4.25 - The Apostolic Creed

Chapter 25 The Apostolic Creed (1 John 5:18-21) The three-fold “We know”—St John’s Positiveness—The Order of his Creed—“I believe in Holiness”—The Blight of Cynicism—The Son of God Keeper of God’s Sons—The Question of Entire Sanctification”—“I believe in Regeneration”—A “World lying in the Evil One”—Mystery of New Births—The Christian Noblesse oblige—“I believe in the Mission of the Son of God”—Come to stay—Christian Use of the Understanding —The True God and the Idols—Christ come to conquer.

―—―♦———

We know that whosoever is begotten of God doth not sin;
But He that was begotten of God keepeth him,
And the Evil One doth not touch him.
We know that we are of God;
And the whole world lieth in the Evil One.
But we know that the Son of God is come;
And He hath given us an understanding, that we may know the
True One.
And we are in the True One,—in His Son Jesus Christ.
This is the true God, and eternal life;
Little children, guard yourselves from the idols.

— 1 John 5:18-21        

―—―♦——— THE concluding paragraph of the Epistle is the seal of the Apostle John set upon the work of his life, now drawing to a close; it is, in effect, a seal set upon the entire fabric of the Apostolic doctrine and testimony by this last survivor of the Twelve and the nearest to the heart of Jesus. Extracting the essential part of the confession, the three short sentences introduced by the thrice repeated We know, we have briefly St John’s creed, in three articles :—

“We know that whosoever is begotten of God doth not sin.

We know that we are of God.

We know that the Son of God is come.” In other words, “I believe in holiness”; “I believe in regeneration”; “I believe in the mission of the Son of God.” Here we find the triple mark of our Christian profession, the standard of the Apostolic faith and life within the Church—in the recognition of our sinless calling, of our Divine birth, and of the revelation of the true God in Jesus Christ His Son. These are great things for any man to affirm. It is a grand confession that we make, who endorse the manifesto of the Apostle John; and it requires a noble style of living to sustain he declaration, and to prove oneself worthy of the high calling it presumes.

Observe the manner in which these assertions are made. Not, We suppose, We hope, We should like to believe—in the speculative, wistful tone common in these days of clouded faith; but We know, we know, we know! Here is the genuine Apostolic note, the ring of a clear and steady and serene conviction, the πληροφορία and παρρησία of Christian faith. St John speaks as a man sure of his ground, who has set his foot upon the rock and feels it firm beneath his tread. He has seen and heard, and handled at every point, the things of which he writes (see 1 John 1:1-4, and Chapter 6), and he knows that they are as the report avouches. This is the kind of faith that, with just right, conquers the world,—the faith that derives its testimony immediately from God, and carries its verification within itself. To such effect the Apostle has written in 1 John 5:4-13. The faith behind the creed of St John’s old age is that of an experimental and wasoned certainty; it is the trust and affiance of the whole man—heart, intelligence, will—by a living process directly and apprehensively grounded upon and built into the realities of God and of Christ.

Observe, moreover, the order in which the three avouchments run. They succeed in the regressive or analytic order—the opposite to that of our dogmatic creeds—the order of experience and not of systematic doctrine, of practice not of theory, the order of life and nature rather than of science or theological reflection. St John’s mind here travels up the stream, from the human to the Divine, from the present knowledge of salvation to the eternal counsels and character of God, out of which our being and salvation sprang. This is the line of reasoning which, in a majority of cases, religious conversion follows: the tree is known by its fruits; the moral demonstrates the metaphysical; supernatural lives vindicate supernatural beliefs ; the image of God in godlike men attests, against all the force of prejudice and preconception, the existence of its Father and Begetter. Thus the argument of the Epistle mounts to the summit from which it first descended, and concludes with “that which was from the beginning.” In its system of thought, “the true God” and the “eternal life” are the beginning and the ending, the fountain at once and the sea of finite being. The possibility of a sinless state for the believer is rooted in the certainty that he is a child of God (see 1 John 3:1-3, 1 John 3:9); and this certainty is derived in turn from the sure knowledge that “the Son of God is come in human flesh, that the very God, the Life of life, is made known in Him and brought into fatherly, and saving relations with mankind (1 John 4:9-14).

Let us consider these three Christian axioms in their relative bearing, and under the light in which the Apostle sets them and the purpose to which he applies them in this place.

1. The first article, then, in St John’s experimental creed is this: “We know that everyone who has been begotten of God, does not sin.” It is as much as to say, “I believe in holiness; in its reality, in its possibility, in its necessity for a Christian man.”

Considered from the practical side, this is the first of all our religious beliefs in its importance. It is the vital issue of all the creeds, and the test of their reality to us. The whole Nicene Confession is worth nothing to a man who does not believe in holiness. Intellectually, historically, he may understand every phrase and syllable of that majestic document, he may recite it from alpha to omega without misgiving; but it is all a dead-letter to his mind, the expression of a purely abstract and disinterested and inoperative persuasion,—like his conviction, for instance, that the moon is uninhabited. What the man does not believe in, he will not worship, he cannot admire nor seek after. There is no unbelief that cuts quite so deep as this, that disables one so utterly from every spiritual exercise and attainment. The cynic, the scorner, the sceptic as to moral excellence, the man who tells you that saints are hypocrites and religion is cant—there is no man farther from grace than he; there is none more narrow-minded and self-deceived, and miserable in his ignorance, than the denier of the Divine in human character. Such a man is the ally and abettor of him who is named “the accuser of the brethren,” whose triumph it is to blight all upward aspirations, to destroy that faith in goodness and longing after purity which find in Jesus Christ their refuge and strength. Alas for him who can see only the tares in God’s vast wheat-field! who has no eye but to count the spots and wrinkles and such-like things upon the face of the Church which is his mother! With such an ideal as ours, nothing is easier than to play the censor and to mock at failure. It is ignoble to plead the defeat of others, who at least have made some struggle, in excuse for our own passive surrender to evil. The one effectual reproof for inconsistent profession of the Christian faith is a profession more consistent.

Those who know anything practically about the Christian religion, know that it means holiness in sinful men, that it makes for goodness and righteousness and truth in every possible way, that the Gospel assimilates us to its Author just so far as we obey it. And with the moral history of the world behind us, we know that no other force has wrought for the cleansing and uplifting of our common nature like this. No other agency or system that can be named, has produced the high and thorough goodness, the love to God and man, the purity of heart, the generosity, the humbleness and patience, the moral energy and courage, which “our faith” can summon into court on its behalf. Under no other order of life have these excellences been forthcoming in anything to compare with the quantity and the quality in which they have been found amongst the disciples of Jesus Christ. Its host of saints, of all lands and times, are the testimonial of the Gospel,—its credentials “written not with ink” nor “on tables of stone,” but “on hearts of flesh” and “by the Spirit of The living God” (2 Corinthians 3:1-3). This is the evidence which Christ Himself proposed to give of the truth of His doctrine; by it He invites the world to judge concerning His claims. The verdict will be awaited in confidence by those who have the earnest of it in themselves. Sin is the great problem of the age, and of all ages—the heart-problem, the race-problem; and Jesus Christ has shown Himself competent to deal with it, under the most various and the most extreme conditions. After these nineteen centuries of Christian experiment, despite the failures and blots upon the Church’s record, we can say with a confidence in some sense greater than that of the Apostolic age, “We believe in holiness; we know that for the children of God there is victory over sin.” The Epistle is, in great part, a reasoning out of this position, an argument upon the necessary connection between faith in the Son of God and an un-sinning life in the believer: “These things write we unto you, that ye sin not” (1 John 2:1). At the outset the Apostle, in asserting that “God is light, having in Him no darkness at all,” drew from this definition the sharp conclusion that “if we say that we have fellowship with Him and walk in darkness, we lie and do not the truth.” In 1 John 3:1-9, the necessity of sinlessness in Christians was categorically laid down, and its grounds and motives were explained. The Apostle went so far as to say that the child of God “cannot sin, because he is begotten of God,—because His seed abideth in him.” This is the subjective ground, the intrinsic reason, for a life of freedom from sin: in the soul is lodged a germinal principle charged with the life of God Himself, to which sin is impossible. This “seed,” planted in the Christian man, communicates to him also a relative non posse peccare,—a potency that is identified in 1 John 3:24 with the Spirit possessed by Christ, “which God hath given us.” But in the text before us (1 John 5:18-21), another objective ground is alleged for the same necessity, a reason kindred to the former: “He that was begotten of God keepeth him (the one begotten of God), and the Evil One toucheth him not (οὐχἅπτεταιαὐτοῦ, layeth not hold of him).” The expression “begotten of God” (γεννηθεὶςἐκτοῦθεοῦ) is unique, in this precise form, as applied to Jesus Christ; unless, to be sure, we should follow Blass¹²⁶ and Resch in reading, after Irenceus, Tertullian, Ambrose, Augustine (qui . . . natus est), and the Sinaitic Syriac palimpsest, the singular in John 1:13,— ὅς (scil. ὁλόγος) . . . ἐκθεοῦἐγεννήθη, i.e. “(on His name) who was begotten not of blood . . . but of God.” Αὐτόν, not ἑαυτόν (him not himself), is clearly the true pronoun in the second clause of 1 John 5:18 (“keepeth him”—an object distinct from the subject); and the antithesis of perfect and aorist participles (γεγεννημένος, γεννηθείς)¹²⁷ unmistakably marks out two contrasted persons in the keeper and the kept. His alliance with Jesus Christ, the incarnate sinless One (John 1:14; Luke 1:35; Matthew 1:18; 2 Corinthians 5:21), brings to the redeemed man this marvellous security: “I give,” He said, “to my sheep a life eternal; and they shall never perish; and none shall snatch them out of my hand” (John 10:28). The warfare with wrong possessed for the Lord Jesus the glow and passion, and concrete reality, of a personal encounter “He keeps them, and the Evil One does not touch them.” The conflict between the Divine and the sinful, between the Spirit and the flesh within the man, is at the same time a contest over the man between Christ and Satan, between the Good Shepherd and “the wolf” who “snatcheth and Scattereth” God’s flock. Our safety, as St John conceives it, lies in the watchful eye, the strong arm and prompt succour, of Him who, while He was with His disciples, “guarded them in the Father’s name” and who, all unseen, is still the Keeper of Israel abiding with the flock, the Shepherd and Bishop of souls “alway, unto the world’s end.”¹²⁸

It is God’s specific property in men that Christ is set to “guard”; on that, while Jesus Christ liveth, the enemy shall lay no hand. “Satan asked to have you, that he might sift you,” said Jesus to Peter before his temptation (Luke 22:31-32)—yes, sift you he shall, but “as wheat,” which comes out of the sifting without one grain of the good corn lost! The God-begotten keeps the God-begotten,—the Firstborn His many brethren; and none may limit or qualify the integrity of that preservation. “I ascend unto my Father and your Father”: what a oneness of family interest, a pledge of fellowship and championship, lies in that identification! Christ guarantees to the faith of His brethren by all the resources of His spiritual kingdom, by the blood of His passion and by the rod of His strength, a full defence and quittance from sin. To “touch them,” the enemy must first break through the shield of Christ’s omnipotence. But is the Apostle John quite clear and firm upon this point of the sinlessness of Christian believers? The offspring of God, he says in 1 John 5:18, as earlier in 1 John 3:9, “sins not”; and yet a moment ago he had written (1 John 5:16), “If any man see his brother [manifestly, a Christian brother] sin a sin not unto death,” making provision for this very lapse and opening to the delinquent the door of restoration. The same paradox startled us in 1 John 2:1: “I write, that ye may not sin”—as though with better instruction and a proper understanding of the Christian’s calling, sin would be out of the question; and yet in the same breath, “and if any man should sin!” What can be more trenchant, more peremptory in its logic, than the dictum of 1 John 3:6, “Whosoever abideth in Him sinneth not; whosoever sinneth hath not seen Him, neither knoweth Him”? If this maxim is to be applied with dialectical rigour, then the Christian is supposed to be from the moment of his regeneration and onwards, without faltering or exception, a sinless and blameless man, and he who is found otherwise is proved unregenerate. This kind of hard and fast logic has played havoc in theology; it is not at all to the Apostle’s taste. He throws out his paradox, and leaves it; he thrusts upon us the discrepancy, which any tyro who chooses may ride to death. The contradiction is in the tangled facts of life, in the unsolved antinomies of everyday Christian experience. The verbal incongruity is softened by the fact that here and in 1 John 3:6, 1 John 3:9 (as compared with 1 John 2:1: see pp. 114, 261) the Greek verbs asserting sinlessness imply use and wont, while those admitting the contingency of sin in the believer indicated an occurrence or isolated fact—an incident, not a character. But the inconsistency of statement is still there, and has its counterpart, only too obviously, in the life of the soul and the Church. The principle is not surrendered, because it is contradicted by unworthy facts; it is only by the true principle that the contradictory can be corrected and overcome. The law of Christian holiness is no induction from experience; it is a deduction from the cross and the Spirit of Christ. St John admits and deals with the abnormal fact of conscious and post-regenerate sin in a child of God; he does not for a moment allow it. All sin, even the least, is unnatural and monstrous in a child of God, and must be regarded with a corresponding shame and grief; it excites an invincible repugnance in the Holy Spirit; which he has from God. However grievously practice may belie our moral ideal, that ideal may on no consideration be lowered in accommodation to the flesh. We dare not put up with the necessity of sin; the instant we do so we are lost. Christianity can make no concession to or compromise with the abominable thing, without stultifying itself and denying its sinless, suffering Lord. Sin is that which has no right to be, and Christ’s mission is God’s assertion that it shall not be.

2. We come to the second article of St John’s creed, implicit in the first—his doctrine of the new birth. It is the man who “is begotten of God” that “sinneth not.” Those who “know that they are of God” have learnt the secret of holiness, and hold the clue to its hidden paths of righteousness and peace. The Apostle virtually says, “I believe in regeneration.”

Taking human nature as it is and reading human history as it was and must have continued to be apart from the coming of Christ, the assurance of our text is altogether irrational. One cannot bring a clean thing out of an unclean, nor make saints out of the men described in the first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans. “The whole world lieth in the Evil One.” Knowing myself as I do (the αὐτὸςἐγώ of Romans 7:25), the resurrection of the dead is less incredible than that I should live an unsinning life. Everyone who has measured his own moral strength against the law of sin in his members, has groaned with Saul of Tarsus, “O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me?” But then St Paul was able to add, “I thank God [it is done], through Jesus Christ our Lord! . . . The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death” (Romans 7:25, Romans 8:1-4). We “must,” as Jesus said, “be born anew” (John 3:7)—born over again, from the Divine spring and original of our being. When this was said to Nicodemus, the Jewish scholar and experienced man of the world, he took it for a useless apophthegm, a figurative way of saying that the thing was impossible. You cannot recall to its pure fountain the stream that is turbid with the filth of a hundred shores; you cannot restore the human race to its cradle of innocence in Paradise, nor send the grey and world-worn man back to his mother’s womb. To declare that we “must be born anew,” that reform, amendment is useless, and only regeneration will save, is to bid us despair. The message of Jesus was not simply that men must, but that they can be born over again.

“We know” the fact; the process is hidden in the workings of God. It is mysterious in the same sense in which all the deepest things of life, and the nature of the human spirit, are so. Every man is, at the bottom, an enigma to himself; the most the critical movements of his soul are those he is least-able to explain. When psychology has taught us everything, it has really settled very little. How a man is “born of the Spirit,” “begotten of God” and transformed by the renewing of his mind—sometimes quite suddenly—from a doubter into a full believer, from a lover of sin into a lover of holiness, from a worldling into a conscious child of the Eternal, is an inscrutable secret. We shall never arrive at a perfect science of salvation, nor formulate the ultimate rationale of a man’s conversion to God. But the event itself, and its moral and material effects,are plain to observation. Such new births of men and of peoples are the master-facts of biography and history. “The manifestation of the Spirit” and His “fruit,” the outcome of the interior, spiritual action of Christ upon human society, is visible enough for those who care to see. “Thou hearest the voice thereof” (John 3:8)—as you know the wind is astir by the thunder of the waves on the beach, by the crashing of the forest trees, though your own face be shielded from the blast. In those great seasons when the winds of God are blowing, only the deaf can doubt the coming on the human spirit of some fresh afflatus, some breath from the eternal shores; a throb stirs the general heart, an ocean tide swells the seas and a mighty rushing fills the spiritual atmosphere, that pulsate from some vast and unseen source. At such times multitudes of men, who lay morally dead as the bones in Ezekiel’s valley, stand up a living army of the Lord. Whole communities at certain epochs have been inspired with a sudden heroism of faith, that shines through history with a superhuman light; the secret of their courage and their victory lay in the conviction, “Deus vult,” “The Lord is on our side.” But “whence” this wind “comes” or “whither it goes”—in what treasuries it is gathered, how, or where, or upon whom it may next descend—“thou knowest not.” The Apostle would have all Christian men cherish habitually the thought that they “are of God,” and live in its strength. They must dare to vindicate their celestial birth and destiny; they must learn to believe in the supernatural within them, in their own redeemed, Christ-given manhood, and to assert its moral rights. The old lofty motto, Noblesse oblige, stands on their escutcheon. High birth demands high bearing. The son of God, the brother and fellow-heir of Jesus Christ, why should he dabble in the mire of sin? He “cannot sin, because he is born of God”; what have God’s priests and kings to do with the shabby tricks and mean expedients of a mercenary ambition, with the compliances and servilities of those who crook the knee to the god of this world? Remember whose sons you are, and by the Spirit of the Father that is in you maintain the honour of your name and house, amidst a world that “lies in the power of the Evil One.” Such is the application that St John makes of his doctrine concerning the New Birth.¹²⁹

It is a splendid, but it is an awful thing to say, “We know that we are of God.” It is to be conscious that the hand of God has been laid upon us, to have felt the breath of the Eternal pass over our spirit to awaken and renew. It is to know that there is a power working within us each, at the root of our nature, that is infinitely wiser and stronger and better than ourselves,–“a Spirit planted in our hearts which comes directly from the being and the will of the Father-God and links us individually to Him. To know this is to hold a distinction immeasurably above earthly glory, and to be superior to all the lures of ambition. It is to be charged with a principle of righteousness that can dissolve every bond of iniquity, that breaks the power of worldly fear and pleasure and will make us, living or dying, more than conquerors.

3. The third is the fundamental article of St John’s belief it is the all in all of his life and of his world of thought: “I believe in the mission of the Son of God.” This last is not, like the other two articles, the declaration of a personal experience, but of a grand historical and cosmic event: “We know that the Son of God is come! “Perfect holiness and conscious sonship to God date from the advent of the Son of God, whose “blood cleanses from all sin,”—“the Son” who “makes us free” that we may be “free indeed” (1 John 1:7; John 8:36). If the sum of this letter, in its practical aim, is “that you sin not,” the sum of its theology is “that Jesus is the Son of God” (1 John 5:5); its Christology and its ethics blend in the experience that Christians are in Christ Jesus themselves sons of God. Within this circle lies the secret of the new life and the new world of Christianity.

Faith in the filial Godhead of Jesus was no fruit of doctrinal reflection, no late developed theologumenon of some Johannine school. The writer learnt his first lesson in the mystery, unless his memory deceives him, at the time of his earliest acquaintance with Jesus, from the Baptist, the master of his youth, on the banks of the Jordan (John 1:29-34). From that day to this he has known, with an ever-growing apprehension of the fact, that “the Son of God is come,” that He has arrived and is here¹³⁰ in this world of men. And though the Lord returned to the Father and is lost to sight and earthly contact, those who know Him know that He is with us always, that He has come to stay (John 14:18, John 14:28; Matthew 28:20); the Apostle does not say, “We know that the Son of God did come,” or “has come,” but that He “is come”—once and for all.

He has come into the world and mixed among men, “and the world knew Him not, His own received Him not”; its “princes crucified the Lord of glory” (John 1:11; 1 Corinthians 2:8); for all His coming, “the world” still “lies in the Evil One.” That we, out of all mankind, should know of His coming is no merit of ours, but a grace: “He hath given us understanding (διάνοιαν) that we should know” Him, and God in Him.¹³¹ “This is the only place in which διάνοια occurs in St John’s writings; and generally nouns which express intellectual powers are rare in them “ (Westcott).¹³² The phrase is most significant. The Apostle does not write,” He hath given us a heart to love Him”—that goes without sayingbut “an understanding to know.” It is a right comprehension of the advent that is implied, the power to realize what is behind the phenomenal fact, the discernment of the veritable God (τὸνἀληθινόν) in the Son whom He sent. This knowledge of God in Christ is the bed-rock of Christianity. St John’s creed is that of the sound intellect, as well as of the simple heart. It claims the homage of our intelligence, our studious and discriminating thought, without which it cannot win our deepest love. St John has done well to tell us that διάνοια, no less than πνεῦμα and ἀγάπη, is the gift of Christ (compare 1 John 3:1, 1 John 3:24). His truth calls for the service of the understanding, while His love elicits and kindles the affections. The object of the knowledge which the Son of God brings is “the True¹³³ One,”—i.e. God Himself, the Real, the Living, in contrast with dead, false “idols” (compare 1 Thessalonians 1:10), whom Jesus has shown to the world. To glorify the Father, not Himself, was the end of Christ’s coming, pursued with unswerving loyalty (see p. 335); the Apostle would have misinterpreted his Master had he stated things otherwise, or given the name of “the True” in such a connection to any other than Him to whom the Son Himself ascribed it—“the only true God” (John 17:3). He repeats the confession of Jesus, for his own last sentence of testimony: “This is the true God, and (here, in this knowledge, is) eternal life.” The supreme knowledge comes from without to ourselves; it is truth shown to us, not evolved within us nor reflected from our own ideas. But the knowledge of God does not stop there, and terminate in the objective perception. If we truly apprehend it, then it apprehends us in turn and absorbs us into itself, into Him whom it reveals; so that “we are in the True One,” since we are–and so far as we are—“in His Son Jesus Christ.”

Dogmatic theology, too eager for proof-texts, has made out of the last clause of 1 John 5:20 an affirmation, superfluous after all that the Apostle has said and foreign to this passage, of the proper Deity of Christ. What St John really has to do is to seal his letter with the assurance to his once pagan readers, that they have found and grasped the very God in Christ, and are no longer mocked with idols and phantoms of blessedness; they are no more, as in heathen days, “men without hope, and godless in the world” (Ephesians 2:12). In this faith well may they, as they surely can, guard themselves front the idols (1 John 5:21). Old habit and the pressure of heathen society around them, and the enchantments and sorceries which the ancient cults possessed, made the danger of yielding to idolatry constant with St John’s readers, and to some of them well-nigh irresistible. They were as men subject to an incessant siege, marked at intervals by violent assaults, who have to stand day and night upon their guard. No other, no slighter faith will save pagan or Christian, the plain man or the theologian, from the idols of his own imagining. St John’s “little children” know that the Son of God is come by “the witness in” them, by “the Spirit He has given” (1 John 5:10; John 3:24, etc.), by their “anointing from the Holy One,” by their own changed life and character, by “the true light” that “shines” on all things for them;¹³⁴ and in this knowledge their security is found. The Son of God has not come to “the world” as to some material cosmos, a mere foothold in space and time; but in truth to that temple and inner centre of the world, the individual mind. When Christ comes to “dwell in the heart by faith,” He has come indeed; then at last the Son of man has where to lay His head, and to build His throne. Those know that He has come who have “received Him as Saviour and Son of God,” to whom accordingly He “has given right to become children of God,—those that believe in His name” (John 1:12; Ephesians 3:17, Ephesians 3:19). The man thus redeemed by the Son of God carries in his heart the pledge of his Redeemer’s world-wide victory. It is no limited, personal salvation that St John conceives in these large outlines. He has justspoken of “the whole world”—ὁκόσμοςὅλος, the world as a whole, in its collective capacity and prevailing character, as “lying in the Evil One” (1 John 5:19), in the domain and under the hand of Satan.¹³⁵ The expression recalls the scene of the Third Temptation of our Lord (Matthew 4:8-11; Luke 4:5-8), when the Devil showed to Jesus from an exceeding high mountain “all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them” —in the midst of it, holding the imperial throne at Rome, Tiberius Caesar, with his angel’s face and fiend’s heart, the ostensible lord of the nations. The great Usurper dared to say, “All this is delivered unto me, and to whomsoever I will I give it!” But listen to Jesus, and He shall speak: “All things were delivered unto me of my Father,” “All authority is given unto me, in heaven and upon earth!” (Matthew 11:27; Matthew 28:18). Which, pray, of the two counter-claims is legitimate? which of those rival masters is inally to dominate the earth?

“The world lieth in the Evil One”: so it was, beyond question, in the Apostle’s day, under the empire of Tiberius, of Nero, and Domitian; and such is the case to a very large extent at this modern date. “But (δέ)¹³⁶ the Son of God is come!” Against all the evils and miseries of the time, against the crimes and ruin of the ages as against our personal guilt and impotence, there is that one fact to set; but it is sufficient. He has come to “destroy the works of the Devil,” to “root out every plant which our heavenly Father had not planted”; and Christ is doing this, through the hands of His servants, upon a wider scale and with more fruitful and visible results than ever before. He will not fail nor be discouraged until the work of uprooting and replanting is complete. “The strong man armed keepeth his goods in peace,” till there arrives “the stronger than he”; then the house is spoiled, and the captives are set free. The Son of God has not come into our world to be defeated. He did not set forth upon a random and uncalculated mission, nor sit down to the siege without first counting the cost. He has set His imperial foot down upon this earth, and He will not draw it back. Its soil has been stained and stamped with the blood of His redemption; the purchase-mark is ineffaceable. Jesus Christ has lifted up before the nations the banner of His cross, which floats a victorious ensign overseas and continents; and to Him shall the gathering of the peoples be.