Paul's Cloak | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 25, 1870

Paul's Cloak.

“The cloak that I left at Troas with Carpus, when thou comest, bring with thee, and the books, but especially the parchments.” 2 Tim. 4:13. This request which was cited by a correspondent last week as a sample of matters of a business character, in giving directions about which “it was not necessary” for the writer “to be divinely inspired,” is thus noticed by Prof. Gaussen of Geneva:—Advent Herald.

“This domestic detail, so many thousand times objected against the inspiration of the Scriptures, from the days of the Anomians of whom St. Jerome speaks; this detail seems to you too trivial for an apostolic book, or at least too insignificant and too foreign from all practical utility, for the dignity of inspiration. Unhappy, however, is he who does not perceive its pathetic grandeur.”

“Jesus Christ also, on the day of his death, spoke of his cloak and of his vesture. Would you have this passage taken away from the inspired volume? It was after a night of fatigue and anguish. They had led him about the streets of Jerusalem for seven successive hours, by the light of torches, from street to street, from tribunal to tribunal, buffeting him, covering him with a veil, striking his head with staves. The morrow’s sun was not yet risen, before they had bound his hands with cords, to lead him again from the high priest’s house to Pilate’s Prætorium. There, lacerated with rods, bathed in his own blood, then delivered for the last punishment, to ferocious soldiers, he had seen his garments all stripped off, that they might clothe him in a scarlet robe, whilst they bowed the knee before him, placed the reed in his hands, and spit upon his face. Then, before laying his cross upon his bruised frame, they had replaced his garments upon his wounds, to lead him to Calvary; but, when they were about to proceed to the execution, they took them away for the third time; and it is then that, stripped of everything, first his cloak, then his coat, then of even his under-dress, he must die naked upon the malefactor’s gibbet, in the view of an immense multitude. Was there ever seen under heaven, a man who has not found these details touching, sublime, inimitable? And was one ever seen, who, from the account of this death, thought of retrenching as useless or too vulgar, the history of these garments which they divided among them,—or of this cloak for which they cast lots? Has not infidelity itself said, in speaking of that event, that the majesty of the Scriptures astonished it, that their simplicity spoke to its heart; that the death of Socrates was that of a sage, but Jesus Christ’s, that of a God!—and if the divine inspiration was reserved for a mere portion of the holy books, would it not be for these very details? Would it not be for the history of that love, which after having lived upon the earth poorer than the birds of the air and the foxes of the field, was willing to die still poorer, deprived of all, even to its cloak and its under-garments, and fastened naked to the malefactor’s gibbet with the arms extended and nailed to the wood? Ah! be not solicitous for the Holy Spirit; he has not derogated from his own majesty; and so far from thinking that he was stooping too low in announcing these facts to the world, he had hastened to recount them to it; and that too, a thousand years in advance. At the period of the Trojan war he already was singing them upon the harp of David: ‘They have pierced my hands and my feet,’ said he, ‘they look and stare upon me, they part my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture.’”

“But it is the same Spirit who would show us St. Paul writing to Timothy, and requesting him to bring his cloak. Hear him; he too is stripped of everything. In his youth, he was already eminent, a favorite of princes, admired of all; but now he has left everything for Christ. It is now thirty years and more, that he has been poor, in labors more than the others, in wounds more than they, in prison oftener; five times he had received of the Jews forty stripes save one; thrice was he beaten with rods; once he was stoned; thrice he has suffered shipwreck; often in journeyings; perils upon the sea, in perils in the city, in perils in the desert; in watching oft, in hunger and in thirst, in cold and nakedness (we quote his own words.) Hear him now; behold him advanced in age; he is in his last prison; he is at Rome; he is expecting his sentence of death; he has fought the good fight; he has finished his course, he has kept the faith; but he is cold, winter is coming on, and he is poorly clad! Buried in a dungeon of the Mamertine prisons, he is so much despised that even all the Christians of Rome are ashamed of him, and that at his first appearing, no man was willing to befriend him. Yet, he had received, ten years before, while a prisoner at Rome, and loaded with chains, at least some money from the Philippians, who, knowing his sufferings, united together in their indigence, to send him some succor. But now, behold him forsaken; no one but St. Luke is with him; all have abandoned him; winter is approaching. He would need a cloak; he left his own, two hundred leagues off, at the house of Carpus, in Troas; and no one in the cold prisons of Rome would lend him one. Has he not then left everything, with joy, for Christ? has he not esteemed all the glory of this world as dross, that he might win Christ? and does he not suffer all things cheerfully for the elect’s sake? (Phil. 3:8; 2 Tim. 2:10.) We were ourselves at Rome, last year, in a hotel, on a rainy day, in the beginning of November. Chilled by the piercing dampness of the cold, evening air, we had a vivid conception of the holy apostle in the subterranean dungeons of the capitol, dictating the last of his letters, regretting the absence of his cloak, and entreating Timothy to bring it to him before the winter!”

“Who would then take from the inspired epistles so striking and pathetic a feature? Does not the Holy Spirit carry you to the prison of Paul, to astonish you with this tender self-renunciation and this sublime poverty; just, too, as he showed you with your own eyes, his charity, some time before, when he made him write in his letter to the Philippians, ‘I weep in writing to you, because there are many among you who mind earthly things, whose end is destruction’? Do you not seem to see him in his prison, loaded with chains, while he is writing, and tears are falling upon his parchment? And does it not seem to you that you behold that poor body, to-day miserably clothed, suffering and benumbed; to-morrow beheaded and dragged to the Tiber, in expectation of the day when the earth shall give up her dead, and the sea, the dead which are in it; and when Christ shall transform our vile bodies, to make them like unto his own glorious body? And if these details are beautiful, think you they are not also useful? And if they are already useful to him who reads them as a simple historical truth, what will they not become to him who believes in their Theopneusty [divine inspiration,] and who says to himself, O my soul, these words are written by Paul; but it is thy God who addresses them to thee? Who can tell the force and consolation which, by their very naturalness, they have for eighteen centuries conveyed into dungeons and huts! Who can count the poor and the martyrs to whom such passages have given encouragement, example and joy? We just now remember, in Switzerland, the pastor Juvet, to whom a coverlet was refused, twenty years ago, in the prisons of the Canton de Vaud. We remember that Jerome of Prague, shut up for three hundred and forty days in the dungeons of Constance, at the bottom of a dark and loathsome tower, and going out only to appear before his murderers. Nor have we forgotten the holy Bishop Hooper, quitting his dark and dismal dungeon, with wretched clothes and a borrowed cloak, to go to the scaffold, supported upon a staff, and bowed by the sciatica. Venerable brethren, happy martyrs, doubtless you then remembered your brother Paul, shut up in the prison of Rome, suffering from cold and nakedness, asking for his cloak! Ah! unfortunate he who does not see the sublime humanity,

the tender grandeur, the foreseeing and divine sympathy, the depth and the charm of such a mode of teaching! But still more unfortunate, perhaps, he who declares it human, because he does not comprehend it. We would here quote the beautiful remarks of the respectable Haldane on this verse of St. Paul: ‘This passage, if you consider the place it occupies in this epistle, and in the solemn farewells of Paul to his disciples, presents this apostle to our view, in the situation most calculated to affect us. He has just been before the emperor; he is about to finish his days by martyrdom; his departure is at hand; the crown of righteousness is reserved for him; behold him about to be offered: in this world, which he is about to leave, ready to be beheaded, as a malefactor, by the order of Nero; in that which he is ultimately to enter, he is to be crowned as a just man by the Lord of lords; in this, abandoned of men; in that, welcomed by angels; in this, needing a poor cloak to cover him: in that, covered with the righteousness of the saints; clothed upon with his heavenly tabernacle of light and joy; so that mortality is swallowed up of life.’”

“Ah, rather than object to such a passage, thereby to deprive the Scriptures of their infallibility, we should there recognize that wisdom of God which, so often by one single touch, has given instructions for which, without that, many pages would have been necessary. We should adore that tender condescension which, stooping even to our weakness, is pleased, not only to reveal to us the highest thoughts of Heaven in the simplest language of earth, but also to offer them to us under forms so living, so dramatic, so penetrating, often compressing them in order to render them more intelligible, within the narrow space of a single verse.”

“It is, then, thus that St. Paul by these words thrown at hazard, even into the last commission of a familiar letter, casts for us a rapid flood of light over his ministry, and discovers to us, by a word, the entire life of an apostle; as a single flash of lightning in the evening illuminates in an instant all the tops of our Alps; and as persons sometimes show you all their soul by a single look.”—Theopneusty, pp. 237–243.