Mateus 3:7-12

Chapter 8

John's Preaching The Right Spirit of Hearing the Old Grit Is Lost a Kingdom Or a Wrath Different Reports of Preaching

Prayer

Almighty God, our mouth is filled with thanksgiving, because our heart is stirred with gratitude. Thou hast done great things for us, and most wonderful, therefore is our mouth opened in praise, therefore are our hands stretched out to thee in the offer of loving service. Thou hast beset us behind and before and laid thine hands upon us, and thine eye has gleamed from heaven like a great sun, shining upon all our way, bringing us continual light and hope. Thou hast lifted us above our fears, so that the clouds have rolled under our feet, and we have seen thy bright blue morning spreading over our whole destiny, like a father's blessing. Thou art great, thou art kind, thy name is mercy, thy ministry is love. These things have we, learned in our heart in its deep pain and want, and having learned them, we would turn them into religious hymns and continual and delightful service. Thou art our God, and we have none beside; thine hand is the treasury of our almightiness, and in thine heart is hidden the gospel of our salvation. We will look unto the hills whence cometh our help; we will repair to the Saviour's cross in the time, of infinite distress on account of sin, and through his most precious blood, shed for the sins of the whole World, our guilt shall receive the answer of thy forgiveness.

We bless thee for this uplifted cross, a tree higher than all forests, a spectacle that makes all other sights dull and poor the great tragedy of thy love. To that tree we come: its leaves are for the healing of the nations, and other healing for the heart of man there is none. This is the Lord's doing; may we within its span be in the Lord's spirit, lifted up in heart, made ecstatic in joy, having around us all the sweet bright ministry of holy hope. Being delivered from every fear, freed from every snare, and delivered from every perplexity, may our souls become filled with thy joy and soothed and calmed by thy peace.

We mourn our sin: 'tis our daily cry; we have done the things we ought not to have done, we have left undone the things that we ought to have done the Lord's mercy be multiplied unto us, and all the ministry of Christ be sent to our aid. Let us every one hear the utterance of thy forgiving love, let the most burdened conscience be delivered from its load, let the wounded and crying heart be healed of its pain, and over all the assembly may there pass the assurance of thy pardon, and may there return upon our life the lifting up of the light of thy countenance.

We bless thee for all thy blessings: they are in our individual life, for thou hast continued unto us health and strength and reasoning power and hope within the limits of this present scene. Thou hast blessed us in basket and in store, so that our trade has brought profit and our merchandise has yielded us a living. Thou hast given us favour in the sight of the people, so that our foothold in society is not lost, Thou hast saved us from many a temptation and delivered us from many a sin and snare, so that oar feet walk in the ways of freedom and we breathe the air of liberty. Thou hast blessed us in the family; the father and the mother and the child are here, reunited, returned to one another, in the grace and fulness of thy protection. The Lord continue all household mercies to us: spare the elder and the younger, may there be no vacant chair, no empty heart, no desolated spirit. Where thou hast sent thy bereaving providence send thine all-healing grace; where thou hast but now dug the deepest grave ever dug in the heart, the Lord fill it up with flowers, and so set upon it the sign and seal of a sure, glorious resurrection." Where the house is dark, do thou kindle an unexpected fire; where the life is impoverished, do thou come with all thy treasure about it.

The Lord heal the wounded, the Lord carry the tired in his arms, the Lord bless the unblest, and send dew upon the withering flower. Thou knowest us every one, our ancestry, our difficulties, our temptations, our temperaments peculiarities which individualize us one from the other. Thou knowest all that is in us and about us be the God of each life, the Saviour of each heart, the friend of each pilgrim.

Give thy word mighty wings to-day, that it may fly farther than ever: make the voices of thy servants sweeter than trumpets of silver and louder than shocks of thunder, and let thy word be heard everywhere, awakening and gladdening the hearts of men.

Pity us in our littleness and infirmity, make the way down to the grave as easy as thou canst, and may the farewells of earth have in them tones subtle and tender, suggesting reunion in heaven. Amen.

Matthew 3:7-12 .

7. But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees come to his baptism, he said unto them, O generation (brood) of vipers, who hath warned (taught) you to flee from the wrath (a kingdom to some, a wrath to others) to come?

8. Bring forth therefore fruits meet for repentance:

9. And think not to say within yourselves, we have Abraham to ( as ) our father: for I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham. ("God is not tied to the law of succession in the church.")

10. And now (already) also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees (the Jews: the Gentiles were stones): therefore every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down and cast into the fire.

11. I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance; but he that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear: he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire:

12. Whose fan is in his hand, and he will thoroughly purge his floor, and gather his wheat into the garner; but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.

This is a wonderful, yet not difficult, change of tone in the speech of such a man as John the Baptist. His baptism was the sensation of the day. Everybody seemed to have more or less interest in it. Not to have heard it was to be misinformed or wanting in information, and not to have partaken of it was to have missed a great opportunity. All the valley of the Jordan was moved, people poured in from every centre, great and small, in order that they might hear this new prophet, for a prophet had not appeared in Israel for five hundred years. Curiosity was touched, wonder was on the alert, national pride was excited, and a great and hardly expressed hope was moving the ambition of the people.

For a long time John seems to have pursued his baptismal course without interruption, and indeed with some signs of satisfaction. There went out to him Jerusalem and all Judea, and all the region round about Jordan, and were baptized of him in Jordan, confessing their sins not, I imagine, confessing their sins in a minute and detailed manner, but generally acknowledging that they were not as good as they ought to have been, pleading guilty to a certain great, broad, general indictment, which all men probably over the civilized world are not unwilling to do. This was enough, as a starting point, in the case which John the Baptist represented. But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to his baptism, the great and leading men of the day, pure in their own estimation, not needing any such ministry as he came to conduct, except in an official and ceremonial manner, it changed his tone; he cried aloud with piercing and ringing voice, "O brood of vipers, progeny of serpents, deceitful, cunning, malignant, empoisoned, how do you account for being here? Who hath warned you, called you, who hath entitled you to avail yourselves of this opportunity?"

John was a man who recognised the possibility of people coming to religious ordinances from wrong motives. The people to whom he spake did not come for purely religious purposes at all. They thought it was something to be passed through in order to realize a great end. They accepted it as a little ceremonial, preceding some great national endowment or fulfilment of long delayed prophecy. John startled them, therefore, with the tidings that this was a religious ordinance, and that men can only avail themselves satisfactorily of religious ordinances in proportion as they come to them with religious motives.

Are the Pharisees and the Sadducees of the olden time the only people who have come to church through wrong motives? Is it possible that any of us can ever go to a holy place with unholy intent, or with a purpose infinitely below the grandeur of the opportunity? When I ask the questions I kill myself. Do I pierce any of your hearts, or wound, ever so slightly, any of your consciences? Whatever is religious must be touched religiously, or it will yield no true benefit or profit. You are not to touch the Bible as literary men, you are not to come to church as clever men, you are not to sit bolt upright as those who have a claim to judge in God's sanctuary. The attitude is abasement, the spirit is contrition, the desire is a yearning for a purer and broader life. "To this man will I look the man that is of a humble and contrite heart, and that trembleth at my word." The haughty he will bow down, the wise he will confound and disappoint. He will look to the eager heart, the gentle, simple, yearning spirit whose one object is to know God's will and to try to do it.

When men come to religious ordinances, they should be warned of the meaning of the action which they wish to accomplish. They should have a clear and most intelligent conception of the whole purpose of religious worship. It is the business of the heralds of the cross and the ministers of the truth to give this warning, to keep back those who have not the right credentials. This is a kingdom that can only be entered by one right, the right of sin, avowed, confessed, deplored. Blind man, your blindness is your certificate, you want no other. Broken-hearted, wounded man, your contrition or your penitence is your credential; seek for none beside. Weary, tired soul, altogether overborne and distressed by the burdens and difficulties of life, your weariness is your claim. Do not try to get up your strength. When you lie flat in your weakness, your attitude is most acceptable to Heaven. To try to gain your breath that you may appear with some decorousness in his presence is to enhance your sin. To come panting, heaving, out of breath, gasping, dying that is the guarantee of a good hearing in the presence of God.

How comes it that people so little profit by religious ordinances? Because they are too clever, too wise, too conceited, too good, in their own estimation. I never heard Pharisees and Sadducees praise with religious gratitude any service they ever attended. They, mighty men, confer an honour, they add lustre to the altar, they lift up the church in which their self-vaunting supplications are uttered. How then can they, who are so full of themselves, who are enriched with the emptiness of their own self-satisfaction, gain any spiritual advantage from any church they ever entered? They do not go to church to get benefit, but to give it. Their purpose is to lay a flattering hand upon the infinite, and to bless it with the paw of their consecration. We should have been richer men to-day, broader and more massive in all religious instruction, intelligence, and force, if we had come with a true humbleness and bent down before God with an utter, absolute sense of unworthiness in his sight.

Surely he was a wilderness-trained man who spake thus to the high citizens of the day. Look at him, with his camel's hair and the leathern girdle about his loins, fed with locusts and wild honey. When he speaks, he will speak honey, but only in his speech to self-satisfied men there will be less honey than locusts. Upon some men you cannot confer any social advantage. They do not want it. What can I do for you, poor Diogenes, living in your tub? Nothing, but stand out of the light. The religious man ought never to be one to whom no favour can be shown. A man who can live in the wilderness, read the literature of the everlasting hills, and decipher the poetry of the skies, asks for no favour, can stoop to receive none; his is a marvellous independence of all social patronage and help. "Do not offend the Pharisees and the Sadducees, conciliate them, conceal as much as you can: they have it in their power to do great things for you." Such might have been the speech spoken to this man with the camel's hair and the leathern girdle, fed on locusts and wild honey; but he would have hurled it back again in shattering accents of scorn. So the religious teacher has it in his power to lift himself high above the line of patronage and the line of obligation, for religious men should be able to live upon nothing. Every true teacher of God should have bread to eat that the world knoweth not of, so that when men who misunderstand his mission come to him and say, "Let us hear your sermon, and then you shall have the loaf," he should be able to decline the loaf, to preach his discourse, and to vanish into the wilderness.

This gospel of Christ, either in its prophetic outlines, or in this transient dispensation of the Baptist, or in its full revelation in Jesus Christ, has never sought to make itself a popular religion in the sense of bowing down hopefully before thrones on which were seated kings that could confer advantages upon it. Its fierce, all but savage, independence always strikes me with infinite force. When the Pharisees and the Sadducees came to the baptism of John, he said, "You are a brood of vipers." He called them by their right name. We dare not use such names now, because we do not live in the wilderness, we live in a city; we are not clothed with camel's hair and a leathern girdle about our loins, we have now gown and bands and a silken girdle, therefore we must be very complacent with the Pharisees and the Sadducees, and with people who are socially tall. I heard a fine and most prosperous gentleman say that he entered a London church once and only once because in the course of the service the minister called some person who had been acting vilely a wretch. "For that reason I have shut up the Bible I heard a man call the most respectable citizens of his day a brood of vipers, a progeny of serpents, a nest of evil things. And I heard another man call a king a fox, and others he called whited sepulchres, hidden graves, actors, masked men." The age of free, clear, grand speech is dead: we have come into the age of euphonism. He is the bold man who so utters his sentences that nobody can quote them, who so rounds and oils them that it is impossible to retain them in the grasp. The old grit is lost, the old free piercing speech is gone; we have alighted upon silken times, and hard words would not become the lips that cannot live but on the rich man's viands.

Though the gospel has never endeavoured to make itself popular in the sense of conciliating those who might confer patronage upon it, yet it has always welcomed with infinite pathos the hearts that felt their need of its redemption. No broken heart was ever turned away from the cross, no weary and overborne soul was ever discouraged by the Son of God. No poor bent woman, having nothing left but her touch of faith, was ever spurned by God's dear Son. He resents our fulness, not our poverty: it is when we are great he has nothing to say to us, not when we are little in our own esteem.

It is everywhere made clear in these Scriptures, that in coming for divine blessings we must renounce all human satisfactions. Nothing but emptiness can be heard at the divine bar. John gives a hint of this grand condition of entrance into the divine kingdom when he says, "Think not literally plume not yourselves by saying, We have Abraham for our father. This is a kingdom that knows nothing of these intermediate and transient relationship; this is not a kingdom of great families, it is a kingdom of humanity." Therefore, for John the Baptist, trained in the wilderness, to come up amid all these glittering things and to lay down this doctrine of the kingdom of Heaven being founded upon humanity, was a miracle then it is a commonplace now, because we have had full instruction upon gospel principles and purposes. But in John the Baptist's day to lay down this grand doctrine here is a kingdom not for special families and particular kindreds, but for all the wide world that was a consummation of all the miracles as well as a fulfilment of all the prophecies.

How difficult it is to break a man's prejudice when it rests upon considerations of the kind which John refers to. A man had Abraham to his father, therefore, he. wildly reasons, it will be all right with him whatever may happen in the world. Christianity aims a destructive blow at all such pretences. This is the last fibre of badness. You cannot take out of some men a claim to God's favour, because of something ancestral or official represented by their individual life. Blessed are they who never heard of Abraham as compared with those who turn their Abrahamic ancestry into a prejudice against the divine kingdom or a condition of entering it. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven. Blessed are they who can say

"Who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?" This is the first time I have heard you say "wrath;" when you began to preach you said, "the kingdom of Heaven." How do you account for this change in your language and your tone? In reply to this inquiry John tells me that the Gospel of Christ is either a kingdom or a wrath. It is a saviour of life unto life, or a saviour of death unto death. It is a gospel or a judgment, a heaven or a hell, an eye turned towards the zenith of God's heart, bright as a morning, or the same eye turned in kindling wrath towards the Egyptians, troubling the camp, and striking off the chariot-wheels though they be made of solid iron. This book cannot occupy a middle place in society. It is either the Book or no Book, a gospel or a lie, a religion or a blasphemy. No man can entertain an opinion of indifference regarding Jesus Christ. If he has considered the subject at all, he must worship Christ or crucify Him. He cannot be allowed to live as an indifferent person, about whom any opinions may be formed you please. When there is earnestness in the inquiry and the criticism, that earnestness ends in homage or crucifixion.

This sermon by John the Baptist is not the kind of introduction one would have expected to the incoming of the Son of God. No gentle tone seems to escape the lips of this man: it is as if a stormy whirlwind had caught him and borne him on through the wilderness of Judea, and as if a great fire were behind him as he earnestly makes his way. Strange and terrible are these words Repent, Prepare, Axe, Purge his floor, Burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire. In all these there is not one tone of conciliation, one smile of amiability, one outflow of cordiality. Yet this man comes before the Prince of Peace. Nor does he allude in this report to the gentler aspects of the coming One. He is taken up with the idea of power; hence he says, "He that cometh after me is mightier than I." The preacher in the wilderness deals with the idea of strength; strength as a terror to evil, as a terrible judicial power. A melodious hymn, such as peace would sing in a garden of flowers, might have been expected, trembling, quivering with hopeful joy; but instead, there is a roar as of a sudden storm, and a cry as of unexpected terror. This is not the introduction I looked for, yet it is like the way of God in the making of human history. He is always setting aside human expectations, and building His temples in unlikely places and with unlikely material. God uses the storm. The ages are not all made up of long radiant summer days: night, and storm, and battle, as well as day, and calm, and peace, are God's servants. This age requires voices that can be heard: the world's vast wilderness is open, and the man that is needed now and in every age is the man who, with throat of brass, inspired with iron lungs, can cry, "Repent." The church is now in danger of overfeeding the few and forgetting the hungry many. There is a work to be done in the wilderness; the manner appropriate to the wilderness may not be appropriate to the church; what is wanted, therefore, is adaptation, the loud cry or the subdued tone both are wanted, and always will be wanted, to meet the world's great want.

Yet how incomplete it would be to say that this report of John's ministry given in the gospel by Matthew fully represents the work done by the energetic Baptist. Supposing we had no other account but the one which is now immediately before us, we should have no conception approaching completeness of the work which John did in his short day. It is so that all preacher's suffer. Let us go and inquire of those who have heard John the Baptist preach, and listen what reports they give of this wonderful man. Have you heard this new preacher deliver a discourse the man whose raiment is of camel's hair, with a leathern girdle about his loins? "Yes," is the reply, "we have heard him preach." What do you think of him? "He is a harsh man, his voice grates, he utters austere words." What did you hear him say? "We heard him call the Pharisees and the Sadducees a brood of vipers." He did not call the Pharisees and the Sadducees a brood of vipers to their faces, did he? "Yes." Then we do not care to hear so fierce a preacher.

Ask others. Have you heard John the Baptist preach? "Yes." What say you about him? "Savage, terrible; do not go near him, he will offend, he will affright you." Why? you say. Can you tell us anything you have heard him say? "Yes, we heard him say, The axe is laid unto the root of the trees: therefore every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down and cast into the fire; and after that he said it was an unquenchable fire." Then he is not the kind of preacher that would suit us: we like the gentle and the quiet, the contemplative, the almost silent: above all things we love the pathetic and the soothing so we shall not go to hear this Jordan-preacher.

But here are others coming from the sermon: have you heard him preach? "Yes." What said he? "He said there was One coming, whose fan was in his hand, and he would thoroughly purge his floor, and gather the wheat into the garner, but burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire."

All these three reports concur: they all represent John the Baptist as a fierce, objurgatory preacher. His lips are iron-bound, his voice is like a shock of tempest, and there is no gentleness in his heart. By these fierce utterances he disproves his claim to be the herald of the man you expect.

There the report of this great preacher might end. Would you have a true conception of his marvellous power from the report which Matthew gives in this chapter? You must collate the other evangelists and put the story together, piece by piece, until you get its wholeness. This same John the Baptist said the tenderest thing that ever fell from human lips. The man who said, "Vipers axe fire fan" said the most touching words that ever fell on the bruised and expectant heart of men. I have noticed that to be the case so frequently that the men who can denounce the age with so fierce an accent, can bless the age with its softest and sweetest benedictions. I have noticed that the humorist is the master of pathos. I have observed that the man who is most fierce against iniquity can also be the most sympathetic with weakness and sorrow.

Now having heard the three reports about John, let us wait a few days and then inquire again. Let us suppose those few days to have elapsed, and here is a party coming from listening to the Baptist. Let us inquire have you heard the Baptist preach? "Yes." What think ye of him? "He hath broken our hearts." What, has he said anything about viper, and fire, and axe, and fan? "Nothing." What then did he say? He cannot have spoken any gentle thing: gentle things would not become that fierce mouth. What said he? Now listen to the reply, and tell me if this does not reveal the character of the Baptist in its roundness. He said, looking upon One who was within sight, and pointing to him, "Behold the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world." What, did the man who said, "Viper, axe, fire, fan, purge the floor" did he say, "Behold the Lamb of God"? "Yes." Then he preached the only sermon worth preaching.