Spurgeon Collection

His education, too, demands our attention. He was not taken as Moses was, from his mother’s breast, to be educated in the halls of a monarch; he was not brought up with all those affected airs which are given to persons who have golden spoons in their mouths, at their births. He was not brought up as the lordling, to look with disdain on every one; but his father being a carpenter, doubtless he toiled in his father’s workshop. “Fit place,” a quaint author says, “for Jesus; for he had to make a ladder that should reach from earth to heaven. And why should he not be the son of a carpenter ?” Full well he knew the curse of Adam: “in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.” Had you seen the holy child Jesus, you would have beheld nothing to distinguish him from other children, save that unsullied purity which rested in his very countenance. When our Lord entered into public life, still he was the same. What was his rank? Did he array himself in scarlet and purple? Oh! no: he wore the simple garb of a peasant—that robe “without seam from the top to the bottom,” one simple piece of stuff, without ornament or embroidery. Did he dwell in state, and make a magnificent show in his journey through Judea? No; he toiled his weary way, and sat down on the curb-stone of the well of Sychar. He was like others, a poor man; he had not courtiers around him; he had fishermen for his companions; and when he spoke, did he speak with smooth and oily words? Did he walk with dainty footsteps, like the king of Amalek? No, he often spoke like the rough Elijah; he spoke what he meant, and he meant what he said. He spoke to the people as the people’s man. He never cringed before great men; he knew not what it was to bow or stoop; but he stood and cried, “Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! Woe unto you, whitewashed sepulchres.” He spared no class of sinners: rank and fortune made no difference to him. He uttered the same truths to the rich men of the Sanhedrim, as to the toiling peasants of Galilee. He was “one of the people.”

Notice his doctrine. Jesus Christ was one of the people in his doctrine. His gospel was never the philosopher’s gospel, for it is not abstruse enough. It will not consent to be buried in hard words and technical phrases: it is so simple that he who can spell over, “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved,” may have a saving knowledge of it. Hence, worldly-wise men scorn the science of truth, and sneeringly say, ‘why, even a blacksmith can preach now-a-day, and men who were at the plough tail may turn preachers,’ while priestcraft demands, ‘What right have they to do any such thing, unauthorized by us?’ Oh! sad case, that gospel truth should be slighted because of its plainness, and that my Master should be despised because he will not be exclusive—will not be monopolised by men of talent and erudition. Jesus is the ignorant man’s Christ as much as the learned man’s Christ; for he hath chosen “the base things of the world and the things that are despised.” Ah! much as I love true science and real education, I mourn and grieve that our ministers are so much diluting the Word of God with philosophy, desiring to be intellectual preachers, delivering model sermons, well fitted for a room full of college students and professors of theology, but of no use to the masses, being destitute of simplicity, warmth, earnestness, or even solid gospel matter. I fear our college training is but a poor gain to our churches, since it often serves to wean the young man’s sympathies from the people, and wed them to the few, the intellectual, and wealthy of the church. It is good to be a fellow-citizen in the republic of letters, but better far to be an able minister of the kingdom of heaven. It is good to be able like some great minds, to attract the mighty; but the more useful man will still be he, who, like Whitfield, uses “market language,” for it is a sad fact that high places and the gospel seldom well agree; and, moreover, be it known that the doctrine of Christ is the doctrine of the people. It was not meant to be the gospel of a caste, a clique, or any one class of the community. The covenant of grace is not ordered for men of one peculiar grade, but some of all sorts are included. A few there were of the rich followed Jesus in his own day, and it is so now. Mary, and Martha, and Lazarus were well to do, and there was the wife of Herod’s steward, with some more of the nobility. These, however, were but a few: his congregation was made up of the lower orders—the masses—the multitude. “The common people heard him gladly;” and his doctrine was one which did not allow of distinction, but put all men as sinners naturally, on an equality in the sight of God. One is your father, “one is your Master, even Christ, and all ye are brethren.” These were words which he taught to his disciples, while in his own person he was the mirror of humility, and proved himself the friend of earth’s poor sons, and the lover of mankind. O ye purse proud! O ye who cannot touch the poor even with your white gloves! Ah! ye with your mitres and your croizers! Ah! ye with your cathedrals and splendid ornaments! This is the man whom ye call Master—the people’s Christ—one of the people! And yet ye look down with scorn upon the people;ye despise them. What are they in your opinion? The common herd—the multitude. Out on ye! Call yourselves no more the ministers of Christ. How can ye be, unless, descending from your pomp and your dignity, ye come amongst the poor and visit them—ye walk amongst our teeming population and preach to them the gospel of Christ Jesus. WE believe you to be the descendants of the fishermen? Ah! no, until ye doff your grandeur, and, like the fishermen, come out, the people’s men, and preach to the people, speak to the people, instead of lolling on your splendid seats, and making yourselves rich at the expense of your pluralites! Christ’s ministers should be the friends of manhood at large, remembering that their Master was the people’s Christ. Rejoice! O rejoice! ye multitudes. Rejoice! rejoice! for Christ was one of the people.

II.Our second point was ELECTION. God says, “I have exalted one chosen out of the people.” Jesus Christ was elected—chosen. Somehow or other, that ugly doctrine of election will come out. Oh! there be some, the moment they hear that word, election, put their hands upon their foreheads, and mutter, “I will wait till that sentence is over; there will be something I shall like better, perhaps.” Some others say, “I shall not go to that place again; the man is a hyper-Calvinist.” But the man is not a hyper-Calvinist; the man said what was in his Bible—that is all. He is a Christian, and you have no right to call him by those ill-names, if indeed an ill-name it be, for we never blush at whatever men do call us. Here it is: “One chosen out of the people.” Now, what does that mean, but that Jesus Christ is chosen? Those who do not like to believe that the heirs of heaven were elect, cannot deny the truth proclaimed in this verse,—that Jesus Christ is the subject of election—that his Father chose him, and that he chose him out of the people. As a man, he was chosen out of the people, to be the people’s Saviour, and the people’s Christ. And now let us gather up our thoughts, and try to discover the transcendent wisdom of God’s choice. Election is no blind thing. God chooses sovereignly, but he always chooses wisely. There is always some secret reason for his choice of any particular individual; though that motive does not lie in ourselves, or in our own merits, yet there always is some secret cause far more remote than the doings of the creature; some mighty reason unknown to all but himself. In the case of Jesus, the motives are apparent; and without pretending to enter the cabinet council of Jehovah, we may discover them.

1. First, we see that justice is thereby fully satisfied by the choice of one out of the people. Suppose God had chosen an angel to make satisfaction for our sins—imagine that an angel were capable of bearing that vast amount of suffering and agony which was necessary to our atonement; yet after the angel had done it all, justice would never have been satisfied, for this one simple reason, that the law declares,—“ The soul that sinneth IT shall die.” Now, man sins, and therefore man must die. Justice required, that as by man came death, by man also should come the resurrection and the life. The law required, that as man was the sinner, man should be the victim—that as in Adam all died, even so in another Adam should all be made alive. Consequently, it was necessary that Jesus Christ should be chosen out of the people; for had yon blazing angel near the throne, that lofty Gabriel, laid aside his splendours, descended to our earth, endured pain, suffered agonies, entered the vault of death, and groaned out a miserable existence in an extremity of woe, after all that, he would not have satisfied inflexible justice, because it is said, a man must die, and otherwise the sentence is not executed.

2. But there is another reason why Jesus Christ was chosen out of the people. It is because thereby the whole race receives honor. Do you know I would not be an angel, if Gabriel would ask me. If he would beseech me to exchange places with him, I would not, I should lose so much by the exchange, and he would gain so much. Poor, weak, and worthless, though I am, yet I am a man, and being a man, there is a dignity about manhood—a dignity lost one day in the garden of the fall but regained in the garden of resurrection. It is a fact, that a man is greater than an angel—that in heaven humanity stands nearer the throne than angelic existence. You will read in the Book of the Revelation, of the four-and-twenty elders who stood around the throne, and in the outer circle stood the angels. The elders, who are the representatives of the whole church, were honored with a greater nearness to God than the ministering spirits. Why man—elect man—is the greatest being in the universe, except God. Man sits up there—look! at God’s right hand, radiant with glory, there sits a man! Ask me who governs Providence, and directs its awfully mysterious machinery; I tell you it is a man—the man Christ Jesus. Ask me who has during the past month bound up the rivers in chains of ice, and who now has loosed them from the shackles of winter, I tell you a man did it—Christ. Ask me who shall come to judge the earth in rigteousness, and I say a man. A real, veritable man is to hold the scales of judgment, and to call all nations around him. And who is the channel of grace? Who is the emporium of all the Father’s mercy? Who is the great gathering up of all the love of the covenant? I reply a man—the man Christ Jesus. And Christ, being a man, has exalted you, and exalted me, and put us into the highest ranks. He made us, originally, a little lower than the angels, and now despite our fall in Adam, he bath crowned us, his elect, with glory and honor, and hath set us at his right hand in heavenly places, in Christ Jesus, that in the ages to come he might shew the exceeding riches of his grace in his kindness towards us through Christ Jesus.