“The sin which doth so easily beset us.”—HEB. xii. 1.
These words occur at the close of the most brilliant rhetorical passage
of the New Testament scripture. They form the point too of the most
close, subtle, and profound argument which is to be met with even in the
epistles of St. Paul. We constantly use them; no sentence of the Bible
is more frequently on our lips. But we isolate them from their
surroundings; we handle them as though they dealt with private matters
of individual experience, the sins and follies to which each nature in
its private propension is specially prone, rather than some broad human
fault or infirmity which is the common sin and sorrow of mankind. We
must read these words in connection with the great argument of which
they form the culmination, and the splendid burst of eloquence which
they close; or we shall miss their large and weighty meaning, and shall
narrow to a private and partial experience what the writer intends to
set forth as the easily besetting sin of mankind. The Epistle to the
Hebrews is certainly one of the most important and profound books in the
New Testament. Be it by Paul himself, as I believe, or be it by some
Pauline man, it is in a measure the keystone of the arch of revelation,
if the Apocalypse is its crown. The way in which, in the order of the
Divine dispensations, the old grows into the new—the method by which,
while so much once ordained by God goes apparently to wreck, to the eye
of God and in the judgment of the far-sighted among men nothing Divine
really perishes, no Divine promise fails of fulfilment, no Divine
purpose or hope misses its fruit—is a subject of supreme importance,
the consideration of which is needful to the completeness of Scripture,
while it is full of suggestion as a key to the Divine ways, to the
successive generations of mankind. Judaism has passed away in every
respect in which it is stronger than a memory. It is essentially, though
Jews live among us in Christendom by millions, a thing of the past; but
the Epistle to the Hebrews, which unfolds the method by which Judaism
developed into Christianity, is a living book in our Bibles, as full of
vital interest for this present time as it was for the generation which
watched with strange awe and wonder the tremendous overthrow of the
elect nation, and saw the last fragments of the ritual and order of a
Divinely established system swept along by the flood as wreck. There is
profound instruction concerning the method of development in
Christendom—how the Church grows, and strikes deeper root through the
ages, while that which men call the Church and cling to suffers constant
shocks, and is ever dropping piecemeal into decay and death—in this
sketch of the philosophy of the most remarkable and startling
development recorded in man’s spiritual history. Whether Paul wrote it
or not, it is the work of a man with Paul’s grasp of intellect, and
saturated with Paul’s ideas both of Judaism and Christianity. One can
hardly imagine Paul’s life-work complete to his own mind without the
production of such an essay as this. He alone grasped with perfect
clearness the vital relation of the two dispensations; and we can well
imagine with what intense earnestness this Hebrew of the Hebrews must
have desired to justify his apostolic ministry to his countrymen and to
mankind. Be this as it may, and these a priori judgments are of little
worth in criticism, the book is one of large thoughts, views, and
principles, reaching deep down to the foundations on which the edifice
of man’s spiritual faith and hope is built.
Let us try to realize some of the main difficulties of those to whom it
is addressed, whose tormenting doubts and apprehensions it was intended
to remove. They would be chiefly, I think, of two kinds; and they might
be put into the shape of questions.