THE CHRISTIAN'S PEACE AND THE CHRISTIAN'S CONSISTENCY
PHILIPPIANS i. 21-30
He will be spared to them--Spiritual wealth of the paragraph--Adolphe
Monod's exposition--Charles Simeon's testimony--The equilibrium and its
secret--The intermediate bliss--He longs for their full
consistency--The "gift" of suffering
Ver. 21. +For to me, to live is Christ+; the consciousness and
experiences of living, in the body, are so full of Christ, my supreme
Interest, that CHRIST sums them all up; +and to die+, the act of
dying,[1] +is gain+, for it will usher me in from an existence of
blessing to an existence of more blessing still. +But+
Ver. 22. +if living+ on, +in the flesh+, be my lot; if the present
suspense issues in my being acquitted at the Roman tribunal, +this will
prove to me+ (_touto moi_) +fruit of work+; it will just mean so much
more work for the Lord, and so much more fruit; I shall welcome it not
as being the best thing in itself, as if I chose mortal life for its
own sake, but because of its ceaseless opportunities for my Lord. +And
which+ alternative +I shall choose, I do not know+, I do not
_recognize_ (_gnorizo_, as one who seeks to be sure of the face of
Ver. 23. a friend amidst other faces). +Nay+ (_de_), +I am held in
suspense on both sides+;[2] +my+ personal +desire being[3] in the
direction of departing+, striking my tent, weighing my anchor
(_analysai_),[4] +and being with Christ+ (for this is what "departing"
means for us Christians, on its other side); +for it is far, far
better+, by far more preferable, _pollo mallon kreisson_--aye even than
a "life in the flesh" which "is Christ"! +But+
Ver. 24. then +the abiding by+ (_epimenein_) +the flesh+, the brave,
faithful, holding fast to the conditions of earthly trial, +is more
necessary+, more obligatory, more of the nature of duty as against
pleasure, +on account of you+, and your further need of me in the Lord.
And +feeling+
Ver. 25. +confident of this, I know that I shall remain+--aye +and
shall remain side by side+ (_parameno_) +with you all+, as your
comrade, your helper, +in order to your progress and joy in your
faith+;[5] so as to promote your growth in the exercise of loyal
reliance on your Lord, and in the deep joy which is the natural issue
of such
Ver. 26. reliance; +so that your exultation may be overflowing in
Christ Jesus+, in your living union with Him, +in me+ (_en emoi_), "in"
whom you see a living example of your Lord's love, shewn to you +by
means of my+
Ver. 27. +coming back to you again+. +Only+, whether I am thus
actually restored to you or not, +order your life[6] in a way worthy of
the Gospel of Christ+ (above all, worthy of the unifying, harmonizing
power of the Gospel); +so that whether coming and seeing you, or+
remaining +absent, I may hear[7] about your circumstances+, your
condition, +that you are standing firm in One Spirit+,[8] in the power
of the One Strengthener, and, +with one soul+, one life and love, the
resultant of the One Spirit's work in you all, +wrestling side by
side+, with enemies and obstacles, +for [9]the faith of the Gospel+,
for the maintenance and victory of that reliance which embraces
Ver. 28. the truth of Christ; +and refusing to be+ (_me_) +scared out
of that attitude in anything by your+ (_ton_) +opponents+, the
unconverted world around you. +Such+ (_hetis_) calm united courage +is
to them an evidence+, a sure token, an omen, +of+ the +perdition+ which
awaits the obstinate foes of holiness, +but to you of+ the +salvation+
which awaits Christ's faithful witnesses. +And this, this+ condition
of conflict and courage, +is from God+; no mere blind result of
accidents, but His purpose.
Ver. 29. Yes, +because to you there has been granted[10] as an+ actual
+boon--for the sake of Christ not only the believing on Him but also
the suffering for His sake+;[11] a sacred privilege when it is involved
by
Ver. 30. loyalty to such a Master! So you will be +experiencing+[12]
(_echontes_) +the same conflict in kind+ (_oion_) (as you wrestle side
by side for your Lord against evil) +as that which you saw in me+, in
my case, when I was with you in those first days (Acts xvi.), _and_
which _you now hear of in me_, as I meet it in my prison at Rome.
The translation of our present section is completed. It has presented
rather more material than usual for grammatical remark and explanation;
constructions have proved to be complex, contracted, or otherwise
slightly anomalous; and points of order and emphasis have claimed
attention. But I trust that this handling of _the texture_ has only
brought more vividly into sight the holy richness and brightness of
_the design_. Sentence by sentence, we have been reading a message of
the first order of spiritual importance, as St Paul has spoken from his
own experience of the Christian's wonderful happiness in life and
death, and then, in his appeal to the Philippians, of the Christian's
path of love and duty.
Let us listen anew to each part of that precious message.
i. The Christian's Happiness in Life and Death.
In Adolphe Monod's volume of death-bed addresses, his _Adieux a ses
Amis et a l'Eglise_, one admirable chapter, the second, is devoted to
the passage before us, Phil. i. 21-26. From the borderland of eternity
the great French Christian looks backward and forward with St Paul's
letter in his hand, and comments there upon this divine possibility of
"Happiness in Life and in Death." "The Apostle," he says, "is asking
here which is most worth while for him, to live or to die. Often has
that question presented itself to us, and perhaps we, like the Apostle,
have answered that 'we are in a strait.' But I fear we may have used
the words in a sense far different from St Paul's. When we have wished
for death, we meant to say, 'I know not which alternative I ought most
to dread, the afflictions of life, from which death would release me,
or the terrors of death, from which life protects me.' In other words,
life and death look to us like two evils of which we know not which is
the less. As for the Apostle, they look to him like two immense
blessings, of which he knows not which is the better. Personally, he
prefers death, in order to be with Christ. As regards the Church and
the world, he prefers life, in order to serve Jesus Christ, to extend
His kingdom, and to win souls for Him. What an admirable view of life
and of death!--admirable, because it is all governed (_dominiee_), all
sanctified, by love, and is akin to the Lord Jesus Christ's own view of
life and death. Let us set ourselves to enter into this feeling
(_sentiment_). Life is good; death is good. Death is good, because it
releases us from the miseries of this life, but above all because, even
were life full for us of all the joys which earth can give, death bids
us enter into a joy and a glory of which we can form no idea. We are
then to consider death as a thing desirable in itself. Let us not shun
what serves to remind us of it. Let all the illnesses, all the sudden
deaths, all that passes round us, remind us that for each one of us
death may come at any moment. But then life also is good, because in
life we can serve, glorify, imitate, Jesus Christ. Life is not worth
the trouble of living for any other object. All the strength we
possess, all the breath, the life, the faculties, all is to be
consecrated, devoted, sanctified, crucified, for the service of our
Lord Jesus Christ. This crucified life is the happy life, even amidst
earth's bitterest pains; it is the life in which we can both taste for
ourselves and diffuse around us the most precious blessings. Let us
love life, let us feel the value of life--but to fill it with Jesus
Christ. In order to such a state of feeling, the Holy Spirit alone can
transform us into new men. But observe; it is not only that _our
spirit_ must be sustained, consoled, fortified; _the Spirit of God_
must come to dwell in us. We often set ourselves to work on ourselves,
to set our spirit in order; this is well, but it is not enough. We
want more. Jesus Christ Himself must dwell in our hearts by the Holy
Spirit.
"My friends, let us reflect upon the character of the promises of the
Gospel, and we shall see how far we are from possessing and enjoying
them. May God open the heavens above our heads; revealing all to us,
filling us with all wisdom, granting us to see that even here below we
may attain to perfect joy, while looking forward to possess hereafter
the plenitude of bliss and of victory. May He teach us how to gather
up the blessings which the heavens love to pour upon the earth which
opens to receive them. And so may He teach us to know that if earth is
able to bear us down and trouble us, it is unable to quench the virtues
of heaven, to annul the promises of God, or to throw a veil, be it even
the lightest cloud, over the love with which God has loved us in Jesus
Christ."[13]
"He being dead yet speaketh." On his bed of prolonged and
inexpressible sufferings Monod, called comparatively early to leave a
life and ministry of singular fruitfulness and rich in interests, found
in Jesus the inexhaustible secret of this blessed _equilibrium_ of St
Paul. And what a cloud of witnesses have borne their testimony to that
same open secret, as the most solid while most supernatural of
realities! As I write, the memory comes up before me of a beloved
friend and kinsman, my contemporary at Cambridge, called unexpectedly
to die in his twenty-second year. Life to him was full of the
strongest interests and most attractive hopes, alike in nature and in
grace. He had no quarrel with life; it had poured out before him a
rich store of social and mental blessings, and a large wealth of
surrounding love, and the Lord Jesus, taking early and decisive
possession of the young man's heart, had only augmented and glorified,
not rebuked or stunted, every interest. But a slight fever, caught in
the Swiss hotel, was medically mismanaged, and when perfect skill was
summoned in, it was too late. His mother came to her son on his sofa
to tell him that he was not only, as he knew, very poorly; he was about
to die. In a moment, without a change of colour, without a tremor,
without a pause, smiling a radiant smile, he looked up and answered,
"Well, to depart and to be with Christ is far better!"
So the young Christian passed away, exchanging life which was sweet for
death which, because of the life it would reveal, was sweeter. And
"the veterans of the King" say just the same. If ever a man enjoyed
life, with a vigorous and conscious joy, it was Simeon of Cambridge.
And till the age of exactly seventy-seven he was permitted to _live_
with a powerful life indeed; a life full of affections, interests,
enterprises, achievements, and all full of Christ. Yet in that
energetic and intensely human soul "the _desire_ was to depart and to
be with Christ." It was no dreamy reverie; but it was supernatural.
It stimulated him to unwearied work; but it was breathed into him from
eternity. "I cannot but run with all my might," he wrote in the midst
of his youthful old age, "_for I am close to the goal_."
It is indeed a phenomenon peculiar to the Gospel, this view of life and
death. It is far more than resignation. It is different even from the
"holy indifference" of the mystic saints. For it is full of warmth,
and sympathy, and all the affections of the heart, _in both
directions_. The man who is the happy possessor of this secret does
not on the one hand go about saying to himself that all around him is
_maya_, is a dream, a phantasm of the desert sands counterfeiting the
waters and the woods of Eden. He is as much alive in human life as the
worldling is, and more. He cordially loves his dear ones; he is the
open-hearted friend, the helpful neighbour, the loving and loyal
citizen and subject, the attentive and intelligent worker in his daily
path of duty. Time with its contents is full of reality and value to
him. He does not hold that the earth is God-forsaken. With his Lord
(Ps. civ.), he "rejoices in the works" of that Lord's hands; and, with
the heavenly Wisdom (Prov. viii.), "his delights are with the sons of
men." But on the other hand, he does not banish from his thoughts as
if it were unpractical the dear prospect of another world. He is not
foolish enough to talk of "other-worldliness," as if it were a selfish
thing to "lay up treasure in heaven," and so to have "his heart there
also." For him the present could not possibly be what it is in its
interests, affections, and purposes, if it were not for the revealed
certainties of an everlasting future in the presence of the King. "He
faints not," in the path of genuine temporal toil and duty, because "he
looks at the things which are not seen."
But now, what is the secret of the equilibrium? We saw in our last
chapter what was the secret of the unruffled peace with which St Paul
could meet the exquisite trials occasioned by the separatist party at
Rome. It was the Lord Jesus Christ. And the secret of the far more
than peace with which here he meets the alternative of life and death
is precisely the same; it is the Lord Jesus Christ. He has no
philosophy of happiness; he has something infinitely better; he has the
Lord. What gives life its zest and charm for him? It is, that life
"is Christ." What makes death an object of positive personal "desire"
for him, matched, let us remember, against a "life" with which he is so
deeply contented? It is, that "to depart" is to be with Christ, which
is "far, far better." On either side of the veil, Jesus Christ is all
things to him. So both sides are divinely good; only, the conditions
of the other side are such that the longed-for companionship of his
MASTER will be more perfectly realized there.
We might linger long over this golden passage. It would give us matter
for more than one chapter to unfold adequately, for example, its clear
witness to the conscious and immediate blessedness in death of the
servants of God. We may ponder long what it implies in this direction
when we remember that its "far, far better" means "better" not than our
present life at its worst but than our present life at its holiest and
best; for, as we have observed already, it is "far, far better" than a
life here which "is Christ." Whatever mysteries attend the thought of
the Intermediate State, and however distinctly we remember that the
_disembodied_ spirit must, as such, be circumstanced less perfectly
than the spirit lodged again in the body, "the body of glory," yet this
at least we gather here; the believer's happy spirit, "departing" from
"this tabernacle," finds itself not in the void, not in the dark, not
under penal or disciplinary pain, but in a state "far, far better" than
its very best yet. It is, in a sense so much better in degree as to be
new in kind, "with Christ."
"Yes, think of all things at the best; in one rich thought unite
All purest joys of sense and soul, all present love and light;
Yet bind this truth upon thy brow and clasp it to thy heart,
And then nor grief nor gladness here shall claim too great a part--
All radiance of this lower sky is to that glory dim;
Far better to depart it is, for we shall be WITH HIM." [14]
ii. But even on this theme I must not linger now. Not only because
"the time would fail me," but because we have to remember that _the
main_ incidence of the Apostle's thought here is not upon the
blessedness of death but upon the joy of duty, the "fruit of labour,"
in continued life. He looks in through the gate, not to sigh because
he may not enter yet, but "to run with all his might," in the path of
unselfish service, "because he is close to the goal"--the goal of being
with Christ, to whom he will belong for ever, and whom he will serve
for ever, "day and night in His temple." He "knows that he shall
remain, and that, side by side with" his dear converts at Philippi.
And his "meat is to do the will of Him that sent him, and _to finish_
His work."
The remainder of our chosen portion is altogether to this purpose. He
has said enough about himself now, having just indicated how much
Christ can be to him for peace and power in the great alternative. Now
his thoughts are wholly at Philippi, and he spends himself on
entreating them to live indeed, to live wholly for Christ; and to do so
in two main respects, in self-forgetting unity, and in the recognition
of the joy and glory of suffering.
"Only let them order their life in a way worthy of the Gospel of
Christ." "_Only_"; as if this were the one possible topic for him now.
This will content him; nothing else will. He "desires one thing of the
Lord"--the practical holiness of his beloved converts; and he cannot
possibly do otherwise, coming as he has just come from "the secret of
the presence," felt in his own experience. Will they be watchful and
prayerful? Will they renounce the life of self-will, and entirely live
for their Lord's holy credit and glory? Will they particularly
surrender a certain temptation to jealousies and divisions? Will they
recollect that Christ has so committed Himself to them to manifest to
the world that it is the "only" thing in life, after all, in the last
resort, to be _practically_ true to Him? Then the Missionary will be
happy; his "joy will be fulfilled."
What pastor, what evangelist, what worker of any true sort for God in
the souls of others, does not know something of the meaning of that
"only" of the Apostle's?
Then he passes, by a transition easy indeed in the case of the
Philippian saints, to the subject of suffering. In that difficult
scene, the Roman _colonia_, to be perfectly consistent, must mean, in
one measure or another, to suffer; it must mean to encounter
"adversaries," such open adversaries, probably, as those who had
dragged Paul and Silas to the judgment seat and the dungeon, ten years
before. How were they to meet that experience, or anything resembling
it? Not merely with resignation, nor even with resolution, but with a
recognition of the joy, nay of the "_gift_," of "suffering for His
sake."
Circumstances infinitely vary, and so therefore do sufferings. The
Master assigns their kinds and degrees, not arbitrarily indeed but
sovereignly; and it is His manifest will that not all equally faithful
Christians should equally encounter open violence, or even open shame,
"for His sake." But it is His will also, definitely revealed, that
suffering in some sort, "for His name's sake," should normally enter
into the lot of "all that will live godly in Christ Jesus." Even in
the Church there is the world. And the world does not like the
allegiance to Christ which quite refuses, however modestly and meekly,
to worship its golden image. To the end, pain must be met with in the
doing here on earth of the "beloved will of God."
But this very pain is "a gift" from the treasures of heaven. Not in
itself; pain is never in itself a good; the perfect bliss will not
include it; "there shall be no more pain." But in its relations and
its effects it is "a gift" indeed. For to the disciple who meets it in
the path of witness and of service for his Master amongst his fellows,
it opens up, as nothing else can do, the fellowship of the faithful,
and the heart of JESUS.
[1] Observe the aorist infinitive, _to apothanein_, of _the crisis_,
dying, contrasted with the present infinitive, _to zen_, of _the
process, living_.--It may be noticed that the renderings of Luther,
_Christus ist mein Leben_, and Tindale, _Christ is to me lyfe_, are
untenable, though expressing as a fact a deep and precious truth. The
Apostle is obviously dealing with the characteristics, not the source,
of "living."
[2] _Sunechomai_: literally, "I am confined, restricted from the two
(sides)"; as if to say, "I am hindered as to my choice, whichever side
you view me from."
[3] Literally, "having the desire"; not "a desire," which misses the
point of the words. He means that his _epithymia_ lies in one
direction, his conviction of call and duty in the other. _The_ desire,
the element of personal longing in him, is for "departing."
[4] The Vulgate renders here, _cupio dissolvi_, as if _analysai_ meant,
so to speak, to "analyse" myself into my elements, to separate my soul
from my body. But the usage of the verb, in the Greek of the
Apocrypha, is for the sense given in our Versions, and above; to "break
up," in the sense of "setting out."
[5] Literally, "your progress and joy of the faith." The Greek
suggests the connexion of both "progress" and "joy" with "faith." And
St Paul's general use of the word _pistis_ favours its reference here
not to the objective _creed_ but to the subjective _reliance_ of the
holder of the creed.
[6] _Politeuesthe_: literally, "live your citizen-life." But in its
usage the verb drops all _explicit_ reference to the _polites_, and
means little more than "live"; in the sense however not of mere
existence, or even of experience, but of a course of principle and
order. See Acts xxiii. 1, the only other N.T. passage where it occurs;
and 2 Macc. vi. 1, xi. 25.
[7] The words suggest to us that the Apostle might have written, more
fully and exactly, _hina ido_, _ean eltho_, _kai hina akouso_, _ean
apo_. But it is best to retain in translation the somewhat lax
grammatical form of the Greek.
[8] The parallels, 1 Cor. xii. 13, Eph. ii. 18, strongly favour the
reference of _pneuma_ here to the Holy Spirit of God.
[9] It is of course possible to translate _synathlountes te piotei_,
"wrestling side by side with the faith," as if "the faith" was the
Comrade of the believers. But the context is not favourable to this;
the emphasis seems to lie throughout on the believers' fellowship _with
one another_.
[10] _Echaristhe_: the English perfect best represents here the Greek
aorist.
[11] The Greek may be explained as if the Apostle had meant to write,
_echaristhn to uper Christou paschein_, and then freely inserted the
antecedent fact of _to pioieuein_.
[12] _Echontes_: the nominative participle takes us back grammatically
to the construction previous to the sentences beginning _hetis eotin
k.t.a._; which sentences may be treated as a parenthesis. I have
attempted to convey this in a paraphrase.
[13] _Adieux_, ed. 1857, pp. 10-12.
[14] From the writer's volume of verse, _In the House of the
Pilgrimage_.
"Lord, we expect to suffer here,
Nor would we dare repine;
But give us still to find Thee near,
And own us still for Thine.
"Let us enjoy, and highly prize,
These tokens of Thy love,
Till Thou shalt bid our spirits rise
To worship Thee above."
NEWTON.
_UNITY IN SELF-FORGETFULNESS: THE EXAMPLE OF THE LORD_
"Our glorious Leader claims our praise
For His own pattern giv'n;
While the long cloud of witnesses
Shew the same path to heav'n."
WATTS.