Christ’s Baptism of Fire

“Whose fan is in His hand, and He will throughly purge His floor, and gather His wheat into the garner; but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”—Matthew iii. 12.

When we compare John the Baptist with the Lord whose way he was sent to prepare, we commonly dwell upon the severity of the first, the graciousness of the second. The servant, we say, stood apart from the world,—the Master freely entered into it. The one we describe as a righteous Reprover,—the other as a merciful Saviour; John, as condemning men for their sins,—Jesus, as bringing them forgiveness for sin.

Whatever truth there may be in this opinion, it seems greatly at variance with the words I have just read to you. There John the Baptist is speaking expressly of Christ. And he does not say, “My words are of a terrific, consuming quality; His will be all grace and gentleness.” But he says, “I baptize with water; He will baptize with fire. I preach repentance; He will throughly purge His floor, and burn up the chaff?” The contrast seems to be put just in the other way to that in which we put it. The forerunner is sent to save men from an impending ruin. He of whom he speaks is coming clothed with a commission and power to destroy.

I think, my brethren, that it is very needful for us to examine this subject carefully. It may be that we have never seriously considered what it is that men need from a King and Deliverer; and how it is that the Christ, whom we confess, has satisfied their needs.

You will see that the different parts of John the Baptist’s discourse are at least consistent. He denounces the Scribes and Pharisees as men whose faith was upon the surface. They said they had Abraham to their father. He tells them, and all, that the axe is now laid to the root of the tree. He says that the Teacher, whose shoes he is not worthy to stoop down and unloose, will baptize with a Spirit which will go down into the depths of human hearts. His own work, he is convinced, is to tear off veils; to show men to themselves as they are; often to reverse their relation to each other; to level the hills and exalt the valleys. He cannot do this work radically and effectually. He can but awaken the self-righteous man to think whether he is righteous at all; whether he is not at the greatest distance from righteousness. Another than he must drive that conviction home; Another than he must look into the man’s own very self, and make him feel that he is detected. He was sent to awaken the consciences of men to a sense that they were wrong. He must leave the process of making them right in different hands. What he declares then is that the Discoverer of wrong,—the Restorer of right,—is at hand, and is about to make Himself manifest. If there was no such a one; if there was no guide and ruler of men’s thoughts and purposes, no inspirer of good, no condemner of evil, he felt he had nothing to hope for, nothing which he could bid his country hope for. If there was no such a one, there was no Christ: all that their Prophets had told them was a delusion.

If a king were coming, such as the Pharisees hoped for,—a king who should give their sect predominance,—the Desire of Nations would prove to be another of those tyrants from whom the world had been groaning to be delivered. But if He was not this, He must be the very reverse of this. He must come sifting, overturning, burning. No symbols could denote Him so fitly as these: “His fan is in His hand, and He will throughly purge his floor.”

The Jew, who was so familiar with emblems of this kind in the Prophets, would understand that the House of Israel was in some sense the threshing-floor which John the Baptist spoke of. Any Scribe would have been ready to translate the language for him. That is to say, the Scribe would have translated simple and direct language, as dictionaries do, into abstract and difficult language. The threshing-floor was a living image, obvious to the sense. By watching and studying the operations that went on there, the dullest peasant might arrive at some apprehension of the teacher’s meaning; at least he would have discovered that there was a meaning to be apprehended. The Scribe would stifle the peasant’s mind, as he had stifled his own, with a mere book-phrase. The threshing-floor did signify the House of Israel in some sense; but in what sense? The man who had heard the Baptist’s call to repentance knew, or was beginning to know. He was sure that by the House of Israel was not intended a mere crowd, a mass of people living within certain geographical boundaries. He was sure that the message was not to a multitude, but to him. The Kingdom of Heaven was near him. He was to turn round to God. He was to look for One whose axe was at the root of the tree; whose fan was in His hand. His heart, his inner being, was part of the threshing-floor, the part with which, at that moment, he had most need to concern himself. If he did concern himself with it, the effect was not that he became more separated from the people among whom he dwelt, that he understood less what it was to belong to a house or family. Then first the force of the fact, the greatness of the privilege, unfolded itself to him. As the hidden springs of his life were opened, as he became aware that the evil which he had seen in his fellows was in himself,—as the thought dawned upon him that the Lord, who was described in the Scriptures as caring for the children of Abraham, was not indifferent about him,—he felt a little of what it was to be the member of a nation which God had called out to know His name. To have Him so near them might be very terrible: Moses had said that it was. But blessing and terror must be wonderfully associated. Was it possible to be truly a man without this privilege? Had he ever known anything of himself, of his own mysterious existence, till he had this glimpse of One who was overlooking him, calling him to account for his acts and his thoughts, meeting with him, judging him?

The Israelite was taking the benefit of his covenant when he was understanding this great human privilege. As long as he was looking for some outward glory, some outward deliverance, he was but like the nations round about, an idolater, and an idolater of the hardest, driest kind. Only when he acknowledged an invisible Sower and Husbandman, who had taken his whole inner being under His culture, who was working continually in him that he might bring forth fruits worthy of the divine seed; only when he believed that this Sower and Husbandman was acting upon a Society of men, a House of Israel,—even as He was acting upon him, a member of that Society and House,—that it might be a witness of God’s Wisdom and Righteousness and Mercy to mankind; only when he expected a more complete revelation of that Wisdom and Righteousness and Mercy than had yet been granted to him; only when he desired that it should have this effect upon himself and upon all his brethren, of separating the true from the false, the chaff from the wheat, did he at all enter into the history of his people, or claim to be an inheritor of the treasures which their fathers had received.

First of all, the disciples of John were to learn that their hearts were under another tillage and cultivation than their own. The seeds which entered into them were not self-sown; they could not bring them to life; they could not even by their own art hinder the birds of the air from flying away with them, or the weeds from choking them. They were subordinate husbandmen; but the harvest depended on their submission to the chief Husbandman,—on their not thwarting His plans by theirs. And as it was with the field, so was it with the floor to which the produce was carried after it had been reaped. They could not winnow it; they could not separate corn from chaff. If there was no one more skilful than they were to do that, the labour had been thrown away; the corn would not supply bread to the eater or seed to the sower.

Next, they were to be sure that this discipline, if it was indeed divine discipline, would be thorough. “He will throughly purge his floor.” The processes would not be insincere or indulgent, like those which we invent, when we pretend to search ourselves or correct ourselves, or like those of friendly admonishers, who often mix fresh chaff of their own with that which needs to be removed, and sometimes leave those whom they desire to help in greater doubt what in them is wheat and what chaff.

Thirdly, Those who heard John speak, and understood him, must have received two lessons, at first sight inconsistent. They must have been sure that He who was conducting that sifting discipline, of which the prophet testified, over them and over the whole nation, was the Lord of the spirits of all flesh; He who had revealed Himself in times past to their fathers by the Prophets. And yet they were told of a man standing among them, who claimed the floor as His, and would prove it to be His by purging it. John himself often found it difficult to reconcile the two assertions. But they were reconciled in the experience of those who repented at his preaching. They could not find any dominion over the thoughts and intents of their hearts real or satisfactory which was not Divine—which was not exercised by Him who knows past, present, and future. They could not find any such dominion real and satisfactory which was not essentially human, which did not involve the knowledge that is derived from the most inward sympathy, from actual participation in their sorrows and temptations. As the thought of a God of righteousness, against whom they had sinned, was exchanged for the thought of a God of mere power, whom they had enraged, they longed more and more, amidst all their fears and tremblings, to see Him as He is,—they became more certain that they could only see Him as He is in the life of a Man.

But again: a man merely showing them a model of excellence—how little would this have answered to the need they had experienced of One who should sway, quicken, renovate the motions of their spirit! A baptism with the Spirit, the gift of a power to dwell in them and with them, to overcome that in them which was corrupt, partial, solitary; to make them the possessors of Truth as well as its subjects; to make them fellow-workers with God and with men; this was the promise to which all John’s words pointed: this was the baptism for which his own was the preparation. If there was no one who could impart this baptism, his had been in vain.

This baptism, however, was no merely gracious gift. It was connected with a judgment,—a judgment awaiting each man and the whole land. Must not John’s converts have often desired that it might be averted; that they at least might escape it? They will have had this desire, but not in the truest moments of their lives, when they were really turning from evil and cleaving to good. At all times, no doubt, they would long that the fires should not utterly destroy their nation; they might be confident that it would in some way come through them. At all times they would pray that they might pass safely through them. But they could not pray that the fire should not be real and mighty, or that it should be quenched by any mere pity for those who were the subjects of it. Least of all could they pray that they might not bear what their fellow-men bore; that the land might suffer its sentence, and they might stand aloof, untouched and unfeeling. The dread of such a state of mind will have been ever present to them. The possibility of being stupid, careless spectators of the calamity which visited their nation will have seemed to them the most terrible of all possibilities, the greatest sign of a divine curse, the proof that they were receiving none of the blessings which the great Deliverer had come to confer.

I have been careful, my brethren, to take these words literally. If John the Baptist had said, “The Christ is about now to accomplish a great work of salvation; thousands of years hence he will come again to gather the wheat into His garner, and to burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire,”—I should have followed his teaching and applied it accordingly. But he leaves us no excuse for such a paraphrase. He describes this as the immediate work—the great work—of the Divine Word, Who was coming after him, and had been before him. When he sent his disciples, at a later day, to ask whether Jesus of Nazareth was He that should come, or whether they were to look for another, he must have meant them to use this test:—“Is He doing what I said He would do? Is He gathering the wheat into His garner, and burning up the chaff?” And whatever the disciples or John himself may have thought of our Lord’s answer, I believe it did accept this test, and was founded upon it. “The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the deaf hear; to the poor the Gospel is preached.” The Son of Man was by all these acts fulfilling this character. He was gathering wheat into His garner. That which had been thought worthless by others, fit only to be thrown aside as good for nothing, He was sifting, separating from the accidents which had made it look contemptible in the world’s eyes, claiming as a treasure for Himself. The most beggarly human body was recognized as having the stamp of His creative wisdom and love upon it. What had brought it into decay and death was an intruding element, which had nothing to do with the true and proper substance. That He vindicated and redeemed; the other fled at his word. And that gospel to poor men’s hearts which He preached, not only with His lips to multitudes, but also by each of those acts of individual grace and compassion, had precisely the same object and the same effect. It claimed every human heart, the most wretched, as God’s; as a subject of His care and husbandry. It invited every human heart to trust in Him and yield to His discipline. And it made each human heart conscious of a vanity, self-sufficiency, slavery, which hindered it from exercising this trust, which made it restless and impatient under this discipline. The more His voice was listened to, the more its loving power was felt and confessed, the more He separated the wheat from the chaff; the more He taught that the union between them was temporary, unnatural, that the one was sentenced to destruction, and that Christ sought to gather the other into His barn.

It is the same in His discourses with the Apostles. They tell us how full their minds were of the poorest and vulgarest notions and motives; how the Scriptures bewildered them; how Christ’s own discourses often bewildered them. They speak of the hardness and stupidity of their hearts; how little impression signs left upon them; how the occurrences of to-day obliterated the lesson of yesterday. They could see afterwards what a process they were passing through at this time; how wonderfully He was winnowing the chaff from the wheat. But they felt equally, and they make us feel, how little mere words, even though they were His words, could accomplish this object. They had to pass through the fires of desertion, sense of insincerity, sense of cowardice, self-contempt. They had to see their Lord taken from them, and all their hopes cast from heaven to hell, before they could be the heralds of a risen Lord and a divine hope. And when they were called to that work, and endued with power to fulfil it, the baptism of fire with which their Master had also been baptized came along with the baptism of His Spirit, and they who were the messengers of peace to the world, were charged, not falsely, with turning it upside down; they themselves became the offscouring of all things, spectacles to angels and men.

And so we understand that other part of our Lord’s discourses which is often supposed to be of a different tenour and spirit from the rest,—that in which He denounces the Scribes and Pharisees, and asks them plainly how they expected to escape the damnation of hell. Their pride and self-righteousness and exclusiveness, their belief that they were the wheat of the land, and that the people were mere chaff which the wind would carry away, their utterly false conceptions of God, as if He were like them, hard-hearted, grudging, self-seeking, their determination that their countrymen should only be fed upon the husks of an outward religion, and therefore their growing incapacity to feed upon anything else themselves,—the absolute confusion of good and evil which was implied in the thought that good and gracious acts could proceed from a bad spirit,—these were the heaviest calamities that could have overtaken them; if they continued in this state of mind, they must be shut out from God’s presence, shut up in their own selfishness. These burning discourses are the expressions of that indignation which He who loves perfectly cherishes, and must ever cherish, for that which is contrary to love. They show us in some degree what that unquenchable fire is, in which all that is base and inhuman and false must be consumed. They show us that if it could be quenched God’s love must be quenched. And therefore they show us how great the danger and the sin is, of making those words which speak of this fire arguments to ourselves, or to any one else, for not trusting that love to the uttermost; for not believing that it encompasses us and all creation. This wall of fire is around us. Oh! let us acknowledge Who has built it, and let us desire that it may do its work, for us and for the Universe!

I have spoken of John the Baptist’s words as fulfilled at once, when Jesus Christ came in the flesh. I believe they have been fulfilling themselves in every age since He ascended on high. In every age, men who have been led to discover their own great necessities, have asked indeed for one who should forgive their sins; but quite as earnestly, and without being able to separate the two petitions, for one who should destroy their sins, who should put an everlasting barrier between that in them which they knew to be their enemy, often their triumphant enemy, and that which cleaved to a Friend, and sought fellowship with Him, likeness to Him. They have felt that that was not a Gospel which did not speak of this separation, that He was not the Christ who did not desire it for them, and work in them to effect it. They have been sure that when they have held fast to any evil, suicidal habit, or to any one which set them at war with other men, they were resisting a mighty power which was seeking to break in pieces their chains, and to make them one. They have learnt to welcome sufferings, when they found that they were designed for this object. The fires were good, which denoted that they were baptized with the Spirit, and that He would not leave them till He had made them what they were created to be. And so, too, the course of History and the trials of nations interpret themselves. As long as there is any strength, vitality, faith in a people, so long is there wheat which Christ will assuredly gather into His garner; and so long that nation will be subjected to frequent fires, that its chaff, all its untruth and baseness and heartlessness, may be burnt up. Nay, it may be said always to be in such fires, for the time of our wealth, as well as the time of our tribulation, is a searching time. That is the time in which it is hardest for us to separate the chaff from the wheat, and therefore in which we have most need to recollect that there is a Lord who is doing it, and will do it thoroughly.

That the chaff in God’s Universal Church, and in every particular portion of it, may be thoroughly burnt up, we ask every time that we say our Litany, or the Lord’s Prayer. If once we begin to think that there is not this chaff in our own Church, and that it does not need to be burnt up, we sink into the condition of the Scribes and Pharisees; we prove how near we must be to a most penetrating and consuming fire. And therefore it is a strange doctrine, which some Christians and some infidels conspire in circulating, that we ought to be full of dread when any of our opinions are assailed, or any of our wrong-doings are detected. “Take care”—this is the meaning of the hint which different benevolent advisers address to us,—“you are in a tottering house; let one brick fall away, and the whole may be in ruins sooner than you know.” If we are in a tottering house,—if it is one that is built on the sand,—Christ’s words oblige us to believe that it must fall, and ought to fall; none of our schemes can save it——He will frustrate them. But if our house is standing upon Him, and therefore upon a rock, we know that though we cannot discover what wood, hay, or stubble we have introduced into it, He will, and will burn them up. And therefore we must tell our friends that they have mistaken the matter altogether; that they are urging us to a course of conduct, because we are Christians, which if we were not Christians would be sagacious and reasonable. If there is no Christ, it is wisdom to keep together all the notions and superstitions of to-day, because, if we parted with them, they will only be succeeded by another and perhaps worse set of notions and superstitions to-morrow. But because we believe in Christ, who came into the world with a fan in His hand and has been using it ever since for purging His floor, we are certain that He will not suffer one falsehood to dwell beside His eternal Truth. We are certain that He will go on winnowing and threshing till every grain of wheat—every good thought, desire, and hope in any man’s heart—is gathered into His garner, and is acknowledged to have come from seed which He planted; till all the chaff which has been mixed with it in this world, whether it be the chaff of religious notions, of philosophical conceits, or of ordinary selfishness and fleshly lusts, is divided from it, and is cast into the unquenchable fire.