Matthew 28:11-20

Chapter 95

Prayer

Almighty God, the darkness and the light are both alike unto thee: thou dost not slumber nor dost thou sleep, nor are thine eyelids weary and heavy. Thou dost cast the horseman into a deep sleep, and in the time of his slumber thou dost work out the great wonders of thy name, yea thou dost blind men with light and cause the day to be unto them as the night, and then thou dost send unto them revelations and messages from heaven. In our day there are twelve hours, but one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years in thy sight are but as one day. We cannot measure thy going, we are surprised and overtaken by sleep; thou dost punctuate our time with nights and hours of forgetfulness, so that we cannot piece together in one line all the days and hours that we breathe. Thou only art sleepless, thou alone dost not slumber, the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, and there is nothing hidden from the penetration of thy glance.

We own before thee our wickedness, and we ask thee not to look upon it with the eyes of judgment, but to look upon it with the eyes of pity and compassion. Thou seest all things, and yet thou dost remember that we are but dust, or as a wind that cometh for a little time and then passeth away. In wrath thou dost remember mercy, thine anger is kept back by thy love, thy righteousness does not strike us with death, because thy compassion pleads for the life which we have forfeited.

We come before thee with praises, with songs innumerable, ay, and sweet, full of the heart's tenderest tones, because of thy continual lovingkindness and the mercy which is to usward everlasting. We find thy mercy always near at hand: sometimes we have to seek for thy judgments, but thy compassions shine in all the light of the day and in all the radiance of the night. We live because thou dost love us; we do not deserve our life, but thou dost spare it unto us as another opportunity to come to thee and be renewed by thy Spirit and by thy grace.

Surely thou dost delight in the man whom thou hast made, otherwise thou wouldst cut him down as with a sword and cast out his name from thy recollection but thou dost spare him and watch him, with choice bread dost thou nourish him, and thou dost find for him water in the wilderness, and thou hast promised him growth and joy and rest in heaven. Thou hast indeed poured out thy heart's love as wine to be drunk by the children of men. How great is thy love, how tender is thy pity, how incessant thy concern for the sons of men. We see this in the cross, we feel it in every beat of the heart of Christ, we behold it in all the revelation of the atoning ministry of the Son of God. In him we live, in him is our rest, in him is the spring of our joy, in him, through him, and by him alone do we live and move and have our being, and is our life lighted with a celestial hope.

We humbly pray thee to give us energy to meet all the demands that are made upon our life. Give us the responsive spirit which quickly, with all the joyous obedience of love, answers every appeal of thine. May we render thee no reluctant homage, but the homage of loving hearts, eager to pray, to adore, to sing, and to serve. Thus may our whole life be a sacrifice unto the Lord, heaven-ascending, sweet-smelling, acceptable unto God, that thou mayest yet have joy in the child of thine own creation.

Teach us how frail is our life upon the earth, how brief our time and how certain our dissolution. May we learn lessons from those that are round about us in pain, in weakness, in poverty and in distress, and whilst we are thankful that we are not reduced to the extremities of their condition, may we remember that in thy providence we too must lay down our life and die. May we therefore give our hearts unto wisdom, with all industry and patience; may we serve every hour of the appointed time, and may we know the joy of those servants who being always ready can hardly be surprised by their Lord's coming.

Speak to those who are ill at ease, and cheer them with secret solaces from heaven. Save those that are helpless, and show them how in the extremity of weakness thou dost magnify thy gracious strength. Visit all who today need thee at home, because the house is dark, or empty, or filled with intolerable sadness. Be thou the Physician at home, and the preacher of thine own gospel to those who cannot come to thy church. Send a plentiful rain upon thine inheritance and refresh and bless every root which thou hast planted.

Care for our little ones, make their infancy the reason of thy tenderness, and because they are so little do thou bow thyself down to take them up, and in all such condescensions of love we shall see the mystery of our own redemption, and know how true it is that we are not saved by works, but by the grace of God. Amen.

Mat 28:11-20

11. Now when they were going, behold, some of the watch came into the city (related by Matthew only), and shewed unto the chief priests all the things that were done.

12. And when they were assembled with the elders, and had taken counsel, they gave large money unto the soldiers,

13. Saying, Say ye, His disciples came by night, and stole him away while we slept.

14. And if this come to the governor's ears, we will persuade him, and secure you.

15. So they took the money, and did as they were taught: and this saying is commonly reported among the Jews until this day.

16. Then the eleven disciples went away into Galilee, into a ( the) mountain where Jesus had appointed them.

17. And when they saw him, they worshipped him: but some doubted.

18. And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given (all authority was given) unto me in heaven and in earth.

19. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations (make disciples of all the heathen), baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost:

20. Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway (all the days), even unto the end of the world (the age). Amen.

The Final Commission

It may be a little fanciful, but I would ask you to remember that this text consists of ten verses, and further to note that the ten verses are equally divided, and may therefore be said to constitute, in point of length, two equal but very different programmes. It may assist your imagination, and contribute to your enjoyment of the exposition, if you will suppose yourselves to be holding one programme in the one hand and the other programme in the other. The one is the programme of the enemies of Christ, the other is the programme of Christ himself, and upon the moral difference of those two programmes I risk the whole Christian controversy! In studying the first five verses we shall see what the enemies did: when we come to the second five verses we shall see what Jesus Christ did, and let me repeat that upon the difference of moral lone, as between those two policies or purposes, I would risk every claim and every appeal coming under, the title of Christian.

Our attention then is to be fixed upon a moral difference. Unusual circumstances have transpired, and the question to be considered and answered by us is What different effects were produced by those unparalleled events? Circumstances develop the moral nature of men: suddenly placed in new relations, the true nature of the man asserts itself. There has been no time for trimming, for preparation, for arrangement of a calculating kind; suddenly, like thunder at midnight, the men on both sides have been awakened to a new consciousness, and the question which we have now to put is What was the moral complexion and tone and purpose of that new condition of affairs? You have the one programme in your right hand, you have the other programme in your left hand look on this picture and on this, and upon the moral difference of the two fear not, Christian believers, to rest and risk the whole truth concerning the kingdom of heaven upon the earth. Let us see, then, how the case stands in detail.

We have first of all, on the part of the watch and those with whom they communicated, confusion. The mind is unbalanced, events have occurred for which there was no adequate intellectual or moral preparation so one is saying one thing, and another another, and there is collision between the statements, and confusion is the word which best describes the condition of the mind of every speaker in that unhallowed communication. What was then to be done? First of all there was bribery, the money power was brought to bear upon those who had some part to play in the transaction. For money you can buy silence, for money you can procure false testimony, for money you can make the next step in your life comparatively easy. Then there were lies. You never find a single sin. Sin does not dwell, so to speak, in solitary places and alone; sin is no hermit, sin means progeny, multitude, allies, confederates of every name and every colour. "Say ye, His disciples came by night and stole him away while we slept." Have a short and simple message to deliver, and stick to it. Put your answer into words of one syllable, which the shallowest head can remember, and having said your lesson over to yourself a few times, it will become familiar to you, and when you are asked a question, speak it, and stand by it.

But that very simple answer incriminated the very men who used it! For observe, they were to confess that they had themselves slept. Why, they had slept all the day before in order to be ready for the sleeplessness of the night on which they were appointed to watch the sealed tomb! But they did not see that they were called upon to make criminals of themselves whilst they were trying to bear false witness against others. It was necessary, to give any colour of probability to their absurd and criminal statement, that they should confess themselves to have been unfaithful to their trust. How difficult it is to be consistently bad! How all but impossible so to patch lies together that they will hold up like a piece of solid masonry, and not slip out here and there and let the roof tumble upon all that they had supposed themselves to have securely built. All stories have to be rehearsed and recast and calculated and tested here and there, and have to be approved by men of cunning and subtle mind, and then they are sent away to make the best they can of such conditions as may daily arise.

Followers and speakers and lovers of truth have no arrangements to make. They may contradict one another in verbal statement, there may be a difference as to the recollection of dates, there may be some apparent direct contradiction as to the fact, now and again, but all can be cleared up and reconciled and settled into self-consistent harmony, without arrangement, collusion, or preparation of any kind. Men are not afraid to own that they were mistaken, to recall a statement, to amend a particular, because truth is always proverbially audacious in its fearlessness. It is not mere boldness, it is sublimely religious courage which upholds truth in all the criticism and cross-examination to which it is subjected.

The men who can tell lies about themselves, can easily tell lies about others, and therefore they engage to say that the disciples came by night and stole him away. The liar takes away the character of other men easily, because he has first taken away his own. He who familiarizes himself with suicide of a moral kind falls easily into murder of a moral nature. His hand is in it, he is to the manner accustomed, if not born. Expect no justice from the liar. Do not imagine that the liar will become a truthful man on purpose to serve your interests and to promote your good fortune and happy progress. The liar will use you, the false man will tear down all that is sacred in your name, tender in your family, and holy in your household. Falsehood is bad, through and through; to it there is nothing sacred; it owns no altar, it respects no oath, it abides by no sacramental bond. It will drink to your health, and stab you under the fifth rib; it will smile upon you, and plunder not your property but your soul your soul! Do not therefore let us give way to the ever-damaging sophism that a man may speak lies in one direction and be quite truthful in another. There are no such anomalies in God's moral creation. He who can deliberately tell one lie, will tell a thousand if he has anything to gain by the cataract of falsehoods.

Then was there truculence. They took the money and did as they were told. They had a part to play, they were paid actors, they were professional liars, they had been feed to swear and work on the other side.

This then is the programme of the enemy. I find nothing noble in it, I find nothing massively sensible about it, I never saw a pack of men so little, mean-minded, sour-hearted, wicked, vile, bad and there is no genius in their craft. Never did men go out into the world with so palpably absurd an account of a surprising event. Read the words again, and tell me if we ourselves, were we evilly disposed, could not have struck out something more ingeniously happy than this "Say ye, His disciples came by night and stole him away while we slept." How could the men look at themselves and look at one another, after perpetrating a piece of contemptible folly like that? How could they ever shake hands one with the other in anything approaching trustful fellowship? How ever could they be sent out on any errand again so long as their life lasted, when they were capable of submitting to so contemptible a humiliation as to be told to say that the disciples outwitted them? Taking their own account of it, the disciples were sharper than they were. Taking the case exactly as they put it, they made fools of themselves as well as criminals. They had a charge, they were armed, the stone rolled to the door of the sepulchre was a sealed stone, and yet they said, for money's sake, that disciples without arms and without strategical power and without resources, came and played a successful trick upon them whilst they were asleep!

The enemy has never got beyond this programme. The enemies of Christianity today are working according to this time-bill. They start from this point, take this journey, and arrive at this destination. The genius of anti-Christian argument has never published another programme than the one which is now before us. The words may have been altered, a little re-arrangement of sentences may have taken place, some difference may have been made in the punctuation, but in substance, in moral compass, in intellectual dignity, the programme of eighteen hundred years ago is the programme of anti-Christians this day.

Let us now look at the programme in the other hand, which is the programme of Jesus Christ and his disciples. The eleven disciples went away into Galilee, into a mountain where Jesus had appointed them the familiar mountain, the grand old hill-church, the typical place! No dark corner, screened off for dark uses, but a mountain caught by the great light of heaven at every point of its rugged majesty. Not into a cavern, not into a fissure of a rock, not into the depths of some inaccessible forest, but into a MOUNTAIN. There is health already in these living lines.

And when Jesus came to them, what did he say? "All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth: go ye therefore and teach." Who would not rather take this programme as his life-guide? Listen to the difference of the moral tone. On the one hand "Say ye, His disciples came by night and stole him away while we slept." On the other, Jesus says, "Go ye therefore," that is, because I have all power in heaven and on earth, "and TEACH." In Christianity, when allowed to speak for itself, you always hear a tone of high spiritual robustness. Christianity is a lesson, a message, and has to be taught, and teachers are appointed of God who are qualified by his Spirit and grace to utter the lesson and explain alike its patent and its hidden eloquence.

And observe how this teaching is bounded. It is only bounded by " all nations." This is the beneficence of Christianity, it will not teach a few, it will not be dwarfed into a sect, it will not be bricked up within given boundaries, and held there as the prisoner of any number of partialists; its wings were meant to flap in the firmament, and its voice loud and sweet enough to be heard all over the spaces, and to cause its gospel tone to fall like a revelation upon the ear of every listening man.

Compare the breadth of the one programme with the narrowness of the other; the breezy, fresh, mountain-like air of the one programme with the head-to-head, whispering, collusive, calculated programme of the enemy. Judge the policies of men by their moral tone. Beware of men who set traps for the catching of the unsuspecting, and have faith in those teachers who have a grand moral tone, and who exhibit in every breath and act and word a life worthy of the majesty which they can but imperfectly represent.

These are the two programmes which are before the world this very day. First of all, in the camp of the enemies, there are perplexities: they do not move along straight lines; for a time the road seems broad enough and open enough, and they get along for a mile or two with considerable speed, and then suddenly there is a gate in the road to which they have no key, or a deep place which they cannot fathom, and dare not attempt to leap. There are ugly facts, there are surprising events to be accounted for, there are cross lights that daze the vision, and cannot be exactly set in their astronomical centres. So the enemies of Christ have told a crooked story, or a lame one, or a short one and I have to ask you to fall asleep over many a mile of the road, or you never can pass that way. There are imperfect explanations: if you will forget the substantial and central thing to be explained and vindicated, then you may be content with certain superficial references, but when you come to vital questions, heart enquiries, when you need an answer to a question shooting itself out of the very centre and sanctuary of the soul, you will not get a satisfactory reply.

And many of those men who undertake to misrepresent the Christian cause, fall into this very matter of self crimination: they are content to say," We were asleep, we had not insight enough, we are but imperfectly acquainted with that subject, we have not before us the necessary information;" in some form or other they will use the explanation, "We were asleep." Christianity is never asleep, truth is never asleep, reality never sleeps, never slumbers; reality is always the same, with a simple, straightforward, graphic, yet oftentimes profound and mysterious tale to tell but the mystery is only as the sky to the earth, a necessary part of the complete economy of things, but heightening itself beyond the hands and eyes of impertinent enquirers.

In the case of the second programme, we see the best and wisest way of treating the first. No notice was taken of the plan of the enemy, no caution was given as to the craftiness of the men who were setting up a contradictory story, That is the wisdom of Christianity, not to be answering the enemy always, but to be telling its own tale, speaking its own gospel, walking its own way, healing the hearts wounded and cursed by sin. The Christian pulpit will become what it ought to be when it pays less attention to the men who hold by the first programme, and when it goes straight forward on its great evangelistic and missionary tour, of telling the world that there is balm in Gilead, and that there is a Physician there. Men are not healed by argument, men are not saved by happy tricks in controversy. I have no message to any man who is not desiring the message before I utter it. The gospel is an answer you must provide the question. The gospel does not come down, saying, "Let us start an argument," the gospel is God's answer to man's necessity. Therefore go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature every creature will not hear it, every creature will not respond to it, but you will find out in every house and town and land and empire where those are who are waiting for the consolation of Israel, and who are asking a question to which there is no true answer but from the cross of Christ. And every man has work to do: Christianity starts men upon no little errands, Christianity has no merely short journeys for its propagandists to undertake. Every journey is a long one, though it may seem to be locally short; there is no stopping place on the line of Christian evangelists until the knowledge of the Lord spread itself over the globe as the waters overflow in infinite billows the channels of the deep.

And then behold the inspiration under which all this work has to be conducted. "Lo, I am with you all the days, even unto the consummation of the age." He does not send us out alone; he divides the burden; he shares the peril; he inspires our courage; he is a present Captain, always in the thick of the fight, and always so near that a whisper may reach him, or a glance of weariness and doubt bring from his radiant face a shining that shall be as the dawning of a new day. Do we realize a present Christ? Have we that acuteness and largeness of faith which can feel the Son of God at our very side? Do we see him in the breaking of the family bread, do we hear him in the movements of the events of the day that is passing over us, do we catch glimpses of him in many a strange providence, and are we quite sure, by the happy realizations of spiritual affection, that he is within the reach, yea, within the beating of our own hearts? If not, we have lost the original inspiration, we are repeating a lesson, not delivering a message; we are uttering a statement in letters, and not a cry from a sanctified and impassioned heart.

This is the programme of Christianity today. If the one programme has not changed, neither has the other. You will get into dangerous places if you change one line of the original programme of your Saviour and Founder, as a Christian Church. Christianity comes to few men as an argument; it may come to all men as a blessing. The light does not come as a puzzle in solar physics, it comes in cheering brilliance and warmth to do manifold good in nature and in life. Few men may be theologians, but all men may be Christians. Go with the opposition, and you will have to evade and arrange and manipulate so as to escape the difficulties of history and the pressure of immediate facts, but go with Christ, and you will teach and comfort and bless all nations. You may be weak in argument, but you may be mighty in prayer. The clever manager of words may outrun you in the race of eloquence, but when the heart is sad and the night of loneliness is without one star to break its infinite and intolerable monotony, then your comfort will be sought as men cry for water when they burn with thirst.

Christianity will find its best eloquence in its beneficence. To do good is to repel every enemy and to answer every sneer. I want us as Christians so to work, that men will be able to say, when they are tempted to abandon the church and leave Christian society, "We are poor men, illiterate men, uneloquent men; we cannot answer arguments; but the Christians of this neighbourhood have been kinder to us than any other people. We know not what you say when you utter long words and refer to historical difficulties, but the woman who sat up with our dying child was a woman who could pray. We do not understand your chronology and archæology and your scientific penetrations and oppositions; you confuse us with such unfamiliar words; but in sorrow it is the Christian who calls at this house first, it is the Christian who stays longest, it is the Christian who speaks most sweetly, it is the Christian that puts into our minds the most elevating and soothing thoughts." So long as Christianity can elicit testimony like that, all opposition against it is a worthless taunt, a mockery that has no message for the heart, a lie that turns black in the face whilst it utters its base message.