'For how many soever be the promises of God,
in Him is the yea: wherefore also through
Him is the Amen.'--2 COR. i. 20 (R.V.).
This is one of the many passages the force and beauty of which are,
for the first time, brought within the reach of an English reader by
the alterations in the Revised Version. These are partly dependent
upon the reading of the text and partly upon the translation. As the
words stand in the Authorised Version, 'yea' and 'amen' seem to be
very nearly synonymous expressions, and to point substantially to the
same thing--viz. that Jesus Christ is, as it were, the confirmation
and seal of God's promises. But in the Revised Version the
alterations, especially in the pronouns, indicate more distinctly
that the Apostle means two different things by the 'yea' and the
'amen'. The one is God's voice, the other is man's. The one has to do
with the certainty of the divine revelation, the other has to do with
the certitude of our faith in the revelation. When God speaks in
Christ, He confirms everything that He has said before, and when we
listen to God speaking in Christ, our lips are, through Christ,
opened to utter our assenting 'Amen' to His great promises. So, then,
we have the double form of our Lord's work, covering the whole ground
of His relations to man, set forth in these two clauses, in the one
of which God's confirmation of His past revelations by Jesus Christ
is treated of, and in the other of which the full and confident
assent which men may give to that revelation is set before us. I
deal, then, with these two points--God's certainties in Christ, and
man's certitudes through Christ.
Now these two things do not always go together. We may be very
certain, as far as our persuasion is concerned, of a very doubtful
fact, or we may be very doubtful, as far as our persuasion is
concerned, of a very certain fact. We speak about truths or facts as
being certain, and we ought to mean by that, not how we think about
them, but what they are in the evidence on which they rest. A certain
truth is a truth which has its evidence irrefragable; and the only
fitting attitude for men, in the presence of a certain truth, is to
have a certitude of the truth. And these two things are, our Apostle
tells us, both given to us in and through Jesus Christ. Let me deal,
then, with these two sides.