The Privileges of the Blessed.
J79
Literature.
Bayley (J.), The Divine Word Opened^ 548.
Grant (W.), Christ our Hope^ 327.
Johnston (S. M.), The Great Things of God, i. 320.
Keble (J.), Sermons for the Christian Year : Miscellaneoua, 267.
Maclaren (A.), Expositions : Epistles of John to Revelation, 380.
„ „ A Year's Ministry, i. 43.
Meyer (F. B.), Blessed are Ye, 131. Norton (J. N.), Old Paths, 239.
Parkhurst (C. H.), A Little Lower than the Angels, 80. Price (A. C), Fifty Sermons, ii. 105.
Ramsay (W. M.), The Letters to the Seven Churches of Asia, 386. Rossetti (C. G.), The Face of the Beep, 537. Wickham (E. C), Words of Light and Life, 94.
The Privileges of the Blessed.
Blessed are they that wash their robes, that they may have the right to come to the tree of life, and may enter in by the gates into the city.— Rev. xxii. 14.
The first Beatitude that Jesus Christ spoke from the mountain was, " Blessed are the poor in spirit." The last Beatitude that He speaks from heaven is, " Blessed are they that wash their robes." And the act commended in the last is but the outcome of the spirit extolled in the first. For they who are poor in spirit know themselves to be sinful men ; and they who know themselves to be sinful men will cleanse their robes in the blood of Jesus Christ.
^ I always regard this as a test text. I should like to ask every Sunday-school teacher, every district visitor, every worker in an inquiry room, to take it, just as it stands, and expound it. And if he stumbles over it, or muddles it, I should like to send him back for a while to a form in God's school, there to learn Christ from Christ Himself, before he ventures to teach others. I said " learn Christ " ; not theologies, not systems of doctrine, but Christ. Christ is here in every word, Christ Jesus, God's Anointed Saviour of poor sinners ; " all and in all " to souls. If a man cannot preach Christ from this passage. He does not know the Gospel so as to be a fit teacher either of babes, or of strong men. It is not a difficult passage, if a man has first the root of the matter in him, and then has sat, as a little child, at the feet of the Holy Ghost to be taught, as He alone can teach, God's beautiful equipoise of truth.^
The text tells us (1) who are the Blessed of the last Beati- tude, and (2) what are their Privileges. The Blessed are " they that do his commandments," or, as in the Eevised Version, according to another reading, " they that wash their robes." Their privileges are right of access to the Tree of Life and entrance through the gates into the City.
^ A. C. Price, Fifty Sermons, ii. 105. 381
382 THE PRIVILEGES OF THE BLESSED
I.
The Blessed.
We are face to face at once with a difficulty of reading. The A.V. had " Blessed are they that do his commandments," following one reading ; the E. V. " Blessed are they that wash their robes," following another. The difference, which seems so great in English, is due to the exchange of only a few letters in Greek. But the change from the Authorized Version to the Eevised is generally hailed by expositors as a relief. " Blessed are they that do his commandments," says Maclaren, carries us back to the old law, and has no more hopeful a sound in it than the thunders of Sinai. If it were, indeed, among Christ's last words to us, it would be a most sad instance of His " building again the things he had destroyed." It is relegating us to the dreary old round of trying to earn heaven by doing good deeds ; and I might almost say it is " making the cross of Christ of none effect." The fact that that corrupt reading came so soon into the Church and has held its ground so long, is to me a very singular proof of the difficulty which men have always had in keeping themselves up to the level of the grand central gospel-truth : " Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us."
Dean Vaughan speaks even more strongly against the reading. If this is the saying of Christ, he says, we must bow to it. If it pleased Him to leave as His last word to the Churches the con- demning sentence, it is not for us to remonstrate or to rebel. If it was the will of Christ to replace His Church, by the very latest of His revelations, on a footing of meritorious obedience, it must be so, and, though with downcast looks and tottering steps, we must set ourselves to follow. Yet we cannot check the rising thought, "We trusted that it had been he which should have redeemed Israel."
But is there this difference between the readings ? There is, and more than this difference, if they who "do his command- ments " have not yet " washed their robes " ; or if, to put it from the other side, the washing of the robes were not one of the commandments that had to be done, and indeed the sum and sub-