Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1380
“We look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are notseen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.” 2 Corinthians 4:18.
THE Apostle Paul was by no means a stoic. He had not conquered all human feeling and rendered himself a stone man. On the contrary, he was exceedingly sensitive. You can see abundant evidence, not only in the Acts of the Apostles, but also in the tone of all his Epistles, that he has a very tender spirit. He feels acutely any unkindness. If a friend forsakes him, he mourns it. Or if friends help him, there is genuine emotion in his gratitude. He is sensitive, too, to poverty, sensitive to shame—sensitive to all those griefs which he has to bear for Christ’s sake. He feels them—you can see that he does. He is not an invulnerable man in armor—he is a man of flesh and blood whom the arrows pierce and pain.
Yet how bravely he sticks to his work! He faces every danger and never dreams of flinching. Never for a single moment does he seem to take into consideration what he may have, personally, to suffer for the testimony of Christ and the triumph of the Gospel. He remembers the pangs when they are past! He looks on the scars when they are healed and he sometimes gives a long list of the perils and privations he has had to endure, thus showing that he was keenly sensitive, but he never tries to shelter himself from any sort of suffering if it is necessary to accomplish his lifework. Thus he pressed steadily on through evil report and good report, through honor and through dishonor, enjoying the love of the Churches at one time and at another time smarting under a cruel suspicion of his Apostleship even among his own converts!
He is now the hero of unbounded popularity, when the people crowd to do him honor, and at another time the victim of public hatred and frenzied riot when he is dragged out of the city to be stoned to death! “But none of these things move me, neither count I my life dear unto me,” he could well say. He seemed as if God had thrown him forth from His hands even as He hurls a thunderbolt, and he stopped not until he reached the end towards which the power of God was hurling him! He cried, “The love of Christ constrains us.” He reckoned himself, therefore, dead to all but Christ. Well may we be curious to know what supported so noble a man under his trials and developed such a hero under such a succession of oppositions.
What kept him so calm? What made him so self-possessed and intrepid? How was it that when cast down he was not destroyed—that when troubled he was not distressed? What sustained him? He gives us the key to this fortitude by telling us that he counted his afflictions light because they were, in his estimation, but for a moment, and they were working out for him a far more exceedingly and eternal weight of glory. He was calm and happy midst rage and tumult, violent prejudice, adverse and even disastrous circumstances, because, in the language of the text, he looked not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are unseen, reckoning that the things which are seen are not worth looking at, they are so transient—while the things unseen are of priceless worth because they are eternal!
That is our subject at this time. First, things not to be looked at. And, second, things to be looked at. The text wears the shape of a double paradox. Things that can be seen are, naturally, the things to be looked at. What should a man look at but what he can see? And yet the Apostle tells us not to look at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen! How can things invisible be looked at? That again is a paradox. How can you look at what you cannot see? This is only one paradox of the Christian life which is all paradox—and the riddle lies rather in the words than in the sense. We shall soon discover that there is no contradiction or incongruity, no difficulty whatever.
I. First, then, let us LOOK AT WHAT CAN BE SEEN and ask what we are to understand by this declaration—“We look not at the things which are seen.” The word for, “look,” is used, I think, six times in the New Testament and is translated in four or five different ways. I do not intend to keep to those translations, but to work them into the explanation of what is meant by not looking at the things which are seen. It means, first, lightly esteeming both present
joy and present sorrow, as if they were not worth looking at. The present is so soon to be over that Paul does not care to look at it. There is so little of it and it lasts such a brief time that he does not even care to give it a glance—he looks not at it.
Here he is persecuted, despised, forsaken. “It will not last long,” he says. “It is but a pin’s prick. It will soon be over and I shall be with the goodly fellowship above and behold my Master’s face.” He will not look at it. He ignores it! Thus it behooves us to do if surrounded with trials, troubles, present sorrows—we should not think so much of them as to fix our attention or rivet our gaze on them. Rather, let us treat them with indifference and say, “It is really a very small matter whether I am in wealth or in poverty, in health or in sickness—whether I am enjoying comforts or whether I am robbed of them. The present will so soon be gone that I do not care to look at it. I am like a man who stays at an inn for a night while he is on a journey.”