Saved by the Word
“Who shall tell thee words, whereby thou and all thy house shall be saved.” Acts xi. 14.
CONVINCED by the concurrence of the vision and the arrival of the ambassadors, Peter at once consented to go to Csesarea. When he arrived, and found that Cornelius had been directed by a Divine message to send for him, he consented to preach the gospel freely to the Gentiles, and to receive them into the fellowship of faith, without imposing on them any part of the Jewish ceremonial.
When the Church at Jerusalem, which consisted of converted Jews, heard what Peter had done, they found fault. “They that were of the circumcision contended with him.” Placed upon his defence, Peter narrated the whole case, and obtained from the assembled council a favourable judgment on his conduct. There is certainly no Popery
Saved by the Word. here. Yet this is subsequent to the time when the Lord had said to him, “Thou art Peter,” etc. Either he was pope at this time, or he was never pope. The council placed him on his defence: he accepted the position, and defended himself. He assumed no autocratic authority. He simply submitted himself to the authority of his brethren.
At the date of Peter’s mission I should not venture to say that Cornelius needed to be saved; but he needed to be taught the way of salvation. There was before this time a quickening by the Spirit in his heart, but as yet he knew not the truth with his mind. Although at that moment the new life was already begun in his soul, so that if he had been called hence ere Peter arrived he would have entered the mansions of the Father’s house, the Word speaks of him as still needing to be taught how he should be saved. I shall adopt the same tone, and show the necessity of conveying even to such a man the message of the GospeL
Peter must go to Caesarea for the express purpose of telling this man how he may be saved. If his alms and prayers had been sufficient, there would have been no need of this message. They that are whole need not a physician.
This was no common publican or sinner. Before the angel promised a minister, or the promised minister came to preach, Cornelius was a “devout man, and one that feared God with all his house, which gave much alms to the people, and prayed to God alway.” Here is a man who possesses all the qualifications of a saint, if a saint can grow in the soil of this earth, without a seed sent down from heaven. He was devout in spirit, exemplary in the training of his children, beneficent to the poor, and constant in his religious duties. Here is a model man. If any man could be just with God, apart from faith in Christ crucified, surely this is the man. A better specimen of humanity you can nowhere find; yet the Word of God treats him as a sinner, and forthwith proceeds to tell him what he must do to be saved. There is no escape from the force of this case. It effectually shuts out all hope in the merit of a man. In presence of this word every mouth must be stopped, and all the world become guilty before God. If this man could not appear before the judgment-seat until his sins were blotted out in the blood of the Lamb, how shall we appear with our own sins or our own goodness marked to our account?
The difficulty of attaining a thorough practical conviction that if God should mark iniquity we could not stand, is greater, in some respects, where the sins are less gross. Open vices, although not more sinful, are more manifest than the rebellion that acts in the heart of a correct but carnal man. Hence the experience, renewed from age to age in history, that publicans and harlots go into the kingdom of heaven more readily than smooth and sombre Pharisees. A child or a savage realises easily and completely that yonder mountain which lifts its head to heaven is matter; but cannot comprehend that the air which encircles and overtops the mountain is matter too. An educated person knows that air is as truly matter as the rock. It is in some such way that those who are childish in spiritual perception take in more easily the thought that vice is sin, than that the godless bent of the carnal mind is sin. It needs a keener spiritual perception to realise that this devout and charitable centurion is lost by sin, unless and until he be found in Christ.
By what means shall Cornelius be saved? By words; “He shall tell thee words whereby thou shalt be saved,” Strange: when the loss is so deep and real, will words bring deliverance? — words — articulated air.
Saved by the Word.
It was natural for Naaman, with his hardy intelligence as a practised soldier, to toss his head in contempt at the proposal of a bath in Jordan as the cure of his disease. There is a class of scholars in our day who sneer at the proposal to cure sin by words, as Naaman sneered at the proposal to wash a leprosy away in water. They have no confidence in doctrines that come into a mans mind from without; they will rather trust to principles that spring up within the man. A salvation by words they despise. Dogma is the scorn of the unbelieving philosophy of the age.
Beware of wandering into the mist here, and so losing your way — your life. Words become life or death when God employs them to express and proclaim his will. God said, Let there be light; and there was light. Jesus cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth; and he that was dead obeyed. But these were the words of God, our Maker and Bedeemer. They were; and on that depended all their power. But may he not send his word into the world still? and may he not employ human lips and human ears as the channels through which it shall flow?
Even in the ordinary experience of life, men are saved or lost by words — the words of their fellows. An ocean-steamer at dead of night is rushing through the water, at the speed of a race-horse, bearing in its bosom a miscellaneous throng of men, women, and children, some asleep, some at work, some at play. Two words — breakers ahead — pass quietly but clearly from the watchman at the bow to the master on the gangway: two other words — starboard hard — ring out from the master to the man at the helm. As soon as these accents fall on the steersman’s ear, he presses the rudder mightily to one side, and the ship bounds clear of the rocks, only leaping a little higher for a moment, in the surf that surrounds their roots. These words, that passed away as breath on the breeze, saved five hundred warm human beings from a cold bed that night in the bottom of the sea.
The world with its teeming freight of humanity is rushing on like that ship through the sea of time. Mankind, like the globe on which they cluster, are, as regards their own sensations, still and stationary; but in the unseen, unfelt reality, sweeping forward like smoke on the wind. All are in motion always. A lost world will one day strike, and sink and die. God, who is rich in mercy, did not leave the world to its fate. He sent his Word, and saved it.
Truth, like a spirit, is invisible until it put a body on: and words are the body in which truth incarnates itself, in order that it may be known and felt. They may be spoken by human lips, or exhibited on a printed page, or sent along a wire in throbs of electric light — it matters not what form the words may assume, as it matters not what may be the colour of the ink in which the letters are written; in every form they are the body in which a spirit dwells. Evil spirits also become incarnate in a body of words. The wicked one embodies himself in words whereby men may be destroyed. The whole Word of God is the body which the Holy Spirit animates for his quickening and sanctifying work. Take heed how ye hear: the missing of a word may be the loss of a soul.