01.07. "AN INCREASING PURPOSE."

Chapter 7 AN INCREASING PURPOSE

" These all, having had witness borne to them through their faith, received not the promise, God having provided some better thing concerning us, that they without us should not be made perfect."

Hebrews 11:39-40 (R.V.) In their original application these words refer to the heroes of the faith whom the grand roll call of this chapter has been enumerating. The whole company of Old Testament believers is included in " these all; "the whole company of New Testament believers in " us." The promise, the fulfillment of which they did not receive, was that of the Messiah and His salvation. They stretched out empty hands to greet it from afar, as sailors the dimly descried land, and possessed not that for which they longed, because God, looking onward through the ages, had mercifully willed that later generations should share in the blessing. The "better thing" foreseen, as given to us New Testament Christians, is the work of Christ, done at a point of time, but sending its influences backwards and forwards to bless all generations. The "perfecting" which it was not fitting that they should reach without us, is that final completeness in which all Christ’s servants shall be united, and of which, since Christ has come, the saints of the older period have already received the earnest, as is manifest from their being subsequently spoken of as spirits " made perfect," and of which we too receive an earnest in another fashion, in the gift of the sanctifying Spirit.

Such being the original bearing of these words, we may venture to apply the principles contained in them in a somewhat different direction, as setting forth truths as to the relation of successive generations in the Church, all of whom have received that " better thing," which, given once for all in full completeness, is yet apprehended gradually by both individuals and the community, and blesses each generation of believing souls with new gifts of knowledge and power, till all are united in the ultimate perfection of the heavens. Our connection with the past, our task in the present, our anticipations in the future, are all taught in these great words.

I We note, first, the bond uniting us with past generations.

" These all " had witness borne to them through their faith. That faith was their common characteristic, supplying a principle of unity which counter wrought the differences of era and circumstance, and made one company of persons so unlike as Abel and Rahab, Enoch and Jephthah. If we throw ourselves back to the condition of things at the date of this Epistle, this chapter appears even more remarkable than we usually consider it. The question then agitating men’s minds was. Is not this new faith in Christ Jesus the destruction of Judaism ? The writer of this Epistle answers the question by the broad assertion that Christianity is the real Judaism, and that the true line of succession runs through the Church, and not through the synagogue. Fancy a stiff Pharisee’s face at hearing a Christian teacher claim Abraham, Jacob, and, most audaciously of all, Moses for his side ! But why did he do so ? Because the foundation of their lives was faith. Their faith was the same. Their creeds were different, if not in essence, yet in comprehensiveness. Their faith was the same exercise of spirit as ours. Nay, the identity goes further still; for though faith in this Epistle be generally meant chiefly in its Old Testament sense of trust in God, and therefore in a future which is the subject of Divine promises, rather than in its New Testament specific sense of trust in Jesus, yet, since Jesus is the Revealer of God, its objects are substantially the same in both epochs of revelation. The secret of the religious life of the ancient believers is laid bare in one sentence concerning the father of them all : " Abraham believed God, and He counted it to him for righteousness." The object of their faith was God, as He spake at sundry times and in divers manners. The object of the Christian faith is God speaking in a Son, to listen to whom is to hear God, to see whom is to see the Father, and who is, as this Epistle elaborately proves, Priest and Temple and Sacrifice. The writer will not allow any difference, except that of development, between the call of prophet and psalmist, " Trust ye in the Lord for ever," and the preaching of apostles, " Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ." There has never been but one way to heaven, and faith has always been one, however different in completeness its creed.

It is but applying the same principle in a slightly different direction to say that all in Christian ages who have the same Spirit of faith are one. All who lay hold of the same Christ with the same confidence are knit together. But it must be the same Christ, the Divine human Christ, the world’s Redeemer ; and the faith must be so far the same that it leans the whole weight of man’s weakness on that incarnate Strength, and hangs all his hopes on that one Lord. If these things be the same, then no other differences, however great, can break the real unity, though, alas ! they have often been permitted to break the consciousness of it. No matter in what age they lived, or what were their relations to one another, all holders of that faith, or rather all who are held by it, are one. Jewish converts with chips of the shell of Judaism still sticking to them, Egyptian hermits, African bishops, Donatist and orthodox, Latin monks, Lutheran professors, English Churchmen and Non conformists, half civilized converts in missionary stations- they all have the King’s broad arrow on them. Faith is deepest, and they who are one in it are fundamentally one, however superficially separate. So, when we look back, there should be more than apathetic or curious glances,, and more than the interest of the historian or controversialist. There should be the generous glow of kindred, and we should feel as we would by the graves of our ancestors. We should be aware of the tingle of the electric chain which binds in one all who hold by the one Lord ; and however some narrow theories may part brethren from us, we should hold fast by the resolve that in heart at any rate we will not be parted from them, but in our sympathies strive to be true to the animating conviction that faith in Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the world, makes all its possessors one.

II

We note the better things foreseen for us. There is no such advance within the limits of Christianity as separated it from the earlier revelation. The further " light " which each age has a right to expect is to " break forth from the Word " already given. " The Christ that is to be" is the Christ that was and is - "the same yesterday, and today, and for ever."

He is " for ever," as being complete. As for truth, all treasures of wisdom and knowledge are in Him, and may be drawn from the deepening understanding of the principles embodied in His life and death, in His resurrection and reign. All theology, morality, sociology, lie in Him as gold in ore, or diamonds in a matrix. As for powers, all that can be needed or done for the regeneration of the world and of single souls has been done and supplied in the work of Christ. What remains is but the application of the power which has been lodged in humanity. But while objective revelation is complete, and God’s treasuries contain no "better thing" than the unspeakable gift once bestowed and ever possessed, there is meant to be advancement in understanding of the truth and in appropriation of the power. Jesus is inexhaustible. No one man can absorb Him all ; no one age can. A thousand mirrors set round that central light will each receive its beam at its own angle, and flash it back in its own fashion. So true progress will consist in a fuller understanding and firmer grasp of Him as Son of God and Redeemer of the world, and in a more complete reception of His Spirit, manifested in more Christ like characters and more Christ pleasing service. It does not mean casting away the old, but finding new force in the old commandment and new depth of meaning in the old revelation. In this alphabet, alpha is omega, and both Alpha and Omega are Christ. Each generation, then, has to receive an incomplete work from its predecessors, and to hand on an incomplete work, made a little less incomplete by its faithful diligence, to its successors. The great cathedral took centuries to rear, and each generation had but to raise its walls a yard or two, and a man might be glad if it were granted him to add some fair carving to a single shaft, or to lay but a single stone. But within these limits there is room for large advance, and in periods of swift change like ours, it is hard to estimate gains and losses as between the new and the old. Temperament and age will affect our sympathies and make our appreciation partial, and it is a piece of very pressing Christian duty for each of us to see that we do not let the " personal equation " so influence us as to make us either the sanguine and exclusive eulogists of the new, or the pessimistic and obstinate partisans of the old. We may not be better than our fathers, but we have some better thing than they had, for which we have to thank God. We have gained inasmuch as theology has become more Christ centered. The Gospels are more to the Church of today than they ever were before. There is less of mere doctrine, and more of Jesus Christ. His present activity as Lord of the universe and King of men is increasingly set forth, and the good news of God is being dis-embarrassed of misty metaphysics which were once thought to be theology. The interminable controversy between the bare conception of an omnipotent will, and the equally crude one of a free human will, has ceased to interest. The love of God stands where for many generations the will of God was set - in the centre. The progressive character of revelation has become an article of belief, and has made the Bible a new book, throbbing with life on all its pages. Christianity has become more sympathetic, and begins to recognize its duty as to social questions. The missionary task of the Church has been accepted by all Churches which have any life in them, and of late years we have seen wonderful increase of personal service by all sorts of Christian people. Nor should we overlook, in our summing up of the good in this our day, the sharpened interest in religious questions, so characteristic of it, even though that interest is often hostile to the claims of Christ. We should share the confidence of the brave apostle, who counted " many adversaries " as the sign of ’’a great door and effectual," and a reason for protracting his stay in so hopeful a field. But every better may become a worse. If former generations grasped too exclusively the conception of the sovereign Divine will, they were made strong men thereby. If their religion was too largely dogmatic theology, they thereby won intense convictions, and a familiarity with profound and ennobling thoughts, which saved life from triviality, and devotion from degenerating into mere emotion. If their morality was somewhat rigid and stern, it kept them grave and pure. If they were too much secluded from the currents of literature, art, and science, their souls were focused on one thing, and the concentrated light burned. Their narrowness meant depth, and if a stream is to be wholesome, which it can only be by movement, depth is better than a breadth which too often is possible only through shallowness.

They had the defects of their qualities. So have we. There is danger that definite doctrinal belief and teaching shall be diminished to the vanishing point, partly from the infection of the unreasonable revolt against "theology," and partly from the influence of evangelistic fervor, which asks for " the simple gospel." There is danger of so presenting the love of God as to neutralize His righteousness and His wrath, thereby losing the mighty power for persuading men which lies in knowing the terror of the Lord.

There is danger of obscuring the characteristic of the gospel as good news of redemption, and of the pulpit’s becoming a professor’s desk or a social reformer’s platform. We have said that all social and ethical truth is involved in and to be deduced from the facts of Christ’s nature and mission, but the first aspect of these facts is their power to bring forgiveness and peace to guilty consciences. Our wisdom and our success will be to keep to the Divine order, and ever make the first and prominent characteristic of the gospel, which we believe and hold forth, its power to deliver the single soul from its burden of sin, through faith in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, and then to set forth its power to furnish the bases of all individual and social action, in the ethics that are en-wrapped in its glad tidings that " God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish." We hear much now of applied Christianity and of the social mission of the gospel. Let us not forget that there must be individual Christianity before there can be social, and that it must be possessed before it can be applied, and that the personal faith of sinful men in Jesus Christ’s work as their personal Saviour is the beginning of all.

There are dangers, too, arising from changed conditions of life. Wealth has brought secularity in its train. Education has introduced familiarity with unchristian and anti-Christian works of genius and learning. Public and political life has opened a more attractive arena for those who in other days would have found their work in more distinctively religious service. The whirl of modern life in which religious people are caught up has diminished habits of quiet meditation and devotion. Even the awakened sense of responsibility for the neglected, and the consequent abundance of work and of workers, bring snares. On the whole, it may well be questioned whether the modern types of religion have not lost much that it would have been gain to keep, and gained something that it would have been better to have lost. Is not personal religion at a low ebb ? Have we not lost much of the depth and unworldliness of ancient piety ? Where are the ancient intense realization of unseen realities, the ardor of communion, the continual sense of a Divine presence, the atmosphere of separation surrounding the Christian heart ? The change from old days is not all progress. We need the exhortation, unwelcome as it is in the ears of an epoch which is so proud of its gains in mechanical arts and physical sciences that it has made contempt of the past into an article of its creed, " Remember the days of old, consider the years of many generations : ask thy father, and he will show thee ; thine elders, and they will tell thee."

Let us beware lest we let go the precious with the vile, and, while we fancy ourselves far ahead of the " simple and narrow " religion of the past, should really be casting away the very essence of revealed Christianity, and with it the depth and fervor of personal godliness, in grasping at the impossible phantom of a religion in harmony with that kind of " modern thought " which will not tolerate the supernatural, nor bow before the Christ who is the Son of God and the Redeemer of the world. If these two fundamental truths are falteringly held, we shall soon have to cry, " Where be all His miracles which our fathers told us of ? " But if to the good things which past ages discovered in these, we add the better things which God, by the march of events and the evolution of new powers in the old gospel to deal with new problems of this eager day so full of possibilities and promise even in its antagonisms, is bestowing on the Churches, if they are wise and large hearted enough to welcome and accept them, then the former days will not be better than these ; but this age too shall be able to reproduce and transcend the triumphs of the past, and shall acknowledge with thankful wonder, " As we have heard, so have we seen in the city of the Lord of hosts, in the city of our God."

III The yet better things in reserve for our successors.

Naturally the progress is not to stop with us, but will go on as long as there is a Church on earth. We, too, have but partial light, and have partially appropriated the gifts and discharged the duties given and enjoined in the partly understood gospel. How much has yet to be done before all the truth as it is in Jesus is drawn out into the consciousness of Christians and incorporated in their lives ! How much more before it passes from the Church to the world, and transforms it into a Church ! No doubt future generations will look back on our insensibility to the flagrant contradictions of the social ethics of Christianity, which they will, no doubt, discern in our lives, with the same kind of half pitying, half amused condemnation with which we look back on "ages of faith," which were ages of cruelty, ignorance, and persecution, or with which we discover that the devout author of the great treatise on the "Freedom of the Will " was a devout slaveholder. Slavery is now recognized as unchristian. War is beginning to be so. What venerable institution which the Churches have canonized will the keener insight of our successors expel from the place of honour? The Church of the future will have broken down all sects. Religion will one day be harmonized with "science." Christian principles will be applied to social and national life with revolutionary effects. Many of the evils are already like ringed trees in Australian forests, forbidden at all events to expand, and sure in time to die. There will be a fuller baptism of the Spirit on the happier Church that is to be, resulting in more consecrated lives, in more missionary and evangelistic effort, and in a finer harmony of nature and a more symmetrical and majestic development of capacities in the individual and the community. Much destructive work will have to be done before that consummation is reached. Does any man suppose that the existing embodiments of Christianity, the churches of this day, are meant to be permanent ?

Let us not fear. There is a trembling for the ark of God, which is the fitting issue of the trembler’s consciousness of his own unfaithful service. But the ark is safe, whatever may become of the cart that bears it, or the oxen that draw it. Out of the wild sea of tossing contraries of opinion will rise a shape of fairer beauty than hitherto has blessed the earth, like the moon swimming up serene and large from some unquiet ocean. Not one grain of the true wheat shall fall to the ground, though a million Satan’s had the Churches to sift. There is an exaggerated conservatism which does not love the old so much as it hates the new, and which understands neither. The men who stoned Stephen for the sake of Moses would have stoned Moses for the sake of Abraham. The things that can be shaken will be removed, that the things which cannot be shaken may remain; as some great building, round whose sides have clustered paltry sheds that hid its fair proportions with their obtrusive meanness, stands out the fairer when they are swept away. The central truth of the Divinity and sacrifice of the Christ of God is the imperishable core of the Christian faith. These and the related necessarily involved truths being preserved, everything is preserved ; for these truths, wielded by the Spirit dwelling in the Church, have power to weave their own vestures, and will in every age mould the forms of Christian thought and life into such shapes as may best correspond to the wants of each age, and most completely sub-serve the increasing purpose which runs through all the ages, and which each age is honored by helping forward towards realization.

IV Our text necessarily includes the idea of the final perfecting in which all are united. The saints of the old and the believers of the new covenant are not to be perfected apart. A blessed future union is shadowed in the words, as it is required by the whole scope of the considerations suggested to us by them.

There is to be a perfect union of all in the common joy of possession of the common gift. On the march the pilgrims were widely separated, but in the camp their tents will be near each other. All who follow the one Shepherd shall be one flock. We can say nothing of the manner of that wondrous future union, which baffles our grasp when we think of the multitudes of whom the flock is composed. But just as Dante saw Paradise under the symbol of a great rose, whose many petals were yet one flower, and just as astronomers tell us that the giant nebulae, consisting of infinite numbers of suns, are yet each one whole, though we cannot imagine what forces bind together across such bewildering spaces, so all who in solitude here, and amid misconceptions and diversities, have yet loved the one Lord and followed the one Shepherd, shall couch round Him above, and in some mysterious but most blessed manner know that they "live together" and all " together with Him," as the bond of their unity and perhaps the medium of their intercourse. There will be a united perfecting in the common possession of the whole Christ. Even then star will differ from star, and we may venture to believe that each will share his special refraction of the central light with others, and the beams of the variously colored stars lovingly blend in perfect whiteness. " Neither said any among them that any of the things which he possessed was his own, but they had all things common."

There will be united perfection in enjoying the results of the long unfolding through the ages of the fulness of Christ. Here one generation originates and another completes. It is given to few to see the triumph of the cause for which they have fought, or the successful working of the plans which they have inaugurated. "One soweth, and another reapeth," is the law for earth. But the time comes when all the workers shall share in the gladness of the finished work ; when all who, separated by long ages, and thick walls of mutual misconception and divergence in practice and opinion, have yet been unknowingly toiling towards the same end, shall clasp inseparable hands in the great result which contains all their work. Division of labour is multiplication of joy and reward. The sower cannot go into the waving harvest and pick out the ears which have sprung from the seed which he sowed. The reaper cannot go up to the stack and identify the sheaves that fell before his sickle. The brook cannot recover its drops from the mighty river or the all enclosing ocean. But the one great result shall gladden all who have ever helped to bring it, and the sower who went forth in sadness shall come back, bearing "the sheaves" that are his, though another reaped them.

So, then, friends, let us set ourselves to our small tasks, happy if we can push forward by the least space the boundary of Christ’s kingdom, or absorb and reflect a sparkle of His light. Let us be reverent of those who have gone before, and thankful for that which they have handed down to us. Let us pass it on, mended and increased by our toil, to those who shall catch up our dropped torches and complete our unfinished work. And, above all, let us take as the end of these thoughts that stirring exhortation to which our text leads up : " Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus," in whom every age finds its Leader, and all the generations of His saints shall at last find their common heaven of perfection.