Lectionary Calendar
Wednesday, January 22nd, 2025
the Second Week after Epiphany
the Second Week after Epiphany
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Bible Commentaries
Hastings' Great Text of the Bible Hastings' Commentary
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Text Courtesy of BibleSupport.com. Used by Permission.
These files are public domain.
Text Courtesy of BibleSupport.com. Used by Permission.
Bibliographical Information
Hastings, James. "Commentary on 1 Peter 2". Hastings' Great Text of the Bible. https://www.studylight.org/commentaries/eng/gtb/1-peter-2.html. 1915.
Hastings, James. "Commentary on 1 Peter 2". Hastings' Great Text of the Bible. https://www.studylight.org/
Whole Bible (50)New Testament (18)Individual Books (10)
Verses 4-5
The Temple of Living Stones
Unto whom coming, a living stone, rejected indeed of men, but with God elect, precious, ye also, as living stones, are built up a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.— 1 Peter 2:4-5.
1. Earth has witnessed few scenes more sublime, none in which all the elements of outward magnificence were more strikingly blended with those of deep religious reverence and awe, than that which was presented by the Temple of Solomon on the day of its dedication. The holy and beautiful house crowning, with its fresh undimmed splendour, the terraced steep of Moriah, the vast congregation of worshippers that filled its courts and colonnades, the rich and solemn swell of choral melody, when minstrels and singers joined in the exulting hallelujah, the great altar in the open court with the brazen platform in front of it, on which the youthful prince kneeled down upon his knees in sight of that breathless multitude and spread forth his hands to heaven, the fire descending in answer to his prayer, and consuming the sacrifice, and the cloud of glory filling the house, so that the priests could not stand to minister;—nothing is wanting to complete the solemn impressiveness of the spectacle.
Many centuries had gone by, and the Temple still stood, after many vicissitudes, in something like its earliest grandeur, and on its ancient site, when Jerusalem, the Holy City, witnessed another and a different scene.
In some humble dwelling, in one of its obscurer streets, a little company of worshippers was gathered together in an upper room. There was no outward splendour there to attract the eye, no imposing rites, no stately ceremonial, no altar, no priest, no ringing burst of melody. A few devoted men and women joining in fervent supplication, nothing more, when “suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind,” and cloven tongues of flame were seen hovering over each of them, and in this baptism of fire every heart was kindled with holy love and zeal, every voice burst forth in accents of adoring wonder and praise. In this outpouring of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost, in fulfilment of the Saviour’s promise, and in token of His divine and almighty power, we see the dedication of that spiritual temple which He founded on this earth, we behold the beginning of that Church which is not for one nation, but for all people; which is not in its essential features outward and visible, but inward, set up in all believing, loving, and obedient hearts; which is not to continue for a season and pass away, but is to endure for ever, as a kingdom of righteousness, and peace, and joy.
2. The Apostle Peter set himself to try to persuade Jewish Christians that the time had come for the admission of the Gentiles to religious equality with the favoured Jewish nation, and that without submitting to the ceremonial law or taking part in the ceremonial sacrifices which (to the ordinary Jewish apprehension) were the price of their spiritual privileges. And the method he adopted was not to belittle the position of Israel as the chosen people of Jehovah, but to suggest that the old Jewish idea of a chosen people was but a poor analogue or type of the position of the Christian Church, that it was in that purely spiritual but none the less visible and concrete society that there was to be found the real fulfilment of the highest aspirations or predictions of Hebrew prophecy. For him the Christian Church was the spiritual Israel. Nor was the new and Catholic society which was to succeed to the narrow Nation-churches of the ancient world a society which could dispense with those fundamental institutions of old-world religion—Temple, Priesthood, Sacrifice. The Church itself, the society, was the true temple—the visible, material, local, yet living, habitation, as it were, of Deity. The whole of this society were Priests. And that society of Priests absorbed into itself the religious functions which everywhere in the old world, and especially in ancient Israel, were shared by kings—“a royal priesthood, a holy nation.” Nor was the temple without its sacrifice; for the external animal sacrifices of the old ritual were but a faint counterpart of the spiritual worship of the new society, the uplifting of will and heart to God, especially in the great act which the ancient Church called the Eucharist or thanksgiving par excellence—itself only a symbol or visible embodiment of the one real and true sacrifice of the will to God in a holy life.
I
The Temple
The Apostle has in his mind the great Temple at Jerusalem, esteemed and honoured by the whole Jewish race. And he summons up the vision not only of that vast edifice, but of the separate stones, which he well knew must have passed under the builder’s eye. And then by a bold venture of imagination he thinks of these stones as endowed with life, and taking their proper place in the building.
1. The Temple has a foundation. Christ is the chief corner stone. The term “stone” speaks to us of all that is solid, massive, steadfast, strong. It suggests at once ideas of immovable principle and ever-persistent purpose, and of capacity at once to resist and to sustain. We read in it how our Master is “the same, yesterday and to-day, and for ever,” in a fixity which the cliffs and crags may picture, but to which all the while they are but as fleeting shadows, as unsubstantial dreams, placed beside Him who is “this same Jesus” for ever.
But then, besides, Christ is the Living Stone. Taken by itself, the rock-metaphor gives us all we want of certainty and strength; but there is nothing in it of itself to warm the thought and to move the soul to a personal regard. But, behold, He is the Living Stone; He is strength instinct with glowing life. This foundation, this bulwark, this massy tower, “foursquare to opposition”—look at it again; it is not it, but He. The Rock has voice, and eyes, and arms, and heart. He lives, all over and all through; and it is with a life which pours itself out in thought, and sympathy, and help, and love, to the refugee upon the Rock.
Here and here only in Holy Scripture is our Lord called the Living Stone. Repeatedly elsewhere, both in the Old Testament and in the New, we read of Him as the Stone, the Rock, Rock of Ages, Stone of the Corner— Angulare Fundamentum. And we have indeed abundant Scriptures where He appears in all the glory and in all the power of Life. “I am he that liveth,” “I am the life.” But here only do the two truths meet in one magnificent witness to His worth and glory; only here is He named “the Living Stone.” 1 [Note: H. C. G. Moule, The Secret of the Presence, 110.]
(1) Christ imparts life. We depend upon Christ for life. He is a “living stone,” and we who believe are “living stones.” But there is this all-important difference between Him and us, viz. He is the Living One, He has life in Himself, while we live only in Him. His life is inherent; ours is derived. He would live on, if we were to die; whereas if He were to die, our life would end for ever.
Here is an elect stone, chosen of God though rejected of men. It stands every test. Satan searched in vain for any flaw in Christ’s character; any imperfection, however small, in His obedience. Sir Walter Scott, in Ivanhoe, tells us how Locksley, with his cloth-yard shafts “told every rivet” in De Bracy’s armour, on the walls of Front de Boeuf’s castle. Had there been a weak point anywhere in that armour, the arrows would have found it out, and De Bracy’s life would have been forfeited. So, to compare the infinitely greater with the less, with his fiery darts of manifold temptations did Satan tell off every rivet of our blessed Lord’s armour of righteousness while here upon earth. Could he have found but one weak point anywhere, His entire work as our Redeemer would have been marred, and He could not have been our Saviour. No weak point, however, could he find—God’s elect and precious stone is a tried stone. 2 [Note: A. C. Price, Fifty Sermons, xi. 19.]
(2) In order that we may become living stones, fit for building on the foundation, we must come into touch with Christ. In His own words we must “come to” Him. That is to say, we must commit ourselves to Him in faith.
Suppose a stranger arrives in a town and inquires where he can safely deposit his money. He is told by a friend that N. & M.’s bank is perfectly safe. He thereupon obtains an audited balance-sheet, examines it, and from it learns the resources of the bank. He believes the person who tells him that the bank is good; he believes about the bank that the security it offers is ample; so he trusts his money to the bank’s keeping, i.e. he believes on the bank. Or, to put it in another way, a boatload of holiday makers may often be seen landing on the shore of some English watering-place. The tide is low, and the boat cannot be brought right up on to the dry sand or beach. The passengers do not wish to wet their feet, so the boatman invites them to ride ashore on his back. They believe him when he makes the suggestion; they look at him, and, seeing that he is a stalwart fellow, they believe about him that he is able to do what he proposes, so one by one they trust themselves to him. 1 [Note: J. G. Hoare, The Foundation Stone of Christian Faith, 228.]
The things mysterious
That here vouchsafe to me their apparition,
Unto all eyes below are so concealed,
That all their being lies in faith alone,
Whereon high Hope proceeds to base herself,
And so Faith takes the place and rank of substance.
And it behoveth us from our belief
To draw conclusions without other sight;
And hence Faith takes the place of argument. 2 [Note: Dante, Paradiso.]
2. The materials of the Temple are living stones.
(1) Where are the stones found?—They are all cut out of the quarry of nature; stone by stone is brought out of that deep cavern, placed upon the living stone, and each united to the other.
I have read that some little while back there was discovered in Jerusalem a deep cavern close by the Damascus Gate, and those who have explored it have come to the conclusion that it is, the spot from which the stones were taken to build the glorious Temple of Solomon. It was there that the hammering and the cutting were done. It was there that the stones were shaped, and from thence, by some process that we do not now understand, they were brought from their deep grave, and separately placed in position upon Mount Zion. The blocks of stone were taken one by one out of the bowels of the earth and out of darkness, and then carried by mighty power to the temple walls, until, when the last stone was cut out and placed in position, with shoutings of “grace unto it,” the whole building was complete. This forms a beautiful illustration of the way in which the Lord builds His spiritual temple. The Spirit of God goes into the deep black quarry of fallen nature, and there hews out the hidden stones, and by His own almighty power bears them to the foundation stone and places them in a living temple to go no more out for ever. 1 [Note: A. G. Brown.]
(2) There must be no deformity in the stones.—You have probably visited one or another of our cathedrals, and, if so, you may have noticed that a process of repair is always going on in some part of the building. Stones once thought good and sound have developed a flaw; or under the influence of the rain and frost and gases of the atmosphere have been found to be losing their solidity, turning back and crumbling into their original sand. As material stones, this is only according to nature; there is nothing to be done but to remove them and put good ones in their places. But in the spiritual building the conditions are not the same. We who are living stones can by God’s help resist the deteriorating and wasting forces of the world. If we will, we may retain our solidity, our firmness, our strength, yes, even our polish and our lustre; and it is our duty so to do. We may be stones placed in inconspicuous positions. But if we are so honoured as to have any, even the most obscure, place in such a temple, how great should be our joy! We may be like those stones Ruskin found built in where they could not possibly be seen save by those who sought them, but still carved and finished as exquisitely as those that were in the facade of the building. If the master Builder knows that we are there, is not that enough to induce us to resolve that by Divine help not a whit of our symmetry and beauty shall be lost?
A beloved and beautiful memory rises before me—a friend of my early undergraduate days, called to die before his own degree, but first called to live, as a living stone. Before he entered Trinity College he had passed through a military academy, a place which at that time was a scene of deep moral pollution. Gentle and even facile as he was by nature, God, just as he entered the place, had made him “a living stone.” With quiet, unshaken, unswerving steadfastness, under acutest difficulties, he lived, and he was a rock. And by the time he left the academy—I record a fact—vice was out of fashion there. 2 [Note: H. C. G. Moule, The Secret of the Presence, 214.]
(3) The building is ever going on.—The workers are legion. Paul, with his relentless, flaming logic; John, with eagle eye, scanning and then writing of the future and the past; Augustine, with his pauseless, countless toils of pen and speech; Chrysostom consecrating his golden eloquence to themes of transcendent and golden worth; Bede labouring on our own northern shore, and in making the blessed Gospel accessible to the Saxon people finding “the last dear service of his parting breath”; Luther, with his strong human tenderness and unquailing knowledge; Calvin, with his severe purity and indomitable industry; Latimer, with his home-spun, ready, and racy heart-compelling speech; Bunyan, that true Greatheart of countless pilgrims; Wesley, that statesman; Whitefield, that captain of preachers. Time would fail us to tell of the great preachers and teachers with voice and pen who have lived to win souls to Christ. If His service can be ennobled by human associations, it is ennobled by such names as these. Let us be worthy of them. And Christ’s work is ever going on; His temple is ever rising. Men of varied faculty are engaged in the one work. The builders are many, the Architect is one. Builders pass, but new builders take up the work and it goes on. New methods of Christian labour may supplement the old. The “tongues” of old theology may cease in a larger and more loving language; but, amid all, the Spiritual Temple is rising.
In the crypt of Fountains Abbey, as in other ancient buildings, you may see windows of varied kinds of architecture—Saxon, Norman, Gothic. The Abbey was long in building. The first builders died. But by other hands, and in other styles, the unfinished work went on. So in Christ’s Church. New styles, so to speak, may mark it from age to age. But though builders die, the Divine Architect survives. And He sees to the continuity of the work.
Have you heard the golden city
Mentioned in the legends old?
Everlasting light shines o’er it,
Wondrous tales of it are told.
Only righteous men and women
Dwell within its gleaming wall;
Wrong is banished from its borders,
Justice reigns supreme o’er all.
We are builders of that city;
All our joys and all our groans
Help to rear its shining ramparts,
All our lives are building stones.
But a few brief years we labour,
Soon our earthly day is o’er,
Other builders take our places,
And our place knows us no more.
But the work which we have builded,
Oft with bleeding hands and tears,
And in error and in anguish,
Will not perish with the years.
It will last, and shine transfigured
In the final reign of Right;
It will merge into the splendours
Of the City of the Light. 1 [Note: Felix Adler.]
II
The Priesthood
St. Peter changes the figure from “ a spiritual house” to “ a holy priesthood.” After saying, “Ye also as living stones are built up a spiritual house,” he adds, “to be a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.”
To understand the meaning of this abrupt change of figure, we must bear in mind that St. Peter was “the Apostle to the circumcision.” He wrote to Jews, and he sought to show them that by becoming Christians they lost neither temple, nor priesthood, nor sacrifices. They had them all. They were themselves all. They were the temple, “built up a spiritual house,” for God’s own habitation. They were priests unto God; “a holy priesthood.” And it was their privilege “to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.”
The New Testament writers were men whose earlier days had been passed in a Church where sacrifices were offered, where there was an altar, a priest, animal victims. It is true that their ordinary weekly worship was presented in synagogues which had no altar, no priest, no victims; where the desk took the place of the altar, and the reader of the priest. But none the less the temple was the place where the culminating act of worship took place, and in that temple the chief place was assigned to the altar, and the chief function devolved upon the priest. Sacrifice—real sacrifice—the actual offering of oxen and sheep and doves—real sacrifice was the chief rite of the Church to which the Apostles in their earlier days belonged. Hence the language of sacrifice was familiar to them as household words, so familiar that they could not throw it off when they exchanged Judaism for Christianity. But though they did not wholly abandon the old phraseology, they gave to it a new and higher meaning. They applied it to the offering of self rather than of oxen or sheep. Christianity went deeper than Judaism. Judaism was content with the offering of bulls and goats. Christianity was content only with the offering of spiritual sacrifices. These it declared were the only sacrifices acceptable to God.
1. They were a spiritual Priesthood.—God dwells in us, and so the obscurest, humblest Christian is greater than the most venerable and splendid of the buildings which kings and nobles and mighty nations have enriched with gold and silver and costly marbles, which have been adorned by the genius of famous painters, and in which many generations of men have worshipped God. It is man that is sacred, above all when made one with Christ. God is a spirit, and He dwells not in material buildings, no matter by what solemn and mysterious rites it may be attempted to consecrate them. He, a Spirit, dwells in the spirit of man and reveals His righteousness and love in the life of man.
To me the poor seamstress that turns into Westminster Abbey for half an hour’s quiet and peace and meditation on Christ who has saved her is more sacred than the memorable building which is associated with the most famous events in the history of our country; and she should be treated with greater reverence. To me the beggar in his rags on the steps of St. Peter’s is more sacred than the vast church which is the material centre of a communion extending over the whole world. In the Christian man is the true shekinah, even though the visible glory which was the symbol of the true has now passed away. The inner life of the Christian man is the true holy of holies. God is there. 1 [Note: R. W. Dale.]
It is certain that to the writers of the New Testament, the word Priest, when not applied to the sacrificial functionaries of the Jews, implied a spiritual function of every believer. It is never once applied by them to the officers of the Christian community. It did not summon up to their minds the ceremonies of public worship, but the acts of common life. And this mode of speech became habitual with the early fathers. These fathers, says Bishop Kaye, used a language directly opposite to that which counts the New Testament use of these words as merely metaphorical. “They regarded the spiritual sacrifice as the true and proper sacrifice, the external sacrificial act as merely the sign and symbol.” 1 [Note: Dean Fremantle, The Gospel of the Secular Life, 177.]
2. They were an holy Priesthood.—In the Jewish dispensation this meant no more, possibly, than an outward separation to the service of God—the priests in the temple, the vestments of their ministry were said to be ceremonially holy. But certainly more is meant by the Apostle in the text than this ritual and external sanctity. The holiness of which he speaks consists in the possession of that mind which was in Christ Jesus, in the reinstatement in us of that image of God which was lost by the disobedience of the fall.
In one of the old Cathedrals in Europe the guide bids the visitor watch a certain spot until the light from a window falls upon it. There he sees, carved on a rafter, a face of such marvellous beauty that it is the very gem of the great building. The legend is, that, when the architect and masters were planning the adornment of the cathedral, an old man came in and begged leave to do some work. They felt that his tottering steps and trembling hands unfitted him for any great service; so they sent him up to the roof, and gave him permission to carve upon one of the rafters. He went his way, and day by day he wrought there in the darkness. One day he was not seen to come down, and going up they found him lying lifeless on the scaffolding, with his sightless eyes turned upward. And there they saw a face carved on the rafter, a face of such exceeding beauty that architects and great men bared their heads as they looked upon it, and recognized the master in him who lay there still in death.
In the Church of the living God we are all set to carve the beauty of the face of Christ, not on the rafters or walls of any cathedral, but on our own heart and life. Be it ours to do this work with such care and skill that, when our eyes are closed in death, men may look with reverence upon the beauty of the face our hands have fashioned. Some of us may feel ourselves too feeble, or too unskilled, to do any great work in this world for Christ; but none are too feeble or too unskilled to carve the beauty of Christ on our life. And it may be that in the time of great revealing, it shall appear that some trembling disciple among us, timid and shrinking, whose work is in some quiet corner, out of sight, has wrought the beauty of Christ-likeness in an exquisiteness which shall outshine all that any even of the greatest of us have done. 1 [Note: J. R. Miller, Glimpses through Life’s Windows, 17.]
III
The Sacrifices
1. The sacrifices are spiritual, like the temple in which they are offered. They originate in the spiritual life of man, under the inspiration of the Spirit of God. They are spiritual acts. Mere external acts, however striking, however splendid, however impressive, are worthless. Only if there is real spiritual force in them can they be acceptable to God, and then only through Christ. The external pomp, the artistic beauty are of no account, but for the excitement of passion and delight which the pomp and the beauty may create. The sacrifices we have to offer are spiritual sacrifices.
The value of a material sacrifice lies in the thing given; the value of the spiritual offering consists in the will to give it. A material sacrifice has its beginning in an act; a spiritual sacrifice has its beginning in a thought. A material sacrifice is one which, by its very nature, demands constant repetition; a spiritual sacrifice, if it be a full expression of the heart, is offered once for all.
I am on a pastoral round among lowly cottage homes. I ask at a certain door for one of our devoted church members, a labourer’s wife. She is not at home, but may be found five or six doors higher up in the street. We go and inquire for her there. It is the home of a sick friend, another labourer’s wife, and when we find her she says to her minister: “You see Mary is ill and in bed, and I considered what I could do to help her; and I decided that I could at least do her week’s washing for her.” It was beautiful! Our sister was a priest, or priestess, if you like, offering, amidst the steam of the washhouse, a spiritual sacrifice. 2 [Note: J. C. Story.]
2. The sacrifice will mean—
(1) Worship.—The essential idea of sacrificial worship is communion, not propitiation—the identification of our wills with God’s by definite spiritual effort as a means to the identification of the will with God’s will in every act and moment of our lives. And this sacrifice of worship, of which the Christian Eucharist forms the highest act, must be looked upon as the act of the whole community. Every Christian must take his part in it. It is not a thing that can be done for one man by another, or rather in one sense it is a thing that can and must be done by every man for every other: since every prayer of the Christian is social, offered by him not as an isolated individual but as a member of the community, for the whole community as well as for himself.
Of Philip Edward Pusey (Pusey’s only son) Dean Burgon says, “Though too deaf to hear what was being spoken, he was constant in his attendance at the daily Service and at Holy Communion: yes, and was absorbed in what was going on. A man, he was, of great religious earnestness, and consistent heartfelt piety. I cannot express what a help and comfort dear Philip was to me, nor how much I felt his loss: nay, how much I feel it still.” 1 [Note: J. W. Burgon, The Lives of Twelve Good Men, i. 17.]
We went to the cathedral, which is mere heaps upon heaps: a huge, misshapen thing, which has no more of symmetry than of neatness belonging to it. I was a little surprised to observe that neither in this, nor in any other of the Romish churches where I have been, is there, properly speaking, any such thing as joint worship; but one prays at one shrine or altar, and another at another, without any regard to or communication with one another. As we came out of the church a procession began on the other side of the churchyard. One of our company scrupling to pull off his hat, a zealous Catholic presently cried out, “Knock down the Lutheran dog.” But we prevented any contest by retiring into the church. 2 [Note: The Journal of John Wesley, ii. 8.]
(2) Mediation.—It is only through the Christian community that the individual can enter into this knowledge of Christ which is the knowledge of God—only through the tradition of Christian teaching handed down by the community, through the religious life which pervades it, through the ideal which is more or less perfectly realized in its corporate life and in the life of some at least among its individual members. Thus it is no platitude to say that every Christian is bound to be a priest; for to say that he is a priest means that he is bound to take a part in this great task of revealing God to his fellow-men, by word and by deed, by the ideal that he proclaims with his lips and cherishes in his heart and sets forth in his life; by contributing to the creation of a Christian public opinion, and by impressing and (so far as may be) enforcing that opinion upon the whole society in which he lives, and so taking his part in the Church’s fundamental task of binding and loosing. It is of the essence of all true communion with God to diffuse itself to other men.
The Archbishop said that as a child he had been very much puzzled by the words of the marriage service—“With my body I thee worship.” He went to his mother and asked, “How can one worship with one’s body?” His mother explained that worship was not used here in the usual spiritual sense, but meant that the husband would do such things for his wife as opening the door for her, fetching her a chair, etc. The little boy secretly made up his mind to watch his father, to see whether he performed these little services for his wife. “But it was no use,” added the Archbishop, “for he always did.” 1 [Note: Frederick Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, i. 80.]
(3) Service.—The materials of sacrifice are all around us, in our common work, in the little calls of Providence, in the trivial crosses we are challenged to take up; even in the very recreation of our lives. The great point is to have the mind set upon seeking and seeing in all things the service of Christ and the glory of God, and then every trifle which that mind touches, every piece of work it handles, every dispensation it encounters, becomes at once a sacrifice.
A young Chinese girl was brought to the Presbyterian Mission Hospital at Canton. She was doomed to blindness and lameness, so her mistress abandoned her. The doctors amputated her leg, and gave her little tasks to perform and taught her the love of the Saviour. She developed leprosy, and was forced to leave the kind friends about her, and betake herself to the darkness and horror of a leper settlement. But she went a Christian, and in two years that blind crippled leper built up a band of Christians in that leper settlement and in five years a Church grew out of her work. That poor crippled invalid life is to-day a centre of joy and service, and other leper villages are sending to her to ask about the wonderful good news which can bring joy even to outcasts.
The Temple of Living Stones
Literature
Brooke (H.), Studies in Leviticus, 57.
Burns (J. D.), Memoir and Remains, 312.
Fremantle (W. H.), The Gospel of the Secular Life, 175.
Hadden (R. H.), Sermons and Memoir, 1.
Hoare (J. G.), The Foundation Stone of Christian Faith, 225.
Jones (J. C.), Studies in the First Epistle of Peter, 233.
Keble (J.), Sermons for the Christian Year: Christmas and Epiphany, 316; Saints’ Days, 415.
Maclaren (A.), Expositions: 1 and 2 Peter and 1 John, 86, 92.
Meyer (F. B.), Tried by Fire, 78.
Moule (H. C. G.), The Secret of the Presence, 210.
Murray (A.), With Christ, 240.
Peabody (A. P.), King’s Chapel Sermons, 118.
Price (A. C.), Fifty Sermons, vi. 233; xi. 17.
Rashdall (H.), Christus in Ecclesia, 92.
Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xxiii. (1877) No. 541.
British Weekly Pulpit, ii. 321 (Dale).
Christian World Pulpit, iv. 409 (Rogers); vi. 161 (Punshon); xxvi. 89 (Mursell); lxxviii. 35 (Story).
Church Pulpit Year Book, ii. (1905) 169 (Punshon).
Contemporary Pulpit, 2nd Ser., ix. 168.
Expositor, 2nd Ser., viii. 187 (Matheson).
Homiletic Review, lix. 377 (Moule).
Verse 21
A Propitiation and a Pattern
Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, that ye should follow his steps.— 1 Peter 2:21.
These words are a striking illustration of the way in which the Gospel brings Christ’s principles to bear upon morals and duty. The Apostle is doing nothing more than exhorting a handful of slaves to the full and complete and patient acceptance of their hard lot, and in order to teach a very homely and lowly lesson to the squalid minds of a few captives, he brings in the mightiest of all lessons by pointing to the most beautiful, most blessed, and most mysterious fact in the world’s history—the cross of Christ.
There are two things in the text—
I. Christ as a Propitiation—“Christ suffered for you.”
II. Christ as a Pattern—“leaving you an example.”
But more important than either of these things, highly important as they are, is their connexion. Christ is of little avail as an example if He is not first a propitiation; and again the propitiation is of little worth if we do not follow the example. We shall take the two separately, but first of all let us take them together.
1. A large number of those who profess and call themselves Christians would fain blot out Calvary from the system of Christian morality. They would tell us that it was only an accident in the onward march of Divine revelation, that the Saviour’s sufferings had in them nothing mediatorial, nothing atoning; and, on the other hand, there are men who would hold so tightly by faith in the power of the Cross of the blessed Saviour as to banish from their minds the idea of an honest, a diligent, and a loving copy of His example. They will say, “Look to the Cross alone, trust in the Cross alone, and all will and must be right.” Good people there may be found in these two extremes, but the scribe that is well instructed in the things pertaining to the Kingdom of God will not be satisfied with either one or the other; he must have both together. Like the two inscriptions, like the two faces on a coin, which must be there before it can be made current of the realm, so the Divine truth has these two manifestations,—first the suffering for sin, next the example of godly life.
2. The Antinomian, the man who thinks that all religion is centred in the single grace of faith, looks at Christ as his Saviour, but forgets that He is also his Example. The Socinian professes to follow Jesus as an Example, but rejects Him as a Saviour. The Bible-taught Christian unites these two opposite systems into one. Confessing with St. Peter that “there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved,” he also allows with St. Paul that he who would taste of this salvation must “so walk as he walked.” In the simple and unmistakable language of the text, believing with all his heart that Christ suffered for him, he has an equally deep conviction that He has left us an example that we should follow His steps.
3. Without the Atonement there would have been little use of the Example. Moses is an example, and Abraham, and Joseph, and David, and every holy man or woman that ever lived—many in our own times and neighbourhood, whom we may ourselves have known. St. Paul, who was the last person in the world to speak presumptuously or vaingloriously, exhorts the Philippians to be followers together of him, and to mark those who walked so as they had him for an ensample. And yet in another Epistle, after calling his readers’ attention to the great cloud of witnesses with whom they were encompassed, all of them “examples” of patience, faith, and other heavenly graces, he does not suffer their thoughts to rest there, or on any merely human object, but carries them on with him still further, even to the foot of the Cross, there bidding them look unto Jesus, the Author and Finisher of their faith; “who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.”
If ever the history of human error comes to be written faithfully and exhaustively, it will be found, I venture to say, that by far the largest proportion of human mistakes, whether in the region of theology or in the region of philosophy, will be found to have their origin, not so much in the abstract grasp of error as in the partial grasp of truth. The danger is inconceivably great of a shallow and imperfect comprehension of the mind and will of God, and in all ages and under all circumstances men have been found taking up this or that or the other statement of God’s most holy Word; emphasizing it and giving to it a dignity and an importance, not possibly in itself greater than it deserves, but relatively to the other truths of God’s Divine Word. And hence it comes to pass, that amidst the multitudes of divisions and parties and sects and schisms that Christianity presents to-day, and, indeed, has presented in all ages, there is no party or sect or schism that has not in some degree a grasp of some kind of Divine truth and revelation, the mistake and the misfortune being that it esteems this particle and portion equal to the entire, and forgets the dignity and importance of declaring the whole counsel of God. 1 [Note: Prebendary Cross.]
I
The Propitiation
“Christ also suffered for you.”
1. The mystery of suffering! Suffering beyond any doubt is the commonest feature of human life. There are none who escape. There are the weird, strange sufferings of childhood, which grow into the sterner sufferings of our manhood; and these pass into the special sufferings of old age. It reaches every portion of our being. Our body is held in the grip of physical suffering; our minds know the exquisite suffering of intense perplexity, our hearts are continually all but broken in the woes of life and our wills in the spheres of intense suffering, in the intense discipline to which we are called upon to submit in life; and the inner shrine of our being is the scene of our most exquisite suffering, the spiritual sorrows of children of God. Suffering—it casts its shadow over our life. Looked at upon the surface, all life may seem to be a comedy; but it is a very weird and pathetic comedy, for beneath this comedy lies the awful tragedy of life.
To-day I had a long and strange interview with a lady who has recently become a member of the congregation.… She asked me if I had ever known a case of trial so severe as hers. “Yes,” I replied: “numbers; it is the case of all. Suffering is very common, so is disappointment.” “Are our affections to be all withered?”—“Very often, I believe.” “Then why were they given me?”—“I am sure I cannot tell you that, but I suppose it would not have been very good for you to have had it all your own way.” “Then, do you think I am better for this blighting succession of griefs?”—“I do not know, but I know you ought to be.” Wordsworth was lying open on the table, and I pointed her to these lines:—
Then was the truth received into my heart,
That, under heaviest sorrow earth can bring,
If from the affliction somewhere do not grow
Honour which could not else have been, a faith,
An elevation, and a sanctity,
If new strength be not given nor old restored,
The blame is ours, not Nature’s.
The deep undertone of this world is sadness: a solemn bass occurring at measured intervals, and heard through all other tones. Ultimately, all the strains of this world’s music resolve themselves into that tone; and I believe that, rightly felt, the Cross, and the Cross alone, interprets the mournful mystery of life—the sorrow of the Highest, the Lord of Life; the result of error and sin, but ultimately remedial, purifying, and exalting. 1 [Note: Life and Letters of F. W. Robertson, 285.]
2. Christ is the first of sufferers. Nothing was wanting, humanly speaking, to make patience impossible. The natural sensitiveness of His tender frame, the ingenious appliances of torture, such as a crown of thorns pressed down upon the head and the temples, the coarse brutality of His executioners, the vivid consciousness of the Sufferer sustained from moment to moment, a consciousness directed upon all that He was enduring, and upon all also that immediately awaited Him—the continuous succession of varied sufferings without any relaxation throughout His passion, without any one pause or relaxation—this might well have exhausted patience. And what His mental sufferings must have been we may infer distantly from the agony in the garden, in which, without any outward cause, His body yielded all the symptoms of a violent convulsion. His sweat was, as it were, great drops of blood falling to the ground.
If you will read this Epistle of Peter at your leisure, you will see that while, with Paul, he makes the cross of Christ the centre of his teaching, Paul speaks more about His death, and Peter more about His sufferings. Throughout the letters of Peter the phrase runs, and the phrase has come into modern Christian usage almost entirely from this Apostle. That vivid imagination of his, when brought to the contemplation of his Master’s trials, supported by his warm heart, which could have said, not once only but always, and with truth, “Lord, thou knowest that I love thee,” led Peter to dwell not merely on the single fact of the death, but also on the accompaniments of that awful death, of the mental and physical pain, and especially the temper of the Saviour.
I saw in Siena pictures,
Wandering wearily;
I sought not the names of the masters,
Nor the works men care to see;
But once in a low-ceiled passage
I came on a place of gloom,
Lit here and there with halos
Like saints within the room.
The pure, serene, mild colours
The early artists used
Had made my heart grow softer,
And still on peace I mused.
Sudden I saw the Sufferer,
And my frame was clenched with pain;
Perchance no throe so noble
Visits my soul again.
Mine were the stripes of the scourging;
On my thorn-pierced brow blood ran;
In my breast the deep compassion
Breaking the heart for man.
I drooped with heavy eyelids,
Till evil should have its will;
On my lips was silence gathered;
My waiting soul stood still.
I gazed, nor knew I was gazing;
I trembled, and woke to know
Him whom they worship in heaven
Still walking on earth below.
Once have I borne His sorrows
Beneath the flail of fate!
Once in the woe of His passion,
I felt the soul grow great!
I turned from my dead Leader;
I passed the silent door;
The gray-walled street received me;
On peace I mused no more. 1 [Note: George Edward Woodberry.]
3. The sufferings of Christ are inexplicable on any other supposition than that they were for others. They could not be the due reward of personal demerit; for, if He suffered more than other men justly, He must have been worse than all men; instead of which He was the best of men, the sinless One in a world of sinners. If then He could not suffer because of personal ill-desert, being wholly free from fault, did He suffer by the unjust decree of Heaven? That again is an impossible supposition; for not only would it destroy the righteousness of God, but it would also contradict the experience of Christ Himself in His sufferings. For He never manifests any sense of being unjustly dealt with. Indeed no other explanation of His painful experiences is possible than that which He Himself gives, and which is repeated in the teachings of the Apostles, namely, that He was a sufferer for others; that He endured voluntarily that which came upon Him, and with a conscious reference to other persons. “The good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep” are His own words. The Apostles simply repeat that which Christ felt and declared when they say, as did St. Paul, “Christ died for us,” or as St. Peter, “Christ suffered for us.” It was this fact that reconciled our Lord to His sufferings and cross; it was this that led Him to take them up in a voluntary manner.
It is interesting to notice how, as his life went on, and his inspiration became more full, this Apostle came to understand, as being the very living and heart centre of his religion, the thing which at first was a stumbling-block and mystery to him. You remember that when Christ was here on earth, and was surrounded by all His disciples, the man who actually led antagonism to the thought of a saving Messiah was this very Apostle Peter. You remember how he displayed his ignorance in the words, “This shall not be unto thee, Lord”; and how his audacity rose to the height of saying, “Lord, why cannot I follow thee now? I will lay down my life for thy sake”—so little did he understand the purposes of Christ’s suffering and death. And even after His resurrection we do not find that Peter in his early preaching had got as far as he seems to have got in this letter. You will notice that here he speaks a great deal about the sufferings of Christ, which he puts side by side and in contrast with God’s glorifying of His Son. Christ’s cross, which at first had come to him as a rejection, has now come to him in all its reality, and to him there was the one grand thing, “He suffered for us,” as though he realized Christ in all His beauty and purity, and not only as a beautiful teacher and dear friend. That which at first seemed to him as an astounding mystery and perfect impossibility, he now comes to understand. With those two little words, “for us,” where there was before impossibility, disappointment, and anomaly, the anomaly vanishes, although the mystery becomes deeper. 1 [Note: A. Maclaren.]
4. The doctrine of the Atonement, then, is this, that we who were by nature “afar off from God,” in Christ are “brought nigh”: that God, for His sake, “hath blotted out our transgressions,” “and our sins and iniquities will he remember no more”: that He gives “the water of life,” to all who will take it, freely: that we are not, and cannot be, saved by our own righteousness: that God’s purpose towards us is full of mercy and tenderness in His blessed Son: that “He willeth not that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance”: that those will be saved who, renouncing their own merits and all carnal titles to God’s favour, look for salvation only through the blood of Christ; who come unto Him that they may have life; who appropriate the benefits of His sacrifice by personal faith, confessing that “they are bought with a price,” and feeling that “he who glorieth must glory in the Lord.” It is a blessed and comfortable doctrine! the anchor of our hopes as well as the object of our faith; the only sure ground of peace, and confidence, and joy; not only enabling but impelling us to “come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need.” It has bridged over the wide gulf that lay between ourselves and God; and shows even to the most obdurate sinner, if he will only follow it, a way by which he may yet hear of joy and gladness; and to the heaviest-laden a place where they may find rest unto their souls. “God hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.”
For poor Jean Valjean, weeping bitterly for his sins, while he watched the boy play with the buttercups and prayed that God would give him, the red and horny-handed criminal, to feel again as he felt when he pressed his dewy cheek against his mother’s knee—for Jean Valjean is there no suffering friend, no forgiving heart? Is there no bosom where poor Magdalene can sob out her bitter confession? What if God were the soul’s father! What if He too serves and suffers vicariously! What if nature and life do but interpret in the small this Divine principle existing in the large in Him who is infinite! What if Calvary is God’s eternal heartache, manifest in time! What if, sore-footed and heavy-hearted, bruised with many a fall, we should come back to the old home, from which once we fled away, gay and foolish prodigals! The time was when, as small boys and girls, with blinding tears, we groped toward the mother’s bosom and sobbed out our bitter pain and sorrow with the full story of our sin. What if the form on Calvary were like the king of eternity, toiling up the hill of time, his feet bare, his locks all wet with the dew of night, while he cries: “Oh, Absalom! my son, my son, Absalom!” What if we are Absalom, and have hurt God’s heart! Reason staggers. Groping, trusting, hoping, we fall blindly on the stairs that slope through darkness up to God. But, falling, we fall into the arms of Him who hath suffered vicariously for man from the foundation of the world. 1 [Note: N. D. Hillis, The Investment of Influence, 86.]
II
The Example
“Leaving you an example, that ye should follow his steps.”
i. Christ is an example
1. The word “example” in the text is a highly technical word. It was a word that was specifically employed by the old writers to indicate the headline of a copy, given by the master for the pupil to imitate, to trace out and to follow. And if we regard the blessed Saviour’s example in that light, much good fruit will be produced in our lives.
In the economy of Divine grace our blessed Master, in the three-and-thirty years of His earthly sojourn, was employed in writing the great headline of the copy; and as He gathers the children of the ages round about Him, generation after generation, century after century, place after place, nation after nation, He says, “I have left you an example”; meaning by that, that pains and diligent care must be taken to copy that great example, and also that the eye may be lovingly and constantly fixed upon that Jesus, who is alike the Author and the Finisher of our faith.
How easily and contentedly we speak of Jesus Christ as our example. Do we realize what it means? If we did, it would revolutionize our life. Do we begin to know our Bible as He did? Do we begin to pray as He did? How thoughtful He was for others, how patient toward dulness, how quiet under insult! Think of what it meant for Him to take a basin and towel like a slave and wash the disciples’ feet! Do we stoop to serve? Can any one say of us, as was said of Him, that we go about “doing good”? Think of His words, servants of His, “I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you.” “Christ-like” is a word often on our lips. Do not speak it too lightly. It is the heart of God’s predestination. It is our high calling. 1 [Note: M. D. Babcock, Thoughts for Every-Day Living, 50.]
2. “That ye should follow.” As Christ gained disciples, or as any proffered to be His disciples, the first and only direction He gave them was to become devoted followers of Himself personally. Instead of laying before them any laws of His Kingdom, or any definite rules by which to regulate their lives, His one exhortation was—forsake all and follow Me. Instead of instituting any inquiry into their moral character or their religious experience—as men do now—the only test He applied was to their love for Him and the need they felt for His love and friendship, which of course would have to be strong in order to secure a consistent and devoted discipleship. Hence, to the words “forsake all,” He often added “take up the cross and follow me.”
It is clear that by following Him, He meant exactly what we mean when we present His life as an example; He meant entering into the spirit and manner, and thereby into the very deeds of His life. To this precept, He in many ways gave great force, as, for instance, when He sent them forth on evangelic missions invested with the powers that He Himself possessed, and when He spoke such striking words as to their being one with Him, even as He was one with the Father.
And how shall I follow Jesus the Christ? The first requisite is a personal relationship to Him. From the Cross where He has saved me I set out on the pilgrim-road of imitation. Sometimes I hear it alleged against Thomas à Kempis’s golden little book, that it fails to insist on these initial experiences of pardon and reconcilement. But the good monk regards them as having been already tasted and passed through. As truly as Charles Wesley, he is persuaded that the Saviour must cover his defenceless head with the shadow of His wing. Has He done so? I cannot wear the loveliness of Jesus till I drink deep of the forgiveness of Jesus.
And, next, I must have a constant remembrance of the real humanness of my Lord. The radiant lights of divinity and eternity gleam about His person. But His example ceases to have practical interest for me unless I feel that He was and is my real Kinsman and my very Brother. I must not lift Him into a magical world from which I am excluded. Where He has gone in advance of me, I can walk in patience behind.
This is necessary, too, that love for Him leaps and flames in my soul. No amount of intellectual comprehension and no attention to worship and work are enough. The heart must enthrone Him, must adore Him, must turn to Him with the inevitableness and the trust of the sunflower turning to the sun. I can resemble Him only if mine is an affection profound, controlling, pervasive, revealing itself in look and word and deed and behaviour, not to be checked by ridicule and opposition, not to be dried up.
And a certain aloofness of spirit is required. Of spirit, not of body. I am not to retire to any hermitage or desert or solitary’s cell. No arbitrary fences are to divide me from my neighbours. Yet, if I would be an epistle of Christ, I must hold on firmly to the heavenly life around the earthly life; my heart will move there while my feet stay here. “The holy man,” said Jacob Böhme, who made and mended shoes, “hath his church about him everywhere, even in himself. He standeth and walketh, sitteth and lieth down, in his church.”
And there must be intimacy with my Lord. His thought, His temper, His motives, His decisions, I am to share. So I must commit myself implicitly and continuously to His Holy Spirit, who takes His things and shows them to me. I must dwell much with Himself in prayer. I must read often the story of His life and death. I must accustom myself to consider Him, the Apostle and High Priest of my confession.
These are some of the modes in which I shall touch and grasp and keep the grace and the wisdom and the power and the gentleness and the splendour of Jesus Christ. 1 [Note: A. Smellie, In the Secret Place, 350.]
In one way or another the idea of withdrawing entirely from the world engaged Francis’ thoughts. He often discussed it with the Brothers of the Order and weighed the pro and con. There was one thing that always prevented him from choosing the hermit life, and that was the example of our Lord. Jesus could have chosen to remain in His glory at His Father’s right hand, but instead descended to earth to endure the vicissitudes of human life and to die the bitter death of shame on the Cross. And it was the Cross that had from the first been Francis’ model, the Cross to which he applied with the rest of the Middle Ages God’s word to Moses: Fac secundum exemplar—“Make it according to the pattern, that was shewn thee in the mount.” 2 [Note: J. Jörgensen, St. Francis of Assisi, 148.]
3. “His steps.” As a guide going across a wet moor with a traveller calls out, “Step where I step, or else you will be bogged,” so we must tread in the steps of the Saviour, and then we shall come safe to the other side.
It is said of the Bohemian king, Wenceslaus, that on one occasion he set forth in a wild snowstorm, when the frost was keen and the air bitterly cold, on an enterprise of mercy and love. His servant, following him barefooted, as was the habit in those days, could not keep up to his master by reason of the bleeding of his naked feet as they trod upon the sharp protruding icicles. So the king said to his follower, “Watch where I plant my steps, and plant yours there too.” And so the master advanced and the servant followed, treading in the master’s steps.
Dean Stanley was one day showing, as he loved to do, some working men over Westminster Abbey. One of them in conversation referred to the Dean’s work on Sinai and Palestine, which he had just been reading, and remarked, as he thought of its graphic descriptions of the Holy Land, and how the Dean had actually stood upon the sacred soil, and personally visited the hallowed places, “How beautiful to have been able to walk where the Saviour had walked.” The man said, “I shall never forget the answer, nor the look with which it was accompanied, as the Dean replied: ‘Beautiful indeed, and not beyond the power of any man to endeavour to walk in the footsteps of the Saviour.’ ”
4. Our Lord’s life, as recorded in the Gospels, does not present situations corresponding to all those in which human beings may be placed. Perhaps too much is sometimes attempted to be made out, with regard to the extent to which the life of Christ tallies in its outward features with the lives of men. It is true that Jesus was an infant, a youth, and a grown man; and it is profitable to consider Him as therefore sharing our infancy, our boyhood, and our adult age. But then it must be admitted that He was not an old man. He was a son, a friend, and presumably an artisan. But He was not a husband or a father; not a landowner or a tradesman. We make perhaps a graver admission still, when we say that He was not a woman. These admissions we might carry on without limit, as we reckon up the various relations and circumstances in which we may be placed. They prove conclusively that a close repetition of the acts of our Lord cannot be what is meant, when it is said that His example is one for all men to follow. If a father seeks to know, for instance, how he ought to act in the management of his children, he will not find it reported how the Son of God acted in similar circumstances. Even when we find a correspondence of circumstances, and can learn how Jesus acted when placed as one of us may be placed, we ought not to consider the following of His example to be simply the repeating of His actions.
The most intelligent Christians here cannot see why they should not have everything we have. They have no national costume, and every one of them would like to have clothes just like ours, from hat to shoes, regardless of the fact that they would be miserable in such dress. One of our elders made me fairly shudder, some months ago, by appearing at communion in a thick overcoat. He sweltered in it through a long hot day with a look of supreme contentment. It was a white man’s coat, and therefore must be right. I suppose I was the only person in the audience who did not envy him. 1 [Note: E. C. Parsons, A Life for Africa, 155.]
5. It is clearly the spirit in which our Saviour acted that we are to follow. The details of our Lord’s conduct may be very helpful in showing us how to act in particular situations; but their highest and most general value consists in their illustrating or interpreting the mind of Christ. As we learn to understand our fellow-men not through metaphysical or ethical descriptions of them, but through the observation of their acts, so is it with our knowledge of the Saviour. It was of infinite importance that we should know the Son of God to be a living person, and should perceive the Spirit that was in Him to be a fountain of conduct, sending forth the streams of word and deed. Everything He did, every word He spoke, has this value, that it contributes to our knowledge of Him who spoke and acted. The single recorded incident of His boyhood, His conversation with the doctors in the Temple, and what we are told of His submission to His mother and Joseph, and His growing in favour with man as well as with God, cannot be thought of with much profit, except in direct connexion with His nature and character. All the acts of His ministry become most instructive when we see in them so many tokens of the simplicity, the sympathy, the kindness, the fearlessness of our Lord’s character. The actions are most precious and indispensable to bring us into acquaintance with the spirit out of which they proceeded; and when they have done that, their chief work is done. Thenceforward, what we have to do with is the spirit.
It does us good to see how faithful persons have discharged duties which we ourselves are called to perform, those of husbands and wives and parents, of lawyers and merchants, of domestic servants, of Christian ministers; and how a life that might have been solitary has been glorified, like that of a Mary Carpenter or a Sister Dora, by special enterprises of noble voluntary service. It is clear therefore that the example left us by the Lord Jesus is one which can be largely supplemented by other lives. Good Christians may be said to fill up that which is behind or lacking in the actions and instructions as well as the afflictions of Christ for the sake of His body, which is the Church. 1 [Note: J. Ll. Davies, Social Questions, 115.]
Not Thine the bigot’s partial plea,
Nor Thine the zealot’s ban;
Thou well canst spare a love of Thee
Which ends in hate of man.
Our Friend, our Brother, and our Lord,
What may Thy service be?—
Nor name, nor form, nor ritual word,
But simply following Thee.
We bring no ghastly holocaust,
We pile no graven stone;
He serves Thee best who loveth most
His brothers and Thy own. 2 [Note: John Greenleaf Whittier.]
ii. Christ is especially an example to sufferers
1. In His public teaching our Lord made much of patient submission to undeserved wrong. He pronounced those men blessed who suffered for righteousness’ sake. “Blessed are ye,” He says, “when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely. Rejoice and be exceeding glad.” Not in exemption from suffering, but in truthful endurance, would His true followers find their peace. “In your patience, possess ye your souls.”
2. Our Lord teaches us by His sufferings more than in any other way. By these He reveals to us the love of God: by these He points to the value of heaven. These sufferings are the measure of the gravity of our sins, of the miseries of hell, of the solemnity of life. But, beyond this, our Lord gives us lessons about pain—pain, that stern and strange mystery which follows hard upon the steps of every one of us throughout life, with which, sooner or later, we each of us become familiar, of which, left to ourselves, we know and even can guess so little.
Do not complain of suffering; it teaches you to succour others. 1 [Note: Golden Thoughts of Carmen Sylva, 35.]
Depend upon it, patient, cheerful acceptance of suffering is a great force which achieves more than many active energies that command the attention of mankind. To take one single instance from the history of this country, how vast has been the effect of the closing scenes of the life of King Charles the First. Had he conquered in his struggle with the Parliament, the English Revolution would have been only deferred. Had he died quietly in his bed, whether in exile or as the occupant of a phantom throne, such as at one time after his great defeat his enemies would still have been content to leave him, he would have lived in history as a monarch who had endeavoured to exaggerate the prerogative and to defend the exaggeration, and who, happily, had failed; and the political and religious history of England might—nay, would—have been widely different. But whatever the mistakes of his earlier life, his last sufferings were covered with a robe of moral glory—the glory of Christian patience. That long imprisonment, borne with such unvarying patient dignity—that refusal at the last to make concessions which did violence to his conscience, but which certainly might have saved his life—above all, that last tragedy at Whitehall, the most tragic, perhaps, all things considered, in the history of our country, when, as the old poet Marvell says,—
He nothing common did or mean
Upon that memorable scene;
But with his keener eye
The axe’s edge did try,
Nor Heaven invoked, with vulgar spite,
To vindicate his helpless right,
But bowed his comely head
Down, as upon a bed,
While his last thoughts were, as we know,
Turned to the cross, and his last words, “I go
From a corruptible crown to
An incorruptible,”—
here was the real secret of the Restoration which followed—here the moral force which, in the end, saved by ennobling the English monarchy. 1 [Note: Canon H. P. Liddon.]
It is a tremendous moment when first one is called upon to join the great army of those who suffer. That vast world of love and pain opens suddenly to admit us one by one within its fortress. We are afraid to enter into the land, yet you will, I know, feel how high is the call. It is as a trumpet speaking to us, that cries aloud—“It is your turn—endure.” Play your part. As they endured before you, so now, close up the ranks—be patient and strong as they were. Since Christ, this world of pain is no accident untoward or sinister, but a lawful department, of life, with experiences, interests, adventures, hopes, delights, secrets of its own. These are all thrown open to us as we pass within the gates—things that we could never learn or know or see, so long as we were well.
God help you to walk through this world now opened to you as through a kingdom, regal, royal, and wide and glorious. 2 [Note: Canon Scott Holland, in a letter to Romanes, in Life and Letters of George John Romanes, 284.]
3. We suffer in mind, we suffer in body, we suffer in soul.
(1) We suffer in mind.—From the point of view of religion there is the suffering of doubt, which comes at times like a cloud between almost every Christian and God. But we suffer not only from doubt, but from fears—fears whether we shall persevere, fears whether we can stand against the storm of trial and temptation, fears, perhaps, whether we are even now in the narrow way. We suffer from perplexity, from the difficulty of deciding our duty in the many questions which come before us. And we suffer in mind lastly, and perhaps most often, in what may be called the “worries” of life; the irritations, the trifling troubles of every day—trifles in themselves, and each one easy to be borne if it stood alone; but coming so continually, coming so thickly, the worries of life often seem to overwhelm us.
We turn to our Lord and we follow Him through His whole life of sorrow and suffering, but we find that He seems to be always so calm—with Him there is no doubt, no perplexity, no fear, no worry. There is one scene in our Lord’s life which seems to be the climax of the concentrated suffering of His mind—that time, between twelve and three upon Good Friday, when He hung upon the Cross, doing penance for the sin of the world, and darkness rolled, not only around His Cross, hiding from sight the light of day, but into His very soul, and extorted from Him that one cry of complaint, the only one in His whole life, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Once only in His life does our Lord reveal to us the sufferings of His mind.
On reading his correspondence, some may accuse him of indicating too strongly his loneliness and passionate desire of sympathy; they may call his fancies diseased, his complaints unmanly, and his transient doubts unchristian. But his faithlessness was but momentary: only the man who can become at one with Frederick Robertson’s strange and manifold character, and can realize as he did the agony and sin of the world,—only the man who can feel the deepest pain, and the highest joy, as Robertson could have felt them—has either the right or the capability of judging him. Doubts did cross his mind, but they passed over it as clouds across the sun. The glowing heart which lay behind soon dissipated them by its warmth.
With regard to his passionate desires and his complaint, they were human, and would have been humanly wrong in him only if he had allowed them to gain predominance over his will, righteously bent all through his life, not on their extinction, but on their subjugation. The untroubled heart is not the deepest, the stern heart not the noblest, the heart which crushes all expression of its pain not that which can produce the most delicate sympathy, the most manifold teaching, or speak so as to give the greatest consolation. Had not Robertson often suffered, and suffered so much as to be unable sometimes to suppress a cry, his sermons would never have been the deep source of comfort and of inspiration which they have proved to thousands. The very knowledge that one who worked out the voyage of his life so truly and so firmly could so suffer and so declare his suffering, is calculated to console and strengthen many who endure partially his pain and loneliness, but who have not, as yet, resisted so victoriously; whose temperament is morbid, but who have not, as yet, subdued it to the loving and healthy cheerfulness of his Christian action. 1 [Note: S. A. Brooke, Life and Letters of F. W. Robertson, 473.]
(2) We have to suffer in body, through sickness or accident. This frame of earth in which we tabernacle during our sojourn in this world, how frail it is! how full of weakness and of pain! And yet, even here, in the majority of cases, we can trace our pain or sickness to our own fault, to the breaking of some law of health, very likely to our luxury of life, or our gluttony, or love of ease, or the pursuit of pleasure.
It may be pointed out with irresistible force that suffering can be traced, often at a long interval, in some cases to sin, and that it is simply one of the wholesome sanctions of law. We are firmly convinced that we live in a moral universe, and by that we mean in a state where it will be made pleasant to do what is right, and very unpleasant to do what is wrong, at least in physical affairs. If one play the fool and slap Nature in the face, that power will take up the quarrel and pursue it to the end with the man and his descendants till she has obtained complete satisfaction. If one make a covenant with Nature and keep her laws loyally, this power will remember him for good, and his children after him, opening her hand and blessing them with health and strength. With her saving judgments and her abundant mercies, Nature fences up the way of life that we may be induced to walk therein with steadfast step. And if any one break through the hedge, it is good that he suffer; and if it be that its actual transgressor do not pay all the debt, but that the innocent must share his liability, this is only the inevitable consequence of the solidarity of the family and the race. None can interfere between the sinner and his penalty, and we can even see that it is well none should, for in so far as one accepts his chastisement with a right mind the pain leaves peace behind. 2 [Note: J. Watson, The Potter’s Wheel, 140.]
(3) And then, lastly, there is the suffering of the human soul; the suffering in our affections—the keenest, the deepest, the hardest of all to bear! And again we see that this comes so often through our own sin; so often we have to suffer in our affections, because our affections have been set on that which is not lawfully within our reach, that which has been forbidden to us by the law of God.
But, whether it be from our own fault, or from those many, many heart-wrenchings which come through love, even in right affections, in right relationships—the sorrows, the pains of husband or wife at the suffering or perhaps sin of the other; the pains (what greater?) of the mother weeping over her erring, wayward, sinful child—all these sufferings of the human soul we find in their fulness throughout our Lord’s life, and reaching their culminating point upon the Cross. For throughout His life He suffered, “being grieved at the hardness of men’s hearts.” He suffered in seeing those for whom He had come to die refuse His proffered grace and turn away from His words of love.
It goes without proving that no one has ever so affected our race for weal as our Master, and that the spring of this salvation is in Himself. Partly it is His example of holy living, and partly it is His Gospel of Divine Truth, but a white marble Christ had not touched the human heart, or loosed the bands of sin. It is the Crucified, in the unutterable pathos of His Passion and Death, who has overcome and gotten unto Himself the victory. Because it appears that God also is in the tragedy of life, and in the heart of its mystery. When one enters the dimness of a foreign cathedral, he sees nothing clearly for a while, save that there is a light from the Eastern window, and it is shining over a figure raised high above the choir. As one’s eyes grow accustomed to the gloom, he identifies the Crucifix, repeated in every side chapel, and marks that to this Sufferer all kneel in their trouble, and are comforted. From age to age the shadow hangs heavy on life and men walk softly in the holy place, but ever the Crucifix faces them, and they are drawn to His feet and goodness by the invitation of the pierced hands.
Had one lived in Jesus’ day and realized His excellence, the Cross would have been an almost insuperable offence to faith. Why should He have had a crown of thorns? Had the veil been lifted from the future, and had one seen the salvation flowing from the five wounds of the Redeemer, then he had been comforted and content. No one then imagined that through the mystery of the Lord’s Passion so great a blessing was to come on all ages, for none had entered into the secret of suffering. To-day we are perplexed by the Passion, which is not now concentrated like a bitter essence in the Cup of a Divine Person, but is distributed in the earthly vessels of ordinary people, and we stand aghast at the lot of the victims. Were our vision purged and power given us to detect spiritual effects, then we would understand, and cease to complain. We would see the hard crust of human nature broken up, and the fountain of fine emotion unsealed; the subtle sins which sap the vigour of character eliminated, and the unconscious virtues brought to bloom. Before the widespread, silent, searching appeal of the suffering, each in his appointed place, the heart of the race grows tender and opens its door to goodness. 1 [Note: J. Watson, The Potter’s Wheel, 150.]
It was the Sea of Sorrow; and I stood
At midnight on the shore. The heavy skies
Hung dark above; the voice of them that wept
Was heard upon the waters, and the chill,
Sad going of a midnight wind, which stirred
No wave thereon. And I was there alone
To face that dreadful sea: I felt the cold
And deathly waters touch my feet, and drew
A little back, and shuddered. Yet I knew
That all who follow Christ must suffer here.
“ Master,” I said, with trembling, in the night,
With voice that none but He would note or know,
So hoarse and weak—“O Master, bid me come!
If on these woeful waters I must walk,
Then let me hear thy voice thereon, that so
I may not die, before I reach Thy feet,
Of loneliness and fear.”
I listened there,
With breathless longing by that solemn sea,
Till through the curtains of the night I heard
His own voice calling me—that voice which draws
His children through the flood and through the fire
To kiss His feet; and at the Master’s word
I left the shore, forth walking on the dim
And untried waters, there to follow Him
Who called me, and there to see His face. 2 [Note: B. M., The Sea of Sorrow.]
A Propitiation and a Pattern
Literature
Brown (C.), Trial and Triumph, 89.
Davies (J. Ll.), Social Questions, 114.
Davies (J. Ll.), The Work of Christ, 104.
Edgar (S.), Sermons at Auckland, N.Z., ii. 27.
Farrar (F. W.), Bells and Pomegranates, 133.
Fraser (J.), Parochial Sermons, 115.
Gibson (J. G.), Stepping Stones to Life, 96.
Hamilton (J.), Works, iv. 217.
Hickey (F. P.), Short Sermons, ii. 94.
Kuegele (F.), Country Sermons, New Ser., ii. 286.
Liddon (H. P.), Easter in St. Paul’s, 346.
Mackennal (A.), The Eternal Son of God and the Human Sonship, 81.
Meyer (F. B.), Tried by Fire, 105.
Mortimer (A. G.), Lenten Preaching, 142.
Russell (A.), The Light that Lighteth Every Man, 122.
Sauter (B.), The Sunday Epistles, 242.
Vaughan (R.), Stones from the Quarry, 87.
Watkinson (W. L.), The Education of the Heart, 186.
Wells (J.), Bible Echoes, 153.
Wilson (J. M.), Truths New and Old, 260.
Wilson (J. M.), Rochdale Sermons, 10.
Wilson (S.), Lenten Shadows and Easter Lights, 71.
Wiseman (N.), Children’s Sermons, 302.
Cambridge Review, xiv. Supplement No. 350 (Ridgeway).
Christian World Pulpit, xviii. 142 (Tatton); xlv. 241 (Fairbairn); lvii. 164 (Body); lxiii. 193 (Fairbairn).
Church of England Pulpit, xlvi. 5 (Henslow); xlix. 290 (Body); 1. 2 (Rawnsley).
Churchman’s Pulpit: Lenten Season: v. 140 (Carter).
Churchman’s Pulpit: 2nd Sunday after Easter: viii. 19 (Liddon), 23 (Cotton), 27 (Henslow), 29 (Fairbairn), 31 (Edger), 34 (Davies).
Churchman’s Pulpit: Sermons to the Young: xvi. 256 (Garbett).
Contemporary Pulpit, 1st Ser., i. 330 (Cross).
Keswick Week, 1899, 84 (Webb-Peploe).
Verse 24
The Ethics of the Atonement
Who his own self bare our sins in his body upon the tree, that we, having died unto sins, might live unto righteousness.— 1 Peter 2:24.
There is no subject so surrounded with difficulty and so fruitful of misrepresentation as the one which Passion Sunday suggests—the Atonement effected for us by Christ on the Cross. No thoughtful man can fail to be struck by the intense moral difficulties which its ordinary and naked presentment involves, and even when he has forced his way beyond them to some more rational standpoint, he still sees only a little light that is ever shading into mysterious darkness. If there is any subject which demands in a Christian teacher reverence and modesty, and a profound conviction that he “knows in part,” and that “he sees through a glass darkly,” it is surely this. At the best our standpoint of knowledge is like a little island floating in a sea of mystery.
There are many devout and intelligent Christians to whom it no longer appeals. They may still hold it as an article of their creed, but it is no longer the vital centre of their faith. It is at best a profound mystery, which they must accept but can never hope to understand.
Yet, as we read the New Testament, we feel that to the first Christians the Atonement was not a puzzle, but a revelation. To Paul and John and Peter it was not an intellectual fog, but a glorious flood of light cast upon the fundamental facts of life. The Word of the Cross might be a stumbling-block to the Jew, and folly to the Greek; but to them it was “the power of God and the wisdom of God.”
This thought penetrates the First Epistle of Peter. It will out, even when we least expect it, even when to minds void of Christian experience it would seem to mar the force of his argument. “It is better,” he cries, “if the will of God should so will, that ye suffer for well-doing.” Why? Because Christ gave you the great example? There surely is the supreme motive for Christians. But no. He cannot gaze at the Cross and speak thus. “Because Christ also suffered for sins once, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God.” There is the paradox of the Christian life. The punishment of Jesus became the power of Christian patience just at the point where there is no comparison between His sufferings and ours. More remarkable still is the passage out of which our text is taken. Here there can be no question that in the humility and patience of the Master the Apostle sees a motive for the endurance of the servant. “Because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, that ye should follow his steps.” But as though taught by instinct that such an appeal was utterly inadequate when addressed by a Christian pastor to children of the Resurrection, he immediately breaks out into those grand sentences, every syllable of which is redolent of the power of the atoning Sacrifice and breathes the merit of the vicarious Death. “Who his own self bare our sins in his body upon the tree, that we, having died unto sins, might live unto righteousness; by whose stripes ye were healed.”
When St. Peter wrote, “Who his own self bare our sins in his body upon the tree, that we, having died unto sins, might live unto righteousness,” this was not the testimony of a person in a distant age, who never knew our Lord; St. Peter said this of one with whom he had lived, whose words he had noted, and with whom he had been in daily intercourse and communion. And yet what a difficult, what a sharp and trying test this for such supernatural pretensions! To say of one person that His death was an atonement for the sins of the world, that He bore them in His own body on the cross, was to assert a profound and awful mystery respecting Him, because it is saying that the whole world was saved by His death; but to say this of one whom he had lived with and known—this is what we have no example of except in the testimony of the Apostles to Christ. 1 [Note: J. B. Mozley.]
The doctrine is the doctrine of vicarious suffering. Now in considering the doctrine of vicarious suffering it is important to remember three things.
(1) The vicarious suffering of Christ is not an isolated fact.—Below the surface of human life lies the great universal fact of vicarious suffering, “not a dogmatic but an experimental truth.” All true service for men involves the bearing of the sins of men, not in the same sense as that in which Christ bore them, but in a sense that helps us to understand the meaning of His suffering.
(2) The vicarious suffering of Christ must not he separated from its purpose—that we, being dead unto sins, should live unto righteousness. The ultimate efficacy of the sacrifice of Christ depends on what it does in us. The old hymn is right—“He died to make us good.”
(3) Only through suffering do we learn the meaning of His suffering.—Slaves bearing ill-usage patiently will by the mysterious power of sympathy learn to see more clearly into the mystery of redemption than the subtlest theologian who has not suffered. The deep truths of Is. 53. were wrung from the heart of the nation as it groaned under the captivity of Babylon, and St. Paul’s knowledge of the meaning of the death of Christ was won on the same battlefield—“I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus” ( Galatians 6:17). Christianity is stamped with the image of the Cross, and the whole life of each true Christian has something of the form and look of Christ crucified.
I
The Vicarious Suffering
“Who his own self bare our sins in his body upon the tree.”
1. Let us first of all try to understand St. Peter’s language. He has here four remarkable phrases.
(1) His own self.—Christ did not employ any one else to accomplish the great work of our redemption; He did it Himself, in His own proper person. The priest of old brought a substitute, and it was a lamb. He struck the knife and the warm blood flowed, but our Lord Jesus Christ had no substitute for Himself. He “his own self bare our sins.” “O thou priest of God! the pangs are to be thine own pangs; the knife must reach thine own heart; no lamb for thee, thou art thyself the Lamb; the blood which streams at thy feet must be thine own blood; wounds there must be, but they must be wounds in thine own flesh.”
A little girl brought me half a sovereign for missions. “Is this all from yourself?” I asked. Pointing to her heart, she said, “Yes, it is all from my own very self.” So St. Peter’s words mean, Christ did bear our sins really and truly; He bore them all alone; He had no rival, or partner, or substitute. When the king travels, the newspapers sometimes tell us that Mr. So-and-so, the superintendent of the line, drove the engine himself. The word himself shows that he did then in person what he usually does by the hand of his servants. 1 [Note: James Wells, Bible Echoes, 138.]
(2) Bare our sins.—The word rendered “bare” has a singular fulness of significance; it is a sacrificial term, constantly used in the Septuagint for offering sacrifice: here it includes two meanings. Our Lord took up our sins, and in His own body which He offered on the cross He expiated them. It must also be noted that when He took up our sins, He took them away, enabling us to be rid of them.
If we examine Scripture from Genesis to Revelation, we shall find four senses in which the words “bearing sin,” are used: First, representation; second, identification; third, substitution; and fourth, satisfaction. If we take those four conceptions—representation—one standing as a representative before God; identification—one being made identical with those he represents; substitution—one substituted in the place or stead of others; and satisfaction—the furnishing of a satisfying atonement in behalf of others,—we have the scope of the meaning of these words. 2 [Note: A. T. Pierson, The Hopes of the Gospel, 87.]
(3) In His body.—That body so purely born, which must have been a fair casket for the holy jewel it contained; which in the Jordan waters was first identified in outward seeming with the weight of human sin, though in itself without sin; which was the very shrine and home of God, who had prepared it for Him; which was the vehicle for so many blessed words and deeds of ministry— that body was made a sin-offering, and, so to speak, was burnt in fire without the camp, as the bodies of the bulls and goats under the Levitical law.
The depth, the fulness, the perfection, of His Being and of His character endowed Him with capacities for suffering which transcend all our most powerful imaginings. We can reach only imperfect, but still very significant, ideas of what He consciously realized in the Crucifixion. So weak are our powers that great injury stupefies the senses to the pain belonging to it. His perfection of mind would support the sense of pain and intensify it. And not only so, but every part of His Being would be quick, because of His fulness of life, to see and feel all that was contained within the act of men to Him. The pains of the flesh would not so absorb His mind that He could not see and feel also the meaning of all that He endured in His body on the tree. Clear before Him would stand out the hate, the malice, the wrong of His murderers. In the pain of the thorns He would be conscious of and would feel the cruel mockery of that shameful act. When His sensitive frame was pierced by the iron nails and racked with the anguish of hanging on the tree He would in this feel with equal reality the moral state of those who inflicted this upon His body. And as, with that penetrating vision which enabled Him to know what was in man, He looked through the present moral state of His murderers He would see the developments of sin which had built up their evil characters; all the several acts of disobedience and wickedness which had gone to fashion men who would murder the Just One stood out with vivid distinctness. Back beyond the present generation He would see the sins of their fathers, sins whose force lived in their degenerate offspring. A long line of ages of human sin, rank beyond rank, stretching back even to the flood and beyond it to fair Eden’s garden, where man first ate the forbidden fruit. All would be seen and felt in and under the nails which fixed Him to the tree. He would read and realize also in the acts of the immediate instruments of His death the moral state of the teeming millions of living sinners, east and west and north and south. And as all this sin would be seen in its past and present, so also would the latent possibilities in it for the future pass before Him. He would see in the sins of His crucifiers those sins, the very same sins, which still have existence after nineteen centuries of grace— our sins. And knowing, as He alone could know, the dire evils linked everlastingly to all departure from right, He would behold the destined end of sin, if left to work its way—death and misery, hell and anguish—scenes such that only infinite strength of soul could enable Him to look upon them. His all-powerful mind measured this mass of moral corruption; His infinitely pure and infinitely sensitive moral nature felt its terrible turpitude; His love, all-embracing, was pained by the wrong of it; His soul filled with suffering pity at the prospect of its dark issues. That which to us is, at best, but a dim conception in idea, was to Him a most terrible and real experience; “Who his own self bare our sins in his body upon the tree.” 1 [Note: R. Vaughan.]
(4) Upon the tree.—The word for “tree” used here is also used twice in Acts ( Acts 5:30, Acts 10:39) by St. Peter for the cross. Its use in Galatians 3:13 is due to the Septuagint of Deuteronomy 21:23. “Upon the tree” is a pregnant construction. He bore our sins up to and upon the tree. Irenaeus speaks of Christ as “remedying the disobedience in the matter of the tree of knowledge by the obedience of the tree of Calvary.” And we think of the “tree of life” of Revelation 22:2, whose leaves were for the healing of the nations.
There are three great trees of the Bible, towering above all other trees, as the cedars of Lebanon tower above the humble shrubs. These are the tree of life in Eden, the tree of death on Calvary, and the tree of life in heaven. The first is the tree for the sinless, the second is the tree for the sinful, and the third is the tree for the saved in glory. We are neither sinless nor saints in glory, and therefore the tree for us is the tree on Calvary. Notice that St. Peter calls it simply the tree. A family have been promised a Christmas-tree by a friend. All their talk for weeks beforehand is about the tree, just as if there were no other tree in the world for them. One day a cart with a nodding fir-tree is seen approaching the house. They rush in and shout, “Oh, mother, the tree has come!” And so the Apostle says, “the tree.” No Christian can mistake it. It is the tree of trees, the prince of trees for us. 2 [Note: James Wells, Bible Echoes, 145.]
2. Now in what sense can it be truly said that Christ bore our sins as a burden? It cannot mean that He bore the guilt of our sin, for guilt is by its very nature inextricably attached to the sinner, and cannot be transferred; no one else can be guilty of the sin which I have committed. Nor can it mean that He bore the punishment of our sin; for punishment, likewise, can attach only to the one who is guilty of the sin. Another may suffer for my sin, but his suffering cannot be called punishment. In what sense, then, could Christ bear our sins?
(1) He bore them by sympathy.—A good mother once heard that her only son had done a deed of shame. The evil news caused her intense agony, her hair soon grew grey, health and joy forsook her, and soon she was brought down in sorrow to the grave. She bore her son’s sin by sympathy. It caused her such grief, because she was so near him, and loved him so fondly. If one sin, or rather that small part of one sin we can know on earth, be such an awful burden, what must it have been to bear the sins of us all? What bounds can be set to “the unknown agonies” of Christ, who has made Himself one with us sinners? Let Gethsemane and its bloody sweat, let the cross and its pains explain these words, “Who bare our sins.”
(2) Christ also bore our sins by sacrifice and substitution.—The whole Bible is filled with this truth, and the names of Jesus help us to understand it. He is “the Lamb of God,” upon whom the Lord hath laid the iniquities of us all. The Jew laid his hand upon the head of the lamb, and confessed his sins. The lamb then in a type had the burden of the Jew’s sins laid upon it, and bare them by being offered as a sacrifice.
In Dr. Bainbridge’s Around The World: Tour of Christian Missions, there is a curiously interesting and suggestive incident. When in his journey he had reached Tokio, Japan, intending to remain there some little time, he was waited upon one morning by an official, with this singular inquiry, “Who stands for you?” Supposing it to be a question of passports, he presented his, but that was not what was wanted. He then offered some letters of introduction he had, but they also were unsatisfactory, and the question was repeated, “Who stands for you?” It was finally explained that there was an ordinance in that city to the effect that no foreigner could take up his residence there for any length of time, unless he provided himself with a “substitute.” And as a matter of fact there were natives who hired themselves out to foreigners for this purpose. If the foreigner transgressed any law the substitute suffered the penalty for it. Even if the penalty were death, the substitute suffered death. Dr. Bainbridge secured a substitute, and was thereafter permitted to remain in peace and security as long as he chose.
II
The Ethical Purpose of the Suffering
“That we, having died unto sins, might live unto righteousness.”
What was the object of Christ’s death? Why did He come and live on earth, and die, and rise again? This may seem a very elementary question, but it is really an all-important one. Our answer to it will colour, if not determine, our theory of atonement. Why, then, did Christ die? You would probably answer, offhand, that Christ died to save men. And you would be right, provided you used that word “save” in the right sense. What does “save” mean? “Salvation,” “save,” are great words which have been used so much that, like worn coins, the original sharpness of their meaning has been almost rubbed away. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes would say they needed “depolarising.” To the ordinary “man in the pew,” salvation too often means simply “safety.” To be saved is to be “safe.” A saved man is a man who has got off the just punishment of his sins, who will escape hell and go to heaven when he dies; and this because he has accepted some mysterious saving work that Christ wrought for him, and instead of him, on the cross. But that is not the New Testament idea of salvation. “To save,” in the New Testament, means to make whole and sound. When a sick man is cured he is said to be “saved”; that is, made well and healthy. To be saved, in the spiritual sense, means to become morally sound, morally healthy, morally well. The idea it conveys is emphatically ethical. In New Testament language, a saved man is a good man, or a man who is on the way to becoming good.
1. Having died unto sins.—Every Christian is like Christ. He was born to die for our sins; and we are born again to die to sin. Our death to sin is like His death for sin; our new life is like His new life when He rose from the grave. Until we have died to sin, we have not begun really to live. We live truly only when we live together with Him.
“Dead to sins.” What a change it speaks of! Offer gold to a corpse. The man may have been a miser all his lifetime, but his eye glistens not now at the sight of the yellow heaps. Place before him the delicacies of the table; he needs them not. Sound in his ear the sweetest strains that the genius of the musician ever gave birth to; they do not touch a single responsive chord; they float by unnoticed, uncared for, unheard. 1 [Note: G. Calthrop, Pulpit Recollections, 141.]
A fellow-student, who was a Jew by birth, once gave me the story of his life. By reading the New Testament he was convinced that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah promised to his fathers. He was converted, forsook the synagogue, and was baptized. His parents were shocked, legally disowned and disinherited him, held him as a dead man, and went the length of having a form of burial, and a funeral service over what passed as his coffin. By his conversion he became dead to Judaism, and alive unto Christianity. He was dead to Judaism every way; in law, in love, in life. He was dead in law, for he had lost all his lawful rights as a Jew and the son of a Jew, and Judaism could no longer claim him as its own; he was dead also in love, for his affections had entirely changed, and their love for him was also clean gone; he was dead also in life, for Judaism was as a dead thing to him, and he to Judaism. What cared he for their phylacteries, and new moons, and carnal ordinances? He gloried only in the cross of Christ, by which Judaism was crucified unto him, and he unto Judaism. But he was alive unto Christianity, for he had devoted himself to the work of Christ. On the day of his conversion he died as a Jew, and began to live as a Christian. 1 [Note: James Wells, Bible Echoes, 147.]
2. St. Peter’s phrase is in the plural: “dead to sins”—it is not “sin”; and this is even better yet, and more gracious and more satisfying to the soul. The difference between “sins” in the plural and “sin” in the singular may be stated thus: “Sin” refers to our sinful nature, the sin in which and into which we were born, while “sins” refers to the consequences or fruits of that nature in the actual transgressions of our lives. How wonderful, therefore, that the atonement of Christ covers not only our sin but our sins, that in Him we are not only dead to sin in our nature but dead to sins in our everyday life.
What we mostly fail to understand is the measure and extent to which that sacrifice of Christ has to be made practically potent to enable us to cease from sin in its activities, its determinations, its intentions, and in the knowledge of it. We were intended by God to cease from sin. And why? Because, as the Apostle says, “Forasmuch then as Christ hath suffered for us in the flesh, arm yourselves likewise with the same mind”; that is, once for all put on the armour which you have given to you now by God—the mind and purpose and determination—and you shall be enabled, by arming yourself with this determination—which is not merely a will, but a reasonable ground of expectation—to cease from sin, as your Saviour, Christ, hath ceased from sin. That it is not an absolute deliverance I affirm; that it is not an absolute deliverance that I will affirm to the last breath I draw in this life, for I think I should dishonour my Lord if I were to say I had ever seen a man whom I could speak of as being altogether without sin. I remember (and I speak it tenderly but firmly) some who have claimed to be free from sin, and my only utterance in my heart has been, “God help me if I had no better Christianity than yours; if I could not find One to look at with greater admiration, I would hardly care to leave this world.” But because we yearn in vain after perfection, it does not follow that we need not, and ought not, day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment, to be getting nearer to Christ now, and be more and more reflecting His image. Because we cannot attain to the absolutely perfect is the very reason why we should seek to attain the relatively perfect, and have the ambition of being conformed to that Perfect One, that we may live according to His example, and tread in His steps. Is there nothing beyond the judicial in ch. 3. v. 18—“That he might bring us to God”? Thanks be to God, there is something more than the substitutionary, the representative, the vicarious; there is the drawing up until every faculty of the being is made to approach to God, until we draw nigh to God; and you cannot draw nigh to God except as being “pure in heart”; and the measure of the vision is exactly as we are pure in heart. 1 [Note: Prebendary Webb-Peploe in The Keswick Week, 1899, p. 86.]
After the sins of the past have been blotted out, is it necessary to the perpetuity of atoning grace that others shall perpetually take their place? A simple illustration may perhaps show the unreasonableness of this thought. Sins spring from sin, as the eruptions on the skin of a patient suffering from measles or scarlet fever spring from the disease. Now suppose the eruption on the surface were soothed and relieved by medical skill, would this be full healing, even should it be continually repeated and perfectly performed? Surely not. While caring for the effects of the disease, true medical science always aims, as we know, at counteracting the exciting cause of the illness; so our Lord’s atoning work, while making provision for the putting away of sins in forgiveness as fast as they appear and are presented to Him in true repentance by the sin-sick Christian, aims at the healing of the disease, and the raising up of a perfectly healthy organism. 2 [Note: Helen B. Harris, Heart Purity, 62.]
3. Might live unto righteousness.—The New Testament writers are full of salvation as a realized, personal experience. They are men who have met Christ, and to whom He has made all the difference. The moral and spiritual change they have experienced is so great that it baffles description. Out of his own experience St. Paul says: “If any man is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old things are passed away; behold they are become new.” They try to describe it by striking metaphors, as a passing from bondage to freedom, from darkness to light, from death to life. And they rightly attribute it to Christ—especially to His death, or rather not so much to His death as to Him dying—Christ crucified.
It is one thing to tell men that Christ died; it is quite another to preach, as St. Peter did, the Death of Christ. It is one thing to declare that by His Cross He taught His brethren and inspired to suffer and to die; it is quite another to proclaim with St. Paul that “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” It is one thing for the shepherd to be ready, if need so require, to bleed for the flock; it is quite another to say, “I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep.” That, and that alone, is the secret of a life not only like Christ, but in Christ. The Christian life—I cannot begin it unless I am buried with Him by baptism unto death; I cannot continue it unless each closing day it is brought beneath the covering of His finished work, to be within Himself made pure; I cannot end it save as the chief of sinners, pleading not my righteousness, but His, who will put into my story what He did. But when my faith looks up to my crucified Saviour, I begin to be a disciple and in my mouth He puts this new song: “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing.” And I follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth. 1 [Note: J. G. Simpson, Christian Ideals, 277.]
The Ethics of the Atonement
Literature
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Groser (W. H.), Outlines for my Class, 80,
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Hamilton (J.), Works, iv. 217.
Harris (H. B.), Heart Purity, 61.
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Christian World Pulpit, xlvi. 170 (Goodrich); xlvii. 245 (Brooks); lxxi. 261 (Martin).
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