Gooding, David: 13 - Highway to Holiness

Now, when we move on to the second half of this chapter, we shall find, by contrast, that it is dark and gloomy, with our Lord's repeated warnings of the world's hatred. Seven times or more, the Savior mentions this hatred, as though to make sure that the apostles would be forewarned and not taken by surprise when they found themselves surrounded by the hatred of the world. For at first sight, it is surely a surprising thing that men like the apostles who went everywhere preaching, as Saint Peter put it, the good news of peace by Jesus Christ, should find themselves so much hated and persecuted. And it is even more surprising to notice by whom they were hated and persecuted. Not certainly by savages whose darkened minds were degenerate almost to the level of animals, but by the sophisticated governing class of the Romans, and by the highly educated, and what is more, the highly religious classes among the Jews. Of those two, the latter, uh, group were the sadder, of course. The Acts of the Apostles shows us, with a monotonant, monotonous recurrence, how grim and how determined was the persecution which the Jewish authorities, uh, uh, staged against the Christians. In Acts chapter seven, we're told they put Stephen on trial, and as he gave his defense, gnashed on him with their teeth, hurried him out of the synagogue, uh, the Sanhedrin, and stoned him. In Acts chapter twelve, the Jewish authorities were delighted when Herod executed James and imprisoned Peter, and thereafter instituted a general persecution of the church. And perhaps the saddest thing at all, of all in this persecution of the early church was that the Jewish authorities who did it, as Christ observes in this chapter sixteen of John, verses one to three, these Jewish authorities managed to persuade themselves that in persecuting, excommunicating, and finally killing the Christians, they were in fact doing God a religious service. The very first murder recorded in Holy Scripture, you will remember, is a religious murder. Cain murdered Abel. For the simple reason that Abel's sacrifice was accepted by God, and Cain's sacrifice was not accepted. God, moreover, appealed to Cain and attempted to reason with the man. But Cain was determined to have his own way, determined to pursue his religious notions in independence of God, to stick to his religion whether God wished it or approved of it or delighted in it or not. And when God refused Cain's, uh, uh, selfish ways and accepted Abel, then Cain lost his temper and murdered Abel. And what we find at the very beginning of Holy Scripture, now we find again at the beginning of the Christian era. The message of Christ through his apostles almost at once was to meet with tremendous hatred and opposition, and supremely from the Jewish religious authorities. It is then a gloomy subject, but let us o- observe now in detail what Christ had to say about the hatred of the world against the apostles and against all those believers that have followed them. First of all, in verse eighteen, he warns us not to be surprised if the world hates us, because it hated him first. And that is interesting, that they should hate him first. Because with us Christians, particularly us lesser fry, it is always possible that it is perhaps in part our own fault that the world hates us. If I may talk for myself, not for you, uh, my oddities, my curious temperament, my coming short might well be causes to provoke the world's hatred, and their hatred be justified. There is no possible case to be made out for their hating Christ, whose life was one impeccable delight, full of kindness and love and mercy. The man above all others that taught the world the meaning of love, the man that would even pray for his persecutors and assassinators, and yet it is on record, and it is the historical fact that they hated Christ. Secondly, let us notice the reason for their hatred as Christ spells it out in verse nineteen. If you were of the world, he said, the world would love its own, but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. That verse will repay consideration. Our Lord seems to put down the hatred particularly to this, that the believer is no longer of the world, in some sense. I must ask you to remember our previous study when we were thinking about the meaning of this term world. How that man, in his independence of God, has set himself up a system of life and a system of thought in which he wants to regard this world as a self-contained flat. Using this world not as a means to bring him nearer God, but as a world that he may enjoy on his own and forget God, and if he can in in in in fact achieve it, prove to his own satisfaction that God does not exist. Now, in this, what I call self-contained flat of a world, man is prepared, or some men are prepared, to have their religion. We should notice very carefully that just because a man is religious, it doesn't mean that he isn't worldly. You can have worldly religion as much as you can have worldly politics. If our religion is but an assertion of our own self-will, our idea, so that I take to religion as another man takes to greyhound racing or politics in order to satisfy my ego, to serve my own career or whatnot, my religion can be as worldly as anything else. But now, says Christ, I have chosen you out of this world. And men who are physically in the world but are in living touch with the God who is, so to speak, outside it, are felt instinctively by people that are determined to be worldly in their outlook, are felt by them to be a little bit of a threat, or at least a painful reminder of the very thing that they're trying to forget. And for this reason, says our Lord, because you are not of the world, I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. I remember a colleague of mine, and it was in a very respectable university I was then, informing us in the common room what a rotten thing it was to get drunk. If there was somebody in the party who wasn't getting drunk, it made you feel very embarrassed because you were all sort of conscious until you lost consciousness completely, that there was this odd chap out who wasn't with you so, and it kind of get under your skin. And the believer in the world, be he never so kind and good and philanthropic, because he stands for that something outside this world, is felt by the man who is, uh, in his bones worldly as a kind of a threat, a permanent reminder of God as the one who threatens constantly to interfere and to break into the world and to spoil its enjoyment. And then Christ proceeds in verse twenty to call upon his disciples to remember that a servant is not greater than his lord. They are to remember this on both sides of the question. If they have kept my words, says Christ, they will keep yours. On the other hand, if they have persecuted me, they'll persecute, they'll persecute you. And he wanted his disciples to remember this. They must not expect better treatment than Christ himself gave. That warning was not unnecessary, of course. Very early on in the church's, church's history, and perhaps for many centuries thereafter, we as Christians have been in the habit of forgetting this and trying to carve ourselves out a place in society much better than Christ had. As I say, it happened very early on. Saint Paul, writing to the church at Corinth, has some very straight and a little sarcastic words to say. In chapter uh four of that, uh, letter, he chides the believers at Corinth. He says, already you are filled, already you are become rich. You have reigned without us. Yea, and I would that ye did reign, that we also might reign with you. For I think that God has set us, the apostles, last of all, as men doomed to death. For we are made a spectacle unto the world, and to angels and to men. We are fools, for Christ's sake, but ye are wise in Christ. We are weak, but ye are strong. Ye have glory, we have dishonor. Even unto this present hour, we both hunger and thirst and are naked and have buffeted and have no certain dwelling place. And thus and thus. What was happening is that the church at Corinth was beginning to forget that as a Christian church, it was not to try and expect to get a treatment from the world that was different from what their Lord received. They were settling down under the impression that it was their task to reign in this world, when the apostles who had brought them the gospel and were still carrying the gospel to other folks were being persecuted. Now, the New Testament certainly does not want to produce in us a persecution complex. Even Paul himself was not for suffering any more than he had to suffer. And if on occasion a little, uh, upstart of a Roman captain was proposing to have Paul beaten quite outside the law, Paul wasn't going to suffer an unnecessary hiding, and he used his citizen rights to stop the aforesaid captain, uh, applying the whip. It is no part of true Christianity to welcome unnecessary suffering. But then, on the other hand, we should remember that we serve our a a a king who has been rejected, not ours now to reign, but to share that rejection with him. And perhaps it had been a happier and a wiser thing if the church in all the Christian ages had remembered that. Then we come in verses twenty to twenty four to a very important statement from our Lord about the world's guilt in all this matter of their hatred and persecution. He points out that the world is guilty because it has hated him in spite of full evidence. Their hatred has not been in ignorance. Verse twenty two, If I had not come and spoken unto them, they had not had sin, but now they have no excuse for their sin. Again, in verse twenty four, He points out they're guilty because they have hated not only in spite of full evidence, but in spite of evidence that is utterly extraordinary and unique. If I had not done among them the works which none other did, they had not had sin. But now they have both seen and hated both me and my Father. And finally, he points out that they are guilty in their hatred, because, as verse twenty five at the end remarks, they hated me without a cause. Not only had our Lord exhibited these marvelous works, but all that he had shown them had revealed a God of infinite compassion and kindness. He had healed their sick, and he had cured their lepers, and he had opened the eyes of their blind. He had taught respect for little children, honor to women, mercy to all men. There was nothing in all that he revealed that could justifiably be held as a cause for anger, and yet they hated him. They hated him without a cause. Now, I want to say again that in talking of the world, I am talking, as our Lord was talking, in general terms. The passage does not mean that every man Jack in the whole world through hates Christ like this, or that the world is nothing more than millions of sadists, everyone the same. Or that every man and woman in the world is equally guilty. Certainly not. These very verses point out how careful and just God is in the matter of assessment of guilt. Says Christ, if I had not come and spoken unto them, they had not had sin. That doesn't mean that in general they would have been sinless and absolutely spotlessly perfect if Christ hadn't come into the world. Our Lord is using the word sin in a specialized sense. What he's saying is that if I hadn't come and spoken to them, then they wouldn't be to blame for rejecting what I said. Obviously not. God will never blame a man for not believing what he never knew. God will never blame a man for not seeing what he never was able to see. And that is a tremendous comfort, isn't it? Doubtless, um, you have found it as I have found it, whensoever you get talking to a non-Christian and the argument begins to come to a personal level, very often the non-Christian develops a sudden interest in the heathen. Ah, says he with evident relief. Uh, what about the heathen, tells he. The kind of logic is that, uh, uh, well, the heathen have never heard of Christ, and therefore you're not going to consign them all to perdition, are you? And therefore, if God is going to have mercy on them, well, likes, it's likely that he's going to have mercy on me too, so why should I bother? Uh, but our Lord, uh, is here, uh, commenting upon that kind of situation. No, the heathen will never be blamed for not believing what they never heard. And in our Lord's explicitly stated fair principle, we might find refuge for all our doubts and alarms over those tremendous questions, what is God going to do with the major part of the world that has never heard of Christ? But perhaps we ought to be more concerned about ourselves and our friends around us who have heard of Christ. We shall be held responsible for what we have heard. God will blame us for deliberately refusing to accept what Christ has explicitly said and what we have been given to know. And who amongst us in the West can claim that we have not heard of what Christ has said? I record it as a thing that never ceases to surprise me personally. In talking to my own colleagues from time to time, men who are educated, know all about current affairs, like to be able to quote a tag of Shakespeare here, uh, and a little Winston Churchill there. Um, but then when it comes to talking about spiritual things, show themselves almost totally ignorant of what the New Testament says. The conversation frequently goes in this fashion. No, I don't believe Christ. I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I can't believe he's the Son of God. Oh yes, and have you read the evidence? What evidence? Why, the New Testament evidence for his deity. Oh yes, of course I've read it. What, the Gospel of John? Well, not the Gospel of John. I think it was Mark that we did at school. And here is a man in his twenties maybe, who thinks he has studied the evidence if, in schoolboy fashion at the age of eleven he did his lessons somewhat cursorily on the Gospel of Mark, but has never taken the trouble with an adult mind seriously to consider the evidence that God has given him in Christ. These verses seem to say to me that God will not overlook that terrible remissness. And then our Lord added another thing that is important in this context in verse twenty three: He that hateth me hateth my Father also. Now, for those of us brought up in the atmosphere of the Christian tradition, the relevance of that perhaps will not immediately appear. It would be immediately obvious for the Jew. The Jew who wished to reject Jesus as Messiah would still wish to cling to the idea that nevertheless he was a sincere worshipper of God. But, says our Lord, now that isn't necessarily possible, because if you have seen me and you hate me, you have both seen and hated my Father. Here our Lord is laying claim once more, as he so frequently did, to being not just another prophet with an alternative version of ethics, but the Son of God, in such fashion that if you have seen him, you have seen God. And therefore it is an illogical thing to say that you reject Christ, but you accept God. In this sense, Jesus Christ and God are one. In the post-Christian times in which we live, we shall need to recur to this thing. The Apostle John, in his epistle, had constantly to remind the believers in whom he was interested of this central fact that if you deny the Son of God, you also deny the Father. Followers of the guru, who appears to be the latest craze in Ulster and elsewhere, will tell you, yes, of course, but we don't necessarily accept Jesus as the Messiah, but we all worship the same God. Oh, but you don't. Not if you reject Jesus, for Jesus is God incarnate. He that hates me hates my father also, says Christ. So this has been a very sad and a daunting picture. Its colors were not overdrawn, as we found at the beginning, no sooner had the infant church got on its feet than they found the words of Christ come all too true. But now notice how this chapter ends. It is in the face of this predicted hatred and persecution that our Lord announces what is his chief objective in the second half of the chapter, namely that his apostles were to go out and in this very world were to be witnesses for him. They were not to run away from the world's hatred or huddle up in a little corner or stay in the rarefied atmosphere of the upper room. They were to go out and look this world in the face, and in the teeth of the opposition, they were to witness for Christ. That might seem even a more daunting thing. One might put it this way, in a world where Christ witnessed for God, and in the end, by doing so, brought himself to a cross and to apparent defeat, how should ever his apostles witness and witness successfully? And the answer is, as our Lord gives it in verse twenty six of this chapter, the key to their witness would be the coming of the Holy Spirit. And in our next session, we shall have to consider this next important provision for the developing holiness of the believer. But as we close this session, let us notice the fact that in the school of holiness, Christ not only leads his disciples to personal saintliness, to personal devotion to himself and to his father, and he not only instructs them as to the development of their character, the producing of the fruits of the Holy Spirit, so to speak, in their behavior, but now he announces that if they would progress and be mature in holiness, then witnessing for Christ in this world is an integral part of the course, and none can be excused.