The following is an expository lesson on 2 Corinthians 9:15 from Alexander
MacLaren. It is an edifying lesson which should help with Christian
understanding.
May God bless,
Carl
my website -- http://www.nettally.com/saints/
my blog -- http://www.anniemayhem.com/cgi-bin/wordpress/
---
God's Unspeakable Gift
- an Exposition Of The Scriptures
by Alexander MacLaren
Thanks be unto God for His unspeakable gift. - 2 Corinthians 9:15
It seems strange that there should ever have been any doubt as to what
gift
it is which evokes this burst of thanksgiving. There is but one of God's
many mercies which is worthy of being thus singled out. There is one
blazing
central sun which ****nes out amidst all the galaxy of lights which fill
the
heavens. There is one gift of God which, beyond all others, merits the
designation of 'unspeakable.' The gift of Christ draws all other divine
gifts after it. 'How should He not with Him also freely give us all
things.'
The connection in which this abrupt jet of praise stands is very
remarkable.
The Apostle has Been dwelling on the Christian obligation of giving
bountifully and cheerfully, and on the great law that a glad giver is
'enriched' and not impoverished thereby, whilst the recipients, for their
part, are blessed by having thankfulness evoked towards the givers. And
that
contemplation of the happy interchange of benefit and thanks between men
leads the fervid Apostle to the thoughts which were always ready to spring
to his lips - of God as the great pattern of giving and of the gratitude
to
Him which should fill all our souls. The expression here 'unspeakable' is
what I wish chiefly to fix upon now. It means literally that which cannot
be
fully declared. Language fails because thought fails.
I. The gift comes from unspeakable love.
God so loved the world that He gave His only gotten Son. The love is the
cause of the gift: the gift is the expression of the love. John's Gospel
says that the Son which is in the bosom of the Father has declared Him.
Paul
here uses a related word for unspeakable which might be rendered 'that
which
cannot be fully declared.' The declaration of the Father partly consists
in
this, that He is declared to be undeclarable, the proclamation of His name
consists partly in this that it is proclaimed to be a name that cannot be
proclaimed. Language fails when it is applied to the expression of human
emotion; no tongue can ever fully serve the heart. Whether there be any
thoughts too great for words or no, there are emotions too great. Language
is ever 'weaker than our grief' and not seldom weaker than our love. It is
but the surface water that can be run off through the narrow channel of
speech: the central deep remains. If it be so with human affection, how
much
more must it be so with God's love? With lowly condescension He uses all
sweet images drawn from earthly relation****ps, to help us in understanding
His. Every dear name is pressed into the service - father, mother,
husband,
wife, brother, friend, and after all are exhausted, the love which clothed
itself in them all in turn, and used them all to give some faint hint of
its
own perfection, remains unspoken. We know human love, its limitations, its
changes, its extravagances, its shortcomings, and cannot but feel how
unworthy it is to mirror for us that perfection in God which we venture to
name by a name so soiled. The analogies between what we call love in man
and
love in God must be supplemented by the differences between them, if we
are
ever to approach a worthy conception of the unspeakable love that
underlies
the unspeakable gift.
II. The gift involves unspeakable sacrifice.
Human love desires to give its most precious treasures to its object and
is
then most blessed: divine love cannot come short of human in this most
characteristic of its manifestations. Surely the copy is not to surpass
the
original, nor the mirror to flash more brightly than the sun which, at the
brightest, it but reflects. In such a matter we can but stammer when we
try
to find words. As our text warns us, we are trying to utter the
unutterable
when we seek to speak of God's giving up for us; but however such a
thought
may seem to be forbidden by other aspects of the divine nature, it seems
to
be involved in the great truth that 'God is love.' Since He is, His
blessedness too, must be in imparting, and in parting with what He gives.
A
humble wor****pper in Jewish times loved enough to say that he would not
offer unto God an offering that cost him nothing, and that loving height
of
self-surrender was at the highest, but a lowly imitation of the love to
which it looked up. When Paul in the Epistle to the Romans says, 'He that
spared not His own Son but delivered Him up for us all,' he is obviously
alluding to, and all but quoting, the divine words to Abraham, 'Seeing
thou
hast not withheld thy son, thine only son, from Me,' and the allusion
permits us to parallel what God did when He sent His Son with what Abraham
did when, with wrung heart, but with submission, he bound and laid Isaac
on
the altar and stretched forth his hand with the knife in it to slay him.
Such a representation contradicts the vulgar conceptions of a passionless,
self-sufficing, icy deity, but reflection on the facts of our own
experience
and on the blessed secrets of our own love, leads us to believe that some
shadow of loss passed across the infinite and eternal completeness of the
divine nature when 'God sent forth His Son made of a woman.' And may we
not
go further and say that when Jesus on the Cross cried from out of the
darkness of eclipse, 'My God! My God! Why hast Thou forsaken me?' there
was
something in the heavens corresponding to the darkness that covered the
earth and something in the Father's heart that answered the Son's. But our
text warns us that such matters are not for our handling in speech, and
are
Best dealt with, not as matters of possibly erring speculation, But as
materials for lowly thanks unto God for His unspeakable gift.
But whatever may be true about the love of the Father who sent, there can
be
no doubt about the love of the Son who came. No man helps his fellows in
suffering But at the cost of his own suffering. Sympathy means
fellow-feeling, and the one indispensable condition of all rescue work of
any sort is that the rescuer must bear on his own shoulders the sins or
sorrows that he is able to bear away. Heartless help is no help. It does
not
matter whether he who 'stands and says, "Be ye clothed and fed,"' gives or
does not give 'the things necessary,' he will be but a 'miserable
comforter'
if he has not in heart and feeling entered into the sorrows and pains
which
he seeks to alleviate. We need not dwell on the familiar truths concerning
Him who was a 'man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.' All through His
life He was in contact with evil, and for Him the contact was like that of
a
****d hand pressed upon hot iron. The sins and woes of the world made His
path through it like that of bare feet on sharp flints. If He had never
died
it would still have been true that 'He was wounded for our transgressions
and bruised for our iniquities.' On the Cross He completed the libation
which had continued throughout His life and 'poured out His soul unto
death'
as He had been pouring it out all through His life. We have no measure by
which we can estimate the inevitable sufferings in such a world as ours of
such a spirit as Christ's. We may know something of the solitude of
uncongenial society; of the pain of seeing miseries that we cannot
comfort,
of the horrors of dwelling amidst impurities that we cannot cleanse, and
of
longings to escape from them all to some nest in the wilderness, but all
these are but the feeblest shadows of the incarnate sorrows whose name
among
men was Jesus. Nothing is more pathetic than the way in which our Lord
kept
all these sorrows close locked within His Own heart, so that scarcely ever
did they come to light. Once He did permit a glimpse into that hidden
chamber when He said, 'O faithless generation, how long shall I be with
you,
how long shall I suffer you?' But for the most part His sorrow was
unspoken
because it was 'unspeakable.'
Once beneath the quivering olives in the moonlight of Gethsemane, He made
a
pitiful appeal for the little help which three drowsy men could give Him,
when He cried, 'My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death. Tarry ye
here and watch with Me,' but for the most part the silence at which His
judges 'marvelled greatly,' and raged as much as they marvelled, was
unbroken, and as 'a sheep before her shearers is dumb,' so 'He opened not
His mouth.' The sacrifice of His death was, for the most part, silent like
the sacrifice of His life. Should it not call forth from us floods of
praise
and thanks to God for His unspeakable gift?
III. The gift brings with it unspeakable results.
In Christ are hid 'all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.' When God
gave
us Him, He gave us a storehouse in which are contained treasures of truth
which can never be fully comprehended, and which, even if comprehended,
can
never be exhausted. The mystery of the Divine Name revealed in Jesus, the
mystery of His person, are themes on which the Christian world has been
nourished ever since, and which are as full of food, not for the
understanding only, but far more for the heart and the will, to-day as
ever
they were. The world may think that it has left the teaching of Jesus
behind, but in reality the teaching is far ahead, and the world's practise
is but slowly creeping towards its imperfect attainment. The Gospel is the
guide of the race, and each generation gathers something more from it, and
progresses in the measure in which it follows Christ,; and as for the
race,
so for the individual. Each of Christ's scholars finds his own gift, and
in
the measure of his faithfulness to what he has found makes ever new
discoveries in the unsearchable riches of Christ. After all have fed full
there still remain abundant baskets full to he taken up.
He who has sounded the depths of Jesus most completely is ever the first
to
acknowledge that he has been but as a child 'gathering pebbles on the
beach
while the great ocean lies unsounded before him.' No single soul, and no
multitude of souls, can exhaust Jesus; neither our individual experiences,
nor the experiences of a believing world can fully realise the endless
wealth laid up in Him. He is the Alpha and the Omega of all our speech,
the
first letter and the last of our alphabet, between which lie all the rest.
The gift is completed in consequences yet unspeakable. Even the first
blessings which the humblest faith receives from the pierced hands have
more
in them than words can tell. Who has ever spoken adequately and in full
correspondence with reality what it is to have God's pardoning love
flowing
in upon the soul? Many singers have sung sweet psalms and hymns and
spiritual songs on which generations of devout souls have fed, but none of
them has spoken the deepest blessedness of a Christian life, or the calm
raptures of communion with God. It is easy to utter the words
'forgiveness,
reconciliation, acceptance, fellow****p, eternal life'; the syllables can
be
spoken, but who knows or can utter the depths of the meanings? After all
human words the half has not been told us, and as every soul carries
within
itself unrevealable emotions, and is a mystery after all revelation, so
the
things which God's gift brings to a soul are after all speech unspeakable,
and the words 'cannot be uttered' which they who are caught up into the
third heavens hear.
Then we may extend our thoughts to the future form of Christian
experience.
'It doth not yet appear what we should be.' All our conceptions of a
future
existence must necessarily be inadequate. Nothing but experience can
reveal
them to us, and our experience there will be capable of indefinite
expansion, and through eternity there will be endless growth in the
appropriation of the unspeakable gift.
For us the only recompense that we can make for the unspeakable gift is to
receive it with 'thanks unto God' and the yielding up of our hearts to
Him.
God pours this love upon us freely, without stint. It is unspeakable in
the
depths of its source, in the manner of its manifestation, in the glory of
its issues. It is like some great stream, rising in the trackless
mountains,
broad and deep, and leading on to a sunlit ocean. We stand on the bank;
let
us trust ourselves to its broad bosom. It will bear us safe. And let us
take
heed that we receive not the gift of God in vain.
|
