Bible Commentaries

Chapter7

The Continuousness of History—Repentance a Common Term—teaching Positive As Well As Negative—the True Baptism

Prayer

Almighty God, our voice is lifted up to thee in praise and thanksgiving, through Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour, because of all thy tender mercy and thy loving kindness shown unto us since we last assembled here. Thou dost lead us by ways that we know not, and unexpected answers dost thou give to our trouble and our want. We look back to behold a long line of light: that line is thy love, thy care, thy patience; and as we look forward we behold a long line of golden promise and tender assurance, so. that we have no fear clouding and darkening our hearts. This is the Lord's doing, this is the gift of heaven, this is the revelation of God's love to our life, though it be dark, dark with sin and vexed with many cares. What time we are afraid, we put our trust in God; when the sky is black, we know that the sun is still there, and that no force but thine can shake that source of light. Help us to know that the troubles of this life are for a moment, but as their season is short, so their visitation is often sharp. May we put our trust in thy love and righteousness and tender care, and be quiet, though the earth be removed and the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea.

Thou hast written thy testimony in our life, thou hast proved thyself every day of our individual history. Thou hast made us and not we ourselves, we are the people of thy pasture and the sheep of thine hand. Thou knowest our frame, thou rememberest that we are dust; every bone thou didst fashion, our reason thou didst set upon its throne, our whole life is brightened by the light of thy presence, and as for the troubles which vex and divide us, behold thou dost so direct them as to bring joy out of our greatest sorrow. What shall we render unto the Lord for all his benefits towards us? We will take the cup of salvation and call upon the name of the Lord, yea, with loudness as men call who are burning with the fire of earnestness. We will not restrain our song before God, but with loud hallelujahs will we praise thee for thy wonderful care, thy continual mercy.

We come always to Jesus, because he is the same yesterday, to-day, for ever,—always fall of love, full of pity, full of thought for our whole life. He died for us and rose again; he is our Saviour; and he is our intercessor; for us he shed his blood, for us he breathed away his heart in priestly prayer. We have no other Saviour; we need no other. His blood is our answer to thy law, his cross the sanctuary of the soul when pursued by its guilt.

We bless thee that we are in thine house, for it is good to be here. Thou dost cause a great calm to fill the sanctuary, and the spirit of peace speaks to the sons of peace, and having fellowship one with another, and with our common Father, great love floods the soul. Forgetting earth and time and dreary sense, we already claim the heritage bought for us by our Saviour Christ. Enjoying this opportunity of communion with God the Father, the Matthew 3:1-6.

1. In those days (thirty years after the events of Chapter II.) came (cometh) John the Baptist, preaching (after the manner of a herald), in the wilderness of Juda (bordering on the Jordan and the Dead Sea).

2. And saying, repent ye (change your mind and purpose): for the kingdom of heaven (a phrase used by Matthew about thirty times, and by him only in the New Testament) is at hand (has come nigh),

3. For this is he that was spoken of by the prophet Esaias, saying, The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.

4. And the same John had his raiment of camel's hair, and a leathern girdle about his loins: and his meat was locusts and wild honey.

5. Then went out to him Jerusalem, and all Juda, and all the region round about Jordan (the whole length of the river valley, including parts of Perea, Samaria, Galilee, and Gaulonitis).

6. And were baptized of him in Jordan, confessing their sins.

If you read the last verse of the second chapter—"And he came and dwelt in a city called Nazareth, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets, he shall be called a Nazarene"—and then read the first verse of the third chapter—"In those days came John the Baptist"—you might suppose that the two events followed one another within a very brief interval, whereas the fact is that thirty years intervened between the last verse of the second chapter and the first verse of the third. The heart is sad at that thought: we do not want the historian to take such wide leaps; we want him to take us down to Nazareth, and give us almost daily glimpses into that obscure but wondrous home. We long to overhear somewhat of the conversation that passes amongst its inmates; especially do we want to look at one with a human face, brightened often with divine flashes, and to listen to a voice like our own, yet much unlike it, so rich, so varied, so tender in pathos, so royal in command. Yet we stand here, at the opening of the third chapter (with one glimpse given by another writer) with thirty years overleaped in silence that is to the imagination provoking.

"In those days came"—literally "in those days cometh" as if all the movement were continuous, without break or gap, as if there were no past tense, as if we lived in a perpetual present, as if history were a continuous breathing, not a succession of shocks, but a perpetual outgo of the divine purpose and the heavenly will. We have broken up our grammar so that we now have present, past, perfect, pluperfect, and future, but there is another grammar in which there is but one mood and one tense, and it is Christ's purpose to draw us up into his own thinking, until all history and all developments, the whole sweep and current of things, shall be to us a living indicative. You go back to take up the past, you break life up into sections, you cut it up into parentheses, you vex the flowing narrative with foot-notes and marginalia, so that I am lost in this wondrous history of the race. He calms me by completing me, withdraws my attention from fractional times and momentary incidents, and fixes it upon the infinite oneness of the divine purpose and way.

In those days came John the Baptist. A transient name. The Baptist must die, the Congregationalism the Presbyterian, the Episcopalian must die—his very name is indicative of the transientness of his coming and purpose. No man can be known by any one little accent of his case throughout immortality. When a man is so specialized the meaning is that his mission is here and gone, whilst you are speaking about him—a breath, a shock, a voice, an echo, a vacancy. Do you still follow the Baptist? Poor laggard, what business hast thou, in this nineteenth century, with following the Baptist? He himself said his mission was introductory, symbolical, a plunge, and all was over. Why art thou still dogging his steps, as if he had aught to give thee? He has eaten up the locusts and wild honey, and his raiment and his leathern girdle are worn out and are not worth thy picking up. O haste thee to catch his Master.

Still, John had a mission, and a great one; and it will be our object to measure it in future expositions. John the Baptist came preaching—a term but little understood. There are few preachers, and ought to be few. There are too many who bear the name who do not understand the vocation. He is not a preacher who stands in one place year after year, talking to the same people, and overfeeding them with intellectual luxuries. Preaching, in the New Testament, is a term which means heralding, going up and down from east to west, crying, shouting, with a ringing voice, "Prepare!" He is the preacher who does Matthew 3:7-12.

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

8. Bring forth therefore fruits meet for repentance:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When men come to religious ordinances, they should be warned of the meaning of the action which they wish to accomplish. They should have a clear and most intelligent conception of the whole purpose of religious worship. It is the business of the heralds of the cross and the ministers of the truth to give this warning, to keep back those who have not the right credentials. This is a kingdom that can only be entered by one right, the right of sin, avowed, confessed, deplored. Blind Matthew 3:13-17.

13. "Then cometh Jesus from Galilee to Jordan unto John , to be baptized of him.

14. But John forbade (sought to hinder) him, saying, I have need to be baptized of thee, and comest thou to me?

15. And Jesus answering said unto him, Suffer it to be so now (for the present) for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness. Then he suffered him.

16. And Jesus when he was baptized went straightway out of the water, and lo the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and lighting upon him:

17. And lo a voice from heaven saying, This is my beloved Son , in whom I am well pleased."

There is one point upon which we are all agreed—namely, that the baptism of Jesus Christ could not be a baptism unto repentance. "He did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth." He was without spot or wrinkle, or any such thing, the very Son of God, pure as the bosom on which he rested and out of which he came. We must, therefore, find other reasons than that of repentance for this baptism of the Saviour of the world. John must enlarge his own conception of the baptism which he came to administer. He had used the word Repent; now a new word was to be attached to his baptism, and an infinitely older and larger word. What man amongst us is there who knows the exact measure of his work? Yet, for the sake of convenience, every one of us has a name by which he designates his ministry. John , for example, called his service a baptism unto repentance. But there came one unto him who said, "The other word which enlarges your service to its true proportion, and indicates its high intent and purport, is—Righteousness." John thought his ministry a negative one: Jesus Christ taught him that his baptism was positive as well as negative, a baptism unto righteousness or in accordance with the spirit of righteousness, as well as a baptism unto repentance.

This baptism of Christ was a baptism of sympathy. Sympathy means feeling with, having a common pathos or feeling, emotion, or passion, and he, the Saviour, was in all points made like unto his brethren, that in all points he might have a fellow-feeling, a kindred passion: that there might be no tone in all the gamut of their life's utterance to which he could not respond, giving it a counterpart, a fulfilment, a higher emphasis, a keener and truer accent. Jesus Christ identified himself with all the dispensations of providence; he was the spirit of the prophets, and now he came into this baptism of John. When he expounded the Scriptures he began at Moses—he could not have begun earlier—and he expounded them to those who listened to him—what was written in Moses, in the prophets, and in the Psalm; and, having been present in all these dispensations or varieties of the divine mood in relation to the children of men, was he to be absent only from the baptism of John? So he accepted that baptism, not because the word Repentance was associated with it, but because it also extended itself by subtle processes wholly unknown to the Baptist himself—to Righteousness.

It was a baptism of inauguration and a baptism of approval; John was hereby sealed as a witness and messenger of God. By this act Jesus Christ said, "John is no adventurer, and his baptism is no mere sensation of the passing hour. It goes back to the decree and purpose of God, it looks forward to the infinite gospel which it holds," and thus John himself was sealed, approved, and crowned in this very act of humble service performed by the Son of God. It was, I repeat, a baptism of inauguration. Jesus Christ was not in the sacerdotal line, though in the line royal: he came to be the Priest of the universe, having from eternity been its King, now he was introduced or inaugurated into his high-priestly office.

How little we know what we are doing when we baptize any life. We speak of repentance and cleansing as the meaning and purport of baptism, and sometimes we are baptizing kings and priests, and we know it not. The possibility that we may be thus inaugurating to high office and noble position some human life should throw over our whole service a tender and hopeful solemnity. You cannot tell who is under your influence: it may be a king, a priest, a deliverer. You thought your work was a preliminary one, you called yourself an elementary teacher, you said, in humble self-deprecation, "I am but a pioneer, I am only a forerunner, my name is a herald and nothing more, and I give introductory lessons, and cannot proceed to the higher learning: I am only a precursor, and nothing more." You limited yourself too much, John thought he was a crying voice, whereas it was appointed of God that he should inaugurate to his priestly office the Saviour of the world.

Thus the lesser may be concerned in the service of the greater. "I have need to be baptized of thee." If a man does not feel his own need of baptism he is unworthy of administering the rite in any of its higher senses to the humblest creature that ever was presented at the altar. "I have need to be baptized of thee, and comest thou to me?" We know the meaning of this in other ranges of thinking. A minister sometimes sees before him persons to whom intellectually he is but slave and minister, and he says, "I have need to be intellectually elevated and illuminated by thee, and comest thou to me?" Yet the coming is perfectly right, for this kingdom of Christ is not a merely intellectual school, it is a school in which intellect has to sit down and humble itself, and patiently wait for the illumining revelation which is shed from Heaven. We do not sit here in our cleverness and grandeur and intellectual influence, but in our moral nakedness and necessity, in our spiritual simplicity and childlike-ness, waiting not for man but for God, and for man only in so far as he is the medium on which the infinite silence breaks into momentary speech for the teaching and comforting of the human heart.

Thus, too, God puts himself under his own laws. "The laws of nature" is a mood of God, is but another expression for God himself. Do not speak of laws of nature as if they were somewhat independent of God. They are God, they are God in motion, God made visible, God made audible, God coming down in wondrous condescension so far into our region, and thinking that we can in some degree trace him, and identify him, and judge him. Thus Jesus Christ came unto the baptism of John. It was to him a baptism of sympathy, a baptism of approval, a baptism of inauguration, a stooping of the divine so as to take up its own laws and exemplify its own purposes.