'So then, abideth these three, faith, hope, love.' When Paul takes
three nouns and couples them with a verb in the singular, he is not
making a slip of the pen, or committing a grammatical blunder which a
child could correct. But there is a great truth in that piece of
apparent grammatical irregularity; for the faith, the hope, and the
love, for which he can only afford a singular verb, are thereby
declared to be in their depth and essence one thing, and it, the
triple star, abides, and continues to shine. The three primitive
colours are unified in the white beam of light. Do not correct the
grammar, and spoil the sense, but discern what he means when he says,
'Now, abid_eth_ faith, hope, love.' For this is what he means,
that the two latter come out of the former, and that without it they
are nought, and that it without them is dead.
Faith breeds Hope. _There_ is the difference between earthly hopes
and Christian people's hopes. Our hopes, apart from the revelation of
God in Jesus Christ, are but the balancing of probabilities, and the
scale is often dragged down by the clutch of eager desires. But all
is baseless and uncertain, unless our hopes are the outcome of our
faith. Which, being translated into other words, is just this, that
the one basis on which men can rest--ay! even for the immediate
future, and the contingencies of life, as well as for the solemnities
and certainties of heaven--any legitimate and substantial hope is
trust in Jesus Christ, His word, His love, His power, and for the
heavenly future, in His Resurrection and present glory. A man who
believes these things, and only that man, has a rock foundation on
which he can build his hope.
Faith, in like manner, is the parent of Love. Paul and John, diverse
as they are in the whole cast of their minds, the one being
speculative and the other mystical, the one argumentative and the
other simply gazing and telling what he sees, are precisely agreed in
regard to this matter. For, to the Apostle of Love, the foundation of
all human love towards God is, 'We have known and believed the love
that God hath to us,' and 'We love Him because He first loved us,'
and to Paul the first step is the trusting reception of the love of
God, 'commended to us' by the fact that 'whilst we were yet sinners
Christ died for us,' and from that necessarily flows, if the faith be
genuine, the love that answers the sacrifice and obeys the Beloved.
So faith, hope, love, these three are a trinity in unity, and it
abideth. That is the main point of our last text. Let me say a word
or two about it.
I have said that the words have often been misunderstood as if the
'now' referred only to the present order of things, in which faith
and hope are supposed to find their only appropriate sphere. But that
is clearly not the Apostle's meaning here, for many reasons with
which I need not trouble you. The abiding of all three is eternal
abiding, and there is a heavenly as well as an earthly form of faith
and hope as well as of love. Just look at these points for a moment.
'Faith abides,' says Paul, yonder, as here. Now, there is a common
saying, which I suppose ninety out of a hundred people think comes
out of the Bible, about faith being lost in sight. There is no such
teaching in Scripture. True, in one aspect, faith is the antithesis
of sight. True, Paul does say 'We walk by faith, not by sight.' But
that antithesis refers only to part of faith's significance. In so
far as it is the opposite of sight, of course it will cease to be in
operation when 'we shall know even as we are known' and 'see Him as
He is.' But the essence of faith is not in the absence of the person
trusted, but the emotion of trust which goes out to the person,
present or absent. And in its deepest meaning of absolute dependence
and happy confidence, faith abides through all the glories and the
lustres of the heavens, as it burns amidst the dimnesses and the
darknesses of earth. For ever and ever, on through the irrevoluble
ages of eternity, dependence on God in Christ will be the life of the
glorified, as it was the life of the militant, Church. No millenniums
of possession, and no imaginable increases in beauty and perfectness
and enrichment with the wealth of God, will bring us one inch nearer
to casting off the state of filial dependence which is, and ever will
be, the condition of our receiving them all. Faith 'abides.'
Hope 'abides.' For it is no more a Scriptural idea that hope is lost
in fruition, than it is that faith is lost in sight. Rather that
Future presents itself to us as the continual communication of an
inexhaustible God to our progressively capacious and capable spirits.
In that continual communication there is continual progress. Wherever
there is progress there must be hope. And thus the fair form, which
has so often danced before us elusive, and has led us into bogs and
miry places and then faded away, will move before us through all the
long avenues of an endless progress, and will ever and anon come back
to tell us of the unseen glories that lie beyond the next turn, and
to woo us further into the depths of heaven and the fulness of God.
Hope 'abides.'
Love 'abides.' I need not, I suppose, enlarge upon that thought which
nobody denies, that love is the eternal form of the human relation to
God. It, too, like the mercy which it clasps, 'endureth for ever.'
But I may remind you of what the Apostle does not explain in our
text, that it is greater than its linked sisters, because whilst
faith and hope belong only to a creature, and are dependent and
expectant of some good to come to themselves, and correspond to
something which is in God in Christ, the love which springs from
faith and hope not only corresponds to, but resembles, that from
which it comes and by which it lives. The fire kindled is cognate
with the fire that kindles; and the love that is in man is like the
love that is in God. It is the climax of his nature; it is the
fulfilling of all duty; it is the crown and jewelled clasp of all
perfection. And so 'abideth faith, hope, love, and the greatest of
these is love.'