Fourth Sunday after Easter

“I prayed therefore unto the Lord, and said, O Lord God, destroy not Thy people and Thine inheritance, which Thou hast redeemed through Thy greatness, which Thou hast brought forth out of Egypt with a mighty hand. Remember Thy servants, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; look not unto the stubbornness of this people, nor to their wickedness, nor to their sin: lest the land whence Thou broughtest us out say, Because the Lord was not able to bring them into the land which He promised them, and because He hated them, He hath brought them out to slay them in the wilderness. Yet they are Thy people, and Thine inheritance, which Thou broughtest out by Thy mighty power, and by Thy stretched out arm.”—Deuteronomy ix. 26-29.

This prayer brings out in its greatest strength a contrast which goes through the Book of Deuteronomy, and through the whole Bible. The Israelites are the people of God, His inheritance, redeemed by His mighty hand. They are stubborn, stiff-necked, wicked. We become so familiar with passages which contain both these descriptions of them, that we often attach little meaning to either. When we begin to study the history with real interest and for a practical purpose, the sins which are denounced become evident enough to us, from their likeness to those which are committed in our own day, or which we are conscious of in ourselves. But while we are dwelling upon them, how is it possible to think of the people to whom they are attributed, as righteous, holy, chosen out of all the people of the earth? These words acquire in our minds a sort of technical signification. The holiness which is said to belong to the Jewish nation cannot, we think, be the holiness which we ascribe to Moses, or Elijah, or Jeremiah. The word must have a different force in its different applications. We are afraid of believing that the language of the Divine Word is as strict and honest language as the language of fallible men. By tampering with it a little we hope to escape the peril of calling evil good and good evil.

The state of mind which such thoughts indicate cannot be a right one. A seed of insincerity lies in it, which must bear fruit hereafter in manifold contradictions, both of belief and conduct. It cannot be cured by stifling the doubts which it does and must engender. Those doubts will penetrate, before we are aware, into the innermost corners of our minds. So long as we have the least suspicion that Righteousness and Holiness are words of merely conventional force in the Bible, so long we shall not regard the Bible as a true book, whatever reverence we may seem to pay it. We have therefore the greatest interest in seeking for a resolution of this difficulty, and in not glossing it over. You will see how nearly it lies to those questions which I have been occupied with lately. Last Sunday I was speaking of Christ’s call to a Church to remember what it had received and heard, to hold fast, and to repent. I applied these words to the Nation and Church of England; I said that Christ was speaking them to us as much as to the Sardians. I said that if we heeded them we might perhaps bind different classes in our land together; that we might reconcile some of them who are most hostile to us, and who suspect us most abroad. We might appeal to the strongest feelings of Protestants as well as Romanists; we might make them fellow-workers instead of foes.

I did not disguise from myself then, that language of this kind would sound very unreal to some of those with whose faith and earnestness I should most wish to claim fellowship. “What,” they will say, “do you mean by national righteousness, national repentance? Individual righteousness, individual repentance we know something of. There was a time in our lives when visible things had an unbounded attraction for us; when we regarded it as the highest end of life to obtain the largest share of them, or to draw the greatest amount of enjoyment from them. One of these charms after another was taken away from us, or proved itself to be hollow. Vacancy and dreariness of spirit followed; then the vision of a higher good floated before us. We tried to grasp it and could not. There was revealed to us an evil in ourselves which till then had been hidden from us. We cried to be delivered from it. At length we perceived and knew that there was a Deliverer. We prayed thenceforth to be admitted into His household, if it were but as menials. We learned that He was far more willing to grant that petition than we were to make it.”

These experimental records bear the clearest stamp of veracity. And they are as beautiful and consolatory as they are true. They explain great moral facts, as scientific discoveries explain physical facts. Those moral facts are just what we all want to understand; what some feel as if they would die to understand. But from them, it is supposed, we can deduce the nature of righteousness and repentance. Taking them as our starting-point, it is concluded that a righteous society will be one which contains a great number of these righteous penitents. “To deserve the name strictly and properly,” it is said, “such a society should contain nothing else; but that is a result which the imagination grasps, which the heart craves for, but which we must be content to dispense with here,—a rude and very distant approximation to it ought to satisfy us. Something may be done to purge a society of its most outrageous members: the sword of a Nation will cut off a few; the discipline of a Church should be desired for the removal of more; but, after all, those who stand in a direct personal relation with God,—those who are something more than externally decorous,—must remain an insignificant minority. The great comfort is, to think that, though of so little importance in the eyes of man, they attract all the Divine complacency; that in fact for their sakes the whole machinery of the Universe, the order of Nature, the policy of Nations, is suffered to exist; that in due time these will pass away, and the chosen Saints will be revealed, thenceforth the sole possessors of those blessings which the ungodly had for awhile been allowed to seize and appropriate.”

That some of these conclusions respecting the ways of God to man sound at first revolting, and seem to clash with apprehensions of His character which we thought we had derived from Scripture, may be no reason for rejecting them, far less for denying the facts from which they have been deduced. But it would be a very serious objection to them, if they clashed with the principles and the method of the Book to which they appeal as an authority and a judge. I think a very little reflection will convince us that this is actually the case.

One all-important contrast suggests itself, the moment we open the Scriptures. They do not set forth the history of a man seeking for God, but of God seeking for men. In the Book of Exodus we have very distinct records of the life of Moses; but no one could possibly think that it was the object of that Book to give us a biography of him or of any other man. Moses is called out by God to know His name and to do His work; that is the account which he gives of himself. This was his holiness: he was separated, set apart by God to act as His minister. He who set him apart revealed to him His character, —showed him that Righteousness, and not Self-Will, was governing the universe. He was called to exhibit this Righteousness to his countrymen and to Pharaoh; he was to tell them that God had seen their affliction and heard their cry; he was to command Pharaoh to let the people whom he was oppressing go. To separate Moses the righteous man from Moses the deliverer of the Israelites, is impossible. He could not have been righteous if he had not fulfilled that task,—he could not have been righteous if he had not testified in all his acts and words that God, not he, was the Deliverer. We miss the whole meaning of the story—the saintship of Moses disappears altogether—if we try to conceive of him apart from his people. Do you remind me that he was forty days in communion with the Lord God of Israel? But was he not in these forty days receiving the law, which was for every Israelite as much as for himself? was he not pleading for Israelites, as if there was not one privilege which they did not share with him?

This is the point upon which we were seeking light. I apprehend that if we once see upon what ground the holiness of Moses stood, we must admit that the nation of which he was a member was holy, in precisely the same sense and for precisely the same reason as he was; nay, that it had a title prior to his, a title from which his own was derived. It was a holy nation, because God had called it out—had chosen it to be His—had put His name upon it. The Scriptures tell us so, and they explain to us what they mean. They never teach us that God created men to be a set of individuals. They say that He created everything after its kind; that He created man in His own image, the words being added, “Male and female created he them.” No language can more distinctly express the idea of Society as essential to the very idea of Humanity than this. It is not the separate man who is in the image of God; it is man as a kind, it is the individual man so far as he is the member of a kind. The first man and woman, we are told, who were put into this world, refused to own themselves as made in God’s image, tried to be independent of Him; and therefore, by a necessary consequence, became suspicious of each other, as well as servants to an inferior creature. But the purpose of the Creator could not be defeated by the unbelief of the creature. They did increase and multiply according to the law and the blessings which He had originally given them; they became a society. In that society the fallen tendency manifested itself. And if the Adam-nature could have made itself manifest,—if man could have seized the dreadful privilege of being left to himself,—that society would have perished; there must have been hopeless, endless strife, hostility, and hatred. But iniquity cannot make itself a law; men cannot cut themselves off from their unseen Lord, nor from their fellows. They feel and know that they cannot; all the acts of their lives the words which they speak—testify that they cannot; the struggle to do it makes contradiction of their lives. How perfectly simple and orderly then is the Scripture narrative, how entirely consistent with itself, when it assumes God to be the author and upholder of social life; when it affirms all society to be irregular, incoherent, disorderly, so soon as it loses sight of Him.

The family of Abraham was signed with God’s covenant, and was declared to be holy. Was it not so actually? Was it only so because Jacob was the head of it, or because Joseph was a member of it? The Scripture is careful to preserve us from any such feeble notions. It forces us to see that Joseph was better than his brethren just because he identified himself with the family, and they acted as if they did not belong to it; because he believed that God had chosen it, and they forgot that He had; because he did, and they did not, believe it to be holy.

The nation of Israel was told that the Invisible God was actually their King; that He had brought them out of the house of bondage; that He was with them in the wilderness; that He would be with them in the promised land. Supposing any Israelite to believe this, he was a strong, brave, free man; he could overcome the enemies of his land; he could tread his own underfoot. Supposing him to lose this faith, he wished again for the flesh-pots of Egypt, he was without heart, hope, enterprise; he cried to the priest to set up a calf, because the Lord was not among them. Did the strength, bravery, freedom, come to one because he believed a lie? and the cowardice, slavery, idolatry to the other because he believed the truth? And yet so it must have been, if the first had not a right to call his nation a holy nation in the strict, full sense of the words; if he had not a right to say, “We are individually holy because we are members of it, and because God has given each of us the same privilege which He has given to the whole people, of calling Him our God, of knowing His name, of trusting in Him.” Could the unbelief of five-sixths of the people make the truth of God of none effect? Could it make any, even the slightest difference in the reality of the Divine Word and Promise, or serve for any other purpose than to demonstrate its truthfulness, by the untruthfulness of those who set it aside or were indifferent to it?

See then how reasonable the prayer was which I have taken for my text this afternoon. Because Moses regarded the Israelites as a holy and chosen people, redeemed by God’s own hand; because he believed that this description belonged to the whole covenant people at all times: therefore he felt with intense anguish their stubbornness, their wickedness, and their sin. Had they not been a holy people, he would not have known in what their sin consisted. It was the forgetfulness of their holy state—the choice of another—which he confessed with such shame and sorrow before God; it was because they had gone out of the right way, forgetting that they were a nation, each man preferring a selfish way of his own,—each thinking that he had an interest apart from his neighbour, apart from the body to which he belonged,—that they needed his intercession, and God’s renewing and restoring mercy. And Moses could ask for that restoring mercy; he had the power to pray, because he was sure that he was asking according to God’s will,—because he was sure that he was asking that that which resisted His will might be taken away. “Remember not, Lord, their wickedness, and their stubbornness, and their sin! All these have come from their unbelief in Thy love and mercy towards them; from their not recollecting that Thou art their King, and that they are Thy subjects. But remember Thy covenant with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob! Maintain Thine own truth against their falsehood! Prove that Thou art their King, and make them to understand that they are Thy subjects! Teach them that Thou hast redeemed them, though they deny that Thou hast, and therefore bow down to tyrants instead of cleaving to their Deliverer! Grant that they may have the full effects of their redemption; that they may come into the land which Thou hast promised them, unworthy and heartless as they may be; lest the heathen should doubt Thy love and power, and so Thy great Name should not be hallowed through Thy grace to us, but should be mocked and set at nought through our distrust of Thee!”

Here surely we have prayer according to its very nature and definition. Moses asks in faith, nothing doubting: he asks according to God’s will; and therefore is sure that he is heard, and shall have his petition, in whatever form the answer may come. Whereas, if he had begun with considering the Jews as sinners and outcasts, and had only believed that they had a certain possibility in them of becoming holy, his prayer would have been an uneasy, restless struggle for a boon, which it might be altogether inconsistent with the nature and design of the Being whom he was imploring, to grant.

I said last Sunday that we in England have always attached a special worth to the Old Testament; that we have accepted it as an explanation of the law under which God has placed us; of the way in which He deals with us. The good men to whom I have referred would not, I am sure, wish us to abandon this reverence. They think, as I do, that we are in danger of losing it; that we need to hold it fast, and let no man, native or foreigner, wrench it from us. Let me beseech them not to be conspirators with the enemies of this faith. Let me beseech them not to exalt their own experiences, precious as they may be, into standards for judging of God’s revelations, when they might use those revelations to illustrate and unfold their experiences.

They accuse themselves of stubbornness, wickedness, and sin. Why? Because a voice was speaking to them which they would not heed; because light was shining about them to which they closed their eyes. Now that they have yielded to the voice,—now that the light has penetrated them,—they are still conscious of the same evil tendencies. And they feel that they have a right to tell other men of their stubbornness and wickedness and sin. Is not the cause the same in those to whom they speak, as in themselves? Are not they refusing to hear a voice, shutting their eyes to a light that would break upon them? Is not that what we say when we preach the Gospel? Why not be consistent with this Gospel? Why not say that our stubbornness and wickedness, and theirs, consists in departing from an order which is ours and theirs? Why not adopt the very language of the Old Testament, and say, that we and they are members of a righteous Nation,—of a holy Society; and that we have refused to own it, and to act as if we were ourselves of it?

If we believe this, what a message we have to the most different classes amongst us! There are some who are living utterly reckless lives. There are some who are observing all proprieties and Christian ordinances, yet are conscious of a secret heartlessness and unbelief. There are those who have aspired to higher thoughts and feelings than ordinary men, and have been taught by some terrible lesson that they are exposed to the same temptations as people whom they had called carnal or worldly. These have moved in different circles, they have suspected and despised each other; but they have all need of the same help: they must have a common salvation, or none at all. They must discover that the covenant of God embraces them all; that each has a right to say, “God has called me, therefore I am holy; therefore my stubbornness and wickedness and sin have come from my not acting as if I were what God has declared that I am. Therefore I may ask Him not to look upon that stubbornness and wickedness and sin, but to remember His covenant, and set me right. So praying, I ask Him to fulfil His will, and not mine. I ask to be set free, not from the punishment which is the just and necessary requital for my evil, but from the evil itself, which I feel and know to be my real curse; from the sensual habit which is enslaving me,—from the secret pride in which I am wrapping myself up, from the trust in my own heart, which has made me a fool.”

Now one who is led to take up this ground for himself, identifies himself with all the people of his land. He has said, practically, “If there is not a covenant which is broad and deep enough for this whole nation, there is not one broad and deep enough for me.” And so, I believe, he arrives at a truth which will help him to reconcile outward, what he has been used to call secular life, with that inward life which he had supposed was incompatible with it. We speak sometimes as if the Jewish history were unlike all others, because it refers all the common transactions of the world, all ordinary offices, all the statutes and ordinances of civil life, to God as their ground and author. I believe that we must come to understand that it is the rule of all other histories because it makes that proclamation; that we shall be less and less able to explain what a nation is, or how it can exist, if we refuse to think of Him as the present King and Lawgiver of it. When we are brought to that conviction, every fact in a nation’s history becomes a sacred fact; every member of a nation must be regarded as a man called to a work and a stewardship; every task, from the highest to the lowest, is nothing less than one which God Himself has appointed. It becomes impossible then to think of citizenship in a nation as a privilege, appertaining to men in virtue of some external possessions and advantages. It must belong (as all the old statesmen taught that it did) to man, because he is a spiritual creature. The more we enlarge the limits of earthly citizenship, the more we confess that we must treat all about us as possessing that higher glory. We are bound therefore to tell them upon what conditions they hold it; we are bound to assert for them all their relations to God. We are bound to tell them that society is not a combination of mutual fears and hatreds; that it has its ground in His Nature, Who is absolutely Righteous, in Whom is no darkness.

Such a faith cannot be shaken by any anomalies which the world around us presents. We may see in these anomalies the tokens and witnesses of a coming judgment; we cannot see in them the abrogation of any principle which the King of Kings has announced as the principle of His government. We must regard our nation as holy, in spite of its wickedness and stubbornness and sin. Therefore, for it, as much as for ourselves,—how can we separate it from ourselves?—we can still pray: “Remember not this wickedness and stubbornness and sin. Remember Thine own covenant. Remember Thy people whom Thou hast redeemed, with Thy mighty hand and outstretched arm.”

This, then, is the ground upon which I speak of national repentance. It is not a fantastic, unreal repentance. Yours and mine must be of this kind, if it is good for anything, if it has any divine root; for we are not to claim a righteousness of our own. We are to say we have none, and can have none. We are to thank God that, by raising Christ from the dead, He has declared His righteousness to be the only righteousness for us all. We are not to seek a selfish felicity. We are to lament before God that we have sought such a felicity, and to thank Him that by Christ’s Sacrifice He has redeemed us from so miserable a pursuit. What is best for England is best for each Englishman; and this, because what is best for England is best for every nation. If we believe that our nation has a holy calling, we shall believe every nation to have a holy calling. The more we confess the stubbornness and wickedness and sin of our own people, the more we shall desire God to remove the stubbornness and wickedness and sin of every people under heaven. While we mourn over our gross idolatries, over the foul orgies of our Mammon-worship, we shall feel a confidence that all idols everywhere, of every kind, shall be utterly abolished. And so the prayer of Moses for his nation will pass into the prayer of Christ for the Universe. The cry of the text, “Yet they are Thy people and Thine inheritance,” will only help us to understand better the cry of the Son, “That they all may be one, as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that they also may be one in Us.”