The thing that strikes this author is the seeming audacity of Christ’s plan.
If it were any merely human plan, we should call it audacity. This audacity is observable, first of all, in the fact that the plan is originally proposed to the world with what might appear to us to be such hazardous completeness. The idea of the kingdom of God issues fully developed from the thought of Christ. Put together the Sermon on the Mount, the Charge to the Twelve Apostles, the Parables of the Kingdom, the Discourse in the Upper Room, and the institution of the Lord’s Supper, and the plan of our Saviour is before you, enunciated with an accent of calm, unfaltering conviction that it will be realized in human history.
Generally speaking, an ambitious idea appears at first as a mere outline, and challenges attention in a tentative way. It is put forward inquiringly, timidly, that it may be completed by the suggestions of friends or modified by the criticism of opponents. The highest genius knows with what difficulty a promising project is launched out of the domain of abstract speculation into the region of practical life.
Social reformers tell us despondingly that facts make sad havoc of their fairest theories, and that schemes which were designed to brighten and to beautify the life of nations are either forgotten altogether, or, like the Republic of Plato, are remembered only as famous samples of the impracticable. For whenever a great idea affecting the well-being of society is permitted to force its way into the world of facts, it is liable to be compressed, exaggerated, disfigured, mutilated, caricatured. In the first French Revolution some of the most humane sociological projects were distorted into becoming the very animating principles of extraordinary barbarities.
Now Jesus Christ our Lord was in the true and very highest sense of the term a social reformer; yet He fully proclaimed the whole of His social plan before He began to realize it. Had He been merely a great Man He would have been more prudent. He would have conditioned His design; He would have tested it; He would have developed it gradually; and then refashioned it before finally proposing it to the world. His actual course must have seemed one of reckless folly unless the event had shown it to be the dictate of more than human wisdom.
He speaks as One who is sure of the faultlessness of His design; He is certain that no human obstacle can balk its realization. He produces it without effort, without reserve, without exaggeration. He is calm because He is in possession of the future, and sees His way clearly through its tangled maze. There is no intimation of need for modification. He did not, for instance, first aim at a political success and then cover His failure by giving a religious turn to His previous manifestoes; He did not begin as a religious teacher and afterwards aspire to convert His increasing religious influence into political capital.
He develops with majestic assurance, with decisive rapidity, the integral features of His work; His teaching centers more and more upon Himself as its central subject, but He nowhere retracts, or modifies, or speaks or acts as would one who feels that he is dependent on events or agencies which he cannot control.
A poor woman pays Him respect at a feast, and He simply announces that the act will be told as a memorial of her throughout the world (Mt. 26:13); He bids His apostles do all things whatever He had commanded them; He promises them His Spirit as a guide into all necessary truth, but He invests them with no such discretionary powers as might imply that His design would need revision under other circumstances, or could be capable of improvement.
He calmly turns the glance of His thought on the long and checkered future which lies clearly displayed before Him, in the immediate foreground of which is His own humiliating death. He speaks as One who sees beyond the most distant possibilities, and who knows full well that His work is indestructible. “The gates of hell,” He calmly observes, “shall not prevail against it” (Mt. 16:18); “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My words shall not pass away.”
But has the plan of Jesus Christ been carried out? The Church of Christ is a living answer to that question. Glance for a moment at the history of the Church from the days of the apostles until now. What is it but a history of gradual, unceasing self-expansion. Compare the Church which sought refuge and which prayed in the upper chamber at Jerusalem with the Church of which Paul is the pioneer and champion in the latter portion of the Acts of the Apostles, or with the Church to which he refers, as already making its way throughout the world in his epistles.
But you say, this representation of the history of the Church may suffice for an ideal picture, but it is not history. Is not the verdict of history a less encouraging one? First of all, do Church annals present this spectacle of an ever-widening extension? What is to be said of the spread of great and vital heresies? Of divisions in the Church? Of the rising tide of Islam? Of rationalism and atheism firmly rooted in lands once dominated by the gospel?
We Christians know full well what we have to expect from the human heart in its natural state; while on the other hand we have been told that the gates of hell shall not prevail against the Church of the Redeemer. But, in speculating on the future destinies of the Church, this hopeful confidence of a sound faith may be seconded by the calm estimate of reflective reason.
Modern unbelief may be deemed less formidable when we observe its moral impotence for all constructive purposes. Its strength and genius lie only in the direction of destruction. It has shown no sort of power to build up any spiritual fabric or system which, as a shelter and a discipline for the hearts and lives of men, can take the place of that which it seeks to destroy. Leaving some of the deepest, most legitimate, and most ineradicable needs of the human soul utterly unsatisfied, modern unbelief can never really hope permanently to establish a popular “religion of humanity.” For this reason modern unbelief, although formidable, is not so full of menace to the future of the kingdom of our Lord as may sometimes be thought by the nervous timidity of Christian piety.
This will appear more certain if from considering the extent of Christ’s realm we turn to the intensive side of His work among men. For indeed the depth of our Lord’s work in the soul of man has always been more wonderful than its breadth. The moral intensity of the life of a sincere Christian is a clearer illustration of the reality of the reign of Christ, and of the success of His plan, than is the territorial range of any Christian empire. “The King’s daughter is all glorious within.” This hidden work tells the true story.
Christianity has conferred a new sanction on civil and domestic relationships among men, and it certainly infused a new life into the most degraded societies. Still this was not its primary aim; it was directed not to this world, but to the next. How complete at this moment is the reign of Christ in the soul of a sincere Christian! Christ is not a limited ruler; He is emphatically an absolute Monarch. His rule is welcomed by His subjects. High above the claims of human teachers the tremendous self-assertion of Christ echoes on from age to age: “I am the Truth.” And from age to age the Christian mind responds by a life-long endeavor “to bring every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ.” But if Christ is Lord of the Christian’s thought, He is also Lord of the Christian’s affections.
Beauty provokes love, and Christ is the highest moral beauty. He does not merely rank as an exponent of the purest morality. He is absolute virtue embodied in a human life, and vividly set forth before our eyes in the story of the Gospels. As such, He claims to reign over the affections of men. He secures the first place in the heart of every true Christian. To have taken the measure of His beauty and yet not to love Him is, in a Christian’s judgment, to be self-condemned. “If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema Maranatha.”
Ruling the affections of the Christian, Christ is also Master of the Christian will. When He has tamed its native stubbornness He teaches it day by day a more and more pliant accuracy of movement in obedience to Himself. In fact, He is not merely its rule of action but its very motive power; each act of devotion and self-sacrifice of which it is capable is but an extension of the energy of Christ’s own moral life. “Without Me,” He says to His servants, “ye can do nothing” (Jn. 15:5); and with Paul His servants reply, “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.”
Christ is Christianity. Detach Christianity from Christ and it vanishes before your eyes into intellectual vapor. For it is of the essence of Christianity that, hour by hour, the Christian should live in conscious, felt, sustained relationship to the ever-living Author of his creed and life. “I live,” exclaims the Apostle, “yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.”
The time approaches when it will be seen that the purposes of Christ have triumphed. Then in that day the whole universe shall see that the plan He revealed when He appeared to be a common laborer from Nazareth was in fact the plan of God Himself. And in that day “…at the name of Jesus every knee [shall] bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; and…every tongue [shall] confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil. 2:10-11).