These words occur at the close of the most brilliant rhetorical passage of the New Testament scripture. They form the point too of the most close, subtle, and profound argument which is to be met with even in the epistles of St. Paul. We constantly use them; no sentence of the Bible is more frequently on our lips. But we isolate them from their surroundings; we handle them as though they dealt with private matters of individual experience, the sins and follies to which each nature in its private propension is specially prone, rather than some broad human fault or infirmity which is the common sin and sorrow of mankind. We must read these words in connection with the great argument of which they form the culmination, and the splendid burst of eloquence which they close; or we shall miss their large and weighty meaning, and shall narrow to a private and partial experience what the writer intends to set forth as the easily besetting sin of mankind. The Epistle to the Hebrews is certainly one of the most important and profound books in the New Testament. Be it by Paul himself, as I believe, or be it by some Pauline man, it is in a measure the keystone of the arch of revelation, if the Apocalypse is its crown. The way in which, in the order of the Divine dispensations, the old grows into the new—the method by which, while so much once ordained by God goes apparently to wreck, to the eye of God and in the judgment of the far-sighted among men nothing Divine really perishes, no Divine promise fails of fulfilment, no Divine purpose or hope misses its fruit—is a subject of supreme importance, the consideration of which is needful to the completeness of Scripture, while it is full of suggestion as a key to the Divine ways, to the successive generations of mankind. Judaism has passed away in every respect in which it is stronger than a memory. It is essentially, though Jews live among us in Christendom by millions, a thing of the past; but the Epistle to the Hebrews, which unfolds the method by which Judaism developed into Christianity, is a living book in our Bibles, as full of vital interest for this present time as it was for the generation which watched with strange awe and wonder the tremendous overthrow of the elect nation, and saw the last fragments of the ritual and order of a Divinely established system swept along by the flood as wreck. There is profound instruction concerning the method of development in Christendom—how the Church grows, and strikes deeper root through the ages, while that which men call the Church and cling to suffers constant shocks, and is ever dropping piecemeal into decay and death—in this sketch of the philosophy of the most remarkable and startling development recorded in man's spiritual history. Whether Paul wrote it or not, it is the work of a man with Paul's grasp of intellect, and saturated with Paul's ideas both of Judaism and Christianity. One can hardly imagine Paul's life-work complete to his own mind without the production of such an essay as this. He alone grasped with perfect clearness the vital relation of the two dispensations; and we can well imagine with what intense earnestness this Hebrew of the Hebrews must have desired to justify his apostolic ministry to his countrymen and to mankind. Be this as it may, and these a priori judgments are of little worth in criticism, the book is one of large thoughts, views, and principles, reaching deep down to the foundations on which the edifice of man's spiritual faith and hope is built. Let us try to realize some of the main difficulties of those to whom it is addressed, whose tormenting doubts and apprehensions it was intended to remove. They would be chiefly, I think, of two kinds; and they might be put into the shape of questions.

1. Can anything which is ordained of God be abrogated?

2. Can the Messiah, the kingly Son of David, be come, while those who follow Him are the world's outcasts, spoiled, persecuted, and slain?

The first is a standing difficulty with all the students of the mysteries of God, in all ages of the world. It pressed on the Hebrew Christians with peculiar force. They and their fathers for ages had believed that a certain visible system had been established on earth by God's own hand, and sustained by His almighty power. It seemed to them as if the very foundations of the universe were shaken, when their temple, their priesthood, their glorious Jerusalem, their beautiful fertile Palestine, vanished like a dream, and left them the beggars and outcasts of mankind.

The second difficulty was equally grave. It touched men where they are ever most sensitive, in their individual experiences and hopes. Can the head of this Christian Church be the God-man, the glorious Being of whom our prophets prophesied, and of whose kingdom they had such brilliant visions, whilst its subjects are despised, hated, and down-trodden, and its princes are the scum and off-scouring of all things unto this day? We say that the Jews were expecting a splendid temporal kingdom, a visible reign of the Messiah in righteousness over a regenerate and exulting world. We say it with a touch of scorn. We may spare our scorn; Christendom is always dreaming of it too. It would be a wonderful thing if the Jews had not nourished some such expectations. All men have not faith. How many Christians understand Christianity better than the Jews understood the Judaism of their times? What is the Papacy but an endeavour to realize this splendid and prosperous reign of Christ, of which Judaism dreamed? A rule of righteousness, peace, and goodwill, under the sceptre of Christ's immediate delegate and regent, is the vision which has haunted in all ages some of the ablest minds in Christendom; and the desire to realize this has been near the heart of some of the most desperate struggles which rent the civilized world throughout the middle age. We cannot wonder at their sad thoughts. We think the same when things much less visibly ordained of God are shattered and swept away as wrecks. The answer of the writer of this epistle to the question which was wrung out of the death agony of that nation and church was substantially this: God does not establish things, He plants seeds which grow. The principle of life in the seed is the principle of identity through the successive stages of the development of the organism. The body of man is one, though it changes form very visibly at successive eras, and though every particle of matter composing it is in constant flux, passing away from without, restored by the constructive force of the living principle within. Rise, he says, to a loftier and more comprehensive view of the Divine dispensations. See how the living principle of God's relation to you, to man, as Father and Redeemer, runs through all the dispensations, moulds the outward form of the Church according to the exigencies of the times, and is ever bringing forth new forms as the ages need. See how the germ which was planted before the law grew into the legal dispensation, and how when the leafage and fruitage of that dispensation grew old and withered, as things must grow old and perish, the living principle within took new and diviner form, suffered, as all divine things do, death and resurrection, and lived with a new and divine life in a new and regenerated world. "God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds; who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high; being made so much better than the angels, as he hath by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they." (Heb. i. 1-4.)

It ought not to be hard for us to understand and enter into the sore perplexities of the Hebrew believers when they found their ancestral kingdom uprooted, while no sign of the new Messiah's kingdom appeared, except the sway which a shameful cross was wielding over individual human hearts. Can this be the beginning of the kingdom? Can Christ be reigning there, and we His subjects here, the objects of His tenderest care and love, be so harried and tormented for our truth and righteousness as never men have been harried and tormented for lies and sins? Is it credible that God's sons in the world should be the world's outlaws; that those whom the hand of Omnipotence shields should be the helpless victims of the most puny foes? Are slaves and beggars the chief subjects of Messiah's kingdom? Does the fellowship of this new realm draw us into loving, tender communion with the saddest, the poorest, the most ignorant, the most wretched of mankind? Is the life of this new regenerate state a ceaseless struggle, a constant pain, with no issue but by the gate of death, whose apparitors may be a lion's jaws or a headsman's axe? Is the symbol of this splendid empire a cross? The answer to these questions is the text. The question is the sin which so easily besets humanity, you and me quite as intensely as the Hebrews; and the cure for the sin, the answer to the question, is the faith which draws from the writer this splendid eulogy, a faith which scans the bounds of the invisible universe, and measures the range of the Divine thought from the height of the Divine throne. It is as though the writer had said, Looked at on the lower level, by the measures of the things seen and temporal, the lot is dark enough and sad enough: "If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable." (1 Cor. xv. 19.) But rise to a higher level. Get up into the mountain, and survey the horizon of a wider world. Search into the nature of man's true well-being, and see where the springs of it rise. Measure the range of man's existence, the endless ages of his being, the boundless faculty of joy or sorrow, of bliss or anguish, that claims eternity as its time. Above all, measure the stature of a man. Study the image after which he is fashioned, the godlike form he wears, the godlike experience he is made to fathom, and the kind of satisfaction which his godlike powers demand, robbed of which they hunger and pine and fill him at last with madness and despair; so shall you comprehend more fully the grandeur and the glory of his Christian vocation—sharing the conflict, the toil, the sorrow, the joy, and the triumph of hisever God. Then lay aside "every weight and the sin that doth so easily beset you." That sin is poverty of faith—a poor-spirited estimate of life, its experiences and its issues; a love for the serfdom of Egypt rather than the freedom of the wilderness, the fleshpots of Goshen rather than the bread of Canaan, the pleasure of the moment rather than the joy which springs from fountains that outlast eternity.

The sin which doth so easily beset us. Want of faith.

I. In ourselves. II. In God. III. In the future.

I. Want of faith in ourselves—poor, base views of our nature, power, and destiny.

The essential dignity of man's nature, as God constituted it, and the utter debasement it has suffered through sin, are facts which in nowise clash or contradict each other. In truth, no man who has not faith enough to comprehend what "power to become the sons of God" may mean, as spoken of man, can enter into the depth of anguish and shame wrung out in the confession, "I was as a beast before thee." "I have heard of thee with the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth thee; wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes." At the root of the humiliation, the debasement, lies this want of faith in our higher being and destiny. We prefer the slave's portion, with the slave's security, to the cares and burdens of freedom, with its hopes and joys. The main difficulty in the emancipation of serfs arises always from themselves. They do not care, nay they fear, to be free. The responsibility of self-government and self-control is a burden from which they shrink;—let us creep safely on the lower levels, rather than strain perilously up the mountain paths, with the free air around us, the bright heaven above us, the mists, the clouds, the storms, seething and flashing beneath our feet. This is the cry of our souls—yours and mine. God is ever stirring us to take the higher view of our nature and destiny; we are ever burying ourselves in the lower:—"'Let us alone, Jesus, thou Son of God.' Thy words are perilous; they search and judge us; they trouble us in our politics, our pleasures, our trade. We are fairly content as it is; why should we weary ourselves by straining after the higher good, which seems thin, impalpable, and may easily elude our hand? Let us alone; depart out of our coasts." This was the mood of these Hebrew Christians; it is ours. And nothing does the devil's work more surely within us than this feeling that on the whole we were made for poor work, poor interests, and poor joys. Paul seeks to stir us to a nobler mood, to fire something within us which will burn with a heavenly lustre and seek to mingle itself with the brightness of its native skies. Man is made to deal with the substance of things, the eternal substance; you are content to converse with their fleeting shadows. "For the law, having a shadow of good things to come, and not the very image of the things, can never with those sacrifices which they offered year by year continually make the comers thereunto perfect. For then would they not have ceased to be offered? because that the worshippers once purged should have had no more conscience of sins. But in those sacrifices there is a remembrance again made of sins every year. For it is not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take away sins." (Heb. x. 1-4.) The heavenly things themselves your minds were made to contemplate, your hearts to love, your spirits to commune with; and you are grovelling amid the ashes of the perishing, while the imperishable, the eternal, passes for ever beyond the range of your sight. Believe in humanity as the first step to a nobler life. Not the poor, weak, trembling humanity which your self-communings reveal to you; but the glorious, Divine humanity which God has set before you to help your infirmity, to recall the memory of the height from which you have fallen, and to kindle the hope of the royal dignity to which you may be restored. Look within; and man seems poor enough, and pitiful enough. But look above: "We see Jesus who was made a little lower than the angels, for the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honour; that he by the grace of God should taste death for every man." Then "lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset you, and run with patience the race that is set before you, looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God."

Behold in Him the perfect image of a man, in His life the beauty of a perfect human life. Believe in that image; gaze on it, meditate on it, till contemplation kindles sympathy, and sympathy grows into love. "Consider the apostle and high-priest of your profession, Christ Jesus"; and if you tread in His footsteps of present sorrow and humiliation, glory in it, and pray that you may go on to know it more perfectly, "the power of his resurrection, the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death." Believe that all that a man was meant to be, to do, to become, can only grow out of this vital fellowship with Jesus. Believe in Him rather than in the world's ideas, maxims, and hopes. Leave them to the Pagans. You, sons of God, heirs of God, joint-heirs with Christ, learn nobler lessons out of the book of His life, aim at loftier marks, thirst for purer and perennial joys.

II. Poor belief about God—unbelief in the Incarnation, and all its blessed meanings to mankind.

The low and slavish idea of man's character and destiny inevitably infects our views of God and of God's action and purpose in the world. Having poor hope ourselves, we cannot understand God's hope, the hope which lit the path to Calvary, and shed a flood of glorious light around the saddest and most shameful passage of man's sad and painful history. To those who believe that man is the serf of the creation, the Incarnation is incredible. God would be ashamed to be called the God, in any high Christian sense, of such beings as some men believe themselves to be and act as if they were. The Hebrew Christians could not believe in the Incarnation; that is, they were beset with unbelief about it. Their fathers could not believe in their angel guide. A glorious triumphant King, coming to the world in splendour, scattering the hosts of His foes by His thunders, and leading His armies to rapid and easy victory, they could comprehend well enough. But the cross was their stumbling-block. Can the living God suffer shame, anguish, and death, for such beings as we are, for such a kingdom as this Crucified One maybe able to win? "That be far from thee, Lord;" it is blasphemy to dream of it. They were like a man in poverty and straits, who is always expecting that a splendid fortune will fall to him suddenly, will enable him to make a magnificent figure, and to be a model of dignity, generosity, and manly grace. But the MAN is he who wins his fortune by bearing the strain of toil through long years of patience, and who trains himself by discipline to rule it as a realm when gained. And we are, most of us, of this foolish temper. What wonderful people we should be, we think, if our platform were higher, and a stronger light were thrown upon our lives! If God would but mend our surroundings, our virtue and dignity would appear! Believe that it seemed good to God, that it became God, to reveal to us the truth of this relation between surroundings and life, by sending His Son, in the likeness of sinful flesh, to live the life of God in poverty, sorrow, and shame, and manifest in that depth of humiliation the mystery of the life eternal. "For it became him, for whom are all things, and by whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings. For both he that sanctifieth and they who are sanctified are all of one: for which cause he is not ashamed to call them brethren, saying, I will declare thy name unto my brethren, in the midst of the church will I sing praise unto thee. And again, I will put my trust in him. And again, Behold I and the children which God hath given me. Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same; that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; and deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage. For verily he took not on him the nature of angels; but he took on him the seed of Abraham. Wherefore in all things it behoved him to be made like unto his brethren, that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in things pertaining to God, to make reconciliation for the sins of the people. For in that he himself hath suffered being tempted, he is able to succour them that are tempted." (Heb. ii. 10-18.)

It was a hard, an incredible saying to many among the Hebrew Christians. In all its deep meaning it is a hard, an incredible saying to us. Do we believe in our heart of hearts that the life of daily denial, cross-bearing, and Divine ministry, missing all earthly honour, golden treasure, and worldly joy, is the life which the Lord God of heaven lived on earth, and glorified earth by living it? Have we an eye for that inner glory? Is that tear-stained path He trod, beautiful, transcendently beautiful, in our sight, as it is to the angels and the white-robed choir on high? Shame on our lives then, if this is the belief of our hearts about it. If we believe that He who was in the form of God, and "thought it not robbery to be equal with God; but made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant and was made in the likeness of men" (Phil. ii. 6-8), left us an ensample that we should follow in His steps, what are our lives like before Him and before the angels, filled as they are with selfish aims and passions, strivings after things that perish, that crumble to dust as we grasp them; contemptuous as they are of celestial things and powers, of all that made His life luminous to the eye of spirits, of all that He came through shame and anguish to set palpably before the vision of our souls. "Lay aside the sin that doth so easily beset you"—this sin of light thoughts of Christ, of the intense reality of His human life, and all the high meanings and inspirations with which it is charged for you, for me, for all mankind. Open wide the gates of your spirit, and let this King of Glory in. "Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in." Who is this King of Glory? The Man of Sorrows, He is the King of Glory. Believe, faint heart, and live.

III. Unbelief in the future.

We cannot believe that this is purely a seed-time. Like children, we are for reaping where we have not sown, and gathering where we have not strawed. Or, if by chance we drop a seed into the earth and leave it for a moment, next morning we are digging about it to see if it is growing, and are sick at heart if it promises no immediate fruit. The Hebrew Church demanded the instant fruitage of the death of Christ. "And Jesus answered them, saying, The hour is come, that the Son of man should be glorified. Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal." (John xii. 23-25.) Lord, we have seen the seed corn cast into the ground, we have seen it lie there, we have seen it rise, and where is the harvest? Where is the kingdom? Where are the throngs? Where is the throne? The offence of the cross still lies in the way of triumph. Tribulations are the only gifts of the kingdom still! The writer of this epistle does not care to argue about the moment. Be it so. Be it as bad as you say: tribulations, persecutions, contempt, spoiling of your goods, and bonds. Be it so. "Ye have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin." You have not faced the last extremity, and the last extremity may be in store. But what matters? Sons of God, brethren of Christ, citizens of the heavenly state, heirs of everlasting joys and glory, what matters it? "Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early and latter rain. Be ye also patient; stablish your hearts: for the coming of the Lord draweth nigh. Grudge not one against another, brethren, lest ye be contemned: behold, the judge standeth before the door. Take, my brethren, the prophets, who have spoken in the name of the Lord, for an example of suffering affliction, and of patience. Behold, we count them happy which endure. Ye have heard of the patience of Job, and have seen the end of the Lord; that the Lord is very pitiful, and of tender mercy." (Jas. v. 7-11.) Is patience no longer beautiful, divine, when it is heaven which has to be waited for, a royal sceptre, an everlasting crown? For shame! moaning over the moment's pains, which are the seeds of everlasting joys; over the dust of the husks and shells of the temporal things, when, as they waste and perish, the glorious forms of the things not seen and eternal, which they veiled, appear. I say not, Compare the one with the other, weigh them well, and make your selection. There is no comparison possible. "I reckon that the sufferings of this present life are not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed." "For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal." (2 Cor. iv. 17, 18.) It is blank unbelief to talk about comparison. The one is infinitely small and pitiful; the other is infinitely great, beautiful, and glorious. "What things were gain to me," when the visible things of earth and time filled my sight, "those I have counted loss for Christ. Yea, doubtless, and I count all things but loss, for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ." (Phil. iii. 7, 8.) This is the Christian estimate. This is the true entrenchment of the human spirit against all the floods of calamity which may beat around the rock on which it builds its hopes. Be my lot what it may, my God, my Father ordains it; and He has the power, the will to make every pain, every wound, every heartache, every cross, every shock, the seed of a harvest whose glorious wealth I cannot measure even in my dreams. The power and the will, said I? His strongest promises, His profoundest purposes, are engaged in the fulfilment of the hope which He kindles in my breast, and which makes me master of the world. Nay, He has staked His life, the very existence of His throne, upon it. He has subjected you and me and the vast creation to vanity, "in hope, the hope that the creation itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the sons of God." We have no true measure of these sad scenes and experiences of earth—and they are sad enough, nothing is to be gained by painting them as lighter than they are; but we can measure them fairly when we get up into the higher region, strong in faith, and share the thought and hope of God. We are saved by hope. Let us bless God for it, for the blessed and boundless future in which the far-off interest of tears will be our eternal portion, and the harvest of brave endurance and patient pain. "Behold we count them patient which endure." And who are they? The world's weaklings and fools. Listen to the bead-roll, and hush your moans for very shame. Abel, Enoch, Noah head the line; Abraham, Isaac, Jacob. "These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For they that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country. And truly, if they had been mindful of that country from whence they came out, they might have had opportunity to have returned. But now they desire a better country, that is an heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he hath prepared for them a city." (Heb. xi. 13-16.) "And what shall I more say? for the time would fail me to tell of Gedeon, and of Barak, and of Samson, and of Jephthae; of David also, and Samuel, and of the prophets: who through faith subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned to flight the armies of the aliens. Women received their dead raised to life again: and others were tortured, not accepting deliverance; that they might obtain a better resurrection: and others had trial of cruel mockings and scourgings, yea, moreover of bonds and imprisonment; they were stoned, they were sawn asunder, were tempted, were slain with the sword: they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins; being destitute, afflicted, tormented; (of whom the world was not worthy:) they wandered in deserts, and in mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth." (Heb. xi. 32-38.) "And these all"—the world's chief heroes, whose names are dear and honoured through the ages on earth, as they shine resplendent as the stars in heaven's firmament on high—"These all, having obtained a good report through faith, received not the promise; God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect." (Heb. xi. 39, 40.) "Wherefore seeing ye are compassed about with so great a crowd of witnesses"—these grand and glorious forms, who watch your battles from their thrones, and prepare to hail your triumphant entrance to the kingdom which the victory of faith shall win—"lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset you, and run with patience the race that is set before you, looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God." (Heb. xii. 1, 2.)