'Whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken.' Just think for
a moment, by way of illustrating this principle, first of all, of
the _positive_ harm which you do to yourself in the act of
turning away from the mercy offered you in Christ; and then think
for a moment of the _negative_ loss which you sustain by the
same act.
Note the _positive_ harm. Am I uncharitable when I say that no
man ever yet _passively neglected_ the message of love in God's
Son; but that always _this_ is the rude outline of the experience
of people who know what it is to have a Saviour offered to them, and
know what it is to put Him away,--that there is a feeble and transitory
movement of heart and will; that Conscience says, 'Thou oughtest'; that
Will says, 'I would'; that the heart is touched by some sense of that
great and gentle vision of light and love which passes before the eye;
that the man, as it were, like some fever-ridden patient, lifts himself
up for an instant from the bed on which he is lying, and puts out a
hand, and then falls back again, the vacillating, fevered, paralysed
will recoiling from the resolution, and the conscience having power to
say, 'Thou oughtest,' but no power to enforce the execution of its
decrees, and the heart turning away from the salvation that it would
have found in the love of love, to the loss that it finds in the love
of self and earth? Or in other words, is it not true that every man
who rejects Christ does in simple verity _reject_ Him, and not
merely neglect Him; that there is always an effort, that there is a
struggle, feeble, perhaps, but real, which ends in the turning away? It
is not that you stand there, and simply let Him go past. That were bad
enough; but the fact is worse than that. It is that you turn your back
upon Him. It is not that His hand is laid on yours, and yours remains
dead and cold, and does not open to clasp it; but it is that His hand
being laid on yours, you clench yours the tighter, and _will not_
have it. And so every man (I believe) who rejects Christ does these
things thereby--wounds his own conscience, hardens his own heart,
makes himself a worse man, just because he has had a glimpse, and
has willingly, and almost consciously, 'loved darkness rather than
light.' Oh, brethren, the message of love can never come into a
human soul, and pass away from it unreceived, without leaving that
spirit worse, with all its lowest characteristics strengthened, and
all its best ones depressed, by the fact of rejection. I have nothing
to do now with pursuing that process to its end; but the natural
result--if there were no future Judgment at all, if there were no
movement ever given to the stone that you ought to build on--the
natural result of the simple rejection of the Gospel is that, bit by
bit, all the lingering remains of nobleness that hover about the man,
like scent about a broken vase, pass away; and that, step by step,
through the simple process of saying, 'I will not have Christ to rule
over me,' the whole being degenerates, until manhood becomes
devil-hood, and the soul is lost by its own want of faith. Unbelief
is its own judgment; unbelief is its own condemnation; unbelief, as
sin, is punished, like all other sins, by the perpetuation of deeper
and darker forms of itself. Every time that you stifle a conviction,
fight down a conviction, or drive away a conviction; and every time
that you feebly move towards the decision, 'I _will_ trust Him, and
love Him, and be His,' yet fail to realise it, you have harmed your
soul, you have made yourself a worse man, you have lowered the tone
of your conscience, you have enfeebled your will, you have made your
heart harder against love, you have drawn another horny scale over
the eye, that will prevent you from seeing the light that is yonder;
you have, as much as in you is, withdrawn from God, and approximated
to the other pole of the universe (if I may say that), to the dark
and deadly antagonist of mercy, and goodness, and truth, and grace.
'Whosoever falls on this stone,' by the natural result of his
unbelief, 'shall be broken' and maimed, and shall mar his own nature.
I need not dwell on the _negative_ evil results of unbelief;
the loss of that which is the only guide for a man, the taking away,
or rather the failing to possess, that great love above us, that
divine Spirit in us, by which only we are ever made what we ought to
be. This only I would leave with you, in this part of my subject,
Whoever is not in Christ is maimed. Only he that is 'a man in Christ'
has come 'to the measure of the stature of a perfect man.' There,
and there alone, do we get the power which will make us full-grown.
There alone is the soul planted in that good soil in which, growing,
it becomes as a rounded, perfect tree, with leaves and fruits in
their season. All other men are half-men, quarter-men, fragments of
men, parts of humanity exaggerated and contorted and distorted from
the reconciling whole which the Christian ought to be, and in
proportion to his Christianity is on the road to be, and one day will
assuredly and actually be, a 'complete and entire man, wanting
nothing'; nothing maimed, nothing broken, the realisation of the
ideal of humanity, the renewed copy 'of the second Adam, the Lord
from heaven.'
There is another consideration closely connected with this second
part of my subject, that I just mention and pass on. Not only by the
act of rejection of Christ do we harm and maim ourselves, but also
all attempts at opposition--formal opposition--to the Gospel as a
system, stand self-convicted and self-condemned to speedy decay.
What a commentary upon that word, 'Whosoever falls on this stone
shall be broken,' is the whole history of the heresies of the Church
and the assaults of unbelief! Man after man, rich in gifts, endowed
often with far larger and nobler faculties than the people who
oppose him, with indomitable perseverance, a martyr to his error,
sets himself up against the truth that is sphered in Jesus Christ;
and the great divine message simply goes on its way, and all the
babblement and noise are like so many bats flying against a light,
or like the sea-birds that come sweeping up in the tempest and the
night, to the hospitable Pharos that is upon the rock, and smite
themselves dead against it. Sceptics well known in their generation,
who made people's hearts tremble for the ark of God, what has become
of them? Their books lie dusty and undisturbed on the top shelf of
libraries; whilst there the Bible stands, with all the scribblings
wiped off the page, as though they had never been! Opponents fire
their small shot against the great Rock of Ages, and the little
pellets fall flattened, and only scale off a bit of the moss that
has gathered there! My brother, let the history of the past teach
you and me, with other deeper thoughts, a very calm and triumphant
confidence about all that opponents say nowadays; for all the modern
opposition to this Gospel will go as all the past has done, and the
newest systems which cut and carve at Christianity, will go to the
tomb where all the rest have gone; and dead old infidelities will
rise up from their thrones, and say to the bran-new ones of this
generation, when their day is worked out, 'Are ye also become weak
as we? art thou also become like one of us?' 'Whosoever shall fall
on this stone shall be broken': personally, he will be harmed; and
his opinions, and his books, and his talk, and all his
argumentation, will come to nothing, like the waves that break into
impotent foam against the rocky cliffs.
III. Last of all, the issue, the ultimate issue, of unbelief is
irremediable destruction when Christ begins to move.
The former clause has spoken about the harm that naturally follows
unbelief whilst the Gospel is being preached; the latter clause speaks
about the active agency of Christ when the end shall have come, and
the preaching of the Gospel shall have merged into the act of judgment.
I do not mean to dwell, brethren, upon that thought; it seems to me
far too awful a one to be handled by my hands, at any rate. Let us
leave it in the vagueness and dreadfulness of the words of Him who
never spoke exaggerated words, and who, when He said, 'It shall grind
him to powder,' meant (as it seems to me) nothing less than a
destruction which, contrasted with the former remediable wounding and
breaking, was a destruction utter, and hopeless, and everlasting, and
without remedy. Ground--ground to powder! Any life left in that? any
gathering up of that, and making a man of it again? All the humanity
battered out of it, and the life clean gone from it! Does not that
sound very much like 'everlasting destruction from the presence of God
and from the glory of His power'? Christ, silent now, will begin to
speak; passive now, will begin to act. The stone comes down, and the
fall of it will be awful. I remember, away up in a lonely Highland
valley, where beneath a tall black cliff, all weather-worn, and cracked,
and seamed, there lies at the foot, resting on the greensward that
creeps round its base, a huge rock, that has fallen from the face of
the precipice. A shepherd was passing beneath it; and suddenly, when
the finger of God's will touched it, and rent it from its ancient bed
in the everlasting rock, it came down, leaping and bounding from pinnacle
to pinnacle--and it fell; and the man that was beneath it is there now!
'Ground to powder.' Ah, my brethren, that is not _my_ illustration--that
is Christ's. Therefore I say to you, since all that stand against Him
shall become 'as the chaff of the summer threshing-floor,' and be swept
utterly away, make Him the foundation on which you build; and when the
storm sweeps away every 'refuge of lies,' you will be safe and serene,
builded upon the Rock of Ages.