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Expositions of Holy Scripture

A >> Alexander Maclaren >> Expositions of Holy Scripture




Then there is another thought here. This invitation of the Master is
also a very distinct call to a firsthand knowledge of Jesus Christ.
Andrew and John had heard from the Baptist about Him, and now what He
bids them to do is to come and hear Himself. That is what He calls
you, dear brethren, to do. Do not listen to us, let the Master Himself
speak to you. Many who reject Christianity reject it through not
having listened to Jesus Himself teaching them, but only to
theologians and other human representations of the truth. Go and ask
Christ to speak to you with His own lips of truth, and take Him as the
Expositor of His own system. Do not be contented with traditional talk
and second-hand information. Go to Christ, and hear what He Himself
has to say to you.

Then, still further, in this 'Come and see' there is a distinct call
to the personal act of faith. Both of these words, '_come_' and
'_see_,' are used in the New Testament as standing emblems of faith.
Coming to Christ is trusting Him; trusting Him is seeing Him, looking
unto Him. 'Come unto Me, and I will give you rest,' 'Look unto Me, and
be ye saved, all ye ends of the earth.' There are two metaphors, both
of them pointing to one thing, and that one thing is the invitation
from the dear lips of the loving Lord to every man, woman, and child
in this congregation. 'Come and see!' 'Put your trust in Me, draw near
to Me by desire and penitence, draw near to Me in the fixed thought of
your mind, in the devotion of your will, in the trust of your whole
being. Come to Me, and see Me by faith; and then--and then--your
hearts will have found what they seek, and your weary quest will be
over, and, like the dove, you will fold your wings and nestle at the
foot of the Cross, and rest for evermore. Come! "Come and see!"'

III. So, lastly, we have in these words a parable of the blessed
experience which binds men's hearts to Jesus for ever. 'They came and
saw where He dwelt, and abode with Him that day, for it was about the
tenth hour.'

'Dwelt' and 'abode' are the same words in the original. It is one of
John's favourite words, and in its deepest meaning expresses the
close, still communion which the soul may have with Jesus Christ,
which communion, on that never-to-be-forgotten day, when he and Andrew
sat with Him in the quiet, confidential fellowship that disclosed
Christ's glory 'full of grace and truth' to their hearts, made them
His for ever.

If the reckoning of time here is made according to the Hebrew fashion,
the 'tenth hour' will be ten o'clock in the morning. So, one long day
of talk! If it be according to the Roman legal fashion, the hour will
be four o'clock in the afternoon, which would only give time for a
brief conversation before the night fell. But, in any case, sacred
reserve is observed as to what passed in that interview. A lesson for
a great deal of blatant talk, in this present day, about conversion
and the details thereof!

'Not easily forgiven
Are those, who setting wide the doors, that bar
The secret bridal chambers of the heart.
Let in the day.'

John had nothing to say to the world about what the Master said to him
and his brother in that long day of communion.

One plain conclusion from this last part of our narrative is that the
impression of Christ's own personality is the strongest force to make
disciples. The character of Jesus Christ is, after all, the central
and standing evidence and the mightiest credential of Christianity. It
bears upon its face the proof of its own truthfulness. If such a
character was not lived, how did it ever come to be described, and
described by such people? And if it was lived, how did it come to be
so? The historical veracity of the character of Jesus Christ is
guaranteed by its very uniqueness. And the divine origin of Jesus
Christ is forced upon us as the only adequate explanation of His
historical character. 'Truly this man was the Son of God.'

I believe that to lift Him up is the work of all Christian preachers
and teachers; as far as they can to hide themselves behind Jesus
Christ, or at the most to let themselves appear, just as the old
painters used to let their own likenesses appear in their great
altar-pieces--a little kneeling figure there, away in a dark corner of
the background. Present Christ, and He will vindicate His own
character; He will vindicate His own nature; He will vindicate His own
gospel. 'They came and saw where He dwelt, and abode with Him,' and
the end of it was that they abode with Him for evermore. And so it
will always be.

Once more, personal experience of the grace and sweetness of this
Saviour binds men to Him as nothing else will:

'He must be loved ere that to you
He will seem worthy of your love.'

The deepest and sweetest and most precious part of His character and
of His gifts can only be known on condition of possessing Him and
them, and they can be possessed only on condition of holding
fellowship with Him. I do not say to any man: 'Try trust in order to
be sure that Jesus Christ is worthy to be trusted,' for by its very
nature faith cannot be an experiment or provisional. I do not say that
my experience is evidence to you, but at the same time I do say that
it is worth any man's while to reflect upon this, that none who ever
trusted in Him have been put to shame. No man has looked to Jesus and
has said: 'Ah! I have found Him out! His help is vain, His promises
empty.' Many men have fallen away from Him, I know, but not because
they have proved Him untruthful, but because they have become
unfaithful.

And so, dear brethren, I come to you with the old message, 'Oh!
taste,' and thus you will 'see that the Lord is good.' There must be
the faith first, and then there will be the experience, which will
make anything seem to you more credible than that He whom you have
loved and trusted, and who has answered your love and your trust,
should be anything else than the Son of God, the Saviour of mankind.
Come to Him and you will see. The impregnable argument will be put
into your mouth--'Whether this man be a sinner or no, I know not. One
thing I know, that whereas I was blind, now I see.' Look to Him,
listen to Him, and when He asks you, 'What seek ye?' answer, 'Rabbi,
where dwellest Thou? It is Thou whom I seek.' He will welcome you to
close blessed intercourse with Him, which will knit you to Him with
cords that cannot be broken, and with His loving voice making music in
memory and heart, you will be able triumphantly to confess--'Now we
believe, not because of any man's saying, for we have heard Him
ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the
world.'




THE FIRST DISCIPLES: II. SIMON PETER


'One of the two which heard John speak, and followed him, was Andrew,
Simon Peter's brother. 41. He first findeth his own brother Simon, and
saith unto him, We have found the Messias, which is, being
interpreted, the Christ. 42. And he brought him to Jesus. And when
Jesus beheld him, He said, Thou art Simon the son of Jona: thou shalt
be called Cephas, which is, by interpretation, a stone.'--JOHN i.
40-42.

There are many ways by which souls are brought to their Saviour.
Sometimes, like the merchantman seeking goodly pearls, men seek Him
earnestly and find Him. Sometimes, by the intervention of another, the
knowledge of Him is kindled in dark hearts. Sometimes He Himself takes
the initiative, and finds those that seek Him not. We have
illustrations of all these various ways in these simple records of the
gathering in of the first disciples. Andrew and his friend, with whom
we were occupied in our last sermon, looked for Christ and found Him.
Peter, with whom we have to do now, was brought to Christ by his
brother; and the third of the group, consisting of Philip, was sought
by Christ while he was not thinking of Him, and found an unsought
treasure; and then Philip again, like Andrew, finds a friend, and
brings him to Christ.

Each of the incidents has its own lesson, and each of them adds
something to the elucidation of John's two great subjects: the
revelation of Jesus as the Son of God, and the development of that
faith in Him which gives us life. It may be profitable to consider
each group in succession, and mark the various aspects of these two
subjects presented by each.

In this incident, then, we have two things mainly to consider: first,
the witness of the disciple; second, the self-revelation of the
Master.

I. The witness of the disciple.

We have seen that the unknown companion of Andrew was probably the
Evangelist himself, who, in accordance with his uniform habit,
suppresses his own name, and that that omission points to John's
authorship of this Gospel. Another morsel of evidence as to the date
and purpose of the Gospel lies in the mention here of Andrew as 'Simon
Peter's brother.' We have not yet heard anything about Simon Peter.
The Evangelist has never mentioned his name, and yet he takes it for
granted that his hearers knew all about Peter, and knew him better
than they did Andrew. That presupposes a considerable familiarity with
the incidents of the Gospel story, and is in harmony with the theory
that this fourth Gospel is the latest of the four, and was written for
the purpose of supplementing, not of repeating, their narrative. Hence
a number of the phenomena of the Gospel, which have troubled critics,
are simply and sufficiently explained.

But that by the way. Passing that, notice first the illustration that
we get here of how instinctive and natural the impulse is, when a man
has found Jesus Christ, to tell some one else about Him. Nobody said
to Andrew, 'Go and look for your brother,' and yet, as soon as he had
fairly realised the fact that this Man standing before him was the
Messiah, though the evening seems to have come, he hurries away to
find his brother, and share with him the glad conviction.

Now, that is always the case. If a man has any real depth of
conviction, he cannot rest till he tries to share it with somebody
else. Why, even a dog that has had its leg mended, will bring other
limping dogs to the man that was kind to it. Whoever really believes
anything becomes a propagandist.

Look round about us to-day! and hearken to the Babel, the wholesale
Babel of noises, where every sort of opinion is trying to make itself
heard. It sounds like a country fair where every huckster is shouting
his loudest. That shows that the men believe the things that they
profess. Thank God that there is so much earnestness in the world! And
now are Christians to be dumb whilst all this vociferous crowd is
calling its wares, and quacks are standing on their platforms shouting
out their specifics, which are mostly delusions? Have you not a
medicine that will cure everything, a real heal-all, a veritable
pain-killer? If you believe that you have, certainly you will never
rest till you share your boon with your brethren.

If the natural effect of all earnest conviction, viz. a yearning and
an absolute necessity to speak it out, is no part of your Christian
experience, very grave inferences ought to be drawn from that. This
man, before he was four-and-twenty hours a disciple, had made another.
Some of you have been disciples for as many years, and have never even
tried to make one. Whence comes that silence which is, alas, so common
among us?

It is very plain that, making all allowance for changed manners, for
social difficulties, for timidity, for the embarrassment that besets
people when they talk to other people about religion, which is 'such
an awkward subject to introduce into mixed company,' and the
like,--making all allowance for these, there is a deplorable number of
Christian people who ought to be, in their own circles, evangelists
and missionaries, who are, if I may venture to quote very rude words
which the Bible uses, 'Dumb dogs lying down, and loving to slumber.'
'He first findeth his own brother, Simon!'

Now, take another lesson out of this witness of the disciple, as to
the channel in which such effort naturally runs. 'He _first_ findeth
_his own brother_'; does not that imply a second finding by the other
of the two? The language of the text suggests that the Evangelist's
tendency to the suppression of himself, of which I have spoken, hides
away, if I may so say, in this singular expression, the fact that he
too went to look for a brother, but that Andrew found his brother
before John found his. If so, each of the original pair of disciples
went to look for one who was knit to him by close ties of kindred and
affection, and found him and brought him to Christ; and before the day
was over the Christian Church was doubled, because each member of it,
by God's grace, had added another. Home, then, and those who are
nearest to us, present the natural channels for Christian work. Many a
very earnest and busy preacher, or Sunday-school teacher, or
missionary, has brothers and sisters, husband or wife, children or
parents at home to whom he has never said a word about Christ. There
is an old proverb, 'The shoemaker's wife is always the worst shod.'
The families of many very busy Christian teachers suffer wofully for
want of remembering 'he first findeth his own brother.' It is a poor
affair if all your philanthropy and Christian energy go off noisily in
Sunday-schools and mission-stations, and if your own vineyard is
neglected, and the people at your own fireside never hear anything
from you about the Master whom you say you love. Some of you want that
hint; will you take it?

But then, the principle is one that might be fairly expanded beyond
the home circle. The natural relationships into which we are brought
by neighbourhood and by ordinary associations prescribe the direction
of our efforts. What, for instance, are we set down in this swarming
population of Lancashire for? For business and personal ends? Yes,
partly. But is that all? Surely, if we believe that 'there is a
divinity that shapes our ends' and determines the bounds of our
habitation, we must believe that other purposes affecting other people
are also meant by God to be accomplished through us, and that where a
man who knows and loves Christ Jesus is brought into neighbourly
contact with thousands who do not, he is thereby constituted his
brethren's keeper, and is as plainly called to tell them of Christ as
if a voice from Heaven had bid him do it. What is to be said of the
depth and vital energy of the Christianity that neither hears the call
nor feels the impulse to share its blessing with the famishing Lazarus
at its gate? What will be the fate of such a church? Why, if you live
in luxury in your own well drained and ventilated house, and take no
heed to the typhoid fever or cholera in the slums at its back, the
chances are that seeds of the disease will find their way to you, and
kill your wife, or child, or yourself. And if you Christian people,
living in the midst of godless people, do not try to heal them, they
will infect you. If you do not seek to impress your conviction that
Christ is the Messiah upon an unbelieving generation, the unbelieving
generation will impress upon you its doubts whether He is; and your
lips will falter, and a pallor will come over the complexion of your
love, and your faith will become congealed and turn into ice.

Notice again the simple word which is the most powerful means of
influencing most men.

Andrew did not begin to argue with his brother. Some of us can do that
and some of us cannot. Some of us are influenced by argument and some
of us are not. You may pound a man's mistaken creed to atoms with
sledge-hammers of reasoning, and he is not much the nearer being a
Christian than he was before; just as you may pound ice to pieces and
it is pounded ice after all. The mightiest argument that we can use,
and the argument that we can all use, if we have got any religion in
us at all, is that of Andrew, 'We have found the Messias.'

I recently read a story in some newspaper or other about a minister
who preached a very elaborate course of lectures in refutation of some
form of infidelity, for the special benefit of a man that attended his
place of worship. Soon after, the man came and declared himself a
Christian. The minister said to him, 'Which of my discourses was it
that removed your doubts?' The reply was, 'Oh! it was not any of your
sermons that influenced me. The thing that set me thinking was that a
poor woman came out of the chapel beside me, and stumbled on the
steps, and I stretched out my hand to help her, and she said "Thank
you!" Then she looked at me and said, "Do you love Jesus Christ, my
blessed Saviour?" And I did not, and I went home and thought about it;
and now I can say _I_ love Jesus.' The poor woman's word, and her
frank confession of her experience, were all the transforming power.

If you have found Christ, you can say that you have. Never mind about
the how! Any how! Only say it! A boy that is sent on an errand by his
father has only one duty to perform, and that is to repeat what he was
told. Whether we have any eloquence or not, whether we have any logic
or not, whether we can speak persuasively and gracefully or not, if we
have laid hold of Christ at all we can say that we have; and it is at
our peril that we do not. We can say it to somebody. There is surely
some one who will listen to you more readily than to any one else.
Surely you have not lived all your life and bound nobody to you by
kindness and love, so that they will gladly attend to what you say.
Well, then, _use_ the power that is given to you.

Remember the beginnings of the Christian Church--two men, each of whom
found his brother. Two and two make four; and if every one of us would
go, according to the old law of warfare, and each of us slay our man,
or rather each of us give life by God's grace to some one, or try to
do it, our congregations and our churches would grow as fast as,
according to the old problem, the money grew that was paid down for
the nails in the horse's shoes. Two snowflakes on the top of a
mountain gather an avalanche by the time they reach the valley. 'He
first findeth his brother, Simon.'

II. And now I turn to the second part of this text, the
self-revelation of the Master.

The bond which knit these men to Christ at first was by no means the
perfect Christian faith which they afterwards attained. They
recognised Him as the Messiah, they were personally attached to Him,
they were ready to accept His teaching and to obey His commandments.
That was about as far as they had gone. But they were scholars. They
had entered the school. The rest would come. It would be absurd to
expect that Christ would begin by preaching to them faith in His
divinity and atoning work. He binds them to _Himself_. That is lesson
enough for a beginner for one day.

It was the impression which Christ Himself made on Simon which
completed the work begun by his brother. What, then, was the
impression? He comes all full of wonder and awe, and he is met by a
look and a sentence. The look, which is described by an unusual word,
was a penetrating gaze which regarded Peter with fixed attention. It
must have been remarkable, to have lived in John's memory for all
these years. Evidently, as I think, a more than natural insight is
implied. So, also, the saying with which our Lord received Peter seems
to me to be meant to show more than natural knowledge: 'Thou art
Simon, the son of Jonas.' Christ may, no doubt, have learned the
Apostle's name and lineage from his brother, or in some other ordinary
way. But if you observe the similar incident which follows in the
conversation with Nicodemus, and the emphatic declaration of the next
chapter that Jesus knew both 'all men,' and 'what was in man'--both
human nature as a whole, and each individual--it is more natural to
see here superhuman knowledge.

So then, the first point in our Lord's self-revelation here is that He
shows Himself possessed of supernatural and thorough knowledge. One
remembers the many instances where our Lord read men's hearts, and the
prayer addressed to Him probably, by Peter, 'Thou, Lord, which knowest
the hearts of all men,' and the vision which John saw of 'eyes like a
flame of fire,' and the sevenfold 'I know thy works.'

It may be a very awful thought, 'Thou, God, seest me.' It is a very
unwelcome thought to a great many men, and it will be so to us unless
we can give it the modification which it receives from the belief in
the divinity of Jesus Christ, and feel sure that the eyes which are
blazing with divine omniscience are dewy with divine and human love.

Do you believe it? Do you feel that Christ is looking at you, and
searching you altogether? Do you rejoice in it? Do you carry it about
with you as a consolation and a strength in moments of weakness and in
times of temptation? Is it as blessed to you to feel 'Thou Christ
beholdest me now,' as it is for a child to feel that, when it is
playing in the garden, its mother is sitting up at the window watching
it, and that no harm can come? There have been men driven mad in
prisons because they knew that somewhere in the wall there was a
little pinhole, through which a gaoler's eye was always, or might be
always, glaring down at them. And the thought of an absolute
Omniscience up there, searching me to the depths of my nature, may
become one from which I recoil shudderingly, and will not be
altogether a blessed one unless it comes to me in this shape:--'My
Christ knows me altogether and loves me better than He knows. And so I
will spread myself out before Him, and though I feel that there is
much in me which I dare not tell to men, I will rejoice that there is
nothing which I need to tell to Him. He knows me through and through.
He knew me when He died for me. He knew me when He forgave me. He knew
me when He undertook to cleanse me. Like this very Peter I will say,
"Lord, Thou knowest all things," and, like him, I will cling the
closer to His feet, because I know, and He knows, my weakness and my
sin.'

Another revelation of our Lord's relation to His disciples is given in
the fact that He changes Simon's name. Jehovah, in the Old Testament,
changes the names of Abraham and of Jacob. Babylonian kings in the Old
Testament change the names of their vassal princes. Masters impose
names on their slaves; and I suppose that even the marriage custom of
the wife's assuming the name of the husband rests originally upon the
same idea of absolute authority. That idea is conveyed in the fact
that our Lord changes Peter's name, and so takes absolute possession
of him, and asserts His mastery over him. We belong to Him altogether,
because He has given Himself altogether for us. His absolute authority
is the correlative of His utter self-surrender. He who can come to me
and say, 'I have spared not my life for thee,' and He only, has the
right to come to me and say, 'yield yourself wholly to Me.' So,
Christian friends, your Master wants all your service; do you give
yourselves up to Him out and out, not by half and half.

Lastly, that change of name implies Christ's power and promise to
bestow a new character and new functions and honours. Peter was by no
means a 'Peter' then. The name no doubt mainly implies official
function, but that official function was prepared for by personal
character; and in so far as the name refers to character, it means
firmness. At that epoch Peter was rash, impulsive, headstrong,
self-confident, vain, and therefore, necessarily changeable. Like the
granite, all fluid and hot, and fluid because it was hot, he needed to
cool in order to solidify into rock. And not until his self-confidence
had been knocked out of him, and he had learned humility by falling;
not until he had been beaten from all his presumption, and tamed down,
and sobered and steadied by years of difficulty and responsibilities,
did he become the rock that Christ meant him to be. All _that_ lay
concealed in the future, but in the change of his name, while he stood
on the very threshold of his Christian career, there was preached to
him, and there is preached to us, this great truth, that if you will
go to Jesus Christ He will make a new man of you. No man's character
is so obstinately rooted in evil but that Christ can change its set
and direction. No man's natural dispositions are so faulty and low but
that Christ can develop counterbalancing virtues, and out of the evil
and weakness make strength. He will not make a Peter into a John, or a
John into a Paul, but He will deliver Peter from the 'defects of his
qualities,' and lead them up into a higher and a nobler region. There
are no outcasts in the view of the transforming Christ. He dismisses
no people out of His hospital as incurable, because anybody,
everybody, the blackest, the most rooted in evil, those who have
longest indulged in any given form of transgression, may all come to
Him; with the certainty that if they will cleave to Him, He will read
all their character and all its weaknesses, and then with a glad smile
of welcome and assured confidence on His face, will ensure to them a
new nature and new dignities. 'Thou art Simon--thou shalt be Peter.'

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