Sons of God; sermons

Contents

SERMON PAGE

I. The Family Record 1

II. The All-Father 13

I. The Family Record

SONS OF GOD.

i.

THE FAMILY KECOKD.

fcniiflB, 23-38.

" Jfesus foas about tfjirtg gears of age, being (as foas supposed) tfje son of Sosepfj . ♦ ♦ fofjicfj foas tfje son of ©airifc ♦ ♦ . fofjicfj foas tfje son of Jtatiafj . ♦ ♦ fofjicfj foas tfje son of Sacob ♦ ♦ . fofjicfj foas tfje son of ♦ . ♦ Esaac ♦ ♦ ♦ fofjtcfj foas tfje son of Libras fjam ♦ ♦ ♦ fofjtefj bias tfje son of Noafj ♦ ♦ ♦ fofjicfj foas tfje son of gUam, fofjtcfj bias tfje son of (Koto."

The third chapter of St. Luke contains the strangest family-tree ever erected. Its root is God ; its stem Adam, Noah, Abraham and his descendants, and the fruit is Jesus. There is no break in the descent anywhere. There is no intimation in the record anywhere that at some point a new kind of being has come in. The author seems to assume with the strangest simplicity that all the persons named are of the same species. That "like begets like" is one of the truisms of human science and human experience. When father, son, and grandson are spoken of, it is assumed without question that they all belong to the same kind of being.

Now, here stands Adam in the direct line of descent between God and Jesus. The stirps is the same. Humanity is Divine. Which is but another way of saying that " we are God's offspring." This fundamental assumption that men literally share in the nature of God, as a child shares in the nature of its father, I believe to be the starting-point of all religion, and the rescuing this truth from oblivion to be the distinctive work of Jesus Christ. It is the fact which makes revelation possible. Only beings of the same kind can hold intercourse. A man can have no commerce with a stone. A fish cannot speak with a bird. Only a god can hold converse with God.

There is a strange notion current in Western theology that human nature was transformed by the "Fall." It was indeed, but not in the way commonly imagined. When Adam came in sight of the " Tree of knowledge of good and evil," God said if they eat of it " they shall become as gods." What He said was true. When they attained the point where they could comprehend moral distinctions, they passed beyond the brute, and took their places as sovereign citizens in the republic of spirits.

" And so I live, you see, Go through the world, try, prove, reject, Prefer, still struggling to effect My warfare; happy that I can Be crossed and thwarted as a man; Not left in God's contempt apart, With ghastly, smooth life, dead at heart, Tame in earth's paddock as her prize."

This Christian genealogical table answers the question which has been for a generation the most

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imperious one in science, "What is man's place in Nature ? " This settles it. He is not in Nature. He belongs to a different category. He is in the supernatural.

This underlying assumption of the Fatherhood of God and the sonship of men is Jesus' starting-point. It comes out with startling distinctness in the two titles by which he described himself, the " Son of man," and the " Son of God." We miss the point when we think of this being true only of Him. On the contrary, the burden of His life was that men would not see that it was true of all men. It was because He realized in Himself exhaustively both natures that He felt their identity. It was when He was most intensely conscious of His humanity that He said, " I and my Father are one."

" The man most man works best for man, Like God at Nazareth."

In the parable of the Prodigal Son, the place where one sees the gospel in action, the son remains a son in all the windings of his tortuous course. He lives among swine, but is not turned into a pig like Ulysses' companions. If the strange women among whom he lived should have borne him children, even those sons of shame would have been the lineal descendants of the father who sat at home, but followed with his eyes the errant son who bore his own flesh and blood. When he returned, it was because he " came to himself." A son he was in his father's house, a son he was in the far country, only a son he was when he came home again. The double revelation of Jesus is, if one may use the phrases without being misapprehended, the humanness of God, and the divineness of man.

In the two primary formularies of Christianity this fact stands in the front, and is the ground of entrance to what follows.

In the Lord's Prayer men are taught to make their intrinsic relationship to God the ground of their approach to him. They come to him, not as manikins to their cunning artificer, but as children to their father; —

" Our Father who art in Heaven."

In the Creed, the essential paternity of God is the first article. The imperious instinct of propagation is characteristic of God as of men. It is not good for God to be alone ! From this, creation comes ; —

" I believe in God, the Father."

And now I beg you to notice a few practical issues from this fundamental truth thus briefly stated and defended.

(1.) The interplay of affection between God and men rests upon this fact. I have already called your attention to the fact that only beings of the same nature can hold intellectual commerce. This is more profoundly true of love than it is of knowledge. A man may be fond of his dog or his horse, and the brute may follow him with eyes of mute worship, but intelligent exchange of love between them there is none possible. They are not commensurate. Their natures are not in the same plane. It is as true that

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like loves like as it is that " like begets like." This is the significance of that pregnant article in the Creed, " Begotten before all worlds." That is, it is of the essential nature of God to love. But love will only go out to a person. Hence, the Son of man, the " first-born among many brethren," is as old as God. This affection of God for his children is the result of their essential nature, and not of their conduct. Human love is not contingent for its existence upon its being either valued, understood, or returned by its object. The father will love the wayward son, the wife the unworthy husband, undeterred by either indifference, stupidity, or absence. It has its root in their community of nature. The father's or wife's very identity has passed into the son or the husband, and cannot be recalled. But there is a strange notion current that God's good-will for a man is latent until set in motion by some deliberate action on the man's part ; that it is only a possibility instead of an actuality wrapping the man always round about; that it is arrested by misbehavior, and may be killed by rejection. This notion seems to me to be in the face of the revelation of Jesus Christ. Its deadly error may be seen by stating it another way. Suppose God to speak thus : — " I once knew and loved such or such a man. He was My child. I loved him. But he offended Me. He was fractious, coarse, obstinate, stupid. I gave him his warning several times, but he would not heed. I have now cast him off. I have thrown him out of My life. My love for him is dead. He is now, like many others of My children, 'dreeing his weird,' but it does not disturb Me. He made his bed himself, and he must lie in it. He can never again be son of Mine."

This is Paganism pure and simple.

Christianity, on the other hand, thinks of God as saying : —

" This, My son, is silly, stubborn, selfish. He was impatient of My way of life. He went away, thinking, foolish child, to be out of My sight. I cannot send out My servants to bring him back by violence ; for it is his love I want, and that cannot be forced. But I have kept him always in My sight. I wait. His rags, his pains, his hunger, are My burden, but he is My son. When he has exhausted himself he will return, and My sorrow shall be turned into joy."

But at this point let me pause to say, in parenthesis, that candor compels the recognition of the fact that there seems to be in the Gospel itself an intimation, of the possibility of a strange and mysterious kind of human action which results in dehumanizing its subject. Just what it is is not very clear. " Offending one of these little ones," Jesus calls it. It seems to be the action of a man who, being consciously aware of God's affection, turns upon it with hate, breaks himself against it, and loses the semblance of a son. The action arouses the wrath of the Lamb Himself ! We will not delay now to speculate upon its issue. Whether it transforms its author into a being of another kind which retains his immortality, or whether it fixes in him a process of degradation which slowly carries him out of his

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unhappy being, have been variously held. This much is clear: it is an action which no soul can commit without the deliberate wish and intent to do so.

(2.) Notice in the next place the relation of Jesus Christ to this fact of Divine Humanity. What was He? What did He conceive Himself to be? He thought it necessary to insist that He was a man. Whence did the necessity arise? Could any sane person ever doubt the fact ? Would not any competent observer have described Him to be "An adult male specimen of Homo Sapiens?" Did He not show flesh, blood, nerves, tissues, hair, beard? Did He not wear clothes, eat food, and warm Himself at the fire ?

" Had He not eyes, hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions ? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as another man ? If one prick Him would He not bleed ? If one tickle Him would He not laugh ? If one poison Him would He not die ? "

Being so palpably man as He was, why should He insist upon the fact ? Why call Himself the " Son of man?"

The reason is not far to seek. Being in Himself the ideal man, He found Himself identifying His consciousness with that of God ! Not enough, I think, has been made of the psychological proof of Christ's Divinity. He seems to show the double consciousness which belongs of necessity to such a Person.

He says, " I and my Father are one," and again " My Father is greater than I ; " and both were alike true. Their harmony is to be sought, not in the unity of any theological system, but in the unique personality of the Divine Man. He carried to their ultimate power the dual spiritual consciousness which belongs to all the sons of men.

" What is man that thou art mindful of him," and " Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels," was the complex feeling of David, and of all men who closely question themselves. In Jesus the complexity was resolved. When man comes to himself he becomes aware of God. In St. Paul it wrought a confusion of his own identity. " It is I, yet not I, but Christ that dwelleth in me."

(3.) But over against all this seem to stand the stubborn facts of human life. Look at men; let attention rest upon them until you become deeply impressed with what they are as they actually exist. Stand upon a street corner, and watch the myriad men and women as they hurry past. You see how commonplace they are. There is no divinity apparent in them. At best they are but respectable. But most fall short of the best. They are intent upon money or enjoyment. See the hard, empty, vacant, brutalized faces. They fall below the standard of humanity ; why put in the claim of divinity for them?

Then call to mind the teeming myriads of narrowskulled savages who dwell in the dark places of the earth. Call you these gods? Can you fairly call

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them men? So low are they, so little above the beast of the field, some of them only yet struggling up out of their original clay into the semblance of man ! Why claim for all these to share the nature of God ?

I reply : Christianity does claim for them just that descent, and in this claim is the secret of her triumph.

But it must be borne in mind that they are children in all stages of development. If the womb of time be torn rudely open, its embryotic children will seem monstrosities of course. Even when they are brought to the birth some are deformed and misshapen. But can deformity beat off a mother's love from the offspring in which runs her blood ? Will she not nourish it, rear it to symmetry within the limitations which its nature sets, taking for the task all the time and all the means available ?

Will moral deformity or mere helplessness beat off the love of God ? And who will say through what stretches of time and upon what successive stages God will develop his children " into the measure and the stature of a perfect man"?

One thing Christianity has already made practically evident, that is, that belief in man and belief in God are bound up together. They stand or fall together. The revelation of Jesus Christ the Son of man concerning the intrinsic nature of His brethren has not been forgotten or ineffective. Even a false and unworthy "theology," though it has obscured, has not been able to hide it. It is the motive force which is slowly shaping the fortunes of the race.

" Beloved, now are we the sons of God ! "

II. The All-father

II.

THE ALL-FATHER.

Safjn WEB. 9.

" ?§e tftat fjatfj seen me fjatfj seen tfje JFatfjer."

When" the gloomy Teuton, our ancestor, walked or sat under the shadows of the German forest, saw its giant branches torn and whirled by the winds, heard the cruel gray North Sea roaring against the shore, heard the ice cracking in the silent nights of winter, he personified all these agencies and called them Thor the "Thunderer." God, to him, was hard, resistless, bowelless Might !

The Hindoo, dwelling for ages in the midst of tropical luxuriance, where the fecund earth riots in growth, where life is prodigal, where tree and plant, and bird and beast, bring forth so abundantly that their children choke and smother one another, personifies the vital force everywhere at work, and with obscene symbols worships Venus Genetrix.

The Egyptians, after centuries of nature worship and nature study, abandon the problem, and perpetuate their despair in the Sphinx.

And so one may call the roll of all the peoples. There have been none of them who did not "seek after God if haply they might find Him." They all did find something. Each saw God in the greatest thing he knew. Men's eyes had slowly to be trained before they could see. God revealed himself to them as fast as they were able to comprehend. But their advance in Divine knowledge was never at a uniform rate of progress. From time to time great strides were made, at each of which men paused, sometimes for ages.

In the Holy Scriptures is contained the record of God's successive manifestations, and of the effect of these manifestations upon the lives and conduct of those to whom they came. " God, who, at sundry times and in divers manners, spake by the prophets, hath, in these last days, spoken unto us by His Son."

I wish you to examine with some care the thought of God, as that thought lay in the minds of three typical men. They are representatives of three great stages of religious progress. One is from the Patriarchal, one from the Hebrew, and one from the Christian world. They are Job, Solomon, and Paul. It will be seen that each is truer than the one which went before, and also that each hands on his ideas to his own successor who incorporates them into the substance of his own faith. The deep truth of Jesus' declaration is vindicated, that He " came not to destroy, but to fulfil the Law and the Prophets." It is probable that every Christian runs through in his own experience the antecedent religious history of his race; just as every man, in embryo, passes through the types of the lower forms of animal life. Even when mature, there are still to be found features in his body, and habits in his mind, whose function is obscure, but whose history is plain : they are survivals from a forgotten past.

So in the Christianity of to-day, there are still extant the great features impressed upon the race ages and ages ago. Indeed, men often fancy they are living " according to Christ," when, in point of fact, they are dominated by the thought of God which belonged to the patriarchs or to the Hebrew Commonwealth.

(1.) Job, the man of Uz. The drama is an unfolding of the thesis that God is Justice. It is the religion of the unfortunate. It is true to the facts of human life. It is not the man who has been stripped bare and lies in ashes who curses God and defies Him. On the contrary, this is the one who cannot afford to lose his faith in equal dealing of the Almighty. If the man who has not yet received his good things abandons his faith in an ultimate fair distribution, he abandons everything. This life he has already lost ; by so much the more does he hold fast to the hope that he will receive them in some other.

Job is a great, rich, benign, courteous, Eastern Sheikh. His noble sons and gracious daughters are worthy children of a worthy sire. In the gate of the city he is known as the leading nobleman of the Empire. His wealth is past count. He lives generously, cares for the poor, fears God, and loves righteousness. No nobler or more attractive character is drawn in any literature.

But out of a clear sky the lightning of misfortune strikes him, blow upon blow. His flocks and herds are swept away. His sons and daughters are dead. His wealth follows. He becomes suspected of secret crime which has called upon him the vengeance of the Almighty. His friends abandon him. He falls sick of a loathsome ailment ; Last, and worst of all, the woman's love upon which he had leaned fails him at his need. His wife turns upon him in disgust, and calls him a fool. He has drained the cup of misery to its last drop. No dramatist has ever left a more vivid impression of a man's utter desolation than in this divine poem. But literary form is not the author's object. He proposes the question which so many have tried to answer Why does God mete out misery to any man ?

His three friends sit down by him, and weary him with the shallow religionism not yet dead. Misfortunes are " judgments," they say. "It is true," they confess, " that in this case the offence has been well concealed. You have figured as an upright man ; but God can see through all that. Your attempt to still hide the fault only makes the matter worse. Come, make a clean breast of it. Undo the evil, whatever it may be, and then God will take his corrective hand off you."

They made the common mistake that God pays moral awards in material coin.

But Job holds fast to his own honesty. "I cannot tell why God has done this thing to me. That it is for any grievous sin I deny. Of course I know that I have, like every other man, failed to do the perfect right ; but I have no crime to charge myself with, as you suppose. God does what is right. Even though he slay me I will still hold to that. To let that slip would make existence meaningless, and would leave me, to all practical purposes, mad ! I will wait. Some day my vindicator will appear. I have faith that the right will be shown before I die. But I will not be false to myself, even to please God ! "

Here the argument ends. The dramatist becomes historian, and records that Job's judgment concerning God was vindicated by the result. For he recovered from his sickness. His wife came back to him with double love. Other sons as noble, and other daughters more fair than, the lost were given to him. Larger wealth and more exalted honor than before became his fortune. And so the drama ends. It exploits that conception of God which is the comfort of all wretched folk. They cling to the belief that the happiness which they have so far missed is guaranteed to them ultimately by the very nature of God, for " Grod is Justice."

(2.) Solomon the Magnificent.

The Hebrew king is the type of the fortunate man. His is probably the most conspicuous example of absolute good fortune on record. Try to reproduce him and his times before your imagination. Imagine a man in the vigor of mature manhood. His manly beauty is the wonder of his time. His health is absolute. He is endowed with understanding beyond any other. He is a poet, a man of science, a soldier, a statesman, a philosopher, a king, and in every character is pre-eminent. He sets before himself the task to test the possibilities of human life. If it be possible for any man to suck happiness out of it Solomon can. He deliberately makes the experiment with his eyes open, noting the observed facts as he goes. First he tries Philosophy. He has all the sciences at his fingers' ends. The " Systems " are as familiar to him as is his nurse's speech. He learns all there is to know, and declares there is nothing in it. He flings it all away, and tries what can be found of pleasure through the senses. Not the gross gratifications which, everybody knows, defeat themselves, but the well considered pleasures of a philosophic voluptuary. He denied himself nothing, — gorgeous residence, dress, service, music, art, entertainment, the fair mistress whom he adored, and the thousand wives and concubines who adored him; the enthusiastic affection of his people and the admiration of his contemporary kings. Again he declares that there is nothing in it. And he says why. It is because God has ordained certain laws of living which a man can no more escape from than he can from his own shadow. Every attempt to violate or ignore any one of them is quietly but relentlessly met and punished. The wise thing to do is to find out as completely as one can what these laws are, and mind them. If he transgress, either through ignorance or foolhardiness, it is but a word and a blow, — and more often the blow without a word.

"This is the substance of the whole matter: fear God and keep his commandments." The final word of Solomon is that " God is Law."

(3.) Paul, " the slave of Jesus Christ."

All will allow that this was an extraordinary man. But, unlike Job and Solomon, the things which made him remarkable are to be looked for not in his surroundings but in himself. There was nothing exceptional in his outward life. He was like ten thousand other men. He was a scholar, a gentleman, a man of comfortable fortune, of position and character, but had nothing about him to attract the attention of even his fellow-townsmen.

But his inner life was most tumultuous. His soul was the arena in which was fought out that struggle between the god and the beast of which every man is compounded. His " Confessions " in the seventh chapter of his epistle to the Romans has held the glass up to millions. From this intolerable conflict he found relief through the aid of the Divine Man in whom he saw the significance of life and the nature of God. Then he emerged into the serene content of a son of God. He found the solution of the problem of existence in the truth that " Grod is Lover

You must see how the domination of one or other of these three notions about God must affect a man's living. In point of fact they are all three actively working to-day.

All about us whole classes of men are in rebellion against the existing conditions of life, and appealing clamorously for a "justice" which they think has been wrongfully denied them. They are poor, and they think their poverty a punishment for an offence which they have never committed. Why should they live meagrely and stinted while their neighbor, no better man than they, lives in luxury. Lazarus in his rags and sores, like Job on his garbage-heap with his boils, asks God " Why ? " They misread, or but partially read, the facts of life, as Job did. They fancy that God makes up his balances yearly. If a practical equity of distribution fails to reach them in a lifetime, they conclude that either God or man is at fault. God, they think it cannot be ; and so they clamor for a human adjustment which will, by laws and governments, bring in the equity which God's justice warrants, and man's injustice thwarts. I wish it might be done ! Surely it is not pleasant to think of pain and poverty as being perennial. Who would not vote for any act of legislature or any economic system which would cure them, — if only it could be ? But the whole thought of God and life out of which such dreams come is shallow, mechanical, of the world's childhood. It would settle the perplexities of life by changing conditions instead of by changing characters. If men were automata, if they were beasts, this way would be practicable. But the disturbing element in this mechanical equation is the incalculable quantity of men's wills. These can never be reached, changed, controlled, moved, or restrained by justice. Only to love will they respond.

But not more true, and much less noble, is the cold-hearted acquiescence in " law " which marks the smug, comfortable man of fortune, or man of science. The one sees in God an infinite policeman, to preserve the established order of things. The sinfulness of crime seems to him to rest in its tendency to disorder. The student finds himself in the presence of a formless, impassive force, which does not hesitate to break up and throw upon the ground a thousand generations of unnoted men that they may form the soil out of which a future generation of better things may grow. I doubt if any more horrible conception of existence will ever be reached than that of the " Reign of Law." In the presence of an infinite justice one may plead and hope. In the presence of law, one will " eat, and drink, and die," — if possible, childless !

The infinite relief which Jesus brings to the situation is this, — one sees in Him the eternally true relation which exists between God and men. They are father and sons. They show the same nature and the same destiny. What derangements exist are in the estranged affections. What is possible is to be sought here. The Christian is the only man who is true to the facts. He only is " scientific." He does "fear God;" but he knows that he cannot "keep His commandments." In sober truth, he is not much concerned about commandments. He asks, not "What am I to do?" but "What am I?" He knows that if he can settle truthfully his eternal relationships his conduct will take care of itself. Keenly and painfully alive as he is to the fact of his " brute inheritance," he is as deeply conscious that he has also descended through another line. This is the one he tries to re-establish. Slowly, as he does so, he comes into the secret of God. The perplexities of life clear up, and the burdens of it become light. As he comes more and more to know his Father, he comes more and more to recognize and care for his brethren. He would reform the world by leading his brothers, one by one, back to their Father. He comes to see that the most imperious force in the universe is the same one which laughs at all obstacles when it shows itself in the lives of men and women, — that is love. He opens his heart to his Father, and walks serenely.