Part 18

The vision of God made Isaiah a prophet; but the immediate effect was something very different. The first effect of contact with God was to produce in his soul an intolerable sense of sin. "Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts." Was, then, Isaiah an exceptionally wicked man? Hardly, when God chose him as His ambassador. But if not, is, then, the proper effect on a good man of an access of nearness to God an overwhelming consciousness of personal defilement? What else should it be? Had Isaiah been a Pharisee, he would have seized the opportunity of his sudden vicinity to the Almighty to direct the Divine attention to his virtues, and excellence, and superiority over other men. Had he been one of those philosophers in whom the heart has been overlaid by the intellect, he would have calmly proceeded to make observations on the Divine for a new theory of the Absolute and Unconditioned, in sublime insensibility to the deepest problem of existence, the awful antithesis of human sin and of Divine holiness. Because Isaiah was a good man, his new proximity to God woke within him a crushing horror of defilement and undoneness. And it was so precisely because he had never been so near to God before, and had never felt himself of so much importance. Away down here, sinning among his fellow-men, the blots and blemishes of his soul seemed of little moment. But up there, in the stainless light of heaven, with God's holy eyes resting on him, every spot of sin within him grew hot and horrible, every defiling stain an insult and a suffering inflicted on the sensitive holiness of God. What he does has an effect on God; what he is, is of consequence to God. Never had Isaiah felt himself so near to God; never had he felt himself of such importance to his Maker; and therefore never had he felt his sin so black and so unpardonable. Believe me, these two things are linked together, and no man can divorce them—the dignity of humanity and the damnableness of sin. You cannot tamper with the one without touching the other. Men may, of laxity or of pitifulness, seek to extenuate the guilt of sin and its infinite possibilities of woes; but be sure of this, they will be compelled ere long to attenuate the moral grandeur of our human nature, and to surrender its majestic birthright of immortality. Two things go hand in hand through the Bible, from the first chapter to the last, and mark it out from all other books: the one is its unique and awful sense of the guiltiness of sin; the other is the quite unapproachable splendour of its conception of the dignity of man, made in the image of God, and destined for His service here, and the fellowship of His love for evermore.

The ethical process by which, in the imagery of the vision, Isaiah's sense of sinfulness came home to him, is finely natural and simple. It was at his lips that the consciousness of his impurity caught him. "Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips." That, judged by our formulas and standards, might seem a somewhat superficial conviction of sin. We should have expected him to speak of his unclean heart, or the total corruption of his whole nature. But conviction of sin, actual conviction of sin, is very regardless of our theories, and is as diverse in its manifestations as are the characters and records of men. Sin finds out one man in one place, and another in a quite different spot, and perhaps the experience is most real when it is least theological. Isaiah felt his defilement in his lips, for suddenly he found himself at heaven's gate, gazing on the glory of God, and listening to the seraphs' ceaseless song of adoring praise. Isaiah loved God, and instinctively he prepared to join his voice to the seraphs' chant, but ere the harmony could pass his lips he caught his breath and was dumb. A horrible sense of uncleanness had seized him. His breath was tainted by his sin. He dared not mingle his polluted praise with the worship of that pure, sinless host of heaven. Oh, the shame and agony of that disability! for it meant that he has no part or place in that fair scene. He is an alien and an intruder. Its beauty and its sweetness are not for him. He belongs to a very different scene and a very different company. He is no inhabitant of heaven, no servant of God; but a denizen of earth, and a companion of sinners. Down there, amid its squalor, and shame, and uncleanness, is his dwelling-place, remote from heaven, and holiness, and God. "Woe is me! because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips." With that, the horror of his situation reached its climax. He stands there, on the threshold of heaven in full sight of God and of His holiness, dumb and praiseless, while all heaven rings and reverberates with the worship of its adoring hosts. The awful tremor of that celestial praise passed into Isaiah's frame, and it seemed like the pangs of instant dissolution. He, a creature of God's, stands there in his Maker's presence, alone mute, alone refusing to chant his Creator's glory, a blot and blank in the holy harmony of heaven, a horrible and foul blemish amid the unsullied purity of that celestial scene. It seemed to Isaiah as if all the light, and glory, and holiness of heaven were gathering itself into one fierce lightning fire of vengeance, to overwhelm and crush him out of existence. "Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts."

Isaiah in the presence of God felt within him the pang of that death which must be the end of unpardoned sin in contact with the Divine holiness. He felt himself already as good as dead, yet never in all his life had he so longed to live as now, in sight of God, and heaven, and holiness. He did not ask to escape. He was too overwhelmed to pray or hope. But to God's heart that cry of despair was an infinitely persuasive prayer for mercy. Ah! Heaven needs no lengthy explanation, nor requires the recital of prescribed forms or theories. The moment a sinful soul turns loathingly from sin, and longingly to God and goodness, that instant the Heart above responds, and meets it with pity, pardon, hope. Ere the piteous echo of Isaiah's cry had died away, one of the seraphs flew with a burning ember from the incense altar, and laid it on Isaiah's mouth, and said, "Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged." The action is of course symbolic, but the thing symbolised is a great spiritual fact. In it we have mirrored the very heart of the process of redemption. The cleansing efficacy of the burning ember resided not in the ember, but in the Divine fire contained in it. In the imagery of sacrifice the fire is always conceived as God's method of accepting and taking to Himself the offering. The sacred flame that comes down from God, licks up the sacrifice, and in vapour carries it up to heaven; a sweet-smelling savour represents, therefore, the pitying holiness of God, that stoops forgivingly to sinful men, and graciously accepts and sanctifies them and their sacrifices. Contact with that has sin-cleansing power, and nothing has besides. Pagan sages and Christian saints alike unite in proclaiming the overmastering strength of sin. Mightier than nature's most potent forces, stronger than all influences of persuasion, not to be reversed or uprooted by any resources of earthly origin, is the grasp of inveterate sin within the sinner's soul. Is there, then, no possibility of recovery, no way of cleansing, no ray of hope? One there is, and one alone. If Divine Purity would but stoop in pity to the sinful one, would but enter, in claiming love, into his polluted soul, would but come into actual contact and conflict with the sin and uncleanness in a decisive struggle of triumph or defeat, then which must prove the stronger, which must conquer—human sinfulness or Divine holiness? Ay, if only God so loves our sin-stained race as that His stainless purity enters really into our humanity, and wrestles with our impurity in a contact that must be suffering to the Divine holiness, and is sin-cleansing to us, that were salvation surely, that were redemption. But is it a reality? Brethren, Jesus Christ has lived, and died, and lives again, and we know that His Holy Spirit dwells in us and in our world. That, and that alone, is salvation—not any theories, nor any rites, but God's Holy Spirit given unto us.

It was at Isaiah's lips that the sense of sin had stung him, and it was there that he received the cleansing. The seraph laid the hot ember on his lips, and it left about his mouth the fragrance of the celestial incense. He felt that he breathed the atmosphere and purity of heaven. He too might now join in heaven's praise and service; no more an alien, but a member of the celestial choir and a servant of the King. That act of Divine mercy had transformed him. He was a new creature, and instantly the change appeared. The voice of God sounds through the temple, saying, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?" And the first of all heaven's hosts to offer is Isaiah. A moment before he had shrunk back, crushed and despairing, from God's presence, feeling as if the Divine gaze were death to him. Now he springs forward, invokes God's attention on himself, and before all heaven's tried and trusty messengers proposes himself as God's ambassador. Was it presumption? was it self-assertion? I think if ever Isaiah was not thinking of himself at all, if ever he had utterly forgotten self, and pride, and all things, and was conscious only of God, and goodness, and gratitude, it was then, when his heart was running over with wonder, love, and praise for God's unspeakable mercy to him. It was not presumption; it was a true and beautiful instinct, that made him yearn with resistless longing to do something for that God who had shown such grace to him. Oh, the tender love and irrepressible devotion of a forgiven heart! Nothing can restrain it, nothing hold it back. Salvation, real salvation, springs resistlessly onward into service.

[Footnote 2: Preached at Nottingham, before the Congregational Union of England and Wales, on Monday evening, October 8th, 1888.]

XII.

_FOR AND AGAINST CHRIST._

"He that is not with Me is against Me: and he that gathereth not with Me scattereth."—LUKE xi. 23.

"He that is not against us is on our part."—MARK ix. 40.

It has never been an easy task to settle with any degree of exactitude who among men should be reckoned the Saviour's friends, and who His foes. But perhaps no time has surrounded the problem with such difficulties as those that arise from the circumstances of our own age. On every side we see truth and error intertwined in such a perplexing tangle that we scarce know on which side to rank men and parties. The Church of Christ is divided into so many divergent sections, within which good and evil are so strangely combined, that you can hardly tell if they are for Christ or against. You find men of unexceptionable profession and ample creed, but with a jarring life and scant morality. On the other hand, you see men whose creed is erroneous or imperfect, but whose life and character are instinct with the spirit of Christ. And amid such anomalies you feel it almost impossible to determine, with even an approach to certainty, whom you shall count followers, and whom foes, of the Lord Jesus Christ.

True, we are not called to sit in judgment on the inner state of heart, the hidden attitude of men's spirits, which is cognisable only by "larger, other eyes than ours;" yet we must for practical guidance form a conditional opinion regarding the position and action of our fellow-men; for so alone can we determine our treatment of them; so alone can we decide whether it is our duty to oppose or co-operate with them, to acknowledge them as brethren or deny to them the name of Christ.

Besides, for your own comfort, you must have some standard or test to determine who are Christ's and who are not, for otherwise how shall you be able to adjudicate on your own case? You are confronted, it may be, by large and influential bodies of Christians who declare you to be no member of Christ's Church at all, because you do not follow after them. You feel all the weight that attends such a verdict; you are sensible of the solemn, tragic awfulness of the question; you are humble, diffident, uncertain yourself of many things, and so, perchance, your heart knows little rest or peace. You would give much to ascertain some sure test by which you could settle, once and for ever, whether you are on Christ's side or against Him.

For our guidance in such matters we can do no better thing than to try and understand how the Saviour, when He was on earth, estimated the attitudes of men to Himself. Let us try, then, to determine the principles that guided Him.

He had come with a very definite aim in view, viz., to establish a kingdom of heaven on earth; that is to say, to secure the domination of men's hearts by God's will, so that they should always act in accordance with the Divine decrees. Or, in other words, He had come to perform this work of delivering men from sin, of making them pure, and holy, and Godlike. For this end, He sought to bring them under His immediate influence, to gather and attach them to His Person, to inspire them with faith and love for Himself. All who aided in this, all who contributed to draw men to Him, all who strove to make Christ and His word accepted and esteemed, all who were at one with Him in His aim, manifestly, were counted by Him as friends; while, on the contrary, those who exerted themselves to thwart Him, who endeavoured to alienate men from His Person and doctrine, all such were His enemies, were against Him.

"But," you may be inclined to say, "while it is true there were some men who did devote themselves to active support of Christ, and others who did commit themselves to declared hostility, was there not, between these two opposing classes, a large number who took sides neither for nor against Him, but preserved a sort of neutrality? What, then, does Christ say of these?" The two sayings of our Lord which I have taken for my text have both been applied to solve this problem. At first sight they have the appearance of clashing with one another. "He that is not with Me is against Me" seems to be a declaration that all who were not positive friends were really enemies, and thus to imply that the Master classed this whole body of neutrals as foes; and so some use it. But again, the second saying, "He that is not against us is on our part," has the appearance of asserting that all who are not declared foes are in reality the Saviour's friends, and so, according to this principle, all neutrals should be counted as allies. The appearance of discrepancy only lasts when you look at these sayings singly and apart from their occasions. They speak not of neutrals at all. Taken in conjunction, they are seen to enunciate, in fact, quite a different principle, viz., that in regard to Christ, indifferentism, neutrality, is impossible, and that every man must be either for or against the Saviour. "He that is not a friend is a foe," while "he that is not a foe is a friend;" consequently there is no such thing as a position of neither friendship nor enmity.

Let us, then, run cursorily over the incidents that gave rise to these two sayings, in order that we may see what is the essential character of the two attitudes of being for or against Christ, and so exhibit how neutrality is impossible.

One day a man possessed of a dumb devil was brought to Jesus. By His word of power Jesus cast out the evil spirit, and immediately the man regained the power of speech. The crowd looking on were filled with wonder and admiration. They were pleased at the good deed which had been done. They partook in the dumb man's joy and gratitude, and they regarded the Saviour with increased reverence and esteem. The influence of the miracle was to attach men to Himself, and draw them towards the kingdom of God. But among the spectators there were some who had no pleasure in the act of healing at all. They were not glad to see their fellow-man in new possession of speech and soundness of mind. On the contrary, they wished it had not been done, for they grudged the credit it brought to the Saviour. His popularity was gall to them. It pained them to see men revere or trust Him. They did not wish that men should be drawn to Him. Accordingly, they attempted to turn the people's admiration into distrust by flinging out a dark suggestion that it was by the aid, not of God, but of the evil one, that the Lord had been able to work the cure. The effect designed is manifest. Such a suspicion would have the effect of turning men away from Christ, of preventing them from submitting to His guidance. Their purpose was not to draw men to Him, but rather to alienate from Him any who were attracted. Thus they were in direct antagonism to Christ's purpose and striving. They did not like Himself, nor His teaching, nor His aims, so they set themselves to oppose Him in every way. It was of such men our Lord said, "He that is not with Me is against Me; and he that gathereth not with Me scattereth."

Turning to the second story, we find that Christ's disciples had come upon a man casting out devils in the name of their Master. It is evident this man had not been much in direct communication with Christ, if at all, for apparently he was not known previously to the disciples, and their grievance is that one who did not with them follow Christ should thus employ the Master's name. It cannot but have been, therefore, that this man knew very little of Christ's Person or teaching. His knowledge of Him must have been very much more imperfect than that of the disciples, and he did not deem it his duty to become an immediate follower of the Lord. Nevertheless, he had made the discovery that Christ's name had power to cast out devils, and for this beneficent purpose he was in the habit of using it. The disciples, perhaps jealous that another, not of their number, should possess the same power, and believing that he could not be one of the Lord's privileged servants, forbade him to make any further use of the Saviour's name. On reporting this to the Master He countermanded their decision and gave His grounds for so doing. They were these: Though he did not attach himself to the personal company of Christ, though he might be very ignorant, etc. etc., nevertheless, by performing miracles of healing through Christ's name, he was bringing new honour and reverence to that name; and again, while he was thus in deed spreading Christ's fame and arousing belief in Him, he was not likely to imitate the Pharisees in slandering the Saviour—for in our Lord's words, "There is no man which shall do a miracle in My name that shall be able easily to speak evil of Me." That is to say, "By using My name to perform a miraculous cure, he puts himself out of a position to say anything that would detract from My credit." Such an one was certainly not a scatterer, but a gatherer. And "he that is thus not against us is on our part."

Reverting now to the first narrative see how the active antagonism of the Pharisees was the inevitable outcome of the fact that inwardly they were not with Him in heart and aim.

Because they did not like Him, and did not desire Him to gain influence with the people they would not unite in the general approbation of the crowd. Such conduct was marked and demanded an explanation. Apparently a good and wonderful miracle had been wrought. It will not do for them to merely refrain from approving. They must justify their reticence. Neutrality is impossible. If they will not adore they must malign. So they are forced to impugn the character of Christ's act. To justify their want of sympathy they must disavow its claim to their approbation. There is no alternative between frank acceptance of the miracle or open repudiation and disparagement of its character.

Still you must take sides for or against Christ, and you cannot be neutral. For His claims reach you not as external facts to be passively gazed at, but as imperative, active demands that lay hold of you, and insist that you shall take action upon them. You must yield or you must resist. You must comply or you must oppose. Christ lays His hand on you and if you will not obey you must shake that hand rudely off. In countless forms that strange, drawing power lays hold of you, and you must follow or reject. It may be a call to you to yield your reverence, your support, your participation to some benevolent or religious movement. If you will not, while others do accede to this claim, you must seek to justify your refusal. So you are forced into disparaging it, depreciating it, slandering it. You cannot own it to be of God and yet remain a rebel against its demands. So you must, with evil, malignant tongue, sneer at it as folly, or revile it as delusion—thus imitating the Pharisees who set down Christ's work to be the doing of the devil.

Remember, too, what a black-hearted, hateful sin that was they were guilty of. Try and picture that gentle, beneficent, holy Jesus. Realise the cruel blow such a thought was to the man just healed. Surely caution, reserve, would have made men hesitate to speak so. But they cruelly, malignantly, eagerly cry, "By Beelzebub He casteth out devils." It was in the face of such light, such considerate helpful words of Christ, that they did it. Think of the gracious words He spoke, and of the beauty of all that life, which in our days bring from the hearts of unbelievers encomiums that sound like adoration. In spite of all that, they were not made reverent, careful, slow to condemn. Nay, they were exasperated by it all.

But you may say, "They were zealous, mistaken men, wrongly trained; they thought Christ a heretic; they were the victims of an erroneous creed. So many had deceived them, so many false Christs had appeared! Besides, did not Moses say that they were not to believe a miracle simply, but to judge it by the teaching of the worker?" It is true, there were many such. But you do not find them among the number who ascribed Christ's works of healing to the devil. There were, indeed, honest but timid souls who were staggered by the pretensions and claims of Christ, but how did they act? Remember how one such came to Christ and went away with mingled feelings of attraction and perplexity; but when the body of Christ lay lone and forsaken Nicodemus came and did honour to the sacred dead. But these men were not such as he; their error was not of the intellect, but of the heart. They did not yield to the beauty of Christ's character, life, and teaching. They were not one with Him in His longing to establish God's kingdom on the earth. There was an inner antagonism of spirit, of nature. They were proud, haughty, self-righteous, and they were hypocrites, evildoers, cruel. They hated Christ because His pure life shamed and pained them, and they dreaded the loss of their own prestige and power. The secret and the essence and seat of their antagonism was not intellectual error, but deep, dark, moral perversion and evil of heart and conscience. Thus, because they were not with Christ, even in so far as to have sympathy with the undeniable good in Him, therefore they were in act and word against Him.