Alexander MacLaren :: Fleeing and Clinging (Hebrews 6:18)

Fleeing and Clinging

'We… who have fled for refuge to lay hold upon the hope set before us.' — Hebrews 6:18.

The name of Christian was invented by outsiders. It is very seldom used in the New Testament, and then evidently as a designation by which Christ's followers were known to others; and not as one employed by themselves. They spoke of each other as 'disciples,' 'believers,' 'saints,' 'brethren,' or the like. Sometimes they used more expanded names, of which my text is an example. It sets forth part of the characteristics of those whom the world knew as 'Christians.' Now that the name has been adopted by the Church and has lost a good deal of its original force in many minds, this description may serve to teach what is one essential feature in the description of a Christian. He is one Who has 'fled for refuge to lay hold on the hope set before' him. That strikes a good many off the list, does it not? Not birth, nor baptism, nor acceptance of a creed, nor association with a community makes a Christian, but the personal act of fleeing for his life and grasping the horus of the altar.

I confine myself to the plain, evangelical teaching, the acceptance in heart and life of which makes a man a Christian, whilst nothing else does. I want to ask you all-or, rather, I pray, that my poor words may help you to ask yourselves, and not rest till you have answered the question 'Have I, thus, my very own self, fled for refuge to the hope that is set before me?' An old divine said, 'Preachers should preach, not for sharpening wits, but for saving souls.' And that is what I want, God helping me, to try to do.

1. First of all, then, let me put a plain statement, and you will forgive the sharpness of the form in which I put it, because I want it to stick — You need a refuge.

   There is nothing sadder than the strange power which men have of blinking the great facts of their own condition and of human life. I know few things that seem to me more tragic, and certainly none that are more contemptible, than the easy-going, superficial optimism, or the easy-going superficial negligence, with which hosts of people altogether slur over, even if they do not deny, the plain fact that every man and woman of us stands here in this world, though compassed by many blessings, and in the enjoyment of much good, and having many delights flowing into our lives, and being warranted in laughter and mirth, — still stands like an unsheltered fugitive in the open, with a ring of enemies round about that may close in upon him. Self-interest seems often to be blind, and in many, I am sure, of my hearers, it is blind to the plainest and largest truths' with reference to themselves, their necessities, and their conditions. Ah, dear friends! after all that we say about the beauty, and the brightness, and the joyfulness of life, and the beneficence of God, we live in a very stern world. There are evils that may come, and there are some that certainly will come. You young people — thank God for it, but do not abuse it — are buoyant in hope, and take short views, and are glad, where older folk who have learned what life is generally have sober estimates of its possibilities, and our radiant visions have toned down into a very subdued grey. Sorrow, disappointment, broken hopes, hopes fulfilled and disappointed — and, that is worst of all — losses, inevitable partings when the giant-shrouded figure of Death forces its way in at the rose-covered portal, in spite of the puny effort of Love to keep it out, sicknesses, failures in business, griefs of many kinds that I cannot touch, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and all the ills that flesh is heir to, these lie wafting somewhere on the road for every one of us. Are you going to stand in the unsheltered plain, a mark for all these? Do you think you can front them in your own strength? Are you able, calmly and soberly, remembering the possibilities that lie in the black clouds over your head, to say, 'Pour on! I will endure?' Nay, verily; you need a refuge.

   You carry your own worst danger buttoned up in your own waistcoats and gowns; you hear about with you in your hearts, in your passions, in your desires, a vase of combustibles amidst the sparks of a volcano, so to speak. And any one of these that fill the air may drop into it, and bring about a conflagration. No man that has measured himself, the irritability of his nerves, the excitability of his passions, the weakness of his will, and its ugly trick of going over to the enemy at the very critical moment of the fight, But, if he is a wise man, will say, 'I need something stronger than myself to fall back upon, I need some damp cloth or other to be laid over the magazine of combustibles in my heart. I need a refuge from myself.'

   You carry — no matter whence it came, or how it was developed; that is of no consequence, you have got it — you carry a conscience that is not altogether silent in any man, I suppose, and that certainly is not altogether dead in you. Its awful voice speaks many a time in the silence of the night, and in the depth of your own heart, and tells you that there are evil things in your past, and a page black in your biography which you can do nothing to cancel or to erase the stains from, or to tear out. 'What I have written I have written.' And so long as memory holds her place and conscience is not shattered altogether, there needs no other hell to make the punishment of the evildoer. You need a refuge from the stings of the true indictments of your own consciences.

   Your conscience is a prophet. It is not, nowadays, fashionable to preach about the Day of Judgment — more's the pity, I think. We say that every one of us shall give an account of ourselves to God. Have you ever tried to Believe that about yourself, and to realise what it means? Think that all, down to the cozy depths that we are ashamed to look at ourselves, will be spread out before the 'pure eyes and perfect judgment of the all-judging' God. O brother! you will need a refuge 'that you may have boldness before Him in the Day of Judgment.' These things that I have been speaking about, external ills, ungoverned self, the accusations of conscience, which is the voice of God, and that future to which we are all driving as fast as we can — these, things are truths. And, being truths, they should enter in, as operative facts, into your lives. My question is, have they done so?

   You need a refuge; have you ever calmly contemplated the necessity? Oh l do not let that dogged ignorance of the facts bewitch you any longer. Do not let the inconsequent levity that cannot see an inch beyond its nose hide from you the realities of our own condition. People in the prisons, during the September massacres of the French Revolution, used to amuse themselves — although the tumbrils were coming for some of them to- morrow morning, and the headsman was waiting for them — used to amuse themselves as if they were free, and got up entertainments with a ghastly mockery of joy. That is something like what some of us do. One has seen a mule going down an Alpine pass, ambling quite comfortably along, with one foot over a precipice, and a thousand feet to fall if it slips. That is how some of us travel along the road. Sheep will nibble the grass, stretching their stupid necks a little bit further to get an especially succulent tuft on the edge of the cliffs, with eight hundred feet and a crawling sea at the bottom of it to receive them if they stumble. Do not be like that. 'Be ye not as the horses or the mules that have no understanding,' but look the facts in the face, and do not be content till you have acted as they prescribe.

2. You have the refuge that you need.

   The writer of this Epistle describes it in my text as being 'the hope set before us.' Now, by 'hope' there, he obviously means, not the emotion, but the object upon which it is fixed. For it is something 'set before' him — that is to say, external to him, and on which, when it is set before him, he can lay an appropriating hand, so that by the hope here is meant the thing hoped for. That, of course, is a very common usage, in which we transfer the name of a feeling to the thing that excites it. So people talk about such and such a thing being their 'dread.' Or, affection gives its own name to its objects, and speaks about or to them as my love, my joy, my delight, in token of the completeness with which the heart has gone out to, and rests on, the thing which is thus identified, transported, as it were, with the emotion which grasps it. In like manner here it is the thing that Christians have laid hold of which is called 'the hope set before us.'

   In the context — that thing set Before men as the object of hope is the great and faithful promise of God, confirmed by His oath long ago, to the ancient patriarchs, the promise of divine blessings and of a future inheritance. And, says the writer, away down here, in the very latest ages, we have the very same solid substance to grasp and cling to that Abraham of old had. For God said to him, 'Blessing I will bless thee,' and He says it to us; and that is a 'refuge.' God said to him, 'Thou shalt have a land for an inheritance,' and He says it to us, and that is a refuge. The presence of God, and the promise of a blessed inheritance, are the elements of the hope of which the writer is speaking. Then, in his rapid way, he crowds figure upon figure, and, not content with the two of my text, the asylum and the strong stay, he adds a third, and likens this hope to the anchor of the soul, giving steadfastness and fixity to the man who clings, being in itself 'sure' so that it will not break, and 'steadfast' so that it will not drag. He goes on to say that this object of hope enters 'into that within the veil.' But notice that in the very next verse he speaks of some one else who entered within the veil — viz., Jesus Christ. So, as in a dissolving view, you have, first the figure of Hope, as the poets have painted her, calm and radiant and smiling; and then that form melts away, and there stands instead of the abstraction Hope, the person Jesus Christ. Which, being translated into plain words, is just this, the refuge is Christ, Christ, our hope. Mark, further, how the writer describes our Lord there as our forerunner and priest.

   Now that exposition of the context opens out into important thoughts. Jesus Christ is our hope and refuge, because He is our priest. Ah, dear brethren! all other enemies and ills are tolerable, and a man may make shift to bear them all without God, though he will bear them very imperfectly, but the deepest need of all, the most threatening enemy of all, can only be dealt with and overcome by the gospel which proclaims the priest whose death is the abolition of death, whose sacrifice is the removal of sin, who 'has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows, and by whose stripes we are healed.' I pray you to recognise this fact, that there is no other way by which Christ can be a refuge and the hope of the world, than by His first dealing triumphantly with the fact of sin, which is the tap-root of all sorrows. It is because that dear Lord has died for every one of us, because in Him we have 'redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins'; because, with Him on our side, we need not fear the accusations of conscience, nor have a fearful looking for of judgment, that He, and He only, is the refuge for the whole of this sinful world. Is He your refuge? and do you know Him as your priest? The acceptance and sufficiency of His sacrifice is witnessed by the fact that He has entered within the veil, and because thus He has entered He is for us our only hope, our all- sufficient refuge.

   I need not remind you, I suppose, too, how utterly different all the inevitable ills and sorrows of this mortal life become when we lay hold on Him, and find shelter there. 'A man shall be a refuge from the storm and a covert from the tempest, as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.' We can bear sickness, and sorrows, and disappointments and failures and partings and all grief, and the arrow-heads are blunted, or, at all events, the poison is wiped off the barbs when we have Christ for our refuge and our friend.

   And because He is our forerunner, and has passed within the veil, as the context says so impressively, 'for us,' we are emancipated, further, from the fear of death; and the dread of what lies beyond, and are emboldened to lift even eyes that weep tears of penitence and a face that is suffused with the blush of conscious unworthiness; and to behold within the veil the pledge of our entrance there in the person of Jesus Christ. So, brethren, for all the ills that flesh can bear, for all that sin entails, for the gnawings of our own conscience, and for the judgments of future retribution, we can betake ourselves to that Saviour and say with quiet confidence, 'I have made the Lord my refuge, no evil shall befall me, nor any plague come nigh my dwelling.'

3. Lastly, I have said, you need a refuge. You, have the refuge you need. Let me put my last word into, not a command, but an entreaty — flee to it.

   The writer, as I have occasion to remark, Mends two vivid metaphors here, the one of a fugitive unsheltered in the open, surrounded by foes, the other of a man grasping some strong stay. Look at the two pictures.

   'Fled for refuge.' There probably is an allusion here to the Israelitish institution of the cities of refuge for the manslayer. But whether there be or not, the scene brought before us is that of a man flying for his life with the pursuer clattering at his heels, and his lance-point within a yard of the fugitive's back. Grass will not grow under that man's feet; he will not stop to look at the flowers by the road. The wealth of South Africa, if it were spread before him, would not check his headlong flight. It is a race for life. If he gets to the open gate he is safe. If he is overtaken before he reaches it he is a dead man. The moment he gets within the portal the majesty of law compasses him about, and delivers him from the wild justice of revenge. Surely, the urgency of flight and the folly of the hesitation and delay that mark some of us are vividly brought out by the metaphor. 'By and by,' kills its tens of thousands. For one man 'that says,' I am not a Christian, and, what is more, I never intend to be,' there are a dozen that say, 'Tomorrow! tomorrow!' 'Let me sow my wild oats as a young man; let me alone for a little while. I am busy at present; when I have a convenient season I will send for Thee' What would have become of the man-slayer if he had curled himself up in his cloak, and lain down beside his victim, and said, 'I am too tired to run for it?' He would have been dead before morning.

   A rabbi's scholar, as the Jewish traditions tell us, once said to him, 'Master! when shall I repent?' 'The day before you die,' said the Rabbi. The scholar said, 'I may die today.' Then said the Rabbi, 'Repent to; day.' 'Choose you this day' whether you will stand unsheltered out there, exposed to the pelting hustling of the pitiless storm, or will flee to the refuge and be saved.

   Look at the other picture, 'to lay hold of the hope.' Perhaps the allusion is to the old institution of sanctuary, which perhaps existed in Israel, and at any rate was well known in ancient times. When a man grasped the horns of the altar he was safe. If so, the two metaphors may really blend into one; the flight first, and then the clutching to that which, so long as the twining fingers could encompass it, would permit no foe to strike the fugitive. This metaphor speaks of the fixity of the hold with which we should grasp Jesus Christ by our faith. The shipwrecked sailor up in the rigging, with the wild sea around him, and the vessel thumping upon the sand, will hold on, with frozen fingers, for hours, to the shrouds, knowing that if he slips his grasp the next hungry wave will sweep him away and devour him. And so you should cling to Jesus Christ, with the consciousness of danger and helplessness, with the tight grasp of despair, with the tight grasp of certain hope. Brother! have you fled; do you grasp?

   I remember reading of an inundation in India, when a dam, away up in a mountain gorge, burst at midnight. Mounted messengers were sent down the glen to gallop as hard as they could, and rouse the sleeping villagers. Those who rose and fled in an instant were in time to reach the high ground, as they saw the tawny flood coming swirling down the gorge, laden with the wrecks of happy homes and many a corpse. Those who hesitated and dawdled were swept away by it. My message to you, dear friends, is, 'Escape for thy life; look not behind thee, neither stay thou in all the plain. Escape to the mountains lest thou be consumed.'