LOVE AND THE DAY
"Owe no man anything, but to love one another: for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law. 9. For this, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Thou shalt not covet; and if there be any other commandment it is briefly comprehended in this saying, namely, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. 10. Love worketh no ill to his neighbour: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law. 11. And that, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed.
12. The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light, 13. Let us walk honestly, as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying: 14. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the l.u.s.ts thereof."--ROMANS xiii. 8-14.
The two paragraphs of this pa.s.sage are but slightly connected. The first inculcates the obligation of universal love; and the second begins by suggesting, as a motive for the discharge of that duty, the near approach of "the day." The light of that dawn draws Paul"s eyes and leads him to wider exhortations on Christian purity as befitting the children of light.
I. Verses 8-10 set forth the obligation of a love which embraces all men, and comprehends all duties to them. The Apostle has just been laying down the general exhortation, "Pay every man his due" and applying it especially to the Christian"s relation to civic rulers.
He repeats it in a negative form, and bases on it the obligation of loving every man. That love is further represented as the sum and substance of the law. Thus Paul brings together two thoughts which are often dealt with as mutually exclusive,--namely, love and law. He does not talk sentimentalisms about the beauty of charity and the like, but lays it down, as a "hard and fast rule," that we are bound to love every man with whom we come in contact; or, as the Greek has it, "the other."
That is the first plain truth taught here. Love is not an emotion which we may indulge or not, as we please. It is not to select its objects according to our estimate of their lovableness or goodness.
But we are bound to love, and that all round, without distinction of beautiful or ugly, good or bad. "A hard saying; who can hear it?"
Every man is our creditor for that debt. He does not get his due from us unless he gets love. Note, further, that the debt of love is never discharged. After all payments it still remains owing. There is no paying in full of all demands, and, as Bengel says, it is an undying debt. We are apt to weary of expending love, especially on unworthy recipients, and to think that we have wiped off all claims, and it may often be true that our obligations to others compel us to cease helping one; but if we laid Paul"s words to heart, our patience would be longer-breathed, and we should not be so soon ready to shut hearts and purses against even unthankful suitors.
Further, Paul here teaches us that this debt (_debitum_, "duty") of love includes all duties. It is the fulfilling of the law, inasmuch as it will secure the conduct which the law prescribes. The Mosaic law itself indicates this, since it recapitulates the various commandments of the second table, in the one precept of love to our neighbour (Lev. xix. 18). Law enjoins but has no power to get its injunctions executed. Love enables and inclines to do all that law prescribes, and to avoid all that it prohibits. The multiplicity of duties is melted into unity; and that unity, when it comes into act, unfolds into whatsoever things are lovely and of good report. Love is the mother tincture which, variously diluted and manipulated, yields all potent and fragrant draughts. It is the white light which the prism of daily life resolves into its component colours.
But Paul seems to limit the action of love here to negative doing no ill. That is simply because the commandments are mostly negative, and that they are is a sad token of the lovelessness natural to us all.
But do we love ourselves only negatively, or are we satisfied with doing ourselves no harm? That stringent pattern of love to others not only prescribes degree, but manner. It teaches that true love to men is not weak indulgence, but must sometimes chastise, and thwart, and always must seek their good, and not merely their gratification.
Whoever will honestly seek to apply that negative precept of working no ill to others, will find it positive enough. We harm men when we fail to help them. If we can do them a kindness, and do it not, we do them ill. Non-activity for good is activity for evil. Surely, nothing can be plainer than the bearing of this teaching on the Christian duty as to intoxicants. If by using these a Christian puts a stumbling-block in the way of a weak will, then he is working ill to his neighbour, and that argues absence of love, and that is dishonest, shirking payment of a plain debt.
II. The great stimulus to love and to all purity is set forth as being the near approach--of the day (verses 11-14). "The day," in Paul"s writing, has usually the sense of the great day of the Lord"s return, and may have that meaning here; for, as Jesus has told us, "it is not for" even inspired Apostles "to know the times or the seasons," and it is no dishonour to apostolic inspiration to a.s.sign to it the limits which the Lord has a.s.signed.
But, whether we take this as the meaning of the phrase, or regard it simply as pointing to the time of death as the dawning of heaven"s day, the weight of the motive is unaffected. The language is vividly picturesque. The darkness is thinning, and the blackness turning grey. Light begins to stir and whisper. A band of soldiers lies asleep, and, as the twilight begins to dawn, the bugle call summons them to awake, to throw off their night-gear,--namely, the works congenial to darkness,--and to brace on their armour of light. Light may here be regarded as the material of which the glistering armour is made; but, more probably, the expression means weapons appropriate to the light.
Such being the general picture, we note the fact which underlies the whole representation; namely, that every life is a definite whole which has a fixed end. Jesus said, "We must work the works of Him that sent Me, while it is day: the night cometh." Paul uses the opposite metaphors in these verses. But, though the two sayings are opposite in form, they are identical in substance. In both, the predominant thought is that of the rapidly diminishing s.p.a.ce of earthly life, and the complete unlikeness to it of the future. We stand like men on a sandbank with an incoming tide, and every wash of the waves eats away its edges, and presently it will yield below our feet. We forget this for the most part, and perhaps it is not well that it should be ever present; but that it should never be present is madness and sore loss.
Paul, in his intense moral earnestness, in verse 13, bids us regard ourselves as already in "the day," and shape our conduct as if it shone around us and all things were made manifest by its light. The sins to be put off are very gross and palpable. They are for the most part sins of flesh, such as even these Roman Christians had to be warned against, and such as need to be manifested by the light even now among many professing Christian communities.
But Paul has one more word to say. If he stopped without it, he would have said little to help men who are crying out, "How am I to strip off this clinging evil, which seems my skin rather than my clothing?
How am I to put on that flashing panoply?" There is but one way,--put on the Lord Jesus Christ. If we commit ourselves to Him by faith, and front our temptations in His strength, and thus, as it were, wrap ourselves in Him, He will be to us dress and armour, strength and righteousness. Our old self will fall away, and we shall take no forethought for the flesh, to fulfil the l.u.s.ts thereof.
SALVATION NEARER
"... Now is our salvation nearer than when we believed."--ROMANS xiii. 11.
There is no doubt, I suppose, that the Apostle, in common with the whole of the early Church, entertained more or less consistently the expectation of living to witness the second coming of Jesus Christ.
There are in Paul"s letters pa.s.sages which look both in the direction of that antic.i.p.ation, and in the other one of expecting to taste death. "We which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord,"
he says twice in one chapter. "I am ready to be offered, and the hour of my departure is at hand," he says in his last letter.
Now this contrariety of antic.i.p.ation is but the natural result of what our Lord Himself said, "It is not for you to know the times and the seasons," and no one, who is content to form his doctrine of the knowledge resulting from inspiration from the words of Jesus Christ Himself, need stumble in the least degree in recognising the plain fact that Paul and his brother Apostles did not know when the Master was to come. Christ Himself had told them that there was a chamber locked against their entrance, and therefore we do not need to think that it militates against the authoritative inspiration of these early teachers of the Church, if they, too, searched "what manner of time the Spirit which was in them did signify when it testified beforehand ... the glory that should follow."
Now, my text is evidently the result of the former of these two antic.i.p.ations, viz. that Paul and his generation were probably to see the coming of the Lord from heaven. And to him the thought that" the night was far spent," as the context says, "and the day was at hand,"
underlay his most buoyant hope, and was the inspiration and motive-spring of his most strenuous effort.
Now, our relation to the closing moments of our own earthly lives, to the fact of death, is precisely the same as that of the Apostle and his brethren to the coming of the Lord. We, too, stand in that position of partial ignorance, and for us practically the words of my text, and all their parallel words, point to how we should think of, and how we should be affected by, the end to which we are coming. And this is the grand characteristic of the Christian view of that last solemn moment. "Now is our salvation nearer than when we believed."
So I would note, first of all, what these words teach us should be the Christian view of our own end; and, second, to what conduct that view should lead us.
I. The Christian view of death.
"Now is our salvation nearer." We have to think away by faith and hope all the grim externals of death, and to get to the heart of the thing. And then everything that is repulsive, everything that makes flesh and blood shrink, disappears and is evaporated, and beneath the folds of his black garment, there is revealed G.o.d"s last, sweetest, most triumphant angel-messenger to Christian souls, the great, strong, silent Angel of Death, and he carries in his hand the gift of a full salvation. That is what our Apostle rose to the rapture of beholding, when he knew that the thought of his surviving till Christ came again must be put away, and when close to the last moment of his life, he said, "The Lord shall deliver me, and save me into His everlasting kingdom." What was the deliverance and being saved that he expected and expresses in these words? Immunity from punishment?
Escape from the headsman"s axe? Being "delivered from the mouth of the lion," the persecuting fangs of the b.l.o.o.d.y Nero? By no means. He knew that death was at hand, and he said, "He will save me"--not from it, but through it--"into His everlasting kingdom." And so in the words of my text we may say--though Paul did not mean them so--as we see the distance between us, and that certain close, dwindling, dwindling, dwindling: "Now," as moment after moment ticks itself into the past, "now is our salvation nearer than when we believed."
Children, when they are getting near their holidays, take strips of paper, and tear off a piece as each day pa.s.ses. And as we tear off the days let us feel that we are drawing closer to our home, and that the blessedness laid up for us in it is drawing nearer to us. "Our salvation," not our destruction, our fuller life, not in any true sense of the word our "death," is "nearer than when we believed."
But some one may say, "Is a man not saved till after he is dead?" Is salvation future, not coming till after the grave? No, certainly not.
There are three aspects of that word in Scripture. Sometimes the New Testament writers treat salvation as past, and represent a Christian as being invested with the possession of it all at the very moment of his first faith. That is true, that whatever is yet to be evolved from what is given to the poorest and foulest sinner, in the moment of his initial faith in Christ, there is nothing to be added to it.
The salvation which the penitent thief received on the cross is all the salvation that he was ever to get. But out of it there came welling and welling and welling, when he had pa.s.sed into the region "where beyond these voices there is peace"--there came welling out from that inexhaustible fountain which was opened in him all the fullnesses of an eternal progress in the heavens. And so it is with us. Salvation is a past gift which we received when we believed.
But in another aspect, which is also emphatically stated in Scripture, it is a progressive process, and not merely a gift bestowed once for all in the past. I do not dwell upon that thought, but just remind you of a turn of expression which occurs in various connections more than once. "The Lord added to the Church daily such as were being saved," says Luke. Still more emphatically in the Epistle to the Corinthians, the Apostle puts into ant.i.thesis the two progressive processes, and speaks of the Gospel as being preached, and being a savour of life unto life "to them that are being saved,"
and a savour of destruction "to them that are being lost." No moral or spiritual condition is stereotyped or stagnant. It is all progressive. And so the salvation that is given once for all is ever being unfolded, and the Christian life on earth is the unfolding of it.
But in another aspect still, such as is presented in my text, and in other parallel pa.s.sages, that salvation is regarded as lying on the other side of the flood, because the manifestations of it there, the evolving there of what is in it, and the great gifts that come then, are so transcendently above all even of our selectest experiences here, that they are, as it were, new, though still their roots are in the old. The salvation which culminates in the absolute removal from our whole being of all manner of evil, whether it be sorrow or sin, and in the conclusive bestowal upon us of all manner of good, whether it be righteousness or joy, and which has for its seal "the adoption, to wit, the redemption of the body," so that body, soul, and spirit "make one music as before, but vaster," is so far beyond the germs of itself which here we experience that my text and its like are amply vindicated. And the man who is most fully persuaded and conscious that he possesses the salvation of G.o.d, and most fully and blessedly aware that that salvation is gradually gaining power in his life, is the very man who will most feel that between its highest manifestation on earth, and its lowest in the heavens there is such a gulf as that the wine that he will drink there at the Father"s table is indeed new wine. And so "is our salvation nearer," though we already possess it, "than when we believed."
Dear brethren, if these things be true, and if to die is to be saved into the kingdom, do not two thoughts result? The one is that that blessed consummation should occupy more of our thoughts than I am afraid it does. As life goes on, and the s.p.a.ce dwindles between us and it, we older people naturally fall into the way, unless we are fools, of more seriously and frequently turning our thoughts to the end. I suppose the last week of a voyage to Australia has far more thoughts in it about the landing next week than the two or three first days of beating down the English Channel had. I do not want to put old heads on young shoulders in this or in any other respect. But sure I am that it does belong very intimately to the strength of our Christian characters that we should, as the Psalmist says, be "wise"
to "consider our latter end."
The other thought that follows is as plain, viz. that that antic.i.p.ation should always be buoyant, hopeful, joyous. We have nothing to do with the sad aspects of parting from earth. They are all but non-existent for the Christian consciousness, when it is as vigorous and G.o.d-directed as it ought to be. They drop into the background, and sometimes are lost to sight altogether. Remember how this Apostle, when he does think about death, looks at it with--I was going to quote words which may strike you as being inappropriate--"a frolic welcome"; how, at all events, he is neither a bit afraid of it, nor does he see in it anything from which to shrink. He speaks of being with Christ, which is far better; "absent from the body, present with the Lord"; "the dissolution of the earthly house of this tabernacle"--the tumbling down of the old clay cottage in order that a stately palace of marble and precious stones may be reared upon its site; "the hour of my departure is at hand; I have finished the fight." Peter, too, chimes in with his words: "My exodus; my departure," and both of the two are looking, if not longingly, at all events without a tremor of the eyelid, into the very eyeb.a.l.l.s of the messenger whom most men feel so hideous. Is it not a wonderful gift to Christian souls that by faith in Jesus Christ, the realm in which their hope can expatiate is more than doubled, and annexes the dim lands beyond the frontier of death? Dear friends, if we are living in Christ, the thought of the end and that here we are absent from home, ought to be infinitely sweet, of whatever superficial terrors this poor, shrinking flesh may still be conscious. And I am sure that the nearer we get to our Saviour, and the more we realise the joyous possession of salvation as already ours, and the more we are conscious of the expanding of that gift in our hearts, the more we shall be delivered from that fear of death which makes men all their "lifetime subject to bondage." So I beseech you to aim at this, that, when you look forward, the furthest thing you see on the horizon of earth may be that great Angel of Death coming to save you into the everlasting kingdom.
Now, just a word about
II. The conduct to which such a hope should incite.
The Apostle puts it very plainly in the context, and we need but expand in a word or two what he teaches us there. "And that knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep, for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed." To what does he refer by "that"? The whole of the practical exhortations to a Christian life which have been given before. Everything that is duty becomes tenfold more stringent and imperative when we apprehend the true meaning of that last moment. They tell us that it is unwholesome to be thinking about death and the beyond, because to do so takes away interest from much of our present occupations and weakens energy. If there is anything from which a man is wrenched away because he steadily contemplates the fact of being wrenched away altogether from everything before long, it is something that he had better be wrenched from. And if there be any occupations which dwindle into nothingness, and into which a man cannot for the life of him fling himself with any thoroughgoing enthusiasm or interest, if once the thought of death stirs in him, depend upon it they are occupations which are in themselves contemptible and unworthy. All good aims will gain greater power over us; we shall have a saner estimate of what is worth living for; we shall have a new standard of what is the relative importance of things; and if some that looked very great turn out to be very small when we let that searching light in upon them, and others which seemed very insignificant spring suddenly up into dominating magnitude--that new and truer perspective will be all clear gain. The more we feel that our salvation is sweeping towards us, as it were, from the throne of G.o.d through the blue abysses, the more diligently we shall "work while it is called day," and the more earnestly we shall seek, when the Saviour and His salvation come, to be found with loins girt for all strenuous work, and lamps burning in all the brightness of the light of a Christian character.
Further, says Paul, this hopeful, cheerful contemplation of approaching salvation should lead us to cast off the evil, and to put on the good. You will remember the heart-stirring imagery which the Apostle employs in the context, where he says, "The day is at hand; let us therefore fling off the works of darkness"--as men in the morning, when the daylight comes through the window, and makes them lift their eyelids, fling off their night-gear--"and let us put on the armour of light." We are soldiers, and must be clad in what will be bullet-proof, and will turn a sword"s edge. And where shall steel of celestial temper be found that can resist the fiery darts shot at the Christian soldier? His armour must be "of light." Clad in the radiance of Christian character he will be invulnerable. And how can we, who have robed ourselves in the works of darkness, either cast them off or array ourselves in sparkling armour of light? Paul tells us, "Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh." The picture is of a camp of sleeping soldiers; the night wears thin, the streaks of saffron are coming in the dawning east.
One after another the sleepers awake; they cast aside their night-gear, and they brace on the armour that sparkles in the beams of the morning sun. So they are ready when the trumpet sounds the reveille, and with the morning comes the Captain of the Lord"s host, and with the Captain comes the perfecting of the salvation which is drawing nearer and nearer to us, as our moments glide through our fingers like the beads of a rosary. Many men think of death and fear; the Christian should think of death--and hope.
THE SOLDIER"S MORNING-CALL
"Let us put on the armour of light."--ROMANS xiii. 12.
It is interesting to notice that the metaphor of the Christian armour occurs in Paul"s letters throughout his whole course. It first appears, in a very rudimentary form, in the earliest of the Epistles, that to the Thessalonians. It appears here in a letter which belongs to the middle of his career, and it appears finally in the Epistle to the Ephesians, in its fully developed and drawn-out shape, at almost the end of his work. So we may fairly suppose that it was one of his familiar thoughts. Here it has a very picturesque addition, for the picture that is floating before his vivid imagination is that of a company of soldiers, roused by the morning bugle, casting off their night-gear because the day is beginning to dawn, and bracing on the armour that sparkles in the light of the rising sun. "That," says Paul, "is what you Christian people ought to be. Can you not hear the notes of the reveille? The night is far spent; the day is at hand; therefore let us put off the works of darkness--the night-gear that was fit for those hours of slumber. Toss it away, and put on the armour that belongs to the day."
Now, I am not going to ask or try to answer the question of how far this Apostolic exhortation is based upon the Apostle"s expectation that the world was drawing near its end. That does not matter at all for us at present, for the fact which he expresses as the foundation of this exhortation is true about us all, and about our position in the midst of these fleeting shadows round us. We are hastening to the dawning of the true day. And so let me try to emphasise the exhortation here, old and threadbare and commonplace as it is, because we all need it, at whatever point of life"s journey we have arrived.
Now, the first thing that strikes me is that the garb for the man expectant of the day is armour.
We might have antic.i.p.ated something very different in accordance with the thoughts that Paul"s imagery here suggests, about the difference between the night which is so swiftly pa.s.sing, and is full of enemies and dangers, and the day which is going to dawn, and is full of light and peace and joy. We might have expected that he would have said, "Let us put on the festal robes." But no! "The night is far spent; the day is at hand." But the dress that befits the expectant of the day is not yet the robe of the feast, but it is "the armour" which, put into plain words, means just this, that there is fighting, always fighting, to be done. If you are ever to belong to the day, you have to equip yourselves _now_ with armour and weapons. I do not need to dwell upon that, but I do wish to insist upon this fact, that after all that may be truly said about growth in grace, and the peaceful approximation towards perfection in the Christian character, we cannot dispense with the other element in progress, and that is fighting. We have to struggle for every step. _Growth_ is not enough to define completely the process by which men become conformed to the image of the Father, and are "made meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light." Growth does express part of it, but only a part. Conflict is needed to come in, before you have the whole aspect of Christian progress before your minds. For there will always be antagonism without and traitors within. There will always be recalcitrant horses that need to be whipped up, and jibbing horses that need to be dragged forward, and shying ones that need to be violently coerced and kept in the traces. Conflict is the law, because of the enemies, and because of the conspiracy between the weakness within and the things without that appeal to it.
We hear a great deal to-day about being "sanctified by faith." I believe that as much as any man, but the office of faith is to bring us the power that cleanses, and the application of that power requires our work, and it requires our fighting. So it is not enough to say, "Trust for your sanctifying as you have trusted for your justifying and acceptance," but you have to work out what you get by your faith, and you will never work it out unless you fight against your unworthy self, and the temptations of the world. The garb of the candidate for the day is armour.