The Immutability of the Divine Word.
When the words of the text were uttered the eye of the Saviour was resting on scenes whose stability promised to be of world-long life. The hills round about Jerusalem looked like Nature's thrown-up fortress to guard from desolation or from the tooth of time, some favoured work of man. But that work cannot live always, says the holy Speaker, nor any other. The seeds of desolation and waste are in everything the eye looks upon. Riches, honours, comforts, friends, youth, beauty, genius, strength; the prospering enterprise, the unfolding hope, the fellowship of kindred minds, and the hallowed, domestic ties, how slight is our hold on these things. Our lesson is to "use the world as not abusing it, for the fashion of this world passeth away." The words of Christ shall not pass away:
I. Because of the eternal power and Godhead of Him who spake them. The doctrine of our Saviour's Divinity is our life. It stamps all His teaching with the impress of infallible truth; it gives to all His promises the force of a present and felt reality. The matters to which Christ's words relate are too vital to our soul's happiness to be received on any authority which is not Divine.
II. Again, the words of Christ shall never pass away because they form the last of that series of communications vouchsafed by God to a lost world, never to be reopened, never to be added to, never by angel's or prophet's voice to be urged again. Christianity always claims for itself the distinction of being a final dispensation; those which went before it never did not the Patriarchal, not the Levitical, not the Prophetical. Each was to usher in something better than itself, being a figure for the time present. All the revelations which went before pointed to Christianity, terminated and were absorbed in it.
III. The words of Christ shall not pass away because they are founded in eternal truth and in the fixed counsels of the immutable God. As God cannot change, so neither shall the word of truth change. It is everlasting, like Himself; it is a great unity, like Himself. Christ is emphatically the truth; His words contain in them an infinite and Divine essence. Omnipotence spoke them; almightiness accompanied them; immortality dwelt in them; they could neither turn, change, nor fail.
IV. There can be no passing away of Christ's words because of their connection with His own final glory as Mediator. The words of Christ have a mission, and He is glorified when that mission is fulfilled. He conquers when we conquer; He is honoured in the success of His work, in the triumphs of His truth, in the power of His grace over rebellious wills, in the diffused and extending reign of sanctity and love and righteousness and peace. "On His head were many crowns," said the beloved Apostle. They were His rejoicing, His recompense, the travail of His soul, the promised seed He should have to serve Him, the proof that His word had not returned unto Him void had not passed away.
D. Moore, Penny Pulpit,No. 3,209.
The Permanence of Christ's Words.
Let us try to observe some characteristics of our Lord's reported language which may enable us to understand the confident prediction of the text.
I. That which strikes us first of all in the words of our Lord Jesus is the authority which speaks in them, or rather which is their very soul. One evangelist says that our Lord's public teaching was so acceptable because "He taught as one having authority, and not as the scribes." The scribes were anxious to bring their countrymen to look at the law in the light of the traditional interpretations of which they were the guardians and exponents; but if the scribes were to do this, it was not enough for them to say, "This is right, and that is wrong." They found themselves confronted with the difficulties which present themselves to any merely human teacher entrusted with the task of recommending a doctrine which he believes to be true to the attention, to the convictions, of the human mind. He knows how solid, how many-sided, is the resistance which awaits him; he feels his way gently; he explains tentatively. He lays siege, as it were, to a fortress which he is bent on capturing, and as if he were directing an intellectual battery against its outworks and defences; and where argument seems to fail him he appeals perhaps to sentiment, to feeling, to passion. This is what the scribes did in their way. They were masters of a kind of reasoning, which, however little suited to Western or to modern tastes, was in its way subtle and effective. It was the instrument with which they worked, and they only succeeded at all if they could get people to attend to it. With our Lord it was otherwise; He, generally speaking, takes no account whatever of those means of producing conviction which in merely human speakers command success. He does not reason at least as a rule; He affirms a truth, knowing that it is the truth, and leaving it to make its own way in the soul of man. He feels that He has an ancient welcome prepared for Him within the soul of man; that He possesses the key to its wants and its mysteries; that within it, as no other teacher can be, He will be at home, and will be owned as its rightful Lord.
II. A second characteristic of our Lord's words is their elevation. His teaching rises above the ripest and largest wisdom of the whole ancient world the best and truest sayings which the conscience, without the light of revelation, has left for the guidance of human life. As we listen to Him we are conscious always and everywhere of a matchless elevation. He is far above His countrymen, far above the wisest wisdom of the time, far above the wisest wisdom of the ages that have succeeded, or of which He has not been directly or indirectly the author. As we listen to Him we feel that He speaks and lives in an atmosphere to which we poor sinful men only ascend at rare intervals and by considerable efforts. As a Teacher, no less than as our Redeemer and Lord, He invites the praises of His Church "Thou, O Christ, with the Holy Ghost, art most high in the glory of God the Father."
III. A third characteristic of the words of Christ is their awful depth. Many of them were addressed to the people, and they were correspondingly simple in form. They were without any of the apparatus of learning, or of the pretence of culture. Each hearer felt at first as if he fully understood them, and saw all their bearings, and had sounded their meaning, and had only to lay up in his heart and mind what was at once so simple and so encouraging. But when they were laid up in memory, and taken down in writing, it was soon seen that there was a great deal more in them than had appeared to be the case at first. It was seen that beyond and beneath the first or superficial meaning there was a second, at once deeper and most adequate, and perhaps there was a third. Our Lord's words have depths in them which are explored sometimes by divinity, sometimes by the experience of a life, but which always elude complete investigation. They have about them that character of infinitude which belongs to the more than human mind from which they proceed. Their depth is seen in their extraordinary and enduring ascendency over the best of men at the distance of these many centuries. He still has the power of pouring his own Divine enthusiasm, for the highest good of mankind, into the souls of others by means of these imperishable words.
H. P. Liddon, Penny Pulpit,p. 1, 121.
The Perpetuity of the Words of Christ.
I. Here we have a fair and bold comparison of two things: one which seems the slightest and most evanescent you can think of; another which seems the very ideal of all that is substantial and durable. Here are on the one side a few words, and on the other side the great solid world. What more fleeting, we should say, than a few articulated syllables, vibrating each on the ear for its second, and then dying away? what more everlasting than this gigantic world we live on? Yet the Saviour dares the comparison. He invites the comparison between the endurance of the words He utters and the endurance of the stars, the earth, and the ocean.
II. It is approaching towards two thousand years since the days of Christ's three years' ministry on earth. Ages are measured out since He spake with His human voice those words of wisdom and mercy, the like of which never man spake; and it is many a day, indeed, since His words, in their prosaic literalness, have passed away, have ceased to stir the audible pulses of the air, have passed to silence. Yet, though no magic was impressed on the syllables which flowed from the lips of the Redeemer to arrest their natural passing away, still it is true and certain that they have not passed away, and cannot pass away while the world stands. For one thing, they have not passed away, in this sense that when they were spoken the simple narrative of the evangelists took and perpetuated them; and in these four Gospels we have the words of Christ preserved.
III. But it is a little thing to say that Christ's words were perpetuated on paper. We should not set much store by the fact that upon printed pages by millions and millions the words of our Redeemer have outlived the storms and the wear of ages; we should not mind much about that if it stood by itself; but take it with this, that these words are so marvellously adapted to the needs of our immortal nature that those who have once felt their power, would feel it was parting with life to part with them. Earthquakes, deluges, might sweep this world, but you must unpeople it before the words of Christ could pass away from it.
IV. Though the last Bible perished, as perish it may in the wreck and ruin of this world; though the blessed words of Jesus were to do what they never can fade away utterly from the remembrance of the glorified soul; even then these words would live on in the effects they had produced. They would live and last in heaven, in the souls they had brought there; in their justification before God, in the purity of their renewed natures, in their changeless and never-ending peace.
A. K. H. B., Graver Thoughts of a Country Parson,3rd series, p. 310.
References: Matthew 24:35. Preacher's Monthly,vol. x., p. 115; Homiletic Magazine,vol. xvi., p. 174; H. P. Liddon, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xviii., p. 97; A. Mursell, Ibid.,vol. xx., p. 181.