Now, you will remember, perhaps, that if we turn to the Gospels, we find
that all of them give the subject-matter of Christ's confession before
Pilate, as being that He was the King of the Jews. But the Evangelist
John expands that conversation, and gives us details which present a
remarkable verbal correspondence with the words of the Apostle here, and
must suggest to us that, though John's Gospel was not written at the
date of this Epistle, the fact that is enshrined for us in it was
independently known by the Apostle Paul.
For, if I may for a moment recall the incident to you, you will remember
that when Pilate put to the Saviour the question, 'Art Thou a King?'
our Lord, before He would answer, took pains to make quite clear the
sense in which the judge asked Him of His royal state. For He said,
'Sayest thou this thing of thyself, or did others tell it thee of Me? If
it is your Roman idea of a king, the answer must be, "No." If it is the
Jewish Messianic idea, the answer must be, "Yes." I must know first what
the question means, in the mind of the questioner, before I answer it.'
And when Pilate brushes aside Christ's question, with a sort of
impatient contempt, and returns to the charge, 'What hast Thou done?'
our Lord, whilst He makes the claim of sovereignty, takes care to make
it in such a way as to show that Rome need fear nothing from Him, and
that His dominion rested not upon force. 'My Kingdom is not of this
world.' And then, when Pilate, like a practical Roman, bewildered with
all these fine-spun distinctions, sweeps them impatiently out of the
field, and comes back to 'Yes, or No; are you a King?' our Lord gives a
distinct affirmative answer, but at once soars up into the region where
Pilate had declined to follow Him: 'To this end was I born, and for this
cause came I into the world, that I might bear witness to the truth.'
'Before Pontius Pilate he witnessed the good confession.' And His
confession was His royalty, His relation to the truth, and His
pre-existence. 'To this end was I born,' and the next clause is no mere
tautology, nor a non-significant parallelism, 'and for this cause came I
into the world.' Then He was before He came, and birth to Him was not
the beginning of being, but the beginning of a new relation.
So, then, out of this great word of our text, which falls into line with
a great many other words of the New Testament, we may gather important
and significant truths with regard to two things, the matter and the
manner of Christ's witnessing. You remember how the same Apostle
John--for whom that word 'witness' has a fascination in all its manifold
applications--in that great vision of the Apocalypse, when to his
blessed sight the vision of the Master was once given, extols Him as
'the faithful witness, and the First-begotten from the dead, and the
Prince of the kings of the earth.' And you may remember how our Lord
Himself, after His conversation with Nicodemus, says, 'We speak that we
do know, and bear witness to that we have seen,' and how again, in
answer to the taunts of the Jews, He takes the taunt as the most
intimate designation of the peculiarity of His person and of His work,
when He says, 'I am one that bear witness of Myself.' So, then, we have
to interpret his declaration before Pilate in the light of all these
other sayings, and to remember that He who said that He came to bear
witness to the truth, said also, 'I am the truth,' and therefore that
his great declaration that He was the witness-bearer to the truth is
absolutely synonymous with His other declaration that He bears witness
of Himself.
Now, here we come upon one of the great peculiarities of Christ as a
religious teacher. The new thing, the distinctive peculiarity, the
differentia between Him and all other teachers, lies just here, that His
theme is not so much moral or religious principles, as His own nature
and person. He was the most egotistical man that ever lived on the face
of the earth, with an egotism only to be accounted for, if we believe,
as He Himself said, that in His person was the truth that He proclaimed,
and that when He witnessed to Himself He revealed God. And thus He
stands, separate from all other teachers, by this, that He is His own
theme and His own witness.
So much for the matter of the good confession to which we need only add
here its pendant in the confession before the High Priest. To the
representative of the civil government He said, 'I am a king,' and then,
as I remarked, He soared up into regions where no Roman official could
rise to follow Him, and to the representative of the Theocratic
government He said, 'Hereafter ye shall see the Son of Man sitting at
the right hand of God, and coming in the clouds of heaven.' These two
truths, that He is the Son of God, who by His witness to the truth, that
is, Himself, lays the foundations of a Monarchy which shall stretch far
further than the pinions of the Roman eagles could ever fly, and that he
is the Son of Man who, exalted to the right hand of God, is to be the
Judge of mankind--these are the good confessions to which the Lord
witnessed.
Then with regard to the manner of His witness. That brings us to another
of the peculiarities of Christ's teaching. I have said that He was the
most egotistical of men. I would say, too, that there never was another
who clashed down in the front of humanity such tremendous assertions,
with not the faintest scintilla of an attempt to prove them to our
understandings, or commend them by any other plea than this, 'Verily,
verily, I say unto you!'
A witness does not need to argue. A witness is a man who reports what he
has seen and heard. The whole question is as to his veracity and
competency. Jesus Christ states it for the characteristic of His work,
'We speak that we do know, and bear witness to that we have seen.' His
relation to the truth which He brings to us is not that of a man who has
thought it out, who has been brought to it by experience, or by feeling,
or by a long course of investigation; still less is it the relation
which a man would bear to a truth that he had learnt from others
originally, however much he had made it his own thereafter: but it is
that of one who is not a thinker, or a learner, or a reasoner, but who
is simply an attester, a witness. And so He stands before us, and says,
'The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, they are life.
Believe Me, and believe the words, for no other reason, primarily, than
because I speak them.' In these two respects, then, the matter and the
manner of His witness, He stands alone, and we have to bow before Him
and say, 'Speak, Lord! for thy servant heareth.' 'Before Pontius Pilate
He witnessed a good confession.'
II. We have here suggested to us the subordinate confessors who echo the
Lord's witness.
It is a matter of no consequence when, and before whom, this Timothy
professed his good profession. It may have been at his baptism. It may
have been when he was installed in his office. It may have been before
some tribunal of which we know nothing. That does not matter. The point
is that a Christian man is to be an echo of the Lord's good confession,
and is to keep within the lines of it, and to be sure that all of it is
echoed in his life. Christ has told us what to say, and we are here to
say it over again. Christ has witnessed; we are to confess. Our relation
to that truth is different from His. We hear it; He speaks it. We accept
it; He reveals it. We are influenced by it; He _is_ it. He brings it to
the world on His own authority; we are to carry it to the world on His.
Be sure that you Christian men are echoes of your Master. Be sure that
you reverberate the note that He struck. Be sure that all its music is
repeated by you And take care that you neither fall short of it, nor go
beyond it, in your faith and in your profession. Echoes of Christ--that
is the highest conception of a Christian life.
But though there is all the difference between the Witness and the
confessors, do not let us forget that, if we are truly Christian, there
is a very deep and blessed sense in which we, too, may witness what we
have seen and heard. A Christian preacher of any sort--and by that I
mean, not merely a man who stands in a pulpit, as I do, but all
Christian people, in their measure and degree--will do nothing by
professing the best profession, unless that profession sounds like the
utterance of a man who speaks that he knows, and who can say, 'that
which our eyes have beheld, that which we have handled, of the Word of
life, we make known unto you.' And so, by the power of personal
experience speaking out in our lives, and by the power of it alone, as I
believe, will victories be won, and the witness of Jesus Christ be
repeated in the world. Christian men and women, the old saying which was
addressed by a prophet to Israel is more true, more solemnly true of us,
and presses on us with a heavier weight of obligation, as well as lifts
us up into a position of greater blessedness: 'Ye are my witnesses,
saith the Lord.' That is what you and I are here for--to bear witness,
different and yet like to, the witness borne by the Lord. We have all to
do that, by words, though not only by them. That is the obligation that
a great many Christian people take very lightly. That yoke of Jesus
Christ many of us slip our necks out of. If He has witnessed, you have
to confess. But some of you carry your Christianity in secret, and
button your coats over the cockade that should tell whose soldiers you
are, and are ashamed, or too shy, or too nervous, or too afraid of
ridicule, or not sufficiently sure of your own grip of the Master, to
confess Him before men. I beseech you remember that a Christian man is
no Christian unless 'with the mouth confession is made unto salvation,'
as well as 'with the heart' belief is exercised unto righteousness.