What should we do in life without measures? This beautiful building could not have been erected as well as it has been if there had not been a good deal of very precise measuring, so that everything should fit into its proper place, without a chink or crack to be seen anywhere. So, every house that is built, every road that is laid out, and especially every railroad, requires a great deal of measuring. When, too, you have to draw a map, or plan, youmust be very precise about your measurements to do it properly. Then, again, the singers’ measure. They have so many beats to the bar. Even poetry is governed by different measures. John says the heavenly city had been measured carefully--“And the city lieth four-square,… and he measured the city with the reed.” The first measure that people used was just a reed out of the hedge: a very rough and ready sort of thing; but it answered the purpose if it was exactly the right length. But as we get more and more respectable, we adopt more costly measures. They are not necessarily a bit more correct; but they are more imposing. We have our wooden measures; then comes the ivory measure; and in this instance we have the costliest of all materials, namely, gold--a measure to measure the city which is a golden reed. Everything was measured with great precision--“the gates thereof, and the walls thereof,” etc. Now I want to show that it is God’s will that you should do everything in this way systematically and punctually--not by rule of thumb, as we call it. Some of the old people used to measure with their thumbs. You know there are some who do that to-day. They reckon as inch between the point of the thumb and the first joint. That is the rule of thumb, and is not very exact. Now what God would have us do in life is not to measure anything in that haphazard way, but everything by a certain and infallible standard. Now, this Book is God’s law from heaven for life on earth; and there is one great standard of whom this Book speaks, namely, Jesus Christ. The Apostle Paul teaches us that it is possible for us by the grace of God to come up to the stature of the perfect man in Christ Jesus. He is our infallible standard; and nobody else is infallible. There are some very good people whose example it is well for us to imitate, in so far as they follow Christ, but no further. Whenever even they fall short, we must not imitate them. We are to go back to the original standard, even Jesus Christ our Saviour. This Book further teaches us what we ought to do. “Ah,” you say, “we so often fail.” Yes you do; and there forgiveness comes in. There are many sins. Some fall through ignorance: they do not know any better, and the Lord forgives them freely. Others sin through sheer wickedness; and if even they repent, the Lord will forgive. But our aim should be to come up to the standard; and the Saviour will give us every needful grace to do so. We could not do much without Him; but we can do a great deal through Him. (D. Davies.)
Two cities
The book of the Revelation is full of contrasts:--e.g., Michael and the dragon; the woman clothed with the sun, and the woman clothed in scarlet; the beast and his mark, and the Lamb and His mark. One might almost re-arrange the contents in a series of contrasts or antitheses, culminating in the great antithesis of Babylon and the New Jerusalem.
I. The appearance of the two cities. Both lie foursquare, but--In Babylon there are no natural heights; such heights as there are, are artificial, and barely rise to the level of the walls. In the New Jerusalem, on the other hand, the height and the length and the breadth are equal. Surely this well represents the difference which exists between the world and the Church. Worldly ambition can, at most, rear for itself some mound of fame; the saints progress by an upward pathway which winds towards the summit of the holy mountain. “Ye are come unto Mount Zion.”
II. The rivers which water the two cities. Babylon was watered by the Euphrates, of which the source lay without the walls. The city was taken through this radical defect; the invaders, altering the course of the river, entered secretly along the river-bed. In the New Jerusalem the river of the water of life has its source in the midst of the city, flowing out from beneath the throne, which occupies its midmost summit. In either case the river is a type of health and happiness. The pleasures of the world, however, are never safe from pollution at the source. Disease and death may taint them at any time, or draw the stream into other channels. But “there is a river, the streams whereof make glad thecity of God,” and that river has its source protected; it confers pleasure “for evermore,” because it is sheltered by His right hand.
III. The comparative size of the two cities. Babylon was a “great city”--about three times the size of London. Yet, comparing the measurements which Herodotus gives of Babylon with those which St. John gives of the New Jerusalem, we find that the latter would contain just 10,000 of the former. The world has great influence, and the cause is adequate to the effect; yet how comparatively insignificant it is when we contrast its pretensions with the greatness of God’s Church!
IV. The gates and streets of the two cities. Babylon here seems to have the advantage--one hundred gates instead of twelve. The advantage, however, is only apparent, and serves to illustrate its real deficiencies. For observe--Babylon is built on a plain, with twenty-five gates on each side, and streets running from gate to gate; its ground-plan forms a series of squares held together by the limiting square of the walls. The New Jerusalem is built on a hill. The city is pyramidal in form; all the streets run up towards the summit, and meet in the vicinity of the throne. The world is held together by restraint; its elements have all a pseudo independence; its motto is, “Each for himself.” It has no true principle of unity. In the Church, on the other hand, there is a centre of attraction. “The throne of God and of the Lamb” gives to the whole an organic unity. Its members may approach from different sides, but all of necessity approach the centre. Their motto is, “Thy will be done”; in dependence on that will they are united. (C. A. Goodhart, M. A.)
The length and the breadth and the height of it are equal.--
The symmetry of life
So much of the noblest life which the world has seen dissatisfies us with its partialness; so many of the greatest men we see are great only on certain sides, and have their other sides all shrunken, flat, and small, that it may be well for us to dwell upon the picture which these words suggest, of a humanity rich, and full, and strong all round, complete on every side, the perfect cube of human life which comes down out of heaven from God.
I. The length of life. All men have their special powers and dispositions. Each man finds that he has his. That nature which he has discovered in himself decides for him his career. What heis, even before he knows it, has decided what he does. His life has run out in a line which had the promise and potency of its direction in the nature which his birth and education gave him. All his self-culture strove that way. Through the confusion and whirl of human lives, his life ran in one sharp, narrow line, from what he knew he was, to what he meant to be and do. That clear, straight line of unswerving intention, that struggle and push right onward to the end--that is the end of his life. To have an end and seek it eagerly--no man does anything in the world without that. Therefore, we may freely say to any young man, Find your purpose and fling your life out to it; and the loftier your purpose is, the more sure you will be to make the world richer with every enrichment of yourself. This, you see, comes to the same thing as saying that this first dimension of life, which we call “length,” the more loftily it is sought, has always a tendency to promote self-development.
II. The second dimension of life is breadth. Breadth in a man’s life is its outreach laterally. It is the tendency of a man’s career to bring him into sympathy and relationship with other men. First, the man’s own career becomes to him the interpretation of the careers of other men; and secondly, by his sympathy with other men, his own life displays to him its best capacity. His task is always glorified and kept from narrowness by his perpetual demand upon it, that it should give him such a broad understanding of human life in general asshould make him fit to read, and touch, and help all other kinds of life.
III. The height of life is its reach upward toward something distinctly greater than humanity. The reaching of mankind towards God! Evidently, in order that that may become a true dimension of a man’s life, it must not be a special action. It must be something which pervades all that he is and does. It must not be a solitary column set on one holy spot of the nature. It must be a movement of the whole nature upward. To any man in whom that uplifting of life has genuinely begun, all life without it must seem very flat and poor. (Bp. Phillips Brooks.)
The proportionateness of the spiritual kingdom of God
The proportionateness of theHoly City as an illustration of what ought to be the proportionateness of another structure.
I. Some are disproportionate through isolated height. Such a one was, at first, the Apostle John. He saw a city in the air, and gazed into heaven. There are many such who dreamily meditate upon the glories of heaven. Such are often the very ones who would pass the beggar-child on the street. They do not notice the tear-dimmed- eyes and the anguish of the suffering face; for they are hurrying home to read, perchance to weep over thoughts that are beautiful. The height and the length and the breadth are not equal.
II. Others are disproportionate through isolated length These are the exclusively practical people. They see the plain matter-of-fact way of duty before them, and they walk bravely along it, yet they have never caught a glimpse of the lights in the streets of the city of God. The length and the height and the breadth are not equal.
III. Others still are disproportionate through isolated breadth. Some are broad for the sake of being broad, and there is no beauty in such. They delight in making a parade of their breadth; they enjoy the look of surprise and pain on the face of some saint of God. They imagine themselves to be liberal, but their knowledge is scant. In them is no height of contemplation; they have never dreamed a dream of the Holy City, nor have seen the Lamb in the midst of the throne. In them is no length of practical usefulness; they have not visited the widow and fatherless in their affliction. Even the breadth which they have is the laxity of ignorance and waywardness, and that is all they have. The breadth and the height and the length are not equal. Some naturally incline towards the heights of spiritual meditation, to gaze on the glories of the Holy City; others towards the plain pathway of the practical; others still towards the breadth by which they hear other voices expressing other thoughts of God’s universe. Others, again, pass through the various stages in succession; while still others possess these three qualities in different degrees. It is the purpose of God, by His grace, to make these qualities in the youthful soul proportionate and harmonious--to make the height, the length, and the breadth equal. Some day a scholar will write a book in which he will tell how God sought to accomplish this in one and another of the disciples. The book will be one of rare suggestiveness. John, the beloved, had the height and the breadth--to him came the command to cast out devils. Paul scaled the heights of contemplation when he meditated upon “the exceeding riches of His grace,” and he passed far along the way of duty when he answered the call, “Come over and help us.” But he needed the breadth, and this he must gain by the sympathy of a common suffering. Therefore came the thorn in the flesh; and thus he saw in the breadth of sympathy at once the sorrows of others and the sorrow of the Son of Man. In the souls of young Christians, the height and length and breadth will meet together in the clear and harmonious colours of a rainbow of our God. The Christian religion, and it only, extirpates or represses no noble instinct; it welcomes height and length and breadth, and all that is included in them, and gives to each its proper place. But we need an ideal to be before us. We look on the noblest sons of men one by one, and find them marred by reason of irregularity. Where shall we find this ideal? Within the magic circle of the Person of the Man Christ Jesus all these three are presented in absolute fulness and exquisite harmony! We stand in awe of the heights of heavenly contemplation of which glimpses are given to us. When He departed into a solitary place, when He lifted up His eyes to heaven in communion with His Father, He drew aside the veil and showed to us the glories of heavenly contemplation. Then, to think of the practical aspect of His active life. How He toiled to realise the Messianic plan by training the twelve, by announcing the laws of the kingdom, by healing every sickness and every disease among the people! Then in Him was breadth bounded only by the universe, broad as the love of God. It was a breadth which led Him to hear voices of sheep not of this fold who would yet enter to find pasture, that there might be one fold and one Shepherd. It is the priceless privilege of every young Christian who has yielded himself to God through Christ, to seek to attain by His grace towards the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ; for in Him and in Him alone the height and the length and the breadth are equal. (G. Matheson, D. D.)
