Sunday Morning at the Birmingham Christadelphian Ecclesia, No. 108
“Exhort one another daily.”—Paul.
p. 262THE call which God addressed to Abraham in Ur of the Chaldees initiated a long series of occurrences whose significance is not apparent to any save those who are acquainted with the whole purpose of God as revealed to His servants the prophets. Popular religion is not in any way dependent upon those thrilling histories which Paul recited in his address to the Jews and Gentiles who were assembled in the synagogue at Antioch. We have read this morning (Acts xiii.) an epitome of the most important events which have transpired on the face of the earth, but none of them can be said to be essential to the Christianity that is recognised and current in this our day. Modern sectarianism is able to flourish and spread on every hand without being particularly concerned about the history of God’s dealing with Israel. Reference is seldom made to that history, as a whole, in the pulpit. We never hear of its engaging the enthusiasm of the clergy. If they extend to it a mere antiquarian interest, seasoned with the smallest spice of an undiscerning reverence, that will be about all. Indeed, in p. 263many cases, open discredit is cast upon the inspired records, and some of the Israelitish events which give to our meeting this morning so much of its true interpretation, are positively classed by not a few of the guides of the people among the exploded historical fallacies of a benighted age. It is a lamentable fact that our contemporaries are not building their expectations on anything God did in Israel in times past, or anything He has promised to do in Israel hereafter. What the Church says, and what is held fashionable and correct by polite Gentile society, is allowed to determine the complexion of the popular hope. But we rejoice together that we are escaped from the all-pervading delusion. He who could obliterate the facts mentioned in this chapter—who could prove that the God of Israel never chose their fathers—that Israel never was in Egypt, and therefore never came out—that Moses is a myth, or at any rate was never made the vehicle of those divine communications which bear his name—that Samuel never prophesied, and that David never “sat upon the throne of the Lord”—and that John never preached the baptism of repentance to all the people of Israel: he who could prove all this would rob our present meeting of its only possible significance and value. For we are absolutely without hope and without reasonable ground of cohesion, if the histories of the Bible are not true. We could not again take refuge in the fictions of Christendom and persuade ourselves that we are immortal, and therefore it comes to this—that we are absolutely shut up to the narrative which entered so largely into Paul’s address at the Antiochean synagogue. These are the things to which we are wont to turn our eye when wearied with the strife and tumult of this probation. And we find it altogether more refreshing to fall back upon actual indisputable fact, than we used to do when we attempted to extract solace and strength from the Paganistic speculations which formerly were allowed to take its place.
It was not the wont of the apostles to deliver neat little moral addresses wherever they went, or to take a piece of Scripture phraseology as a peg on which to hang a few platitudes after the style of the modern pulpit. Such a mode of address may suit the taste of people who do not desire to burden their recollection with the details of divinely-accomplished fact, and who are unaware that God’s purpose in the earth is inseparably associated with the land and the people of Israel; but it would never have had much interest for “men and brethren of the stock of Abraham.” An audience so constituted required to be reminded of “the promise which was made unto the fathers.” and no doubt would listen with deep attention to the words of Paul as he ran over the history of their nation in a way, however, which would be considered very tame and tedious by the religious Gentiles of our day. Men have made two great mistakes since Christ rose from the dead. Jews refuse to connect the hope of Israel with Jesus of Nazareth in any way. And Gentiles refuse to connect his resurrection with that self-same hope, and therefore are impatient of any attempt to recapitulate the leading events of Jewish history as Paul’s manner was whenever he entered a synagogue of the Jews.
Ours is a middle path of truth and harmony between the two extremes of Jewish and Gentile unbelief concerning the relation in which Jesus stands to the purpose of God. And it is most comforting to have the well-attested facts which are brought before us in the chapter read, focalised as they are in this ordinance of the breaking of bread. They seem, as we read them, to supply a foundation of solid rock on which we may build our hope toward God. Inspired history is an altogether more satisfying thing than empty declamation about “mansions in the skies.” Astronomy is doubtless a p. 264wonderfully interesting science, but not if it fail to make discoveries; and certain it is that no telescope has ever been found adapted to the exigencies of popular religious hope. “The hope of Israel” does not require the assistance of the optician. The well-known facts of geography will suffice, if they be definitely associated with the promises of God. However dark the sky may seem above us sometimes, we can always remember the Euphrates on the one side and the Mediterranean on the other; and, going back a few centuries, take comfort from the indisputable fact that the history of the most remarkable people that ever existed on earth is entirely without meaning, if God has never spoken, and if His hand was not revealed in Palestine more than eighteen centuries ago. We are reminded by Paul’s address that even in his day a great deal of the divine programme had passed into the region of accomplished fact. Had he been living now, he would have been able to issue a greatly enlarged edition of this historical exhortation, and to have shown us how signally intervening centuries have given birth to their appropriate events, in harmony with the wisdom of God. Beginning with the overthrow of the commonwealth of Israel, and the dispersion of the Jews, he would have proceeded to tell us of the taking away of Paganism and the consequent revelation of the man of sin exactly as he foretold in his second letter to the brethren at Thessalonica. Then he would have dwelt on the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and would have been able to exhibit that history in a light which Gibbon, with all his clearness, could never comprehend. The ten-horned beast of Daniel’s vision and the other little horn which came up among the rest, would find its true historical counterpart in the succeeding state of Europe. The establishment of the Mahometan Power, and the now imminent evaporation of the same, with all the contemporaneous signs of returning favour to Zion, would have swollen out Paul’s speech to much greater historical dimensions than were possible to it in his day. God be thanked that, amid all the confusion and the foolishness of these days, there is such a thing as the truth, and that there exists a community of people who, if they are what they profess, are the workmanship of the wisdom of the Deity as embodied in the Scriptures! Men blame us for the attitude we assume; but let them rather blame the inspired histories and the divinely-generated hope which have placed us where, and made us what, we are.
There is danger lest the things which took place in the Holy Land in Paul’s day should seem less real and less important to us than they were to him. Historic facts that are very remote from our own generation are prone to lose their interest, and to acquire a certain vagueness which robs us of our enthusiasm in relation thereto if they be not continually rehearsed. To meet this peril we are provided with this weekly memorial. Thus the concerns of this present mortal life are being perpetually lifted back to their proper position of insignificance out of the place of importance they so readily assume. When placed side by side with the great matters which Paul discoursed upon at Antioch, how very trifling do all our temporal affairs become! We are careful and troubled about many things, for the days are evil, and it is no easy task to “provide things honest in the sight of all men,” in a day when so few are to be found who have the fear of God before their eyes, and society is rotten to the core, and nothing can be hoped for until a destructive storm of Divine vengeance has swept all the abominations of the earth away.
But our solicitudes are of little consequence when it is borne in mind that “God raised Jesus from the dead, and p. 265that he was seen many days of them which came up with him from Galilee to Jerusalem, who were his witnesses unto the people.” The things which are calculated to occasion us anxiety are all things which can be altered, and which will be altered by and bye, so far as our relation to them is concerned. But the resurrection of Christ is something that never can be altered. He is stereotyped—“the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever.” Everything for us depends upon this statement being true. If the apostle had not been able to tell the people at Antioch that God had raised Jesus from the dead, many of us would never have known each other, and Paul would not have been in the company of Barnabas either at Antioch or anywhere else. Suppose in the course of his address he had reached the 29th verse, and there stopped because there was nothing more for him to say:—“When they had fulfilled all that was written of him, they took him down from the tree, and laid him in a sepulchre.” What a wail of lamentation would fill this place to-day if some one could come among us and with irresistible evidence prove that Christ’s sepulchre was never disturbed, and that his ashes are there to this day! “But God raised him from the dead.” We come across many glorious “buts” in the Scriptures, and here is one. Jesus was laid in a sepulchre, but he is living to-day. “I am he that liveth and was dead, and behold I am alive for evermore.” There is a most consolatory “but” to be written over against the gloomiest experience of all Christ’s true brethren. It has been the lot of some here during the past week to stand by the open grave of our beloved brother Blount, but it was not with the sorrow of those who have no hope. All who knew our departed brother intimately, knew him as one in whom the things of the spirit were relegated to no subordinate or secondary place. He adorned the gospel and laboured industriously and acceptably in the work of its proclamation, though with physical energies all too weak. He rests in the grave, but he does not know he is there. By and bye he will awake, surprised to find how short and sound his sleep has been. The Lord hear his sister wife in the day of her trouble. The name of the mighty God of Jacob defend her. “A father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widow is God in His holy habitation.”
Many hundreds have been laid in the grave during the week, and there they must lie. No “but” can scripturally qualify the announcement of their burial. Survivors may weep, and try to solace themselves with their vain traditions, and picture the departed in the region and attitude of ineffable delight, but all that won’t remove the curse which holds their dead ones in its eternal grasp. Men deny the fact of death, and continue their denial while their tears fall, and their sobs break forth in death’s very presence!
Oh! brethren, everything we see and have to do with that is outside Christ is undeserving of our attention, for “the fashion of this world passeth away.” Yet a little while and it will all be gone, and only Christ and the things which concern his name will remain to us. Is it not folly to put him in the background, and allow some ephemeral object of affection and solicitude to stand in the front? If he were not real and living, we could understand the conduct which treats him as though he were a fable or dead. If he were never returning to the earth, we should have less difficulty in accounting for his behaviour who is supremely engrossed in the things which perish in the using. We speak of the Gentiles around us as “drunken,” but let us beware lest we suffer ourselves to become intoxicated by false and unspiritual theories concerning our duty towards Christ in the day of his absence from the earth. The disciple of wisdom cannot p. 266expect to be understood by men who do not believe in the complete subordination of present interests and gratifications to an invisible, and, as it seems to them, highly improbable object of desire. We need to beware lest we take our cue from a generation of evil-doers at whose hands the wisdom of God stands no chance of recognition. But wisdom will be justified of all her children. “The workers of iniquity shall soon be cut down like the grass, and wither as the green herb.” The lid is to be screwed on the coffin before long, and the man taken out of the house, and put down among the worms, to go to corruption and then to dust, while his name shall rot from the remembrance of mankind. Nothing truer under the sun than that in the end all the guests of folly are in the depths of sheol; and there is no “but” in the case, for “the man that wandereth out of the way of understanding shall remain in the congregation of the dead.”
But we, brethren, are being builded together for a glorious destiny, even for a habitation of God through the spirit. In the Father’s household there will be many abiding-places—a multitude of immortal beings in whom the Deity will dwell and walk for evermore. And the future constitution of things upon the earth is to rest on these seven pillars, this complete association of incorruptible ones with Jesus Christ as the chief corner stone. God, in multitudinous spirit-manifestation—in a great number of sons from Adam’s race, every one of whom will have been made all-powerful, and all-wise, and deathless—Deity in man thus proposes to take the world’s affairs in hand, and, ruling them in righteousness, to bless the nations of the earth in Abraham and his seed. And we are aspirants to a place of authority in that new heavens and earth. It is truly not without reason that the apostle speaks of our calling as a high vocation. The eternal spirit in Christ will fix the pillars of the future habitable, and when once fixed they will never be removed from their appointed places. “Him that overcometh,” says Christ, “will I make a pillar in the temple of my God, and he shall go no more out, and I will write upon him the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God—New Jerusalem—which cometh down out of heaven from my God, and my new name.”—(Rev. iii. 12.) Adam got his name from the dust of which he was made. This was the name of the Pharisees, to whom Jesus said, “Ye are from beneath.” But he being “from above,” could speak to John about his “new name.” The first begotten from the dead—he has that in his bestowal which once conferred can never be withdrawn. We all want new natures. “We that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened.” But we know who has the power to give us what we long for. No wonder that between the new nature and this mortal, Christ should have interposed a variety of precepts for our observance. His commandments are not burdensome or unreasonable. It is for us as wise men, looking for a permanent appointment of honour and glory at the hands of eternal wisdom, to make our calling and election sure, by the means which God has appointed for the purpose, that in the day of Christ we may be found of him in peace, without spot and blameless, and be made partakers of his own “new name,” his own eternal life of power and wisdom and joy unspeakable, and full of glory.
R. ASHCROFT.