'... His Divine power hath given unto us all things that pertain
unto life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him that hath
called us to glory and virtue.'--2 Peter i. 3.
'I knew thee,' said the idle servant in our Lord's parable, 'that thou
wert an austere man, reaping where thou didst not sow, and gathering
where thou hadst not strewed. I was afraid, and went and hid my talent
in the earth.' Our Lord would teach us all with that pregnant word the
great truth that if once a man gets it into his head that God's
principal relation to him is to demand, and to command, you will get no
work out of that man; that such a notion will paralyse all activity and
cut the nerve of all service. And the converse is as true, namely, that
the one thought about God, which is fruitful of all blessing, joy,
spontaneous, glad activity, is the thought of Him as giving, and not of
demanding, of bestowing, and not of commanding. Teach a man that he is,
as the book of James has it,'the giving God,' and let that thought soak
into the man's heart and mind, and you will get any work out of him. And
only when that thought is deep in the spirit will there be true service.
Now that is the connection in which the words of my text come; for they
are laid as the broad foundation of the great commandment that follows:
'Beside this, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue, and to
your virtue knowledge,' and so on, all the round of the ladder by which
the Apostle represents us as climbing up to God. The foundation of this
injunction is--God has given you everything. You have got it to begin
with, and so do you set yourselves to work, and see that you make the
thing that is yours your own, and incorporate into your being and into
the very substance of your soul, and work out in all the blessed
activities of a Christian life, the gifts that His royal and kingly hand
has bestowed upon you. Take for granted that God loves you and gives you
His whole self, and work on in the fulness of His possessed gift.
That is the connection of the words before us. I take them just as they
lie in our passage, dealing first of all with this question--God's call
to you and me; how it is done. Now I do not know if I can venture to
indulge any remarks about Biblical criticism, but you will perhaps bear
with me just for a moment whilst I say that the people who know a great
deal more about such subjects than either you or I, agree with one
consent that the proper way of reading this verse of my text is not as
our Bible has it; 'Him that has called us _to_ glory and virtue,' but
'Him that hath called us _by_--by his own glory and virtue.' Do you see
the difference? In one case the language expresses the things in
imitation of the Divine nature to which God summons you and me when He
calls us. That is how our Bible has taken it; but the deeper thought
still is the things in that Divine nature and activity itself which
constitute His great summons and invitation of men to His side; and
these are the two, whatever they might be, which the Apostle here
describes in that rather peculiar and unusual language for Scripture,
'Who has called us by His own glory and His own virtue.' I venture to
dwell on these two points for a moment or two.
Now, first of all, God's glory. Threadbare and consequently vague as the
expression is in the minds of a great many people who have heard it with
their ears ever since they were little children, God's glory has a very
distinct and definite meaning in Scripture, and all starts, as I think,
from the Old Testament use of the expression, which was the distinct
specific name for the supernatural light that lay between the cherubim,
and brooded over the ark on the mercy-seat. The word signifies
specifically and originally the glory of God, and irradiation of a
material, though supernatural, symbol of His Divine and spiritual
presence. Very well, lay hold of that material picture, for God teaches
us as we do our children, with pictures. Take the symbol and lift it up
into the spiritual region, and it is just this: the glory of God in its
deepest meaning is the irradiation and the perpetual pouring out and out
and out from Himself, as the rays of the sun stream out from its great
orb, pouring out from Himself the light and the perfectness and the
beauty of His own self revelation. And I think we may fairly translate
and paraphrase the first words of my text into this: God's great way of
summoning men to Himself is by laying out His love upon them and letting
the fulness of that ineffable and uncreated light, in which is no
darkness at all, stream into the else blinded and hopeless lives and
hearts of men. Then the other side of the Apostle's thought seems to
me--if we will only strip it of the threadbare technicalities associated
with it--as great and wonderful, God's glory and God's virtue. A
heathenish kind of smack lingers about that word, both as applied to men
and as applied to God, and so seldom found in the New Testament; but
meaning here, as I venture to say, without stopping to show it--meaning
here substantially the same thing that we mean by that word energy or
power. You know old women in country places talk about the virtues of
plants. They do not mean by this the goodness of plants, but they mean
the occult powers which they suppose them able to put forth. We read in
one of the gospels that our Lord Himself said at one singular period of
His life that virtue had gone out of Him, meaning thereby not goodness
but energy. So I think we get a sufficient equivalent to the Apostle's
meaning if for the second two words of my text we read, 'He hath called
us by the glory, the raying out of his love, and He hath called us by
the activity and the energy, the power in action of His great and
illustrious Spirit.' So you see these two things, the light that streams
out of an energy which is born of the streaming light. These two things
are really at bottom but one, various aspects of one idea. Modern
physicists tell us that all the activity in the system comes from the
sun, and in the higher region all the activity comes from the sun, and
there is no mightier force in the physical universe than the sunlight.
Lightnings are vulgar, noisy, and limited in contrast. The
all-conquering force is the light that streams out, and so says Peter in
his vivid picturesque way--not meaning the mere talk of philosophy or
theology--the manifestation of the glory of God is the mightiest force
in the whole universe. It is not like the play of the moonbeam upon an
iceberg, ineffectual, cold, merely touching the death without melting or
warming it, but it rays out like the sun in the heavens, and the work
done by the light is mightier than all our work. By His glory, and by
the transcendent energies which reside in that illustrious manifestation
of the uncreated light, God summons men to Himself. Well, if that is
anything like fair exposition of the words before us, let me just ask
you before I go further to stop on them for one moment. If I may venture
to say so, put off your theological spectacles for a minute, and do not
let us harden this thought down with any mere dogma that can be selected
in the language of the creeds. Let us try and put it into words a little
less hackneyed. Suppose, instead of talking about calling, you were to
talk about inviting, summoning, beckoning; or I might use tenderer words
still--beseeching, wooing, entreating; for all that lies in the thought.
God summoning and calling, in that sense, men to Himself, by the raying
out of His own perfect beauty, and the might with which the beams go
forth into the darkness. Ah! is not that beautiful, dear brethren; that
there is nothing more, indeed, for God to do to draw us to Himself than
to let us see what He is? So perfectly fair, so sweet, so tender, so
strong, so absolutely corresponding to all the necessities of our
beings and the hunger of our hearts, that when we see Him we cannot
choose but love Him, and that He can do nothing more to call wandering
hearts back to the light and sweetness of His own heart than to show
them Himself. And so from all corners of His universe, and in every
activity of His hand and heart and spirit, we can hear a voice saying,
'Son, give me thine heart.' 'Oh! taste and see that God is good.'
'Acquaint now thyself with Him and be at peace; thereby good shall come
unto thee.'
But great and wonderful as such a thought seems to be when we look at it
in the freshness which belongs to it, do you suppose that that was all
that Peter was thinking about? Do you think that a wide, general, and if
you leave it by itself, vague utterance like that which I have been
indulging in, would give all the specific precision and fulness of the
meaning of the word before us? I think not. I fancy that when this
Apostle wrote these words he remembered a time long, long ago, when
somebody stood by the little fishing-cobble there, and as the men were
up to their knees in slush and dirt, washing their nets, said to them,
'Follow Me.' I think that was in Peter's estimate God's call to him by
God's glory and by God's virtue. And so I pause there for a moment to
say that all the lustrous pouring out of light, all that transcendent
energy of active love, is not diffused nebulous through a universe; it
is not even spread in that sense over all the deeds of His hand; but
whilst it is everywhere, it has a focus and a centre and a fire. The
fire is gathered into the Son, Jesus Christ; Jesus Christ in His manhood
and in His Deity; Jesus Christ in His life, passion, death,
resurrection, ascension, and kingly reign. The whole creation, as this
New Testament proclaims Him to us, is God's glory and God's virtue,
whereby He draws men to Himself. I cannot stay to dwell on that thought
as I should be glad to do. Let me just remind you of the two parts into
which it splits itself up; and I commend it, dogmatically as I have to
state it in such an audience as this--I commend it to the multitudes of
young men here present. The highest form of the Divine glory is Jesus
Christ, not the attributes with which men clothe the Divinity, not those
abstractions which you find in books of theology. All that is but the
fringe of the glory. And I tell you, dear friends, the living white
light at the centre and heart of all the radiance of the flame is the
light of life which is conveyed into the gentle Christ. As the Apostle
John has it, 'We beheld His glory.' Yes, and taking and binding together
the two words which people have so often treated against each other, 'We
beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full
of grace and truth,' the highest light in Him that says, 'I am the light
of the world'--very light of very light. As a much maligned document has
it,'very light of very light,' the brightness of His glory, the
irradiation of His splendour, and the express image of His person. And
as the light so the power. Christ the power; power in its highest,
noblest form, the power of patient gentleness and Divine suffering;
power in its widest sweep, 'unto every one that believeth'; power in its
most wondrous operation, 'the power of God unto salvation.' So I come to
you, I hope, with one message on my lips and in my heart. If you want
light, look to Christ. If you want to behold that unveiled face, the
glory of the Lord, turn to Him, and let His sunshine smite you on the
face as the light smote Stephen, and then you can say, 'He that hath
seen Him hath seen the Father.' My brother, the highest, noblest,
perfect, and, as I believe, final form in which all God's glory, all
God's energy, are gathered together, and make their appeal to you and
me, was when a Galilean peasant stood up in a little knot of forgotten
Jews and said to them, and through them to you and me, 'Come unto Me all
ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.' He calls
by His glory and by His virtue.
Now still further. Confining myself as before to the words as they lie
here in this text, let me ask you to think, and that for a moment or two
only, on the great and wondrous purpose which this Divine energy and
light had in view in summoning us to itself. His Divine power hath given
unto us all things that pertain to life and all things that pertain to
godliness. Look at that! One of the old Psalms says: 'Gather my saints
together unto me, those who have made a covenant with me by sacrifice;
assemble them all before my throne, and I will judge my people.' Is that
the last and final revelation of God's purpose of drawing men to Him? Is
that why He sends out His heralds and summons through the whole
intelligent creation? Nay, something better. Not to judge, not to
scourge, not to chastise, not to avenge. To give. This is the meaning of
that summons that comes out through the whole earth, 'Come up hither,'
that when we get there we may be flooded with the richness of His mercy,
and that He may pour His whole soul out over us in the greatness of His
gifts. This is God, and the perpetual activity summoning men to Himself
that there He may bless them. He makes our hearts empty that He may fill
them. He shapes us as we are that we may need Him and may recreate
ourselves in Him. He says, 'Bring all your vessels and I will fill them
full.' Now look in this part of my subject at what I may venture to call
the magnificent confidence that this Peter has in the--what shall I
say?--the encyclopædical--if I may use a long word--and universal
character of God. All things that pertain to life, all things that
pertain to godliness. And somebody says, 'Yes, that is tautology, that
is saying the same thing twice over in different language.' Never mind,
says Peter, so much the better, it will help to express the exuberant
abundance and fulness. He takes a leaf out of his brother Paul's book.
He is often guilty when he speaks of God's gifts of that same sin of
tautology, as for instance, 'Now unto Him who is able to do exceeding,
abundantly, above all'--there are four of them--'all that we can ask or
think.' Yes, in all forms language is but faint and feeble, weak and
poor in the presence of that great miracle of a love that passeth
knowledge and that we may know the heights and depths. And so says our
Apostle, 'All things that pertain to life, all things that pertain to
godliness.' The whole circle all round, all the 360 degrees of it, God's
love will come down and lie on the top of it as it were, superimposed,
so that there should not be a single gift where there is a flaw or a
defect. Everything you want of life, everything you want for godliness.
Yes, of course, the gift must bear some kind of proportion to the giver.
You do not expect a millionaire to put down half a crown to a
subscription list if he gives anything at all. And God says to you and
me, 'Come and look at My storehouses, count if you can those golden
vases filled with treasure, look at those massive ingots of bullion,
gaze into the vanishing distances of the infiniteness of My nature and
of My possessions, and then listen to Me. I give thee Myself--Myself,
that ye may be filled with all the fulness of God. All things that
pertain to life, all things that pertain to godliness. But I cannot pass
on from this part of my subject without venturing one more remark. It is
this: I do not suppose it is too minute, verbal criticism. This great
encyclopædiacal gift is represented in my text, not as a thing that you
are going to get, Christian men and women, but as a thing that you have
gotten. And any of you that are able to test the correctness of my
assertion will see I have thought the form of language used in the
original is such as to point still more specifically than in our
translation, to some one definite act in the past in which all that
fulness of glory and virtue of life and godliness was given to us men.
Is there any doubt as to what that is? We talk sometimes as if we had to
ask God to give us more. God cannot give you any more than He gave you
nineteen hundred years ago. It was all in Christ. Get a very vulgar
illustration which is altogether inadequate for a great many purposes,
but may serve for one. Suppose some man told you that there was a
thousand pounds paid to your credit at a London bank, and that you were
to get the use of it as you drew cheques against it. Well, the money is
there, is it not? The gift is given, and yet for all that you may be
dying, and half-dead, a pauper. I was reading a book only the other day
which contained a story that comes in here. An Arctic expedition, some
years ago, found an ammunition chest that Commander Parry had left fifty
years ago, safe under a pile of stones. The wood of the chest had not
rotted yet; the provisions inside of it were perfectly sweet, and good,
and eatable. There it had lain all those years. Men had died of
starvation within arm's length of it. It was there all the same. And
so, if I might venture to vulgarise the great theme that I try to speak
about, God has given us His Son, and in Him, all that pertains to life
and all that pertains to godliness. My brother, take the things that are
freely given to you of God.
And so that leads me to one last word, and it shall only be a word, in
regard to what our text tells us of the way by which on our side we can
yield to this Divine call, and receive this Divine fulness of gifts,
through the knowledge of Him that hath called us to glory. Through the
knowledge! Yes, well there are two kinds of knowledge, are there not?
There is the knowledge by which you know a book, for instance, on the
subject of study, and there is the knowledge by which you know one
another; and the kind of thing I mean when I say, 'I know mathematics,'
is entirely different to what I mean when I say, 'I know John, Thomas,'
or whoever he may be. And I venture to say that the knowledge, which is
the condition of receiving the whole fulness of the glory and the whole
fulness of the light, is a great deal more like the thing we mean when
we talk of knowing one another than when we talk of knowing a book. That
is to say, a man may have all the creeds and confessions of faith clear
in his head, and yet none of the life, none of the light, none of the
power, and none of the godliness. But if we know Him as our brother,
know Him as our friend, our sacrifice, our Redeemer, Lord, all in all;
know Him as our heaven, our righteousness, and our strength; if we know
Him with the knowledge which is possession; if we know Him with the
knowledge which, as the profoundest of the Apostles says, 'hath the
truth in life'; if we know Him, see then, 'This is life eternal, to
know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom Thou hast sent.'
Now, friends, my words are done. God is calling you. No, let us put it a
little more definitely than that--God is calling _thee_. There is no
speech nor language where His voice is not heard. His words are gone out
to the end of the world, and have reached even thyself. He calls thee,
oh! brother, sister, friend, that you and I may turn round to Him and
say, 'When Thou saidst, Seek ye my face, my heart said unto Thee, Thy
face, Lord, will I seek.' Amen.