Hebrews 13:14

THE POSITION OF CHRISTIANS IN THE WORLD

‘For here we have no continuing city, but we seek one to come.’

Hebrews 13:14

These words sum up what was certainly the apostolic mind as to the position of Christians in this world. They were members—they could not help being members—as we are of a vast and powerful and complex association, human society; but with all its great attributes it wanted one—it wanted permanence. ‘The world passeth away’—is passing away, as we work or speak.

I. We are all of us under the unalterable necessity in one way or another of change.—It is the absolute condition of existing, now and here. How shall we feel about this fact, as certain as death; how shall we meet it when we no longer merely know it, but imagine and realise it?—no longer merely hear of it by the hearing of the ear, but see it with the inner eye of the living mind. It may impress and affect us in many ways. It may darken or it may brighten life; it may depress and discourage, or it may inspire with boundless hope. We may find in it the highest summons to courage or the excuse for the most enervating sentimentalism. We may bow our heads in sullen despair under the yoke of its necessity; we may cease to strive, and throw up the game in the vain attempt to master or to stem it; or we may see in it more gain than loss, and welcome it charged with infinite possibilities of recovery and advance. We may meet it, thankful that we are born under its dominion and its hopes; or we may meet it with the indifference with which we resign ourselves to what is inevitable; or with the regrets which see in it that which has robbed us of what we most loved and trusted, only a companionship with bereavement, decay, degeneracy; or with irritation at its monotony, its fruitlessness, its aimlessness, its undirected and purposeless course.

II. How does the Bible teach us to think and to feel about this truth, which often comes upon us so unexpectedly, with such piercing force? The Bible, we know, was written that we, ‘through patience and comfort of the Scriptures, might have hope’ in the changes and chances of this mortal life, as well as in its sins, its temptations, its terrible evils. The Bible, which has told us of the presence and victory of our Lord, of the life and immortality which He has brought to light, teaches us abundantly what to think of change, both in its good and its evil, and of that unchanging glory in which it is to be swallowed up. But is there in the Bible any special guiding for judgment, for temper, for self-discipline, for everyday feeling and everyday behaviour, under the disquieting consciousness of change—any ever-ready counter-charm when the stern facts of change present themselves oppressively, insupportably? Doubtless, a sentence from the mouth of Christ, an inspiration of an Apostle, can carry strength and comfort to the soul. But we have that, too, which was a source of teaching and a stay to Apostles, and from the words of which the words of men, though taught by the Holy Ghost, even the Son of Man deigned to draw language for His feeling and thought. We have the Book of Psalms, the mirror of the deepest and most varied spiritual experience, the inspirer of the strongest feelings of religious assurance. In the Book of Psalms we may read how the believer in God may learn to feel and to act, when he sees the great currents of change sweep by him, and feels himself borne upon their tide.

III. ‘Here we have no continuing city,’ any more than they had. But we know, with a distinctness which all of them had not, of a ‘city which hath foundations, whose Builder and Maker is God’—a ‘house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.’ But where is that passionate, delighted, triumphant faith of those men of old? What have we of their joy and gladness at the very thought of God, even amid the tumults of the nations and the overthrows of life, the certainty that at the best they too must soon ‘follow the generation of their fathers’? Where is that assurance which they had that ‘to the godly there ariseth light in the darkness? He shall never be moved; he will not be afraid of any evil tidings, for his heart standeth fast and believeth in the Lord.’ Where is that ‘fearful joy’ with which they responded even to the terrors of the world? ‘The floods are risen, O Lord, the floods have lifted up their voice; the floods lift up their waves.’ ‘The Lord sitteth above the waterflood; and the Lord remaineth a King for ever.… The Lord shall give His people the blessing of peace.’ As surely as they were as we are, in the experience of life, so surely had they this lofty, burning faith, this never-failing, abundant hope. ‘What reward shall I give unto the Lord for all the benefits which He hath done unto me? I will receive the cup of salvation, and call on the name of the Lord.’ And so they cast themselves into the arms of God, and were blessed. Oh that we could catch something of the contagion of that faith and hope, as day by day we repeat again and again their wonderful words!

—Dean Church.

Illustration

‘Human pride, knowing the truth of perpetual change, has tried to defy it; the monuments of these mighty attempts in Egypt, in Assyria, in India, in China, have survived the centuries: there was once an empire which seemed as solid as the world; there was a city which called itself the Eternal City; and their ruins, like the drifted fragments of a wreck, battered but undestroyed, are the witnesses in our museums or in desolate places of the earth to those enormous powers of change over which mortal men once thought to triumph. It is in vain—even the “unchanging East” must go through its revolutions—even the Roman Empire must pass away:—

So fails, so languishes, grows dim and dies,

All that this world is proud of. From their spheres

The stars of human glory are cast down:

Perish the roses and the flowers of kings,

Princes and emperors, and the crowns and palms

Of all the mighty.

… The vast Frame

Of social nature changes evermore

Her organs and her members, with decay

Restless, and restless generation, powers

And functions dying and produced at need:—

And by this law the mighty whole subsists.’