The Apostle draws a contrast, and bids us choose which of two things we prefer. "The world," he says, "passeth away, and the lust thereof"; at its best it is but for a moment; "but he that doeth the will of God," hard though it may be at the time, "abideth for ever."
I. Now the world, so far as it is summed up in man, may be roughly divided into three spheres: one of those who act, one of those who think, and one of those who enjoy. In the first sphere, love of power is the dominant idea; and, worked out to its grandest result, it is embodied in empire. In the second, love of knowledge is the supreme attraction; and here we meet men of letters. In the third, the end of life is represented by the rich man centred in Christ's parable: "Soul, take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry," and here for pleasure we can find a name. The Apostle tells us that in each and all of those spheres "the world passeth away, and the lust thereof," and sooner or later we shall find it out. "The world passeth away." Men cease to care for it even before they are done with it; for it cannot satisfy the nature that was made by God, and they in time discover it.
II. God desires and proposes three main things for us: duty, goodness, and truth. Duty means our filling the place and doing the work assigned to us, whether it be of kings or of peasants. Not to be happy, but to be good, is the true aim of an enlightened conscience; and often the goodness comes through the lost happiness, because happiness rests on circumstances, and goodness on discipline. We shall live if we do the will of God live, not only there, but here; live, not only in eternity, but in time; live though we be dead, and buried, and forgotten. This is completed immortality: to abide everlastingly first in the life and fruition of God, with whom, in His life, and truth, and energy, and holiness, we are joined already in a completed and mystic union; and when those truthful seeds of goodness are wafted over the spaces of the ages from our poor lips and lives, they will ripen in a kindly soil into eternal life.
Bishop Thorold, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xv., p. 65.
Obedience the Only Reality.
In a certain sense, all things, the most shadowy and fleeting the frosts, and dews, and mists of heaven are real. Every light which falls from the upper air, every reflection of its brightness toward heaven again, is a reality. It is a creature of God, and is here in His world fulfilling His word. But these things we are wont to take as symbols and parables of unreality, and that because they are changeful and transitory. It is clear, then, that when we speak of reality we mean things that have in them the germ of an abiding life. In strictness of speech we can call nothing real which is not eternal. Now it is in this sense that I say the only reality in the world is a will obedient to the will of God.
I. It is plain that the only reality in this visible world is man. Of all things that have life without a reasonable soul, we know no more than that they perish. Nothing survives but the mass of human life, and that not blended as before, but each as several and apart as if none lived before God but he only. And thus it is that all that is real in the world is ever passing out of it tarrying for a while in the midst of shadows and reflections and then, as it were, melting out of sight.
II. Again, as the only reality in the world is man, so the only reality in man is his spiritual life. Nothing of all we have and are in this world save only our spiritual life, and that which is impressed upon it and blended with it, shall we carry into the world unseen. The aim of our life ought then to be to partake of the eternal obedience. Nothing else is worth our living for. "The world passeth away, and the lust thereof." It is confounded at its own perpetual changes; it sees that none of its schemes abide, that it daily grows more weary of toiling and more transient in its toils. All men are conscious of this. They crave after something through which they may submit themselves to the realities of the eternal world. And for this end was the visible Church ordained. To meet the yearnings of our baffled hearts, it stands in the earth as a symbol of the everlasting; under the veil of its material sacraments are the powers of an endless life; its unity and order are the expression of heavenly things, its worship of an eternal homage. Blessed are they that dwell within its hallowed precinct, shielded from the lures and spells of the world, living in plainness, even in poverty, hid from the gaze of men, in silence and solitude walking with God.
H. E. Manning, Sermons,vol. i., p. 129.
River and Rock.
There are but two things set forth in this text, which is a great and wonderful antithesis between something which is in perpetual flux and passage and something which is permanent. If I might venture to cast the two thoughts into metaphorical form, I should say that here are a river and a rock, the one the sad truth of sense, universally believed and as universally forgotten; the other the glad truth of faith, so little regarded or operative in men's lives.
I. Note the river, or the sad truth of sense. You observe that there are two things in my text of which this transiency is predicated, the one the world, the other the lust thereof; the one outside us, the other within us. As the original implies even more strongly than in our translation, "the world" is in the act of "passing away." Like the slow travelling of the scenes of some movable panorama, which glide along even as the eye looks upon them, and are concealed behind the side flats before the gaze has taken in the whole picture, so equably, constantly, silently, and therefore unnoticed by us, all is in a state of motion. There is no present time. Even whilst we name the moment it dies. The drop hangs for an instant on the verge, gleaming in the sunlight, and then falls into the gloomy abyss that silently sucks up years and centuries. There is no present, but all is movement. If a man has anchored himself to that which has no perpetual stay, so long as the cable holds, he follows the fate of the thing to which he has pinned himself; and if it perish, he perishes, in a very profound sense, with it. If you trust to the leaky vessel, when the water rises in it it will drown you, and you will go to the bottom with the craft to which you have trusted. If you sink all in the little ship which carries Christ and His fortunes, you will come with Him to the haven. When they build a new house in Rome, they have to dig down through sometimes sixty or a hundred feet of rubbish that runs like water, the ruins of old temples and palaces, once occupied by men in the same flush of life in which we are now. We, too, have to dig down through ruins, until we get to rock, and build there, and build securely. Withdraw your affections, and your thoughts, and your desires from the fleeting, and fix them on the permanent. If a captain takes anything but the pole-star for his fixed point, he will lose his reckoning, and his ship will be on the reefs; if we take anything but God for our supreme delight and desire, we shall perish.
II. The rock, or the glad truth of faith. Obedience to God's will is the permanent element in human life. Whosoever humbly and trustfully seeks to mould his will after the Divine will, and to bring God's will into practice in his doings that man has pierced through the shadows and grasped the substance, partakes of the immortality which he adores and serves. Himself shall live for ever in the true life, which is blessedness. His deeds shall live for ever when all that lifted itself in opposition to the Divine will shall be crushed and annihilated.
A. Maclaren, The God of the Amen,p. 248.
References: 1 John 2:17. T. Binney, Christian World Pulpit,vol. v., p. 129; J. Greenfield, Ibid.,vol. xiii., p. 325; Dean Bradley, Ibid.,vol. xxiv., p. 17; A. Legge, Ibid.,vol. xxix., p. 120; A. Raleigh, The Little Sanctuary,p. 157.