John 18:37 Pilate therefore said to him, Are you a king then? Jesus answered, You say that I am a king. To this end was I born… The whole fabric of the Christian religion rests on the monarchy of Christ. The Hebrew prisoner who stood before the Roman judge claimed to be the King of men: and eighteen centuries have only verified His claim. 1. On what title does this claim rest? (1) Had the Messiah founded His kingdom on force, He would simply have been a rival of the Caesars. This was all that Pilate meant at first by his question. As a Roman he had no other conception of rule. But the empire of strength was now passing away; for no kingdom founded on force is destined to permanence. "They that take the sword," &c. Before Pilate, Christ distinctly disclaimed this. "If My kingdom were of this world," &c. (2) The next conceivable basis is prescriptive authority. The scribes' and priests' conception. They claimed to rule on a title such as this — "It is written." But Christ spoke lightly of venerable institutions and contravened opinions which were grey with the hoar of ages. He taught, as the men of His day remarked, on an authority very different from that of the scribes. Not even on His own authority. "If I say the truth, why do ye not believe Me?"(3) He might have claimed to rule on the ground of incontrovertible demonstration of His principles. This was the ground taken by every philosopher who was the founder of a sect. Apparently, after the failure of his first guess, Pilate thought that he was called to try some new pretender of a truth which was to dethrone its rival system. This seems to be implied in his bitter question. For in those days it was as in our own: the opinion of to-day dethroned by the opinion of to-morrow: the heterodoxy of this age reckoned the orthodoxy of the next. And Pilate, having lived to see failure after failure, smiled bitterly at the enthusiast who again asserted His claims to have discovered the undiscoverable. And indeed, had the Redeemer claimed this — to overthrow the doctrine of the Porch and of the Academy, and to enthrone Christianity upon their ruins, by mere argument, that sceptical cry would have been not ill-timed. 2. In these three ways have men attempted the propagation of the gospel. (1) By force, when the Church ruled by persecution. (2) By prescriptive authority, when she claimed infallibility in the popery of Rome or the popery of the pulpit. (3) By reasoning, in the age of "evidences," when she pledged herself to rule the world by the conviction of the understanding, and laid deep and broad the foundations of rationalism. I. THE BASIS OF THE KINGLY RULE OF CHRIST. Christ is a King in virtue of His being a witness to the truth. 1. Truth is used here in a sense equivalent to reality. It would indeed fritter down the majesty of the Redeemer's life, to say that He was a witness for the truth of any number of theological dogmas. The realities of life, of the universe, to these His every act and word bore testimony. He was as much a witness to the truth of the purity of domestic life as to the truth of the doctrine of the Incarnation: to the truth of goodness being identical with greatness as much as to the doctrine of the Trinity — and more — His mind corresponded with reality as the dial with the sun. 2. In being a witness to reality, we are to understand something deeper than that He spoke truly. Veracity is a correspondence between words and thoughts: truthfulness a correspondence between thoughts and realities, To be veracious, it is only necessary that a man give utterance to his convictions: to be true, it is needful that his convictions have affinity with fact. Let us take some illustrations of this distinction. (1) The prophet tells of men who call good evil, and evil good; yet these were veracious men; for to them evil was good. There was a correspondence between their opinions and their words, but none between their opinions and eternal fact: this was untruthfulness. The Pharisees were men of veracity. They thought that Christ was an impostor, that to tithe mint, anise, and cummin was as acceptable to God as to be just, and merciful, and true: yet veracious as they were, the title perpetually affixed to them is, "Ye hypocrites." The life they led being a false life, is called, in the phraseology of the Apostle John, a lie. (2) If a man speak a careless slander against another, believing it, he has not sinned against veracity: but the carelessness which has led him into so grave an error, effectually bars his claim to clear truthfulness. Or a man may have taken up second-hand, indolently, religious views: may believe them: defend them vehemently, — Is he a man of truth? 3. It is implied that His very Being, here, manifested to the world Divine realities. Human nature is meant to be a witness to the Divine, and the difference between Christ and other men is this: they are imperfect reflections, He a perfect one of God. There are mirrors which are concave, which magnify the thing that they reflect: there are mirrors convex, which diminish it. And we in like manner, represent the Divine in a false, distorted way. In One alone has the Divine been so blended with the human, that, as the ocean mirrors every star and every tint of blue upon the sky, so was the earthly life of Christ the Life of God on earth. 4. As truly as it was said by Christ, may it be said by each of us, "To this end was I born," &c. (1) The architect is here to be a witness. He succeeds only so far as he is a witness, and a true one. The lines and curves, the acanthus on his column, the proportions, all are successful and beautiful, only so far as they are true: the report of an eye which has lain open to God's world. If he build his lighthouse to resist the storm, the law of imitation bids him build it after the shape of the spreading oak which has defied the tempest. If man construct the ship which is to cleave the waters, calculation or imitation builds it on the model upon which the Eternal Wisdom has already constructed the fish's form. (2) The artist is a witness to the truth; or he will never attain the beautiful. (3) So is the agriculturist; or he will never reap a harvest. (4) So is the statesman, building up a nation's polity on the principles which time has proved true, or else all his work crumbles down in revolution: for national revolution is only the Divine rejection stamped on the social falsehood. 5. Christ's kingdom formed itself upon this law: "Every one that is of the truth heareth My voice;" that eternal law which makes truth assimilate all that is congenial to itself. Truth is like life: whatever lives absorbs into itself all that is congenial. The Church grew round Christ as a centre, attracted by the truth: all that had in it harmony with His Divine life and words, grew to Him (by gradual accretions): clung to Him as the iron to the magnet. The truer you are, the humbler, the nobler, the more will you feel Christ to be your King. You may be very little able to prove the King's Divine genealogy, or to appreciate those claims to your allegiance which arise out of His eternal generation: but He will be your Sovereign and your Lord by that affinity of character which compels you to acknowledge His words and life to be Divine. "He that receiveth His testimony hath to set to his seal that God is true." II. THE QUALIFICATION OF THE SUBJECTS OF THE EMPIRE OF THE TRUTH. 1. To be true: "He that is of the truth heareth My voice." Truth lies in character. Christ did not simply speak truth: He was Truth. For example. The friends of Job spoke words of truth. Scarcely a maxim which they uttered could be impugned: cold, hard, theological verities: but verities out of place, in that place cruel and untrue. Job spoke many hasty, impetuous, blundering words; but the whirlwind came, and, before the voice of God, the veracious falsehoods were swept into endless nothingness: the true man, wrong, perplexed, in verbal error, stood firm: he was true though his sentences were not. 2. Integrity — which means not simply sincerity or honesty, but entireness, wholeness, soundness: that which Christ means when He says, "If thine eye be single or sound, thy whole body shall be full of light." This integrity is found in small matters as well as great; for the allegiance of the soul to truth is tested by small things rather than by those which are more important. There is many a man who would lose his life rather than perjure himself in a court of justice, whose life is yet a tissue of small insincerities. We resent hypocrisy, and treachery, and calumny, not because they are untrue, but because they harm us. We hate the false calumny, but we are half pleased with the false praise. Now he is a man of integrity who hates untruth as untruth. To a moral, pure mind, the artifices in every department of life are painful: the stained wood which deceives the eye by seeming what it is not, marble: the gilding which is meant to pass for gold; and the glass which is worn to look like jewels. "These are trifles." Yes, but it is just these trifles which go to the formation of character. He that is habituated to deceptions and artificialities in trifles will try in vain to be true in matters of importance: for truth is a thing of habit rather than of will. 3. Doing the truth. Christianity joins two things inseparably: acting truly, and perceiving truly. If any man will do His will, &c.(l) It is a perilous thing to separate feeling from acting. The romance, the poem, and the sermon, teach us how to feel. But the danger is this; if feeling be suffered to awake without passing into duty, the character becomes untrue. "We pity wretchedness and shun the wretched." We utter sentiments, just, honourable, refined, lofty — but somehow, when a truth presents itself in the shape of a duty, we are unable to perform it. And so such characters become by degrees like the artificial pleasure-grounds of bad taste, in which the waterfall does not fall, and the grotto offers only the refreshment of an imaginary shade, and the green hill does not strike the skies, and the tree does not grow. Their lives are a sugared crust of sweetness trembling over black depths of hollowness: more truly still, "whited sepulchres" — fair without to look upon, "within full of all uncleanness."(2) It is perilous to separate thinking rightly from acting rightly. He is already half false who speculates on truth and does not do it. Truth is given, not to be contemplated, but to be done. Life is an action — not a thought. And the penalty paid by him who speculates on truth, is that by degrees the very truth he holds becomes to him a falsehood. There is no truthfulness, therefore, except in the witness borne to God by doing His will — to live the truths we hold, or else they will be no truths at all. It was thus that He witnessed to the truth. He lived it. Conclusion: The kingly character of truth is exhibited strikingly in the calmness of the bearing of the Son of Man before His judge. Veracity is not necessarily dignified. There is a vulgar effrontery-a spirit of defiance which taunts, and challenges condemnation. Again, the man of mere veracity is often violent, for what he says rests upon his own assertion: and vehemence of assertion is the only addition he can make to it. (F. W. Robertson, M. A.) Parallel Verses KJV: Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice. |
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