2.01.09. Trees of righteousness ,Part 1

IX. TREES OF RIGHTEOUSNESS.

PART I.

“Make the tree good, and his fruit good.” — Matthew 12:33.

HERE are two kinds of religion in the world; and perhaps we would not greatly err, if we should say, there are two only. They stand over against each other, not only different but opposite in their essential characteristics; and the manifold varieties that have sprung up in diverse periods and diverse regions, may be classed under the one or the other of these two great normal types.

These two kinds of religion, so radically distinct that they cannot by any art be amalgamated, and yet so comprehensive that they include all religion under their ample folds, are not Christianity and Paganism, — are not Protestantism and Popery, — are not Presbytery and Episcopacy, — are not the Church spiritually free and the Church submitting to Erastian control. The two great genera, which between them comprehend all subordinate species, have distinct natures, but not distinguishing names. They cannot be designated by single words; they must be described by their essential features.

One kind of religion teaches that men are not so holy as they should be, but that by a little attention they may be improved; the other kind of religion confesses that men are all and only evil, and must be made new creatures ere they can be pleasing to God or fit for his presence. The first starts with the assumption of something good to begin with, and busies itself in making good better; the second starts with the assumption that all is evil, and seeks from God the grace to change the evil into good: the one mends, the other makes. The one looks up to heaven and says, “ I am not as other men; I fast, I pray, I give alms:” the other looks down to the earth and cries, “ God be merciful to me a sinner.” The one builds his house upon the sand, which, while the weather is fair, seems to his eye firm enough: the other refuses to build at all until he get down to the living rock.

Both confess failing; both seek help; and both seek help from Christ. In outward aspect they are like each other; so closely do they resemble each other, that in some aspects they are distinguished only by one little word. One says, Christ and I: the other says, Christ, not I. The one says, I cannot live alone, but I can live if Christ is near me: the other says, I live; nevertheless not I, but Christ liveth in me. The Lord and my righteousness, says this man: the Lord my righteousness, says that. Of these two that seem so familiar, the one is falsehood, the other truth; the one is darkness, the other light. The great Teacher himself took pains with his pupils on this point. At one time he allowed a self-righteous man to try his own method, that by the fall which it entailed he might be crushed out of his error. “ Good master,” said a promising scholar once, “ Good master, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life, “ Keep the commandments.”

“ I have kept them; what more?” “GO sell all that thou hast, and give to the poor, and come follow me.” Under this pressure the good resolution broke down; he went away sorrowful. On another occasion the Lord taught the same lesson in a gentler form to a more gentle inquirer: “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

It behoves us to know well this human error that undermines the spiritual life. It springs within, and circulates secretly but mightily, like the blood in the veins. By making light of the disease, it makes light also of the cure provided. By failing to estimate aright the fall, it forms a false judgment regarding the unspeakable gift of God.

It is not indeed written in the creed that mankind are holy in nature and in life; but the habit of the heart’s thoughts, flowing strong and steady like a river, counts the man in the main good, and seeks in religion not the new creation of the lost, but the gradual improvement of the defective. This system takes the word of Christ and turns it upside down. Christ says. Make the tree good, and his fruit good; but it says, Make the fruit good in the first place, and the tree will improve of its own accord. Leaving the tree as it grows, this system directs all its energies to the task of making the fruit good, or at least seem good. It is the weary work of dropping buckets into empty wells and growing old in bringing nothing up. It is the labour of a life-time to gather grapes off thorns and figs off thistles. The tree has grown from seed. For a while in its inf ajicy it bears no fruit, and it is not expected to bear any.

Before its nature is developed, it neither does good nor evil, in a tangible or practical form. Its nature and tendencies are fixed, but they are not known. People who look on the tender plant putting forth its leaves, expect that when it comes to maturity its fruit will be good. At length, while the tree is yet young, it begins to bear fruit. There is not much at first. The quantity is diminutive, but the quality is well defined. There is no mistake here. The fruit is bitter — is bad. But it is young. What could you expect? Wait for wisdom. They wait, they fence, they water; but the fruit is still bitter. In the case of the tree, as long as you look only on its fruit, you may be deceived in your judgment. The fruit may be thoroughly evil, and yet in colour and shape it may be like good fruit. It is only by tasting it that you can certainly determine its character. Our Father is the husbandman, and we are his husbandry. When we bear fruit, he is not contented with looking on its external appearance. He comes near and tastes it. A man cannot certainly determine the taste of the fruit that his neighbours bear — cannot certainly determine the taste even of his own. “Ye know not what spirit ye are of.” Peter did not discern what was the taste of his own soul’s emotions; but his Master knew and loathed it: “ Get thee behind me, Satan.” The outward appearance of a gift, for example, may have all the lineaments of charity; yet to Him who looketh on the heart, it may be a nauseous outgrowth of selfishness or pride. We must be purged from dead works as well as from bad works ere we can acceptably serve the living God. Dead works, though in form they may be the fulfilment of his law, are not sweet to his taste. That is a dreadful sentence which the risen Saviour pronounced on the fruit of a bitter tree: “ I will spue thee out of my mouth.”

I shall assume that the reader knows in the main how the common fruit trees of our gardens are made good. Instead of explaining the process of engrafting, I shall take for granted that it is known, and proceed at once to deduce and apply the lessons which the Lord’s brief parable suggests. The essence of the art consists in this, that the tree is not mended but made new. The old tree is cut off and cast away, and another is inserted in its stead. It is not amelioration, but regeneration. As in man’s husbandry, so in God’s. Good fruit is attained by making the tree good.

I shall now submit a series of lessons suggested by the analogy. Let us prolong for a little our walk through these avenues of nature, gathering as we go the precious fruits of grace. Among these trees of the garden we may now hear, not for judgment, but for mercy, the voice of the Lord God.

I. Although the tree has been made good by engrafting, and has consequently begun to bear good fruit, the young trees that spring from the seed of that good fruit, when it is sown again, take after the original bitter root of the parent tree, and not after the sweetness subsequently imparted to it. Trees that spring from the seed of an evil tree that has been made good, are not good but evil.

Bitter is every one, and bitter the fruit it bears, unless and until it put off itself and put on another.

Such is our condition as fallen; such is the law that lives in our members, whether we find out that law or not. The child of a Christian man is not by birth a Christian.

We are born into the condition which our parents had by nature, not into the condition into which they may have been brought by grace. It is true that blessings exceeding rich and precious accrue, in God’s covenant, to the children of believers, in virtue of their relation to godly parents; but the benefits do not include or amount to safety and holiness through the natural birthright. “Bom not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:13). Children, you may learn from the trees of the garden, and by the teaching of the Lord, that although your parents are saints on earth or in heaven, except ye be born again, ye cannot enter their home or join their company. So far am I from undervaluing the privilege of descent from the people of God, that every day I live I learn to give more fervent thanks to God that I was in this sense the seed of the righteous. I have no memory of my mother, for soon after my eyes were opened hers were closed; but something clearer, stronger than memory— something allied to faith, but not to sight— has for many years kept her by my side, as one that walks with God in white, and gently beckons me to follow her as she followed Christ. I do not undervalue the privilege of being by natural birth the seed of the righteous: I know it; I enjoy it; 1 have been enriched by it, more than they whose comand wine have most increased. But I warn all who enjoy the privilege, that it will not save them. There is only one Saviour. You cannot be carried into heaven by clinging to a parent’s skirts. Your place in the family of God’s children will aggravate your condemnation, if you do not yourselves accept Christ as your own; as they who fall from the greatest height are most deeply bruised by the fall.

II. As the first lesson is one of warning to those who presume upon their privileges, the second lesson is one of encouragement to those who have had in youth no privileges to presume upon. This lesson, too, we shall read from the tree that is made good.

Although a young tree has sprung from the seed of an evil tree, it may be made good by engrafting as easily and as effectually as if its parent had been the best in the garden.

These two lessons, both on the natural side and the spiritual, are precisely the converse of each other. The first is gathered from the natural fact that the tree which springs from the seed of one that has been made good needs to be engrafted ere it can become good like its parent; the second is gathered from the natural fact that a tree which has sprung from a parent not made good may by engrafting attain the goodness which its parent never knew. The one fact teaches that the privileged should not presume; the other fact teaches that the unprivileged need not be despondent. In point of fact, the cultivator of fruit trees does not make much distinction between the trees that have sprung from renewed and those that have sprung from unrenewed parents. He looks not to the parentage of the original root, but to the character of the new branch which is inserted. This new good branch is necessary to the plant that came from the seed of the best tree; and it is sufficient for the plant that came from the seed of the worst. The rule that the character of the tree follows the branch that has been grafted on as head, and not the root out of which it has sprung, points equally in two opposite directions and tells in two different results. Pretensions of good in the root, and fears of evil, are equally destitute of validity. Those do not count in favour of the tree, and these do not count against it.

Most necessary and most precious is the corresponding fact in the spiritual sphere. As we have already seen that the goodness of the parents, although they are new creatures in Christ, cannot pass through the natural birth into the children, so as to save them, so we now, in the second place, assuredly gather, that the badness of parents, although they remain in the gall of bitterness and the bond of iniquity, does not penetrate through the conversion of children so as to condemn them. As certain substances, although in quantity small as a quivering film, act as nonconductors, and, when interposed effectually, bar the passage of electricity, however strong may be the current, or however near may be the congenial receiver, so generation is a non-conductor of grace, and regeneration a non-conductor of corruption. Grace, though pulsing strong in the parent, cannot pass through birth into the child; corruption, though pulsing in the parent, and communicated also to the child, cannot pass the regeneration, and reduce the child who is born again into the spiritual condition of the unconverted parent. The cultivator of fruit trees can make as good a tree from the progeny of an evil parent as from the progeny of a good parent; so our Father, the husbandman, is wont, in his own inscrutable purposes, to create again in Christ many children whose parents remain in sin.

I have endeavoured to utter a needed warning to those who are descended from godly parents: Beware of a false hope; ye must be born again. I now, in turn, address a word of glad encouragement to children who have not known these privileges: Give not way to false fear; ye may be born again. The promise runs not. Him that is born of a godly parent, but, Him that cometh, I will in nowise east out.

Some of the bitterest reproaches cast against Christ in the days of his flesh became hymns to his praise. The wrath of man praised him when enemies exclaimed, ’ This man receiveth sinners.” To those who were not in childhood brought up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord — who either had no living father, or, sadder still, a father of whom they had cause to be ashamed — comfort and encouragement spring here. There is no respect of pei-sons with God. The rule of the kingdom is. Whosoever will. His father’s light did not bring one child into the kingdom, and his father’s darkness did not keep another out. The owner of a garden, when he is about to make his young trees good by engrafting, scarcely inquires which of them sprang from renewed trees, and which from trees that remained in the bitterness of nature. Placing all on a level, and treating all alike, he engrafts them all, and all the engrafted become good: in due time all bring forth good fruit together. Of these two classes, the church on earth — of these two classes, heaven on high is full; and, as they mingle in the praises of their Lord, nor man nor angel can distinguish between them. In the general assembly and church of the first-born, it will never be said, This one was the son of a saint, aud that one the son of a sinner. These distinctions are lost; they were written only in the earth, and the earth with its records will be burnt up. The son of a saint cannot be distinguished in the circle; he wears not a whiter robe, he bears not a fresher palm, he sings not a sweeter song than his neighbour. One baptism has blotted all distinctions out, and one description serves to designate all the throng, — They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.

Privileged, beware! What will your name to live avail you if you be dead? If you are not “found in Him/’ nothing in heaven or earth can open the door to let you in.

Destitute, be encouraged! Arise, lo He calleth you. If you come at his call, all the sins that ever defiled man, and all the devils that ever tempted him, cannot shut the door to keep you out.