The Apostle employs here a very emphatic compound term for 'hath
wrought.' It conveys not only the idea of operation, but the idea of
continuous and somewhat toilsome and effortful work, as if against
the resistance of something that did not yield itself naturally to
the impulse that He would bestow. Like some sculptor with a hard bit
of marble, or some metallurgist who has to work the rough ore till it
becomes tractable, so the loving, patient, Divine Artificer is here
represented as labouring long and earnestly with a somewhat obstinate
material which can and does resist His loving touch, and yet going on
with imperturbable and patient hope, by manifold touches, here a
little and there a little, all through life preparing a man for His
purpose. The great Artificer toils at His task, 'rising early' and
working long, and not discouraged when He comes upon a black vein in
the white marble, nor when the hard stone turns the edge of His
chisels.
Now I would have you notice that there lies in this conception a very
important thought, viz. God cannot make you fit for heaven all at a
jump, or by a simple act of will. That is not His way of working. He
can make a world so, He cannot make a saint so. He can speak and it
is done when it is only a universe that has to be brought into being;
or He can say, 'Let there be light,' and light springs at His word.
But He cannot say, and He does not say, Let there be holiness, and it
comes. Not so can God make man meet for the 'inheritance of the
saints in light.' And it takes Him all His energies, for all a
lifetime, to prepare His child for what He wants to make of him.
There is another thought here, which I can only touch, and that is
that God cannot give a man that glorified body of which I have been
speaking, unless the man's spirit is Christlike. He cannot raise a
bad man at the resurrection with the body of His glory. By the
necessities of the case it is confined to the purified, because it
corresponds to their inward spiritual being. It is only a perfect
spirit that can dwell in a perfect body. You could not put a bad man,
Godless and Christless, into the body which will be fit for them whom
Christ has changed first of all in heart and spirit into His own
likeness. He would be like those hermit crabs that you see on the
beach who run into any kind of a shell, whether it fits them or not,
in order to get a house.
There are two principles at work in the resurrection of the dead. The
glorified body is not the physical outcome of the material body here,
but is the issue and manifestation, in visible form, of the perfect
and Christlike spirit. Some shall rise to glory and immortality, some
to shame and everlasting contempt. If we are to stand at the last
with the body of our humiliation changed into a body of glory, we
must begin by being changed in the spirit of our mind. As the mind
is, so will the body be one day. But, passing from such thoughts as
these, and remembering that the Apostle here is speaking only about
Christian people, and the divine operations upon them, we may still
extend the meaning of this significant word 'wrought' somewhat
further, and ask you just to consider, and that very briefly, the
three-fold processes which, in the divine working, terminate in, and
contemplate, this great issue.
God has wrought us for it in the very act of making us what we are.
Human nature is an insoluble enigma, if this world is its only field.
Amidst all the waste, the mysterious waste, of creation, there is no
more profligate expenditure of powers than that which is involved in
giving a man such faculties and capacities, if this be the only field
on which they are to be exercised. If you think of what most of us do
in this world, and of what it is in us to be, and to do, it is almost
ludicrous to consider the disproportion. All other creatures fit
their circumstances; nothing in them is bigger than their
environment. They find in life a field for every power. You and I do
not. 'The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have
roosting-places.' They all correspond to their circumstances, but we
have an infinitude of faculty lying half dormant in each of us, which
finds no work at all in this present world. And so, looking at men as
they are with eternity in their hearts, with natures that go reaching
out towards infinity, the question comes up: 'Wherefore hast Thou
made all men in vain? What is the use of us, and why should we be
what we are, if there is nothing for us except this poor present?'
God, or whoever made us, has made a mistake; and strangely enough, if
we were not made, but evolved, evolution has worked out faculties
which have no correspondence with the things around them.
Life and man are an insoluble enigma except on one hypothesis, and
that is that this is a nursery-ground, and that the plants will be
pricked out some day, and planted where they are meant to grow. The
hearts that feel after absolute and perfect love, the spirits
that can conceive the idea of an infinite goodness, the dumb desires,
the blank misgivings that wander homeless amidst the narrowness of
this poor earth, all these things proclaim that there is a region
where they will find their nutriment and expatiate, and when we look
at a man we can only say, He that hath wrought him for an infinite
world, and an endless communion with a perfect good, is God.
Still further, another field of the divine operation to this end is
in what we roughly call 'providences.' What is the meaning of all
this discipline through which we are passed, if there is nothing to
be disciplined for? What is the good of an apprenticeship if there is
no journeyman's life to come after it, where the powers that have
been slowly acquired shall be nobly exercised upon broader fields?
Why should men be taken, as it were, and, like the rough iron from
the ground,
'Be heated hot with hopes and fears,
And plunged in baths of hissing tears,
And battered with the shocks of doom,'
if, after all the process, the polished shaft is to be broken in two,
and tossed away as rubbish? If death ends faculty, it is a pity that
the faculty was so patiently developed. If God is educating us all in
His school, and then means that, like some wastrel boys, we should
lose all our education as soon as we leave its benches, there is
little use in the rod, and little meaning in the training. Brethren!
life is an insoluble riddle unless the purpose of it lie yonder, and
unless all this patient training of our sorrows and our gladnesses,
the warmth that expands and the cold that contracts the heart, the
light that gladdens and the darkness that saddens the eye and the
spirit, are equally meant for training us for the perfect life of a
perfect soul moving a perfect body in a perfect universe. Here is a
pillar in some ancient hall that has fallen into poor hands, and has
had a low roof thrown across the centre of the chamber at half its
height. In the lower half there is part of a pillar that means
nothing; ugly, bare, evidently climbing, and passing through the
aperture, and away above yonder is the carved capital and the great
entablature that it carries. Who could understand the shaft unless he
could look up through the aperture, and see the summit? And who can
think of life as anything but a wretched fragment unless he knows
that all which begins here runs upwards into the room above, and
there finds its explanation and its completion?
But there is the third sphere of the divine operation. As in creation
and in providence, so in all the work and mystery of our redemption,
this is the goal that God has in view. It was not worth Christ's
while to come and die, if nothing more was to come of it than the
imperfect reception of His blessings and gifts which the noblest
Christian life in this world presents. The meaning and purpose of the
Cross, the meaning and purpose of all the patient dealings of His
whispering Spirit, are that we shall be like our Divine Lord in
spirit first, and in body afterwards.
And everything about the experiences of a true Christian spirit is
charged with a prophecy of immortality. I have not time to dwell upon
one point gathered from the context, that I intended to have insisted
upon, viz. that the very desires which God's good Spirit works in a
believing soul are themselves confirmations of their own fulfilment.
But if you notice at your leisure the verses that precede my text,
you will find that the Apostle adduces the groanings of 'earnest
desire to be clothed with our house which is from Heaven,' as a proof
that we _have_ 'a building of God, a house not made with hands.'
That is to say, every longing in a Christian heart when it is most
filled with that Spirit, and most in contact with God, and which is
the answer of that heart to a promise of Christ--every such longing
carries with it the assurance of its own fulfilment. He that hath
wrought it has wrought it in order that the desire may fit us for its
answer, and that the open mouth may be ready for the abundant filling
which His grace designs. He works upon us, therefore, by making us
desire a gift, and then He gives that which He desires. So let us
cherish these longings, not for the accident of escaping death, nor
as choosing the path by which we shall reach the blessed issue, but
longing for that great issue itself; and try to keep more distinct
and clear before all our minds this thought, 'God means for me the
participation in Christ's glorified Manhood, and my attaining of that
Manhood is the end that He has in view in all that He does with me.'
III. So I must say one word about the last thought that is here, and
that is the certainty and the confidence. 'Therefore we are always
confident,' says the Apostle.
'He that hath wrought us for the self-same thing is God.' Then we may
be sure that as far as He is concerned, the work will not be
suspended nor vain. _This_ man does not begin to build and is
unable to finish. This workman has infinite resources, an unchanging
purpose, and infinite long-suffering. He will complete His task.
In the quarries of Egypt you will find gigantic stones, half-dressed,
and intended to have been transported to some great temple. But there
they lie, the work incomplete, and they never carried to their place.
There are no half-polished stones in God's quarries. They are all
finished where they lie, and then borne across the sea, like Hiram's
from Lebanon, to the Temple on the hill. It is a certainty that God
will finish His work; and since 'He that hath wrought us is God,' we
may be sure that He will not stop till He has done.
But it is a certainty that you can thwart. It is an operation that
you can counterwork. The potter in Jeremiah's parable was making a
vessel upon his wheel, and the vessel was marred in his hand, and did
not turn out what he wanted it. The meaning of the metaphor, which
has often been twisted to express the very opposite, is that the
potter's work may fail, that the artificer may be balked, that you
can counterwork the divine dealing, and that all His purpose in your
creation, in His providence and in His gift of His Son for your
redemption, may come to nought as far as you are concerned. 'I
beseech you that ye receive not the grace of God in vain.' 'In vain
have I smitten your children,' wailed the Divine Love; 'they have
received no correction.' In vain God lavishes upon some of us His
mercies, in vain for some of us has Christ toiled and suffered and
died. Oh, brother! do not let all God's work on you come to nought,
but yield yourselves to it. Rejoice in the confidence that He is
moulding your character, cheerfully welcome and accept the
providences, painful as they may be, by which He prepares you for
heaven. The chisel is sharp that strikes off the superfluous pieces
of marble, and when the chisel cuts, not into marble, but into a
heart, there is a pang. Bear it, bear it! and understand the meaning
of the blow of the sculptor's mallet, and see in all life the divine
hand working towards the accomplishment of His own loving purpose.
Then if we turn to Him, amid the pains of His discipline and the joys
of His gifts of grace, with recognition and acceptance of His meaning
in them all, and cry to Him, 'Thy mercy, O Lord, endureth for ever,
forsake not the work of Thine own hands,' we may be always confident,
as knowing that 'the Lord will perfect that which concerneth us.'