Verses 1-29
Chapter 7
7:1-5 Do not
judge others, in order that you may not be judged; for with the standard
of judgment with which you judge you will be judged; and with the
measure you measure to others it will be measured to you. Why do you
look for the speck of dust in your brother's eye, and never notice the
plank that is in your own eye? or, how will you say to your brother:
"Let me remove the speck of dust from your eye," and, see, there is a
plank in your own eye? Hypocrite! first remove the plank from your own
eye; then you will see clearly to remove the speck of dust from your
brother's eye.
When Jesus spoke like this, as so often in the Sermon on the
Mount, he was using words and ideas which were quite familiar to the
highest thoughts of the Jews. Many a time the Rabbis warned people
against judging others. "He who judges his neighbour favourably," they
said, "will be judged favourably by God." They laid it down that there
were six great works which brought a man credit in this world and profit
in the world to come--study, visiting the sick, hospitality, devotion
in prayer, the education of children in the Law, and thinking the best
of other people. The Jews knew that kindliness in judgment is nothing
less than a sacred duty.
One would have thought that this would have been a commandment
easy to obey, for history is strewn with the record of the most amazing
misjudgments. There have been so many that one would have thought it
would be a warning to men not to judge at all.
It has been so in literature. In the Edinburgh Review of
November, 1814, Lord Jeffrey wrote a review of Wordsworth's newly
published poem The Excursion, in which he delivered the now famous, or
infamous verdict: "This will never do." In a review of Keats' Endymion,
The Quarterly patronizingly noted "a certain amount of talent which
deserves to be put in the right way."
Again and again men and women who became famous have been
dismissed as nonentities. In his autobiography Gilbert Frankau tells how
in the Victorian days his mother's house was a salon where the most
brilliant people met. His mother arranged for the entertainment of her
guests. Once she engaged a young Australian soprano to sing. After she
had sung, Gilbert Frankau's mother said, "What an appalling voice! She
ought to be muzzled and allowed to sing no more!" The young singer's
name was Nellie Melba.
Gilbert Frankau himself was producing a play. He sent to a
theatrical agency for a young male actor to play the leading male part.
The young man was interviewed and tested. After the test Gilbert Frankau
telephoned to the agent. "This man", he said, "will never do. He cannot
act, and he never will be able to act, and you had better tell him to
look for some other profession before he starves. By the way, tell me
his name again so that I can cross him off my list." The actor was
Ronald Colman who was to become one of the most famous the screen has
ever known.
Again and again people have been guilty of the most notorious
moral misjudgments. Collie Knox tells of what happened to himself and a
friend. He himself had been badly smashed up in a flying accident while
serving in the Royal Flying Corps. The friend had that very day been
decorated for gallantry at Buckingham Palace. They had changed from
service dress into civilian clothes and were lunching together at a
famous London restaurant, when a girl came up and handed to each of them
a white feather--the badge of cowardice.
There is hardly anyone who has not been guilty of some grave
misjudgment; there is hardly anyone who has not suffered from someone
else's misjudgment. And yet the strange fact is that there is hardly any
commandment of Jesus which is more consistently broken and neglected.
There are three great reasons why no man should judge another.
(i) We never know the whole facts or the whole person. Long ago
Hillel the famous Rabbi said, "Do not judge a man until you yourself
have come into his circumstances or situation." No man knows the
strength of another man's temptations. The man with the placid and
equable temperament knows nothing of the temptations of the man whose
blood is afire and whose passions are on a hair-trigger. The man brought
up in a good home and in Christian surroundings knows nothing of the
temptation of the man brought up in a slum, or in a place where evil
stalks abroad. The man blessed with fine parents knows nothing of the
temptations of the man who has the load of a bad heredity upon his back.
The fact is that if we realized what some people have to go through, so
far from condemning them, we would be amazed that they have succeeded
in being as good as they are.
No more do we know the whole person. In one set of circumstances
a person may be unlovely and graceless; in another that same person may
be a tower of strength and beauty. In one of his novels Mark Rutherford
tells of a man who married for the second time. His wife had also been
married before, and she had a daughter in her teens. The daughter seemed
a sullen and unlovely creature, without a grain of attractiveness in
her. The man could make nothing of her. Then, unexpectedly, the mother
fell ill. At once the daughter was transformed. She became the perfect
nurse, the embodiment of service and tireless devotion. Her sullenness
was lit by a sudden radiance, and there appeared in her a person no one
would ever have dreamed was there.
There is a kind of crystal called Labrador spar. At first sight
it is dull and without lustre; but if it is turned round and round, and
here and there, it will suddenly come into a position where the light
strikes it in a certain way and it will sparkle with flashing beauty.
People are like that. They may seem unlovely simply because we do not
know the whole person. Everyone has something good in him or her. Our
task is not to condemn, and to judge by, the superficial unloveliness,
but to look for the underlying beauty. That is what we would have others
do to us, and that is what we must do to them.
(ii) It is almost impossible for any man to be strictly
impartial in his judgment. Again and again we are swayed by instinctive
and unreasoning reactions to people.
It is told that sometimes, when the Greeks held a particularly
important and difficult trial, they held it in the dark so that judge
and jury would not even see the man on trial, and so would be influenced
by nothing but the facts of the case.
Montaigne has a grim tale in one of his essays. There was a
Persian judge who had given a biased verdict, and he had given it under
the influence of bribery. When Cambysses, the king, discovered what had
happened, he ordered the judge to be executed. Then he had the skin
flayed from the dead body and preserved; and with the skin he covered
the seat of the chair on which judges sat in judgment, that it might be a
grim reminder to them never to allow prejudice to affect their
verdicts.
Only a completely impartial person has a right to judge. It is
not in human nature to be completely impartial. Only God can judge.
(iii) But it was Jesus who stated the supreme reason why we
should not judge others. No man is good enough to judge any other man.
Jesus drew a vivid picture of a man with a plank in his own eye trying
to extract a speck of dust from someone else's eye. The humour of the
picture would raise a laugh which would drive the lesson home.
Only the faultless has a right to look for faults in others. No
man has a right to criticize another man unless he is prepared at least
to try to do the thing he criticizes better. Every Saturday the football
terracings are full of people who are violent critics, and who would
yet make a pretty poor show if they themselves were to descend to the
arena. Every association and every Church is full of people who are
prepared to criticize from the body of the hall, or even from an
arm-chair, but who would never even dream of taking office themselves.
The world is full of people who claim the right to be extremely vocal in
criticism and totally exempt from action.
No man has a right to criticize others unless he is prepared to
venture himself in the same situation. No man is good enough to
criticize his fellow-men.
We have quite enough to do to rectify our own lives without
seeking censoriously to rectify the lives of others. We would do well to
concentrate on our own faults, and to leave the faults of others to
God.
7:6 Do not give
that which is holy to the dogs, and do not cast your pearls before
pigs, lest they trample upon them with their feet, and turn and rend
you.
This is a very difficult saying of Jesus for, on the face of
it, it seems to demand an exclusiveness which is the very reverse of the
Christian message. It was, in fact, a saying which was used in two ways
in the early Church.
(i) It was used by the Jews who believed that God's gifts and
God's grace were for Jews alone. It was used by those Jews who were the
enemies of Paul, and who argued that a gentile must become circumcised
and accept the Law and become a Jew before he could become a Christian.
It was indeed a text which could be used--misused--in the interests of
Jewish exclusiveness.
(ii) The early Church used this text in a special way. The early
Church was under a double threat. It was under the threat which came
from outside. The early Church was an island of Christian purity in a
surrounding sea of gentile immorality; and it was always supremely
liable to be infected with the taint of the world. It was under the
threat which came from inside. In those early days men were thinking
things out, and it was inevitable that there would be those whose
speculations would wander into the pathways of heresy; there were those
who tried to effect a compromise between Christian and pagan thought,
and to arrive at some synthesis of belief which would satisfy both. If
the Christian Church was to survive, it had to defend itself alike from
the threat from outside and the threat from inside, or it would have
become simply another of the many religions which competed within the
Roman Empire.
In particular the early Church was very careful about whom it
admitted to the Lord's Table, and this text became associated with the
Lord's Table. The Lord's Supper began with the announcement: "Holy
things for holy people." Theodoret quotes what he says is an unwritten
saying of Jesus: "My mysteries are for myself and for my people." The
Apostolic Constitutions lay it down that at the beginning of the Lord's
Supper the deacon shall say, "Let none of the catechumens (that is,
those still under instruction), let none of the hearers (that is, those
who had come to the service because they were interested in
Christianity), let none of the unbelievers, let none of the heretics,
stay here." There was a fencing of the Table against all but pledged
Christians. The Didachi, or, to give it its full name, The Teaching of
the Twelve Apostles, which dates back to A.D. 100 and which is the first
service order book of the Christian Church, lays it down: "Let no one
eat or drink of your Eucharist except those baptised into the name of
the Lord; for, as regards this, the Lord has said, 'Give not that which
is holy unto dogs.'" It is Tertullian's complaint that the heretics
allow all kinds of people, even the heathen, into the Lord's Supper, and
by so doing, "That which is holy they will cast to the dogs, and pearls
(although, to be sure, they are not real ones) to swine" (De
Praescriptione 41).
In all these instances this text is used as a basis of
exclusiveness. It was not that the Church was not missionary-minded; the
Church in the early days was consumed with the desire to win everyone;
but the Church was desperately aware of the utter necessity of
maintaining the purity of the faith, lest Christianity should be
gradually assimilated to and ultimately swallowed up in, the surrounding
sea of paganism.
It is easy to see the temporary meaning of this text; but we must try to see its permanent meaning as well.
It is just possible that this saying of Jesus has become
altered accidentally in its transmission. It is a good example of the
Hebrew habit of parallelism which we have already met (Matthew 6:10). Let us set it down in its parallel clauses:
"Give not that which is holy unto the dogs;
Neither cast ye your pearls before swine."
With the exception of one word the parallelism is
complete. Give is parallelled by cast; dogs by swine; but holy is not
really balanced by pearls. There the parallelism breaks down. It so
happens that there are two Hebrew words which are very like each other,
especially when we remember that Hebrew has no written vowels. The word
for holy is qadosh (Hebrew #6918)
(Q-D-SH); and the Aramaic word for an ear-ring is qadasha (Q-D-SH). The
consonants are exactly the same, and in primitive written Hebrew the
words would look exactly the same. Still further, in the Talmud, "an
ear-ring in a swine's snout" is a proverbial phrase for something which
is entirely incongruous and out of place. It is by no means impossible
that the original phrase ran:
"Give not an ear-ring to the dogs;
Neither cast ye your pearls before swine,"
in which case the parallelism would be perfect.
If that is the real meaning of the phrase, it would simply mean
that there are certain people who are not fit, not able, to receive the
message which the Church is so willing to give. It would not then be a
statement of exclusiveness; it would be the statement of a practical
difficulty of communication which meets the preacher in every age. It is
quite true that there are certain people to whom it is impossible to
impart truth. Something has to happen to them before they can be taught.
There is actually a rabbinic saying, "Even as a treasure must not be
shown to everyone, so with the words of the Law; one must not go deeply
into them, except in the presence of suitable people."
This is in fact a universal truth. It is not to everyone that we
can talk of everything. Within a group of friends we may sit and talk
about our faith; we may allow our minds to question and adventure; we
may talk about the things which puzzle and perplex; and we may allow our
minds to go out on the roads of speculation. But if into that group
there comes a person of rigid and unsympathetic orthodoxy, he might well
brand us as a set of dangerous heretics; or if there entered a simple
and unquestioning soul, his faith might well be shocked and shaken. A
medical film might well be to one person an eye-opening, valuable, and
salutary experience; while to another it might equally produce a
prurient and prying obscenity. It is told that once Dr. Johnson and a
group of friends were talking and jesting as only old friends can.
Johnson saw an unpleasant creature approach. "Let us be silent," he
said, "a fool is coming."
So, then, there are some people who cannot receive Christian
truth. It may be that their minds are shut; it may be that their minds
are brutalised and covered over with a film of filth; it may be that
they have lived a life which has obscured their ability to see the
truth; it may be that they are constitutional mockers of all things
holy; it may be, as sometimes happens, that we and they have absolutely
no common ground on which we can argue.
A man can only understand what he is fit to understand. It is
not to everyone that we can lay bare the secrets of our hearts. There
are always those to whom the preaching of Christ will be foolishness,
and in whose minds the truth, when expressed in words, will meet an
insuperable barrier.
What is to be done with these people? Are they to be abandoned
as hopeless? Is the Christian message simply to be withdrawn from them?
What Christian words cannot do, a Christian life can often do. A man may
be blind and impervious to any Christian argument in words; but he can
have no answer to the demonstration of a Christian life.
Cecil Northcott in A Modern Epiphany tells of a discussion in a
camp of young people where representatives of many nations were living
together. "One wet night the campers were discussing various ways of
telling people about Christ. They turned to the girl from Africa.
'Maria,' they asked, 'what do you do in your country?' 'Oh,' said Maria,
'we don't have missions or give pamphlets away. We just send one or two
Christian families to live and work in a village, and when people see
what Christians are like, then they want to be Christians too.'" In the
end the only all-conquering argument is the argument of a Christian
life.
It is often impossible to talk to some people about Jesus
Christ. Their insensitiveness, their moral blindness, their intellectual
pride, their cynical mockery, the tarnishing film, make them impervious
to words about Christ. But it is always possible to show men Christ;
and the weakness of the Church lies not in lack of Christian arguments,
but in lack of Christian lives.
7:7-11 Keep on
asking, and it will be given you; Keep on seeking, and you will find;
Keep on knocking, and it will be opened to you. For everyone that asks
receives; And he who seeks finds; And to him who knocks it will be
opened. What man is there, who, if his son will ask him for bread, will
give him a stone? Or, if he will ask for a fish, will he give him a
serpent? If, then, you, who are grudging, know how to give good gifts to
your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good
things to them that ask him?
Any man who prays is bound to want to know to what kind of God
he is praying. He wants to know in what kind of atmosphere his prayers
will be heard. Is he praying to a grudging God out of whom every gift
has to be squeezed and coerced? Is he praying to a mocking God whose
gifts may well be double-edged? Is he praying to a God whose heart is so
kind that he is more ready to give than we are to ask?
Jesus came from a nation which loved prayer. The Jewish Rabbis
said the loveliest things about prayer. "God is as near to his creatures
as the ear to the mouth." "Human beings can hardly hear two people
talking at once, but God, if all the world calls to him at the one time,
hears their cry." "A man is annoyed by being worried by the requests of
his friends, but with God, all the time a man puts his needs and
requests before him, God loves him all the more." Jesus had been brought
up to love prayer; and in this passage he gives us the Christian
charter of prayer.
Jesus' argument is very simple. One of the Jewish Rabbis asked,
"Is there a man who ever hates his son?" Jesus' argument is that no
father ever refused the request of his son; and God the great Father
will never refuse the requests of his children.
Jesus' examples are carefully chosen. He takes three examples,
for Luke adds a third to the two Matthew gives. If a son asks bread,
will his father give him a stone? If a son asks a fish, will his father
give him a serpent? If a son asks an egg, will his father give him a
scorpion? (Luke 11:12). The point is that in each case the two things cited bear a close resemblance.
The little, round, limestone stones on the seashore were exactly
the shape and the colour of little loaves. If a son asks bread will his
father mock him by offering him a stone, which looks like bread but
which is impossible to eat?
If a son asks a fish, will his father give him a serpent? Almost
certainly the serpent is an eel. According to the Jewish food laws an
eel could not be eaten, because an eel was an unclean fish. "Everything
in the waters that has not fins and scales is an abomination to you" (Leviticus 11:12).
That regulation ruled out the eel as an article of diet. If a son asks
for a fish, will his father indeed give him a fish, but a fish which it
is forbidden to eat, and which is useless to eat? Would a father mock
his son's hunger like that?
If the son asks for an egg, will his father give him a scorpion?
The scorpion is a dangerous little animal. In action it is rather like a
small lobster, with claws with which it clutches its victim. Its sting
is in its tail, and it brings its tail up over its back to strike its
victim. The sting can be exceedingly painful, and sometimes even fatal.
When the scorpion is at rest its claws and tail are folded in, and there
is a pale kind of scorpion, which, when folded up, would look exactly
like an egg. If a son asks for an egg, will his father mock him by
handing him a biting scorpion?
God will never refuse our prayers; and God will never mock our
prayers. The Greeks had their stories about the gods who answered men's
prayers, but the answer was an answer with a barb in it, a double-edged
gift. Aurora, the goddess of the dawn, fell in love with Tithonus a
mortal youth, so the Greek story ran. Zeus, the king of the gods,
offered her any gift that she might choose for her mortal lover. Aurora
very naturally chose that Tithonus might live for ever; but she had
forgotten to ask that Tithonus might remain for ever young; and so
Tithonus grew older and older and older, and could never die, and the
gift became a curse.
There is a lesson here; God will always answer our prayers; but
he will answer them in his way, and his way will be the way of perfect
wisdom and of perfect love. Often if he answered our prayers as we at
the moment desired it would be the worst thing possible for us, for in
our ignorance we often ask for gifts which would be our ruin. This
saying of Jesus tells us, not only that God will answer, but that God
will answer in wisdom and in love.
Although this is the charter of prayer, it lays certain
obligations upon us. In Greek there are two kinds of imperative; there
is the aorist imperative which issues one definite command. "Shut the
door behind you," would be an aorist imperative. There is the present
imperative which issues a command that a man should always do something
or should go on doing something. "Always shut doors behind you," would
be a present imperative. The imperatives here are present imperatives;
therefore Jesus is saying, "Go on asking; go on seeking; go on
knocking." He is telling us to persist in prayer; he is telling us never
to be discouraged in prayer. Clearly therein lies the test of our
sincerity. Do we really want a thing? Is a thing such that we can bring
it repeatedly into the presence of God, for the biggest test of any
desire is: Can I pray about it?
Jesus here lays down the twin facts that God will always answer
our prayers in his way, in wisdom and in love; and that we must bring to
God an undiscouraged life of prayer, which tests the rightness of the
things we pray for, and which tests our own sincerity in asking for
them.
7:12 So, then,
all the things which you wish that men should do to you, so do you too
do to them; for this is the Law and the prophets.
This is probably the most universally famous thing that Jesus
ever said. With this commandment the Sermon on the Mount reaches its
summit. This saying of Jesus has been called "the capstone of the whole
discourse." It is the topmost peak of social ethics, and the Everest of
all ethical teaching.
It is possible to quote rabbinic parallels for almost everything
that Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount; but there is no real
parallel to this saying. This is something which had never been said
before. It is new teaching, and a new view of life and of life's
obligations.
It is not difficult to find many parallels to this saying in its
negative form. As we have seen, there were two most famous Jewish
teachers. There was Shammai who was famous for his stem and rigid
austerity; there was Hillel who was famous for his sweet graciousness.
The Jews had a story like this: "A heathen came to Shammai and said, 'I
am prepared to be received as a proselyte on the condition that you
teach me the whole Law while I am standing on one leg.' Shammai drove
him away with a foot-rule which he had in his hand. He went to Hillel
who received him as a proselyte. He said to him, 'What is hateful to
yourself, do to no other; that is the whole Law, and the rest is
commentary. Go and learn.'" There is the Golden Rule in its negative
form.
In the Book of Tobit there is a passage in which the aged Tobias
teaches his son all that is necessary for life. One of his maxims is:
"What thou thyself hatest, to no man do" (Tobit 4:16).
There is a Jewish work called The Letter to Aristeas, which
purports to be an account of the Jewish scholars who went to Alexandria
to translate the Hebrew scriptures into Greek, and who produced the
Septuagint. The Egyptian king gave them a banquet at which he asked them
certain difficult questions. "What is the teaching of wisdom?" he
asked. A Jewish scholar answered, "As you wish that no evil should
befall you, but to be a partaker of all good things, so you should act
on the same principle towards your subjects and offenders, and you
should mildly admonish the noble and the good. For God draws all men
unto himself by his benignity" (The Letter to Aristeas 207).
Rabbi Eliezer came nearer to Jesus' way of putting it when he
said, "Let the honour of thy friend be as dear unto thee as thine own."
The Psalmist again had the negative form when he said that only the man
who does no evil to his neighbour can approach God (Psalms 15:3).
It is not difficult to find this rule in Jewish teaching in its
negative form; but there is no parallel to the positive form in which
Jesus put it.
The same is true of the teaching of other religions. The
negative form is one of the basic principles of Confucius. Tsze-Kung
asked him, "Is there one word which may serve as a rule of practice for
all one's life?" Confucius said, "Is not reciprocity such a word? What
you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others."
There are certain beautiful lines in the Buddhist Hymns of the Faith which come very near the Christian teaching:
"All men tremble at the rod, all men fear death;
Putting oneself in the place of others, kill not, nor cause to
kin.
All men tremble at the rod, unto all men life is dear;
Doing as one would be done by, kill not nor cause to kill."
With the Greeks and the Romans it is the same. Isocrates tells
how King Nicocles advised his subordinate officials: "Do not do to
others the things which make you angry when you experience them at the
hands of other people." Epictetus condemned slavery on the principle:
"What you avoid suffering yourselves, seek not to inflict upon others."
The Stoics had as one of their basic maxims: "What you do not wish to be
done to you, do not do to anyone else." And it is told that the Emperor
Alexander Severus had that sentence engraved upon the walls of his
palace that he might never forget it as a rule of life.
In its negative form this rule is in fact the basis of all
ethical teaching, but no one but Jesus ever put it in its positive form.
Many voices had said, "Do not do to others what you would not have them
do to you," but no voice had ever said, "Do to others what you would
have them do to you."
Let us see just how the positive form of the golden rule differs from
the negative form; and let us see just how much more Jesus was
demanding than any teacher had ever demanded before.
When this rule is put in its negative form, when we are told
that we must refrain from doing to others that which we would not wish
them to do to us, it is not an essentially religious rule at all. It is
simply a common-sense statement without which no social intercourse at
all would be possible. Sir Thomas Browne once said, "We are beholden to
every man we meet that he doth not kill us." In a sense that is true,
but, if we could not assume that the conduct and the behaviour of other
people to us would conform to the accepted standards of civilized life,
then life would be intolerable. The negative form of the golden rule is
not in any sense an extra; it is something without which life could not
go on at all.
Further, the negative form of the rule involves nothing more
than not doing certain things; it means refraining from certain actions.
It is never very difficult not to do things. That we must not do injury
to other people is not a specially religious principle; it is rather a
legal principle. It is the kind of principle that could well be kept by a
man who has no belief and no interest in religion at all. A man might
for ever refrain from doing any injury to any one else, and yet be a
quite useless citizen to his fellow-men. A man could satisfy the
negative form of the rule by simple inaction; if he consistently did
nothing he would never break it. And a goodness which consists in doing
nothing would be a contradiction of everything that Christian goodness
means.
When this rule is put positively, when we are told that we must
actively do to others what we would have them do to us, a new principle
enters into life, and a new attitude to our fellow-men. It is one thing
to say, "I must not injure people; I must not do to them what I would
object to their doing to me." That, the law can compel us to do. It is
quite another thing to say, "I must go out of my way to help other
people and to be kind to them, as I would wish them to help and to be
kind to me." That, only love can compel us to do. The attitude which
says, "I must do no harm to people," is quite different from the
attitude which says, "I must do my best to help people."
To take a very simple analogy--if a man has a motor car the law
can compel him to drive it in such a way that he does not injure anyone
else on the road, but no law can compel him to stop and to give a weary
and a foot-sore traveller a lift along the road. It is quite a simple
thing to refrain from hurting and injuring people; it is not so very
difficult to respect their principles and their feelings; it is a far
harder thing to make it the chosen and deliberate policy of life to go
out of our way to be as kind to them as we would wish them to be to us.
And yet it is just that new attitude which makes life beautiful.
Jane Stoddart quotes an incident from the life of W. H. Smith. "When
Smith was at the War Office, his private secretary, Mr. Fleetwood
Wilson, noticed that at the end of a week's work, when his chief was
preparing to leave for Greenlands on a Saturday afternoon, he used to
pack a despatch-box with the papers he required to take with him, and
carry it himself on his journey. Mr. Wilson remarked that Mr. Smith
would save himself much trouble, if he did as was the practice of other
ministers--leave the papers to be put in an office 'pouch' and sent by
post. Mr. Smith looked rather ashamed for a moment, and then looking up
at his secretary said, 'Well, my dear Wilson, that fact is this: our
postman who brings the letters from Henley, has plenty to carry. I
watched him one morning coming up the approach with my heavy pouch in
addition to his usual load, and I determined to save him as much as I
could.'" An action like that shows a certain attitude to one's
fellow-men. It is the attitude which believes that we should treat our
fellow-men, not as the law allows, but as love demands.
It is perfectly possible for a man of the world to observe the
negative form of the golden rule. He could without very serious
difficulty so discipline his life that he would not do to others what he
did not wish them to do to him; but the only man who can even begin to
satisfy the positive form of the rule is the man who has the love of
Christ within his heart. He will try to forgive as he would wish to be
forgiven, to help as he would wish to be helped, to praise as he would
wish to be praised, to understand as he would wish to be understood. He
will never seek to avoid doing things; he will always look for things to
do. Clearly this will make life much more complicated; clearly he will
have much less time to spend on his own desires and his own activities,
for time and time again he will have to stop what he is doing to help
someone else. It will be a principle which will dominate his life at
home, in the factory, in the bus, in the office, in the street, in the
train, at his games, everywhere. He can never do it until self withers
and dies within his heart. To obey this commandment a man must become a
new man with a new centre to his life; and if the world was composed of
people who sought to obey this rule, it would be a new world.
7:13-14 Go in
through the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the road
which leads to ruin, and there are many who go in through it. Narrow is
the gate and hard is the way that leads to life, and those who find it
are few.
There is always a certain dramatic quality about life, for, as
it has been said, "all life concentrates on man at the cross-roads." In
every action of life man is confronted with a choice; and he can never
evade the choice, because he can never stand still. He must always take
one way or the other. Because of that, it has always been one of the
supreme functions of the great men of history that they should confront
men with that inevitable choice. As the end drew near, Moses spoke to
the people: "See, I have set before you this day life and good, and
death and evil.... Therefore choose life, that you and your descendants
may live" (Deuteronomy 30:15-20).
When Joshua was laying down the leadership of the nation at the end of
his life, he presented them with the same choice: "Choose this day whom
you will serve" (Joshua 24:15).
Jeremiah heard the voice of God saying to him, "And to this people you
will say, Thus says the Lord: Behold I set before you the way of life
and the way of death" (Jeremiah 21:8). John Oxenham wrote:
"To every man there openeth
A way and ways and a way;
And the high soul treads the high way,
And the low soul gropes the low;
And in between on the misty flats
The rest drift to and fro;
But to every man there openeth
A high way and a low,
And every man decideth
The way his soul shall go."
That is the choice with which Jesus is confronting men in this
passage. There is a broad and an easy way, and there are many who take
it; but the end of it is ruin. There is a narrow and a hard way, and
there are few who take it; but the end of it is life. Cebes, the
disciple of Socrates, writes in the Tabula: "Dost thou see a little
door, and a way in front of the door, which is not much crowded, but the
travellers are few? That is the way that leadeth to true instruction."
Let us examine the difference between the two ways.
(i) It is the difference between the hard and the easy way.
There is never any easy way to greatness; greatness is always the
product of toil. Hesiod, the old Greek poet, writes, "Wickedness can be
had in abundance easily; smooth is the road, and very nigh she dwells;
but in front of virtue the gods immortal have put sweat." Epicharmus
said, "The gods demand of us toil as the price of all good things."
"Knave," he warns, "yearn not for the soft things, lest thou earn the
hard."
Once Edmund Burke made a great speech in the House of Commons.
Afterwards his brother Richard Burke was observed deep in thought. He
was asked what he was thinking about, and answered, "I have been
wondering how it has come about that Ned has contrived to monopolise all
the talents of our family; but then again I remember that, when we were
at play, he was always at work." Even when a thing is done with an
appearance of ease, that ease is the product of unremitting toil. The
skill of the master executant on the piano, or the champion player on
the golf course did not come without sweat. There never has been any
other way to greatness than the way of toil, and anything else which
promises such a way is a delusion and a snare.
(ii) It is the difference between the long and the short way.
Very rarely something may emerge complete and perfect in a flash, but
far oftener greatness is the result of long labour and constant
attention to detail. Horace in The Art of Poetry? advises Piso, when he
has written something, to keep it beside him for nine years before he
publishes it. He tells how a pupil used to take exercises to Quintilius,
the famous critic. Quintilius would say, "Scratch it out; the work has
been badly turned; send it back to the fire and the anvil." Virgil's
Aneid occupied the last ten years of Virgil's life; and. as he was
dying, he would have destroyed it, because he thought it so imperfect,
if his friends had not stopped him. Plato's Republic begins with a
simple sentence: "I went down to the Piraeus yesterday with Glaucon, the
son of Ariston, that I might offer up prayer to the goddess." On
Plato's own manuscript, in his own handwriting, there were no fewer than
thirteen different versions of that opening sentence. The master writer
had laboured at arrangement after arrangement that he might get the
cadences exactly right. Thomas Gray's Elegy written in a Country
Churchyard is one of the immortal poems. It was begun in the summer of
1742; it was finally privately circulated on 12th June, 1750. Its
lapidary perfection had taken eight years to produce. No one ever
arrived at a masterpiece by a short-cut. In this world we are constantly
faced with the short way, which promises immediate results, and the
long way, of which the results are in the far distance. But the lasting
things never come quickly; the long way is the best way in the end.
(iii) It is the difference between the disciplined and the
undisciplined way. Nothing was ever achieved without discipline; and
many an athlete and many a man has been ruined because he abandoned
discipline and let himself grow slack. Coleridge is the supreme tragedy
of indiscipline. Never did so great a mind produce so little. He left
Cambridge University to join the army; he left the army because, in
spite of all his erudition, he could not rub down a horse; he returned
to Oxford and left without a degree. He began a paper called The
Watchman which lived for ten numbers and then died. It has been said of
him: "He lost himself in visions of work to be done, that always
remained to be done. Coleridge had every poetic gift but one--the gift
of sustained and concentrated effort." In his head and in his mind he
had all kinds of books, as he said, himself, "completed save for
transcription." "I am on the eve," he says, "of sending to the press two
octave volumes." But the books were never composed outside Coleridge's
mind, because. he would not face the discipline of sitting down to write
them out. No one ever reached any eminence, and no one having reached
it ever maintained it, without discipline.
(iv) It is the difference between the thoughtful and the
thoughtless way. Here we come to the heart of the matter. No one would
ever take the easy, the short, the undisciplined way, if he only
thought. Everything in this world has two aspects-- how it looks at the
moment, and how it will look in the time to come. The easy way may look
very inviting at the moment, and the hard way may look very daunting.
The only way to get our values right is to see, not the beginning, but
the end of the way, to see things, not in the light of time, but in the
light of eternity.
7:15-20 Beware
of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing, but who within
are rapacious wolves. You will recognize them from their fruits. Surely
men do not gather grapes from thorns, and figs from thistles? So every
good tree produces fine fruit; but every rotten tree produces bad fruit.
A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a rotten tree produce
fine fruit. Every tree which does not produce fine fruit is cut down and
thrown into the fire. So then you will recognize them from their
fruits.
Almost every phrase and word in this section would ring an
answering bell in the minds of the Jews who heard it for the first time.
The Jews knew all about false prophets. Jeremiah, for instance,
had his conflict with the prophets who said "Peace, peace, when there is
no peace" (Jeremiah 6:14; Jeremiah 8:11).
Wolves was the very name by which false rulers and false prophets were
called. In the bad days Ezekiel had said, "Her princes in the midst of
her are like wolves tearing the prey, shedding blood and destroying
lives, to get dishonest gain" (Ezekiel 22:27).
Zephaniah drew a grim picture of the state of things in Israel, when,
"Her officials within her are roaring lions; her judges are evening
wolves that leave nothing till the morning. Her prophets are wanton,
faithless men" (Zephaniah 3:3).
When Paul was warning the elders of Ephesus of dangers to come, as he
took a last farewell of them, he said, "Fierce wolves will come in among
you, not sparing the flock" (Acts 20:29). Jesus said that he was sending out his disciples as sheep in the midst of wolves (Matthew 10:16); and he told of the Good Shepherd who protected the flock from the wolves with his life (John 10:12). Here indeed was a picture which everyone could recognize and understand.
He said that the false prophets were like wolves in sheep's
clothing. When the shepherd watched his flocks upon the hillside, his
garment was a sheepskin, worn with the skin outside and the fleece
inside. But a man might wear a shepherd's dress and still not be a
shepherd. The prophets had acquired a conventional dress. Elijah had a
mantle (1 Kings 19:13; 1 Kings 19:19), and that mantle had been a hairy cloak (2 Kings 1:8).
That sheepskin mantle had become the uniform of the prophets, just as
the Greek philosophers had worn the philosopher's robe. It was by that
mantle that the prophet could be distinguished from other men. But
sometimes that garb was worn by those who had no right to wear it, for
Zechariah in his picture of the great days to come says, "He will not
put on a hairy mantle in order to deceive" (Zechariah 13:4). There were those who wore a prophet's cloak, but who lived anything but a prophet's life.
There were false prophets in the ancient days, but there were
also false prophets in New Testament times. Matthew was written about
A.D. 85, and at that time prophets were still an institution in the
Church. They were men with no fixed abode, men who had given up
everything to wander throughout the country. bringing to the Churches a
message which they believed to come direct from God.
At their best the prophets were the inspiration of the Church,
for they were men who had abandoned everything to serve God and the
Church of God. But the office of prophet was singularly liable to abuse.
There were men who used it to gain prestige, and to impose on the
generosity of local congregations, and so live a life of comfortable,
and even pampered, idleness. The Didachi is the first order book of the
Christian Church; it dates to about A.D. 100; and its regulations
concerning these wandering prophets are very illuminating. A true
prophet was to be held in the highest honour; he was to be welcomed; his
word must never be disregarded, and his freedom must never be
curtailed; but "He shall remain one day, and, if necessary, another day
also; but if he remain three days, he is a false prophet." He must never
ask for anything but bread. "If he asks for money, he is a false
prophet." Prophets all claim to speak in the Spirit, but there is one
acid test: "By their characters a true and a false prophet shall be
known." "Every prophet that teacheth the truth, if he do not what he
teacheth, is a false prophet." If a prophet, claiming to speak in the
Spirit, orders a table and a meal to be set before him he is a false
prophet. "Whosoever shall say in the Spirit: Give me money or any other
things, ye shall not hear him; but if he tell you to give in the matter
of others who have need, let no one judge him." If a wanderer comes to a
congregation, and wishes to settle there, if he has a trade, "let him
work and eat." If he has no trade, "consider in your wisdom how he may
not live with you as a Christian in idleness.... But if he will not do
this, he is a trafficker in Christ. Beware of such" (Didache chapters 11
and 12).
Past history and present events made the words of Jesus
meaningful to those who heard them for the first time, and to those to
whom Matthew transmitted them.
The Jews, the Greeks and the Romans all used the idea that a tree is
to be judged by its fruits. "Like root, like fruit," ran the proverb.
Epictetus was later to say, "How can a vine grow not like a vine but
like an olive, or, how can an olive grow not like an olive but like a
vine" (Epictetus, Discourses 2: 20). Seneca declared that good cannot
grow from evil any more than a fig tree can from an olive.
But there is more in this than meets the eye. "Are grapes
gathered from thorns?" asked Jesus. There was a certain thorn, the
buckthorn, which had little black berries which closely resembled little
grapes. "Or figs from thistles?" There was a certain thistle, which had
a flower, which, at least at a distance, might well be taken for a fig.
The point is real, and relevant, and salutary. There may be a
superficial resemblance between the true and the false prophet. The
false prophet may wear the right clothes and use the right language; but
you cannot sustain life with the berries of a buckthorn or the flowers
of a thistle; and the life of the soul can never be sustained with the
food which a false prophet offers. The real test of any teaching is:
Does it strengthen a man to bear the burdens of life, and to walk in the
way wherein he ought to go?
Let us then look at the false prophets and see their
characteristics. If the way is difficult and the gate is so narrow that
it is hard to find, then we must be very careful to get ourselves
teachers who wit help us to find it, and not teachers who will lure us
away from it.
The basic fault of the false prophet is self-interest. The true
shepherd cares for the flock more than he cares for his life; the wolf
cares for nothing but to satisfy his own gluttony and his own greed. The
false prophet is in the business of teaching, not for what he can give
to others, but for what he can get to himself.
The Jews were alive to this danger. The Rabbis were the Jewish
teachers, but it was a cardinal principle of Jewish Law that a Rabbi
must have a trade by which he earned his living, and must on no account
accept any payment for teaching. Rabbi Zadok said, "Make the knowledge
of the Law neither a crown wherewith to make a show, nor a spade
wherewith to dig." Hillel said, "He who uses the crown of the Law for
external aims fades away." The Jews knew all about the teacher who used
his teaching self-interestedly, for no other reason than to make a
profit for himself. There are three ways in which a teacher can be
dominated by self interest.
(i) He may teach solely for gain. It is told that there was
trouble in the Church at Ecclefechan, where Thomas Carlyle's father was
an elder. It was a dispute between the congregation and the minister on a
matter of money and of salary. When much had been said on both sides,
Carlyle's father rose and uttered one devastating sentence: "Give the
hireling his wages, and let him go." No man can live on nothing, and few
men can do their best work when the pressure of material things is too
fiercely on them, but the great privilege of teaching is not the pay it
offers, but the thrill of opening the minds of boys and girls, and young
men and maidens, and men and women to the truth.
(ii) He may teach solely for prestige. A man may teach in order
to help others, or he may teach to show how clever he is. Denney once
said a savage thing: "No man can at one and the same time prove that he
is clever and that Christ is wonderful." Prestige is the last thing that
the great teachers desire. J. P. Strutliers was a saint of God. He
spent all his life in the service of the little Reformed Presbyterian
Church when he could have occupied any pulpit in Britain. Men loved him,
and the better they knew him the more they loved him. Two men were
talking of him. One man knew all that Struthers had done, but did not
know Struthers personally. Remembering Struthers' saintly ministry, he
said, "Struthers will have a front seat in the Kingdom of Heaven." The
other had known Struthers personally and his answer was: "Struthers
would be miserable in a front seat anywhere." There is a kind of teacher
and preacher who uses his message as a setting for himself. The false
prophet is interested in self-display; the true prophet desires
self-obliteration.
(iii) He may teach solely to transmit his own ideas. The false
prophet is out to disseminate his version of the truth; the true prophet
is out to publish abroad God's truth. It is quite true that every man
must think things out for himself; but it was said of John Brown of
Haddington that, when he preached, ever and again he used to pause "as
if listening for a voice." The true prophet listens to God before he
speaks to men. He never forgets that he is nothing more than a voice to
speak for God and a channel through which God's grace can come to men.
It is a teacher's duty and a preacher's duty to bring to men, not his
private idea of the truth, but the truth as it is in Jesus Christ.
This passage has much to say about the evil fruits of the
false prophets. What are the false effects, the evil fruits, which a
false prophet may produce?
(i) Teaching is false if it produces a religion which
consists solely or mainly in the observance of externals. That is what
was wrong with the Scribes and Pharisees. To them religion consisted in
the observance of the ceremonial law. If a man went through the correct
procedure of handwashing, if on the Sabbath he never carried anything
weighing more than two figs, if he never walked on the Sabbath farther
than the prescribed distance, if he was meticulous in giving tithes of
everything down to the herbs of his kitchen garden, then he was a good
man.
It is easy to confuse religion with religious
practices. It is possible--and indeed not uncommon--to teach that
religion consists in going to Church, observing the Lord's Day,
fulfilling one's financial obligations to the Church, reading one's
Bible. A man might do all these things and be far off from being a
Christian, for Christianity is an attitude of the heart to God and to
man.
(ii) Teaching is false if it produces a religion which
consists in prohibitions. Any religion which is based on a series of
"thou shalt not's" is a false religion. There is a type of teacher who
says to a person who has set out on the Christian way: "From now on you
will no longer go to the cinema; from now on you will no longer dance;
from now on you will no longer smoke or use make-up; from now on you
will no longer read a novel or a Sunday newspaper; from now on you will
never enter a theatre."
If a man could become a Christian simply by abstaining
from doing things Christianity would be a much easier religion than it
is. But the whole essence of Christianity is that it does not consist in
not doing things; it consists in doing things. A negative Christianity
on our part can never answer the positive love of God.
(iii) Teaching is false if it produces an easy
religion. There were false teachers in the days of Paul, an echo of
whose teaching we can hear in Romans 6:1-23
. They said to Paul: "You believe that God's grace is the biggest thing
in the universe?" "Yes." "You believe that God's grace is wide enough
to cover every sin?" "Yes." "Well then, if that be so, let us go on
sinning to our hearts' content. God will forgive. And, after all, our
sin is simply giving God's wonderful grace an opportunity to operate." A
religion like that is a travesty of religion because it is an insult to
the love of God.
Any teaching which takes the iron out of religion, any
teaching which takes the Cross out of Christianity, any teaching which
eliminates the threat from the voice of Christ, any teaching which
pushes judgment into the background and makes men think lightly of sin,
is false teaching.
(iv) Teaching is false if it divorces religion and
life. Any teaching which removes the Christian from the life and
activity of the world is false. That was the mistake the monks and the
hermits made. It was their belief that to live the Christian life they
must retire to a desert or to a monastery, that they must cut themselves
off from the engrossing and tempting life of the world, that they could
only be truly Christian by ceasing to live in the world. Jesus said,
and he prayed for his disciples, "I do not pray that thou shouldest take
them out of the world, but that thou shouldst keep them from the evil
one" (John 17:15).
We have heard, for instance, of a journalist who found it hard to
maintain her Christian principles in the life of a daily newspaper, and
who left it to take up work on a purely religious journal.
No man can be a good soldier by running away, and the
Christian is the soldier of Christ. How shall the leaven ever work if
the leaven refuses to be inserted into the mass? What is witness worth
unless it is witness to those who do not believe? Any teaching which
encourages a man to take what John Mackay called "the balcony view of
life" is wrong. The Christian is not a spectator from the balcony; he is
involved in the warfare of life.
(v) Teaching is false if it produces a religion which
is arrogant and separatist. Any teaching which encourages a man to
withdraw into a narrow sect, and to regard the rest of the world as
sinners, is false teaching. The function of religion is not to erect
middle walls of partition but to tear them down. It is the dream of
Jesus Christ that there shall be one flock and one shepherd (John 10:16). Exclusiveness is not a religious quality; it is an irreligious quality. Fosdick quotes four lines of doggerel:
"We are God's chosen few,
All others will be damned;
There is no room in heaven for you;
We can't have heaven crammed."
Religion is meant to bring men closer together, not to drive men
apart. Religion is meant to gather men into one family, not to split
them up into hostile groups. The teaching which declares that any Church
or any sect has a monopoly of the grace of God is false teaching, for
Christ is not the Christ who divides, he is the Christ who unites.
7:21-23 Not
everyone that says to me: "Lord, Lord" will enter into the Kingdom of
Heaven, but he who does the will of my father who is in heaven. Many
will say to me on that day: "Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your
name, and in your name did we not cast out devils, and in your name did
we not do many deeds of power?" Then will I publicly announce to them:
"I never knew you. Depart from me you doers of iniquity."
There is an apparently surprising feature about this passage.
Jesus is quite ready to concede that many of the false prophets will do
and say wonderful and impressive things.
We must remember what the ancient world was like. Miracles were
common events. The frequency of miracles came from the ancient idea of
illness. In the ancient world all illness was held to be the work of
demons. A man was ill because a demon had succeeded in exercising some
malign influence over him, or in winning a way into some part of his
body. Cures were therefore wrought by exorcism. The result of all this
was that a great deal of illness was what we would call psychological,
as were a great many cures. If a man succeeded in convincing--or
deluding--himself into a belief that a demon was in him or had him in
his power, that man would undoubtedly be ill. And if someone could
convince him that the hold of the demon was broken, then quite certainly
that man would be cured.
The leaders of the Church never denied heathen miracles. In
answer to the miracles of Christ, Celsus quoted the miracles attributed
to Aesculapius and Apollo. Origen, who met his arguments, did not for a
moment deny these miracles. He simply answered, "Such curative power is
of itself neither good nor bad, but within the reach of godless as well
as of honest people" (Origen: Against Celsus 3: 22). Even in the New
Testament we read of Jewish exorcists who added the name of Jesus to
their repertoire, and who banished devils by its aid (Acts 19:13).
There was many a charlatan who rendered a lip service to Jesus Christ,
and who used his name to produce wonderful effects on demon-possessed
people. What Jesus is saying is that if any man uses his name on false
pretenses, the day of reckoning will come. His real motives will be
exposed, and he will be banished from the presence of God.
There are two great permanent truths within this passage. There
is only one way in which a man's sincerity can be proved, and that is by
his practice. Fine words can never be a substitute for fine deeds.
There is only one proof of love, and that proof is obedience. There is
no point in saying that we love a person, and then doing things which
break that person's heart. When we were young maybe we used sometimes to
say to our mothers, "Mother, I love you." And maybe mother sometimes
smiled a little wistfully and said, "I wish you would show it a little
more in the way you behave." So often we confess God with our lips and
deny him with our lives. It is not difficult to recite a creed, but it
is difficult to live the Christian life. Faith without practice is a
contradiction in terms, and love without obedience is an impossibility.
At the back of this passage is the idea of judgment. All through
it there runs the certainty that the day of reckoning comes. A man may
succeed for long in maintaining the pretenses and the disguises, but
there comes a day when the pretenses are shown for what they are, and
the disguises are stripped away. We may deceive men with our words, but
we cannot deceive God. "Thou discernest my thoughts from afar," said the
Psalmist (Psalms 139:2). No man can ultimately deceive the God who sees the heart.
7:24-27 So,
then, everyone who hears these words of mine and does them will be
likened to a wise man who built his house upon the rock. And the rain
came down, and the rivers swelled, and the wind blew, and fell upon that
house, and it did not fall, for it was founded upon the rock. And
everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be
likened to a foolish man who built his house upon the sand. And the rain
came down, and the rivers swelled, and the winds blew and beat upon
that house, and it fell; and its fall was great. And when Jesus had
ended these words, the people were astonished at his teaching, for he
was teaching them as one who had authority, and not as their Scribes.
Jesus was in a double sense an expert. He was an expert in
scripture. The writer of Proverbs gave him the hint for his picture:
"When the tempest passes, the wicked is no more, but the righteous is
established for ever" (Proverbs 10:25).
Here is the germ of the picture which Jesus drew of the two houses and
the two builders. But Jesus was also an expert in life. He was the
craftsman who knew all about the building of houses, and when he spoke
about the foundations of a house he knew what he was talking about. This
is no illustration formed by a scholar in his study; this is the
illustration of a practical man.
Nor is this a far-fetched illustration; it is a story of the
kind of thing which could well happen. In Palestine the builder must
think ahead. There was many a gully which in summer was a pleasant sandy
hollow, but was in winter a raging torrent of rushing water. A man
might be looking for a house; he might find a pleasantly sheltered sandy
hollow; and he might think this a very suitable place. But, if he was a
short-sighted man, he might well have built his house in the dried-up
bed of a river, and, when the winter came, his house would disintegrate.
Even on an ordinary site it was tempting to begin building on the
smoothed-over sand, and not to bother digging down to the shelf of rock
below, but that way disaster lay ahead.
Only a house whose foundations are firm can withstand the storm;
and only a life whose foundations are sure can stand the test. Jesus
demanded two things.
(i) He demanded that men should listen. One of the great
difficulties which face us today is the simple fact that men often do
not know what Jesus said or what the Church teaches. In fact the matter
is worse. They have often a quite mistaken notion of what Jesus said and
of what the Church teaches. It is no part of the duty of an honourable
man to condemn either a person, or an institution, unheard--and that
today is precisely what so many do. The first step to the Christian life
is simply to give Jesus Christ a chance to be heard.
(ii) He demanded that men should do. Knowledge only becomes
relevant when it is translated into action. It would be perfectly
possible for a man to pass an examination in Christian Ethics with the
highest distinction, and yet not to be a Christian. Knowledge must
become action; theory must become practice; theology must become life.
There is little point in going to a doctor, unless we are prepared to do
the things we hear him say to us. There is little point in going to an
expert, unless we are prepared to act upon his advice. And yet there are
thousands of people who listen to the teaching of Jesus Christ every
Sunday, and who have a very good knowledge of what Jesus taught, and who
yet make little or no deliberate attempt to put it into practice. If we
are to be in any sense followers of Jesus we must hear and do.
Is there any word in which hearing and doing are summed up?
There is such a word, and that word is obedience. Jesus demands our
implicit obedience. To learn to obey is the most important thing in
life.
Some time ago there was a report of the case of a sailor in the
Royal Navy who was very severely punished for a breach of discipline. So
severe was the punishment that in certain civilian quarters it was
thought to be far too severe. A newspaper asked its readers to express
their opinions about the severity of the punishment.
One who answered was a man who himself had served for years in
the Royal Navy. In his view the punishment was not too severe. He held
that discipline was absolutely essential, for the purpose of discipline
was to condition a man automatically and unquestioningly to obey orders,
and on such obedience a man's life might well depend. He cited a case
from his own experience. He was in a launch which was towing a much
heavier vessel in a rough sea. The vessel was attached to the launch by a
wire hawser. Suddenly in the midst of the wind and the spray there came
a single, insistent word of command from the officer in charge of the
launch. "Down!" he shouted. On the spot the crew of the launch flung
themselves down. Just at that moment the wire towing-hawser snapped, and
the broken parts of it whipped about like a maddened steel snake. If
any man had been struck by it he would have been instantly killed. But
the whole crew automatically obeyed and no one was injured. If anyone
had stopped to argue, or to ask why, he would have been a dead man.
Obedience saved lives.
It is such obedience that Jesus demands. It is Jesus' claim that
obedience to him is the only sure foundation for life; and it is his
promise that the life which is founded on obedience to him is safe, no
matter what storms may come.
-Barclay's Daily Study Bible (NT)