IN CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, NOV. 29, 1914.
“Because He hath appointed a day, in which He will judge the world in righteousness by that Man Whom He hath ordained; whereof He hath given assurance unto all men, in that He hath raised Him from the dead.”
The season of Advent, with which the Church’s year reopens brings to us a message of peculiar appropriateness and encouragement at the present moment. It does so because it lays the corner-stone of the grand edifice of the Gospel, or the good news of God, of which we shall follow the construction through the Church’s year. What is the special message of Advent? It is the message of that grand verse in the Psalms, “Righteousness and judgment are the habitation of His seat.” It proclaims to us the message of the prophets, opened to us in triumphant tones by the prophet Isaiah in the Lesson of to-day, that righteousness is the very foundation on which God is building up society; that it is the very root from which our own lives and the life of our nation derive their existence; that it was to promote this righteousness that our Lord came into the world at His first Advent in great humility; and that it is to establish that righteousness finally that He will come again in great glory to judge the quick and the dead. This is the beginning of God’s revelation to us, and it is also the end and the culmination of His revelation. It is the beginning of the Gospel, and it is also the end of the Gospel.
If we would understand the blessing of the Gospel, we must begin with the conviction that the one great object for which this whole dispensation of human society exists is that complete righteousness, the glory of the Divine righteousness, may be established in it, and that nothing but this can promote either the glory of God or the happiness of man. Read the Psalms with this consideration in your mind, and I think you will be deeply impressed with the fact that every prayer to God embodies a prayer for the establishment of right against wrong; so that the Psalmist only dares to pray for himself so far as the deliverances and successes he prays for are in harmony with the righteous will and purposes of God. Every prayer is in the spirit of the exquisite Psalm of this evening: “Deliver me, O Lord, from mine enemies: for I flee unto Thee to hide me. Teach me to do the thing that pleaseth Thee, for Thou art my God: let Thy loving spirit lead me forth into the land of righteousness.” We have no right to ask or expect help on any other condition than that; for the one supreme work which God is working day by day, and year by year, and century by century, is the realization in human life of what that righteousness and judgment are, which are the foundation of His throne.
Advent reminds us, in the first place, of this grand and simple fact, and bids us make it the starting point of all our Christian thought and hope; but it gives us the further assurance that God is not only carrying forward that work of righteousness now, but that He will complete it hereafter. It repeats that message which St. Paul proclaimed to the world at large, through the Athenians, that “God hath appointed a day in the which He will judge the world in righteousness by that Man Whom He hath ordained; whereof He hath given assurance unto all men, in that He hath raised Him from the dead.” That was the culmination of St. Paul’s Gospel to the people of Athens. That is the culmination of the message of the Gospel to ourselves at the present day. What do we need more than all at this moment? What are our minds full of but the dreadful spectacle before us of the whole earth filled with violence, of an awful outbreak of hatred, unrighteousness, injustice, wanton cruelty, and barbarity? The words of Isaiah read this morning are exactly applicable to the spectacle of Belgium and France at this moment: “Your country is desolate; your cities are burned with fire; your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate, as overthrown by strangers. And the daughter of Zion is left as a cottage in a vineyard, as a lodge in a garden of cucumbers, as a besieged city.” Might not our hearts almost fail us as we contemplate such a volcanic eruption of injustice and violence after nineteen centuries of Christianity? But our hearts will not fail us, any more than the heart of Isaiah failed him in his day. And why? Because of this assurance—an assurance deep down in our souls—that this unrighteousness cannot prevail. That conviction lies very deep in human nature, even apart from God’s revelation in the Psalms and the Gospel. But by this revelation it is given an irrefragable strength, and we grasp with the deepest conviction the assurance of the Psalmist: “Let the floods clap their hands, and let the hills be joyful together before the Lord, for He is come to judge the earth, with righteousness to judge the world, and the people with His truth.” That is the message of Advent, and there never was a time in history when we could grasp it more thankfully with all our hearts and souls.
There is something inexpressibly elevating and inspiring in this message of a future judgment and of the final vindication of righteousness, as it enables us to look beyond this present scene of distress and trouble, to realize that all that is passing around us is in reality only part of a far larger and grander scene, and that the events of the hour are but a brief passage in a universal history, which has been carried forward for centuries under God’s hand, and is being worked out under His guidance to a glorious and righteous conclusion. If you allow your gaze and your thoughts to be fixed mainly on your own lives, on the lives of your own generation, or even of our own national history, you may well be distressed and perplexed at the apparent defeat of righteous causes and purposes, at the overthrow of the laborious work of years of peace, at what seems like the destruction of those bonds of human society to which prophets and saints and soldiers and statesmen had devoted their labours and their very lives for generations. So it seemed to Isaiah in his day; so it seemed to Habakkuk when he exclaimed, “that judgment doth never go forth.” So it has seemed to many a devoted servant of God and man, if he trusted only to his own eyes, from generation to generation. Nothing but prophecy, the prophecy of the Old and New Testaments, is, in fact, adequate to the strain thus put upon men and women by these experiences. But only believe, as the prophets assure you, only believe as our Saviour declared, and as His Apostles proclaimed by His commission, that it is but part of one great history, one great universal dispensation, in which God is steadily ensuring, by whatever means may in His Divine wisdom be necessary, the supremacy of righteousness and the overthrow of evil, and you can then live through it, and struggle through it, not merely with the patience, but with the exultation, which marked the Jewish prophets and psalmists. Belgium and Northern France are now passing through the very experiences, to the letter, which Isaiah described in the case of the people of Israel in his day; but Isaiah looked through all these distresses to a time when “the Lord’s House should be established in the top of the mountains and should be exalted above the hills, and all nations should flow into it”; when “out of Zion should go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem”; when “He should judge the nations, and should rebuke many peoples, and should beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks, when nation should not lift up sword against nation, neither should they learn war any more.” That was Isaiah’s assurance, even in the dark days he describes. We have a hundred-fold more ground for the same assurance when it has been proclaimed to us by our Lord Himself, and sealed with His blood, and countersigned with the assurance and the blood of His Apostles and Saints.
Even from this general point of view, the message of Advent comes to us with a supremely inspiring force in the crisis of our great national struggle, but it has other aspects of profound grace and comfort as well as of warning. The most gracious, perhaps, of all its aspects is the assurance it gives us that the final judgment of the world, the final establishment of righteousness, the final reward of the good, will be in the hands of our Lord Jesus Christ. This, of course, is a matter of faith, based on positive revelation, resting on the personal assurance of our Lord and His Apostles. It is no matter of speculation, no matter of opinion, but a positive statement of fact, which is one of the corner-stones of the Christian religion. There is too much tendency at present to resolve that religion into matters of mere human thought and feeling and hope, and to make its acceptance depend on its conformity to modern ideas; but there is no possibility of treating in that manner such a point of definite, momentous, fundamental fact as that our Lord Jesus Christ has been appointed by God to be the Judge of quick and dead, to sum up the whole world’s destiny, and to assign to each one of us, to every one in this congregation, his place hereafter in the Kingdom of God or outside it. The office of judge, even in this world, is a solemn one. How infinitely awful is the position of the Eternal Judge of all! Now the substance of the revelation of Advent is that this great office is not veiled, as it was to the Jews, and as it must needs be, without revelation, to all the world, in the mysterious, distant, and dread form of the absolute majesty of God Himself; but that it is formally delegated to One Who is not only the Son of God, but the Son of Man, to the Lord Jesus Christ, Who took our flesh and blood upon Him, Who died for us and rose again. “God hath appointed a day,” St. Paul says, “in the which He will judge the world in righteousness by that man Whom He hath ordained ... Whom He raised from the dead.” The grace which is involved in this declaration is so infinite that I hesitate to speak freely of it in my own words, and I am thankful to be able to express it in language of one of the most authoritative of all divines, our own Bishop Pearson, in his grave and deliberate Exposition of the Creed. “If,” he says (page 305), “we look upon the judgment to come only as revealing our secrets, as discerning our actions, as sentencing our persons, according to the works done in the flesh, there is not one of us can expect life from that tribunal at the last day.... It is necessary, therefore, that we should believe that Christ shall sit upon the throne, that our Redeemer shall be our Judge, that we shall receive our sentence, not according to the rigour of the law, but the mildness and mercies of the Gospel; and then we may look not only upon the precepts, but also upon the promises of God. Whatsoever sentence in the sacred Scriptures speaketh anything of hope, whatsoever text administereth any comfort, whatsoever argument drawn from thence can breed in us any assurance, we can confidently make use of them all in reference to the judgment to come; because by that Gospel which contains them all we shall be judged. If we consider Whose Gospel it is, and Who shall judge us by it, ‘we are the members of His Body, of His Flesh, and of His Bones; for which cause He is not ashamed to call us brethren.’ As one of our brethren He hath redeemed us, He hath laid down His life as a ransom for us.... Well, therefore, may ‘we have boldness and access with confidence,’ by the faith of Him unto the throne of that Judge, Who is our brother, Who is our Redeemer, Who is our High Priest, Who is our Advocate, Who will not by His word at the last day condemn us, because He hath already by the same word absolved us, saying, ‘Verily, verily, I say unto you, he that heareth My word, and believeth on Him that sent Me hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation, but is passed from death into life.’”
At a time when death is all around us, when so many of our nearest and dearest and best may pass at any moment through the shadow of death to the judgment which is beyond, it is of infinite comfort to be assured by this Divine message that they pass, not to a severe tribunal which will judge them by the letter of the law, and by a strict estimate of their faults, but to this gracious and merciful throne of their Brother, their Advocate, and their Redeemer, Who will judge them with infinite mercy and equity. I do not hesitate to say that He will judge them with peculiar sympathy, because they have died in the very cause in which He died Himself, and which it is His office as a judge to maintain—the cause of righteousness. In the ancient Church, martyrdom was regarded as ensuring remission of sins and absolution. Soldiers, no doubt, would feel that it would be putting their case too high to place their sacrifice of their lives in the cause of their King and country, in a war like this, on quite the same level as the heroic martyrdom of the great Saints of old. But it is a sacrifice of the same nature. It is coloured by the virtue of the sacrifice of Christ Himself, and of His followers; and we may confidently be assured that those who meet their death on the battlefields of this war in the spirit of faith in Christ, and in simple devotion to duty, will be received by Him in the sense of those gracious words, “Well done, good and faithful servant,” and may hope to be admitted in some degree into the joy of their Lord. According to the judgment of the ancient Church, and the greatest of our own Divines, we may confidently bear the memories of them in our prayers before that Throne of gracious judgment—not presuming to know, or desiring to know, more than this, that they are in the hands of One Who is at once a Judge and a Saviour, and trusting that, in praying for His gracious and merciful reception of them, we are but giving expression to the yearnings of His own Divine and Human Heart.
Such are some of the blessed assurances which the Advent Season brings us, and we cannot be too thankful for them in our present time of distress. But it brings us one lesson of warning, which it is equally important for us to bear in mind. A war like this is undoubtedly a judgment. It springs from the sins of men, from their passions and their lusts, their lack of love, their unrighteousnesses of various kinds. War shows us death, and all that is involved in death, as the natural consequence of human passions, when not controlled by the spirit of Christ and the Will of God. “When lust hath conceived it bringeth forth sin, and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.” That is the law of Nature. It applies more or less to all who are engaged in war, and we, in this war, must not shrink from acknowledging our part in the accumulation of human wrong which has, at length, exploded into this scene of violence and misery. Advent, therefore, bids us look into our own hearts and lives, and ask ourselves what there has been in them which is not in conformity with the Will of God and with the law of the Saviour Who is to be our Judge. One immense blessing conferred on us by the knowledge that He will be our Judge is that we know, by His teaching and by His example, what are the principles of that righteousness and judgment which it is His office to enforce. It points us to the records of His love and teaching in the Gospels, to the messages of His Apostles, and to the Bible which was His law, as our guide in daily life in all circumstances and relations. That is the standard by which we shall be hereafter judged; and in proportion as we believe and realize this, shall we devote ourselves to its study and strive after its fulfilment. We are sadly reminded now that in this world there is no comfort on which we can permanently rely; but there is one comfort in life and in death of which we may be assured; it is that which our Lord revealed to us, when He gave us at once this command and this assurance, “If ye love me, keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father, and He shall give you another Comforter, that He may abide with you for ever.” Let us seek that comfort in life and in death, and it will not fail us.