1 Peter 3:18-20 For Christ also has once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh… The term applied here to the Almighty represents Him as we are not very apt to think of Him, i.e., as having before Him all the evil, of every kind, in His children, and bearing it; our ingratitude, our disobedience, our folly, our fickleness, our obstinacy, our selfishness, our wilfulness, our sensuality, our irreverence, our vanity — the whole dark and diversified mass of our sin. The catalogue of its shapes and degrees is well-nigh inexhaustible, yet it does not exhaust His patience. We have, it is true, as men and women, our disapprobations and even our little indignations at wrong-doing. But what marks a special contrast between them and the Divine displeasure is this, that as they gain in strength our human antipathies toward transgression are apt to grow hot and hasty. We want to see judgment against evil works executed speedily, forgetting that it was only just now that we began to see them to be evil works. Our brother trespasses against us, and, not considering that he is our brother, moulded of just such clay and subject to just such infirmities as ourselves, we cry out for the magistrate and the prison, if not the lash; and sometimes because there is no lash in the jailer's hand, we take one up with our tongue. This is the impatient spirit that vitiates so many of our remonstrances against our neighbours' crimes. Let us give a little wider reach to the treatment of the subject by contemplating the patience of God in its sublime delay, its slowness as men count slowness, in bringing about the most beneficent ends. He shows us this patience first as the Maker of things. You find it in the unhurried order of the natural creation; the slow building and furnishing of the outer worlds; the slow succession of geologic ages; the slow procession in ascending ranks, one only so little above another, of the races of plants and animals, affording an epoch for a reptile or a fern; the 'slow preparation of the planet for its final purpose in the rearing of an immortal family, the revelation of the spiritual glory of the Divine Man in the flesh, and the manifestation, by that incarnation, of a new earth with the sons of God for its kings and priests. We rise from the physical to the moral world. Take the broadest divisions of the human family — races and nations. From their beginnings in the East, as an eastern shepherd leads out his flocks, the Everlasting Father has brought His tribes out of their native sheepcotes and stationed them here and there over the globe. Vast territories, with fertile soils and blooming vegetation, with the wealth of navies and harvests in their bosom, were waiting to receive them: and some are waiting still. God waited His own good time for occupying them with human industry. Nor is this the chief exercise of His patience. One after another these nations have broken away from their Creator's commandment. For each one of them He kindled the light of conscience or of revelation, to show them the way, and they shut their eyes upon it. Every national life has grown corrupt. No sooner have they come to prosperity than they have come to luxury, idleness, and the beginnings of decay. They have tempted and betrayed each other; cheated, fought, enslaved, murdered each other. Very seldom has He come to them with sudden judgments or wide spread desolations. He has waited till they would destroy themselves. He has tried them again and again. When one has gone down He has set up another, and waited patiently for that. Even the one people that He chose out of all the rest for His own, folding and guarding them, turned itself into the bitterest offence against Him. But His long suffering waited, and waited not only in the days of Noah, as the text says, but waited through the age of the patriarchs, waited through the age of Moses, and of the judges, and of the kings, waited till the captivity, waited and brought them back after it, waited till the fulness of time. But we can bring the doctrine home much closer to our personal feeling than this. We all know well enough what those things are that try and irritate us, in the common intercourse of life, and where our patience gives way. We know what the provocation is, when our motives are misjudged, or our self-respect is insulted; when mean calculations take advantage of our friendship; when our children are forgetful or wilful, our pupils dull, our servants careless, our neighbours arrogant, our beneficiaries unthankful or impertinent. We all know the sting that hurts us in contempt, in estrangement, in forgetfulness. Now, all these hateful things, in every instance, are known to God. They are full in His sight. Just so far as they are real offences at all, they are offences against Him before they are to us. He does not overlook them, but looks directly at them all. He sees the tyrants, the traitors, the hardened profligates, living out their many days, and some of them dying natural deaths in their beds, the Alvas and Torquemadas, small and great, of every age — His judgment seat not moved forward one hair's breadth to meet them this side the grave. Some one says, God is patient because He is eternal; and so we make excuses for our impatience. God is patient because He is good, as well as because He is strong and wise. He waits for men that they may return to Him. He spares them that they may spare each other. And then, if we could look far into the heart of God, might it not: appear that He has — considering their light, their calling, their privileges, and promises — quite as much occasion to let His patience have her perfect work in the inconstancies of Christians as in the crimes of unbelievers? the cold affections, lifeless prayers, halting steps. He has to wait even for His own people that He has redeemed — the Church that He has purchased with His blood — in her backward and worldly living. It is quite noticeable that one of the apostles of our Lord dwells on this grace of patience with peculiar earnestness, returning to it as if it had a special power to his conscience and a special sacredness to his heart; and this is St. Peter, from whom my text is taken. Have we not a reason for this, and at the same time a deeper look into his warm heart, when we turn to his personal character and history? His was just one of those impressible, impetuous temperaments, with great faults and great virtues, which lay a heavy tax upon the patience of friends, and yet inspire, beneath all that, a lively interest. So he must have felt how repeatedly and bitterly he had tried that one Divine Friend. Nor is the whole Scripture less clear and strong as to the practical value of this virtue in the Christian standard of character. Thus it shows us the kneeling suppliant at his lord's feet crying, "Have patience with me and I will pay thee all." It pronounces its blessing on those that bring forth fruit with patience. It casts in a beam of light on the dark mystery of our sufferings by telling us that tribulation worketh patience, and patience experience, bidding us rest in the Lord and wait patiently for Him. Nay, further yet; by one true and deep interpretation of it the Cross of our Saviour is but the symbol of this doctrine. Patience and passion are but varied forms of one word; the sacrifice of long suffering. In the Son of Mary the patience of God comes down among men, and we behold His glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth, in the face of Jesus Christ giving His life for the world, and waiting for its faith. (Bp. Huntington.) Parallel Verses KJV: For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit: |
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