Zechariah 8:4-5 Thus said the LORD of hosts; There shall yet old men and old women dwell in the streets of Jerusalem… The dear old capital, the centre of their reverential affections, and seat of their worship, beautiful for situation and holy for its history, will put on its thriving look again, and be the same blessed home to them that it was before. Observe that this Jerusalem was the city of God — a city that He has fashioned and filled after His own design, just as He wished it to be. This future Jerusalem was no mere mortal metropolis, bruit by human ambition, or populated by some sordid colony. It was to be modelled after a heavenly pattern. It was to embody the Divine ideal of a perfect, pure, and happy state. There is no mistake, then, in the city's composition, and no accident in its arrangements. If the Lord does not mean to have old men and old women in it, they will not be seen there; if boys and girls are found playing in the streets of it, we may be sure they did not stray in as vagrants, or get dropped there as foundlings; they are there by the express appointment of the Father of all the families of the earth. We may take these sentences, therefore, as a graphic outline of what God would have a Christian state of society to be, not in heaven, but in this world. In the scriptural imagery of symbolism, Jerusalem is a type of the Christian Church. Where the Gospel of Christ has done its perfect work, where Christianity has realised itself in social institution, and has penetrated all our private and public life with its practical regulation, there the whole of our being will come under its control; all its periods, from childhood to old age, will take the stamp and bear the fruit of this holy and gracious power in the heart; every capacity will be invigorated to its best exercise by Christian faith; our common work will be better and safer and happier work for being done in the name of Christ and for the sake of Christ; done by a Christian will, with a Christian purpose, in a Christian spirit, with Christian hands and brain and feet. Our faith is really the bread of our life. The Church is meant to open straight into your homes. The man and the children in the street, as the text says, should be the constant signs and witnesses of the kingdom of God within them — men about their business, children at their play, so toiling and trafficking, or so playing, as to make it plain that the stamp of the regeneration is upon them, the image of Christ within them. There is nothing in our domestic habits too small to bear this stamp and seal of the law of Christ, nothing too commonplace to be a test of sanctification. In these villages and cities there are many men who treat the whole system of positive Christianity, both doctrine and ordinance, with indifference. They live by the side of Christian institutions very much as they would live by neighbours speaking another language, and following different pursuits. What can break up this strange and heathenish unconcern? It is due largely to the impression men have that religion lies aside of life, and apart from its vital interests. Religion is regarded as a class concern, or a periodical and occasional concern, at any rate a partial and narrow concern. It lays hold on a peculiar and exceptional faculty in the mind. It comes to some, and not to others, and those others must be excused. There is much of this sentiment abroad, and it kills, in not a few, all effort to be Christians. Nothing will be more convincing, in exploding this error, than a daily demonstration, in our own persons and conduct, of the opposite truth Turn and look into the face of Christ as He walks the world in the majesty and beauty of His holiness. Is there anything that looks like a class, piety there? Do you gather from anything He says, that His followers are to have two divided lives, serving mammon a part of their time and God a part, the world with their busy energies, and God only with some sentimental states brought out at special seasons? Analyse the very essence and marrow of the Christian life. What are the parts of it? Faith, hope, charity. Is any one of them a class possession? Christianity intends that every man and woman and boy and girl shall be the better for it, and every corner and instant in the character and life of each shall be the better. It would make strong men more manly, pure women more pure, light-hearted children lighter-hearted, because the love of Christ casts all, fear out. We must expand our ideas, and give them life, by convictions of me "way of coming" to Christ, and being made one with Him in this world. It is a very simple road. Theology becomes only a blind guide when it complicates and mystifies it, and puzzles the unsophisticated mind with metaphysical cross examination. Do you want to be a Christian? Then you have already begun to be one — but you have only begun. The greatest part of salvation on our part is in the being willing to be saved. (Bishop Huntington.) Parallel Verses KJV: Thus saith the LORD of hosts; There shall yet old men and old women dwell in the streets of Jerusalem, and every man with his staff in his hand for very age. |
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