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1 Peter 4:14:
14If ye be reproached for the name of Christ, happy are ye; for the spirit of glory and of God resteth upon you: on their part he is evil spoken of, but on your part he is glorified.
It was a glorious word that Jesus spake—a word that still pours balm into many a wound, and revives the courage of faith that has grown faint; a word that has made martyrs, and has strengthened and comforted them—when, at the end of the beatitudes He said with so great emphasis: "Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you for My sake" (Matthew 5:11).
It is a word that reaches farther than the prophecy that prison and martyrdom awaited the disciples. This took place in only certain periods in the struggle of Jesus' church. But what is not bound to any one period of time, what always continues, and ever repeats itself, is this very personal grieving and annoying, this mockery, scorn and disdain from which the world can not wean itself whenever it meets a real manifestation of strength on the part of the Lord's people that opposes it and has courage to resist it.
Persecution unto blood is exceptional. This other persecution which strikes at the heart with the lancet of scorn and abuse goes on in all ages. And, therefore, this beatitude of the Lord enters so deeply into our human life. It betrays to us that tender fellow-feeling of Jesus for what awaited His own. It is a word that every day finds its application, now here and now there. No day passes but it practices its ministry of encouragement and comfort. It does not tend, daringly and defiantly to meet the world that is offended at the cause of the Lord, but the effect of it is this, that it makes the disciples of the Lord, when they would retract, stand their ground, and, in the face of injury and slander, remain unmoved.
But do not forget that this word has also its dangerous side, because it has so frequently been quoted and applied where the application was not permissible.
This depends upon the question of what it is in your actions and omissions, in your words and manner, that incites people to do you injury and to persecute you and falsely to say all manner of evil against you.
This may be your earnest endeavor to advance the cause of your Lord, but it can also be your over-zealousness, your eccentricity, your loveless enthusiasm, or, worse yet, the gap that yawns between your profession and your practice, the hypocrisy that to some extent disfigures your life.
And though in this latter case the strength of your resistance against the world may lie in your zeal for the cause of Christ, actually you put into this zeal so much of your own self and act in behalf of your own interest to such an extent that the "for my sake," which Jesus put as the condition for His beatitude applies to you but in part.
Yea, it can be, and does happen, that the scorn, the abuse and the slander of the world are so almost exclusively invited by this your own sinful alloy that even not a few among your fellow-believers are bound to take the part of the world against you, and, far from calling you blessed in Jesus' name, feel as by instinct that your example hurts more than it helps the cause of your Lord.
Understand this well. This implies by no means that you are in the right only when the world honors your lovableness of character, your honesty and uprightness, and pays homage to what is called your philanthropic and ethical nature.
This the world has shown differently to Jesus himself. If we do nothing else in the name of Jesus than what the world can approve and laud in us, the distinctive characteristic itself is gone from our profession and from our practice.
On ethical grounds nothing could be laid to the charge of the Apostles of the Lord, and yet the world has done them shame, and has not rested till it had hounded them to the death.
In our profession, and practice, and zeal the essential factor must always be that which the world can not tolerate, what offends it and impels it to offer resistance.
Only, what may never be wanting, if the beatitude of the Lord shall be applicable to us, is what Peter (1 Peter 4:14) expresses thus: "If ye be reproached for the name of Christ, happy are ye, for the spirit of glory and the Spirit of God resteth upon you."
This must be the case.
The Spirit of the Lord must rest upon you. The Spirit of the Lord must speak from what you do and do not do. It must not be against you but against that Spirit of the Lord, that the fierce anger of the world turns itself.
Then you are reviled for Christ's sake, and then from this abuse there germinates in your behalf the blessedness after which your heart thirsts.
Here too it depends again upon your being near to God, for when you are near unto God, God is near unto you, and then it is not against you but against God that the world turns itself, and against you only because you are found to be near unto God and God near unto you.
Proof of this is, that the world is instantly ready to turn its scorn into praise and its abuse into applause, the moment you cut loose from God.
Undoubtedly, in the sin of the world there is also hatred against the neighbor. This began with Cain. But in so far alone as the personal hatred of egoism operates against the neighbor, the fire of this hatred is brought to bursting out into flame by the passion for personal gain, by material interest, by the struggle for position, by slavery to passion and jealousy. And this hatred of the world does not turn itself in particular against the Christian people, but is astir in the world itself, as one rises up against the other.
But in the deepest bottom of what is sinful in the human heart lies the hatred not against the neighbor but against God. So it began with Satan, and so Satan has transplanted it in the human heart.
This hatred against God may largely express itself in covered form, and only occasionally turn into open denial of God and blasphemy, yet it is this hatred that propels the current of the life of the nations. The never satisfied passion for emancipation. The will to be one's own lord and master, and to recognize no God as Lord and Master above one's self. To be as God, and to be God oneself, and the determination not to bend the knee, is the evil germ from which all sin unfolds.
And because the people of the Lord enter protest against this, and openly plead for the Majesty of God, the world turns itself against that people, in order to stop their mouth, in order to rob them of influence, and to doom them to inaction.
But fiercely and bitterly the fire of this hatred bursts forth only when the world discerns that it is no more you who speak of God and bear witness for Him, but that the living God Himself is with you, that He dwelleth in you, that you are near God and God is near to you, and that for this reason, in you it can strike at God Himself and at His Christ.
When it perceives that the Spirit of the Lord rests upon you, then it cannot tolerate you, and forces the choice upon you of letting go of this God, or of incurring its deadly hatred which shall not rest till it has actually or morally ruined you.
To be near unto God, so near that He has formed your heart for His temple, and with Christ has come to you, in order in the Holy Ghost to tabernacle with you, is glorious, blessed sweet mysticism of soul; but there is more.
Your heart can be no cover to hide the light that shines in you. When the Spirit of God really rests upon you, it becomes evident, the glow of that light radiates to the region without, and he who hardens himself against that light comes not at once, but gradually, to the discovery that you are a person who stands in contact with the living God, and that whoever has to do with you has also to do with that holy Power which is God's.
And then comes the opposition, not because of anything of secondary importance, not because of accidentals, but because of that highest and most glorious reality that is in you.
When Asaph sang of the blessedness of being near unto God, his mind was absorbed in thought of this antithesis between the world and its God.
This antithesis can not be separated, therefore, from the nearness unto God.
The nearer you are to the world, the farther you are from God. But then, too, the nearer you are unto your God, the greater the distance that must mark itself between you and this world.
If, having come near unto God, you could go out from the world, no conflict would kindle in your heart, and no hatred in the world against you.
But this you may not do.
"I pray thee O Father, not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that in the world thou shouldest keep them from the evil" (John 17:15).
The high seriousness of your position is just this, that you, with God in your heart, must yet live in the midst of a world which at heart and in its life is opposed to this God.
And now it has indeed been tried, as Christian so to behave oneself in this world that the world hands you out a passport and grants you an honorary diploma as one who "though Christian, is yet a tolerable person;" but such a seductive exhibition of favor on the part of the world is never bought otherwise than at the price of dulling the sharp edges of your creedal profession.
If, now, the world could only make such a separation between you and the God Whom you profess and for Whom you zealously labor, that it would be able to continue its opposition against Him without affecting you, it would be ready to do so. To you as man it still feels ties.
But just this it cannot do with the real followers of Christ. They are so near God that the eye of the world discovers no more distance.
And therefore it attacks you personally. It magnifies as broadly as possible whatever wrong it discovers in you. It makes sport of every unsanctified utterance that is observed in you. And then falsely and slanderously it says all manner of evil against you.
To be near unto God and to bear this grief belong together. In such a way, however, that you may never court it, that from desire after the martyr crown, you may never incite the world to it.
That alone which is wholly natural and springs up of itself is here also inwardly true and has value with God.
And then the blessedness does not come only later on, but is already tasted in the midst of the oppression, and then God's angels see, and then God's children perceive, that already here, in the midst of tribulation, the spirit of glory, the Spirit of God rests upon you.
* * * * * * *This devotional classic offers 110 meditations on a single thought from Psalm 73: "As for me, it is good to be near to God." The author states, "The fellowship of being near unto God must become reality ... it must permeate and give color to our feeling, our perceptions, our sensations, our thinking, our imagining, our willing, our acting, our speaking. It must not stand as a foreign factor in our life, but it must be the passion that breathes throughout our whole existence."
The meditations reflect the blending of spiritual vigor with doctrinal loyalty so consistently expressed in the life of Abraham Kuyper. These are devotions with true substance, avoiding the extremes about which Kuyper adds a word of caution: "Stress in creedal confession, without drinking from the Living Fountain, runs dry in barren orthodoxy, just as truly as spiritual emotion, without clearness in confessional standards, makes one sink in the bog of sickly mysticism."
Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) was a Dutch political leader and Calvinist theologian. Elected to parliament in 1874, he became Prime Minister in 1901 and served in that capacity until 1905. As a theologian, he revived a systematic, orthodox Calvinism. He founded the Free Reformed Church and the Free University of Amsterdam. His other works include Principles of Sacred Theology, Lectures on Calvinism, and The Work of the Holy Spirit
Further information about Abraham Kuyper's life can be seen in the translator's "Biographical Note"; further information about To Be Near Unto God can be Abraham Kuyper's "Preface" to that book.
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