Chapter 5: Christ One and Many-sided.
Chapter 5: Christ One and Many-sided.
ISA. XXVII: 2.
LIFE PRESENTS THE same features to the toiling myriads of England as to the dwellers amid the vineyards and pasture lands of Judah, to whom Isaiah wrote when He compared it to the experiences of a caravan passing across a sandy waste. Sometimes it is the sirocco blast of temptation, burning hot; the air is laden with particles of grit that sting and irritate, and find their way through closed doors; thus all day long the devil vexes us. Sometimes the tempest of trouble rises high; the cavillings and misjudgments of men, difficulties in daily business, the overwhelming competition and strife of our time, combine to fill our lives with storm. Now we happen on a dry place, from which human love seems to have retreated, so that no green thing breaks the monotony of our pilgrimage, no child's embrace, no tender caress, no tone or touch of love. And, again, we are traversing a weary land; we are tired, tired of the inward strife, of the daily cross, of the perpetual demand on our sympathy and self-control, longing for the evening bell, and the passage across the harbor-bar from the restless sea to the tranquil waters of the haven.
We must not take the pessimist's view of life. In every year there are more hours of sun than of rain, in all lives there are more joys than sorrows. For all grief there is an anodyne; for all loss there is compensation. Nature is always beautiful. Troops of fresh young lives are ever pouring into our world, with their merry laughter and their gay frolic. The very work of life brings zest and interest; and hope is ever painting its bright frescoes on the dark cloud that hides the future. And yet it is undeniable that there are many sad aspects to life which press themselves upon our notice, and sometimes cause heart and flesh to fail.
Men naturally resort to the readiest methods of averting the pressure of anxiety and pain. The natural man is always looking out for his hiding place, the niche in the rock which may serve as one. He resorts to a temporary expedient which serves him in pressing difficulty; but shortly after he is seeking for a covert against a tornado, which all suddenly has broken upon him. After a while he is sensible of consuming thirst, and searches in another direction for water. And again worn by fatigue he looks around for a great rock, casting a sharply-defined shadow on the burning sand, in whose blue depths he may find shelter. Thus man is always seeking help in different quarters to carry him through the pressing anxieties and difficulties of his life.
The children of this world hide themselves under the golden canopy of money, which wards off many of the grosser forms of evil, but cannot satisfy the craving of the heart for love and sympathy and rest. They yield themselves to systems of philosophy that brace men to suffer with stoical fortitude and indifference, as when the weak and boneless animal makes for itself the hard shell or case that shelters it from collision and shock. Or they take refuge in some passionate human attachment, seeking in man or woman the covert, the water-spring, and the shadow of a great rock; hope which is doomed to disappointment, because none is allsided enough to supply another's need in the numberless necessities of human experience. These are broken cisterns, clouds without rain, the mirage without the fountain, the grate without fire.
In all true life there is education and growth. We pass upward from things to human sympathy, and seek in men and women the comforter we originally sought in -wealth, or travel, or book. Then we pass from the outward to the inward, from the finite to the infinite, from the time sphere to the eternal. We start back appalled at the insufficiency of the tenderest human love to meet the exhaustless hunger of our souls, and long for the Divine in human form, presented to us in the Man. Finally there comes a great unity into our life, and having found the Man in whom all the fulness of the Godhead dwells, having realized something of what He can be to the soul that He made and redeemed, we return again to men and things, and find in them a beauty and fitness which we had never realized before. Nature wears a lovelier dress, because the Man, whom we love, arrayed her, and her hues and scents are borrowed from His thought. Children are lovelier, because they reflect traits of His character. All true thoughts are more satisfying, because we detect in them the intonations of His voice. Earthly friendships are transfigured, because as we lift them to our lips they brim with water from the fountain of His love; and the commonest incidents of life are invested with unwonted meaning, because all things are of Him, and through Him, and to Him forever.
For the Christian, only one Being is needful. There is a blessed unity in his life. He desires only the Man of whom Isaiah spoke, the Man that trod the soil of Palestine, that died upon the cross, that lives in the glory, the Man Christ Jesus. Jesus is the one answer to every question, the one satisfaction of every desire. To the Apostles the Master was all in all. In Him they found strength for spiritual conflict, defence from their foes, tenderness amid rebuke and reproach, rest in weariness; and Jesus Christ is willing to be as much and more to all who believe on Him through their word. During His earthly life, He was the one answer to all the aches and ills of human bodies. Blindness, paralysis, demon possession, found their antidote in His Presence, His name, His touch. And He is still all-sufficient to meet each demand now of the spiritual, as then of the physical life.
AII we require for this life and the next is ours in Christ. We are, alas, too slow to possess our possessions. Do we need a shelter from the sirocco of temptation? We may find it in Jesus. Hiding behind Him, taking refuge in the pavilion of His Presence, we are secure. Put the Man Christ Jesus between you and temptation or adverse circumstances, as the Roman soldier his shield between him and the fiery darts of the foe. In days of tempest He is the impenetrable covert. In loneliness He is like the murmur of waters in a dry place. In weariness He is the shadow of a great rock, beneath which we may sit with great delight. In other words Jesus Christ is the one answer of the soul to every possible circumstance, to all emergencies, to the demands and appeals that constantly knock at the door of our life, like the telegraph lad with the buff-colored envelope, and its unexpected summons.
There is something more. The soul that abides in Christ extracts blessings from the repeated discipline which reveals the many-sidedness of Christ. It greets sirocco and tornado; it welcomes drought and weariness; it rejoices in tribulation; because out of all these things it is acquiring an experience of qualities and attributes which otherwise had slumbered in Christ unknown. Human need has always been the background for the revelation of God's nature, as the ailments of a child reveal the tender patience of the mother, and as the virulence of disease the resource of doctor or nurse. You asked to know Him, then be not surprised if you are placed on steep standpoints of vision whence unexpected glimpses of His nature may be obtained.
Not unfrequently men teach us what the Man can be. They are but broken lights of Him. Splinters from the crystal, drops from the fountain. One setting forth this trait, and another that of His character, but none of them able to combine more than one, or at the most two, of those characteristics which the prophet attributes to the Man whose praises he recites. They are coverts, but not hiding-places; or hiding-places, but not rivers; or rivers, but not shadowing rocks. Take the best of the best of men; gather into one all the chivalry, bravery, tenderness, loveliness, which have dwelt in the fairest of our race; and all together will not suffice to depict the comprehensiveness, and glory, and sufficiency of the Son of Man.
It should be our ambition so to live that men may catch glimpses of Christ in us, so that they may say, if this man or this woman is so strong and sweet, so true and tender, what must not He be, in whom their virtues dwell as their home? And for ourselves, such may be our fellowship with Christ, that we shall be less sensitive to the transitions and trials of our mortal life. There shall be no more sirocco, or waterless waste, or unbearable heat, because in having Him, we shall be shielded in Him. These great modern cities will become in our eyes as fair as lands of perennial spring; and sad, homeless, desolate hearts become more sensible of their possessions than of their losses, of the One Presence than of the absence of any. "Our sun shall no more go down, neither shall our moon withdraw itself, for the Lord shall be to us an everlasting light, and the days of our mourning shall be ended."