The Apostle conceives of himself and of his brother preachers of Christ
as going forth on a merciful warfare. He thinks of strong rock
fortresses, with lofty walls set on high, and frowning down on any
assailants. No doubt he is thinking first of the opposition which he had
to front in Corinth from the Judaisers to whom we have referred, but the
application of the metaphor goes far beyond the petty strife in Corinth
and carries for us the wholesome lesson that one main cause which keeps
men back from Christ is a too high estimate of themselves. Some of us
are enclosed in the fortress of self-sufficiency: we will not humbly
acknowledge our dependence on God, and have turned self-reliance into
the law of our lives. There are many voices, some of them sweet and
powerful, which to-day are preaching that gospel. It finds eager
response in many hearts, and there is something in us all to which it
appeals. We are often tempted to say defiantly, 'Who is Lord over us?'
And the teaching that bids us rely on ourselves is so wholly in accord
with the highest wisdom and the noblest life that what is good and what
is evil in each of us contribute to reinforce it. Self-dependence is a
great virtue, and the mother of much energy and nobleness, but it is
also a great error and a great sin. To be so self-sufficing as not to
need externals is good; to be so self-sufficing as not to need or to see
God is ruin and death. The title which, as one of our great thinkers
tells us, a humourist put on the back of a volume of heterodox tracts,
'Every man his own redeemer,' makes a claim for self-sufficiency which
more or less unconsciously shuts out many men from the salvation of
Christ.
There is the fortress of culture and the pride of it in which many of us
are to-day entrenched against the Gospel. The attitude of mind into
which persons of culture tend to fall is distinctly adverse to their
reception of the Gospel, and that is not because the Gospel is adverse
to culture, but because cultured people do not care to be put on the
same level with publicans and harlots. They would be less disinclined to
go into the feast if there were in it reserved seats for superior people
and a private entrance to them. If the wise and prudent were more of
both, they would be liker the babes to whom these things are revealed,
and they would be revealed to them too. Not knowledge but the
superciliousness which is the result of the conceit of knowledge hinders
from God, and is one of the strongest fortresses against which the
weapons of our warfare have to be employed.
There is the fortress of ignorance. Most men who are kept from Christ
are so because they know neither themselves nor God. The most widely
prevailing characteristic of the superficial life of most men is their
absolute unconsciousness of the fact of sin; they neither know it as
universal nor as personal. They have never gone deeply enough down into
the depths of their own hearts to have come up scared at the ugly things
that lie sleeping there, nor have they ever reflected on their own
conduct with sufficient gravity to discern its aberrations from the law
of right, hence the average man is quite unconscious of sin, and is a
complete stranger to himself. The cup has been drunk by and intoxicated
the world, and the masses of men are quite unaware that it has
intoxicated them.
They are ignorant of God as they are of themselves, and if at any time,
by some flash of light, they see themselves as they are, they think of
God as if He were altogether such an one as themselves, and fall back on
a vague trust in the vaguer mercy of their half-believed-in God as their
hope for a vague salvation. Men who thus walk in a vain show will never
feel their need of Jesus, and the lazy ignorance of themselves and the
as lazy trust in what they call their God, are a fortress against which
it will task the power of God to make any weapons of warfare mighty to
its pulling down.