'Whose image and superscription hath it?'--Luke xx. 24.
It is no unusual thing for antagonists to join forces in order to
crush a third person obnoxious to both. So in this incident we have
an unnatural alliance of the two parties in Jewish politics who were
at daggers drawn. The representatives of the narrow conservative
Judaism, which loathed a foreign yoke, in the person of the
Pharisees and Scribes, and the Herodians, the partisans of a
foreigner and a usurper, lay their heads together to propose a
question to Christ which they think will discredit or destroy Him.
They would have answered their own question in opposite ways. One
would have said, 'It _is_ lawful to give tribute to Caesar';
the other would have said, 'It is not.' But that is a small matter
when malice prompts. They calculate, 'If He says, No! we will
denounce Him to Pilate as a rebel. If He says, Yes! we will go to
the people and say, Here is a pretty Messiah for you, that has no
objection to the foreign yoke. Either way we shall end Him.'
Jesus Christ serenely walks through the cobwebs, and lays His hand
upon the fact. 'Let Me see a silver penny!'--which, by the bye, was
the amount of the tribute--'Whose head is that?' The currency of the
country proclaims the monarch of the country. To stamp his image on
the coin is an act of sovereignty. 'Caesar's head declares that you
are Caesar's subjects, whether you like it or not, and it is too
late to ask questions about tribute when you pay your bills in
his money.' 'Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's.'
Does not the other side of Christ's answer--'to God the things that
are God's'--rest upon a similar fact? Does not the parallelism
require that we should suppose that the destiny of things to be
devoted to God is stamped upon them, whatever they are, at least as
plainly as the right of Caesar to exact tribute was inferred from
the fact that his money was the currency of the country? The thought
widens out in a great many directions, but I want to confine it to
one special line of contemplation, and to take it as suggesting to
each of us this great truth, that the very make of men shows that
they belong to God, and are bound to yield themselves to Him. If the
answer to the question be plain, and the conclusion irresistible,
about the penny with the image of Tiberius, the answer is no less
plain, nor the conclusion less irresistible, when we turn the
interrogation within, and, looking at our own being, say to
ourselves, 'Whose image and superscription hath _it_?'
I. First, then, note the image stamped upon man, and the consequent
obligation.
We can very often tell what a thing is for by noticing its make. The
instructed eye of an anatomist will, from a bone, divine the sphere
in which the creature to whom it belonged was intended to live. Just
as plainly as gills or lungs, fins or wings, or legs and arms,
declare the element in which the creature that possesses them is
intended to move, so plainly stamped upon all our natures is this,
that God is our Lord since we are made in a true sense in His image,
and that only in Him can we find rest.
I need not remind you, I suppose, of the old word, 'Let us make man
in our own image.' Nor need I, I suppose, insist at any length upon
the truth that though, by the fact of man's sin, the whole glory and
splendour of the divine image in which he was made is marred and
defaced, there still remain such solemn, blessed, and awful
resemblances between man and God that there can be no mistake as to
which beings in the universe are the most kindred; nor any
misunderstanding as to who it is after whose likeness we are formed,
and in whose love and life alone we can be blessed.
I am not going to weary you with thoughts for which, perhaps, the
pulpit is not the proper place; but let me just remind you of one or
two points. Is there any other being on this earth that can say of
itself 'I am'? God says '_I am that I am'_. You and I cannot
say that, but we alone, in this order of things, possess that solemn
and awful gift, the consciousness of our personal being. And,
brethren, whoever is able to say to himself 'I am' will never know
rest until he can turn to God and say 'Thou art,' and then, laying
his hand in the Great Father's hand, venture to say '_We_ are.'
We are made in His image, in that profoundest of all senses.
But to come to something less recondite. We are like God in that we
can love; we are like Him in that we can perceive the right, and
that the right is supreme; we are like Him in that we have the power
to say 'I will.' And these great capacities demand that the creature
who thus knows himself to be, who thus knows the right, who thus can
love, who thus can purpose, resolve, and act, should find his home
and his refuge in fellowship with God.
But if you take a coin, and compare it with the die from which it
has been struck, you will find that wherever in the die there is a
relief, in the coin there is a sunken place; and conversely. So
there are not only resemblances in man to the divine nature, which
bear upon them the manifest marks of his destiny, but there are
correspondences, wants, on our side, being met by gifts upon His;
hollow emptinesses in us being filled, when we are brought into
contact with Him, by the abundance of His outstanding supplies and
gifts. So the poorest, narrowest, meanest life has in it a depth of
desire, an ardour, and sometimes a pain and a madness of yearning
and longing which nothing but God can fill. Though we often
misunderstand the voice, and so make ourselves miserable by vain
efforts, our 'heart and our flesh,' in every fibre of our being,
'cry out for the living God.' And what we all want is some one Pearl
of great price into which all the dispersed preciousness and
fragmentary brilliances that dazzle the eye shall be gathered. We
want a Person, a living Person, a present Person, a sufficient
Person, who shall satisfy our hearts, our whole hearts, and that at
one and the same time, or else we shall never be at rest.
Because, then, we are made dependent, because we possess these wild
desires, because immortal thirst attaches to our nature, because we
have consciences that need illuminating, wills that are only free
when they are absolutely submissive, hearts that are dissatisfied,
and left yearning, after all the sweetnesses of limited, transient,
and creatural affections, we bear on our very fronts the image of
God; and any man that wisely looks at himself can answer the
question, 'Whose image and superscription hath it?' in but one way.
'In the image of God created He him.'
Therefore by loving fellowship, by lowly trust, by ardour of love,
by submissiveness of obedience, by continuity of contemplation, by
the sacrifice of self, we must yield ourselves to God if we would
pay the tribute manifestly owing to the Emperor by the fact that His
image and superscription are upon the coin.
II. And so let me ask you to look, in the next place, at the
defacement of the image and the wrong expenditure of the coin.
You sometimes get into your hands money on which there has been
stamped, by mischief, or for some selfish purpose, the name of some
one else than the king's or queen's which surrounds the head upon it.
And in like manner our nature has gone through the stamping-press
again, and another likeness has been deeply imprinted upon it. The
image of God, which every man has, is in some senses and aspects
ineffaceable by any course of conduct of theirs. But in another
aspect it is not like the permanent similitude stamped upon the
solid metal of the penny, but like the reflection, rather, that
falls upon some polished plate, or that is cast upon the white sheet
from a lantern. If the polished plate be rusty and stained, the
image is faint and indistinct; if it be turned away from the light
the image passes. And that is what some of you are doing. By living
to yourselves, by living day in and day out without ever remembering
God, by yielding to passions, lusts, ambitions, low desires, and the
like, you are doing your very best to erase the likeness which still
lingers in your nature. Is there any one here that has yielded to
some lust of the flesh, some appetite, drunkenness, gluttony,
impurity, or the like, and has so sold himself to it, as that that
part of the divine image, the power of saying 'I will,' has pretty
nearly gone? I am afraid there must be some who, by long submission
to passion, have lost the control that reason and conscience and a
firm steady purpose ought to give. Is there any man here who, by
long course of utter neglect of the divine love, has ceased to feel
that there is a heart at the centre of the universe, or that He has
anything to do with it? Brethren, the awful power that is given
to men of degrading themselves till, lineament by lineament, the
likeness in which they are made vanishes, is the saddest and most
tragical thing in the world. 'Like the beasts that perish,' says one
of the psalms, the men become who, by the acids and the files of
worldliness and sensuality and passion, have so rubbed away the
likeness of God that it is scarcely perceptible in them. Do I speak
to some such now? If there is nothing else left there is this, a
hunger for absolute good and for the satisfaction of your desires.
That is part of the proof that you are made for God, and that only
in Him can you find rest.
All occupations of heart and mind and will and active life with
other things to the exclusion of supreme devotion to God are, then,
sacrilege and rebellion. The emperor's head was the token of
sovereignty and carried with it the obligation to pay tribute. Every
fibre in your nature protests against the prostitution of itself to
anything short of God. You remember the story in the Old Testament
about that saturnalia of debauchery, the night when Babylon fell,
when Bel-shazzar, in the very wantonness of godless insolence, could
not be satisfied with drinking his wine out of anything less sacred
than the vessels that had been brought from the Temple at Jerusalem.
That is what many of us are doing, taking the sacred cup which is
meant to be filled with the wine of the kingdom and pouring into it
the foaming but poisonous beverages which steal away our brains and
make us drunk, the moment before our empire totters to its fall and
we to our ruin. 'All the consecrated things of the house of the Lord
they dedicated to Baal,' says one of the narratives in the Book of
Chronicles. That is what some of us are doing, taking the soul that
is meant to be consecrated to God and find its blessedness there,
and offering it to false gods in whose service there is no
blessedness.
For, dear friends, I beseech you, lay this to heart that you cannot
thus use the Godlike being that you possess without bringing down
upon your heads miseries and unrest. The raven, that black bird of
evil omen, went out from the ark, and flew homeless over the
weltering ocean. The souls that seek not God fly thus, strangers and
restless, through a drowned and lifeless world. The dove came back
with an olive branch in its beak. Souls that are wise and have made
their nests in the sanctuary can there fold their wings and be at
peace. As the ancient saint said, 'We are made for God, and only in
God have we rest.' 'Oh, that thou hadst hearkened to me, then had
thy peace been as a river, and thy righteousness as the waves of the
sea.' Cannot you see the blessed, gentle gliding of the full stream
through the meadows with the sunshine upon its ripples? Such is the
heart that has yielded itself to God. In solemn contrast to that
lovely image, the same prophet has for a repeated refrain in his
book, 'The wicked is like the troubled sea which cannot rest,' but
goes moaning round the world, and breaking in idle foam upon every
shore, and still is unquiet for evermore. Brethren, only when we
render to God the thing that is God's--our hearts and ourselves-have
we repose.
III. Now, lastly, notice the restoration and perfecting of the
defaced image.
Because man is like God, it is possible for God to become like man.
The possibility of Revelation and of Redemption by an incarnate
Saviour depend upon the reality of the fact that man is made in the
image of God. Thus there comes to us that divine Christ, who lays
'His hands upon both' and being on the one hand the express image of
His person, so that He can say, 'He that hath seen Me hath seen the
Father,' on the other hand 'was in all points made like unto His
brethren,' with only the exception that the defacement which had
obliterated the divine image in them left it clear, untarnished, and
sharply cut in Him.
Therefore, because Jesus Christ has come, our Brother, 'bone of our
bone, and flesh of our flesh,' made like unto us, and in our
likeness presenting to us the very image of God and eradiation of
His light, therefore no defacement that it is possible for men or
devils to make on this poor humanity of ours need be irrevocable and
final. All the stains may be blotted out, all the usurping
superscriptions may be removed and the original imprint restored.
The dints may be elevated, the too lofty points may be lowered, the
tarnish and the rust may be rubbed off, and, fairer than before, the
likeness of God may be stamped on every one of us, 'after the image
of Him that created us,' if only we will turn ourselves to that dear
Lord, and cast our souls upon Him. Christ hath become like us that
we might become like Him, and therein be partakers of the divine
nature. 'We all, reflecting as a glass does the glory of the Lord,
may be changed into the same image from glory to glory.'
Nor do the possibilities stop there, for we look forward to a time
when, if I might pursue the metaphor of my text, the coinage shall
be called in and reminted, in new forms of nobleness and of
likeness. We have before us this great prospect, that 'we shall be
like Him, for we shall see Him as He is'; and in all the glories of
that heaven we shall partake, for all that is Christ's is ours, and
'we that have borne the image of the earthly shall also bear the
image of the heavenly.'
I come to you, then, with this old question: 'Whose image and
superscription hath it?' and the old exhortation founded thereupon:
'Render therefore to God the thing that is God's'; and yield
yourselves to Him. Another question I would ask, and pray that you
may lay it to heart, 'To what purpose is this waste?' What are you
doing with the silver penny of your own soul? Wherefore do ye 'spend
it for that which is not bread?' Give yourselves to God; trust
yourselves to the Christ who is like you, and like Him. And, resting
upon His great love you will be saved from the prostitution of
capacities, and the vain attempts to satisfy your souls with the
husks of earth; and whilst you remain here will be made partakers of
Christ's life, and growingly of His likeness, and when you remove
yonder, your body, soul, and spirit will be conformed to His image,
and transformed into the likeness of His glory, 'according to the
mighty working whereby He is able even to subdue all things unto
Himself.'