We have seen in the first three chapters of the epistle the believer’s standing in Christ, and God’s thoughts about the church. The practical teaching which follows is divided into four classes, according to the believer’s relationship with the church (ch. 4:1-16), the world (4:17-5: 21), the family (5:21-6:9), and the powers of darkness (6:10-17). We shall see how, in each of these positions, the rule of conduct given him corresponds with his standing as shown in the earlier part of the epistle.
The apostle describes himself as a “prisoner in the Lord.” This is an interesting circumstance, and throws much light on the Lord’s present ways. Although, as Peter told the Jews, “God hath made that same Jesus, whom ye have crucified, both Lord and Christ,” yet His lordship is so far from being recognized by the world that His most faithful servant and ambassador is now a prisoner in the hands of the world’s ruling power. This could not have been if the kingdom in its proper or prophetic form had been established. In that day Christ will cast out His enemies, and exalt His faithful followers. Now, however, tribulation and rejection are the portion which God’s people are told to expect. This does not at all interfere with the lordship of Christ. David was as much God’s anointed king when he hid in the cave of Adullam as when he reigned on the throne in Zion; but in the one case his dignity was discerned only by faith, in the other by sight. So with the great Antitype. Christ’s lordship exists now as much as it will when He comes to reign over the earth. But it is now only seen by the eye of faith; and the world may go on despising Him and rejecting His people without calling down immediate judgment. Jesus has taken in grace the position of a dependent and obedient man; and He retains His position as man, though glorified at the right hand of God. He waits till the world shall be given Him by His Father. Till then, vengeance belongeth unto God, and Jesus, like David, leaves His case in God’s hands. His followers are called upon to share His patience and rejection; and hence the foremost apostle is now nothing in the eyes of the world but an obscure prisoner in a Roman jail.
He begins his exhortation in the fourth chapter with the word “therefore.” This word really resumes the sentence commenced in the first verse of the third chapter, and interrupted by the long and wonderful parenthesis of which that chapter consists. It refers, therefore, to what has been said before in chapter 2, that is, to the calling of the Gentiles and Jews into one “new man,” the breaking down of the middle wall of partition between them, and the building of them both into “an holy temple in the Lord,” of which Jesus Christ Himself was the chief corner-stone, the apostles and prophets the foundation course, and believers the materials, “builded together for an habitation of God through the Spirit.” And this call was from a condition of deadness in trespasses and sins, a state of distance and alienation from God, to which no promises and no covenant relationships attached; so that all was of simple grace, the believer having no claim to any portion of the blessing he receives in Christ.
Such, then, being the character of the saints’ standing, the apostle beseeches them “that ye walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called” (Chapter 4:1). But what walk is worthy of a vocation in which all is of simple grace? The most humbling thing in the world is the reception of boundless and undeserved favor; and the first point therefore which the Spirit urges on believers as worthy of their calling is that they should walk “with all lowliness and meekness, with long-suffering, forbearing one another in love.” (vs. 2) Nothing is more becoming in a believer than “lowliness and meekness,” but perhaps there is nothing more misunderstood. In too many instances these beautiful Christian graces are transformed, through the craft of Satan, into doubts dishonoring to God and destructive of the believer’s peace. Now God never calls it lowliness and meekness to doubt the truth of His word, or the efficacy of Christ’s work. On the contrary, He counts it pride and presumption. The simple childlike faith which bows to the word He has spoken, which says, “Let God be true, but every man a liar,” alone pleases and honors Him. Abraham was commended, not because he questioned God’s truth, but because he trusted it, and even “against hope believed in hope;” not because he doubted whether God would fulfill His word, but because he was “fully persuaded that, what He had promised, He was able also to perform.” And what was the effect? Did it puff him up? Just the contrary. Because he was “strong in faith” he gave “glory to God.” The very fact that there was no power in himself only magnified God’s grace. And so it must be with the believer. The more fully we lay hold of what grace has done for us, the more completely are we abased in God’s presence. That we, sinners and enemies, should be chosen by God to be fellow-heirs with Christ, should be predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, can, if really apprehended by faith, only fill us with wonder and praise. Where is the room for boasting when all is so clearly of God? None are so meek and lowly as the crowned elders who fall down and worship in heaven; and the larger our grasp of God’s purposes towards us, the deeper our lowliness and meekness will be. So far, then, from being founded on doubts as to the blessings we have received, these graces are the proper fruits of faith, and are always proportioned to the degree in which the blessings are apprehended by the soul.
There is, however, another mistake on which we would touch while speaking of lowliness and meekness. If it is not true lowliness, but Satan’s counterfeit of lowliness, to doubt our standing in Christ, neither is it true lowliness for one to shrink from taking the place, or exercising the gift, which God has bestowed upon him in the church. There is a time to speak as well as a time to be silent; and while nothing is more unbecoming than that forwardness and ostentation of gift which seems to have brought disorder into the meetings of the assembly at Corinth; yet, on the other hand, it is quite possible to quench the Spirit, and thus hinder blessing, under the false impression that silence is a display of lowliness and meekness. If God has bestowed a gift, He means it to be used; and to plead lowliness and meekness as a reason for not using it is merely to cloak our unfaithfulness under a pretentious name. So as to prayer, or the giving out of a hymn, if anyone has it laid on his heart by the Spirit thus to take part in an assembly, is it lowliness and meekness to remain silent? Is it not rather the vanity that shrinks from the criticism of others, or seeks their applause by a feigned modesty? No doubt there is need of spiritual discernment as to when and how to take part; but this will be given where it is sought. It was becoming in Barnabas, when traveling with a more gifted brother, to let Paul be the chief speaker. But would it have been becoming in Paul to decline exercising the gift which he had received, on the plea of showing “all lowliness and meekness” in the presence of Barnabas, who was his elder? It was becoming in Elihu to stand aside in the colloquy between Job and his old friends; but would it have been becoming in him, when they had failed to convince Job, and when the truth was taught him by the Spirit, to remain silent and refuse to utter it? These, no doubt, are very far from ordinary examples, but they serve to show the difference between true lowliness and meekness, and that which, though so easily mistaken for it, is in fact nothing more than the indulgence of the sloth or timidity of the natural heart in opposition to the leadings of the Spirit of God.
“Lowliness and meekness,” then, are the first things pressed upon us by the Spirit of God as worthy of the vocation wherewith we are called. But closely associated with these, and indeed necessarily flowing out of them, are other graces mentioned in the same verse “long-suffering, forbearing one another in love.” The man who is prompt to resent injuries and assert rights is the man who has a high opinion of himself. If he sees himself in the nothingness to which grace reduces him, patience under injury, and forbearance towards those who have wronged him, will be the result. But still more will this be the case with those with whom he is made one in Christ. How can the man who is conscious of the grace that has remitted the ten thousand talents seize his brother by the throat and claim the hundred pence due to himself? If there is any sense of the love with which we are loved, and loved in spite of our coldness and deadness, our ingratitude and provocations—if there is any apprehension of the grace which bought us, and which still bears with us in all our perverseness and folly—long-suffering will be a comparatively easy thing, and forbearance in love will commend itself as suited to the state of one whose own failures and sins are continually calling for the forbearing love of our blessed Lord.
The key to the whole verse is “love.” This is the nature of God Himself, and grace, which is the form love takes when directed towards sinners, is just the very thing which the Son manifested when He came to reveal the Father. For “the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth” (John 1:1414And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth. (John 1:14)). The long-suffering and forbearance here spoken of are not the results of a naturally placable and generous disposition, nor of the training which reason and philosophy may give. They have a higher source. They are the outflow of divine love, dwelling in the heart, and shaping the ways in conformity with the mind and walk of the blessed Lord. In Him alone we see all these graces perfectly displayed. Unwearied in devotion, whether to God or to man, “having loved His own which were in the world, He loved them unto the end.” How beautifully, too, does the same appear in the ways of His servant who, in writing to the Corinthians, could say, “I will very gladly spend and be spent for you; though the more abundantly I love you, the less I be loved.”
Yet here again, Satan has been busy in setting up an imitation of Christian love which is too easily accepted for the original. To talk of Christian love while there is allowance of evil is to suppose Christian love in which Christ is dishonored. Forbearance and forgiveness towards those who commit evil is surely a very different thing from connivance at the evil itself. Where did love manifest itself in forgiveness so marvelously as at the cross? and where was God’s intolerance of evil so fearfully displayed? The blessed Lord’s present dealings with us are expressly for the purpose of cleansing us from defilement by the washing of water; for He cannot endure that the least stain should rest upon His beloved people. So, too, the Father’s chastening is directed just to this point, “that we might be partakers of His holiness.” Under the Levitical economy an Israelite was told, “Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine heart: thou shalt in any wise rebuke thy neighbor, and not suffer sin upon him” (Lev. 19:1717Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine heart: thou shalt in any wise rebuke thy neighbor, and not suffer sin upon him. (Leviticus 19:17)). So, too, if one believer has been injured by another, he is to go to him and “tell him his fault,” not with a view of getting redress for himself, but because “if he shall hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother.” In extreme cases, the discipline of the church must be called into action, and the offender put out as a “wicked person;” but even here the motive is love, and the object to be sought is, “that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus” (1 Cor. 5:55To deliver such an one unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus. (1 Corinthians 5:5)).
Nothing therefore can be less in accordance with the love here spoken of than that sort of good fellowship with believers which refuses to disturb their conscience when they are acting in a way to dishonor the Lord. True Christian love must give Christ the first place, and where the fellowship of believers is preferred to the honor of Christ, the “love in the Spirit” spoken of by the apostle has really been surrendered to the instincts of natural affection. On the other hand, if we are called to show the Lord’s faithfulness in dealing with evil, we are called to show His gentleness too. How many a rebuke has missed its point altogether, because the manner in which it was delivered savored rather of the natural legality of the human heart than of the tenderness of Christ. May we be much in His own presence, that His ways may be more perfectly reflected in our walk. This is the only transforming power. Just so far as we are “with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are” we “changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.”
T. B. B.