WILL YE ALSO GO AWAY?
By
D. M.
PANTON, B.A.
The massed disciples
drifting away from Christ, in the first great landslide from the Christian
Faith, are a wonderful forecast of the massed millions who will leave Him in
our closing Age. “In 1965,” says Mr.
H. G. Wells, “the organized
HARD SAYINGS
Now what caused the
departure? Hard sayings, difficult
truths. “Many
therefore of his disciples, when they heard this, said, This is a hard saying”:
harsh, severe; not necessarily difficult to understand, but difficult to accept
– “who can hear it?”; for the Christian Faith
has sayings hard to solve, hard to do, hard to bear (Lange). Each disciple is
stumbled by a different stone of offence.
But is this wonderful? Surely Incarnate Godhead speaking truth out of
worlds we have never known must sometime speak fathomless things: both our
limited minds and our defective moral receptiveness not only make ‘hard sayings’ inevitable, but a remarkable proof that
God is
speaking: we are up against mysteries, and therefore up against
tremendous and revolutionary truths. The difficulties are dawning on this mass
of loose disciples, who, the day before, were ready to accept Jesus as the
Messianic King, but who, when they realize that the teachings of Christ are
profoundly different from what they had anticipated, abandon Him disenchanted.
WILL YE?
But now the Lord
Himself makes the crisis inconceivably solemn for us all. For He presses home the decision on every
child of God. Not one solitary Christian
is out of danger; because it is to the twelve Apostles themselves, summarizing
the whole Church - it is the first time ‘the twelve’
are so named - that Jesus says:- “Will ye
also” - for no Christian is beyond the peril – “go away?” Every
one of us is bound sooner or later to be brought up, sharply stumbled, by some new
and deeply disconcerting doctrine falling from the lips of Christ; when some
flashlight of truth from His lips, lighting up our whole life, slowly settles
on something wrong; and the thought then steals into the heart – “This is a hard saying; who can hear it?” At this moment truth after truth is
disappearing from the creed of the Church: much
of the fine gold from the lips of Christ is silently disbelieved, steadily
disobeyed, or openly ridiculed. It
is the pathway to apostasy. Partial
faith creates for itself difficulties greater than faith ever has to meet, and
can end in complete bankruptcy. On a
memorial to Bishop Butler in Bristol
Cathedral are these words from Origen
:‑“He who believes the Scripture to have
proceeded from Him who is the Author of Nature, may well expect to find the
same sort of difficulties in it as are found in the constitution of Nature.”
THE CHOICE
Ponder the Lord’s
question further. The Lord Jesus gives
us an absolutely free option. He
flatters no one, He compromises with no one, He compels no one. Why?
(1) Because He always respects the awful gift with which the Creator has
endowed us - free will: we can leave Christ. It is the deep principle of all spiritual
life, of all destiny, that I settle my own eternity. (2) Because Christ sifts as well as
saves. He wants more than merely
purchased souls: He wants heroes. The
Lord is more concerned about the purity of His Church than about its numbers.* And (3) because our Lord is seeking,
then, as now, for a little band which
will be impregnable against apostasy.
In the raging of a battle a colour-sergeant had carried the colours to a
distant knoll, and the regiment was wavering; and the commanding officer cried:
“Bring back the colours!” The lonely
sergeant shouted back:- “I will never bring back the
colours: you bring forward the men!”
Times of apostasy are the loudest of all summons to rally to the Lord.
[* Whether the
individual apostate is regenerate, or not, only God can declare; but that he
can be regenerate is certain from Peter’s words: “I
know not the man” (Matt. 26: 72). The modern apostate can repudiate Christ more
bitterly, but he cannot repudiate Him more completely, than Peter actually did after regeneration.]
NO ALTERNATIVE
Now it is certain that
God will never want splendid veterans, beginning with the Apostles. Jesus finds the faithful (as He hints) by the
very way He couched His question: “You will not also go
away, will you?” (The Greek
expects the answer, ‘No’.) Jesus finds heroes in the Twelve - save one;
all eleven - so far as we can learn - were ultimately martyred; and Peter, as
ever, voices their responding cry- “Lord, to
whom shall we go?”
Peter puts the practical question which every hesitating soul ought to
face. Christ’s hard sayings all put
together are not so hard, so hopeless, as the mystery of a world without
Christ. It is hardly conceivable that
one Englishman in a million would choose Buddha or Mohammed or Confucius
instead of Christ; and it is highly improbable that anyone who reads this would
abandon the Christian Faith for Spiritualism or Atheism or Communism. But mere agnosticism - the lapsing into a
mental state where one says that Christianity may or may not be true, but
anyway one leaves it - is a drowning man shouting back that he does not deny
that the rope can save - he does not know - but he is done with trying it. His action is infinitely more solemn than he
knows. When a man goes back who has
known Christ, and even walked with Him in professed discipleship, he is showing
a power of sin, a criminal dynamic, that can break the most powerful spiritual
bonds in the world, and his character and destiny are doomed.
NO OTHER
The only loser is the departing
disciple himself, for Christ wants no hypocrites, and his departure only sifts
and purifies Christ’s glorious Church.
So one sun fills all Peter’s sky: “Lord, Thou”;
as Augustine puts it:- “If Thou wishest us to leave Thee, give us a second Thou.” In all the great universe has not God given
me someone to love? and if it is not Jesus, I must despair: for no diviner
Christ can ever come - He is God’s only Son; no lovelier life can ever appear,
for He is the throbbing heart out of the bosom of the Father; no such saving
word can ever be heard again, for there is no other name given among men
whereby we must be saved. What memories - of happy hours, holy inspirations,
heavenly visions, dead possibilities - must haunt the hearts that have turned
their last look on Christ! We do well to
accept all the hard sayings, even those that wound, for it is the surgeon’s
cutting hand that heals.
ETERNAL LIFE
But Peter now gives
our central personal reason for following Christ, and so incidentally solves the problem of the hard sayings. “Thou hast the words
of ETERNAL LIFE.” By Satan’s words men were lost, by Christ’s
words they are saved. It is deeply
significant that in all earth’s history no one has ever offered eternal life
except Jesus Christ, and those who, obeying Him, have repeated His words. We are all facing death, in a world of death:
we need a Saviour who, by reason of His expiation of our sins, is able to grant
life - glorious life, unending life, divine life; and Christ, and Christ alone, offers
an inheritance which will outlast the sun, and survive as long as God
Himself. “What
is eternity?” was a question once asked at a deaf and dumb institution
in
THE HOLY ONE OF GOD
So Peter, finally,
gives the divine reason why we follow Christ, and so closes on what is always
the supreme height - not what Christ says, or even what He has done, but that
which alone gives value to all the rest - what He is. “We have believed and
know” - a past act of faith flowering now into an absolute knowledge – “that thou art THE HOLY
ONE OF GOD.” The waves of
doubt all hurl themselves only to be shattered for ever on the rock of the person of Christ. All the doctrine is true because the Person is
true; and all the doctrine is holy because the Person is holy. It is most remarkable that Peter singles out
the title by which the Lord Jesus is known to the spirits of another world,
dwellers in eternity, who knew Him long ages ere the creation of man, and knew
Him as God’s perfection of holiness. “What have we to do with thee, thou Jesus of Nazareth? art
thou come to destroy us? I know
thee who thou art, THE HOLY ONE OF GOD” (Mark
1: 24).
* * *
HARD SAYINGS
The rejection of ‘hard sayings’ in Scripture can lead to apostasy. Here is a letter written by two Japanese
Christians of thirty-six years’ standing to a Japanese journal:- “A generation ago we were taught by the early missionaries to
believe the Bible to be verbally inspired from Genesis to Revelation: we now
hold it to be full of errors. We reject
the greater part of Paul’s teaching: we no longer believe in the Virgin Birth,
or Everlasting Punishment for unbelievers, nor that God can forgive us only through the mediation and suffering of
Christ:- this, a mere Paulinism, is no longer tenable. Many who, thirty or forty years ago, became
Christians, have ceased to be Christians for these reasons, and there are more
who have left the Church than now belong to it.” The death of the Church lies in the
extinction of the Book. In the startling
words of Professor T. H. Huxley on
the Higher Criticism:- “If Satan had wished to devise the best means of
discrediting Revelation, he could not have done better.”
*
* *
PLAN NOT
He will
silently plan for thee
(Zeph. 3: 17)
Plan
not, for all thy plans will fail,
And
God looks calmly on;
He
holds the helm; and, so, come storm or gale,
His
Sun has shone.
Thou
need’st not have a fear; He plans:
Wait
thou His way to see.
’Tis
thine to pray; the issue is with Him
Who
plans for thee.
Fear
not, thy fears dishonour Him,
Who
hitherto hath led:
Hath
He not through thy pilgrimage,
With
manna ever fed?
-
LOUISE F. E. ABRAHAM.
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