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Page 36
Pain, then, has a real place in our progress. Who that has suffered can
ever doubt it again?
Let us consider, therefore, under this Word of Christ, whether our
attitude to bodily pain is what God would have it to be. There are two
mistakes that we may be committing. Either we may fear it too
little--meet it, that is to say, with Pagan stoicism instead of with
Christianity--or we may fear it too much. _Despise not the chastening_,
on one side, _or faint_ on the other. It is surely the second warning
that is most needed now. For pain had a real place in Christ's programme
of life. He fasted for forty days at the beginning of His Ministry, and
He willed every shocking detail of the Praetorium and Calvary at the
end. He told us that _His Spirit willed it_ and, yet more kindly, that
_His Flesh was weak_. He revealed, then, that He really suffered and
that He willed it so.... _I thirst._
THE SIXTH WORD
_It is consummated._
He has finished _His Father's business_, He has dealt with sinners and
saints, and has finally disclosed to us the secrets of the Soul and the
Body of His that are the hope of both sinners and saints alike. And
there is no more for Him to do.
An entirely new Beginning, then, is at hand, now that the Last Sabbath
is come--the Last Sabbath, so much greater than the First as Redemption
is greater than Creation. For Creation is a mere introduction to the
Book of Life; it is the arrangement of materials that are to be thrown
instantly into confusion again by man, who should be its crown and
master. The Old Testament is one medley of mistakes and fragments and
broken promises and violated treaties, to reach its climax in the
capital Mistake of Calvary, when men indeed _knew not what they did._
And even God Himself in the New Testament, as man in the Old, has gone
down in the catastrophe and hangs here mutilated and broken. Real life,
then, is now to begin.
Yet, strangely enough, He calls it an End rather than a Beginning.
_Consummatum est!_
I. The one and only thing in human life that God desires to end is Sin.
There is not a pure joy or a sweet human relationship or a selfless
ambition or a divine hope which He does not desire to continue and to be
crowned and transfigured beyond all ambition and all hope. On the
contrary, He desires only to end that one single thing which ruins
relationships and spoils joy and poisons aspirations. For up to the
present there is not one page of history which has not this blot upon
it.
God has had to tolerate, for lack of better, such miserable specimens of
humanity! _Jacob have I loved!_ ... _David a man after my heart;_ the
one a poor, mean, calculating man, who had, however, that single glimmer
of the supernatural which Esau, for all his genial sturdiness, was
without; the other an adulterous murderer, who yet had grace enough for
real contrition. Hitherto He has been content with so little. He has
accepted vinegar for want of wine.
Next, God has had to tolerate, and indeed to sanction--such an unworthy
worship of Himself--all the blood of the temple and the spilled entrails
and the nameless horrors. And yet this was all to which men could rise;
for without it, they never could have learned the more nameless horror
of sin.
Last, for His worshippers He has had to content Himself with but one
People instead of _all peoples and nations and languages._ And what a
People,--whom even Moses could not bear for their treachery and
instability! And all this wretched record ends in the Crime of Calvary,
at which the very earth revolts and the sun grows dark with shame. Is it
any wonder that Christ cried, Thank God that is all done with at last!
II. Instead of this miserable past, then, what is to come? What is that
_New Wine He would drink with us in His Father's Kingdom?_ First; real
and complete saints of God are to take the place of the fragmentary
saints of the Old Dispensation, saints with heads of gold and feet of
clay. Souls are to be born again in Baptism, not merely sealed by
circumcision, and to be purified before they can contract any actual
guilt of their own. And, of these, many shall keep their baptismal
innocence and shall go, wearing that white robe, before God Who gave it
them. Others again shall lose it, but regain it once more, and, through
the power of the Precious Blood, shall rise to heights of which Jacob
and David never even dreamed. To _awake in His likeness_ was the
highest ambition of _the man after God's Heart;_ but to be not merely
like Christ, but one with Him, is the hope of the Christian. _I live_,
the new saints shall say with truth, _yet now not I, but Christ liveth
in me._
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