As I have observed, there is a very significant omission in one of the
forms of the words. The enemies are told that they will never find Him,
but no such dark words are spoken to the friends. So, then, hostile
seeking of the Christ is in vain, and loving seeking of Him by His
friends, though they understand Him but very poorly, and therefore seek
Him that they may know Him better, is always answered and
over-answered.
Let me deal just for a moment or two with each of these. In their
simplest use the words of my first text merely mean this: 'You cannot
touch Me, I am passing into a safe asylum where your hands can never
reach Me.'
We may generalise that for a moment, though it does not lie directly in
our path, and preach the old blessed truth that no man with hostile
intent seeking for Christ in His person, in His Gospel, or in His
followers and friends, can ever find Him. All the antagonism that has
stormed against Him and His cause and words, and His followers and
lovers, has been impotent and vain. The pursuers are like dogs chasing
a bird, sniffing along the ground after their prey, which all the while
sits out of their reach on a bough, and carols to the sky. As in the
days of His flesh, His foes could not touch His person till He chose,
and vainly sought Him when it pleased Him to hide from them, so ever
since, in regard to His cause, and in regard to all hearts that love
Him, no weapon that is formed against them shall prosper. They shall be
wrapped, when need be, in a cloud of protecting darkness, and stand
safe within its shelter. Take good cheer, all you that are trying to do
anything, however little, however secular it may appear to be, for the
good and well-being of your fellows! All such service is a prolongation
of Christ's work, and an effluence from His, if there be any good in it
at all; and it is immortal and safe, as is His. 'Ye shall seek Me and
shall not find Me.'
But then, besides that, there is another thought. It is not merely
hostile seeking of Him that is hopeless vain. When the dark days came
over Israel, under the growing pressure of the Roman yoke, and amidst
the agonies of that last siege, and the unutterable sufferings which
all but annihilated the nation, do you not think that there were many
of these people who said to themselves: 'Ah! if we had only that Jesus
of Nazareth back with us for a day or two; if we had only listened to
Him!' Do you not think that before Israel dissolved in blood there were
many of those who had stood hostile or alienated, who desired to see
'one of the days of the Son of Man,' and did not see it? They sought
Him, not in anger any more; they sought Him, not in penitence, or else
they would have found Him; but they sought Him simply in distress, and
wishing that they could have back again what they had cared so little
for when they had it.
And are there no people listening to me now, to whom these words
apply?—
'He that will not, when he may,
When he will it shall be—Nay!'
Although it is (blessed be His name) always true that a seeking heart
finds Him, and whensoever there is the faintest trace of penitent
desire to get hold of Christ's hand it does grasp ours, it is also true
that things neglected once cannot be brought back; that the sowing time
allowed to pass can never return; and that they who have turned, as
some of you have turned, dear friends, all your lives, a deaf ear to
the Christ that asks you to love Him and trust Him, may one day wish
that it had been otherwise, and go to look for Him and not find Him.
There is another kind of seeking that is vain, an intellectual seeking
without the preparation of the heart. There are, no doubt, some people
here to-day that would say, 'We have been seeking the truth about
religion all our lives, and we have not got to it yet.' Well, I do not
want to judge either your motives or your methods, but I know this,
that there is many a man who goes on the quest for religious certainty,
and looks _at_, if not _for_ Jesus Christ, and is not really capable of
discerning Him when he sees Him, because his eye is not single, or
because his heart is full of worldliness or indifference, or because he
begins with a foregone conclusion, and looks for facts to establish
that; or because he will not cast down and put away evil things that
rise up between him and his Master.
My brother! if you go to look for Jesus Christ with a heart full of the
world, if you go to look for Him while you wish to hold on by all the
habitudes and earthlinesses of your past, you will never find Him. The
sensualist seeks for Him, the covetous man seeks for Him, the
passionate, ill-tempered man seeks for Him; the woman plunged in
frivolities, or steeped to the eyebrows in domestic cares,—these may in
some feeble fashion go to look for Him and they will not find Him,
because they have sought for Him with hearts overcharged with other
things and filled with the affairs of this life, its trifles and its
sins.
I turn for a moment to the seeking that is not vain. 'Ye shall seek Me'
is not on Christ's lips to any heart that loves Him, however
imperfectly, a sentence of separation or an appointment of a sorrowful
lot, but it is a blessed law, the law of the Christian life.
That life is all one great seeking after Christ. Love seeks the absent
when removed from our sight. If we care anything about Him at all, our
hearts will turn to Him as naturally as, when the winter begins to
pinch, the migrating birds seek the sunny south, impelled by an
instinct that they do not themselves understand.
The same law which sends loving thoughts out across the globe to seek
for husband, child, or friend when absent, sets the really Christian
heart seeking for the Christ, whom, having not seen, it loves, as
surely as the ivy tendril feels out for a support. As surely as the
roots of a mountain-ash growing on the top of a boulder feel down the
side of the rock till they reach the soil; as surely as the stork
follows the warmth to the sunny Mediterranean, so surely, if your heart
loves Christ, will the very heart and motive of your action be the
search for Him.
And if you do _not_ seek Him, brother, as surely as He is parted from
our sense you will lose Him, and He will be parted from you wholly, for
there is no way by which a person who is not before our eyes may be
kept near us except only by diligent effort on our part to keep thought
and love and will all in contact with Him; thought meditating, love
going out towards Him, will submitting. Unless there be this effort,
you will lose your Master as surely as a little child in a crowd will
lose his nurse and his guide, if his hand slips from out the protecting
hand. The dark shadow of the earth on which you stand will slowly steal
over His silvery brightness, as when the moon is eclipsed, and you will
not know how you have lost Him, but only be sadly aware that your
heaven is darkened. 'Ye shall seek Me,' is the condition of all happy
communion between Christ and us.
And that seeking, dear brother, in the threefold form in which I have
spoken of it—effort to keep Him in our thoughts, in our love, and over
our will—is neither a seeking which starts from a sense that we do not
possess Him, nor one which ends in disappointment. But we seek for Him
because we already have Him in a measure, and we seek Him that we may
possess Him more abundantly, and anything is possible rather than that
such a search shall be vain. Men may go to created wells, and find no
water, and return ashamed, and with their vessels empty, but every one
who seeks for that Fountain of salvation shall draw from it with joy.
It is as impossible that a heart which desires Jesus Christ shall not
have Him, as it is that lungs dilated shall not fill with air, or as it
is that an empty vessel put out in a rainfall shall not be replenished.
He does not hide Himself, but He desires to be found. May I say that as
a mother will sometimes pretend to her child to hide, that the child's
delight may be the greater in searching and in finding, so Christ has
gone away from our sight in order, for one reason, that He may
stimulate our desires to feel after Him! If we seek Him hid in God, we
shall find Him for the joy of our hearts.
A great thinker once said that he would rather have the search after
truth than the possession of truth. It was a rash word, but it pointed
to the fact that there is a search which is only one shade less blessed
than the possession. And if that be so in regard to any pure and high
truth, it is still more so about Christ Himself. To seek for Him is
joy; to find Him is joy. What can be a happier life than the life of
constant pursuit after an infinitely precious object, which is ever
being sought and ever being found; sought with a profound consciousness
of its preciousness, found with a widening appreciation and capacity
for its enjoyment? 'Ye shall seek Me' is a word not of evil but of good
cheer; for buried in the depth of the commandment to search is the
promise that we shall find.