'And David said to Nathan, As the Lord liveth, the man that hath done
this thing shall surely die; because he did this thing, and because he
had no pity. And Nathan said to David, Thou art the man.'--2 SAMUEL
xii. 5-7.
Nathan's apologue, so tenderly beautiful, takes the poet-king on the
most susceptible side of his character. All his history shows him as a
man of wonderfully sweet, chivalrous, generous, swiftly compassionate
nature. And so, when he hears the story of a mean, heartless
selfishness, all that is best in him kindles into a generous
indignation, and flames out into instinctive condemnation. 'The man
that did this thing shall die because he had no pity.'
And then, on to that hot fervour of righteous wrath, comes this dash of
cold water, 'And Nathan said to David, Thou art the man.' Like some
keen spear-point, sharpened almost to invisibility, this short sentence
(two words in the original) driven by a strong hand, goes right through
the armour to the very heart. What a collapse there would be in the
king when the pointed forefinger of the prophet emphasised and drove
home the application!
I. This dramatic scene before us may be taken as suggesting first that
we are all strangely blind to our own faults.
If a man's own sin is held up before him a little disguised, he says,
'How ugly it is!' And if only for a moment he can be persuaded that it
is not his own conduct but some other sinner's that he is judging, the
instinctive condemnation comes. We have two sets of names for vices:
one set which rather mitigates and excuses them, and another set which
puts them in their real hideousness. We keep the palliative set for
home consumption, and liberally distribute the plain-spoken, ugly set
amongst the vices and faults of our friends. The same thing which I
call in myself prudence I call in you meanness. The same thing which
you call in yourselves generous living, you call in your friend filthy
sensualism. That which, to the doer of it, is only righteous
indignation, to the onlooker is passionate anger. That which, in the
practiser of it, is no more than a due regard for the interests of his
own family and himself in the future, is, to the envious lookers-on,
shabbiness and meanness in money matters. That which, to the liar, is
only prudent diplomatic reticence, to the listener is falsehood. That
which, in the man that judges his own conduct, is but 'a choleric
word,' is, in his friend, when he judges him, 'flat blasphemy.'
And so we go all round the circle, and condemn our own vices, when we
see them in other people. So the king who had never thought, when he
stole away Uriah's one ewe lamb, and did him to death by traitorous
commands, setting him in the front of the battle, that he was wanting
in compassion, blazes up at once, and righteously sentences the other
'man' to death, 'because he had no pity.' He had never thought of
himself or of his crime as cruel, as mean, as selfish, as heartless.
But when he sees a partially disguised picture of it he knows it for
the devil's child that it is.
'O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,'
and so it would, to see ourselves as we see others. We judge our
brother and ourselves by two different standards.
And that is only one phase of a more general principle, one case that
comes under a yet wider law, viz. that we are all blind, strangely
blind, to our own faults. Why that is so I do not need to spend time in
inquiring, except for a distinctly practical purpose. Let me just
remind you how a strong wish for a thing that seems desirable always
tends to confuse to a man the plain distinction between right and
wrong; and how passions once excited, or the animal lusts and desires
once kindled in a man, go straight to their object without the smallest
regard to whether that object is to be reached by the breach of all
laws, human and divine, or not. Excite any passion, and the passion is
but a blind propensity towards certain good, and takes no question or
consideration of whether right or wrong is involved at all.
And further, habit familiarises with evil and diminishes our sense of
it as evil. A man that has been for half a day in some ill-ventilated
room does not notice the poisonous atmosphere; if you go into it you
are half suffocated at first, and breathe more easily as you get used
to it. A man can live amidst the foulest poison of evil; and, as the
Styrian peasants get fat upon arsenic, his whole nature may seem to
thrive by the poison that it absorbs. They tell us that the breed of
fish that live in the lightless caverns in the bowels of some
mountains, by long disuse have had their eyes atrophied out of them,
and are blind because they have lived out of the light. And so men that
live in the love of evil lose the capacity of discerning the evil, and
'he that walketh in darkness' becomes blind, blind to his sin, and
blind to all the realities of life.
Then is it not true, too, that many of us systematically and of set
purpose, continually avoid all questions as to the moral nature of our
conduct? How many a man and woman who reads these words never sits down
to think whether what they have been doing is right or wrong, because
they have deep down in their consciences an uneasy suspicion as to what
the answer would be. So, by reason of fostering passion, by reason of
listening to wishes, by reason of the habit of wrongdoing, by reason of
the systematic avoidance of all careful investigation of our character
and of our conduct, we lose the power of fairly deciding upon the
nature of our own acts.
Then self-love comes in, and still another thing tends to blind us. We
are all ready to acquiesce in the general indictment, and so to shirk
the particular application of it. That is what people do about all
great moral principles that ought to affect conduct,--they admit them
in words, as general truths applying to mankind, and then hide
themselves in the crowd, and think that they escape the incidence and
particular application of the truths. No one of us would, I suppose,
venture in plain words to stand up and say: 'I am an exception to your
general confessions of sin,' and most of us would be ready to unite in
the acknowledgment: 'We have all come short of the glory of God,'
though in our consciences there has never stirred the faintest movement
of self-condemnation even whilst our lips have been uttering the
confession. Do not shrink away in the crowd, my brother! Come out to
the front, and stand by yourself as God sees you, isolated. Look at
your own actions; never mind about other men's. Do not content
yourselves with saying,' _We_ have sinned'; say, '_I_ have sinned
against _Thee._' God and you are as if alone in the universe. 'Against
Thee, Thee only, have I sinned.' There are no crowds in God's eyes; He
deals with single souls. Every one of us,--thou, and thou, and
thou,--must give account of himself to God.
II. In the next place, let me ask you to think how this story suggests
that the true work of God's message is to tear down the veil and to
show the ugly thing.
'Nathan said unto David, Thou art the man.' It needed a prophet to do
that, with divine authority. Nothing less would suffice to get through
the thick bosses of the buckler of self-conceit and ignorance which he
had to penetrate. As God's messenger, he gathered up, as I said, into
one sharp-pointed, keen-edged, steel-bright sentence, the very spirit
of the whole ancient Law, which seeks to individualise the sinner, and
to drive home to the conscience the consciousness of wrong-doing.
The remarks that I have been making, in the former part of this sermon,
imperfect as they must necessarily be, may at least serve one or two
purposes in reference to this part of my discourse.
It seems to me that if what I have been saying as to a man's blindness
to his own true moral character be at all correct, there flows from
that thought a strong presumption in favour of a divine revelation. We
need another than our own voice to lay down the law of conduct, and to
accuse and condemn the breaches of it. Conscience is not a wholly
reliable guide, and is neither an impartial nor an all-knowing judge.
Unconsciousness of evil is not innocence. It is not the purest of women
who 'wipes her mouth and says, I have done no harm.' My conscience says
to me, 'It is wrong to do wrong'; but when I say to my conscience,
'Yes, and pray what is wrong?' a large variety of answers is possible.
A man may sophisticate his conscience, or bribe his conscience, or
throttle his conscience, or sear his conscience. And so the man who is
worst, who, therefore, ought to be most chastised by his conscience,
has most immunity from it, and where, if it is to be of use, it ought
to be most powerful, there it is weakest.
What then? Why this, then--a standard that varies is not a standard; we
are left with a leaden rule. My conscience, your conscience, is like
the standard measures which we at present possess, which by their very
names--foot, handbreadth, nail, and the like, tell us that they were
originally but the length of one man's limb. And so your measure of
right and wrong, and another man's measure, though they may
substantially correspond, yet differ according to your differences of
education, character, and a thousand other things. So that the
individual man's standard needs to be rectified. You have to send all
the weights and measures up to the Tower now and then, to get them
stamped and certified. And, as I believe, this fluctuation of our moral
judgments shows the need for a fixed pattern and firm unchangeable
standard, external to our mutable selves. A light on deck which pitches
with the pitching ship is no guide. It must flash from a white pillar
founded on a rock and immovable amid the restless waves. Our need of
such a standard raises a strong presumption that a good God will give
us what we need, if He can. Such a standard He has given, as I believe,
in the revelation of Himself which lies in this book, and culminates in
the life and character of Jesus Christ our Lord. There, and by that, we
can set our watches. There we can read the law of morality, and by our
deflections from it we can measure the amount of our guilt.
But beyond that, the remarks which I have already made in the former
part of my sermon may suggest to us, along with this utterance of the
prophet's, that one indispensable characteristic and certain criterion
of a true message and gospel from God is that it pierces the conscience
and kindles the sense of sin. My dear brethren, there is a great deal
of so-called Christian teaching, both from pulpits and books in this
day, which, to my mind, is altogether defective by reason of its
underestimate of the cardinal fact of sin, and its consequent failure
to represent the fundamental characteristic of the gospel as being
deliverance and redemption. I am quite sure that the root of
nine-tenths of all the heresies that have ever afflicted the Christian
Church, and of the weakness of so much popular Christianity, is none
other than this failure adequately to recognise the universality and
the gravity of the fact of transgression. If a word comes to you, calls
itself God's message, and does not start with man's sin, nor put in the
forefront of its utterances the way by which the dominion of that sin
in your own heart can be broken, and the penalties of that sin in your
present and future life can be swept away, it is condemned, _ipso
facto_, as not a gospel from God, or fit for man. O my brother! it
sounds harsh; but it is the truest kindness, when Nathan stands before
the king, and with his flashing eye and stern, calm voice says, 'Thou
art the man.' Was not that nobler, truer, tenderer, worthier of God,
than if he had smoothed David down with soft speeches that would not
have roused his conscience? Is it not the truest benevolence that keeps
the surgeon's hand steady whilst his heart is touched by the pain that
he inflicts, as he thrusts his gleaming instrument of tender cruelty
into the poisonous sore? And are not God's mercy and love manifest for
us in this, that He begins all His work on us with the grave, solemn
indictment of each soul by itself, 'Thou art the man'?
'He showed me all the mercy,
For He taught me all the sin.'
III. Lastly, let me say that God accuses us and condemns us one by one
that He may save us one by one.
The meaning of Nathan's sharp sentence was speedily disclosed when the
broken-down king exclaimed, 'I have sinned against the Lord,' and when,
with laconic force as great as that which barbed the condemnation, the
prophet stanched the wound with the brief words, 'And the Lord hath
made to pass the iniquity of thy sin.' The intention of the accusation
is the extension of the mercy and forgiveness. God, as the Apostle puts
it, 'hath concluded all in unbelief, that He might have mercy upon all.'
And now, mark, for the carrying out of that divine purpose in regard to
us, and for our possession of the proffered mercy, the same
individualising and isolating process is needful as was needful for the
conviction of the sin. God desires to save the world, but God can only
save men one at a time. There must be an individual access to Him for
the reception of forgiveness, as there must be in regard to the
conviction of sin, just as if He and I were the only two beings in the
whole universe. There is no wholesale entrance into God's Church or
into God's kingdom. God's mercy is not given to crowds, except as
composed of individuals who have individually received it. There must
be the personal act of faith; there must be my solitary coming to Him.
As the old mystics used to define prayer, so I might define the whole
process by which men are saved from their sins, 'the flight of the
lonely soul to the lonely God.' My brother, it is not enough for you to
say, 'We have sinned'; say, 'I have sinned.' It is not enough that from
a gathered congregation there should go up the united litany, 'Lord,
have mercy upon us! Christ, have mercy upon us! Lord, have mercy upon
us!' You must make the prayer your own: 'Lord, have mercy upon _me_!'
It is not enough that you should believe, as I suppose most of you
fancy that you believe, that Christ has died for the sins of the whole
world. That belief will give you no share in His forgiveness. You must
come to closer grips with Him than that; and you must be able to say,
'Who loved _me_, and gave Himself for _me_.' Let us have no running
away into the crowd. Come out, and stand by yourselves, and for
yourselves stretch out your own band, and take Christ for yourselves.
A man may die of starvation in a granary. You may be lost in the midst
of this abundance which Christ has provided for you. And the difference
between really possessing salvation and not possessing it, lies very
largely in the difference between saying 'us' and 'me.' 'Thou art the
man' in regard to the general accusation of sin; 'Thou art the man' in
regard to the solemn law which proclaims that 'the soul that sinneth it
shall die'; and, blessed be God, 'Thou art the man' in regard to the
great promise that says, 'If any man thirst, let him come unto Me and
drink.' Christ gives you a blank cheque in His word: 'Whoso cometh unto
Me, I will in no wise cast out.' Write thine own name in, and by thy
personal faith in the Lamb of God that died for thee, thy sins shall
pass away; and all the fulness of God shall be thy very own for ever.
'If thou be wise, thou shalt be wise for thyself, and if thou scornest,
thou alone shall bear it.'