Bible Commentaries
John 1

Verse 1

The Word

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.— John 1:1.

1. The text seems speculative and hard to understand. But St. John wrote the Fourth Gospel with a practical aim, and in language which he meant to be intelligible. What his aim was he states in the end of the twentieth chapter—the chapter with which his Gospel originally ended (he himself seems to have added the twenty-first at a later time). He says: “These are written, (1) that ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and (2) that believing ye may have life in his name.” No doubt his language was more familiar to his Jewish readers than it is to us. But we ought to know the Old Testament, and although the special expression he uses here, Logos or Word, is not found exactly in this way in the Old Testament, the idea is there. For in the Old Testament God constantly makes Himself known and seen. Now, “No man hath seen God at any time.” It is therefore not God the Father; but He whom the Father sanctifies and sends into the world—it is He who appeared to Abraham, to Moses, to Joshua, to Samuel. This Person may well be called God’s Word, since His mission is always to reveal the will of God, to speak for God, to speak as God. By and by this Person, whom the Old Testament writers call the Angel of the Lord, comes into the world to dwell there for a season, taking human flesh, and He is called not the Word or Revealer now, but Jesus the Saviour, for He is come to save His people from their sins.

2. St. John works backwards. He came to know the Word first as Jesus. He knew Him as a Man among men. He went with Him to the marriage feast. He saw Him sit weary on the wayside well. He was near when the cry, “O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me,” rent the silent night. He saw Him nailed to the cross. He knew that He remained there till He was dead. But he also at that wedding feast saw Him turn the water into wine. He heard Him say, “If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink.” He caught the prayer, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do,” and the promise, “To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise.” He started thus with a man among men, but a Man who was more than men, and as soon as He had ascended into heaven, John and the rest felt that the first thing for them was to know and to make known who He was. They had the facts of the life of Jesus on the earth. They saw that that human life had passed into the eternal. This, then, was what they learned first, that it had come out of the eternal. It looked before as well as after. The Jesus whom they knew had been before they knew Him. He had been the Revealer of God to men in Old Testament times, the Logos, the Word. He had been the Agent in the creation (which of itself is simply a revelation). He had been with the Father before the creation of the world. “In the beginning was the Word.”

3. St. John started with Jesus of Nazareth, and he has reached this: “In the beginning was the Word.” But he cannot rest in that. Jesus was the Word in Old Testament times and earlier, because He uttered God’s will. He came into the world to utter it. But He did not separate Himself from God by coming into the world. You must not say that the Word is here and God is yonder. If He could thus be separated from God, He could not perfectly reveal God. He must be in closest proximity, in proximity of heart and will. He must rather be God to men than represent God to men. And so the Old Testament writers speak of the Angel of the Lord, and next moment let the Angel of the Lord say, “ I am the God of Abraham.” And in like manner St. John says that all the while Jesus was the Word and was coming into the world to reveal God’s will to men, He was “with God.” St. John caught the thought from Jesus, “As thou, Father, art in me and I in thee.” Indeed, St. John caught all these thoughts from Jesus, and we may trace them all from words of Christ he himself has reported.

4. Starting from Jesus of Nazareth, St. John has now reached two thoughts: Jesus is the pre-existent Word, and though He was continually revealing God’s will to the world, He never left the Father’s presence. He was more than in constant communication with God. He did more than come and go between the earth and heaven. He was always with God. He was always, not only doing God’s will, but willing it. And that leads inevitably to a third thought. If the will of the Word and of God is one, then the Word and God are themselves one. There is God the Father, whom no man hath seen or can see. There is also God the Son, who constantly made Himself seen and known from the beginning, and in St. John’s own day had flesh and dwelt among men, so that St. John and the rest could say of Him: “We have heard, we have seen with our eyes, we have looked upon, and our hands have handled.” And these two are one God. It is a long way to go from Jesus of Nazareth, “whose father and mother we know”; but the way was open and unobstructed, and Jesus Himself showed it. St. John, who saw Jesus nailed to the cross on Calvary by rough Roman soldiers, says at last, “In the beginning was (Jesus) the Word, and (Jesus) the Word was with God, and (Jesus) the Word was God.” And he writes these things “that believing ye may have life in his name.”

I

The Word

1. Let us look in at this writer’s workshop, and watch him choosing his themes and even at times his very language: or rather let us listen to the religious teacher as, with disciples around him, he proceeds to recall, and probably dictate to one of them, his reminiscences of his Lord, and, before doing so, tries to show the central importance of the life which he is going to illustrate.

That life, he has come to see more and more, was no accident in history; each saying, each action had grown in meaning as he had watched each prophecy fulfilled, and seen the power of each act repeated in the experience of the Christian Church; the life was of eternal significance; it came from God and told of God in every detail; it was the act of that God who had ever been revealing Himself: it was a link, the most important link, in a chain of continuous revelation. Now Jewish and Greek and Christian thought alike had long been feeling after some means of expressing this method of revelation, some Being who could mediate between the infinite God and the finite creature, who could act as God’s organ in creation and in providence. And the writer had seen Jesus Christ control creation, he had known His care for himself and for the Church; of this, at least, he is sure, that, however that Being is to be defined, He is one with Jesus Christ.

What title then shall he choose out of the many descriptions and definitions which had been given of Him? Among these many he has practically a choice of two alternatives, which stood out prominently from among all other titles. Shall he call Him “The Wisdom of God” or shall he call Him “The Word of God”? There was much to be said for either. “The Wisdom” would recall at once the whole Wisdom literature of the Old Testament; and it would have support in our Lord’s own words ( Matthew 11:19; Luke 7:35; Luke 11:49). But it would have this drawback; it would suggest primarily the thought of a quality immanent in the mind of God, the wisdom of the Divine architect, the plan in His mind on which all material things were modelled. But our writer’s aim is rather to show how God has been revealed, interpreted to man; his thought is not primarily that the world had been the perfect work of a wise Creator and Jesus Christ the climax of His work, but that ever since creation there had been a revealing of God to man, and that Jesus Christ had been the fullest organ of that Revelation. The Word, then, will be the better title for his purpose.

2. This title will have many advantages. It will lead up naturally to the stress which the writer wants to lay on the words of Jesus as being spirit and life, and on His discourses as being the utterances of Him who claimed to be the Truth: they will be sayings of One who had already been described as “the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God.” And “the Word” also has its roots in the Old Testament; it recalls each “God said” of creation: it recalls the Psalmist’s summary of creation, and his use and that of the Apocryphal writers of “God’s Word” as the agent of His Providence in healing and delivering His chosen people: above all, it will take up the Rabbinic reverence, which when speaking of God’s manifestation of Himself to man substituted for God the title “the Word of God,” “the memra.” In using it, he will be speaking of the same Being of whom the Jewish Rabbis thought when they spoke of God protecting Noah by “his Word,” making a covenant between Abraham and “his Word,” of Moses bringing forth the people to meet “the Word of God” at Mount Sinai. There was one further reason why the title would help his purpose; for through Philo its Greek philosophical meaning had become current throughout the eastern religious world, and even in Christian circles; much of the language associated with it had been adopted by St. Paul and the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews; and yet there were striking points in which the Philonian doctrine might mislead Christian disciples: he would be able to guard against this, while he stated shortly, clearly, authoritatively, what “the Word” really was. 1 [Note: W. Lock, The Bible and Christian Life, 25.]

A word is the true expression of him who utters it. We have various ways of communicating with one another, but the chief of all these ways is by speech. Within this intricate apparatus, which we call the body, sits a tenant who is wholly distinct from the body. This tenant thinks, wills, feels—lives a life separate from the senses—a life sacred and invisible. How shall this tenant communicate with the outer world? By speech: alphabets and words come to his help; the lip is taught their use, and then the sacred tenant within the body can utter itself to the world. So St. John conceives God as cut off from man by many barriers; “no man hath seen God at any time, nor can see him.” How shall God communicate with the creature He has made? He does so by Christ who is His Word. Christ is the very mind of God translating itself into symbols which man can comprehend. As your word is yourself uttered, so Christ is God uttered. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” 2 [Note: W. J. Dawson, The Reproach of Christ, 23.]

II

The Nature of the Word

1. In the Prologue to St. John’s Gospel we have a principle by which we may harmonize the facts of Christ’s life. St. John gives us a key which proves itself by fitting into all the wards of the lock. What Christ did and said becomes explicable only by knowing what Christ is.

2. The first sentence of the Gospel offers a perfect example of the stately symmetry by which the whole narrative is marked. The three clauses of which it consists are set side by side (… and … and …); the Subject ( the Word) is three times repeated; and the substantive verb three times occupies the same relative position. The symmetry of form corresponds with the exhaustiveness of the thought. The three clauses contain all that it is possible for man to realize as to the essential nature of the Word in relation to time, and mode of being, and character: He was (1) in the beginning: He was (2) with God: He was (3) God. At the same time these three clauses answer to the three great moments of the Incarnation of the Word declared in John 1:14. He who “was God,” became flesh: He who “was with God,” tabernacled among us (cf. 1 John 1:2): He who “was in the beginning,” became (in time). 1 [Note: Westcott.]

3. The three propositions are brief, having a deeply marked character like oracles. The first indicates the eternity of the Logos; the second expresses profoundly the idea of His personality; the third His divinity.

i. His Eternity

“In the beginning was the Word.”

1. The phrase “in the beginning” carries us back to Genesis 1:1, which necessarily fixes the sense of the beginning. Here, as there, “the beginning” is the initial moment of time and creation; but with this difference, that Moses dwells on that which starts from the point, and traces the record of Divine action from the beginning (cf. 1 John 1:1; 1 John 2:13), while St. John lifts our thoughts beyond the beginning and dwells on that which “was” when time, and with time finite being, began its course. Already when “God created the heaven and the earth,” “the Word was.” The “being” of the Word is thus necessarily carried beyond the limits of time, though the pre-existence of the Word is not definitely stated. The simple affirmation of existence in this connection suggests a loftier conception than that of pre-existence; which is embarrassed by the idea of time.

2. The Lord Himself had spoken of His life with the Father “before the world was” ( John 17:5; John 17:24): so the Evangelist must trace it back as far as creation. But his actual phrase recalls the Jewish description of Wisdom created “in the beginning” ( Proverbs 8:22); and the words are thrown in the forefront of the sentence that they may recall the opening words of the Book of Genesis: “ In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth.” The life which he is going to describe affects all creation.

3. The “beginning” described by St. John in the Prologue to his Gospel is manifestly the absolute beginning, the origination of all being or existence in the universe in which we find ourselves. It is a logical rather than a chronological conception; the “all things” included in it, in their successive “becomings,” may have had no actual beginning at all in time; we cannot conceive of them as without beginning in thought, or without causal beginning. In whatever sense “being” is eternal, it is not without principium, without some “principle” of being. The “beginning” is causative and constitutive, and not merely initiative.

ii. His Personality

“And the Word was with God.”

1. The Word, already said to have been “in the beginning,” is now stated to have been “with God.” That is, not “with,” in the sense of together with, or besides; but “with” in the sense of abiding with, as when we say, “I have it with me,” or “He is abiding with us”—“with God,” so as to be in that place (if we may so speak) where God especially was present; so as to be at home with Him and inseparable from Him. Our Evangelist elsewhere expresses this in other words: “The only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father”: in His closest counsels, delighting in Him, and in being the acting expression of His must holy will.

2. To this has ever been referred by the Church that sublime description in the Book of Proverbs, chap. 8, where Wisdom says, “The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When there were no depths, I was brought forth; when there were no fountains abounding with water. Before the mountains were settled, before the hills was I brought forth: while as yet he had not made the earth, nor the fields, nor the highest part of the dust of the world. When he prepared the heavens, I was there: when he set a compass upon the face of the depth: when he established the clouds above: when he strengthened the fountains of the deep: when he gave to the sea his decree, that the waters should not pass his commandment: when he appointed the foundations of the earth. Then I was by him as one brought up with him; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him; rejoicing in the habitable part of his earth; and my delights were with the sons of men.”

3. Clearly, no interpretation of these words fathoms their depth, or makes worthy sense, which does not recognize that the Word is a person. If there had been no distinct personality the Apostle might still have said, “The Word was God,” but he could not have said, “The Word was with God.” “The Word was God,” says Dr. Owen, “in the unity of the Divine essence, and the Word was with God in the distinct personal subsistence.” Jesus did not claim to be the Father, but He did claim to be one with the Father—“I and my Father are one” ( John 10:30). We are encouraged to pray to the Father in the name of the Son ( John 15:16), but there could be no reason for this if there were no distinction of personality between the Father and the Son.

4. The expression, “The Word was with God,” has been rendered, “The Word was towards God.” This is a very suggestive rendering. It is significant of delight in God. The Being of the Son was attracted by the Being of the Father, as some flowers are attracted by the sun. Thus it is with those who are in Christ. Sin separates men from God, but Christ brings them back to Him. In Christ they are reconciled to God ( 2 Corinthians 5:18), and those who are reconciled enjoy the privilege of fellowship with God ( 1 John 1:3). The passage has also been rendered, “The Word was at home with God.” “No restraint,” says Jones, “No reserve, no shyness, but open, free, confidential fellowship for ever” (see Proverbs 8:22-31). How different it was with Adam when he sinned! He was afraid of the presence of God, and sought to get away from it ( Genesis 3:10).

God could be known in nature, in conscience, in history; but if He was to be thoroughly known, He must be known in a person. So Christ stands the central fount of personality, who explains, not my gifts, my attainments, my knowledge, my capacities, but me, that which lies beyond these, uses them and gives them meaning and coherence. 1 [Note: The Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton, ii. 212.]

iii. His Divinity

“And the Word was God.”

1. The distinction of persons, so strongly emphasized by the second proposition, is in this third resolved into a community of essence: “And the Word was God.” And this community of essence is not inconsistent with distinction of persons, but makes the communion of active Love possible; for none could, in the depths of eternity, dwell with and perfectly love and be loved by God, except one who Himself was God.

2. It is now apparent why St. John chooses this title to designate Christ in His pre-existent life. No other title brings out so clearly the identification of Christ with God, and the function of Christ to reveal God. It was a term which made the transition easy from Jewish Monotheism to Christian Trinitarianism. Being already used by the strictest Monotheists to denote a spiritual intermediary between God and the world, it is chosen by St. John as the appropriate title of Him through whom all revelation of God in the past had been mediated, and who has at length finished revelation in the person of Jesus Christ.

The experience of David Nitschmann, the Moravian, is related in Wesley’s Journal, as follows:—

I then fell into doubts of another kind. I believed in God; but not in Christ. I opened my heart to Martin Dober, who used many arguments with me, but in vain. For above four years I found no rest by reason of this unbelief; till one day, as I was sitting in my house, despairing of any relief, those words shot into me, “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself.” I thought, “Then God and Christ are one.” Immediately my heart was filled with joy; and much more at the remembrance of these words which I now felt I did believe: “The Word was with God, and the Word was God. And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.” 1 [Note: John Wesley’s Journal (Standard edition), ii. 38.]

III

The Worth of the Word

The Apostle’s words are practical. What practical use can we make of them? There are three ways in which they bring us strength.

1. The first way in which this passage helps us is that it assures us that there is communication between God and His creatures in Christ. We can choose between two theories of the universe and only two. The first is that it is all dumb, blind matter in a process of unconscious evolution. There is no God, for none is needed. All the morality that man has, he has created for himself in his own protection. It is vain to assault those far-reaching shining heavens with prayer—they are empty. Of this theory we are ready to say, with Wordsworth, better all the childish allegory of Greek mythology than this—

Great God! I’d rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

If that theory fails there is but one other, it is that God exists, that God has shrined Himself in man, and that God has some means of communicating with man. That is credible—for it explains the grandeur of human life. But if God really speaks with man, is it not just to suppose that it will be with unmistakable clearness and certainty? Will He not find means to make us aware of what His mind is? And when we find in Jesus, not only thoughts so high and perfect that none else are comparable with them, but a life so lofty and sublime that even the most sceptical of men see in it something Divinely beautiful—may we not say, behold this is God’s communication with us; this is His true Word; behold the very mind of the Highest is incarnated in Jesus Christ? “I can only comprehend God, as God is seen in Christ,” was the confession of Dr. Arnold and Charles Kingsley. “The acknowledgment of God in Christ, accepted by thy reason, solves in thee all questions in the earth and out of it,” said Browning; but if there had been no Christ, then the assurance that God had communicated His mind to us would be wholly vain.

What has been the greatest dread of man since he entered on conscious intelligent life? It has been the dread of God’s dumbness. The famous question put by Bonaparte to his atheistic Generals in Egypt, “Sirs, who made all that?” as he pointed to the starry splendour of the midnight sky over the Pyramids, has been a question always weighing heavily upon the heart of man. Man has never yet been wholly able to accommodate himself to a purely animal existence. He has gazed upon the solid universe with curious eyes, has felt the mystery of depth opening over depth in the blue abyss above and around him; has gone softly, haunted by the suspicion of a God hidden in stream and wood; has realized that life is an enigma for which there must needs be some answer. I look upon the ruined temples of Egypt, and inscriptions meet me eloquent of man’s search for God; I enter the tombs of the old Etruscans, and over the funeral urn is the rising sun—mute witness to a hope which survives death. That strange altar to the unknown God, which St. Paul found at Athens, is discoverable in every land, among all peoples, through all time. “Sirs, who made all this?” man asks ever and again in painful astonishment. Can it be that the Maker is dumb? Can it be that He has created children whom He disowns? Is there no voice or language in all that starry immensity, all these vague, unending fields of splendour? That God should be dumb—that He should sit far from us, He who has made us, silent as a stone amid the rush of worlds—that is the most intolerable of thoughts, that is man’s greatest dread, that is the terror which has cast its shadow on his heart from the beginning of the ages. 1 [Note: W. J. Dawson, The Reproach of Christ, 25.]

At length he came, of lowly birth, despised

And by the world rejected; but a band

Of humble men observed and felt the power

Of kindling love and faith with which he taught.

For in him thou, the eternal Word of truth,

Who once didst grave thy precepts upon stone,

Hadst become flesh; and they beheld with awe

God’s glory in a human face expressed.

There justice sat revealed, and holiness,

And rapt devotion, as of one who felt

God’s presence everywhere, within, around.

But all in one expression were combined,

A yearning love, which came in ceaseless stream

From heaven’s exhaustless fount, and poured itself

Forth on the world, to heal and bless mankind.

There grace and truth shone star-like from the eye,

And trembled on the lips; and longing hearts,

Oppressed with sin, or hardened by the world,

Beheld and wept, and rested in that love.

And so his face in every line expressed

The Son of God, the eternal Thought for man;

And whosoe’er beheld the Son beheld

The Father who had sent him, and whose love

Had come in him to seek and save, and dwell

In manifested form in this sad world. 1 [Note: James Drummond, Johannine Thoughts, 12.]

(1) The Word of God is God’s power, intelligence, and will in expression; not dormant and potential only, but in active exercise. God’s Word is His will going forth with creative energy, and communicating life from God, the Source of life and being. “Without him was not any thing made that was made.” He was prior to all created things and Himself “with God,” and “God.” He is God coming into relation with other things, revealing Himself, manifesting Himself, communicating Himself. The world is not itself God; things created are not God, but the intelligence and will which brought them into being, and which now sustain and regulate them, these are God. And between the works we see and the God who is past finding out there is the Word, One who from eternity has been with God, the medium of the first utterance of God’s mind and the first forthputting of His power; as close to the inmost nature of God, and as truly uttering that nature, as our word is close to and utters our thought, capable of being used by no one besides, but by ourselves only.

Where the bud has never blown

Who for scent is debtor?

Where the spirit rests unknown

Fatal is the letter.

In Thee, Jesus, Godhead-stored,

All things we inherit,

For Thou art the very Word

And the very Spirit!

(2) Nature is never silent, but is always uttering her secrets. On the stillest night the heart would break, the mind would reel, for brain would be injured, if no sound were. In that comparative stillness which we miscall silence, we catch the sounds unheeded amid the noises of the busy day. We detect how multitudinous are the instruments which make up the quiet concert of the world, the music of the universe so harmoniously set that we perceive not its parts. Silent Nature would be Nature dead—nay, non-existent, which is an absurdity. Nature is ever revealing, giving expression to life; and is known only by that expression. And if it be so with Nature, because in Nature, we believe, God dwells, how much more clearly must it be so with God Himself? A God silent to the sorrows, the needs, the yearnings, the mere curiosity of men, would not be God. Man thinks of God simply by the fact that God has thought of him. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

For us to hold this Catholic doctrine of Christ’s Divinity is not merely to tax or strain our credence for the acceptance of a mystery as such, or of a belief bound up with primitive Christian traditions, as well as with ecclesiastical authority in councils or the like. It is to get hold of a final decisive assurance that the Infinite God does infinitely care for man. It is after we have recited, in our Eucharistic confession of faith, the epithets belonging to Jesus as a Son of God in the fullest sense, God begotten of God, and of one substance with the Father, that we are so well able to say with thankfulness, “Who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven and was incarnate.” Look at Bethlehem in the light of this belief, and think what a God the Father of Christ must be. The Holiest, the Mightiest, the Highest is for those who thus believe no longer a God far off. He has really come near to us, and continues to be near to us in the person of One who, being uncreate, is what no angel, not Michael himself, could be, the “adequate image” and “interpreter of the Father.” The names of Jesus and Emmanuel might in other cases only record the fact that the Lord was willing to save His people, that God was and would be with them: in this one case, as belonging to a Divine Christ, they expand from affirmations of such grounds of confidence into titles by personal right His own. 1 [Note: W. Bright, The Law of Faith, 118.]

2. Next, this passage tells us that the character of Christ is the character of God. We cannot read the Gospels without a sense of the infinite piety, tenderness, holiness, and magnanimity of Jesus. Were the Gospels but a pure human idyll, still the picture they present of the character of Christ would be the loveliest known to man. The character of Christ is the character of God. He who told the stories of the Lost Sheep and the Prodigal Son, is God speaking out of the infinite tenderness of the Divine heart. He who healed the leper, blessed the Magdalene, forgave the thief, is God in His relation to human frailty, folly, and sin. The way in which Christ thought and acted is the precise measure of the way in which God thinks and acts. All theologies must come to that test.

All that our faith in the Incarnation warrants us in asserting is, that in Jesus Christ we have “authentic tidings of invisible things,”—that in Him the Divine and human are so united and blent that we can draw certain and reliable conclusions as to the nature of God, so far as that nature can and need be known by us. Think what this means! Think what the difference is between saying, “Jesus is only a man seeking God,—adding one more to the many guesses as to the nature of God”; and saying, “In Jesus we see God seeking man, and seeking him out of pure love in order to save him”; “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners”; “The Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost.” True: there may, there must be, mysteries in the Divine Nature far beyond what even the Incarnation can tell us. The Incarnation tells us all that we need to know. When we “have told its isles of light, and fancied all beyond,” there must yet be heights and depths, in that High and Lofty One who inhabiteth eternity, which no fancy, however soaring, can penetrate. 1 [Note: D. J. Vaughan, The Present Trial of Faith, 47.]

If preachers still speak as though the Jehovah of a barbarous people were the true God whom Jesus called the Father in heaven, reject their message, for they know not what they say. If from this or that isolated saying of Christ or His Apostles visions of future torture have been evolved which revolt the human heart, and outrage its sense of pity, apply to them this simple test—Would Jesus have done this even to the most sinful of men? And if you know that Jesus would not have done it, you may be sure that God will not do it either. “I and my Father are One,” said Christ; between God and Christ there is perfect moral accord, absolute spiritual identity. “The Word was with God, and the Word was God.” 2 [Note: W. J. Dawson, The Reproach of Christ, 33.]

Henry Ward Beecher put before the Church the doctrine of the Deity of Jesus Christ which to me seems absolutely irrefutable. He did not merely gather texts strewn here and there over the Bible page, and piece them together and say, “This Book tells me that He was God, and I must believe it because the Book says it.” No; he went back into his own experience, into the experience of the Christian Church. And what did he find? He found there, unmistakably, a great yearning after God, a yearning so deep and persistent that only one thing could be concluded—that God put it there, and put it there as a ground of expectation that He would answer the craving which He had created. And out of that came clearly and necessarily the conclusion that the God who made man thus to need and yearn after Himself must answer him, must come to him, or must cease to be God. Thus it was that, arguing from Christian experience, Beecher learned that it was reasonable and obligatory for the God who made man to come to him, and speak to him, and work for him, and die for him. Then bringing these observations and reasonings to the light of the Scriptural revelation, and looking at the historic Christ from the standpoint of human cravings and needs, Beecher could not escape the conclusion that the Christ portrayed in the Gospels was God’s answer to man’s necessity. And in grateful surprise he cried, “Why, this is God! There is not a single thing I would have in God but I find in Christ. There is not a single thing in Christ I would not like to have in God. Why, this is, this must be, God! I worship and I adore.” 3 [Note: Charles A. Berry, 159.]

In Christ I feel the heart of God

Throbbing from heaven through earth;

Life stirs again within the clod,

Renewed in beauteous birth;

The soul springs up, a flower of prayer,

Breathing His breath out on the air.

In Christ I touch the hand of God,

From His pure height reached down,

By blessed ways before untrod,

To lift us to our crown;

Victory that only perfect is

Through loving sacrifice, like His.

Holding His hand, my steadied feet

May walk the air, the seas;

On life and death His smile falls sweet,

Lights up all mysteries:

Stranger nor exile can I be

In new worlds where He leadeth me.

Not my Christ only; He is ours;

Humanity’s close bond;

Key to its vast, unopened powers,

Dream of our dreams beyond.

What yet we shall be none can tell:

Now are we His, and all is well. 1 [Note: Lucy Larcom.]

3. Lastly, in this truth we have the guarantee of authority and permanence in the Christian religion. If religion is a need of the soul, and a primal fact in human life, we must have a centre of authority in religion which is immovable and immutable amid the impermanent elements of human thought. We demand that the truth which involves the most solemn of all issues shall be permanent; that its evolution shall be complete; that it shall be the sure word of prophecy, changeless and steadfast amid all the change of time and thought. And in Christ that Word is spoken. He speaks with authority, and not as the scribes. He is “the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever.” No man ever yet took the Word as his guide without finding in that Word a complete code of directions for life and death; and something more than a code of directions—an inner light by which the spirit lived and walked in the light, as God is in the light. He, who in sundry times and divers manners, spake to us by the Prophets, has at last spoken to us by His Son. God’s last Word is Christ. Rest here: “He who hath known me hath known the Father also.”

If Jesus was not God, Christianity is not a religion, but a contribution to moral philosophy. It is in this latter way that it appeals to you. But mankind wants a religion: and it is as a religion that Christianity works in the world. 1 [Note: Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton, ii. 256.]

(1) How impermanent human thought is, we all know. Men are continually shedding their beliefs and opinions as trees shed their bark, and snakes their skins, in the process of growth. In the rapid march of human knowledge mankind is like a great army which casts its baggage away that it may move unencumbered towards the battles of the future. No man thinks in mid-life what he thought in youth. The great teachers of the world themselves have no abiding word, and often their latest teaching is a direct recantation of their earliest. But we all feel that in a true Divine religion no such process of change could be tolerated. We cannot have one religion for youth and another for age; a truth that may be true to-day and false to-morrow; a voice that contradicts itself, a revelation that varies in its message with the varying tastes of men. No; we ask, and justly ask, for religion a changeless, abiding, authoritative voice that will speak through all our perplexities the sure Word by which the soul may live. Listen, then, “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.” Here is the true authoritative voice.

Across the sea, along the shore,

In numbers more and ever more,

From lonely hut and busy town,

The valley through, the mountain down,

was it ye went out to see,

Ye silly folk of Galilee?

The reed that in the wind doth shake?

The weed that washes in the lake?

The reeds that waver, the weeds that float?—

A young man preaching in a boat.

What was it ye went out to hear,

By sea and land, from far and near?

A teacher? Rather seek the feet

Of those who sit in Moses’ seat.

Go humbly seek, and bow to them,

Far off in great Jerusalem.

From them that in her courts ye saw,

Her perfect doctors of the law,

What is it ye came here to note?—

A young man preaching in a boat.

A prophet! Boys and women weak!

Declare, or cease to rave;

Whence is it he hath learned to speak?

Say, who his doctrine gave?

A prophet? Prophet wherefore he

Of all in Israel tribes?

He teacheth with authority,

And not as do the scribes. 1 [Note: Clough, Poems, 46.]

(2) This Word of God has indeed illumined and quickened all men and all races in their several degrees, Buddha and Confucius and Zoroaster, Zeno and Pythagoras, Indians and Persians, Babylonians and Egyptians, Greeks and Romans. He has been present in universal history, as He has been present in every individual soul of man. But nevertheless He has specially visited one family, one race. There was a prerogative tribe selected in due time from the rest, a first-fruits of the nations of the earth, a peculiar people consecrated to God. Though there be many tributaries, the main stream of religious history runs in this channel. To this nation the Word of God came as to His own inheritance, spake as to His own household—spake by lawgivers and prophets, by priests and kings, spake in divers stages and divers manners, spake with an intensity and a power and a directness, with a continuity and a fulness, with which He spake to no other nation besides. In neither case was the response equal to the appeal. Among the nations at large “the light” shone “in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not”: to the descendants of Abraham “he came as to his own” vineyard; yet “his own received him not.” Nevertheless among both—among the nations whom He approached through the avenues of the natural conscience, and among the Israelites to whom He spoke in the piercing tones of inspiration, there were those who did feel His presence, did hear His voice; and these were rescued from their grovelling, material, earthly life, were born anew in Him, were made sons of God through God the Word.

There is no broken reed so poor and base,

No rush, the bending tilt of swamp-fly blue,

But He therewith the ravening wolf can chase,

And guide His flock to springs and pastures new;

Through ways unlooked for, and through many lands,

Far from the rich folds built with human hands,

The gracious footprints of His love I trace. 1 [Note: Lowell, Poems, 112.]

(3) We have no need to question any value that can be claimed for writings held as sacred by others outside the Christian world. All truth is of God, and is profitable according to its degree, and its adaptedness to the genius and growth of the people who receive it. To judge and condemn other scriptures, such as the Koran, as wholly worthless and evil, is measurably to judge and condemn Him, by whose Providence the book and its religion exists, until its believers are prepared for clearer and fuller light. Yet in every such revelation, professing to come directly from heaven, even the human element is relatively most imperfect, and comparatively powerless. Such scriptures appeal authoritatively only to the devotional or emotional element in man; never to his intellect and heart. They demand reception under pain of condemnation, independent of rational perception of their truth; and they promise, as a reward of faith, a sensuous paradise to the faithful. In their words is no potency of progress beyond a certain point. On the other hand, in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures there is a clear revelation of human development, through the growth of the spiritual or Christ nature in man throughout the ages.

No two ideals could be more opposite than a Christian saint in a Gothic cathedral and a Buddhist saint in a Chinese temple. The opposition exists at every point; but perhaps the shortest statement of it is that the Buddhist saint always has his eyes shut, while the Christian saint always has them very wide open. The Buddhist saint always has a very sleek and harmonious body, but his eyes are heavy and sealed with sleep. The medieval saint’s body is wasted to its crazy bones, but his eyes are frightfully alive. There cannot be any real community of spirit between forces that produced symbols so different as that. Granted that both images are extravagances, are perversions of the pure creed, it must be a real divergence which could produce such opposite extravagances. The Buddhist is looking with peculiar intentness inwards. The Christian is staring with a frantic intentness outwards. 1 [Note: G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy.]

In these days of the religion of this and that,—briefly let us say, the religion of Stocks and Posts—in order to say a clear word of the Campo Santo, one must first say a firm word concerning Christianity itself. I find numbers, even of the most intelligent and amiable people, not knowing what the word means; because they are always asking how much is true, and how much they like, and never ask, first, what was the total meaning of it, whether they like it or not.

The total meaning was, and is, that the God who made earth and its creatures, took at a certain time upon the earth, the flesh and form of man; in that flesh sustained the pain and died the death of the creature He had made; rose again after death into glorious human life, and when the date of the human race is ended, will return in visible human form, and render to every man according to his work. Christianity is the belief in, and love of, God thus manifested. Anything less than this, the mere acceptance of the sayings of Christ, or assertion of any less than Divine power in His Being, may be, for aught I know, enough for virtue, peace, and safety; but they do not make people Christians, or enable them to understand the heart of the simplest believer in the old doctrine. Two verses of George Herbert will put the height of that doctrine into less debateable, though figurative, picture than any longer talk of mine—

Hast thou not heard that my Lord Jesus died?

Then let me tell thee a strange story.

The God of Power, as he did ride

In his majestic robes of glory,

Resolved to light; and so, one day

He did descend, undressing all the way.

The stars his tire of light, and rings, obtained,

The cloud his bow, the fire his spear,

The heavens his azure mantle gained,

And when they asked what he would wear,

He smiled, and said as he did go,

“ He had new clothes a-making, here, below.”

I write from memory; the lines have been my lesson, ever since 1845, of the noblesse of thought which makes the simplest word best. 1 [Note: Ruskin, Præterita, ii. 208.]

The Word

Literature

Abbott (E. A.), Oxford Sermons, 46.

Alexander (W.), Leading Ideas of the Gospel, 181.

Alford (H.), Quebec Chapel Sermons, vi. 1.

Barton (G. A.), The Roots of Christian Teaching, 25.

Bickersteth (C.), The Gospel of Incarnate Love, 127.

Bright (W.), The Law of Faith, 111.

Dale (R. W.), Christian Doctrine, 170.

Dawson (W. J.), The Reproach of Christ, 23.

DuBose (W. P.), The Reason of Life, 12.

Farquhar (J. W.), The Gospel of Divine Humanity, 15.

Kingsley (C.), Village, Town, and Country Sermons, 176.

Lock (W.), The Bible and Christian Life, 20.

Macintosh (W.), Rabbi Jesus, 151.

Maclaren (A.), Expositions: John i.–viii. 1.

Martineau (J.), Endeavours after the Christian Life, 498.

Ragg (L.), Christ and our Ideals, 25.

Swan (F. R.), The Immanence of Christ in Modern Life, 121.

Westcott (B. F.), The Historic Faith, 43.

Cambridge Review, iii. Supplement No. 73 (Quarry).

Christian World Pulpit, xlviii. 125 (Gasquoine); lxvi. 357 (Eland); lxxii. 138 (Whitman), 374 (Gibbon).

Churchman’s Pulpit: Christmas Day: ii. 164 (Clements), 166 (Hutton), 168 (Bright), 169 (Bagot).

Homiletic Review, l. 463 (Metcalf).

Verse 14

The Incarnation of the Word

And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us (and we beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father), full of grace and truth.— John 1:14.

1. “The Word.” Thrice elsewhere ( John 1:1; 1 John 1:1; Revelation 19:13) is this term used to designate the same Person. It is used in the first verse of this Gospel without apology, and without definition, as if the readers were acquainted with it, as indeed they were, for it had a large circulation among both Greek and Jewish thinkers. It is one of the most pregnant words used in the New Testament. In John 1:18 we are told why the term is so used—“No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.” As thus used the term is one of great significance. By our words we make our wills known to others. By our words we issue our prohibitions or commands, and give effect to our intentions. Our words, then, give expression to our will. And, similarly, the Word of God is God’s will expressing itself. It is the God of Heaven coming into relation with created things and revealing Himself.

2. Who is this Word? He is one who existed in the beginning, and is in perfect union with God, being the expression of God’s thought and purpose and energy. He is Himself the Creator of all things, of bird and flower, of mountain and sea, of sun and star. He is the Creator of man; and all the light of truth and goodness that has ever arisen in man’s heart came only from Him. Who, then, is this mysterious Person, this Eternal Word of God? We must turn to this fourteenth verse. “And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us (and we beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father), full of grace and truth.” The “Word became flesh, and dwelt among us! This august and mysterious Word of God, Himself became a man. Then we know who He is. He must be Jesus, that Jesus of Nazareth who was born in Bethlehem.

3. Far away down the years, at the close of the first century, an old man sits brooding over the things that he had seen and heard in the cities of Judah and in the fields of Galilee. Forty, fifty, sixty years, and more perhaps, now lie between him and the scenes which he records. Sixty years—and such years!—years of revolution—years of judgment—years in which the old order perished in doom, and the New World rose into victory under the breath of the Spirit of God. He had himself, long ago, it may be, laid up in the Book of the Revelation the visions in which the tremendous drama of those momentous years moved towards its final and critical act. Yet, now, his look is not forward into the silences that delay the trumpet-blasts of Divine action. His eyes turn ever back, overleaping the crowded interval; back to those wonderful days when he walked behind the feet of the Master—the days when he saw, and heard, and handled. Still his whole being hangs upon those sealed memories. Still he ponders, and weighs, and wonders, and broods. For we are listening, in these first verses of St. John, to an old man’s broodings. No one can mistake their tone, or be insensible to their atmosphere, as the verses fall on the ear with their solemn weight of measured monotony, serious as a winter’s eve, in which the stars silently offer themselves to our eyes, one by one, in seemly order and in noiseless ease. So the great words detach themselves from his lips, single, slow, deliberate, unhasting. Round and round the story his spirit has searched and laboured, and waited, until word could set itself to word, and phrase to phrase. No time could be too long in which to collect into one brief passage the sum and substance of all that revelation which was made known to him in the Name of Jesus Christ. 1 [Note: H. Scott Holland, Creed and Character, 3.]

The belief in the Divinity of Christ is waning among us. They who hold it have petrified it into a theological dogma without life or warmth, and thoughtful men are more and more beginning to put it aside. How are we then to get back this belief in the Son of God—by authority or by the old way of persecution? The time for these has passed. The other way is to begin at the beginning. Begin as the Bible begins, with Christ the Son of Man. Begin with Him as God’s character revealed under the limitations of humanity. Lay the foundations of a higher faith deeply in a belief of His Humanity. See Him as He was. Breathe His spirit. After that, try to comprehend His Life. Enter into His Childhood. Feel with Him when He looked round about Him in anger, when He vindicated the crushed woman from the powerless venom of her ferocious accusers;—when He stood alone in the solitary Majesty of Truth in Pilate’s judgment-hall; when the light of the Roman soldiers’ torches flashed on Kedron in the dark night, and He knew that watching was too late; when His heart-strings gave way upon the Cross. Walk with Him through the Marriage Feast. See how the sick and weary came to Him instinctively; how men, when they saw Him, felt their sin, they knew not why, and fell at His feet; how guilt unconsciously revealed itself, and all that was good in men was drawn out, and they became higher than themselves in His presence. Realize this. Live with Him till He becomes a living thought—ever present—and you will find a reverence growing up which compares with nothing else in human feeling. You will feel that a slighting word spoken of Him wounds with a dart more sharp than personal insult. You will feel that to bow at the name of Jesus is no form at will of others, but a relief and welcome. And if it should ever chance that, finding yourself thrown upon your own self, and cut off from sects—suspected, in quest of a truth which no man gives,—then that wondrous sense of strength and friendship comes, the being alone with Christ, with the strength of a manlier independence. Slowly then, this almost insensibly merges into adoration. For what is it to adore Christ? To call Him God; to say Lord, Lord? No. Adoration is the mightiest love the soul can give—call it by what name you will. 1 [Note: F. W. Robertson, in Life and Letters, 417.]

4. The one supremely significant fact in the universe is, to quote Dr. Peabody’s fine paraphrase, “the transformation of language into life.” We see this transformation in three different moments. There was the creation at the beginning, when great vitalizing words of God took form in created beings. Again there is the same transformation in all human work and morality to the end, when man is hearing words of God within him and is transforming them into deeds and finished products. But between these two there stands the stupendous fact of Christ, interpreting the first and inspiring the second.

(1) Creation.—It is matter of general consent that the universe as we know it had a beginning. As thought travels backward into the great silence before that beginning, it must needs discover a moment when the eternal thought found expression, and the universe began. The word became flesh. God spoke, and the thing spoken stood out as a created fact. “The universe is God’s language.” The unspoken word is all that might be; the spoken word is all that is. This is the meaning of those wonderful stories of Genesis, in which we see all things coming forth in their mighty evolution in answer to the words of God.

That is the Christian view of nature and the universe. It is not an eternally grinding machine, nor is it a dream-picture woven of mist. It is a real universe, in which God’s language is transformed into life. The great words were spoken, and there are the mountains and the fields and the seas, and the ships upon the seas and the cities of men. It makes all the difference in the world whether as we stand in the midst of all these things we hear only a jangle of meaningless sounds, or whether we hear the word of the Lord. Listen to that word in the summer fields and sunshine, in the winter storms and the voice of the tossing seas. Listen, too, in the crowded streets, the throb of machinery and traffic, the bustle and the gentle speech of homes. In new thought and adventurous policy, in great loyalties to ancient institutions; in the voices of teachers in schools, of preachers in pulpits, of business men in offices, of shopkeepers in shops; in the heart-beatings of the lonely and the sobs of the penitent—everywhere creation is the word become flesh.

(2) Jesus Christ.—The word had been spoken in an unknown tongue. We heard it, and saw its incarnate forms, but we did not understand. Science was patiently deciphering it, retranslating it back from life to language; endeavouring from the manifest facts of the universe to spell out the meaning of the Word of God. But science finds it difficult, and conscience and love find it far more difficult to understand. The Divine Word has seemed to change and suffer in the process of becoming flesh. Its meaning is obscure, and it seems to have been mingled with much other speech that is not Divine.

Many had tried to interpret it into human speech. Psalmists, prophets, philosophers had tried; but their words died away, leaving fainter and fainter echoes in man’s conscience. They had written their interpretation, but God’s word can never find full expression in a book. Language must be transformed into life—and not, this time, the general life of the universe, but our human life—that we may understand. So “the Word became flesh.” The meaning of life, the purpose of God in creation, became intelligible in Jesus Christ. His whole speech and conduct and being interpreted the world. When men saw Him they said, Life ought to be like that: God is like that.

Take three of the words of God, and let us see their transformation into life in Christ:—

( a) Holiness.—The word was familiar, for there was abundance of ethical speculation and of conscience too. But holiness was dead and buried in formal rules of conduct, paralysed by man’s universal failure, and hopelessly unattainable. But here was holiness splendidly alive, spontaneous, free, and natural. Here it was not merely attainable but actually attained. Jesus Christ— that was what God had meant by conscience, what conscience had tried to say; that was what ethical science had seen afar off, but never reached.

( b) Love—the most fascinating and yet the most elusive word of God. Men heard it in their own hearts and homes, but it was uncertain or sinister, and always precarious, being threatened both by life and by death. That was human love, and the Divine love was but a remote and dim whisper of possible goodwill, if things turned out to be as one sometimes almost dared to hope. But here was love at once stronger than death and simple as the laughter of a child. Men saw its patience, its responsiveness, its facility. They felt its tenderness, its understanding, its healing power. Here is God’s heart, seen in the heart of a man. Here is what all true love actually means. The word Love had become flesh.

( c) Death—that last sad word. Every death before had been recognized as a Word of God, but how unfriendly and how harsh! Since Jesus died, men have known what God means by His great word Death, for the death of Jesus has interpreted the whole of life. In the light of its love and sacrifice we look with new eyes upon sin, despair, forgiveness, restoration. And that death has reinterpreted death itself, giving to it surprisingly rich and blessed meaning. All the wonder of the eternal life—its rest, its renewal, its reward, its higher service—all these were included in the meaning of the word death, when in Christ language was translated into life. Truly man may say to the spectre, at the grave of Jesus—

Thou hast stolen a jewel, Death,

Shall light thy dark up like a star.

All this, and far more than this, is included in the meaning of “the word became flesh.” Flesh, the tempted and tempting thing, weak and suffering, subject to all contingencies and liable to all risks—flesh was used to express adequately and for ever the meaning of God’s word of creation.

(3) The third stage of this incarnation has yet to be considered. The text is a command that the word shall become flesh again in every Christian life. The translation of language into life is the great act of religion.

We are familiar with the idea of the incarnation being perpetuated in the Bible, the Church, and the Sacraments. But besides these, each life around us is a Word of God, a special purpose and design realized in flesh in its degree. This thought surely gives new meaning to our intercourse with those who do business with us or live beside us. “There is but one temple in the world,” says Novalis, “and that temple is the Body of Man.… We touch heaven when we lay our hands on a human body.” Another has said: “The body of a child is as the body of the Lord; I am not worthy of either.” How reverently, gently, purely, should we treat one another if this is indeed so.

But most especially in ourselves must language be transformed into life. We all hear many words of God. The worship of the Church, its songs and prayers, its readings and thoughts, and the inward response to these is desire, aspiration, and resolve; these words are to become flesh in us when we return from our worship to our daily life. And also there are other words which our spirits hear from day to day. What has life been saying to you? What has your experience meant? What lessons has God been trying to make you understand? Some of it we cannot understand, and all that is required of us is that we shall walk among these unknown voices of life, erect and brave and self-respecting and gentle. But there is much that we understand quite well. It is the Word of God, spoken clearly and in familiar language by the voice of life.

But that Word has yet to become flesh. There are countless words of God in the knowledge and conviction of us all which are as yet no more than words. These are waiting for their incarnation in our character and influence, in our daily work and service of man and God. The works of our hands are God’s word fulfilled in us. We who can work are born that certain great words we have heard in our secret souls may become flesh in deeds. Rise then and do the work that thy hands find to do. In this living fashion speak out what is in thee. So shalt thou also be a Word of God incarnate, an expression of His mind in living flesh. 1 [Note: J. Kelman.]

The Incarnation of God in the terms of the Christ is not finished yet. Still as “the Christ within” He has to be born again in the hearts of men, and not only yesterday, but to-day and for ever, has Jesus to be received by His own. If the redemption of the world is to be wrought out and completed, that spirit which dwelt in Jesus, that grace and truth, that complete merging of the individual will in the Divine, that passionate love of men, that reverence for all things as belonging to the Father, that consciousness of unity with Him—all these have to become our common inheritance and possession. The Christian is not called upon to go out of his ordinary world to find his God, but by his very loyalty to Christ he must look first of all for his God in terms of the human life he knows so well. Having once God in Christ he must go on to look for and to find “the Christ as every man.” The Incarnation must not be for him historical, a past phenomenon merely, but a continually recurring process and experience. The Christ who was born once in Jewry has to be born again in the hearts of all who would attain their true manhood. Not in nothingness and non-entity, then, but in living, breathing, feeling power does the God who is Spirit still reveal Himself and carry forward His purpose. To every generation He manifests Himself afresh, Love making for itself new channels to meet the new needs. Still the God of Love clothes Himself in the garment of form, and still He becomes flesh and dwells among men. 2 [Note: M. C. Albright, The Common Heritage, 144.]

Lo! this one preached with fervent tongue;

The world went forth to hear;

Upon his burning words they hung,

Intent, with ravished ear.

Like other lives the life he led,

Men spake no word of blame;

And yet, unblest, unprofited,

The world went on the same.

Another came, and lived, and wrought,

His heart all drawn above;

By deeds, and not by words, he taught

Self-sacrificing love.

No eager crowds his preaching drew;

Yet one by one they came;

The secret of his power they knew,

And caught the sacred flame.

And all around, as morning light

Steals on with silent wing,

The world became more pure and bright

And life a holier thing.

Ah! Pastor, is thy heart full sore

At all this sin and strife?

Feed with the Word, but ah! far more

Feed with a holy life. 1 [Note: W. Walsham How.]

5. There is a difficulty in the construction of this passage, which our English Versions endeavour to clear up by putting the middle portion of the verse in a parenthesis. Some of the best commentators give their sanction to the course which our translators have adopted; and we may therefore, perhaps, safely regard the Evangelist as in the text announcing the doctrine that “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth,” and throwing in at the same time the parenthetical remark, “We beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father.”

Thus we have—

I. The Divine Life entering upon a Human Life.

“And the Word became flesh.”

II. The Character of the Human Life.

“And dwelt among us—full of grace and truth.”

III. The Divine discovered in the Human.

“And we beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father.”

I

The Divine entering the Human

“And the Word became flesh.”

This is called the Incarnation. What does the word “Incarnation” mean? We know that carnal means fleshly, and carnivorous means flesh-eating, and carnation means a flesh-coloured flower. Incarnate, then, means to clothe in flesh; and the Incarnation is the “becoming clothed in flesh,” or the “assumption of flesh.” So that when we speak of the Incarnation we are using an abbreviated phrase; it must mean the Incarnation of something; and when it stands in this way, alone with the definite article, it refers to the Incarnation of the Son of God. The subject before us, then, is the clothing of the Son of God in flesh, or the Son of God assuming human nature.

Two things therefore have to be understood: First, that before assuming human nature He previously existed as Son of God; Second, that when He assumed human nature He really and truly became a man. When these two things are understood we must consider why the Son of God became Son of man.

i. His Pre-existence

1. Who is it of whom St. John says that He became flesh? The Word, he says. And who was the Word? Was it some prophet, a voice from God, bringing His word to man? It was more than that. Was it some Being, more than man, created on purpose to be the messenger of God to His creatures, and to declare His will with more authority than any human being could declare it? If we believe anything at all about Him, it was more than that. Was it some great angel, a dweller in the secret place where thought of man never approaches, seated near God’s throne, ever beholding the face of God?—was it such a one, who was sent to clothe himself with man’s form and flesh? Was it Gabriel, who stands in the presence of God? Was it Michael, the Prince of Angels? Was it one of the Seraphim, who day and night cry aloud, “Holy, holy, holy”? It was more than that—more, infinitely more than that—one to whom highest angels were but messengers and servants. Was it some heavenly Person, greater, higher, more ancient than the archangels, created almost from all eternity, to be the companion of the solitude of the Godhead on the eternal throne, to be His minister in all creation, the revealer and utterer of the mind of God, the sharer with Him in the worship of heaven and earth—all but God? Again, if we hold the faith of St. Paul and St. James, if we believe Him of whom we are speaking, it was more than this. The gulf is infinite, the gulf is impassable, between such a supposed being and the reality declared in Scripture—between God and the highest of His creatures. Who was the Word? St. John tells us, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that hath been made.” “The Word was God.” This is He of whom it is said, “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.” This is that Jesus Christ, of whom it is written, that “She brought forth her firstborn son; and she wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.” The Son of God, only begotten, equal to the Father, ever with the Father, by whom also He made the worlds; “God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God”; “the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power.” “The firstborn of every creature, for by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him: and he is before all things, and by him all things consist”;—not to be named with the angels, for the angels were made by Him, and Him do the angels worship—“Far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come.” Only He knew the secret of God, for He was one with God. Only He had seen God, for He was the Son of God, “in glory with God before the world was.” “No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son (himself God), which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.” And from the “glory” and “bosom” of the Father He came, to be a little child, born in Bethlehem of Judæa, the city of David; and He who came, was God.

Such a relation as we believe our Saviour now bears to the Father could not have arisen at a point of time. It could not have been created by His earthly life. The power to exercise God’s prerogative of forgiveness, judgment, and redemption could never have been acquired by the moral excellence or religious achievement of any created being, however endowed by the Spirit of God. I confess (if I may descend so far) I had long this difficulty, which lowered the roof of my faith, and arrested the flight of devotion. And I am afraid, from the state of our public worship, I was not alone in that difficulty. I could not get the plenitude of New Testament worship or Catholic faith out of the mere self-sacrifice of the human Christ even unto death. Nor could I rise to it from that level. I was too little moved by His earthly renunciations to rise to the dimensions of the Church’s faith, for I am not speaking of its creed, which was my own. The cross of such a Christ, who was the mere martyr of His revelation, or the paragon of self-sacrifice, was not adequate to produce the absolute devotion which made a proud Pharisee, yea a proud Apostle, glory in being Christ’s entire slave, and which drove the whole Church to call Christ Lord and God, in a devotion the most magnificent the soul has ever known. Such worship seemed too large a response to anything which Jesus, with all His unique greatness, did or determined in the course of His earthly life alone. The Synoptic record alone would not account for the Christian religion, nor produce the plerophory of Christian faith. Christ’s earthly humiliation had to have its foundation laid in Heaven, and to be viewed but as the working out of a renunciation before the world was. 1 [Note: P. T. Forsyth, The Person and Place of Jesus Christ, 269.]

Among geographers there have sometimes been disputes as to the identity of a river. They have debated, for instance, whether the Quorra were the same as the Niger; but when a boat, launched on the Niger, after a few weeks made its appearance floating on the Quorra, there was an end of the argument: the names might be two, but the streams were demonstrably the one the continuation of the other. And sometimes a critic, indignant at an anonymous author, has shown how much better a well-known writer would have handled the self-same subject—when it turns out that the nameless and the well-known personages are in this instance identical. In the 102nd Psalm, eternity and unchangeableness are ascribed to the Great Creator; and there is no opponent of the Saviour’s divinity who would not sing that psalm as a fitting ascription to the Most High God: when behold! the Epistle to the Hebrews informs us that it is a hymn of praise to Jesus Christ! 1 [Note: James Hamilton, Works, iii. 257.]

2. The doctrine of the Incarnation involves the pre-existence of Christ, not in an ideal, mystic sense, but as a personal Being. The preposition “with” in the second clause of John 1:1—“the Word was with God”—is one which implies mutual association in a striking way. It suggests the intercourse of those who are standing face to face—“The Word was directed to God, moving toward God.” The same idea appears in a more tender form in John 1:18—“No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.” Christ asserts His personal pre-existence in the majestic words of John 8:58: “Then said the Jews unto him, Thou art not yet fifty years old, and hast thou seen Abraham? Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I AM.” It is implied in the saying so frequently upon His lips about His coming into the world, coming with a purpose which it was His constant effort to fulfil. It has its loftiest expression in His solemn words of prayer, “I have glorified thee on the earth; I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do. And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self, with the glory which I had with thee before the world was.”

In ordinary biographies, a birth is the beginning. It was in the year 1483 that the mind to which we owe the Reformation commenced its existence; for it was then that Martin Luther was born. It was in London that the career began to which England is indebted for its great epic poem, and that other from which science received its mightiest modern impulse; for it was there that Milton and Bacon first saw the light of life. Having told us this, the biographer feels that he has begun at the beginning; and with this statement coincides the consciousness of the individual himself. For, whatever the old philosophy may have dreamed about the pre-existence of spirit and the transmigration of souls, no man could ever seriously say that he had led another life before he was born; no man could ever tell incidents and experiences which had occurred to him in a state of existence anterior to the present. With us, to all intents, our birth is our beginning. In the whole history of our species there has been only one exception. 1 [Note: James Hamilton, Works, iii. 249.]

3. The Apostle Paul draws practical appeals from the same truth. When he would urge the Corinthians to “prove the sincerity of their love,” he gives them this touching reminder—“For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might become rich.” The sacrifice which ended in the Cross began when Jesus left “the bosom of the Father.” “Have this mind in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: who, being in the form of God, counted not the being equal with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men; and being found in fashion as a man, then he humbled himself, becoming obedient as far as unto death, even the death of the cross.”

The doctrine of the pre-existence of Jesus is not confined to St. John. Writing to the Corinthian Church St. Paul reminds them in one passage of the history of Israel of old, and then he adds the remarkable words, “They drank of a spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ”—that is, Christ was with God’s ancient people in their wanderings in the wilderness some fourteen or fifteen hundred years before He was born ( 1 Corinthians 10:4). So, too, in the great passage on the resurrection of the dead in the same Epistle, he says, “The first man is of the earth, earthy: the second man is of heaven” ( 1 Corinthians 15:47); and in the Second Epistle to the same Church at Corinth he reminds them of “the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might become rich”—words which have no possible meaning unless Jesus had lived a heavenly life before His incarnation. Perhaps the strongest assertion of the pre-incarnate Being of Christ in all the writings of St. Paul is the following passage in the Epistle to the Philippians ( John 2:6-7): “Who, being in the form of God, counted it not a prize to be on an equality with God, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men; and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, becoming obedient unto death, yea, the death of the cross.”

So, too, St. Peter declares that long before Jesus came into the world, the Spirit of Jesus was moving and working in the prophets of the Hebrew people: “Concerning which salvation the prophets sought and searched diligently, who prophesied of the grace that should come unto you: searching what time or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ which was in them did point unto, when it testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ, and the glories that should follow them” ( 1 Peter 1:10-11). 1 [Note: G. S. Barrett, The Earliest Christian Hymn, 32.]

ii. His Humanity

1. Very early in the history of the Christian Church, and even before all the original Apostles had passed away, there were persons who had received Christian baptism and professed to be Christians to whom it seemed incredible that our Lord was really man—that according to the vigorous statement of St. John in the text, He “became flesh.” The form in which St. John affirms the truth was, no doubt, suggested by the heresies which denied it. There was a very common belief in the ancient world that human sin has its origin and roots in the flesh and blood of the body, and that all matter is necessarily evil; to disengage and separate the higher and spiritual life of man from his physical nature was therefore supposed to be the true discipline of moral and spiritual perfection. There were teachers in the Church, claiming to speak in the power of the Spirit of God, who taught this doctrine, and to whom it was inconceivable that our Lord could have had a body like our own. St. John was thinking of these teachers when he said in his Epistle, “Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: every spirit which confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God; and every spirit which confesseth not Jesus is not of God: and this is the spirit of the antichrist.”

Earnest belief in Christ’s divinity has a difficulty in allowing His real humanity. The idea, for example, of Christ’s growing, as a man, in wisdom as well as in stature, is repugnant to some minds; and, despite the teaching of Scripture, there are those who refuse to think of His being subject to any ordinary human limitations, whether of power or of knowledge. This idea of Christ, too common among believers in His divinity, finds expression in Shelley’s fine but misleading figure—

A mortal shape to him

Was like the vapour dim,

Which the orient planet animates with light.

The same poet makes Him tread the thorns of death and shame, like a triumphal path, of which He never truly felt the sharpness. One of our hymns falls into this heresy when it speaks of the “seeming infant of a day.” This is exactly to reduce His humanity to a mere appearance. He was not the “seeming infant,” but the real “infant of a day.” I have myself met people to whom Christ’s patience and suffering, for example, could offer no consolation, because they said, “He was God all the time, and it was easy for Him.” 1 [Note: A. Halliday Douglas.]

“I believe,” cries Irving with the deepest emotion, “that my Lord did come down and toil, and sweat, and travail, in exceeding great sorrow, in this mass of temptation, with which I and every sinful man am oppressed; did bring His Divine presence into death-possessed humanity, into the one substance of manhood created in Adam, and by the Fall brought into a state of resistance and alienation from God, of condemnation and proclivity to evil, of subjection to the devil; and bearing it all upon His shoulders in that very state into which God put it after Adam had sinned, did suffer its sorrows and pains, and swimming anguish, its darkness, wasteness, disconsolateness, and hiddenness from the countenance of God; and by His faith and patience did win for Himself the name of the Man of Sorrows and the author and finisher of our faith.”

This was the very essence of his belief. And when from unexpected quarters, everywhere round him, he discovered that other men, that his fathers and brethren in his own Church, disowned this central truth which gave life and reality to the gospel, it went to his heart like a personal affliction. It was not that they differed with him on a controverted subject; the matter was different to his grieved and wondering perception. To him it appeared that they denied the Lord. The deepest heart of Divine grace and pity, the real unspeakable redemption, seemed to Irving overlooked and despised when this wonderful identity of nature was disputed. He stood wondering and sorrowful, always in the midst of his argument turning back again to simple statement, as if, like his Lord, he would have asked, “Do ye now believe?” 1 [Note: Mrs. Oliphant, Life of Edward Irving, ii. 109.]

2. The faith of the Church in our Lord’s humanity rests primarily on experience—the experience of those who knew Him during His earthly life. And their experience must also determine our whole conception of the Incarnation. Our theory must be governed by the facts; we shall go far astray if we attempt first to construct a theory and then to force the facts into agreement with it. What, then, are the facts?

Mary, His mother, was the friend of the original apostles and disciples of our Lord, and after His crucifixion, she lived with the Apostle John. She would tell our Lord’s friends how He grew from infancy to childhood, and childhood to youth, increasing in wisdom as well as in height and strength with His increasing years,—a child and a youth to attract the favour of both God and man. Nor was it Mary alone who could tell them of our Lord’s childhood, youth, and manhood. James and Jude, to whom two Epistles, bearing their names, are attributed in the New Testament, but who do not appear to have become His disciples till after His resurrection, were His “brothers.” Salome, the wife of Zebedee, was, in all probability, the sister of Mary His mother, and was therefore His aunt. Her sons, the two Apostles James and John, were His cousins; and it was this relationship, as well as the special confidence with which our Lord had treated them, that, perhaps, suggested the request that they might sit, one on His right hand and one on His left hand, in His Kingdom. All these relatives of His, who were well known to the first generation of Christians, could recall our Lord’s life in Nazareth before His public ministry began; and it is certain that they never doubted that He was really man. Nor were there any signs during His public ministry that our Lord had lost any of the characteristics of humanity or had been liberated from any of its limitations.

Man has always found it easier to see a Divine element in the strange and awful and supernatural, and to picture his Deity as living above him in the high mountains, or the unknown depth of sky, than to find Him in the near and the accustomed. Now in the fulness of time he has been called upon to see Him in the “Word made flesh,” dwelling among men “in fashion as a man,” not taking upon Him the nature of angels, but the nature of suffering humanity. The Greeks might indeed conceive of their gods, their Apollo or Athena, taking some part in the affairs of men, and jealously watching the interests of their worshippers; the Egyptian might picture Horus or Osiris, experiencing like men the triumph of victory or the ignominy of defeat; but the Christian has a more difficult, but a far more glorious, conception to which he may rise. He may see his God as manifested in terms of his own life, becoming his Comrade in temptation, and his Example in humility. Here is one who undertook, not to govern the world from afar, but to overcome it from within, who calls Himself not high and lifted up, but meek and lowly, the servant of all. As a shepherd He goes before His sheep to make the crooked paths straight, and the rough places smooth, and in His own experience He conquers death and triumphs over the grave. 1 [Note: M. C. Albright, The Common Heritage, 113.]

In deep spiritual temptations nothing has helped me better, with nothing have I heartened myself and driven away the devil better, than with this, that Christ, the true Eternal Son of God, is “bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh”; and that He sits on the right hand of God, and pleads for us. When I can grasp this shield of faith, I have already chased away the evil one with his fiery darts. 2 [Note: Luther.]

3. Why do we insist upon the humanity of Christ?

(1) First, there is the sense of our loss should the doctrine be obscured. Such comfortable words as these—“Though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered; and being made perfect, he became the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey him”: “We have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin”—would lose their meaning.

(2) And, secondly, we should fall back into the old error about the character of God. It was because men thought it degrading to the Son of God to have become flesh that they denied it. St. John knew that humiliation is not degradation; pride degrades. The imperfect soars or stands aloof. “The blessed and only Potentate, the King of kings, and Lord of lords,” can only reveal Himself by stooping. We shall never know by our experience the glory and the bliss of immeasurable condescension, for He came to lift us into participation with Himself. But we can adore the man Christ Jesus, and the Father whom He reveals, as we could not have adored a God shrouded from us in His own perfections.

Save through the flesh Thou wouldst not come to me—

The flesh, wherein Thy strength my weakness found,

A weight to bow Thy Godhead to the ground,

And lift to heaven a lost humanity. 1 [Note: John Bannister Tabb.]

4. Christ was not only truly man, with body, soul, and spirit, in each of which He suffered, by hunger and weariness and pain, by grief and anger, by desolation: He also was and is perfectly man, and He was and is representatively man.

(1) Christ was and is perfectly man.—For us humanity is broken up into fragments by sex, by race, by time, by circumstance. From the beginning its endowments were not unequally divided between man and woman, whose differences are essential to the true idea of the whole. And we can see that countless nations and ages have not yet exhausted the manifold capacities of manhood and womanhood under the varied disciplines and inspirations of life. Again and again even in our own experience some new flash of courage or wisdom or patience or tenderness goes to brighten the picture of man’s completed and real self. But in Christ there are no broken or imperfect lights. In Him everything which is shown to us of right and good and lovely in the history of the whole world is gathered up once for all. Nothing limits His humanity, but the limits proper to humanity itself. Whatever there is in man of strength, of justice, of wisdom: whatever there is in woman of sensibility, of purity, of insight, is in Christ without the conditions which hinder among us the development of contrasted virtues in one person. Christ belongs peculiarly to no one people, to no one time. And conversely, if there be aught that is noble in the achievements or in the aspirations of any people or of any time, it finds a place in His sympathy, and strength from His example.

(2) Christ was and is also representatively man.—Seeing that He unites in Himself all that is truly manly and truly womanly, stripped of the accidental forms which belong to some one country, or to some one period, every one therefore can find in Him for his own work union with the eternal. He is, in the language of St. Paul, “the last Adam,” “a life-giving spirit.” For Him, consciously or unconsciously, all men were looking: to Him all history tended: in Him a higher life had its beginning and its pledge. “Ye shall see,” He said Himself in answer to the first confession of faith, “the heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man.” And for us the promise has found accomplishment. In Him we are enabled to perceive that the broken unity of earth and heaven has been restored; in Him we are enabled to recognize that the earlier intercourse between the seen and the unseen worlds has been brought to an absolute fulfilment. Christ the Son of man has bestowed on all men the gifts which belonged to Him as the Son of God.

iii. Why did He become flesh?

The purpose of the Incarnation has been abundantly discussed in the history of Christendom, from the Alexandrine Fathers onward. Anselm, in his “Cur Deus Homo,” asks and answers the question by saying that God became incarnate to provide a remedy for human sin; and two great mediæval schools, the Thomists and Scotists, took opposite sides on this point. The controversy is not even yet over; some maintain that God would have become incarnate whether man had sinned or not, and others assert that human sin is the predisposing cause of the humiliation of Deity. Perhaps a reconciliation might be effected between both extremes if it were recognized that moral evil is here by the good purpose of God, and hence that one main and necessary object of the Incarnation must, in the foreknowledge of God, have been the salvation of men from their sins and sorrows. It is not to the purpose to discuss whether Christ would have been born into the world had man never sinned, for in creating man God must have foreknown that he would sin. On the other hand, however, we may say that it was fitting that in the fulness of time God should send forth His Son, so that men might recognize and obey the very Self of God. God being what He is, it is clear that as soon as humanity was able to receive a revelation so complete as the fact of the Incarnation provides, such a revelation was just what we might expect. Had there been no Christ of history men to-day would have been wistfully longing for just such an expression of God as Christ brought into the world. We may therefore say that God became man for three reasons: (1) in order that He might realize Himself; (2) in order that He might give to the world a fuller revelation of God; and (3) in order that He might make atonement for sin.

1. He became man in order that He might realize Himself. This point we must touch reverently, yet firmly. It has a certain significance. God shares in every experience of the race and lives His life in every individual. The Hegelian philosophy declares that creation is the result of a process in which the Deity realizes Himself. To say less would be to affirm that man purchases in the school of pain an experience of which God is in possession without pain. A nobler thought is that which represents humanity as living its life with God, in God, and for God; and God as living His life in company with men, through men, and by men. That God has a deeper life than humanity can ever touch is certainly the case, but that the life of humanity has immediate value for the life of God is also an indispensable truth. God is the Universal Consciousness within whom are many separate centres of consciousness. God is immediately conscious of all that enters into our individual consciousness; He is, indeed, more conscious of us than we are of ourselves. Yet something more is needed even for Deity than this general consciousness of the flux of creation. God knows being in general; He needs to know human nature in particular. Here, perhaps, is a key to the purpose of the Incarnation. It was fitting that the Captain of our salvation should be made perfect through sufferings. God thus knows Himself through incarnation in a human life, and returns to Himself through humanity.

Previous to His Incarnation, Christ knew, as a Divine person, what was the condition of man on earth—not only knew it, but regarded it with tender interest. The sad music of humanity entered His ear and touched His compassion. It was because of the pitying love He felt for us, that He visited and redeemed us. But it is one thing to look on suffering, and another thing to suffer; and when Christ not only pitied the miserable, but came down and took up His abode among them, clothed Himself with their nature, lived among them, felt with them, wept with them, suffered with them, was made in all points like them, sin excepted, He acquired a new experience, which suffused the infinite compassion of His Godhead with the glow of a human tenderness. Then He knew the state of man as a sinner by making it His own, and through this personal acquaintance with evil He qualified Himself to be a merciful and faithful High Priest.

Thus, instead of jarring against our idea of God, the Incarnation seems not only natural but delightful to conceive. How often have we ourselves, when affection for the lower creation has been kindled in us, desired in idea to enter into their life for a time, and then to return into ourselves again with a new consciousness of a lower life than our own, and with increased ability and desire to help. And if we have felt this towards a nature not kindred to our own, how much more may God have felt it towards a nature in direct kinship with Himself? It is a noble thought: it ought to commend itself to all who have ever loved purely and passionately, and desired to become at one with the being of those they loved.

Macaulay never wrote more truly than when he said, “It was before Deity embodied in a human form, walking among men, partaking of their infirmities, leaning on their bosoms, weeping over their graves, slumbering in the manger, bleeding on the cross, that the prejudices of the synagogue, and the doubts of the academy, and the fasces of the lictor, and the swords of thirty legions were humbled in the dust.” By His very gentleness the incarnate Son does make men great, and he who seeks for purest sympathy and richest solace must betake himself to Christ. 1 [Note: W. M. Taylor, The Limitations of Life, 28.]

There was once a chaplain to a prison who thought that the prisoners were treated cruelly—more severely than their judges intended them to be; so he determined to live as they lived, to be punished as they were punished, although he had not committed any crime. This is almost exactly what our Lord Jesus Christ did. 2 [Note: J. Robinson Gregory.]

2. He became man in order that He might give to the world a fuller revelation of God. Nature has in all ages and in all lands spoken of God and taught men to worship Him, but nature has never been able to get beyond a mere declaration of the existence of a Supreme Being, and her disciples must, perforce, erect their altars to the Unknown God, and worship Him in ignorance and through the medium of symbols. Nature is powerless to expound the attributes of Deity. She cannot even, in the face of so much sorrow and suffering on every hand, go so far as to assert His unchanging and unchangeable goodness. She proclaims to us, with her ten thousand voices echoing through earth and sea and sky, that there is a God, but she can tell us no more. Here, then, is the province of revelation. From a world sitting in darkness there is borne upwards a cry whose burden is, “More light! more light!” And the cry is heard, the petition is granted, and through the deep gloom of the shadow-wrapped land a voice resounds, “Arise, shine, for thy light is come!”

When Christ came, He, and He first, taught us that we, with our sin-stained lips, might call upon God as “Our Father which art in heaven.” Thus a new relationship altogether was (not established but) revealed between the Creator and the creature, and that connection which David faintly foreshadowed when he said, “Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him,” was shown by our Saviour to be not a semblance but a reality.

If a friend visits you, you like to show him your most valued possessions. If you are a gardener you take him to see the loveliest flower in your conservatory. If you are an artist you lead him to your studio and show him your best picture. If you are an author you place your favourite volume in his hand. Now God wishes man to know what He glories in, what He deems His best possession, what affords Him more joy than anything else. He wishes to give us the knowledge of His glory. What does He glory in? What does He wish us to know above everything else?

Does He wish us to know His power? Certainly not. That might impress some. But He placed our first parents in the Garden of Eden. Great loveliness was there, but no special manifestation of power. I notice that when kings and other potentates visit one another they are taken to see the arsenal, or the army, or the fleet. The host is very anxious to give the guests a great idea of his power. This is one of the many particulars in which the King of kings is essentially different from all other kings. He put our first parents in the Garden of Eden where there was no great display of power. He might have placed them on some solitary island, around which great oceans leaped and rolled. But He has never gone out of His way to impress men with His power. Neither has He ever sought to overwhelm them with His wisdom. It is only lately that He has begun to unfold to us, on a large scale, the marvels of His knowledge. The physical sciences are exceedingly modern. It is only in our own lifetime that God has permitted us, by the use of such modern inventions as the microscope, the telescope, and the spectroscope, to find out the wonders of His skill. He was in no hurry to impress us with that. Nothing can be more absurd, or wicked, or degraded, than the idolatrous worship of mere cleverness. We may be as clever or as powerful as Satan himself, and yet as odious and degraded. God does not glory either in power or in wisdom.

But what God does glory in, what He has been trying to reveal to us from the beginning, what He wishes us to know more than anything else, is that His nature is love! He wishes to persuade us that He attaches an immeasurably higher value to love than to power or to wisdom. Where shall we find words to describe the rapture of man when he discovers that “God is love”? One of the most delightful passages in human biography is in the life of Henry Ward Beecher. He was brought up in a narrow, hard, Calvinistic school. For a long time he groped in darkness and misery. The name of God was to him a name of terror. But with glowing eloquence and delight he tells us how on one memorable day it dawned upon him that God is love. At once the whole universe was radiant with new beauty. Everything was changed. He was changed. He passed from hell to heaven, and the light of that rapturous moment never passed away. But neither to him nor to us could that vivid and full knowledge of the love of God ever have come except in the face of Jesus Christ. All previous revelations are summed up, supplemented, and completed in Christ. “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father” ( John 14:9). There is “life for a look” at that face. 1 [Note: H. Price Hughes, Essential Christianity, 50.]

3. But the grand reason why God became man in Christ, the New Testament tells us, was that He might make propitiation or atonement for sin. This is the great reason which Anselm discusses in his own way in his book. The law had something to say in Court, as it were, with regard to the bestowment of an absolutely gratuitous pardon, and the right to claim that its principles and requirements should be duly conserved and satisfied. Now the Incarnation of the Son of God and His perfect obedience to the law, thus “magnifying the law and maintaining its honour,” fully met the case. He fully met all the requirements which the law might put forth with a view to securing a free pardon, and He did it as man’s Head and Representative. Accordingly, when the penitent sinner accepts Christ in His incarnate fulness—His law-satisfying life and death—Christ’s law-satisfying life and death practically and substantially become the sinner’s own, and count for his salvation. Thus it follows that while pardon is freely given, the law is duly honoured, maintained, and even fulfilled. Christ Himself declares that He came “to give his life a ransom for many” ( Matthew 20:28). As St. John puts it, God “loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” ( 1 John 4:10).

And this brings new life into the world. Christ is the propitiation for His people through whom they recover their lost place in the Divine favour. But besides this, He is their life, and is made to them a quickening spirit. To Him they are indebted for their new existence; in His likeness they are renewed; on Him they depend; and in Him they find their unity. His own favourite image of the relation is that of a tree: “I am the vine; ye are the branches.” The branches spring from the tree; they are nourished by it; they are in union with it; and so believers have their being from Christ; they live in Him; they are one with Him.

The Incarnation of the Son of God has not left human nature where it was, but imported into it a new Divine splendour. Wonderful as man was in his created likeness to God, the entrance of the Son of God into the vital body of humanity has raised human nature to a higher point than it ever attained before. This, like the Incarnation itself, is as difficult to define as it is clearly a fact. When “the Word became flesh, and dwelt among men,” the measurements of humanity had to be taken from a new height, even from the glory of the Son of Man_1:1 [Note: J. Thomas, The Mysteries of Grace, 24.]

So the Lord of all things,

Caring for His own,

Even for the small things

Left His golden throne.

Down the mystic stairway,

To the bourne of earth,

Of the womb of Mary,

By a human birth,

Came the Sun of Healing

Above human ken,

All His might concealing

From the sons of men.

That He might precede them,

Out of pain and strife,

Head them, join them, teach them, lead them

Into fuller life.

For the life diurnal

Waxeth old and dim;

Love and life eternal

Rest alone in Him!

All is in the story

How the Christ brought good

In a costly crimson glory

Of His Brotherhood. 1 [Note: John W. Taylor, The Doorkeeper, 5.]

II

The Human Life

“And dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.”

The Nativity was but the beginning of a long work. The Son of God not only came as man, but He grew as man grows. He passed through the stages of human development, “tempted in all points” even as we are. He consecrated not our nature only, but our life. “He dwelt among us.” He shared the transitory joys and griefs—the spirit of righteous anger and the spirit of thankful exultation—which belong to us. “He tabernacled among us,”—to preserve the idea of the original, which carries us back to the time when the people of Israel wandered as pilgrims in the wilderness, and the visible glory of the Lord rested when they should rest and guided their forward path, the sign and type of God’s abiding presence. Even so it was with Christ. He tabernacled with us, and the faithful beheld His glory. He marked out the path of life. He hallowed each resting-place upon the way. The material splendour of the fiery pillar was changed into a spiritual beacon; but it was still clear with the light of heaven—clear to the loving. But even here, as of old time, that which is the light of the Christian is the thick gloom which enwraps the unbelieving—the thick gloom or even the consuming fire.

We know, we feel, we value all that He gave up. We know how He passed through that life of man on earth, which He accepted from its beginning to its close. We know that there is nothing so pinched and hard and trying in man’s condition that it was not His will to go through. We know that there is nothing so mean and scorned, so rough and dangerous in what the poor of this world have to put up with that did not fall to His lot when He came among men. That we might not feel Him to be in lot and condition above any of us, He chose to be below most of us—on a level with the meanest and the most helpless. He asked for no privilege as the Son of God; He refused nothing appointed to man to go through; He desired not to be spared any burden of our mortal state. As each thing came in the course of years, He accepted it. He hurried nothing; He waited till the years should change the babe into the child, and the child into the boy, and the boy into the man. For He came to be among us, not a passing vision, or a strange spectacle, but actually and in earnest to be man with men, to be “flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone,” to bind us to Himself in life, and in death, and in resurrection. He came that we might see and know that, being what He was, He had made Himself one of ourselves, living our very life, feeling, suffering, buffeted, tempted like man, but without man’s sin.

What must it be, only to be a man, when you think what He did to save and to bless mankind? What must it be, only to be a man, when you think that it is to be what Jesus Christ was once—and is now at the Father’s right hand? Let it be enough, to be of that nature which God cared for so wonderfully, for which He has opened such a road to perfection, for which He has provided such wondrous hopes. It cannot be a small thing to be a man—to be what our God and Maker was pleased to become, that He might be more closely joined to us. It cannot be a small thing to be man, with man’s destiny; to be man, with the honour put on man by God. 1 [Note: Dean Church, The Message of Peace, 170.]

1. The Word “dwelt among us.” There can be little doubt that the author had in mind the Shekinah of the temple of the old dispensation. Biblical history tells us that after the erection of the tabernacle in the wilderness, the glory of God descended with the pillar of cloud and took possession of the Holy of Holies, and abode there upon the cherubic throne. So in the temple, the God of Israel was enthroned in theophanic glory in the Holy of Holies, on the outstretched wings of the cherubim. The tabernacle and the temple, its historic successor, continued, until the destruction of Jerusalem at the Babylonian exile, to be the dwelling-place of God enthroned upon the cherubim. Just as the temple was the abiding presence of the theophanic God in the old dispensation, just so the Word of God tabernacled in the flesh of Jesus of Nazareth.

All that was glorious in the conception of the Shekinah and the temple of the old dispensation became still more glorious in Jesus Christ; only that glory was veiled and hidden in His flesh, as the Shekinah had been hidden in the innermost throne-room of the temple. But this veiling of the glory of the Word was only a temporary veiling, during His earthly life; when the veil of the temple of Jerusalem was rent by an earthquake, the veil of the flesh of the Son of God was also rent, and when His body arose from the tomb, the body of the risen Lord no longer veiled the glory, but transmitted it in Christophanies to His disciples.

The process of the Incarnation St. John describes very simply. The Jews were familiar with the idea of God dwelling with His people. By the word St. John here uses he links the body of Christ to the ancient dwelling of God round which the tents of Israel had clustered. God now dwelt among men in the humanity of Jesus Christ. The tabernacle was human, the indwelling Person was Divine. In Christ is realized the actual presence of God among His people, the actual entrance into and personal participation in human history which was hinted at in the tabernacle and the temple. 2 [Note: M. Dods, Footsteps in the Path of Life, 19.]

2. “Full of grace and truth.” St. John had a special form of the manifestation of grace and truth before his mind when he wrote these words. He was thinking of the covenant God, who proclaimed Himself to Moses on the mount when He descended in the cloud as “Jehovah, Jehovah, a God full of compassion, and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy and truth.” He was thinking of David’s prayer, “O prepare loving-kindness and truth”; and his heart burned within him as he saw them now prepared. It was the thought of Christ’s redeeming work that filled his mind, and that led him to sum up the revelation of the Incarnation in the revelation of grace and truth. Therefore he says, not “love,” but “grace”—undeserved love to sinners. And in “truth” he is thinking chiefly of Christ’s “faithfulness.” The Divine glory that rested as a nimbus on the Lord’s head was compounded before all else of His ineffable love for the unlovely, of His changeless faithfulness to the unfaithful. For in Christ, God commended His love to us in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

Nevertheless, it would be a serious error to confine the words as here used to this single reference. This is rather the culmination and climax of their meaning than the whole extent and meaning of it. Christ is not only love as manifested in grace, but as the God of love manifest in the flesh He is love itself in all its height and breadth. Not only the loftiest reaches of love, love for the undeserving, find their model in Him, but all the love that is in the world finds its source and must seek its support in Him. His was the love that wept at the grave of a friend and over the earthly sorrows of Jerusalem, that yearned with the bereaved mother at Nain, and took the little children into His arms to bless them; as well as the love that availed to offer Himself a sacrifice for sin. In like manner, that St. John has especially in mind here the highest manifestations of truth—our Lord’s trustiness in the great work of salvation—in no way empties the word of its lower contents. He is still the true Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world; and all the truth that is in the world comes from Him and must seek its strength in Him. “We beheld his glory,” says the Apostle, “ full”—complete, perfect—“of grace and truth.” And perfection of love and truth avails for all their manifestations. This man, the man Christ Jesus, could not act in any relation otherwise than lovingly, could not speak on any subject otherwise than truly. He is the pure fountain of love and truth.

(1) Grace and truth are spoken of in the concrete. The Apostle says that the only begotten is “full of grace and truth.” He did not come to tell us about grace, but actually to bring us grace. He is not full of the news of grace and truth, but of grace and truth themselves. Others had been messengers of gracious tidings, but He came to bring grace. Others teach us truth, but Jesus is the truth. He is that grace and truth whereof others spake.

(2) The grace and truth are blended. The “and” between the two words is more than a common conjunction. The two rivers unite in one fulness—“Full of grace and truth”: that is to say, the grace is truthful grace, grace not in fiction or in fancy, grace not to be hoped for and to be dreamed of, but grace every atom of which is fact; redemption which does redeem, pardon which does blot out sin, renewal which actually regenerates, salvation which completely saves. We have not here blessings which charm the ear and cheat the soul; but real, substantial favours from God that cannot lie. Then blend these things the other way. “Grace and truth”: the Lord has come to bring us truth, but it is not the kind of truth which censures, condemns, and punishes; it is gracious truth, truth steeped in love, truth saturated with mercy. The truth which Jesus brings to His people comes not from the judgment-seat, but from the mercy-seat; it has a gracious drift and aim about it, and ever tends to salvation. His light is the life of men. The grace is all true, and the truth is all gracious.

There are souls which easily bestow grace, which find it not hard to forgive, but they have often a dim perception of the majesty of that truth which has been violated. There are souls which have a clear perception of the majesty of truth and a deep sense of the sin that swerves from it, but they are often inexorable in their justice and unable to pardon; they have more truth than grace. Here there is a perfect blending of extremes—fulness of grace united to fulness of truth. There is a forgiveness which is valueless because there is no sense of wrong; there is a sense of wrong which is forbidding because there is no power of forgiveness. Here perfect forgiveness is joined with perfect perception. The glory of Christ’s love is that it comes not from darkness but from light; He forgave the sinner because He bore the sin. 1 [Note: G. Matheson, Moments on the Mount, 221.]

I was eight years old, I believe, when another boy, a little older than myself, told me that we owed the Christmas gifts to our parents, that they did not come from heaven. This gave me such a shock that I fell with both my fists upon the boy, pommelling him with all my might; but I got the worst of the battle, almost the only one I fought in my life, and came home crying to ask for confirmation of the dreadful tale. My dear mother had to give it, but did it in such a delicate way that, although I felt the mysterious poetry of that night was gone, my love for my parents was increased. 2 [Note: Life and Letters of Sir Charles Hallé, 20.]

i. Grace

Men who had been accustomed to hear of religion solely as stereotyped tradition or condemning law, “wondered at the gracious words which proceeded out of his mouth,” so full was He of the revealed mercy of God to sinners. That was the general impression made by His life and ministry. And it is the impression made to-day by the record of it. We see Him still across the distance of ages, as that Divine head rises above the corn-fields through which He walked; we see Him under the trees at eventide, or sitting on Jacob’s well at noon, or in the boat at the edge of Tiberias, or standing in the meadows above Bethsaida. Everywhere the impression made concerning Him is the same. It is Divine Love in earnest, seeking and saving that which was lost. We here look, not upon a speculative teacher, or a great analyst of the mystery of human life, or a disputatious theologue pouring forth doctrines and articles of belief, or a mighty intellect addressing the human understanding so as to found a school, but on a living practical love, descending into the midst of men’s sufferings and sins; and earnestly labouring to relieve them.

Grace is power. That power whereby God works in nature is called power. That power whereby He works in the wills of His reasonable creatures is called grace. 3 [Note: J. B. Mozley, On Predestination, 302.]

Grace is a force in the spiritual order, not simply God’s unmerited kindness in the abstract, but such kindness in action as a movement of His Spirit within the soul, resulting from the Incarnation, and imparting to the will and the affections a new capacity of obedience and love. 1 [Note: W. Bright, Anti-Pelagian Treatises of St. Augustine, x.]

Grace is not simply kindly feeling on the part of God, but a positive boon conferred on man. Grace is a real and active force: it is “the power that worketh in us,” illuminating the intellect, warming the heart, strengthening the will of redeemed humanity. It is the might of the Everlasting Spirit, renovating man by uniting him, whether immediately or through the Sacraments, to the Sacred Manhood of the Word Incarnate. 2 [Note: H. P. Liddon, University Sermons, i. 44.]

1. Grace is a revelation of the will of God now. A child knows something of the mind and will of the parent from personal contact with that parent, but not from the rules, or only to a very slender degree from the rules, which are laid down for its guidance. But when we turn from Law to Grace, then we see at once that we are now dealing with a revelation of the mind and the will of Him from whom the grace proceeds. Each act of favour which a parent bestows upon his child, or which a sovereign bestows upon his subject, is a revelation, so far as it goes, of the mind and will of the parent towards that particular child, or of the sovereign towards that particular subject, as the case may be. And even so every act of grace which we receive from God is a revelation, so far as it goes, of the mind and will of God towards us who are affected by the act. And if it be so with each of these acts of favour, obviously grace as a whole must be regarded as nothing less than a complete manifestation of the mind and will of God Himself towards us, that is to say, so far as any manifestation of the Infinite to finite intelligence can be complete.

2. The words “full of grace” not only comprise the supply of all that sinners need on earth, they include heaven itself in reversion. These sunbeams fly over an eternal future. Other rays of light are lost in distance, swallowed up at last in darkness, absorbed in the bosom of eternal night; but these go forward, bright as at first, into the profound, and reveal along the surface of that shoreless ocean the isles of the blessed stretching onward to an horizon beyond which no eye but One can direct a space-penetrating beam. “He seeth under the whole heaven”; and that which He sees is “an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away.”

ii. Truth

The living Word, the voice of God walking among men, was “full of truth,” as well as of grace. The expressions of the Evangelist, being prompted by a very real inspiration of Him who is Light, resemble sun-rays. They contain more than a single element of meaning, they fly in complex glory through the ages. If St. John had been asked what he meant by his phrase “full of truth,” he would doubtless have said, I mean that He was full of reality, full of sincerity, full of instruction. There is no sense in which you can employ the word Truth without making it describe Him, who was the “Amen,” “the faithful and true witness.” Let us think, then, of Jesus Christ under each aspect. Let the three rays, the violet, the crimson, the gold, as they pass through the prism of our analysis, fall in succession upon the sacred head of this Prince of the Kings of the Earth.

1. He was full of Reality.—We know what we mean when we say that we have met with a real man. This is a world of false appearances, of poverty striving to set up and maintain a respectable exterior, of cheap materials set forth so as to look rich and fine; a world of paint, varnish, stucco, and veneer. So is it in character; a world much more than half filled with people trying to pass themselves off for something greater and better than the reality, for wiser, richer, more learned, and more beautiful than they actually are. The experience of life deepens the persuasion that the majority will not bear a close examination of the “inward parts.” The religious public is in the same condemnation. In Christ’s time religious society was one complicated pretence. But look at the Christ! He is real, genuine, solid to the centre. He is at the heart what He is at the surface. We shall never find Him different from that which we see Him now. The zeal of God burns in an inextinguishable flame in the deepest recesses of His spirit. He means all that He says. His acts are exactly parallel with His words. His passions move by the same rule as His thoughts. We never know any man thoroughly until we see him under excitement. Jesus when excited is animated by the same inspiration as in repose. “The zeal of God’s house” is the fiery cloak which enfolds Him.

Professor Huxley was no model man, but his son describes some characteristics that ought to be felt to be model when he sets forth “that passion for veracity which was perhaps his strongest characteristic, an uncompromising passion for truth in thought, which would admit no particle of self-deception, no assertion beyond what could be verified; for truth in act, perfect straightforwardness and sincerity, with complete disregard of personal consequences for uttering unpalatable fact. Truthfulness in his eyes was the cardinal virtue, without which no stable society can exist.… The lie from interested motives was only more hateful to him than the lie from self-delusion or foggy thinking.… In his mind, no compromise was possible between truth and untruth.” 1 [Note: R. E. Speer, The Marks of a Man, 24.]

2. He was full of Sincerity.—This is one of the chief impressions made on all readers of the Gospels, that Jesus of Nazareth was perfectly honest, that He was not a conscious impostor, that He spoke with a strength and depth of sincerity which raised Him far above the level of ordinary witnesses. The frank and penetrating beam of His holy eye rests on every one who contemplates Him in the mirror of the gospel history. The goodness of His nature was a pledge of His honesty.

Perhaps no warmer encomium was ever passed upon faulty man than this of Mrs. Hutchinson upon her husband, who was Governor of Nottingham Castle during the English Civil War: “He never professed the thing he intended not, nor promised what he believed out of his power, nor failed in the performance of anything that was in his power to fulfil.”

3. He was full of truth in being full of Instruction.—He made human nature appear to be what it is, a grand and solemn thing. He made human life in its moral aspects seem an arena where issues of infinite importance are at stake. He made the soul of man seem an awfully real existence within him. He made right and wrong seem as distinct as noon and midnight. He made the Almighty appear a Being real and near, overshadowing the earth with His excellent glory. His countenance blazed like the sun with the splendour of God. Aforetime the Deity had been faintly revealed in events, in descriptions, in institutions, in nature; but in Him God became visible. “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.” He caused the invisible world to appear to the soul as real as the visible. He was in manifest communion with the unseen. He opened the Scriptures, and the world of the present, and the realms of the dead, and the future eternity, and compelled men to feel that these bursts of supreme inspiration were but the first outbreakings of a fountain which would flow through eternity. 1 [Note: E. White, The Mystery of Growth, 91.]

Truth lives and thrives in her fair house of Learned Theory. But its grand, pillared front is too high, its wide doors too rich and ponderous; her form as she moves within is too fair and proud and queenly for common men to dare to come and enter her great gates and ask to learn of God and Nature and their own humanity from her lips. Rather will they stand without for ever, looking from far away upon the towers of her wondrous home and see the great Mistress walking with a few bold scholars through the greenness of her trees, deeming it all a thing in which there is no part for them. So then, fair Truth, that she may claim her right to govern from her readiness to help all men, lays by her gorgeous robes, takes the plain white mantle of most simple faith, comes down from her great house, and goes along the crowded street and close lanes of poor men’s homes, with a lesson and a smile for each, a soothing touch for the sick child’s forehead, a helping word for the poor working woman, a passing look that makes the strong man’s heart more strong and happy, long after she has passed back to her house. 2 [Note: Phillips Brooks, 73.]

This inner admonition which compels us to the thought of God, to the thirst for Him, to the search after Him, comes to us from the source of all Truth. It is the sun which shines within our souls. It is the truth which we divine when, our eyes being too feeble, or too suddenly opened, we are afraid to look it in the face. It is none other than God Himself, in His changeless perfection. So long as we persist in seeking to satisfy our thirst elsewhere than at this fountain, we must admit that we have not attained our proper goal, and therefore, though God be for us, we are neither wise nor happy. Complete satisfaction of soul, the truly happy life, is to know purely and fully what Truth itself is, what conducts in the search after it, and by what relations it connects us with the supreme perfection. These three demonstrate to purified souls the one only God, the one only Reality, in distinction from the self-contradicting fables of superstition. 3 [Note: St. Augustine, Soliloquies, xxxvi.]

Despised! Rejected by the priest-led roar

Of the multitude! The imperial purple flung

About the form the hissing scourge had stung,

Witnessing naked to the truth it bore!

True Son of Father true, I Thee adore,

Even the mocking purple truthful hung

On Thy true shoulders, bleeding its folds among,

For Thou wast king, art king for evermore!

I know the Father: he knows me the truth.

Truth-witness, therefore the one essential king,

With Thee I die, with Thee live worshipping!

O human God, O brother, eldest born,

Never but Thee was there a man in sooth,

Never a true crown but Thy crown of thorn! 1 [Note: George MacDonald, Poetical Works, i. 259.]

III

Divinity discovered in Humanity

“We beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father.”

The New Testament embodies this unique Apostolic experience. There are critical considerations which give a graduated value to its materials. Some portions are more near the centre than others. Some passages and sections are relegated to the fringe. Some may have a doubtful claim. There is a certain variance in tone: a certain growth: a certain personal element. All this can be allowed for, and rationally examined and classified and estimated. But the main bulk is there, as the record of the impression which was made on those who came within that incomparable and authoritative experience. This is what they said who saw and touched and handled and proved the living Presence of the Christ. This is what it came to. This is the thing that happened to them, and this is the language in which they came to express it. They could not say what they had passed through in any other way. They could not find any other type of terms that would adequately convey to themselves or to others the fact which experience had pressed home upon their innermost being.

And how would they express it? What are the words in which they present it? Well, they could not stop short of an ultimate verdict, which became quite inevitable to all those who came under the supreme experience. They might tremble to say it; or wonder how it came to be so inevitable; or brood over it before they said it; or find it break from them in a single outburst of irresistible inspiration. But one and all come to it. One and all say it. One and all feel that nothing short of it will adequately signalize their inward conviction. It was impossible to be inside that experience of living with Jesus, or of seeing Him in His Risen Reality, without letting their belief culminate and crystallize in a simple victorious expression. The Word had been made Flesh. It was “the Word of God” in human flesh. God had sent forth His Son. “Truly, this was the Christ, the Son of the Highest.” “God hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son,” “the express image of his Person.” “We beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father.” “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son … in the likeness of sinful flesh, to condemn sin in the flesh.” It must come to that. That is the heart and core of the whole matter. That is the joy and the fellowship into which believers are invited by those to whom the Life was manifested—the Eternal Life which was with the Father. “That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you.” “We know him that is true, and we are in him that is true, even in his Son Jesus Christ.” “This is the true God, and Eternal Life.”

I know what beauty is, for Thou

Hast set the world within my heart;

Of me Thou madest it a part;

I never loved it more than now.

I know the Sabbath afternoons;

The light asleep upon the graves;

Against the sky the poplar waves;

The river murmurs organ tunes.

I know the spring with bud and bell;

The hush in summer woods at night;

Autumn, when leaves let in more light;

Fantastic winter’s lovely spell.

I know the rapture music gives,

Its mystery of ordered tones:

Dream-muffled soul, it loves and moans,

And, half-alive, comes in and lives.

And verse I know, whose concord high

Of thought and music lifts the soul

Where many a glimmering starry shoal

Glides through the Godhead’s living sky.

Yea, Beauty’s regnant All I know—

The imperial head, the thoughtful eyes;

The God-imprisoned harmonies

That out in gracious motions go.

But I leave all, O Son of man,

Put off my shoes, and come to Thee,

Most lovely Thou of all I see,

Most potent Thou of all that can!

As child forsakes his favourite toy,

His sisters’ sport, his new-found nest,

And, climbing to his mother’s breast,

Enjoys yet more his late-left joy—

I lose to find. On fair-browed bride

Fair pearls their fairest light afford;

So, gathered round Thy glory, Lord,

All glory else is glorified. 1 [Note: George MacDonald.]

1. “We beheld his glory.” St. John is telling us what of his own immediate knowledge he knows—testifying what he had heard, what he had seen with his eyes, what he had beheld and his hands had handled. An eye-witness to Christ’s majesty, he had seen His glory and bears his willing witness to it. Nor must we fancy that he gives us merely a subjective opinion of his own, as if he were telling us only that the man Jesus was so full of grace and truth in His daily walk that he, looking upon Him admiringly, had been led to conjecture that He was more than man. He testifies not to subjective opinion but to objective fact. And precisely what St. John witnesses is that the Word did become flesh, and dwelt among men, full of grace and truth, and that the blaze of His glory was manifest to every seeing eye that looked upon Him.

2. There would be several facts which would stand out with peculiar prominence before St. John’s mind when he thought of the glory of the Divine Word as manifested in the human life of Jesus Christ.

(1) He might probably have in mind, for example, that vision which was granted to St. Peter, St. James, and himself, when the Lord was transfigured on the Mount. He who had been taken apart by Christ, and had seen the fashion of his Lord’s visage changed, so as to shine bright as the light, and His raiment to become white and glistering,—that visage, which was so marred more than any man, made for the while fairer than the fairest, and those poor garments changed for the vesture of angels,—he who had witnessed (whether in the body, or out of the body) such a transfiguration as this might well say that even in the midst of His humiliation the glory of the Incarnate Word had been seen by him.

(2) Or again, the Evangelist might have in his thoughts those works of wonder, and at the same time of mercy, whereby the Lord had given evidence from time to time of the advent of a new power in the world. He might remember how the blind had received their sight, how the deaf had been made to hear, how the sick had been healed, and the lepers cleansed, nay, how the dead had risen up as if from sleep when bid to do so by the voice of Christ; he who had witnessed for the space of three years and more such works as these must have been blind indeed if the veil of human flesh had quite prevented him from recognizing the glory which was ever manifesting itself forth in acts of Divine goodness and power.

(3) Or still further, it may be that in using such language as that of the text, St. John had reference to those two great events to which the mind of any disciple who was taunted with worshipping a crucified Lord would instinctively turn, namely, the Resurrection and the Ascension. We can easily understand how the patent fact of the crucifixion should have appeared, to those who knew no more of Christ, to have reduced His claims to an absurdity, how the Cross should have proved a stumbling-block to one class of minds and folly to another,—there is nothing to surprise us in this,—but the death of their Master would imply to His disciples no destruction of the faith, because they knew that He who was dead and buried rose again from the dead, and ascended into Heaven. And how could St. John above all, who had been first of the disciples at the empty sepulchre, and had been one of the company from whose presence the Lord was taken up,—how could he fail to testify that, however much the weakness of human flesh, the acknowledged truth that Jesus Christ had died, might seem to Jews and Greeks a fatal obstacle to the faith, it was very different with those who had beheld the glory of Christ, declared to be the only begotten Son by the Resurrection from the dead and the Ascension to the right hand of God?

3. “We beheld his glory.” That is the Apostle’s deliberate answer; that is his description of the process which gained them conviction. “We beheld.” They used the help both of eyes and of mind; for the word suggests that they saw as men see when they let their minds follow their eyes—when they watch and think and learn as they look. The Apostles had had no brief and unsteady sight of the Master. They had had time given them to rest their gaze upon Him, and to continue looking, as He moved, as He spoke, as He went up and down with them. In many moods and varied scenes, in hope and in fear, in exaltation and in depression, by day and by night, alone and in a crowd, as a Prophet in the glare of the public sun, as a Friend in the secrecy of confidence, in a thousand incidents unforeseen and surprising—in all they had been close, very close, to Him, and had looked with all their eyes, and had hung upon Him with all their souls, and had meditated over all that they saw, and had pondered and had brooded, and had done this slowly, by degrees, habitually, moving forward step by step to this great conclusion. So they had seen; in this sure and tested study of Him, they had lived and walked; and what was it they found by so looking?

4. Of one thing they were convinced. That which they found in Him was something that had not been in the world at all before Jesus came. It was not merely a higher form of that which had been already in others, even in the highest—in the Baptist, or in Moses. As they had known all that the Baptist could do, so, too, they had felt all that Moses could bring them. He had brought them a great gift. He had given them a law from God. But this peculiar grace and life which they now had received came into the world in Jesus Christ, and in Him only. So strange, so new, so marvellous, so incomparable was this deep secret on which they had found themselves gazing. And what was it, then, this secret? How could it be told, this discovery? “Well,” the Apostle says, “it was nothing short of the supreme vision of all visions. It was (and we, as we waited and watched, became more and more certain of it)—it was the disclosure, the unveiling of God Himself. It was in character, in substance, in reality, God’s own glory. Whatever men have found God to be, whatever our fathers of old time felt God to be, as He shone in upon their hearts through the splendour of the Shekinah in the Tabernacle of Moses, that same thing Jesus showed Himself to be to us who so closely studied and loved Him. We saw Him, saw Him long, saw Him very near, saw Him very carefully; and what we saw in Him was the glory of God—the glory as of the only begotten Son of the Almighty Father.”

That human character, what was it? Was it simply one character among many? Was it a superlatively good man side by side with whom there were the Caiaphases and the Pilates, the weak men and the desperately wicked men? Was it simply one out of many? No, it had dawned upon them more and more that here He had not only one human character, He had something which drew from deeper depths than that, and covered an infinitely wider area. True, He was very Man, the Word was indeed made flesh, but that which they saw here in the reality of human nature was nothing less than the Divine Being, no other than the Eternal Son. The Word, the Son of God, had been made flesh; this human character was God’s character; this human love, this human justice, this human severity, this human compassion, are the Divine love, the eternal love, the eternal justice, the eternal severity, the eternal compassion. Verily, it is God made man! And here in the intelligible form of a human character we have disclosed to us the great secret of God. No man has seen God at any time, but the only begotten Son—God only begotten—He declared it.

In the rays of the sun, the topaz surpasses in splendour all precious stones; and even so does the humanity of our Lord Jesus Christ excel in glory and in majesty all the saints and all the angels because of His union with the eternal Father. And in this union the reflection of the Divine Sun is so clear and glorious that it attracts and reflects in its clearness all the eyes of saints and angels in immediate vision, and those also of just men to whom its splendour is revealed. So likewise does the topaz attract and reflect in itself the eyes of those who behold it, because of its great clearness. But if you were to cut the topaz it would darken, while if you leave it in its natural state it will remain clear. And so, too, if you examine and try to penetrate the splendour of the eternal Word, that splendour will darken and you will lose it. But leave it as it is, and follow it with earnest gaze, and with self-abnegation, and it will give you light. 1 [Note: M. Maeterlinck, Ruysbroeck and The Mystics, 61.]

5. The doctrine of the Incarnation involves the reality of the Divine Sonship of Jesus. “The Word was God.” We have here a substantive used as an adjective. The Word was Divine in essential being. And this essentially Divine Being “became flesh and dwelt among us.” The man Christ Jesus was the Son of God. Translate the term “Word” into the language of personality, it becomes “Son.” Such was the faith to which the Apostles bore witness, into which many who had seen Jesus of Nazareth, and heard His voice, and followed Him, grew. It was a faith which had power to propagate itself; it knows not how to die.

The first preachers of the gospel were aware how the language they used about Jesus would strike the ear, how it would startle men to be told that Jesus had come from heaven to earth; that the Father had singled Him out from all others, had watched and guarded and glorified Him as the Son of His begetting and His love. They were Jews, with the first commandment ringing in their ears, followed by the second and the third, which fence about the Divine Name from intrusive curiosity and undisciplined fancy and too fervent speech. They knew what their words meant; how the faith they aimed at awakening would draw men’s thoughts more and more to Jesus; how worshippers would no longer seek to scale the distant heavens, but would let affection settle, and the heart’s worship centre, in a human life. They knew that a passionate loyalty would be kindled toward Christ; that tragedies of devotion would result from it; that when once that faith was rooted in the soul it would mean a

Toiling up new Calvaries ever,

With the Cross that turns not back.

And they could not but speak the things which they had seen and known; this was their deepest faith, their clearest knowledge, their surest certainty, and it must be spoken. And the generations which have followed them have felt the same necessity. The same solemn constraint of faith and confession is upon us. 1 [Note: A. Mackennal, The Eternal Son of God and The Human Sonship, 18.]

The Incarnation of the Word

Literature

Barrow (E. P.), The Way not a Sect, 23.

Briggs (C. A.), The Incarnation of the Lord, 190.

Brooke (S. A.), Christ in Modern Life, 63, 75.

Campbell (R. J.), A Faith for To-day, 197.

Church (R. W.), The Message of Peace, 159.

Dale (R. W.), Christian Doctrine, 45.

Dods (M.), Footsteps in the Path of Life, 19.

Douglas (A. H.), Sermons, 249.

Goodwin (H.), Hulsean Lectures for 1856, 1.

Gregory (J. R.), Scripture Truths made Simple, 41.

Holland (H. S.), Creed and Character, 3.

Holland (H. S.), Fibres of Faith, 92.

Hughes (H. P.), Essential Christianity, 44.

Kelman (J.), Ephemera Eternitatis, 306.

Mackennal (A.), The Eternal Son of God and the Human Sonship, 9.

Macleod (D.), Christ and Society, 141.

Matheson (G.), Moments on the Mount, 221.

Maurice (F. D.), Christmas Day, 1.

Murphy (J. B. C.), The Service of the Master, 36.

Ramage (W.), Sermons, 1.

Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xxxi. (1885), No. 1862.

Taylor (W. M.), The Limitations of Life, 15.

Thomas (J.), The Mysteries of Grace, 16.

Warfield (B. B.), in Princeton Sermons, 94.

Westcott (B. F.), The Historic Faith, 43, 58.

Westcott (B. F.), Village Sermons, 33.

White (E.), The Mystery of Growth, 79.

Christian World Pulpit, xx. 198 (Haynes); lii. 371 (Storey); liii. 24 (Gore); lv. 236 (Lynch).

Churchman’s Pulpit: Christmas Day: ii. 208 (Scott), 223 (Swanson).

Homiletic Review, lvi. 45 (Mair).

Verse 29

The Lamb of God

On the morrow he seeth Jesus coming unto him, and saith, Behold, the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world!— John 1:29.

1. The importance of the Baptist’s ministry becomes fully intelligible only when his teaching is placed over against the characteristics of the religious thought of his day. It is no far-fetched analogy to liken his work, in one respect, to that of the Reformers of the sixteenth century. He made a great attempt to go back from the accretions of a later age to the purer doctrine of the Scriptures.

Pharisaism had, both directly and indirectly, done vast damage to the spiritual life of Palestine. It had “bound” upon men’s aching backs “heavy burdens and grievous to be borne.” Righteousness had been made to consist in the punctilious discharge of a multitude of ceremonial obligations. The conception of God as a loving and gracious Father had to no small extent been thrust into the background, while in the forefront of Pharisaic teaching was the idea of “a servile relationship”—God as the Master, man as the servant who was required to perform certain duties, and had a right, in return, to the Divine favour. A free, healthy spiritual life was thus made impossible, while encouragement was given, on the one hand to religious self-complacency and self-confidence, and on the other to hypocrisy, and equivocation, and subterfuge.

The effect of such encouragement was only too plain in connection with the popular anticipations of the Divine Kingdom. These anticipations always included the triumph of Israel and the overthrow of the heathen; but they took little or no account of Israel’s own unworthiness, of Israel’s own moral and spiritual failure, of Israel’s own utter need of reconciliation and regeneration. The Judaism of that day failed to realize what sin must mean for God’s chosen people. Controlled to a great extent by the Pharisees, it insisted with wearisome urgency upon offering, ablution, fast, or tithe, but it “left undone the weightier matters of the law.” It refused to contemplate the possibility of a day of wrath coming for Israel.

At a critical hour in the fortunes of the nation John the Baptist sought to create a stricter, juster, healthier sense of the requirements of real religion. His teaching was the strong and uncompromising corrective of the prevailing fallacies and errors. He attacked with all his might the fabric of belief in privilege which confronted him like some enemy’s stronghold. He told his auditors that their Abrahamic descent would afford them no refuge from the judgment which was impending. A new life! A new mind! Purity of heart and conscience! Self-separation from the guilty past!—herein lay the hope of salvation. It was the teaching of the Old Testament at its highest and best. The prophets had ever laid stress upon the renewal of the inner life through the operation of the Divine grace; and it was this idea that animated all the ministry of the appointed Forerunner of the Lord.

Thine, Baptist, was the cry,

In ages long gone by,

Heard in clear accents by the Prophet’s ear;

As if ’twere thine to wait,

And with imperial state

Herald some Eastern monarch’s proud career;

Who thus might march his host in full array,

And speed through trackless wilds his unresisted way.

But other task hadst thou

Than lofty hills to bow,

Make straight the crooked, the rough places plain:

Thine was the harder part

To smooth the human heart,

The wilderness where sin had fixed his reign;

To make deceit his mazy wiles forego,

Bring down high vaulting pride, and lay ambition low.

Such, Baptist, was thy care,

That no objection there,

Might check the progress of the King of kings;

But that a clear highway

Might welcome the array

Of Heavenly graces which His Presence brings;

And where Repentance had prepared the road,

There Faith might enter in, and Love to man and God. 1 [Note: Richard Mant.]

2. Two utterances mark the flood-tide of St. John’s prophetic inspiration; for when he says of his greater successor, “He shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire,” the very term “baptize” connects his thought with “the divers washings” under the old dispensation, while the words “with the Holy Ghost and with fire” fore-herald that ministration of the Spirit which was ushered in on the day of Pentecost. So, again, when he exclaimed, “Behold, the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world!” the phraseology in which he describes the great propitiation of Christ is seen at once to be derived from the typical sacrifices with which as the son of a priest he was perfectly familiar; while the mention of “the world” gives a wider range to the efficacy of the Atonement than the common Jew would have assigned to it, and is the prelude of the great commission, “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.” In the former instance it would almost seem that he had received a vision of the Upper Room at the moment when, to the disciples assembled in it, there appeared “cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them.” In the latter he appears to have had a revelation of the uplifted Christ on Calvary drawing all men unto Him.

The text is “Behold, the Lamb of God, which taketh away [margin “beareth”] the sin of the world!” Let us consider it in this way—

I. The Sin of the World.

II. The Lamb of God.

III. The Lamb and the Sin.

I

The Sin of the World

1. Sin.—Sin, the choice of evil instead of good, the perversion of the desires, the slavery of the will, the darkening of the mind, the deadly sickness of the whole heart—this is the fountain of all trouble, the cause of all disorder and wretchedness. This is the wall which makes the world seem sometimes like a prison and sometimes like a madhouse. This is the curse which destroys life’s harmony and beauty. This is the obstacle which separates the soul, in darkness and sorrow, from God. The forms of every religion, the voice of unceasing prayers, the smoke of endless burnt-offerings, the blood of bulls and goats, the oblations of all that is most precious, cruel altars drenched with human gore, and flames consuming the offspring of man’s body,—gifts, propitiations, pleadings, sacrifices, without stint and without number,—bear witness to the deep and awful sense of sin which rests upon the heart of the world.

What do we really think about sin—as we see it in others, as we find it in ourselves? And side by side with such a question as that goes another: What is our conception of repentance? We are all acquainted with its philological significance; but what is its actual significance to our inmost conscience? What is our attitude towards those sins which come to us again and again till we know their faces well enough, till they possess for us a degrading—or even, it may be, a fatal—familiarity? What is our attitude towards that one type of sin which is, as it were, our constant companion—which we sometimes seriously try to shake off, but which appears to keep pace with us like the very shadow of ourselves? What is our attitude towards that one particular piece of iniquity which, perhaps in the fierce heat of sudden temptation, or perhaps after cool and deliberate calculation, we committed in past years, and which stands out with such hideous prominence from the midst of a life that often has been far enough from being pure and innocent and unselfish and upright?

As we have grown older, we have become clearer and clearer sighted, and we now see that what we at one time thought little or nothing of was really altogether unworthy of any Christian man or woman. Do not let us be afraid of this truer vision of the past; neither let us dread any sudden opening of the eyes, at some future moment, to what we are now, or to what we have been in the days that are beyond recall. Of course, we may let such a realization overwhelm us, but it is our own fault and folly if we do.

Man, what is this, and why art thou despairing?

God shall forgive thee all but thy despair.

We may awake and see the sins which we have committed thronging about us, just as Robespierre—in the drama that was played some years ago in London—saw in the Conciergerie the ghosts of those whom he had sent to the guillotine. Those spectres may press upon us both on the right hand and on the left; they may come from the days of youth, when we were weak and easily led; or from early manhood or womanhood, when we were wild and reckless, without self-restraint and self-discipline; or from later years, when our conscience had become hardened, and we had made ourselves capable of actions from which aforetime we should have shrunk. Yes; they may come to threaten and appal us. But there is deliverance from them.

(1) The sense of sin is not found everywhere. The Egyptians and Babylonians had their catalogues of sins, but their sinfulness never troubled them as the sinfulness of the Hebrews troubled them. We may almost say that the ancient Greeks had no real conception of sin. The Greeks recognized the existence of vice, certain actions were to them unlovely, disagreeable, mischievous; but the Greek people never felt the burden of their sinfulness. The countrymen of Homer and of Pericles were the lightest hearted of all the peoples of the earth, as joyous and as sunny as the sea which broke into laughter on the shores of their lovely islands. The Romans were far more earnest than the Greeks, but they had no deep consciousness of sin. We can hardly think of Julius Cæsar shedding tears over his transgressions. Rome had her priests and her sacrifices, but her conception of sin had slight influence on either the personal or the national life. Christianity is pre-eminently the religion which develops in its adherents a sense of sin. Buddhism, and Brahminism, and Confucianism, and Zoroastrianism all recognize the existence of evil, and attempt to deal with it in different ways; but in none of these religions is there a recognition of sin in the sense in which Christians use that word.

A genial sense of “camaraderie” was inspired and maintained by sacred dance, song, and simple prayer, and especially by the sacrificial banquet at which the deity and his tribe were imagined as feasting together. And whatever ritual was in vogue for the purging of the people’s sins was external and mechanical merely, accompanied by no call to real repentance, no appeal to the individual conscience. 1 [Note: L. R. Farnell, The Higher Aspects of Greek Religion, 132.]

Nor, when the dying Indian had been induced at last to express a desire for Paradise, was it an easy matter to bring him to a due contrition for his sins; for he would deny with indignation that he had ever committed any. 2 [Note: Parkman, The Jesuits in North America, i. 178.]

A sense of darkness and ignorance made the Greek sorrow, a sense of sin and evil the Hebrew sorrow. The Hebrew sorrow expressed itself in three ways—in a passion for forgiveness, in a passion for redemption, and in a passion for life; and these three passions are pointed out by the Baptist in this new phrase which he has coined for the new age, “Behold, the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world!” 3 [Note: W. W. Peyton.]

Dale’s sense of sin was deep and vivid. Sin—not merely as revealed in speech and conduct, but as that principle of evil within us by which the very springs of life are corrupted; sin, whether ours by inheritance, or through our own defect, or by our mysterious community in the moral life of the race—sin, in all its forms and degrees, he felt to be the most terrible of realities. No one who knew him intimately could fail to perceive it. He sometimes referred, half wonderingly, half sadly, to the experience of a friend of his who once asked him what theologians meant by “original sin”:—“I cannot understand what they mean,” he said, “I have never been conscious of any inclination to do what I knew to be wrong.” The fact of original sin presented no difficulty to Dale. He knew only too well the unremitting energy of moral evil, and the incessant struggle against its malignant power. Altogether apart from any special incentive, he would never have dealt lightly with the baser elements in human character and conduct; and anxiety to avert any moral degeneracy in those who had accepted the new doctrine intensified his natural antipathy to evil. At times his denunciation of sin was overwhelming in its force. He never stormed; but his wrath, as it grew, glowed with passion at a white heat. It swept on in waves of living fire. It seemed to scorch, to shrivel, to consume. And if it was not often that he let indignation break into flame, there was always a certain austerity—it might even be called harshness—in his moral judgment, which strongly contrasted with his charitable temper in dealing with individual offenders; though even with them his sternness, when provoked, could be terrible. 1 [Note: The Life of R. W. Dale, 314.]

(2) It is impossible to have any adequate sense of sin without a great conception of God. It was because the Hebrew prophets saw God to be high and lifted up that they felt themselves to be sinners. I “am but dust and ashes,” says Abraham. “Behold, I am vile; I will lay my hand upon my mouth,” says Job. “Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips,” says Isaiah. All the great Hebrews, from Abraham to John the Baptist, lie with their faces in the dust, crying, “God be merciful to me a sinner!”

Where in any literature will you find a poem like the Fifty-first Psalm? “Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness: according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions. Wash me throughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. For I acknowledge my transgressions: and my sin is ever before me. Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight.” “Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from thy presence; and take not thy holy spirit from me.” The man who wrote that is a Shakespeare in the realm of spiritual expression. 2 [Note: C. E. Jefferson, Things Fundamental, 234.]

(3) The world thinks that the Church makes much ado about little. Men of the world cannot see that sin is terrible, or that it needs to be shunned or feared. Men sometimes confess in a jocose tone that they are sinners; they confess their sinfulness between loud bursts of laughter. One would think from their behaviour that sinning is a joke. Every generation has brought forth its host of writers who have endeavoured to persuade the world that sin is nothing but a trifle, a straw that some happy wind will some day blow away. Or they make it out a form of immaturity, an imperfection, a crudity, a greenness, a rawness, a pardonable ignorance which will certainly be outgrown. “You do not blame the apple tree in the early spring because the blossoms are not full blown. Give the tree sufficient time, and the apples will be forthcoming.”

All depends on our maintaining the inviolability of the will; and for finite beings a will is no will which cannot choose evil. If —— admits that, but says that the continued rebellion of any is irreconcilable with the triumph of God’s will and love, then I say that the present rebellion of any is likewise inconsistent with the same. While that awful fact of sin is staring you in the face, you cannot weave theories for the future that will hold water, except by the German dodge of refining sin into a lesser kind of necessary good, which is the very devil. 1 [Note: Life and Letters of Fenton J. A. Hort, i. 326.]

One night some years ago in a University town there was a meeting of the White Cross Society. The meeting was over, one of the members had argued that sin was not natural, and at the close one of the medical professors, gathering a group of students around him, said, “That’s gammon! The sin you have heard of to-night is natural,” and the students to a man hissed him out of the room. 2 [Note: George Adam Smith, The Life of Henry Drummond, 471.]

I said to Heart, “How goes it?” Heart replied:

“Right as a Ribstone Pippin!” But it lied. 3 [Note: H. Belloc, Verses, 81.]

(4) According to Jesus, there is nothing terrible in the world but sin. It is the thing to be shunned, feared, hated. If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out; it is better to lose an eye than to do wrong. If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off; it is better to have no right hand than to do wrong. Beware how you tempt others to sin; it were better that a millstone should be hanged about a man’s neck, and that the man should be cast into the midst of the sea, than that he should cause a human being to do wrong. That is not the language which we are apt to use, nor is it the feeling which is in our hearts. Many of us would commit a score of sins, rather than lose an eye or a hand. But to the mind of Jesus no loss which may come to the body is to be compared with the loss which comes to the soul by breaking the law of God. “Joy,” He said, “shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth.” This feeling of Jesus was communicated to His disciples. His Apostles go to work with unflagging earnestness to root out the sins of men. Whenever St. Paul writes of sin, his language becomes terribly earnest and intense. Sin to him is no shadow, it is an awful reality. He speaks to his converts in words which sound like the blast of a bugle. “Put on the whole armour of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.”

It could not have been a trifle that started the great drops of blood from the body of Jesus Christ in Gethsemane, or that caused Him His exceeding sorrow on the tree. Great natures cannot weep blood but on great occasions. There must, then, have been something terrible about this moral putrescence which is called sin. It was no speck on the surface; it was poison in the blood. The tones heard at Golgotha are not the harsh tones of vengeance; there is no scream of fury; no thunder of cursing; there is a wail of sorrow, deep, loud, long, as if the very heart of God had broken. It is the agony of love; it is the paroxysm of a lacerated and dying spirit. It was love that had failed in life, determined to succeed in death. It was dying innocence struggling with dead guilt. 1 [Note: J. Parker.]

2. The sin of the world.—The word “world” is one of St. John’s words. It appears on almost every page of his writings. It Stands out prominently both in his Gospel and in his Epistles. What, then, was his conception of the world? There are two words in Scripture used to denote the world There is the word “kosmos.” This means the world under the condition of space. There is the word “æon,” which means the world under the condition of time. The latter word is translated sometimes “age” or “epoch” or “dispensation,” and it is this word that is used and never the other when the end of the world is spoken of. But the other word “kosmos” is the word referred to here. What is its meaning? Its first and earliest meaning is the sum total of material things, their order, their beauty, symmetry, law. But this world is never represented as sinful, only as unmoral. Then into this framework of kosmos man is set. It was made for him. It was kept in existence for him, and so the world comes to mean, next, the material universe of which man is the moral centre. Then it comes to be applied to the men themselves, the sum total of humanity who live and move and have their being in this material framework. But man takes the world and uses it without reference to the Giver. He was put into it as a steward, but instead of faithfully recognizing the true owner, he appropriates the proceeds for his own purposes. Hence comes the next idea of the world. It is humanity separated from God. From separation the next step is easy. It is hostility. Thus the last stage of the world is humanity separated, hostile, rebellious against God. That is sin. That is the sin of the world.

(1) The view of the Baptist embraces the human race. His words are that the Lamb of God “taketh away the sin of the world”; that is, the whole enormous mass of iniquity which is in the world, which burdens and blights the world; the sin of which original depravity is as it were the root, vicious habits the branches, thoughts, words, and deeds of impiety and injustice the leaves and fruits.

John knew very well the sin of the nation. He had seen unreality and formalism in the religious circles of his day, the scandalous life of Herod, and the terrible effect of such examples upon public morality. He had seen the moral indifference of the Herodian, whom nothing could rouse to contend for the principles on which life is based. He had come in close contact with admitted and regretted sin. He had been roused to indignation, to sorrow, moved to pity, knowing that his brother-men had sought for happiness along the paths which end in misery. But from the sin of a nation he rose to a yet more overwhelming thought, which was the sin of the world. All the collective evil of mankind; the burden of inherited evil from which our Lord alone is exempt; the vast innumerable multitude of personal sins from the first rebellion at Eden down to the last evil deed which humanity shall commit: the ghastly retinue of the passions and selfishness of mankind.

All holiness and gentleness work for the world’s redemption within their appointed field. A refined and loving soul, though without the gifts that attract the attention of the world, takes away the sin of a home or neighbourhood. But the power over men which we describe as greatness extends the influence more widely. The purity and gentleness of Jesus might have been hidden away in the little town of Nazareth, and have been an unseen ripple in the great ocean of the world’s affairs. He was, however, not only the Lamb of God, but as He is described elsewhere, “the lion of the tribe of Judah.” Like the monarch of the forest, He had strength. He had that power of command over men which, for good or evil, influences the world. His power was acknowledged and proved by the bitterness of His enemies; and when He was lifted up from the earth, He drew the eyes of nations, and became a beacon-light for succeeding centuries. And to this day His holiness and gentleness are the mightiest power that we know for taking away the sin of the world. It may still be long before the brute powers are dethroned and the reign of humanity is established, but never was the rule of Christ’s spirit higher than it is to-day. 1 [Note: J. Drummond, Johannine Thoughts, 29.]

(2) Perhaps what appeals more forcibly to the sensitiveness of the present age is the suffering of the world, the burden of the anguish which rests upon mankind. And indeed in its collective mass it is, if viewed apart from Calvary, a terrible enigma. And yet incomparably more awful to a conscience really enlightened by penitence and faith would be the appalling, the overwhelming idea of “the sin of the world.” That thought has rested with almost intolerable weight upon some of the saintliest of mankind. It rested that day upon St. John.

There was laughter in my father’s hall,

Mirth in my mothers bower,

When One crept silently up by the wall

In the dim, dull, twilight hour.

How did he pass the faithful guard

Who watch both long and late?

Did he steal through the window strongly barred,

Or slipped he in by the gate?

What is the name of this fearful guest,

Sorrow or Shame or Sin?

I cannot tell, but I know no rest

Since his dread form came in. 2 [Note: Margaret Blaikie, Songs by the Way, 29.]

(3) It is not the sins but the sin of the world. The sin of the world, of which the various sins are so many branches and manifestations, is the world’s apostasy and alienation from the living God; the two great evils connected going into one—that, we have forsaken Jehovah, the fountain of living waters, and have hewn out to ourselves broken cisterns that can hold no water. “Whosoever committeth sin transgresseth also the law: for sin is the transgression of the law.” And the law of God is one—multitudes of commandments, but one in its principle, its principle being love to God, and love to all created beings for God’s sake. It is one, as flowing all from the same essential purity, justice, and universal moral good—the Divine nature.

In what does the sin of the world essentially consist? It consists in omitting God from its life. It consists in forgetting, ignoring, denying, defying God. Get hold of that truth, and never let it go. The Bible never wavers in representing this as the essence and origin of all sin. We sometimes speak of sin as drunkenness, or lust, or murder, or theft, or covetousness, or lying. These are rather crimes or vices. They are related to sin as the fruit is related to the tree, or the plant is related to the root. They are not so much sin as the last fruitage of sin. Sin itself lies deeper. It lies in “an evil heart of unbelief, in departing from the living God.” 1 [Note: R. Waddell, Behold the Lamb of God, 123.]

Says Drummond: The whole of a man’s nature is built up, I might say, of cells. One after another, good and bad, all things have become part of him. His sins have made sin a part of him. That unkind thing you say or do makes you an unkind character. That selfish thing you do makes you selfish, pure and holy and noble thoughts are turned out, and you become an animal. Paul says, “Wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from this dead body?” Chained as they were in those dark dungeons of the East, if one prisoner died he was left chained to the man next him.… “This dead body”—it was Sin. But, gentlemen, we are making dead bodies with our own hands and lives: cell by cell we become dead. Sin is a part of one, and the end of these things is death, and all of a sudden some morning we awake and say, “Wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from this dead body?” 2 [Note: The Life of Henry Drummond, 478.]

Modern masters of science are much impressed with the need of beginning all inquiry with a fact. The ancient masters of religion were quite equally impressed with that necessity. They began with the fact of sin—a fact as practical as potatoes. Whether or not man could be washed in miraculous waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he wanted washing. But certain religious leaders in London, not mere Materialists, have begun in our day not to deny the highly disputable water, but to deny the indisputable dirt. Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved. 3 [Note: G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy.]

I still, to suppose it true, for my part,

See reasons and reasons; this, to begin:

’Tis the faith that launched point-blank her dart

At the head of a lie—taught Original Sin,

The Corruption of Man’s Heart. 1 [Note: Browning, Gold Hair.]

II

The Lamb of God

1. In the conception of Jesus as the Lamb of God, to be offered in expiation of human transgressions, the religious genius of the Baptist reaches (if the expression may be used) its high-water mark. So intense was his appreciation of the real significance of moral evil that he saw that while the utmost a guilty soul can do is to repent, yet more is necessary in the counsels of God if forgiveness is to become a full possibility. There must be the actual removal of human guilt through the self-oblation of the Christ. It was a great venture of thought, even although there was that in the literature of the Old Testament which pointed the way. Here and there in Israel there must have been natures—Simeon’s seems to have been one of them—which were capable of recognizing the justice and force of such an anticipation; but it was very different with the almost universal sentiment of the nation. St. John stood nearly by himself in his realization of the profound truth. Flesh and blood had not revealed it unto him.

2. It has sometimes been asked and debated, To which of the lambs of sacrifice, ordained in the Old Testament, did the Baptist here refer; to which did he liken that immaculate Lamb, who, being without spot and stain, should take away our spots and stains, and bear the collective sin of the world? Did St. John allude to the daily lamb of the morning and evening sacrifice? or was it to the lamb of the passover, commemorating the old deliverance from Egypt? or was it to some other of the many lambs which were prescribed in the law of Moses, as a portion of the ritual of sacrifice appointed there? The question is surely a superfluous one. The reference is not special, but comprehensive. It is to none of these in particular, being indeed to them all. They severally set forth in type and in figure some part of that which He fulfilled in substance and in life; in Him, not now a lamb of men, but the Lamb of God, being at length fulfilled to the uttermost the significant word of Abraham, “God will provide himself a lamb.”

(1) One thing that was associated with the lamb in the sacrifices of which it was the centre was innocence. Innocence belongs conceivably to two stages of life. We speak of the innocence of a child. We do not mean, if we understand our words, that he is free from sin. We mean that he has not yet actually done wrong. But in the case of Christ, we mean something more than that.

As children emerge into manhood, innocence passes, and it is one of the sore regrets of life that it comes back no more. You remember the beautiful sonnet in which Charles Lamb utters his grief for the loss of innocence—

We were two pretty babes; the youngest she—

The youngest, and the loveliest far (I ween),

And innocence her name. The time has been

We two did love each other’s company;

Time was we two had wept to have been apart.

But when by show of seeming good beguiled,

I left the garb and manners of a child,

And my first love for man’s society,

Defiling with the world my virgin heart—

My lov’d companion dropt a tear, and fled,

And hid in deepest shades her awful head.

Beloved, who shall tell me, where thou art,

In what delicious Eden to be found?

That I may seek thee, the wide world round.

Now, that was the test that Christ never needed. Why? Because He never lost innocence. He went down among the sins and temptations of life, but He came out of them pure and unsoiled. We call tried innocence holiness. Christ was sinless. That is the marvel of this Lamb of God. The animal was innocent, but it was an untried and unmoral innocence. This Lamb is not only innocent, but also perfectly holy.

Make no mistake as to what we call by the name of virtue. It is the generous force of life. Virtue is not an innocent. We adore Divine innocence, but it is not of all ages and all conditions; it is not ready for all encounters. It protects itself against the snares of nature and of man. Innocence fears everything, virtue fears nothing. Virtue can, if it be necessary, plunge with a sublime impurity into the depths of misery to console it, into every vice to recover it. It knows what the great human task is, and that it is sometimes necessary to soil one’s hands. 1 [Note: Anatole France, On Life and Letters, 291.]

(2) The second point about the lamb was its gentleness. It is the perfect type of meek, uncomplaining suffering. Christ’s gentleness was wonderful. It was wonderful because it was not the outcome either of necessity or of weakness. A person is sometimes tolerant because he is morally indifferent. He manifests no anger or passion because he does not feel or see wrong But with Christ it was not so. His gentleness was not the outcome of insensibility, of a mere ignorant good-nature. His holiness made it impossible for Him to be ignorant of sin, made it inevitable that He should see sin with clearer eyes than the sinner himself. Neither was it born from necessity. People are sometimes gentle because they must. They endure and suffer in silence because they say, “Well, we cannot help it; it is best to be quiet and resigned.” That was not Christ’s case either. The assumption of the New Testament is that Christ could help it; that He had only to speak, and legions of angels would leap to His command.

This beautiful figure reveals the kind of impression which Jesus made by His simple presence. The lamb is an emblem of innocence and gentleness, as Spenser says:

And by her in a line a milke-white lamb she led

So pure and innocent, as that same lambe,

She was in life and every vertuous lore.

Innocence in a moral agent is not the mere absence of guilt, but reaches the positive rank of purity, or, higher still, of holiness. This holiness in Himself and gentleness towards others marked Jesus out as God’s own Lamb, a man Divine in purity and love, and therefore the “beloved Son” of God. So much might well be apparent to the searching glance of sympathy and a prophet’s power of reading the heart. But the succeeding words disclose a deeper insight, and give utterance to a grand truth. Holiness and gentleness are the redeeming powers of the world, and these two great powers have wrought in Christendom from that day to this. The men and women who have lifted the burden of the world’s sin have always been the saints who have washed their robes white in the blood of the Lamb, or, in less figurative language, have imbibed His spirit of holiness and gentleness, and with their own peace have lulled the storms of passion, and with their own purity have sweetened the fountains of life. The holiness of Christ awakens the sense of sin, while we see that that is the true life of man, and our own hearts look black against that bright illumination. And then His gentleness saves us from despair. Were there nothing but condemnation and scorn, no sympathy, no tender pity, we could not bear that holiness, and could only abandon ourselves as lost. But when it comes with such soothing and loving accents, we are drawn within its folds, and purified in its purity. “Thy gentleness has made me great.” The maxim of the world, and too often of the Church, has been that violence and revenge take away the sin of the world. But it is not so. These only harden and degrade, whereas love melts the heart, and gives a new and conquering motive in an answering love. In this soul-subduing love we recognize that which is heavenly and eternal. The Lamb of God manifests the holiness and the gentleness of God. And so our fear is cast out; and, lowly and contrite, we draw near, and are folded in the bosom of our Father, and receive the grace of sonship. 1 [Note: J. Drummond, Johannine Thoughts, 28.]

A lamb is innocent and mild

And merry on the soft green sod;

And Jesus Christ, the Undefiled,

Is the Lamb of God:

Only spotless He

Upon His Mother’s knee;

White and ruddy, soon to be

Sacrificed for you and me.

Nay, lamb is not so sweet a word,

Nor lily half so pure a name;

Another name our hearts hath stirred,

Kindling them to flame:

“Jesus” certainly

Is music and melody:

Heart with heart in harmony

Carol we and worship we. 2 [Note: C. G. Rossetti, Poems, 158.]

When the great Father came to unveil Himself in the person of His Son, it was a life of Divine gentleness that came to earth. Jesus was the incarnation of gentleness. When He was reviled He reviled not again. There never was a life so mild and yet so firm and strong. Munkacsy, in his famous picture of “Christ before Pilate,” has thrown this Divine trait into the face and figure of Christ. All around is strife, hatred, unrest, but in the centre stands the King of majesty and love with the gentleness of another world upon Him. They spit upon Him, they taunt Him, they crown Him with thorns, but He is still the “Lamb of God.” Even on the cross this greatness abides, as the Saviour reaches the sublimest and Divinest moment of His passion with the prayer: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” 1 [Note: J. I. Vance, Royal Manhood, 53.]

(3) But what was in St. John’s mind when he uttered these words was not so much the character of the Lamb—innocence, holiness, sinlessness, gentleness—it was death. It is beyond all doubt that he connected Christ with the sacrifices of the old dispensation. Here at last they found their fulfilment. Here at last the type was completed in the antitype. The Lamb is no unwilling victim. That was the weak spot in all preceding sacrifices. The creature went to death reluctantly. It was forced to its doom. Therefore its death in itself had no moral significance. But the remarkable thing about the death of the Lamb of God is that it is purely voluntary. From very early in His career Christ saw where He was going. It was no blind groping that ended accidentally or necessarily in the cross. He carried the cross on His heart long before it was laid on His shoulders.

There are various types of death. There is the death of the good, the death when the soul surrenders itself into the hands of God. There is another kind of death. It is the death of Gordon of Khartum, the death of the hero. There is a third. Literature has never forgotten Socrates in the Agora of Athens. It is a beautiful scene. The Grecian sage has been sentenced to death on a false charge. He is to be his own executioner, and the great old man talks calmly to his disciples, settles his earthly affairs, says good-bye to one after another, then takes the cup of poison and drinks it, and all is over. Or yet, once more, yonder in a Chinese town a Chinese Christian sinks beneath the stones of the mob. “Are you sorry?” asks the missionary. “Sorry! Oh no,” he says. “How glad! Only sorry that I have done so little for Jesus.” These are the types of death as the world gives them. They are the deaths of the good, the heroic, the sage, the martyr. Christ’s was not like any of these. Or rather it takes up and comprehends all these. There is one thing common to them all. They had to be. But Christ’s was predicted. Christ’s was foreseen. Christ’s was deliberately accepted. Death did not choose Him. He chose death. He met it at the trysting-place where He and not death determined, and He went to the cross, though legions of angels were waiting to bear Him away from it. That makes His death unique in the world. 1 [Note: R. Waddell,]

3. He is the Lamb of God. For He is provided by God. But the Lamb of God does not mean merely a Lamb appointed or ordained by God. The words have reference to an abiding element in God Himself. The Lamb of God belongs as much to the eternal essence of God as His glory, His righteousness, His truth, and His love. And for us, and perhaps for all worlds, this is the most wonderful and entrancing name of all. The highest praise we can offer to God is to sing, “Worthy is the Lamb!”

Put emphasis on the words, “of God.” There you strike the distinctive feature of this sacrifice, and of the religion which it created. The difference between Christianity and all other religions lies in these two words. In other religions man provides his sacrifice for his god. In Christianity God provides the sacrifice for man. Christ comes forth out of the heart of God. Shall we not indeed say He is God? Here is where a devastating error has crept in. Men have talked and written as if somehow God and Christ were divided, as if somehow Christ propitiated God, and won Him the mercy. Nowhere in Scripture is there any such statement made. It is a heathen importation. Men are heard saying, “Oh, God will do nothing for us. Our only hope is in Christ.” What a dreadful travesty of the truth! God and Christ are one in this supreme work. The Father sends the Son, and the Son issues forth gladly out of the Father’s heart. The two are an absolute unity in working out man’s salvation. Here is the everlasting proof of the love of God. Men say God is loving, and therefore He does not need to be propitiated. The New Testament says, “God is love,” and therefore He Himself provides a propitiation.

III

The Lamb and the Sin

1. “Behold, the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world!” What precisely do these words mean? In the margin of the ordinary version we read, “beareth away” the sin of the world; and in that of the Revised Version it is given simply, “beareth the sin.” But perhaps the full significance of the word is to be had by the union of both the textual and the marginal renderings, for the term in the original is the equivalent of a Hebrew word, which sometimes denotes the bearing of the punishment of sin, and sometimes the making of expiation for sin; and so, as Alford remarks, “it will in our verse bear either of these meanings, or both conjoined, for if the Lamb is to suffer the burden of the sins of the world, and is to take away sin and its guilt by expiation, this result must be accomplished by the offering of himself.”

(1) The simplest meaning of the word is to lift, and this is also the simplest consciousness of liberation from sin. Man, unable to free himself from the fatal burden, feels it lifted from heart and conscience by the redeeming hand of God. Trust in God is not the product of profound doctrinal understanding, but the expression of the felt need of casting our infirmity and sin on the strength and grace of God. The beginning of the soul’s redemption is the discovery that we ourselves cannot overcome sin, but that we can safely leave it all with the boundless love and mercy of God.

(2) The second phase in the meaning of the word is to bear. The Divine Saviour who “lifts” the sin from our aching hearts bears it on His own. This is the substance of the great act and process of atonement, which is the centre of the Christian faith, and in its inexhaustible import both the joy and the despair of the human understanding. It is related, on the one hand, to the inviolable righteousness and truth and love of God, and, on the other, to the vital union of the Divine life with the life of humanity. It is therefore at one and the same time the fulfilment of the Divine righteousness and the working of redemptive energy in the lives of men. The Cross is not an isolated thing, but the sacrificial life of the Son of God interwoven with the red fibres of the human spirit.

(3) The last phase of meaning in the word is to bear away. This ends the succession in the line of grace. The Saviour lifts the sin of the world; He bears the sin of the world; He bears away the sin of the world. The beginning of redemption is liberation from the weight of sin; the completion of redemption is everlasting separation from the power of sin. The Sin-bearer bears away our sin, and we are thrall to it no longer. It can never return to condemn us. He has borne it past all the measureless abysses of death and Hades, and overwhelmed it in the glory of His resurrection. This is the salvation of our God. We are risen with the Risen Christ. Old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new.

2. The saving power of the Cross of Christ is no theory; it is a fact. The sign of shame and guilt has become the sign of faith and hope. The instrument of torture and death, defiled and loathed and hated, has been lifted out of the gloom and horror of sin, transfigured, crowned with honour and victory, and planted for ever on the hill of salvation. The eyes of the world turn to the Cross of Christ. Fainting, despairing, dying, bound in the prison-houses of crime, crushed under the load of transgressions, parched and burning with the fever of life, from every place of sorrow and suffering and darkness, the lost children of men are looking to the Cross with speechless longing, and feeling its blessed power with unutterable joy.

Do you want to know how it is possible? What if I could not tell? You want to go by the cable cars. Can you explain the force that draws them? Will you wait until you understand the nature of steam and the machinery it uses before you trust yourself to them? You want to use the telegraph to send a message of sympathy or a sum of money to a relative who is in sorrow or want. Do you comprehend the nature of the electric fluid that is waiting to run with your message, and will you delay sending it until you do? You are hungry or thirsty, dying for want of food or drink. Here are both. Will you refuse them till you comprehend the chemical constituents of water, or the means by which the grain from the hillside is turned into the bread that delivers from starvation? Is the experience of others, hundreds of thousands, not enough to assure you in venturing although you do not understand all? “Behold, the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world!” That is the Gospel. That is the good news from heaven. It comes as an offer, as a gift. It is ours only to put aside prejudice, and unwillingness, and indifference, and embrace the offer and receive the gift. This is what amazed the Son of God, that men dying should refuse the means of life, that men under the guilt and bondage of sin should decline deliverance. Their unbelief filled Him with dismay. Let it not be said of any of us as of those of old, “He marvelled at their unbelief.” For unbelief seals us up in sin, and delivers us to the death eternal, from which the Son of God came to set us free. 1 [Note: R. Waddell, Behold the Lamb of God, 134.]

3. How the death of Christ upon the Cross is an atonement for the sins of the whole world is a complete mystery to us; but that it is so we know from revelation. All sin, upon repentance, is made as though it had never been by virtue of this sacrifice; it is cancelled, done away with. “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.” What an astonishing result! What a miracle of power and mercy! Here is accomplished all that man has yearned for, and so ineffectually striven after—the compensation, the atonement for sin. His wish is accomplished, though he cannot understand how. The atonement, when it has come, is a mystery; but he knows that it is made, that something has been done in heaven by which sin has been cancelled. He knows that there has been a great reconciliation, a great restoration. He does not see this, but he apprehends it by faith.

The various aspects of this mysterious atoning sacrifice emerge in constant succession throughout this Gospel, even before the narrative of the Passion begins. To Nathanael, in those earliest days of all, is whispered the mysterious prophecy of a new Bethel vision. The Person of the Son of Man is to be a fresh medium of access, a new ladder of communication between earth and an opened heaven. To Nicodemus the Son of Man is revealed as the antitype of Moses’ brazen serpent, lifted up for the saving of those who will look to Him. Meanwhile a still more mysterious utterance has been given to those scandalized by His fierce cleansing of the Temple courts, an utterance which not even the most intimate understood till long afterwards. But St. John is determined that his readers shall understand it, there, in its place, and shall know that thus early the Master was conscious of that supreme trial through which His body had to pass, and of His own inner power to transform death into victory. “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”

The same thought again underlies His clear consciousness of the murderous intention of the Jews, recorded in the earlier contests from the fifth chapter to the eighth, and is concentrated in the teaching of the sixth chapter and the tenth.

The sacrificial language of the Fourth Gospel is matched, as we might expect, by that of the First Epistle, here as elsewhere fulfilling the function of an inspired commentary on the writer’s earlier work. Thus, in the first chapter, it is declared that the blood of Jesus cleanses from all sin those who in communion with Him are walking in the light. In the second, “Jesus Christ the righteous” is set forth as at once Advocate and Propitiation concerning the sins, not merely of a limited circle of privileged ones, but “of the whole world.” Later on in the same chapter, and again in those that follow it, we are told of a mutual indwelling, wherein the believer attains to that mystic union with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, which is the ultimate end of all sacrifice—that true and only eternal Life; so that we are prepared for the clear teaching of the final chapter, where, in the uncompromising language of the beloved disciple, it is proclaimed that “He that hath the Son hath the life; he that hath not the Son of God hath not the life.”

I have felt that to understand the Passion one must be one’s self, as it were, God infinite, and able to comprehend the love and the agony of an infinite nature. This sight, of all I look upon, alone has power to arrest my heart. It seems foreign to the order in which I am at present moving, yet it is friendly, familiar to some inner instinct, as if it were native to a kingdom in which I had once moved. 1 [Note: Dora Greenwell.]

4. There are, however, certain principles which we can hardly mistake, if we listen either to the voice of Scripture, or to the voice of the Church, or to the voice of our own moral reason—voices which speak in true concord more frequently than is sometimes supposed.

(1) The first principle which is thus guaranteed to us is that the Death of Christ was not only efficacious by way of example, or because of its influence on the minds of those who think of it, but objectively, in itself, and in relation to the law of righteousness. It is quite true that it is the supremest example of self-sacrifice that the world has witnessed, quite true that the message of the Cross has had power to convince of sin and to lead men to holiness, solely from the pathetic pleading of the love of which it tells. But it is impossible to reconcile the words of Scripture with a theory which goes no farther than this, or to understand the moral necessity for the awful victory of the Cross, if nothing more than this be true.

(2) On the other hand, the word “punishment” is not used in the New Testament of the Death of Christ. His Atonement is never there described as a punishment of the innocent instead of the guilty, though it has been so described by careless readers of Scripture. That is a conception which is repugnant to all our notions of justice, and it is foreign to the teaching of the Gospels. Punishment can be justly inflicted only on the offender himself. Certainly it does not follow that only the guilty suffer in consequence of their sin. Every day’s experience convinces us of the contrary. The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children; “the fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” But that is not to say that the Almighty punishes the children for what was no fault of theirs; it is rather to say that we are all linked together by bonds so close in one great brotherhood that, “if one member suffer, all the members suffer with it.” It may be said that this makes no difference as to the pain entailed upon the innocent; but surely it makes a wide difference in our conception of the justice of the Supreme Orderer of men’s lives, whether we regard Him as the immediate Author of that pain, or whether we look on it as an inevitable consequence of the unity of mankind and of the warfare against good inspired by the wayward wills of men. To ask that it should be otherwise is to ask that man should not be man, should have been created other than he is. The innocent is not punished instead of the guilty; and so it is not said in the New Testament that Christ was punished instead of man. It is said that He suffered because of man, for the sake of man, that the sin which man commits every hour issued in His Passion.

Ghastliest of all misconceptions ever put before this city or any other is the assertion that the doctrine of the Atonement implies, first, that an innocent being is made guilty in the sense of being personally blameworthy; and, secondly, that that innocent being is punished in the sense of suffering pain for personal ill-desert. Both these propositions all clear thought discards, all religious science condemns. We have no doctrine of the Atonement which declares that personal demerit is laid upon our Lord, or that, in the strict sense of the word, He suffered punishment—that is, pain inflicted for personal blameworthiness. He had no personal blameworthiness. He was an innocent being, as He always will be; and never did, can, or will suffer punishment, in the strict sense of the word. 1 [Note: Joseph Cook, Monday Lectures, i. 151.]

(3) Once more, the Death of Jesus is not represented in the New Testament as the cause of the love of God. It is its effect, its outcome. It is a parody of the Gospel to speak of Christ’s having, as it were, purchased by His eath God’s love for man. For “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son.”

I recollect particularly well an answer he gave once in private conversation to the question, “Do you believe that the sacrifice of Christ is the essential and basal thing in the Christian religion?” The interrogator desired an answer, Yes or No. It was at the time when Drummond’s position was being assailed from almost every quarter. I shall not soon forget the slow, deliberate reply: “Then my answer must be No.” The questioner remarked that it was satisfactory to have such a plain answer. But there was in store for him something which probably made matters plainer still: “If I may venture a supplementary remark,” said Drummond, “I would say that in my opinion the sacrifice of Christ is a part of the very essence of Christianity, but the basis of Christianity is the eternal love of God.” 2 [Note: George Adam Smith, The Life of Henry Drummond, 335.]

(4) And, lastly, such a conception as that of a Martyr Prophet suffering in innocence instead of sinners who had to share in his sorrow and his pain would be demoralizing to man himself. It would cut at the root of personal responsibility. But the doctrine of the Incarnation has been only half learnt if we have not understood that Christ claimed to be, not only in word, but in fact, the Representative and the Recapitulation of all men. It was in the name of the race whose nature He assumed that He confessed the guilt of sin, on their behalf that He suffered the inevitable consequence of sin. He “tasted death for every man.” He drank the cup to the dregs. Even alienation from the Divine love was felt by Him at last. “My God,” He cried, “why hast thou forsaken me?” Herein was the law of righteousness fulfilled.

Writing to Westcott, Hort says: I entirely agree with what you say on the Atonement, having for many years believed that “the absolute union of the Christian (or rather, of man) with Christ Himself” is the spiritual truth of which the popular doctrine of substitution is an immoral and material counterfeit. 1 [Note: Life and Letters of Fenton J. A. Hort, i. 430.]

The Lamb of God

Literature

Alexander (J. A.), The Gospel of Jesus Christ, 48.

Banks (L. A.), Christ and His Friends, 27.

Bernard (J. H.), Via Domini, 124.

Bowen (W. E.), Parochial Sermons, 110.

Duncan (J.), In the Pulpit and at the Communion Table, 442, 462.

Flint (R.), Sermons and Addresses, 197.

Jefferson (C. E.), Things Fundamental, 225.

Maclaren (A.), Expositions: John i.–viii. 40.

Mozley (J. B.), Sermons Parochial and Occasional, 130.

Newbolt (W. C. E.), The Gospel Message, 51.

Perowne (E. H.), The Godhead of Jesus, 83.

Ragg (L.), Christ and our Ideals, 131.

Simpson (W. J. S.), The Prophet of the Highest, 139.

Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xxxiii. (1887) No. 1, 987; lvi. (1910) No. 3, 222.

Taylor (W. M.), The Silence of Jesus, 17.

Thomas (J.), The Dynamic of the Cross, 86.

Trench (R. C.), Sermons in Westminster Abbey, 163.

Van Dyke (H.), The Reality of Religion, 99.

Waddell (R.), Behold the Lamb of God, 107, 121.

Webb-Peploe (H. W.), Calls to Holiness, 11.

Biblical World, xxxvii. 30 (Robinson).

Christian World Pulpit, xxxvi. 233 (Symes); xxxix. 75 (Peyton); xli. 251 (Abbott); lxx. 74 (Silvester); lxxviii. 241 (Selbie).

Verses 40-42

Personal Service

One of the two that heard John speak, and followed him, was Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother. He findeth first his own brother Simon, and saith unto him, We have found the Messiah (which is, being interpreted, Christ). He brought him unto Jesus.— John 1:40-42.

According to St. John’s narrative, Andrew and John (who characteristically does not name himself in the narrative) were the first men who heard and responded to the Master’s call, the first whom He enlisted in His little cohort of disciples. They had previously been followers of John the Baptist; but one day as Christ passed by they heard that prophet speak of Him as the Lamb of God, and they looked into His face and felt some wonderful attraction drawing them to Him, and all uninvited they followed and abode with Him one day. What Christ did with them and what He said on that day we know not, but it removed every doubt from their minds if any doubt had lingered there. It was a day of revelation, a day of grace, the most wonderful and the happiest day that these men had yet known, for they had found the Saviour of the world.

And then we have this incident recorded. Andrew had no sooner made his great discovery, than he burned to impart the secret to others. Quickly therefore he sought his own brother Simon and passed on the glad tidings—“We have found the Christ,” and “he brought him to Jesus.” Here, then, we have to deal with (1) a great discovery, (2) a great enthusiasm kindled by that discovery, and (3) a great service accomplished as the result of the enthusiasm.

This is one of the famous personal work chapters. There are three “findeths” in it. Andrew findeth his brother Peter. That was a great find. John in his modesty does not speak of it, but in all likelihood he findeth James his brother. Jesus findeth Philip, and Philip in turn findeth Nathanael, the guileless Man_1:1 [Note: S. D. Gordon, Quiet Talks on Service, 27.]

I

A Great Discovery

“We have found the Messiah.”

1. It was a great day in the life of Andrew when he uttered these words. It was a great day also in the life of the race, for he announced to his brother, Peter, a discovery fraught with importance far beyond his own comprehension.

(1) “We have found.” They had been looking for Him. The Jews were the nation of hope. Both Andrew and Peter, we may be sure, had heard of the Messiah, the hope of Israel, all their lives. From the earliest antiquity, down through the centuries of the tragic, chequered, strange career of this extraordinary people, there had presented itself, with varying degrees of distinctness, the hope of a Coming One who would be the source of great, although for many centuries undefined, blessings. They had been taught as children, as young men, to put the precious promises of Scripture together, just as nowadays family treasures are taken out and scanned, and arranged and re-arranged, and put back again, from time to time. These promises were the splendid inheritance of the great Jewish family, carried by it everywhere in its sufferings—carried by it throughout the civilized world; and the Galilean peasants, like all others of the race of Israel, felt that they were ennobled by having a share in this great possession. How much that we cannot even understand, in this age of the world, was gathered into those pregnant words: “We have found the Messiah.”

(2) “The Messiah (which is, being interpreted, Christ).” What did Andrew mean when he said “Christ”? In the thought of the best men of that time the word “Christ” set forth a Heaven-commissioned Prince, the Deliverer of the oppressed people, who should lead His followers to dignity, freedom, and happiness, and in whom all the nations of the earth should be blessed. This indeed Christ fulfilled, though not in the way Andrew imagined when he ran to Peter with his great discovery. For to the popular conception of the Christ our Lord added the momentous fact that the Messianic goal was to be reached by suffering, humiliation, and death, and that His supreme duty as the Anointed of God was to give Himself up for the race that rejected Him.

(3) How did Andrew find out Jesus to be the Messiah? There is no reason to think that Jesus told him so. The more carefully we study our Lord’s own words about Himself, the more convinced we shall be that He made no such revelation to an inquiring disciple at this early period. He had seen no miracles to convince him, for it is not till the next chapter that we hear of Christ’s first miracle. As far as we can judge, every sign of outward power was wanting; for all he could see, Jesus might be the weakest and the most helpless of mankind. What was it then that led him to speak so confidently to Peter? Surely it must have been, first, the effect of Christ’s unutterable goodness; and, secondly, that of Christ’s inward power, the power of spirit over spirit. Good men, no doubt, as we commonly call men good, he had seen and known before, as almost all of us have done; but here was One whose deep and perfect goodness made Andrew feel as if he were in the presence of God Himself. His own heart was sound and right enough to know the true marks of One come from God.

(4) But when Andrew spoke thus, he knew little of the real Christ. During the next three years he was to be continually finding Christ. He found Him anew in the Sermon on the Mount. He grew larger to his thought as he saw Him heal the sick, teach the inquiring, forgive the sinning. He grew still mightier as he watched Him feed the thousands, still the storm, and raise the dead. And the Christ in the upper room, in Gethsemane, and on Calvary, towered still higher above the Christ to whom he introduced his brother, and was in turn surpassed by the Christ of the Resurrection morning and the Ascension Mount. It is a red-letter day in any man’s life when he finds Christ, but that is only the beginning of his religious life. From that point we “follow on to know the Lord.”

2. To-day our Lord is living and working among us, revealing His glory and manifesting His power, to a far greater degree than when He trod the plains of Galilee, or taught in the Temple courts. But of this the majority of men are little conscious. The need of our times is for men and women who can say with the conviction of Andrew, “We have found the Christ.” Amidst the perplexities of our modern life, there is a cry for those who can speak with certainty of Divine things. It was the peerless personality of the Son of God that first attracted Andrew, and made him declare to Peter the discovery he had made. And the same attraction is operating to-day. Men are not won by beliefs about Christ, but by Christ Himself.

(1) If we would find Christ, we must be looking for Him, and preparing for Him. God taught His own chosen people for whole generations. He taught them about the Messiah, who He would be, what He would do, preparing by His messengers the way before Him; and the consequence of all that steady, systematic teaching was that, when the fulness of the time was come, and one brother said to another, “We have found him, of whom Moses in the law, and the prophets, did write,” they had not to ask who was meant; they took all their old religious knowledge and religious teaching in their hand and went to Jesus, and found Him to be all that they had learnt He would be. And so with our teaching of religious truth; we teach the history of Christ, and His sermons and His parables and His miracles; and we teach, laboriously perhaps, and in the sweat of our brow, the meaning of His Word and of His Sacraments. It is not labour lost. When the fire from heaven descends upon the sacrifice to consume it, it does so all the more readily because the prophet had previously prepared the altar, and set the wood in order, and laid the sacrifice on the wood.

(2) But we must not be content to know about Christ. We must come into personal contact with Him. We must be in the house with Him, we must learn to know Him as the Son of God and the Lamb of God—as that One who came from His Father to be our Brother, to share our nature and to bear our sins and to take us back to God as His Father and our Father, His God and our God—a Friend in sickness and sorrow and death, who points us through death to life eternal. This is the one great discovery, compared with which all other inventions are shortlived opiates of an hour—a little ease on the road to death.

(3) Having recognized the Master when we are brought face to face with Him, we must trust Him as Andrew did. Possibly these early disciples may have thought that, having “found Christ,” the rest was easy and secure; that the new Kingdom of great David’s greater Son would present no difficulties, either to flesh and blood or to mind or spirit; that, having found and recognized and honoured the King, there was nothing to follow but position and privilege, and glory such as the Kingdom could and would liberally supply. If this was their thought, they were quickly to be undeceived. The King, though personally dearer to them every day, seemed every day to become more mysterious and unintelligible, and His Kingdom more disappointing and more remote. If He began to tell them about His coming Kingdom, He spoke in parables which they could not understand. If He showed evidence of His superhuman power, it seemed to be His policy to restrain the publication of those miraculous proofs as much as possible. When they suggested that an exhibition of His wrath in the way of punishment might be a warning to His opponents, He rebuked their ignorance of the very spirit of His Kingdom. When they expected Him to be telling them of coming triumph, He could speak only of persecution and suffering and death, until the uncontrollable “Be it far from thee” broke from the lips of their scandalized spokesman. What, then, was the charm, what was the bond, which held the Master and followers together? We answer without hesitation, it was their personal love of the Christ whom they had found. This was what made all disappointment at His want of success and all perplexity as to His doctrine equally unable to break up their little society. They did not pretend to understand His methods or His objects, but when He laid before them one of the hardest and most difficult of His doctrines, that which caused many of His disciples to go back, and walk no more with Him, Peter, answering for the Apostles, could neither turn back nor yet pretend to say that he understood the difficult matter in question; but in all the helplessness of a constraining love, with all the confidence of such a plenary devotion as has no other choice and wishes for no other, he put the seal on his former declaration, “We have left all, and followed thee,” by adding to it, “Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life. And we believe and are sure that thou art that Christ, the Son of the living God.”

(4) If we can say “We have found the Messiah,” it is now, as of old, enough. John in the desert, Andrew on the morrow after meeting the Redeemer, did not look like the men who were to initiate nothing less than the spiritual conquest of the world. But one truth, seriously believed and proclaimed with the accents of sincerity, will go a great way with any single soul. If, indeed, we have found the Messiah, not merely in a literature, not merely as an explanation of existing institutions, not merely as the centre of much thought and activity in this our time and day, not merely as an historical personage that must needs be recognized by intelligent men,—if we have found Him for ourselves, found Him as a still living friend, found Him in our prayers, found Him in our Bibles, found Him in our efforts to conquer deep-seated evil within us, found Him in our intercourse with His living servants, found Him in the appointed Sacrament of His love,—if we have found Him as the pardoner of sin and as the conqueror of sin, then we have motives enough and to spare for working for the evangelization of others, for bringing all whom we can to that agreement in the faith and knowledge of God, to such ripeness and perfectness of age in Christ, that there may be no place left either for error in religion or for viciousness in life.

3. Society must find Christ. The conception of Christ as the Saviour of individuals only is insufficient for the fulfilling of prophecy or the solution of historic problems. The institutions of men must be saved as truly as individual souls. The Christian design for the world is not an anarchy of good individuals. And it is as society finds Christ that it rejoices in the exhilarating pulsations of a diviner life than the older dispensations ever dreamed of. Modern civilization, so far as it is virtuous, philanthropic, and high-principled, is the result of Andrew’s discovery. And one of the great needs of our age is to extend the beneficent influence of this discovery. The spirit of Christ claims dominion over all life, and the principle of Christ’s own life must be the principle of the home, the shop, the school, the court, and in the work of every department of our many-sided activities. It is as men realize this, and practise it, that the time is hastened when the new Jerusalem shall descend out of heaven from God, having peace for its walls, righteousness for its foundations, and love for its law.

There is a great deal of good talk these days about regenerating society. It used to be that men talked about “reaching the masses.” Now the other putting of it is commoner. It is helpful talk whichever way it is put. The Gospel of Jesus is to affect all society. It has affected all society, and is to do so more and more. But the thing to mark keenly is this, the key to the mass is the man. The way to regenerate society is to start on the individual. The law of influence through personal contact is too tremendous to be grasped. You influence one man and you have influenced a group of men, and then a group around each man of the group, and so on endlessly. Hand-picked fruit gets the first and best market. The keenest marksmen are picked for the sharpshooters’ corps. 1 [Note: S. D. Gordon, Quiet Talks on Service, 29.]

II

A Great Enthusiasm

“He first findeth his own brother Simon.”

Andrew does not dream of keeping his great discovery to himself. His first thought is to tell it to his brother Simon. He is full of it—can think or talk of nothing else. His eye flashes, his face shines, his voice rings with the music of it. “Simon, we have found Christ.”

I like greatly the motto of the Salvation Army. It must have been born for those workers in the warm heart of the mother of the Army, Catherine Booth. That mother explains much of the marvellous power of that organization. Their motto is, “ Saved to Serve.” 2 [Note: lbid. 141.]

1. There is no joy known to human hearts so glorious, so imperative—breaking down all strongholds and through all restraints—as the joy of a heart in its first gladness in finding the Lord and knowing the forgiveness of sins. As Morley Punshon, the famous English preacher, said, there was joy in the breast of the sage of Syracuse when he shouted aloud his glad “Eureka” in the hearing of the people who deemed him mad; there was joy in the soul of Sir Isaac Newton when the first conception of the law of gravitation burst upon his thought as he sat under his orchard tree; there was joy in the heart of Columbus in that moment of triumph over doubt and mutiny, when the tiny land-birds settled upon the sails of his vessel, bearing upon their timid wings the welcomes of the new world; there is joy for the gold-finder, when he sees the precious ore shining in his gold-pan; joy for children when new marvels of the world open on their vision; joy for the poet when he sends through the world a glad thought that stirs the pulse of mankind; but none of these can compare with the joy of the ransomed sinner who can clasp his brother’s hand and say, “Come, brother, we have found the Lord.”

I remember well how I used to pray for joy. I was told that a Christian must be joyful. I prayed and prayed, and I must say I did not get it. Why not? Because it does not come by prayer alone. It may come that way, but not alone. I used to think that joy was kept in lumps—packets which were stored up and then doled out—or injected like morphia—and that if I prayed a lump would come. This is a material conception that many hold. They want virtues and graces, and they set-to and pray. They pray for rest, peace, love, joy, and they hope these will drop from heaven and stay with them for ever. But these are Fruits. How can you have Fruits without Branches? Where are your branches to bear fruit, where is your blossom to precede it? What’s the use of a lump of joy if there are no branches? Now, gentlemen, look up in your Bibles and find out how to get joy; find the cause of joy. Work by the law you know of as “cause and effect.” Joy is an effect, find the cause. There is one, just as surely as you have a cause for toothache. Turn to the fifteenth of John, and there you will read the parable of the Vine in the words of Jesus. He tells His disciples about the tree and its branches, and then He tells them the “why” of these things:—“These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full.” That is the end of the parable—the cause of joy, something of which the effect is joy. Joy comes of a great law. But what is the condition? Go home and look and see. It is to do good. Abide in Christ and bring forth fruit, then comes the joy, and you can’t help yourself. You don’t make the joy. It simply follows after a certain cause, and I defy any man in this hall to go off and do something for somebody, comfort them, help them, any one whom you may meet—I say, I defy him to do that and not come back happier and full of joy. 1 [Note: Drummond, in Smith’s Life of Henry Drummond, 496.]

2. Andrew started at once to spread the good tidings. The day after his conversion was the day in which he became a soul-winner. How instinctive and natural the impulse is, when a man has found Jesus Christ, to tell some one else about Him. Nobody said to Andrew, “Go and look for your brother”; and yet, as soon as he had fairly realized the fact that this Man standing before him was the Messiah, though the evening seems to have come, he hurried away to find his brother, and share with him the glad conviction. That is always the case. If a man has any real depth of conviction, he cannot rest till he tries to share it with somebody else. Why, even a dog that has had its leg mended will bring other limping dogs to the man who was kind to it. Whoever really believes anything becomes a propagandist. Look round about us to-day! and hearken to the Babel, the wholesale Babel of noises, where every sort of opinion is trying to make itself heard. It sounds like a country fair where every huckster is shouting his loudest. That shows that the men believe the things they profess. Thank God that there is so much earnestness in the world! And are Christians to be dumb whilst all this vociferous crowd is calling its wares, and quacks are standing on their platforms shouting out their specifics, which are mostly delusions? Have we not a medicine that will cure everything, a real heal-all, a veritable pain-killer? If we believe that we have, certainly we will never rest till we share our boon with our brethren.

I am, and have for a long time been, persuaded that if the Christian Church were to claim that fulness of the Holy Spirit which is her birthright, her equipment, the greatest of all her needs, the proportion of what we call evangelists to pastors and teachers would be very much larger than it is at present. Touched with this flame, not only a multitude of ministers, but of the laity, who have hardly tasted the ecstasy of soul-winning, would joyously respond to God’s call with a fervent “Here am I, send me!” Then He could and would send them, and they would come back laden with trophies of victory. 1 [Note: T. Waugh, Twenty-three Years a Missioner, 65.]

3. Andrew did not wait until the Master had given him full equipment and training. He started with imperfect knowledge. As yet, and for long after, there was an earthly and mistaken element in Andrew’s idea of the Messiah whom he had found. He knew that the Messiah had come, but of the vast consequences to the world, to the soul, of that coming—consequences extending through the sphere of time into the depths of the eternal future, as we find these things developed in the Epistles of St. Paul—of these at such a time he must have had only an indistinct perception. One truth was clearly present to him, whatever else it might involve, and that one truth sufficed to kindle every affection and power of his spirit, to concentrate in its analysis every ray of his understanding,—“We have found the Messiah.” He had seen enough of Jesus in those few hours to be awed, attracted, won,—enough to know instinctively that John was right,—enough to know that here was one whom he could perfectly love and trust,—enough to know that the best thing he could possibly do for those nearest and dearest to himself was to tell them of his own experience.

In a list of Indian missionaries of Mohammedanism, published in the journal of a religious and philanthropic society of Lahore, says Arnold in The Preaching of Islam, “We find the names of schoolmasters, government clerks in the Canal and Opium Departments, traders, including a dealer in camel carts, an editor of a newspaper, a bookbinder, and a workman in a printing establishment. These men devote the hours of leisure left them after the completion of the day’s labour to the preaching of their religion in the streets and bazaars of Indian cities, seeking to win converts from among Christians and Hindus, whose religious belief they controvert and attack.” This is what constitutes the power of Islam. With no missionary organization, with no missionary order, the religion yet spread over Western Asia and Northern Africa, and retains still its foothold on the soil of Europe. Where the common man believes his religion and spreads it, other men believe it, too. 1 [Note: R. E. Speer, A Young Man’s Questions, 55.]

III

A Great Service

“He brought him unto Jesus.”

“He brought him unto Jesus”; it was the kindest and best service that any human being could do to any other.

1. Consider the nature of the man who performed this service.

(1) Andrew was an ordinary man. He was not a genius. He does not play a conspicuous part in the gospel drama. We know him better than some of the other disciples, better than Bartholomew and Jude, but not nearly so well as Peter and John. He is one of the subordinate characters stepping on the stage here and there to do a bit of modest work, and then vanishing into the background. Men like Andrew are the one-talented men who use their one talent sweetly and nobly, and show us all the way we ought to go and the work which we can do.

We often think that if we had that man’s means or that man’s ability or that man’s opportunity, we could do something worth doing; but, as we are, there is no possibility of any great thing. Yet God does not want us to fill any other man’s place, or to do any other man’s work. God wants us to improve our own opportunity with the possessions and the powers that He has given us. It is a very great thing for us to do the very best we can do just where and as we are. God asks no one of us to do more than this, nor has any one of us a right to do less. 1 [Note: M. D. Babcock, Thoughts for Everyday Living, 19.]

(2) Andrew had come from communion with Christ. He had spent a night with the Master, and in the sacred, secret converse of those few mysterious hours his whole life was altered. He had seen and had found the Christ. Here we have the secret of success. It is to be found in communion with Christ. This is the indispensable qualification of every Christian worker. It makes of the dwarf a giant, and without it the giant becomes a dwarf. In the Christian realm we can influence others only as we ourselves are influenced.

Place a bar of iron, cold and lifeless, by a piece of wood. The wood is not influenced at all, but when the iron is placed in the furnace and left there for a while and afterwards withdrawn, a change is then effected, for the iron seems to have ceased to be iron and to have become a mass of fire. If placed then by the side of the piece of wood how different is the result; as it has been influenced, so it influences, and the wood too becomes a mass of fire. 2 [Note: William Arthur, The Tongue of Fire.]

(3) This ordinary man, coming from communion with Christ, shows three remarkable qualities—the courage which initiates, the sympathy which communicates with others, the humility which obliterates self. Courage, sympathy, humility—three chief elements in the saintly character.

( a) There is first of all the courage of the man, the boldness which takes the first step, the spirit which comes bravely forward while all others are hanging back, timid or irresolute. We have many phrases which bear testimony to the value and the rarity of this courage. We speak of breaking the ice, of shooting Niagara. It is a plunge into an unknown future, where none has gone before, of which none can foretell the consequences. We say that it is the first step which costs. We are lost in admiration of the soldier who steps forward to lead the forlorn hope, to storm the breach, though almost certain death is his destiny. The forlorn hope—does not the very phrase tell its own tale? Yes, it is the first step which costs. Where one—though only one—has gone before, it does not cost half—not a twentieth part—of the bravery, the resolution, for a second to follow. And for a third and a fourth the degree of courage required lessens in a rapidly decreasing scale. The first step was taken by Andrew. He was the leader of the forlorn hope of Christendom, the first to storm the citadel of the Kingdom of heaven, taking it as alone it can be taken—taking it by force. Be not deceived. Only the violent enter therein—only the brave, resolute, unflinching soldiers, who will brook no opposition, who make straight for truth and righteousness and love, come what may, who are ready to lose their lives that they may save them. This unique glory is Andrew’s. Peter may have held a more commanding position in the Church of Christ; Paul may have travelled over a larger area and gathered greater numbers into the fold; but Andrew’s crown has a freshness and a brightness of its own which shall never fade—a glory of which no man can rob it.

On Sunday afternoons the boys in his passage would often indulge in pillow fights or games of a somewhat rowdy order. In order to stop this, Hogg, now one of the eldest boys at Joynes’, suggested that they should all club together and have tea in his room, and then read aloud. He collected a large quantity of old Chambers’s Journals, in which he would look out any curious or interesting articles for these Sunday afternoons. After a time he proposed that before separating a chapter of Scripture should be read and a prayer offered. It must have cost any boy a great effort to make such a suggestion, though the fact that a strong religious revival was then moving England, and that the movement had touched even the great public schools, may have made it a slightly less difficult innovation than one would imagine. Yet his contemporaries own they “would not have stood it from any one else”; and he himself spoke of it as a “sore struggle.” As a matter of fact, very little opposition or ridicule was met with. Most of the boys respected him for having the courage of his convictions; the majority responded to the invitation; those who held aloof were by no means antagonistic. Young Hogg used to read the chapter, and usually made some remarks as he did so; occasionally other boys would take an active part, and thus gradually the Chambers’s Journals were dropped, and the gathering became a regular Bible Class. 1 [Note: Quintin Hogg, 36.]

( b) The second quality is wholly different. It is the sympathy which mediates; the temper and character which draws others together; the “conductivity” of the man. It is a remarkable fact that, after this first meeting with Christ, every subsequent notice of Andrew specially brings out this feature in his character. It is not that he does any great thing himself, but that he is the means of getting great things done for or by others. What was his first impulse, what was his first act, after his call? Not the establishment of his own position with Christ, not the proclamation of his discovery on the housetops, nothing of self or self-seeking in any, even in its highest, form; but “he first findeth his own brother Simon”; “and he brought him to Jesus”—brought him who was henceforward to be the leader of the Apostles, the foremost after the Ascension to proclaim his risen Lord to a hostile world, the earliest to gather the first-fruits of the Gentiles into the garner of Christ.

Dr. Trumbull was often spoken of as being a man of exceptional “tact.” He practised pretty constantly at individual soul-winning from the time when he first found his Saviour, at twenty-one, until his death more than fifty years later. People who knew him and his ways, and his lifelong habit, have said of him, “Oh, it was ‘second nature’ to Dr. Trumbull to speak to a man about his soul. He simply couldn’t help doing it, it was so easy for him. I never could get his ease in the work.” And in so saying they showed how little they knew of him or of the demands of this work upon every man. The book on Individual Work was written after its author was seventy years of age. Hear what he had to say as to the “ease” which his long practice had brought him: “From nearly half a century of such practice, as I have had opportunity day by day, I can say that I have spoken with thousands upon thousands on the subject of their spiritual welfare. Yet, so far from my becoming accustomed to this matter, so that I can take hold of it as a matter of course, I find it as difficult to speak about it at the end of these years as at the beginning. Never to the present day can I speak to a single soul for Christ without being reminded by Satan that I am in danger of harming the cause by introducing it just now. If there is one thing that Satan is sensitive about, it is the danger of a Christian’s harming the cause he loves by speaking of Christ to a needy soul. He [Satan] has more than once, or twice, or thrice, kept me from speaking on the subject by his sensitive pious caution, and he has tried a thousand times to do so. Therefore my experience leads me to suppose that he is urging other persons to try any method for souls except the best one.” 1 [Note: C. G. Trumbull, Taking Men Alive, 53.]

( c) The third feature in his character is intimately connected with the second. To Andrew was given the humility which obliterates self. He, who brought others forward, was content himself to retire. Just as at a later date Barnabas, the primitive disciple, took Saul by the hand, introduced him to the elder Apostles, and started him on his career as an Evangelist, content that his own light should wane in the greater glory of this new and more able missionary of Christ, so was it now. Andrew was the first called Apostle. Andrew brought Simon Peter to Christ. Yet Andrew is known only as Simon Peter’s brother. We know in what school he had learnt this lesson. Andrew was the Baptist’s disciple, and was not this the lesson of the Baptist’s life? “He must increase, but I must decrease”—obscuration, eclipse, obliteration of self. The personality of Andrew is lost in the personality of Simon. So it is truly said that the world knows nothing of its greatest benefactors. They are lost in their work, or are lost in others.

Lord, I read at the transfiguration that Peter, James, and John were admitted to behold Christ; but Andrew was excluded. So again at the reviving of the daughter of the ruler of the synagogue, these three were let in, and Andrew shut out. Lastly, in the agony, the aforesaid three were called to be witnesses thereof, and still Andrew left behind. Yet he was Peter’s brother, and a good man, and an apostle; why did not Christ take the two pair of brothers? was it not a pity to part them? But methinks I seem more offended thereat than Andrew himself was, whom I find to express no discontent, being pleased to be accounted a loyal subject for the general, though he was no favourite in these particulars. Give me to be pleased in myself, and thankful to thee, for what I am, though I be not equal to others in personal perfections. For such peculiar privileges are courtesies from thee when given, and no injuries to us when denied. 1 [Note: Thomas Fuller.]

2. Consider the manner of the service.

(1) It was service rendered as the result of experience.—No sermon did Andrew preach that day. He simply uttered one sentence, “We have found the Messiah, which is, being interpreted, the Christ.” Who could not have uttered such a sentence, if he had possessed the experience? The man who had experienced the effect of his eyes being opened, the woman who had experienced the opening out of her life before her eyes—both spoke with such power that men believed the words they uttered. So Andrew had found the Messiah, and the words of such a man, though few, had a weight such as those of a Demosthenes could not carry. Eloquence can never make up for the lack of experience. Experience with one sentence can move men as eloquence without it can never do, and Andrew with his one sentence brought Peter to Christ. When the Holy Ghost fell upon the Apostles they went out stating that God had “shed forth this”; so, to-day, the man who has spent the night with the Christ can go forth and, with the light of joy in his life, and the ring of conviction in his tone, can say, “We have found the Christ,” and men will listen to his message.

Some of us are influenced by argument and some of us are not. You may pound a man’s mistaken creed to atoms with sledge-hammers of reasoning, and he is not much nearer being a Christian than he was before; just as you may pound ice to pieces and it is pounded ice after all. The mightiest argument that we can use, and the argument that we can all use, if we have got any religion in us at all, is that of Andrew, “We have found the Messiah.” 2 [Note: A. Maclaren.]

When John Wesley went as a missionary to Georgia, he went, as he writes, “to save his own soul”; but two years later he returned to England a disappointed man, having saved neither his own soul nor those of the colonists and Indians. “I who went to America to convert others,” he says, “was never myself converted.” Then, with a new accession of self-forgetfulness, he turned from his own salvation to the service of others. The words spoken of his Master came home to him: “He saved others; himself he cannot save.” He was no longer Wesley the ritualist, but Wesley the missionary. “He first findeth his own brother Simon,” and soon his own life acquired confidence and peace. “His soul was saved,” says his biographer, “because he had found his work.” 1 [Note: F. G. Peabody, Mornings in the College Chapel, ii. 59.]

(2) It was service rendered by the utterance of one sentence.—Andrew was a young convert and had no learning. He could not argue about it, and he could not preach about it—all of which was a great mercy. Because he could do nothing else he had to stick to the point—“We have found the Messiah.” The simple sentence uttered by one man to another is often the way by which men are brought into touch with Christ. We cannot all be preachers to the crowd, nor are we all called to such a work; but we are all qualified and we are all called to pass the message on to any one into whose company we may be thrown.

The real powers of the Early Church were not men who could harangue crowds or arouse congregations by their fervid appeals, but men who could talk to a brother, a friend, a companion, a neighbour, about the wonderful love and beauty of Jesus Christ, and out of the fulness of their own joys testify to those nearest them of the new life which they had found. It was in that way chiefly, and not by the orators of the Church, that Christianity was spread in the early days. A man who had realized the blessedness of it passed it on to the one next to him. It went like a forest fire, each tree kindled set fire to another. Each convert was as good as two, for each one made a second. The Christian plant, like every other, propagated itself; the flower of its joy dropped seed as it ripened into fruit. Prisoners whispered the glad secret to their gaolers, soldiers to their comrades, servants to their masters, women to every one who would listen. Each saved soul was eager to save another, eager to pluck a brand from the burning and win a jewel for Christ. So the work went on, so the army of the Lord grew, so the great Roman Empire was slowly subdued under the Cross, and Christianity made the ruling faith of the world. 1 [Note: J. G. Greenhough.]

I recently read a story in some newspaper or other about a minister who preached a very elaborate course of lectures in refutation of some form of infidelity, for the special benefit of a man who attended his place of worship. Soon after, the man came and declared himself a Christian. The minister said to him, “Which of my discourses was it that removed your doubts?” The reply was, “Oh! it was not any of your sermons that influenced me. The thing that set me thinking was that a poor woman came out of the chapel beside me, and stumbled on the steps, and I stretched out my hand to help her, and she said, ‘Thank you!’ Then she looked at me and said, ‘Do you love Jesus Christ, my blessed Saviour?’ And I did not, and I went home and thought about it; and now I can say I love Jesus.” 2 [Note: A. Maclaren.]

(3) Andrew did not wait till he could talk to a crowd; he took the message to one.—Have you ever noticed what stress the Scripture lays upon one soul—as if with a tender regard for the hidden workers who deal with the one at a time? There is joy among the angels in the presence of God over one sinner that repenteth. It is the one sheep that the Shepherd seeketh, and bringeth home with rejoicing. It is the one piece of money that the woman makes so much of. It is the one son that has all to himself the loveliest parable that earth—or surely heaven either—has ever listened to. “He brought him to Jesus”—do not wait for them.

We are told of a minister in Scotland, who was called to task by some of the Church officers because of his want of success. And he had to confess that during the whole year only one young man had joined the Church, so that his heart was sick within him. But that very night the same young man spoke to his pastor of his intention of becoming a missionary. Then the pastor’s grief was turned into joy, and he thought that the work would be judged by quality rather than by quantity. The young man was Robert Moffat, who afterwards became famous by his mission work in the dark continent. The year of his conversion was not barren in the annals of that country parish after all. 3 [Note: H. C. Williams.]

In the Introduction to his Lives of Twelve Good Men, Burgon gives a sketch of two or three others whom he knew and who deserved to be called “good.” Among them is Charles Portalés Golightly. He says: The Rev. T. Mozley (who is not promiscuous in his bestowal of praise) “acknowledges the greatest of obligations” to him. “Golightly” (he says) “was the first human being to talk to me, directly and plainly, for my soul’s good; and that is the debt that no time, no distance, no vicissitudes, no differences, can efface; no, not eternity itself.” On which, Dean Goulburn remarks—“But this was what Golightly was always doing; and, for the sake of doing which, he cultivated the acquaintance of all undergraduates who were introduced to him; showed them no end of kindness, walked with them, talked with them, took them with him for a Sunday excursion to his little parish of Toot Baldon.” 1 [Note: J. W. Burgon, Lives of Twelve Good Men, i., xxv.]

(4) The closer the tie, the more emphatic the testimony.—It is what brother says to brother, husband to wife, parent to child, friend to friend, far more than what preacher says to hearer, that carries with it irresistible, persuasive power. When the truth of the utterance is vouched for by the obvious gladness and purity of the life; when the finding of the Christ is obviously as real as the finding of a better situation and as satisfying as promotion in life, then conviction will be carried with the announcement.

Some who would not hesitate to speak of spiritual things to casual strangers find their tongues tied when they ought to speak for God to a wife, a husband, a brother, or a child. It is perhaps because we have an instinctive feeling that our intimate associates know us too well; they would feel that some inconsistency, not to say insincerity, in our Christian conversation should make us silent. Let the thought of our duty to those we love drive us to commune with our hearts and discover what it is that ties our tongue and hinders us from giving the word of warning or exhortation that is due. 2 [Note: C. Bickersteth, The Gospel of Incarnate Love, 10.]

3. Consider the success of the service.

Andrew gained his brother. Simon yielded and went, and the first interview must have gladdened Andrew’s heart. When Jesus beheld him He said: “Thou art Simon the son of Jona: thou shalt be called Cephas, which is by interpretation, A Stone.” We cannot now tell all that Peter did; how his boldness and open confession of Christ confirmed the hearts of Andrew and his fellow-disciples; how, though he fell, he received this charge: “Strengthen thy brethren”; how thousands were converted in a day by his preaching; and how, in the Epistles he has left, he has been made such an instrument for comforting and building up the people of God in all ages. We hear very little afterwards of Andrew; no doubt he continued to work in the spirit of his first mission effort, and no doubt also he had his continued success; yet he had not the ability and energy of Peter, and he retires into the shade. But we cannot forget that it is to Andrew we owe Simon Peter, and all that he did. Often afterwards, we may well believe, when Andrew saw Peter’s character unfolding, when he beheld him opening the door of faith on the Day of Pentecost, and standing forth as one of the pillars of the Christian Church, he must have thanked Christ that He not only touched his own heart, but put it into his heart to bring his brother.

God often uses minnows to catch salmon. It may be the consolation that He gives to the ungifted, that they should be the means of bringing to Jesus the eminently useful. There is Ananias leading the blind Saul to the Saviour; and little Bilney leading sturdy Hugh Latimer; and John Bunyan drawn by the godly gossip of the old women at Bedford; and John Wesley led by the simple Moravians. In our own time instances are plentiful enough. We think of Spurgeon going burdened to the Primitive Methodists, and hearing from some plain man who murdered the Queen’s English the way of life everlasting. We think of Thomas Binney, led by the simple workman to the Methodist Class-meeting, and there having the good seed sown. Andrew did a good day’s work when he brought Simon to Jesus. It is a sign of genius when you can turn to good account the gifts of other people. Let us be geniuses of that sort if we cannot be of any other. And the best way to turn any man’s gifts to good account is to bring him to Jesus.

Consider the untold capacities for high saintliness which lie buried in the mass of men who, as yet, know nothing of grace and truth. Our cities—these great hives of agglomerated human beings—abound with men and women who are, in the eye of society—who are, it may be, in the eye of the law—among the worst and the vilest, but who have bright and clear understandings; who have warm and generous hearts; who need but the illumination of truth, and the invigorating touch of grace, to become great in the true sense of that much misused word. “I have much people in this city,” was the motto traced by Christ Himself over one of the most vicious towns of ancient heathendom. Humanity is like a mine wherein flints and diamonds lie side by side in an indistinguishable disorder until the light of Divine knowledge is poured in upon the buried mass, and the hidden beauties of lives outwardly degraded are revealed. How often does it happen that the found are greater, far greater, than the finder; that Peter, in the event, takes precedence altogether of Andrew; that those who enter last into the Kingdom of heaven are bidden, in the eternal presence-chamber, to stand among the first. 1 [Note: Canon Liddon.]

Personal Service

Literature

Assheton (R. O.), The Kingdom and the Empire, 51.

Banks (L. A.), Christ and His Friends, 56.

Bickersteth (C.), The Gospel of Incarnate Love, 1.

Boyd (A. K. H.), Changed Aspects of Unchanged Truths, 54.

Broughton (L. G.), The Soul-Winning Church, 62.

Burrell (D. J.), Christ and Men, 40.

Chapman (J. W.), Bells of Gold, 56.

Darlow (T. H.), The Upward Calling, 90.

Greenhough (J. G.), in Men of the New Testament, 83.

Hall (W. A. N.), “ Do Out the Duty,” 67.

Horne (C. S.), The Relationships of Life, 31.

Hort (F. J. A.), Village Sermons, i. 117.

Ker (J.), Sermons, ii. 100.

Liddon (H. P.), Sermons (Contemporary Pulpit Library), iv. 109.

Lightfoot (J. B.), Sermons on Special Occasions, 160.

Maclaren (A.), Expositions: John i.–viii. 62.

Matheson (G.), Rests by the River, 246.

Peabody (F. G.), Mornings in the College Chapel, ii. 58.

Price (A. C.), Fifty Sermons, i. 337.

Punshon (W. M.), Sermons, i. 1.

Raleigh (A.), From Dawn to the Perfect Day, 250.

Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, x. (1864) No. 570; xv. (1869) No. 855.

Stuart (J. G.), Talks about Soul Winning, 63.

Virgin (S. H.), Spiritual Sanity, 61.

Watts-Ditchfield (J. E.), Here and Hereafter, 105.

Wells (J.), Christ in the Present Age, 61.

Wheeler (W. C.), Sermons and Addresses, 9.

Williams (H. C.), Christ the Centre, 114.

Christian World Pulpit, xxxvii. 177 (Sloan); lxiv. 139 (Gregg).

Churchman’s Pulpit: Mission Work: xvii. 223 (Maguire).

Examiner, Feb. 2, 1905, p. 100 (Jowett).