08 Jesus Himself Began to be About Thirty Years of Age
VIII JESUS HIMSELF BEGAN TO BE ABOUT THIRTY YEARS OF AGE
Now, why, would you suppose, was our Lord so late in entering upon the proper work of His life? For, thirty years of age in the East is equal to thirty-five or forty years of age with us in the West. And, speaking after the manner of men would that not be looked on as very late in life for any of us to enter on the real work of our life? You may not indulge yourselves in such speculations as these. And I neither praise you nor blame you for that. Only, speaking for myself, I find nothing in this world so entrancing to me as to go back and pay one adoring visit after another to Nazareth, and to think of the thirty years that my Lord spent there, and of what He was doing there all those thirty years. The last three years of His life on earth are far oftener visited by me than the first thirty. But that is because we have so much full and reliable information about our Lord during those three years. At the same time, the very lack of such full and such reliable information about the foregoing thirty years of our Lord’s life on earth gives a fascination to those years to me that carries my heart captive. For, when I take those thirty years and the succeeding three years together, they form to me by far the most fascinating succession of years from the creation of Adam down to the day of judgment. The years of next interest and next importance to me, after my Lord’s thirty-three years on earth, are my own now twice His number of earthly years. My own allotted years are, in the nature of things, of the utmost and the most intimate interest and importance to me. At the same time His allotted years, first twelve, then eighteen, and then three, are, out of all measure, more important to me than all my own years. For it had been beyond all words better for me that all my allotted years on earth had been blotted out before they were begun, unless all His years are to be imputed to me, and are to be set down to my account, as having all been undertaken and accomplished for me. Now, since that is so, you will see that it is from no desire to be wise above what is written that I go so often back and tarry so long on those all-important thirty years of my Lord’s life on earth. It is with no idle curiosity that I go back to those years of His. It is with the deepest adoration, and with an ever-increasing faith and love and obedience that I so go back. If you have no understanding, and no imagination, and no intellectual and spiritual taste for such things, then you will not join with me to-night in my meditation which I have made touching those thirty years of my Lord.
1. There are these five things that may safely be taken as having entered into those thirty years of our Lord’s life in Nazareth. There may well have been many more things that we cannot wade out into; but let us take these five. And first. Some think that it was an old Levitical law that ruled our Lord’s long life of seclusion and silence. Some think that it was Moses who fixed for our Lord the exact year of His entrance on His open Messiahship. And for that view of theirs they quote this enactment out of the Books of Moses, From thirty years old, and upwards, even until fifty years old, all that enter into the host, to do the work of the tabernacle of the congregation," and so on. And then there is the fact that Joseph was thirty years old when he first stood before Pharaoh, and David was thirty years old when he began to reign in Hebron. On the other hand, some others think that all these cases are but so many Old Testament coincidences, and that they do not throw any real light on the problem of our Lord’s thirty years delay in beginning His openly Messianic life.
2. Speaking for myself, it would not stumble me were I to be told that the very homeliest of all homely duties had not a little to do with our Lord’s so long seclusion in Nazareth. It would not offend against my own sense of the fitness of things were I to be told that our Lord was not set free from those homely obligations of His till He began to be about thirty years of age. It would not shock my feelings of reverence toward my Lord were I to be told that His weekly wages were all needed at home till the day when His manifestation to Israel could no longer be postponed. I am not dogmatising for any one else, but I never read this taunt that His townsmen threw at Him on account of his notorious lack of preparation for His preaching, without thinking of the place He must for so long have filled in that early orphaned, and suddenly impoverished household of which He was now the responsible head. "Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary? the brother of James, and Joses, and Judas, and Simon?" And, then, as if they were enumerating those of Mary’s family who had not as yet found homes of their own, His contemptuous townsmen go on to add--"And are not His sisters here with us?" Does it not look to you as if His four brothers had all gone away to homes of their own by this time, and had left their widowed mother and her unmarried daughters dependent on her eldest son? Yes. It may well have been for the very humblest and homeliest of reasons that our Lord was still known among His kinsfolk and acquaintance as "the carpenter," long after He was well on into His Messianic ministry. "I have coveted," said His apostle, "no man’s silver, or gold, or apparel. Yea, ye yourselves know, that these hands have ministered to my necessities, and to them that were with me."
3. But, very humble and very homely as our Lord’s outward life was for thirty years, all that is perfectly compatible with an inward life that was high and heavenly all that time, far beyond all understanding or imagination of men. Who hath known the mind of our Lord all that time, or who hath been His counselor during those thirty years of His in Nazareth? Who can tell but that it may have taken Him all those thirty years of meditation, and prayer, and communion with His Father, and with the Holy Ghost, and with Himself, to enable Jesus of Nazareth to apprehend that for which He had been apprehended of His Father and of the Holy Ghost? To apprehend, if not to comprehend, what it was for Him, the son of Mary, to be taken up into the very Godhead of the Son of God, and to be made one with the Son of God for ever. What tremendous years were those, and what untold discoveries and experiences and attainments were going forward in those tremendous years, during which a mortal man came at last to feel Himself at home in the bosom of the Father. Just think how long it has taken the Church of Christ with the Holy Ghost to help her, to enter but a little way into that mystery of Godliness, the Word made flesh. It has taken nineteen centuries for the Holy Ghost to take some of those things of Christ and to show them to Paul, and to John, and to Athanasius, and to Basil, and to Cyril, and to a great apostolic succession of doctors and saints, down to our own day. All the Epistles of Paul, the Fourth Gospel, all the canons and decrees and catechisms of all the Councils and all the Synods and all the Assemblies of the Church of Christ, were already being written on the living tables of our Lord’s mind and heart. Nicea sat in the carpenter’s shop at Nazareth, and beside Nicea sat Constantinople and Chalcedon and many other sacred Synods, till He at whose feet they all sat was able to say such things in their hearing as these :--"No man knoweth the Son but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father but the Son. I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life, no man cometh to the Father but by Me. And this is life eternal, that they might know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom Thou hast sent."
I do not wonder that it took thirty years and more for a mortal man like one of ourselves to be taken up into God, and to be henceforth so much one with God as to be able to come forth from God to speak and to act in such a divine way as He did speak and act in Galilee and in Jewry and in Samaria. If we are to speak about the man Jesus of Nazareth at all in such a transcendent dispensation as was that of the Incarnation, then no number of years would seem to be too many or anything but too few, for the creature to be taken up and for ever made one with the Creator; for Mary’s carpenter-son to be taken up and made part and parcel of the very Son of Almighty God Himself. No doubt you will remind me that you yourselves have been made the sons and daughters of the Lord Almighty in much shorter time than thirty years. And I rejoice with you that it is so. But if your sonship is to be a well understood and a solid possession to you, you must always remember that there would have been no such sonship possible for you unless the Sonship of Jesus Christ had gone before yours and so had secured yours for you. Jesus of Nazareth is first taken up into the Divine Sonship, and then you are taken up into Him. Go back often with me to His union with God, and then often descend from that union into our union with Him.
4. And then there is this also. And it is a thing that is almost as great a wonder to me as any,--how during those eighteen years He could be made " the righteousness of God" to all them that believe. Alford, who is far too much neglected in these days, has this fine passage on this subject:--"We are apt to forget that it was during those eighteen mysterious years that much of the work of the second Adam was done. The growing up through infancy, childhood, youth, manhood, from grace to grace, from holiness to holiness, in subjection, in self-command, and in love, without one polluting touch of sin,--this it was that, consummated by the three years of active ministry, by the Passover, and by the cross, constituted that obedience of one Man by which many were made righteous." Yes; my brethren. The suretyship-righteousness by which we are justified did not spring into existence for the first time when Paul first preached it in his immortal Epistle to the Romans. Far less when Luther wrote his life-giving commentary on the Galatians. Neither did that glorious righteousness of Christ come into being when you and I first put it on to justification of life. That suretyship-righteousness of Christ for us came into existence, step by step, during those eighteen or thirty-three years. Every breath that our Surety drew during those wonderful years; every thought of His, and every word of His, and every deed of His, it all entered into that justifying righteousness which He was working out, not for Himself but for us. You must not wonder at my often going back with rapture to those great suretyship years. If you were only as naked to your shame as I am, you would go back with me, and would with me watch Jesus Christ working out moment by moment a righteousness for you that you cannot work out for yourselves. "So, then," said Greatheart, "here is a righteousness that Christ, as God, has no need of, for He is God without it. And it is a righteousness that Christ, as man, has no need of, for He is perfect man without it. And since He has it and wanteth it not, therefore He giveth it away, and hence ’tis called the gift of righteousness. Our Lord hath woven two coats, as it were; one for Himself, and one to spare. Wherefore He freely bestows one upon those who have none. Your Lord Christ is He that has worked, and has given away that He worked to the next poor beggar He meets. Thus He has ransomed you from all your sins by His blood, and has covered your polluted and deformed souls with His righteousness; for the sake of which, ’God passeth by you, and will not hurt you, when He comes to judge the world.’" "O, thou loving one!" exclaimed Christiana at Greatheart’s words--"thou deservest to have me, for thou hast bought me! Thou hast paid for me ten thousand times more than I am worth. No wonder that this made the water stand in my dear husband’s eyes, and that it made him trudge so nimbly on. I am persuaded he wished me with him; but, vile wretch that I was, I let him come all alone. O Mercy! that thy father and mother were here, yea, and Mrs. Timorous also. Nay, I wish with all my heart that here were Madame Wanton too. Surely their hearts would be affected till they could not refuse to become good pilgrims."
5. And then, as if all that were not enough to make those thirty years of His to overflow, there is this also. During those thirty years He was in all points "tempted like as we are." And thou shalt remember,--it may be prophetically and mystically read of Him,--"all the way the Lord thy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness to humble thee, and to prove thee, and to know what was in thine heart; to know whether thou wouldst keep His commandments, or no. And He humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna, that He might make thee know that man doth not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the month of the Lord doth man live." What a spectacle Nazareth must have been, as it was seen from heaven, for those thirty tempted and tried years! No wonder that the angels desired to look into them! And no wonder that at the end of those years the heavens opened, and a voice came down, which said, "Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased."
"I often take a turn up and down in my old unregenerate state," says a great saint. Let us all join him in that. Let us often go back over our past years--how many are they now? And let us stop and recall where we were at such and such a year, and what we were doing. Let us go back upon all the way that the Lord our God led us all those wilderness years, to know what was in our heart, and to know whether we would keep his commandments or no. And if the retrospect fills us with a great remorse, and with a great horror at the prospect of death and judgment,--then let us go back, as we have done to-night, to our Surety-Redeemer, and take His holy and God-pleasing life, and lay it over against our own sinful and God-condemned life. And that not once, nor twice. But let us keep constantly doing all that, till the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall drive all remorse and all horror out of our hearts for ever. And till He is made of God to us, not peace of conscience only, but wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption. For it hath pleased the Father that in Him should all fulness dwell, till as many as believe in Him are complete in Him.