Expositions of Holy Scripture

A >> Alexander Maclaren >> Expositions of Holy Scripture

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But to us, with our Christian consciousness, 'life' means more than
living, and 'He is our life' in a deeper and more blessed sense than
that our physical existence is sustained by His continual energy. The
love of God and consequent union with Him give us the only true life.
Jesus is 'our life,' and He enters the spirit which opens to Him by
faith, and communicates to it a spark of His own immortal life. He that
is joined to Jesus lives; he that is separated from Him 'is dead while
he liveth.'

The last point here is the solemn responsibility for choosing one's
part, which the revelation of the law brings with it. 'I have set
before thee life and death, the blessing and the curse, therefore
choose life.' We each determine for ourselves whether the knowledge of
what we ought to be will lead to life or to death, and by choosing
obedience we choose life. Every ray of light from God is capable of
producing a double effect. It either gladdens or pains, it either gives
vision or blindness. The gospel, which is the perfect revelation of God
in Christ, brings every one of us face to face with the great
alternative, and urgently demands from each his personal act of choice
whether he will accept it or neglect or reject it. Not to choose to
accept _is_ to choose to reject. To do nothing is to choose death.
The knowledge of the law was not enough, and neither is an intellectual
reception of the gospel. The one bred Pharisees, who were 'whited
sepulchres'; the other breeds orthodox professors, who have 'a name to
live and are dead.' The clearer our light, the heavier our
responsibility. If we are to live, we have to 'choose life'; and if we
do not, by the vigorous exercise of our will, turn away from earth and
self, and take Jesus for our Saviour and Lord, loving and obeying whom
we love and obey God, we have effectually chosen a worse death than
that of the body, and flung away a better life than that of earth.

GOD'S TRUE TREASURE IN MAN

'The Lord's portion is His people; Jacob is the lot of His
inheritance.'--DEUT, xxxii.9.

'Jesus Christ (Who) gave Himself for us, that He might redeem us from
all iniquity, and purify unto Himself a peculiar people.'--TITUS ii.
14.

I choose these two texts because they together present us with the
other side of the thought to that which I have elsewhere considered,
that man's true treasure is in God. That great axiom of the religious
consciousness, which pervades the whole of Scripture, is rapturously
expressed in many a psalm, and never more assuredly than in that one
which struggles up from the miry clay in which the Psalmist's 'steps
had well-nigh slipped' and soars and sings thus: 'The Lord is the
portion of my inheritance and of my cup; Thou maintainest my lot,' 'The
lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly
heritage.'

You observe the correspondence between these words and those of my
first text: 'The Lord's portion is His people; Jacob is the lot of His
inheritance.' The correspondence in the original is not quite so marked
as it is in our Authorised Version, but still the idea in the two
passages is the same. Now it is plain that persons can possess persons
only by love, sympathy, and communion. From that it follows that the
possession must be mutual; or, in other words, that only he can say
'Thou art mine' who can say 'I am Thine.' And so to possess God, and to
be possessed by God, are but two ways of putting the same fact. 'The
Lord is the portion of His people, and the Lord's portion is His
people,' are only two ways of stating the same truth.

Then my second text clearly quotes the well-known utterance that lies
at the foundation of the national life of Israel: 'Ye shall be unto Me
a peculiar treasure above all people,' and claims that privilege, like
all Israel's privileges, for the Christian Church. In like manner Peter
(1 Pet. ii. 9) quotes the same words, 'a peculiar people,' as properly
applying to Christians. I need scarcely remind you that 'peculiar' here
is used in its proper original sense of belonging to, or, as the
Revised Version gives it, 'a people for God's own possession' and has
no trace of the modern signification of 'singular.' Similarly we find
Paul in his Epistle to the Ephesians giving both sides of the idea of
the inheritance in intentional juxtaposition, when he speaks (i. 14) of
the 'earnest of our inheritance ... unto the redemption of God's own
possession.' In the words before us we have the same idea; and this
text besides tells us how Christ, the Revealer of God, wins men for
Himself, and what manner of men they must be whom He counts as His.

Therefore there are, as I take it, three things to be spoken about now.
First, God has a special ownership in some people. Second, God owns
these people because He has given Himself to them. Third, God
possesses, and is possessed by, His inheritance, that He may give and
receive services of love. Or, in briefer words, I have to speak about
this wonderful thought of a special divine ownership, what it rests
upon, and what it involves.

I. God has special ownership in some people.

'The Lord's portion is His people; Jacob is the lot of His
inheritance.' Put side by side with those other words of the Old
Testament: 'All souls are Mine,' or the utterance of the 100th Psalm
rightly translated: 'It is He that hath made us, and to Him we belong.'
There is a right of absolute and utter ownership and possession
inherent in the very relation of Creator and creature; so that the
being made is wholly and altogether at the disposal, and is the
property, of Him that makes him.

But is that enough for God's heart? Is that worth calling ownership at
all? An arbitrary tyrant in an unconstitutional kingdom, or a slave-
owner, may have the most absolute right of property over his subject or
his slave; may have the right of entire disposal of all his industry,
of the profit of all his labour; may be able to do anything he likes
with him, may have the power of life and death; but such ownership is
only of the husk and case of a man: the man himself may be free, and
may smile at the claim of possession. 'They may '_own_' the body,
and after that have no more than they can do.' That kind of authority
and ownership, absolute and utter, to the point of death, may satisfy a
tyrant or a slave-driver, it does not satisfy the loving heart of God.
It is not real possession at all. In what sense did Nero own Paul when
he shut him up in prison, and cut his head off? Does the slave-owner
own the man whom he whips within an inch of his life, and who dare not
do anything without his permission? Does God, in any sense that
corresponds with the longing of infinite love, own the men that
reluctantly obey Him, and are simply, as it were, tools in His hands?
He covets and longs for a deeper relationship and tenderer ties, and
though all creatures are His, and all men are His servants and His
possession, yet, like certain regiments in our own British army, there
are some who have the right to bear in a special manner on their
uniform and on their banners the emblazonment, 'The King's Own.' 'The
Lord's portion is His people; Jacob is the lot of His inheritance.'

Well, then, the next thought is that the special relationship of
possession is constituted by mutual love. I said at the beginning of
these remarks that as concerns men's relations, the only real
possession is through love, sympathy, and communion, and that that must
necessarily be mutual. We have a perfect right to apply the human
analogy here; in fact, we are bound to do it if we would rightly
understand such words as those of my text; and it just leads us to
this, that the one thing whereby God reckons that He possesses a man at
all is when His love falls upon that man's heart and soaks into it, and
when there springs up in the heart a corresponding emotion and
affection. The men who welcome the divine love that goes through the
whole world, seeking such to worship it, and to trust it, and to become
its own; and who therefore lovingly yield to the loving divine will,
and take it for their law--these are the men whom He regards as His
'portion' and 'the lot of His inheritance.' So that God is mine, and
that 'I am God's,' are two ends of one truth; 'I possess Him,' and 'I
am possessed by Him,' are but the statement of one fact expressed from
two points of view. In the one case you look upon it from above, in the
other case you look upon it from beneath. All the sweet commerce of
mutual surrender and possession which makes the joy of our hearts, in
friendship and in domestic life, we have the right to lift up into this
loftier region, and find in it the last teaching of what makes the
special bond of mutual possession between God and man.

And deep words of Scripture point in that direction. Those parables of
our Lord's: the lost sheep, the lost coin, the lost son, in their
infinite beauty, whilst they contain a great deal besides this, do
contain this in their several ways; the money, the animal, the man
belong to the woman of the house, to the shepherd, to the father. Each
is 'lost' in a different fashion, but the most clear revelation is
given in the last parable of the three, which explains the other two.
The son was 'lost' when he did not love the father; and he was 'found'
by the father when he returned the yearning of the father's heart.

And so, dear brethren, it ever is; the one thing that knits men to God
is that the silken cord of love let down from Heaven should by our own
hand be wrapped round our own hearts, and then we are united to Him. We
are His and He is ours by the double action of His love manifested by
Him, and His love received by us.

Now there is nothing in all that of favouritism. The declaration that
there are people who have a special relationship to the divine heart
may be so stated as to have a very ugly look, and it often has been so
stated as to be nothing more than self-complacent Pharisaism, which
values a privilege principally because its possession is an insult to
somebody else that has it not.

There has been plenty of Christianity of that sort in the world, but
there is nothing of it in the thoughts of these texts rightly looked
at. There is only this: it cannot but be that men who yield to God and
love Him, and try to live near Him and to do righteousness, are His in
a manner that those who steel themselves against Him and turn away from
Him are not. Whilst all creatures have a place in His heart, and are
flooded with His benefits, and get as much of Him as they can hold, the
men who recognise the source of their blessing, and turn to it with
grateful hearts, are nearer Him than those that do not do so. Let us
take care, lest for the sake of seeming to preserve the impartiality of
His love, we have destroyed all in Him that makes His love worth
having. If to Him the good and the bad, the men who fear Him and the
men who fear Him not, are equally satisfactory, and, in the same
manner, the objects of an equal love, then He is not a God that has
pleasure in righteousness; and if He is not a God that 'has pleasure in
righteousness,' He is not a God for us to trust to. We are not giving
countenance to the notion that God has any step-children, any petted
members of His family, when we cleave to this--they that have welcomed
His love into their hearts are nearer to Him than those that have
closed the door against it.

And there is one more point here about this matter of ownership on
which I dwell for a moment, namely, that this conception of certain men
being in a special sense God's possession and inheritance means also
that He has a special delight in, and lofty appreciation of, them. All
this material creation exists for the sake of growing good men and
women. That is the use of the things that are seen and temporal; they
are like greenhouses built for the great Gardener's use in striking and
furthering the growth of His plants; and when He has got the plants He
has got what He wanted, and you may pull the greenhouse down if you
like. And so God estimates, and teaches us to estimate, the relative
value and greatness of the material and the spiritual in this fashion,
that He says to us in effect: 'All these magnificences and magnitudes
round you are small and vulgar as compared with this--a heart in which
wisdom and divine truth and the love and likeness of God have attained
to some tolerable measure of maturity and of strength.' These are His
'jewels,' as the Roman matron said about her two boys. The great Father
looks upon the men that love Him as His jewels, and, having got the
jewels, the rock in which they were embedded and preserved may be
crushed when you like. 'They shall be Mine,' saith the Lord, 'My
treasures in that day of judgment which I make.'

And so, my brother, all the insignificance of man, as compared with the
magnitude and duration of the universe, need not stagger our faith that
the divinest thing in the universe is a heart that has learnt to love
God and aspires after Him, and should but increase our wonder and our
gratitude that He has been mindful of man and has visited him, in order
that He might give Himself to men, and so might win men for Himself.

II. That brings me, and very briefly, to the other points that I desire
to deal with now. The second one, which is suggested to us from my
second text in the Epistle to Titus, is that this possession, by God,
of man, like man's possession of God, comes because God has given
Himself to man.

The Apostle puts it very strongly in the Epistle to Titus: 'The
glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ, who
gave Himself for us that He might purify unto Himself _a people for a
possession_.' Israel, according to one metaphor, was God's 'son,'
begotten by that great redeeming act of deliverance from the captivity
of Egypt (Deut. xxxii. 6-19). According to another metaphor, Israel was
God's bride, wooed and won for His own by that same act. Both of these
figures point to the thought that in order to get man for His own He
has to give Himself to man.

And the very height and sublimity of that truth is found in the
Christian fact which the Apostle points to here. We need not depart
from human analogies here either. Christ gave Himself to us that He
might acquire us for Himself. Absolute possession of others is only
possible at the price of absolute surrender to them. No human heart
ever gave itself away unless it was convinced that the heart to which
it gave itself had given itself to it.

And on the lower levels of gratitude and obligation, the only thing
that binds a man to another in utter submission is the conviction that
that other has given himself in absolute sacrifice for him. A doctor
goes into the wards of an hospital with his life in his hands, and
because he does, he wins the full confidence and affection of those
whom he treats. You cannot buy a heart with anything less than a heart.
In the barter of the world it is not 'skin for skin,' but it is 'self
for self'; and if you want to own me, you must give yourself altogether
to me. And the measure in which teachers and guides and preachers and
philanthropists of all sorts make conquests of men is the measure in
which they make themselves sacrifices for men.

Now all that is true, and is lifted to its superlative truth, in the
great central fact of the Christian faith. But there is more than human
analogy here. Christ is not only self-sacrifice in the sense of
surrender, but He is sacrifice in the sense of giving Himself for our
redemption and forgiveness. He has not only given Himself to us, He has
given Himself for us. And there, and on that, is builded, and on that
alone has He a right to build, or have we a right to yield to it, His
claim to absolute authority and utter command over each of us.

He has died for us, therefore the springs of our life are at His
disposal; and the strongest motives which can sway our lives are set in
motion by His touch. His death, says this text, redeems us from
iniquity and purifies us. That points to its power in delivering us
from the service and practice of sin. He buys us from the despot whose
slaves we were, and makes us His own in the hatred of evil and the
doing of righteousness. Moved by His death, we become capable of
heroisms and martyrdoms of devotion to Him. Brethren, it is only as
that self-sacrificing love touches us, which died for our sins upon the
Cross, that the diabolical chain of selfishness will be broken from our
affections and our wills, and we shall be led into the large place of
glad surrender of ourselves to the sweetness and the gentle authority
of His omnipotent love.

III. The last thought that I suggest is the issues to which this mutual
possession points. God owns men, and is owned by them, in order that
there may be a giving and receiving of mutual services of love.

'The Lord's portion is His people.' That in the Old Testament is always
laid as the foundation of certain obligations under which He has come,
and which He will abundantly discharge. What is a great landlord
expected to do to his estate? 'What ought I to have done to my
vineyard?' the divine Proprietor asks through the mouth of His servant
the prophet. He ought to till it, He ought not to starve it, He ought
to fence it, He ought to cast a wall about it, He ought to reap the
fruits. And He does all that for His inheritance. God's honour is
concerned in His portion not being waste. It is not to be a 'garden of
the sluggard,' by which people who pass can see the thorns growing
there. So He will till it, He will plough it, He will pick out the
weeds, and all the disciplines of life will come to us, and the
ploughshare will be driven deep into the heart, that 'the peaceable
fruit of righteousness' may spring up. He will fence His vineyard.
Round about His inheritance His hand will be cast, within His people
His Spirit will dwell. No harm shall come near thee if thy love is
given to Him; safe and untouched by evil thou shalt walk if thou walk
with God. 'He that toucheth you toucheth the apple of Mine eye.' The
soul that trusts Him He takes in charge, and before any evil can fall
to it 'the pillared firmament must be rottenness, and earth be built on
stubble.' 'He is able to keep that which I have committed unto Him
against that day.' 'The Lord's portion is His people,' and 'none shall
pluck them out of His hand.'

And on the other side, we belong to God in Christ. What do we owe Him?
What does the vineyard owe the husbandman? Fruit. We are His, therefore
we are bound to absolute submission. 'Ye are not your own.' Life,
circumstances, occupations, all--we hold them at His will. We have no
more right of property in anything than a slave in the bad old days had
in his cabin and patch of ground. They belonged to the master to whom
he belonged. Let us recognise our stewardship, and be glad to know
ourselves His, and all events and things which we sometimes think ours,
His also.

We are His, therefore we owe absolute trust. The slave has at least
this blessing in his lot, that he need have no anxieties; nor need we.
We belong to God, and He will take care of us. A rich man's horses and
dogs are well cared for, and our Owner will not leave us unheeded. Our
well-being involves His good name. Leave anxious thought to masterless
hearts which have to front the world with nobody at their backs. If you
are God's you will be looked after.

We are His, therefore we are bound to live to His praise. That is the
conclusion which one Old Testament passage draws. 'This people have I
formed for Myself; they shall show forth My praise' (Isaiah xliii. 21).
The Apostle Peter quotes these words immediately after those from
Exodus, which describe Israel as 'a people for God's own possession,'
when he says 'that ye should show forth the praise of Him who hath
called you.' Let us, then, live to His glory, and remember that the
servants of the King are bound to stand to their colours amid rebels,
and that they who know the sweetness of possessing God, and the
blessedness of yielding to His supreme control, should acknowledge what
they have found of His goodness, and 'tell forth the honour of His
name, and make His praise glorious.' Let not all the magnificent and
wonderful expenditure of divine longing and love be in vain, nor run
off your hearts like water poured upon a rock. Surely the sun's flames
leaping leagues high, they tell us, in tongues of burning gas, must
melt everything that is near them. Shall we keep our hearts sullen and
cold before such a fire of love? Surely that superb and wonderful
manifestation of the love of God in the Cross of Christ should melt
into running rivers of gratitude all the ice of our hearts.

'He gave Himself for me!' Let us turn to Him and say: 'Lo! I give
myself to Thee. Thou art mine. Make me Thine by the constraint of Thy
love, so utterly, and so saturate my spirit with Thyself, that it shall
not only be Thine, but in a very deep sense it shall be Thee, and that
it may be "no more I that live, but Christ that liveth in me."'

THE EAGLE AND ITS BROOD

'As an eagle stirreth up her nest, fluttereth over her young, spreadeth
abroad her wings, taketh them, beareth them on her wings.'--DEUT.
xxxii. 11.

This is an incomplete sentence in the Authorised Version, but really it
should be rendered as a complete one; the description of the eagle's
action including only the two first clauses, and (the figure being
still retained) the person spoken of in the last clauses being God
Himself. That is to say, it should read thus, 'As an eagle stirreth up
his nest, fluttereth over his young, _He_ spreads abroad His
wings, takes them, bears them on His pinions.' That is far grander, as
well as more compact, than the somewhat dragging comparison which,
according to the Authorised Version, is spread over the whole verse and
tardily explained, in the following, by a clause introduced by an
unwarranted 'So'--'the Lord alone did lead him, and there was no
strange god with him.'

Now, of course, we all know that the original reference of these words
is to the deliverance of the Israelites from Egypt, and their training
in the desert. In the solemn address by Jehovah at the giving of the
law (Exodus xix. 4), the same metaphor is employed, and, no doubt, that
passage was the source of the extended imagery here. There we read, 'Ye
know what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles' wings,
and brought you unto Myself.' The meaning of the glowing metaphor, with
its vivid details, is just that Jehovah brought Israel out of its fixed
abode in Goshen, and trained it for mature national life by its varied
desert experiences. As one of the prophets puts the same idea, 'I
taught Ephraim to go,' where the figure of the parent bird training its
callow fledglings for flight is exchanged for that of the nurse
teaching a child to walk. While, then, the text primarily refers to the
experience of the infant nation in the forty years' wanderings, it
carries large truths about us all; and sets forth the true meaning and
importance of life. There seem to me to be three thoughts here, which I
desire to touch on briefly: first, a great thought about God; then an
illuminating thought about the true meaning and aspect of life; and
lastly a calming thought about the variety of the methods by which God
carries out our training.

I. Here is a great thought about God.

Now, it may come as something of a shock if I say that the bird that is
selected for the comparison is not really the eagle, but one which, in
our estimation, is of a very much lower order--viz. the carnivorous
vulture. But a poetical emblem is not the less fitting, though, besides
the points of resemblance, the thing which is so used has others less
noble. Our modern repugnance to the vulture as feeding on carcasses was
probably not felt by the singer of this song. What he brings into view
are the characteristics common to the eagle and the vulture; superb
strength in beak and claw, keenness of vision almost incredible,
magnificent sweep of pinion and power of rapid, unwearied flight. And
these characteristics, we may say, have their analogues in the divine
nature, and the emblem not unfitly shadows forth one aspect of the God
of Israel, who is 'fearful in praises,' who is strong to destroy as
well as to save, whose all-seeing eye marks every foul thing, and who
often pounces on it swiftly to rend it to pieces, though the sky seemed
empty a moment before.

But the action described in the text is not destructive, terrible, or
fierce. The monarch of the sky busies itself with tender cares for its
brood. Then, there is gentleness along with the terribleness. The
strong beak and claw, the gaze that can see so far, and the mighty
spread of wings that can lift it till it is an invisible speck in the
blue vault, go along with the instinct of paternity: and the fledglings
in the nest look up at the fierce beak and bright eyes, and know no
terror. The impression of this blending of power and gentleness is
greatly deepened, as it seems to me, if we notice that it is the male
bird that is spoken about in the text, which should be rendered: 'As
the eagle stirreth up _his_ nest and fluttereth over _his_ young.'