'Whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken:
but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to
powder.'--MATT. xxi. 44.
As Christ's ministry drew to its close, its severity and its
gentleness both increased; its severity to the class to whom it was
always severe, and its gentleness to the class from whom it never
turned away. Side by side, through all His manifestation of Himself,
there were the two aspects: 'He showed Himself _froward_' (if I
may quote the word) to the self-righteous and the Pharisee; and He
bent with more than a woman's tenderness of yearning love over the
darkness and sinfulness, which in its great darkness dimly knew
itself blind, and in its sinfulness stretched out a lame hand of
faith, and groped after a divine deliverer. Here, in my text, there
are only words of severity and awful foreboding. Christ has been
telling those Pharisees and priests that the kingdom is to be taken
from them, and given to a nation that brings forth the fruits
thereof. He interprets for them an Old Testament figure, often
recurring, which we read in the 118th Psalm (and I may just say, in
passing, that we get here His interpretation of that psalm, and the
vindication of our application of it, and other similar ones, to Him
and His office); 'The stone which the builders rejected,' said He,
'is become the head of the corner'; and then, falling back on other
Old Testament uses of the same figure, He weaves into one the whole
of them--that in Isaiah about the 'sure foundation,' and that in
Daniel about 'the stone cut out without hands, which became a great
mountain,' crushing down all opposition,--and centres them all in
Himself; as fulfilled in Himself, in His person and His work.
The two clauses of my text figuratively point to two different
classes of operation on the rejecters of the Gospel. What are these
two classes? 'Whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken:
but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder.' In
the one case, the stone is represented as passive, lying quiet; in
the other, it has acquired motion. In the one case, the man stumbles
and hurts himself; a remediable injury, a self-inflicted injury, a
natural injury, without the active operation of Christ to produce it
at all; in the other case the injury is worse than remediable, it is
utter, absolute, grinding destruction, and it comes from the active
operation of the 'stone of stumbling.' That is to say, the one class
represents the present hurts and harms which, by the natural
operation of things, without the action of Christ judicially at all,
every man receives in the very act of rejecting the Gospel; and the
other represents the ultimate issue of that rejection, which
rejection is darkened into opposition and fixed hostility, when the
stone that was laid 'for a foundation' has got wings (if I may so
say), and comes down in judgment, crushing and destroying the
antagonist utterly. 'Whosoever falls on this stone is broken,' here
and now; and 'on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to
powder,' hereafter and yonder.
Taking, then, into account the weaving together in this passage of
the three figures from the Old Testament to which I have already
referred,--the rejected stone, the foundation, and the mountain-stone
of Daniel, and looking in the light of these, at the twofold issues,
one present and one future, which the text distinctly brings before
us,--we have just three points to which I ask your attention now.
First, Every man has some kind of contact with Christ. Secondly,
Rejection of Him, here and now, is harm and maiming. And, lastly,
Rejection of Him, hereafter and yonder, is hopeless, endless, utter
destruction.
I. In the first place, every man has some kind of connection with
Christ.
I am not going to enter at all now upon any question about the
condition of the 'dark places of the earth' where the Gospel has not
come as a well-known preached message; we have nothing to do with
that; the principles on which _they_ are judged is not the
question before us now. I am speaking exclusively about persons who
have heard the word of salvation, and are dwelling in the midst of
what we call a Christian land. Christ is offered to each of us, in
good faith on God's part, as a means of salvation, a foundation on
which we may build. A man is free to accept or to reject that offer.
If he reject it, he has not thereby cut himself off from all contact
and connection with that rejected Saviour, but he still sustains a
relation to Him; and the message that he has refused to believe, is
exercising an influence upon his character and his destiny.
Christ comes, I say, offered to us all in good faith on the part of
God, as a foundation upon which we may build. And then comes in that
strange mystery, that a man, consciously free, turns away from the
offered mercy, and makes Him that was intended to be the basis of
his life, the foundation of his hope, the rock on which, steadfast
and serene, he should build up a temple-home for his soul to dwell
in,--makes Him a stumbling-stone against which, by rejection and
unbelief, he breaks himself!
My friend, will you let me lay this one thing upon your heart,--you
cannot hinder the Gospel from influencing you somehow. Taking it in
its lowest aspects, it is one of the forces of modern society, an
element in our present civilisation. It is everywhere, it obtrudes
itself on you at every turn, the air is saturated with its
influence. To be unaffected by such an all-pervading phenomenon is
impossible. To no individual member of the great whole of a nation
is it given to isolate himself utterly from the community. Whether
he oppose or whether he acquiesce in current opinions, to denude
himself of the possessions which belong in common to his age and
state of society is in either case impracticable. 'That which cometh
into your mind,' said one of the prophets to the Jews who were
trying to cut themselves loose from their national faith and their
ancestral prerogatives, 'That which cometh into your mind shall not
be at all, that ye say, We will be as the heathen, as the families
of the countries to serve wood and stone.' Vain dream! You can no
more say, I will pass the Gospel by, and it shall be nothing to me,
I will simply let it alone, than you can say, I will shut myself up
from other influences proper to my time and nation. You cannot go
back to the old naked barbarism, and you cannot reduce the influence
of Christianity, even considered merely as one of the characteristics
of the times, to zero. You may fancy you are letting it alone, but
it does not let you alone; it is here, and you cannot shut yourself
off from it.
But it is not merely as a subtle and diffused influence that the
Gospel exercises a permanent effect upon us. It is presented to each
of us here individually, in the definite form of an actual offer of
salvation for each, and of an actual demand of trust from each. The
words pass into our souls, and thenceforward we can never be the
same as if they had not been there. The smallest ray of light
falling on a sensitive plate produces a chemical change that can
never be undone again, and the light of Christ's love, once brought
to the knowledge and presented for the acceptance of a soul, stamps
on it an ineffaceable sign of its having been there. The Gospel once
heard, is always the Gospel which has been heard. Nothing can alter
that. Once heard, it is henceforward a perpetual element in the
whole condition, character, and destiny of the hearer.
Christ does something to every one of us. His Gospel will tell upon
you, it _is_ telling upon you. If you disbelieve it, you are
not the same as if you had never heard it. Never is the box of
ointment opened without some savour from it abiding in every nostril
to which its odour is wafted. Only the alternative, the awful
'either, or,' is open for each--the 'savour of life unto life,
_or_ the savour of death unto death.' To come back to the
illustration of the text, Christ is something, and does something to
every one of us. He is either the rock on which I build, poor, weak,
sinful creature as I am, getting security, and sanctity, and
strength from Him, I being a living stone' built upon 'the living
stone,' and partaking of the vitality of the foundation; or else He
is the other thing, 'a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence to
them which stumble at the word.' Christ stands for ever in some kind
of relation to, and exercises for ever some kind of influence on,
every man who has heard the Gospel.