The Tolerance and Intolerance of the Gospel
W. Alexander, D. D. Psalm 6:10 Let all my enemies be ashamed and sore vexed: let them return and be ashamed suddenly. A difficulty is often felt in reading or repeating these imprecations. These denunciations are appalling, withering. Are they not essentially personal, the breathing of a Jewish spirit of revenge, and in no sense Christian and universal? 1. I can find no difficulty in granting that the Old Testament spirit was a harder and a sterner spirit than that of the New. The emblem of the New Testament is the cross, which signifies passive endurance. The emblem of the Old Testament is the sword. As the Spirit of God freely uses individual thought, style and expression, overruling them so as to bring out His own higher meaning, I should not be surprised to find occasional phrases of a fiercer and an angrier complexion than any which occur in the New Testament, and which I should interpret with a different signification from that which their utterer designed. We need not consider these imprecatory Psalms as the utterance of David's longing for personal revenge It is very singular that each of the Psalms in which the strongest imprecatory passages are found contains also gentle undertones, breathings of beneficent love. 2. When under the old covenant, earthly prosperity was the portion of the wicked, and earthly adversity of the pious, the whole moral government of God seemed to be veiled in clouds and darkness. Now, when all seems troubled, we can look up and behold by faith the glory that shall be revealed. "God is patient because He is eternal." Man is impatient when he is not assured of his immortality. 3. We must interpret every book by the mind of the author. If so, we must apply this to the Bible and to the Psalms. The real author is the Holy Spirit. "The prophet seems to speak as if in prayer — when he sees that which will certainly come — showing that the known counsel of God, which He has firmly and immutably fixed, should not displease us." Conceive a created spirit enlarged so as to embrace the will of God in relation to all the children of men — a spirit looking from the margin of an eternal world upon the petty histories of the past, purified from personal hatred, partiality, and prejudice, measuring all things by the counsels of God, such a spirit could say without a taint of personal revenge, "let all mine enemies be ashamed." Turn to two passages of the New Testament (Luke 9:49, and sequel). We think of St. John as a man of angelic, or at least of feminine, gentleness. But in his nature, as in the blue sky of his native Galilee, there were sudden storms and fierce lightning flashes. As yet the brothers knew not Jesus thoroughly. They would build up by force the kingdom whose walls are cemented, not by "blood and iron," but by love. Such is the spirit of intolerance, which would in one age offer to God the hideous thing called by a fearful profanation an auto-da-fe; which in another would rivet the chains of penal laws upon a population; in another, with the cant of toleration upon its lips, stamp out an unpopular minority by rubrics and definitions. Is there any intolerance in the gospel? For answer see 2 John 10. To deny that Jesus was the God-Man was to question His legitimacy and impugn His truth. Pagan toleration has been invidiously compared with Christian intolerance. But pagan toleration is a conclusion drawn from the false premises that all religions are about equally true; while Christian persecution is a conclusion falsely drawn from the true principle of the exclusiveness of true religion. Commend the spirit of tolerance to all whom our Church tolerates. Amidst much that is depressing there is one happy sign of our times. There are tokens that Churches sundered hitherto are yearning to be one. A day is coming, even on the earth, when the inward unity of Christ's redeemed shall manifest itself outwardly; when the prayer of our High priest shall he fulfilled, "that they all may be one." (W. Alexander, D. D.). Parallel Verses KJV: Let all mine enemies be ashamed and sore vexed: let them return and be ashamed suddenly. WEB: May all my enemies be ashamed and dismayed. They shall turn back, they shall be disgraced suddenly. A meditation by David, which he sang to Yahweh, concerning the words of Cush, the Benjamite.