The passage: “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.”
I have tried to show you on former Sundays that the Gospel St. Paul preached was an Epiphany of God’s glory in the face of Jesus Christ; that this is why it provoked the opposition of the god of this world among both Jews and Gentiles, and why it brought Jews and Gentiles into one. I have spoken of a like manifestation of God’s glory as the power that turned St. Paul from a hard, exclusive Judaizer into the herald of this Gospel to mankind.
One subject remains before we leave this part of our year. Does this revelation of God’s glory concern only past and present, or does it touch the future too? We believe Jesus Christ was the Image of God the prophets longed to see, and that in the fulness of time that longing was fulfilled — He took flesh and showed the fulness of glory earlier ages had glimpsed only in fragments. Is that enough for us? Are we content that the world, Christian or not, should go on as it is? If not, what do we want — something other than the manifestation of Christ, some new revelation? Is Jesus the One who is to come, or do we look for another?
We must face this question, brethren. There is, we must admit, a disposition among religious people to look for something besides the manifestation of Christ. They think He came in the flesh and died so that they might escape Hell and gain Heaven — but ask them what Hell and Heaven are, and their answers grow vague. Hell is some infinite evil Christ delivered them from; Heaven some infinite good He has won for them — but the evil seems to be certain punishments God has appointed for wrongdoing, the good certain rewards promised to goodness. Christ, on this view, is a means to an end, not the end itself; seeing Him is not itself what they want, losing Him not itself what they dread.
Again, no few people today say the Gospel has failed of its purpose. They point to facts: has it set the world right, ended misery, ended wrong, brought the reign of peace? Eighteen weary centuries, they say, have fulfilled none of its early promises. The Deliverer cannot yet have been born into the world. Perhaps some King or Hero is still to come; perhaps some great social change or enlightenment of minds will do what our fathers thought He would do.
I think this last opinion, which so dismays religious people, will not be — should not be — rejected until they have cleared their minds of the first. If those who call themselves Christians are not above all desiring the unveiling of Christ, how can they blame others for setting their hopes elsewhere? Is it certain that some of these others may not, under another name, be seeking more earnestly for Him whom prophets and kings desired to see than we are? That they may not be haunted by the very vision of the Son of Man and Son of God we might proclaim to them, if we understood our own faith? That we ourselves have not been refusing to enter the kingdom of Heaven, and hindering those who are entering?
Reading the Old Testament, you find a striking uniformity beneath its variety. The misery of the Jewish people, in different ages, comes from the most different instruments, but the cause is always the same. Pharaoh makes them build bricks without straw; Jabin torments them with six hundred iron chariots; Sennacherib threatens Jerusalem; Nebuchadnezzar burns the Temple and carries the people captive. But whatever the tyrant, tyranny is the cause of their groaning — they cry out because of oppression, or, when their hearts are too benumbed to cry, holy men cry for them. And since the disease is always the same, so is the remedy: a Deliverer from Egyptian, Canaanite, Assyrian, Babylonian bondage is their one infinite necessity. Men appear as deliverers, but always in the name of the Lord: “He has sent us; we have no power or will of our own to save you; He has the power and will; He is the enemy of tyrants; He is the Deliverer.” Moses tells the crushed slaves of Goshen this, sends plagues in God’s name, lifts the rod so the waters drown the pursuer. But at Sinai Moses speaks no more; out of the thunder and darkness the voice itself says, “I am the Lord thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt… Thou shalt have none other Gods but Me.”
As Gideon ponders these words by his sheepfold, as Samson hears them from Manoah’s lips, as Samuel is taught them in the night visions when the Temple lamp has gone out, each feels the same inspiration: the Lord his God is a Deliverer, and each rises to break the chain binding his people. The King, praying alone before battle, casts himself on God as his Saviour and his people’s, and in that strength goes forth to victory. The Prophet seldom has that consolation — his battles are fought in his own secret chamber, with himself, with slanderous friends, with a mocking people who take his stern plain reproofs for parables. But he sees more clearly than lawgivers or kings what they struggle against: why idolatry has been the nation’s sin and curse; why gods who are not deliverers but tyrants — gods imaged in kings who build tombs with slave labor, or kings with their six hundred iron chariots — have become objects of worship and fear to Abraham’s children as to the surrounding nations. This is the cause of their deep moral degradation, the reason they cannot rise out of servitude, the reason they practice petty tyrannies of their own even while trampled by tyrants.
At first such a view seems impenetrably dark. History shows an ever-increasing tendency to this idolatry; it fulfils the second Commandment, the sins of the fathers visited on the children to the third and fourth generation. There are moments of faith, sudden bursts of thanksgiving, then distrust and quick decline. The Israelites sing that the Lord has triumphed gloriously, the horse and rider thrown into the sea — and soon forget His works, sinking into stupid indifference, so that the host of heaven or an Egyptian calf becomes more real to them than the God of the cloudy pillar. They can only think of God as one from whom to hide. How can this end? Without faith none can please Him, and without faith there is no energy or life in man — yet to depend on faith was to depend on the most changeable of things, a morning cloud that appears and vanishes.
These experiences were the school of the Prophets. Through this despair of faith they learned what faith was; through the prevalence of idolatry in the world and in their own hearts, they were driven to rely on God’s might and to expect the revelation of His glory. Reading Isaiah’s fortieth chapter and those that follow, you can see he had passed through this baptism, and how it had made him invulnerable. He finds comfort for his people rising out of the depths of their sorrow — not from any change in circumstance (he had seen promising changes come to nothing), but from certainty that God would declare Himself, in that same character declared of old in the Commandments — as Deliverer — confounding every counterfeit god that mimicked His power to work not freedom but oppression, robbery, murder instead of life. The more his experience showed him human weakness, even in chosen men and the chosen nation, the fuller and clearer this vision grew. God cannot be disappointed; His purposes cannot fail. His purpose is to reveal Himself, and He will. That revelation is the blessing and deliverance man wants; all else is ineffectual apart from it, and all else is included within it.
This is why Isaiah is rightly called “the Evangelical Prophet.” He saw, more clearly than anyone, that only one who perfectly revealed God as Deliverer could be the Person Israel and all nations desired — the desire He Himself was teaching them to feel. He saw in every event of his own day a partial Epiphany, a manifestation of God the Righteous Judge and Deliverer, not confined to Jews but carrying its message, like the sun, to the ends of the earth. Yet the more he recognized these partial revelations, the more he craved one that should be perfect, for all flesh in the fullest sense. Living in the heart of Judaism, perhaps seven hundred, at the least five hundred, years before Christ appeared, he was certain it must come — to expect less would have been treason against God. The mouth of the Lord had spoken this as surely as He had spoken the commands against adultery, murder, false witness; one might as soon be abrogated as this promise. The old heaven and earth might pass away, but nothing could prevent the glory of the Lord from being revealed, and all flesh from seeing it together.
The Apostles joyfully claimed the words of this and all the prophets as pointing to Him who took the form of a servant and died for men — affirming that God’s Righteousness, Wisdom, and Power were manifest in His weakness and death, that in Him dwelt all the fulness of the Godhead bodily, that all flesh were to share the blessings of His Incarnation and Death, baptizing men of all nations and preaching His Kingdom to all. Yet none of them taught their disciples to be content with what they had heard, seen, felt, or believed — nor even to rest satisfied with their own most solid convictions, their strongest trust in Christ as Lord and Saviour and Friend. They said, “We are saved by hope.” They urged the Churches to hope continually for what they did not see, pointing them always to the future revelation of Christ and of the Son of God in Him as the one goal of expectation. Every eye should see Him, they said, even those who pierced Him.
Such language is as definite as possible in pointing to one Person, who had revealed Himself in the simplest acts of human love. Yet it is boundless language, considering either the creatures addressed or the Being spoken of. Those creatures suffered every form of sorrow, material and spiritual; Jesus on earth had met some specimen of each with sympathy and healing power. So long as any of these evils remained unredressed — so long as creation groaned, so long as wills remained bound by inward evil — they could not but hope for a deliverance yet to come, however much the pledge of it had already been given. And that hope ranged wider even than the evils that provoked it could justify, when it turned to the infinite Goodness and Love discovered in the Son, losing itself in raptures like: “Oh the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!… of Him and to Him and through Him are all things” — or in prayers like: “that ye may comprehend the breadth and length and depth and height, and know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge, that ye may be filled with all the fulness of God.”
If such teaching were truly received, this must follow: whatever calamities befell the world would only stimulate and encourage this hope. There would be no shame in it, since it was hope for the world, not only for oneself. There would be no uncertainty in it, since it rested not on their faith or virtue but on the Eternal Word of God — the mouth of the Lord had spoken it. There would be no danger of forgetting the abyss of darkness while dwelling on visions of light, for the more they hoped for God’s glory, the more they would feel the horror of being left without it, sinking back into their own wretched selves. Nor would they lose their motive for earthly action while expecting a glory to be revealed most fully after death — because that glory is the glory of God the Deliverer of earth and man, and they could only know it by entering His service, doing His work, becoming deliverers themselves.
So, brethren, we may take these lessons for our own profit. Let us not doubt that, however we classify men’s oppressions — individual or social, political or intellectual, animal or spiritual — God Himself has awakened the cry for freedom, and that this cry, rightly understood, is a cry that God will appear as Deliverer, that His glory may be revealed. Let us therefore meet all these cries eagerly, however discordant, however full of absurdity or contradiction, however they wear the form of denial — with true Christian sympathy, showing rather by acts than words, rather by confessing our fellowship in the same needs than by boasting our own wisdom, that we believe we can give God’s answer to them. We shall not give that answer if we in any way narrow Scripture’s statements or explain away its grand full words. If all flesh together is to see the glory of God, let us be sure that all flesh will see it, and that it is good that all flesh should see it. We may not be able to foresee the effect of such a burst of light on this man or that — it may dazzle and blind, or fill the whole body with light — but light is to be desired and darkness hated, and so we should encourage all men to hope for this revelation. We should turn men’s wretchedness into an argument for hope, and their sinfulness too — for no man ever rose out of sin, or ever will, until he begins to hope.
It is an old commonplace of divinity, which we are strangely forgetting, that despair alone is utter ruin — for despair imprisons a man in his evil nature and fastens the Evil Spirit’s chain on him, while all hope points upward to God and answers His Spirit with ours. So I say again: we ought to stir up hope in every human being — hope for present help from God against the sin that besets him, hope that he may say to the mountain in his way “Remove, and be cast into the sea,” hope for the future that the glory of the Deliverer shall be fully revealed and that he, included in the “all flesh” of the Prophet’s words, bearing the nature for which Christ died, shall see it and rejoice in it. If this seems strange and incredible to him, let us send him to the Cross of Christ and tell him that is the Being, and no other, we look for; that the glory to be revealed is the glory that shone in His agony and death; that this has power to take the poison and curse out of our nature and remake us in His likeness. Let us do this for others and for ourselves, and then see whether they wish for some other lord than this crucified man — a triumphant hero and destroyer rather than this fellow-sufferer — one who would glorify them, rather than one whose glory shall be so revealed that all flesh may see it together.
This test will prove decisive at last, deciding who are and who are not content to be Christ’s sheep and follow where He leads. Used wisely, it may turn some who have spent their days chasing a phantom toward a real object very near them. But when we fail with any man, let us not blame him, and least of all blame God — let us instead turn the test upon ourselves, asking whether this is the Christ we hope for, whether it is the glory of that Cross we wish revealed, whether we truly want all flesh to see it and be blessed by it as well as ourselves. If we do, we will receive with ever more joy and thankfulness the words “The mouth of the Lord has spoken it.” This promise of a final Epiphany rests not on lawgivers’ decrees, holy men’s expectations, or seers’ confidence, but on Him who said, “Let there be light, and there was light.” It was first uttered when He made man in His own image. All history’s thousand voices have echoed and ratified it; the very sins of men that strive to defeat it bear witness for it; the Redeemer, by His Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension, has made it firmer than the everlasting hills; the Holy Spirit writes it on men’s hearts, confirming it through every trial that tears those hearts asunder. Its fulfilment seems as unlikely as the sun rising out of dark, cold night, or spring’s teeming life following winter’s death — yet it is more sure than the return of day or the order of the heavens, for those belong to things temporary and symbolic, while this has its fixed, permanent reality in the New Heaven and New Earth where righteousness dwells.