'Now He which stablisheth us with you in Christ,
and hath anointed us, is God.'--2 COR. i. 21.
The connection in which these words occur is a remarkable
illustration of the Apostle's habit of looking at the most trivial
things in the light of the highest truths. He had been obliged, as
the context informs us, to abandon an intended visit to Corinth. The
miserable crew of antagonists, who yelped at his heels all his life,
seized this change of purpose as the occasion for a double-barrelled
charge. They said he was either fickle and infirm of purpose, or
insincere, and saying 'Yea' with one side of his mouth and 'Nay' with
the other. He rebuts this accusation with apparently quite
disproportionate vehemence and great solemnity. He points in the
context to the faithfulness of God, to the firm Gospel which he had
preached, to God's great 'Yea!' as his answer. He says in effect,
'How could I, with such a word burning in my heart, move in a region
of equivocation and double-dealing; or how could I, whose whole being
is saturated with so firm and stable a Gospel, be unreliable and
fickle? The message must make the messenger like itself. Communion
with a faithful God must make faith-keeping men; the certainties of
God's "Yea," and the certitudes of our "Amen," must influence our
characters.' And so to suppose that a man, influenced by
Christianity, is a weak, double-dealing, unsteadfast man is a
contradiction in terms. In the text he carries his argument a step
further, and points, not only to the power of the Gospel to steady
and confirm, but also to the fact that God Himself communicates to
the believing soul Christian stability by the anointing which He
bestows.
So, then, we have in these words the declaration that inflexible,
immovable steadfastness is a mark of a Christian, and that this
Christian steadfastness, without which there is no Christianity worth
the naming, is a direct gift from God Himself by means of that great
anointing which He confers upon men. To that thought, in one or two
of its aspects, I ask your attention.