Alexander MacLaren :: The True Ideal (Hebrews 8:5)

The True Ideal

'See (saith He) that thou make all things according to the pattern shewed to thee in the mount.' — Hebrews 8:5

I do not intend to deal with the original bearing of these words, nor with the use made of them by the writer of Hebrews. Primarily they refer to the directions as to the Tabernacle and its furniture, which are given at such length, and with such minuteness, in Leviticus, and are there said to have been received by Moses on Sinai. The author of this Epistle attaches an even loftier significance to them, as supporting his contention that the whole ceremonial worship, as well as the Temple and its equipment, was a copy of heavenly realities, the heavenly sanctuary and its altar and priest. I wish to take a much humbler view of the injunction, and to apply it, with permissible violence, as a maxim for conduct and the great rule for the ordering of our lives. 'See that thou,' in thy shop and office, and wherever thou mayst be, 'make all things according to the pattern shewed to thee in the mount.' A far-reaching, high-soaring commandment, not to be obeyed without much effort, and able to revolutionise the lives of most of us. There are three points in it: the pattern, its universal applicability, and the place where we get to see it.

1. The pattern.

   The difference between noble and ignoble lives is very largely that the one has — and seeks, however partially and interruptedly, to follow — an ideal and the other has not. Or, to put it into plainer words, the one man regulates his life according to momentary inclinations and the obvious calls of sense, business and the like, and the other man has, far ahead and high up, a great light burning, to which he is ever striving to attain. The one has an aim to which he can only approximate, and the other largely lives from hand to mouth, as circumstances and sense, and the recurring calls of material necessities, or temptations that are put in his way every day, may dictate. And so, the one turns out a poor creature, and the other — God helping him — may turn out a saint. Which are you? Which we are depends very largely on the clearness with which we keep before us — like some great mountain summit rising above the mists, and stirring the ambition of every climber to reach the peak, where foot has never trod — the ideal, to use modern language, or to fall back upon the good old- fashioned Bible words, 'the pattern shewed to us.'

   You know that in mountain districts the mists are apt to gather their white folds round the summits, and that often for many days the dwellers in the plains have to plod along on their low levels, without a glimpse of the calm peak. And so it is with our highest ideal. Earth-born mists from the undrained swamps in our own hearts hide it too often from our eyes, and even when that is not the case, we are like many a mountaineer, who never lifts an eye to the sacred summit overhead, nor looks higher than his own fields and cattle-sheds. So it needs an effort to keep clear before us the pattern that is high above us, and to make very plain to ourselves, and very substantial in our thoughts, the unattained and untrodden heights. 'Not in vain the distance' should 'beckon.' 'Forward, forward, let us range,' should always be our word. 'See that thou make all things after the pattern,' and do not rule your lives according to whim, or fancy, or inclination, or the temptations of sense and circumstances.

   To aim at the unreached is the secret of perpetual youth. No man is old as long as he aspires. It is the secret of perpetual growth. No man stagnates till he has ceased to see, or to believe in great dim possibilities for character, as yet unrealised. It is the secret of perpetual blessedness. No man can be desolate who has for his companion the unreached self that he may become. And so artist, poet, painter, all live nobler lives than they otherwise would, because they live, not so much with the commonplace realities round them, as with noble ideals, be they of melody or of beauty, or of musical words and great thoughts. There should be the same life with, and directed towards, attaining the unstrained in the moralist, and above all in the Christian.

   But then, do not let us forget that we are not here in our text, as I am using it in this sermon, relegated to a pattern which takes its origin, after all, in our own thoughts and imaginations The poet's ideal, the painter's ideal, varies according to his genius. Ours has taken solidity and substance and a human form, and stands before us, and says: 'If any man serve Me, let him follow Me.' 'See that thou make all things according to the pattern,' and be thankful that we are not left to our own thoughts, or to our brethren's teachings, or to abstract ideas of the true and the beautiful and the good for our pattern and mould of life, but that we have the law embodied in a Person, and the ideal made actual, in our Brother and our Saviour. There is the joy and the blessedness of the Christian aim after Christian perfection. There is something unsubstantial, misty, shadowy, in an ideal which is embodied nowhere. It is ghost-like, and has little power to move or to attract. But for Christians the pattern is all gathered into the one sweet, heart. compelling form of Jesus, and whatever is remote and sometimes cold in the thought of an unattained aim, changes when we make it our supreme purpose to be like Jesus Christ. Our goal is no cold, solitary mountain top. It is the warm, loving heart, and companionable purity and perfectness of our Brother, and when we can, even in a measure, reach that sweet resting-place, we are wrapped in the soft atmosphere of His love.

   We shall be like Him when we see Him as He is; we grow like Him here, in the measure in which we do see Him, even darkly. We reach Him most surely by loving Him, and we become like Him most surely by loving Him, for love breeds likeness, and they who live near the light are drenched with the light, and become lights in their turn.

   There is another point here that I would suggest, and that is

2. The universal applicability of the pattern — 'See that thou make all things.'

   Let us go back to Leviticus There you will find page after page that reads like an architect's specification. The words that I have taken as my text are given in immediate connection with the directions for making the seven-branched candlestick, which are so minute and specific and detailed, that any brass-founder in Europe could make one to-day 'after the pattern.' So many bowls, so many knops, so many branches; such and such a distance between each of them; and all the rest of it — there it is, in most prosaic minuteness. Similarly, we read how many threads and fringes, and how many bells on the high priest's robe. Verse after verse is full of these details; and then, on the back of them all, comes, 'See that thou make all things according to the pattern.' Which things are a parable — and just come to this, that the minutest pieces of daily life, the most commonplace and trivial incidents, may all be moulded after that great example, the life of Jesus Christ.

   It is one of the miracles of revelation that it should be so. The life of Jesus Christ, in the fragmentary records of it in these four Gospels, although it only covered a few years, and is very imperfectly recorded, and in outward form was passed under conditions most remote from the strange complex conditions of our civilisation, yet fits as closely as a glove does to the hand, to all the necessities of our daily lives. Men and women, young men and maidens, old men and children, professional men and students, women in their houses, men of business, merchants, and they that sail the sea and they that dig in the mine; they may all find directions for everything that they have to do, in that one life.

   And here is the centre and secret of it. 'Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone.' Therefore that which is the law for Jesus is the law for us, and the next verse goes on; 'he that loveth hie life shall lose it,' and the next verse hammers the nail farther in: 'If any man serve Me, let him follow Me.' — Take that injunction and apply it, in all the details of daily life, and you will be on the road to reproduce the pattern. But remember the 'all things.' It is for us, if we are Christian people, to bring the greatest principles to bear on the smallest duties, 'Small duties?' ' Great' and 'small' are adjectives that ought never to be tacked on to ' duty.' For all duties are of one size, and while we may speak, and often do speak, very mistakenly about things which we vulgarly consider 'great,' or superciliously treat as 'small,' the fact is that no man can tell what is a great thing, and what is a small one. For the most important crises in a man's life have a strange knack of leaping up out of the smallest incidents; just as a whisper may start an avalanche, and so nobody can tell what are the great things and what the small ones. The tiniest pin in a machine drops out, and all the great wheels stop. The small things are the things that for the most part make up life. You can apply Christ's example to the least of them, and there is very small chance of your applying it to the great things if you have not been in the way of applying it to the small ones. For the small things make the habits which the great ones test and require.

   So 'thorough' is the word. 'See that thou make all things according to the pattern.'

   I remember once going up to the roof of Milan Cathedral, and finding there stowed away behind a buttress — where I suppose one man in fifty years might notice it, a little statuette, as completely chiselled, as perfectly polished, as if it had been of giant size, and set in the facade for all the people in the piazza to see. That is the sort of way in which Christian men should carve out their lives. Finish off the unseen bits perfectly, and then you may be quite sure that the seen bits will take care of themselves. 'See that thou make all things' — and begin with the small ones — 'according to the pattern.'

   Lastly,

3. Where we are to see the pattern. — 'Shewed to thee in the mount.'

   Ay, that is where we have to go if we are to see it. The difference between Christian men's convictions of duty depends largely on the difference in the distance that they have climbed up the hill. The higher you go, the better you see the He of the land. The higher you go, the purer and more wholesome the atmosphere. And many a thing which a Christian man on the low levels thought to be perfectly in accordance with 'the pattern,' when he goes up a little higher, he finds to be hopelessly at variance with it. It is of no use to lay down a multitude of minute, red-tape regulations as to what Christian morality requires from people in given circumstances. Go up the hill, and you will see for yourselves.

   Our elevation determines our range of vision. And the nearer, and the closer, and the deeper is our habitual fellowship with God in Christ, the more lofty will be our conceptions of what we ought to be and do. The reason for inconsistent lives is imperfect communion, mad the higher we go on the mountain of vision, the dearer will be our vision. On the other hand, whilst we see 'the pattern' in the mount, we have to come down into the valley to 'make' the 'things.' The clay and the potter's wheels are down in Hinnom, and the mountain top is above. You have to carry your pattern- book down, and set to work with it before you. Therefore, whilst the way to see the pattern is to climb, the way to copy it is to descend. And having faithfully copied what you saw on the Mount of Vision, you will see more the next time you go back; for 'to him that hath shall be given.'