437. Revision of Creeds

Revision of Creeds

Joh_11:44 : ’93Loose him and let him go.’94

My Bible is, at the place of this text, written all over with lead-pencil marks, made in December, 1889, at Bethany, on the ruins of the house of Mary and Martha and Lazarus. We dismounted from our horses on the way up from Jordan and the Dead Sea. Bethany was the summer evening retreat of Jesus. After spending the day in the hot city of Jerusalem, he would come out there almost every evening to the house of his three friends. I think the occupants of that house were orphans, for the father and mother are not mentioned. But the son and two daughters must have inherited property, for it must have been, judging from what I saw of the foundations and the size of the rooms, an opulent home. Lazarus, the brother, was now the head of the household, and his sisters depended on him, and were proud of him, for he was very popular and everybody liked him, and these girls were splendid girls. Martha, a first-rate housekeeper, and Mary, a spirituelle, somewhat dreamy, but affectionate, and as good a girl as could be found in all Palestine. But one day Lazarus got sick. The sisters were in consternation. Father gone and mother gone, they feel very nervous lest they lose their brother also. Disease did its quick work. How the girls hung over his pillow! Not much sleep about that house, no sleep at all. From the characteristics otherwise developed, I judge that Martha prepared the medicines, and made tempting ’91dishes of food for the poor appetite of the sufferer, but Mary prayed and sobbed. Worse and worse gets Lazarus until the doctor announces that he can do no more. The shriek that went up from that household when the last breath had been drawn, and the two sisters were being led by sympathizers into the adjoining room, all those of us can imagine who have had our own hearts broken. But why was not Jesus there as he so often had been? Far away in the country districts preaching, healing other sick, how unfortunate that this Omnipotent Doctor had not been at that domestic crisis in Bethany. When at last Jesus arrived in Bethany, Lazarus had been buried four days, and dissolution had taken place. In that climate the breathless body disintegrates more rapidly than in ours. If, immediately after decease, that body had been awakened into life, unbelievers might have said he was only in a comatose state, or in a sort of trance, and by some vigorous manipulation or powerful stimulant vitality had been renewed. No! Four days dead. At the door of the sepulchre is a crowd of people, but the three most memorable are Jesus, who was the family friend, and the two bereft sisters. We went into the traditional tomb in December, and it is deep down and dark, and with torches we explored it. We found it all quiet that afternoon of our visit, but the day spoken of in the Bible there was present an excited multitude. I wonder what Jesus will do? He orders the door of the grave removed, and then he begins to descend the steps, Mary and Martha close after him, and the crowd after them. Deeper down into the shadows and deeper! The hot tears of Jesus roll over his cheeks, and plash upon the back of his hands. Were ever so many sorrows compressed into so small a space as in that group pressing on down after Christ, all the time bemoaning that he had not come before?

Now all the whispering and all the crying and all the sounds of shuffling feet are stopped. It is the silence of expectancy. Death had conquered, but now the vanquisher of Death confronted the scene. Amid the awful hush of the tomb the familiar name which Christ had often had upon his lips in the hospitalities of the village home came back to his tongue, and with a pathos and an almightiness of which the resurrection of the last day shall be only an echo, he cries, ’93Lazarus, come forth!’94 The eyes of the slumberer open, and he rises and comes to the foot of the steps, and with great difficulty begins to ascend, for the cerements of the tomb are yet on him, and his feet are fast, and his hands are fast, and the impediments to all his movements are so great that Jesus commands: ’93Take off these cerements; remove these hindrances; unfasten these graveclothes; loose him, and let him go.’94

Oh, I am so glad that after the Lord raised Lazarus he went on, and commanded the loosening of the cords that bound his feet so that he could walk, and the breaking off of the cerement that bound his hands so that he could stretch out his arms in salutation, and the tearing off of the bandage from around his jaws so that he could speak. What would resurrected life have been to Lazarus if he had not been freed from all those cripplements of his body? I am glad that Christ commanded his complete emancipation, saying, ’93Loose him, and let him go.’94

The unfortunate thing now is that so many Christians are only half liberated. They have been raised from the death and burial of sin into spiritual life, but they yet have the graveclothes on them. They are, like Lazarus, hobbling up the stairs of the tomb bound hand and foot, and the object of this sermon is to help free their body and free their soul, and I shall try to obey the Master’92s command that comes to me, and comes to every minister of religion, ’93Loose him, and let him go.’94

First, many are bound hand and foot by religious creeds. Let no man misinterpret me as antagonizing creeds. I have eight or ten of them; a creed about religion, a creed about art, a creed about social life, a creed about government, and so on. A creed is something that a man believes, whether it be written or unwritten. The Presbyterian Church is now agitated about its creed. Some good men in it are for keeping it because it was framed from the belief of John Calvin. Other good men in it want revision. I am with neither party. Instead of revision, I want substitution. I was sorry to have the question disturbed at all. The creed did not hinder us from offering the pardon and the comfort of the Gospel to all men, and the Westminster Confession has not interfered with me one minute. But now that the electric lights have been turned on the imperfections of that creed’97and everything that man fashions is imperfect’97let us put the old creed respectfully aside and get a brand-new one.

It is impossible that people who lived hundreds of years ago should fashion an appropriate creed for our times. John Calvin was a great and good man, but he died more than three hundred years ago. The best centuries of Bible study have come since then, and explorers have done their work, and you might as well have the world go back and stick to what Robert Fulton knew about steamboats, and reject the subsequent improvements in navigation; and go back to John Guttenberg, the inventor of the art of printing, and reject all modern newspaper presses; and go back to the time when telegraphy was the elevating of signals, or the burning of bonfires on the hill-tops, and reject the magnetic wire which is the tongue of nations, as to ignore all the exegetes and the philologists, and the theologians of the last three hundred years, and put your head under the sleeve of the gown of a sixteenth-century doctor. I could call the names of twenty living Presbyterian ministers of religion who could make a better creed than John Calvin. The nineteenth century ought not to be called to sit at the feet of the sixteenth.

’93But,’94 you say, ’93it is the same old Bible, and John Calvin had that as well as the present student of the Scriptures.’94 Yes; so it is the same old sun in the heavens, but in our time it has gone to making daguerreotypes and photographs. It is the same old water, but in our century it has gone to running steam engines. It is the same old electricity, but in our time it has become a lightning-footed errand boy. So it is the old Bible, but new applications, new uses, new interpretations. You must remember that during the last three hundred years words have changed their meaning, and some of them now mean more, and some less. I do not think that John Calvin believed, as some say he did, in the damnation of infants, although some of the recent hot disputes would seem to imply that there is such a thing as the damnation of infants. A man who believes in the damnation of infants himself deserves to lose heaven. I do not think any good man could admit such a possibility. What Christ will do with all the babies in the next world I conclude from what he did with the babies in Palestine when he hugged them and kissed them. When some of you grown people go out of this world your doubtful destiny will be an embarrassment to ministers officiating at your obsequies, who will have to be cautious so as not to hurt surviving friends. But when the darling children go there are no ’93ifs’94 or ’93buts’94 or guesses.

We must remember that good John Calvin was a logician and a metaphysician, and by the proclivities of his nature put some things in an unfortunate way. Logic has its use, and metaphysics has its use, but they are not good at making creeds. A gardener hands you a blooming rose, dewy, fresh, but a severe botanist comes to you with a rose and says, ’93I will show you the structure of this rose,’94 and he proceeds to take it apart, and pulls off the leaves, and he says, ’93There are the petals,’94 and he takes out the anthers, and he says, ’93Just look at the wonderful structure of these floral pillars!’94 and then he cuts the stem to show you the juices of the plant. So logic or metaphysics takes the aromatic rose of the Christian religion and says, ’93I will just show you how this rose of religion was fashioned;’94 and it pulls off of it a piece, and says, ’93That is the human will,’94 and another piece, and says, ’93This is God’92s will,’94 and another piece, and says, ’93This is sovereignty;’94 and another piece, and says, ’93This is free agency;’94 this is this, and that is that. And while I stand looking at the fragments of the rose pulled apart, one whom Mary took for a gardener comes in, and presents me with a crimson rose, red as blood, and says, ’93Inhale the sweetness of this, wear it on your heart, and wear it forever.’94 I must confess that I prefer the rose in full bloom to the rose pulled apart.

What a time we have had with the dogmatics, the apologetics and the hermeneutics. The defect in some of the creeds is that they try to tell us all about the decrees of God. Now the only human being that was ever competent to handle that subject was Paul, and he would not have been competent had he not been inspired. I believe in the sovereignty of God and I believe in man’92s free agency, but no one can harmonize the two. It is not necessary that we harmonize them. Every sermon that I have ever heard that attempted such harmonization was to me as clear as mud. My brother of the nineteenth century, my brother of the sixteenth century, give us Paul’92s statement and leave out your own. Better one chapter of Paul on that subject than all of Calvin’92s institutes, able and honest and mighty as they are. Do not try to measure either the throne of God or the thunderbolts of God with your little steel pen. What do you know about the decrees? You cannot pry open the door of God’92s eternal counsels. You cannot explain the mysteries of God’92s government now; much less the mysteries of his government five hundred quintillion of years ago.

I move for a creed for all our denominations made out of Scripture quotations pure and simple. That would take the earth for God. That would be impregnable against infidelity and Apollyonic assault. That would be beyond human criticism. The denomination, whatever its name be, that can rise up to that will be the Church of the millennium, will swallow up all other denominations, and be the one that will be the bride when the Bridegroom cometh. Let us make it simpler and plainer for people to get into the kingdom of God. Do not hinder people by the idea that they may not have been elected. Do not tag on to the one essential of faith in Christ any of the innumerable non-essentials. A man who heartily accepts Christ is a Christian, and the man who does not accept him is not a Christian, and that is all there is of it. He need not believe in election or reprobation. He need not believe in the eternal generation of the Son. He need not believe in everlasting punishment. He need not believe in infant baptism. He need not believe in plenary inspiration. Faith in Christ is the criterion, is the test, is the pivot, is the indispensable.

But there are those who would add unto the tests rather than subtract from them. There are thousands who would not accept persons into church membership if they drink wine, or if they smoke cigars, or if they attend the theatre, or if they play cards, of if they drive a fast horse. Now I do not drink wine or smoke or attend the theatre, never played a game of cards, and do not drive a fast horse, although I would if I owned one. But do not substitute tests which the Bible does not establish. There is one passage of Scripture wide enough to let all in who ought to enter, and keep out all who ought to be kept out: ’93Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.’94 Get a man’92s heart right, and his life will be right.

But now that the old creeds have been put under public scrutiny, something radical must be done. Some would split them, some would carve them, some would elongate them, some would abbreviate them. At the present moment and in the present shape they are a hindrance. Lazarus is alive, but hampered with the old graveclothes. If you want one glorious Church, free and unencumbered, take off the cerements of old ecclesiastical vocabulary. Loose her, and let her go!

Again, there are Christians who are under sepulchral shadows, and hindered and hobbled by doubts and fears and sins long ago repented of. What they need is to understand the liberty of the sons of God. They spend more time under the shadow of Sinai than at the base of Calvary. They have been singing the only poor hymn that Newton ever wrote:

’91Tis a point I long to know,

Oft it causes anxious thought’97

Do I love the Lord or no,

Am I his or am I not?

Long to know, do you? Why do you not find out? Go to work for God, and you will very soon find out. The man who is all the time feeling of his pulse and looking at his tongue to see whether it is coated, is morbid, and cannot be physically well. The doctor will say: ’93Go out into the fresh air and into active life, and stop thinking of yourself, and you will get well and strong.’94 So there are people who are watching their spiritual symptoms, and they call it self-examination, and they get weaker and sicklier in their faith all the time. Go out and do something nobly Christian. Take holy exercise and then examine yourself, and instead of Newton’92s saturnine and bilious hymn that I first quoted, you will sing Newton’92s other hymn:

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound

That saved a wretch like me!

I once was lost, but now am found,

Was blind, but now I see.

What many of you Christians most need is to get your graveclothes off. I rejoice that you have been brought from the death of sin to the life of the Gospel; but you need to get your hand loose and your feet loose and your tongue loose and your soul loose. There is no sin that the Bible so arraigns and punctures and flaggellates as the sin of unbelief, and that is what is the matter with you. ’93Oh,’94 you say, ’93if you knew what I once was, and how many times I have grievously strayed, you would understand why I do not come out brighter. Then I think you would call yourself the chief of sinners.’94 I am glad you hit upon that term, for I have a promise that fits into your case as the cogs of one wheel between the cogs of another wheel, or as the key fits into the labyrinths of a lock. A man who was once called Saul, but afterwards Paul, declared: ’93This a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief.’94 Mark that’97’94of whom I am chief.’94 ’93Put down your overcoats and hats and I will take care of them while you kill Stephen’94’97so Saul said to the stoners of the first martyr’97’94I do not care to exert myself much, but I will guard your surplus apparel while you do the murder.’94 The New Testament account says, ’93The witnesses laid down their clothes at a young man’92s feet, whose name was Saul.’94 No wonder he said, ’93Sinners, of whom I am the chief.’94

Christ is used to climbing. He climbed to the top of the Temple. He climbed to the top of Mount Olivet. He climbed to the top of the cliffs about Nazareth. He climbed to the top of Golgotha. And to the top of the hills and the mountains of your transgression he is ready to climb with pardon for every one of you. The groan of Calvary is mightier than the thunder of Sinai. Full receipt is offered for all your indebtedness. If one throw a stone at midnight into a bush where the hedge bird roosts, it immediately begins to sing; and into the midnight hedges of your despondency these words I hurl, hoping to awaken you to anthem. Drop the tunes in the minor key and take the major. Do you think it pleases the Lord for you to be carrying around with you the debris and carcasses of old transgressions? You make me think of some ship that has had a tempestuous time at sea, and, now that it proposes another voyage, keeps on its davits the damaged lifeboats and keeps on board the splinters of a shivered mast and the broken glass of a smashed skylight. My advice is: Clear the decks, overboard with all the damaged rigging, brighten up the salted smoke-stacks, open a new log-book, haul in the planks, lay out a new course, and set sail for heaven. You have had the spiritual dumps long enough. You will please the Lord more by being happy than by being miserable.

Have you not sometimes started out in the rain with your umbrella and you were busy thinking, and you did not notice that the rain had stopped, and though it had cleared off you still had your umbrella up, and when you discovered what you were doing you felt silly enough? That is what some of you are doing in religious things. You have got so used to sadness that though the rain has stopped you still have your umbrella up. Come out of the shadow. Ascend the stairs of your sepulchre. Step out into the broad light of noonday. We come around you to help to remove your graveclothes, and a voice from the heavens, tremulous but omnipotent, commands, ’93Loose him, and let him go.’94

Again, my text has good advice concerning any Christian hampered and bothered and bound by fear of his own dissolution. To such the Book refers when it speaks of those who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage. The most of us, even if we have the Christian hope, are cowards about death. If a plank fall from a scaffolding and just grazes our hat, how pale we look! If the Atlantic Ocean plays with the steamship, pitching it toward the heavens and letting it suddenly drop, how even the Christian passengers pester the steward or stewardess as to whether there is any danger, and the captain, who has been all night on the bridge, and chilled through, coming in for a cup of coffee, is assailed with a whole battery of questions as to what he thinks of the weather. And many of the best people are, as Paul says, throughout their lifetime in bondage by fear of death. My brothers and sisters, if we made full use of our religion we would soon get over this.

Backed up by the teachings of your Bible, just look through the telescope some bright night and see how many worlds there are, and reflect that all you have seen, compared with the number of worlds in existence, are less than the fingers of your right hand compared with all the fingers of the human race. How foolish, then, for us to think that ours is the only world fit for us to stay in. I think that all the stars are inhabited, and by beings like the human race in feelings and sentiments, and the difference is in lung respiration, and heart beat, and physical conformation, their physical conformation fit for the climate of their world, and our physical conformation fit for the climate of our world. So we shall feel at home in any of the stellar neighborhoods, our physical limitations having ceased.

One of our first realizations in getting out of this world, I think, will be that in this world we were very much pent up, and had cramped apartments, and were kept on the limits. The most, even of our small world, is water, and the water says to the human race, ’93Don’92t come here or you will drown.’94 A few thousand feet up the atmosphere is uninhabitable, and the atmosphere says to the human race, ’93Don’92t come up here or you cannot breathe.’94 A few miles down the earth is a furnace of fire, and the fire says, ’93Don’92t come here or you will burn.’94 The caverns of the mountains are full of poisonous gases, and the gases say, ’93Don’92t come here or you will be asphyxiated.’94 And, crossing a rail track, you must look out or you will be crushed. And, standing by a steam boiler, you must look out or you will be blown up. And pneumonias and pleurisies and consumptions and apoplexies go across this earth in flocks, in droves, in herds, and it is a world of equinoxes and cyclones and graves. Yet we are under the delusion that it is the only place fit to stay in. We want to stick to the wet plank midocean while the great ship ’93The City of God,’94 of the Celestial line, goes sailing past, and would gladly take us up in a lifeboat. My Christian friends, let me tear off your despondencies and frights about dissolution. My Lord commands me regarding you, saying, ’93Loose him, and let him go.’94

Heaven is ninety-five per cent. better than this world, a thousand per cent. better, a million per cent. better. Take the gladdest, brightest, most jubilant days you ever had on earth, and compress them all into one hour, and that hour would be a requiem, a fast-day, a gloom, a horror, as compared with the poorest hour they ever had in heaven since its first tower was built, or its first gates swung, or its first song caroled. ’93Oh,’94 you say, ’93that may be true, but I am so afraid of crossing over from this world to the next, and I fear the snapping of the cord between soul and body.’94 Well, all the surgeons and physicians and scientists declare that there is no pang at the parting of the body and soul, and all the restlessness at the closing hour of life is involuntary, and no distress at all. And I agree with the doctors, for what they say is confirmed by the fact that persons who were drowned, or were submerged until all consciousness departed, and were afterward resuscitated, declare that the sensation of passing into unconsciousness was pleasurable rather than distressful. The cage of the body has a door on easy hinges, and when that door of the physical cage opens, the soul simply puts out its wings and soars.

’93But,’94 you say, ’93I fear to go because the future is so full of mystery.’94 Well, I will tell you how to treat the mysteries. The mysteries have ceased bothering me, for I do as the judges of your courts often do. They hear all the arguments in the case and then say, ’93I will take these papers and give you my decision next week.’94 So I have heard all the arguments in regard to the next world, and some things are uncertain and full of mystery, and so I fold up the papers and reserve until the next world my decision about them. I can there study all the mysteries to better advantage, for the light will be better and my faculties stronger, and I will ask the Christian philosophers who have had all the advantages of heaven for centuries, to help me, and I may be permitted myself humbly to ask the Lord, and I think there will be only one mystery left; that will be how one so unworthy as myself got into such an enraptured place. Come up out of the sepulchral shadows. If you are not Christians by faith in Christ, come up into the light; and if you are already like Lazarus, reanimated, but still have your graveclothes on, get rid of them. The command is: ’93Loose him, and let him go.’94

The only part of my recent journey that I really dreaded, although I did not say much about it beforehand, was the landing at Joppa. That is the port of entrance for the Holy Land, and! there are many rocks, and in rough weather people cannot land at all. The boats taking the people from the steamer to the docks must run between reefs that looked to me to be about fifty feet apart, and one mistroke of an oarsman, or an unexpected wave, has sometimes been fatal, and hundreds have perished along those reefs. Besides that, as we left Port Said the evening before, an old traveler said: ’93The wind is just right to give you a rough landing at Joppa; indeed, I think you will not be able to land at all.’94 The fact was, that when our Mediterranean steamer dropped anchor near Joppa and we put out for shore in the small boat, the water was as still as though it had been sound asleep a hundred years, and we landed as easily as I came on this platform. Well, your fears have pictured for you an appalling arrival at the end of your voyage of life, and they say that the seas will run high and that the breakers will swallow you up; or that if you reach Canaan at all, it will be a very rough landing. The very opposite will be true if you have the eternal God for your portion. Your disembarkation for the promised land will be as smooth as was ours at Palestine that December. Christ will meet you far out at sea and pilot you into complete safety, and you will land with a hosanna on one side of you and a hallelujah on the other.

Land ahead! its fruits are waving

O’92er the hill of fadeless green,

And the living waters laving

Shores where heavenly forms are seen.

Rocks and storms I’92ll fear no more,

When on that eternal shore;

Drop the anchor! furl the sail!

I am safe within the veil!

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage