Bible Commentaries
John 3

Verse 5

A New Beginning

Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.— John 3:5.

1. It is impossible for any one to read or hear these words without remembering what solemn words they have been to multitudes of our fellow-men. There are hardly any words that Christ ever spoke which have more fascinated and held the hearts of earnest men.

In a letter from Whitefield to Benjamin Franklin, dated 1752, occur these words: “As I find you growing more and more famous in the learned world I would recommend to your diligent and unprejudiced study the mystery of the new birth. It is a most important study, and, when mastered, will richly answer all your pains. I bid you, my friend, remember that One at whose bar we shall both presently appear hath solemnly declared that without it we shall in no wise see His Kingdom.”

2. Born again! The new birth! Oh, these old words which so many souls have puzzled over and could not understand, and yet have been fascinated by so that they could not let them go! In silent chambers souls have agonized and wondered, “What is it to be born again?” In silent chambers souls, conscious of a richer and fuller life, have dreamed and questioned timidly: “Is it possible, then, that this is the new birth? Have we come any nearer to an answer to it all to-day? Have we passed from the shallow life to the profound, from the unspiritual to the spiritual, from the first life to the second?” 1 [Note: Phillips Brooks, Seeking Life, 208.]

How was it that he, who in 1727 could not move a village, after 1739 could shake three kingdoms? How did it come to pass that the teacher who was driven out of a little colony as a mere human irritant became the teacher, the comforter, the trusted leader of whole generations? The explanation certainly does not lie in any personal gifts of body or brain Wesley possessed. These were exactly the same at both stages of his career. Wesley at Wroote was twenty-five years of age. He had then the scholar’s brain, the zealot’s fire, the orator’s tongue; and he failed—failed consciously and completely. “I preached much,” is his own record, “but saw no fruits of my labour.” Wesley, again, in Charleston, was thirty-two years of age. At no stage of his life did he show a higher passion of zeal, or more methodical and resolute industry; a self-sacrifice so nearly heroic in temper. And yet he failed! But something came into his life by the gate of his conversion, something he never lost, something which transfigured his career. It was a strange gift of power—power that used Wesley’s natural gifts—his tough body, his keen intellect, his resolute will—as instruments, but which was more than these. Who looks on Wesley’s life as a whole, and sees on one side of a particular date doubt, weakness, and defeat, and on the other side certainty, gladness, and matchless power, cannot doubt that the secret of Wesley’s career lies in the spiritual realm. Wesley’s story is simply one embodied, historic, and overwhelming demonstration of the truth of what is called the Evangelical reading of Christianity. 1 [Note: W. H. Fitchett Wesleu and his Century 281.]

3. Many are perplexed, as Nicodemus was. They understand religion on its educational and tangible side; but the doctrine of regeneration, of conversion, perplexes and offends them. They will consent to the faith of Christ, to the Church of Christ, excepting this one doctrine, which is of its very essence. Yet what of the fact? Only as our interior eyes are enlightened can we see the Kingdom of God; only as our mind, affections, conscience, and will are raised and energized by the Holy Spirit can we enter into that Kingdom and share its righteousness and blessedness. Such is the teaching of the Master, and tens of thousands in all generations testify to the truth of His teaching. They are conscious that they have experienced this very change; they know it as a fact, the most glorious fact of their history. They have been transformed in the spirit of their mind; they henceforth walk in newness of life. These witnesses will vary much as to what brought it all about, as to their recognition of the time and place of awakening, and many features of the experiences through which they passed; but concerning the substantial fact itself, that the Spirit of God has imparted to them a higher life, given them a clean heart, and renewed within them a right spirit, they bear testimony to it as the most indubitable and blessed fact of their life. Let there be no mistake about it; that penitent men are turned from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God, is one of the best authenticated facts in the history of the race.

There are a great many things that I cannot explain and cannot reason out, and yet that I believe. I heard a commercial traveller say that he had heard that the ministry and religion of Jesus Christ were matters of revelation and not of investigation. “When it pleased God to reveal his Son in me,” says St. Paul ( Galatians 1:15-16). There was a party of young men together, going up the country; and on their journey they made up their minds not to believe anything they could not reason out. An old man heard them, and presently he said, “I heard you say you would not believe anything you could not reason out.” “Yes,” they said, “that is so.” “Well,” he said, “coming down on the train to-day, I noticed some geese, some sheep, some swine, and some cattle, all eating grass. Can you tell me by what process that same grass was turned into hair, feathers, bristles, and wool? Do you believe it is a fact?” “Oh yes,” they said, “we cannot help believing that, though we fail to understand it.” “Well,” said the old man, “I cannot help believing in Jesus Christ. And I cannot help believing in the regeneration of man, when I see men who have been reclaimed, when I see men who have been reformed.” 1 [Note: D. L. Moody, The Way to God, 45.]

4. Let us remember the occasion upon which the words were spoken. Our Lord at the very beginning of His ministry exercised His vital powers to heal those who were sick with all manner of diseases; and this He did in order to manifest His sympathy with human suffering, to win confidence for Himself and His message, to illustrate the operations of grace in renewing the life and vigour of the soul, and to reveal in living form, by prophecy, the coming time when the former things shall have passed away, and no one shall ever again know pain, and cry out, “I am sick!”

His works of healing not only touched the people but moved thoughtful men very deeply. One of them, a member of the Great Council, came to Him for more light. He came alone, secretly, in the night. He was no coward. He was not yet convinced, not yet ready to commit himself. He had much to sacrifice should he become a disciple of this young Rabbi. Not until he could be sure that he had more to gain than to lose would he be able to decide. At last, when all had forsaken Him and fled, it was this unknown follower of Jesus who was ready to perform the sacred rites of burial.

His words, as he first spoke, were these: “Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God; for no man can do these signs which thou doest, except God be with him.” Jesus immediately replied, not to these words, but to the inmost thought of the man, which had moved him to seek His presence and turn a listening ear to His teachings: “Except a man be born anew, he cannot so much as perceive the kingdom of God.” Nicodemus confessed that he could not understand, and then strove to draw the Master out: “Surely one cannot return to the single, throbbing cell of life, and grow, and be born anew? Thou dost not speak words that have their ordinary meanings; what, then, dost Thou mean by the use of them?” Then Jesus explained: “That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.” By the word “flesh” Jesus evidently meant our nature as it comes into the world by the first birth, therefore what the Apostle calls the “natural”; for He sets the flesh over against the spirit as the Apostle sets the natural over against the spiritual. A man, therefore, who comes into the world in the fulness of human nature, made in the image of God, and after His likeness, must pass through a change which is really a birth anew. And this is but the quickening life, the inspiring breath of the Divine Spirit, which, confluent with his own spirit, gives him life abundantly. The growth and progress of man, then, made in God’s image and after His likeness, into His full, complete, glorious, blessed likeness, involves a transition which may be called a birth anew.

Now one thing that strikes us about Christ’s conversation with Nicodemus is its representative character. The situation is always recurring wherever the call to higher truth comes face to face with mere traditional teaching or hereditary precept. Nicodemus is always with us in one shape or another. He is the embodiment of religious conventionalism and social respectability. He is always ready with his rationalistic efforts at solving spiritual mysteries; he is always trying to reduce the mysterious to the common-place. He has his dwelling among current traditions and rules and interpretations, and he will not look beyond them. How can a man be born again except by recurrence to some improbable natural method? And Christ’s answer is always the same: You must be born again—not in the lower world, but into a higher world; you must be born again, the Spirit must touch your spirit, and you must leave rule and tradition and interpretations behind you. Morally you must be born again into the Kingdom of the Father, where God is loved and trusted and dealt with at first hand and communed with.

Speaking of the writer of the “Eikon Basilike,” Carlyle said that he was the most portentously self-righteous mortal ever extant in this planet; that seemed to say to the Almighty, in place of asking for His grace and mercy, “Oh, Lord, I have attained to such a pitch of heavenly perfection that I fear it is not even in Thy power to make me any better than I am; but if at the time Thou shouldst find an opportunity for adding a little finish and perfectness to my many excellences I should feel obliged to Thee.” 1 [Note: Mrs. Brookfield and Her Circle, ii. 436.]

5. In religious circles in Jerusalem there was nothing being talked of but the Kingdom of God which John the Baptist had declared to be at hand. And when Jesus told Nicodemus that in order to enter this Kingdom he must be born again, He told him just what John had been telling the whole people. John had assured them that, though the King was in their midst, they must not suppose they were already within His Kingdom by being the children of Abraham. He excommunicated the whole nation, and taught them that it was something different from natural birth that gave admission to God’s Kingdom. And just as they had compelled Gentiles to be baptized, and to submit to other arrangements when they wished to partake of Jewish privileges, so John compelled them to be baptized. The Gentile who wished to become a Jew had to be symbolically born again. He had to be baptized, going down under the cleansing waters, washing away his old and defiled life, being buried by baptism, disappearing from men’s sight as a Gentile, and rising from the water as a new man. He was thus born of water, and this time born, not a Gentile, but a Jew. As the Gentile had to be naturalized and born again that he might rank as a child of Abraham, and enjoy the external privileges of the Jew, so must the Jew himself be born again if he is to rank as a child of God and to belong to the Kingdom of God. He must submit to the double baptism of water and of the Spirit—of water for the pardon and cleansing of past sin and defilement, of the Spirit for the inspiration of a new and holy life.

The Jewish doctors, it is said, not uncommonly described the Gentile as one who became a little child, who began his life anew, when he was received by baptism into the privileges of their outer court. If so, Nicodemus must have been familiar with the expression; but it must have been to him, and to most who availed themselves of it, a mere figure of rhetoric—one of those counters which pass among religious people, which have a certain value at first, but which become at length so depreciated that they serve no purpose but to impose on those who take and those who give them. However little Nicodemus might know of Jesus, he did know that He was not resorting to figures of rhetoric—that if He spoke of a birth, He meant a birth; and he must have perceived that what He said did not apply to sinners of the Gentiles, but to him, the religious ruler of the Jews. It was, therefore, a good and healthy sign, a proof of the power of the new Teacher, that he forgot the conventionalisms of the Sanhedrim, and spoke out coarsely and naturally, as a peasant might have done. Our Lord, surely, passed this judgment upon him; for, instead of rebuking him for his question, He meets it in the most direct manner possible: “Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.” The object of Nicodemus in coming to ask Him about His kingdom is still kept prominently forward; but there is a noticeable change in our Lord’s words. He had spoken of seeing the Kingdom of God; He now speaks of entering into it. Each expression may, unquestionably does, involve the other; still they are distinct. To see a kingdom is to have an apprehension of its reality and of its nature; to enter into a kingdom is to become a subject of it. 1 [Note: F. D. Maurice, The Gospel of John, 90.]

6. Our Lord speaks of the second birth as completed by two agencies, water and the Spirit. To make the one of these merely the symbol of the other is to miss His meaning. The Baptist baptized with water for the remission of sins, but he was always careful to disclaim power to baptize with the Holy Ghost. His baptism with water was of course symbolical; that is to say, the water itself exercised no spiritual influence, but merely represented to the eye what was invisibly done in the heart. But that which it symbolized was not the life-giving influence of the Holy Spirit, but the washing away of sin from the soul. Assurance of pardon John was empowered to give. Those who humbly submitted to his baptism with confession of their sins went from it forgiven and cleansed. But more than that was needed to make them new men—and yet, more he could not give. For that which would fill them with new life they must go to a Greater than he, who alone could bestow the Holy Ghost.

These, then, are the two great incidents of the second birth—the pardon of sin, which is preparatory, and which cuts our connection with the past; the communication of life by the Spirit of God, which fits us for the future. Both of these are represented by Christian baptism because in Christ we have both; but those who were baptized by John’s baptism were only prepared for receiving Christ’s Spirit by receiving the forgiveness of their sins.

This passage brings out the deep truth of which Baptism was afterwards made an outward and visible exponent. Here we are shown the need of an external acceptance of promise and position, and of these being sealed on us, and still further the need of the Spirit dwelling in our hearts to make this outward confession a reality, and give us power for practising it. And so, be it ever remembered, the mere form of baptism, unless the Holy Spirit be actually in the heart, can avail nothing. It is but, as it were, a husk, and can be no more, but the gift of the Holy Spirit is open to all; and as we read this passage, and are perhaps for the moment tempted to think it excludes some, or even ourselves, from the Kingdom, we should put beside it that other glorious passage of promise: “If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?” ( Luke 11:13). 1 [Note: J. H. Rogers, The “Verily, Verilys” of Christ, 28.]

Imagine not infants, but crowds of grown-up persons already changed in heart and feelings; their “life hidden with Christ in God,” losing their personal consciousness in the laver of regeneration; rising again from its depths into the light of heaven, in communion with God and nature; met as they rose from the bath with the white raiment, which is “the righteousness of the saints,” and ever after looking back on that moment as the instant of their new birth, of the putting off of the old man, and the putting on of Christ. Baptism was to them the figure of death, burial, and resurrection all in one, the most apt expression of the greatest change that can pass upon man, like the sudden change into another life when we leave the body. 1 [Note: B. Jowett, The Epistles of St. Paul, i. 291.]

7. We now see what our Lord demanded of Nicodemus. It was that he should enter into an entirely new relationship to God. There were two classes of people, “the righteous” and “the sinners.” The difference between them was due to their attitude to the Law. The righteous “knew” the Law, and so counted themselves right with God; the sinners did not “know” it; and the judgment which the righteous pronounced on them was, “This people who knoweth not the law are cursed.”

Now when Nicodemus came to Jesus, instead of being confirmed in his righteousness, or perhaps told what omissions he had to make good in order that his obedience to the Law might be perfect, he was informed that the whole framework of his life was wrong. His relation had been to the Law, not to the Person of God. He had obeyed God as a servant; he had not loved Him as a son. The whole structure of righteousness which he had built up laboriously, by rigid observance of the precepts of the Law, had therefore to be taken down. He had to begin at the beginning again; or, to use the inimitable figure of our Lord, he had to be “born anew.”

The New Birth, then, is the entrance on a new attitude towards God, the attitude of a loving son to a Father instead of that of an obedient servant to a lawgiver. This new attitude is entered upon by repentance on the part of the sinner (however “righteous” the sinner may have thought himself to be), and the gift of the Spirit on God’s part. It thus involves three things—first and chiefly a new attitude to God; next, and as belonging to that, a new attitude to the past, or Repentance; and, last, a new attitude to the future, or Spiritual Life.

I doubt if there is a doctrine of Jesus which modern men so thoroughly disbelieve as that which staggered Nicodemus nineteen centuries ago. I know just how men roast it over the slow fires of their sarcasm. I have watched them score it with the keenest infidel blades. I have seen it pilloried and hung in effigy before an admiring crowd. To all of which there is just this to say—and I believe it can be substantiated with vital truth—that of all the Master’s doctrines none is more self-evident and philosophical than this. There was nothing in it to bewilder Nicodemus or any man of us. Jesus touched the bedrock of common-sense when He insisted that there is no way into His Kingdom except through “a second birth.” 1 [Note: G. C. Peck, Ringing Questions, 161.]

I

A New Attitude to God

1. To be “born again” means to get back to our childhood. Who has not cried, “Oh, that I were a child again! If only I could start life over again, free from all the errors and disasters, free from all the stains and soils of the past!” We may, we can. We can get back to childhood again. For Naaman there was the river that washed away the leprosy of the flesh; for us “there is a fountain opened in the house of David for sin and uncleanness,” where the soul may be washed clean. To get back to childhood, to get the weight of sin removed, to start anew—Jesus says we can. Science tells us that all that is wanted to create a new star is a start. There are the vast floating nebulae. If they will only cohere at some little point, then the globe will begin to form, and presently you will have a star. All that we want is the point of contact, the cohering point; then the new life will begin to stir in us, and the new soul begin to grow into the starry image of Christ.

2. When a child is born in common life it is born into a sonship; it becomes at once a member of the family; and there and then, before it has done a thing to merit it, the little child has a right to its father’s and mother’s love. It is exactly the same with the new birth of the child of God. Every person born of the Spirit is born into a sonship, and is received at once as a beloved child into the family of God. This is what St. John teaches us ( John 1:12): “As many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name”; and what St. Paul teaches ( Galatians 4:4-5): “When the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons.”

3. Now this new attitude to God, which is here called a new birth, is necessary—“Ye must be born again.” It is necessary for the acknowledged sinner, since his attitude is openly and admittedly wrong. But it is necessary also for every person whose highest aim in life has been to do his duty. He must be born anew as a son and begin to live a life of love to God as his Father. The Kingdom of God, as far as man is concerned, is a state in which we are in our right relation to Him. All irrational creatures obey God and do His will: the sun runs his course with an exactness and punctuality we cannot rival; the grace and strength of many of the lower animals, their marvellous instincts and aptitudes, are so superior to anything in ourselves that we cannot even comprehend them. But what we have as our speciality is to render to God a willing service; to understand His purposes and enter sympathetically into them. The lower creatures obey a law impressed upon their nature; they cannot sin; their performance of God’s will is a tribute to the power which made them so skilfully, but it lacks all conscious recognition of His worthiness to be served and all knowledge of His object in creation. It is God serving Himself: He made them so, and therefore they do His will. So it is with men who merely obey their nature: they may do kindly, noble, heroic actions, but they lack all reference to God; and, however excellent these actions are, they give no guarantee that the men who do them would sympathize with God in all things, and do His will gladly.

“In the evening I got into a very interesting conversation with Macleod, the blacksmith of the Pioneer. He is a Scot from Campsie, has a true west country twang, and, like most of our countrymen, is far better informed on many subjects of the highest importance than nine-tenths of those among whom he lives. I found him to be a Christian, and the manner of his calling was one of the most singular that has ever been heard of. He was for some time resting on a righteousness of his own, trusting to a moral life and his general goodness, but frequently with misgivings as to the security of his foundations. At times he felt that the sand on which he was resting was moving. When at Johanna on board the Lynx, he was sent along with a party to assist the Enchantress, which had got ashore. In the subsequent destruction of the vessel there was much confusion. Kicking about the deck, he found some of Spurgeon’s sermons. In reading a few sentences casually where the book opened, he met the expression: ‘You need not carry your coals to Newcastle,’ i.e. you need not bring your righteousness to the righteousness of Christ. He saw his mistake, and shortly afterwards found peace and rest on the true foundation.” This blacksmith had made the very discovery that was made by Saul of Tarsus, Luther, Wesley, and Dr. Chalmers. 1 [Note: Stewart of Lovedale, 67.]

(1) This new attitude is not required, of course, of such as are already subjects of the change; and many are so even from their earliest years, having grown up into Christ by the preventing or anticipating grace of their nurture in the Lord, so that they can recollect no time when Christ was not their love, and the currents of their inclination did not run toward His word and His cause. The case, however, of such is no real exception; and, besides this, there is even no semblance of exception. Intelligence, in fact, is not more necessary to our proper humanity than the second birth of this humanity to its salvation.

The first years of our existence are simply animal; then the life of a young man is not that of mere instinct, it is a life of passion, with mighty indignations, strong aversions. And then passing on through life we sometimes see a person in whom these things are merged; the instincts are there only for the support of existence; the passions are so ruled that they have become gentleness, and meekness, and love. Between these two extremes there must have been a middle point, when the life of sense, appetite, and passion, which had ruled, ceased to rule, and was ruled over by the life of the spirit; that moment, whether it be long or short, whether it come like the rushing mighty wind, or as the slow, gentle zephyr of the spring—whenever that moment was, then was the moment of spiritual regeneration.

My conversion to the Lord Jesus might, with propriety, be compared to a mother rousing an infant with a kiss—a simile answering exactly to my experience in recalling it. Nor can I look back to that blessed epoch in my life without magnifying His tender loving-kindness who spared me the doubts, terrors, and perplexities through which so many souls have passed ere they tasted “joy and peace in believing.” 1 [Note: The Life, Labours, and Writings of Cæsar Malan, 37.]

There is no outwardly marked act of religious decision in Rainy’s youth, except that he was admitted as a communicant in the year 1842 in connection with St. John’s congregation, the minister of which at the time was the Rev. Dr. Thomas Brown. He was a notably regular attendant at public worship. But we have merely these outward facts. No one now survives who could give any report of his religious impressions at this period and he has himself left no indication of them. I venture, however, to recall in this connection a remark he once made to me to the effect that Tolstoi’s way of stating the Christian life lacked something of saneness and even his way of exposing sinful life something of wholesomeness, probably because his conversion unfortunately had had to be so violent a reaction. Robert Rainy’s decisive religious experience, it may be safely said (if one may so far presume as to characterize it), was not so much a reaction as a realization—that equally genuine and equally evangelical type of conversion (though the word conversion seems inappropriate to describe it) which consists in the love and grace of God in Jesus Christ becoming, and that perhaps not at any special time but with the natural development of mind and heart and will, something personal and something vital. A Christian life thus originated is at once supernatural and normal. It is the Christian life of one who not only has been converted but has been converted and become as a little child, with a child’s natural trust in its father, a child’s sheer happiness in goodness, a child’s instinct of recoil from the impure. This was the note of Principal Rainy’s religion to the end, and it seems to have been so from the beginning. 2 [Note: P. C. Simpson, The Life of Principal Rainy, i. 25.]

(2) One reason why the new attitude must be entered on by everybody is that it is the entrance into a new order of being. It is the passage from the natural to the spiritual. That fact gives the figure of the “new birth” peculiar appropriateness, though the figure must not be urged too far, or treated literally. The passage from the natural to the spiritual is beyond a man’s own effort; it is accomplished by co-operation with the Spirit of God.

In this world we find a number of creatures which have what is known as animal life. They can work, and feel, and, in a fashion, think. They have wills, and certain dispositions, and distinctive characteristics. Every creature that has animal life has a certain nature according to its kind, and determined by its parentage; and this nature which the animal receives from its parents determines from the first the capabilities and sphere of the animal’s life. The mole cannot soar in the face of the sun like the eagle; neither can the bird that comes out of the eagle’s egg burrow like the mole. No training can possibly make the tortoise as swift as the antelope, or the antelope as strong as the lion. If a mole began to fly and enjoy the sunlight it must be counted a new kind of creature, and no longer a mole. The very fact of its passing certain limitations shows that another nature has somehow been infused into it. Beyond its own nature no animal can act. You might as well attempt to give the eagle the appearance of the serpent as try to teach it to crawl. Each kind of animal is by its birth endowed with its own nature, fitting it to do certain things, and making other things impossible. So is it with us: we are born with certain faculties and endowments, with a certain nature; and just as all animals, without receiving any new, individual, supernatural help from God, can act according to their nature, so can we. We, being human, have a high and richly-endowed animal nature, a nature that leads us not only to eat, drink, sleep, and fight like the lower animals, but also to think and to love, and which, by culture and education, can enjoy a much richer and wider life than the lower creatures. Men need not be in the Kingdom of God in order to do much that is admirable, noble, lovely, because their nature as animals fits them for that. If we were to exist at all as a race of animals superior to all others, then all this is just what must be found in us. Irrespective of any kingdom of God at all, irrespective of any knowledge of God or reference to Him, we have a life in this world, and a nature fitting us for it. And it is this we have by our natural birth, a place among our kind, an animal life. The first man, from whom we all descend, was, as St. Paul profoundly says, “a living soul,” that is to say, an animal, a living human being; but he had not “a quickening spirit,” could not give to his children spiritual life and make them children of God.

It is not any doctrine of development or self-culture, no scheme of ethical practice or social reorganization; but it is a salvation—a power moving on fallen humanity from above its level to regenerate, and so to save. The whole fabric is absurd, therefore, unless there was something to be done in man, and for him, that required a supernatural intervention. We can see, too, at a glance, that the style of the transaction is supernatural from the incarnate appearing onward. Were it otherwise—were Christianity a merely natural and earthly product—then it were only a fungus growing out of the world, and, with all its high pretensions, could have nothing more to do for the world than any other fungus for the heap on which it grows. The very name, Jesus, is a false pretence unless He has something to do for the race which the race cannot do for itself—something regenerative and new-creative—something fitly called a salvation. 1 [Note: H. Bushnell, The New Life, 60.]

The difference between the two positions is radical. Translating from the language of Science into that of Religion, the theory of Spontaneous Generation is simply that a man may become gradually better and better until in course of the process he reaches that quality of religious nature known as Spiritual Life. This Life is not something added ab extra to the natural man; it is the normal and appropriate development of the natural man. Biogenesis opposes to this the whole doctrine of Regeneration. The Spiritual Life is the gift of the Living Spirit. The spiritual man is no mere development of the natural man. He is a New Creation born from above. As well expect a hay infusion to become gradually more and more living, until in course of the process it reached Vitality, as expect a man by becoming better and better to attain the Eternal Life. 2 [Note: H. Drummond, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, 65.]

Truly there is only one way of being born again, regeneration by the power of the Spirit of God, the new heart; but there are many ways of conversion, of outwardly turning to the Lord, of taking the actual first step that shows on whose side we are. Regeneration is the sole work of the Holy Spirit in the human heart and soul, and is in every case one and the same. Conversion, on the other hand, bringing into play the action also of the human will, is never absolutely the same perhaps in even two souls—as like and yet as different as are the faces of men. 3 [Note: John G. Paton, ii. 217.]

II

A New Attitude to the Past

The new attitude to God involves a new attitude to the past life. The “sinner” repents of his sin and turns to God in Christ; the “righteous” man passes from outward obedience to inward love, with a sense of his sinfulness as keen as that of any acknowledged sinner.

When men talk of the abolition of conversion and of the imitation of Jesus Christ, they forget that there is a past which must be atoned for. Look at it this way. Supposing I have run up an account with a tradesman, and I owe him quite a large sum of money. I call at his place of business and I tell him that in future all my transactions with him will be on a strictly cash basis, that I will pay for everything as I order or receive it. I say nothing about the money which I owe him, but I point out that as I intend to pay cash in future we start all square! Do you think you could find a tradesman willing to agree to this? No. “What about the money you already owe?” he would ask. “Payment of cash in the future will never wipe out the debt of the past, and not until that is cleared off can we start square.” 1 [Note: A Father’s Letters to his Son, 128.]

1. We can verify our Lord’s assertion by honestly searching the depths of our own hearts, and looking at ourselves in the light of God. Think what is meant when we say, “God is light and in him is no darkness at all.” Think of that absolute purity, that, to us, awful aversion from all that is evil, from all that is sinful. Think of what sort of men they must be who can see the Lord. Are we fit to pass that threshold? Are we fit to gaze into that Face? Is it possible that we should have fellowship with Him? If we rightly meditate upon two facts, the holiness of God and our own characters, we shall feel that Jesus Christ has truly stated the case when He says, “Ye must be born again.” Unless we can get ourselves radically changed, there is no Heaven for us; there is no fellowship with God for us. We must stand before Him, and feel that a great gulf is fixed between us and Him.

Self-dissatisfaction is with most of us our one necessity. Do you remember Browning’s verses on the pictures in Florence, that tremendous and thrilling contrast which he draws between the great Christian pictures in their manifest incompleteness and the early Greek statues with their manifest completeness of beauty and grace? Many of us have felt the contrast. It would be well for us all if we fought our way with him through the depression to which the thought sometimes gives birth. How vividly he sets forth the truth that a sense of incompleteness is the first condition of completeness! You must ever be born again to higher completeness if you would believe in a life to come, and the very fact that you recognize your imperfection is the best thing about you. It is finiteness in view and purpose that is our besetting sin. It was finiteness of view and purpose that gave to the old classic statues a chance to seem complete, and their very finiteness is the proof of their utter incompleteness; out of that came at once their possibilities and their impossibilities. 1 [Note: R. Eyton, The Glory of the Lord, 25.]

Growth came when, looking your last on them all,

You turned your eyes inwardly one fine day

And cried with a start—What if we so small

Be greater and grander the while than they?

Are they perfect of lineament, perfect of stature?

In both, of such lower types are we

Precisely because of our wider nature;

For time, theirs—ours, for eternity.

To-day’s brief passion limits their range;

It seethes with the morrow for us and more.

They are perfect—how else? they shall never change:

We are faulty—why not? we have time in store.

The Artificer’s hand is not arrested

With us; we are rough-hewn, nowise polished:

They stand for our copy, and, once invested

With all they can teach, we shall see them abolished.

’Tis a life-long toil till our lump be leaven—

The better! What’s come to perfection perishes.

Things learned on earth, we shall practise in heaven.

2. How close and personal are the lessons which we may learn from our Lord’s treatment of Nicodemus! He had lost a great opportunity in resisting the teaching of John. The “way of the Lord” would have been prepared in his heart had he listened to the desert preacher. He would not now have been sitting bewildered and amazed at the teaching of Jesus. Neglect of light and truth is always punished. Every duty we omit obscures some truth we should have known. As one of Browning’s characters says—

I see a duty and do it not, therefore I see no higher.

We must be faithful to the light which comes to us, if we would be ready for the greater light when it arises.

Our deeds still travel with us from afar,

And what we have been makes us what we are.

We can never tell how much we lose by unfaithfulness to the truths which touch the conscience or to the light which shows the way of duty. The demands from which we shrink or which we refuse are not always done with when we turn away from them. They meet us again. The sin we know, the duty we have neglected, the right which we have disobeyed, present themselves to us again. They have to be confessed, performed, obeyed, before we can enter the kingdom of life and peace.

(1) The first evidence of the reality of the new attitude to the past is that the sinner ceases from sin. This is the meaning of the words of St. John ( 1 John 3:9): “Whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin; for his seed remaineth in him; and he cannot sin, because he is born of God.” The passage of which this forms a part is sometimes quoted as proving the sinlessness of all those who are partakers of what is called higher life. The sixth verse especially is thus appealed to. But these passages do not refer to any particular class who have attained this higher life of which they speak, but to all, according to the sixth verse, who have either seen or known Christ, and, according to the ninth verse, to all who have been born again. If the passage teaches the perfect sinlessness in thought, word, and act of any individual, it is of every one that has been born of the Spirit. But that is not the meaning of the passage. The tense employed in the Greek is the tense employed to denote habit, and the word is that made use of by St. John himself to express habitual practice. The word rendered “commit” in 1 John 3:9 is the same word as is rendered “keep” in John 7:19: “None of you keepeth the law”; and the one verse may explain the other. As none of the Jews kept the law, so those who have been born again do not keep sin. With their whole heart they have given up their wicked ways; their habits are changed; they have abandoned their former ways; they hate the sins they once loved, and they prove by their life and conversation that a real change has taken place in their heart. That this is the true meaning of the passage is proved beyond all doubt by the tenth verse, “In this the children of God are manifest, and the children of the devil; whosoever doeth not righteousness is not of God, neither he that loveth not his brother.”

A man lying drunk was accosted by Dr. Kidd, who asked him what he was and why he was lying there. “Do you not know me, Doctor? I am ane o’ your converts,” was the reply. “Very like my handiwork,” rejoined the Doctor; “for if God had converted you, you wouldn‘t be where you are.” 1 [Note: James Stark, Dr. Kidd of Aberdeen, 277.]

(2) Another sign of the reality of our new attitude to our past life is that we obtain a clear victory over sin. It is impossible to overestimate the terrific hold that sin has on the natural man. It grips him with such a grasp that he has no better hope of escape than a fly has in a spider’s web. But when a person is reconciled to God through the precious blood of Christ, and born in Him into the family of God, the web is broken, the chains are loosed, the conqueror is conquered, and the captive free. Look at the words in 1 John 5:4-5: “For whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world: and this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith. Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God?” The change therefore is not merely one in thought or feeling, nor only an alteration of opinion; it is essentially practical, and the result of it is that the dishonest man becomes honest; the drunkard becomes sober; the rough-tempered man gentle; the corrupt man pure; and the immoral profligate is transformed into the humble, holy, repentant, and God-fearing servant of the Lord.

I would not for one minute have you suppose that God’s children are perfect, and without spot or stain or defilement in themselves. Do not go away and say I told you they were pure as angels and never made a slip or stumble. The same St. John in the same Epistle declares: “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.… If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.” But I do say that in the matter of breaking God’s commandments, every one that is born again is quite a new man. He no longer takes a light and cool and easy view of sin; he no longer judges of it with the world’s judgment; he no longer thinks a little swearing, or a little Sabbath-breaking, or a little fornication, or a little drinking, or a little covetousness, small and trifling matters; but he looks on every sort of sin against God or man as exceeding abominable and damnable in the Lord’s sight, and, as far as in him lies, he hates it and abhors it, and desires to be rid of it root and branch, with his whole heart and mind and soul and strength. 1 [Note: J. C. Ryle, The Christian Race, 44.]

Immediately upon his conversion the conviction came clearly to the scholar’s mind that his opium-habit must at once be broken. There seems to have been no parleying about it. Ever since he first entered the missionary’s household his conscience had troubled him on the subject. Mr. Hill’s kind but sorrowful words would not leave him, and their reproach was burnt into his soul.

“ Mr. Hsi,” he had said, “you are a distinguished member of a scholarly family. I deeply regret to see you brought to so enfeebled a condition through opium. If you do not cleanse yourself, how can you be an example to others?”

But at that time he knew no power that could enable him to cleanse himself from the degrading vice. Now all was different. He belonged to Christ, and there could be no doubt as to the will of his new Master. It was thoroughly in keeping with the character of the man to come to this clear decision at once. Of course, he knew well what leaving off opium-smoking would involve. But there was no shrinking; no attempt at half measures. He saw it must be sacrificed at once, entirely, and for ever.

Then came the awful conflict. It was as though the great enemy of souls, seeing his prisoner escaping, fell back upon this opium-habit as an invincible chain with which to bind him. How critical was the struggle, how momentous the issues, Hsi himself hardly realized. Upon its outcome all his future power and usefulness depended. As angels lingered near the Saviour tempted in the wilderness, may we not believe the watchful ones lingered near Hsi in the hour of his great need? By the merciful aid of God he was at last victorious. 2 [Note: J. E. Hellier, Life of David Hill, 136.]

(3) Another sign is that we gain the victory over the world. What is the natural man?—a wretched slave to the opinion of this world. What the world says is right he follows and approves; what the world says is wrong he renounces and condemns also. How shall I do what my neighbours do not do? What will men say of me if I become more strict than they? This is the natural man’s argument. But from all this he that is born again is free. He is no longer led by the praise or the blame, the laughter or the frown, of children of Adam like himself. He no longer thinks that the sort of religion which everybody about him professes must necessarily be right. He no longer considers “What will the world say?” but “What does God command?”

I fear that unworldliness is almost conspicuous by its absence from our Church members to-day. The world and the Church are so interlocked in unholy wedlock that it is scarcely possible to say where the Church ends and where the world begins. There was a time when the world and the Church were widely separated, in the days when the early Christians carried their cross for Jesus; but now the world has become religious, or which amounts to the same thing, the Church has become worldly and the power of God has almost left us. 1 [Note: G. C. Grubb, Unsearchable Riches, 33.]

(4) The whole man is changed. “Old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.” There are new sorrows, new joys, new motives, new hopes, and new principles. All things are now seen under a new light, and so appear in a new colour; for “all things are of God, who hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ.” That great reconciliation changes everything.

It is inevitable that in such a moment there shall come into a man’s mind a disgust for the past life,—the life of selfishness, the life of low ideals, the life of contentment with self and with selfish surroundings. There will come a disgust in the man’s soul, and he will say, Is it possible that I was made for this, that this is the end and object of my life?—to go down town every morning and back again at night, to see more beautiful things year by year in my house, to gather my books about me, to learn a little more, to make myself more comfortable? Is it possible that this is the last expression of life, the outcome of all the Divine power that has been moving in the universe since the fiery clouds first filled the firmament? Is this the outcome of it? An animal, comfortable, respecting himself, respected of his fellow-men? Is this the end? Is there no higher term of existence? 1 [Note: L. Parks, The Winning of the Soul, 182.]

In a former chapter, we followed Father Paul Le Jeune on his winter roamings, with a band of Montagnais, among the forests on the northern boundary of Maine. Now Father Gabriel Druilletes sets forth on a similar excursion, but with one essential difference. Le Jeune’s companions were heathen, who persecuted him day and night with their gibes and sarcasms. Those of Druilletes were all converts, who looked on him as a friend and a father. There were prayers, confessions, masses, and invocations of St. Joseph. They built their bark chapel at every camp, and no festival of the Church passed unobserved. On Good Friday they laid their best robe of beaver-skin on the snow, placed on it a crucifix, and knelt around it in prayer. What was their prayer? It was a petition for the forgiveness and the conversion of their enemies, the Iroquois. Those who know the intensity and tenacity of an Indian’s hatred will see in this something more than a change from one superstition to another. An idea had been presented to the mind of the savage to which he had previously been an utter stranger. This is the most remarkable record of success in the whole body of the Jesuit Relations. 2 [Note: Parkman, The Jesuits in North America, ii. 138.]

That noble old soul, Abraham, stood by me as an angel of God in sickness and in danger; he went at my side wherever I had to go; he helped me willingly to the last inch of strength in all that I had to do; and it was perfectly manifest that he was doing all this, not from mere human love, but for the sake of Jesus. That man had been a Cannibal in his heathen days, but by the grace of God there he stood verily a new creature in Christ Jesus. Any trust, however sacred or valuable, could be absolutely reposed in him; and in trial or danger, I was often refreshed by that old Teacher’s prayers, as I used to be by the prayers of my saintly father in my childhood’s home. No white man could have been a more valuable helper to me in my perilous circumstances, and no person, white or black, could have shown more fearless and chivalrous devotion. 3 [Note: John G. Paton, i. 173.]

III

A New Attitude to the Future

We have seen that two things are essential to a member of the Kingdom—an outward act of allegiance, signifying repentance and the acceptance of pardon, and an inward infusion of a new nature, which is indicated generally in chap. John 1:12 by the words, “As many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name.”

The Christianity of Clovis does not indeed produce any fruits of the kind usually looked for in a modern convert. We do not hear of his repenting ever so little of any of his sins, nor resolving to lead a new life in any the smallest particular. He had not been impressed with convictions of sin at the battle of Tolbiac; nor, in asking for the help of the God of Clotilde, had he felt or professed the remotest intention of changing his character, or abandoning his projects. What he was, before he believed in his queen’s God, he only more intensely afterwards became, in the confidence of that before unknown God’s supernatural help. His natural gratitude to the Delivering Power, and pride in its protection, added only fierceness to his soldiership, and deepened his political enmities with the rancour of religious indignation. No more dangerous snare is set by the fiends for human frailty than the belief that our own enemies are also the enemies of God; and it is perfectly conceivable to me that the conduct of Clovis might have been the more unscrupulous, precisely in the measure that his faith was more sincere. 1 [Note: Ruskin, The Bible of Amiens (Works, xxxiii. 39).]

1. The new birth is the commencement of a new life. When the child is born it begins to live. No one can tell what that mysterious power is that we call life. It is something which all the science of the world is unable either to create or to define. Now as life commences in the child at the moment of its birth, so life commences in the soul when it is born again of the Spirit. The new birth is not merely a change of habit in a living soul, it is the commencement of life where there was none before. Thus the change when a person is born again is of the same character as that which took place in Adam when God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” There is the same difference in a person before the new birth and after it as there is between a beautiful statue and a living man. The statue may be perfect in form, but it is lifeless; the living person may be in some respects less beautiful in figure, but he is alive, and, being alive, can move, and think, and act for God.

They tell me that some months ago a young Scotsman, who had been blind all his life, suddenly, by a marvellous operation, received his sight. They say that to that young man the world is another place. He wanders daily up and down in scenes with which you and I are so familiar that we do not even call them beautiful, and he sees a radiance which was hidden from ordinary everyday eyes that have gazed upon them all their lives. “Oh,” he says, “the world is so beautiful! Who would have thought it was so beautiful?” Apt figure of the experience of the man who has found his God through the touch of a quickening Spirit. 1 [Note: R. J. Campbell, The Song of Ages, 160.]

Lord, I was blind: I could not see

In Thy marred visage any grace;

But now the brightness of Thy face

In radiant vision dawns on me.

2. The fundamental difficulty in understanding the truth of the new birth and the new life lies in attempting to grasp it as a whole, and not in its special activities. All life grows vague if you try to understand its central essence. All life is clear, if you look at its special exhibitions. Ask us what life is in the most commonplace of living men, and we utterly fail to tell what it is in its unfound essence, or where it lurks among the hiding-places of the wondrous body; but when he lifts his hand and strikes, when he opens his mouth and talks, then in a moment we know unmistakably the living man. Now, so it is with the spiritual life. It is hard to tell just what the essence of the new Christian life is in any man. Theologians may contend over that, just as the physiologists contend over the essence of life in the body; but the new functions of the new existence, the way in which each separate power works differently, and each separate act is done differently, in the Christian’s experience—this is not hard to trace.

(1) One of the features of the new life is self-satisfaction.—There is a bad and a good self-satisfaction. The bad self-satisfaction is only too common. It is what we call self-conceit. A man seems to himself sufficient for everything. There is no task that he will not accept. He does not look outside himself. The strength is in his own arm, which he can make strong as iron to subdue his foes; in his own heart, which he can make hard as a rock to bear his troubles. For doing or enduring he needs nothing but himself. He can do anything. That self-conceit must die, or the man is a failure. Somehow or other, the man must learn that in himself he can do nothing. Then comes humility; and when in his humility he casts himself upon another strength, and expects to do nothing save in the power of God, then he is born again into a new self-satisfaction. To find himself taken by God; to feel that God is giving him His strength; to say, “I can do anything through Christ”; to face the world not in his own power, but in his Master’s—that is the new, the deeper self-satisfaction.

“The first effect of conversion,” says Pascal, “is that we see the world and ourselves from a standpoint altogether new.” New also are the feelings of relief after struggle, of peace and harmony, of strength suddenly acquired, that the triumph of unity brings in its train. The convert is caught up into a world of grandeurs hitherto unknown. While shackled to the Moi he was a prisoner in a strange land, cooped up in narrow bounds of space and time. Its chains once broken, he feels heir to immensities beyond all telling. 1 [Note: Viscount St. Cyres, Pascal, 227.]

It is with man’s Soul as it was with Nature: the beginning of Creation is—Light. Till the eye have vision, the whole members are in bonds. Divine moment, when over the tempest-tost Soul, as once over the wild-weltering Chaos, it is spoken: Let there be Light! Ever to the greatest that has felt such moment, is it not miraculous and God-announcing; even as, under simpler figures, to the simplest and least? The mad primeval Discord is hushed; the rudely-jumbled conflicting elements bind themselves into separate Firmaments: deep silent rock-foundations are built beneath; and the skyey vault with its everlasting Luminaries above: instead of a dark wasteful Chaos, we have a blooming, fertile, heaven-encompassed World. 2 [Note: Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, bk. ii. ch. ix.]

(2) Another feature is Happiness.—It is easy to recognize the two levels of happiness, and the way in which men pass from the upper and lighter into the profounder and more serious one. Is this man happy whom I see in the first flush of youth, just feeling his new powers, the red blood strong and swift in all his veins, the exquisite delight of trying his just-discovered faculties of taste and thought and skill filling each day with interest up to the brim? Is he happy, he with his countless friends, his easy home, the tools and toys of life both lying ready at his hand? Most certainly he is. His days sing as they go, and sparkle with a bright delight that makes the generous observer rejoice for him, and makes the jealous envy him.

But then you lose sight of him for a while, and years after you come on him again. The man is changed. All is so altered! Everything is sobered. Is he happy still? As you look into his face you cannot doubt his happiness a moment, but neither can you fail to see that this new happiness is something very different from that which sparkled there before. This is serene and steady, and as you look at it you see that its newness lies in this, that it is a happiness in principles and character, while the other was a happiness in circumstances. The man whom you used to know was happy because everything was right about him, because his self was thoroughly indulged, because the sun shone and he was strong. The man whom you know now is happy because there is goodness in the world, because God is governing it, because in his own character the discipline of God is going on. The first sort of happiness was self-indulgent; the new sort is built on and around self-sacrifice.

You hear much of conversion nowadays: but people always seem to think they have got to be made wretched by conversion,—to be converted to long faces. No, friends, you have got to be converted to short ones; you have to repent into childhood, to repent into delight, and delightsomeness. 1 [Note: Ruskin, The Crown of Wild Olive (Works, xviii. 431).]

To “the typical Moody convert,” during this mission, the Gospel came as tidings of great joy.

“ I had seen occasional instances before of instant transition from religious anxiety to the clear and triumphant consciousness of restoration to God; but what struck me in the gallery of Bingley Hall was the fact that this instant transition took place with nearly every person with whom I talked. They had come up into the gallery anxious, restless, feeling after God in the darkness, and when, after a conversation of a quarter of an hour or twenty minutes, they went away, their faces were filled with light, and they left me not only at peace with God but filled with joy. I have seen the sunrise from the top of Helvellyn and the top of the Righi, and there is something very glorious in it; but to see the light of heaven suddenly strike on man after man in the course of one evening is very much more thrilling. These people carried their new joy with them to their homes and their workshops. It could not be hid.” 1 [Note: The Life of R. W. Dale of Birmingham, 319.]

A short time before leaving for China it became my daily duty to dress the foot of a patient suffering from senile gangrene. The disease commenced as usual insidiously, and the patient had little idea that he was a doomed man and probably had not long to live. I was not the first to attend him, but when the case was transferred to me I naturally became very anxious about his soul. The family with whom he lived were Christians, and from them I learned that he was an avowed atheist and very antagonistic to anything religious. They had without asking his consent invited a Scripture reader to visit him, but in great passion he had ordered him from the room. The Vicar of the district had also called, hoping to help him, but he had spit in his face and refused to allow him to speak. His temper was described to me as very violent, and altogether the case seemed as hopeless as could well be imagined.

Upon first commencing to attend him I prayed much about it, but for two or three days said nothing of a religious nature. By special care in dressing his diseased limb I was able considerably to lessen his sufferings, and he soon began to manifest appreciation of my services. One day with a trembling heart I took advantage of his grateful acknowledgments to tell him what was the spring of my action, and to speak of his solemn position and need of God’s mercy through Christ. It was evidently only a powerful effort of self-restraint that kept his lips closed. He turned over in bed with his back to me, and uttered no word.

I could not get the poor man out of my mind, and very often through each day I pleaded with God, by His Spirit, to save him ere He took him hence. After dressing the wound and relieving the pain, I never failed to say a few words to him which I hoped the Lord would bless. He always turned his back, looking annoyed, but never made any reply.

After continuing this for some time my heart sank. It seemed to me that I was not only doing no good but perhaps really hardening him and increasing his guilt. One day after dressing his limb and washing my hands, instead of returning to the bedside, I went to the door and stood hesitating a moment with the thought in my mind, “Ephraim is joined to idols; let him alone.” Looking at my patient I saw his surprise, as it was the first time since opening the subject that I had attempted to leave without saying a few words for my Master.

I could bear it no longer. Bursting into tears, I crossed the room and said: “My friend, whether you will hear or whether you will forbear, I must deliver my soul,” and went on to speak very earnestly, telling him how much I wished that he would let me pray with him. To my unspeakable joy he did not turn away, but replied:

“ If it will be a relief to you, do.”

I need scarcely say that falling upon my knees I poured out my soul to God on his behalf. Then and there, I believe, the Lord wrought a change in his soul. He was never afterwards unwilling to be spoken to and prayed with, and within a few days he definitely accepted Christ as his Saviour.

Oh the joy it was to me to see that dear man rejoicing in hope of the glory of God! He told me that for forty years he had never darkened the door of a church or chapel, and that then, forty years ago, he had only entered a place of worship to be married, and could not be persuaded to go inside when his wife was buried. Now, thank God, his sin-stained soul I had every reason to believe was washed, was sanctified, was “justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.” Often in my early work in China, when circumstances rendered me almost hopeless of success, I have thought of this man’s conversion and have been encouraged to persevere in speaking the Word, whether men would hear or whether they would forbear.

The now happy sufferer lived for some time after this change, and was never tired of bearing testimony to the grace of God. Though his condition was most distressing, the alteration in his character and behaviour made the previously painful duty of attending him one of real pleasure. I have often thought since in connection with this case and the work of God generally of the words, “He that goeth forth and weepeth bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.” Perhaps if there were more of that intense distress for souls that leads to tears, we should more frequently see the results we desire. Sometimes it may be that while we are complaining of the hardness of the hearts of those we are seeking to benefit, the hardness of our own hearts and our own feeble apprehension of the solemn reality of eternal things may be the true cause of our want of success. 1 [Note: Hudson Taylor in Early Years, 178.]

(3) Faith.—There is a first faith and a second faith. The first faith is the easy, traditional belief of childhood, taken from other people, believed because it belongs to the time and land. The second faith is the personal conviction of the soul. It is the heart knowing, because God has spoken to it, the things of God, the after-faith that means communion. The first faith has a certain regulative force, but it has no real, life-giving power in it. The second faith is full of life. It, and it alone, is the belief which brings salvation.

Bushnell’s reconversion, if such it should be called, was a conversion to duty rather than to faith, but he made the discovery that faith could wait, but duty could not. Through this simple principle he found his way not only into a full faith, but into the conception of Christianity as a life—Christ Himself rather than beliefs about Christ, a distinction which, if not then seen in its fulness, is implied in all his writings. 1 [Note: T. T. Munger, Horace Bushnell, 27.]

(4) Knowledge.—There is a shallow and a deep, an upper and a lower knowledge. The quick perception that catches the mere outside of things, and, recognizing the current condition of affairs, is able to throw itself in with them and so achieve a certain cheap success; and the calm, philosophic wisdom which looks down to the roots of things and sees their causes, and really helps to govern them—those are the two.

Have you never heard a man talking flippantly to-day of the world’s system, of the government of life, of the secrets of existence? and to-morrow some blow, some surprise has come right into the midst of his knowledge and killed it. Things have gone entirely different from what he expected, from what he prophesied. He has found how ignorant he is, and has been driven to the deeper understanding of a Will that works under everything, to that fear of the Lord which is the beginning of wisdom. Knowledge, ignorance, wisdom—here are the strata of life again; the first birth into one, death through the second, and a new birth into the third. 2 [Note: Phillips Brooks, Seeking Life, 198.]

A young girl of twelve years decided to become a Christian. She was one of a large family of children. The new purpose went down into the vitals of her sensitive nature, and became the over-mastering passion. She had less opportunity of schooling than some of the others. But in strong, gripping life-purpose, in mental keenness, in deep, tender sympathy, and in the achievement of her life, she has so far outstripped all the others of the family, parents and children alike, that there seems to be no second. 3 [Note: S. D. Gordon, Quiet Talks on Home Ideals, 248.]

A friend in America told me that in one of his after-meetings, a man came to him with a long list of questions written out for him to answer. He said: “If you can answer these questions satisfactorily, I have made up my mind to be a Christian.” “Do you not think,” said my friend, “that you had better come to Christ first? Then you can look into these questions.” The man thought that perhaps he had better do so. After he had received Christ, he looked again at his list of questions; but then it seemed to him as if they had all been answered. Nicodemus came with his troubled mind, and Christ said to him, “Ye must be born again.” He was treated altogether differently from what he expected; but I venture to say that was the most blessed night in all his life. To be “born again” is the greatest blessing that will ever come to us in this world. 1 [Note: D. L. Moody, The Way to God, 39.]

(5) Love.—We have now a new motive in life. Hitherto it has been only for ourselves that we have cared to live, and not even for our better selves, but just to gratify what our own fancies have dictated. And now this is changed. “Not your own” is our watchword; to show forth the praises of Him who hath called us “out of darkness into his marvellous light” is our aim, so that, as it were, a new spirit is infused into us, and a new object set before us. This is the direct consequence of our acceptance of the atoning sacrifice of Christ, for “he died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him which died for them, and rose again.”

Love is the infallible mark of possessing eternal life in Christ. “We know,” says the Apostle John, “that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren”—the brethren of the Lord Jesus Christ; those that do the will of Jesus; we feel at home with them, and learn to love them, because they have the same Father, the same Elder Brother as ourselves. 2 [Note: G. C. Grubb, Unsearchable Riches, 32.]

He that is born of the Spirit loves his neighbour as himself; he knows nothing of the selfishness and uncharitableness and ill-nature of this world; he loves his neighbour’s property as his own; he would not injure it, nor stand by and see it injured; he loves his neighbour’s person as his own, and he would count no trouble ill bestowed if he could help or assist him; he loves his neighbour’s character as his own, and you will not hear him speak a word against it, or allow it to be blackened by falsehoods if he can defend it; and then he loves his neighbour’s soul as his own, and he will not suffer him to turn his back on God without endeavouring to stop him by saying, “Oh, do not so!” 1 [Note: J. C. Ryle, The Christian Race, 51.]

I no longer stood aloof from men, and found pleasure in intellectual superiority; I was willing to “become a fool for Christ’s sake” if by any means I might save some. I issued a card of invitation to the services of my church with this motto of St. Paul’s upon it, which I now felt was mine. I had had for years feelings of resentment towards one who, I thought, had wronged me; those feelings were now dead. In another case I had been harsh and unforgiving under great provocation; but when I met after a long interval of time the one who had injured me, my heart had only love and pity for him. I sought out the drunkard and the harlot, and, when I found them, all repulsion perished in the flow of infinite compassion which I felt. I prayed with fallen women, sought them in their miserable abodes, fought with them for their own souls, and O exquisite moment!—I saw the soul awake in them, I saw in their tear-filled eyes the look that Jesus saw in the eyes of Magdalene. On my last Sabbath in London before leaving for America, one of these rescued girls, now as pure of look and manner as those most sweetly nurtured, called at my house to give my daughter a little present bought with the first money she had earned by honest toil in many years. On the day we sailed another said a special mass for us, and held the day sacred for prayer, in the convent where her bruised life had been nursed back to moral beauty. Love had triumphed in them, and I had brought them that love. 2 [Note: W. J. Dawson, The Empire of Love, 115.]

(6) Goodness.—There is a first and second goodness. Man is born into a garden, as that story runs. Right impulses, perceptions that the good is better and more beautiful than the bad—these are not wanting in the early, the unregenerate life. And yet that life is unregenerate. It must be born again. Those good impulses, that mere sense of the beauty of goodness, that ignorance of vice, are not the true strength of the moral man, in which he can resist temptation and really grow to God. That fails. He dies out of that; and, once out of that, he never can go back to it again. The angels and the flaming sword are at the gate, to keep any man who has been innocent, and sinned, from ever returning to innocence again.

There is a natural goodness; there is also a relative goodness. Some men are naturally good-tempered; it costs them nothing to be amiable; it would be difficult for them to be severe even in the judgment of wrong,—they would excuse it, or wink at it, or in some way escape the duty of branding it. And some are constitutionally more generous than others. They like to give; they like to lighten burdens, and to help the blind and the weak over difficult roads. This, indeed, is beautiful, charming, as are also other wild flowers often found in hedge-rows or in rocky places. 1 [Note: J. Parker.]

The very first mark of regeneration is straightness. Oh, for a revival of Divine righteousness in our business circles! oh, for a revival of Divine righteousness in our ecclesiastical dealings with money! oh, for a revival of Divine righteousness in our family lives! The first mark that God gives is not any inward ecstasy, is not any peculiarity of feeling, is not the singing of hymns, and saying Hallelujah; the first mark of regeneration is that you are straight inside and straight outside. He that doeth righteousness, hath been born of God. 2 [Note: G. C. Grubb, Unsearchable Riches, 29.]

(7) Progress.—When we are born again it is not only to a position but a power, not only to give us a technical right to certain promises and possessions, but to enable us to enter upon them and to use them. There is, indeed, a new creation in us—a power that never existed before; and one which, though it may be very small at first, still does exist, and will go on growing and growing day by day, until it assumes a real and vigorous proportion which all our enemies “shall not be able to gainsay nor resist.”

Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to suit the vision. Progress does mean (just now) that we are always changing the vision. It should mean that we are slow but sure in bringing justice and mercy among men: it does mean that we are very swift in doubting the desirability of justice and mercy: a wild page from any Prussian sophist makes men doubt it. Progress should mean that we are always walking towards the New Jerusalem. It does mean that the New Jerusalem is always walking away from us. We are not altering the real to suit the ideal. We are altering the ideal: it is easier. 3 [Note: G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 193.]

The soul’s whole life is in progress, in the eternal search, the quest of the Grail.

Glory of warrior, glory of orator, glory of song,

Paid with a voice flying by to be lost in an endless sea—

Glory of virtue to fight, to struggle, to right the wrong,—

Nay but she aimed not at glory, no lover of glory she:

Give her the glory of going on and still to be.

The wages of sin is death; if the wages of virtue be dust

Would she have heart to endure for the life of the worm and the fly?

She desires no isles of the blest, no quiet seats of the just,

To rest in a golden grove or to bask in a summer sky;

Give her the wages of going on and not to die.

This “going on” is the life of the soul. It is the essential thing in Christian character, which is not a possession of finished qualities, but a stern self-government under the will of God to the end of the widest service and an unending attainment. 1 [Note: R. E. Speer, The Marks of a Man, 160.]

One of the most interesting aspects of the life of St. Francis is, in fact, the continual development revealing itself in him. He is one of the small number to whom to live is to be active, and to be active is to make progress. There is hardly any one except St. Paul in whom is found to the same degree the devouring need of being always something more, always something better. 2 [Note: Paul Sabatier, St. Francis of Assisi.]

Our course is onward, onward into light:

What though the darkness gathereth amain,

Yet to return or tarry, both are vain.

How tarry, when around us is thick night?

Whither return? what flower yet ever might,

In days of gloom and cold and stormy rain,

Enclose itself in its green bud again,

Hiding from wrath of tempest out of sight?

Courage—we travel through a darksome cave;

But still as nearer to the light we draw,

Fresh gales will reach us from the upper air,

And wholesome dews of heaven our foreheads lave,

The darkness lighten more, till full of awe

We stand in the open sunshine unaware. 3 [Note: R. C. Trench, Poems, 36.]

A New Beginning

Literature

Albertson (C. C.), The Gospel according to Christ, 25.

Arnold (T.), Sermons, vi. 124.

Bain (J. A.), Questions Answered by Christ, 133.

Banks (L. A.), The Great Saints of the Bible, 276.

Brooks (P.), Seeking Life, 193.

Burrell (D. J.), The Verilies of Jesus, 1.

Bushnell (H.), The New Life, 58.

Campbell (R. J.), The Song of Ages, 147.

Chapman (J. W.), Revival Sermons, 110.

Dawson (W. J.), The Evangelistic Note, 133.

Drummond (H.), Natural Law in the Spiritual World, 64.

Edger (S.), Sermons at Auckland, New Zealand, i. 96.

Eyton (R.), The Glory of the Lord, 20.

Gordon (A. J.), Ecce Venit, 85.

Grubb (G. C.), Unsearchable Riches, 24.

Hoare (E.), Great Principles of Divine Truth, 239.

Jowett (J. H.), Brooks by the Traveller’s Way, 137.

Maurice (F. D.), The Gospel of St. John, 85.

Moberly (G.), Plain Sermons at Brighstone, 1.

Moody (D. L.), The Way to God, 38.

Parks (L.), The Winning of the Soul, 177.

Pearse (M. G.), Jesus Christ and the People, 370.

Peck (G. C.), Ringing Questions, 157.

Reid (J.), Jesus and Nicodemus, 43.

Robertson (F. W.), Sermons, iv. 103.

Rogers (J. H.), The “ Verily, Verilys” of Christ, 12, 21.

Ryle (J. C.), The Christian Race, 15.

Simon (D. W.), Twice Born, 1.

Watkinson (W. L.), The Fatal Barter, 77.

Watkinson (W. L.), The Transfigured Sackcloth, 169.

Christian Age, xlvi. 114 (Duryea).

Christian World Pulpit, x. 201, xxviii. 266, xxx. 33 (Beecher); lxxv. 104 (Watkinson).

Verses 14-15

Look And Live

And the Lord said unto Moses, Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a standard: and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he seeth it, shall live. And Moses made a serpent of brass, and set it upon the standard: and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he looked unto the serpent of brass, he lived.— Numbers 21:8-9.

[And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: that whosoever believeth may in him have eternal life.— John 3:14-15.]

1. While the children of Israel were roaming homeless through the wilderness, their heart, we read, failed them because of the way, and, as was their wont, they vented their vexation in angry thoughts and rebellious words against God. On this occasion God sent among them judgment in the form of fiery serpents. The bite of these serpents was deadly, so that when a man was once bitten by their venomous fangs his life was forfeited, and, although he did not drop down dead on the instant, in one sense he was a dead man already. What a moment of agony and terror it must have been as all around unfortunate victims were being attacked by these messengers of death! In this terrible emergency the people cried to God, and in doing so confessed, “We have sinned”; and in answer to their prayer Moses was instructed to make a fiery serpent of brass and set it on a pole, and it should come to pass that, if any were bitten by a fiery serpent, on looking at this they would live.

They did well, when they came to Moses, and said, “We have sinned, for we have spoken against the Lord, and against thee.” So far as I know, it is the only real expression of true sorrow and willing confession which we find in the wilderness story. “We have sinned.” And if so, it is well worth while for us to notice, that this was the occasion for God’s giving to them the great sign of mercy to which Jesus Christ pointed as a sign of Himself. So it is that God gives grace to the humble, encourages the contrite, is found of those who seek. 1 [Note: E. S. Talbot.]

2. Recalling this incident of Israel, Jesus found in it a type and prophecy of Himself. “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.”

It is very instructive to notice the New Testament use of the Old Testament record of Moses. His history and its incidents are constantly referred to as illustrations and types of Christ. St. Paul again and again finds his illustrations in the life of Moses, and much more than illustrations. Not with any curious fancy is it that his sturdy logic finds the materials for two compact arguments in these chapters. The manna, the rock, the veil on the face of Moses, are all immediately connected with Jesus Christ. St. John, too, in the Book of Revelation, constantly finds here the imagery by which he sets forth the things which are to come. And the Church in all ages has found in Egypt and the wilderness journey to the goodly land a very Pilgrim’s Progress. No type is more familiar, no illustration more constant. The arrangements of Jewish worship are full of predictions of Christ—living pictures of our salvation. The Lord Jesus is the sacrifice for our sins—the Lamb of God which beareth away the sins of the world. He is the Mercy-seat, as the word propitiation is rendered in the marginal reference. He is the High Priest who ever liveth to make intercession for us, and who is able to save to the uttermost all that come to God by Him. 2 [Note: M. G. Pearse.]

The old is always becoming the new. “As Moses … so the Son of man”; as the old, so the new; as the historical so the prophetical. All the pattern of the spiritual temple has been shown in the mountain, and has been frayed out in shapely and significant clouds which themselves were parables. “That the Scripture might be fulfilled.” History always has something more to do than it seems to have; it does not only record the event of the day, it redeems old subjects, old vows and oaths; it takes up what seems to be the exhausted past and turns it into the present and energetic action of the moment. As Moses, as Jonah, as Solomon, as the bold Esaias; it is always a going-back upon the sacred past and eating up the food that was there provided. Do not live too much in what we call the present; do not live upon the bubble of the hour; have some city of the mind, some far-away strong temple-sanctuary made noble by associations and memories of the tenderest kind. You could easily be dislodged from some sophism of yesterday. If you are living in the little programmes that were published but last night you have but a poor lodgment, and to-morrow you will be found naked, destitute, and hungry. Always go back to the “As Moses, as David, as Daniel, as Jeremiah,” and see in every culminating event a confirmation of this holy word—“that the Scripture might be fulfilled.” The plan was drawn before the building was commenced; the specification was all written out before the builder handled his hammer and his trowel; we do but work out old specifications—old, but not decayed; old with the venerableness of truth. See that you stand upon a broad rock, and do not try to launch your lifeship upon a bubble. 1 [Note: Joseph Parker.]

We have here—

I. A Pressing Danger.

i. Death from the bite of a Serpent—“The Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people; and much people of Israel died” ( Numbers 21:6).

ii. Perishing in Sin—“might not perish” ( John 3:15 A.V.; “should not perish,” Numbers 3:16).

II. A Way of Escape.

i. A Brazen Serpent lifted up on a pole—“Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a standard” ( Numbers 21:8).

ii. A Sin-bearer lifted up on the Cross—“As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up” ( John 3:14).

III. How to use the Way of Escape.

i. Looking to the Serpent—“If a serpent had bitten any man, when he looked unto the serpent of brass, he lived” ( Numbers 21:9).

ii. Believing in the Sin-bearer—“that whosoever believeth in him,” R.V. “that whosoever believeth may in him have eternal life” ( John 3:15).

IV. The Good Effect.

i. Life—“When he looked unto the serpent of brass, he lived” ( Numbers 21:9).

ii. Eternal Life—“that whosoever believeth may in him have eternal life” ( John 3:15).

I

A Pressing Danger

The danger is—(i.) Death from the bite of a serpent ( Numbers 21:6); (ii.) “perishing” in sin ( John 3:16).

i. The Serpent and Death

1. The district through which the Israelites were passing is infested at the present day with venomous reptiles of various kinds, and this seems to have been its character in the time of Moses. It is impossible clearly to identify these “fiery serpents” with any of the several species now known, or to say why they received the appellation “fiery.” The name may have been given them on account of their colour, or their ferocity, or, inasmuch as the word is rendered “deadly” in the Septuagint, and “burning” in some other versions, it may indicate the burning sensation produced by their bite, and its venomous and fatal character.

2. The bite was fatal. “Much people died.” It was no light affliction which was but for a moment, a passing inconvenience that wore away with time; no sickness was it from which prudence and care could recover them. Not as when Paul shook off his venomous beast into the crackling flames, and it perished there. He who was bitten died: old and young, strong man and frail woman. “Ah,” said some of those who are always ready to make light of any illness unless it is their own, “he will get over it; he is young, and he has youth on his side.” “See,” said another, “what a splendid constitution he has; he will mend.” “Come,” said another, “we must hope for the best.” But much people died.

In October, 1852, Gurling, one of the keepers of the reptiles in the Zoological Gardens, was about to part with a friend who was going to Australia, and according to custom he must needs drink with him. He drank considerable quantities of gin, and although he would probably have been in a great passion if any one had called him drunk, yet reason and common sense had evidently been overpowered. He went back to his post at the gardens in an excited state. He had some months before seen an exhibition of snake-charming, and this was on his poor muddled brain. He must emulate the Egyptians, and play with serpents. First he took out of its cage a Morocco venom-snake, put it round his neck, twisted it about, and whirled it round about him. Happily for him it did not rouse itself so as to bite. The assistant-keeper cried out, “For God’s sake, put back the snake,” but the foolish man replied, “I am inspired.” Putting back the venom-snake, he exclaimed, “Now for the cobra!” This deadly serpent was somewhat torpid with the cold of the previous night, and therefore the rash man placed it in his bosom till it revived, and glided downward till its head appeared below the back of his waistcoat. He took it by the body, about a foot from the head, and then seized it lower down by the other hand, intending to hold it by the tail and swing it round his head. He held it for an instant opposite to his face, and like a flash of lightning the serpent struck him between the eyes. The blood streamed down his face, and he called for help, but his companion fled in horror; and, as he told the jury, he did not know how long he was gone, for he was “in a maze.” When assistance arrived, Gurling was sitting on a chair, having restored the cobra to its place. He said, “I am a dead man.” They put him in a cab, and took him to the hospital. First his speech went, he could only point to his poor throat and moan; then his vision failed him, and lastly his hearing. His pulse gradually sank, and in one hour from the time at which he had been struck he was a corpse. There was only a little mark upon the bridge of his nose, but the poison spread over the body, and he was a dead Man_1:1 [Note: C. H. Spurgeon.]

ii. Sin and Perishing

1. The bite of these serpents was mortal. The Israelites could have no question about that, because in their own presence “much people of Israel died.” They saw their own friends die of the snake-bite, and they helped to bury them. They knew why they died, and were sure that it was because the venom of the fiery serpents was in their veins. They were left almost without an excuse for imagining that they could be bitten and yet live. Now, we know that many have perished as the result of sin. We are not in doubt as to what sin will do, for we are told by the infallible Word, that “the wages of sin is death,” and, yet again, “sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.”

Sin can have but one ending—death—death—death. The soul that sinneth it shall die, so rings the warning of God. How foolishly we talk of it! When it is the child, we say, “He is young, and will grow better.” When it is the youth, we say, “Let him sow his wild oats, and he will settle down.” Ah, what cruel folly! What a man soweth, that shall he also reap. When it is middle age, we say, “Yes, it is very sad, but he has a great many good points, you know.” And when he is an old man and dies, we say, “Well, we must hope for the best.” And in upon this Babel there comes the terrible note of doom: The wages of sin is death. 1 [Note: M. G. Pearse.]

2. Is it always immediate? Not always. May we not play with the serpent? We may not. Are there not moments when the cruel beast is not cruel? Not one. The sandwasp paralyses the beetle with his sting that he may, and that his progeny may profit, by the paralysis. The sandwasp does not kill the insect, but thrusts a sting into him, not fatally; the insect can still lay eggs for the advantage of the progeny of the sandwasp. It is so with many serpentine tricks; we are paralysed to be used, not to-day, but to be eaten in six months. We are so paralysed that we will do this or do that and have joy in it and have a banquet over it, ay, a foaming tankard of wine that froths out its own mocking laugh. It is the sting of the sandwasp; it has thrust in that venomous sting and hung us up for the next meeting, for the next occasion, just before the bankruptcy comes, and the devouring of our very soul by those whom we have wronged.

The worst consequences of sin are sin itself, more sin. Drink and lust mean stronger passion, more ungovernable desire. Anger and temper mean as their consequence a heart more bitter, more ready for more wrath. Selfish ways mean less power even to see when we are selfish or what selfishness is. Yes, and not only is there deepening of the same sin, but other sins are bred from it; cruelty, even murderous, out of lust and drink; cruelty, too, out of selfishness; lying and slander out of the hot heart and ungoverned life of anger. So it goes: sin breeding sin, sin deepening into more sin. 2 [Note: E. S. Talbot.]

It is necessary to be ever vigilant, and, always looking on a trifling sin as one of magnitude, to flee far from it; because if the virtuous deeds exceed the sinful acts by even the point of one of the hairs of the eyelashes, the spirit goes to Paradise; but should the contrary be the case, it descends to hell. 1 [Note: “The Dabistan” in Field’s Book of Eastern Wisdom, 121.]

3. What was the sin the Israelites were guilty of?

(1) The fiery serpents came among the people because they had despised God’s way. “The soul of the people was much discouraged because of the way.” It was God’s way; He had chosen it for them, and He had chosen it in wisdom and mercy, but they murmured at it. As an old divine says, “It was lonesome and longsome”; but still it was God’s way, and therefore it ought not to have been loathsome. His pillar of fire and cloud went before them, and His servants Moses and Aaron led them like a flock, and they ought to have followed cheerfully. Every step of their previous journey had been rightly ordered, and they ought to have been quite sure that this compassing of the land of Edom was rightly ordered too. But, no; they quarrelled with God’s way, and wanted to have their own way. This is one of the great standing follies of men; they cannot be content to wait on the Lord and keep His way, but prefer a will and a way of their own.

(2) The people also quarrelled with God’s food. He gave them the best of the best, for “men did eat angels’ food”; but they called the manna by an opprobrious title, which in the Hebrew has a sound of ridicule about it, and even in our translation conveys the idea of contempt. They said, “Our soul loatheth this light bread,” as if they thought it unsubstantial, and only fitted to puff them out, because it was easy of digestion, and did not breed in them that heat of blood and tendency to disease which a heavier diet would have brought with it. Being discontented with their God they quarrelled with the bread which He set upon their table. This is another of man’s follies; his heart refuses to feed upon God’s Word or believe God’s truth. He craves the flesh-meat of carnal reason, the leeks and the garlic of superstitious tradition, and the cucumbers of speculation; he cannot bring his mind down to believe the Word of God, or to accept truth so simple, so fitted to the capacity of a child.

II

A Way of Escape

The way is—(i.) a brazen serpent lifted up on a pole; (ii.) a Sin-bearer lifted up on the cross.

i. The Brazen Serpent

1. The command to make a brazen or copper serpent, and set it on some conspicuous place, that to look on it might stay the effect of the poison, is remarkable, not only as sanctioning the forming of an image, but as associating healing power with a material object. Two questions must be considered separately—What did the method of cure say to the men who turned their bloodshot, languid eyes to it? and What does it mean for us, who see it by the light of our Lord’s great words about it? As to the former question, we have not to take into account the Old Testament symbolism which makes the serpent the emblem of Satan or of sin. Serpents had bitten the wounded. Here was one like them, but without poison, hanging harmless on the pole. Surely that would declare that God had rendered innocuous the else fatal creatures.

That to which they were to look was to be a serpent, but it was to be a serpent triumphed over, as it were, not triumphing, and held up to view and exhibited as a trophy. Around on every side the serpents are victorious, and the people are dying. Here the serpent is represented as conquered and, we may say, made a spectacle of, and the people who see it live. Strong were the serpents in their power of death, but stronger was God in His omnipotence of life, and the life triumphed.

The sight of the brazen serpent was as though God’s spear had pierced the plague, and held it aloft before their eyes, a vanquished, broken thing. It was not one of the serpents; it was an image of all and any of them; it was the whole serpent curse and plague in effigy. 1 [Note: E. S. Talbot.]

2. How could a cure be wrought through merely looking at twisted brass? It seemed, indeed, to be almost a mockery to bid men look at the very thing which had caused their misery. Shall the bite of a serpent be cured by looking at a serpent? Shall that which brings death also bring life? But herein lay the excellency of the remedy, that it was of divine origin; for when God ordains a cure He is by that very fact bound to put potency into it. He will not devise a failure or prescribe a mockery. It should always be enough for us to know that God ordains a way of blessing us, for if He ordains, it must accomplish the promised result. We need not know how it will work, it is quite sufficient for us that God’s mighty grace is pledged to make it bring forth good to our souls.

ii. The Sin-bearer

1. It is strange that the same which hurt should also heal; that from a serpent should come the poison, and from a serpent the antidote of the poison; the same inflicting the wound, and being in God’s ordinance appointed for the healing of the wound. The history would sound a strange one, and would suggest some underlying mystery, even if it stood alone, with no after-word of Scripture claiming a special significance for it. But it is stranger and more mysterious still when we come to the Lord’s appropriation of it to Himself. The Son of Man, healer and helper of the lost race whose nature He took, compared to a serpent! Of what is the serpent the figure everywhere else in Scripture? Not of Christ, but of Christ’s chiefest enemy; of the author of death, not of the Prince of life. Disguised in a serpent’s form, he won his first success, and poisoned at the fountain-head the life of all our race. His name is “the Old Serpent”; while the wicked are a “serpent seed,” a “generation of vipers,” as being in a manner born of him. Strange therefore and most perplexing it is to find the whole symbolism of Scripture on this one occasion reversed, and Christ, not Satan, likened to the serpent.

There is only one explanation which really meets the difficulties of the case. In the words of St. Paul, to the effect that God sent “His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin,” we have the key to the whole mystery.

2. The “sign of salvation,” as it is called in the Book of Wisdom, which Moses was commanded of God to make, was at once most like the serpents which hurt the people, and also most unlike them; most like in appearance, most unlike in reality. In outward appearance it was most like, and doubtless was fashioned of copper or shining brass that it might resemble their fiery aspect the more closely; but in reality it was most unlike them, being, in the very necessities of its nature, harmless and without venom; while they were most harmful, filled with deadliest poison. And thus it came to pass that the thing which most resembled the serpents that had hurt them, the thing therefore which they, the Israelites, must have been disposed to look at with the most shuddering abhorrence, was yet appointed of God as the salve, remedy, medicine, and antidote of all their hurts: and approved itself as such; for “it came to pass that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived.” Unlikely remedy, and yet most effectual! And exactly thus it befell in that great apparent paradox, that “foolishness of God,” the plan of our salvation. As a serpent hurt and a serpent healed, so in like manner, as by man came death, by man should come also the resurrection from the dead; as by “one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one should many be made righteous”; “as in Adam all die, even so in Christ,” the second Adam, “shall all be made alive.”

3. That serpent, so like in many points to those which hurt the people, so like in colour, in form, in outward show, was yet unlike in one, and that the most essential point of all—in this, namely, that it was not poisonous, as they were; that there was no harm or hurt in it, as there was in them. Exactly so the resemblance of Christ to His fellow-men, most real in many things, for He was “found in fashion as a man,” hungered, thirsted, was weary, was tempted, suffered, died like other men, was yet in one point, and that the most essential, only apparent. He only seemed to have that poison which they really had. Wearing the sinner’s likeness, for He came “in the likeness of sinful flesh,” bearing the sinner’s doom, “His face was more marred than any man’s,” He was yet “holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners”; altogether clear from every spot, taint, and infection of our fallen nature. What was, and indeed could only be, negative in a dead thing, such as that brazen serpent, the poor type and weak figure of the true, namely, the absence of the venom, this was positive in Him, as the presence of the antidote. And thus out of this Man’s curse came every man’s blessing, out of this Man’s death came every other man’s life.

My predecessor, Dr. Gill, edited the works of Tobias Crisp, but Tobias Crisp went further than Dr. Gill or any of us can approve; for in one place Crisp calls Christ a sinner, though he does not mean that He ever sinned Himself. He actually calls Christ a transgressor, and justifies himself by that passage, “He was numbered with the transgressors.” Martin Luther is reputed to have broadly said that, although Jesus Christ was sinless, yet He was the greatest sinner that ever lived, because all the sins of His people lay upon Him. Now, such expressions I think to be unguarded, if not profane. Certainly Christian men should take care that they use not language which, by the ignorant and uninstructed, may be translated to mean what they never intended to teach. 1 [Note: C. H. Spurgeon.]

There is a text ( 2 Corinthians 5:21) which tells us that He “knew no sin.” That is very beautiful and significant—“who knew no sin.” It does not merely say did none, but knew none. Sin was no acquaintance of His; He was acquainted with grief, but no acquaintance of sin. He had to walk in the midst of its most frequented haunts, but did not know it; not that He was ignorant of its nature, or did not know its penalty, but He did not know it; he was a stranger to it, He never gave it the wink or nod of familiar recognition. Of course He knew what sin was, for He was very God, but with sin He had no communion, no fellowship, no brotherhood. He was a perfect stranger in the presence of sin; He was a foreigner; He was not an inhabitant of that land where sin is acknowledged. He passed through the wilderness of suffering, but into the wilderness of sin He could never go. “He knew no sin”; mark that expression and treasure it up, and when you are thinking of your substitute, and see Him hang bleeding upon the Cross, think that you see written in those lines of blood traced along His blessed body, “He knew no sin.” Mingled with the redness of His blood (that Rose of Sharon), behold the purity of His nature (the Lily of the Valley)—“He knew no sin.” 2 [Note: Ibid.]

4. The Serpent and the Sin-bearer were “lifted up.” The elevation of the serpent was simply intended to make it visible from afar; but it could not have been set so high as to be seen from all parts of the camp, and we must suppose that the wounded were in many cases carried from the distant parts of the wide-spreading encampment to places whence they could catch a glimpse of it glittering in the sunshine.

Of the meaning of this there cannot well be any mistake. It denotes the lifting up of our Lord on the Cross; as St. John, in another place, tells us, that when He said to the Pharisees, “I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me,” He spoke, ‘signifying by what death he should die.” He did not mean merely that His Name should be preached in all the world, and made thoroughly known as the only way of salvation; He meant that He should be really and bodily lifted up. He meant His nailing to the Cross, and then the setting of the Cross upright in the earth. By this He became, more especially, the “scorn of men, and the outcast of the people.” 1 [Note: John Keble.]

It is the lifting up that is the chief point in the comparison The word is mentioned twice—“As Moses lifted up the serpent, even so must the Son of man be lifted up.” To Jesus, and to John as taught by Him, the “lifting up” was doubly significant. It meant death upon the Cross, but it also suggested the beginning of His exaltation. As the serpent was lifted up so that it might be seen, we are compelled to adopt the same reason for the lifting up of the Son of Man. It is a marvellous thought, an amazing foresight. The death which was intended to consign Him and His teaching to oblivion was the means by which attention was directed to them. That which was to make Him “accursed” became the means by which He entered into His glory. His name was not obscured, but was exalted above all other names by the shame which men put upon it. The crucifixion was the first step of exaltation, the beginning of a higher stage of Revelation 2 [Note: John Reid.]

I feel a need divine

That meeteth need of mine;

No rigid fate I meet, no law austere.

I see my God, who turns

And o’er His creature yearns:

Upon the cross God gives and claims the tear. 3 [Note: Dora Greenwell, Carmina Crucis.]

III

The Acceptance of the Offer of Escape

The offer of escape is accepted—(i.) by looking to the brazen serpent; (ii.) by believing in the Sin-bearer.

i. Looking to the Serpent

1. We are not told that trust in God was an essential part of the look, but that is taken for granted. Why else should a half-dead man lift his eyelids to look? Such a one knew that God had commanded the image to be made, and had promised healing for a look. His gaze was fixed on it, in obedience to the command involved in the promise, and was, in some measure, a manifestation of faith. No doubt the faith was very imperfect, and the desire was only for physical healing; but none the less it had in it the essence of faith. It would have been too hard a requirement for men through whose veins the swift poison was burning its way, and who, at the best, were so little capable of rising above sense, to have asked from them, as the condition of their cure, a trust which had no external symbol to help it. The singularity of the method adopted witnesses to the graciousness of God, who gave their feebleness a thing to look at, in order to aid them in grasping the unseen power which really effected the cure. “He that hath turned himself to it,” says the Book of Wisdom, “was not saved by the thing which he saw, but by thee, that art the Saviour of all.”

They would try all their own remedies before they turned to the Lord. I can think that none would be so busy as the charmers. Amongst them would be some who knew the secrets of the Egyptian snake-charmers. In the “mixed multitude” may have been the professional charmer, boasting a descent which could not fail in its authority. And they come bringing assured remedies. There is the music that can charm the serpent, and destroy the poison. There is the mystic sign set around the place that made it sacred. There are mysterious magic amulets to be worn for safety; this on the neck, and this about the wrist. There is a ceremony that shall hold the serpent spellbound and powerless. But come hither. Lift up this curtain. See here one lies on the ground. “He sleeps.” Nay, indeed, he will never wake again. Why, it is the charmer. Here are the spells and the charms and the mystic signs all around him. And lo! there glides the serpent; the charmer himself is dead. 1 [Note: M. G. Pearse.]

2. We can imagine that when that brazen serpent was lifted up in the wilderness, there were some bitten by those fiery serpents who refused to look at this exalted sign of salvation, and so perished after all.

We may imagine, for instance, a wounded Israelite saying, “I do not believe this hurt of mine to be deadly. If some have died of the same, yet this is no reason why all should die. Surely there are natural remedies, herbs, or salves which the desert itself will supply, by whose aid I can restore health to myself.”

We can imagine another Israelite running into an opposite extreme, not slighting his hurt, but saying on the contrary, “My wound is too deadly for any remedy to avail for its cure. Thousands who have been bitten have already died, their carcases strew the wilderness. I too must die. Some, indeed, may have been healed by looking at that serpent lifted up, but none who were so deeply hurt as I am, none into whose frame that poison had penetrated so far, had circulated so long;” and so he may have turned away his face, and despaired, and died; and as the other perished by thinking lightly of the hurt, this will have perished by thinking lightly of the remedy, as fatal, if not as frequent, an error.

Can we not imagine one of the Israelites demanding, in a moodier and more sullen discontent, “Why were these serpents sent at all? Why was I exposed to injury by them? Now, indeed, after I am hurt, a remedy is proposed; why was not the hurt itself hindered?” Translate these murmurings into the language of the modern world, and you will recognize in others, perhaps at times in yourself, the same displeasure against God’s plan of salvation. “Why should this redemption have been needful at all? Why was I framed so obvious to temptation, so liable to sin? I will not fall in with His plan for counterworking the evil which He has wrought. Let Him, who is its true author, answer for it.” We all know more or less of this temptation, this anger, not against ourselves, but against God, that we should be the sinners which we are, this discontent with the scheme of restoration which He has provided. But what is this after all but an angry putting of that question, older than this world of ours, “Why is there any evil, and whence?“—a mystery none have searched out or can search out here. This only is sure, that “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all”; and of the evil in the world, that it is against His will; of the evil in us, that He is on our side in all our struggles to subdue and cast it out.

ii. Believing in the Sin-bearer

1. The brazen serpent was to be looked upon. The wounded persons were to turn their eyes towards it, and so to be healed. So Christ, lifted up on the Cross, is to be believed on, to be looked upon with the eyes of our heart. “The Son of man” is “lifted up, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” “The Law could not save us, in that it was weak through the flesh”; through the corruption of our fallen nature, for which it provided no cure. It could but point to Him who is our cure, as Moses did to the brazen serpent. It could not justify us, it could only bring us to Christ, that we might be justified by faith. Justification by faith is that which was betokened by the healing of the Israelites when they looked up to the serpent. It justifies, because it brings us to Him, with whom to be united is to be justified; that is, to be forgiven and saved from this evil world, to be clothed with heavenly righteousness.

2. Trust is no arbitrary condition. The Israelite was told to turn to the brazen serpent. There was no connexion between his look and his healing, except in so far as the symbol was a help to, and looking at it was a test of, his faith in the healing power of God. But it is no arbitrary appointment, as many people often think it is, which connects inseparably together the look of faith and the eternal life that Christ gives. For seeing that salvation is no mere external gift of shutting up some outward Hell and opening the door to some outward Heaven, but is a state of heart and mind, of relation to God, the only way by which that salvation can come into a man’s heart is that he, knowing his need of it, shall trust Christ, and through Him the new life will flow into his heart. Faith is trust, and trust is the stretching out of the hand to take the precious gift, the opening of the heart for the influx of the grace, the eating of the bread, the drinking of the water, of life.

Looking at Jesus—what does it mean practically? It means hearing about Him first, then actually appealing to Him, accepting His word as personal to one’s self, putting Him to the test in life, trusting His death to square up one’s sin score, trusting His power to clean the heart and sweeten the spirit and stiffen the will. It means holding the whole life up to His ideals. Ay, it means more yet; something on His side, an answering look from Him. There comes a consciousness within of His love and winsomeness. That answering look of His holds us for ever after His willing slaves, love’s slaves. Paul speaks of the eyes of the heart. It is with these eyes we look to Him, and receive His answering look. 1 [Note: S. D. Gordon, Quiet Talks on Service, 16.]

Faith is the keynote of the Gospel by John. The very purpose for which this Gospel was written was that men might believe that Jesus is the Son of God, and that believing they might have life through His name ( John 20:31). This purpose is everywhere its predominant feature. From the announcement that John the Baptist was sent “that all men through him might believe” ( John 1:7), to the confident assurance with which the beloved disciple makes the declaration that he knows his testimony is true ( John 21:24), the Gospel of John is one long argument, conceived with the evident intention of inducing men to believe that Jesus is the Son of God and the Saviour of all who trust in Him. The word “believe” occurs in this Gospel no fewer than ninety-eight times, and either that or some cognate word is to be found in every chapter. 2 [Note: H. Thorne.]

A woman who was always looking within herself, and could not reach assurance and peace, was told she must look out and up. Yet light did not come. One night she dreamed that she was in a pit which was deep, dark, and dirty. There was no way of escape—no door, no ladder, no steps, no rope. Looking right overhead she saw a little bit of blue sky, and in it one star. While gazing at the star she began to rise inch by inch in the pit. Then she cried out, “Who is lifting me?” and she looked down to see. But the moment she looked down she was back again at the bottom of the pit. Again she looked up, saw the star, and began to rise. Again she looked down to see who or what was lifting her, and again she found herself at the bottom. Resolving not to look down again, she for the third time gazed at the star. Little by little she rose; tempted to look down, she resisted the desire; higher and higher she ascended, with her eyes on the star, till at last she was out of the pit altogether. Then she awoke, and said, “I see it all now. I am not to look down or within, but out and up to the Bright and Morning Star, the Lord Jesus Christ.” 3 [Note: J. J. Mackay.]

IV

The Good Effect

The effect is—(i.) life: “when he looked unto the serpent of brass, he lived”; (ii.) eternal life: “that whosoever believeth may in him have eternal life.”

i. Life

It does not seem possible that so great a thing as life should depend upon so small a thing as a look. But life often depends on a look. A traveller was once walking over a mountain-road; it grew quite dark, and he lost his way. Then a thunderstorm came on, and he made all the haste he could to try to find some shelter. A flash of lightning showed just for a moment where he was going. He was on the very edge of a precipice. The one look that the lightning enabled him to take saved his life. A few weeks ago I was in a train after it was dark. The signal was put “all right,” and the train started. We had gone a few hundred yards, when I heard the whistle sound very sharply, and soon the train stopped. Some one had shown the engine-driver a red light, and warned him of danger. It turned out that one of the chains by which the carriages were coupled together had broken. If the man who saw the broken chain had not looked, and if the engine-driver had not looked and so seen the red light, most likely many lives would have been lost. Here, again, life depended upon a look.

The wounded Israelite was in one sense dead already, his life was forfeit as soon as he was bitten; it follows that the new life infused by a look at the brazen serpent was miraculous in its character. What have we here but a striking figure of death and resurrection? Not by any natural process of improvement or gradual restoration was the death-stricken Israelite rescued from his fate, but by the direct and supernatural intervention of Him who was even then, as He is still, the resurrection and the life, in whom whosoever believes lives though he were dead. 1 [Note: W. H. M. H. Aitken.]

ii. Eternal Life

1. Our Lord said, “Ye must be born again,” and Nicodemus answered, “How can a man be born again when he is old?” Our Lord replied by telling him something more. A man needs to be born not only outwardly of water, but inwardly of the Spirit, and when he is so born he will be as free as the wind—from legal bondage—from the tyranny of sin. And to this Nicodemus replied by asking yet more impatiently, “How can these things be?” The answer that he receives is given through the speaking figure of death and resurrection, and if we desire a striking commentary on the figure, and a definite statement of the truth, we have only to turn to St. Paul’s Epistles. “You hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins.” “But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us, even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, and hath raised us up together.” “And you, being dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh, hath he quickened together with him, having forgiven you all trespasses.” “Having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in his cross.” Surely nothing can be more striking than the parallelism between the words of this passage and the symbolism of the scene that we are contemplating.

Eternal life is the blessing of the Kingdom of God viewed as a personal possession. The description is peculiar to John’s Gospel, but it agrees with the “life” which is spoken of with such emphasis in the other Gospels. According to them, to enter into the Kingdom is to enter into “life” ( Matthew 18:3; Matthew 18:8-9). It is not so much duration that is expressed by the word “eternal” as the peculiar quality of the life that arises out of the new relations with God which are brought about by Jesus Christ. It is deathless life, although the believer has still to die, “and go unterrified into the gulf of Death.” It may be described as a life which seeks to obey an eternal rule, the will of God; which is inspired by an eternal motive, the love of God; which lives for and is lightened by an eternal glory, the glory of God; and abides in an eternal blessedness, communion with God. It is both present and future. Here and now for the believer there are a new heaven and a new earth, and the glory of God doth lighten them, and the Lamb is the light thereof. No change which time or death can bring has power to affect the essential character of his life, though its glory as terrestrial is one, and its glory as celestial is another. Wherever after death the man may be who has believed in Jesus, the life that he lives will be the same in its inner spirit and relation. “To him all one, if on the earth or in the sun,” God’s will must be his law, God’s glory his light, God’s presence his blessedness, God’s love his inspiration and joy. 1 [Note: John Reid.]

I distinguish between Life, which is our Being in God, and Eternal Life, which is the Light of the Life, that is, fellowship with the Author, Substance, and Former of our Being, the Alpha and Omega. It is the heart that needs re-creation; it is the heart that is desperately wicked, not the Being of man. I think a distinction is carefully maintained in Holy Scripture between the life in the heart and the Life of the Being: “Lighten thou my eyes that I sleep not in death.” It is the Light of Life we want, to purify or re-create or regenerate our hearts so that we may be the Children of Light. 2 [Note: R. W. Corbet, Letters from a Mystic of the Present Day, 63.]

2. In the Revised Version there is a little change made here, partly by the exclusion of a clause and partly by changing the order of the words. The alteration is not only nearer the original text, but brings out a striking thought. It reads that “whosoever believeth may in him have eternal life.” “May in him have eternal life”—union with Christ by faith, that profound incorporation into Him, which the New Testament sets forth in all sorts of aspects as the very foundation of the blessings of Christianity; that union is the condition of eternal life.

A soldier lay dying on the battlefield; the chaplain speaking to him read St. John 3. When he came to Numbers 21:14-15, he was asked to read them again; when they were read, the soldier, having repeated them, added, “That is enough for me; that is all I want.” 3 [Note: L. N. Caley.]

There is a most impressive little story which tells how Sternberg, the great German artist, was led to paint his “Messiah,” which is his masterpiece. One day the artist met a little gypsy girl on the street, and was so struck by her peculiar beauty that he requested her to accompany him to his studio in order that he might paint her. This she consented to do, and while sitting for the great artist she noticed a half-finished painting of Christ on the cross. The gypsy girl, who was ignorant and uneducated, asked Sternberg what it was, and wondered if Christ must not have been an awfully bad man to be nailed to a cross. Sternberg replied that Christ was the best man that ever lived, and that He died on the cross that others might live. “Did He die for you?” asked the gypsy. This question so preyed upon the mind of Sternberg, who was not a Christian, that he was greatly disturbed by it. The more he pondered it, the more impressed he became that, though Christ had died for him, he had not accepted the sacrifice. It was this that led him at last to paint the “Messiah,” which became famous throughout the world. It is said that John Wesley got one of his greatest inspirations from this picture.

Literature

Aitken (W. H. M. H.), God’s Everlasting Yea, 117.

Banks (L. A.), On the Trail of Moses, 201.

Keble (J.), Sermons for the Christian Year, Holy Week, 114, 480.

Mackay (J. J.), Recent Letters of Christ, 156.

Maclaren (A.), Christ’s Musts, 1.

Maclaren (A.), Expositions: Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, 362; St. John i.–viii., 162, 171.

Macpherson (W. M.), The Path of Life, 105.

Parker (J.), The City Temple Pulpit, iv. 12.

Pearse (M. G.), Moses, 253.

Price (A. C.), Fifty Sermons, ix. 169.

Reid (J.), Jesus and Nicodemus, 185.

Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xxv. No. 1500.

Talbot (E. S.), Sermons in Leeds Parish Church. 147.

Thorne (H.), Foreshadowings of the Gospel, 57.

Thorne (H.), Notable Sayings of the Great Teacher, 25.

Trench (R. C), Sermons in Ireland, 228.

Christian World Pulpit, xx. 237 (Walters).

Churchman’s Pulpit (Second Sunday after Easter), viii. 15 (Caley).

Preacher’s Magazine, iv. (1893) 469.

Verse 16

The Amazing Gift of Love

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have eternal life.— John 3:16.

1. This is perhaps the favourite text in the Bible—one of the first texts which we learn as children, and one whose meaning becomes only the more precious to us as we grow older. For in these few simple words the whole Gospel is summed up. The depth of God’s love, the greatness of His gift, and the blessings which He freely offers to us—all are made known to us every time that we repeat these words.

I suppose it is a common fact of experience that those who live within sound of church bells after awhile do not notice their striking; might I suggest that something similar may be true of the great bell-note that is struck for us in the opening clause of this text? Which of us is sufficiently sensitive or responsive to its vibrations? Which of us realizes sufficiently that these words proclaim a final truth, the culmination of religious thought, something never to be transcended? 1 [Note: J. Warschauer.]

2. It is no accident that has given to this statement its unique place in the mind and heart of Christendom. The deepest thinker sees in this verse a summing-up of the Gospel; the humblest believer feels that it expresses the whole substance of his faith. The inspired writer gathers himself up, as it were, to a supreme effort, and presents in one majestic, sweeping, comprehensive sentence the essence of Christian belief. And there stands the declaration still in all its simple grandeur, in all its boundless love, in all its mighty power. Centuries have passed over it, and left no impress. Time has failed to impair its freshness; it is the same to-day as it was yesterday. That which it is to-day it will be for ever. For eighteen hundred years and more it has poured forth its blessings with unceasing flow upon the foolish and the wise, upon the sinner and the saint, upon the martyr and his murderer. Years have thrown no new light upon its meaning. The wisdom and learning of men, the meditations of the holiest and the best, have not added one jot to our comprehension of its mystery. Age upon age of opposition, of scorn, and of derision have as little succeeded in shaking its power. When we accept it in all its fulness, is it not still as much the source of joy as when it supported men, women, and children to a cruel death, gladly offering their lives in its defence? When we reject it, what can we offer in its place to support the weak or encourage the desperate? Is it not still the most sovereign balm to bind up the broken hearts of mourners; the surest stay of the dying? Is it not still the silver clarion, whose peal rises high and clear above the din of strife—stirring wearied soldiers of Christ to renew their struggle with evil, whether within their own hearts or in the world? Is it not still the rock upon which Christianity is founded? Is it not in reality the sum and substance of Christianity itself?

For six nights Mr. Moorhouse had preached on this one text. The seventh night came and he went into the pulpit. Every eye was upon him. He said, “Beloved friends, I have been hunting all day for a new text, but I cannot find anything so good as the old one, so we will go back to John 3:16”; and he preached the seventh sermon from those wonderful words: “God so loved the world.” I remember the end of that sermon: “My friends,” he said, “for a whole week I have been trying to tell you how much God loves you, but I cannot do it with this poor stammering tongue. If I could borrow Jacob’s ladder, and climb up into Heaven, and ask Gabriel, who stands in the presence of the Almighty, to tell me how much love the Father has for the world, all he could say would be: ‘God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have eternal life.’ ” 1 [Note: Life of D. L. Moody, 128.]

At the World Missionary Conference held in Edinburgh in 1910, Dr. Tasaku Harada, President of the Doshisha College, said: “As regards the aspects of the Christian Gospel and Christian life which appeal to the Japanese, in the first place I mention the love of God. Dr. Neesima used to say that he regarded the 16th verse of the third chapter of St. John’s Gospel as the Fujiyama of the New Testament—‘God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.’ If there are two words which have created the greatest transformation since the introduction of Christianity into Japan they are the words ‘God’ and ‘love.’ ” 1 [Note: World Missionary Conference, 1910, iv. 305.]

Fuji, it should be said, is not only the sacred mountain of Japan but the ideal of excellence. Its almost perfect cone can be seen from most parts of the main island, and it forms the background of many Japanese landscapes, whether actually visible or not.

3. These words explain to us the relation in which Jesus stands as Son of man, first to God and next to us; and they interpret to our understanding, as well as to our faith and affection, the method by which the Eternal seeks us and finds us, saves us from ourselves and our sins, grants us the quickening sense of pardon, and fills us with the calm and strength of His everlasting life. Selecting the familiar incident from the Hebrew Scriptures in which the brazen serpent is lifted up before the dying people, Jesus says, “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: that whosoever believeth may in him have eternal life”: and then He adds the sublime statement, “ For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have eternal life.”

Now, this revelation is inexhaustible in its significance. It is a gospel within a gospel; and though uttered almost as swiftly as a morning salutation, yet it comprehends the contents of all the Gospels. It is as when, beginning our study of the universe, we start with a sea-beach, a stone-quarry, or a flower-garden, and then rise from it to the everlasting hills, thence to the infinite splendours of the midnight sky, and afterwards, through telescopes of ever-increasing power, look into the depths of the immeasurable heavens, adding world to world, and system to system, till we are overwhelmed with the marvel and grandeur of the realms of God; so, beginning with this primal declaration of the only begotten Son who dwelt in the bosom of the Father, and learning some of its contents, we are led on and on in our investigation, charmed by its simplicity, gladdened by its wealth, and awed by its mystery, till, mastered by our effort to comprehend the breadth and length, depth and height of the message, even St. Paul’s language is too poor to express our wonder and our praise: “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgements, and his ways past tracing out! For who hath known the mind of the Lord? or who hath been his counsellor? or who hath first given to him, and it shall be recompensed unto him again? For of him, and through him, and unto him, are all things. To him be the glory for ever.”

The “comfortable words,” as they are called, in the Order of Holy Communion ( Matthew 11:28; John 3:16; 1 Timothy 1:15; 1 John 2:1-2), form an element peculiar to the English rite, being found elsewhere only in those liturgies which derive their inheritance through the channel of the English Reformation. They appeared for the first time in the Prayer-Book of 1549, and their insertion was apparently suggested to our Reformers by the recent issue on the Continent of a manual, based on the work of Luther, Bucer, and Melanchthon, which contained numerous hints for reform in liturgical worship, and has left traces of its influence in other parts of the Book of Common Prayer. All will agree that the step here taken by our Revisers was a distinct enrichment of our Service, and that they have introduced a most beautiful characteristic of our present liturgy. You remember the place at which the words occur. The congregation is invited to kneel and join in a united confession of sin; and then, after the absolution has been pronounced, the four words of comfort are recited to the people, assuring them of the reality and meaning of that spiritual exercise in which they have been engaged. At such a moment each speaks with an eloquence which the heart of the faithful worshipper can readily understand. No comment is added, because none is required, and any paraphrase would be felt to jar upon the ear. The actual language of Holy Writ has been incorporated into the scheme of our liturgy, and the utterances of our Lord and His Apostles are left to make good by themselves the force of their appeal. 1 [Note: H. T. Knight. The Cross, the Font, and the Altar, 1.]

4. Let us distribute the text into parts for easier apprehension, and in such a way as seems to us best “for the use of edifying.” Dr. Warschauer proceeds in a direct line, taking the thoughts of the verse as they come—(1) God, (2) a loving God, (3) a great Giver, (4) the Gift of the Son, (5) Belief, (6) Eternal Life. Dr. Eadie makes God’s Love the subject, and begins with the world as the Object of God’s love, takes next the Gift of God’s love, and ends with the Design of God’s love. Dr. Maclaren’s divisions are: (1) The great Lake—“God so loved the world”; (2) the River—“that he gave his only begotten Son”; (3) the Pitcher—“that whosoever believeth on him”; (4) the Draught—“should have eternal life.” If any criticism should be made of so effective and attractive a division of the text, it would be that it misses the prominence due to the world. For it has to be remembered that the revelation to Nicodemus was twofold—first, that he, a Pharisee, had to be born again before he could enter the Kingdom of God; and, next, that the way was open not only to Pharisees, but to sinners, including sinners of the Gentiles, that is to say, to the whole world. And it is this second part of the great revelation that St. John is now giving us. Accordingly the next verse proceeds, “For God sent not the Son into the world to judge the world; but that the world should be saved through him.”

Let us, then, in order to keep the world-wide offer in our mind throughout, adopt this method of exposition—

I. God and the World—“God so loved the world.”

II. Christ and the World—“that he gave his only begotten Son.”

III. The World and Christ—“that whosoever believeth on him.”

IV. The World and God—“should not perish but have eternal life.”

I

God and the World

“God so loved the world.”

The introductory “for” shows that this verse presents itself as the reason of a previous statement. The reference in it is to a remarkable incident in the history of ancient Israel. They had, in one of their periodical fits of national insanity, so provoked God that He sent among them “fiery flying serpents,” and many of them were bitten and died. But to counteract the chastisement, and make its terror a means of salutary impression, Moses was commanded to frame a brazen figure of one of the poisonous reptiles, and place it on the summit of a flagstaff, so that any wounded Hebrew might be able to see it from the extremity of the camp. And every one, no matter how sorely he felt the poison in his fevered veins, if he could only turn his languid vision to the sacred emblem, was instantly healed. It is then asserted that salvation is a process of equal simplicity, facility, and certainty—“even so must the Son of man be lifted up, that whosoever believeth on him may have eternal life.” But why are belief and salvation so connected; and how comes it that any one, every one, confiding in the Son of man, is rescued and blessed—saved from the death which he has merited, and elevated to a life which he had forfeited? This pledge of safety and glory to the believer has its origin in nothing else than the truth of the text: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have eternal life.”

i. God

Jesus begins with God; God Himself, God in His totality; not with His “attributes” or “qualities,” but with Himself in His redeeming activity. God is; is the first and last; and Jesus who knows Him, and knows Him as no other visitant of our earth does, starts in His description of redemption not from man, in his weltering wickedness and glaring rebellions, but from God in His eternally loving thought of us. It is permissible to take the opposite order, beginning with the lowest and ascending to the highest; but it is wiser in this, as in all else, to follow the Master, and look first, not at man, his sinning and its fateful consequences, but at God and His love of the world, and what it leads to. Salvation belongs to the Lord. The righteous Lord delights in mercy, and Jesus knows it and affirms it, as the supreme and all-controlling fact in our interpretation of God and of His world.

1. There is perhaps no text that speaks so directly to the Christian heart. There is none perhaps that finds a more immediate or more enthusiastic welcome in our breast; because we feel that in it we have the answer to all the devious problems of intellect and the most pressing and urgent needs of our soul. For what after all is the great problem of all problems that come into the quiet of our own hearts? What is it that we most want to have assurance about? Surely in our deepest moments the thought that presses home most upon us is, What kind of a God is it we have to deal with? Is He a God who cares for us and loves us, or is He a God who moves so far away from us that we are, as it were, but the dust of the balance in His sight?

2. What, then, does the word “God” mean to us? There is probably no question that goes deeper to the root than this. We are not specially helped, certainly not in our religious life, when we have admitted that there must be a Supreme Power which has created and sustains the visible world. Granted that is so, such a Power has little to say to us. We might acknowledge its existence as we acknowledge the existence of some far-off fixed star, and with just as much or as little practical result, just as little effect upon our thought and life. Not that God is, but what God is, is what matters to us; nobody can be vitally interested in some far-off, great first cause, and we certainly are no better off—worse, if anything—when we hear or use such empty phrases as the totality of being, instead of speaking of our Father in heaven.

ii. God’s Love

1. A God who does not care, does not count; if He is not interested in us, how—to say it boldly—are we to be interested in Him? That is why, in practice, pantheism is hardly to be distinguished from atheism; you cannot worship a totality of being—you cannot pray to a nameless Power that is heedless of your welfare, not concerned in human joy or despair. No, the assurance which man’s soul craves is that which bursts upon him in this declaration, “God so loved the world.”

For a loving worm within the clod

Were better far than a loveless God.

He created the world, not in order to escape the boredom of eternity, but from love; He called souls into being, not for the purpose of conducting an endless series of aimless experiments, but in order that His love might have objects on which to bestow itself; He leads them, not through a gnat-like span of existence to the gloom of annihilation, but to the home of everlasting love. That conception—and it alone—gives us anything worth calling a religion; and because Christianity insists upon and emphasizes this conception—God’s love of the world and for the human soul—it is the absolute religion.

If our endeavours, our struggles, our failures, our hopes, our aspirations, were nothing to the Eternal, what could the Eternal be to us? Here is a human document which came into my hands only a couple of days ago. The writer says: “The conception of God that I now have is not the personal one that I had under the old belief.… Instead of living under the daily notice of God’s favour or resentment, I find that … we are but unnoticed units in all the vast millions of the universe. The result is that I am questioning the value of life.” Can you wonder? I do not wonder at all! But if we feel that His eye is upon us, that our little lives mean something to His heart, that we matter to Him, and that His intention is for our good, then that very fact lifts our lives out of insignificance, makes the conflict worth waging, and enables the toiler, the sufferer, the witness for truth and right to say in the midst of seeming defeat and desolation, “And yet I am not alone, because the Father is with me.” God loves the world: all faith which stops short of that lacks the element which makes it faith indeed. 1 [Note: J. Warschauer.]

2. “God loves.” Where, outside of Christianity, does anybody dare to say that as a certainty? Men have hoped it; men have feared that it could not be; men have dimly dreamed and strongly doubted; men have had gods cruel, gods lustful, gods capricious, gods good-natured, gods indifferent or apathetic, but a loving God is the discovery of Christianity. Neither the gross deities of heathenism, nor the shadowy god of theism, nor the unknown somewhat which (perhaps) “makes for righteousness” of our modern agnostics, presents anything like this—“God loves.”

It seems to us a simple and purely elementary truth that God is holy love, but how could we have known anything about it without Christ and the revelation made by Him? Nature and history show us clearly the wise and mighty God, but where do they show Him as holy and loving? 2 [Note: R. Rothe, Still Hours, 107.]

God is here set forth as a lover; loving men, all men, every man. “God so loved the world.” Let us then at once make an addition to the first avowal of the Apostles’ Creed, and say:—“I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and lover of the whole world.” We sing, “Jesus, lover of my soul.” We have equal right and warrant to sing, “God the Father Almighty, lover of my soul.” 1 [Note: H. Johnson, From Love to Praise, 10.]

iii. The World

This designation of the object upon which the Divine love rested and rests eternally is to be interpreted according to the usage of this Gospel, and that usage distinctly gives to the expression “the world” not only the meaning of the total of humanity, but also the further meaning of humanity separated by its own evil from God. And so we get, not only the statement of the universality of the love of God, but also this great truth, that no sin or unworthiness, no unfaithfulness or rebellion, nothing which degrades humanity even to its lowest depths, and seems all but to extinguish the spark within it that is capable of being fanned into a flame, has the least power to deflect, turn back, or alter the love of God. That love falls upon “the world,” the mass of men who have wrenched themselves away from Him, but cannot wrench Him away from themselves. They never can prevent His love from pouring itself over them; even as the bright waters of the ocean will break over some grim rock, black in the sunshine. Thus the outcasts, criminals, barbarians, degraded people that the world consents to regard as irrevocably bad and hopeless are all grasped in His love.

The first meaning of the Greek word for world ( kosmos) is “order.” And as all order is more or less beautiful, the second meaning of the term is “ornament.” The word is found with this meaning in 1 Peter 3:3,—“Whose adorning let it not be that outward adorning of plaiting the hair, and of wearing of gold, or of putting on of apparel; but let it be the hidden man of the heart, in that which is not corruptible, even the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price.” After the word had for ages been employed by the Greeks in these acceptations, it occurred to one of the greatest thinkers that ever lived that there was no order so wonderful as the order of the universe, no ornament so ornamental, so real, as the great world. Hence he employed the word which signified “order” and “ornament” to designate the “world.” The Holy Spirit, who guided the holy men who wrote the New Testament, approving of his idea, adopted the Greek term in its Pythagorean sense. And thus it is that we read such expressions as the following:—“The invisible things of God from the creation of the ( orderly and beautiful) world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.” “Glorify thou me with thine own self, with the glory which I had with thee before the world was.” “What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”

To the eye of most of the ancients, however, the sun and the stars, instead of being orbs greater and more glorious than our earth, were only luminaries or lamps to light us by day and by night. The earth was to them almost all the universe. And it was the earth especially which they called the world. This import of the term became stereotyped; and thus we read in the Bible: “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.”

But this world—the earth—is the temporary home of a vast multitude of thinking beings, every one of whom seems to be more wonderful and glorious than the vast earth on which he moves and has his being. These thinking beings use the earth; the earth does not use them. They think of the earth; the earth does not think of them. They feel too,—they feel the earth; the earth does not feel them. They live; the earth does not live. They are the lords of the earth, and subdue it and have dominion over it. They are men; and as they rise into the consciousness of what they are, they gradually reach the idea—“We are the world; the earth is beneath our feet.” The men of the earth are a world upon a world. They are a thinking, feeling, will-endowed, moral world. They are “the world.” Hence it is that we read of “ all the world being guilty before God.” God shall “judge the world.” And in this Gospel according to Jesus, our Saviour is His own herald, and says that “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have eternal life.” The “world,” then, which is loved by God, is the world of men.

It is, we may add, the world of all men. The word “world,” when not expressly limited in its scope by the mention of the parties to whom it refers, or when not obviously limited by the nature of the case, must be understood in its simple, unrestricted, universal acceptation. It is not expressly limited here by the mention of any mere section of the race. The expression is not “the fashionable world,” “the scientific world,” “the religious world,” “the commercial world,” “the literary world,” “the busy world.” Neither is there anything in the nature of the case referred to,—there is nothing in the nature of God’s love,—that should lead us to suppose that it is confined either to the religious, or to the fashionable, or the scientific, or the commercial, or the busy, or the literary. It must be the whole world—the world of all men—that is referred to.

It is true that the word “world” is sometimes hyperbolically used with a limited reference. Even the expression, “the whole world,” is sometimes thus used. We read that “the whole world lieth in wickedness”; although in that very passage we also read that they who believe in Christ are not lying in wickedness, but are “of God.” Jesus said to His disciples, “If ye were of the world, the world would love his own; but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you.” Here the word “world” obviously means somewhat less than all men. It means “the worldly.” It means those who are characterized by the spirit which actuated men in general all over the world.

But in the text it is not used with limitation. It is the world of all men, without distinction or exception, that is meant. It is the same world which is called “the whole world” in that other precious little gospel which runs thus:—“If any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: and he is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.” The true extent of the import of the word may be seen in those other passages which assure us that there “is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus; who gave himself a ransom for all,” and who tasted death for every Man_1:1 [Note: J. Morison, Holiness and Happiness, 14.]

1. But what about election? There is nothing in this text about it. God so loved the world—not a portion of the world—not the elect. The elect are only a part of the world and chosen out of it. But this love of God is world-wide, for everybody, without a hint of election in it. It sweeps away out beyond election, and has no boundaries, no limitations, no reservations.

I believe in election. It is one of the great basal truths of Scripture, and a most blessed doctrine, charged with infinite stay and comfort for God’s believing children. It puts the Father’s everlasting arms about every child of His, and makes it certain he will never perish. But while it clearly and definitely includes somebody, it just as clearly and positively excludes nobody. It makes heaven sure for the chosen, but it keeps no one out of heaven. It is no chain gang bound about the necks of men, dragging some to salvation and some to perdition. 1 [Note: H. Johnson, From Love to Praise, 17.]

2. This is the vital doctrine of election, the election of some for the benediction of the whole. “I pray for these, that the world may believe.” The elect are called not to a sphere of exclusion, but to a function of transmission. They are elected not to privilege, but to service; not to the secret hoarding of blessing, but to its widespread distribution. The elect are not circles, but centres, heat centres for radiating gracious influence to remote circumferences, that under its warming and softening ministry “the world may believe” in the Son of God. That is the way of the Master. He will work upon the frozen streams and rivers of the world by raising the general temperature. He seeks to increase the fervour of those who are His own, and, through the pure and intense flame of their zeal, to create an atmosphere in which the hard frozen indifference of the world shall be melted into wonder, into tender inquisition, that on the cold altar of the heart may be kindled the fire of spiritual devotion. “I pray not for the world, but for these … that the world may believe.” Through the disciple He seeks the vagrant; through the believer He seeks the unbeliever; through the Church He seeks the world; through the ministry of Christian men and women the world is to be won for Christ.

iv. God’s Love of the World

God loves the world, the world of men, Gentile as well as Jew, Cornelius not less than Nicodemus, Scythian as well as Syrian, bond not less than free. God in His totality loves man in his totality, loves his welfare, which is purity and peace, faith and love, self-poise and perseverance, devotion to high ideals, and enduring joy. “There is no difference.” The Divine love is infinite as the Divine nature. It has no exclusions. Sin divides, degrades, excludes, but God is at war with sin. He loves the world. This is the glorious fact that sends its clear, pulsing light through all our human life. Oh, the joy, the unutterable joy of it! God loves the prodigal who in his wayward folly has lost the track to the Father’s house, the rebel who has defied His misjudged authority, the ingrate who has despised His goodness; and yet His love is such that it conquers their sin and ends their sinning, and brings them back to the Father’s home penitent, obedient, and grateful.

1. How can it be that God loves such a world? A partial explanation lies in the fact that it is God’s nature to love, that while others are by nature hard and unpitying, and even vengeful, God by nature is tender, sympathetic, and merciful. Yet it is the most tremendous statement that has ever confronted the human mind, the statement of God’s gracious love for the world. It is the most difficult statement for the belief of man to grasp.

2. There are those who are eminently disgusted with God’s world, who claim that we cannot have high moral perceptions and know humanity without feeling that humanity is despicable. There are those who would sweep the whole multitude of mankind into the sea and drown them; they have no patience with them and they have no hope for them. When, then, the theory is propounded that though God did indeed create this world and start humanity, He later cast off all thought of the world, having no further concern for humanity, the theory appeals to such persons, and they say that through such a theory they can understand the meaning of human life.

(1) But any such theory is apart from the supreme fact of revelation. That supreme fact teaches that, the very nature of God being love, His love insistently and persistently goes out to every one of His creatures. If it be asked how can it be possible that a holy God in His omniscience can thus love those who are wrong, incomplete, and unattractive, the answer is that in that omniscience lies largely our explanation of His love. The Eastern shepherd, because he knows each individual sheep of his flock, knows the needs of each individual sheep. Did not Longfellow say that it makes no difference who the man is, provided we know him, know his temptations and trials, we are sure to love him? Is it not also said that no man can hate another if he understands all his failures and distresses? The prejudice of man towards his fellow is based on man’s ignorance of his fellow. Nothing in all this earth so awakens interest in the individual as acquaintance with the individual. The person who is actually hideous as a perfect stranger, as an acquaintance is found to have a past history and a present experience that appeal to pity and even to love. A. C. Benson, in Seen from a College Window, says: “If the dullest person in the world would only put down sincerely what he or she thought about his or her life, about work and love, religion and emotion, it would be a fascinating document.”

(2) Beyond God’s omniscience lies His realization of the possible development of each one of all His world. He never is ashamed of humanity and He never allows that He has made a mistake in creating humanity. He believes that deep down in every human heart there are possibilities of development into beauty and even into power. Throughout history He has been laying His hand upon all sorts of people in sheepfolds or on farms, in obscure villages, in streets of both small and great cities, and He has summoned them to great riches of character, and to great usefulness of service. Where others look in hopelessness, He looks in profound expectation. To Him humanity has expressed itself in the spirit and conduct of Jesus Christ, and He anticipates that man after man from all sections and tribes of the earth will measure up to the likeness of Christ; and He rejoices with abundant joy when the Magdalenes are restored, the lepers are healed, the dumb sing, the blind see, and the dead live again. God is always anticipating glorious transformations of character.

3. Do we realize that, when we say “God loves the world,” that really means, as far as each of us is concerned, God loves me? And just as the whole beams of the sun come pouring down into every eye of the crowd that is looking up to it, so the whole love of God pours down, not upon a multitude, an abstraction, a community, but upon every single soul that makes up that community. He loves us all because He loves each of us. We shall never get all the good of that thought until we translate it, and lay it upon our hearts. It is all very well to say, “Ah yes! God is love,” and it is all very well to say He loves “the world.” But what is a great deal better is to say, as St. Paul said, “Who loved me and gave himself for me.”

When we speak of loving a number of individuals—the broader the stream, the shallower it is, is it not? The most intense patriot in England does not love her one ten-thousandth part as well as he loves his own little girl. When we think or feel anything about a great multitude of people, it is like looking at a forest. We do not see the trees, we see the whole wood. But that is not how God loves the world. Suppose I said that I loved the people in India, I should not mean by that that I had any feeling about any individual soul of all those dusky millions, but only that I massed them all together, or made what people call a generalization of them. But that is not the way in which God loves. He loves all because He loves each. And when we say, “God so loved the world,” we have to break up the mass into its atoms, and to think of each atom as being an object of His love. We all stand out in God’s love just as we should do to one another’s eyes if we were on the top of a mountain-ridge with a clear sunset sky behind us. Each little black dot of the long procession would be separately visible. And we all stand out like that, every man of us isolated, and getting as much of the love of God as if there were not another creature in the whole universe but God and ourselves. 1 [Note: A. Maclaren.]

After this he seems to have again paid a flying visit to Bathgate, the residence of his brother-in-law; for to this year belongs a beautiful anecdote told of him in that place. A young man belonging to the Church there was very ill, “dying of consumption.” Mr. Martin had promised to take his distinguished relative to see this youth, and Irving’s time was so limited, that the visit had to be paid about six in the morning, before he started on his further journey. When the two clergymen entered the sick chamber, Irving went up to the bedside, and looking in the face of the patient said softly, but earnestly, “George M——, God loves you; be assured of this— God loves you.” When the hurried visit was over, the young man’s sister, coming in, found her patient in a tearful ecstasy not to be described. “What do you think? Mr. Irving says God loves me,” cried the dying lad, overwhelmed with the confused pathetic joy of that great discovery. The sudden message had brought sunshine and light into the chamber of death. 2 [Note: Mrs. Oliphant, The Life of Edward Irving, ii. 87.]

4. “God so loved the world.” The pearl of this wonderful statement is the measure it supplies of that eternal love which redeems sinful man. “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son.” It is the earthly way of describing the sacrifice God makes of God, of His true and real self for man. Language could not more clearly or strongly declare the fact that God gives Himself, His essential self, to the temptation and toil, the suffering and anguish, of our limited and burdened life, that He may carry out His world-loving purpose.

The marvel of God’s love for mankind grows as we learn the degree of that love. It is the degree of it that is apocalyptic. The Old Testament had attempted to disclose the graciousness of God, telling men that like as a father pities, so God pities. Exterior nature too had tried to make known God’s healing and comforting power; abundant harvests telling of His affection, zephyrs breathing His soothing kindness, health-giving air and the recuperative tendencies within every normal body indicating that love is over mankind. But the degree of that love was never known to any man, however scholarly, until it was revealed when God out of desire to secure to man the highest possible good actually gave His Son for Man_1:1 [Note: J. G. K. McClure, Supreme Things, 19.]

Winds weary with the old sea tune

Slide inland with some cloud, and soon

From woods that whisper summer noon

Weigh their wight wings with odour boon.

So I, long salted in our ocean drear

Of disbelief that Essence can be won

By any form of thought invented here,

Felt such a gush of joy about

My heart-roots, as if in and out

’ Twas life-blood billowed; and as stout

As once we sent the battle-shout

Pitching clear notes against barbaric din,—

Oh, brother, my soul’s voice against the rout

Of unbeliefs a man doth muse within,

Arising and protesting wild,

Spake, speaking out untruth defiled;

Spake, speaking in the truth exiled;

Spake, Little head and weary child,

Come home, God loves, God loves through sin and shame,—

Come home, God loves His world. 2 [Note: Richard Watson Dixon.]

II

Christ and the World

“He gave his only begotten Son.”

The evidence of the love of God is the advent of God into the sinful and suffering life of man, bearing sin vicariously as His way of eradicating it from the heart and will of the sinner. “God,” as St. Paul says, “was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself.” “It is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus”—“the effulgence of the Father’s glory and the very image of his person,” uniquely and inexpressibly related to Him as “the only begotten Son”—He, and not a stranger, nor a seraph; He, and not one of the ordinary sons of men—“came into the world to save sinners”; to enter into contest with the awful power of sin; to make an end of it, and to bring in an everlasting righteousness.

Here, then, in the life of Jesus are the only unerring measures of the love of God. He spared not Himself from the suffering and agony and sacrifice necessary to save them, but in love of them bore it for them, to rescue them from the stupor and death of sin, and lift them to a share in His life. He who sees Jesus in Bethlehem as a babe, in Galilee as a working healer and wise teacher, in Gethsemane and on Calvary as the Just One dying for the unjust, sees the Father, and knows and understands a little of the way in which He mediates the redemption of a lost world.

1. Let us seek, first of all, to get rid of misconceptions in this vital matter.

(1) One of the most prevalent notions of God is this: that God is a hard, inexorable Being, who has been made mild and forgiving only by the death of Jesus Christ. This great Gospel text teaches just the contrary. It represents God as in love with men already before Christ came—with all men—with every man. “God so loved the world.” And this is not any elect or select portion of the world, but the whole world of human beings that ever have lived, that live now or that ever will live on the face of the earth: not the world of the elect, but the world of sinners.

How can you appease love? How can a loving God propitiate Himself? Read this text with this thought of a propitiation of God injected into it, and see how it sounds. “God so loved the world that he gave his beloved Son to abate his own wrath and to placate himself!” Or, “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that he might stop hating it.” This is simply suicide by self-contradiction! What folly to talk of bribing to mercy One who is bent by every instinct and prompting of His heart to the exhibition of mercy! Will you bribe a mother to love her child? 1 [Note: H. Johnson, From Love to Praise, 5.]

(2) But there is another false notion of God quite as prevalent in our day as the one just named, and probably quite as mischievous. It arises from the swing of the human heart to the opposite extreme of thought. God is conceived of as a Being whose love is so vast and sweeping as to make punishment at last impossible. Instead of being thought of now as a stern judge who will by no means clear the guilty, He is thought of as a Father too loving to punish, and so full of mercy that it will not be in His heart to deal with men according to any rigid standard of justice. But this notion is as false and unscriptural as the other, and to this notion as well as to the other the great Gospel text we have before us stands opposed. In the bosom of this heavenly message we not only find the beat of an infinite heart, but the imperial majesty of a holy will.

There is no more warrant for the dear God of sentimentalism than for the hard malignant God of railing unbelief, and there is no warrant whatever for either. Let us carefully read the text again. “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish.” Whosoever believes. But suppose men do not believe and will not believe. Do you not see the inevitable, irresistible next step? If men still will not believe, then they still will perish. God’s love does not save everybody, although it goes out to everybody. Some men will not take its great gift. And if the sacrifice is rejected, how can it help the sinner it is made for?

God is all Love, and nothing but Love and Goodness can come from Him. He is as far from Anger in Himself, as from Pain and Darkness. But when the fallen Soul of Man had awakened in itself a wrathful, self-tormenting Fire, which could never be put out by itself, which could never be relieved by the natural Power of any Creature whatsoever, then the Son of God, by a Love greater than that which created the World, became Man, and gave His own Blood and Life into the fallen Soul, that it might, through His Life in it, be raised, quickened, and born again into its first state of inward Peace and Delight, Glory and Perfection, never to be lost any more. 1 [Note: William Law.]

2. “God so loved the world that he gave.” This is always and everywhere the sign and token of love, this generous need to give itself forth. Love is prodigal—a reaching out, an overflowing beyond the borders and boundaries of self; an imperious desire to make some sacrifice, to do something for the sake of the beloved. Wherever you meet this passion of affection, you will meet that same splendid impetus of self-giving. The one great passion of a poet like W. E. Henley is a love of his country—not always wise but always genuine—and it bursts forth into those exultant lines—

What have I done for you,

England, my England?

What is there I would not do,

England, my own?

The story is told by Luther that when his translation of the Bible was being printed in Germany, pieces of the printer’s work were allowed to fall carelessly upon the floor of his shop. One day the printer’s little daughter coming in picked up a piece of paper on which she found just the words, “God so loved the world that he gave”—the rest of the sentence not having yet been printed. It was a veritable revelation to her, for up to that time she had always been told that the Almighty was to be dreaded, and could be approached only through penance. The new light thrown upon God’s nature by the scrap that had fallen into her hands seemed to flood her whole being with its radiance, so that her mother asked her the reason of her joyfulness. Putting her hand in her pocket, Luther tells us, the girl handed, out the little crumpled piece of paper with the unfinished sentence. Her mother read it, and was perplexed: “He gave—what was it He gave?” For a moment the child was puzzled, but only for a moment; then, with a quick intuition, “I don’t know; but if He loved us well enough to give us anything, we need not be afraid of Him.” Truly there are things hidden from the wise and prudent that are revealed to babes. How impossible is Spinoza’s demand that although God is not so much as interested in us, we ought to feel towards Him an overmastering love of the mind! And how absolutely true, on the other hand, is the insight which declares, “We love him because he first loved us!” 1 [Note: J. Warschauer]

In the next verse, where the same subject is dealt with, a different expression is employed. There we read, “God sent his Son.” But here, where the matter in hand is the love of God, sent is far too cold a word, and gave is used as congruous with loved. It must needs be that the Divine love manifest itself even as the human does by an infinite delight in bestowing. The very property and life of love, as we know it even in its tainted and semi-selfish forms as it prevails amongst us, is to give, and the life of the Divine love is the same. He loves, and therefore He gives. His love is a longing to bestow Himself, and the proof and sign that He loves is that “He gave his only begotten Son.” 2 [Note: A. Maclaren.]

3. “He gave his only begotten Son.” We cannot reach the bottom of this saying. The shallow sounding lines of men that are cast into that deep water do not touch the bottom, though some imagine that they do. What does it mean?—“His only begotten Son.” There are some that would seek to minimize the force of that wonderful designation “only begotten.” They tell us that it does not always signify soleness, or even uniqueness; and they point us to the fact that Isaac is called Abraham’s only begotten son although Ishmael was equally his child. But such an argument is not good enough even to be called sophistical. It has no point and no relevancy. “Only begotten” must of necessity mean both uniqueness and soleness. Isaac was Abraham’s only begotten son from the standpoint from which the term was applied. He was so with reference to the promise and the seed of Abraham. He was the promised only begotten son of the sacred line, and that of course is the meaning which no sophistry, no amount of quibbling, can ever get rid of. As applied to Christ it means a relation to God, which is not, and can not, be shared by any other man or by any other creature in the whole universe of God.

The true test, as it seems to me, between a view of Christ’s nature which can be regarded as a legitimate development of historical Christianity and one which can only be looked upon as a new and different creed, is this, “Does it admit the Divine Sonship of Christ in some unique, some solitary sense, or does it make Christ merely one of many sons of God?” 1 [Note: H. Rashdall, Doctrine and Development, 79.]

It is hardly denied that Browning’s whole being was penetrated with this idea of Christ as the supreme revealer, the one paramount representative of God to man. And yet we have been told by his biographer that, though he uses the language of Christian Theology, his declarations cannot of course be understood in the sense of orthodox Christianity. Why “of course”? If we tried to get to the bottom of the old phrases in which orthodox Christianity has become stereotyped, we should find perhaps sometimes that the burning words of a nineteenth-century poet are after all only the present-day equivalent of the thoughts and words of a St. John in the first century, and of an Athanasius in the fourth. If there be any truth in the way in which I have attempted to explain this tremendous phrase, “the only begotten Son of God,” the thought which they contain is one of which Robert Browning’s poetry is simply full. 2 [Note: Ibid. 81.]

Why have we only one Christ? We have had many philosophers, and neither to Socrates, nor Plato, nor Aristotle among the ancients; neither to Bacon, nor Descartes, nor Spinoza, nor Kant, nor Schelling, nor Hegel among the moderns, could the palm of solitary, indisputable superiority be given. We have had many poets, and neither to Homer, nor Dante, nor Shakespeare, nor Milton, nor Goethe could the praise of unique and unapproachable excellence be awarded. We have had many soldiers, and neither to Alexander, nor Hannibal, nor Cæsar, nor Charlemagne, nor to any of the mediaeval and modern commanders could absolutely unequalled military genius be attributed. And so in every other department of human thought and action. No man is entirely unique. Every man has many compeers; Christ, and Christ alone, and that in the highest department, the religious, is unique, solitary, incomparable; and our question is, Why? Why has the Creator of men created only one Christ, while He has created myriads of all other kinds of men? That Creator is infinitely benevolent; He loves His creatures, He seeks their highest well-being. That well-being Christ has promoted not only more than any other man, but more than all other men that have ever lived. If one Christ has been so mighty for good, what would a multitude have accomplished? Yet God has given to our poor humanity only one, and if we persist in asking, Why? can we find a fitter answer than the answer that stands written in the history of the Word made flesh? God in giving one gave His all: “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have eternal life.” 1 [Note: A. M. Fairbairn, The City of God, 251.]

This has always been the Christian religion. There has never been any other Christian religion except this—never. St. Paul believed this. This was his religion. “God sent forth his Son made of a woman, made under the law.” “God sent forth his Son.” How can you reconcile that with Jesus Christ being only a very good man? “Declared to be the Son of God with power.” Does that sound like a very good man? “Through whom are all things.” Is that the sort of thing you would say about a man? “Who, though he was rich, yet for our sakes became poor.” When was He ever rich as man? Never. From those four undisputed Epistles of St. Paul—the two to the Corinthians, Romans, and Galatians—it can be proved to demonstration that St. Paul believed that the Incarnation was the centre of the Christian religion. Take St. Peter and read what he says about “the Shepherd and Bishop of your souls,” to see what he believed. Take St. John. This is St. John: “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son.” Take the old Christian liturgies—take a hymn like the Gloria in Excelsis, which has come down to us from the beginning, and you find the same thing: “Thou art the Everlasting Son.” Take the Nicene Creed, which the early Church fought about with those who did not believe, and its final shape states that the Son was of the very substance with the Father, the same, identically the same substance with the Father. 2 [Note: Bishop Winnington Ingram, The Love of the Trinity, 117.]

One of the most notable events of my freshman’s term was the death of the Rev. Charles Simeon. He was persuaded, though much advanced in years and diffident concerning his own physical strength, to accept the office of Select Preacher for the month of November. He had prepared his four sermons; but when November came, he was lying on a sick-bed; and when St. Mary’s bell tolled for him, it announced, not his sermons, but his death. I heard those four sermons delivered by Mr. Simeon’s successor in his own pulpit. So far as I can remember, the first three were introductory to the fourth, and the fourth gathered up the whole course and showed how type and shadow and prophecy and all the preparatory portion of God’s dispensation found their fulfilment and explanation in the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. Whether my recollection of those particular sermons be correct or not, certain it is that the supreme position of Christ, as the Alpha and Omega of the revelation of God, as “the way, the truth, and the life,” as the true link between earth and heaven, as the one sufficient sacrifice for sin, “the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world,” as the one foundation of human hope laid by the love of God Himself—certain it is, I say, that this supreme position of Christ was the point to which all Mr. Simeon’s teaching turned, the basis upon which his ministry was built. What was the difference between that teaching and the teaching which it strove to supersede? It professed no new discovery, it did not consciously embody any doctrine which was not already embodied in the Book of Common Prayer. The difference would seem to be expressible by the phrase, the preaching of a living Christ. The teaching purported to reproduce the words of the text, “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son,” and to reassert the words of St. Paul, “we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling-block, and unto the Greeks foolishness; but unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God.”

A criticism of a similar kind may be made upon the teaching of a still more remarkable man, to some extent contemporary with Mr. Simeon; I mean John Wesley. What was the secret of the marvellous power of John Wesley’s preaching? It owed much, I have no doubt, to his great natural endowments; much to his zeal and the strength of his convictions; but I believe that the ultimate analysis of the subject would show that, fundamentally, the secret of his power was his own clear hold upon, and his living exposition of, the doctrine of the Incarnation of the Son of God. I say the living exposition because this is just what is necessary to infuse life into the souls of others. Vivum ex vivo, say the physiologists: vivum ex vivo, ought to echo the theologians; and a man who has a living apprehension of the love of God, as manifested to mankind in the mission of Him who is called “the only begotten Son,” possesses in that apprehension a spiritual power, which it is more easy to regard with wonder than to measure or to restrain. The preaching of John Wesley can scarcely be reproduced; but the hymns composed by him and by his brother, who in this respect was even more remarkable than himself, will go far towards substantiating what I have now been saying.

Nor is it to be believed that the great movement of the Church of England which has taken place in the last half-century would have been the real and living thing which it has proved to be, if it had not rested upon Christ as the Incarnate Son of God. A superficial criticism may identify this movement with questions of forms, of vestments, of architecture, of chanting the Church’s offices; or, perhaps, with higher questions, such as the power of the Priesthood, the grace of the Sacraments, and other doctrines or practices, which, more or less, divide opinion. And, doubtless, it is true that as the movement described as the Evangelical was a reaction from the preceding condition of the Church, and contained a reassertion of doctrines which had been allowed to fall too much into abeyance, so the next great movement gained strength from the fact that in the fervour of the evangelical effort the symmetry of Catholic teaching had been to some extent lost sight of and injured. But allowing for all this, it may still be maintained that the real foundation of what is sometimes called the Catholic movement, equally with the Evangelical, was Christ, the Incarnate Son of God. Who can doubt this who has studied and loved Keble’s “Christian Year”? Foolish things may have been said, foolish things may have been done; but these foolish things have not helped the movement; they have tended to mar and hinder it. The wisest and best teachers, whether they be called High Church or Low Church, Catholic or Evangelical, so far as their teaching is wise, earnest, and true, can adopt the words of him who hated divisions, and simply styled himself “the servant of the Lord Jesus Christ,” when he wrote to one of the Churches, “I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified.”

The same thing may be said if we go back to the greatest movement of all which can be found in our English Church history, namely, the Reformation of the sixteenth century. A variety of causes, as we all know, conspired at that time to bring about a great religious change; a variety of smaller causes conspired to determine the precise form which the change should assume in this country: general dissatisfaction with the then condition of things, long-standing jealousy of the Pope of Rome, the increase of learning, the translation of the Scriptures, the growth of the seed which John Wyclif had sown, combined with political and local causes to overthrow the Church as it then was. The traces of destruction are clear enough; but what were the forces of conservation and growth? Surely these were to be found in the fact that the wisest and best amongst the Reformers held fast to the doctrine of Jesus Christ as the Son of God. Truly the Church needed a strong foundation in those terrible days; the storms raged and the winds beat upon the house; and it fell not, because it was founded upon a rock, and “that rock was Christ.” In this supreme crisis of the Church’s history she needed no new doctrine, no new faith, no new machinery, but only a clearing away of all that tended to obscure the visage of her Lord and towards substituting the legends and inventions of man for the faith once delivered to the saints.

And if I wished for another illustration of the point which I am now pressing, I would seek it in a very different quarter, namely, in that wonderful book known by the title De Imitatione Christi. The title, as we know, is taken from one particular portion of the volume; but did you ever observe what an absolute misnomer it is as applied to the whole? To speak of imitating another implies that imitation is possible; a child imitates its father or its mother, or a man sees his neighbour do a charitable act and he follows his example, or the pupil imitates his tutor, hoping to become like him; and so when you read the history of Christ being kind and gentle, holy and devout and good; when you read of His being constant in prayer, or of His indignation against hypocrisy, and His compassion for the ignorant and fallen, or when you are told that when He was reviled He reviled not again, when He suffered He threatened not, and so forth throughout the whole human side of His history, you feel not only that you can try at least to follow His example, but that you ought and would like to do it; and if this were all, still more if Jesus Christ were such as Renan and others would represent Him to have been, you feel that there is at least nothing impossible in an imitation of Christ; but the Christ of Thomas à Kempis is very different from our modern pictures of Jesus of Nazareth; it is not only Christ the man, to be followed as an example, as all good men should be, but Christ the Son of God, who in the plenitude of His love and condescension holds converse with the human soul. And because this is so, the title of the book may be called a misnomer; but also because this is so, therefore the book has its marvellous and unequalled power of influence and magical fascination; it is the record of the possible communion of the soul with God through Christ, which is unspeakably precious, just because Christ is infinitely higher than humanity, and is worthy of worship, but incapable of imitation. 1 [Note: Bishop Harvey Goodwin, in The Cambridge Review, Nov. 24, 1886.]

4. Must we not say more and go further than this? Must we not say that in giving us Jesus Christ, God gave us Himself, just so far as we could receive this culminating gift? Is it not the fact that in Him we have the Way to God, the Truth about God, and the Life of God lived out among men? Is it not He who has made God real for us, by interpreting Godhead in terms of Fatherhood, so that henceforth we know God and have seen Him? He brings men to God as Teacher and Leader; but, even more wonderful, He brings God to men by visibly manifesting the Divine within Himself. In the face of so great a proof we can no longer doubt the love which prompted it. Men had thought of the Eternal as of some mighty Potentate, irresponsible in power, jealous of His own dignity, exacting obedience and praise and sacrifices; but in Christ they saw God willing to seek and to save, ready even, incredible though it might seem, to suffer and agonize for their sakes, loving men even in their disobedience and wilfulness, and giving Himself for them. “God so loved the world that he gave” Himself to us in His own dear Son.

Men readily concede that God gave us Jesus, but they do not seem to see with equal clearness that God gave Himself in Jesus, and that He still continues to give Himself in everything worthy of Jesus that is making the world better, nobler, kinder. I remember reading during the South African war that the greatest deaths were those of the mothers who died in their sons, the greatest gifts were those of the mothers who gave their sons, the keenest anguish was that of the mothers who suffered in their sons for the sake of England. Here is a figure of the word of God for the world. 1 [Note: R. J. Campbell.]

(1) Here we come upon the doctrine of the Atonement, properly so called; that is, we are led to the recognition of the truth that the spiritual condition of the race of man has been changed, as the result of the Incarnation of the Son of God. Persons may of course easily misrepresent this doctrine, and say that it is derogatory to the character of the Almighty that He should require a human sacrifice to appease His wrath; that God is love and cannot be propitiated by the sufferings of the innocent; and that it is impossible for a man of honourable feeling to wish for a boon so obtained. But who preaches such doctrines as those which are thus reprobated? who does not maintain the doctrine of the text as the only ground of that of the Atonement, namely, that God so loved the world, that He even stooped Himself to save it?

“What is the blood of Christ?” asked Livingstone of his own solitary soul in the last months of his African wanderings. “It is Himself. It is the inherent and everlasting mercy of God made apparent to human eyes and ears. The everlasting love was disclosed by our Lord’s life and death. It showed that God forgives because He loves to forgive.” 1 [Note: J. Clifford, The Secret of Jesus, 101.]

(2) Not only is the gift of the only begotten Son the gift of God Himself, it is also the gift of God Himself in sacrifice. In giving Jesus to us God made a real sacrifice and really impoverished Himself to give it. If God had not truly loved us, or if He had loved us only in a measure, would He not have kept His Son in blessed fellowship, living in His love and finding in it His highest joy and the satisfaction of all His needs? But no; the love which God had was the love which stopped short at no sacrifice, and therefore He gave to us His only begotten Son.

When we are asked, as we have been asked in Robert Elsmere, and in much literature that has preceded and followed it, why we do not get rid of the sternness and awfulness of religion and rest content simply with preaching the Fatherhood of God, our answer is plain. The one proof of God’s love that will ever convince the world is the Cross of Christ. Said the great German, “If I were God, the sorrows of the world would break my heart.” He knew not what he said. The sorrows of the world did break the Heart of hearts. Surely He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows, even unto blood, even unto broken-heartedness. Why do you not say that God is Father and that all is to be well, and leave Christ out? Why do you not read the text, “God so loved the world, that he gave to every one everlasting life”? If any one proclaims that God is love, upon what facts is he to rest his arguments? Does he find the love of God in the mass of misery and vice in which the world around is weltering? Belief in the love of God has been maintained and propagated in the shadow of the Cross, and only there. Apart from that, where is the proof that God is a Father and not merely a force? In the Old Testament they did not know it, though there are passages that dimly shadow it. Christ came in time. The heart of the world was failing. Martyr after martyr, prophet after prophet had died without a token. He came to change the Cross into a throne, and the shroud into a robe, and death into a sleep, and defeat into everlasting triumph. 2 [Note: W. Robertson Nicoll, The Lamp of Sacrifice, 251.]

I preach to-day the sacrifice of God.

Ride on, ride on, in majesty,

In lowly pomp ride on to die,

Bow Thy meek head in mortal pain,

Then take, O God, Thy power and reign.

That is the old theology, that is the faith which has converted the world, that is the faith of the martyrs, that is the faith of the writers of the New Testament, that is the faith of the missionaries who brought Christianity to what was then barbarous Britain, and I for one say, “Thank God, that is my faith to-day.” 1 [Note: Bishop Winnington Ingram, The Call of the Father, 199.]

If God had done nothing, and I was asked to go and see a sister dying of cancer before my eyes, or to spend the night in the Cancer Hospital—I was once up all night there with a man dying with cancer, until five o’clock in the morning—do you suppose I could easily love God? I could not, because I could not feel that He had done anything or suffered anything. When some man says to me, “Come, let us fight this difficult battle together; I will bear the worst with you; I will go and suffer with you, fight with you, bear the unpopularity with you, and all that is brought against you; I will fight side by side with you”—I honour that man, and I would go and follow him, stand by him, and I should feel that he had done something to show his sympathy. And when God, as I believe, comes down among all the cancer and the consumption and the misery, and says, “I will come and bear it with you; I cannot explain to you now why it has to be borne, but I will bear the worst with you; I suffered more than I ask you to suffer,” I can understand that; and when I am dying, or when I am with some one dying, it is everything to know that God knows of the suffering and death, and has borne it Himself. And, therefore, I say without the Incarnation I could not answer one of these questions that are put to me about the pain and misery and sickness we have in the world. 2 [Note: Bishop Winnington Ingram, The Love of the Trinity, 113.]

(3) By looking thus upon the sacrifice of our blessed Lord, and the great law of vicarious suffering of which that was the highest manifestation, we gain a new sense of the love of God thus suffering for us; and it is thus that, if we would rise with Christ and share His Kingdom, we must also suffer and die with Him. At some time or other we all pray that we may sit down with Him when He comes into the inheritance of His glory, but to all of us He returns the same answer: “Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of? and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?” And no doubt we can, if we are filled with His love and have learned to lean upon His Cross; but suffering will have no beauty in it unless it be sanctified by love, as indeed it has no virtue in it unless we bear it for a good end and from the constraining force of love. And thus we arrive at the true idea of our own life, which is that we should aim, not at freedom from suffering, but at elevation of character and a spirit of unselfish devotion.

Norman Macleod in his Highland Parish tells a wonderful story of love’s redemptive sacrifice. Years ago a Highland widow, unable to pay her rent, was threatened with eviction. She set out, with her only child, to walk ten miles over the mountains to the home of a relative. When she started the weather was warm and bright, for the month was May, but before she reached the home of her friend a terrible snowstorm fell upon the hills. She did not reach her destination, and next day a dozen strong men started to search for her. At the summit of the pass where the storm had been the fiercest they found her in the snow, stripped almost to nakedness, dead. In a sheltering nook they found the child, safe and well, wrapped in the garments the mother had taken from her own body. Years afterwards the son of the minister who had conducted the mother’s funeral went to Glasgow to preach a preparatory sermon. The night was stormy and the audience small. The snow and the storm recalled to his mind the story he had often heard his father tell, and, abandoning his prepared sermon, he told the story of a mother’s love. Some days after he was hastily summoned to the bed of a dying man. The man was a stranger to him, but seizing the minister’s hand he said, “You do not know me, but I know you, and knew your father before you. Although I have lived in Glasgow many years, I have never attended a church. The other day I happened to pass your door as the snow came down. I heard the singing and slipped into a back seat. There I heard the story of the widow and her son.” The man’s voice choked and he cried, “I am that son. Never did I forget my mother’s love, but I never saw the love of God in giving Himself for me until now. It was God made you tell that story. My mother did not die in vain. Her prayer is answered.” 1 [Note: The Expository Times, xx. 301.]

III

The World and Christ

“Whosoever believeth on him.”

The purpose of God in the gift to the world of His only begotten Son is that whosoever believeth on Him may not perish but have eternal life. For He wills that all men should be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God, one Mediator also between God and man, Himself God, the Man Christ Jesus, who gave Himself a ransom for all. Personal trust in Jesus as the infallible Revealer of what God thinks and feels about us, and what He will do for the worst of us at our worst, kills the despair and self-torture born of sin, whilst it makes sin appear exceedingly sinful, lifts us into fellowship with the Divine, with right and purity and goodness and service, and compels us to feel that the God who suffers so inconceivably and mysteriously for us as He did will surely supply all our needs and make us sharers of His joy for ever. It is a new and renewing thought of God. The faith on Christ is love, the love is faith. Each works by the other, and both work on and towards righteousness, for Christ and righteousness are one; and to trust and love Him is to trust eternal right and love it and work for it; and so the Gospel is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth on Jesus. The secret of Jesus is laid bare.

The other day, when I was in Northumberland, some one asked me in public, with evident sincerity, if it did not make a difference whether he accepted Christ or not; and when we had arrived at a mutual agreement as to what we meant by “accepting Christ,” we agreed about the question itself, namely, that it made all the difference whether a man accepted or rejected Him. To accept Him means to believe that truth and right are worth witnessing and, if need be, suffering for, in daily life, in the home, and the shop, and the office, and the factory; that to give is more blessed than to receive; it means a firm belief in the victory of goodness, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding; it means the acknowledgment of the kingship of love. How far are we one and all from that consummation! Yet not so far but that we desire it, and in our best moments strive after it. 1 [Note: J. Warschauer.]

1. St. John has in mind something more than merely intellectual assent.

(1) Believing does not, for example, mean here holding all that is taught in the Bible about Creation, about Adam and Eve, or about the Fall. Nor does believing here mean accepting all that is said about Christ in the Bible. A man might believe everything in the Bible and yet not believe on Christ in St. John’s sense at all; while, on the other hand, he might believe on Christ in St. John’s sense, and yet not believe other things in the Bible.

(2) Again, believing does not mean here the kind of belief implied in the acceptance or the recitation of a Creed. Many solemnly and sincerely recite a Creed, and bow at the Name of Jesus, who yet never believed on Jesus in St. John’s sense; while, on the other hand, a man may believe on Jesus, in St. John’s sense, and have Eternal Life, and yet conscientiously hesitate to recite a Creed, feeling that he could not honestly accept some of the points that are mentioned in it.

(3) Believing does not mean here simply holding a certain doctrine or theory of the Atonement. There have always been multitudes of people who have held the correct, orthodox view of the Atonement—or the view which in their time was generally held to be orthodox—have held it absolutely and passionately, and yet, in St. John’s sense, have never believed on Jesus, and never had Eternal Life; while there have been people who believed on Him in St. John’s sense, and had Eternal Life, but who never attempted to formulate any theory of the Sacrifice which was offered by Jesus once for all.

2. St. John includes an undoubtedly intellectual element, when he speaks of “belief,” as even this passage shows. His whole object in writing is to prove from the reminiscences of the life of the Lord that Jesus was the Word made flesh, that He was the only begotten Son of God, and that, though Son of Man, He was Divine. There is that intellectual element in St. John’s idea of believing. But the distinctive meaning of “believe” in St. John’s writings is not that intellectual element. That intellectual element underlies his thought, but it is not that which he is urging. In order to see what he means by using the word “belief,” we should look at what results from the believing. According to him, “belief” gives life. But what gives life is nothing but vital fellowship with God, and therefore by “believing” he means something which produces a vital fellowship with God. What is it that produces vital fellowship with God?

(1) It is the act of personal trust in Jesus as a living Person, in Jesus as the personal Manifestation of God the Father to the soul of Man. It is not believing this or that about Him—the intellectual side of Faith; it is casting ourselves upon Him, the Unseen, as a Reality, as the Reality, as the Reality of God.

Never shall I forget how in my early years I was distressed as to the meaning of the word “believe” as used in Scripture. It seemed to me to have a mysterious significance, associated with experiences that no ordinary youth could possibly have. I felt that if I myself should ever believe on Jesus Christ it must be through some strange in working whereby I should be lifted into special ecstasies, and given special visions. But one day I came upon the statement that the word “believe” is made up of two old words “by” and “live,” that to believe on a person is to “by-live” or “live-by” that person, that if I believe in Washington I live by the spirit that animated Washington, and that if I believe in Jesus Christ I live by the Spirit of Jesus Christ. Whether or not this statement concerning the origin of the word stands the test of linguistic criticism is of minor significance; the fact remains, and ever will remain, whatever linguistic criticism may say, that any man who lives by another believes in that other. And when I realized this fact and I simply started out to do what I thought Jesus Christ would have me do in my place and in my time, I am sure that I began to answer to God’s desire, and that then in those earliest moments, whether I lived or whether I died, I was in God’s sight a believer. 1 [Note: J. G. K. McClure, Supreme Things, 23.]

(2) To trust Christ is not merely to believe with the intellect the truth about Him, but to commit our hearts to His keeping. What all that is going to mean we cannot know at first, but there is in the life of every Christian one moment, which may or may not be remembered, when the turn is taken. In the life of every one who has really tried to make a high use of the years, there is always a point where the road ceases to descend and begins to climb upward. What has happened? Perhaps some fervent and rousing word has been carried home by the Holy Spirit. There has been a bereavement—perhaps some one has died who is so cruelly missed that the rest of life seems dark and cold as the later hours of a winter day. There has been a disappointment, perhaps, in something on which the heart has been fixed, and for consolation it has turned to the Refuge and the Lover of souls. To one who sat dreaming in her garden, repeating the old enigmas, “Was He? Was He not? If He was not, from whence came I? If He is, what am I, and what am I doing with my life?” a voice seemed to speak. The voice spoke and said, “Act as if I were, and thou shalt know I Am!” She obeyed, and soon He revealed Himself. In this way and that is the story told, is the experience passed through; but in essence it is always the same. It is a committal for time and for eternity, for life and for death, to the Lord of all worlds. Then is the channel opened between the poor, narrow, needy life and the great lake of love. Then the Divine Lover has His way with the soul.

You believe God; that is good. You believe the Gospel; that is good too. Believe all that; but that is not the point. It is not believing the Bible, it is not even believing God, it is not believing the Gospel that gives the Everlasting Life that is spoken of. It is the definite act of self-committal to Jesus Christ as the Way, the Truth and the Life, as the Manifestation of the saving Power and Love of God to you. It is that definite committal of yourself—an act of the soul—a going out, a reaching forth, a casting of yourself on Him. It is that act of faith, that believing in Him, that gives the fellowship with God which is Eternal Life. 1 [Note: R. F. Horton, The Triumph of the Cross, 14.]

I sometimes wish we had never heard that word “faith.” For as soon as we begin to talk about “faith,” people begin to think that we are away up in some theological region far above everyday life. Suppose we try to bring it down a little nearer to our businesses and bosoms, and instead of using a word that is kept sacred for employment in religious matters, and saying “faith,” we say “trust.” That is what you give to your wives and husbands, is it not? And that is exactly what you have to give to Jesus Christ, simply to lay hold of Him as a man lays hold of the heart that loves him, and leans his whole weight upon it. Lean hard on Him, hang on Him, or, to take the other metaphor that is one of the Old Testament words for trust, “flee for refuge” to Him. Fancy a man with the avenger of blood at his back, and the point of the pursuer’s spear almost pricking his spine—don’t you think he would make for the City of Refuge with some speed? That is what you have to do. He that believeth, and by trust lays hold of the Hand that holds him up, will never fall; and he that does not lay hold of that Hand will never stand, to say nothing of rising. And so by these two links God’s love of the world is connected with the salvation of the world. 1 [Note: A. Maclaren.]

3. “Whosoever.”—Take together the two words “world” and “whosoever.” It need not be said that those are both universal terms. “World” is the most universal term that we have in the language. For instance, we sometimes mean by it the whole earth on which we dwell; sometimes the whole human family that dwells on the earth; and sometimes the world-age, or whole period during winch the whole family of man occupies the sphere. That is the word that God uses to indicate the objects of His love. But there is always danger of our losing sight of ourselves in a multitude of people. In the great mass individuals are lost, and it becomes to us simply a countless throng. But when God looks at us, He never forgets each individual. Every one of us stands out just as plainly before the Lord as though we were the only man, woman, or child on earth. So God adds here another word, “whosoever,” which is also universal, but with this difference between the two: “world” is collectively universal, that is, it takes all men in the mass; “whosoever” is distributively universal, that is, it takes every one out of the mass, and holds him up separately before the Lord. If this precious text only said, “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son,” one might say, “Oh, he never thought of me. He had a kind of general love to the whole world, but he never thought of me.” But when God uses that all-embracing word “whosoever,” that must mean me; for whatever my name may be, it is “whosoever.”

“Thank God,” said Richard Baxter, “for that ‘whosoever.’ Had it been—‘Let Richard Baxter take,’ I might have doubted if I were meant; but that ‘whosoever will’ includes me, though the worst of all Richard Baxters.”

In the South Seas, in the beginning of last century, was a man of the name of Hunt, who had gone to preach the Gospel to the inhabitants of Tahiti The missionaries had laboured there for about fourteen or fifteen years, but had not, as yet, a single convert. Desolating wars were then spreading across the island of Tahiti and the neighbouring islands. The most awful idolatry, sensuality, ignorance, and brutality, with everything else that was horrible, prevailed; and the Word of God seemed to have made no impression upon those awfully degraded islanders. A translation of the Gospel according to St. John had just been completed, and Mr. Hunt, before it was printed, read, from the manuscript translation, the third chapter; and, as he read on, he reached this sixteenth verse, and, in the Tahitian language, gave those poor idolaters this compact little gospel: “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have eternal life.” A chief stepped out from the rest (Pomare II.), and said, “Would you read that again, Mr. Hunt?” Mr. Hunt read it again. “Would you read that once more?” and he read it once more. “Ah!” said the man, “that may be true of you white folks, but it is not true of us down here in these islands. The gods have no such love as that for us.” Mr. Hunt stopped in his reading, and he took that one word “whosoever,” and by it showed that poor chief that God’s gospel message meant him; that it could not mean one man or woman any more than another. Mr. Hunt was expounding this wonderful truth, when Pomare II. said, “Well, then, if that is the case, your book shall be my book, and your God shall be my God, and your people shall be my people, and your heaven shall be my home. We, down on the island of Tahiti, never heard of any God that loved us and loved everybody in that way.” And that first convert is now the leader of a host, numbering nearly a million, in the South Seas. 1 [Note: A. T. Pierson.]

Bengel, the accomplished expositor of Scripture, says, “The ground I feel under me is this: that by the power of the Holy Ghost I confide in Jesus as an everlasting High Priest, in whom I have all and abound.” Archbishop Whately said, “Talk to me no more of intellect; there is nothing for me now but Christ.” Bunsen said, “I see Christ, and I see, through Christ, God.” That brilliant preacher, Dr. McCall, of Manchester, said,” I am no fanatic; rather I have been too much of a speculatist; and I wish to say this—which I hope you will all forgive me for uttering in your presence—I am a great sinner, I have been a great sinner; but my trust is in Jesus Christ and what He has done and suffered for sinners. Upon this, as the foundation of my hope, I can confidently rely now that I am sinking into eternity.” 2 [Note: J. Clifford, The Secret of Jesus, 96.]

IV

The World and God

“Should not perish, but have eternal life.”

1. Perishing.—Pardon is not wrung from the Father by the Son. It is from the Father’s love that salvation flows. But this love of God to our sinful world does not form a contradiction to that wrath which suspends judgment over it. It is not in reality the love of communion with which God embraces the pardoned sinner; it is a love of compassion like that which is felt for the unhappy or for enemies, a love the intensity of which arises from the very greatness of the punishment which awaits the obdurate sinner. Thus the two ideas which form the beginning and end of the verse—Divine love and threatening perdition—are closely joined together.

(1) Perishing in its more obvious and terrible forms we have all seen. We have seen bright young lives clouded, over-darkened, devastated, destroyed. But there is such a thing as perishing respectably, and that is far more common. A man may succeed in life, and attain his low ambitions, and pass well among his fellow-townsmen, and yet when you contemplate him you know that he has perished, that his ideals are gone, that there is now no longer any communication between him and his Maker, that his soul is gone out of him. There are more who perish in silk and broadcloth than there are who perish in rags.

There is a danger, which only the mission of Jesus Christ averts, that men may perish. That is a danger which is as universal as the love of God, for it is “the world” that is in danger of perishing; and it is a danger which is as individualizing and specific as the love itself, for “the world” that “perishes” is made up of single souls. In that category you have a place, and I, and all our brethren. Whoever stands in the great class of the objects of Divine love belongs also to the class of those who are in risk of destruction. It does not become me to fling about the thunderbolts of God, or to threaten and lighten as He has the right to do; but I do believe that much of the preaching of this generation is toothless, impotent, unblessed, because men have got too falsely tender-hearted and sentimental to talk about the necessary issue of alienation from God. Be you sure of this, that in whatever form it may be realized—and that is of secondary importance—the world—and especially you that have heard the Gospel all your days—stands in peril of destruction. “To perish,” whether it mean to be reduced into non-being, or whether it mean, as I believe it means, to be so separated from the one Source of life that, conscious existence continuing, everything that made life beautiful and blessed and desirable is gone—to “perish” is the necessary end of the man who wrenches himself away from God. 1 [Note: A. Maclaren, Paul’s Prayers, 187.]

(2) There is a terrible significance in that short negative clause “should not perish but”—most terrible. For, regarded in the light of the rest of the text, to perish—what is to perish? It is to fall beyond the outermost sphere of God’s love, as to be saved is to be drawn into its innermost circle. To perish is to feel that the sweet attraction of all that is good, all that is lovely, has lost its hold on the soul, to feel that another horrible attraction working in a contrary direction is bearing the spirit away into the abyss of malignant sin and of eternal death. The fearful anticlimax of eternal life! The two are mutual alternatives: the absence of the one is the presence of the other. There is a strange antagonistic correspondence between the two. The punishment of the lost is not merely in proportion to sin, but seems to be in some proportion to the parallel eternity of the glory offered but refused. It is the punishment of beings to whom eternal life has been tendered but rejected, of beings who have had an option and taken their choice. “This is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light.”

One day in America, near the Falls of Niagara, Moore saw this scene:—An Indian whose boat was moored to the shore was making love to the wife of another Indian; the husband came upon them unawares; he jumped into the boat, when the other cut the cord, and in an instant it was carried into the middle of the stream, and before he could seize his paddle was already within the rapids. He exerted all his force to extricate himself from the peril, but finding that his efforts were vain, and his canoe was drawn with increasing rapidity towards the Falls, he threw away his paddle, drank off at a draught the contents of a bottle of brandy, tossed the empty bottle into the air, then quietly folded his arms, extended himself in the boat, and awaited with perfect calmness his inevitable fate. In a few moments he was whirled down the Falls and disappeared for ever. 1 [Note: The Greville Memoirs, i. 254.]

The scene is terrible enough. But the perishing of a man’s body is a light thing in comparison with the perishing of his soul.

(3) The light and the darkness, the Light of Light and the blackness of darkness, salvation and perdition—between these two extremes the inhabitants of this earth occupy the middle place. We move on the neutral ground, between the armies of Heaven and the legions of Satan, in the debatable territory—this world is the region of our option and the scene of our free decision. Out of Christ there is no salvation to any man: neither in this world nor in the world to come. “There is none other name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved,” but the great name of Jesus. Faith in Him is, as He Himself is, the gift of God, but it is the gift of the Spirit inviting, persuading our will, not compelling it. To refuse these gifts is to perish; to reject them now is to be rejected at the last day. To lose them here is to learn their value by contrast hereafter and to weep their loss for ever.

In the Royal Academy of 1908 there was a picture by the Hon. John Collier which will always attract attention. It is called “Sentenced to Death.” We are introduced into the consulting room of a great physician, and facing us is a young man who is hearing from the doctor the result of his diagnosis. The doctor is telling him that he is a doomed man, that he will presently die. The young man sits there in the chair, faultlessly dressed, handsome, with all the promise of youth in his face, and there is no special look of illness except perhaps to a doctor’s eye. He has just received his sentence of death, and has strung himself to endurance.

I thought I saw in the intention of the artist the dawning of a vision in the young man’s eyes, as if he were seeking for an inward hope, or trying to fix his thought upon a faith that he half knew. As I looked into his face how I longed, though it was only a picture, how I longed to tell him that if he believed in Jesus he had everlasting life, that he need not be afraid, he need not even be cast down. Believing in Jesus he has everlasting life. As I looked at the picture I so longed to tell him, that I turned my face away lest I should cry out in the room. 2 [Note: R. F. Horton.]

2. Eternal Life.—Eternal life comes, and can come, only by a vital fellowship with the Ever-living God; and the reason why this believing in Jesus brings eternal life is that it brings us into vital fellowship with God. Through Christ, through faith in Christ and the committal of the soul to Him, we find we have come into vital contact with God. We have touched the source of Life—Eternal Life.

(1) It is called eternal life, which does not mean that it is a life in a future world; but it is called eternal life here and now, because here and now this life which means vital fellowship with God is established, and begins to run on into Eternity. A life begins here and now which continues there and then—beyond and for ever. Believing in Christ means that we have come into contact with the very Fountain of Life—God Himself, the Eternal and Ever-living God; and therefore, believing, you have eternal life. When we believe in Christ, eternal life has begun in us.

God does not help His children now and then, but now, always now. There is no “then”; it exists only in imagination. The only time we ever actually need God is now. If “then” troubles us in imagination and we wonder what will become of us then, let us learn to live with God now. Form the habit of using God and being used of God, and the imaginary and dreadful “then” will be swallowed up in the stream of now when the time comes. No clocks keep time to-morrow. Springs push and hands point now. Now is the appointed time for clocks as well as people. God never helped anyone to-morrow. He is a very present help. What is eternity but God’s now? Let us then live the eternal life with God now. 1 [Note: M. D. Babcock, Thoughts for Every-Day Living, 44.]

(2) The end God has in view in such belief is our largest opportunity. He calls it eternal life. It is fulness of everything that makes man great and existence sweet. It is not mere immortality. Immortality simply gives the ennobled spirit its endless perfect province. Eternal life is realized when a man comes to his better self; when he is saved from being “frittered away in frivolities, from being consumed by the canker of avarice, from being palsied by the mildew of idleness, from being enervated by luxury, from being crippled by the paralysis of doubt.” Eternal life is rescue from perishing in selfishness, animalism, hate and pride, with all the other evils that destroy humanity. Eternal life is when a man, entering upon the path of truth and nobility, renders service to humanity, his body being obedient to every known law of health, his mind entering into fellowship with the highest thoughts of eternity, and his spirit communing with the spirits of the just and good on earth and of the just and good in heaven: when a man in his own time and place according to his own temperament reproduces in himself Jesus Christ.

We shall behold with our inward eyes the mirror of the wisdom of God, in which shall shine and be illumined all things which have ever existed and which can rejoice our hearts. And we shall hear with our outward ears the melody and the sweet songs of saints and angels, who shall praise God throughout eternity. And with our inner ears we shall hear the inborn Word of the Father; and in this Word we shall receive all knowledge and all truth. And the sublime fragrance of the Holy Spirit shall pass before us, sweeter than all balms and precious herbs that ever were; and this fragrance shall draw us out of ourselves, towards the eternal love of God, and we shall taste His everlasting goodness, sweeter than all honey, and it shall feed us, and enter into our soul and our body; and we shall be ever an hungered and athirst for it, and because of our hunger and thirst, these delights and this nourishment shall remain with us for ever, evermore renewed; and this is eternal life. 1 [Note: M. Maeterlinck, Ruysbroeck and the Mystics, 76.]

3. What response are we making, or are we prepared to make, to the love of God? There was a book written not many years ago of which the title was: The Christian Life: A Response. It was a beautiful title, which put the Christian life in the true attitude—it should not be lived out of fear of hell, not lived to purchase heaven, but rather as a response to the love of God. What sort of response are we expected to make to the love of God?

(1) Gratitude.—Perhaps you are familiar with the story of the brilliant unbeliever, Harriet Martineau. She said to a friend on some glorious morning, “Doesn’t such a day make one feel grateful?” To which her friend quietly replied, “Grateful to whom, my dear?” Some of us have been tasting this summer the joys of travel in enchanting scenery, full of grandeur and manifold loveliness, and have experienced this sense of gratitude over and over again; but we have our answer to the question, “Grateful to whom?” Shall we not love Him who gave us these delights and all the satisfactions and stimulus of our lives because He loves us? How strange it seems to read of the late Professor Huxley, in the full career of joyful work, saying that at the end of every day he felt a strong desire to say, “Thank you” to some Power if he could only have known to whom to say it. It should not have been so difficult to say, “Thank you, God!” 1 [Note: J. Warschauer.]

When Robert M‘Cheyne and Andrew Bonar were in the Holy Land, they went to visit the Garden of Gethsemane. Dr. Bonar thus writes: “The sun had newly risen; few people were upon the road, and the Valley of Jehoshaphat was lonely and still. We read over all the passages of Scripture relating to Gethsemane while seated together there. It seemed nothing wonderful to read of the wanderings of these three disciples, when we remembered that they were sinful men like disciples now; but the compassion, the unwavering love of Jesus appeared by the contrast to be infinitely amazing. For such souls as ours He rent this vale with His strong crying and tears, wetted this ground with His bloody sweat, and set His face like a flint to go forward and die. ‘While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.’ Each of us occupied part of the time alone—in private meditation—and then we joined together in prayer, putting our sins into that cup which our Master drank here, and pleading for our own souls, for our far-distant friends, and for the flocks committed to our care.”

(2) Adoration.—The shepherds were quite right when they said: “O come let us adore him!” The angels were right when they sang: “Glory to God in the highest!” So we should come to the house of God and bow the head in adoring worship if we believe at all.

What a Sunday! At 8 a.m. we were present at the Lutheran Mass, if I may so call it. The altar, the candles, the comings and goings of the pastor, the litanies sung with responses, all astonished me. However, it is a beautiful idea that pervades all that, and one which we have lost sight of in our Reformed Churches, namely, adoration. We go to the preaching ( au prêche) and that is all. 2 [Note: Coillard of the Zambesi, 162.]

(3) Purity.—The love of God believed in must mean a life of growing purity. If we may have the Son of God within us; if He loved us, and gave Himself for us like that; if He has come like a good shepherd over the hills to find us, and has found us, then we must live a life, in His strength, of something like correspondence to His; we must confess the sins that we have done; we must be perfectly plain about what our life has been, and how careless and unworthy it has been, if we feel it has been so. Then we must not be content with that. Having got straight with God, we must ask Him to come to our heart.

Come to my heart, Lord Jesus;

There is room in my heart for Thee.

“Look straight into the light, and you will always have the shadows behind.” Yes, but more than that, you will see more clearly how to walk. Look straight into the light, and every year you will see more things that you must do, and more clearly the things you must avoid. “Every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as he is pure.” 1 [Note: Bishop Winnington Ingram, The Gospel in Action, 323.]

(4) Service.—Lastly, there is the response of service. If He came down from heaven, and so loved the world, we must find a way in which to love our fellow-men as He loved us. Christ’s doctrines find their best meaning only in service! Who shall know so well what the Atonement means as they who are striving every day to bring its light into dark places? Who shall understand the mercy of God as those who are toiling helpfully amongst poor, weak-willed men, who, crushed by the hard laws of life, can be raised only by compassion? Who shall catch so full a glimpse of the wisdom of God’s purpose as they who, ministering to the needy, the ignorant, the hungry, find how strong are the moral forces which are born, not of constraint, but of love and of free will?

God loves the world. Therefore he loves the men of every nation, of every language, of every creed. He loves the man that jostles me in the street. He loves the man that overreaches me, and deprives me of my rights, or who insults or slanders me. And if I call myself a Christian, I must love them with a deep and holy love, and must be willing even to suffer in order to give light to their darkened eyes, and soften their hard hearts with brotherly affections. Otherwise I have no real fellowship with the Father and the Son. “He that hateth his brother is a murderer, and no murderer has eternal life abiding in him.” 2 [Note: James Drummond, Johannine Thoughts, 40.]

Are we ready for the Master’s use? Do we really believe in the possibility of the world’s redemption? How spacious is our belief? How large is the possibility which we entertain? When we survey the clamant needs of the race, do we discover any “hopeless cases”? Where have we obtained the right to use the word “hopeless”? What evidence or experience will justify us in saying of any man, “He is too far gone”? In what atmosphere of thought and expectancy are we living? Are we dwelling in the Book of Ecclesiastes, or making our home in the Gospel of St. John? Let us ransack the city. Let us rake out, if we can find him, the worst of our race. Let us produce the sin-steeped and the lust-sodden soul, and then let us hear the word of the Master: “Believe ye that I am able to do this?” The first condition of being capable ministers of Christ is to believe in the possibility of the world’s salvation. 1 [Note: J. H. Jowett.]

I shall never forget how Professor Elmslie, in the brief delirium before death, when his mind was wandering, came back over and over again to “God is Love, God is Love; I will go out and tell this to all the world. They do not know it.” 2 [Note: W. Robertson Nicoll, The Lamp of Sacrifice, 247.]

Teach me to love the world as thou dost love,

Ready to give my dearest and my best,

Than self more dear, to save it from its sins,

And turn all hearts to thee. Oh! grant the faith

In thy beloved Son, thy holy Lamb,

Which wakes, within, the sleeping life of love,

And makes us one with him who died that men

Might share his life eternal, and might dwell

In thee, from whose exhaustless fulness all

Who look to thee in fervent prayer receive

Thy Spirit’s bounteous gift. But from that love

Which clings in fondness to the world’s bad ways,

And sinks the soul in its corrupting guile,

Save me, O God; for earth must pass away,

Ambition’s pride, and all the idle glare

Of social rank, and wealth’s delusive charm.

That which we see is temporal, and soon

Must yield to time’s corrosive touch, and sink

To dark oblivion. But the things unseen,

Love, holiness, and truth, eternal stand

Before thy glorious throne, and speak thy word

Within the heart of man. To that blest word

Be all my powers subdued, that I may still

Show forth thy love which quickens and redeems. 3 [Note: James Drummond, Johannine Thoughts, 42.]

The Amazing Gift of Love

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