Bible Commentaries
2 Corinthians 5

Verse 7

Walking by Faith

For we walk by faith, not by sight.— 2 Corinthians 5:7.

1. St. Paul describes the mood in which, possessed of the Christian hope, he confronts all the conditions of the present and the alternatives of the future. We are of good courage at all times, he says. We know that while we are at home in the body we are away from home as far as the Lord is concerned—at a distance from Him. This does not mean that fellowship is broken, or that the soul is separated from the love of Christ; it means only that earth is not heaven, and that St. Paul is painfully conscious of the fact. This is what is proved by 2 Corinthians 5:7: We are absent from the Lord, our true home, for in this world we are walking through the realm of faith, not through that of actual appearance. There is a world, a mode of existence, to which St. Paul looks forward, which is one of actual appearance; he will be in Christ’s presence there, and see Him face to face. But the world through which his course lies meanwhile is not that world of immediate presence and manifestation; on the contrary, it is a world of faith, which realizes that future world of manifestation only by a strong spiritual conviction; it is through a faithland that St. Paul’s journey leads him. All along the way his faith keeps him in good heart; nay, when he thinks of all that it ensures, of all that is guaranteed by the Spirit, he is willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be at home with the Lord.

For, ah! the Master is so fair

His smile so sweet on banished men,

That they who meet it unaware

Can never turn to earth again;

And they who see Him risen afar,

At God’s right hand to welcome them,

Forgetful stand of home and land,

Desiring fair Jerusalem.

St. Paul stood between two worlds; he felt the whole attraction of both; in the earnest of the Spirit he knew that he had an inheritance there as well as here. It is this consciousness of the dimensions of life that makes him so immensely interesting; he never wrote a dull word; his soul was stirred incessantly by impulses from earth and from heaven, swept by breezes from the dark and troubled sea of man’s life, touched by inspirations from the radiant heights where Christ dwelt. We do not need to be afraid of the reproach of “other-worldliness” if we seek to live in this same spirit; the reproach is as false as it is threadbare. It would be an incalculable gain if we could recover the primitive hope in something like its primitive strength. It would not make us false to our duties in the world, but it would give us the victory over the world. 1 [Note: J. Denney, The Second Epistle to the Corinthians, 183.]

2. Two kinds of walking are here contrasted. “We walk not by sight.” How then? “We walk by faith.” St. Paul speaks of life not as the three score years and ten, with all its natural divisions of childhood, youth, manhood, and old age, and all its circumstantial divisions of education and profession, prosperity and adversity, happiness and bereavement, concerning which as going home a good man says, “God shall be my guide through it unto death.” He speaks of life as a succession of days, each with its morning and its evening, each with its little detail of thought and speech and feeling and action; and he says that there are two ways of living such a life. We may believe what we see, or we may see what we believe. We may walk, that is live, by faith in the unseen, or we may walk by sight, by what we see and taste and handle. We may take the next step in trust or we may refuse to take it until we see what it is.

We never know what lies before us. Sorrow may be waiting, or sore temptation, or death. We see not a step before our feet. But no matter, if God is leading; for He knows all that lies before us. A young man had almost decided to become a Christian. But one doubt held him back; he did not see how he could continue faithful all through his life. He spent an evening with his minister, and they talked long on the subject. Still his fears and his indecision remained. As he left, the pastor observed how dark it was, and getting a lantern handed it to the young man, saying, “This little light will not show at once the whole way to your home, but only one step at a time; yet take that step, and you will reach home in safety.” As the young man walked homeward he pondered, “Why can I not trust my Heavenly Father, even if I can’t see my way clear to the end, if He gives me light for one step?” Only as we go on, step by step, does God disclose to us His will and plan for our life. Thus the joys of life do not dazzle us, for our hearts have been chastened to receive them. The sorrows do not overwhelm us, because each one brings its own special comfort with it. But, if we had known in advance of the coming joys and prosperities, the exultation might have made us heedless of duty and of danger. We might have let go God’s hand and grown self-confident, thus missing the benediction that comes only to simple, trusting faith. If we had known of the struggles and trials before us, we might have become disheartened, thus failing of courage to endure. In either case we could not have borne the revealing, and it was in tenderness that the Master withheld it. 1 [Note: J. R. Miller.]

I do not ask, O Lord, that Thou shouldst shed

Full radiance here:

Give but a ray of peace, that I may tread

Without a fear.

I do not ask my cross to understand,

My way to see;

Better in darkness just to feel Thy hand,

And follow Thee. 2 [Note: Adelaide A. Procter.]

I

Not by Sight

1. There is a sense in which no man walks by sight.—“We walk not by sight.” The exact expression, as given in the margin, is “by means of an appearance,” that is, a shape and form visible to the senses. It is evident, though not always pondered as it should be, that no man really walks by sight. To do this would cut him off from life, the whole world of the past, the whole world of the future, and more than half the world of the present. A man who consistently carried through the endeavour to walk by sight would discard history as fable; would neither sow his field nor educate his children; would count feeling fancy and affection folly; would reduce himself to, and therefore below, the level of the beasts that perish; and long before he reached the practical goal of his theory, he would find himself the inmate of a prison or an asylum, to be a standing witness to the world which looks on, that the gospel has reason on its side, as well as religion, when it says, “Walk not by sight, walk by faith.”

There are, however, approaches to the walking by sight to which all men are liable. A man walks by sight who makes Mammon his god; lives for getting and hoarding, or else for spending and squandering; estimates worth by wealth, and will count himself a happy man if he can but die rich. A man walks by sight who cannot control appetite or passion, cannot put aside the thing good for food or pleasant to the eyes even for the sake of avoiding to-morrow’s sickness or this night’s remorse, or a life’s disgrace; finds himself again and again yielding to a temptation which he has suffered from or prayed against; weakly lives and miserably dies the slave of a sin which his better nature condemns and despises, but to which this body of flesh and blood, made his tyrant by long yielding to it, ties and binds him.

It may not be equally evident, but it is true, that another class of faults is traceable to the same cause. A man walks by sight who, under the influence of the subtle impersonal presence which we call the world, allows himself to echo the language, to court the applause, to live for the admiration of other people; losing all the independence and all the manliness of his personal being as it is lived in God’s sight here and as he must give account of it to Him hereafter. Thus, not only covetousness or self-indulgence in the lowest sense of the word, but vanity and worldliness and vulgar ambition, all have their root in the walking by sight which St. Paul here disclaims and repudiates for the Christian.

Is it not mad folly always to be craving for things which can never quiet our longings, much less satisfy them? No matter how many such things one has, he is always lusting after what he has not; never at peace, he sighs for new possessions. Discontented, he spends himself in fruitless toil, and finds only weariness in the evanescent and unreal pleasures of the world. In his greediness, he counts all that he has clutched as nothing in comparison with what is beyond his grasp, and loses all pleasure in his actual possessions by longing after what he has not, yet covets. No man can ever hope to own all things. Even the little one does possess is got only with toil, and is held in fear; since each is certain to lose what he hath when God’s day, appointed though unrevealed, shall come. But the perverted will struggles towards the ultimate good by devious ways, yearning after satisfaction, yet led astray by vanity and deceived by wickedness. Ah, if you wish to attain to the consummation of all desire, so that nothing unfulfilled will be left, why weary yourself with fruitless efforts, running hither and thither, only to die long before the goal is reached?

It is so that these impious ones wander in a circle, longing after something to gratify their yearnings, yet madly rejecting that which alone can bring them to their desired end, not by exhaustion but by attainment. And if their utmost longing were realized so that they should have all the world for their own, yet without possessing Him who is the Author of all being, then the same law of their desire would make them contemn what they had, and restlessly seek Him whom they still lacked, that is God Himself. Rest is in Him alone. Man knows no peace in the world; but he has no disturbance when he is with God. And so the soul says with confidence, “Whom have I in heaven but thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside thee. God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever.” 1 [Note: St. Bernard of Clairvaux, On Loving God.]

2. There is a special sense in which the Christian walks not by sight.—St. Paul had a particular thought in his mind when he wrote these words. The statement for which the text gives the reason is this: “Whilst we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord; for we walk by faith, not by sight.” And this accounts for the peculiarity of the expression—not by the help of visible shape or form. The word for “sight” is rare. It is used in Scripture by St. Luke in the narrative of our Lord’s baptism: “The Holy Spirit descended in bodily shape like a dove upon him”; and once again by St. John in his fifth chapter: “Ye have neither heard the Father’s voice at any time, nor seen his shape.” It is remarkable, therefore, that to each one of the Persons of the Holy Trinity—the Father, the Son, and the Spirit—this same word is once applied in Holy Scripture; for what St. Paul says here he says of our Lord Jesus Christ: “We walk not by the help of seeing His shape or form visibly, but by the help of the spiritual sight of Him, which is the grace of faith.” He contrasts the present condition of the Christian who has to live the daily life by seeing the invisible with two other experiences—one past, one future—each of which may be called walking by sight.

The disciples walked by sight during the earthly ministry of the Saviour. They lived the daily life during those three wonderful years by the help of visible shape and form. “While I was with them in the world,” He says Himself in the great prayer, “I kept them in thy name.” The personal influence, the ascendancy of perfect goodness, the motive of reverential love, something more powerful still, mysteriously hinted in His own saying: “The Spirit dwelleth with you, and shall be in you,” secured their walk during those years at least from levity, passion, or sin, though it very imperfectly enlightened their understanding, and left them liable to the first gust of temptation the moment it was withdrawn. Still, to walk by sight, when that sight was the sight of Jesus Christ, was a wonderful privilege while it could be theirs. St. Paul himself had never known this kind of life. He was not one of the Twelve. His sight of Christ had been but for a moment, though it left an indelible impression upon his life. When he said, “We walk not by sight,” he probably had in his mind a walk not past, done with, but a walk future, and not yet possible. The passage in which the text is embedded is a passage of expectation. He is reconciling himself and his readers to a present condition of pilgrimage and homelessness by the prospect of a beautiful and magnificent change. He seems to say in the text, “We walk not yet, but we shall walk, by sight.”

To credit ordinary and visible objects is not faith, but persuasion. Some believe the better for seeing Christ’s sepulchre; and when they have seen the Red Sea doubt not of the miracle. Now contrarily, I bless myself, and am thankful, that I lived not in the days of miracles: that I never saw Christ and His disciples. I would not have been one of those Israelites that passed the Red Sea; nor one of Christ’s patients on whom He wrought His wonders: then had my faith been thrust upon me; nor should I enjoy that greater blessing being pronounced to all that believe and saw not. ’Tis an easy and necessary belief, to credit what our eye and sense hath examined. I believe He was dead, and buried, and rose again; and desire to see Him in His glory, rather than to contemplate Him in His cenotaph or sepulchre. Nor is this much to believe: as we have reason, we owe this faith unto history: they only had the advantage of a bold and noble faith who lived before His Coming, who, upon obscure prophecies and mystical types, could raise a belief, and expect apparent impossibilities. 1 [Note: Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, see. 9.]

II

By Faith

1. There, is a sense in which every man walks by faith.—As there is a sense in which no man, absolutely no man, walks or can walk by sight, so there is a sense in which every man walks and must walk by faith. In making faith everything in the Christian life, our Lord merely elevated and illuminated a natural principle into that which is above nature. Every man who is not a fool or a madman, in some sense, walks and must walk by faith. The monstrous and shameful avowal, “I believe in nothing that I do not see,” though it has been made before now on an infidel platform, is the mere babbling of idiocy. The rough seaman who once answered the saying on the instant by the question, “Don’t you believe in the wind?” caught the point of the fallacy and saved philosophy and theology the trouble of a reply. Every investment of the money hoarded, every engagement of the worldling, every project of the sensualist, is made on the faith of a to-morrow. Each one of these, in a miserable way, walks by faith. But, as before, in speaking of sight, so now again of faith, we may notice approaches and approximations, however far they may be from an attainment. A man walks by faith in proportion as he lives above sense. A man who in any degree controls appetite, keeps under his body, lives soberly and chastely, whatever the motive, so far walks by faith. A man who refuses to judge the world’s judgment, forms his own opinion and holds to it, expresses an independent mind upon things right and wrong in private or public, more or less certainly walks by faith in doing so. A man who studies deeply, who dwells much in philosophy and history, keeps company with the great minds and souls of the past, has a real sympathy with beautiful thoughts of the dead as well as of the living, walks by faith in a more definite, because a positive and not a negative, way; not leaving vacant, if that were possible, the space redeemed from the sensual and the sensible, but filling and peopling it with forms and substances having an inherent worth and virtue. Such a man is a living witness to a world out of sight, a world as real and a thousand times as permanent as the visible. So far he is on the side of Christ and the gospel, for he avows the reality of a world unseen.

Bring it down to our own common life. What supreme issues we decide in faith! The battle is risked on the testimony of a single spy. We entrust ourselves on the great pathless ocean, because we have faith in the man at the wheel and in the man who is on the outlook at the masthead. Think of life without the element of faith and trust—fathers without faith in wives and mothers; brothers and sisters without mutual faith. It would mean that there could be no such thing as love, for love always presupposes implicit faith. We actually measure the character of men by the quality of their faith. We see a man who believes in goodness, and we say: He is a good man. He suspects and doubts the goodness of his fellows; we suspect and doubt him. Is it not clear that faith is not an experience relating to religion alone? It is no strange peculiar thing superimposed on man by priests and preachers, but the very principle by which we live from day to day.

I love to see my children trustful

Of the best things from my hand;

Never doubting me, nor curious

All to know and understand.

For trust is nobler far than knowledge,

Faith than sight, a hundredfold:

One the coward shows, the other

Both for good and ill makes bold.

And so ’tis sure the Heavenly Father,

Who His children’s welfare plans

With a changeless love, and wisdom

More consummate far than man’s,

Rejoices most in those who trust Him,

Leaning simply on His love,

These His best things here discover,

And will win the best above. 1 [Note: T. Crawford, Horae Serenae, 61.]

2. There is a special sense in which the Christian walks by faith.—St. Paul was not thinking of a world of poetry or history or philosophy, when he wrote the words, “We walk by faith.” St. Paul’s world out of sight was not a world of magnitude or multitude, of beauty as such, or of wonder as such, or of power or wisdom or charity in the abstract. For him the invisible was a Person, the combination and concentration of the great and good, the true and the beautiful in whom are all things, and we in Him.

The Christian’s activities and serviceableness are from one side perfectly natural, as he lives in true contact with the waking realities of human life. But from another side they are supernatural all the while, for the regenerate man is supernaturally conditioned and related. He is joined to Him who is invisible, and the union has to do with his whole being. He lives his life in the flesh by faith in the Son of God, who loved him and gave Himself for him. He perseveres as seeing Him whom yet he has not seen, but whom he shall yet see as He is. He thinks so highly of the present because of the eternal, to which it is as the seed-grain is to the summer harvest.

So the Christian walks by faith. Take out of his walk his faith, which is the very antithesis to credulity, and the difference for him will be practical indeed. Into the now formless void will disappear not only the fair idea of the things unseen, but the very substance, the very essence, of the noblest motive to the willing service of man on earth, and to a reverent jealousy over the duties of to-day. We walk by faith. And such a life is the one life fully worth living. Such a walk is the one walk that moves in true liberty along true certainty, making for a real goal.

Faith is a certitude without proofs. Being a certitude, it is an energetic principle of action. Being without proof, it is the contrary of science. Hence its two aspects and its two effects. Is its point of departure intelligence? No, thought may shake or strengthen faith; it cannot produce it. Is its origin in the will? No, good-will may favour it, ill-will may hinder it, but no one believes by will, and faith is not a duty. Faith is a sentiment, for it is a hope; it is an instinct, for it precedes all outward instruction. The need of faith never leaves us. It is the postulate of a higher truth which is to bring all things into harmony. It is the stimulus of research; it holds out to us the reward, it points us to the goal. 1 [Note: Amiel’s Journal (trans. by Mrs. Humphry Ward), 192.]

That which in lifeless things ennobles them by seeming to indicate life, ennobles higher creatures by indicating the exaltation of their earthly vitality into a Divine vitality; and raising the life of sense into the life of faith: faith, whether we receive it in the sense of adherence to resolution, obedience to law, regard fulness of promise, in which from all time it has been the test, as the shield, of the true being and life of man; or in the still higher sense of trustfulness in the presence, kindness, and word of God, in which form it has been exhibited under the Christian dispensation. For whether, in one or other form,—whether the faithfulness of men whose path is chosen and portion fixed, in the following and receiving of that path and portion, as in the Thermopylæ camp; or the happier faithfulness of children in the good giving of their Father, and of subjects in the conduct of their King, as in the “Stand still and see the salvation of God” of the Red Sea shore, there is rest and peacefulness, the “standing still,” in both, the quietness of action determined, of spirit unalarmed, of expectation unimpatient: beautiful even when based only, as of old, on the self-command and self-possession, the persistent dignity or the uncalculating love, of the creature; but more beautiful yet when the rest is one of humility instead of pride, and the trust no more in the resolution we have taken, but in the hand we hold. 1 [Note: Ruskin, Modern Painters, ii. (Works, iv. 116).]

III

The Superiority of Faith Over Sight

1. Walking by faith we are better able to appreciate Christ’s power.—We have a juster conception of Christ’s power, its spiritual nature, its universality, its unfailing energy, than His contemporaries could have had. To us He is no mere wonder-working magician, but the wielder of that spiritual force which still raises the dead soul to life, gives strength to the palsied will, and casts out the unclean spirit; the power which is made perfect in weakness, and which is able to use the foolish things of this world to confound the wise. Not even the disciples could, during our Lord’s lifetime on earth, have understood Christ’s power as we understand it.

A poor boy lay dying. The night I saw him was cold and gloomy without, the house within was small and poor. On that bed he had lain for months without a murmur, suffering severe bodily pain. Around him were signs of blood as if he lay wounded on a battle-field. From that pale face, lighted up only by blue eyes serene and quiet, I heard these words the night his spirit met his Saviour, and they were worthy of the greatest warrior, “I am strong in Him.” Yes, child, stronger than all the fleets and armies of Europe. 1 [Note: Norman Macleod, Love the Fulfilling of the Law, 24.]

2. We are better able to appreciate Christ’s love.—His contemporaries saw that the Lord was loving; but they naturally read into His life the limitations of which they were conscious in their own, and did not realize the universality of His love. They expected it to be limited by racial antipathies. “How is it that thou, being a Jew, askest drink of me, which am a woman of Samaria,” said the stranger to Him at the well of Sychar. They expected that He would shrink back from contact with sinners. “This man, if he were a prophet, would have known who and what manner of woman this is that toucheth him.” His contemporaries could not so denude themselves of their ordinary conceptions of humanity as to realize that the love of Jesus transcended all human limits, embraced every member of our race, and yearned with special earnestness over the prodigal and the lost. But we, who have never known Christ after the flesh, have some glimpse of the breadth and length and depth and height of that love of Christ which passeth knowledge.

Again, as regards that supreme instance of His love, the offering of Himself for the sins of the world—what was it to those who saw it, to John and Mary, and to those who “stood afar off beholding”? What were the struggling thoughts to which that spectacle gave rise? That He was innocent, that He, the most loving of men, was suffering the cruellest of deaths, that history was repeating itself, and the Jews were slaying their greatest and best, that they themselves were losing their friend, their spiritual helper, so that henceforth life would be dark and sad to them. But how little did they realize that that crucifixion was the great crisis in the world’s history, yes, and the great crisis, too, in the history of every individual soul. How little did they realize then the meaning of His own words, “I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me.” How little did they know that that was a voluntary offering of the God-man, who gave Himself for the life of the world. Afterwards, it is true, they learnt all this; but, remember, they were taught it not by sight, but by faith, and faith alone can draw the inspiring doctrine from love, that whosoever abideth in love abideth in God and God in him.

You cannot see Christ, but you believe that He is true, loving, faithful, touched with sympathy when you suffer; that He knows all about you, and loves you with a love personal, deep, tender, strong, everlasting. You know, too, that He has all power, and that all His power is yours to support, keep, bless, deliver, protect, save you. You know that He has all wisdom—wisdom that never errs, that never counsels rashly, indiscreetly, short-sightedly—and that all this wisdom is for the guidance of your life, the ordering of your steps. As we think along these lines the unseen Christ becomes very real to us. 1 [Note: J. R. Miller.]

3. We are better able to realize the abiding presence of Christ.—This was the lesson the Lord was teaching His followers during the forty days. To those who had known Him by sight, He had appeared as bound by the limits of space and time. But the forty days gave the disciples wider views. What would be the effect of His appearing suddenly, when least expected, now in Galilee, now in Jerusalem; revealing Himself to them now as they sit in the room with closed doors, now as they take their evening walk, now as they cast their nets in the Galilean lake? Must not the belief have sprung up in them that their Master might at any moment grow into sight out of the empty space—that, in fact, seen or not seen, He was always beside them, viewing their every action and hearing their every word? His Ascension has made that belief the property of all His followers. The Christian is never troubled now with the thought that Christ cannot be in two places at once. Simultaneously, it may be, to those who lie dying in some far-off battle-field, to those who cling to wrecks in lonely seas, to the mother who sits bereaved beside her dead child, the presence of the Lord is vouchsafed. They realize that He is there, and are calmed and comforted. It is only through His Ascension that the promise has been made good, “Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.”

That heroic and saintly missionary, James Gilmour of Mongolia, was one of those whose sense of the abiding presence of Christ was always vivid and supporting. “No one,” he writes, “who does not go away, leaving all and going alone can feel the force of the promise ‘Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world,’ and when I begin to feel my heart threatening to go down, I betake myself to this companionship, and, thank God, I have felt the blessedness of this promise rushing over me repeatedly when I knelt down and spoke to Jesus as a present companion from whom I am sure to find sympathy.”

IV

One Day we shall Walk by Sight

Here and now, while we are at home in the body and absent from the Lord, “we walk by faith, not by sight.” Therefore, by the implication of the whole surrounding thought, when we leave home in the body and get home to the Lord, we walk by sight, and not by faith. “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed”; yes, for they, as they step out of this life, shall see indeed. True, there will be there, and for ever, occasion enough for an immortal exercise of faith. That world, let us be abundantly assured, will have its mysteries as well as this; its calls to the blessed to confide, to rely, as they worship before the throne. But the conditions will be gloriously altered. It will be a faith exercised under sight. It will be the confidence we feel in some immeasurably wiser friend while he carries out his plans in our presence, and our eyes are all the while upon his face, as against the sometimes trying efforts of a confidence in him exercised at a distance from him, and in spite of false rumours of his death, and amidst a thousand accusations and misrepresentations of his purposes and his actions.

Death, for the believer, for the follower of Jesus Christ, will be to go to Him, to see Him. We shall walk, amidst the trees of that deathless and sinless Paradise, by sight, not by faith. The disciplinary strain, having done its work, will cease. The rest, the sabbatism, having come to its season, will begin, and grow, and bear its fruit of bliss, and knowledge, and endless readiness for the exercise of the powers of the resurrection, in the vernal sunshine of that Sight, that eidos, that most blessed and most beautifying “Object Visible.” 1 [Note: Bishop H. C. G. Moule, Christ is All, 93.]

The hope of hopes, the promise of promises, the joy of joys, the crown of crowns, is being with Christ, where He is, that we may see His glory. If Christians in their daily lives, and useful activities, and frequent sorrows would but take this more to heart, how different their whole lives would be, in their level of attainment and in their interpretation of circumstances! Life is beautiful and desirable, chiefly on account of what it leads to and educates us for. But what will it be, when we see God face to face, in the sinless, tearless land? Only let Christ be King in our hearts, and our true satisfaction and consolation about everything; the Friend on whom we lean without knowing it; the Master from whom we take our orders, and who has given each of us our task to do. When that is done, He will send for us. Then surely we should have an unspeakable rest flowing into us: we should cease to fear circumstances, we should only fear to miss using and interpreting them properly. We should be always hoping, with a hope that never makes ashamed; and our joy no man would take away. 2 [Note: Bishop Thorold, Questions of Faith and Duty.]

Walking by Faith

Literature

Bersier (E.), in Foreign Protestant Pulpit, i. 1.

Cuckson (J.), Faith and Fellowship, 3.

Darlow (T. H.), Via Sacra, 3.

Dewhurst (E. M.), The King and His Servants, 94.

Evans (R. W.), Parochial Sermons, 191.

Moule (H. C. G.), Christ is All, 81.

Nicoll (W. R.), The Garden of Nuts, 161.

Norton (J. N.), Golden Truths, 377.

Paget (F. E.), Sermons for Special Occasions, 1.

Robertson (S.), The Rope of Hair, 175.

Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xii. (1866), No. 109.

Sturrock (J. B.), Our Present Hope and Our Future Home, 9, 15.

Wagner (C.), Courage, 33.

Westcott (B. F.), The Incarnation and Common Life, 362.

Woodrow (S. G.), Christian Verities, 1.

Christian World Pulpit, xxxv. 244 (J. LI. Davies); lii. 43 (C. Voysey); lvi. 136 (A. H. Bradford); lix. 235 (C. S. Macfarland).

Churchman’s Pulpit: Ascension Day, viii. 506 (A. M. Mackay).

Preachers’ Monthly, vii. 65 (C. J. Vaughan).

Verses 14-15

The Constraint of Love

For the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that one died for all, therefore all died; and he died for all, that they which live should no longer live unto themselves, but unto him who for their sakes died and rose again.— 2 Corinthians 5:14-15.

This is the great Apostle’s triumphant answer to his accusers. The First Epistle to the Corinthians had only fomented the Judaistic elements in the already faction-torn church at Corinth, until, at the date of this Epistle, they were clamorously challenging the authority of St. Paul and the truth of the doctrines he was preaching. More persons than St. Paul have found that it is not easy to maintain one’s equanimity under unjust criticism, especially when the aspersions relate to the fondest attachment and the supreme ambition of life. Such an ordeal reveals the man, and in its fierce light graces or defects stand forth in sharpest outline. If St. Paul never appeared more human, neither was he ever more manifestly great, than when pouring out his mighty heart in these rushing sentences, often made obscure by their very intensity. Is St. Paul ambitious? Does he desire by talking about bonds and imprisonments, or dream and revelations, to exalt himself above his brethren? Does he wish by his unsparing anti-Judaism, by ideal demands on the Christian life, to make himself the judge of conscience and the infallible interpretation of the Divine mind? Or has he gone quite beyond himself and is he mad? All this—and much more—his enemies openly charge. To one and all his answer is: “The love of Christ constraineth us.”

If we connect this assertion with the words which immediately precede it—“Whether we be beside ourselves, it is to God; or whether we be sober, it is for your cause”—we shall see that not only his great heroic deeds, but his common acts and judgments, were moulded by the same power. He had defended himself so vehemently against the great public charges which had been brought against his character that to the refined and self-contained Corinthians he appeared “beside himself”; but he affirms that burning torrent of defence was not for self-interest, but for God; because the love of Christ constrained him. There had been charges too subtle and shadowy for public defences to remove, and these this man of vehemence had calmly lived down; but he declares that this meek endurance sprang not from his self-control, but from the love of Christ which constrained him. If, then, not only his grander deeds but his daily acts and judgments were thus inspired, these words express a power which was acting intensely on Paul’s whole nature, and which made his silence and vehemence, his love and suffering, one living language, by which the constraining love of Christ strove to utter its burning energy.

I

The Test of Life is found in its Motive

1. The life of an intelligent being must be under the sway of some chosen and cherished motive. High degrees of intelligence find their expression in the careful selection of the motive. Where the intelligence is low and untrained, we find men blindly obeying motives which the accident of the hour may have raised up, or to which the bodily passions may excite. We can look into the face of no fellow-man and say, “That man is living without a motive.” The consideration of the motives that actually rule men’s lives gives us very sad thoughts of our humanity. They range between the animal and the Divine, but they belong for the most part to the lower levels. The entire aspect and character of a man’s life may be changed by a change of his motives. A new and nobler motive will soon make a man a better man. No man ever did rise to do noble things while his motive concerned only self and self-interests. All noble lives have been spent in service to others. All the best lives in private spheres have been self-denying lives. All the heroic lives in public spheres have been the lives of patriots, the lives of the generous, the pitying, and the helpful.

Humanity does not need morals, it needs motives; it is sick of speculation, it longs for action. Men see their duty in every land and age with exasperating clearness. We know not how to do it. The religion which inspires men with a genuine passion for holiness and a constraining motive of service will last. It has solved the problem of spiritual motion. 1 [Note: John Watson, The Mind of the Master, 180.]

(1) Many people have no higher motive than the hope of reward and the fear of punishment.—Hope and fear are among the most powerful feelings of our nature; and, acting in opposite directions as they generally do, they lead to a behaviour in which the influence of both is to be seen, like those compound motions, the result of equal and opposing mechanical forces. How much do we do from the hope of reward! How much do we not do from the dread of punishment! How steadily are we thus preserved in the straight path of duty from the pressure on the one side and the other of these two powers!

The statute-book does not simply say, like the Decalogue, “Thou shalt not steal”; it says, “If you do steal, the detective will deliver you to the judge, and the judge to the jailer, and he will cast you into prison, and you shall not get out thence till you have paid the forfeit of your crime.” We know that if we rob our neighbour’s house, or assault our neighbour’s person, or slander our neighbour’s good name, or in any other way disturb the peace of society and violate the letter of the law, we must pay the penalty. The fear thus inspired operates like a charm. It pervades the whole mass of society: though unseen it is felt; and even when scarcely consciously felt, its influence is active, like some of those subtle agencies in the atmosphere that surrounds us, which tell upon our happiness, our health, and our life, though we are altogether unaware of their existence. It makes the thief honest, the slanderer silent, the turbulent peaceful. We are virtuous by compulsion. We do good because we dare not do evil.

But even in this motive there lies an element of truth. There is at least the recognition of righteousness in the earth. And when we have done evil we recognize the justice of the punishment which overtakes us.

Mourner that dost deserve thy mournfulness,

Call thyself punished, call the earth thy hell;

Say, “God is angry, and I earned it well—

I would not have Him smile on wickedness”:

Say this, and straightway all thy grief grows less:—

“God rules at least, I find as prophets tell,

And proves it in this prison!”—then thy cell

Smiles with an unsuspected loveliness.

“A prison—and yet from door and window-bar

I catch a thousand breaths of His sweet air!

Even to me His days and nights are fair!

He shows me many a flower and many a star!

And though I mourn and He is very far,

He does not kill the hope that reaches there!” 1 [Note: George MacDonald, Poetical Works, ii. 248.]

(2) A higher motive is found in the sense of duty.—There is something in us which recognizes moral obligation, and impels us to take a line of conduct which, perhaps, we have no natural inclination to follow. Now, we can all of us see that, when we come to speak of duty, we have risen into a higher region of thought. And yet the purest motive of life is not conscience. That is what the Puritans built on. There was very little love in the Puritan theology, very little exposition of the love of God, very little manifestation of love in the household (there was love, but it was concealed, not manifested), very little preaching of love in the pulpit. The great power that bound Puritanism together was the power of conscience. That was the power of Judaism. There was love in Judaism, but not much. The real power of Judaism was an awakened conscience. The school of Ethical Culture is a survival of Puritanism, as Puritanism was a survival of Judaism. In them conscience is the key-note. Judaism, Puritanism, and Ethical Culture are incarnate conscience. Christianity is incarnate love. A man may conform to law because it is righteous law; but he cannot love the law. We cannot love an abstraction. We cannot love a thing. There must be some heart, some power to love in return, in that which we love. We can love only a person. Christianity comes, and it shows in the heart of history this Divine Person, and says to us, “Love for Him—that is to be the constraining power, the motive power, the secret of your life.”

There is no disguising it that law, fate, destiny, or commandment may produce an exceedingly noble form of religion; that it may make a nation strong in law, and powerful in all things; but it tends always to produce a character that is hard and cold; noble, but ungenial, ungracious. Yet the result of a clear understanding of law, and a very clear obedience to it, is never in any way to be accounted cheap. For it is better to be ungracious and obedient than to be gracious without obedience. It is better to be moral and undevout than to be devout and immoral. It is better to have your strength, even though clothed in raggedness as to beauty, than to have a sensuous beauty upon inward deformity and untruth. 1 [Note: George Dawson.]

In actual practice the theory that lays the emphasis upon duty, as opposed to inclination, contains an important element of truth, which naturalistic theories of the end of action have always tended to overlook. For it is undoubtedly true that at a certain stage in moral development, both in the individual and in the race the negative or ascetic element is the prominent one. All moral progress consists in subordination of lower to higher impulses, and at a certain stage it may be more important to conquer the lower than to give effect to the higher. How far it is possible to effect this conquest without appeal to higher and more positive principles of action—how far, for instance, sensual impulses can be made to yield before the abstract announcements of reason that they are “wrong,” without assignment of further reason or without appeal to the higher interests and affections—is a question for the educator. What is certain is that morality begins in self-restraint and self-denial, and that it is impossible to conceive of circumstances in which this negative element will be totally absent from it. Whatever we are to say of the desire to enjoy pleasure, it is certain that readiness to suffer pain is an element in all virtue, and that there is more danger for the individual in indulging the former than in over-cultivating the latter. 2 [Note: J. H. Muirhead, The Elements of Ethics, 128.]

II

The Sovereign Motive is Born at the Cross

1. The Apostle does not mean, as at a first glance we might suppose, his own affection for Christ, his own devotion to Christ. This affection, this devotion, was indeed a constraining power. But it was only second in the chain of causes and consequences. It was not the source and origin of his energy. The source must be sought farther back than this. The source must be sought outside himself. The source must be found in God, not in man. Not his love for Christ, but Christ’s love for him, for others, for all mankind, for a world steeped in ignorance and sin and misery—this was the prime cause of all his moral activity, the paramount motive which started and directed all the energies of this most magnificent of all magnificent lives. His own love for Christ was only the response, only the sequel—as he himself would have confessed, the necessary, the inevitable sequel—to Christ’s love for him once impressed upon his being. Christ first loved him, and he (how could he help himself?) was fain to love Christ. It was not he, St. Paul, that lived any longer; it was Christ that lived in him. It was not he, St. Paul, that planned, that felt, that toiled, that suffered for Christ, that traversed the world with his life in his hand for Christ, that was instant in season and out of season for Christ, that died daily for Christ; but it was Christ’s own love fermenting like leaven in his inmost being, stirring and animating his sluggishness. This unspeakable love rises up before him, as the one great fact which will not be thrust aside, the one clear voice which will not be silenced. It haunts him sleeping and waking. It occupies the whole background of his thoughts. Forget it? How can he forget it? Others may forget, but he can never forget.

Many Christian men endeavour to rouse themselves into energy by the strength of their own devotion. Their glance is perpetually on themselves, and they try to work from their own feelings of consecration to the Lord; hence their energy is fitful, and depends upon excitements. At one time they are filled with ardour, and at another cold in gloom. When their love is deep, then are they strong; when it is feeble, they endeavour to awaken it by spasmodic effort and self-condemnation; and as their vows of devotion fade and fail, they sink either into a morbid gloom that withers their energy, or into a calm self-contentment that lulls them in a spiritual dream. A feeling we possess is ever feeble and liable to change; a feeling possessing us is strong and enduring. This love surrounding and resting on a man, takes him out of himself, and becomes a permanent influence, not diminishing in temptation, or lessening by change of circumstances. It is, then, a love in Christ inspiring man—rendering him its instrument, making his life its language, changing not with his changes, but acting with eternal charm on his spirit—this is the power to which our text refers.

2. The supreme proof of Christ’s love was His death on the cross. “He died for all.” The death of Christ for all—which is equivalent to the death of Christ for each—is the great solvent by which the love of God melts men’s hearts and is the great proof that Jesus Christ loves each one of us. If we strike out that conception we have struck out from Christianity the vindication of the belief that Christ loves the world. The basis of Christ’s authority, and the vital centre of all His power over men’s hearts by which He transforms lives, and lifts those which are embedded in selfishness up to wondrous heights of self-denial, is to be found in the fact that He died on the cross for each of us. As a matter of fact, those types of Christian teaching which have failed to hold the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ as the centre of His work, and have brought Him down to the level of a man, have failed to kindle any warmth of affection for Him. A Christ who did not love me when He was upon earth, and who does not love me now that He is gone up on high, is not a Christ whom I can be called upon to love. And a Christ that did not die for me on the cross is not a Christ who has either the right or the power to rule my life.

We must accept that full-toned teaching if we are to solve the riddle of the power which the Man of Nazareth has over the world. Unless He was the Son of God, and therefore loving us each, as only a Divine heart can love; unless He was the Sacrifice for sin, and therefore rendering up Himself unto the death for each of us, there is nothing in Him that will absolutely sway hearts and perfectly ennoble lives. The cross, interpreted as St. Paul interpreted it, is the secret of all His power, and if once Christian teachers and Christian churches fail to grasp it as St. Paul did their strength is departed.

“Few men in these days,” he once said to me, “have done so much for the religious life of Scotland as James Morison. The pendulum of human thought is ever swinging to the extreme points: he found it at the extreme point of God’s sovereignty, and brought it to the other extreme—man’s responsibility; but the truth lies where these two meet”; and, crossing his arms, he made the sacred sign, as, in a voice of singular depth and persuasiveness, he said—“All truth centres in the Cross of Christ.” 1 [Note: A. Guthrie, Robertson of Irvinc, 63.]

3. The love of Christ manifested on the cross stirs love in us. The Redeemer’s love is a fire of live coals, which ever burns on the altar of His own compassionate heart. But the human heart is as an unkindled piece of coal, hard, cold and dark. It never can of itself either kindle itself or catch the fire of Divine love to do so. It can never, therefore, change its coldness and darkness into warmth and brightness; nevertheless, if a live coal from the altar of celestial love touch and catch hold of it, it is speedily transformed, its blackness into brightness, its coldness into radiating heat, and its hardness into yielding softness. It is similar, when the love of Christ catches and kindles with its heavenly flame the human heart. It transforms the soul into which it enters, so that its spiritual darkness is replaced by spiritual brightness, its hardness becomes softness and sensibility, its coldness a fountain of warmth, glowing and scintillating with true Christian feeling. In fact the heart and life is transformed by the entrance of the love of Christ, and becomes instinct with His love. A new energy or force has been created in it which is similar to, but feebler than, the love which kindled it.

It was about three weeks before his end, whilst confined to his room for a few days by an attack of feverish illness, to which, especially when in anxiety, he had always from time to time been liable, that he called Mrs. Arnold to his bed-side, and expressed to her how, within the last few days, he seemed to have “felt quite a rush of love in his heart towards God and Christ”; and how he hoped that all this might make him more gentle and tender, and that he might not soon lose the impression thus made upon him; adding that, as a help to keeping it alive, he intended to write something in the evenings before he retired to rest. 2 [Note: A. P. Stanley, The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, ii. 321.]

Lord, hast Thou so loved us, and will not we

Love Thee with heart and mind and strength and soul,

Desiring Thee beyond our glorious goal,

Beyond the heaven of heavens desiring Thee?

Each saint, all saints cry out: Yea me, yea me,

Thou hast desired beyond an aureole,

Beyond Thy many Crowns, beyond the whole

Ninety and nine unwandering family.

Souls in green pastures of the watered land,

Faint pilgrim souls wayfaring thro’ the sand,

Abide with Thee and in Thee are at rest:

Yet evermore, kind Lord, renew Thy quest

After new wanderers; such as once Thy Hand

Gathered, Thy Shoulders bore, Thy Heart caressed. 1 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti, Verses, 34.]

4. The impulse that comes from the cross is sustained by the convictions of an enlightened judgment. “The love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that one died for all.” The love of Christ is a principle which operates, and can operate, only for reasons shown. It calls into exercise our judging faculty. So far from dealing exclusively with the feelings, it requires us to think. In this manner is its motive power maintained, just as in the case of the engine by whose nice and measured play the huge vessel is propelled against wind and tide. To one who has never witnessed the results of steam-power, such a sight is quite a marvel. “How can it be?” he asks. “How such power?” You tell him of the expansive power of steam. “But what is steam?” he asks; “and where is it generated?” You take him on board, and descend with him into the vessel. You show him the huge boilers, and the great furnaces beneath, and the heaps of fuel with which the fires are fed. Only then his wonder ceases. And what constitutes the fuel of the fire which underlies, so to speak, the visible play of the Christian propelling power? The Holy Spirit, it must always be allowed, is the source of all spiritual processes. He is the Inspirer of Christian love. He fans the hidden flame, and keeps up the glow. At the same time, He employs means; and the means which the Spirit usually employs for maintaining the influence of the love of Christ up to the constraining point is this— judging concerning the grand comprehensive fact that “Christ died for us.” The facts of Calvary constitute, as it were, the fuel which feeds the sacred fire, whereby is maintained the power of spiritual propulsion; and by the earnest, prayerful, and persistent exercise of all our faculties—our thinking, reasoning, judging, determining faculty—upon these Calvary-facts, we bring, as it were, fresh supplies of fuel in order that with them we may feed the fire of Christian exercise and action.

My apprehension of the love of Christ must come in between its manifestation and its power to grip, to restrain, to impel me. If I may use such a figure, He stands, as it were, bugle in hand, and blows the sweet strains that are meant to set the echoes flying. But the rock must receive the impact of the vibrations ere it can throw back the thinned echo of the music. Love, in like manner, must be believed and known ere it can be responded to. 1 [Note: A. Maclaren.]

In the convent of San Marco in Florence, in cell after cell there are depicted upon the walls the scenes of the crucifixion of Jesus by the brush of that poet-painter-preacher, Fra Angelico. The painter has seemed to feel that the figure of Jesus crucified was more than he could compass; he has left it most conventionally treated. All the depth of his power he has put into the figure of St. Dominic, who stands at the cross representing the Christian soul in all the various phases of feeling which pass over it, as it contemplates the spectacle of Jesus crucified. First, there is the mere bewilderment, as of one who contemplates a sight shocking and horrible, and he hides his face in horror, as from something disgraceful. You pass into another cell, and the scene is changed. Now he is looking up in questioning bewilderment; he has not yet taken in the meaning of the scene, but he is sure that there are hidden there depths of misery and truth. You pass to another cell, and now he has understood what it is. He has seen in Jesus One who is suffering for human sin; he is determined that he will not share those sins, he feels there a penitence which is represented by the scourge at the foot of the cross. You pass into another, and now he has found the joy and repose of that forgiveness which passeth out of the loving heart of Christ. He kneels there, he contemplates in ecstasy Jesus who has forgiven him. Once more. Alone he is standing, with his arms outstretched, as one who simply contemplates in admiration the glory of that great love for all the world which beams from the cross. Once more, he is kneeling there, kneeling on one knee, as one who had prepared to start up; he is there half in homage, half in recognition that this cross lays upon his life the allegiance of a great service; he is grasping it as one who is just leaving for his mission. 2 [Note: Bishop Gore.]

III

The Power of the Cross Constrains to Unselfish Service

“The love of Christ,” says the Apostle, using a highly forcible expression, “constraineth us.” The corresponding word in the original primarily signifies to “shut up” or to “compress,” as by some coercive power which cannot be withstood; and in its secondary sense it means to “impel,” to “bear away,” or to “hurry onwards,” as if by the force of some rapid and impetuous torrent. As employed in the text, it intimates that the love of Christ exerts somewhat of this mighty and well-nigh irresistible influence on His people as often as it takes full possession of their souls, captivating their every thought, engaging their every affection, shutting them closely up, or hemming them completely in, so that only one line of conduct can be adopted by them—urging all their energies into action, bearing them on in the face of every obstacle, and leaving them no alternative but to obey its dictates.

1. The first great effect of Christ’s love is to change the centre of life.—All love derives its power to elevate, refine, beautify, ennoble, conquer, from the fact that, in a lower degree, all love makes the beloved and not the self the centre. Hence the mother’s self-sacrifice, hence the sweet reciprocity of wedded life, hence everything in humanity that is noble and good. Love is the antagonist of selfishness and the highest type of love should be, and in the measure in which we are under the influence of Christ’s love will be, the self-surrendering life of a Christian man. The one power that rescues a man from the tyranny of living for self, which is the mother of all sin and ignobleness, is when a man can say, “Christ is my aim,” “Christ is my object.” There is no secret of self-annihilation, which is self-transfiguration and, I was going to say, deification, like that of loving Christ with all my heart because He has loved me so.

Keith Falconer, that noble young man who died in Arabia in starting a mission among the Mahommedans, said, “Let people call you eccentric. Eccentric means nothing more than out of centre, and if you have got a new centre in God of course you are out of the old centre of the world. Let the world’s machinery move round the old centre. You have begun to move by that eccentric movement about quite another pivot than that around which the world moves.” 1 [Note: J. K. Maclean, Dr. Pierson and his Message, 278.]

A comet—these vagrants of the skies—has liberty to roam, and what does it make of it? It plunges away out into depths of darkness and infernos of ice and cold. But if it came within the attraction of some great blazing sun, and subsided into a planet, it would have lost nothing of its true liberty, and would move in music and light around the source of blessedness and life. And so you and I, as long as we make ourselves the “sinful centres of our rebel powers,” so long do we subject ourselves to alterations of temperature almost too great to bear. Let us come back to the light, and move round the Christ; satellites of that Sun, and therefore illumined by His light and warmed by His life-producing heat. 2 [Note: A. Maclaren.]

2. Next, the dynamic of the cross becomes the inspiration of a sacrificial life.—“One died for all, therefore all died; and he died for all, that they which live should no longer live unto themselves, but unto him who for their sakes died and rose again.” The idea here expressed is a favourite one with the Apostle. Often he speaks of Christians as “dead with Christ,” as “made conformable to his death,” as “planted together in the likeness of his death.” And in one very striking passage in particular, which occurs in the second chapter of the Epistle to the Galatians, at the twentieth verse, he thus writes: “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.” In this striking passage the very same idea is expressed in nearly the same language as in the text, namely, that, in the practical judgment of the faithful Christian, his own life, as to all selfish purposes, is held by him to have expired upon his Saviour’s cross, so that in his prevailing disposition he is now dead to everything that interferes with his devotedness to the Son of God, who gave Himself for him. So closely does his fate unite him to the Saviour that he views himself as having fellowship with that Saviour alike in His crucifixion and in His resurrection, and “reckons himself” to be “dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ.” He lives no more himself, but Christ liveth in him; the whole life which he now leads, as a Christian, being one of conformity to the example, and subserviency to the will of Christ.

He dwelt within the wilderness

Disdaining Mammon’s lure:

He walked among the thorns of pain,

And yet His step was sure.

He saw the vine-deck’t homes of men,

And gazed with quiet eyes;

He turned away: “Not here,” He said,

“Is found My Paradise.”

He saw the gilded chariots pass,

The conqueror’s array:

They held to Him a laurel crown,

And still He turned away.

Back to the wilderness He went

Without a thought of loss:

He hewed out of the wood two beams

And made Himself a Cross.

“If I would save them I must die!”

(This was the thing He said);

“Perchance the hearts that hate Me now

Will learn to love Me dead.”

He died upon the Cross He made,

Without a lip to bless:

He rose into a million hearts,

And this was His success. 1 [Note: W. J. Dawson, The Book of Courage, 26.]

3. It is a glad ministry.—For the yoke of Christ is not a despotic constraint, like the law with its “shalt” and “shalt not,” spoken in thunder from Sinai: not an unreasonable constraint, like that of self and Satan, chaining men to compliances which they know to be unlawful and fatal to truth and peace; not an arbitrary constraint, like the shifting fashions of this vain world, which men follow blindly about, not knowing whither they may lead them. It is none of these; its law is generated in the soul itself, and in its best and highest portion. Its cord that binds men is woven out of the noblest of human motives—faith, gratitude, adoration. “The Son of God loved me”—this is its first principle, graven deeply on the heart. This is no vague admiration of His love; this goes beyond the orator and the poet; this is the guilty sinner grasping his Saviour, the drowning mariner reaching at his plank; a fact not only consented to by the understanding, not only uttered by the lips, not only overflowing at the fountain of tears, but fixed in the central depths of the personal being, resident, and paramount, in the council chamber of the heart. “The Son of God loved me.” Am I convinced of this? Then He is bound to me, and I to Him; wherever He is, there am I; wherever I am, there is He.

When the long absent sun once more revisits the Polar seas, and the weary adventurer, close captive of the cold, with his bark anchored to an ice-floe, becomes conscious of the universal thaw, and feels himself borne outward by the resistless pressure of the liberated waters; right joyously does he loose his moorings and commit himself to the gladsome flush, and steers full gallantly through the melting masses which are speeding southward with himself. Thus eagerly does the soul, long frozen up in selfishness, obey the mighty influence of the Sun of Righteousness, and surrender itself to the onflow of the love of Christ. “For the love of Christ constraineth us.” 1 [Note: B. Gregory, Sermons, Addresses and Pastoral Letters, 198.]

The Constraint of Love

Literature

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Arnold (T.), Sermons, iii. 1.

Battle (H. W.), in The Southern Baptist Pulpit, 133.

Bradley (C.), Sermons, i. 293.

Calthrop (G.), The Future Life, 88.

Cunningham (J.), in Scotch Sermons, 50.

Dawson (G.), Three Books of God, 79.

Fraser (J.), Parochial Sermons, 59.

Gregory (B.), Sermons, Addresses and Pastoral Letters, 198.

Hull (E. L.), Sermons, i. 102.

Iverach (J.), The Other Side of Greatness, 237.

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Manning (H. E.), Sermons on Ecclesiastical Subjects, 345.

Myres (W. M.), Fragments that Remain, 14.

Rendall (G. H.), Charterhouse Sermons, 188.

Robertson (F. W.), Sermons, iii. 90.

Robertson (J.), Sermons and Expositions, 157.

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Verse 17

The New and the Old

The old things are passed away; behold, they are become new.— 2 Corinthians 5:17.

1. This is a very bold and sweeping statement. We seem almost to be listening to a prophet of revolution. St. Paul, addressing the democratic Corinthians, might be regarded himself as speaking the language of democracy. His view of Christianity, it might be said, was that it was an absolute emancipation from the fetters and traditions of the past. He was an over-zealous and ardent reformer; he had no reverence for antiquity; he was full only of a new order of things which was to supersede all that had gone before. Old thoughts, old systems, old beliefs—of all these a clean sweep was to be made, and man was to start afresh on a new path of progress, of which none could see the end. And something like this is the view, no doubt, which many persons have taken of Christianity. They do regard it essentially as a democratic movement, as a class religion. They identify it with the interests of a class. To them its chief charm consists in its assertion of the freedom and the equality of all men. They see that it has emancipated the slave and defended the right of the poor, and they value it most exclusively as the prime agent in a great social revolution. It was this communistic tendency that caused it to be welcomed at first by one class and suspected by another. Hence it was that the poor and the oppressed embraced it so eagerly. Hence it was that rulers, holding it to be subversive of governments, dreaded and sought to crush it in its cradle. It is the same tendency that in later times made many hail its influence, who had no sympathy with its creed.

Yet it cannot seriously be maintained that this is the view which St. Paul took of Christianity. Much less can it be pretended that such an opinion finds any kind of countenance or support in this passage. The revolution of which St. Paul is speaking here is entirely a spiritual revolution. He has learnt, he tells us, a new estimate of things, he has learnt to give them their proper value. He no longer regards men or things by the common standards of the world. Even his appreciation of Christ as his Saviour is no longer what it then was—“after the flesh,” that is, of an external kind; it has been exchanged for a profoundly spiritual recognition of His glory. He has become the disciple of a Divine mysticism. He has a life quite distinct from the life of the senses or the life of the intellect. He can say of himself, “I live; and yet no longer I, but Christ liveth in me.” St. Paul claims to have passed into a new region of spiritual life. He claims to have dispensed with a view of Christ’s work which, true no doubt in itself, still fell far short of that to which he had now attained. Looking back upon his past career, and comparing his former with his present knowledge of his Saviour, he could liken the change to nothing less than a new creation: “If any man is in Christ, he is a new creature: the old things are passed away; behold, they are become new.”

2. The words of the Authorized Version do not represent accurately the original passage. The words, as written by St. Paul, are not “Old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new,” but “Old things are passed away; behold, they are become new.” St. Paul does not speak of an obliteration of the past, but of a renewal of the past. The old things themselves have become new. The old was gone, not because it had been blotted out, but because it had reappeared under a purer, nobler, more excellent form. God’s law, as seen in the building up of the Christian life and Christian society, was the same law as might be discerned in all the work of His hands. Transformation, not destruction, is the rule of His operation.

You may trace that law, as some have thought, in that creation of which the first chapter of Genesis contains the record. The first creation fell into wasteness and crumbled into ruin; but out of its ruins was built up that world of order and beauty which we inhabit. Old things passed away; behold, they became new. You may trace that law, scientific observers will tell you, throughout the material universe. No matter perishes; no force is lost. The particles which constituted one body may be fashioned anew to constitute another. The force which we know as heat may be known under another name as motion or electricity; but the matter never perishes, the force never decays. The old has passed away; behold, it is become new. You may trace that law in the vegetable world, when the corn of wheat falls into the ground and dies only to emerge again, first in the green blade and then in the golden ear, the same and yet how different. The old has passed away; behold, it is become new. You may trace the law in that most wonderful of transformations, when the crawling, unsightly worm, whose house and world have been a leaf, bursts from its chrysalis-tomb, clothed with beauty and splendour, to spread its dazzling wings in the summer’s sun, and to feed where it will on the choicest sweets of the summer’s flowers. This eternal law shall be seen, we are assured, hereafter, when our human bodies, having turned to corruption, shall be raised anew, the same not in identity of substance but in identity of form, when that which was sown a natural body shall be raised a spiritual body, and that which was sown in corruption shall be raised in incorruption. And the change of the individual shall be repeated throughout God’s visible creation, and there shall be new heavens and a new earth, new not by destruction but by transformation, and fitted for their new and transformed inhabitants.

To those in Christ all things are not only new, but they are growing continually newer. In the old world, and with the old man, it is just the other way. Things are always getting older, until life gets to be an insufferable burden, a dreary round, a wretched repetition, and we see backs bent with nothing but pure sorrow, and heads white with none other sickness than vexation of spirit, and men brought to the grave because life was too wearisome, and time too intolerable, and existence too aimless and stale, to be supported any longer. But in the new world, and with the new man, the whole is reversed; and the new cry ever waxes more frequent and more loud. “Look, and look again, how the old is passing, how the new is coming, how things are getting new.” Every day more of the old is weeded out, more of the new is coming in. Life is “fresher and freer” and fuller of promise. There are new discoveries of the Father’s love, new revelations of Christ’s grace, new experiences of the Spirit’s comfort. Life becomes interesting, and entertaining, and significant, and splendid, and grand beyond belief. What views of life Christ’s world contains; what heavens of expansion overarch it; what hills of attainment are reared upon it; what distances of outlook are discernible from it! Yourself, Christ, God—what thoughts about them all you could never have conceived before! History, Time, Eternity—what feelings they stir in you, you never could have felt before! Purpose, Progress, Achievement—what mighty motions of the will they produce! 1 [Note: R. W. Barbour, Thoughts, 130.]

3. Now the principle here laid down by the Apostle is one of the greatest importance when regarded as a principle of reconciliation between opposing tendencies. For both political parties and religious parties may be said, as a rule, to range themselves respectively under the banners of the past and of the future. “Old things” is the watchword of the one; “new things” is the watchword of the other. The one would try to resuscitate the past, would cherish it, even in its fossilized forms would try to galvanize it into life; the other would sweep away its every vestige, or leave it only as a subject of curious inquiry to the archæologist, or of inspiration to the poet. The one dislikes all change; the other thinks that no change can be too radical and too sweeping. The one hugs the shore or keeps to the harbour; the other riots in the tumult of winds and waves, if only a new world may be given to its eager quest and dauntless courage. But both these extreme parties are alike at war with the very constitution of the world. You cannot stereotype any phase of human existence. Change is God’s law; progress is God’s law.

The claim of a new thing to be old is, in varying degrees, a common characteristic of great movements. The Reformation professed to be a return to the Bible, the Evangelical movement in England a return to the Gospels, the High Church movement a return to the early Church. A large element, even in the French Revolution, the greatest of all breaches with the past, had for its ideal a return to the Roman republican virtue or to the simplicity of the natural man. I noticed quite lately a speech of an American Progressive leader claiming that his principles were simply those of Abraham Lincoln. 2 [Note: Gilbert Murray, Four Stages of Greek Religion, 58.]

4. “The old things are passed away”; and quite rightly we are slow to see it. He has little sense of holiness who tramples on the past, or scorns the words of those whom God has taken from us. Yet the old things do pass away, and often silently. We seem to wake of a sudden to find that the old hand has lost its cunning, the old custom is turned to wrong, the old teaching emptied of its living force. Then what are we to do? We have a carnal craving for something fixed in this world, some rock of adamant on which the storms of time shall beat in vain. Meaner men simply will not take the trouble to give up the old things. The foolish mother would like her baby to be always little; the stupid politician shrinks from needful reform; the cowardly Christian looks out for a master upon earth, or hides himself among the trees of dogma, that no fresh voice from heaven may unsettle the thing he is pleased to call his faith.

All purely natural things must pass away. The beauty of our childhood fades, the proud powers of our manhood fail us, and words that were spirit and life to our fathers are empty sounds to us whom God has changed. Who cares now for the battle-cry of the Crusaders? The old things are passed away, and the glory seems departed with them from the earth. We look wistfully to the culture of Greece, the splendour of Rome, the fervour of the early Christians, the simple faith of the Middle Ages, the strong righteousness of Puritanism; but we can no more recall them than we can wake the dead. They have passed away for ever, and we must face as we best can the work of a world which without them seems cheerless and commonplace.

Passing away, saith the World, passing away:

Chances, beauty, and youth, sapped day by day:

Thy life never continueth in one stay.

Is the eye waxen dim, is the dark hair changing to grey

That hath won neither laurel nor bay?

I shall clothe myself in Spring and bud in May:

Thou, root-stricken, shalt not rebuild thy decay

On my bosom for aye.

Then I answered: Yea.

Passing away, saith my Soul, passing away:

With its burden of fear and hope, of labour and play,

Hearken what the past doth witness and say:

Rust in thy gold, a moth is in thine array,

A canker is in thy bud, thy leaf must decay.

At midnight, at cockcrow, at morning, one certain day

Lo the Bridegroom shall come and shall not delay;

Watch thou and pray.

Then I answered: Yea.

Passing away, saith my God, passing away:

Winter passeth after the long delay:

New grapes on the vine, new figs on the tender spray,

Turtle calleth turtle in Heaven’s May.

Though I tarry, wait for Me, trust Me, watch and pray:

Arise, come away, night is past and lo it is day,

My love, My sister, My spouse, thou shalt hear Me say.

Then I answered: Yea. 1 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti, Poems, 191.]

5. “The old things are passed away; behold, they are become new.” This is God’s law of change. They leave us only to return in other shapes; they vanish only to come back in nobler forms. God never takes away but that He may give us more abundantly. He takes away the innocence of childhood that He may give us the old man’s crown of glory. He takes away the fathers we leaned on and the children in whom we garnered up our love that He may be Himself the Father of the fatherless and the hope of them that are desolate. He takes away the guides we trusted, the friends who were our very life, that He may be Himself our guide and ever-living Friend. He unsettles the simple belief of ignorance that He may give us the nobler faith of them that know. He smites with emptiness the burning words which stirred our fathers that He may give us other words of deeper meaning and of yet more thrilling call. Nothing that is good can perish. Though He sift it as corn is sifted in a sieve, yet shall not the least grain fall upon the earth. The dross of our thoughts shall perish; but the word of our God which came to us will embody itself again in worthier forms. Through all the changing scenes of history His call remains the same—Come upward hither, and I will show thee of My glory.

But it is needful to look at God’s manner of making new Sometimes the change comes with a mighty destruction and the crack of doom. But has the old really perished? Is anything that was precious in the earth or the heaven of the old time taken clean away out of our reach? The answer lies in the Bibles which we hold in our hands. They have an Old Testament as well as a New. Adam’s earth is ours. David’s heaven is ours. Israel after the flesh has grown into Israel after the spirit. We cannot neglect the Scriptures of the Old Covenant without misreading the Scriptures of the New Covenant. It was Christ’s coming that made the law to cease, and rendered useless part at least of the office of the prophets. Yet Christ Himself said, “Think not that I came to destroy the law or the prophets: I came not to destroy but to fulfil.” That in them which He did seem to destroy had, in fact, already died a natural death, for its work was done; but in making all things new He brought life and immortality into the old. And even so must they in each generation strive to act who follow in His steps.

All around, in those well-ordered precincts, were quiet signs of wealth, and a noble taste—a taste, indeed, chiefly evidenced in the selection and juxtaposition of the material it had to deal with, consisting almost exclusively of the remains of older art, here arranged and harmonized, with effects, both as regards colour and form, so delicate, as to seem really derivative from a spirit fairer than any which lay within the resources of the ancient world. It was the old way of true Renaissance, the way of nature with her roses, the Divine way with the body of man, and it may be with his very soul—conceiving the new organism, by no sudden and abrupt creation, but rather by the action of a new principle upon elements all of which had indeed lived and died many times. The fragments of older architecture, the mosaics, the spiral columns, the precious corner stones of immemorial building, had put on, by such juxtaposition, a new and singular expressiveness, an air of grave thought and intellectual purpose. 1 [Note: Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean.]

(1) The principle is seen in History.—If Greece has perished, she remains a light to the world. If Rome’s eternal throne is cast down, her witness to right and law is imperishable. If the old saints are mouldered into dust, their spirit lives among us in many a patient toiler of whom the world is not worthy—more prosaic, it may be, but no way less heroic than that which dared the cross and the fire in the olden time. If Puritanism has passed away, it has left us many of the best features of English life—the sober earnestness, the civil freedom, the Sunday rest, the quiet sense of duty which labours to unloose the bands of wickedness and to undo the heavy burdens of all that suffer wrong. The more appalling the world-wide scene of change, decay and ruin, the more certainly a power of life is working upward through it all.

The great empires of the East passed away, but not before they had transmitted to the people of God the treasures of their civilization. Greece fell; Rome fell: but in other forms they survive still, Let us only think what we owe in our own intellectual life, and in the expression of our religious faith, to Greece; think what we owe in our civil and ecclesiastical organization to Rome; and perhaps we shall be inclined to confess with a new conviction that “the dead rule the living,” and recognize, humbled at once and stirred by the grandeur of our obligation, that God has placed the future in our hands. 1 [Note: B. F. Westcott, Christian Aspects of Life, 89.]

(2) It is seen in the history of the Church.—Whilst it is God’s law in creation and God’s law in the history of man that old things pass away because they become new, this is true in the highest sense of the great work of human redemption. Look at the history of that redemption. When man fell, what was the Divine method? Did God blot out the rebellious race, and create another race upon the earth? No; out of the ruin of human nature a new and more glorious fabric was revealed; Christ the Son of God, the second Adam, was promised, and came in the likeness of sinful flesh. The bitter waters of the natural fountain were changed into sweet. A ruin was made the material of the new and better structure. The old became new. Mankind, which fell in the first Adam, was built up in the second Adam, Jesus Christ, God manifest in the flesh. And as God revealed Himself, first to patriarchs and then to Moses, the law-giver of the Old Covenant, and then to prophets who were interpreters of His will, there were elements of the earlier dispensation which were perpetuated in the next. The patriarchal nearness to God, the vision of the Almighty, did not cease when God went before His people in a pillar of cloud and in a pillar of flame. The Tabernacle was perpetuated in the Temple, the rites and ceremonies of the law were not abrogated but spiritualized by the prophets. And when St. Paul would find the great proof of his doctrine of justification by faith, he goes back to the ancient dispensation. Abraham is its great example; the prophet Habakkuk waiting upon God, when the Chaldæan armies were approaching, gives him the words which are the key-note of his gospel. But the old had become new. For Jesus Christ had come in the flesh, revealed as the great object of faith; and the true life of faith was life in union with Christ. And our Lord Himself teaches the same lesson. “Think not that I came to destroy the law or the prophets: I came not to destroy, but to fulfil.” The Jewish priesthood perished, the Jewish sacrifices were abolished, the Jewish Temple was levelled with the ground, but their Divine meaning was fulfilled in Christ, and abides in Him and in His people to the present hour.

The Latin church left its work of witnessing and ministering for Christ, and made itself a judge and a divider among men. Its doctrines were all poisoned by one colossal blasphemy. It required what God has never asked even for Himself—to be believed without regard to reason, and obeyed without regard to conscience. So the yoke of Christian Pharisaism had to be broken, that men might be free to serve God in spirit and truth. The unspiritual unity of Western Europe had to be shattered in pieces, that nations might escape the tyranny of an alien and sectarian church. Above all, the idea of an infallible church holding plenary powers from an absent king had to be rooted out before men could begin to see the gradual development which is God’s word to successive generations. But an infallible church is also incorrigible: therefore He cut her in sunder, and appointed her portion with the hypocrites. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were the after-swell of the storm; and only the nineteenth was free to take up the work which the Reformation made possible even in countries where it was rejected. That work is hardly more than begun; but we can already see its character. Our losses are no doubt immense. The old social order is gone, the old conception of miracle and inspiration is overthrown, and a growing tangle of practical questions represents the growing complexity of life and thought. But is there no gain in our wider knowledge of truth? in a more strenuous and earnest life? in a quickened hatred of social wrong? in a higher tone of that national conscience which under any form of government speaks the final word? Is it nothing to know Christ as He never was known before? to see the realms of grace and nature joined in their incarnate Lord? to be made free from the horror of past ages, the inscrutable despot far off in heaven, who sought some other glory than the highest welfare of His creatures? No heavier burden has been lifted from men since the Gospel swept away the whole slavery of gods and saints and demons, and left us face to face with the risen Son of Man who hears the prayer of all flesh from His throne on high. 1 [Note: H. M. Gwatkin, The Eye for Spiritual Things, 54.]

The Master stood upon the mount, and taught.

He saw a fire in His disciples’ eyes;

“The old law,” they said, “is wholly come to nought,

Behold the new world rise!”

“Was it,” the Lord then said, “with scorn ye saw

The old law observed by Scribes and Pharisees?

I say unto you, see ye keep that law

More faithfully than these!

“Too hasty heads for ordering worlds, alas!

Think not that I to annul the law have will’d;

No jot, no tittle from the law shall pass,

Till all have been fulfill’d.”

So Christ said eighteen hundred years ago.

And what then shall be said to those to-day,

Who cry aloud to lay the old world low

To clear the new world’s way?

“Religious fervours! ardour misapplied!

Hence, hence,” they cry, “ye do but keep man blind!

But keep him self-immersed, preoccupied,

And lame the active mind!”

Ah! from the old world let some one answer give:

“Scorn ye this world, their tears, their inward cares?

I say unto you, see that your souls live

A deeper life than theirs!”

Here let that voice make end; then, let a strain,

From a far lonelier distance, like the wind

Be heard, floating through heaven, and fill again

These men’s profoundest mind:

“Children of men! the unseen Power, whose eye

For ever doth accompany mankind,

Hath look’d on no religion scornfully

That men did ever find.

“Which has not taught weak wills how much they can?

Which has not fall’n on the dry heart like rain?

Which has not cried to sunk, self-weary man:

Thou must be born again!

“Children of men! not that your age excel

In pride of life the ages of your sires,

But that ye think clear, feel deep, bear fruit well,

The Friend of man desires.” 1 [Note: Matthew Arnold, Poems, ii. 169.]

(3) It is seen in the life of the Individual.—That which is true of the great redemptive work of Christ in the world is true no less of His redemptive work in every soul of man. Here there is ever change, here there is ever progress; but here there is no destruction except of that which has been corrupted through sin. The grace of God in Jesus Christ is indeed a mighty power in the heart. The conversion of a sinner to God is indeed nothing less than a turning from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God. But even where that change has been as marked, as sudden, as decisive as it was in St. Paul, there is no obliteration of past history or past character. New affections are not given, but the old affections are made new, because they are turned to a new object, because they are purified, strengthened, elevated. The trust which once leaned upon earthly props is now fixed upon God and His Christ; the hope which once was bounded by the narrow horizon of time is now full of immortality and embraces eternity in its arms. The love which once was idolatry of some human object has now found its legitimate satisfaction in Him whose love passeth knowledge. A new intellect is not given, but the old intellect is made new, because it now finds its highest exercise, not in science or art or literature, though it despises none of these things, but in the study of the revelation of God. A new character is not given, but the old character is sanctified to a higher use. Energy becomes devotion to God; impetuosity, zeal in His service; resolution, loyalty to Christ Jesus. And so long as life lasts, the perpetual transformation is going on.

We are slowly, very slowly, abandoning our belief in sudden and violent transitions for a surer and fuller acceptance of the doctrine of evolution; but most of us still draw a sharp line of demarcation between this world and the next, and expect a radical change in ourselves and our surroundings, a break in the chain of continuity entirely contrary to the teaching of nature and experience. In the same way we cling to the specious untruth that we can begin over and over again in this world, forgetting that while our sorrow and repentance bring sacramental gifts of grace and strength, God Himself cannot, by His own limitation, rewrite the Past. We are in our sorrow that which we have made ourselves in our sin; our temptations are there as well as the way of escape. We are in the image of God. We create our world, our undying selves, our heaven, or our hell. Qui creavit te sine te non salvabit te sine te. It is stupendous, magnificent, and most appalling. A man does not change as he crosses the threshold of the larger room. His personality remains the same, although the expression of it may be altered. 1 [Note: Michael Fairless, The Roadmender, 79.]

There were some rough diamonds among the converts; but if they were rough they were diamonds still. One man, a brick-layer’s labourer, could not read a chapter of the Bible without a mistake in every line. Yet for fifteen years he attended the Sunday morning prayer-meeting at seven o’clock, often conducting it, and praying with such fervour and power that my father felt the influence of his prayers upon his ministry to be exceptional, if not unique. A woman, who in the early days of his work among the pig-feeders of Notting Dale held up in his face a quart pot of beer and laughed at him with words of scornful obscenity, was attracted to the Tabernacle, was soundly converted to Jesus Christ, and was thenceforward a living monument of the most winsome Christian goodness. It was with special reference to her that my father wrote: “I believe we had as real and noble a company of praying women as ever they had in the apostolic days.” Another woman was a member of a little colony of gypsies who often encamped upon some waste ground not far away from the Tabernacle. Herself led to the feet of Jesus by my father’s ministry, she brought several others to hear him preach, and among those of them who were converted were three brothers—the father and two uncles of the now famous evangelist, Gypsy Smith. My father baptized them—I can myself remember the scene—with peculiar and exultant joy. 2 [Note: Henry Varley’s Life-Story, 69.]

In his Confessions St. Augustine has left record in literature of a profligate and shameful past, of a deep repentance and flight to God for succour, and of a grand recovery alike to moral obedience and to splendid service. The profligate of Carthage, steeped in degrading animalism, becomes in Rome the first of the four great Latin Fathers of the Church, exercising an influence on Christian thought and life second only to that of the Apostle Paul. In this case, as in many others which might be recorded, the springs of action were not lamed by the memory of a mournful past, but rather quickened into finer intensity and more strenuous endeavour. Shakespeare had dared to say:

Best men are moulded out of faults.

There is blue sky in front of us if in the memory of any guilty act we feel that we would rather die than repeat it. To have erred in the past does not condemn us to degradation in the future. The soul, though deeply stained, may be cleansed and regain its purity, if not its innocence. Again and yet again He who “knoweth our frame, and remembereth that we are dust” takes us by the hand and says “Start afresh.” With God, and hope, and tomorrow, we may mock the counsels of despair. It is inevitable that some error should creep into our lives, for we are but human. Let the bitterness of past failure sting us into nobler action in the present, and the weakness revealed urge us to supplication for diviner strength. We have at least gained through defeat a fuller knowledge of ourselves. Our self-confidence has been rebuked, and we have learned the special perils, the besetting sins, against which we need to guard. Says Browning:

When the fight begins within himself,

A man’s worth something.

He is tried that he may triumph. He wrestles that he may be crowned. 1 [Note: R. P. Downs, Beaten Gold, 148.]

The New and the Old

Literature

Arnold (T.), Sermons, i. 10; iv. 274.

Bonar (H.), Family Sermons, 435.

Calthrop (G.), in The Penny Pulpit, No. 853.

Dewey (O.), Works, 759.

Dykes (J. O.), Sermons, 249.

Gibson (J. M.), The Glory of Life, 35.

Gladden (W.), Where does the Sky Begin, 187.

Gwatkin (H. M.), The Eye for Spiritual Things, 49.

Jowett (B.), Sermons Biographical and Miscellaneous, 356.

Martin (G. C.), in Great Texts of the New Testament, 127.

Newman (J. H.), Parochial and Plain Sermons, v. 164.

Perowne (J. J. S.), Sermons, 172.

Westcott (B. F.), Christian Aspects of Life, 86.

Westcott (B. F.), The Historic Faith, 129.

Wordsworth (J.), Sermons Preached in Salisbury Cathedral Church, 97.

Christian World Pulpit; xxxv. 346 (G. Matheson); lii. 187 (T. V. Tymms); lxvii. 86 (K. Lake); lxix. 262 (W. L. Watkinson).

Churchman’s Pulpit: Easter Day and Season, vii. 342 (A. M. Mackay).

Clergyman’s Magazine, 3rd. Ser., viii. 93 (G. Calthrop).

Verse 20

Ambassadors for Christ

We are ambassadors therefore on behalf of Christ, as though God were intreating by us: we beseech you on behalf of Christ, be ye reconciled to God.— 2 Corinthians 5:20.

1. The ministry is one of the original elements of historic. Christianity. From the beginning there have been duly appointed ministers in the Church. The ministry was implied in the constitution of the Christian Society. No thoughtful student of the Gospels can doubt that the ultimate origin of the ministry must be traced to Christ Himself. From the start the Church has taken the form of an ordered society. The earliest Christian writings we possess indicate the existence of an authorized and accepted ministry. The ministry takes rank with the two Sacraments, the Lord’s Day, the Scripture, as an original and therefore essential element of historic Christianity. The earliest Christian document we possess is the First Epistle to the Thessalonians, and there we encounter the ministry as a settled thing. “We beseech you, brethren, to know them that labour among you, and are over you in the Lord, and admonish you; and to esteem them exceeding highly in love for their work’s sake.”

2. The Christian ministry has, in the course of history, fulfilled itself in many ways. The methods of one age have not been the methods of another. The clergy have been variously organized; the Christian Society has run a parallel course to the State. There has been continuity of government in and through changes of system; for the standing necessities which government exists to meet never change, though the actual forms in which they must be met are never long the same. Every generation comes fresh to its problems, and has to learn the lesson of duty, and submit itself to the yoke of discipline. The proper and inalienable services of the Christian ministry will never be superfluous. The unseen world is too closely pressed by the world of sight and sense to vindicate its claim to human regard. There is need for Christ’s testimony being taken up, uttered in intelligible terms of the age, applied in actual life, pressed home by authoritative voices, illustrated by consecrated characters.

As an ambassador for Christ, I regard a preacher of the gospel as filling the most responsible office any mortal can occupy His pulpit is, in my eyes, loftier than a throne; and of all professions, learned or unlearned, his, though usually in point of wealth the poorest, I esteem the most honourable. That office is one angels themselves might covet. 1 [Note: Thomas Guthrie, in Memoir, i. 272.]

I

An Ambassador is a Commissioner

The word “Ambassador” is one of great dignity. It is common among the ancient writers. In Luke 14:32, Jesus tells of one king who, “while the other is yet a great way off, sendeth an ambassage, and asketh conditions of peace.” St. Paul is fully conscious of the great commission which he bears from God on behalf of Christ. In a word, St. Paul, as all ministers are, is God’s spokesman to men. He comes with authoritative word as the ambassador from the Court of Heaven to plead the cause of Christ with men whom God so loved that He gave His Son to die for them.

1. The commission is from God, and the ambassador owes his standing to Divine authority. What is it that makes a man an ambassador of the king? It is not that he chooses or wishes to be so, or that he is clothed in a certain robe, or is a member of a certain family; but it is solely and exclusively that he has the commission of his sovereign. What is it that makes a man a minister of Christ? Not any form or ceremonial, however beautiful and good; not ordination by presbyter or bishop, however useful and proper in its place; but the commission of the King of kings, the Lord Jesus Christ. In other words, the minister of the gospel is here said to sustain to Christ, the heavenly King, precisely the relationship which an earthly ambassador sustains to an earthly monarch; and if none can make an ambassador but the sovereign, so none can constitute a man a· minister of Christ but He who rules by His power, inspires by His wisdom, and creates faith by His grace. Whatever rites of ordination are proper for the public declaration and consecration of those who are the ministers of Christ, the minister is assumed to have been first called by the Holy Spirit. He is ordained, not that he may be made a minister, but because he has been set apart for that great office. An ambassador of the king, when he goes to a foreign court to reside, does not there make law, but simply executes the commission entrusted to him; he does not declare and define the terms of communion between his own kingdom and another, but simply declares what is the will of his sovereign, or his government, in reference to that other country. So a minister of the gospel is not to make law, but to preach law already made; he is not to make a sacrifice, but to proclaim a sacrifice already furnished; he is not to set up a rule of faith, but to call attention to a rule of faith already complete. That ambassador best discharges the duties entrusted to him by his sovereign who expresses least of his own mind, and most clearly the sovereign’s mind; and that minister best discharges the duties which he owes to God who gives the least of human conjectures, and who declares most plainly and distinctly the will and word of the Lord Jesus Christ.

There is one condition before any man can deliver such a message as this; it is, first, that he should have had it delivered to his own soul. Unless the message has within it that reality which only comes from its being a real part of your own life, a great deal of what you are saying must inevitably be words, and nothing else. If there be any truth that you are setting forth of which it is possible for you to say, “Had it been untrue I should have been just the same as I am,” then depend upon it such a belief as that is not a belief that would enable you to impress the truth upon your people—it is not a belief that will enable you to be a real ambassador of Christ to deliver that message. Spiritual teaching must be backed up by truth of life, or else it loses its power. 1 [Note: Frederick Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, i. 408.]

2. The substance of the commission is this: “Be ye reconciled to God.” To sue for love, to beg that an enemy will put away his enmity is the part of the inferior rather than of the superior, is the part of the offender rather than of the offended; is the part of the vanquished rather than of the victor; is the part, surely, not of the king but of the rebel. And yet here, in the sublime transcending of all human precedent and pattern which characterizes the Divine dealing, we have the places of the suppliant and of the supplicated inverted, and Love upon the Throne bends down to ask of the rebel that lies powerless and sullen at His feet, and yet is not conquered until his heart be won, though his limbs be manacled, that he would put away all the bitterness out of his heart, and come back to the love and the grace which are ready to pour over him. “He that might the vengeance best have taken, finds out the remedy.” He against whom we have transgressed prays us to be reconciled; and the Infinite Love lowers Himself in the lowering which is, in another aspect, the climax of His exaltation, to pray the rebels to accept His amnesty.

Conceive a king with an overwhelming power—furnished with everything to command success, able, at any moment, to crush the rebellious force which had outraged him in every possible way—just on the eve of taking the most complete vengeance, at the very height of his supremacy, and in the moment of the surest confidence of his victory, sending forth a flag of truce to the enemy—and in the most suppliant and endearing terms, for no advantage of his own, but entirely for that enemy’s sake—beseeching an embassy and a reconciliation. Conceive that the result of that proposition, if accepted, is nothing less than the elevation of that pardoned state, to all the privileges and dignities which its captor could bestow, even to the position of equality with his own dearest and most obedient children. Conceive that so dear was this reconciliation to that all-conquering monarch, that, to compass it, he spared not his dearest and his best, and that even when his well-beloved son had been murdered by the treachery of those to whom he was bearing the white flag of his father’s clemency, still he continued to send forth more messengers with the same offers, and never ceased to use all the arguments, and to take on himself the suitor’s part, as though he were the guilty one! What an unparalleled passage that would be in the history of man! And yet, what is that to the grandeur of this simple fact here set forth, “We are ambassadors therefore on behalf of Christ, as though God were intreating by us: we beseech you on behalf of Christ, be ye reconciled to God”?

I read the other day that a father in Watford last year was greatly troubled about his son, who had gone wrong, and who was now ill and despondent and wrote to him, very tremblingly and fearfully, as if to ask whether there was any hope. The father sent a telegram to him, and the telegram consisted of one word; the one word was “Home,” and it was signed “Father.” Now the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ is God’s telegram to the sinful world, summed up in one word, “Home,” and signed by one name, “Father.” 1 [Note: R. F. Horton, How the Cross Saves, 102.]

3. The message is for all men. The supplement which stands in our Authorized Version in this text is a misleading and unfortunate one. “As though God did beseech you” and “we pray you” unduly narrow the scope of the Apostolic message, and confuse the whole course of the Apostolic reasoning here. For he has been speaking of a world which is reconciled to God, and he finds a consequence of that reconciliation of the world in the fact that he and his fellow-preachers are entrusted with the word of reconciliation. The scope of their message, then, can be no narrower than the scope of the reconciliation; and, inasmuch as that is world-wide, the beseeching must be co-extensive therewith, and must cover the whole ground of humanity. It is a universal message that is set forth here. The Corinthians, to whom St. Paul was speaking, are, by his hypothesis, already reconciled to God, and the message which he has in trust for them is given in the subsequent words: “We then, as workers together with God, beseech you also that ye receive not the grace of God in vain.” But the message, the pleading of the Divine heart, “be ye reconconciled to God,” is a pleading that reaches over the whole range of a reconciled world.

In 1854, when the British fleet was lying in Nagasaki Bay, the Japanese Government was extremely anxious that we should not land, and General Wakasa was appointed to watch the fleet and to prevent the British troops from landing. It happened that, as he rowed about the bay in fulfilment of his duty, some careless sailor on one of those English men-of-war had dropped his New Testament overboard. Probably he cared very little for his New Testament and he parted with it without any regret. But it so happened that General Wakasa picked it up out of the sea, and he was curious to know what this book was. He got an interpreter to tell him what it was. He became interested in it. He procured a Chinese New Testament and read it through—it brought him to Christ. Twelve years later General Wakasa came down to Verbeck, the missionary, and asked to be baptized because he had found the Saviour. Your British sailor let his New Testament fall into the sea, but that New Testament converted the General of the Japanese army, and his family, and the whole circle of his friends, and planted the blessed truth of reconciliation in the islands of Japan. That is the logic of missions. The first duty is to let the world know, and let every race of men know, to have it in every language, to put it within reach of every human being, that God is “in Christ reconciling the world unto himself.” 1 [Note: R. F. Horton, How the Cross Saves, 109.]

4. To turn a deaf ear to this message is to incur great guilt. It is an awful and solemn power that every poor little speck of humanity has, to lift itself up in God’s face, and say, in answer to all His pleadings, “I will not!” as if the dwellers in some little island, a mere pin-point of black, barren rock, jutting up at sea, were to declare war against a kingdom that stretched through twenty degrees of longitude on the mainland. So we, on our little bit of island, our pin-point of rock in the great waste ocean, can separate ourselves from the great Continent; or, rather, God has, in a fashion, made us separate in order that we may either unite ourselves with Him, by our willing yielding, or wrench ourselves away from Him by our antagonism and rebellion.

God cannot prise open a man’s heart with a crowbar, as it were, and force Himself inside. The door opens from within. “Behold! I stand at the door and knock.” There is an “if.” “If any man open I will come in.” Hence the beseeching, hence the wail of wisdom that cries aloud and no man regards it; of love that stands at the entering in of the city, and pleads in vain, and says, “I have called, and ye have refused.… How often would I have gathered … and ye would not.”

We heard his footfall on the vacant stair

The whole night long. We lay awake in bed

And heard him climb;—but those who slept instead

Smiled and assured us that he was not there.

We had our own important things to care

About—place, profit and the daily bread;

And then the street so thundered in one’s head

And often life’s a commonplace affair!

Yet then we heard him!—we not they were right:

We heard him—Yes! tho’ now we sleep by night

Almost as soundly as we sleep by day,

We waked, we heard him, heard—and nothing more. 1 [Note: G. C. Lodge, Poems and Dramas, ii. 152.]

II

An Ambassador is a Representative

1. An ambassador has no independent position, no independent authority. What he is, he is because he represents the king or nation which has commissioned him to bear their message. Instructions are given him, and he must not exceed them. The terms he proposes, the plans he communicates, have been settled beforehand, and they are not his own. He is the mouthpiece of others. He mediates between kings or nations, because he represents one king or one nation to another. To put the ambassador in the place of his king or nation would be a gross perversion of the truth. To put the minister in the place of Christ would be equally gross. And yet the minister does represent Christ, does mediate between his people and Christ, for he speaks in his Master’s name.

We are ambassadors not only “for Christ,” but “on Christ’s behalf.” And the same preposition is repeated in the subsequent clause. “We pray you,” not merely “in Christ’s stead,” though that is much, but “on His account,” which is more—as if it lay very near His heart that we should put away our enmity; and as if in some transcendent and wonderful manner the all-perfect, self-sufficing God was made glad, and the Master, who is His image for us, “saw of the travail of his soul, and,” in regard to one man, “was satisfied,” when the man lets the warmth of God’s love in Christ thaw away the coldness out of his heart, and kindle there an answering flame. An old divine says, “We cannot do God a greater pleasure, or more oblige His very heart, than to trust in Him as a God of love.”

There is one absolute essential to successful preaching and to beneficial hearing—firm faith that it is God’s own appointed plan for the conversion of souls, and that He never will withhold the blessing when it is earnestly sought. The moment you allow the mind to fix itself solely and exclusively on the human element in preaching—the man, the talent, the oratory—you miss the good of preaching. The way to regard it is this: to look upon the man as but the machine in God’s hand, doing God’s work. Then you reap the benefit; because you listen reverently, patiently, receptively. This is far too little enforced and far too little understood. 1 [Note: Dr. MacGregor of St. Cuthberts, 97.]

The clergyman is not simply an officer or servant of God or workman of God, but His ambassador and herald to tell men about God Himself. He must bring distinctly before men the reality of the heaven of which the earth and all that it contains is but the symbol and vesture. And, since all human teaching is but the purging of the ear to hear God’s teaching, and since the whole man, and not certain faculties only, must enter into the Divine presence, the sacraments must be the centre and crown (I don’t mean central subject) of his teaching, for there the real heights and depths of heaven are most fully revealed, and at the same time the commonest acts and things of earth are most closely and clearly connected with the highest heaven. This is, briefly, my view of a clergyman’s work; and by this, I think, must the nature of the Spirit’s inward motion be determined. 2 [Note: F. J. A. Hort, in Life and Letters, i. 279.]

2. The Christian ambassador must spare no pains to be a true copy of the Master whom he represents. David Brainerd was a young American missionary to the Red Indians. Weak and ill in body he died at twenty-nine, but what a noble history he left. He travelled, in spite of suffering, four thousand miles a year, through woods, over mountains and rivers. At night he lay out in the open woods, or in log and turf huts. He ate the Indians’ coarse food, learned their strange language, and preached to them in their wigwams, full of smoke and filth, the Indians often laughing and drinking around. And he tells us why he so lived and suffered: first “to be conformed to Jesus in toil and suffering”; and second, “I cared not where or how I lived, or what hardships I went through, so that I could but win souls to Christ.”

To one who asked MacGregor in the zenith of his power what were the things which stood behind his preaching, the answer was characteristically descriptive of what was felt by every listening hearer of his ministry: “All through, from the beginning, I have tried to be true to my colours—preaching Christ and Him crucified. The rock of my faith is the eternal Sonship of the Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. All flows from that. Religion without that is a pithless, marrowless concern. On that I rest my own eternal hopes; on the work done for me; on Christ as the Redeemer of men; the love of God in sending His Son, in giving Him as a sacrifice for the sins of the world; the love of Christ in executing His Father’s loving purpose; and the love and power of the Holy Ghost in applying the benefits which Christ secured for us.” These doctrines he never preached with bated breath. “The clarion voice gave no uncertain call.” A herald charged with a direct commission, he might fitly have begun and closed every one of his sermons with the words, “Thus saith the Lord.” 1 [Note: Dr. MacGregor of St. Cuthberts, 163.]

III

An Ambassador is a Diplomatist

1. The ambassador has to recommend his message. Everything, or almost everything, depends on address in the ambassador. What corresponds to this in the Christian minister? Why, the first element is character, and the second is character, and the third is character—the character and life of the minister of Christ, of the preacher of the gospel—a life of earnestness, of self-forgetfulness, of truthfulness, of singleness of purpose, of simplicity.

Diplomacy! What ideas do we not commonly connect with the word? Ambiguity, manœuvre, chicane, over-reaching, fraud. Not such must be our diplomacy. Only let people feel that we have a single heart and a single eye; only let them see that in all our words and all our acts we seek not theirs but them; not ourselves, but our work; not ourselves, but Christ Jesus our Lord; and the battle is already half won. Duplicity, untruthfulness, insincerity, self-assertion, self-seeking in any form—this it is which mars a man’s influence.

Remember how often Christ has said, “The Father has sent me. I am sent. I do the will of him who has sent me.”

These words have always been obscure to me.

Only now has the simple, clear, and joyous meaning of these words been revealed to me. I arrived at the comprehension of them through doubt and suffering.

Their meaning is this, that Christ has taught all men the life which He considered the true one for Himself. But He considers His life an embassy, a fulfilment of the will of Him who sent Him.

But the will of Him who sent is the rational (good) life of the whole world. Consequently, it is the business of life to carry the truth into the world.

If I am God’s messenger, my chief business does not only consist in fulfilling the commandments—they are only conditions under which I must fulfil the ambassadorship—but in living in such a way as to carry into the world with all means given me that truth which I know, that truth which is entrusted to me.

It may happen that I shall myself often be bad, that I shall be false to my mission; all this cannot for a moment destroy the meaning of my life: “To shine with that light which is in me, so long as I am able, so long as there is light in me.”

The conviction of the ambassadorship has the following practical effect upon me (I speak for myself and, I know, for others also).

Outside the physical necessities, in which I try to confine myself to the least, as soon as I am drawn to some activity,—speaking, writing, working,—I ask myself (I do not even ask, I feel it) whether with this work I serve Him who sent me. I joyously surrender myself to the work and forget all doubts and—fly, like a stone, and am glad that I am flying.

But if the work is not for Him who has sent me, it does not even attract me, I simply feel ennui, and I only try to get rid of it, I try to observe all the rules given for messengers. But this does not even happen. It seems to me that a man can live in such a way as to sleep, or in such a way as with his whole soul, with delight, to serve Him who sent him. 1 [Note: Tolstoy, Thoughts and Aphorisms (Works, xix. 100).]

2. The ambassador must use the most persuasive modes of speech. He must entreat and beseech those to whom he is sent. It is, indeed, a strange thing that men should need beseeching to take what is the greatest good, and indeed the only good, that the human soul can gain—reconciliation with God. But it is a fact that all of us need beseeching, and most of us who have come to Christ have come because some dear voice entreated. And it is the duty of every Christian to use every art of entreaty, every sanctified art of entreaty—argument, reasoning, pleading—but also literally beseeching, wooing, winning, pleading with men to be reconciled to God.

Entreating and beseeching—these are wonderful words to use in regard to God’s dealings with men. We can understand how fitting it is for man to beseech God for those Divine gifts without which he must perish. We can understand also that man should entreat God to be gracious unto him with strong crying and tears. But that God should beseech and Christ should entreat men to accept the greatest gifts is marvellous indeed. But such is the fact, such are the terms of a minister’s commission. “We beseech you on behalf of Christ, be ye reconciled to God.”

There was put up in the town of Bedford, some twenty-five or thirty years ago, a statue to the memory of John Bunyan. On the pedestal of the statue are engraved these words: “It had eyes lifted up to Heaven, the best of books in his hand, the law of truth was written upon its lips, the world was behind his back; it stood as if it pleaded with men, and a crown of gold did hang over its head.” This was the picture which Christian saw in the Interpreter’s house, and this is the picture which the sculptor has sought to embody in his bronze. “It stood as if it pleaded with men”—what better picture could we have of the great Apostle? Thrice in the one short passage ( 2 Corinthians 5:20 to 2 Corinthians 6:1) is the word of entreaty on his lips, with such tender solicitude did he urge upon his readers, and does he urge upon us, “Be ye reconciled to God.” 1 [Note: G. Jackson, Memoranda Paulina, 261.]

It was after midnight that Jamie rose and crept to Leeby’s bedside. Leeby was shaking the bed in her agony. Jess heard what they said.

“Leeby,” said Jamie, “dinna greet, an’ I’ll never do’t again.”

He put his arms round her, and she kissed him passionately.

“Oh, Jamie,” she said, “hae ye prayed to God to forgie ye?”

Jamie did not speak.

“If ye was to die this nicht,” cried Leeby, “an’ you no made it up wi’ God, ye wouldna gang to heaven. Jamie, I canna sleep till ye’ve made it up wi’ God.”

But Jamie still hung back. Leeby slipped from her bed, and went down on her knees.

“O God, O dear God,” she cried, “mak’ Jamie to pray to you!”

Then Jamie went down on his knees too, and they made it up with God together. 1 [Note: J. M. Barrie, A Window in Thrums, 174.]

3. The ambassador must use all dispatch in executing his commission. He must be urgent as well as persuasive. “He who has before his mental eye the Four Last Things,” says Newman, “will have the true earnestness, the horror, or the rapture, of one who witnesses a conflagration, or discerns some rich and sublime prospect of natural scenery. His countenance, his manner, his voice, speak for him, in proportion as his view has been vivid and minute. The great English poet has described this sort of eloquence when a calamity had befallen—

Yea, this man’s brow, like to a title-leaf,

Foretells the nature of a tragic volume.

Thou tremblest; and the whiteness in thy cheek

Is apter than thy tongue to tell thy errand. 2 [Note: J. H. Newman, Idea of a University.]

Bishop Paget writes from Priest Leys, to the Rev. G. S. Barrett, of Norwich, thanking him for his book, Religion in Daily Life:—

… “A friend of mine said to me once about my father-in-law [Dean Church] after an University sermon at Oxford: ‘Well, at all events he has one great quality as a preacher—he makes one thoroughly uncomfortable’;—and I am thankful for some thoroughly disturbing words of yours. And I am thankful, too, with all my heart, for the resolute gathering of all daily life, of all its relations and opportunities and tasks and phases and problems, into the light of our Lord’s teaching, to be ruled by His demand and estimated by His standard:—together with the recurring witness to the gladness of a disciplined life, the rest that is hidden in the strenuousness of obedience.” 3 [Note: Francis Paget, Bishop of Oxford, 143.]

Sometimes while preaching I have felt as if I could imitate that Roman ambassador who met a certain king, and told him that the Romans forbade him to advance farther. The king somewhat jested at the stern command of the Romans, but the ambassador stooped down, and with his stick drew a ring in the dust round the king, and said, “You must give your answer before you come out of that circle; for if you step over that line, the Romans will accept it as a signal of war.” I have sometimes felt, when preaching to this great congregation, as if there were some who had to decide for God or for the world before they stepped out of this place, for God’s ambassador had, as it were, drawn a line all round them, and said to them, “Choose ye this day whom ye will serve. If the Lord be God, follow him: but if Baal, then follow him.” 1 [Note: C. H. Spurgeon.]

Ambassadors for Christ

Literature

Aitken (W. H. M. H.), Mission Sermons, 272.

Cameron (J.), Sermons and Memoir, 13.

Cooper (T. J.), Love’s Unveiling, 49.

Fowler (G. H.), Things Old and New, 153.

Garbett (E.), The Soul’s Life, 34.

Henson (H. H.), Preaching to the Times, 174.

Horton (R. F.), How the Cross Saves, 101.

Jackson (G.), Memoranda Paulina, 260.

Lightfoot (J. B.), Ordination Addresses, 44.

Maclaren (A.), Expositions: 1 and 2 Corinthians, 380.

Meyer (F. B.), In the Beginning God, 163.

Price (A. C.), Fifty Sermons, iv. 33; viii. 361.

Randolph (B. W.), The Threshold of the Sanctuary, 30.

Robertson (A. T.), The Glory of the Ministry, 203.

Robertson (J.), Sermons and Expositions, 3.

Robinson (C. S.), Studies in the New Testament, 48.

Snell (B. J.), in The Sermon Year Book, ii. 1.

Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xix. (1873), No. 1124; lv. (1909), No. 3148.

Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), vi. (1869), No. 627.

Watson (F.), The Christian Life Here and Hereafter, 161.

Watson (J.), Preparing for Home, 238.

Church of England Magazine, x. 296 (E. Parker); xv. 166 (W. Stone); xx. 200 (W. H. Brett).

Homiletic Review, liii. 306 (R. Smith).

Verse 21

The Sinless Made Sin

Him who knew no sin he made to be sin on our behalf; that we might become the righteousness of God in him.— 2 Corinthians 5:21.

There are many to whom there is no dearer verse in the Book than this. But there are others who can only study it with knitted brows and puzzled minds. Sometimes perhaps they think they have glimpses of its meaning, but the momentary insight fades, and they are puzzled again. Their experience is like John Bunyan’s in his groping days; he sometimes for his comfort got “sweet glances” at this and kindred verses; “But these words were but hints, touches and short visits, though very sweet when present: only they lasted not; but, like to Peter’s sheet, and of a sudden were caught up from me to heaven again.” Yet even if we do not always fully understand, we can feel somewhat of the tremendous import, and therefore of the tremendous importance, of a verse like this; its daring paradox seems to point us into the centre of things, and its passionate intensity moves our hearts to wonder and prayer.

Perhaps the verse is made somewhat easier if we are careful to distinguish between two things—one the mannerism of St. Paul and the other the message that lies behind the mannerism. St. Paul’s style is often very direct, compressed and abrupt. And where some writer of looser method and less intense quality would put some word of connexion or of comparison, St. Paul dispenses with all connecting links and puts a bold identification. Take for the sake of clearness a parallel instance, which is all the clearer because it is two instances in one. In another place he says, “ Ye were sometime darkness,” not “in darkness,” not “children of darkness,” not “in bondage to darkness,” but by a bold and direct identification, “ye were darkness.” And then he goes on, “but now are ye light in the Lord”—not “ye have come into the light,” nor “ye have been brought to see the light”; but again by a bold and direct identification, “Now are ye light.” Perhaps such a parallel case throws light upon St. Paul’s method of expression here, where by an awfully daring identification, he speaks about Christ being made sin and ourselves being made righteousness.

With these introductory words we pass to the contents of the text. It contains two subjects.—

I. The Sinless made Sin

II. The Sinner become Righteousness.

I

The Sinless Made Sin

1. “Him who knew no sin.” That any man should be sinless was an idea quite alien to Jewish thought and belief; and therefore the emphasis given to it by St. Paul, and the absolutely unqualified way in which it is laid down in a letter addressed to a community containing not only friends but foes who would eagerly fasten on any doubtful statement, show that it must have been regarded as axiomatic among Christians at the early date when this Epistle was written.

It was Christ’s own verdict upon Himself. He whose words search our very hearts, and bring to light unsuspected seeds of badness, never Himself betrays the faintest consciousness of guilt. He challenges His enemies directly—“Which of you convinceth me of sin?” It is the verdict of all sincere human souls, as uttered by the soldier who watched His cross—“Truly this was a righteous man.” It is the verdict even of the great enemy who assailed Him again and again, and found nothing in Him, and whose agents recognized Him as the Holy One of God. Above all, it is the verdict of God. He was the beloved Son, in whom the Father was well pleased. For three-and-thirty years, in daily contact with the world and its sins, Christ lived and yet knew no sin. To His will and conscience it was a foreign thing. What infinite worth that sinless life possessed in God’s sight! When He looked down to earth it was the one absolutely precious thing. Filled full of righteousness, absolutely well-pleasing in His eyes, it was worth more to God than all the world beside.

Your friend asks, “When does Scripture mention the least impatience or any sin in the man Christ Jesus?” and then goes on to speak, with great horror, of my “awful notion” of admitting the germ of evil, etc., in Him. I presume this is a misconception of an expression which I have more than once used. Specially dwelling on the Redeemer’s sinlessness, I have shown how all the innocent feelings of our nature were in Him, but stopped on the verge which separates the innocent from the wrong. An inclination of human nature is not wrong—hunger, anger—but being gratified unduly, or in forbidden circumstances, it passes into sin. “Be ye angry, and sin not.” Legitimate anger was to stop short of sinful vindictiveness. Similarly, our Lord felt the weariness of life, and was anxious to have it done, amidst perpetual opposition of enemies and misconception of friends. “How am I straitened till it be accomplished?” “O faithless generation, how long shall I be with you? how long shall I suffer you?” There was no germ of sin in Christ; for sin is the acting of an evil will. Sin resides in the will, not in the natural appetites. There was no germ of sin in Him; but there were germs of feeling, natural and innocent, which show that He was in all points tempted like as we are. 1 [Note: Lift and Letters of F. W. Robertson, 143.]

2. All sinless as Christ was, God made Him to be sin on our behalf. What does this mean? Not exactly that He made Him a sin-offering on our behalf. The expression for a sin-offering is different, and the parallelism with righteousness in the next clause forbids that reference here. The sin-offering of the Old Testament can at most have pointed towards and dimly suggested so tremendous an utterance as this; and the profoundest word of the New Testament cannot be adequately interpreted by anything in the Old. When St. Paul says, “Him that knew no sin God made sin,” he must mean that in Christ on His cross, by Divine appointment, the extremest opposites met and became one—incarnate righteousness and the sin of the world. The sin is laid by God on the sinless One; its doom is laid on Him; His death is the execution of the Divine sentence upon it. When He dies, He has put away sin; it no longer stands, as it once stood, between God and the world. On the contrary, God has made peace by this great transaction; He has wrought out reconciliation: and its ministers can go everywhere with this awful appeal: “Receive the reconciliation: Him who knew no sin God hath made sin on our behalf, and there is henceforth no condemnation to them that are in Christ.”

Chrysostom makes the following comment on this verse: “What mind can represent these things? He made the righteous One a sinner, that He might make the sinners righteous. Rather this is not what he says, but something much greater. He says, not that He made Him a sinner, but that He made Him sin,—not only Him who had not sinned, but Him who did not know sin,—that we might be made (not righteous, but) righteousness, and the righteousness of God. For this is the righteousness of God, when we are justified, not by works (for in this case it is necessary that there should be no spot in them) but by grace in the blotting out of all sin. This does not permit us to be lifted up, for God freely gives us all and teaches us the greatness of the gift; because the former righteousness is that of the law and of works, but this is the righteousness of God.”

3. If we look at the verses that precede we shall see that St. Paul’s thoughts, as always when he treats of these great themes, were dwelling on the identification of Christ with sinful man. “One died for all, therefore all died,” he says ( 2 Corinthians 5:14); and those who are “in him” are new creatures, reconciled to God and living “not unto themselves, but unto him who for their sakes died and rose again.” Hence it would seem that the phrase “made to be sin” must be understood in the light of this thought of identification. We may, perhaps, paraphrase the words thus:—“Jesus Christ, though sinless, identified Himself with us in our sinfulness, in order that we, though sinful, might be able to identify ourselves with Him in His righteousness.”

Now this identification of Christ with sinful men is due to His intense sympathy. There was a time in our Lord’s life on earth, we are told, when He met a man coming out of the tombs, whom no man could bind, “no, not with chains.” That man was “possessed by an unclean spirit.” Of all men upon earth, you would say that he was the one between whom and the pure and holy Jesus there must have existed the most thorough-going repugnance. What Pharisee who shrank from the filthy and loathsome words of that maniac could have experienced one-thousandth part of the inward and intense loathing which Christ must have experienced for the mind that those words expressed? For it was into that He looked; that which He understood; that which in His inmost being He must have felt, which must have given Him a shock such as it could have given to no other. He must have felt the wickedness of that man in His inmost being. He must have been conscious of it, as no one else was or could be. Now, if we have ever had the consciousness, in a very slight degree, of evil in another man, has it not been, up to that degree, as if the evil were in ourselves? Suppose the offender were a friend, or a brother, or a child, has not this sense of personal shame, of the evil being ours, been proportionably stronger and more acute? However much we might feel ourselves called upon to act as judges, this perception still remained. It was not crushed even by the anger, the selfish anger, and the impatience of an injury done to us which, most probably, mingled with and corrupted the purer indignation and sorrow. Most of us confess with humiliation how little we have had of this lively consciousness of other men’s impurity, or injustice, or falsehood, or baseness. But we do confess it; we know, therefore, that we should be better if we had more of it. In our best moments we admire with a fervent admiration—in our worse, we envy with a wicked envy—those in whom we trace most of it. And we have had just enough of it to be certain that it belongs to the truest and most radical part of the character, not to its transient impulses. Suppose, then, this carried to its highest point. Cannot you, at a great distance, apprehend that Christ may have entered into the sin of that poor maniac’s spirit, may have had the most inward realization of it, not because it was like what was in Himself, but because it was utterly and intensely unlike? And yet are you not sure that this could not have been, unless He had the most perfect and thorough sympathy with this man, whose nature was transformed into the likeness of a brute, whose spirit had acquired the image of a devil? Does the co-existence of this sympathy and this antipathy perplex you? When we consider we see that they must dwell together in their highest degree, in their fullest power, in any one of whom we could say, “He is perfect; He is the standard of excellence.” Diminish by one atom the loathing and horror, or the fellowship and sympathy, and by that atom you lower the character; you are sure that you have brought it nearer to the level of your own low imaginations; that you have made it less like the Being who would raise you towards Himself. 1 [Note: F. D. Maurice.]

Love is a principle essentially vicarious in its own nature, identifying the subject with others, so as to suffer their adversities and pains, and taking on itself the burden of their evils. It does not come in officiously and abruptly and propose to be substituted in some formal and literal way that overturns all the moral relations of law and desert, but it clings to the evil and lost man as in feeling, afflicted for him, burdened by his ill deserts, incapacities, and pains, encountering gladly any loss or suffering for his sake. Approving nothing wrong in him, but faithfully reproving and condemning him in all sin, it is yet made sin—plunged, so to speak, into all the fortunes of sin, by its friendly sympathy. In this manner it is entered vicariously into sacrifice on his account. So naturally and easily does the vicarious sacrifice commend itself to our intelligence, by the stock ideas and feelings out of which it grows. 2 [Note: Horace Bushnell, The Vicarious Sacrifice, 42.]

There is a fine Welsh poem in which the poet imagines that the Sun, and all the attendant planets and satellites in his sphere, passed before the Great White Throne of the Creator; and as each passed, He smiled; but when Earth came to her turn, He blushed. We may couple with that a true story which was recently told of human sin and crime. A girl was brought before a board of guardians for immoral conduct of a very gross and aggravated kind; and, instead of showing any womanly shame, she was hard and brazen-faced. A lady who was on the board sat amongst the guardians, and her face was dyed crimson with shame. Though the girl showed no shame for herself, the lady felt it for her sin and her hardness; and as the girl caught sight of that pure, shame-cast face, she broke down in a flood of tears, and afterwards asked to be permitted to speak to her unknown friend. The incident led to the girl’s ultimate reclamation. And when, according to the poet, we are told that God blushed as the Earth passed beneath His eye, may not his suggestion be coupled with this story, and may not the blush that suffused the face of Christ be also reflected from the face of Earth? 3 [Note: F. B. Meyer, In the Beginning God, 163.]

I wandered forth to meet the rising sun.

To all infinity the snow lay bright

Beneath the dawn—a seamless garb of white

In God’s own looms immaculately spun.

Oh, spotless peace! Yet, ere an hour should run,

I knew that, with the broadening of the light,

The feet of man would mar that perfect sight,

And blot it wholly ere the day were done.

And, as I went, my heart was full of pain

To think of all man’s deeds that would deface,

Ere set of sun, the glistening garb of grace:

Of truth that would be blotted with pretence,

And of the treachery that would print its stain

Upon the virgin snow of innocence. 1 [Note: G. Thomas, The Wayside Altar, 32.]

4. Sympathy has always an element of vicariousness in it, the more as it rises to the highest form of spiritual identification. Sympathy, by common consent one of the holiest and most influential forces in social life, is indeed itself a vicarious emotion. Its presence implies that we are putting ourselves into another man’s place and participating in his experiences. By an act of imagination we bring our sensibilities into unison with kindred sensibilities in groups of sufferers, and so enter into their lot. There has been a mental substitution of our personality for that of a neighbour who is racked with pain, stricken by tragic bereavement, or wallowing in want and abject privation. It is quite possible we may suffer as much as the ill-fated victim himself, or even more, if his temperament chance to be slow and stolid. By an act of mental transmigration we share the dire conditions of another, and the process may be momentary or persistent. This act of thinking ourselves into another’s place may be so vivid that his trouble will continue to haunt us for years. Who will venture to deny that there is the dawn of a great virtue in every generous impulse which compels us to put ourselves at the standpoint of a sufferer? Sympathy when divorced from wise, practical action may cease to be a virtue. It may pass into hypocrisy, and be cherished because of the sense of spurious self-approval to which it ministers. But all the same we are bound to recognize that it is the source of altruism, and that the sincere emotion is one of the great healing forces at work in a woe-begone world.

What we call the vicarious sacrifice of Christ is nothing strange as regards the principle of it, no superlative, unexampled, and therefore unintelligible grace. It only does and suffers, and comes into substitution for, just what any and all love will according to its degree. And in this view, it is not something higher in principle than our human virtue knows and which we ourselves are never to copy or receive, but it is to be understood by what we know already, and is to be more fully understood by what we are to know hereafter, when we are complete in Christ. Nothing is wanting to resolve the vicarious sacrifice of Jesus but the commonly known, always familiar principle of love, accepted as the fundamental law of duty, even by mankind. Given the universality of love, the universality of vicarious sacrifice is given also. Here is the centre and deepest spot of good, or goodness, conceivable. At this point we look into heaven’s eye itself, and read the meaning of all heavenly grace. 1 [Note: Horace Bushnell, The Vicarious Sacrifice, 48.]

There is an authentic and beautiful little story told graphically by Dr. Hanna—the biographer and the son-in-law of Dr. Chalmers. “In a household which enjoyed all the benefits of high culture and Christian care one of the children committed a grievous and unexpected fault—he told a falsehood to cover a petty theft. Rebuke and punishment were administered, carried further than they had ever been before, but without effect. The offender was not awakened to any real or deep sorrow for his offence. The boy’s insensibility quite overcame his father. Sitting in the same room with his sullen and obstinate child, he bent his head upon his hand and burst into a flood of tears. For a moment or two the boy looked on in wonder; he then crept gradually nearer and nearer to his sobbing parent, and at last got up on his father’s knees, asking in a low whisper why it was that he was weeping so. He was told the reason. It wrought like a spell upon his young heart; the sight of his father suffering so bitterly on his account was more than he could bear. He flung his little arms round his father and wept along with him. That father never needed to correct his child again for any like offence.”

5. Here, however, it is necessary to meet two common mis-apprehensions. On the one hand, it is often maintained that for any sin, however great, the word of forgiveness and reconciliation is enough—a man needs no more; while on the other hand it is averred that the deed once done can never be undone, that the sinner must bear the consequences of his sin, and, what is more terrible, remain for ever associated with the memory of it. As F. W. H. Myers in “Saint Paul” says:

Yes, Thou forgivest, but, with all forgiving,

Canst not renew mine innocence again:

Make Thou, O Christ, a dying of my living,

Purge from the sin but never from the pain.

(1) Why can there not be forgiveness without sacrifice? The answer is this: Because of that moral necessity in the Nature of God which calls for the condemnation of sin. It cannot be necessary to defend with argument the position of such a moral necessity in the Nature of God as calls for the condemnation of sin. To some extent we are conscious of that moral necessity in ourselves, not only in moments of disgust and loathing following an evil indulgence, but also, and far more surely, in moments of spiritual strength and vision, when, lifted near to God, we have discerned, as from His side, the goodness of good and the sinfulness of sin. To some extent we are conscious of that moral necessity as confessed in the life of the community and of the nation in its undying struggle after public righteousness, its eternal condemnation of public sin. But when we lift our thought to God the Righteous, the existence of a moral necessity in His Nature calling for the condemnation of sin becomes an axiom, a self-evident proposition transcending demonstration. Apart from it, God the Righteous is unthinkable. For there are but four attitudes possible in any being toward sin—ignorance, indifference, consent, condemnation. God the Righteous cannot be ignorant; God the Righteous cannot be indifferent; God the Righteous cannot consent; God the Righteous must condemn, must, under the moral necessity of His Being. But how is condemnation to be expressed? In two ways only is it expressible to man on the part of God—through precept and through penalty. When the first fails, there remains only the second. God condemned sin by precept to the unfallen world: “Thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” The wrath of God was revealed from heaven against all sin, all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men. The judgment of God was known, that they which commit such things are worthy of death. The condemnation of sin through precept was universally published; it was written in the natural conscience, it was spoken in the Law. God was true to the moral necessity of His Nature in openly condemning sin and warning against it. In vain; the freedom of man challenged the precept of God. “By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.” The condemnation of sin by penalty became, therefore, in the failure of precept, a moral necessity in the nature of God the Righteous. He could not do otherwise. There is nothing of passion, nothing of revenge, nothing of hatred, nothing of sanguinary desire in God’s punishment of sin. The punishment of sin is the condemnation of sin by penalty, its condemnation by precept having failed. Therefore to suggest forgiveness without sacrifice is to suggest a knowledge of sin on God’s part unaccompanied by His condemnation of it.

The fact of what is meant by original sin is as mysterious and inexplicable as the origin of evil, but it is obviously as much a fact. There is a fault and vice in the race which, given time, as surely develops into actual sin as our physical constitution, given at birth, does into sickness and physical death. It is of this inherited tendency to sin in our nature, looked upon in the abstract and without reference to concrete cases, that I suppose the ninth Article speaks. How can we suppose that such a nature looks in God’s eyes, according to the standard of perfect righteousness which we also suppose to be God’s standard and law? Does It satisfy that standard? Can He look with neutrality on its divergence from His perfect standard? What is His moral judgment of it as a subject for moral judgment? What He may do to cure it, to pardon it, to make allowances for it, in known or unknown ways, is another matter, about which His known attributes of mercy alone may reassure us; but the question is, How does He look upon this fact of our nature in itself, that without exception it has this strong efficacious germ of evil within it, of which He sees all the possibilities and all the consequences? Can He look on it, even in germ, with complacency or indifference? Must He not judge it and condemn it as in itself, because evil, deserving condemnation? I cannot see what other answer can be given but one, and this is what the Article says. 1 [Note: Lift and Letters of Dean Church, 248.]

(2) But there is the feeling already hinted at, namely, that every sinner feels himself to be permanently associated with his own evil deeds. Suppose that a man has committed a great sin, such, for instance, as the betrayal of a trust. If that sin becomes known to society the sinner will be punished, not only by the censures of his fellows but by their remembrance of his action. He will always be pointed at as the man who did such and such things in such and such a year. No matter how much he tries, he will never wholly live it down, if he has really been guilty of the offence. But suppose that the world does not know of the misdeed. Will his experience be very different? If he is a man of low sordid nature he will probably suffer no pangs of remorse, but if he is a man of high temper, with capacity for nobler things, he will discover that, as Milton says,

The mind is its own place, and in itself

Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.

It is noteworthy that the sense of guilt, as we have now stated it, is the product of the influence of Jesus Christ in the world. Nothing precisely like it is to be found apart from that influence. As Professor Van Dyke says, “It was Jesus of Nazareth who illuminated the moral evil in the world most deeply and clearly. He showed its spring, its secret workings, and the power which lies behind it.” Thus, to state the point briefly, Jesus, who showed to mankind the foulness of sin, must also be the Person who can deal with guilt, otherwise it were better that He had never come at all. As a matter of fact, this is just what Christians have always believed their Master was able to do. The Christian doctrine of Atonement is the only remedy that has ever been propounded to the world to deal with the psychological fact of guilt. It satisfies a Christ-awakened need. It has been verified by experience during nineteen hundred years. The belief that Christ by His sufferings has wrought out our redemption has been the secret that has lifted thousands of our fellow-men out of the slough of sin and made a holy life possible. Men are not saved by fancies. There must therefore be somewhere in the doctrine a truth that has shown itself able to free men from the thraldom of sin and the worst of its consequences.

In Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler’s interesting book, Concerning Isabel Carnaby, there occurs a conversation between a godly father and a noble son. I may here venture to give an extract from the same.

“The teaching of modern philosophy is that what is done is done, and what we have written we have written; and that there is no atonement for the deed once accomplished, and no washing out of the handwriting against us. But I have not so learnt of Christ.”

“Then do you believe that what is done can ever be undone?” asked Paul. “Surely that is impossible.”

“I do not wish to prophesy smooth things,” replied his father, “nor to sprinkle the way of life with rose-water. I know that if a man breaks the law of Nature he will be punished to the uttermost, for there is no forgiveness in Nature. I know that if a man breaks the laws of society he will find neither remission nor mercy, for there is no forgiveness in society; but I believe that if a man breaks the law of God his transgression can be taken away as though it had never been, for ‘there is forgiveness with thee that thou mayest be feared.’ ”

“It is a grand gospel that you preach, father, and seems almost too good to be true.”

“Nothing is too good to be true; the truth is the best of everything.” 1 [Note: R. J. Campbell, A Faith for To-day, 277.]

II

The Sinner Become Righteousness

Having identified Christ with sin, the Apostle goes on in a somewhat similar way to identify believing souls with righteousness. “That we might become the righteousness of God in him.” The usual interpretation of these words applies them to the acceptance of the believing soul—his forgiveness, his justification. That of course is included, but it is also transcended. Just as on the one hand it takes a whole Christ, and not merely a portion of His history, to fill out the great meaning of the words “He was made to be sin,” so it requires a whole Christian experience, and not merely the initial stages of it, to fill out the full meaning of these words, “that we might become righteousness in him.” As on the one hand you cannot find such a commentary upon sin as you find in the experience of Christ, so on the other hand you cannot find such an illustration of righteousness as in the souls in whom the work of Christ bears its fruits, beginning and growing and going on to perfection. Just as Christ was treated in this world as if He were sin, so His people are treated here and hereafter as if they were righteousness.

1. As Christ has identified Himself with us in our sinfulness, so we are identified with Him in His righteousness. Not, again, by any legal fiction; but as, by the purity and love and sorrow of a true mother, a wandering son may be rescued, broken down in penitence and led to trust in God and in his mother, when he cannot trust himself, so the cross of Jesus has ever been the supreme agency whereby God comes close to men, breaks down their pride, heals their self-distrust, and assures them that the love and self-sacrifice and obedience of Christ are all for them.

One day, as I was passing in the field, and that too with some dashes on my conscience, fearing lest yet all was not right, suddenly this sentence fell upon my soul, “Thy righteousness is in heaven”; and methought withal, I saw with the eyes of my soul Jesus Christ at God’s right hand. There, I say, was my righteousness; so that wherever I was, or whatever I was doing, God could not say of me, “He wants my righteousness,” for that was just before Him. I also saw, moreover, that it was not my good frame of heart that made my righteousness better, nor my bad frame that made my righteousness worse: for my righteousness was Jesus Christ Himself, “the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever.” Now did my chains fall off my legs indeed. I was loosed from my afflictions and irons, my temptations also fled away; so that from that time those dreadful Scriptures of God left off to trouble me. 1 [Note: Bunyan, Grace Abounding.]

2. In whatever way our Lord was made sin, we are made righteousness. As sin was placed on Him, and He was reckoned with as though it were His own, so His righteousness is reckoned to us, who are in Him by faith, as though it were indeed ours. Christ’s identification with us in our sin filled Him with untold anguish; so let our identification with Him in His glorious righteousness fill us with unspeakable joy. And if it is indeed ours, let us dismiss our fears; let us dare to stand in the very light of God’s holiness, accepted in the Beloved; let us greatly rejoice in the Lord, and our souls be joyful in the Lord, since He has covered us with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decketh himself with ornaments, and a bride adorneth herself with jewels.

An error of mysterious and alarming sound was charged upon Dr. Crisp—namely, the permutation of persons, or commutation of persons. If the perplexed reader inquires with wonder what this heresy can be, a historian tells him, it is “actually to make a Saviour of the sinner, and a sinner of the Saviour.” I have read Dr. Crisp’s sermons and there is no declaration in them which is as strong as the following by Luther: “Faith without adulteration must be taught, because by it thou mayest be so cemented with Christ that out of thee and Him there may be made one person that cannot be separated, but eternally coheres; that with confidence thou mayest be able to say, I am Christ—that is, Christ’s righteousness is mine, His victory is mine, His existence is mine, etc. And, conversely, Christ may say, I am that sinner—that is, his sins are Mine, his death is Mine, etc., because he adheres to Me, and I to him. We have been joined by faith into one flesh and bone ( Ephesians 5:30), we are members of Christ’s body, of His flesh and of His bones. This faith unites me to Christ more closely than a husband is joined to his wife. So this faith is not a trifling quality, but its magnitude is such that it obscures and entirely sweeps away those most senseless dreams of sophistical charity, concerning merits, concerning worth or qualities of our own, etc.” Crisp’s alleged heresy is thus the Apostle’s doctrine that “Christ was made sin,” and that believers are “the righteousness of God”—the old scriptural doctrine taught by the Reformers, by “judicious Hooker,” and others. 1 [Note: D. C. A. Agnew, The Theology of Consolation, 234.]

3. The identification is always in Christ. “In him,” says the Apostle. These striking and original words show that St. Paul means much more than the imputation of human sin to Christ, and the imputation of Divine righteousness to men; the sin is not merely regarded as laid on Him, nor the righteousness as conferred on us, but there is in both cases an inner identification, as it were—of Him with sin, and of us with righteousness. This, then, is the heart of the gospel, according to St. Paul: this explains the reconciliation on which throughout the paragraph he has so frequently and earnestly insisted. We are acquitted, justified, in Christ; but, in order to this, He had to be made sin. We could never have been identified with Him and His righteousness, had He not first been identified with us and our sin. We climb the heights because He descended to the depths.

We can conceive a vast society of men wholly obedient to the will of God, living in reverent adoration, working with lowly love; we can conceive this society composed of those who have made a sorrowful trial of what life out of harmony with God is, and who, having sinned, have been redeemed; in such a society all that is good and beautiful in our present human life is secured and made permanent, all that is base and vile is excluded; death has lost its meaning, because it is understood that these beings are immortal, and if they pass from world to world, gently translated they may fade out of sight, but, no longer identified with a material and earthly organism, they are no longer subjected to the law of decay. Thrilled through and through with the unimpeded life of God, moving in the faultless harmony of that one holy and loving will, they range through the endless spheres and systems of existence, ever learning, ever wondering, ever worshipping, blessed infinitely as in brief and vanishing moments of the present life some of us have been blessed. The yearning which this order of things can create but never satisfy is progressively satisfied. The dreams of the good are realized—

The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard, The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky.

Now this dream of a sinless humanity, made out of this sinful humanity redeemed, this dream which haunts the imagination of Plato, Sir Thomas More, and the Utopian prophets of all ages, this dream which, materialized, inspires all Socialist reformers, this dream which evolutionists retain in the cold and comfortless form of a distant and vastly improved humanity in which we have no part except that of dying for it, this dream is the sober expectation of the Apostles. They are convinced that it will be; they are also convinced that they hold in their hands the truth and the power which will ultimately, however slowly, realize it.

How far off the final triumph of Christ may be when sin shall be destroyed for ever and death itself shall die, it is not ours to know. Long has been the strife, intense the agony, and the whole creation is groaning and travailing in pain together until now; and so will continue till Christ be formed in every human soul, and in Him all are made alive. Then will the prayer of ages be answered and God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Towards this sublime consummation, the unchallenged reign of God the Father, and the uninterrupted harmony of the human race with its Creator, all things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, unceasingly conspire. We have seen how far from primeval fire vapour and stellar dust, through immeasurable geologic eras this process swept forward till the earth became prepared for that august, mysterious guest called Life, and on through that endless kaleidoscopic succession of ever rising organisms till God-like man appeared, and still on through man’s chequered career till Christ Himself became incarnate to remake Mankind, to save that which was lost, and to turn this sin-blighted earth into Heaven. For this He is now energizing in the souls of men, and we cannot doubt that the ultimate survival of the Christ-type is assured. By Divine right of the fittest it must prevail. Thus, at long last, shall the Divine heart be satisfied, and a saved and wondering universe behold—no longer in a mirror darkly, but face to face—the Unveiled Glory. 1 [Note: L. W. Caws, The Unveiled, Glory, 205.]

With this ambiguous earth

His dealings have been told us. These abide:

The signal to a maid, the human birth,

The lesson, and the young Man crucified.

But not a star of all

The innumerable host of stars has heard

How He administered this terrestrial ball.

Our race have kept their Lord’s entrusted Word.

Of His earth-visiting feet

None knows the secret, cherished, perilous,

The terrible, shamefast, frightened, whispered, sweet,

Heart-shattering secret of His way with us.

No planet knows that this

Our wayside planet, carrying land and wave,

Love and life multiplied, and pain and bliss,

Bears, as chief treasure, one forsaken grave.

Nor, in our little day,

May His devices with the heavens be guessed,

His pilgrimage to thread the Milky Way

Or His bestowals there be manifest.

But in the eternities,

Doubtless we shall compare together, hear

A million alien Gospels, in what guise

He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear.

O, be prepared, my soul!

To read the inconceivable, to scan

The million forms of God those stars unroll

When, in our turn, we show to them a Man_1:1 [Note: Alice Meynell, Poems, 114.]

4. Now out of all this two great lights flash forth—one upon God, and one upon ourselves.

(1) Here is a great light upon God. For it is God who does it all: He hath made Him to be sin. There used to be a way of stating the sacrifice of Christ as if it were something flung at the feet of an angry God to persuade Him to change His mind. But God did not need to change His mind. The ministry of reconciliation began in His own heart before ever it expressed itself in the perfect Life or the wondrous Death. It was necessary that the world should be redeemed by sacrifice; but the sacrifice that redeemed us was the sacrifice of God, and the price that bought us was the gift of God. “He hath made him to be sin”; and when we see Christ identifying Himself with our sinful race, even to the uttermost of all that was involved in that, we know that the heart of God is thus entangled in our sorrow, and the hands of God are stretched out to save us from our sin. That is why this message is so melting, so subduing, so morally magnificent. It was of the message of this verse that Goethe said, “There is nothing diviner than this.” And there is indeed nothing diviner than this—that God Himself should stoop to share the lot of His creatures, even to the deepest that was involved in their sin, and should raise them to His own glory and immortality. This is a God we can worship. His nature and His name is Love.

When you speak to me of the love of God, I always feel sure that you mean a love which includes and implies righteousness, and I had hoped that you would interpret me in the same way. In fact I would say that, in contrasting the fatherhood of God with His judgeship, I meant the first to represent a righteousness which seeks to communicate itself, and the second a righteousness which seeks to vindicate itself, and I intended to say that the second was put in action in subserviency to the first. 2 [Note: Letters of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, ii. 183.]

For me,

I have my own church equally:

And in this church my faith sprang first!…

In youth I looked to these very skies,

And probing their immensities,

I found God there, His visible power;

Yet felt in my heart, amid all its sense

Of the power, an equal evidence

That His love, there too, was the nobler dower.

For the loving worm within its clod

Were diviner than a loveless god

Amid His worlds, I will dare to say …

Love which, on earth, amid all the shows of it,

Has ever been seen the sole good of life in it,

The love, ever growing there, spite of the strife in it;

Shall arise, made perfect, from death’s repose of it.

And I shall behold Thee, face to face,

O God, and in Thy light retrace

How in all I loved here, still wast Thou!

Whom pressing to, then, as I fain would now,

I shall find as able to satiate

The love, Thy gift, as my spirit’s wonder

Thou art able to quicken and sublimate,

With this sky of Thine, that I now walk under,

And glory in Thee for, as I gaze

Thus, thus! Oh, let men keep their ways

Of seeking Thee in a narrow shrine—

Be this my way! And this is mine! 1 [Note: Browning, Christmas Eve.]

(2) Here also is a light upon ourselves and our own possibilities. We want to make something of ourselves—What shall it be? Shall we allow God to make us—righteousness? To make us the righteousness of God? To give us this Divine standing and hope and victory? We must bestir our hearts to receive the message, to take the gift, to live the life; since, because Christ has lived and died, all things are possible. “That we might be made …” What hope, what promise, what victory lies there!

I have somewhere read of an American statesman who sinned a certain sin. On his death-bed he asked for a dictionary; he wanted, he said, to look up the word “Remorse.” The physician told him there was no dictionary in the room. “Take a card then,” said he, “and write on it the word that best symbolizes my soul. Write it in large letters. Underscore it—the word Remorse.” It was done as he desired, and after he had gazed upon it for a time, he handed the card again to the doctor. “What shall I do with it?” said the puzzled physician. “Put it in your pocket,” was the reply; “and when I am gone, take it out and look at it, and say,’ That is the soul of John Randolph.’ ” That is what some men have made of themselves—remorse, living remorse, incarnate remorse. But God desires that we should be made something better than that: He desires that we should be made righteousness. It is possible.

Just and holy is Thy name,

I am all unrighteousness;

False and full of sin I am,

Thou art full of truth and grace. 1 [Note: J. M. E. Ross.]

The Sinless Made Sin

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