Hebrews 6:17-20 Wherein God, willing more abundantly to show to the heirs of promise the immutability of his counsel, confirmed it by an oath:… This comparison of hope with an anchor is opposed to common modes of thought and expression. The more natural figure to most minds would be that of a buoy. I apprehend that, where that of the anchor is employed, in nine cases out of ten it is quoted from the Bible without any definite meaning. Yet I do not believe that it was used at haphazard in our text; but it seems to me one of the numerous cases in which a profound wealth of spiritual significance is condensed into a single word of Scripture. All hope is not anchor-like; or, if it be, there are many hopes which are anchors with cables too short to reach the bottom, and which therefore only expose the vessel to quicker, more irregular, and more violent pitches and plunges in the storm-lifted deep. The anchor needs a length of cable sufficient, but not too great; adequate weight; and the adjustment of stock, shank, and flukes, which will most effectually hold the ship to her moorings. These characteristics applied to spiritual things would give us adequate remoteness, vastness, and certainty as the requisite properties of a hope that shall be an anchor to the soul. I. ADEQUATE REMOTENESS. Remote in point of time we cannot, indeed. pronounce the objects of the Christian hope; for there may be at any moment but a step between us and death. Yet the doe effect of distance is produced in part by the indefiniteness of our term of life here, and in part by our imperfect knowledge of the details of our future condition. The hopeful Christian sees heaven near enough to furnish every possible motive for virtue, fidelity, and spiritual affections, yet not near enough to detach him from the relations in which God would have him conscientiously faithful — from the field of duty of which the Master says, "Occupy till I come." II. Our Christian anchor is of SUFFICIENT WEIGHT. Time presents no attractions that can vie with the promises of eternity. Our conceptions of heaven are enough to more than fill the soul with their fulness, and to outshine all things else by their Divine radiance. The imagery of the New Testament carries fancy on to its utmost limits and up till its pinions can soar no higher. In these boundless and infinite prospects we have more than a counterpoise for whatever might beguile our souls from their high calling and destiny. III. Our Christian anchor has ITS FIRM HOLD OF CERTAIN AND IMMOVABLE EVIDENCE, Little as we know where or what heaven is, no law of our being is made more sure to us than our immortality. Its evidence is not intuition, surmise, speculation, or longing, but fact which cannot he gainsaid unless we pronounce the whole past a dream and all history a fable. We have the same proof that the dead have risen which we have that countless multitudes have sunk into the death-slumber. The resurrection of Christ is not even an isolated fact of authentic history, but a fact which has left surer traces of its reality, deeper channels of its influence, than any other event that has occurred since the creation of man. It was the initial cause, and the only possible cause, of a series of events and experiences that have been developing themselves for eighteen hundred years. In thus laving intense stress on the historical argument, I forget not the intimations of immortality, the hopeful analogies, he onward pointings, of which nature and life are full. The spring flowers that bloom around the sepulchre of Jesus never wither. Again, there are times when our sculls seem almost conscious of immortality, spring forth into a higher sphere, behold their celestial birthright, and read the words of eternal life in capacities which they have no room to develop here, in longings which earth cannot satisfy, in aspirations that transcend all created good. But weariness, care, or sorrow comes; and then the wings of the spirit droop, its heaven is clouded over, and to him who depends on his own clear intuition all looks dark and desolate. But the Christian thus bowed down stoops to look into the place where the Lord lay, hears the voice of the resurrection angel, and sees, through a cleft in the clouds, the shining path of the ascending Redeemer. We have, then, a hope fitted to be an anchor of the soul. and we need it to give us stability equally among the temptations, the duties, and the trials of life. 1. Among its temptations. How close their pressure! How intense their disturbing force! Like the swell of a storm-lifted octan, they break upon our youth, dash against the strength of our maturer years, and burst over the hoary head. Appetite and passion, pride and gain, ease and indolence, how do they essay by turns their single and their combined power upon every soul of man! How do they toss and dash from breaker to breaker, and from shallow to shallow, every unachored spirit! And their hold upon us is as unanchored spirits — through our intense desire of immediate gratification and our detachment from the unseen future. But let me only behold in faith my risen Saviour, and hear from Him those Divine words, "Because I live, ye shall live also," then I can cast away the withening wreath from the earthly vine for the amadanthine crown. I can dash from me the cup of sensual gratification, for the water which I may drink and thirst no more for ever. I can tread the rough and steep path, while at every step the celestial city rises clearer and brighter to my view. 2. But we no less need this anchor when we have escaped the temptations which assail the lower nature, and find ourselves on the shoreless sea of duty. Here again the waves lit up their voice. How vest the extent, how complex the demands, how imperative the claims, how earnest the calls of spiritual obligation! How liable we are, even with a quick and tender conscience, to let some of these voices drown others — to select our easy or our favourite departments of duty instead of aiming at entire fidelity — to let waywardness modify principle, and convenience limit obligation! How does the random, errotic course of many who mean to do right and well, resemble that of a ship driven by the wind and tossed on the billows 1 And here our anchor comes into use, to keep us in the moorings where God has placed us. It is earthly breezes — human opinion, fear, and favour — that sway us hither and thither. The consciousness of our immortality alone can make us firm and resolute, with every real demand of duty before us in its relative claimers and just proportions, with the work given us to do present to the inward vision, and with the whole power of the world to come making its strength perfect in our weakness. 3. We need our anchor among the trials and sorrows which are the lot of all. However calmly the sea of life may roll for a while there are times when the waves and the billows so over us, and the floods lift up their voices around us — times when, if in this life only we have hope, we at. ready to pronounce ourselves of all men the most miserable. When the gains of a lifetime are swept away in an hour, and a prime spent in affluence sinks into a needy old age, when, agonised by violent disease, we pass at once from vigorous health into the very jaws of death, or, crippled by chronic infirmity, we drag our limbs after us as a prisoner his chain; when the light of our eyes is quenched, and the voices that made sweet melody in our hearts are silent in the grave: when, as with not a few among us, our dead outnumber our living, and the monuments in the cemetery are more than the olive-plants around our table — we then have encountered griefs beyond the reach of human comforters. They set adrift the soul that has no hold on heaven. They abandon it to empty regrets, fruitless complainings — often to a despondency which can find relief only in the self-forgetfulness of sensual indulgence. They are, in an earthly point of view, intense and unmitigated evils. Ver. with the anchor of an immortal hope, how serenely may the Christian outride these storms, and at the very acme of their violence hear the voice which ever says to the a winds and to the waves, "Peace! be still!" (J. P. Peabody.) Parallel Verses KJV: Wherein God, willing more abundantly to shew unto the heirs of promise the immutability of his counsel, confirmed it by an oath: |
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