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Chapter VII
When we return to the teaching of Jesus, we find that he draws a clear and sharp line between right and wrong. He indicates that right is right to the end of all creation, and wrong is wrong up to the very Judgement Throne of God (Matt. 25). He views these things, as the old phrase puts it, "sub specie aeternitatis", from the outlook of eternity. Right and wrong do not meet at infinity. There is no higher synthesis that can make them one and the same thing. Everything with Jesus is Theocentric, and until God changes there will be no very great change in right and wrong. Partly because he uses the language of his day, partly because he thinks as a rule in pictures, his language is apt to be misconstrued by moderns. But the central ideas are clear enough. "How are you to escape the judgement of Gehenna?" he asks the Pharisees (Matt. 23:33; the subjunctive mood is worth study). It is not a threat, but a question. There yawns the chasm; with your driving, how do you think you can avoid disaster? He warns men of a doom where the worm dies not and the fire is not quenched; a man will do well to sacrifice hand, foot or eye, to save the rest of himself from that (Mark 9:43-48). But a more striking picture, though commonly less noticed, he draws or suggests in talk at the last supper. "Simon, Simon, behold Satan asked for you to sift you as wheat, but I prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not; and thou, when thou comest back, strengthen thy brethren" (Luke 22:31, 32). The scene suggested is not unlike that at the beginning of the Book of Job, or that in the Book of Zechariah (chap. 3). There is the throne of God, and into that Presence pushes Satan with a demand—the verb in the Greek is a strong one, though not so strong as the Revised Version suggests. Satan "made a push to have you." "But I prayed for thee."
To any reader who has any feeling or imagination, what do these short sentences mean? What can they mean, from the lips of a thinker so clear and so serious, and a friend so tender? What but unspeakable peril? The language has for us a certain strangeness; but it shows plainly enough that, to Jesus' mind, the disciples, and Peter in particular, stood in danger, a danger so urgent that it called for the Saviour's prayer. So much it meant to him, and he himself tells Peter what he had realized, what he had done, in language that could not be mistaken or forgotten. To the nature of the danger that sin involves, we shall return. Meanwhile we may consider what Jesus means by sin before we discuss its consequences.