Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 665
Delivered on Sunday Morning, December 17, 1865, by C. H. Spurgeon, at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington
“This Man receives sinners and eats with them.” Luke 15:2.
IT is not very unusual that the Pharisees could not understand the Savior’s mode of action—not only because self-righteousness and bigotry had blinded their eyes and callousness of heart to the interest of others and had bound them up in the darkness of self-righteousness—but also because the Savior’s mode of acting was contrary to the general current of the dispensation to which the Pharisee had been accustomed. The dispensation of the old Covenant was that of distance. When God appeared to His servant Moses, it was, “Draw not near here: put off your shoes from off your feet.” And when He manifested Himself upon Mount Sinai to His own chosen and separated people, one of the first commands was, “You shall set bounds about the mount and if so much as a beast touches the mountain it shall be stoned or thrust through with a dart.”
In the sacred worship of the tabernacle and the temple the thought of distance must always have been prominent to the devout mind. The mass of the people did not even enter the outer court. Into the inner court none but the priests could ever dare to come. And into the innermost place, or the holy of holies, once a year one person only ever entered! A thick costly veil hung before the manifestation of Jehovah’s Presence and upon the Shekinah no mortal eye ever gazed, except that eye which, once a year, alone, dared to look upon its splendor through the mist of the smoking incense when the blood of atonement was sprinkled on the Mercy Seat.
The Lord seemed ever to be saying to the whole of His people, with but a few exceptions, “Come not near here.” It was the dispensation of distance—as if the Lord in those early ages would teach man that sin was so utterly loathsome to Him that He must treat men as lepers put outside the camp. And when He came nearest to them, yet He made them feel the width of the separation between a holy God and the impure sinner.
But Jesus Christ came on quite another footing. The word, “Go,” was now exchanged for, “Come,” and distance was made to give place to nearness! Partitions were broken down, middle walls of separation became like tottering fences, and we, who sometime were afar off, were made near by the blood of Jesus Christ. Therefore, Incarnate Deity has no wall of fire about it. Christ was surrounded with that Divinity which does hedge about a king, but it was only as a hedge of thorns to Himself and not as a hedge of briars to keep off the approach of the mean of mankind.
“Come unto Me all you that labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest”—that is the joyful proclamation of God as He appears in human flesh! Not now does He teach the leper his leprosy by setting him at a distance, but by suffering the penalty of man’s defilement. Not now does He teach man that the disease is naturally incurable—He now shows him the heavenly cure by revealing the fact that God, without sullying His purity, can come into contact with impurity in order to its removal and without receiving contagion from the arch-leper. The devil can grapple with Him in the human heart—He can lay hold upon His adversary that He may bind him hand and foot and cast him away from men—no more to oppress our race!
Jesus ushered in the dispensation of nearness, which, as you all know is to be followed by one of greater nearness still, for, as God is very near to us spiritually, the day draws near—oh, hasten it, good Lord!—when the angels shall sing, “The tabernacle of God is with men and He does dwell among them!” We shall need no temple in which Deity can be enshrined, for the Lord God and the Lamb shall be the Temple of universal manhood and we shall see Him face to face and days of distance and of mourning shall be ended.
I do not wonder then that Pharisees, who had drunk very deep into the separating spirit of the Law, should have been perfectly astounded that a Person claiming to be the Messiah and professing to be that Adonai who sits at the right hand of Jehovah till His enemies are made His footstool—should, as they thought—act so inconsistently with His own professions and allow constantly a mob of the dross and scum and raff of the population to be associated with Him! They therefore said, “This Man receives sinners,” and worse still, He breaks through all rules of caste and all degrees of separateness and makes Himself so familiar that He actually eats with them!
Now, this fact, which so startled them, has become very familiar to those of us who have been received and have eaten with Him. But still, the sinner, trembling under a sense of sin, feels the spirit of the old Law like a black cloud hovering over him and he can hardly venture to believe, much less to understand in all its richness of mercy, that Jesus still receives sinners! He fosters the notion that Jesus will look for some good thing in him and demand at least some redeeming trait in character, some act of penitence, some holy resolution, something or other which may mitigate guilt and conciliate regard. But the abstract truth that this Man receives sinners as such and eats with them needs to be proclaimed again and again and again—that the ears of unbelieving, mistrustful men may at last receive it—and that their hearts may feel its power!