The accepted man (2 Corinthians 3) (Part
4)
John Nelson
Darby
The very idea,
fabulous as it is, he possesses of heaven, renders the assumption of his being
there less pardonable than would have been his utter ignorance about it. A man
would be less wrong, supposing he did not know anything about a regal palace (a
savage, fit only for the woods), than a person who knew what the palace was, and
had some idea of the requirements of the place, and yet thought to go and live
there. The unconverted man acts and thinks more apart from God in thinking he
ought to go to heaven, than if he thought there was no such place at all ; he in
a state of sin is expecting to get into the presence of a holy God!One thing
impressed my own mind most peculiarly when the Lord was first opening my eyes-I
never found Christ doing a single thing for Himself. Here is an immense
principle. There was not one act in all Christ's life done to serve or to please
Himself. An unbroken stream of blessed, perfect, unfailing love flowed from Him,
no matter what the contradiction of sinners-one amazing and unwavering testimony
of love and sympathy and help; but it was ever others, and not Himself, that
were comforted, and nothing could weary it, nothing turn it aside.
Now the world's
whole principle is self, doing well for itself; Psa. 49:18. Men know that it is
upon the energy of selfishness they have to depend. Every one that knows
anything at all of the world knows this. Without it the world could not go on.
What is the world's honour ? Self. What its wealth ? Self. What is advancement
in the world ? Self. They are but so many forms of the same thing; the principle
that animates the individual man in each is the spirit of self-seeking. The
business of the world is the seeking of self, and the pleasures of the world are
selfish pleasures. They are troublesome pleasures too ; for we cannot escape
from a world where God has said, " In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat
bread, till thou return to the ground," etc. Toil for self is irksome ; but
suppose a man finds out at length that the busy seeking of self is trouble and
weariness, and having procured the means of living without it, gives it up, what
then? He just adopts another form of the same spirit of self, and turns to
selfish case.
I am not now speaking of vice and gross sin (of course every
one will allow that to be opposite to the spirit of Christ) ; but of the whole
course of the world. Take the world's decent moral man, and is he an " epistle
of Christ " ? Is there in him a single motive like Christ's ? He may do the same
things; he may be a carpenter as Christ was (Mark 6 : 3) ; but he has not one
thought in common with Christ. As to the outside, the world goes on with its
religion and its philanthropy ; it does good, builds its hospitals, feeds the
hungry, lothes the naked, and the like ; but its inward springs of action are
not Christ's. Every motive that governed Christ all the way along is not that
which governs men; and the motives which keep the world going are not those
which were found in Christ at all.
The infidel owns Christ's moral beauty, and selfishness
can take pleasure in unselfishness ; but the Christian is to " put on Christ."
He went about doing good all the day long; there was not a moment but He was
ready as the servant in grace of the need of others. And do not let us suppose
that this cost Him nothing. He had not where to lay His head; He hungered and
was wearied; and when He sat down, where was it ? Under the scorching sun, at
the well's mouth, whilst His disciples went into the city to buy bread. And what
then ? He was as ready for the poor vile sinner who came to Him, as if He had
not hungered, neither was faint and weary; John 4. He was never at ease. He was
in all the trials and troubles that man is in as the consequences of sin, and
see how He walked! He
made bread for others ; but He would not touch a stone
to turn it into bread for Himself. As to the moral motives of the soul, the man
of the world has no one principle in common with Christ. If then the world is to
read in a Christian the character of Christ, it is evident the world cannot read
it in him ; he is not a Christian ; he is not in the road to heaven at all, and
every step he takes only conducts him farther and farther from the object in
view. When a man is in a wrong road, the farther he goes in it the more he is
astray. [To be
concluded]