'I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not.' Did it fail? If
we look only at Peter's denial, we must answer, Yes. If we look at
the whole of the future life of the Apostle, we answer, No. Eclipse
is not extinction; the momentary untruthfulness to one's deepest
convictions is not the annihilation of these convictions. Christ's
prayer is never vain, and Christ's prayer was answered just because
Peter, though he fell, did not lie in the mud, but staggered to his
feet again, and with sore weeping and many an agony of shame,
struggled onward, with unconquerable hope, in the path from which,
for a moment, he strayed. Better one great outburst like his, the
nature of which there is no possibility of mistaking, than the going
on, as so many professing Christians do, from year to year, walking
in a vain show of godliness, and fancying themselves to be
disciples, when all the while they are recreants and apostates.
There is more chance of the recovery of a good man that has fallen
into some sin, 'gross as a mountain, open, palpable,' than there is
of the recovery of those who let their religion trickle out of them
in drops, and never know that their veins are empty until the heart
ceases to beat at all.
Here, then, we have two large lessons from which we may take strength,
taught us by this darkening and re-illumination of an eclipsed faith.
One is that the sincerest love, the truest desire to follow Jesus,
the firmest faith, may be overborne, and the whole set of a life
contradicted for a time. Thank God, there is a vast difference between
conduct which is inconsistent with being a Christian and conduct which
is incompatible with being a Christian. It is dangerous, perhaps, to
apply the difference too liberally in judging ourselves; it is
imperative to apply it always in judging our fellows. But if it be
true that Peter meant, down to the very bottom of his heart, all that
he said when he said, 'I will lay down my life for Thee,' while yet
within a few hours afterwards the sad prophecy of our Lord was
fulfilled--'Thou shalt deny Me thrice!'--let us take the lesson, not,
indeed, to abate our horror of the sin, but on the one hand to cut
the comb of our own self-confidence, and on the other hand to judge
with all charity and tenderness the faults of our brethren. 'Be not
high-minded, but fear,' and when we look into the black gulf into
which Peter fell bodily, let us cry, 'Hold Thou me up and I shall be
safe.'
The other lesson is that the deepest fall may be recovered. Our Lord in
the words of our text does not definitely prophesy what He subsequently
declares in plain terms, the fall of Peter, but He implies it when He
says, 'when thou art converted'--or, as the Revised Version reads it
much more accurately, 'when once thou hast turned again strengthen
thy brethren.' Then, the Apostle's face had been turned the wrong way
for a time, and he needed to turn right-about-face in order to renew
the old direction of his life. He came back for two reasons--one because
Christ prayed for him, and the other because he 'turned himself.' For
the only way back is through the valley of weeping and the dark lane
of penitence; and whosoever has denied with Peter, or at least grovelled
with Peter, or perhaps grovelled much more than Peter, 'denying the
Lord that bought him' by living as if He was not his Lord, will never
come back to the place that Peter again won for himself, but by the
road by which Peter went. 'The Lord turned and looked upon him,' and
Christ's face, with love and sorrow and reproach in it, taught him his
sin, and bowed his heart, 'and he went out and wept bitterly.'
Peter and Judas both 'went out'; the one 'went out and hanged
himself,' because his conviction of his sin was unaccompanied with a
faith in his Master's love, and his repentance was only remorse; and
the other 'went out and wept bitterly,' and so came back with a
clean heart. And on the Resurrection morning he was ready for the
message: 'Go, tell His disciples, _and Peter_, He goeth before
you into Galilee.' And the Lord appeared to him, in that conversation,
the existence of which was known, though the particulars were unknown,
to the rest; and when 'He appeared unto Cephas,' spoke his full
forgiveness. There is the road back for all wanderers.
III. The last thought is, the larger service for which such an
experience will fit him who falls.
'Strengthen thy brethren when once thou hast turned again.' I need
not remind you how nobly the Apostle fulfilled this commandment.
Satan desired to have him, that he might sift him as wheat; but
Satan's sifting was in order that he might get rid of the wheat and
harvest the chaff. His malice worked indirectly the effect opposite
to his purpose, and achieved the same result as Christ's winnowing
seeks to accomplish--namely, it got rid of the chaff and kept the
wheat. Peter's vanity was sifted out of him, his self-confidence was
sifted out of him, his rash presumption was sifted out of him, his
impulsive readiness to blurt out the first thought that came into
his head was sifted out of him, and so his unreliableness and
changeableness were largely sifted out of him, and he became what
Christ said he had in him the makings of being--'Cephas, a rock,'
or, as the Apostle Paul, who was never unwilling to praise the
others, said, a man 'who looked like a pillar.' He 'strengthened his
brethren,' and to many generations the story of the Apostle who
denied the Lord he loved has ministered comfort. To how many tempted
souls, and souls that have yielded to temptation, and souls that,
having yielded, are beginning to grope their way back again out of
its vulgar delights and surfeiting sweetnesses, and find that there
is a desert to be traversed before they can again reach the place
where they stood before, has that story ministered hope, as it will
minister to the very end! The bone that is broken is stronger, they
tell us, at the point of junction, when it heals and grows again,
than it ever was before. And it may well be that a faith that has
made experience of falling and restoration has learned a depth of
self-distrust, a firmness of confidence in Christ, a warmth of
grateful love which it would never otherwise have experienced.
The Apostle about whom we have been speaking seems to have carried
in his mind and memory an abiding impression from that bitter
experience, and in his letter when he was an old man, and all that
past was far away, he writes many words which sound like echoes and
reminiscences of it. In the last chapter of his epistle, in which he
speaks of himself as a witness of the sufferings of Christ, there
are numbers of verses which seem to point to what had happened in
the Upper Room. 'Ye younger, submit yourselves unto the elder.'
Jesus Christ had then said, 'He that is the greater among you, let
him be as the younger.' Peter says, 'Be clothed with humility'; he
remembers Christ wrapping a towel around Him, girding Himself, and
taking the basin. He says, 'God resisteth the proud,' and he
remembers how proud he had been, with his boast: 'Though all should
... yet will not I,' and how low he fell because he was 'fool'
enough to 'trust in his own heart.' 'Be sober, be vigilant; because
your adversary, the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking
whom he may devour: whom resist, steadfast in the faith.' 'The God
of all grace stablish, strengthen, settle you.' He thus strengthened
his brethren when he reminded them of the temptation to which he
himself had so shamefully succumbed, and when he referred them for
all their strength to the source of it all, even God in Christ.