^^r•75 Division Sectioa MESSAGES FROM THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS MESSAGES FROM THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS "By HANDLEY C. G. MOULE, D.D. BISHOP OF DURHAM i 1910 .1 HODDER AND STOUGHTON NEW YORK 1909 The Bible is the Sky in which God has set Christ the Sun. John Ker, D.D. PREFACE fTlHE following chapters are the work of -L intervals of leisure scattered over a long time. The exposition had advanced some way when an unexpected call to new and exacting duties compelled me to put it aside for several years. Accordingly a certain difference of treat- ment in the later chapters as compared with the earlier will probably be seen by the reader, particularly a rather fuller detail in the exposition. But purpose and plan are essen- tially the same throughout. No attempt whatever is made, here or in the course of the work, to deal with those Hterary and historical problems which so conspicuously attach themselves to this Epistle. Who the " Hebrews " were is nowhere discussed. Nor is any positive answer offered to a question to which assuredly no such answer can be given, the question, namely, of the authorship. In my opinion, in face of all that I have read to the contrary, it still seems at least possible vi PREFACE that the ultimate human author was St. Paul. All, or very nearly all, the objections to his name which the phenomena of the Epistle primd facie present, and some of which lie unquestionably deep, seem to be capable of a provisional answer if we assume, what is 80 conceivable, that the Apostle committed his message and its argument, on purpose, to a colleague so gifted, mentally and by the Spirit, that he might be trusted to cast the work into his own style. The well- known remark of Origen that only God knows who " wrote " the Epistle appears to me to point (if we look at its context) this way. Origen surely means by the " writer " what is meant in Eom. xvi. 22. Only, on the hypothesis, the amanuensis of our Epistle was, for a special purpose presumably, a Christian prophet in his own right. In any case the author, if not an apostle, was a prophet. And he carries to us a prophet's " burthen " of unspeakable import, and in words to which all through the Christian ages the soul has responded as to the words of the Holy Spirit. HANDLEY DUNELM. Easter, 1909. CONTENTS PAOB Consider Him • • • . . i Heb. i.-ii. II A Heart of Faith ..... 8 Heb. iii. Ill Unto Perfection . . . . .14 Heb. iv.-vi. IV Our Great Melchizedek . . . .23 Heb. vii. V The Better Covenant . . . .32 Heb. viii. VI Sanctuary and Sacrifice . . , .42 Heb. ix. viii CONTENTS VII PAQK Full, Perfect, and Sufficient . . .51 Heb. X, 61 VIII Faith and its Power Heb. xi. (I.). IX Faith and its Annals Heb. xi. (II.). X Followers of them Heb. xii. 1-14. XI Sinai and Sion , Heb, xii. 14-28. 71 80 90 XII Appeals and Instructions . . . 100 Heb. xiii. 1-14. XIII Last Words ...... 110 Heb. xiii. l.')-25. MESSAGES FROM THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS CHAPTER I CONSIDER HIM Heb. i.-ii. LET us open the Epistle to the Hebrews, with an aim simple and altogether practical for heart and for life. Let us take it just as it stands, and somewhat as a whole. We will not discuss its authorship, interesting and extensive as that problem is. We will not attempt, within the compass of a few short chapters, to expound continuously its wonderful text. Eather, we will gather up from it some of its large and conspicuous spiritual messages, taken as messages of the Word of God " which liveth and abideth for ever." No part of Holy Scripture is ever really out 2 CONSIDER HIM of date. But it is true meanwhile that, as for persons so for periods, there are Scripture books and Scripture truths which are more than ordinarily timely. It is not that others are therefore untimely, nor that only one class of book or one aspect of truth can be eminently timely at one time. But it seems evident that the foreseeing Architect of the Bible has so adjusted the parts of His wonderful vehicle of revelation and blessing that special fitnesses continually emerge between our varying times and seasons on the one hand and the multifold Word on the other. The Epistle to the Hebrews is in some re- markable respects a book timely for our day. It invites to itself, if I read it aright, the renewed attention of the thoughtful Christian, and not least of the thoughtful Christian of the English Church, as it brings him messages singularly in point to some of the main present needs of his spiritual life and its surroundings. It was written manifestly in the first instance to meet special and pressing current trials ; it bears the impress of a time of severe sifting, a time when foundations were challenged, and individual faith put to even agonizing proofs, and the community threatened with an almost dissolution. Such a writing must have a voice articulate and sym- pathetic for a period like ours. THE PERSON OF CHRIST 3 We will take into our hands then, portion by portion, this wonderful " open letter," and listen through it to some of the things which " the Spirit saith " to the saints and to the Church. We now contemplate in this sense the first two chapters. We put quite aside a host of points of profound interest in detail, and ask ourselves only what is the broad surface, the drift and total, of the message here. As to its climax, it is Jesus Christ, our " merciful and faithful High Priest" (ii. 17). As to the steps that lead up to the climax, they are a presentation of the personal glory of Jesus Christ, as God the Son of God, as Man the Son of Man, who for us men and our salvation came, suffered, and prevailed. Who that reads the Bible with the least care has not often noted this in the first passages of the Hebrews, and could not at once so state the matter ? What is the great truth of Hebrews i. ? Jesus Christ is God (ver. 8) ; the Son (ver. 2) ; absolutely like the Father (ver. 3) ; Lord of the bright Company of Heaven, who in all their ranks and orders worship Him (ver. 6) ; creative Originator of the Universe (ver. 10), such that the starry depths of space are but the folds of His vesture, which hereafter He shall change for another (ver. 1 2) ; Himself eternal, " the same," transcendent above all time, yet all the while the Son begotten, the Son, infinitely adequate 4 CONSIDER HIM and infinitely willing to be the final Vehicle of the Father's voice to us (verses 1, 5, 6). What is the great truth of Hebrews ii. ? Jesus Christ is Man. He is other than angelic, for He is God. But also He is other than angelic, for He is Man (verses 5, 6, 7). He is the Brother of Man as truly as He is the Son of God (ver. 11). He has taken share with us in flesh and blood (ver. 14), that is to say, He has assumed manhood in that state or stage in which it is capable of death, and He has done this on purpose (it is a wonder- ful thought) that He may be capable of dying. This blessed Jesus Christ, this God and Man, our Saviour, was bent upon dying, and that for a reason altogether connected with us and with His will to save us (ver. 15). We were im- measurably dear and important to Him. And our deliverance demanded His identification with us in nature, and His temptations (ver. 18), and finally His mysterious suffering. So He came. He suffered, He was " perfected " — in respect of capacity to be our Eedeemer — " through suffer- ings " (ver. 10). And now, incarnate, slain, and risen again, He, still our Brother, is " crowned with glory and honour" (ver. 9), He is our Leader (ver. 10). He is our High Priest, merciful and faithful (ver. 17). Thus the Epistle, on its way to recall its readers, at a crisis of confusion and temptation, CHRIST FIRST 5 to certainty, patience, and peace, leads them — not last but first — to Jesus Christ. It unfolds at once to them His glories of Person, His wonder of Work and Love. It does not elabo- rately travel up to Him through general con- siderations. It sets out from Him. It makes Him the base and reason for all it has to say — and it has to say many things. Its first theme is not the Community, but the Lord ; not Church principles, not that great duty of cohesion about which it will speak, and speak urgently, further on, but the Lord, in His adorable personal greatness, in His unique and all-wonderful personal achievement. To that attitude of thought it recurs again and again in its later stages. In one way or another it is always bidding us look up from even the greatest related subjects and " consider Him." Am I not right in saying that here is a message straight to the restless heart of our time, and not least to the special conditions of Christian life just now in our well-beloved Church ? We must, of course we must, think about a hundred problems presented by the circumference of the life of the Christian and the life of the Church. At all times such problems, asking for attention and solution, emerge to every thoughtful disciple's sight. In our own time they seem to multiply upon one 6 CONSIDER HIM another with an importunate demand — problems doctrinal, ritual, governmental, social ; the strife of principles and tendencies within the Church-; all that is involved in the relations between the Church and the State, and again between the Church and the world, that is to say, human life in different or opposed to the living Christian creed and the spiritual Christian rule. Well, for these very reasons let us make here first this brief appeal, prompted by the opening paragraphs of the great Epistle. If you would deal aright with the circumference, earnest Christian of the English Church, live at the Centre. " Dwell deep." From the Church come back evermore to Jesus Christ, that from Jesus Christ you may the better go back to the Church, bearing the peace and the power of the Lord Himself upon you. There is nothing that can serve as a substitute for this. The " consideration " of our blessed Eedeemer and King is not merely good for us ; it is vital. To " behold His glory," deliberately, with worship, with worshipping love, and seen hy direct attention to the mirror of His Word, can and must secure for us blessings which we shall otherwise infallibly lose. This, and this alone, amidst the strife of tongues and all the perplexities of life, can develope in us at once the humblest reverence and the noblest liberty, A VITAL NEED 7 convictions firm to resist a whole world in opposition, yet the meekness and the fear which utterly exclude injustice, untruth, hardness, or the bitter word. For us if for any, for us now if ever, this first great message of the Epistle meets a vital need ; " Consider Him." CHAPTER II A HEART OF FAITH Heb. iii. "ITyE have just endeavoured to find a message, * » " godly and wholesome, and necessary for these times," in the opening paragraphs in the Epistle to the Hebrews. We come now to interrogate our oracle again, and we open the third chapter as we do so. Here again we find the Epistle full, first, of " Jesus Christ Himself." He is " the Apostle and the High Priest of our profession" (ver. 1), or let us read rather, " our confession," the " confession " of us who are loyal to His Name as His disciples. We are expressly called here to do what the first two chapters implied that we must do — to " consider Him " (ver. 1), to bend upon His Person, character, and work the attention of the whole heart and mind. We are pointed to His holy fidelity to His mission (ver. 2) in words which equally remind us of His sub- ordination to the Father's will and of His THE SON 9 absolute authority as the Father's perfect Re- presentative. We are reminded (ver. 3) of that magnificent other side of His position, that He acts and administers in " the house of God " not as a servant but as the Father's " own Son (ver. 6) that serveth Him." Nay, such is He that the " house " in which He does His filial service is a building which He Himself has reared (ver. 3) ; He is its Architect and its Constructor in a sense in which none could be who is not Divine. Yes, He is no less than God (ver. 4) ; God Filial, God so conditioned that He is also the faithful Sent- One of the Father, but none the less God. We saw Him already in the first chapter (ver. 10), placed before us in His majesty as the Originator of the material Universe, to whom the starry skies are but His robe, to be put on and put off in season. Here He is the doer of a yet more wonderful achievement ; He is the Builder of the Church of the Faithful, For the " house " which He thus built is nothing else than " we " (ver. 6), we who by faith have entered into the structure of the " living stones " (see 1 Pet. ii. 5), and who, by " the confidence and the rejoicing of our hope," abide within it. Thus the blessed Lord is before us here again, filling our sphere of thought and contemplation. It is here just as it is in the Epistle to the Colossiaus. There, as here, errors and confusions lo A HEART OF FAITH in the Church are in view — a subtle theosophy and also a retrograde ceremonialism, probably both amalgamating into one dangerous total. And St. Paul's method of defence for his con- verts there — what is it ? Above all, it is the presentation of Jesus Christ, in the glories of His Person and His Work. He places Him in the very front of thought, first as the Head, Founder, and Corner-stone of the Universe ; then as the Head, Eedeemer, and Life of the Church. With Him so seen he meets the dreamy thinker and the ceremonial devotee ; Christ is the ultimate and only repose, alike for thought and for the soul. In this Epistle as in that we have the same phenomenon, deeply suggestive and seasonable for our life to-day. In both cases, not only for individuals but for the Church, there was mental and spiritual trouble. Alike in Phrygian Colossi and wherever the " Hebrews " lived there was an invasion of church difficulties and confusion. A certain affinity in detail links the two cases together. Colossian Christians and Hebrew Christians, under widely different circumstances, and no doubt in very different tones, persuasive in one case, threatening in the other, were pressed to retrograde from the sublime simplicity and fulness of the truth. Their danger was what I may venture to call a certain medievalism. RETROGRESSION ii Not Mosaism, not Propbetism, but Judaism, the successor and distortion of the ancient revela- tions, invited or commanded their adhesion, or, in the case of the " Hebrews," their return, as to the one true faith and fold. There were great differences in detail. At Colossae it does not seem that the " medievalists " professed to deny Christianity ; rather they professed to teach the Judaistic version of it as the authentic type. Among the " Hebrews " anti-Christianity was using every effort to allure or to alarm the disciples back to open Eabbinism, " doing de- spite to the Son of God." But both streams of tendency went in the same general direction so far that they put into the utmost prominence aspects of religion full of a traditional cere- monialism, and of the idea of human meritorious achievement rather than of a spiritual reliance for the salvation of the soul. Deeply significant it is that in both cases we have the danger met thus — by the presentation of the Incarnate Redeemer Himself, in His per- sonal and official glory, to the most immediate possible view of every disciple, "nothing between." The Epistles, both of them, have much to say on deep general principles. But all this they say in vital connexion with Jesus Christ ; and about Him they say most of all. He is the supreme Antidote. He, " considered," considered fully, is 12 A HEART OF FAITH not so much the clue out of the labyrinth as the great point of view from which the mind and the soul can look down upon it and see how tortuous, and also how limited, it is. But the message of our chapter has not yet been fully heard. It has spoken to us of Christ Jesus, and of the " consideration " of Him to which we are called. At its close it speaks to us of faith : " Take heed, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief, in departing from the living God" (ver. 12). "To whom sware He that they should not enter into His rest, but to them that believed not ? So we see that they could not enter in because of unbelief " (verses 18, 19). That is to say, our " consideration " of Jesus Christ must not be all our action towards Him, if we would be sure, and safe, and strong. It must be but the preliminary to a " heart of faith." That is to say again, we must personally and practically take Him at His word, and rely upon Him, committing our souls and our all to Him, to Him directly, to Him solely. We must, in the exercise of this reliance, use Him ever- more as our Prophet, Priest, and King. We must venture upon His promises, just as Israel ought to have ventured upon the promises of Him who had redeemed them, although He tried their will and power to do so by the THE POWER OF FAITH 13 terrors of the wilderness and by the giants of Canaan. Thus to rely is faith ; for faith is personal confidence in the Lord in His promise. And such faith is not only, as it is, the empty hand which receives Divine blessings in detail. It is the empty arms which clasp always that com- prehensive blessing, the presence of " the living God " in Christ, so making sure of a secret of peace, of rest, of decision, of strength, of deep- sighted and tranquil thought upon " things which differ," which is of infinite importance at a time of confusion and debate in the Christian Church. Therefore, alike for our safety and for our usefulness, let us first afresh "consider Him." And then let us afresh " take heed " that with " a good heart of faith " we draw to and abide in union with the " considered " Christ, in whom we know and possess the living God. CHAPTER III UNTO PERFECTION Hee. iv.-vi. OUR study of the great Epistle takes here another step, covering three short but pregnant chapters. So pregnant are they that it would be altogether vain to attempt to deal with them thus briefly were we not mindful of our special point of view. We are pondering the Epistle not for all that it has to say, but for what it has to say of special moment and application for certain needs of our own time. The outline of the portion before us must accordingly be traced. In detail it presents many questions of connexion and argument, for, particularly in chapter iv., the apostolic thought takes occasionally a parenthetical flight of large circuit. But in outline the progression may be traced without serious difficulty. We have first the appeal to exercise the promptitude and decision of faith, in view of the magnificent promise of a Canaan of sacred THE WORD 15 rest made to the true Israel in Christ. Even to " seem " (iv. 1 ) to fail of this, even to seem to sink into a desert grave of unbelief while " the rest of faith " is waiting to be entered, is a thought to " fear," Great indeed are the promises ; " living " and " energetic " is " the Word " which conveys them.* That " Word " is piercing as a sword in its convictions, for it is the vehicle of His mind and His holiness " with whom is concerned our discourse" (iv. 13); while yet it is, on its other side, a " Gospel " indeed (iv. 2), the message of supreme good, if only it is met with faith by the convicted soul. Yes, it is a message which tells of a land of " rest," near and open, fairer far than the Canaan on which Caleb reported and from which he and his fellows brought the great clusters of its golden vines. Passage after passage of the old Scriptures (iv. 3-9) shows that that Canaan was no finality, no true ter- minus of the purpose of God ; another " rest," another " day " of entrance and blessing, was intimated all along. Unbelief forfeited the true fruition of even the old Canaan for the old Israel. And now out of that evil has sprung the glorious good of a more articulate promise of the new Canaan, the inheritance of rest in * Ch. iv. 12, if I am right, follows in thought upon iv. 2, leaving a long and deep parenthesis between. l6 UNTO PERFECTION Christ, destined for the new Israel. But as then, so now, the promise, if it is to come to its effect, must be met and realized by obedient faith. Despite all the difficulties, in face of what- ever may seem the Anakim of to-day, lookmg to Him who is immeasurably more than Moses, and who is the true and second Joshua,* we must make haste to enter in by the way of faith. We must " mingle the word with faith " (iv. 2), into one glorious issue of attained and abiding rest. We must lay our hearts soft and open (iv. 7) before the will of the Promiser. We must "be in earnest" to enter in (iv. 11). Then, at iv. 14, the appeal takes us in beautiful order more directly to Him who is at once the Leader and the Promised Land. And again He stands before us as a " great High Priest." Our Moses, our Joshua, is also our more than Aaron, combining in Himself every possible qualification to be our guide and pre- server as we enter in. He stands before us in all the alluring and endearing character of mingled majesty and mercy ; a High Priest, a great High Priest, immeasurably great ; He has "passed through the heavens" (iv. 14) to the Holiest, to the throne, the celestial mercy-seat (iv. 16) "within the veil" (vi. 19); He is the Son (v. 5) ; He is the Priest-King, the true * The "Jesus" (iv. 8) of the Authorized Version. THE GREAT HIGH PRIEST 17 Melchizedek ; He is all this for ever (vi. 20). But on the other hand He is the sinner's Friend, who has so identified Himself in His blessed Manhood with the sinner, veritably taking our veritable nature, that He is " able to feel with our weaknesses" (iv. 15); "able to feel a sympathetic tolerance (fieTpioTradetp) towards the ignorant and the wandering " (v. 2) ; understanding well " what sore temptations mean, for He has felt the same " ; yea, He has known what it is to " cry out mightily and shed tears " (v. 7) in face of a horror of death ; to cast Him- self as a genuine suppliant, in uttermost suffering, upon paternal kindness ; to get to know by personal experience what submission means {efiaOe ttjv v'rraKorjv, v. 8) ; " not my will but Thine be done." Such is the " Leader of our faith," so great, so glorious, so perfect, so tender, so deep in fellow- ship with us. Shall we not follow Him into " the rest," though a " Jordan rolls between " and though cities of giants seem to frown upon us even on the other side ? Shall we not dare thither to follow Him out of the desert of our " own works " ? Much, says the Epistle (v. 11, etc.), is to be said about Him ; the theme is deep, it is in- exhaustible, for He is God and Man, one Christ. And the Hebrew believers (and is it not the i8 UNTO PERFECTION same with us ?) are not quick to learn the great lesson of His glory, and so to grow into the adult manhood of grace. But let us try ; let us address ourselves to " bear onwards (epu>/j,€da) to perfection " (vi. 1), in our thought, our faith, and so in our experience. The great foundation factors must be for ever there, the initial acts or attitudes of repentance, and of " faith towards God " ; the abandonment of the service of sin, including the bondage of a would-be salvation of self by self, and the simple turning God-ward of a soul which has come to despair of its own resources — truths symboHzed and sealed by the primal rites of baptism and blessing (vi. 2) ; and then the great revealed facts in prospect, resur- rection and judgment, must be always remem- bered and reckoned with. These however must be "left" (vi. 1), not in oblivion but in progress, just as a building " leaves " the level of its always necessary foundation. We must " bear onwards" and upwards, into the upper air of the fulness of the truth of the glory of our Christ. We must seek "perfection," the pro- found maturity of the Christian, by a maturer and yet maturer insight into Him. Awful is the spiritual risk of any other course. The soul content to stand still is in peril of a tremendous fall. To know about salvation at all, and not to seek to develope the knowledge NEED AND LAW OF GROWTH 19 towards " perfection," is to expose one's self to the terrible possibility of the fate reserved for those who have much light but no love (vi. 4-9).* But this, by the grace of God, shall not be for the readers of the Epistle. They have shewn living proofs of love already, practical and precious, for the blessed Name's sake (vi. 10). Only, let them remember the spiritual law — the necessity of growth, of pro- gress, of " bearing onwards to perfection " ; the tremendous risks of a subtle stagnation ; the looking back ; the pillar of salt. In order that full blessing may thus be theirs, let them look for it in the only possible direction. Let them take again to their souls the mighty promise of eternal benediction (vi. 14), sealed and crowned with the Promiser's gracious oath in His own Name, binding Himself to fidelity under the bond of His own majesty (vi. 13). Aye, and then let them again " consider " Him in whom promise and oath are embodied and vivified for ever ; in whom rests — nay, in whom consists — our anchor of an eternal hope (vi. 19); Jesus, our Man of men, our High Priest of the everlasting order, now entered " within the veil," * I make no attempt here to expound in detail the fonnidable words of vi. 4-8. But I believe that their purport is fairly described in the sentence above in the text. Their tnie scrip- tural illustrations are to be sought in a Balaam and a Judas. 20 UNTO PERFECTION into the place of the covenant and the glory, and "as Forerunner on our behalf" (vi. 20). To follow Him in there, in the " consideration " of faith and of worshipping love — this is the secret, to the end, for " bearing onwards to perfection." Our review of the passage is thus in some sort over. Confessedly it is an outline ; but I do not think that any vital element in the matter has been overlooked. Much of the message we are seeking has been inevitably given us by the way ; we may be content now to gather up and summarize the main result. The "Hebrews," then, and their special circumstances of difficulty, are here in view, as everywhere else in the Epistle. Tempted to " fall away," to give up the " hope set before them," to relapse to legalism, to bondage, to the desert, to a famine of the soul, to barrenness and death — here they are dealt with, in order to the more than prevention of the evil. And here, as ever, the remedy propounded is our Lord Jesus Christ, in His personal glory, in His majestic offices, in His unfathomable human sympathy, seen in perfect harmony of hght with His eternal greatness. The remedy is Christ ; a deeper, fuller, always maturing sight of Christ. The urgent necessity is first promptitude and then progress in respect of knowing Him. SOME PRESENT TENDENCIES 21 At the risk of a charge of iteration and monotony, I reaffirm that here is the great antidote for the many kindred difficulties of our troubled time. From how many sides comes the strain ! Sometimes from that of an open naturalism ; sometimes from that of a partial yet far-reaching " naturalism under a veil " which some recent teachings on " The Being of Christianity " may exemplify, with principles and presuppositions which largely underlie the extremer forms, certainly, of the modem critique of Scripture ; sometimes from the opposite quarter of an ecclesiasticism which more or less exaggerates or distorts the great ideas of corporate life and sacramental operation. It would be idle to ignore the subtle nuances of difference between mind and mind, and the resultant varying incidence in detail of great and many-sided truths. But is it not fair and true to say that, on the whole, the supreme personal glory of Christ, as presented direct to the human soul in its august and ineffable loveliness, in its infinite lovableness, is what alike the naturalistic and the ultra-ecclesiastic theories of religion tend to becloud ? On the other side, accordingly, it is in the " considera- tion " of that glory, in acquaintance with that wonderful Christ, that we shall find the glow which can melt and overcome the cloud. 22 UNTO PERFECTION We must put ourselves continually in face of the revelation of this in tlie Word of God. We must let that revelation so sink into the heart as to do its self-verifying work there thoroughly, yet with a growtli never to be exhausted. We must " bear onwards " evermore " unto perfection " — in " knowing Him." So we shall stand, and live, and love, and labour on. CHAPTER IV OUR GREAT MELCHIZEDEK Hee. vii. THERE is a symmetrical dignity all its own in the seventh chapter of the Hebrews. I recollect listening, now many years ago, to a characteristic exposition of it by the late beloved and venerated Edward Hoare, in a well-known drawing-room at Cromer — a " Bible Reading " full alike of mental stimulus and spiritual force. He remarked, among many other things, that the chapter might be described as a sermon, divided under three headings, on the text of Psalm ex. 4. This division and its significance he proceeded to develope. The chapter opens with a preamble, a statement of the unique phenomena which surround, in the narrative of Genesis, the name and person of Melchizedek. Then, starting from the presupposition, to whose truth the Lord Himself is so abundantly a witness, that the Old Testament is alive every- where with intimations of the Christ, and 23 24 OUR GREAT MELCHIZEDEK remembering that in the Psalm in question a mysterious import is explicitly assigned to Melchizedek, the Writer proceeds to his discourse. Its theme is the primacy of the priesthood embodied in Melchizedek over that represented by Aaron, and the bearing of this on the glory of Him who is proclaimed a priest for ever after Melchizedek's order. This theme is pre- sented under headings, somewhat as follows. First (verses 4—14), the one priesthood is greater than the other in order. Abraham, bearing the whole Aaronic hierarchy potentially within him, defers to Melchizedek as to his greater. Hence, among other inferences, the sacred Personage who is a priest for ever after Melchizedek's order, wholly independent of Levitical limits, must dominate and must supersede the order of the sons of Aaron with their inferior status and with their transitory lives. Secondly (verses 15—19), the one priest- hood is greater than the other in respect of the finality, the permanence, the everlastingness, of the greater Priest and of His office. He is what He is " for ever, on the scale of the power of indissoluble life." * As such. He is the Priest not of an introductory and transient " command- ment " but of that " better hope " which (ver. 19) has at last " made perfect " the purpose and the promise, fulfilled the intention of eternal mercy, * AcarA duya/xtv fw^s dKaToKvTov, AN INSPIRED SERMON 25 and brouglit 11s, the people of this great covenant, absolutely nigh to God. Thirdly (verses 20, 21), this second aspect of the supremacy of the greater Priesthood is emphasized and solemnized by one further reference to Psalm ex. 4. There the Eternal, looking upon the mysterious Partner of His throne, is heard not to promise only but to vow, with an oath unalterable as Himself, that the Priesthood of " His Fellow " shall be ever- lasting. No such solemnity of affirmation attended Aaron's investiture. There is something greater here, and more immediately Divine. The " covenant " (ver. 22) committed to the admini- stration of One thus sealed with the oath of Heaven must indeed be " better," and cannot but be final ; the goal of the eternal purpose. Then (verses 23-28) the discourse passes into what we may call its epilogue. The thought recurs to the sublime contrast between the pathetic numerousness of the successors of Aaron, " not suffered to continue by reason of death," and the singleness, the " unsuccessional " identity for ever, of the true Melchizedek, who abides eter- nally. And then, moving to its end, the argu- ment glows and brightens into an " application " to the human heart. We have in Jesus (the Name has now already been pronounced, ver. 22) a Friend, an Intercessor, infinitely and for ever competent to save us, His true Israel. We 26 OUR GREAT MELCHIZEDEK have in Him a High Priest supreme in every attribute of holiness and power, and qualified for His work of intercession by that sacrifice of Himself which is at once solitary and all- sufficient. Behold then the contrast and the conclusion. To a great Dispensation, the pre- paratory, succeeds a greater, the greatest, the other's end and crown. To the " weak " mortal priesthood of the law, never warranted by the vow of God to abide always in possession, succeeds One who is Priest, and King, and Son, sealed for His office by the irrevocable vow, " consecrated for evermore," Such on the whole, as I recall it, was the exposition of my venerable friend, in 1887. Each new reading of the chapter seems to me to bear out the substantial accuracy of it ; indeed the symmetry and order of the chapter make it almost inevitable that some such line should be taken by the explanation. Thus then it lies before us. It is filled in all its parts with Jesus Christ, in His character of the true Melchizedek, our final, everlasting, perfect, supreme, Divine High Priest. This simple treatise is not the place for critical discussions. I do not attempt a formal vindication of the mystical and Messianic refer- ence of Psalm ex. All I can do here, and perhaps all I should do, is to affirm solemnly my PSALM CX 27 belief in it, at the feet of Christ. I am perfectly aware that now, within the Church, and by men unquestionably Christian as well as learned, our Lord's own interpretation of that Psalm,* involv- ing as it does His assertion of its Davidic authorship, is treated as quite open to criticism and disproof. One such scholar does not hesitate to say that, if the majority of modern experts are right as to the non -Davidic authorship, and he seems to think that they are, " our Lord's artjument breaks down." All I would remark upon such utterances, coming from men who all tlie while sincerely adore Christ as their Lord and God, is that they must surely open the way towards conceptions of His whole teaching which make for the ruin of faith. For the question is not at all whether our Kedeemer consented to submit to limits in His conscious human know- ledge ; I for one hold that He assuredly did so. It is whether He consented to that sort of limitation which alone, in respect of imperfection of knowledge, is the real peril of a teacher, and which is his fatal peril — the ignorance of his own ignorance, and a consequent claim to teach where he does not know. In human schools the betrayal of that sort of ignorance is a death- blow to confidence, not only in some special utterance, but in the teacher, for it strikes at * Matt. xxii. 44 ; Luke xx. 42. Cp. Acts ii. 34. 28 OUR GREAT MELCHIZEDEK his claim not to knowledge so much as to wisdom, to balance and insight of thought. I venture to say that recent drifts of speculation shew how rapidly the conception of a fallible Christ developes towards that of a wholly im- perfect and untrustworthy Christ. And, looking again at the vast phenomenon of the Portrait in the Gospels, I hold that the line of thought which offers by very far the least difficulty, not to faith only but to reason, is that which relies absolutely on His affirmations wherever He is pleased actually to affirm. So thinking, I take His exposition of Psalm ex. as for me final. And that exposition guarantees at once a typical mystery latent in Gen. xiv. and the rightness of its development in the passage here before us. But now, what " message " has our chapter for us, in view of the needs of our own time ? First, as to its sacerdotal doctrine. It throws a broad illumination on the grand finality and uniqueness of the mediatorial priesthood of our Lord, the Son of God. It puts into the most vivid possible contrast the age of " the law " and that of Christ as to the priestly conception and institution. Somehow, under the law, there was a need for priests who were " men, having in- firmity." For certain grave purposes (not for all, by any means, even in that legal period) it MEDIATORIAL PRIESTHOOD 29 was the will of God that they should staud between His Israel and Him. But the argument of this chapter, unless it elaborately veils its true self in clouds, goes directly to shew that such properly mediatorial functions, in the age of Christ, are for ever withdrawn from " men, having infirmity." Where they stood of old, one after another, sacrificing, interceding, going in behind the veil, permitted to draw nearer to God, in an official sanctity, than their brethren, there now stands Another, sublime, supreme, alone. He is Man indeed, but He is not " man having infirmity." He is higher than the heavens, while He is one with us. And now our one secret for a complete approach to God is to come to God " through Him." And this, unless the chapter is an elaborate semblance of what it is not, means nothing if it does not mean that between the Church, and between the soul, and the Lord Jesus Christ, there is to come absolutely nothing mediatorial. As little as the Jew, for ceremonial purposes, needed an inter- mediary in dealing with his mortal priest so little do we, for the whole needs of our being, need an intermediary in dealing with our eternal Priest. In the age of Christ, no office can for one moment put one " man having infirmity " nearer to God than another, if this chapter means what 30 OUR GREAT MELCHIZEDEK it says. Mediatorial priesthood, a very different thing from commissioDed pastorate, has no place in apostolic Christianity, with the vast exception of its sublime and solitary place in the Person of our most blessed Lord. Then further, the chapter, far from giving us merely the cold gift (as it would be if this were all) of a negative certainty against unlawful human claims, gives us, as its true, its inmost message, a glorious positive. It gives us the certainty that, for every human heart which asks for God, this wonderful Christ, personal, eternal, human, Divine, is quite immediately accessible. The hands of need and trust have but to be lifted, and they hold Him. And He is the Son. In Him we have the Father. We do indeed " draw nigh to God through Him." Therefore we will do it. The thousand con- fusions of our time shall only make this Divine simplicity the more precious to us. We will at once and continually take Jesus Christ for granted in all the fulness and splendour of His High-priesthood after the order of Melcliizedek. That Priesthood is for ever what it is ; it is as new and young to-day in its virtue as if the oath had but to-day been spoken, and He had but to-day sat down at the right hand. Happy we if we use Him thus. He blesses A STORY OF GRACE 31 those who do so with blessings which they can- not analyse, but which they know. Many years ago a Christian lady, daughter of a saintly Non- conformist pastor in the west of Dorset, told me how, in a then distant time, her father had striven to teach a sick man, a young gipsy in a wandering camp, to read, and to come to Christ. The camp moved after a while, and the young man, dying of consumption, took a Bible with him. Time rolled on, and one day a gray-haired gipsy came to the minister's door ; it was the youth's father, with the news of his son's happy death, and with his Bible, " Sir, I cannot read a word : but he was always reading it, and he marked what he liked with a stick from the fire. And he said you would find one place marked with two lines ; it was everything to my poor lad." The leaves were turned, and the stick was found to have scored two lines at the side of Heb. vii. 25: "He is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by Him, seeing that He ever liveth to make intercession for them." CHAPTER V THE BETTER COVENANT Heb. viii. THE Person and greatness of our High Priest are now full before the readers of the Epistle. The paragraph we enter next, after one more deliberate contemplation of His dignity and His qualifications, proceeds to ex- pound His relation to the better and eternal Covenant. We shall find here also messages appropriate to our time. The first step then is a review, a summing up, a " look again " upon the true King of Eight- eousness and peace (verses 1, 2). " Such a High Priest we have." It is a wonderful affir- mation, not only of His existence but of His relation to " us," His people. " We have " Him. He has taken His seat indeed " at the right hand of the throne of the majesty in the heavens." But this great exaltation has not removed Him for a moment out of our posses- sion ; we have Him. He is now the great 32 WE HAVE 33 Minister, the supreme sacerdotal Functionary, of the heavenly sanctuary, " the true taber- nacle," T% aK'i)vrj^ Trj<; a\7}6ivrj<;, the non-figura- tive reality of which the Mosaic structure was only the shadow ; the true scene of unveiled Presence and immortal worship, " pitched " by Him whose face makes Heaven, and makes it all one temple. But this sublimity of our Priest's place and power does not make Him in the least less ours ; we have Him. The words invite us to a new and deliberate look upward, and then to a recollection deeper than ever that He is held spiritually in our very hands ; that He is a possession, nearer to us than any other. Then (verses 3 and following) the thought moves towards the sacrificial and offertorial qualifications of this great and most sacred Person. He is what He is, our High Priest, our Minister of the sanctuary above, on perfectly valid grounds. For He is, what every sacerdotal minister must be, an Offerer. And He is this in a sense, in a way, congruous to His heavenly position. He has no blood of goats and calves to present, like the priests on earth. Indeed, were He " on earth " (ver. 4), this greatest of all High Priests " would not even be a priest " (ovB' av rjv lepev'i), an ordinary priest. For that function, says the Writer, is already filled, 3 34 THE BETTER COVENANT " according to the law," by the Aaronic order, to which He never belonged and never could belong (see vii. 13, 14). It is in charge of the sacred servants (Xarpevova-cv) of the earthly sanctuary, the God-given type and shadow (ver. 5) of the realities of Heaven, but no more than their type and shadow, partial and transient. No, His sacerdotal qualification is of another sort and a greater. What it is which " He hath to offer" in the celestial Holiest is not yet explicitly said ; that is reserved for the ninth chapter, to which this is but the vestibule. But already the Epistle emphasizes the truth that " He hath someivhat to offer," so that we may fully realize the completeness of His high- priestly power. It may be well to pause here, and to ask whether this passage reveals that our Lord Jesus Christ is at this moment " offering " for us, in His heavenly life. We are all aware that this has been widely held and earnestly pressed, sometimes into inferences which, as far as I can see, cannot at all be borne even by the doctrine that He is offering for us now. In particular it is said that, if He in glory is offering for His Church, then His Church must, in some sense, as in a counterpart, be offering here on earth, in union with Him. In short, there must still be priests on earth who are ministers of " the example OFFERING AND OFFERER 35 and shadow of heavenly things." But surely, if this Epistle makes anything clear, it makes it clear that our great Priest is the superseding fulfilment of all such ministrations done by " men having infirmity." It is His glory, and it is ours, that He is known by us as our one and all-suflicient Offerer and Mediator. It is precisely as such that " we have Him," in a way to distinguish our position and privilege in a magnificent sense from that of those who needed the sacerdotal aid of their mortal brethren. But then further, does this passage really intimate at all that He is offering now ? The thought appears to be decisively negatived by the grandeur of the terras of the first verse of this chapter. Where, in the heavenly sanctuary, is our High Priest now ? He has " taken His seat on the right hand of the throne of the majesty." But enthronement is a thought out of line with the act and attitude of oblation. Tlie offerer stands before the Power he ap- proaches. Our Priest is seated — where Deity alone can sit. Does not this tell us that the words (ver. 3), " It is necessary that He too should have some- thing to offer," are to be explained not of a continuous historical procedure (to which idea, by the way, the aorist verb irpoaeve'yK'p would hardly be appropriate), but as the statement of a 36 THE BETTER COVENANT principle in terms of time ? The " necessity " is, not that He should have something to offer now, and to-morrow, and always, but that the matter and act of offering should belong to Him. And they do so belong, in principle and effect, for priestly purposes, by having been once and for ever handled and performed by Him. His " need " is, not to be always offering, but to be always an Offerer. He meets that need by being for ever the Priest who had Himself to offer, and who offered Himself, and who now dispenses from His sacerdotal seat the benedic- tions based upon the sacrifice of which He is for ever the once accepted Offerer. Only thus viewed, I venture to say, can this phrase be read in its full harmony with the whole Epistle. " He hath somewhat to offer," in the sense that He has for ever the grand sacerdotal qualification of being an Offerer who, having executed that function, now bears to all eternity its character. But He is not therefore always executing the function. Otherwise He must descend from His throne. But His en- thronement, His session, is a fact of His present position as important and characteristic as possible in this whole Epistle. Aaron was not always offering. But he was always an offerer. On the morrow of the Atonement Day he was as much an offerer WHAT THE COVENANT IS 37 as on the day itself. All through the year, even until the next Atonement, he was still an offerer. He exercised his priestly functions at all times because, in principle, he "had some- what to offer " in its proper time. Oitr High Priest knows only one Atonement Day, and it is over for ever. And His Israel have it for their privilege and glory not to be " serving unto an example and shadow " of even His work and office, but to be going always, daily and hourly, direct to Him in His perfect Priesthood, in which they always " have " Him, and to be always abiding, in virtue of Him, " boldly," " with con- fidence," in the very presence of the Lord. Then the chapter moves forward (verses 6 and following) to consider the relation between our High Priest and the Covenant of which He is the Mediator. Here begins one of the great themes of the Epistle. It will recur again and again, till at last we read (xiii. 20) of "the blood of the Covenant eternal." This pregnant subject is introduced by a solemn reference to the " promises upon which has been legislated," legally insituted, v€vofiodeTi]Tat, this new compact between God and man. The reference is to the thirtieth chapter of Jeremiah, from which an extract is here made at lengtli. There the prophet, in the name of his God, ex- plicitly foretells the advent of what we may 38 THE BETTER COVENANT reverently call a new departure in the revealed relations between Jehovah and His people. At Sinai He had engaged to bless them, yet under conditions which left them to discover the total inability of their own sin-stricken wills to meet His holy while benignant will. They failed, they broke the pact, and judgment followed them of course. But now another order is to be taken. Their King and Lawgiver, without for one moment ceasing to be such, will also undertake another function, wholly new, as regards the method of covenant. He will place Himself so upon their side as Himself to readjust and empower their affections and their wills. He " will put His laws into their mind and write them upon their hearts," and " they shall all know Him," with the knowledge which is life eternal. And furtlier, as the antecedent to all this, in order to open the path to it, to place them where this wonderful blessing can rightly reach and fill them, their King and Lawgiver pledges Himself to a 2?rct'to?cation of the degraded, because at the heart of his useful life he spiritually knows " Him that is invisible," and is animated by the thought that he works for beings capable, after this life's discipline, of " enjoying Him fully for ever." He labours for man, man on earth, because he loves God in heaven, and because he believes that God made man and redeemed man for an immortality to which time is only tlie short while all-important avenue. In the calmest and most normal Christian periods, accordingly, for the least perilous and heroic forms of faithful Christian service, it is vital to remember that attitude and action of the soul which we call 70 FAITH AND ITS POWER faith. For faith is essential both to the victories and the utilities of the Christian life, just so far as that life touches always at its living spring " things hoped for," " things not seen." And at a time like that of the first readers of the Epistle every such necessity was enhanced indefinitely, both by the perils and threatenings which they had to face and by the majestic illusion to which they were continually exposed — the illusion under which the order of the Law, because it was Divine in origin and magnificent in its visible embodiment, looked as if it must be the permanent, the final, phase of sacred truth and life on earth. In our next chapter we will consider both the account of faith here given and some main points in the illustration of it by examples. CHAPTER IX FAITH AND ITS ANNALS Heb. xi. (II.) WE considered in the last chapter the account of Faith with which the apostolic Writer opens this great recital of the " life, work, and triumph of faith" in holy human lives. His words, as we found, lend themselves to some variety of explanation in detail : the term v7r6(TTacn<; alone may be interpreted in at least three ways. But I do not think that this need disturb us as to the essential meaning of the description. Each and all of the renderings leave us with the thought that faith has a power in it to make the thing hoped-for act upon us as if it were attained, and the invisible as if it were before our eyes. We may pause so far further over the description of faith here as to point out that it is precisely this, a description, not a definition. To quote Heb. xi. 1 as a good definition of faith is to mistake its import altogether. I have often recalled, in speech or writing, a story told 72 FAITH AND ITS ANNALS me forty years ago by an Oxford friend when we were masters together at a public school. He had attended a Greek Testament lecture at his college a few years before, and the lecturer one day asked the class for a definition of faith. Some one quoted Heb. xi. 1, and the lecturer's answer was, " You could not have given a worse definition." My old friend, a " broad " but most reverent Churchman, referred to this as an instance of painful flippancy. It may have been so. But I am prepared to think that the lecturer may not have meant it so at all. He may only have expressed rather crudely his view, the right view, to my mind, that we have here not a definition of faith at all but a description of faith as an operative force, an account of what faith looks like when it is at work ; and this is a very different matter. What is a definition ? A precise and ex- clusive statement of the essentials of a thing, such that it will fit no other thing. A description may be something altogether different from this. It may so handle the object that the terms are not exclusive at all, but are equally applicable to something else ; as here for example, where the phraseology would equally well describe imagination in its more vivid forms — a thing as different as possible from faith. To be quite practical, we have here, if we read this first DESCRIPTION NOT DEFINITION 73 verse in the light of the whole subsequent development of the chapter, a description of faith at work, of the potency and victories of faith, rather than a definition of faith in its distinctive essence. A true parallel to this passage is the familiar sentence, " Knowledge is power." Those words do not define knowledge, obviously ; to do that would demand a totally different phrase. What the words do is to give us one great resultant of knowledge ; to tell us that the possession and use of knowledge endows the man who knows with a force and efficiency which he would lack without it. Few words are more elastic and adaptable than the verb sub- stantive. " Is " can denote a wide variety of ideas, from that of personal identity, as when I see that yonder distant figure is my brother ; to that of equivalence, as when a stamped and signed piece of thin paper called a bank-note is five pounds of gold ; or to that of mere repre- sentation, as when another piece of paper, or a sheet of canvas, duly lined and coloured by the artist to show the semblance of a human face, is the King, or is my father ; or to that of result and effect, as when we say that knowledge is power, or that seeing is believing.* * It is obvious that these elementary reflections have every- thing to do with the need of caution in explaining those most sacred words, "This is my body which is given for you." 74 FAITH AND ITS ANNALS Here we have precisely that last application of the verb substantive, only in an exact and most noble antithesis. " Seeing is believing," says the familiar proverb. " Believing is seeing," says the Divine word here. That is to say, when the human soul so relies upon God that His word is absolute and sufficient for its certainties, this reliance, this faith, has in it the potency of sight. It is as sure of the promised blessing as if it were a present possession. It is as ready to act upon " the things not seen as yet," the laws, powers, hopes beyond the veil, as if all was in open view to the eyes of the body. The whole course of the chapter, when it comes down to particulars and persons, bears this out. From first to last the message carried to us by the lives and actions of the faithful is this, that they took their Lord at His word, simply as His word, and in the power of that reliance found themselves able to act as if the unseen were seen and the hoped-for were present. " The elders " (ver. 2) are in view from the first — that is to say, the pre-Christian saints, who were in that sense distinctively men who proved the power of faith, that they all lived and died before the visible fulfilment of the great promise of salvation. To them, to be sure, or rather to many of them, not to all, merciful helps were THE ELDERS 75 granted. The unseen and the hoped-for was sometimes, not always, made more tangible to them by the grant of some sign and token, some portent or miracle, by the way. But the careful Bible-reader knows how very little such things are represented in the holy histories as being the " daily bread " of the life of the old believers. Even in the lives where they occur most often they come at long and difficult intervals, and in some lives not at all, or hardly at all. And assuredly we gather here that, to the mind of the apostolic Writer, no experience of miracles, no permission even to hold direct colloquy with the Eternal, ever made up for that immeasurable " aid to faith " which we enjoy who know the Incarnate Son as fact, and walk on an earth which has seen the God-Man traverse it, and die upon it, and rise again. These " elders " were men called to live, in an eminent and most trying degree, not by sight but by faith, by mere reliance upon a Promiser. Therefore their living witness to the capacity of faith to make the unseen visible and the hoped-for present is the more precious to us. We, with the Christ of God manifested to us, displayed in history, experienced in the heart — what are not we to find the power of faith to be in our lives, having, for our supreme seal upon faith, the promise fulfilled, the Image ^6 FAITH AND ITS ANNALS of the Invisible God, made one with our nature and dwelling in our hearts ? One partial exception, and only one, to this great ruling lesson of the chapter is to be noted ; it occurs in the second verse. There " by faith we perceive that the worlds," the (Bon^, the dispensations and evolutions of created being, " have been framed," perfected, adjusted to one another, " by the Word of God, so that not from things which appear has that which is seen originated." These words appear to be inserted where they stand in order, so to speak, to carry the sequence of the references to the Old Testament down from its very first page. The work of faith has exercise in face of the mysterious narrative of Creation, and in this one instance the exercise is quoted as what concerns us now quite as much as " the elders." They like us, we like them, get our guarantee as to the facts of the primal past not by sight but by faith, by taking God at His word. He, in His revelation, tells us that " in the be- ginning " — the beginning of whatever existence is other than eternal — " God created." Things finite, things visible, came into original being not as evolved from previous similar material, but as of His will. But when that pregnant side-word has once been said, the argument settles itself forthwith THE ELDERS AND THEIR FAITH ^^ upon the recorded examples of the potency of faith as " the elders " exercised it. We see man after man enabled to treat the invisible as visible, the promised as present, by reliant rest upon the word of God, however conveyed. To Abel, we know not how, it was divinely said that the sacrificed " firstling " was the acceptable oflering, and, antecedent to any possible experience, he offered it. To Enoch, we know not how, it was made known that the Eternal, as invisible to him as to us, cared for man's worshipping company, and he addressed himself tlirougli his age-long life to " walk with God." Noah was apprised, for the first time in man's known history, of an approaching cataclysm and of the way of escape ; the promise came to him wrapped in the cloud of an awful warning, and it was long delayed, but he acted upon it in the steady energy of faith. Abraham was " called," we know not precisely how, but in some way which tested his reliance on things " not seen as yet," and he set out on that wonderful life of a hundred years of faith. He renounced the settled habits and old civilization of Chaldea for the new life of a Syrian nomad, " settling permanently in tents " (eV a-Kr]uat<; Karot,K7]aa<;), he and his son and his grandson after him, all in view of an invisible future made visible by the trusted promise, a future culminating at last to his " eye 78 FAITH AND ITS ANNALS of faith," so here we are solemnly assured, in the city of the saints, in the Canaan of the heavens. The same reliance on the sheer word of promise nerved him to the awful ordeal of the ail-but immolation of his son. And that son in his turn, against all appearances, and rather bowing to the Word of God than embracing it, blessed his least-loved son above his dearest ; and that son in his turn, and his son in his turn, carried the process on, treating the greatness of Ephraim and the deliverance from Egypt as things seen and present, because God had so spoken. The parents of Moses, and then Moses himself, in his strange life of disappointments and wonders, deal likewise with the future, the unseen, the seemingly impossible, on the warrant of a promise. Figures as little heroic in natural character as Sarah, as little noble in life as Eahab, take place in the long procession, as those who treat the invisible as visible by faith. So do the thronging " elders " of ver. 3 2 — a group singularly diverse in everything but this victory over the seen and present by faith in the promise. So do the unnamed confessors and martyrs of the closing paragraph, the heart- broken, the tortured, the wanderers of the dens and caves, who all alike, amidst a thousand differences of condition and of character, " ob- tained a good report through faith " ; and all THE ELDERS AND THEIR FAITH 79 won through faith that victory, so great when we reflect upon it — that they died " not having received the promise." They trusted to the very end. When they sank down in death upon their shadowy path of pilgrimage, " the promise," the promised Christ, had not yet come. Never- theless they treated the hope of Him as fact, and they won their victory by faith. And now they are parts and members of the " great cloud " who watch us in our turn — us, with things unseen and hoped-for still in front, but with Jesus at our side. CHAPTER X FOLLOWERS OF THEM Hkb. xii. 1-14 THE Epistle approaches its close. The Writer has much yet to say to the disciples upon many things, all connected with that main interest of their lives, a resolute fidelity to the Lord, to the Gospel, and to one another. But he has not yet quite done with that side of their " exceeding need " to which the antidote is the faith which can deal with the future as the present, with the unseen as the seen. Upon this theme, from one aspect or another, is spent the passage now before us. First, the appeal is to the recollection that the combat, the race, the victory of faith, as it was for the Hebrew believers, " the contest set before ns" (ver. 1), not only had been fought and won before them by the saints of the old time, but that those saints were now, from their blessed rest, as " spirits of the just made perfect" (ver. 23), watchers and witnesses of 8o THE WITNESSES 8i their successors' course. " We have, lying around us, so great a cloud of witnesses " (ver. 1). "We" are running, like the com- petitors in the Hellenic stadium, in the public view of a mighty concourse, so vast, so aggre- gated, so placed aloft, that no word less great than " cloud " occurs as its designation : that " long cloud " as it is finely called in Isaac Watts' noble hymn, " Give me the wings of faith." True, the multitudinous watchers are unseen, but this only gives faith another opportunity of exercise ; we are to treat the Blessed as seen, for we know that they are there, living to God, one with us, fellows of our life and love. So let us address ourselves afresh to the spiritual race, the course of faith. Let us, as athletes of the soul, strip all encumbrance off, " every weight " of allowed wrong, all guilty links with the world of rebellion and self-love ; " the sin which doth so easily beset us," cling- ing so soon around the feet, like a net of fine but stubborn meshes, till the runner gives up the hopeless effort and is lost.* I thus explain the " witnesses " to mean spectators, watchers, not testifiers. The con- * I cannot think possible the alternative (marginal) render- ing of €VTr fpiffTarov in the Revised Version — "admired by many." There is example for the meaning in classical Greek, but the idea is totally out of keeping with the spirit of this passage. 6 82 FOLLOWERS OF THEM text seems to me to decide somewhat positively for this explanation. It is an altogether pictorial context ; the imagery of the foot-race comes suddenly up, and in a moment raises before us the vision of the stadium and its surroundings. The reader cannot see the course with his inner eyes without also seeing those hosts of eager lookers-on which made, on every such occasion, in the old world as now, the life of the hour. In such a context nothing but explicit and positive reasons to the contrary could give to the word " witnesses," and to tlie word " cloud " in connexion with it, any other allusion. True, these watchers are all, as a fact, evidential " witnesses " also, testifiers to the infinite benefit and success of the race of faith. But that thought lies almost hidden behind the other. It is as loving, sympathetic, inspiring lookers-on that the old saints, from Abel on- wards, are here seen gathered, thronging and intent, around us as we run. The conception runs off of course into mystery, as every possible conception about the unseen docs, even when Scripture is most explicit about unseen facts. We ask, and ask in vain, what is the medium through which these observers watch us, the air and light, as it were, in which their vision acts ; what is their proximity to us all the while ; to what extent AN INSPIRING REVELATION 83 they are able to know the entire conditions of our race. But all this leaves faith in peaceful possession of a fact of unspeakable animation. It tells the discouraged or tired Christian, tempted to think of the unseen as a dark void, that it is rather a bright and populous world, in mysterious touch and continuity with this, and that our forerunners, from those of tlie remotest past down to the last-called beloved one who has passed out of our sight, know enough about us to mark our advance and to prepare their welcome at the goal. In that rich treasury of sacred song, Hymns from the Land of Luther, is included the trans- lation of a noble hymn by Simon Dach, wie sclig seid ihr doch, ihr Frommen, " how happy arc ye, saints forgiven." That hymn beautifully illustrates this verse. It is written rcsponsively all through. One stanza, sung upward, is the utterance from below of the pilgrim Church, longing for her rest. The next, sung from above, is the answer of the Blessed, telling of their love and sympathy, taught them by their own similar sufferings, of their bright forevicw of tlie celestial crown reserved for their still toiling brethren. So the two choirs answer each other, turn by turn, till at last both join in a glorious concert of blended song, a closing strain 84 FOLLOWERS OF THEM of faith aud praise. Let us listen often for those answers from above. But the holy Writer has more to say yet about the motives to faith. He points the weary saints upward, even beyond the " cloud," to a Form radiant and supreme. They are to run, conscious of the witnesses, but yet more intently " looking off (atpopwvre'i) unto Jesus, the supreme Leader (ap-xriyov) and Perfecter of faith " ; that is to say, the Lord of the whole host of the believing, and Himself the consum- mate Worker in the field of faith, who, for a joy promised hut not seen, " endured the Cross," when its immediate aspect was an inexpressible outrage and disgrace ; reaching the throne of all existence, as Son of Man, in spite of every possible appearance to the contrary (ver. 2). Yes, and not only was that final victory thus won by Him, but He arrived at it 1)y a path full of the conflicts which threaten faith. He " endured the contradiction of sinners against Himself " (ver. 3). Year by year, day by day, from the Pharisee, from the worldling, from the leaders of religion, from the inconstant crowd. He had " contradiction " to endure — sometimes even from " the men of His own household." He was challenged to prove His claims ; He was insulted over His assertion of them, or over His silence about them. In every way, at every turn, they THE SUPREME BELIEVER 85 spoke against Him to His face, as He slowly advanced, through a life of love and suffering, to the Agony and the Crucifixion. Let us not think that all this put no strain, even in the King Messiah, upon faith. It may seem scarcely reverent (I know devout and thoughtful Christians who have felt it to he so) to speak of our blessed Lord as exercising faith, as being the supreme Believer. But we need not shrink from the thought. It is no more irreverent, surely, than to accept the evidence of the Gospels to His perfect human capacity to be weary, to be surprised, to be specially moved to compassion by the sight of suffering. In His sinless conformity " in all things to His brethren " there was never for one moment room in Him — of this we may be amply sure — for error of thought or of word, as He acted as the supreme and absolute Prophet of His Church. But there was room, so we are ex- pressly told, on one tremendous occasion at least (Matt. xxvi. 37), for a mysterious "be- wilderment" {ahr]ixovelv) of His blessed human soul. Can we doubt that the victory won in the Garden, after which He went with profound calmness to the unjust priest, and Pilate, and the Cross, was of the nature of a victory of faith ? Did He not then treat the coming " joy " as a reality although, in so awful a sense and 86 FOLLOWERS OF THEM measure He did not " feel " it then ? The " be- wilderment " did not drive Him back from our redemption ; and why ? Because " He trusted in God that He would deliver Him " (Ps. xxii. 9 ; Matt, xxvii, 42), whatever should be the con- tents of " the cup " from which His whole humanity turned away as almost impossible to drink. And may we not be sure that on many a previous occasion of minor and yet bitter trial, when evil men gathered round Him with cynical objections and ruthless denials of His claims, the victory was akin to the victory of Geth- semane ? Often, surely, a strange " bewilder- ment " must have beset the Redeemer's soul, of which the external token was the sigh, the groan, the tears, which shewed Him to be so truly Man. We all hold, in full doctrinal orthodoxy, that the Lord's sufferings, both of soul and body, were no " docetic " semblance but a deep and infinitely pathetic reality. But we need at times to think somewhat deliberately in order to receive the full impression of that truth upon the heart. And then surely we are constrained to see in Him, who thus really suffered and really " en- dured," the supreme Exemplar of the victory of faith, the perfect Sympathizer with the tried believer. WHEN COMES THE EVIL DAY 87 From this pregnant thought, of the faith exercised by Jesus, the disciple is directly led in the remainder of our passage to the practical inferences for himself. The days, for those first readers of the Epistle, were indeed evil. Though not yet called to martyrdom (ver. 4), they were hard beset, not only by importunate reasonings and appeals which, as we have seen all along, were straining their spiritual allegiance, but by actual outrages (see e.g. x. 34), by the " scourg- ing" (ver. 6) of bitter social persecution. Well, " looking off unto " Him who had so greatly endured, they were, in these things also, to see the unseen and to presentiate the future. From the Proverbs (iii. 11, 12), that book where the apostolic insight so often finds the purest spiritual messages,'^ he quotes (verses 5, 6) the tender words which bid the chastened child see in his chastening the assurance (ver. 8) of his happy, holy sonship in the home of a Father, " the Father of our spirits," who, unlike our earthly fathers even at their best (and that was a noble best indeed), not only chastens, but chastens with an unerring result of holiness in the submissive child — yea, a holiness which is one with His own (ver. 10), His Spirit in our wills. * It was evidently a book dear to St. Peter's mind, as liis First Epistle shews. 88 FOLLOWERS OF THEM Beautiful is the sympathy of this appeal to live, by faith, the life of victorious patience. " All chastening, for the present, seems not to belong to joy but grief" (ver. 11). Yes, the immediate pain is here fully recognized, not ignored. It is not spoken of as if, in view of its sequel, it did not matter. " It belongs to grief." Scripture is full of this tender insight into the bitterness of even our salutary sorrows, and its appeals to patience are all the more potent for that insight. " Nevertheless, afterward, it pro- duces the peace-bringing fruit of righteousness," the sense of a profound inward rest, found in conformity to the " sweet, beloved will of God," in living correspondence to the Father's rule, " for those who have been exercised, as in a spiritual gymnasium (yeyvfjLvaa-fiivoi';), thereby." That " exercise " was to tell at once, as they surrendered their wills to it in faith, in a present sense of the certainty of future blessing. " Brace the slack hands " to toil, " and the unstrung knees" to march (ver. 12), "and make straight paths for your feet," using your will, faith- strengthened, to choose the line of the will of God, and that alone. So should " the lame thing " be " healed " rather than " turned aside." The walk, feeble and halting always when the will is divided, should be restored to firmness and certainty again. AFTERWARD 89 "Nevertheless, afterward." That is the watchword of the whole pregnant passage. Nature, shortsighted and impatient, can deal with the seen and the present only. Grace, in its victorious form of patient faith, already takes hold upon the " afterward," and works on, and walks on, " as seeing Him that is invisible." With the thought of the witness-cloud around us, and "looking off" to the Prince of Faith, ascended, yet present with us, and sure of the ultimate and eternal " fruit of righteousness " which lies hidden in the chastening of the Father of our spirits — we too will live by faith, taking God at His word, and saying Amen to His will, even to the end. CHAPTER XI SINAI AND SION Heb. xii. 14-28 THE paragraph before us is largely concerned with the inner life of the believing com- munity, its cohesion member with member, and the call to each member and to all to " walk warily in dangerous days," in the path of evan- gelical holiness. The Writer lays it upon them (ver. 14) to "pursue peace with all," such peace as always tends, even in bad times, to reward the "sons of peace," while they so behave themselves as never on their own part to con- tribute a factor to avoidable strife, and while the intiuence of their meek consistency leavens in some measure the mass around them. With equal and concurrent care they are to " pursue sanctification." It is to be their strong ambition to develope and deepen incessantly that dedica- tion of themselves to the Holy One which will give them at once the standard and the secret of holiness, by bringing them into immediate 90 WARNINGS 91 contact with Him who is at once their law and their life. They are to " live out," in the spirit of a resolute quest after fuller and yet fuller attainment, the fact that He has redeemed them to be " a people of His own possession " ; re- membering, with a solemn simplicity of con- viction, that only " the pure in heart " shall ever be able to " see God." For the spirit which refuses to come into a surrendered harmony with His Spirit might be set in the midst of heaven itself, yet it would be blind, it would be blinded — by that alien glory. They are to keep watch and oversight upon one another (ver. 15), mutually observant all round, to see that the life of faith and love is alive indeed. Does any one find his fellow-believer " falling short of the grace of God," sinking into conduct no better than the world's ? This must at once disquiet the observer, and call out his loving warnings, or at least his anxious intercessions ; for the declining convert inevitably extends an infiuence of decline around him, and the issue will be, in the end, a declining Churcli. Is " any root of bitterness growing up " ? Is there (see Deut. xxix. 18) any Christian in the company so fallen, so " embittered " by alienation from his Lord, as to be a cause around him of " defile- ment," so as to stain ultimately large circles {ol TToWol) with the deep pollution of a practical 92 SINAI AND SION apostasy from holiness ? Is there here and there a personal example of spiritual infidelity {iropvos:) to the Lord, of that radically " secular " (/3€/3T)Xo precisely attaches ? The glory is to the Father in the Son, to the Son in the Father. One closing word remains. Observe this designation just here applied to the Lord Jesus Christ; "the Shepherd, the great Shepherd, of the sheep." It is noteworthy, because in our Epistle it stands here quite alone. We have had the Christ of God presented to us through- out under the totally different character of the High Priest, the great Self-Immolator of the Cross, now exalted in the glory of His High Priesthood to be the Giver of blessing from the Throne. To Him in that sublime aspect the thought of the Hebrew believer, so sorely tempted to look away from Him, to look backward to the old and ended order, has been steadily directed, for spiritual rest of conscience and for loyalty of will. But here, true to that haUt of the Bible, if the word may be used, with which it accumulates on Him the most diverse I20 LAST WORDS titles iu the effort to set forth His fulness, the Writer exchanges all this range of thought for the one endearing designation of the Shepherd of the sheep. It was as such that He went down to death, giving for the flock His life. It was as such that He is " brought again," to rescue, to watch, to feed, to guide His beloved charge, " in the power of life indissoluble." Not without purpose surely was the Lord left pictured thus in the view of His tried and tempted followers. In the region of conviction and contemplation He was to shine always before them as the High Priest upon His throne, the more than fulfilment of every type and shadow, the goal of Prophecy, " the end of the Law." But He was to be all this as being also, close beside them, their Shepherd, great and good. He was to be with them in the pasture, and in the desert, and in the valley of the shadow of death. They had followed Him indeed as their Sacrifice without the gate. But precisely there He took to Himself His resurrection-life, to be their Companion and their Watcher for evermore. The Lord was their Shepherd, and He is ours ; they should not, and we shall not, want. 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