Now notice how, in my text, there alternates, as if substantially the
same idea, the thoughts that Christ and that God pray men to be
reconciled. 'We are ambassadors on _Christ's_ behalf, as though
_God_ did beseech you by us, we pray on _Christ's_ behalf.'
So you see, first, Christ the Pleader, then God beseeching, then
Christ again entreating and praying. Could any man have so spoken,
passing instinctively from the one thought to the other, unless he
had believed that whatsoever things the Father doeth, these also
doeth the Son likewise; and that Jesus Christ is the Representative
of the whole Deity for mankind, so as that when He pleads God pleads,
and God pleads through Him. I do not dwell upon this, but I simply
wish to mark it in passing as one of the innumerable strong and
irrefragable testimonies to the familiarity and firmness with which
that thought of the divinity of Jesus Christ, and the full revelation
of the Father by Him, was grasped by the Apostle, and was believed by
the people to whom he spoke. God pleads, therefore Christ pleads,
Christ pleads, therefore God pleads; and these Two are One in their
beseechings, and the voice of the Father echoes to us in the
tenderness of the Son.
So, then, let us think of that pleading. To sue for love, to beg that
an enemy will put away his enmity is the part of the inferior rather
than of the superior; is the part of the offender rather than of the
offended; is the part of the vanquished rather than of the victor; is
the part surely not of the king but of the rebel. And yet here, in
the sublime transcending of all human precedent and pattern which
characterises the divine dealing, we have the place of the suppliant
and of the supplicated inverted, and Love upon the Throne bends down
to ask of the rebel that lies powerless and sullen at His feet, and
yet is not conquered until his heart be won, though his limbs be
manacled, that he would put away all the bitterness out of his heart,
and come back to the love and the grace which are ready to pour over
him. 'He that might the vengeance best have taken, finds out the
remedy.' He against whom we have transgressed prays us to be
reconciled; and the Infinite Love lowers Himself in that lowering
which is, in another aspect, the climax of His exaltation, to pray
the rebels to accept His amnesty.
Oh, dear brethren! this is no mere piece of rhetoric. What facts in
the divine heart does it represent? What facts in the divine conduct
does it represent? It represents these facts in the divine heart,
that there is in it an infinite longing for the creature's love, an
infinite desire for unity between Him and us.
There are wonderful significance and beauty in the language of my
text which are lost in the Authorised Version; but are preserved in
the Revised. 'We are ambassadors' not only '_for_ Christ,' but
'_on Christ's behalf_.' And the same proposition is repeated in
the subsequent clause. 'We pray you,' not merely 'in Christ's stead,'
though that is much, but '_on His account_,' which is more--as
if it lay very near His heart that we should put away our enmity; and
as if in some transcendent and wonderful manner the all-perfect,
self-sufficing God was made glad, and the Master, who is His image
for us, 'saw of the travail of His soul, and,' in regard to one man,
'was satisfied,' when the man lets the warmth of God's love in Christ
thaw away the coldness out of his heart, and kindle there an
answering flame. An old divine says, 'We cannot do God a greater
pleasure or more oblige His very heart, than to trust in Him as a God
of love.' He is ready to stoop to any humiliation to effect that
purpose. So intense is the divine desire to win the world to His
love, that He will stoop to sue for it rather than lose it. Such is
at least part of the fact in the divine heart, which is shadowed
forth for us by that wonderful thought of the beseeching God.
And what facts in the divine conduct does this great word represent?
A God that beseeches. Well, think of the tears of imploring love
which fell from Christ's eyes as He looked across the valley from
Olivet, and saw the Temple glittering in the early sunshine. Think of
'O Jerusalem! Jerusalem! ... how often would I have gathered thy
children together ... and ye would not.' And are we not to see in the
Christ who wept in the earnestness of His desire, and in the pain of
its disappointment, the very revelation of the Father's heart and the
very action of the Father's arm? 'Come unto me, all ye that labour,
and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.' That is Christ
beseeching and God beseeching in Him. Need I quote other words,
gentle, winning, loving? Do we not feel, when looking upon Christ, as
if the secret of His whole life was the stretching out imploring and
welcoming hands to men, and praying them to grasp His hands, and be
saved? But, oh, brethren! the fact that towers above all others,
which explains the whole procedure of divinity, and is the keystone
of the whole arch of revelation; the fact which reveals in one triple
beam of light, God, man, and sin in the clearest illumination, is the
Cross of Jesus Christ. And if that be not the very sublime of
entreaty; and if any voice can be conceived, human or divine, that
shall reach men's hearts with a more piercing note of pathetic
invitation than sounds from that Cross, I know not where it is.
Christ that dies, in His dying breath calls to us, and 'the blood of
sprinkling speaketh better things than that of Abel'; inasmuch as its
voice is, 'Come unto Me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth.'
Not only in the divine facts of the life and death of Jesus Christ,
but in all the appeals of that great revelation which lies before us
in Scripture; and may I say, in the poor, broken utterances of men
whose harsh, thin voices try to set themselves, in some measure, to
the sweetness and the fulness of His beseeching tones--does
God call upon you to draw close to Him, and put away your enmity. And
not only by His Word written or ministered from human lips, but also
by the patient providences of His love He calls and prays you to
come. A mother will sometimes, in foolish fondness, coax her sullen
child by injudicious kindness, or, in wise patience, will seek to
draw the little heart away from the faults that she desires not to
notice, by redoubled ingenuity of tenderness and of care. And so God
does with us. When you and I, who deserve--oh! so different
treatment--get, as we do get, daily care and providential blessings
from Him, is not that His saying to us, 'I beseech you to cherish no
alienation, enmity, indifference, but to come back and live in the
love'? When He draws near to us in these outward gifts of His mercy,
is He not doing Himself what He has bid us to do; and what He never
could have bid us to do, nor our hearts have recognised to be the
highest strain of human virtue to do, unless He Himself were doing it
first? 'If thine enemy hunger, feed him. If he thirst, give him
drink; for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire upon his head.'
Not only by the great demonstration of His stooping and infinite
desire for our love which lies in the life and death of Jesus Christ,
nor only by His outward work, nor by His providence, but by many an
inward touch on our spirits, by many a prick of conscience, by many a
strange longing that has swept across our souls, sudden as some
perfumed air in the scentless atmosphere; by many an inward voice,
coming we know not whence, that has spoken to us of Him, of His love,
of our duty; by many a drawing which has brought us nearer to the
Cross of Jesus Christ, only, alas! in some cases that we might recoil
further from it,--has He been beseeching, beseeching us all.
Brethren! God pleads with you. He pleads with you because there is
nothing in His heart to any of you but love, and a desire to bless
you; He pleads with you because, unless you will let Him, He cannot
lavish upon you His richest gifts and His highest blessings. He
pleads with you, bowing to the level, and beneath the level, of your
alienation and reluctance. And the sum and substance of all His
dealings with every soul is, 'My son! give Me thy heart.' 'Be ye
reconciled to God.'
II. And now turn, very briefly, to the next suggestion arising from
this text, the terrible obverse, so to speak, of the coin: Man
refusing a beseeching God.
That is the great paradox and mystery. Nobody has ever fathomed that
yet, and nobody will. How it comes, how it is possible, there is no
need for us to inquire. It is an awful and a solemn power that every
poor little speck of humanity has, to lift itself up in God's face,
and say, in answer to all His pleadings, 'I will not!' as if the
dwellers in some little island, a mere pin-point of black, barren
rock, jutting up at sea, were to declare war against a kingdom that
stretched through twenty degrees of longitude on the mainland. So we,
on our little bit of island, our pin-point of rock in the great waste
ocean, we can separate ourselves from the great Continent; or,
rather, God has, in a fashion, made us separate in order that we may
either unite ourselves with Him, by our willing yielding, or wrench
ourselves away from Him by our antagonism and rebellion. God
beseeches because God has so settled the relations between Him and
us, that that is what He has to do in order to get men to love Him.
He cannot force them. He cannot prise open a man's heart with a
crowbar, as it were, and force Himself inside. The door opens from
within. 'Behold! I stand at the door and knock.' There is an 'if.'
'If any man open I will come in.' Hence the beseeching, hence the
wail of wisdom that cries aloud and no man regards it; of love that
stands at the entering in of the city, and pleads in vain, and says,
'I have called, and ye have refused.... How often would I have
gathered ... and ye would not.' Oh, brethren! it is an awful
responsibility, a mysterious prerogative, which each one of us,
whether consciously or no, has to exercise, to accept or to refuse
the pleadings of an entreating Christ.
And let me remind you that the act of refusal is a very simple one.
Not to accept is to reject; not to yield is to rebel. You have only
to do nothing, to do it all. There are dozens of people in our
churches and chapels listening with self-satisfied unconcern, who
have all their lives been refusing a beseeching God. And they do not
know that they ever did it! They say, 'Oh! I will be a Christian
sometime or other.' They cherish vague ideas that, somehow or other,
they are so already. They have done nothing at all, they have simply
been absolutely indifferent and passive. Some of you have heard
sermons like this so often that they produce no effect. 'It is the
right kind of thing to say. It is the thing we have heard a hundred
times.' Perhaps you wonder why I should be so much in earnest about
the matter, and then you go outside, and discuss me or the weather,
and forget all about the sermon. And thus, once more, you reject
Christ. It is done without knowing it; done simply by doing nothing.
My brother! do not stop your ears any more against that tender,
imploring love.
Then let me remind you that this refusing the beseeching of God is
the climax of all folly. For consider what it is,--a man refusing his
highest good and choosing his certain ruin. I am afraid that people
have been arguing and fighting so much of late years over disputable
points in reference to the doctrine of future retribution that the
indisputable fact of such retribution has lost much of its solemn
power.
I pray you, brethren, to ask yourselves one question: Is there
anything, in the present or in the future condition of a man that is
not reconciled to God, which explains God's beseeching urgency? Why
this energy and intensity of divine desire? Why this which, if it
were human only, would be called _passionate_ entreaty? Why was
it needful for Jesus Christ to die? Why was it worth His while to
bear the punishment of man's sin? Why should God and Christ, through
all the ages, plead with unintermittent voice? There must be some
explanation of it all, and here is the explanation, 'They that hate
Me love _death_.' 'Be ye reconciled to God,' for enmity is ruin
and destruction.
And finally, dear friends, this turning away from Him that speaketh
from Heaven, of which some of you have all your lives been guilty, is
not only supreme folly, but it is the climax of all guilt. For there
can be nothing worse, darker, arguing a nature more averse or
indifferent to the highest good, than that God should plead, and I
should steel my heart and deafen mine ear against His voice. The
crown of a man's sin, because it is the disclosure of the secrets of
his deepest heart as loving darkness rather than light, is turning
away from the divine voice that woos us to love and to God.
Oh! there are some of you that have heard that Voice too often to be
much touched by it. There are some of you too busy to attend to it,
who hear it not because of the clatter of the streets and the whir of
the spindles. There are some of you that are seeking to drown it in
the shouts of mirth and revelry. There are some of you to whom it
comes muffled in the mists of doubt; but I beseech you all, look at
the Cross, _look at the Cross!_ and hear Him that hangs there
pleading with you.
Before the battle there comes out the captain of the twenty thousand
to the King with the ten thousand, who in His loftiness is not afraid
to stoop to sue for peace from the weaker power. My brother! the
moment is precious; the white flag may never be waved before your
eyes again. Do not; do not refuse! or the next instant the clarion of
the assault may sound, and where will you be then?
It is vain for thee to rush against the thick bosses of the Almighty
buckler. 'We beseech, in Christ's behalf, be ye reconciled with God.'