'Lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.'--MALACHI iv. 6.
'The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all.
Amen.'--REVELATION xxii. 21.
It is of course only an accident that these words close the Old and the
New Testaments. In the Hebrew Bible Malachi's prophecies do not stand at
the end; but he was the last of the Old Testament prophets, and after
him there were 'four centuries of silence.' We seem to hear in his words
the dying echoes of the rolling thunders of Sinai. They gather up the
whole burden of the Law and of the prophets; of the former in their
declaration of a coming retribution, of the latter in the hope that that
retribution may be averted.
Then, in regard to John's words, of course as they stand they are simply
the parting benediction with which he takes leave of his readers; but it
is fitting that the Book of which they are the close should seal up the
canon, because it stands as the one prophetic book of the New Testament,
and so reaches forward into the coming ages, even to the consummation of
all things. And just as Christ in His Ascension was taken from them
whilst His hands were lifted up in the act of blessing, so it is fitting
that the revelation of which He is the centre and the theme should part
from us as He did, shedding with its final words the dew of benediction
on our upturned heads.
I venture, then, to look at these significant closing words of the two
Testaments as conveying the spirit of each, and suggesting some thoughts
about the contrast and the harmony and the order that subsist between
them.
I. I ask you, first, to notice the apparent contrast and the real
harmony and unity of these two texts.
'Lest I come and smite the land with a curse.' That last awful word does
not convey, in the original, quite the idea of our English word 'curse.'
It refers to a somewhat singular institution in the Mosaic Law according
to which things devoted, in a certain sense, to God were deprived of
life. And the reference historically is to the judgments that were
inflicted upon the nations that occupied the land before the Israelitish
invasion, those Canaanites and others who were put under 'the ban' and
devoted to utter destruction. So, says my text, Israel, which has
stepped into their places, may bring down upon its head the same
devastation; and as they were swept off the face of the land that they
had polluted with their iniquities, so an apostate and God-forgetting
Judah may again experience the same utter destruction falling upon them.
If instead of the word 'curse' we were to substitute the word
'destruction,' we should get the true idea of the passage.
And the thought that I want to insist upon is this, that here we have
distinctly gathered up the whole spirit of millenniums of divine
revelation, all of which declare this one thing, that as certainly as
there is a God, every transgression and disobedience receives, and must
receive, its just recompense of reward.
That is the spirit of law, for law has nothing to say, except, 'Do this,
and thou shalt live; do not this, and thou shalt die.'
And then turn to the other. 'The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with
you all.' What has become of the thunder? All melted into dewy rain of
love and pity and compassion. Grace is love that stoops; grace is love
that foregoes its claims, and forgives sins against itself. Grace is
love that imparts, and this grace, thus stooping, thus pardoning, thus
bestowing, is a universal gift. The Apostolic benediction is the
declaration of the divine purpose, and the inmost heart and loftiest
meaning of all the words which from the beginning God hath spoken is
that His condescending, pardoning, self-bestowing mercy may fall upon
all hearts, and gladden every soul.
So there seems to emerge, and there is, a very real and a very
significant contrast. 'I come and smite the earth with a curse' sounds
strangely unlike 'The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all.'
And, of course, in this generation there is a strong tendency to dwell
upon that contrast and to exaggerate it, and to assert that the more
recent has antiquated the more ancient, and that now the day when we
have to think of and to dread the curse that smites the earth is past,
'because the true Light now shineth.'
So I ask you to notice that beneath this apparent contrast there is a
real harmony, and that these two utterances, though they seem to be so
diverse, are quite consistent at bottom, and must both be taken into
account if we would grasp the whole truth. For, as a matter of fact,
nowhere are there more tender utterances and sweeter revelations of a
divine mercy than in that ancient law with its attendant prophets. And
as a matter of fact, nowhere, through all the thunderings and lightnings
of Sinai, are there such solemn words of retribution as dropped from the
lips of the Incarnate Love. There is nothing anywhere so dreadful as
Christ's own words about what comes, and must come, to sinful men. Is
there any depth of darkness in the Old Testament teaching of retribution
half as deep, half as black, and as terrible, as the gulf that Christ
opens at your feet and mine? Is there anything so awful as the
threatenings of Infinite Love?
And the same blending of the widest proclamation of, and the most
perfect rejoicing confidence in, the universal and all-forgiving love of
God, with the teaching of the sharpest retribution, lies in the writings
of this very Apostle about whose words I am speaking. There are nowhere
in Scripture more solemn pictures than those in that book of the
Apocalypse, of the inevitable consequences of departure from the love
and the faith of God, and John, the Apostle of love, is the preacher of
judgment as none of the other writers of the New Testament are.
Such is the fact, and there is a necessity for it. There must be this
blending; for if you take away from your conception of God the absolute
holiness which hates sin, and the rigid righteousness which apportions
to all evil its bitter fruits, you have left a maimed God that has not
power to love but is nothing but weak, good-natured indulgence. Impunity
is not mercy, and punishment is never the negation of perfect love, but
rather, if you destroy the one you hopelessly maim the other. The two
halves are needed in order to give full emphasis to either. Each note
alone is untrue; blended, they make the perfect chord.
II. And now, let me ask you to look with me at another point, and that
is, the relation of the grace to the punishment.
Is it not love which proclaims judgment? Are not the words of my first
text, if you take them all, merciful, however they wear a surface of
threatening? 'Lest I come.' Then He speaks that He may not come, and
declares the issue of sin in order that that issue may never need to be
experienced by us that listen to Him. Brethren! both in regard to the
Bible and in regard to human ministrations of the Gospel, it is
all-important, as it seems to me at present, to insist that it is the
cruellest kindness to keep back the threatenings for fear of darkening
the grace; and that, on the other hand, it is the truest tenderness to
warn and to proclaim them. It is love that threatens; 'tis mercy to tell
us that the wrath will come.
And just as one relation between the grace and the retribution is that
the proclamation of the retribution is the work of the grace, so there
is another relation--the grace is manifested in bearing the punishment,
and in bearing it away by bearing it. Oh! there is no adequate measure
of what the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ is except the measure of the
smiting destruction from which He frees us. It is because every
transgression receives its just recompense of reward, because the wages
of sin is death, because God cannot but hate and punish the evil, that
we get our truest standard of what Christ's love is to every soul of us.
For on Him have met all the converging rays of the divine retribution,
and burnt the penal fire into His very heart. He has come between every
one of us, if we will, and that certain incidence of retribution for our
evil, taking upon Himself the whole burden of our sin and of our guilt,
and bearing that awful death which consists not in the mere dissolution
of the tie between soul and body, but in the separation of the conscious
spirit from God, in order that we may stand peaceful, serene, untouched,
when the hail and the fire of the divine judgment are falling from the
heavens and running along the earth. The grace depends for all our
conceptions of its glory, its tenderness, and its depth, on our estimate
of the wrath from which it delivers.
So, dear brethren, remember, if you tamper with the one you destroy the
other; if there be no fearful judgment from which men need to be
delivered, Christ has borne nothing for us that entitles Him to demand
our hearts; and all the ascriptions of praise and adoration to Him, and
all the surrender of loving hearts, in utter self-abandonment, to Him
that has borne the curse for us, fade and are silent. If you strike out
the truth of Christ's bearing the results of sin from your theology, you
do not thereby exalt, but you fatally lower the love; and in the
interests of the loftiest conceptions of a divine loving-kindness and
mercy that ever have blessed the world, I beseech you, be on your guard
against all teachings that diminish the sinfulness of sin, and that ask
again the question which first of all came from lips that do not commend
it to us--'_Hath_ God said?' or advance to the assertion--'Ye shall
_not_ surely die.' If 'I come to smite the earth with a curse' ceases to
be a truth to you, 'the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ' will fade away
for you likewise.
III. Now, still further, let me ask you to consider, lastly, the
alternative which these texts open for us.
I believe that the order in which they stand in Scripture is the order
in which men generally come to believe them, and to feel them. I am
old-fashioned enough and narrow enough to believe in conversion; and to
believe further that, as a rule, the course through which the soul
passes from darkness into light is the course which divine revelation
took: first, the unveiling of sin and its issues, and then the glad
leaping up of the trustful heart to the conception of redeeming grace.
But what I seek briefly to suggest now is, not only the order of
manifestation as brought out in these words, but also the alternative
which they present to us, one branch or other of which every soul of you
will have to experience. You must have either the destruction or the
grace. And, more wonderful still, the same coming of the same Lord will
be to one man the destruction, and to another the manifestation and
reception of His perfect grace. As it was in the Lord's first coming,
'He is set for the rise and the fall of many in Israel.' The same heat
softens some substances and bakes others into hardness. A bit of wax and
a bit of clay put into the same fire--one becomes liquefied and the
other solidified. The same light is joy to one eye and torture to
another. The same pillar of cloud was light to the hosts of Israel, and
darkness and dismay to the armies of Egypt. The same Gospel is 'a savour
of life unto life, or of death unto death,' by the giving forth of the
same influences killing the one and reviving the other; the same Christ
is a Stone to build upon or a Stone of stumbling; and when He cometh at
the last, Prince, King, Judge, to you and me, His coming shall be
prepared as the morning; and ye 'shall have a song as when one cometh
with a pipe to the mountain of the Lord'; or else it shall be a day of
darkness and not of light. He comes to me, to you; He comes to smite or
He comes to glorify.
Oh, brethren! do not believe that God's threatenings are wind and words;
do not let teachings that sap the very foundations of morality and eat
all the power out of the Gospel persuade you that the solemn words, 'The
soul that sinneth it shall die,' are not simple verity.
And then, my brethren, oh! then, do you turn yourselves to that dear
Lord whose grace is magnified in this most chiefly, that 'He hath borne
our sins and carried our sorrows'; and taking Him for your Saviour, your
King, your Shield, your All, when He cometh it will be life to you; and
the grace that He imparts will be heaven for ever more.
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