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SERMON III.

THE SERVANT AND THE SON.

JOHN viii, 35.

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

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 consecration, which ceased thereby to be bondage) -in token whereof he had his ear fastened to the doorpost 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-he who 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 things 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 the whole of the two classes, 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-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 is 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 here 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 sure 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 though they be, high above our power to scale, and clammy with the sighs of a thousand generations, are undermined and tottering. Deliverance is possible.

For, in the light of God's revelation, we see that the slave-master is an usurper. Sin is clearly not natural to man, as God meant him to be, howsoever it may seem to