2. Can the Messiah, the kingly Son of David, be come, while those who
follow Him are the world’s outcasts, spoiled, persecuted, and slain?
The first is a standing difficulty with all the students of the
mysteries of God, in all ages of the world. It pressed on the Hebrew
Christians with peculiar force. They and their fathers for ages had
believed that a certain visible system had been established on earth by
God’s own hand, and sustained by His almighty power. It seemed to them
as if the very foundations of the universe were shaken, when their
temple, their priesthood, their glorious Jerusalem, their beautiful
fertile Palestine, vanished like a dream, and left them the beggars and
outcasts of mankind.
The second difficulty was equally grave. It touched men where they are
ever most sensitive, in their individual experiences and hopes. Can the
head of this Christian Church be the God-man, the glorious Being of whom
our prophets prophesied, and of whose kingdom they had such brilliant
visions, whilst its subjects are despised, hated, and down-trodden, and
its princes are the scum and off-scouring of all things unto this day?
We say that the Jews were expecting a splendid temporal kingdom, a
visible reign of the Messiah in righteousness over a regenerate and
exulting world. We say it with a touch of scorn. We may spare our scorn;
Christendom is always dreaming of it too. It would be a wonderful thing
if the Jews had not nourished some such expectations. All men have not
faith. How many Christians understand Christianity better than the Jews
understood the Judaism of their times? What is the Papacy but an
endeavour to realize this splendid and prosperous reign of Christ, of
which Judaism dreamed? A rule of righteousness, peace, and goodwill,
under the sceptre of Christ’s immediate delegate and regent, is the
vision which has haunted in all ages some of the ablest minds in
Christendom; and the desire to realize this has been near the heart of
some of the most desperate struggles which rent the civilized world
throughout the middle age. We cannot wonder at their sad thoughts. We
think the same when things much less visibly ordained of God are
shattered and swept away as wrecks. The answer of the writer of this
epistle to the question which was wrung out of the death agony of that
nation and church was substantially this: God does not establish things,
He plants seeds which grow. The principle of life in the seed is the
principle of identity through the successive stages of the development
of the organism. The body of man is one, though it changes form very
visibly at successive eras, and though every particle of matter
composing it is in constant flux, passing away from without, restored by
the constructive force of the living principle within. Rise, he says, to
a loftier and more comprehensive view of the Divine dispensations. See
how the living principle of God’s relation to you, to man, as Father and
Redeemer, runs through all the dispensations, moulds the outward form of
the Church according to the exigencies of the times, and is ever
bringing forth new forms as the ages need. See how the germ which was
planted before the law grew into the legal dispensation, and how when
the leafage and fruitage of that dispensation grew old and withered, as
_things_ must grow old and perish, the living principle within took new
and diviner form, suffered, as all divine things do, death and
resurrection, and lived with a new and divine life in a new and
regenerated world. “_God, who at sundry times and in divers manners
spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last
days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all
things, by whom also he made the worlds; who being the brightness of
his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things
by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat
down on the right hand of the Majesty on high; being made so much better
than the angels, as he hath by inheritance obtained a more excellent
name than they._” (Heb. i. 1–4.)
It ought not to be hard for us to understand and enter into the sore
perplexities of the Hebrew believers when they found their ancestral
kingdom uprooted, while no sign of the new Messiah’s kingdom appeared,
except the sway which a shameful cross was wielding over individual
human hearts. Can this be the beginning of the kingdom? Can Christ be
reigning there, and we His subjects here, the objects of His tenderest
care and love, be so harried and tormented for our truth and
righteousness as never men have been harried and tormented for lies and
sins? Is it credible that God’s sons in the world should be the world’s
outlaws; that those whom the hand of Omnipotence shields should be the
helpless victims of the most puny foes? Are slaves and beggars the chief
subjects of Messiah’s kingdom? Does the fellowship of this new realm
draw us into loving, tender communion with the saddest, the poorest, the
most ignorant, the most wretched of mankind? Is the life of this new
regenerate state a ceaseless struggle, a constant pain, with no issue
but by the gate of death, whose apparitors may be a lion’s jaws or a
headsman’s axe? Is the symbol of this splendid empire a cross? The
answer to these questions is the text. The question is the sin which so
easily besets humanity, you and me quite as intensely as the Hebrews;
and the cure for the sin, the answer to the question, is the faith which
draws from the writer this splendid eulogy, a faith which scans the
bounds of the invisible universe, and measures the range of the Divine
thought from the height of the Divine throne. It is as though the writer
had said, Looked at on the lower level, by the measures of the things
seen and temporal, the lot is dark enough and sad enough: “_If in this
life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable._”
(1 Cor. xv. 19.) But rise to a higher level. Get up into the mountain,
and survey the horizon of a wider world. Search into the nature of man’s
true well-being, and see where the springs of it rise. Measure the range
of man’s existence, the endless ages of his being, the boundless faculty
of joy or sorrow, of bliss or anguish, that claims eternity as its time.
Above all, measure the stature of a man. Study the image after which he
is fashioned, the godlike form he wears, the godlike experience he is
made to fathom, and the kind of satisfaction which his godlike powers
demand, robbed of which they hunger and pine and fill him at last with
madness and despair; so shall you comprehend more fully the grandeur and
the glory of his Christian vocation—sharing the conflict, the toil, the
sorrow, the joy, and the triumph of hisever God. Then lay aside “every
weight and the sin that doth so easily beset you.” That sin is poverty
of faith—a poor-spirited estimate of life, its experiences and its
issues; a love for the serfdom of Egypt rather than the freedom of the
wilderness, the fleshpots of Goshen rather than the bread of Canaan, the
pleasure of the moment rather than the joy which springs from fountains
that outlast eternity.
The sin which doth so easily beset us. Want of faith.