The First-Born

The first-born of every creature. — COLOSSIAXS i. 15.

THOUSANDS each night — the watchman on his beat, the sentinel on the ramparts, the seaman on the heaving deep, the jaded votaries of pleasure on their return from ball and revel — walk beneath the spangled heavens, nor once raise their eyes, or, if they do, raise not their thoughts to the magnificence of the scene. And each day, thousands engrossed with the pursuit of pleasure or business, tread the spangled sward with an eye of no more intelligence than an ox — careless of the beautiful flowers, which with a happier, purer taste, the little child loves to gather, and, singing to her work, weaves into garlands for her sunny brow. Not that these persons are constitutionally dead to beauty, or devoid of intelligence. Not that they look on the face of nature with an idiot’s vacant stare, but familiarity, which breeds contempt in some instances, in this has bred indifference. Behold, perhaps one reason why, though our Lord presented such a glorious combination of divine and human excellencies, many were insensible to it; and why, sad to think of it, he found so much occasion to apply to himself the old proverb, A prophet is not without honour but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house!

A less pardonable reason, however, may be found for this in his case, as in others, and found in that envy to which our fallen nature is prone. A bad, a base, in every way an unprofitable passion, one that, more than any other, carries its own punishment with it, and makes those who cherish it wretched, envy is its own avenger; and yet, so prone are many to regard others with envy, that a man may feel assured that he has begun to rise in the world so soon as he hears the buzz of detractors, and feels their poisoned stings. This, indeed, is not a bad test of merit, just as we know that to be the finest and the ripest fruit which bears the marks of having been attacked by wasp, or hornet, or other such winged or wingless insects. The goose, and the sea-gull, and other common creatures, are left to pursue their way through the fields of air without interruption or attack, but I have seen, when some noble bird appeared, who had a wing to soar aloft, to cleave the clouds, how he was harassed and hunted by a noisy crowd, that assailed him with their voices, but, mingling cunning with insolence, kept beyond the swoop of his pinions, or the stroke of his talons. Now, see how Moses, the meekest, noblest, most generous of men, was envied by ambitious spirits among the children of Israel! Ye take too much upon you, they said to him and his brother, seeing all the congregation are holy, every one of them, and the Lord is among them; wherefore, then, lift ye up yourselves above the congregation of the Lord? Ay, and even his own brother and sister grew jealous of him. On pretence of his having done wrong in marrying an Ethiopian woman, they who should have supported, the brother to whom they owed their position, most basely and ungratefully attempted to undermine his influence. It was very wrong in Moses to make this marriage — to enter into such an unsuitable alliance; so they said to the multitude. Yet mere dust and smoke that, which they raised to cover their real motives and base ends. The envy, from whose evil eye no excellence is a protecting charrn, and which, rending asunder the most sacred ties, refuses to spare a brother, was at the bottom of their discontent. For while Aaron and Miriam held such language to the people, masking their selfish passions under a fair pretence of patriotism and piety, listen to them in their tent, how different their language to each other, Hath the Lord indeed spoken only by Moses? hath he not spoken also by us?

Looking at such cases, what else was to be expected from the men of Nazareth, a place of proverbially bad repute, than that they should grudge Jesus his honours, and hate him for his success? He had emerged from deep obscurity into a fame that filled every mouth with his works, and embraced within its widening circle all the land. He had become famous; and they had not. It did not matter that that was not his fault. They felt themselves grow less as he grew greater, and they could not brook that; such as were stars among them, or wished to be thought so, were bitterly mortified to find them selves extinguished in the light of this rising sun.

Therefore they hated Christ, giving him ground to complain, A prophet is not without honour but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house.

Let me turn your attention to one occasion when this feeling, which had been grumbling like a pent-up volcano, burst forth most insolently, most offensively. Our Lord was teaching in the synagogue of Nazareth — teaching with that strange, wonderful, divine wisdom, which in its very dawn, when the child was but twelve years old, astonished the grey divines and subtlest lawyers of the temple; and which not only made unprejudiced hearers hang on his gracious lips, but compelled his enemies to confess, Never man spake like this man. On the occasion to which I refer, envy gnawed, like a canker-worm, at the heart of his townsmen. What business had he to reach an eminence they might aspire to, but could never attain? Hopeless of that, although they could not rise to his height, they might perchance pull him down to their own level. They will try. And so, at the close of his discourse, when we might have expected them to praise God for the wisdom that had dropped from his lips, and to congratulate Mary on her son, and their native town on an inhabitant whose name would render Nazareth famous to the latest ages, they cast about for something which, by detracting from his glory, might gratify their spleen. They had nothing to say against either the matter or the manner of the discourse; both were perfect. Nor had they a whisper to breathe against the life and character of the speaker. A circumstance worthy of note! For it is one of the finest testimonies borne to our Lord’s lofty and holy life, that the thirty years which he spent in a small town — where leisure always abounds, and scandal is often rife, and every man’s character and habits are discussed in private circles, and dissected by many cutting tongues — did not furnish them with the shred of an excuse for whispering an ill word against him. His life resembled a polished mirror, which the foulest breath cannot stain, nor dim beyond a passing moment. What a noble testimony to Jesus Christ! Holy, harmless, undcfiled, separate from sinners, envy found no way to vent its malice and spit its venom at him, but by a taunt she drew from his humble origin and poor relatives. As if it were not an honour to rise above the circumstances of our birth, as if a man’s ascent by one step above his original condition, fairly, honestly, and honourably won, were not more a matter of just pride, than a descent traced from the proudest ancestry, they said, Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James, and Joses, and of Juda, and Simon? and are not his sisters here with us? — whence, then, hath this man all these things?

Extending from his early youth into the years of mature manhood, there is a great blank in our Lord’s history. Eighteen years of his life stand unaccounted for; and that blank, looking as dark as the starless regions of the sky, tradition, usually so fertile in invention, has not attempted to fill up. How often have I wondered and tried to fancy what Jesus did, and how he passed the time between his boyhood, when he vanishes from our sight, and his thirtieth year, when he again appears upon the stage to enter on his public ministry? Thanks to his townsmen’s envious sneer, or, rather, thanks to Him who permitted the insult, and thus has made the wrath of man to praise him, their insolent taunt throws a ray of light into the deep obscurity. Their question, Is not this the carpenter? not, as at another time, the carpenter’s son, but the carpenter himself, suggests to us the picture of a humble home in Nazareth, known to the neighbourhood as the carpenter’s, and under whose roof of thatch Jesus resided with his mother — in all probability then a widow, and, like many a widow since then, cheered by the love and supported by the labours of a dutiful son. I have no doubt that holy angels, turning their wings away from lordly mansions and the proud palaces of kings, often hovered over that peaceful home, as still they, who are ministering spirits sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation, do over the humblest abodes of piety. But, so far as this world and its inhabitants were concerned, Jesus passed his days in contented obscurity, unnoticed and unknown, save to the neighbours, whose esteem he could not fail to win by his pure life, and gentle temper, and holy manners. He was to grow in favour with God and man. All Nazareth regarded him as a paragon of human virtues, and many a mother pointed to Mary’s son as the pattern her own lads should copy.

How wonderful it is to transport ourselves back, in fancy, some eighteen hundred years, to that small town; and on asking, with the Greeks, to “see Jesus,” to be conducted to a humble dwelling, where chips of wood, and squared logs, and unbarked trunks of trees lying about, in the oak, and olive, and cedar, and sycamore that had fallen to his axe, point out “the carpenter’s.” By the door, and under a bowering vine, which, trained beneath the eaves over some rude trellis-work, forms a grateful shade from the noon-day sun, a widow sits — her fingers employed in weaving, but an expression in her face and eye which indicates a mind engaged in far loftier objects, thoughts deeper, holier, stranger, than a buried husband, and a widow’s grief. She rises, lifts the latch, and, stooping, we enter that lowly door; and there, bending to his work, we see the carpenter — in him the Son of the Most High God! Time was, when he set his compass on the deep; time was, when he stood and measured the earth; and now, with line, and compass, and plane, and hatchet, the sweat dropping from his lofty brow, he who made heaven and earth, and the sea, and all that in them is, in the guise of a common tradesman, bends at a carpenter’s bench. How low he stooped to save us!

The world was once astonished to see a king stoop to such work. The founder of the Russian empire left his palace and capital, the seductive pleasures and all the pomp of royalty, to acquire the art of ship-building in the dockyard of a Dutch sea-port. He learned it, that he might teach it to his subjects; he became a servant, that he might be the better master, and lay in

Russia the foundations of a great naval power. Nor has his country been ungrateful; her capital, which bears his name, is adorned with a monument to his memory, massive as his mind; and she has embalmed his deathless name in her heart and in her victories. Yet, little as many think of Jesus, lightly as they esteem him, a far greater sight is here. There, in a king becoming a subject that his subjects might find in him a king, there was much for men; but here, there is much both for men and angels to wonder at, and praise through all eternity. The Son of God stoops to toil. What an amazing scene! Henceforth, 1st honest labour feel itself ennobled; let no man, whatever rank he has attained, blush for the meanness of his origin, or be ashamed of his father’s trade; let the sons of toil lift their heads before the overweening pride of birth or wealth, and feel themselves stand taller on the earth; let the idle learn to do some good in this world, and turn their brains and hands to some useful purpose; above all, there let sinners behold a marvellous, most affecting exhibition of the condescension and love of God. This carpenter of Nazareth is He whom the apostle calls “the first-born of every creature;” and “by him,” he adds, “were all things created that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him and for him: and he is before all things, and by him all things consist.” Let us now consider the meaning of this expression, “the first-born of every creature,” and let me shew —

I. What the expression does not and can not mean.

The first-born of every creature! A strange expression! and one which, seeming to assign our Lord a place among creatures, sounds so strangely that, in some degree perplexed, we are ready to ask what the apostle can mean by applying such a questionable term to the eternal Son of God? For, though he honours him with the foremost place, still he seems to place him in the rank of creatures.

Now, there are those who say that Christ was a mere man; and this expression, beyond all doubt, cuts the ground out from below their feet. The first-born of every creature — these words, assigning to our Lord, at the very least, the highest place among the highest angels, do not leave the Sociuian an inch of ground to stand on. But do they not, it may be asked, seem to countenance the Arian heresy — the doctrine of those who hold that, although the highest and noblest of all created things, our Lord, notwithstanding, is still a creature? Is it so? Have we mistaken his true character? Shall we find, in going to glory, that, as ardent love is prone to do, we have exaggerated his excellences; and that, while another occupies the throne of heaven, Jesus is but the first in her noble peerage, the highest and oldest of her ancient nobility? Even as being the first of creatures in point of rank and age, as one who dwelt with God when there was none other than himself, as one whose life dates back beyond the

20G THE FIRST-BORN.

far remote period when seas first rolled, and stars shone, and angels sang, Jesus were an object, next to God he were the object of our deepest interest. Yet, if our blessed Lord is only a creature, however great his power, exalted his rank, pure his nature, lofty his intellect, and incalculable the years of his age, I cannot trust him with my soul; I cannot depend on him for salvation; I cannot, dare not worship him, nor overleap this barrier, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.”

The Apostle John once saw a strange sight in heaven. Yet if, as the first-born of every creature, our Lord be but a creature, nor hold divinity within a human shrine, I undertake to show you one yet more strange. There appeared, says the apostle, a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars: and she being with child, cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered. That in heaven! Yet, if Jesus, though created prior to all others, and in rank next therefore to God, is, after all, but a creature, this mystic woman, so superbly clad and crowned, so strangely pregnant and pained in heaven, offers no wonder so inexplicable as these angels do, who worship at the Saviour’s feet; nor in that upper world, where there are neither births nor burials, do her birth-pang cries sound so strange in my ears, as that command from the excellent majesty, Let all the angels of God wor ship him. If he is not God, how can the law, which forbids me to worship any but God, allow to angels what it denies to man? Can that be right in them which is wrong in us? Can that be true worship in heaven which were idolatry on earth? If it be sin to render divine worship to a creature here, it appears to me that it would be but further wrong, and a deeper wrong, an aggravation of the sin, to worship one in heaven; and, therefore, startled by an expression which seems to rank our Lord with creatures, we might, at the first blush of the thing, address Paul in the words of the men of Athens.

Having astonished her philosophers, having preached in Jesus and resurrection from the grave a doctrine which her boldest spirits had never ventured to imagine, ar?d having, by news such as these news-seekers had never dreamed of, thrown the city into commotion, they hurried him away to the Areopagus, saying, Thou bringest certain strange things to our ears: we would know therefore what these things mean. We might be disposed to say the same to Paul. He brings strange tidings to our ears — he calls Christ “the first-born of creatures.” What does he mean? Well, what he does not mean is very plain from the way in which he conjoins this verse with the next. In the same breath, and as part of the same sentence, the apostle says that He created all things. Created all things! But he could not create himself, and he was therefore himself uncreated; and Paul therefore never could mean to say that our Lord, however high might be the rank assigned him, was to be placed in the rank of creatures. No man inspired of God, no logician like the apostle, no person even of common sense, could write, nor would men of ordinary reason and intelligence believe, a thing so absurd and self-contradictory as, that anything could create itself, or a thing created possess creating power. To create, to call something out of nothing, be it a dying spark or a blazing sun, a dew-drop cradled in a lily’s bosom, or the vast ocean in the hollow of God’s hand, mole-hill or mountain, the dancing motes of a sunbeam or the rolling planets of a system, a burning seraph or a feeble glow-worm, one of the ephemera that takes wing in the morning and is dead at night, or one of the angels that sang when our Lord was born; whatever be the thing created, the power to create is God’s, the act of creation his; and, therefore, since Paul says that Jesus Christ created all things, he cannot mean to depose our Lord from the throne of divinity, and lower God’s only begotten son to the level of a created being.

II. Consider what this phrase, “the first-born of every creature,” does mean.

Eli trembled for the ark of God. And dear as that ark, which rash hands had borne into the battle-field, to the devout, blind old priest, is our Lord’s divinity to us. The loss of that broke his neck, the loss of this would break our hearts. But this expression gives no cause for anxiety about Christ’s honours. It does not detract from, but rather illustrates his divinity; and is a figure of speech, under which that doctrine lies as firm, solid, immovable, as the living rock beneath the flush of flowers and the green sward that cover it. Paul has clothed the doctrine in a Jewish metaphor, and to understand it aright, we must examine it, not with Christian, but with Jewish eyes. For that purpose, let us study this expression by the light of these two cases : —

Isaac is old and blind. He is sitting in his tent like a man who is making his will — engaged, although death was yet distant, in deathbed arrangements. His youngest son, who has passed himself off for his elder brother, and thereby stolen that brother’s rights, has just gone out, when Esau, as ignorant as his father of the trick that had been so cleverly but so foully played, enters, saying, Let my father arise, and eat of his son’s venison, that thy soul may bless me. The old man, knowing that he had already given away the blessing, and believing that he had bestowed it upon Esau, surprised at the request, says, Who art thou? I am thy son, thy first-born Esau, was the answer. It struck Isaac with sudden and dire alarm. Fearful that he had given away what he could not recal, and, under the impression that he was the first-born, had conferred on another rights belonging to Esau, he trembled very exceedingly, and said, Who? where is he that hath taken venison, and brought it me, and I have eaten of all before thou earnest, and have blessed him? yea, and he shall be blessed. Now, the truth flashed on Esau, and, startling the tents around, he utters “a great and exceeding bitter cry.” Unaccustomed to tears, he wept like a woman;

p and the calm, subdued, but deep grief of the good old man mingled with the wild, sweeping, terrible, impetuous torrent of Esau’s passions. But vain the flood of grief! He found no place of repentance, though he sought it carefully with tears. Behold, said Isaac, as he spoke of him who had won the game, and won it by passing himself off as the first-born, I have made him thy lord, and all his brethren have I given him for servants. And so you see from this case, that to be what Esau really was, and what Jacob said he was, to be the first born, and obtain the rights belonging to that condition, was, as a matter of law and order, to be heir and lord of all.

From the tent of the patriarch, turn now to the palace in Jerusalem. An old man, worn out with wars and troubles, fills the throne — the sceptre shaking in his palsied hands. It is necessary that Jehoshaphat — for this old king is he — have a coadjutor and successor; and in seven sons who stand before him, we should think that he had room for choice. What is his decision? To the six younger he gave great gifts of silver, and of gold, and of precious things, with fenced cities in Judah, but the kingdom, it is said, gave he to Jehoram. And why? What moved him to that? His princely qualities? He had none. He was a bloody monster; for his father’s ashes were hardly cold, when he murdered, in cold blood, all these, his brethren. The kingdom, it is said, gave he to Jehoram; because he was the first-lorn. And there, again, you see, that to be the first-born, or to get the rights belonging to that position, was to be heir and lord of all.

Thus, springing from the customs of the county, and by long use and wont, the expression “first-lorn” became among the Jews just another word for head, lord, sovereign proprietor of all. Of this fact, let me add, we have a most remarkable example in the language of some Jewish rabbins. They have not hesitated to apply that very term to God himself, calling Jehovah The First-Born of the World; and that in honour, in deepest reverence — meaning thereby to exalt him above all creatures, as prince, and king, and Lord of all. See now, how that which seemed at first sight contrary to our Lord’s divinity, is not only consistent with it, but confirmatory of it. In pronouncing him “the first-born of every creature,” my text exalts Jesus above all creatures, and crowns him divine Head, and Lord, and Sovereign of all. It proclaims one of his many royal titles, and invests him with the insignia of universal empire. Revealing the divine heights from which he descended to the humiliation of Calvary, how should it endear him to our hearts, and recommend him to our glad and grateful acceptance! Calvary grows in wonder, our sins sink deeper in guilt, and our souls rise higher in value, as we contemplate the glory from which he stooped, to bow his head in death upon an ignominious cross; dying, as is never to be forgotten, “the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.”

III. Our Lord, as in this sense “the first-born of every creature,” existed before all.

One day the door of Egypt’s palace is thrown open, and Joseph — a model of beautiful manhood, mind in his eagle eye, strength in his form, majesty in his manner, and on his countenance that lofty look which bespeaks high virtue and integrity — enters, accompanied by his father. The old man’s step was slow and feeble; the old man’s eyes were dim with age; a few thin silver locks mingled with the snowy beard that flowed down his breast, as he came forward leaning on Joseph’s arm, and bending beneath the weight of years. Struck by the contrast, and moved to respect by the patriarch’s venerable aspect, Pharaoh accosted him with the question, How old art thou?

Age naturally awakens our respect. “Thou shalt rise up before the hoary head, and honour the face of the old man.” That beautiful and divine command touches a chord in every heart, and sounds in harmony with the best feelings of our nature; and so a Greek historian tells how, in the pure and early and most virtuous days of the republic, if an old man entered the crowded assembly, all ranks rose to give room and place to him. Age throws such a character of dignity even over inanimate objects, that the spectator regards them with a sort of awe and veneration. We have stood before the hoary and ivy-mantled ruin of a bygone age with deeper feelings of respect than ever touched us in the marble halls and amid the gilded grandeur of modern palaces; nor did the proudest tree which lifted its umbrageous head and towering form to the skies ever affect us with such strange emotions as an old, withered, wasted trunk that, though hollowed by time into a gnarled shell, still showed some green signs of life. Nor, as we lingered beneath the shade of that ancient yew, could we look on such an old tenant of the earth without feelings of veneration, when we thought how it had been bathed by the sun which shone upon the cross of Calvary, and had stood white with hoar-frost that Christmas night on which angels sang the birth of our Saviour King.

It is a curious thing to stand alone beside a swathed, dark, dusty mummy, which some traveller has brought from its tomb on the banks of the Nile; and to mark with wonder how the gold-leaf still glitters on the nails of the tapering fingers, and the raven hair still clings to the mouldering skull, and how, with the arms peacefully folded on the breast, and the limbs stretched out to their full extent, humanity still retains much of its original form. But when we think how many centuries have marched over that dead one’s head; that in this womanly figure, with the metal mirror still beside her, in which she had once admired her departed charms, we see, perhaps, the wife of Joseph, perhaps the royal maid, who, coming to give her beauty to the pure embraces of the Nile, received the infant Moses in her kind protecting arms, our wonder changes into a sort of awe.

Age, indeed, heightens the grandeur of the grandest objects. The bald hoar mountains rise in dignity, the voice of ocean sounds more sublime on her stormy shores, and starry heavens sparkle with brighter splendour, when we think how old they are; how long it is since that ocean began to roll, or these lamps of night to shine. Yet these, the first star that ever shone, nay, the first angel that ever sang, are but things of yesterday beside this manger, where, couched in straw and wrapped in swaddling clothes, a new-born babe is sleeping. “Before Abraham was,” or these were, “I am,” says Jesus. His mother’s maker, and his mother’s child, he formed the living womb that gave him birth, and, ten thousand ages before that, the dead rock that gave him burial. A child, yet Almighty God; a son, yet the everlasting Father, his history carries us back into eternity; and the dignities which he left, those glories which he veiled, how should they lead us to adore his transcendent love, and to kneel the lower at his cross to cry, Jesus! thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women, My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.