108. O Methought, Christ! Christ! Christ!

CVIII ‘O Methought, Christ! Christ! Christ!’

JOHN BUNYAN frankly confesses to us that he never had the advantage of going to school to Aristotle or to Quintilian or to Longinus. At the same time, and in spite of that great disadvantage, he is able to employ their rhetorical figure of apostrophe to absolute perfection. Genial and generous Nature, very Genius herself, was the tinker’s sole and sufficient teacher in his oratorical style. And then the grace of God came to him and gave him his unparalleled impulse and opportunity. Till he is as good at this literary figure of those ancient masters as if he had taken first-class honours in one of their famous schools. And till we carry this great apostrophe of his in our memories and in our hearts beside the great apostrophies of the prophets and the psalmists and the apostles. And till we borrow this great apostrophe of his and make use of it on our own account and on our own occasions almost as much as if it were Holy Scripture itself.

‘O methought, Christ! Christ! There was nothing but Christ that was now before my eyes! O Christ! O Christ! O Christ! My Lord and my Saviour! O Christ! O Christ!’

Let us take in his own order some of John Bunyan’s experiences of the grace of Christ that led him to apostrophise Christ in this so impassioned and so impressive way. You all have the first of those great passages of his by heart, and therefore you will enjoy it all the more when I again repeat it in your hearing. Out of Paul himself I know nothing to equal this passage:

‘But one day as I was passing in the field, and that too with some dashes in my conscience, fearing lest yet all was not right, suddenly this sentence fell upon my soul, Thy Righteousness is in Heaven! And, methought, withal, I saw with the eyes of my soul, Jesus Christ at God’s Right Hand. There, I say, was my Righteousness. So that wherever I was or whatever I was doing, God could not say of me that He wanted my righteousness, for, there it was, just before Him. I also saw, moreover, that it was not my good frame of heart that made my Righteousness better, nor my bad frame that made my Righteousness worse. For my Righteousness was Jesus Christ Himself, the same yesterday to-day and for ever.’ And again:

‘Twas glorious to me to see His exaltation, and the worth and the prevalency of all His benefits. And that because I could now look from myself to Him, and should reckon that all those graces of God that were now green on me, were yet but like those crack-groats and four-pencehalfpennies that rich men carry in their purses, when their gold is in their trunks at home! O, I saw that my gold was all in my trunk at home! Even in Christ, my Lord and my Saviour! Now Christ was my all! He was made of God to me all my Wisdom, all my Righteousness, all my Sanctification, and all my Redemption!’

Now, righteousness, you will remark, is the one foundation of all those glorious passages. And righteousness is the one foundation of a thousand passages elsewhere, far more glorious than any passage even in Grace Abounding. For righteousness is the one foundation word and the one foundation thing of all the great foundation passages in the prophets, and in the psalmists, and in the greatest of all the apostles. If you will take the trouble to consult your Cruden on this great subject you will see that for yourselves. And as you think over all that, this reflection cannot but occur to you that of all the preachers of the Gospel, old or new, John Bunyan and his Puritan contemporaries come, by a long way, the nearest to David, and to Isaiah, and to Paul in this fundamental matter of righteousness: what it is, in whom we have it, how it is to be obtained, and how it is to be held fast and for ever made our own. Now as regards righteousness, true and pure and complete righteousness of heart and of life, you yourselves know as well as Paul and Luther and Bunyan, how the holy law of God condemns you to your face every day and every hour you live: condemns you, and all but executes you on the spot. God’s holy law arrested and condemned and executed David, and Isaiah, and Paul, and Luther, and Bunyan every day, and on the spot, as you will read in their great autobiographies. And what those great sinners did when they were so executed and slain we read in all their apostrophes, and in all their prayers, and in all their praises.

Now with all that the main point for us is this, not what Paul and Luther and Bunyan did, but what you and I do when we are in the same awful condemnation. To us the priceless importance of the Psalms and the Romans and the Galatians and the Grace Abounding stands in this, that they all show us what all those sinful men did in their dreadful extremity. And it was what they were enabled to do, or rather it was what Christ came and did for them, that makes them all so to apostrophise Him in every psalm and epistle and paragraph of theirs. And as many of you as are taken by the throat continually by God’s broken law, it is for you above all men that the Psalms and the Romans and the Galatians and theGrace Abounding were all written. Nobody but you, and the like of you, will understand a single line of those divine books: no, not one single syllable. And then if you will take your lesson in all this matter of righteousness and life from John Bunyan, he will do you a service in this respect that neither Aristotle, nor Quintilian, nor Longinus, nor Dionysius of Halicarnassus can do you. That is to say, he will take you to his own school of Christian doctrine and Christian experience and Christian eloquence, and he will there teach you how to adore and how to magnify and how to apostrophise and how to cry continually, O Christ! O Christ! O Christ! And that with more and more passion and more and more rapture every new day: O methought, Christ! Christ! There was nothing but Christ that was now before my eyes! I was not now only for looking upon this or that benefit of Christ apart, as of His Blood, His Burial, or His Resurrection. But I considered Him now as a whole Christ. As He in whom all these and all other His Virtues, Relations, Offices, and Operations met together: and that too, as He sat on the Right Hand of God in Heaven.

Sometimes, so Bunyan tells us about himself, he would be like David in the Hundred and Third Psalm and like our own Shorter Catechism. That is to say, he would sometimes look at some one benefit of Christ alone and by itself. As David looked in that fine psalm of his now at the forgiveness of all his iniquities, and now at the healing of all his diseases, and now at the redemption of his life from destruction, and now at the satisfying of his mouth with good things, and now at this, that God had not dealt with him after his sins, nor had rewarded him according to his iniquities. Or again as our Catechism looks in one place at our assurance of God’s love, and then at our peace of conscience, and then at our joy in the Holy Ghost, and then at our increase of grace, and then at our perseverance therein to the end. And again our Catechism looks at the benefits believers receive from Christ at their death, and then again, at the benefits they receive at their resurrection. And Bunyan sometimes looked at his salvation benefits one by one and apart in that way. But as he became better and better skilled in this matter, so far as he himself was concerned, and not finding fault with the Psalm, nor with the Catechism, he was now not only for looking upon this or the other benefit of Christ apart and by itself. But he got more and more into the great evangelical way of gathering up all Christ’s benefits into Christ Himself. In his own so expressive words, he more and more accustomed himself to consider Christ as a whole Christ and as a complete Christ. He more and more trained himself and practised himself to see Christ and to treat with Him as the true Christ of God in whom it has pleased the Father that all God’s fullness should dwell. And out of whose fullness, day after day and hour after hour, he was to receive the assurance, and the experience, and the personal possession of all his salvation benefits, as often as he felt his need of them, and again went back to Christ for them. And it was as he continually returned to Christ for all his salvation benefits that he more and more broke out into this adoring and rapturous apostrophe: O Christ! O Christ! O Christ! My Lord and my Saviour! O Christ, the alone source and spring of all my saving benefits! O Christ! O Christ! O Christ!

Now after all that, was it any wonder that the very Name of Christ, as often as he read it in the Word of God, was made to spangle in John Bunyan’s eyes. ‘Spangle’ is his own expressive word in this matter. And no wonder. For whose eyes would not spangle at that glorious Name? Whose eyes that were once opened truly to see Him to whom that glorious Name belongs? I have often seen your own eyes spangling in this house and in your own house at home as I read that Name to you in the Gospels and in the Epistles. I saw some of your eyes spangling like the sun itself this forenoon and this afternoon as often as the Name of Christ fell again upon your open and hungry ears as you sat at His Table. How could it be otherwise? As John Bunyan says, you would be so many Philistines if your eyes did not spangle at that Name which is above every name. Far better be born and die without having eyes at all than have to give an account of two eyes that had never once spangled at the Name of Christ. You will need nothing more to secure you a great welcome and an abundant entrance on that Day than just the light and the love that will spangle in your eyes at your first sight of Christ. I always think of our own Samuel Rutherford as having two of the most Christ-spangling eyes in all the world. You will all remember how he was wont to protest that from the day when he first saw Christ in the beauty of His holiness, he had so fallen in love with Christ, that he could give up his whole heart to no one else. He was wont to write to his more spangling-eyed correspondents that if he loved wife or child or Anwoth, and he loved them all with all his big and warm heart; yet, all the time, it was in Christ, and for Christ’s sake, that he so loved them. And in the spangling of his heart he was wont to declare that he loved his very banishment in Aberdeen because it was for Christ’s sake that he was living in silence there. And he was wont to declare also that he would welcome the stake and the gallows for the same Name, and that his eyes would spangle and that he would apostrophise Christ as he fell bound among the flames. Happy people! who besides your Bible have the spangling books of John Bunyan and Samuel Rutherford. Happy people who possess spangling eyes wherewith to read the Name of Christ in those spangling books! Now it was to teach and to constrain and to compel a multitude that no man can number to exclaim, O Christ! O Christ! O Christ! and that with spangling eyes: that was the final cause, as Aristotle would have said had he known it, and the chief end of all created things and all redeemed things and all restored things. Yes, the very creation itself, and then the fall, and then the cross, and then the Lord’s Supper; all law and all righteousness, all grace and all glory; all, all was intended and was overruled to lead all God’s saints up to this apostrophe: O Christ! O Christ! O Christ!

Aye and all your own personal experience of sin, with all your unspeakable misery and shame and degradation all your days on account of your sin, with all your inward agony from that never-ceasing war in your own soul between sin and grace, a war and a bondage past all imagination of mortal man; it has all been appointed you and ordained you in order that you might be brought at last to exclaim, with spangling eyes: O Christ! O Christ! O Christ! And if any of you have been so exclaiming all this communion day, then your households should keep their eyes on you and watch well both your going out and your coming in lest you be not left much longer with them. For the days of the years of your pilgrimage among them must be fast nearing their accomplishment when that communion day comes on which your heart is so carried captive all the day that you are heard to utter nothing so articulately as this: O Christ! O Christ! O Christ! Then the heavenly elder will soon be at your door with your communion card for the Table above. And when it is all over here I will tell you what will happen to you on your arrival there. Make way! it will be proclaimed as with the sound of a trumpet: Make way for this great lover of our Lord! Make way for this communicant with the rich voice and the spangling eyes! And then you will begin fully to see and fully to understand and fully to accept why it was that you had to pass through such a hell upon earth while you were here, through such a lifetime of such sinfulness and such spiritual suffering on account of your sinfulness. And why also you were so emptied from vessel to vessel till now you are to be for ever sanctified and for ever satisfied with the love of Christ and with your everlasting likeness to Christ. Only, your heart will be so full when you first see Christ that you will not be able for a time even to say to Him so much as His Name. But He will say your name to you. And to hear your name even once from His lips, with His eyes spangling when He sees you — let the bride describe your feelings: ‘He brought me,’ you will say, ‘to the banqueting house, and His banner over me was love. Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples; for I am sick of love. His left hand is under my head, and his right hand doth embrace me.’ ‘Beloved,’ says one of the friends of the Bridegroom to you and to all such as you are, ‘Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be; but we know that when He shall appear we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.’ ‘O methought, Christ! Christ!’ says another friend of the Bridegroom. ‘There was nothing now but Christ before my eyes. O Christ! O Christ! O Christ!’