Verses 20-25
Questions and Answers
Questions upon religious subjects will be asked, and we ought to be prepared to answer them in some degree at least. We are not called upon to be irrational that is, without reason even in our Christianity. We did not part with our reason when we were enabled to yield ourselves to the higher inspiration of faith. We ought to be able to say something in reply to inquiries addressed to us concerning the most important portions of our history. We ought, therefore, to be instructed in our own doctrine, and to have some clear conception of the way along which Christian doctrine has passed; and we ought, further, to be able to identify ourselves with that doctrine, and thus give sharpness and clearness to all our religious recitals and arguments. Moses told Israel that questions would be asked. The son would ask of the father the meaning of institutions, statutes, and judgments, and the father was bound to reply to the son's natural and rational inquiry. Such is our position now. Suppose that one wholly uninstructed as to Christian faith and doctrine and practice should ask us, What mean ye? account for yourselves; what are you doing? and why do you act as you do? it would be pitiful to the point of unpardonableness if in presence of such an inquiry we were dumb; our speechlessness would show that our piety is a mere superstition. It is surely, therefore, incumbent upon us to be able to give some reason or explanation for the faith and the hope that are in us. We cannot adopt a better reply than the answer suggested by Moses. No originality of answer is required. The leader of Israel gave the only reply that will stand the test of reason and the wear and tear of time. All we need is in this paragraph.
Adopting this reply, what answer should we make to the kind of inquirer now supposed? We should, first of all, make the answer broadly historical. We are not called to invention, or speculation, or the recital of dreams: we do not want any man's impressions as a basis of rational and universal action; we call for history, facts, realities, points of time that can be identified, and circumstances that can be defined and have a determinate value fixed upon them. We could enlarge the answer which Israel was to give, and ennoble it. We, too, were in a house of bondage. That must be our first point. The house was dark; the life of the prison was intolerable; no morning light penetrated the dungeon; no summer beauty visited the eyes of those who were bound in fetters. Human nature had gone astray. The great cry of the ages was, "All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way;" "There is none righteous, no, not one." The Christian argument starts there. All Christian doctrine is founded upon that one fact, or bears direct and vital relation to it.
We, too, could add with Israel, human nature was divinely delivered. The action began in heaven. No man's arm delivered us; no man's eye could look upon us with pity that was unstained and unenfeebled by sin. God's eye pitied; God's arm was outstretched to save. Great was the compassion of God and tender his love; and every action of his hand, though an action of almightiness, was chastened, softened, mellowed, by an indwelling and overflowing tenderness.
Then we could continue the reply, and say the divine deliverance was attested by many "signs and wonders." Christianity has its miracles corresponding, according to time and speciality of need, to the miracles wrought in Egypt by the Jehovah of Israel. We do not surrender the miracles. Some of them we have seen. As we grow away from them we grow towards them, in their highest and most spiritual meaning. To-day miracles are wrought miracles of the higher sort: an inner vision is opened, the ear of the soul is excited to reverent attention, the whole nature is transformed, changed, lifted up into new relations, and made glad with new and immortal hopes. The temple of God is a temple of miracles. The nature of the miracles may have undergone considerable change, but their inner meaning is an eternal truth: it abides through all the ages, for every purpose of God in the miracles which were wrought was a purpose of life, growth, holiness, transformation into his own image. The purpose is in reality the miracle. That being so, the miracles never cease, for today the Gospel performs nothing less than the miracle of making the dead live, and the blind see, and the dumb speak in new and beauteous eloquence. We, too, had a Deliverer, as Israel had; the name of our Deliverer is Jesus Christ. He was born in Bethlehem; he proclaimed himself the Son of man, the Son of God; he looked upon the whole race with eyes filled with tears; he tasted death for every man; he died the just for the unjust that he might bring us to God; he was crucified, he died and was buried, and on the third day he rose again, and now he is in heaven, our Advocate before the throne; his wounds still upon him as historical marks, but the pain of the wounding is for ever gone. That is our answer in brief and imperfect outline. We, therefore, stand upon this historical ground. Right or wrong, here we are. We did not make the history, we may not modify it, we are not at liberty to introduce any new elements into it; our position is historical: we continue a story, we are chapters added to a great narration. Never part with your history; always go back upon the fact. We are not called upon, as has been said many times, to invent a Bible or to suggest a new form of revelation; we stand upon history, and therefore give a broadly historical reply.
In the next place, still following the idea laid down by Moses, we must make the answer definitely personal: "thou shalt say unto thy son" ( Deu 6:21 ). Speak about yourselves, about your own vital relation to the historical facts. The history is not something outside of you and beyond you: it is part and parcel of your own development, and your development would have been an impossibility apart from the history; let us, therefore, know what this history has done for you. The answer will be poor if it be but a recital of circumstances and occurrences and anecdotes, a vague, although partially reverent, reference to ancient history. The man who speaks must connect himself with the thing which is spoken. Christianity, in its incarnations, is not the recital of a lesson: it is the embodiment and vitalisation of a truth. We may repeat the history all day long, and who will care? But give it personality, show how it bears upon the individual life and the personal witness, include and involve your own integrity in the story which you recite, then the man who hears it has two things to do: not only to disprove the history but to disprove your testimony. Suppose, then, we could speak thus in reply: We perused the history; it seemed strange to us; many a question was excited by the perusal; sometimes our faith was in the ascendant, sometimes doubt seemed to break our wings so that we could not fly heavenward: we fell to the earth enfeebled and distressed; but we returned to the history and considered it deeply; in the first instance we felt our own need of something of the kind; the miracles bewildered us, but when we came to the offer of salvation, when a Man called Jesus stood up before us and said, "I will give you rest" we said within ourselves, Rest is what we need: we are restless; we are killed all the day long; the burden of life is heavy over us, and the accusations of life bear down upon us like a final judgment; then we began to see that perhaps this Man is the very man we needed; we trusted him; we began shamefacedly at first: we were almost afraid to be caught in the company of the Man or listening to his doctrine; but as he advanced we wondered at the gracious words which proceeded out of his mouth; we turned aside and said to one another, He knows us altogether: he has plumbed the depth of our necessity; hear how he speaks! with what wisdom! with what grace! with what sympathy! he will cast none out; now we begin to see a new light shining upon the miracles; we could have doubted them; we could have brought them altogether in one view and written our denial across them; but, becoming familiar with the Miracle-worker himself, getting to know somewhat of his spirit, feeling in some degree the fascination of his sympathy, we were enabled to go farther, and we stood before the Cross: we watched the whole tragedy; and as we looked upon him we said to one another, "Truly this Man was the Son of God;" our reason could not go much further, but a new faculty was called into operation, a faculty called faith trust, confidence, an outleaping of the heart towards outstretched arms; we were enabled to cast ourselves into the arms of Jesus Christ, and having done so rest came into our souls, a sense of pardon made us glad; we entered into the mystery of spiritual peace; then we were stirred towards beneficence of ministry: we became eyes to the blind, and ears to the deaf, and a tongue to the man that was silent; and we followed Christ step by step, doing as he did according to the measure of our power; and now we feel the energy of God in the soul, renewing us every day, drawing us forward by gracious compulsion to nobler life. That is our answer to any man who asks us, What mean ye by this Christian profession and activity?
Thus the answer is, in the first instance, broadly historical a mere outline of facts, the facts being well-nigh innumerable, and so striking in many instances as to be almost incredible. Then the answer is distinctly and definitely personal. We had to deal with the facts, to weigh them and consider their value. We adopted that course, and the outcome of the process was faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, a tender, vital clinging to the Saviour's Cross. So far we feel the solidity of our ground. The ground would not have been solid to us if the history had not been personalised, vitalised, adopted by the individual man himself so that he who went through the process of conversion becomes an annotator upon the page of the history, and where there was difficulty before there is light now. The answer is still incomplete. It is broadly historical, and therefore can be searched into by men who care for letters and events and ancient occurrences; the answer is definitely personal, and therefore the character of the witness has to be destroyed before any progress can be made with his particular view of the history; now the answer must, in the third place, be made vitally experimental. The twenty-fifth verse thus defines this conclusion: "And it shall be our righteousness, if we observe to do all these commandments before the Lord our God, as he hath commanded us." One targum says, "it shall be our merit." The general meaning would seem to be, "it shall be accounted unto us for righteousness:" the attention and the service shall not be disregarded or put down into any secondary place, but what we do in the way of attention and observance and duty and service shall be reckoned unto us as a species of righteousness. What is the meaning to us in our present state of education and our present relations to one another? The meaning is that out of the history and out of the personal relation to that history there will come a quantity which is called character. God is all the while forming character. His object has been to do us "good always, that he might preserve us alive, as it is at this day." Without the righteousness where is the history? Without the character what is the value of our personal testimony? We may be speaking from a wrong centre from mental invention, from intellectual imagination, from spiritual impulse, from moral emotion; we may not be standing upon vital facts and spiritual realities. The outcome, then, is righteousness, character, moral manhood, great robustness and strength, and reality of life. The Christian man's history is to himself worthless if it be not sealed by character. The speaker's eloquence is as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal if it be not followed by solid and invincible character not the kind of character that is mechanically arranged, one part being beautifully consistent with another but so beautiful as to be suspicious; it may be a rugged character, but in the centre of it is a burning fire, a desire after God and God's holiness. The character is not a neatly trimmed and dressed arrangement: it is a spirit, a meaning, a high and noble purpose in life; the word is a bond; the outputting of the hand is an oath; an assurance is a pledge that cannot be broken. The man who is thus righteous may die, but will never break his word; he may suffer much, but he will never falter in his testimony; he may be marked by a thousand defects as to action, attitude, and temporary relation, but his soul is alive with God and his life is consecrated to his Saviour. Who adds righteousness to the good-doer? Not himself. If the man made record of his own actions and totalised them into some nameable virtue, his diary and his reckoning would throw suspicion upon his motive. God is not unrighteous to forget your work of faith and labour of love. It is God who imputes righteousness. It is God who says, "Well done, good and faithful servant." It is the Father who says, "Bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat and be merry: for this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found" make the house thrill with music, for there is a birth in it of manhood and immortality. So, we must have no mongering in virtue, no dealing and tricking and arranging in nice little actions and pat little circumstances, having upon them the bloom of a bastard piety. We must keep up the history, relate ourselves personally to it, turn it into character, and leave God to count the righteousness and to number up our actions and to put a value upon them. Character involves solidity, hope, recompense, reality. A man cannot pretend to character who may lay some little claim to reputation. Reputation is but expressive of appearances, superficial estimates; but character is the man, the man's very soul, the man's very self, without which he would seem to have no existence. So then, there is a doctrine of virtue, a doctrine of works, a doctrine of legal values. The fatal mistake upon our part would be if we set ourselves to its adjustment and determination. We have really nothing to do with it. We begin with duty, we continue with duty; we add nothing to God's Word: we obey it by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ; and at last we shall be startled and gladdened by finding that all our life long we have by the grace of God been building up into heaven.
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