Chapter 18: IN THE NAME
Chapter 18: IN THE NAME
Acts iii. i6
"O strengthen me, that while I stand
Firm on the Rock and strong in Thee,
I may stretch out a loving hand
To wrestlers with the troubled sea."
— F. R. Havergal.
HIS NAME THROUGH Faith in His Name." These two are inseparable. The Name, i. e., the Nature of Jesus, may be poured forth as fragrance on the air, or light from the sun, but there must be an appropriate organ of sense ready, or the fragrance will be wasted and the light unappreciated. Before perfect soundness can be imparted to any bruised, lame, or helpless soul, there must be the energy of the Divine, which resides in Jesus, and the receptivity of the Human, which is the necessary condition in us. No great work of salvation or renewal is possible apart from the clear enunciation of preacher, teacher, or Christian worker, first of His Name, and second, of Faith in His Name. Not the Name without the Faith, and not the Faith apart from the Name, but the Name and Faith in the Name.
A landscape may be outspread before us, from the snow mountains on the horizon to the blue waters of the lake at our feet, but there must also be a healthy human eye! Truth may be explained with lucidity and eloquence, but of what service will expositors be apart from the intelligent and alert mind? Love may throb in the breast of the mother, but alas! if there be no response in the lad or girl who has drifted into some far country! Always there should be the Name and the organ of Faith in the Name. Beneath the teaching of the Holy Spirit Peter had learnt this lesson well, and in his second great Pentecostal sermon he announced and bequeathed the eternal truth that the Nature of the Risen Lord, appropriated of a living Faith, will give perfect soundness.
I. WHAT PETER SAW. — The Temple was enclosed in three marble courts, rising in successive levels from the city floor. The lowest of these was the only one open to Gentiles. A flight of steps led up from it to the second, or middle, court, beyond which women might not go. Thence another flight of steps ascended to the upper level on which were the altar and the sanctuary. At the head of this second stairway, which only Jewish men might ascend, stood the Beautiful Gate, which opened on the Temple level. It was made of Corinthian brass — an amalgam of precious metals formed at the burning of Corinth — and richly overlaid with plates of gold and silver, which in the sunrise shone with dazzling glory. The Temple entrance faced the East, to make sun-worship impossible, and therefore this magnificent doorway, fashioned after the semblance of a vine, was the first to catch the sunrise.
It was so massive as to task the strength of twenty men to open and close its massive leaves. It was surely fitting that men should enter the Temple of God by the door of Beauty. We remember that the Psalmist sang of "the beauties of holiness." In nature God ever expresses Himself in forms of beauty. Whether it be the frosted devices that Winter imprints upon our window-panes, or the platines of cirri which lie on the blue meadows of the sky like a flock of resting sheep — all God's handiwork is naturally beautiful. When the Love of God is in our hearts, it will express itself in exquisite poetry, in richest architecture, and in music from which perhaps angel-minstrelsy may get the theme of new songs. This is not wrong, so long as we do not allow the outward and sensuous to overwhelm or submerge the devotion of the spirit. We may have our Gate Beautiful, but we must not stay there wondering at its beauty. If we do, it will become a snare and hurtful. We must pass through the outward to the inward, through the sensuous to the spiritual, through the emblem to the reality. Else it will be' better that, like the early Puritans, we should carefully abjure the beautiful, and worship in the barest sanctuaries, with nothing to vie with the claims of the All-Holy, who dwells not in places made with hands.
For Beauty alone can never inspire Life or Health; and there was an evident example of its impotence — apart from the Spirit of Life — in the presence of this unfortunate man, now more than forty years of age, who from his birth had never walked, and who was so poor that he needed to live on charitable doles, to obtain which he was daily carried by kindly hands from the poor slum where he dwelt to that spot near the Beautiful Gate, on which he lay year after year, begging a pittance from the crowds that passed him through the Gate to gain the Temple plateau. He was evidently a well-known figure to the citizens who made constant visits to the sacred shrine. It is a tribute to the power of religion that poor people gather towards its fires, from the chill indifference of the world; but we must see to it that we do not rid ourselves of responsibility for them by a passing dole. It is wiser far to consider the cause of distress and poverty, and endeavour to remedy it, than to drop a meagre coin into the outstretched hand and pass away. It is not thus that we act as our brother's keeper.
As in company with his friend and fellow-Apostle Peter passed up the Temple steps on his way to the afternoon service, he beheld the glory of the magnificent structure in all its wealth, and his eye would have been attracted by the splendour of the gateway through which they were about to pass. He saw also the familiar spectacle of this lame man in his misery. But he saw something beside, which was hidden from unanointed eyes. Being in the Spirit, the secrets of the spiritual world were open to him, and he beheld that crippled life as God meant it to be — whole, sound, healthy, vigorous, full of the music of perfected human vitality. The ideal man was there hovering as a beautiful vision above the travesty that lay on that well-worn mat. The man who was presently to accompany them into the Temple, through that Beautiful Gate, "walking and leaping, and praising God," was there as a reality in the spiritual and eternal sphere, but awaiting realization in the actual experience of this material time-sphere.
He saw also the Prince of Life, nearer to him than breathing, closer than hands and feet. The Lord of the Temple was beside him, ready to cooperate, brimming with the power of an indissoluble life, yearning to communicate the strength and vigour so urgently needed by this crippled existence. Here was weakness, there immortal life. Here despair, there resource and hope. Here the depression of prolonged ill-health, there the radiance of the dawn. The one problem was to bring these two together. There must be His Name, but something more was necessary. Faith in His Name must be called unto operation before the lame man could obtain that perfect soundness, resident in the Prince of Life.
II. WHAT PETER DID. — The instant response given by the lame man to Peter's use of "the Name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth " suggests that it was the result of a long process of thought which had evidently been at work previously in the heart of the cripple.
Without doubt he was perfectly familiar with the person of Jesus of Nazareth. He had seen Him pass up those stairs scores of times. But He had no form nor comeliness, no appearance of affluent wealth, nothing to encourage the hope that He could give him an alms. The appearance of our Lord must have been that of the ranks from which he sprang. When they divided His clothes, the only thing that seemed of any worth to the soldiers was His inner tunic. But of late strange rumours had gathered around the Nazarene. All Jerusalem knew of His arrest, trial, and consignment to the Cross. The preternatural darkness that veiled His anguish and the earthquake which had synchronized with His death had been the subject of universal comment. The cripple himself was lying on the accustomed spot when the frenzied priests and Levites rushed out of the Temple Court with the tidings that the veil had been grasped and rent from top to bottom, as by unseen hands. The story of the empty tomb and of the mysterious disappearance on the Mount of Olives may also have been discussed in his hearing; and the recent marvel of the Day of Pentecost and its result had been matters within his own cognizance, for the Temple itself had witnessed them. He had heard the people talking as they came away from Peter's sermon; and the baptism of 3,000 converts in the great Temple reservoirs, was too astounding not to have come to his ears. Thoughts of this kind had been floating for days through his mind. As yet they had not crystallized into resolve or action. They were waiting for some additional impulse before they would precipitate in a living and working faith. In the story of the Apostle Paul we are told that a similar case to this was presented to him at Lystra. There also was a man, lame from his birth, who had never walked.
The same heard Paul's address, and we are told that at its close the Apostle fixed his eyes on him — and the same Greek word is used there as here — and saw that he had faith to be healed.
The similarity between these two cases is too remarkable to be passed over, and we may infer that, led by a Divine prompting, the Apostle suddenly realized, by a gleam of incipient faith on the cripple's face, that he had faith unto salvation, and by his voice and gesture called it into expression. In an instant there were the blade, the ear, and the full corn in the ear.
One of our Lord's injunctions, when He sent the Apostles forth was: Get you no gold, nor silver, nor brass in your purses, and no wallet for your journey; and though that marching-order had been modified on the eve of His death, it is probable that it was still literally fulfilled, and the Apostles, like the rest, ate at a common table, provided from the common purse. It was literally true as Peter phrased it: "Silver and gold have I none."
There are four classes of persons in the world:
1. The people who have neither silver nor gold nor anything else to give — these are the drift-wood on the ocean.
2. The people who have silver and gold, and no moral or religious property — these are the paupers of the universe.
3. The people who have neither silver nor gold, but, like Peter, they have vision, inspiration, faith, hope, and love — these are the rich-unto-God.
4. The people who have silver and gold, and withal the things which are honourable, just, pure, lovely, and of good report.
The Apostles belonged to the third of these classes. They were poor, yet making many rich, as having nothing, and yet possessing the key to the Divine treasuries.
Silver and gold they had none. In this, as the Pope reminded Thomas Aquinas, his fancied successors have widely departed from his example; but they had, as Aquinas reminded the Pope, a power which cannot be passed down any line of mystical descent, and can only be received as the direct and individual gift of the Holy Spirit.
Wealth is not the standard of worth. Mankind has been primarily beholden to those who have possessed little of this world's goods, but have abounded "in faith, and utterance, and knowledge, and in all earnestness, and in love." Through the poverty of Christ we have been enriched with all spiritual treasures and entitled to an inheritance that fadeth not away. There are bags in the heavens that wax not old, and treasures in the heavens that fail not, where no thief draweth nigh, neither moth destroyeth. Yonder a little girl is sobbing piteously on the grave of her mother! I am touched, and offer her a gold piece! She snatches it from my hand, flings it into the open grave, and continues to sob convulsively! What more can I do? That is all that I had to give, and it was unavailing! Presently a poor woman, in plain and shabby clothes, kisses the child, strokes the little head, presses her to her bosom, and comforts her with gentle crooning! See the eyes droop in sleep, and the little one is soothed and quieted! That woman had neither silver nor gold, but she possessed what was infinitely more precious, and that she gave without stint. This is what the world needs to-day.
Would that men and women of all classes in society realized it, and instead of the giddy race for wealth and pleasure, would possess themselves of, and impart to others, treasures compared with which the mines of Croesus offer a miser's dole.
In the present case Peter communicated the inspiration of his own strong faith in Jesus of Nazareth. He summoned him to act on such faith as he had. He called on things that apparently were not as though they were. He mingled a drop of his own soul-tincture into the clouded uncertainty and questioning of the cripple's soul, and it suddenly crystallized with the daring act of faith. He took him by the right hand and raised him up, as he had seen his Master raise up his wife's mother years before. Immediately the man's faith sprang into vigorous exercise. His feet and anklebones received strength. The life of the risen Lord was now able to enter his anaemic frame. His mortal body was quickened by the entrance and accession of the life of the Prince of Life, who was working together with His Apostle, given on the Mount of Ascension. "He sat down at the right hand of God. And they went forth, and preached everywhere, the Lord working with them, and confirming their word by signs following." As for the cripple, he entered with them into the Temple, from which his congenital deformity had always excluded him, according to Levitical precept, "walking, and leaping, and praising God; and all the people saw him walking and praising God: and they took knowledge of him that it was he which sat for alms at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple, and they were filled with wonder and amazement at that which had happened unto him."
III. HOW PETER PREACHED. — When the Temple service concluded, and the two left the upper court, descended the steps, and crossed the marble pavement to the double colonnade called Solomon's Porch, in which our Lord used to teach, and where the infant Church generally gathered in those early days, a vast concourse of people followed, and in reply to the buzz of questioning and the awestruck wonder of the crowd Peter delivered his second great address.
He turned the thoughts of his audience from John and himself to their Lord. It was not by their power or holiness that the man stood there before them whole, but by the act of Him whom they had denied in the presence of Pontius Pilate, overpowering his ardent wish to release Him. He charged them with preferring a murderer to God's Holy and Righteous One. He insisted that the evidence of Christ's Resurrection consisted not simply in the witness of those who had been in His company after He had left the grave, but in the fact of the miracle wrought on the impotent man, which was evident to them all. He admitted that they and their rulers had not recognized the Lord of Glory, or they would not have crucified Him; and from that point he branched out into an eager entreaty that they would repent and turn again that their sins might be blotted out.
It is very interesting to obtain this side-light on the action of the Jewish rulers and the Jewish crowds.
They were blinded by prejudice and wounded pride.
They were expecting the Messiah to come in Princely State, and never dreamt that the mean garb of the village carpenter concealed the glories of Immanuel. Such ignorance did not excuse their crime, but palliated it.
It left them within the zone of penitence and pardon. In this Peter only followed the example of Jesus, who drew a distinction between the servant who knew and the servant who knew not his Lord's will, and who, when the nails first pierced His tender flesh, cried, "Father, forgive them, they know not what they do." There is clearly a difference for the sins of presumption and of ignorance. For the former there remaineth no further sacrifice for sin; in the latter we may count on mercy, if only like Paul we turn to Him, whom we had in our ignorance repelled and crucified afresh.
Peter assured them that this sin might be blotted out.
The Oriental merchant keeps his accounts on little tablets of wax. On these, with the blunt point of the stylus or pencil, he makes the indented record of a debt, and when it is paid, with the blunt end of his instrument he flattens down the wax, so that all record of the debt is entirely obliterated. If we erase a debt from our account-book, there is still the trace of it having been there, but on the wax there is no trace whatever. The handwriting that was against the debtor is entirely blotted out. The sin is blotted out, as Isaiah puts it, as completely as a wreath of cloud is blotted from the summer sky. What a vision Peter had of the utterness and completeness of the Divine forgiveness! Once he had hazarded the suggestion that seven times was the limit to which forgiveness could go.
Now he has entered into a more adequate conception of the Love of God, which forgets as it forgives, and drops our sins when we confess into the fathomless depths of the ocean of His Love. They shall no more be found or remembered or mentioned for ever.
The arguments with which the speaker plied his audience were very tender and enticing. He said that if only Israel repented of their sin and recognized Jesus of Nazareth as the Holy One of God, times of refreshing would come from the presence of the Lord, and these are afterwards defined as the times of the restoration of all things, whereof God has spoken by the mouth of His holy prophets. Sweet is the lay of prophecy; too sweet not to be wronged by a mere mortal touch!
"Six thousand years of sorrow have well-nigh fulfilled
Their tardy and disastrous course over a sinful world;
And what remains of this tempestuous state of human things
Is merely as the working of the sea before a calm
That rocks itself to rest. For He whose car the winds are
And the clouds the dust that waits upon His sultry march.
Shall visit earth in mercy, shall descend; and what sin's storms
Have blasted and defaced, shall with a smile repair!
Oh scenes surpassing fable and yet true! Scenes of accomplished bliss
Which who can see, though but in distant prospect, and not feel
His soul refreshed by foretaste of their joy!"
Notice the two sendings of the Christ. He was sent in the first Advent to bless His people, in turning them away from their iniquities; He will be sent a second time to bring on the Golden Age, to set up His Kingdom, to put down all rule and authority and power, until such time as that God shall be All-in-All, and the eternal timeless era of blessedness shall be inaugurated.
What radiant visions had broken upon the soul of this man who was accounted ignorant and unlearned by the religious leaders of his age, but to whom, according to his Master's promise, the Holy Spirit was showing things to come!
Ere we close this chapter shall we not apply to ourselves its lessons? May not we be included amongst those who have spent many years just outside the Gate of the Blessed Life, lame and needing to be carried by Pastors, Teachers, Helpers, but not able to walk and run in the way of Christ's commandments; hearing the music floating through the gate, but not able to join; living a Christian life at second-hand, or perhaps not having commenced it? Let all such dwell on the Love, the invitations, the salvation offered them in Jesus Christ. Let them not only hear His Name, let them also believe in that Name, so shall they rise to the full stature of the perfect life, realize the Divine ideal that waits within their reach, and go on their way walking, leaping, and praising God!