PERISHING OR BEING SAVED

'For the preaching of the Cross is to them that perish

foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power

of God.'--1 COR. i. 18.

The starting-point of my remarks is the observation that a slight

variation of rendering, which will be found in the Revised Version,

brings out the true meaning of these words. Instead of reading 'them

that perish' and 'us which are saved,' we ought to read 'them that

_are perishing_,' and 'us which _are being_ saved.' That is to say,

the Apostle represents the two contrasted conditions, not so much as

fixed states, either present or future, but rather as processes which

are going on, and are manifestly, in the present, incomplete. That

opens some very solemn and intensely practical considerations.

Then I may further note that this antithesis includes the whole of

the persons to whom the Gospel is preached. In one or other of these

two classes they all stand. Further, we have to observe that the

consideration which determines the class to which men belong, is the

attitude which they respectively take to the preaching of the Cross.

If it be, and because it is, 'foolishness' to some, they belong to

the catalogue of the perishing. If it be, and because it is, 'the

power of God' to others, they belong to the class of those who are in

process of being saved.

So, then, we have the ground cleared for two or three very simple,

but, as it seems to me, very important thoughts.

I. I desire, first, to look at the two contrasted conditions,

'perishing' and 'being saved.'

Now we shall best, I think, understand the force of the darker of

these two terms if we first ask what is the force of the brighter and

more radiant. If we understand what the Apostle means by 'saving' and

'salvation' we shall understand also what he means by 'perishing.'

If, then, we turn for a moment to Scripture analogy and teaching, we

find that that threadbare word 'salvation,' which we all take it for

granted that we understand, and which, like a well-worn coin, has

been so passed from hand to hand that it scarcely remains

legible--that well-worn word 'salvation' starts from a double

metaphorical meaning. It means either--and is used for both--being

healed or being made safe. In the one sense it is often employed in

the Gospel narratives of our Lord's miracles, and it involves the

metaphor of a sick man and his cure; in the other it involves the

metaphor of a man in peril and his deliverance and security. The

negative side, then, of the Gospel idea of salvation is the making

whole from a disease, and the making safe from a danger. Negatively,

it is the removal from each of us of the one sickness, which is sin;

and the one danger, which is the reaping of the fruits and

consequences of sin, in their variety as guilt, remorse, habit, and

slavery under it, perverted relation to God, a fearful apprehension

of penal consequences here, and, if there be a hereafter, there, too.

The sickness of soul and the perils that threaten life, flow from the

central fact of sin, and salvation consists, negatively, in the

sweeping away of all of these, whether the sin itself, or the fatal

facility with which we yield to it, or the desolation and perversion

which it brings into all the faculties and susceptibilities, or the

perversion of relation to God, and the consequent evils, here and

hereafter, which throng around the evil-doer. The sick man is healed,

and the man in peril is set in safety.

But, besides that, there is a great deal more. The cure is incomplete

till the full tide of health follows convalescence. When God saves,

He does not only bar up the iron gate through which the hosts of evil

rush out upon the defenceless soul, but He flings wide the golden

gate through which the glad troops of blessings and of graces flock

around the delivered spirit, and enrich it with all joys and with all

beauties. So the positive side of salvation is the investiture of the

saved man with throbbing health through all his veins, and the

strength that comes from a divine life. It is the bestowal upon the

delivered man of everything that he needs for blessedness and for

duty. All good conferred, and every evil banned back into its dark

den, such is the Christian conception of salvation. It is much that

the negative should be accomplished, but it is little in comparison

with the rich fulness of positive endowments, of happiness, and of

holiness which make an integral part of the salvation of God.

This, then, being the one side, what about the other? If this be

salvation, its precise opposite is the Scriptural idea of

'perishing.' Utter ruin lies in the word, the entire failure to be

what God meant a man to be. That is in it, and no contortions of

arbitrary interpretation can knock that solemn significance out of

the dreadful expression. If salvation be the cure of the sickness,

perishing is the fatal end of the unchecked disease. If salvation be

the deliverance from the outstretched claws of the harpy evils that

crowd about the trembling soul, then perishing is the fixing of their

poisoned talons into their prey, and their rending of it into

fragments.

Of course that is metaphor, but no metaphor can be half so dreadful

as the plain, prosaic fact that the exact opposite of the salvation,

which consists in the healing from sin and the deliverance from

danger, and in the endowment with all gifts good and beautiful, is

the Christian idea of the alternative 'perishing.' Then it means the

disease running its course. It means the dangers laying hold of the

man in peril. It means the withdrawal, or the non-bestowal, of all

which is good, whether it be good of holiness or good of happiness.

It does not mean, as it seems to me, the cessation of conscious

existence, any more than salvation means the bestowal of conscious

existence. But he who perishes knows that he has perished, even as he

knows the process while he is in the process of perishing. Therefore,

we have to think of the gradual fading away from consciousness, and

dying out of a life, of many things beautiful and sweet and gracious,

of the gradual increase of distance from Him, union with whom is the

condition of true life, of the gradual sinking into the pit of utter

ruin, of the gradual increase of that awful death in life and life in

death in which living consciousness

makes the conscious subject aware that he is lost; lost to God, lost

to himself.

Brethren, it is no part of my business to enlarge upon such awful

thoughts, but the brighter the light of salvation, the darker the

eclipse of ruin which rings it round. This, then, is the first

contrast.

II. Now note, secondly, the progressiveness of both members of the

alternative.

All states of heart or mind tend to increase, by the very fact of

continuance. Life is a process, and every part of a spiritual being

is in living motion and continuous action in a given direction. So

the law for the world, and for every man in it, in all regions of his

life, quite as much as in the religious, is 'To him that hath shall

be given, and he shall have abundance.'

Look, then, at this thought of the process by which these two

conditions become more and more confirmed, consolidated, and

complete. Salvation is a progressive fact. In the New Testament we

have that great idea looked at from three points of view. Sometimes

it is spoken of as having been accomplished in the past in the case

of every believing soul--'Ye have been saved' is said more than once.

Sometimes it is spoken of as being accomplished in the present--'Ye

are saved' is said more than once. And sometimes it is relegated to

the future--'Now is our salvation nearer than when we believed,' and

the like. But there are a number of New Testament passages which

coincide with this text in regarding salvation as, not the work of

any one moment, but as a continuous operation running through life,

not a point either in the past, present, or future, but a continued

life. As, for instance, 'The Lord added to the Church daily those

that were being saved.' By one offering He hath perfected for ever

them that are being sanctified. And in a passage in the Second

Epistle to the Corinthians, which, in some respects, is an exact

parallel to that of my text, we read of the preaching of the Gospel

as being a 'savour of Christ in them that are being saved, and in

them that are perishing.'

So the process of being saved is going on as long as a Christian man

lives in this world; and every one who professes to be Christ's

follower ought, day by day, to be growing more and more saved, more

fully filled with that Divine Spirit, more entirely the conqueror of

his own lusts and passions and evil, more and more invested with all

the gifts of holiness and of blessedness which Jesus Christ is ready

to bestow upon him.

Ah, brethren! that notion of a progressive salvation at work in all

true Christians has all but faded away out of the beliefs, as it has

all but disappeared from the experience, of hosts of you that call

yourselves Christ's followers, and are not a bit further on than you

were ten years ago; are no more healed of your corruptions (perhaps

less so, for relapses are dangerous) than you were then--have not

advanced any further into the depths of God than when you first got a

glimpse of Him as loving, and your Father, in Jesus Christ--are

contented to linger, like some weak band of invaders in a strange

land, on the borders and coasts, instead of pressing inwards and

making it all your own. Growing Christians--may I venture to

say?--are not the majority of professing Christians. And, on the

other side, as certainly, there are progressive deterioration and

approximation to disintegration and ruin. How many men there are

listening to me now who were far nearer being delivered from their

sins when they were lads than they have ever been since! How many in

whom the sensibility to the message of salvation has disappeared, in

whom the world has ossified their consciences and their hearts, in

whom there is a more entire and unstruggling submission to low things

and selfish things and worldly things and wicked things, than there

used to be! I am sure that there are not a few among us now who were

far better, and far happier, when they were poor and young, and could

still thrill with generous emotion and tremble at the Word of God,

than they are to-day. Why! there are some of you that could no more

bring back your former loftier impulses, and compunction of spirit

and throbs of desire towards Christ and His salvation, than you could

bring back the birds' nests or the snows of your youthful years. You

are perishing, in the very process of going down and down into the

dark.

Now, notice, that the Apostle treats these two classes as covering

the whole ground of the hearers of the Word, and as alternatives. If

not in the one class we are in the other. Ah, brethren! life is no

level plane, but a steep incline, on which there is no standing

still, and if you try to stand still, down you go. Either up or down

must be the motion. If you are not more of a Christian than you were a

year ago, you are less. If you are not more saved--for there is a

degree of comparison--if you are not more saved, you are less saved.

Now, do not let that go over your head as pulpit thunder, meaning

nothing. It means _you_, and, whether you feel or think it or

not, one or other of these two solemn developments is at this moment

going on in you. And that is not a thought to be put lightly on one

side.

Further, note what a light such considerations as these, that

salvation and perishing are vital processes--'going on all the time,'

as the Americans say--throw upon the future. Clearly the two

processes are incomplete here. You get the direction of the line, but

not its natural termination. And thus a heaven and a hell are

demanded by the phenomena of growing goodness and of growing badness

which we see round about us. The arc of the circle is partially

swept. Are the compasses going to stop at the point where the grave

comes in? By no means. Round they will go, and will complete the

circle. But that is not all. The necessity for progress will persist

after death; and all through the duration of immortal being,

goodness, blessedness, holiness, Godlikeness, will, on the one hand,

grow in brighter lustre; and on the other, alienation from God, loss

of the noble elements of the nature, and all the other doleful

darknesses which attend that conception of a lost man, will increase

likewise. And so, two people, sitting side by side here now, may

start from the same level, and by the operation of the one principle

the one may rise, and rise, and rise, till he is lost in God, and so

finds himself, and the other sink, and sink, and sink, into the

obscurity of woe and evil that lies beneath every human life as a

possibility.

III. And now, lastly, notice the determining attitude to the Cross

which settles the class to which we belong.

Paul, in my text, is explaining his reason for not preaching the

Gospel with what he calls 'the words of man's wisdom,' and he says,

in effect, 'It would be of no use if I did, because what settles

whether the Cross shall look "foolishness" to a man or not is the

man's whole moral condition, and what settles whether a man shall

find it to be "the power of God" or not is whether he has passed into

the region of those that are being saved.'

So there are two thoughts suggested which sound as if they were

illogically combined, but which yet are both true. It is true that

men perish, or are saved, because the Cross is to them respectively

'foolishness' or 'the power of God'; and the other thing is also

true, that the Cross is to them 'foolishness,' or 'the power of God'

because, respectively, they are perishing or being saved. That is not

putting the cart before the horse, but both aspects of the truth are

true.

If you see nothing in Jesus Christ, and His death for us all, except

'foolishness,' something unfit to do you any good, and unnecessary to

be taken into account in your lives--oh, my friends! _that_ is the

condemnation of your eyes, and not of the thing you look at. If a

man, gazing on the sun at twelve o'clock on a June day, says to me,

'It is not bright,' the only thing I have to say to him is, 'Friend,

you had better go to an oculist.' And if to us the Cross is

'foolishness,' it is because already a process of 'perishing' has

gone so far that it has attacked our capacity of recognising the

wisdom and love of God when we see them.

But, on the other hand, if we clasp that Cross in simple trust, we

find that it is the power which saves us out of all sins, sorrows,

and dangers, and 'shall save us' at last 'into His heavenly kingdom.'

Dear friends, that message leaves no man exactly as it found him. My

words, I feel, in this sermon, have been very poor, set by the side

of the greatness of the theme; but, poor as they have been, you will

not be exactly the same man after them, if you have listened to them,

as you were before. The difference may be very imperceptible, but it

will be real. One more, almost invisible, film, over the eyeball; one

more thin layer of wax in the ear; one more fold of insensibility

round heart and conscience--or else some yielding to the love; some

finger put out to take the salvation; some lightening of the pressure

of the sickness; some removal of the peril and the danger. The same

sun hurts diseased eyes, and gladdens sound ones. The same fire melts

wax and hardens clay. 'This Child is set for the rise and fall of

many in Israel.' 'To the one He is the savour of life unto life; to

the other He is the savour of death unto death.' _Which_ is He, for

He _is_ one of them, to you?