Sermons on National Subjects

by Charles Kingsley

Not merely to the Jews, but to all heathens who hungered and thirsted after righteousness, did the Lord Jesus show something of His truth; as it is written, God is no acceptor of persons; that is, no shower of partiality, or unjust favour: but in every nation, he that feareth God and worketh righteousness is accepted of Him.

But at the time that the Lord Jesus sent down His Holy Spirit, men were not working righteousness. There was not one who did good, no not one. For men had forgotten what righteousness was like, what a righteous man ought to do and be. Men are ready to forget it every day. You and I are ready to forget it, and invent some false righteousness of our own, not like Jesus Christ, but like what we in our private fancies think is most graceful, or most agreeable, or most easy; or most grand, and far-fetched, and difficult. But the Holy Spirit came to convince men of righteousness; to show them what true righteousness was like.

And how? In the same way that He must convince us of righteousness, if we are ever to know what righteousness is, or are ever to be righteous ourselves. He must show us goodness; or we shall never see it, or receive it, or copy it.

And where is this righteousness, this perfect goodness of which the Holy Spirit will convince us? Where, but in the Lord Jesus Christ? In the Lord Jesus’s character, the Lord Jesus’s good works; His love, His patience, His perfect obedience, His life, His death. The Holy Spirit, if we give up our hearts to be taught by Him, will make us believe, and be sure, and feel in our very inmost hearts, how noble, how beautiful, how holy, how perfectly Godlike, was He who was born of a poor virgin, who walked this earth for thirty-three years in toil and sorrow, who gave His back to the smiters, and His cheeks to them that plucked off the hair, and hid not His face from shame and spitting, who died upon a cross between two thieves. And the Holy Spirit will convince us of righteousness, by making us feel what the Lord Jesus’s righteousness consisted in; what was the root of all His goodness and holiness, namely His perfect obedience to His Father and our Father in heaven. That is the righteousness, which is not our own, but God’s; the righteousness which comes by faith; not to trust in ourselves, but in God; not to please ourselves, but God; not to do our own will, but God’s will. That is the righteousness of Jesus Christ, which God set His seal on and approved, when He exalted Him far above all principality and powers, and set Him at His own right hand for a sign to all men, and angels, and archangels; that righteousness means to trust and to obey God even to the death.

3. Of judgment, because the prince of this world is judged.

This may seem a puzzling speech at first. We shall understand it best, I think, by considering who the prince of this world was in our Lord’s time, and what he was like. A little before our Lord’s time the Roman emperor had conquered almost the whole world which was then known, and kept all nations in slavery, careless about their doing right, provided they obeyed him and paid him tribute; nay, forcing them and tempting them into all brutal and foul sin and ignorance, that he might keep up his own power over man.

But now the Lord of all the earth, and the Prince of men’s hearts and thoughts, was come to visit that poor enslaved and sinful world. He came; the princes of this world knew Him not, and crucified the Lord of Glory. They crucified the righteous and the just One; and so they were judged. They judged themselves; they condemned themselves. For they showed that what they admired and what they wanted was not righteousness and love, but wealth and power. They showed that no doing of good, no healing of the sick, or giving of sight to the blind, or preaching the gospel to the poor, no holiness, no love, not the perfect likeness of God’s own goodness, which shone forth in the spotless Jesus, was anything to them; was any reason why they should not put Him to death with the most cruel torments, because they were afraid of His taking away their power. He said He was a King; and therefore they crucified Him, lest His kingdom should interfere with theirs; and for the same reason these same Roman emperors and their magistrates, for hundreds of years afterwards, persecuted the Christians, and hunted them down like wild beasts, and put them to death by all horrible tortures, for the same reason that Cain slew Abel; became his brother’s deeds were righteous, and his own wicked.

So these Roman emperors, and their magistrates and generals were judged. They had shown what was in their evil hearts. They had been tried in God’s balances, and found wanting. The sentence of the Lord God had gone forth against them. The man Christ Jesus, whom they rejected, God accepted, and raised to His own right hand. They crucified Him; but God gave Him all power in heaven and earth: and the Lord Jesus used His power; yea, and uses it still. He gave His saints and martyrs strength to defy those Roman tyrants, and to witness to all the earth that the righteous Son of God was the King of heaven and earth, and that the princes of this world, who wished to break His yoke off their necks, and crush all nations to powder for their own pleasure, and fatten themselves upon the plunder of all the earth, would surely come to naught, as it is written in the second Psalm: “The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord and His Anointed. Yet have I set my King upon my holy hill of Zion. Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron: thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.”

And they did come to naught. That great Roman empire rotted away miserably after years of such distress as had never been seen on the earth before; and the emperors came, one after another, to shameful or dreadful deaths. And all the while the gospel spread, and the Church grew, till all the kingdoms of the Roman empire had become the kingdoms of God and of His Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit working in men’s hearts, and showing them, as our Lord said He would, that Jesus of Nazareth was both Lord and King. And so was fulfilled the Lord’s words in the gospel for to-day: “The Holy Spirit shall glorify me, for He shall receive of mine, and shall show it unto you. All things that the Father hath are mine; therefore said I that He should take of mine, and show it unto you.”

Oh my friends, pray for yourselves, and join me while I pray for you, that the holy and righteous Spirit of God may convince you, and me, and all mankind, more and more, day by day, of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment.