One might have expected that the immediate inference to be drawn from
'All power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth' would have been
some word of encouragement and strengthening to those who were so soon
to be left, and who were beginning to be conscious of their feebleness.
But there is nothing more striking in the whole of the incidents of
those forty days than the prominence which is given in them to the
work of the Church when the Master had left it, and to the imperative
obligations devolving upon it. And so here, not encouragement, but
obligation is the inference that is drawn from that tremendous claim.
'Because I have all power, therefore you are charged with the duty
of winning the world for its King.' The all-ruling Christ calls for
the universal proclamation of His sovereignty by His disciples. These
five hundred little understood the sweep of the commandment, and, as
history shows, terribly failed to apprehend the emancipating power
of it. But He says to us, as to them, 'I am not content with the
authority given to Me by God, unless I have the authority that each
man for himself can give Me, by willing surrender of his heart and
will to Me.' Jesus Christ craves no empty rule, no mere elevation
by virtue of Divine supremacy, over men. He regards that elevation
as incomplete without the voluntary surrender of men to become His
subjects and champions. Without its own consent He does not count
that His universal power is established in a human heart. Though
that dominion be all-embracing like the ocean, and stretching into
all corners of the universe, and dominating over all ages, yet in
that ocean there may stand up black and dry rocks, barren as they
are dry, and blasted as they are black, because, with the awful
power of a human will, men have said, 'We will not have this Man
to reign over us.' It is willing subjects whom Christ seeks, in
order to make the Divine grant of authority a reality.
In that work He needs His servants. The gift of God notwithstanding,
the power of His Cross notwithstanding, the perfection and
completeness of His great reconciling and redeeming work
notwithstanding, all these are vain unless we, His servants, will
take them in our hands as our weapons, and go forth on the warfare
to which He has summoned us. This is the command laid upon us all,
'Make disciples of all nations.' Only so will the reality correspond
to the initial and all-embracing grant.
It would take us too far to deal at all adequately, or in anything
but the most superficial fashion, with the remaining parts of this
great commission. 'Make disciples of all nations'--that is the first
thing. Then comes the second step: 'Baptizing them into the name of
the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.' Who are to be
baptized? Now, notice, if I may venture upon being slightly
technical for a moment, that the word 'nations' in the preceding
clause is a neuter one, and that the word for 'them' in this clause
is a masculine, which seems to me fairly to imply that the command
'baptizing them' does not refer to 'all nations,' but to the
disciples latent among them, and to be drawn from them. Surely,
surely the great claim of absolute and unbounded power has for its
consequence something better than the lame and impotent conclusion
of appointing an indiscriminate rite, as the means of making
disciples! Surely that is not in accordance with the spirituality of
the Christian faith!
'Baptizing them into the Name'--the name is one, that of the Father,
and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Does that mean the name of God,
and of a man, and of an influence, all jumbled up together in
blasphemous and irrational union? Surely, if Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit have one name, the name of Divinity, then it is but a step to
say that three Persons are one God! But there is a great deal more
here than a baptismal formula, for to be baptized into the Name is
but the symbol of being plunged into communion with this one
threefold God of our salvation. The ideal state of the Christian
disciple is that he shall be as a vase dropped into the Atlantic,
encompassed about with God, and filled with Him. We all 'live, and
move, and have our being' in Him, but some of us have so wrapped
ourselves, if I may venture to use such a figure, in waterproof
covering, that, though we are floating in an ocean of Divinity, not
a drop finds its way in. Cast the covering aside, and you will be
saturated with God, and only in the measure in which you live and
move and have your being in the Name are you disciples.
There is another step still. Making disciples and bringing into
communion with the Godhead is not all that is to flow from, and
correspond to, and realise in the individual, the absolute authority
of Jesus Christ--'Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I
have commanded you.' We hear a great deal in these days about the
worthlessness of mere dogmatic Christianity. Jesus Christ
anticipated all that talk, and guarded it from exaggeration. For
what He tells us here that we are to train ourselves and others in,
is not creed but conduct; not things to be believed or _credenda_
but things to be done or _agenda_--'teaching them to observe all
things whatsoever I have commanded you.' A creed that is not wrought
out in actions is empty; conduct that is not informed, penetrated,
regulated by creed, is unworthy of a man, not to say of a Christian.
What we are to know we are to know in order that we may do, and so
inherit the benediction, which is never bestowed upon them that
know, but upon them that, knowing these things, are blessed _in_,
as well as _for_, the doing of them.
That training is to be continuous, educating to new views of duty;
new applications of old truths, new sensitiveness of conscience,
unveiling to us, ever as we climb, new heights to which we aspire.
The Christian Church has not yet learnt--thank God it is learning,
though by slow degrees--all the moral and practical implications and
applications of 'the truth as it is in Jesus.' And so these are the
three things by which the Church recognises and corresponds to the
universal dominion of Christ, the making disciples universally; the
bringing them into the communion of the Father, the Son, and the
Holy Spirit; and the training of them to conduct ever approximating
more and more to the Divine ideal of humanity in the glorified
Christ.
And now I must gather just into a sentence or two what is to be said
about the last point. There is--