SERMON III. Personal Responsibility of Man, as ST. MATTHEW xxii. 31, 32. "But as touching the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living." THIS HIS is one of those wise and deep sayings of our blessed Lord, which, while they testify to the truth and inspiration of the Scriptures of the Old Testament, tell us at the same time how much of profound, and to some extent hidden meaning, lies buried beneath the surface of the sacred text, unsuspected by the careless and superficial reader, yet not less surely written for our learning, and forming a part of the lesson which the Divine Author of the Scriptures intended that we should draw from them. I say intended, though it is probable that there may be some readers of this passage of Holy Writ, who, while prepared to accept, as every Christian is bound to do, reverently and submissively, the interpretation thus put forth on the authority of Him who spake as never man spake, may yet be disposed to doubt whether, but for that authority, the inference drawn in it could be regarded as so certain as it now claims to be regarded by us, or what there is that makes it so natural and unquestionable as to call down upon the unbelieving Sadducees the accompanying rebuke, "Ye do err, not knowing the Scriptures." We may be sometimes tempted to ask, Might not the words of the Lord, spoken to Moses, be interpreted simply and naturally in a historical sense only, to recall to mind the favour shewn by God to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, while they were yet alive on the earth, to declare that the same God who had been their God during their earthly life would continue His divine protection to their posterity in the house of bondage; without necessarily implying that the deceased patriarchs were still living to God, or containing a distinct declaration of the general resurrection of the dead? A doubt such as this, raised with regard to words which came from the lips of the Saviour Himself, would almost of itself suggest to the Christian student of Scripture a suspicion that the interpretation which gives rise to it, if not altogether erroneous, must be at least partial and incomplete; that the true meaning of Scripture is not always that which lies on the surface of the text and suggests itself at first sight; that the duty of searching the Scriptures necessarily implies the existence of truths within the sacred pages which only careful scarch can discover. The unbelieving Jew read the Law and the Prophets without perceiving that they testified of Jesus Christ: does it therefore follow that the testimony is not there, or cannot be seen there by those who read aright? The unbelieving Sadducee read the passage of the bush without seeing in it any acknowledgment of an immortal life and a judgment to come. Yet a more earnest study might have shewn him that the testimony is there; even as the Jew might have read in his own Scriptures that Jesus is the Christ. It is part of one and the same method in God's dealings with man, that neither His Works nor His Word will yield their proper fruit and do their full service to the creature on whom they are bestowed, without thought and labour on his part to avail himself of the hidden blessing. The bread that strengthens man's heart does not spring spontaneously in the field, to be gathered at once by every passer by; but needs to be cultivated with care, and wrought with labour and skill; and God has given to man the knowledge and the power by which this can be done. And if it is ordained that man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God, it is but according to the analogy of God's dealings with the body, if like labour be needed, and like means graciously provided, for preparing the food of the soul. When we say, then, that a pious and thoughtful reader, though he were but a Jew, reading the Scriptures of his people by the light of the elder covenant, might naturally and rightly be expected to elicit from the language of my text the meaning which our Lord declares to be contained in it, we must presume that he would bring to the task of studying the Scriptures such aids as God had granted to him for the right interpretation thereof; such aids as are indeed, in a great degree, furnished to all men by the natural conscience and religious instincts of humanity, but which to the Jew in particular were enlarged and strengthened by the whole history of his forefathers and his race, and by the laws and institutions which guided his daily life and worship. Of these aids, the first and principal is that on which rests, as on its foundation, the possibility of any religious relation between God and man-the consciousness of the Personality of God, and of the Personality of Man. When God declares Himself, with express mention of individual names, to be the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, He proclaims the existence of a relation altogether distinct from that in which He is revealed as having made heaven and earth, the sea and all that in them is, in which Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and the whole race of mankind are included, with all the rest of the universe, with the mineral and vegetable creation, with the beasts of the field, the fowls of the air, and the fishes of the sea, among the wonderful works of God. The brute creation, indeed, are the objects of God's providence and sustaining care; but they are so as things, not as persons; they have no consciousness of any personal relation to God as their God; they have no feeling of dependence upon Him, prompting them to prayer; they have no sense of moral obligation towards Him, demanding obedience; they have no free-will to place that obedience in their own power; no choice to obey or disobey, making the one a duty and the other a sin; no conviction that there is a higher nature in what they ought to be than in what they are, and therefore a capacity, unrealized in this life, of a higher perfection and a nobler destiny. And therefore it is that the purposes of God's providence are fulfilled towards them when each successive generation completes its course, and accomplishes the period of its animal existence, and passes away from the earth, to be succeeded by another generation with a like purpose and a like end. Their permanence is of the species, not of the individuala: they glorify their Maker without choice a Cf. Neander, "Life of Christ," p. 399, Eng. Trans.: "This argument, derived from the Theocratic basis of the Old Testament, is founded upon and unconsciously; and therefore His glory is declared and His purpose is accomplished equally and without difference by this generation and by that; even as the grass of the field, which to-day is and to-morrow is cast into the oven, is clothed by God in each successive growth with each returning year. Man, too, as regards the mere animal conditions of his life, is subject to the same natural laws as the brute creation. Like them, he must pass through the stages of birth, and growth, and maturity, and decay, and death. Like them, he is subject to pleasure and pain, and health and sickness; like theirs, his life is supported by the air which he breathes and the food which nourishes him. But the one prerogative which exalts him above the brutes; the one endowment whereby he is a person and not a thing, which places him in a personal and individual relation to a personal God is-strange paradox it may sound, but not more strange than true that whereby alone he is capable of sin. It is, that God has given him a moral law and a free-will-a consciousness of duty with a power of obedience or disobedience, — in one word, a responsibility. By making man responsible for his actions, by giving him a power to do or not to do, and a sense of right or wrong as he chooses the one or the other, God has emphatically proclaimed to man, with a voice which all who choose to listen may hear, that the deeds which he does are not the consequences of the laws which surround him, not the results of the circumstances in which he is placed, not links in a pre-ordained series of causes and a more general one, viz. the connexion between the consciousness of God and that of immortality. Man could not become conscious of God as his God, if he were not a personal spirit, divinely allied and destined for eternity, an eternal object (as an individual) of God; and thereby far above all natural and perishable beings, whose perpetuity is that of the species, not of the individual." D |