Verses 32-35
Chapter 40
Prayer
Almighty God, thy word is like a great balm upon the wound of our life, full of comforting, give us the feeling of a new hope. Thou hast surely bruised the life of man at every point and given him to know the bitterness of great sorrow and the acuteness of intolerable pain; thou hast followed such visitations with great grace, with consolations greater than the sorrows they would soothe; as where sin aboundeth grace doth much more bound, so where our sorrow multiplies itself, thy solaces, increase in number and their gentleness doth recover our hope. Thou hast made us as a pelican in the wilderness, as an owl in the desert, as a sparrow sitting alone upon the house-top, and then thou hast gathered us into great places, poured thy summer light upon us, and sent thy tender music through our drooping hearts, and with infinite plenteousness of rain hast thou refreshed the thirsty land, and with infinite light hast thou restored the comfort and the hope of man.
We have read thy word, and there is no music so inspiring and uplifting. We feel that we are one with the ages gone, that the saints of the early Church had experience which we reproduce, so that we are all one, and as our sorrow is one, so is the source of our healing and joy. Age after age comes to thee, each with its own cry, each with its own wound, and thou dost multiply thy comforts upon all time, and write the testimony of thy grace upon the rising and dying generations.
We have come each with his own song today. We sing of the blessings at home; thou hast given us light there, and there thou hast set bread before us, morning, noon, and night. Thou hast protected and defended the household, and our family life today is a witness to thy superintending and gracious care. Hear us, then, as heads of houses, fathers and mothers, and households complete, when we sing of thy goodness and mercy and bless thee for our life at home. Thou hast watched us in all the daily commerce of life, in our buying and selling and getting gain, in our endeavours and our failures, in our enterprises and our successes behold the whole is before thee; what came not of thine inspiration do thou utterly destroy; that which came of the motion of thine own Spirit thou wilt establish in imperishable integrity and honour.
Do thou grant unto us daily ministries from Heaven, so that we may know what is the good and acceptable way, so that we may have an increasing love for all that is true, beautiful, and divine, and so that our whole life may move upon an ascending line, never knowing the joy of contentment until that contentment is found in thyself. Give us a strong grip of truth, give us a healthy and honest heart, loving the truth and pursuing that which is holy. As for our trials and difficulties, what are they but the shadow of the time through which we pass? They have a meaning which we cannot read wholly just now; in the hurry and rush of our dying life we have but little time for the deeper and broader reading of life, but we will trust in the Living One all things work together for good to them that love God. This shall be our anchor in the wild sea, this shall be our light in the time of darkness, and here shall we find our peace when the storm is strongest.
We commend one another to thy tender care. There are here broken hearts, men who are wounded in their very life, souls that can see nothing but great gloom, without a star to break its despairing night. There are those whose goblet is full of choice wine, whose life is a daily song, and whose continuance upon the earth is an unbroken health. According to our experience, whether it be this or that, let thy blessing come to every heart amongst us, and send none away untouched, unillumined, unblest. Let all the people praise thee, yea, let all the people praise thee, with songs, feeble or loud, but all coming from the heart, because of thine infinite tenderness and thine immeasurable grace. Comfort the old with surprising light and joy, direct the young man whose purposes are set in the right direction, and give him favour in the sight of the people, that all his honourable plans and purposes may be consummated in a success which thou canst approve. Speak to those whose lives are rounds of monotony, always the same, always hoping, never realizing, always waiting, and never satisfied with the one answer that alone can bring content. The Lord show us the place of patience in our discipline, and help us to wait with the patience that shall itself be as a heroism in thy sight.
Hear any who have special praises to offer thee for life given and for life spared. The Lord hear such family praise and grant unto it confirmation day by day of renewed favour and support. Hear the praise of those who thank thee for returned friends, for absences brought to an end, and for fellowships reunited. Hear the hymn of those who would bless thee in fervent song for guidance and protection on land and water, at home and abroad, and who return to us this day to utter their praises in the common song.
The Lord go out after those who would not come with us, after the prodigal, wanton, wild, desperate man, a fool, a criminal, hard of heart seek for him thyself, thou Shepherd of the heavens and the earth, for our feet are weary, and our eyes fail through searching. The Lord be with those who could not come with us, with the sick, the weak, the aged, those whose next sight will be thyself and whose next worship will be in heaven. The Lord hear every cry, and specially the cry for pardon which is uttered at the Saviour's cross great cross, wondrous tree, altar of the one sacrifice, scene of the one shedding of blood that can alone touch the malady and the agony of life!
The Lord hear us, and His hearing shall itself be as an answer. Amen.
Christ Must Be Accounted for
You will find a fuller account of the same matter in the Gospel according to Mark
22. And the Scribes which came down from Jerusalem said, He hath Beelzebub, and by the prince of the devils casteth he out devils.
23. And he called them unto him, and said unto them, in parables, How can Satan cast out Satan?
24. And if a kingdom be divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.
25. And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.
26. And if Satan rise up against himself and be divided, he cannot stand, but hath an end.
27. No man can enter into a strong man's house and spoil his goods, except he first bind the strong man, and then he will spoil his house.
28. Verily I say unto you, All sins shall be forgiven unto the sons of men, and blasphemies wherewith soever they shall blaspheme.
29. But he that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness, but is in danger of eternal damnation.
30. Because they said, He hath an unclean spirit.
You will see from these words that Christianity has to be accounted for. Men must have some opinion about its origin and about its inspiration, and concerning its whole scope and purpose. It is not, indeed, Christianity that has to be accounted for so much as it is Christ himself. There is a time in the life of every considerable man when his friends begin to wonder how he came to be what he is, and that which constitutes a common theme of inquiry amongst ourselves reaches its very highest point of intensity and significance in the case of Jesus Christ, the Son of Man. Do nothing in the world, and nobody will care who you are or whence you came. You will not be a figure, you will not be a force in society, you do not start any impulses that move other men, you throw no new lights upon the path of life, there never comes into your voice a startling tone; nobody cares, therefore, who you are and whence you came, it is a point of concern to no one to account for you, simply because there is nothing to be accounted for. But challenge the thinking of the time, put truth in new phases and aspects before the intellect of the age, startle the world by challenging its ancient orthodoxies and its most accredited traditions and prejudices, then perhaps people may begin to say, "Who are you? By what authority doest thou these things?"
These questions arose continually in connection with Jesus Christ. "Who is he? Is he not the son of Mary and of Joseph? Are not his brethren and his sisters with us? From whence hath this Man this wisdom and these mighty works? Whence do they come?" Thus Jesus became the problem of his age. He is the problem of all time; he is the secret and the terror of human history; he is the hope and the light of human prophecy, and today men wonder who he is; they reject his claims, and they call him back to ask him further questions. It is, therefore, not so much Christianity that has to be accounted for as Christ Himself, for in very deed Christ is Christianity, Christ is the Gospel. This is a matter of personality, not of abstraction or of metaphysics.
Now there have been various accounts given of Christ, and we have one of these accounts in the text. Ask worldliness what it has to say about Christ and Christianity. The answer will be, "No doubt Christ is a very good man; probably a little fanatical in his methods, with very fine theories, and if they could be carried out it would be a good thing for the world, but we cannot carry them out, they are too fine-spun. No doubt he was a good man, and we have nothing to say against him;" and worldliness passes on, to add another window to its shop and another acre to its estates. Compliment is faint praise: there is no sting or viciousness in it; it is good so far as it goes.
Ask mere intellectualism to account for Christ. "A myth, a fable, a dream, a poem not without fascination, often glittering in its sparks of happy suggestion, but a myth, a conception of the mind, a piece of beautiful patchwork. If we cared to go into its discrepancies we could upset the historic credibility of the whole, but we are content to say, a myth, and to pass on."
Ask prejudice to account for Christ and his work. The bad answer is in the text, "He casteth out devils through the prince of the devils."
Note the difference in those replies. Worldliness, engaged in its occupations, its brain in the whirl and rush of money-making and business and enterprise, says, "No doubt Jesus Christ was a very good man; we have no fault to find with him, but we have no time to go into all his claims and to settle his place in history." Cold intellectualism says, "Fable, fantasy, myth very good in its way, nothing more." Prejudice, with low brow and muffled face, with a mien that indicates everything that can degrade human grandeur, says, "He casteth out devils by the prince of the devils. He is in league with Beelzebub, and learned in Satanic tricks."
Now observe, every one of those theories has its own peculiar difficulties. The worldly man finds a character in history that stands back from his policies and programmes, that says, "Labour not for the meat which perisheth. A man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things that he possesseth. Take no thought or the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Have your treasure in heaven, where neither moth nor rust corrupteth, and where thieves do not break through nor steal;" and worldliness can only say, "Very good; a fine theory, but impracticable." Still, there stands a man that said these things and that lived them: he is not put down by a compliment, neither is he shattered by an assault. To-day his holy gospel lifts its sweet and serene voice amid all the tumult of conflicting teachings, and says, "Your life is within you: be rather than merely have: live in God seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you;" and worldliness with its little shallow compliment, does not account for, with any adequacy of explanation, the moral grandeur of the man who kept the world under his feet and his heart in the very heaven of God.
And the cold intellect leaves the Christ just where it found him. The intellectualist has to account for a man who was dreamed into being. Then the dreamer must himself be equal to the man he dreamed. You have to account for a man born in the imagination of some other man, and who, as a creature of imagination, has risen to the supreme place in human history, and who today rules innumerable millions of human lives and ministries and destinies. It is easy to call him and his work mythical, romantic, fabulous, but that does not account for the profound moral influence, the beneficent results, and the whole ministry that is represented by the term Christ, or by the phrase the Christian Church.
But what shall we say about the answer of prejudice? What is prejudice who can define it? How it spoils our life, how it takes the bloom off the finest fruits that grow in the garden or human fellowship. Once let prejudice occupy your mind, and the object of that prejudice can never be good, or seem good, of do good, or think good. He may do the noblest works ever done by human energy, but you will not allow him to be crowned because he has accomplished them; yea, he may serve you and your family night and day, but you will find the devil in his prayers, selfishness in his benevolence, and his very light shall be darkness, and all his meaning shall be a piece of self-idolatry. Beware of prejudice. We can answer an argument, we can rebut a charge, but who can find out the root and the issue of irrational and vicious prejudice? There are some men who never can do right in our estimation. They may be gifted with genius, their character may be above suspicion, and all their work may be of a high type, but we hate them, and therefore, when we are called upon to explain their influence or to account for their character, we are willing to accredit the devil with the whole rather than to speak one just word about the man we detest.
Beware of prejudice: it enters the mind very subtly, and once in the mind, it is the most difficult of all its occupants and rulers to dislodge. It is irrational, you cannot get hold of it, it has no centre, it acknowledges no court of appeal, it is invisible. It was from such prejudice that Jesus Christ suffered. When the Pharisees and the Scribes and the most religious men of the day heard the dumb speaking and were made aware that the deaf could hear and the lame could walk and could see all the good works done by Christ and his disciples, they were willing rather to praise the devil than to praise him.
See to what degradation prejudice may drag you; and we are all exposed to the influence of prejudice. Beware of it, it is the worst of the devils, it skulks, it sneaks, it watches in silence, it drops its poison into the cup when nobody is looking. It is the biggest of thieves, it is the most noted of liars, it is the most persistent of persecutors, and yet all the time it can cause those who are its subjects upon the largest scale to disown it. Have we not all heard men who were known to be all but filled with prejudice declare, with a serene innocence, that they were perfectly sure that they were not at all animated by prejudice? It is a horrible devil, it swears and breaks its oath, it will kiss any Bible, and burn the book it kissed, and put the oath into the fire, that they may both go to the same hot ashes. Are there not some men you so bitterly dislike that they can do nothing good in your sight? It was from prejudice that Christ suffered.
Now I want to turn and to consider Christ's answer to this prejudice. The answer was argumentative. Having heard what the Scribes which came down from Jerusalem said, he called them unto him, and said unto them in parables, "How can Satan cast out Satan? And if a kingdom be divided against itself that kingdom cannot stand, and if a house be divided against itself that house cannot stand, and if Satan rise up against himself and be divided he cannot stand, but hath an end." That was an argumentative reply. Christianity has an argumentative answer to every assault. Christianity can fight for its position with any weapons that an enemy may choose. Did you ever know a case of the so-called reductio ad absurdum so complete as this? The Scribes thought they had answered the whole case by referring it to a diabolic origin. Jesus said, "How can Satan cast out Satan? And if a kingdom be divided against itself that kingdom cannot stand, and if a house be divided against itself that house cannot stand."
I ask you to look at that answer in the light of argument, and tell me if it could be improved in its logical construction and force. He confounded the enemy out of his own mouth. He took the sword from the enemy and thrust it into the enemy's own heart. That is what Christianity can always do. I have heard all the arguments that can be addressed against Christianity, and I have never heard one that could not be triumphantly answered and repelled. This is a specimen of the answers that can be given: it gleams with wit, it strikes like a spear, it burns like a fire. There is no reply possible to that argument. How can Satan cast out Satan? If Satan be divided against himself he cannot stand, if a house be divided against itself it cannot stand, if a man be divided against himself he cannot stand. Division is destruction.
Consider, therefore, that Jesus Christ's answer was, in the first place, distinctly and broadly argumentative. In the next place it was judicial. Jesus Christ did not stop at the argumentative; having shown his adversaries how their logic limped, and how their accounting for his supremacy was not only a lie but an absurdity, he said, "Verily, assuredly, I say unto you, all sins shall be forgiven unto the sons of men, and blasphemies wherewith soever they shall blaspheme, but he that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness, but is in danger of eternal damnation," because they said, "He hath an unclean spirit." Christianity is something more than an argumentative contest. This is not a question of whether one point is fifty miles distant from another point, it is a question that involves moral issues, tremendous outgoings, it involves the whole question of personal and universal destiny. In the first part of his answer the tone of Christ was light, trenchant, bright, as became a merely argumentative retort. Suddenly that voice, bright as all the lights of heaven, sobered and broadened into thunder as he said, "This is the kind of sin that never can be forgiven." When you come with these Christian questions you do not come into an exercise of merely intellectual gymnastics; this is not a question of one man being cleverer than another in the use of mere words, it is not a clash of wooden swords, it is a question of life or death. The Scribes thought they had given an answer sufficient in its contemptuous-ness when they referred Christ and his miracles to the devil. They little knew all they were doing: they were writing on heaven's own scroll their own unpardonableness.
Take care how you treat the Bible, the altar, the Church. Words of contempt may easily rise to your lips, but they may mean more than you intend them to mean. You throw a little pebble into the broad lake: you thought it would go straight down and be seen no more. So far you may be right, but the circles are on the surface, and they vibrate and widen and multiply and make the whole lake throb, and who can tell what may come out of a contemptuous criticism of Jesus Christ and his ministry? Beware of clever blasphemers, of those little agile blasphemers who make atheism an easy trick in words, and get rid of the universe and its mysteries by the nod of an empty head. There are moral issues, there are judicial penalties, there are certain ungovernable recoils. A man has not done with his words merely when he has uttered them; they go away from him and are judged and sent back again upon his life, angels that bless him, or shadows that turn his day into night. We have known this in countless instances. The men themselves have not always been able to explain the mystery; but find out men who are suffering in divers ways, not always to be set forth in express words, and it is not impossible, if you trace their history sufficiently back, but that you may find that these practical bitternesses, these black harvests, are the results of early blasphemies or profanities of the heart. Understand, therefore, that the blatant atheist who sells his atheism and pronounces its first little syllable with a vicious emphasis, does not always see or feel at the moment the result of his blasphemies.
Jesus Christ is not short-coming in the matter of his forgiveness, but there is a point at which his pardons are themselves shut out. Say he has an unclean spirit, and you extinguish the sun that makes every day and creates every summer, and having put out the fountain of light, there is no more brightness possible. Consider, therefore, that Jesus Christ's answer was, in the second place, strictly and solemnly judicial. That reply was more than either argumentative or judicial it was, in the third place, practical. The proof of that you will find in the thirty-fifth verse. "And Jesus went about all the cities and villages teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every sickness and every disease among the people." That is the way to answer your enemies: keep on with your work; any fool can resign, it requires no genius and no heroism to give up the pulpit, or to withdraw from the Church, or to throw up what is called vulgarly "the whole thing." Jesus Christ did not do that; he was sometimes driven out, but he would not be driven out till the first great thunder drops of the storm were splashing on the pavement whose dust had rejected him. Then he said, "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often would I have gathered thee as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings, and ye would not, but now your house is left unto you desolate," and a great hollow wind roared through the metropolitan streets, and great blotches of black rain fell from the thunderous clouds, and the lightnings looked from every point, and Jerusalem was being swallowed up. Blessed One they told him that he was in league with the devil, and he answered them in witty argument, visited them with judicial penalty and then went about doing good, went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every sickness and every disease among the people. Let that always be your reply to every wicked assault. They said, "He hath a devil;" he went about teaching, preaching, and healing. Beneficent reply, sharper than wit, more intelligible than judgment. He made life, if possible, more a sacrifice than ever. And who am I that I should resign, when Jesus, my Saviour, might have resigned his care over me every day since I first knew him? I have wounded his right hand and his left, and both his feet, I have thrust a spear into his side, and crushed the thorns into his temples, and I have done it every day, and still he will not give me up. He lets the lifted thunder drop; he pursues me still. Who am I, then, that I because of some rude offence or incivility on the part of man, should run away from the altar and the work and the cross? I have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against any sin, or writhing under any insult. Let us, then, run with patience the race set before us, looking unto Jesus, the Author and Finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, scorning it with a divine heroism, and making it ashamed of itself.
So, then, we stand on rocky foundations. My house is not built upon a gilded cloud; I stand beside Christ, I love Christ, I know whom I have believed. He has been more insulted than any teacher; Pythagoras would have dismissed his school, Socrates would have run away from his mean pupils and vicious critics; this man never gave a lesson without having every word of it turned into a stone and thrown back into his own teeth, and still he teaches on. He was despised and rejected of men, but he shall one day be the desire of all nations. He was a root out of a dry ground, but one day he will be to the world as the Flower of Jesse and the Plant of Renown. He can wait. Falsehood is in a hurry; it may be at any moment detected and punished; truth is calm, serene, its judgment is on high, its King cometh out of the chambers of eternity.
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