Hebrews 13:5, 6 God's Voice and Man's Echo
‘He hath said, I will never leave
thee, nor forsake thee. 6. So that we may boldly say, The Lord is my helper,
and I will not fear what man shall do unto me.’ — Hebrews 13:5, 6.
‘HE hath said’; ‘we may... say.’ So,
then, here are two voices; or, rather, a voice and an echo — God’s voice of
promises, and man’s answering voice of confidence. God speaks to us that we
may speak to Him; and when He speaks His promises, the only fitting answer
is to accept them as true in all their fulness fixed confidence.
The writer quotes two passsges as from the Old Testament. The first of them
is not found verbatim anywhere there; the nearest approach to it, and
obviously the source of the quotation, occurs in a connection that is worth
noting. When Moses was handing over the charge of his people to his
successor, Joshua, he said first to the people and then to Joshua, ‘Be
strong and of good courage .... He will not fail thee, neither forsake
thee.’ The writer of the Epistle falls back upon these words with a slight
alteration, and turns ‘He’ into’ I,’ simply because he recognised that when
Moses spoke, God was speaking through him, and countersigning with His own
seal the promise which His servant made in His name. The other passage comes
from the 118th Psalm. So, then, let us listen to the divine voice and the
human answer.
I. God’s voice of promise.
‘He hath said, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee.’ Now, notice that
there is a distinct parallel between the position of the people to whom this
Epistle was addressed, and that of the Hebrews to whom the original promise
was made. The latter were standing on the verge of a great change. They were
passing from under the leadership of Moses, and going under the leadership
of the untried Joshua. Is it fanciful to recall that Joshua and Jesus are
the same name; and that the difficulty which Israel on the borders of Canaan
had to face, and the difficulty which these Hebrew Christians had to
encounter, were similar, being in each case a change of leaders — the
ceasing to look to Moses and the beginning to take commands from another? To
men in such a crisis, when venerable authority was becoming antiquated, it
might seem as if nothing was stable. Very appropriate, therefore, and strong
was the encouragement given by pointing away from the flowing river to the
Rock of Ages, rising changeless above the changing current off human life.
So Moses said to his generation, and the author of the Epistle says after
him to his contemporaries you may change the leaders, but you keep the one
Presence.
This letter goes on the principle throughout that everything which belonged
to Israel, in the way of institutions, sacred persons, promises, is handed
over to the Christian Church, and we are, as it were, served heirs to the
whole of these. So, then, to every one of us the message comes, and comes in
its most individual aspect, ‘I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee.’
Now, ‘to leave’ and ‘to forsake’ are identical, and the promise, if we keep
to the Authorised Version, is a repetition, in the two clauses, of the same
thought. But whilst the two clauses are substantially identical, there is a
very beautiful variation in the form in which the one assurance is given in
them. With regard to the first of them, ‘I will never leave thee,’ both in
the Hebrew and in the Greek the word which is employed, and which is
translated ‘leave,’ means the withdrawing of a hand that sustains. And so
the Revised Version wisely substitutes for ‘leave thee,’ ‘I will never fail
thee.’ We might even put it more colloquially, and approach more nearly the
original expression, if we said, ‘He will never drop thee’; never let His
hand slacken, never withdraw its sustaining power, but will communicate for
ever, day by day, not only the strength, but the conscious security that
comes from feeling that great, strong, gentle hand, closing thee round and
keeping thee tight. No man ‘shall pluck them out of My father’s hand.’
‘The Lord upholdeth all that fall,’ says one Psalm, and another of the
psalmists puts it even more picturesquely; ‘When I said my foot slippeth,
Thy mercy, O Lord, held me up,’ To Say ‘my foot slippeth,’ with a strong
emphasis on the ‘my’ is the sure way to be able to say the other thing: ‘Thy
mercy held me up.’ ‘He shall not fall, for the Lord is able to make him
stand.’ Suppose a man on some slippery glacier, not accustomed to ice- work,
as he feels his foot going out from under him, he gets nervous, and
nervousness means a fall, and a fall means disaster and sometimes death.
So he grips the guide’s hand, and then
he can walk. There is Peter, out on the sea that he had presumptuously asked
leave to walk on, and as he feels the cold water coming above his ankle, and
sees it rising higher and higher, he begins to fear, and his fear makes him
heavier, so that he sinks the faster, till the very extremity of need and
paroxysm of terror strike out a spark of faith, and faith and fear are
strangely blended in the cry: ‘Lord, save me.’ Christ’s outstretched hand
answered the cry, and its touch held Peter up, made him buoyant again, and
as he rose, the water seemed to sink beneath his feet, and on that heaving
pavement, glistening in the moonlight, he walked till he was helped into the
boat again. So will God do for us, if we will, for He has said: ‘I will
never relax My grasp. Nothing ‘shall ever come between My hand and thine.’
When a nurse or a mother is holding a child’s hand, her grip slackens unless
it is perpetually repeated by fresh nervous tension. So all human helps tend
to become less helpful, and all human love has its limits. But God’s hand
never slackens its grip, and we may be sure that, as He has grasped He will
hold, and ‘keep that which we have committed unto Him.’
But mark the other form of the promise. ‘I will never drop thee’ — that
promises the communication of sustaining strength according to our need:‘nor
forsake thee’ — that is the same promise, in another shape.
The tottering limbs need to be held
up. The lonely heart walking the way of life, lonely after all
companionship, and which has depths that the purest human love cannot sound,
and sometimes dark secrets that it durst not admit the dearest to behold —
that heart may have a divine companion. Here is a word for the solitary, and
we are all solitary. Some of us, more plainly than others, are called upon
to walk a lonely read in a great darkness, and to live lives little
apprehended, little sympathised with, by others, or perchance having for our
best companion, next to God, the memories of those who are beside us no
more. Moses died, Joshua took his place; but behind the dying Moses-buried
in his unknown grave, and left far away as the ties crossed the Jordan — and
behind the living Joshua, there was the Lord who liveth for ever. ‘I will
not forsake thee.’ Dear ones go, and take half our hearts with them People
misunderstand us. We feel that we dare not open out our whole selves to any.
We feel that, just as scientists tell us that no two atoms of the most solid
body are in actual juxtaposition, but that there is a film of air between
them, and hence all bodies are more or less elastic, if sufficient pressure
be applied, so after the closest companionship there is a film. But that
film makes no separation between us and God. ‘I will not drop thee’ — there
is the of strength according to our need. I will not forsake thee,’ there is
companionship in all our solitude.
But do not let us forget that all God’s promises have conditions appended,
and that this one has its conditions like all the rest. Was not the history
of Israel a contradiction of that glowing promise which was given them
before they crossed the Jordan? Does the Jew to-day look as if he belonged
to a nation that God would never leave nor forsake? Certainly not. And why?
Simply because God’s promise of not dropping us, and of never leaving us, is
contingent upon our not dropping Him, and of our never leaving Him.
‘No man shall pluck them out of My
Father’s hand’ No; but they can wriggle themselves out of their Father’s
hand. They can break the communion; they can separate themselves, and bring
a film, not of impalpable and pure atmosphere, but of poisonous gases,
between themselves and God. And God who, according to the grand old legend,
before the Roman soldier flung his torch into the Holy of Holies, and’ burnt
up the beautiful house where our fathers praised Him with fire,’ was heard
saying, ‘Let us depart hence,’ does say sometimes, when a man has gone away
from Him, ‘I will go and return to My place until they seek Me. In their
affliction, they will seek Me early.’
And now let me say a word about the second voice that sounds here.
II. The human answer, or the echo of the divine voice.
If God speaks to me, He waits for me to speak to Him. My answer should be
immediate, and my answer should embrace as true all that He has said to me,
and my answer should build upon His great faithful promise a great
triumphant confidence. Do we speak to God in the strain in which He speaks
to us? When He says, ‘I will,’ do our hearts leap up with joyful confidence,
and answer, ‘Thou dost’? Do we take all His promises for our trust, or do we
meet His firm ‘assurance with a feeble, faltering faith? We turn God’s
‘verily’ into a peradventure, often, and at best when He says to us ‘I
will,’ we doubtingly say ‘perhaps He may.’ That is the kind of faith, even
at its highest, with which the best of us meet this great promise, building
frail tabernacles on the Rock of Ages and putting shame on God’s
faithfulness by our faithlessness. ‘He hath said,’ and then He pauses and
listens, whether we are going to say anything in answer, and whether when He
promises: ‘I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee,’ We are bold to say,
‘The Lord is my helper, I will not fear what man can do unto me.’ Now, I do
not suppose that I am’ keeping too slavishly to the mere words of the text
if I ask you to look at the beautiful sequence of thought in these three
clauses which make the response of the man to the divine promise. There is a
kind of throb of wonder in that word. ‘The Lord is my helper.’ That is the
answer of faith to the divine promise, grasping it, never hesitating about
it, laying it upon the heart, or on the fevered forehead like a cooling
leaf, to subdue the hot pulsations there. And then what comes next? ‘I will
not fear.’ We have the power of controlling our apprehension of peril, but
it is Of no use to screw ourselves up to a fictitious courage which consists
mainly in the ostrich’s wisdom of hiding its head from the danger, and in
saying, ‘Who is afraid?’ Unless we can say ‘The Lord is my helper,’ it is
folly to say, ‘I will not be afraid, I will brace myself up, and be
courageous to meet these difficulties. That is all right, but it is not all
right unless we have laid the right foundation for courage. Having our
purged ears opened to hear the great, strong, sweet divine promise, we are
able to coerce our terrors, and to Banish them from our minds By the
assurance that, whatever comes, God is with us. ‘The Lord is my helper ‘ —
that is the foundation, and built upon that — and madness unless it is built
upon it— is the courage which says to all my fears,’ Down, down, you are not
to get the mastery over me.’ ‘I will trust,’ says the Psalmist, ‘and not be
afraid.’ Faith is the antagonist to fear, because faith grasps the fact of
the divine promise.
Now, there is another thought which may come in here since it is suggested
by the context, and that is, that the recognition of God thus, as always
With us to sustain us, makes all earthly conditions tolerable. The whole of
my text is given as the ground of the exhortation: ‘Be content with such
things as ye have,’ for He hath said, ‘I will never leave thee.’ If Thou
dost not leave me, then such things as I have are enough for me, and if Thou
hast gone away, no things that I merely have are of much good to me. And
then comes the last stage in our answer to what God says, which is better
represented by a slight variation in translation, putting the last words of
my text as a question: ‘What can man do unto me?’ It is safe to look at men
and things, and their possibly calamitous action upon our outward lives,
when we have done the other two things, grasped God and rested in faith on
Him. If we begin with what ought to come last, and look first at what man
can do unto us, then fear will surge over us, as it ought to do. But if we
follow the order of faith, and start with God’s promise, grapple that to our
heart, and put down with strong hand the craven dread that coils round our
hearts, then we can look out with calm eyes upon all the appearances that
may threaten evil, and say, ‘Come on, Come all, my foot is on the Rock of
Ages, and my back is against it, No man can touch me,’ So we may boldly say,
‘What can man do unto me?’
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Hebrews 13:8 The Unchanging Christ
‘Jesus Christ the mine yesterday,
and today, and for ever: — Hebrews 13:8.
How far back does this ‘yesterday’ go?
The limit must be found by observing that it is ‘Jesus Christ’ who is spoken
of — that is to say, the Incarnate Saviour. That observation disposes of the
reference of these words to the past eternity in which the eternal Word of
God was what He is to-day. The sameness that is referred to here is neither
the sameness of the divine Son from all eternity, nor the sameness of the
medium of revelation in both the old and the new dispensations, but the
sameness of the human Christ to all generations of His followers. And the
epoch referred to in the ‘yesterday’ is defined more closely if we observe
the previous context, which speaks of the dying teachers who have had the
rule and have passed away. The ‘yesterday’ is the period of these departed
teachers; the ‘to-day’ is the period of the writer and his readers.
But whilst the words of my text are thus narrowly: limited, the attribute,
which is predicated of Christ in them, is something more than belongs to
manhood, and requires for its foundation the assumption of His deity. He is
the unchanging Jesus because He is the divine Son. The text resumes at the
end of the Epistle, the solemn words of the first chapter, which referred
the declaration of the Psalmist to ‘the Son’ — ‘Thou art the same, and thy
years shall not fail.’ That Son, changeless and eternal by divine
immutability, is Jesus Christ, the incarnate Redeemer.
This text may well be taken as our motto in looking forward, as I suppose we
are all of us more or less doing, and trying to forecast the dim outlines of
the coming events of this New Year. Whatever may happen, let us hold fast by
that confidence, ‘Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, and today, and for
ever.’
I. I apply these words, then, as a New-Year’s motto, in two or three
different directions, and ask you to consider, first, the unchanging Christ
in His relation to our changeful lives.
The one thing of which anticipation may be sure is that nothing continues in
one stay. True, ‘that which is to be hath already been’; true, there is
‘nothing new under the sun’; but just as in the physical world the infinite
variety of creatures and things is all made Out of a few very simple
elements, so, in our lives, out of a comparatively small number of possible
incidents, an immense variety of combinations results, with the effect that,
while we may be sure of the broad outlines of our future, we are all in the
dark as to its particular events, and only know that ceaseless change with
characterise it. So all forward looking must have a touch of fear in it, and
there is only one thing that will enable us to front the else intolerable
certainty of uncertainty, and that is, to fall back upon this thought’ of my
text, ‘Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever.’
The one lesson of our changeful lives ought to be for each of us the
existence of that which changes not. By the very law of contrast, and by the
need of finding sufficient reason for the changes, we are driven from the
contemplation of the fleeting to the vision of the permanent. The waves of
this stormy sea of life ought to fling us all high and dry on the safe
shore. Blessed are they who, in a world of passing phenomena, penetrate to
the still centre of rest, and looking over all the vacillations of the
things that can be shaken, can turn to the Christ and say, Thou who movest
all things art Thyself unmoved; Thou who changest all things, Thyself
changest not. As the moon rises slow and silvery, with its broad shield, out
of the fluctuations of the ocean, so the one radiant Figure of the all
sufficient and immutable Lover and Friend of our souls should rise for us
out of the billows of life’s tossing ocean, and come to us across the seal
Brother! let the fleeting proclaim to you the permanent; let the world with
its revolutions lead you up to the thought of Him who is the same for ever.
For that is the only thought on which a man can build, and, building, be at
rest.
The yesterday of my text may either be applied to the generations that have
passed, and then the ‘to-day’ is our little life; or may be applied to my
own yesterday, and then the to-day is this narrow present. In either
application the words of my text are full of hope and of joy. In the former
they say to us that no time can waste, nor any drawing from the fountain can
diminish the all-sufficiency of that divine Christ in whom eighteen
centuries have trusted and been ‘lightened, and their faces were not
ashamed.’ The yesterday of His grace to past generations: is the prophecy of
the future and the law for the present. There is nothing that any past epoch
has ever drawn from Him, of courage and confidence, of hope and wisdom, of
guidance and strength, of love and consolation, of righteousness and purity,
of brave hope and patient endurance, which He does not stand by my side
ready to give to me too to-day, ‘As we have heard, so have we seen in the
city of the Lord of Hosts,’ and the old Christ of a thousand years ago is
the Christ of to-day, ready to help, to succour, and to make us like
Himself.
In the second reference, narrowing the ‘yesterdays’ to our own experiences,
the words are full of consolation and of hope. ‘Thou hast been my Help;
leave me not, neither forsake me,’ is the prayer that ought to be taught us
by every remembrance of what Jesus Christ has been to us. The high-water
mark of His possible sweetness does not lie in some irrevocable past moment
of our lives. We never have to say that we have found a sufficiency in Him
which we never shall find any more. Remember the time in your experience
when Jesus Christ was most tender, most near, most sweet, most mysterious,
most soul-sufficing for you, and be sure that He stands beside you, ready to
renew the ancient blessing and to surpass it in His gift. Man’s love
sometimes wearies, Christ’s never; man’s basket may be emptied, Christ’s is
fuller after the distribution than it was before. This fountain can never
run dry. Not until seven times, but Until seventy times seven — perfection
multiplied into perfection, and that again multiplied by perfection once
more — is the limit of the inexhaustible mercy of our Lord, and all in which
the past has been rich lives in the present. Remember, too, that this same
thought which heartens us to front the inevitable changes, also gives
dignity, beauty, poetry, to the small prosaic present. ‘Jesus Christ is the
same to-day.’ We are always tempted to think that this moment is commonplace
and insignificant. Yesterday lies consecrated in memory; to-morrow, radiant
in hope; but to-day is poverty- stricken and prose. The sky is farthest away
from us right over our heads; behind and in front it seems to touch the
earth. But if we will only that all that sparkling lustre and all that more
than mortal tenderness of pity and of love with which Jesus Christ has
irradiated and sweetened any past is verily here with us amidst the
commonplaces and insignificant duties of the dusty to-day, then we need look
back to no purple distance, nor forward to any horizon where sky and earth
kiss, but feel that here or nowhere, now or never, is Christ the
all-sufficient and unchanging Friend. He is faithful. He cannot deny
Himself.
II. So, secondly, I apply these words in another direction. I ask you to
think of the relation between the unchanging Christ and the dying helpers.
That is the connection in which the words occur in my text. The writer has
been speaking of the subordinate and delegated leaders and rulers in the
Church ‘who have spoken the word of God’ and who have passed away, leaving a
faith to be followed, and a conversation the end of which is to be
considered. And, turning from all these mortal companions, helpers, guides,
he bids us think of Him who liveth for ever, and for ever is the teacher,
the companion the home of our hearts, and the goal of our love. All other
ties — sweet, tender, infinitely precious, have been or will be broken for
you and me. Some of us have to look back upon their snapping; some of us
have to look forward. But there is one bond over which the skeleton fingers
of Death have no power, and they fumble at that knot in vain. He separates
us from all others; blessed be God! he cannot separate us from Christ. ‘I
shall lose Thee though I die’; and Thou, Thou diest never.
God’s changeful providence comes into all our lives, and ports dear ones,
making their places empty, that Christ Himself may fill the empty places,
and, striking away other props, though the tendrils that twine round them
bleed with the wrench, in order that the plant may no longer trail along the
ground, but twine itself round the Cross and climb to the Christ upon the
throne. ‘In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a
throne.’ The true King was manifested when the earthly, shadowy monarch was
swept away. And just as, on the face of some great wooded cliff, when the
leaves drop, the solemn strength of the everlasting rock gleams out pure, so
when our dear ones fall away, Jesus Christ is revealed, ‘the same yesterday,
and to-day, and for ever.’ ‘They tautly were many, because they were not
suffered to continue by reason of death.’ ‘This Man continueth ever.’ He
lives, and in Him all loves and companionships live unchanged. III. So,
further, we apply, in the third place, this thought to the relation between
the unchanging Christ and decaying institutions and opinions.
The era in which this Epistle was written was an era of revolution no great
that we can scarcely imagine its apparent magnitude. It was close upon the
final destruction of the ancient system of Judaism an external institution.
The temple was tottering o its fall, the nation was ready to be scattered,
and the writer, speaking to Hebrews, to whom that crash seemed to be the
passing away of the eternal verities of God, bids them lift their eyes above
all the chaos and dust of dissolving institutions and behold the true
Eternal, the ever-living Christ. He warns them in the verse that follows nay
text not to be carried about with divers and strange doctrines, bat to keep
fast to the unchanging Jesus. And so these words may well come to us with
lessons of encouragement, and with teaching of duty and steadfastness, in an
epoch of much unrest and change — social, theological, ecclesiastical— such
as that in which our lot is cast. Man’s systems are the shadows on the
hillside. Christ is the everlasting solemn mountain itself, Much in the
popular conception and representation of Christianity is in the act of
passing. Let it go; Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, and to-day, and for
ever. We need not fear change within the limits of His Church or of His
world. For change there means progress, and the more the human creations and
embodiments of Christian truth crumble and disintegrate, the more distinctly
does the solemn, single, unique figure of Christ the Same, rise before us.
There is nothing in the world’s history to compare with the phenomenon which
is presented by the unworn freshness of Jesus Christ after all these
centuries. All other men, however burning and shining their light, flicker
and die out into extinction, and but for a season can the world rejoice in
any of their beams; but this Jesus dominates the ages, and is as fresh
to-day, in spite of all that men say, as He was eighteen centuries ago. They
toll us He is losing His power; they tell us that mists of oblivion are
wrapping Him round, as He moves slowly to the doom which besets Him in
common with all the great names of the world. The wish is father to the
thought. Christ is not done with yet, nor has the world done with Him, nor
is He less available for the necessities of this generation, with its
perplexities and difficulties, than He was in the past. His sameness is
consistent with an infinite unfolding of new preciousness and new powers, as
new generations with new questions arise, and the world seeks for fresh
guidance. ‘I write no new commandment unto you’; I preach no new Christ unto
you, ‘again, a new commandment I write unto you,’ and every generation will
find new impulse, new teaching, new shaping energies, social and individual,
ecclesiastical, theological, intellectual, in the old Christ who was
crucified for our offences and raised again for our justification, and
remains ‘the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever.’ IV. Lastly, look at
these words in their application to the relation between the unchanging
Christ and the eternal life of heaven.
The ‘for ever’ of my text is not to be limited to this present life, but it
runs on into the remotest future, and summons up before us the grand and
boundless prospect of an eternal unfolding and reception of new beauties in
the old earthly Christ. For Him the change between the ‘to-day’ of His
earthly life and the ‘for ever’ of His ascended glory made no change in the
tenderness of His heart, the sweetness of His smile, the nearness of His
helping hand. The beloved apostle, when he saw Him for the first time after
He was ascended, fell at His feet as dead, because the attributes of His
nature had become so glorious. But when the old hand, the same hand that had
been pierced with the nails on the Cross, though it now held the seven
stars, was laid upon him, and the old voice, the same voice that had spoken
to him in the upper room, and in feebleness from the Cross,’ though it was
now as the ‘sound of many waters,’ said to him, ‘Fear not, I am the first
and the last; I am He that liveth and was dead and am alive for ever more’;
John learned that the change from the Cross to the throne touched but the
circumference of his Master’s Being, and left the whole centre of His love
and brotherhood wholly unaffected.
Nor will the change for us, from earth
to the close communion of the heavens, bring us into contact with a changed
Christ. It will be but like the experience of a man starting from the
outermost verge of the solar system, where that giant, planet welters, away
out in the darkness and the cold, and travelling inwards ever nearer and
nearer to the central light, the warmth becoming more fervent, the radiance
becoming more wondrous, as he draws closer and closer to the greatness which
he divined when he was far away, and which he knows better when he is beside
it. It will be the same Christ, the Mediator, the Revealer in heaven, whom
we here dimly saw and knew to be the Sun of our souls through the clouds and
mists of earth.
That radiant and eternal sameness will
consist with continual variety, and an endless streaming forth of new
lustres and new powers. But through all the growing proximity and
illumination of the heavens He will be the same Jesus that we knew upon
earth; still the Friend and the Lover of our souls. So, dear friends, if you
and I have Him for our very own, then we do not need to fear change, for
change will be progress; nor loss, for loss will be gain; nor the storm of
life, which will drive us to His breast; nor the solitude of death, for our
Shepherd will be with us there. He will be ‘the same for ever’; though we
shall know Him more deeply; even as we shall be the same, though ‘changed
from glory into glory.’. If we have Him, we may be sure, on earth, of a
‘to-morrow,’ which ‘shall be as this day, and much more abundant.’ If we
have Him, we may be sure of a heaven in which the sunny hours of its
unending day will be filled with fruition and ever new glories from the old
Christ who, for earth and heaven, is ‘the same yesterday, and to-day, and
for ever.’
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Hebrews 13:9 - An Established Heart
‘... It is a good thing that the heart be established with grace.’ — Hebrews
13:9.
This saying immediately follows the
exhortation with which it is contrasted: ‘Be not carried away with divers
and strange doctrines.’ Now, it is quite clear that the unsettlement and
moving past some fixed point which are suggested in the word ‘carried away’
are contrasted with the fixedness which is implied in the main word of our
text. They who are established, ‘rooted and grounded,’ are not apt to be
swept away by the blasts of ‘divers and strange doctrines.’ But there is
another contrast besides this, and that is the one which exists between
doctrines and grace; and there is a still further subsequent contrast in the
words that follow my text, ‘It is a good thing that the heart be established
with grace; not with meats.
Now I need not trouble you with the question as to what was the original
reference of either of these two expressions, ‘doctrines’ and ‘meats,’ or
whether they both point to some one form of teaching. What I rather want to
emphasise here, in a sentence, is how, in these three principal words of
three successive clauses, we get three aspects of the religious life — two
of them spurious and partial, one of them sufficing and complete
—‘teachings’; ‘grace’; ‘meats.’ Turned into modern English, the writer’s
meaning is that the merely intellectual religion, which is always occupied
with propositions instead of with Jesus Christ, ‘Who is the same yesterday,
and to-day, and for ever,’ is worthless, and the merely ceremonial religion,
which is always occupied with casuistries about questions of meats, or
external observance of any sort, is as valueless. There is no fixity; there
is no rest of soul, no steadfastness of character to be found in either of
these two directions. The only thing that ballasts and fills and calms the
heart is what the writer here calls ‘grace,’ that is to say, the living
personal experience of the love of God bestowed upon me and dwelling in my
heart. You may have doctrines chattered to all eternity, and you may be so
occupied about the externals of religion as that yon never come near its
centre, and its centre is that great thing which is here called ‘grace,’
which alone has power to establish the man’s heart.
So, then, the main theme of these words is the possible stability of a
fluctuating human life, the means of securing it, and the glory and beauty
of the character which has secured it. Let us turn to then thoughts for a
moment.
I. First, then, mark what this writer conceives to be the one source of
human stability.
‘It is a good thing that the heart be established with grace.’ Now I have a
strong suspicion that a great deal of preaching goes over the heads of the
hearers, because preachers have not gauged the ignorance of their auditory,
and that, howsoever familiar to the ear the key-words of Christian
revelation may be, it by no means follows that there is any definite and
clear idea attached to these. So I do not think that it will be a waste of
time for just a minute or two to try and put, as plainly as I can, what the
New Testament means by this familiar and frequently reiterated word ‘grace,’
which, I suspect, is oftener pronounced than it is understood by a great
many people.
To begin with, then, the root meaning of that word, which runs all through
the New Testament, is simply favour, benignity, kindness, or to put all into
a better and simpler form, the active love of God. Now, if we look at the
various uses of the expression we find, for instance, that it is contrasted
with a number of other things. Sometimes it is set in opposition to sin —
sin reigns to righteousness, grace reigns to life. Sometimes it is
contrasted with ‘debt,’ and sometimes put in opposition to ‘works,’ as, for
instance, by Paul when he says, ‘If it be of works then is it no more
grace.’ Sometimes it is opposed to law, as in the same apostle’s words, ‘Ye
are not under law, but under grace.’ Now, if we keep these various uses and
contrasts in view we just come to this thought, that that active love of God
is conditioned, not by any merit on our part — bubbles up from the depths of
His own infinite heart, not because of what we are, but because of what He
is, transcends all the rigid retributions of law, is not turned away by my
sin, but continues to flood the world, simply because it wells up from the
infinite and changeless fountain of love in the heart of God.
And then, from this central, deepest meaning of active love manifesting
itself irrespective of what we deserve, there comes a second great aspect of
the word. The cause gives its name to the effect, and the communicated
blessings and gifts which flow to men from the love of God are designated by
this great name. You know we have the same kind of idiom in our own tongue.
‘Kindness’ is the disposition; ‘a kindness’ is a single deed which flows
from that disposition. ‘Favour’ is the way in which we regard a man; ‘a
favour’ is the act or gift which manifests and flows from the regard. The
water in the pitchers is the same as the water in the spring. The name of
the cause is extended to all the lustrous variety of its effects. So the
complex whole of the blessings and gifts which Jesus Christ brings to us,
and which are sometimes designated in view of what they do for us, as
salvation or eternal life, are also designated in view of that in God from
which they come, as being collectively His ‘grace.’
All the gifts that Christ brings are, we may say, but the love of God made
visible in its bestowal upon us. The meteor that rushes through space
catches fire when it passes into our atmosphere. The love of God, when it
comes into our manifold necessities, is made visible in the large gifts
which it bestows upon them.
And then there is a final application
of the expression which is deduced from that second one — viz., the specific
and individual excellences of character or conduct which result from the
communication to men of the blessings that flow to Him from the love of God.
So these three: first the fountain, the love undisturbed and unalterable;
second, the stream, the manifold gifts and blessings that flow to us through
Christ; and third, the little cupfuls that each of us have, the various
beauties and excellences of character which are developed under the
fertilising influences of the sunshine of that love-these three are all
included in this great Christian word.
There are other phases of its employment in the New Testament which I do not
need to trouble you with now. But thus far we just come to this, that the
one ground on which all steadfastness and calm tranquillity and settlement
of nature and character can be reared is that we shall be in touch with God,
shall be conscious of His love, and shall be receiving into our hearts the
strength that He bestows. Man is a dependent creature; his make and his
relationships to things round him render it impossible that the strength by
which he is strong and the calmness by which he is established can be
self-originated. They must come from without. There is only one way by which
we can be kept from being drifted away by the currents and blown away by the
tempests that run and range through every life, and that is that we shall
anchor ourselves on God. His grace, His love possessed, and the sufficing
gifts for all our hungry desires which come through that love possessed,
these, and these alone, are the conditions of human stability.
II. And so I come, in the second place, to look at some of the various
ways in which this establishing grace calms and stills the life.
We men are like some of the islands in the Eastern Tropics, fertile and
luxuriant, but subject to be swept by typhoons, to be shaken by earthquakes,
to be devastated by volcanoes. Around us there gather external foes
assailing our steadfastness, and within us there He even more formidable
enemies to an established and settled peace. We are like men carrying powder
through a conflagration; bearing a whole magazine of combustibles within us,
upon which at any moment a spark may alight. How are such creatures ever to
be established? My text tells us by drawing into themselves the love, the
giving love of God; and in the consciousness of that love, and in the rest
of spirit that comes from the true possession of its gifts, there will be
found the secret of tranquillity for the most storm- ridden life.
I would note, as one of the aspects of
the tranquillity and establishment that comes from this conscious possession
of the giving love of God, how it delivers men from all the dangers of being
‘carried away by divers strange doctrines.’ I do not give much for any
orthodoxy which is not vitalised by personal experiences of the indwelling
love of God. I do not care much what a man believes, or what he denies, or
how he may occupy himself intellectually with the philosophical and
doctrinal aspect of Christian revelation. The question is, how much of it
has filtered from his brain into his heart, and has become part of himself,
and verified to himself by his own experience? So much, and not one
hairbreadth more, of the Christian creed is your creed. So much as you have
lived out, so much you are sure of because you have not only thought it but
felt it, and cannot for a moment doubt, because your hearts have risen up
and witnessed to its truth. About these parts of your belief there will be
no fluctuation. There is no real and permanent grasp of any parts of
religious truth except such as is verified by personal experience. And that
sturdy blind man in the gospels had got hold of the true principle of the
most convincing Christian apologetics when he said, ‘You may talk as long as
you like about the question whether this man is a sinner or not; settle it
anyhow you please. One thing I know, that whereas I was blind now I see.’
The ‘grace’ that had come to him in a purely external form established as a
foundation axiom for his thinking, that the man who had done that for him
was a messenger from God. That is the way by which you will come to a hold
worth calling so of Christian truth, and unless you come to it by that hold
it does not matter much whether you believe it or deny it all.
But, if there be such a living consciousness of the true possession of God’s
love giving you these blessings, then with great equanimity and openness of
mind you can regard the discussion that may be raging about a great many
so-called ‘burning’ questions. If I know that Jesus Christ died for me, and
that my soul is saved because He did, it does not matter very much to me who
wrote the Pentateuch, or whether the Book of Jonah is a parable or a
history. I can let all such questions-and I only refer to these as specimens
— be settled by appropriate evidence, by the experts, without putting myself
in a fluster, and can say, ‘I am not going to be carried away. My heart is
established in grace.’
Still further, this conscious possession of the grace of God will keep a man
very quiet amidst all the occasions for agitation which changing
circumstances bring. Such there are in every life. Nothing continues in one
stay. Thunder-claps, earthquakes, tempests, shocks of doom come to every one
of us. Is it possible that amidst this continuous fluctuation, in which
nothing is changeless but the fact of change, we can stand fixed and firm?
Yes! As they say on the other side of the Border, there is a ‘low,’ place at
the back of the wall. There is shelter only in one spot, and that is when we
have God between us and the angry blast. And oh, brother, if there steal
into a man’s heart, and be faithfully kept there, the quiet thought that God
is with him, to bless and keep and communicate to him all that he needs, why
should he be troubled? ‘He shall not be afraid of evil tidings.’ What?
In this world full of evil? Yes. ‘He
shall not be afraid of evil tidings. His heart is fixed; trusting in the
Lord.’ An empty heart is an easily agitated heart. A full heart, like a full
sack, stands upright, and it is not so easy for the wind to whirl it about
as if it were empty. They who are rooted in God will have a firm bole, which
will be immovable, howsoever branches may sway and creak, and leaves may
flutter and dance, or even fall, before the power of the storm. They who
have no hold upon that grace are like the chaff which the wind drives from
the threshing-floor. The storms of life will sweep you away unless the heart
be ‘established in grace.’
Further, another form of the stability communicated by that possessed love
of God is in regard to the internal occasions for agitation. Passion, lust,
hot desires, bitter regrets, eager clutching after uncertain and
insufficient and perishable good, all these will be damped down if the love
of God lives in our hearts. Oh, brethren, it is ourselves that disturb
ourselves, and not the world that disturbs us. ‘There is no joy hut calm’;
and there is no calm but in the possession of the grace which is the giving
love of God.
III. Lastly, my text suggests how beautiful a thing is the character of
the man that is established in grace.
The word translated ‘good’ in my text would be better rendered ‘fair,’ or
‘lovely,’ or ‘beautiful,’ or some such expression conveying the idea that
the writer was thinking, not so much about the essential goodness as about
the beauty, in visible appearance, of a character which was thus established
by grace. Is there anything fairer than the strong, steadfast, calm, equable
character, unshaken by the storms of passion, unaffected by the blasts of
calamity, un-devastated by the lava from the hellish subterranean fires that
are in every soul; and yet not stolidly insensible nor obstinately
conservative, but open to the inspiration of each successive moment, and
gathering the blessed fruit of all mutability in a more profound and
unchanging possession of the unchanging good? Surely the gospel which brings
to men the possibility of being thus established brings to them the highest
ideal of fair human character.
So do you see to it that you rectify your notions of what makes the beauty
of character. There is many a poor old woman in a garret who presents, if
not to men, at any rate to angels and to God, a far fairer character than
the vulgar ideals which most people have. The beauty of meek patience, of
persistent endeavour, of calm, steadfast trust, is fairer than all the
‘purple patches’ which the world admires because they are gaudy, and which
an eye educated by looking at Jesus turns from with disgust, And do you see
to it that you cultivate that type of excellence. It is a great deal easier
to cultivate other kinds. It is hard to be quiet, hard to rule one’s stormy
nature, hard to stand ‘foursquare to every wind that blows.’ But it is
possible — possible on one condition, that we drive our roots through all
the loose shingle on the surface, ‘the things seen and temporal,’ and
penetrate to the eternal substratum that lies beneath it all.
Then, my brother, if we keep ourselves near Jesus Christ, and let His grace
flow into our hearts, then we, too, shall be able to say, ‘Because I set Him
at my right hand I shall not be moved,’ and we may be able to carry, by His
grace, even through the storms of life and amidst all the agitations of our
own passions and desires, a steady light, neither blown about by tempests
without, nor pulsating with alternations of brightness and dimness by reason
of intermittent supplies from within, but blazing with the steadfast
splendour of the morning star. ‘ He that believeth shall not make haste.’
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Hebrews 13:10, 15 Our Altar
‘We have an altar, whereof they
have no right to eat which serve the tabernacle. 15. By him therefore let us
offer the sacrifice of praise to God continually: — Hebrews 13:10, 15.
‘We have an altar.’ There is a certain
militant emphasis on the words in the original, as if they were an assertion
of something that had been denied. Who the deniers are is plain enough. They
were the adherents of Judaism, who naturally found Christianity a strange
contrast to their worship, of which altar and sacrifice were prominent
features.
Just as to heathen nations the ritual of Judaism, its empty shrine, and
temple without a God, were a puzzle and a scoff, so to heathen and Jew, the
bare, starved worship of the Church, without temple, priest, sacrifice, or
altar, was a mystery and a puzzle.
The writer of this letter in those words, then, in accordance with the
central theme of his whole Epistle, insists that Christianity has more truly
than heathenism or Judaism, altar and sacrifice.
And he is not content with alleging its possession o£ the reality of the
altar, but he goes further, insists upon the superiority, even in that
respect, of the Christian system.
He points to the fact that the great sin-offering of the Jewish ritual was
not partaken of by the offerers, but consumed by fire without the camp, and
he implies, in the earlier words of my text, that the Christian sacrifice
differs from, and is superior to, the Jewish in this particular, that on it
the worshippers feasted and fed.
Then, in the last words of my text, he touches upon another point of
superiority — viz., that all Christian men are priests of this altar, and
have to offer upon it sacrifices of thanksgiving.
And so he exalts the purely spiritual worship of Christianity as not only
possessed of all which the gorgeous rituals round about it presented, but as
being high above them even in regard to that which seemed their special
prerogative. So, then, we have three things here — our Christian altar; our
Christian feast on the sacrifice; and our Christian sacrifices on the altar.
Let us regard these successively.
I. First, then, our Christian altar.
‘We have,’ says the writer, with a triumphant emphasis upon the word, ‘We
have an altar’; ‘though there seems none visible in our external worship;
and some of our converts miss the sensuous presentation to which they were
accustomed; and others are puzzled by it, and taunt us with its absence.’
Now it is to be noticed, I think, that though in sacrificial religions the
altar is the centre-point round which the temple is reared, it is of no
moment in itself, and only comes into consideration as being that upon which
the sacrifice is offered. So I do not suppose that any specific object was
in the mind of the writer as answering to the altar in those sacrificial
systems. He was thinking most of the sacrifice that was laid upon the altar,
and of the altar only in connection therewith. But if we are not satisfied
with such an explanation of the words, there are two interpretations open to
us.
One is that the Cross is the altar.
But that seems to me too gross and material, and savouring too much of the
very error which this whole Epistle is written to destroy — viz., that the
material is of moment, as measured against the spiritual. The other
explanation is much to be preferred, according to which, if the altar has
any special significance, it means the divine-human personality of Jesus
Christ, on and in which the sacrifice is offered.
But the main thing to be laid hold of here is, I take it, that the central
fact of Christianity is an altar, on which lies a sacrifice. If we are to
accept the significance that I have suggested as possible for the emblem of
my text, then the altar expresses the great mystery and gospel of the
Incarnation, and the sacrifice expresses the great mystery and gospel of the
passion of Christ’s life and death, which is the atonement for our sins.
But that possibly is too much of a refinement, and so I confine myself here
to the general ideas suggested — that the very living heart of the gospel is
an altar and a sacrifice. That idea saturates the whole New Testament, from
the page where John the forerunner’s proclamation is, ‘Behold the Lamb of
God, which taketh away the sin of the world,’ to the last triumphant vision
in which the Apocalyptic seer ‘beheld a Lamb as it had been slain’; the
eternal Co-Regnant of the universe, and the mediation through whom the whole
surrounding Church for ever worships the Father.
The days are past, as it seems to me,
when any man can reasonably contend that the New Testament does not teach —
in every page of it, I was going to say — this truth of the sacrifice of
Jesus Christ. Time was when violent contortions and effort were resorted to
in order to explain its language as not necessarily involving that
significance. But we have got beyond that now, and we oftener hear from
deniers this: ‘Oh yes! I admit that throughout the New Testament this
sacrificial idea is present, but that is only a chip of the old shell of
Judaism, and we are above that level of religious thought.’
Now, I am not going to enter upon a discussion, for which neither place nor
time are suited; but I will just suggest that the relation between the
ancient system of revelation, with its sacrifice, altar, priest, temple, and
the new system of Christianity is far more profoundly, and, I believe, far
more philosophically, set forth in this Epistle to the Hebrews, as being the
relation between shadow and substance, between prophecy and fulfilment, than
when the old is contemptuously brushed aside as ‘Hebrew old clothes,’ with
which the true Christianity has no concern. Judaism teas because Christ was
to be, and the ancient ritual (whether modern ideas of the date of its
origin be accepted or no) was a God-appointed mirror, in which, the shadow
of the coming event was presented. Jesus Christ is all which temple, priest,
altar, sacrifice proclaimed should one day be. And just as the relation
between Christ’s work and the Judaic system of external ritual sacrifices is
that of shadow and substance, prophecy and fulfilment, so, in analogous
manner, the relation between the altar and sacrifice of the New Testament
and all the systems of heathenism, with their smoking altars, is that these
declare a want, and this affords its supply; that these are the confession
of humanity that it is conscious of sin, separation, alienation, and that
need of a sacrifice, and that Christ is what heathenism in all lands has
wailed that it needs, and has desperately hoped that it might find.
There are many attempts made to explain on other grounds the universality of
sacrifice, and to weaken the force of its witness to the deep necessities of
humanity as rooted in the consciousness of sin, but I venture to affirm that
all these are superficial, and that the study of comparative religions goes
on wrong lines unless it recognises in the whole heathen world a longing,
the supply of which it recognises in Jesus Christ and His work. I venture to
say that that is a truer philosophy of religion than much that nowadays
calls itself by the name.
And what lies in this great thought? I am not going to attempt a theory of
the Atonement. I do not believe that any such thing is completely possible
for us. But this, at least, I recognise as being fundamental and essential
to the thought of my text; ‘we have an altar,’ that Christ in His
representative relation, in His true affinity to every man upon earth, has
in His life or death taken upon Himself the consequences of human
transgression, not merely by sympathy, nor only by reason of the
uniqueness-of His representative relation, but by willing submission to that
awful separation from the Father, of which the cry out of the thick darkness
of the Cross, ‘Why hast Thou forsaken Me?’ is the unfathomable witness.
Thus, bearing our sin, He bears it away, and ‘we have an altar.’
Now notice that this great truth has a distinct teaching for those who
hanker after externalities of ritual The writer of this Epistle uses it for
the purpose of declaring that in the Christian Church, because of its
possession of the true sacrifice, there is no room for any other; that
priest, temple, altar, sacrifice in any material external forms are an
anachronism and a contradiction of the very central idea of the gospel And
it seems very strange that sections of Christendom should so have been blind
to the very meaning of my text, and so missed the lesson which it teaches,
and fallen into the error which it opposes, as that these very words, which
are a protest against any materialisation of the idea of altar and
sacrifice, should have been twisted to mean by the altar the table of the
Lord, and by sacrifice the communion of His body and blood. But so it is. So
strong are the tendencies in our weak humanity to grasp at some sensuous
embodiment of the truth that the Christian Church, as a whole, has not been
able to keep on the lofty levels of my text, and has hungered after some
external signs to which it may attach notions of efficacy which attach only
to the spiritual sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Thus we have got a strange
contradiction, as it seems to me, of the spirit and letter of my text, and
of the whole Epistle from which it comes, and there, has crept
surreptitiously into, and been obstinately maintained in, large sections of
the Christian Church the idea o£ a sacrificing priesthood, and of a true
sacrifice offered upon a material altar. My text protests against all that,
and said to these early Christians what it says to us: ‘Go into your upper
rooms and there offer your worship, which to sense seems so bare and
starved. Never mind though people say there is nothing in your system for
sense to lay hold of. So much the better. Never mind though you can present
no ritual with an altar, and a priest, and a sacrifice. All these are swept
away for ever, because once Jesus Christ hath put away sin by the sacrifice
of Himself. Our temple is His body; our priest is before the throne. We rear
no altar; He has died. Our sacrifice was offered on Calvary, and
henceforward our worship, cleared from these materialities, rises unto
loftier regions, and we worship God in the spirit, and have no confidence in
the flesh.’
Still further, this truth has a bearing on the opposite pole of error, on
those who would fain have a Christianity without an altar. I am not going to
say how far genuine discipleship of Jesus Christ is possible with the
omission of this article from the creed. It is no business of mine to
determine that, but it is my business, as I think, to assert this, that a
Christianity without an altar is a Christianity without power; impotent to
move the world or to control the individual heart, inadequate to meet the
needs and the cravings of men. Where are the decaying Christians? Where are
the Christians that have let go the central fact of an incarnate sacrifice
for the world’s sin? The answer to the two questions is the same. Wherever
you find a feeble grasp of that central truth, or a faltering utterance of
it on the part of the preachers, there you find deadness and formality.
Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ’s servants, I was going to say, obey the same
law, and that law is, no cross, no crown. If Christ has not died, the
world’s sacrifice, He will never reign, the world’s King. If His Cross be an
altar it is a throne. If it be not, it is merely a gallows, on which a
religious enthusiast, with many sweet and lovable qualities, died a long
time ago, and it is nothing to me. ‘We have an altar,’ or else we have no
religion worth keeping.
II. Mark here, secondly, our feast on the sacrifice.
From this altar, says the writer, the
adherents of the ancient system have no right to partake. That implies that
those who have left the ancient system have the right to partake, and do
partake. Now the writer is drawing a contrast, which he proceeds to
elaborate, between the great sacrifice on the Day of Atonement and the
sacrifice of Christ on the Cross. The former was not, as many other
sacrifices were, partaken of by priests and worshippers, but simply the
blood was brought within the holy place, and the whole of the rest of the
sacrifice consumed in a waste spot without the camp. And this contrast is in
the writer’s mind. We have a sacrifice on which we feast.
That is to say, the Christ who died
for my sins is not only my means of reconciliation with God, but His
sacrifice and death are the sustenance of my spiritual life. We live upon
the Christ that died for us. That this is no mere metaphor, but goes
penetratingly and deep down to the very basis of the spiritual life, is
attested sufficiently by many a word of Scripture on which I cannot now
dwell. The life of the Christian is the indwelling Christ. For he whose
heart hath not received that Christ within him is dead whilst he lives, and
has no possession of the one true Hie for a human spirit, viz., the fife of
union with God. Christ in us is the consequence of Christ for us; and that
Christianity is all imperfect which does not grasp with equal emphasis the
thought of the sacrifice or the cross, and of the feast or the sacrifice.
But how is that feeding on the
sacrifice accomplished? ‘He that eateth Me, even he shall ‘live by Me.’ He
that believeth, eateth. He that with humble faith makes Christ his very own,
and appropriates as the nourishment and basis of his own better life the
facts of the life and death of sacrifice, he truly lives thereby. To eat is
to believe; to believe is to live.
I need not remind you, I suppose, how, though there be no reference in the
words of my text, as I have tried to show, to the external rite of the
communion of the Lord’s body and blood, and though the ‘altar’ here has no
reference whatever to that table, yet there is a connection between the two
representations, inasmuch as the one declares in words what the other sets
forth in symbol, and the meaning of the feast on the sacrifice is expressed
by this great word. ‘This is My body, broken for you.’ ‘This is the new
covenant in My blood’: ‘Drink ye all of it.’ ‘We have an altar,’ and though
it be not the table on which the symbols of our Lord’s sacrificial death are
spread for us, yet these symbols and the words of my text, like the words of
His great discourse in the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel, point to the same
fact, that the spiritual participation of Christ by faith is the reality of
‘eating of Him,’ and the condition of living for ever.
III. And now, lastly, my text suggests our Christian offerings on the
altar.
‘By Him, therefore, let us offer the sacrifice of praise to God
continually.’ What are these offerings? Christ’s death stands alone,
incapable of repetition, meeting no repetition, the eternal, sole,
‘sufficient obligation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world.’
But there be other kinds of sacrifice. There are sacrifices of thanksgiving
as well as for propitiation. And we, on the footing of that great sacrifice
to which we can add nothing, and on which alone we must rest, may bring the
offerings of our thankful hearts. These offerings are of a two-fold sort,
says the writer. There are words of praise. There are works of beneficence.
The service of man is sacrifice to God. That is a deep saying and reaches
far. Such praise and such beneficence are only possible on the footing of
Christ’s sacrifice, for only on that footing is our praise acceptable; and
only when moved by that infinite mercy and love shall we yield ourselves,
thank offerings to God. And thus, brethren, the whole extent of the
Christian life, in its inmost springs, and in its outward manifestations, is
covered by these two thoughts — the ‘feast on the sacrifice once offered,
and the sacrifices which we in our turn offer on the altar. If we thus,
moved by the mercy of God, ‘yield ourselves as living sacrifices, which is
our reasonable service,’ then not only will life be one long thank-offering,
but as the Apostle puts it in another place, death itself may become, too, a
thankful surrender to Him. For He says, ‘I am ready to be offered.’ And so
the thankful heart, resting on the sacrificial life and death of Jesus
Christ, makes all life a thanksgiving, ‘death God’s endless mercy seals, and
makes the sacrifice complete.’ There is one Christ that can thus hallow and
make acceptable our living and our dying, and that is the Christ that has
died for us, and lives that in Him we may be priests to God. There is only
one Christianity that will do for us what we will need, and that is the
Christianity whose centre is an altar, on which the Son of God, our
Passover, is slain for us.
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Hebrews 13:13, 14 Without the Camp
‘Let us go forth therefore unto Him
without the camp, Bearing His reproach. 14. For here have we no continuing
city, but we seek one to come.’ —Hebrews 13:13, 14
CALVARY was outside Jerusalem. That
wholly accidental and trivial circumstance is laid hold of in the context,
in order to give picturesque force to the main contention and purpose of
this Epistle. One of the solemn parts of the ritual of Judaism was the great
Day of Atonement, on which the sacrifice that took away the sins of the
nation was berne outside the camp, and consumed by fire, instead of being
partaken of by the priests, as were most of the other sacrifices. Our writer
here sees in these two roughly parallel things, not an argument but an
imaginative illustration of great truths. Though he does not mean to say
that the death on Calvary was intended to be pointed to by the unique
arrangement in question, he does mean to say that the coincidence of the two
things helps us to grasp two great truths-one, that Jesus Christ really did
what that old sacrifice expressed the need for having done, and the other
that, in His death on Calvary, the Jewish nation, as one of the parables has
it, ‘cast Him out of the vineyard.’ In the context, he urges this analogy
between the two things. But a Christ outside the camp beckons His disciples
to His side. If any man serve Him, he has to follow Him, and the
blessedness, as well as the duty, of the servant on earth, as well as in
heaven, is to be where his Master is.
So the writer finds here a picturesque
way to enforce the great lesson of his treatise, namely, that the Jewish
adherent to Christianity must break with Judaism. In the early stages, it
was possible to combine faith in Christ and adherence to the Temple and its
ritual. But now that by process of time and experience the Church has learnt
better who and what Christ is, that which was in part has to be done away,
and the Christian Church is to stand clear of the Jewish synagogue.
Now it is to be distinctly understood that the words of my text, in the
writer’s intention, are not a general principle or exhortation, but that
they are a special commandment to a certain class under special
circumstances, and when we use them, as I am going to do now, for a wider
purpose, we must remember that that wider purpose was by no means in the
writer’s mind. What he was thinking about was simply the relation between
the Jewish Christian and the Jewish community. But if we take them as we may
legitimately do — only remembering that we are diverting them from their
original intention — as carrying more general lessons for us, what they seem
to teach is that faithful discipleship involves detachment from the world.
This commandment, ‘Let us go forth unto Him without the camp,’ stands, if
you will notice, between two reasons for it, which buttress it up, as it
were, on either side. Before it is enunciated, the writer has been pointing,
as I have tried to show, to the thought that a Christ without the camp
necessarily involves disciples without the camp. And he follow, it with
another reason, ‘here we have no continuing city, but we seek that which is
to come.’ Here, then, is a general principle, supported on either side by a
great reason.
Let me first try to set before you,
I. What this detachment is not.
The Jewish Christian was obliged utterly and outwardly to break his
connection with Judaism, on the peril, if he did not, of being involved in
its ruin, and, as was historically the case with certain Judaising sects, of
losing his Christianity altogether. It was a cruel necessity, and no wonder
that it needed this long letter to screw the disciples of Hebrew extraction
up to the point of making the leap from the sinking ship to the deck of the
one that floated. The parallel does not hold with regard to us. The
detachment from the world, or the coming out from the camp, to which my text
exhorts, is not the abandonment of our relations with what the Bible calls
‘the world,’ and what we call — roughly meaning the same thing — society.
The function of the Christian Church as leaven, involves the necessity of
being closely associated, and in contact with, all forms of human life,
national, civic, domestic, social, commercial, intellectual, political. Does
my text counsel an opposite course? ‘Go forth without the camp,’ — does that
mean huddle yourself together into a separate flock, and let the camp go to
the devil? By no means. For the society or world, out of which the Christian
is drawn by the attraction of the Cross, like iron filings out of a heap by
a magnet, is in itself good and God-appointed. It is He ‘that sets the
solitary in families.’ It is He that gathers humanity into the bonds of
civic and national life. It is He that gives capacities which find their
sphere, their education, and their increase in the walks of intellectual or
commercial or political life. And He does not build up with one hand and
destroy with the other, or set men by His providence in circumstances out of
which He draws them by His grace. By no means. To go apart from humanity is
to miss the very purpose for which God has set the Church in the world. For
contact with the sick to be healed is requisite for healing, and they are
poor disciples of the ‘Friend of publicans and sinners’ who prefer to
consort with Pharisees. ‘Let both grow together till the harvest’ — the
roots are intertwined, and it is God that has intertwined them. Now, I know
that one does not need to insist upon this principle to the average
Christianity of this day, which is only too ready to mingle itself with the
world, but one does need to insist that. in so mingling, detachment from the
world is still to be observed; and it does need to be taught that Christian
men are not lowering the standard of the Christian life, when they fling
themselves frankly and energetically into the various forms of human,
activity, if and only if, whilst they do so, they still remember and obey
the commandment, ‘Let us go forth unto Him without the camp.’ The
commandment misinterpreted so as to he absolutely impossible to be obeyed,
becomes a snare to people who do not keep it, and yet sometimes feel as if
they were to blame, because they do not. And, therefore, I turn in the next
place to consider —
II. What this detachment really is.
Will you let me put what I have to say into the shape of two or three plain,
practical exhortations, not because I wish to assume a position of authority
or command, but only in’ order to give vividness and point to my thoughts?
First, then, let us habitually nourish
the inner life of union with Jesus Christ. Notice the words of my text, and
see what comes first and what comes second. ‘Let us go forth unto Him’ —
that is the main thing: ‘Without the camp’ is second, and a consequence;
‘unto Him,’ is primary, which is just to say that the highest, widest,
noblest, all-comprehensive conception of what a Christian life is, is that
it is union with Jesus Christ, and whatever else it is follows from that.
The soul is ever to be looking up through all the shadows and shows, the
changes and circumstances, of this fleeting present unto Him, and seeking to
be more closely united with Him. Union with Him is life, and separation from
Him is death. To be so united is to be a Christian. Never mind about camps
or anything else, to begin with. If the heart is joined to Jesus, then all
the rest will come right. If it is not, then you may make regulations as
many as you like, and they will only be red tape to entangle your feet in.
‘Let us go forth unto Him’; that is the sovereign commandment. And how is
that to be done? How is it to be done but by nourishing habitual
consciousness of union with Him and life in Him, by an habitual reference of
all our acts to Him? As the Roman Catholics put it, in their hard external
way, ‘the practice of the presence of God’ is the keynote to all real,
vigorous Christianity. For, brethren, such an habitual fellowship with Jesus
Christ is possible for us. Though with many interruptions, no doubt, still
ideally is it possible that it shall be continuous and real. It is possible,
perfectly possible, that it shall be a great deal more continuous than,
alas! it is with many of us.
Depend upon it, this nourishing of an inward life of fellowship with Jesus,
so that we may say, ‘our lives are hid’ — hid, after all vigorous
manifestation and consistent action — ’ with Christ in God,’ will not
weaken, but increase, the force with which we act on the things seen and
temporal. There is an unwholesome kind of mysticism which withdraws men from
the plain duties of everyday life; and there is a deep, sane, wholesome, and
eminently Christian mysticism which enables men to come down with greater
force, and to act with more decision, with more energy, with more effect, in
all the common deeds of life. The greatest mystics have been the hardest
workers. Who was it that said, ‘I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me’?
That man had gone far, very far, towards an habitual consciousness of
Christ’s presence, and it was the same man that said, ‘That which cometh
upon me daily is the care of all the churches.’ The greatest mystic of the
Middle Ages, the saint that rode by the lake all day long, and was so
absorbed in contemplation that he said at night, ‘Where is the lake?’ was
the man that held all the threads of European politics in his hands, and
from his cell at Clairvaux guided popes, and flung the nations of the West
into a crusade. John Wesley was one of the hardest workers that the Church
has ever had, and was one of those who lived most habitually without the
camp. Be sure of this, that the more our lives are wrapped in Christ, the
more energetic will they be in the world. They tell us that the branches of
a spreading tree describe roughly the same circumference in the atmosphere
that its roots do underground, and so far as our roots extend in Christ, so
far will our branches spread in the world. ‘Let us go forth unto Him,
without the camp.’
Again, let me say, do the same things as other people, but with a
difference. The more our so-called civilisation advances, the more, I was
going to say, mechanical, or at least largely released from the control of
the will and personal idiosyncrasy, become great parts of our work. The
Christian weaver drives her looms very much in the same fashion that the
non-Christian girl who is looking after the next sot does. The Christian
clerk adds up his figures, and writes his letters, very much in the same
fashion that the worldly clerk does. The believing doctor visits his
patients, and writes out his prescriptions in the fashion that his neighbour
who is not a Christian does. But there is always room for the personal
equation — always! and two lives may be, superficially and roughly, the
same, and yet there may be a difference in them impalpable, undefinable, and
very obvious and very real and very mighty. The Christian motive is love to
Jesus Christ and fellowship with Him, and that motive may be brought to bear
upon all life —
‘A servant with this
clause
Makes drudgery divine.’
He that for Christ’s sake does a
common thing it outer the fatal region of the commonplace, and makes it
great and beautiful We do not want from all Christian people specifically
Christian service, in the narrow sense which that phrase has acquired, half
so much as we want common things done from an uncommon motive; worldly
things done because of the love of Jesus Christ in our hearts. And, depend
upon it, just as, from some unseen bank of violets, there come odours in
opening spring, so from the unspoken and deeply hidden motive of love to
Jesus Christ, there will be a fragrance in our commonest actions which all
men will recognise. They tell us that rivers which flow from lakes are so
clear that they are tinged throughout with celestial blue, because all the
mud that they brought down from their upper reaches has been deposited in
the still waters of the lake from which they flow; and if from the deep tam
of love to Jesus Christ in our hearts the stream of our lives flows out, it
will be like the Rhone below Geneva, distinguishable from the muddy waters
that run by its side in the same channel. Two people, partners in business,
joined in the same work, marching step for step in the same ranks, may yet
be entirely distinguishable and truly separate, because, doing the same
things, they do them from different motives.
Let me say, still further, and finally about this matter, that sometimes we
shall have to come actually out of the camp. The world as God made it is
good; society is ordained by God. The occupations which men pursue are of
His appointment, for the most part. But into the thing that was good there
have crept all manner of corruptions and abominations, so that often it will
be a Christian duty to come away from all outward connection with that which
is incurably corrupt. I know very well that a morality which mainly consists
of prohibitions is pedantic and poor. I know very well that a Christianity
which interprets such a precept as this of my text simply as meaning
abstinence from certain conventionally selected and branded forms of life,
occupation, or amusement, is but a very poor affair. But ‘Thou shalt not’ is
very often absolutely necessary as a support to ‘Thou shalt.’ If you go into
an Eastern city, you will find the houses with their fronts to the street,
having narrow slits of windows all barred, and a heavy gate, frowning and
ugly. But pass within, and there are flower-beds and fountains. The frowning
street front is there for the defence of the fountains and the flower-beds
within, from the assaults of foes, and speaks of a disturbed state of
society, in which no flowers can grow and no fountains can bubble and
sparkle, unless a strong barrier is round them. And so ‘thou shalt not, in a
world like this, is needful in order that ‘ thou shalt’ shall have fair
play. No law can be laid down for other people. Every man must settle this
matter of abstinence for himself. Things that you may do, perhaps I may not
do; things that you may not do, I very likely may. ‘A liberal Christianity,’
as the world calls it, is often a very shallow Christianity. ‘A sour
Puritanical severity,’ as loose-living men call it, is very often plain,
Christian morality. An inconsistent Christian may he hailed as ’a good
fellow,’ and laughed at behind his back. Samson made sport for the
Philistines when he was blind. The uncircumcised do often say of professing
Christians, that try to be like them, and to keep step with them, ‘What do
these Hebrews here?’ and God always says to such, ‘What dost thou here,
Elijah?’
Lastly —
III. Why this detachment is enforced.
‘For here we have no continuing city, but we seek one to come.’ That
translation does not give the full force of the original, for it suggests
the idea of a vague uncertainty in the seeking, whereas what the writer
means is, not ‘one to come,’ but one which is coming. The Christian object
of seeking is definite, and it is not merely future but present, and in
process of being realised even here and now, and tending to completion. Paul
uses the same metaphor of the city in one of his leisure, ‘Your citizenship
is in heaven.’ He says that to the Philippians. Philippi was a colony; that
is to say, it was a bit of Rome put down in a foreign land, with Roman laws,
its citizens enrolled upon the registers of the Roman tribes, and not under
the jurisdiction of the provincial governor. That is what we Christians are,
whether we know it or not.’ We are here in an order to which we outwardly
belong, but in the depths of our being we belong to another order of things
altogether. Therefore the essentials of the Christian life may be stated as
being the looking forward to the city, and the realising of our affinities
to it and not to the things around us. In the measure in which, dear
brethren, we realise to what community we belong, will the things here be
seen to be fleeting and alive to our deepest selves. ‘Here we have no
continuing city’ is not merely the result of the tran-siency of temporal
things, and the brevity of our earthly lives, but it is much rather the
result of our affinity to the other order of things beyond the seas.
Abraham dwelt in tents, because he ‘looked for a airy,’ and so it was better
for him to stop on the breezy uplands, though the herbage was scant, than to
go with Lot into the vale of Sodom, though it looked Hire the garden of the
Lord. In like manner, the more intensely we realise that we belong to the
city, the more shall we be willing to ‘go forth without the camp.’ Let these
two thoughts dominate our minds and shape our lives; our union with Jesus
Christ and our citizenship of the heavenly Jerusalem. In the measure in
which they do, it will be no sacrifice for us to come out of the transient
camp, because we shall thereby go to Him and come to the city of the living
God, the heavenly Jerusalem, ‘which hath the foundations.’
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Hebrews 13:15, 16 Christian Sacrifice
‘By Him therefore let us offer the
sacrifice of praise to God continually, that is, the fruit of our lips
giving thanks to His name. 16. But to do good and to communicate forget not:
for with such sacrifices God is well pleased. —Hebrews 13:15, 16.
MUCH attention is given now to the
Study of comparative religion. The beliefs and observances Of the rudest
tribes are narrowly scrutinised, in order to discover the underlying ideas.
And many a practice which seems to be trivial, absurd, or sanguinary is
found to have its foundation in some noble and profound thought. Charity and
insight have both gained by the study.
But, singularly enough, the very people who are so interested in the
rationale of the rites of savages will turn away when anybody applies a
similar process to the ritual of the Jews. That is what this Epistle to the
Hebrews does. It translates altar, ritual festivals, priests, into thoughts;
and it declares that Jesus Christ’ is the only adequate and abiding
embodiment of these thoughts. We are not dressing Christian truth in a
foreign garb when we express the substance of its revelation in language
borrowed from the ritualistic system that preceded it. But we are
extricating truths, which the world needs to-day as much as ever it did,
from the form in which they were embodied for one stage of religion, when we
translate them into their Christian equivalents.
So the writer here has been speaking about Christ as by His death
sanctifying His people. And on that great thought, that He is what all
priesthood symbolises, and what all bloody sacrifices reach out towards, he
builds this grand exhortation of my text, which is at once a lofty
conception of what the Christian life ought to be, and a directory as to the
method by which it may become so.
‘By Him let us offer
sacrifices continually, for
with such sacrifices God is well pleased.’
Now, it seems to me that there are
here mainly three points to be looked at. First, the basis of; second, the
material of; and third, the divine delight in, the sacrifices of the
Christian life. And to these three points I ask your attention.
I. First, then, note here the emphatic way in which the one basis of
Christian sacrifice is laid down.
Anybody who can consult the original will see, what indeed is partially
expressed in our translation, that the position of these two words ‘through’
(or by) ‘Him’ underscores and puts great emphasis upon them. There are two
thoughts which may be in-eluded in them; the one, that Jesus is the Priest
by whose mediation we come to God, and the other that He is the sacrifice,
on the footing of which we can present our sacrifices. It seems to me,
however, that it is the latter idea principally that is in the writer’s mind
here. And on it I touch lightly in a few words.
Now, let me recall to you, as a world-wide fact which is expressed in the
noblest form in the ancient Jewish ritual, that there was a broad line of
distinction drawn between two kinds of sacrifices, differing in their
material and in their purpose. If I wanted to use mere theological
technicalities, which I do not, I should talk about the difference between
sacrifices of propitiation and sacrifices of thanksgiving. But let us put
these well-worn phrases on one side, as far as we can, for the moment. Here,
then, is the fact that all the world over, and in the Mosaic ritual, there
was expressed a double consciousness one, that there was, somehow or other,
a black dam between the worshipper and his Deity, which needed to be swept
away; and the other, that when that barrier was removed there could be an
uninterrupted flow of thanksgiving and of service. So on one altar was laid
a bleeding victim, and on another were spread the flowers of the field, the
fruits of the earth, all things gracious, lovely, fair, and sweet, as
expressions of the thankfulness of the reconciled worshippers. One set of
sacrifices expressed the consciousness of sin; the other expressed the
joyful recognition of its removal.
Now I want to know whether that world-wide confession of need is nothing
more to us than a mere piece of interesting reminiscence of a stage of
development beyond which we have advanced. I do not believe that there is
such a gulf of difference between the lowest savage and the most cultivated
nineteenth-century Englishman, that the fundamental needs of the one, in
spirit, are not almost as identical as are the fundamental needs of the one
and the other in regard to bodily wants. And sure I am that, if the voice of
humanity has declared all the world over, as it has declared, that it is
conscious of a cloud that has come between it and the awful Power above, and
that it seeks by sacrifice the removal of the cloud, the probability is that
that need is your need and mine; and that the remedy which humanity has
divined as necessary has some affinity with the remedy which God has
revealed as provided.
I am not going to attempt theorising about the manner in which the life and
death of Jesus Christ sweep away the battier between us and God, and deal
with the consciousness of transgression, which lies coiled and dormant, but
always ready to wake and sting, in human hearts. But I do venture to appeal
to each man’s and woman’s own consciousness, and to ask, Is there not
something in us Which recognises the necessity that the sin which stands
between God and man shall be swept away? Is there not something in us which
recognises the blessedness of the message, ‘The blood of Jesus Christ
cleanseth from all sin’? Oh, brethren! do not fancy that it is a mere
theological doctrine of an atonement that is in question. It is the
possibility of loving access to God, as made possible through Jesus, and
through Him alone, that I want to press upon your hearts.
‘Through Him let us
offer.’
II. Secondly, notice the light
which our text throws upon the material or contents of the Christian
sacrifice.
I need not dwell at all, I suppose, upon the explanation of the words, which
are plain enough. The writer seems to me to divide the sacrifice of praise,
which he prescribes, into two parts, the praise of the lip and the praise of
the life.
But before I deal with this twofold distribution of the thought, let me fix
upon the main general idea that is expressed here, and that is that the
highest notion, the noblest and purest of what a Christian life is, is that
it is one long sacrifice. Have we risen to the height of that conception? I
do not say, Have we attained to the fulfilment of it? The answer to the
latter question one knows only too well. But has it ever dawned upon us that
the true ideal of the Christian life which we profess to be living is this —
a sacrifice?
Now, that thought involves two things. One is the continuous surrender of
self, and that means the absolute suppression of our own wills; the bridling
of our own inclinations and fancies; the ceasing obstinately to adhere to
our own purposes and conceptions of What is good; the recognition that there
is a higher will above us, ruling and guiding, to which we are to submit.
Sacrifice means nothing if it does not mean surrender; and surrender is
nothing if it is not the surrender of the will. It was a great deal easier
for Abraham to take the knife in his hand, and climb the hill with the fixed
intention of thrusting it into his son’s heart, than it is for us to take
the sword of the Spirit in our hands and slay our own wills, and I am here
to say that unless we do we have very little right to call ourselves
Christians.
But, then, surrender is only half the conception of the sacrifice which has
to be accomplished in our whole days and selves. Surrender to God is the
full meaning of sacrifice. And that implies the distinct reference of all
that I am, and all that I do, to Him, as not only commanding, but as being
the aim and end of my life. We are to labour on as at His command. You in
your counting-houses, and mills, and shops, and homes; and we students in
our studies, and laboratories, and lecture-rooms, are to link everything
with Him, with His will, and with the thought of Him. What vice could live
in that light? What meanness would not be struck dead if we were connected
with that great reservoir of electric force? What slothfulness would not be
spurred into unhasting and unresting zeal if all our work were referred to
God? Unless our lives be thus sacrifice, in the full sense of conscious
surrender to Him. we have yet to learn what is the meaning and the purpose
of the propitiatory sacrifice on which we say that our lives are built.
I need not, I suppose, remind you at any length of how our text draws broad
and deep the distinction between the nature and the scope of the fundamental
offering made by Christ, and the offerings made by us. The one takes away
the separating barrier; the other is the flow of the stream where the
barrier had stood. The one is the melting away of the cloud that hid the
sun; the other is the flashing of the mirror of my heart when the sun shines
upon it. Our sacrifice is thanksgiving. Then there will be no reluctance
because duty is heavy. There will be no grudging because requirements are
great. There will be no avoiding of the obligations of the Christian life,
and rendering as small a percentage by way of dividend as the Creditor up in
the heavens will accept. If the offering is a thank- offering, then it will
be given gladly. The grateful heart does not hold the scales like a
scrupulous retail dealer afraid of putting the thousandth part of an ounce
more in than can be avoided.
‘Give all thou
canst, high heaven rejects the lore
Of nicely calculated less or more.’
Power is the measure of duty, and they
whose offering is the expression of their thankfulness will heap incense
upon the brazier, and cover the altar with flowers.
Ah, brethren, what a blessed life it would be for us, if indeed all the
painfulness and harshness of duty, with all the efforts of constraint and
restriction and stimulus which it so often requires, were transmuted into
that glad expression of infinite obligation for the great sacrifice on which
our life and hopes rest!
I do not purpose to say much about the
two classes of sacrifice into which our writer divides the whole. Words come
first, work follows. That order may seem strange, because we are accustomed
to think more of work than words. But the Bible has a solemn reverence for
man’s utterances of speech, and many a protest against ‘God’s great gift of
speech abused.’ And the text rightly supposes that if there is in us any
deep, real, abiding, life-shaping thankfulness for the gift of Jesus Christ,
it is impossible that our tongues should cleave to the roofs of our mouths,
and that we should be contented to live in silence. Loving hearts must
speak. What would you think of a husband who never felt any impulse to tell
his wife that she was dear to him; or a mother
