_SLAYING SELF THE FOUNDATION PRECEPT OF PRACTICAL CHRISTIANITY._
"Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth;
fornication, uncleanness, passion, evil desire, and covetousness,
the which is idolatry; for which things' sake cometh the wrath of
God upon the sons of disobedience; in the which ye also walked
aforetime, when ye lived in these things. But now put ye also away
all these; anger, wrath, malice, railing, shameful speaking out of
your mouth: lie not one to another."--COL. iii. 5-9 (Rev. Ver.).
"Mortify _therefore_"--wherefore? The previous words give the reason.
Because "ye died" with Christ, and because ye "were raised together with
Him." In other words, the plainest, homeliest moral teaching of this
Epistle, such as that which immediately follows, is built upon its
"mystical" theology. Paul thinks that the deep things which he has been
saying about union with Christ in His death and resurrection have the
most intimate connection with common life. These profound truths have
the keenest edge, and are as a sacrificial knife, to slay the life of
self. Creed is meant to tell on conduct. Character is the last outcome
and test of doctrine. But too many people deal with their theological
beliefs as they do with their hassocks and prayer books and hymn books
in their pews--use them for formal worship once a week, and leave them
for the dust to settle on them till Sunday comes round again. So it is
very necessary to put the practical inferences very plainly, to
reiterate the most commonplace and threadbare precepts as the issue of
the most recondite teaching, and to bind the burden of duty on men's
backs with the cords of principles and doctrines.
Accordingly the section of the Epistle which deals with Christian
character now begins, and this "therefore" knits the two halves
together. That word protests against opposite errors. On the one hand,
some good people are to be found impatient of exhortations to duties,
and ready to say, Preach the gospel, and the duties will spring up
spontaneously where it is received; on the other hand, some people are
to be found who see no connection between the practice of common
morality and the belief of Christian truths, and are ready to say, Put
away your theology; it is useless lumber, the machine will work as well
without it. But Paul believed that the firmest basis for moral teaching
and the most powerful motive for moral conduct is "the truth as it is in
Jesus."
I. We have here put very plainly the paradox of continual self-slaying
as the all-embracing duty of a Christian.
It is a pity that the R. V. has retained "mortify" here, as that
Latinized word says to an ordinary reader much less than is meant, and
hides the allusion to the preceding contest. The marginal alternative
"make dead" is, to say the least, not idiomatic English. The suggestion
of the American revisers, which is printed at the end of the R. V., "put
to death," is much better, and perhaps a single word, such as "slay" or
"kill" might have been better still.
"Slay your members which are upon the earth." It is a vehement and
paradoxical injunction, though it be but the echo of still more solemn
and stringent words--"pluck it out, cut it off, and cast it from thee."
The possibility of misunderstanding it and bringing it down to the level
of that spurious asceticism and "severity to the body" against which he
has just been thundering, seems to occur to the Apostle, and therefore
he hastens to explain that he does not mean the maiming of selves, or
hacking away limbs, but the slaying of the passions and desires which
root themselves in our bodily constitution. The eager haste of the
explanation destroys the congruity of the sentence, but he does not mind
that. And then follows a grim catalogue of the evil-doers on whom
sentence of death is passed.
Before dealing with that list, two points of some importance may be
observed. The first is that the practical exhortations of this letter
begin with this command to put off certain characteristics which are
assumed to belong to the Colossian Christians in their natural state,
and that only afterwards comes the precept to put on (ver. 12) the
fairer robes of Christlike purity, clasped about by the girdle of
perfectness. That is to say, Paul's anthropology regards men as wrong
and having to get right. A great deal of the moral teaching which is
outside of Christianity, and which does not sufficiently recognise that
the first thing to be done is to cure and alter, but talks as if men
were, on the whole, rather inclined to be good, is for that very reason
perfectly useless. Its fine precepts and lofty sentiments go clean over
people's heads, and are ludicrously inappropriate to the facts of the
case. The serpent has twined itself round my limbs, and unless you can
give me a knife, sharp and strong enough to cut its loathsome coils
asunder, it is cruel to bid me walk. All men on the face of the earth
need, for moral progress, to be shown and helped first how _not_ to be
what they have been, and only after that is it of the slightest use to
tell them what they ought to be. The only thing that reaches the
universal need is a power that will make us different from what we are.
If we are to grow into goodness and beauty, we must begin by a complete
reversal of tastes and tendencies. The thing we want first is not
progress, the going on in the direction in which our faces are turned,
but a power which can lay a mastering hand upon our shoulders, turn us
right round, and make us go in the way opposite to that. Culture, the
development of what is in us in germ, is not the beginning of good
husbandry on human nature as it is. The thorns have to be stubbed up
first, and the poisonous seeds sifted out, and new soil laid down, and
then culture will bring forth something better than wild grapes.
First--"mortify;" then--"put on."
Another point to be carefully noted is that, according to the Apostle's
teaching, the root and beginning of all such slaying of the evil which
is in us all, lies in our being dead with Christ to the world. In the
former chapter we found that the Apostle's final condemnation of the
false asceticism which was beginning to infect the Colossian Church, was
that it was of no value as a counteractive of fleshly indulgence. But
here he proclaims that what asceticism could not do, in that it was
weak through the flesh, union with Jesus Christ in His death and risen
life will do; it will subdue sin in the flesh. That slaying here
enjoined as fundamental to all Christian holiness, is but the working
out in life and character of the revolution in the inmost self which has
been effected, if by faith we are joined to the living Lord, who was
dead and is alive for evermore.
There must, however, be a very vigorous act of personal determination if
the power of that union is to be manifested in us. The act of "slaying"
can never be pleasant or easy. The vehemence of the command and the form
of the metaphor express the strenuousness of the effort and the
painfulness of the process, in the same way as Paul's other saying,
"crucify the flesh," does. Suppose a man working at some machine. His
fingers get drawn between the rollers or caught in some belting. Another
minute and he will be flattened to a shapeless bloody mass. He catches
up an axe lying by and with his own arm hacks off his own hand at the
wrist. It takes some nerve to do that. It is not easy nor pleasant, but
it is the only alternative to a horrible death. I know of no stimulus
that will string a man up to the analogous spiritual act here enjoined,
and enjoined by conscience also, except participation in the death of
Christ and in the resulting life.
"Slay your members which are upon the earth" means tears and blood and
more than blood. It is easier far to cut off the hand, which after all
is not me, than to sacrifice passions and desires which, though they be
my worst self, are myself. It is useless to blink the fact that the only
road to holiness is through self-suppression, self-annihilation; and
nothing can make that easy and pleasant. True, the paths of religion are
ways of pleasantness and paths of peace, but they are steep, and
climbing is never easy. The upper air is bracing and exhilarating
indeed, but trying to lungs accustomed to the low levels. Religion is
delightsome, but self-denial is always against the grain of the self
which is denied, and there is no religion without it. Holiness is not to
be won in a moment. It is not a matter of consciousness, possessed when
we know that we possess it. But it has to be attained by effort. The way
to heaven is not by "the primrose path." That leads to "the everlasting
bonfire." For ever it remains true that men _obtain_ forgiveness and
eternal life as a gift for which the only requisite is faith, but they
_achieve_ holiness, which is the permeating of their characters with
that eternal life, by patient, believing, continuous effort. An
essential part of that effort is directed towards the conquest and
casting out of the old self in its earthward-looking lusts and passions.
The love of Jesus Christ and the indwelling of His renewing spirit make
that conquest possible, by supplying an all-constraining motive and an
all-conquering power. But even they do not make it easy, nor deaden the
flesh to the cut of the sacrificial knife.