My text, as I have already remarked, emphatically repeats 'in this
mountain' in its next clause. 'He will destroy in this mountain the
face of the covering cast over all people, and the veil that is spread
over all nations.'
Now, of course, the pathetic picture that is implied here, of a dark
pall that lies over the whole world, suggests the idea of mourning, but
still more emphatically, I think, that of obscuration and gloom. The
veil prevents vision and shuts out light, and that is the picture of
humanity as it presents itself before this prophet--a world of men
entangled in the folds of a dark pall that lay over their heads, and
swathed them round about, and prevented them from seeing; shut them up
in darkness and entangled their feet, so that they stumbled in the
gloom. It is a pathetic picture, but it does not go beyond the
realities of the case. For, with all our light on other matters, with
all our freedom of action, with all our frequent forgetfulness of the
fact that we are thus encompassed, it remains true that, apart from the
emancipation and illumination that are effected by Jesus Christ, this
is the picture of mankind as they are. And you are beneath that veil,
and swathed, obstructively as regards light and liberty, by its heavy
folds, unless Christ has freed you.
But we must go a step further than that, I think; and although one does
not wish to force too much meaning on to a poetic metaphor, still I
cannot help supposing that that universal pall, as I called it, which
is cast over all nations, has a very definite and a very tragic
meaning. There is a universal fact of human experience which answers to
the figure, and that is sin. That is the black thing whose ebon folds
hamper us, and darken us, and shut out the visions of God and
blessedness, and all the glorious blue above us. The heavy, dark mist
settles down on the plains, though the sky above is undimmed by it, and
the sun is blazing in the zenith. Not one beam can penetrate through
the wet, chill obstruction, and men stumble about in the fog with lamps
and torches, and all the while a hundred feet up it is brightness and
day. Or, if at some points the obstruction is thinned and the sun does
come through, it is shorn of all its gracious beams and power to warm
and cheer, and looks but like a copper-coloured, livid, angry ball. So
the 'veil that is spread over all nations, 'that awful fact of
universal sinfulness, shuts out God--who is our light and our joy--from
us, and no other lights or joys are more than twinkling tapers in the
mist. Or it makes us see Him as men in a fog see the sun--shorn of His
graciousness, threatening, wrathful, unlovely.
Brethren, the fact of universal sinfulness is the outstanding fact of
humanity. Jesus Christ deals with it by His death, which is God's
sacrifice and the world's atonement. That Lamb of God has borne away
the world's sins, and my sins and thy sins are there. By the fact of
His death He has rent the veil from the top to the bottom, and the
light comes in, unhindered by the terrible solemn fact that all of us
have sinned and come short of the glory of God. By His life He
communicates to each of us, if we will trust our poor sinful souls to
Him, a new power of living which is triumphant over temptation, and
gives the victory over sin if we will be true to Him. And so the last
shreds of the veil, like the torn clouds of a spent thunderstorm, are
parted into filmy rags and float away below the horizon, leaving the
untarnished heavens and the flaming sunshine; and 'we with unveiled
faces' can lift them up to be irradiated by the light. 'In this
mountain will the Lord destroy the covering that is spread over all
nations.'
The weak point of all these schemes and methods to which I have already
referred for helping humanity out of the slough, and making men
happier, is that they underestimate the fact of sin. If a man comes to
them and says, 'I have broken God's law. What am I to do? I have a
power within me that impels me now to evil. How am I to get rid of it?'
they have no adequate answer. There is only one remedy that deals
radically with the fact of human transgression; only one power that
will deliver each of us, if we will, from the penalty, the guilt, the
power of sin; and that is the sacrifice of Christ on Calvary, and its
result, the inspiration of the spirit of life that was in Jesus Christ,
breathed into us from the Throne itself. Thus, and thus only, is the
veil done away in Christ.