'The Breaker is come up before them: they have broken up, and have
passed through the gate, and are gone out by it: and their king
shall pass before them, and the Lord on the head of them.'--MICAH
ii. 13.
Micah was contemporary with Isaiah. The two prophets stand, to a large
extent, on the same level of prophetic knowledge. Characteristic of both
of them is the increasing clearness of the figure of the personal
Messiah, and the increasing fulness of detail with which His functions
are described. Characteristic of both of them is the presentation which
we find in this text of that Messiah's work as being the gathering
together of the scattered captive people and the leading them back in
triumph into the blessed land.
Such is the image which underlies my text. Of course I have nothing to
do now with questions as to any narrower and nearer historical
fulfilment, because I believe that all these Messianic prophecies which
were susceptible of, and many of which obtained, a historical and
approximate fulfilment in the restoration of the Jews from the
Babylonish captivity, have a higher and broader and more real
accomplishment in that great deliverance wrought by Jesus Christ, of
which all these earlier and partial and outward manifestations were
themselves prophecies and shadows.
So I make no apology for taking the words before us as having their only
real accomplishment in the office and working of Jesus Christ. He is
'the Breaker which is come up before us.' He it is that has broken out
the path on which we may travel, and in whom, in a manner which the
Prophet dreamed not of, 'the Lord is at the head' of us, and our King
goes before us. So that my object is simply to take that great name, the
Breaker, and to see the manifold ways in which in Scripture it is
applied to the various work of Jesus Christ in our redemption.
I. I follow entirely the lead of corresponding passages in other
portions of Scripture, and to begin with, I ask you to think of that
great work of our Divine Redeemer by which He has broken for the
captives the prison-house of their bondage.
The image that is here before us is either that of some foreign land in
which the scattered exiles were bound in iron captivity, or more
probably some dark and gloomy prison, with high walls, massive gates,
and barred windows, wherein they were held; and to them sitting hopeless
in the shadow of death, and bound in affliction and iron, there comes
one mysterious figure whom the Prophet could not describe more
particularly, and at His coming the gates flew apart, and the chains
dropped from their hands; and the captives had heart put into them, and
gathering themselves together into a triumphant band, they went out with
songs and everlasting joy upon their heads; freemen, and on the march to
the home of their fathers. 'The Breaker is gone up before them; they
have broken, and passed through the gate, and are gone out by it.'
And is not that our condition? Many of us know not the bondage in which
we are held. We are held in it all the more really and sadly because we
conceit ourselves to be free. Those poor, light-hearted people in the
dreadful days of the French Revolution, used to keep up some ghastly
mockery of society and cheerfulness in their prisons; and festooned the
bars with flowers, and made believe to be carrying on their life freely
as they used to do; but for all that, day after day the tumbrils came to
the gates, and morning after morning the jailer stood at the door of the
dungeons with the fatal list in his hand, and one after another of the
triflers was dragged away to death. And so men and women are living a
life which they fancy is free, and all the while they are in bondage,
held in a prison-house. You, my brother! are chained by guilt; you are
chained by sin, you are chained by the habit of evil with a strength of
which you never know till you try to shake it off.
And there comes to each of us a mighty Deliverer, who breaks the gates
of brass, and who cuts the bars of iron in sunder. Christ comes to us.
By His death He has borne away the guilt; by His living Spirit He will
bear away the dominion of sin from our hearts; and if the Son will make
us free we shall be free indeed. Oh! ponder that deep truth, I pray you,
which the Lord Christ has spoken in words that carry conviction in their
very simplicity to every conscience: 'He that committeth sin is the
slave of sin.' And as you feel sometimes--and you all feel
sometimes--the catch of the fetter on your wrists when you would fain
stretch out your hands to good, listen as to a true gospel to this old
word which, in its picturesque imagery, carries a truth that should be
life. To us all 'the Breaker is gone up before us,' the prison gates are
open. Follow His steps, and take the freedom which He gives; and be sure
that you 'stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made you free,
and be not entangled again with any yoke of bondage.'
Men and women! Some of you are the slaves of your own lusts. Some of you
are the slaves of the world's maxims. Some of you are held in bondage by
some habit that you abominate, but cannot get away from. Here is freedom
for you. The dark walls of the prison are round us all. 'The Scripture
hath shut up all in sin, that He might have mercy upon all.' Blessed be
His name! As the angel came to the sleeping Apostle, and to his light
touch the iron gates swung obedient on their hinges, and Roman soldiers
who ought to have watched their prey were lulled to sleep, and fetters
that held the limbs dropped as if melted; so, silently, in His meek and
merciful strength, the Christ comes to us all, and the iron gate which
leadeth out into freedom opens of its own accord at His touch, and the
fetters fall from our limbs, and we go forth free men. 'The Breaker is
gone up before us.'
II. Again, take another application of this same figure found in
Scripture, which sets forth Jesus Christ as being the Opener of the path
to God.
'I am the Way and the Truth and the Life, no man cometh to the Father
but by Me,' said He. And again, 'By a new and living way which He hath
opened for us through the veil' (that is to say, His flesh), we can have
free access 'with confidence by the faith of Him.' That is to say, if we
rightly understand our natural condition, it is not only one of bondage
to evil, but it is one of separation from God. Parts of the divine
character are always beautiful and sweet to every human heart when it
thinks about them. Parts of the divine character stand frowning before a
man who knows himself for what he is; and conscience tells us that
between God and us there is a mountain of impediment piled up by our own
evil. To us Christ comes, the Path-finder and the Path; the Pioneer who
breaks the way for us through all the hindrances, and leads us up to the
presence of God.
For we do not know God as He is except by Jesus Christ. We see
fragments, and often distorted fragments, of the divine nature and
character apart from Jesus, but the real divine nature as it is, and as
it is in its relation to me, a sinner, is only made known to me in the
face of Jesus Christ. When we see Him we see God; Christ's tears are
God's pity, Christ's gentleness is God's meekness, Christ's tender,
drawing love is not only a revelation of a most pure and sweet Brother's
heart, but a manifestation through that Brother's heart of the deepest
depths of the divine nature. Christ is the heart of God. Apart from Him,
we come to the God of our own consciences and we tremble; we come to the
God of our own fancies and we presume; we come to the God dimly guessed
at and pieced together from out of the hints and indications of His
works, and He is little more than a dead name to us. Apart from Christ
we come to a peradventure which we call a God; a shadow through which
you can see the stars shining. But we know the Father when we believe in
Christ. And so all the clouds rising from our own hearts and consciences
and fancies and misconceptions, which we have piled together between God
and ourselves, Christ clears away; and thus He opens the path to God.
And He opens it in another way too, on which I cannot dwell. It is only
the God manifest in Jesus Christ that draws men's hearts to Him. The
attractive power of the divine nature is ail in Him who has said, 'I, if
I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me.' The God whom men know, or
think they know, outside of the revelation of divinity in Jesus Christ,
is a God before whom they sometimes tremble, who is far more often their
terror than their love, who is their 'ghastliest doubt' still more
frequently than He is their 'dearest faith.' But the God that is in
Christ woos and wins men to Him, and from His great sweetness there
streams out, as it were, a magnetic influence that draws hearts to Him.
The God that is in Christ is the only God that humanity ever loved.
Other gods they may have worshipped with cowering terror and with
far-off lip reverence, but this God has a heart, and wins hearts because
He has. So Christ opens the way to Him.
And still further, in a yet higher fashion, that Saviour is the
Path-breaker to the Divine Presence, in that He not only makes God known
to us, and not only makes Him so known to us as to draw us to Him, but
in that likewise He, by the fact of His Cross and passion, has borne and
borne away the impediments of our own sin and transgression which rise
for ever between us and Him, unless He shall sweep them out of the way.
He has made 'the rough places plain and the crooked things straight';
levelled the mountains and raised the valleys, and cast up across all
the wilderness of the world a highway along which 'the wayfaring man
though a fool' may travel. Narrow understandings may know, and selfish
hearts may love, and low-pitched confessions may reach the ear of the
God who comes near to us in Christ, that we in Christ may come near to
Him. The Breaker is gone up before us; 'having therefore, brethren,
boldness to enter into the holiest of all ... by a new and living way,
which He hath consecrated for us ... let us draw near with true hearts'
III. Then still further, another modification of this figure is found in
the frequent representations of Scripture, by which our Lord is the
Breaker, going up before us in the sense that He is the Captain of our
life's march.
We have, in the words of my text, the image of the gladly-gathered
people flocking after the Leader. 'They have broken up, and have passed
through the gate, and are gone out by it; and their King shall pass
before them, and the Lord on the head of them.' The Prophet knew not
that the Lord their King, of whom it is enigmatically said that He too,
as well as 'the Breaker,' is to go before them, was in mysterious
fashion to dwell in that Breaker; and that those two, whom He sees
separately, are yet in a deep and mysterious sense one. The host of the
captives, returning in triumphant march through the wilderness and to
the promised land, is, in the Prophet's words, headed both by the
Breaker and by the Lord. We know that the Breaker is the Lord, the Angel
of the Covenant in whom is the name of Jehovah.
And so we connect with all these words of my text such words as
designate our Saviour as the Captain of our salvation; such words as His
own in which He says, 'When He putteth forth His sheep He goeth before
them'--such words as His Apostle used when he said, 'Leaving us an
ensample that we should follow in His steps.' And by all there is
suggested this--that Christ, who breaks the prison of our sins, and
leads us forth on the path to God, marches at the head of our life's
journey, and is our Example and Commander; and Himself present with us
through all life's changes and its sorrows.
Here is the great blessing and peculiarity of Christian morals that they
are all brought down to that sweet obligation: 'Do as I did.' Here is
the great blessing and strength for the Christian life in all its
difficulties--you can never go where you cannot see in the desert the
footprints, haply spotted with blood, that your Master left there before
you, and planting your trembling feet in the prints, as a child might
imitate his father's strides, may learn to recognise that all duty comes
to this: 'Follow Me'; and that all sorrow is calmed, ennobled, made
tolerable, and glorified, by the thought that He has borne it.
The Roman matron of the legend struck the knife into her bosom, and
handed it to her husband with the words, 'It is not painful!' Christ has
gone before us in all the dreary solitude, and in all the agony and
pains of life. He has hallowed them all, and has taken the bitterness
and the pain out of each of them for them that love Him. If we feel that
the Breaker is before us, and that we are marching behind Him, then
whithersoever He leads us we may follow, and whatsoever He has passed
through we may pass through. We carry In His life the all-sufficing
pattern of duty. We have in His companionship the all-strengthening
consolation. Let us leave the direction of our road in His hands, who
never says 'Go!' but always 'Come!' This General marches in the midst of
His battalions and sets His soldiers on no enterprises or forlorn hopes
which He has not Himself dared and overcome.
So Christ goes as our Companion before us, the true pillar of fire and
cloud in which the present Deity abode, and He is with us in real
companionship. Our joyful march through the wilderness is directed,
patterned, protected, companioned by Him, and when He 'putteth forth His
own sheep,' blessed be His name, 'He goeth before them.'
IV. And now, lastly, there is a final application of this figure which
sets forth our Lord as the Breaker for us of the bands of death, and the
Forerunner 'entered for us into the heavens.'
Christ's resurrection is the only solid proof of a future life. Christ's
present resurrection life is the power by partaking in which, 'though we
were dead, yet shall we live.'
He has trodden that path, too, before us. He has entered into the great
prison-house into which the generations of men have been hounded and
hurried; and where they lie in their graves, as in their narrow cells.
He has entered there; with one blow He has struck the gates from their
hinges, and has passed out, and no soul can any longer be shut in as for
ever into that ruined and opened prison. Like Samson, He has taken the
gates which from of old barred its entrance, and borne them on His
strong shoulders to the city on the hill, and now Death's darts are
blunted, his fetters are broken, and his gaol has its doors wide open,
and there is nothing for him to do now but to fall upon his sword and to
kill himself, for his prisoners are free. 'Oh, death! I will be thy
plague; oh, grave! I will be thy destruction.' 'The Breaker has gone
up before us'; therefore it is not possible that we should be holden of
the impotent chains that He has broken.
The Forerunner is for us entered and passed through the heavens, and
entered into the holiest of all. We are too closely knit to Him, if we
love Him and trust Him, to make it possible that we shall be where He is
not, or that He shall be where we are not. Where He has gone we shall
go. In heaven, blessed be His name! He will still be the leader of our
progress and the captain at the head of our march. For He crowns all His
other work by this, that having broken the prison-house of our sins, and
opened for us the way to God, and been the leader and the captain of our
march through all the pilgrimage of life, and the opener of the gate of
the grave for our joyful resurrection, and the opener of the gate of
heaven for our triumphal entrance, He will still as the Lamb that is in
the midst of the Throne, go before us, and lead us into green pastures
and by the still waters, and this shall be the description of the
growing blessedness and power of the saints' life above, 'These are
they which follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth.'