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  WRITINGS OF W ROBERTSON NICOLL
  by W. Robertson Nicoll
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A collection of theological writings, sermons, and essays by W. Robertson
Nicoll, compiled for study and devotional reading.

  Chapters: 10

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS
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    1. 00.00  THE LAMB OF GOD
    2. 00.01     Preface
    3. 01    Holy, Harmless, and Undefiled
    4. 02    The Sin-Bearing Lamb
    5. 03    The Lamb in the midst of the Throne
    6. 04    The Lamb opening the Sealed Book
    7. 05    The Warrior Lamb
    8. 06    The Marriage of the Lamb
    9. 07    The Wrath of the Lamb
   10. S.     Gethsemane, the Rose Garden of God

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  CHAPTER 1: 00.00  THE LAMB OF GOD
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THE LAMB OF GOD Expositions in the Writings of St. John by W. Robertson Nicoll
New York: MacMillan & Co.

1883


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  CHAPTER 2: 00.01     PREFACE
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PREFACE

Although critical discussion would obviously be out of place in a volume like
the present, it is perhaps permissible to indicate the important bearings the
subject has on the Johannine controversy. The figure of the Lamb holds so
prominent a place in the fourth gospel that it is regarded by Baur as one of the
great dogmatic points in the interest of which that gospel was penned, and for
the sake of which the writer deliberately changed the day already known in the
church as that of the Lord’s Death. This fundamental and peculiar conception of
the fourth gospel also rules the Apocalypse ; is perhaps the main figure ; is
associated with what at first seem startling incongruities ; and is met with no
fewer than twenty-seven times. Besides, the Saviour is not only the Lamb but the
slain Lamb, the word used signifying sacrifice — a conception naturally allying
itself with that contained in the nineteenth chapter of the fourth gospel, where
stress is laid on the fact that blood flowed from Jesus at His death. The whole
subject is discussed by Dr Milligan in his thoughtful paper, " St John’s Gospel
and the Apocalypse" {Contemporary Review, Aug. 1871), as well as in a series of
papers in the Expositor, 1882. The various English and foreign commentaries have
been used in the preparation of this little book, and I have endeavored to own
my main obligations. I am anxious to acknowledge my great indebtedness
throughout the whole volume to the writings of Dr Maclaren and Dean Church, more
especially the former. So far as I am aware there is no separate work on the
subject.

Kelso, Jan. 1883.


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  CHAPTER 3: 01    HOLY, HARMLESS, AND UNDEFILED
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Chapter 1 HOLY, HARMLESS, AND UNDEFILED.

Wrath by His meekness, And by His health sickness, Are driven away from our
immortal day. The first words that pointed John to Christ were those of the
Baptist — " Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world." The
profound implications that lay in these words were probably little perceived at
first, but they became clearer with growing years and ripening experience. And
long after he who had delivered the message was lying in his bloody grave, after
the death on the cross, when the Evangelist was in the isle that is called
Patmos for the word of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ, he lifted up his
eyes from the rocks around him and the tossing sea that girdled them, and saw in
the depth of the sanctifies of heaven the Lamb as it had been slain.

He found no greater word to describe the glory of the noon than that through
which he had seen the dawn. It was the same light in its zenith as when it first
greeted him through the mist. Surely it is worth while to investigate a
revelation like this, which was as much to the aged seer as it was to the young
fisherman. How beautiful is a life of which the early days, the middle, and the
latest hold the same convictions, only growing with the man’s growth, and
widening with his experience. How beautiful when the life is based on truths
which no experience can overthrow, which experience only renders more precious ;
and how different from the lives of men who flit restlessly from one faith to
another and find no abiding home. It is beautiful when we see the father and the
young man and the child bound together by the faith which goes through all the
stages of life, the end circling round the beginning, only with a deeper
conviction and a stronger love at last. To understand the meaning of this
profound phrase we must go back to the Old Testament, in which the mind of him
who first uttered it was steeped. Perhaps the passage which was most clearly
before him as he spoke was that in the climax of evangelical prophecy where
Jesus is described as a Lamb led to the slaughter,and where it is said that as a
sheep before his shearers is dumb so he opened not his mouth. Forty days before
Christ had been baptized, and in the interval John had no doubt been meditating
deeply on the prophecies that announced the Messiah ; and this would stand more
clearly before his mind than any. Besides, through those days and before them,
he had been hearing countless stories of grief and sin from those who came to be
baptized of him ; and would he not think of one into whose ear sorrow would
never be sobbed in vain — one who was to deal with sin adequately and finally by
taking it away ? " He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our
iniquities, the chastisement of our peace was upon him, and with his stripes we
are healed," But along with this we must include a reference to the Paschal
Lamb. Few thoughts in John’s Gospel are more distinct than that of the relation
of Jesus Christ to the Paschal Sacrifice and Feast. The Passover, which was the
most conspicuous symbol of the Messianic deliverance, was not far off; flocks of
lambs were passing by to Jerusalem to be offered at the coming feast, and the
sight may have brought home the thought. Further, there is no difficulty in
believing that the forerunner, who had deeply meditated the Messianic prophecies
and the meaning of the sacrifices, saw, with prophetic insight, that Christ was
to suffer, thus standing for a time on a higher level than any of the disciples.

We find in the expression the idea of sacrifice central to the Bible — the
fundamental thought of the Christian life — the Alpha and Omega of John’s
experience and faith. " Without expiation, and the ideas connected with it,
what," says Vinet, " is Christianity?" So our object is to show the foundation
and meaning of this great idea of sacrifice, and then its large unfoldings as we
find them in the Revelation of St John, where we are told of the Lamb enthroned,
the Lamb opening the sealed book, the Lamb making war, the Lamb leading, and
feeding, and lightening his people, the Lamb overwhelming his enemies with his
wrath. The basis of all is found in the words of the Apostle Peter— " A Lamb
without blemish and without spot ; " or, as it is phrased by the writer of the
Epistle to the Hebrews, in describing the High priest who became us — " Holy,
harmless, and undefiled." The ideas brought before us by words like these are,
first, Christ’s innocence and gentleness : and, secondly, the bearing of these
upon His sufferings and death.

I

1. The innocence of Christ signifies that He was absolutely free from every
taint of evil. He was not only free from all evil, he was full of all good. When
we speak of His holiness we point to the positive element — His possession of
all good. When we speak of His innocence we lay stress rather on the complete
absence of evil from His every thought, word, and deed. Even those who make it
often fail to understand all that is implied in this immense claim. It means
that the boundary lines between right and wrong, often to us more or less
obscured, were to Him always as clear as noon. The wonderful skill with which He
maps out the frontiers of righteousness, and the nice discrimination with which
He goes so far. and no farther, is the perpetual wonder of moral teachers. It
signifies, besides, that He perilled His whole claim upon any, even the minutest
fact of His life. All other men, even the best, are only right on the whole, and
we are content and thankful if they reach that point of excellence. We should
rightly count the critic no less foolish than ungenerous who would reject and
condemn a great and noble character because of the flaws and errors that make it
human. We are glad to accept our heroes with far greater limitations and blots,
and to overlook even much shortcoming, in consideration of much attainment. Our
temptation is unconsciously to transfer this line of reasoning to Christ, and to
look suspiciously upon those who claim His example as a perpetual rule, and who
say that to deny His perfection in one, even the least point, is to deny it in
all. But, as it has been forcibly said, Christ was either sinless or sinful.
Between sinlessness and sinfulness there is no middle term. The quantity of sin
is not the point in question ; it is its existence. Should the denier be able to
make good any charge, even the least, against the moral perfection of Christ,
the whole scheme of salvation vanishes like a dream, and He Himself needs
redemption, instead of being a Redeemer: Our faith is vain, and we are yet in
our sins. But great and sweeping as this claim is, the innocence of Christ means
something more. It means something positive. When we speak of innocence we think
of the bloom and fragrance there is about childhood — that childhood which He
Himself was pleased to make a type of man’s regained Paradise, when He said — "
Except ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall in no wise enter
into the kingdom of heaven." Innocence, it has been said, has something strange
and wonderful about it. It has a look of exile, as of something heavenly
detained in slavery upon earth, a look of peril and of helplessness, such as we
sometimes see in children. This spotless, childlike innocence Jesus the "
Eternal Child " kept to the very last. This innocence was not ignorance. With
childhood it is; and men justly count it a high crime to violate the sanctifies
of childhood. To break in upon that sacred ignorance which makes the sunshine
round the head of a young child ripple into a softer gold, to cause one of those
little ones to stumble, is to deserve to be thrown with a mill-stone round one’s
neck into the depths of the sea, and this in the judgment even of the most
abandoned. For to lose ignorance is to lose innocence. The evil knowledge lays
hold of something evil within, and though no outward transgression may follow,
we know too well that in the soul a battle has been fought and lost. But He knew
all things. He speaks with a strange familiarity of vice and crime. He knows
what young men do when they leave the father’s house, and plunge into
transgression in a strange country. He knows how they feel when the wild
pleasure thrills them, and how when the reaction comes, when the money is spent
and friendly doors are closed, and how when the spirit turns faintly to its
father and its home. He knows how sinners entice, and how the son consents. All
these things he knows, and has described in imperishable words ; and yet the
bloom of his innocence is unsmirched through all.

Neither was his an untried innocence. What we call a child’s innocence is never
of course complete, and disappears when temptation comes ; and the prayer for
childhood and for age is — " Lead us not into temptation." Christ’s sinlessness
did not imply a freedom from the burden of maintaining a contest with evil. But
it implies that there was no yielding in the contest. He met Satan in conflict
face to face and overthrew him. He was tried in the silence of his spirit all
through his life with the wiles of the devil, and upon the cross the enemy was
there, plying him with the old deceits to the very last. And yet, sore as the
temptation was, there was not so much as even the least compliance in thought,
and all the temptation of the Wicked One no more defiled him than the shadow of
a cloud stains the snow.

2. The image of the Lamb suggests not only the innocence, but also the
gentleness of Christ ; " Gentle Jesus, meek and mild."

It is in this aspect that he first lays hold of us, and in this aspect he
continues most clearly to reveal himself This gentleness is seen both in what he
did and in what he endured. We know how gently he used his power ; with what a
delicate sympathy he conferred his gifts, how when he healed the leper he put
out his pure hand and came near the need that he might relieve the pain, how he
touched the little children in their innocence, and the harlots in their filth,
how he refused to be the judge of men because he had come to be their Saviour.
But that is not the most remarkable aspect of his gentleness. In the gentle use
of power he was well skilled through his long rule of the kingdom of the eternal
patience. What is most striking and impressive is the gentleness with which he
endured suffering. The great mystery of suffering came up in his history in its
sharpest form. His life was confessed by all men pure, sinless, perfect in
beauty, and yet he suffered. The contradiction rises to its superlative degree,
and we stand amazed. Not only was he man, but he suffered as the uncreated and
eternal Son of God. It is as if a star should withdraw its beams and forget to
shine that he should pass through an experience strange and awful for a man, so
much more strange and mysterious for God incarnate. Besides, suffering was new
to him. He learned obedience not as we do in the way of learning to exercise a
disposition which otherwise is not ours — not in the sense of having his will
molded and tempered through submission. We know that from the beginning, before
the shadow had passed over him, the very inmost of his will was in harmony with
the will of God. But that inmost will needed to be wrought out in life. He had
to make practical acquaintance by experience with the act of submission. He had
to learn obedience in actual exercise, and the discipline through which he
passed was infinitely more severe than ours. His obedience had to maintain
itself in the face of greater and greater demands upon it ; and as he had to
meet these demands rising with the rising tide of things which he suffered, he
entered ever more deeply into the experience of what obedience was. And how
gently he bore his sufferings ! We remember the impressive silence which he
maintained before the furious and malignant storm of accusation at the bar of
Pilate. We remember how, amidst a series of insults and torture which makes us
shudder to read of, when the thorns were crushed into his brow, and the faded
scarlet thrown round him, and the reed put into his hand and then wrested from
him and used to strike him again and again, not one word of reproach, or
protest, or anger escaped his lips. We remember "what a grace he had, even in
his dying hour ; " how he prayed when the nails were driven through His hands,
"Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do;" how He opened Paradise
to the penitent thief at His side ; how He died with no word of bitterness upon
His lips. And therein, as in all His life, we behold His exceeding gentleness.
This gentleness was not weakness, for, as suggestive hints tell us again and
again, there dwelt in Him energies which could have routed and destroyed all His
enemies. And He was watched by legions of angels, every angel with his hand upon
his sword, so that it may not be too much to say that His difficulty was to
restrain and refrain from using these powers. His gentleness in suffering
receives a new meaning when considered as the gentleness of the strong one who
bore not by the constraint of weakness but by the stronger constraint of love.
And still further, this gentleness was not softness of temper, not moral
indifference or weakness. To confound the majestic and solemn tenderness of
Christ with weak good nature is profoundly to misconceive it. The Lamb of God
has seven horns. The heat that destroys and the heat that quickens both come
from one source. His grief was sometimes mingled with anger, and, when need was,
He could rebuke and silence those who opposed Him. But this power also He rarely
used, and the image of the gentle Christ is that left on our minds after a
perusal of His whole life.

II The innocence and gentleness of Christ, on account of which He is called the
Lamb of God, help us to realise what is very difficult for us adequately to
conceive, the horror of His sufferings. We do not feel as we should the
sufferings of Jesus, partly because into their greatest depths we are not able
to see very far, and partly because in this world of sin and pain it is so much
a matter of course that a man should suffer, and we ourselves become so familiar
with suffering that it is hard to spare thought or sympathy for those who share
it with us, however great their share may be.

Every one who comes into this world and seeks a career there, must bear his part
of the ills of this tried life. He must have his experience of the shocks and
overthrows and strange reversals and bitter bereavements of earth ; and, unless
his suffering reaches some unparalleled height, we can scarcely spare a thought
for it. And so it is that it has been found most difficult to stimulate our dull
and selfish imaginations into any adequate feeling about the suffering of
Christ. But nothing will help us more to throw away the brazen armor of our
selfishness, and to feel how terrible an expression of human sin the Cross was,
as to conceive of the sufferer as the Lamb of God. Men must be strangely
hardened and deadened before they cease to respond to the suffering of a
helpless and innocent being. Suffering wantonly and purposelessly inflicted on
dumb and helpless animals moves in minds not altogether devilish an instant
horror and sympathy. More especially when those who are so tortured show, as
they sometimes do, their love in the very midst of their agony, do we feel the
dreadfulness of the deed. Those " who would mangle the living dog that had loved
them and fawned at their knee," raise execration in the hearts even of the most
criminal. That an innocent and unconscious child should be put to torture, is an
idea so sickening that we cannot dwell upon it. The legend of one such deed has
lingered about an English town for hundreds of years. Now, we are warranted in
taking those ideas and transferring them to Christ. He was more innocent than
any child, more loving, more gentle, and by the constraint of His love, more
helpless than any other could be. And it was He whom men chose and did to death
in agony and in shame. This aspect of Christ’s suffering, if we dwell upon it,
may make us feel as those did who, when they saw it, smote their breasts and
returned. This is the end of human nature apart from God — to nail upon the
cross the Son of God Himself; and in this crime we all of us had a share. In the
cross, looked at from this point of view, we have the culmination and the
condemnation of human guilt ; and were this the only point of view from which we
could regard it, it would fill us with horror and despair. But a profounder
thought leads us to see in the death of the Lamb of God not merely the
condemnation, but also the atonement for human guilt. He died in the fulness of
power, of consciousness, and of love. Viewed from the human side His death was a
murder, but deeper knowledge reveals it as the determinate counsel of God, and
the expression of His own loving will. There is more in the Cross than at first
we dreamt of If it opens the great depths of man’s sin, it opens also the
greater depths of God’s mercy. As we gaze heart-stricken on the Sufferer the
calm lips will say to us the old, old words, " Thy sins, which are many, are
forgiven thee : go in peace."


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  CHAPTER 4: 02    THE SIN-BEARING LAMB
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Chapter 2 THE SIN-BEARING LAMB. Not all the blood of beasts, On Jewish altars
slain, Could give the guilty conscience peace, Or wash away the stain. But
Christ, the Heavenly Lamb, Takes all our sins away ; A sacrifice of nobler name.
And richer blood than they. My faith would lay her hand. On that dear head of
thine ;

While like a penitent I stand. And there confess my sin. My soul looks back to
see. The burden thou didst bear, When hanging on the cursed tree, And knows her
guilt was there. The great difference between Christianity and other religions
is that in Christianity the work of salvation is accomplished by God. In other
religions and systems of moral reformation the work of emancipation is one that
man himself must accomplish. They begin by telling him what he has to do to
avert the wrath and to win the favour of Deity. They differ, indeed, in their
requirements, but this fundamental idea is common to every one of them, which
shows that it is a natural and congenial thought of the human mind. The true
religion, on the other hand, commences by contradicting and overturning this
thought. It tells us that salvation, so far from being a work of man, is the
result of a long and arduous work of sacrifice accomplished by God Himself. It
tells us not what man has to do to win God, but what God has done to win man. It
comes to him not as an elaborate code of rules which he must obey, but as a free
gift which he is to receive ; and the reason why so many fail to gain salvation
is because they make the fatal mistake of supposing that it is something that
they must work out, instead of something that they must receive from the God who
Himself has wrought it out. When John says, " Behold the Lamb of God, which
taketh away the sin of the world," he is manifestly pointing back to the
sacrificial system which pervades the Bible from the beginning to the end. He is
thinking of the great process which led up to Christ. He remembers how from the
beginning lambs were slain continually — how they were offered up by Abel, Noah,
and Abraham — how the altar of God was ever red with blood ; and he sees Jesus
Christ as coming to complete these sacrifices and terminate them by the offering
of Himself. So to understand the force of the passage we must look to these
sacrifices, and no sufficient explanation of them can be given which does not
admit that they implied the substitution of the victim in place of the offerer,
and the acceptance of a satisfaction for the offense; in other words, that they
were both vicarious and expiatory. And so Jesus Christ, as a sacrifice, is to be
viewed as satisfying Divine justice, and reconciling men to God. We must indeed
exclude the idea that He produced a new disposition in God toward us. But what
He did was to reconcile the Godhead within itself, and so to alter the judicial
relations of God toward us as that He can deal with us upon a new footing. So
much as this may be defined as the teaching of Scripture, from which we learn
all that we know on the subject, in contradistinction to what we may guess or
suppose. But this explanation leaves great mysteries, which we could explain
only if it were possible for us to climb the heights and fathom the depths of
the Divine nature. A consideration of Jesus Christ as the sacrificial Lamb may
show us both what we can understand, and why it is impossible for us to
understand more.

I

1. Jesus Christ died, but, as we have seen, not for His own sins. He was the
Lamb of God. He passed pure as a sunbeam through all the defilement of the
world. His life was like a spring of water in the salt sea, throwing its
sweetness over the surrounding bitterness. He appeared, indeed, in the likeness
of sinful flesh, even as the brazen serpent was made in the likeness of the
serpents that slew the Israelites. "Man," says Gregory, "is freed from sin by
Him who assumed the form of sin, and was made after our fashion, who were
changed into the form of the serpent." But, as there was no venom in the
life-giving image to which the people looked, so Jesus Christ had in Himself no
taint of sin. He was holy, harmless, and undefiled ; and His death cannot be
understood except as a death for the sin of others. Had He not been sinless His
life would have been forfeited, and it would not have been in His power to offer
it up in atonement.

2. 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.

3. 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. Hence came its efficacy. The blood of bulls
and goats secured the outward religious position of the offerer, but could not
put away sin, could not operate in the sphere of the spiritual. The blood of the
eternal Christ must have a transcendent power. How great we cannot tell. The
thought distances and rebukes reason. But it has power to put away sin. And this
helps us to see why the doctrine of the atonement must be in a measure
mysterious.

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 a
Unitarian theory of the person 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.

4. The Lamb of God was also true man. He became man and entered into true
sympathy with all our sufferings. He was bone of our bone and flesh of our
flesh, and He enters into vital union with those whom He came to save. And here
we have another fruitful source of error arising from the question of the
atonement being disposed of as if Christ and man were entirely distinct, whereas
there is between the Redeemer and the redeemed an essential and vital unity. The
Christ on the cross is not some miserable man suffering for his own sins, but a
representative of mankind. He is the Flower and Head of the race, the
Representative of humanity, the second Adam. He becomes one with those who have
seen Him as identified with them in a manner which finds its parallel only in
the unity of the Triune God. Those who believe in Him live and move and have
their spiritual being in Him.

5. He died of his own free will. From the very beginning His obedience was
voluntary. His incarnation loses its whole meaning and value, unless we
understand it as the willing entrance into our condition for our sakes of the
Son of God. For our sakes He deigned and consented to be born, even as for our
sakes He deigned and consented to die. He had before Him all the way what He was
to pass through. In the very beginning of His ministry, the same thought came
over His spirit that crossed it at the end ; and He said that He had to be
lifted up even as the serpent was lifted up in the wilderness. This gives their
whole meaning to His sufferings. The very essence of sacrifice lies in the
spirit, and if the spirit of Jesus Christ had rebelled, or if He had been but
the feeble victim of an enormous wrong, His sacrifice would have been of no
value. So if the shocks and storms of life had taken Him unawares, as they take
us, the meaning of that life would not have been what it is. But we know that He
counted the cost — that every step of his restless wandering life brought him
nearer Jerusalem, where the prophets were slain, and that He freely willed to
die for us. " If I had known," we often say, "what I had to pass through, I
never could have lived." He knew it all, and loaded with the weight of this
foreknowledge. He went through it for our sakes.

6. His sufferings were in a peculiar sense the bearing of our sins. Looked at
externally, we could not assign to the life of Jesus Christ the pre-eminence in
suffering. Life has been less sweet and death more bitter from that point of
view to others than to Him. Others have endured greater privations, greater
physical tortures, and have had far less to up-bear and console them than He
had; but, when we look at the matter more closely, we perceive that His
sufferings were in a mysterious sense the endurance of sin. Especially we see
this in connection with His death. The shuddering with which He looked forward
to it is not explained by the natural shrinking and reluctance of the physical
frame. " We know," it has been said, "with what a piercing strength the first
glimpses of a coming sorrow shoot in upon us — how they checker our whole life
and overshadow all things, how sad thoughts glance off from all we say and do
and listen to, how the mind converts everything into its own feeling and master
thought. It is not only on the greater and sad occasions that our afflictions
overwhelm us; perhaps our keenest sufferings are in sudden recollections, remote
associations, words, tones, little acts of unconscious friends. And so it was
with Jesus. The very spikenard had in it the savour of death." " She hath done
it against my burial." " I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how am I
straitened till it be accomplished." The shrinking is most manifest at
Gethsemane. There, we are told, He began to be appalled, stunned, smitten out of
Himself. His soul was sorrowful all round. His straining eyes stretched the
whole horizon, and found it one unbroken pall. He was sorrowful even unto death,
as if one more weight laid upon the quivering breast would have been too much.
Great drops of blood fell from Him in His agony. How shall we explain that
thundercloud of darkness, and storm, and passion, with its flashing lightnings,
in which His soul was wrapped? Is there any torch which throws a ray into deep
gloom save that which was put in our hands by the prophet when he says, " He was
wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities . " The heroic
calmness and courage which marks the life of Christ makes it impossible for us
to explain His fear of death in any other way. He if any had lived -- A life
which dares send A challenge to its end, And when it comes say, " Welcome,
friend."

He who the noble army of martyrs praise is not less brave than the bravest of
that company ; and yet he shrank and shuddered as none of them ever did, because
in His sufferings He was to enter a deeper depth than any of them could ever
know.

II. The result of all this is, that the suffering is efficacious — " He taketh
away the sin of the world." The blood of bulls and of goats could never take
away sin, but this man has offered up one sacrifice for sins for ever, " He
taketh away ; " it is not merely " He bears the sin of the world."

He takes it away by taking it upon Him. Many an unconscious victim had shed its
blood for the sin of the world, and yet the sin remained. Many a great heart had
borne the sin of the World, and had broken under the weight, and still the sin
remained. There had been many that palliated the sin of the world, and yet it
remained.

It is possible to disguise the sin of the world, to drive it under the surface,
to cover it with a fair exterior, to make excuse for it, but that is not to take
it away. It is possible to fight with separate sins of the world, and in some
measure to master them, but as long as any sin remains the sin of the world has
not been taken away. But Jesus came not to deal with the sins of the world but
with the sin of the world. In human nature strictness in one direction often
compensates itself by laxity in another, and men dream that they have overcome
sin when they have gained a victory in some isolated fragment of the world of
moral duty. But to exchange one sin for another, as Samson the Nazarite did, is
not redemption. Nor is the mere escaping from the penalty of sin redemption.
Redemption means the removal of sin, not merely of the punishment of sin ; and
He who dealt with sin effectually by taking it away was Jesus Christ, and Jesus
Christ alone. The sin of the world, not the sins. The victory of Christ was over
sin as a unity, the whole corruption of human nature which finds expression in
separate sins. The sin of the world is regarded as heaped up in one tremendous
pile, and that pile laid upon the head of Christ. That was the load which He
staggered under. Think of the sin of one life, the sin with which it is born,
the sins of childhood, youth, manhood, age ; the sins of broken vows, broken
oaths, unfulfilled duties ; and then multiply that one life by the numbers of
all the world, and consider what a foe it was Christ came to reckon with, what a
foe it was that He overcame in the body of His flesh through death. The sin of
the world. When John spoke of the world he manifestly did not think of the
extent of redemption. He did not mean to say that the work of Christ was
effectual for all humanity, and that all sinners, no matter how they regarded
Christ and His atonement, had their sins removed. He was thinking of the world,
not in its extent but in its nature. He thought of the world as it is apart from
and hostile to God, and the sin which belongs to the world as such. The world
has ceased to be the expression of God’s mind and has become his rival. On the
one side He sees the world with its sin, on the other side he sees God with His
Lamb, and God with His Lamb is able to meet the world with its sin. The remedy
is sufficient ; the obstacle henceforth lies on the side of man and not upon the
side of God. We believe that our Jesus is the Saviour of the whole world.
Although only one-third of the human race is Christian even in name, we know
that He is the new head of humanity, not of England or of present Christendom
only, but of the whole world — that all the aimless self-denial of the Buddhist,
all the Pantheistic yearnings of the Brahmin, all the loveless theism of the
Mohammedan, all the blind gropings of the rude and unlettered savage will find
their real rest and satisfaction in Him.

III. The condition of salvation is to behold ; and if we consider the nature of
salvation we see that the condition is not arbitrary but lies in the very nature
of the case. If the Gospel had been an elaborate code of laws it would not have
required trust. If it had been possible through rites and ceremonies to save the
soul, then the performance of these, apart from the feeling of the worshiper,
would have been sufficient. But since salvation is vitally and essentially a
gift that God is willing to give to man, it is clear that if man be free
everything must depend upon man’s willingness to receive the gift—that is, upon
his faith ; and so the connection between faith and salvation is simply
inevitable. The look is the look of longing, of desire, of trust ; such a look
as the dying Israelite in the desert, where the very sand round him seemed to be
hatching serpents, gave to the brazen serpent lifted on high. Then new life
stole into the languid frame. It is the look that takes hold of Christ.
Appropriation, said Isaac Taylor, is the secret of dying. And it is the secret
of living too. We take hold of Him, He takes hold of us, and the great old word
is fulfilled—He sent down from above ; He drew me; He took me out of many
waters.

Round this doctrine of the Atonement man’s trust and hope have ever gathered. It
is the resting-place of the soul. Denounced as immoral by those who do not
understand it, not thoroughly apprehended, and often much misapprehended, even
by those who love it, it has vindicated itself triumphantly in its influence on
faith and life through all the ages. It will increasingly vindicate itself in
the experience of those who lovingly embrace it. ’’While there is life in thee,"
says a great teacher of the Church, "in this death alone place thy trust,
confide in nothing else besides to this death commit thyself altogether ; with
this shelter thy whole self ; with this death array thyself from head to foot.
And if the Lord thy God will judge thee, say, Lord, between Thy judgment and me
I cast the death of our Lord Jesus Christ ; no otherwise can I contend with
Thee. And if He say to thee, Thou art a sinner, say, Lord, I stretch forth the
death of our Lord Jesus Christ between my sins and Thee. If he say, Thou art
worthy of condemnation, say, Lord, I set the death of our Lord Jesus Christ
between my evil deserts and Thee, and His merits I offer for those merits which
I ought to have, but have not of my own. If He say that He is wroth with thee,
say. Lord, I lift up the death of our Lord Jesus Christ between Thy wrath and
me."


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  CHAPTER 5: 03    THE LAMB IN THE MIDST OF THE THRONE
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Chapter 3 THE LAMB IN THE MIDST OF THE THRONE Thou whose ways we praise, Clear
alike and dark, Keep our works and ways This and all Thy days Safe inside Thine
ark.

Thou whose face gives grace As the sun’s doth heat.

Let Thy sun-bright face Lighten time and space Here beneath Thy feet.

Bid our peace increase, Thou that madest mom ;

Bid oppressions cease ;

Bid the night be peace ;

Bid the day be born.

One of the ground thoughts in the Book of Revelation is that Jesus Christ, who
died upon the tree, sits upon the throne of the universe. We find the thought
expressed in varying forms. For example, we are told that Jesus is the First and
the Last, the origin and the goal of all things. We are told that He has the key
of David, an expression signifying absolute power and irresistible will. We read
that His feet are as fine brass, describing His sovereign march over the fields
of life. But the clearest expression of the thought is the phrase which we have
chosen as the heading for this chapter, in which Jesus Christ the Lamb as it had
been slain, is represented as seated on the central throne of the universe, and
receiving the praises of the various orders of creation. This great thought may
be viewed under varying aspects, Jesus Christ rules the universe as Creator,
Lord, and Reconciler.

I

He rules it as the Creator. All things, according to the uniform doctrine of
Scripture, were made by Christ. Whether there be thrones, or dominions, or
principalities, or powers ; whatever orders of being may exist, these and the
worlds they people came from His creative mind and His plastic hand.

He Himself was the anticipation of creation. In the remarkable prefiguration of
Christ in the Book of Proverbs, Wisdom is made to say, " I was set up from
everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When there were no
depths I was brought forth, when there were no fountains abounding with water.
Before the mountains were settled, before the hills was I brought forth." Jesus
Christ is the image of the invisible God in a sense which does not depend upon
the Incarnation, and which does not vanish with earth or time, but which remains
when the veils of flesh and sense are lifted, and we see face to face. The
absolute invisible God no man can see, save as He is revealed in Jesus Christ.
This Christ was the prophecy of creation, and He Himself fulfilled the prophecy.
The creating power passes through Christ as its medium — "Without Him was not
anything made that was made." All the products of nature are from His hand ;
from Him all the terms of creaturely existence take their rise, and of all life
in its lowest as well as in its highest forms. He is the Distributor and Giver ;
so that in a manner, for all creatures, to live is Christ, whether they
acknowledge it or not.

How much needed is this great and half-forgotten truth in days when men soar and
roam through the universe, and find it empty of God, when everything spiritual
and divine is said to be vanishing from the world before the march of Science.
Nothing can be sadder than to wander through Nature and find it tenantless. But
how different when we render to Christ the things that are Christ’s in it all.
There is nothing created, said Goethe, so mean and trifling that it is not a
thought of God. But the more beautiful and tender truth is that everything
created is a thought of Christ, meant to lead us straight to him. We are, in
spite of ourselves, swayed by the influences of our time. Nature often seems,
even to the Christian, very stern and pitiless. It is blessed to be able to see’
in it all proofs of the thought and expressions of the mind of him who is not
only Creator but Redeemer.

II. Not only is Jesus Christ the creator of nature, but He holds it together. By
Him all things consist, and so of all the unconscious forces in the world. He is
Lord ; and those who wrote over the grave of one killed on the Riffelhorn the
words, " It is I, be not afraid," understood in whose hands are all the powers
of the Universe that seem so blind and unrestrained. But, putting it more
generally, Jesus Christ is the Lord of providence — the true King with plenary
power. It is He who rules over the evolution of events and the disclosing of the
epochs in the world’s history.

There is much to confirm the thought which has visited all in hours of gloom,
that history is nothing more than a shifting phantasmagoria of passions and
desires. Sometimes men seem to be flung together, a rude and chaotic mass of
creatures, who fight and crawl over each other, and die, and are laid in the
hopelessness of a beast’s grave. Sometimes history seems no more than a series
of petty stage-plays, without connection, and leading to no issue. But even
sceptical thinkers admit the organic unity of all history. Only to many each
event is but a link in the long chain of the harmony of the universe ; to such "
the organic development of history will mean the unbroken sweep of natural law,
without one breath of the creative spirit from on high, while to a higher school
of thought the one purpose of history is the purpose of everlasting love worked
out in and through human personality by a personal redeeming God." We see above
it all the throne where the King sits, who holds all things in His hand and
guides them according to the purposes of changeless love. The true exposition
and idea of history are to be found in the kingdom of redemption.

III.

Jesus Christ reigns as the Reconciler. Old divines were wont to distinguish
between two kingdoms of Christ — the one inalienable, which He possessed as the
eternal Son of the Father, and the other given to Him as Mediator by the Father,
and delivered over to the Father in the end. The distinction is a real one, and
is kept in view in what we say. Jesus Christ rules not only as Creator and Lord,
but as the Reconciler of the universe to God.

1. In the full and deep sense, reconciliation can only be a reconciliation of
men and spirits. Only spirits can love and hate, only spirits can be turned from
hate to love ; and the great work that Jesus does as Reconciler — that which is
most vital to us, and at the same time most intelligible — is the work which He
does in bringing back those who were rent and sundered from God by wicked works
to their soul’s true rest and home. The carnal mind is enmity against God ; not
indeed that the enmity is always consciously felt, nor that it always expresses
itself in blasphemy and defiance. Yet enmity it is, as all honest, thoughtful
people will admit. At the very best, God is not in all our thoughts ; at the
very best there is a deep dissonance between our thoughts and the thoughts of
God ; at the very best we do not glorify Him in our bodies and spirits which are
His. There is between us and Him a deep gulf — how deep and broad we cannot
tell, only it seems deeper and broader the more we look into it ; and to bridge
that gulf, and bring us back again to God is the work of Jesus Christ, the Lamb.
As we saw, He reconciles us in the body of His flesh through death. It was part
of the reconciling process that He should become man, and share in the
experiences of humanity. But this alone was not enough. It was through death,
through the bowing of His head to the last enemy, through His victory over death
and the grave that He made it possible for the old fellowship between man and
God to be renewed, and so in a great and noble sense He is King over the higher
universe of redeemed souls — redeemed by His blood, who offer up to him
intelligent and conscious allegiance, and who bear testimony that through His
work they have been brought back to themselves and their Father.

2. But, as we are taught, there is a further reconciliation. Jesus Christ
reconciles not only men, but all things on earth. The reconciliation is in a
sense over and done with. It lies in the past, however it may be appropriated
and worked out in the future. The universal reconciliation of all things in
Christ affirmed by Paul, cannot be said to bear upon the question whether or not
at some point in the future all intelligent creatures will consciously love and
serve God. But it cannot mean less than this, that the influence of the cross,
in ways we do not understand, is felt all over the creation — that the influence
goes into heights and depths beyond our ken. It cannot mean less than this, that
nature itself, over which a deep shadow has passed through the sin of man, shall
find that shadow vanish to return no more. And here we are on ground where
speculation is vain. We deal with matters in which Scripture is our only
teacher, and we find in Scripture intimations which strangely recall the latest
utterances of science about the imperfection and inadequacy of nature. " The
creature was subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of Him who hath
subjected the same in hope; because the creature also shall be delivered from
the bondage and brought into the glorious liberty of the children of God." And
then the mystery which so shadows all its beauties will end, all things being
reconciled.

3. Still more unfamiliar and strange is the thought that Jesus Christ the Lamb
is the Reconciler of things in heaven. How can those who have never fallen, who
have never left the light, need to be reconciled to a God from whom they have
never been alienated ? And here again it is obvious that the word reconciliation
is not used in its full sense. Still it is clearly taught that all orders of
spiritual being are brought near to God through the work of Christ. The angels
in their errands to the world have been perplexed by its misery and sin. The
angels ministered to the Son of God in the days of His flesh, and sustained Him
in His agonies. In the cross of Christ the very depths of the Divine nature have
been unveiled — depths of yearning, self-sacrificing tenderness which never
otherwise would have been revealed to angels; and thus we read that into the
mysteries of redemption they desire to look. The word " look " means a
penetrating intense gaze. It is the word used to describe the sharpened, eager
wistfulness with which the women looked into the empty tomb, and the statuesque
unwavering gaze of the cherubim on the mercy-seat. And now the way and the end
of the Divine love have been made plain to them, and they stand nearer to God
than ever before.

So, then, we perceive the cross of Christ is the centre of the universe ; and
thus we read that the living creatures, the representatives of creation, the
elders who represent the Church and the angels who represent the higher order of
spiritual being, burst out together into the great shout of triumphal praise to
the Lamb that was slain, who is worthy to receive power, riches, and honour,
glory and blessing. And so all His many crowns encircle the wreath that wounded
Him. The Lamb as it had been slain sits in the midst of the throne.

Another aspect of Christ’s kingly work, which we propose to treat in another
chapter, is His punitive and destructive energy, which will end at last in the
disablement and abasement of all hostile powers. They will be put beneath His
feet. On the other side of the advent there may be a period of conflict with a
succession of evil domination’s. How distant the issue may be we cannot tell,
but that period too will close in His complete victory ; and then the revolt
will be finally quelled, and the reign of Christ as Mediator will come to an
end. " The Son Himself, also, shall be made subject to Him that did put all
things under Him that God .may be all in all." (1 Corinthians 15:28)

Christ, as it were, had authority given to Him by His Father to go forth and
quell the insurrection. So long as the rebellion lasts the Son of the King
stands in the front of the fight. He leads the troops. He commands all
operations till the final victory ; but when that comes He takes the kingdom He
has won and gives it to His Father, not quitting the throne where God and the
Lamb sit in indissoluble unity, but ruling as the Second Person of the Trinity
with the Father and the Spirit, God being all in all.

We conclude with two practical reflections. We have seen that all the universe
and its forces are being administered for purposes of redemption. The Lamb rules
and He rules as the Lamb. How calming to feel this, to look up from the turmoil
of this visible, flaring, and lying world — from the shows and shams and the
tinted scene of the theatre ; from all in life that startles and appalls, to Him
who sits above it all. From Him all things proceed, and to Him they return in
circular flow. The shadows are all passing ; the reality is behind. Nothing
lasts; our trials are all hasting away to oblivion; let the wind rave as it
will, we look at the Christ who abides. How small all our conflicts and
ambitions seem to be, how transient and easily borne our sorrows, when we look
up as John looked from the rock and the wild waters to the serene King, against
whose changeless purpose all the waves of time and circumstance break in vain.

We have seen Christ as the Reconciler moving by the influences that streamed
from His Cross all the universe in its heights and depths. There is a sense in
which we must be moved by that cross whether we will or no. Hostile or friendly
we must yield to it. But what will it avail us to be laid prostrate beneath His
feet in the day of a triumph which, had we willed it, we might have shared ?
What will it avail us that all the universe is tied with blood-red silken cords
to His Cross if we are trampled beneath His feet as ashes? Let us see that we
crown Him as King by the willing and full surrender of heart and intellect, and
conscience and life, to His command. "We are ambassadors for Christ ; and as
though God did beseech you by us, we pray you, in Christ’s stead, be ye
reconciled to God."


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  CHAPTER 6: 04    THE LAMB OPENING THE SEALED BOOK
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Chapter 4 THE LAMB OPENING THE SEALED BOOK

Sometimes still I come here for a little, and speak a word Of peace to those who
wait. The slow wheel turns, The cycles round themselves and grow complete, The
world’s year whitens to the harvest tide, And one word only am I sent to say To
those dear souls who wait here, or who now Breathe earthly air — one universal
word To all things living, and the word is Love.

We have looked on the steadying vision of the Lamb in the midst of the throne,
holding the scepter and controlling the forces of the universe ; we have viewed
Him as Lord of nature, providence, and the higher universe of redeemed souls ;
we have seen how such a thought is fitted to thrill and soothe us, and yet we
desire something more. God tells us nothing about Himself merely to gratify our
curiosity. It is a principle of revelation that its light is a light to guide
the feet. God teaches us not in order that we may know, but in order that we may
do. There is nothing given merely to make us wise, but all knowledge is bestowed
to make us good. Revelation is not a mass of theories and principles, but the
knowledge of His will ; and hence it is that much mystery and darkness is left,
and will be left. Many questions unanswered, and many problems unsolved — these
exist, and will exist. Only there are mysteries so terrible that we can hardly
live and work without some rays of light on them. The burden of the
unintelligible world would be too heavy were there nothing to relieve it ; and
so we are told in a sublime vision that the Lamb of God opens the seven-sealed
Book of God’s purposes and man’s destinies, and our tears over the mystery of
things are to be dried, and our complaints turned into praise at that great
sight. It is foreign to our purpose to enter into the details of apocalyptic
interpretation, suffice it to say that the book contains the key to the true
knowledge of life, and that He who opens it is the Lamb.

I

1. First of all, we have the mystery of nature. There are moods and aspects in
which nature seems full of the goodness of God. Look on a summer day at the
quiet meadows, the nestling homes, the delicious haze in which all is wrapt, and
the whole fair land seems a haunt of peace ancient and undisturbed. Listen to
the cheerful hum that rises from animated creation, happy in so fair a home, and
you are inclined to echo the saying, " It is a happy world after all." The
general tendency of Christian men till recently was to maintain that nature
illustrated perfectly the wisdom and the goodness of God. The exquisite skill
with which her work was finished, and her instruments adapted for their purpose,
the radiant blossoms of spring, the glories of summer, the golden treasures of
harvest, the lavish ministration to man’s sense of beauty as well as to his
material needs — these were dwelt upon to the exclusion of other sterner
aspects. Of late years, however, various tendencies have opened men’s eyes to
facts old, indeed, and always partially known, but never set in so clear a light
as now. We see how the east wind blights the blossom ; how the rain destroys the
harvest ; how the noblest and sublimest scenes of nature have, as the inevitable
accompaniments of their beauty, misery and pain. We find always imperfections in
the most exquisite and skilful creation ; the ideal is never reached ; nothing
perfectly attains and expresses the end aimed at. When we look below the surface
we see how, under all the beauty, there is the tumult of the contest — how the
lowest forms of life devour and are devoured, how nature is red in tooth and
claw. We perceive that the law of life is a law of struggle — struggle in which
innumerable individuals and species are blotted from the book of being. We
perceive that the whole lower world is full of cruelty, full of acts of violence
— one individual preying upon another. We see how the highest forms of animate
creation are, in their turn, subdued and oppressed by man, whose sin has brought
such misery to his humble friends, and has cast so dark a shadow over all the
fields of life. A deeper study shows us that the first glance was superficial,
and that nature is full of imperfection and pain.

2. And if the mystery of nature be great, no less terrible is the mystery of
history. John wrote these words in a day of storm and earthquake, a day of
overthrow and catastrophe such as the moral world had never before seen. He
wrote in the age of slavery. It was the age of the amphitheater. It was the age
of blood ; when life was hard, fierce, brutal — full of savagery and pain. It
was the age of war ; the world was filled with terror and massacre. It was the
age of famine, when people died in thousands, when the supplies of life were
easily and often stopped, when sights of nameless horror had been witnessed in
the endeavor to preserve existence — a dark and tragic time, leaving lurid
ineffaceable tints on the pages of the book of Revelation. And yet, was it so
much more terrible than other times that have been ? The good old times — we
speak of these ; but we know, when we look soberly at the matter, that they
never existed. The past was even more full than the present of misery in its
various and complicated forms, and it is only because the cries of pain have
died and the scenes of woe are veiled that our imagination has liberty in the
far off distance, and paints what should have been, but was not. Famine, war,
disease — we toss the mere words about and talk of them in a wholesale way. But
let any one take, for example, the Inquisition, and seriously investigate all
that is covered by that word, and this vague way of looking at things will
disappear, and he will come to understand how hard of solution is the problem of
history.

3. And is the mystery of the present much less great ? Something has been
accomplished, but how much remains unchanged and unremoved ? How full the world
is of blood, of misery, of poverty, and despair. Could one have believed that
such scenes as have been witnessed in the wars of the last decade could ever
have returned ? They seem like a feverish dream, the torture, the cruelty, the
massacre, the brutal defilement of the bodies of helpless Christian women, which
are temples of the Holy Ghost. And even when the more terrible convulsions of
society cease for a time, how awful are the miseries that go on unthought of,
and unrelieved ; the frightful, irremediable contrasts between wealth and
poverty ; the existence of the thousands and millions to whom life seems to
bring no one good thing, no one good opportunity. How pathetic is the spectacle
that steals into the imagination when one looks into the faces of a crowd and
thinks what possibilities of happiness each has missed, what experiences of
privation, disappointment, and suffering each has endured. How rayless and
barren life is for the great multitude. The immense and awful gloom that broods
over the world, the " oppression that maketh a wise man mad," the hopeless
tardiness of efforts to amend and retrieve, the dull and paralyzed sense of
justice in the minds of those who have power — these things sometimes so crush
us that we seek relief from the burden of a life at once so miserable and so
powerless. Nor less terrible is the mystery of our own life. Let any one past
the first freshness of youth consider what he has had to bear, and what he knows
lies waiting for him in the future — what pangs of separation, what bitterness
of disappointment, what agony of hope deferred. If all these troubles seemed to
be sent to soften and sanctify they would not press upon us as they do ; but
many seem almost as if they were designed to harden us. The dear ones are taken
from us whose love softened our hearts and opened them to better influences ;
the hard earnings of a lifetime are lost when we were planning how to lay them
out in the service of God ; the voices which spoke bravely for Christ are
silenced, and the hands are tied that gladly did His bidding. The purposes and
plans of our life which had least of selfishness in them, those efforts in which
we humbly and sincerely sought the good of His kingdom come to utter ruin and
defeat. Can we not join in the tears of him who wept much : " I wept much." "
The words, ’I wept much,’ can only be understood by those who have lived in
great catastrophes of the Church, and entered with the fullest sympathy into her
sufferings. Not without tears was the book of Revelation written, and not
without tears can it be understood." Doubt has been called the last trial of the
sons of God, and it is perhaps the most terrible. Yet this was not a failure of
faith, but the outburst of a heart loving God and his fellow-creatures and the
light. The light came when the Lamb took the book.

II The Lamb opens this seven-sealed Book. The fact gives us not by any means a
complete solution of mystery. Perfect understanding of all things may be beyond
our capacities, and the power of tracing the golden thread of love which unites
God’s ways, is a gift for the hereafter. What we receive is light enough to
enable us to work and suffer and wait, patiently abiding God’s time.

1. The Lamb opens the seals, because He shows us God’s heart. The question that
tortures us is : — " Does God care for our suffering? If there be a God, is He a
being enthroned in an eternity of passionless bliss, who looks untroubled on the
struggle and wreck of the world? If He does care, why does He not interpose, why
does not His mighty hand turn back the tide of evil and suffering, and bring in
rest and joy ? " Such questions have ever perplexed the heart, and will perplex
it until the Revelation of the Lamb is understood. Nor will it be sufficient for
us to believe, as devout hearts always have believed, that the great God on high
in his eternal years, must pity the frail and fading creatures of a day — that
His great heart must be touched with pity at the sight of our miserable
struggles, our sad environment, and our inevitable defeat. There may be comfort
in such a thought, but it is not all the comfort that we need ; and, besides, we
want something that will prove it. Now, the revelation of God in Jesus Christ,
the Lamb, not only gives us a new view of God’s pity, but it gives us what was
wanted as much, and that is an undeniable and irresistible proof. It gives us a
new view of God’s pity, for it shows us not a God having compassion from the
heights of the throne, but a God who of his own will left these heights, and
came down into the depths of mortal darkness, that He might understand by actual
experience, those evils which He had to relieve. It shows us a God with human
eyes, filled with human .tears ; a God who has made trial of the strangest, most
humbling, most afflicting experiences, and who has not shrunk from the crowning
and final proof of love — giving up His own life. The compassion is turned into
sympathy, and is far more welcome and dear because it comes from one who stands
by our side, and not from one lifted infinitely above us in the glories and the
eternities. But not only have we this new revelation of God’s feeling towards
human suffering — we have it actually verified to us. In the Cross we gaze into
the depths of God’s heart ; and in that tremendous and unimaginable event, God
dying upon the Cross for human sins, we see a proof, that never can be shaken,
of God’s love towards men.

One may see something of the new light Christianity has brought into the world,
by looking at pictures which may sometimes be seen hanging side by side — the
glowing deities of the classic religions, in the ecstasy of sensual bliss, and
the Son of God, with streaming wounds, and a face of pain and sorrow. " God so
loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son." The very centre of our
religion is a suffering man. " If God made the world," said the pessimist
philosopher of Germany, " I should not like to be in the place of God ; its woes
would break my heart." He knew not what he said. The woes of the world did break
the heart of God manifest in the flesh.

2. Again, there is rest and peace in the thought, in the measure in which we
make it ours, that the government and destinies of the world belong to the Lamb.
He who died for the world, has in His hands the empire of the world, and with
that empire He has all power given unto Him. Can we not trust Him ? Surely He
has done much which ought to make trust easy. He has shown His love for the
world by dying for the world, and the care of a world which He loved so well,
and for which He did so much, may surely be left quietly in His own keeping. He
alone knows the ways He must travel to reach His great end. Verily, His way is
in the sea, and His path in the great waters, and His footsteps are not known ;
nevertheless, He leads His people like a flock. Why should we not trust Him ?
Why should we grieve Him with our doubt ? Shall we doubt the love that died, and
shall we seek to wrest the destinies of the world from the wisdom and power, and
love of the Lamb ? Most restful and blessed is the thought, that He to whom all
power is committed, is He who has shown that He knows best how to use it.

3. Again, the Cross shows us how, what seems at the time to be irretrievable and
unalleviated disaster may be the chiefest blessing. When Jesus Christ died, the
very strongest faith was overwhelmed. All forsook him and fled, and even those
who seemed to have entered furthest into the meaning of his mission were hardly
braver than their neighbors He died lonely, forsaken by men, even by those who
might have been expected to cling to him longest and last. Nor is this very
wonderful, for to human eyes it seemed that the Cross of Jesus meant the defeat
and the extinction of all his hopes. It is hard for us looking back, with the
history of Christianity in our minds, to understand the depth of the darkness
which wrapt God’s ways, even to the most faithful, when Jesus was crucified. We
know now that the Cross is the spring of all Christian life. We know that the
death of Christ has poured the life-blood of a new hope into the heart of the
world ; we know that the Cross turns not back but goes on ever to win new
victories. Let us take the light of that Cross and throw it upon all other
smaller crosses. Does it not throw its light upon the shadows of nature and show
us the meaning of the great law of sacrifice that rules there? We see in nature
not a mere blind and purposeless waste of life, but a striving towards a fair
end of things. Nature is ever seeking to repair waste places, and to cover
desolation with loveliness, and the final result of all the struggle will be
beauty, and a true and gracious issue will be reached when the pain is past, and
a universe will exist in which nothing will be deformed or fading. The teaching
of St Paul on the vanity of creation is one of the many thoughts of scripture
that has not yet been thoroughly incorporated into the Christian consciousness.
He recognized as clearly as the latest men of science the existence of a law of
struggle, and the misery thence arising. But to him these pains were the birth
throes of a new creation. He refused to believe with scientific teachers that
the groaning and travailing of creation will end in stagnation and despair. Life
is not to cease when anguish ceases, creation will be delivered from the bondage
of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. " God will
restore to a perfect state the world now fallen together with mankind." And the
same is true of history. Looking back on the darkest and most disastrous times,
on volcanic eruptions which seemed for the time to devastate the earth, we see
that they were needed for the clearing of the air. for the overthrow of tyranny,
for the entering in of a better time. In the lesser trials of our own life we
see the working of the same principle. We can look back on the old dead griefs
and see how they were all intended to bless us, and how Christ was with us in
them. Let us learn to see him by our side in the present furnace, to speak with
Paul, of sufferings in which we now rejoice. In the very moment of the intensest
pressure of the pain, when the iron is entering into our souls, let us be aware
of the love that chastens us for our profit, that we may be partakers of his
holiness.

He himself sustained his faith so. Remember how when the Greeks came to him a
transient pang seized him at the thought that so great and fruitful a work was
to be so soon arrested by death. But he recalled that his shameful uplifting on
the tree was to be the true glorious elevation to which the world was to turn.
He remembered that death was to be infinitely more fruitful than life. He
projects the shadow of the piece of wood on which he was to be lifted a few feet
from the ground into the heaven of heavens, and says, " I, if I be lifted up,
will draw all men unto me." These who had come to him were but the first ripple
of the full tide of humanity that was to roll shoreward to his feet. His Cross
was his throne, and its light is flung back on all the lesser crosses of Nature
and of Man.


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 7: 05    THE WARRIOR LAMB
========================================================================

Chapter 5 THE WARRIOR LAMB Workmen of God! oh lose not heart, But learn what God
is like, And in the darkest battle-field Thou shalt know where to strike.

Thrice blest is he to whom is given The instinct that can tell That God is on
the field when He Is most invisible.

Then learn to scorn the praise of men, And learn to lose with God, For Jesus won
the world through shame, And beckons thee His road.

It has been said truly that the reach and scope of Christ’s gospel are so large,
that we cannot follow all its lines. There is an under-lying unity which we
cannot thoroughly master — the action of a great principle, which we are not
able to express except by a paradox. Thus Christianity binds together statements
apparently intensely opposed, and we are prone, for refuge, to fall into the
easy and misleading habit of accepting one side of the truth and ignoring the
other. In Jesus Christ paradox reaches its climax. All contradictions meet in
Him, and are reconciled so quietly, so without strain or effort, as to assure us
that in Him we have found the full truth. He is the Lamb, the very ideal of
innocence and gentleness, and yet He is the Judge, the enemy, the warrior. And
here we have Him figured as the great antagonist of the beast, whom He is
ultimately to subdue. The spiritual lesson is the same, whatever view we take of
the person before the apostle’s mind, and whether or not we believe in a future
historical realization of the vision. It is sufficient for our purpose to say,
that the beast represents that element in man against which Jesus Christ fights.
We shall look at two things — First, the foe ; and secondly, the manner in which
the Lamb fights against him and overcomes.

I

First, then, we have the beast — the foe in man. As we have seen, when John
wrote this book, the power of the beast seemed dominant in the world. Forms of
evil, strange, terrible, and overpowering, prevailed and made themselves
manifest in glaring and appalling clearness. Now, while the power of the beast
element in man is not now so palpable, while there are signs, as we shall see,
that it is in a measure weakened, not even the blindest can deny the extent and
the depth of his sway. It is true that great efforts have been made to disguise
the hideous face of evil. It is true, speaking generally, that in our popular
literature the worst forms of animalism are suppressed, and the delicacy and
reticence of society in speaking on certain themes, or rather their complete
banishment, are to some extent proofs of progress. It is true that the slaves of
evil and the tempters to evil do not ply their trade so unrestrainedly as once
they did, and it is true that the hearts and consciences of Christian people
have been awakened, as perhaps never before, to their responsibilities in
connection with the disfigurements and perils of national life. But, after all,
is there much to congratulate ourselves upon? In our great cities the forces of
the law seem to be paralyzed in the face of certain iniquities which lift
themselves unabashed, and press themselves in their most hideous forms upon the
notice even of the most innocent. The best and the most earnest lovers of their
kind, have been driven into the deepest perplexities as to how legislation is to
cope with evils that seem almost too great for its force. Many of the purest and
noblest spirits of our time have been forced to the conclusion, that it is
hopeless to expect the destruction of certain evils ; that nothing more is
possible than to regulate and control them. Nor is there so much to congratulate
ourselves upon in our literature. The taint may not be so gross, but it’s there,
though in a subtler form, and not less seductive because it is somewhat
disguised ; and though much is suppressed, we have now and then terrible
indications of what lies behind and beneath that silence, and finds expression
in its own place and time. The development of intellect and culture has done
nothing to destroy the power of beasthood. Nay, the intellect has often been
used to devise new refinements of sin, and from under the decorous exterior,
ever and anon leap out startling manifestations of the animal. Even in the best
this power is often agonizingly felt. Some of the holiest lives the world has
ever known have been darkened and shortened through struggles with the animal
nature — the changed soul in the unchanged body, fretting in its prison. And
this is the explanation of the astounding falls from high position and
profession that often terrify us, and which lead all wise men to pray with St
Augustine — "The Lord deliver me from that wicked man myself." It is not our
business to inquire how far the intellect itself is distorted and perverted
through the passions. A striking phrase in one of the prophets says, that the
sins of the people are written upon the horns of the altar, and much of our
popular religion, with its poor and shallow conceptions of sin and
righteousness, may take its rise from man’s sin. At any rate, the fact remains
that the power of the beast, is as it has been, the mightiest in the world.

II

Against this enemy the Lamb of God wars. We shall consider his war mainly as the
Lamb of God, but there is another side which must not be overlooked:

1. The punitive and terrible side of Christ’s nature is manifested in his war
against sin. That there is such an aspect of the gentle Christ is clearly taught
in the Old Testament, where men are warned to kiss the Son lest He be angry, and
they perish in the way when his wrath is kindled but a little. The revelation of
the New Testament does not supersede although it supplements the Old. It is in
this book of Revelation that we read of Jesus Christ having eyes like a flame of
fire, and feet like fine brass — eyes of flame to show His knowledge of man’s
sin, and the indignation it kindles in him, and feet like fine brass to show the
active energy which follows upon His clear perception of evil and His
indignation against it. We must take the whole Christ as He is presented to us ;
and indeed the beauty and preciousness of the gentle aspect is greatly limited,
and lowered when we ignore the other side in which he appears as the Judge and
Avenger of evil. This punitive and destroying energy of Christ is a fact of
history as well as a fact of Scripture. All along history we have examples of
institutions contrary to the will of Christ which have suddenly perished, not
merely from an internal process of decay, nor because of the power of their
enemies amongst men, but simply by the destructive energy of a Christ who, grown
weary of them, lifted his heavy foot to crush them. When friends predicted a
long lease of life, when foes were faint at heart because the strength opposed
to them seemed so great, in a moment, to the amazement of all, such institutions
have suddenly vanished to the utter confusion of too confident prophets.

We do not need to go further back than to the crash of slavery in America. How
little likely that seemed from any human point of view, and yet how sudden,
complete, and miraculous the overthrow was, hardly explicable, save as a
manifestation of the destroying energy of Christ.

Why and when does Christ use this destructive power ? He uses it because these
things cannot be sanctified, and He uses it when the last hope of reformation
from within has utterly vanished. Then force becomes a remedy, and force is
applied. Hoary tyrannies, blood-cemented, are thrown to the ground. Churches,
institutions, nations, individuals are visited with complete destruction,
trampled beneath His feet in ruin. But this never happens until every hope of
reformation is exhausted. Christ is able to turn with clean hands to a watching
world, and say of every institution thus visited, " I gave her space to repent."
His patience exceeds our own, and often when we say, ’ Cut it down, why
cumbereth it the ground ? " He answers, "Let it alone this year also." Only, His
coming in judgment, if it be slow, is sure, and institutions which will not
listen to the voice of pleading and warning may hear the sound of the
approaching footfalls of the Son of God coming to destroy them. The destruction
He inflicts is complete. When some great evil vanishes from the world we know
assuredly that, come what may, that horrid head at least shall never be reared
again. With that wrong we are done for ever. When Christ does His work He does
it effectually.

2. Although, as we have said, force in one sense is a remedy as against
irreclaimable foes like these, yet there is a sense in which force is no remedy,
for the true victory is the victory over the will. That is the victory which
Christ values — not the victory of destruction, but the bringing of the
rebellious will into loving allegiance to Him. And so He fights against the
beast by His cross. His apostle, Paul, took for the motto of his strange and
bold invasion of the world, " God forbid that I should glory, save in the
cross." The antagonist to the sin of man is the grace of God in Christ.

(1) The cross tells us, first of all, that the antagonist of sin is not man, but
God. Man’s antagonism to sin has always been short-lived and futile. All
experience teaches that man is not able to prevail against sin. Our own
experience is full of testimonies to the same truth to the vanity of our
resolutions and struggles, to our certain and absolute defeat. Now, to men who,
having lost hope, have almost given over the conflict, the cross is the message
that God has taken the field, that He has ceased any more to be invisible, far
off, or questionable ; that He has come to us in the person of His Son to help
us in our else vain struggle against faults, and sins, and crimes. How wonderful
the change from questioning whether there was a God at all, from conceiving Him,
if we believed Him to exist, as an Avenger and a wrathful Judge ! We pass into a
certain and clear knowledge of God — a knowledge which shows Him as the friend
fighting for us in the battle against sin.

(2) The cross tells us that the attribute by which God fights against sin is His
love. The very fact that Jesus Christ appeared in the flesh showed that God had
made common cause with us ; and the fact that Jesus died upon the cross is the
declaration that upon God’s part all hindrance is removed, and that His will,
yea, His yearning desire, is that men should be reconciled to Him. It is by the
sunshine of His love that He melts our hard hearts. Force is no remedy. Force
may break in pieces the ice, and yet every fragment remains hard ; " sunshine
makes it flow down in sweet water that mirrors the light that loosed its bonds
of cold." The thunder of threatening may appall us, the power of God may humble
us and crush us, but it is the love of God that brings back the lost, and wins
the wayward heart, and quenches the fire of lust, and makes us His true
children.

(3). The cross tells us that the crowning attribute of God is love. Love, as it
were, is throned and sceptered, and uses all the other attributes of God as her
tools and instruments. They all are but the "ministers of love, and feed her
sacred flame." God is love. This is the message, above all others, that has gone
to the heart of the world.

(4). Jesus Christ fights with His cross, and behind the cross are the energies
of the Spirit. The cross is preached by faithful men who have Christ’s spirit in
them, and work in a strength which is not their own, Jesus Christ is represented
in this book as the Lord of the seven spirits and the seven stars. He differs
from all other teachers in being able to pour out His Spirit ; and the way in
which this Spirit works in the world is generally through men called, and
chosen, and faithful, who are filled with that Spirit, and gain victories
through its power. He has, as it were, in one hand the full flagon — the seven
spirits ; in the other the empty vessel the seven stars. He pours life from one
into the other. And when a Church is dying He sends stars — men like Wesley and
Whitfield — to blow the embers into flame ; and every one fighting in this war
of the Lamb has behind him, if he seeks them, the energies of this Divine and
all-victorious Spirit. So then our confidence in the spread of religion depends
on this — " I believe in the Holy Ghost." All opposition outside the Church, and
all skepticism within it, are met by this answer. If we are sure that it is the
war of the Lamb that we are fighting, then no matter what opposition of
circumstances there may be ; no matter what combinations may be formed against
us ; no matter what earthly obstacles and difficulties may rise ; we are to do
our work with cheerful confidence, springing from our trust in the Divine
Spirit, who will not fail us, and who is stronger than them all.

III

Such is the war the Son of God is fighting, and after eighteen hundred years of
this war of the cross, what are we to say of the results ? Is the cross marching
on to victory ? Now, whatever history lay behind us, we should have to say of
what lies before us that " our hopes are bright as the promises of God." But is
it possible for any one to look on the history of these years and not see the
onward march of the cross of Christ ? Christ our Lord was a new birth.
Christianity was a new energy breathed across the world. It is not without
reason that all the years since He came have been called years of the Lord. The
innumerable lives of virtue, the deathbeds of triumphant peace, the hundreds and
thousands in every land who have not counted their lives dear to them for His
sake, the innumerable host of believers taken home, the great company still
militant, the energy and the hope with which Christianity has ever gone forward
to annex new fields these are enough to rebuke our despondency, and to assure us
that the Lamb is to conquer in His war. And what changes the cross has wrought
upon society! Much that is evil still lingers, but, compared with the time of
John — as one of our chief thinkers says — life seems now like a trained and
serious manhood beside a wild and passionate childhood. And if there is much
that still discourages and depresses us, let us remember that evil is to grow as
well as good. Both grew together until the harvest. We wrestle with invisible
powers, not affected by the progress of civilization, nor moved, save to enmity,
by Christian influences. These forces exist, they have existed, and they will
grow. Let us not be surprised at new and malignant outbreaks of the powers of
evil — outbreaks which men of the world would indignantly deny to be possible.
Many students of Scripture believe that as evil and good both grow, so at last
they will come in conflict at the end of the world in a great struggle, in which
the evil will be utterly put down, the close of the dispensation thus being in
an evening red with blood. Whether it be so or not, let us not be alarmed at
evil, not terrified by its growth. Let us behave as those who have been warned
of this, who are prepared for it, and who are assured through all of the final
triumph of the good.

2. How are we who are engaged in the war of the Lamb to look upon our weapon?
Turn back and we see how in the worst and most fatal storms, the hopes of the
kingdom of God and its springs of recovery have never been destroyed. Turn back
and see how its language is for the many, not merely for the few. See how it
meets the needs of the highest as well as the lowest — of Shakespeare, and
Bacon, and Newton, as well of the poor who can hardly spell the words they trust
in. Even as all men are equal before the facts of life, so all men need equally
the grace of God in Christ. See how Christianity still exists after everything
that undermines and ruins ideas and institutions has done its worst. See how
even in our own day it still sends the thrill through men that it sent through
them at first. See how in an age of culture the coarsest and crudest form of
Christian teaching moves and sways the hearts of men, stirring them to the very
depths. And shall we give up a faith like this, with all the overcoming and
regenerating forces that are stored in it, with all its powers for
righteousness, and all its hopes for men before the ominous aspects and
prophecies of the hour, because of the ways of thinking of some of the leaders
of the present generation? God forbid.

" O Lord, in Thee have I trust, let me never be confounded." "This is the
victory that overcometh the world, even our faith." The bearer of this standard
alone we count upon in the spiritual conflict wherein all Europe is engaging or
engaged. "All the old signs and quarterings will soon be in the dust. The
proudest banners of the earth are already tripping up their clansmen, or are
bound in shreds around wounds they cannot staunch. If God would send us some
young brave spirits to spur bareheaded in the stifling tumult, with a cross
displayed on a fair white field, we might again subdue the world."


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  CHAPTER 8: 06    THE MARRIAGE OF THE LAMB
========================================================================

Chapter 6 THE MARRIAGE OF THE LAMB Jerusalem makes melody For simple joy of
heart, An organ of full compass she, One tuned through every part.

While not to day or night belong Her matins and her even song. The one
thanksgiving of her throng.

Jerusalem, where song nor gem. Nor fruit nor waters cease, God bring us to
Jerusalem, God bring us home in peace. The strong who stand, the weak who fall.
The first and last, the great and small, Home one by one, home one and all.

I The various descriptions of the state of final blessedness in connection with
the Lamb rest upon two great principles, with which we start.

1. The state of heaven is a state of grace. The entrance is through the grace of
redemption: the blessed have washed their robes and made them white in the blood
of the Lamb. It was by grace that we were called from the state of trespasses
and sins into the life of Christ. It is by grace that we are comforted in our
sorrows and upborne in our conflicts. It is grace that helps us to die
peacefully, and it is grace to which all is due, when our palm-bearing hands are
at rest and the fight lies behind us, and we sit down with the Saviour, who has
overcome, in the new kingdom. There is never a moment in which any enjoyment of
eternity is to be ascribed to our own desert, and this is one great reason why
the state of heaven is represented as a state of praise. The praise is the
utterance of the gratitude of full hearts, which praise because only praise can
speak their feelings, and do not cease praising because they never cease
receiving, and because all that they can express of thankfulness leaves a great
deep unuttered. Why do they sing ? It is because speech is too weak to tell what
they feel. Words are the feeblest language of the soul. How poor an instrument
is speech for the great multitude who never acquire any real mastery over it,
and who feel it rather a bar against which the tide of feeling breaks, than a
channel for the full river of emotion to flow in. Each of us has felt in trying
to put into words our grief, our gratitude, and love, that we have not been able
to tell the half. If this is felt on earth, how much more is it felt in the
deeper hearts of heaven, and is it wonderful that they try to utter themselves
in praise ? " Worthy is the Lamb that was slain," they sing, because He has
redeemed them to God by His blood.

2. The other principle is that the experience of the Church on earth and that of
the Church in heaven are essentially the same. Glory is only the superlative
degree of grace. Grace is glory in the bud; glory is grace in the flower. A
golden thread of unity ties together all the experiences and possessions of the
Christian, from the time that he first opens his eyes on the light, on through
the endless pulses of an unbroken eternity. And the way to feel heaven real, and
to desire it as we should, is to have Christ dwelling richly in us now. Paul, in
arguing for the reality of a life to come, built upon the great fact of the
resurrection of Jesus Christ. In one sense that is the final proof of
immortality. The great mountain wall which bounds human experience and human
life is cloven in one place. Through the narrow pass come gleams of light, and a
way is disclosed by which the fair form of hope may lead us on and on through
the darkness. But the final proof to the Christian is " Christ in you the hope
of glory." When we are tempted to think that " this little life-boat of a world
with its noisy crew of mankind will vanish like a cloud speck from the azure of
the all," we remember Christ in you. Like a light in the cabin of a ship tossing
on the stormy sea it marks a path across the waters, refuses to be extinguished
by all the tempests of life, and will, we know, outlive the last winds of death.

It has been said that the belief in immortality, even the desire for
immortality, have become weak in our day ; and it has been suggested that the
faith and the desire will revive if the future life ceases to be considered as a
state of blissful idleness, and comes to be viewed as a prolongation of all
noble energies and all generous activities. It may be so, but it is more certain
that the result will be reached if here on earth Christians have a deeper
experience of the preciousness and the power of Christ. If a higher type of
Christian life becomes common it will be felt impossible not to believe that
grace must of necessity be crowned and consummated in glory.

II The description of heaven we have chosen under which to group the rest is
that in which the Church triumphant is described as the Lamb’s wife. This very
tender and deep conception occurs elsewhere in the Bible, and involves various
ideas.

1. The Bride is presented in perfect purity. In Oriental manners it was
indispensable that there should be one to give away the bride to her bridegroom,
and the Apostle Paul, speaking of that last great time when humanity shall be
wedded to her true husband, says that the Church shall be presented to Christ
without spot or wrinkle or any such thing. Pure in virginal beauty shall she
stand before the perfect judgment of God, shaking from her all fault and stain,
as water is shaken from the white wing of the swan as it rises, the end of her
Creator and the desire of her husband being satisfied at last. Not only will
there be perfect purity — the absence of every speck of dust — but the purity
will be lustrous. Clothed in fine linen, clean and white, means a very sunburst
of purity, dazzling and brilliant, drawing all eyes. Then shall the righteous
blaze out like the sun in the kingdom of the Father. The armies of heaven follow
Christ not in armored steel, but in the fine linen which is the righteousness of
the saints.

2. The state of heaven is a state of love. Only one thing is the same in the
Christian as in God, and that is love. All other emotions and parts of the
religious life in us correspond to something in God, but they are not the same.
Our obedience to His commandments, our faith in His promises, and such like,
are, as it were, concave, to receive the Divine convexity to which they
correspond. But love is the same.

He that dwelleth in love, says the apostle, dwelleth in God. He that dwelleth,
not going into the sacred habitation for a moment, and then bustling out into
the market-place, but day by day, night by night, inhabiting the secret place of
the Most High. How different this calm, perpetual thought of God from the
existence we most of us lead — fleeing to God in our trouble, and leaving the
refuge in still weather. Here love is weak and secret, there strong and
confessed. Here it is a little spark, there a great clear flame. Here doubtful
and misty, there made perfect, so that we have boldness in the day of judgment
before the light of the earth that streams from the great white throne. As in
the old story, the prince who wooed and won his bride in the disguise of a
beggar, brought her,to the capital city and the king’s palace, took leave of her
on some pretext, and caused her to be led all shrinking and solitary into the
chamber. When she looked she saw on the throne her lover, her husband, and all
fear fled. So the Bride, the Lamb’s wife, wooed and won by Him, being found in
fashion as a servant, lifts up her eyes and sees on the throne the old face she
has learned to love, and is very glad and confident. Her love is made perfect,
she has boldness in the day of judgment, and goes to dwell with love for
evermore.

3. The next idea involved is that of perfect confidence. That is essential to
any happy marriage — full mutual trust. In the blessed state all mystery shall
have ceased, all pain, and all doubt. That does not imply that we shall know
everything. The thought of eternity would be awful and confounding if it were
not that we have to spend it with an infinite God. No ghastlier vision has risen
before our later seers than that of an immortality without God. If eternity had
to be spent with the limitations of finitude we should grow weary and sick of
life. The endless existence would become intolerably burdensome. Our joy is that
Christ is exhaustless. Only there will be no mysteries, no locked doors in His
palace — doors infinite, but every one of them opening to our touch— to be
explored throughout the endless ages. We shall understand His purpose and read
His heart — close to Him as a loving wife is to her husband.

4. Again, the image carries with it the idea of satisfaction. Each satisfies the
other ; each ministers to the happiness of the other. He satisfies us. We are
told that He does so by ending all our sorrows and fulfilling all our desires.
He wipes every tear from our eyes. Life has been so difficult and so hard that
even at the entrance into bliss there linger on our cheeks traces of what we
have had to bear, but these He removes, and they never return. There is no more
death, neither sorrow nor crying. The shadow of the curse is for ever gone, and
the former things have passed away. The virtue which is one of the highest in
our present state, that, namely, of resignation, needs to be exercised no longer
; only, as Butler says, it is by the practice of this virtue that we have been
prepared for the time when it is no longer necessary. There is a complete
absence of everything that once disquieted us — no shadow left upon past,
present, or future.

He supplies our needs as they rise. He feeds us and leads us by living fountains
of water. The Lamb feeds us ; the Shepherd is of the same nature as the flock,
and knows their needs and supplies them. A very important part of the symbolism
of the Paschal Lamb was that after it was sacrificed it was eaten by the family.
So we feed upon Christ; all our wants are supplied from the exhaustless treasury
of His own nature. As if this were not enough He leads us by living fountains of
water — the deep fountains that flow by the throne. No desire is indulged in
vain, all are met to the full. On our side we satisfy Him. His servants shall
serve Him. His slaves, more literally, shall serve Him as priests. The word
"slave" in this book loses all its associations of humility, and is lifted up to
a position of transcendent dignity. We spend eternity in the exercise of
activity and obedience. Heaven is a prolongation of the multiform activities of
life in their intensity. If men have cherished the idea of a lazy psalm-singing
heaven, they have not found it in the Bible. Here are words that we might have
found brand new in some magazine of the month — " His servants shall serve Him."
Only all their service is to be priestly service. Even down here, the commonest
acts of our life done with a thought of love " as to the Lord," flash up into
worship.

" Nothing can be so mean, But with this tincture for thy sake, Doth not grow
bright and clean."

Consciously related to Him and advancing His glory, we serve as priests.

After a certain experience of life the craving of most men is for rest. The word
seems to hold in it everything that is good for them. They have become so weary
of the labour and the conflict that they desire to be done with all for ever,
and nothing attracts them like the description of the place of rest. But were
the rest reached, after a time it would become more irksome than the labour. The
faculties would crave to be again employed, and so we read that heaven is a
state of perfect rest, and at the same time a state of intense activity. Only
there is nothing here of the modern adoration of work. Life, it has been well
said, is not for learning, neither is life for working, but learning and working
are for life. While they work they gaze on His face. Meditation and
contemplation so hard to combine in this life in fit measure are perfectly
united there. The Martha and the Mary, whom we so rarely find in harmony, do not
any more conflict with one another. We dwell in Him in peaceful contemplation,
in quiet communion, in meditative gaze, and at the same time we serve Him with
all the perfected energies of our being. And by meditation we satisfy Him even
as by action. The great desire of Christ for His people on earth is that they
should remember Him. He loves their service, but He does not value a mechanical
activity that takes no thought of Him, and does not consciously render itself up
to Him. "This do," He said, "in remembrance of Me." In heaven His love is
satisfied by His ever dwelling in the faithful heart of the bride, and by her
faithful eyes never being taken away from His face.

Besides this, we satisfy Him by perfectly reflecting His character. His name is
written on our brows. His character is visible and manifest before all who look.
As the servants of the great Antichrist bear the marks of the Beast, so the
spirits of the just made perfect bear the mark of Jesus. His name is His
character, and the image means that His face paints itself upon ours, that,
mirror-like, we reflect His beauty. " 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."

III In conclusion, it may be asked, what light do these meditations throw upon
two great questions often and earnestly asked ?

1. Shall we know our friends in heaven? One after another they fall by our side,
till at last a shadow is cast over every good-night and good-bye, and life comes
to be a journey into the wilderness, there to die alone. Yet we do not cease to
love them and desire them. Long lost, they are longer dear ; and the question we
put is — " Is the Love of the Lamb so jealous and so strong as to absorb and
consume all meaner passions, leaving no room for any but the one affection? "
The answer is to be discovered by putting another question — " Do we find that
our love for Christ weakens our love for those who share with His supreme
affection ? " Is it true that all who love one another before they were in
Christ, love one another less when they pass from darkness into light? Is it not
emphatically the contrary? Are not all other loves hallowed, ennobled, and
eternised by this other affection? The love of Christ includes our love for all
those who are in Christ. It intensifies and perpetuates the earthly affection,
and any heavenly love that does otherwise is diseased and perverted.

"He who being bold For life to come is false to the past sweet Of mortal life,
hath killed the world above. For why to live again, if not to meet? And why to
meet, if not to meet in love? And why in love if not in that dear love of old? "

" The sun, the more bright, and glorious, and gladdening, and life-elevating it
is, is not necessarily on that account the only thing to be looked at and
thought of; it is seen in the light it gives, and thought of for the delight it
gives. So even in another world may it be with God: the clearer we see Him, the
better and more rightly may we see and know all besides Him, all His creatures,
and all that He has made. We have no reason to think that our fellow beings will
be less interesting to us or less cared for by us there than here. It is the
nearer presence and the clearer view of Him which will be the source of the
truer understanding of and better sympathy with them."

2. Another question is, Can we conceive of heaven as material or is eternity to
be thought of under spiritual conceptions which bar the efforts of imagination?
In reply, we say that the fact of the resurrection of the body implies that
heaven is a place in some sense material. The imagination may dream as it will.
Conceive if you will all that you most desire — the old home, the old hill and
streams, the dear old faces, for no conception will come near the reality. The
highest hopes of future blessedness are wise, and modest, and sober, when we
consider who it is that is preparing the place, and for whom He is preparing it.
But many will be content to leave it to Him. He knows best. When His time comes
He will make it known to us. He is busy behind the veil with a tender thought
for every separate soul that is at last to be with Him. He prepares a fitting
place for each; and, when the right moment comes, He will put forth His hand and
roll back the curtain on its rings, " Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the
kingdom prepared for you from before the foundation of the world."

Then — when sun nor moon, Time nor death finds place, Seeing in the eternal noon

Thy face.

Then — when tears and sighing Changes, sorrows cease, Living by Thy life undying
In peace.

Then — when all creation Keeps its jubilee.

Crowned, discrowned in adoration Of Thee.


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 9: 07    THE WRATH OF THE LAMB
========================================================================

Chapter 7 THE WRATH OF THE LAMB Recordare, Jesu pie, Quod sura causa tuae viae,
Ne me perdas ilia die.

Me remember. Saviour — one, For whose soul Thy course was run, Lest I be that
day undone. The idea of the element of wrath existing in the character of God is
most unwelcome to many minds, and still more unwelcome is the thought that it
should be an attribute of the gentle Christ. But Christ came to reveal God, the
whole God — not an incomplete and limited deity. Hence we should expect to find
not one side but all sides of God represented in Him. Thus, the real question is
not, whether wrath exists in Christ, but whether it is an attribute in God. Now
we accept the fact that it is so, not merely on the ground of scriptural
statements, not merely on that of actual experience, but for the reason that in
every complete and strong moral character the attribute of wrath must exist. Few
essential elements of human nature have been so distorted and perverted as this,
and so generally associated with sin. But this does not prove that sin is
necessarily connected with anger. There is a righteous indignation, however
rarely it may be seen in man — an indignation which is a passion in behalf of
order, truth, righteousness, purity ; not a heat of revenge springing from
personal grudge, but a quality essential to a perfect nature, and this we find
in God the Father and in Jesus Christ the Lamb of God. It is impossible to
define this feeling. We may state its effects, but the feeling is an ultimate
one incapable of analysis. To complete our picture of the Lamb of God the
shadows must be inserted as well as the light. But we do not mean to enter into
the large and difficult questions connected with the future of the wicked. We
merely touch upon those lights thrown upon that future by the expression which
heads the chapter, " The wrath of the Lamb."

I The wrath of the Lamb is primarily the wrath of a rejected Redeemer. It is
indignation not so much against sin as such, but against the sin that refuses to
accept and trust Christ.

Every careful reader of Christ’s life must have observed that sin did not affect
Him with the shudder and recoil that we should have expected. We should have
imagined that one who is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity and cannot bear
to look upon evil, would have turned with horror and shrinking from the
manifestations of the power of sin that met Him on every hand. But, instead of
that, we find that He speaks of sin calmly. We find that He sits with publicans
and sinners as their guest, and exposes Himself to the taunts of those who call
Him a glutton and a wine-bibber, the friend of publicans and sinners. A writer
on the life of Christ has attempted to explain Christ’s attitude when the woman
taken in adultery was brought before Him, as caused by shame. When He cast his
eyes down to the ground and wrote upon it, and did not lift them until the
people were all gone. His cheeks, it is supposed, were suffused with the blush
of shame. Many readers may have perceived the unsatisfactoriness of this without
being able to give a reason for their feeling. The reason may be here. We might,
any of us, have blushed at such a sight, but our blush would have been a
confession of the solidarity of the race — of our share in our sister’s sin. But
He knew no sin, and, knowing no sin, knew no shame. Where shame exists sin
exists. He was pure from sin, and so He looked upon our sins, not with the
consciousness of one who has been or may be guilty of the same misdeeds, but as
God has looked and does look.

Very different is His attitude towards one particular sin on which the
conscience of the great majority scarcely speaks at all — the sin of unbelief.
There are many who would be struck with shame and terror if they had committed
any other great sin who are never visited by one pang at the thought that they
are committing this. But to Christ it was the sin of sins. He marveled at it, we
are told. It seemed to Him the most astonishing and unreasonable thing in the
universe — the one unreasonable, indeed — for although there are thousands of
excuses for it, reasons there are none — excuses enough to build a wall between
the soul and its Saviour, but no reason. The one inexplicable thing in the
universe is neither God, nor hell, nor sorrow, nor sin — it is unbelief. That
men should look at Him and not trust Him — that men dying for want of love, and
peace, and hope, and rest, should refuse to put out a finger to grasp them when
they are all put within their reach — this is the real wonder of the universe.
That men should believe that they are to die and face judgment and eternity —
should know that they need salvation, and that Christ is the Saviour, and yet do
nothing — that is the one thing that moves the marvel of Christ ; and it was
that which moved His tears. He wept over the city that refused to be gathered.
It moved His anger — this hardness of men’s hearts. His breast was shaken with
wonder, and sorrow, and pity, and anger at the sin of sins — unbelief. A homely
illustration may help to make His feeling clearer. If we had within our power a
remedy which could heal every disease to which flesh is heir, I suppose we
should not look much at the diseases, but urge the taking of the remedy. We
should not care to listen to the varied tales of pain and sorrow poured into our
ears ; we should say, it is enough that here is a remedy to meet every need. And
if it were conceivable that any should refuse the remedy, that refusal would
seem to us so strange and so terrible that we should have no power to think of
anything besides. That may be how it seemed to Christ; He knew that He could
heal all the world’s disease and meet all the world’s need ; and the wonder of
wonders and the pain of pains was that needy, dying men should refuse Him. So
the sin for which the Lamb will judge and visit with His wrath will be primarily
the sin of unbelief, the sin of rejecting Him in His great salvation. " Could
the despisers of Christ’s love be well pleasing to God, love would declare its
own work superfluous." This comes home specially to all who have heard the
message of the Gospel. Whatever light there may be in the future for those who
have never heard, there is darkness for those who, having heard, have rejected
and disbelieved ; and the darkness comes because they refused. " The sin
rendering the individual absolutely bad can only be the personal guilt of
rejecting Christ, in which, of course, rejection of good itself is included, and
therefore acquiescence in all other possible sin."

II The wrath of the Lamb must be a wrath that can be justified. It is not like
so much of the anger of this world, unreasonable, hasty, and vindictive. It is
the wrath of the Lamb, most gentle, most pitiful, most merciful, most
longsuffering. Some have said that the wrath of the Lamb must be terrible
because it is love turned to anger. There is no fire, it has been said, like the
sheen of a dead affection ; no enemy like one that has once been a friend. " To
be wroth with one we love doth work like madness in the brain," But while this
is true of men, we cannot affirm it in the same way about Christ, because this
very excess of resentment and passion is often an infirmity and a sin. We may
say that in Christ, as the flame of love is purer and stronger, so the flame of
anger may be ; but we cannot say that anything in His anger is passionate or
vindictive. The truth pressed on us is that we shall have no defender when the
Lamb ceases to plead for us. No one is so abundant in the resources of mercy and
patience, and when His resources are exhausted, on whose shall we fall back ?
One of the greatest difficulties in connection with future punishment has been
how to understand the happiness of the blessed in connection with the misery of
the lost. How can we be glad in heaven while they are punished in hell? Now,
whatever the punishment of sin may be, this at least is certain, that it will be
a punishment that will meet with the complete acquiescence of the whole moral
universe. That is the meaning of such texts as "Again they said Alleluiah, and
her smoke rose up for ever and ever." That seems terrible, but how much more
awful if they did not acquiesce ; how much more awful if the lost went to their
doom with the sympathy of the blessed? Nor would it be enough if the blessed
merely resigned themselves to the will of God in this dispensation. The only
solution that can be borne is that the justice and righteousness of God in the
punishment of the lost are so completely vindicated, that the blessed will
suffer them to go to their doom without one tear or pang.

Here we touch on a dark and perplexed subject. But are there not indications
even in this confused existence which help us to understand it? Are those really
the most merciful who refuse to condemn sin and crime? Are there not crimes that
move a man to thank God that Prophet is ordained of old? Do not even the most
merciful feel sometimes a joy in the thought that the cruel, the brutal, and the
wicked have been brought to their punishment and their doom? What is thought of
the moral state of a country where murder and outrage prevail unchecked by
public opinion, and where those convicted of the most brutal crimes perish with
the sympathy of their fellows? Is this not held rightly to show that the land
has been demoralized, that conscience has been stupefied or deadened, and is it
not regarded as showing the necessity for moral awakening, so that crime shall
be looked on in its true light? When those who have power and wealth given to
them use the power to crush and oppress the weak, who does not heave a sigh of
relief when the long tyranny of such a life is ended? Who does not rejoice that
the strong one has met with the stronger at last? When the purest and noblest
feeling of the soul is perverted into a vile and cancerous passion, destroying
the objects on which it feeds, who will protest when retribution comes to the
seducer ? Is there not such a thing to be seen on earth as even the most blind
and faithful love opening its eyes and turning away — father and mother saying
at last, " Every spark of divine light has gone out, and I can love no more."
And may it not, must it not be supposed that there will be a similar
acquiescence in God’s judgment at the last? That the judgment, whatever it may
be, will not shock, revolt, and confound the moral sense, but will carry with it
the full acquiescence of every pure and righteous spirit? In saying this we by
no means assent to the monstrous doctrine — ultimately subversive of all
religion — that our consciences here give us no real knowledge of good and evil.
Nor do we deny that there are theories of future punishment to which the
conscience could never in any future consent. What we affirm is that the
punishment of the wicked, be it what it may, will commend itself to the
conscience of the righteous, and will be recognized even by themselves as just.
The lost soul " has been under an infinitely beneficent system of trial.
Everything he has known of God has assumed the benign form of a dissuasion from
sin ; his experience has generated countless motives to obedience ; his steps
have been thronged by them as by pleading spirits ; but for his guilt his
conscience alone would have been an ever present song of God’s love to him ; if
he has had Christian training the disclosures of redemption have opened upon him
the most intense system of allurements to believers known in the universe ; the
teachings of wise men, the prayers of good men, the visions of inspired men, and
the ministrations of angels, have stretched a cordon of holy sympathies around
him ; the cross of Christ has blocked his way to destruction more impassably
than by a flaming sword ; intercession in heaven has been made for him with
hands uplifted in which were the prints of the nails ; the Holy Spirit has
striven to turn him back by all the devices which infinite ingenuity could frame
at the bidding of infinite compassion ; his history has been one long struggle
against obstacles to the suicide of his soul ; he has sought out, and
discovered, and selected, and seized upon, and made sure of his own way, over
and around and through them to the world of despair. He has done it — he, and
not another. Such is every lost life. Is it any marvel that a lost soul is
speechless?"

III The wrath of the Lamb is a personal infliction. Some have sought to relieve
the difficulties connected with this question, by saying that future punishment
is simply a self-executing law of the universe, the inevitable consequence
following upon transgression. But to accept such a doctrine would be to withdraw
the punishment of sin from the conscience of the sinner. Punishment would then
simply work upon fear, and on nothing beside ; and righteousness would come to
be nothing more than selfish prudence. Now, on the other hand, the Bible view
represents sin and righteousness as a relation between persons. Duty is more
than the recognition of a naked law ; when we commit sin we wrong others, and we
wrong a power which bound us not to wrong them. The punishment of sin is to come
face to face with that living power and be judged by it at last. In the whole
discipline of our life, Christ strives to bring us face to face with Himself.
Wherever we meet with even the least of His brethren, we meet with Him. He is
sick, sad, unvisited. He shivers unclothed, He languishes in prison, He is the
stranger that knocks at our door. It is He whom we persecute, when we lift our
hands against His truth. He feels afresh, as the old hymn says, "what every
member bears." When we reject His messenger, we reject Himself He meets us at
every turn of our life, and the thought of Him is inseparably bound up with the
familiar objects and actions of our existence. He is the way, the truth, the
life, the bread, the water, the door, the shepherd, the star, the sun. To
everything He has attached some association of Himself, that we may, as it were,
live face to face with Him ; and so whenever we commit sin we deal with Him, and
we grow at last into the meaning of this old agony of confession — "Against
Thee, Thee only have I sinned."

Scripture teaches that a day is coming when the whole account of the universe
shall be summed up, and when all shall receive the due reward of their deeds.
The world’s history is not of itself sufficient to be the world’s judgment,
Christ will sit upon the great white throne upon that day, the central figure to
which all eyes turn. We shall come face to face yet more unmistakably with Him
with whom we have been dealing all our life. We shall see Him there as Judge
whom we knew of old as Saviour, and He will judge every one of us according to
our works. What will give its power to the judgment will be that He judges — He
who died for us. The intense moral effort that it costs a God of infinite love
to deal thus with the sinner, will give the judgment its power over the
conscience and the heart. We shall come face to face with Him who wept over
Jerusalem, and the eyes that were once as fountains of water will be as a flame
of fire. It is a terrible thing to be ground in pieces by the law, but much more
terrible to fall into the hands of the living Christ. So much we may affirm; but
many questions rise to which we can give no answer. There are awful breadths of
promise and doom which our Lord has not seen good to light up, and into which
our search is vain. This much is clear, that "the New Testament is a very severe
as well as a very hopeful book. It takes a very severe view of the world, and of
the ways and conduct of men. And certainly our Lord’s own teaching is not the
least stern part of it. Look at it carefully and you will find how large a
proportion the language of rebuke and warning bears to the language of
consolation and promise ; the one is as grave, as anxious, as alarming, as the
other is gracious beyond all our hopes. ... Of the closing retribution our Lord
has used words and figures which have graven themselves deep in the memory and
imagination of mankind — the eternal punishment, the fire that never shall be
quenched, the worm that dieth not, the place of torment prepared for the devil
and his angels. What could our Saviour mean us to understand by all this ?
Surely He did not mean simply to frighten us. Surely He meant us to take His
words as true. We may put aside the New Testament altogether ; but if we profess
to be guided by it, " is there anything but ’a certain fearful looking for of
judgment and fiery indignation ’ for obstinate, impenitent, unforgiven sin, sin
without excuse and without change."* So He turns round to us as of old when we
put our questions, and says, " Take heed to yourselves." Our own personal and
separate interest let us at least make sure of. He is the Lamb ; none perish
that,’put their trust in Him. Let us trust Him for ourselves — for what we know,
for what we do not know. Through all the awful hazards of the future He will
lead us if we cling to Him. Passing the time of our sojourning here in fear, we
shall be kept by the ’power of God; and at the last He will shew us His
salvation. When earth and sea shall empty all Their graves of great and small ;
When earth wrapped in a fiery flood Shall no more hide her blood ; When
mysteries shall be revealed, All secrets be unsealed ;

Then Awful Judge, most Awful God, Then cause to bud Thy rod. To bloom with
blossoms, and to give Almonds; yea, bid us live.

I plead myself with Thee; I plead Thee in our utter need ;

Jesus, most Merciful of men Show mercy on us then ;

Lord God of Mercy and of Men, Show mercy on us then.


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 10: S.     GETHSEMANE, THE ROSE GARDEN OF GOD
========================================================================

Gethsemane, the Rose Garden of God Without shedding of blood is no—Hebrews 9:22.

I had a strange feeling, dear brethren, this morning, in busy London, on a
week-day, in the sunshine, reading these words from the Epistle to the Hebrews;
and it struck me that some few would think they were strangely antique, that
they contrasted violently with your morning newspapers. And then it passed
through my mind again that there could not be anything so vitally modern, so
close and quick to the moment in London as just my text—”Without shedding of
blood there is no”—no anything; nothing; no mighty result, no achievement, no
triumph, no high thing accomplished without shedding of blood. That is just on
the lowest plane what we are getting to know as a nation, and if we are taught
it as Christians, then we shall come to know at last what Christianity means.

Dear brethren, life is just our chance of making this great and strange
discovery, that without shedding of blood there is nothing, nothing at all. How
do young people begin, most of them? They begin by doing little or nothing; they
begin by trifling. And then they begin to find that they are not making
progress. And if so, they are wise, gradually they put more strength into it;
and then more, till at last they have put all their strength into it. And then
they say they have not succeeded, have not gained their point. And they say,
What have we got to do now? You take off your coat to your work. A man may
disrobe; what more can be done? What more have I got left? Left? You have got
your blood left, and until you begin to part with that you will never do any
great work at all. I mean by that, if you leave a mark in life; to fulfil a
mission in life there is wanted something more than the concentration of life. I
appeal to you, there is wanted, besides, the pruning of life, aye, and even the
maiming of life. There must be for success, even in the business world, I say,
in the world of commercial achievement, there must be more and more an actual
parting with the life before it is reached. And we are being sternly taught this
lesson as a nation. But I want to teach it this morning to the Church as
Christians.

Well, let me go back to the very beginning. I find that there is in the
primitive elemental religion a profound and solemn witness to this truth;
“Without shedding of blood there is no remission,” no peace with God, no life in
Christ. And I look upon these early and crude and distorted ideas as God’s deep
preparation of the mind and heart of man by the grand gospel of the substitution
under the law of Jesus Christ for guilty sinners. And we can not get those
thoughts out, they are embodied in our very language. Do you know what the word
“bless” means, what it was derived from? The word “bless” comes from the
Anglo-Saxon word for “blood.” And the idea dimly aimed at is this: that before
you can really bless a fellow creature you must part with your life, or part of
your life, for him; shed blood. We can do a great deal by little things; our
Lord said so—by smiles, by gifts, by kind words, by cups of cold water. Christ
will never forget these things. But at the same time, if you are to bless a soul
in the superlative sense, you can not do it in that easy way; you have to
sprinkle the soul with blood, and with your own blood. You know what I mean. Oh,
some of you know it who have labored for another soul for weary years; you know
it too well. But part with your life and you will win a soul at last. It will
cover a multitude of sins.

I wish I had time to quote from the primitive religions; but I would remind you
of the old legend of the building of Copenhagen. The builders could not make
progress with their work; the sea came in and took it away, until at last they
took a human life, and by the sacrifice of that human life they gave to the city
stability. And you know the old idea of primitive religion, that the corn will
not grow in the seed ground unless the body of a dead man is buried there—life
coming out of death. Now, I say all these things point on to the supreme Author
of the universe; Jesus died, the Just for the unjust, that He might bring us to
God. Now do you not think you can see how it is that the eternal Son shed His
blood in Gethsemane, and offered Himself immaculate to God on Calvary? But we
shall never know quite—none of the ransomed ever know—how deep were the waters
crost, or how dark was the night that the Lord passed through ere He found the
sheep that was lost. But we read with hearts bowed the prayer offered up with
strong crying and tears—the prayer, “If it be possible let this cup pass.” There
is no prayer like that, when you feel that a life is hanging in the balance,
that the issues are not quite decided, that your prayer might turn it. Then you
understand what prayer can be. And we hear those dim, overcome witnesses who
heard afar the broken moaning, the long-drawn sighs, who saw the hard-won
victory which seemed defeat, and we read—I love to read—about that all-pitying
but undimmed angel who appeared to strengthen at last. God made His minister a
flame of fire in the dark and cold, else could Christ have conquered? His prayer
was answered; the cup was not taken away, but His lips were made brave to drink
it, and He drank it and opened the kingdom of heaven to all believers. Some of
my friends think that the real crowning-point in the suffering of Christ was
Gethsemane, that it was over there that the cross was more the public and open
manifestation which the world, passing by the wayside, could see. I do not know.
Christ quivered a lament upon the cross too. And now I come to the two thoughts
of my sermon. In the first place, partly from etymology, we learn that the
shedding of our own blood is the condition of our blessing others. And then my
second point is, that since bloom and blossom, the perfection of life, are also
associated with the root, with the word blood, then I say that the bloom and
perfection of our own lives depend upon our parting with the natural life and
having it replaced by the resurrection life. I hope it is simple enough. Without
shedding of blood there is no blessing to others; without shedding of blood
there is no blessing to ourselves. Take these two great ruling missionary ideas.

I. Bloodshed for blessing others.

I spoke about Gethsemane because I wanted you to understand that I was referring
not merely to absolute physical death, but to the death which leads a man to go
on, and perhaps to live more abundantly than before. But still, dear friends, we
have been most solemnly and impressively reminded in these times, that, whatever
has failed in the Church of Christ, the race of martyrs has not failed. Great
names have been written there, the names of those who have been received in
heaven. And, for my part, I love the way in which the Church of Rome reverences
the martyrs. You know that that Church never prays for the martyrs, but makes
requests for their prayers; you know that that Church pictures in the assembly
of the redeemed before the throne the martyrs in their robes of crimson and the
saints in white. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church. We can not
atone for others, but we can bless others. We can not, dear friends, have any
part in the one perfect oblation and substitution in the sacrifice of the world,
but we fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ. We know Him
and the fellowship of His sufferings as well as the power of His resurrection.
And when Christ first laid His hand on His well-beloved He said: “I will show
him how great things he must suffer for my name’s sake.” This is the chief work
of the martyr, to suffer; and it is the chief work of every Christian to suffer
for Christ’s name’s sake. And I sometimes think the whole of Christianity, for
the present generation, is summed up in this: fill up that which is behind of
the afflictions of Christ, for until that is filled up He can not have His
triumph.

But, dear brethren, of course I do not confuse labor and suffering in the
Christian servant’s life. The labor is effective in proportion as there is
suffering, and the suffering by itself is nothing without the labor. But, oh,
how Christ’s great servants have suffered! Have you ever thought how St. Paul
was actually driven to use the awful language of the passion when he described
his own life? He did not like to do it; he always drew the line sharp and clear
between himself and the Master. He said, “Was Paul crucified for you?” Yes; but
he was driven to say, “I am crucified with Christ”—always bearing about the body
and its death—”I die daily.” Oh, they have suffered by way of bloodshed. Yes;
but, dear brethren, I think that in the lives of the great servants of Christ,
the elect servants, there is always one Gethsemane above the rest, far above the
rest; one shedding of blood, one parting with life which makes all the rest
comparatively easy. We can not tell, I think, about other people’s Gethsemane;
and we can not tell, will not tell, nothing would make us tell, about our own.

How does the Gethsemane come? Often it is passed with very little sign or show.
You have read in “The Bonny Brier Bush” that when George Howe came home to die,
his mother hid herself beneath the laburnum, and as the cat stood beneath the
stile, it told the plain fact, as she had feared. And Margaret passed through
her Gethsemane with the gold blossoms falling on her face. I believe there are
some of you who are passing through your Gethsemane in this chapel while I am
speaking to you now. There is little to show—some absence of manner, some
twitching of the lips, some unwonted pallor, some strange abstraction, but no
more. And you will never tell anybody about it, and nobody will discover it when
you are dead. You sometimes suspect—do you not?—about another man what his
Gethsemane has been. You are almost sure to be wrong. That surrender which you
see was accomplished almost without murmur or reluctance. Sometimes in
biographies I think I can see where the Gethsemane is. It may be, and often is,
the rooting out of some cherished ambition that has filled the heart and
occupied every thought, every dream for years and years. It may be the
shattering of some song, the breaking of some dream. It may be, and often is, a
great rending of the affections, the cutting the soul free from some detaining
human tenderness. Well, we do not know—the real Gethsemane never lasts long. I
think an hour is the longest that anybody could bear it—” Could ye not watch
with me one hour?” True, the heartache may go on to the end, but the Gethsemane,
that can not last a long time.

We have in biographies some instances of Gethsemanes, and sometimes in very
unexpected places. You would not imagine that a prosperous suburban minister,
with a rich congregation, and every earthly ambition realized, would have his
Gethsemane as a missionary far among the heathen has. But in the “Life of Dr.
Raleigh,” of Kensington, whom many of you remember, there is a significant
passage. When he was at the zenith of his fame he said that ministers came and
looked around at his crowded church and envied his position. “They do not know,”
he said, “what it has cost me to come to this.” In the “Life” of the beloved
James Hamilton, of Regent Square, there is a passage which always touches me. It
shows how he parted, for Christ’s sake, with the great ambition of his life. He
longed to write a life of Erasmus, but other things came and he was balked of
his desire. He says:

“So this day, with a certain touch of tenderness, I restored the eleven tone
folios to the shelf and tied up my memoranda, and took leave of a project which
has often cheered the hours of exhaustion, the mere thought of which has always
been enough to overcome my natural indulgence. It is well. It is the only chance
I ever had of attaining a small measure of literary distinction, and where there
is so much pride and naughtiness of heart it is better to remain unknown.”

I think we may all easily see where the Gethsemane came in in Henry Martyn’s
life, and—I say it with great diffidence—I think we may see where the Gethsemane
came in in John Wesley’s life, though I should not care to indicate it. But the
heart knoweth its own bitterness. What we know is that the Gethsemanes in the
Christian life are in the course of duty, and in obedience to God’s will, as it
is revealed from day to day.

Go back to John Wesley’s Journal. On one occasion he had the claim of a reputed
saint, and he rejected it, and said—mark these words: “No blood of the martyrs
is here, no scandal of the cross, no persecution of them that love God.” No
blood is here, no saint. When Adam Clarke was speaking in the City-Road Chapel
in 1816, at the establishment of a missionary society in London, he told the
people about the Moravians. And I need not tell you how great the Moravian
influence was on early Methodism. He told his hearers at that time that the
Moravians, when all told, only numbered six hundred members, but they had
missionaries in every part of the globe to which it was then possible to send
them. Dr. Clarke told them of the beginning, which was in the far-away place of
St. Thomas. A negro slave escaped from St. Thomas somehow, and he came into
contact with Zinzendorf, and found the way of salvation, and rejoiced in Christ.
Well, this negro came to the Moravians, and he told them that among his fellow
slaves in St. Thomas there were several—his own sister was one, I think—who were
feeling after God. “But,” he said, “nobody can go out to tell them the gospel
unless they sell themselves as slaves and go out as slaves.” Whereupon two
brethren immediately offered themselves, and exprest their willingness to be
sold as slaves, that they might preach Christ. Yes, we may be sure that no life
will bring forth fruit to God if it is without its Gethsemane, with the great
drops of blood in it; and I believe that just as the Savior’s blood dropt in
Gethsemane and the ground blest it, so the blood of the surrendered soul makes
its Gethsemane a garden, if not now, then hereafter; but the time must be,
whenever a martyr’s blood has been shed, upon that ground the fruits of
righteousness must spring.

II. Bloodshed for self-perfection.

I have just my other point. The second point is that there must be bloodshedding
for the bloom and perfection of our own lives before they can come to their
flower, to God’s ideal beauty; there must be the expenditure of the natural
life.

Now, what is it that should follow when we have parted with our life and lived
our Gethsemane; what should be the effect upon our lives? Well, what ought to
follow is, that the resurrection life, which the shedding of blood has made room
for, should take the place of the other. But what does follow? I think three
things, often:

First, it often happens that a real Gethsemane of the soul means a brief
tarrying in this world. It seems as if too much life had gone, as if the spirit
could not recover its energies. There are a few books which the heart of the
Church has always loved. I call them Gethsemane books. They are books about
Gethsemane, about the bloodshedding in the early days and what was gone through.
They are chiefly the lives of David Brainerd, Henry Martyn, and McCheyne. But
there are many others that I have no time to name. All of these died young, not
without signs of the divine blessing, but their rich, fervent natures were
prematurely exhausted and burned out. Have you read the memoir of Brainerd? John
Wesley published it, slightly abridged, for his people, and I have a copy. Read
it, mark its reserved passion, its austere tenderness; read the story of young
Miss Edwards, who followed her betrothed so soon. You will then feel that you
have done business in great waters. The pages of this book are all spotted with
blood. Read Brainerd’s aspirations:

“Oh, that I might be a flaming fire in the service of my God! Here I am, Lord,
send me; send me to the ends of the earth; send me to the rough and savage
pagan, to the wilderness; send me from all that is called earthly comfort; send
me even to death, itself if it be but in Thy service and to promote Thy
Kingdom.” But sometimes the earthly life is parted with and not fully replaced
by the resurrection life, and the long-drawn melancholy ensues. You really must
not believe that I am speaking as an enemy of Methodism when I say I venture to
think there is something of that in the life of that great saint and supreme
Christian poet, Charles Wesley. I think it will be granted by his most ardent
admirers that the last thirty years of his life will not compare with those of
his mighty brother. They were sad years in the main, spent in comparative
inaction, with many, many wearisome discontented days. Dear friends, there is no
such thing as melancholy in the New Testament—nothing. And Charles Wesley’s
melancholy is the most attractive in the world—

Oh, when shall we sweetly move?

Oh, when shall our souls be at rest? And there is this view of life: “Suffer out
my threescore years till the Deliverer come; and then this soul appeals to God
to explain my life of misery with all Thy love’s designs in Thee.” Those are
awful matters—”explain my life of misery with all Thy love’s designs in Thee.”
But, dear friends, am I right in saying that this frame is a Christian frame?
When Charles Wesley was in his last years his favorite text was—and it is a text
which will always go with his name—”I will bring the third part through the
fire.” That is, he thought that God would bring to glory one-third part of
Methodists, that one-third of them would endure to the end. Compare that with
“God is with us who seeth the end.” Who is right? And he never sought an
abundant entrance into the kingdom. What he used to say over and over again was:
“Oh, that I might escape safe to land on a broken piece of the ship. This is my
daily, hourly prayer, that I may escape safe to land.” In his latter days he was
always warning those about him that a flood was coming out over the country
which would sweep much of this religion away. You know it was said on another
deathbed, “Clouds drop fatness.”

It is always necessary that the bloom of life should come out of death. What
Christ means is that as the natural life goes, as the veins are depleted, there
is the resurrection life which should fill them and pour into them to
strengthen. There is no book in the world, I think, like John Wesley’s
“Journal,” because it is the book of the resurrection life, and I do not know
another in all literature; the resurrection life lived in this world almost as
Christ might have gone on living it if the forty years had been prolonged into
fifty years. As a book it stands out solitary in all literature, clear,
detached, columnar. It is a tree that is ever green before the Lord. It tells us
of a heart that kept to the last its innocent pleasures, but held them so
lightly, while its Christian renunciation and its passionate peace grew and grew
to the end, the old wistfulness, the old calm fiery and revealed eloquence.

John Wesley was indeed one of those who had attained the inward stillness, who
had entered the second rest, who, to use his own fine words, was “of those who
are at rest before they go hence, possessors of that rest which remaineth even
here”—even here—”for the people of God.” With what emotion one comes to his
closing days, and follows him to that last sermon at Leatherhead, on the word:
“Seek ye the Lord while he may be found, call ye upon him while he is near!” And
watch by his triumphant deathbed and hear him say, “The clouds drop fatness.”
The only one I can compare him with in all the history of the Church is the
apostle Elliot, the missionary to the Indians, whose life was written by Cotton
Mather. You know that in that day they had a tradition that the country was safe
as long as the apostle was there. Some of you will remember that Nathaniel
Hawthorne, in his great book, “The Scarlet Letter,” tells us of how the poor
children of Arthur Dimsdale pleaded to see the apostle Elliot, for the testimony
is that there was an unearthly light upon his face to the last of his long life.
We read about that great apostle, fit to be named with Wesley, that he had his
bitter sorrows. Two sons died before him, and Cotton Mather says they were
desirable preachers of the gospel. But the old man sacrificed them. Now, note
Cotton Mather’s phrase, “sacrificed with such a sacred indifference.” And he was
so nailed to the cross and the Lord Jesus Christ that the grandeur of this world
would seem to him just what it would be to a dying man, when at a great age and
nearing the end he grew, with John Wesley, still more heavenly, more Saviorly,
more divine and scented more and more of that spicy country at which he was
ready to put ashore. His last words were, “Welcome, joy,” and he died. Such a
life of sacrifice is the gateway of the eternal city.

2. It is likewise necessary that the conversion of the world should come out of
death. I for one believe in the ancient promise, “The knowledge of the Lord
shall cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.” Yes, but before the
knowledge of the Lord shall cover the earth, the earth must be covered with the
blood falling upon it from faithful souls. “Without shedding of blood there is
no—.” Some young men whom I love have started societies for the evangelization
of the world in the present generation. I love that; let us try. But what is
evangelization? To send Bibles, to deliver the message to everybody? No, not
that, but the shedding of the servants’ blood on every field, with the world as
one great Gethsemane. We shall see over it the flowers that grew only in the
garden where Christ’s brow dropt blood. At this meeting, in this chapel, there
will be some sweet mother who is going through her Gethsemane. She is resolving
to give up a son who has heard the call: “Depart, for I will send them far hence
to the heathen.” One in widow’s weeds was asked if she had subscribed to the
missionary society. She said: “Yes, I gave my only son, and he died in the
field.” That is my text: “Without shedding of blood there is no—.”

Yes, and there is some young heart here that has a great deal to give up, a
great deal at home. And he is hearing me, and he has made up his mind that he
will make the sacrifice, too; that he will go forth to Christ. And what are the
rest of us doing? Well, dear brethren, there is to be a collection, and we will
put our hands in our pockets in the old way, half thinking what we will spend,
and how we are to spend it before we go home; and select a coin and put it in.
And then we shall go home and see a missionary magazine on the table, and
express our regret that missionary magazines are not better edited and not more
interesting. Of course, there will be something for the collector when the
collector goes round. It will not be much; and perhaps, owing to the war, you
know, we can not give quite so much as last year. And do you really think that
the world will ever be converted in that way? Do you believe it? Have you any
right to expect that it should be converted in that way? No right at all. The
world will never be converted until the Church is in agony, and prays more
earnestly, and sweats, as it were, great drops of blood; never, never! “Without
shedding of blood there is no remission of sins.”


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Source: https://sermonindex.net/books/writings-of-w-robertson-nicoll/
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