Revelation 22:3-4 And there shall be no more curse: but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it; and his servants shall serve him:… There is not a little in the temper of our day which resists the thought that God is a Master. Many people more or less consciously recoil from the assertion of a claim so imperative as is necessarily involved in such a conception of the Supreme. Some absolutely reject religion on this account; they think, or speak as if they thought, that their independence would be compromised, their dignity insulted, by the recognition of a Sovereign in heaven, no less than by subjection to a master on earth; perhaps they go so far as to say that the very notion of a God claiming to have dominion over man's whole being is an invention of the governing orders, a piece of the machinery devised by their class-selfishness for the obvious purpose of "keeping the people down." Others, who cannot dispense with religion altogether, endeavour, as far as possible, to keep the idea of Divine sovereignty in the background. Perhaps they may in part be under the influence of a recoil from one-sided and repellent views of that Sovereignty, which were a stumbling-block to believers in the Divine moral perfection. But the reaction must be worse than extravagant which leads men to emphasise "the Fatherhood of God" by detaching from it, in effect, the idea of paternal authority (Malachi 1:6). Given the idea of a living God, and the conviction that we are bound to serve Him follows; and Scripture does but emphasise the conclusion which natural reason forces upon all serious theists. "I am Thy servant," is the burden of all that intercourse between the human soul and its God which pervades and vitalises the Psalter; and the prophet's language about "the Lord's servant," passes beyond an "idealised Israel" to its fulfilment in the obedience completed on the Cross. And although the gospel is a "law of liberty," yet no delusive spirit from the pit ever uttered a deeper falsehood than that which could confound liberty with license, or deny that moral law is involved in the relations between men. St. Paul repeatedly intimates that God's moral law is still to be the rule of Christian conduct; he speaks of the "law of the Spirit of Life in Christ Jesus," and of our "fulfilling the requirements of the law," very much as St. James speaks of the "royal law of liberty," and as St. John identifies sin with "lawlessness." Furthermore, the gospel reveals a new and special ground of the obligation of God's service; He has acquired a supernatural right over us in virtue of the fact of our redemption. If we have been bought, in the Scriptural imagery, at no less a price than the blood of God's own Son, it follows that "we are not our own": we cannot be "without law to God," we must be "under law to Christ" (1 Corinthians 6:19; 1 Corinthians 9:21). If we call Him Saviour, we must also call Him King. Two phrases are used in the New Testament, to impress this thought upon us. In some passages a word is used which originally represented the condition of a hired servant (Acts 27:23; Romans 1:9; 2 Timothy 1:3; Hebrews 9:14). But as if this term were not strong enough to stand alone, the relation between a bondservant or slave, and a master whose rights over him were absolute — a relation which Christianity was to undermine, but which for the time was suffered to exist — is utilised, so to speak, for the purpose of enforcing this great lesson (Romans 1:1; Galatians 1:10; Philippians 1:1; Titus 1:1; 2 Peter 1:1; Revelation 1:1; James 1:1; Jude 1.). In the text both phrases are combined: "His slaves shall do Him service for wages." Do we shrink from the austerity of this language? Do we fancy that it makes our religion servile — that if apostles used it in their own time, we need not treat it as symbol]sing a permanent truth — that it is, in fact, a surviving fragment of Judaism, inconsistent with the higher apostolic affirmation, "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty?" Do we plead, so to speak, that our Lord has promised us the truest freedom as the result of an effective knowledge of the truth, and that, on the last evening of His earthly ministry, He said to His faithful eleven," Henceforth I call you not servants, but friends? Well, this was His gracious condescension, assuring them that their relation to Him was to be one of affectionate confidence. Blessed be HIS name, He does not keep us at arm's length; He does not treat us coldly, sternly, magisterially: we are to be "willing," freewill offerings, "in the day of His power." We are to be made "sons" in Him, the true and only-begotten Son, and so to be "free indeed." His service is to be, in a most true sense, perfect freedom, or even a true royalty; but it must needs be service, if He is what He is, if we are what we are. Take just one noble and beautiful instance of the combination of obedience and love, of service and joyfulness, in him who had apparently been consecrated to the episcopate by St. John, and who, when invited to save his life by uttering some form of renunciation of Christ, answered, "Eighty-six years have I been His servant, and He has done me no wrong: how, then, can I revile my King Who saved me?" (W. Bright, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: And there shall be no more curse: but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it; and his servants shall serve him: |
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