2 Peter 1:9 But he that lacks these things is blind, and cannot see afar off, and has forgotten that he was purged from his old sins. The man to whom these grave defects are imputed is supposed to possess an elementary degree of faith and to have once felt the purifying power of God in his dark and guilty spirit. He has received into him self the graft of a Divine life, but through some unhealthy condition of the stock that life has not become active, pulsating, fruitful. The life can only reach the true measure of its excellence through earnest self-cultivation. In the spiritual world there are wasted seeds, stunted developments. This disastrous turning back of God's spring in our hearts starts in our own neglect. To know what these deficiencies that maim a man's religious life are, we must turn to the category of qualities needing cultivation that Peter gives us. "Giving all diligence, in your faith supply virtue." That faith may be brought to bear its perfect fruit of virtue and strength, we must cultivate all the ethical branches of the faith that had been Divinely implanted within us. There is no true beginning for us before the beginning of faith, and that must be created within us by the very power of God. Do we not, however, say sometimes that the religious life not only begins but also ends in faith? So it does; just as when you go to London, if you get into a through carriage, your journey begins and ends in the same compartment. But the compartment rolls through many belts of varying country before you step out of it into the streets of London. And so, though all religious life begins and ends in faith, the faith moves in the meantime through a very wide range of virtues. "In your faith supply virtue." Here man's part in the cultivation of religion begins. Virtue implies the tone and strength of religious life. "And in your virtue supply knowledge." Religious life that has virtue without knowledge is on pretty much the same level as aerial navigation. The balloon may be made to rise into the pathway of forces that will sweep it on with unapproachable speed, but there is no known apparatus by which its course can be accurately directed. Delicate regulating power from within is wanted. So with the character to which virtue has been added without the further complement of knowledge. The lack always makes void much of the grace of the past. "And in knowledge supply temperance" or self-restraint. Strength of character must never make us reckless. Our temperance must be united with "patience." Under the crosses, disappointments, and sufferings of our daily life there must be steadfastness and untroubled hope. Murmuring and petulance are symptoms of subtle spiritual disease. "And in your patience supply godliness." Our resignation to the cross-influences of our life must not begin and end in stoicism. It would be a very poor end to all our tribulations, if they ossified our sensibilities and qualified us for the defiance of pain. And then to the temper we cherish towards God there must be joined a right attitude of mind towards our fellow-believers. "In your godliness supply brotherly kindness." And to "brotherly kindness" there must be joined a world-embracing charity. Narrow tempers are inconsistent with religious life. A true faith will always bring with it, if duly cherished, a generous breadth. Where there is the lack of this you have religious defect, limitation, shortsightedness. Let us just glance at these qualities again, and see how each quality connects itself with some important part of man's nature. "To faith add virtue." Virtue, or inward strength, connects itself with the will, for it is through the will it works. That is the first thing God claims for Himself in His purifying work of grace. "To virtue knowledge." It is through all the channels of the intellectual life that knowledge is received and treasured. When God washes a man from the defilements of the past, He demands the consecration of intelligence to His service. "And to knowledge temperance." Temperance is concerned with the government of the passions; and God, in cleansing a man from his past pollutions, seeks the subjection of well-ruled passions to His service. "To temperance patience." Patience connects itself with the sensibilities through which we are made to suffer. In cleansing a man, God seeks the after-harmony of all his sensibilities with the Divine will. "And to patience godliness." In separating a man from evil, God seeks for the response of all the religious faculties to His operations. "And to godliness brotherly kindness and charity." These qualities link themselves with the sphere of the affections. In cleansing a man from his old sires, God seeks to bring about the healthy exercise and benevolent direction of his affections. The whole range of man's powers is indirectly specified, the powers through which a man enters into relationship with his fellow-men, as well as the powers through which he knows God and enters into relationship with the Eternal. God cleanses a man to make him holy in all these relationships, holy by the putting on of all these high graces. "For if these things are yours and abound, they make you that ye shall neither be barren nor unfruitful unto the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ." An imputed possession of these excellences will give us no high place in the scale of spiritual being. The stinted, spasmodic possession of these graces will not ennoble us very much more than the mere fiction of an imputed possession. These things are in some people as rare plants are in particular sections of country. You may come across them if you are very lucky and search long enough. A true believer's life should be as full of them as the banks and hedgerows of mid-May are full of the glint and perfume of flowers. Faith oftentimes lies dormant like hibernating insects. A book of Chinese fables tells of a country where the people wake once in fifty days, and take the dreams of their sleep for realities, and the things they see in their waking moments for dreams. The imaginative author might have been describing some believing Christians. The power of innate faith rarely breaks out into moral movement. Now faith is not a fruit-bearing stock, but so much dead lumber within us, unless it lead by the way of these practical graces up to the perfect knowledge of Jesus Christ. That is to be the grand issue of all these excellences. The end has not been reached when they have regulated our present life and beautified our present relationships. The apostle describes the lack of these things, first, under the metaphor of a grave defect in one of the leading physical senses; and, secondly, under the figure of a lapse in the working of the intellectual powers. 1. He who is wanting in one or all of these high qualities lacks the primary organ of perfect spiritual perception. "He is blind." The stagnant and unprogressive believer is blind, no less than the purely natural man who discerns not the things of the Spirit of God. How many of us have inadequate views of what salvation means! Some people see nothing in salvation but deliverance from wrath and tempest and everlasting fire. A miserably defective view that is! God does not save us to put us on to some secure level of moral mediocrity and to leave us there, but to bring us into fellowship with Himself. A shipwrecked sailor has been helped by a timely hand on to a raft or floating spar. He has not been put there that he may live on a keg of rain-water and a cask of biscuits, and spend the rest of his days on a few square feet of planking. That is but a passing means to a larger and a better end. If you watched him drifting on the raft, and saw that he made no effort to secure the larger and better end, you would say he was either blinded by the sea-spray, struck by the lightning of the storm, or driven insane by his misfortunes. He drifts close under the beetling cliffs. Now he is within an arm's length of some fissure in the cliffs. Through that fissure rock-cut steps lead up and out into a land of springs, and cornfields and orchards, and noble cities, and breadths of summer sunshine, and all the precious fellowships of men. He drifts away as though it were his will to live and die on the raft. Voices call to him from the shore, but he seems careless of the benign destiny to whose threshold he has come. The man, you would say, is blind. So with those of us who, saved by the forgiving grace of God, neglect to enter into that region of privilege and fellowship and ennobling spiritual experience to which virtue, knowledge, temperance, patience, godliness, brotherly kindness, charity are the successive steps for the loyal and believing soul. "He that lacketh these things is blind." And now Peter softens the expression and substitutes a somewhat milder term. 2. At best the blindness is half-blindness. If the man who neglects the cultivation of these qualities is not as dark as an unregenerate man, he at least labours under a most serious disability. He suffers from spiritual myopia, for the word used in the text is precisely the same Greek word the medical man of to-day uses to describe short-sight. "He cannot see afar off." He discerns the near, but is quite at fault when he comes to deal with the distant. Foregrounds are clear, but all the backgrounds are sheer haze. The shortsighted man can see the puddle at his feet as he crosses the desert, but not the river of crystal, with belt of green, that flows for his refreshment on the far away edge of the desert. And so with the unprogressive believer who is afflicted by this spiritual shortsightedness. In the absence of the knowledge to which these graces lead he does not discern the complete character of the Benefactor who has washed and purified him; nor does he discern the heavenly ideal to which the washing and the purification were to point his aspirations and direct his footsteps. He sees, perhaps, a little of what God converts from, but scarcely anything of what God converts to. He has no perception of the largeness of his own destiny. 3. Again, St. Peter describes the lack of these higher Christian excellences under the figure of an intellectual lapse. "Having forgotten the cleansing from his old sin." When some Lady Bountiful takes pity on a gutter child, and washes it from its nauseous accumulations of filth, it is that having put it into better clothes, she may introduce it to a more genial and generous life. If the child begins to dress itself in its old rags and patches, or stands shivering in the cold, neglecting to wrap itself about in the better raiment that has been made ready for it, it is because the child has forgotten, if it ever understood, the purpose for which the Lady Bountiful took it from the streets and washed it. She wanted to make it her own, and give it a place on her hearth and at her table. God washed us from the guilt and contamination of the past, not that we might stand lounging for ever at the starting-point of our first faith, or possibly go back to our old defilements, but that we might put on Christ and be clothed in these excellences that are summed up in the glorious character of Christ, and stand in His presence, chosen friends and companions for ever. If the new life is not delighting the eye with its inimitable grace, and filling the air with its reviving freshness, it is because there has been some untimely and disastrous arrest. The past cleansing and its Divine motive of perfect life and attainment have been overlooked and forgotten. 4. These words imply that the memory of past grace will be a living and effectual inspiration to us at each successive step of our perfecting. When God first touches our spirits with His cleansing power, that act has in it the potentiality of complete Christian excellence. The sustained remembrance of your conversion will keep fresh and forceful the motive that will stimulate you to the attainment of these various moral and spiritual excellences. You might as well try to grow a cedar tree without roots as seek to cultivate these qualities without the peculiar type of motive supplied by the act of God's gracious cleansing from sin. (T. G. Selby.) Parallel Verses KJV: But he that lacketh these things is blind, and cannot see afar off, and hath forgotten that he was purged from his old sins. |
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