New Tabernacle Sermons

by T. De Witt Talmage

If the photographic art had been discovered early enough, we should have had the facial proportions of Christ—the front face, the side face, Jesus sitting, Jesus standing—provided He had submitted to that art; but since the sun did not become a portrait painter until eighteen centuries after Christ, our idea about the Saviour's personal appearance is all guess work. Still, tradition tells us that He was the most infinitely beautiful being that ever walked our small earth. If His features had been rugged, and His gait had been ungainly, that would not have hindered Him from being attractive. Many men you have known and loved have had few charms of physiognomy. Wilberforce was not attractive in face. Socrates was repulsive. Suwarrow, the great Russian hero, looked almost an imbecile. And some whom you have known, and honored, and loved, have not had very great attractiveness of personal appearance. The shape of the mouth, and the nose, and the eyebrow, did not hinder the soul from shining through the cuticle of the face in all-powerful irradiation.

But to a lovely exterior Christ joined all loveliness of disposition. Run through the galleries of heaven, and find out that He is a non-such. The sunshine of His love mingling with the shadows of His sorrows, crossed by the crystalline stream of His tears and the crimson flowing forth of His blood, make a picture worthy of being called the masterpiece of the eternities. Hung on the wall of heaven, the celestial population would be enchanted but for the fact that they have the grand and magnificent original, and they want no picture. But Christ having gone away from earth, we are dependent upon four indistinct pictures. Matthew took one, Mark another, Luke another, and John another. I care not which picture you take, it is lovely. Lovely? He was altogether lovely.

He had a way of taking up a dropsical limb without hurting it, and of removing the cataract from the eye without the knife, and of starting the circulation through the shrunken arteries without the shock of the electric battery, and of putting intelligence into the dull stare of lunacy, and of restringing the auditory nerve of the deaf ear, and of striking articulation into the stiff tongue, and of making the stark-naked madman dress himself and exchange tombstone for ottoman, and of unlocking from the skeleton grip of death the daughter of Jairus to embosom her in her glad father's arms. Oh, He was lovely—sitting, standing, kneeling, lying down—always lovely.

Lovely in His sacrifice. Why, He gave up everything for us. Home, celestial companionship, music of seraphic harps, balmy breath of eternal summer, all joy, all light, all music, and heard the gates slam shut behind Him as He came out to fight for our freedom, and with bare feet plunged on the sharp javelins of human and satanic hate, until His blood spurted into the faces of those who slew Him. You want the soft, low, minor key of sweetest music to describe the pathos; but it needs an orchestra, under swinging of an archangel's baton, reaching from throne to manger, to drum and trumpet the doxologies of His praise. He took everybody's trouble—the leper's sickness, the widow's dead boy, the harlot's shame, the Galilean fisherman's poor luck, the invalidism of Simon's mother-in-law, the sting of Malchus' amputated ear.

Some people cry very easily, and for some it is very difficult to cry. A great many tears on some cheeks do not mean so much as one tear on another cheek. What is it that I see glittering in the mild eye of Jesus? It was all the sorrows of earth, and the woes of hell, from which He had plucked our souls, accreted into one transparent drop, lingering on the lower eyelash until it fell on a cheek red with the slap of human hands—just one salt, bitter, burning tear of Jesus. No wonder the rock, the sky, and the cemetery were in consternation when He died! No wonder the universe was convulsed! It was the Lord God Almighty bursting into tears. Now, suppose that, notwithstanding all this, a man can not have any affection for Him. What ought to be done with such hard behavior?

It seems to me that there ought to be some chastisement for a man who will not love such a Christ. Does it not make your blood tingle to think of Jesus coming over the tens of thousands of miles that seem to separate God from us, and then to see a man jostle Him out, and push Him back, and shut the door in His face, and trample upon His entreaties? While you may not be able to rise up to the towering excitement of the Apostle in my text, you can at any rate somewhat understand his feelings when he cried out: "After all this, 'if a man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema Maranatha.'"

Just look at the injustice of not loving Him. Now, there is nothing that excites a man like injustice. You go along the street, and you see your little child buffeted, or a ruffian comes and takes a boy's hat and throws it into the ditch. You say: "What great meanness, what injustice that is!" You can not stand injustice. I remember, in my boyhood days, attending a large meeting in Tripler Hall, New York. Thousands of people were huzzaing, and the same kind of audiences were assembled at the same time in Boston, Edinburgh, and London. Why? Because the Madaii family, in Italy, had been robbed of their Bible. "A little thing," you say. Ah, that injustice was enough to arouse the indignation of a world. But while we are so sensitive about injustice as between man and man, how little sensitive we are about injustice between man and God. If there ever was a fair and square purchase of anything, then Christ purchased us. He paid for us, not in shekels, not in ancient coins inscribed with effigies of Hercules, or Ægina's tortoise, or lyre of Mitylene, but in two kinds of coin—one red, the other glittering—blood and tears! If anything is purchased and paid for, ought not the goods to be delivered? If you have bought property and given the money, do you not want to come into possession of it? "Yes," you say, "I will have it. I bought and paid for it." And you will go to law for it, and you will denounce the man as a defrauder. Ay, if need be, you will hurl him into jail. You will say: "I am bound to get that property. I bought it. I paid for it!"

Now, transpose the case. Suppose Jesus Christ to be the wronged purchaser on the one side, and the impenitent soul on the other, trying to defraud Him of that which He bought at such an exorbitant price, how do you feel about that injustice? How do you feel toward that spiritual fraud, turpitude and perfidy? A man with an ardent temperament rises and he says that such injustice as between man and man is bad enough, but between man and God it is reprehensible and intolerable, and he brings his fist down on the pew, and he says: "I can stand this injustice no longer. After all this purchase, 'if any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema Maranatha'!"

I go still further, and show you how suicidal it is for a man not to love Christ. If a man gets in trouble, and he can not get out, we have only one feeling toward him—sympathy and a desire to help him. If he has failed for a vast amount of money, and can not pay more than ten cents on a dollar—ay, if he can not pay anything—though his creditors may come after him like a pack of hounds, we sympathize with him. We go to his store, or house, and we express our condolence. But suppose the day before that man failed, William E. Dodge had come into his store and said: "My friend, I hear you are in trouble. I have come to help you. If ten thousand dollars will see you through your perplexity, I have a loan of that amount for you. Here is a check for the amount of that loan." Suppose the man said: "With that ten thousand dollars I could get through until next spring, and then everything will be all right; but, Mr. Dodge, I don't want it; I won't take it; I would rather fail than take it; I don't even thank you for offering it." Your sympathy for that man would cease immediately. You would say: "He had a fair offer; he might have got out; he wants to fail; he refuses all help; now let him fail." There is no one in all this house who would have any sympathy for that man.

But do not let us be too hasty. Christ hears of our spiritual embarrassments, he finds that we are on the very verge of eternal defalcation. He finds the law knocking at our door with this dun: "Pay me what thou owest."