Now, I must ask you for a moment's attention in regard to these two
untranslated words. _Anathema Maran-atha_. The first thing to be
noticed is that the latter of them stands independently of the
former, and forms a sentence by itself, as I shall have to show you
presently. 'Anathema' means an offering, or a thing devoted; and its
use in the New Testament arises from its use in the Greek translation
of the Old Testament, where it is employed for persons and things
that, in a peculiar sense, were set apart and devoted to God. In the
story of the conquest of Canaan, for instance, we read of Jericho and
other places, persons, or things that were, as our version somewhat
unfortunately renders it, 'accursed,' or as it ought rather to be
rendered, 'devoted,' or 'put under a ban.' And this 'devotion' was of
such a sort as that the things or persons devoted were doomed to
destruction. All the dreadful things that were done in the Conquest
were the consequences of the persons that endured them being thus
'consecrated,' in a very dreadful sense, or set apart for God. The
underlying idea was that evil things brought into contact with Him
were necessarily destroyed with a swift destruction. That being the
meaning of the word, it is clear that its use in my text is
distinctly metaphorical, and that it suggests to us that the
unloving, like those cities full of uncleanness, when they are
brought into contact with the infinite love of the coming Judge,
shrivel up and are destroyed.
The other word 'Maran-atha,' as I said, is to be taken as a separate
sentence. It belongs to the dialect, which was probably the
vernacular of Palestine in the time of Paul, and to which belong, for
the most part, the other untranslated words that are scattered up and
down the Gospels, such as 'Aceldama,' 'Ephphatha,' and the like. It
means 'our Lord comes.' Why Paul chose to use that untranslated scrap
of another tongue in a letter to a Gentile Church we cannot tell.
Perhaps it had come to be a kind of watchword amongst the early
Jewish Christians, which came naturally to his lips. But, at any
rate, the use of it here is distinctly to confirm the warning of the
previous clause, by pointing to the time at which that warning shall
be fulfilled. 'If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be
devoted and destroyed. Our Lord comes.' The only other thing to be
noticed by way of introduction is that this first clause is not an
imprecation, nor any wish on the part of the Apostle, but is a solemn
prophetic warning (acquiesced in by every righteous heart) of that
which will certainly come. The significance of the whole may be
gathered into one simple sentence--The coming of the Lord of Love is
the destruction of the unloving.
'Our Lord comes.' Paul's Christianity gathered round two facts and
moments--one in the past, Christ has come; one in the future, Christ
will come. For memory, the coming by the cradle and the Cross; for
hope, the coming on His throne in glory; and between these two
moments, like the solid piers of a suspension bridge, the frail
structure of the Present hangs swinging. In this day men have lost
their expectation of the one, and to a large extent their faith in
the other. But we shall not understand Scripture unless we seek to
make as prominent in our thoughts as on its pages that second coming
as the complement and necessary issue of the first. It stands stamped
on every line. It colours all the New Testament views of life. It is
used as a motive for every duty, and as a magnet to draw men to Jesus
Christ by salutary dread. There is no hint in my text about the time
of the Lord's coming, no disturbing of the solemnity of the thought
by non-essential details of chronology, so we may dismiss these from
our minds. The fact is the same, and has the same force as a motive
for life, whether it is to be fulfilled in the next moment or
thousands of years hence, provided only that you and I are to be
there when He comes.
There have been many comings in the past, besides the comings in the
flesh. The days of the Lord that have already appeared in the history
of the world are not few. One characteristic is stamped upon them
all, and that is the swift annihilation of what is opposed to Him.
The Bible has a set of standing metaphors by which to illustrate this
thought of the Coming of the Lord--a flood, a harvest when the ears
are ripe for the sickle, the waking of God from slumber, and the
like; all suggesting similar thoughts. _The_ day of the Lord,
_the_ coming of the Lord, will include and surpass all the
characteristics which these lesser and premonitory judgment days
presented in miniature. I do not enlarge on this theme. I would not
play the orator about it if I could; but I appeal to your
consciences, which, in the case of most of us, not only testify of
right and wrong, but of responsibility, and suggest a judge to whom
we are responsible. And I urge on each, and on myself, this simple
question: Have I allowed its due weight on my life and character to
that watchword of the ancient church--_Maran-atha_, 'our Lord
cometh'?
Now, the coming of the Lord of Love is the annihilation of the
unloving. The destruction implied in Anathema does not mean the
cessation of Being, but a death which is worse than death, because it
is a death in life. Suppose a man with all his past annihilated,
with all its effort foiled and crushed, with all its possessions
evaporated and disappeared, and with his memory and his conscience
stung into clear-sighted activity, so that he looks back upon his
former self and into his present self, and feels that it is all waste
and chaos, would not that fulfil the word of my text--'Let him be
Anathema'? And suppose that such a man, in addition to these
thoughts, and as the root and the source of them, had ever the
quivering consciousness that he was and must be in the presence of an
unloved Judge; have you not there the naked bones of a very dreadful
thing, which does not need any tawdry eloquence of man to make it
more solemn and more real? The unloving heart is always ill at ease
in the presence of Him whom it does not love. The unloving heart does
not love, because it does not trust, nor see the love. Therefore, the
unloving heart is a heart that is only capable of apprehending the
wrathful side of Christ's character. It is a heart devoid of the
fruits of love which are likeness and righteousness, 'without which
no man shall see the Lord,' nor stand the flash of the brightness of
His coming. So there is no cruelty nor arbitrariness in the decree
that the heart that loves not, when brought into contact with the
infinite Lord of Love, must find in the touch death and not life,
darkness and not light, terror and not hope. Notice that Paul's
negation _is_ a negation and not an affirmation. He does not say
'he that hateth,' but 'he that doth not love.' The absence of the
active emotion of love, which is the child of faith, the parent of
righteousness, the condition of joy in His presence, is sufficient to
ensure that this fate shall fall upon a man. I durst not enlarge. I
leave the truth on your hearts.
II. Secondly, notice the present grace of the coming Lord. 'Our Lord
cometh. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all.' These
two things are not contradictory, but we often deal with them as if
they were. And some men lay hold of the one side of the antithesis,
and some men lay hold of the other, and rend them apart, and make
antagonistic theories of Christianity out of them. But the real
doctrine puts the two together and says there is no terror without
tenderness, and there is no tenderness without terror. If we
sacrifice the aspects of the divine nature, as revealed to us in the
gentle Christ, which kindle a wholesome dread, we have, all
unwittingly, robbed the aspects of the divine nature, which warm in
us a gracious love, of their power to inflame and to illuminate. You
cannot have love which is anything nobler than facile good nature
and unrighteous indifference, unless you have along with it aspects of
God's character and government which ought to make some men afraid.
And you cannot keep these latter aspects from being exaggerated and
darkened into a Moloch of cruelty, unless you remember that, side by
side with them, or rather underlying them and determining them, are
aspects of the divine nature to which only child-like confidence and
calm beatific returns of love do rightly respond. The terror of the
Lord is a garb which our sins force upon the love of the Lord, and
when the one is presented it brings with it the other. Never should
they be parted in our thoughts or in our teaching.
Note what that present grace is. It is a tenderness which gathers
into its embrace all these imperfect, immoral, lax, heretical people
in Corinth, as well as everywhere else--'The grace of our Lord Jesus
Christ be with _you all_.' There were men in that church that said,
'I am of Paul, I of Apollos, I of Cephas, I of Christ.' There were
men in that church that had defiled their souls and their flesh, and
corrupted the community, and blasphemed the name of Christ by such
foul, sensual sin as was 'not even named among the Gentiles.' There
were men in that church so dead to all the sanctities even of the
communion-table as that, with the bread between their teeth and the
wine-cup in their hands, one was hungry and another drunken. There
were men in that church, whose Christianity was so anomalous and
singularly fragmentary that they did not believe in the resurrection
of the dead. And yet Paul flings the great rainbow, as it were, of
Christ's enclosing love over them all. And surely the love which
gathers in such people leaves none outside its sweep; and the
tenderness which stoops from heaven to pity, to pardon, to cleanse
such is a tenderness to which the weakest, saddest, sinfullest,
foulest of the sons of men may confidently resort. Let nothing rob
you of this assurance, that Christ, the coming Lord, is present with
us all, and with all our weak and wicked brethren, in the full
condescension of His all-embracing, all-hoping, all-forgetting, and
all-restoring love. All that we need, in order to get its full
sunshine into our hearts, is that we trust Him utterly, and, so
trusting, love Him back again with that love which is the fulfilling
of the Law and the crown of the Gospel.
III. And now, lastly, note the tenderness, caught from the Master
Himself, of the servant who rebukes.
This last message of love from the Apostle himself, in verse 24, is
quite anomalous. There is no other instance in his letters where he
introduces himself and his own love at the end, after he has
pronounced solemn benediction commending to Christ's grace. But here,
as if he had felt that he must leave an impression of himself on
their minds, which corresponded to the impression of his Master that
he desired to leave, he deviates from his ordinary habit, and makes
his last word a personal word--'_My love_ be with you all in Christ
Jesus.' Rebuke is the sign of love. Sharp condemnation may be the
language of love. Plain warning of possible evils is the simple duty
of love. So Paul folds all whom he has been rebuking in the warm
embrace of his proffered love, which was the very cause of his
rebuke. The healing balm of this closing message was to be applied to
the wounds which his keen edged words had made, and to show that they
were wounds by a surgeon, not by a foe. In effect, this parting smile
of love says, 'I am not become your enemy because I tell you the
truth; I show my love to you by the plainness and roughness of my
words.' Generalise that, free it from its personal reference, and it
just comes to this: There never was a shallower sneer than the sneer
which is cast at Christianity, as if it were harsh, 'ferocious,' or
unloving, when it preaches the terror of the Lord. No! rather,
because the Gospel _is_ a Gospel, it must speak plainly about death
and destruction to the unloving. The danger signal is not to be
blamed for a collision, which it is hoisted to avert; and it is a
strange sign of an unfeeling and unsympathetic, or of a harsh and
gloomy system, that it should tell men where they are driving, in
order that they may never reach the miserable goal. 'Knowing,
therefore, the terror of the Lord, we persuade men.' And when people
say to us preachers, 'Is that your Gospel, a Gospel that talks about
everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord at the glory of
His coming--is that your Gospel?' We can only answer, 'Yes, it is!
Because, so to talk, may by God's mercy, secure that some who hear
shall never know anything of the wrath, save the hearing of it with
the ear, and may, by the warning of it, be drawn to the Rock of Ages
for safety and shelter from the storm.'
Therefore, dear friends, the upshot of all that I have been feebly
trying to say is just this; let us lay hold with all our hearts, and
by simple faith, of the present grace of the coming, loving Lord and
Judge. You can do it. It is your only hope to do it. _Have_ you
done it? If so, then you may lift up your heads to the throne, and be
glad, as those who know that their Friend and Deliverer will come at
last, to help, to bless, to save. If not, dear friend, take the
warning, that not to love is to be shrivelled like a leaf in the
flame, at that coming which is life to them that love, and
destruction to all besides. 'Herein is our love made perfect, that we
may have boldness before Him in the day of judgment.'