xi. 2. _The Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon Him._
This is declared concerning the Messiah. Short as this declaration
is, some of the profoundest of all truths are involved in it. It is
implied that God is a person, that from Him there goes forth an
influence by which the character of other persons is affected, and
that all that qualified Jesus of Nazareth to be the Messiah came from
God. Let us think of these things. Do not be deterred from doing so
by the idea that they are transcendental, far away from our daily
life. They need not be so; we shall be very blameworthy if we make
them so.
+I. God is a person.+ There are those who would have us put away this
faith. In their view, God is merely the great controlling Force
behind all other forces, the life of the universe, diffused
throughout it, manifesting itself in innumerable forms. As it is the
same life in the tree that manifests itself in root, trunk, branch,
spray, twig, leaf, blossom, fruit, so all things that exist are not
the creations of a personal will, but the manifestations of an
impersonal and all-pervading life; all forces, convertible the one
into the other, are but varying forms of the one underlying force.
Every individual life is but a wave that seems for a moment to be
separated from the one universal ocean of life; it leaps up from it,
falls back into it, is absorbed by it. True, these waves are often
strangely diverse--Nero and St. Paul, John Howard and Napoleon, the
Virgin Mary and Lucrezia Borgia; but in that great Unity of which
they are all manifestations, there is an all-comprehensive
reconciliation, though it may elude our grasp. For Pantheism, many
would have us put away the doctrine of a personal God. But this
exchange, if it could be forced upon us by some logical necessity
(which it is not), would not be a gain, but a tremendous loss. For,
1. _There would be a tremendous loss to the heart._ A force may be
feared, but not loved. To gravitation we owe much, but no one ever
professed to love it. A force cannot be loved, because it does not
love. Strike out of our life all that comes to us from the confidence
that God loves us, and from the responsive love that springs up in
our hearts towards Him, and how much is lost! Then there is no longer
any assurance amid the mysteries of life, nor consolation in its
sorrows. In a word, we are orphaned: we can no longer say, "Our
Father, who art in heaven." There is no longer a Father, knowing us,
loving us, causing all good things to work together for our good;
there is only a Force, to which it is useless to appeal, against
which it is impossible to contend. 2. _We should also lose one of the
greatest of all helps to a noble life._ Not to dwell on the fact that
to speak of virtue or vice would then be absurd,--then we should no
longer sin, we should merely make mistakes,--consider how much the
world owes to the aspiration to be like God which has stirred so many
noble souls. Through them the average morality of the world has been
marvellously raised; but this would have been impossible but for the
stimulus these inspiring souls found in the character of God. That is
the first fact of which this text reminds us, that God is a person
from whom a spirit--an influence--can go forth affecting the
character of other persons.
+II. From God such an influence does go forth.+ The possibility is a
glorious fact. That from God a "spirit" should go forth, and that it
should do so invisibly, is in accordance with all that we know of the
universe which God has made, and which is in some sort a revelation
of Him. 1. Nothing in the universe is unrelated. From orb to orb
influences go forth by which they are mutually affected. 2. The
mightiest influences are invisible. In all this, the material is a
counter-fact and revelation of the spiritual. It would be altogether
abnormal, if from God there did not go forth an influence operating
upon and affecting other persons. It is invisible, but its effects
are recognisable. One of them is the activity of conscience, rightly
understood. Another is the moral growth and refinement which those in
whom it is most conspicuous, most invariably and distinctly attribute
to influences exerted upon them by God. Even Socrates did so. This
also is a doctrine full of hope and comfort. If we need moral
transformation, there streams from God an influence capable of
effecting it: to that influence let us submit ourselves, and the
transformation shall come to pass; the Spirit of the Lord will rest
upon us, and we shall become like Him.
+III. To the influence exerted upon Him by the Spirit of the Lord,
Jesus of Nazareth owed all that qualified Him to be the Messiah+
(vers. 2-5). That which was born of the Virgin Mary was a true human
child. A sinless child, yet sinless not as the result of the
sinlessness of the mother (as Rome teaches), but of the influence of
the Spirit of the Lord resting upon Him from the beginning of his
earthly life. His was a real humanity--_our_ humanity sanctified. All
that was pure, noble, Godlike in Him was "born not of the flesh, nor
of the will of man, but of God." How full of comfort and hope is this
truth also! To us also is offered the same Spirit. Nothing can be
more express than the declarations that we may have it if we will,
and that, if we have it, the ultimate result will be that we shall be
found partakers of the holiness of God. Let us not be unwisely cast
down by the frailty and pollution of our nature; if the Spirit of the
Lord rest upon us, the purity and the strength of God will become
ours, and at length the Father will say to each of us, as He did of
Jesus of Nazareth, "This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well
pleased."