The Servant And The Son

And the servant abideth not in the house for ever: but the Son abideth ever. John 8:35.

I MUST first ask your attention to a remark or two on what I conceive to be the force and connection of this passage. There is nothing in the words themselves requiring explanation or illustration. They are simple and plain enough; but their bearing on what precedes and follows, and the application which they were intended to have, present very considerable difficulty.

The servant abideth not in the house for ever: but the Son abideth ever.' This at least is clear, that our Lord is speaking of servant and son generically, or in other words, is drawing a contrast between the two relations, wherever they are found, in the matter of permanence. A son is a natural, inalienable part of the family, whatever the family may be; a slave is not. He may be acquired, he may be sold, or given away to another master, or set free. In Jewish servitude--with which Christ's hearers were chiefly familiar--there was special provision against the slave's continuing' in the house for ever.' At the Jubilee, unless he voluntarily elected to give himself up in perpetuity to his master (so passing from a state of involuntary slavery to one of willing servitude, which ceased thereby to be bondage)--in token whereof he had his ear fastened to the door-post with an awl through it--he was free to depart where he liked. But a son is bound to his father's household by a tie which no distance breaks, and no time wears away.

Then comes the question, what application does Christ mean to be made of this general truth about the characteristic difference between service and sonship? The common answer seems to me to be very unsatisfactory. It is, in brief, this--that the servants who abide not in the house for ever are the Jews who, because they regarded themselves as bound to God only by the harsh bond of constrained obedience, and were slaves, not sons at heart, would certainly forfeit their special national privileges, and be cast out of the house --the land of Israel or the old covenant. According to that interpretation, the general statement would in effect be made special by inserting of God' in the clause, and would mean substantially this--hewho is only an unwilling servant--a slave--of God's, has no permanent place in the household of God.

But you should observe that, in the previous verse, the master of the servant is distinctly specified--he that committeth sin is the slave of sin: And it is a most violent and sudden twist of the connection to make it turn away all at once from speaking of slaves of sin to speak of slaves of God. Notice, too, that both clauses of our text, the former as well as the latter, are laid as the double grounds on which the conclusion reposes--If the Son, therefore, shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.' Keeping these two points in view, it seems impossible to accept the ordinary explanation of the words, which wrenches them forcibly apart from the preceding verse, and disconnects them from the conclusion which our Lord founds on them in the subsequent verse, whilst it brings in a wholly irrelevant thought about the Jews being turned out of Canaan, because they were slaves and not sons of God.

Supposing, then, that whilst the words speak about servants and sons generically, laying down a general principle that applies to all the members of each class, the immediate application is meant to be to the slaves of sin, of whom He has just been speaking, would the words so referred yield an appropriate and adequate sense? What would be the force of the thought that Sin's slave does not abide for ever in Sin's house? Would it not be the declaration of the great truth that, howsoever hard and long the bondage and servitude of sin had been, yet the very relation itself is of such a character that it needs not to be perpetual, but bears upon its front the hope that one day the captive may come out of the prison-house and shake himself loose from his connection with this tyrant's household, of which he has become a part? However long and weary the years of bondage, the slave is not in his true home, nor incorporated hopelessly into his taskmaster's family. There is no natural affinity between him and his lord; but only a bond which may be snapped at any moment, if one can be found strong enough to enter the strong man's house, and spoil his goods.' The saying, then, may be regarded as stating the possibility of emancipation as contained in the very nature of the bondage.

The next clause goes on to declare that into the midst of this tyrant's household there has come one who is a Son, and abides for ever, by natural immutable relationship, in the household of God. It is clear that the first application of the general statement, that a son is for ever part of his father's family, must be to Christ. It is therefore clear that the house in which He abides is the house of God. Sin's house, in so far as that expression denotes this fair world, belongs to God; and the tyranny which that grim despot wields is usurpation. Into the midst of human society He comes who is a Son for ever, and for ever dwells with the Father; and by reason of His everlasting Sonship and abode with God, He is able to convert the possibility of deliverance, which the very nature of the bondage proclaims, into actual fact, and to set us free. The slave need not abide for ever--there is hope. The Son abides ever'--there is hope still brighter.

And on both facts reposes the grand certainty--If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.' If He have the will, as He has the power--if it shall be that He will really use his unquestionable prerogative for the purpose for which men, with eyes dim with tears and hearts torn by desperate hopes, long through a thousand generations--then ye shall be free indeed. Nor, in that case, will bare freedom only be ours, but, as is implied by the antithesis of our text, emancipation will be adoption, and to pass out of the state of the slave will be to pass into the alternative relation--the state of a son.

I have thus put briefly, but as far as I can see fairly, the sequence of thought which our Lord would hero bring before us; and I would ask you to consider whether, so understood, the words do not hold together better, and yield a more consistent and impressive meaning than in the usual interpretation of them. Let me briefly try to expand a little further the principles which are thus set forth.

 I. There Is First The Possible Ending Of The Tyranny Of Sin.

A slave abides not in the house for ever.' Therefore the very fact that the service of sin is so hard a slavery shows it to be unnatural, abnormal, and capable of a termination. All the world has dimly hoped that it was so, if not from love of good, at all events from weariness of evil, and from pain of conscience. But no man has been sure of it, apart from the influence of revelation. It is Christ alone who makes us certain that this universal condition is yet an unnatural one, from which restoration is possible for us all. He alone shows us that the black walls of the prison-house where we toil, solid seeming, high above our power to scale, and clammy with the sighs of a thousand generations though they be, are undermined and tottering. Deliverance is possible. For, in the light of God's revelation, we see that the slave-master is as usurper. Sin is clearly not natural to man, as God meant him to be, howsoever it may seem to have entwined itself around his life. It is something supervening, not original; a deformity, not a part of the ideal by which God made him.

The most superficial glance at our own nature and condition, the constitution of our being, our capacities or relations, is enough to show that. The witnesses are within us. Look at these minds of ours that can originate and entertain thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proof that they were born for immortality,' at those hearts with their rich treasures of transcendent affections wasted, as some drunken spendthrift throws handfuls of gold among a ragged mob; at these wills so weak and yet so strong, ever craving for some absolute authority to guide them, and yet ever impotently trying to be a law unto themselves'; at these consciences, so sensitive and yet so dull, waking up only when the evil is done, like careless warders who lock the prison doors with all safety after the prisoner has fled, powerless to prevent but strong to avenge--voices which have no means of getting their behests obeyed, and yet are the echo of the supreme, personal Lawgiver's voice. Think of the manifest disproportion between ourselves as we are, and as we know we might be; remember that in this region might and ought are the same. And then say whether this universal condition of sinfulness is not plainly and in the deepest sense of the word--unnatural; a fungus, not a true growth; a monstrosity or abnormal development; a diseased excrescence or wen, and not sound, healthy flesh.

Then, if so, it is clear that there is no such relation between a sinful man and his sin as that deliverance from it is impossible. It must be possible to part them, and to leave the man stronger for the loss of what made him weak, and more himself by the plucking off him of the venomous beast that has fastened upon his life. Somehow or other it must be possible to separate me from my sin, to cast that behind God's back into the depths of the sea, and to set me before His face in light and love. If we are slaves of Sin, then we may be transferred from its household and brought to our true home in our Father's house. Here, then, is the blessed hope for us all. Howsoever the fetters may have galled and mortified the limbs and eaten into the stiffened wrists, they may be struck off. No man is condemned to a hopeless necessary continuance in evil. We may have been living all our days in it, and, so far as in us lies, may have corrupted and perverted our whole nature. Be it so. Still the foul thing has not become so intertwined with our life that it cannot be wrenched away. No matter what we are, for us all there is a possibility of deliverance. For criminals below the gallows with the rope around their necks, for those who have gone farthest into the far country of forgetfulness of God, and there have wasted themselves in riotous living, ay, and for those who are harder to touch and more hopeless than publicans and harlots--the sleek, orthodox, respectable Scribes and Pharisees, the church and chapel going people, saturated with the form of religion and uninfluenced by its power, for all, freedom is possible.

And let me remind you that men have always cherished those convictions; even when they seemed to have the least reason for them, have cherished them obstinately in spite of history and of experience. They have tried to set themselves free, and their attempts have come to nothing; and yet, after all failures, this hope' has sprung immortal in the human breast.' People who have tried in vain to cure themselves of some awkward habit, some peculiarity of manner, some intonation of voice, yet believe that somehow or other there is a power fit to break from them all the chains of evil and to set them free. Strange, is it not? Pathetic, tragic, except on one hypothesis. I know few things sadder--unless we believe in Christ, the Deliverer, as I hope most of us do--than that indestructible hope with which a thousand sinful generations have lived, and yet have died without its fulfilment. What countless unfulfilled aspirations, what baffled trust, what gleams of light that faded and seemed treacherous as the morning red that dies into rainy grey before the day is old! And are the noblest visions, then, the falsest? and are we to believe the bitter creed that smiles sadly at these hopes as airy dreams? or is it true--as the world has believed, though it knew not how its hope was to be fulfilled--that the tyranny which has ruled the earth and built high the black walls of its prison house round all humanity is, after all, a usurpation which had a beginning later than man, and will have an end?

True, we cannot make the division between ourselves and our sin, nor effect the deliverance. It is like some cancer--a blood disease. We may pare and cut away the rotting flesh--the single manifestations of the evil we can do something to reduce. But the source of these is floating through the veins, and comes pulsing from the heart. A deeper cure than our surgery is needed, a transfusion of fresh blood from an untainted source. Sin is not our personality, and so we may have it removed and live. But sin has become so entwined with ourselves that we cannot separate the tangled mass. The demoniac in the Gospels, who in his confused consciousness did not know which was devil and which was man, and when the question was put, What is thy name?' gave the awful answer, which blends so strangely the voice of both, My name is legion, for we are many,' could not shake off the demon that rode him. No more can we. And yet it can be dragged from its lair. Rending and tearing, convulsions and foaming, wounds and semi-death may accompany the separation. Better these than the strong man armed, keeping his goods in peace.' The voice that said, Thou foul spirit, I charge thee come out of him,' has power still.

Whence arise these hopes, cherished in spite of all failures? They are like morning dreams which the proverb tells us are true. Their fulfilment is made probable by the very fact of their existence; for God never sends mouths, but He sends meat to feed them.' Their fulfilment lies in Him who fulfils the unconscious prophecies' and the conscious cravings of heathendom and humanity--even in the Christ who is all that the world wants, and more than allthat we or our brethren have dared to hope. So much then for the first idea, contained in these words--that of the possibility, inherent in the very nature of the case, of emancipation from the burden and bondage of sin. The next verse goes on to declare how this possibility is converted into fact. So we have --

 II. The Actual Deliverer.

The slave need not abide for ever; but is there any one who will take him out of the unnatural state of slavery? The relationship is capable of being terminated, if there is any one who will terminate it. And the question whether there be, is answered in these words, The Son abideth ever,' which, while they are primarily a general statement, applying to all sons as such, have unquestionably a specific reference to our Lord Himself. That I presume is clear from the fact that there is founded on them, with a therefore,' to bind it firmly to them, the grand conclusion, If the Son make you free, ye shall be free indeed.'

Notice, too, that if the contrasted statements of our text are to be so put together as to give ground for that joyous certainty of true freedom as the Son's gift, then somehow or other the two houses must be the same; or at least the Son, who is ever in His Father's house, must yet, while thus abiding, also be in the midst of the bondsmen in the dark fortress of the tyrant. That is but a figurative way of putting the necessity which even our consciences and hearts, made wise by bitter experience of failure, can discern--that our freedom from sin must come from a power beyond the circle of humanity, and yet must be diffused from a source within the circle. Unless it come from above it will not be able to lift us out of the pit of the prison-house; but unless it be on our level we shall not be able to grasp it. The Deliverer must Himself be free; therefore He must be removed from the fatal continuity of evil, which, like a lengthened chain, shackles all the prisoners together. The Deliverer must be like those whom He would help, and be a sharer in their condition. The contradictory requirements are harmonised in One, of whom it was spoken long ago, He hath anointed me to proclaim liberty to the captives'; and who has Himself claimed to unite them both in His own person: No man hath ascended up to heaven but He that came down from heaven, even the Son of Man which is in heaven.' He is truly one of us, the very perfection of humanity; the whole essential characteristics of manhood are in Him. He has come down from heaven, entered the prison-house, become one of the company of slaves--and yet all the while is in heaven,' abiding in that true and unbroken fellowship with God of which He testified when He said, The Father hath not left Me alone.' He is the Son of Man which came down from heaven, and He is the only begotten Son which is in the bosom of the Father.' Therefore is He the Deliverer of His brethren.

The conversion, then, of the mere possibility of freedom into actual fact requires two things--that the Deliverer should be the Son of God and that He should be the Son for ever. If we are ever, dear friends, to be rescued from the iron grip of this miserable bondage, it must be by one who wields and brings, and is, the energy, and the wisdom, and the all-bestowing love of the Father. It must be by one who is a Son in that full emphatic sense of perfect kindred in, and participation of, the boundless Godhead which none other possesses. None less mighty has the power, none less patient has the love, which such a task needs. It must be The Son who sets us free.

And so I come to you with that living central truth of the Gospel, and beseech you, dear brethren, to lay to heart the solemn fact of our need, and the blessed answer to it which is given to us all in Christ. Such an High Priest became us.' He and His work are in accurate correspondence with our wants. There is no deliverance possible from this clinging curse of corruption unless there have come into the very midst of us bondsmen, one who shares our nature but does not share our sin, who is above us and yet beside us, who is separate from sinners and yet cleaveth closer than a brother to the most polluted, whose hands are pure and yet whose heart is so tender that He will lay His pure hand unshrinking on leprosy and death, who is in all points like ourselves and yet is unfettered by the chains under which we groan and die. And this impossible combination we have, blessed be God! in that dear Lord. Christ is the Son of God and the brother of every man. There is the life, fontal not derived, divine that it may be human; there is Manhood unstained by sin, having no affinity with evil, and in its completeness a living protest against the lie that sin is an integral part of human nature, and a prophecy that we too may be like Him, set free from bondage and perfected in glory. God sent forth His Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons.' Yes! a Son will set free, none other will. Yes! the Son has set free. We need none other.

Further, our Lord puts emphasis here on the perpetual abiding of the Son, as a part of the basis of His fitness for the mighty work. We and all men to the end of time have to trust to a living Saviour, who is as near to the latest generations as He was to those that gathered round His cross on earth. Nay, we may even say that He is nearer to save and fuller of power to bless, not indeed in Himself, but in our apprehensions of His nearness and fulness, which should be deepened by all that has passed since He ascended up on high. Have not the might of His work and the majesty of His person gained fresh illustrations from the experience of all these centuries? As distance has paled other lights, and hidden lower watch-towers below the horizon, have we not learned thereby to estimate more truly the brightness of the one undying flame which burns across the waste nor knows diminution by space nor extinction by time, and to measure more accurately the height of that rallying-point for the nations which towers higher and higher as we recede from it? Surely, if we will faithfully use the inspired record, the Indwelling Spirit, the voice of our own experience, and the history of God's Church, we may come, by reason of the very lapse of ages, and all which they have brought of testing and of triumph, to apprehend yet more of the fulness of Christ's freedom than was possible at first. It is expedient for you that I go away.'

Nor is this all; for the Son who bids us rejoice, both for His sake and ours, that He goes to the Father, was with the Father while He walked on earth, and is with us while He is on the throne of God. He abideth ever by our sides to bless and set free. He carries on our deliverance by the present forth-putting of His love and power, even as He effected it by His Cross. This man, because He continueth ever, is able to save unto the uttermost? We have an ever-living Saviour to trust to. The Son abideth for ever.' If He therefore make us free, we shall be free indeed.'

 III. The Abiding Sonship Which Constitutes The Slave's Emancipation.

Then, finally, we may very briefly touch upon the thought that is implied here and in the whole con-text--namely, the abiding Sonship which constitutes the slave's emancipation.

The process of deliverance is the transference from the one household to the other. We are set free from our bondage when, through Christ, we receive the adoption, and cry Abba, Father!' This filial Spirit, the Spirit of life which was in Christ, and this alone,' makes us free from the law of sin and death.' The only way by which a man is reclaimed from obedience to sin is by his learning to call God Father, and by receiving into his evil nature the life, kindred with the paternal source, which owns no allegiance to his former taskmaster. The only way by which a man receives that new life from God which has nothing to do with sin, and that consciousness of kindred with God which makes the name Father' natural to his heart, is by simple faith in Christ, who gives power to become sons of God to as many as receive Him.

There are but two conditions in which we can stand. One or other of them must be ours. The alternatives are--slaves of sin, or sons of God. What a contrast both in the relation and in that to which it is sustained! Slaves or sons I God or Sin! On the one side tyrannous bondage, on the other gentle swaying love. On the one side the whip and the lash, on the other, My son, hear the instruction of thy Father.' On the one side is such a master, to obey whom is degradation, and like all base-born usurpers, cruel as lawless. What a wretched humiliation for a man with such a nature to be the serf of such a lord--to be, as Milton says,' the dejected and downtrodden vassal of perdition!' On the other side is the Source of all love, the Fruition of all desires, the Fountain of all purity and all peace. And we, dear brethren, may, through Christ, draw near to Him as sons, and cry Abba, Father!' Then we shall abide in His house for ever, in the happy consciousness of His Fatherhood and love, compassed by His care, and enriched by His gifts, and glad to serve, and blessed in obedience. Earth's changes will not take us away from our rest in God, nor its distractions rob us of the sweetness of kindred with Him. Whithersoever we go we may still be at home with God; whatsoever we do we may still be about our Father's business. Death itself will not break our Sonship, nor our consciousness of it. We shall but pass from an outer to an inner abiding-place in our Father's house, the place prepared for us by the Son, who set us free. Thou art no more a servant, but a son,' and if sons, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.'