July 5, 1857
“This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief.”—1 Timothy i. 15.
If a person who was acquainted with the outline of St. Paul’s history should hear these words for the first time, and should be told that they were the Apostle’s, he would be likely to form a very erroneous conjecture respecting the occasion which called them forth. He would probably conclude that a sentence containing such an elementary truth as this must have occurred in some discourse to heathens who had never before heard the Gospel. The concluding clause would seem to him to fix the date of that discourse very shortly after St. Paul’s own conversion. It would be most natural for one from whose eyes the scales had just fallen, who was overpowered with wonder at the mercy of Christ, who recollected the few days which had elapsed since he was seeking to bind all who called upon that name, to exclaim, “Of all sinners whom He came to save, I am the chief.” Would not such a person be startled if he were told that this primary truth was delivered with so much solemnity and emphasis in a letter to one who from a child had known the Scriptures, who had been for years under St. Paul’s own guidance, whom he had thought ripe enough in faith and wisdom to rule over a Church which must have required more various gifts for its government than almost any other? Would not the surprise be still greater, when he learnt that it was Paul the aged; Paul who had been in imprisonments, scourgings, deaths oft, for the sake of the Gospel; upon whom came every day the care of all Churches, who thought his sin surpassed that of the disobedient and ungodly of whom he had just been speaking, and for whom he said the Law was framed?
I. I would speak to you, brethren, on this last point first. How are we to understand this language of the Apostle respecting himself? How can he have had a right to say he was the chief of sinners? If he had that right, how can any other person claim the same? How can the words be used by a minister or a layman in the present day without some consciousness of insincerity?
You will, I hope, at once dismiss from your minds any thought that the Apostle was exhibiting to his son Timothy what some would call a graceful humility. We ought to assure ourselves that no humility can be graceful, because none can be gracious which has not its foundation in truth. Of all qualities, this is the one which it is most monstrous to counterfeit. Airs of lowliness, the assumption of insignificance and baseness, denote a man who has never known what he himself is, and who is trying to obtain the credit of being something better than he is. Of all persons in the world, St. Paul was the freest from this wretched affectation. He does not scruple to proclaim his powers as an Apostle; he does not fear, when the occasion demanded it, even to boast of what God had called him to do and to suffer. He would speak of himself as he would of another man, honestly and simply. If it was the fact that he had laboured more abundantly than all the Apostles, he did not shrink from announcing it.
Neither must we say that St. Paul was led to give himself this title because he had a sudden and keen remembrance of his life when he was a persecutor of the faith. He certainly had that remembrance. The context of this passage shows that he had it while he was writing to Timothy.
But he could not think himself—we know from the words which he uses when describing his previous history that he did not think himself—worse than other persecutors merely because he was more zealous than they were. His zeal was a heavenly and divine quality, not an earthly or a devilish one. The energy which drove him to seek letters from the High Priest, that he might go to Damascus rather than abide at Jerusalem, was the energy which afterwards carried him to Macedonia at the bidding of the Angel, made him preach the word in season and out of season, enabled him to resist the entreaties of his friends and the prophets, because he was willing not to be bound only, but to die for the name of the Lord Jesus. He was certainly not the chief of sinners because he acted out a wrong conviction more vigorously than others did.
Nor must we forget that the words, literally taken, do not warrant us in supposing that St. Paul referred wholly or chiefly to the past. If he says, “I am first, or chief,” Timothy must have understood that he was not charging himself with the crimes of other days, but was expressing what was in his mind at the time he wrote. Whatever he learnt on the day when it was first revealed to him that he was persecuting his Lord and Deliverer, had been strengthening and deepening and expanding within him ever since. That which was true once, he believed to be true then. His apprehension of the truth was not less but more vivid than it had been at the first moment.
It has been suggested that the word πρῶτος may not mean exactly what we mean by “chief”; that it may rather denote St. Paul to be a specimen of the mercy shown to sinners, than indicate any comparison between him and others. I am willing and desirous to substitute the adjective “first” for “chief.” But the change will not produce all the effect which those who have proposed it anticipate from it. St. Paul must still speak of himself as representing the whole class of sinners, not merely as representing those who have experienced God’s forgiveness. The alteration is good for this reason. The word “chief” has led some to suppose that he is measuring his crimes, or transgressions of the law, against those of his fellow-men. Nothing could be further from his intention. He affirms in his letter to the Philippians that he “was, as touching the righteousness that is in the Law, blameless.” He describes in the context of this passage the persons to whom the punishments of the Law were applicable, and against whom they were to be denounced. He speaks of “murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers”; and of all other the most flagrant offenders against the peace and order of society. The Law proved its justice by affixing to each palpable outrage and overt act its meet recompense of reward. St. Paul had been a zealot in enforcing the Law; he had never brought himself within the range of one, even the mildest, of its formal censures.
“But by the Law,” he says elsewhere, “comes the knowledge of Sin.” It prohibits offences; it awakens a man to perceive that there is in him a disposition to commit these offences. It makes him conscious that he has a will which is struggling with the will of the Lawgiver, even while he submits, humbly or sullenly, to His decrees. This is the discovery of another fact altogether. Legal measures are altogether out of place here. How can a code prescribe a punishment for alienation of heart? How can the code which is most accurately and divinely adapted to the correction of misdoings, reach the doer? How can it make him another man?
Here then St. Paul found himself “first.” Yes, in a most awful sense, alone. He had no means of ascertaining how far other men had separated themselves from the righteous, loving mind of God. The Law said, “Thou hast done it.” And by degrees he found that the Law was only echoing without, what a Living Voice was saying to him within. The Spirit of God convinced him of Sin. The Spirit of God showed him that he had separated himself from the true Lord of his Spirit, from Him in Whom righteousness and life dwell. The Spirit of God spoke not to him as one of a crowd of offenders, but to him directly; to him “first.” He only knew other men’s sins through his own. He could only estimate their deflections from the true standard by his. And since the more he knew of the attraction of the divine magnet, the more he knew the strength of the inclination there was in him to wander from it, the more he attributed any right direction of his spirit to its influence—he could say, with no affectation, with the inmost sincerity, “Of sinners I am first. More of this love has been shown to me than to any I know; my resistance therefore has been greater than that of others. If the light has overpowered me, there has been a struggle with it, there is a struggle with it, which I dare not say is equally mighty and desperate in them.”
If this was the warrant for this mode of speech, you will not wonder that he should have used it with even more emphasis in the later days of his earthly pilgrimage, than in the earlier. It was not that his conscience became more scrupulous as he grew in years, and therefore that he attached sinfulness to acts which he once regarded as indifferent. Precisely the opposite assertion is true. He could eat or abstain, be a Jew or Gentile, as served his Master’s cause best; his conscience every day acquired more freedom. It was that as he became more possessed with the Spirit of God, he became more aware how near the Spirit of Evil dwelt to him; it was that falsehood, malignity, selfishness, the essential qualities of the Evil Spirit, looked to him more dreadful and detestable than all the outward forms of wickedness which they generate. It was that he felt he was in closer contact with those principalities and powers in high places than his converts, or than those who were unconverted. It was that but for a supporting arm, a continually present grace, he felt he should fall into a depth of evil and death which none of them had sounded.
You will think, perhaps, that St. Paul’s large and intimate acquaintance with the moral abuses and corruptions that sprang up in the members of the different Churches which he had planted, may have diverted his mind from this contemplation, and may have proved that there was a wickedness about him which had never penetrated within him. Assuredly his continual occupations will have had the blessed effect of withdrawing him from any morbid self-contemplation, and will have confirmed the witness of his own spirit and of God’s Spirit, that a man is not to pore over his own feelings in order to find materials either for accusation or encouragement. But you must not fancy that he thought more gently of himself as he became acquainted with the party-spirit and sensuality of the Corinthians, or when he found the Galatians regarding him whom they had once loved with such a violent affection, as their enemy because he told them the truth. I rather suppose that he detected in himself all the evils which caused him such bitter pain in them, that he understood their heresies and carnality and suspicions by the seeds of the like which he found in his own heart; that he never condemned them without passing sentence upon tendencies which might at any moment start to life in him. I apprehend that in this way the more he did this,—the more he understood his relation to his flock as their minister and priest,—the more he perceived that he was the first among sinners.
By such processes, brethren, he was, I conceive, trained to a real, not a mock humility. He actually sank lower in his own estimation than we ever sink in ours, because he had a clearer insight into the glory of his position than we have; he had a profounder and more personal knowledge of sin, because he had also a more elevated and comprehensive belief in the salvation from it. This is the second point to which I wish to call your attention.
II. The words “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners,” sound to us like a commonplace which we heard in the nursery. They were certainly not less familiar to Timothy or to St. Paul. Why did they never lose their freshness for the aged Apostle? Had he discovered some more refined sense for them than that in which they were received by children and women? No, I apprehend it was exactly their application to the vulgarest people of the earth which gave them their force and vitality for him. I apprehend it is exactly because we have gone in search of refined meanings for them,—because we have substituted what we call a theory or scheme of salvation for the belief which the words, simply taken, express,—that they have lost their force and vitality for us. He who had been led to think of himself as a sinner, to understand sin by what he found in himself—he who, when he thought of sinners, thought first of himself,—could not enter into large speculations about the amount of guilt which the world had incurred by its transgression of God’s commandments, about the amount of punishment which that guilt had necessarily contracted, about the amount of satisfaction which is demanded that that guilt and punishment may be removed from it. The question which he had to debate was of far too terrible a kind to be met by any such reasonings and adjustments. There was some strange hostility between his mind and the mind of a Righteous Being, his Creator. Could they be reconciled? There was some bondage upon his will. Could it be set free? This experience, this demand, is met by the broad announcement: “One is come from that Righteous Being with whom thou art at war, expressly to make peace. One is come to save sinners out of their sins.” He might doubt long and ask earnestly whether news so good could be true. He must have a real emancipation, real peace with God. The claim of every one calling himself a Deliverer and Reconciler must endure the severest of all tests. Was he able to do that which none else had been able to do? Could he accomplish what the Law and sacrifices, that he held to be most divine, had not accomplished? Could he succeed where they had failed? Could he set at rest the controversies which they had aroused? Those points must be settled to the satisfaction of one who was engaged in a battle for life and death. No one could settle them for him. An archangel could not force him to accept the Gospel merely on his authority. The poorest man might bring it with such evidence to his conscience that he could not but say, “It is true.” And when he had said this, the repetition of the truth to which he had given his adhesion could never become a flat or a stale one. For there were ever within him the threatenings of fresh tumults, of a new rebellion. Oftentimes the insurgents were actually in arms. Oftentimes he had to ask himself, “Am I leagued with them?” And the tyrants who had held him bound were not dead, not even sleeping; his limbs sometimes seemed to miss the support of the chains that had been so heavy upon them.
Was this all? Was there no brighter light coming to him every moment from that Heaven into which he believed the Son of God had ascended? no clearer and deeper insight into the effects of His coming to our world than had been vouchsafed here at first? Surely there was. It is contained in the plural, sinners. His experience had been personal. He had known sin in himself. He had known deliverance in himself. But that sin consisted in separation from his fellows as well as from God. That deliverance consisted in reunion to his fellows as well as to God. Jesus Christ had saved him; but He had not come into the world to save him. There was not a man who had not the same needs as he had; there was not a man who had not the same Helper as he had. It was impossible to separate himself from his kind. Faithful is the saying, and worthy of universal acceptation; worthy, as our Communion Service renders the sentence, deviating a little from the letter of the words to assert their meaning,—“worthy of all men to be received,” that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners from that which would not let them be members of a human family, to bind them into such a family in Himself.
So the plain words are the most comprehensive as well as the most personal. We have not exhausted them yet. We are only beginning to have a little glimpse of their signification. That glimpse is lost almost entirely when we try to learn what is sin by observing others and judging others; when we fancy that what we need is an escape from God’s judgments, not an escape from ourselves and a reconciliation to Him. But if we become children in malice and men in understanding, if, not as a paltry pretence when we are making a display before cowards, but in a letter to a dear friend, in our secret colloquies with ourselves, we confess ourselves to be first in the rank of sinners because we confess ourselves to have received all help to be righteous,—then these glimpses will grow brighter and brighter till the perfect day. Then the Communion will indeed be the interpreter of the words with which we prepare our communicants. Then we shall be sure that He Who came into the world to save sinners is sustaining them with His own pure and perfect sacrifice, and is inviting them to fellowship with His Father and their Father. Then we shall not doubt that the rapturous anticipations of St. Paul, which we have read in the Epistle for to-day, shall be fulfilled; and that not we only, but the whole involuntary creation which has suffered from the consequences of man’s sins, shall share in the glory of the Deliverer, when He appears without sin unto salvation.