30 Thou Art Not Yet Fifty Years Old

XXX THOU ART NOT YET FIFTY YEARS OLD

John 8:57 The Jews of Jerusalem did not know our Lord’s right age, but they made a bold guess at it. They felt themselves safe in saying that He had not yet turned fifty. As a matter of fact He had not much turned thirty. Now why was their guess at our Lord’s age so wide of the mark? What was it about our Lord that threw the Jews so far out in their reckoning? Why was it that He looked to them almost fifty when, in reality, He had only begun to be about thirty? There is not one single line written about our Lord that is not written for our learning. And this line also is written that we might, in some new way believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing, we might have life through His name. To begin with, the prophets and the psalmists of Israel always foresaw and foretold that when the Messiah came He would always look to the eyes of men to be very much older than He actually was. Though in Himself far fairer than any of the children of men, yet His offices and His experiences would so disfigure and deface Him that there would be no beauty left in Him. His visage was so marred more than any man and His form more than the sons of men. For He shall grow up before Him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground; He hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see Him there is no beauty that we should desire Him. He is despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and we hid, as it were, our faces from Him; He was despised, and we esteemed Him not. Surely He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we did esteem Him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But He was wounded for our transgressions I He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon Him; and with His stripes we are healed. These things said Esaias, when he foresaw Him and spake of Him. And David also foresaw Him and forespake of Him in the same way in the twenty-second Psalm. "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me? But I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised of the people. All they that see me laugh me to scorn; they shoot out the lip; they shake the head. I may tell all my bones; they look and stare upon me. They part my garments among them, and east lots upon my vesture." Now, if all that is at all a true forecast and prophecy of our Lord’s experiences, no wonder that He looked twenty years older than He actually was. For men’s looks do not go by the exact number of their years, but by a thousand other things. And then when the Messiah did come; our Lord’s daily life for thirty years in His mother’s house, and among His brothers and His sisters, must have much aged Him while He was yet young. When! was condoling on one occasion with a public man on account of the injustice and , the cruelty he was suffering out of doors--"O," he said to me, "you know I am very happy at home." But our Lord could not say that. And when a man is not happy at home, you know how that undermines his youth and his health and his strength and his ability to bear the tear and wear of public life. And then all His prophesied Messiahship beginning to be laid on our Lord through all those early years in His so uncongenial home,--how all that must have bowed His whole inward and outward life down to the earth before the time! His own tender-hearted sinlessness; and the universal and rampant and hard-hearted sinfulness all around Him; His unspeakable and unimaginable pain at the sight of all that around Him, and especially in those nearest and dearest to Him; that filling His opening Messiahship for the first thirty years of His earthly life,--no wonder that when He began to be about thirty years of age He already looked like fifty.

Seneca tells us that as often as Heraclitus went out of doors and beheld such multitudes of men all living and dying in sin and misery, he used to hasten home again, weeping all the way. Heraclitus was of a far too tender-hearted disposition to be sent into this world, and thus it was that he himself was one of those men for whom he used to weep. And so was our Lord. The evangelists as good as say the very same thing about our Lord that Seneca says about Heraclitus. "That it might be fulfilled," says Matthew, which was spoken by Esaias, "Himself took our infirmities, and bare our sicknesses." And they all tell us how He looked in pity on the multitudes and spoke of them as of sheep without a shepherd. And then John tells us how his Master groaned and wept at Lazarus’ grave. Democritus, on the other hand, never came out of doors without in-continently bursting into laughter, such rank fools did all men he met appear to him to be. But then we are told by some ancient authorities that our Lord was never once seen to laugh all His days. He only wept the more at what made Democritus so jest and jeer. Take your New Testament and go over the names of the men and the number of the things that must have made our Lord weep at their sin and at the wages of their sin, and when you have added it all up you will hold with Holy Scripture that Jesus Christ was far more a man of sorrows than ever Heraclitus could be. On every page of the Four Gospels you will come on men and on things that must have made our Lord’s head to be waters, and His eyes to be a fountain of tears. Whom do men say that I the Son of Man am? He asked at His disciples on one occasion in a holy curiosity. Some say Jeremias, was their answer. And they made a happy guess who so said. For what has Jeremias left on record concerning his own premature old age? He has left these things--"Oh that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, , that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people. Oh that I had in the wilderness a lodging-place of wayfaring men; that I might leave my people, and go from them! for they proceed from evil to evil, and they know not Me, saith the Lord. Take ye heed every man of his neighbor, and trust ye not in any brother; for every brother will utterly supplant, and every neighbor will walk with slanders. Behold, I am pressed under you, as a cart is pressed that is full of sheaves." His own continual neglect of Himself and other men’s continued neglect of Him, all added together, would all work together to age our Lord before His time. His too early hard work for His own support, and for the support of His mother’s house, and for the relief of the other houses of poor people round about; His incessant working with His hands, that He might have to give to them that needed it; the many nights He never slept on account of both work and prayer; His long seasons of fasting and prayer of which we are not fully told; His long and weary foot-journeys, and His long periods of exhausting preaching, with an occasional fig from off a wayside tree, and an occasional cup of water out of a wayside well; all that must have visibly told on our Lord. He laid down the severest rules on His disciples in the matter of their journeys and their lodgings and their meals, and He observed His own rules to the letter, and beyond it. He lay on the bare ground in the garden of Gethsemane far oftener than He slept in Martha’s house in Bethany. And during His last week He wholly exhausted and utterly spent Himself on those terrible sermons that to this day make us old to read them. And then He went out all night to the Mount of Olives. I often remember the impression this passage in Goodwin made on me when I first read it as an undergraduate student "This went on for the whole of that week before He was crucified," says the great Puritan. "For Christ, when He saw that He must die, and that now His time to die was come, He deliberately wore His body out. He cared not, as it were, what became of Him now. He wholly spent Himself in praying and in preaching. In this garden, where He had often received consolation and strength in prayer, in that place must Christ be first attacked, and there must He begin to suffer. For, indeed, God did so deal with Christ, that He would have all things that were most comfortable to Him to be most embittered to Him. He sweat His bloody sweat in this place where He had so often prayed." And in all that Gethsemane only summed up and sealed His whole life of caring not what became of Himself, nor how all His comforts were turned to bitterness, if only He were able to finish the awful work, the body- and soul-aging work, that His Father had laid on Him to do.

Now it is enough in many cases that the disciple be as his master. And how many of such disciples in this matter have we known? How many fellow-students has every university man known who simply gave way altogether, and went down to an untimely grave through great gifts allied to great poverty? And they, in not a few cases, the most brilliant of men. I see one of them at this moment. His emaciated frame rises up before me at this moment. The best Greek scholar of his time, as he lay in his starved and consumptive death-bed, looked to my eyes as if he had been seventy instead of three and twenty. May God’s best blessing rest on those men of means and heart who take to heart the fast-aging and fast-killing struggle of those gifted youths, who, alongside of their gifts, have their Master’s ambition to lay their gifts on the greatest of altars.

You may have seen speculations as to our Lord’s temperament, as it is called. Whether it was predominantly of the sanguine, or the choleric, or the melancholy order. The students of these things will find some most suggestive and most reverential reading on this subject in the second volume of Keim. After we have read all and thought all on this subject, we fall back upon this: Our Lord’s body and soul must have been the best compounded and the best balanced; His must have been the best temperament that was ever possessed by any of the sons of men. ’We," says John Owen, ’have not only the depravation of our natures in general to conflict withal; we have also the obliquity of our particular complexions and constitutions. But in the body and soul of Christ there was no disposition or tendency to the least deviation from perfect holiness. The exquisite harmony of His natural temperament made love, meekness, gentleness, patience, benignity, and goodness to be natural and cognate to Him." At the same time, "a more than ordinary depth of thought produces the melancholy temperament," says one of the most deep-thought men that ever lived. And it was this that made our Lord to be a man of such melancholy. He saw far deeper into the melancholy of men and things than any other man ever did, and that made Him carry a correspondingly heavier load on His mind and on His heart. And this also aged Him, as it ages, in their measure and degree, all men of the same mind. Our Lord’s exquisite and un-approached sensibility to all that He saw so deeply in all men and all things around Him, made Him the Man of Sorrows unparalleled and unapproached; till it is no wonder that it made Him look like fifty when as yet He was only beginning to be about thirty. But the half of what so aged our Lord has not been told, and cannot be told. For our Lord was such, that not only had He eyes to see deeper than other men, and a heart to feel heavier than other men; but as if that were not half enough for His great office before God, in the fearful language of Holy Scripture, our sinless Lord was made that which made Him so melancholy; in the awful words of the Holy Ghost, our Lord was made sin. And it was from His being made sin that all His unapproachable sorrow came, and all His increasing melancholy, and all His premature old age. Made sin. What a word! What an office! What a fore-ordination and predestination! And what a life-long and ever-increasing experience! Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? Behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow, which is done unto me, and wherewith the Loan hath afflicted me. But Israel doth not know. My people doth not consider.