A Threefold Retrospect

I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith, A.V.

The good contest I have wrestled out, the race I have finished, the faith I have kept. Two metaphors, under which St. Paul pictures his 2 Tim. iv. life’s end, have just passed before us, the libation 7* shed upon the altar, the boat unmoored from our Raa mortal shore, set free to cross the narrow strait of in Metaphor. death to the better land. Here he is metaphorical again, and the metaphors cover now not the end but the course, not martyrdom in prospect but life in retrospect. And here again, as in the previous verse, the old saint’s mind goes back upon mental pictures dear in earlier days, and he sees again the struggling limbs and the swift feet of the Greek athletes. Life had long ago seemed to him to be vividly parabled by those scenes. In one great passage (1 Cor. ix. 24-27) he had developed the illustration in minute and powerful detail; the stern discipline of training, the strict rules, the rejection which must follow an infraction, the straight eager course of the runners, the terribly purposeful blows of the boxers, the wreath of leaves, ‘corruptible’ shadow of the amaranthine crown of the victorious Christian. Again and again in other less conspicuous passages (one of them met Anticipation. us above, ii. 5) he had used those familiar and eloquent associations to animate himself and his disciples to live true to the Lord, true to present grace and to coming glory. Once more here, yet once more, the athlete of Christ speaks the old dialect, but now with the accent of achievement and repose. He is so very near the end, so very much of the peculiar trial of his lot is for ever over, the ‘journeyings often,’ ‘the care of all the Churches’ (2 Cor. xi. 26, 28), and so certain is his Master to love him and to uphold him over those few difficult paces before the end, that he speaks as if already off the field. Christ Jesus had enabled him so long for such a life that it was a relatively minor thing (may we not dare to say it?) to be sure that He would enable him, with a glorious adequacy, for the one last step of death.

For such an anticipation of the end St. Paul had one supreme precedent. His Lord had spoken just so, as if all was over, when yet for Him remained Gethsemane and Calvary; and they formed no mere final incident of His blessed work but the awful essence of it! Yet He could say to His Father, in that High Priestly Prayer (Joh. xvii. 4) so full of love, of peace, of heaven; ‘I have glorified Thee upon the earth; I have finished the work which Thou gavest me to do.’ Only some twenty hours more, and the anticipation would be supreme reality; ‘Jesus said, [¢ 1s finished; and He bowed His head and gave up the ghost’ (Joh. xix. 30).

So thinks and so speaks now His follower, who has striven so long and run so far in the power of the grace of the Crucified and Risen. He looks back

A Threefold Retrospect

already, with the consciousness of a soul half in 2 Tim. iv. heaven, upon the ‘good contest,’ the ‘grand 7. wrestling’; so almost we may render. It is nearly ‘wrestled out’ now; and the running is just ending at the goal. Yes, all that, practically, is completed and put aside. The days and nights of care and toil, the fight with temptations outward and inward, the conflicts with subtle and aggressive error, ‘the thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan’ (2 Cor. xii. 7), the extreme physical exhaustion amidst the personal perils and half-deaths of those long travellings — it is a finished story. The palestra, the stadiwn — he trained for them rigorously, and he has trodden them long; now he seems to contemplate them as one seated on some green overlooking hill. He has ‘kept the faith’; he has been true to the truth of the blessed Name; and that Name is to bring him now no more fighting, no more for ever, only rest, rest for ever with the Lord.

O Christian worker, Christian soldier, Christian pilgrim, in the midst of your ‘contest’ and your Respice ‘running’ to-day, or in what seems the midst of it, *7°™ for the end may all the while be just upon you, take heart often from the thought that even so for you, if you are true to the blessed Name, it shall one day be. The last care will have been felt — and cast upon the Lord, the last exhausting effort will have been made, the last witness under difficulties borne, the last sorrow faced and entered, the last word written, the last word spoken. And then the one remaining thing will be to let the Lord, ‘the Man at the Gate,’ lift thee in, and give thee rest.

2 Tim. iv.
8.

The Final
Hope.

Action and
Friction.