'These things they will do unto you,' and they will do them 'for My
name's sake'; they will do them 'because they know not Him that sent
Me.'
'The world,' in Christ's language, is the aggregate of godless men. Or,
to put it a little more sharply, our Lord, in this context, gives in
His full adhesion to that narrow view which divides those who have come
under the influence of His truth into two portions. There is no mincing
of the matter in the antithesis which Christ here draws; no hesitation,
as if there were a great central mass, too bad for a blessing perhaps,
but too good for a curse; which was neither black nor white, but
neutral grey. No! however it may be with the masses beyond the reach of
the dividing and revealing power of His truth, the men that come into
contact with Him, like a heap of metal filings brought into contact
with a magnet, mass themselves into two bunches, the one those who
yield to the attraction, and the other those who do not. The one is 'My
disciples,' and the other is 'the world.' And now, says Jesus Christ,
all that mass that stands apart from Him, and, having looked upon Him
with the superficial eye of those men round about Him at that day, or
of the men who hear of Him now, have no real love to Him--have, as the
underlying motive of their conduct and their feelings, a real ignorance
of God, 'They know not Him that sent Me.'
Our Lord assumes that He is so completely the Copy and Revealer of the
divine nature as that any man that looks upon Him has had the
opportunity of becoming acquainted with God, and that any man who turns
away from Him has lost that opportunity. The God that the men who do
not love Jesus Christ believe in, is not the Father that sent Him. It
is a fragment, a distorted image tinted by the lens. The world has its
conception of God; but outside of Jesus Christ and His manifestation of
the whole divine nature, the world's God is but a syllable, a fragment,
a broken part of the perfect completeness. 'The Father of an infinite
majesty,' and of as infinite a tenderness, the stooping God, the
pitying God, the forgiving God, the loving God is known only where
Christ is accepted. In other hearts He may be dimly hoped for, in other
hearts He may be half believed in, in other hearts He may be thought
possible; but hopes and anticipations and fears and doubts are not
knowledge, and they who see not the light in Christ see but the
darkness. Out of Him God is not known, and they that turn away from His
beneficent manifestation turn their faces to the black north, from
which no sun can shine. Brother, do you know God in Christ? Unless you
do, you do not know the God who is.
But there is a deeper meaning in that word than simply the possession
of true thoughts concerning the divine nature. We know God as we know
one another; because God is a Person, as we are persons, and the only
way to know persons is through familiar acquaintance and sympathy. So
the world which turns away from Christ has no acquaintance with God.
This is a surface fact. Our Lord goes on to show what lies below it.
II. His second thought here is--the world's ignorance in the face of
Christ's light is worse than ignorance; it is sin.
Mark how He speaks: 'If I had not come and spoken unto them, they had
not had sin: but now they have no cloke for their sin.' And then again:
'If I had not done amongst them the works which none other men did,
they had not had sin.' So then He puts before us two forms of His
manifestation of the divine nature, by His words and His works. Of
these two He puts His words foremost, as being a deeper and more
precious and brilliant revelation of what God is than are His miracles.
The latter are subordinate, they come as a second source of
illumination. Men who will not see the beauty and listen to the truth
that lie in His word may perchance be led by His deed. But the word
towers in its nature high above the work, and the miracle to the word
is but like the picture in the child's book to the text, fit for feeble
eyes and infantile judgments, but containing far less of the revelation
of God than the sacred words which He speaks. First the words, next the
miracles.
But notice, too, how decisively, and yet simply and humbly and
sorrowfully, our Lord here makes a claim which, on the lips of any but
Himself, would have been mere madness of presumption. Think of any of
us saying that our words made all the difference between innocent
ignorance and criminality! Think of any of us saying that to listen to
us, and not be persuaded, was the sin of sins! Think of any of us
pointing to our actions and saying, In these God is so manifest that
not to see Him augurs wickedness, and is condemnation! And yet Jesus
Christ says all this. And, what is more wonderful, nobody wonders that
He says it, and the world believes that He is saying the truth when He
says it.
How does that come? There is only one answer; only one. His words were
the illuminating manifestation of God, and His deeds were the plain and
unambiguous operation of the divine hand then and there, only because
He Himself was divine, and in Him 'God was manifested in the flesh.'
But passing from that, notice how our Lord here declares that in
comparison with the sin of not listening to His words, and being taught
by His manifestation, all other sins dwindle into nothing. 'If I had
not spoken, they had not had sin.' That does not mean, of course, that
these men would have been clear of all moral delinquency; it does not
mean that there would not have been amongst them crimes against their
own consciences, crimes against the law written on their own hearts,
crimes against the law of revelation. There were liars, impure men,
selfish men, and men committing all the ordinary forms of human
transgression amongst them. And yet, says Christ, black and bespattered
as these natures are, they are white in comparison with the blackness
of the man who, looking into His face, sees nothing there that he
should desire. Beside the mountain belching out its sulphurous flame
the little pimple of a molehill is nought. And so, says Christ, heaven
heads the count of sins with this--unbelief in Me.
Ah, brother, as light grows responsibility grows, and this is the
misery of all illumination that comes through Jesus Christ, that where
it does not draw a man into His sweet love, and fill him with the
knowledge of God which is eternal life, it darkens his nature and
aggravates his condemnation, and lays a heavier burden upon his soul.
The truth that the measure of light is the measure of guilt has many
aspects. It turns a face of alleviation to the dark places of the
earth; but just in the measure that it lightens the condemnation of the
heathen, it adds weight to the condemnation of you men and women who
are bathed in the light of Christianity, and all your days have had it
streaming in upon you. The measure of the guilt is the brightness of
the light. No shadows are so black as those which the intense sunshine
of the tropics casts. And you and I live in the very tropical regions
of divine revelation, and 'if we turn away from Him that spoke on earth
and speaketh from heaven, of how much sorer punishment, think you,
shall we be thought worthy' than those who live away out in the
glimmering twilight of an unevangelised paganism, or who stood by the
side of Jesus Christ when they had only His earthly life to teach them?