1. Blessed. — There is a distinction maintained in Scripture between " blessed " as applied to God, and " blessed " as applied to men. Although we are obliged to use the same term for both in our language, they are distinct in the Greek. That which is applied to God means to be pronounced blessed; that which is applied to men means to be made blessed. Christians are blessed in the sense that they receive blessings; God is blessed in the sense that He receives, not blessings, but praises. This formula of praise is applicable only to Him from whom are all things.
2. The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. — Of all the aspects and attributes of the great God, that which first leaps to the lips of this Apostle is, " the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ." How real and vivid was spiritual life in those primitive Christians. Faith really dominated. Farm and merchandise receded into the background, and the relations of the soul with God and eternity bounded to the front. And mark how St. Peter finds it possible to draw near to God : he takes refuge in the Mediator. When he sees God as the giver of the unspeakable Gift, he comes forward with boldness. In point of fact, unless we recognize Him in that character, we cannot relish Him in any. " How shall he not also
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with him freely give us all things ? " These men were skilful. They knew where consolation lay ; they grasped God by His title of Father of our Lord Jesus, and were enabled to cling in fond confidence as dear children.
^ A father is one who, because of love, chooses to give of himself, of his own life, that there may be another one, made in his own image, with whom he may have fellowship in spirit, and partnership in service. And whatever some of our scholarly friends may do with the simple Genesis story of creation, it is impossible to get away from this, that its direct purpose was to let us know that God really fathered man. He was moved by love. He chose to have us made. He gave of His own life that we might come into life ; and yet more, that we might come into His own sort of life, life like His, and that we should be in His own likeness in our life.
And if there be any doubt at all about this it disappears entirely as we stand on the foot of the hill of the Cross. A father gives of his life at the first that his child may come into life ; then he gives constantly that his child may grow into fulness of matured life. And in any emergency that may arise he un- hesitatingly gives of his life again, to the extreme of giving it out, that his child may be saved from death.
It was Jesus who taught us to call God Father. The word was used before, but it was used very little. He taught us the blessed habit of using that word for God. But He did infinitely more than teach us the use of a word, even of that great word. He acted the father part for God on Calvary .^
3. According to His great mercy. — It is manifest that this living hope can only be of Divine bestowment ; it is at once too lofty and too lasting to come from meaner hands. And it is the gift of God to those who receive the Gospel of His Son. Faith in Christ produces it, and in proportion to the intensity of the faith does the hope ' increase and brighten. Now we must never forget that, like every other spiritual blessing, it is " not of debt, but of grace." It is not of our prescriptive or unforfeited right, but " according to His great mercy." None of those who have reahzed the hope will deny that its source is the mercy of God. Their conception of sin is too deep, they are too enlightened upon the magnitude of their deliverance, to hesitate upon the matter for a moment. The brow of the sceptical may darken, and the pride of
^ S. D. Gordon, Quiet Talks on Hoinc Ideals, 140.
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36 A LIVING HOPE
the carnal may rebel ; but if you interrogate the godly, you will find that his will is submissive, and his heart is full. The penitent, who has but recently believed, who yet shudders as if he felt the sliding earth — " a blasphemer, a persecutor, injurious " — tells you, amid grateful tears, " but I obtained mercy." The white-haired saint, as, just ready to depart, he surveys from the Nebo-summit the whole path of his difficult climbing, gasps out his latest testimony, " By the grace of God, I^am what I am." The blessed ones, whose long experience of the golden streets has made them at home in heaven, fling down upon us without ceasing the melody of the same eternal song : — " Unto him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood."
^ The great question that presses upon the human mind, from age to age, is the inquiry : Is God a merciful Being, and will He show mercy ? Living as we do under the light of Eevelation, we know little of the doubts and fears that spontaneously rise in the guilty human soul when it is left solely to the light of nature to answer it. With the Bible in our hands, and hearing the good news of redemption from our earliest years, it seems a matter of course that the Deity should pardon sin. Nay, a certain class of men in Christendom seem to have come to the opinion that it is more difficult to prove that God is just than to prove that He is merciful. But this is not the thought and feeling of man when outside of the pale of Eevelation. Go into the ancient pagan world, examine the theologizing of the Greek and Eoman mind, and you will discover that the fears of the justice far out- numbered the hopes of the mercy ; that Plato and Plutarch and Cicero and Tacitus were far more certain that God would punish sin, than that He would pardon it. This is the reason that there is no light, or joy, in any of the pagan rehgions. Except when religion was converted into the worship of Beauty, as in the instance of the later Greek, and all the solemn and truthful ideas of law and justice were eliminated from it, every one of the natural religions of the globe is filled with sombre and gloomy hues, and no others. The truest and best religions of the ancient world were always the sternest and saddest, because the unaided human mind is certain that God is just, but is not certain that He is merciful. When man is outside of Eevelation, it is by no means a matter of course that God is clement, and that sin shall be forgiven. Great uncertainty overhangs the doctrine of the Divine mercy, from the position of natural religion, and it is only within the province of revealed truth that the uncertainty is removed. Apart from a distinct and direct promise from the