The Power of an Endless Life.
The idea of a priesthood appears to have entered largely, if not universally, into the economy of the human race at all times. Before Christ came, men were under the priesthood of the law; since His advent, He Himself has become their priest. There is, of course, a wide and characteristic difference between these priesthoods; a difference as wide as that between the finite and the infinite: the mortal and the immortal: the temporal and the eternal. About the first there is the inexorable hardness of the cold, dead statue; in the second there are warmth, heart, life, and freedom. This difference is in exact accordance, not merely with the nature of the two priesthoods, but with their purposes. The one, being natural, took cognisance only of the outward, and adapted itself accordingly, so that it became "the law of a carnal commandment." The other repudiates this law, and takes cognisance of the inner life, and touching the motive-spring of spiritual aspirations, adapts itself to immortal requirements, and so becomes made "the power," or force, or impulse "of an endless life." The one supervises the carnal, the other the spiritual. The one guides the body, the other presides over the soul.
I. The emphatic word of the text is not "endless," but "power" "the powerof an endless life." The human soul does not float about in a serene equipoise of eternal mediocrity, but it grows and gathers strength with the ages. This growth must not be overlooked because it is latent and unseen. The soul is a nucleus or germ or kernel of an illimitable possibility.
But the implication of the text would seem to point to some monstrous perversion of the power of the endless life, to some mad, insensate, infatuated, wasting away of its power. Yes, it does take cognisance of some such fact, for it was the existence of this wreck which made a need-be for the intervention of the Great High Priest to whom the text refers. One of the most emphatic lessons which the Redeemer ever taught when on earth was propounded categorically, was put in the form of a question, and the question was this: "What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?" The very fact of Christ putting such a question implies a recognition on His part of the tendency in man to underrate his soul, and to make mistakes in his computation of his value. And the selfsame cause which leads us to underrate our soul leads us to set aside redemption as a scheme or as a theory too prodigious for belief. We think these little souls are not worth so much, and we will not believe the scheme of salvation, because we will not rightly value the immortality to be saved. We must never look upon heaven as a condition of stationary mediocrity, and we must think ourselves into the conception of an eternal growth, a perpetual expansion: not merely everlasting existence, but everlasting enlargement. And having mastered this colossal idea, we must gauge our need by our capacity, and we must gauge Christ's work by both; not by our present capacity, but by our capacity after the lapse of ages, when they shall be grown with the eternity.
A. Mursell, Penny Pulpit,New Series, No. 150.