Acts 28:1-6

Chapter 102

Prayer

Almighty God, may we stand near thee. We stand in the name of Jesus Christ and in the grace of the Cross. We may not see thy glory, but we may look upon thy goodness. Thou hast made all thy goodness pass before us, and truly it is a wondrous procession. The Lord is good unto all, and his tender mercies are overall his works. God is love. It is our joy to know that love is at the heart of things. We are not trembling under a great power: we are appealing unto a great love. It shall be well with us. The battle means victory; the running is already completed in covenant; and even now we reach the goal and seize the prize. All things are done and established in the order and decree of God, and we are but carrying out the daily process, coming nearer and nearer to the happy end, closer and closer to the radiant home. All things are settled; the world is saved, and is in the mighty arms of Christ. Jesus, our Saviour, came to seek us, to save us: he can lose none but the son of perdition. Help us to believe in the finished work of Christ; help us to see that there is no accident in his ministry, no difficulty as to the end, but that already his foot is upon the serpent's head, and already the kingdoms of the world are the kingdoms of our God and of his Christ. Thus would we see the end, and lay hold upon it, and stand in the sanctuary of its completeness, and feel within us the rising of sacred triumph, knowing that the Lord is God, and that in the answer of his fire there is the assured destruction of his foes. We bless thee for every hope we have. This hope is the summer of the soul. Having hope born within us of the Spirit of God, may we purify ourselves even as Christ himself is pure, so that our hope may be no mere sentiment, gratifying a subtle and unexpressed vanity, but a renewing, an invigorating, and a purifying power, that, answering all the music of its light and all the eloquence of its persuasion, we may be found waiting for our Lord, with all industry or with all patience, as he himself may determine. The whole world is thine, the poor, little, sinful world. It has run away from the centre, it has endeavoured to find a way for itself; today it has returned to its Shepherd and its Bishop, and is now, in all spiritual meaning and hope, set amongst the family of the stars to go out no more for ever. For all Christian hope we bless thee. It is our daily inspiration; it is a light from heaven. It operates upon the soul as most tender music; it lifts us above the clouds and causes us to live in heaven. We come to worship God, to bow down before him; to bury our pride and vanity and self-sufficiency; to mourn our sin, to hate it, and to abandon it. We come to look upon the Saviour in the agony of his soul, in the priesthood of his ministry, in the infinite sacrifice of his suffering, that so looking, we may also believe, casting ourselves in simple and unqualified trust upon a mystery we cannot explain, upon a love which we humbly adore. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ is sufficient for us. It is an answer mightier than the accusation of the enemy; it is our reply to angry and just law. The work of our Saviour we accept as the grace of God. We pray that we may be sanctified, body, soul, and spirit; that we may be living temples of the Holy Ghost, without sin, without fear, without pain of heart, wholly cleansed of unbelief and earthliness, and filled with the truth and grace and light of God. Surely to our prayer thou wilt send a great answer. We pray our prayer in the Saviour's name. He takes up our little plea and expands it into his infinite intercession. Saviour of the world, our Lord Jesus Christ, Son of man, Son of God, help us every one; feed us with thy flesh; quench our thirst with thy blood; lead us into the mystery beyond all words "Except a man eat my flesh, and drink my blood, he hath no life in him." We do not know thy meaning; we would obey thy word. We would find in obedience our peace, and in our acceptance of the mystery of thy sacrifice our present and assured heaven. Physician of man, Healer of all souls, bind up the broken heart, comfort the wounded spirit, speak peaceably to those whose souls are in tumult, and lead out by unexpected ways from difficulties which seem to bar in the pilgrim and to mock his every effort and his every hope. Amen.

Act 28:1-6

1. And when they were escaped, then they knew that the island was called Melita.

2. And the barbarous people shewed us no little kindness: for they kindled a fire, and received us every one, because of the present rain, and because of the cold.

3. And when Paul had gathered a bundle of sticks, and laid them on the fire, there came a viper out of the heat, and fastened on his hand.

4. And when the barbarians saw the venomous beast hang on his hand, they said among themselves, No doubt this man is a murderer, whom, though he hath escaped the sea, yet vengeance suffereth not to live.

5. And he shook off the beast into the fire, and felt no harm.

6. Howbeit they looked when he should have swollen, or fallen down dead suddenly: but after they had looked a great while, and saw no harm come to him, they changed their minds, and said that he was a god.

Unreasoning Conclusions

This is an instance of getting out of one trouble only to get into another. There is a mysterious law of succession in the coming of sorrow and difficulty in human life; hence the proverb "It never rains but it pours." There is a mystery of grace also in this succession. We do not know the best side of trouble until we have had a great deal of it. One trouble is of no use. You must get into the music of trouble, the rhythm of sorrow, the rise and fall of the melody of discipline. There comes a time in the sufferer's life when joy would be a kind of vexation to him; it would be in another key; it would be, so to say, a kind of foreign or forgotten language. It is marvellous how trouble can sit upon all the chairs in the house as if by right and how it can make the house happy, comfortable with a strange and weird sense of its being there at Heaven's bidding and under Heaven's decree and order. It is not so with the first trouble that always upsets a man; vexes and irritates him, merely tries his temper, stops the smooth rolling of life's common machinery; it exasperates, and frets, and annoys. The second trouble is accepted in rather a better spirit; then the third comes like an expected guest, and then the door is set wide open, as if a whole procession of black visitors must pass through the hospitable dwelling. "It is better" when trouble has wrought out its most sacred mystery "to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting." It has been pointed out that different nationalities have different salutations. The Greek would say, "Joy be with you!" The key-note of his salutation was "Rejoice! be happy! be glad! Joy be to you!" He lived in beauty, he lived in the region of the senses; he delighted in high art, in high feasting, in all social sensuousness, in the luxury of civilisation. The Hebrew never said so: he spoke in a deeper tone, in a nobler bass; he said, with mystery in his dark eyes and mystery in the minor key of his voice, "Peace be with you!" The Hebrew was the man of soul, the man of tragic experience spiritual and political the suffering man, the man who had been torn in pieces, hunted as prey upon the mountains, whose nights had been full of the darkness of terror and whose days were but half-lighted by the timid sun. He said nothing of joy: he spoke the deeper word "Peace be with you!" So trouble leads us into these deeper mysteries of experience; it takes away the laughter of childhood, the merry shout, "Joy be with you!"; it fills the heart and the mouth with a nobler salutation. Having seen what life is how deep, how narrow, how full of pain, how fretted and exasperated by a thousand mockeries it says, "Peace be with you!" not indifference, not languor, but the reconciliation of all tumults, the great and final end of all controversy and friction, the harmonisation of all laws, fellowships, experiences, and relations; the mystery so deep that men mistake its depth, the mystery of peace. So Jesus Christ, in all his agonies and sorrows, which made his soul "exceeding sorrowful, even unto death," said, "My peace I give unto you." Peace is the greatest, richest, fullest gift of God. May the peace of God, that passeth understanding, keep your hearts and minds, watch over you in critical and gracious guardianship, and bind up all the elements of your manhood, lest they fall out of order and true relation and you be ruined and destroyed! A noble prayer which could be prayed only by him who was cast upon this island and subjected to these successive sorrows.

Here is an instance of the rough judgments which men are always prone to pass upon men. When the viper came out of the heat and fastened on Paul's hand, the simple Punic people said, "No doubt this man is a murderer, whom, though he hath escaped the sea, yet vengeance suffereth not to live." Alas! how many murderers there would be if we had to judge of sin by apparently penal circumstances! How ready we are to form the rough and ungracious judgment of one another! Who ever failed in business, even in the most honourable way for there are honourable failures as well as failures dishonourable without some friends knowing that this very collapse would take place, without their having seen it all the while, and without their deploring it with hypocritical pretence, rejoicing in it all the time, and taking morals from it intended to magnify their own better business faculty and capacity? Who ever pitied the man upon whom the viper fastened? Observers knew that, sooner or later, it would come to this. Wise men have foreseen it all the time; even when they were silent they knew the judgment was coming; they had never spoken about it; they felt quite sure that one day the viper would spring out of the heat and fasten upon the unjust and unrighteous man. Do not make a man a murderer because you thus exhaust in one phrase all possible accusations. Be more discriminate in judgment. Surely no man is quite so bad as that. Surely some who have killed men are not murderers. There is one murderer that is a murderer from the beginning from the very first psalm and fibre of him the devil. Jesus Christ would see in the very worst man something to admire, or praise, or recognise, in a way that would give the bad man another chance or bring upon him the light and warmth of a new and inexplicable hope. There is no man quite so bad as he appears to be, even though the viper be in the very centre of his palm. But some men have no moderation in judgment; they do not look out for the beautiful, the mitigating, the redeeming qualities; they rush at conclusions which sometimes they have to modify, or utterly repudiate. Circumstances are sometimes against men. The venomous beast is upon that man's hand at this moment. For a time even stigmas attach to good names. We have seen the most brilliant of men stigmatised, the viper of a false accusation fastening upon the hand that never did mischief to a human creature. But we are loath to believe this; we are born to believe in each other's wickedness; we like it; it suits the palate. Why should this be so? You have only to charge a man with being a murderer, a. liar, a thief, or what you please, and somebody will stand up to say he saw the viper on his hand. I would pray for the spirit that pities the hand, rather than praises the viper; that believeth all things good; that would rather be deceived than willingly accept the ungenerous judgment, the condemning and ruinous accusation. "Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy."

Yet here, even in this very judgment, so rough and undiscriminating, we have a wondrous mystery, with which we cannot part, except under a sense of great spiritual deprivation. Here is the mystery of intuitive or instructive religion. It would seem as if religion were born in the human mind and heart. The features of this inborn religion are really grand. What are they as suggested by this graphic incident? Here is a sense of a Presence in the universe that means righteousness, honourableness. The heart instinctively says when wrong is done, "This must be punished." Christianity never uproots that intuitive perception, but ennobles it, sanctifies it, attempers it, and perfects it in holy meaning and utility. This is written in the human heart: "Murderers cannot live." Who wrote that law? It is written upon the tablets of the mind by an invisible penman. The universe is against murder. No part of the fair creation was constituted for the accommodation of the bad man. Where can he live? Into what quarter of the universe shall he be shut? The universe does not want him; all its beams of light are darts of punishment; its purest, holiest is to him as blackest perdition. We cannot give up the thought that the bad man will one day have the worst of it. That is intuitive religion; that is a good and honest faith. It is the kind of faith that is beyond argument, and yet that is always fortifying itself by innumerable historical instances. The universe would fall to pieces if we could relinquish that doctrine; it would be no longer safe to walk out under the blue heavens, so charged with the infinite weight of the stars. But our hearts tell us that the bad man will get the worst of it: he may escape the sea, he may escape the viper, he may escape the wilderness, he may seem to make fortunes out of other men's ruin; but, at the last, the sword will strike him, and the fire of heaven will utterly destroy his place. We did not need a revelation to tell us that: somehow we felt that if a wall was built out of plumb, it must fall. We learn a great deal from the history of idolatrous and instinctive religions. These so-called barbarians were theologians in their way: they said, "We do not see everything." This was not a spontaneous or extemporaneous thought just struck off at the moment: behind this utterance lay a wonderfully large induction of facts. The Punic people had observed though unable to speak Greek or Latin in the high and refined sense, which would have relieved them from the stigma of being called barbarians that there was a Ruling Power; that the Ruling Power was on the side of right; that human life, widely and deeply read, was itself a religion, was itself a revelation. That is the corner-stone of a great argument on the Christian side. Read human life, study human ways, take in the great breadth of human history; do not judge by isolated incidents or solitary facts, but take in what you can of the horizon of things, and though you may not come to say the hated word "God," you will be constrained lo say "Mystery," "Secret," "Force," an "Unknowable Quantity," whilst Christian men say "Our Father which art in heaven." We prefer the latter position: it justifies itself to our reason, and it enters our hearts with all the cordiality and sufficiency of grace.

Here is also a point of progress in the religion of these barbarians. They who could not understand a sermon could comprehend the treatment of a viper, and reason upon it. They were observant people: they made religious deductions from ordinary facts. "They looked when" Paul should have become inflamed red as fire, or when he should have "fallen down dead suddenly: but after they had looked a great while, and saw no harm come to him, they changed their minds, and said that he was a god." What was this? A direct contradiction of so-called experience. Here was the greater law setting itself in noble sovereignty over the common daily law; and the people, observing it, paid homage to it. They were a frank people; they had attained a very high point in education, in being able to shake out of the mind lessons and prejudices which opposed themselves to the startling fact which immediately appealed to their vision. If we could persuade Western nations to act in the same way, we should have no unbelievers in all these Northern and Western quarters. If every viper shaken off the hand proved the nobleness of the character so destroying it, and led to the higher reasoning that such a character is a Divine creation, we should have no controversy amongst us as to many spiritual questions and mysteries. All Christian history may be summed up in this one line: that the Christian hand has always shaken off the viper and flung it into the fire. That is what the Church is always doing; that is what the individual Christian is always doing; that is what the growing part, undergoing the process of sanctification, is always doing. It is part of the great original mystery: the seed of the woman shall bruise the head of the serpent. We belong to that lineage, by grace Divine. The viper is on us now; the bite is sharp and deep, the poison has touched the red current of the blood; but, by the grace of Christ, we will shake it off, and it shall be burned and destroyed. Do I speak to some poor sufferer who feels the viper at his heart? It is not in poor human strength to render the bite innocuous. Is it an unseen viper that is piercing you and poisoning the inner veins of your soul's life? Then the mystery of deliverance will be as secret, but that mystery can culminate in perfect deliverance from the agony and the sorrow. Flee to the Saviour in humble, earnest crying and prayer. Is it a public viper a viper clinging to the hand that everybody can see, that even barbarians can look upon and even barbarians can mock? The Lord will not leave his chosen ones that is to say, his trusting and loving ones long in that misery. Blessed are they whom the viper has seized only by the hand! It is an external difficulty; it is a matter that can be dealt with directly and simply. I am more concerned about the viper at the heart the inner serpent, the venomous beast that is biting the soul. O thou who didst come from Bozrah, clothed with garments dyed, like blood, thou art mighty to save; tear out this venomous beast and set thy foot upon his head!