s reception.
We own ourselves only on condition of being Christian men. For, under all
other circumstances and forms of life, the true self is domineered over and
brought into slavery and dragged away from its proper bearings by storms and
swarms of lusts and passions and inclinations and ambitions and senses. A
man’s flesh is his master, or his pride is his master, or some fraction of
his nature is his master, and he himself is an oppressed slave, tyrannised
over by rebellious powers. The only way to get the mastery of yourselves, to
be able to keep a tight hand upon all inferior parts of your nature, and to
have that self-command and self-possession without which there is nothing
noble in life, is to go to God and say, ‘Oh, Lord! I cannot rule this
anarchic being of mine. Do Thou take it into Thine hands. Here are the
reins: do with me what Thou wilt.’ Then you will be your own masters, not
till then. Then you will own yourselves; till then, the devil and the world
and the flesh, and the pomps and prides and passions and lusts and
lazinesses that are in your nature will own you. But if we have exercised
the faith which casts itself wholly upon God, we therein and thereby win God
and our own selves also, and that is one of the meanings of ‘saving our own
souls.’
Or, to put it in another light, the only things worth calling treasures and
possessions are true thoughts that we have learned from God; pure affections
that go out to Him; yearning desires after Him, which, in their very
yearning, bear the prophecy, and are to a large extent the foretaste, of
their own fruition.
These are the things that make a man’s treasure. The inner life of
obedience, of love, of trust, the conscience cleansed, the will made plastic
and docile, the heart filled with all pure and heavenward affections,
aspirations that lift us above self and time, and bring us into the sweet
and calm light of the Eternal Love whose name is God — these are the
possessions which are worth possessing. And he, and only he, has such who
has found them in lowly submission of his sinful self to Christ who has died
that our spirits might be cleansed and given back unto us.
Brethren, the realisation of this possession of ourselves depends on our
faith. Stoics and moralists and lofty souled men in all ages have talked
about the true possession of oneself, which comes by self-surrender and
annihilation, but Christian faith realises the dream, and they only find the
reality who pass towards it through the gate of trust in Jesus Christ. Then,
and only then, will the old English poet’s lovely picture be fulfilled, and
the man’s soul
Made free from
slavish bands, Of hope to rise, or fear to fall;
Lord of himself, though not of lands; And having nothing, yet hath all.’
II. Note, again, how here we hear
asserted the superiority of this possession.
It is ‘better’ in its essential
quality. That does not need many words. Surely these possessions of heart
and mind and will and desires all brought into fellowship with and filled by
God are things more correspondent with the nature of man and his needs than
any accumulation of outward possessions can ever be. And surely it is a
plain piece of prose, and no exaggerated religious enthusiasm, which says,
‘Whom have I in heaven but Thee, and there is none upon earth that I desire
besides Thee.’ Men call it mysticism. It is the very foundation of all true
religion. The apprehension of union with God is the one thing that will
satisfy the sold; the one thing that we need, width having, we cannot be
wholly desolate, however dark may be our path, nor wholly solitary, however
lonely may be our lot, nor utterly bereaved, however Blessings may be
dragged from our hands; and without which we cannot be at rest, however
compassed with stays and succours and treasures and friends; nor rich,
however we may have Bursting coffers and all things to enjoy.
The possession which we tarry within us is better than any which we can
gather round us. ‘Surely he is disquieted in vain, he heapeth up treasures’—
and the very fact that they need to be ‘heaped,’ and that that is all that
he can do with them, shows the vanity of the disquiet that raked them
together. Not what a man has, but what a man is, is his wealth.
And the better treasure is an enduring possession. That is the second
element of its excellence. These things, the calm joys, the pure delights of
still fellowship with God in heart and mind and will — these things have in
them no seed of decay. These cannot be separated from their possessor by
anything but his own unfaithfulness. There will never come the time when
they shall have to be left behind. Use does not wear these out, but
strengthens and increases them. The things which are destined ‘to perish
with the using’ belong to an inferior category. All the best things are
intended and destined to increase with the using, and this treasure, the
more it is expended the fuller is the coffer, and the more we exercise the
love, the communion, the obedience which make our true riches, the more do
the riches increase. And then, when all other things drop from their
nerveless hands; and ‘His glory’ — whose glory was in outward things —‘shall
not descend after him,’ we shall carry these treasures with us wherever we
go, and find that they were the pledge of immortality.
III. My text, lastly, suggests to us the quiet superiority to earthly
loss and change which the possession of this treasure involves.
The writer is speaking to Christian men who have endured a great fight of
afflictions, and he says of them, ‘Ye took joyfully the spoiling of your
goods, because you knew that you had this Better and enduring substance.’
Joyfully! When you strike away the false props the strength of the real ones
becomes more conspicuous. And many and many a time we may experience, unless
we waste our discipline and our sorrows, that the surest way to become
richer towards God is to lose the earthly stays and supports. But whether
that be so or no, he who sits in the centre, and has the light round him,
need not mind much what storms are raging without, and he whose inexpugnable
fortress is within the depths of God may smile at all the hubbub and
confusion down in the valley. If we possess this true treasure which lies at
our doors, and may be had for the taking, we shall be like men in some
strong fortress, with firm walls, abundant provisions, and a well in the
courtyard, and we can laugh at besiegers ‘His abiding place shall be the
munitions of rooks; his bread shall be given him and his water shall be made
sure.’ We may be quiet and lofty, infinitely above the fear of chance and
change, if we keep the firm hold which we may keep of the enduring riches
which God brings with Him into our souls.
Some of you may be in circumstances which make such thoughts as these
specially applicable, either because dark days may be threatening, or
because the sunshine of prosperity may be dazzling some eyes and making them
lose sight of their true wealth. To the one class the thought of my text is
gathered up in the warning, ‘Charge them that they trust not in the
uncertainty of riches, but in the living God.’ And, to the other class, the
text should quicken and consolidate the resolve, ‘What time I am afraid I
will trust in Thee. Thou art the strength of my heart, and mine inheritance
for ever.’
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Hebrews 11:6 Seeking God
‘He is a rewarder of them that
diligently seek Him.’ — Hebrews 11:6
THE writer has been pointing to the
patriarch Enoch as the second of these examples of the power of faith in the
Old Covenant; and it occurs to him that there is nothing said in Genesis
about Enoch’s faith, so he set about showing that he must have had faith,
because he ‘walked with God,’ and pleased Him, and no man could thus walk
with God, and please Him, unless he had come to Him, and no man could come
to a God in whom he did not believe, and whom he did not believe to be
waiting to help and bless him, when he did come. So the facts of Enoch’s
life show that there must have been in him an underlying faith. That is all
that I need to say about the context of the words before us. I am not going
to speak of the writer’s argument, but only of this one aspect of the divine
character which is brought out here. ‘He is a rewarder of them that
diligently seek Him.’
I. Now a word about the seeking.
Seek?’ Do we need to seek? Not in the way in which people go in quest of a
thing that they have lost and do not know where to find. We do not need to
search; we do not need to seek.
The beginning of all our seeking is that God has sought us in Jesus Christ,
and so we have done for ever with: ‘Oh! that I knew where I might find Him.’
We have done for ever with ‘feeling after Him, if haply we might find Him.’
That is all past. We have to seek, but let us never forget that we must have
been found of Him, before we seek Him. That is to say, He must have revealed
Himself to us in the fulness and reality and solid certainty of His
existence and character, before there can be kindled in any heart or mind
the desire to possess Him. He must have flashed His light upon the eye
before the eye beholds; and He must have stimulated the desire by the
revelation of Himself which comes before all desires, ere any of us will
stir ourselves up to lay hold upon God. Ours, then, is not to be a doubtful
search, hut a certain seeking, that goes straight to the place whore it
knows that its treasure is, just as a migratory bird will set out from the
foggy and ice-bound shores of the north, and go straight through the mists
and the night, over continents and oceans, to a place where it never was
before, but to which it is led — God only knows how — by some deep instinct,
too deep to be an error, and too persistent not to find its resting-place.
That is how we are to seek. We are to seek as the flower turns its opening
petals to the sunshine, making no mistake as to the quarter of the heaven in
which the radiance is lodged. We have to seek, as the rootlet goes straight
to the river, knowing where the water is, from which life and sap will come.
Thus we have to seek where and what we know. Our quest is no doubtful and
miserable hunting about for a possible good, but an earnest desire for a
certain and a solid blessing. That is the seeking.
Let us put it into two or three plain words. The prime requisite of the
Christian’s seeking after God is as the writer here says, faith, I need not
dwell upon that. ‘Must believe that He is’ — yes; of course. We do not seek
after negations or hypotheses; we seek after a living Being. ‘And that He is
the Rewarder of them that diligently seek Him’ — yes; if we were not cure
that we should find what we wanted, we should never go to look for it. But,
beyond all that, let me put three things as included in, and necessary to,
the Christian seeking — desire, effort, prayer. We seek what we desire. But
too many of us do not wish God, and would not know what to do with Him if we
had Him, and would be very much embarrassed if it were possible for the full
blessings which come along with Him, to be entrusted to our slack hands and
unloving .hearts. Brethren, we call ourselves Christians; let us be honest
with ourselves, and rigid in the investigation of the thoughts of our own
hearts. Is there a wish for God there? Is there an aching void in His
absence, or do we shovel cartloads of earthly rubbish into our hearts, and
thus dull desires that can be satisfied only with Him? These are not
questions to which any one has a right to expect an answer from another;
they are not questions that any Christian man can safely shirk answering to
himself and to God. The measure of our seeking is actually settled by the
measure of our desire.
Then effort, of course, follows desire as surely as the shadow comes after
the substance, because the only purpose of our desires, in the constitution
of our nature, is to supply the driving power for effort. They are the steam
in the boiler intended to whirl round the wheels. And so for a man to desire
a thing that he can do nothing whatever to bring about, is misery and folly.
But for a man to desire, and not to. work towards fulfilling his desire, is
greater misery and greater stupidity. One cannot believe in the genuineness
of those devout aspirations that one hears in people’s prayers, who get up
and wipe the dust off their knees, and go out into the world, and do nothing
to bring about the fulfilment of their prayers. There is a great deal of
that sort of desire amongst professing Christians in all churches,
conventional utterances which are backed up and verified by no corresponding
conduct. If we are seeking after God, we shall not let all the seeking
effervesce in pious aspirations; it will get consolidated into corresponding
action, and operate to keep thought and love directed towards Him, even
amidst the trivialities, and legitimate duties, and great things of life.
There will be effort to bring Him into connection with all our work; effort
to keep by Him as we go about our daily tasks, if we are truly seeking after
God.
And then, desire and effort being pre-supposed, there will come honest
prayers, genuine prayers. ‘Seek ye the Lord while He may be found,’ says the
prophet, and immediately goes on to exhort us to ‘call upon Him while He is
near,’ as one and the chief way of seeking Him. He is always near, closer to
us than friends and lovers, closer to us than our eyes and hands, near in
His Son and the Spirit, near to hear and to bless, near and desiring to be
nearer, yea to be blended with our being and to dwell in us and we in Him.
We have not only to desire His gift, and to work towards it, but to ask for
it. Then, if we exercise these three activities of desire, effort, petition,
we may truly say: ‘When Thou saidst, "Seek ye My face," my heart said unto
Thee, "Thy face, Lord! will I seek,"’ and may go on, as the psalmist did, to
offer the consequent prayer: ‘Hide not Thy face from me,’ in full assurance
that He is found by every seeking soul So much for the seeking.
II. Now a word about the diligence in seeking.
The writer uses a very strong expression, one word in the original, which is
here adequately rendered, ‘them that diligently seek Him.’ Half-hearted
seeking finds nothing. You sometimes say to your children, when you have set
them to look for anything, and they come back and say they have not been
able to find it, ‘You do not know how to seek.’ And that is true about a
great many of us. Half and half desire, so that one eye is turned on earth,
and the other lifted up now and then to heaven, does not bring us much. It
will bring a little, but not the fulness of blessing which follows on whole-
hearted, continuous, persevering seeking. If you hold a cup below a tap, in
an unsteady hand, sometimes it is under the whole rush of the water, and
sometimes is on one side, and it will be a long time before you get it
filled. There will be much of the water spilled. God pours Himself upon us,
and we hold our vessels with unsteady hands, and twitch them away sometimes,
and the bright blessing falls on the ground and cannot be gathered up, and
our cup is empty, and our lips parched. Interrupted seeking will find
little; perfunctory seeking will find less. Conventional religion brings
very little blessing, very little consciousness of the presence of God; and
that is why so many who call themselves Christians, and are so, in a measure
and in a sense, know so little of the joy of being found of God. They have
sought but not sought diligently.
Now let us take the rebuke to ourselves, if we need it, and we all need it
more or less. It is a very threadbare piece of Christian counsel, to be
earnest in our seeking after God, but it is none the less needed because it
is threadbare, and it would not be threadbare if it had not been so much
needed. ‘They that search diligently’ — which is the real meaning of the
words in the Book of Proverbs rendered, ‘they that seek Me early’ —‘shall
find Me.’
III. So this brings me to the last thing here, the Rewarder and the
reward.
‘He is the rewarder of them that diligently seek Him.’ The best reward of
seeking is to find the thing that you are looking for. So the best reward
that God, the Rewarder, gives is when He gives Himself. There are a great
many other good things that come to the diligently seeking Christian soul,
but the best thing is that God draws near. Enoch sought God, came to God,
and so he walked with God. The reward of his coming was continuous, calm
communion, which gave him a companion in solitude, and one to walk at his
side all through the darkness and the roughnesses, as well as the joys and
the smoothnesses, of daily life.
Ah, brethren! there is no reward comparable to the felt presence in our own
quiet hearts of the God who has found us, and whom we have found. And if we
have that, then He becomes, here and now, the reward of the diligent search,
and the reward of it to, day carries in itself the assurance of the perfect
reward of the coming time. ‘He walked with God, and... God took him.’ That
will be true of all of us. There is only one seeking in life that is sure to
result in the finding of what we seek. All other search — the quest after
the chief good — if it runs in any other direction, is resultless and
barren. But there is one course, and one only, in which the result is solid
and certain. ‘I have never said to any of the seed of Jacob, seek ye My face
in vain.’ If we seek He will be found of us, and so be our Rewarder and our
reward.
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Hebrews 11:7 - Noah's Faith and Ours
‘By faith Noah, being warned of God
of things not seen as yet. moved with fear, In. patrol an ark to the saving
of his house.’ — Hebrews 11:7
THE creed of these Old Testament
saints was a very short one, and very different from ours. Their faith was
the very same. It is the great object of the writer of this Epistle, in this
magnificent catalogue of the heroes of the faith, the muster roll of God’s
great army, to establish the principle that from the Beginning there has
only been one kind of religion, only one way to God and that, however
rudimentary and brief the articles of belief in those early days, the
faculty by which these far-away believers lay hold on them, and its
practical issues, were identical in them and in us, And that is a principle
well worth getting into our minds, that the scope of the creed has nothing
to do with the essence of the faith.
So we may look at this instance and discern in it. beneath all superficial
differences, the underlying identities, and take this dim, half-intelligible
figure of Noah, as he stands almost on the horizon of history, as being an
example for us, in very vivid fashion, of the true object of faith, its
operation in a two-fold fashion, and its vindication.
I. Look first at Noah’s faith in
regard to its object.
If we think of the incident brought
before us in these words, we shall see how the confidence with which Noah
laid hold of a dim future, about which he knew nothing, except Because God
had spoken to him, was, at bottom, identical with that great attitude of the
soul which we call faith, as it is exercised towards Jesus Christ.
No doubt in this Epistle to the Hebrews, the aspect of faith by which it
lays hold of the future and the unseen, is the one on which the writer’s
mind is mainly fixed. But notice, that whilst the near object, so to speak,
to which Noah stretched out his hands, and of which he laid hold, was that
coming catastrophe, with its certainties of destruction and of deliverance;
there was only one reason why he knew anything about that, and there was
only one reason why he knew or believed anything about it, and that was
because he believed Him who had told him. So, at bottom, God who had
revealed the unseen future to him was the object of his faith. He trusted
the Person, therefore he believed in that Person’s word, and therefore he
had the assured realisation of things not seen as yet; and the future, so
dim and uncertain to unaided eyes, became to him as certain as the past, and
expectation as reliable as memory. His faith grasped the invisible things to
come, only because it grasped the Invisible Person, who was, is, and is to
come, and who lifted for him the curtain and showed him the things that
should be. So is it with our faith; whether it lays hold upon a past
sacrifice on Calvary, or upon a present Christ dwelling in our hearts, or
whether it becomes telescopic, and stretches forward into the future, and
brings the distant near, all its various aspects are but aspects of one
thing, and that is personal trust in the personal Christ who speaks to us.
What he says is a matter of secondary importance in this respect. The
contents of God’s revelation vary; the act by which man accepts them is
always the same.
So the great question for us all is — do we trust God? Do we believe Him,
and therefore accept His words, not only with the assent of the
understanding, which of all idle things is the idlest, but do-we believe
Him, revealing, commanding, promising, threatening, with the trust and
affiance of our whole hearts? Then, and then only, can we look with quiet
certainty into the dim future, which else is all full of rolling clouds,
that sometimes shape themselves to our imaginations into the likeness of
stable things, but alas! change and melt while we gaze. Only then can we
front the solemn future, and say: ‘I do not expect only, I know what is
there.’ My brother, if our faith is worth calling faith at all, it rests so
absolutely and confidingly upon God, that His bare word becomes to us the
infallible source of certitude with regard to all the shifting hours of
time, and to the steadfast day of an eternity, whose change is blessed
growth to an un-reached and undeclining noon.
And what was the future that loomed before this man? The coming of a
destruction as certain as God, and the coming of a deliverance as complete
as His love could make it. Never mind although Noah’s outlook related but to
a temporary catastrophe, and ours has reference to an eternal condition of
things. That is a difference of no real moment. We have what Noah had, a
definite, divine utterance, as the source of all our knowledge of what is
coming. Both are alike in having two sides, one dark and menacing with a
certain destruction, the other radiant and lustrous with as certain a
deliverance. And now the question for each of us is, do I so believe God
that that future is to me what it was to this man — far more real than these
fleeing illusions that lie nearer me?
When Noah walked the earth and saw his contemporaries busy with buying and
selling, planting and building, marrying and giving in marriage, how
fantastic and unreal their work must have seemed to him, when behind them he
saw blazing a vision, which he alone of all that multitude believed.
Do not let us fancy that we have faith
if these near trifles are to us the great realities, and the distance is
dim, and unsubstantial, and doubtful, hidden in mist and forgotten. The
years that stretched between the divine utterance and its fulfilment were to
this man as nothing, and for him the unseen was the reality, and the seen
was the shadowy and phantasmal. And that is what faith worth calling the
name will always do for men. Ask yourselves the question if your dim
apprehension of that future, in either of its aspects, is anything so vivid
as the certitude which blazed ever before the eye of this man. One of our
old English writers says, ‘If the felicities of another world were as
closely apprehended as the joys of this, it were martyrdom to live.’ That
may be an exaggeration, but surely, surely there is something wrong in men
who call themselves believers in God and His word, to whom the things seen
and temporal are all or nearly all important, and the trifles an inch from
their eyes are big enough to shut out heaven and all its stars. II. Still
further, notice Noah’s faith in its practical effects.
If faith has any reality in us at all, it works. If it has no effect it has
no existence. The writer points out two operations of this confidence in God
which, through belief in His word, leads to a realisation of a remote and
unseen future. The effects are two-fold; First on Noah’s disposition, faith
produced appropriate emotion, excited by the belief in the coming deluge; he
was ‘moved with fear.’ Then, secondly, through emotion, faith influenced
conduct — he ‘prepared an ark.’ This is the order in which faith ever works.
If real and strong, it will first affect emotion. By ‘fear’ here we are not
merely to understand, though possibly it is not to be excluded, a dread of
personal consequences, but much rather the sweet and lofty emotion which is
described in another part of this same book by the same word: ‘Let us serve
Him with reverence and with godly fear.’ It is the fear of pious regard, of
religious awe, of reverence which has love blended inseparably with it, and
is not merely a tremulous apprehension of some mischief coming to me. Noah
had no need for that serf-regarding ‘fear,’ inasmuch as one half of his
knowledge of the future was the knowledge of his own absolute safety. But
reverence, the dread of going against his Father’s will, lowly submission,
and all analogous and kindred sentiments, are expressed by the word.
Such holy and blessed emotion, which has no torment, is the sure result of
real faith. Unless a man’s faith is warm enough to melt his heart, it is
worth very little. A faith unaccompanied by emotion is, I was going to say
worse, at any rate it is quite as bad, as a faith which is all wasted in
emotion. It is not a good thing when all the steam roars out through an
escape pipe; it is perhaps a worse thing when there is no steam in the
boiler to escape. It is easy for people that have not any religion to scoff
at what they suppose to be the fanatical excess of emotion which some forms
of religious belief develop, I, for my part, would rather have the extremest
emotion than a dead cold orthodoxy, that believes everything and feels
nothing. There is some hope in the one; the other is only fit to be buried.
Do not be afraid of feeling which is the child of faith. Be very much more
afraid of a religion that leaves your heart beating just exactly at the same
rate that it did before you took the truth into it. I am very, very sure
that there is no road, between a man’s faith and his practice, except
through his heart, and that, as the Apostle has it in a somewhat different
form of speech, meaning, however, the same thing that I am now insisting
upon, ‘faith worketh by love.’ Love is the path through which creed travels
outward to conduct.
So we come to the second and more remote effect of faith. Emotion will lead
to action. ‘Moved with fear he prepared an ark.’ If emotion be the child of
faith, conduct is the child of emotion. Noah’s faith, then, led him to a
line of action that separated him from the men around him; and it led him to
a protracted labour in preparation for a remote end, for the coming of which
he had no guarantee except what he believed to be God’s word. Commentators
calculate that there were a hundred and twenty years between the time of the
divine command and the Flood. Think of how this man, for all that long
while, set himself to his task, and how many clever speeches would be made,
proving that he was a fool, and how many witty gibes would come showering
around his head like hail. But he kept steadily on, on a line of conduct
which made him singular, and which had regard only to that result a hundred
and twenty years off.
Now, is that what you and I are doing? Does our faith so shape our lives
that whatever we are about, there is still regard to that far-off future? If
you meet a man in the street, hurrying somewhere to welcome a friend
expected to arrive from a far-off land, and you detain him in conversation,
as you speak he is impatient, keeps looking over your shoulder down the road
to see if there is any sign of his coming. That is how we should be acting
here — doing our work and sticking to our tasks, but ever letting
expectation and desire carry us onwards to that great future, which has
already set out from the throne in Eternity, and is speeding towards us even
now. Let that future, dear brethren, stand so clear before each of us, that
it shall shape our whole work in the present. We shall mould all our lives
with reference to it, if we are wise. For what we make our present, that
will our future be. The smaller ends for which men live, and the nearer
futures which they struggle towards, lose no jot of their worth by being
regarded as but means to that far greater end. Rather, time is only redeemed
from triviality, when it is seen to be the preparation for eternity, and
earth is never so fair and good as when we discern and use it as the
vestibule of heaven Never mind being singular. He is the wise man whose
vision reaches as far as his existence, and whose earthly life has for the
end of its effort, to please Christ and be found in Him.
III. And so, lastly, let me point
to Noah’s faith, in regard to its vindication.
‘He condemned the world.’ ‘The world’ thought him wasting life foolishly. No
doubt there were plenty of witty and wise things said about him.
‘Prudent, far-sighted, practical men’
would say, ‘How fanatical! What a misuse of energies and opportunities’; and
so forth. And then, one morning, the rain began, and continued, and for
forty days it did not stop, and they began to think that perhaps, after all,
there was some method in his madness. Noah got into his ark, and still it
rained, and I wonder what the wits and’ practical men,’ that had treated the
whole thing as moonshine and folly, thought about it all then, with the
water up to their knees. How their gibes and jests would die in their
throats when it reached their lips! And so, my dear friends, the faith of
the poor, ignorant old woman that up in her garret lives to serve Jesus
Christ, and to win an eternal crown, will get its vindication some day, and
it will be found out then which was the
‘practical’ man and the wise man, and
all the witty speeches and smart sayings will seem very foolish, even to
their authors, when the light of that future shines on them. And the old
word will come true once more, that the man who lives for the present, and
for anything bounded by Time, will have to ‘leave it in the midst of his
days,’ and ‘at his latter end shall be a fool,’ whilst the ‘foolish’ man who
lived for the future, when the future has come to the present, and the
present has dwindled away into the past, and sunk beneath the horizon, shall
be proved to be wise, and shall shine as the brightness of the firmament,
and as the stars for ever and ever.
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Hebrews 11:9, 10 The City and the Tent
‘Dwelling in tabernacles.., for he
looked for a city.’ — Hebrews 11:9, 10
THE purpose of the great muster-roll
of the ancient heroes of Judaism in this chapter is mainly to establish the
fact that there has never been but one way to God. However diverse the
degrees of knowledge and the externals, the essence of religion has always
been the same. So the writer of this Epistle, to the great astonishment, no
doubt, of some of the Hebrews to whom it was addressed, puts out his hand,
and claims, as Christians before Christ, all the worthies of whom they were
nationally so proud. He is speaking here about the three patriarchs. Whether
he conceives them to have all lived on the earth at one time or no, does not
trouble us at all ‘By faith,’ says he, ‘Abraham sojourned in the land of
promise as in a strange country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and
Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise,’ because, ‘he looked for the
city which hath the foundations, whom builder’ — or rather Architect — ‘and
maker’ — or rather Builder — ‘is God.’
Now, of course, the writer gives a considerable extension of the meaning to
the word ‘faith’; and in his use one aspect of it is prominent, though by no
means exclusively so — viz., the aspect which looks to the unseen and the
future, rather than that which grasps the personal Christ. But this is no
essential difference from the ordinary New Testament usage; it is only a
variation in point of view, and in the prominence given to an element always
present in faith. What he says here, then, is substantially this — that in
these patriarched lives we get a picturesque embodiment of the essential
substance of all true Christian living, and that mainly in regard of two
points, the great object which should fill mind and heart, and the
consequent detachment from transitory things which should be cultivated.
‘He looked for a city,’ and so he was
contented to dwell in a movable tent. That is an emblem containing the
essence of what our lives ought to be, if we are truly to be Christian. Let
us, then, deal with these two inseparable and indispensable characteristics
of the life of faith.
I. Faith will behold the Unseen City, and the vision will steadfastly
fill mind and heart.
As I have remarked, the conception of faith presented in the Epistle is
slightly different from that found in other parts of the New Testament. It
is but slightly different, for, whether we say that the object of our faith
is the Christ, ‘Whom having not seen we love; in whom, though now we see Him
not, yet believing we rejoice,’ or whether we say that it is the whole realm
and order of things beyond the grave and above the skies where He is and
which He has made our native land, makes in reality very little difference.
We come at last to the thought of personal reliance on Him by whose word and
by whose resurrection and ascension only we apprehend, and by whose grace
and power and love only we shall ever possess that unseen futurity. So we
may fairly say that whilst, no doubt, it is true that the living Christ
Himself — and no heaven apart from Him, nor any future apart from Him, nor
any thing of His, apart from Him, though it be a cross, but the living
Christ Himself is the true object of faith, yet that conception of its
object includes the view of the Epistle to the Hebrews, and the ‘city which
has the foundations,’ should, because it is all clustered round Him who is
its King, Be the object that fills our minds and hearts.
I am not going to discuss the details of what this writer supposes to have
been the animating principle and aim of that ancient patriarch’s life. It
matters nothing at all for the power of his example whether we suppose that
Abraham looked forward to the realisation of this unseen ideal city in this
life or no, for the effect of it upon him would be exactly the same
whichever of the two alternatives may have been the case. It matters nothing
as to whether Abraham believed in the realisation in that land over which he
wandered, of the perfect order of things, or whether he had caught some
glimpse, which is very unlikely, of it as reserved for a future beyond the
grave. In either case, he lived for and by an unseen and future condition of
things. It is beautiful to notice how the writer here, in his picturesque
and simple words, puts many blessed ideas as to that future. We may,
perhaps, make these a little more clear, but I am afraid we shall make them
much more weak, by taking them out of the metaphorical form.
‘The City’ — then there is only one. ‘The City’ — then the object of our
hope, ought to be, and is, if we understand it aright, a perfect society, in
which the ‘sojourners and pilgrims,’ like the patriarch, and his little band
of children and attendants, who wandered lonely up and down the world, will
all be gathered together at last; and, instead of the solitude of the march,
and the undefended weakness of the frail encampment, there will be the
conjoined gladness and security of an innumerable multitude. ‘The City’ is
the perfection of society, and all of us who live in the world, alone after
all communion, and separated from each other by the awful mystery of
personal being, and by many another film beside, may hope to understand, as
we never shall do here, what the meaning of the little word ‘together’ is
when we get there. ‘He looked for the city.’
‘The city which hath the foundations’ — then the object of faith is a stable
thing, which knows no fluctuations, feels no changes, fears no assault, can
never be subjected to violence, nor ever crumple into dust. ‘The city which’
hath the foundations’ — here and now we have to build, if we build at all,
more or less like the foolish man in the Master’s parable, upon sand. It is
the condition of our earthly life. We have to accept, and to make the best
of it. But, oh! those who have learned most the agony of change and the
misery of uncertainty are those who have been best disciplined to grasp at
and lay up in their hearts the large consolation and encouragement hived in
that designation, ‘the city which hath the foundations.’
The city, ‘whose Architect’ — for the word rendered ‘Builder’ should be so
translated — ‘is God.’ It is the accomplishment of His plan, which, in
modern language, is called the realisation of His ideal. I like the old-
fashioned Biblical language better — ‘the city whose Architect is God.’ He
planned, and, of course, there follows upon that ‘whose Maker or actual
Builder is’ — the same as the Planner. Architects put their drawings into
the hands of rude workmen, and no completed work of man’s hands corresponds
to the fair vision that dawned on its designer when it took definite shape
in His mind.
That is another of the laws of our earthly life which we have to make the
best of — that we design grand buildings when we begin, and, when we have
finished our lives, and look back upon what we have built, it is a mean and
incomplete structure at the best. But God’s working drawings get built; His
plans are all wrought out in an adequate material; and everything that was
in the divine mind once exists in outward fact in that perfect future.
So, inasmuch as the city is a state of perfect society, of stability, is
planned by God, and brought about by Him at last, it is to be possessed by
us on condition of fellowship with Him. Does it not seem to you to be
infinitely unimportant whether this old patriarch thought that what he was
looking for was to be builded upon the hills and plains of Canaan or not?
That he had the vision is the thing. Where it was to be accomplished was of
small moment. We do not know where the vision is to be accomplished any more
than Abraham did. We do not know whether here, on this old earth, renovated
by some cosmic change, or whether in some region in space, though beyond the
stars, perfected spirits shall dwell, and it does not matter. That we should
have the vision is the main thing. The where, the when, the how of its
fulfilment are of no manner of practical importance, and people who busy
themselves about such questions, and think that therefore they are
cultivating the spirit that my text suggests, make a woful mistake.
But let me press on you, dear brethren, this one simple thought, that the
average type of Christian life and experience to-day is wofully lacking in
that clear vision of the future. Partly it comes, I suppose, from certain
peculiarities in the trend of thought and way of looking at things that are
fashionable in this generation. We hear so much about Christianity as a
social system, and about what it is going to do in this world, which perhaps
it was necessary should be stated very emphatically, in order to
counterpoise the too great silence upon such subjects in past times, that
preaching about the future life strikes a hearer as unfamiliar, and probably
some Of my audience have been feeling as if I were carrying them into misty
regions far away from, and little related to, the realities of life. But,
dear brethren, from my heart I believe that one very operative cause of the
undeniable feebleness of Christian life, which is so largely manifested
round us — and it is for each of us to say whether we participate in it — is
due to this, that, somehow or other, there has come in the mind of great
masses of Christian people a fading away of that blessed vision of the city,
for which we ought to live. You scarcely hear sermons nowadays about the
blessedness of a future life. What you hear about it is, how well for this
life it is to be a Christian man.
No doubt godliness ‘hath promise of
the life that now is,’ and that side of the gospel cannot be too
emphatically set forth. But it may be disproportionately presented, as I
venture to think that, on the whole, it is being presented now. Therefore
there is the more need for consciously endeavouring to cultivate the habit
of looking beyond the mists Of the present to the gleaming battlements and
spires of the city. Let us polish the glasses of our telescopes, and use
them not only for distances on earth’s low levels, but to bring the stars
nearer. So shall we realise more of the present good and power of faith,
when it is allowed its widest and noblest range.
II. Faith consequently leads to
willing detachment from the present order of offerings.
‘He dwelt in tabernacles,’ that is, he lived a nomad life in his tents. He
and his son and grandson — three generations of long livers — proved the
depth, solidity, and practical power of their faith in the promise of the
city by the remarkable persistence of their refusal to be absorbed in the
settled population of the land. Recent discoveries have shown us, and
discoveries still to be made, I have no doubt, will show still more, what a
highly organised and developed civilisation prevailed in Canaan when these
wanderers from the East came into it, with their black camels’-hair tents.
They were almost as much out of place, and as noticeably unique, by such a
life in Canaan then, as gypsies are in England, and the reason why they
would not go into Hebron, or any other of the populous cities which were
closely studded in the land, was that ‘they looked for the City.’ It was
better for them to dwell in tents than in houses.
The clear vision of that great future impresses on us the transiency of the
present. We shall know that what we live in is but as a tent that is soon to
be struck, even while some of our fellow-lodgers may fancy it to be a house
that will last for ever.
The illusion of the permanence of this fleeting show creeps over us all, in
spite of our better knowledge, and has to be fought against. The world,
though it seems to be at rest, is going faster than any of the objects in it
which are known to be in motion. We are deceived by the universality of the
movement of which all things partake, and to us it seems rest. If there
comes friction, and now and then a collision, we find out how fast we are
going. And then there come misery, and melancholy, and lamentations about
the brevity of life, and the awfulness of change, and all these other
commonplaces that are the stock-in-trade of poetasters, but which cut with
such surprise and agony into our own hearts when we experience them. But,
brethren, to be convinced of the transiency of life, by reason of the
clearness of the vision of the permanence of the heavens, is blessedness and
not misery, and is the only way by which a man can bear to say to himself,
‘My days are as a hand-breadth,’ and not fling down his tools and fall into
sadness, from feeling that life is as futile as frail. To recognise that
nothing continues in one stay, and to see nothing else that is permanent, is
the greatest misery that is laid upon man But to feel, ‘Thou art from
everlasting to everlasting, and Thy kingdom endureth through all generations
and I belong to it,’ makes us regard with equanimity, and sometimes with
solemn satisfaction, the passing away of all the transient,‘that the things
which cannot be shaken may remain.’ ‘He looked for a city’; so, ‘he dwelt in
tents.’
There is another side to that thought. The clear vision of that permanent
future will detach us from the perishable present.
Now many difficult questions arise as to how far Christians should hold
aloof from the order of things in which they dwell: and to a very large
extent the application of the principle in detail must be left to each man
for himself, in the presence of God. But this I am quite sure of, that in
this generation the average Christian has a great deal more need to be
warned against too great intermingling with than against too great
separation from the present world. Abraham sets us an example beautifully
comprehensive. He held cordial relations with the people amongst whom he
dwelt. He was honoured by them as a prince; he was recognised by them as a
servant of God. They knew his bravery. He did not scruple to draw the sword,
and to fight in defence, not only of his kinsmen but of his heathen
neighbours in Sodom. And yet nothing would induce him to come down from his
tent, beneath the terebinth tree of Mamre, in the-uplands. Everybody knew
that his name was Abraham the Hebrew — the man from the other side. He
carried out that name in his life.
Now, I am not going to lay down hard and fast rules — conventional
regulations are the ruin of principles. But let us ask ourselves, ‘Would
anybody call me "the man from the other side," the man who belongs to
another set of things altogether than this?’ We have to work in the world;
to trade in the world; to try to influence the world; to draw many of our
enjoyments from it, in common with those who have no other enjoyments than
those drawn from it. Of course, there is a great tract of ground common to
the men of faith and the men of sense, and I am not urging false aloofness
from any occupation, interest, duty, or enjoyment. But what I say is that,
if we have the vision of the city clear before us, there will be no need to
tell us not to make our home in Hebron or in Sodom.
Lot went down there when he had his choice — and he got what he wanted,
pasturage for his cattle. But he also got what he did not want, destruction,
and he lost what he did not care to keep, his share in the city. Abraham
stayed on the heights, and up there he kept God, and a good conscience.
Probably he did not make so much money as Lot did. Very likely Lot’s flocks
and herds were larger than his uncle’s. But the one man from his height,
through the clear air, could see far away the sparkling of the turrets of
the city; and the other, down in the hot, steaming plains of Sodom, could
see nothing but Sodom and the mountains behind it, Better to live on the
heights with Abraham and God than down below with Lot, and wealth, and
subterranean brimstone, and naphtha fires ready to burst forth. ‘He looked
for the city,’ ‘he dwelt in tents.’
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Hebrews 11:13 The Attachments and Detachments of
Faith
‘These all died in faith, not
having received the promises, but having seem them and greeted them from
afar, and having confessed that they were strangers end pilgrims on the
earth.’ — Hebrews 11:13 (R.V.)
THE great roll-call of heroes of faith
in this grand chapter goes upon the supposition that the living spirit of
religion was the same in Old and in New Testament times. In both it was
faith which knit men to God. It has often been alleged that that great word
faith has a different signification in this Epistle from that which it has
in the other New Testament writings. The allegation is largely true; in so
far as the things Believed are concerned they are extremely different; but
it is not true in so far as the person trusted, or in so far as the act of
trusting are concerned. These are identical. It was no mere temporal and
earthly promise on which the faith of these patriarchs was builded. They
looked indeed for the land, but in looking for the land, they looked ‘for
the city which hath foundations’; and their future hopes had the same dim
haze of ignorance, and the same questions unresolved about perspective and
relative distances which our future hopes have; and their faith, whatever
were its contents, was fundamentally the same out of a soul casting itself
upon God, which is the essence of our faith in the Divine Son in whom God is
made manifest So with surface difference there is a deep-lying absolute
oneness in the faith of the Old Testament and ours, in essential nature, in
the Object which they grasp, and in their practical effects upon life.
Therefore, these words of my text, describing what faith did for the world’s
grey forefathers, have a more immediate bearing upon us than at first sight
may appear, and may suggest for us some thoughts about the proper, practical
issues of Christian faith in our daily lives.
I. I take two or three of the points which come most plainly out from the
words before us, and ask you to notice, in the first place, how faith fills
eye and heart with the future.
You will have observed that I have read my text somewhat differently from
the form which it assumes in our Authorised Version. Observe that the words
‘And were persuaded of them,’ in our Old Version are a gloss, — no part of
the original text. Observe, further, that the adverb ‘afar off’ is intended
to apply to both the clauses: ‘Having seen them,’ and ‘embraced them.’ And
that, consequently, ‘embraced’ must necessarily be an inadequate
representation of the writer’s idea; for you cannot embrace a thing that is
‘afar off’; and to ‘embrace the promises’ was the very thing that these men
did not do. The meaning of the word is here not embraced, but saluted or
greeted; and the figure that lies in it is a very beautiful one. As some
traveller topping the water-shed may see far off the white porch of his
home, and wave a greeting to it, though it be distant, while his heart goes
out over all the intervening, weary leagues; or as some homeward-bound crew
catch, away yonder on the horizon, the tremulous low line that is home, and
welcome it with a shout of joy, though many a billow dash and break between
them and it, these men looked across the weary waste, and saw far away; and
as they saw their hearts went out towards the things that were promised,
because they ‘judged Him faithful that had promised.’ And that is the
attitude and the act which all true faith in God ought to operate in us.
So, then, here are two things to think about for a moment. One, Faith’s
vision; the other, Faith’s greeting.
People say, ‘Seeing is believing.’ I should be disposed to turn the aphorism
right round, and to say, ‘Believing is seeing.’ For there is a clearer
insight, and a more immediate, direct contact with the thing beheld, and a
deeper certitude in the vision of faith than in the poor, purblind sight of
sense, all full of illusions, and which has no real possession in it of the
things which it beholds. The sight that faith gives is solid, substantial,
clear, certain. If I might so say, the true exercise of faith is to
stereoscope the dim ghostlike realities of the future, and to make them
stand out solid in relief there before us. And he who, clasping the hand,
and if I might so say, looking through the eyes, of God, sees the future, in
humble acceptance of His great words of promise, in some measure as God sees
it — has a source of knowledge, clear, immediate, certain, which sense with
its lies and imperfections, is altogether inadequate even to symbolise. The
vision of Faith is far deeper, far more real, far more correspondent to the
realities, and far more satisfying to the eye that gazes, than is any of the
sight of sense. Do not you be deceived or seduced by talk that assumes to be
profound and philosophical, into believing that when you venture your all
upon God’s word, and doing so say, ‘I know, and behold mine inheritance,’
you are saying more than calm reason and common-sense teaches us. We have
the thing, and we see it, if we believe Him that in His word shows it to us,
Well, then, still further, there is suggested that this vision of faith,
with all its blessed clearness and certitude and sufficiency, is not a
direct perception of the things promised, but only a sight of them in the
promise. And does that make it less blessed? Does the astronomer, who sits
in his chamber, and when he would most carefully observe the heavens, looks
downwards on to the mirror of the reflecting telescope that he uses, feel
that he sees the starry lights less clearly and less really than when he
gazes up into the abyss itself and sees them there? Is not the reflection a
better and a more accurate source of knowledge for him than even the direct
observation of the sky would be? And so, if we look down into the promise,
we shall see, gleaming and glittering there, the starry points which are the
true images adapted to our present sense and power of reception of the great
invisible lights above. God be thanked that faith looks to the promises and
not to the realities, else it were no more faith, and would lose some of its
blessedness.
And then, still further, let me remind you that this vision of faith varies
in the measure of our faith. It is not always the same. Refraction brings up
sometimes, above the surface of the sea, a spectral likeness of the opposite
shore, and men stand now and then upon our southern coasts, and for an hour
or two, in some conditions of the atmosphere, they see the low sandhills of
the French or the Belgian coast, as if they were at arm’s length. So faith,
refracting the rays of light that strike from the Throne of God, brings up
the image, and when it is strong the image is clear, and when it flags the
image ‘fades away into the light of common day’; and where there glowed the
fair outlines of the far-off land, there is nothing but a weary wash of
waters and a solitary stretch of sea.
My brother! do you see to it that this vision of faith is cultivated by you.
It is hard to do. The pressure of the present is terribly strong; the chains
of sense that hold us are very adamantine and thick; but still it is
possible for us to cultivate the faculty of beholding, and to train the eye
to look into that telescope that pries into distant worlds, and brings
eternal glories near. No pair of eyes can look the one at a thing near, and
the other at a thing afar off; at least if they do the man squints. And no
soul can look so as to behold the unseen glories if its eye be turned to all
these vanities here. Do- you choose whether you shall, like John Bunyan’s
man with the muckrake, have your eyes fixed upon the straws and filth at
your feet, or whether you will look upwards and see the crown that is
glittering there just above your head, and ready to drop upon it. ‘These all
in faith saw the promises.’
Yes! And when they saw them they greeted them. Their hands and their hearts
went out, and a glad shout came to their lips as they beheld the fair vision
of all the wonder that should be. And so faith has in it, in proportion to
its depth and reality, this going out of the soul towards the things
discerned. They draw us when we see them,
One of our seventeenth-century prose writers says: — ‘Were the happiness of
the next world as closely apprehended as felicities of this, it were a
martyrdom to live.’ It is true. If we see, we cannot choose but love. Our
vision will break into desire, and to behold is to yearn after. Oh,
Christian men and women! do we know anything of that going out of the soul,
in a calm transport of deliberate preference to the things that are unseen
and eternal. It is a sharp test of the reality of our Christian profession;
do not shrink from applying it to yourselves.
II. And now in the next place, we see here how faith produces a sense of
detachment from the present, ‘They confessed that they were strangers and
pilgrims on the earth.’
The writer is, no doubt, referring to
the words of Abraham when he stood up before the Hittites, and asked for a
bit of ground to lay his Sarah in — ‘I am a stranger and a sojourner with
you’; and also to Jacob’s words to Pharaoh, ‘The days of the years of my
pilgrimage are an hundred and thirty years.’ These utterances revealed the
spirit in which they looked upon the settled order in the midst of which
they dwelt, They felt that they were not of it, but belonged to another.
Now there are two different kinds of consciousness that we are strangers and
sojourners here. There is one that merely comes from the consideration of
the natural transiency of all earthly things, and the shortness of human
life. There is another that comes from the consciousness that we belong to
another kingdom and another order. A ‘stranger’ is a man who, in a given
constitution of things, in some country with a settled government, owes
allegiance to another king, and belongs to another polity. A ‘pilgrim’ or a
‘sojourner’ is a man who is only in the place where he now is for a little
while. So the one of the two words expresses the idea of belonging to
another state of things, and the other expresses the idea of transiency in
the present condition.
But the true Christian consciousness of being ‘a stranger and a sojourner’
comes, not from any thought that life is fleeting and ebbing away, but from
the better and more blessed operation of the faith which reveals the things
promised, and knits me so closely to them that I cannot but feel separated
from the things that are round about me. Men who live in mountainous
countries, be-it Switzerland, or the Highlands, or anywhere else, when they
come down into the plains, pine and fade away sometimes, with the intensity
of the ‘Heimweh,’ the homesickness which seizes them. And we, if we are
Christians, and belong to the other order of things, shall feel that this is
not our native soil, nor here the home in which we would dwell Abraham could
not go to live in Sodom, though Lot went; and he and his son and grandson
kept themselves outside of the organisation of the society in the midst of
which they dwelt, because they were so sure that they belonged to another.
Or, as the context puts it, they ‘dwelt in tents because they looked for the
City.’ It is only sad, disheartening, cutting the nerve of much activity,
destroying the intensity of much joy, drawing over life the pall of a deep
sadness for a man to say, ‘Seventy years are a hand- breadth. I am a
stranger and a sojourner.’ But it is an ally of all noble, intense, happy
living that a man should say, ‘My home is with God. I am a stranger and a
sojourner here.’ The one conviction is perfectly consistent with even
desperate absorption in present things. ‘Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow
we die,’ is quite as legitimate a conclusion from the consciousness of human
frailty, as, ‘Let us live for heaven, for to-morrow we die.’ It all depends
upon what is the source and occasion of this consciousness, whether it shall
make us bitter, and shall make us cling to the perishable thing all the more
because it is going so soon, or whether it shall lift us up above all these
transient treasures or sorrows and fill our hearts with the glad conviction,
‘I am a citizen of no mean city, and therefore here I am but a stranger.’
My brother! does your faith lessen the bonds that bind you to earth? Does it
detach you from the things that are seen and temporal, or is your life
ordered upon the same maxims and devoted to the pursuit of the same objects,
and gladdened by the same transitory and partial successes, and embittered
by the same fleeting and light afflictions which rule and sway the lives
that are rooted only in earth as the tempest sways the grass on the
sandhills? If so, what business have we to call ourselves Christians? If so,
how can we say that we live by faith when we are so blind, and so incapable
of seeing afar off, that the smallest trifle beside us blots out from our
vision, as a fourpenny piece held up against your eyeball might do the sun
itself in the heavens there. True faith detaches a man from this present, If
your faith does not do that, look into it and see where the falsity of it
is. III. And, lastly, my text brings out the thought of how this same faith
triumphs in the article of death. ‘These all died in faith.’
That is a very grand thought as applied to those old patriarchs, that just
because all their lives long God had done nothing for them of what He had
promised, therefore they died believing that He was going to do it. All
their disappointments fed their faith. Because the words on which they had
been leaning all their lives had not come to a fulfilment, therefore they
must be true. That is a strange paradox, and yet it is the one which filled
these men’s hearts with peace, and which made the dying Jacob break in upon
his prophetic swan-song, at the close, with the verse which stands in no
relation to what goes before it, or what comes after it. ‘I have waited for
Thy salvation, O Lord.’ ‘These all died in faith’ just because they had not
‘received the promises.’
So, dear brethren, for us the end of life may have a faith nurtured by
disappointments, made more sure of everything because it has nothing;
certain that He calls into existence another world to redress the balance of
the old, because here there has been so much of bitterness and weariness and
woe. And our end like theirs may be an end beatified by a clear vision of
the things that ‘no man hath seen, nor can see’; and into the darkness there
may come for us, as there came of old to another, an open heaven and a beam
of God’s glory smiting us on the face and changing it into the face of an
angel And so there may come for us all in that article and act of death, a
tranquil and cheerful abandonment of the life which has been futile and
frail, except when thought of as the vestibule of heaven. Some men cling to
the vanishing skirts of this earthly life, and say, ‘I will not let thee
go.’ And others are able to say, ‘Lord, I have waited for Thy salvation.’
‘Now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace.’
‘These all died in faith’; and the sorrows and disappointments of the past
made the very background on which the bow of promise spanned the sky,
beneath which they passed into the Promised Land. ‘These all died in faith’;
with a vision gleaming upon the inward sense which made the solitude of
death bliss, and with a calm willingness ‘to depart, and to be with Christ,
which is far better.’
Choose whether you will live by sense and die in sorrow, or whether you will
live by the faith of the Son of God, and die to enter ‘the City which hath
foundations,’ which He has built for them that love Him, and which even now,
‘in seasons of calm weather,’ we can see shining on the hill top far away.
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Hebrews 11:14 Seek The Fatherland
‘They that say such things declare
plainly that they seek a Country. —Hebrews 11:14
WHAT things? Evidently those which the
writer has just been saying that the patriarchs of old ‘said,’ as stated in
the previous words — ‘They confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims
upon earth.’ The writer has in his mind, no doubt, some of the beautiful
incidents of the Book of Genesis; especially, I suppose, that very touching
one where Abraham is standing up by the side of his dead, in the presence of
the sons of Herb, and begs from them for the first time a little piece of
land that he could call his Own. He tells them that he is a stranger and a
sojourner amongst them, and wants ‘the field and the cave that is therein’
in which to bury his dead. Or he may be thinking of the no less touching
incident, when Jacob, in his extreme old age, tells the King of Egypt that
the days of the years of his pilgrimage have been few and evil, not having
attained to the years of his father.
The writer points to these declarations, and reads into them what he was
entitled to read into them, something more than a mere acceptance of the
external facts of the speakers’ condition, as wanderers in the midst of a
civilization to which they did not belong. He sees gleaming through the
primary force of the words the further hope which the patriarchs cherished,
though it was, as it wore, latent in the nearer hope of an earthly
inheritance — viz., that of the city which hath foundations, and the country
which they could call their own.
Although the writer is not adducing those patriarchs as being patterns for
us, but is only establishing his great thesis that they lived by faith in a
future blessing, as we ought to do, still we may take the words of my text,
with a permissible amount of violence, as appropriate to all of us who call
ourselves Christians. ‘They who say such things do hereby declare plainly,’
and by their lives should declare more plainly still, ‘that they are seeking
a country.’
I. Note, then, first of all, the remarkable representation here given of
that future for which Christians look, as being their native land.
The word of our text is very inadequately rendered in our Authorized Version
as merely ‘a country.’ Fully and etymologically rendered, it would be ‘the
fatherland.’ Whether we choose to adopt that somewhat un-English expression
or no, at all events, the idea conveyed is that these men, having come out
from Mesopotamia, and being wanderers, in their goat’s-hair tents, in the
midst of the fenced cities of Canaan, were thereby seeking for a land which
was their native land, their home, the place to which they felt that they
belonged far more truly than to the land from which they came out, or to the
land in which they were for the moment wandering. That is the idea that I
would enforce as needful for all true and noble Christian living, the
recognition that our true home, the country and the order with which we are
connected by all our deepest and most real affinities, the land where, and
where only, we shall feel at rest, and surrounded by familiar things and
loved persons, is that land which lies beyond the flood.
We do not belong, and should feel that we do not belong, to the place and
order where we happen to stand to-day. This present and the order of things
here should be for us either like that Aram Naharaim, ‘the Syria between the
two rivers,’ the dust of which Abraham had shaken from off his feet; or it
should be like that rotten though splendid civilization into the midst of
which He came, and of which He sternly refused to enrol Himself as a
citizen. Our home is where Jesus Christ is, and there is something pro-
roundly wrong in us unless we feel that that, and not this, is our native
soil, and that there, and not here, is the place to which we belong.
Our colonists on the other side of the world, though they have never seen
England, talk about ‘going home.’ And so we, inhabitants of this outlying
colony of the great city, ought to look across the flood, and sometimes
catch a sight of those bright realms beyond, and always feel that they are
really our native land. ‘They that say such things declare plainly’ that
they are not citizens here, but belong yonder.
II. Then, mark again, the other parallel which may be drawn between these
men’s attitude and ours, in that their whole career was a seeking the true
Fatherland.
Again, our translation is inadequate because it does not give the energetic
force of the word that is rendered ‘seek.’ It was not a seeking, on the part
of the patriarchs, in the sense of looking for an unseen thing, or searching
about to find an undiscovered one. That was all done for them by God. They
had not to seek in that unsatisfactory and disturbing sense, but they had to
seek, in the sense of projecting their desires onwards to the blessing that
God held out in His hand for them, and letting their faith grasp the promise
and their thoughts expatiate in the future, which was as sure to them as the
present, because God had made it. The word for seeking in the original is
very emphatic. It implies the going out of longings and yearnings and
thoughts to something which is there, to be grasped and laid hold of. Thank
God we have not to seek our native soil as wanderers who may perchance fail
in our quest, and die at last homeless. It is brought to us, and certified
to us by the divine veracity, sealed to us by the divine faithfulness,
reserved for us by the divine power, made possible for us by the divine
forgiving mercy. But still we have to seek, letting our hearts go out
towards that good land, letting our thoughts play about it and become
familiar with it, letting our desires tend towards it, and ever, in all the
dusty ways of daily life, and amidst all the distractions of monotonous and
recurring duties, keeping our heads above the mist and looking into the
clear blue, where we may see the vision of the certain future.
The management and discipline of our thoughts is included in that seeking,
and I am afraid that that is a part of Christian culture woefully neglected
by the average Christian of this day. If we consider the comparative
magnitude of the future and the present, and the certain issue of the
present in the future, are our thoughts of it such as common-sense would
make them? Is that ‘land that is very far off’ a frequent ordinary subject
of contemplation by us, in the midst of the hurry and bustle of our daffy
life? Or have we let the glasses of the telescope of hope get all dimmed and
dirty; and when we do polish them up, do we use them to look at the stars
with, or at the earth and its beauties? Whither do my anticipations of the
future tend? Is my hope shortsighted or longsighted? Is it only able to see
the things on this side the river, or can it catch any of the glories
beyond? Our fault is not in not living enough in the future, but in the
selection of the future in which we live. ‘We are saved by hope,’ if we
rightly direct the hope. We are ruined by hopes when they are cribbed,
cabined, and confined to this miserable present. Brother! do you seek your
home by the cultivation of the contemplation of it and the desire for it,
and so almost emulate the divine prerogative and call things that are not as
though they were?
Oh! how different our lives would be if we walked in the light of that great
hope, and how different everything here would be if we regarded all here as
auxiliary and subsidiary to that.
Above all, if it were true of us, as it ought to be in accordance with our
profession of being Christians, that we seek a country, should we think
about death as we do? Should we drape it in such ugly forms? Should we
shrink from it as most of us, I fear, do as a dread and an enemy and a
disaster? No doubt there is, and there always will be. a natural shrinking;
but the man who can say that to die is to be with Christ, and who sets that
thought ever before him, will be helped over the dark gulf; and the
shrinking will be turned, if not into desire at least into calm scorn of the
last enemy, the encounter with whom does not diminish his longing to be with
his Lord.
These are heights, of Christian feeling so far above most of us that we are
tempted to think them unreal and fantastic; but they are the heights to
which we should naturally rise, if once we realised the greatness, the
blessedness, the certainty of that hidden hope above. Dear friends, if we
look onwards to our own end, are we only or chiefly conscious of a cold
thrill of recoil and repulsion? Let us ask ourselves if our feeling
corresponds to our profession that Christ is our life, and that where He is
is our heaven and our hope.
III. Lastly, notice the unmistakable witness of profession and life which
we are to bear.
‘They declare plainly.’ They make it absolutely and unmistakably manifest,
says the writer, that they seek a country. It did not need that Abraham
should stand up before the sons of Heth and say, ‘I am a pilgrim and a
sojourner amongst you.’ They all knew it. There was his tent outside the
city walls, and a strange life that little tribe of people, he and his
followers, lived, wandering up and down the land and refusing to settle
,themselves anywhere. They lived a life unlike that of the people among whom
they dwelt, We know that in these early days there were fenced cities,
outside the walls of which they dwelt, and there all the evidences of a
highly developed and advanced civilization existing in the land. These
patriarchs lived like gypsies in the country, roaming everywhere but rooted
nowhere; and the reason they so lived was that they ‘looked for a city which
hath foundations.’
‘Yes! the man, before the eyes of
whose faith there is ever shining that permanent state of blessed union with
Jesus Christ and of sweet society with all the good, can afford to recognise
the things that are seen as transient, as they must be. He will be in no
danger of mistaking the fleeting shows for eternal realities. If we are
looking for the city we shall dwell in tabernacles; and the more our faith
grasps the permanent realities beyond, the more will our experience realise
the transitoriness of the things here by our sides.
The very fact that men call themselves Christians is a declaration that they
are seeking for a city. Do you act up to your declaration? Is your
Christianity a matter of lip or of life? Have you pitched your tents outside
the city to confirm your declaration that you do not belong to this
community? And do you live as in it, but not of it?
Our outward lives ought to make most distinctly manifest that we are
citizens of the heavens, and that will be made manifest by abstinence from a
great deal There are many things, right enough in themselves, which are not
expedient, and therefore not right, for a Christian man to do, if they
fasten him down to this present. And you will have to cut yourselves loose
from a good deal to which otherwise it would he permissible for you to be
attached, if you intend to rise towards God; and whatever we do like other
people, we shall have to do from a manifestly different temper or spirit.
Two men may engage in precisely the same occupation. For instance, there may
be two tellers at one side of a bank counter, or two depositors on the
other, doing exactly the same things, and yet one of them may do them so as
to ‘declare plainly,’ even in that act, ‘that he is seeking a country,’ and
that he is not wholly swallowed up in the love and high estimate of worldly
wealth. The motive from which, the end towards which, the help by which, the
accompanying thoughts with which, we do our daily, secular work, may hallow
it, and make it express our heavenly-mindedness, as completely as if we went
apart on the mountain, and held communion in prayer and praise with God.
We do not want ‘plain’ declarations by so-called religious acts, still less
by religious professions, half as much as we do plain declarations by an
obviously Christian way of doing secular things, and living the daily life
of men upon earth. Remember the illustration from the conduct of the very
men of whom my text speaks. I said that they kept themselves aloof from the
civilisation around them. That requires modification to be a full statement
of the case. They threw themselves into it, when necessary, with all energy.
Lot went down to Sodom because it offered good grazing land. He behaved just
as many professing Christians handle the world, going down amongst the
slime-pits and the scoundrels for the sake of making a little money out of
them — whilst Abraham stopped on the. more barren pastures of the hills,
with freedom, security, and holiness. When Lot got what he deserved, and was
involved in the disaster of the city that he had made his home, Abraham did
not say, ‘It is a very sad thing, but Lot must get himself out of the
difficulty.’ He buckled on his sword and armed his followers, turning
himself into a soldier for the time being, and promptly gave chase to the
robbers, following them all through the night, along the whole length of the
Holy Land, and pounced upon them, routing them, as they lay in fancied
security, and liberating their prisoner, who was the captive of his own lust
and covetousness much more sadly than of the Eastern marauders.
And so, the detachment from the present, which is needful for Christian men,
is to be combined with the most energetic discharge of the duties which we
owe to ourselves and to those around us, and especially to be combined with
the most diligent work for those who have fallen captive to the snares of
the world which we, by His mercy, have been able to escape. And he will best
manifest, and most plainly declare, that he seeks a country who seeks most
earnestly to hallow all ordinary life, and to do the work, here and now,
which God prescribes for him: There is an old story about a question being
put to some good man who was fond of playing chess.
‘What would you do if, when you were
at the chess-board, you were told that Jesus Christ was coming?’ ‘Finish the
game’ was the wise answer. There is another story about a scene in the
American House of Representatives in its early time. A great darkness came
on during the sitting, and some timid souls began to think that the last day
was at band. The President said, ‘Bring candles and let us go on with the
debate.’ If the Master is coming, we are best found doing our work. Yes!
Best doing our work, if it is His work. And all our work may be His if it is
done for His sake and in His strength.
Christian. men and women! see to it that there he no ambiguity about your
position, no mistaking your nationality, and that in your life, without
ostentation, without offensively forcing your religion upon peoples’ notice,
you declare plainly that you, at any rate, seek your native home.
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Hebrews 11:16 The Future Which Vindicates God
‘Wherefore God is not ashamed to be
called their God; for He hath prepared for them a city.’ — Hebrews 11:16
THESE are bold words. They tell us
that unless God has provided a future condition of social blessedness for
those whom He calls His, their life’s experience on earth is a blot on His
character and administration. He needs heaven for His vindication. The
preparation of the City is the reason why He is not ‘ashamed to be called
their God.’ If there were not such a preparation, He had need to be ashamed.
Then my text, further, by its first word ‘wherefore,’ carries our thoughts
back to what has been said beforehand; and that is, ‘They desire a better
country, that is, a heavenly.’ Therefore God ‘is not ashamed of them,’ as
the Revised Version has it, with a fuller rendering, ‘to be called their
God.’ That is to say, the attitude of the men who look ever forward, through
the temporal, to the things unseen and eternal, is worthy of their relation
with Him, and it alone is worthy. And if people professing to be His, and
professing that He is theirs, do not so live, they would be a disgrace to
God, and He would be ashamed to own them for His.
So there are two lines of thought suggested by our text; two sets of
obligations which are deduced by the writer of this Epistle from that solemn
name — ‘The God of Abraham, and of Isaac, and of Jacob.’ The one set of
obligations refers to Him; the other to us. There are, then, three things
here for our consideration — the name; what it pledges God to do; and what
it binds men to seek. Let me ask you to look at these three things with me.
I. First of all, then, regard the significance of the name round which
the whole argument of our verse turns.
The writer lays hold of that wonderful designation, by which the God of the
whole earth knit Himself, in special relationship of unity and mutual
possession, to these three poor men — Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and he
would have us ponder that name, as meaning a great deal more than the fact
that these three were His worshippers, and that He was their God, in the
sense in which Moloch was the God of the Phoenicians; Jupiter, the god of
the Romans; or Zeus of the Greeks. There is a far deeper and sacreder
relation involved than that. ‘The God of Abraham, and of Isaac, and of
Jacob’ means not only that His name was in some measure known as a
designation, and in some measure honoured by external worship, by the
patriarchs, but it involved much in regard to Him, and much in regard to
them. It is the name which He took for Himself, not which men gave to Him,
and, therefore, it expresses what He had made Himself to these men. That is
to say, the name implies a direct act of self-revelation on the part of God.
It implies condescending approach and nearness of communion. It implies
possession, mutual and reciprocal, as all possession of spirit by spirit
must be. It implies still more wonderfully and profoundly that, just as in
regard to the relations between ourselves, so, in regard to the loftiest of
all relations, God owns men, and men possess God, because, on both sides of
the relationship, there is the same love. Other forms of connection between
men and God differ from this deepest of all in that the attitude on the one
side corresponds to, but is different from, the attitude on the other. If we
think of God as the object of trust, on His side there is faithfulness, on
our side there is faith. If we think of Him as the object of adoration, on
His side there is loftiness, on our side there is lowliness. If we think of
Him as the Supreme Governor, His commandment is answered by our obedience.
But if we think of Him as ours, and of ourselves as His, the bond is
identical on either part. And though there be all the difference that there
is between a drop of dew and the boundless ocean, between the little love
that refreshes and bedews my heart, and the great abyss of the same that
lies, not stagnant though calm, in His, yet my love is like God’s, and God’s
love is like mine. And that is the deepest meaning of the name, ‘the God of
Abraham, and of Isaac, and of Jacob’: — mutual possession based upon common
and identical love.
And then, of course, in so far as we are concerned, the name carries with it
the most blessed depths of the devout life, in all its sacredness of
intimacy, in all its sweetness of communion, in all its perfectness of
dependence, in all its victory over self, in all its triumphant
appropriation, as its very own, of the common and universal good. It is much
to be able to say ‘Our God, our help in ages past.’ It is more to be able to
say ‘My Lord and my God.’ And that appropriation deprives no other of his
possession of God. I do not rob you of one beam of the sunshine when it
irradiates my vision. We take in of the common land that which belongs to
us, and no other man is the poorer or has the less for his. My God is thy
God; and when we each realise our individual and personal relation ‘to Him,
as expressed by these two little words, then we are able to say, in close
union, ‘Our God, the God and Father of us all.’ So much, then, for the name.
II. Now a word or two, in the second place, as to what that name pledges
God to do.
He is ‘not ashamed’ of it, ‘for He hath prepared for them a city.’ Now I do
not need to enter at all upon the question as to whether the three
patriarchs to whom my text has original reference had any notion of a future
life. It matters nothing where .or how they thought that that coming
blessing towards which they were ever looking was to be realised. The point
of the text is that, in any case, they were servants of a future promised to
them by God, as they believed, and that that future shaped their whole life.
Think of what their life was. How all their days, from the moment when
Abraham left his home, to the moment when the dying Jacob said, with a
passion of unfilled expectancy, which yet had in it no hesitancy or doubt or
rebuke, ‘I have waited for Thy salvation, O Lord,’ that future shaped their
whole career! And then, if the end of all was that they lay down in the dust
and died, having been lured on from step to step by dazzling illusions
dangled before them, which were nothing but dreams, what about the God who
did it? and what about their relation to Him! Would there be anything in
such a God deserving to be worshipped, Might He not be ashamed of ‘being
called their God’ if that was all that they got thereby? God needs the City
for His own vindication.
Now that seems to be a daring way of putting it, hut it is only another form
of expressing a very plain thought, that the facts of the religious life
here on earth are such as necessarily do involve a future of blessedness,
and a heaven.
I need not, I suppose, dwell for more than just in a sentence upon the first
plain way in which this truth may be illustrated — namely, that nothing but
a future life of blessedness, such as we usually connote by the simple name
‘heaven,’ saves God’s veracity and the truthfulness of His promises. If we
believe that the awful silence of the universe has ever been broken by a
divine voice; if we believe that God has said anything to men — apart, I
mean, from the revelation of Himself made by our nature and in our daily
experience — we must believe that He has promised a life to come. And unless
such a life do await those who, humbly and with many faults and
imperfections, have yet clung to Him as theirs, and yielded themselves to
Him as His possession, then
‘The pillared
firmament is rottenness,
And earth’s base built on stubble.’
Let God be true and every man a lie.
Unless there is a heaven, He has flashed before us an illusion like that
which has tempted many a wanderer into the bog to perish. He has fooled us
with a mirage, which at the distance looked like palm-trees and cool,
flashing lakes, and when we reach it is only burning sand, strewn with
bleached bones of the generations that have been cheated before us. ‘God is
not ashamed... for He hath prepared a city.’
But, then, there is another thought, closely con-netted with the preceding,
and yet capable of being dealt with separately, and that is that there is a
blot ineffaceable on the divine character unless the desires which He
Himself has implanted have a reality corresponding to them. That is true, of
course, in the most absolute sense, in regard to all the physical
necessities and yearnings which the animal nature possesses. In all that
region God never sends mouths but He sends meat to fill them; and need is
the precursor and the prophecy of supply. So it is in regard to the whole
creation; so it is in regard to that in us which we share in common with
them. Care never irks the full-fed beast. No ungratified desires torture the
frame of the short-lived creatures. ‘Foxes have holes, and the birds of air
have their roosting-places’; and all beings dwell in an environment
absolutely corresponding to their capacities, and fitted to satisfy their
necessities. But amongst ‘them stalks the exile of creation, man; blessed,
though he sometimes thinks he is cursed, with longings which the world has
nothing to satisfy; and with ideals which are never capable of realisation
amidst the imperfections and fleetingnesses of time. And is that to be all?
If so, then God is a tyrant and not a god, and there is little to love in
such a character, and He might be ashamed, if He is not, to have made men
like that, so ill-fitted for their abode, and to have bestowed upon them the
possibility of imagining that to which realisation shall be for ever denied.
And if that is true in regard of many of the desires of life, apart
altogether from religion, it becomes still more manifestly and eminently
true in regard of Christian experience and devout emotions. For if there is
any one thing which an acceptance of Christianity in the heart and life is
sure to do, it is to kindle and make dominant longings, yearnings rising
sometimes to pain, which the world is utterly unable to satisfy. Is it ever
to be so? Then, oh then, better for us that we should never have known that
name; better for us that we had nourished a blind life within our brains;
better for us that we had never been born. But ‘He hath prepared for them a
city,’ where wishes shall be embodied, and the ideal shall be reality, and
desires shall be fulfilled, and everything that has dwelt, silently and
secretly, in the chambers of the imagination shall come forth into the
sunlight. Morning dreams are proverbially true. ‘We are not of the night,
nor of the darkness: we are the children of the day,’ and our dreams are one
day to pass into the sober certainty of waking bliss.
Then there is another thought still, and that is that it would be a blot
ineffaceable on the divine character if all the discipline of life were to
have no field in the future on which its results could be manifested. These
three poor men were schooled by many sorrows. What were they all for? For
the City. And in like manner the facts of our earthly life and our Christian
experiences are equally inexplicable and confounding unless beyond these dim
and trifling things of time there lie the sunlit and solemn fields of
eternity, in which whatsoever of force, valor, worthiness, manhood, we have
made our own here shall expatiate for ever more.
I do not mean that life is so sad and weary that we need to call another
world into existence to redress the iralante of the old. I think that is
only very partially true, for we are always apt in such considerations to
minimize the pleasures on the whole, and to exaggerate the pains on the
whole, of the earthly life. But I mean that the one true view of all that
befalls us here on earth is discipline; and that discipline implies an end
for which it is applied, and a realm in which its results are to be
manifested. And if God carefully trains us, passes us through varieties of
condition, in order to evolve in us a character conformed to His will; puts
us to the long threescore years and ten of the apprenticeship, and then has
no workshop in which to occupy us afterwards, we are reduced to a state of
utter intellectual bewilderment, and life is an inextricable tangle and
puzzle.
You may go into certain prehistoric depots, where you will find lying by
thousands flint weapons which have been carefully chipped and shaped and
polished, and then, apparently, left in a heap, and never anything done with
them. Is the world a great cemetery of weapons prepared and then tossed
aside like that? We need a heaven where the faithfulness of the servant
shall be exchanged for the joy of the Lord, and he that was faithful in a
few things shall be made ruler over many things.
III. And now a word about my last thought; and that is, what this name
binds Christian people to seek.
My text in its former part says, ‘They desire a better country, that is, a
heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God.’ If Abraham,
instead of stopping under the oak tree at Mature, had gone down into Sodom
with Lot, and taken up his quarters there; or if he had become a naturalized
citizen of Hebron, and struck up alliances with the children of Heth, would
the Sodomites or the Hebronites or the Hittites have thought any the better
of him therefore? As long as he kept apart from them, he witnessed to the
promise, and God looked upon him and blessed him. But if, professing to look
for ‘the city which hath the foundations,’ he had not been content to dwell
in tabernacles, God would have been ashamed of him to be called his God.
Translate that into plain English, and it is this. As long as Christian
people live like pilgrims and strangers, they are worthy of being called
God’s, and God is glad to be called theirs. And as long as they do so, the
world will know a religious man when it sees him, and, though it may not
like him, it will at least respect him. But a secularized Church or
individuals who say that they are Christians, and who have precisely the
same estimates of good and evil as the world has, and live by the same
maxims, and pursue the same aims, and never lift their eyes to look at the
City beyond the river, these are a disgrace to God and to themselves, and to
the religion which they say they profess.
I cannot but feel — and feel, I think, in growing degree — that one main
clause of the woful feebleness of our average Christianity is that our hopes
and visions of the City which hath the foundations have become dim, and
that, to a very large extent, the thoughts of ‘the rest that remaineth for
the people of God’ is dormant in the minds of the mass of professing
Christian people.
Oh, dear friends! if we will yield to that sweet, strong appeal that is made
to us in the frame, and, feeling that God is ours and we are His, will turn
our hearts and thoughts more than, alas! we have done, to that blessed hope,
Jesus will not be ashamed to call us brethren, nor God be ashamed to be
called our God. Let us beware that we are not ashamed to be called His, nor
to ‘declare plainly that we seek a country.’
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Hebrews 11:24-27 The Faith of Moses
‘By faith Moses, when he was come
to years, refused to be called the of Pharaoh’s daughter; 25. Choosing
rather to suffer affliction with the people of God, than to enjoy the
pleasures of sin for a season; 26. Esteeming the reproach of Christ greater
riches than the treasures in Egypt: for he had respect unto the recompence
of the reward. 27. By faith he forsook Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the
king: for he endured, as seeing Him who is invisible. — Hebrews 11:24-27
I HAVE ventured to take these verses
as a text, not with the idea of expounding their details, or even of
touching many of the large questions which they raise, but for the sake of
catching their general drift. They are the writer’s description of two
significant instances in the life of the great Lawgiver of the power of
faith. He deals with both in the same fashion. He first tells the act, then
he analyses its spring in the state of feeling which produced it, and then
he traces that state of feeling to certain external facts which were obvious
to the faith of Moses. ‘The Great Refusal,’ by which he flung up his
position at the court of Pharaoh, and chose to identify himself with his
people, is the one. His flight from Egypt to the solitudes of Horeb is the
other. The two acts are traced to the states of feeling or opinion in Moses.
The former came from a choice and an estimate. ‘He chose to suffer with the
people of God’; and he ‘esteemed the reproach... greater riches than the
treasures in Egypt.’ The latter in like manner came from a state of feeling.
He ‘forsook Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king.’ What underlay the
choice, the estimate, the courage? ‘He had respect,’ or more literally and
forcibly, ‘he looked away to the recompense of the reward.’ He saw ‘Him who
is invisible.’ So, an act of vision which disclosed him a future recompense
and a present God was the basis of all. And from that act of vision there
came states of mind which made it easy and natural to choose a lot of
suffering and humiliation, and to turn away from all the glories and
treasures and wrath of Egypt.
That is to say, we have here two things — what this man saw, and what the
vision did for his life, and I wish to consider these two. The same sight is
possible for us; and, if we have it, the same conduct will certainly follow.
I. Note then, first, what this man saw.
Two things, says the writer. ‘He looked away to the recompense of the
reward,’ and he saw God. Now I need not remind you, I suppose, that these
two objects of real vision correspond to the two elements of faith which the
writer describes in the first verse of our chapter, where he says that it is
‘the substance of things hoped for’; to which corresponds ‘the recompense of
the reward,’ and ‘the evidence of things not seen; to which answers Him who
is invisible.’
Now, that conception of faith, as having mainly to do with the future and
the unseen, is somewhat different superficially from the ordinary notion of
faith, set forth in the New Testament, as being trust in Jesus Christ. But
the difference is only superficial, and arises mainly from a variety in the
prominence given to the elements which both conceptions have in common. For
the faith which is trust in Jesus Christ is directed towards the unseen, and
includes in itself the realisation of the future. And the faith which is
vivid consciousness of the invisible world, and realisation of a coming
retribution, finds them both most clearly and most surely in that Lord ‘in
whom, though now we wee Him not, yet believing we rejoice,’ and anticipate
the future ‘end of our faith’ even the salvation of our souls. So we may
take these two points that emerge from our text, and look at them as
containing for our present purpose a sufficient description of what our
faith ought to do for us.
There must be, first, then, a vivid and resolute realisation of future
retribution. Now, note that this same expression, a somewhat peculiar one,
‘the recompense of the reward,’ is found again in this letter in directly
the opposite reference from that which it has here. In the second chapter of
the Epistle we read that ‘every transgression and disobedience shall receive
its just recompense of reward.’ Both recompense by punishment and by
blessedness are included in the word, so that its meaning is the exact
requital of good or evil by a sovereign judge.
And that is the very purpose which faith has for one of its chief functions,
to burn in the conviction on our slothful minds — that all that is round
about us is at once cause and consequence; that life is a network of issues
of past actions, and of progenitors of future ones; that nothing that a man
does ever dies; that
‘Through his soul the echoes roll,
And grow for ever and for ever’
that ‘whatsoever a man soweth that
shall he also reap.’ Character is the result of actions. Condition is
largely, if not altogether, dependent upon conduct and upon character. And,
just as the sandstone cliffs were laid down grain by grain by an evaporated
ocean, and stand eternal when the waters have all vanished, so whatever else
you and I are making of, and in, our lives, we are making permanent cliffs
of character which will remain when all the waves of time have foamed
themselves away.
That process, which is going on moment by moment all through our lives,
Christian faith follows beyond the grave. It works right up to the edge of
the grave as everybody can see, and many a man’s last harvest of the seed
that he sowed to the flesh is his, when laid a Corrupted corpse into his
coffin. But does it stop there? The world may say, ‘We know not.’ Christian
faith overleaps the gulf and sees the process going on more intensely and
unhindered in the life yonder. We are like signalmen in their isolated
boxes. They pull a lever, and the points a quarter of a mile away are
shifted. The man does not see what he has done, but he has done it all the
same. And when his time for travelling comes, he will find that he has
determined the course on which he must run by the actions that were done
here.
And so, brethren, this conviction, not merely as being a selfish looking for
a peaceful and blessed heaven, as some people try to vulgarise the
conception, but as being the thrilling consciousness that every deed has its
issues, and is to be done, or refrained from, in view of these, this is what
is meant by the word of my text: ‘he looked away’ to the recompense of
reward.
Now remember that such a vision clear and definite before a man, substantial
and solid and continuous enough to become a formative power in his life, and
even to determine its main direction, is only realisable as the result of
very special and continuous effort. The writer of the letter employs a
singular and a strong word, which I have tried to English by the phrase
‘looking off unto the recompense.’ He turned away by a determined effort of
resolution, averting his gaze from other things in order to fix it on the
far off thing. One use of the tube of the telescope is to shut out cross
lights, and concentrate the vision on the far off object, looked at
undisturbed. Unless we can thus shut off on either side these dazzling and
bewildering brilliances that dance and flicker round us, we shall never see
clearly that solemn future and all its infinite possibilities of sorrow or
of blessedness. The eye that is focused to look at the things on the earth
cannot see the stars. When the look-out man at the bow wants to make sure
whether that white flash on the horizon is a sun-smitten sail or a breaker,
he knits his brows and shades his eyes with his hand, and concentrates his
steady gaze till he sees. And you and I have to do that, or the most real
things in the universe, away yonder in the extreme distance, will be
problematical and questionable to us. Oh, brother! our Christian lives would
be altogether different if we made the resolve and kept it, to fix our gaze
on ‘the recompense of the reward.’
Then the next thing that this man saw, says my text, was ‘Him who is
invisible.’
Now I do not suppose that there is any reference there to the miraculous
manifestations of a divine presence which were given to the lawgiver, for
these came long after the incidents which are being dealt with in my text.
True! he saw God face to face amidst the solitudes and the sanctities of
Sinai. But that is not at all what the writer is thinking about here. He is
thinking about the vision which was given to Moses, in no other fashion than
it may be given to us, if we will have it, the sight of God to the ‘inward
eye, which is the bliss of solitude,’ and ministers strength to our lives,
in solitude or in society. The conscious realisation of God’s presence in
our minds and hearts and wills, and the whole trembling and yet rejoicing
inner man, aware that God is near, are what is meant by this vision of Him.
The realisation of His presence continually, the sight of Him in nature, so
that every bush burns with a visible deity, and every cloud is the pillar in
which He moves for guidance, the realisation of His presence, in history, in
society, operating all changes and working round us, and in us, and on us —
this is the highest result of a true religious faith.
And it is worthy to be called sight. For not the vision of the eye is the
source of the truest certitude, but the vision of the inward spirit. A man
may be surer of God than he is of the material universe that he touches and
handles and beholds. The vision that a trustful heart has of God is as real,
as direct, and, I venture to say, more assured, than the knowledge which is
brought to us through sense.
And such a vision ought to be, and will be if we are right, no disturbing or
unwelcome thought, but a delight and a strength. A prisoner in a solitary
cell sometimes goes mad because he knows that somewhere in its walls there
is a peep-hole at which, at any moment, the eye of a gaoler may be on the
watch. But the loving heart that yearns after God has nothing but joy in the
otherwise awful thought, ‘If I take the wings of the morning, Thou art
there. If I fly to the uttermost parts of the west, there I meet Thee.’ ‘If
I make my bed in the grave, Thou art there. Thou hast beset me behind and
before.’ Brethren, either our ghastliest doubt or our deepest joy is, ‘Thou,
God, seest me.’ ‘When I awake I am still with Thee.’
II. And now, secondly, notice what the vision did for this man.
I cannot do more than touch very lightly upon the various points that are
involved here. But I would have you notice in general that the writer masses
the enemies of a noble life, which Moses overcame by this sight, in three
general classes — pleasures, treasures, dangers. The faith of Moses lifted
him above ignoble pleasures, saved him from coveting fleeting possessions,
armed him against mere corporeal perils. And these three — delights, rules,
dangers, may be roughly said to be the triple-headed Cerberus that bars our
way. Let us look how the vision will help to overcome them all.
This sight will take the brightness out of ignoble and fleeting pleasures.
Moses had the ball at his foot, Jewish legends tell us that the very crown
was intended to be placed on his head. However that may be, a life of
luxurious ease, of command over men, accompanied by the half deification
which in old days hedged a king, were his for the taking; and he turned from
them all. He did not choose suffering: but he chose to be identified with
the people of God, though he knew that thereby he was electing a life of
sorrow and of pain. The world has seen no nobler act than that when he
passed through the gates of Pharaoh’s palace, the fragments of whose
glorious architecture we still wonder at, and housed himself in the dark
reed huts where the slaves dwelt.
Now that same spirit, both in regard to choice and to estimate, must be
ours, and will be ours, if we have any depth and reality of vision of the
recompense and of the invisible God. For if you once let the light of these
two solemn thoughts in upon the delights of earth, how poor and paltry, how
coarse and ignoble, they look! Did you ever see the scenes of a theatre by
daylight? What daubs; what rents; what coarse work! Let the light of the
‘recompense’ and of God in upon earthly delights, and how they shrivel, and
dwindle, and disappear! Ah, brethren! if we would only bring our earthly
desires to the touchstone of these two great thoughts, we should find that
many a thing that holds us would slacken its grasp, and the fair forms, with
their tiny harps, and their sweet songs that tempt us on the flowery island,
would be seen for what they are — ravenous monsters whose guests are in the
depths of hell. ‘He had respect to the recompense of the reward,’ and
spurned ignoble pleasures. If you see the things that are, you will not be
tempted with the things that seem.
And then, further, such a vision will help us to appraise at their true
value earthly possessions.. I cannot enter upon the question of what the
writer means precisely by that singular phrase, attributing to Moses ‘the
reproach of Christ.’ Whether it implies the reproach borne for Christ, or
like Christ, or by Christ, all which interpretations are possible, and have
been suggested, need not concern us now. The point is that the twofold
vision of which the writer is speaking, let in upon worldly possessions,
reveals their emptiness and dressiness, as compared with the true riches.
There are old stories of men who in the night received from fairy hands
gifts of gold in some cave, and when the daylight came upon them what had
seemed to be gold and jewels was a bundle of withered leaves and red
berries, already half corrupted and altogether worthless. There are many
things that the world counts very precious which are lille the fairy’s gold.
Nothing that can be taken from a man really belongs to him. The only real
riches, corresponder with his necessities, are those which, once possessed,
are inseparable from his being, the riches of an indwelling God, and of a
nature conformed to His.
And that effect of the vision of the unseen and the future, as bringing down
to their true value all the wealth of Egypt and of the world, is a lesson
which no man needs more than do we whose lives, and habits of thinking, are
passed and formed in a commercial community, in which success means a
fortune, and failure means poverty; in which the poor are tempted to look
upon the possession of wealth as the only thing to be coveted, and the rich
are tempted to look upon it as the one thing to be rejoiced over. Let the
light of the future, and of God, ever shine upon your estimates of the worth
of the world’s wealth.
Lastly, such a vision will arm a man against all perils. I take it that
‘forsaking Egypt’ in my text refers to Moses’ flight to Horeb. Now, in the
book of Exodus that flight is traced to his fear. In my text it is traced to
his courage. So, then, there may dwell in one heart fearing and not fearing.
There may be dread, as there was with Moses, sufficient to impel him to
flight, though not sufficient to induce him to abandon the purpose which
made flight necessary. He was afraid enough to shelter himself. He was not
afraid enough, by reason of dangers and difficulties, to fling up his
mission. That is to say, the vision will not take away from a man natural
tremors, nor will it blind him to real dangers and difficulties, but it will
steady his resolve, and make him determined, though he may have to bow
before the blast, to yield no jot of his convictions, nor fling away any of
his confidence. He will flee to Horeb, if need be, but he will not cease to
labour for the redemption of Israel If we put our trust in God, and live in
the continual realisation of future retribution, then, whilst we may
prudently adapt our course so as to find a smooth bit of road to walk on,
and to avoid dangers which may threaten, we shall never let these either
shake our confidence in God, or alter our conviction of what He requires
from us.
So I gather up all that I have been trying to say in the one word — the true
way to make life noble is the old way, the way of faith. The sight of God,
the vision of judgment will make earth’s pleasures paltry, earth’s treasures
dross, earth’s dangers contemptible. The way to secure that ennobling and
strengthening vision to attend us everywhere, is to keep near to Jesus
Christ, and to fix our hearts on Him. In communion with Him pleasures that
perish will woo in vain, and possessions from which we must part will lose
their worth, and perils that touch the body will cease to terrify; and
through faith ‘we shall be more than conquerors in Him that loved us.’
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Hebrews 12:1, 2 The Cloud of Witnesses and Their Leader
Compassed about with so great a
cloud of witnesses,... looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of faith,’
— Hebrews 12:1, 2
WHAT an awful sight the rows above
rows of spectators must have been to the wrestler who looked up at them from
the arena, and saw a mist of white faces and pitiless eyes all directed on
himself! How many a poor gladiator turned in his despair from them to the
place where purple curtains and flashing axes proclaimed the presence of the
emperor, on whose word hung his life, whose will could crown him with a rich
reward!
That is the picture which this text brings before our eyes, as the likeness
of the Christian life. We are in the arena; the race has to be run, the
battle to be fought, All round and high above us, a mist, as it were, of
fixed gazers beholds us, and on the throne is the Lord of life, the judge of
the strife, whose smile is better than all crowns, whose downward-pointing
finger seals our fate. We are compassed with a cloud of witnesses, and we
may see Jesus the author and finisher of faith. Both of these facts are
alleged here as encouragements to persevering, brave struggle in the
Christian life. Hence we have here mainly two subjects for consideration,
namely the relation between the saints who are gone and ourselves, and the
encouragement derived from it; and the contrasted relation between Jesus and
ourselves, and the encouragement derived from it.
I. The metaphor of the ‘cloud of witnesses’ is perhaps intended to express
multitude, and also elevation. It may have been naturally suggested by the
thought of the saints of the Old Testament (of whom the previous chapter has
been so nobly speaking) as exalted to heaven, and hovering far above and far
away like the pure whitenesses that tower there. Raphael’s great Sistine
Madonna has for background just such a light mist of angel faces and adoring
eyes all turned to the gentle majesty of the Virgin. There may also be
blending in the writer’s mind such a reference to the amphitheatre as we
have already noticed, which certainly exists in the later portion of the
context. But we must remember that tempting as it is to a hasty reader to
deduce from the words the idea that the saints whose ‘warfare is
accomplished’ look down on our struggles here, there is, at all events, no
support to that idea in the word ‘witnesses.’ It is not used, as often in
our speech, as equivalent to spectators, but means here exactly what it does
in the previous chapter, namely, attesters or testifiers. They are not
witnesses of us, but to us, as we shall see presently. It may, indeed, be
that the thought of the heavenly spectators of our Christian course is
implied in the whole strain of the passage, and of the imagery borrowed from
the arena, which would certainly be incomplete if there were nothing to
answer to the spectators, who, whether at Corinth or Rome, made so important
a part in the scene.
We shall be going too far, I think, if we dogmatically assert, on the
strength of a figure, that this context teaches a positive communion between
earth and heaven of such a sort as that they who have ‘overcome by the blood
of the Lamb, and by the word of His testimony,’ know about the struggles of
us down here in the arena. Still, one feels that such an idea is almost
needed to give full force either to the figure or exhortation. It does seem
somewhat lame to say, You are like racers, surrounded with a crowd of
witnesses, therefore run, only do not suppose that they really see you. If
this be so, the glowing imagery certainly seems to receive a violent chill,
and the flow of the exhortation to be much choked. Still we can go no
further than a modest ‘perhaps.’
But even as a ‘may be,’ the thought of
such a knowledge stimulates. As all the thousand eyes of assembled Greece
looked on at the runners, and all the dialects of its states swelled the
tumult of acclaim which surged round the victor, so here the general
assembly and Church of the firstborn, the festal gathering on Mount Zion,
into relations with which this very chapter says we have come, may be
conceived of as sitting, solemn and still, on the thrones around the central
throne, and bending not unloving looks of earnest pity on the arena below
where they too once toiled and suffered.
It may be that, before their eyes, who have been made wise by death, and
who, standing within the ‘sanctuary of God, understand the end’ of life and
life’s sorrows, are manifest our struggles, as with Weary feet and drooping
limbs we blunder on in the race. Surely there is love in heaven, and it may
be there is knowledge, and it may be there is care for us. It may be that,
standing on the serene shore beside the Lord, who has already prepared a
meal for us with His own hands, they discern, tossing on the darkened sea,
the poor little boats of us downhearted, unsuccessful toilers, who cannot
yet descry the Lord, or the welcome which waits on the beach.
At all events the thought may come
with cheer to our hearts, that, whether conscious of one another’s mode of
being or no, they in their triumph and we in our toils are bound together
with real bonds The thought, if not the knowledge, of their blessedness may
be wafted down to us, just as the thought, if not the knowledge, of our
labour may be in their restful souls. The hope of their tranquil shore may
strengthen us that are far off upon the sea, though we cannot see more of it
than the dim lights moving about, and catch an occasional fragrance in the
air that tells of land, just as the memory of their stormy voyage mingles in
their experience with their gladness because the waves be quiet, and God has
brought them to their desired haven. Such thoughts may come with
encouragement for the conflict, even if we hesitate to assert that the cloud
of witnesses is a cloud of spectators. What, then, is the sense in which
these heroes of the faith which the previous chapter has marshalled in a
glorious bede-roll, are ‘witnesses’? The answer will be found by observing
the frequent occurrence of the word, and its cognate words, in that chapter.
We read there, for instance, that the elders ‘had witness borne to them’
(verse 2, Revised Version); that Abel by the acceptance of his sacrifice,
‘had witness borne to him that he was righteous,’ ‘God bearing witness in
respect of his gifts’ (verse 4, Revised Version); that Enoch ‘had witness
borne to him that he had been well pleasing unto God’ (verse 5, Revised
Version), and that the whole illustrious succession ‘had witness borne to
them through their faith’ (verse 39, Revised Version). This witness borne to
them by God is, of course, His giving to them the blessings which belong to
a genuine faith, whether of conscious acceptance with God, or of inward
peace and power, or of outward victory over sorrows and foes. But they
become witnesses to us for God by the very same facts by which He makes
Himself the witness of their faith, for they therein become proofs of the
blessedness of true religion, visible evidences of God’s faithfulness, and
their histories shine out across the centuries testifying to us in our toils
how good it is to trust in the Lord, and how small and transient are the
troubles and hindrances that a life of faith meets. The calm stars declare
the glory of God, and witness from age to age of His power, which keeps them
every one from failing; and these bright names that shine in the heaven of
His word proclaim His tender pity, and His rewarding love to all who, like
them, fight the good fight. Like the innumerable suns that make up the Milky
Way, they melt into one bright cloud that lies still and eternal above our
heads and sheds a radiance on our dim struggles. So we have here brought out
the stimulus to our Christian race from the faith and blessedness of these
saints.
We have their history before us: we know what they were, and we have the
‘end of their conversation’ — that is, the issue or outcome of their manner
of life — as the next chapter says. It was a hard fight, but it ended in
victory. They had more than their share of sorrows and troubles, but ‘the
glory dies not, and the grief is past.’ From their thrones they call to us
words of cheer, and point us to their tears turned into diamonds, to their
struggles stilled in depths of repose, to their wounded brows crowned with
light and glory.
They witness to us how mighty and divine a thing is a life of faith. Their
human weakness was filled with the power of God. Tremblings and self-
distrust and all the ills that flesh is heir to dwelt in them. Black doubts
and sore conflicts were their portion. They, too, knew what we know, how
hard it is to live and do the right. But they fought through, because a
mightier hand was upon them, and God’s grace was breathed into their
weakness — and there they stand, victorious witnesses to us, that
whosoever will put his trust in the Lord shall have strength according to
his need inbreathed into his uttermost weakness, and have One by his side in
every furnace, like unto the Son of Man. They witness to us of companions in
suffering, and the thought of them may come to a lonely heart wading in
dark, deep waters, with the assurance that there is a ford, and that others
have known the icy cold, and the downward rush of the stream, and have not
been carried away by it. It is not a selfish thought that sometimes brings
encouragement to a solitary sufferer, ‘the same afflictions have been
accomplished in your brethren.’ It helps us to remember the great multitude
who before us have come through the great tribulation and are before the
throne. The cloud of witnesses testify how impotent is sorrow to harm, how
strong to bless those who put their trust in God.
They witness to us of the faithfulness of God, who has led them, and upheld
them, through all their conflicts, and has brought them to His side at last.
That wondrous power avails for us, fresh and young, as when it helped the
world’s grey fathers. God refers us to their experiences, and summons them
as His witnesses, for they will speak good of His name, and each of them, as
they bend down from their seats around the arena, calls to us, ‘O love the
Lord, all ye His saints. I was brought low and He helped me.’ So that we,
taking heart by their example, can set ourselves to our struggles with the
peaceful confidence, ‘This God is our God for ever and ever.’
The word rendered ‘witnesses’ has a narrower meaning in later usage,
according to which it comes to signify those who have sealed their testimony
with their blood, in which sense it is transferred, untranslated, into
English, in ‘martyr.’ What an eloquent epitome of the early history of the
Church lies in that one fact! So ordinarily had the faithful confessor to
die for his testimony that the very name had the thought of a bloody death
inextricably associated with it. And if we for a moment think of that
meaning, and look back to the long series of martyrs from the days of
Stephen to the last Malagasy Christian or missionary, what solemn scorn of
soft delights, and noble contempt of life itself may be kindled in our
souls. Easy paths are appointed to us. We ‘have not yet resisted unto
blood.’ Let us run our smoother race with patience, as we think of those who
ran theirs with bleeding feet, and through the smoke of Smithfield or the
dust of the arena beheld the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing
ready to help, and so went to their death with the light from His face
changing theirs into the same image.
But let us not forget that all these witnesses for God were imperfect men,
whose imperfections are full of encouragement for us. Look at the names in
that great muster-roll — Noah with his drunkenness, Jacob with his craft,
Samson with his giant strength and giant passion, Jephtha with his savage
faithfulness to a savage vow, David with his too well-known sins, and in
them all not one name to which some great evil did not cling. There are
quickly reached limits to the veneration with which we are to regard the
noblest heroes and saints, and none of them are to be to us patterns,
however we may draw encouragement from their lives, and in some respects
follow their faith. Thank God for the shameful stories told of so many of
them in the unmoved narrative of Scripture! They were men of common clay.
The saints’ halo is round the head of men and women like ourselves. We look
at our own sins and shortcomings, and are ready to despair. But we may lift
our eyes to the cloud of witnesses and for every evil of ours find a
counterpart in the earthly lives of these radiant saints. Thinking of our
own evil we may hopefully say, as we gaze on them, ‘Such were some of ye,
but ye are washed, and ye are sanctified.’ Therefore I will not doubt but
that He is able to keep me, even me, ‘from falling, and to present me
faultless before the presence of His glory.’
II. But we are not left to draw encouragement from the remembrance of men
of like passions with ourselves only.
The second of these clauses turns our
thoughts to the contrasted relations between Christ and us, and the stimulus
derived from it. ‘Looking unto Jesus, the author and perfecter of our
faith.’
Our Lord is hero very emphatically set in a place by Himself apart from all
that cloud of witnesses, who in their measure are held forth as noble
examples of faith. All these, the greatest names of old, are in one class,
and He stands above them in a class of which He is the only member. There we
see no other man save Jesus only. Whatever be the inference from that fact,
the fact itself is plain. He is something to all the fighters in the lists
which none of these are. Our eyes may profitably dwell on them, but we have
to look higher than their serene seats, even to His throne, and the relation
between us and Him is altogether unlike that which binds us to the holiest
of these.
The names He bears in this context are
noteworthy, ‘the author and finisher of faith,’ the former being the same
word which, in Acts 3:15, is rendered ‘prince’ (of life), and in this
Epistle (Hebrews 2:10), ‘captain’ (of salvation). Its meaning may perhaps be
best given as ‘leader.’ All these others are the long files of the great
army, but Christ is the Commander of the whole array. ‘As Captain of the
Lord’s host am I come up, said the man with the drawn sword, who stood
before Joshua as he brooded outside the walls of Jericho over his task, and
that armed angel of the Lord was He who, in the fulness of time, took our
humanity that He might lead the many sons to glory. Not in order of time,
but by the precedence of nature, is He the Leader and Lord of all who live
by faith.
He is also the finisher, or more properly the perfecter of faith, inasmuch
as He in His own life has shown it in its perfect form and power; inasmuch
also as He gives to each of us, if we will have it, grace to perfect it in
our lives; and inasmuch as, finally, He crowns and rewards it at last.
One more remark as to the force of the language here may be allowed. The
word rendered ‘looking’ is an emphatic compound, and if full force be given
to both its elements, we might read it ‘looking away,’ that is, turning our
eyes from all other, even the grandest of these grand witnesses, to gaze on
Christ alone.
All these details serve to bring out
the unique position which our Lord holds, and the attitude in which we
should stand to Him.
Christ is the one perfect example of faith. We are familiar with the rest of
His perfect example in regard to other graces of the Christian character,
but we dwell less frequently than we ought on Him as having Himself lived a
life of faith. Many orthodox believers so believe in Christ’s divinity as to
weaken their sense of the reality of His manhood, just as, on the other
hand, a vivid apprehension of His manhood obscures to many the rays of His
divinity. We lose much by not making very real to our minds that Jesus lived
His earthly life by faith, that for Him as for us dependence on God, and
humble confidence in Him, were the secret of peace, and the spring of power.
This very Epistle, in another place, quotes the words of the psalm, ‘I will
put my trust in Him,’ as the very inmost expression of Christ’s life, and as
one of the ways in which He proves His brotherhood with us. He, too, knows
what it is to hang on God; and is not only in His divine nature the object,
but in His true manhood the pattern of our faith.
And His pattern is perfect. In all others, even the loveliest of saints and
most heroic of martyrs, the gem is marred by many a streak of baser
material, but in Him is the one ‘entire and perfect chrysolite.’ That faith
never faltered, never turned its gaze from the things not seen, never
slackened its grasp of the things hoped, nor degenerated into self-pleasing,
nor changed its attitude of meek submission. We may look to others for
examples, but they will all be sometimes warnings as well, only to Jesus we
may look continually and find uusullied purity and perfect faith.
He is more than example. He gives us power to copy His fair pattern. The
influence of heroic, saintly lives may be depressing as well as encouraging.
Despondency often creeps over us when we think of them. It is not models
that we want, for we all know well enough what we ought to be, and an
example of supreme excellence in morals or religion may be as hurtful as the
unapproachable superiority of Shake-spears or Raphael may to a young
aspirant. Perfect patterns will not save the world. They do not get
themselves copied. What we want is not the knowledge of what we ought to be,
but the will and the power to be it. And that we get from Christ, and from
Him alone. He stretches out His hand to hold us up in our poor struggles.
His grace and His peace come into our hearts, Looking to Him, His Spirit
enters our spirits, and we live, yet not we, but Christ liveth in us. Models
will help us little. They stand there like statues on their pedestals, pure
marble loveliness; but in Christ the marble becomes flesh, and the lovely
perfection has a heart to pity and a strong hand stretched out to help. So
let us look away from all others, who can only give us example, to Him who
can give us strength. Turn from the circling thrones to the imperial throne
in the centre. We are more closely bound to Him who sits on it than to them.
Look away from the cloud of witnesses to the sun of uls, from whom, gazing,
we receive warmth and light and life. They may teach us to fight, but He
fights in us. They are patterns of faith. So is He, but He is also its
object and its giver.
Christ is the imperial Rewarder of faith. At the last He will give the full
possession of all which it has looked and hoped for, and will lift it into
the nobler form in which, even in heaven, we shall live by faith. In that
region where struggles cease, and sense and sight no longer lead astray, and
we behold Him as He is, faith still abides, as conscious dependence and
happy trust. It is perfected in manner, measure, and reward. And Christ is
the giver of all that perfects it.
Let us, then, turn away our eyes from all beside, and look to Christ. He is
the Reward as well as the Rewarder of our faith. As we look to Him we shall
gain power for the fight, and victory and the crown. The gladiators in the
arena lowered their swords to the emperor, before they fought, with the grim
greeting ‘Hail, Caesar! the dying salute thee.’ So, in happier fashion, our
Lord, who has Himself fought in the lists where we now strive. Then we shall
have strength for the conflict, and when the conflict is drawing to its end
and all else swims before our sight, and the din grows faint in our ears, we
shall close our eyes in peace; and when we open them again, lo! the bloody
field, and the broken sword, and the battered helm, have all disappeared,
and we sit, crowned, and palm-bearing, at His side, hailed as victors, and
lapped in sweetest rest for ever more!
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Hebrews 12:1 The Christian Life a Race
‘Let us run with patience the race
that is set before us.’ — Hebrews 12:1
THE previous clauses of this verse
bring before us the runner’s position as ‘compassed about with a cloud of
witnesses,’ and his preparation as ‘laying aside every weight and.., sin.’
The text carries us a stage further in the metaphor, and shows us the
company of runners standing ready, stripped, and straining at the
starting-post, with the long course stretching before them.
The metaphor of the Christian life as a race is threadbare, so far as our
knowledge is concerned, but it may be questioned if it has sunk deeply
enough into the practice of any of us. It is a very noble one, and contains
an ideal of the Christian life which it would do us all good to hold up by
the side of our realisation of it. It might stimulate and it would shame us.
What is the special note of that metaphor? Compare with the ‘kindred one,
equally well-worn and threadbare, of a journey or a pilgrimage. The two have
much in common. They both represent life as changeful, continuous,
progressive, tending to an end; but the metaphor of the race underscores, as
it were, another idea, that of effort. The traveller may go at his Leisure,
he may fling himself down to rest under a tree, he may diverge from the
road, but the runner must not look askance, must not he afraid of dust or
sweat, must tax muscle and lungs to the utmost, if, panting, he is to reach
the goal and win the prize, So, very significantly, our writer here puts
forward only one characteristic of the race. It is to be ‘run with
patience,’ by which great word the New Testament means, not merely passive
endurance, noble and difficult as that may be, but active perseverance which
presses on unmoved, ay, and unhindered, to its goal in the teeth of all
opposition.
But, whilst that is the special characteristic of the metaphor, as
distinguished from others kindred to it, and of the ideal which it sets
forth, I desire in this sermon to take a little wider sweep, and to try to
bring out the whole of the elements which lie in this well-worn figure. I
see in it four things: a definite aim, clearly apprehended and eagerly
embraced; a God- appointed path; a steady advance; and a strenuous effort.
Now let us ask ourselves the question, Do they correspond to anything in my
professing Christian life?
We have here, then
I. A definite aim, clearly apprehended and eagerly embraced.
Most men have aims, definite enough, in regard lower things, and if you ask
the average man out of the ruck what he is living for, he will generally be
able to answer curtly and clearly, or at any rate his life will show, even
if he cannot put it into words. But all these are means rather than ends; ‘I
am living to make a big business.’ ‘I am living to make a fortune.’ ‘I am
living to found a family.’ ‘I am living to learn a science, an art, a
profession.’ ‘I am living for enjoy-merit,’ etc., etc. Yes, and then suppose
somebody perks up with the exceedingly inconvenient further question, ‘Well,
and what then?’ Then, all that fabric of life-aims rushes down into
destruction, and is manifest for what it is-altogether disproportionate to
the man that is pursuing it. Such shabby, immediate’ aims’ are not worth
calling so. But my text sets forth far beyond, and far above them, the one
only goal which it is becoming, which it is natural which it is anything
else than ludicrous, if it were not so tragical, that any man should be
pursuing. And what is that mark? You can put it in a hundred different ways.
Evangelical Christian people generally say salvation, and a great many
so-called Evangelical Christian people have a very low, inadequate, and
selfish idea of what they mean by the word. Let us put it in another form.
The only aim that it is worthy of a man to live for, as his supreme and
dominant one, is that he shall be completely moulded in character,
disposition, nature, heart, and will into the likeness of Jesus Christ, who
is the image of God, and that he shall pass into no Nirvana of
unconsciousness, but into that blessed union with the divine nature, which
is not absorption into it, or the Weakening of the individual, but the
making a man tenfold more himself because he lives in God, as the taper
plunged into the jar of oxygen, which burns the brighter for its
surroundings, and unlike the taper, is unconsumed by burning. Thus the
complete development of human character into the divine image, and the
complete union of the human with the divine, is the aim that Christianity
sets before us.
And that aim it becomes every one of
us professing Christians clearly to apprehend, and keep ever in view as the
thing to which we are not merely tending, but to which we are striving.
Clearly apprehended, and eagerly embraced, this conception of the purpose of
our lives must be if we are not to make them ignoble and conscious or
unconscious hypocrisies. But remember that such an aim may be pursued
through, and requires for its attainment, all those lower aims and ends
which monopolise men’s efforts without regard to anything beyond. What we
want most is a Christianity which, recognising that great, supreme purpose,
follows it persistently and doggedly through all nearer and lesser pursuits.
We want our Christian principle to penetrate into all the tissues of our
lives, and to bring there healing, purging, and quickening. And if we
suppose that the greatest of all aims is contrary to any of these lesser
ones, except such of them as are sinful, then we misapprehend both the
highest blessedness and good of the nearest objects that are set before us,
and still more fatally misapprehend the very genius and intention of that
Christianity, which is not unworldliness but the secret of making the world
and all its fading sweets subservient to this highest end.
Now, need I say one word as to the nobleness and blessedness of a life which
is consistently and thoroughly ordered with a view to this great aim? Think
of the unity that thus will be blessedly breathed over all the else
bewildering diversity of earthly conditions and occupations. As the moon
gathers into one great tidal wave the heaped waters of the shoreless ocean,
and mastering currents, and laughing at the opposing powers of the tempest,
carries the watery wall round the earth, so the white, pure beam of that aim
shining down on the confused welter of our earthly life will draw it all
after itself. Think, too, of the power that comes into a life from this
unity. A man of one aim is always formidable, and high above all other aims
in its absorbing power is this one that a Christian man only deserves his
name if-he sets and keeps before him. Such a unity will, if I may so say,
gather together the whole power of our nature, and bring it into a point,
and it will heat it as well as concentrate it. If you take a bit of blunt
iron, cold, and try to bore a hole in a ten-inch plank, you will make little
progress; but if you sharpen it to a point, and heat it red-hot, then it
will penetrate anything. So my life gathered up into one, and heated, by the
very fact of its being concentrated, will pierce through all obstacles, and
I shall be strong in the proportion in which ‘ this one thing I do,’ and do
it through all other things.
I need not remind you, either, of the blessedness which is involved in this
unity of aim, clearly apprehended and eagerly embraced, in so far as it will
act as a test of all lower pursuits and objects Wherever there comes a
little rill of fresh water down upon the coral reef the creatures that build
it die, and the reef disappears, and thus a great aim will kill all lower
ones that work in the dark, creeping and crawling, and that are contrary to
itself.
Further, this supreme aim is supremely blessed, because it will shine ever
before us. There is a blessedness in having an object of pursuit which we
never reach. It is better to steer straight to the pole-star, though we
never get there, than to creep like the old mariners, from headland to
headland, and leave behind us sinking on the backward horizon, purpose after
purpose, hope after hope, aim after aim. Better to have it shining ahead.
Let me point out the second idea contained in this metaphor, that of
II. A God-appointed path.
The race is ‘ set before us.’ Set
before us by whom? The course is staked out and determined by the Judge of
the games. And that may well be applied in two directions. My duties are
appointed by God, and if only we realise that, and bring the thought of His
will continually into connection with the smallest of the sets which
circumstance, relationships, occupations and the like constitute our duties,
how different they all become! It is an entirely different thing to say,
‘Being where I am, I must do so-and-so’; or ‘Right and wrong being what it
is, I must do so-and-so; or to say,’ This and that man prescribes ‘so,
and-so for me’; and to say. ‘Thou hast prepared a path for us, and ordained
that we should walk therein.’ That elevates, that sweetens, that calms us,
that smooths the road, makes the rough places plain and the crooked things
straight. We want with the clear vision of the aim the equally clear and
abiding persuasion that God has appointed the path. A modern thinker said
that religion was morality touched by emotion. No, religion is morality
transfigured into obedience to the law of God. Bring your duties into
connection with His appointment, and they will all be easy; and when the
path stretches gloomy before you, and it seems that you are called upon to
do some hard thing, say: ‘Created unto good works which God hath before
ordained that we should walk in them.’
Then there is the other thought that, as the duties are appointed by Him, so
the circumstances are appointed, too. You know what they call an
obstacle-race, in which the intention is to accumulate as many difficulties
in the course as can be crowded into it; I fancy that is a good deal like
the race that is set before all of us, by God’s wisdom. There are many
fences to be climbed, many barriers to be crept under, many deep ditches to
be waded through, many bad bits of road studded with sharp points, through
which we have to pick our way. We say as to ourselves, and as to our
friends, ‘What does it all mean?’ And the answer is, ‘He has set the race
before for our profit that we might be partakers of His holiness.’
Again, we have here the notion of
III. A steady progress.
Continual advance is the very salt of
the Christian life, and unless there be such progress there is something
fatally wrong with the Christianity. An unprogressive Christianity is very
apt to become a moribund and then a dead Christianity. Of course that is so
because the aim of which I have been speaking is, in its very nature,
inaccessible and yet capable of indefinite approximation. ‘Alps upon Alps
arise.’ Neither in regard to the intellectual or spiritual apprehension of
the deep things of God, nor in regard to the incorporation of His likeness
into itself, will human nature ever be able to say, ‘Lo, I have passed
through the land, and know it all.’ But an indefinite approximation to an
eternally unreached point is a description of a geometrical figure, and it
is the description of the Christian life. And, therefore, at no point must
we stop, and at no point is it safe for us to say, ‘I have apprehended and
attained.’ Our nature, quite as much as the divine nature towards which we
tend, demands this continuous progress, for the human spirit is capable of
an indefinite expansion, and the seed of the life kindred to God which is
lodged in every believing soul, though it be at the beginning ‘less than the
least of all,’ must grow into a great tree.
Ah, brethren! what a sad contrast to this unbroken progress our lives
present to our own consciousness! How many Christian people there are who
have almost lost sight of the notion, and have certainly ceased from the
practice of an unbroken advance in either of the directions of which I have
been speaking, likeness to God or communion with Him! Ask yourselves the
question, ‘Am I further on than I was this day last year, this day ten
years, this day twenty years?’ The Japanese gardeners pride themselves on
having the secret of dwarfing forest trees, and they will put an oak into a
flower-pot; and there it is, only a few inches high, in age a patriarch, in
height a seedling. And that is what a great many of you Christian people are
doing, dwarfing the tree; even if you are not distorting it. And now the
last thing that I point out here is
IV. The strenuous effort, I have already said a word or two about that as
being the differentia, the special characteristic, of this metaphor. And I
may just refer for one moment to the fact that the word rendered here
‘race,’ and quite rightly so rendered, literally means a contest — ‘Let us
run the contest that is set before us.’ What does that say? Why, just this,
that every foot of advance has to be fought; it is not merely ‘running,’ it
is conflict as well. And then, pointing in the same direction, comes the
selection in the text, which I have already touched upon, of the one
qualification that is necessary — patient endurance, which suggests
antagonism. Opposition — where does the opposition come from? The Apostle
asked the Galatians that once. ‘Ye did run well; what did hinder you?’ And
the answers are diverse: flowers by the roadside, golden apples flung across
the course, siren voices tempting us, the force of gravity holding us back,
the pressure of the wind on our faces. Yes, and my own self most of all That
is what hinders, and that is what has to be fought against by myself.
Effort, effort, effort is the secret of all noble life, in all departments,
and it is the secret of advancing Christian life.
Now, let us understand aright the relations between the faith of which the
New Testament makes so much and the effort of which this metaphor makes so
much. A great many Christian people seem to fancy that faith supersedes
effort. Not so! It stimulates and strengthens effort. If I trust, I receive
the power to run, but whether I shall really run or not depends on myself.
God gives the ability in Jesus Christ, and then we have to use the ability,
and to turn it into an actuality. They have invented a movable platform at
the Paris Exhibition, they tell me, on which a man steps, and having stepped
upon it is lazily carried to his destination in the building without lifting
a foot or moving a muscle. And some people seem to think that Christianity
is a platform of that sort, a ‘living way,’ on which, if once they get, they
may be as idle as they like, and they will reach their journey’s end. Not
so! Not so! By faith we enter on the race; through faith we receive the
power that will make us able to run and not be weary, and to walk and not
faint. But unless we run we shall not advance, and unless we advance we
shall not attain. Understand, then, that faith is the basis of effort, and
effort is the crown of faith. If we will thus trust ourselves to that Lord,
and draw from Him the power which He is infinitely willing to give, then the
great vision of the prophet will be fulfilled in our case, and we shall find
stretching across the low, swampy levels of this world ‘a highway,’ and it
shall be ‘a way of holiness, and no ravenous beast shall come up therein,
but the redeemed shall walk there, and the ransomed of the Lord shall
return, and come to Zion with songs and everlasting joy upon their heads:
they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.’
