“We sadly watch’d the close of all,Life balanced in a breath;We saw upon his features fallThe awful shade of death.All dark and desolate we were;And murmuring nature cried—‘Oh! surely, Lord! hadstThoubeen hereOur brother had not died!’“But when its glance the memory castOn all that grace had done;And thought of life’s long warfare pass’d,And endless victory won.Then faith prevailing, wiped the tear,And looking upward, cried—‘O Lord! Thou surelyhastbeen here,Our brother hasnotdied!’”
“We sadly watch’d the close of all,Life balanced in a breath;We saw upon his features fallThe awful shade of death.All dark and desolate we were;And murmuring nature cried—‘Oh! surely, Lord! hadstThoubeen hereOur brother had not died!’
“But when its glance the memory castOn all that grace had done;And thought of life’s long warfare pass’d,And endless victory won.Then faith prevailing, wiped the tear,And looking upward, cried—‘O Lord! Thou surelyhastbeen here,Our brother hasnotdied!’”
We have already had occasion to note the impressive and significant silence of the Saviour to Mary. We may just again revert to it in a sentence here. Martha had, a few moments before, given vent to the same impassioned utterance respecting her departed brother. Jesus had replied to her; questioned her as to her faith; and opened up to her sublime sources of solace and consolation. With Mary it is different. He responds to her also—but it is only in silence and in tears!
Why this distinction? Does it not unfold to us a lovely feature in the dealings of Jesus—how He adapts Himself to the peculiarities of individual character. With those of a bolder temperament He can argue and remonstrate—with those of a meek, sensitive, contemplative spirit, He can be silent and weep!
The stout but manly heart of Peter needed at times a bold and cutting rebuke; a similar reproof would have crushed to the dust the tender soul of John. The character of the one is painted in his walking on the stormy water to meet his Lord; of the other, in his reclining on the bosom of thesame Divine Master, drinking sacred draughts at the Fountain-head of love!
So it was with Martha and Mary, “the Peter and John of Bethany;” and so it is with His people still.
How beautifully and considerately Jesusstudiestheir case—adapting His dealings to what He sees and knows they can bear—fitting the yoke to the neck, and the neck to the yoke. To some He is “the Lion of the tribe of Judah, uttering His thunders”—pleading with Martha-spirits “by terrible things in righteousness;”—to others (the shrinking, sensitive Marys) whispering only accents of gentleness—giving expression to no needless word that would aggravate or embitter their sorrows.
Ah, believer! how tenderly considerate is your dear Lord! Well may you make it your prayer, “Let me fall into the hands of God, for great are His mercies!” He may at times, like Joseph to His brethren,appearto “speak roughly,” but it is dissembledkindness. When a father inflicts on his wayward child the severest and harshest discipline, none but he can tell the bitter heart-pangsof yearning love that accompany every stroke of the rod. So it is with your Father in Heaven; with this difference, that the earthly parentmayact unwisely, arbitrarily, indiscreetly—he may misjudge the necessities of the case—he may do violence and wrong to the natural disposition of his offspring. Not so with an all-wise Heavenly Parent. He will inflict no redundant or unneeded chastisement. Manmayerr,haserred, andisever erring—but “as for God, His way is perfect!”
The Weeping Saviour.
The silent procession is moving on. We may suppose they have reached the gates of the burial-ground. But a new scene and incident here arrest our thoughts!
It is not the humiliating memorials of mortality that lie scattered around,—the caves and grottoes and grassy heaps sacred to many a Bethany villager. It is not even the newly sealed stone which marks the spot where Lazarus “sleeps.” Let us turn aside for a little, and see this great sight. It is the Creator of all worlds in tears!—the God-man Mediator dissolved in tenderest grief! Of all the memories of Bethany, this surely is themosthallowed and the most wondrous. These tears form the most touching episode in sacred story; and if we are in sorrow, it may either dryour own tears, or give them the warrant to flow when we are told—Jesus wept!
Whence those tears? This is what we shall now inquire. There is often a false interpretation put upon this brief and touching verse, as if it denoted the expression of the Saviour’s sorrow for the loss of a loved friend. This, it is plain, it could not be. However mingled may have been the hopes and fears of the weeping mourners around him,Heat least knew that in a few brief moments Lazarus was to be restored. He could not surely weep so bitterly, possessing, as He then did, the confident assurance that death was about to give back its captive, and light up every tear-dimmed eye with an ecstasy of joy. Whence, then, we again ask, this strange and mysterious grief? Come and let us surround the grave of Bethany, and as we behold the chief mourner at that grave, let us inquire why it was that “Jesus wept!”
(1.)Jesus weptout of Sympathy for the Bereaved.
The hearts around Him were breaking with anguish. All unconscious of how soon and how wondrously their sorrow was to be turned intojoy, the appalling thought was alone present to them in all its fearfulness—“Lazarus is dead!” WhenHe, the God-man Mediator, with the refined sensibilities of His tender heart, beheld the poignancy of that grief, the pent-up torrent of His own human sympathies could be restrained no longer. His tears flowed too.
But it would be a contracted view of the tears of Jesus to think that two solitary mourners in a Jewish graveyard engrossed and monopolised that sympathy. It had a far wider sweep.
There were hearts, yes—myriads of desolate sufferers in ages then unborn, who He knew would be brought to stand as He was then doing by the grave of loved relatives—mourners who would have no visible comforter or restorer to rush to, as had Martha and Mary, to dry their tears, and give them back their dead; and when He thought of this, “Jesus wept!”
What an interest it gives to that scene of weeping, to think that at that eventful moment, the Saviour had before Him the bereaved ofall time—that His eye was roaming at that moment through deserted chambers, and vacant seats, and openedgraves, down to the end of the world. The aged Jacobs and Rachels weeping for their children—the Ezekiels mourning in the dust and ashes of disconsolate widowhood, “the desire of their eyes taken away by a stroke”—the unsolaced Marys and Marthas brooding over a dark future, with the prop and support of existence swept down, the central sun and light of their being eclipsed in mysterious darkness! Think, (as you are now perusing these pages,) throughout the wide world, how many breaking hearts there are—how loud the wail of suffering humanity, could we but hear it!—those written childless and fatherless, and friendless and homeless!—Bethany-processions pacing with slow and measured step to deposit their earthly all in the cold custody of the tomb! Think of the Marys and Marthas who are now “going to some grave to weep there,” perhaps with no Saviour’s smile to gladden them—or the desolate chambers that are now resounding to the plaintive dirge, “O Absalom, Absalom, would God I had died for thee; O Absalom, my son! my son!” Think of all these scenes at that moment vividly suggested and pictured to theRedeemer’s eye—the long and loudmiserere, echoing dismally from the remotest bounds of time, and there “entering into the ear of the God of Sabaoth,” and can you wonder that—Jesus wept!
Blessed and amazing picture of the Lord of glory! It combines the delineation alike of the tenderness of His humanity, and the majesty of His Godhead. His Humanity! It is revealed in those tear drops, falling from a human eye on a human grave. HisGodhead! It is manifested in His ability to take in with a giant grasp all the prospective sufferings of His suffering people.
Weeping believer! thine anguished heart was included in those Bethany tears! Be assured thy grief was visibly portrayed at that moment to that omniscient Saviour. He had all thy sorrows before Him—thy anxious moments during thy friend’s tedious sickness—the trembling suspense—the nights of weary watching—the agonising revelation of “no hope”—the closing scene! Bethany’s graveyard became to Him a picture-gallery of the world’s aching hearts; andthine, yes!thinewasthere! and as He beheld it, “Jesus wept!”
“Jesus wept! These tears are over,But His heart is still the same;Kinsman, Friend, and Elder Brother,Is His everlasting name.Saviour, who can love like Thee,GraciousOne of Bethany!“When the pangs of trial seize us,When the waves of sorrow roll,I will lay my head on Jesus,Pillow of the troubled soul.Surely none can feel like Thee,WeepingOne of Bethany!“Jesus wept! And still in glory,He can mark each mourner’s tear;Loving to retrace the storyOf the hearts he solaced here.Lord! when I am call’d to die,Let me think of Bethany!“Jesus wept! That tear of sorrowIs a legacy of love;Yesterday, to-day, to-morrow,He the same doth ever prove.Thou art all in all to me,LivingOne of Bethany!”
“Jesus wept! These tears are over,But His heart is still the same;Kinsman, Friend, and Elder Brother,Is His everlasting name.Saviour, who can love like Thee,GraciousOne of Bethany!
“When the pangs of trial seize us,When the waves of sorrow roll,I will lay my head on Jesus,Pillow of the troubled soul.Surely none can feel like Thee,WeepingOne of Bethany!
“Jesus wept! And still in glory,He can mark each mourner’s tear;Loving to retrace the storyOf the hearts he solaced here.Lord! when I am call’d to die,Let me think of Bethany!
“Jesus wept! That tear of sorrowIs a legacy of love;Yesterday, to-day, to-morrow,He the same doth ever prove.Thou art all in all to me,LivingOne of Bethany!”
(2.)Jesus weptwhen He thought of the triumphs of Death!
He was treading a burial ground—moulderingheaps were around Him—silent sepulchral caves, giving forth no echo of life!
It is a solemn and impressive thing, even forus, to tread the graveyard; more especially if there are there nameless treasures of buried affection. The thought that those whose smile gladdened to us every step in the wilderness, who formed our solace in sorrow, and our joy in adversity—whose words, and society, and converse were intertwined with our very being—it is solemn and saddening, as we tread that land of oblivion, to find these words and looks and tears unanswered—a gloomy silence hovering over the spot where the wrecks of worth and loveliness are laid! He would have a bold, a stern heart indeed who could pace unmoved over such hallowed ground, and forbid a tear to flow over the gushing memories of the past!
What, then, must it have been at that moment in Bethany withJesus, when he saw one of those purchased by his own blood (dearest to him) chased by the unsparing destroyer to that gloomy prison-house?
If we have supposed that the tears of Marthaand Mary were suggestive of manifold other broken and sorrowing hearts in other ages, we may well believe that graveyard was suggestive of triumphs still in reserve for the tomb, numberless trophies which in every age were to be reaped in by the King of Terrors until the reaper’s arm was paralyzed, and death swallowed up in victory. The few silent sepulchres around must have significantly called to the mind of the Divine spectator how sin had blasted and scathed His noblest workmanship; converting the fairest province of His creation into one vastNecropolis,—one dismal “city of the dead!” The body of man, “so fearfully and wonderfully made,” and on which he had originally placed His own impress of “very good,”ruined, and resolved into a mass of humiliating dust! If the Architect mourns over the destruction of some favourite edifice which the storm has swept down, or the fire has wrapt in conflagration and reduced to ashes—if the Sculptor mourns to see his breathing marble with one rude stroke hurled to the ground, and its fragments scattered at his feet—what must have been the sensations of the mighty Architect of the humanframe, at whose completion the morning stars and the sons of God chanted a loud anthem—what must have been His sensations as He thought of them, now a devastated wreck, mouldering in dissolution and decay, the King of Terrors sitting in regal state, holding his high holiday over a vassal world!
In Bethany He beheld only a few of these broken and prostrate columns, but they were powerfully suggestive of millions on millions which were yet in coming ages to undergo the same doom of mortality.
If even our less sensitive hearts may be wrung with emotion at the tidings of some mournful catastrophe that occupies, after all, but some passing hour in the world’s history, but which has carried death and lamentation into many households—the sudden pestilence that has swept down its thousands—the gallant vessel that was a moment before spreading proudly its white wings to the gale, the joyous hearts on board dreaming of hearth and home, and the “many ports that would exult in the gleam of her mast”—the next! hurrying down to the depths of an ocean grave,with no survivor to tell the tale!—or the terrible records of War—the ranks of bold and brave laid low in the carnage of battle—youth and strength and beauty and rank and friendship blent in one red burial!—if these and such like mournful tales of death, and the power of death, affect at the moment even the most callous amongst us, causing the lip to grow pale, and demanding the tribute of more than a tear, oh! what must it have been to the omniscient eye and exquisitely sensitive spirit of Jesus, as, taking in all time at a glance, He beheld the Pale Horse with its ghastly rider trampling under foot the vast human family; converting the globe in which they dwelt into a mournful valley of vision, filled with the wrecks and skeletons of breathing men and animated frames!
The triumphs of death are, in ordinary circumstances, to us scarcely perceptible. He moves with noiseless tread. The footprint is made on the sands of time; but like the tides of the ocean, the world’s oblivion-power washes it away. The name of yonder churchyard is “theland of forgetfulness!” Not so with the Lord ofLife, the great Antagonist of this usurper! The future, a ghastly future, rose in appalling vividness before Him.—Death (vulture-like) flapping his wings over the multitudes he claimed as his own,—vessels freighted with immortality lying wrecked and stranded on the shores of Time!
Yes! we can only understand the full import of these tears of Jesus, as we imagine to ourselves His Godlike eye penetrating at that moment every churchyard and every grave: the mausoleums of the great—the grassy sods of the poor; the marble cenotaph of the noble and illustrious slumbering under fretted aisle and cathedral canopy—the myriads whose requiem is chanted by the bleak winds of the desert or the chimes of the ocean! The child carried away in the twinkling of an eye—the blossom just opening, and then frost-blighted; the aged sire, cut down like a shock of corn in its season, falling withered and seared like the leaves of autumn; the young exulting in the prime of manhood; the pious and benevolent, the great and good, succumbing indiscriminately to the same inexorable decree; the erring and thoughtless, reckless of all warning, hurried away in the midstof scorned mercy—Oh! as He beheld this ghastly funeral procession moving before Him, the whole world going to the same long home, and He Himself alone left the survivor, can we wonder thatJesus wept?
(3.) Once more,Jesus weptwhen He thought of the impenitence and obduracy of the human heart.
This may not be at first sight patent as a cause of the tears of Jesus, but we may well believe it entered largely as an element into this strange flood of sorrow.
He was about to perform a great (His greatest) miracle; but whileHeknew that, in consequence of this manifestation of His mighty power, many of those who now stood around Lazarus’ tomb wouldbelieve,Heknew also that others would only “despise, and wonder, and perish;” that while some, as we shall afterwards find, acknowledged Him as the Messiah, others went straightway into Jerusalem to concert with the Pharisees in plotting His murder. When He observed the impenitence of these obdurate hearts at His side, He could not subdue His tenderest emotion. Weread that, when He saw the sisters weeping,and the Jews that were with them weeping, Jesus wept. These Jews could weep for a fellow-mortal, but they could not weep forthemselves, and thereforefor them, Jesus wept!
One soul was precious to Him. He who alone can estimate alike the worth and the loss of the soul, might have wept, even had there been but one then present found to resist His claims and forfeit His salvation. But these tears extended far beyond that lonely spot in a Jewish village, and the few impenitent hearts that were then flocking around. These obdurate Jews were types of the world’s impenitency. There was at that moment summoned before Him a mournful picture of the hardened hearts in every age—those who would read His gospel, and hear of His miracles, and listen to the story of His love all unmoved—who would die as they had lived, uncheered by His grace and unmeet for His presence.
Ah! surely no cause could more tenderly elicit a Redeemer’s tears thanthis—the thought of His Redemption scorned, His blood trampled on, His work set at nought.
If we have thought of Him shedding tears over the ruin of thebody, what must have been the depth and intensity of those tears over the sadder, more fearful ruin of the soul? Immortal powers, that ought to have been ennobled and consecrated to His service, alienated, degraded, destroyed!—immortal beings spurning from them the day of grace and the hopes of heaven! Bitter as may have been the wail of mourning and sorrowing hearts that may then have reached His ear from future ages, more agonising and dismal far must have been the wailing cry which, beyond the limits of time, came floating up from a dark and dreary eternity; those who might have believed and lived, but who blasphemed or trifled, neglected and procrastinated, and finally perished!
If we think of it, it is not the loss of health, or the loss of wealth, or the loss of friends, which forms the heaviest of trials, the deepest ground of soul sadness.Weput on the sable attire as emblems of mourning; but if we saw it as a weeping Jesus sees it, there is more real cause for sackcloth and ashes in the heart at enmity with God, and despising His salvation, trampling under foot HisSon, and enacting over again the sad tragedy of Calvary.
Reader! are you at this moment guilty of living on in a state of presumptuous impenitence—salvation unsought—Jesus a stranger—His name unhonoured—His Bible unread—His promises unappropriated—His wrath undreaded—defeating all His marvellous appliances of love, and remonstrance, and forbearance—meeting a prodigal expenditure of patience and long-suffering with cold and chilling indifference and neglect—casting away from you the hoarded riches of eternity which He has been holding out for your acceptance? In that sacred Bethany ground, as ye mark these falling tear-drops which dim His eye, there may have been a tear foryou! Eighteen hundred years have since elapsed, but He to whom “a thousand years are as one day,” marked eventhenyour present ungrateful apostacy or guilty alienation—there was a tear then which stole down that cheek on account of unrequited love?
Is that tear to flow in vain? Are you to mock His tender sympathy still with cold formalism, or persisted-in impenitency? Are you to thinkof Bethany and its tear-drops and still go on in sin?
Ah, never was sermon preached to an erring or impenitent sinner half so eloquent asthis. Paul was not given to weeping, and it makes his fervid love of souls all the more striking when we find him confessing that he had wept like a child over those who were “enemies to the cross of Christ.” We have often felt Paul’s burning tears over hardened sinners to be touching and impressive. But what are they, after all, in comparison with those of Paul’s Lord?
He, the Great Sun of the World—the Sun of Righteousness, was to set in a few brief days behind the walls of ungrateful Jerusalem in darkness and blood—His last rays seem now lingering over the crest of Olivet—His tears seem to tell that He has clung till He can cling no more to the fond hope that an impenitent nation and guilty city will yet turn at His reproof, believe and live.
And still does He linger amongus. Though the night cometh, the beams of mercy are still tardily lingering, as if loth to leave the backslidingto their wanderings, or the impenitent to their own midnight of despair.
O Reader! leave notthissubject—leave not the graveyard of Bethany till you think of Jesus as then weeping forthee. Yes! forthee—thy pitiable condition—thy perverse ingratitude—thy slighting of His warnings—thy grieving of His spirit—thy unkindness toHim—thine obstinate disregard of thine own everlasting interests. Let it be the most wondrous and heart-searching of all the memories of Bethany, that for thy soul—that traitor, truant, worthless soul—which like a stray planet He might have suffered to drift away from Himself into the blackness of eternal darkness—helpless, hopeless, ruined, lost!—Yes! that forthee,Jesus wept!
“And doth the Saviour weepOver His people’s sin,Because we will not let Him keepThe souls He died to win?Ye hearts that love the Lord,If at this sight ye burn,See that in thought, in deed, in word,Ye hate what made Him mourn.”
“And doth the Saviour weepOver His people’s sin,Because we will not let Him keepThe souls He died to win?Ye hearts that love the Lord,If at this sight ye burn,See that in thought, in deed, in word,Ye hate what made Him mourn.”
The Grave Stone.
They have now reached the grave. It was a rocky sepulchre. A flat stone (possibly with some Hebrew inscription) lay upon the mouth of it.
In wondering amazement the sorrowing group follow the footsteps of the Saviour. “Behold how He loved him,” whisper the Jews to one another as they witness His fast falling tears. Can His repairing thus to the tomb be anything more than to pay a mournful tribute to an honoured friendship, and behold the silent home of the loved dead? Nay; He is about, as the Lord of Life, to wrench away the swaddling-bands of corruption, to vindicate His name and prerogative as the “Abolisher of death”—to have the first-fruits of that vast triumph which, ages before the birth of time, He had anticipated with longing earnestness—“I willransom them from the power of the grave, I will redeem them from death. O death, I will be thy plagues; O grave, I will be thy destruction.”
Does He proceed forthwith to speak the word, and to accomplish the giant deed? He breaks silence. But we listen, in the first instance, not to the omnipotent summons, but to an address to the bystanders—“Jesus said, Take ye away the stone!”[15]
What need of this parenthesis in His mighty work? Why this summoning in any feeble human agency when His own independent fiat could have effected the whole? Would it not have been a more startling manifestation of Omnipotence, by a mandate similar to that which chained the tempests of Tiberias, or the demoniac of Gadara, to have hurled the incumbent stone into fragments? Might not He who has “the keys of the grave and of death” have Himself unlocked the portals preparatory to the vaster prodigy that was to follow?
Nay, there was a mighty lesson to be read in thus delegating human hands to remove the interveningbarrier. The Church of the living God may, in every age, gather from it instruction!
What, then, does the Saviour here figuratively, but significantly, teach His people? Is it not the important truth that, though dependent on Him for all they are, and all they have, they are not thereby released and exempted from the use ofmeans? He alone can bring back Lazarus from his death-sleep. Martha and Mary may weep an ocean of tears, but they cannot weep him back. They may linger for days and nights in that lonely graveyard, making it resound with their bitter dirges, but their impassioned entreaties will be mocked with impressive silence. Too well do they knowthatspirit is fled beyond their recall—the spark of life extinguished beyond any earthly rekindling!
But though the word of Omnipotence can alone bring back the dead, human hands and human efforts can roll away the interjacent stone, and prepare for the performance of the miracle; and after the miracleisperformed, human hands may again be called in to tear off the cerements of the tomb,to ungird the bandages from the restored captive, to “loose him and let him go!”
This simple incident in the Bethany narrative admits of manifold practical applications. Let us look to it with reference to the mightier moral miracle of the Resurrection of the soul “dead in trespasses and sins.” Jesus, and Jesus alone, can awake that soul from the deep slumber of its spiritual death, and invest it with the glories of a new resurrection-life. In vain can it awake of itself; no human skill can put animation into the moral skeleton. No power of human eloquence, no “excellency of man’s wisdom,” can open these rayless eyes, and pour life, and light, and hope into the dull caverns of the spiritual sepulchre. “Prophesy to the dry bones!”—We may prophesy for ever—we may wake the valley of vision by ceaseless invocations, but the dead will hear not. No bone of the spiritual skeleton will stir, for it is “not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts.”
But though it be a Divine work from first to last which effects the spiritual regeneration of man, are we from this presumptuously to disregard the useof means? Are prayer, and preaching, and human effort, and strenuous earnestness in the work of our high calling, are these all to be superseded, and pronounced unavailing and unnecessary?
Nay, though man cannot wake to life his dormant spiritual energies—though these lie slumbering in the deep sleep of the sheeted dead, and nothing but Lazarus’ Lord can break the moral trance—yethe can use the appointed means. He dare not be guilty of the monstrous inconsistency and crime of willingly allowing impediments to stand in the way of his spiritual revival which his own efforts may remove! He cannot expect his Lord to sound over his soul the gladdening accents of peace, and reconciliation, and joy, if some known sin be still lying, like the superincumbent grave-stone, which it is in his power to roll away, and at his peril if he suffer to remain!
Christ is alone the “abolisher of death,” and the “giver of life;” but notwithstanding this, “Roll ye away the stone!”—neglect not the means He has appointed and prescribed. If ye neglect prayer, and despise ordinances, and trifle with temptation, or venture on forbidden ground, ye areonly making the intervening obstacle firmer and faster, and wilfully denuding yourselves of the gift of life. Naaman must plunge seven times in Jordan, else he cannot be made clean. To cleansehimselfof his leprosy he cannot, but to wash in Jordanhe can. The Israelite must gaze on the brazen serpent; he cannot of himself heal one fevered wound, but to gaze on the appointed symbol of cure he can. In vain can the engines of war effect a breach on the walls of Jericho; but the hosts of Joshua can sound the appointed trumpet, and raise the prescribed shout, and the battlements in a moment are in the dust. Martha and Mary in vain can make their voices be heard in the “dull, cold ear of death,” but at their Lord’s bidding they can hurl back the outer portals where their dead is laid. They cannot unbind one fetter, but they can open with human hand the prison-door to admit the Divine Liberator.
Let it not be supposed that in this we detract in any wise from the omnipotence of the Saviour’s grace. God forbid! All is of grace, from first to last—free, sovereign grace. Man has no more merit in salvation than the beggar has merit in reachingforth his hand for alms, or in stooping down to drink of the wayside fountain. But neither must we ignore the great truth which God strives throughout His Word to impress upon us, that He works bymeans, and that for the neglect of these means we are ourselves responsible. Paul had the assurance given him by an angel from heaven, when tossed in the storm in Adria, that not one life in his vessel was to be lost; that though the ship was to be wrecked, all her crew were to come safe to land. But was there on this account any effort on his part relaxed to secure their safety? No! he toiled and laboured at the pumps and rigging and anchors as unremittingly as before; and when some of the sailors made the cowardly attempt, by lowering a small boat, to effect their own escape, the voice of the apostle was heard proclaiming, amid the storm, that unless they abode in the ship none could be saved!
The true philosophy of the Gospel system is this, to feel as if much depended on ourselves; but at the same time entertaining the loftier conviction thatalldepends upon God. Jesus, when He invites to the strait gate, does not inculcate remainingoutside, in a state of passive and listless inaction, until the portals be seen to move by the Divine hand. His exhortation and command rather is, “Strive”—“knock”—agoniseto “enter in!” We are not to ascend to heaven, seated, like Elijah, in a chariot of fire, without toil or effort, but rather to “fightthe good fight of faith.” The saying of the great Apostle is a vivid portraiture of what the Christian’s feelings ought to be regarding personal holiness—“I laboured, ... yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.”
As the Lord of Bethany gives the summons, “Roll ye away the stone,” His words seem paraphrased in this other Scripture, “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God that worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.” You may feel assured that He will not impose upon you one needless burden; He will not exact more than He knows your strength will bear; He will ask no Peter to come to Him on the water, unless He impart at the same time strength and support on the unstable wave; He will not demand of you the endurance of providences, and trials, and temptations you areunable to cope with; He will not ask you to draw water if the well is too deep, or withdraw the stone if too heavy. But neither, at the same time, will He admit as an impossibility that which, as a free and responsible agent, it is in your power to avert. He will not regard as your misfortune what is your crime. “If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me.”
Oh! let life be, more than it ever has been, one constant effort to roll away the stone from the moral sepulchre—carefully to remove every barrier between our souls and Jesus—looking forward to that glorious day when the voice of the Restorer shall be heard uttering the omnipotent “Come forth!” and to His angel assessors the mandate shall be given regarding the thronging myriads of risen dead, “Loose them and let them go!”
Unbelief.
Man—short-sighted man—often raises impossibilities when God does not. It is hard for rebellious unbelief to lie submissive and still. In moments when the spirit might well be overawed into silence, it gives utterance to its querulous questionings and surmisings rather than remain obedient at the feet of Christ, reposing on the sublime aphorism, “All things are possible to him that believeth.” In the mind of Martha, where faith had been so recently triumphant, doubt and unbelief have begun again to insinuate themselves. This “Peter of her sex” had ventured out boldly on the water to meet her Lord. She had owned Him as the giver of life, and triumphed in Him as her Saviour! But now she is beginning to sink. A natural difficulty presents itself to her mind about the removalof the incumbent grave-stone. She avers how needless its displacement would be, as by this time corruption must have begun its fatal work. Four brief days only had elapsed since the eye of Lazarus had beamed with fraternal affection. Now these lips must be “saying to corruption, Thou art my father; to the worm, Thou art my mother and my sister.” Death, she felt, must now be stamping his impressive mockery on that cherished earthly friendship, and, attired in his most terrible insignia, putting the last fatal extinguisher on the glimmerings of her faith and hope. “What need is there, Lord,” she seems to say, “for this redundant labour? My brother is far beyond the reach even of a voice like Thine. Why excite vain expectations in my breast which never can be realised? That grave has closed upon him for the ‘for ever’ of time. Nothing now can revoke the sentence, or reanimate the silent dust, save the trump of God on the final day.”[16]
Thus blindly did Martha reason. She can see no other object her Redeemer can have for the removal of the stone, save to gaze once more on a form andcountenance He loved. Both for His sake, and the strangers assembled, she recoils from the thought of disclosing so humiliating a sight.
Alas! how little are fitful frames and feelings to be trusted. Only a few brief moments before, she had made a noble protestation of her faith in the presence of her Lord. His own majestic utterances had soothed her griefs, dried her tears, and elicited the confession that He was truly the Son of God. But the sight of the tomb and its mournful accompaniments obliterate for a moment the recollection of better thoughts and a nobler avowal. She forgets that “things which are impossible with men are possible with God.” She is guilty of “limiting the Holy One of Israel.”
How often is it so with us! How easy is it for us, like Martha, to be bold in our creed when there is nothing to cross our wishes, or dim and darken our faith. But when the hour of trial comes, how often doessensethreaten to displace and supplant the nobler antagonist principle! How often do we lose sight of the Saviour at the very moment when we most need to have Him continually in view! How often are ourconvictions of the efficacy of prayer most dulled and deadened just when the dark waves are cresting over our heads, and voices of unbelief are uttering the upbraiding in our ears, “Where is now thy God?” But will Jesus leave His people to their own guilty unbelieving doubts? Will Martha, by her unworthy insinuations, put an arrest on her Lord’s arm; or will He, in righteous retribution for her faithlessness, leave the stone sealed, and the dead unraised?
Nay! He loves His people too well to let their stupid unbelief and hardness of heart interfere with His own gracious purposes! How tenderly He rebukes the spirit of this doubter. “Why,” as if He said, “Why distrust me? Why stultify thyself with these unbelieving surmises. Hast thou already forgotten my own gracious assurances, and thine own unqualified acceptance of them. My hand is never shortened that it cannot save; my ear is never heavy that it cannot hear. I can call the things which are not, and make them as though they were. Said I not unto thee, in that earnest conversation which I had a little ago outside the village, in which Gospel faith wasthe great theme, if thou wouldst believe, thou shouldst see the glory of God?”
This Bethany utterance has still a voice,—a voice of rebuke and of comfort in our hours of trial. When, like aged Jacob, we are ready to say, “All these things are against me;” when we are about to lose the footsteps of a God of love, orhaveperhaps lost them, there is a voice ready to hush into silence every unbelieving doubt and surmise. “Although thou sayest thou canst not see Him, yet judgment is before Him, therefore trust thou in Him.” God often thus hides Himself from His people in order to try their faith, and elicit their confidence. He puts us in perplexing paths—“allures” and “brings into the wilderness,” only, however, that we may see more of Himself, and that He may “speak comfortably unto us.” He lets our need attain its extremity, that His intervention may appear the more signal. He suffers apparently even His own promises to fail, that He may test the faith of His waiting people;—tutor them to “hope against hope,” and to find, inunansweredprayers and baffled expectations, only a fresh reason for clinging to His all-powerful arm, and frequenting His mercy-seat.He dashes first to the ground our human confidences and refuges, shewing how utterly “vain is the help of man;” so that faith, with her own folded, dove-like wings, may repose in quiet confidence in His faithfulness, saying, “In the Lord put I my trust: why say ye to my soul, Flee as a bird to your mountain?”
Reader! It would be well for you to hear this gentle chiding of Christ, too, in the moment of yourspiritualdepression;—when complaining of your corruptions, the weakness of your graces, your low attainments in holiness, the strength of your temptations, and your inability to resist sin. “Said I not unto thee,” interposes this voice of mingled reproof and love, “My grace is sufficient for thee?” “The bruised reed I will not break, the smoking flax I will not quench.” “Look untoMe, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth.” We are too apt to look toourselves, to turn our contemplationinwards, instead of keeping the eye of faith centered undeviatingly on a faithful covenant-keeping God, laying our finger on every promise of His Word, and making the challenge regarding each, “Hath he said, and shall he not do it? or hath he spoken, and shall he not bring it to pass?”
Yes; there may be much to try and perplex. Sense and sight may stagger, and stumble, and fall; we may be able to see no break in the clouds; “deep may be calling to deep,” and wave responding to wave, “yet the Lord will command his loving-kindness in the daytime, and in the night his song shall be with me.“ If we only ”believe” in spite of unbelief; hoping on, and praying on, and trusting on; like the great Father of the faithful, in the midst of adverse providences, “strong in faith, giving glory to God,” He will yet cause the day-spring from on high to visit us. Even inthisworld perplexing paths may be made plain, and slippery places smooth, and judgments “bright as the noonday;” but if nothere, thereisat least a glorious day of disclosures at hand, when the reign of unbelieving doubt shall terminate for ever, when the archives of a chequered past will be ransacked of their every mystery;—all events mirrored and made plain in the light of eternity; and this saying of the weeping Saviour of Bethany obtain its true and everlasting fulfilment, “Said I not unto thee, if thou wouldst believe, thou shouldst see the glory of God?”
The Divine Pleader.
The stone is rolled away, but there is a solemn pause just when the miracle is about to be performed.
Jesus prays!The God-Man Mediator—the Lord of Life—the Abolisher of Death—the Being of all Beings—who had the boundless treasures of eternity in His grasp—pauses by the grave of the dead, and lifts up His eyes to heaven in supplication! How often in the same incidents, during our Lord’s incarnation, do we find His manhood and His Godhead standing together in stupendous contrast. At His birth, the mystic star and the lowly manger were together; at His death, the ignominious cross and the eclipsed sun were together. Here He weeps and prays at the very moment when He is baring the arm of Omnipotence. The“mighty God” appears in conjunction with “the man Christ Jesus.” “His name is Immanuel, God with us.”
The body of Lazarus was now probably, by the rolling away of the stone, exposed to view. It was a humiliating sight. Earth—the grave—could afford no solace to the spectators. The Redeemer, by a significant act, shews them where alone, at such an hour, comfort can be found. He points the mourning spirit to its only true source of consolation and peace in God Himself, teaching it to rise above the mortal to the immortal—the corruptible to the incorruptible—from earth to heaven.
Ah! there is nothing but humiliation and sadness in every view of the grave and corruption. Why dwell on the shattered casket, and not rather on the jewel which is sparkling brighter than ever in a better world? Why persist in gazing on the trophies of the last enemy, when we can joyfully realise the emancipated soul exulting in the plenitude of purchased bliss? Why fall with broken wing and wailing cry to the dust, when on eagle-pinion we can soar to the celestial gate, and learnthe unkindness of wishing the sainted and crowned one back to the nether valley?
It isPrayer, observe, which thus brings the eye and the heart near to heaven. It isPrayerwhich opens the celestial portals, and gives to the soul a sight of the invisible.
Yes; ye who may be now weeping in unavailing sorrow over the departed, remember, in conjunction with thetears, theprayersof Jesus. Many a desolate mourner derives comfort from the thought—“Jesus wept.” Forget not this other simple entry in our touching narrative, telling where the spirit should ever rest amid the shadows of death—“Jesus lifted up his eyes, and said, Father, I thank Thee that Thou hast heard me. And I knew that Thou hearest me always.”[17]
Let us gather for a little around this incident in the story of Bethany. It is one of the many golden sayings of priceless value.
That utterance has at this moment lost none of its preciousness; that voice, silent on earth, is still eloquent in heaven. The Great Intercessor still is there, “walking in the midst of the seven goldencandlesticks;” loving to note all the wants and weaknesses, the necessities and distresses, of every Church, and every member of His Church. What He said of old to Peter, He says to every trembling believer—“Ihaveprayed, andampraying forthee, that thy faith fail not!” “Forthee!” We must not merge the interest which Jesus has in each separate member of His family, in His intercession for the Church in general. While He lets down His censer, and receives into it, for presentation on the golden altar, the prayers of the vast aggregate; while, as the true High Priest, He enters the holiest of all with the names of His spiritual Israel on His breastplate—carrying the burden of their hourly needs to the foot of the mercy-seat;—yet still, He pleads, as if the case ofeachstood separate and alone! He remembersthee, dejected Mourner, as if there were no other heart but thine to be healed, and no other tears but thine to be dried. His own words, speaking of believers, not collectively but individually, are these—“I will confesshisname before my Father and his angels.”[18]“Whotouchedme?” was His interrogation once on earth, as His discriminating love was conscious of some special contact amid the press of the multitude,—“Somebodyhath touched me!” If we can say, in the language of Paul’s appropriating faith, “He lovedme, and gave Himself forme,” we can add, He pleads forme, and bearsme! He bears this very heart ofmine, with all its weaknesses, and infirmities, and sins, before His Father’s throne. He has engraven each stone of His Zion on the “palms of His hands,” and “its walls are continually before Him!”
How untiring, too, in His advocacy! What has the Christian so to complain of, as his own cold, unworthy prayers—mixed so with unbelief—soiled with worldliness—sometimes guiltily omitted or curtailed. Not the fervid ejaculations of those feelingly alive to their spiritual exigencies, but listless, unctionless, the hands hanging down, the knees feeble and trembling!
But notwithstanding all, Jesuspleads! Still the Great Intercessor “waits to be gracious.” He is at once Moses on the mountain, and Joshua on the battle-plain—fightingwithus in the one, prayingforus in the other. No Aarons or Hurs needed to sustain His sinking strength, for it is His sublime prerogative neither to “faint nor grow weary!” There is no loftier occupation for faith than to speed upwards to the throne and behold that wondrous Pleader, receiving at one moment, and ateverymoment, the countless supplications and prayers which are coming up before Him from every corner of His Church. The Sinner just awoke from his moral slumber, and in the agonies of conviction, exclaiming, “What must I do to be saved?”—The Procrastinator sending up from the brink of despair the cry of importunate agony.—The Backslider wailing forth his bitter lamentation over guilty departures, and foul ingratitude, and injured love.—The Sick man feebly groaning forth, in undertones of suffering, his petition for succour.—The Dying, on the brink of eternity, invoking the presence and support of the alone arm which can be of any avail to them.—The Bereaved, in the fresh gush of their sorrow, calling upon Him who is the healer of the broken-hearted. Butall heard! Every tear marked—every sigh registered—every suppliant succoured.Amalek may come threatening nothing but discomfiture; but that pleading Voice on the heavenly Hill is “greater far than all that can be against us!” He pleads for His elect in every phase of their spiritual history—He pleads for their inbringing into His fold—He pleads for their perseverance in grace—He pleads for their deliverance at once from the accusations and the power of Satan—He pleads for their growing sanctification;—and when the battle of life is over, He uplifts His last pleading voice for their complete glorification. The intercession of Jesus is the golden key which unlocks the gates of Paradise to the departing soul. At a saint’s dying moments we are too often occupied with the lowerearthlyscene to think of theheavenly. The tears of surrounding relatives cloud too often the more glorious revelations which faith discloses. But in the muffled stillness of that death-chamber, when each is holding his breath as the King of Terrors passes by—if we could listen to it, we should hear the “Prince who has power with God” thus uttering His final prayer, and on the rushing wings of ministering angels receiving an answer while Heis yet speaking—“Father, I will that they also, whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am, that they may behold my glory!”
Reader! exult more and more in this all-prevailing Advocate. See that ye approach the mercy-seat with no other trust but in His atoning work and meritorious righteousness. There was butOnesolitary man of the whole human race who, of old, in the Jewish temple, was permitted to speak face to face with Jehovah. There is butonesolitary Being in the vast universe of God who, in the heavenly sanctuary, can effectually plead in behalf of His Spiritual Israel. “Seeing, then, that we have a Great High Priest passed into the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, ... let us come boldly to the throne of grace.” If Jesus delights in asking, God delights in bestowing. Let us put our every want, and difficulty, and perplexity, in His hand, feeling the precious assurance, that all which is really good for us will be given, and all that is adverse will, in equal mercy, be withheld. There is no limitation set to our requests. The treasury of grace is flung wide open for every suppliant. “Verily, verily, I say untoyou, whatsoever ye shall ask the Fatherin my nameHe will give it you.” Surely we may cease to wonder that the Great Apostle should have clung with such intense interest to this elevating theme—the Saviour’sintercession;—that in his brief, but most comprehensive and beautiful creed,[19]he should have so exalted, as he does, its relative importance, compared with other cognate truths. “It is Christ that died,yea rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God,who also maketh intercession for us.” Climbing, step by step, in the upward ascent of Christian faith and hope, he seems only to “reach the height of his great argument” when he stands on “the mountain of myrrh and the hill of frankincense.”There, gazing on the face of the great officiating Priest who fills all heaven with His fragrance, and feeling that againstthatintercession the gates of hell can never prevail, he can utter the challenge to devils, and angels, and men, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?”