Bible Commentaries
Revelation 22

Verses 3-4

The Perfect Life

His servants shall do him service; and they shall see his face; and his name shall be on their foreheads.— Revelation 22:3-4.

This promise or prophecy is the last and the best in the Bible. It seems purposely reserved to be the crowning point. For, to be with God, to be near God, to see God, to know God, to enjoy God, to be like God—these blessings are all subordinate to the blessing of serving God.

It is a promise not merely for a far-off heaven, but for a present practical earth. Ever since Jesus stood in the carpenter’s shop at Nazareth, the prosaic place of honest labour has become holy ground. Experience has taught us that there are certain fundamentals of character which cannot be learnt from pleasure or from pain, but only from work.

Often indeed it is as useful as it is delightful to look through such revelations upward; to use the Divine promise—not our mere aspirations, but the promise—as the means by which thought may reach toward the better world. Our vision will be but dim, at the clearest; but light from that pure eternity, even shed through clouds, can bring with it a strange reality of peace, and hope, and courage. So, when the two Pilgrims in the great Allegory looked from the Delectable Mountains through the perspective-glass of the Shepherds, “their hands indeed did shake, yet they thought they saw something like the gate, and also some of the glory of the place”; and they went forward singing on their way. But more often it is our duty and our safety not so much to gaze up into heaven as thoughtfully to remember that we “pass through nature to eternity.” To us, we may be sure, if the path thitherward is not a reality, the brightness of the end is but a dream.

Heavenly bliss is no arbitrary beginning of existence over again. It is the carrying out into endless issues of the process which grace begins on this side the grave. It is a joyful harvest reaped in the sunlight of an eternal summer; but it is reaped off the very fields which were ploughed and sown beneath the clouds and showers of time. 1 [Note: H. C. G. Moule, Christ is All, 214.]

The text gives three elements of the perfected life—Service, Vision, Likeness.

I

Service

“His servants shall do him service.”

To understand the precise force of this statement, one must observe that the two expressions for “servant” and “serve” are not related to one another in Greek as they are in English, but are two quite independent words, the former meaning literally “a slave,” and the latter being exclusively confined in Scripture to one kind of service. It would never be employed for any service that a man did for a man; it is a religious word, and means only the service that men do for God, whether in specific acts of so-called worship or in the wider worship of daily life.

1. The highest life is a life of service. In heaven itself there is no emancipation from the bonds of God. The holy nations are eternally bound, in absolute obligation, to the will of God and of the Lamb. It is no part of the Creator’s promise to raise or to educate the creature to independence, to self-dependence. That could not be, without a profound and fatal contradiction. The created soul cannot be the basis of its own being; how could it be the source of its own joy and power, or the law of its own eternity? We read what is but likely when we read that the nearer and the clearer is the sight of the Creator granted to the creature, the better the creature recognizes the blessedness of self-surrender; the nearer the approach, the more entire the service.

I used as a child to pore over the Apocalypse, which I thought by far the most beautiful and absorbing of all the books of the Bible; it seemed full of rich and dim pictures, things which I could not interpret and did not wish to interpret, the shining of clear gem-like walls, lonely riders, amazing monsters, sealed books, all of which took perfectly definite shape in the childish imagination. The consequence is that I can no more criticize it than I could criticize old tapestries or pictures familiar from infancy. They are there, just so, and any difference of form is inconceivable. In one point, however, the strange visions have come to hold for me an increased grandeur; I used to think of much of it as a sort of dramatic performance, self-consciously enacted for the benefit of the spectator; but now I think of it as an awful and spontaneous energy of spiritual life going on, of which the prophet was enabled to catch a glimpse. Those “voices crying day and night,” “the new song that was sung before the throne,” the cry of “Come and see”—these were but part of a vast and urgent business, which the prophet was allowed to overhear. It is not a silent place, that highest heaven, of indolence and placid peace, but a scene of fierce activity and the clamour of mighty voices. 1 [Note: A. C. Benson, Joyous Gard, 119.]

2. The ideal life, though full of activity, knows the truest rest. There is a rest which is mere inaction—the quiet of the stone, the stillness of the grave, the exhaustion of a spent and feeble nature. But there is a nobler rest than this. There is rest in health; there is rest in the musical repose of exquisitely balanced powers; there is rest to the desiring faculties when they find the thing desired; there is rest in the rapture of congenial employment; rest in the flow of joyful strength; rest in the swift glide of the stream when it meets with no impediment. Such is the rest of the glorified—perfect beings in a perfect world, rejoicing in their native element, having no weakness within, and no resisting force without, to check the outflow and expression of their loving natures; their activity, therefore, being easy, natural, and necessary as light is to the sun, and fragrance to the flowers of spring—activity to them is rest.

Stagnation is as incompatible with the life that is lived in the heavenly city as it is with true life here. To represent heaven as a place of rest merely is to present it as a place where men would be less truly men than before. Peace and fellowship with God do not exclude activity; rather must they stimulate it.

I count that heaven itself

Is only work to surer issues.

Heaven means the bringing to maturity and perfection of those powers and energies which are only partially developed here. “His servants shall do him service”: in love without a grain of selfishness, in faith without a spasm of doubt, in knowledge without a shadow of uncertainty. All “those instincts immature,” all “those purposes unsure,” which we recognize in ourselves or have guessed in others, find their full development, their completion, when “that which is in part is done away.”

What here is faithfully begun

Shall be completed, not undone.

The deepest rest and the highest activity coincide. They do so in God who “worketh hitherto” in undisturbed tranquillity; they may do so in us. The wheel that goes round in swiftest rotation seems to be standing still. Work at its intensest, if it is pleasurable work, and level with the capacity of the doer, is the truest form of rest. In vacuity there are stings and torment; it is only in joyous activity which is not pushed to the extent of strain and unwelcome effort that the true rest of man is to be found. And the two verses in the Book of Revelation about this matter, which look at first sight to be opposed to each other, are like the two sides of a sphere, which unite and make the perfect whole. “They rest from their labours.” “They rest not, day nor night.”

Whatever may be the inability, in this present life, to mingle the full enjoyment of the Divine works with the full discharge of every practical duty, and confessedly in many cases this must be, let us not attribute the inconsistency to any indignity of the faculty of contemplation, but to the sin and the suffering of the fallen state, and the change of order from the keeping of the garden to the tilling of the ground. We cannot say how far it is right or agreeable with God’s will, while men are perishing round about us; while grief and pain, and wrath, and impiety, and death, and all the powers of the air, are working wildly and evermore, and the cry of blood going up to heaven, that any of us should take hand from the plough; but this we know, that there will come a time when the service of God shall be the beholding of Him; and though, in these stormy seas where we are now driven up and down, His Spirit is dimly seen on the face of the waters, and we are left to cast anchors out of the stern, and wish for the day, that day will come, when, with the evangelists on the crystal and stable sea, all the creatures of God shall be full of eyes within, and there shall be “no more curse, but His servants shall serve Him, and shall see His face.” 1 [Note: Ruskin, Modern Painters, pt. iii. sec. i. ch. xv. § 12 (Works, iv. 217).]

3. This life is distinguished by variety. The blessed God delights in variety. In all His works, along with perfect order, there is eternal change. There is no mountain exactly like another mountain; there are no two trees whose boughs bend into the same network of interlacing lines; no two leaves alike; no two clouds alike; no two waves alike; but the face of nature is infinitely diversified. So also is the Church. You see no two men with like endowments; no two spheres marked by exact similarity. Each one has his own peculiar gift for his own peculiar station; some have to serve their Lord with the power of the pen, others with the power of the tongue; some by their poverty, others by their wealth; and each one has a distinct individuality of power and place and opportunity. We see Aaron with his eloquence, and Moses with his stammering speech. There is a Jeremiah to give the prophecy, and a Baruch to read it; a Paul to plant, and an Apollos to water. One man is a “son of consolation,” another a “son of thunder.” One servant has five talents, another two, and another one. As the Church in heaven is but the consummation of the Church on earth, we may infer that the law of variety which shines in this earthly exhibition of Christianity, and which prevails all over this region of existence, sheds its fascinations over paradise.

The highest service that we can render is to reveal God. It is true that at the best we can only reveal certain aspects of God to another. One by his sterling integrity gives a glimpse of the Divine righteousness; another by his purity, a glimpse of the Divine holiness; a third by his sympathy, some reflection of the Divine compassion; a fourth by his tenderness, some idea of the Divine love. Only once has there been a man—the Divine Man—who could reflect every aspect of the Divine perfections; for He was the brightness of His Father’s Glory, the express Image of His Person.

Here the whole Deity is seen,

Nor dares a creature guess,

Which of the glories brighter shone

The justice or the grace.

“Because I live,” saith our Lord, “ye shall live also,” and as living, be partakers in that which belongs to Life: freedom, expansion, and variety. It has been often remarked that each one among the branches of our Lord’s great family preserves some portion of His teaching more faithfully, reflects some aspect of His character more clearly, than is done by the rest, and passing from churches to individuals, we shall find that they who are in Christ will resemble each other in so much as they resemble Him; they will be like each other (as in earthly relationships) without being alike. Our natural characteristics are not obliterated; rather is the man renewed after Christ’s likeness restored to Himself, that excellent thing for which God made him at the first, the type from which he had consciously fallen away. 1 [Note: Dora Greenwell, The Patience of Hope (ed. 1894), 139.]

Gladstone, Newman and Rainy—perhaps the three most remarkable men of their day of those who really applied their minds to the matters of Christian faith—were all in agreement not only as to personal experience of religion but also—if we except certain matters about the Church (and these are not in the Creed)—as to the fundamental doctrines of Christianity. But the intellectual attitude of each of these minds to these doctrines was distinct. Gladstone’s mind was essentially and constitutionally orthodox and he was never critical regarding ecclesiastical dogma. Newman’s was essentially and constitutionally sceptical, and the Church’s authoritative system was to him less the native home of his mind than its only refuge. Rainy’s mind was well content to lodge in Catholic forms of doctrine, but he neither denied the element of imperfection and difficulty in such forms nor was disturbed by it, for this only made him more deeply feel “how great a thing it is to believe in God.” 2 [Note: P. Carnegie Simpson, The Life of Principal Rainy, i. 287.]

II

Vision

“They shall see his face.”

This is the highest station of honour in the service of God. To stand in the presence of the Great King, is the station of princes, the honour that belongs only to the royal family of heaven. In them the saying is fulfilled, “He raiseth the poor out of the dust, and lifteth the needy out of the dunghill; that he may set him with princes, even with the princes of his people.” Theirs is the dignity of a life at court, the court of the “Ancient of Days.”

1. The face is the index to the character and distinctive attributes of any being. In the poetry of the primitive ages, the “face” is another word for the character; and thoroughly to know it, and see into it, is thoroughly to know the real man. “The face of God,” let it be reverentially spoken, is the character of God; to see it is to know what God is. The greatest revelation of the Father, according to St. Paul’s teaching, was in “the face” of the Redeemer. St. John here tells us that this is the face which Christ’s servants shall see by and by. But had not John seen this face already? Yes, in a sense. He had leaned upon the Master’s bosom many a time, and looked up into that face, and if there was anything in Christ’s human nature that expressed to John His Divine glory and tenderness beyond all other, it was that countenance. But John also saw only as much of that face as to awaken within him an intense yearning to see more. “We shall see him as he is,” and “they shall see his face,” are his fond refrains. He practically says, “It is true that for a brief time I saw His face, but there was so much of hiding in His incarnation, that I only saw dimly its deep meaning. By and by I shall see Him without any of the mist of His humanity that gathered round Him while on earth to lessen the brightness of His glory or the full beauty of His face.”

For anyone who knew the previous life of the author, the fitness of her roadmender to present herself and her ideals was obvious. “After all,” he says for her in that opening chapter, “what do we ask of life, here or indeed hereafter, but leave to serve, to live, to commune with our fellow-men and with ourselves, and from the lap of earth to look up into the face of God?” That aspiration to service and communion had been in her no affair of mere aspiration: it had been a burning force, not a quietistic scheme. Yet always her heart and soul rested gladly in “the lap of earth”; and she turned her face towards the face of God as she discerned that vision everywhere, in earth and earth’s little ones, and in the face of Man_1:1 [Note: Michael Fairless: Her Life and Writings, 54.]

Day after day, O lord of my life, shall I stand before thee face to face? With folded hands, O lord of all worlds, shall I stand before thee face to face?

Under thy great sky in solitude and silence, with humble heart shall I stand before thee face to face?

In this laborious world of thine, tumultuous with toil and with struggle, among hurrying crowds shall I stand before thee face to face?

And when my work shall be done in this world, O King of kings, alone and speechless shall I stand before thee face to face? 2 [Note: Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali, 70.]

“It comforts me much,” said Whitefield in the last sermon he ever preached in London, “to think that, whenever God shall call for me, angels will carry me into the bosom of Abraham; but it comforts me more to think that, as soon as they lay hold of me, my first question to them will be, ‘Where is my Master? Where is my Jesus?’ And that, after all my tossings and tumblings here, I shall be brought to see His face at last.” 3 [Note: L. Tyerman, The Life of the Rev. George Whitefield, ii. 562.]

Lord Houghton’s notes of Carlyle’s talk contain the following: “I would rather have one real glimpse of the young Jew face of Christ than see all the Raffælles in the world.” 4 [Note: The Life, Letters and Friendships of Richard Monckton Milnes, ii. 481.]

Men oft see God

But never know ’tis He till He has passed. 5 [Note: Memoir and Correspondence of Coventry Patmore, ii. 60.]

2. The full vision is possible only to the pure in heart. The pure in heart shall see God. In harmony with this, St. John, who wrote the words of the text, wrote also, “Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is.” Having thus predicted the blissful consummation of a perfect vision of Christ, St. John proceeds to show how this hope to see Him, and to be like Him, produces in those who cherish it the necessary fitness for such a vision and attainment—“And every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as he is pure.” Thus would be fulfilled in him the beatitude of the Saviour Himself, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”

Over the torno of the Convent of the Carmelites at Medina is Teresa’s beautiful advice to her nuns—

“Let your desire be to see God, your fear that you may lose Him; your grief that you do not enjoy Him, your joy in all which may lift you to Him. Thus you shall live in great peace.” 1 [Note: H. H. Colvill, Saint Teresa of Spain, 124.]

When St. Paul speaks of the glory of God in the Face of Jesus Christ, the context and its implied contrast show that he means the Face, and that his vision was a Face-to-face vision. And I think it was the vision of the Face that kept him so true to his message of the Cross. His question to the Galatians, Have not I seen Jesus Christ the Lord? means, inter alia, Have I not shut my eyes to all other seeing and turned away from all other vision? St. Paul’s art was limited, he would paint figures; no, one figure; faces, no, one face. “That one face.” “I love you,” said General Gordon to a friend of mine (both are now on the other side), “because you paint faces”; “I love you, Paul,” we may say, “because you paint one face, His. Even the Galatians would have given you their eyes for painting His. I would give you mine if I could see with yours.” 2 [Note: J. Rendel Harris, The Sufferings and the Glory (1914), 138.]

3. The vision becomes clearer through service. We learn to know our friend, not only by conversation and correspondence, but still more by work. It is when we receive a note from him, asking us to come up and help him in his day’s duties, that we feel not only honoured by the request, but delighted with the prospect of getting that further insight into his character which a share in his work will certainly give. Perhaps the invitation is to be his secretary, and we shall then see how he bears himself in relation with others; or his messenger, when his mind will be laid open to us in the secrets he confides; or it may be he proposes to give us a piece of work to ourselves, and we shall have the happiness of discovering how it ought to be done. It is not otherwise with our Lord. His revelations are not reserved for those smaller and more definite acts of communion with Him which we call prayer. The larger parts of life are illuminated by His Presence. When we begin to realize that all our work is work for Him; that the work in the study, the office, and the shop may be His as truly as the ministry in the Church or the mission room, then we shall learn to expect such visits of encouragement and guidance as some great employer of labour now and again pays to his workpeople.

I find again and again illustrations of the saying, which I believe came from our Lord’s own lips, though it is recorded in no gospel: “Raise the stone, and there thou shalt find Me; cleave the wood and there am I.” The raising of the stone, the cleaving of the wood, are not works in themselves of an interesting or lofty character. They stand for the humble duties of life. Yet it is just then—when pursuing our daily tasks, which whether they be of head or of hand seem often so monotonous and so unprofitable—there at least as much as in our acts of private devotion, that I find from the experiences of Christian men and the witness of the Scriptures themselves that the Lord makes Himself known to us. 1 [Note: F. Ealand, The Spirit of Life, 63.]

There is a beautiful legend which tells that one shepherd was kept at home watching a fevered guest the night the angels came to Bethlehem with the announcement of the birth of Jesus. The other shepherds saw the heavenly host, heard their song, and beheld the glory. Returning home, their hearts were wonderfully elated. But all the night Shemuel sat alone by the restless sufferer and waited. His fellow-shepherds pitied him because he had missed the vision and the glory which they had seen. But in his patient serving he had found blessing and reward of his own. He had missed, indeed, the splendour of that night in the fields, and in his serving he gave up his own life, for the fever-poison touched him and he died. But he had tasted the joy of sacrifice, and then his eyes saw a more wondrous glory when he entered the Divine presence.

Shemuel, by the fever-bed,

Touched by beckoning hands that led,

Died and saw the Uncreated;

All his fellows lived and waited. 2 [Note: J. R. Miller, Our New Edens, 106.]

III

Likeness

“And his name shall be on their foreheads.”

This means that they shall wear the imprint of His perfections. The name of a man is that by which he is identified and known; and as God is identified and known by His perfections, His perfections are called His name. To have God’s name is to bear a resemblance to Him—to have what we call His image and likeness. The face on which they gaze must transform, by the quickening power of its glories, each adoring spirit into its living likeness. If you turn away from the sun, your face will be in shadow, but if you turn to it, your face will shine, and the sun’s name will be imprinted in letters of light upon your forehead; and so, by a glorious necessity, those who see God will shine with His reflected Name.

This is not some mystic mark that no one can understand; it is the beauty of holiness. When we study the Gospels and see Christ Himself, we learn what that name is which shines on the forehead of His friends. It is nothing mysterious or occult—it is patience, gentleness, thoughtfulness, humility, kindness, the spirit of forgiveness, meekness, peace, joy, goodness. People have no difficulty in discovering the marks of Jesus on those who wear them.

The variety of nature is as useful as it is beautiful. What if faces had been like coins, and each one had to carry his name on his forehead to be known? His name on his forehead! There is an obscure way in which character imprints itself on the face. The very attempt to conceal writes—Hypocrite. In the future world this shall be complete, the soul and face keeping time like work and dial-plate,—infinite variety of character, perfect transparency in all. 1 [Note: John Ker, Thoughts for Heart and Life, 236.]

1. The name on the forehead is the sign of possession. Under the old dispensation a frontlet was worn upon the forehead as well as upon the left arm. The frontlet upon the left arm was tied on with a thong, which was wound around the arm until it reached the tip of the longest finger. This seemed to indicate that the power of service on the part of the individual was consecrated. The frontlet placed on the forehead between the eyes, on the contrary, was intended to express the fact that the whole intelligence of the man was consecrated to God. Thus St. John, having already referred to the service rendered, now speaks of the impress of Divine ownership which the noblest feature of man shall bear—“His name shall be on their foreheads.” More than that, as the plate upon Aaron’s forehead had the words written on it “Holy is the Lord,” so shall those who once were God’s servants become His temple priests, and, seeing His face, shall also wear upon their foreheads the name of their God, and thus bear silent but eloquent and everlasting witness that they are His.

Devout Hindoos always have marks on their foreheads, showing the particular god they worship. The trident indicates the worship of Vishnu; while ashes made from cow-dung are rubbed on their foreheads if Siva is their special deity. What impresses one so much is that they are not ashamed to own that they are followers of their gods, while we too often are ashamed to confess that we are followers of the true and living God, and of His Son, Jesus Christ. 1 [Note: H. S. Streatfeild, Glimpses of Indian Life, 4.]

J. M. Neale remarks that the Holy Name was set forth everywhere by the Saints of the Middle Ages; not merely in church art but in household and domestic furniture. “Go, for example,” he says, “into many of the farms round here, and notice the fire-dogs that stand in the yawning chimney; how they are wrought at the sides into those most blessed of all letters, the IHC by which our dear Lord is set forth. Nothing so mean, that it was thought unworthy of this monogram; nothing so glorious, that it was considered unfit to have that excellent glory added thereto. Silver and gold and gems conspired together to mark out this Name on the paten, or the chalice, or the shrine; the manufacturer of Limoges worked it out in his enamel, the art of producing which we are only beginning to recover; in the monastery potteries they burnt it in on their tiles; in convents they embroidered it on chasuble and cope; in the glorious windows of churches the light came in, sanctified, as it were, and hallowed by the name of the true Light. I know all this very well. But I know also that the poor peasant was encouraged, with his clasp knife, to consecrate his house by carving the same name on the hutch of his door, or the barge-boards of his roof; the Name of Salvation could never be out of place among the dwellings of those who looked to be saved; the Name which to adore will be the work of eternity, could never be out of place for the meditation and the worship of earth.” 2 [Note: J. T. Stoddart, The New Testament in Life and Literature (1914), 358.]

2. The name on the forehead means that the imprint of the Divine perfections will be open and visible. By the seal of the Spirit the servants of God even on earth bear this impression; and it is essential, in order to authenticate their claims. But, too frequently, the mark is scarcely seen; it is within their hearts, but it is not upon their foreheads, to be known and read of all men. Only He who knows the heart can trace it with absolute certainty. Infirmities disguise, or obscurities of station hide from view, the mystic name written on many a pillar of grace. It is like some dim inscription on a monument, mouldering into indistinctness, and veiled by trailing leaves, overlooked by the casual traveller, and deciphered only by the antiquary’s eye.

As fire is hidden in the unstruck stone, as the future flower is hidden in the present root, as the gem is hidden by the rough incrustation round it, the grace of God is frequently hidden by the weakness and waywardness of man. But there it will not be so. No one in that world will be satisfied with a secret and latent piety; not one will say, “I make no profession”; no deprecating voice will make the plea, “Lord, I was afraid, and went and hid thy talent in the earth; lo, there thou hast that is thine!” To intimate that the name of Jehovah will be so conspicuously visible on all His servants that you must see it if you see them, it is said to flame upon their very foreheads. 1 [Note: C. Stanford, Central Truths, 231.]

The forehead is in itself an inscription; it is the mark of Man. For no other creature bears this smooth-domed architrave and metopon over the portal of its communication with the world. The birds, with their swiftness and airiness of motion, lack the forehead altogether; and the beasts, notwithstanding broad and heavy frontlets, designed, as it were, to push and thrust through the jungle or against the foe, have not the arched dome on which a name might be written. When there is the lofty dome of Shakespeare or of Sir Walter Scott, or “the bar of Michael Angelo,” we estimate the genius which resides and works within by the stately span of the arched building. But even the humblest human brow is far removed from that of the noblest ape; on the ape’s brow nothing can be written, but on the man’s is at least written this: that he is a Man. It is this meaning and mark of the forehead which gives the imaginative glory to Milton’s figure, when he says that the Star

Flames in the forehead of the morning sky. 2 [Note: R. F. Horton, The Christian World, March 24, 1910.]

3. The name is where others can see it, but where it is not seen by the person himself. You cannot see your own forehead, and you are not aware of the nobleness or the brightness that others see there. This unconsciousness of the radiance on the face is part of the splendour; to be aware of it would be to dim the brightness. We know that when any one is conscious of the beauty or the refinement stamped on his face, a great part of the beauty or the refinement is gone. So self-consciousness mars spiritual loveliness. When a man knows that he is humble, he is no longer humble. The man who is truly poor in spirit is not himself aware of the shining of his life, the splendour of his deeds, the power of his words, or of his ministries. The best people are always the least conscious of their goodness and worth. Others see the shining, but they themselves do not.

In meditation his face appeared to some a little severe; in relaxation none could be more gracious and genial. In his last years the light of heaven played about his features. This radiancy, which was but the symbol of the life within, was startling at times. On one occasion an Irish servant-girl opened the door for him at a house where he was calling, and on announcing him said that she had forgotten his name, but that he certainly had the face of an angel. This strange spiritual light was neither the silver shimmer of the hair nor the deep benignity of the farshining pupil, nor the calm of the features. It seemed to be all these suffused with something else too subtle for description, something ethereal, rare, beatific. 1 [Note: A. J. Gordon: A Biography, 186.]

They do His will, they see His Face, their foreheads bear His name,

Who stand before the throne of God, and give the Lamb acclaim;

No curse can ever enter in, no night the glory dim,

Where shining souls, thus triple-crowned, eternal praises hymn.

Obedience such as theirs, O Lord, teach me even here below;

The vision of Thy blessed Face in bright effulgence show;

Thy name and image, clear and pure, grave deeper on my brow,

Till all shall see that I am Thine—my Lord and Master Thou!

And thus shall curse, and night, and sin, like shadows flee away

From out my life, and Light divine gleam through it every day;

The Throne of God and of the Lamb fixed deep within shall be,

Heaven’s life and bliss already mine, and through eternity. 1 [Note: T. Crawford, Horœ Serenœ, 42.]

The Perfect Life

Literature

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Verse 13

The Alpha and the Omega

I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.— Revelation 22:13.

There is one feature of the Apocalypse of St. John which must strike every thoughtful student of that wonderful book. Through all the majestic sequence of the symbolic visions in which it shadows forth the struggles, the defeats, and the victories of the Church of God, it views everything from above. Commencing with the charge to the Apostle, imprisoned in the mines of Patmos, to write down the things which he sees and send them to the seven Churches of Asia, that outlook is maintained to the end. It is human life seen in the light of the exalted Christ. As the mighty pageant of judgment and conflict unfolds itself before the Seer’s eye, he stands always above time and its changes; until at last the vision closes with the new heaven and the new earth, and the prayer, “Amen, come, Lord Jesus,” passes into the familiar benediction of the saints.

The reason is plain. St. John has ever before his spirit the vision of the Eternal Christ. St. Mark’s Gospel opens with the beginning of the earthly ministry. St. Matthew starts with the genealogy of Jesus, the Son of David, and the events which preceded His birth. St. Luke’s Gospel of the Infancy commences earlier, yet even this sets out from the days of Herod the king. But St. John dips back into the eternity which was before the world was made, and there kneels in adoration before the Eternal Word, who in time became flesh and dwelt among men. His ear is full of the voices of the spiritual world which lies behind and above time and yet is immanent in it; and every voice that pierces the silence is eloquent of his Lord. To him was given an overwhelming sense of the eternal which transcends while it transforms the things which are nearest to us in the life of this present world. And so when the Apocalypse is finished and the pictured scroll of his vision is just about to be rolled up, as if to pledge once more and finally the truth and reality of the revelation that has been made, the Voice which is the undertone of all things speaks the tremendous words, “I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” Upon Him, the eternal Jesus, rests the solemn sanction of the message; here lies its awful claim to be heard; these are its credentials. It is the testimony of Jesus; it is the word of the Eternal Word.

I

God’s Alphabet

1. An alphabet! What a strange world of possibilities lies hid in those few rudiments! There they lie before our eyes, twenty-six odd signs from A to Z; so unmeaning in themselves, so artificial, so queer. Could anything be less suggestive, less rational? Their very shapes have long ceased to be intelligible, except to those who grope about in a remote past and follow their lives back to old-world pictures of houses and camels and water and snakes, through which by a fanciful transition they have come to stand for sounds which have no relation whatever to those which the signs represented. Yet, although they lie there covered by one glance of the eye, they are the materials out of which whole worlds of experience and of literature can find their expression. Everything that has ever been said or thought or written by entire families or nations has found, in some combination of those quaint signs, its adequate realization. How incredible that those few artificial signs can adapt themselves to such infinite needs, the unnumbered shades of fleeting experience! And, again, the melodious refrains, the fine and rare evolutions of metre, the play and counter-play of inwoven rhymes, all the craft of a thousand poets spent on giving to the intricacies of feeling their perfect form and sound—all this has been wrung out of these twisted fragments. And this capacity is wholly unexhausted. Century after century will follow and still they will yield novel effects in prose and verse, and still there will be the endless delight of ever fresh combinations and complications to which the ear of man will delightedly respond, and in which the heart of man will discover itself anew.

2. As alpha is the first, so omega is the last letter of the Greek alphabet. Now the first and last letters of the alphabet may be used to represent in brief the sum and substance of any subject; just as we call the elements of any study its A B C, so that which is the all-pervading idea, the centre, the substance of any treatise would be its alpha and omega. When Christ declares Himself the Alpha and Omega, He declares Himself the sum and substance of expressed thought. Of whose thought is He the expression? Of whose language is He the theme? There can be but one answer. It is God’s thought that He expresses, God’s language of which He is the utterance. This truth, then, is proclaimed in the text—that Christ is the sum and substance of God’s revealed thought.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.… All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men.” What means this language but that the Son of God, who became flesh in Jesus Christ, is so emphatically the revelation of God’s thought that He is called literally the Word of God, and that He has been so from the very beginning of all things? Christ is God’s utterance; He is all of God’s revealed thought; through Him the Father works; He created the world; He is the world’s spiritual light.

(1) Christ is the sum and substance of the Bible itself, and so the practical truth, the substance of truth to be believed. The book is a mosaic, made by different artists under the unknown direction of a greater than they. It is God’s word to man—manifold, complex, and prolonged; and yet when we receive it all, we discover that, of all this mass of revealed thought, Jesus Christ is the Alpha and the Omega, the substance and the sum, the stone out of which each piece of the mosaic is taken, and the figure which all the pieces unite to portray. Looking back to the beginning we can see that though He was but seldom mentioned, He underlay all. In the earliest sacrifices, His sacrifice was implied. The ritual of the Tabernacle and the Temple anticipated His coming. All that God taught men of old time was part and parcel of Christ; so that, were it lost and He only retained, not one whit of God’s thought would perish for mankind.

(2) Christ is the sum and substance of Bible doctrine as well as of Bible history. Everything must be viewed in His light. Everything must be explained by its relation to Him. He is the text on which all else is the comment. He is the truth of which all else is the application. He is the centre from which all else radiates, and the foundation on which all else rests.

In a certain canvas belonging to the modern French School, “The Repose in Egypt,” by Oliver Merson, there is a piece of symbolism which fitly concludes the whole matter. Before our eyes stretches the limitless desert pervaded by mysterious halflights; above it, the monstrous basaltic Figure that was quarried and sculptured in the depths of antiquity; then left there in the sand as a monument alike to the plastic powers and superstitions of primitive man. Its stony stare fills the desert with a sense of frustration and ancient death. Yet what is that lying muffled in a cloak not many yards away from the mammoth feet?—Joseph the carpenter perchance, who, flying southwards to escape the murderous frenzy of Herod, here rests awhile! But Mary and the Holy Child—where are they? Yonder—in the very lap of the Sphinx sleeps the Mother—in her arms the Babe, a radiant spot of light in the deepening dark. Such is the artist’s dream, and now what is the interpretation thereof? Surely this—that in the heart of the great Enigma sleeps its Key! For, if that amorphous Form with the inscrutable stare be but the emblem of blind yet questioning humanity, propounding riddles while unable itself to solve them, it shelters One who, when grown to man’s estate, was to break the silence, appeasing all yearnings, confirming all hesitancies, reshaping all faiths—One who, through paradox and parable, through doctrine, deed, and death, was to inscribe over all altars erected to the Unknown God those words of infinite rest—“Jesus hominum Salvator.” 1 [Note: W. Aylmer-Stark, Mens Jesu Christi, 222.]

II

Christ’s Eternity

The text comprises Christ’s declaration of Himself; He asserts His own eternity. He is the beginning of all things and the end of all things—an eternity of the past, an eternity of the future. His power for man resides in these, His two eternities, each of which, His life as Alpha and His life as Omega, has its peculiar benefits for us. Christ says, “I am Eternal.” That must mean not merely that He has existed and shall exist forever, but also that in the forever of the past and of the future He is eternally Christ, that the special nature in which He relates Himself to us as Saviour never had a beginning and shall never have an end.

Jesus sets Himself above all time-relations. His earthly life was but a brief one—not one half of the allotted space of man. He counted only thirty-three of our human years; and thirty of these were silent years. But somehow we feel as if our usual time-conditions did not fit in with His earthly life—as if some element of the eternal had dropped into the problem, giving to the figures wider spaces and larger meanings. He says to the Pharisees, “Before Abraham was, I am”—borrowing the language, and even the very name, of Jehovah. Again He says, as He dismisses His Apostles to their task, “Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world,” indicating that His “I am” is not as ours, shut in and narrowed by these brief moments, but spreading itself out to the farthest reaches of time, and over into the great eternities. So does Jesus set Himself above and outside our time-relations, and as He claims a conscious existence with the Father “before the world was”—that is, before our earth had begun its revolutions round the sun, and so before days and years had begun to be—Jesus sets Himself clear of all earthly years, back in the silent eternity.

By this title God describeth His own being, and distinguisheth it from all other:—“I the Lord, the first, and the last; I am he” ( Isaiah 41:4). “I am he; I am the first, I also am the last” ( Isaiah 48:12). “I am the first, and I am the last; and beside me there is no God” ( Isaiah 44:6). But Christ is expressly called Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last. This title is attributed unto Christ absolutely and universally, without any kind of restriction or limitation, without any assignation of any particular in respect of which He is the first or last; in the same latitude and eminence of expression, in which it is or can be attributed to the Supreme God.… Wherefore seeing Christ hath so immediately, and with so great solemnity and frequency, taken the same style upon Him, by which the Father did express His Godhead, it followeth that He hath declared Himself to be the Supreme, Almighty, and Eternal God. And being thus the Alpha and the first, He was before any time assignable, and consequently before He was conceived of the Virgin; and the being which then He had was the Divine essence, by which He was truly and properly the Almighty and Eternal God. 1 [Note: J. Pearson, An Exposition of the Creed.]

A great variety of objects have been found with A and Ω inscribed upon them; it figures on tombstones, as well as on other monuments, on mosaics, frescoes, and bricks, also on vases, cups, lamps, and on rings; it appears also on coins, its earliest occurrence on these being of the time of Constans and Constantius, the sons of Constantine the Great. These all belong to different ages and different countries; in its earliest known form (Rome, a.d. 295) it appears as “ω et A,” but this is exceptional, and is perhaps of Gnostic origin. The symbol in its usual form is found on objects belonging to the 3rd cent. in Rome and N. Africa; on objects belonging to the 4th cent. It has been found in Asia Minor, Sicily, Upper and Lower Italy, and Gaul; by the beginning of the Middle Ages it must have become known in most of the countries of Central Europe. 2 [Note: W. O. E. Oesterley, in the Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics, i. 1.]

i. Christ’s Past Eternity

1. Are we not in the habit of talking as if the redemption which called for an anointed Redeemer were a late thought in the universal history? Untold ages after the dateless time when God began to be, His almighty word was spoken, and a new world with a new race to live on it shaped itself out from the void. In that new world a new experiment of moral life brought a catastrophe unknown before, to meet whose terrible demands the great Creator came Himself and took the nature of this last creature living in His last creation. God was made man, and Christ the God-man was made manifest before the worlds. Here we make man a late thing in the history of the universe; and how is it possible, then, that Christ, who is God with the element of human sympathy, should be eternal? And just here comes in one of the key-passages of the Bible, which we are always far too apt to overlook. It is that verse in Genesis, “In the image of God created he man.” God made man like Himself. Ages before the Incarnation made God so wonderfully in the image of man, the creation had made man in the image of God. Now, if we can comprehend that truth at all, it must be evident that before man was made the man-type existed in God. In some part of His perfect nature there was the image of what the new creation was to be. Already, before man trod the Garden in the high glory of his new Godlikeness, the pattern of the thing he was to be existed in the nature of Him who was to make him. Before the clay was fashioned and the breath was given, this humanity existed in the Divinity; already there was a union of the Divine and the human; and thus already there was the eternal Christ.

The coin of the realm is the creation of the sovereign; it proceeds from his authority and is called in by his authority, in token of which it bears his image and the inscription of his name. The soul of man is the spiritual creation of God, and, what is incomparably greater, the soul is created for union with God, of which she bears the sign in the image of God and in the inscription of His law, graved with light upon her spirit. The image and name of the sovereign are cast on perishable metal, but whilst the metal lasts it asserts his sovereign claim. The soul received from God bears His image and His law, the signet of His sovereign claim upon that soul. The coin of the sovereign bears his image on the surface; the image of God is in the inmost constitution of the soul, the soul herself is that image, and the light of God’s law sealed therein is the direction of the soul to her Divine Original. 1 [Note: Bishop Ullathorne, The Endowments of Man, 27.]

2. Thus the Incarnation was God’s commentary on that verse in Genesis, “In the image of God created he man.” Yes, “from the beginning” there had been a second Person in the Trinity—a Christ, whose nature included the man-type. In due time this man-type was copied and incorporated in the special exhibition of a race. There it degenerated and went off into sin. And then the Christ, who had been what He was for ever, came and brought the pattern and set it down beside the degenerate copy, and wrought men’s hearts to shame and penitence when they saw the everlasting type of what they had been meant to be, walking among the miserable shows of what they were.

In Jesus Christ there is historically presented to us the actual realization of the Divine image in man. The resplendently glorious fact about Christ as man is that in Him we have the perfect realization of the moral image of the Father. Alone of all who have ever lived on earth, Jesus was absolutely and stainlessly holy. No flaw of imperfection marred His character; every moral and spiritual excellence existed in Him in the highest conceivable degree; His will was throughout in complete unison with the Father’s. While of every other it has to be confessed that out of the heart proceed evil thoughts and desires, the thoughts and affections that issued from His heart were wholly pure. In His spirit shone the light of a perfect knowledge of the Father; His life was the model of perfect love, trust, obedience, submission to God’s Fatherly will; the quality of everything He thought, said, and did, was what we call filial. He was the perfect realization of the spirit of sonship. In Him, therefore, as the central personage of history—the archetypal man, second Adam of the race, its new and saving head—there was given the perfect realization of the Divine image in human nature, and in that the revelation of the capability of humanity to bear that image. 1 [Note: J. Orr, God’s Image in Man, 271.]

3. The highest importance of this truth of Christ’s past eternity must always be for the great Christian doctrine of the Atonement, which tells us that when man fell from holiness to sin there appeared in the whole universe only one nature which had in itself a fitness to undertake the work of reconciliation and restoration. Only one nature stood forth saying, “Lo, I come!” Christ, the incarnate God, assumed the work and manifested the one necessary fitness in His union of the Divine and the human natures. Then comes the question, When did that fitness of the Christ begin? Was it a nature given Him when He was born of Mary? Was it a new assumption of an element of life which had before been wholly unfamiliar? If so, the Atonement becomes—what? A late expedient for patching up the breach in God’s experiment; a special provision for an unforeseen catastrophe. The precious element of Christ’s humanity becomes only the tardy and pitiful consequence of human sin. But take the deeper view. What if this fitness of nature were an everlasting thing in Christ, only coming to special utterance when He was born Jesus, the child of the Hebrew Virgin? What if He had borne for ever the human element in His Divinity, anointed Christ from all eternity? What if there had been for ever a Saviourhood in the Deity, an everlasting readiness which made it always certain that, if such a catastrophe as Eden ever came, such a remedy as Calvary must follow? Does not this deepen all our thoughts of our salvation? Does it not teach us what is meant by “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world”?

Jesus Christ died according to the appointment of His Father. They do fatally misconceive the whole evangelical system who represent the heart of the Father toward man as different from the heart of Christ. “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son.” It pleased the Father that in Him should all fulness dwell, and that that fulness should be opened up in His death. It pleased the Lord to bruise Him. Christ is the Lamb which God Himself furnishes for sacrifice. The idea that God needed to be mollified or appeased by the sacrifice of His Son is a heathenish misconception. Whatever love dwelt in the heart of Christ was the love of the Father. Whatever fulness dwells in Him to forgive and to save is the fulness of the Father. He appeared to do the will of God when He came into the world to die.

Not only was He the Lamb appointed by God—He was also God Himself. He took upon Him our humanity, but He took it into union with His Divine nature. It was through His eternal Divine nature that He offered Himself to be a sacrifice to God, and because it was so the sacrifice was efficacious. He took human nature at His incarnation into eternal union with the Divine. The blood which He shed on the tree was the blood not merely of the Son of Mary, but of the Infinite Being thus united to a created form.

Much of the misconception which has attended the orthodox theory of the atonement has arisen from the fact that it has been unconsciously discussed on the Unitarian theory of the person of Christ. The transcendent mystery which we cannot remove lies in the fact that we have in the atonement the love of the Three-one God working for man; or, as it has been expressed, the self-reconciling of the Godhead with itself, or an action of the Godhead within, and at unity with itself for our salvation. 1 [Note: W. R. Nicoll, The Lamb of God, 24.]

ii. Christ’s Future Eternity

1. If the term “Alpha” asserts a past eternity for Christ, the other term “Omega” declares for Him an eternity in the future. There shall always be a Divine Human in the Godhead. This, too, is a truth which we are liable to forget. As we think that the marvellous nature of the Saviour began in the manger, so we sometimes feel as if its elements were sundered in the last agony of the cross. Practically a great many of us believe in a Trinity only for thirty-three years of history. Is not this the value of those passages in the New Testament which show us the ascended Saviour speaking or acting still in the same genuine humanity which He had worn on earth? While Stephen stood waiting for the crash of murderous stones, “he looked up stedfastly into heaven, and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God.” Saul, prostrate on the Damascus road, cried out to the rebuking voice, “Who art thou, Lord?” and the answer was, “I am Jesus.” And as the last Revelation closes, the last voice that comes forth is the voice of Christ, still wearing His human name and lineage, “I Jesus have sent my angel. I am the root and offspring of David.” What is all this for, but to assure us of the everlasting manhood in our Lord? The human hand still weighs; the human voice still speaks; the human heart still loves. He is not only Alpha, but also Omega. As all our hope shines from the truth that there ever has been, so it all centres in the truth that there for ever shall be, a Divine and human Christ.

No part of the New Testament is so decided as the Epistle to the Hebrews in its presentation of our Lord’s humanity. In this it is something like the Fourth Gospel, which opens with the statement that “In the beginning was the Word,” and continues with the statement that “Jesus wept!” Think of the exquisite picture of the sympathizing High Priest, made like in all things to His brethren, tempted in all things like His brethren, not ashamed to call them brethren. Think of the language in which the suffering of Christ is described, the strong crying and tears, to which there is no parallel except in the Gospel of Luke (again one of the most human of books); or if it should be held to be an insertion in Luke (though I do not think this view will be held much longer), then make your parallel with the soul “sorrowful even unto death,” without the vivid illustration from the suffering body. Indeed the whole of the passage about the offering of prayers to Him that was able to save His soul from death is so absolutely human that it even invites an apologetic treatment. Or take the passage in which the human evolution of Christ’s character is described as a learning of obedience by the way of suffering, and you will see where the Arians, even if unbelieving, or only half-believing, could be reverent and almost devout.

But when we quote words like “learned obedience by the things which he suffered,” we must not be satisfied that we have got at the writer’s whole meaning when we have pointed out the emphasis on our Lord’s humanity; for this is the same writer who had just before been saying:

“Brightness of the Father’s glory,”

which is not the description of you or me;

“Express image of his person,”

which is not my photograph or yours;

“Upholding all things by the word of his power,”

which is an Atlas task which our little arms have not even collectively undertaken;

“By himself making purgation of sins,”

which, to judge by the climax of the speech, is a more difficult task than the maintenance of the cosmic order, and therefore is not for you or me. Moreover, this is the very same writer who will presently be speaking of Jesus Christ under the strange and far from human terms of

“Yesterday, to-day and forever,”

which apply to no human creature and do not connote human nature. 1 [Note: J. Rendel Harris, The Sufferings and the Glory (1914), 72.]

2. Because our life is in time and passes away, there is always a pathos about the end of anything which concerns us. An end will ever suggest a loss and a comparative failure, because it speaks of work done which must needs be seen to be lower than the highest. Apart from the faith which grasps the things eternal, the pathos becomes tragedy as each end points to the last end—death. Why do we shrink from the end of ourselves? Because, since, “man has forever,” he can “look before and after,” and he feels, inevitably, after the eternal. We shudder at our endings because of our capacity for immortality, and it is by the law of our own nature that we refuse to drop head foremost into the abyss of nothingness. That is one of many reasons why this message from Him who is both beginning and end comes to the human soul as a voice from heaven. It leads man to find his final rest in the bosom of the Eternal Christ.

In his journal for 22nd December 1867—the year after his wife’s tragically sudden death—Carlyle wrote:

“The last stage of life’s journey is necessarily dark, sad, and carried on under steadily increasing difficulties. We are alone; all our loved ones and cheering fellow-pilgrims gone. Our strength is failing, wasting more and more; day is sinking on us; night coming, not metaphorically only. The road, to our growing weakness, dimness, injurability of every kind, becomes more and more obstructed, intricate, difficult to feet and eyes; a road among brakes and brambles, swamps and stumbling places; no welcome shine of a human cottage with its hospitable candle now alight for us in these waste solitudes. Our eyes, if we have any light, rest only on the eternal stars. Thus we stagger on, impediments increasing, force diminishing, till at length there is equality between the terms, and we do all infallibly arrive. So it has been from the beginning; so it will be to the end—forever a mystery and miracle before which human intellect falls dumb. Do we reach those stars then? Do we sink in those swamps amid the dance of dying dreams? Is the threshold we step over but the brink in that instance, and our home thenceforth an infinite Inane? God, our Eternal Maker, alone knows, and it shall be as He wills, not as we would. His mercy be upon us! What a natural human aspiration!” 1 [Note: J. A. Froude, Thomas Carlyle, 1834–1881, ii. 361.]

Earth breaks up, time drops away,

In flows heaven, with its new day

Of endless life, when He who trod,

Very man and very God,

This earth in weakness, shame and pain,

Dying the death whose signs remain

Up yonder on the accursèd tree—

Shall come again, no more to be

Of captivity the thrall,

But the one God, all in all,

King of kings, and Lord of lords,

As His servant John received the words,

“ I died, and live for evermore.”

III

Man’s Alphabet

1. There is nothing we can think of in God that we do not possess in Jesus. We say to Him, as the psalmist said to Jehovah, “Thou art my Lord, I have no good beyond thee.” We look at Jesus in all His relations with men, and supremely when He hangs on the cross, and we are compelled to confess, “Behold our God!” That is what we mean by the word “God.” In Jesus dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily. What more can there be?

Thou, O Christ, art all I want;

More than all in Thee I find.

In the unveiling of the character, the purpose, the heart, the will of Him whom we adore as God over all, Jesus is our Alpha and our Omega.

All the great controversies which have raged round the Person of Jesus Christ have not been able to obscure His message or diminish His power over the hearts of men. He speaks to-day, as He spoke long ages ago, through the voice of a living religious experience. As men look, not back to Him as they are often urged to do, but up to Him, they find the beginning of a new life and the inspiration to a nobler service. The memory of His words and the example of His deeds remain an undying source of inspiration. But the true servant of Christ finds more in Him than this, precious and effective though it is. His living presence with the soul of man has become in the case of multitudes an experience which cannot be gainsaid. In the eyes of the Apostles Jesus claimed to fulfil the functions of the Old Testament Messiah, to judge the world, to forgive sins, and to be the Lord of life and death. These are the prerogatives of God Himself, and yet the modern Christian sees no incongruity in granting the claim. That the claim should be contested is natural enough, and the appeal in proof of it is still, as it was in the early days, to the experience of those who have known Christ for themselves, and to the effect which He has produced in and through them.… In a sense which is true of no other personality in history, Jesus Christ still lives and still speaks to the hearts of men. The truth of His message each man may test for himself, not by the process of historical inquiry and criticism alone, but by those deeper and more subtle processes, obedience and faith. There is a charm about His demeanour and a simplicity about His words that will always appeal to the student. But to know Him in all His power and beauty it is necessary to become not merely a student, but a disciple. To the inner Sanctuary of His presence there is only one password—My Lord and my God. 1 [Note: W. B. Selbie, Life and Teaching of Jesus Christ, 167.]

2. We have no hesitation in going to Jesus for the final solution of any problem which may arise in connexion with man’s relations to the Unseen, or with his most practical relations with his fellows. We do not think of Jesus as tentative and temporary, as affording us the best guidance up to date, but ultimately to be surpassed or superseded. We take the most complicated questions of our age—race problems, industrial perplexities, political questions, social questions—we take them all to Jesus, certain that His spirit, if seriously and conscientiously applied to them, will infallibly lead to an ultimate solution. We do not expect to find our questions answered in so many words in the teaching of Jesus. But the principle, the controlling spirit, has been given in Him, and we are confident that the spirit of Jesus is adequate to guide us to such a solution that, if we obey, we shall find the Kingdom of God coming, and at length see His will done in earth, as it is in heaven.

Mr. Higginson reports an interesting conversation between Emerson and Whittier. The former had remarked that the world had not yet seen the highest development of manhood.

“Does thee think so?” said Whittier. “I suppose thee would admit that Jesus Christ is the highest development our world has seen?”

“ Yes, yes, but not the highest it will see.”

“ Does thee think the world has yet reached the ideals the Christ has set for mankind?”

“ No, no, I think not”

“ Then is it not the part of wisdom to be content with what has been given us, till we have lived up to that ideal? And when we need something higher, Infinite Wisdom will supply our needs.” 1 [Note: H. S. Coffin, University Sermons, 43.]

Yea thro’ life, death, thro’ sorrow and thro’ sinning

He shall suffice me, for He hath sufficed:

Christ is the end, for Christ was the beginning,

Christ the beginning, for the end is Christ. 2 [Note: F. W. H. Myers, Saint Paul.]

3. But Jesus is not only the unveiling of the ideal for ourselves and for all men; He is also the inspiration to achieve it. It is because we have discovered in Him the mightiest force of which we are aware, a force whose potencies we never seem to exhaust, that we are driven to confess that He is the Alpha and the Omega. Were Jesus any less to us than final He could not enlist all our loyalty and command our entire consecration. He draws from us all the reverence, all the confidence, all the adoration, all the self-dedication of which we are capable.

A soul enters on the higher life, passes by the doorway of conversion from disobedience to obedience. When does that soul find Christ? Is it after it has passed, by some power of its own, over the threshold, that there, on the inside, it finds the Lord waiting to be its leader? Oh no! it looks back and cannot tell the moment when it was not led by Him. It came, but He called. It answered, but first He spoke. Yes, we begin, but Christ always began before us. He is the Alpha of our religious life, antedating every act of man’s obedience by the eternal promptings of His spirit and the eternal freeness of His grace. And then He is its Omega too. We may go far in the eternal developments of holiness, but we can never outgo Him. He will be present at the end of every period of everlasting progress, to round and close it for us and to introduce us to a new one as He introduced us to the first, for He is exhaustless.

The fault of our religion is that we do not know enough of Christ. May God grant that, if we have at all learned how He begins the Christian life in man, we may go on learning new lessons of His wondrous power every day, till some day, in the perfect world, we learn the perfect lesson of how He can glorify a poor, weak, human creature with Himself, and, gathering all its culture into Him, take our souls for His and be our Omega, our End as He has been our Beginning, the last complete fulfilment of the last prayer that we shall ever pray, when prayer ceases because need has ceased forever! 1 [Note: Phillips Brooks, The Mystery of Iniquity, 326.]

The mystic union between Christ and His Church unfolded by St. Paul was the inspiration of Lord Radstock’s life. St. Paul saw the Church of his vision “without spot or wrinkle or any such thing,” while the individual “believer” was declared to be “complete” in Christ. In that completeness Christ “has perfected for ever them that are sanctified,” although such “completeness” is not apparent in our present imperfect and temporary condition, our want of experience causing limitations in the apprehension of these divine truths. 2 [Note: Mrs. E. Trotter, Lord Radstock (1894), 86.]

No imitation of Christ can be according to the Gospel if it is anything else than an aspect of the life of faith. The task of the disciple is not in the narrower sense to copy Jesus, but to receive His spirit, understand His mind, and let Him be formed within. Disciples are to preach, through a life of love, Christ’s life; and through faith He begets in His followers a likeness to Himself, so that in a relative and mediate sense, disciples are fitted to be examples founded on the Spirit of Jesus. Christ cannot be followed by imitating Him in externals. Christian ethics pre-suppose the Christian Gospel—obedience follows from knowing Christ as our life and our hope, and the faultless fulfilment of daily vocation is founded on an inner principle of faith and love, not on that of external copying Him, who is the contemporary of all the ages, and is exhausted by none. Scripture exhorts men to exclusive loyalty toward the Master, to a possession of the mind of Christ, to a change by beholding Him, to strenuousness in following Him, to a putting on of Christ or the new man, to following in His steps, as well as to the retention of hope. But all these rest on inward faith and love as their root, arise from a heart touched by Christ’s Holy Spirit, and from the spiritual insight and purity of moral perception thereby created. 1 [Note: D. Butler, Thomas à Kempis, 57.]

The Alpha and the Omega

Literature

Aylmer-Stark (W.), Mens Jesu Christi, 195.

Bernard (J. H.), Via Domini, 216.

Bonar (H.), Light and Truth: The Revelation, 33.

Brooks (P.), The Mystery of Iniquity, 310.

Burton (H.), The Coming of the Kingdom, 191.

Cairns (J.), Christ the Morning Star, 18.

Coffin (H. S.), University Sermons, 36.

Cook (F. C.), Church Doctrine and Spiritual Life, 202.

Davies (T.), Sermons and Expositions, i. 358.

Dewhurst (E. M.), The King and His Servants, 145.

Gibbons (J.), Discourses and Sermons, 297.

Gough (E. J.), The Religion of the Son of Man, 155.

Hitchcock (F. R. M.), Harvest Thoughts, 7.

Houghton (C. A.), Problems of Life, 1.

Law (H.), Christ is All, 256.

McLeod (M. J.), The Unsearchable Riches, 31.

Macnutt (F. B.), Advent Certainties, 77.

Purves (G. T.), Faith and Life, 21.

Robinson (C. S.), Studies in the New Testament, 214.

Smellie (A.), In the Secret Place, 131.

Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, ix. (1863), No. 546.

Talmage (T. de W.), Fifty Sermons, i. 177.

Webster (F. S.), My Lord and I, 190.

Wells (J.), Bible Echoes, 203.

Wilberforce (B.), Inward Vision, 81.

Christian Commonwealth, xxxi. (1910) 121 (R. J. Campbell).

Christian World Pulpit, xxiii. 129 (W. Landels); lix. 29 (A. J. Mason); lxiii. 1 (H. S. Holland).

Church of England Pulpit, xlii. 28 (T. B. Naylor).

Churchman’s Pulpit: Trinity Sunday, ix. 281 (F. C. Cook).

Dictionary of Christ and the Gospels, i. 43 (B. W. Bacon).

Encyclopœdia of Religion and Ethics, i. l (W. O. E. Oesterley).

Verse 14

The Privileges of the Blessed

Blessed are they that wash their robes, that they may have the right to come to the tree of life, and may enter in by the gates into the city.— Revelation 22:14.

The first Beatitude that Jesus Christ spoke from the mountain was, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” The last Beatitude that He speaks from heaven is, “Blessed are they that wash their robes.” And the act commended in the last is but the outcome of the spirit extolled in the first. For they who are poor in spirit know themselves to be sinful men; and they who know themselves to be sinful men will cleanse their robes in the blood of Jesus Christ.

I always regard this as a test text. I should like to ask every Sunday-school teacher, every district visitor, every worker in an inquiry room, to take it, just as it stands, and expound it. And if he stumbles over it, or muddles it, I should like to send him back for a while to a form in God’s school, there to learn Christ from Christ Himself, before he ventures to teach others. I said “learn Christ”; not theologies, not systems of doctrine, but Christ. Christ is here in every word, Christ Jesus, God’s Anointed Saviour of poor sinners; “all and in all” to souls. If a man cannot preach Christ from this passage, He does not know the Gospel so as to be a fit teacher either of babes, or of strong men. It is not a difficult passage, if a man has first the root of the matter in him, and then has sat, as a little child, at the feet of the Holy Ghost to be taught, as He alone can teach, God’s beautiful equipoise of truth. 1 [Note: A. C. Price, Fifty Sermons, ii. 105.]

The text tells us (1) who are the Blessed of the last Beatitude, and (2) what are their Privileges. The Blessed are “they that do his commandments,” or, as in the Revised Version, according to another reading, “they that wash their robes.” Their privileges are right of access to the Tree of Life and entrance through the gates into the city.

I

The Blessed

We are face to face at once with a difficulty of reading. The A.V. had “Blessed are they that do his commandments,” following one reading; the R.V. “Blessed are they that wash their robes,” following another. The difference, which seems so great in English, is due to the exchange of only a few letters in Greek. But the change from the Authorized Version to the Revised is generally hailed by expositors as a relief. “Blessed are they that do his commandments,” says Maclaren, carries us back to the old law, and has no more hopeful a sound in it than the thunders of Sinai. If it were, indeed, among Christ’s last words to us, it would be a most sad instance of His “building again the things he had destroyed.” It is relegating us to the dreary old round of trying to earn heaven by doing good deeds; and I might almost say it is “making the cross of Christ of none effect.” The fact that that corrupt reading came so soon into the Church and has held its ground so long, is to me a very singular proof of the difficulty which men have always had in keeping themselves up to the level of the grand central gospel-truth: “Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us.”

Dean Vaughan speaks even more strongly against the reading. If this is the saying of Christ, he says, we must bow to it. If it pleased Him to leave as His last word to the Churches the condemning sentence, it is not for us to remonstrate or to rebel. If it was the will of Christ to replace His Church, by the very latest of His revelations, on a footing of meritorious obedience, it must be so, and, though with downcast looks and tottering steps, we must set ourselves to follow. Yet we cannot check the rising thought, “We trusted that it has been he which should have redeemed Israel.”

But is there this difference between the readings? There is, and more than this difference, if they who “do his commandments” have not yet “washed their robes”; or if, to put it from the other side, the washing of the robes were not one of the commandments that had to be done, and indeed the sum and substance of them. It is quite true that our right of access to the Tree of Life is not of works, but of grace; yet when we have been saved by grace we proceed to keep the commandments of God. This is the evidence of our salvation, and the enjoyment of it. “If a man love me, he will keep my words”—that is doing His commandments—“and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him” ( John 14:23)—that is enjoying access to the Tree of Life.

Swete has some difficulty in deciding between the readings. If the Greek letters were changed in the course of transcription, he thinks it slightly more probable that “wash their robes” arose out of “do his commandments,” than that the reverse occurred. But the evidence of the documents is in favour of “wash their robes”; and in the Johannine Writings the phrase is “ keep his commandments,” “do” occurring only once, in 1 John 5:2. On the whole, then, he thinks, “wash their robes” may with some confidence be preferred.

1. I need not remind you, I suppose, says Maclaren, how continually this symbol of the robe is used in Scripture as an expression for moral character. This Book of the Apocalypse is saturated through and through with Jewish implications and allusions, and there can be no doubt whatever that in this metaphor of the cleansing of the robes there is an allusion to that vision which the Apocalyptic seer of the Old Covenant, the prophet Zechariah, had when he saw the high priest standing before the altar clad in foul raiment, and the word came forth, “Take away the filthy garments from him.” Nor need I do more than remind you how the same metaphor is often on the lips of our Lord Himself, notably in the story of the man who had not on the wedding garment, and in the touching and beautiful incident in the parable of the Prodigal Son, where the exuberance of the father’s love bids them cast the best robe round the rags and the leanness of his long-lost boy. Nor need I remind you how St. Paul catches up the metaphor, and is continually referring to an investing and a divesting—the putting on and the putting off of the new and the old man. In this same Book of the Apocalypse, we see, gleaming all through it, the white robes of the purified soul: “They shall walk with me in white; for they are worthy.” “I beheld, and, lo, a great multitude, which no man could number,” who had “washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.”

All three made their way to the beautiful valley of Ivirna, where the lands of the chief Manaune were situated. The welkin rang with merry shouts of Kua tau mai Rori! (“Rori is found!”). The news spread all over the island the same day, so that crowds came to see this poor fellow. And a miserable skeleton he was, his skin almost black through continual exposure. A feast was made for him by the people of Ivirna, but he scarcely tasted the unaccustomed food. He was then led in procession round the island by his protector and others; the crowning point was for him to bathe in Rongo’s Sacred Fountain, in token of his being cleansed from a state of bondage and fear, and being allowed to participate freely in all the good things of the dominant tribe. 1 [Note: W. W. Gill, From Darkness to Light in Polynesia, 234.]

White was widely considered among the ancient nations as the colour of innocence and purity. On this account it was appropriate for those who were engaged in the worship of the gods, for purity was prescribed as a condition of engaging in Divine service, though usually the purity was understood in a merely ceremonial sense. All Roman citizens wore the pure white toga on holidays and at religious ceremonies, whether or not they wore it on ordinary days; in fact, the great majority of them did not ordinarily wear that heavy and cumbrous garment, and hence the city on festivals and holidays is called “candida urbs,” the city in white. Especially on the day of a Triumph white was the universal colour—though the soldiers, of course, wore not the toga, the garb of peace, but their full-dress military attire with all their decorations—and there can hardly be any doubt that the idea of walking in a Triumph similar to that celebrated by a victorious Roman general is present in the mind of the writer of the Apocalypse when he uses the words, “they shall walk with me in white.” A dirty and dark-coloured toga, on the other hand, was the appropriate dress of sorrow and of guilt. Hence it was worn by mourners and by persons accused of crimes. 2 [Note: W. M. Ramsay, The Letters to the Seven Churches of Asia, 386.]

2. The foul robes can be cleansed. The text does not state the method. That has already been declared. “They washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb” ( Revelation 7:14). In his Epistle, St. John has the same paradox: “The blood of Jesus his Son cleanseth us from all sin” ( 1 John 1:7). St. John saw the paradox, and he saw that the paradox helped to illustrate the great truth which he was trying to proclaim, that the red blood whitened the black robe, and that in its full tide there was a limpid river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the cross of Christ.

In one of the letters written by Dr. Dale during the first year of his ministry at Carr’s Lane, he says: “If all the truths which have been realized and made precious eras of our religious progress, all the facts which at different times have assumed to our spiritual consciousness the hardness and grimness of a rock, all the wisdom which has come from the lips of others, or has been painfully learnt from doubt and difficulty and sin and folly, could be kept visibly and consciously before the mind, how different our life would be. Why, even that blessed text, ‘The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth us from all sin,’ which sometimes comes down on the heart like a whole heaven of peace and joy and glory, will at other times be as meaningless as the darkest sayings of the prophets, or as powerless as the vainest utterances of human folly. And then just as one is bemoaning its darkness, it will suddenly blaze out in astonishing brightness, and almost startle the heart by its revelations of safety and strength.” 1 [Note: A. W. W. Dale, The Life of R. W. Dale of Birmingham, 79.]

3. But it is not a past washing only that is spoken of here. It is also a daily washing of the robes of the redeemed even now. It is not, “Blessed are they that have washed.” The Greek is the perpetual present—“Blessed are they that keep washing.” Having once washed the whole body in the fountain opened for sin and for uncleanness, they have need constantly to wash the feet, soiled afterwards, and again and again, by contact with the dust and the miry clay of this world. “Blessed are they that evermore wash their robes,” by an ever-repeated application of the “blood of sprinkling” alike to the accusing conscience and to the sin-stained life.

It is a most dangerous thing to fall into the habit of letting any committed sin pass sub silentio (as it were) between man and his soul. Scripture indeed counsels no morbid self-scrutiny. Harm may be done by it. A man may walk timidly and slavishly before God by reason of it. We are not taught that many express words, or perhaps any express words, need pass about particular wrong thoughts, acts, or words, in direct converse on the subject between God and the soul. But if so, it must be because the intercourse is so thorough that it need not be microscopic. The man does not wash each separate spot and stain, because he washes the whole robe, and them with it. One way or another, the tablets of memory and the tablets of conscience and the tablets of life must be sponged clean every evening—and in only one way, by what Scripture calls “the blood of the Lamb”—that is, the atonement made once for all for all sin, applied in earnest faith to the individual man’s heart and soul in the sight of God.

I have been told, says the Rev. D. M. Henry of Whithorn, Wigtownshire, that in this district in days gone by, those who were communicants of the Church might be known by the “washings” on the ropes in their greens, or, if they had no greens, on the dykes and hedges near their houses on the week before the communion Sabbath. And on one communion Sabbath morning, as I had occasion to go over the dewy fields very early, I met a working man near a rock in the middle of a field well away from the town, to whom I said, when I came up to him, “Dear me, James, you are early about.” To which he replied, “Ay, I always come out at sunrise on the communion Sunday to prepare”; and then something told me quite plainly that he had been at prayer at the rock-side before I had appeared.

4. The washing of their robes is done by the blessed themselves. “Blessed are they that wash their robes.” On the one hand is all the fulness of cleansing; on the other is the heap of dirty rags that will not be cleansed by our sitting there and looking at them. The two must be brought into contact. How? By the magic band that unites strength and weakness, purity and foulness, the Saviour and the penitent; the magic band of simple affiance, and trust, and submission to the cleansing power of His death and of His life.

A long list of uncouth, monosyllabic names at the end of Dr. Gordon’s church directory attests the patient interest which the Clarendon Street Church has taken in the Chinese of the city. A school was organized many years ago for these strangers. Its proportions grew rapidly. More than one hundred laundrymen from all parts of Boston and from adjacent towns meet each Sabbath.… That conversion is much the same experience among all peoples can be clearly seen from the following:—

Chin Tong came into the mission school a raw, uncouth, unresponsive Chinaman. Unlike most of his fellows, he was in his person very unclean and unsavory. The teacher to whom he was assigned worked with him month after month without making upon him the least apparent impression. One Sunday the text, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness,” was marked in his New Testament and assigned for the next lesson. When he turned up the following Sabbath the verse was almost obliterated from the page by the incessant movement of his finger back and forth over the lines. One word alone puzzled him, the word “cleanse.” However, this was easily explained to one whose daily work was over tubs and ironing-boards. During the next week a young man called twice at the teacher’s home, but would not leave his name. When the hour for the Chinese school came round again, the teacher took her seat in the accustomed place. Presently a man in Occidental dress entered and sat down beside her. It was Chin Tong, but so changed as not to be recognizable. His cue was off, his hair shingled, his long finger-nails pared, his face clean as a new coin, his clothes new and well cared for. The text had done its work. “Jesus Christ make me clean inside and outside,” he explained. Heart, mind, and person had been transformed. 1 [Note: A. J. Gordon: A Biography, 341.]

II

Their Privileges

Their privileges are two: Right to come to the Tree of Life and Entrance into the City. Now the Tree of Life is in the midst of the Paradise of God, and the Paradise is in the centre of the City of God. So we come first through the gates into the City.

i. Entrance into the City

The city is the society of the redeemed. In relation to Christ it is spoken of as a bride. In relation to the followers of Christ themselves as a city, the city in which they dwell together. In the old world the whole power and splendour of great kingdoms was gathered in their capitals, Babylon and Nineveh in the past, Rome in the present. To St. John the forces of evil were all concentrated in that city on the Seven Hills. To him the antagonistic forces which were the hope of the world were all concentrated in the real ideal city which he expected to come down from heaven—the New Jerusalem.

What are the characteristics of this city of God into which the blessed of the last Beatitude enter?

1. It is a city of social activities.—Genesis began with a garden; man’s sin sent him out of the garden. God out of evil evolves good, and for the lost garden comes the better thing, the found city. “Then comes the statelier Eden back to man.” For surely it is better that men should live in the activities of the city than in the sweetness and indolence of the garden; and manifold and miserable as are the sins and the sorrows of great cities, the opprobria of our modern so-called civilization, yet still the aggregation of great masses of men for worthy objects generates a form of character, and sets loose energies and activities, which no other kind of life could have produced.

Why do our citizens appear to care less for London than their citizens care for Florence, or Venice, or Rome, or Pisa? Is it because we are interested mainly in a few famous thoroughfares and buildings and have never yet begotten a civic patriotism enlightened and powerful enough to care for the back streets and obscure houses? Are we satisfied if our millionaires are richly housed in Park Lane, that their destitute neighbours should be rack-rented for the use of a cellar in St. Pancras or Soho? It is the old story. We perish for lack of vision. The cure is to breed citizens who shall be penetrated with the civic ideal. No man with the New Testament in his hand can complain of lack of guidance in the matter of citizenship. Here is Paul, the hero of the Apostolic age, boasting his local patriotism to the city of Tarsus, proud of its commercial and educational traditions; glorying, secondly, in his imperial citizenship, and looking beyond the narrow boundaries of Tarsus to the frontiers of the Roman Empire to whose civilization and citizenship he was free-born; and, finally, claiming the supreme privilege of his citizenship to the Kingdom of God, his membership of a society that acknowledges no limitations of race, or tongue, or land, but exists to create a universal brother-hood on the basis of a universal righteousness. There are still thousands of excellent Christians who admire and extol Paul’s devotion to the Kingdom of God, who have no use for his local patriotism or his imperial citizenship. Yet the lesser flags do not challenge the supremacy of the august Standard that is the symbol of Christ’s universal rule. 1 [Note: C. Silvester Horne, Pulpit, Platform and Parliament, 182.]

In a speech he delivered at the opening of the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition in 1878, the Bishop said: “I have no wish, like Mr. Ruskin, to retire into the solitude of a Westmoreland valley. I like to hear the thud of the steam-hammer and the whistle of the locomotive. I like to live in the midst of men and women who are dependent on their industry for their daily bread. Where I find content and good relations subsisting between men, that is my bit of blue sky, of which I want to see more and more.” 1 [Note: T. Hughes, James Fraser, Second Bishop of Manchester, 242.]

2. It is a city of reunion.—Scripture leads us to associate the reunion of dead and living with a world from which all idolatry and all selfishness will have been for ever cast out by the unveiled presence of that one Person whom to know is life, whom to serve is glory. St. Paul used to speak of meeting there his own converts, Asiatic and European, and seemed to say that it would scarcely be heaven to him if they shared it not with him. “He which raised up the Lord Jesus shall raise up us also by Jesus, and shall present us— with you.” “What is our hope, or joy, or crown of rejoicing? Are not even ye in the presence of our Lord Jesus Christ at his coming?” So large was his conception of the amplitude of the glory, and of its characteristic features of human sympathy as well as of Divine communion.

Surely there, amidst the solemn troops and sweet societies, the long-loved, long-lost, will be found again. I cannot believe that, like the Virgin and Joseph, we shall have to go wandering up and down the streets of Jerusalem when we get there, looking for our dear ones. “Wist ye not that I should be in the Father’s house?” We shall know where to find them.

We shall clasp them again,

And with God be the rest. 2 [Note: A. Maclaren, A Year’s Ministry, i. 52.]

3. It is a city of abiding.—The city is the emblem of security and of permanence. No more shall life be as a desert march, with changes which only bring sorrow, and yet a dreary monotony amidst them all. We shall dwell amidst abiding realities, our-selves fixed in unchanging, but ever growing, completeness and peace. The tents shall be done with; we shall inhabit the solid mansions of the city which hath foundations, and shall wonderingly exclaim, as our unaccustomed eyes gaze on their indestructible strength, “What manner of stones, and what buildings are here!”—and not one stone of these shall ever be thrown down.

The third essential development of Marius’ thought is that of the City of God, which for him assumes the shape of a perfected and purified Rome, the concrete embodiment of the ideals of life and character. This is indeed the inevitable sequel of any such spiritual developments as the fear of enemies and the sense of an unseen companion. Man moves inevitably to the city, and all his ideals demand an embodiment in social form before they reach their full power and truth. In that house of life which he calls society, he longs to see his noblest dreams find a local habitation and a name. This is the grand ideal passed from hand to hand by the greatest and most outstanding of the world’s seers—from Plato to Augustine, from Augustine to Dante—the ideal of the City of God. It is but little developed in Pater’s “Marius the Epicurean,” for that would be beside the purpose of so intimate and inward a history. Yet we see, as it were, the towers and palaces of this “dear City of Zeus” shining in the clear light of the early Christian time, like the break of day over some vast prospect, with the new City, as it were some celestial new Rome in the midst of it. 1 [Note: J. Kelman, Among Famous Books, 61.]

ii. Access to the Tree

As the city is social, the tree of life is individual. In the city we enjoy the society of the redeemed; at the tree of life we enjoy fellowship with God, a fellowship which is the peculiar privilege of each one of those who have washed their robes. We receive a name which no one knows except the Giver and the receiver of it. The promise is particular: “If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.”

The tree of life stands out in the first page of God’s Word as a sacramental symbol to unfallen man. It was a visible and tangible thing—a tree growing in the garden like other trees, but so inscribed with the word of God that in the use of its fruit unfallen man could receive the spiritual assurance of God’s love and favour. In this respect it differed from the other trees of the garden. They were God’s permitted gifts to satisfy man’s animal wants; but the tree of life has regard to the higher needs of his spiritual nature, which even then had a genuine sacramental instinct, and hungered for some tangible assurance of God’s abiding grace.

When Adam sinned, the way to the tree of life was no longer open to him; and this healthful sacrament became at once forbidden fruit. In very mercy its use was forbidden to him, and put beyond his reach. Evidently its withdrawal has a peculiar solemnity about it: it is to save man from a fresh blunder and a new sin. The dream—that if only, by any means, he could retain the coveted assurance of God’s love, all would be well, and all his disobedience would be neutralized, and all his sin forgotten—must at once be rudely broken. Even more than that, there is a dreadful possibility of his destroying all hope of restoration, if he rush in and claim the old symbol of God’s love. For him to feed on the tree of life, when in a state of sin and anger and shame, would practically mean a second death.

But when we have washed our robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb, we have again as good a fitness to approach the tree of life as in primeval innocence. It is our fitness that constitutes our right. It is in being cleansed that the new right to come and eat is valid. Not unsullied innocence itself can come with surer step to have the bread of God’s own life given to it than impurity that has been graciously cleansed away. The pardoned rebel, in his robes washed white, has a title to life as good as the angels, who have never defiled their garments.

I am going to a city

Where the living never die,

Where no sickness and no sorrow can molest;

From this body to release me

He is speeding from on high;

He will greet me and escort me to my rest.

Charles M. Alexander, the singer-evangelist, once told the following story of the origin of the hymn of which the above is the chorus:—

“I always like to know how hymns came to be written, and so I asked the man who wrote this hymn how he came to do so. He told me that a friend of his went from New York City to the country. He was far gone in consumption, but in the deceptive nature of the disease thought that he was growing better day by day, till one morning he said he was so much improved in health that he was returning to the city the next day. The writer of the hymn went to see him in the afternoon, and found him in bed again. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘I thought you were going to the city tomorrow?’ The sick man’s face lighted up, and he answered, ‘I’m going to a city, but it is a city where the living never die, and where no sickness and no sorrow can come.’ After his death, his friend, remembering his words, wrote this hymn.”

1. Access to the tree of life is a matter of right, not of reward. This we might illustrate by reference to the case of a pupil who is being promoted from a school of one grade to a school that is of a grade higher. He is promoted, not for the purpose of rewarding him for the faithful work he has done in the inferior grades, but because the superior grade is the place for him. He has acquired the “right” to a place in that grade. That pupils are sometimes promoted before they have acquired the right, and prematurely advanced out of consideration of favouritism, is undoubtedly the fact, but advancement on such grounds invalidates the whole scheme of promotion and, in all ordinary relations,—in everything, one may say, except in religion,—is amenable to universal disapproval. Whether in schools or in matters of civil service, individual merit is regarded as the essential condition of promotion; and to set up some other principle of preferment in matters of the future world, and to assume that there is some other legitimate title to the tree of life than simple individual right to the tree of life, and right to a residence in the celestial city, is to break with what we all recognize as justice in affairs of mundane experience, and to let our future condition be decided by a so-called system of Divine determination too arbitrary and evasive to be tolerated by any responsible human society. If, then, the pupil is promoted, it is not to reward him for his work; and if he is not promoted, it is not to punish him for his lack of work. There is a place where he belongs, and in any well-regulated system of school administration the place where he belongs is the place where he will be kept or put.

2. But if the right is more minutely examined, it will be found to be—

(1) A right of promise.—“This is the promise which he promised us, even the life eternal” ( 1 John 2:25). The promise is made sure by the washing of the robes in the blood of the Lamb. “For how many soever be the promises of God, in him is the yea: wherefore also through him is the Amen ( 2 Corinthians 1:20).

(2) A right of inheritance.—“As many as received him, to them gave he the right to become children of God” ( John 1:12). And this Johannine assurance is confirmed by St. Paul: “Ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus” ( Galatians 3:26). “And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ” ( Romans 8:17).

(3) A right of fitness.—This is the special right of the text, and it is as sure as the others, however astonishing that may be. “Made fit for the inheritance of the saints in light”—that is one thing. That is the entrance which is abundantly ministered unto us through the gates into the city. Fitness also for fellowship so close and intimate that because He lives we live also; and that “I live, and yet no longer I, but Christ liveth in me.” That is the right to the tree of life.

Almost beyond belief it seems blessed in the eternal kingdom to “have right to the Tree of Life.” All is of God’s grace, nothing of man’s desert. Of His grace it pleases Him to constitute such a privilege our “right”; and our right thence-forward it becomes, whilst first and last all is of grace. “For he spake, and it was done; he commanded, and it stood fast.” As the hart desireth the water-brooks, doth our soul so long after that Tree of Life? Surely yea, if we be not lower than the beasts that perish.… Alas! not “surely” at all, unless our present longings can stand one test which too often shames them. For already we have a right to our own precious Tree of Life, Christ in the Sacrament of His most Blessed Body and Blood. Whoso longs not for Christ here, wherefore should he long for Him there? Because our Saviour longed for us on earth, we are convinced that He longs for us in heaven. If we long not for Him on earth, who shall kindle our longing for Him in heaven?

Good Lord Jesus, our only Hope; because we cannot help ourselves, help Thou us. Because we cannot quicken ourselves, quicken Thou us. Because we cannot kindle ourselves, kindle Thou us. Because we cannot cleanse ourselves, cleanse Thou us. Because we cannot heal ourselves, heal Thou us. For Thou hast no pleasure in our impotence, lifelessness, coldness, pollutions, infirmity. If Thou desire our love, who shall give us love where-with to love Thee except Thou who art Love give it us? Helpless we are, and our helplessness appeals to Thee. 1 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti, The Face of the Deep, 537.]

The Privileges of the Blessed

Literature

Bayley (J.), The Divine Word Opened, 548.

Grant (W.), Christ our Hope, 327.

Johnston (S. M.), The Great Things of God, i. 320.

Keble (J.), Sermons for the Christian Year: Miscellaneous, 267.

Maclaren (A.), Expositions: Epistles of John to Revelation, 380.

Maclaren (A.), A Year’s Ministry, i. 43.

Meyer (F. B.), Blessed are Ye, 131.

Norton (J. N.), Old Paths, 239.

Parkhurst (C. H.), A Little Lower than the Angels, 80.

Price (A. C.), Fifty Sermons, ii. 105.

Ramsay (W. M.), The Letters to the Seven Churches of Asia, 386.

Rossetti (C. G.), The Face of the Deep, 537.

Wickham (E. C.), Words of Light and Life, 94.

Verse 16

Christ’s Witness to Himself

I am the root and the offspring of David, the bright, the morning star.— Revelation 22:16.

1. This is the last place in Scripture where the Redeemer bears witness to Himself. A few verses below He once more promises to return—“I come quickly”—but of His own words regarding His own excellence and majesty, this is the last: “I am the root and the offspring of David, the bright, the morning star.”

2. The hours of the great Vision were almost over. The Apostle, who had walked long ago with Jesus as His daily friend, had been entranced for awhile into immediate experience of His presence in the mode of endless life; and now the trance was closing. An influence wholly from above had been imprinting on his soul the message to the Churches, and the order of the future of the Church; and now, at the end, the spiritual Voice has still this word to say; the Lord speaks of Himself once more. Perhaps the cloud of literal night was rolling from the rock of Patmos, and the literal day-star shone above the region of the dawn. But the spiritual view and the inner word were all of the light and of the day. There came a sound full of immortality, “I am the bright, the morning star.”

3. The Lord speaks here, indeed, in a manner that is all His own. Nothing is more profoundly characteristic in His words, from first to last, than His witness to Himself. It is one of the main phenomena of the gospel, most perplexing on the theory of unbelief, most truthlike on the theory of belief—this self-witness of the Man of humility and sorrows. He, the sacred exemplar of all self-denial, yet always and immovably presents Himself in terms of self-assertion, and such self-assertion as must mean either Deity or a delusion, moral as well as mental, of infinite depth. “I am the truth; I am the life; I am the bread of life; I am the true vine; I am the good shepherd.” We have but this same tone, perfectly retained, when here the same Voice speaks from amid the realities of the unseen. The imagery, indeed, is lifted to the scenery of the firmament; He who is the genial Vine, and the laborious Shepherd, now also reveals Himself as the Star of Stars in a spiritual sky. But the new splendour of the term only conveys the truth which had always stood in the very front of the testimony of Jesus; the truth of His own sacredness and glory; the doctrine that He, the Son of the Father, is the ultimate peace, and hope, and joy, of the soul of man.

I

The Root and the Offspring of David

“I am the root and the offspring of David.”

1. In these words Jesus speaks to us as the historic Christ, the Messiah so long expected, who entered human life in connexion with a definite human family and race in a definite part of the world. The root of Jesse in time produced the branch; in His human nature He was the descendant of Israel’s famous king. Independently of all theories and interpretations, the Church must continually be going back to the historic Christ if she would keep true to the original gospel. And the facts recorded in the Gospels—we must grow familiar with them, meditate on them, search their significance until they become living truths to us. “I am the root and the offspring of David”; so He speaks, using the language of men, revealing Himself to us in the terms of a perfect human life. We think about Jesus Christ, and, guided by St. John and St. Paul, our thoughts travel wide and high, until, please God, we find that all things are by Him and in Him and unto Him; He is the Centre, as He is the Beginning and the End of all; we cannot explain the universe apart from Him. So the Church has built up her Divine philosophy on the foundation of the incarnate Word, the Reason, and the Utterance of Almighty God. But the Church throughout her history has found it necessary to balance her high and large philosophy by laying equal emphasis on the facts of Christ’s earthly life. Dearly as she values the philosophy of the Incarnation, the Church can never afford to lose touch with Jesus of Nazareth, who lived in Galilee and Judæa and died upon the cross.

There is one lecture, delivered at this period, in 1874, which contains much that is original and powerful, on the all-important subject of our Lord’s Divinity. It was the first of a series given to the students of the English Presbyterian College. As a Jew, Dr. Saphir throws himself into the very period and circumstances of his fathers at the advent of Christ.… He concluded his lecture with this very touching personal testimony:

“I was brought up in my childhood in the synagogue, and was taught that there was one God, infinite, incomprehensible, holy Spirit; high above us and omnipresent. Much stress was laid on the unity and unicity of God. But this bare, vague, and abstract Monotheism leaves the mind in darkness, while the heart is chilly and desolate. There was another and a better current which then influenced me. It was the national history, as recorded in the books of Moses, the Psalms, and the Prophets, and commemorated in the festivals. There I was met by no abstract idea of unicity, but by a loving God, who appeared unto Abraham and spoke to him; who led Israel through the wilderness and dwelt among them; and after, when I thought of the friendly, kind, concrete, and human way in which the Lord God then appeared unto His people and dwelt with them, I wondered why He was not now with us, known, loved, and followed.

“ One day I was looking at some books, and the title of one arrested my eye. It was Die Menschwerdung Gottes—God becoming man. The thought went through my mind like a flash of lightning; it thrilled my soul with a most joyous solemnity. ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘this would be the most beautiful thing, if God were to become man and visit us!’ Not many years after I heard about Jesus, and read the Gospels. I felt here the same presence, the same loving, condescending, redeeming, and sanctifying God, that appeared unto the Fathers. I felt that here was Jehovah; that all darkness had disappeared, and that the grand but inconceivable glory here shone upon us in the perfect, peaceful, and holy countenance of the man Christ Jesus. Peniel! I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.… To believe in Jesus, the Son of God, is not an abstract dogma, or a theosophic speculation, but a soul-experience, a new heart-life. It is the mystery of godliness. May the result of all we learn and experience on earth be summed up in this: By God’s spirit I believe that Jesus is the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me.” 1 [Note: G. Carlyle, A Memoir of Adolph Saphir, 228.]

2. Christ is at once the Root and the Offshoot, the Beginning and the End of the whole economy associated with the Davidic family. In the Messiah, the latest Scion of the House of David, its earliest ideals and hopes are realized. He is the “Son, who was born of the seed of David according to the flesh,” the substance of ancient prophecy, the long-promised and looked-for King. Thus He is connected on the one side with earth, on the other with heaven, “Immanuel, God with us,” touched with a feeling of our infirmities, mighty to save. The root of David? Yes, the source of David’s humanity, that of God from which David and all else that we call human has come forth. What an astounding claim, yet unmistakable! Before David was, Christ is, the very Christ who in the course of ages became manifest to the world as the Jesus born of David’s line, Alpha and Omega, first and last. If, in any sense, Jesus is the root of human nature, as well as the flower thereof, it is evident that we are of lofty lineage, whether we realize it or not.

These New Testament applications of the title, Son of David, are in close harmony with the Old Testament description of the Messiah. David was the founder of the kingdom of Israel. Whenever in later centuries the nation and its welfare were in the mind, the thought naturally turned to David. When the house of David no longer ruled, and the kingdom was shattered, prophets and singers lamented the misfortunes that had overtaken David and his house. When their hopefulness and faith in God expressed itself in visions of a bright future, they naturally spoke of a second David, a branch of his house, who should restore the nation to its former prosperity. As the past, and especially David’s rule, grew fairer by contrast with the dismal present, so the new kingdom of David in the future was pictured in extravagant colours. The Kingdom should extend over the whole earth, irresistibly, triumphantly. But this conquest was not conquest for conquest’s sake. It was a process without which the longedfor prosperity could, in their imagination, not be realized. It was but an incident in the larger blessedness of the future. 2 [Note: O. H. Gates, in The Dictionary of Christ and the Gospels, ii. 653.]

As you look full at the façade of Amiens Cathedral in front, the statues which fill the minor porches are either obscured in their narrower recesses or withdrawn behind each other so as to be unseen. And the entire mass of the front is seen, literally, as built on the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief corner-stone. Literally that; for the receding Porch is a deep “angulus,” and its mid-pillar is the “Head of the Corner.”

Built on the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets, that is to say of the Prophets who foretold Christ, and the Apostles who declared Him. Though Moses was an Apostle, of God, he is not here—though Elijah was a Prophet, of God, he is not here. The voice of the entire building is that of the Heaven at the Transfiguration. “This is my beloved Son, hear ye him.”

There is yet another and a greater prophet still, who, as it seems at first, is not here. Shall the people enter the gates of the temple, singing, “Hosanna to the Son of David”; and see no image of His father, then?—Christ Himself declare, “I am the root and the offspring of David”; and yet the Root have no sign near it of its Earth?

Not so. David and his Son are together. David is the pedestal of the Christ. The statue of David is only two-thirds life-size, occupying the niche in front of the pedestal. He holds his sceptre in his right hand, the scroll in his left. King and Prophet, type of all Divinely right doing, and right claiming, and right proclaiming, kinghood, for ever. The entire monolith is one of the noblest pieces of Christian sculpture in the world. 1 [Note: Ruskin, The Bible of Amiens, ch. iv. § 30 (Works, xxxiii. 144).]

II

The Morning Star

Both in the Gospels and in the Book of Revelation, when our Lord uses symbolical language about Himself, He uses such symbols as all can understand; they are universal in their range and common to all men. “The morning star” is one of them; it shines for all, and all men know it, and recognize it with a greeting of welcome. The light by which we live is the true light of the universe. It is not for us alone, but for all who do not acknowledge it as yet.

1. Why should Christ speak of Himself as the Star? We may be perfectly sure that the word, with all its radiant beauty is no mere flight of fancy. Prophecy, not poetry, underlies these last oracles of the Bible; and among the prophecies in which stars form the imagery there is but one which can be thought to point to Messiah—the prophecy of Balaam ( Numbers 24:17). Balaam had heard, among “the words of God,” of a mysterious Person, or at least of a mysterious Power, strong to destroy and save; figured to his soul in vision as a Star, destined in other days to appear out of Israel; and the belief of the Jewish Church, in the lifetime of Jesus, certainly was that the Star of that prediction was the King Messiah. No doubt the import of Balaam’s words has been variously explained; but if we believe this utterance in the Apocalypse to be a Divine reality, we are safe in believing along with it, under guidance of the fact that no other similar prediction fairly offers, that it was of Messiah that Balaam had heard in “the words of God,” and that he had seen Messiah, in “the vision of the Almighty,” as the Star of Jacob.

Prophecy, then, spoke of Messiah as the Star. The word indicated, probably, the royal dignity, touched and glorified with the light of Deity, or of Divinity at least.

There is good evidence that in the time of Christ the “Star” of Numbers 24:17 was popularly identified with the Messianic King. This idea may have influenced those New Testament passages where Jesus is represented as the “Morning Star” ( Revelation 22:16; Revelation 2:28), though it must be remembered that the angels are described symbolically in the Book of Enoch (86:1, 3) as “stars”—a metaphor which helps to explain the symbolism by which Jesus is here described as “the Morning Star.” … The essential idea of the conception is present in all those passages of the New Testament which speak of the spiritual illumination that accompanies the revelation of the Messiah.… The remarkable description of the Messiah as the “Dayspring from on high” in the Song of Zacharias ( Luke 1:78), may possibly have been associated in thought with the Messianic Star. 1 [Note: G. H. Box.]

2. But the Voice at Patmos not only claims the primeval prophecy for Jesus, as the King of the new Israel. It expands that prophecy, and discloses truth within truth treasured there. For the Lord does not only assert Himself to be the Star, the bright Star; as of course His brightness must be surpassing if He is in any sense at all a Star. His own presentation of the metaphor has in it something new and special—“I am the morning star.” Why was not the word Star left alone in the utterance? In pointing to Messiah as the Star, were not the ideas of brilliancy, and elevation, and all that is ethereal, sufficient? No; it was not to be so. Christ Himself so qualifies the word by this one bright epithet as to show Himself, not as the King merely, but as the King of Morning, around whom gathered, and should gather for ever, all that is real in tenderest hope, and youngest vigour, and most cheerful aspiration, and such beginnings as shall eternally develop and never contract into fixity and decline.

Some traveller of the Norman times is passing along an old English valley as the night begins to deepen. On the hillside facing him groups of peasants are returning from their fields, and they have kindled torches to frighten away the wolves. Through the open doors of the distant hamlet the faint glow of fire comes, and dim tapers flicker in the casements. By and by the valley becomes one long, unbroken shadow. And now at last the curfew sounds from the lowly church on the hill. The peasants have reached their homes, the lights in the casements are quenched, and the scattered habitations are shrouded in darkness. In the clear sky behind the shoulder of the hill a star shines which obeys no sound of curfew. It glittered over the triremes of the Romans as they crossed to Britain’s shores. It will hang undimmed over the grave of the youngest child cradled in the hamlet, and will watch the long procession of Normans, Plantagenets, Tudors, Stuarts, to their last resting-places.

And is it not thus with One who is described as the Bright and Morning Star? Prophet, apostle, and evangelist hold out to the dark and erring world the light of life, and by and by the solemn curfew sounds across the heavens, and the light in which we were “willing to walk for a season” has passed from our pathway. The apostles are gone. The reformers have long since followed in their steps. The evangelists of the last century, of imperishable work and memory, do they live for ever? The twilight knell is heard again, and the men who were the lights and guides of our spiritual childhood are no longer with us. But the Lord of the Church abides when His servants vanish; and from His celestial enthronement an unchanged Christ looks down upon each succeeding generation of men, to guide their feet into the way of peace. 1 [Note: T. G. Selby, The Unheeding God, 381.]

3. This last self-witness of Jesus Christ reminds the disciple that his blessed Lord is no mere name of tender recollection, no dear relic of a perished past, to be drawn sometimes in silence from its casket and clasped with the aching fondness, and sprinkled with the hot tears, of hopeless memory. He is not Hesperus that sets, but Phosphorus that rises, springing into the sky through the earliest dawn; the pledge of reviving life, and growing light, and all the energies and all the pleasures of the happy day. And the word speaks of a kind of joy for which the open day would not be so true a simile. It indicates the delights of hope along with those of fruition; a happiness in which one of the deep elements is always the thought of something yet to be revealed; light with more light to follow, joy to develop into further joy, as the dawn passes into the morning and then into the day.

Do you say, But is this all that Christ is to His Church now—only a “star”? Yes, all—in comparison with what He will be. But remember, “the morning star” makes the daybreak quite sure—it always precedes it—they are never divided—and it is itself brilliant to the midnight that would be without it. Four thousand years, in contrast, our earth was very dark. Nearly two thousand years “the morning star” has shone; and many and many a child of the day has looked on it—been guided by it safe, and recognized its note of hope, and waited the more, with quiet patience, for the morning. And many of those children of the day are still looking on it, and say, as they look out for its coming, in their quiet resting-places, “How long? How long?” And surely it cannot be now very long till the “star” of our faith shall melt away into the sun of our sight; and risen souls shall rise again to bask in its lustre. 1 [Note: J. Vaughan, Sermons, iv. 4.]

4. The metaphor of Christ as the Morning Star suggests—(1) the Distinction He has; (2) the Light He gives; (3) the Cheer He imparts; (4) the Hope He inspires.

(1) The distinction Christ has.—The morning star is pre-eminently the star of distinction. It is larger and brighter to view than any other; it is the only star that has light enough to cast a shadow; it is indeed so dazzlingly bright that on this very account we know less about its material surface than about other planets; the light cannot be penetrated to make research. It is, as astronomers tell us, the most brilliant of all the planets, and the most beautiful object to us in the heavens. No one can mistake the morning star in the firmament, or confound it with any other orb. It shines pre-eminent and alone. In the words of Milton, it “flames in the forehead of the morning sky.” Thus is it with Christ. He is the “bright” as well as the Morning Star. He is without a rival in time, and He will be, even more gloriously, without a rival in eternity. “In all things he has the pre-eminence.”

The morning star is what is known in astronomy as the planet Venus. The Greeks and Romans named the planets after their gods and goddesses; but, as old Thomas Adams says, “we need not trouble our heads about such matters, Christ is our morning star.” 1 [Note: R. Cowan, The Weakness of God, 278.]

(2) The light Christ gives.—The classical names for the morning star mean light-bearer or light-bringer. And this is what Christ is. In Him is the light of truth, of wisdom and knowledge, of righteousness and holiness, of consolation and joy; in Him, above all, is the light of our salvation. That light is in Him, and in Him only; in Him in contrast to the darkness that is everywhere else, and that would always have been but for His rising. It belongs to the day star to appear in the midst of gloom when the shades of night are still thick and heavy, and to announce their departure. It was in this sense that Christ came as the Light of the world.

There was a general sense in which the whole world sat in darkness, as it does still where Christ is not known. “Darkness covered the earth and gross darkness the people.” When Christ came, the world was in the darkness of guilt, with only light enough to read the sentence of conscience, but none to see how it could be reversed. There was the darkness of depravity—a darkness of untold misery; but when Christ came into the world, a Morning Star appeared upon the brow of night. He scattered the darkness of ignorance by revealing God, salvation, and immortality. He removed the darkness of guilt by atoning for it. He met the darkness of depravity by sending down the effectual beams of truth, purity, and spiritual life, into hearts the most degraded; and He dispelled the darkness of misery by lifting upon the world the light of God’s countenance, by solving the mystery of the grave, and by assuring the children of sorrow that trouble, pain, and death work together for good to them that love God. Thus was Christ the Light of the world when He came; thus is He the Light of the world still; and to His appearing, as to that of the day star amidst the long-enduring gloom, the words of the prophecy may be applied: “The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwelt in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.”

Of the morning star, as light-bringer, herald and harbinger of day, the beauty and transcendent brightness is being continually celebrated by poets, as by Homer ( Il. xxii. 317); by Virgil (Æn. viii. 389); by Ovid ( Trist. i. 3. 71); and by Milton ( Par. Lost, iv. 605: “Hesperus, that led the starry host, rode brightest”). Thus does He who is “fairer than the children of men” claim all that is fairest and loveliest in creation as the faint shadow and image of His perfections. 1 [Note: R. C. Trench.]

In the Apocalypse Christ is called the Morning Star, but in the Gospels He is the Sun. The comparison in the Apocalypse belongs to a different period and another circle of thought. Its meaning may be illustrated by the expression in the letter to the Church at Thyatira, “he that overcometh … I will give him the Morning Star” ( Revelation 2:28). We must understand that the Star is the dawn of a brighter day and a new career. To the victor there shall be given the brightness and splendour and power that outshine the great Empire, and the promise of and entrance upon a higher life. It is the same thought as afterwards suggested the term dies natalis for the day on which a martyr died: this day was his birthday, on which he entered into a nobler life. After the same fashion Christ calls Himself in Revelation 22:16 the Morning Star, as the beginner and introducer of a new era. 2 [Note: W. M. Ramsay.]

(3) The cheer Christ imparts.—Light is cheering; all light is, and not least that of the morning star. It cheers by its present light and beauty, and by its prophecy: “The day cometh.” Christ’s aim when on earth was always to impart cheer. To the paralytic, laid a wreck at His feet, He said, “Son, be of good cheer; thy sins are forgiven.” To the woman who touched His garment and feared she might be chid for presumption, His reply was, “Daughter, be of good cheer; thy faith hath made thee whole.” To the storm-tossed disciples in the dark night, He, appearing as their Morning Star, exclaimed, “Be of good cheer; it is I; be not afraid.” To St. Paul in prison, looking anxiously out on the future, He said, “Be of good cheer: for as thou hast testified concerning me at Jerusalem, so must thou bear witness also at Rome.” To all disciples in all trouble that arises, He says, “These things have I spoken unto you, that in me ye may have peace. In the world ye have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.” And thus, to the end of time, for all His people, He has the word of cheer and the power to work it.

I once said to an old sick-nurse, “You must have often seen the morning star?” “Yes,” she said, “and it was always a cheering sight; and then, a little after, the larks would begin to sing, and I thought they were praising God; and when I looked at the buds on the trees and the grass twinkling with the dew, it just seemed as if all nature were full of His presence.” Perhaps it is in sickness, or when watching with the sick, that the morning is most longed for and tokens of its coming most welcome. Jonathan Edwards tells of a sickness he had when a youth, shortly after his conversion, and how, when he saw those that watched with him looking wistfully out for the morning, it brought to mind the psalmist’s words: “My soul waiteth for the Lord more than they that watch for the morning.” “And then,” he says, “when the light of day came in at the window, it refreshed my soul from one morning to another; it seemed to be some image of the light of God’s glory.” 1 [Note: R. Cowan, The Weakness of God, 284.]

(4) The hope Christ inspires.—The morning star is the star of hope. When we see it in the sky we know that morning is near, light will grow, the sun will soon be up, the day begun. Christ is in this sense also our morning Star. With reference to the life to come He is so; and with reference also to the life that now is. We get light when we first believe on Him, the light of a full salvation; if not all of it at once in possession, all in sure hope. But there is more light to follow—light of truth, of holiness, of joy. Christ is ever pointing forward, beckoning us on, saying, “Ye shall see greater things.” It is the property of the morning star to be the day’s harbinger. Other stars rise and shine and set, and leave the darkness still behind them. They belong to the night; and night wraps her mantle around her own children that cannot pass beyond the sombre shadow. But the morning star is not a child of night but of the day. With Christ as the Morning Star the victory over darkness is decided from the first, and night can never resume her ancient empire. If we abide in Him, and let His words abide in us, our light will grow. Difficulties will be overcome, temptations vanquished, sin subdued, consolation in Him will more and more abound. Then shall we know, if we follow on to know the Lord. His going forth is prepared as the morning.

In ancient times it used to be imagined that the morning star was different from the evening star; we know, of course, that the two are simply different manifestations of the same planet. So the words of the text gain a fuller meaning. The star that shines at the day’s dawn shines also at the day’s close. That which has been our beacon of hope and blessing in life’s day, will be with us in all its brightness at life’s evening, when, in God’s mercy, we pass into a state of clearer light, the light not of lamp or sun or star, but the unveiled glory of the Lord God Himself. 1 [Note: G. A. Cooke, The Progress of Revelation, 169.]

Sept. 18, 1849: This morning early I had awakened and looked out. It was about four o’clock. The morning star was shining directly before our window in a bright sky. One part of the window was misty with frost, the other clear, and through the clear part the star shone most beautifully. I thought of Christ’s words, ὁ? ἀ?στὴ?ρ ὁ? λαμπρὸ?ς ὁ? πρωϊνός ( Revelation 22:16). Christ is all this in this world to me till the day break. I fell asleep, and when I next awoke the sun was shining through my room. Shall it not be thus at the Resurrection? Our shadowy views of Christ are passed, and now He is the Sun of Righteousness. 2 [Note: Andrew A. Bonar, D.D.: Diary and Letters.]

Our Lord is designated as the “Sun of Righteousness” by a Prophet: the sun without peer rules over the planetary system. But Christ with lips full of grace deigns to call Himself “the Bright and Morning Star”: which star solitary in office and in dignity lights up hope for the darkened world and promises and ushers in day after night. Yet is it a veritable star amid fellow stars; incomparably the Chiefest, but among ten thousand. 3 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti, The Face of the Deep, 540.]

And when, refreshed, the soul once more puts on new life and power,

Oh, let Thine image, Lord, alone, gild the first waking hour!

Let that dear Presence rise and glow fairer than morn’s first ray,

And Thy pure radiance overflow the splendour of the day.

So in the hastening evening, so in the coming morn,

When deeper slumber shall be given, and fresher life be born,

Shine out, true Light! to guide my way amid that deepening gloom,

And rise, O Morning Star, the first that dayspring to illume.

I cannot dread the darkness, where Thou wilt watch o’er me,

Nor smile to greet the sunrise, unless Thy smile I see;

Creator, Saviour, Comforter! on Thee my soul is cast;

At morn, at night, in earth, in heaven, be Thou my First and Last. 1 [Note: Eliza Scudder.]

Christ’s Witness to Himself

Literature

Bellew (J. C. M.), Sermons, i. 15.

Blackley (T.), Practical Sermons, i. 1.

Brown (A. G.), Forty Sermons, No. 37.

Cairns (J.), Christ the Morning Star, 1.

Cooke (G. A.), The Progress of Revelation, 164.

Cowan (R.), The Weakness of God, 277.

Hort (F. J. A.), Sermons on the Books of the Bible, 131.

Hort (F. J. A.), Village Sermons, 257.

King (D.), Memoir and Sermons, 317.

Kuegele (F.), Country Sermons, New Ser., v. 10.

Mitchell (J.), Stones for Sermon Builders, 42.

Norton (J. N.), Golden Truths, 59.

Trench (R. C.), Commentary on the Epistles to the Seven Churches in Asia, 155.

Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), iv. (1864), No. 489; xii. (1874), No. 7.

Wilkes (H.), The Bright and Morning Star, 1.

Williams (I.), Sermons on the Epistles and Gospels, i. 83.

Cambridge Review, ii., Supplement No. 27 (H. C. G. Moule).

Christian Commonwealth, xxxi. (1911) 441 (R. J. Campbell).

Church of England Pulpit, xli. 149 (J. Silvester).

Dictionary of Christ and the Gospels, ii. 675 (G. H. Box).

Expositor, 7th Ser., v. 14 (W. M. Ramsay).

Verse 17

Come

And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And he that heareth, let him say, Come. And he that is athirst, let him come: he that will, let him take the water of life freely.— Revelation 22:17.

The last verses of this book of Scripture are like the final movement of some great concerto, in which we hear all the instruments of the orchestra swelling the flood of triumph. In them many voices are audible alternately. Sometimes it is the Seer who speaks, sometimes an angel, sometimes a deeper voice from the Throne, that of Christ Himself. It is often difficult, therefore, amidst these swift transitions, to tell who is the speaker; but this much is clear, that, just before the verse from which the text is taken, our Lord has been proclaiming from the Throne His royalty and His swift coming to render to every man according to his work, and to gather His own into the heavenly city. After that solemn utterance He is silent for a moment, and there is a great hush. Then our Lord’s declaration is met by a response from the Spirit and the Church. The Spirit and the Bride reply, “Come.” The call is also to be taken up by every hearer. Each one is to say, “Come.” Then, in answer to the cry of the spirit, of the Church, and of the Faithful, begging Him to come, our Lord speaks again, this time to all the yearning and weary souls among mankind: “He that is athirst, let him come: he that will [that desires to have Jesus], let him take the water of life freely.”

Thus there are two comings in this verse—the final coming of Christ to the world, and the invited coming of the world to Christ. Such a way of understanding the text, with its vivid interchange of speakers and subjects, gives a far richer meaning to it than the common interpretation which recognizes in all these “Comes” only a reference to one and the same subject—the approach of men to Jesus Christ through faith in Him.

The Book of the Revelation goes out on a kind of fugue on the word “Come.” “The Spirit and the Bride say, Come”; the Spirit, searching the deep things of man and interpreting the unwritten yearnings of the race, saith, “Come”; the Bride, the Church of Christ, weary yet willing to wait, willing to wait yet weary, saith, “Come.” And he “that heareth and understandeth” all that is meant by the coming, saith, “Come.” And all together, the Spirit, the Church, and the men who have heard, unite to plead with the man who has not found the water of life, and with tender urgency bid him “Come,” and take freely, in order that having drunk from the well of salvation he may add his voice to their prayer. And the answer falls: “Behold, I come quickly.” Blessed are they who, after reading “the words of the book of this prophecy,” can say, “Even so, come, Lord Jesus.” 1 [Note: C. A. Scott, The Book of the Revelation, 336.]

We have in the text—

I. An Invitation to Christ to come, presented by

(1) The Spirit.

(2) The Bride.

(3) The Hearer.

II. An Invitation to come to Christ, addressed to

(1) The Thirsty.

(2) The Willing.

I

The Invitation to Christ

The invitation is given (1) by the Spirit, (2) by the Bride, and (3) by the Hearer. The Spirit and the Bride are not identical, as if the Spirit simply spoke through the Bride, that is, the Church. And yet the writer of the Apocalypse does not mean that the Spirit, as the third person in the Trinity, gives the invitation directly to the second Person to hasten His coming. By the spirit, St. John means those who are especially endowed with the spirit of wisdom and of utterance. There was in the Early Church a distinct order or school of “prophets” to whom the word of the Lord came, as it came to the prophets of the old dispensation. But it did not come from without. The word was in their heart. It was the Spirit within them; it was the Spirit of God expressing itself by them. People, says Dr. W. M. Macgregor, had the wisdom and the courage in those days to believe that in their lowly gatherings the voice of God was sometimes heard. When plain men spoke above themselves, in words all depth and fire and essential insight, speaking so as to catch their fellows up to God, it was reverently confessed that the Spirit of God was speaking; and on the lips of these men, who for the moment had the inspired utterance, the recurring word was, “Come, Lord Jesus.” Then the Bride, the whole Church of Christ, joined in the invitation. And last of all the hearer, every hearer of this book; not only the Church in her ideal unity, but each individual member of every Christian congregation where the book shall be read is invited to demand the fulfilment of the Lord’s promise, “Behold, I come quickly.”

1. The Spirit says, Come.—It is true that the spirit of this world and age does not speak thus. The more it strives after ease and comfort in this life, the further it is from wishing to have the present state of things ended by the coming of the Lord. But the Spirit of God and of Christ, which is meant here—the true spiritual life-throb of the children of God; the power of faith and salvation, of hope and patience, by which they fight their way victoriously through this world—this Spirit cries at all times, come, Lord Jesus; come to our aid in every difficulty; come and advance Thy Kingdom; even by the very obstacles raised by Thine enemies come, and by Thine advent make an end to all sorrow and suffering! This Spirit, emanating as it does from eternity, implants in our hearts a holy longing after this eternity, and is itself the innermost strength of this holy longing, of this love for the Lord and His appearing. It is this same Spirit that creates a deep yearning for freedom from all the bonds of sin and death, and for entire unity with the Lord; that creates the burning desire to see the Church of Christ healed of all schisms and corruption, and the honour of the glory of the Lord made manifest before the whole world, and incontestably established for all eternity. Thus does the Spirit continually incite to the prayer, “Come, Lord Jesus!”

In what respect the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them, differ from the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, which are God’s forever, is seldom, as far as I have heard, intelligibly explained from the pulpit; and still less the irreconcilable hostility between the two royalties and realms asserted in its sternness of decision. Whether it be, indeed, Utopian to believe that the kingdom we are taught to pray for may come—verily come—for the asking, it is surely not for man to judge; but it is at least at his choice to resolve that he will no longer render obedience, nor ascribe glory and power, to the Devil. If he cannot find strength in himself to advance towards Heaven, he may at least say to the power of Hell, “Get thee behind me”; and staying himself on the testimony of Him who saith, “Surely I come quickly,” ratify his happy prayer with the faithful “Amen, even so, come, Lord Jesus.” 1 [Note: Ruskin, The Lord’s Prayer and the Church (Works, xxxiv. 212).]

Lo as some venturer, from his stars receiving

Promise and presage of sublime emprise,

Wears evermore the seal of his believing

Deep in the dark of solitary eyes,

Yea to the end, in palace or in prison,

Fashions his fancies of the realm to be,

Fallen from the height or from the deeps arisen,

Ringed with the rocks and sundered of the sea;—

So even I, and with a pang more thrilling,

So even I, and with a hope more sweet,

Yearn for the sign, O Christ! of Thy fulfilling,

Faint for the flaming of Thine advent feet. 2 [Note: F. W. H. Myers, Saint Paul.]

2. The Bride says, Come.—This is not indeed the heart cry of the whole visible Church; for in so far as she allows herself to be rocked to sleep by the spirit of this world, she becomes, with all her hopes and wishes, so completely a citizen of this world that she wishes the day of the Lord may long be delayed, until she herself has enjoyed life. Therefore she does not say, or at least does not say from her heart, “Come, Lord Jesus.” But the Bride who has given herself wholly to the Lord, who keeps the covenant of faith which she has made with Him, and as His betrothed keeps herself unspotted from the world, who knows full well that the good things of this world are fair but poor and perishable, who knows that by the appearing of her Beloved a time of unclouded, endless joy and glory will dawn for her, she it is who says and prays with earnest longing, “Come, Lord Jesus.”

The Bride is represented here on earth. The Bride is represented there in glory:

One family we dwell in Him,

One Church above, beneath;

Though now divided by the stream,

The narrow stream of death.

But whether it is here on earth or yonder in glory, still the Bride speaks one language. Wherever you meet with a soul in whom there is the spirit of the Bride, and who belongs in God’s eternal foreknowledge to that elect company, you will find one whose life is a continuous invitation; for, wherever the Bride is, she still seems to say, “Come.” 1 [Note: W. H. M. H. Aitken, God’s Everlasting Yea, 242.]

3. And let him that heareth say, Come; that is, let him that heareth with the hearing of faith; let him who has made his own the glorious prospect opened up in the visions of this Book as to the Lord’s Second Coming add his individual cry to the cry of the universal Church. The call is to be taken up and repeated by every hearer of the Book; not only the Church in her ideal unity, but each individual member of every Christian congregation where the Book shall be read, is invited to demand the fulfilment of the Lord’s promise. “The power of the whole gospel,” says Bengel, “concentrates itself in this, that one should be able to respond to this Come, and repeat it from the heart.”

I do not know of a better evangelist than a fresh convert. When the love of God is first shed abroad in our hearts, and we receive the fulness of His first blessing, it is so natural that we should go and tell other people of what the Lord has done for us. About three weeks after a mission had been held in the north of England, the mission preacher paid another visit to the neighbourhood, and asked those who had received benefit to meet him in the school-room of the church. One of the very first to come forward was a little boy. He came forward like a man, and held out his little hand and grasped the mission preacher by his. His eyes were sparkling with joy. “Well, my dear boy, how are you getting on? Have you been doing the part of a mission preacher?” “Yes,” said the boy; “and now, sir, we are all of one mind in our house, mother and brothers and sisters, all except father, and we are bound to have him too.” 1 [Note: W. H. M. H. Aitken, God’s Everlasting Yea, 245.]

All day the caravan had toiled over the hot sand without water. They had thought to find it twenty-four hours before; but when they reached the place where they expected it, the spring was dry. There had been only a few drops of water left in their skin bags then. Now there was none; and the little girl of the company lay sick in her mother’s arms, moaning for water.

“ Water! Water! Water!” was her constant cry. Her father could not bear it. He stopped the caravan, and said, “We must find water, or the child will die. We will make a bed for her on the sand and leave her here with her mother, and we will go out and search far and wide until we have found water.”

Oh, how earnestly the boy Hafiz hunted! Every minute his dear little sister’s moans seemed to sound in his ears. He clambered over jagged rocks. He searched over barren wastes, and at last he found a spring that gushed up cool and clear behind a pile of concealing stones. He shouted to the rest and waved his arms, calling to them over the desert, “Come! Come! Here is water!”

With all possible speed they hastened to the blessed spring. Each one shouted to his neighbour, who passed the word on. “Come! Come! Come! Come!” The sound seemed to fill the desert. How they ran to the spot, bringing water skins, gourds, cooking vessels, everything that would hold water!

The little girl took a long, long draught and her moaning ceased. The perspiration came out in drops on her forehead. The flush went out of her face. She turned over and fell into a quiet sleep.

“ I believe the water saved her life,” said the mother to Hafiz. 2 [Note: From The Children’s Friend, Richmond, U.S.A.]

II

The Invitation to the Sinner

Here we have a remarkable change. We pass at once, and quite abruptly, from an invitation to Christ to hasten His coming to an invitation addressed to those who are thirsty, and those who are willing, to come to Christ. It is as if the writer had intended to ask the thirsty one, and every one that had any good will at all, to join in the welcome to the coming Christ, and then suddenly remembered that that could not be until they knew Christ. So he turns his sentence into an invitation to them to come to Christ, that they may taste and see how gracious the Lord is. Then will they be ready to welcome His coming.

Man was forbidden to come near to the tree after he had sinned in the Garden of Eden. There was a flaming sword to keep him from coming near that tree, but now here there are not only trees of life, but there is also a river of life, and this river of life has its source in the throne of glory, and as it flows along, the word of the Lord is this: “Is any man thirsty? Let him take of the water of life freely.” Oh, that grand word “let”! If God says, “Let him,” who then is going to deny it? 1 [Note: A. G. Brown, God’s Full-Orbed Gospel, 79.]

i. The Invitation to the Thirsty

There is no animal craving so fierce or so intolerable as the craving of thirst. This may be due to the fact that the deprivation of liquid is a condition with which all the tissues sympathize. Every atom of the body joins in the cry, and the expression is concentrated in the parched mouth and the dry and feverish lips. This great craving of thirst is used in this book to symbolize the craving of the soul, and these plenteous waters are used to shadow forth the abundance of the satisfaction which is found in the Lord Jesus Christ.

We must go to the far East and the far South to understand the images which were called up in the mind of an old Jew at the very name of wells and water-springs; and why the Scriptures speak of them as special gifts of God, life-giving and Divine. We must have seen the treeless waste, the blazing sun, the sickening glare, the choking dust, the parched rocks, the distant mountains quivering as in the vapour of a furnace; we must have felt the lassitude of heat, the torment of thirst, ere we can welcome, as did those old Easterns, the well dug long ago by pious hands, whither the maidens come with their jars at eventide, when the stone is rolled away, to water the thirsty flocks; or the living fountain, under the shadow of a great rock in a weary land, with its grove of trees, where all the birds for many a mile flock in, and shake the copses with their song; its lawn of green, on which the long-dazzled eye rests with refreshment and delight; its brook, wandering away—perhaps to be lost soon in burning sand, but giving, as far as it flows, Life; a Water of Life to plant, to animal, and to Man_1:1 [Note: C. Kingsley, The Water of Life, 1.]

1. Will anything allay this thirst?

(1) Not sin. The wonderful thing is that we can ever persuade ourselves that it can. The devil can mix the most insidious potions and can make them sparkle like the water of life, but when we drink them it is as though a man consumes salt water to appease his thirst. Animal gratification can never quench a spiritual craving. It is the most pathetic of all tragedies when a man or woman flees to drink to quieten the soul. It shall be “as when a thirsty man dreameth, and, behold, he drinketh; but he awaketh, and, behold, he is faint, and his soul hath appetite.”

Against the deceitfulness of sin he warned his friends in such terms as these: “Sin says, ‘I’m not sin at all.’ Then Sin says, ‘I’m pleasant.’ Yes, pleasant poison. Then Sin says, ‘Ah! do you call that sin? Well, it is but a little sin.’ Alas! alas! for us men there can be no little sin, unless there be a little God against whom to commit it. Then Sin says, ‘It is a common sin; good people do that.’ A good man has crooked legs; are crooked legs therefore no evil? He has stiff joints; are stiff joints therefore no evil? Ah! men don’t argue that way about the natural evil, but they do about the spiritual evil, because they love sin, and will take any excuse for it, and never readier than when they find it in a good man. Then Sin says, ‘If you sin there’s Christ to go to.’ ” 2 [Note: A. Moody Stuart, Recollections of the late John Duncan, 109.]

(2) Not work. I will join any man, says Jowett, in singing a pæan of blessedness on work; but if hard work will lead to spiritual contentment, the great majority of my congregation will be in the enjoyment of spiritual rest. And yet after the hardest day’s work, often in the midst of it, there is a sigh, a weariness, a state of staleness, a certain out-of-jointness, which is abundant proof that the old craving is still there like a smoking volcano, and that its inner fires are not yet quenched. Thank God for work, but work can never take the place of God.

The opponents of legislation on the question of limiting the hours of labour induced the Lord Mayor to call a general meeting of London shopkeepers, expecting to carry a resolution against any such measure as he had proposed. Sir John attended and asked for a hearing. Having explained how matters stood, he moved an amendment in favour of his [Shop Hours Regulation] Bill and quoted, as illustrating the hard lives of shop assistants, and especially of women, the Norfolk epitaph:

Here lies a poor woman, who always was tired,

For she lived in a world where too much was required.

Weep not for me, friends, she said, for I’m going

Where there’ll neither be cooking nor washing nor sewing.

I go where the loud Hallelujahs are ringing,

But I shall not take any part in the singing.

Then weep not for me, friends, if death do us sever,

For I’m going to do nothing for ever and ever.

“This quotation,” he observes, “carried the meeting and the amendment.” Variant readings of this epitaph are extant, but the gist of it is the same in all. 1 [Note: H. G. Hutchinson, Life of Sir John Lubbock, Lord Avebury (1914), i. 223.]

(3) Not money. The most awful weariness in the world today will be found where money abounds. The fact of the matter is, spiritual satisfaction is to be obtained at a counter where money is not accepted as a means of exchange. “Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money.”

We have seen what money can do. Every moment we feel its power. But the things it cannot do! You can get out of it all life’s bottom things, but you can get none of life’s top things. It can feed all the flesh appetites. It will supply you with luxury, with ease. It can buy bows, and reverences, and salutations in the market-place. It is a purveyor to all the devilries—to avarice, to covetousness, to selfishness, to envy, to hatred, to lust, to murder. Not, certainly, that it always produces these things. But it can produce them; it is the soil where they grow; where they have grown in every age and every country of the world. But from all the gold bags in the Bank of England you could not distil one drop of mother love. You can extract from them nothing of the world’s highest thought or best feeling. You cannot write a spiritual book on money; no, nor a spiritual chapter. We are trying here, but are failing egregiously. The real soul of humanity gets no rise from this source. Under its power the heart chills; it never expands. Ask whence has come the great literature, the noble music, the fine heroisms? They do not hail from Mammon. Gold is a separator, never a uniter. 1 [Note: J. Brierley, The Secret of Living, 41.]

(4) Not culture. Satisfaction cannot be found even in the higher and finer cultures of the mind—in music and art and literature. These ministries can soothe, they can excite, they can gratify, but they cannot satisfy; and when the volume is closed, when the harmonious strains have died away, when the creations of art have been laid aside, the secret yearning asserts itself, and the unsatisfied soul cries out, “I thirst!”

Man, individually, cannot be satisfied with the material, the intellectual, the æsthetic. There is still a part of his nature which rises above these, and demands more. It shows itself in his religions, his philosophies, and in the inordinate graspings of lower natures after the material. This is one answer to the Goethe view of man’s chief end—present enjoyment, wisely moderated, and long drawn out. It never has satisfied, and cannot; it is the resource of moral defect or of despair. It is the positivism of Comte gilded, which sometimes affects a high Stoicism and worship of humanity,—as if that could be in the mass which is not in the man,—sometimes falls back by a natural reaction to Epicureanism, and sometimes hovers round the scepticism depicted by the “Preacher.” 2 [Note: John Ker, Thoughts for Heart and Life, 215.]

2. “If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink.” The Lord Jesus claims to satisfy the soul; yes, to satisfy the soul as a babe is satisfied to find its mother’s breast. “The water that I shall give shall be in him a well.” The Lord creates a new well of peace and fruitful satisfaction. For, look you, solid satisfaction. lies in the possession of a certain quality of spirit. What is that spirit? What sort of gif t would send this congregation away in radiant triumph? If God were now to give me the choice as to what every member of this congregation should receive before we leave the building, what would I choose? I think I would choose three things. First of all, pardon: forgiveness for all our ill doings and all our wasted treasure. Secondly, purity: the washing away of all stains, the searching out of hidden germs and defilement. And thirdly, peace: the sense of the glorious at-one-ness with the glorious God. And if we obtained those three gifts we should all go away with feet like hinds’ feet. And these are just the gifts to be found in Christ. “Let him come unto me and drink.” We should find pardon; “in whom we have the forgiveness of sins.” We should find purity; “He hath washed us from our sins in his own blood.” We should find peace; “My peace I give unto you.” He is the fountain of these secrets of blessedness. “Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters.” 1 [Note: J. H. Jowett.]

The words “Water of Life” have a spiritual and mystic meaning. The East—and indeed the West likewise—was haunted by dreams of a Water of Life, a Fount of Perpetual Youth, a Cup of Immortality. How could that in man which ought not to die be kept alive? how strengthened and refreshed into perpetual youth? And water—with its life-giving and refreshing powers, often with medicinal properties seemingly miraculous—what better symbol could be found for that which would keep off death? Perhaps there was some reality which answered the symbol, some actual Cup of Immortality, some actual Fount of Youth. But who could attain to them? Surely the gods hid their own special treasure from the grasp of man. Surely that Water of Life was to be sought for far away, amid trackless mountain-peaks, guarded by dragons and demons. For the old legends and dreams, in whatsoever they differed, agreed at least in this, that the Water of Life was far away; infinitely difficult to reach; the prize only of some extraordinary favourite of fortune, or of some being of superhuman energy and endurance. The gods grudged life to mortals, as they grudged them joy and all good things. That God should say Come; that the Water of Life could be a gift, a grace, a boon of free generosity and perfect condescension, never entered into their minds. That the God of gods, the Maker of the universe, should say, “Come, and drink freely “; that He should stoop from heaven to bring life and immortality to light—to tell men what the Water of Life was, and where it was, and how to attain it; much more, that that God should stoop to become incarnate, and suffer and die on the cross, that He might purchase the Water of Life, not for a favoured few, but for all mankind; that He should offer it to all, without condition, stint, or drawback;—this, this, never entered into their wildest dreams. 2 [Note: C. Kingsley, The Water of Life, 6.]

ii. The Invitation to the Willing

1. Behind the thirsty there is yet this other class who are invited to come—those who are willing. Willingness to receive the truth may exist where as yet there is no thirst for it, and such willingness is of God, and a first step towards eternal life.

However little chance we may seem to have of doing anything, we can at least determine to be something; not to let our life be filled, like some base vessel, with the offscourings and rinsings of other spirits, but to remember that the water of life is given freely to all who come. That is the worst of our dull view of the great Gospel of Christ. We think—I do not say this profanely but seriously—of that water of life as a series of propositions like the Athanasian Creed!

Christ meant something very different by the water of life. He meant that the soul that was athirst could receive a draught of a spring of cool refreshment and living joy. He did not mean a set of doctrines; doctrines are to life what parchments and title-deeds are to an estate with woods and waters, fields and gardens, houses and cottages, and live people moving to and fro. It is of no use to possess the title-deed if one does not visit one’s estate. Doctrines are an attempt to State, in bare and precise language, ideas and thoughts dear and fresh to the heart. It is in qualities, hopes and affections that we live; and if our eyes are opened, we can see, as my friend dreamed he saw, the surface of the hard rock full of moving points, and shimmering with threads of swift life, when the sun has fallen from the height, and the wind comes cool across the moor from the open gates of the evening. 1 [Note: A. C. Benson, Joyous Gard, 134.]

2. This seems to include everyone. But it does not. It excludes a great many persons. “Whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely.” The Bible invitation turns on the human will. It invites every man that chooses, but there it stops. The Bible rests on the assumption that every man, if he enters into life, must enter into it by his own free choice.

God pays His child no finer compliment than when He trusts him with his destiny. There must be something inexpressibly great in man to merit this surpassing confidence. True, God was held by the alternative of making a race of automatons or a race endowed with choice; and He made the latter. It was counted that such a creature was worth all the cost of pain and woe, of evil and despair; worth the cost of Calvary. But God leaves us not alone: a highway of truth is blazed by revelation, sweet voices counsel us to walk thereon, an inner Spirit offers holy motive, and a Saviour takes the thrust of an avenging sword. Above, below, around, within us tender help is proffered; but no power may touch with lightest hand the sceptre of the soul. There in the throne-room man is master. A thousand ministries from heaven wait his nod; a thousand demons from the pit attend his will. 1 [Note: C. G. Doney, The Throne-Room of the Soul, 11.]

If you ask me why the King is upon the throne, I reply in the words he insists should be on all his coins, “Dei Gratia”—by the grace of God. But, on the other hand, if you ask me why yonder criminal is in the cell, I dare not reply, By the will of God; but I say, Because he has done wrong; and I insist that he is morally responsible, else you must not shut him up as a criminal. You may confine him as a lunatic, as one who is dangerous to society; but do not punish him as a criminal for what he had no power to avoid. No, these two things are quite compatible—the Divine sovereignty and the free agency of man; and herein consists the glory of God. He performs His purposes not by mere machines, but by living moral agents, who have this power of will. We all acknowledge that the power of the statesman, who moulds the will of the people, is of a higher order than the power of a blacksmith, who moulds a dead, resistless piece of iron to his purpose. So God carries out His own will, though liable to be crossed at every turn by the will of Man_1:2 [Note: E. A. Stuart, Children of God, 162.]

With the call to come, give us the will to come, most Bountiful Lord Jesus. Thou who turnedst water into wine; who saidst, “Give me to drink”; who criest, “If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink”; who saidst, “With desire I have desired”; who declarest, “My blood is drink indeed”; who saidst in extremity, “I thirst”; suffer us not to make ourselves as Dives, but join us to Thyself and quench our thirst. 3 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti, The Face of the Deep, 542.]

A visitor to Dr. Horatius Bonar’s church (about 1876) says: “His address was founded on the words ‘The Spirit and the bride say, Come’—‘the last invitation in the Bible.’ It was marked by the absence of all attempt at originality. It was simply an invitation—warm, loving, urgent. With one of the most winning faces I ever saw, he closed: ‘Whosoever—that includes you : whosoever will—does that include you?’ ”

Long since that aged saint hath reached the fair celestial shore,

And gained the martyr’s crown, for he the martyr’s suffering bore;

Long since his happy feet have stood within his Father’s home,

Yet still the mighty voice he heard, with ceaseless cry, saith, “Come!”

And life’s bright fountain springeth yet, as free, and fresh, and fair,

As when in Patmos’ dreary Isle it cheered the exile there!

And hark! the Spirit and the Bride repeat in mercy still,

That he who is athirst may drink—yea, whosoever will!

O blessed voices! be it ours your loving call to hear

And so obey that when, at last, from yonder radiant sphere

The Heavenly Bridegroom shall descend to claim His own again,

We may lift up our heads and say, “Lord, even so, Amen!” 1 [Note: Elizabeth Surr.]

Come

Literature

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Bannerman (J.), Sermons, 382.

Brewin (R.), Gospel Sermons, 85.

Brown (A. G.), God’s Full-Orbed Gospel, 66.

Christlieb (T.), Memoir and Sermons, 105.

Davies (T.), Sermons and Expositions, i. 568.

Davison (W. T.), The Indwelling Spirit, 195.

Dods (M.), Footsteps in the Path of Life, 127.

Doney (C. G.), The Throne-Room of the Soul, 11.

Goodwin (H.), Parish Sermons, ii. 132.

Hackett (B.), Memorials of a Ministry, 116.

Hall (C. R.), Advent to Whitsun-Day, 69.

Jeffrey (G.), The Believer’s Privilege, 269.

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McNeill (J.), Regent Square Pulpit, iii. 81.

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