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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
‘If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine.’
Joh_7:17
I. God once known in any degree makes an immediate personal demand upon our conduct.—To reject that demand is, by the very nature of the case, to refuse to know Him, while to comply with the demand is to do His will, and so to verify the teaching of the text that if any man willeth to do, he shall know of the teaching. God means to us, above all things, a holy being, and holiness casts an obligation upon us who come near it. To be in the presence of holiness is to feel an obligation to be holy. This obligation is part of the very nature of holiness. To decline the obligation is to deny the nature of holiness, to be blind to its existence, and therefore to Him Whose attribute it is. There is, therefore, nothing unreasonable in the assertion that conduct is the key to creed, for the analogy of all knowledge argues this. The only difference in this respect between secular and sacred science is that the former is departmental, while the latter is universal.
II. There is a quantitative relation between our doing and knowing.—We shall learn exactly as much of science as our experiment has justified, of God as our conduct may deserve. The same line of thought may help us to meet a further objection of the day. Knowledge which is based on conduct is a personal property which outsiders cannot share. This many resent. They expect belief to be universal—open to all; to be read in a book and criticised at will. But such is not the case with any other sort of knowledge.
III. Divine truth is a revelation.—We have not chosen Him, but He has chosen us, and He appeals to all the faculties of our complex being. It was not in the critical attitude of the faculties that the saints of old spoke. From this personal character it follows that religious knowledge must be mystic, incommunicable. The religious man may be able to adduce reasons for the faith that is in him, but he feels all the while that his arguments cannot produce conviction. They but draw their colour therefrom, and are too secret, too spiritual, too sacred to produce. Our belief is sure. The influence of our life, prayers answered, judgments unmistakable, punishment for secret sin—these, as they gather round our inner history, make us hear the same voice speaking which said to Nathanael, ‘Before that Philip called thee, when thou wast under the fig tree, I saw thee.’ Saintly example may call us to Christ, but it is only the sense that His eye is upon us that can change probability into certainty, and elicit the confession, ‘Thou art the Son of God, Thou art the King of Israel.’ The knowledge of God depends, primarily, upon the desire to do His will. It is revealed, not invented. It may be described and commended, but not imparted to our fellowmen.
IV. ‘Come, and I will show you what the Lord hath done for my soul’ is the limit of a possible missionary appeal. From this vein the Church of Christ draws a practical corollary which men do not like to draw—that moral purification is necessary to the knowledge of God. There may have been earnest seekers after truth who have not found Him, but these are few and far between. Those who bandy words about agnosticism have not been in earnest as the Church of Christ counts earnestness. Earnestness means to bring our secret sins into the light of God’s countenance; to mourn over them, forsake them, and acquiesce in the solemn fact that we have marred our purity for ever. The very fact that men consider it an insult to have unbelief attributed to sin shows how little they have studied the effect of sin on the soul. The knowledge of God may indeed be hard of attainment, as calling for personal effort long sustained. But it is within the reach of all, simple as well as sage. All men, of whatever intellectual capacity, are capable of loving, and may follow love’s leading if they will. ‘And he that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.’
Rev. J. R. Illingworth.
Illustration‘The best and most active-minded Christians, even those whose interests and tastes are naturally speculative, seem increasingly disposed to recognise that their main energies ought to be directed to practical and social rather than to intellectual pursuits, that their chief life’s work ought to be done in the world of their fellowmen rather than in their studies. This disposition arises not from any tendency to obscurantism, but from their increasing recognition of the fact that Christianity is, and ever must be, its own chief evidence, and that, therefore, the man who lives a consistent, progressive Christian life, and thus displays its beauty and its grace in concrete form, is the most effective kind of apologist. He not merely can point to evidence already existing—he produces new evidence himself, and that in a form most likely to be convincing to a race of predominantly practical instincts.
KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING
I. We have Christ’s own word for it.—Our text is a fitting one for Trinity Sunday, the Day of the Athanasian Creed, the day which sums up all the series of amazing facts and marvellous doctrines, when Christ tells us that the Doing of God’s will is the way to know that all these doctrines are true; and that there is one plain way of knowledge, and that is doing God’s will. He does not say, If any man will be very clever and very intellectual, and succeed in understanding all mysteries, then he shall know that all this is true; He does say, If any man will do His will he shall know of the doctrine.
II. This is intensely comforting.—Think how few people can give their lives to hard thinking and to solving difficulties; it would be a poor Gospel, indeed, which was a Gospel only for the learned.
III. It is also a very solemn warning.—Look how it brings the knowledge of God home to every one of us as a thing quite within your reach, so that you are all quite inexcusable if you do not get it. For knowing means that sort of feeling quite sure about a thing which you have about the facts of your own house and family. This knowing of the doctrine means feeling the same sort of sureness and certainty that Christ is your Saviour, that God is your Father, that the Holy Spirit is in you—working out your renewal into God’s likeness—the same sort of certainty of all these things—and that your life is arranged for you by God—as you had that your earthly parents watched over your infancy and provided for your bringing up.
IV. It is the doing of His will which is sure to bring this home to you.—Therefore we know that disbelief in a man’s mind means sin in a man’s life. It is a strong thing to say; but Christ says it, not I, and I am bound to say what Christ says. Christ says it, not I; and Christ must know, for He made us, and He knows what is in man. What is God’s will that we are to do? There are many things; but one thing is the chief. When Christ was about to be offered He gave His Apostles one command—one New Command—that Love to one another should be the rule of their lives: as He had loved us, so we are to love one another; and St. Paul fills it up when he says Charity and Love is the life of Christianity. It is the one rule for all: for individuals, for churches, for parishes, for towns—practical charity, goodwill to one another in private life and in public. All evil speaking, all thinking evil of one another, all jealousies, misrepresentations, all party spirit—all these things war against the life of religion, and throw us open to the misunderstanding of the doctrine, as well as to forsaking the way of Christ.
Illustration
‘It should never be forgotten that God deals with us as moral beings, and not as beasts or stones. He loves to encourage us to self-exertion and diligent use of such means as we have in our hands. The plain things in religion are undeniably very many. Let a man honestly attend to them, and he shall be taught the deep things of God. Whatever some may say about their inability to find out truth, you will rarely find one of them who does not know better than he practises. Then if he is sincere, let him begin here at once. Let him humbly use what little knowledge he has got, and God will soon give him more.’