CLVI. AN EVIL HEART OF UNBELIEF. St. John v. 41-44. I receive not honour from men. But I know you, that ye have not the love of God in you. I am come in my Father's name, and ye receive me not: if another shall come in his own name, him ye will receive. How can ye believe, which receive honour one of another, and seek not the honour that cometh from God only? Our Lord points out the causes why the Jews were unwilling to receive Him whom the Father and the Baptist and His own works and their own Scriptures all witnessed to be the Messiah. It was because He appeared in a style so contrary to their expectations and carnal desires, because He disclaimed human honour, because He sought not His own glory but the glory of Him that sent Him. Had the same love of God been in them, they would have welcomed Him. But their expectation of the Messiah proceeded only from selfishness. It was not the glory of God they desired, but the advancement of their own nation. It was not the love of God but self-love that gave wings to their expectation. And this our Lord, from His Divine inspection of their hearts and acquaintance with their motives, knew, and they could not deny it. He knew them who knew not themselves. He convicts them at once of past and present obstinacy, and predicts their future perverseness. Though He came in His Father's name, as His works witnessed, with Divine authority and power, yet they rejected Him; while ready to receive almost any impostor coming in His own name, though wholly unable to give those proofs of a Divine commission which He had given abundantly. False Christs, false prophets, so their history proved, were made welcome by those who rejected Him. It was their insatiate love of earth that kept them from seeking Heaven. They were so 1 St. John ii. 24, 25. taken up with giving and receiving human honour, that no place was left for seeking that which was divine.' They were in fact idolaters, loving and serving the creature more than the Creator, putting earthly glory in the place of the only God. Our Lord here as elsewhere goes to the root of the matter. He shows them the evil that was in their hearts; shows them that the evil was in their hearts. How can ye believe, He asks, while of this earthly mind? 3 CLVII. THE SAME SUBJECT-continued. St. John v. 45-47. Do not think that I will accuse you to the Father: there is one that accuseth you, even Moses, in whom ye trust. For had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me: for he wrote of But if ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe my words? me. Jews that He is not Our Lord proceeds to show the singular in His charge against them. Moses, agreed with Him in all. Not that He was going to be their accuser before God. There was no need of this. They were already convicted out of those very writings to which they so confidently appealed. That same Moses, under whose shadow they sheltered themselves in vain, was the very one who accused them. This he does throughout his writings. The argument may be stated thus: Moses everywhere, in type and in prophecy, testifies to Christ; they reject Christ; therefore Moses testifies against them. And our Lord shows moreover, that they did not believe even what Moses said; for, if so, they would have believed Him, seeing that Moses wrote concerning Him. The argu 1 St. John xii. 43. 2 So the phrase in v. 44 should probably be rendered. See Rom. i, 25. 3 Philip. iii. 18, 19. ment again may be thus stated: Moses testified to Christ; they will not believe in Christ; therefore they reject the testimony of Moses. Thus He proves to them, by a double argument, both that Moses to whom they appeal is in fact their accuser, and that, notwithstanding all their professions, they do not really believe Moses. Our Lord concludes His discourse with a sad reflection upon their unbelief. Moses moreover had written. It was documentary evidence, which had the stamp of age and authority. If they rejected this, no wonder that they should reject the other. If they rejected the hallowed writings of one whom they professed to reverence, they were not likely to receive the hard sayings of one whom they openly opposed. From our Lord's discourse we may learn the duty of believing upon sufficient testimony. In demanding our faith, He requires of us no more than what in numberless matters of every-day life we are ready and forward to do. Let us learn from it also to beware of the form without the power; holding the Book it may be scrupulously, almost superstitiously, and yet to no purpose; slaves of the letter, but unpossessed by the Spirit. CLVIII. SABBATARIANISM. St. Matthew xii. 1-4. At that time Jesus went on the sabbath day through the corn; and his disciples were an hungred, and began to pluck the ears of corn, and to eat. But when the Pharisees saw it, they said unto him, Behold, thy disciples do that which is not lawful to do upon the sabbath day. But he said unto them, Have ye not The argument here is an application of what our Lord had already said in v. 39, where He had shown their utter inconsistency in acknowledging the authority of the Scripture, and yet refusing to yield to the authority of that same Scripture which bade them believe in Him. The original word marks the exact, careful, and considered character of the testimony, and so is stronger than the ordinary word for writings would have been. read what David did, when he was an hungred, and they that were with him; how he entered into the house of God, and did eat the shewbread, which was not lawful for him to eat, neither for them which were with him, but only for the priests? 1 4 3 The Pharisees, who explained away moral commands, exaggerated ceremonial ones. The Jews, who had formerly been grossly neglectful of their Sabbath, had now fallen into the opposite extreme of a superstitious strictness concerning it. "Profaneness and superstition prepare the way for each other." Our Lord who had already rebuked this spirit at Bethesda, now takes another opportunity of facing the question. What a picture this gives us of the deep poverty of the Disciples! The Jews were allowed by their Law 2 to pluck a few ears as they passed through the cornfields; but that the Disciples on a Sabbath day should do what came under the head of servile work was pronounced by the Pharisees a breach of the fourth commandment. These same who, on the one hand, made the commandment of God of none effect that they might keep their own tradition," were fond, on the other hand, of binding heavy burdens and grievous to be borne on men's shoulders. In their censoriousness they attacked the Disciples on the subject, and some of them called our Lord's attention to it, as though He were overlooking a manifest breach of the Law. Their language marks their confident assumption that this was a breach of the Law, and that from their interpretation of the Law there could be no appeal. Our Lord, who is by no means disposed to admit their misinterpretation of the Law, Abp. Secker in D'Oyly and Mant. 2 Deut. xxiii. 25. 3 And that Sabbath day, we find from St. Luke (vi. 1) was an high day. "Of the three Sabbath days accounted the most solemn, as falling in with the three great Feasts of the Passover, Pentecost, and Tabernacles, the second of these three chief or principal was that of Pentecost."Quesnel. St. Luke adds a graphic touch to the picture, "rubbing them in their 6 hands," to separate the grain. 6 St. Matt. xxiii. 4. "It is no new thing for the most harmless and innocent action of Christ's Disciples to be evil spoken of, and reflected upon as unlawful, especially by those who are zealous for their own inventions and impositions . . . Those are no friends to Christ and His Disciples who make that to be unlawful which God has not made to be so."-Henry. St. John v. 39, 45, 46. yet contents Himself for the present with reproving their blindness by appealing, as before,' first to those Scriptures they professed to revere. He cites the case of David,2 whom they had never misdoubted, as showing that need or necessity may sometimes be allowed to override a law. Here was a like case. When he and his men, fleeing from the face of Saul, were pressed by hunger, they were allowed to have even the holy bread which God had appointed for the Priests alone. By a parity of reasoning, the Disciples might procure food to relieve hunger even on a holy day, admitting, for the sake of argument, it was not generally lawful. CLIX. THE SAME SUBJECT-continued. St. Matthew xii. 5-8. Or have ye not read in the law, how that on the sabbath days the priests in the temple profane the sabbath, and are blameless? But I say unto you, That in this place is one greater than the temple. But if ye had known what this meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice, ye would not have condemned the guiltless. For the Son of man is Lord even of the sabbath day. Our Lord further asks these who, making their boast of the Law, showed yet a strange ignorance of the Law, how they could thus condemn those who did no more than their Priests were continually doing. To hear them speak, one would think that they had never read the Law of which they were the professors. There rules are laid down for sacrificial and other work which would be literally a desecration of the Sabbath, but which became even consecrated work. Who thinks of finding fault with the Priests for what, judged by the letter, is profanation? Why then should they find fault 1 St. John v. 39, 45, 46. 21 Sam. xxi. 1-6. 3 On the supposed substitution of Abiathar for Ahimelech, see Bp. |