Hebrews 12:1 Weights and Sins
‘Let as lay snide every weight, sad
the sin which doth so easily beset us.’ —Hebrews 12:1
THERE is a regular series of thoughts
in this clause, and in the one or two which follow it, ‘Let us lay aside
every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us; and let us run with
patience the race that is set before us — looking unto Jesus.’ That is to
say, If we would run well, we must run light; if we would run light, we must
look to Christ. The central injunction is, ‘Let us run with patience’; the
only way of doing that is the ‘laying aside all weights and sin’; and the
only way of laying aside the weights and sins is, ‘looking unto Jesus.’
Of course the Apostle does not mean some one special kind of transgression
when he says, ‘the sin which doth so easily beset us.’ He is speaking about
sin generically — all manner of transgression. It is not, as we sometimes
hear the words misquoted, ‘that sin which doth most easily beset us.’ All
sin is, according to this passage, a besetting sin. It is the characteristic
of every kind of transgression, that it circles us round about, that it is
always lying in wait and lurking for us. The whole of it, therefore, in all
its species, is to be cast aside if we would run with patience this
appointed race. But then, besides that, there is something else to be put
aside as well as sin. There is ‘every weight’ as well as every
transgression— two distinct things, meant’ to be distinguished. The putting
away of both of them is equally needful for the race. The figure is plain
enough. We as racers must throw aside the garment that wraps us round — that
is to say, ‘the sin that easily besets us’; and then, besides that, we must
lay aside everything else which weights us for the race — that is to say,
certain habits or tendencies within us.
We have, then, to consider these three points ; — First, There are
hindrances which are not sins. Secondly, If we would run, we must put aside
these. And lastly, If we would put them aside, we must look to Christ.
In the first place, there are
hindrances which are not sins. The distinction which the writer draws is a
very important one. Sin is that which, by its very nature, in all
circumstances, by whomsoever done, without regard to consequences, is a
transgression of God’s law. A ‘weight’ is that which, allowable in itself,
legitimate, perhaps a blessing, the exercise of a power which God has given
us — is, for some reason, a hindrance and impediment in our running the
heavenly race. The one word describes the action or habit by its inmost
essence, the other describes it by its accidental consequences. Sin is sin,
whosoever does it; but weights may be weights to me, and not weights to you.
Sin is sin in whatever degree it is done; but weights may be weights when
they are in excess, and helps, not hindrances, when they are in moderation.
The one is a legitimate thing turned to a false use; the other is always,
and everywhere, and by whomsoever performed, a transgression of God’s law.
Then, what are these weights? The first stop in the answer to that question
is to be taken by remembering that, according to the image of this text we
carry them about with us, and we are to put them away from ourselves. It is
fair to say then, that the whole class of weights are not so much external
circumstances which may be turned to evil, as the feelings and habits of
mind by which we abuse God’s great gifts and mercies, and turn that which
was ordained to be for life into death. The renunciation that is spoken
about is not so much the putting away from ourselves of certain things lying
round about us, that may become temptations; as the putting away of the
dispositions within us which make these things temptations. The other is, of
course, included as well; but if we want to understand the true depth of the
doctrine of self-denial and serf-sacrifice which is taught here, we must
remember that the sin and the weights alike lie within our own hearts — that
they are our feelings, not God’s perfect gifts — that they are our abuse of
God’s benefits, not the benefits which are given to us for our use. We shall
have to see, presently, that By the power which we possess of turning all
these outward blessings of God’s hands into occasion for transgression,
God’s most precious endowments may become weights — but let us observe that,
accurately and to begin with, the text enjoins us to put away what cleaves
to us, and is in us, not what is lying round about us. Then, if it be mainly
and primarily, legitimate feelings and thoughts, abused and exaggerated,
which make the weights that we are to lay aside, what are the things which
may thus become weights? Oh, brethren! a little word answers that.
Everything. It is an awful and mysterious power that which we all possess,
of perverting the highest endowments, whether of soul or of circumstances,
which God has given us, into the occasions for faltering, and falling back
in the divine life. Just as men, by devilish ingenuity, can distil poison
out of God’s fairest flowers, so we can do with everything that we have,
with all the richest treasures of our nature, with the hearts which He has
given us that we may love Him with them; with the understandings which He
has bestowed upon us, that we may apprehend His divine truth and His
wonderful counsel with them; with these powers of work in the world which He
has conferred upon us, that by them we may bring to Him acceptable service
and fitting offering; and, in like manner, with all the gladness and grace
with which He surrounds our life, intending that out of it we should draw
ever occasions for thankfulness, reasons for trust, helps towards God,
ladders to assist us in climbing heavenward. Ah! and because we cleave to
them too much, because we cleave to them not only in a wrong degree but in a
wrong manner (for that is the deepest part of the fault), we may make them
all hindrances. So, for instance, in a very awful sense is fulfilled that
threatening, ‘A man’s foes shall be they of his own household,’ when we make
those that we love best our idols, not because we love them too well, but
because we love them apart from God; when instead of drawing from those that
are dear to us — our husbands, and wives, and children, and parents, and
friends, and every other tender name — lessons of God’s infinite goodness,
and reasons why our hearts should flow perpetually with love to Him — we
stay with them, and hang back from God, and forget that His love is best,
His heart deepest, and His sufficiency our safest trust. That is one single
instance; and as it is in that sacredest of regions, so is it in all others.
Every blessing, every gladness, every possession, external to us, and every
faculty and attribute within us, we turn into heavy weights that drag us
down to this low spot of earth- We make them all sharp knives with which we
clip the wings of our heavenward tendencies, and then we grovel in the dust.
And now, if this be the explanation of what the Apostle means by ‘weights’ —
legitimate things that hinder us in our course towards God — there comes
this second consideration, If we would run we must lay these aside. Why must
we lay ‘them aside? The whole of the Christian’s course is a fight. We carry
with us a double nature. The best of us know that ‘flesh lusts against
spirit, and spirit against flesh.’ Because of that conflict, it follows that
if ever there is to be a positive progress in the Christian race, it must be
accompanied, and made possible, by the negative process of casting away and
losing much that interferes with it. Yes! that race is not merely the easy
and natural unfolding of what is within us. The way by which we come to ‘the
measure of the stature of perfect men’ in Christ, is not the way by which
these material bodies of ours grow up into their perfectness. They have but
to be nourished, and they grow. ‘The blade and the ear, and the full corn in
the ear,’ come by the process of gradual growth and increase. That law of
growth is used by our Lord as a description, but only as a partial
description, of the way by which the kingdom of Christ advances in the
heart. There is another side to it as well as that, The kingdom advances by
warfare as well as by growth. It would Be easy if it were but a matter of
getting more and more; but it is not that only. Every step of the road you
have to cut your way through opposing foes. Every step of the road has to be
marked with the blood that comes from wounded feet. Every step of the road
is won by a tussle and a strife.
There is no spiritual life without
dying, there is no spiritual growth without putting off ‘the old man with
his affections and lusts.’ The hands cannot move freely until the bonds be
broken. The new life that is in us cannot run with patience the race that is
set before it, until the old life that is in us is put down and subdued. And
if we fancy that we are to get to heaven by a process of persistent growth,
without painful self-sacrifice and martyrdom, we know nothing about it. That
is not the law. For every new step that we win in the Christian course there
must have been the laying aside of something. For every progress in
knowledge, there must have been a sacrifice and martyrdom of our own
indolence, of our own pride, of our own blindness of heart, of our own
perverseness of will. For every progress in devout emotion, there must have
been a crucifying and slaying of our earthly affections, of our wavering
hearts that are drawn away from God by the sweetness of this world. For
every progress in strenuous work for God, there must have been a slaying of
the selfishness which urges us to work in our own strength and for our own
sake. All along the Christian course there must be set up altars to God on
which you sacrifice yourselves, or you will never advance a step. The old
legend that the Grecian host lay weather-bound in their port, vainly waiting
for a wind to come and carry them to conquest; and that they were obliged to
slay a human sacrifice ere the heavens would be propitious and fill their
sails, may be translated into the deepest verity of the Christian life. We
may see in it that solemn lesson — no prosperous voyage, and no final
conquest until the natural life has been offered up on the altar of hourly
self-denial. That self-denial must reach beyond gross and undoubted sins.
They must be swept away, of course, but deeper than these must the
sacrificial knife strike its healing wound. If you would ,run with patience,
‘you must ‘lay aside every weight,’ as well as ‘the sin which so easily
besets you.’
So much for the why; well, then, how is this laying aside to be performed?
There are two ways by which this injunction of my text may be obeyed. The
one is, by getting so strong that the thing shall not be a weight, though we
carry it; and the other is that feeling ourselves to be weak, we take the
prudent course of put-ring it utterly aside. Or, to turn that into other
words: the highest type of the Christian character would be, that we should,
as the Apostle says, ‘use the world without abusing it’ — that’ they who
possess should be as though they possessed not; and they that weep, as
though they wept not; and they that rejoice, as though they rejoiced not.’
The noblest style of a Christian would be a man, who exercising all the
faculties which God had given him, and enjoying all the blessings wherewith
God had surrounded him, walked his Christian course like some of those
knights of old, lightly bearing his heavy mail, not feeling it a burden, but
strong enough to bear the massive breastplate and to wield the ponderous
sword, and fitted for his rough warfare by it all. It would be possible,
perhaps, some day for us to come to this — that inasmuch as it is the
feelings within us which make the weights, and not the objects without us —
we should keep and enjoy the blessings and the gladness that we possess, and
yet never thereby be thwarted or stayed in our journey heavenward. It would
be the highest condition. I suppose we shall come to it yonder, where there
will no longer be any need to maim ourselves that we may ‘ enter into life,’
but where all the maimings that were done in this world for the sake of
entering into life shall be compensated and restored, and each soul shall
stand perfect and complete, wanting nothing.
But, alas! though that course be the highest, the abstract best, the thing
for which we ought to strive and try; it is not the course for which the
weakness and inaptness of the most of us makes us strong enough. And
therefore, seeing that we have a nature so weak and feeble, that temptations
surround us so constantly, that so many things legitimate become to us
harmful and sinful — the path of prudence, the safe path, is absolutely and
utterly to put them away from us, and have nothing to do with them.
Of course, there are many duties which, by our own sinfulness, we make
weights, and we dare not, and we cannot if we would, lay them aside. A man,
for instance, is born into certain circumstances, wherein he must abide; he
has ‘a calling whereunto he is called.’ Your trade is a weight, your daily
occupations are weights. The spirit of this commandment before us is not,
‘Leave your plough, and go up into the mountain to pray; Again, a man finds
himself surrounded by friends and domestic ties. He dare not, he must not,
he cannot, shake himself free from these. There are cases in which to put
away the occupation that has become a weight — to sacrifice the blessing
that has become a hindrance — to abstain from the circumstances which clog
and impede our divine life, is a sin. Where God sets us, we must stand, if
we die. What God has given us to do, we must do. The duties that in our
weakness become impediments and weights, we must not leave.
But for all besides these, anything which I know has become a snare to me —
unless it be something in the course of my simple duty, or unless it be some
one of those relations of life which I cannot got rid of — I must have done
with it! It may be sweet, it may he very dear, it may He very near thy
heart, it may be a part of thy very being : — never mind, put it away! If
God has said to you, There, my child, stand there, surrounded by
temptations! — then, like a man, stand to your colours, and do not take
these words as if they said I am to leave a place because I find myself too
weak to resist — a place in which God, for the good of others or for the
good of myself, has manifestly set me. But for all other provinces of life,
if I feel myself weak I shall be wise to fly. As Christ has said, ‘If thy
hand offend thee,’ put it down on the block there, and take the knife in the
other, ‘and cut it off’: it is better, it is better for thee to go into life
with that maimed and bleeding stump, an imperfect man, than with all thy
natural capacities and powers to be utterly lost at the last! And some of
us, perhaps, may feel that these solemn lessons apply not only to affection
and outward business. I may be speaking to some young man to whom study, and
thought, are a snare. I know that I am saying a grave thing, but I do say,
In that region too, the principle applies. Better be ignorant, and saved,
than wise, and lost. Better a maimed man in Christ’s fold, than a perfect
man, if that were possible, outside of it.
I know that there is a large field for misconception and misapplication in
the settlement of the practical question — Which of my weights arise from
circumstances that I dare not seek to alter, and which from circumstances
that I dare not leave unaltered? There is a large margin left for the play
of honesty of purpose, and plain common-sense, in the fitting of such
general maxims to the shifting and complicated details of an individual
life. But no laws can be laid down to save us that trouble. No man can judge
for another about this matter. It must be our own sense of what harms our
spiritual life, and not other people’s notions of what is likely to harm
either theirs or ours, that guides us. What by experience I find does me
harm, let me give up! No man has a right to come to me and say, There is a
legitimate thing, an indifferent thing; it is not a sin; there is not in it,
in itself, the essential element of transgression; but you must forsake it,
because it is a weight to other people! To my own master I stand or fall.
The commandment is, Have no weights! But the way to fulfil that commandment
— whether by rejecting the thing altogether, or by keeping it, and yet not
letting it be a weight, that is a matter for every one’s own conscience, for
every one’s own judgment and practical prudence, guided by the Spirit of
God, to determine. The obedience to the commandment is a simple matter of
loyalty to Christ. But the manner of obedience is to be fixed by Christian
wisdom. And remember that on both sides of the alternative there are
dangers. There is danger in the too great freedom which says, I am strong; I
can venture to do this thing — another man cannot — and I will do it! There
is a danger On the other side in saying, We are all weak, and we will
forsake all these things together! The one class of moralists axe apt to
confound their own unsanctified inclinations with the dictates of Christian
freedom. The other class are apt to confound their own narrowness with the
commandments of God. The one class are apt to turn their liberty into a
cloak of licentiousness. The other class are apt to turn their obligation
into a yoke which neither they nor their disciples are able to bear. The
Apostle pointed out the evils which these two ways of dealing with things
indifferent are apt to foster when he said to those who adopt the one, ‘Let
not him that eateth despise him that eateth not’; and to those who adopt the
other ‘Let not him which eateth not judge him that eateth.’ That is to say,
on the one hand, beware of the fancied superiority to the weaknesses and
narrowness of your more scrupulous brother, which is prone to creep into the
hearts of the more liberal and strong. Remember that perhaps the difference
between you is not all in your favour. It may be that what you call
over-scrupulous timidity is the fruit of a more earnest Christian principle
than yours; and that what you call in yourself freedom from foolish
scruples, is only the result of a less sensitive conscience, not of a more
robust Christianity. Then for the other class, the lesson is, ‘Let not him
which eateth not, judge him that eateth.’ Judge not from the height of your
superior self-denial, your brother who allows himself what you avoid. Your
besetting sin is self-righteous condemnation of those who perhaps, after
all, are wiser as well as wider than you, and who in their strength may be
able to walk as near to God on a road, which to you would be full of perils,
as you are in the manner of life which you know to be needful for you. Let
us all remember, besides, that a thing which to ourselves is no weight, may
yet be right for us to forsake, out of true and tender brotherly regard to
others who, weaker than we, or perhaps more conscientious than we, could not
do the same thing without damaging their spirits and weakening their
Christian life. ‘Him that is weak in the faith, receive.’ Him that is weak
in the faith, help. And in all these matters indifferent, which are weights
to one and not weights to another, let us remember, first, for ourselves,
that a weight retained is a sin; and let us remember, next, for others, that
they stand not by our experience, but by their own; and that we are neither
to judge their strength, nor to offend their weakness.
And now, in the last place: This laying aside of every weight is only
possible by looking to Christ. That self-denial of which I have been
speaking has in it no merit, no worthiness. The man that practises it is not
a bit better than the man that does not, except in so far as it is a
preparation for greater reception of the spiritual life. Some people suppose
that when they have laid aside a weight, conquered a hindrance, given up
some bad habit, they have done a meritorious thing. Well, we are
strengthened, no doubt, by the very act; but then, it is of no use at all
except in so far as it makes us better fitted for the positive progress
which is to come after it. What is the use of the racer betaking, himself to
the starting-post, and throwing aside every weight, and then standing still?
He puts aside his garments that he may run. We empty our hearts; but the
empty heart is dull, and cold, and dark: we empty our hearts that Christ may
fill them. That is not all: Christ must have begun to fill them before we
can empty them. ‘Looking to Jesus’ is the only means of thorough-going,
absolute self-deniaL All other surrender than that which is based upon love
to Him, and faith in Him, is but surface work, and drives the subtle disease
to the vitals. The man that tries, by paring off an excrescence here, and
giving up a bad habit there, to hammer and tinker and cut himself into the
shape of a true and perfect man, may do it outwardly. He will scarcely do
that, but it is possible he may partially. And then, what has he made
himself? ‘A whited sepulchre’; outside, — adorned, beautiful, clean; inside,
— full of rottenness and dead men’s bones! The self that was beaten in the
open field of outward life, retires, like a defeated army, behind broad
rivers; and concentrates itself in its fortresses, and prepares hopefully
for a victorious resistance in the citadel of the heart.
My brother, if you would ‘run with patience the race that is set before
you,’ you must ‘lay aside, every weight.’ If you would lay aside every
weight, you must look to Christ, and let His love flow into thy soul. Then,
self-denial will not be self-denial. It will be blessing and joy, sweet and
easy. Just as the old leaves drop naturally from the tree when the new buds
of spring begin to put themselves out, let the new affection come and dwell
in thy heart, and expel the old. ‘Lay aside every weight’ — ‘looking unto
Jesus.’ Then, too, you will find that the sacrifice and maiming of the old
man has been the perfecting of the man. You will find that whatever you give
up for Christ you get back from Christ, better, more beautiful, more
blessed, hallowed to its inmost core, a joy and a possession for ever. For
He will not suffer that any gift laid upon His altar shall not be given back
to us. He will have no maimed man in His service. So, the hand that is cut
off, the eye that is plucked out, the possessions that are rendered up, the
idols that are slain — they are all given back to us again when we stand in
God’s own light in glory — perfect men, made after the image of Christ, and
surrounded with all possessions transfigured and glorified in the light of
God. ‘There is no man that hath left house, or parents, or brethren, or
wife, or children, for the kingdom of God’s sake, who shall not receive
manifold more in this present time, and in the world to come life
everlasting.
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Hebrews 12:2 The Perfecter of Faith
Set down at the right, hand of the
throne of God. — Hebrews 12:2
ST. LUKE gives us two accounts of the
Ascension, one at the end of his Gospel and one at the beginning of the
Acts. The difference of position suggests delicate shades of colouring and
of distinction in the two narratives, the one is the ending of the sweet
intercourse on earth, the other is the beginning of a new era and a
different type of companionship. So in that which closes the Gospel,
emphasis is put upon our Lord’s ascension as being parted from; and all that
is told us is of the final benediction befitting a farewell, and of the
uplifted hands, which left upon their minds the last sweet impression of the
departing friend. But if we turn to the Acts of the Apostles, where the
incident is the same, the whole spirit of the narrative is altered. We see
there the beginning of a new era, and so we read nothing about parting, but,
instead of the indefinite expression, He blessed them, we hear of their
promised investiture with a new power, and of there being laid upon them a
new obligation — ‘Ye shall be clothed with the Spirit: ye shall be My
witnesses.’ And the two men who stand by them, and are only mentioned in the
Book of Acts, announce the great thought, that the departing Christ will
return, ‘He shall so come in like manner as ye have seen Him go.’ All in
that account has a forward aspect. It is a beginning with a new power,
strengthened by a new duty, and having a far- off hope. Thus equipped, these
eleven no more feel that their Lord is parted from them, nor that they are
abandoned and forlorn; but they cast themselves into their new
circumstances, and joyfully take up their new work. So the Ascension of
Christ is represented in that second account as being the transition from
the earthly to the heavenly life and type of communion with Him, and as the
preparation for that great fact which my text enshrines in highly figurative
language, as being the sitting at the right hand of the throne of God. The
Ascension is no transient fact, it is the beginning of the permanent
condition of the Church, and of the permanent present relations between
Jesus Christ, God, the Church, and the world. So I desire to turn now to the
various characteristics of the present and permanent relationship of Jesus
Christ to these three — God, the Church, the world.
And first of all I wish
to notice’ we have here the thought of the Enthroned
Christ. The attitude of sitting indicates repose. The position at the right
hand of the throne of God indicates
participation in the divine energies and in the administration of the divine
providences. But the point to observe is that the Ascension is declared to
be the prerogative of the Man Christ Jesus. And so with great emphasis and
significance, in the verse with a part of which I am now dealing, we have
brought together the name of the humanity, the name that was borne by many
another Jew in the same era as Jesus bore it, we have brought together the
name of the humanity and the affirmation of the divine dignity, ‘We see
Jesus... set down at the right hand of the throne of God.’ And over and over
again, not only in this Epistle, But in other parts of Scripture, we have
the same intentional, emphatic juxtaposition of the two ideas which shallow
thinkers regard as in some sense incompatible — the humanity and the
divinity.
Remember, for instance, ‘this same Jesus shall so come in like manner as ye
have seen Him go.’ And remember the rapturous and wonderful exclamation
which broke from the lips of the proto-martyr. ‘Behold, I see the heavens
opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.’ So then that
exaltation and ascension is — according to New Testament teaching, which is
not contradicted by the deepest thought of the affinities and resemblances
of the divine and the human — the lifting up of the Man into the glory which
the Incarnate Word had with the Father before the world was. And just as the
earthly life of that Incarnate Word has shown how divine a thing a human
life here may be, so the heavenly life of the still Incarnate Word shows us
what our approximation to, and union with, the divine nature may be, when we
are purged and perfected in the Kingdom of God, whither the Forerunner is
for us entered.
But further, in addition to this thought, there comes another which is
constantly associated with the teaching of this session of the Son of Man at
the right hand Of God, namely, that it is intercessory. That is a word the
history of which will take us far, and I dare not enter upon it now. But one
thing I wish to make very emphatic, and that is that the ordinary notion of
intercession is not the New Testament notion. We limit it, or tend to limit
it, to prayer for others. There is no such idea in the New Testament use of
the phrase. It is a great deal wider than any verbal expression of sympathy
and desire. It has to deal with realities and not with words. It is not a
synonym for asking for another that some blessing may come upon him; but the
intercession of the great High Priest who has gone into the holiest of all
for us covers the whole ground of the acts by which, by reason of our deep
and true union with Jesus Christ through faith, He communicates to His
children whatsoever of blessing and power and sweet tokens of ineffable love
He has received from the Father. Whatsoever He draws in filial dependence
from the Divine Father He in brotherly unity imparts to us; and the real
communication of real blessing, and not the verbal petitions for
forgiveness, is what He is doing there within the veil. ‘He is able to save
them to the uttermost that come unto God by Him, seeing He ever liveth to
make intercession for them.’
But still further in this great figure of my text, the Enthroned Christ,
there lies a wondrous thought which He Himself has given us, ‘I go to
prepare a place for you.’ What activities are involved in that wondrous idea
it boots us not to inquire, nor would it become us to say. We know that
never could we tread those pure pavements except our robes and our feet had
been washed By Him. But that is the consequence of His earthly work, and not
of His heavenly and present energy. Perhaps in our ignorance of all that
lies behind the veil, we can get little further than to see that the very
fact of His presence is the preparation of the place. For that awful
thought, that crushing thought, of eternal life under conditions
bewilderingly different from anything we experience here, would be no joy
unless we could say we shall see Him and be with Him. I know not how it may
be with you, but I think that the nearer we come to the end of the earthly
life, and the more the realities beyond begin to press upon our thoughts and
our imaginations as those with which we shall soon make acquaintance, we
feel more and more how unquestionable the misery the thought of eternal life
would bring if it were not for the fact that the world beyond is lighted up
and made familiar by the thought of Christ’s presence there. Can you fancy
some poor clod-hopping rustic brought up from a remote village and set down
all in a moment in the midst of some brilliant court? How out of place he
would feel, how unhomelike it would appear, how ill at ease he would be; ay,
and what an unburdening there would be in his heart, if amongst the strange
splendour he detected beneath the crown and above the robes, sitting on the
throne, one whom he had known in the far-off hamlet, and who there had taken
part with him in all the ignoble toils and narrow interests of that rustic
scene. Jesus said, ‘I go to prepare a place for you,’ and when I lift up my
eyes to those far-off realities which overwhelm me when I try to think about
them, I say, I am not dazzled by the splendour, I am not oppressed by the
perpetuity of it, I do not faint at the thought of unlike conditions, for I
shall be the same and He will be with me.
‘It is enough that
Christ knows all, And I shall be with Him.’
And so the Enthroned Christ is
preparing a place for us. Ay, brethren, and He is not preparing it for us
only when we die, but He is preparing it for us whilst we live; for it is
only by faith in Him that we have boldness of access and confidence. And
neither for the prayers and desires of Christian men on earth nor for the
spirits of just men made perfect hereafter will the eternal golden gates
swing open except His hand is on the bolt, and by His power the way into the
Holiest is made manifest. And so set your minds as well as your affections
on the things above, where Christ is sitting on the right hand of God.
Now, secondly, we have here the Present Christ. Matthew, in his Gospel, does
not tell of the Ascension, but he preserves the promise, ‘Lo, I am with you
alway, even to the end of the world,’ and that promise is not contradicted,
but is realised by the fact of Christ’s ascension. He does tell us of the
remarkable utterance to Mary on the morning of the Resurrection. ‘Touch Me
not, for I am not yet ascended to My Father.’ The implication that we have
plainly is, when I am ascended you may touch. And the contact of even her
nervous and clutching hand round His feet is less than the touch and the
presence for which that departure makes the way. ‘He was parted from them’
is the thought that ends the Gospel. He was parted for a season that thou
mightest receive Him for ever, is the thought that begins the Acts and the
history of the Church. And it is true of Him and His relation to us,, and
because it is true about Him and about His relation to us, it is also true
about all those who sleep in Jesus. Their relation towards the earthly form
ceases, and there is an empty place where they once stood.
But there is a presence more real and capable of yielding finer influences,
strengthening and sanctifying, than ever came from the earthly presence. It
is blessed to clasp hands, it is blessed to link arms, it is blessed to
press together the lips; but there is a higher touch than these, and sight
is a less clear vision than faith; and they who can pass across the abyss of
the centuries and the yet broader and deeper and blacker abyss between earth
and heaven, and lay the hand of faith on the hand of Christ, have passed
through the veil, that is to say His flesh, and have clasped His real
presence. Yes, and the thing that calls itself such, is but a part of the
general retrogression of Catholicism to heathenism and materialism. We have
the real presence if we have the Christ in our heart by faith. He is present
with us; enthroned on high above all heavens, He yet is near the humblest
heart, the companion of the lonely, the solace of all that trust Him. ‘He
trod the winepress alone,’ in order that none of us need ever live alone or
die alone.
And there is another side to this presence. As I have said, He is present
with us here, and you and I may be present with Him yonder; for one of the
Epistles tells us that, ‘we die with Him that we may live with Him, and that
God has quickened us (if we are Christian people) together with Him and made
us sit together with Him in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.’ Your life,
Christian men and women, is in its roots and sources, and ought to be in its
flow and course, ‘hid with Christ in God,’ and you should not only seek to
realise the presence of the Master with you, but to climb to Himself, being
present with Him.
Thirdly, this great figure of my text sets before us the working Christ. The
attitude of sitting at the right hand of God suggests repose; but that is a
repose which is consistent with, and is accompanied by, the greatest energy
for continuous operation. You remember, no doubt (although, perhaps, not in
its full significance), the great words with which the close of St. Mark’s
Gospel points on to the future, ‘So then, after the Lord had spoken unto
them, He was received up into heaven, and sat on the right hand of God. And
they went everywhere preaching the word.’ The Master gone, the servants
left; the Master resting, the servants journeying and toiling. It is like
the two halves of Raphael’s great transfiguration picture. The Lord and the
three are up there in the amber light, the demoniac boy writhing in his
convulsions, and the disciples by him helpless, down here. The gap is great.
Yes. ‘They went everywhere preaching the Word, the Lord also working with
them, and confirming the Word with signs following.’ There is the true
notion of the repose of Christ resting indeed at the right hand of God, yet
working with His servants scattered over the face of the earth. And so in
the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, the keynote is struck when St. Luke
says, ‘The former treatise have I made of all that Jesus began both to do
and to teach until the day on which He was taken up’; and this treatise, O
Theophilus, is the second volume of the one story, the history of all that
Jesus Continued both to do and to teach after the day on which He was taken
up. Acts of the Apostles? No; Acts of the Ascended Christ — that is the name
of the book. Never mind about the apostles. They do come into the
foreground; but the writer has little care about them. It is the Christ who
is moving; and so we find it all through the book, the Lord did this, the
Lord did that, the Lord did the other thing; and the apostles are, I was
going to say, the pawns on the chess-board. And so you remember, too, that
dying Stephen saw the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God. He
sprang to his feet, not breaking the eternal repose, to look down and to
send down help and sustenance and blessing and good cheer to the man there
at the foot of the old wall ready to die for Him.
And that is. the type of the whole history of the Church, I have said that
Christ’s Ascension is the transition from the lower to the higher form of
presence; and it is the transition to the wider form of work. He works for
us, on us, in us, and with us, and as the apostle Peter said in expounding
the significance of the Day of Pentecost, ‘Being to the right hand of God
exalted He hath shed forth this,’ so the Christ is no longer tired, but is
still working, working in us, with us, and for us.
And lastly, the metaphor of my text brings before us the returning Christ,
It was not only the angel’s message that declared that departure and
ascension were not the last that the worker was going to see of. Jesus. The
necessities of the case, if I may say so, tell us the same message. The
Incarnation necessarily involves the Crucifixion; the Crucifixion (if it is
what we believe it to be) as necessarily involves the Resurrection, ‘for it
was not possible that He should be holden of it,’ the grim death. The
Resurrection and the Ascension are but as it were the initial point, which
is produced into the line of His heavenly session. It cannot be that
Ascension is the last word to be said The path of the King does not run into
a cul de sac like that. The world has not done with Jesus Christ. He is
coming, was the great thought around which all the past clustered. He will
come, is the great hope around which all the future hopes for the Church and
the world are piled and built, ‘He shall so come in like manner as ye havre
seen Him go,’ corporeally, visibly, locally, in His manhood, in His
divinity. ‘As He was once offered to bear the sin of many, so shall He come
the second time without sin unto salvation.’ Brethren, that is the hope of
the Church, discredited by many unworthy representations and mixed up with a
great deal that does not commend it by the folly of those who believe in it;
but standing out so distinct and so required by all that is gone before,
that no Christian man can afford to relegate the expectation into the region
of dimness, or to waver in his faith in it, without much imperilling his
conception of his Master, and the blessedness of union with Him. You do not
understand the Cross unless you believe in the throne; and you do not
understand the throne unless you believe in the judgment-seat. The returning
Christ shall judge the world. Brethren! Jesus is enthroned. Do you bow to
His command? Do you trust His power? Do you see in Him the pattern of what
you may be, and the pledge that you will be it if you
put your confidence in your Lord? The
enthroned Christ is present. Do you walk in blessed and continuous communion
with Him? The enthroned and present Christ is working. Do you trust in His
operation, peacefully, for yourself, for the Church, for the world? Do you
open your heart to the abundant energies with which He is flooding His
Church, and which His Church is so sadly and so much allowing to run to
waste? The enthroned, present, working Christ is coming back, and you and I
have to choose whether we shall be of ‘the servants whom the Lord, when He
cometh, shall find watching,’ and obeying His command with girt loins and
lit lamps, and so will sweep with Him into the festal hall, and sit down
with Him, on His throne; or whether we shall wail because of Him, and shrink
abashed from the judgment-seat of Christ.
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Hebrews 12:4 Resisting Unto Blood
‘Ye have not yet resisted unto
blood, striving against sin.’ — Hebrews 12:4
‘Ye have not yet resisted’ — then
others had done so; and the writer bids his readers contrast their own
comparative immunity from persecution from the fate of such, in order that
they may the more cheerfully do the easier task devolved upon them. Who were
those others?
If the supposition of many is correct that this Epistle was addressed to the
Mother Church at Jerusalem, the fate of Stephen the first martyr, and of
James the brother of John, who had ‘had the rule over’ that Church, may have
been in the writer’s mind. If the date assigned to the letter by some is
accepted, the persecution under Nero, which had lighted the gardens of the
Capitol with living torches, had already occurred; and the writer may have
wished the-Jerusalem Church to Bethink themselves that they had fared better
than their brethren in Rome. But whether these conjectures are adopted or
no, there is another contrast evidently in the writer’s mind. He has Been
speaking of the long series of heroes of the faith, some of whom had been
‘stoned and sawn asunder,’ and he would have the Christians whom he
addresses contrast their position with that of these ancient saints and
martyrs. And there is another contrast more touching still, more wonderful
and impressive, in his mind; for my text follows immediately upon a
reference to Jesus Christ, ‘who endured the Cross, despising the shame.’ So
Himself ‘had resisted unto blood.’ And thus the writer bids his readers
think of the martyrs in the Mother Church; of the blood that had deluged the
Church at Rome; of the slaughtered saints in past generations; and, above
all, of the great Captain of their salvation; and, animated by the thoughts,
manfully to bear and mightily to resist in the conflict that is laid upon
them. ‘Ye have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against Sin.’
I. So then, we have here, to begin with, the permanent condition of the
Christian life, as one of Warfare and resistance.
The imagery of the whole context is drawn from the arena. A verse or two
before the writer was speaking about the race. Now he slightly shifts his
point of view, and is speaking rather about the wrestling or the pugilistic
encounters that were there waged. And his point is that always, and
everywhere, however the forms may vary in which the conflict is carried on,
there is inseparable from the Christian life an element of effort, endurance
and antagonism. That is worth thinking about for a moment. It is all very
Well to sing of green pastures and still waters, and to rejoice in the
blessings, the consolations, the tranquillities, the raptures of Christian
experience, and to rejoice in the thought of the many mercies for body and
soul which come to men through faith. That is all true and all blessed, but
it is only one side of the truth. And unless we have apprehended, and have
¥educed to practice and experience the other side of the Christian life,
which makes it a toil and a pain to the lower self, and a continual
resistance, I venture to say that we have no right to the soothing and sweet
and tender side of it; and have need to ask ourselves whether we know
anything about Christianity at all. It is not given to us merely — it is not
given to us chiefly — to secure those great and precious things which it
does secure, but it is given to us in order that, enriched and steadied and
strengthened by the possession of them. we should be the better fit for the
conflict, just as a wise commander will see that his soldiers are well fed
before he flings them into the battle.
But then, passing from that, which is only a side issue, let me remind you
of what our antagonist is ‘striving against sin.’
Now some people would take my text to mean solely the conflict which each of
us has to wage with our own evils, meannesses and weaknesses. And some,
guided by the context, would take the reference to be exclusively to the
antagonisms with evils round about us, and with the embodiment of these in
men who do not share Christian views of life or conduct. But I think that
neither the one nor the other of these two exclusive interpretations can be
maintained. For sin is one, whether embodied in ourselves or embodied in men
or in institutions. And we have the same conflict to wage against precisely
the same antagonist when we are occupied in the task of purging ourselves
from all filthiness of flesh and spirit, and when we are occupied in the
wider task of seeking to bring every man to recognise the power of Christ’s
love, and to live in purity by obedience to Him.
And so, the first field on which every Christian is to win his spurs, to
prove his prowess, and to exercise his strength is the field within, where
the lists are very narrow, and where self wages war against self in daily
conflict. Every man of us carries his own worst enemy inside his own
waistcoat. We have all lusts, passions, inclinations, desires, faults,
vices, meannesses, selfishnesses, indolences, — a whole host of evils lying
there like a nest of vipers within us, and our first task and our lifelong
task, is to take the sting and the poison out of these, and to throttle them
and to east them out.
And then, and only after that, there comes the next thing — viz., the
antagonism in which Christian men must permanently stand to a world which
does not sympathise with their views, which is strange to the maxims that
rule their lives, and which renders no fealty to the King whom they are
sworn to obey. And that antagonism runs out into various forms. First of
all, it is the solemn duty of every Christian to wage war so as to prevent
himself from being caught up in the current of godless living which prevails
round him. We have to fight to keep ourselves from being harmed by the world
and the worldly communities amidst which we dwell What would become of the
captain of a ship who did not take care to have his compass corrected so as
to neutralize the effects of all the mass of iron in his vessel? You walk as
in the wards of a hospital. If you do not take precautions you will catch
the disease that is in the air. It is as certain that careless Christian
people who do not ever keep on guard against impending and surrounding evil
shall be infected by it, as it is certain that if an Englishman goes out,
say to the United States, he will come back with the intonations of our
brethren on the other side of the Atlantic slipping unconsciously from his
tongue. The first duty, imperative upon Christian people, is to realise that
they live in the midst of an order of things that is not in accordance with
the Master’s principles, and so to beware that they do not catch the
infection.
I do not need to say a word about the other form of antagonism, which is
equally imperative, and which will prevent us from caring much about the
judgments that may be formed of us by the people round us. ‘With me it is a
very small matter that I should be judged of you, or of man’s judgment.’ But
the resistance against sin, which is the Christian man’s merciful warfare in
the world, is not completed either by his keeping himself from complicity
with surrounding evils or by his refusing to let antagonism divert him from
his course. There is something more that is plain duty, and that is, that
every Christian should be Christ’s soldier in the attempt to get Christ’s
commandments recognised, and the principles of His word obeyed, in the
world.
Society is not organised on Christian principles. You have only to look
around you to see that. I do not need to dwell upon the various discordances
between the plain teachings of this Book and every community, and every
nation, and every individual; but let me remind you that until the Sermon on
the Mount is the law for individuals and communities, the Christian man, if
he is loyal to his Lord, must be ‘striving against sin’ in the endeavour to
get established Christ’s kingdom, which is the kingdom of righteousness.
That sermon does not contain all Christian truth, but it is the Magna Charta
of an applied Christianity; the laws of the kingdom from the lips of the
King Himself.
So, brethren, I come to you with this for my message, that no Christian man
is doing his work as Christ’s soldier, ‘striving against sin,’ until he is
seeking, with the best of his strength, to get Christ’s law, which is
righteousness, established on the face of the earth.
Talk of dynamiters and explosives, why, there is explosive power enough in
Christianity to shatter to pieces the corruptions which make so large a part
of modern social life. But, alas! the Christian Church has too long and too
generally been employed in damping down the gunpowder instead of firing it,
and seeking to explain away the large and plain commandments of the Master,
instead of seeking to apply them.
There is a new spirit springing up around us to-day, for which we should be
devoutly thankful, whilst at the same time we must forget that, like all new
move-merits, it is apt to be one-sided and exaggerated. Much harm is done, I
believe, in many directions by Christian teachers seeking to apply the
principles of Christ’s commandments to various phases of social iniquity
without a clear knowledge of the facts of the case. But that being fully
admitted, I still rejoice to believe that Christ’s men round about us are
waking up, as they never did before, to the solemn obligation laid upon
Christian churches, if they are not to perish of inanition and inactivity,
to proclaim and seek to have recognised Christ’s laws for the individual and
Christ’s law for the community.
Only remember the limitations and the antecedents about which I have already
spoken a word. No man has any business to go crusading among other people
until he has cleansed himself. And the first task of the Christian reformer
is with his own heart. And again, it is useless to deal with institutions
unless you deal with the men who live under them. The main work of the
Christian Church must ever be with individuals, and through their
improvement the improvement of society will be most fully secured. But the
error of many good and earnest men to-day is in thinking that if you set the
‘environment,’ as they call it, right you will get the men right. It is a
mistake. Take a pack of drunken wastrels out of the slums and put them into
model lodging-houses, and in a fortnight the lodging-houses. will be as
dirty, as the sties from which the men were dragged. Mend the men, and then
you may hopefully Set them in new environment; mend the men, and society
will be mended. And, mend yourselves first, and then you will be able to
mend society. Resist your own sin, and then go out to fight with the sin of
others.
II. Notice the brunt of the battle which has been borne by others.
I have already said that the immediate context suggests two contrasts
between the comparative immunity from persecution of the readers of the
letter and certain others.
The first is that suggested by all that glorious muster-roll of heroes and
martyrs of the faith which precedes this chapter. And I may say without
dealing in rhetoric, or dilating on the subject, that Christian men in this
generation may well bethink themselves of what it was that their fathers
bore, and did, that has won for them this ease.
I remember an old church, on the slopes of one of the hills of Rome, which
is covered over on all its interior walls with a set of the most gruesome
pictures of the martyrs. There may be an unwholesome admiration and
adoration of these. I think modern Christianity, in its complacency with
itself, and this marvellous nineteenth century, of which we are so proud,
would be all the better if it went back sometimes to remember that there
were times when ‘young men and maidens, and old men and children,’ had to
resist to blood; and when they went to their deaths as joyfully as a bride
to the altar.
Ah, brethren I you Nonconformists in this generation, who have an easy-
going religion, do not always remember how it was worn Think of George Fox
and the Friends. Think of the early Nonconformists, hunted and harried,
their noses slit and ears cropped off, their pillories and exile, and then
be ashamed to talk about the difficulties that you have to meet. ‘Ye have
not resisted unto blood.’
There is a far more touching contrast suggested, and apparently mainly in
the writer’s mind, because just before he has said, ‘Consider Him that
endured such contradiction of sinners.’ The word that he employs for
‘consider’ might be rendered ‘compare, weigh in the balance,’ Christ’s
sufferings and yours. He has borne the heavy end of the Cross of which He
lays the light end upon our shoulders. Of course the more mysterious and
profound aspects of Christ’s death, in which He is no pattern for us, but
the propitiation for our sins, do not come into view in this contrast. They
are abundantly treated in the rest of the letter. But here the writer is
thinking of Jesus Christ in His capacity of the Prince of sufferers for
righteousness’ sake, who could have escaped His Cross if He had chosen to
abandon His warfare and His witness. Jesus Christ is a great deal more than
that. And the differentia of His sufferings and death is not touched by such
a consideration. But do not let us forget that He is that, and that whatever
else His death is, it stands also as being the very climax of all suffering
for righteousness. He is the King of the martyrs as well as the Sacrifice
for the world’s sin. Let us turn to Him, and mark the heroic strength of
character, hidden from hasty observation by the sweet gentleness in which it
was enshrined, like the iron hand in a velvet glove.
Let us understand how His pattern is
held forth to us, and how the Cross is our example, as well as the ground of
all our hope. ‘Ye have not yet resisted ... Consider Him.’
III. And now, lastly, note the lighter warfare incumbent upon us.
The resistance changes its form, but in essence it continues. In old days
warfare consisted in men bludgeoning each other, or engaging in hand- grips
foot to foot and face to face. Nowadays it is artillery duels — a great deal
more scientific, a great deal less coarse; but it is warfare all the same.
The world used to burn Christians, to hang them, to stone them. It does not
do that now, but it fights them yet. The world has become partially
Christianised, and the principles of Christianity have, in a certain
imperfect way, infiltrated themselves through the mass, so that the
antagonism is not quite as hot as it once was. And the Church has weakened
its testimony and largely adopted the maxims of the world. So why should the
world persecute a Church which is only a bit of the world under another
name? But let any man for himself honestly try to live a life modelled on
Christ’s maxims, and let him cast himself against some of the clamant evils
round about him, and seek to subdue them, because Christ has bidden him, and
he will see whether the old antagonism is not there yet. What a chorus of
select epithets will immediately be discharged! ‘Impracticable,’
‘fanatical,’ ‘one-sided,’ ‘revolutionary,’ ‘sour visaged,’ ‘Pharisee,’
‘hypocrite.’ These will be the sweet, smelling flowers in the garland that
will be woven Depend upon it, a Christian man who is bent on living out
Christianity for himself, and on seeking to apply it around him, will have
to fight and endure.
But all that is. as nothing — nothing — to what the front rank had to go
through, and went through, joyfully. They fell in the trenches and filled
them up, that the rear rank might pass across. They bore sword stabs; we
have only to bear pin pricks. Stones were flung at them, as at Stephen
outside the wall; handfuls of mud are all that we have to be afraid of.
So, brethren, accept thankfully to-day’s form of the permanent conflict, and
see that you do unmurmuringly, cheerfully, and thoroughly the task that is
laid upon you. And do not think much of the discomforts and annoyances. For
us to speak about sacrifices for Christ is as if a bargeman on a canal were
to dilate on the perils of his voyage in the hearing of an Arctic explorer;
or as if a man that went in a first-class carriage to London were to speak
to an African traveller about ‘the perils of the road.’ ‘Ye have not yet
resisted unto blood. ‘Consider Him’; and take up your cross, and follow Him.
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Hebrews 12:10 A Father's Discipline
‘For they verily for a few days
chastened us after their own pleasure; but He for our profit,, that we might
be partakers of His holiness.’ — Hebrews 12:10
FEW words of Scripture have been
oftener than these laid as a healing balm on wounded hearts. They may be
long unnoticed on the page, like a lighthouse in calm sunshine, but sooner
or later the stormy night falls, and then the bright beam flashes out and is
welcome. They go very deep into the meaning of life as discipline; they tell
us how much better God’s discipline is than that of the most loving and wise
of parents, and they give that superiority as a reason for our yielding more
entire and cheerful obedience to Him than we do to such.
Now, to grasp the full meaning of these words, we have to notice that the
earthly and the heavenly disciplines are described in four contrasted
clauses. which are arranged in what students call inverted parallelism —
that is to say, the first clause corresponds to the fourth and the second to
the third. ‘For a few days’ pairs off with ‘that we might be partakers of
His holiness.’ Now, at first sight that does not seem a contrast; but notice
that the ‘for’ in the former clause is not the ‘for’ of duration, but of
direction. It does not tell us the space during which the chastisement or
discipline lasts, but the end towards which it is pointed. The earthly
parent’s discipline trains a boy or girl for circumstances, pursuits,
occupations, professions, all of which terminate with the brief span of
life. God’s training is for an eternal day. It would be quite irrelevant to
bring in here any reference to the length of time during which an earthly
father’s discipline lasts, but it is in full consonance with the writer’s
intention to dwell upon the limited scope of the one and the wide and
eternal purpose of the other.
Then, as for the other contrast — ‘for their own pleasure,’ or, as the
Revised Version reads it, ‘as Seemed good to them’ — ‘but He for our
profit.’ Elements of personal peculiarity, whim, passion, limited and
possibly erroneous conceptions of what is the right thing to do for the
child, enter into the training of the wisest and most loving amongst us; and
we often make a mistake and do harm when we think we are doing good. But
God’s training is all from a simple and unerring regard to the benefit of
His child. Thus the guiding principles of the two disciplines are contrasted
in the two central clauses.
Now, these are very threadbare, commonplace, and old-fashioned thoughts;
but, perhaps, they are so familiar that they have not their proper power
over us; and I wish to try in this sermon, if I can, to get more into them,
or to get them more into us, by one or two very plain remarks.
I. I would ask you to note, first, the grand, deep, general conception,
here firmly laid hold of, of life as only intelligible when it is regarded
as education or discipline.
God corrects, chastens, trains, educates. That is the deepest word about
everything that befalls us. Now, there are involved in that two or three
very obvious thoughts, which would make us all calmer and nobler and
stronger, if they were vividly and vitally present to us day by day.
The first is that all which befalls us has a will behind it and is
co-operant to an end. Life is not a heap of unconnected incidents, like a
number of links flung down on the ground, but the links are a chain, and the
chain has a staple. It is not a law without a law-giver that shapes men’s
lives. It is not a blind, impersonal chance that presides over it. Why,
these very meteors that astronomers expect in autumn to be flying and
flashing through the sky in apparent wild disorder, all obey law. Our lives,
in like manner, are embodied thoughts of God’s, in as far as the incidents
which befall in them are concerned. We may mar, we may fight against, may
contradict the presiding divine purpose; but yet, behind the wild dance of
flashing and transitory lights that go careering all over the sky, there
guides, not an impersonal Power, but a living, loving Will He, not it; He,
not they, men, circumstances, what people call second causes — He corrects,
and He does it for a great purpose.
Ah! if we believed that, and not merely said it from the teeth outwards, but
if it were a living conviction with us, do you not think our lives would
tower up into a nobleness, and settle themselves down into a tranquillity
all strange to them to-day?
But, then, further, there is the other thought to be grasped, that all our
days we are here in a state of pupilage. The world is God’s nursery. There
are many mansions in the Father’s house; and this earth is where He keeps
the little ones. That is the true meaning of everything that befalls us. It
is education. Work would not be worth doing if it were not. Life is given to
us to teach us how to live, to exercise our powers, to give us habits and
facilities of working. We are like boys in a training ship that lies for
most of the time in harbour, and now and then goes out upon some short and
easy cruise; not for the sake of getting anywhere in particular, but for the
sake of exercising the lads in seamanship. There is no meaning worthy of us
— to say nothing of God — in anything that we do, unless it is looked upon
as schooling. We all say we believe that. Alas! I am afraid very many of us
forget it,
But that conception of the meaning of each event that befalls us carries
with it the conception of the whole of this life, as being an education
towards another. I do not understand how any man can bear to live here, and
to do all his painful work, unless he thinks that by it he is getting ready
for the life beyond; and that ‘nothing can bereave him of the force he made
his own, being here.’ The rough ore is turned into steel by being
‘Plunged in baths of hissing tears, And heated hot with hopes and fears, And
battered with the shocks of doom’
And then — what then? Is an instrument, thus fashioned, and tempered and
polished, destined to be broken and ‘thrown as rubbish to the void’?
Certainly not. If this life is education, as is obvious’ upon its very face,
then there is a place where we shall exercise the faculties that we have
acquired here, and manifest in loftier forms the characters which here we
have made our own.
Now, brethren, if we carry these thoughts with us habitually, what a
difference it will make upon everything that befalls us! You hear men often
maundering and murmuring about the mysteries of the pain and sorrow and
suffering of this world, wondering if there is any loving Will behind it
all. That perplexed questioning goes on the hypothesis that life is meant
mainly for enjoyment or for material good. If we once apprehended in its
all- applicable range this simple truth, that life is a discipline, we
should have less difficulty in understanding what people call the mysteries
of Providence. I do not say it would interpret everything, but it would
interpret an immense deal. It would make us eager, as each event came, to
find out its special mission and what it was meant to do for us. It would
dignify trifles, and bring down the overwhelming magnitude of the so- called
great events, and would make us lords of ourselves, and lords of
circumstances, and ready to wring the last drop of possible advantage out of
each thing that befell us. Life is a Father’s discipline.
II. Note the guiding principle of that discipline.
‘They... as seemed good to them.’ I have already said that, even in the most
wise and unselfish training by an earthly parent, there will -mingle
subjective elements, peculiarities of view and thought, and sometimes of
passion and whim and other ingredients, which detract from the value of all
such training. The guiding principle for each earthly parent, even at the
best, can only be his conception of what is for the good of his child; and
oftentimes that is not purely the guide by which the parent’s discipline is
directed. So the text turns us away from all these incompletenesses, and
tells us, ‘He for our profit’ — with no sidelong look to anything else, and
with an entirely wise knowledge of what is best for us, so that the result
will be always and only for our good. This is the point of view from which
every Christian man ought to look upon all that befalls him.
What follows? This, plainly: there is no such thing as evil except the evil
of sin. All that comes is good — of various sorts and various complexions,
but all generically the same. The inundation comes up over the fields, and
men are in despair. It goes down; and then, like the slime left from the
Nile in flood, there is better soil for the fertilising of our land. Storms
keep sea and air from stagnating. All that men earl evil in the material
world has in it a soul of good.
That is an old, old commonplace; but, like the other one, of which I have
been speaking, it is more often professed than realised, and we need to be
brought back to the recognition of it more entirely than we ordinarily are.
If it be that all my life is paternal discipline, and that God makes no
mistakes, then I can embrace whatever comes to me, and be sure that in it I
shall find that which will be for my good.
Ah, brethren, it is easy to say so when things go well; but, surely, when
the night falls is the time for the stars to shine. That gracious word
should shine upon some of us in to-day’s perplexities, and pains, and
disappointments, and sorrows — ‘He for our profit.’
Now, that great thought does not in the least deny the fact that pain and
sorrow, and so-called evil, are very real There is no false stoicism in
Christianity. The mission of our troubles would not be effected unless they
did trouble us. The good that we get from a sorrow would not be realised
unless we did sorrow. ‘Weep for yourselves’ said the Master, ‘and for your
children.’ It is right that we should writhe in palm It is right that we
should yield to the impressions that are made upon us by calamities. But it
is not right that we should be so affected as that we should fail to discern
in them this gracious thought — ‘for our profit.’ God sends us many
love-tokens, and amongst them are the great and the little annoyances and
pains that beset our lives, and on each of them, if we would look, we should
see written, in His own hand, this inscription: ‘For your good.’ Do not let
us have our eyes so full of tears that we cannot see, or our hearts so full
of regrets that we cannot accept, that sweet, strong message.
The guiding principle of all that befalls us is God’s unerring knowledge of
what will do us good. That will not prevent, and is not meant to prevent,
the arrow from wounding, but it does wipe the poison off the arrow, and
diminish the pain, and should diminish the tears.
III. Lastly, here we see the great aim of all the discipline.
The earthly parent trains his son, or her daughter, for earthly occupations.
These last a little while. God trains us for an eternal end: ‘that we should
be partakers of His holiness.’ The one object which is congruous with a
man’s nature, and is stamped on his whole being, as its only adequate end,
is that he should be like God. Holiness is the Scriptural shorthand
expression for all that in the divine nature which separates God from, and
lifts Him above, the creature; and in that aspect of the word the gulf can
never be lessened nor bridged between us and Him. But it also is the
expression for the moral purity and perfection of that divine nature which
separates Him from the creatures far more really than do the metaphysical
attributes that belong to His infinitude and eternity; and in that aspect
the great hope that is given to us is that we may rise nearer and nearer to
that perfect whiteness of purity, and though we cannot share in His
essential, changeless being, may ‘walk’ — as befits our limited and
changeful natures — ‘in the light, as He’ — as befits His boundless and
eternal being — ‘is in the light.’ That is the only end which it is worthy
of a man, being what he is, to propose to himself as the issue of his
earthly experience. If I fail in that, whatever else I have accomplished, I
fail in everything. I may have made myself rich, cultured, learned; famous,
refined, prosperous; but if I have not at least begun to be like God in
purity, in will, in heart, then my whole career has missed the purpose for
which I was made, and for which all the discipline of life has been lavished
upon me. Fail there, and, wherever you succeed, you are a failure. Succeed
there, and, wherever you fail, you are a success.
That great and only worthy end may be reached by the ministration of
circumstances and the discipline through which God passes us. These are not
the only ways by which He makes us partakers of His holiness, as we well
know. There is the work of that Divine Spirit who is granted to every
Believer to breathe into him the holy breath of an immortal and
incorruptible life. To work along with these there is the influence that is
brought to bear upon us by the circumstances in which we are placed and the
duties which we have to perform. These may all help us to be nearer and
liker to God.
That is the intention of our sorrows. They will wean us; they will refine
us; and they will blow us to His breast, as a strong wind might sweep a man
into some refuge from itself. I am sure that among my hearers there are some
who can thankfully attest that they were brought nearer to God by some
short, sharp sorrow than by many long days of prosperity. What Absalom, in
his wayward, impulsive way, did with Joab is like what God sometimes does
with His sons. Joab would not come to Absalom’s palace, so Absalom set his
corn on fire; and then Joab came. So God sometimes burns our harvests that
we may go to Him.
But the sorrow that is meant to bring us nearer to Him may be in vain. The
same circumstances may produce opposite effects. I dare say there are people
listening to me now who have been made hard, and sullen, and bitter, and
paralysed for good work, because they have some heavy burden or some wound
that life can never heal, to be carded or to ache. Ah, brethren! we are
often like shipwrecked crews, of whom some are driven by the danger to their
knees, and some are driven to the spirit-casks. Take care that you do not
waste your sorrows; that you do not let the precious gifts of
disappointment, pain, loss, loneliness, ill-health, or similar afflictions
that come into your. daily life, mar you instead of mending you. See that
they send you. nearer to God, and not that they drive you farther from Him.
See that they make you more anxious to have the durable riches and
righteousness which no man can take from you, than to grasp at what may yet
remain, of fleeting: earthly joys.
So, brethren, let us try to school
ourselves into the habitual and operative conviction that life is
discipline. Let us yield ourselves to the loving will of the unerring
Father, the perfect love. Let us beware of getting no good from what is
charged to the brim with good. And let us see to it that out of the many
fleeting circumstances of life we gather and keep the eternal fruit of being
partakers of His holiness. May it never have to be said of any of us that we
wasted the mercies which were judgments too, and found no good in the
things, that our tortured hearts felt to be also evils, lest God, should
have to wail over any of us, ‘In vain have I smitten your children; they
have received no correction!’
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Hebrews 12:17 Esau's Vain Tears
‘For ye know how that afterward,
when he would have inherited the blessing, he was rejected: for he found no
place of repentance, though he sought it carefully with tears.’ — Hebrews
12:17
THESE words have Been often understood
as teaching a very ghastly and terrible doctrine, viz., that a man may
earnestly and tearfully desire to repent, and be unable to do so. Such
teaching has burdened many a heart, and has put obstacles before many feeble
feet in the way of a return to God. It seems to me to be contradicted by a
thousand places of Scripture, and to involve something very much like a
contradiction in terms.
The Revised Version, by a very slight change, has dispelled that ugly dream.
It has put the clause ‘for he found no place of repentance’ in a
parenthesis. The effect of that is to bring the first and last clauses of
the verse more closely together; and to show more clearly that what Esau is
represented as seeking, and seeking with tears in vain, is not repentance,
but the Father’s blessing.
It may not, perhaps, be legitimate, regard being had to the construction of
the sentence, to treat the clause in question as a parenthesis, because it
is so closely connected with the succeeding clause by the antithesis of
‘found’ in the one and ‘sought’ in the other. But although that may be so, I
have no doubt whatever that the truth intended to be conveyed by the
parenthesis of the Revised Version is the true interpretation of the words
before us; and that we are to find here simply the declaration that this
man, at a given time of his life; ‘would have inherited the blessing,’
‘sought it carefully with tears,’ and found it not.
Now the words, thus understood, teach a sufficiently grave and solemn
lesson, though they do not teach the ghastly, and, as I believe, the
erroneous thought that has been drawn from them. And it may he worth our
while to consider for a moment the lessons that they do teach, and to try to
lay them upon our hearts.
I. I begin then, first, with asking you to look at the history which is
held up before us here as a solemn warning.
The character of Esau is a very simple one. In many respects he is much more
attractive and admirable than his brother Jacob. He is frank, generous,
quick to kindle into anger, but, as the story shows us too, quick to
forgive; placable, easily to be entreated; with the wild Arab virtues of
chivalry and generosity and bravery; and the vices Belonging to such a
character, of almost utter incapacity to rise beyond the present, and of a
great susceptibility to mere material and sensual gratification.
And so he comes in from the field hungry and faint. The pottage smells
savoury there, as it smokes in the dish before him. The birthright is a long
way off, very unsubstantial, very ideal, and the thing that is nearest him,
though it be small, shuts out from his view the far greater thing that lies
beyond. Therefore he elects to secure present gratification of a material
character, whatever becomes of future satisfaction of a higher and more
spiritual nature.
And are you going to throw stones at him for that? Is it such a very unusual
thing to find men choosing paths that will yield some modicum of
sufficiently hot and sufficiently savory pottage, whatever becomes of their
birthright? Is there nobody here that believes more in wealth than in
purity? Is there no young man here who would rather live to make a fortune
than to cultivate his own nature into loftiest beauty? Are there none of you
that despise the priceless things, the things that have no price in the
market because they are beyond all its wealth to purchase? Are there none of
us who are such fools that a spoonful of pottage to-day seems to us to be
more real and more precious than a whole heaven hereafter?
Esau had a show of reason. He said: ‘I am ready to die, and what will my
birthright do for me?’ Better a thousand times that he, or we, should die as
animals that we may live as the sons of God, than that we should buy
existence at the price of true life. And so the man of our text is
sufficiently like the rest of you, for you to have a fellow feeling to him
that should make you wondrous kind, and his faults are nothing at all
extraordinary, but only putting in graphic form, and in such disproportion
as to be almost absurd, the choice that the mass of men always make between
present and future, between the material and the spiritual. And then the
story goes on to tell us that, long years afterwards, we do not know how
long, he found out what a fool he had been. Perhaps so much as thirty or
forty years elapsed between the moment when he despised his birthright and
the other moment that is set before us here. What are the points that come
out in the narrative to which our text refers? ‘When Esau heard the words of
his father, he cried with a great and exceeding hitter cry, and said unto
his father, Bless me, even me also, O my father’... and again, ‘Hast thou
but one blessing, my father? Bless me, even me also, O my father. And Esau
lifted up his voice and wept,’ These are the parts of the history which the
writer of the Hebrews recalls to his Jewish hearers. There is nothing in
them about Esau’s vainly seeking for repentance, but there is an account of
his passionate weeping and loud entreaties that he yet might obtain a
blessing from Isaac’s trembling lips. In the story there is no word of his
vainly trying to repent, but there is a real repentance in the sense in
which alone that word can be employed, in reference to such an incident and
upon that plane of things, viz., there is in him a decided and fundamental
change of view, of mind, as to the value of the birthright that he had
despised, and that is repentance; and there is bitter sorrow for what had
passed, and that is repentance; and there is earnest desire that it might be
different, and that is a sign of repentance. There is no sign of sorrow for
sin, of repentance, in that sense of the word, but if we take the word not
in the, religious meaning, but in what may be called its secular
significance, there are in Esau’s ease, as recorded in Genesis, both the
elements of a decided alteration of mind and purpose, and of penitence and
sorrow for the past. These, then, are the facts of the story, and these are
the facts to which my text appeals, for it begins by saying, as to those to
whom the whole narrative was familiar: ‘Ye know how that.’ Therefore all
that follows must find its vindication in the story as it is Written in
Genesis.
II. These, then, being the facts, let me now come, in the second place,
to deal with the lesson which this story teaches us.
Remember what I have said as to points which come out in the narrative, that
the man there seeks with tears for the blessing, that so far from vainly
seeking to repent, in the lower sense of the word which alone is appropriate
in the present ease, he does repent. Therefore that expression of our text
‘he found no place of repentance’ does not mean ‘he found no place where he
could repent,’ but it means he found no field on which such repentance as he
had could operate — so as to undo that which was past. His repentance did
not alter the fixed destination of the blessing. His repentance, his change
of mind as to the worth of the thing thrown away, and as to his own conduct
in despising it, did not bring the thing back again to him. His tears did
not obliterate what was done. He wished that it had been otherwise, but his
wishes were vain.
And that is the lesson, my brethren, which this text as it stands is
intended to teach us. We are pointed hack to that tragic picture of Esau
there, weeping, wringing his hands in the wild passion of his uncultured
nature, when the blessing, seen to be desirable too late, had vanished from
his convulsive grasp. And the lesson that is taught us is just this old
solemn one. There may come in your life a time when the scales will fall
from your eyes, and you will see how insignificant and miserable are the
present gratifications for which you have sold your birthright, and may wish
the bargain undone which cannot be undone. You cannot wash out bitter
memories, you cannot blot out habits by a wish. Tears will not alter the
irrevocable, you cannot avert consequences that fall upon a man, the
consequences of a lifetime, by any weeping and wringing of your hands, and
by any wish that they might disappear. ‘What I have written I have written,’
said Pilate, and in tragic sense it is true about many a man who at the end
looks back upon many ‘a line which dying he would wish to blot,’ but which
stands ineffaceable, not to be scratched out by any of your penknives,
unless you can cut out the substance of the soul on which it is written.
My brother! learn the lesson. You young men and women, do you begin right,
that there may not be in your career deeds or a set of the life which one
day you may wake to see has been all madness and misery! Oh! it is an awful
thing for men to stand looking back upon a past life which to them appears
as the vale of Sodom, on the morning after the eruption, did to Abraham as
he looked on it from Mature, ‘and lo! the smoke of the country went up as
the smoke of a furnace.’ So foul with slime-pits of boiling bitumen, the
indulged lusts of the flesh, and dark with curling smoke-wreaths which tell
of infernal fires wasting the fields that might have waved fruitful with
harvests, the dark remembrances and blighting habits of sin set on fire of
hell, does many a man’s life lie spread out to his gaze. How fain would he
cancel the record, if he could! How fain would he
forget and reverse the history! How fain would he bring back his early
innocence of these lusts and crimes! In vain! in vain!
The past stands — ‘Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.’ I
know, thank God for the knowledge, I know that — as we shall have to say
presently — any man, at any moment of his earthly career, may find, if he
seeks for it, the mercy of the Lord which bringeth salvation, but I know too
that the salvation which comes to a man who has all his life been giving
himself up to earth, and limiting his views and moulding his character by
the present and its contemptible objects, will not be as large, as full, as
blessed in many an aspect, as the salvation which might have been his if at
an early stage in his life, with his character still to mould, and his
memory still unwritten with evil, he had turned himself to his God, and
found peace in the blood of Jesus Christ. Maimed and marred in a thousand
ways, having memories which burn and sting, having habits which it will be
hard to fight against; with the marks of thee gyves upon his wrists; and his
eyes unaccustomed to the daylight, like the prisoner that came out of the
Bastille after a lifetime of imprisonment there, and wanted to go back again
because he could not bear freedom and sunshine: so many a man brought to God
and saved yet so as by fire, near the end of his days, has to feel that it
is not all the same whether a lifetime has been spent in the temple and
priestly service, or in the foul haunts of vice and debauchery.
We shall always have as much of God as we can hold, and as much of salvation
as we desire; but the tragic thing is that a life spent in living,
Esau-like, for the world and for the present, lames our desires and limits
our capacities, so that even if such a man afterwards become a Christian, it
may be impossible even for the giving God to give us as large a bestowment
of His mercy and grace as we might otherwise have possessed. On the other
side it is not to be forgotten ‘the publicans and the harlots shall go into
the Kingdom of God before you,’ Pharisees and Sadducees. And there is such a
thing as the deep repentance and the passionate trust with which a soul, all
spattered and befouled with fleshly sins, may cleave to the Master that may
overcome even these disabilities of which I have spoken. But in the main it
remains true that even if Esau at the last gets a blessing, he bears away a
less blessing than he might have done had his earlier life been different.
III. And now let me turn last of all to what I venture to consider the
misapprehension which these words do not teach.
They do not teach that a man may desire to repent with tears and be unable
to do so. That, it seems to me, is to assert a staring, stark contradiction,
for if a man desire to repent he must have changed his views as to the
conduct of which he desires to repent, and that change of View is the
repentance which he desires. And if a man desires to repent there must be in
him some measure of regret and sorrow for the conduct Of which he desires to
repent, considered as sin against God, and that is repentance.
Nor do the words teach, as it seems to me, the cognate thought which has
sometimes been deduced from them, that a man may desire to receive the
salvation of His soul from God, and may not receive it. To desire is to
possess; to possess in the measure of the desire, and according to its
reality. There is no such thing in the spiritual realm as a real longing
unfulfilled. ‘Whosoever will, let him come and take of the water of life
freely.’ And the awful pictures that have been drawn of men weeping because
they could not repent, and of men with passionate tears imploring from the
Father in heaven the blessing which does not come to them, are slanders upon
God and misapprehensions of His gospel. That gospel proclaims that
wheresoever and whosoever will ask shall receive, or rather that God has
already given, and that nothing but obstinate determination not to possess
prevents any man from being enriched with the fulness of God’s salvation.
Only remember, dear brethren, it is possible for a man to wish vagrantly,
with half his will, to wish in a languid fashion, to wish while he is not
prepared to surrender what stands in the way of his wish being gratified.
And such wishing as that never got salvation, and never will. There are
plenty of people that would like to Be saved as they understand it, and to
be sure that they are so, who are not prepared to close with the terms of
salvation. It is not wishing of that sort that I am talking about. Heaven
may be had for the wishing, but it must be an honest wish, it must Be
out-and- out wishing, it must be wishing which actuates the life, it must be
wishing which drives you to the Cross of Christ. And then, in the measure of
the desire shall be the gift; and the larger the petition, the larger the
benediction which comes fluttering down from heaven on to your head and into
your heart.
We have all sold our birthright, but we have a Brother in whom we may win it
back, the elder Brother of us prodigals, who, instead of grudging us the
fatted calf and the festival welcome, Himself has died that they may be
ours; and that no penitence may be unavailing, nor any longing be
unsatisfied for ever more.
Whatever we are, whatever has been our past, however embruted in sensual
vice, however entangled in material gains, we have but to turn ourselves to
that gracious Lord our Brother, in whom the Father blesses us with all
heavenly blessings, and we shall share in the birthright of His firstborn
Son, ‘being heirs of God, and joint heirs with Christ.’
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Hebrews 12:22, 23 With Whom Faith Lives
‘Ye are come unto mount Zion, and
unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an
innumerable company of angels, 23, To the general assembly and church of the
firstborn, which are written in heaven.’ — Hebrews 12:22, 23
The magnificent passage of which these
words are part sums up the contrast between Judaism and Christianity which
this whole Epistle has been illustrating and enforcing. The writer takes the
scene on Sinai as expressive of the genius of the former revelation, whose
centre was a law which evoked the consciousness of sin, and kindled terror;
and which was embodied in sensible and material symbols. Far other and
better are the characteristics of the latter revelation. That excites no
dread; is given from no flashing mountain with accompaniments of darkness
and trumpet blasts and terrible words; and it brings us into contact with no
mere material and therefore perishable symbols, but with realities none the
less real because they are above sense, and not remote from us though they
be.
For, says my text, ‘Ye are come,’ not ‘Ye shall come.’ The humblest life may
be in touch with the grandest realities in the universe, and need not wait
for death to draw aside the separating curtain in order to be in the
presence of God and in the heavenly Jerusalem.
How are these things brought to us? By the revelation of God in Christ. How
are we brought to them? By faith in that revelation. So every believing
life, howsoever encompassed by flesh and sense, can thrust, as it were, a
hand through the veil, and grasp the realities beyond. The scene described
in the first words of my text may verily be the platform on which our lives
are lived, howsoever in outward form they may be passed on this low earth;
and the companions, which the second part of our text discloses, may verily
be our companions, though we ‘wander lonely as a cloud,’ or seem to be
surrounded by far less noble society. By faith we are come to the unseen
realities which are come to us by the revelation of God in Christ. ‘Ye are
come unto Mount Zion.’
Now, looking generally at these words, they give us just two things — the
scene and the companions of the Christian life. The remainder of the passage
will occupy us on future occasions, but for the present I confine myself to
the words which I have read. And I shall best deal with them, I think, if I
simply follow that division into which they naturally fall, and ask you to
note, first, where faith lives, and, second, with whom faith lives.
I. First, then, where fait
