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Updated: June 18, 2025
The next clause is evidently the continuation of the idea begun in that of our text, and it runs: 'And to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge. It is the immeasurable measure, then; the boundless bounds and dimensions of the love of Christ which fire the Apostle's thoughts here.
At all events, the Apostle's acquaintance with the judge so far condoned his discipleship to the criminal, that the doors of the audience chamber were open to him, though he was known as 'one of them. So he and poor Peter were parted, and the latter left shivering outside in the grey of the morning.
Then he remembered that he also needed matches. This called for a gesture rather more complex; so complex, indeed, that perhaps nobody but a Nepenthean gifted, as all his nation is, with alert intuition could have divined the Apostle's want. The tobacconist was equal to the occasion. With a friendly smile of comprehension he laid on the counter a diminutive pack of wax vestas, price two sous.
The love of God in exercise to sinful men: that is what the New Testament means by grace. And is it not a great thought? Notice, for further elucidation of the Apostle's conception, how he sacrifices the verbal correctness of his antithesis in order to get to the real opposition. What is the opposite of Sin? Righteousness.
He had failed in a most important part of an apostle's character. True, he had repented with bitter tears, and had received a message from the empty tomb; on that Easter morn he had heard his forgiveness spoken by the lips of his Lord, and he would not have exchanged that forgiveness for an imperial crown; but he was not quite at ease.
The Apostle's promptitude is as noticeable as his penetration. He wastes no time in remonstrance with the cowards, who would have been over the side and off in the dark while he talked, but goes straight to the man in authority. It is not his business to suggest what is to be done.
It beat like a pulse in all his purposes. It determined and vitalized his decisions in the crisis, as well as in the lesser trifles of the common day. His conception of redemption was regulative of all his thought. But it is not only the immediacy of redemption in the apostle's thought by which I am imprest. I stand in awed amazement before its vast, far-stretching reaches into the eternities.
The day before there was still time to stop, there was time to cast far away temptations and impure desires, to avoid the infernal snares and ambushes, to take refuge, according to the Apostle's advice, in the bosom of God; now it was too late, it was no longer in his power; he found himself hemmed in within the circle of abominations, and he did not see how he could get forth.
There are spheres of undeniable duty where the Christian may often almost, if not altogether, take up the apostle's declaration, and say, "No man stood by me." This, to the full extent, has never yet been my experience; but I have often found many against me, both without and within, when earnestly bent on dealing a blow at the great antichrist. It is no good sign when all goes on too smoothly.
So I think we get a sufficient equivalent to the Apostle's meaning if for the second two words of my text we read, 'He hath called us by the glory, the raying out of his love, and He hath called us by the activity and the energy, the power in action of His great and illustrious Spirit. So you see these two things, the light that streams out of an energy which is born of the streaming light.
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