“Thine own friend, and thy father’s friend, forsake not.”—Proverbs 27:10.
True friends are very scarce. We have a great many acquaintances and sometimes we call them friends, and so misuse the noble word “friendship.” Peradventure in some after-day of adversity when these so-called friends have looked out for their own interests and left us to do the best we can for ourselves, that word friendship may come back to us with sad and sorrowful associations. The friend in need is the friend indeed, and such friends I say again, are scarce. When thou hast found such a man, and proved the sincerity of his friendship; when he has been faithful to thy father and to thee, grapple him to thyself with hooks of steel and never let him go. It may be that because he is a faithful friend he will sometimes vex thee and anger thee. See how Solomon puts it in this very chapter: “Open rebuke is better than secret love. Faithful are the wounds of a friend.” It takes a great deal of friendship to be able to tell a man of his faults. It is no friendship that flatters; it is small friendship that holds its tongue when it ought to speak; but it is true friendship that can speak at the right time and if need be even speak so sharply as to cause a wound. If thou art like many other foolish ones, thou wilt be angry with the man who is so much thy friend that he will tell thee the truth. If thou art unworthy of thy friend, thou wilt begin to grow weary of him when he is performing on thy behalf the most heroic act of pure charity by warning thee of thy danger, and reminding thee of thine imperfection. Solomon, in prospect of such a case, knowing that this is one of the greatest trials of friendship among such poor imperfect beings as we are, tells us not to forsake for this reason—nor indeed for any other reason—the man who has been to us and to our family a true friend: “Thine own friend, and thy father’s friend, forsake not.”
I do not think that I should waste your time if I were to give you a lecture upon friendship—its duties, its dangers, its rights, and its privileges; but it is not my intention to do so. There is one Friend to whom these words of Solomon are specially applicable, there is a Friend who is the chief and highest of all friends; and when I speak of him I feel that I am not spiritualizing the text in the least. He is a true and real Friend, and these words are truly and really applicable to him; and if ever the text is emphatic it is so when it is applied to him, for there was never such another friend to us and to our fathers; there is no friend to whom we ought to be so intensely attached as to him: “Thine own friend, and thy father’s friend, forsake not.”
I want under the guidance of the Holy Spirit to speak upon this subject thus; First here is a descriptive title which may be fitly applied to Christ by very many of us; he is our own Friend and also our father’s Friend. Secondly here is suggestive advice concerning this Friend: “Forsake him not.” And ere I have done I shall say a little upon a consequent resolution. I hope that we shall turn the text into a solemn resolve and say, “My own Friend, and my father’s Friend, I will not forsake.”
I. First then here is a descriptive title for our blessed Lord and Master.
First, he is a Friend, the Friend of man. I know that Young calls him the “great Philanthropist.” I do not care to see that title used just so; it is not good enough for him, though truly the great Lover of man is Christ. Better still is the title which was given to him when he was upon earth, “the friend of sinners.”
Friend of sinners, is his name.
Their Friend—thinking of them with love when no other eye pitied them and no other heart seemed to care for them. Their Friend, entering with tenderest sympathy into the case of the lost, for “the Son of man came to seek and to save that which was lost.” Their Friend—giving them good and sound advice and wholesome counsel, for whosoever listens to the words of Christ shall find in his teaching and in his guidance the highest wisdom. Their Friend, giving far more than sympathy and mere words however— giving a lifetime of holy service for the sake of those whose cause he had espoused, and going further even than this, doing for them the utmost that a friend can do, for what is there more than that a man should lay down his life for his friend? Friend of man, and therefore born of man, Friend of sinners, and therefore living among them and ministering to them. Friend of sinners, and therefore taking their sin upon himself and bearing it “in his own body on the tree,” so fulfilling Gabriel’s prophecy that he would come “to finish the transgression and to make an end of sins, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness.”
Christ has done for us all that needed to be done. He has done much more than we ever could have asked him to do or expected him to do. He has done more for us than we can understand even now that he has done it, and more than you and I are likely ever to understand even when our intellect shall have been developed and enlarged to the utmost degree before the eternal throne, for even there I do not think we shall ever fully know how much we owe to the friendship of our best Friend. However self-denying and tender other fiends may be, our Lord must ever stand at the head of the list, and we will not put a second there as worthy of any comparison with him.
Next, it is a very blessed thing to have the Lord Jesus Christ as having been our father’s friend. There are some of us to whom this has been literally true for many generations. I suppose that there is some pride in being the fourteenth earl, or the tenth duke, or having a certain rank among men; but sometimes quietly to myself I glory in my pedigree, because I can trace the line of spiritual grace back as far as I can go to men who loved the Lord, and who, many of them, have preached his Word. Many of you I know in this church and in other churches have a glorious heraldry in the line of the Lord’s nobles. It is true that some of you have had the great mercy of being taken like trees out of the desert and planted in the courts of our God, for which you may well be glad; but others of you are slips from vines that in their turn were slips from other vines, loved and cared for by the great Husbandman. You cannot tell how long this blessed succession has continued; your fathers and your fathers’ fathers as far back as you can trace them were friends of Christ. Happy Ephraim, whose father Joseph had God with him! Happy Joseph, whose father Jacob saw God at Bethel! Happy Jacob, whose father Isaac walked in the fields and meditated in communion with Jehovah! Happy Isaac, whose father Abraham had spoken with God and was called “the friend of God.” God has a habit of loving families; David said “The mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting upon them that fear him, and his righteousness unto children’s children; to such as keep his covenant and to those that remember his commandments to do them.” Grace does not run in the blood, but often the stream of divine mercy has run side by side with it, and instead of the fathers have been the children whom the Lord has made to be princes in the earth.
“This article originally appeared here at Bible Bulletin Board.”
