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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE - J. Oswald Dykes

Ex-Principal and Barbour professor of divinity in Theological College of Presbyterian Church of England, 1888-1907; born Port Glasgow, Scotland, August 14, 1835; educated at Dumfries Academy, Edinburgh University and New College, Heidelberg and Erlangen; ordained at East Kilbride, 1859; colleague to Dr. Candlish in Free St. George's church, Edinburgh, 1861; resigned through ill-health, 1864; spent three years without charge in Melbourne, Australia; minister of. Regent Square church, London, 1869-88; author of "The Beatitudes of the Kingdom," "Laws of the Kingdom," "Relations of the Kingdom," "From Jerusalem to Antioch," "Abraham the Friend of God," "Daily Prayers for the Household," "Sermons," etc.

"It shall bruise thy head and thou shalt bruise his heel." - Gen. 3:15.

Most nations which have achieved independence and renown, have either possest or fabled in the dawn of their origin some famous national hero - the champion and the deliverer of his people. Indeed, the earliest names that have struggled down to us, encrusted with legend, from dim ages, are probably the names of strong and valiant men who in their day wrought a kind of deliverance on the earth. In the most primitive times of all the contest was necessarily with hostile powers of nature; the monster of the forest or the pestilential swamp. How many a dragon legend is to be found in traditional story; how many a giant to be slain; how many a tale of romantic exploit by adventurous pioneers, who pierced the savage wildernesses of the world to clear its forests, slay its wolves, drain and till its fens, till the land grew safe and healthy for human habitation. Within historic periods, the task of a national champion has more often been to contend with hostile tribes, to fire his countrymen with the love of freedom or to lead their resistance against some more powerful neighbor. But whether it be in the legend of a Hercules or Perseus, or of Romulus or Arthur, or in the more sober pages which record the name of Leonidas or Tell, Wallace or Washington, all such champions represent a battle which has never ceased since the world was - the ancient endless battle of spirit against brute strength or craft, of order against lawless self-will, of liberty against tyranny, of light against darkness. It is with good right that such tales, dear to the heart of boyhood, linger on in the memory of grown men. For they all preserve some obscure episode or another in the struggle between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. Strangely distorted as they may be or drest in allegory and in fable, they do serve for unconscious types of His mighty task who from the beginning has been the expected champion of human deliverance.

In men of this heroic type no nation's story was ever richer than the sacred annals of the Jews, with one notable distinction. Such names as Moses, Joshua, Samson, Gideon, David, represent deliverances wrought for their fellow countrymen indeed; yet deliverances in which, not man, but God Himself was the evident and acknowledged Deliverer, even more than in the case of their fellow Semites, though the trait is a Semitic one. In the nation's perils, whether from the Egyptian, or the Bedouin, or the Canaanite, warrior after warrior was raised up, champion after champion, stout of heart and strong of arm; yet always he bore Jehovah's direct commission; always he acted in Jehovah's name; always it was not his bow or sword the people were taught to extol, but the outstretched arm of Israel's God and King. While most other nations, therefore, semi-deified their ancient heroes, this was the language of the Hebrew poet:


One example will show how this continued to be the sentiment of the best men in the nation till the close of its career. The last of Israel's great "deliverances" was that from the bondage in Babylon. In speaking of this, the most eloquent of its prophets depicts Jehovah as contemplating "with dismay" the waste and wrongful ruin inflicted upon His repentant people by heathen hands. "Wondering" that no man arose to redress such oppression, He Himself, Jehovah, arms Himself for the combat. With justice for a breastplate, salvation for a head-piece, and the zeal of an avenger for a warrior's crimson cloak, the Almighty descends into the arena against Israel's adversaries:


Thus by worthier and still worthier instances do we approach that supreme Hero and Deliverer of mankind, divine yet human, who, predicted in the infancy of our race, was manifested in its old age. Fulfiller of all Gentile and Hebrew hope, greater than all Gentile or Hebrew precedent, Jesus is the champion of all men ?s cause, who in single combat has overthrown the giant dragon, fountain of unnumbered woes, and won for every nation rest and liberty and prosperous life.

Keeping in view this aspect of our Lord's work, foreshadowed in the first prophecy, let me single out in a few sentences some of His characteristics as the ideal champion - dragon-slayer, and rescuer of men from evil.

In the first place our Lord stands alone in this, that He aims at the deliverance of all men from all evil. In other words, it is rescue universal He seeks to compass, and rescue complete. Not the men of a tribe or of a land only, but man as man, human na¬ture and the human family in its integrity. As much as this is implied in the title given Him in this ancient oracle - "the seed of the woman." And the same idea is continued in the title (with a similar meaning) which He adopted for Himself: "the Son of man." It is as One qualified to represent every other human being, the Head therefore and the champion of us all, that He enters the lists. And the deliverance is to be as thorough as its benefits will be wide. For He fights not against this or that form of evil, for this or that single blessing; but against the head seat and fontal source of all human ill, that He may restore us to the whole of our forfeited inheritance. His adversary is the ancient ser¬pent, to whose craft human innocence fell a prey. In him is summed up, as in a single head, the whole of that alien and hostile force with which, under its innumerable hydra shapes, men have been contending from the beginning. In these combatants are incarnated, as it were, two realms of good and evil. "He shall bruise thy head."

From this we gather, in the second place, the region and character of the struggle. Human nature and human life are devastated by a malignant power, not native to us, but intruding from without. Where is its chief seat or citadel? When our Lord Himself described His task under this figure of a combat with the ruler of the darkness, He spoke of "the strong man armed," as one whose goods must lie in peace so long as he held possession of his "house," his central fortress and habitation of strength, where like a robber chieftain he sits secure, lording it over the whole territory of this world. Now, what is this "house" of Satan, where first he must be mastered and bound, if ever the goods he has ravished from us are to be restored? It is the moral nature and moral choice of man himself. It is by perverting to sin the tastes and preferences of each of us, as of the first human pair, that evil gains admittance to the true citadel of life. The central seat of the mischiefs that afflict mankind lies there: in a heart turned aside from God, subdued to lawless desire and preferring evil to good. All evils flow from choosing the bad; and choosing the bad from distrust of God. Within the wide circumference of physical lies moral evil; and at the core of moral you lay your finger on religious evil - the sin of an ungodly nature. Here sits the grisly king that holds us captive; and here must the true Deliverer grapple with the power that has ruined man. It follows that the theater of this tremendous conflict is to be sought inside of man's own spiritual being. Have we not here the key to the mysterious experience of temptation which, like a dark thread, traversed and colored the earthly life of Jesus? From His first great trial in the wilderness to His last in the olive-garden, Jesus' life was a struggle against evil choice, conducted within the recesses of His own personal life; a fight for purity and goodness and pious trust against every form of seductive or appalling evil, fought out in His own human soul. The weapons of His warfare were not carnal, but spiritual. He fought first to safeguard the citadel of His personal integrity and holiness. Like the ideal knight of romance, He became invincible only by being pure. To borrow His own words: The prince of this world came, but found nothing of his own in Him.

It is quite in harmony with this inward and moral character of Christ's own conflict that His victory should always work from within men outward. The evils of life which are the first to arrest attention and claim deliverance of some sort, are such as affect the body and its outward well-being; physical evils, first of all, in the wild beasts and savage and destructive elements which have to be overcome if human life is to grow orderly, settled and civilized. There, also, are the oppression of man's rights by his stronger fellow man; individual slavery, serfdom, subjection of woman, military oppression of one tribe by another, feudal lordship over vassals, despotic forms of government. Even now the evils we most keenly realize and of which we most loudly complain are such as arise out of social or political causes. Ignorance, pauperism, class legislation, expensive justice, preventable disease, contests of labor with capital - such are the modern ills to which brave men toil to apply a remedy. True successors they of their forefathers who fought the savage beast or curbed the rage of kings. The form of the contest has changed, but we have still, under other forms, to compel the elements of nature to minister to human welfare; still to check, if we can not prevent, the wasteful action of social injustice and selfish passion. But while all other champions of human deliverance are thus operating on the outside, more or less, Jesus to this hour continues to act by preference from within. He did not ride abroad redressing wrongs; nor does He yet. He did not make war in His own day upon unequal laws or domestic slavery or military despotism. No more is it here that we are now to look for His peculiar sphere. But knowing that if once the individual will be renewed, all other reforms will follow of themselves, Christ goes to the root of the disorder. He acts on units first in order to act the better on the mass. He aims at religious, that He may achieve moral, social, and political regeneration. lie addresses to each of us His gracious word and desires leave to put forth within us His regenerating power. Within your soul He wants to be master in the name of God - to break down the fortress of pride, to sweeten the sour temper, to bridle the hot lips of passion, to reconcile you to the dominion of your Heavenly Father, to restore to the little inner realm of your heart order and law and peace and purity and sweet graciousness. For if that be but done, and the serpent of selfishness within you wounded to death, and the strong evil power of ungodly preference and rebellious will chained, then full well does He know that in the train of that victory will flow all victories, and that spiritual deliverance will be the harbinger of all deliverances.

Here, then, is a champion fit for such of us - (pity they should be so few!) - as desire above all things to subdue sin within themselves. If this be the enterprise on which you are bent - to slay the dragons of pride, temper, lust and ungodliness within you?be sure One is at your side who fighteth for you! This is His elected field of combat, and these spiritual enemies who oppress your better will, and threaten forever to quench the life of faith - these are the foes He has faced in personal encounter and subdued. Cling to His aid and faint not! Grasp His weapons and strike hard! Lean your feebleness against Christ's mighty arm and hide you beneath the shield of His protection: for this is He by whom "the principalities" have been worsted, "the rulers of the darkness of this world," the "spiritual wickedness" that sits in "heavenly" places! This is He who bruised the serpent's head.

In the third place, the character of Jesus Christ is our ideal of the hero. I said His weapons were spiritual, not carnal. They were so because the struggle is a moral one within the heart. Unlike in this all His types in romance or in heroic tale, nevertheless He required for His enterprise the same high qualities of soul which men praise in them. What are the hard tasks given to the sons of men? To face physical peril with material weapons; to beard the lion like David or rend him like Samson; to brave toil and exposure and fatigue, whether in battle or in exile, or in pioneering the steps of the colonist and the trader in arctic frost or tropic swamp; to lead a philanthropic movement or advocate a just reform in its early unpopular days when public ridicule assails It - these all are enterprises of very dissimilar character and all of them unlike our Lord's contest with sin. Yet the qualities which these call forth and exercise in brave men were still more demanded for His work. What is the type of nobleness men style heroic? What ideal floats before the enthusiastic imagination when in youth we picture to ourselves the chivalrous, champion of right against powerful wrong? On the one side, the manful virtues: strength, skill, endurance of hardship, tenacity of purpose, fearless valor, indifference to blows or pain, and the power to smite evil with unsparing hand. Yet on the other side?no less tenderness to the weak, pity for the opprest, magnanimity, generosity, scorn of all meanness, hatred of all cruelty and lies. My friends, I am describing Jesus Christ. If it be not actually from Himself we have drawn our ideal of the blameless hero, at least in Him is that ideal realized. True, He wore no sword of steel. With no earthly arms He fought, but with saintly meekness, with continual prayer, with words of heavenly truth, with deeds of gentle kindness. All the resistance which He offered to evil was the resistance of His will to sin; to armed hostility, to brute force He offered none. He gave His wrist to the fetter and His back to the scourge. He let the serpent bite Him in the heel, the lowest and only vulnerable part, which was His material life and fleshly mortal body. That heel of His He suffered to be stung unresisting; yet with the very heel that was stung did He crush the serpent's head. For in such a contest of spiritual and moral forces, material defeat is often the substance of victory. In physical weakness Jesus discovered His true strength - strength to endure for love's and justice's sake. Thus He overcame, not by material, but moral forces: in meekness, not in pride; suffering a seeming defeat, not with the insolence of a triumph. He crowned bleeding brows with a coronet of thorn and wielded a reed for a rod of power. But from His example heroism learned a new nobleness. What tenacity was His to a generous enterprise! What firmness of moral fiber, true as steel to duty! What silent courage to sustain disaster hopefully and take buffets without complaint! What prodigality of Himself! What unselfish sacrifice for others! What fearlessness of foes in earth or hell! What amazing strength of soul veiled under lamblike submission! As the contest was without parallel, so was this a hero without compeer!

Of one heroic attribute, at the least, has He need to this hour. A victory which is spiritual is a hidden victory. A deliverance which begins within man's soul and works thence outward is slow to become apparent. The spiritual intelligences in heaven and earth, who look beneath the surface, know that the fatal dominion of Satan over man has long been a broken and a doomed dominion. The first sinful soul whom the cross of Jesus turned into a penitent and His grace lifted to Paradise was token enough that the head of the evil one was bruised, sin, in principle at least, destroyed, death (as Paul says) abolished, and victory won for mankind over its ancient foe. Yet because the rescue and the victory lie within the spiritual sphere, in the change of each man?s relations to God and the renewal of each man's will, therefore they are realized but slowly, man by man, and they do not at first betray themselves by any material consequences. The bruising of Jesus' heel we see; for that was physical suffering. The crushing of Satan's head we do not see; for that was a moral conquest. Hence is this champion robbed of His need of laurel. Men will not praise what they can not see; nor applaud a success that leaves the physical condition of humanity where it was. Very slowly indeed, and in a very partial measure, Christ has shown Himself able to better the social, political, and even material condition of the nations. That has come about very fitfully, very gradually, and very imperfectly. Yet to this extent and no further is Christ owned by the world at large as a benefactor. His real claim, His great achievement, the world overlooks. Let us try to be wiser than the world! Ask for eyes to see things spiritual. Pray to be no longer blind to the true meaning of Christ's work or the true glory of His conquest. Enter by faith into the victory He achieved for you over sin and Satan, over death and hell; and by faith and prayer and spiritual effort make that victory your own. He bruised Satan for you; in you He will bruise him likewise. He will enable you to bruise him. He will make you sharers in His own inward and moral supremacy over temptation, fear, unbelief, fleshly desire, and spiritual pride - helping you also to plant your foot upon the head of every sin that lifts itself within your soul. It may be you, too, will suffer in the process. It may be your heel must be stung. It may be you have to pay with material loss or bodily pain for each moral victory you win. It may be, therefore, that no splendid or pleasant fruits of conquest are yours to boast of in this life. Meantime your victory over the dragon may be as far from apparent as your Lord's. Yet wait. I said He had still need of one attribute of heroes. Here it is: Patience to wait for the fruits of victory. This also belongs to the conquest of faith over sense, of spirit over matter. To believe that the dragon's heal is bruised; that the lord of the castle is bound and his power passed into better hands; that all things therefore will be righted one day, and the real conqueror crowned, and His true followers made glad, and all old things pass and all things grow new; to believe this now, when little or nothing of it is to be seen; to believe in it, I say, and to wait for it and in patience work for it: here is the faith and patience of the saints!

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