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 faith lives.
‘Ye are come unto Mount Zion, and unto the city of the living God, the
heavenly Jerusalem.’ There are two points here which carry us back to the
topography of the ancient sacred city. In the literal Jerusalem, Zion was
the lofty Acropolis, at once fortress and site of the king’s palace, and
round it clustered the dwellings of the city.
The two symbols are thus closely connected, and present substantially the
same idea, and perhaps it is pressing a figure too far to find a diversity
of meaning in the separate parts of this closely connected whole. But still
it seems to me that there is a substantial difference of aspect in the two
clauses.
The first thought, therefore, that I would suggest to you is this, that the
life of a man who has truly laid hold of Jesus Christ, and so is living by
faith, is on its inward side — that is, in deepest reality — a life passed
in the dwelling of the great King. All through this letter, the writer is
recurring to the thought of access to God, unimpeded and continual, as being
the great gift which Jesus Christ has brought to us. And here he gathers it
into the noblest symbol. There, lifted high above all the humbler roofs,
flash the golden pinnacles of the great palace in which God Himself dwells.
And we, toiling and moiling down here, surrounded by squalid circumstances,
and annoyed by many cares, and limited by many narrownesses which we often
find to be painful, and fighting with many sorrows, and seeming to ourselves
to be, sometimes, homeless wanderers in a wilderness, may yet ever more
‘dwell in the house of the Lord, to behold His beauty and to inquire in His
temple.’
The privilege has for its other side a
duty; the duty has for its foundation a privilege. For if it be true that
the real life of every believing soul is a life that never moves from the
temple-palace where God is, and that its inmost secret and the spring of its
vitality is communion with God, what shall we say of the sort of lives that
most of us most often live? Is there any truth in such exalted metaphors as
this in reference to us? Does it not sound far liker irony than truth to say
of people whose days are so shuttlecocked about by trifling cares, and
absorbed in fleeting objects, and wasted in the chase after perishable
delights, that they ‘are come unto Mount Zion,’ and dwell in the presence of
God? Is my ‘life hid with Christ in God’? There is no possibility of Death
being your usher, to introduce you into the house of God not made with
hands, unless faith has introduced you into it even whilst you tarry here,
and unless your habitual direction of heart and mind towards Him keeps you
ever more at least a waiter at His threshold, if you do not pass beyond. ‘I
had rather be a doorkeeper in the house of the Lord than dwell in the tents
of wickedness.’
My brother! do we so knit ourselves to Him, by heartfelt acceptance of the
good news of His loving proximity to us which Jesus Christ .brings, as that
indeed we have left earth and care and sin at the foot of the mount, with
the asses and the servants, and have our faces set to the lofty sweetnesses
of our ‘Father’s house’? ‘Blessed are they that dwell in Thy house,’ and no
less blessed are they ‘in whose hearts are the ways’ that lead to it.
Then let me remind you how Zion contrasts with Sinai, and thus suggests the
thought that a true Christian life, based upon faith, has a communion with
God which is darkened by no dread, nor disturbed by consciousness of
unforgiven sin. We have set against each other the terrors of that theophany
on Mount Sinai, attendant on, or rather precedent to, the giving of the law
— the mountain wrapped in smoke; in the heart of the wreathing blackness the
flashing fire; from out of the midst of it the long-drawn trumpet blasts,
the proclamation of the coming of the King; and then. the voice which,
divine as it was, froze the marrow of the hearers’ bones, that they
entreated that no words like these should any more fall on their trembling
ears.
That is the one picture. The other shows us the mount where the King dwells,
serene and peaceful, the clouds far below the horizon; the flashing fire
changed into lambent light; the blast of the trumpet stilled; the dread
voice changed into a voice ‘that speaketh better things’ than were heard
amidst the granite cliffs of the wilderness.
And so in vivid, picturesque form the writer gathers up the one great
contrast between the revelation of which the message was law and its highest
result the consciousness of sin and the shrinking that ensued, and the other
of which the inmost heart is love, and the issue the attraction of hearts by
the magnetism of its grace. The old fable of a mountain of loadstone which
drew ships at sea to its cliffs is true of this Mount Zion, which is exalted
above the mountains that it may draw hearts tossing on the restless sea of
life to the’ fair havens’ beneath its sheltering height, There is no dread,
though there is reverence, and no fear, though there is awe, in the approach
of those who come through Jesus Christ, and live beneath the smile of their
reconciled God and Father. ‘Ye are come unto Mount Zion,’ the dwelling-place
of the living God, from whose lips there will steal into the ears and the
hearts of those who keep near Him, gracious words of consolation, so
thrilling, so soothing, so enlightening, so searching, so encouraging, that
they which hear them shall say, ‘Speak yet again, that I may be blessed.’
And then there is the other aspect of this scene where faith lives. ‘Ye are
come unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem.’ I need not
remind you of how much we hear in this Epistle in reference to that city. It
is generally set forth as being yet to come, as being the object of seeking
rather than of possession. But the fact is that there are two aspects of it.
In one it is future, in the other it is present, The general idea to be
attached to it is simply that of the order and social state of those who
love and serve God. Here, in this part of my text, we have to deal with the
city rather than with its inhabitants. They follow thereafter, but, so far
as we can separate between the two, we have just this idea enforced in the
words that I am now commenting upon — viz., that the lowliest life, knit, as
it seems to be, by so many bonds to the perishable associations and
affinities of earth, yet, if it be a life of faith in Jesus Christ, has its
true affinities and relationships beyond, and not here. ‘We have our
citizenship in heaven,’ says the Apostle, ‘from whence also we look for the
Saviour.’ And every Christian man and woman is therefore hound to two or
three very plain duties.
If you are living by faith, you do not belong to this order in the midst of
which you find yourself. See that you keep vivid the consciousness that you
do not. Cultivate the sense of detachment from the present, of not being
absorbed by, or belonging to, things which are not coeval with yourself, and
from all of which you will have to pass. Cultivate the sense of having your
true home beyond the seas; and look to it as emigrants’ and colonists in a
far-off land do to the old country, as being home. Live by the laws of your
own city, and not by those that run in the community in which you dwell. You
are under another jurisdiction. The examples, the maxims of low earthly
prudence, or even of a somewhat higher earthly morality, are not your laws.
You are not bound to do as the people round about you do.
‘I appeal unto Caesar.’ I take my
orders from him. I send my despatches home, and report to headquarters, and
if I get approbation thence, it does not matter what the people amongst whom
I dwell think about me. Make your investments at home. The Jews invented
banking and letters of credit in order that they might the more easily shift
their wealth from one land to another as exigencies required. We are
strangers where we are. Do not put your property into the country in which
you live as an alien, and lock it up there; but remit, as you can do, to the
land where you are going, and to which you belong. Home securities are a
good deal better than foreign ones. ‘ Ye are come to the city of the living
God.’ ‘Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth.’
II. And now let me turn to the other thought herewith whom does faith
live.
I need not trouble you with merely expository remarks upon the diversity of
arrangements which is possible in the second half of my text. Suffice it to
say that just as the scene of the life of faith has been represented in a
twofold and yet closely connected form as Mount Zion and the heavenly
Jerusalem, so the companions of that life are also represented in a twofold
and yet closely connected form.
A slight alteration in the punctuation and order of the words in our text
brings out, as it seems to me, the writer’s idea. Suppose you put a comma
after ‘innumerable company,’ and substitute for that phrase the original
Greek word, so reading ‘and to myriads’ and then pause there. That is the
general definition, on which follows the division of the ‘myriads’ into two
parts; one of which is ‘the general assembly of angels,’ and the other is
the ‘Church of the firstborn which are written in heaven.’ So then, of
companions for us, in our lonely earthly life, there he two sorts, and as to
both of them the condition of recognising and enjoying their society is the
same — via, the exercise of faith,
Now the word rendered ‘general assembly’ has a grander idea in it than that.
It is the technical word employed in classic Greek for the festal meetings
of a nation at their great games or other solemn occasions, and always
carries in it the idea of joy as well as of society. And so here the writer
would have us think of one part of that great city, the heavenly Jerusalem,
as, if I may So say, the dwelling-place of a loftier race of creatures whose
life is immortal and pure joy; and that we, even we, have some connection
with them. In an earlier part of this letter we read that they are all
‘ministering spirits sent forth to minister to them that shall be heirs of
salvation.’ But here the ministration is not referred to, simply the fact of
union and communion.
I am not going to enter at any length upon that subject, concerning which we
know but very little. But still it seems to me that our ordinary type of
Christian belief loses a great deal because it gives so little heed to the
numerous teachings of the New Testament in regard to the reality of the
existence of such beings, and of the tie that unites them with lowly
believers here. All the servants of the King are friends of one another. And
howsoever many they may be, and howsoever high above us in present stature
any may tower; and howsoever impossible it be for us to see the glancing and
hear the winnowing of their silver wings, as they flash upon errands of
obedience to Him, and rejoice to hearken to the voice of His word, there is
joy in the true belief that the else waste places of the universe are filled
with those who, in their loftiness, rejoice to bend to us, saying, ‘I am thy
fellow servant, and of them which worship God.’ Brethren, we have a better
face brightening the unseen than any angel face. But just because Jesus
Christ fills the unseen for us, in Him we are united to all those of whom He
is the Lord, and He is Lord of men as well as angels. So if the eyes of our
hearts are opened, we, too, may see ‘the mountain full of chariots of fire
and horses of fire round about’ the believing soul. And we, too, may come to
the joyful assembly of the angels, whose joy is all the more poignant and
deep when they, the elder brethren, see the prodigals return.
But the second group of companions is probably the more important for us.
‘Ye are come,’ says the text, not only to the angelic beings that cluster
round His throne in joyful harmony, but also ‘to the Church of the
firstborn, which are written in heaven.’ And, seeing that the names are in
heaven, that means, evidently, men who themselves are here upon earth.
I have not time to dwell upon the great ideas which are here contained in
the designation of the community of believing souls; I only remind you that
probably the word ‘church’ is not so much employed here in its distinct
ecclesiastical sense (for there are no ecclesiastical phrases in the Epistle
to the Hebrews), as with allusion to the assembly of the Israelites beneath
Mount Sinai, the contrast with which colours the whole of the context. It
means, therefore, in general, simply the assembly of the firstborn. Can
there be more than one firstborn in a family? Yes! In this family there can,
for it is a name here not pointing to a temporary order, but to dignity and
prerogative. The firstborn had the right of inheritance; the firstborn was
sanctified to the Lord; the firstborn, by his ‘primogeniture, was destined
in the old system to be priest and king. All Israel collectively was
regarded as the firstborn of the Lord. We, if our hearts are knit to Him who
is preeminently firstborn amongst many brethren, obtain, by virtue of our
union with Him, the rights and privileges, the obligations and
responsibilities, of the eldest sons of the family of God. We inherit; we
ought to be sanctified. It is for us, as the ‘first fruits of His
creatures,’ to bring other men to Him, that through the Church the world may
reach its goal, and creation may become that which God intended it to be.
These firstborn have their names written in heaven — inscribed on the
register of the great city. And to that great community, invisible like the
other realities in my text, and not conterminous with any visible society
such as the existing visible Church, all those belong and come who are knit
together by faith in the one Lord.
So, dear friends, it is for us to realise, in the midst, perhaps, of
loneliness, the tie that knits us to every heart that finds in Jesus Christ
what we do. In times when we seem to stand in a minority; in times when we
are tormented by uncongenial surroundings; when we are tempted by lower
society; when we are disposed to say, ‘I am alone, with none to lean upon,’
it does us good to think that, not only are there angels in heaven who may
have charge concerning us, but that, all over the world, there are scattered
brethren whose existence is a comfort, though we have never clasped their
hands.
Such, then, is the scene, and such is the society, in which we may all
dwell. Christian men and women, do you make conscience of realizing all this
by faith, by contemplation, by direct endeavors to pierce beyond the surface
and shows of things to the realities that are unseen? See to it that you
avail yourself of all the power, the peace, the blessing which will be yours
in the degree in which your faith makes these the home and companions of
your lives.
How noble the lowest life may become, like some poor, rough sea-shell with a
gnarled and dimly coloured, exterior, tossed about in the surge of a stormy
sea, or anchored to a rock, but when opened all iridescent with rainbow
sheen within, and bearing a pearl of great price! So, to outward seeming, my
life may be rough and solitary and inconspicuous and sad, but, in inner
reality, it may have come to Mount Zion, the city of the living God, and
have angels for its guardians, and all the firstborn for its brethren and
companions.
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Hebrews 12:23 Faith's Access to the Judge, and His
Attendants
Ye are come.., to God the Judge of
an, and to the spirits of Just men made perfect.’ — Hebrews 12:23
THE principle of arrangement in this
grand section of this letter is obscure, and I am afraid that I cannot east
much, if any, light upon it. We might, at first sight, have expected that
the two clauses of our present text should have been inverted, so as to
bring all the constituent parts of ‘the city of the living God’ closely
together — viz., ‘the angels,’ the members of the militant Church on earth,
and those of the triumphant Church in heaven; and also to bring together
‘God the Judge of all,’ and ‘Jesus the Mediator of the New Covenant.’ But
the arrangement, as it stands in our text, may he compared profitably with
that of the preceding verses, which we were considering in the last sermon.
There, as here, the allusion to the immediate presence of God passed at once
into the reference to the citizens of the heavenly Jerusalem. And just as
there Zion, the palace, was immediately connected with the city of the
living God, so here the writer, harking back, as it were, to his original
starting-point, no sooner names ‘God the Judge’ than he passes on to set
before us ‘the spirits of just men made perfect.’ In the earlier clauses we
have had the more general reference to the palace and the city around it.
Here, if I may so say, we pass within the palace gates, and the writer tells
us what we find there. This interweaving of the presence of God with that of
the creatures that live in His love witnesses to the great truth that our
God dwells in no isolated supremacy, but in the midst of a blessed society;
and that the solitary souls who find their way into His presence have a
welcome, not only from Him, but from all their brethren Of His great family.
So the arrangement may not be so inexplicable as, at first sight, it strikes
us as being, if it suggests to us the close and indissoluble connection
between God Himself and all those who, in every place, whether the place
above or the place beneath, call upon the name of Him who is both their God
and ours. In dealing with these words, I have simply to consider these two
ideas thus set before us.
I. Faith plants us at the very bar of God.
‘Ye are come to God the Judge of all.’ Now, it is to be observed that, more
accurately, the words might be rendered, ‘Ye are come to the God of all as
Judge’; for the point which the writer wishes to bring out is not so much
the general idea of the divine presence, as that presence considered under a
specific aspect, and referring to one mode of His action — viz., the
judicial It is further to be noticed that the judgment which is here spoken
about is not, as the very language, ‘Ye are come to the Judge; implies,
future, but present. The Old Testament, with continual reference to which
this letter is saturated, has a great deal more to say about the present
continuous judgment which God works all through the ages than about the
final future judgment, And, in accordance, not only with the language of our
text, which makes coming a present thing, but, in accordance also with the
whole tone of the Old Testament, we should recognise here, not so much a
reference to the final tribunal Before which all mankind must stand (at
which the Judge is characteristically represented in the New Testament as
being, not God the Father, But Jesus Christ), as to the continual judgment,
both in the sense of decision as to character and infliction of
consequences, which is being exercised now by the God of all.
So, then, the first thought that I would suggest from this idea is, Here is
a truth which it is the office of faith to realise continually in our daily
lives. Your loving access to God, Christian men and women, has brought you
right under the eye of the Judge, and, though there be no terror in our
approach to that tribunal, there ought to be a wholesome awe as the
permanent attitude of our spirits, the awe which is the very opposite of the
cowering dread which hath torment. He would be a bold criminal who would
commit crimes in the very judgment-hall and before the face of his judge.
And that must be a very defective Christian faith which, like the so- called
faith of many amongst us, goes through life and sins in entire oblivion of
the fact that it stands in the very presence of the Judge of all the earth.
Oh, if we could rend the veil as death will rend it, and see the things
which are, as faith will help us to see them — for it thins, if it does not
tear, the envious curtain between — would it be possible that we should live
the low, mean, selfish, earthly, sinful lives, devoured by anxieties,
defaced by stains, depressed by trivial sorrows, which, alas! so many of us
do live? ‘Ye are come.., unto God the Judge of all.’ ‘If ye call Him Father,
who, without respect of persons, judgeth according to every man’s work, pass
the time of your sojourning here in fear.’
Then, again, notice that this judgment of God is one which a Christian man
should joyfully accept. ‘The Lord will judge His people,’ says one of the
psalms. ‘You only have I known of all the inhabitants of the earth;
therefore will I punish you for your iniquities,’ says one of the prophets.
Such sayings represent this present judgment as inevitable, just because of
the close connection into which true faith brings a man with his Father in
heaven. Inevitable, and likewise most blessed and desirable, for in the
thought are included all the methods by which, in providence, and by
ministration of His truth and of His Spirit, God reveals to us our hidden
meannesses; and delivers us sometimes, even by the consequences which accrue
from them, from the burden and power of our sin.
So, then, the office of faith in regard to this continuous judgment which
God is exercising upon us because He loves us is, first of all, to open our
hearts to it by confession, by frank communion, by referring all our actions
to Him to court that investigation. That judgment is no mere knowledge by
cold omniscience, such as a heathen conception of the divine eye might make
it to be; but just as a careful gardener will go over his rose-trees, and
the more carefully the more precious they are in his sight, to pick from
each nestling-place at the junction of the leaves with the stem the tiny
insects that are sucking out the sap and destroying them, so God will search
our hearts in order to pluck from these the crawling evils which,
microscopic and tiny as they may be, will yet, in their multitude
innumerable, be destructive of our spirits’ lives.
It is a gospel when we say, ‘The Lord will judge His people.’ Therefore in
many a psalm we have the writers spreading themselves out before God, and
beseeching Him to come and search them, and try them, and sift them through
His sieve, and know them altogether, in the sure confidence that wheresoever
He beholds an evil He will be ready to cure it, and that whosoever spreadeth
out his sin before God will be lightened of the burden of his sin.
This merciful judgment, which is, in fact, all directed to the perfecting
and sanctifying of its subjects, reaches its end in the measure in which we
register its decisions in our consciences. God writes His mind about us on
them, and when they speak they are only speaking an echo of the sentence
that has been pronounced from that loftier tribunal. Therefore, whosoever
professeth himself to be a Christian and does anything, be it great or
small, which his conscience rebukes when done, and prohibited before it was
done, that man is despising the judgment of God, and bringing down upon
himself the condemnation which follows despised judgment. ‘If we should
judge ourselves we should not be judged.’ Reverence your consciences: they
are the echo of the Judge’s voice; peruse their records; they are the
register of the Judge’s sentence; and whensoever that inward voice speaks,
bow before it and say, ‘Lord! servant heareth.’
And then, further, remember that this judgment is one that demands our
thankful acceptance of the discipline which it puts in force. If we knew
ourselves we should bless God for our sorrows. These are His special means
of drawing His children away from their evil. ‘When we are chastened, we are
chastened of the Lord that we should not be condemned with the world.’ Oh!
there would be less impatience, less blank amazement when suffering comes to
us, less vain and impotent regrets for vanished blessings, if we saw in all
the dealings of our Father’s hands the results of His judgment, and believed
that it is better for us to be separated, though it be with violence and
much bleeding of torn-away hearts, from our idols than that our idolatry
should destroy us and mar them. ‘Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth.’ This
judgment is not only the merciful separation of us from our sins, but it is
also a judgment on our behalf.
The office of the early Jewish judges was not only the judicial one which we
mean by the word, but was much wider, and some trace of that wider idea runs
through almost all the Old Testament references to the divine judgment. It
comes to mean, not merely a decision adverse or favorable, as the ease may
be, as to the moral character of its subjects, but it also substantially
means pleading their cause, defending their right, intervening for them, and
so in many a psalm you will find such petitions as this, ‘Judge me, O Lord;
for I am poor and needy. Plead my cause against them which rise up against
me.’ And the same conception of the Judge’s office appears in one of our
Lord’s parables, familiar to us all, in which we are told that ‘the Lord
will judge His own elect though He bear long with them.’
Thus, another of the blessed thoughts that come out of this conception of
our approach to ‘the Judge of all’ is that we may confidently commit our
cause to Him, and leave our vindication in His hands. So, abstinence from
self-assertion, from self-vindication, from vengeance or recompense,
patience, courage, consolation, strength, all these virtues will be ours if
we understand to whom we come by our faith, and can behold, on the throne of
the universe, One who will plead our cause, and undertake for us whensoever
we are burdened and oppressed.
II. Secondly, Faith carries us while living to the society of the living
dead.
‘The Judge of all, and the spirits of just men made perfect.’ Immediately on
the thought of God arising in the writer’s mind, there rises also the
blessed thought of the blessed company in the centre of whom He lives and
reigns. We can say little about that subject, and perhaps the less we say
the more we shall understand, and the more deeply we shall feel We get
glimpses but no clear vision, as when a flock of birds turn in their rapid
flight, and for a moment the sun glances on their white wings; and then,
with another turn, they drift away, spots of blackness in the blue. So we
see but for a moment as the light falls, and then lose the momentary glory,
but we may at least reverently note the exalted words here.
‘The spirits of... men made perfect.’ That is to say, they dwell freed from
the incubus and limitations, and absolved from the activities, of a bodily
organisa-tion. We cannot understand such a condition. To us it may seem to
mean passivity or almost unconsciousness, but we know, as another New
Testament writer has told us, that to be absent from the body is to be
present with the Lord; and that in some deep, and to us now undiscoverable,
fashion, that which the corporeal frame does for men here, immersed in the
material world, there the encircling Christ in whom they rest does for them.
We know little more, but we have a glimpse of a land of deep peace in which
repose is not passivity nor unconsciousness; any more than service is
weariness. And there we have to leave it, knowing only this, that it is
possible for a man to exist and to be, in a relative sense, perfected
without a body. Then, further, these spirits are ‘perfect.’
The writer has said, at the close of the preceding chapter, that the ancient
saints ‘without us should not be made perfect.’ And here he employs the same
word with distant reference, as I suppose, to his previous declaration. From
which I infer that that old thought is true, that Jesus Christ shot some
rays of His victorious and all-reconciling power from His Cross into the
regions of darkness, and brought thence those who had been waiting for His
coming through many a long age. A great painter has left on the walls of a
little cell in his Florentine convent a picture of the victorious Christ,
white-robed and banner-bearing, breaking down the iron gates that shut in
the dark, rocky cave; and flocking to Him, with outstretched hands of eager
welcome, the whole long series from the first man downwards, hastening to
rejoice in His light, and to participate in His redemption.
So the ancient Church was ‘perfected’ in Christ; but the words refer, not
only to those Old Testament patriarchs and saints, but to all who, up to the
time of the writer’s composition of his letter, ‘slept in Jesus.’ They have
reached their goal in Him. The end for which they were created has been
attained. They are in the summer of their powers, and full-grown adults,
whilst we here, the maturest and the wisest, the strongest and the holiest,
are but as babes in Christ.
But yet that ‘perfecting’ does not exclude progress, continuous through all
the ages; and especially it does not exclude one great step in advance
which, as Scripture teaches us, will be taken when the resurrection of the
body is granted. Corporeity is the perfecting humanity. Body, soul, and
spirit, these make the full-summed man in all his powers. And so the souls
beneath the altar, clothed in white, and rapt in felicity, do yet wait ‘for
the adoption, even the redemption of the body.’
Mark, further, that these spirits perfected would not have been perfected
there unless they had been made just here. That is the first step, without
which nothing in death has any tendency to ennoble or exalt men. If we are
ever to come to the perfecting of the heavens, we must begin with the
justifying that takes place on earth.
Let me point you to one other consideration, bearing not so much on the
condition as on the place of these perfected spirits. It is very
significant, as I tried to point out, that they should be closely associated
in our text with ‘God the Judge of all.’ Is there any hint there that men
who have been redeemed, who being unjust, have been made just, and have had
experience of restoration and of the misery of departure, shall, in the
ultimate order of things, stand nearer the throne than unfallen spirits, and
teach angels? If the ‘just man made perfect,’ and not the festal assembly of
the angels, that are brought into connection here with ‘the Judge of all.’
Is there any hint that in some sense these perfected spirits are assessors
of God in His great judgment? ‘Ye shall sit on twelve thrones, judging the
twelve tribes of Israel,’ seems to point in that direction. But the ground
is precarious, and I only point to the words in passing as possibly
affording a foothold for a ‘perhaps.’
But the more important consideration is the real unity between poor souls
here who are knit to Jesus Christ, and the spirits of the just made perfect
who stand so close to the judgment seat.
Ah, brethren! we have to alter the meaning of the words ‘present’ and
‘absent’ when we come to speak of spiritual realities. The gross localized
conceptions that are appropriate to material space, and to transitory time,
have nothing to do with that higher religion. It is no mere piece of
rhetoric or sentiment to say that where our treasure is, there are our
hearts, and where our hearts are there are we.
Love has no localities. It knits together two between whom oceans wide roll;
it knits together saints on earth and saints in heaven. To talk of place is
irrelevant in reference to such a union; for if our love, our aims, our
hopes be the same, we are together. And if they on the upper side, and we on
the lower, grasp each the outstretched hand of the same God, then we are one
in Him, and the same life will tingle through our earthly frames and through
their perfected spirits. He is the centre of the great wheel whose spokes
are light and blessedness; and all who stand around Him are brought into
unity by their common relation to the centre.
Our sorrows would be less sorrowful,
our loss less utter, if we truly believed that while apart we are still
together. Our courage and our hope would rise if we came closer in loving
contemplation and believing thought to the present blessedness of those once
our fellow-travelers, who, weak as we, have entered into rest. Heaven itself
would gain some touch of true attractiveness if we more clearly saw, and
more thankfully felt, that there is
‘the Judge of all,’ and there also
‘the spirit of just men made perfect.’ But howsoever great may be the
encouragement, the consolation, the quieting that come from them, let us
turn away our eyes from the surrounding and lower seats to fix them on the
central throne. Let us ever realise that we are ever in our great Judge’s
eye. Let us spread out our hearts for His scrutiny and decision, for His
discipline if need be. Let us commit to Him our cause, and, in the peace
that comes therefrom, we may understand why it was that psalmists of old
called upon earth to rejoice and the hills to be glad because He ‘cometh to
judge the earth, to judge the world with righteousness, and the people with
His truth.’
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Hebrews 12:24 The Messenger of the Covenant and its Seat
‘Ye are come.., to Jesus the
mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling, that speaketh
better things than that of Abel.’ — Hebrews 12:24
IN previous sermons on the preceding
context, we have had frequent occasion to remark on the parallel and
contrast between Sinai and Zion, as expressive of the difference between the
genius of Judaism and Christianity, which shapes the whole of this section
That contrast and parallel are most obvious at its beginning and here at its
close.
In the beginning we had the mountain of the Law, swathed in darkness, lit by
flashing flame, contrasted with the sunny slopes of Zion, palace- crowned,
and the wild desert set in opposition to the city of peace that clustered
round the foot of Zion’s Mount. Here at the close we have the key-words of
the old revelation laid hold of and applied to the new. Judaism was a
covenant in the form of a law, of which the terms were these: ‘Do, and thou
shalt live!’ The gospel is a covenant in the form of a promise, of which the
tenor is ‘Believe and live; live and do!’ The ancient covenant had Moses for
its mediator, passing between the mountain and the plain. The gospel has a
better and a truer link of union between God and man than any mere man,
however exalted, can be. The ancient system had its sprinkled blood, by
which the men on whom it fell entered into the covenant, and were
ceremonially sanctified. The new covenant has its blood. An awful voice
rolled amongst the peaks of Sinai. That ‘blood of sprinkling’ speaks too.
And then the writer blends with that allusion another, to the voice of the
blood of the first martyr, every drop of which cried to God for retribution,
and points to the blood of the more innocent Abel, every drop of which
appeals to the Father’s heart for pardon.
Now it may be said that thus to present Christian truth under the guise of
the symbols of an ancient ceremonial and external system is a retrograde
step. And some people, who think themselves very enlightened, tell us that
the time is past for looking at Christianity from such a point of view. One
great man has let himself talk about ‘Hebrew old clothes.’ I am very much
mistaken if these old clothes will not turn out to be something like the
raiment that the Hebrews. wore in the wilderness, ‘which waxed not old for
forty years,’ and outlasted a great many suits that other people had cut for
themselves. We have only to ponder upon these emblems until they become
significant to us, in order to see that, instead of being antiquated and
effete, they are throbbing with life, and fit as close to the needs of to-
lay u ever they did. They came with a special message, no doubt, to these
men to whom this letter was first addressed, who were by descent and habit
Hebrews, and saturated with the law. But their message is quite as much to
you and me; and I desire now simply to bring out the large and permanent
meanings which lie beneath them.
I. First, then, note that God’s revelation to us is hi the form of a
covenant.
Now, of course, when we talk about a
covenant or compact between two men, we mean a matter of bargaining on the
terms of which both have been consulted, and which has assumed its final
form after negotiations and perhaps compromise. But there are necessarily
limitations to the transference of all human ideas to divine relations. One
such limitation is expressed in the very language of the original. The word
rendered ‘covenant’ suppresses the idea of conjunction, and emphasises that
of appointment. By which we are to learn that the covenant which God makes
with man is of His own settling and is not the result of mutual giving and
taking; that men have nothing to do with the determining of these
conditions; that He Himself has made them, and that He is bound by them, not
because we have arranged them with Him, but because He has announced them to
us. With that limitation we can take the idea and apply it to the relation
between God and us, established in the great message of the gospel.
For what is the notion that underlies the old-fashioned, and to some of you
obsolete and unwelcome word? Why, simply this, it is a definite disclosure
of God’s purpose as affecting you and me, by which disclosure He is prepared
to stand and to be bound. It is a revelation, but a revelation that obliges
the Revealer to a certain course of conduct; or, if you would rather have a
less theological word, it is a system of promise under which God mercifully
has willed that we should live. And just as when a king gives forth a
proclamation, he is bound by the fact that he gave it forth, so God, out of
all the infinite possibilities of His action, condescends to tell us what
His line is to be, and He will adhere to it. He lets us see the works of the
clock, if I may so say, not wholly, but in so far as we are affected by His
action.
What, then, are the terms of this covenant? We have them drawn out, first,
in the words of Jeremiah, who apprehended, when he was dwelling in the midst
of that eternal system, that it could not be a final system; and next, by
the writer of this letter quoting the prophet, who, in the midst of the
vanishing of that which could be shaken, saw emerging, like the fairy form
of the fabled goddess out of the sea-foam, the vast and permanent outlines
of a nobler system. The promises of the covenant are, then, full forgiveness
as the foundation of all, and built upon that, a knowledge of God inwardly
illuminating and making a man independent of external helps, though he may
sometimes be grateful for them; then a mutual possession which is based upon
these, whereby I, even I, can venture to say, God is mine, and, more
‘wonderful still, I, even I, can venture to believe that He bends down from
heaven and says: ‘And thou, thou art Mine!’ and then, as the result of all —
named first, but coming last in the order of nature — the law of His
commandment will be So written upon the heart that delight and duty are
spelt with the same letters, and His will is our will. These are the
elements, or you can gather them all up into one, namely, the promise of
eternal life— based upon forgiveness, operating through the knowledge of
God, and issuing in perfect conformity to His blessed will.
If these, then, be the articles of the paction, think for a moment of the
blessedness that lies hived in this ancient, and to some of us musty,
thought of a covenant of God’s. It gives a basis for knowledge. Unless He
audibly and articulately and verifiably utters His mind and will, I know not
There men are to go to get it. Without an actual revelation from heaven, of
other nature, of clearer contents, of more solid certitude than the
revelations that may have been written upon the tablets of our hearts, over
which we have too often scrawled the devil’s message, and over and above the
ambiguous articles that may be picked out and pieced together, from
reflection upon providence and nature, we need something better and firmer,
more comprehensively and more manifestly authoritative, before we are
entitled to say, ‘Behold! I know that God loves me, and that I may put my
trust in Him.’ Brethren! I for my part believe that between agnosticism on
that side, and the full evangeliced faith of the New Testament in a
supernatural revelation on this side, all forms of so-called Christianity
which shy at the idea of a supernatural ‘revelation are destined to have the
life squeezed out of them, and that what will be left will be the two
logical positions; first, God, if there be a God, never spoke, and we do not
know anything about Him; and, second, ‘God, who at sundry times and in
divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in
these last days spoken unto us by His Son.’ If there be a God at all, and if
there be in Him any love and any righteousness, it is infinitely more
reasonable to suppose that He should have spoken His mind and heart to men,
and given them a covenant on which they can reckon, than that He has been
from the beginning a dumb God, that never opened His mouth with a word of
guidance or of sympathy for the sons of men. Believe that who may; I cannot
believe in a pure theism, which has no place for a supernatural revelation.
And then, again, let me remind you how here is the one foothold, if I may so
say, for confidence. If God hath not spoken there is nothing to reckon upon.
There are perhaps, probabilities if you like, possibilities, but nothing
beyond, and no man can build a faith on a peradventure. There must be solid
ground on which to rest; and here is solid ground: ‘I make a covenant with
you.’ ‘God is not a man that He should lie, nor the Son of Man that He
should repent.’ And armed with that great thought that He has verily rent
the darkness and spoken words which commit Him and assure us, we, even the
weakest of us, may venture to go to Him, and plead with Him that He cannot
and dare not alter the thing that has gone forth out of His mouth; and so,
in deepest reverence, can approach Him and plead the necessity of a great
Must under which He has placed Himself by His own word. God is faithful, the
covenant-making and the covenant- keeping God.
II. Secondly, mark that Jesus
Christ is the Executor of this covenant.
Moses, of course, was a go-between, in
a mere external sense; from the mountain to the plain and from the plain to
the mountain, he passed, and in either case simply carried a message bearing
God’s will to man or man’s submission to God. But we have to dig far deeper
into the idea than that of a mere outward messenger who carries what is
entrusted to him, as an errand boy might, if we are to get the notion of
Christ’s relation to these great promises, which, massed together, are God’s
covenant with us. Observe that the emphasis is here laid on the manhood of
the Lord. It is Jesus who is the ‘Mediator of the covenant’: and observe,
too, that that idea passes into the wider notion of His place as the link
uniting God and man. The depth of the thought is only reached whoa we
recognise His divinity and His humanity. He is the ladder with its foot on
earth and its top in heaven.
Because God dwells in Him, and the word became flesh, He is able to lay His
hand upon both, and to bring God to man and man to God.
He brings God to man. If what I have been saying is at all true, that for
all solid faith we must have an articulate declaration of the divine mind
and heart, it seems to me to be equally irrefragable that for any such
declaration of the divine heart and mind we must have a human vehicle. God
speaks through men. It is His highest way of making Himself known to mere
And Jesus Christ in His Manhood declares God to us. Not by the mere words
which He speaks, as a teacher and a wise man, a religious genius and a
saint, a philosopher and a poet, a moralist and a judge; but by these, and
also by His life, by His emotions of pity and gentleness and patience, and
by everything that He does and everything that He endures, He speaks to us
of God.
Brethren, where shall a poor man rest his soul outside of the direct or
indirect influences of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ? Why I the very
men who reject Him to-day, on the plea that they have learnt a nobler
conception of God than they can find in Christianity, owe their conception
of Him to the gospel which they reject. Where else is there certitude solid
enough to resist the pressure of sorrow and of sin; confidence enough to
maintain faith in the face of difficulty and conscious evil and death; or
energy enough in a creed to make religion an all-controlling influence and
an all-gladdening stay except in Jesus Christ? I venture to say, nowhere I
Nowhere beyond the limits to which either the river of the water of life has
manifestly flowed; or some rills and rivulets from it have crept underground
to give strange verdure to some far-off pasture; nowhere else is there found
the confidence in the Father’s heart which is the property of the Christian
man, and the result of the Christian covenant. Jesus Christ brings God to
man by the declaration of His nature incarnate in humanity.
And, on the other hand, He brings man to God: for He stands to each of us as
our true Brother, and-united to us by such close and real bends as that all
which He has been and done may be ours if we join ourselves to Him by faith.
And He brings men to God, because in Him only do we find the drawings that
incline wayward and wandering hearts to the Father. And He seals for us that
great Covenant in His own person and work, in so far as what He in manhood
has done has made it possible that such promises should be given to us. And,
still further, He is the Mediator of the covenant, in so far as He Himself
possesses in His humanity all the blessings which manhood is capable of
deriving from the Father, and He has them all in order that He may give them
all. There is the great reservoir from which all men may fill their tiny
cups.
Men tell us that they want no Mediator between them and God. Ah, my brother!
go down into your own hearts; try to understand what sin is; and then go up
as near as you can to the dazzling white light, and try partially to
conceive of what God’s holiness is, and tell us, Do you think you, as you
are, could walk in that light and not be consumed? It seems to me that no
man who has any deep knowledge of his own heart, and any, though it be
inadequate, yet true, conception of the divine nature, dare take upon his
lips that boast that we often hear, ‘We need none to come between us and
God.’
For me, I thankfully hear Him say, ‘No man cometh to the Father but by Me’;
and pray for grace to tread in that only way that leadeth unto God. III.
Note the sprinkling of the blood which seals the covenant.
There is an allusion there, as I have already suggested, to the ceremonial
at Sinai, when, in token of their entrance into the covenant, the Blood of
the sacrifice was sprinkled upon the crowd; and also an allusion to the
voice of the blood of the innocent Abel, which ‘cried to God from the
ground.’ The writer has already referred to that in the earlier part of the
letter; and here he weaves the two together because, with whatever
differences of representation, the substantial meaning of both images is the
same. The blood shed establishes the covenant; and the blood sprinkled
brings us into it.
If Jesus had not died, there would have been no promises for us, beginning
in forgiveness and ending in wills delighting in God’s law. It is ‘the new
covenant in His blood.’ The death of Christ is ever present to the divine
mind and determines the divine action.
Hence the allusion to the voice, in contrast both to the dread voice that
echoed among the grim peaks of Sinai, and to that which, as if each drop had
a tongue, called from Abel’s innocent blood for retribution. Christ’s, too,
has a voice, and that an all-powerful one. It cries for pardon with the same
authority of intercession as we hear in His wondrous high-priestly prayer:
‘Father, I will.’
Further, that sprinkling, which introduced technically and formally these
people into that covenant, represents for us the personal application to
ourselves of the power of His death and of His life by which we may make all
God’s promises our own, and be cleansed from all sin. It is ‘sprinkled.’
Then it is capable of division into indefinitely small portions, and of the
closest contact with individuals. That is but a highly metaphorical way of
saying that Jesus Christ has died for each of us, that each of us may find
acceptance and cleansing, and the inheritance of all the promises, if we put
our trust in Him.
For remember, these words of my text are the end of a great sentence, which
begins, ‘Ye are come.’
Faith is that coming. What did Christ say? ‘He that cometh unto Me shall
never hunger. He that believeth on Me shall never thirst.’ There is His own
interpretation of the metaphor. Whosoever trusts Him, comes to Him. If I put
my tremulous faith on that dear Lord, though He be on the throne of the
universe, and I down here, in this far-away dim corner of His creation, I am
with Him where He is, and no film of distance need separate us. If we trust
Him we come to Him. If we rest upon Him as our advocate and hope, then the
loud voice of our sins will not be heard, accusing-tongued though they be,
above the voice of His pleading blood.
And they who come to Christ, therein and thereby, come to all other glorious
and precious persons and things in the universe. For, as I have already
said, my text is the end of a long sentence, and is last named as being the
foundation of all that precedes, and the condition of our finding ourselves
in touch with all the other glories of which the writer has been speaking.
He that comes to Christ is in the city. He that comes to Christ is — not
will be — in the palace. He that comes to Christ is in the presence of the
Judge. He that comes to Christ touches angels and perfected spirits, and is
knit to all that are knit to the same Lord. He that comes to Christ comes to
cleansing, and enters into the fulness of the promise, and lives in the
presence and companionship of his present-absent Lord. If we come to Jesus
by faith, Jesus will come at last to us to receive us to Himself; and join
us to the choirs of the perfected spirits who ‘have washed their robes and
made them white in the blood of the Lamb.’
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Hebrews 12:25 Refusing God's Voice
See that ye refuse not Him that
speaketh: for if they escaped not who refused Him that spake on earth, much
more shall not we escape, if we turn away from Him that speaketh from
heaven. — Hebrews 12:25
THE writer has finished his great
contrast of Judaism and Christianity as typified by the mounts Sinai and
Zion. But the scene at the former still haunts his imagination and shapes
this solemn warning. The multitude gathered there had shrunk from the divine
voice, and ‘entreated that it might not be spoken to them any more.’ So may
we do, standing before the better mount of a better revelation. The parallel
between the two congregations at the two mountains is still more obvious if
we remark that the word translated in my text ‘refuse’ is the same as has
just been employed in a previous verse, describing the conduct of the
Israelites, where it is rendered ‘entreated.’ It may seem strange that after
so joyous and triumphant an enumeration of the glorious persons and things
with whom we are brought into contact by faith, there should come the
jarring note of solemn warning which seems to bring back the terrors of the
ancient law. But, alas I the glories and blessedness into which faith
introduces us are no guarantees against its decay; and they who are ‘come
unto Mount Zion and the city of the living God,’ may turn their backs upon
all the splendour, and wander away into the gaunt desert.
I. So we have here, first of all, the solemn possibility of refusal.
Now, to gain the whole force and
solemnity of this .exhortation, it is very needful to remember that it is
addressed to professing Christians, who have in so far exercised real faith,
as that by it ‘they are come to Mount Zion, and to the city o£ the living
God.’ We are to keep that clear, or we lose the whole force and meaning of
this exhortation before us, which is addressed distinctly, emphatically,
and, in its true application, exclusively to Christian men — ‘See that ye
refuse not Him that speaketh.’
Then, again, it is to be noted that
the refusal here spoken about, and against which we professing Christians
are thus solemnly warned, is not necessarily entire intellectual rejection
of the gospel and its message. For the Israelites, who made the original
‘refusal,’ to which that against which we are warned is paralleled,
recognised the voice that they would not listen to as being God’s voice; and
just because it was His voice, wanted to hear no more of it. And so,
although we may permissibly extend the words before us to include more than
is thereby originally meant, yet we must remember that the true and proper
application of them is to the conduct of men who, recognising that God is
speaking to them, do not want to hear anything more from Him. That is to
say, this warning brings to us Christians the reminder that it is possible
for us so to tamper with what we know to be the uttered will and expressed
commandment of God, as that our conduct is tantamount to saying, ‘Be silent,
O Lord! and let me not hear Thee speak any more to me.’ The reason for that
refusal, which thus, in its deepest criminality and darkest sin, can only be
made by men that recognise the voice to be God’s, lies just here, ‘they
could not endure that which was commanded.’ So, then, the sum of the whole
thing is this, that it is possible for Christian people so to cherish wills
and purposes which they know to be in diametrical and flagrant contradiction
to the win and purpose of God, that obstinately they prefer to stick by
their own desires, and, if it may be, to stifle the voice of God.
Then remember, too, that this refusal, which is reality is the rising up of
the creature’s will, tastes, inclinations, desires, against the manifest and
recognised will of God, may, and as a matter of fact often does, go along
with a great deal of lip reverence and unconsciously hypocritical worship.
These men, from whom the writer is drawing his warning in the wilderness
there, said, ‘Do not let Him speak! We are willing to obey all that He has
to command; only let it come to us through human lips, and not in these
tremendous syllables that awe our spirits.’ They thought themselves to be
perfectly willing to keep the commandments when they were given, and all
that they wanted was some little accommodation to human weakness in the
selection of the medium by which the word was brought. So we may be
wrenching ourselves away from the voice of God, because we uncomfortably
feel that it is against our resolves, and all the while may never know that
we are unwilling to obey His commandments. The unconscious refusal is the
formidable and the fatal One.
It comes by reason, as I have said, fundamentally of the rising up of our
own determinations and wishes against His commandments; but it is also due
to other causes operating along with this. How can you hear God’s voice if
you are letting your own yelping dog-kennel of passions speak so loudly as
they do? Will God’s voice be heard in a heart that is all echoing with
earthly wishes, loudly clamant for their gratification, or with sensual
desires passionately demanding their food to be flung to them? Will God’s
voice be heard in a heart where the janglings of contending wishes and
earthly inclinations are perpetually loud in their brawling? Will it be
heard in a heart which has turned itself into a sounding-board for all the
noises of the world and the voices of men? The voice of God is heard in
silence, and not amidst the Babel of our own hearts. And they who,
unconsciously, perhaps, of what they are doing, open their ears wide to hear
what they themselves in the lower parts of their souls prescribe, or bow
themselves in obedience to the precepts and maxims of men-round them, are
really refusing to hear the voice of God.
It is not to be forgotten, howsoever, that whilst thus the true and proper
application of these words is to Christian men, and the way by which we
refuse to listen to that awful utterance is by withdrawing our lives from
the control of His will, and dragging away our contemplations from
meditation upon His word, yet there is a further form in which men may
refuse that voice, which eminently threatened the persons to whom this
warning was first directed. All through this letter we see that the writer
is in fear that his correspondents should fall away into intellectual and
complete rejection of Christianity. And the reason was mainly this, that the
fall of the ancient and ramrod system of the old covenant might lead them to
distrust all revelation from God, and to east aside the gospel message. So
the exhortation of my text assumes a special closeness of application to us
whose lot has been east in revolutionary times, as was theirs, and who have,
in our measure, something of that same experience to go through which made
the sharp trial of these Hebrew Christians. To them, solid and permanent as
they had fancied them, ancient and God-appointed realities and ordinances
were melting away; and it was natural that they should ask themselves, ‘Is
there anything that will not melt, on which we can rest?’ And to us in this
day much of the same sort of discipline is appointed; and we, too, have to
see, both in the religious and in the social world, much evidently waxing
old and ready to vanish away which our fathers thought to be permanent. And
the question for us is, Is there anything that we can cling to? Yes! to the
‘voice that speaks from heaven’ in Jesus Christ. As long as that is sounding
in our ears we can calmly look out on the evanescence of the evanescent, and
confidently rely on the permanence of the permanent. And so, brother, though
this, that, and the other of the externals of Christianity, in polity, in
form, in mode, may he passing away, be sure of this, the solid core abides;
and that core lies in the first word of this letter. ‘God... hath spoken
unto us in His Son.’ See that no experience of mutation leads you to falter
in your confidence in that voice, and ‘see that ye refuse not Him that
speaketh.’
II. Again, note the sleepless vigilance necessary to counteract the
tendency to refusal.
‘See that ye refuse not.’ A warning finger is, as it were, lifted. Take heed
against the tendencies that lie in yourself and the temptations around you.
The consciousness of the possibility of the danger is half the battle.
‘Blessed is the man that feareth
always,’ says the psalm. ‘The confident’ — by which is meant the
presumptuous, and not the trustful — ‘goeth on and is punished.’ The timid —
by which I mean the self-distrustful — clings to God, because he knows his
danger, and is safe. If we think that we are on the verge of falling, we are
nearer standing than we ever are besides. To lay to heart the reality and
the imminence and the gravity of the possibility that is disclosed here is
an essential part of the means for preventing its becoming a reality. They
who would say ‘I cannot turn away because I have come,’ have yet to learn
the weakness of their own hearts and the strength of the world that draws
them away. There is no security for us except in the continual temper of
rooted self-distrust, for there is no motive that will drive us to the
continual confidence in which alone is security but the persistent pressure
of that sense that in ourselves we are nothing, and cannot but fall. I want
no man to live in that selfish and anxious dread ‘which hath torment,’ but I
am sure that the shortest road to the brave security which is certain of
never being defeated is the clear and continual consciousness that ‘In
ourselves we nothing can, Full soon were we down-ridden; But for us fights
the proper Man, Whom God Himself hath bidden.’
The dark underside of the triumphant confidence, which on its sunny side
looks up to heaven and receives its light, is that self-distrust which says
always to ourselves, ‘We have to take heed lest we refuse Him that speaketh.’
If there is any need to dwell upon specific methods by which this vigilance
and continuous self-distrust may work out for us our security, one would say
— by careful trying to reverse all these conditions which, as we have seen,
lead us surely to the refusal. Silence the passions, the wishes, the voices
of your own wills and tastes and inclinations and purposes. Bring them all
into close touch with Him. Let there be no voice in your hearts till you
know God’s will; and then with a leap let your hearts be eager to do it.
Keep yourselves out of the babble of the world’s voices; and be accustomed
to go by yourselves and let God speak. Nature seems to be silent to the busy
traveller who never gets away from the thumping of the piston of the engine
and the rattle of the wheels of the train.
Let him go and sit down by himself on
the mountain top, and the silence becomes all vocal and full of noises. Go
into the lone place of silent contemplation, and so get near God, and you
will hear His voice. But you will not hear it unless you still the beating
of your own heart. Even in such busy lives as most of us have to live it is
possible to secure some space for such solitary communion and meditation if
we seriously feel that we must, and are ready to cut off needless
distractions. He who thus has the habit of going alone with God will be able
to hear His voice piercing through the importunate noises of earth, which
drown it for others. Do promptly, precisely, perfectly, all that you know He
has said. That is the way to sharpen your ears for the more delicate
intonations of His voice, and the closer manifestations of His will. If you
do not, the voice will hush itself into silence. Thus bringing your lives
habitually into contact with God’s word, and testing them all by it, you
will not be in danger of ‘refusing Him that speaketh.’
III. Lastly, note the solemn motives by which this sleepless vigilance is
enforced.
‘If they escaped not who refused Him that spake on earth’ — or, perhaps,
‘who on earth refused Him that spake’ — ‘much more shall not we escape if we
turn away from Him that speaketh from heaven.’ The clearness of the voice is
the measure of the penalty of non-attention to it. The voice that spoke on
earth had earthly penalties as the consequence of disobedience. The voice
that speaks from heaven, by reason of its loftier majesty, and of the dearer
utterances which are granted to us thereby, necessarily involves more severe
and fatal issues from negligence to it.
Mark how the words of my text deepen
and darken in their significance in the latter portion. In the first we had
simply ‘refusal,’ or the desire not to hear the voice, and in the latter
portion that has solidified and deepened itself into ‘turning away from
Him.’ That is to say, when we once begin, as many professing Christians have
begun, to be intolerant of God’s voice meddling with their lives, we are
upon an inclined plane, which, with a sharp pitch and a very short descent,
carries us down to the darker condition of ‘turning away from Him.’ The man
who stops his ears will very soon turn his back and be in flight, so far as
he can, from the voice. Do not tamper with God’s utterances. If you do, you
have begun a course that ends in alienation from Him.
Then mark, again, the evils which fell upon these people who turned away
from Him that speaketh on earth were their long wanderings in the
wilderness, and their exclusion from the Land of Promise, and final deaths
in the desert, where their bleaching bones lay white in the sunshine. And if
you and I, dear friends, by continuous and increasing deafness to our
Father’s voice, have turned away from Him, then all that assemblage of
flashing glories and majestic persons and of reconciling blood to which we
come by faith, will melt away, ‘and leave not a wrack behind.’ We shall be
like men who, in a dream, have thought themselves in a king’s palace,
surrounded by beauty and treasures, and awaken with a start and a shiver to
find themselves alone in the desert. It will be loss enough if the fair city
which hath foundations, and the palace-home of the king on the mountain, and
the joyful assemblage of the angels, and the Church of the firstborn, and
the spirits of the just made perfect, and the blood of sprinkling, all pass
away from our vision, and instead of them there is nothing left but this
mean, vulgar, fleeting world. They will pass if you do not listen to God,
and that is why so many of you have so little conscious contact with the
unseen and glorious realities to which faith gives access.
But then there are dark and real penalties to come in another life which the
writer dimly shows to us. It is no part of my business to enlarge upon these
solemn warnings. An inspired man may do it. I do not think that it is
reverent for me to do it much. But at the same time, let me remind you that
terror is a legitimate weapon to which to appeal, and unwelcome and
unfashionable as its use is nowadays, it is one of the weapons in the
armoury of the true preacher of God’s Word. I believe we Christian ministers
would do more if we were less chary of speaking out ‘the terror of the
Lord.’ And though I shrink from anything like vulgar and rhetorical and
sensational appeals to that side of divine revelation, and to what answers
to it in us, I consider that I should be a traitor to the truth if I did not
declare the fact that such appeals are legitimate, and that such terror is a
part of the divine revelation.
So, dear friends, though I dare not dwell upon these, I dare not burke them.
I remind you — and I do no more — of the tone that runs through all this
letter, of which you have such instances as these, ‘If the word spoken by
angels was steadfast, and every transgression received its just recompense
of reward, how shall We escape if we neglect so great salvation?’ and ‘Of
how much sorer punishment, think you, shall they be thought worthy who have
counted the blood of the Covenant wherewith they were sanctified a common
thing?’ ‘See that ye refuse not Him that speaketh,’ for the clearer, the
tenderer, the more stringent the beseechings of the love and the warnings of
Christ’s voice, the more solemn the consequences if we stop our ears to it.
Better to hear it now, when it warns and pleads and beseeches and comforts
and hallows and quickens, than to hear it first when it rends the tombs and
shakes the earth, and summons all to judgment, and condemns some to the
outer darkness to which they had first condemned themselves
