The Earth of the Redemption

“The heavens, even the heavens are the Lord’s: but the earth hath he given to the children of men.” — PSALM cxv. 16.

TO-DAY we stand upon the summit of our privileges and look abroad upon our duties. It is as if we sat with Jesus by the well at Sychar and heard him say, “Lift up your eyes and look on the fields, for they are white already to the harvest.” We are to think of Foreign Missions. And the words which have suggested the line of thought which I want to ask you to pursue, are these striking words of David.

The heavens and the earth are set in contrast with each other. The heavens with their sun and moon and stars, their wandering winds, their majestic domes and pinnacles and fields of cloud, their mysteries of rain and dew, of frost and snow; and then the earth, with its familiar cities and forests and corn-fields, its homes of men and women, ics seas and rivers, its sports and toils, its friendships i 74 The Itarth of the Redemption.

and kinships, those stain1. <>Y<T a — ain<t each other. Ami their contract is in i .t while the heavare nut of the re-ieh of man, the expression and it of forces which lie cannot control, the earth is whut man makes ir. He is the changing power here. He turns the rivers when- h-.- will, and makes the forests give place to gardens, and builds the cities where, the lions used to roar. Over his head all the while stretch the great mysterious 1, some

times all calmness, sometimes all tumult, sending their influences down to him, but out of reach of any influence of his, “The heavens, even the heavens are the Lord’s. The earth hath he given to the children of men.”

It is the familiar contrast which is alwavs pre-nt and always having its effect upon our life. The earth and life upon the earth are never the name things that they would bo if the great heaven did not stretch, mysterious and unattainable, above them. Man, great as his power grows upon the earth, is always kept aware of how limited his power is. There is always the heaven above him, which is n.»r his. but God’s. And this becomes a figure of the limit of man’s power everywhere. Not to create Jir-t principles OF truths, nor to change them i,i any way, but only t<> apply them, to set them at work upon the material of life, this is the limited prerogative of man. Not to call into be in — the hipowers, but «»nly to open the lower re-inns of’ nature to their influence, as the farmer opens the earth to the sunshine and the rain, this is our human w«>rk.

So David’s verse has in it the lofty description of the pvat philosophy of the universe, to the knowledge of which mankind gradually arrives, that the source of all power is beyond man’s reach, and that the place of man is just to furnish in his faithful arid obedient life a medium through which the power that is in the heavens may descend and work upon the earth.

For evidently when David says that God has “given the earth to the children of men,” he cannot mean that it has been given away from those eternal plans and purposes of goodness which God must always keep with reference to all His creation. If we had any such thought as that we should only need another verse of the same David to set us right. In the twenty-fourth psalm he sings, “The earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof; the round world and they that dwell therein.” In whatever sense then it is true that God has given the earth to man, it is not true in any sense which would imply that it had ceased to be God’s world, that He had given it away from Himself, out of His oversight or out of those purposes of righteousness and holiness which are in the very substance of His nature. It is God’s world still. It has been given to man not absolutely, but in trust, that man may work out in it the will of ( ;<><!; given — may we not say? — -just as a father gives a child a corner of his great garden, and says, ‘• Then-, that is yours; now cultivate it.” Still there lies thu father’s great garden with its orderly beds and rich llow<-rs, which is the child’s pattern in all i 7 6 The Jtarth .->/ /// -: fit ion.

that lie tries to d- !•• tin- l-itln-r’- inlen

the child nm the slips and seeds for

his <»wn soil; and when the summer comes it is !«y the standard of tin- lather’s ^reat u’anlen that the success or failure of the lpoy’s gardening must, l»e judged. That is the way in which God hsis given the earth to man; not to be played with for our own pleasure, but to be worked for Him.

You know how full the parables of Jesus are of this idea. “A certain householder planted a vineyard, and let it out to husbandmen.” “A man travelling into a far country, called his servants and delivered unto them his goods.” “Give me the portion of goods that falleth to me,” says the younger son to the father. “And he divided unto them his living,” runs the story. Everywhere the notion is of entrustment

Here is the fundamental difference in the lives of men. Man finds the world in his hands. He can do with it what he will. Oh how obedient it is, how docile, and how plastic! He makes the fields his slaves, and bids them fill his barns and load his table. He makes the hills his treasuries and calls upon their silver and their gold to glorify his Hie. !!•• the river, “Feed me,” to the ocean, “Carry me;” to the subtle powers of the air, “Give me your light.” Kv< ry where the world is his. But everywhere the, difference of men lies here, in whether this mastery seems to be absolute, or whether it seems to lie a trust. Absolute mastery UK a us s-1 (-indulgence. Its reckless fruits are everywhere, in arrogance and insolence, in “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life.” The mastery of trust means humility, conscientiousness, elevation, charity, the fear of God and love of man. These are the two great types of strength which fill the earth — the Caesars and Napoleons claiming the earth for them selves, and subduing it to their proud wills — the Pauls and Bonifaces and Xaviers and Elliots and Livingstons, claiming the earth for holiness, and subduing it to the will of God.

And now it is in connection with this higher and true view of the giving of the world by God to man that the coming of Christ into the world gains its true meaning. “God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself.” What do these words of the great apostle mean? Think of it! Here was God’s world given to man to keep, to use, to work for God. Here was man, always falling in to the temptation to think the gift of trust an absolute gift. And here the Giver came with clear assurance of himself; making the men who saw him know that it was he; touching the earth which was his own with a wise power that called out from it capacities which the poor tenant never had discovered; not taking it back out of man’s keeping, but making himself man, so that all men might see what it might really mean for man to keep and use and work the earth of God; so God came to his world.

Could anything be more effectual than that? It was as if the maker of a great instrument had given

it into the keeping of a pupil of his who, losing the

1 78 77/6’ Earth of the Redemption.

knowledge of what mysterious and mighty harm’ were hidden in the subtle mechanism, had degr it to low employment and played upon it only dancing ditties and sensuous melodies. By-and-by the master comes into the pupil’s house. He lays his lingers on the keys. He wakes the organ’s Bleeping heart. The wakened instrument responds, and for a moment men hear the great revelation of its nature. There is the redemption of the organ. Just exactly such was Christ’s redemption of the world. It was a true man; all the truer man because it was God in man; it was the Father in the Son who showed what earth, used in the fear of God, might be. In him there could be no doubt of what sort had been the giving of the earth to the children of men of which David had sung so long ago. It could not for one moment seem to have been a gift to man’s self-indulgence and selfishness. It certainly had not been a giving of the earth away from God. It had been given to the divine in man, to that in man which had in it the nature of divinity, and which was capable, by obedience, of becoming infinitely near to God. It was the gift of trust from a Father to his child, in which the given thing is all the more the Father’s when it has been given to the child who is true part of the Father. That this is the real nature of God’s gift of earth to man, was the assertion of the incarnation and of all the life of Jesus.

I hope you see that this is no slight distinction. It lies at the bottom of all man’s life upon the earth. Shall he make the earth the kingdom of God, or the kingdom of his own selfishness? Christ stands in the midst of all the tumult of human history and says to men, “After this manner pray ye. Our Father wh a art in heaven. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” The divine character of human life is asserted wherever that prayer is prayed. The brutal vices and the cultivated frivolities of men, the cruelties, and wrongs, and injustices of man to man, the stupefying of men’s souls by self-indulgence, the lusts and hatred which make so much of the earth so wretched, all of these are declared to be intruders; not merely ungodly but inhuman; not the natural but the unnatural development of man’s life upon the earth, wherever the true nature of God’s gift of earth to man is set forth by the life and word of Jesus.

It is within this great general purpose that all the special personal works which Christ does for men are included. He forgives the sins of souls that are penitent. It is that they may be able to take the world which God has given them and live in it as His, full of the profoundest gratitude which a soul can feel. He comforts sufferers in sorrow. It is that by one more avenue they may understand his love, and so bring loving hearts to the understanding of this earthly life, and find it full of him. He sets before men the promise of eternal glory. It is that this life may be glorified by the anticipated radiance of the perfect life to which it leads. Forgiveness, consolation, the promised heaven, none of them has its complete and final purpose in itself. The ultimate purpose of all is present character; tin, man, here and now, living the redeemed life in the redeemed world, offering in all his godly use of it the world which God has given him to God. This was what Christ asserted and made possible.

And now, what has all this to do with foreign missions? Do you not see? The world is God’s world, given by Him to man for man to use in obedience to God. Man has taken the world, but he has largely forgotten that it is his in trust, and has used it largely as if it were absolutely his. Yet everywhere misgivings and vague reminiscences of the true nature of the gift remain. These constitute the never fixed but never wholly perishing religious life of man. Now into this world God comes in Christ to redeem it to Himself, as I have been trying to describe. That coming takes place at one certain point. We can see I suppose two reasons for that. One reason was that if it were to be a genuine Incarnation, an actual utterance of the divine life in a special human body, there was a natural necessity that for that body there should be a fixed locality upon the earth. There must be a Holy Land. There must be a Bethlehem, and a Jerusal in where the actual feet of the Incarnate God should walk. The other reason, no doubt, was that this new wonder was to follow the principle of all God’s wonderful communications, like the communication of light and the communication of truth, which never flash in simultaneous splendor through a whole atmosphere at once, but always pass by degrees, however rapidly, from particle to particle in a communicating medium which itself is glorified and educated by the passage. At one point then this Revelation comes, this Christ appears. But evidently that one point is but an incident. The fact which he comes to establish, the consciousness which he comes to renew, is one that belongs to all the earth. It is as true among the snows of Greenland and in the jungles of the tropics as upon the rocky plateau of Moriah and the green shores of Tiberias, that the earth is man’s only as man is God’s. The tidings must of necessity fall upon the earth as the sun must of necessity strike the planet first upon some one most exposed mountain top, but the mountain top knows that the sun is not for it alone, but for the world; and instantly it is calling to the other hill tops and to the deep valleys. Or, shall we say, in homelier metaphor, it is as if a father sends his message to the household of his children, and one child takes the message at the door, not the best child by any certainty, not by any certainty the child most capable of understanding what the message means, but just perhaps the child who stands the nearest to the door. And then the moment that that child has it in his hand, he knows that it is not for him alone, and calls out to his brothers, “Come and hear.” That is the simple genesis of foreign missions, and its principle always remains the same. The circle widens from its first centre. New circles with new centres form, but still so long as there is any child in the whole house who has not heard the father’s message, the impulse and the sense of duty live. The desire to let the whole redeemed world know of its r< •<!< -i up turn, moves in the heart of every man vividly conscious of the redemption in himself.

And what will be the result of such a telling of the true nature of God’s gift of the world to man? We cannot fail to know beforehand. That part of the world which wants to use the world selfishly and basely, will reject the story, and perhaps will kill the man who tells it. That part of the world which has been dissatisfied with its attempt to make the world a mere scene of self-indulgence, but which has not been able to conceive for it any great consistent purpose, will be dazed and bewildered by such a vast story as this which the incarnation tells, that all man’s life, and the earth where it is lived, belongs to God. But wherever any preservation of the world’s first idea has been kept, it will be brought out to meet this declaration in which it will recognize at once a kinship to itsel£ Men and religions in whom has lingered and struggled some knowledge of the sacredness of human life and of the possibility of man, how they will gather around the missionary truth of Christ and say,” Yes, we have been sure that somehow we and our earth belong-God: behold how we have tried to utter that assurance. This is what our poor altar means, Xay, this ip what these very idols meant at first, which have since then become such v stumbli:

We know that we and our earth have bi God. lias lu- indeed oome to claim up ‘.’ Trll us about it.” Is it not just what I said? Brother asking of brother what is the message which the Father has sent to the whole family, but which has fallen into one child’s hands before the rest!

I think there can hardly be conceived a picture of any more gracious and beautiful relation between man and his fellow-man than is involved in such a thought of missionary work as this. There is no arrogance about the missionary preacher or the missionary nation that so thinks about the missionary work. It is not Moses standing superior to the cringing multitude, insulting their thirst with the parade of his power to give or to refuse the water: “Hear now, ye rebels, must we bring you water out of this rock?” Such missionary insolence and contempt for the heathen there may sometimes have been. This is not that. Eather it is the exquisite and noble honor for the souls it speaks to, which fills all the rest of the history of Moses beside that one unhappy outbreak. You remember the profound .respect with which the great messenger of God again and again speaks of His Israel. “For they are thy people and thine inheritance.” So he pleads with God. So must Christendom think and speak of heathenism; so it will think and speak of heathenism when it has caught the true idea of the message of redemption which it has to carry.

We have been talking about the work which Christendom has to do for heathenism, as the carrying of a message; and we speak of it rightly so. Only, in order to ^etthe fullest understanding of this matter, we must remember what God’s messages are, and what it is to carry them. One of the lessons which we learn in our own Christian life at home is that God’s messages are not mere facts, to be given and received by the mere statement of their terms. God’s messages which he has sent to us, have always been full truths, which were not ours until our whole nature had received them. Only when they had possessed each part of us, our hearts, our tastes, our consciences, our intellects, did they become really ours. Now we must know that in the same complete way we are to give to the heathen what God has given us. Only as full grown truth, not as mere bare fact, we are to give the gospel to the heathen. Preaching the gospel to the heathen is not standing upon the beach of a dark continent and crying into the darkness the story of the Lord. It is nothing less, no thing easier, than laying upon all the heathen nature, upon body and soul and mind and conscience and ordinary habits, all together, the truth of the redeemed world as it has been laid upon all our nature in all our Christian culture. That is the reason why the missionary colleges in China and in India, and the medical missions with their hospital where the poor bring their sick bodies to be healed, and the mission aries’ homes with their living pictures of Christian family life, are as true and legitimate a part of our missionary power as are the churches where the missionaries preach. Philanthropy and education have come in these modern times to take a very prominent place in missionary operations, not because they were needed in addition to religion, but be cause they were part of the complete religion, be cause the full truth of Christ must reach the whole nature of man through the whole nature of man, or the true Gospel was not preached. What wonder also if sometimes, since, as we have seen, the Gospel looks for recognition to a consciousness already present in the soul of man, it should be able to attain that recognition the more readily, if knocking first at the outermost and easiest doors of physical necessity and intellectual curiosity, it seeks through them a gradual approach to the chamber where the power of the deepest faith resides, and so philanthropy and education should be at first most prominent in the missionary work. It is so with the heathen man among us here, and there is no reason why it should not be so also with the heathen man across the sea. There are two principal objections which in these days rise in men’s minds, with every thought of Foreign Missions. One is the excellence of the heathen and the other is the imperfection of Christians. I cannot but think that both of these objections disappear, if such an idea of Foreign Missions as I have tried to set before you this morning is thoroughly understood. What shall we say about the first difficulty? You know how common it is. When we talk of going to tell men in heathen lands the story of the revelation of God in Christ, we are reminded that they know very much of God already. “They are not Godless,” we are told. Their sacred books are opened, the holy lives of their best men are pictured, and the whole power of their present knowledge of heaven, of the Deity, and of the soul, H to be set as an objection in the way of their ehan<v of receiving the fuller light which Christianity claims to be ready to bestow. Now, grant, tor tin; moment, the whole force of the <>l»j«:rtiuii, just as it is stated, and yet see how powerless it is. If Christianity were set forth as man’s only way of knowing anything about God,

it might indeed be puzzling to the missionary, when he came to his heathen land, to find a great deal of the knowledge of God there already. But if Christianity be what we have pictured, a redemption, a bringing back and reclaiming for God of an earth which has always belonged to Him, then surely the messenger of that redemption will not be surprised, but only devoutly thankful when he finds some consciousness of that belonging of the earth to God awaiting him wherever he goes. N land so dark that there is not some such light there! No brutal savagedom so savage that, in some breast of nobler sort, or, it may be, kept only in some fantastic rite whose spiritual meaning has long been lost, there is not uttered some sort of craving for the true nobility of servantship to God, of stewardship for earth. There can be no grudging of any such illumination. Christianity has not got to explain it away. She is all ready to lay hold on it and magnify it all she can. If to-day, in some as yet unopened island of the southern seas, there should be found a type of spiritual life far surpassing any tiling which heathenism ever yet has shown, a l«-ar of God a sense of duty and desire of holiness which made that island shine in the midst of heathenism like a star — what would be the true feeling of Christianity towards that island? Would there not be a special impulse to send our missionary there? Not the same impulse indeed which makes us want to send him to some horrid land, where men are murdering and torturing each other in their cruelty and lust, but a yet higher impulse; not the impulse which makes you want to put just one ray of light into the utter blackness of the midnight, but the impulse which makes you want to pour the full glory of the noontide into the beautiful but imperfect glory of the -morning.

And then the other objection to the work of Foreign Missions lies in the imperfection of Christians. You know the venerable argument which was never very strong, and which halts and stumbles now from age and long dishonorable service: “The heathen in Boston!” we are told. “Look how poor a thing our home religion is. Shall we not -make our own religion strong, convert our own masses, conquer our own sins, before we go around the world to preach our yet unappropriated gospel to the heathen?” It is not always those who are most earnest 01 active to complete our home religion who use Buch an argument. But that is not the point. It all proceeds upon a wrong idea of Christianity, and of its way of gaining power over man. If we recur a moment to the simple figure which I used awhile ago, and see the one child who stands nearest to the door taking his father’s message first, the question comes at once: What right has that one child to keep the message all to himself, until such time as he has perfectly read and learned and inwardly digested it, before he gives it to his brothers, whose it is as much as his? What right has Andrew to wait till he is sure that he has perfectly comprehended Jesus, before he findeth his brother Simon, and pours into his ears the tidings which belong to both, “We have found the Messias “?

Probably it is not an argument with which it is worth while to argue, but we cannot help thinking where, with such an argument in force, would have been the richness of Christian history! If every land must for itself have made the very best and fullest use of the Gospel before it could offer it to any other land, how the great work would have halted and stayed in its first littleness. Still, on the desolate fields of Galilee, or amid the ruins of Jerusalem, a few disconsolate and hopeless Jews would be telling to-day to one another the un believed and unused story of the cross. The earnest heart and manly intellect of Paul, full of the spirit of his Mas ter, soon broke the spell of such a sophistry as that, and Europe saw the light through the dim medium of a Judaism which was itself still more than half darkness.

Truth is too eager to wait for any one soul to appropriate it perfectly before it presses on through it to other souls. Truth will crowd like the river through narrow gates of rock, to reach the open val ley which waits for her beyond, and will not deny her richness to the open valley until she has worn herself a full broad passage through the slowly yielding rock. A little child finds a strange shell upon the sea shore, and he need not wait until he has himself completely understood it before he carries it to the great naturalist and gives him in it the one golden key to whole regions of knowledge which have been locked up and useless. Indeed there is no nobler sight than to see the weaker thus ministering to the greater of its own half appreciated knowledge of the works of God. Let every man tell what he knows of truth, of nature, and of God; and other men hearing his message, shall send back to him interpretations of it which he could never have discovered for himself. Reflected out of other men’s experiences it shall come back to enlighten him. That is the only principle.

This is the simple principle of foreign missions. See what we have to-day. The world is growing more and more open every year. No longer like a ship with watertight compartments, any one of which might be flooded with blessing or with ruin, and the rest remain unconscious of the change, no richer and no poorer than they were before; but now, with all its bulkheads broken down, so that the whole great system is but one, and what belongs to any part belongs to all, so lives the world to-day, so it is evidently going to live more and more in days to come.

No longer are there clearly defined limits of Christendom and heathenism. The Chinese Joss House grins in its fantastic worship on the streets of San

Francisco, and tin- truths of Christianity arc del on the highways of Japan. For the first tinir in the history of the world there is a manifest possibility of a universal faith. Distance has ceased to be a hindrance. Language no longer makes men total strangers. A universal commerce is creating common bases and forms of thought. For the first time in the history of the world there is a manifest, almost an immediate, possibility of a universal religion. No wonder that at such a time the missionary spirit which had slumbered for centuries should have sprung upon its feet, and the last fifty years should have been one of the very greatest epochs in missionary labor in the whole history of the world.

I have indicated clearly enough to-day what is the special character of this new missionary spirit of these modern times. It is not arrogant. It is humble. It tries to learn as well as teach. It does not hesitate to feel and to declare its honor for very much of the greatness and spiritual power of the paganism to which it brings the Gospel.

That spirit is a mighty gain. It is the spirit of light, and honesty and truth. It is full of faith in God and man. I have tried to show also that it is the spirit of an intensified and not of a diminished energy in missionary work.

And yet we must not let that spirit run to i’alp tremes; we must not yield to false exaggerations. We must not idealize heathenism while we see all the faults and flaws of an arch-Christianity. Th< remains, beyond the contradiction of the lild- folly, that the best part of the world to-day is Christian, and not heathen. The healthiest life, the truest brotherhood, the noblest thought, the fullest manhood, where is the advocate of heathen virtue, where is the critic or foe of Christian faith, who will deny to day, as a plain fact, that all these great things are to be found within the sound of the Gospel, within the light of the cross, and not under the shadow of any heathen temple in the most beautiful of pagan lands? This is our plea for foreign missions. God has given the earth to the children of men. But the children of men are God’s children too. Only in His name and fear do they truly possess the earth which He has given them. To claim the earth for Him was the great work of Christ. To claim the earth for Him must be the work of every servant of Christ who in any degree is like his Master. That claim is to be made first by living ourselves brave, pure, faithful, Godlike lives upon the earth, letting men see and proving to ourselves that a man may live upon this wicked earth as the true child of God. It is to be made again by telling to all mankind, in the never outworn, never outgrown story of the Incarnation, that they and the earth on which they live are not their own but God’s; are their own only be cause they are God’s; have been made truly and thoroughly their own by being redeemed to God in Jesus Christ.