HERALDS OF GOD
Him absent when He is present. Or again, you may have been struck, in reading the Epistles, by the dramatic use Paul makes of two short, simple words—"But now." Again and again they break out of his argument like the sudden note of a trumpet or the beat of a drum. "By the deeds of the law shall no flesh be justified. But now the righteousness of God without the law is revealed." "The end of those things is death. But now being made free from sin." "Ye were without God in the world: but now ye are made nigh." "If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable. But now is Christ risen from the dead." By the coming of Christ, Paul is saying in these four passages, something has got a foothold in history which turns man's struggle into victory, his sin into redemption, his solitude into divine communion, his setting sun into the daybreak of an eternal morning. And all the way through, that trumpet-toned text will keep sounding forth the truth that God's new era for the sons of men is not mere vision and prophecy, for in Christ it has already appeared. It is not a pious dream, it is historic fact. It is not to-morrow, it is to-day. It is not yonder, it is here. But now!
Here let me add that your very calling as expositors of God's Word implies that often you will preach, not from isolated texts or groups of texts, but from whole passages and narratives and incidents. No sermons are more likely to meet with a response of genuine interest and gratitude than those in which the spiritual
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