The Patient Divine Workman and His Purpose
A. Maclaren, D. D. 2 Corinthians 5:5 Now he that has worked us for the selfsame thing is God, who also has given to us the earnest of the Spirit. These words penetrate deep into the secrets of God. To Paul everything is the Divine working. Life is to him no mere blind whirl of accidental forces, but the slow operation of the great Workman. And he believes that the clear perception of the Divine purpose will be a charm against all sorrow, doubt, despondency, or fear. I. GOD'S PURPOSE IN ALL HIS WORKING. 1. What is that "self-same thing"? The apostle has been speaking about the instinctive reluctance that even good men feel at the prospect of "putting off the earthly house of this tabernacle." He distinguishes between three different conditions in which the human spirit may be — dwelling in the earthly body, stripped of that, and "clothed with the house which is from heaven"; and this last and highest state is the very thing for which God has wrought us — i.e., the highest aim of the Divine love in all its dealings with us is not merely a blessed spiritual life, but the completion of our humanity in a perfect spirit dwelling in a glorified body. 2. That glorified body is described in our context. II. THE SLOW PROCESS OF THE DIVINE WORKMAN. 1. The apostle employs a term which conveys the idea of continuous and effortful work, as if against resistance. Like some sculptor with a hard bit of marble, or some metallurgist with rough ore, so the loving, patient, Divine Artificer labours long and earnestly with somewhat obstinate material, by manifold touches, here a little and there a little, and not discouraged when He comes upon a black vein in the white marble, nor when the hard stone turns the edge of His chisels. Learn, then — (1) That God cannot make you fit for heaven all at a jump, or by a simple act of will. He can make a world so, not a saint. He cannot say, and He does not say, "Let there be holiness," and it comes. Not so can God make man meet for the "inheritance of the saints in light." And it takes Him all His energies, for all a lifetime, to prepare His child for what He wants to make of him. (2) That God cannot give a man that glorified body of which I have been speaking unless the man's spirit is Christlike. By the necessities of the case it is confined to the purified, because it corresponds to their inward spiritual being. It is only a perfect spirit that can dwell in a perfect body. Some shall rise to glory and immortality, some to shame and everlasting contempt. If we are to stand at the last with the body of our humiliation changed into a body of glory, we must begin by being changed in the spirit of our mind. 2. Consider the three-fold processes which, in the Divine working, terminate in this great issue. (1) God has wrought us for it in the very act of making us what we are. Human nature is an insoluble enigma if this world is its only field. Amidst all the mysterious waste of creation, there is no more profligate expenditure of powers than that which is involved in giving a man such faculties and capacities if this be the only field on which they are to be exercised. All other creatures fit their circumstances; nothing in them is bigger than their environment. They find in life a field for every power. But we have an infinitude of faculty lying half dormant in each of us which finds no work at all in this present world. What is the use of us if there is nothing except this poor present? God, or whoever made us, has made a mistake; and, strangely enough, if we were not made, but evolved, evolution has worked out faculties which have no correspondence with the things around them. Life, and man, is an insoluble enigma except on the hypothesis that this is a nursery-ground, and that the little plants will be pricked out some day, and planted where they are meant to grow. (2) Another field of the Divine operation to this end is in what we roughly call "providences." What is the meaning of all this discipline through which we are passed if there is nothing to be disciplined for? What is the good of an apprenticeship if there is no journeyman's life to come after it, where the powers that have been slowly acquired shall be nobly exercised upon broader fields? Life is an insoluble riddle unless the purpose of it lie yonder, and unless all this patient training of our sorrows and our gladnesses is equally meant for training us for the perfect life of a perfect soul, moving a perfect body in a perfect universe. And who can think of life as anything but a wretched fragment unless he knows that all which begins here runs upwards into the room above, and there finds its explanation and its completion? (3) So in all the work and mystery of our redemption this is the goal that God has in view. It was not worth Christ's while to come and die if nothing more was to come of it than the imperfect reception of His blessings and gifts which the noblest Christian life in this world presents. The meaning and purpose of the Cross, the meaning and purpose of all the patient dealings of His whispering Spirit, is that we shall be like our Divine Lord in spirit first, and in body afterwards. 3. And everything about the experiences of a true Christian spirit is charged with a prophecy of immortality. The very desires which God's good Spirit works in a believing soul are themselves confirmations of their own fulfilment. III. THE CERTAINTY AND THE CONFIDENCE. 1. "He that hath wrought us for the self-same thing is God." Then we may be sure that, as far as He is concerned, the work will not be suspended nor vain. This Workman has infinite resources, an unchanging purpose, and infinite long-suffering. In the quarries of Egypt you will find gigantic stones, half-dressed, and intended to have been transported to some great temple. But there they lie, the work incomplete, and they never carried to their place. There are no half-polished stones in God's quarries. They are all finished where they lie, and then borne across the sea, like Hiram's from Lebanon, to the temple on the hill. 2. But it is a certainty that you can thwart. It is an operation that you can counter-work. Oh! do not let all God's work on you come to naught, but yield yourselves to it. Rejoice in the confidence that He is moulding your character, cheerfully welcome the providences, painful as they may be, by which He prepares you for heaven. (A. Maclaren, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: Now he that hath wrought us for the selfsame thing is God, who also hath given unto us the earnest of the Spirit. WEB: Now he who made us for this very thing is God, who also gave to us the down payment of the Spirit.