The language of the text, 'a stone of proof,' as it reads in the
original, probably means a stone which has been tested and stood the
trial. And because it is thus a tested stone, it therefore is a
precious stone. There are two kinds of testing--the testing from the
assaults of enemies, and the testing by the building upon it of
friends. And both these methods of proof have been applied, and it has
stood the test.
Think of all the assaults that have been made from this side and the
other against Christ and His gospel, and what has become of them all?
Travellers tell us how they often see some wandering tribes of savage
Arabs trying to move the great stones, for instance, of Baalbec--those
wonders of unfinished architecture. But what can a crowd of such
people, with all their crowbars and levers, do to the great stone
bedded there, where it has been for centuries? They cannot stir it one
hair's-breadth. And so, against Jesus Christ and His gospel there has
stormed for eighteen hundred years an assaulting crowd, varying in its
individuals and in its methods of attack, but the same in its purpose,
and the same in the fruitlessness of its effort. Century after century
they have said, as they are saying to-day, '_Now_ the final assault is
going to be delivered; it can never stand _this_.' And when the smoke
has cleared away there may be a little blackening upon the edge, but
there is not a chip off its bulk, and it stands in its bed where it
did; and of all the grand preparations for a shattering explosion,
nothing is left but a sulphurous smell, and a wreath of smoke, and both
are floating away down into the distance. Generation after generation
has attacked the gospel; generation after generation has been foiled;
and I do not need to be a prophet, or the son of a prophet, to be quite
sure of this, that all who to-day are trying to destroy men's faith in
the Incarnate Son of God, who died for them and rose again, will meet
the same fate. I can see the ancient and discredited systems of
unbelief, that have gone down into oblivion, rising from their seats,
as the prophet in his great vision saw the kings of the earth, to greet
the last comer who had fought against God and failed, with 'Art thou
also become weak as we? Art thou become like unto us?' The stone will
stand, whosoever tries to blow it up with his dynamite, or to pound it
with his hammers.
But there is the other kind of testing. One proves the foundation by
building upon it. If the stone be soft, if it be slender, if it be
imperfectly bedded, it will crumble, it will shift, it will sink. But
this stone has borne all the weight that the world has laid upon it,
and borne it up. Did any man ever come to Jesus Christ with a sorrow
that He could not comfort, with a sin that He could not forgive, with a
soul that He could not save? And we may trust Him to the end. He is a
'tried stone.' 'This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him, and saved
him out of all his troubles,' has been the experience of nineteen
centuries.
So, being tried, it is precious,--precious to God who laid it there at
a great and real cost to Himself--having given up 'His only begotten
Son'; precious, inasmuch as building upon it is the one safety from the
raging tempest and flood that would else engulf and destroy us.