February 1, 1857
“And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together: for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.”—Isaiah xl. 5.
I have endeavoured on former Sundays to show you that the Gospel which St. Paul preached was an Epiphany or manifestation of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ; that therefore it awakened the opposition of the God of this world in the minds of Jews as well as Gentiles; that therefore it brought Jews and Gentiles into one. I have spoken of a similar manifestation of the glory of God as the power which converted St. Paul from a hard exclusive Judaizer into the herald of this Gospel to mankind.
One subject remains to be spoken of before we leave this portion of our year. Has this revelation of God’s glory respect only to the past and to the present? Has it nothing to do with the future? We believe that Jesus Christ was that Image of God Whom prophets had been desiring to behold. We believe that in the fulness of the time these desires were accomplished. He took flesh, and through His flesh showed forth the fulness of that glory which the previous ages had only seen in scattered glimpses. Is that enough for us? Are we content that the world should go on as it is—the Christian world, or the world that is not Christian? If not, what is it we wish for? Is it something else than the manifestation of Christ? Is it some new revelation? Is Jesus the One that shall come, or do we look for another?
Brethren, we must face this question. There is a disposition—it must not be denied—among religious men, to look for something else than the manifestation of Christ. They think that He has come in the flesh and died for them, that they may escape Hell and that they may obtain Heaven. But when they are asked what Hell is, and what Heaven is, their answers are vague. One is something infinitely evil, which Christ has delivered them from; one is something infinitely good, which Christ has won for them. But they seem to regard the infinite evil as consisting in certain inflictions which God has appointed for evil; the infinite good as consisting in certain blessings which God has promised to good. Christ is, according to them, a means to an end, but not the end; the sight of Him is not itself what they covet; the loss of Him is not itself what they dread.
Again there are certainly not a few in our day who say that the Gospel has failed of its object. They appeal to facts. Has it set the world right? Has misery ceased? Has wrong ceased? Has the reign of peace begun? We have passed, they tell us, eighteen weary centuries, which have fulfilled none of the promises with which they commenced. The Deliverer cannot yet have been born into the world. It may be that there is still some King or Hero to come. It may be that we are to find in some great social change, or in some great illumination of individual minds, what our fathers supposed that He was to do for us.
I think that the last of these opinions, which fills religious men with dismay, will not be rejected—ought not to be rejected—till they have cleared their minds of the first. If those who call themselves Christians are not desiring above all things the unveiling or Epiphany of Christ, with what face can they complain of other men for setting their affections and hopes on some other object? Nay, is it certain that some of these may not, under a different name, be asking more earnestly for Him Whom prophets and kings desired to see, than they are? Is it certain that they may not be haunted with the vision of that very Son of Man and Son of God Whom, if we understood our own faith, we might proclaim to them? Is it certain that we have not been refusing to enter into the kingdom of Heaven ourselves, and hindering those that are entering from going in?
If you read the Old Testament you will perceive that there is a striking uniformity amidst the variety of its records. The misery of the Jewish people in the different ages of their commonwealth is produced by the most different instruments, but the cause of it is always the same. Pharaoh may send the people to make bricks, for which he gives them no straw, in Egypt; Jabin may torment them with his six hundred chariots of iron in Canaan; Sennacherib may come down on their fenced cities and threaten Jerusalem; Nebuchadnezzar may take and burn the Temple, and carry the people into captivity. But whoever are the tyrants, tyranny is the cause of their groaning; they cry by reason of oppression; or they are not able to cry, because their hearts are benumbed, because they like the flesh-pots better than freedom; and then the holy men cry for them in deeper anguish. And as the disease is the same, the remedy is the same. A Deliverer from Egyptian bondage, from Canaanitish bondage, from Assyrian bondage, and from Babylonian bondage, is their one infinite necessity. Men appear as their deliverers; but they appear in the name of the Lord. Their witness in each age is, “He has sent us. We have no power, not even any will of our own to save you. He has the power and the will. He is the enemy of tyrants. He is the Deliverer.” Moses comes to tell the crushed slaves of Goshen this. Moses, in God’s name, sends plagues upon Pharaoh, that he may let the people go. Moses lifts the rod, and the waters go back to drown the hosts of the pursuer. But at Sinai Moses speaks no more. Out of the thunders and the thick darkness the voice comes forth, saying, “I am the Lord thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have none other Gods but Me.”
As Gideon thinks over those words by his sheepfold,—as Samson listens to them from the lips of Manoah,—as they are taught to Samuel in the visions of the night, when the lamp is gone out in the Temple of God, each feels the inspiration; each is sure that the Lord his God is a Deliverer; each is stirred to rise and break off that chain by which his people at that moment is bound. The King, in his lonely prayer before the battle, casts himself upon God, his Saviour and his people’s Saviour: in the strength of that prayer he can go forth and put his enemies to flight. The Prophet has seldom that consolation. His battles are in his secret chamber with himself, or with slanderous friends, or with a people that mock him, and fancy he is speaking parables when he is speaking stern plain reproofs to their consciences. But he has this compensation: he sees more clearly even than the Lawgivers and Kings what it is they have had to struggle with, and still must struggle with. He sees why they must put down idols; why idolatry has been the sin and the curse of his nation. He sees that Gods who are not deliverers, Gods who are tyrants; Gods who are imaged in the Kings that built tombs and pyramids with the toil and sweat of slaves, or the Kings that went forth with their six hundred iron chariots, have become the objects of fear and of worship to the children of Abraham, as well as to the nations round about them. This is the cause of their deep moral degradation; this is the cause why they cannot emerge out of the condition of servants of servants; this is the cause why they are practising all little tyrannies to the extent of their power, while they are trampled upon by tyrants themselves.
At first such a view of things appears impenetrably dark. For history exhibits an ever increasing tendency to this idolatry. It ratifies and fulfils the second Commandment. The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation. It exhibits moments of faith—sudden gusts of thanksgiving, then distrust and rapid declension. The Israelites sing to the Lord, for He has triumphed gloriously, the horse and the rider have gone down into the sea. Within a little while they forget His works and the wonders He has wrought; they sink into stupid indifference; the host of Heaven, or any Egyptian calf, become more real to them than He Who led them by the cloudy pillar. They cannot think of a God except as a Being from Whom they are to hide themselves. How can this end? Without faith it is impossible to please Him. Without faith is no energy, no life for man. And yet to depend upon faith was to depend upon the most changeable and fleeting of all things—upon a morning cloud that appeared for a little while and then vanished away.
These thoughts and experiences were the school of the Prophets. By this despair of faith they learned what faith was. Through this prevalence of idolatry in the world, and in their own hearts, they were forced to rely upon the might of God, and to expect the revelation of His glory. You cannot read this fortieth chapter of Isaiah, or any of the chapters which follow, without perceiving that he had passed through this baptism, and without seeing how invulnerable it had made him. He discovers a comfort for his people coming out of the depths of their sorrow, and this, not from any change which had taken place (in his day he had witnessed the most promising changes, and they had come to nothing), but from the certainty that God would declare Himself,—that He would declare Himself in that selfsame character in which He had been declared of old in the Commandments, as the Deliverer—that He would confound all counterfeits of Himself—all Gods which mimicked and usurped His power to work not freedom but oppression; robbery and murder instead of life. At every step of his experience, which has shown him more of his mortal weakness, more of the weakness of the chosen men and of the chosen nation, this vision becomes fuller and clearer. God cannot be disappointed. His purposes cannot come to naught. His purpose is to reveal Himself. And He will reveal Himself. And that revelation is the blessing and deliverance man wants. All others without this must be ineffectual. All others must be included in this.
Therefore it is, Brethren, that Isaiah is called so rightly “The Evangelical Prophet.” He saw more clearly than any one, that only one who perfectly revealed God, who perfectly revealed Him as a Deliverer, could be the Person whom Israelites and all nations desired, whom He Himself was teaching them to desire. He saw, indeed, in every event which took place in his own day a partial Epiphany, a manifestation of God the Righteous Judge, of God the Deliverer. He saw that these Epiphanies were not confined to Jews; that like the sun they carried a message to the ends of the earth. But the more he recognized these revelations of the glory of God, the more he craved for one that should be perfect, that should be, in the strictest and fullest sense, for all flesh. A man living in the heart of Judaism, perhaps seven hundred years, at the lowest calculation five hundred years before the appearance of Christ, was certain it must be. Less than that it was treason against God to expect. The mouth of the Lord had as much spoken this as He had spoken the commands against adultery or murder or false witness. Any one of these commandments might as well be abrogated as this promise and assurance. The old heaven and the old earth might pass away, but nothing could prevent the glory of the Lord being revealed and all flesh from seeing it together.
Apostles while they joyfully claimed the words of this prophet and of all prophets as pointing to Him, Who had taken upon Him the form of a servant, and had died for men,—while they affirmed that the Righteousness and the Wisdom and the Power of God were manifest in His weakness and death,—while they said that in Him dwelt all the fulness of the Godhead bodily,—while they vindicated for Him the words that all flesh were to share in the blessings of His Incarnation and Death by baptizing men of all nations and preaching His Kingdom to all: yet none for a moment taught their disciples to be content with what they had heard or seen or felt or believed. I use all these expressions, because I wish to intimate that the Apostles not only did not allow their disciples to rest in a hearsay, second-hand faith, derived from their testimony, but that they would not have them be satisfied with their own most solid and realized convictions, with the strongest trust which they had been able to put in Christ as their Lord and Saviour and Friend. They said, “We are saved by hope.” They exhorted the Churches to hope continually for that which they saw not. They pointed them continually to the future revelation of Christ, and of the Son of God in Him, as the one object and goal of their expectation. They said that every eye should see Him, and they also which pierced Him.
Such language as this is as definite as it can be, in so far as it points to one Person, and that a Person who had discovered Himself to men in the simplest acts of human love. But it is quite illimitable language, if one considers either the creatures to whom it is addressed or the nature of the Being about Whom it is conversant. Those creatures were subject to all forms of sorrow, material and spiritual. Some specimen of each of those material and spiritual woes Jesus had on earth encountered with His sympathy and His healing power. So long as any of them remained unredressed,—so long as the outward creation remained subject to vanity, not willingly,—so long as there were wills tied and bound with inward evil,—so long they could not but hope for a deliverance yet to be accomplished, however the pledge and earnest of it might have been already given. And that hope took a wider range than even the sight of the evils which called it forth could justify, when it turned to the infinite Goodness and Love which had been discovered in the Son. There it could lose itself in such raptures as these: “Oh the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments, and His ways past finding out! For of Him and to Him and through Him are all things.” Or in such prayers as this: “That ye may be able to comprehend what is the breadth and length and depth and height, and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge; that ye may be filled with all the fulness of God.”
Of such teaching, if it were truly received, this must, I think, have been the consequence. Whatever calamities come upon the world will have been stimulants and encouragements to this hope. There will have been no shame in indulging it; because it will have been a hope for the world and not only for themselves. There will have been no uncertainty about it; because it did not depend upon their faith or virtue, but upon the Eternal Word of God;—the mouth of the Lord had spoken it. There will have been no fear lest they should lose sight of the deep abyss of darkness while they were dwelling on visions of light; for the more they hoped for the glory of God, the more they would feel the infinite horror of being left without it, of sinking back into their own wretched selves. There would be no danger of their losing the motives to action on earth, while they are expecting that glory which would be revealed most completely to them when they had left the earth; because the glory is of God, the Deliverer of the earth and of man, and they could only know it by entering His service, by doing His work, by becoming deliverers themselves.
And, therefore, Brethren, we may take these lessons home for our own profit. Let us have no doubt that, however we may classify men’s oppressions as individual or as social, as political or intellectual, as animal or spiritual, God Himself has awakened the cry for freedom. Let us have no doubt that that cry is, when truly understood and interpreted, a cry that God will appear as the Deliverer, that His glory may be revealed. Let us therefore be most eager to meet all these cries, however discordant they may be,—however they may be convicted of absurdities and contradictions,—however they may put on the forms of denial—with a true Christian sympathy and recognition; and let us, without precipitation,—rather by acts than in words,—rather with the confession of a fellowship in the necessities of all than with any boast of our own superior wisdom,—show that we believe we can give God’s answer to them. Let us be quite sure that we shall not give that answer if we in anywise contract the statements of Scripture, or explain away its grand and full words. If it is said that all flesh together is to see the glory of God, let us be sure that all flesh will see it together; and let us be as confident that it is good that all flesh should see it. We may be quite unable to anticipate the effects on this man or on that of any burst of light. It may dazzle and blind, or it may make the whole body luminous. But at all events, light is to be desired and darkness is to be hated; and therefore we should by all means encourage men to hope for this revelation of God’s light and glory. We should make their wretchedness into an argument for hope; we should make their sinfulness into an argument for hope. Yes, their sinfulness! for no man ever did yet rise out of his sin, no man ever will, till he begins to hope.
It is an old commonplace of divinity, which we are strangely forgetting, that despair is the only utter perdition; because despair binds a man in the prison of his evil nature, and fastens the chain of the Evil Spirit upon him; because all hope points upwards to God, and is the response of our spirit to His Spirit. Therefore I say it again, We ought to stir up hope in every human being. Hope for present help from God to overcome the sin that most easily besets him; hope that he shall be able to say to the mountains which now stand in his way, “Remove, and be cast into the sea;” hope for the future, that the glory of God, the Deliverer, shall be fully revealed; and that he, being included in the “all flesh” of which the Prophet writes, bearing that nature in and for which Christ died, shall be able to see it and rejoice in it. And if this seems to him a strange and incredible assurance, then let us send him to the Cross of Christ, and tell him that that is the Being, and no other, Whom we look for; that the glory which will be revealed is the glory which shone forth in His agony and death; that this has in it a marvellous power to take the poison and curse out of our nature, and to make us anew after His own likeness. Let us do this for other men and for ourselves; and then let us see whether or no they wish for some other Lord rather than for this crucified man; whether they had rather have a triumphant hero and destroyer than this fellow-sufferer; whether they had rather have one who shall glorify them, than one whose glory shall be so manifested that all flesh may see it together.
This will be a test which will prove at last decisive,—which will decide who are and who are not content to be Christ’s sheep, and to follow Him where He leads them. If we use this test wisely and rightly, we may have the joy of turning some who have spent their days in restless seeking after a phantom, to a real object, and to One Who is very near them. But let us not say, when we fail in the case of any man, that the fault is his, not ours; least of all let us ascribe it to God. Let us use it the more strictly and vigilantly upon ourselves, asking whether this is the Christ we are hoping for; whether it is the glory of that Cross we would see revealed; whether we are content and desirous that all flesh should see it, and be blessed by it, as well as ourselves. If we are, then we shall receive with more and more joy and thankfulness the words “The mouth of the Lord has spoken it.” The promise of this final Epiphany stands not on the decrees of lawgivers, or the expectations of holy men, or the confidence of seers. It comes from Him Who said, “Let there be light, and there was light.” It was uttered first when He made man in His own Image. All history, by its thousand voices, has echoed it and ratified it; the sins of men, which have striven to defeat it, witness for it; the Redeemer, by His Passion and Resurrection and Ascension, has made it firmer than the everlasting hills; the Holy Spirit writes it on the hearts of men, and draws a confirmation of it from every trial that has torn those hearts asunder. The fulfilment is as unlikely as it is that the sun should rise out of the dark chilly night,—that the teeming life of spring should follow the death of winter. The fulfilment of it is more sure than the return of day or than the order of heaven. They belong to things temporary and symbolical. It has its fixed and permanent realization in the New Heaven and the New Earth wherein dwelleth righteousness.