Verse 21
The Christian Conqueror.
This is the last of seven honours set before the Christian conquerors in the epistles to the seven Churches; and the throne of which this blessing speaks is itself described in St. John's next vision. We know what a throne it was which he saw unveil itself before him. We see at once that this throne means the centre of creation; that the glory of it is as of One invisible, and, except by His own will, unknowable; and that in that heart and centre of all things lives One who has suffered, One who has died, One who is and who ever has remained sinless: the Lamb that had been slain and dieth no more is in the midst of the throne. Perfect sympathy with pain, perfect deliverance from evil, are there in absolute life and light; and the Lamb, the Victor-Victim, speaks, and says, "He that overcometh, I will give to him to sit down with Me in My throne, even as I also overcame and sat down with My Father in His throne."
I. He that overcometh. When St. John wrote, people, like that faithful martyr Antipas, were overcoming by their own blood, and the whole Apocalypse shows a world about to be red with martyrdoms. Yet even then the word "overcoming" is used in these seven brief letters in connection with trials and difficulties which were not necessarily to end with them. That was only the supreme method of solving such problems of life as were otherwise insoluble. There were final conflicts in those days in which the forces of God and of the world were grappled together in the lives of men; the spirits of light and darkness incarnated themselves in men's daily action in forms so violent that he who meant to give God the victory in his own life could often do it only by giving his own life over to the death. But if the extremity of the struggle is not now commonly suffered to work itself out to the same bitter end with the knowledge of the onlooking world, it never could be suffered now yet similar, and sometimes the same, problems have to be solved in men's lives still, and still the Christian is called to overcome, and still he can often be victor only by being first a victim, as the Lamb was; and if he overcomes, his place is still henceforth the centre of all things. He sits with Him on the throne in true sympathy with the pain of this world, and also having himself a share in this world's deliverance from pain and from all evil.
II. What, then, are these problems which once could only be solved by readiness to die for the right solution, and which still present themselves for solutions for solutions on the rightness or wrongness of which almost all, if not all, about us depends? Such problems when St. John wrote were all the awful wickedness of the age; the conventional false worships which were then the cementing of the State and of all society; slavery; gladiator shows; one vast licentiousness of life. Men and women died freely in combating such things, for there was that within them which was a perpetual war with the spirit of these things. Among the problems outside us are such expenses of civilisation still: licentiousness of life; the classes that are sacrificed to it; the tender age of corruption; again, the miserable, unclean, indecent abodes which are all that civilised towns and villages offer, and grudge, to their myriads or their hundreds; again, our submissiveness to wealth, and our submissiveness to numbers, and our extreme difficulty in the way of simplicity of life or of speech, and now, even now, the ancient difficulty seeming to begin again of how to live, and talk, and think Christianly among unbelievers. One who does his own honest part in healing the world's sorrow and lightening the world's burdens, and is not ashamed to say he does it for Christ he is the overcoming one who helps to solve the world's greatest problems. That is the part which must be greater in the world to come than it can be now; for we shall not find ourselves able to do these things except in the spirit of Christ.
Archbishop Tait, Family Churchman, May 23rd, 1883.
Be the first to react on this!
