Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2529
“Who can have compassion on the ignorant, and on them that are out of the way.” Hebrews 5:2.
THE ignorant have need of compassion. “That the soul is without knowledge, it is not good.” Every kind of ignorance, like darkness, is evil, and knowledge, which is light, is, according to its kind, good, or better, or best. For a man to be ignorant of Divine things is a very sorrowful piece of business. To be going into eternity and not to know anything about it—yes, and even to be passing through this life and yet to not know the way everlasting which leads to Glory, but to be stumbling upon the dark mountains of mere thought and vain imagination—this is a very dreadful thing! Ignorance of God, ignorance of the right, ignorance of Christ, ignorance of mercy, ignorance of Heaven—these are things for which men are to be blamed, but for which they are also to be pitied. Wherever we see ignorance about the things of God, let our hearts go forth in tenderness, but let our prayers arise to God in love—and let our efforts be made in true benevolence that the ignorance may be removed, for, if we are men of God like our Great High Priest, it will be true, also, of us that we “have compassion on the ignorant.”
Now, dear Brothers and Sisters, it becomes every man to have compassion on the ignorant because the ignorant man is still a man! However little he knows, he is still a man, and you and I need not be excessively modest if we put ourselves, also, down among the ignorant, for what if we are better instructed than others? How little do we know, after all! The most intelligent, the most experienced—the man who has dwelt nearest to his Lord—yet how much there remains even for him to know! He knows the love of Christ, but it passes his knowledge. He knows many things, yet he is obliged to confess that here he only knows in part—and it is not till the hereafter that he shall know even as he is not. Therefore, seeing you are a man and, in your measure ignorant, you are to have great compassion upon your fellow man and upon his ignorance.
And inasmuch as the ignorance here meant is the ignorance of sin, which is constantly described in the Old Testament as folly, so that every sinner is declared to be a fool—yet concerning this, you and I may well have compassion because we are sinners, too! If God has made us to differ, yet that difference is all the result of His Grace and, therefore, not to be taken to ourselves as a reason for pride and lifting ourselves up above others. No, a sinner yourself, you should be very tender to all other sinners. Yourself indebted—oh, how deeply—to Infinite Love, you should be very gentle to others who need that love! What if you are cleansed from the pollution of sin? It was a fountain filled with blood in which you were washed! Therefore, be you anxious that your fellow man should be washed there, too! What if the power of your sin is conquered? It was the Holy Spirit who worked this victory in you! Should you not desire that other captives should be set free, that other rebels should be subdued, that others who are under the domination of sin should be brought under the rule of your Divine Lord? If you are a man, a gracious man, a man of God, a chosen man, a blood-washed man, you should “have compassion on the ignorant, and on them that are out of the way.”
But, dear Friends, under the old dispensation, there were some who were chosen of God to take up a peculiar relationship to their fellow men. These were the priests and especially the High Priest—the one man who, alone, of all Israel, might once in the year enter into the Most Holy Place with the blood of the atonement. He who has to deal with men for God must be, above all others, very tender and very patient. It was a most trying experience for Hannah, when she went up with her sorrowful spirit to the house of the Lord, that God’s High Priest was not a man of tender and compassionate spirit, for Eli spoke very sharply to the good woman, and well-near broke that heart which God would have to be healed!
It is a very sad thing when a man who is ordained of God to speak to men for God, is hard, cold and cruel—as if he were a judge rather than a father, or as if he were a butcher to slay the sheep rather than a shepherd to fetch it back from its wandering!
The Lord Jesus has made all His saints to be priests—we offer no sacrifice of blood—but He has made us kings and priests unto God, and we have to deal with men for God, all of us, I mean, not ministers, alone, but all of you who are the Lord’s own people! And it ought to be said of all of you who are kings and priests unto God that you “can have compassion on the ignorant.” A Christian without compassion seems to me to have missed a very vital part of the Christian character. A hard-hearted Christian—is not that a complete contradiction? Must not our hearts have been broken before we could, ourselves, be penitent? And He who bound them up and healed them, did not harden them with His gentle touch! I reckon that He gave them an additional tenderness by the very act of binding them up with His own dear pierced hands! And we ought to be very gentle—as a nurse with her child, as a mother with her darling—in dealing with the ignorant and those that are out of the way. Our sympathy ought to be always flowing, like a crystal fountain that is never dried up in summer, nor frozen in winter. The Lord has chosen us and called us to this office, that we should “have compassion on the ignorant, and on them that are out of the way,” not only because we are men, but because God has made us priests—not only because we are, ourselves, children of God, but because we are now servants of God, set on purpose to look after the lost sheep and bring them into the fold.