The Idolatry of Novelty.
The one text exhibits to us in a lively picture the working of a great idolatry; the other text shows us the abolition of that idolatry by the satisfaction of the want of which it is the expression. Together they present to us the two sides of our subject, which is the idolatry of novelty. It cannot be denied that there is in all lives, probably not least in the busiest and the loftiest, an element of dulness. This is only to say that there must be routine in every life which is either active or useful; and that the life which is neither active nor useful is sure to have a routine of its own, a monotony of mere indolence or mere self-indulgence, of all monotonies the most irksome and the most fatiguing.
I. The Athenians were not mere gossips or newsmongers. The first sound of the words does them some injustice. Their idolatry of novelty by no means exhausted itself in inventing, or embellishing, or retailing scandalous or mischievous stories against the great men of their city, or against humbler neighbours "dwelling securely by them." Their treatment of St. Paul shows this. He was not a man of sufficient notoriety or sufficient importance to attract the attention of the mere tattler or scandalmonger. It was because he raised grave questions, going to the very root of the national and individual life, that these idolaters of novelty were attracted by him, and thought it worth while to bring him before the religious tribunal of the Areopagus, saying, "May we know what this new doctrine which is talked by thee is?" "this new doctrine," because, as St. Luke adds in the text, their great interest was in the hearing and telling of "anything at all new."
II. Those Athenians might well have an open ear for the preacher of a new divinity. This was but to confess, what was no secret by this time, that their anonymous altar was still standing, and that they waited to worship till it had a name. For them the idolatry of novelty was their hope and their religion. After all these centuries, we too are left with an anonymous altar, and the worship of English hearts is offered once again at the shrine of an unknown, an avowably unknowable, God. There is not an arrival of a so-called new apostle, there is not an importation of a so-called new divinity, for which this modern Athens has not at least one of its ears open. We are told that some one has dared to say, within the Christian Church of London, that Buddha himself is second only (if second) to Jesus Christ in morals, and superior to Christ Himself in this: that he never claimed for himself Divinity.
III. The very feeling, the very want, the very sense of monotony which has made impatient man set up this paltry idol of novelty, is provided for by God Himself saying, "Behold, I make" (not a few things, but) "all things new." There are two ways of fulfilling the promise of renovation. One is by the renewal of the thing itself; the other is by the renewal of the eye that views it. If the one is the promise of the text, the other is the promise elsewhere alike of St. John and St. Paul. We have all known in ourselves how the same object sea, sky, cloud, landscape, home itself and its inmates, the loved face, the letter from the dearest one may look dull or look lively, look beautiful or look ugly, according to the state of the mind that views it. It looks quite different when a sin is strong in us from that which it looked when we had just risen from prayer, and the very skin of the face shone from the reflection of the King in His beauty.
"Dark and cheerless is the morn
Unaccompanied by Thee;
Cheerless is the day's return
Till Thy mercy's beams I see"
then all is altered. Then the old commandment looks new. Then the heaven and the earth are new for me. Then He that sitteth upon the throne hath said, "Behold, I make all things new" yea (as St. Paul interprets), the old things themselves.
C. J. Vaughan, Restful Thoughts for Restless Times,p. 272.
All Things New.
I. Consider what Holy Scripture teaches us as to our resurrection life. Let us try to learn something as to the state and place in which we hope to find ourselves hereafter. We are expressly told that there shall be a new heaven and a new earth. Our home, our bright, blessed, glorious home, is not to be in a world of sin and sorrow, not in a world which groans under the curse of God, but it will be a new home, nothing like what we see now, something quite different, something quite fresh, something altogether new: a new heaven and a new earth. "The former things" death, sorrow, sickness, sin, temptation, misery, wretchedness; all that makes life a burden to us; all that troubles us and vexes us; all that saddens us and grieves us in this lower existence all will have gone for ever; "the former things are passed away."
II. Not only is the place to be new, but those that inhabit the place must be new also. If no sin can enter there, if no sickness, no weariness, no weakness, if none of these things can enter that new Jerusalem, then certainly we must be new new in body and new in soul. And so it will be: we shall be changed; we shall live under new conditions of existence. Mortality will give place to immortality. This corruptible frame of ours shall become incorruptible.
III. But our text tells us how this is to be. It explains how all this is to be accomplished: "And He that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new." All this must be God's work, God's work in our hearts. The work is a gradual work: it has its beginning, and its middle, and its end. The work will be finished in heaven, but it must begin here on earth. Here it is imperfect and incomplete; here it is a painful work, a work of toil and difficulty. In heaven it shall be finished, quite perfect, quite complete; for we shall be like Him, like Him for ever.
E. V. Hall, The Waiting Saviour,p. 103.
A New Creation.
A religion which professes to claim the attention and the allegiance of man must show itself to be a religion fitted for man. It must be capable of satisfying his legitimate and innocent instincts. It is perfectly true that the very idea of a religion is this: that it is to repress man's vices and to educate within him holier desires; but it is also true that if religion appears at all, it must appear capable of satisfying his legitimate and his innocent instincts. And one of the features of the Christian faith is pre-eminently this. It is not merely one which sets itself in utter and irreconcilable antagonism to all that savours of sin or of vice in man, but it does not seek to distort human nature; it does not seek to turn man from what is natural to him. It is not merely antagonistic to evil, but it is also capable of developing good, because it comes to man, and dealing with man as he is, it proclaims to him the duty of an entire self-control.
I. There are several instincts which, as intimated in the text, the Christian religion will satisfy. What are these instincts? It has been often said that we are creatures of the present; that is, that our life is bounded by that little moment which we call "now." The past that has slipped from our grasp; the future it is not yet ours; and all of that which we can call life, which is really in our possession, is simply the present moment of time. This is perfectly true if by it we understand that our opportunities are limited to the present; but it is utterly untrue if it means that man can be for ever isolated from the past, or ever removed in anticipation from the future. We are bound to the past by the law of reminiscence; we are bound to the future by the law of hope. Though memory may be stronger in age, and hope may be stronger in youth, yet the two instincts of hope and memory walk side by side with us from the very cradle to the grave; and no religion which is worthy of the name can dare to come before man unless it satisfies these two instincts. The religion of the Master satisfies both. The words of the text seem to incorporate that which will satisfy both our longing after the past and our glorious anticipation of the future, when One who, sitting upon the throne of the universe, cries out to men who are sinking under the agony of despair as they find things withering at their touch, "Behold, I make all things new." It satisfies the instinct of hope.
II. But is this all? There is the other instinct. It is the love of the things old. It is that which memory so constantly pleads for; and do the words which seem to speak of newness satisfy that also? Christ does not say, "Behold, I make all things utterly unlike what they are; I make you a new heaven and a new earth." He surely never means that He does violence to the instinct which makes us cling to the things old. He means that He will put back the freshness of youth without robbing us of the love of memory; He means that He will give us back the suppleness and the power of the old early days, but He will not rob us of that which is dear and familiar to us. One of the grandest things in the whole of this book of Revelation is the way in which it preserves, so to speak, the contact of Christian minds with the past.
Bishop Boyd-Carpenter, Penny Pulpit,New Series, No. 1037.
References: Revelation 21:5. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxxi., No. 1816; G. W. McCree, Christian World Pulpit,vol. x., p. 168. Revelation 21:6. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxvi., No. 1549; Homilist,3rd series, vol. i., p. 107; Preacher's Monthly,vol. v., p. 50; Homiletic Magazine,vol. xiv., p. 113; H. P. Liddon, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxx., p. 353.