In John's mind, the difference between the two baptisms, his and the
Christ's, expresses accurately the difference between the two ministries
and their effects. As has been truly and beautifully said, he is
conscious of something 'cold and negative' in his own teaching, of which
the water of his baptism is a fit representation. His message is divine
and true, but it is hard: 'Repent, do what you ought, wait for the
Kingdom and its King.' And, when his command has been obeyed, his
disciples come up out of Jordan, at the best but superficially cleansed,
and needing that the process begun in them should be perfected by
mightier powers than any which his message wields. They need more than
that outward washing--they need an inward cleansing; they need more than
the preaching of repentance and morality--they need a gift of life; they
need a new power poured into their souls, the fiery steam of which, as
it rolls along, like a lava current through mountain forests, shall
seize and burn every growth of evil in their natures. They need not
water, but Spirit; not water, but Fire. They need what shall be life to
their truest life, and death to all the death within, that separates
them from the life of God.
So the two main effects expressed here are these: quickening and
cleansing.
Fire gives warmth. We talk about ardent desires, warm hearts, the glow
of love, the fire of enthusiasm, and even the flame of life. We draw the
contrast with cold natures, which are loveless and unemotional, hard to
stir and quicken; we talk about thawing reserve, about an icy torpor,
and so on. The same general strain of allusion is undoubtedly to be
traced in our text. Whatever more it means, it surely means this, that
Christ comes to kindle in men's souls a blaze of enthusiastic, divine
love, such as the world never saw, and to set them aflame with fervent
earnestness, which shall melt all their icy hardness of heart, and turn
cold self-regard into self-forgetting consecration.
Here, then, our text touches upon one of the very profoundest
characteristics of Christianity considered as a power in human life. The
contrast between it and all other religions and systems of ethics lies,
amongst other things, in the stress which it lays upon love and on the
earnestness which comes from love; whereas these are scarcely regarded
as elements in virtue according to the world, and have certainly no
place at all in the world's notion of 'temperate religion.' Christ gives
fervour by giving His Spirit. Christ gives fervour by bringing the
warmth of His own love to bear upon our hearts through the Spirit, and
that kindles ours. Where His great work for men is believed and trusted
in, there, and there only, is there excited an intensity of consequent
affection to Him which glows throughout the life. It is not enough to
say that Christianity is singular among religious and moral systems in
exalting fervour into a virtue. Its peculiarity lies deeper--in its
method of producing that fervour. It is kindled by that Spirit using as
His means the truth of the dying love of Christ. The secret of the
Gospel is not solved by saying that Christ excites love in our souls.
_The_ question yet remains--how? There is but one answer to that. He
loved us to the death. That truth laid on hearts by the Spirit, who
takes of Christ's and shows them to us, and that truth alone, makes
fire burst from their coldness.
Here is the power that produces that inner fervour without which virtue
is a name and religion a yoke. Here is the contrast, not only to John's
baptism, but to all worldly religion, to all formalism and decent
deadness of external propriety. Here is the consecration of
enthusiasm--not a lurid, sullen heat of ignorant fanaticism, but a
living glow of an enkindled nature, which flames because kindled by the
inextinguishable blaze of His love who gave Himself for us. 'He shall
baptize you in fire.'
Then, dear brethren, if we profess to have come into personal contact
with Jesus Christ, here is a sharp test for us, and a solemn rebuke to
much of our lives. For a Christian to be cold is sin. Our coldness can
only come from our neglecting to stir up the gift that is in us. People
reproach us with extravagant emotion: let us confess that we have never
deserved that reproach half as much as we ought. The world's ideal of
religion is decorous coldness--has not the world's ideal been our
practice? We are afraid to be fervent, but our true danger is icy
torpor. We sit frost-bitten and almost dead among the snows, and all the
while the gracious sunshine is pouring down, that is able to melt the
white death that covers us, and to free us from the bonds that hold us
prisoned in their benumbing clasp.
No evil is more marked among the Christian Churches of this day than
precisely the absence of this 'spirit of burning.' There is plenty of
liberality and effort, there is much interest in religious questions,
there is genial tolerance and wide culture, there is a high standard of
morality, and, on the whole, a tolerable adherence to it--but there is
little love, and little fervour. 'I have somewhat against thee, that
thou hast left thy first love.'
Where is that Spirit which was poured out on Pentecost? Where are the
cloven tongues of fire, where the flame which Christ died to light up?
Has it burned down to grey ashes, or, like some house-fire, lit and left
untended, has it gone out after a little ineffectual crackling among the
lighter pieces of wood and paper, without ever reaching the solid mass
of obstinate coal? Where? The question is not difficult to answer. His
promise remains faithful. He does send the Spirit, who is fire. But our
sin, our negligence, our eager absorption with worldly cares, and our
withdrawal of mind and heart from the patient contemplation of His
truth, have gone far to quench the Spirit. Is it not so? Are our souls
on fire with the love of God, aglow with the ardour caught from Christ's
love? Does that love which fills our hearts coruscate and flame in our
lives, making us lights in the darkness, as some firebrand caught up
from the hearth will serve for a torch and blaze out into the night? 'He
shall baptize with fire.'
'O Thou that earnest from above,
The pure celestial fire to impart,
Kindle a flame of sacred love
On the mean altar of my heart.'
Then there is another thought expressed by this symbol, namely, that
this baptism gives cleansing as well as warmth, or rather gives
cleansing by warmth. Fire purifies. That Spirit, which is fire,
produces holiness in heart and character, by this most chiefly among all
His manifold operations, that He excites the flame of love to God, which
burns our souls clear with its white fervours. This is the Christian
method of making men good,--first, know His love, then believe it, then
love Him back again, and then let that genial heat permeate all your
life, and it will woo forth everywhere blossoms of beauty and fruits of
holiness, that shall clothe the pastures of the wilderness with
gladness. Did you ever see a blast-furnace? How long would it take a
man, think you, with hammer and chisel, or by chemical means, to get the
bits of ore out from the stony matrix? But fling them into the great
cylinder, and pile the fire and let the strong draught roar through the
burning mass, and by evening you can run off a golden stream of pure and
fluid metal, from which all the dross and rubbish is parted, which has
been charmed out of all its sullen hardness, and will take the shape of
any mould into which you like to run it. The fire has conquered, has
melted, has purified. So with us. Love 'shed abroad in our hearts by the
Holy Ghost given unto us,' love that answers to Christ's, love that is
fixed upon Him who is pure and separate from sinners, will purify us and
sever us from our sins. Nothing else will. All other cleansing is
superficial, like the water of John's baptism. Moralities and the
externals of religion will wash away the foulness which lies on the
surface, but stains that have sunk deep into the very substance of the
soul, and have dyed every thread in warp and woof to its centre, are not
to be got rid of so. The awful words which our great dramatist puts into
the mouth of the queenly murderess are heavy with the weight of most
solemn truth. After all vain attempts to cleanse away the stains, we,
like her, have to say, 'There's the smell of the blood still--will
these hands ne'er be clean?' No, never; unless there be something
mightier, more inward in its power, than the water with which we can
wash them, some better gospel than 'Repent and reform.' God be thanked,
there is a mightier detergent than all these--even that divine Spirit
which Christ gives, and that divine forgiveness which Christ brings.
There, and there alone, dear brethren, we can lose all the guilt of our
faultful past, and receive a new and better life which will mould our
future into growing likeness to His great purity. Oh do not resist that
merciful searching fire, which is ready to penetrate our very bones and
marrow, and burn up the seeds of death which lurk in the inmost intents
of the heart! Let Him plunge you into that gracious baptism, as we put
some poor piece of foul clay into the fire, and like it, as you glow you
will whiten, and all the spots will melt away before the conquering
tongues of the cleansing flame. In that furnace, heated seven times
hotter than any earthly power could achieve, they who walk live by the
presence of the Son of Man, and nothing is consumed but the bonds that
held them. His Spirit is fire, and that Spirit of fire is, therefore,
the Spirit of holiness.
But take one warning word in conclusion. The alternative for every man
is to be baptized in the fire or to be consumed by it. The symbol of
which we have been speaking sets forth the double thought of purifying
and destruction. Nothing which we have said as to the former in the
least weakens the completing truth that there is in it an under side of
possible terror. One of the felicities of the emblem is its capacity to
set forth this twofold idea. There is that in the divine nature which
the Bible calls wrath, the necessary displeasure and aversion of holy
love from sin and wrong-doers. There is in the divine procedure even
now and here, the manifestation of that aversion in punishment. 'The
light of Israel becomes a flaming fire.'
I have no panorama of hell to exhibit, and I would speak with all
reticence on matters so awful; but this much, at any rate, is clear,
that the very same revelation of God, thankfully accepted and submitted
to, is the medium of cleansing and the source of joyful life, and,
rejected, becomes the source of sorrow and the occasion of death. Every
man sees that aspect of God's face which he has made himself fit to see.
Every gift of God is to men either a savour of life unto life, or a
savour of death unto death. Most chiefly is this so in regard to Christ
and His gospel, who, though He came not to judge but to save, yet by
reason of that very universal purpose of salvation, becomes a judge in
the act of saving, and a condemnation to those in whom, by their own
faults, that purpose is not fulfilled.
The same pillar of fire which gladdened the ranks of Israel as they
camped by the Red Sea, shone baleful and terrible to the Egyptian hosts.
The same Ark of the Covenant whose presence blessed the house of
Obed-edom, and hallowed Zion, and saved Jerusalem, smote the
Philistines, and struck down their bestial gods. Christ and His gospel
even here hurt the men whom they do not save.
And we have only to carry that process onwards into another world, and
suppose it made more energetic there, as it will be, to feel dimly in
how awful a sense it may be that the same fire which gives life may be
the occasion of death--and how profound a truth lies in the words--
'What maketh Heaven, that maketh Hell.'
Yes, verily; to be salted with fire or to be consumed by it, to be
baptized in it or to be cast into it, is the choice offered to us all;
to thee, my brother, and to me. Israel made its choice, and in seventy
years, the Roman standards on Zion and the flames leaping round the
Temple, interpreted John's words in one of their halves, while the
growing energy of the fire that was lit on Pentecost fulfilled them in
the other. Many a nation and Church has made its choice since then. You
have to make yours. 'The fire shall try every man's work, of what sort
it is.' Shall our work be gold, and silver, and precious stones which
shall gleam and flash in the light, or wood, hay, and stubble which
shall writhe for a moment in the blaze and perish? 'Our God is a
consuming fire.' Shall that be the ground of my confidence that I shall
one day be pure from all my sins, or shall it be the parent of my
ghastliest fear that I may be, like the chaff, destroyed by contact with
a holy love rejected, with a Saviour disbelieved, with a Spirit grieved
and quenched? Choose which.