Sunday Morning at the Birmingham Christadelphian Ecclesia, No. 95
“Exhort one another daily.”—Paul.
p. 205We are all aware that the object of these meetings for the breaking of bread is to bring Christ to remembrance; and we, doubtless, realise in our experience of them how entirely they are adapted to the purpose in view. Christ is brought vividly before us every time we surround the table, and our memories are refreshed and our purpose strengthened with regard to that future purpose of divine love which centres in him. But there are different ways in which this memory of Christ can be contemplated. The contemplation that will be acceptable to Christ himself is the one we must aim at, and that contemplation is one which embraces all sides of him, so to speak. We must not think of him merely as an p. 206historical character; we must realise him as a present loving personage, exalted in glory at the Father’s right hand as a priest over the house of God, and cognisant of all his brethren by the Spirit to which he now stands in the same relation of omniscience and omnipotence as the Father. We must not think of him merely as the coming vanquisher of Gentile power and the ruler of universal man in the age of blessing; we must recal him as the Lamb of God who sojourned among men in sorrow and dishonour 1,800 years ago, and who obediently submitted to the cruel death in which it pleased God to offer up the condemned nature of Adam which he wore, as a sacrifice through which the contrite-hearted amongst the sinful sons of men might approach Him in reconciliation and worship. We must think of him not only as the immortaliser of our bodies but as the judge of our actions at his coming; not only as a merciful and faithful high priest, but as the inflictor of vengeance in flaming fire on all the disobedient; not only as the loving and forgiving friend but as the zealous teacher, the denouncer of unrighteousness, the insistor on holiness, the exactor of our utmost affection and repudiator of the present evil world and all who belong to it. We must remember him not only as brother but as Lord; not only as the seed of David but as the Word made flesh. In a word, we must open our minds to THE TRUTH, of which he is the personal incorporation.
In doing this, there is one thing we will not fail to do. We will remember the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, from whom the whole system of truth derives its meaning, and apart from whom it would have no reason or existence. As no man can come to the Father but by Christ, so no man can scripturally come to Christ who does not discern the Father in him. Jesus gave, as the reason of his enemies rejecting him, that they had not known the Father. He said if God had been their Father they would have loved him whom the Father had sanctified and sent into the world, saying further, “I and my Father are one.” He said to his disciples: “If ye had known me ye should have known my Father also; and added, to Philip’s great surprise, “from henceforth ye know Him and have seen Him . . . He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.” One of the most conspicuous features of Christ’s teaching on earth was the prominence which he gave to the Father’s relation to all he said and did. He expressly said, “I am come in my Father’s name;” and describing, in his prayer to the Father the work he had accomplished on the earth, he said, “I have declared Thy name to the men whom Thou hast given me.”
In remembering Christ, then, in the breaking of bread, we do not remember him as he desires to be remembered, unless we remember him as the manifestation of the Father’s glory, the exhibitor of the Father’s mind, the exerciser of the Father’s power, the Father come nigh to us in him—“God in Christ reconciling the world to Himself.” The Father, indeed, is the glory of Christ. Apart from Him, there would have been no Christ, who though a Son who learned obedience by the things that he suffered, is yet the Father in manifestation; for though he said, “The works that I do, I do not of myself,” he also said, “The Father who is in me, He doeth the works.” To remember Christ, then, is to remember the Father also who dwelt in him and made him what he was. To remember a mere man is not to remember Christ; and to remember a son without a will of his own is not to remember him. To remember him scripturally is to remember him as he is presented in his discourses to his disciples, in which, while exhibiting himself as the voluntary subject of the Father, he expressed surprise that he should have p. 207been so long with his disciples without them knowing that in looking upon him they looked upon the Father manifest in His Son.
We have every reason to rejoice in this aspect of the memories that circle round the table of the Lord. Jesus brings the Father very near to us in the words he spoke to his disciples about him—near I mean as regards the Father’s attitude or disposition towards us. We are liable to think of the Father as a distant and unapproachable majesty. He is, doubtless, this, apart from Christ; but we are liable to continue to think of him in this way even in connection with Christ. Christ dissipates all such thoughts by the words addressed to his disciples in the last conversation he had with them in the flesh. He said, “I say not unto you that I will pray the Father for you, for the Father Himself loveth you because ye have loved me, and have believed that I came out from God.” He makes our connection with the Father’s love even more intimate and practically obvious in the following words: “He that hath my commandments and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me, and he that loveth me shall be loved of my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him. . . At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father and ye in me and I in you.” To detach Christ from the Father is, therefore, an impossibility, and to see Christ without seeing the Father is not to see the Christ of the Scriptures but another Jesus than the one Paul preached.
It is most comforting to dwell upon this association of the Father with Jesus. It is the association to which Paul gives such fervid emphasis when he says that “Nothing shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” This is, in fact, the great revelation concerning God which shines through the whole course of Scripture. It was proclaimed even at Sinai that Jehovah is “merciful and gracious, long-suffering and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin.” The fact was illustrated in all the history of Israel’s transgressions which David thus summarises: “Their heart was not right with Him, neither were they steadfast in His covenant; but He being full of compassion, forgave their iniquity and destroyed them not; yea, many a time turned He His anger away and did not stir up all His wrath; for He remembered they were but flesh, a wind that passeth away and cometh not again.” The Psalms of David, which are to us the voice of God, abound with comforting declarations on this subject. This may be taken as a specimen of all: “The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and plenteous in mercy. He will not always chide, neither will He keep His anger for ever. He hath not dealt with us after our sins nor rewarded us according to our iniquities; for as the heaven is high above the earth, so great is His mercy toward them that fear Him.”
The goodness of God is the sublimest fact in the universe. Let us open our hearts to the fulness of the consolation. We may rob ourselves of the comfort through sheer thoughtlessness and lay ourselves open to the sharp rebuke implied in Christ’s words to Peter: “O ye of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?” It may be said, we forget because we do not see; but why do we not see? Is it not because we allow ourselves to become blind with a blindness that is curable? Paul, addressing the idolatrous priests and people at Lystra, while allowing that God had “suffered all nations to walk in their own ways,” adds, “Nevertheless, He left not himself without WITNESS, in that He did good and gave them rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, filling their hearts with joy and gladness.” According to this, Paul expected ordinary intelligence p. 208to be able to see evidence of God’s goodness in the beneficent appointments of nature. There is no doubt that in this Paul was in the right. Although there is much that seems terrible in the operations of nature, it must be apparent to the shallowest reflection that there is a weighty preponderance of that which is manifestly good, and that the principal afflictions of the human race come from their own unloving actions one to another. Even that which is evil in nature is found closely allied with the accomplishment of good, such as the purification of earth and air, effected by the tempests of winter. Taking nature in its totality, beneficence is distinctly visible on its face, and therefore a contriver of good.
Now, if Paul expected unenlightened men, in the pre-apostolic age, to discern evidence of God’s existence and goodness in the beneficent aspects of nature, what would He not expect of our generation with so many more materials for conviction? If it could be said that God left not Himself without witness when He gave the rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, what may we not say when He has given the fufilment of His word in so many forms before our eyes? Have we not the Jews in our midst, dispersed in all the countries, after centuries of tumult and confusion, as declared by the prophets? Are they not “His witnesses”—witnesses that He is God—as God Himself has said?—(Isa. xliii. 10-13.) Could any human discernment have foreseen that a scattered and persecuted race would continue to exist when the mighty nations of antiquity should have passed away? Would not a merely human discernment, speculating on probability, have surmised that the Jews in dispersion, especially harbouring, as they did, a desire for conformity to the Gentile nations, would, in course of time, have become absorbed and lost in the surrounding populations among whom they mixed so constantly in business and otherwise? Yet there they are, a distinct people among all peoples, circumcising their children, worshipping the God of Abraham in their synagogues, observing the feasts of Moses, so far as they can be observed in a strange land, and looking forward, the bulk of them, to the day of promised restoration. Are they not witnesses for God and helpers to our faith?
And what of the Gentiles? Has God given us no witnesses in them? Have we not in their history the evidence of a sure word of prophecy—quite apart from the events which are so powerfully stimulating our hopes in this the time of the end? Have events for ages not run in the groove marked out for them in the “things revealed unto Daniel,” and in the vision signified to His servant John. Can we forget the four great empires, each with the characteristic details corresponding to the symbolism of the prophecy? Can we shut our eyes to the chequered career of the fourth kingdom upon earth, with its horn-subdivisions and barbarian clay admixture from the north; and its papal horn with eyes, lording it over all? Can we forget the city reigning over the Roman kings which hath made the inhabitants of the earth, for ages, drunk, in a spiritual intoxication of false doctrine, false spirit, false precept and institutions, and with whom the kings of the earth have lived deliciously? What human foresight could have disclosed these things which have come to pass? Where is the man, in our age—an age supposed to excel all previous times in discernment and penetration—where is the man who can tell us a single day ahead what shall come to pass among the nations of the earth? We know he is not to be found. What is the conclusion? Hath not God given us “witness” of Himself in the accomplished history of the Gentiles?
And what shall we say of Christ? No man can obliterate this living footprint of p. 209God on earth. Whatever explanation men may try to give of him (and learned men have vainly exerted their profoundest ingenuities to bring him within the category of common men), they cannot deny him as a fact of history. He has left his mark too deep for that. His name is in all the archives and political documents of the civilized world for ages past. Only men who doze in a moral and intellectual torpor, engrossed with the affairs of their private lives, can be insensible to the mass of incontestable, palpable facts that tell us that Jesus of Nazareth appeared upon the stage of history 1,800 years ago, and astonished the world by “works which none other men did,” and words “such as never man spake.” Gaze at his picture as it shows itself to us in authenticated records of the past. Is it not natural for us to unite in the question put by his neighbours: “Whence hath this man this wisdom and these mighty works?” And is it not equally natural for us to say with Nicodemus who visited Jesus by night: “We know that thou art a teacher come from God, for no man can do these miracles which thou doest except God be with him?” Verily if God left not Himself without witness, in giving us rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, He has almost forced Himself into our presence in the gift of His beloved Son, the true and faithful witness, who came not in his own but in his Father’s name, glorifying Him on the earth and finishing the work which He gave him to do.
Finally, what can a man say about the want of evidence who possesses the Bible? Anything said by such a man in this direction must be said because he is unacquainted with the treasure in his hands. The existence of the Bible itself becomes at last an all-sufficient witness for God, even without the external testimony at which I have glanced. The Bible cannot be accounted for on any theory that supposes a merely human authorship. This, the strongest witness for God, is the last perhaps to be felt in its fulness of force on account of the slowness of the process which leads to its apprehension, viz., the complete acquaintance with the Bible to be acquired only in the daily reading of it for years, and the corresponding acquaintance with the ways and thoughts of man obtained by experience. When, however, this witness is fully apprehended, faith is established on a rock nothing can move.
What is the sum and substance of the whole matter? What but that which Paul declares, that we have a strong consolation who have fled for refuge to the hope set before us? The consolation arises from the fact that in breaking bread and drinking wine, as we do from Sunday morning to Sunday morning, in obedience to the commandments of Christ, we bring not only Christ to memory but his Father and our Father—the Creator of heaven and earth, who fainteth not, neither is weary, and there is no searching of His understanding; and with whom there is no variableness nor shadow of a turning. We can say with Moses and Israel when they came out of Egypt: “The Lord is my strength and song, He is become my salvation. He is my God and I will prepare Him an habitation; my father’s God, and I will exalt him.” We can shout with David: “The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer; my God, my strength, in whom I will trust; my buckler and the horn of my salvation and my high tower.” Shall we not therefore be able rejoicingly to say “I will not fear what man can do unto me?” Yea, and we shall, like David, commune with our own hearts and soliloquize with a delight unknown to the poetry of the heathen: “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits; who forgiveth all thine iniquities, who redeemeth thy life from destruction; who crowneth thee with loving-kindness and tender mercies; who satisfieth thy mouth p. 210with good things, so that thy youth is renewed like the eagle’s.” Rising with a stronger flight, we shall emerge from soliloquy and ascend boldly to the throne with words which, acceptable at the mouth of the man after God’s own heart, will not be rejected at our hands if we approach with contrite spirits, clean hands and a pure heart: “I will extol thee, my God O King, and I will bless Thy name for ever. Every day will I bless Thee and I will praise Thy name for ever and ever. Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised: His greatness is unsearchable. I will speak of the glorious honour of Thy Majesty and of Thy wondrous works.”
EDITOR.