2. Perfect manhood is a complete Christ-likeness.—“Unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ” (ver. 13). Man is so great that he is perpetually striving after a loftier ideal; nothing that has limits can satisfy him. “It is because there is an infinite in him which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the finite. Will the whole finance ministers and upholsterers and confectioners of modern Europe undertake in joint-stock company to make one shoeblack happy? They cannot accomplish it above an hour or two; for the shoeblack also has a soul quite other than his stomach, and would require, if you consider it for his permanent satisfaction and saturation, simply this allotment, no more and no less—God’s infinite universe altogether to himself, therein to enjoy infinitely and fill every wish as fast as it arose. Try him with half a universe of an omnipotence, he sets to quarrelling with the proprietor of the other half and declares himself the most maltreated of men” (Carlyle). True manhood does not consist in the development of a fine physique, or a brilliant mentality, or in the pursuit of heroic ambitions. It lies in the nobleness of the soul at peace with God, seeking in all things to please Him, and to possess and exhibit the mind of Christ. The pagan hero is the warrior, the ruler, the poet, the philosopher; the Christian hero is the Christ-like man. The supreme type of manhood is Christ-likeness. The ideal is conceived by faith, and the actual is attained only by the exercise of the same grace.
II. Superior to the childish vacillation induced by deceptive teaching (ver. 14).—The false teachers played with truth, as men play with dice, with the reckless indifference of gamblers, and they and their victims were swayed to and fro, with ruin for the ultimate goal. Like a rudderless ship they were tossed about at the caprice of every current, with the inevitable result of wreckage among the rocks and quicksands. Professing a zeal for truth, they deceived themselves and others by ever changing their point of view, and craftily avoiding the practical bearing of truth in the aims to change the heart and reform the life. The moment the application of truth pressing upon the conscience made them uncomfortable, they tacked about and sailed off under another issue. As the restless seaweed, waving to and fro in the ever-changing tide, can never grow to the dignity of a tree, so those who were swayed by every changing phase of error can never grow up to the strength and stability of true Christian manhood. We can sympathise with the doubts and perplexities of an earnest seeker after truth; but our sympathy changes into impatience when we discover that the seeker is more in search of novelty than truth, of variety rather than certainty. To be for ever in doubt is to be in the fickle stage of mental and moral infancy. It is the worst phase of childishness.
III. It is a continual growth in the truth and love of Christ (vers. 15, 16).—It is the high distinction of man that he is susceptible of almost unlimited growth in mental and moral attainments. One of the greatest distances between animalism and man is seen in the unbridged gulf of progress. The animal remains where he was, but man has been progressing in every department of life from the very first. There is between them all the breadth of history. The animal builds its nest as it ever did, the bee by the same marvellous instinct constructs its geometrical cells now as at the first; but man is a genius—he creates. His first rude efforts in shaping his dwellings have gone on progressing and improving until we have the architectural development of to-day. In every kind of art it is the same—rude flint knives, lance heads, needles, were his first weapons and implements; to them succeeded bronze, and then iron—each marking stages in that history of progress up to the beautiful cutlery, stores, and arsenals of the present day. The animal roars or chatters to-day as it has done all along. It has made no progress towards intelligent speech—a Rubicon the animal will never cross. But man, who began with one speech, and a very limited vocabulary of words, has developed speech into the great languages of ancient and modern literature. A wider gulf than this is hardly conceivable. But the moral growth of man is more remarkable. The era of the Gospel is a revelation of the power of love. With the ancients a mere sentiment, Christianity teaches that love is the essence of religion; and that nature is the manliest and noblest that advances in the knowledge of Divine truth and in the self-sacrificing love of Christ. The whole fabric of the Christian character is built up in the ever-increasing exercise of Christ-like love.
Lessons.—Christian manhood is—1. Acquired by an intelligent faith in Christ. 2. Developed by an imitation of Christ. 3. Maintained and strengthened by constant fidelity to Christ.
GERM NOTES ON THE VERSES.
Vers. 13–16. The Growth of the Church.
I. The goal of the Church’s life (ver. 13).—The mark at which the Church is to arrive is set forth in a two-fold way—in its collective and its individual aspects. We must all unitedly attain the oneness of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God; and we must attain, each of us, a perfect manhood, the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ. All our defects are, at the bottom, deficiencies of faith. We fail to apprehend and appropriate the fulness of God in Christ. The goal of the regenerate life is never absolutely won; it is hid with Christ in God. But there is to be a constant approximation to it, both in the individual believer and in the body of Christ’s people. And a time is coming when that goal will be practically attained, so far as earthly conditions allow. The Church after long strife will be reunited, after long trial will be perfected. Then this world will have had its use, and will give place to the new heavens and earth.
II. The malady which arrests its development (ver. 14).—The childishness of so many Christian believers exposed them to the seductions of error, and ready to be driven this way and that by the evil influences active in the world of thought around them. So long as the Church contains a number of unstable souls, so long she will remain subject to strife and corruption. At every crisis in human thought there emerges some prevailing method of truth, or of error, the resultant of current tendencies, which unites the suffrages of a large body of thinkers, and claims to embody the spirit of the age. Such a method of error our own age has produced as the outcome of the anti-Christian speculation of modern times, in the doctrines current under the names of Positivism, Secularism, or Agnosticism. Modern Agnosticism removes God farther from us, beyond the reach of thought, and leaves us with material nature as the one positive and accessible reality, as the basis of life and law. Faith and knowledge of the Son of God it banishes as dreams of our childhood. This materialistic philosophy gathers to a head the unbelief of the century. It is the living antagonist of Divine revelation.
III. The means and conditions of its growth (vers. 15, 16).—To the craft of false teachers St. Paul would have his Churches oppose the weapons only of truth and love. Sincere believers, heartily devoted to Christ, will not fall into fatal error. A healthy life instinctively repels disease. Next to the moral condition lies the spiritual condition of advancement—the full recognition of the supremacy and sufficiency of Christ. He is the perfect ideal for each, the common source of life and progress for all. He is the Head of the Church and the heart of the world. Another practical condition of Church growth is organization—“all the body fitly framed and knit together.” A building or a machine is fitted together by the adjustment of its parts. A body needs, besides this mechanical construction, a pervasive life, a sympathetic force, knitting it together. And so it is in love that this body of the Church builds up itself. The perfect Christian and the perfect Church are taking shape at once. Each of them requires the other for its due realisation. The primary condition of Church health and progress is that there shall be an unobstructed flow of the life of grace from point to point through the tissues and substance of the entire frame.—Findlay.
Vers. 13–15. Christian Manhood.