Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chapters I to XIVMaclaren, Alexander
Religion
Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chapters I to XIV
Maclaren, Alexander
Bible. John -- Commentaries
I do not mean, as is sometimes meant, by that statement that a man has
to try to force his understanding into the attitude of accepting
religious truth, in order that he may have an experience which will
convince him that it is true. I mean a very much simpler thing than
that, and a very much truer one, viz. this, that unless we trust to
Christ and take our illumination from Him, we shall never behold a
whole set of truths which, when once we trust Him, are all plain and
clear to us. It is no mysticism to say that. What do you _know_ about
God?—I put emphasis upon the word 'know'—What do you know about Him,
however much you may argue and speculate and think probable, and fear,
and hope, and question, about Him? What do you know about Him apart
from Jesus Christ? What do you know about human duty, apart from Him?
What do you know of all that dim region that lies beyond the grave,
apart from Him? If you trust Him, if you fall at His feet and say
'Rabbi! Thou art my Teacher and mine illumination,' then you will see.
You will see God, man, yourselves, duty; you will see light upon a
thousand complications and perplexities; and you will have a brightness
above that of the noonday sun, streaming into the thickest darkness of
death and the grave and the awful hereafter. Christ is the Light. In
that 'Light shall we see light.' And just as it needs the sun to rise
in order that my eye may behold the outer world, so it needs that I
shall have Christ shining in my heaven to illuminate the whole
universe, in order that I may see clearly. 'Believe and thou shalt
see.' For only when we trust Him do the mightiest truths that affect
humanity stand plain and clear before us.
And besides that, if we trust Christ, we get a living experience of a
multitude of facts and principles which are all mist and darkness to
men except through their faith; an experience which is so vivid and
brings such certitude as that it may well be called vision. The world
says, 'Seeing is believing.' So it is about the coarse things that you
can handle, but about everything that is higher than these invert the
proverb, and you get the truth. 'Seeing is believing.' Yes, in regard
to outward things. Believing is seeing in regard to God and spiritual
truth. 'Believest thou? thou shalt see.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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