Matthew 4:12-17

Chapter 13

Temptation Prepares for Work The Sculptured But Useless Stone the Restfulness of Obedience Some Texts Beyond Our Strength Good Listening

Prayer

Almighty God, if we are remembered by thee, it matters not by whom we are forgotten; thou dost engrave our names on the palms of thine hands, the walls of Zion are continually before thee, and sooner shall our eyes behold the falling of all that is in thy heavens than we shall see that thou hast forgotten them that trust thee. Whilst thou art mindful of thy children, may thy children be mindful of their Lord. May our right hand forget its cunning, and our tongue cleave to the roof of our mouth if we forget Jerusalem, and prefer it not before our chief joy. May we be enabled to utter these things by the intelligence and the ardour of our love. Truly thou hast remembered us in our low estate, thou wert mindful of us before we had returned, and whilst yet we were in the far off wilderness, even then thine eye pitied and thine arm was outstretched in salvation. And now that we have returned to the Shepherd and Bishop of our souls, and are enfolded with those that love and follow thee, surely thy remembrance of us will be quicker than ever, and thy tenderness will flow towards us in perpetual fulness.

We have to bless thee for thy gentle care, thy long-suffering, thy great patience. We have outworn our friends, we have tried and vexed with sore distress those who bare us, and behold thy love is greater than our mother's, and thy patience has been without limit. We live in thy long suffering: if thou wert strict to mark iniquities, we could not stand before thee in judgment. Thou dost look upon us in thy Son Jesus Christ, our one priest and our only Saviour, and see us in him and through his work; behold thou dost count us of great value; yea, thou dost set store by us, as if we were needful to the completion of thy happiness.

The very hairs of our head are all numbered; thou dost count our steps one by one, our downsitting and our uprising are not too mean to be noticed in Heaven; thou dost beset us behind and before, and lay thine hand upon us; thou dost send thine angels to watch our life and to bless us with many benedictions. Thou hast filled our cup, thou hast made our bed, thou hast kept our dwelling-place, thou hast been round about us as a defence of fire. What shall we render unto the Lord for all his benefits towards us? We are here this day to bow down our heads and to say that we are unprofitable because unclean; we have come that we might make common confession of sin, and unanimously implore the exercise of thy forgiveness, through Jesus Christ our blessed and infinite Redeemer. Wherein our conscience is. oppressed as with a great weight, wherein our life is made gloomy by the infinite darkness of aggravated sin, let the Lord manifest himself towards us in peculiar concern and sympathy, and look upon us through all the work accomplished for us by his Son Christ Jesus. Wherein we have spoiled the week thou didst give us to work in, let thy pardon come to us. Wherein the days have been blotted by our unskilful hands, wherein we have returned thy gifts perverted and dishonoured, let the Lord be merciful unto us, remembering that we came of the dust, and that we are in ourselves but as a wind that cometh for a little time and then passeth away. The Lord's love be greater than his judgment, and the mercy of the Lord shall be more than all our sin.

We bless thee that our desire is still towards the light; once we loved darkness, now we pray for the broadening light of the day, that it may be spread over us until the whole sky be filled with its brightness and there be no shadow left, but we stand in the infinite fulness of such glory as our souls can now receive. We bless thee, too, that we care for thy truth, that we look into thy book with wistful eyes and eager heart, desiring to see and to hear what God the Lord will say. Enable us to see the beauty of thy word, to feel the nearness of the sympathy of thy spirit, and may thy revelation destroy all earthly delusions, all foolish prejudices, all narrow conceptions of our own imagining, and may we stand not in our own thinking, but in the breadth and glory of the divine revelation.

We commend one another to thy tender care. Help us to pray for one another, with a full and anxious heart. Thou knowest what we need we are always needing, our want is daily, our life is a long cry of necessity, and a long moan of pain. So would we always have the Lord's fulness near and the Lord's blessing at hand; we would not be for one moment without thee, for in that moment would our ruin be wrought. Where there is desire to know thee better, let the light increase in lustre and in breadth; where there is bitterness of soul on account of sin, let the infinite sweetness of thy forgiving grace be tasted; where there is a vow to live a nobler life, enable him who took the oath to fulfil it to its letter; where there is a heart struggling against difficulty, temptation, distress of mind, body, or estate, let the angel of the Lord help the struggler, and bring him into more than victory. Where there is self-conceit, self-trust, consciousness that all that is needed lies within human power, the Lord consume the delusion as with fire from Heaven, and work in every self-righteous heart the spirit of childlike humility, of Christian modesty.

The Lord help us when we need help most. The angel of the Lord be near us when the enemy would come in as a flood, and may the delivering spirit redeem us from despair and set our tried souls again high on the everlasting hills where they will catch all the brightness of the hope that is in God. Pity us when we are proud of ourselves, fight not against us when we give way before thee and fall down in penitence and expectation, and let the light of thy countenance fall upon us it will never be a burden, it will be a deliverance and a hope. If any man have a quarrel against any, let the quarrel now cease, let the spirit of reconciliation seize the heart from which it has gone in exile. If any man cry unto thee because of a peculiar trial which he cannot put into words, the Lord read his heart and secretly answer his prayer.

Remember the stranger within our gates, the traveller, the man, the woman, far from home, great seas rolling between them and the place they love, the Lord be with such and give to them to feel that this is their Father's house, and by the elevation of Christian fellowship, by the flooding of the soul with all that is Christian and divine, may there be an uplifting above all temporary separation and distress.

The Lord's blessing go beyond us to the sick chamber, where there is danger, where there is pain, where death has almost taken possession; to the prison where the prisoner languishes and is being taught the value of moral reflection by his isolation and punishment, to the sea where men are in trouble and in great fear, to the field of battle where the soldier's life is one keen anxiety; yea, let thy blessing go the whole earth round, omitting none from its baptism of light, and let the earth feel that it is still in God's hand, yea, in God's heart, the earth that has borne the cross, and shall one day see the throne of the Saviour's glory. Amen.

Matthew 4:12-17 .

12. Now when Jesus had heard (and because he had heard) that John was cast into prison (at Machœrus), he departed into Galilee (by the shortest route, through Samaria).

13. And leaving Nazareth, he came and dwelt in Capernaum, which is upon the sea-coast, in the borders of Zabulon and Nephthalim:

14. That it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Esaias the prophet, saying,

15. The land of Zabulon, and the land of Nephthalim, by the way of the sea, beyond Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles;

16. The people which sat in darkness saw great light: and to them which sat in the region of the shadow of death light is sprung up.

17. From that time Jesus began to preach, and to say. Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

The eleventh verse reads "Then the devil leaveth him, and behold angels came and ministered unto him;" and the twelfth verse reads "Now, when Jesus had heard that John was cast into prison, he departed into Galilee." You must not imagine that the events in the eleventh and twelfth verses followed one another in immediate succession. Jesus had been exercising something like an eight months' ministry in Judea, when he heard that John was cast into prison. Still, I cannot but feel that the temptation prepared the great Worker for his marvellous toil. He was in all points tempted like as we are, how otherwise could he have been our Priest and Saviour in every sense of those immeasurable terms? No angel could have preached to me; he would not have understood me, his language would be unknown, he would have nothing in common with my deepest and most painful experience, he would be altogether above me, too grand and sublime for my spiritual conception; it was needful that he who was to speak the universal language, should pass under the universal experience. he should know the devil, he should have met him as it were face to face, he should have felt the keenness of his subtlest approaches, and the blow of his heaviest assault. Jesus Christ was thus prepared by temptation to preach the gospel to the world, and indeed to do all the work for the world which he had from eternity undertaken to accomplish.

Men are fitted for work in various ways. Some men are fitted for it by the reading of many books hard and difficult to be understood, others are fitted by a wear and tear that seems to have no expression adequate to itself in human words, a continual vexation of the soul and distress of all its best faculties, so that they come up out of great agonies to speak tender words, and they bring themselves out of the night of intolerable despair to utter the word of benediction. But no man can be prepared for any deep and vital work in the world who has not gone through the, school of the devil. You cannot be taught to preach by reading many books, how long and eloquent soever. You overshoot my life; I must hear something in your tone which will enable me to identify you as of my own kindred. Now and again there must break from your heart's voice tones and accents which tell me that you too have been in the pit, have been dragged through the lake of fire, and have understood what it is to be almost gone. He has wonderful influence over me who can pity me in the distresses of my temptation. He who can only make my intellect wonder, touch my imagination with new and flashing lights, has but momentary fascination for me; I own it, and bid the man farewell; but he who knows the devil in and out, all the temptations in me, and who has come away from the life-battle feeling that the enemy is no small one, but subtle in suggestion and mighty in influence, and who says to me, "The battle is very heavy, do not underrate it; your strength will be tried to its very last fibre and throb, but God will help you; your extremity shall be his opportunity" then he takes me under his influence, and I yield myself to him and call him, not preacher only, and teacher, wise and true, but friend sympathetic, with whose soul mine has fellowship, and we can go together both in blessed and hopeful union to the common throne of the church, from which is dispensed the blessing which is better than bread, the word which gives the soul immortality.

Have you been fitted for your work? If so, why are you not doing it? To be qualified and yet to be idle is to incur the severest displeasure of man and of God. How many more books are you going to read before you begin to speak? How much longer are you going to study the providence of God amongst the children of men before you begin to open your mouth in witness? How many more sermons and prayers are you going to hear and endorse, before you begin in the marketplace to say, "My scales are kept in Heaven and my standards are set up in the sanctuary of the sky"? It is time that some of us were proving our fitness by our activity; sad is the sight of a man qualified, evidently fitted to do certain work, and yet not doing it. We have all heard of that wonderful stone in the quarry out of which Baalbec was builded; it was a great stone, it was cut out of the rock with great labour, the mason squared it, the sculptor chiselled it, nothing more that the tool could do to it remained to be done, and yet there it lay in the quarry, not lifted to its proper eminence, not set amid its designed surroundings, a gigantic miscarriage, a horrible failure; fitted, made beautiful, almost speaking in its perfected sculpture, and yet there it was lying with the rubbish, when it might have been shining like a living presence in some magnificent temple.

What is true of that stone is surely true of some of us. We have been a long time at school, yet we never use our learning tor the good of men, We have been much trained in music, yet we do little but mumble in the vocal worship of Almighty God. We have read many books, yet we are silent as the grave. We have passed through many a temptation, but the word of sympathy never falls from our lips. We have proved the vanity of the world and we have never told the young that the world is a gigantic lie and life but an empty wind apart from God and the infinite Saviour Jesus Christ, How much longer therefore shall we be qualified to do much and yet be doing little? How much longer shall we have studied the eloquence which is taught only in the expensive school of experience, and yet shut up our lips in criminal dumbness? Our Saviour Jesus Christ, having been qualified for his work, went to it. Arise, let us go hence.

When Jesus heard that John was cast into prison cast into prison by Herod, because the Baptist had reproved the ruler for his evil ways then the work ceased. Shut up the preacher in prison and you will shut up Christ's Church, would seem to be the short and easy method of persons who take superficial views of divine truth. A man is plaguing you with his remonstrances: shut him up in gaol, and there will be an end of your trouble. That would be a fool's speech to make, if ever you did make one. You can shut up the worker, but can you shut up the work? You can silence the individual minister what is he but a little creature in the presence and in relation to the power of a reigning monarch? But how can you shut up the divine truth? John was cast into prison, but there came a great light. Now, Herod, rattle your gaol-keys, get them all out and shut up the light in gaol. O the mockery, the satire, the instructive sarcasm of the King that reigns over all! John is incarcerated, and the Lord sends a great light over the lands, and bids the kings of the earth shut it up in their dungeons. So it is with the progress of divine truth. A minister dies, but the light increases: the individual speaker comes to the end of his discourse, but there are silent and subtle ministries evermore proceeding with infinite effect to work out the decree and purpose of God. The eloquent thunder ceases, the silent light goes on. This Christian kingdom is a ministry of light; it is a marvellous light, it is a great light, it is impalpable, intangible, immeasurable; it is around us and we cannot touch it; we put out our hands and dash through it, and still it stands there, an angel that fills the whole horizon. Fear not: your great Baptist is mewed up in prison and the axe is being whetted that shall take off his head: the next thing that axe will have to do will be to strike the beams off the sun. Can it perform that deed, or is the axe not yet made that can shatter one ray from the source out of which it falls?

When Jesus had heard that John was cast into prison he departed, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet. Can a man not go from one city or province to another, without fulfilling some old and sacred word of prophecy? The answer to that inquiry is "No." Did you come to church to-day by the divine decree? The answer to that inquiry is "Yes." You could not help coming. Do not suppose that we are here by accident. We are here that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet. Do not isolate yourself from the great body of history and the great stream of prophecy, and say that you do just what you like. You think you do: it is your delusion, and it will prove in the long run to be a source of unrest and pain to you. Let me feel my connection with all my kind; let me feel that I am in God's hands, and that the bounds of my habitation are fixed; let me feel that my liberty is itself but part of the divine law. Then there will come into my soul a deep rest, a gentle peace, a profound assurance, and though the mountains be removed and carried into the depths of the sea, yet I shall remain at rest in the very heart of God.

There is nothing trifling in your life. As to whether you shall live, on this side of the street or that, will be settled for you if you will put yourself quietly into the hand of God. Why do you undertake anything on your own account? Why do you say you will do this or do that, purely of your own suggestion and to carry out some motion of your own will? I will not go out until the Master sends for me, I will tarry in dark Egypt till the angel says, "The way is clear: arise and go": yea, I will sit down in prison until Pharaoh send for me by God's suggestion. Could I talk so I should feel that life were worth living, and as for tomorrow's letters, and difficulties, and fears, and perils, and distresses, I would meet them all after a long night's deep slumber, and they would vanish before my strength. Oh, fussy little fool, a self-manager and self-controller, sit thee down and learn that to obey is better than to be clever, and to wait upon God is sometimes the sublimest genius.

Thus wondrously does the Old Testament overlap the New. Men who are critical upon these matters tell us that some two hundred and sixty times there are references in the New Testament to the Old, and thus the Old and the New overlap and intertwine, and the two Testaments are one revelation, as the morning and the evening are one day. Now and again we see a little into the details of life. This is an instance in point Jesus arises, leaving Nazareth to dwell in Capernaum, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Esaias the prophet. Details vex us; we cannot piece them together and make anything of unity and shape of them; they fall to pieces under our clumsy fingers. Now and again there is a rent, and I see somewhat of the meaning of detail: I see that there is a hand jointing them, articulating them, and behold it is making order out of confusion. Lord, take up all the details of my life: they are exceedingly incoherent, and they baffle me; they sometimes almost make a non-believer of me; they sometimes arise and fall upon my life altogether as if they would crush it. I bless thee for these little peeps into this inner working of thine, about the hairs of my head, the guiding of my steps, the ordering of my habitation undertake for me altogether let me do nothing but in fulfilment of thy providence.

He came and dwelt in Capernaum. Thou art exalted unto heaven, take care lest thou be thrust down into hell. It is an awful and sacred thing to have a good neighbour, to come into contact with a good man, to have amongst us a voice of fire, a teaching of love, a ministry of light. He came and dwelt in Capernaum. He came as the light came into this house this morning, without making any noise, but filling the whole space. He came without noise or cry or tremulous voice, but Capernaum felt that there was a ghost, a spirit, a strange influence within itself, and that Capernaum, if it grow not right up into heaven and be absorbed into Zion, will be thrust down into hell. Our privileges become our judgments.

Zabulon and Nephthalim, Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles are these a mere cluster of words? What, the Gentiles already? His beginnings are like endings, his first words have somewhat of the ripeness and mellowness of high climaxes. Already is there flashing even in secondary light some gleam of divine lustre upon the Gentile places of the earth? Does the word Gentiles occur so soon in the sacred narrative? We are Gentiles. Whenever we see that word we should say, "There is something about us: what is it?" It is like seeing our name in a foreign book, like opening a work written in a language we cannot understand, and seeing our name broadly in the middle of the page. We are arrested, and we wonder what it means. God's purpose is one that girdles the whole earth: it takes it little by little, but it takes it all in, and the meadow is not jealous because the mountain-tops catch the light first. You have stood on a mountain-top to watch the sun rise why didn't you stay in the valley? Because you said, "The mountain-top will catch the first light; let us be, therefore, on the highest possible point." And did the valleys below retire from the earth and say they would never grow any more gardens and meadows, and any more harvests of wheat, because the snowy peaks caught the first blessing and warmed to the earliest kiss? Thou art but a poor reader of history who objectest that the Jews caught the first gleam of the new morning. I would sooner think of yonder sweet blue Lucerne water grumbling and working itself up into gruff noises and tumultuous storms because Pilatus had the first gleam upon his rocky head, or because the snows of the Rhigi blushed with the dawn before the waters of the lake felt its touch. A little more time and that sun will fill the earth, a little more time and this Sun of Righteousness will shoot out his glories until every land shall be bright with the pure lustre of divine truth.

When Jesus heard that John was cast into prison he came to the front. It might have been an excellent reason for departing again into the wilderness to avoid danger. It would have been so had the kingdom which they came to reveal and establish been a kingdom of mere sentiment or a conception of merely and purely intellectual energy. This is how the Christian kingdom has advanced from the first ages until now. The front rank of soldiers all shot Forward next rank, over the dead bodies! That has been done and is being done, and none can hinder the progress of this divine kingdom, connected as that progress is with a heroism that is not of human inspiration, but of divine beginning and strength. Where there is danger there should be a provocation of courage.

We know nothing about courage now. There are some texts I dare not preach from. Dare I preach from this text "None of these things move me, yea, I count not my life dear unto me that I may finish the ministry which I have received of the Lord Jesus"? You will never hear me preach from that text. It would burn like a conscious lie upon my coward lips. These things do move me. I am annoyed by trifles, discouraged by trumpery circumstances of a temporary nature dare I preach from a hero's words? There have, however, been times in the church when Christians have been heroic. We read in history not more than three hundred years old of Christians who having heard that John was cast into prison went forward to take his place. I was reading only a few days ago some such occurrence. The Christians of one town were all driven into one dungeon; they were gathered together and shut up into one prison, and the executioner came to them and took them out one by one, having first put a muffler over the eyes of the doomed victim. He led him out in the presence of the others to the place of execution, and put a knife through his throat, and leaving him half dead, he took the muffler off and went back for the next, the knife streaming with blood held between his teeth, as he tied the muffler over the eyes of the next victim. And twenty were done so, and forty and sixty, and seventy and eighty-eight, and that human butcher failed, not the Christian heroism. It was so that your liberties were bought. We were redeemed not with corruptible things, but with precious blood, and we sit here to-day, quiet, perhaps indifferent, as the result of human blood. Are we worthy of our traditions? We dare not go out if it is raining, we take offence because of trifles, we leave the work because of some little pique, not worthy of a moment's consideration. Let us get back into the spirit of those traditions which have made the country what it is, as far as it is great and noble and influential for good.

What have we done for our Lord? Of the eighty-eight sufferers it was said that it was well borne by the elder Christians, but when the executioner came to the younger ones they were more timorous. Who wonders? Does the dear young life like to give itself out thus boldly, all at once, early in the morning? But not a heart fell back. Do not tell me that a kingdom thus begun and thus continued is going to fall. These men did not work through some delusion for which they could give no account; they accepted their fate intelligently, they gave reasons for it, they were not moved by mere delusions, but by arguments which to them were as intellectually complete as they were morally influential.

I would God we had a little more heroism in the church. I ask you younger men and women to come forward and take the places of the elder, who are not cast into prison, but who may be disabled by age, who may be constrained by one uncontrollable circumstance or another to leave the front. They have had a long and useful day, and now they desire to rest, and it is no coward's prayer they pray when they ask for relief if not release. Will you see the place left vacant? Are you content to see great gaps in the ranks of the church? Will you be baptized for the dead? Will you know that it is your turn next? There is a soldier in front of you dying; pluck up your courage in the divine strength, and be ready to take his place. When this spirit returns to the church Herod will be troubled upon his throne, and the time is not far off when he will be consumed by the fire of the Lord.

Jesus began to preach, and he repeated John's sermon. The sermon is one. He said, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand," Why, who preached that sermon before? John the Baptist, and Jesus Christ, seeing that John was in prison, saw that the sermon should not fail of utterance, and with another voice, that had in it wondrous possibility of intonation and colour, he said, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." He began to preach. Have we begun to hear? Hearing is an art, listening is not possible except to the attentive soul. Who listens well? Few men. What happens to him who listens well? He hears the Spirit's music.