Bible Commentaries
Revelation 1

Verses 5-6

Redeeming Love

Unto him that loveth us and loosed us from our sins by his blood; and he made us to be a kingdom, to be priests unto his God and Father; to him be the glory and the dominion for ever and ever. Amen.— Revelation 1:5-6.

John is writing to the seven churches of Asia, representative of all churches in all time. He salutes them in the name of Father, Son, and Spirit, though employing unusual phraseology, coined in his own mint and very precious. While setting forth the work and glory of Christ as “the faithful witness, the firstborn from the dead, the ruler of the kings of the earth,” he can contain himself no longer. He cannot deliver his message till he has relieved his heart, and he pours forth, as from a fountain of thanksgiving aspiring heavenward, the anthem of the Church of the redeemed below—“Unto him that loveth us!”

An utterance like this gathers up so many experiences in itself; it implies so much, reminds us of so much, suggests so much. In the story of the Roman Empire we read of the banquet in which, because the rarest wines were not costly enough, the guests drank from goblets in which priceless pearls had been dissolved. But how richly filled is the chalice containing the thanksgivings of saints, forgiven, cleansed, and fitted for lofty service; and who can estimate the significance of the praises they offer to their Saviour for His redeeming grace? And best of all, such a text, while reminding us of our sins and our redemption, our trials and deliverances, our evil and its mastery, our low estate and the rank to which Christ has raised us, leads entirely away from self and fastens all our attention on another Figure—to Him be glory for ever!

Like Christian who, encountering the perils of the Valley, found there also the delivering power of the Lord of the Hill, the soul redeemed and restored cannot but sing,—

O world of wonders! (I can say no less)

That I should be preserv’d in that distress

That I have met with here! O blessed be

The Hand that from it hath delivered me!

Dangers in darkness, devils, hell, and sin

Did compass me, while I this vale was in:

Yea, snares, and pits, and traps, and nets did lie

My path about, that worthless silly I

Might have been catch’d, entangled, and cast down.

But since I live, let Jesus wear the Crown.

The text is an ascription of praise unto Him whose love is—

I. An Unceasing Love—“who loveth us.”

II. An Emancipating Love—“who loosed us from our sins.”

III. An Enfranchising Love—“who made us to be a kingdom, to be priests unto his God and Father.”

I

The Love that is Ever with Us

“Unto him that loveth us.”

So the true text reads. Some copyist, who was thinking more of grammar than of Christian experience, thought it must be a mistake, and altered it to “loved.” Or perhaps St. John himself first wrote “loved” and then bethought him: “Why should I say ‘loved’ when He loves us still?” At any rate, this is the conviction of the Early Church: the Jesus whom they had known not only loved them while He was their Companion on the earth, but loves them still, shares therefore in that further quality of the Godhead of which St. John writes elsewhere: “God is Love,” and gives to that quality just what each man requires to find in it—personal direction towards himself. Thus Jesus is the link between the universal God and the individual soul. What without Him would be incredible, not only becomes credible, but is actually realized through Him. God loves me: I know it by referring myself to the historical Jesus: and when that is so, He has for me the value of God.

1. Love begins with God.—That is where our hopes are born. That is the background in which we find the warrant for all our confidence and all our faith. God loves us. All effective reasoning concerning human redemption must begin here. God loves! The beginning is not to be found in us, in our inclinations and gropings and resolvings and prayers. These are essential but secondary. The primary element is the inclination of God. Omnia exeunt in mysterium, says Sir Thomas Browne; all things issue in mystery. But also all things issue from mystery; by which we mean not the incomprehensible, but the all-comprehending; not the unintelligible, but the self-sufficing and self-explaining; not the blackness of darkness, but the blaze of truth with excess of light.

We cannot get behind Divine love as a cause. In Deuteronomy ( Revelation 6:7) Israel is told that Jehovah loved His people—because He loved them. The Christian hymn says the same thing. “He hath loved, He hath loved us, we cannot tell why; He hath loved, He hath loved us because He would love.” The Jews were chosen, not because of their numbers, not because of their warlike virtues, not because of their “religious instincts” or amenability to religious teaching, but because God loved them. A Syrian ready to perish was their father, but God made of them a nation to whom all the world has been, and still is, indebted. That does not mean that Divine love is irrational, arbitrary, capricious; but it does mean that for personal beings love is a primary fact, a source, a fountain, an ultimate explanation, beyond which it is well not to strive to pass—especially the unworthy, the wayward, and the evil; all they can do is to sing—

Who for me vouchsafed to die,

Loves me still—I know not why!

The fire which warms the hearthstone is not original; it is derivative, and refers us back to the sun. The candle with which we search for the lost piece of silver is not original and originating; it is borrowed flame from the great altar-fires of the sun. Earth’s broken lights, a candle here, a lamp there, a fire yonder, all index backwards, and point us to the great originating centre of solar light and heat. The lamps and candles and fires that burn in human life, everything that is bright and genial and aspiring, have reference backward to some creative and beneficent source. “We love, because he first loveth us.” “He first loveth!” That is the primary quantity, and every kindly feeling that warms the heart, every pure hope that illumines the mind, were begotten of that most gracious source. 1 [Note: J. H. Jowett, Apostolic Optimism, 237.]

2. This love never leaves us.—The past tense expresses a blessed truth, but “loveth” includes all—past, present, and future; it is a timeless word, bringing with it fresh breezes from across the ocean of eternity. It is not a single act that is here indicated, but a state abiding. For this “loveth” is the timeless present of that Divine nature, of which we cannot properly say either that it was or that it will be, but only that it for ever is; and the outgoings of His love are like the outgoings of that Divine energy of which we cannot properly say that it did or that it will do, but only that it ever does. His love, if one may use such a phrase, is lifted above all tenses, and transcends even the bounds of grammar. He did love. He does love. He will love. All three forms of speech must be combined in setting forth the ever present, because timeless and eternal, love of the Incarnate Word.

The great poems of the world have been love-poems; they have been poems of love betrayed, or unrequited, or they have been thunders wailed out over a dead and buried love. But the greatest love-story of all is of One who loves for ever because He lives for ever. The Lord Jesus Christ has awakened a passionate love in unnumbered hearts, but among them all not one sweet, dead, disappointed face—like Elaine’s confronting Lancelot at the river-gate of Arthur’s palace—upturned in mute appeal, has ever reproached the Crucified for having offered to Him in vain an unmeasured affection. The love of the living has been offered to the living, and only a living Lord could have awakened and satisfied a love which has been poured out at His feet like spikenard. It is this consciousness of being loved that gives ever deeper meaning and ever gathering volume to the great doxology, “Unto him be the dominion for ever.”

When Sir James Mackintosh lay dying, his friends by the bedside saw his lips slightly moving, and as one of them desired to catch, if possible, the last words of the great and good man, he leaned over, and applying the ear close, heard him saying, “Jesus, love, the same thing; Jesus, love, the same thing.” 2 [Note: A. H. Drysdale, A Moderator’s Year, 99.]

There is a highroad which I knew full well away in the distant North, and a gladsome, shining river keeps it company. Their tracks remain in closest fellowship. They turn and wind together, and at any moment you may step from the dusty highway and drink deep draughts from the limpid stream. “There is a river, the streams whereof make glad the city of God.” Here is the hard, dusty highway of the individual life, and near it there flows the gladdening river of the Eternal Love. It turns with our turnings, and winds through all the perplexing labyrinths of our intensely varied day. We may ignore the river; we cannot ignore it away. Thrice blessed are they who heed and use it. “They drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them, and that Rock was Christ.” The inspiring resources are always just at hand. The river of love runs just by the hard road. It never parts company with the highway. 1 [Note: J. H. Jowett, Apostolic Optimism, 239.]

3. We can set no limit to the extent of this love.—“Unto him that loveth us.” The words become especially beautiful if we remember that they come from the lips of him whose distinction it was that he was “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” It is as if he had said, “I share my privilege with you all. I was no nearer Him than you may be. Every head may rest on the breast where mine rested. Having the sweet remembrance of that early love, these things write I unto you that ye also may have fellowship with me in that which was my great distinction. I, the disciple whom Jesus loved, speak to you as the disciples whom Jesus loves.” He is speaking of One who had been dead for half a century, and he is speaking to people none of whom had probably ever seen Jesus in His lifetime, and most of whom had not been born when He died. Yet to them all he turns with that profound and mighty present tense, and says, “He loveth us.” He was speaking to all generations, and telling all the tribes of men of a love which is in active operation towards each of them, not only at the moment when St. John spoke to Asiatic Greeks, but at the moment when we Englishmen read his words, “Christ that loveth us.”

When we extend our thoughts or our sympathies to a crowd, we lose the individual. We generalize, as logicians say, by neglecting the particular instances. That is to say, when we look at the forest we do not see the trees. But Jesus Christ sees each tree, each stem, each branch, each leaf, just as when the crowd thronged Him and pressed Him, He knew when the tremulous finger, wasted and shrunken to skin and bone, was timidly laid on the hem of His garment; as there was room for all the five thousand on the grass, and no man’s plenty was secured at the expense of another man’s penury, so each of us has a place in that heart; and my abundance will not starve you, or your feeding full diminish the supplies for me. Christ loves all, not with the vague general philanthropy with which men love the mass, but with the individualizing knowledge and special direction of affection towards the individual which demands for its fulness a Divine nature to exercise it. And so each of us may have our own rainbow, to each of us the sunbeam may come straight from the sun and strike upon our eye in a direct line, to each of us the whole warmth of the orb may be conveyed, and each of us may say, “He loved me, and gave himself for me.”

Let us now turn aside and look upon this great sight, of Love that burneth with fire, yet is not consumed; of Love that having poured out its soul unto death, yet liveth, to see of that soul’s long travail and to be satisfied with it. “Behold the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world.” When were Love’s arms stretched so wide as upon the Cross? When did they embrace so much as when Thou, O Christ, didst gather within Thy bosom the spears and arrows of the mighty to open us a Lane for Freedom! 1 [Note: Dora Greenwell, The Patience of Hope (ed. 1894), 130.]

“He loveth us.” That covers past, present, and future. The love of our Redeemer stretches from eternity to eternity. It had no beginning, and will have no ending. It is unchanged, unmodified, untouched, either by lapse of time or variation of circumstance. Utterly inexhaustible, it flows incessantly in undiminished and undiminishable tide into the lives towards which it is directed.

Immortal Love, for ever full,

For ever flowing free,

For ever shared, for ever whole,

A never ebbing sea. 2 [Note: Hector Mackiunon: A Memoir, by his Wife (1914), 181.]

II

The Love that has Made Us Free

“And loosed us from our sins by his blood.”

This work is described by two different words in A.V. and R.V.—“washed” and “loosed.” These are two figures for one fact. There is but the difference of a single letter in the Greek, and not a letter of difference in the reality, though the point of view differs. The one word regards sin as defilement, the other as bondage. The one thanksgiving rejoices in our being purified, the other in our being freed. The same Divine act accomplishes both ends; and at one time we may rejoice in the thought that the old foul self may be made clean, at another in the delightful consciousness that our chains are snapped, the dungeon walls broken down, and the slave is emancipated for ever.

1. The notion of bondage underlies the metaphor of loosing a fetter. If we would be honest with ourselves, in our account of our own inward experiences, that bondage we all know. There is the bondage of sin as guilt, the sense of responsibility, the feeling that we have to answer for what we have done, and to answer not only here but also hereafter, when we appear before the judgment-seat of Christ. Guilt is a chain. And there is the bondage of habit, which ties and holds us with the cords of our sins, so that, slight as the fetter may seem at first, it has an awful power of thickening and becoming heavier and more pressing, till at last it holds a man in a grip from which he cannot get away.

Sin finds men out in the form of Temptation. Temptation is the result of constantly yielding. A constant doing passing into a habit—it really comes to be a predisposition to do what we have done before over again, and this is temptation. We have built up the muscle-fibre of temptation by constantly using it. Some day Tennyson’s lines will be true, that our character is a part of all we have met. Look at the brain. It is made up, as you know, of countless cells and processes. If an intellectual process runs through our brain once, it leaves comparatively no effect. But say it over a hundred times, and a footpath is worn through the brain; the hundred and first time will be easy. Say it a thousand times, and lo! through all the cellular structure of the brain there is for ever laid a thoroughfare upon this one intellectual idea, and temptations and sins march to and fro in endless procession along the beaten track. Men do not commit two different kinds of sin. You have your own favourite sin, and I have mine, and as it grows the trick is intensified, the path more beaten still, and the end is Death. One thing kills a man, and if you are guilty of one sin, your doom is sealed. Therefore guard against making a thoroughfare. Decide once for all to close the thoroughfare by gates which shall last for ever. Let that evil thought never pass that way again. 1 [Note: The Life of Henry Drummond, 478.]

2. But we have an Emancipator. “He loosed us from our sins.” This proclaims not a mere cleansing, but a liberation; not the remission of penalty only, but the removal also of moral bondage. Sin’s bondage is one of the strongest forces in life; for sin, like a tyrant, subjugates memory, deteriorates moral strength, and increasingly destroys a man’s power of resistance and action. And to such as are fast bound in its remorseless grip, this Evangel proclaims “liberty to the captives,” such liberty indeed as befits and enables men to serve God “in holiness and righteousness.”

I think I have never coveted happiness, but freedom of spirit I have earnestly desired, freedom from that burden which crushes joy and sorrow both—the mere dead weight of care and of remorse. And I believe God, who gave me this desire, has in some measure fulfilled it, and will fulfil it more in spite of my rebellion. The spirit of freedom, of peace, of a sound mind, is, I am sure, given to us. We are only to remember its presence and to walk in it.

The Spirit does make intercessions within us, with groanings that cannot be uttered, and if the sense of personal sins presses them out, they do extend, I trust, to the whole universe; they are groans for its redemption and not for ours only. The word redemption, all the past which it implies, all the future which it points to, has for me a wonderful charm. I cannot separate the idea of deliverance from the idea of God, or ever think of man as blessed except as he enters into God’s redeeming purpose, and labours to make others free.

The bondage of circumstances, of the world, but chiefly of self, has at times seemed to me quite intolerable; the more because it takes away all one’s energy to throw it off, and then the difficulty of escaping to God! of asking to have the weight taken away! Oh there is infinite comfort in the thought that He hears all our cries for rescue, and is Himself the Author and Finisher of it. 1 [Note: Life of Frederick Denison Maurice, i. 520.]

3. “He loosed us from our sins by his blood.” Christ is the Emancipator, and the instrument by which He makes us free is His blood. The teaching of Scripture is that the death of Christ was necessary for the remission of man’s sin. The explanation of that necessity may be beyond us; a full explanation is certainly beyond our powers at present. But not only is the fact made clear in Scripture, the reasons are not obscurely shadowed forth. And we are taught that without such death God could not Himself righteously forgive sin, and that its bands could not be loosed, because the chief bondage which holds an unforgiven sinner under the wrath of a holy God cannot be relaxed by mere fiat, by the single word, Go free! It is not that the Father is angry and the Son steps in to save us from His wrath, as if there could be schism in the Godhead. It is, God so loved the world that He gave His Son to save it, and Christ so loved the world that He loosed the bands of its sins by His blood. As without shedding of blood there was no remission under the Jewish law, so without the death of the cross there is no redemption for a sinful world. A Saviour who stopped short of death would have lacked the power to loose man from sin, in relation either to God or to the powers of evil or to his own moral and spiritual constitution.

Any simple statement of the Gospel had a great attraction for him, and the simpler it was he enjoyed it the more, if it was not controversial but the genuine utterance of the heart. The account of redemption from the lips of an African woman, a slave, impressed him deeply; he liked to repeat it in conversation, and on one occasion at a meeting for prayer, he stood up and said without further remark of his own: “I have never heard the gospel better stated than it was put by a poor negress: ‘Me die, or He die; He die, me no die.’ ” 2 [Note: A. Moody Stuart, Recollections of the late John Duncan, 193.]

Some of the great artists of the Crucifixion have painted the cross as reaching into the skies, exercising a cosmic influence for the world upon which its foot rests, whilst its top touches and moves the very heavens. There is such a painting by Luino at Lugano, and another by Guido Reni at Rome. The head of the suffering Christ in the latter is often reproduced, but the whole of the picture should be seen to understand the artist’s thought. And so the power of the Cross touches the burden of sin which we sinners carry on our shoulders at a thousand points, loosening it at every one and so causing it to fall away from our shoulders in the way Bunyan describes. Freed from condemnation in the sight of God, we are freed altogether: it is God that justifieth, who is he that condemneth? We are freed from the bondage of law, from the thraldom of the devil, from the power of evil habit, from the fear of death and that which follows after death.

Neither passion nor pride

Thy cross can abide,

But melt in the fountain that streams from Thy side. 1 [Note: W. T. Davison, Strength for the Way, 29.]

III

The Love that has Given Us Citizenship

“And he made us to be a kingdom, to be priests unto his God and Father.”

1. Here the Revisers adopted, not the reading that would give the smoothest and simplest English, but the reading that had the highest support in the Greek text. And so they substituted “a kingdom” for “kings.” This substitution places the promises of the new dispensation in direct connexion with the facts of the old. The language of St. Peter and St. John was no novel coinage. It was merely an adaptation to the Israel after the spirit of the titles and distinctions accorded of old to the “Israel after the flesh.” There was a holy nation, a peculiar people, a regal priesthood, before Christianity. It was only enlarged, developed, spiritualized, under the gospel. The foundation passage in the Old Testament on which the language of both Christian Apostles alike was moulded is the promise made to the Israelites through Moses on Sinai, “If ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people … ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation.” Thus the mention of the kingdom links Sinai with Zion—the old with the new.

If we lose the idea of the kingdom we lose with it the most valuable lesson of the passage. A kingdom denotes an organized, united whole. It implies consolidation and harmony. It is not enough that we should realize the individual Christian as a king; we must think of him as a member of a kingdom. The kings of this world are constantly at war one with another. Self-aggrandizement and self-assertion seem natural to their position. Solitariness, isolation, independence—these are ideas inseparable from the kingly throne. But this is not the conception of the true disciple of Christ. He is before all things a member of a body. In the Kingdom of Christ indeed all the citizens are kings, because all are associated in the kingliness of Christ. But they are citizens still. They have the duties, the responsibilities, the manifold and complex relationships of citizens. This Kingdom of God, this Church of Christ, exists for a definite end. Its citizen-kings have each their proper functions, perform each their several tasks, contribute each their special gifts to the fulfilment of this purpose.

The Kingdom of God cometh to a man when he sets up Jesus’ Cross in his heart, and begins to live what Mr. Laurence Oliphant used to call “the life.” It passes on its way when that man rises from table and girds himself and serves the person next him. Yesterday the kingdom was one man, now it is a group. From the one who washes to the one whose feet are washed the kingdom grows and multiplies. It stands around us on every side,—not in Pharisees nor in fanatics, not in noise nor tumult, but in modest and Christ-like men. One can see it in their faces, and catch it in the tone of their voices. And if one has eyes to see and ears to hear, then let him be of good cheer, for the Kingdom of God is come. It is the world-wide state, whose law is the Divine will, whose members obey the spirit of Jesus, whose strength is goodness, whose heritage is God. 1 [Note: John Watson, The Mind of the Master.]

2. We were made not only a “kingdom,” but also “priests.” The two ideas are not carelessly united. Indeed they cannot be separated. The uniting bond is the words, “ unto God.” One may be a king without being a priest, but not a king unto God. Human life is a Divine thing. It has no coherence, no meaning, no use or end except as it is brought under the laws of God. A man does not find himself, he does not get upon the track of true living, until along with self-culture he combines the rule and habit of service—making the most of others as well as the most of himself.

(1) The priest has direct access to God.—All of us, each of us, may pass into the secret place of the Most High, and stand there with happy hearts, unabashed and unafraid, beneath the very blaze of the light of the Shekinah. And we can do so because Jesus Christ has come to us with these words upon His lips: “I am the way; no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” The path into that Divine Presence is blocked for every sinful soul by an immense black rock, its own transgressions; but He has blasted away the rock, and the path is patent for all our feet. By His death we have the way made open into the holiest of all. And so we can come, come with lowly hearts, come with childlike confidence, come with the whole burden of our weaknesses and wants and woes, and can spread them all before Him, and nestle to the great heart of God the Father Himself. We are priests to God, and our prerogative is to pass within the veil by the new and living Way which Christ is for us.

There were many Old Testament customs that were the chrysalis of some beautiful winged truth, to be set free at the touch of Christ. The shell had to be shattered, that such spiritual treasure as Judaism held might become available for the world. That was what Christ meant when He said He came not to destroy, but to fulfil. Priesthood was abolished in the narrow exclusive sense by making all believers priests. 1 [Note: F. C. Hoggarth.]

(2) The priest is appointed to offer sacrifice.—In one sense the sacrifice is offered already; our High Priest offered Himself once for all upon the altar of the cross, and in that sacrifice none other may share. Yet as our deepest sufferings in His cause “fill up that which is lacking of his afflictions,” so our sacrifices are participations, such as men may make, by union with Him, in the one great act of obedience whereby He reconciled us to His Father. We “offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.” Even in the Old Testament there is the suggestion that God had some pleasure in the smell of the sacrifice. Gradually, through the influence of the prophet in Israel, there grew up a spiritual conception of sacrifice. Micah’s protest (chap. 6) and the Psalmist’s confession (Psalms 51) represent the final teaching of the Old Testament on the matter. This spiritual idea of sacrifice runs throughout the New Testament; e.g., “I beseech you therefore, brethren … to present your bodies a living sacrifice” ( Romans 12:1). We ought then to offer our conduct as a holy sacrifice to Him. There is also in the New Testament the idea that the new altar, as Hatch says, is that of human need. We give to God in giving to our brother-man. All service that alleviates human suffering, emancipates the enslaved, saves the children, is a sacrifice. “To do good and to communicate forget not: for with such sacrifices God is well pleased.”

Love has only one measure—its willingness to sacrifice itself. Love’s general law is to seek to do good to others, by service, toil, suffering, both passively and actively. What does a mother endure for her child? Sleepless nights, without food, as she soothes the suffering of her little one and wins back life and health to the child by the offering and sacrifice of her own health and life. What of Father Damien, and others like him, who became lepers to save lepers? Sister Kate Marsden, too? They give themselves to remove the curse of leprosy, or at least to remove the darker curse of leprosy. It is love undertaking on another’s behalf, by means of sacrifice, to win for them some good. There is nothing great and noble and praiseworthy in the world, but this principle of love is at the root of it. 1 [Note: John Brown Paton, by his Son (1914), 372.]

(3) The priest is a mediator representing God before men, and representing men before God. As our Lord Jesus Christ represents God to men, and we, being one with Him, also stand as being, in a secondary sense, God’s representatives, so He is perfect man, and in Him the whole of our race is summed up, and we, after a partial manner, may also appear in God’s sight on behalf of our fellow-men. They do not need to approach God through us, yet we can voice their wants even when they themselves do not know them. We cannot bear the burden of a world’s sin, under which our Saviour bowed, but we can by our prayer and intercession—and that, rightly understood, is no light burden—make the silence of our fellows articulate at the throne of grace.

Man is sometimes spoken of as a priest in relation to nature; as George Herbert puts it—

Man is the world’s high-priest: he doth present

The sacrifice for all; while they below

Unto the service mutter an assent,

Such as springs use that fall, and winds that blow.

But this is a poet’s graceful fancy. The truth of the text lies in the relation of the Christian to God and his fellow-men. There is no human priest in Christianity to come between God and any single human heart; the only Mediator is He who is Son of God and Son of Man, a High Priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek. Yet every Christian is to be a priest unto God, as himself offering spiritual sacrifices and helping to interpret God-in-Christ to man and to bring men to the God and Father whom he has learned to love and serve. 1 [Note: W. T. Davison, Strength for the Way, 33.]

The whole function of Priesthood was, on Christmas morning, at once and for ever gathered into His Person who was born at Bethlehem; and thenceforward, all who are united with Him, and who with Him make sacrifice of themselves; that is to say, all members of the Invisible Church become, at the instant of their conversion, Priests; and are so called in 1 Peter 2:5 and Revelation 1:6; Revelation 20:6, where, observe, there is no possibility of limiting the expression to the Clergy; the conditions of Priesthood being simply having been loved by Christ, and washed in His blood. 2 [Note: Ruskin, The Construction of Sheepfolds, § 15 (Works, xii. 537).]

Priests, priests,—there’s no such name!—God’s own, except

Ye take most vainly. Through heaven’s lifted gate

The priestly ephod in sole glory swept,

When Christ ascended, entered in, and sate

(With victor face sublimely overwept)

At Deity’s right hand, to mediate

He alone, He for ever. On His breast

The Urim and the Thummim, fed with fire

From the full Godhead, flicker with the unrest

Of human, pitiful heartbeats. Come up higher,

All Christians! Levi’s tribe is dispossest. 3 [Note: E. B. Browning, Casa Guida Windows.]

Redeeming Love

Literature

Cunningham (W.), Sermons from 1828 to 1860, 146.

Davies (J. L1.), The Work of Christ, 72.

Davison (W. T.), Strength for the Way, 16.

Drysdale (A. H.), A Moderator’s Year, 95.

Eames (J.), The Shattered Temple, 33.

Genner (E. E.), in A Book of Lay Sermons, 91.

Griffin (E. D.), Plain Practical Sermons, ii. 20.

Haslam (W.), The Threefold Gift of God, 155.

Holden (J. S.), The Pre-Eminent Lord, 165.

Jowett (J. H.), Apostolic Optimism, 237.

Lightfoot (J. B.), Sermons on Special Occasions, 191.

McIntyre (D. M.), Life in His Name, 199.

Maclaren (A.), Expositions: Epistles of John to Revelation, 126.

Macpherson (W. M.), The Path of Life, 182.

Maurice (F. D.), The Doctrine of Sacrifice, 276.

Menzies (A.), in Scotch Sermons, 1880, p. 259.

Meyer (F. B.), The Present Tenses of the Blessed Life, 51.

Munger (T. T.), Character through Inspiration, 118.

Nixon (W.), in Modern Scottish Pulpit, i. 211.

Rattenbury (J. E.), Six Sermons on Social Subjects, 81.

Scott (C. A.), The Book of the Revelation, 30.

British Weekly Pulpit, iii. 481 (J. Robertson).

Christian World Pulpit, liv. 369 (J. H. Jowett); lvi. 38 (G. Littlemore); lx. 49 (C. Gore).

Church of England Magazine, lxviii. 240 (E. T. Cardale).

Homiletic Review, lv. 459 (A. Wood).

Preacher’s Magazine, xxv. 416 (F. C. Hoggarth).

Verse 7

The Second Advent

Behold he cometh with the clouds; and every eye shall see him, and they which pierced him; and all the tribes of the earth shall mourn over him. Even so, Amen.— Revelation 1:7.

No one can study the New Testament without feeling that the thought of Christ’s Return was everywhere present and powerful in the first age. In the Gospels and in the Apocalypse, in the Acts and in the Epistles, the same hope is the subject of promise, of exhortation, of vision. It would perhaps be impossible to find any other special doctrine of Christianity which is not only affirmed, but affirmed in the same language, by St. Paul and St. James, by St. Peter and St. John. The Return of Christ to judgment was the subject on which St. Peter spoke when the Jewish multitude were astonished at the first apostolic miracle; it was the subject on which St. Paul spoke when he first passed over into Macedonia and his enemies accused him of preaching “another king than Cæsar.” It seems to rise uppermost in the minds of the Apostles when they are themselves most deeply moved and when they wish to move others most deeply. It is, as they declare it, the sufficient motive for patience in affliction and the end of expectation in the presence of triumphant evil. And more than this: the hope of Christ’s Return was not only universal in the first age; it was instant. From Jerusalem and Corinth the same voice came that “the time was at hand,” even as when the Baptist heralded Christ’s ministry. The dawn of an endless day was held to be already breaking after a weary night; and while St. Paul reproved the error of those at Thessalonica who neglected the certain duties of life that they might, as they fancied, watch better the spread of the heavenly glory, he confirmed the truth which they had misinterpreted. With us it is far otherwise. A few enthusiasts from time to time bring the thought of Christ’s Return into prominence, but for the most part it has little influence upon our hearts and minds. We acknowledge generally, in a vague manner, that we shall severally render an account of our doings, but we do not look beyond this either in hope or in fear to any manifestation of judgment in the world.

One of Dr. Bonar’s reminiscences of the people at Jedburgh was a story of a half-witted man whom he used to visit. This poor man had found Christ and had learned to rejoice in the thought of His return to earth. He went to Edinburgh on a visit, and came home much dissatisfied with the ministers. When asked why, he said, “Oh, they a’ flee (fly) wi’ ae (one) wing!” They preached Christ’s First, but not His Second, Coming. 1 [Note: Reminiscences of Andrew A. Bonar, 4.]

I

“He cometh.”

1. The Lord shall come! This is the burden of this last book of Scripture. It was the burden of the Old Testament; for Enoch’s prophecy runs through all its books,—“Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousand of his saints.” It is the burden of the New Testament; for both the Master and His Apostles give out the same solemn utterance,—“Behold he cometh;” and the Church in the early ages took up the subject as of profoundest and most pressing interest, “looking for that blessed hope.” In that coming, the manifestation of Christ, all things, our actions and ourselves, shall be seen as they are, seen by ourselves and seen by others. Then the whole course of life, the life of creation, of humanity, of men, will be laid open, and that vision will be a judgment beyond controversy and beyond appeal.

Dr. Bonar was absorbed from first to last in the faith and hope of the Second Advent. Wherever we open the New Testament, we find it thrilling to the heat and joy of that manifestation and coming of the Lord when we shall see Him as He is. Edward Irving, with all his errors, did one thing. He revived for his generation the Parousia as the definite hope of the Church which witnesses to the Lord’s death till He come. Dr. Nansen has recently told us what science has to say about the end of the world. He tells that the end will take place after millions of years, when the sun has been cooled. Life will then have to cope with greater and greater difficulties of existence, until it finally and entirely disappears. The possibilities of existence will become gradually less and less favourable for the complicated and highly developed animals, whilst the simple low organisms will probably be those that will live longest until even they disappear. But the faith of the Church is that the Christ who once offered Himself in our nature as the full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, satisfaction, and oblation for the sins of the whole world will come again. The Christ who comes will be the Christ who departed, and His coming will be in like manner as the disciples saw Him go, visible, corporeal, local. We, according to His promise, look for a new heaven and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness. I venture to think it a great weakness of our teaching that so little is said about the blessed hope and appearing of our great God and Saviour. Meanwhile, if He returns not in our lifetime, we know that we are dying people, all of us; that there are before us death, judgment, and eternity. So let us offer the prayer:

Then, O my Lord, prepare

My soul for that great day;

O wash me in Thy precious blood,

And take my sins away. 1 [Note: W. R. Nicoll, in Memories of Dr. Horatius Bonar, 109.]

2. No truth, therefore, ought to be more frequently proclaimed, next to the first coming of the Lord, than His second coming; and we cannot thoroughly set forth all the ends and bearings of the first advent if we forget the second. At the Lord’s Supper, there is no discerning the Lord’s body unless we discern His first coming; there is no drinking His cup to its fulness, unless we also hear Him say, “Until I come.” We must look forward, as well as backward. We must look to Him on the cross and on the throne. We must vividly realize that He who has once come is coming yet again, or else our testimony will be marred and one-sided. The great advent may be near, or it may be far off. It may come while things remain as they are, or not till after great changes. But, come when it may, it will come surely. Of that our Lord has warned us. We know not, and we are not to know, when; but come it will. Those who are then living will see it; and those who are in the graves will awake to see it. We know not of which number we shall be. But this we do know, that see Him we shall, and that either to our unspeakable joy or to our shame and terror and despair.

These were the days of warm and even bitter discussion relative to “The Lord’s Second Coming.” Pre-millennialists and post-millennialists could scarcely come together for prophetical Bible study without sharp controversy on the subject. Since Dr. Pierson’s views had undergone a change, through his interviews with George Müller and his later Bible studies, he held the decided and unyielding conviction that Christians must be ready and looking for the return of the Lord at any moment. He was not prepared, nor did he think it right, to prophesy as to dates, “since,” he said, “the only date given for the Lord’s return is ‘In such an hour as ye think not, the Son of man cometh.’ ” He believed that the world was to be “evangelized” but not necessarily converted before the Lord should come. 1 [Note: Arthur T. Pierson: A Biography, by his Son, 185.]

3. The text speaks of Christ’s coming “with the clouds”—an expression suggestive of glory and power. Of all natural objects that awaken the sense of awe none can rival for power, mountains, clouds, and sea. But clouds combine, in a measure, the resources of sea and mountains; smoothed out at dawn or sunset, twisted into strange contortions by the storm, they rival the solemnity of mountains in their vast proportions, and imitate in their changeful movements the beating of the waves. Black as forces of evil, bright with the smile of opening day, floating on the surface of an azure heaven, or piled in giant waves above the mountains with a look of doom—everywhere they give the sense of thinly veiled depths of mystery yet to be revealed, and of the wrath and power of God against sin.

Each common cloud in this our cloudy climate may serve to remind us of the cloud of the Ascension, and of the clouds of the second Advent. Also of that great cloud of witnesses who already compass us about, who one day will hear our doom pronounced; who perhaps will then for the moment become as nothing to us when we stand face to face with Christ our Judge: “At the brightness of His presence His clouds removed.” 2 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti, The Face of the Deep, 20.]

Every one knows the history of Raphael’s “Madonna di San Sisto,” at Dresden. Its background is composed of clouds. For many years the picture, begrimed with dirt, remained uncleaned, and the background of clouds looked dark and threatening; when the picture was cleaned and carefully examined, it was discovered that the supposed clouds were not dark atmospheric clouds but multitudes of angel faces luminously massed together. It is ever thus. His clouds are ministering spirits, angel faces; the heavy masses of Earth’s dust, which look so dark and unangelic, are His veil; in them He comes, seeking the heart, striving to eradicate selfishness, to quench passion, to melt obstinacy, to wean from earthly things. 1 [Note: B. Wilberforce, New (?) Theology, 243.]

II

“Every eye shall see him.”

1. When Christ came before, He came to an obscure quarter of the world, and if all of that land had assembled to see Him, the number would have been but moderate; but, in fact, only Mary and Joseph were present, with perhaps one or two attendants; and the shepherds came to look, and the wise men brought their gifts; and that was all. Few were the eyes that saw Him then. But when He comes again “every eye shall see him,” as every man sees the sun each day. Jesus said to the high priest, “Hereafter ye shall see the Son of man sitting at the right hand of power, and coming on the clouds of heaven” ( Matthew 26:64). Caiaphas will see Him, and the scribes and elders—those who mocked Him, and smote Him, and spit upon Him; the people who cried “Crucify him!… not this man, but Barabbas”; Pilate, who, against his conscience, condemned Him; the penitent thief, and the impenitent; all the penitent and all the impenitent; those who have crucified Him afresh by their sins, and those who have served and glorified Him; all who have ever lived, the high and the low, the rich and the poor, the old and the young; all shall see Him, at one and the same moment, all together; the eyes of the blind shall be opened to see Him, all that are in the graves shall see Him, and all who lie in the depths of the sea.

“And every eye shall see him”—All impelled in one direction, all looking in one direction. Even a very small crowd doing the same thing at the same instant has a thrilling, awful power; as once when I saw the chorus of a numerous orchestra turn over their music-sheets at the same moment, it brought before me the Day of Judgment. 2 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti, The Face of the Deep, 20.]

Earth must fade away from our eyes, and we must anticipate that great and solemn truth, which we shall not fully understand till we stand before God in judgment, that to us there are but two beings in the whole world, God and ourselves. The sympathy of others, the pleasant voice, the glad eye, the smiling countenance, the thrilling heart, which at present are our very life, all will be away from us, when Christ comes in judgment. Every one will have to think of himself. Every eye shall see Him; every heart will be full of Him. He will speak to every one; and every one will be rendering to Him his own account. 1 [Note: J. H. Newman.]

2. There is consolation in the thought—“Every eye shall see him.” It is a glorious promise, for, whether in this life or in the life to come, the law is eternal, that only the sanctified can see the Holy One, only “the pure in heart shall see God,”—yet “every eye shall see him.” It is the infinite thirst of every awakened soul, the supreme consummation awaiting the noblest spirits who have passed through earth’s education. Every inarticulate upward straining of the spirit that we have been unable to interpret has been the inner eye feeling for Him. Some can interpret it. Faraday, when asked by Acland his conception of after-death consciousness, cried out, “I shall see Him, and that will be enough for me.” Augustine cried out, “O let me see Thee; and if to see Thee is to die, let me die that I may see Thee.”

I remember a man born blind who loved our Lord most intensely, and he was wont to glory in this, that his eyes had been reserved for his Lord. Said he, “The first whom I shall ever see will be the Son of man in His glory.” 2 [Note: C. H. Spurgeon.]

“Every eye shall see him.” Every eye; the eye of every living man, whoever he is. None will be able to prevent it. The voice of the trumpet, the brightness of the flame, shall direct all eyes to Him, shall fix all eyes upon Him. Be it ever so busy an eye, or ever so vain an eye, whatever employment, whatever amusement it had the moment before, will then no longer be able to employ it, or to amuse it. The eye will be lifted up to Christ, and will no more look down upon money, upon books, upon land, upon houses, upon gardens. Alas! these things will then all pass away in a moment; and not the eyes of the living alone, but also all the eyes that have ever beheld the sun, though but for a moment; the eyes of all the sleeping dead will be awakened and opened. The eyes of saints and sinners of former generations. Your eyes and mine. O awful thought! Blessed Jesus! May we not see Thee as through tears; may we not then tremble at the sight! 1 [Note: Philip Doddridge.]

III

“And they which pierced him; and all the tribes of the earth shall mourn over him.”

1. With what different feelings shall men see Christ on the last great day! Some rejoicing, others mourning: some with hallelujahs, others with cries of despair. “All tribes of the earth shall mourn over him.” Some of every generation and every tribe; so many, that it is said “ all.” Yet not every individual. Of every generation and tribe, some will see Him with joy. This was the hope with which He cheered His disciples, sorrowing at His going: “I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also” ( John 14:3); “I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you” ( John 16:22). And this was the comfort the angels gave to those who saw Him ascend out of their sight: “This same Jesus … shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven.” To them, as to all His disciples, the Lord’s return was and is an object, not of dread, but of joyful hope.

This same great coming, then, which “every eye shall see,” is an object of dread to some, of joy unspeakable to others. When they see the Lord appear, some will wail in terror and despair, others will rejoice “with joy unspeakable, and full of glory”; and even now, while some “love his appearing,” others are terrified at the thought. Whence arises this vast difference? From the vast difference in their present state with regard to Him who will come. As men (those at least to whom the gospel has come) feel towards Christ Himself, so do they feel with regard to His coming, and so will they feel when they see Him appear. They who love Him love to think of His appearing, and will rejoice to see Him; they who love Him not, and have no saving faith in Him, now fear to think of His coming, and will then call on the rocks to cover them.

“All kindreds of the earth shall wail” is the reading of the Authorized Version. I cannot put into English the full meaning of that most expressive word, “wail.” Sound it at length, and it conveys its own meaning. It is as when men wring their hands and burst out into a loud cry; or as when Eastern women, in their anguish, rend their garments, and lift up their voices with the most mournful notes. “All kindreds of the earth shall wail;” wail as a mother laments over her dead child; wail as a man might wail who found himself hopelessly imprisoned and doomed to die. Such will be the hopeless grief of all the kindreds of the earth at the sight of Christ in the clouds: if they remain impenitent, they shall not be able to be silent; they shall not be able to repress or conceal their anguish. 1 [Note: C. H. Spurgeon.]

2. “They which pierced him” are by no means a few. Who have pierced Christ? The Roman soldier who thrust his spear into the Messiah’s side is not the only one. They that once professed to love Christ and have gone back to the world; they that speak against the Christ whom once they professed to love; they whose inconsistent lives have brought dishonour upon the sacred name of Jesus; they who refused His love, stifled their consciences, and rejected His rebukes; they who scorn the love and mercy offered by the Saviour—all these may be said to have pierced Him.

The words “they which pierced him” are taken from Zechariah 12:10. Both here and in John 19:37 the New Testament writer does not adopt, as usual, the Septuagint reading, which runs, “because they have mocked me” but “whom they have pierced.” This, as Alford remarks, is almost a demonstration of the common authorship of the Apocalypse and the Fourth Gospel. This and John 19:37 are the only places in the New Testament where this prophecy is alluded to. 2 [Note: M. F. Sadler, The Revelation of St. John the Divine, 7.]

Ah, Lord, we all have pierced Thee: wilt Thou be

Wroth with us all to slay us all?

Nay, Lord, be this thing far from Thee and me:

By whom should we arise, for we are small,

By whom if not by Thee?

Lord, if of us who pierced Thee Thou spare one,

Spare yet one more to love Thy Face,

And yet another of poor souls undone,

Another, and another—God of grace,

Let mercy overrun. 3 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti, Poetical Works, 137.]

IV

“Even so, Amen.”

1. “This same Jesus shall come.” These words of the angel to the disciples after the Ascension are words of comfort to those who believe. He “who loved me, and gave himself for me,” is He who will come in glory; the same Jesus as went about doing good, and died to redeem us by His blood; as full of grace and love as ever, unchangeably the same. It is our Saviour who will come with clouds, and whose coming the Apostle hails in the closing words of the text, “Even so, Amen.” The first of these words is Greek, “Yes”; the second Hebrew, “So be it”; both together form the fullest expression that could be given of the certainty and truth of what is stated, and the deep longing of heart for the fulfilment of the prediction. Here are all St. John’s innermost desires summed up and spoken out. What earnestness, what vehemence, what longing, are expressed in this double Amen! It is the amen of faith, and hope, and joy. It is the amen of a weary, heart-broken exile. It is the amen of a saint left on earth long behind his fellow-saints, and sighing for the promised rest when the great Rest-giver comes. It is the Church’s amen; her vehement desire for the day of meeting.

“Even so, Amen.”—“Amen” alone closed the doxology ( Revelation 1:6), but here where judgment is the theme, St. John doubles his assent. A lesson of adhesion to the revealed Will of God, be that Will what it may: a foreshadowing of the perfected will and mind of all saints at the separating right and left of the final division: an example of the conformity we must now pray and strive after: “Even so, Amen.” 1 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti, The Face of the Deep, 23.]

The little word Amen means, truly, verily, certainly; and it is a word of firm, heartfelt faith: as if thou saidst, “O God and Father, those things for which I have prayed I doubt not; they are surely true and will come to pass, not because I have prayed for them, but because Thou hast commanded me to ask for them, and hast surely promised; and I am convinced that Thou art indeed God, and canst not lie. And, therefore, not because of the worthiness of my prayer, but because of the certainty of Thy promise, I do firmly believe it, and I have no doubt that an Amen will come out of it, and it will be an Amen.” 1 [Note: Luther, Commentary on the Lord’s Prayer.]

2. Thus the Book of Revelation calls the Church to fix her eyes more intently upon her true hope. For what is that hope? Is it not the hope of the revelation of her Lord in the glory that belongs to Him? No hope springs so eternal in the Christian breast. It was that of the early Church, as she believed that He whom she had loved while He was on earth would return to perfect the happiness of His redeemed. It ought not less to be our hope now. “Watching for it, waiting for it, being patient unto it, groaning without it, looking for it, hasting unto it, loving it—these are the phrases which Scripture uses concerning the day of God.” And surely it may well use them; for what in comparison with the prospect of such a day is every other anticipation of the future?

In a letter to Lady Kinloch he wrote: “The return of the Lord Jesus, and our being glorified together with Him (if so be that we suffer with Him), this true and lively hope seems to me like a star, which is not seen in the garish light of prosperity and a smooth course, but only in the stillness of sorrow, or at least of a chastened, crucified condition. I think this is one reason why the Church lost this hope, after the first ages of martyrdom, and why now-a-days it so often degenerates into a mere sentimental speculation,—a pious Zeitvertreib.” 2 [Note: G. Carlyle, A Memoir of Adolph Saphir, 216.]

Writing to his sister Mrs. Julius Hare, he says: “The words of the Apostle, ‘Looking for the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ,’ have seemed to me the only words that gave me any glimpse into the future state, or into the use which we are to make of it, in urging ourselves and others to fight. I think the Millenarians are altogether right, and have done an infinite service to the Church, in fixing our minds upon these words, and so turning them away from the expectations of mere personal felicity apart from the establishment of Christ’s kingdom; from the notion of Heaven which makes us indifferent to the future condition of the earth. I think they have done good also, in urging the hope of Christ’s coming, as a duty upon the Church, and in denouncing the want of it as a sin.” 3 [Note: Life of Frederick Denison Maurice, ii. 243.]

The whole Bible was to him bright with the promise of the Lord’s Return, and this expectation gave joy and hopefulness to his whole life. Sorrow and bereavement made him think of the glorious time when “death shall have become resurrection”; pain and suffering reminded him of the “new heavens and the new earth” yet to come. “Are you content,” he writes to a friend, “with the Lord’s gracious letter to you when you might rather be wearying for Himself? I know that ‘this same Jesus’ is as precious to you as to any of us, but when will you be ‘a man of Galilee, gazing up into heaven’?” To another friend he writes: “Are you loving Christ’s appearing and His kingdom? If not, He hath somewhat against thee.” … “Some Christians make a great mistake. They think that because Christ said it was expedient that He should go away, therefore it is expedient that He should stay away! He went away to present His finished work to the Father, but He must come back again.”

“ I find the thought of Christ’s Coming,” he said, “very helpful in keeping me awake. Those who are waiting for His appearing will get a special blessing. Perhaps they will get nearer His Person. I sometimes hope it will be so, and that He will beckon me nearer to Him if I am waiting for Him; just as at a meeting, you often see one beckoned to come up to the platform nearer the speakers.”

At a meeting in Philadelphia in 1881, to bid him farewell, the chairman—the late George Stewart—closed his address by saying that “the Lord, the Righteous Judge, would give to His dear servant a crown of righteousness at the great day.” He sat down, and on rising to reply, Dr. Bonar said, “ ‘And not to me only, but to all them also that love his appearing’ ” 1 [Note: Reminiscences of Andrew A. Bonar, 148.]

The Second Advent

Literature

Banks (L. A.), John and his Friends, 189.

Bonar (H.), Light and Truth: The Revelation, 25.

Bourdillon (F.), Short Sermons, 201.

Davies (T.), Sermons and Expositions, i. 347.

Eadie (J.), in The Home Preacher, 737.

Eyton (R.), The Apostles’ Creed, 104.

Little (W. J. K.), The Mystery of the Passion, 181.

Milligan (W.), Lectures on the Apocalypse, 219.

Rossetti (C. G.), The Face of the Deep, 19.

Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xxxiii. (1887), No. 1989.

Temple (W.), Repton School Sermons, 198.

Westcott (B. F.), The Historic Faith, 85.

Wilberforce (B.), New ( ?) Theology, 236.

Christian World Pulpit, lxiv. 408 (E. H. Eland).

Church of England Magazine, lxxi. 368 (J. J. Cort).

Contemporary Pulpit, v. 257 (W. Thomson).

Literary Churchman, xxx. (1884) 510 (C. G. H. Baskcomb).

National Preacher, xxxii. 382 (S. B. Willis).

Verse 10

The Lord’s Day

I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day.— Revelation 1:10.

1. The religious importance of the first day of the week arose from the conviction that Christ had risen from the dead on that day. The conviction is certainly found to exist very early in the Church, and we can hardly resist the conclusion that its origin must be sought in the fact that, in some mode which we shall never exactly understand, it was on “the first day of the week” that Christ so manifested Himself to His Apostles as to create in them the assurance of His being actually alive among them in the fulness of personal life. The phrase of the Apocalypse, then, is not hard of explanation. The first day of the week was known as “the Lord’s Day,” because in truth the Lord had then made clear His title to the lordship He claimed. It was on that day, so the Church believed, that the Son of Man, “who was born of the seed of David according to the flesh,” was “declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection of the dead.” It was as an “Easter Day in every week” that the first day of the week first secured its religious importance.

The Church had no definite command from the Lord to change the date of its rest-day, nor indeed did the Church do that all at once; it was not possible. But the first day of the week, the day on which He rose from the dead and appeared to His disciples, the day, too, on which the Holy Spirit came, the Church has, by a sort of inspired instinct, set apart to Christian fellowship, meetings for prayer and worship, and the celebration of the Holy Supper. Gradually it took the place of the seventh day as the day of rest.

There is no historical fact that enjoys better proof than this—that the observance of the day by intermission of toil and by special religious exercises was the constant practice of the Christian Church from the days of the Apostles. The civil laws, when the secular arm was extended to the Church, tell the same tale. Constantine forbade lawsuits on this day: the courts were to be closed. The Valentians, elder and younger, follow. Theodosius enacts that all Sundays in the year be days of vacation from all business of the law whatsoever.

Secular business of a more private kind was also strictly forbidden, though ploughing and harvesting were at first excepted from the prohibition. Christian soldiers were required to attend church. And what is of special interest, in view of present-day tendencies, no public games or shows or frivolous recreations were allowed by law on the Lord’s Day.

From the very beginning the English people believed that this was a day apart, a day given of God, a day in which men could recover their connection with spiritual things, and refresh their hearts by waiting upon the invisible God. Perhaps no one has described the English Sunday better than the Royalist poet, George Herbert:

Sundays the pillars are

On which heav’n’s palace arched lies;

The other days fill up the spare

And hollow room with vanities:

They are the fruitful beds and borders

In God’s rich garden; that is bare

Which parts their ranks and orders.

2. The spirit of man is tidal and “the soul wins its victories as the sea wins hers.” The tides of the spirit are known to us all—the great reactions, the swinging tides of feeling, interest, and energy. These are from above, coming down upon us, unlike the pedestrian guides of common sense and principle which direct us evenly on our way. This does not apply merely to the ebb and flow of sweet or tender feeling, though it includes that also. Rather one thinks of the occasional heightening of life all round, the intensification of its powers in moments when it “means intensely, and means good.” Now this occasional quality of human nature is the explanation of the common delight in the observance of special days. Birthdays and other anniversaries, the return of friends from afar, the festivals commemorating national and religious events, are all of them times of spiritual rising tide. It is fitting to give them their opportunity, to set time apart, and to forbid encroaching duties.

Dr. Haegler, in his Expenditure and Repair of Vital Force, says that the night succeeding a day’s labour does not afford a complete recuperation of zig-zag lines. The Monday line shows a man at his maximum strength. With each succeeding day the line is shortened a little. On Tuesday morning the workman, refreshed by sleep, has regained most of his lost energy, but not all. On Wednesday the line is shorter still, that is, there is a larger margin of loss. On Thursday and Friday and Saturday the lines are shortened more and more. On Saturday night the minimum of strength is reached. Now comes Sunday. If the workman observes it, he regains his full normal vigour and begins again where he began a week ago. If he refuses to observe it, and keeps on doing so, he will never regain his normal standard of vital force, but will suffer a constant drain and decline until he ends in physical breakdown. Thus it appears as a scientific fact that the man who habitually refuses to rest on Sunday is living on his reserve. He is literally working himself to death.

3. The need for the observance of set days is embedded in human nature. Eternal as the constitution of the soul of man is the necessity for the existence of a day of rest. And on this ground alone can we find an impregnable defence of the proportion one day in seven. The seventh being altered to the first, one might ask why one in seven might not be altered to one in ten. The thing has been tried; and by the necessities of human nature the change has been found pernicious. One day in ten, prescribed by revolutionary France, was actually pronounced by physiologists insufficient. So that we begin to find that, in a deeper sense than we at first suspected, “the sabbath was made for man.” Even in the contrivance of one day in seven, it was arranged by unerring wisdom. Just because the Sabbath was made for man, and not because man was ordained to keep the Sabbath-day, we cannot tamper even with the iota, one day in seven.

Professor Hodge of Clark University, Worcester, Mass., demonstrated in his biological laboratory that the nerve cells are not fully restored from a day’s wear by a night’s rest, and that they need to be fully restored every few days, and that such perfect restoration cannot be accomplished with less than thirty to thirty-six hours of continuous rest, which means a rest-day added to the adjoining two nights, a rest such as the Sabbath regularly affords.

“I beg and pray of you,” said Dolly Winthrop, “to leave off weaving of a Sunday, for it’s bad for soul and body—and the money as comes i’ that way ’ull be a bad bed to lie down on at the last, if it doesn’t fly away, nobody knows where, like the white frost. And you’ll excuse me being that free with you, Master Marner, for I wish you well—I do.” 1 [Note: George Eliot, Silas Marner.]

I certainly do feel by experience the eternal obligation because of the eternal necessity of the Sabbath. The soul withers without it; it thrives in proportion to the fidelity of its observance. Nay, I even believe the stern rigour of the Puritan Sabbath had a grand effect upon the soul. Fancy a man thrown in upon himself, with no permitted music, nor relaxation, nor literature, nor secular conversation—nothing but his Bible, his own soul and God’s silence! What hearts of iron this system must have made. How different from our stuffed-arm-chair religion and “gospel of comfort!” as if to be made comfortable were the great end of religion. I am persuaded, however, that the Sabbath must rest not on an enactment, but on the necessities of human nature. It is necessary not because it is commanded; but it is commanded because it is necessary. If the Bible says, “Eat the herb of the field,” sustenance does not become a duty in consequence of the enactment, but the enactment is only a statement of the law of human nature. And so with the Sabbath, and this appears to be a truer and far more impregnable base to place it on. You cannot base it on a law; but you can show that the law was based on an eternal fitness. There I think it never can be dislodged. 2 [Note: Life and Letters of the Rev. F. W. Robertson, 211.]

Sunday is a quiet hollow, scooped out of the windy hill of the week. 3 [Note: George MacDonald.]

4. To observe a day in any worthy sense, one must enter into its spirit. The true worth of Sunday to us all depends on our coming to find in it the opportunity, the hope, the means of some such rising above this world as that of which St. John speaks; some approach towards that entrance among things eternal which he links with the Lord’s Day. Yes, whatever may be our place and work in life, our share in its pleasures and hardships and interests and sorrows, if Sunday is to mean more and not less to us as the years go by, we must be using it to learn a little more of our duty, and of our need, of ourselves, as God sees us, and, above all, of His will, His ways, His mercy, and His justice.

As is the Spirit, so is the Lord’s Day. The one is proportionate to the other. You cannot make any day the Lord’s Day for a man who has no Lord. You cannot make any day a Sabbath, if a man has no Sabbath in him. True, our Saviour said, “The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath,” but then the Sabbath which is made for the man must be made in the man, and by him. Forced rest is not restful. The man whose day is only an outer quiet can have no inner peace. There is no dreariness so dreadful as the dreariness of a period of loneliness, of solitude, to a man who fears his own society and pants for the distraction that comes from the society of other men. Hence there can be no Lord’s Day for any man unless he be in the Spirit, and just in proportion as he is in it will the day be to him rich with a message from heaven, great with the grace of God.

We all remember times when we have gone to our work all out of tune, and unable to fix the mind on what we had to do, half dead, as it were, to the demand; to find, as the time went on, that things were slipping through our hands to no sort of purpose; and when night came we had to say sadly, with the emperor, “I have lost a day.” We have lost the day, because we have not caught its spirit. But on another day we have found we were so clear of head and sure of hand that we have done the work of two men, and come out all aglow with the spirit which has borne us as on the wings of eagles.

I go into my study, and become absorbed in a book. The author may be dead and gone this thousand years, and no other trace of him remain on the earth; but if he has hidden his spirit in that book, and I can find it, he opens his heart to me, and I open mine to him, and find myself touched as he was touched when he wrote that chapter. I cannot help the tears in my eyes as I read, any more than he could help them when he wrote, or the strong throb of the heart, or the ripple of laughter. I see what he saw in human homes and human lives, catch the vision he had of the open heavens, or the lurid flame and smoke. I am in the spirit of this master of my morning, and his spirit is in me; my senses are simply the messengers between his soul and mine. I seem to hear the voice when I read they used to hear who knew the writer. There is a spell on me which makes time and place of no account, and I wonder how my morning has slipped away. 1 [Note: R. Collyer, The Joy of Youth, 53.]

5. When we are in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day, the gates of a new world open to us. The seer in Patmos saw visions and heard the sound of trumpets. The tradition is that he was banished to Patmos, to work in the mines there, because he was of the outcast and branded Christian sect; and if this is the truth, we cannot doubt that his overseers would keep a stern hand on him, and allow no day for rest, or time for worship. He would have to dig and delve his full stint, like the slave he was, until the time came to lay down his pick and go to his hovel. Or, if it was known among his keepers that this day was more sacred to him than any other in the week, they would mark it for him, it may be, with the rubric of a deeper misery.

Sunday was not a holiday in the mines, but the spirit of this redeemed man is free, and he has access to the spiritual world. While his feet and hands toil at their dreary tasks, he passes into an ecstatic state, suspending his connexion with this material world, and leading him into the other land, unseen of any eyes but his. In this exalted state the boundaries of both time and space are thrown down, and he moves free in a larger world. He is back again in the morning light of the day of Christ’s rising. Again he runs to the empty tomb with Peter; again the woman whom they have left solitary by that empty tomb comes and tells them what she has seen; and again, amid the evening shadows, he himself hears the words, “Peace be unto you.” Similarly he escapes from the narrow confines of the island, and shares the life of the infant Church scattered along the coast-lines of the Great Sea. He is their brother and companion, both in the tribulation and in the Kingdom of Jesus Christ; he is with them both in darkness and in glory. He is with them, too, in that patience of the saints which both the tribulation and the Kingdom have taught them—that wonderful patience of the Early Church, which had learned to be patient with life, both in its present trial and in its deferred hope.

Principal Alexander Whyte, in giving a New Year exhortation in 1913, testified: “If my experience of the Lord’s Day is of any value or any interest to any of you—well, here it is. I have had a long lifetime’s experience of, on the whole, a somewhat scrupulously kept Lord’s Day. And that day, so kept, has been to me one of my chief blessings in a life full of such blessings. I can testify, and that with the most entire integrity, that from my childhood down to this hour, I have greatly loved and greatly valued the seclusion, and the silence, and the rest, and especially the reading proper to the Lord’s Day. And at the end of a long life, I look back and bless God for those who brought me up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord’s Day. Especially do I recall my Lord’s Day reading before my teens, and during them and after them. Speak for yourselves. But it would ill become me and it would be very unsafe for me if I were to be silent about the Scottish Sabbath, or were I to do less than all that in me lies to secure such a Sabbath to my own household and to yours.”

Alexander M c Laren’s upbringing would now be called rigidly Puritanic, but instead of its having left on his mind any unhappy impression, all through life it was recalled with feelings of gratitude and pleasure. As for “Sabbath day” employments, no recollections were more lovingly dwelt on than their “unvarying round.” “When I was a boy,” he would say, “I was taken regularly to two services long before I was old enough to listen attentively to the sermon, but no remembrance of wishing the service to be over dwells in my memory. There was no evening service in those days. Parents were expected to teach their children then, and they did. In my father’s house, after an extra good tea, the lesson began, very often with the repetition of the second chapter of Ephesians, each member of the family, including father and mother, repeating one verse. I, as youngest, brought up the rear. I knew nothing of ‘dreary Sundays,’ so often spoken of as being the rule in Scotland, especially long ago.” 1 [Note: E. T. McLaren, Dr. McLaren of Manchester, 8.]

O day to sweet religious thought

So wisely set apart,

Back to the silent strength of life

Help thou my wavering heart.

Nor let the obtrusive lies of sense

My meditations draw

From the composed, majestic realm

Of everlasting law.

I know these outward forms, wherein

So much my hopes I stay,

Are but the shadowy hints of that

Which cannot pass away.

That just outside the work-day path

By man’s volition trod,

Lie the resistless issues of

The things ordained of God. 2 [Note: Alice Carey.]

6. A set day kept in the spirit goes far to hallow all our days. Christianity is not satisfied with one-seventh of our time. It lays imperious claims to the whole, and in our settings forth of the duty of Sunday observance, we may not stoop in her name to contract for a fraction, on the understanding that the residuum may legitimately be given to the world. It behoves us to bate not one jot of the sacred claims of Him who “desires not ours but us” for His purchased possession. In abandoning Egypt, “not a hoof may be left behind.” If “the Son of man is Lord also of the sabbath,” we will bear in mind that this appropriation on His part does not imply the ceding of His lordship over all our days. He is Lord over the Sabbath, to interpret it, to preside over it, to ennoble it by merging it in “the Lord’s Day,” breathing into it an air of liberty and love, necessarily unknown before, and thus making it the nearest resemblance to the eternal sabbatism. But, in doing this as its Lord, He claims the first-fruits as holy only that the lump also may be holy, thus to secure that—

The week-days following in their train

The fulness of the blessing gain,

Till all, both resting and employ,

Be one Lord’s day of holy joy.

It is said that those who serve a battery on the battlefield are obliged at intervals to pause in calm self-possession, heeding not the awful excitement, that the guns may cool; yes, and that the smoke may lift to enable them to take accurate aim; and further that they may replenish their stores of ammunition. And so no Christian can truly fight the battle of the week without the quiet Sabbath to cool his guns, to lift off earth-lowering shadows, and to replenish his stores of strength from the secret place of the Most High.

Through the week we go down into the valleys of care and shadow. Our Sabbaths should be hills of light and joy in God’s presence; and so, as time rolls by, we shall go on from mountain-top to mountain-top, till at last we catch the glory of the gate, and enter in, to go no more out forever. 1 [Note: H. W. Beecher.]

A conscientious observance of the Sabbath brings a double blessing—release from the pressure of outward business, and escape from the tyranny of a man’s own strength. All unvaried activity is apt to become engrossing; and the best thing a man can do, in order to preserve the completeness of a rich and well-balanced humanity, is to shake himself loose as frequently as possible from the domination of an exclusive current of thought. Nothing more dangerous or more hostile to moral health than what the Germans would call a pampered subjectivity. 1 [Note: The Day Book of John Stuart Blackie, 52.]

Among the counsels written by Mr. Gladstone in 1854–1857 for the use of his eldest son is the following:—

“ Sunday, the day of the Resurrection, is at once the emblem, the earnest, and the joy, of the renewed life: cherish it accordingly: grudge, and as it were resent, any intrusion of worldly thoughts or conversation: except upon real necessity, strive to shut out rigorously any worldly business: always view the devotion of the day to God, not as a yoke, but as a privilege; and be assured that if and so far as this view of it shall seem over-strained, the soul is not in its health.” 2 [Note: Letters on Church and Religion of W. E. Gladstone, ii. 414.]

The Lord’s Day was observed as a remembrance of the Risen Lord. Its observance is a direct testimony to the greatest fact of the Gospel—the Resurrection; and to one of the chief doctrines of our faith—Christ’s Divinity. If it was not His day, the day He had for ever purchased and baptised to Himself by rising again from the dead, Christianity had no foundation, forgiveness no security, “men’s faith was vain, they were yet in their sins.” … It was a point of personal loyalty to Christ to keep it. It was one great way of showing love and worship to their Redeemer. It was not a command so much as a privilege. They did not ask, “What shall I lose by keeping it?” but, “What may I not miss by neglecting it?” Is this our attitude to the Lord’s Day? Is it a day of personal gratitude to One who gave Himself for me? You keep your friend’s birthday, you think of him, send messages and presents to him. Have you no thoughts, words, gifts for Christ on His birthday? You ask for ways of showing Him love, of letting it be known that you are His. Here is one. Show Him your love by dedicating to Him this day. 3 [Note: R. W. Barbour, Thoughts, 56.]

Still Sundays, rising o’er the world,

Have never failed to bring their calm,

While from their tranquil wings unfurled,

On the tired heart distilling balm,

A purer air bathes all the fields,

A purer gold the generous sky;

The land a hallowed silence yields,

All things in mute, glad worship lie,—

All, save where careless innocence

In the great Presence sports and plays,

A wild bird whistles, or the wind

Tosses the light snow from the sprays.

For life renews itself each week,

Each Sunday seems to crown the year;

The fair earth rounds as fresh a cheek

As though just made another sphere.

The shadowy film that sometimes breathes

Between our thought and heaven disparts,

The quiet hour so brightly wreathes

Its solemn peace about our hearts,

And Nature, whether sun or shower

Caprices with her soaring days,

Rests conscious, in a happy sense,

Of the wide smile that lights her ways. 1 [Note: Harriet P. Spofford, Poems.]

The Lord’s Day

Literature

Aitken (J.), The Abiding Law, 75.

Brindley (R. B.), The Darkness where God is, 151.

Burder (H. F.), Sermons, 408.

Collyer (R.), The Joy of Youth, 53.

Dean (J. T.), Visions and Revelations, 1.

Fuller (M.), The Lord’s Day, 327.

Henson (H. H.), Christ and the Nation, 210.

Kelman (J.), Ephemera Eternitatis, 1.

Knight (G. H.), Abiding Help for Changing Days, 147.

Lees (H. C.), The Sunshine of the Good News, 47.

Liddon (H. P.), Easter in St. Paul’s, 275.

Moule (H. C. G.), Thoughts for the Sundays of the Year, 14.

Nicoll (W. R.), Sunday Evening, 189.

Ogden (S.), Sermons, 248.

Paget (F.), Studies in the Christian Character, 32.

Pearson (A.), The Claims of the Faith, 140.

Rowland (A.), Open Windows, 20.

Smith (D.), Christian Counsel, 53.

Stanley (A. P.), Sermons on Special Occasions, 78.

Vallings (J. F.), The Holy Spirit of Promise, 207.

Christian World Pulpit, xxxviii. 275 (W. H. Bliss); lii. 56 (A. M. Fairbairn); lxvii. 361 (H. H. Henson).

Church of England Magazine, xvii. 369 (G. Burgess); xxxv. 185 (G. Venables).

Church of England Pulpit, lix. 313 (J. Pattison); lxi. 379 (W. M. Sinclair); lxiii. 252 (M. P. Maturin).

Expositor, 1st Ser., ii. 115 (E. H. Plumptre).

Homiletic Review, xxxi. 323 (A. Da Montefeltro).

Verses 17-18

Fear Not

And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as one dead. And he laid his right hand upon me, saying, Fear not; I am the first and the last, and the Living one; and I was dead, and behold, I am alive for evermore, and I have the keys of death and of Hades.— Revelation 1:17-18.

It seems strange to us that St. John, of all men in the world, should be afraid of Jesus. He had spent with the Master so many familiar days. He had talked with Him on the highways, and listened to His voice by the seashore. He had joined with the inner circle of the disciples on the transfiguration mount, in the death chamber of Jairus’ house, and in the solemn stillness of Gethsemane by night. He had leaned on the Saviour’s breast at supper; and when the cross was upreared on Calvary, he had taken from the Lord’s dying lips the direction to receive Mary, the mother of Jesus, into his own home. And yet now, with all his experience of the Master, when the vision of the glorified Christ flashed upon him, he fell in consternation and terror at His feet.

But there was a great contrast between the vision which disclosed itself to the mind of St. John as he turned to see it and the memory which he cherished of the Lord as He was when he walked with Him in Palestine, or when he leaned on His breast at the supper table. St. John was the beloved disciple; he had been on terms of exceptional intimacy with his Master, but this was the risen and ascended Saviour; and so great was the contrast that he fell at His feet as one dead. He was overcome by the splendour of the vision; he was overwhelmed with the majesty of the Saviour. But it was the same loving Lord. “And he laid his right hand upon me, saying, Fear not; I am the first and the last, and the Living one; and I was dead, and behold, I am alive for evermore, and have the keys of death and of Hades.”

Martin Luther tells us himself that in his youth, while he was still a devout member of the Roman Catholic Church, he was walking one day at Eisleben in his priest’s robes following the procession of the Mass, when suddenly he was overcome by the thought that the Sacrament, carried by the vicar-general (Dr. Staupitz), was really Jesus Christ (as he then believed) in person. “A cold sweat,” he says, “covered my body, and I believed myself dying of terror.” Afterwards he confessed his fears to Dr. Staupitz, when the latter (one of the more enlightened of the old school) replied: “Your thoughts are not of Christ. Christ never alarms; He comforts.” “These words,” adds Luther, “filled me with joy, and were a great consolation to me.” 1 [Note: J. Waddell.]

There are three great encouragements in the text—

I. Fear not to Live: “I am the Living one.”

II. Fear not to Die: “I was dead, and behold, I am alive for evermore.”

III. Fear not what comes after Death: “I have the keys of death and of Hades.”

I

Fear not to Live

“I am the Living one.”

1. The instinct of fear is deeply rooted in our nature. The thing that is unknown, yet known to be, will always be more or less formidable. When it is known as immeasurably greater than ourselves, and as having claims and making demands upon us, the more vaguely these are apprehended, the more room is there for anxiety; and when the conscience is not clear, this anxiety may well amount to terror. According to the nature of the mind which occupies itself with the idea of the Supreme, whether regarded as Maker or Ruler, will be the kind and degree of the terror. To this terror need belong no exalted ideas of God; those fear Him most who most imagine Him like their own evil selves, only beyond them in power, easily able to work His arbitrary will with them. The same consciousness of evil and of offence as gave rise to the bloody sacrifice is still at work in the minds of some who call themselves Christians. Naturally the first emotion of man towards the Being he calls God, but of whom he knows so little, is fear.

(1) Human experience is steeped in the fears brought by a guilty conscience. In all ages men have been terror-stricken as they thought of their sin. Even the most cultured peoples of paganism found no relief from such dread in turning to their gods. They did not think so well of their deities as to conceive of their pitying, helping, and saving. The favour of these monsters was to be won by pain, by suffering, and by surrender of what they loved the most; and so they hated their gods, and in their hearts bewailed the dire necessity of religion.

The ease of a guilty conscience is found only in the Lord Jesus Christ, the Living One. It is in the touch of His right hand, in the hearing of the voice of Jesus, in the steadfast regard of what Jesus is, of what Jesus has done, and in the apprehension of the place that Jesus fills, and of the power that Jesus wields, that St. John is to find the ground of his fearlessness and steadfast confidence. This is one of the common places of Christian experience. Not in ourselves, not in our attainments, not in our circumstances, not in anything that is ours, not even in any suffering, surrender, or sacrifice, can we find any sure ground of confidence or of deliverance. It is in Christ, and in Him alone, that peace and rest can be found. While we look at Him, while we steadfastly contemplate Him, and dwell on His perfection, on His work, on the gracious relation He condescends to bear to us, we are safe from inward perturbation and from hesitation and doubt.

(2) Men are oft overcome with fear as they face some great crisis in life. Again and again in life we are called to face emergencies, to take risks, to attempt the apparently impossible, to stand steadfast when confronted with opposition or trial or persecution. And the nobler the life is, the more numerous are the occasions on which this call comes to us. The true man, the man who feels the hand of the Almighty upon him, soon finds that life is full of episodes of this kind, often recurring with increasing frequency; that so far from becoming easier as it goes on, life often becomes more strenuous and more difficult; that the path which he is called to tread is no level highway, not even a graduated ascent to a predestined goal. It is an ascent indeed, but not always gradual or continuous. At times he finds that it is broken by obstacles that have to be surmounted, by dangerous chasms that have to be bridged over, by slippery places in which it is difficult to find a foothold, by storm and by tempest and by darkness and by false guides and by open enemies.

Man trembles as he enters into the cloud of sorrow. He would rather be let alone. He would prefer that his money-making, or his pleasure, or his sin should not be interrupted by sickness or misfortune. In prosperity he feels strong; in adversity his heart fails him. It is just then, in his hour of need, that a strong right hand is laid upon him, and a Voice whispers in his ear: “I will in no wise fail thee.” “Fear not.” Sometimes, when an electric car is mounting a steep street, the power fails, and the car sticks fast with half the height still to be climbed. But on the Hill Difficulty, or on the mountain of trial, the power of Christ will never come short. The most trying seasons of life are the seasons when His grace is most magnified and His arm strongest to save.

(3) There are those who fear to live because they can look forward to nothing day by day and year by year but the small dull round of toil, and its endless reaches of flat, straight, unchanging road oppress their souls. Every cyclist knows that the dead level is far more wearying than a road where he must climb even steep hills now and then. The same muscles are unceasingly exercised; one misses the fresh breeze and the expansive outlook of the uplands; one loses the rest that is born of change. So life on the dead level is in danger of exhaustion. Nowhere does one more plainly need to hear the Master’s voice saying: “Fear not.” In the dead monotonies Christ reveals His power. He brings blessedness into the dull round of toil—the bitter weariness of chronic pain, the wearing anxieties of unchanging years. The desert can be made to blossom like the rose. What we are in soul will determine what we are in work. St. Paul’s tent-making was never to him a monotonous desert. Let us try to catch the light of heaven, as we pursue our daily callings, whatever they may be, and we shall not fear to live through unchanging years.

To every thoughtful man life has its responsibilities, its cares, and its possibilities. Shall I be able to live worthily, to make a fit use of my opportunities? Shall I be able to live a rich, full, and gracious life, and be equal to the duties and the responsibilities which may devolve upon me? As we reflect on this, as we think out the situations and possibilities that open out to us as life proceeds and new horizons are disclosed, we feel the gracious power of this word, “Fear not to live; for I am the Living One.” It is as if the Lord said, “Fear not to live; I share your life. Through Me you will be able to grasp the opportunities of life, you will rise to the height of your calling, and when duty calls you will be able to answer all its demands. You will be able to say, ‘I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.’ ” 1 [Note: J. Iverach, The Other Side of Greatness, 139.]

2. Jesus, then, would have us meet every fear with the assurance that He is the Living One. “I am the first and the last, and the Living one”; not merely “the first and the last,” not merely God at the beginning and God at the end, a Creator who put the world-machine into working order and who will step forward again into view at the last day to judge and punish and reward; but a God who is the Living One from first to last, the Giver and Sustainer of life, upholding—carrying along—all things by the word of His power. In this picture is portrayed with a lightning touch the eternal being and the eternal activity of God.

The close connexion of clauses suggests that the claim made in the expression “the Living one” means more than that He was alive. It means exactly what Jesus meant when, in the hearing of this same Apostle, He said upon earth, “As the Father hath life in himself, so hath he given”—strange paradox—“so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself”—a life which, considered in contrast to all the life of creatures, is underived, independent, self-feeding, and, considered in contrast with the life of the Father with whom that Son stands in ineffable and unbroken union, is bestowed. It is a paradox, but until we assume that we have sounded all the depths and climbed all the heights, and gone round the boundless boundaries of the circumference of that Divine nature, we have no business to say that it is impossible. And this is what the great words that echoed from heaven in the Apostle’s hearing upon Patmos meant—the claim by the glorified Christ to possess absolute fontal life, and to be the Source of all creation, “in whom was life.” He was not only “the Living one,” but, as He Himself has said, He was “the Life.”

Stevenson in his essays insists upon “being vital,” as he calls it. Whatever else you are, he says, “be vital.” He is encouraging and seeking to foster a brave and cheerful optimism. Do not trouble about death, says Stevenson, make the best of life. Now there is truth in that, and wisdom in it; and in all literature there is nothing more touching than the zest with which Stevenson determined to live, though in his sickly body he carried all his days the sentence of death in himself. 1 [Note: J. D. Jones, The Gospel of Grace, 132.]

II

Fear not to Die

“I was dead.”

1. Man naturally fears death. Through fear of death men are all their lifetime subject to bondage. Though, under high motives and devotion to great causes, men have often subdued the fear of death, yet this fear is really a feeling common to all men. For men do not know what it is to die. It is an experience that is strange to men, and no one returns to tell others what it is to die. No traveller returns from the other land, and the experience of death lies before each man as new and as strange as if no one had ever had that experience. No one had ever before said, “I was dead, and behold, I am alive for evermore.”

It is said that George Morland, the painter, who killed himself by drinking, was possessed of such an unreasonable fear of darkness that, if the light happened to go out, he would creep towards the fire or the person next him, and he could never sleep without two lights in his room, lest one by some accident should be put out. That is something like the intolerable fear that most men have of death. They may reason themselves out of it, but the instinctive dread remains. Darwin used to go to the London Zoological Gardens, and, standing by the glass case that contained the cobra, put his forehead against the glass, while the cobra struck out at him. He was trying to conquer an instinctive fear; but though he knew that the glass was between, every time the creature struck out the scientist dodged. The same instinct makes most men fear the termination of earthly life. They may be firmly convinced in their minds that death is no enemy, but like Samuel Johnson they look forward with something very like terror to the “awful hour of their decease.” And yet, when the time came for Johnson, he was able to face death with calmness and Christian fortitude. 1 [Note: J. Waddell.]

2. Christ does not teach us to make light of death; He says nothing to weaken a right sense of its awfulness and solemnity. Had we no shrinking from it, we should be lacking in the ordinary instincts of self-preservation and in due reverence for the sanctities of that human life which man may destroy but can never replace. Had we no native horror at the shedding of human blood, we might rush on suicide or murder, with the ferocious delight of savages or brute beasts. Yes! there is a rightful fear of death which is associated with a sense of the blessing and value of God-given life and in fullest accord with all the primary instincts of our being and well-being. We cannot suppose that this laudable fear is meant to be impaired by the gospel. No! the Lord’s words here do not mean that we are to have nothing of that natural fear of death which is one of the strong safeguards of our own life and that of others. It is only the tyrannous, embarrassing, distracting, oppressive, mischievous terror that becomes simply a curse and a snare for all who come under its sway, to which this command “Fear not” applies, and from which it is part of the gracious Saviour’s design to deliver us.

That man must be a coward or a liar who could boast of never having felt a fear of death. 2 [Note: The Duke of Wellington.]

3. Christ bids us master the fear of death by remembering that He passed through its dark portals. “I was dead.” This announcement would remove all doubts from the mind of the Apostle as to the person addressing him. Whatever disparity between His present appearance and what He was when the Apostle saw and conversed with Him in the world, this declaration would remove all doubt. In the glorious One now in the midst of the golden candlesticks, and holding the seven stars in His right hand, and clothed with indescribable glory and majesty, he beholds the One whom he knew on earth as the “man of sorrows and acquainted with grief”—the One whom he saw arrayed in mock royal robes and the crown of thorns, the One whom he saw arraigned before an earthly tribunal and there unjustly condemned, the One whom he saw in indescribable agony in the gloomy precincts of Gethsemane, the One whom he saw nailed to the accursed tree, and whose cry of bitter agony he heard while under the hiding of His Father’s countenance, and whom at last he helped to commit to the dark and lonely grave. But what a contrast now! No longer the “man of sorrows and acquainted with grief”; no longer the object of the hateful scorn and derision of the wicked; no longer the suffering Jesus, crushed with the burden of sins not His own—bearing the cross on which to lay down His life a ransom for many; no longer the seemingly conquered of death and the tenant of the grave, but the mighty conqueror risen to the possession of an endless life.

The actual words are, “I became dead”—a mysterious paradox, in which a most wonderful event is inserted, incorporated, into that eternity of being. In this short phrase He intimates the whole mystery of the Incarnation; but He presents just that aspect of it which sinful man, prone at His feet, most needs. He does not articulate the thought now of His blessed birth, or of His life, His speech, His labour, His example; there is nothing said here of Bethlehem, or of the years in Nazareth, or of the fair borders of the Lake with the furrowed fields, and the floating fishing-craft, and the listening multitudes upon the flowery slopes. It is all the cross; it is only and altogether the precious death and burial. “I became dead.” We read that sentence in the light of the long Apocalypse, and what do we see within it? The shame and glory of the crucifixion, the atoning and redeeming blood, the sacrifice of the Lamb, the Lamb not of innocence only but of the altar—“as it had been slain.”

“And behold, I am alive for evermore.” This existence after death is special, and different. It is not a mere reassertion of what had been already included in His great word, “I am the Living one.” It is something added. It is an assurance that in the continued life which has once passed through the experience of death there is something new, another sympathy, the only one which before could have been lacking with His brethren whose lot it is to die, and so a helpfulness to them which could not otherwise have been, even in His perfect love. This new life—the life which has conquered death by tasting it, which has enriched itself with a before unknown sympathy with men whose lives are for ever tending towards and at last all going down into the darkness of the grave—this life stretches on and out for ever. It is to know no ending. So long as there are men living and dying, so long above them and around them there shall be the Christ, the God-man, who liveth, and was dead, and is alive for evermore.

Death and darkness get you packing,

Nothing now to man is lacking;

All your triumphs now are ended,

And what Adam marr’d is mended

Graves are beds now for the weary

Death a nap, to wake more merry. 1 [Note: Henry Vaughan.]

4. Because Christ lives, His people must live too. They cannot die. He made Himself one with His people, so much one with them that His life was their life, His dying their dying, and His work their work. The closeness of that union is illustrated on the other side as well. Their life is His life, their dying is His dying, and their work is His work. So the Apostle of the Gentiles says to the Colossian Christians, “Ye died, and your life is hid with Christ in God.” So close is the unity between Christ and His people that St. Paul could say, “If one died for all, then were all dead.” If we trace this thought, as set forth in its fulness in Scripture, we find that the fear of death is overcome because the bitterness of death is past. It is no mere figure of speech which affirms that the Christian has died when he became a Christian. Nor is it only the case that when Christ died all His people died with Him. But the other side of the twofold experience is also true. Christ shares the death of His people. He is with them in the valley of the shadow of death. It is no lonely death that they die, when body and spirit part for the time. Christ is with them, and keeps them company in their dying hour. The sting of death has been withdrawn, and the bitterness of it has been taken away. For in virtue of the faith which has made him one with Christ, a Christian has died to sin, has passed into the state where there is no more condemnation.

It is told of Leonardo da Vinci that on his death-bed the king came to visit and cheer him. He talked to his majesty “lamenting that he had offended God and man in that he had not laboured in art as he ought to have done.” Suddenly he was seized with a paroxysm, and the king, taking him in his arms to give him comfort, the weary penitent “died in the arms of his king.” The words are a parable of that which awaits every Christian in the hour of death. He will die in the arms of his King, “the Eternal God, his refuge, and underneath the everlasting arms,” and so the pathway will not be strange. 1 [Note: J. Waddell.]

III

Fear not what comes after Death

“I have the keys of death and of Hades.”

Two things in the rendering of the Authorized Version have given rise to much misapprehension. One is the order in which, following an inferior reading, it has placed the two things specified. And the other is that mistranslation, as it has come to be, of the word Hades by the word “Hell.” The true original does not read “hell and death,” but “death and Hades,” the dim unseen regions in which all the dead, whatsoever their condition may be, are gathered. The Hades of the New Testament includes the Paradise into which the penitent thief was promised entrance, as well as the Gehenna which threatened to open for the impenitent.

Here it is figured as being a great gloomy fortress, with bars and gates and locks, of which that “shadow feared of man” is the warder, and keeps the portals. But he does not keep the keys. The kingly Christ has these in His own hand.

When land on both sides of a river is held by the same farmer he also has the rights of the water. In the same manner Jesus Christ is the owner, on this side as well as the other side. Consequently He has the rights of the river which divides the two worlds. 2 [Note: Richard Jones.]

1. Jesus went into death and Hades to become their Master on behalf of men. It was not necessary for Him to seek the keys of death and Hades for Himself, for He was in Himself the Lord of Life, and death and Hades were His vassals. It was humanity that had lost the keys, and was in bondage to death and Hades, and it was for humanity, and as its representative, that Jesus “became dead,” in order that He might “become alive again” and bear for us the keys of death and Hades. “Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same; that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; and deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage.”

Because He was the “Living one,” He broke death’s power, and Hades could not detain Him. It is a Divine paradox that the Lord of essential life should enter into death and Hades at all, but it would have been more than a paradox, it would have been the subversion of eternal truth and reason, if they had been able to detain Him. By voluntary surrender He entered into their domain, and by His will He burst their bands asunder and shattered their prison. They were compelled to admit into their stronghold One stronger than they, and they were conquered in their own citadel. They who had conquered millions were at last conquered for men by the Son of Man. With the majesty of invincible life all was measured out beforehand, not only the entrance into death’s domain, but also the rising on the third day. Conquering all the dark domain, He came forth bearing the keys of death and Hades. “I became dead, and behold, I am alive for evermore.”

There is a well-known engraving of Monica and her son St. Augustine. They clasp hands in the twilight, and look wistfully into the open sky. They are not gazing at the stars, their eyes are turned towards the infinite; they are asking—Beyond the horizon, what? Who will read for us the everlasting riddle? There is a little poem by George MacDonald—

Traveller, what lies over the hill?

Traveller, tell to me;

I am only a child at the window-sill,

Over I cannot see.

A verse in Richard Baxter’s hymn answers it well—

My knowledge of that life is small,

The eye of faith is dim;

But ’tis enough that Christ knows all,

And I shall be with Him. 1 [Note: F. Harper, A Broken Altar, 47.]

2. Jesus now carries the keys. Keys are symbols of authority and law; and the keys of death remind us that government and order prevail in the realm of mortality. Having regard to events which we constantly witness, it might seem that death is entirely lawless. Sweeter than the virgin rose, the young perish with the rose, whilst the very aged wearily grow older still; the strong are broken by sickness in a day, whilst the feeble linger on in helplessness and pain; the good cease from the land, whilst the vicious remain to torment and pollute. We know not when death will make its appearance, or whom it will strike; it seems the most fitful of agents, setting at naught all probability and prophecy. But just as the meteorologist sees, and sees ever more clearly, how law governs the wind which bloweth where it listeth, so the actuary discerns regulating principles under the apparent capriciousness of death, and bases his insurance tables upon those ascertained principles. However it may seem, the dark archer never draws his bow at a venture. The gate of the grave is not blown about by the winds of chance; it has keys, it opens and shuts by royal authority.

To have the key of any experience means to have entered into it and passed through it and endured it, and learned its secrets and made them your own.

Now Jesus knows what dying is like, and He knows what comes after. By the grace of God He tasted death for every man. He Himself felt that fear of it which makes cowards of us all. He Himself shrank from it, as we do. He Himself endured it, as we must. He suffered far more than any other man ever did or ever need, suffer. Of all men He was most solitary and forsaken. He trod the wine-press alone. He died deserted, in the dark. He Himself gave up the ghost, and went down into a human grave. He was crucified, dead and buried, and He descended into Hades. He went wherever we, in our turn, must go. He passed the mysterious gateway, and as Man He entered the unseen world, and all the secrets of that unutterable experience belong to Him.

One of the most profound and suggestive legends of ancient Greece was the legend of the Sphinx. The Sphinx, according to the old story, was a monstrous creature, half human, half animal, who had a riddle to propound to any travellers who passed her way. What exactly the riddle was does not matter to us just now. All that concerns us is that here was a creature propounding her riddle to men and exacting their lives as forfeit if they failed to answer it. Traveller after traveller, the legend says, tried and failed and perished. But at last there came one who discovered the answer, and the Sphinx, her secret discovered, destroyed herself. Whenever I think of that Greek legend I feel that from first to last it is nothing but a parable of death. Death is the Sphinx. Ever since the world began death has been in it propounding to mankind this tremendous riddle, “If a man die, shall he live again?”—challenging them to discover her own secret, saying to them, “Explain me or pay the forfeit in a life passed in fear and bondage.” And generation after generation tried to discover the secret and explain the riddle. The greatest sages and philosophers and teachers tried and failed. The psalmists and prophets of the Old Testament tried and failed. Death remained the terrible and inscrutable Sphinx. But there came One at last who “became dead” and went down into the grave, and on the morning of the third day came out of it again. And now He says to the world, “ I have the Key.” 1 [Note: J. D. Jones, The Gospel of Grace, 128.]

3. The keys of death and Hades are in the hand of Him who is seated on the judgment-seat. “He openeth, and no man shutteth; he shutteth, and no man openeth.” Nor is the consolation derived from the thought that all power is in the hand of Jesus Christ. That would be an untrustworthy source of comfort. For the Christian would not desire or wish that the power should be strained on his behalf, or that an unworthy verdict should be given. For on that day it will be found that those who obtain the sentence of acquittal and of reward have become worthy of their place in the Father’s Kingdom. They have become the righteousness of God in Christ. They have become like Christ, have really obtained the Spirit of adoption, and have learned the language of the Father’s family, and are really the sons of God. The final procedure recognizes all that has been done for them, and all that is accomplished in them, and the verdict is given accordingly. Justified by grace, and yet judged according to works, is the final wonder of the Christian experience.

The weary child, the long play done,

Wags slow to bed at set of sun;

Sees mother leave, fears night begun,

But by remembered kisses made

To feel, tho’ lonely, undismayed,

Glides into dreamland unafraid.

The weary man, life’s long day done,

Looks lovingly at his last sun;

Sees all friends fade, fears night begun,

But by remembered mercies made

To feel, tho’ dying, undismayed,

Glides into glory unafraid.

Fear Not

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