There is contempt in the careless massing together of the foes which
the Apostle enumerates. He begins with the widest word that covers
everything--'affliction.' Then he specifies various forms of
it--'distress,' _straitening_, as the word might be rendered,
then he comes to evils inflicted for Christ's sake by hostile
men--'persecution,' then he names purely physical evils, 'hunger' and
'nakedness,' then he harks back again to man's antagonism, 'peril,'
and 'sword.' And thus carelessly, and without an effort at logical
order, he throws together, as specimens of their class, these salient
points, as it were, and crests of the great sea, whose billows
threaten to roll over us; and he laughs at them all, as impotent and
nought, when compared with the love of Christ, which shields us from
them all.
Now it must be noticed that here, in his triumphant question, the
Apostle means not our love to Christ but His to us; and not even our
sense of that love, but the fact itself. And his question is just
this:--Is there any evil in the world that can make Christ stop
loving a man that cleaves to Him? And, as I said, to ask the question
is to answer it. The two things belong to two different regions. They
have nothing in common. The one moves amongst the low levels of
earth; the other dwells up amidst the abysses of eternity, and to
suppose that anything that assails and afflicts us here has any
effect in making that great heart cease to love us is to fancy that
the mists can quench the sunlight, is to suppose that that which lies
down low in the earth can rise to poison and to darken the heavens.
There is no need, in order to rise to the full height of the
Christian contempt for calamity, to deny any of its terrible power.
These things can separate us from much. They can separate us from
joy, from hope, from almost all that makes life desirable. They can
strip us to the very quick, but the quick they cannot touch. The
frost comes and kills the flowers, browns the leaves, cuts off the
stems, binds the sweet music of the flowing rivers in silent chains,
casts mists and darkness over the face of the solitary grey world,
but it does not touch the life that is in the root.
And so all these outward sorrows that have power over the whole of
the outward life, and can slay joy and all but stifle hope, and can
ban men into irrevocable darkness and unalleviated solitude, they do
not touch in the smallest degree the secret bond that binds the heart
to Jesus, nor in any measure affect the flow of His love to us.
Therefore we may front them and smile at them and say:
'Do as thou wilt, devouring time,
With this wide world, and all its fading sweets';
'my flesh and my heart faileth, but God is the strength of my heart,
and my portion for ever.'
You need not be very much afraid of anything being taken from you as
long as Christ is left you. You will not be altogether hopeless so
long as Christ, who is our hope, still speaks His faithful promises
to you, nor will the world be lonely and dark to them who feel that
they are lapt in the sweet and all-pervading consciousness of the
changeless love of the heart of Christ. 'Shall tribulation, or
distress, or persecution?'--in any of these things, 'we are more than
conquerors through Him that loved us.' Brethren, that is the
Christian way of looking at all externals, not only at the dark and
the sorrowful, but at the bright and the gladsome. If the withdrawal
of external blessings does not touch the central sanctities and
sweetness of a life in communion with Jesus, the bestowal of external
blessedness does not much brighten or gladden it. We can face the
withdrawal of them all, we need not covet the possession of them all,
for we have all in Christ; and the world without His love contributes
less to our blessedness and our peace than the absence of all its
joys with His love does. So let us feel that earth, in its givings
and in its withholdings, is equally impotent to touch the one thing
that we need, the conscious possession of the love of Christ.
All these foes, as I have said, have no power over the fact of
Christ's love to us, but they have power, and a very terrible power,
over our consciousness of that love; and we may so kick against the
pricks as to lose, in the pain of our sorrows, the assurance of His
presence, or be so fascinated by the false and vulgar sweetnesses and
promises of the world as, in the eagerness of our chase after them,
to lose our sense of the all-sufficing certitude of His love.
Tribulation does not strip us of His love, but tribulation may so
darken our perceptions that we cannot see the sun. Joys need not rob
us of His heart, but joys may so fill ours, as that there shall be no
longing for His presence within us. Therefore let us not exaggerate
the impotence of these foes, but feel that there are real dangers, as
in the sorrows so in the blessings of our outward life, and that the
evil to be dreaded is that outward things, whether in their bright or
in their dark aspects, may come between us and the home of our
hearts, the love of the loving Christ.