Didsbury sermons : fifteen discourses preached in the Wesleyan College Chapel, Didsbury, near Manchester

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SERMON I.

MAN THE GLORY OF GOD.

I

The form of the passage is polemical. It presumes, that is to say, an opponent ; if not a personal one, at least doctrine, with which it disagrees and is at issue. It protests with emphasis against certain religious teachings and practices, actual or possible, which contravene and deny it. And we should do injustice to Christ's meaning if we did not consider the text, in the first place, under this controversial aspect. No man, whatever may be affirmed or essayed to the contrary, cometh to God, the Father of all, except through Jesus Christ.

The words were directly addressed to the apostles, and were intended to guide their personal belief and conduct. But we cannot read the foregoing chapters of the Gospel without feeling that they have, and were designed to have, a much wider application, and that Christ here simply preaches to willing ears doctrine which He had taught to unwilling ones all through his public ministry.

Throughout that ministry He was in conflict with men, who held the doctrine of the fatherhood of God, but not the true doctrine. Again and again He encountered a school of religionists, who, if they did not formally abjure the Scripture Revelation, yet sublimed it away, reducing sin to a peccadillo, denying the world to come, or else stripping it of its terrors, and so representing God as though He looked upon his human offspring, at least upon that portion of it forming in their estimation the sum of mankind, with a complacency which winked at all moral distinctions. In fact the Supreme Father looked upon all with equal indifference ; all had right and power of free communication with Him at their pleasure ; and in the future life, if there was a future life, all would attain to sure beatitude in God.

In opposition to this theory, Christ taught that, child of God as man was, he was estranged from God through sin. He had lost the knowledge of God, and was spiritually dark. He had lost the favour of God, and was spiritually guilty. He had lost the image of God, and was spiritually corrupt. He had lost the life of God, and was dead in trespasses and sins. Moreover, that there was no remedy in the natural relations subsisting between God and the creature, and that men could only come to God, and secure the prerogatives of sonship by intervention from without. In other words, as against the doctrine of salvation by natural right and competence, Christ preached salvation by grace and by external help through a Divinely appointed Mediatorship. And this is the immutable witness of the Gospel through the ages.

There are those among ourselves who, with certain modifications, teach the old doctrines of a philosophical Sadduceeism. Is not God the Father of men ? Are we not all his children — foolish and wayward possibly, but still his children? Who shall separate us from the love of God ? Let us assure our hearts before Him. Let us look Him in the face with an unflinching eye. Let us not doubt but that sooner or later He will teach us the lessons of a perfect self-knowledge and self-correction, and so will gather us in for ever to his home and bosom.

Christianity challenges this doctrine. Appealing to Christ's credentials as a teacher sent from God, it proclaims to the world on his behalf, that God hath given to men eternal life, and that this life is by a Mediator whom

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He hath ordained. The Gospel does not argue the doctrine of the mediatorship so much as testify it. Not that it does not admit of argument. There is no absurdity in the doctrine. Why may not God, in the exercise of his moral government of the creatures, be Himself approached by mediation, just as under his providential government a being that is naturally or morally higher may be so approached by one that is naturally or morally lower ? Who but God is competent to determine how we may most fitly come to Him ? And as the mediatorship is actually constituted, what lessons touching the Divine holiness and love on the one hand, touching the ruin and helplessness, the dignity and sublime vocation of man on the other, does it not pour into our ears and into those of the wondering universe ! The doctrine, however, transcends argument. It is matter of supernatural witness. And in face of all deistical reasoning and sentiment to the contrary, Christ's Gospel maintains, that no man cometh to God, the Father of heaven and earth, otherwise than by a Divinely prescribed mediatorship.

But Christ's ministry did battle even more keenly with another school of misbelievers in the fatherhood of God. The men whom He resisted unto blood, striving against their evildoing in doctrine and life, were men who held that God was their Father through mediatorship. Angels, Abraham, Moses , saintly pedigree, holy observances, meritorious fasting and almsdeeds — these were their mouthpiece with God, their stepping-stones to immortality.

Christ told them, they carried a lie in their right hand. The props on which they depended were unreal, or they were inadequate. While they were right in believing that man could only find God through mediation, there was in fact— so He taught — but one Mediator between God and men, even Himself, the eternal and then incarnate Son of God. And this also is the abiding witness of God in the Gospel.

Alas ! we have the doctrine of the Pharisees among us as well as that of the Sadducees. Men are heard proclaiming, that the prayer of a disembodied saint, or the benediction of a consecrated fellowman, or the magic of a Christian rite, or a self-inflicted mortification of the flesh,

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has the stupendous power to join earth and heaven together, setting guilty souls at one with God again, ridding the human heart by some inexplicable process of its moral pollutions and diseases, and furnishing men with a sure passport to eternal life.

The New Testament pronounces all this to be a delusion and a falsehood. Our almsdeeds, our fastings, our bowings at the sacred name, our frequent communions, the baptismal waters, the intercessions of the dead or living, the absolutions of a priesthood — these bridge the gulf between us and God ! What does a man think of himself, what does he think of God, who takes up with such a hypothesis ? Christ alone is the Mediator. There is absolutely no other. All besides, personal or impersonal, are pretenders to a virtue which they do not possess. They are false, or weak, or superannuated, and if men hear Christ, they will disavow and reject them.

II

But the Lord's language is not controversial only. Taken with its context, it becomes the summary and index of a most large and precious Scripture teaching as to the nature of that mediatorship of Christ, through which men come to God. It calls our attention to the answer which the Gospel makes to the question — How do men come to the Father through Christ ?

In the necessity of things, the person, character, and history of the Mediator will have much to do with the nature and method of his mediation. And on these points we have affluent light. Who the Mediator was, let St. John tell us. " In the beginning existed the Word, and the Word existed in relation to God, and the Word existed (being) God. . . . And the Word became flesh, and tabernacled among us." This was the Mediator. And his character and history — how He was holy, harmless, separate from sinners; how He bore our sicknesses and carried our sorrows , how He spake words of truth and power, such as the world had never heard before, has never heard since ; how He wrought Divine miracles of healing and blessing ; how in the perpetration of a crime which might almost sadden eternity He was put to death by the hands of wicked men ; how He rose again from the dead, and amidst gazing human eyes went up through the clouds into heaven — all this we know on the credit of testimony which bears every conceivable token of trustworthiness.

With these facts in view, men have held, that the value of Christ's mediation consists in the energy of the truth which He taught, and in the force of his moral example. The thoughtless, self-pleasing, prodigal children of God here upon earth, arrested by the awful charm of Christ's doctrine, and spellbound by the fascination of his pure and lovely character, return to their Father, and are brought into everlasting agreement with his holy will.

Others, rising higher than this, explain that the Eternal Son of Man, by his perfect fulfilment through his earthly life of the will of God as our representative, became so acceptable to God, that by reason of what He was and did God is now the loving Father of us all, and in Him all men virtually are already, and by and by will actually be for ever, justified, and sanctified, and glorified.

Now both these theories of Christ's mediation, the ethical and the mystical, as they may be called — and subject to slight variations of statement they are the two prevailing theories of our time, not being the true one — whatever their merits or demerits, ignore, if they do not expressly deny, the most positive and repeated declarations of Christ Himself, and of the New Testament Scriptures on this subject. Judged by the testimony of these witnesses — and surely they are the only ones that have any authority to speak — the theories in question mistake the entire basis, method, and scope of the mediatorship of Christ, which, while it is most truly ethical, and within certain limits perhaps mystical also, is essentially, in all its grounds, processes, bearings, and issues, an economy of holy law — an economy, that is to say, in which God and man sustain towards each other not simply the tender relations of father and son, but those larger, loftier, more august, and absolutely unique relations of the Moral Governor of the universe, on the one hand, and of the rational and responsible creature on the other.

If we will hear the Scriptures, the whole human race has apostatized from God through the wiles of the Devil. Under altered circumstances mankind in their generations have repeated the original transgression, and are gone astray from God like lost sheep. By personal sin we have incurred the Divine displeasure — a displeasure from which we have no power to relieve ourselves. Indeed by reason of our moral corruption we are as indisposed as we are unable to do the will of God. We are children of wrath, liable to

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the everlasting loss of ourselves. But, so the Scriptures teach, by Christ as the Mediator provision is made for the establishing again of the relations which at first bound us to God. He, the Eternal Son of God, by the grace of the Father sent upon the earth in the likeness of our sinful flesh, partaker at once of the nature of sinning man, and of the nature of Him against whom man had sinned, freely of his love to us delivered Himself as an oblation to God for the world's sin, being " lifted up " between heaven and earth— such is his own word in the connection of the text — the just for the unjust, on the altar of his cross, so making atonement for human transgression, propitiating the righteous anger of God towards sinners, and securing for the whole world, under condition of faith in Him as its Saviour, a gracious right to all the vast, various, and immortal privileges of our original sonship to God.

More particularly, according to the doctrine of Christ and his disciples, men come unto God, entering into filial relation to Him, and enjoying the perfect benefit of that relation, through Christ's mediation, inasmuch as :

In the first place— the costly blood of Christ has made satisfaction in law to Divine justice for the sins of all mankind. Apart from Christ's offering the world was guilty before God. By virtue of that offering its guilt is expiated, and all men, through a personal faith in his merits, may find mercy and acceptance with God unto life eternal.

Secondly — as the purchase and recompense of the Redeemer's passion, God gives to the world by Christ's hands, in his character of intercessor for men, his own Holy Spirit, " to open their eyes, and to turn them from darkness to light and from the power of Satan unto God." By his gracious operations the way is prepared for Christ's doctrine ; moral obstacles to faith are weakened and struck down ; assurance of pardon is given to believers ; and the human soul, recovered by a second birth to its primeval righteousness, shines once more in the image of Him who created it.

Last of all — under the reign of Christ, exalted to God's right hand as lord of heaven and earth, believers in Him are protected from the evil that is in the world ; are subjected to a providential discipline, designed to rest, develop, and mature the graces of their regeneration ; and through all the hazard and difficulty of their probationary being are furnished with strength, enabling them to do the will of God and to make their way to everlasting life.

And so— the Gospel being witness — by the death of Christ as our reconciliation with God, by the Spirit of Christ as the restorer of our moral likeness to God, and by the mediatorial kingship of Christ as the eternal conqueror of sin and death, men come unto the Father through Him.