Hallowing Christ - Alexander Maclaren

Be not afraid of their terror, neither be troubled; but sanctify the Lord God in your hearts.

These words are a quotation from the prophet Isaiah, with some very significant variations. As originally spoken, they come from a period of the prophet’s life when he was surrounded by conspirators against him, eager to destroy, and when he had been giving utterance to threatening prophecies as to the coming up of the King of Assyria, and the voice of God encouraged him and his disciples with the ringing words: ‘Fear not their fear, nor be afraid. Sanctify the Lord of Hosts Himself, and let Him be your fear, and let Him be your dread, and He shall be for a sanctuary.’ Peter was in similar circumstances. The gathering storm of persecution of the Christians as Christians seems to have been rising on his horizon, and he turns to his brethren, and commends to them the old word which long ago had been spoken to and by the prophet. But the variations are very remarkable. The Revised Version correctly reads my text thus: ‘Fear not their fear, neither be troubled, but sanctify in your hearts Christ as Lord.’

I. We have first to note the substitution, as a matter of course, without any need for explanation or vindication, of Jesus Christ in place of the Jehovah of the Old Testament.

There is no doubt that the reading adopted in the Revised Version is the true one, as attested by weighty evidence in the manuscripts, and in itself more probable by reason of its very difficulty. The other reading adopted in Authorised Versions is likely to have arisen from a marginal note which crept into the text, and was due to some copyist who was struck by Peter’s free handling of the passage, and wished to make the quotations verbally accurate.

Now, if we think for a moment of the Jew’s reverence for the letter of Scripture, and then think again of the Jew’s intense monotheism and dread of putting any creature into the place of God, we shall understand how saturated with the belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ, and how convinced that it was the vital centre of all Christian teaching, this Apostle must have been when, without a word of explanation, he took his pen, and, as it were, drew it through ‘Lord God’ in Isaiah’s words, and wrote in capitals over it, ‘Christ as Lord.’

What does that mean? Some of us would, perhaps, hesitate to say that it means that He who was all through the growing ages of brightening revelation of old, named ‘Jehovah,’ is now named Jesus Christ. I believe that from the beginning He whom we call, according to the teaching of the great prologue of John’s Gospel, the ‘Word of God,’ was the Agent of all Divine revelation. But whether that be so or no, whether we have the right to say that the same Person who was revealed as ‘Jehovah’ is now revealed as ‘Jesus Christ,’ the ‘Word made flesh,’ or no, we distinctly fail to apprehend who and what Jesus Christ was to the writer of this epistle, and fail to sanctify Him in our hearts, unless we say: ‘To Thee belongeth all that belongs to God.’ That is the first great truth that comes out of these words, and I would commend it to any of you who may be hesitating about that Christian fact of the true divinity of Jesus Christ. You cannot strike it out of the New Testament, and if you try to do so you tear the book to pieces, and reduce it to rags and tatters.

Further, mark here what the Apostle means by the Christian sanctifying of Christ.

That is a strange expression. How am I to sanctify Jesus Christ? Well, it is the same word that is used in the Lord’s Prayer, and perhaps its use there may throw light on Peter’s meaning here. ‘Hallowed be Thy name’ — explains the meaning of hallowing Christ as Lord in our hearts. We sanctify or hallow one who is holy already, when we recognise the holiness, and honour what we recognise. So that the plain meaning of the commandments here is: set Christ in your hearts on the pedestal and pinnacle that belongs to Him, and then bow down before Him with all reverence and submission. Be sure that you give Him all that is His due, and in the love of your hearts, as well as in the thinkings of your minds, recognise Him for what He is, the Lord. Let us take care that our thoughts about Jesus Christ are full of devout awe and reverence. I venture to think that a great deal of modern and sentimental Christianity is very defective in this respect. You cannot love Jesus Christ too much, but you can love Him with too little reverence. And if you take up some of our luscious modern hymns that people are so fond of singing, I think you will find in them a twang of unwholesomeness, just because the love is not reverent enough, and the approaching confidence has not enough of devout awe in it. This generation looks at the half of Christ. When people are suffering from indigestion, they can only see half of the thing that they look at, and there are many of us that can only see a part of the whole Christ: and so, forgetting that He is judge, and forgetting that He is the Lion of the tribe of Judah, and forgetting that whilst He is manifested in the flesh our brother He is also God manifest in the flesh, our Creator as well as our Redeemer, and our Judge as well as our Saviour, some do not enough hallow Him in their hearts as Lord.

Peter had heard Jesus say that ‘all men should honour the Son as they honoured the Father.’ I beseech you, embrace the whole Christ, and see to it that you do not dethrone Him from His rightful place, or take from Him the glory that is due to His name. For your love will suffer, and become a mere sentiment, inoperative and sometimes unwholesome, unless you keep in mind Peter’s injunction.

But, further, there is included in this commandment, not only what Isaiah said, ‘Let Him be your fear and your dread,’ but also a reverent love and trust. For we do not hallow Christ as we ought, unless we absolutely confide in every word of His lips. Did you ever think that not to trust Jesus Christ is to blaspheme and profane that holy name by which we are called; and that to hallow Him means to say to Him, ‘I believe every word that Thou speakest, and I am ready to risk my life upon Thy veracity’? Distrust is dishonouring the Master, and taking from Him the glory that is due unto His name.

Then there is another point to be noted: ‘Sanctify in your hearts Christ as Lord.’ That is Peter’s addition to Isaiah’s words, and it is not a mere piece of tautology, but puts great emphasis into the exhortation. What is a man’s heart, in New Testament and Old Testament language? It is the very centre-point of the personal self. And when Peter says, ‘Hallow Him in your hearts,’ he means that, deep down in the very midst of your personal being, as it were, there should be, fundamental to all, and interior to all, this reverential awe and absolute trust in Jesus Christ — an habitual thought, a central emotion, an all-dominant impulse. ‘Out of the heart are the issues of life.’ Put the healing agent into it, the fountain-head, and all the streams that pour out thence will be purified and sweetened. Deep in the heart put Christ, and life will be pure.

Now, in another part of this letter the Apostle says, ‘Ye are a spiritual house.’ I think some notion of the same sort is running in his mind here. He thinks of each man’s heart as being a shrine in which the god is enthroned, and in which worship is rendered. And if we have Christ in our hearts, then our hearts are temples; and if we ‘hallow’ the Christ that dwells within us, we shall take care that there are no foul things in that sanctuary. We dishonour the indwelling Deity when into that same heart we allow to come lusts, foulnesses, meannesses, worldlinesses, passions, sins, and all the crew of reptiles and wild beasts that we sometimes admit there. If we hallow Christ in our hearts, in any true fashion, He will turn out the money-changers and overturn the tables. And if we desire to hallow Him in our hearts, we too, must by His Spirit’s help, purge the temple that He may enter and abide.

And so I come to the next point, and that is the Christian courage and calmness that ensue from hallowing Christ in the heart.

The Apostle first puts his exhortation: ‘Be not afraid of their terror, neither be troubled,’ and then he presents us an opposite injunction, obedience to which is the only means of obeying the first exhortation. If you do not sanctify Christ in your hearts, you cannot help being afraid of their terror, and troubled. If you do, then there is no fear that you will fall into that snare. That is to say, the one thing that delivers men from the fears that make cowards of us all is to have Christ lodged within our hearts. Sunshine puts out culinary fires. They who have the awe and the reverent love that knit them to Jesus Christ, and who carry Him within their hearts, have no need to be afraid of anything besides. Only he who can say, ‘The Lord is the strength of my life’ can go on to say, ‘Of whom shall I be afraid?’ There is nothing more hopeless than to address to men, ringed about with dangers, the foolish exhortations: ‘Cheer up! do not be frightened,’ unless you can tell them some reason for not being frightened. And the one reason that will carry weight with it, in all circumstances, is the presence of Jesus.

‘With Christ in the vessel
I smile at the storm.’

The world comes to us and says: ‘Do not be afraid, do not be afraid; be of good courage; pluck up your heart, man.’ The Apostle comes and says: ‘Sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts; and then, and only then, will you be bold.’ The boldness which fronts the certain dangers and calamities and the possible dangers and calamities of this life, without Christ, is not boldness, but foolhardiness. ‘The simple passeth on, and is punished,’ says the book of Proverbs. It is easy to whistle when going through the churchyard, and to say, ‘Who’s afraid?’ But the ghosts rise all the same, and there is only one thing that lays them, and that is — the present Christ.

In like manner the sanctifying of Jesus Christ in the heart is the secret of calmness. ‘Fear not their fear, neither be troubled.’ I wonder if Peter was thinking at all of another saying: ‘Let not your heart be troubled; neither let it be afraid.’ Perhaps he was. At any rate, his thought is parallel with our Lord’s when He said, ‘Let not your heart be troubled. Believe in God, and believe in Me.’ The two alternatives are possible; we shall have either troubled hearts, or hearts calmed by faith in Christ. The ships behind the breakwater do not pitch and toss. The little town up amongst the hills, with the high cliffs around it, lies quiet, and ‘hears not the loud winds when they call.’ And the heart that has Christ for its possession has a secret peace, whatever strife may be raging round it.

‘Be not troubled; sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts.’ Peter leaves out a clause of Isaiah’s, though he conveys the idea without reiterating the words. But Isaiah had added a sweet promise which means much the same thing as I have now been saying, when he went on to declare that to those who sanctify the Lord God in their hearts, He shall be for a sanctuary. ‘The sanctuary was an asylum where men were safe. And if we have made our hearts temples in which Christ is honoured, worshipped, and trusted, then we shall dwell in Him as in the secret place of the Most High’; and in the inner chamber of the Temple it will be quiet, whatever noises are in the camp, and there is light coming from the Shekinah, whatever darkness may lie around. If we take Christ into our hearts, and reverence and love Him there, He will take us into His heart, and we shall dwell in peace, because we dwell in Him.