One of the greatest perils of the Christian life lurks in the common pathway of discipleship. It is the peril of being offended in Christ. The fellowship to which the Gospel calls us will bring a constant new and humiliating discovery of self; and a disturbance of established order in our lives, as His will corrects and opposes our own. The danger in this exercise is that we are apt to break down under the test and training of it all, to go back and walk no more with Him. We become, in fact, offended in Him. It is always possible, despite every sincere profession of the soul, that what God meant for blessing should become blight to us by our misunderstanding of what He is doing.
But Christ, with that absolute frankness which is a large part of His attractiveness to men, cannot be held to blame for such pitiful defections. For He never disguises the possibility. In His Gospel, He combines welcome with warning as none other has ever done. Hence it is that to the most earnest and self-convinced of us all He says: “Blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in Me.” The blessedness of the unoffended, despite all the danger without and the weakness within, is the possibility of receiving a blessing from every trial. And this is blessedness indeed.
Now it is necessary to remember the meaning of the word “offend.” In its original form it is the very word we frequently use-scandalize, and has the force of causing to stumble. So we may translate and expand this saying of Christ as being: “Blessed is he who does not find in Me any cause of stumbling.”
Now we are prepared to find offences in the world, in the opposition of the devil, in the proven insincerity of others—but in Him! This is surely the most startling of all His warnings. For in Him we have already found life and salvation, guidance and peace, inspiration and satisfaction. And now to consider the thought of being offended in Him—this fairly staggers us.
Had this word offended been applied to men of the world, it would bring little, if any, surprise. For instance, we are not greatly taken aback when the Pharisees were offended in Him because He spoke to them of the evil thoughts, adulteries, murders, and the like, which proceed from the hearts of men; for His words convicted them of sin. We are not much surprised that He should be a rock of offence to those who are purposely disobedient to His demands. But when His own friends, those who really know Him, and have been admitted into the intimacies of fellowship with Him, should find cause of offence, this seems very strange at first. And its very mystery warns us to take heed to ourselves.
The setting that surrounds this verse in Matt. 11:6, is very revealing. John the Baptist was languishing in prison on the shores of the Dead Sea. This was the end of a life of utmost faithfulness. He had been tremendously loyal to Christ, splendidly in earnest concerning his mission, wonderfully courageous in giving forth the message committed to him, and yet it had all ended in a dungeon.
It seemed as though his faith, his self-restriction, his willingness to decrease that Christ might increase, had all been unrecognized and unvalued. His present experience so entirely contradicted God’s assurance of a Messiah, that it is easy to understand the perplexity of mind which led him to send his disciples to Christ with the searching question: “Art thou He that should come?” For here is One who has come to deliver captives, and yet He does not deliver the man, who, more than all others, seemed to have claims upon Him. He has proclaimed His own mission in terms of sympathy and love for the heartbroken, and yet here is a crushed and heartbroken man of whom He apparently takes no notice.
We should not be surprised, that at last, doubt has overcome his faith. We should not wonder why he who sits in prison would send messengers to Christ in the hope that He will declare Himself plainly. He probably had hopes of an explanation of such utterly contradictory circumstances. After all, he was the one who had at immense cost to himself maintained a devoted loyalty to the Son of God? Christ’s only answer to these messengers was an exhibition of His sovereign power over the forces of destruction and death, and an injunction that they should tell John what they had seen. He told them to give John a special message; which calls for a new triumphant trust on his part: “Blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in Me.” It was a reminder that in the pathway of blessing, the providence of testing will always be experienced. Its implication is that there is true peace only for that man who will trust Christ when he has no external aids to faith. The blessing is for he who believes Him and who holds to his loyalty without stumbling when God’s treatment of him tests his endurance to the uttermost.
Now, it is not disloyal to Christ to say this: that He not only masters men but mystifies them also. While He blesses them He bewilders them too. His ways and thoughts are so much higher than ours. He persuades us to love and loyalty; but He puzzles us too. And in the life of every true follower of Him, there will always be, some great unanswered “Why?” None of us will ever be exempt from the need of acquiring by faith and patience the blessedness of the unoffended.
Now, let us think of an ordinary and typical instance of offence. It is not commonly a matter of open backsliding, of heartless rejection of the truth, or of bitter denial of past experience. Rather, doesn’t it begin with the disappointment of some hope, the failure of an expectation, the weariness of an unanswered prayer, or the ache of a heart that seems to evoke no sympathetic answer from God. All this generates an unspoken and almost unspeakable distrust. Then as we brood over it, a sense of injustice grows, a feeling that we have not been treated quite fairly by Christ. And how many there are all around us of whose lives it is a true description! From small beginnings of distrust the largest disasters grow. If two parallel lines are produced into infinity, there will never be any variation of the distance between them. But let them diverge at any point by only a hair’s breadth. Then the farther they are produced, the wider the divergence becomes, until at length there is a universe of distance between them. So also in our fellowship with Christ. This kind of distrust and disobedience is charged with the potential of infinite loss. If we do not discover this attitude and repent, it can eventually put an eternity of distance between the soul and the Savior. If therefore, we can estimate some of the unchanging certainties of discipleship; and explore some of the perilous causes of offence in Christ, then we can establish a new relationship of implicit trust with our Lord, and be saved from this threatening peril. And this is surely the aim of His forewarning Word. Let us look at some of His unchanging ways.
There is first of all the severity of His requirements. When we first come to Christ the pathway seems to be strewn with roses, and the air seems filled with sweet and soothing perfumes. Though Christ is absolutely frank with us, and veils nothing of the hardships and conflicts we must endure, our own powers of understanding are so limited. We see but one thing at a time and that one thing is that Christ meets all the immediate needs of my life. Hence we march to a glad strain of faith and our hearts are in tune. But before long we discover that the conditions of fellowship are severe, a real separation, without popularity. It involves a severance of ties, the sacrifice of material prosperity, and the end of self-indulgence, a crucifixion. And when all this comes to be clearly apprehended, then it is that men are offended in Christ.
Then there is the mystery of His contradictions. It often seems as though Christ is unsympathetic with our best desires, with those desires that have originated in our fellowship with Him. You want, for instance, to do some great service and to fill some great sphere; but Christ’s answer to your longing is to set you down to face the difficulties of a small work where there is little, if any, recognition of your toil. You ask for spiritual service, and all that has been granted is a monotonous round of secular duty. And you are in danger of being offended in Him, just because there seems so little justification for His treatment of your high aim.
Or, maybe you have asked the gift of rest, and claimed His great promises on this line; but the answer has come in the necessity for stern and continuous conflict. The fires of temptation blaze around you, not less, but far more fiercely than ever. And, you are both puzzled and provoked at such realities. Or, you have desired to have a life less burdened and strained, but His only response has been to impose other and heavier burdens upon you. And you are well nigh offended in Him. The mystery of it all baffles every serious purpose, and the temptation to distrust is at times almost too much.
In reality, He is only unsympathetic with our egotism. He only seeks to destroy within us any kind of self-love, self-pride, and self-sufficiency, and to reproduce in us something of the beauty of His own character.
Beyond these causes is yet another in the slowness of His methods. We come to Him and put our lives under His control, expectant of immediate realization of a deliverance, which shall lift us beyond all concern regarding temptation and opposing forces. But how disappointingly slow is this realization; and how hardly won are our victories even when we are re-enforced by His Spirit.
Quite early we find that life is not a song, but rather a strife; that the grace of Christ is not a mere ecstasy but rather an energy which works painfully for righteousness in us. And the slowness of Christ in this matter of our own spiritual conflicts is often the cause of offence to us.
The same is true also in regard to the progress of the Kingdom. How often we find the slowness with which spiritual results are achieved a cause of offence in Christ. We begin by expecting that when we lift up Christ we shall immediately see crowds flocking to Him. We imagine that we have but to work faithfully in the service of God and man, and results are certain to be apparent. But how different is the reality!
We face the difficulty of believing that God is on the field when He is most invisible and it is too much for many who commence to work for Him with high hopes and valiant beliefs. Like the disciples, they think, “the Kingdom of God should immediately appear”; and it does not. As He attempts to guide their enthusiasm, and deepen their consecration into perseverance, they are apt to be “offended.” Now it would not be difficult to bring instance upon instance to prove that, in spiritual work, when results are least visible they are often most real. The worker who will go on without the stimulus of outward success, who will continue His witness even when he is met by cold indifference is the one who gets the blessedness of the unoffended. And part of that blessing is in knowing there will be a harvest of all his sowing, and the sure reward of all his service.
But perhaps over and above these suggested causes of offence in Christ is the unreasonableness of His silences. I have total sympathy with John the Baptist in his perplexity. If this is really the Christ, why does he not act as Christ? Why does He do nothing to deliver His captive herald, or to bring peace to his troubled heart? One visit from Christ would have changed his prison to a palace. One handshake from Him would have transmuted his gloom into glory. But He did not give it. It was the same at Bethany, when He left Martha and Mary to their sorrow for two long and weary days. I sympathize with them in their utter inability to understand His delay in the light of His love. I understand the implied protest of the word with which they at length greeted Him: “If Thou hadst been here, my brother had not died.” His silence seemed so entirely unreasonable.
Even now for us, it seems unreasonable when He apparently pays no heed to our prayers, and we cry as to a silent heaven. Who does not know this bitter experience and the subtle temptation lurking there? You have prayed for the conversion of loved ones, but they are apparently today as unyielding and impenitent as ever. You have prayed for temporal things, which seemed entirely necessary, and no answer has come. You have sought relief from some pressing burden, but no lightening of the load has been given; and today it is heavier than ever. And the thought that Christ’s silence is unreasonable is never far away. Loyalty to Him is strained sorely, almost to breaking point. It is almost excusable to be “offended” in Him. But as with John in prison, and the sisters at Bethany, and host of others in all ages, He is not unmindful, even though His silence may seem to point to it. He is training them and us to undaunted faith, to live in the realm of the unseen and eternal; to walk in His own steps.
Sometimes what we call unanswered prayer proves beyond question a greater blessing than the desired answer could possibly have been. He withholds secondary mercies to teach us the importance and value of the primary.
His denials are our enrichments, not our impoverishments. For His purposes are vastly bigger than our prayers; and while His speech may be as silver, His silence is as gold. “Blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended in Me.”
“These things have I spoken unto you, that,” despite the severity of My requirements, the mystery of My contradictions, the slowness of My methods, and the unreasonableness of My silences, “ye should not be offended.”
