I will now proceed as plainly as I can with the precise issue upon which the Jews challenged our Lord. The Pagans then, as now, worshiped many gods. The Philosophers then, as now, subscribed to many theories. But the Jews and their Rabbis cleared the ground of gods and theories by surrendering themselves to an absorbing belief in one Everlasting, Omnipotent, and All-knowing Jehovah. "We know what we worship," was our Lord's tribute to this stupendous concentration of reverence on the Father of all. "Salvation," He added, "is of the Jews "--the reason being that to the Jews had been revealed the simple knowledge of God and duty, of right and wrong, which is the basis of Redemption. They knew that they had to deal, not with hypotheses, not with idols, but with Persons--the Almighty on the one hand, devils and angels and men and women on the other.
When, therefore, the Jew had to decide what he thought about Jesus, he was to two alternatives. Either the Man of Nazareth came from God or He came from the Devil; either He was utmost good or He was utmost evil; either He was Divine or He blasphemed. Since those days, men have sought to evade this supreme choice by formulating some kind of a middle solution, like Unitarianism, in one of its many guises. None of these compromises avails for more than a few years, and with a few enthusiasts. Sooner or later, we have, like the Jews, to face the main question, as they faced it--either to worship the Christ, or to reject or neglect Him. For months they watched Him, discussing His every act and word. Their verdict against Him was deliberate and considered. Their sin was that they knew it to be a lie. They said that He had a devil; that by Beelzebub, Prince of Devils, He cast out devils; that as a blasphemer, He deserved to die.
It was a desperate paradox, but it can be explained. To the Jew, as to us all, the nearest and most evident reality is not good, but evil; and in evil, therefore, it was most easy to believe. John came, neither eating nor drinking, and they said that he had a devil. Our Lord came, accepting hospitality and returning it, and again it was the devil that they attributed to Him. They were like the liar who cannot credit another man with speaking the truth, or a drunkard who is certain that all teetotalers are tipplers in secret. And their hypothesis is echoed even in our own day. Men and women, as respectable and as honored as the Rabbis, will have it that the Gospel is based, not on justice and truth and sanity and love; but on superstition, credulity, ignorance, unwholesome excitement, religio-mania--all the evidences of devilry--backed by documents that are not what they pretend to be. The Prince of Devils presents himself to our intellects as an angel of enlightenment, and scholarship, and inquiry, and presents our Saviour as the arch-enemy of truth and good sense. In this controversy we, like the Pharisees, have to take one side or the other.
Wanted, a Man!
To those who abused Him, Jesus applied a cooling and final logic. He knew well enough that prejudices would obscure the path. He spoke of false Christs arising who would deceive even the elect. He told of persecutors who, in killing His disciples, would think that they were doing God's service. But He was fully convinced that Satan would never be so stupid as to cast out Satan. This would mean that the haunts of evil, being divided against themselves, must collapse, which is not what has happened. Among Christians, there are schisms and sects; but about wickedness, in all its forms, there is an impressive solidarity. Each iniquity reinforces the others, so that it is not one devil but a legion that must be expelled from the human heart-devils that speak with one voice, and act with one impulse, whether they possess men or swine. If the heart is to be delivered from such usurpers, it will not be by sowing dissension among the enemy. A strong man armed must arise and engage all devilry in mortal combat. A strong man--be it noted--not an archangel, or a ghost, or a sentimentalist--a man, strong because incarnate. And if there be amongst the Jews or amongst ourselves children who cast out devils, or otherwise resist evil, then do they testify, consciously or unconsciously, that our Lord defeated evil, not with evil but with good, that. He was not devil but Divine.
Peculiarly malicious was the reference to Beelzebub, the lord of indulgence. When Jesus dined with publicans, like Matthew or Zacchæus, or with a rich leper, like Simon, they said He was a wine-bibber, who battened on the plunder of the people. They did not realize that His Gospel was as much for the West End as for the East End; that there is as deadly a sickness of soul at a dinner party as there is in a gin-palace; that wherever He went--be it among rich or poor--His object was to make men and women " whole," to restore to them the full use of all their faculties, to give them the more abundant life.
Doubtless, the hospitality thus extended to Him by the wealthy was, spiritually considered, an imperfect devotion. He might have replied: "This is living to the flesh; I can have no part in it." But with a deeper wisdom He accepted from them what they intended to be in His honor. In due course, men like Matthew, who made Him a great feast, learnt more fully what banquet it was that He desired. It was in their hearts that they spread the table for Him, and when, in wisdom, He removed from them His Bodily Presence, they found Him again wherever there were poor and needy awaiting comfort.
Slander assailed Him most severely when He rescued fallen women. Even His disciples were amazed that, at the well of Samaria, He should talk openly with such an one. To Him, the publicans and harlot8 were nearer to the Kingdom than the scribes and Pharisees. If these latter had been really righteous, He would not have asked them to "change their minds"; it was only sinners that He called to repentance. But the point was that the Rabbis were like the man who says, so willingly, "I go"--and then stays where he is. It is far better to declare bluntly, "I won't go"--and afterwards decide to obey. The moment that the Samaritan woman was convicted of her Shame, He spoke to her in loftiest language about worshiping God in spirit and in truth; and she listened, and, What is more, understood.
Christ and Home Life
If He moved freely with people of no character, it was not that He held morals in light esteem. On the contrary, He said that "in the beginning"--the phrase which casually reveals His intimacy with creation--it was not so. God made male and female, and God unites them; let not man put asunder. Divorce was only a concession by Moses to our hardness of heart; and marriage after divorce is adultery. His standard in these matters was so utterly beyond us that--as He admitted--all cannot receive it. And so far was He from playing with the grave obligations on which home is founded that, unmarried Himself, He constantly blessed the home. It was at a wedding that He did His first miracle. It was Peter's wife's mother that He cured of a fever. And when the Baptist said that the Saviour's joy in His disciples was like the Bridegroom's joy in the Bride, He accepted the simile and developed it into parables and sayings of tenderest significance. The sinners loved Him much, not because they lacked guilt, but because they admitted guilt and were forgiven much. When, in an ecstasy of gratitude, such an one washed His feet with tears of repentance, and wiped them, humbly, with her hair, and kissed them in adoration, He did not ordain these acts as ceremonies, as the Pope has done, but, on the other hand, He defeated those who would have raised a scandal. Nowhere, declared He, would the Gospel be preached without mention of this deed. What He looked at was the love that prompted the act, and the joy of salvation that inspired the love. And, although the occasion was not public in the usual sense, yet His prophecy has come to pass. What was seen by a score or two of people has been known to scores of hundreds of millions. Where we save reputations by suppressing the truth, our Lord defends His own by spreading it.
This, then, is the issue--awful in its momentous contrast--Is He Devil or is He Divine? Does He bewitch us or does He save us? Clearly, it was and is a matter of life or death. It is a question that we must answer. Despite all their denials, our Lord knew in Himself that they went about to kill Him. The Pharisees stood for the supremacy of the spiritual power; the Herodians asserted the temporal power; but they united against the Messiah, and their coalition was joined by the Sadducees. For the last time in her history, the priests, the Rabbis, the soldiers, and the people of Jerusalem were swayed by one impulse. Over His condemnation, Herod, the monarch, who ruled by hereditary privilege, and Pontius Pilate, the governor, who governed by efficiency, made up their perennial quarrel; and, with Him slain, all sides hoped for a conclusive peace. But what happened was that society, deprived of its righteous basis, broke up into fragments. The questions which Jesus answered with such authority when they "tempted" Him split up the nation into antagonisms so bitter that, when Paul came to be tried, no verdict for him or against him could be secured from a distracted Sanhedrin. A few years later, when the Redeemer's Gospel was drawing Jew and Greek, barbarian, Scythian, bond and free, into one fold, the Temple area, with its Pharisees and Sadducees and Herodians and Zealots, ran red with the blood of fratricidal strife; and His disciples, obeying His instructions, fled into the mountains, knowing well that where His love and sacrifice had been rejected, their witness was of no further avail. The stubborn citizens, who had refused to acknowledge the abomination of desolation within themselves, witnessed ultimately the abomination of desolation, standing where it ought not, within their Temple.
The Worm and the Fire
As their cold rage against Him reached a climax, He spoke with a calm but fearful emphasis of retribution. On earth, there would be the destruction of their city and Temple, the ruin of their womanhood, the massacre of their babes. But beyond the grave-- what then? He told of the worm--instrument of corruption--that dieth not; the fire--instrument of remorse--which is not quenched; of the soul, that endures eternal, after the body has been resolved, by decay or by burning, into its physical elements. He therefore set out to save men and cleanse men now. In this present life, He laid on us the sovereign responsibility of making our choice. Here must we wear the wedding garment. Here must we fill the lamp with oil. Here must we put His talents to fullest use. What we do, what we say, what we think and believe--all this He thus rescued from the trivial; and in His sight we stand, free agents of the future, among the angels and archangels. His judgments were, on the one hand, Divinely merciful; and on the other, Divinely terrible. Knowing our frame, remembering that we are dust, He pities our infirmities. He does not condemn. He would not have us condemn one another. When they drove the nails into His hands, He begged forgiveness for them. The strokes of that hammer symbolized for all time the utmost conceivable sin of the flesh. There He healed--there He pardoned. Man's hand against His hand--that He forgave.
But man's spirit against God's Spirit--man's will against God's will--of that He took a graver view. The body is of time, the Spirit and our spirits are of eternity; and the Spirit will not always strive with man. If peace comes not by union, then it must come by separation; it is the only other way. If recent calamities have taught us nothing else, they have surely brought us back to the everlasting consequences of resistance to the Son of God.