Acts 22:22-30

Chapter 84

Prayer

Almighty God, we are thy children, and would make a child's speech unto thee, every one in his own need and in his own sin. Every one of us has a need of his own and also a sin which he cannot lay at the door of others. Thou knowest us within and without yea, thou dost know our thought before it is fully formed, and thou dost hear the word whilst it is yet but a thought. We cannot run away from the glory of thy light; there is no spot which it does not brighten. We cannot escape God "Thou, God, seest me." All things are naked and open unto thine eyes; there is no concealment, there is no darkness, there is no sure hiding. We stand in the light of thine eye all the day and all the night; this is our joy as well as our fear. Thou knowest us altogether. Thou knowest what we are, what we sprang from, what are our temptations and peculiarities, and thou wilt judge righteous judgment. In wrath thou wilt remember mercy, and in thy sword is measure; thou wilt not forget that we are but dust. We have come with the new song in our mouth, because of the new mercy that is in our life. The song is not first: it is second. We cannot overtake the Lord; we cannot outrun the Almighty. The mercy is always first; the song comes too long afterward. Thy mercy is a great mountain, a shining sun, a river full of water and infinite comfort yea, it is all things beautiful and rich and good in one sublime donation. Because of the Lord's mercies we are not consumed; because of the Lord's compassion we have yet a lot and portion in the land and a memorial amongst the living. This is the Lord's daily goodness; this is the perpetual miracle of love: behold! this also is part of the redeeming ministry of heaven. Thou dost redeem us with blood every day; the Cross is still here: we see it, touch it, read its meaning so full of love and bow down before its sacrifice as the one thing needed to deliver us from the infinite guilt and burden of sin. Keep us near the Cross; there is healing in that tree, there is safety in that refuge, there is hope in that light. Keep us closer still to the tree on which the Saviour died. We would plant no tree of our own; we would make no refuge of our own invention; we would flee unto the Lord's own Cross, and, knowing no other answer to thy law, we would rest there, and there find the peace which passeth understanding. Thou hast given each of us work to do, and thou hast given us strength to do it with. Help each of us to know his exact duty and to do it, not with one hand, but with both hands, and with both hands earnestly, as if the whole struggle depended upon us; and then, having done what in us lies, may we find the rest of good service and sacred industry in the' blessing of heaven. We thank thee that we lift up our eyes beyond the dust; we thank thee for the voices within, which will not let us rest in a mean life; we are glad because of the discontent which afflicts us with holy trouble; it is our immortality, it is the presence of the Divine One in our heart, it is the inspiration of God. Prevent us from settling down upon the emptiness of this earth and the uselessness of the honours and gifts of dying time. We seek a city out of sight. We would declare plainly that we are but pilgrims and can only tarry for an hour and then rise to pursue the mysterious journey. Help us whilst using the earth not to abuse it, to handle it right wisely with the prudence of heavenly wisdom the large-mindedness which comes of Divine inspiration. For all thy love, we bless thee. We put out our hand towards thee in token of homage; we bow down before the Lord, not with servile fear, but with an abasement of soul which comes of overflowing gratitude and unspeakable reverence and love. Continue thy goodness to us for the few miles more of life's little journey. Be with those who are far down the hill not far from the gate which opens upon the acre of the dead. Be with those who are on the top of the hill, shouting in the fulness of their strength, and show them that their way now lies gently downward. Be with all who are struggling towards the top often weary, out of breath, longing to lie down, willing to find a grave even on the youth-side of life's great hill. Give them courage, newness of hope, confidence in God, and may they rise to pursue the journey like men who have been refreshed at the heavenly banquet. Show us again and again somewhat of life's mystery that we may be sober, and that we may chasten ourselves and know that we are but men who can read only a little of thy will and who soon forget what they read. Then touch our hearts secretly and surprise us into such little joys and passing delight as may recover us from irreligious dejection, and give us hope that one day we shall stand amongst those on whose bright faces there is no sign of sorrow. The Lord give us hold of the upper world; the Lord take our hearts up into heaven and feed them there and send them back to the earth to despise its enticements, but to do its work with willing obedience. Comfort our sick ones at home; give them Sabbath twice over in the quiet of their own chambers; whilst they wonder that they are not in their accustomed place, may the whole house in which they dwell become doubly sacred to them because of spiritual presences and ministrations. Cause their health to return and their hope to be re-established, and bring them back to us again longing to make up for work left undone. The Lord to whom the sea belongs look upon all who are now upon it; give them good voyaging, sleep at night, joy by day, health all the twenty-four hours, and bring them to their desired haven singing a new song, blessing the Providence which saved them. Be with all our dear ones in the colonies, in the distant parts of the earth amongst strange people speaking unfamiliar tongues. Why these separations? Why these divisions? May we be chastened and sanctified by the influence arising from such thinking and doing good, hope that through the blood of the everlasting covenant the blood precious in the sight of heaven we shall all be gathered together into one bright heaven the summer-land, unvisited by winter, never touched by chilling frost the land of song and liberty, of purity and service, the mysterious land, the home of the blessed. Amen.

Act 22:22-30

22. And they gave him audience unto this word [ Act 21:28 ]; and they lifted up their voice, and said, Away with such a fellow from the earth: for it is not fit that he should live.

23. And as they cried out, and threw off their garments, and cast dust into the air [stoning preliminaries],

24. The chief captain commanded him to be brought into the castle, bidding that he should be examined by scourging, that he might know for what cause they so shouted against him.

25. And when they had tied him up with [G. "before," i.e., ready for the thongs, the scourges], Paul said unto the centurion that stood by, Is it lawful for you to scourge a man that is a Roman, and uncondemned?

26. And when the centurion heard it. he went to the chief captain, and told him, saying, What art thou about to do? for this man is a Roman.

27. And the chief captain [tribune] came, and said unto him [for he would know that a native of Tarsus had not, as suck, the right of citizenship]. Tell me, art thou [Gr. "thou," emphatic used in contemptuous surprise] a Roman? And he said, Yea.

28. And the chief captain answered, With a great sum of money [G. "capital"] obtained I this citizenship [Dio. Cass. lx. 17 and al. relate the frequent sale of the citizenship at this epoch an oft-ridiculed abuse to fill the exchequer]. And Paul said [answering the contempt], But I am a Roman born [hereditary citizenship nobler than that obtained by purchase. Moreover, Paul's ancestor probably obtained it by the exercise of some noble magistracy].

29. They then which were about to examine [scourge] him straightway departed from him: and the chief captain also was afraid, when he knew that he was a Roman and because he had [was in the position of having] bound him.

30. But on the morrow, desiring to know the certainty wherefore he was accused of the Jews, he loosed him [the haughty tribune had left him bound when the scourging was intermitted, his pride, in spite of his fear ( Act 22:29 ), not allowing him to go back upon his own act], and commanded the chief priests and all the council to come together, and brought Paul down, and set him before them.

The Point of Secession

Paul calls this speech his defence. That defence we have already examined line by line. We were struck by the thought that the defence is not an intellectual argument, but a personal experience. We ventured to lay down the doctrine that personal testimony is the best defence alike of providence and redemption. Each man must say what he knows, and not concern himself with things that lie beyond his consciousness and outside his own experience. An interesting point occurs on the review of the defence, namely, that our conversion does not cause us to forget our past life. Paul recounts his earlier years with painfulness of detail and in tones which must have caused his heart no little suffering. Not one incident is forgotten; nothing is kept back of all the dreary tale. The past is not a dead-letter in the memory of the converted man. He looks at it that he may receive instruction from it; he remembers the hole of the pit out of which he was digged; he says it does him good to go back to that mire and pit and look at beginnings, for it chastens his soul, it shows him new aspects of the goodness and the power of God, it lifts his prayers to a higher level, it chastens into noblest and strongest refinement all his desires and aspirations. The past is always to be the present, but only in a sense not to rule over us, not to throw us into deep and nightly dejection, but to show on the other side the miracle of Divine love, the completeness of Divine deliverance, the perfectness of Divine wisdom. It would be convenient to forget the past; it would, in many cases, be pleasant to have no past. But the days do not die in the nights: they are but planted in that dark soil to grow up and bear fruit on the shining morrow. Still, life would become intolerable if we could not deal in some other way with the past. Christianity deals intelligently with all our past career. It takes it up line by line, examines it in the light, it sets it down item by item, it adds it up into its total significance and value, and then it says as an accusing, as a charge of guilt upon the soul, as a pitiless creditor, "Thou art for that disabled and dispossessed." The past is still there a book to be read, a figure to be looked at, a caution from which to learn wisdom; but in its tormenting force, in its stinging accusativeness, it is no longer the tyrant of our life. That is the mystery of faith, that is the mystery of forgiveness: that the things are still there, as things that did actually occur, but their moral relation to us is wholly and for ever changed. Who could stand a daily accumulating hell behind him? God says, "Not any coal shall be added to that fire: the fire itself shall be put out, but the black ashes shall be full of meaning to the man who was once scorched by the fury of their flames." We are thankful for this; it is a very gospel, it is a complete and glorious deliverance; but for this, every day would bring its own burden, and the days all added up into one total would burn us with unquenchable fire. This is let us say to our souls over and over again the mystery of pardon, the miracle of forgiveness; and if we are so constituted that we cannot forgive ourselves, yet is that self-unforgivingness, when properly managed and administered, an agent of real discipline and health to the soul that submits to it. Paul then, you observe, kept his past steadily before him, right away up from his birth and birthplace to the time when he bent his back for the last laceration all things before him clearly, quotably, yet not accusingly. That our past should always be at our right hand, and yet have no power to stop our prayers, is the triumph of God; that all the past should be near us, touching our very neck, and yet have no power of strangulation this is the mystery of saving grace. We are thereby saved from suicide; no man could stand the pressure of all his yesterdays; if he were to open his mind to that pressure and let the full storm of his guilty days break upon his soul, he would be turned to despair or to self-slaughter. Here again blessed be God! here is the power that enables us to escape from the past, and turn the future through its suggestive and sobering influence into a better time. This is the only right way of dealing with the past. Do not escape it by any species of intoxication; do not drown your conscience; do not fill your ears with the unholy din that will silence the tones of the accusing angel; you must fight that battle out upon holy ground. The aim is not to secure by narcotics what can only be secured by forgiveness. He who shuts his ears and says there is no noise is a foolish man; he who closes his eyes when his house is on fire and says, "I do not see the flame, and therefore there is none," is a madman. The past must be intelligently dealt with yea, I will say philosophically that is to say, its very heart must be pierced, its innermost quality must be known, and it must be dealt with on its merits and throughout the whole circle of its scope, and the only power known to me which can do that is the Cross and blood of Christ. "The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth from all sin." I would begin every sermon with that sentence; in every sermon that should be the loudest note; every discourse should conclude with that solemn gospel.

The immediate point of the 22nd verse is hardly of less consequence. Paul was listened to attentively until he came to a certain word. What was that word? You find it in the 21st verse: "I will send thee," said the Lord, "far hence unto the Gentiles. And they gave him audience unto this word, and then lifted up their voices and said, Away with such a fellow from the earth: for it is not fit that he should live." How some words madden men single words, short words, but words pregnant with history and moral suggestion. We are not offended by the word "Gentiles," otherwise we should be offended by our own name, for we indeed belong to the Gentile tribes; but the ancient Jews were the enemies of the Gentiles I am not speaking of modern Jews, who have lost nearly everything that makes a Jew, but of the ancient Jews and they have written hatred in their books against the Gentiles; they have written oaths that they themselves would rather not have any Messiah than a Messiah that had a kindly feeling towards the heathen: they would only have a Messiah for themselves; and the books of the ancient Jews are full of cursing and swearing and bitterest language against all men who are not, or were not, Jews according to their definition of the term. This explains the fury of the mob: so long as Paul had a tale to tell they listened to him. Paul a wise rhetorician kept the burning word until the very last, but like a man skilled in speech, he got it quite out. The very place of this word in the great speech is a stroke of genius; it is the last word, it is all there, but the moment it was uttered it was like a spark thrown into a magazine of gunpowder. It is curious to observe in the New Testament the points at which audiences break away from the speakers. Take the case of Jesus Christ himself; one of his sublimest speeches you will find in John vi. In the course of that speech he becomes intensely spiritual; in the 66th verse of the chapter we read, "From that time many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him." What time was that? It was the time of spiritual revelation. So long as there were parables to hear, and loaves and fishes to be divided, and miracles to be gazed upon and wondered at, there was no turning away; but when the Lord became intensely spiritual in his teaching, profoundly doctrinal, when he said, "Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you. Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him. As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father: so he that eateth me, even he shall live by me.... It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.... No man can come unto me, except it were given unto him of my Father," then they left him. This is a point which is often forgotten in estimating the influence of Christ's ministry. We are often told, "Preach like Jesus Christ, and the people will hear you gladly;" whereas the truth is that the moment Jesus Christ left the elements of teaching the merely introductory and alphabetic points of teaching the moment he came to deal with the real and eternal purpose of his teaching, the people left him. That must be the result of spiritual preaching everywhere. The world does not want spiritual preaching; the Church cannot understand spiritual preaching. If we were to speak spiritually, shaking off all accent and colour and mere form, the churches would be empty by necessity: we are obliged to keep on the outside, and show the great stones of the temple; we dare not go inside and touch the altar. The Athenians left Paul at another point. They listened to him with more or less interest when he made his great speech upon Mars' Hill, but the moment he began to speak about the resurrection of the dead, "some mocked: and others said, We will hear thee again of this matter," with an ill-suppressed sneering laugh in their tone. They did not want to hear about the resurrection of the dead; they wanted philosophy, speculation, high discourse, poetry. So long as Paul kept himself to the exposition of a kind of theosophy, the Athenians listened to him, and thought he was an extraordinary man, notwithstanding the novelty of his appearance; but when he spoke of the resurrection of the dead, they mocked. In this particular instance another point of departure is chosen. The Jews listened unto Paul so long as he related incidents and confined himself to matters which were, more or less, of a purely Jewish kind; but the moment he said "Gentiles," they went mad, cried out, cast off their clothes, and threw dust into the air, and were in a fury of resentment.

The great teaching of this review is that all men part company with their teachers at certain points. The point is not always the same: some remained with Jesus, notwithstanding the spirituality of his teaching; some heard about the resurrection of the dead with comparative interest, for they themselves had some leaning in the direction of that doctrine; others could hear about the Gentiles with mental composure; there was nothing in the word itself to unbalance their equilibrium. But the lesson is, that there are points at which we all fly off. There are points which would dissolve this assembly in a moment, to which we dare not, or may not, refer. Men always like to listen to themselves preaching; it is not the teacher who preaches, but the people who, accepting his monotonous and indisputable platitudes, are themselves preaching through him, and the more energetic he is the more comfortable they are. But who dare speak the new word, start the new thought, break away into the new direction, shake off the accepted, and enter neglected paths, and carve, under what is believed to be Divine inspiration, new and broader paths of progress? Look at this particular case: what was the disease under which these people were suffering? The eternal disease of humanity, which is narrow-mindedness. It is distressing, were it not for a kind of sad comedy that runs through it and puckers it into a kind of unholy laughter, to see how we rebuke narrow-mindedness in others, and practise it with religious fidelity ourselves. I know not how the difficulty is to be met. The moment the Jews heard the word "Gentiles" they would hear no more of Apostolic eloquence. The man who could entertain a kindly interest towards the Gentiles was a "fellow" "not fit to live." That was called religious earnestness, religious zeal, contention for the faith once delivered to the saints! Are there any against whom we cry out? Have we learned Christ's great lesson: "Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold; them also I must bring"? Have we left the ninety-and-nine accepted ideas in the wilderness and gone out after that which is lost, until we find it? Are we shepherds or bigots? men of progress or men of retrogression? I do not ask for new truth, for there is none and can be none; I do not ask for a "new theology," for that were a contradiction in terms theology, properly understood, is an eternal quantity. I ask for great-heartedness all but infinite heartedness, that will listen to all kinds of people, hoping that in the course of their talk they will drop the one word which the great Teacher can take up and magnify into a gospel. Save us! O Saviour of the world! our Lord Christ Jesus, from the spirit that listens for the other word, which we can work up into an indictment. If any man has a prophecy, let us hear it; if any man has a saying, let us listen to it; if any man has a new reading of the old Book, let us hear him. A tone may be a lesson; an emphasis may be equal to a revelation. We lose so much when we are narrow, unsympathetic, bigoted. The only condition of mind which Jesus Christ can approve is a condition of all hopeful love. Is that a mere sentiment? Far from it, for nothing can burn with so intense a wrath against all evil as holy love. Indifference cannot be angry. Love has two looks like the mysterious wheel in the great ancient darkness one look of benignity, warmth, hopefulness, and benediction towards all who want to be better and to pray the large prayer; and the other look that strikes off the hoops of iron from the wheels of the enemy the piercing, blighting look, the face of holy anger that will have no truce, or parleying, or compromise with any child of darkness. Let us take care how we condemn the narrow-mindedness of men who lived nineteen centuries since, and then practise it in some other form ourselves. Let our prayer be for larger roads, swifter progress, ampler light, more courage, more hope.