2.03.21. The witness of a pure life
XXL THE WITNESS OF A PURE LIFE.
“Having your conversation honest among the Gentiles: that, whereas they speak against you as evil-doers, they may by your good works, which they shall behold, glorify God in the day of visitation. Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake.”— 1 Peter 2:12-13.
HAVING your conversation honest.” Both terms need some explanation. Both words come from the Latin, and have in process of time greatly changed their meaning. In modem English, conversation means the talking of two or more persons with each other; but the sense in the text is, the whole habit and life-course of a person, — his character, and temper, and conduct in presence of his fellows. You are exposed now on this side and now on that, — now to one observer and now to another. See that the whole circumference of your life be wise and pure and true. At all times, and in all circumstances, walk circumspectly, for you never know who may be looking on. The modern meaning of honest is, that you do not cheat in a bargain; but as used here, and in ancient times generally, it signifies beautiful, — first a material and then a moral winsomeness. These two terms in conjunction convey the precept. Let all the circumference of your life shine in the beauty of holiness.
Alas! bid this dull earth shine like a star of heaven! There is nothing impossible there. In very deed this opaque globe does shine as a star, not a whit behind its neighbours in brightness, when it receives and reflects the sunbeams. To have commanded the house of Israel to shine as a light to surrounding nations would have been an impossible requirement, if the precept had not been mated with a promise. But as the record runs, it is a reasonable service that is demanded: “ Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee” (Isaiah 60:1). This precept given by Peter is on both its sides the echo of Isaiah’s words. A light is needed because darkness reigns around. Peter desiderates a beautiful life among the Gentiles; and Isaiah expects that, when Israel basks in the favour of God, the Gentiles shall come to their light.
It was in the same spirit that the Lord promised to the eleven before the Pentecost, “ Ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me.” The nations sat in darkness, and the disciples of Christ were commissioned to go out as lights in the world. One day, the people of Lystra brought a garlanded ox, and would have sacrificed to Paul as a god; another day they stoned him, and left him for dead. Such was heathenism at its best.
It is a characteristic of true faith that it has positive hope. It does not despair even when things are at the worst, for it trusts in God. It is not enough that the primitive disciples should repel surrounding, assailing evil, and hold their own. They expect to make aggression and to gain a victory; to turn scoffs into hymns of praise, and enemies of Christ into zealous disciples: ’* That, whereas they speak against you as evil-doers, they may by your good works, which they shall behold, glorify God in the day of visitation.”
It is not by the loudest debate and profession that these conquests can be made. It is not by what Christians say, but by what Christians are, that they can win the neighbourhood. The call is not so much to give evidence, as to be witnesses. What the adversaries see will be more effectual to convert them than what they hear. It is by their “ walk “ that Paul distinguished certain persons at Philippi as enemies of the cross of Christ; and it is by their walk that true disciples may most effectually challenge recognition as its real friends.
Still further the precepts run down into detail. Submission to magistrates is prescribed as a Christian duty.
Considering the time and the circumstances, this is a remarkable feature of the New Testament Scriptures. They are in favour of authority, but not of tyranny. The gospel fosters liberty, but does not suggest insurrection.
Witness the emigration of the persecuted Puritans from England to America. These men would not resist constituted authority; but neither would they allow themselves to be crushed by a despot, as long as a remedy, which they could with a good conscience adopt, lay within their reach. The results will tell with decisive effect on the future condition of the human race.
Ordinances of man should be obeyed, but they stand not on the same level with ordinances of God. Divine laws that directly appeal to the individual conscience must be obeyed absolutely and at all hazards; ordinances enacted by the civil legislature are binding also when they do not come in conflict with a higher law. If any man resist civil enactment, regularly made and enforced, it is at his own peril. He must in that case make very sure that the law of God forbids obedience. The principle that we must obey God rather than man, is precious not only as a religious truth, but as the firmest safeguard of national liberty. But there is an application of that principle in vogue in some quarters of Europe which is a caricature of truth and decency. When the Pope issues an order to the subjects of a king, or the citizens of a commonwealth, which is directly at variance with the laws of the State, and Papists claim the liberty of obeying their spiritual head in defiance of their country’s law, under authority of the rule. Obey God rather than man, they ofifer an insult to the common sense of the community, and to the real authority of the divine Word. It seems degrading to the dignity of human nature to be obliged even to maintain an argument on this question. The citizen who profanely identifies the random and passionate assertion of a foreign priest with the word of the living God addressed to the souls that he has made, does not deserve an answer. When he violates the “ ordinance of man “ — the legal statutes of the constituted authorities — on such grounds, he must even be left in prison to meditate on the consequences of his crime.
How honest old Peter would have stared, if any one had proposed a qualifying clause at this point of his Epistle, to the eficct that any one should be at liberty to resist the ordinance, provided a priest in Rome, claiming to be Peter’s successor, gave him permission!