Messages from the Epistle to the Hebrews Part 4

One partial exception, and only one, to this great ruling lesson of the chapter is to be noted; it occurs in the second verse. There "by faith we perceive that the worlds," the _aeons_, the dispensations and evolutions of created being, "have been framed," perfected, adjusted to one another, "by the Word of G.o.d, so that not from things which appear has that which is seen originated." These words appear to be inserted where they stand in order, so to speak, to carry the sequence of the references to the Old Testament down from its very first page. The work of faith has exercise in face of the mysterious narrative of Creation, and in this one instance the exercise is quoted as what concerns us now quite as much as "the elders." They like us, we like them, get our guarantee as to the facts of the primal past not by sight but by faith, by taking G.o.d at His word. He, in His revelation, tells us that "in the beginning"--the beginning of whatever existence is other than eternal--"G.o.d created." Things finite, things visible, came into original being not as evolved from previous similar material, but as of His will.

But when that pregnant side-word has once been said, the argument settles itself forthwith upon the recorded examples of the potency of faith as "the elders" exercised it. We see man after man enabled to treat the invisible as visible, the promised as present, by reliant rest upon the word of G.o.d, however conveyed. To Abel, we know not how, it was divinely said that the sacrificed "firstling" was the acceptable offering, and, antecedent to any possible experience, he offered it. To Enoch, we know not how, it was made known that the Eternal, as invisible to him as to us, cared for man's wors.h.i.+pping company, and he addressed himself through his age-long life to "walk with G.o.d." Noah was apprised, for the first time in man's known history, of an approaching cataclysm and of the way of escape; the promise came to him wrapped in the cloud of an awful warning, and it was long delayed, but he acted upon it in the steady energy of faith. Abraham was "called," we know not precisely how, but in some way which tested his reliance on things "not seen as yet," and he set out on that wonderful life of a hundred years of faith.

He renounced the settled habits and old civilization of Chaldea for the new life of a Syrian nomad, "settling permanently in tents" ([Greek: en skenais katoikesas]), he and his son and his grandson after him, all in view of an invisible future made visible by the trusted promise, a future culminating at last to his "eye of faith," so here we are solemnly a.s.sured, in the city of the saints, in the Canaan of the heavens. The same reliance on the sheer word of promise nerved him to the awful ordeal of the all-but immolation of his son. And that son in his turn, against all appearances, and rather bowing to the Word of G.o.d than embracing it, blessed _his_ least-loved son above his dearest; and that son in his turn, and his son in his turn, carried the process on, treating the greatness of Ephraim and the deliverance from Egypt as things seen and present, because G.o.d had so spoken. The parents of Moses, and then Moses himself, in his strange life of disappointments and wonders, deal likewise with the future, the unseen, the seemingly impossible, on the warrant of a promise. Figures as little heroic in natural character as Sarah, as little n.o.ble in life as Rahab, take place in the long procession, as those who treat the invisible as visible by faith. So do the thronging "elders" of ver. 32--a group singularly diverse in everything but this victory over the seen and present by faith in the promise. So do the unnamed confessors and martyrs of the closing paragraph, the heartbroken, the tortured, the wanderers of the dens and caves, who all alike, amidst a thousand differences of condition and of character, "obtained a good report through faith"; and all won through faith that victory, so great when we reflect upon it--that they died "not having received the promise." They trusted _to the very end_. When they sank down in death upon their shadowy path of pilgrimage, "the promise," the promised Christ, had not yet come.

Nevertheless they treated the hope of Him as fact, and they won their victory by faith.

And now they are parts and members of the "great cloud" who watch us in our turn--us, with things unseen and hoped-for still in front, but with JESUS at our side.

CHAPTER X

FOLLOWERS OF THEM

HEB. xii. 1-14

The Epistle approaches its close. The Writer has much yet to say to the disciples upon many things, all connected with that main interest of their lives, a resolute fidelity to the Lord, to the Gospel, and to one another. But he has not yet quite done with that side of their "exceeding need" to which the antidote is _the faith_ which can deal with the future as the present, with the unseen as the seen. Upon this theme, from one aspect or another, is spent the pa.s.sage now before us.

First, the appeal is to the recollection that the combat, the race, the victory of faith, as it was for the Hebrew believers, "the contest set before _us_" (ver. 1), not only had been fought and won before them by the saints of the old time, but that those saints were now, from their blessed rest, as "spirits of the just made perfect" (ver. 23), watchers and witnesses of their successors' course. "We have, lying around us, so great a cloud of witnesses" (ver. 1). "We" are running, like the compet.i.tors in the h.e.l.lenic stadium, in the public view of a mighty concourse, so vast, so aggregated, so placed aloft, that no word less great than "cloud" occurs as its designation: that "long cloud" as it is finely called in Isaac Watts' n.o.ble hymn, "Give me the wings of faith."

True, the mult.i.tudinous watchers are unseen, but this only gives faith another opportunity of exercise; we are to treat the Blessed as seen, for we know that they are there, living to G.o.d, one with us, fellows of our life and love. So let us address ourselves afresh to the spiritual race, the course of faith. Let us, as athletes of the soul, strip all enc.u.mbrance off, "every weight" of allowed wrong, all guilty links with the world of rebellion and self-love; "the sin which doth so easily beset us," clinging so soon around the feet, like a net of fine but stubborn meshes, till the runner gives up the hopeless effort and is lost.[N]

[N] I cannot think possible the alternative (marginal) rendering of [Greek: euperistaton] in the Revised Version--"_admired by many_." There is example for the meaning in cla.s.sical Greek, but the _idea_ is totally out of keeping with the spirit of this pa.s.sage.

I thus explain the "witnesses" to mean spectators, watchers, not testifiers. The context seems to me to decide somewhat positively for this explanation. It is an altogether pictorial context; the imagery of the foot-race comes suddenly up, and in a moment raises before us the vision of the stadium and its surroundings. The reader cannot see the course with his inner eyes without also seeing those hosts of eager lookers-on which made, on every such occasion, in the old world as now, the life of the hour. In such a context nothing but explicit and positive reasons to the contrary could give to the word "witnesses," and to the word "cloud" in connexion with it, any other allusion. True, these watchers are all, as a fact, evidential "witnesses" also, testifiers to the infinite benefit and success of the race of faith. But that thought lies almost hidden behind the other. It is as loving, sympathetic, inspiring lookers-on that the old saints, from Abel onwards, are here seen gathered, thronging and intent, around us as we run.

The conception runs off of course into mystery, as every possible conception about the unseen does, even when Scripture is most explicit about unseen facts. We ask, and ask in vain, what is the medium through which these observers watch us, the air and light, as it were, in which their vision acts; what is their proximity to us all the while; to what extent they are able to know the entire conditions of our race. But all this leaves faith in peaceful possession of a fact of unspeakable animation. It tells the discouraged or tired Christian, tempted to think of the unseen as a dark void, that it is rather a bright and populous world, in mysterious touch and continuity with this, and that our forerunners, from those of the remotest past down to the last-called beloved one who has pa.s.sed out of our sight, know enough about us to mark our advance and to prepare their welcome at the goal.

In that rich treasury of sacred song, _Hymns from the Land of Luther_, is included the translation of a n.o.ble hymn by Simon Dach, _O wie selig seid ihr doch, ihr Frommen_, "O how happy are ye, saints forgiven." That hymn beautifully ill.u.s.trates this verse. It is written responsively all through. One stanza, sung upward, is the utterance from below of the pilgrim Church, longing for her rest. The next, sung from above, is the answer of the Blessed, telling of their love and sympathy, taught them by their own similar sufferings, of their bright foreview of the celestial crown reserved for their still toiling brethren. So the two choirs answer each other, turn by turn, till at last both join in a glorious concert of blended song, a closing strain of faith and praise.

Let us listen often for those answers from above.

But the holy Writer has more to say yet about the motives to faith. He points the weary saints upward, even beyond the "cloud," to a Form radiant and supreme. They are to run, conscious of the witnesses, but yet more intently "looking off ([Greek: aphorontes]) unto JESUS, the supreme Leader ([Greek: archegon]) and Perfecter of faith"; that is to say, the Lord of the whole host of the believing, and Himself the consummate Worker in the field of faith, who, for a joy promised _but not seen_, "endured the Cross," when its immediate aspect was an inexpressible outrage and disgrace; reaching the throne of all existence, as Son of Man, in spite of every possible appearance to the contrary (ver. 2). Yes, and not only was that final victory thus won by Him, but He arrived at it by a path full of the conflicts which threaten faith. He "endured the contradiction of sinners against Himself" (ver.

3). Year by year, day by day, from the Pharisee, from the worldling, from the leaders of religion, from the inconstant crowd, He had "contradiction" to endure--sometimes even from "the men of His own household." He was challenged to prove His claims; He was insulted over His a.s.sertion of them, or over His silence about them. In every way, at every turn, they spoke against Him to His face, as He slowly advanced, through a life of love and suffering, to the Agony and the Crucifixion.

Let us not think that all this put no strain, even in the King Messiah, upon faith. It may seem scarcely reverent (I know devout and thoughtful Christians who have felt it to be so) to speak of our blessed Lord as exercising faith, as being the supreme Believer. But we need not shrink from the thought. It is no more irreverent, surely, than to accept the evidence of the Gospels to His perfect human capacity to be weary, to be surprised, to be specially moved to compa.s.sion by _the sight_ of suffering. In His sinless conformity "in all things to His brethren"

there was never for one moment room in Him--of this we may be amply sure--for error of thought or of word, as He acted as the supreme and absolute Prophet of His Church. But there was room, so we are expressly told, on one tremendous occasion at least (Matt. xxvi. 37), for a mysterious "bewilderment" ([Greek: ademonein]) of His blessed human soul. Can we doubt that the victory won in the Garden, after which He went with profound calmness to the unjust priest, and Pilate, and the Cross, was of the nature of a victory of faith? Did He not then treat the coming "joy" as a reality although, in so awful a sense and measure He did not "feel" it then? The "bewilderment" did not drive Him back from our redemption; and why? Because "He TRUSTED in G.o.d that He would deliver Him" (Ps. xxii. 9; Matt. xxvii. 42), whatever should be the contents of "the cup" from which His whole humanity turned away as _almost_ impossible to drink.

And may we not be sure that on many a previous occasion of minor and yet bitter trial, when evil men gathered round Him with cynical objections and ruthless denials of His claims, the victory was akin to the victory of Gethsemane? Often, surely, a strange "bewilderment" must have beset the Redeemer's soul, of which the external token was the sigh, the groan, the tears, which shewed Him to be so truly Man.

We all hold, in full doctrinal orthodoxy, that the Lord's sufferings, both of soul and body, were no "docetic" semblance but a deep and infinitely pathetic reality. But we need at times to think somewhat deliberately in order to receive the full impression of that truth upon the heart. And then surely we are constrained to see in Him, who thus really suffered and really "endured," the supreme Exemplar of the victory of faith, the perfect Sympathizer with the tried believer.

From this pregnant thought, of the faith exercised by JESUS, the disciple is directly led in the remainder of our pa.s.sage to the practical inferences for himself. The days, for those first readers of the Epistle, were indeed evil. Though not yet called to martyrdom (ver.

4), they were hard beset, not only by importunate reasonings and appeals which, as we have seen all along, were straining their spiritual allegiance, but by actual outrages (see _e.g._ x. 34), by the "scourging" (ver. 6) of bitter social persecution. Well, "looking off unto" Him who had so greatly endured, they were, in these things also, to see the unseen and to presentiate the future. From the Proverbs (iii.

11, 12), that book where the apostolic insight so often finds the purest spiritual messages,[O] he quotes (verses 5, 6) the tender words which bid the chastened child see in his chastening the a.s.surance (ver. 8) of his happy, holy sons.h.i.+p in the home of a Father, "the Father of our spirits," who, unlike our earthly fathers even at their best (and that was a n.o.ble best indeed), not only chastens, but chastens with an unerring result of holiness in the submissive child--yea, a holiness which is one with His own (ver. 10), His Spirit in our wills.

[O] It was evidently a book dear to St. Peter's mind, as his First Epistle shews.

Beautiful is _the sympathy_ of this appeal to live, by faith, the life of victorious patience. "All chastening, for the present, seems not to belong to joy but grief" (ver. 11). Yes, the immediate pain is here fully recognized, not ignored. It is not spoken of as if, in view of its sequel, it did not matter. "It belongs to grief." Scripture is full of this tender insight into the bitterness of even our salutary sorrows, and its appeals to patience are all the more potent for that insight.

"Nevertheless, afterward, it produces the peace-bringing fruit of righteousness," the sense of a profound inward rest, found in conformity to the "sweet, beloved will of G.o.d," in living correspondence to the Father's rule, "for those who have been exercised, as in a spiritual _gymnasium_ ([Greek: gegymnasmenois]), thereby." That "exercise" was to tell at once, as they surrendered their wills to it in faith, in a present sense of the certainty of future blessing. "Brace the slack hands" to toil, "and the unstrung knees" to march (ver. 12), "and make straight paths for your feet," using your will, faith-strengthened, to choose the line of the will of G.o.d, and that alone. So should "the lame thing" be "healed" rather than "turned aside." The walk, feeble and halting always when the will is divided, should be restored to firmness and certainty again.

"Nevertheless, afterward." That is the watchword of the whole pregnant pa.s.sage. Nature, shortsighted and impatient, can deal with the seen and the present only. Grace, in its victorious form of patient faith, already takes hold upon the "afterward," and works on, and walks on, "as seeing Him that is invisible."

With the thought of the witness-cloud around us, and "looking off" to the Prince of Faith, ascended, yet present with us, and sure of the ultimate and eternal "fruit of righteousness" which lies hidden in the chastening of the Father of our spirits--we too will live by faith, taking G.o.d at His word, and saying Amen to His will, even to the end.

CHAPTER XI

SINAI AND SION

HEB. xii. 14-28

The paragraph before us is largely concerned with the inner life of the believing community, its cohesion member with member, and the call to each member and to all to "walk warily in dangerous days," in the path of evangelical holiness. The Writer lays it upon them (ver. 14) to "pursue peace with all," such peace as always _tends_, even in bad times, to reward the "sons of peace," while they so behave themselves as never on their own part to contribute a factor to avoidable strife, and while the influence of their meek consistency leavens in some measure the ma.s.s around them. With equal and concurrent care they are to "pursue sanctification." It is to be their strong ambition to develope and deepen incessantly that dedication of themselves to the Holy One which will give them at once the standard and the secret of holiness, by bringing them into immediate contact with Him who is at once their law and their life. They are to "live out," in the spirit of a resolute quest after fuller and yet fuller attainment, the fact that He has redeemed them to be "a people of His own possession"; remembering, with a solemn simplicity of conviction, that only "the pure in heart" shall ever be able to "see G.o.d." For the spirit which refuses to come into a surrendered harmony with His Spirit might be set in the midst of heaven itself, yet it would be blind, it would be blinded--by that _alien_ glory. They are to keep watch and oversight upon one another (ver. 15), mutually observant all round, to see that the life of faith and love is alive indeed. Does any one find his fellow-believer "falling short of the grace of G.o.d," sinking into conduct no better than the world's? This must at once disquiet the observer, and call out his loving warnings, or at least his anxious intercessions; for the declining convert inevitably extends an influence of decline around him, and the issue will be, in the end, a declining Church. Is "any root of bitterness growing up"? Is there (see Deut. xxix. 18) any Christian in the company so fallen, so "embittered" by alienation from his Lord, as to be a cause around him of "defilement," so as to stain ultimately large circles ([Greek: hoi polloi]) with the deep pollution of a practical apostasy from holiness?

Is there here and there a personal example of spiritual infidelity ([Greek: p.o.r.nos]) to the Lord, of that radically "secular" ([Greek: bebelos]) spirit (ver. 16) of which Esau is the type, to which some "mess of meat," some material advantage, proves overwhelmingly more momentous than the unworldly "birthright" given by the promise of G.o.d?

Let them all watch as for their life against such symptoms. It is a matter of eternal import. The ancient Esau found too late that he was an outcast, irrevocably, from the great blessing, though then he cried for it with a cry great and bitter. In vain he asked his father to reverse the destiny; there was no "place of repentance" in Isaac's will, for Isaac knew that he had but carried out, blind as he was, the will of G.o.d.

Then follows (verses 18-24) that sublime ant.i.thesis of Sinai and Sion which forms one of the greatest examples of rhythmical, of almost lyrical, eloquence in the whole New Testament. On the one hand looms on the view the Thing,[P] material, tangible ([Greek: pselaphomeno]), all on fire, black with tempestuous cloud, its echoes pealing (ver. 19) to a tremendous trumpet-blast and then to a yet more awful "voice of words."

At its base cowers an awe-struck, horror-struck, host of men, shuddering at the warning (ver. 20) not to touch the fatal rocks, crowding for refuge round a leader who himself owns (ver. 21) to heart-shaking fears.[Q] On the other hand, as the eyes of faith are lifted, there s.h.i.+nes into view, and in the closest spiritual proximity (for the believing company has actually "come unto it," ver. 22), the hill eternal, the true Mount Sion, where s.h.i.+nes the city of the living G.o.d, the Jerusalem of heaven. No barren rocks are there, nor do menaces of articulate thunder sound from and around that height. All is light, and all is life. Yes, above all things all is life. Behold the countless thousands ([Greek: myriasin]) of radiant denizens, the angelic friends of man; and then beatified men besides (ver. 23), "festal, a.s.sembly and church of the first-born, enrolled in heaven"; the Blessed gone before, the "great cloud," seen now in their other character, as the triumphant throng of a celestial Pa.s.sover, or of a Tabernacle-feast of palms, kept in the better Canaan to commemorate the mercies of the mortal wilderness. And there, centre and sun of the wonderful scene, is the glory of the "Judge of all," Vindicator (so we read the meaning of the word [Greek: krites] here) of His afflicted ones, treading down their enemies and presiding in majesty over their happy estate. Around Him rest and rejoice the pure "spirits of the just made perfect," the dear and holy who have lately pa.s.sed through death, "perfected" already, even before their resurrection, in respect of the course finished, the fight fought, the faith kept, the trial for ever over. Lastly (ver. 24), the form is seen of the more than Moses of this better Mount of G.o.d. Behold the Mediator, not of the old covenant but of the new, the Covenant of the Eternal Spirit. Behold the Surety of the promise of the purified heart, the promise sealed with that sprinkled blood of the Incarnate Lamb which, in Divine ant.i.thesis to the call for vengeance on the fratricide which went up from Abel's death, claims for the "brethren"

who once slew their Deliverer not remission only but holiness and heaven.

[P] The word [Greek: orei] is certainly absent from the true text. We are left as in presence of a mysterious _somewhat_, a mighty ma.s.s, mantled in terror and without form or name.

[Q] A traditional utterance must be referred to. But the whole narrative in Exodus and in Deuteronomy supports it.

It is a wonderful picture, the hill of the awful Law confronted by the "hill whence cometh our help." And we ask ourselves why, just here in the Epistle, it is painted for us and left upon our spirit's eyes for ever. Surely it is that the Hebrew disciple (and we in our turn to-day) may be quickened in watching and in walking alike by an immense encouragement and a warning of corresponding power. The call has just been made, all through the twelfth chapter up to this point, to endure, to watch, to warn each other, to pursue to the uttermost the ambition of holiness. Let this be done as by those whose pilgrim tents are pitched as it were in a valley between those two mountains of G.o.d. Let the true Israelite turn his eyes sometimes upon Sinai, to learn again from its shadows and its thunders the infinite importance of the eternal Will, the awfulness of transgression, the terrors of the Law when its demand is met only by the miserable failures of the sinner. Then, humbled lower than the dust, let him turn towards the eternal Sion, and not only turn towards it but recollect that in the Spirit, and in the Son, he has "_come unto it_." In the Lord Christ, his better Moses, his saving Mediator, he has already arrived beside it and rests upon it. No voice of thunder bids him not to touch it "lest he be thrust through." He is commanded to come as near to it as it is possible to be, because he is to come to "the Lord of the Hill" Himself, in the absolute proximity of faith, love, and life. He is welcomed to its recesses, and to its heights. The first-born are his brethren; the just made perfect are his own beloved; every angel of all the host is his friend; the supreme Judge is his omnipotent Protector; Jesus is his Peace, through the blood of His Cross. "Blest inhabitant of Sion, washed in the Redeemer's blood!" Shall he not address himself to the path and pursuit of holiness with a heart beating with an inexhaustible hope, and with a life present while eternal?

Then, as the great paragraph approaches its climax, the note of warning sounds again (ver. 25). The convert, fresh from the reminder of the "voice" of the sprinkled blood of the better covenant, is cautioned not to "refuse" it, not to "decline" it ([Greek: me paraitesesthe]). The primary reference is manifestly to that perpetual danger of the Hebrews, the temptation to turn back from the Gospel, with its spiritual order and its hopes of things not yet seen, to the outworn Dispensation, with its externally majestic circ.u.mstances of glorious ritual and imposing shows of polity and power. They would need again and again to open the soul's ears and eyes, and steadfastly to recollect, against all appearances, that we "_are come unto_ the Mount Sion," if they were to resist the magnetic forces which drew them back towards Sinai--and towards death. So they were to hear the sweet voices of heavenly love, and festal life, and blood-bought covenanted peace, sounding from the true Sion, with joy indeed but also with holy dread. They were to _fear_ lest they should "decline" them, lest sense should conquer faith and the soul be lost under the mountain of condemnation after all. "For if they did not escape who on earth declined Him who spoke oraculous warning ([Greek: chrematizonta]), much more shall we not escape, turning from Him who warns from heaven" (ver. 25). The contemner of the ban of Sinai fell "stricken through" the body. The "decliner" of the admonition to turn no more to the hill of doom, but boldly to climb the hill of peace, will fall stricken through the soul. That warning voice, which once shook the desert, has now promised (ver. 26)--for a promise, the promise of an eternal redemption, lies deep in that threatening (Hag. ii.

6)--that not earth only but heaven is yet to feel His shaking, and once for ever when it comes. He, "yet once more," shall work one vast "removing"; and then (ver. 27) a stability irremovable shall finally come in. "The things that have been made," the terrestrial and material "figures of the real" (ix. 24), are to pa.s.s away, never to return, in order that "the things incapable of disturbance" ([Greek: ta me saleuomena]) "may remain." And what are these things? Nothing less than the spiritual, ultimate, all-fulfilling truths and glories to which the "things made" served as preparation, type, and foil, but which themselves to all eternity shall know no successors, no "new order"

through which G.o.d shall otherwise "fulfil Himself." For what are they, in their inmost essence? They are the truths which spring always from the Incarnate Son, and return always into Him; "the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, with eternal glory."

So let the disciples clasp their sublime privileges, and greatly rejoice--and also greatly fear to "decline" them, to surrender them, to treat them lightly. They "are in receipt ([Greek: paralambanoutes]) of a kingdom unshakable," for they have become the willing va.s.sals of the eternal David of the true Israel, in whose kings.h.i.+p they too are kings, reigning over "all the power of the enemy." But, for the very reason that they hold a royalty, and such a royalty, let them address themselves to a life of adoration, and reverence, and awe, deep as that of the holy ones who, close to the throne above, veil their faces and their feet evermore with their wings, not in terror but in a joy full of wonder and of wors.h.i.+p. "Let us have grace," let us _take and use_ the grace which in the covenant is ours,[R] and in it let us live this life.

For it is to be a life all the while not of alarm and doubting, but _of grace_. Only it is to be lived as before Him who is (ver. 29) "consuming fire, a jealous G.o.d" (Deut. iv. 24), "jealous" against all "forsakers of their own mercy" (Jonah ii. 8), rejectors of His Son, even when they seem to fly for refuge to His Law.

[R] For this use of [Greek: echomen] compare Rom. v. 1, where the best supported reading gives [Greek: echomen eirenen].

Thus the great concatenated pa.s.sage concludes with one of the most formidable of Scripture utterances. But let us boldly gather peace and hope even from this word of fire. For what is the true message of the verses we have traversed, when we look back and sum them up? It is the glory, the fulness, the living richness, the abundant lovingkindness, the supreme and absolute finality, of the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is our Lord Himself, the perfect and ultimate revelation of the grace and peace of G.o.d. And the fiery jealousy of the close, the warning that we shall lose our souls if we "decline" the blessed Son, what does it mean as to His Father's heart? That He so loves the Son, and so loves us, that He adjures us by all His terrors as well as all His mercies never to turn for refuge for one hour away from the all-perfect Christ.

CHAPTER XII

APPEALS AND INSTRUCTIONS

HEB. xiii. 1-14