The Living Word

That Jesus Christ came into the world is a fact supported by other evidence than that of the New Testament. Here we are not dealing with mythology, but with history. Then let us raise the question —

Why did Jesus Christ come into the World?

Some say that Jesus Christ came into the world that he might reveal the Father; others, that he might show us an Example; others, that he revealed himself as the head of the race; some, that he might prove in his own blameless and hallowed life the possible perfectness and obedience of self-sacrifice. He showed how self-will might be overcome. He was the supreme Virtue. He was the ideal Man. In him all human excellence culminated, All these answers I reject simply on the ground of insufficiency. To my mind they do not rise higher than the level of personal opinions. They are not revelations; they are not even audacious guesses; the answers are not of the quality of the question. The only sufficing answers that I know of are in the New Testament. Modern inspiration may have discovered them to be wrong, yet I receive them after asking to be guided by God the Holy Ghost. Here they are:

“He was manifested to take
away our sins.” — I John iii. 5.

“For this purpose the Son of
God was manifested, that he might
destroy the works of the devil.” — 1 John iii. 8.

“The Lamb of God which taketh
away the sin of the world.” — John
i. 29.

“Christ Jesus came into the
world to save sinners.” — 1 Tim.
i. 15.

The Son of man is come to
seek and to save that which was
lost.” — Luke xix. 10.

We feel at once that these are not mere opinions, nor hesitant guesses, nor such answers as any mere man outside the election of grace could have given. If they are wrong, they are the sublimest mistakes in history. To bring the personality of Christ within the compass of our opinion would be a profane impertinence. Once Jesus Christ himself showed how impossible it was for mere opinion to compass the magnitude of his Personality. “Whom do men say that I the Son of man am?” This was a challenge to Opinion to do its best. It was a magnificent opportunity. Having heard all that Opinion could do by way of criticism, Christ inquired, “But whom say ye that I am? And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” That was the answer of Revelation. Christ instantly and as it were exultantly accepted it. as such. For that reason I would humbly go to Revelation for all my answers. Opinion has mocked me: Revelation has filled my soul with light and joy. It is assuredly profitable for doctrine. The answers which have just been quoted are so clear as to make it evident that but for sin we should not have known Christ after the flesh — in the manner of what we now call the Incarnation. We owe Jesus to sin. But what is sin? It is a familiar word in the New Testament,

Without it such a Testament would have been impossible. Yet Jesus himself hardly ever used the word, perhaps never in exactly the same sense in which the apostles used it. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, it would be substantially true to say that sin is a word hardly named at all. In John the term does occur a few times, but hardly in the Pauline sense. Yet Jesus was manifested to take away our sins! For this purpose the Son of God was manifested! Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners!

What is sin? Let us regard it as disobedience, violation of law, revolt from God, self-will, self-indulgence, each of these, all of these, even more than all. It is easier to feel what sin is than to say what it is. A possible difficulty may be thus stated: As sin is a spiritual offense, why not overcome it by spiritual means? Why an incarnation, a crucifixion, a blood-offering, a resurrection? Does the remedy lie along the same line as the disease? As the offense was moral, should not the remedial agency be moral also? It is characteristic of the greatest

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questions that they cannot be wholly answered. It is especially characteristic of the Bible that its events bring their own explanation. No book calls for so much retrospect as the Bible. Other books can explain themselves at every point of their own progress, but the Bible explains in one century what it said in another. Its very revelations are enigmas until the answers come. This was made very clear by Jesus Christ himself, who after his resurrection began at Moses and the prophets and all the Scriptures, and expounded to the dejected disciples the things concerning himself. Why could they not read them intelligently for themselves? There was the writing, why did they not read it and grasp its meaning? When Jesus Christ expounded the Scriptures, he re- wrote them. He is still their one Expositor. The Bible is a sealed book to the oldest and wisest of men until it is opened by the Lion of the tribe of Judah. Thus the Bible is not to be compared with other books. Its meaning does not come through criticism, but through spiritual illumination; it is the gift of God. The reason of the Incarnation, then, must be found in the events which accompanied and followed it — in the events which may be happening in our own day — in the present facts of our own experience.

The Incarnation of Christ was the - divine answer to another incarnation. Sin had already clothed itself with flesh. It had made itself visible above all other spectacles. It had darkened the whole sky. There is no doubt about this degraded incarnation — sin had poisoned the very blood, and shamed the heavens with wantonness. Christ, then, had not to address himself to a metaphysical or transcendental difficulty — a spiritual tragedy which had not come into the sphere of words and deeds — something living far back in the soul, as a specter hardly assured of its own existence. That was not the problem. The world was lying in the wicked one. It was in the gall of bitterness and the bond of iniquity. Here is an insight into its condition:

“When they knew God
they glorified him not as
God, neither were thankful; but became vain in
their imaginations, and
their foolish heart was
darkened. Professing
themselves to be wise
they became fools. And
changed the glory of the
uncorruptible God into
an image made like to
corruptible man, and to
birds and to four-footed
beasts and creeping things.
They were filled with all
unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness;
full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity;
whisperers, backsliders,
haters of God.”

That was the problem! That was the first incarnation! Then was Jesus born in Bethlehem of Judea, and the people that sat in darkness saw a great light.

If, then, we want a definition of sin, we must read its own history and thus study its own incarnations. It is not an etymological term; it is a bitter experience. To the intellect sin may be little more than a word more or less indicative of some superficial or temporary flaw, slip, irregularity, or mischance: to the heart which has seen its first vision of holiness, it is everything that can be typified by the word “hell” — it is the abominable thing which God hates — it is a blasphemy which disdains the portrayal of words. There must be a vision of sin as well as a vision of holiness. They have reciprocal effects. We must see ourselves before we can see God: we must see God in order to see ourselves. This is a difficulty in words, yet the heart knows the answer to the riddle. But how can there be sin if man is an evolution rather than a creation? Has he not come up through all the countless ages higher and higher, glorious with ever-brightening splendor? If we say Yes, we do not disprove the Bible account, we may only illustrate it. Even science may be confronted by practice, and compelled to pay some attention to commonplace. We ourselves are the best answers to the evolution which flatters us. Let us talk the matter out quite frankly: — We have come up from the lowest form of life; we have outgrown many signs of early degradation; we have, through millions of ages, passed from beasthood to manhood; we can think, speak, act; quite true; but does it follow that we cannot sin? Can we not bite and devour one another? Is murder impossible? Is falsehood beyond our reach? If we can do wrong, when did we begin to do it? Why did we begin to do it? When did we become conscious of it? If it is a part of a great Necessity, why do we punish it? Why not tolerate it in others? Why complain of it? If it is point in progress, why chafe under it, resent it, condemn it, and load it with penalty? The Christian contention is that at whatever point man did wrong, at that point he needed divine interposition. There must have been a moment when man became a responsible agent, whether he was developed or created, the proof being that he is now, at all events, a responsible agent, and the argument is that when he became a responsible agent he did something which affected his own moral standing and history. That something we call Sin. That something called Sin Christ was manifested to destroy, to take away, to forgive. Evolution is a theory: Sin is a fact.

It was to the fact of Sin that Christ immediately addressed himself. He began to preach, and to say Repent. That was his first sermon. The keynote was full of significance. “Repent,” pronounced by such lips, was a condensed statement of the world’s condition. “For the kingdom of heaven is at hand,” was Christ’s way of announcing his own Personality. He was himself that kingdom and its King. In this business of sin-destruction the earth needs the heavens. The action is spiritually astronomic. The motive or the reason must come from above, not to terrify by its dignity, but to sustain and redeem by its sufficiency. Hence the mingled tragedy and glory of that opening call —

“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”

Then came the miracles, saying the same thing in another language. They were full of the kingdom of heaven in its tender, domestic, healing aspect. They were gospels for the body. But not for the body only, only for the body as an entrance to the soul. It was the inner vision Christ wanted to open when he healed the blindness of the body. The leprous flesh was cleansed that a way might be found to the leprous soul. After the sermon and the miracles came the cross, repeating the same mystery of thought and recovery, but with a pathos

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unique and ineffable. The cross cannot be explained. To nail our poor theories on that tree but shows how our love has cooled and stiffened and expired. It is a mystery as a fact; it is a mystery as an explanation. Yet a mystery which communes with the heart and fills it with unutterable joy; a twilight mystery; the password of the evening breeze, on which the Lord ever comes to Eden; a mystery better known through tears than through speech, yet that may be known in a way no words can explain. We must not think of it as too dazzling to be useful, but as too tender to be rejected. I would only remove the mystery from the cold intellect that I might transfer it to the glowing heart.

But the cross is associated with blood. Yes. We must not set up our refinement against Christ’s agony. Let us warn our very souls against the shameful affectation of being more appalled by the blood than by the sin. A very wonderful thing this is that man should have become so refined as to shrink from blood and yet be able to speak of sin as if it shocked no feeling. Thus we deceive ourselves. We pretend to sink the sinner in the gentleman when we stand before the cross. This may be the deepest depth of infatuation. On the other hand, we must not think of blood only, but of the blood of Christ. Nor of the blood of Christ only, but of “the precious blood of Christ” — the very word being twice qualified, and thus raised out of common thought into regions of dignity and holiness. The last of Christ’s miracles before the resurrection was to turn his own blood into wine. That blood lay beyond the reach of Roman spear. That blood did not fall upon the earth and waste itself in the dust. Corruptible gold could have bought corruptible redemption, but we have come by faith to know that we “are not redeemed with corruptible things.”

When we sink into the humiliation which alone befits our sense of sin — when we abhor ourselves in dust and ashes — the thing above all other things that we do not want is an Example. After redemption we need it, but not before. To preach to me the fact and the doctrine of Christ’s Example when I am stung through and through with experiences of my sin is simply to mock me. It is to oppose to me an infinite sneer. I then want a Saviour, not an

Example. I want salvation, not rebuke. Do not say to me, See in Christ an instance of self-sacrifice and loving obedience, but say to me, Behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world. Bring down your gospel to the pit of my helplessness. Tell angels of examples, but to the sinner preach a Saviour. And that Saviour must have in his hands the print of the nails and in his side the wound of the spear. I must see them and feel them by faith. The redness of his apparel must proclaim his quality. He must not come to me in the snow of his holiness, but in the crimson of his sacrifice. The shame of my sin can bear the sight of his blood. This would be ecstasy but for the humiliation and the sorrow of my soul. My contrition takes it out of the rank of romance and sets it at the head of facts. As the cross is the one way to heaven, so conscious sin is the one way to the cross. To the intellect it is foolishness, to pride it is a stumbling-block, but to broken-heartedness and self-helplessness it is the very power and love and glory of God.

The heart has many moods, and the aspects of Christ and his work must be various enough to meet them all. Science is for experts; the cross is for sinners. As the world is many, so the heart itself is many. It must be met in every experience, especially in its agony on account of sin. The temptation of the expert is to write for experts. He cannot easily change his apparatus. He talks to his peers, or to those who may become his peers, through long training and much acquisition. But the evangelist talks to the common heart, speaking to every man of the wonderful works of God in the tongue wherein the man was born. This is the great translation. This is the pentecostal miracle. Thus, instead of emptying the gospel message out of one language into another, God the Holy Ghost enables every man who has received the gift of life to tell the gospel story in the only truly original language of living and definite experience. Grammar is not excluded; it is subordinated. The expert and the evangelist should work together. In this connection the point is that Christ’s work should appeal to every mood of the heart, and that to exclude the evangelical view of that work is to leave the heart without comfort or hope in its bitterest desolation. It is not to be supposed that the world is full of experts who are only waiting for a rectified record in order to become Christians. We must not imagine that the question of dates is standing between men and the forgiveness of their sins. Such questions are by no means unimportant, yet there are other questions which infinitely transcend them in urgency. Take this case: What must I do to be saved? I have sinned against heaven with an outstretched arm: by day I have no light and by night no rest because of the pain and shame of self-reproach: I dare not look toward God in his righteousness: I am hopeless, helpless, desolate. — What is the answer to the condition faintly indicated by these confessions? for be it always understood that such agony has no adequate speech. I have always found that the best answer is the cross, and that the reply of the cross is this:

1. Jesus Christ came expressly to
meet such cases.

2. That Jesus Christ did something
for the sinner which the sinner
could never do for himself.
What that* something is no
words can fully tell.

3. That Jesus Christ tasted death
for every man,

4. That where sin abounded grace
did much more abound.

5. That Christ is able to save unto
the uttermost.

These are the great evangelical replies, and by them the sincerity of the inquirer may be tested beyond doubt. Broken-heartedness on account of personal sin will never chafe under such gracious and healing counsel. These replies are greater than literal criticism. They are spiritual answers to a spiritual condition. They express the majesty and the pathos of the crucified Christ. There are moments in the soul’s suffering when that word

CRUCIFIED

shines with the glory of an immediate revelation. It represents the tenderest love of God. It bruises the serpent’s head.

Have we not some hints of deeper meanings in the case of common human suffering? Here is one mourning for his firstborn, and will not be comforted. The life so lonely, the grave so deep and cold, the farewell so long; the poor heart cannot bear it; faith totters under a mortal blow; the very soul is almost turned into desperate blasphemy. Who amongst us can touch that agony — who dare speak to such sacred woe? Can the physiologist calm the heart by his science? Can the physician recall the vanished joy by some professional statement? Who, then, can find the door of the sanctuary? Only one who has suffered a kindred loss. One who has been crucified. One who knows the password of grief. Sorrow must speak to sorrow. Wound must speak to wound. So with the deeper agonies. We have not an high-priest that cannot be touched. He lays his wounds on ours — he heals us with his blood.

This can hardly be explained in words. Perhaps we may find it convenient at this point — face to face as we are with such unfathomable words as Sin and Blood — to make up our minds to some working estimate of the limit and function of Explanation as applied to Christian mysteries. For my own guidance, personally and pastorally, I have laid down a few governing principles. Thus:

1. The human can never fully
grasp or realize the whole
meaning of the divine.

2. The inability of the human to
grasp the whole meaning of the
divine is not a humiliation but
a necessity and a discipline.

3. To insist upon the literal and
exhaustive explanation of spiritual mysteries is one of the most
deceitful impulses -of intellectual
vanity.

4. Every attempt to bring spiritual
mysteries within purely intellectual apprehension is to encroach upon the function of the
heart as the best interpreter of
God.

5. Obedience to the divine will is the primary condition of knowing all that is knowable of the divine doctrine.

Within the range of these principles I have escaped the frets and disappointments inseparable from fruitless ambitions, and in that degree have been enabled to bring undivided attention to bear in legitimate directions. They have, too, if I may continue to be personal, had a useful effect upon all my endeavors after what is called definite religious teaching. I have lived to know that we can be as definite in declaring a mystery as in stating a fact.

The soul may be a long time in coming to the apprehension of that possibility. The mystery is itself a fact. We have to walk under the sky, not over it. We have to worship God, not to understand him. The honest teacher will never be ashamed to say, “I do not know.” He must often say so, and at these points, marked against trespass, he and his students will unite in common prayer, and temptation may be resisted by fasting. We cannot be as definite in the statement or even in the apprehension of spiritual truth — the truth which is without form — as in the statement of scientific facts, for reasons which lie within the facts themselves. Science concerns itself with phenomena, with the measurable, the ascertainable, the concrete, and when it gets to the limit of phenomena it stops, lest it should stumble upon a religion. With what does religion concern itself? With God and sin and motive, with redemption, forgiveness, character, destiny. Science can make all. the words it wants for the telling of its wondrous tale; but religion is always short of words, and so is driven into exclamations and impetuosities which literalists easily mistake for cant. It cries out, Who can find out the Almighty unto perfection? Who hath directed the Spirit of the Lord, or being his counselor hath taught him? Oh the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out! Whether in the body or out of the body, the spiritual man is often quite uncertain, and as for the things he hears in the higher places — the subdued thunders, the thrilling whispers, the weird beating of unseen wings, the inscriptions in half-lightning and in half-gloom — he says, such communings and visions are not for words, they are for the heart’s mute wonder. In religion there are few things we can fitly tell. Religion can sometimes do little more than hint at its own secret. We can measure the altar, but not the prayer. We can tell all about the Roman gallows, but language is hushed and awed before the Christian cross. The crucifixion is Roman; the Atonement is divine. We know it and receive it and trust it expressly in its character as a mystery. It must not be supposed that because it is a mystery we do not know it. Forgetting that a doctrine may be received as a mystery, we confuse all the higher truths and put them in a false relation. It is a high attainment of knowledge to know that some things cannot be known. It is just at that point that the divine faculty for which the best name is Faith begins its unique work in the soul. Faith does no commerce in the small market of explanations. Faith has infinite ventures on the seas and continents of mystery. It is the substance of things hoped for; the evidence of things not seen. Thus we stand in a great mystery. Sin and Atonement, Law and Forgiveness, Holiness and Destiny, are mysteries. We hold them in Christian faith: all we know about them we learned from a Book which has taken such hold of our highest nature that we have come to regard it reverently as

THE WORD OF GOD.