Matthew 10:23

A COUNSEL OF PRUDENCE

‘When they persecute you in this city, flee ye into another: for verily I say unto you, Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel till the Son of man be come.’

Matthew 10:23

The text is a counsel of prudence. The Gospel is no hare-brained or star-gazing enthusiasm, but a religion sober, healthful, and sensible, taking account of circumstances, discriminating between means and ends, embracing in its view time as well as eternity, the life that now is as well as that which is to come. Such is the counsel of prudence.

I. The reason.—‘For verily I say unto you, ye shall not have gone over,’ or, more literally, ‘ye shall not have finished’ or ‘completed the cities of Israel till the Son of man be come.’ The general idea is plain. Do not court martyrdom; do not make it a point of duty to stay out a local persecution. If one place refuses you, flee to another.

II. What coming of the Son of man is in view?—These disciples were being sent out, it seems, on a sort of experimental mission through a region through which Christ Himself was about to follow them in person. The text might mean that they must be expeditions, or He would overtake them before the business on which they were sent was done. So narrow and prosaic an interpretation will satisfy no one. It might mean that they must press forward on their life-journey as heralds of Christ to the chosen people, or they would be overtaken ere that life-journey was accomplished, by the catastrophe which must for ever close the opportunities of grace for the national Israel. But this explanation also is felt to be inadequate. The ‘coming’ spoken of is the great Advent, and the warning, parabolical and typical in its language, is applicable to all Christian work and to all Christian workmen in every land and age.

III. The work of Christ in the world will never be finished till He comes.—Why?

(a) One reason for this lies in the mere sequence of human generations. Births and deaths are incessant. Every birth introduces new work, and every death removes, or ought to remove, an old workman. ‘One generation goeth, and another generation cometh,’ but they are both on the stage at once during a large part of the lifetime of each, and the board is never cleared for a new beginning.

(b) Another and a deeper reason lies in the nature of the work. The most real work of all—perhaps the only kind of work which is quite real—is that intangible, impalpable thing which we call influence. The work that can be finished is always more or less mechanical. Influence is the thing which Christ looks for, and it is an indefinite and so an interminable thing.

(c) We can see one other reason: it is the security thus given for the salubriousness of labour.

There might be something of elation, something certainly of satisfaction, in the contemplation of work done. True indeed it is that when ‘the dead’ has ‘died in the Lord,’ ‘his works “follow him,” ’ still influencing and to influence a few that miss and mourn him, a few more than these, perhaps even a Church or a nation stirred by his memory into a brighter zeal and a deeper devotion. ‘But where is boasting? It is excluded.’ By the thought, by the fact of the multitude of the cities of Israel, and of the impossibility of compassing them, of the incompleteness of all work that is worth the name, and of the surprise which interrupts it by the Advent or by the death.’

—Dean Vaughan.

Illustration

‘Henry Martyn died at the age of one-and-thirty. Into those few years were crowded, first the Grammar School of Truro, with its noble memories of Cardew, the master, and Kempthorne, the monitor; then the early start at Cambridge, developing into the senior wrangler of nineteen; then the awakening piety, under influence of friendship and sorrow—the two most powerful factors the father’s death and the sister’s pleading, the dead Brainerd and the living Simeon; then the self-dedication of the Ely ordination, and the Sunday and weekday ministries at Lolworth and in Cambridge; then the resolution for a missionary life, and the thrilling anguish of the severance; then the nine months’ voyage to India, with the battle scenes of the Cape and the “fighting with beasts” on ship board; then the four years’ ministry at Dinapore and Cawnpore, with its long toils in translating and its eager efforts to evangelise; then the baffled hopes and humble self-resignations; then the cruel journeyings through Persia and Asia; at last the desolate death at Tokat, and the silence settling down upon the tomb in the land of strangers. How mournful a commentary upon the “unfinished” work among the cities of Israel! How incomplete man must acknowledge that work, that toil, that achievement! But were there, or were there not, twelve hours in that day?’