01.04. IV. Christ, The Teacher
IV CHRIST, THE TEACHER “Rabbi, we know that thou are a teacher come from God.”—John 3:2.
CHRIST, the Teacher, is an appropriate subject for students, of the New Testament, for we must remember that teaching was one of the prominent traits of His earth-life as well as one of the most important functions of His matchless ministry. Many of those who came to Him addressed Him as “Teacher,” and in so doing they spake better than they knew, for indeed He was, as Nicodemus said, “a teacher come from God.”
Before Him Cicero had been in Rome, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle had stimulated Greek students by their instruction, and contemporaneous with Him, Gamaliel taught among the Jews; and yet, if all the ages past and all the ages to come could have been brought together in Jesus’ time, He would still be worthy of the title “The Teacher,” because of a truth “never man spake like this man.”
It is my purpose to call your attention to some respects in which Christ effectively illustrated our text.
I. HIS UTTERANCE WAS WITH AUTHORITY.
If we turn to Mark 1:22, we find Jesus in a synagogue of Capernaum on the Sabbath day, teaching, and it is said of what He taught, “They were astonished at his doctrine; for he taught them as one that had authority, and not as the scribes.” If we look into Matthew 7:28, we are at the end of the longest discourse Christ ever delivered, at least so far as the inspired reports of His sermons inform us. This sermon was delivered on the mountain-side Matthew 5:1-48, Matthew 6:1-34, Matthew 7:1-29 close “And it came to pass that when Jesus had ended these sayings, the people were astonished at his doctrine; for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.”
What else would we expect from the Son of God than that He should so speak? He with whom wisdom is, needs not to be trained in poor schools and taught the traditions of the fathers and made familiar with the speeches of the so-called great in order that He may speak. Henry van Dyke, in “The Gospel for an Age of Doubt,” says, “He did not make a long catena of quotations from learned sources.” “He was not a commentator on truths already revealed. He was a Revealer of new truth. His teaching was not the exposition; it was the text. . . . He gave out His doctrine from the depths of His own consciousness as a flower breathes perfume—fresh, pure, original and convincing.” “His teaching is neither ancient nor modern, neither deductive, nor inductive, neither Jewish nor Greek, it is universal, enduring, valid for all minds and for all times. . . . It fits the spiritual needs of the nineteenth as closely as it fit the needs of the first century.” “By His word we test all doctrines, conclusions and commands. On His word we build all faith. This is the source of authority in the Kingdom of Heaven.” And Van Dyke only voices what the so-called Christian world accepts to the extent of its true Christianity, for the moment a man calls into question the authority of Jesus Christ, his Christianity is not in question but is under condemnation.
There are those who vainly imagine that they can deny the authority of Jesus Christ and yet keep a Bible that is worth one’s study, and is a guide to life, holiness and heaven. But, as Dr. Talmage said, “Christ is the Alpha and Omega of this Word, and to deny Him and the authority of His every utterance, is to destroy the Word itself, for if we begin with Genesis, “the seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent’s head” is Christ, the Alpha, and when we come to Revelation, the Lamb before the Throne who has conquered the Dragon of the Pit, is “Christ—the Omega.” Take Christ out of the Bible and you have the Louvre without the pictures, the Tower of London without the jewels; take Him out and man is a failure, the world a carcass and eternity a vast horror.” But, thanks be to God, you cannot take Him out, for “Never man spake as this man.” “He taught them as one having authority.”
II. HIS SENTENCES WERE SIMPLE AND STRAIGHTFORWARD. The Sermon on the Mount abundantly illustrates this claim, “And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying, Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven. Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.”
Take Matthew 6:1-34 : His sentences are equally simple and straightforward. “Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them, otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven. Therefore when thou doest thine, alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth, that thine alms may be in secret, and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly.” And in Matthew 7:1-29 : “Judge not that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged; and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye, and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.”
Dr. Broadus, in his volume entitled “Preparation and Delivery of Sermons, says, “Style is excellent when, like the atmosphere, it shows the thought but itself is not seen, or, perhaps like stereoscopic glasses which, transparent themselves, give frame and body, and distinct outline to that which they exhibit.” And surely that claim can be made for the style of Jesus Christ. It was not His habit to employ terms so technical and high-sounding as to obscure the thought and thereby get for Himself a cheap reputation for learning or eloquence, or both. As I listen to men speak, whether as teachers, preachers or lecturers, there is nothing that quite so tries me as the obscurity of their sentences. A man may be as scholastic as he pleases in his own study, but when he stands before his audience he ought to be so simple and straightforward in statement that the little ones and the unlearned can understand him. At that point Christ Jesus is a Teacher of teachers.
Dr. John Hall, as he spoke to students for the ministry, said, “Young men, it is a good thing to know Greek, but if you are to preach in America, it is absolutely necessary for you to speak in plain English.” The beauty of that statement is that Dr. John Hall himself was a good illustration of it. A distinguished theologian in conversation with Dr. Theodore Cuyler said, “If I should return to the pastoral charge of a church I should do two things: I would make more direct personal efforts for the conversion of souls and I would spend no time on the rhetoric of my sermons. I would saturate my mind with Bible truth and then deliver that truth in the simplest idiomatic English I could command.”
I speak to not a few who teach, some in public school and college, a number of you in Sunday Schools; and in a certain sense all those of us who have come to years of maturity are instructors. Shall we not speak in plain words? I listened recently to two addresses delivered by a teacher who is reputed to be great, to audiences that were certainly not above the average. It is not an overstatement to say that every fifth word in his discourse would require a dictionary upon the part of a college graduate.
God’s Son is no such teacher. Every sentence, from Matthew 3:15, where Jesus began His public ministry, to Matthew 28:20, where He uttered the Great Commission, is as clear as the noonday, and illustrates the claim of Christ, “I am the light of the world.” In His teaching is no darkness at all. With elaborate sentences He had nothing to do; technical terms found little employment at His tongue, well-poised sentences, perfectly rounded periods, and high-sounding climaxes may come from the lips of little men, but the great Son of God speaks and the ignorant of earth, and the little children understand. “Never man spake like this man.”
III. THIS SUBJECTS WERE THE GREAT ESSENTIALS.
He spake of the Kingdom of God and of Heaven. He taught concerning the Son of Man, concerning the Father, concerning the Holy Ghost. He taught concerning sin, concerning repentance, concerning regeneration, concerning righteousness, concerning salvation. He taught concerning the church, concerning the immediate and final effects of His Gospel, concerning His second coming, the Millennium, the judgment, the future. No small theme ever engaged His tongue.
Put down a list of the subjects that could stand as proper titles to His talks to the disciples, and His sermons to the multitude, and write beside them the subjects that the average preacher puts into the paper in the course of the year; it would be to shame the latter. At the present time some good men are engaged in collating the teachings of Jesus as they can be easily gathered out of the four Gospels, and in systematising them to show what subjects He discussed and what He said about them. They are bringing together abbreviated reports of Jesus’ words and the result is a new vision of the Son of Man.
Dr. Horton tells us that in the ruined Abbey of St. Albans the restorers found a large amount of carved and painted stone trodden into the ground behind the chancel. When these were collected and patiently fitted together the shrine of the saint was recovered and now stands in its completeness, a visible proof that the fragments had originally belonged to the whole. “In the same way we are able to take the scattered utterances and thoughts of Jesus and fit them together until a lovely and harmonious structure of doctrine rises before our eyes.” He might have added that when that structure is finished, when the last piece is laid in its place from foundation stone to finial, there is not one unimportant subject introduced, not one cheap sentence employed. “Never man spake like this man.”
IV. THE OBJECT OF HIS TEACHING WAS EQUALLY SUPREME. That object was two-fold.
First, He taught to make successors unto Himself. From the first day of His public ministry He seems never to have forgotten that He was shortly to cease speaking and go His way to Golgotha, and yet His teaching was of such importance to the wicked world that He would fain have it continued, and must therefore, find some one or more who would stand in His stead after Calvary had cut short His life. That was doubtless the occasion of choosing the twelve. They were to be His successors in the office of teaching. They were successors in the truest sense. Not that any one of them, not even that the twelve combined, could ever teach as He taught, so far as natural powers were concerned, but upon the faithful eleven He was to send the Holy Spirit to “bring to their remembrance” the things He Himself had said, and to “guide them into all truth.” In John’s Gospel, fourteenth chapter, twelfth verse, He is talking to His disciples about succeeding Him in office. He has told them again of His speedy departure and they are sad. He has comforted them by saying “Let not your hearts be troubled, ye believe in God, believe also in me.” Then, to show that everything was not to cease when He passed from the earth, He said, “Verily, verily I say unto you, he that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also, and greater works than these shall he do, because I go unto my Father.” And again, “The Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, He shall teach you all things and bring all things to your remembrance whatsoever I have said unto you.”
James Stalker, in his volume entitled “Imago Christi,” says, “If we were to express the aim of Christ in the training of the twelve by saying that it was to provide successors to Himself, we should be using too strong a word, for in His greatest and most characteristic work, the working out of redemption by His sufferings and death, He had and could have no successor. He finished the work, leaving nothing for anyone else to do. But this being understood, we may perhaps best understand what He did as a Teacher by saying that He was training His own successors.”
It would seem indeed that no man who ever filled an office in love could be content to leave it unless he hoped a suitable successor could be found. In proportion as one partakes of the Christ-spirit this thought stands forth, for Christianity is a religion which looks to the future, and in the future must find its victory and reward. The question of a suitable successor arises every time a call from another field brings up the question of quitting the one of present occupancy, and every time a pain starts in him the thought “Who knows but I may be near my end.” A few years ago a teacher in a small college in Indiana, having had offered him a place of larger honour and richer financial returns, said, “I would accept this office instantly, only, if I did, I don’t just know who would come to succeed me here.” For a man to be so situated as to be able to train up his successors, and through that training to come into such intimate touch with them as to know them in character as well as in conduct, in motive as well as in outward motion, and be convinced that truth would suffer nothing at their tongues, and find an equally vigourous putting by their pen would be a delight.
Dr. John A. Broadus mourned that he had no son to take up his work of teaching, but the cause of mourning was removed when a most scholarly man married his daughter, and at the Doctor’s decision, stepped into his office to teach others the things the great man of God had taught him. The second object of Christ’s teaching was the all-essential one, namely, Salvation. His mission to the world is well defined in the Old Testament. It was prophesied of Him, “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek, he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound.” He was faithful unto His office! In the Book of Matthew it is said, “And thou shalt call his name Jesus, for he shall save his people from their sins,” while Luke reports Him in these words, “The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was lost.” When Nicodemus came to Him at night and said, “Master, we know that thou art a teacher come from God,” Jesus responded to this appeal for instruction by saying, “Verily, verily I say unto thee, except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.” That was the all-essential object of His instruction. If one considers the subjects to which He turns His attention they were all essential to instruction about salvation. To Nicodemus He says, “Ye must be born again.” Concerning the Father He said, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life.” Concerning the Spirit He said, “When he is come he will convince the world of sin, of righteousness and of the judgment; of sin because they believed not on me.” Concerning repentance, He said, “Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.” Concerning regeneration, “Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.” Concerning righteousness, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you.” Concerning the Gospel He taught what Paul afterwards voiced in a single sentence, “It is the power of God unto salvation unto every one that believeth.” Concerning the Second Coming, He insisted upon preparation, since we “know not the day nor the hour when the Son of man cometh.” No sincere student of the teachings of Jesus could ever call into question that the purpose of it all, so far as the supreme object was concerned, was salvation.
It seems a sad circumstance that so few of the teachers in our schools today, academies, colleges, universities and divinity seminaries are making salvation the supreme object of teaching. Would that more of them felt what a certain Principal expressed at a great Convention when he said, “Unless I can see accomplished student salvation I will not remain in the office of teacher.”
What is the use of science if it does not show men to God? What is the use of literature if it does not lead to Him? What is the use of philosophy if through it you cannot find life? What is the use of charity unless you appreciate what Dr. Henderson said, “The soul of charity is charity for the soul.” Oh, that the Spirit of Christ might possess more of our teachers as it possessed Prof. Tholuck, that great theological teacher, that successful enemy of German rationalism. In the midst of all his teaching, his work as an exegete, his book-writing and publishing, while walking rapidly to the position of a world-wide reputation, he gave four hours a day, we are told, to talking with students about their salvation, and when he was but a few years in his office as teacher he was able to say that he knew where there were more than a thousand young men that he had led to the Lord. Truly we may believe that he said, as reputed, “I have but one passion, and that is Christ.”