'Let not your heart be troubled … believe in God, believe also in
Me.'—JOHN xiv. 1.
The twelve were sitting in the upper chamber, stupefied with the
dreary, half-understood prospect of Christ's departure. He, forgetting
His own burden, turns to comfort and encourage them. These sweet and
great words most singularly blend gentleness and dignity. Who can
reproduce the cadence of soothing tenderness, soft as a mother's hand,
in that 'Let not your heart be troubled'? And who can fail to feel the
tone of majesty in that 'Believe in God, believe also in Me'?
The Greek presents an ambiguity in the latter half of the verse, for
the verb may be either indicative or imperative, and so we may read
four different ways, according as we render each of the two 'believes'
in either of these two fashions. Our Authorised and Revised Versions
concur in adopting the indicative 'Ye believe' in the former clause and
the imperative in the latter. But I venture to think that we get a more
true and appropriate meaning if we keep both clauses in the same mood,
and read them both as imperatives: 'Believe in God, believe also in
Me.' It would be harsh, I think, to take one as an affirmation and the
other as a command. It would be irrelevant, I think, to remind the
disciples of their belief in God. It would break the unity of the verse
and destroy the relation of the latter half to the former, the former
being a negative precept: 'Let not your heart be troubled'; and the
latter being a positive one: 'Instead of being troubled, believe in
God, and believe in Me.' So, for all these reasons, I venture to adopt
the reading I have indicated.
I. Now in these words the first thing that strikes me is that Christ
here points to Himself as the object of precisely the same religious
trust which is to be given to God.
It is only our familiarity with these words that blinds us to their
wonderfulness and their greatness. Try to hear them for the first time,
and to bring into remembrance the circumstances in which they were
spoken. Here is a man sitting among a handful of His friends, who is
within four-and-twenty hours of a shameful death, which to all
appearance was the utter annihilation of all His claims and hopes, and
He says, 'Trust in God, and trust in Me'! I think that if we had heard
that for the first time, we should have understood a little better than
some of us do the depth of its meaning.
What is it that Christ asks for here? Or rather let me say, What is it
that Christ offers to us here? For we must not look at the words as a
demand or as a command, but rather as a merciful invitation to do what
it is life and blessing to do. It is a very low and inadequate
interpretation of these words which takes them as meaning little more
than 'Believe in God, believe that He is; believe in Me, believe that I
am.' But it is scarcely less so to suppose that the mere assent of the
understanding to His teaching is all that Christ is asking for here. By
no means; what He invites us to goes a great deal deeper than that. The
essence of it is an act of the will and of the heart, not of the
understanding at all. A man may believe in Him as a historical person,
may accept all that is said about Him here, and yet not be within sight
of the trust in Him of which He here speaks. For the essence of the
whole is not the intellectual process of assent to a proposition, but
the intensely personal act of yielding up will and heart to a living
person. Faith does not grasp a doctrine, but a heart. The trust which
Christ requires is the bond that unites souls with Him; and the very
life of it is entire committal of myself to Him in all my relations and
for all my needs, and absolute utter confidence in Him as
all-sufficient for everything that I can require. Let us get away from
the cold intellectualism of 'belief' into the warm atmosphere of
'trust,' and we shall understand better than by many volumes what
Christ here means and the sphere and the power and the blessedness of
that faith which Christ requires.
Further, note that, whatever may be this believing in Him which He asks
from us or invites us to render, it is precisely the same thing which
He bids us render to God. The two clauses in the original bring out
that idea even more vividly than in our version, because the order of
the words in the latter clause is inverted; and they read literally
thus: 'Believe in God, in Me also believe.' The purpose of the
inversion is to put these two, God and Christ, as close together as
possible; and to put the two identical emotions at the beginning and at
the end, at the two extremes and outsides of the whole sentence. Could
language be more deliberately adopted and moulded, even in its
consecution and arrangement, to enforce this thought, that whatever it
is that we give to Christ, it is the very same thing that we give to
God? And so He here proposes Himself as the worthy and adequate
recipient of all these emotions of confidence, submission, resignation,
which make up religion in its deepest sense.
That tone is by no means singular in this place. It is the uniform tone
and characteristic of our Lord's teaching. Let me remind you just in a
sentence of one or two instances. What did He think of Himself who
stood up before the world and, with arms outstretched, like that great
white Christ in Thorwaldsen's lovely statue, said to all the troop of
languid and burdened and fatigued ones crowding at His feet: 'Come unto
Me all ye that are weary and are heavy laden, and I will give you
rest'? That surely is a divine prerogative. What did He think of
Himself who said, 'All men should honour the Son even as they honour
the Father'? What did He think of Himself who, in that very Sermon on
the Mount (to which the advocates of a maimed and mutilated
Christianity tell us they pin their faith, instead of to mystical
doctrines) declared that He Himself was the Judge of humanity, and that
all men should stand at His bar and receive from Him 'according to the
deeds done in their body'? Upon any honest principle of interpreting
these Gospels, and unless you avowedly go picking and choosing amongst
His words, accepting this and rejecting that, you cannot eliminate from
the scriptural representation of Jesus Christ the fact that He claimed
as His own the emotions of the heart to which only God has a right and
only God can satisfy.
I do not dwell upon that point, but I say, in one sentence, we have to
take that into account if we would estimate the character of Jesus
Christ as a Teacher and as a Man. I would not turn away from Him any
imperfect conceptions, as they seem to me, of His nature and His
work—rather would I foster them, and lead them on to a fuller
recognition of the full Christ—but this I am bound to say, that for my
part I believe that nothing but the wildest caprice, dealing with the
Gospels according to one's own subjective fancies, irrespective
altogether of the evidence, can strike out from the teaching of Christ
this its characteristic difference. What signalises Him, and separates
Him from all other religious teachers, is not the clearness or the
tenderness with which He reiterated the truths about the divine
Father's love, or about morality, and justice, and truth, and goodness;
but _the_ peculiarity of His call to the world is, 'Believe in Me.' And
if He said that, or anything like it, and if the representations of His
teaching in these four Gospels, which are the only source from which we
get any notion of Him at all, are to be accepted, why, then, one of two
things follows. Either He was wrong, and then He was a crazy
enthusiast, only acquitted of blasphemy because convicted of insanity;
or else—or else—He was 'God, manifest in the flesh.' It is vain to bow
down before a fancy portrait of a bit of Christ, and to exalt the
humble sage of Nazareth, and to leave out the very thing that makes the
difference between Him and all others, namely, these either audacious
or most true claims to be the Son of God, the worthy Recipient and the
adequate Object of man's religious emotions. 'Believe in God, in Me
also believe.'
II. Now, secondly, notice that faith in Christ and faith in God are not
two, but one.
These two clauses on the surface present juxtaposition. Looked at more
closely they present interpenetration and identity. Jesus Christ does
not merely set Himself up by the side of God, nor are we worshippers of
two Gods when we bow before Jesus and bow before the Father; but faith
in Christ is faith in God, and faith in God which is not faith in
Christ is imperfect, incomplete, and will not long last. To trust in
Him is to trust in the Father; to trust in the Father is to trust in
Him.
What is the underlying truth that is here? How comes it that these two
objects blend into one, like two figures in a stereoscope; and that the
faith which flows to Jesus Christ rests upon God? This is the
underlying truth, that Jesus Christ, Himself divine, is the divine
Revealer of God. I need not dwell upon the latter of these two
thoughts: how there is no real knowledge of the real God in the depth
of His love, the tenderness of His nature or the lustrousness of His
holiness; how there is no certitude; how the God that we see outside of
Jesus Christ is sometimes doubt, sometimes hope, sometimes fear, always
far-off and vague, an abstraction rather than a person, 'a stream of
tendency' without us, that which is unnameable, and the like. I need
not dwell upon the thought that Jesus Christ has showed us a Father,
has brought a God to our hearts whom we can love, whom we can know
really though not fully, of whom we can be sure with a certitude which
is as deep as the certitude of our own personal being; that He has
brought to us a God before whom we do not need to crouch far off, that
He has brought to us a God whom we can trust. Very significant is it
that Christianity alone puts the very heart of religion in the act of
trust. Other religions put it in dread, worship, service, and the like.
Jesus Christ alone says, the bond between men and God is that blessed
one of trust. And He says so because He alone brings us a God whom it
is not ridiculous to tell men to trust.
And, on the other hand, the truth that underlies this is not only that
Jesus Christ is the Revealer of God, but that He Himself is divine.
Light shines through a window, but the light and the glass that makes
it visible have nothing in common with one another. The Godhead shines
through Christ, but _He_ is not a mere transparent medium. It is
Himself that He is showing us when He is showing us God. 'He that hath
seen Me hath seen'—not the light that streams through Me—but 'hath
seen,' in Me, 'the Father.' And because He is Himself divine and the
divine Revealer, therefore the faith that grasps Him is inseparably one
with the faith that grasps God. Men could look upon a Moses, an Isaiah,
or a Paul, and in them recognise the eradiation of the divinity that
imparted itself through them, but the medium was forgotten in
proportion as that which it revealed was beheld. You cannot forget
Christ in order to see God more clearly, but to behold Him is to behold
God.
And if that be true, these two things follow. One is that all imperfect
revelation of God is prophetic of, and leads up towards, the perfect
revelation in Jesus Christ. The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews
gives that truth in a very striking fashion. He compares all other
means of knowing God to fragmentary syllables of a great word, of which
one was given to one man and another to another. God 'spoke at sundry
times and in manifold portions to the fathers by the prophets'; but the
whole word is articulately uttered by the Son, in whom He has 'spoken
unto us in these last times.' The imperfect revelation, by means of
those who were merely mediums for the revelation leads up to Him who is
Himself the Revelation, the Revealer, and the Revealed.
And in like manner, all the imperfect faith that, laying hold of other
fragmentary means of knowing God, has tremulously tried to trust Him,
finds its climax and consummate flower in the full-blossomed faith that
lays hold upon Jesus Christ. The unconscious prophecies of heathendom;
the trust that select souls up and down the world have put in One whom
they dimly apprehended; the faith of the Old Testament saints; the
rudimentary beginnings of a knowledge of God and of a trust in Him
which are found in men to-day, and amongst us, outside of the circle of
Christianity—all these things are as manifestly incomplete as a
building reared half its height, and waiting for the corner-stone to be
brought forth, the full revelation of God in Jesus Christ, and the
intelligent and full acceptance of Him and faith in Him.
And another thing is true, that without faith in Christ such faith in
God as is possible is feeble, incomplete, and will not long last.
Historically a pure theism is all but impotent. There is only one
example of it on a large scale in the world, and that is a kind of
bastard Christianity—Mohammedanism; and we all know what good that is
as a religion. There are plenty of people amongst us nowadays who claim
to be very advanced thinkers, and who call themselves Theists, and not
Christians. Well, I venture to say that that is a phase that will not
last. There is little substance in it. The God whom men know outside of
Jesus Christ is a poor, nebulous thing; an idea, not a reality. He, or
rather It, is a film of cloud shaped into a vague form, through which
you can see the stars. It has little power to restrain. It has less to
inspire and impel. It has still less to comfort; it has least of all to
satisfy the heart. You will have to get something more substantial than
the far-off god of an unchristian Theism if you mean to sway the world
and to satisfy men's hearts.
And so, dear brethren, I come to this—perhaps the word may be fitting
for some that listen to me—'Believe in God,' and that you may, 'believe
also in Christ.' For sure I am that when the stress comes, and you
_want_ a god, unless your god is the God revealed in Jesus Christ, he
will be a powerless deity. If you have not faith in Christ, you will
not long have faith in God that is vital and worth anything.