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THE EXPOSITOR'S
DICTIONARY OF TEXTS
CONTAINING OUTLINES, EXPOSITIONS, AND
ILLUSTRATIONS OF BIBLE TEXTS, WITH FULL
REFERENCES TO THE BEST HOMILETIC LITERATURE
EDITED BY THE REV.
SIR W. ROBERTSON NICOLL, M.A., LL. D.
u
AND
JANE T. STODDART
WITH THE CO-OPERATION OP THE REV.
JAMES MOFFATT, M.A., D. D.
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOLUME ONE
GENESIS TO ST. MARK
HODDER AND STOUGHTON
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
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CONTENTS
GENESIS .
EXODUS .
LEVITICUS
NUMBERS
DEUTERONOMY
PAGE
I
73
128
127
142
JOSHUA ........ 166
JUDGES 173
RUTH 196
THE FIRST BOOK OF SAMUEL . . .201
THE SECOND BOOK OF SAMUEL . . 219
THE FIRST BOOK OF KINGS . . .230
THE SECOND BOOK OF KINGS . . .254
THE FIRST BOOK OF THE CHRONICLES. 274
THE SECOND BOOK OF THE CHRONICLES 292
EZRA 299
NEHEMIAH 301
ESTHER 307
JOB 314
PSALMS 363
PROVERBS 513
ECCLESIASTES 531
MM
SONG OF SOLOMON 558
ISAIAH 572
JEREMIAH 650
LAMENTATIONS 67l
EZEKIEL 676
DANIEL 706
HOSEA 726
JOEL 734
AMOS 786
OBADIAH 739
JONAH 740
MICAH 743
NAHUM 751
HABAKKUK 751
ZEPHANIAH 754
HAGGAI 754
ZECHARIAH 755
MALACHI 764
ST. MATTHEW ...... 769
ST. MARK 988
MZSS52
THE EXPOSITOR'S
DICTIONARY OF TEXTS
THE BOOK OF GENESIS
COPYRIGHT, 1910
BY
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
GENESIS
r
GENESIS
In the British Museum Library there is a folio Latin
Bible, published in 1546, which contains marginal
notes by various Reformers. In the narrow space
above the heading of Genesis two and a half lines
have been inserted. The Latin sentence tells us that
' the whole Book of Genesis excels in sweetness all
other books and histories '. The German reads :
' There is no more beautiful and more lovable little
book '. At the end of the inscription are the initials
in Greek letters : ' Ph. M.,' i.e. Philip Melanchthon.
THE BOOK OF GENESIS
It was on the book of Genesis that Luther delivered
his last lectures in the Autumn of 1545. At the
conclusion of his lecture on 17 November he said:
' This is the beloved Genesis ; God grant that after
me it may be better done. I can do no more — I am
weak. Pray God that He may grant me a good and
happy end.' He began no new lectures.
GENESIS— THE BOOK OF BEGINNINGS
The book of Genesis is the book of origins. There
is nothing final in this book. The Divine plan of
redemption is not fully unfolded, but the first move-
ments in history towards its outworking are clearly
revealed. There are three divisions.
I. Generations. — In this division there are two
sections.
f(a) We have the Bible declaration of the origin of
the material universe, and it is one in which faith
finds reasonable foundation. The evolutionary pro-
cess has never been able to discover a link between
the highest form of animal life and man; that link is
* supplied in the affirmation ' God created man in His
P own image '.
' (b) The relation of man to God and nature was
conditiond by a simple and yet perfectly clear com-
mand, which indicated the limits of liberty. Man was
completed by the bringing to him of one who was of
himself, and in whom he found the true complement
of his own nature.
II. Degeneration. — Everything commences with
the individual. Spiritual evil took material form to
reach spiritual man through the material side of his
being. Moving swiftly upon the degradation of the
individual came that of the family. The race moved
on, but the shadow of the issue of sin was on the
whole of them. This ended in a Divine interference
of swift and overwhelming judgment. Out of the
devastation a remnant was saved, and human history
started forward upon a new basis, as there emerged
a new idea of social relationship, that of the nation.
The book chronicles the story of the failure of this
national idea. Finally, the time of continuity from
Shem to Abram is declared.
III. Regeneration. — The regeneration of the in-
dividual gives us the account of the dealings of God
with three men: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. In
this study of the beginnings of the regeneration of
the individual the truth is revealed that the one
principle through which God is able to operate is
that of faith in Himself. Through the sons of Jacob
the circle widens, and we see the movement toward
the regeneration of the family. Through years God
purged the family and society, and in the final verses
of the book of Genesis the national idea is seen for a
moment as a prophecy and a hope. — G. Campbell
Morgan, The Analysed Bible, p. 3.
THE CREATION
Genesis i. and n.
Every writing must be judged by the object the
writer has in view. If the object of the writer of
these chapters was to convey physical information,
then certainly it is imperfectly fulfilled. But if his
object was to give an intelligible account of God's re-
lation to the world and to man, then it must be owned
that he has been successful in the highest degree. In-
timate communion with God, a spirit trained to dis-
cern spiritual things, a perfect understanding and zeal
for God's purpose, these are qualities quite indepen-
dent of a knowledge of the discoveries of science.
I. This then is the first lesson of the Bible — that at
the root and origin of all this vast universe there
abides a living, conscious Spirit, who wills and knows
and fashions all things. The belief of this changes
for us the whole face of nature, and instead of a chill,
impersonal world of forces to which no appeal can be
made, and in which matter is supreme, gives us the
home of a Father. This becomes immensely clearer
as we pass into the world of man.
II. The other great truth that this writer teaches
is that man was the chief work of God, for whose sake
all else was brought into being. It is conceivable that
in this scarcely discernible speck in the vastness of
the universe should be played out the chief est act in
the history of God. To Him who maintains these
systems in their respective relations and orbits it can
be no burden to relieve the needs of individuals. —
Marcus Dods, The Book of Genesis, p. 1.
OOD THE CREATOR OF ALL THINGS
Genesis L, ii. 1-3.
There is a Persian fable that God created the world
a vast plain and sent His angels to sow it with flower
Ver. 1,
GENESIS I
Ver. 1.
seeds. But Satan was watching, bent on destruction.
He buried every seed underground; he called on
the rain to fall and rot God's handiwork, and so, he
thought, creation was destroyed. But as he stood
gazing the seeds began to grow; they rose into the
sunlight and opened into a thousand forms of beauty.
The new world in all its wonder revealed the wisdom
and the power of the Creator.
' How do you know whether there be a God ? '
was asked once of a Bedouin, and he replied: ' How
do I know whether a camel or a man passed my tent
last night — by their footprints in the sand'.
CREATED!
1 God created the earth.* — Genesis i. i.
Some words do not terminate in themselves. 'Created'
is only the first syllable in an infinitely greater word.
What if at the end it should turn out that all the
words expressive of power, wisdom, love, care, should
be run into one grand vocable?
I. The word ' created ' is but the first syllable of
all the words that belong to it, and they a million
thick, squared and cubed by other millions up to the
point of infinity.
God not only created the world, He drowned the
world, and in Sodom and Gomorrah He typically
burned the world, and in John He so loved the world
as to redeem it with blood: all this is implied in the
â– word ' create '. We must break create as a word up
into its constituent particles or elements ; it is a multi-
tudinous word, a verbal host, a countless throng of
ideas, suggestions, encouragements, responsibilities.
II. God created the earth, God destroyed the earth
by drowning, God burned the earth with fire, and
after all these processes we come to John m. 16,
* God loved the world '. Love is a bigger word than
create. Love will never give up the world. It is
given to love to save the whole earth.
III. We might now reverse the process. Instead
of saying, God created, destroyed, redeemed, loved,
we might say loved, redeemed, destroyed, created.
This is one of the great words that reads the same
backwards as forwards. There are a few such words
in the English language. All the time God is creat-
ing the earth. Do not imagine that creation is a
separate and final act; it is God's inclusive ministry.
Whatever He does is an aspect of creation, forma-
tion, culture, development, and ultimate sanctifica-
tion, and crowning with the bays and garlands of
the heavenly paradise. God is creating man. There
is an elementary sense in which man was created
countless centuries ago: there is a spiritual sense in
which man is being created every day. ' Ye must be
born again ' is the gospel of every sunrise ; every day
is birthday. We are born into a higher life, a nobler
conception, a fuller manhood.
IV. At what period of this process are we standing?
Some of us are standing at the period of chastisement.
We are being drowned or we are being burned, we
are being sorely smitten or utterly desolated; but
God has promised that He will see that a remnant
remains out of which He will grow the flower of
immortality. — Joseph Parkes, City Temple Pulpit,
vol. vii. p. 128.
THE MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF GENESIS
'In the beginning God.'— Genesis i. i.
From some points of view the book of Genesis is the
most interesting in the Bible. It is the book of be-
ginnings, the book of origins, the book of the story of
God's dealings with man. It has an interest and an
importance to which no other document of antiquity
can pretend. When we turn to the study of Genesis
as a whole, the first thing we notice is the unity of plan
in the book. Though forming part of a greater whole
it also is a complete work. It was written to show how
Israel, in answer to the call, and in accordance with
the purpose of God, gradually emerged from among
many other tribes and peoples, into a separate and
distinct existence as the people of Jehovah.
I. Genesis emphasizes the Divine sovereignty and
supremacy. Its opening words are as emphatic a
testimony to this as can be found in the whole Bible.
The Bible makes no attempt to prove the existence
of God, nor does it strive to prove the supremacy of
God. But look on the book before us. In it every-
thing is traced up to God. God is sovereign, God
is supreme, God is first. Therefore Genesis evidences
itself to be a true revelation from God. But what
is true of the book is true also of life. Our lives are
meant to be revelations of God. This cannot be
until by utter consecration of ourselves to Him we
have in our lives made God first.
II. Genesis emphasizes the Divine grace and love.
The revelation of the Bible is essentially a revelation
of redemption, and the redemption note is sounded
from the first. The whole record of Genesis is a re-
cord of the grace of God combating man's sin. The
whole story is a story of Divine love, the story of One
with whom judgment is a strange work. And this love
throughout all this book is seen working with a purpose.
III. Genesis emphasizes the Divine holiness. It
represents God as approachable to men, and yet as
unapproachable by men. This book teaches us what
subsequent revelation confirms, that if the sinner is to
approach God so as to be accepted by Him, he must
approach God in the way of God's appointment. But
this is a lesson which, in our day, we need specially
to learn. We dwell so much on the Divine love and
the riches of the Divine grace that we are apt to for-
get that the grace is only bestowed upon us in the
Beloved. In our joy at the revelation which Christ
made to us of the love of God, we are in danger of
forgetting that that love of God reaches men so as to
save them only through Jesus Christ. — H. C. Mac-
gregor, Messages of the Old Testament, p. 3.
THE HOLY TRINITY
(For Trinity Sunday)
'In the beginning God.'— Genesis i. i.
Some people tell us that we cannot find any mention
of the word 'Trinity' in the Bible. Perhaps not;
Ver. 1.
GENESIS I
Ver. 3.
but we do find, what is more important, the doctrine
of the Holy Trinity most clearly set forth.
I. What saith the Scriptures ?— The Scriptures
which have been brought before us in our services
to-day are all concerned with the blessed truth that
our God is a Triune God, and that in the unity of
the Godhead there are three Persons — God the Father,
God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost. The First
Lesson this morning set before us the vision granted
to Isaiah of the thrice-holy God, and in the Second
Lesson we read of St. John's vision wherein was re-
vealed the threefold omnipotence of God — which is,
which was, and which is to be, the Almighty. This
evening we read as our First Lesson the first chapter
of the Bible, which tells us of God creating the world
by the Word, after that the Spirit had moved upon
the face of the waters ; and in the Second Lesson
(Ephesians iv.) we notice St. Paul's reference to One
Father, One Lord, and One Spirit. These are but
samples, as it were, of the teaching of the Scrip-
tures on the great and glorious truth we think of
to-day.
II. What saith the Church ? — It is not possible
for us to understand the great mystery thus brought
before us, but the Church in some measure explains
what it involves. In the Apostles' Creed we have
brought before us the definite work of each Person in
the Blessed Trinity. In the Nicene Creed this is still
more clearly defined. In the Athanasian Creed we
have the relation of these three Persons each to the
other, presented to our view.
III. God, the Centre of the Universe. — The in-
spiring thought which comes to us from a considera-
tion of our text is the Triune God as the Centre of all
things. This first chapter of Genesis reminds us of
God as the Centre of the universe. ' In the beginning
God.' That is our faith in regard to the world.
Geologists and scientists may tell us that the world
is much older than anyone imagines, but that does
not affect our faith. What does it matter to us if
the world is millions of years old? We go back to
the beginning of things and say that whenever that
time was, God was the Creator of the universe. No
scientific teaching can get behind that. Many scien-
tists admit that there must have been a first cause,
but they cannot explain to us on scientific principles
what it was. It is here that the Bible supplies what
is missing, and it tells us that, ' In the beginning God
created the heaven and the earth '. That is the bed-
rock upon which the Christian takes his stand ; thus
he can give an answer to all the criticisms and doubts
of the scientists. What the scientist cannot explain
the humble believer can appreciate in the light of
God's own revelation. And just as God created the
world, so He upholds all things by the Word of His
power. When he looks up into the heavens the be-
liever sees behind and beyond all else ' the Glory of
God ' ; and when he considers this great universe he
thinks of it as God's handiwork. This thought gives
a new interest to the study of nature ; and the beauty
of it all is that the Christian believer knows that He
Who was the Creator, and is the Centre of the universe,
is his loving Heavenly Father.
IV. God, the Centre of the Affairs of this Life
God was not only the Creator of the world; He re-
mains the Centre of its affairs. He it is Who makes
and dethrones kings. He it is Who governs all
things in earth. This is a truth which is not realized
so often as it should be. Men talk of empires as
though they could build them up as and when they
wished; but depend upon it the empire in which He
is not recognized rests upon an unstable foundation.
The empire that will endure is that which is built on
the eternal principles of righteousness.
V, God, the Centre of the Individual Life But,
lastly, what God is in the universe and in the affairs
of men, that He is also in the individual life. Are we
conscious of this great truth that the great Triune
God is the Centre of our life? that in Him we live and
move and have our being? Do we realize the con-
trolling, the guiding, the inspiring, the impelling
power of God in our own individual life? If not, it
is because we have let sin have dominion over us,
and thus God has been shut out.
References. — I. 1. — H. P. Liddon, University Sermons
(2nd series), p. 38, 1890; Sermons and Addresses, p. 56. W.
H. Ilutchings, Sermon Sketches, p. 54. A. Coote, Twelve Ser-
mons, p. 20. T. G. Bonney, Sermons on Questions of the Day,
p. 1. A. G. Mortimer, The Church's Lessons, vol. i. p. 179.
E. White, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxxviii. p. 331. B.
Jowett, Sermons on Faith and Doctrine, p. 282. J. C. M. Bel-
lew, Sermons, vol. iv. p. 241. H. Alford, Quebec Chapel Ser-
mons, vol. iv. p. 1. I. 1-5. — C. H. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xi.
No. GOO. I. 2. — A. P. Stanley, Sermons on Special Occasions,
p. 138. Bishop Browne, Old Testament Outlines, p. 2.
i S i*.<- Lftf^
' God said, Let there be light, and there was light
Genesis i. 3.
Dr. A. C. Bradley quotes these words in his Oxford
Lectures on Poetry, pp. 57, 58. He says, ' I will
take a last example. It has probably been men-
tioned in almost every account of the sublime since
Longinus quoted it in his work on Elevation of Style.
And it is of special interest here because it illus-
trates at one and the same time the two kinds of
sublimity which we are engaged in distinguishing.
" God said, Let there be light, and there was light."
The idea of the first and instantaneous appearance
of light, and that the whole light of the whole world
is sublime; and its primary appeal is to sense. The
further idea, that this transcendently glorious ap-
parition is due to mere words, to a breath — our
symbol of tenuity, evanescence, impotence to influ-
ence material bulk — heightens enormously the im-
pression of absolutely immeasurable power.'
1 Let there be light.'— Genesis i. 3.
There is a very remarkable reference to this passage
in the writings of St. John of the Cross {Obras Es-
pirituales, vol. ii. p. 894). The Spanish mystic is
seeking to draw a clear contrast between the dark
night of the soul, as it is understood by the saints,
and the darkness of sin. There may be two reasons,
he says, why the eye fails to see. It may be in
3
Ver. 3.
GENESIS I
Ver. 3, 4.
obscurity (a escuras), or it may be blind. ' God is
the light and the true object of the soul; and when
He fails to illuminate it, the soul is in darkness,
although its vision may remain very keen. When
it is in sin, or when the appetite is filled with other
things, it is blind.' ' Una cosa es estar a escuras, otra
estar en tinieblas.' By the first he means the darkness
of vision, a darkness caused by excess of light ; by the
second he means the gross darkness of sin. He uses
the expression ' ciego en pecado ' — ' blind in sin '.
' But he who lives in obscurity may live there with-
out sin. And this in two ways : as regards his natural
being which receives no light from some natural
things, and as regards his supernatural being, which
receives no light from many supernatural things. Un-
til the Lord said, Fiat lux there was darkness over
the face of the deep cavern of the soul's understanding.
The deeper that abyss, and themoreprofoundits caves,
so much the deeper and more unfathomable is the
darkness when God, who is Light, does not illuminate
them with His beams.' Of itself, the writer goes on,
the soul can travel only from one darkness to another
— ' guiado por aquella tiniebla, porque no puede
Suiar unatiniebla sino a otra teniebla ' — (' guided
by the darkness itself, because one darkness can lead
only to another darkness '). He continues — ' As David
says: "Dies diei eructat verbum, et nox nocti indicat
scientiam". [Psalm xix. 2, ' Day unto day uttereth
speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge '.]
And thus the writer adds ' one deep of darkness call-
eth to another, and one deep of light to another deep
of light '.
' Everywhere like calls to like, and thus to that
light of grace which God has given the soul already
(having opened its inward eyes to the Divine light,
and made it well-pleasing to Himself) there calls
another deep of grace, I mean the Divine transforma-
tion of the soul in God in which the eye of the under-
standing remains fully enlightened and well-pleasing
unto Him.'
Genesis i. 3.
Coleridge, in his lectures on Shakespeare, observes
that Shakespeare's plays are distinguished from those
1 of other dramatists by the characteristic of ' expecta-
tion in preference to surprise. It is like the true read-
ing of the passage: "God said, Let there be light, and
there was light" j not, there was light. As the
feelings with which we startle at a shooting star,
compared with that of watching the sunrise at the
pre-established moment, such law is surprise com-
pared with expectation.'
A LIGHT UNTO OUR PATH
'And God said, Let there be light ; and there was light. And
God saw the light, that it was good.'— Genesis i. 3, 4.
' Let there be light.' It is at once the motto and
the condititon of all progress that is worthy of the
name. From chaos into order, from slumber into
wakefulness, from torpor into the glow of life — yes,
and ' from strength to strength ' ; it has been a con-
dition of progress that there should be light. God
saw the light, that it was good.
We thank God for His revelation in the Bible.
We are all persuaded in our minds that among the
means of extending that light the Bibe itself has for
centuries taken the foremost place. But, with man's
proneness to distort or misuse even the grandest of
God's gifts, this very privilege has had a peril of its
own. People have forgotten, in the using of it, the
manner in which the book, under the guiding hand
of God, came to take the form in which we know it
now, and have neglected the help thus given to us
for understanding how to use without abusing it, how
to accept it as both human and Divine. It is because
men, it is because teachers in the Church of God, have
forgotten this that half our perplexities about the
Bible have arisen.
I. The Bible and Science — ' Let there be light.'
No man, I suppose, will admit, probably no man ever
did admit, even to himself, that in these matters it
is daylight that he fears. But has it not been true,
nevertheless, and true of many of the best and most
devout souls, as the Christian centuries have run their
course, that — albeit unintentionally or unawares —
they were setting themselves, however impotently, to
thwart the Divine purpose, ' Let there be light ' ?
What else can we say of the persistency with which
— untaught by past experience — the guardians and
champions of orthodox belief as based on Holy Scrip-
ture have, times without number, on the authority
of their own interpretation of the Bible, denounced
as presumptuous or even blasphemous error the dis-
coveries and aims of scientific men? It was on
the strength of Biblical texts that the scheme of
Christopher Columbus was condemned by the Spanish
Junta in 1490 as vain and indefensible. In 1616
Galileo's teaching that the earth moves round the
sun was formally censured by the consulting theo-
logians of the Holy Office ' because expressly contrary
to Holy Scripture '. A generation or two afterwards
English students were warned by high authority
against the investigations of so true and profound a
Christian thinker as Sir Isaac Newton as being ' built
on fallible phenomena and advanced by many arbi-
trary presumptions against evident testimonies of
Scripture '. And the lives of Roger Bacon, of Coper-
nicus, of Kepler, and of many more, down even to
our own day, and to incidents fresh in the recollection
of many here, suggest to the thoughtful student of
Holy Scripture the imperative need of a reverent and
humble-minded caution in our attitude towards every
controversy of the kind. We are not, indeed, required
to accept at once every unproven hypothesis, or to
mistake for absolute science mere assertions about
that which is unknowable. Some of the votaries of
science have had as little right to speak authoritatively
and finally in the name of God. True science and
true religion are twin sisters, each studying her own
sacred Book of God, and nothing but disaster can
arise from the petulant scorn of the one, or from the
timidity or the tyrannies of the other. ' Let there
^-^r
Ver. 5.
GENESIS
Ver. 5.
be light.' From the Father of light cometh every
good and every perfect gift.
II. The History and Character of the Bible. —
And as with the scientific knowledge which has been
so strangely supposed to be contradictory to Scripture
rightly used and rightly understood, so, too — must we
not say it to-day? — so, too, with every reverent and
honest investigation into the history and the character
of the sacred volume itself. ' Let there be light.' As
regards the Old Testament, we have had access in
these latter days, under the over-ruling Providence of
God, to a wholly new range of facts about the dawn
of civilization in the ancient nations of the world.
Egypt and Assj-ria now vie with each other in their
once undreamed-of contributions to the elucidation of
our Sacred Book. And every fresh discovery, every
new disinterment of significant tablet or cyinder or
inscription from its resting-place of literally thou-
sands of years, seems, to me at least, to do something
more towards the strengthening and deepening of our
belief in the genuine inspiration of the written Word
of God, and in the distinctive glory of its divinely
ordered message. We can give a new application to
the Gospel sentence, ' If they hear not Moses and the
prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one
rose from the dead '.
III. The Bible's Personal Appeal — 'Let there
be light.' If it be true, as one sometimes fears it is,
that there is less of the deliberate, prayerful, devo-
tional study of the Word of God in our homes and
on our knees than there used to be in England in days
gone by, it is certainly true, I think, to say that there
never was a time when so many people as now were
bringing the whole power of trained intelligence and
of cultured thoughtfulness to bear upon its every part.
And that sustained effort cannot but be fruitful, can-
not but react in its turn — and react healthfully for us
and for our children — upon the other mode of Bible
study, that mode which shapes itself in prayer. For
this surely is unquestionable — he who sets himself in
faith and hope to evoke from the Bible such secrets
as it will disclose about the story of its structure and
its growth will find himself, so to speak, forced to his
knees by the very divineness of the message of guid-
ance and of revelation which it will impart to his in-
most soul. *
References.— I. 3.— H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, A Year's
Plain Sermons, p. 231. E. A. Askew, Sermons Preached in
Greystokc Church, p. 59. J. Aspinall, Parish Sermons (1st
series), p. 250. J. Thomas, Myrtle Street Pulpit, vol. ii. p.
293. F. W. Robertson, Notes on Genesis, p. 1. I. 4. —
Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxi. No. 1252. H. J. Wilmot-Bux-
ton, Sunday Lessons, vol. i. p. 171.
NEW YEAR'S THOUGHTS
' The First Day.' — Genesis i. 5.
A wonderful scene is conjured up in the story of
creation, and it is not without significance that God's
first work on the first day was the creation of light.
All the great mass of material creation had been called
into being, but thus far ' the earth was without form
and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep,'
and then as the Spirit of God moved upon the face of
the waters, there came from Him Who dwelleth in the
light that no man can approach unto, the irresistible
mandate, ' Let there be light,' and there was light,
and as the clouds rolled back and the darkness van-
ished before the great stream of splendid light that
came from God Himself, there appeared as the light
streamed over nature strange forms of matter ranging
themselves into order and beauty out of darkness, and
gloom, and confusion, and chaos.
May we not on this, the first day of a New Year,
profitably consider some ' First Days ' and see what
they have to teach us?
I. The FirstDayof the Year. — Our thoughts natur-
ally turn at once to New Year's Day when we keep
the Feast of the Circumcision. God's gift to the world
on the first day of creation was the wonderful gift of
light, but on this day we think of a more wonderful
gift still — the gift of His own Incarnate Son. When
the time was come that one was found who was fitted
by her purity and her obedience to become the mother
of the Incarnate God, when she had said, ' Behold the
handmaid of the Lord, be it unto me according to
Thy word,' and in her humility and her faith, had re-
signed herself to God ; and when in due course the
Eternal Son of God was born of her in Bethlehem,
then on the eighth day He was brought to His cir-
cumcision, and then was obedient to the law for man,
thus in His own person setting us that splendid ex-
ample of the life of perfect obedience which alone is
acceptable in the sight of God.
II. The First Day of Creation — God's gift to the
world on creation's first day was, as I have already re-
minded you, the gift of light. And this is His gift to
you still. He gives you light, the light of conscience,
the light of reason, the light of revelation, the light
in the face of Jesus Christ, the Incarnate God.
III. The First Day after the Flood.— ' After the
rain had descended ... on the first day of the month
the waters were dried up,' and Noah and his family
came forth, having been preserved from the Flood.
God's gift to you still is the gift of preservation.
You have passed over the troublous waters of life dur-
ing the past year in the ark of God's love and care.
And now, as the New Year opens before you, He gives
you a preserved life, new opportunities for doing His
will stretch out before you. Remember this, remember
it always, that the preserved life should be a dedi-
cated life, a life dedicated to God with sacrifice.
IV. The First Day of the Tabernacle.— God had
brought His people out of Egypt; they had crossed
the Red Sea ! they murmured at Marah, yet they
were led on to Elim and afterwards to Mount Sinai,
where they remained a year, during which they were
taught His will, and then on the first day of the
first month the Tabernacle was set up and ' the glory
of the Lord filled the Tabernacle'. It was the
manifested presence of Himself as the reward of
the obedient worship according to His will. You
have the same gift given to you this New Year's Day.
Ver. 13.
GENESIS I
Ver. 26.
V. The First Day of Judah's Repentance We
pass on to the time of Hezekiah, who, deeply moved
by all the misery and degradation that had come as
the result of his father's evil reign, set himself heart
and soul to the work of restoration. It was a great
call to repentance; first to the whole nation, and
then also a call which was extended to the nation of
Israel, who, alas ! disregarded it. But Judah listened
to the call, and we are told that ' on the first day of
the first month they began to sanctify themselves '.
VI. The First Day of Ezra's Return from Baby-
lon.— But Judah again fell away, and the seventy
years' captivity in Babylon followed. Then came the
return under Zerubbabel, the House of the Lord
was rebuilt and worship was restored. Later there
was another large return led by Ezra, whose very
purpose was that he might seek the law of the Lord
and teach it to the people, and we read that ' on the
first day of the first month he began to go up from
Babylon.' You know how he went up and how he
worked.
There shall yet be for us another first day, a day
that shall never end, in which we shall possess these
' first day ' gifts in perfection, if only we strive our
very best to use them aright now.
Refebences. — I. 5. — Phillips Brooks, The Mystery of
Iniquity, p. 327. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xi. No. 660.
AT THE GATES OF THE DAWN
'And the evening and the morning were the third day.' —
Genesis i. 13.
Six times these words are repeated, and the one
lesson that rings out is that God counts His periods,
not as man does from night to night, but from even-
ing till morning.
I. This is true of creation. At present a veil is
cast over all peoples. The creature is subject to
illusion, to incompleteness, or, as the Apostle says,
to vanity. Probably no earthly realization, however
good and beautiful, can set forth all that there is in
God; and certainly human sin has infected the house
of human life, as cholera and fever infect the tene-
ments in which they have bred. The horror of dark-
ness is the dower of the blind forces to which- some
of our teachers attribute the system of ' things of
which we form a part '. Creation shall participate
in the glorious liberty of the sons of God. There
shall be evening, there shall be morning, and
a Seventh Day.
II. So of the race. The evening was dark when
the children of Babel gathered in rebellion against
God, and when the knowledge of the original law
seemed submerged in savagery and passion. It was
destined to become still darker. Darkness was to
cover the earth, and gross darkness the people.
There have been many dark skies since then, but
never so dark as before; and no thoughtful student
of history can deny that things are slowly becoming
better.
III. So of the individual. Your life is dark. Sin
is darkness; sorrow is darkness; and to a greater or
less extent these three are part of your daily lot.
But the night is far spent, the day is at hand. The
darkling waves, as they break around your boat, are
bearing you onward to the morning meal upon the
silver sands, where you will find love has gone before
you with its preparation. It shall be evening and
morning, and lo ! a day without night. — F. B. Meyer,
Baptist Times and Freeman, vol. liv. p. 815.
References. — I. 14-15. — A. P. Stanely, Sermons on Spe-
cial Occasions, p. 138.
A DIVINE REVELATION
(For Trinity Sunday)
'And God said, Let Us make man in Our image, after Our
likeness.' — Genesis i. 26.
The word ' Trinity ' is derived from the Latin word
Trinus, which signifies ' three-fold,' or ' three-in-
one ' ; and thus it exactly expresses the profound
mystery of three Persons in the unity of one God-
head. To-day the Church most seasonably brings
the doctrine of this mystery specially before us.
I. It is distinctly a Divine Revelation. — It is
absolute that this doctrine of the adorable Trinity
be divinely revealed. And so it has been in various
parts of Holy Scripture; but we confine our thought
briefly to three instances.
(a) Take the text first. — ' And God said, Let Us
make man in Our image, after Our likeness.' The
word ' God ' is, in the original, in the plural number,
and yet it- is connected with a singular verb. This
is not an accidental violation of grammar ; for if we
go through the whole Bible we shall find the same
thing, that is, ' Elohim,' plural, used with a singular
verb; but if we read the text thus, ' And the Three-
in-One said, Let Us make man in Our image, after
Our likeness,' all difficulty vanishes, and we at once
agree with Jewish commentators and Christian divines
that even on the first page of the Bible there is
affirmed the great and precious truth of a Triune
Jehovah.
(o) But turn from the first page of the Old
Testament to some of the first pages of the New,
and this doctrine meets the eye again and in stronger
form. ' And Jesus,' says St. Matthew, ' when He was
baptized, went up straightway out of the water; and
lo! the heavens were opened, and He saw the Spirit
of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon
Him. And lo ! a voice from heaven, saying, This is
My beloved Son, in Whom I am well pleased.' Here
are the three Divine Persons. And how beautifully
and strictly in keeping with all this is the baptismal
formula given by our Lord to His disciples just before
He went back to His Father ! ' Go ye therefore,'
said He to them, ' and make disciples of all the
nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father,
and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.' Here again
the doctrine of the Trinity is enunciated, and each
Divine Person is not only linked in one Godhead, but
put upon an equality with the other. And the like
sublime things are found in the apostolic benediction.
Thus the Bible asserts distinctly from beginning to
6
Ver. 27.
GENESIS I
Ver. 27.
end that the Father is God; it asserts as distinctly
that the Son is God ; and it asserts as distinctly that
the Holy Ghost is God.
II. It is the Emphatic Belief of the Church. —
Take, as first proof, what is denominated ' the Apos-
tles' Creed,' because it publishes the Deityship of the
Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost in language
that cannot possibly be mistaken. Take next what
is named ' the Nicene Creed,' because it is, if anything,
more emphatic than ' the Apostles' Creed,' especially
in the third paragraph, having been composed by a
council of holy fathers to define the perfect Christian
faith in opposition to a contrary doctrine respecting
the Holy Ghost. And then take what is called ' the
Athanasian Creed,' because it is still more elaborate
and precise than the two former creeds. In this creed
it is affirmed that ' the Godhead of the Father, of
the Son, and of the Holy Ghost is all one, the Majesty
co-eternal. And in this Trinity none is afore or after
other; none is greater or less than another. So that
in all things the Unity in Trinity and the Trinity in
Unity is to be worshipped.'
References. — I. 26. — H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, The Master's
Message, p. 183. H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit, No. 1491, p. 65.
Bishop Woodford, Sermons Preached in Various Churches, p.
33. C. Kingsley, Gospel of the Pentateuch, p. 18. I. 26-31. —
F. W. Robertson, Notes on Genesis, p. 9. I. 26-11. 3. — A.
Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture — Genesis, p. 1.
ADAM THE CHILD
'And God created man.'— Genesis i. ej.
The characteristic of they Jewish portraits is their
derivation from the period of youth, and this chord
is struck at the very beginning.
I. The man who painted Adam knew he was paint-
ing a child. Is his picture childlike enough to be
universal? This artist has no pretence hand; his is
the touch of a master. The Garden scene has never
become absolute, and the reason is that it is planted
in that field of humanity whose products neither grow
nor decline.
II. Why is this a representative picture? Because
in the dawning consciousness of your own infant you
will find exactly the same mixture of dust and divin-
ity. But look again at the development of your child,
and you will see how cosmopolitan is this biography
of the primeval Adam.
III. The common view is that the artist is describ-
ing a case of mere disobedience. That is not the
deepest idea of the picture. The primitive narration
has attached itself, not to the portrayal of obedience,
but to the portrayal of justice. It is not the de-
pendant forgetting the respect to his master; it is
the partner ignoring his contract, the associate break-
ing his bond, the sharer of dual rights attempting to
encroach upon the rights of the other. This child,
every after child, has his tragedy inside, his dramatic
personages inside, his dialogues inside. I do not
think the tragedies would be less complete if the
outward deed had been omitted; for the final act of
injustice in the sight of heaven is ever consummated
in the region of the soul. — G. Matheson, The Repre-
sentative Men of the Bible, p. 23.
THE ORIGIN AND THE DESTINY OF MAN
1 God created man in His own image.' — Genesis i. 27.
I. If we would profit by our own reading of the
wonderful poem of Creation which is preserved for
us in the first chapter of Genesis, we must fix our
thoughts on the great spiritual truths which it teaches.
Think of one of these truths, perhaps the most im-
portant of all in relation to ourselves and our conduct.
We may take it in the words of the text : ' God
created man in His own image, in the image of God
created He him.' You may ask, no doubt, how this
account of the Creation of man can be reconciled with
the teaching of modern science as to his cousinship
with the lower animals, teaching which we receive,
perhaps, with a little natural reluctance when it is
first put before us. But the truth is, that what the
Bible is concerned with is not man's pedigree on the
side of his humble ancestors, but his heritage and his
birthright as made in the image of God. That as
regards his bodily form man is akin to the lower
animals may be very true. It is a matter with which
Scripture does not concern itself. However life came
it came from the one Source of Life. But that is not
to say that man has no privilege of his own in which
the beasts do not share. It is this prerogative of his,
which the text puts before us. However man comes
to his present stage of growth, there was given to
him at some point in his long history a unique gift,
the reason and the will which reflect the Supreme
Reason, the Divine Will. And this gift is quite
independent of those bodily appetites and desires
which he shares with the brutes. It is independent,
for personality is one thing, nature is another. And
as it is not a product of the body, so it does nob
perish with the body.
II. What does that teach us about our Lord's
Person? Is it not this, that though He became man,
took upon Him human nature with all its joys and
sorrows, His Divine Personality still continues. The
forces which could sadden His human life, which
brought about His bitter death, could not touch or
destroy His Divine Person.
III. And so, in a lower degree, indeed, and with
many differences, may we say, that it is with man and
his pedigree. He is an animal by nature ; his bodily
life and death are as the life and death of the animals
over which he rules. But then his personality; what
of that ? Whence comes it ? From his animal nature ?
Nay; but from God in whose image and likeness he
is made. He is made after the Divine likeness in
respect of his soul; and it is because we believe that,
that we have a right to say that if the present is the
life of beasts, it is the future which is the true life of
man. — J. H. Bernard, Via Domini, p. 41.
Ver. 27.
GENESIS I
Ver. 28.
WHAT IS MAN?
' So God created man in His own image.' — Genesis i. 27.
And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and
breathed into his nostrils the breath of life ; and man be-
came a living soul.'— Genesis h. 7.
What are the great principles of religion which are
revealed to us in these early chapters of Genesis?
Speaking, generally, there are three.
I. The Revelation of a Personal God. — The first is
the revelation of a personal God Who made the world
and rules all our life. In the Old Testament the
writers never question the existence of God at all.
God is there. What the Old Testament writers do
give is the character and nature of that God Who is
there from the beginning. Any conception of God
which other religions may have must be brought to
the test of the revelation of God which is made to us
here. For instance, if you bring to the test the idea
that man is swallowed up in God — that the finite is
absorbed and lost in the infinite altogether — you find
that that must be wrong, because it does not allow
man that independence which the Bible narrative re-
veals. Now we have here quite clearly marked the
position of God. God is in the beginning, and this
world's reality is through the Will of God. And you
and I see that behind all the processes of Nature,
whatever they may be, however long these processes
may have taken, however strange may be the methods
by which those processes have made the universe, it
is God Who, behind all, is ruling. God is the begin-
ning, God is the means, and God is the end. That is
a practical matter, not merely one of intellectual de-
delight. All that comes to us comes from the will, from
the mind, from the heart of the living Person of God.
II. The Revelation of Man's Privileges — Man has
been made in the image of God. He stands quite
apart from all the rest of the Creation. He has that
power of self-consciousness which belongs to no other
creature. His will is not like that of the animals,
determined simply by the strongest physical passion
or desire. In that lies this great fact : man is capable
of union with God, he is capable of receiving a Divine
revelation. Science itself is willing to acknowledge
that there is this unearthly element in the nature of
man. But as man has a higher side, so he has a lower
side. God made man of the dust of the earth. There
is the revelation of the material side of man's nature.
What were the actual processes by which that material
clay was prepared until it became ready for the breath
of God ? It was God Himself Who guided those early
developments till the clay was ready for the gift of
self-consciousness. On the one side man is at one with
Nature. At the same time man is raised distinctly
above the animals by that breath of God. The long
struggle continually leading us to fight for the higher
ideal, the nobler life, is a constant witness to the Di-
vine side of man. If we are made in the image of God,
then we have the capacity to know God.
III. The Revelation of Man's Fall. — Yet we know
how man's life, as a matter of fact, falls far short of
the ideal of the Divine life. We need that to be ex-
plained, and in this early account of the Creation we
have the explanation set clearly before us. There are
very few references to the actual story of the fall, and
yet all the while, especially after the captivity, there
was a very strong sense of the gravity of sin. The
Jews never looked back to a golden age, always to a
golden age to come. When you look at the account
of the fall and ask yourself, ' What does it really
mean? ' you must try to realize quite clearly what is
meant about the state of man before the fall. It is
perfectly true that man did possess before the fall
what he afterwards did not possess — a moral purity
and innocence. But man did not possess what men
have sometimes thought he possessed, such perfection
as perfection of intellectual capacity — such a capacity,
for instance, as man possesses to-day. Man was just a
child. He was perfect in the sense that he perfectly
corresponded with the Will of God. Man by his
disobedience to the distinct Will of God introduced
sin into the world. There came a moment when this
disobedience broke down the development of man's life.
Thus we see the need of redemption.
References. — I. 27. — T. G. Bonney, Sermons on Ques-
tions of the Day, p. 1. G. Sarson, A. Lent in London, p. 142.
C. Kingsley, The Good News of God, p. 212. A. Gray, Faith
and Diligence, p. 139. C. Brown, God and Man, p. 86. Bis-
hop Jones, Old Testament Outlines, p. 4. Bishop Goodman,
Parish Sermons, vol. v. p. 1. H. Alford, Quebec Chapel Ser-
mons, vol. iv. p. 35.
QOD AND MAN
' Have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of
the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the
earth.' — Genesis i. 28.
There are many things which prove to be a puzzle to
the brain of man, and if we try and think out first
principles we often find ourselves tied up as it were in
a knot. There are, however, three things in this world
which the mind of man can reduce and think of as
being, so to speak, first principles. Nobody can deny
their existence. Here they are. We know of them,
we see their working, they compose the whole of the
created universe — matter, that which composes the
whole of creation ; force, a technical term to represent
the energy and power of the universe ; and law, those
wonderful results which we see following from differ-
ent causes, and yet so regularly, that man is able to
count upon them, to act upon them, and to frame the
whole of his life from their results.
Now these three things fail to account for three
things concerning themselves.
I. They Fail to Account for their Own Exist-
ence. — You and I may study science, we may argue
back, we may think out problems, we may arrive at
some great conclusion, we may, indeed, understand all
the mysteries of how and why, but as you get farther
and farther back, you come to these three things,
matter, force, and law, and there is no ingenuity of the
brain of man that has yet been able to account for
their existence. There is no explanation of them.
You think yourself back to the far ages; you may
adopt, if you like, the principle of development, evolu-
8
Ver. 81.
GENESIS I
Ver. 81.
tion, of whatever you wish, but you come eventually
back to these things, matter, force, law ; and no man's
mind can, or has hitherto invented any system that
will account for their being in existence. But when
you open your Bible, when you turn to the first
chapter of Genesis, there you find one explanation
which has held good from the earliest time, and which
has no refutation even to-day. In the very first
chapter, in the very first verse, in the very first words,
the one and only explanation is found, 'In the begin-
ning God.' There is no other solution; there is no
other explanation.
II. Where is the Ingenuity of Man's Mind that
can Conceive how these Things come to be in
Action ? — It is all very well to produce and publish
axioms which govern theories. It is all very well to
test by the most accurate scientific knowledge and
prove effects, but you have to go back to the final
question: How they all became active, alive, so mag-
nificently full of energy, force, and life as we see
them? There is only one explanation; there is only
one answer, and you find it still in the first chapter of
Genesis, 'And God said . . . "Let there be" — '
III. How is it ail the Things in the World that
we see are Gradually Working Out and Promoting
the Welfare of Mankind? — All that the world passes
through, one phase after another, one form of life
giving place to another form of life. You may go into
the wilds of a distant country, or into the hub of
the great civilized world, London, what do you find?
That law, matter, force, in its natural result is all aid-
ing the betterment of human beings. How do you
account for this? We have no special physical force
that would enable us to capture the world; we have
no great magnificent power which enables us, as it
were, to rule the forces of Nature in ourselves, except
that we find, as we look round the world, in all the
created things of life, they all turn, they all develop,
they are all capable of being made for the promotion
of the welfare of mankind. This, I think, you will
find answered in the same first chapter of Genesis, for
in the twenty-ninth verse, God has there said: 'I have
given you all the earth'. Here you have matter, force,
and law; here you have them failing to account for
their own existence and failing to account for their
being in action, and the mysterious fact that it all
works out in its results for promoting the welfare of
human beings. It is one of the most wonderful
thoughts that a man can have: God has created, God
has said, God has given.
THE MANIFOLD MERCIES OF GOD
'And God saw everything that He had made, and, behold, it
was very good.' — Genesis I. 31.
The pessimist view of the Creation, nay, of man him-
self, of life, of all things, is now in the ascendant. I
mean by the pessimist view, the view which tends to
depreciate both man and his world. The wise ones
of the hour, happily only of the hour, who lead the
thoughts of this generation, and are listened to as its
prophets, seem to be settling to the cheerful convic-
tion that Creation has on the whole been a blunder,
of which all sentient things have to suffer the penalty
in the pain and futility which torment the world.
I. I believe that this pessimist view of man and the
creation is just the reaction — the inevitable reaction
— against that foolishly and wearisomely optimist
view which, during the last generations, the writers
on Christian evidences have dinned into the ears of
men. The intellectual world is just weary to nausea-
tion of hearing that all things in the universe work
together with the smoothness and constancy of a
machine, whose steam power the Being whom they
are pleased to call the great Artificer supplied. The
curse of our theology during the last century has
been this, that owing mainly to the vigour of
the Deistic and Atheistic assault on the truth of
the Gospel, theologians have been tempted to think
that they had to make out a case for God, and to
hold the citadel of their narrow theology as a Divine
fortress, which they were bound to defend at any
cost. They have effected a complete understanding
of the scheme of the universe ; have explained away
or hidden all that seemed inconsistent with the
benignity of the Creator, and pushed forward and
magnified all that fell in with their notions of His
goodness, until their Creation — the Creation which
they undertook to explain and to justify, whose de-
sign they were ever ready to expound, and whose
plan fitted their expositions as a key fits its wards —
had come to be a very unreal and unlifelike world.
When we hear from our wise ones in the lore of
nature that there is more pain than joy within the
range of their sight, we remind ourselves that Scrip-
ture told us it was a travail. When they tell us that
it seems to be but a blundering and futile scheme,
we remind ourselves again that the Scripture tells us
that it is a seed time, and what can seem so blundering
and futile as casting seed into the furrows to rot under
the dull pall of winter, to him who has no eye to
forecast the radiance of the coming spring.
II. The grand distinctive feature of the Creation,
that which reveals the loving-kindness of the Creator,
and is the signature of His goodness, is the law of
progress which rules its development; the continued
evolution of finer, compacter, purer, nobler forms of
things, as the unfolding of the purpose of the Creator
proceeds, so that the world of to-day is altogether a
more beautiful, orderly, and joyful world to live in,
than the world, as far as we can discern its features,
of myriads of years ago. There is struggle, shock,
and apparent confusion without question.
The world of to-day seems built on the ruins of the
world of yesterday. The feet of the living tread
everywhere the dust of death. But the living now
stand higher than the living of old — with more erect
port, with freer gesture, with braver dress.
Something in the inner soul of nature moves her to
this continual refining and elevating of form. We
cannot be blind to the manifest hand of the living
God. It is the course of development which from the
9
Ver. 2.
GENESIS II
Ver. 2.
first He prophesied. As we see it complete itself we
cannot help connecting it with the unseen Almighty
hand. There has been through all the ages that
law of progress working mightily, which is announced
as the law of the Divine operation in the Scripture.
All things there breathe the spirit of progress, of vital
propulsive movement, of onward, upward develop-
ment ; progress, the onward, upward movement, is the
breath of their life. It is with Creation as with
history. God prophesies, not that we may be able to
paint in detail the scheme of the future, but that
when we see it unfold itself we may know that it is
His work (Isaiah xlv. 18-25).
III. There is that in the Creation which the largest
and most developed human intellect and spirit, albeit
conversant with heavenly things, and familiar with
the thoughts of God, contemplates with eager and
keen delight, which seems to transcend its power of
comprehension and its organ of expression, which
bends it low in something like awestruck adoration,
while it murmurs, ' O Lord, my God, how wonderful
are Thy works, how glorious! In wisdom and in
faithfulness hast Thou made them all.' — J. Baldwin
Brown, Christian World Pulpit, vol. vi. p. 341.
References. — I. 31. — T. G. Bonney, Sermons on Ques-
tions of the Day, p. 17. C. Kingsley, The Good News of God,
p. 268. E. T. A. Morriner, Sermons Preached at Lyme Regis,
p. 185. T. Arnold, Sermons, vol. ii. p. 238. II. — G. Moberly,
Parochial Sermons, p. 61. II. 1-3. — J. Bowstead, Practical
Sermons, vol. i. p. 19. J. Parker, Adams, Noah, and Abra-
ham, p. 14.
THE CREATOR EXPLAINED BY THE
CREATION
' God ended His work which He had made. — Genesis ii. 2.
Given the Creation, to find the Creator, at least to
conjecture about Him.
Given the house, to discover something about the
builder of it, or the owner or the occupant. It is a
large house; very well, then the man behind it, who
made it, or is responsible for it, must be a man of
some substance and property. It is an artistically
furnished house; every piece of furniture has been
set down by the hands of love just in the right place
and in the right light and in the right relation to
every other piece: then the man who made all this
arrangement must, of necessity, have the mind, the
instinct, or the training of an artist. No house ever
made itself, therefore I think the heavens and the
earth cannot have made themselves ; no candle ever
lighted its own wick, therefore I should be surprised
if the stars were their own lamplighters.
I. I begin to feel that if any man suggested to me
that all this creation-house was built by an Infinite
Power and an Infinite Intelligence, I should believe
him. In very deed it seems like it; all the pieces
are so vast ; arithmetic endeavoured to calculate
their distances, and having written an endless line of
ciphers, it threw down the chalk and ran away, be-
cause it could not express in words its own discoveries.
God is as great in detail as He is in the totality and
massiveness of things. I read in the first chapter of
the book of Genesis a most astounding thing: that
God said ' Let there be light,' and He made the
grass, and there is no sense of anticlimax or retro-
cession in the action of Divine power. God is fur-
nishing a house for some one, and He will not leave
that some one to find the grass ; if God undertakes
to furnish a place it will be well furnished and com-
pletely furnished, and not only will there be great
lights and great spaces, but man will not be asked to
create one blade of grass, it shall all be done for him.
II. God came nearer still to us in the work which
He made and which He ended. He incarnated Him-
self, He infleshed Himself, He embodied Himself.
There stands the incarnation ! What is his name ?
Adam — ' God created man in His own image, in the
image and likeness of God created He him '. That
is the daring solution of the great problem of human
existence as given by the Bible.
III. In all the work which He wrought did He
ever speak? He spake all the time. Sometimes I
think there is a sound as of subdued singing, a sup-
pressed psalm running throusrh all the action of the
Creation. 'God said' — then He spake? Yes; all
things start in the word. Did not man make words?
No; all the words were made before man came upon
the scene at all. They were such great words that
the first Speaker used in the making of His heaven-
and-earth house.
God not only said, God blessed; so to say, He
laid His gracious right hand upon the things and
said to each, Very good; take thy place, work out
the purpose which I have written in the psalm of
thine heart. God not only said, and blessed, God
called: gave names to things, gave names to great
spaces and left some little small pieces of things
which we might name, but all the great broad names,
names of comprehension, names that grasp the total-
ity and the destiny of things, He Himself made.
IV. We are invited, by a meditation like this not
to go into eternity, the metaphysical and unthinkable
eternity, to find God ; we are invited to stand before
the first molehill, before the first time-written rock
that tells its tale in facial moss ; we are invited to
go out into the twilight and to ask, Who did this,
who built this, who keeps this in order, who guaran-
tees that these planets will not fall on this head?
Surely the argument upon which the Christian faith
is built is eminently reasonable, it is an argument
which we apply along the whole line of our experi-
ence; then when we come into the deeper mysteries,
the great spiritual verities, we are prepared to enter
the holy of holies just in the degree in which we have
carefully, intelligently, and lovingly walked along
the line of what may be called natural creation and
natural phenomena. If we have been reverent along
that line we shall hear greater mysteries still.
We are asked in the New Testament to believe
that God redeemed man. In very deed redemption
is implied in creation. Never forget that words have
not only a superficial meaning but an implied mean-
ing, an enfolded and concealed meaning, which must
10
Ver. 7.
GENESIS II
Ver. 7.
be taken out and allowed to develop in all the fulness
of their beauty and poetry. So read, created means
redeemed, as the beginning means the end. — Joseph
Parker, City Temple Pulpit, vol. vii. p. 3.
References. — II. 3. — F. Corbett, Preachers' Year, p. 41.
R. S. Candlish, The Book of Genesis, p. 18. II. 4.— F. W.
Robertson, Notes on Genesis, p. 16.
' And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and
breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man
became a living soul.'— Genesis h. 7.
When? If you look in the margin of your Bible
you will see ' 4004 years before Christ '. Is that
right? It is no part of the original book. It is
only a marginal note which was made there by those
who calculated according to the genealogies of those
men who, generation by generation, succeeded Adam.
But it will not do.
I. Age by Age. — We read this morning of the
Creation of the world. We read to-night a con-
tinuation of the story and of that time when the
Lord God formed man out of the dust of the ground.
Have we here in this book of Genesis an account of
seven actual days of twenty-four hours ? ' And the
evening and the morning were the first day,' ' and
the evening and the morning were the second day,'
and so on. Surely not. What is it that science has
revealed to us about all this? It has revealed to us
that the Creation as we now hold it must have taken
something like 4000 million years at least. God
works very slowly, and when we read of God working
day by day we know that he who wrote these words
meant ' age by age'. ' And the evening and the
morning were the first day.' Why, the very ex-
pression suggests to us the length of time — the long
night — of God's creation. From the little to the
greater; from the twilight to the dawn. Thus God
worked. It is very important that we should re-
member this: otherwise we should be so staggered
in the matter of our religion; otherwise we should
find ourselves face to face with such tremendous
difficulties. Science has revealed so much to us that
we did not know when man wrote in the margin
' 4004 years'.
II. The Identity of Science and the Bible. — How
has God been working then? Science teaches us so
much, and if we do not believe science we shall be-
come very unsettled in our minds, and we shall say
to ourselves, What about this book? is it true? can
it be trusted? And then we recall to mind that our
Lord Jesus Christ took this book for true and quoted
from it, and we shall say to ourselves, Was He too
mistaken? But we must not do that. Whatever
science teaches us accurately and fairly we must face,
and we need never be afraid if we do so that the
truth of science will clash with God's holy word.
What is it we really find in this book of Genesis?
We find most accurate scientific language. We find
the one who writes this book to say that through
long ages God created a world, and we find that He
first created that which is inorganic — to speak popu-
larly the earth — next vegetable life, then animal life,
then man's life. And that is just what science says
was done. If you can read and understand the
Hebrew you will find four words used to express this
creation by God. The first is to form, and the next
is to breathe into, and the next is to make, and the
last is to create. And this is actually scientific lan-
guage. But between the first and the second and
the third and the fourth science finds gaps. Science
has no means of explaining how the step was made
from one to the other — how it was from earth to
vegetable life, from vegetable to animal life with its
consciousness, how from animal life with its conscious-
ness came man with his intellectual powers and, as
most scientists admit, with his spiritual being. To
us as believers in the one true God, to us as Christians,
the followers of the Holy One the Son of God, it
comes quite simply. God worked through the long
ages, beginning at inorganic matter, then by His
creating power gave life which made the vegetable,
then by His creating power breathed into that life
that which made the animal life with its conscious-
ness, and then created the spiritual being of man.
Through the long, long ages man, if you will, was
evolved by the power of God. Why, it is scriptural
language! 'The Lord God formed man out of the
dust of the ground.' Then what does it matter to
us if scientific men find fossil remains of man which
must have been in existence long ages before the
4004 years ago mentioned in the margin? We ex-
pect them to find that. So God has been working,
so God has been evolving, if you will from the dust
of the ground by His almighty power the creature
who now is man.
III. Man's Relation to God You are not a bit
of earth, you are not a vegetable, you are not merely
an animal conscious of your being — you are a man
created by God, you are the outcome of God's
almighty working, God has breathed into you the
breath of life and you have become a living soul.
You are eternal, a son of God created in God's image
and having spiritual powers. Oh, it is a wonderful
ancestry! Oh, it is a wonderful dignity to have
arrived at by the power of God ! Are we living as
if only earth? Are we living only as vegetables in
this world ? Are we living only as animals, conscious
of animal pleasure or animal pain? Or are we living
as we may live — as sons of God, conscious, living, real
— the children of God in whom is eternity?
LITTLE SOULS
' The Lord God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life ;
and man became a living soul.' — Genesis ii. 7.
I. Little Souls. We hear people spoken of as good
souls, poor souls, and the like, let us think now of
those who may be called little souls.
It was the custom in old-fashioned gardens to cut
back the shrubs and trees, which were intended by
Nature to grow large and luxuriant, till they became
stunted and dwarfed, even grotesque. People treat
their souls in the same way. They do not let them
grow as God plans, but keep cutting them back, as
11
Ver. 12.
GENESIS II
Ver. 12.
it were. There is no development, no growth, and
therefore no beauty in their lives ; they have merely
stunted souls. God intends our souls to grow and
develop as our body does. A Christian is meant to
grow, to advance. His watchwords are, go up higher,
excelsior, amplius, higher, wider, till we come to
a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of
Christ.
II. Marks of a Little Soul. —
1. People with little souls take narrow views
of religion.
2. Small souled people take narrow views of
duty.
3. People with little souls are wanting in
sympathy.
III. The Duty of Taking a Wider View Let us
try to take a wider view of things, of life, of religion,
of duty, of our responsibilities. Let us cultivate a
wider sympathy with others' needs, instead of sitting
down upon our own little bundle of thorns. — H. J.
Wilmot-Buxton, Notes of Sermons for the Year, pp.
114-20.
'Man became a living soul.' — Genesis ii. 7.
Thk nature of man was that in which God was at
last to give His crowning revelation, and for that
no preparation could seem extravagant. Fascinating
and full of marvel as is the history of the past which
science discloses to us ; full as these slow-moving
millions of years are in evidences of the exhaustless
wealth of nature, and mysterious as the delay appears,
all that expenditure of resources is eclipsed, and all
the delay justified when the whole work is crowned by
the Incarnation, for in it we see that all that slow
process was the preparation of a nature in which God
could manifest Himself as a Person to persons. —
Marcus Dods.
References. — II. 7. — J. Keble, Sermons for Septua-
gesima, p. 108. J. Budgen, Parochial Sermons, vol. ii. p. 40;
Sermons for the Christian Year, vol. iii. p. 108. J. Aspinall,
Parish Sermons, p. 250. J. Laidlaw, The Bible Doctrine of
Man, p. 48. R. W. Evans, Parochial Sermons, p. 293. II.
8. — H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, Bible Object Lessons, p. 203. C.
Perren, Revival Sermons, p. 301. W. L. Watkinson, The
Blind Spot, p. 183. R. Fetherston, A Garden Eastward, p. 1.
II. 9. — J. Keble, Sermons for the Holy Week, p. 446. A.
Ainger, Sermons Preached in the Temple Church, p. 283. II.
12. — W. L. Watkinson, The Ashes of Roses, p. 105. II. 15 —
R. E. Hutton, The Crown of Christ, p. 265.
GOLD AND ONYX NOT ENOUGH
'And the gold of that land is good : there is bdellium and the
onyx stone. — Genesis ii. 12.
Gold and bdellium and onyx — what more did it need ?
Is not this a sufficing inventory of the land? It
needed a river. Land without river is sand, nothing-
ness, a great ghastly image of fruitlessness and despair.
But if it have gold and bdellium and onyx, is it not
fruitful? No; no more is your life. You have gold
and gum and grey onyx and precious stones, but no
river ; write yourself poor, make out yourself a bank-
rupt in the court of heaven.
You may use this metaphor of the river in many
senses. The emblems of God are capable of being
broken up into various aspects and driven along
various lines of practical application. The metaphor
is not confined to water only; there are other things
that may stand for water in the elaboration of this
great argument.
I. Here is a man who has great capacity. He is a
man of insight and foresight, he balances things well,
his judgments are sound, his talents are somewhat
even brilliant. Then why does he not succeed in
life? For want of the river. What is that river?
Capital. He is abler than many, full of resource,
very quick in sight and very sure in calculation, but
you might as well attempt to sail a great American
liner in a basinful of water as to carry forward all
the possibilities of his talent when he is in want of
capital, gold, and bdellium and onyx. The Divine
grace utilizes all our powers, gives them scope, causes
them to grow, satisfies their aspirations, ennobles
their uses, and we may have everything but the
wealth of God, the wealth of grace, the wealth of
character, ability enough, even splendour of intellect
enough, but no river of grace, no river of the true
gold, no river of spiritual capital. What, then, does
it all mean? Ruin. There is no way for splendour
to find its road into heaven.
II. Here is a man who has capital, gold, and bdel-
lium and onyx, and his balances pecuniary are so great
that he hardly cares to count them; and yet he is
to be pitied. Why so? Want of the river. What
river? Health! Health turns stones into gold, de-
serts into gardens; health creates stars for the mid-
night, and revels in the splendour of the planets;
health is a continual miracle, health clears a way
for itself; and the man who is being pictured by my
fancy at this moment has everything but health. If
God would send that Pison, that stream, that member
of the great fourfold Eden river into his life, the man
would stand up a king.
III. Here is a very remarkable life: the man has
learning and great intellectual capacity and many
attributes that other men might covet or envy ; and
yet, oh how dismal is that life ! What does it
want? The river. What river? Sunshine, the light-
river.
IV. And another figure which comes to my fancy
is that of a man in sore loneliness. He could do much
under given circumstances, but under the circum-
stances which now crush him he can do nothing.
What does he want? The river. What river? The
river of a strong friend. Some of us were nothing
till the strong friend got hold of us, and then we
expanded into something, and were accounted of re-
pute and influence. There is a Friend that sticketh
closer than a brother, there is a Friend accessible to
all, the name, unchangeable, is Jesus of Nazareth,
whom the Jews murdered, but whom God offered up
in sacrifice: He is the Friend of all. — Joseph Parker,
City Temple Pulpit, vol. i. p. 69.
12
Vv. 16, 17.
GENESIS II
Ver. 18.
THE STANDARD OF RIGHTEOUSNESS
f And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, of every tree
of the garden thou mayest freely eat; but of the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat, for in the day
that thou eatest thou shalt surely die.' — Genesis ii. 16, 17.
"Sin is the transgression of the law.' Before we can
understand the consequences of sin we must try to
understand the nature of the law. If religious fatal-
ism is dead, scientific fatalism does not lack its
prophets. We are told that environment is every-
thing. You cannot choose what you will think, or
say, or do. There is no will in man to master the
sovereign impulses of Nature. ,
I. The first point that strikes us is that if this is
true the whole government of the world is a mon-
strous injustice. If there is no vice to be punished
it is nothing short of a scandal that punishment
should be inflicted. The fact of the matter is that
the theory breaks down before the actual conscious-
ness of men. The moral nature of man is a special
communication of God.
II. We have reached the point where the problem
of revelation begins to face us. If it is true, as we
feel, that we can obey or disobey the will of God,
what is that will? How has it been revealed to
man? The education of the conscience is a great
historical process. In this second chapter of Genesis,
and indeed throughout the whole Bible, revelation is
represented as being of two kinds — inward and out-
ward. In the very spirit and nature of a man made
in the likeness of God there is a certain elementary
revelation of the will of God. There are in every
conscience certain broad lines of right and wrong.
To walk as we are sometimes encouraged to do by
the light of nature, as if that were enough, is simply
to court degeneration and decay. The spirit life
needs, like every other life, to be kept alive by a
friendly spiritual environment. To live in God, to
absorb His quickening, vitalizing power, to hearken
to His commandment, and be refreshed and strength-
ened by His grace — these are no fables of Scripture
but living experiences of men. Revelation is from
without as well as from within.
III. Commandment without example, without illus-
tration, is morally of very little effect. ' How can you
define in words where legitimate indulgence ends and
where positive vice begins? What is lawful for me
may not be expedient because of my brother.' Ages
ago in response to human need the Ten Command-
ments were given. The Ten Commandments grew into
a whole system and government of life. The Rabbis
said 'thus and thus you should live.' But yet they
could not teach the world in words the will of God.
IV. God has explained and defined. But the mind
of man could not comprehend. There remained one
way and only one. It was that God Himself should
take in hand the task of life, and live it out before
the world. He is the end and crown of revelation. —
C. Silvester Horne, Christian World Pulpit, vol.
xxxix. p. 78.
Reference.— II. 16-17. — A. W. Momerie, The Origin of
Evil, p. 1.
SATAN IN HISTORY
'And the Lord God said .
'And the serpent said .
—Genesis ii. 18.
-Genesis iii. 4.
And between these two voices the education and dis-
cipline of man have been conducted from the first
day until now. Never let us shut our eyes to facts.
There is a temptation to avoid unpleasant subjects;
such temptation is one of the devil's tricks.
I. 'And the Lord God said . . .' 'And the serpent
said . . .,' and they both spoke practically on the
first page of the first book in the Bible; the devil
was nearly as instantaneously present as was God.
'And God said . . .' 'And the serpent said . . .,'
and sometimes they are blended and interblended,
and you can hardly discriminate between one tone
and the other.
If I look abroad upon the earth so far as it is ac-
cessible to my observation, I cannot but find proofs
enough that there is an enemy, call him by what
name you please, account for him as you like, deny
him if you will ; I can not account for certain broad
facts, events, collisions, tragedies, woes, losses, apart
from the suggestion that there is an unslumbering
enemy; I cannot trace everything to a good parent.
I am not able yet to say that all things are pure,
sweet, beneficent, healing, and full of blessedness. On
the contrary, I can say, There is an enemy here, or
there, or yonder; God never dug a grave, God never
inflicted pain; there must be behind all the pain
which He inflicts a reason or a suggestion which re-
fers to some other and alien and antagonistic and
most cruel force.
II. It is wonderful how the Bible from beginning
to end, from almost the first page to the last, broadly,
definitely, recognizes the personality and ministry of
an evil one. The slime of the serpent is upon every
page, his fang thrusts itself through all the rose
leaves and summer beauty of life and time.
Until we get back to fundamental facts we cannot
preach the Gospel ; in fact, we shall have no Gospel
to preach. It was not until 'the serpent said' that
another voice replied, 'The seed of the woman shall
bruise the head of the serpent'. The serpent speech
is the first page, the first sentence, in the Christian
theology.
III. Now as visibly in the one case as in the other
there is certainly a good spirit abroad, a holy redeem-
ing spirit, a gentle, tender, sympathizing spirit, a
benign power that will not leave us until the red
wound has been skinned over and until that skin has
grown into a sufficient and permanent security. The
Bible does not create God; I see God in providence,
I see Him in my own life, I see Him in the family
life of all my friends ; He wants time for the develop-
ment of His personality and the full revelation of
His design and the complete outlining and outspher-
ing of His beneficent purpose.
(1) Remember that the power of the serpent is
limited. He is chained, he cannot add one link to
his chain ; he cannot stretch it, it is not an elastic
chain, it is inflexible.
13
Ver. 23.
GENESIS II
Ver. 23.
(2) And the ministry of the evil one is educational
if properly received. It teaches us what we are,
what we may become, it teaches us our need of re-
deeming love, it teaches us the vanity of love, the
transitoriness of the things upon which we lavish our
affection.
(3) And the power of the devil is revelatory. It
will help us to understand the larger and fuller side
of things ; it Will help us to account for some things
which otherwise would distress our faith. Satan can
only do a certain amount of mischief; the amount of
mischief shall return upon his own head ; and one
day, far off, we shall see how it was that without
knowing it the enemy was one of our friends. —
Joseph Parker, City Temple Pulpit, vol. vii. p. 21.
References. — II. 18. — G. Bainton, Christian World Pul-
pit, vol. xxxviii. p. 163. J. Aspinall, Parish Sermons (1st
series), p. 250. C. J. Ridgeway, The King and His Kingdom,
p. 20. II. 21, 24. — Archbishop Bourne, Sermons in West-
minster Abbey, p. 96. II. 22. — J. C. M. Bellew, Sermons,
vol. iii. p. 344. S. Leathes, Studies in Genesis, p. 31.
EVE THE UNFOLDED
' And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones and flesh of
my flesh.' — Genesis ii. 23.
The second chapter of Genesis is an attempt to paint
not the making but the marriage of woman. It is
an effort to delineate the day not of her birth but of
her emergence. There are three periods indicated in
the development of this primitive woman — a period
of innocence or unconsciousness, a period of conscious
expansion, and a period of conscious or voluntary
self-repression. The picture of Eve is an unfolding
of these stages. She begins, so to speak, under-
ground. She is at first invisible in the garden. It
is her period of unconsciousness, of spontaneity, of
existence that has never seen itself in the mirror nor
stood before the bar of its own judgment-seat.
The second period of female development. Eve
has become the mistress of Adam's ground. Spon-
taneity is dead, artlessness is dead, simplicity is dead.
It is she and not Adam that wakens first to the
glories of the garden. The first conviction of being
beautiful may impart to her a thrill of awe. Her
gifts have ordained her to a ministry that must ren-
der her less and not more free. But there is another
way in which the woman may be affected by her
looking-glass pride. It is this latter experience and
not the former which is the case of Eve. The charm
of her new-found possession dazzled her. Her satis-
faction has its root in unblushing egotism. She is
tempted by the offer of wisdom to be a God. The
temptation of the woman in Eden is not a temptation
to disobey, but a temptation to get possession of
something which can only be got through disobedi-
ence. What is this sin of the woman — extrava-
gance.
The third stage — conscious contraction. The
typical woman of the world generally settles down.
The scene of her empire narrows. It is not a stoop-
ing of her pride. It is the taking pride in something
new, something nobler. There has come to Eve —
motherhood. — G. Matheson, Representative Women
of the Bible, p. 29.
THE FALL
Genesis hi.
Moral evil cannot be accounted for by referring it to
a brute source. Vitally important truths underlie
the narrative and are bodied forth by it. But the
way to reach these truths is not to adhere too rigidly
to the literal meaning, but to catch the general
impression.
I. Variety of interpretation in details is not to be
lamented. The very purpose of such representations
as are here given is to suit all stages of mental and
physical advancement.
II. The most significant elements in man's primitive
condition are represented by the two trees of the
garden.
(a) The tree of life, the fruit of which bestowed
immortality. Man was therefore naturally mortal,
though apparently with a capacity for immortality.
The mystical nature of the tree of life is recognized
in the New Testament by our Lord, and by John
when he describes the New Jerusalem. Both these
representations are intended to convey in a striking
and pictorial form the promise of life everlasting.
(6) The trial of man's obedience is imaged in the
tree of the knowledge of good and evil. From the
child-like innocence in which man originally was, he
was to pass forward into the condition of moral
manhood.
Temptation comes like a serpent.
III. Temptation succeeds at first by exciting our
curiosity. This dangerous craving has many elements
in it.
(a) The instinctive drawing towards what is mys-
terious.
(fo) The sense of incompleteness. Few boys wish
to be always boys.
IV. Through craving for a large experience un-
belief in God's goodness finds entrance. In the
presence of forbidden pleasure we are tempted to feel
as if God were grudging us enjoyment. The very
arguments of the serpent occur to our mind.
V. If we know our own history we cannot be
surprised to read that one taste of evil ruined our
first parents. The actual experience of sin is like
the one taste of alcohol to a reclaimed drunkard.
VI. The first result of sin is shame. The form in
which the knowledge of good and evil comes to us is
the knowing we are naked.
VII. When Adam found he was no longer fit for
God's eye, God provided a covering which might
enable him again to live in His presence without dis-
may. Man had exhausted his own ingenuity and
resources, and exhausted them without finding relief
to his shame. If his shame was to be effectually
removed, God must do it. — Marcus Dods, The Book
of Genesis, p. 15.
14
GENESIS HI
Ver. 1.
THE FIRST TEMPTATION OF MAN
Genesis hi.
Let us consider the great First Temptation of Man,
the story of Genesis in. I shall not attempt to dis-
cuss the deep question how far we are to take every
detail of that chapter literally. It is no mere 'al-
legory'. It puts before us an awful fact; I am sure
of this. But the first few pages of Scripture, in the
nature of their subjects, are so mysterious that we
may well hold our peace when the question is asked,
Is every word to be taken literally? Do these
chapters tell us their story in the same style of detail
as that in which we are told, for example, the ship-
wreck of St. Paul? Is it not at least possible that,
as the last pages of the Bible tell us of a glorious and
blissful future in terms of symbol and figure, so the
first pages of the Bible tell us in the same style of a
mysterious past? Gates of pearl and streets of gold
are assuredly to be understood as symbols of 'the
glory to be revealed'. The same may be true of
many a phrase used to depict the 'glory' of man's
first estate, and his fall from it. But I say all this
by the way. Here is the picture before us. We are
called to study the fact of the First Temptation, in
the terms given us in the Word of God.
What do we see, then, in the mystery so revealed
to us?
I. First, we see that man was, from the beginning,
in the wisdom of God, placed under a gentle but real
test by his heavenly Friend, and permitted, through
it, to be enticed by his enemy. His obedience was
tested by a firm while mild prohibition. His will
was enticed into revolt by a misrepresentation of the
mind of Him who had forbidden him 'the fruit'. A
thousand varieties of temptation can be grouped in
one class in the light of that fact.
II. Then, the First Temptation is one in which
the evil power approached man through what, in it-
self, was purely good. What can be fairer to thought
than the fruit of a tree in the Garden of God? No
poison could lurk in that 'fruit' itself. The only
evil lay in the fact that, for purposes of Divine love,
and perhaps only for a season, even so, its use was
forbidden. The thing was good, the pure creation of
the all-perfect Maker. But His command, 'Thou
shalt not eat,' made the using of it evil.
III. Have we not here again a type of whole
-worlds of temptation? In countless cases the thing
through which the temptation comes from beneath is
a thing whose origin is from above, yea, from the
Father of Lights, the Giver of every good and perfect
gift. It is something beautiful and pure in itself, and
the use of which, under other conditions, or at other
times, may be as right as it is delightful. But some
high reason says to us, just now, in view of that
particular tree of God's own garden of pleasures,
'Do not eat'. Just now, just for us now, that
charming object, that interesting occupation, that
sweet society, that pleasant place is, in the Lord's
wise love, to be foregone. We are asked to 'do
without it; to be 'as a weaned child' about it. No
condemnation is passed upon it. But our use of it
would be against His will. And that makes it a test
in the hands of our Friend, and an enticement in the
hands of our enemy. We are at once tested and
enticed by a conflict of pleasure with duty, where the
pleasure in itself is pure.
IV. Then, we see, in the First Temptation, the
very method and manner of the enemy's use of good
for ends of evil. Through man's thought about 'the
fruit' he aims a subtle thrust with a poisoned dagger
at man's thought about God. He suggests that God
is not love. He whispers that God withholds the
fruit for selfish reasons ; that He does not want man .
to be as happy as possible, to be too near Himself, to
be too much like Himself. So, by that poisoned
wound, the root of all sin is left in man. For sin, in
its last analysis, is a discord between man and the
blessed God. And we are at discord with His great
love, not only when we openly defy His will, but
when we suspect it, when we distrust it. That is,
'the little rift within the lute,' which has in it the
possible discords of all imaginable actual sinning.
When the primeval human heart first listened to
that dreadful suggestion, that God would say one
word to His beloved creature, made in His image,
which was not a word of love, then man sinned, then
man fell. And the nature which so fell has felt the
shock of its fall ever since; it has kept the discord
ever since ; so that only the hand of the slandered
God of Love can set it right, taking away from it
this fatal mischief of distrust of Him, putting into its
hand 'the shield of faith, of trust in Him, where-
with it shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of
the wicked.' — Bishop H. C. G. Moule.
References. — III. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxix. No.
2299 ; ibid. vol. 1. No. 2900.
SATAN'S WILES
'And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said.' —
Genesis hi. i.
The first words which Satan is ever recorded to have
spoken must be words of interest, if it be only that
they may serve as a key to unlock some of his later
subtleties. And I observe at once a remarkable
similarity between all the beginnings of Satan's words.
I hear him coming to the first Adam — 'Yea, hath
God said ? ' then I listen to him approaching the second
Adam — 'If thou be the Son of God'. And there
is one feature characterizing both. He begins with
laying a doubt at the root. He questions; he un-
settles. He does not assert error: he does not contra-
dict truth ; but he confounds both. He sets the mind
at cavilling. He leaves a worm to gnaw at the core;
and then he goes his way. Just so I observe his deal-
ing when he speaks to God about Job. He opens his
mouth with a question — 'Does Job fear God for
nought ? '
So I at once take this general inference — that Satan
makes his first entries — not by violent attack, but by
secret sapping; and that he endeavors to confuse and
15
Vv. 1-5.
GENESIS III
Vv. 1-15.
cloud the mind which he is afterwards going to kill in
the dark.
I. Take the experience of a believer, and take the
facts recorded in Satan's history, and it is evident in
the outset that these questionings of the mind are
always to be taken as Satan's temptations. The his-
tory of paradise will be sufficient to show this. The
more you can resist these doubts as temptations, and
bring to bear upon them your defensive armour, as you
do in any moral temptation, and especially the more
you throw them off as not your own, and give them
back again, the sooner will be the victory; and the
sooner the trial will pass away.
II. With all Satan's views, his far end is to diminish
from the glory of God. You are wrong, if you think
his far end is to destroy your soul: you are wrong, if
you think his far end is to destroy the universe of
souls. He takes these but as a means to his highest
amibitious end: his final object is to derogate some-
thing from the Majesty of God. Against God is his
spleen directed ; therefore, to mar God's design, he
insinuated his wily coil into the garden of Eden; to
mar God's design, he met Jesus Christ in the wilder-
ness, on the mountain top, and on the pinnacle of the
temple; to mar God's design, he is always leading us to
take unworthy views of God's nature and God's work.
III. It is Satan's delight to make limitations — draw
boundary lines around grace. There is not a beauti-
ful doctrine, but he will try to diminish it, and draw
out of it, if he can, a proof of a limited gospel. He
is always saying — 'It is not for everybody: it is not
for all persons: but it is for "the elect" '. 'It is not
in everything; it does not go down into little parti-
culars.' And so he tries to make the very mind of
the child of God, which ought to be standing out in
perfect liberty, wherewith Christ hath made it free,
to be bound in the prison house. He detracts from
the largeness of God's love; he will not hold the
grandeur of universal love ; he will not hold particular
election : he hates both — because both glorify God.
Particular election, showing particular love, universal
redemption, the vastness of his compassion: therefore
both he would put away. Satan is always disparag-
ing or impugning universal redemption or individual
election.
IV. For all these confining, limiting views there is
but one remedy — it is to look at the character of God,
as He is revealed in the covenant of His grace. You
•will observe that this is exactly what our Saviour did.
When He was tempted, He threw Himself and Satan
back upon 'what is written'. — J. Vaughan, Fifty
Sermons (1874), p. 172.
THE TEMPTATION IN THE GARDEN OF
EDEN
'And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, ye shall
not eat of every tree of the Garden.' etc. — Genesis hi. 1-5.
How did the Tempter effect his purpose?
I. By a question.
(a) On the serpent-lips of the tempter it meant
this:—
'May you not settle for yourself what is morally
right and what is morally wrong, instead of obeying
the eternal law of right? May you not feel your-
self at liberty to disobey a command given you by
God?'
(0) Mark the subtlety of the question. God gave
His gifts largely, and placed on human freedom but
one limitation. But the tempter hides the love, and
aggravates the burden of the prohibition.
(c) How did Eve meet the question? Exactly as
you and I have met the same question when we have
been tempted to indulge in some unlawful gratifica-
tion. Do we not all listen as Eve listened, doubt as
she doubted, have hard thoughts of God as she had,
put a barrier where God has put none, and break
down defence where He has fixed it, and so place our-
selves at the tempter's mercy?
II. He makes the way to sin easy by removing all
fear of the consequences. There is the negation, 'ye
shall not surely die.'
III. But the seductive power could not stop there.
Man cannot live by doubt and by negation. Hence the
Satanic doubt and the Satanic negation are followed
by the Satanic promise.
(a) Note the malevolence of these words, 'God
doth know'. Is there not a marvellous consistency in
the story which puts that suggestion into the serpent's
mind?
(b) See the fascination of the promise: 'Ye shall
be as gods, knowing good and evil'. Addressed to that
which was noblest in man- — the largeness of his capa-
city, the grandeur of his aims, the infinite within him.
It was fascinating then to unsuspecting innocence, it
is fascinating still to us in our fallen condition, most
fascinating to those to whom God has given large
intellect and large hearts if they have not found
Him.
IV. Man has fallen through the tempter's art, but
man has also triumphed over the tempter. Christ
reversed the fall of man ; thus did He give our nature
its true exaltation and raise it to the right hand of
power. — J. J. S. Perowne, The Contemporary Pulpit,
vol. v. p. 119.
BEGINNING OF SIN AND REDEMPTION
Genesis hi. 1-15.
'The Fall,' says Dr. Cunningham Geikie, 'finds an
echo in every religion in the world.' In the Thibetan
story the first men were perfect like the gods ; but
they ate of the white sugar-sweet tree, and grew
corrupt. In the oldest Hindoo temples two figures
of Krishna are still seen, in one of which he is tramp-
ling on the crushed head of a serpent. In the museum
of the Capitol there is an old sarcophagus which
shows a naked man and woman standing beneath a
tree from which the man is about to pluck fruit.
The demon who tempts him is standing near.
There are no such thorns found in a state of nature,
says Dr. Hugh Macmillan, as those produced by
ground once tilled by man. In the waste clearings
of New Zealand and Canada, and around the ruined
16
Ver. 4.
GENESIS III
Ver. 4.
shieling on the Highland moor, thorns may be seen
which were unknown before.
References. — III. 1-15. — A. Maclaren, Expositions of
Holy Scripture — Genesis, p. 5. III. 1. — Spurgeon, Sermons
vol. xlvi. No. 2707. H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, Sunday Lessons,
vol. i. p. 185. C. J. Vaughan, Voices of the Prophets, p. 237.
Bishop Goodwin, Parish Sermons, vol. v. p. 17. R. S. Cand-
lish, Book of Genesis, vol. i. p. GO. III. 1-4. — G. W. Brameld,
Practical Sermons, p. 47. III. 3. — J. Keble, Sermons for the
Christian Year, vol. iii. p. 118.
THE SERPENT TEMPTING MAN
' And the Serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die.'
Genesis hi. 4.
There is no thought more awful than this: that sin
is all around and within us, and we know not what it
is. We are beset by it on every side; it dogs our
every way, draws our wills under its sway, and our-
selves under its dominion. It is a pestilence that
walketh in darkness, and nothing stays its advances.
It passes through all barriers, and pierces every
stronghold. In the beginning, we are told, sin was
not in the world, and that by one man's disobedience
sin hath entered. Ever since this time it has taken
up its abode here ; and it has been followed by death,
for 'death hath passed upon all men; for all have
sinned.' 'This much we do know: thai it is" a will
opposed to the will of God. A will which chooses
evil is a will opposed to the will of God.' In fact,
the will of man is in a state of rebellion against that
of God. Whence, then, came this clashing of wills,
this open rebellion, this presence of evil?
I. The first man, fresh from his Maker's hand,
placed in Paradise, and appointed lord of the earth,
was endowed with every requisite for developing his
God-given and God-inspired nature, and fulfilling his
destiny. But a tempter came to him from the midst
of the animal world, and man yielded to the tempta-
tion. But when we consider that Adam was lord of
this animal kingdom, and, moreover, that man alone
was endued with the gift of speech, it must be evident
that this tortuous animal was but the tool of that
evil and serpentine Spirit, Satan, 'that old serpent
called the Devil '. Under the form of this serpent, the
Wicked One therefore tempted man to his destruc-
tion. The temptation of the second Adam is the
counterpart of that of the first. Christ overcame,
that by His victory the dominion which Satan had
obtained over the whole human race, through the
Fall of the guilty pair, might be destroyed. The
Tempter approached our Lord openly, but he came
to man in disguise. It was a real serpent (not a dis-
guise or assumed form), perverted by Satan to be
the instrument of his temptation. Satan is still, as
he was from the beginning, himself a creature of God ;
and, as a creature, then, he made use of a creature to
carry out his designs. When, then, the temptation
came through one of the animal kingdom, it pro-
ceeded from a grade inferior to our first parents
themselves. There could, therefore, be no palliation
for their sin. Man had dominion over the beasts of
the field; he must not, therefore, take the law from
them. Besides, the presence of a spirit must have
been self-evident, for there was both speech and
reasoning power in the serpent. When, then, they
listened and were persuaded, their fall was without
excuse.
II. This will explain to us the sources of man's
temptation. We are here upon our trial. This life
is for us the time of our probation. We are free
agents, and by our own will and choice we determine
our eternal portion. Temptations are inevitable; no
one is exempt, for we are all on the same level of our
common humanity. 'To be forwarned is to be fore-
armed ;' it is therefore real wisdom on our part to
find out for ourselves the sources of temptation. In
the case of our first parents we notice that the first
source is: —
(1) The evil suggestion from without. Of all the
trees of the garden (including the Tree of Life) man
was allowed freely to eat, but it was forbidden him to
eat of 'the tree of knowledge of good and evil,' under
penalty of death. The command was definite and
precise ; the consequence of disobedience was made
clear to them. Here was a positive law, and this
moral code in its simplicity was sufficient for the
training of man's moral nature. Without such a test
of sincerity it could not have been perfected. Clearly,
then, if man fell, it could only be by the violation of
the Divine command.
(2) We find innocent tendencies, proclivities, which
are also a source of temptation from within. The
appetites, inclinations, and desires of our flesh are not
in themselves sin ; it is the indulgence of them under
wrong circumstances which constitutes the sin. They
may be the instruments of our sanctification as well
as our degradation — of holiness as well as sin. As
tendencies only they are perfectly innocent, they are
of God's appointment, and are the means of carrying
out some of His providential designs ; and not till
stimulated into action by evil suggestions from with-
out do they become sinful. Having, then, got an
evil suggestion from without, and possessing the
tendencies within, only the third source of temptation
is wanting to complete the sin.
(3) The opportunity for the sin itself. In solitude,
and away from the side of her natural protector, the
Tempter plied his temptation with terrible success.
Thus, these three sources of temptation having 'met
together and kissed each other,' the fall became in-
evitable.
III. The sin was committed by Eve alone. But
by Adam it was repeated through her, and therefore in
society. He fell through her influence. The tempted
became the tempter. The strong tempted the weak,
and again the weak tempted the strong. It is the
weak who do most harm in God's world. The com-
pletion of weakness is the weak tempting the strong.
References. — III. 4. — H. Alford, Quebec Chapel Ser-
mons, vol. i. p. 100. F. Bourdillon, Plain Sermons for Fam-
ily Reading (2nd series), p. 156. III. 4-6. — J. Bowstead,
Practical Sermons, vol. ii. p. 30.
17 2
Ver. 5.
GENESIS III
Ver. 6.
THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOOD AND EVIL
* And the Serpent said unto the woman, God doth know that in
the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and
ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil. — Genesis
hi. s.
Can we believe this story? Most certainly.
It must have happened, for it happens now. It may
well have been the first temptation, for it is the last,
the most subtle, and the most widespread in the world.
Let us notice.
I. This is a divinely inspired warning against a
common temptation. Because they cannot reconcile
the facts of science with these chapters many doubt
their Divine inspiration. But we need not seek for
proofs of the Divine Spirit in this writing. They lie
upon the surface. Three things it teaches which must
have come from God.
(a) All things were made by one God, and one only.
(b) All things were made by God, but one thing
God did not make — sin.
(c) Then here we have also that truth, afterwards
forgotten so long, and the rediscovery of which is re-
volutionizing the world to-day — the equality of woman
with man.
II. What, then, is the temptation against which
this passage warns us ? This temptation has been the
commonest down the ages, and it is the commonest to-
day. The majority of young men and women who are
lured from the paths of virtue and Christ are drawn
away by the idea that they will 'see life,' and if they
come back after as 'sadder' they will be 'wiser men'.
Intellectual doubt is affecting some, practical doubt
of the moral intuition is ruining more.
III. Let us consider the folly of yielding to this
temptation.
(a) Whatever wisdom can be won through sin, it is
at any rate not the highest wisdom.
(fc) Whatever wisdom is won through sin, it does
not enable us to compare sin and holiness.^
(c) Whatever wisdom comes through sin, it does
not teach us to know life.
(d) And yet it is a very subtle temptation. If
mistake it be, it seems such a little mistake. It is
symbolized by the apple. The eating of an apple was
so small a thing to work such tremendous ruin. — E.
Aldom French, God's Message Through Modern
Doubt, p. 90.
References. — III. 6. — Bishop Bethel, Sermons, vol. ii. p.
165. C. Perren, Outline Sermons, p. 222. A. G. Mortimer.
The Church's Lessons, vol. i. p. 196. J. Bush, A Memorial,
p. 91.
THE FALL
(For Sexagesimal Sunday)
'And when the woman saw th?.t the tree was good for food,
and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be de-
sired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and
did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her ; and
he did eat.' — Genesis hi. 6.
A voice, soft, melodious, insinuating, is heard by Eve
as she stands observing this strange tree, and on
turning she finds that it proceeds from a serpent.
I. The Temptation. — The voice utters a question
which perhaps we may venture to interpret in two
different ways, according to the tone and manner in
which the question was put. ' I have heard that
God has given you all the trees of the gardens but
one, to use for your own purposes and at your own
discretion. Mistress of this fair domain, to whom we
creatures are all of us subject, and to whom we
naturally look for instruction, tell me if it is so. To
you I come for information. I have no misgivings
as to the goodness and the wisdom of the Great
Creator; but I should like to have the matter ex-
plained to me.' Or it might express this thought:
'You do not really mean to tell me that God has
thrown a fence of prohibition round this wonderful
tree? If so — why should He do so? Why should
He deny you and your husband anything? You
have been accustomed to regard your Creator as a
Being of love and goodness. Is this shutting you off
from a part of your domain, this grudging you a fair
and noble possession, consistent with the opinion you
have hitherto entertained about Him? What do
you say, when you consider the matter calmly?'
Now, Eve seems to have taken the second interpreta-
tion ; and here you have the first injection of the poison.
The Tempter gets a footing in the mind of his victim
by insinuating just a little incipient doubt about the
goodness of God. It occurs to Eve that God was
not altogether what she had been accustomed to
think Him. Now at this point her duty was plain.
Clearly she had made a mistake in allowing herself
to be drawn into this colloquy at all, ignorant as she
was of the ways of the world, and of its dark secrets.
Some mischief had been done already, but it was not
yet irreparable. And conscience, stirring in the breast
of this child-woman, must surely have said, 'Quit
this place. It is dangerous ground. Speak no more
with this strange questioner. Too probably he is an
enemy of your God and you.' But, unfortunately
she remains, fascinated, as it would seem, and remains
to carry on the conversation, in what she considers
to be a generous defence of the God whom this
serpent so completely misunderstands — her very con-
tinuance of the colloquy showing that she is begin-
ning to waver.
How true a picture this is of our human life!
There is a fascination for us about what is forbidden.
II. The Fall.— The Tempter's work is done. He
has aimed at producing distrust of God, and he has
produced it. He has carried it on till it has become
a settled feeling. The love of God, which was once
in the woman's heart, naturally gave way when she
came to look upon God as one who grudged her the
highest gratification, the noblest position. And now
she is quite ready to throw aside her allegiance, to
act for herself, to aspire to that pre-eminence which
the Tempter has falsely promised her. And she con-
trives — one scarcely knows how — to draw her husband
into an infatuated participation in her folly and sin.
'She did eat, and gave also to her husband with her,
and he did eat.'
18
Ver. 8.
GENESIS III
Ver. 8.
III. The Practical Point to which I am anxious to
draw your special attention is this — that the aim
of the Tempter throughout was to induce Adam to
assert an independence of God, to claim for himself a
position of false self-dependence. It was not the
flavour of the fruit nor the beauty of the fruit that
attracted the man, although his imagination may
probably have thrown a glamour round the appear-
ance of the tree, and he may have seen it through a
misleading medium. We have no reason to suppose
that in any respect (save that of being prohibited)
the tree of knowledge of good and of evil differed
from the other trees of the garden. But the flavour
and the beauty were only means to an end. The
thing which snared Adam was the promise that he
should be as God, that he should be his own lord and
master, that he should rise to all the blessedness,
and dignity, and grandeur of a position in which he
should recognize and bow before no will but his own.
He was not beguiled so much by sensuality as by an
ungovernable desire for self-exaltation.
(a) Observe the consequences of the first trans-
gression. — It makes the transgressor, as sin always
does, mean and cowardly. It induces him, as it
always does, to justify himself and to lay the blame
on others. It makes him, as it always does, sneak -
ingly defiant of God. It disintegrates, as it always
does, instead of bringing and binding together; and
it separates two beings intended to love and to help
one another.
(o) We who believe in the Bible are sometimes
twitted with the utter insignificance of the whole
transaction. — Well, I suggest three considerations.
If a cobra bites me, the puncture is very trifling in-
deed, scarcely visible. Look at it, and you would say,
'A prick of a pin, nothing more'. But if bitten by a
cobra I shall be a dead man in an hour. Again, if
I steal only a penny, I am as truly guilty of dis-
honesty and of a breach of the law as if I stole a
hundred thousand pounds. And, again, if sin be a
virtual dethronement of the Supreme Governor of
the universe, an outraging of the moral order which
He has established amongst the myriads of creatures
under His sway, the whole apparatus of Redemption
— the Incarnation, the Death, and the Resurrection
of Jesus Christ — would have been needed to right the
derangement caused by the sin in the Garden of Eden,
even if not a single other sin had been committed
during all the successive generations of the human
race.
THE DIVINE ALLEGORY OF THE FALL
'And Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of
the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden.' — Genesis
HI. 8.
Nearly all the most eminent Biblical scholars are
now agreed that the clue to the meaning of this third
chapter of Genesis is to be found by regarding it as
an allegory or parable rather than as a historical
document in the modern sense of the term.
I. The truth is one truth, but its several aspects
are revealed in due order and sequence. As in a
drama, the story moves in from point to point with
increasing complication. The man shown to us is
made in the image of God — he is the crown and
summit of created things, in virtue of being a spirit-
ual creature. Therein lies the core of his significance.
But his moral nature is all unformed, undeveloped.
Having never been tried, he cannot be said to possess
a character. The narrative in Genesis helps us to
understand through what experiences man outgrew
his infantile condition, and how becoming conscious
of a moral law, he became at the same time aware of
the inward discord which is the result of a breach of
law. Here, if anywhere, Adam, the first man, stands
for us all. His craving for a false independence, his
initial act of rebellion, his acquisition of a guilty
knowledge of good and evil, his expulsion from the
Garden of Eden, are the door through which he
passes into the possibility of self-knowledge, and of
moral freedom, won at the cost of effort and suffering.
II. Again, the first sin of Scripture is in some sort
the type of all our sins. They grow out of a common
root. In the language of morals, they are a revolt
against the pressure of rules and obligation felt to be
in conflict with personal desires. In the language
of the Bible, they spring from a state of rebellion
against God and the order established by Him. All
our worst sins, too, are marked with a certain reck-
lessness of consequences. In our blindness and in-
fatuation, we excuse ourselves, but the author of the
record of Genesis does not stop here. He shows us
in poetic imagery the inward as well as the outward
consequences of any deliberate act of rebellion. All
sin, until with repentance comes pardon, alters the
relation between the creature and the Creator. An
estranging cloud comes between the soul and God.
III. Real religion stands and falls with the belief
in a personal God, and in realizing the need of com-
munion with Him. When once we destroy, or tamper
with, the conviction that we are living, or should be
living, in spiritual contact with a Divine Being who
has revealed Himself to us, in His Son, worship ceases
to have any real meaning. Competent observers have
remarked that a reluctance to think of themselves as
spiritual creatures in contact with God is one of the
characteristics of those who have drunk most deeply
of the spirit of this restless, inquiring age. Let us
consider briefly one or two forms in which this re-
luctance manifests itself.
(a) One is levity, born of shallowness, like that of
the Athenians who scoffed at St. Paul when he spoke
to them of the resurrection of the dead.
(6) Another way of hiding from God is the re-
fusal to listen to the voice of conscience when it con-
demns us, the ingrained habit of slipping away from
reminders of duties neglected and obligations left un-
fulfilled, so finely delineated by George Eliot in the
character of Tito Melema.
(c) We can be hiding from God even while we
flatter ourselves that we are seeking His face. Even
religion may be so perverted so as to become a
19
Ver. 8.
GENESIS III
Ver. 15.
deadening influence when we identify it with opinions,
or party views, or zeal for dogma, or external things
like ceremonies, or forms of worship, or matters of
Church order and discipline. — J. W. Shepard, Light
and Life, p. 141.
ADAM AND EVE— THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD
'And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the
garden in the cool of the day.'— Genesis hi. 8.
I. We see Adam and Eve in the opening chapter of
Genesis surrounded by the creatures that God had
made, like those lower creatures in many respects, and
yet absolutely different in one — the possession of a
soul created in the image of God, and as they were
created in the image of God, they were endowed with
many great gifts — for instance knowledge.
(a) Through experience we have gained much know-
ledge, and by being taught have made our own what
other people gathered by experience, but Adam and
Eve had no parents, yet they had a very great know-
ledge of the world and its powers, and that knowledge
was the direct gift of God.
(b) They not only knew about God, but knew God
in the intimate intercourse of communion with Him,
and this was the great gift which they lost to a very
great extent by their sin.
(c) But yet this knowledge has been more than re-
stored to us through our Lord Jesus Christ.
II. Both of these sorts of knowledge we may have.
(a) The first imperfectly; by the labour of investi-
gation.
(6) We may know too about God, for He has given
us a revelation about Himself, and has given us an in-
fallible guide in His Church to interpret that revela-
tion, and His Holy Spirit in our hearts to help us
to understand it. — A. G. Mortimer, Stories from
Genesis.
References.— III. 8, 9. — Spurgeon, Sermon*, vol 1. No.
2900. H. P. Liddon, Cambridge Lent Sermons (1864), p. 23.
H. Hayman, Sermons in Rugby School Chapel, p. 159. W.
Mellor, Village Homilies, p. 212. G. Matheson, Moments on
the Mount, p. 1. H. Macmillan, The Olive Leaf, p. 241. C.
Kingsley, Gospel of the Pentateuch, p. 41. Spurgeon, Evening
by Evening, p. 184. J. Keble, Sermons for Septuagesima, p.
139. G. Calthrop, Pulpit Recollections, p. 16. T. Birkett
Dover, A Lent Manual, p. 1. W. Hay Aitken, Mission
Sermons (2nd series), p. 1. C. J. Vaughan, Penny Pulpit,
No. 3263. J. Vaughan, Sermons to Children (1875), p. 177.
J. Van Oosterzee, The Year of Salvation, vol. i. p. 5. Spur-
geon, Sermons, vol. vii. No. 412. G. Brooks, Five Hundred
Outlines, p. 276. III. 9. — W. F. Shaw, Sermon Sketches, p.
32. E. A. Bray, Sermons, vol. i. p. 44. J. Keble, Sermons
for Septuagesima to Ash Wednesday, p. 103; Sermons for the
Christian Year, vol. ii. p. 129. III. 10.— R. Hiley, A Year's
Sermons, vol. ii. p. 65. III. 12. — C. Kingsley, The Good
News of God, p. 347.
Genesis hi. 12.
'Adam, in the Garden of Eden, said, "The woman gave
it to me, and I did eat," but he was held responsible
for his actions nevertheless ; and this is the great lesson
to be taught to persons of feeble will and persons of
arbitrary will alike.' — Dr. S. Bryant in Studies in
Character, p. 162.
Reference. — III. 14, 15. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxvi.
No. 2165.
THE GOSPEL OF GENESIS
'It shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.' —
Genesis hi. 15.
Theologians have a special name for this text. They
term it the 'Protevangelium,' which being interpreted
is the 'First Gospel'. Who uttered this first Evangel?
God Himself. To whom was the Protevangelium ut-
tered? To Satan.
I. The Saviour's Injury to Satan. — 'Her seed — it
shall bruise thy head.' The margin of the Revised
Version renders it 'shall lie in wait for thy head'.
It has also been rendered 'shall break thy head'.
An Indian Missionary told me the other day that in
the East every one would understand such an allusion.
A serpent is being addressed, and the poison-bag of
a serpent is on or near the serpent's head. An East-
ern, my friend assured me, would at once perceive that
by lying in wait for a bruising or breaking the head
of the serpent was meant the destroying of the poison-
bag, so that though the creature might still live, its
death-dealing power was done away. The Prote-
vangelium is fulfilled in the Incarnate Saviour. When
He became 'the seed of the woman' He accomplished
this prediction in great degree.
(a) What a death-blow to Satan was and is the
character of our Lord. Man is by the Incarnation
shown to be capable of moral and spiritual victory.
The character of Christ is at once the great proof of
His duty, and the great prophecy of man's glory.
(b) The teachings of Christ verify this Gospel pro-
phecy. No marvel Satan loathes these heavenly or-
acles, and seeks to suppress them. Seen from every
angle they are matchless. Compare them with the
canonical sayings of other religions, and they are as
sunlight as to shadow. Christ flashed on the mind
of man the most splendid theology the universe has
known.
(c) The death of Christ lent to this message its
great fulfilment. Our Lord's death was no mere in-
dividual death. It was a representative death. It
was a generous death. Some one has termed it a
'borrowed' death. Such indeed it was. If the poison-
bag is ever to be plucked from the destroying serpent,
only a Divine Being can do it, and only a dying God.
Jesus conquered the foe after He seemed hopelessly
conquered by the foe. Our heavenly Achilles, albeit
His wounded heel, plucked in triumph the serpent's
poison-bag away.
(d) 'It shall bruise thy head.' This sure word is
realized in the exaltation of Christ. Everything in
Christianity depends on our Lord's physical resurrec-
tion. If Christ be not risen there is no Christianity.
(e) We see a delightful illustration of the fulfilment
of this earliest Gospel promise in the conversion of
sinners. Whenever a soul turns trustfully to Jesus,
Satan's head is bruised.
20
Ver. 15.
GENESIS III
Vv. 16-18.
(/) The sanctification ofChristians has this outcome.
Beautiful lives deal Satan trenchant blows. Godliness
is never merely defensive it is grandly offensive.
(<7) Our Lord's return will give the Protevangelium
its most illustrious verification. Satan will be de-
stroyed with the brightness of His coming.
II. Satan's injury to the Saviour.
(a) The Conquering Christ is to be wounded in the
struggle. Assuredly this prediction was fulfilled in the
earthly sufferings of Christ. It was and is so in the
trials of His People. All His servant's wounds are
His wounds. 'Why persecutest thou me?' He in-
quired of the astonished Saul of Tarsus.
(6) The sorrows of the universe help to realize this
pathetic prophecy. Nature and man are in a groaning
and travailing state. There is an undertone of sad-
ness everywhere and in everything. The universe He
created and which He mystically indwells pains Him
by its pains.
(c) But the sin of the world is the most terrible
illustration of this prophetic truth. By means of the
iniquity of men the serpent bruises the Saviour's heel.
Sinners indeed know not what they do. — Dinsdale
T. Young, The Enthusiasm of God, p. 79.
THE PROPHECY OF THE BRUISINQS
' I will put emnity between these (the serpent) and the woman,
and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy
head and thou shalt bruise his head.' — Genesis hi. 15.
There is to be conflict between Christ and Satan,
between good and evil — perpetual conflict. In this
conflict victory will come to one side, but bruisings
to both.
I. Can we have the victory without the bruisings?
As we read in his biography, Bishop Creighton in his
early years was visited by a dream of this kind. His
theory of life, as he then held it, is not very clearly ex-
pressed, but perhaps we shall do him no injustice if
we say that he was determined to be cheerful and
content in all circumstances, to do his own work, to
recognize his limitations, and so far as he could to
keep himself free of strife. He knew that he could
give to the world some valuable literary work, if he
had leisure in which to prepare it. From the sanguin-
ary conflicts of the world and the Church he shrank.
For one thing he had a strong sense of the impotence
of man. Man does his best and is foiled. His defeat
is not due to the strength of his human foes, but to the
sudden interposition of a power above. Against that
power it is vain to fight.
II. But we may have the bruisings without the
victory. It is possible so to be overborne by the
pangs and losses and defeats of the Christian soldier
as to lose faith in Divine love and providence. There
is an awful possibility of giving over prayer, of com-
ing to think that the Lord's ear is heavy that He can-
not hear, and His arm shortened that He cannot save.
III. What then does the promise mean? It means
that wherever Christ is there is conflict. That is the
token and foundation of hope. There is enmity be-
tween the Son of man and evil and that enmity never
dies. But the Son of man and his legions are bruised
in the fighting. Some dream of a triumph won with-
out pain or pang, but it is a vain dream.
IV. But the victory is sure because the leader is
Christ. He did not fight merely as an example to
His soldiers. His contest is much more than an
addition to the records of heroism that keep the
world alive. He breathes His spirit into His soldiers
and He is the Conqueror. The time and the manner
we must leave with Him, but He asks us to throw
ourselves into the conflict, and He promises us the
interpretation of reverse and delay in the world where
burdens are unbound and wounds healed and mortal-
ity swallowed up of life. — W. Robertson Nicoll,
The Garden of Nuts, p. 219.
References. — III. 15. — Phillips Brooks, Twenty Ser-
mons, p. 93. J. Monro Gibson, Ages hefore Moses, p. 98.
Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxii. No. 1326.
THE STORY OF THE FALL
'Unto the woman He said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow
and thy conception,' etc. — Genesis hi. 16-18.
By the Fall sin entered in, and by sin a change passed
over the whole world. The change affected the moral
relations of man. In becoming disobedient to God
he lost all control over himself. While subject to
the Divine Will, he wielded absolute power over his
own nature. His passions were then pure ones, held
in a bond of unity and subjection. But when he re-
belled, they rebelled too, and warred one against the
other, bringing in turn the will into bondage to them.
His will revolted against his Maker, and it became
one with the will of the Evil One; it moved in con-
cert with it, and became part of the evil which was in
the world. Man represented the antagonistic power
which broke the unity of God's kingdom ; his will
was diametrically opposed to that of God. Such is
sin.
I. The moral consequences and chastisement of the
Fall.
(1) Man was driven away from the Presence of
God; and from two causes, shame and fear.
Ashamed, for they knew that they were naked;
afraid, for they feared to meet their Maker. They
had lost ' that ignorance of innocence which knows
nothing of nakedness '. That it was the conscience
which was really at work is evidenced by their fear,
which impelled them to hide themselves. Man in his
innocence knew nothing of either shame or fear.
And this, too, is the peculiar trait of childhood.
Adam was ashamed, but yet he thought more of the
consequences of sin than of the sin itself ; more of his
nakedness than of having broken the commandment
of God. And so it ever is now; men think more of
the pain, the shame, the publicity, the humiliation
induced by sin, than the transgression itself. But an
evil conscience still fears to be alone with God; and
like Adam, the sinner would fain hide himself.
(2) The second moral consequence of the Fall is
selfishness. That is the love and consequent indul-
gence of self ; the liking to have one's own way for the
21
Vv. 16-18.
GENESIS III., IV
Vv. 3, 4, 5.
sake of having it. It is the root of all personal sin.
It is the getting another centre besides the true one,
round which we live and move and have our being.
It brings the wills of us all into collision with the
rule and will of the Eternal Good One. It is to re-
volve round ourselves, instead of making God the
centre of our thoughts, feelings, opinions, actions,
and aspirations. Everywhere there is mutual de-
pendence, mutual support, and co-operation. ' No
man liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself,'
even in the body politic (2 Cor. v. 15). Where,
then, is any place for selfishness in religion? We
cannot keep it to ourselves ; our light must shine
before men, that they may glorify the Great Father
in Heaven. Christ has given us something outside
ourselves to live for: the poor, the sick, sinners at
home, heathen abroad, and all who need our help and
prayers. Further, as Adam and Eve showed their
selfishness by their cowardice in hiding, and by the
severity with which they regarded the sin of the
other, while lenient to their own share in the trans-
gression, so it is still; the sinner first throws the
blame on others as tempters, and then upon circum-
stances which God has ordained.
II. The penal consequences or chastisement of the
Fall were threefold :—
( 1 ) The curse fell upon the ground. By man's sin
came death ; death passed from man into the rest of
creation, pervading the whole; and the curse fell on
the ground (Gen. in. 17, 18; Rom. vm. 22).
(2) The second penal consequence was the impossi-
bility of ease ; pain to woman, toil to man, and finally
death to both. There was to be no rest for either
the weaker or the stronger, for the tempter or the
tempted (Gen. in. 16-19).
(3) The third penal consequence was the being
shut out from the trees of knowledge and life (Gen.
in. 22-21). After the germ of death had penetrated
into man's nature, through sin, it was Mercy which
prevented his taking of the Tree of Life, and thus
living for ever; the fruit which produced immortal-
ity could only do him harm. Immortality in a state
of sin and misery is not that eternal life which God
designed for man. Man's expulsion from Eden was
for his ultimate good ; while exposing him to physical
death, it preserved him from eternal or spiritual
death. And man, too, was shut out from the Tree
of Knowledge. We all know this by bitter experi-
ence. With what difficulty knowledge of any kind
is obtained ; what intense application and labour are
required. There is no royal road to learning; we
must pay the prices — sweat of brain — if we would un-
lock its priceless treasures.
Lastly, consider the future hopes of the human
race. The first ground of hope is from what we were
originally. Man was created in the likeness of God —
perfect, upright, pure, and holy. What we have
been, that we shall be. The second ground is from
the evidence we have in our own feelings, that we
were born for something higher; this world cannot
satisfy us. ' We seek a better country, that is, a
heavenly ' (see Phil. in. 13, 14). The third ground is
from the curse pronounced on evil. A true life
fought out in the spirit of God's truth shall conquer
at last. ' The seed of the woman shall bruise the
serpent's head' (Gen. in. 15). The spiritual seed
culminated in Christ. But, remember, except we
are in Christ, we are in guilt. ' We are yet in our
sins ' ; for, ' as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall
all be made alive '.
Reference. — III. 18. — Spurgeon Sermons, vol. xxxix.
No. 2290.
' In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.' — Genesis m. 19.
' It may be proved, with much certainty, that God
intends no man to live in this world without work-
ing: but it seems to me no less evident that He
intends every man to be happy in his work. It is
written, "in the sweat of thy brow," but it was never
written, "in the breaking of thine heart," thou shalt
eat bread.' — Ruskin, On the Old Road, vol. i.
References.— III. 19.— Bishop Goodwin, Parish Ser-
mons, vol. v. p. 32. S. Baring-Gould, Village Preaching for
a Year, vol. i. p. 137. III. 20.— L. D. Bevan, Christ and the
Age, p. 227. III. 21.— L. D. Bevan, Christ and tlw Age, p.
209. J. Keble, Sermons for Septuagesima to Ash Wednesday,
p. 108; Sermons for the Christian Year, vol iii. p. 181. III.
22. — L. D. Bevan, Christ and the Age, p. ll»3. J. Martineau,
Endeavour after the Christian Life, p. 34 (2nd series). III.
22-24. — L. D. Bevan, Christ and the Age, p. 243. III. 23. —
F. Bourdillon, Plain Sermons for Family Reading, p. 38.
III. 23. — C. E. Shipley, Miscellaneous Sermons, p. 13. III.
24. — J. Wright, The Guarded Gate, p. 9. M. Biggs, Prac-
tical Sermons on Old Testament Subjects, p. 20. III. — F. W.
Robertson, Notes on Genesis, p. 24. A. Maclaren, Exposi-
tions of Holy Scripture — Genesis, p. 10.
Genesis iv.
' Marriage, which has been the bourne of so many
narratives, is still a great beginning, or it was to
Adam and Eve, who kept their honeymoon in Eden,
but had their first little one among the thorns and
thistles of the wilderness. It is still the beginning of
the home epic — the gradual conquest or irremediable
loss of that complete union which makes the ad-
vancing years a climax, and age the harvest of sweet
memories in common.' — George Eliot, Middlemarch.
CAIN AND ABEL
'Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the
Lorfl, and Abel he also brought of the firstlings of his
flock and the fat thereof, and the Lord had respect unto
Abel and his offering, but unto Cain and his offering He
had not respect.'— Genesis iv. 3, 4, 5.
We perceive that both these brothers recognized the
duty and obligation of religious worship, but when
their offerings were brought God did not receive them
both alike.
I. From the nature of Abel's offering, through
faith, he presented a more acceptable sacrifice than
Cain. There is every reason to believe that the
offering up of animals in sacrifice to God (which was
the ancient way of worship) was no idea of man's;
man would never, probably, have thought of such
a thing had he not been taught to do so by Divine
22
Ver. 4.
GENESIS IV
Ver. 7.
instruction. Adam, after his fall, was probably in-
structed in this, for the animals from whose skins
they were clothed must have been slain, and as God
did not then permit the eating of animal food, these
animals will doubtless have been slain in sacrifice;
the slaughtered animals being types of a crucified
Saviour, the skins types of Christ's righteousness, in
which every saved sinner must be clothed.
II. Still the reason why Abel was preferred to
Cain was not merely the nature of his offering, but
the spirit, the frame of mind in which he offered it.
He had faith or belief in man's fallen condition, he
believed in the entrance of sin, he believed in death,
he believed in that Saviour in whose blood he him-
self and all others who would be accepted by God
must alone be cleansed. On the other hand, Cain
by his offering shows that he had no faith in the
promise of a Saviour, that he did not believe in the
fall — no faith in the entrance of sin, no faith in the
promise of a Saviour, that he did not believe in
the cleansing blood of Christ. — E. J. Brewster,
Scripture Characters, p. 1.
Reference. — IV. 3-16. — A. Maclaren, Expositions of
Holy Scripture — Genesis, p. 14.
ABEL THE UNDEVELOPED
'And the Lord had respect unto Abel.'— Genesis iv. 4.
Abel personified something which did not pertain
to any special age, something which was cosmopoli-
tan and therefore everlasting. By that cosmopolitan
quality Abel was kept alive — alive amid the changing
environment, alive amid the traces of the dead; he
has a present voice — he yet speaketh.
I. What is this quality of which Abel is the in-
augurator, and by whose inauguration he lives? He
is the representative of all the great who die young.
The Picture is meant to declare that no really great
work is ever interrupted.
II. Its simple features show that Cain is a child
of the dust ! Abel is a product of the Divine breath.
Both the brothers are religious, so far as the form
of worship is concerned, both offer a sacrifice. The
difference between the dust and the divinity does not
lie in the diversity of these men's gifts, but in the
diversity of their spirit.
III. The offerings are made, and each brother re-
tires to his home. Time passes ; and by and by
there happens a strange thing. These brothers meet
with opposite destinies. Abel has a splendid year.
For Cain the wheel of fortune has turned the opposite
way, and he is filled with indignation. His is the
anger of a man defrauded. To him the aggravation
is not so much his failure as the fact that he has
failed where his brother has succeeded. Cain has
begun with covetousness and has developed into
envy. The sin of the garden has become procreative.
Adam had been content to say, ' All these things
shall be mine ' ; Cain has reached the darker thought,
' They at least shall not be my brother's '.
IV. In the view of the early spectator, Abel has
not finished his work of sacrifice. It is only a germ-
cell that has appeared when he is called away. His
was a protest in favour of the higher over the lower
life; a protest against utilitarian worship, against
buying and selling in the temple of God. But it
was his own higher life that he vindicated. — G.
Matheson, The Representative Men of the Bible,
p. 45.
References. — IV. 4. — G. Brooks, Outlines of Sermons, p.
376. IV. 5-7.— J. Oates, The Sorrow of God, p. 81.
JEALOUSY
'Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell.' — Genesis iv. 5.
This cannot be considered too weak a motive to carry
so enormous a crime. Even in a highly civilized age
we find an English statesman saying: 'Pique is one
of the strongest motives in the human mind. Fear
is strong but transient. Interest is more lasting, per-
haps, and steady, but weaker; I will ever back pique
against them both. It is the spur the devil rides the
noblest tempers with, and will do more work with
them in a week than with other poor jades in a
twelvemonth.' — Marcus Dods.
CAIN— WORSHIP
'And the Lord said unto Cain, Why art thou wroth ? and why
is thy countenance fallen ? If thou dost well, shalt thou
not be accepted ? And if thou dost not well, sin lieth at
thy door.' — Genesis iv. 6, 7.
Sin came into the world with Adam and Eve; then
its fatal seed was planted in human nature.
I. Cain's sin was not only the sin of murder, but
it began as all sin does, in disobedience to God. All
sin is against God because it is breaking God's law.
II. Ever since the time of Cain there have been
two ways in which people have worshipped God- —
either according' to God's revealed commands or
according to their own private opinion. There are a
great many people who will tell you that it does not
matter how you worship God, so long as you are sin-
cere, but the Bible shows us again and again from
the time of Cain right through its whole history that
God will not accept worship which is founded on
self-will and disobedience. — A. G. Mortimer, Stories
from Genesis, p. 44
Reference. — IV. 6., 7. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxii.
No. 1929.
'Sin lieth at the door.' — Genesis iv. 7.
' Amongst the proverbial sayings of the Welsh, which
are chiefly preserved in the form of triads, is the
following one: "Three things come unawares upon a
man, sleep, sin, and old age". This saying holds
sometimes good with respect to sleep and old age,
but never with respect to sin. Sin does not come
unawares upon a man: God is just, and would never
punish a man, as He always does, for being overcome
by sin, if sin were able to take him unawares ; and
neither sleep nor old age always come unawares upon
a man.' — From Borrow's Wild Wales, ch. lviii.
References. — IV. 7. — A. W. Momerie, The Origin of
Evil, p. 101. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture —
Genesis, p. 22.
23
Vv. 8-16.
GENESIS IV
Ver. 9.
THE CRIME OF CAIN
Genesis iv. 8-16.
' In a famous picture in the Louvre, the painter shows
us — amidst wan lights — pale crime fleeing, pursued
by Truth and Justice. They hover as avengers over-
head, armed with the torch and the sword. The
criminal does not see them, perhaps, but the restless
anxiety on his forehead tells us that he feels their
threatenings — I might almost say that their breath
burns him. Human punishments are not always
certain, for God reserves His hour; but the sinner,
even if he does not always lose health, fortune, life,
honour, feels none the less at his heels the pursuers
who threaten to plunge him into the abyss where all
is lost and broken. That fugitive, if we like, is Cain,
the eternal image of the sinner — even the sinner who
is unknown to men — the image of all those unknown
Cains who have trembled, who tremble, or will some
day tremble, at the mighty voice of God. ... It was
no fiction which Victor Hugo invented in his poem
on "Conscience". It is the Bible he is transposing,
it is the history of the sinner he is symbolizing w,hen
he represents him to us in his verses as "dishevelled,
pale in the midst of tempests — Cain, who is fleeing
before Jehovah !" While his weary family are asleep,
he can take no rest. He is haunted with the vision
of the look of God, of conscience, which penetrates
the thickest darkness.
Au fond des cieux funebres
II vit un ceil tout grand ouvert dans les tenebres
Et qui le regardait dans P ombre fixement.
Vainly does he pursue his sinister flight. Even if he
went to the world's end, he would find there the
same gaze and the same terror. Neither the canvas
of tents nor the precincts of towers — neither solitude
nor the whirlwind of pleasure — can tear the sinner
away from himself; neither life nor the grave can tear
him away from God. Against God, against remorse,
we cannot wall up either the gate of cities or the
gate of hearts. That ancestral criminal, that first
homicide, the murderer of Abel, symbolizes all the
others, not alone those who have shed blood, but
those who have soiled their souls with more wicked
murders or have dragged into evil the souls of others,
their innocent brothers. For them as for him, under
some dark vault, some lurking-place beneath the
earth:
L'oeil etait dans la tombe et regardait Cain ! '
Jules Pacheu, Psychologie des Mystiques Chre-
tiens, pp. 47-49.
Reference. — IV. 8. — A. Phelps, The Old Testament, p.
137.
THE EVANGELIZATION OF THE WORLD
'Am I my brother's keeper ?*— Genesis iv. 9.
I. Your brothers! where are they? Ask Jesus
Christ. Did He not say, 'When I am lifted up
from the earth, I shall draw all men unto Me ' ?
They are everywhere: they are not merely those who
love and respect you, but those who despise and hate
you, friends and enemies alike.
II. You are the guardians of your brothers. Their
interests are your interests, their welfare yours. This
general truth presents itself under two aspects. Man
is twofold by nature. He has a body and a soul.
He suffers in both. Hence arises a double mission,
at once to relieve temporal miseries and to save souls.
(a) You ought to compassionate and alleviate the
temporal distresses of your neighbours.
(b) If, however, you comprehend the true dignity
of the soul, the spiritual life and its immortal destiny
and bliss, will you not desire to awaken others to the
higher realities and possibilities of this being?
III. The love of souls! All the time the Church
has lived the life of the Master it has more than felt
this love; it has been penetrated by it. This is why
there is in the new age and in modern life a fact un-
known to antiquity, a fact peculiar to Christianity,
to wit, missions. Christianity alone could give birth
to them. You may be disposed to disparage them,
but have you ever seriously reflected what civilized
Europe would have given to pagan populations if
Christian missionaries had not been there? Rifles
and other fire-arms wherewith to destroy each other:
brandy and opium, to brutalize and to degrade !
IV. But souls to save are not only in the far
distant plains of earth. They are in your family, in
your dwelling, at your hearth. They are in your
streets and fields and workshops. They ply your
Christian calling. Whilst therefore you endeavour
to cherish a love which would embrace the whole
earth, let those whom God has given to you be yet
the first recipients of that love. — J. Miller, from the
French of E. Bersier's Sermons Literary and Scien-
tific, p. 202.
HOME MISSIONS
'And the Lord said . . . Where is . . . thy brother? And
he said, I know not : am I my brother's keeper? ' — Genesis
IV. 9.
God's question ! Man's answer ! It is not God's first
question, for He had already addressed to Adam — as
to the representative of the human race — that per-
sonal inquiry which the Holy Spirit still brings home
to every heart convicted of sin, to every man when
he first realizes that he is naked before God and longs
to hide himself from Him : ' Where art thou ? ' No !
this is God's second question, ' Where is thy brother ? '
And just as the first question was addressed to man
upon his first conviction of sin, so this second question
is addressed to man after his first struggle with his
fellow-man. It is asked of the victor concerning the
vanquished in the cruel competition of life, ' Where
is thy brother ? ' Cain's answer, ' I know not,' was
a lie, as most selfish answers are; but the important
point occurs in the latter part of his reply, wherein
he embodied, in the form of a counter-question, the
great principle which God had so far only implied.
In doing so he sent ringing down the ages a
question, the answer to which must, to the latest
24
Ver. 9.
GENESIS IV
Ver. 9.
chapter of earth's history, divide men into two
classes.
I. This Question is of the very Essence of the
Gospel Principle — It is at the very centre, and not
at the circumference of spiritual things in the system
of Christ. It is absolutely fundamental in the new
or Christian covenant: for whereas the Law asked a
man the question ' Where art thou ? ' the Gospel
passed on at once to the more far-reaching question,
' Where is thy brother ? ' It made a man essentially
his brother's keeper, and the principles of spiritual
citizenship were enunciated by our Lord with the
express purpose of bringing home to each one of us,
His followers, this responsibility, and enabling each
one of us to discharge it.
II. What is the very First Principle of Heavenly
Citizenship as laid down by Christ Jesus our Lord
upon the mount ? ' Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.' And what did
He mean by it? Surely that the first condition of
heavenly possession is the absolute renunciation by
the human spirit of all claim to personal ownership
of any earthly possession, whether it be property or
time, or talent or opportunity, with which it may
have been entrusted by God. And what said He
next? ' Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall
be comforted.' What did our Lord mean by this
but that the second great principle of His kingdom is
this: that it is an impossibility for His true follower
to be really happy as long as some one else is sad ;
that even the enjoyment of the Gospel is to be con-
sidered imperfect as long as there be those who know
not of it, or have not accepted it; that the heavenly
citizen will feel his brother's sorrow, his brother's
pain; that he will mourn for his brother's sadness.
Are not these the two principles which have been
ignored or slurred over by the modern Church of
Christ? Do not we feel that we need their re-stating
in no uncertain terms? Is it not just at this point
that the Church of Christ has failed in her efforts to
grapple with the Home Mission problem of our day?
It is the greatest problem that the Church of Christ
has got to deal with to-day ; and it is the problem
which is nearest to her hand — that of the overgrown
populations in the poorer parts of our great cities.
III. It is the Modern Lazarus who, by the exi-
gencies of nineteenth and twentieth century life, has
been laid at our gate full of sores.
(a) Look at the physical sore, the unhealthy sur-
roundings, the fetid air of the close alleys or filthy
slums. That atmosphere is full of evil of all descrip-
tion.
(b) Look at the social sore. — The people are not
only herded together, but they are so far of a dead
level of one class of society — and that the most help-
less class — that there is no man to become a leader
amongst his fellows.
(c) Look at the moral sore. — See those public-
houses at every street-corner, and abounding in all"
directions, like the links of a chain which bind the
people to their sin so that they cannot break away.
(d) Look at the financial sore. — The poor are
herded in one district by themselves, and the rich
(who should be their leaven, the very stewards of
God in this matter) are congregated together else-
where. Time was when master and man lived near
together, and they took an interest in each other's
welfare; but the masters now live far afield, in the
residential districts, and the men congregate in dense
masses nearer to the place of their employment.
Such is the Lazarus of poverty and misery and sin
which is at our gate — the gate of every great city in
our land — to-day. We need not stay to ask how it
came to be there or whose fault it is that things are as
they are. Selfishness and sin, we may be pretty sure,
have had much to do with it. The great point to
notice is that in the providence of God this poor man,
this Lazarus with all his sores, is laid at our gate,
that he is our brother, and that he is in our keeping.
IV. What are we Going to do with Him? —
Social movements, political movements, labour
movements, have all their own part — and a very im-
portant part — to take in this matter, but it will re-
quire the balm of Gilead, the spiritual medicine of the
Great Physician, even of Christ, the anointing of the
Holy Ghost, before these terrible sores can be healed.
And to this intent some one must needs go to Lazarus
and tend and care for him. — T. Brocas Waters.
KEEPING OUR BROTHER
'Am I my brother's keeper?' — Genesis iv. 9.
You remember the connexion in which these words
were asked. They were the words of a man as he
stood forth in the presence of Almighty God with
his hands red with the blood of his murdered brother.
It was an excuse which fell from the lips of a man
who knew perfectly well that he was his brother's
keeper, and it is the same excuse which has risen to
the lips of men and women from that day forward —
men and women who have been false to a charge
which has been given to them, to the souls and bodies
committed to their care, who have disgraced their
humanity by neglecting those whom God has put it
into their power to help.
I. Who is my Brother? — ' Am I my brother's
keeper ? ' Who is my brother ? Think of Calvary
and of the outstretched arms of the Saviour, and see
there the answer to the question — who is my brother?
Those arms stretched wide, that He might embrace
the whole world. He teaches us, even though upon
the cross, that all men are His brothers. And so
when we ask ' Who is my brother : of whom am I the
keeper ? ' the answer is, every one whom God has
given you, every one whom you have the power to
help, even though it be but by the kind word spoken
— we are their keeper, and God looks to you to see
to it that they learn from you something of His love
and care.
II. How am I to 'keep' him? — 'Who is my
brother ; and how am I to help him ? ' Just look
for one moment at the way in which Christ helped
those across whom He came.
25
Ver. 9.
GENESIS IV
Ver. 9.
(a) Help for the body. — Christ was surrounded
daily by crowds of sick and suffering and poor. Think
of the bodily suffering in its two great forms in which
you and I know it — the suffering which comes from
poverty and sickness — and see how He dealt with it.
You remember in the miracle of the feeding of the
four thousand that Christ said : ' Ye seek Me not
because ye saw the works, but because ye did eat of
the loaves and were filled '. But though He knew it
was simply curiosity sometimes, or bodily suffering,
hunger and want and poverty, still out of the abund-
ance of His heart He did not deny them. Simply
because they were hungry and poor He gave them to
eat. And so Christ tells us to do to-day. What we
very often forget is that those He has left with us
are His representatives. ' The poor, the hungry, the
stricken in Body,' He says, ' they are My representa-
tives, and He that does it to one of these does it to
Me'.
(b) Help for the Soul. — But we not only think of
the way Christ dealt with actual bodily suffering
amongst the poor people He came across; we re-
member the duty that the Church of Christ has to
souls of men. Christ rarely wrought a miracle with-
out at the same time touching the soul. And so it is
to be with His Church. All systems, however valuable,
which would try to make men better off as regards
their state avail nothing until they touch the soul.
(c) The wider call. — Next we must look away from
our own home, and think of those in our neighbour-
hood, our town, our country, and even abroad. They
are all our brethren, for whom we have work to do.
We have to send the Gospel of Christ to those thou-
sands of additional people who are annually crowding
into our great cities. These vast multitudes of people
spreading out from the centre of the town or city into
the suburbs, what do they find? No religious privi-
leges, no church, no minister at all. And you say:
' Of course, if they want a church they must build
one '. Yes, but they do not want a church. Theji
need it badly, but it is about the last thing that some
of them want. We must be ready, therefore, when-
ever we are asked, to help those great Home Mission
Societies which seek to take to these thousands of
people the blessings of the Gospel. The Church —
laity as well as clergy — has to remember the teaching
of our Lord in the parable of the Great Supper, when
all those who were bidden would not come — and yet
there was room : ' Go out into the highways and
hedges and compel them to come in '.
THE FLYINQ ANGEL
' My brother's keeper.'— Genesis iv. 9.
It is a commonplace that responsibility places man
in his true position in the scale of Creation, neither
too high nor too low. The fact of his responsibility
proves man's possession of an intelligent mind, a
moral sense and will-power which he is bound to exer-
cise deliberately and for the benefit of others. Thus,
when a ship is wrecked and human lives are lost, we
do not blame the winds and the waves. These blind
forces of Nature simply carry out the laws imposed
upon them. But we have a right to blame the
captain if by neglect or incompetency he has run the
vessel upon the rocks. When the lightning strikes
the haystack and destroys the collected produce of
the year the farmer must accept the inevitable. No
other course lies before him. But if tramp or labourer
has dropped a burning match among the hay the
farmer is justified in expressing indignation for gross
neglect of necessary precautions. Yes ; man's place
in Nature is too high, his power for good or evil too
great, for him to attempt to shirk his unique responsi-
bilities by classing himself with the beasts that perish.
And yet, high as he is in the scale of Creation, man is
not supreme. Above him stands God, the righteous
Judge, against Whose decision there is no appeal;
and, however much man may endeavour to delude
himself with phrases such as fatalism and the like, his
conscience admits that God is just in demanding at
the Last Day an account of the deeds done in the
body, and that upon that Great Assize should depend
his own reward or punishment in the life beyond the
grave.
I. Man is his Brother's Keeper — This lesson of
responsibility is not an evolution of modern ethics.
At the very dawn of human life we find the truth re-
vealed and enforced that man is his brother's keeper.
From the first, life stands revealed to us as linked with
life in the collocation of family and tribe. For good
or ill, father and his children stood or fell together,
king and his subjects. This simple, this rough-and-
ready principle runs continually through the earlier
books of the Old Testament. It strikes our modern
minds with a certain moral shock to read that not
only Dathan and Abiram, but ' their wives, their sons,
and their little children ' were swallowed up in the
common ruin; that when Achan was convicted of a
theft which involved Israel in an unexpected defeat
before their enemies, not Achan only, but his 'sons and
his daughters ' were stoned with stones, and their
bodies burned with fire. But we must remember that
in the nursery period of the education of humanity
lessons are taught with a dramatic simplicity suitable
to an age incapable of fine distinctions. As we ponder
over these past incidents we must take care not to
confuse temporal with eternal punishment. Again,
we must not forget that life in family or tribe was
linked together not only for special punishment, but
for preservation also. Noah, preacher of righteous-
ness, was saved from the waters of the flood. But he
was not saved alone. God's protection was extended
to his family also.
II. Fatalism and Responsibility. — But as life be-
came more complex moral difficulties began to perplex
thoughtful minds and obstinate questionings arose.
These difficulties increased as men directed their at-
tention not so much to the central figure of influence,
patriarch or king, head of tribe or family, but to those
subordinate characters in the drama, those whom his
actions so vitally affected for good or ill — associated
in the common salvation or the common ruin, the re-
26
Ver. 9.
GENESIS IV
Ver. 9.
cipients of a special favour or the victims (so it
seemed) of another man's sins. In dark days of de-
pression or of national calamity a tendency emerged
to doubt the justice of God, to despair of personal ef-
fort, as though after all it mattered not, when the many
were punished, whether the individual did well or ill.
This train of thought, we can see at once, was radically
at fault, just because it missed the whole lesson by dis-
regarding the central cause. The far-reaching results
of good and evil, when rightly viewed, ought to have
proved an added stimulus to the cultivation of char-
acter, a new call to personal righteousness of life.
But in moments of despair it produced in weaker
minds a contrary effect. Fatalism took the place of
responsibility. The period of Jewish captivity wit-
nessed the spread of pessimism,and the proverb passed
from mouth to mouth : ' The fathers have eaten sour
grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge '. It
was to correct this spreading paralysis of personal
effort that, by the Providence of God, Ezekiel arose
with the exact message needed by the circumstances
of his time. He begins by tracing the national judg-
ment to continued national apostasy. But he goes
on to explain that national apostasy is the sum total
of individual apostasy. And individual responsibility
cannot be evaded by attributing present calamity to
the sins of a previous generation — to the faults of
forefathers. He enunciates the law of personal lia-
bility. God does not merge the individual in the
nation. ' All souls are Mine,' He claims. And
further, ' The soul that sinneth, it shall die '. A good
father may have a bad son, and that bad son may in
his turn beget a good son. But, as far as moral re-
sponsibility goes, each case in God's eyes is dealt with
singly.
III. The Message of the Gospel. — Ezekiel antici-
pates the message of the Gospel, and this in two ways.
First, he calls to repentance with the promise of un-
conditional forgiveness. ' When the wicked man
turneth away from his wickedness that he hath com-
mitted, and doeth that which is lawful and right, he
shall save his soul alive.' Next, he points to the larger
life beyond the grave. He extends the horizon.
' Turn yourselves,' he cries, ' and live ye ;' live, that
is to say, the ampler, fuller life which, commencing
here on earth, is continued beyond the grave. For
these perplexing questions of cause and effect, of
shades of influence good and malign, of rewards and
punishments, can be viewed in their completeness only
and finally in the Great Beyond. Then shall we un-
derstand the mystery of the reconciliation of perfect
j ustice and perfect love ; we shall learn how it is that
' mercy and truth are met together ; righteousness
and peace have kissed each other.' — Bishop Harmer
of Rochester.
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER
' Am I my brother's keeper ?' — Genesis iv. 9.
'How sin gains dominion over human nature.'
I. Among the ties which bind men together what is
stronger or more enduring than the sense of consan-
guinity? Nothing can abolish a man's duty to the
brothers who were boys with him in one home.
II. But we leave home, and go out into a world of
fierce competition. And competition encourages us
in selfishness. Can we honestly cherish brotherly
feelings for our successful rivals? One chief secret of
Christianity is that it puts Divine power and meaning
into human brotherhood. Christ binds us to our
fellow-men by binding us to Himself. The life of
self-sacrifice has its origin and fountains not in man,
but in the heart of God.
Ill; As soon as we recognize that this brotherhood
— even with the unthankful and the evil — is a real
thing, we wake up to feel the responsibility which it
involves. My duty to my brother — and especially to
my weaker brother — is to safeguard him from slipping
away from duty, to keep him mindful of his pledges,
and faithful to his vows. In life's practical business
it is not easy to remember that we have a daily re-
sponsibility to God for the men and women we mix
with, the people we employ, and the people also who
employ us. We are debtors to the wise and to the
foolish. — T. H. Darlow, The Upward Call, p. 288.
THE BROTHERHOOD OF MAN
' Am I my brother's keeper ? ' — Genesis iv. 9.
Humanity is one great body, and we as individuals
are all members of that body.
I. Man is united to man, nation to nation; and so
complete is the union that no man liveth to himself.
Nor is this union of social formation only; the rela-
tionship is vital. It is a spirit relationship. A mere
social relationship would be poor indeed, for the term
' socialism ' conveys an idea of distinction. Certainly
socialism is, in a measure, a means of unification, but
it is also a means of separation. But while socialism
has its distinctions, while it divides into classes, it is
incapable of separating from the mass. If it is weak
in uniting, it is impotent to detach. There is a felt
though invisible something by which man is insepar-
ably united to man.
II. The composition of this union may be difficult
to explain. But I have thought that it is God in each
answering to God in all. No life is entirely void of
God. Divinity has never been utterly expelled from
any man. In some God sits on the throne of the heart,
and governs the life ; in others He resides as an unre-
cognized guest, subjugated by the mind of the flesh.
III. This doctrine of universal brotherhood does
not diminish the importance of that other great doct-
rine — individual responsibility. It rather increases it.
Personal responsibility may, as some one has said,
' exist independently of relative responsibility ' ; but
the latter greatly enhances the importance of the
former. We have not only to bear our own burden;
we have also to bear one another's burdens, and so
fulfil the law of Christ.— P. H. Hall, The Brother-
hood of Man, p. 5.
References. — IV. 9. — G. Brooks, Outlines of Sermons, p.
277. Bishop Goodwin, Parish Sermons, vol. iv. p. 72. Arch-
deacon Sinclair, Christ and Our Times, p. 298. J. Bateman,
27
Ver. 10.
GENESIS IV., V
Ver. 24.
Sermons Preached in Guernsey, p. 18. D. W. Simon, Twice
Born and other Sermons, vol. xxiv. No. 1399. Spurgeon,
Sermons, vol. xxiv. No. 1399.
'The voice of thy brother's blood crieth to me from the
ground.' — Genesis iv. io.
The famous preacher, John Geiler of Kaysersberg,
used this text in an unusual way. As cathedral
preacher in Strasbourg from 1478 to 1510, he was
often called upon to deliver funeral orations for great
men. His custom was to make the spirits of bishops
and others speak in their own person, as it were, and to
utter admonitions whose sternness the living preacher
might have feared to imitate. Geiler 's chief French
biographer, the Abbe Dacheux, remarks on the truly
apostolic freedom with which he was thus enabled to
pour forth warnings. One of his most striking ser-
mons was founded on the text quoted above. ' He
effaced himself and made the dead speak in his own
person. "Listen, my brothers," he said, "to the voice
of your brother. ... It says remember, ' Dust thou
art and unto dust shalt thou return '." Borrowing the
words of Job, he told, in the mournful accents of Holy
Scripture, of our days which are so short and yet so
full of misery ; he showed the transient shadow, the
scarce-opened flower which was already trampled
under the feet of those who pass by. He reminded his
hearers of the dread mysteries of the grave. "I have
said to corruption, Thou art my father; to the worm,
Thou art my mother and my sister." '
Among those who listened to Geiler of Kaysersberg
were the nearest relatives and successors of bishops
and other cathedral dignitaries. His pulpit method
may be compared with that of Bossuet and Massillon.
The Arabs have a belief that over the grave of a
murdered man his spirit hovers in the form of a bird
that cries, ' Give me drink, give me drink,' and only
ceases when the blood of the murderer is shed. Cain's
conscience told him the same thing; there was no
criminal law threatening death to the murderer, but
he felt men would kill him if they could. He heard
the blood of Abel crying from the earth. The blood
of Christ also crieth to God, but cries not for ven-
geance but for pardon. — Marcus Dods.
References. — IV. 10. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol viii. No.
461; ibid. vol. xii. No. 708. IV. 15, 16.— R. S. Candlish,
Book of Genesis, vol. i. pp. 86 and 108. IV. 23, 24.— H.
Rix, Sermons, Addresses, and Essays, p. 18. IV. 26. — E. A.
Bray, Sermons, vol. ii. p. 354. G. Brooks, Outlines of Ser-
mons, p. 381. IV. — J. Monro Gibson, The Ages before Moses,
p. 116. V. 1. — J. Parker, Adam, Noah, and Abraham, p. 35.
V. 2. — J. Laidlaw, Bible Doctrine of Man, p. 98. V. 3. — G.
Brooks, Outlines of Sermons, p. 382. V. 21-24.— J. Banner-
man, Sermons, p. 24. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxii. No. 1307.
V. 22. — C. Maclaren, Expositions — Genesis, p. 32. V. 23, 24.
— E. A. Bray, Sermons, vol. i. p. 157.
ENOCH
'And Enoch walked with God : and he was not : for God
took him.' — Genesis v. 24.
The character of Enoch is the point on which atten-
tion is fixed. He ' walked with God,' he ' pleased
God'.
I. What is Implied in this Description ?
(a) Agreement. — ' Can two walk together except
they be agreed ? ' Man naturally is at enmity with
God, averse to Him, disliking His law. This enmity
must be destroyed. There is no peace with the
wicked, and as the first requisite to walking with
God obedience is required.
(b) Intimate Communion. — Agreement in aim
and purpose is possible apart from intimacy: but
walking implies close and personal converse with
Jehovah. Knowledge of God begets confidence in
Him, life is lived under His eye, and in constant
recognition of His presence and law.
(c) Progress. — He ' walked,' went on from grace
to grace. There was activity in the spiritual life:
no cessation of effort. God walks with us to lead us
into full knowledge and holiness.
II. The Foundation of His Character What was
the fount and root of this life? Genesis is silent,
but the Epistle to the Hebrews gives the informa-
tion ' By faith/ etc. How great this faith was we
can scarcely measure, but the least faith which brings
a man to God is faith in His existence and in His love.
Thus walking with God becomes a source of know-
ledge and an aid to faith, enlarging its sphere, and
giving greater power for service.
III. The Reward — ' God took him.' His aim was
to please God, and he was rewarded with the high
honour of going home without passing through the
gates of death. When his character was mature
the intercourse with heaven was more perfect. — J.
Edwards, The Pulpit, vol. v.
Genesis v. 24.
I. What was the Character of the Age in which
Enoch Lived? — Now respecting the age when Enoch
lived we know little, but that little is very bad. He
was the seventh from Adam, and lived in the time
before the flood. In those days we are told the earth
was corrupt before God, and filled with violence.
Every sort of wickedness seems to have prevailed ;
men walked after the vile lusts of their hearts, and
did that which appeared good to them without fear
and without shame. Such was the character of the
men before the flood; and in the middle of this age
of wickedness Enoch lived, and Enoch walked with
God.
II. What was his Character? — You have heard
he walked with God, and you know perhaps it is an
expression of great praise. A man that walks with
God is one of God's friends. That unhappy enmity
and dislike which men naturally feel towards their
Maker has been removed ; he feels perfectly recon-
ciled and at peace. Again he that walks with God
is one of God's dear children. He looks upon Him
as his Father, and as such he loves Him, he reveres
Him, he rejoices in Him, he trusts Him in everything.
And lastly to walk with God is to be always going
forward, always pressing on, never standing still and
flattering ourselves that we are the men and have
borne much fruit; but to grow in grace, to go on
28
Ver. 24.
GENESIS V
Ver. 24.
from strength to strength, to forget the things behind,
and if by grace we have attained unto anything, to
abound yet more and more.
III. Enoch's Motive. — Faith was the seed which
bore such goodly fruit; faith was the root of his
holiness and decision on the Lord's side — faith with-
out which there has never been any salvation, faith
without which not one of us will ever enter into the
kingdom of heaven.
IV. Enoch's End. — We are simply informed that
' He was not, for God took him '. The interpretation
of this is, that God was pleased to interfere on His
servant's behalf, and so He suddenly removed him
from this world without the pains of death, and took
him to that blessed place where all the saints are
waiting in joyful expectation for the end of all things,
where sin and pain and sorrow are no more. And
this, no doubt, was done for several reasons. It was
done to convince a hard-hearted, unbelieving world
that God does observe the lives of men and will
honour those who honour Him. It was done to show
every living soul that Satan had not won a complete
victory when he deceived Eve ; that we may yet get
to heaven by the way of faith, and although in Adam
all die, still in Christ all may be made alive. — J. C.
Ryle, The Christian Race, p. 243.
ENOCH THE IMMORTAL
Genesis v. 24.
What has its sublimest consummation in the Chris-
tian consciousness had its crude form in the por-
trait of Enoch. That portrait was God's message
of universal hope. Every man of the future aspired
to be an Enoch.
I. Brief as it is, this record is a biography — the
description of a rounded life. Three times the
curtain rises and falls.
(a) We see first an ordinary man — a life in no way
distinguished from his contemporaries — engrossed in
family cares and engaged in secular pursuits.
(6) Suddenly there comes a change — drastic, com-
plete, revolutionary. Up to the birth of his son
Methuselah he has merely ' lived ' ; he now begins to
' walk with God '. He had lived sixty-five years as
a man of the world occupied with the cares of a
household. When he changes mere ' living ' into
walking with God he goes over precisely the same
ground — he is still occupied with the care of ' sons
and daughters '. No outward eye could have de-
tected any difference.
(c) Now we have a third and distinctively unique
scene. Enoch himself has disappeared: there is no
trace of him. There is no grave for him. There is
the place where the grave should have been, and
there is a tablet above the spot; but in the tablet are
inscribed the words ' He is not here ; he is risen '.
II. Why is this man represented as escaping
death? It is on the ground of holiness; it is be-
cause ' he walked with God '. Do you think that is
an accidental connexion of ideas? It is the keynote
to all the subsequent teaching both of the Old
Testament and of the New — the prelude to all the
coming music.
III. Enoch was not transplanted into foreign soil.
The text says that translation was preceded by
revelation — that before going out into the new world
he had a picture of that world in his mind. It
tells us that the beginning of the process was not
the approach of earth to heaven; it was the ap-
proach of heaven to earth. He did not first go to
Eshcol to try the taste of the grapes; he had speci-
mens of the fruit brought to him — sent unto his
desert as a foretaste, and this foretaste was the climax
of the glory; it made the glory, when it came, not
wholly new. — G. Matheson, The Representative Men
of the Bible, p. 67.
Genesis v. 24.
' Oh ! for a closer walk with God ' is number one
on the list of Cowper's Olney Hymns.
I. There are some hymns in our hymn books which
thoughtful people decline to sing. They will tell
you that the aspirations expressed are so lofty and
so far above their desires, that to join in singing such
hymns seems to them devoid of reality. But here we
have a hymn breathing the holiest and loftiest as-
pirations, and yet every member of a congregation
can heartily join in singing it. Every member of a
congregation, whether good or bad, can honestly ex-
press a heartfelt desire for ' a closer walk with God,'
and where is the man or woman who does not sigh
for that ' calm and heavenly frame ' of mind which
springs from a ' closer walk with God '.
II. Cowper might well have selected as the motto
for this hymn the words of the Apostle St. James,
' Draw nigh to God, and He will draw nigh to you '.
So you see that the opening aspiration is not only
thoroughly reasonable, but thoroughly scriptural, and
is well calculated to give expression to the desire
of every worshipper. And what prayer can be more
appropriate to those who are travelling through a
vale of darkness than the prayer for light! We
have, thank God, the light of His Holy Book to
guide our steps aright, but we need the aid of the
Holy Spirit to enable us to say with the Psalmist,
' Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto
my path '.
III. Few hours in life are more fraught with happi-
ness than those in which we contemplate sweet inter-
course with dear ones who have passed away. And
yet with all their sweetness there is felt, deep down
in the heart, a want that can never in this world be
supplied. This is a rough illustration of the con-
dition of the lapsed Christian. The memory of the
peace that was once enjoyed mingles with the feeling
of present alienation from God, which no amount of
worldly excitement can obliterate. This feeling of a
want, this aching void in the soul is often the pre-
cursor of the prodigal's return. He, like the son in
the parable, comes to himself. — M. H. James, Hymns
and their Singers, p. 112.
References. — V. 24. — A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy
Scripture — Genesis, p. 38. J. Edwards, The Pulpit, vol. v.
29
Ver. 4.
GENESIS VI
Ver. 5.
J. Jackson Goadley, Christian World Pulpit, 1891, p. 139.
C. E. Shipley, Baptist Times, vol. liv. p. 807. E. H. Bicker-
steth, Thoughts in Past Years, p. 21. G. Brooks, Outlines of
Sermons, p. 382 ; ibid. Old Testament Outlines, p. 5. V. 26.
— G. B. Cheever, American Pulpit, p. 72. VI. 2. — J. Keble,
Sermons for the Christian Year, vol. ii. p. 161. VI. 3. — J.
Budgen, Parochial Sermons, vol. ii. p. 159. J. Keble, Ser-
mons for Septuagesima to Ash Wednesday, p. 161. C. G.
Finney, Penny Pulpit, No. 1675, p. 439.
THE LESSON OF THE TOWER
'And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose
top may reach into heaven : and let us make us a name,
lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole
earth.'— Genesis vi. 4.
The form of this story belongs to the early stages
of an ascending scale of civilization. The soul of the
narrative is for all time. Take one obvious aspect of
that soul. The builders of city and tower were men
of great ambition. They would dare high things and
they would do them. This is well, for God made us
all for ambition. But it is part of the tragedy of our
humanity that each day we are tempted to sully am-
bition with some phase of latent or expressed selfish-
ness. Ambition tainted by egotism ever makes for
futility.
I. A Theological Application. — This is an age of
controversy. Controversy means movement, not al-
ways spiritual movement, but still movement, and all
movement wisely directed becomes progress. When
with the vision that trembles not because it has
focussed itself upon the living Christ we look out upon
the area of theological controversy, what see we?
We see many things, and among them we discern a
mighty building of Towers. All the builders are our
brethren; and we can afford to look at them with
the eyes of love, and to bestow upon them the dis-
criminating criticism that brothers ever offer to one
another.
II. The Spirit of Empire — In the light of that
lesson, let us look at our Empire beyond the seas and
let us glance at things at home. We can only expect
to justify empire by rising to the level of the duties
it suggests. As certainly as a mere race selfishness
dominates our colonial policy the plans of God will be
thwarted, and later centuries will see this nation fall
Babel-like to confusion and the dust. Let the tower
teach us that you cannot build selfishly and also
build permanently.
III. Individual Spirituality. — We are sincere in
our efforts after the spiritual life. Yet the tower
totters, and is in danger of falling, because at the
centre of our high desires there is often so much of
subtle egotism. There are people whose desire for
heaven is merely self-preservation veneered with seem-
ing spirituality. The fact remains that so long as
in our religious life we are seeking something for
ourselves rather than something for Christ and the
people, we are in danger of repeating the experience
of Babel. Learn from Babel that he only builds well
who builds unselfishly.
THE SINFULNESS OF SIN
(For Sexagesima Sunday)
'And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the
earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his
heart was only evil continually.' — Genesis vi. 5.
We have four passages of Scripture put before us
on Sexagesima Sunday which teach us the exceeding
sinfulness of sin.
First of all we have the Gospel, which is the par-
able of the sower. It teaches us how much it matters
whether the seed, the Word of God, sinks into our
souls. It teaches us how serious the hinderances are
which interfere with the sinking in of the seed, the
Word of God, into our hearts. And that teaching, I
am sure, is much needed, because one of the terrible
signs of to-day is that so many people are going about
saying and thinking that nothing very much matters
— sin does not matter, it will be all the same a thou-
sand years hence. But it does very much matter, and
I want you to apply it to yourself. What are the
hinderances in your heart to the seed, the Word of
God, sinking in and becoming fruitful ?
And then there is the Epistle, and that, you re-
member, is the account of St. Paul's sufferings. What
does that great list of sufferings tell us ? It speaks of
the fact of what St. Paul felt about our Lord Jesus
Christ and the great deliverance that He had wrought
for him. St. Paul was a man who felt down to the
depths of his inmost soul that to Jesus Christ he owed
his salvation, that he owed to Him a great deliverance
— deliverance fromsin,deliverance from eternal death.
Why do we lead such easy lives? Why is it that we
dislike the least pain or the least trouble we have to
endure for our religion? Because we do not realize,
as St. Paul did, the great deliverance that is offered
us in Jesus Christ. We have nothing approaching to
St. Paul's sense of sin.
And then to fill up this lesson we have God's judg-
ment on sin given to us in the first lesson for the,
morning and the first lesson for this evening, the third
and sixth chapters of Genesis. The third chapter, you
will remember, is the account of the Fall and God's
punishment of our first parents; and this evening's
lesson is the picture of the Flood, the great judgment
of God upon the world of the ungodly, a picture in-
tended, beyond question, by God to teach us the
awfulness of sin and God's anger against it, and the
awful consequences of sin.
I. Do we Fear Sin? — Now do we fear sin as we
ought? I do not think so. I think that we are much
more inclined to believe that sin does not matter, and
that it will be all right in the end. We have to re-
member the awful possibility which hangs over every
man and woman of hardening themselves into habits
which become incompatible with God and God's
Presence, which become eternal sin, and therefore
eternally excluding from the Presence of God.
II. The Greatness of the Deliverance. — The
seriousness of sin is shown again by the greatness of
God's means for deliverance from sin. In the Old Tes-
tament we have His picture of the Ark, the building
30
Ver. 9.
GENESIS VI
Ver. 22.
of the Ark, the tremendous labour that the work must
have cost. The greatness of God's work for our de-
liverance is the measure of the greatness of sin from
which He works to deliver. But if that picture in
the Old Testament of the means that God takes to
deliver us is great, what shall we say of the redemp-
tion of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ? Could
any greater means be imagined than the sending of
the only Begotten Son from the bosom of the Father
to be a man amongst men, to live the life and die the
death on the Cross? Could any means be imagined
greater? The supreme greatness of Calvary is always
and must be the measure to the world of the terrible
greatness and awfulness of sin which crucified the Son
of God. It is impossible when we think of it like that
to treat sin lightly, as so many do in the present day.
Never say ' I cannot help it,' and ' it does not matter '.
You can help it, and it does matter. The sins that
you give way to habitually matter terribly. I know
they matter because sin has made me other than God
meant me to be. If I had never sinned I should have
been much better, more useful in the world. And I
not only see sin in myself, but I see its ravages in
others. I see how sin has pulled down other people;
I see it all about me, and 1 can not underrate it, and
think it does not matter — it does matter. Pray, then,
for godly fear, and deal with sin in yourselves, so that
you may be able to help others.
III. Lead to the Saviour. — Surely that is the
ambition of every man and woman, to be able to help
their fellows, and to guide them to the Saviour. And
the first step in leading people to the Saviour is to
make them feel their need of that Saviour; and they
never will feel the need of the Saviour unless they
feel how terrible sin is.
References. — VI. 5. — J. Laidlaw, Bible Doctrine of Man,
p. 138. C. Perren, Outlines of Sermons, p. 306. VI. 6. — H.
Bonar, Short Sermons for Family Reading, pp. 293 and 302.
VI. 8. — R. S. Candlish, Book of Genesis, vol. i. p. 108.
NOAH THE RENEWER
' Noah was a just man, and perfect in his generations.' —
Genesis vi. 9.
For the first time we are confronted with the idea of
reform. Noah is not the first to protest, but he is
the first to reform. With Noah, there begins the
first of a series of efforts to save the world — to trans-
late, not the man, but the earth. He is the sad
spectator of a scene of moral corruption. His heart
is heavy with the burden of a degenerate race.
I. What was this vision of corruption which Noah
saw? The greatest danger that can meet a human
soul — the danger of mistaking evil for good. This
race had fixed upon the physical development as the
one end in life. They had enthroned in their
imagination the men of bone and sinew. They had
come to look upon meekness, mercy, compassion, as
unmanly things.
II. The original aim of Noah was to avert the
Flood. He was not a prophet in any other sense than
Jonah was a prophet. He was not magically to
foretell the evitable occurrence of an event. Rather
was he to proclaim that its occurrence was not inevit-
able — that it might or might not happen according
to the righteousness of the community. The ark of
safety which he proposed to build for the world was
at no time the ark of gopher wood. The ark of
gopher wood was never meant for the safety of the
world, but, as the writer to the Hebrews says : ' For
the saving of his own house '. It was only to be used
when the world refused to be saved."
III. The characteristic of the life of Noah is
solitary waiting.
(a) We first see the man in the midst of the
world, lifting a solitary protest against the life of
that world. His faith watching and waiting for the
dawn.
(6) The man is lifted above the world. He is
floated in the air in a lively sea. But even in this
vast solitude this human soul is waiting for an earth
renewed.
(c) The world has arisen baptized from its corrup-
tion. The old life is past but the new is not yet
come. And there stands Noah — solitary, waiting
still. The new life has not come, but hope has
dawned. — G. Matheson, The Representative Men of
the Bible, p. 89.
Refebences. — VI. 9. — C. Kingsley, Village Sermons, p. 74.
R. S. Candlish, The Book of Genesis. VI. 9-22.— A. Mac-
laren, Expositions — Genesis, p. 48, vol. i. p. 127. VI. 13. — J.
Parker, Adam, Noah, and Abraham, p. 35.
THE OBEDIENCE OF FAITH
'Thus did Noah; according to all that God commanded
him, so did he.' — Genesis vi. 22.
God told Noah how He was going to punish the sin
of man by a flood, and told him also of the means by
which he should be saved.
I. God seldom punishes without warning us of the
punishment which is coming.
II. Noah believed God's words, and showed that
he believed them by setting to work at once to build
the ark. It would be very difficult to find any
greater lesson than the importance of acting on our
belief.
III. This will lead us especially to three things: —
(a) To take great pains to keep all the rules of the
Church.
(o) To pray with faith and to act on our prayers.
(c) To repent of our sins. Repentance requires an
act of will. A repentance which stops short at being
sorry for what we have done wrong is as useless as
a faith which does not lead us to act upon our
belief.
IV. We learn from Noah the importance of a life
in which our actions really represent our convic-
tions.
(a) Its importance to ourselves since it was by
building the Ark that Noah found a refuge and was
saved.
(6) Its importance to others since it was by build-
ing the Ark that Noah witnessed to the world that
31
Ver. 1-22.
GENESIS VIL, VIII
Vv. 1.
he believed God's message of warning. A. G.
Mortimer, Stories from Genesis, p. 81.
Reference.— VI. 22. — G. Brooks, Outlines of Sermons, p.
383.
THE STORY OF THE FLOOD
Gknisis VII. VIII.
It has been remarked that though the narrative
[of the Flood]is vivid and forcible, it is entirely want-
ing in that sort of description which in a modern
historian or poet would have occupied the largest
space. ' We see nothing of the death-struggle ; we
hear not the cry of despair; we are not called upon
to witness the frantic agony of husband and wife, and
parent and child, as they fled in terror before the
rising waters. Nor is a word said of the sadness of
the one righteous man who, safe himself, looked upon
the destruction which he could not avert.' The
Chaldean tradition, which is the most closely allied to
the Biblical account, is not so reticent. Tears are
shed in heaven over the catastrophe, and even con-
sternation affected its inhabitants, while within the
ark itself the Chaldean Noah says : ' When the storm
came to an end and the terrible water-spout ceased,
I opened the window and the light smote upon my
face. I looked at the sea attentively observing, and
the whole of humanity had returned to mud; like
seaweed the corpses floated. I was seized with sad-
ness ; I sat down and wept and my tears fell upon
my face.' — Marcus Dods.
References. — VII. 1. — H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, Bible Ob-
ject Lessons, p. 1. M. Badger, American Pulpit, p. 96. J.
Keble, Sermons for Septuagesima to Ash Wednesday, p. 171.
Sermons for the Christian Year, vol. iii. p. 171. G. Brooks,
Outlines of Sermons, p. 118. VII. 1-7. — Spurgeon, Sermons,
vol. xxiii. No. 1336. VII. 15. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol.
liii. No. 3042. VII. 16. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxvii. No.
1613.
NOAH SAVED IN THE ARK
Genesis viii. 1-22.
Traditions of the Flood linger among all branches
of the human race except the black. Remember
from the Greek story of Deucalion, when Zeus had
resolved to destroy mankind, after the treatment he
had received from Lycaon, Deucalion built an ark in
which he and his wife Pyrrha floated during the nine
days' flood which destroyed Greece. When the waters
subsided, Deucalion's ark rested on Mount Parnassus.
Ten buildings the size of Solomon's temple could
have been stowed away in Noah's Ark. In 1609
a Dutchman, Peter Jansen, built a vessel in the exact
proportions of the ark, only smaller. Every one
laughed at him, but he kept sturdily on. When his
vessel was launched it carried more freight and sailed
faster than any other ships of the same size.
Reference. — VIII. 1-22. — A. Maclaren, Expositions of
Holy Scripture — Genesis, p. 55.
GOD'S REMEMBRANCE OF NOAH
'God remembered Noah.'— Genesis viii. i.
The beautiful simplicity of this language goes home
to the heart of every reader. We picture Noah in
his isolation, in his apparent desolateness and hope-
lessness, his ark alone upon the wide-spreading
waters, and no living soul to hail him and to cheer
him with good news. Had he thought himself for-
saken and forgotten, his ark ' alone on a wide, wide
sea,' we could not have wondered. But ' God re-
membered Noah '. When the Scriptures speak of
the remembrance of God, it is usually remembrance
' for good '. So it is here.
I. The Purpose of God's Remembrance.
(a) To deliver him from danger. — The provision
of the ark, into which God had appointed that Noah
and his family should enter for refuge, was a measure
of safety; but it now seemed as though the very
refuge was itself a source of danger. How long
could such a captivity with its attendant privations
be endured? Were the members of this rescued
family to be left to drift upon the waters and to
perish? These questions were answered by the Lord
remembering Noah. Let such as are placed in
circumstances of peril, hardship, and anxiety be
assured that whilst they remember and call upon
God He will remember and will not forsake them.
(b) To reward him for his piety. — Noah had
been ' faithful among the faithless,' had maintained
the true religion amidst prevailing corruptions. And
God did not forget His servant's justice and devout-
ness, but treated him with a discriminating favour.
As Nehemiah afterwards entreated God to remember
him for good, and to remember his works, so now
doubtless the second father of the race called upon
the Lord God. And his cry was not unheeded, for
the Lord remembered him in mercy.
(c) To establish with him an unchanging coven-
ant. — ' God remembered Noah ' to such good pur-
pose as to undertake on his behalf, and on behalf of
his posterity, engagements which have proved most
advantageous and beneficial to the race. The pro-
mise was given that the waters should no more sub-
merge the earth, that the seasons should pursue
their regular and uninterrupted course; and these
promises were confirmed by a sign, the bow in the
clouds, at the sight of which the heart is still cheered
and the hope is still inspired.
II. The Character of God's Remembrance.
(a) It is individual. — ' Noah, and every living
thing.' Man has the power of generalizing; but it
is his imperfection that necessitates the expedient;
imperfection of memory and general intellectual
power; imperfection of sympathy. Every thing and
every heart is present to God in its distinctiveness
of individuality and condition. The very hairs of
your head are numbered; He hears the young ravens
when they cry.
(b) It is universal. — The ark was then the living
world, and He remembered all in it. ' We are also
His offspring.' The meanest thing that lived is cared
for, loved, remembered by God. Be kind to dumb
animals. Also, have wide sympathy and large hope.
Rejoice not that you are the members of a small
family, a pet few, for you are not; but that you are
82
Vv. 20, 21.
GENESIS VIII
Ver. 21.
the child of a Father of whom the whole family in
heaven and earth is named.
(c) It is not lessened by the terrible judgments
■which He executes. — The floods that drown a world
do not quench His love, or obliterate His remem-
brance. The ark tossing helmless on the wide waste,
and every living thing in it, is remembered by God.
God remembers every living thing. He has the
destinies of all creatures in His hand and on His
heart. After the seemingly helpless, hopeless drift-
ing of the ark, it will rest at last; and new heavens
will smile upon a renovated earth ; and a ' rainbow '
will be ' about God's throne, in sight like unto an
emerald '.
References. — VIII. 1. — H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, God's
Heroes, p. 1. VIII. 4. — C. D. Bell, Hills that Bring Peace,
p. 23. Bishop Browne, Sermons on the Atonement, p. 67.
VII. 9. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xi, No. 637 ; ibid. vol.
xl. No. 2373.
NOAH'S SACRIFICE
'And Noah builded an altar unto the Lord ; and took of every
clean beast, and of every clean fowl, and offered burnt
offerings on the altar. And the Lord smelled a sweet
savour.' — Genesis viii. 20, 21.
I. What was the first employment which Noah set
his hand to when he came out of the ark? His soul
was full of thanks and praise; as he knew the way
that God had appointed, by which he and all sinful
men should express their praise, he complied at once
with that service of thanksgiving which God had
ordained, the offering up a sacrifice.
II. But how could he afford to spare the animals
which were requisite for a sacrifice? Noah had in
his possession but a little stock. But Noah was
a man of faith and piety: his faith led him to
believe God's promise, that the fowl and the cattle
should increase abundantly, and his piety led him
to feel that he would sooner lose every sheep or
bullock he possessed than leave his God unthanked
and unacknowledged in the way that was ap-
pointed.
III. And how did God regard it? To him Noah's
motives, faith, thankfulness, and obedience were as
a secret refreshing scent to ourselves. Noah's faith
looked above the lamb or bullock which he offered
to Him whose death upon the cross they represented,
and God therefore was well pleased with the faith
and the obedience.
IV. What did it lead Him to promise and engage
for? Such a promise that we may consider ourselves
indebted to it, for God's forbearance even now, for
the regularity with which our spring succeeds to
winter, and our harvest to the seedtime, and our
day to night. It is not because man has become
a better object of God's bounty now than in the
old days before the Flood. It is because God had
respect to Noah's sacrifice, because in it he re-
garded that better sacrifice which it represented and
set forth. — E. J. Brewster, Scripture Characters,
p. 11.
THE FIGURATIVE ELEMENT IN BIBLE
LANGUAGE
'The Lord smelled a sweet savour.' — Genesis viii. 21.
There is a saying of the rabbis, which, if its full
significance be understood, and wisely applied, is worth
the whole folios of their formal exegesis. It is that
' The law speaks in the tongue of the sons of men '.
If the rabbis had taken to heart this saying of their
own famous Rabbi Ishmael, the greater part of their
exegetic system would at once have been shown to be
nugatory. For that system, as it gained vogue in
spite of some strong protests, is founded on the prin-
ciple that Scripture language is so mysterious, so un-
earthly, so little accordant with the ordinary tongue
of men, that it may be distorted into the most
monstrous meanings, and pressed into the most ex-
orbitant inferences. It has been a terrible disaster
to the Christian Church that she accepted without
challenge the vicious principles of Talmudic inter-
pretation. Out of many dangers which have resulted
from the error of literalism let me choose two.
I. Language and thought can no more exactly
coincide than two particles of matter can absolutely
touch each other. No single virtue, no single faculty,
no single spiritual truth, no single metaphysical con-
ception, can be expressed without the aid of analogy
and metaphor. Now if this be true in general, how
much more true is it of any language in which we
speak of God. The untrained imagination of the
world's childhood could not conceive of a bodiless and
omnipresent Spirit. It was necessary, therefore, for
the sacred writer to speak of God as if he had a
human body; and this is what is called anthropo-
morphism.
II. But if harm was done by the crude errors of
the heresy which insisted on exact literalism, and
declared that the Trinity wore a human form, per-
haps even deadlier evil arose from the imperfection of
language which is technically called anthropopathy ;
namely, the attribution to God of human passions.
When we speak of God's wrath, and fury, and fierce
jealousy, and implacable rage, and describe His awful
majesty, the 'Tartarean drench' of many modern
sermons, or in the tempestuously incongruous language
of many modern hymns, we ought to beware lest we
are talking with too gross a familiarity of Him
' whose tender mercies are over all His works '. It
is then most necessary to carry with us into the study
of the Scriptures the perpetual sense of the shadows,
the imperfection,the uncertainties of human languages.
There are hundreds of passages of the Bible which
have been misunderstood by millions, misunderstood
for ages, misunderstood at times by perhaps nearly
every living representative of the Church of God.
All that we can now do is to gather up the signific-
ance of these considerations in a few general rules,
(a) There is no basis whatever for the allegorical
system of interpretation, in plain passages or ordinary
narratives. To admit such a style of exegesis is to
forget the very meaning and purpose of ordinary
33 3
Ver. 22.
GENESIS VIII
Ver. 22.
language, (o) Even where we have to deal with
professed metaphor, or with allegories and parables,
theological conclusions may never be based on isolated
expressions or collateral inferences. — F. W. Farrar,
British Weekly Pulpit, vol. iii. p. 392.
References.— VIII. 21.— J. Burnet, Penny Pulpit, No.
1485, p. 17. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xi. No. 615. C. S.
Robinson, Sermons on Neglected Texts, p. 258.
HARVEST THANKSGIVING
', While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold
and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night
shall not cease.' — Genesis vni. 22.
Why is it that we are grateful? Why is it that we
like to express this when we realize benefits that we
have received? I think we shall find that the fact
of this quality of gratitude and this expression of
thankfulness is implanted in us by our instincts, and
that it is also a definite revelation of God, that He
requires it at our hands, that a grateful, thankful
disposition is that which goes to make up the char-
acter of man as God would have it.
We like when we have done a kindness to know
that it has touched the heart of him to whom it has
been done. We like ourselves to recognize gratitude
in others. So then it is the same with our heavenly
Father. That which I have read as our text is per-
haps one of the first examples of it. God is accepting
there the offering of thanksgiving after the Flood
which overwhelmed the earth, or that portion at least
which was inhabited by man. We look to the New
Testament. We find that our blessed Lord especially
emphasized His acceptance of gratitude and the
expression of it, as in the case of the ten lepers.
We might multiply instances, but we realize that
God Himself has distinctly made us know that the
spirit of gratitude is a spirit that He desires to see
as a part of human character.
I. Why is this Harvest especially a Cause of
Thanksgiving ?
(a) It is the fulfilment of a Divine promise. —
We remind ourselves of the goodness of God in the
fulfilment of that promise that these things that go
to make our lives bright and happy, the morning and
the evening, the day for labour and the night for
rest, the summer and the winter, and the seedtime
and the harvest, they shall never cease while the
earth remaineth, as they once ceased in the days of
the Flood of Noah.
(b) We regard it also as a fulfilment of a desire
on our part as the granting of prayer. — It is a
very curious thing that our blessed Lord, Who came
on earth, as we have said, to reveal God's mind with
regard to men's life, when asked how to pray, taught
those pattern supplications which are contained in
what is called The Lord's Prayer, and if we offer
these supplications day by day, and very thought-
fully, we shall quite understand how all through the
year we have been crying to God for a certain thing,
' Give us day by day our daily bread,' or, ' our bread
to-day for to-morrow,' as some translators would have
it. We have been crying to God so to bless the
earth that it may produce its fruits for our use.
How far this Divine miracle would cease, were the
human cry to cease, we do not know. But we know
that, in answer to that Divine command, daily, a
great stream of intercession goes forth to God. And
so, at the end of the year we gather together, in
order to return our thanks for the giving of the gift
for which we have prayed; for, after all, it is by
Divine arrangement that the want of one part of the
earth is supplied by the plenty of the other, that
means of locomotion increase as men's needs increase,
so that we are fed not only by the produce of the
land on which we live, but by the whole great world
of which we are a part.
II. How are we to Return Thanks?
(a) By the service we offer. — It is a very striking
thing, is it not, that in the Old Testament, when
God prescribed great festivals for the Jews, He pre-
scribed three of them, as distinctly in connexion with
the ingathering of the fruits of the earth — the sow-
ing, the first fruits, and the ingathering. So it was
in the mind of God especially then, that thanksgiving
should be offered by people united in the act of
worship and praise, as it were, making beautiful the
thank-offering that they sent up to heaven.
(fc) And then there is that further act of wor-
ship by which we most specially and signally mark
our festivals of thanksgiving, the great thank-offering
in the holy communion which our blessed Lord and
Saviour Jesus Christ gave us, the great thank-offering,
as it used to be called in the early Church, the
Eucharist, as we call it, which signifies the great
service of thanksgiving.
(c) We should offer ourselves, our souls and
bodies, to the service of our God. That which God
would have at our hands in the time of our thanks-
giving is that which we can give — an offering of our-
selves.
HARVEST FESTIVAL
'While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold
and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night
shall not cease.'— Genesis viii. 22.
I. This passage is one of what are usually called
the ' Jehovistic ' sections of the book of Genesis.
Specific portions of the narrative are characterized by
the constant recurrence of the name ' Lord,' which is
the translation in our Revised Version for 'Jehovah/
whilst other and more lengthy parts are usually dis-
tinguished by the exclusive use of the appellation
' Elohim ' which is invariably rendered ' God '. This
word is generic, and is in Scripture applied to the
heathen divinities as well as to the true God, whilst
the title ' Jehovah ' or ' Lord ' is specific, or rather
essentially personal, and denotes the national or
covenant God of Israel.
II. It is an important fact that the God of the
seasons, the God of Nature, is the ' I am,' the self-
existent one of Jewish worship, and that fact gets
explicit statement in the earlier pages of the Revela-
tion. An intelligent personal will is thus perceived
34
Ver. 11.
GENESIS IX
Ver. 13.
to be the guiding force or principle in all changes
and development, whether of nature or of providence.
Nothing comes to pass by chance or an inexorable
necessity, as some of the more thoughtful heathen
supposed ; the more destructive forces of the universe,
storms and floods and earthquakes, are not diabolic,
the sad and malignant work of evil supernatural spirits
as others thought, but, however, inexplicable, are the
issue of the Almighty fiat of Him who ruleth all things
according to the counsel of His own will, ' the Lord '.
III. The unchangeable faithfulness of the Lord
under all His successive dispensations is one main
truth and lesson of the passage now before us, the
rainbow in the domain of nature being no less a
visible and sure sign or token of it, than the water
or the bread or wine of the Sacraments in the sphere
of grace. Salvation is all of grace from beginning to
end; but our special business usually is to trace the
Hand which wrought it out in the bounties of nature,in
the joyousness of the harvest home and the vintage. —
J. Miller, Sermons Literary and Scientific, p. 179.
Hefebences. — VIII. 22. — D. J. Waller, Preachers' Mag-
azine, vol. xix. p. 415. R. S. Candlish, The Book of Genesis,
vol. i. p. 140. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxii. No. 1891.
IX. 1-7. — R. S. Candlish, The Book of Genesis, vol. i. p. 140.
IX. 4. — A. G. Mortimer, The Church's Lessons, vol. ii. p. 1.
IX. 8-17. — A. Maclaren, Expositions — Genesit, p. 60. R. S.
Candlish, The Book of Genesis, vol. i. p. 151.
THE BOW IN THE CLOUD
'I will establish My covenant with you.' — Genesis ix. ii.
In the midst of wrath God remembered mercy. Upon
the subsidence of the Flood and the restoration of
the family of Noah to their accustomed avocations,
the great Ruler and Lord graciously renewed to the
human race the expression of His favour.
I. The Covenant was established between, on the
one hand, the Lord Himself; on the other hand, the
sons of men, represented in the person of Noah.
(a) Its occasion. — It was after the vindication of
Divine justice and authority by the deluge of waters;
it was upon the restoration of the order of nature as
before ; it was when the family of Noah commenced
anew the offices of human life and toil. A new be-
ginning of human history seemed an appropriate time
for the establishment of a new covenant between a
reconciled God and the subjects of His kingdom.
(6) Its purport. — It was an undertaking that never
again should the waters return in fury so destructive
and disastrous.
(c) Its nature. — In an ordinary covenant, the
parties mutually agree to a certain course of conduct,
and bind themselves thereto. Now, in any agreement
between God and man, it must be borne in mind that
the promise which God makes is absolutely free; He
enters into an engagement of His own accord, and
aware that man can offer Him no equivalent for what
He engages His honour to do.
(ti) Its sign. — The bow in the cloud was probably
as old as the Creation, but from this time forth it
became a sign of Divine mercy and a pledge of Divine
faithfulness. Something frequent, something beauti-
ful, something heavenly— how fitted to tell us of the
love and fidelity of our Divine Father !
II. God is to all a Covenant God. — He has given
offers of mercy, assurances of compassion, promise of
life to all mankind. His covenant has been ratified
with the blood of Christ. To those who enter into
its privileges He says, 'This is as the waters of Noah/
etc. (Isa. liv. 9).
References. — IX. 11. — H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, Sunday
Lessons, vol. i. p. 198. Bishop Armstrong, Parochial Ser-
mons, p. 163. IX. 12, 13. — R. Winterbotham, Sermons,
p. 84.
THE RAINBOW THE TYPE OF THE COVENANT
'And God said, This is the token of the covenant which I make
between Me and you, and every living creature that is
with you, for perpetual generations: I do set My bow
in the cloud,' etc. — Genesis ix. 12-15.
God was pleased to impart to Noah the gracious
assurance that He would ' establish His covenant,' to
appoint an outward and visible sign which would
serve at once to confirm men in their faith and to
dispel their fears.
I. The rainbow is equally dependent for its exist-
ence upon storm and upon sunshine. Marvellously
adapted, therefore, to serve as a type of mercy follow-
ing upon judgment — as a sign of connexion between
man's sin and God's free and unmerited grace, con-
necting gloomy recollections of past with bright
expectations of future.
II. It is also a type of that equally distinctive
peculiarity of Christ's Gospel, that sorrow and suffer-
ing have their appointed sphere of exercise both
generally in the providential administration of the
world, and individually in the growth and develop-
ment of personal holiness. It is the Gospel of Christ
Jesus alone which converts sorrow and suffering into
instruments for the attainment of higher and more
enduring blessings.
III. As the rainbow spans the vault of the sky and
becomes a link between earth and heaven, so, in the
person and work of Christ, is beheld the unchange-
ableness and perpetuity of that covenant of grace
which like Jacob's ladder maintains the communica-
tion between earth and heaven, and thus by bringing
God very near to man, ushers man into the presence-
chamber of God.
IV. In nature the continued appearance of rainbow
is dependent on the continued existence of cloud. In
heaven, the rainbow will ever continue to point back-
ward to man's fall and onward to the perpetuity of a
covenant which is ' ordered in all things and sure '.
But work of judgment will then be accomplished,
and therefore the cloud inseparable from the condition
of the redeemed in earth — will have no more place in
heaven. — Canon Elliott, The Contemporary Pulpit,
vol. v. p. 151.
THE MESSAGE OF THE RAINBOW
' I do set my bow in the cloud.' — Genesis ix. 13.
When a man has passed through the deep waters
as Noah passed, there is a new depth in the
35
Ver. 13.
GENESIS IX., XI
Ver. 32.
familiar Bible, there is a new meaning in the familiar
bow.
I. What we most dread God can illuminate. If
there was one thing full of terror to Noah, it was the
cloud. How Noah with the fearful memories of the
Flood, would tremble at the rain-cloud in the sky!
yet it was there that the Almighty set his bow. It
was that very terror He illuminated. And a kind
God is always doing that. What we most dread,
He can illuminate. Was there ever anything more
dreaded than the Cross, that symbol of disgrace in an
old world, that foulest punishment, that last in-
dignity that could be cast on a slave? And Christ
has so illuminated that thing of terror, that the one
hope to-day for sinful men, and the one type and
model of the holiest life, is nothing else than that.
IT. There is unchanging purpose in the most
changeful things. In the whole of nature there is
scarce anything so changeful as the clouds. But God,
living and full of power, would have His name and
covenant upon the cloud. And if that means any-
thing surely it is this: that through all change, and
movement, and recasting, run the eternal purposes of
God.
III. There is meaning in the mystery of life.
Clouds are the symbol, clouds are the spring of
mystery. And so when God sets His bow upon the
cloud, I believe that there is meaning in life's mystery.
I am like a man travelling among the hills and there
is a precipice and I know it not, and yonder is a
chasm where many a man has perished, and I cannot
see it. But on the clouds that hide God lights
His rainbow; and the ends of it are here on earth,
and the crown of it is lifted up to heaven. And I
feel that God is with me in the gloom, and there is
meaning in life's mystery for me.
IV. But there is another message of the bow. It
tells me that the background of joy is sorrow. God
has painted His rainbow on the cloud, and back of
its glories yonder is the mist. And underneath life's
gladness is an unrest, and a pain that we cannot well
interpret, and a sorrow that is born we know not
how. Will the Cross of Calvary interpret life if the
deepest secret of life is merriment? Impossible!
I cannot look at the rainbow on the cloud, I cannot
see the Saviour on the Cross, but I feel that back of
gladness there is agony, and that the richest joy is
born of sorrow. — G. H. Morrison, Flood Tide, p. 170.
References. — IX. 13. — J. Parker, Adam, Noah, and
Abraham, p. 54. IX. 14. — C. Perren, Revival Sermons, p.
292. Baring-Gould, Village Preaching for a Year, vol. ii. p.
28. IX. 15. — J. Monro Gibson, The Ages before Moses, p.
138. IX. 16. — H. N. Powers, American Pulpit of To-day,
vol. iii. p. 414. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. ix. No. 517. IX.
18-29. — R. S. Candlish, Booh of Genesis, vol. i. p. 157. X.
1-5. — J. Parker, Adam, Noah, and Abraham, p. G4. X. 32.
— S. Wilberforce, Sermons, p. 64. XI. 1. — J. Vaughan,
Fifty Sermons (10th Series), p. 103. XI. 4-9.— S. Leathes,
Studies in Genesis, p. 81. XI. 9.— F. E. Paget, Village Ser-
mons, p. 223. XI. 27.— R. S. Candlish, Book of Genesis,
vol. i. p. 181. J. Monro Gibson, The Ages before Moses, p.
159. XI. 31. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxiv. No. 2011.
YOUTH AND AFTER
' And Terah died in Haran.'— Genesis xi. 32.
' And Terah died in Haran.' What of that?
It was not until they came to Haran that they
touched, as it were, their first footprints and found
the old religion. There had been little temptation
to pause before on the score of a people's worship, but
when, worn out in body and mind, Abram suddenly
came upon the old religion, his journeyings after
another faith and form of worship were at an end.
It was Abram the younger man who withstood the
temptations of Haran.
I. You see the thought underlying this bit of
prosaic information. It simply means that the years
close down the possibilities of a certain kind of moral
Exodus. If you wait until you get into years before
you find right principles, form good resolutions — well
then it is better to make some start in the right
direction, but why pile up the odds that start you
never will?
The enthusiasms of old men are as rare as they are
short-lived unless they are evolved out of earlier and
worthy days. I am far from saying that old age
necessarily blocks the way to great attempts or to
conspicuous success in them. All history would cry
out against such a statement. There is an old age
we delight to honour and which reverses the ordinary
attitude to it in the general world.
II. We may apply what has been so far advanced,
first to pleasures, and secondly to something more
important to you than old age, and that is — middle
life.
(a) To everything, says the preacher, there is a
time and a season, and it must be that youth is the
time for amusements and pleasures which are not so
much the privilege of youth as native to it. We are
told that Darwin in his old age expressed regret that
he had deprived himself of so many of the pleasures
and resources of life by his concentration upon that
study the results of which have made his name so
justly famous, and no young man should give place
to a doctrine of work which excludes his right to the
joyous abandon of his years.
(6) When a man begins to sight the middle years
he learns to know himself as never before or after.
This is the stage where increase of knowledge often
means increase of sorrow. It is in truth the sorrow
of finding out our limitations, which in their first
acquaintance often seem more appalling than they
actually are. While youth may be saved by hope
of what is to be, middle life is often lost in the drab
reality of what is, and even where middle life has won
success in the things men covet, and after which they
strive, it may be that that success is just deadly
in its reaction of monotony. Men do not always go
under because they cannot do things. They fail not
because they do not know what it is well to do, but
because they do not choose to attempt it. And
why do they not choose ? So far as this question affects
middle life it is largely because so few of us have the
36
Ver. 1.
GENESIS XII
Vv. 1-3.
grit to face its difficulties. — Ambrose Shepherd, Men
in the Making, p. 1.
'Now the Lord had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy
country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's
house, unto aland that I will shew thee.' — Genesis XII. I.
Abraham was the father of the faithful, and we have
here the first recorded test to which his faith was put.
The first and one of the greatest.
I. The Substance of God's Call to Abraham. —
1. He was called from rest to pilgrimage. — From his
country and kindred and father's house, to undertake
lifelong journeying. He was at an age at which he
would fain rest. His wanderings seemed to be begun
at the wrong end of his life. But it was then God
said, ' Get thee out '. It is as life advances that the
idea of journeying, ' getting out,' comes home to men.
The child rests in his home ; but the outside world,
with its responsibilities, self-direction and support,
begins at last to open to him, and he must ' get out '.
So with resting among old friends, etc. We must one
day ' get out '. As years increase, all things seem in
constant flow. Then at death. Above all, hear God's
voice telling you to set out on the Christian pilgrimage.
2. He was called from the familiar to the un-
tried. — The child's familiarity with his environment
is never attained to in after years. ' New faces, other
minds ' meet men's eyes and souls ; and they know,
however peaceful their lot may be, that they are not
in the old, familiar home. But let us extend our idea
of home. The lifelong invalid would feel from home
in another room of the same house. Let God be our
home, the great house in which we live and move
about; then wherever He is, we shall feel at home.
Most so when we leave the lower room altogether to
be ' at home with the Lord ' above.
3. He was called from sight to faith. — From the
portion he had in his country and in his father's
house, to wait at all times on the unseen God, and
go to the land which He would show him. Let us
willingly make this exchange. God is better than
country, and kindred, and father's house.
II. TheCharacteristics of God's Call to Abraham.
— 1. It laid clearly before him all that he was to
surrender. — How full and attractive the picture is
made to Abraham's last sight of it ; ' thy country,
kindred,' etc. So, when from duty and loyalty to
Christ, we make sacrifices, etc., the possessions will
often seem peculiarly fascinating, just when we are to
part with them.
2. It was uncompromising. — ' Get thee out,'
with no promise or prospect of ever returning. The
gifts of God are never repeated in exactly the same
form. The pleasures of sin must be left ungrudg-
ingly and for ever.
3. It was urgent. — ' Get thee out.' Now. ' Abra-
ham departed, as the Lord had spoken to him.' Let
us give the same ready, instant obedience.
'Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from
thy father's house, unto a land that I will shew thee.' —
Genesis xii. i, 2.
It was with these words that Johann Reuchlin sum-
moned his grandnephew, Philip Melanchthon, to
accept the Greek professorship at Wittenberg which
was offered him, in the summer of 1518, by the
Elector Frederick of Saxony. Melanchthon was at
that time only twenty-one and had been studying
and teaching for some years at the University of
Tubingen. He wished for a change, and had written
to Reuchlin that he was wasting his time in element-
ary work. He promised in a letter of 12 July to
go wherever Reuchlin might send him and to work
hard. Looking to the distant future, he hoped that
the time would come when rest and literary leisure
would be all the sweeter from the previous toil. On
24 July Reuchlin wrote the famous letter in which
he quoted the passage from Genesis. ' I will not ad-
dress you in poetry,' he said, ' but will use the true
promise which God made to faithful Abraham: " Get
thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and
from thy father's house, unto a land that I will shew
thee. And I will make of thee a great nation, and I
will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou
shalt be a blessing" (see Genesis xii.). So does my
mind predict your future, so do I hope for you, my
Philip, my work and my consolation. Come therefore
with joyous and cheerful mind.' After giving many
practical directions for his grandnephew's packing,
journey, and family farewells, Reuchlin bade him not
linger, but hasten. Evidently the shrewd scholar
and man of business feared that if the Elector
quitted Augsburg without having met his new pro-
fessor, the negotiations which he himself had so
cleverly arranged might fall to the ground. Dr.
Karl Sell, commenting on this letter (which will be
found in full in the Corpus Reformatorum, vol. i.
pp. 32, 33), says that Melanchthon had no idea when
he accepted the call of the nature of the task that
lay before him in Wittenberg. ' He set forth with
no presentment of the future towards that great
vocation which brought him so much suffering and
which has given him his place in the world's history.'
His longing for literary repose was never fulfilled,
but Reuchlin's prediction was realized in a way of
which the writer never dreamed.
THE FIRST MISSIONARY
'Now the Lord had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy
country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's
house, unto a land that I will shew thee. '—Genesis xii. 1-3.
I. How strange that call must have seemed to
Abraham. It was not like the call which sends forth
missionaries now. It was a command to strike out
into a new and untried path. It was very indefinite
as to the immediate future. He was to go to Canaan
and live there. But we are not told that he preached
to the people, or endeavoured to convert them to his
own faith. We can look back upon Abraham's work
and its fruits, upon God's promise and fulfilment,
and we can see how the call of Abraham was a great
step in God's purpose to train a race of men who
should be missionaries to humanity.
II. In the New Testament the missionary call is
renewed, only it is made more sweeping. It is no
37
Vv. 1-9.
GENESIS XII
Vv. 6-9.
longer to one country or nation but to all humanity.
How far has this promise been fulfilled? It is one
of the most encouraging signs of our own time that
there is a real revival of missionary interest, a realiza-
tion of our duty to preach the Gospel to the heathen
and an attempt to fulfil it- — A. G. Mortimeh, One
Hundred Miniature Sermons, p. 321.
GOD CALLS ABRAM
Genesis xii. 1-9.
The same voice, says F. B. Meyer, has often spoken
since. It called Elijah from Thisbe, and Amos from
Tekoa ; Peter from his fishing nets, and Matthew
from his toll-booth ; Cromwell from his farm in
Huntingdon, and Luther from his cloister at Erfurt.
The same voice, we may add, called the Pilgrim
Fathers when on 6 September, 1620, they set sail
from Plymouth in the ' Mayflower,' bound for the
banks of the Hudson.
Note the three marks of the pilgrims given by
Bunyan: (1) their dress was strange, (2) few could
understand what they said, (3) they set very light by
the wares of Vanity Fair.
References.— XII. — S. Wilberforce, Sermons, p. 165.
XII. 1-3. — J. Aspinall, Parish Sermons (1st Series), p. 126.
F. D. Maurice, Patriarchs and Law Givers of the Old Tes-
tament, p. 68. XII. 1-7. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xlviii.
No. 2523. XII. 1-9. — A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy
Scripture, p. 66.
ABRAHAM THE COSMOPOLITAN
'And I will make of thee a great nation.' — Genesis xii. 2.
Abraham is to dream of a land beyond the years.
The most mature of all the Gospels declares that he
anticipated the Christian Era.
I. He is born too soon. The father of a vast mul-
titude, he is himself a lonely figure — about his sur-
roundings, unappreciated by his age. He has conceived
an idea to which his age is a stranger, an idea the
working out of which itself involves sacrifice.
II. Abraham is not the man of a village seeking a
metropolis, he is the man of a metropolis seeking to
extend a village. The dream which burst upon the
'soul of Abraham was the hope of being a secular mis-
sionary, a colonist of waste places.
III. This portrait of Abraham is the earliest at-
tempt to represent a cosmopolitan man — a man seek-
ing to make the world a recipient of his own blessing.
He is the forerunner of that great missionary band
which, whether in the sphere of religion or of culture,
have been the pioneers of a new era to lands that
were outside the pale. But for that very reason it
was a curtailment of his sphere among contemporaries.
It exposed him to social ostracism. It separated him
from his age. The path selected by Abraham was a
path which the world of his day did not deem heroic.
IV. The life of Abraham begins with an experience
which, in germ, is identical with that of Jesus. On
the threshold of his ministry there is an analogy be-
tween the first three trials of Abraham and the three
temptations of Jesus.
(a) He is first assailed by famine; the bodily nature
is made on the very threshold to protest against the
enterprise.
(6) Then comes the temptation, not to abandon,
but to accelerate it by an exercise of physical power.
Nor does Abraham come forth scatheless from the
trial.
(c) But the third temptation is destined to redeem
him. There comes the call to an act of choice between
worldly possessions, in which he selects the apparently
barren one.
V. Abraham is a cosmopolitan at the beginning,
and an individual at the end. The man who at the
opening of the day has only an eye for multitudes,
subsides at evening into the family circle. The
starry dome is exchanged for the precincts of the
tent. The sacrificial character remains, but its sphere
is altered ; it ceases to be a sacrifice for the nations,
it becomes a surrender to the hearth. — G. Matheson,
The Representative Men of the Bible, p. 110.
References. — XII. 2. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xliii.
No. 2523. J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons, p. 293. J. H.
Evans, Thursday Penny Pulpit, vol. x. p. 113. XII. 5. —
A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture — Genesis, p. 77.
II. J. Wilmot-Buxton, Common Life Religion, p. 134.
Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xiv. No. 843 ; ibid. vol. xxxiv. No.
2011.
'And Abram passed through the land unto the place of Sichem,
unto the plain of Moreh. And the Canaanite was then in
the land. And the Lord appeared unto Abram, and said,
Unto thy seed will I give this land: and there builded he
an altar unto the Lord, Who appeared unto him. And
he removed from thence unto a mountain on the east of
Beth-el, and pitched his tent, having Beth-el on the west,
and Hai on the east : and there he builded an altar unto
the Lord, and called upon the name of the Lord. And
Abram journeyed, going on still toward the south.' —
Genesis xii. 6-9.
Up to the chapter out of which this text is taken,
the history of the Bible is rather taken up with the
history of the human race in its more general and
more universal aspect. It seems to stop at this
particular chapter and to look upon the human race
less in its larger and universal aspect than in the
national aspect of the children of God. The character
of the history of the people of God is manifested in
the character of the person who founded that history,
and with whom the national history begins. I need
not remind you that nations catch and are infected
with the spirit of their founder. The history of the
Israelitish people is rather the history of saintliness,
than what we understand by a secular or profane
history, and it had its root and foundation in him
who was called the Father of the Faithful.
I. Abraham's Career. — A most remarkable career
was that of Abraham. He was trained by what?
By a process of separation ; the giving up this, and the
foregoing that. That was the keynote of Abraham's
life; one time called to do this, another time called to
forego that; the sign early laid upon him of the Cross.
He leaves his home without a moment of delay, no hesi-
tation about it, not even knowing where he was going.
And there was vouchsafed to him for his encourage-
ment a special manifestation, he was promised a land,
a seed, and a blessing as his reward ; great inheritance,
38
Vv. 10, 11.
GENESIS XIII
Ver. 11.
abounding posterity, and a remarkable influence. He
sets out on this journey toward the promised land,
which he never regarded as his real resting-place or
home. It is rather typical, not of heaven, but of the
visibleChurch,and of the life of individualChristians in
the world ; and his experience was that his life must be
more or less migratory and wandering till he reached
his home. The Canaanite — it is an expressive passage
— was still in the land, therefore it was not heaven.
He pitched his tent as we might pitch a tent or mar-
quee in our fields, as you see gipsies pitch them when-
even they find a night's lodging or resting-place;
plain, homely, but enough for the purpose.
II. The Aitar Built. — And side by side with this
simple dwelling-place, easily removed, ever reminding
him that the call might come to take it up and go
somewhere else, he built an altar, rude, rough in its
way, and there it was that he called upon the Lord.
He built it as a spontaneous act of gratitude that
should tell the passers-by of mercies countless that he
had received. It was rough and rude, and, simple
as it was, it was not divorced violently from homely,
common-day life. Now what lies at the bottom of
this simple act of the Father of the Faithful? It
was the expression of what, I believe, is a profound
and unquenchable spiritual instinct that seeks after
God. The instinct of man has led him to localize
God, sometimes in a shrine, sometimes in a dark
grave. But you know that impressions pass very
quickly away from us, and feelings very soon evapor-
ate. Religion— it is not superstition, but religion
as we call it, a comprehensive term — is kept in mind
and made more real to us by buildings like this church,
which you never mistake for anything else; and by
certain rites and ceremonies and forms, which are the
channels approved by generations of men, in which
devotion flows. I do not say that churchgoing is
religion, but I think that religion would die out
without our churches. The very architecture tells
the passer-by that it is something dedicated to God
and to His glory. And we still believe that the
strength of this great nation really lies, not in her
armaments and not in her standing armies, but in
her godliness, in her national piety, in her righteous-
ness, in her reverence for God's holy day, in her de-
vout regard for churches, and in that godliness which
fetches its inspiration from all that we learn and hear
and receive in these earthly temples.
References. — XII. 6, 7. — A. Maclaren, Expositions of
Holy Scripture — Genesis, p. 82. XII. 8. — A. Maclaren,
Expositions of Holy Scripture — Genesis, p. 84. XII. —
J. Parker, Adam, Noah, and Abraham, p. 91. F. W. Robert-
son, Notes on Genesis, p. 33. R. S. Candlish, Book of Genesis,
vol. i. p. 181. S. Leathes, Studies in Genesis, p. 96. XIII.
1. — J. Parker, Adam, Noah, and Abraham, p. 91. XIII.
1-13.— A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture — Gene-
sis, p. 85.
' Lot lifted up his eyes and beheld all the plain of Jordan, etc.
— Genesis xiii. io, ii.
The lesson to be gained from the history of Abraham
and Lot is obviously this — that nothing but a clear
apprehension of things unseen, a simple trust in God's
promises, and the greatness of mind thence arising, can
make us act above the world — indifferent, or almost
so, to its comforts, enjoyments, and friendships, or in
other words, that its goods corrupt the common run
even of religious men who possess them. . . . Could
we not easily persuade ourselves to support Antichrist,
I will not say at home, but at least abroad, rather
than we should lose one portion of the freights which
' the ships of Tarshish bring us "... . Surely, if we
are to be saved, it is not by keeping ourselves just
above the line of reprobation, and living without any
anxiety and struggle to serve God with a perfect
heart. No one, surely, can be a Christian who makes
his worldly interests his chief end of action. — J. H.
Newman.
LOT'S CHOICE
'Then Lot chose him all the plain of Jordan; and Lot jour-
neyed east: and they separated themselves the one from
the other. Abram dwelled in the land of Canaan, and
Lot dwelled in the cities of the plain, and pitched his tent
toward Sodom.'— Genesis xiii. ii.
In the story of patriarchal times we see how the pos-
session of property brought with it new social problems
for the primitive family. In this case the difficulty
began not with the principals, but with their retainers.
Before the difficulty struck the masters, the servants
were at war. Jealousy about respective rights, and
emulation to secure the better bargain crept in.
Abram with his calm wisdom saw that it would be
better to avoid all such unseemly quarrels by volun-
tarily separating. Abram with generous disinter-
estedaess offers Lot his choice. ' If thou wilt take the
left hand then I will go to the right; or if thou wilt
take the right hand then I will go to the left.' It
was quite like Abram to do this, in keeping with his
noble nature.
I. The presence of moral greatness either raises us
or dwarfs us, either prompts us to rise to the occa-
sion or tempts us to take advantage of it. Lot lost
his choice of meeting Abram's generosity. Worldly
advantage was the first element in his choice. He
judged according to the world's judgment; he judged
by the eye. His heart was allured by the beauty and
fertility of the plain. On the other side the gain was
limited and hardly won.
II. Now the power of the temptation to Lot, as it
is the power of it to us, was that the good of the one
alternative was present, while the good of the other
seemed distant. The one could be had at sight; the
other only through faith. The seduction of the world
is that it is here, palpable, to be had now. To exer-
cise self-control for the sake of a future blessing, to
put off a present good for a prospective good needs
strength of character and will, and, above all, faith.
III. Faith is the refusal of the small for the sake
of the large. Worldly wisdom is not wisdom; it is
folly, the blind grasping at what is within reach.
Lot thought he was doing a wise thing in making the
choice he did, but a share in the wealth of Sodom was
a pitiful substitute for a place in Abram's company
and a share in Abram's thoughts and faith. And the
39
Ver. 12.
GENESIS XII L, XIV
Ver. 18.
end was a ruined home, a desolate life, and a broken
heart. — H. Black, Edinburgh Sermons, p. 38.
References. — XIII. 11. — G. A. Towler, From Heart to
Heart, p. 1. XIII. 11-14. — O. Perren, Revival Sermons, p.
242.
ABRAHAM AND LOT— A CONTRAST
'And Abram dwelled in the land of Canaan, and Lot dwelled
in the cities of the plain, and pitched his tent toward
Sodom.' — Genesis xiii. 12.
Abraham's life is characterized throughout by great
simplicity of motive. He is a man called of God, and
true to the heavenly vision — a ' pilgrim of the invis-
ible,' as Robertson of Brighton called him, laying by
his faith and high surrender of himself the foundation
of a kingdom from which the prophet and the psalm-
ist and the apostle and our Lord Himself were to
come. You get a glimpse into the inner soul of
Abraham in this chapter. When it comes to a quarrel
between his servants and Lot's, and the younger man
is scheming how he can promote his own interests by
striking a good bargain, Abraham betrays on the
whole subject a lofty indifference. He is so sure about
God that he feels it matters very little whether he
goes to the right hand or to the left. He does not
need to stoop to any mean or grasping course to get
what God has promised him. And although in this
difference with Lot, as the older man and the leader
of the enterprise, he might have claimed the first
choice, he instead surrenders it.
I. In (iod's Company. — I find then that acting as
he did Abraham got the best of both worlds. For
one thing when he left Lot he went in God's com-
pany. As always when a man does right, even at a
sacrifice, he saw the heavens opened and heard God
speaking. And then in making this lofty unselfish
choice, Abraham discovered that he had not lost
his inheritance, but rather come to the gate of it.
Abraham sought heavenly riches and lo ! the wealth
of the world lay at his feet.
II. The Divided Heart. — Lot is the type of a
man, who tried in a very mistaken use of the phrase,
to make the best of both worlds, and in the end
got the good out of neither. You see him at every
point trying to serve two masters, fearing God and
yet pitching his tent towards Sodom. If you were
to sum Lot up you might say he was an unsuccessful
religious man, and an unsuccessful worldling, neither
satisfied on the one side of his being nor the other.
Lot's was a dissatisfied life; let me try to make
the statement good. For on the one side his religion
was spoiled by his worldliness. When you see him
in Sodom he is sitting in the gate to dispense
hospitality, perhaps to administer justice. He vexes
his righteous soul at the depravity that goes on
about him. He is looked upon by the lawless
Sodomites as in some ways a moral censor; for you
remember they say, ' This one fellow came in to
sojourn, and he will needs be a judge'. But you
feel at once that Lot differs from Abraham in that
he did not make religious principle the guiding star
of his life. Right feeling, for instance, should have
prompted him to refuse Abraham's generous offer of
the first choice. But he did not refuse to take an
unfair advantage of his kinsman. Then he pitched
his tent towards Sodom, risking for worldly gear the
defilement of his family.
III. A Lifeof Double Failure. — Then on the other
side Lot's worldliness was spoiled by his religion.
Another man might have let go the reins, and sur-
rendered himself with whole-hearted zest to the
sordid and vicious life of Sodom. But Lot could not
do that. And why? Because following him like
a spectre was the memory of the days that were gone,
the uplifting communion with Abraham and with
God. And so he remained in Sodom, not entering
into its life, uneasy »and disturbed, vexing his
righteous soul from day to day but without the
moral courage to leave the city, till he was thrust
out by the mercy of heaven ' saved yet so as by fire'. —
J. McColl, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lxxiv. p.
170.
References. — XIII. 12. — W. J. Dawson, The Comrade
of Christ, p. 243. XIII. 12-13.— R. C. Trench, Sermons
New and Old, p. 258. XIII. 18-20.— J. Vaughan, Fifty
Sermons (2nd Series), p. 22. C. Stanford, Symbols of
Christ, p. 3. XIII. — F. W. R.obertson,N otes on Genesis, p.
39. XIV. 13. — A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scrip-
ture — Genesis, p. 93. XIV. 15, 16. — J. Budgen, Parochial
Sermons, vol. ii. p. 285. XIV. 17-24. — Spurgeon, Sermons,
vol. xliii. No. 2523; ibid., vol. xlix. No. 2814.
MELCHISEDEK THE UNCANONICAL
' He was the priest of the most high God.' — Genesis xiv. 18.
A deeply veiled figure. The force of the figure lies
in its background ; its mystery in its mean surround-
ings. Melchisedek was a Canaanite. His birthplace
was uncanonieal. He ruled with wonderfully des-
potic power. What gave this man such a marvellous
power? His personal sanctity. Abraham represents
earth; Melchisedek is the High Priest of heaven.
I. Where did Melchisedek get that priesthood
which he was certainly credited with possessing.
Melchisedek was the earliest man of his class, and
was therefore not ordained with hands. The first
priest of God in the history of the world must have
come from a house not made with hands.
II. The beginning of every ecclesiastical chain is
something not ecclesiastical — something human.
The churches of the Old World each began in a
human soul. In Melchisedek within the precincts
of one heart was laid the nucleus of all that sanctity
which attached to the patriarchal line. There are
three orders of priesthood in the Bible — the Patri-
archal, the Jewish, and the Christian, and at the
beginning of each dispensation there stands an in-
dividual life whose ordination is not made with hands.
The origin of the patriarchal dispensation is the
holiness of one man — the man Melchisedek. The
origin of the Jewish dispensation is the holiness of
one man — Moses. The origin of the Christian dis-
pensation is from the human side the holiness of one
man — the man Christ Jesus.
40
Ver. 20.
GENESIS XIV.-XVI
Ver. 13.
III. The point of comparison between Melchisedek
and Christ is just the uncanonical manner of their
ordination. Looking at the matter from the human
side, and abstracting the attention from theological
prepossessions there is nothing more remarkable than
the uncanonical aspect of the Son of Man. He has
obtained it ' after the manner of Melchisedek '. Un-
consecrated he became the source of consecration. —
G. Matheson, Representative Men of the Bible, p.
43.
Reference. — XIV. 18-20. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. x.
No. 589.
CHRIST THE TRUE JOSEPH
'The good of all the land of Egypt is yours.'— Genesis xiv. 20.
Consider (1) What is the true principle of inter-
pretation to be applied to a particular class of so-
called ' types '; and (2) What is the relation in which
Christ's people have a right to consider themselves as
standing to that outer world, which in some schools
of theology is described as ' their spiritual enemy '
and in all schools is allowed to be the sphere of their
trial.
I. In what sense do we use the words, when caught
by, and gazing on, some old saintly or heroic character,
whose deeds are chronicled in the history of the people
of God, we say instinctively ' Here is a plain type of
the Lord Jesus Christ ' ? What do we mean by this
manner of speaking? What sort of relation between
type and antitype do our words imply ? ' Whatso-
ever things are true,' says the Gospels' most renowned
preacher, ' whatsoever things are honest, whotsoever
things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatso-
ever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good
report ; if there be any virtue, if there be any praise
think on these things'. Think of them as the diadem
of grace that crowned the head of Him to whom the
Father ' gave not the Spirit by measure,' Who made
for Himself one glorious crown of all these precious
jewels and set it upon His head that all men might
behold its beauty, and Who now weareth it on His
throne in the heavenly place for evermore. So He
was the perfect man, the 'recapitulation' of humanity,
the incarnation — the prototype rather than the anti-
type — of all that men have ever seen or dreamed of,
or pictured to themselves in fancy of the heroic, the
pure, the altogether lovely and spotless, the godlike
in man.
II. ' The good of all the land of Egypt is yours.'
So spake Joseph to his kindred; so speaks Christ to
us who are members of His body. We dwell in Egypt,
and all its good things are ours, we are not taken out
of the world ; but by providences and graces, inscru-
table in their processes, palpable only in their results,
are kept from its evil and suffering, bidden to enjoy
its good. For it is possible ' to use the world as not
abusing it ' ; and not only so but to use and be the
better for the use. A Christian man may come in
contact with what is loathsomest and foulest, and
instead of being defiled he shall be the purer, the
saintlier, the nearer and the liker God. Egypt is
Egypt still: a land lying under a curse; visited at
times with plagues; where idols are worshipped with
more zeal than God. But if I am Christ's this Egypt
is mine. Its curse shall not scathe me. Its plague-
spots shall not infect me. While then I assert un-
falteringly my claim to all the good things of Egypt,
I shall limit myself in the use of them by three main
considerations: (1) By my neighbour's good; (2) By
the possibility of misconstruction ; (3) By a wholesome
fear of becoming secularized. I know not that we
need any other safeguards; and I do not find that
the Gospel has multiplied restraints. A few great
guiding principles are better than many subtle, fine-
drawn rules. — J. Fraseh, University Sermons, p. 18.
Reference. — XIV. — J. Parker, Adam, Noah, and Abra-
ham, p. 111.
Genesis xv.
' Read the fifteenth chapter with extreme care. If
you have a good memory, learn it by heart from
beginning to end; it is one of the most sublime and
pregnant passages in the entire compass of ancient
literature.' — Ruskin, Fors Clarigeva (lxiv).
References. — XV. 1. — J. Parker, Adam, Noah, and
Abraham, p. 120. J. Thomas, Myrtle Street Pulpit, vol. ii.
p. 341. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xlix. No. 2814. XV. 2.— J.
Kelly, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xviii. p. 165. XV. 5, 6.
— Archbishop Magee, Penny Pulpit, No. 501. XV. 5-18. —
A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture — Genesis, p.
101. XV. 1. — A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture
—Genesis, p. 111. XV. 6.— E. W. Shalders, Christian World
Pulpit, vol. xv. p. 235. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xiv. No.
844. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture — Genesis,
p. 116. XV. 8. — H. Woodcock, Sermon Outlines, pp. 87, 92.
XV. 8, 9.— G. Brooks, Outlines of Sermons, p. 278. XV.
11. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. vii. No. 420 ; ibid. vol. xxxiii.
No. 1993. XV. 16. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. liii. No. 3043.
XV. — J. Parker, Adam, Noah, and Abraham, p. 129.
A PARTICULAR PROVIDENCE AS REVEALED
IN THE GOSPEL
'Thou God seest me.' — Genesis xvi. 13.
God beholds thee individually, whoever thou art. He
' calls the by thy name '. He sees thee, and under-
stands thee, as He made thee. He knows what is
in thee, all thy own peculiar feelings and thoughts,
thy dispositions and likings, thy strength and thy
weakness. He views thee in thy day of rejoicing, and
thy day of sorrow. He sympathizes in thy hopes and
thy temptations. He interests Himself in all thy
anxieties and remembrances, all the risings and fall-
ings of thy spirit. He has numbered the very hairs
of thy head and the cubits of thy stature. He
compasses thee round and bears thee in his arms;
He takes thee up and sets thee down. He notes
thy very countenance, whether smiling or in tears,
whether healthful or sickly. He looks tenderly upon
thy hands and thy feet; He hears thy voice, the
beating of thy heart, and thy very breathing. Thou
dost not love thyself better than He loves thee. Thou
canst not shrink from pain more than He dislikes thy
bearing it; and if He puts it on thee, it is as thou;
wilt put it on thyself, if thou art wise, for a greater
41
Ver. 13.
GENESIS XVI., XVII
Ver. 18.
good afterwards. . . . What is man, what are we, what
am I, that the Son of God should be so mindful of
me ? What am I, that He should have raised me from
almost a devil's nature to that of an Angel's? that
He should have changed my soul's original constitu-
tion, new-made me, who from my youth up have been
a transgressor, and should Himself dwell personally
in this very heart of mine, making me His temple?
What am I, that God the Holy Ghost should enter
into me, and draw up my thoughts heavenward, ' with
plaints unutterable?' — J. H. Newman.
THE PRESENCE OF GOD
'Thou God seest me.' — Genesis xvi. 13.
A poor Egyptian slave-girl, Hagar, spoke these words.
Her life had become unendurable, and so she ran away
into the wilderness, and an angel from God came to
her and told her to return. Hagar's words teach us : —
I. A lesson of God's watchful Providence. These
words of Hagar are a special help to us: —
(a) When we are exposed to great temptations.
(6) In any time of trouble or sorrow or struggle.
(c) In time of prayer.
(d) When we have to make difficult decisions in
our life.
II. God's presence ought to be the great joy of our
life here, as it will be in our life hereafter. Heaven
is simply life in God's Presence, and the best prepara-
tion we can make will be to cultivate the recollection
of that Presence now. — A. G. Mortimer, Stories from
Genesis, p. 127.
References. — XVI. 13. — H. Ranken, Christian World
Pulpit, 1890, p. 276. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. ii. No. 85 ;
ibid. vol. xxxi. No. 1869. XVI. — J. Parker, Adam, Noah,
and Abraham, p. 129. XVII. 1.— A. G. Mortimer, The
Church's Lessons, vol. i. p. 85. A. Martin, Penny Pulpit,
No. 878. XVII. 1, 2. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xiv. No.
845; ibid. vol. xviii. No. ^082. XVII. 1-9.— A. Maclaren,
Expositions of Holy Scripture — Genesis, p. 117. XVII. 5.
— J. Morgan, Penny Pulpit, No. 382.
GOD THE GIVER
I will give . . . ' — Genesis xvii. 8.
' I will give.' That is the text. It is found in
Genesis, and therefore in the right place; it is heard
in the Apocalypse, and therefore the great Amen
cannot be far off. Let us see how the river runs, and
walk by it, as it were, hand in hand with God.
I. The Lord had to incarnate Himself in little
phrases and small toy meanings in order to get at
man's imagination, so He says in Genesis xvii, 8, ' I
will give unto thee . . . land '. Do not put a full-
stop after ' land '. That is the poorest and meanest
of His gifts, and would be poorer and meaner still if
it did not carry with it all the other gifts by implica-
tion, suggestion, far-flashing indication of an opening
universe. But the land is God's to give. The land
never belonged to any one but God. It is something
to know that God gives men land, and clay out of
which to make bricks, and quarries out of which to
dig palaces, and forests out of which to bring navies
and homes of beauty.
II. ' I will give you rain.' Of course ; having given
us the land, He could not withhold the rain. What
is the land without rain? — dust unshaped into
humanity and stewardship and responsibility — a
poor waste, nothing but dust, that cannot grow a
flower. Now I feel to be warming towards this great
notion of the One-Giver and All-Giver. ' I will give
you rain ' — soft water, the kind of water the roots
like and pine for. Never dissociate God from land
and from water; they are both His, He only can
give them in any sense that will bring with it satis-
faction. There is a way of appeasing hunger that
does not touch the deeper inner hunger of the other
self — that excites a man and mocks him every day.
III. ' I will give thee ' - — what more can He
give? He has given us the land, He has given us
the rain, He says, 'I will give thee riches and wealth
and honour'. Is there a fountain of honour in the
universe? Yes, and if we seek it not, we shall find
it sooner; if we do not go after riches and wealth
and honour, the poor weazened things will come to us.
IV. Now He begins a higher style of talk. He
was condescending all the while to get at us, so lowly
was our place in the pit. Now we are coming nearer
to the light. He says, ' I will give you pastors
according to Mine heart ' (Jer. m. 15) — bits of God's
own heart, fragments of His infinite love, souls that
have received the kiss and will impart it to despairing
spirits.
V. He is coming very near us now. What can
follow such gifts — land and rain and riches and
pastors ? He said, ' I will give unto thee a son '.
' For God so loved the world that He gave His only
begotten Son.' So loved — that He gave. That is
the way to love. He lives to give. That is love.
If you take all in and allow nothing to flow out you
will one day find that your great gathering of water
has burst the cistern or the deep reservoir and has
gone. You come in the morning and say, ' I have an
abundance of water, but I will not give you any, but
you may look at it and see how rich I am ; this is
the reservoir, walk up this green slope, and I will
show you what is worth more than crystal.' We say,
' I do not see it, where is it ?' ' Wait a moment and
you will see it, over this little hillock.' And we
climb the hillock, and look, and the water, the
gathered, stored water, kept from the poor and the
needy and the thirsty, has gone. God will take it all
up again into His sky and turn it into rainbows and
into showers and pour it upon worthier receivers.
They are storing poverty who are storing gold with-
out God. — Joseph Parker, City Temple Pulpit, vol.
v. p. 242.
Genesis xvii. 18.
' Abraham looked upon the vigorous, bold, brilliant
young Ishmael, and said appealingly to God : " O that
Ishmael might bve before Thee ! " But it cannot be ;
the promises are to conduct, to conduct only. And so,
again, we in like manner behold, long after Greece
has perished, a brilliant successor of Greece, the
Renascence, present herself with high hopes. . . . And
42
Vv. 16-33.
GENESIS XVII L, XXI
Ver. 10.
all the world salutes with pride and joy the Renascence,
and prays to Heaven : " O that Ishmael might live
before Thee ! " Surely the future belongs to this
new-comer.' — M. Arnold in Literature and Dogma.
References. — XVII. 18. — A. Maclaren, Expositions of
Holy Scripture— Genesis, p. 123. XVIII. 1. — Expositor
(3rd Series), vol. ii. p. 203; ibid. vol. iii. p. 69. XVIII. 16-
33. — A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture — Genesis
p. 129. XVIII. 19.— G. Bainton, Christian World Pulpit,
5 Nov. 1890. J. Budgen, Parochial Sermons, vol. ii. p. 185.
XVIII. 22. — 0. J. Vaughan, Harrow School Sermons, p.
371. XVIII. 25. — Bishop W. Ingram, Under the Dome. p.
219. W. R. Inge, Faith and Knowledge, p. 57. Professor
Story, Christian World Pulpit, 1891, p. 88. XVIII.— J.
Parker, Adam, Noah, and Abraham, p. 135. XVIII. 25. —
J. Vaughan, Sermons (15th Series), p. 117.
ABRAHAM'S INTERCESSION
Genesis xviii. 16-33.
When Scott the commentator was dying, we are told
that he spoke much to those around him on the way
in which his prayers for others had been answered.
He thought he had failed less in the duty of inter-
cession than in any other. Whether that be true of
Scott or not, it is surely very true of Abraham. His
nearness to God is never more apparent than when
he intercedes for Sodom. Meyer notes these features
of his prayer : ( 1 ) It was lonely prayer. ' He waited
till on all the wide plateau there was no living man
to overhear.' (2) It was prolonged prayer. ' We do
not give the sun a chance to thaw us. (3) It was very
humble prayer, and (4) It was persevering prayer.
' In point of fact God was drawing him on.'
Reference. — XVIII. 17-33. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol.
xli. No. 2400.
Genesis xviii. 32.
Burke in his ' Observations on a late Publication in-
tituled " The Present State of the Nation," ' remarks
that the author, ' after the character he has given of
[England's] inhabitants of all ranks and classes, has
great charity in caring much about them ; and, indeed,
no less hope, in being of opinion that such a detest-
able nation can ever become the care of Providence.
He has not found even five good men in our devoted
city.'
References.— XIX. 12. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. x.
No. 601. XIX. 14. — C. Perren, Revival Sermons, p. 216.
XIX. 14, 15, 17, 24-26.— R. S. Soanes, Sermons for the
Young, p. 83. G. Brooks, Outlines of Sermons, p. 120.
XIX. 15-26. — A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture —
Genesis, p. 142. XIX. 15. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. Ii. No.
2944. XIX. 16.— W. J. Wilmot-Buxton, Sunday Lessons,
vol. i. p. 222. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xiv. No. 789. XIX.
17. — J. Aspinall, Parish Sermons (1st Series) p. 200. W.
H. Hutchings, Sermon Sketches, p. 71. Spurgeon, Sermons,
vol. xli. No. 2400; vol. x. No. 550. G. Brooks, Outlines of
Sermons, p. 119. XIX. 20. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol v. No.
248. XIX. 23.— Ibid. vol. xlv. No. 2042. J. C. M. Bellew,
Sermons, vol. iii. p. 111. XIX. 26. — A. G. Mortimer, The
Church's Lessons, vol. ii. p. 241. C. Perren, Outline Ser-
mons, p. 286. H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit, No. 2445. XIX.
27, 28. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. x. No. 602. XIX. — F.
W. Robertson, Notes on Genesis, p. 43. XX. 11. — J. Bald-
win Brown, The Sunday Afternoon, p. 402. XX. J,
Parker, Adam, Noah, and Abraham, p. 151.
SARAH THE STEADFAST
Genesis xxi.
What is that quality in the mind of Sarah which lies
below all other qualities, and which subsists when
others change? It may be expressed in one word —
steadfastness. The abiding secret of this woman's
greatness is her own abidingness.
I. Sarah in the romantic stage. When the scene
first opens in the married life of Abraham and Sarah,
they are having an experience which their romance
had not bargained for — the poverty of the land.
For a married pair I can imagine no duller experience.
This must have been Sarah's first real sorrow — not
the famine in the land, but the famine in Abraham's
soul. She sees her ideal husband in a new light.
She has seen him in Ur of the Chaldees flaming with
the poetic impulse to abandon himself for the sake
of humanity. She beholds him in the land of
Canaan with his fire cooled down. True he is under
a cloud, and the cloud distresses her; but her eye
looks beyond the cloud to the normal shining of her
husband's soul.
II. She has need of all her hope; for meantime
the gloom deepens. The complaint which has come
to Abraham is one which seems occasionally to
beset high-strung natures — a reaction of the nerves
producing extreme timidity. He says to Sarah,
' We are going into a country where I shall suffer by
your beauty. Men will envy me the possession of
you; they will lament that you are wedded, bound;
they will seek to kill me that you may be free. You
can save me if you will. Pretend that you are
already free.' This is the eclipse in Abraham's heart
of the wifely relation itself. A more terrible strain
upon a woman's conjugal love is not to be conceived.
Yet this noble woman stood the strain.
III. The cloud clears from Canaan, and Abraham
and Sarah return. Years pass, and for Abraham
prosperity dawns. But there throbs in Sarah's heart
a pulse of pain. There is as yet no heir. She says
to her husband, ' Take my slave Hagar as a second
wife '. She says to herself, ' If an heir should come
through Hagar he will still be my son, not hers '.
But Sarah has miscalculated something. She has
said that even maternity will not make Hagar less
her slave. In body perhaps not: but in spirit it will
break her bonds. It is essential to Sarah's peace that
Hagar should be not a person but a thing. The
combat ends in favour of Sarah. Mother and son are
sent out into the desert. Sarah has purified her
home. She has relighted her nuptial fire. — G.
Matheson, Representative Women of the Bible,
p. 55.
ISHMAEL THE OUTCAST
'Cast out this bondswoman and her son.' — Genesis xxi. 10.
Israel has from the very first provided a place for
the pariah — has opened a door of entrance to the
43
GENESIS XXII
man whom she has herself turned out. Ishmael is the
first pariah, the first outcast from society. To any
man who had breathed the patriarchal atmosphere
the expulsion from that atmosphere was death in the
desert. Expulsion from the patriarchal fold was not
necessarily a change of land at all: the outcast could
live in sight of his former home. But the sting lay
in the fact that the brotherhood itself was broken.
I. What brought Ishmael into this exile? As in
nearly all cases of social ostracism he owes it partly
to his misfortune— for an Eastern — of being an un-
conventional man. The spirit of the age is at
variance with his spirit. He set up the authority
of his individual conscience in opposition to the use
and want of the whole community. What was that
individual conviction for which Ishmael strove?
Ishmael saw Hagar, his actual mother, in the posi-
tion of a menial to his adopted mother. He saw her
subjected to daily indignities. He listened to her
assertions of a right to be equal to Sarah, of her claim
to be treated as the wife of Abraham.
II. Then something happened. A real heir was
born to Sarah. Ishmael was supplanted. All his
hopes were withered. He seems to have thrown off
the mask which had hitherto concealed his irritation.
His tone became mocking, satirical. He preferred a
life of independent poverty to a life of luxurious
vassalage. He panted to be free. The wrath of
Sarah was kindled. She moves her hand and says
' Go ! ' and Hagar and Ishmael issue forth from the
patriarchal home to return no more. When they
reach the desert their supply of water is exhausted.
Hagar betook herself to prayer. It was not the
God of Israel she communed with. It was her own
God. But he answered her. The answer comes in
the form of an inward peace. It sent no super-
natural vision, because that was not needed. The
means of refuge lay within the limits of the natural.
The well was there, had always been there. What
was wanted was a mental calm adequate to the re-
cognition of it.
III. But the grand thing was the moral bearing of
the fact. It had an historical significance. It de-
clared that God had a place for the pariah. It pro-
claimed that the God of Abraham and the God of
Isaac was still the God of Egypt and the God of
Hagar. God is larger than all our creeds, and higher
than all our theories. — G. Matheson, Representa-
tive Men of the Bible, p. 1.
Refekences. — XXI. 6. — Spurgeon, Morning by Morn-
ing, p. 1G7. XXI. 16. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xvii. No.
974. XXI. 17. — C. Bosanquet, Tender Grass for the Lambs,
p. 1. J. Vaughan, Sermons to Children (5th Series), p.
105. XXI. 19. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xix. No. 1123;
ibid. vol. xxv. No. 1461. XXI.— J. Parker, Adam, Noah,
and Abraham, p. 14. F. W. Robertson, Notes on Genesis,
p. 50.
THE TEMPTATION OF ABRAHAM
Genesis xxii.
This narrative has been an awful difficulty to many.
Some, who have not quite cast the Bible away as
God's Word, yet go near to saying that we cannot see
God's Word in this passage. It is said by some
that the whole incident must be explained by ideas
in Abraham's mind, suggested by the practice of
human sacrifices around him. Abraham thought on
these till the feeling arose that his God also de-
manded nothing short of the life of his best beloved
treasure; then this feeling mastered him as a pas-
sionate resolve, till he all but slew his son.
Such a view I refuse to accept. I am quite sure it
is not the view meant to be given by the narrative,
and I am quite sure that the narrative had the ap-
proval of our Lord Jesus Christ, as a true account of
His Father's will and work. So I am sure that,
somehow, God supernatural ly conveyed to Abraham
His command, as the absolute Lord of the life of His
creatures ; that Abraham obeyed not his own feel-
ings, but that command ; that he was supernaturally
prevented from the final act, when his willingness to
do even it at his Lord's word had been shown, and
that his whole conduct received a glorious crown
of approval, then and there, from heaven. All this
I steadfastly believe ; but I do not wonder at the
difficulties many hearts have felt over the story.
Now here note some of the ' messages ' of Abra-
ham's temptation.
I. First, it was obviously a case where ' test ' and
' enticement ' might, and no doubt did, beset Abra-
ham at the same time. His heavenly Friend was
testing him. His dark Enemy is not mentioned ;
Genesis has no clear reference to him at all after
Chapter III. But we may be sure he was watching
his occasion, and would whisper deep into Abraham's
soul the thought that if this call was from the Lord,
the Lord was an awfully ' austere ' Master ; would
not some other Deity, after all, be more kind and
tolerant ?
II. Then, we see where the essence of the awful
test lay. Abraham was asked, in effect, two questions
through it. He was asked whether he absolutely
resigned himself to the Lord's ownership, and also
whether he absolutely trusted his Owner's truth and
love. The two questions were not identical, but they
were twined close together. And the response of
Abraham, by the grace of God in his heart, to both
questions was a ' yes ' which sounds on for ever
through all the generations of the followers of the
faith of Abraham. He so acted as to say, in effect,
' I am Thine, and all mine is Thine, utterly and for
ever '. And this he did, not as just submitting in
stern silence to the inevitable, but ' in faith '. He
was quite sure that ' He was faithful who had pro-
mised.' He was sure of this because of His character;
because he knew God, and knowing Him, loved Him.
So he overcame. So he received the crown; he was
blessed himself, and a blessing to the world.
III. Are we ever ' proved ' in ways which in the
least remind us of Abraham upon Moriah? Is it
very strange, very dreadful, very arbitrary, to our
poor aching eyes? Let us remember whose we are,
and whom we trust, because we know Him. We
44
Vv. 1, 2.
GENESIS XXII
Vv. 2-18.
belong to Him by purchase, by conquest, by sur-
render. Therefore all our ' belongings ' belong to
Him, in the sense that He has perfect right to de-
tach them from us if He thinks it well. And we
rely on Him to whom we belong. We know that
not only are His rights absolute, but so also is His
love, which abideth, is Himself.
The Divine command to Abraham, not merely to
surrender Isaac but to kill him, is of course the
mystery of the story. I believe it is enough to say
that the absolute Lord of the lives of Abraham and
of Isaac had the right not only to call for Isaac's
life, but to call for it so — having already trained
Abraham up to a full reliance on His character. But
we should also observe that the command would
appeal to a human fact of that age, and of ages after ;
the fact that family was then so constituted that the
child was regarded as the property of the parent.
In the full light of the Gospel, while every filial duty
is deepened and glorified, such a constitution is not
possible. We may be sure that no such command
will be given in the Christian age. — Bishop H. C. G.
Mouxe.
ABRAHAM'S FAITH
'And it came to pass after these things that God did tempt
Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Be-
hold, here I am. And he said, Take now thy son, thine
only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the
land of Moriah, and offer him there for a burnt-offering
upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.' —
Genesis xxii. i, 2.
I. The word tempt here means try. To those
dwelling out of the Kingdom of Faith such a com-
mand as this must appear strange indeed, one exact-
ing from a father, it seems so contrary to nature, so
opposed to the very feelings sown in the heart of
man; and doubtless multitudes think the same of
the entire plan of salvation, as also of affliction, or
trials of any sort. But there are those who have
gone through difficulties, and sufferings, and have
felt, however painful the trials, yet were they ac-
companied with brightening, purifying influences ;
they drew those tried ones nearer to God, in propor-
tion as they had faith and grace to bear.
II. The conduct of men in general is influenced by
reason, by feeling, by interest, but in this act of
Abraham's we find all these laid aside. Abraham
did not act from any of these motives, but from
a principle which was in opposition to them all.
Therefore when the command came, it might have
startled him perhaps, but he did not criticize it, he
did not sit in judgment on it, he knew where it came
from, it must be right, and it must be obeyed.
III. Not only were Abraham's reason and feelings
opposed to his faith, but also his highly cherished
interests. In Isaac were wrapped up the father's
fond affections, all his worldly hopes and prospects;
through him he was taught to expect that his descen-
dants should become a mighty nation, that from him
should spring a race of kings, yea, the Messiah, the
King of kings; yet when the command came to slay
that son, faith led him to obey it.
IV. Besides Abraham being set before us in this
Scripture as a noble example of faith and obedience
to God's commands, there is another lesson which
this narrative seems evidently intended to teach.
We have here a lively type and illustration of the
sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ for the sins of men.
The whole history is, in several parts, a sort of breath-
ing picture, prefiguring by actual persons and actual
sufferings the great sacrifice of Christ upon the Cross.
— E. J. Brewster, Scripture Characters, p. 20.
References. — XXII. 1. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vols. xxii.
xxiii. No. 37. XXII. 1-14. — A. Maclaren, Expositions of
Holy Scripture — Genesis, p. 152. XXII. 1-19. — J. Clifford,
Daily Strength for Daily Living, p. 19. J. J. S. Perowne,
Sermons, p. 332.
ISAAC THE DOMESTICATED
' Thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest.' — Genesis xxii. 2.
Isaac is distinctively a female type. He reveals human
nature in a passive attitude — precisely that attitude
which the old world did not like.
I. The life of Isaac is from beginning to end a
suffering in private. His was that form of sacrifice
which does not show, which wins no reputation for
heroism.
II. Our first sight of him is the sight of an unre-
sisting victim on an altar of sacrifice, but his attitude
is not that of a mere victim. It is that of acqui-
escence. In the deepest sense Isaac has bound him-
self to the altar. He has submitted to self-effacement
for the sake of his family. That submission is the
type of his whole life.
III. Most probably this self-effacement on the
part of Isaac did not come from a quiet nature. His
sacrifice takes the form of personal divestiture. It is
all inward, but the man who can give his will has
given everything. His was the surrender and not
the crushing of a will. The crushing of a will brings
vacancy, but the surrender of a will is itself an exer-
cise of will power. — G. Matheson, The Representa-
tive Men of the Bible, p. 131.
References. — XXII. 2. — J. Parker, Adam, Noah, and
Abraham, p. 191. C. D. Bell, Hills that Bring Peace, p. 45.
Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xv. No. 868.
THE OFFERING OF ISAAC
'Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest,
and get thee into the land of Moriah, and offer him there
for a burnt-offering upon one of the mountains which I
will tell thee of.' — Genesis xxii. 2-18.
Certain features of this severe trial closely resemble
some of the operations of Divine providence known
to ourselves.
I. We are often exposed to great trials without
any reason being assigned for their infliction. When
such trials are accepted in a filial spirit, the triumph
of faith is complete.
II. Even in our severest trials, in the very crisis
and agony of our chastisement, we have hope in the
delivering Mercy of God. This is often so in human
life; the inward contradicts the outward. Faith
substitutes a greater fact for a small one.
45
Ver. 4.
GENESIS XXII
Ver. 4.
III. We are often made to feel the uttermost
bitterness of a trial in its foretelling and anticipation.
Sudden calamities are nothing compared with the
lingering death which some men have to die.
IV. Filial obedience on our part has ever been
followed by special tokens of God's approval. We
ourselves have in appropriate degrees realized this
same overflowing and all-comforting blessing of God
in return for our filial obedience.
V. The supreme lesson which we should learn from
this history is that almighty God, in the just exer-
cise of His sovereign and paternal authority, demands
the complete subjugation of our will to His own.
We are distinctly called to give up everything, to
sink our will in God's ; to be no longer our own ; to
sum up every prayer with, ' Nevertheless, not my
will, but Thine be done '. — Joseph Parker, The Con-
temporary Pulpit, vol. v. p. 154.
THE BACKGROUNDS OF LIFE
'Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw the place afar off.' —
Genesis xxii. 4.
Abraham was on his way to offer up Isaac, and ' the
place afar off ' was the mountain on which he had
been told to perform the sacrifice. Let me put aside
at once any consideration of the object of his journey
and any discussion of the disputed question of the
locality. I am taking the words of the text as
simply suggesting the idea of a distant view closed
in by a mountain range. Views of this kind are
common in Palestine. There are few parts of the
country where the horizon is not bounded by a
mountain outline, and though the heights are not
great when compared with the higher Alps, yet the
shapes and the structures are those of mountains,
not hills. Our personal memories of mountain
scenery in other lands are enough to give us an idea
of the view which lay before Abraham. We think
of distant, delicate, changing tints, purple or blue or
grey, seen across a foreground of plain or valley; we
think of the charm of what Ruskin calls mountain
gloom and mountain glory. That was not, of course,
the way in which the Jews of the Old Testament re-
garded their mountains. It was not love of their
beauty which they felt; it was rather a sense of
their awfulness. They associated mountain heights,
as in the case of Mount Sinai, with the immediate
presence of God. ' He that treadeth on the high
places of the earth,' says the prophet Amos, ' the
Lord the God of Hosts is His name.' If this belief
inspired a feeling of awe about mountains, from
another point of view it was not devoid of comfort.
To the Psalmist the mountain horizons of his father-
land suggested the assurance of God's protection.
' I will lift up mine eyes unto the mountains from
whence cometh my help.' ' As the mountains are
round about Jerusalem, so the Lord is round about
His people from this time forth and for evermore.'
We have all felt, I suppose, the beauty of the
Psalmist's simile. May we not claim that it still has
a meaning of value for us ? Let us think for a little
about the mountain backgrounds of life. Our lives
are like a great landscape; each life has its own fore-
ground and background; the foreground full of
detail, full of the movement of our daily work,
looming much larger on our sight than the distance
beyond it, pressing upon us calls of business that we
cannot put off, keeping our thoughts immersed in
the ceaseless hurry and hustle of our professional
career, calling continually for our immediate atten-
tion to this or that thing that has to be done. Such
is the foreground of life. And then behind all this
multiplicity of detail and movement come the wider
horizons, the larger aspirations,the deeper convictions,
the eternal truths, the unchangeable principles to
which we must continually lift up our eyes if our life
is to have any general plan or purpose. These are
the mountain backgrounds. Both foreground and
background are equally indispensable. No life can
be complete that ignores either of them. But there
is this difference between them. Men as a rule are
naturally inclined to pay far more attention to the
foreground than to the background. There are
indeed sluggish or visionary natures which are content
to stand aside from the ordinary activities of life,
but these are exceptional. Most men find their
immediate daily duties so engrossing that they are
apt to neglect the view beyond. The mountain
distances become blurred or blotted out. That is
a great loss — how great a loss our Lord teaches us
Himself by His own example. We cannot suppose
that He, in His busy daily life, ever really put God
out of His thoughts; always He must have had with
Him the sense of His Heavenly Father's presence.
Yet none the less He felt the need of going up into
a mountain apart to pray.
The idea that life is like a landscape is a mere
metaphor of course, but it may be helpful and sug-
gestive. Let me try to give one or two illustrations.
I. There is the background of the inner personal-
ity, for instance. Behind the foreground of conduct
comes the background of character. The teaching of
Jesus covers the whole range of this spiritual land-
scape. He says, ' Keep My commandments ' — that is
the rule of conduct. But He also says (and we feel
that it is a still deeper saying) ' Ye must be born
again '. That is the need of regeneration of character.
These two sayings are closely connected. Conduct
and character must be in harmony, or there can be
no real sincerity of life. Many lives, we all know,
never attain this sincerity. That means a discrep-
ancy, a want of harmony between foreground and
background.
II. Then, again, there is the background of prayer.
Every true prayer, it has been said, has its back-
ground and its foreground. The foreground of
prayer is the intense immediate longing for some
blessing which seems to be absolutely necessary for
the soul to have ; the background of prayer is the
quiet, earnest desire that the will of God, whatever it
may be, should be done. Examine from this point of
view our Lord's perfect prayer at Gethsemane. In
46
Ver. 4.
GENESIS XXII
Vv. 10, 11, 12.
front we see the intense longing that the cup of
agony and death might pass away from Him; but
behind there stands the strong, steadfast desire that
the Will of God should be done. Take away either
of these conditions and the prayer becomes less per-
fect. Leave out the foreground (I quote the words
of a great preacher) — let there be no expression of
the wish of him who prays — and there is left a pure
submission which is almost fatalism. Leave out the
background — let there be no acceptance of the Will
of God — and the prayer is only a manifestation of
self-will, an ill-regulated petition for personal grati-
fication, without reference to any higher law. It is
just this background of prayer on which we need to
keep our eyes fixed.
III. Take again the background of Divine truth.
What do we see as we look down on the foreground
of our lives in these days of controversy ? There lies
before us a series of battle-scenes full of noise and
confusion — the conflict of parties within our Church,
the conflict of Church and Church, the conflict of
Christian and non-Christian belief, the conflict of
religion and agnosticism. We must lift up our eyes
to the still, solemn mountain background which rises
far away beyond the scene of conflict. There, on the
distant horizon of our lives, we shall find, if we have
Pbut faith to see, that eternal truth which is one
aspect of the nature of God, that truth which tests
and explains and reconciles our partial and conflicting
beliefs. There are times, no doubt, when to some of
us the truth may be hidden from our eyes. The
mountains may be veiled in clouds which we cannot
pierce. But some of us perhaps have had experience
of moments and moods when Divine truth seems to
burst in upon the eye of the soul, and it is an im-
mense help to be able to believe that, whether we see
it or not, it is always there in the background of life,
the one eternal, unchangeable goal of all the faith
and of all the intellectual effort of mankind.
IV. One other spiritual background let me men-
tion — it is the background of the Christian ideal.
Behind the foreground of the actual daily lives lived
by Christian men and women comes the distant ideal
— and do we not constantly feel that it is unattain-
ably distant? — which the Master has set before His
Church. The teaching which presents that ideal is
no mere dead record of a life that has passed away:
it is a perennial reservoir of suggesiiveness. Age
after age has witnessed the reincarnation of the
Christian ideal. It has been assailed in these days,
as it has often been assailed in times past. But the
movement of modern thought has not been without
its compensating advantages to Christianity, and I
think we may claim that in some respects we are in
closer touch than men used to be with the mind and
the heart of Jesus Christ. — H. G. Woods, Master of
the Temple.
References.— XXII. 6.-J. Keble, Sermons for the
Holy Week, p. 454. XXII. 7.— M. Biggs, Practical Ser-
mons on Old Testament Subjects, p. 53. XXII. 7 8. F
D. Maurice, Patriarchs and Lawgivers of the Old Testa-
ment, p. 83. R. Winterbotham, Sermons and Expositions,
47
p. 19. XXII. 9.— Bishop Armstrong, Parochial Sermons,
p. 172. XXII. 9, 10.— C. Bradley, The Christian Life, p.
206. E. Blencowe, Plain Sermons to a Country Conoreaa-
tion (2nd Series), p. 1G3.
THE HIGHEST SELF-OFFERING
' And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to
slay his son. And the angel of the Lord called unto him
out of heaven, and said, Abraham, Abraham : and he said
Here ami. And he said, Lay not thine hand upon the lad'
neither do thou anything unto him: for now I know that
thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son
thine only son, from Me.'— Genesis xxii. io, ii, 12.
This chapter teaches us that Abraham had to dis-
cover something about God. God did not tempt
Abraham to any deed of violence. Instead of that
He raised the faith of Abraham and the service and
even the character of Abraham to a higher level than
they had ever occupied before.
I. Abraham having discovered his God of righteous-
ness proceeds to test himself with regard to the
validity of all earthly affection, and I can imagine, as
he feels his pride in his dear son growing day by day,
that the influence of early training would come over
him. 'Would it be a sublime thing, in fact does
God want it— that I offer my boy, as my father and
my father's father have offered their boys to their
Gods ? ' Then the moment comes, the resolution is
taken, he sets out upon his journey, and the lad who
is to be his victim accompanies him, unquestioning,
for Isaac had a part in this event. Abraham binds
him who is dearer than life itself to the old man,
lays him on the altar, and prepares for the last dread
blow. But something cries, * Hold, lay not thine
hand upon the lad.' It was as though an angel
spoke to him, for God did speak in the mind of this
heroic single-minded servant, who with a very dim
light shining in his soul chose to serve at his best.
II. The principle herein declared, the situation
herein described, has repeated itself in human history
a thousand times since that far-off day — a thousand
times ? may be a thousand thousand times. It teaches
us this — God requires no meaningless sacrifices from
any man. I said no meaningless sacrifices, but there
are occasions in life when earthly affection has to be
sacrificed to eternal truth, when a lower love has to
be offered up in the name of a higher. John Bunyan
went to prison for his faith in a day when it meant
much to suffer, and he endured within those prison
walls some things which were harder than death.
Here was a man to whom the stake would have meant
nothing, a man who could have faced torture and
shame and death with equanimity. He was putting
on the altar what was dearer to him than a thousand
lives. His blind child, his wife, his other dear ones,
were offered to the service of the Most High and for
love of Jesus Christ.
III. But there is a love for which men and women
will sin. The wife will lie for the husband, mothers
will do wrong for their children, fathers will sin for
home, friend will sacrifice to the devil for friend.
Know then that in every case where such decision is
taken you have sacrificed husband, wife, child, self,
Ver. 14.
GENESIS XXI L, XXIV
Ver. 18.
to the lower, and not to the higher. The highest
love is the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge,
and by that I mean the love of Christ which never
spared, never will spare those whom He calls. Conse-
crate all earth's affection at the altar, and if from
the altar you must go to Calvary, then go ! Love's
highest is called for, the worthiest, the only one
which you can offer in the presence of the Lamb of
God. — R. J. Campbell, Sermons Addressed to In-
dividuals, p. 171.
References. — XXII. 10. — R. Hiley, A Year's Ser-
mons, vol. iii. p. 83. S. A. Tipple, Echoes of Spoken
Words, p. 213.
JEHOVAH-JIREH
'And Abraham called the name of that place Jehovah-jireh ;
that is, the Lord will provide.*— Genesis xxii. 14.
I. The Intended Sacrifice by Abraham of Isaac.
— It may be worth our while to ask for a moment
what it was exactly that Abraham expected the Lord
to provide. We generally use the expression in re-
ference to outward things. But there is a meaning
deeper than that in the words. What was it God
provided for Abraham? What is it God provides for
us? A way to discharge the arduous duties which,
when they are commanded seem all but impossible for
us. 'The Lord will provide.' Provide what? The
lamb for a burnt-offering which He has commanded.
We see in the fact that God provided the ram which
became the appointed sacrifice, through which Isaac's
life was preserved. A dim adumbration of the great
truth that the only sacrifice which God accepts for
the world's sin is the sacrifice which He Himself has
promised.
II. Note on what Conditions He Provides — If we
want to get our outward needs supplied, our outward
weaknesses strengthened, power and energy sufficient
for duty, wisdom for perplexity, a share in the sacri-
fice which taketh away the sins of the world, we get
them all on the condition that we are found in the
place where all the provision is treasured.
Note when the provision is realized. Up to the
very edge we are driven before the hand is put out
to help us.
III. Note what we are to do with the Provision
when we get it. — Abraham christened the anony-
mous mountain-top not by a name which reminded
him or others of his trial but by a name that pro-
claimed God's deliverance. He did not say anything
about his agony or about his obedience. God spoke
about that, not Abraham. Many a bare bald
mountain-top in your career and mine we have got
names for. Are they names that commemorate our
sufferings, or God's blessings? — A. Maclaren, The
God of the Amen, p. 209.
References. — XXII. 14. — A. Maclaren, Expositions of
Holy Scripture — Genesis, p. 165. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol.
xxx. No. 1803. S. Martin, Sermons, p. 159. XXII. 15-18.
—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xliii. No. 2523. XXII. 16-18 —
E. H. Gifford, Voices of the Prophets, p. 131. XXII. 18.—
Expositor (2nd Series), vol. viii. p. 200. XXII.— F. W.
Robertson, Notes on Genesis, p. 53. XXIII. 19. — J. Baines,
Sermons, p. 139. XXIII. — F. W. Robertson, Notes on
Genesis, p. 62.
REBEKAH THE FARSEEINQ
Genesis xxiv.
I. In the case of Sarah the real drama opens with
married life. In the case of Rebekah it opens with
the proposal of marriage. The offer comes from Isaac.
When she sees the servant approaching she has no
idea of his errand. But Rebekah has a wonderful
talisman against such surprise — an astonishing power
of putting herself instantaneously in the place of
those to whom she is speaking.
II. There is a peculiarity about Rebekah's sym-
pathetic insight. It is not only manifested to things
near, but to things at a distance. I would call her a
farseeing woman, by which I mean a woman with an
insight into the future. What she sees is a vision of
the coming will of God. From a worldly standpoint
she could do better than marry Isaac. If Rebekah's
insight had been limited to the things around her she
would have rejected the suit of Isaac. To unite with
a worshipper of another God was the revulsion of her
soul, so from Rebekah's gaze all Hittite offers fade,
and the figure of the Hebrew Isaac stands triumphant.
III. The heart of Isaac had been overshadowed by
the death of Sarah. Rebekah crept into the vacant
spot, and rekindled the ashes in the scene of the van-
ished fire. Then comes the actual motherhood of
Rebekah. Two sons are born — Esau and Jacob.
Esau was the natural heir to the birthright and the
blessing. In the ordinary course of things he would
be both monarch and priest of the Clan. But now
there comes into play the extraordinary foresight of
this woman Rebekah. With the eye of an eagle she
watches the youth of her two boys. She finds that
the first-born is utterly unfit for the great destiny
that is before him. She sees that Jacob and not Esau
is the man for his father's priesthood. Might not
Isaac be made to ordain God's man instead of his
own? Rebekah fell by fanaticism for God. She
never dreamed that she was working for any end but
the cause of Providence. — G. Matheson, Representa-
tive Women of the Bible, p. 79.
References. — XXIV. 1. — G. Woolnough, Christian
World Pulpit, vol. xiv. p. 366. XXIV. 5-8. — Spurgeon,
Sermons, vol. xxxiv. No. 2047. XXIV. 12.— T. L. Cuyler,
Christian World Pulpit, 1890, p. 174.
THE CHOKED WELLS
'And Isaac digged again the wells ol water, which they had
digged in the days of Abraham his father.' — Genesis xxiv.
18.
I. The wells of our father may get choked. There
are some wells where men were drinking when the
world was young, and spite of all the ages they are
still fresh, and the dripping bucket plashed in them
this day. Such was the well of Jacob, for example,
and Jesus, weary with His journey, drank of that,
though Jacob had been sleeping in his grave for
centuries ; and the traveller still slakes his thirst
there. But the common fate of wells is not like that.
Time, changing environment, or even malicious mis-
chief, silts them up. Perhaps the most signal instance
48
Ver. 58.
GENESIS XXIV
Ver. 58.
of that choking the world has ever seen was the law
of Moses in the time of Christ. Once, in the golden
days of Israel, the law of Moses had been a well of
water. Then came the Pharisees and Jewish lawyers,
and buried God's simple law in such a mass of learned
human folly, poured such a cargo of sand upon the
spring, that the wells were choked, and the waters
that their fathers drank were lost. And have we not
found the same thing in the Gospel? Take the great
central doctrine of the sacrifice on Calvary. It was
the gladdest news that ever cheered the world, that
Jesus died on Calvary for men. But by and by that
well got silted up. It became filled with intolerable
views of God. It was buried under degrading views
of man. The well was choked.
II. We must each dig for ourselves to reach the
water. One great blight upon the Church to-day is
just that men and women will not dig. They are
either content to accept their father's creed, or they
are content, on the strength of arguments a child
could answer, to cast it overboard. You can always
tell when a man has been digging for himself by the
freshness, the individuality of his religion. The
humblest souls, if they have dug for themselves, and
by their own search have found the water, will have
a note in their music that was never heard before, and
some discovery of God that is their own.
III. Our discovered wells were named long since.
When Isaac dug his well at Gerar men had forgotten
about the wells of Abraham. But the day came when
Isaac named his wells. And when the neighbours
gathered and asked him what the names were, they
found they were the names that had been given by
Abraham. The wells were not new. They were but
rediscovered. I never dig but a new well is found.
And we think at first these wells are all our own.
But the day comes when we find it is not so. They
are the very waters our fathers drank; but the toil
and effort, the struggle and the prayer that it took
us to reach them, made them so fresh to us that we
thought they were a new thing in the world. — G. H.
Morrison, Flood-Tide, p. 148.
References. — XXIV. 23. — A. Mursell, Christian World
Pulpit, vol. xxii. p. 195. XXIV. 27.— A. Maclaren, Ex-
positions of Holy Scripture— Genesis, p. 173. XXIV. 40. —
H. J. Buxton, Common Life Religion, p. 258. XXIV. 49. —
Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxvii. No. 2231. XXIV. 55. —
Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xiii. No. 772.
LOVE AND COURTSHIP
'And they called Rebekah, and said unto her, Wilt thou go
with this man ? And she said, I will go.'— Genesis xxiv.
S 8.
So much of life's weal or woe is determined by a
well-advised or ill-advised love and courtship that the
question cannot be approached with too serious and
sympathetic attention.
I. Parental and Friendly Interest in the Love
Affairs of Young People. — Nothing is more delight-
ful, and delightfully instructive, in this idyllic tale,
than the loving sympathy Abraham and Eliezer
showed in the matrimonial concerns of Isaac. Look
how excellently Abraham behaved himself in such a
matter! He was deeply and tenderly interested that
Isaac should secure a wife who would be a benediction
to him. That is the right spirit. Let all parents
and older friends note it and emulate it.
II. A Wife sought among the People of Qod
Beware of alliances with those who are morally
Canaanites and Philistines ! Seek a wife, a husband,
among the people of God. The perils of a godless
home are of all perils the most to be dreaded. Seek
God's guidance and sojourn amid what is godly.
III. Confidence in Divine Guidance Amid Love
and Courtship. — Abraham never wavered in his faith
that God would direct Isaac's future. He argued from
God's care of his past interest to God's care of his
son's future interests. Parents may be sure that, if
they be believers, the God who has guided them will
guide their children, His ' Angel ' shall be sent to
further their love and their courtship.
IV. Qualities which Promise Happiness. — When
Eliezer met Rebekah in her remote home he dis-
covered features of her personality and character
which foretold that she would make a suitable wife
for his master's son. And amid many qualities these
are well worthy to be noted. She was a domesti-
cated woman. When she appeared upon the scene
she had ' her pitcher upon her shoulder '. And she
used it. There is a danger to-day of Rebekah being
minus her pitcher and of her not using it though she
may be possessed of it. Rebekah was a woman of a
kindly disposition. The spirit of genial courtesy
possessed her. A sweet, kind, generous spirit is a
powerful factor in the happiness of wedded life.
Rebekah and Isaac were both graced with filial de-
votion. Rebekah was a devoted daughter. And as
for Isaac he is, as a son, beyond all praise. It is such
daughters who make faithful and loving wives. It is
such sons who are afterwards devoted and affectionate
husbands.
V. True Love Irradiated this Ancient Court-
ship. — ' He loved her ' is the finale of the romantic
and tender story. No qualities, however good or
noble, can supersede the necessity of deep and strong
mutual affection. The love of Isaac and Rebekah
is an essential guarantee of happy married life. —
Dinsdale T. Young, Messages for Home and Life,
p. 75.
References. — XXIV. 58. — C. D. Bell, The Name
Above Every Name, p. 137. W. H. Aitken, Mission Ser-
mons, (3rd Series), p. 51. XXIV. 63. — J. Aspinall, Par-
ish Sermons (1st Series), p. 216. Spurgeon, Morning by
Morning, p. 228. XXIV. 67.— Bishop Thorold, The Yoke
of Christ, p. 247. XXIV.— F. W. Robertson, Notes on
Genesis, p. 68. W. H. Buxton, Penny Pulpit, No. 834. T.
Guthrie, Studies of Character from the Old Testament, p.
61. XXV. 8. — A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture
— Genesis, p. 180. J. Parker, Adam, Noah, and Abraham,
p. 191. A. Maclaren, Christ in the Heart, p. 117. XXV.
11. — Spurgeon, Morning by Morning, p. 48. F. W. Farrar,
The Fall of Man, p. 228. XXV. 27.— L. D. Bevan, Penny
Pulpit, No. 574. XXV. 27-34. — A. Maclaren, Expositions
of Holy Scripture, p. 192. XXV. 29-34. — C. Kingsley,
The Gospel of the Pentateuch, p. 72.
49 4
Ver. 32.
GENESIS XXV., XXVI
Vv. 12-25.
THE ATTRACTION OF THE PRESENT
'And Esau said, Behold, I am at the point to die: and what
profit shall this birthright do to me ?' — Genesis xxv. 32.
Esau's weakness and fall in the presence of his over-
mastering temptation.
I. Esau's good qualities are very evident, being of
the kind easily recognized and easily popular among
men, the typical sportsman who is only a sportsman,
bold and frank and free and generous, with no intri-
cacies of character, impulsive and capable of magna-
nimity. The very opposite of the prudent, dexterous,
nimble man of affairs, rather reckless indeed and hot-
headed and passionate. His virtues are, we see,
dangerously near to being vices. Without self-con-
trol, without spiritual insight, without capacity even
to know what spiritual issues were, judging things by
immediate profit and material advantage, there was
not in him depth of nature out of which a really noble
character could be cut. This damning lack of self-
control comes out in the passage of our text, the
transaction of the birthright. Coming from the
hunt hungry and faint, he finds Jacob cooking por-
ridge of lentils and asks for it. The sting of ungovern-
able appetite makes him feel as if he would die if he
did not get it. Jacob takes advantage of his brother's
appetite and offers to barter his dish of pottage for
Esau's birthright. Esau was hungry, and before his
fierce desire for food actually before him such a thing
as a prospective right of birth seemed an ethereal
thing of no real value. He feels he is going to die,
as a man of his type is always sure he will die if he
does not get what he wants when the passion is on
him; and supposing he does die, it will be poor con-
solation that he did not barter this intangible and
shadowy blessing of his birthright. ' Behold I am at
the point to die: and what profit shall this birth
right do to me? '
II. This scene where he surrendered his birthright
did not settle the destiny of the two brothers — a
compact like this could not stand good for ever, and
in some magical way substitute Jacob for Esau in the
line of God's great religious purpose. But this scene,
though it did not settle their destiny in that sense,
revealed the character, the one essential thing which
was necessary for the spiritual succession to Abraham ;
and Esau failed here in this test as he would fail any-
where. His question to reassure himself, ' What
profit shall this birthright do to me ? ' reveals the bent
of his life, and explains his failure. True self-control
means willingness to resign the small for the sake of
the great, the present for the sake of the future, the
material for the sake of the spiritual, and that is what
faith makes possible. He had no patience to wait, no
faith to believe in the real value of anything that was
not material, no self-restraint to keep him from in-
stant surrender to the demand for present gratifica-
tion. This is the power of all appeal to passion, that
it is present with us now, to be had at once. It is
clamant, imperious, insistent, demanding to be satiated
with what is actually present. It has no use for a
far-off good. It wants immediate profit.
III. But it is not merely lack of self-control which
Esau displays by the question of our text. It is also
lack of appreciation of spiritual values. In a vague
way he knew that the birthright meant a religious
blessing, and in the grip of his temptation that looked
to him as purely a sentiment not to be seriously con-
sidered as on a par with a material advantage. How
easy it is for all of us to drift into the class of the
profane, the secular persons as Esau ; to have ou?
spiritual sensibility blunted; to lose our appreciation
of things unseen; to be so taken up with the means'
of living that we forget life itself and the things that
alone give it security and dignity. We have our
birthright as sons of God born to an inheritance as
joint heirs with Christ. We belong by essential
nature not to the animal kingdom, but to the King-
dom of Heaven ; and when we forget it and live only
with reference to the things of sense and time, we are
disinheriting ourselves as Esau did. — Hugh Black,
University Sermons, p. 121.
Refebence. — XXV. 32. — J. C. M. Bellew, Sermons, vol.
iii. p. 139.
ESAU DESPISED HIS BIRTHRIGHT
Genesis xxv. 34.
Dr. Marcus Dods says : ' It is perhaps worth noticing
that the birthright in Ishmael's line, the guardianship
of the temple at Mecca, passed from one branch of
the family to another in a precisely similar way.
We read that when the guardianship of the temple
and the governorship of the town fell into the hands
of Abu Gabshan a weak and silly man, Cosa, one of
Mohammed's ancestors, circumvented him while in a
drunken humour, and bought of him the keys of the
temple, and with them the presidency of it, for a
bottle of wine. But Abu Gabshan being gotten out
of his drunken fit, sufficiently repented of his foolish
bargain, from whence grew these proverbs among the
Arabs: More vexed with late repentance than Abu
Gabshan; and more silly than Abu Gabshan — which
are usually said of those who part with a thing of
great moment for a small matter.'
References.— XXV. 34. — A. Maclaren, Expositions of
Holy Scripture — Genesis, p. 198. J. Keble, Sermons for
Lent to Passiontide, p. 104. C. C. Bartholomew, Sermons
Chiefly Practical, p. 183. W. Bull, Christian World Pul-
pit, vol. xxii. p. 100. Archbishop Benson, Sundays in Well-
ington College, p. 190. G. Brooks, Outlines of Sermons, p.
77. J. Keble, Sermons for Lent to Passiontide, p. 104.
XXV. — F. W. Robertson, Notes on Genesis, p. 71.
ISAAC THE PEACEMAKER
Genesis xxvi. 12-25.
Isaac gave up his wells rather than quarrel over them.
A similar historical instance of peace-loving is given
by Knox in his History of the Reformation. George
Wishart, the martyr, a man, ' lowly, lovely, glad to
teach, desirous to learn,' went by request to the church
of Mauchline to preach there. But the Sheriff of
Ayrshire, fearing the destruction of the ornaments of
the church, got a number of the local gentlemen to
50
Ver. 18.
GENESIS XXVI
Ver. 25.
garrison it against the preacher. One friend of
Wishart's determined to enter it by force, but Wish-
art, drawing him aside, said : ' Brother, Christ Jesus
is as potent upon the fields as in the kirk, ... it is
the word of peace that God sends by me ; the blood of
no man shall be shed this day for the preaching of it.'
And so, withdrawing the whole people, he came, says
Knox, to a dyke on a moor-edge, upon which he
ascended and continued in preaching for more than
three hours.
Reference. — XXVI. 12-25. — A. Maclaren, Expositions
of Holy Scripture — Genesis, p. 201.
THE BURIED WELLS
'And Isaac digged again the wells of water, which they had
digged in the days of Abraham his father: for the Philis-
tines had stopped them up.' †” Genesis xxvi. i8.
There is a deep sense in which every life might say,
' All my springs are in Thee '. With that vision in
our hearts we need not be afraid to speak of springs
of good in men's lives. To say that you can hear the
ripple of a spring is not to say you never heard the
splash of falling rain. You can honour the water in
the well without despising the original and continuous
bounty of the skies. And so, with the great over-
arching heaven in our minds all the time, we can
begin our search for the earthly wells.
I. And they need looking for. They are often lost
beneath the drift of the years, or choked up by the
rubbish that a Philistine world has cast into them.
And it is easy to forget that they are there. We see
the ground trampled and dust-strewn, and there is
little or nothing to suggest that down beneath that
unpromising surface there is a spring that might be
helping to refresh a tired and thirsty world.
Beneath the barren and trampled surface of hu-
manity we must find the wells of reverence and faith
and love that God Himself has sunk in these hearts
â– of ours. Man was made to worship and believe and
aspire. God made him so. This Philistine world
succeeds in burying deep the springs of the heart's
true life. The wells are choked.
II. That is the sad fact on which we have to con-
centrate our toil. But that involves another fact,
bright and inspiring and thrilling — the wells are there.
Isaac and his servants worked with a will, with a
steady enthusiasm, amidst those piles of stones and
heaps of earth. A bystander knowing nothing of the
history of these desert spots might well have wondered
at the sight of such hopeful toil amid such unpromis-
ing surroundings. But they who were doing the work
were in possession of one fact that afforded them com-
plete inspiration. They knew that there were springs
of water if only they had the energy and patience to
come at them.
The essential spirituality of human life is an ulti-
mate fact. When we toil for the souls of men, we are
not working on the strength of a speculation. We
are not prospecting. Like Isaac of old, we work
where our Father Himself has worked before us.
III. ' He digged again the wells of . . . Abraham
his Father ; . . . and called them after the names by
which his father had called them.' Is not that the
story of Jesus of Nazareth?
Even as Isaac found in the devastated valley of
Gerar the wells of his father Abraham, so did Jesus
find in the barren hearts of men the wells of His
Father God. They were choked with sins and the
cares of the years, but He found them and sounded
them, and let into them the light and air of the sky
of the Father's mercy, and set the water of life, love
and faith and hope, flowing into these poor world-
choked hearts. — P. Ainsworth, The Pilgrim Church,
p. 157.
Reference. — XXVI. 18. — C. Perren, Outline Sermons,
p. 135.
LIFE ON GOD'S PLAN
'And Isaac builded an altar there, and called upon the name
of the Lord, and pitched his tent there ; and there Isaac's
servants digged a well.' — Genesis xxvi. 25.
Isaac is felt by every Bible reader to be a much less
commanding figure than the men who stand on either
side of him — his father Abraham and his son Jacob.
He had neither the lofty and daring faith of the one,
nor the other's passionate instinct of adventure. His
qualities were not such as stir the imagination of the
world. Passive rather than intense, he spent one of
those lives that are largely controlled and arranged
by other people. The influence of his friends always
tended to be too strong for him ; so it was, for ex-
ample, when the wife he was to marry was selected by
his father, and brought home to him by deputy.
Hence we are apt to call him tame, torpid, and slow;
at all events the too easy victim of over modesty and
inertia.
But of course such a character has another side.
Isaac, it is true, is unlike Abraham and Jacob ; but
it is they that are uncommon men, not he. Of the
three he exhibits far the closest resemblance to aver-
age humanity. You will find a score of Isaacs for
every Abraham that emerges. And just for that
reason the fact that Isaac was given his place in the
great patriarchal succession speaks to us of the truth
that God is the God of ordinary people, not less than
of those in whom there sleeps the Divine spark of
genius or greatness. As some one has said, ' God has
a place for the quiet man '. We may have neither
distinguished talents nor a distinguished history, but
one thing we can do, we can form a link in the chain
by which the Divine blessing goes down from one
generation to another. . . Pick out the three centres
here, where the threads cross, and they are these,
the altar, the tent, the well. There we see focussed
sharply, and gathered up, the main constituents or
impulses which are always to be found in the life of
a man after God's own heart; and without being un-
duly imaginative or fantastic, we may decide that they
stand for religion, home, work. . . . The man of
the tent is the prey of time, and passes ; the man of
the altar endures for ever. Religion has in it that
which is superior to time. . . . Considered as one of the
threads which God's hand is weaving into the strand
51
Ver. 25.
GENESIS XXVI.-XXVIII
Ver. 17.
of life, is not work a pure blessing? Is it not, like
Isaac's will, an ever-flowing source of power and re-
freshment? Does not the will feed both tent and
altar. — H. R. Mackintosh, Life on God's Plan, p. 1.
COMMON PLACE PEOPLE
'Isaac's servants digged a well.' — Genesis xxvi. 25.
Isaac is the representative of the unimportant but
overwhelming majority, and his life and history stood
to his descendants, and stand to us, for the glorifica-
tion of the commonplace.
I. The World's Useful Drudges — When shall
we begin to see the poetry, the beauty, the eternal
blessedness of common work; the loyalty, the patriot-
ism, the high Christian service there may be in
simply conducting an honest business or filling a
commercial situation ! Every man who conducts his
business with clean hands is helping to bring in uni-
versal clean-handedness : every man who fills a situa-
tion as it ought to be filled is raising the ideal of
service and enriching and beautifying his race. Isaac
was not an Empire-builder like Abraham, not a great
pathetic heroic figure like Jacob, he was a plain man
of affairs. He stuck to his work as a sinker of wells,
and for three thousand years men, to whom Abraham
was a legend and Jacob a hazy tradition, have drunk
of the sweet waters of Beer-sheba, and blessed the
memory of the man who digged that well.
II. The Well - digger's Blessing. — And these
things, important in themselves, are also parables of
higher things. Your business gives you no time for
the work you would so dearly like. It is all you can
do to keep things straight in your own little world
of trade. Never fear; you will supply your neigh-
bour with an honest article at a reasonable price,
and finding employment for those who otherwise
might starve, you are digging one of father Isaac's
wells. When with quaking heart you took that
class book and tried to start that little class-meeting
you digged a well, and thirsty souls have drunk of it
and will bless you evermore. Your little Sunday-
school class, your mission-room, is a well, and when
this life is over for you, men will think and speak in
blessing of the man that digged that well. — F. R.
Smith, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lxx. p. 118.
References. — XXVI. 29. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol.
xxxviii. No. 2238. XXVI. — F. W. Robertson, Notes on Gene-
sis, p. 77. XXVII. 1-4. — F. W. Robertson, Sermons (4th
Series), p. 123. XXVII. 13.— A. G. Mortimer, The Church's
Lessons, vol. ii. p. 255. E. Cooper, Fifty-two Family Ser-
mons, p. 247.
MUSIC TO THE HOUSE OF GOD
(At a Musical Festival)
' This is none other than the house of God.' — Genesis xxvn. 17.
I. If we ask what is the true place of music in the
Church of God, we can but answer that it has a
wondrous power of creating and sustaining emotion
and enthusiasm. The danger lies in our confusing
music designed and executed for devotional purposes
with music designed for other purposes. The devo-
tion of the performer's heart in spiritual penitence
or praise must inspire the music of the Church if it
is to be for the worship of God.
II. Music like all other gifts has two sides. Use
it as God's gift, praise God in it, let it preach to you
higher things and it will be one of your best posses-
sions. But do nothing with it except enjoy it, let it
end in nothing more lasting than a beautiful feeling
and it may be a sensual snare. — Bishop Yeatman-
Biggs, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lxix., 1904,
p. 185.
References.— XXVII. 33.— C. Parsons Reichel, Sermons,
p. 2. XXVII. 34. — J. B. Lightfoot, Cambridge Sermons, p.
3. J. H. Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons, p. 141.
J. J. Blunt, Plain Sermons (2nd Series), p. 227. J. S. Bar-
rett, Sermons, p. 33. Bishop Armstrong, Parochial Ser-
mons, p. 1. XXVII. 37. — R. Winterbotham, Sermons, p.
118. XXVII. 38.— J. S. Barrett, Sermons, p. 33. Bishop
Harvey Goodwin, Parish Sermons (2nd Series), p. 1. T. Ar-
nold, Sermons, vol. iv. p. 133. XXVII. — F. W. Robertson,
Notes on Genesis, p. 85.
DREAMS
'Jacob's dream.' — Genesis xxvm.
This dream deals with the supernatural, though in
one sense all life is supernatural. And what happened
to Jacob occurs again and again in your life and mine.
I. Jacob has deceived his father and defrauded his
brother: he has fled his home. As he journeyed
forward he came to the lonely and rugged hill of
Bethel. The darkness overtakes him as he ascends,
creeps like a shadowy ghost over him, and then covers
with its deep shadow the whole of the mountain from
base to summit; and so Jacob is alone in the dark
night. Seeking suitable shelter, he takes a stone for
his pillow, and, lying down, he is soon fast asleep, a
tired, worn man. He dreams, and lo ! in his dream
the darkness has fled, and the whole air is lit up with
supernatural glory, and the mountain-side is busy with
supernatural life. The mountain is a great staircase,
and ascending and descending upon it appear angel
forms ; while high up, as on a throne of golden splend-
our, he seems to see God the great Invisible: and
wonderful to tell, he seems to hear a voice, the voice
of the Eternal, and the actual words come floating
down upon him with an infinite calm. ' I am with
thee, and I will keep thee in all places where thou
goest, and will bring thee again into this land.'
II. Dreams sometimes are evidences of the possibil-
ities of our character. The dream may show the
mental habit of thought, and the subjects which lie,
if not nearest, at least somewhere within the heart of
man. Dreams may be a warning to us all. A bad
dream may be a revelation of our potential badness.
It is the liberation of the evil spirit, the demon within
a man. Our evil visions may be revelations of what
we may be if left entirely to ourselves, and our good
visions manifestations of what God means us to be,
prophecies of what we might be, if living close to God
in prayer.
III. Of course, from an humanistic point of view,
the dream of Jacob gives us a glimpse into his char-
52
Vv. 10-22.
GENESIS XXVIII
Ver. 12.
acter. He was far from being a perfect man, yet his
dreams reveal to us that his failings were not of the
essence of his life. His vision, too, was a new revela-
tion to Jacob. It had entered the soul of Jacob and
touched chords in his life which never more could be
silent. This crisis marked a development in Jacob's
character. Hitherto Jacob, though naturally spiritual,
had been proudly self-reliant: he had complete faith
in his own resources, cleverness, and strength; felt he
was quite a match for most men, a match for life. He
wanted to make himself, was going to be his own
creator, and so in character he was at heart weak. A
man who relies entirely upon himself is not at heart
a strong man. Man's strength comes in the strength
of his weakness. The moment a man submits his will
to the Almighty he becomes a strong man, because he
becomes part of God's will. The desert experience
convinced Jacob of his need. It revealed to him some-
thing of his own nothingness and weakness and loneli-
ness, and God's Almightiness and Strength and so he
rises from his pillow of stone a stronger and wiser
because a humbler man, and sets up his pillar of con-
secration while he commits the keeping of his ways
to God, the great Guide and great Friend. — M. Gard-
ner, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lxxvi. p. 268.
References. — XXVIII. — F. W. Robertson, Notes on
Genesis, p. 101. XXVIII. 10-13.— T. Sadler, Sunday Thoughts,
p. 14. H. W. Beecher, Sermons, 1870, p. 643. XXVIII. 10-
17. — F. D. Maurice, The Patriarchs and Lawgivers of the
Old Testament, p. 100.
JACOB AT BETHEL
Genesis xxviii. 10-22.
Dean Stanley tells us a story of a girl whose grand-
father, not believing in the existence of God, had
written above his bed, ' God is nowhere '. But the
child was only learning to read. Words of more than
one syllable were yet beyond her, so she spelled out
in her own way what her grandfather had written, and
it read for her ' God is now here '. It was the
great lesson that Jacob learned at Bethel.
References. — XXVIII. 10-22. — A. Liaclaren, Exposi-
tions of Holy Scripture — Genesis, p. 206. C. Perren, Outline
Sermons, p. 257. S. A. Brooke, Sermons (2nd Series), pp.
231, 249. XXVIII. 11-16.— S. A. Tipple, Echoes of Spoken
Words, p. 201.
JACOB'S DREAM
'And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set upon the earth, and
the top of it reached to heaven : and behold the angels of
God ascending and descending on it.' — Genesis xxviii. 12.
The vision of Jacob's ladder is God's response to two
universal longings of the human heart — a craving for
a Revelation, and a craving for an Incarnation.
I. A Craving for a Revelation. — 'Revelation is a
necessity of our thinking mind, a need of our moral
nature.' As a child is born with faculties of speech, yet
speech lies dormant in the breast of the child until
called into exercise by the words which he hears around
him, so man was created to hold communion with
God, but God must speak to man before man can
speak to Him. God has spoken ! Jacob's seed was
the elected channel of the Divine communication.
The ' angels of God ' ascended and descended upon
Israel. The vision was a prediction. Hosea says,
' God spake with us at Bethel '. But Divine revela-
tion was the possession of one nation in order that
from thence it might become the possession of all
mankind. In ' thee and in thy seed shall all the
nations of the earth be blessed '. As the light of
heaven is adapted to every eye, and the air we breathe
to every lung, so the Word of God is adapted to the
mental and moral constitution of every child of the
human race.
II. A Craving for an Incarnation ' Let not God
speak with us, lest we die,' is the voice not only of
Israel but of humanity. No ancient religion is with-
out the presentiment of an incarnation. The popular
idea of Jacob's ladder is false. The vision was that
of a staircase of rock. The Rock of Israel was to be
no inaccessible crag, but a staircase, a means of com-
munication between earth and heaven. This vision
was the grand prefiguration of the coming Mediator
who was to bridge the chasm between a holy God
and sinful man. In the 'fullness of time' Christ came.
The ultimate end of the Incarnation was atonement.
' Without shedding of blood is no remission.' The
angels of God cannot ascend and descend upon the
body of which Christ is the Head unless sin be re-
moved. ' He put away sin by the sacrifice of Him-
self.' Yet something more is needed for communion
between God and man. Salvation is not merely
pardon of sin — it is renewal — it is restoration — it is
a new birth — a communication of a Divine life — a
new nature — a new power.
III. The same Lord Who, on the Day of Pente-
cost, gave some Apostles and some Prophets and
some Pastors and Teachers, has still Gifts for
Men.
(a) Every minister of Christ, every servant of
the Cross, must be ' endued with power from on
high ' if he is to have any real success. ' Without
Me ye can do nothing.' How did the Apostles re-
ceive the baptism of the Holy Ghost? It was vouch-
safed in answer to prayer. 'Ask and ye shall receive.'
Fervent, persevering prayer is the secret of holiness;
it is also the secret of power and the prelude of
victory. King Alfred has left a memorable passage
in which he sets forth the ideas with which he as-
sumed the charge of his distracted realm. He says
it is above all things necessary for a king that he
hath in his kingdom prayer-men, army-men, work-
men. The King of kings needs these three classes
of men in every age, and never more than now, and
it is in proportion as we, the clergy, and you, the
laity, are men of prayer we shall be men of war, bold
in our assaults on the strongholds of Satan and the
fortresses of sin, and also at the same time workmen
needing not to be ashamed as we build up the temple
of the living God.
(b) The vision at Bethel is full of encouragement.
— Every vision of God, every opened heaven, first
humbles and then strengthens, from the vision of
Jacob's ladder, with the accompanying words, ' I will
53
Ver. 12.
GENESIS XXVIII
Ver. 12.
never leave thee/ to that revelation vouchsafed to the
aged St. John in the Isle of Patmos, so dear to hearts
fearful of falling into heresy and sin, in which the
Apostle saw the stars, the angels of the churches,
held and kept in the strong right hand of the glorified
Lord. The heavens are opened to-day! The gift of
Pentecost has never been recalled ! The illuminating
light of the Spirit is not dim; His fires of love are
not chilled; the Sacraments are as valid to-day as
when administered by apostolic hands; the Gospel is
still the ' power of God unto salvation '. The final
victory lies with the Cross of Christ.
THE RETURN OF THE ANGELS
' And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and
the top of it reached to heaven : and behold the angels of
God ascending and descending on it.' — Genesis xxvm. 12.
' And Jacob went on his way, and the angels of God met him.'
Genesis xxxii. i.
Wellnigh twenty years had passed away since Jacob
had had his vision at Bethel. They had been years
of hard and constant labour; they had been years
of remarkable prosperity. No longer was Jacob an
empty-handed fugitive, leaving his home for an un-
certain future. God had been with him, and had
advanced him wonderfully, and had blessed him in his
basket and his store. And now he was a rich and
prosperous man, master of herds and flocks innumer-
able, and with a host of servants at his call, ready to
further him in every venture. There are men who
prosper and who pay for prospering by never seeing
the angels any more. They win their fortune, but
they lose their vision, and so are they poorer than
at one-and-twenty. But Jacob, for all his cunning
shrewdness, was not the man to lose his hold on God ;
he had a heart that thirsted after God even in his
most worldly and successful days. Now he was on his
way home to Canaan, and as he j ourneyed the angels
of God met him. This was the second time, for — -
twenty years before — had they not flashed upon his
sight at Bethel? And what I want to do to-night is
this, I want to take these two angelic visits, and to
show you how they differed from one another, and
how these differences have their meanings still.
I. First, then, the former angels were seen among
the hills; but the latter upon the trodden highway.
We can readily picture the scenery at Bethel, where
Jacob saw the ladder to the heavens. It was a place
of wild and rugged grandeur, touched with the mystery
of highland solitudes. At home, in the pasture-land
of rich Beer-sheba, his eye had looked out upon the
rolling downs. There was nothing sublime or awful
at Beer-sheba; it was a sweet and satisfying prospect.
But here it was different; here there were rugged
cliffs, and rock up-piled on rock in wild confusion;
and it was here among the hills of Bethel that Jacob
had his first vision of the angels. It was a resting-
place of highland grandeur, and the spirit of Jacob
was uplifted by it. He was thrilled with the high
sense of the sublime, as he lay down amid the loneli-
ness of nature. But it was not amid a grandeur such
as that that he had his vision when twenty years
were gone — he went on his way and the angels of
God met him. He was no longer a romantic youth;
he was a conventional and unromantic wayfarer. And
the road was familiar, and it was hard and dusty, and
there was none of the mystery of Bethel here. And
yet the angels who had shone at Bethel, in the de-
licious hour of freedom and of youth, came back again
on to the common road, where feet were plodding
along wearily.
Now it seems to me that, if we are living wisely,
we ought all to have an experience like Jacob. If
we have had our hour at Bethel once, we ought also
to have our Mahanaim. The man who climbs may
have his glimpse of heaven; but so has the man who
simply pushes on. And that is the test and triumph
of religion, not that it irradiates golden moments, but
that it comes, with music and with ministry, into the
dusty highroad of to-day. We all grow weary of the
routine sometimes. We are tempted to break away
and take our liberty. But it was not when Jacob
broke into his liberty that the angels of God met
with him again. It was when Jacob went upon his
way, and quietly and doggedly pushed on, and took
the homeward road and did his duty, although seduc-
tive voices might be calling.
II. Again, the former vision came in solitude, but
the latter vision in society. That is another differ-
ence to be noted between Bethel and Mahanaim. At
Bethel Jacob was utterly alone. For the first time
in his life he was alone. He was an exile now from
the old tent where he had passed the happy days of
boyhood. And at that very hour (for it was sun-
down) his brother Esau would be wending homeward,
and his aged father would be waiting him, and his
mother would be busy in the tent. It is such
memories that make us lonely. It was such memories
that made Jacob lonely. He saw his home again,
and heard its voices ; and it was night, and round
him were the hills. And it was then, in such an
hour of solitude, when he might cry and there was
none to answer, that Jacob had his vision of the
angels. Do you see the difference at Mahanaim?
Jacob was not solitary now. His wife was there ; his
family was there; his servants and his shepherds
were about him. And the road was noisy with the
stir of life— shouting of drover and lowing of the
herd — and now there was a snatch of song, and now
the laughter of his merry children. At Bethel there
was utter solitude ; at Mahanaim was society. At
Bethel there was none to answer; at Mahanaim there
were happy voices. And the point to note is that
the angels who flashed upon the solitude at Bethel
came back again amid that intercourse.
III. There is another difference, perhaps the most
significant of all. At Bethel the angels were on a
shining staircase; at Mahanaim they were armed for
war.
And so we learn the old and precious lesson that
God reveals Himself just as we need Him. He never
gives us what we shall want to-morrow; He gives us
54
Ver. 12.
GENESIS XXVIII
Ver. 22.
richly what we need to-day. Just as water, poured
into twenty goblets, will take the different shape of
every goblet, so the grace of God poured into twenty
days, will fill the different need of every day. — G. H.
Morrison, The Return of the Angels, p. 1.
NEARER, MY GOD, TO THEE
'And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and
the top of it reached to heaven.' — Genesis xxviii. 12.
The Bible asks us to believe that God did occasionally
reveal Himself through the vehicle of dreams. Of
course it does not follow from this that God must
continue for an indefinite period of time such a
method of communication with the spirit of man.
Many of the dreams recorded in the Scriptures were
vouchsafed to individuals outside the covenant made
with Israel, and with regard to the rest it may be
remarked that they belong to a very early age when
the knowledge of God was scanty and ill-defined.
I. While some of the Bible dreams sound the note
of warning, others, including Jacob's at Bethel, are
harbingers of blessing. An exile from home, he was
not an exile from heaven ; for in his sleep he saw the
world that is not seen.
II. Hazlitt said: 'In Jacob's day there was a
ladder between heaven and earth, but now the heavens
have gone further off, and become astronomical '. But
that is only true in the minds of those who have
misunderstood the nature of God. There is no de-
thronement of man by any theory of astronomy, for
he is neither less nor more man than he was before;
he is still the creature of God's love. — W. Taylor,
Twelve Favourite Hymns, p. 46.
JACOB'S LADDER
Jacob's ladder, set up on earth, and reaching to heav-
en ; what does it typify or represent but that new way
of approach to God which is opened to us in Jesus
Christ?
I. The fact that it is Jacob's ladder, that so early
as his time God gave notice of a Mediator increases
our reverence and admiration for His goodness.
It shows how far back in God's counsels the great
plan of man's redemption was prepared.
II. Like Jacob we sometimes in our judgment may
light upon a solitary place. We must draw near to
God, trusting to nothing but the merits and inter-
cession of His dear son. ' He is the way.'
III. The particular promise that God made to
Jacob. He renewed the covenant that He had made
with Abraham, and promised that from him should
spring the Messiah.
IV. The effect of this remarkable dream on Jacob.
When he awakened his soul was filled with awe. It
were well if something of this reverent spirit were to
be found among worshippers. — R. D. B. Rawnsley,
Village Sermons, Series iii. p. 53.
References.— XXVIII. 12. — J. W. Bardsley, Many
Mansions, p. 20. F. Corbett, The Preacher's Year, p. 149.
Bishop Woodford, Occasional Sermons, p. 242. J. E. Vaux
Sermon Notes (2nd Series), p. GG. XXVIII. 13.— G. Mathe-
son, The Scottish Review, vol. iii. p. 49. XXVIII. 15. H.
Melvill, Penny Pulpit, No. 1921. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol.
xxvii. No. 1630. XXVIII. 16.— J. B. Lightfoot, Cambridge
Sermons, p. 300. J. Aspinall, Parish Sermons (1st Series),
p. 269. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. vii. No. 401.
JACOB AT BETHEL
'This is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate
of heaven.' — Genesis xxviii. 17.
Jacob had his Bethel, and it came to him just at
the moment when we should least have expected it,
just at the time when he was smarting under the
sense of his own sin, and loneliness, and outlawry.
The King of Love Himself appears to him, and says:
' I will go with thee wherever thou goest '. Man's ex-
tremity is God's opportunity.
I. What makes our Bethel? Is it not the sense
of God's nearness to us and our need of Him? The
churches would all be full if the people felt their
need of God, for this is God's house, and we want it
to be the gate of heaven. Now, and here in God's
house, we may look up into heaven and see there our
Saviour, Who loves us with an everlasting love, and
round about Him those whom we have ' loved and
lost awhile '.
II. Before we leave Jacob, let us look at his beauti-
ful prayer to God, in which he vows a vow of obedi-
ence. This is the use of all Bethels — that as God
speaks to us we may make our vows back to Him.
Church and churchgoing will do us no good unless
we hear God speaking to us in the reading of His
AVord, and in the preaching, and in the prayers, and
in the music, and unless, having heard God's Voice,
we do our part and answer back and make our vows
that God shall be our God. Will you do this,
will you rejoice before God with this blessed vow of
Jacob's, ' The Lord shall be my God'? Oh, it will
help you so all through your life. This is the house
of God; we desire that it should be the gate of
heaven. You see sometimes little children pointing
upwards, but the Book says that heaven is where
God is, and if God is here then heaven has begun
upon earth. If God is here, then His love is with us,
and we shall grow more loving here and now.
References.— XXVIII. 17.— J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons,
(9th Series), p. 81. XXVIII. 19.— J. Eames, Sermons to
Boys and Girls, p. 155. XXVIII. 20-22.— H. Allon, Chris-
tian World Pulpit, vol. xxv. p. 60.
'Of all that Thou shalt give me, I will surely give the tenth
unto Thee.' — Genesis xxviii. 22.
Jacob's vow has been the preacher's theme in every
age, yet its teaching for the Christian Church has
never been more greatly needed than it is to-day.
Permit me, therefore, to put before you a few
thoughts on giving to God as suggested by our text.
I. How we can Give to God God, who giveth
to all men liberally and upbraideth not, requires us
to give to Him in return.
(a) We give to Him when we give to those whom
He has left, or made, poor in worldly substance. —
The widow, fatherless, unfortunate, incapable, even
55
Ver. 22.
GENESIS XXVIIL, XXIX., XXXII
Ver. 1.
those who by sin and prodigality have brought them-
selves to want. As the father leaves little patches in
his garden, and says to his children, ' I leave you to
cultivate these; those are your little gardens/ so
does our Heavenly Father leave, in those poor and
needy ones, patches in His great garden for us to
dress and keep ; and he that ' giveth to the poor
lendeth to the Lord '.
(b) We give to him when we promote the great
purposes which He has at heart. — An earnest man
is so bound up with his purposes and work that they
are, as it were, but a larger self. We speak of men
' embarking ' in enterprises — going into them as the
pilot into his ship. The wind that wafts the ship
on carries him upon his way. Christ is steering the
ship of this world's destinies and those of individual
souls to the shore of safety and purity and bliss, and
to help to fill its sails is to waft on Christ Himself
on His triumphal way. Give to promote Christ's
cause on the earth, and you are giving to God.
II. The Motive Power. — All motive power which
constrains men to give to God is from God Himself.
1. A recognition of dependence upon God. — ' All
that Thou shalt give me.' ' What hast thou that
thou hast not received ? ' Tenants of God, we owe
Him our rent of cheerful giving.
2. Gratitude to God. — ' All that Thou shalt give
me.' How generous is that ' all '. ' We are always
giving, giving,' said one. ' Not quite that,' was the re-
ply, ' but we are always getting, getting.' He gives life
and friends ; He gave His Son ; He giveth the Holy
Spirit to them that ask Him. ' What shall I render
unto the Lord for all His benefits ? '
3. Imitation of God. — As He gives let us give.
Be the children of your Father, Who maketh His
sun to shine and His rain to fall on the just and un-
just.
4. Response to God. — ' Of all that Thou shalt give
I shall give.' God's giving to us is the seed which
He sows in our hearts and lives, to bring forth from
them the fair harvest of kindliness, beneficence, help-
fulness. What could He do for His vineyard that
He has not done ? Surely a ' tenth ' is but a small
return for such bountiful sowing.
III. Practical Rules lor Giving — l. Seize special
times of blessing for devising liberal things for
God. — It was just after Jacob had his wonderful and
comforting vision that he made this vow. As the
swift current of the stream tells of the height of the
mountains in which it took its rise, so if we seize the
time of signal blessing from God for opening a fresh
spring of devotedness and beneficence, its bountiful
and eager flow will be preserved far into the tame
plains of our ordinary life.
2. Lay your plans and adapt your expenditure
for giving. — ' I shall surely give.' Out of my
abundance, if I have it; out of my poverty, if that
is my lot. As the ancient Greeks spilt a little wine
from the cup before tasting it, as a libation to the
gods, so let us provide first for God. The first-fruits.
I may want pictures, books, delicacies, fine clothes,
travel, sight-seeing, even ordinary comfort, but ' I
shall surely give '. If you have no other luxury, make
sure of the luxury of doing good.
8. Bring system to your aid in giving. — Not
to check your generous impulses; but still, as the
groundwork, there should be system. System as the
measure, which, after filling, the heart is free to shake
and press together, and make to run over.
RACHEL THE PLACID
Genesis xxix.
You will meet her type continually in the modern
world. Do you not know women who seem to go
through life easily?
I. When Rachel is keeping her father's sheep at
the Well of Haran she sees advancing a young man.
It is her cousin Jacob. He has come as a fugitive,
flying from his brother's vengeance. Jacob breaks
into the red heat of love. He is dazzled by Rachel's
beauty. He makes an offer to Laban for the hand
of his younger daughter. He promises to serve him
for seven years, and the offer is accepted. The seven
years are past, and the happy day is coming. But
there are two dissentients to the general joy. The
one is Laban, the other is Leah. She has cherished
for Jacob a secret and passionate love. The solemn
act is completed. What is that face which emerges
from the veil. It is not Rachel ; it is Leah.
II. We can in a measure explain Jacob's ac-
quiescence. But Rachel — it is her placidness that
surprises us. Why does she not protest? Her
placidness was appropriate, for two reasons.
(a) The artist is describing a race and time where-
in everything that happens is received as an act of
Divine will.
(o) There was something about this youngwoman's
religion which would make her not wholly averse to
polygamy. She was not altogether emancipated
from the belief that in addition to the Almighty
God of heaven there were certain subordinate deities
allowed to carry out His will on earth. Specially in
the regions of the home she sought a sphere for
these. So Rachel accepted her ill fortune with a
good grace — almost with graciousness. — G. Mathe-
son, Representative Women of the Bible, p. 105.
References. — XXIX. — F. W. Robertson, Notes on Gen-
esis, p. 110. XXX. 1; 48-50.— F. W. Robertson, Notes on
Genesis, p. 113. XXX. 27. — H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, Common
Life Religion, p. 223. XXXI. 3-5. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol.
xxvii. No. 1630. XXXI. 13. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxi.
No. 1267. XXX. 48-50. — F. W. Robertson, Notes on Gene-
sis, p. 113.
JACOB THE ASPIRING
'The angels of God met him.'— Genesis xxxii. i.
We are accustomed to think of Jacob as a character
of lights and shadows mingling without reason.
I. As commonly understood, the portrait of this
man does present an inconsistency. This apparently
bad man has a beautiful dream, so beautiful that it
has become immortal. What the best men of the
past had not seen this fraudulent youth beholds.
56
Ver. 1.
GENESIS XXXII
Ver. 1.
II. Why did the artist give such a vision to such
a man? The previous life of Jacob had not been
that prosaic thing which the popular view would have
us believe. This dream of the night was in the first
instance a dream of the morning, and the vision which
Jacob saw in the desert was the vision which had
followed him amid the haunts of men. Jacob, then,
appears from the very outset as a mentally aspir-
ing man. He wanted to be the cleric of the family,
the ecclesiastic of the clan.
III. But in Jacob's Bethel dream there is a penal
as well as a pleasurable element. He pronounced the
spot of the vision to be a 'dreadful place'. The dream
had a retributive as well as a rewarding function. To
be a Churchman in those days was to be a power; it
was to wield an influence far beyond the strength of
the secular arm. Jacob felt what many a young man
now feels — the social uplifting involved in the clerical
office. This was the bane of his dream, and this was
the feeling which the vision reproved.
IV. The effect of Jacob's dream in one word was
' Peniel '. He never would have wrestled at Peniel if
he had dreamed at Bethel ! This dream gave him
a conscience. It told him that to be an angel of God
was a very serious thing.
V. There is a curious suggestion in the picture of
this conflicting period of Jacob's life. The angel with
whom he is struggling is represented as saying ' Let
me go ! for the day breaketh '. Jacob found it easier
to be good by night than by day. But his greatest
glory is reserved for his hour of greatest solitude —
the hour of death. There the angel of the struggle
appears once more. He is still the angel of ministra-
tion, but he is no longer a mere helper to Jacob — he
is inciting Jacob to bless others. The dying man
becomes for the first time the universal benefactor. —
G. Matheson, Representative Men of the Bible, p.
152.
THE SEASON FOR DIVINE HELP
' Jacob went on his way, and the angels of God met him.' —
Genesis xxxii. i.
I. The important word here is the word " met '. It
is distinctly implied that no supernatural help came
to Jacob at the beginning. He went out on his own
way and on the strength of his own resources ; it was
only in the middle of his journey that he encountered
the angels of God. And I believe this is typical of
the life of every man. We are most of us under a
mistake on this point. We often see young people
waiting for a special call to some mission — for a mani-
fest intervention of God that says, ' This is the way ;
walk ye in it '. The special call does not come at the
outset; they must start without it. There is a great
difference between not having a special call to go and
having a special call not to go. The latter case is a
very common one, and it should certainly be taken
as a prohibition. Many a man has a family depen-
dent on him for bread. Many a woman has an aged
mother to nurse. Many a youth has an ancestral
taint of delicacy which incapacitates for active service.
All these hear a voice which says, ' Do not work to-
day in my vineyard '. Sometimes a man has no pro-
hibition, but simply an inability to see the full length
of the way. In extreme youth I was offered in a
crowded town an appointment which involved weekly
preaching at two services. I had only twelve sermons,
and I did not see where the thirteenth was to come
from. I was tempted to decline. But I asked my-
self the question, ' Are you adequate to the twelve ? '
and I answered ' yes '. Then I said to myself: ' God's
presence will not reveal itself till your own power is
exhausted. He has given you twelve talents to begin
with. Do not bury them, do not lay them up in a
napkin; go in your own strength as far as you can;
and on the way He will meet you and light your torch
anew.' The experience was abundantly realized. If
there is a multitude to be fed in the wilderness, it is
no proof of your disqualification that you have only
five loaves. You have five; and that is your call to
a beginning. You have probably material for ten
people. Minister to the ten ! Do not let the eleventh
frighten you beforehand ! Take each case as it
comes ! Break the bread as far as it will go ! Re-
fuse to paralyse yourself by looking forward ! Keep
the eleventh man in abeyance until you have come up
to him; and then the angels will meet you with their
twelve baskets, and the crowd will greet you with
their blessings, and the limit will expand into an
overflow. — G. Matheson, Messages of Hope, p. 27.
ST. MICHAEL AND ALL ANQELS
'The angels of God.'— Genesis xxxii. i.
I. AH the Company of Heaven — It is not the
custom in this day to think as much about this un-
seen holy existence as men did in days that are
gone. It is impossible for us to read the Holy Scrip-
tures without constantly observing that those who
lived in the days of the writers of these sacred books
very fully believed in the existence near about them
of endless holy beings belonging to God's unseen
kingdom, holy souls serving God either in worship or
in ministration to the sons of men. In the book of
Genesis we read of Jacob and the angels. Passing on
to a later stage we read of the ministration by Angels
in the times of the great prophets Elijah and Elisha,
and, not to multiply instances, we can readily recall
the words of the Hebrew Psalmist when he speaks of
the angel of God tarrying round about those of the sons
of men who fear God. Passing to the New Testament,
we can think of the appearance of angels to minister
to One no less great than the Son of Man at the end of
His temptation, to minister to Him in the Garden of
Gethsemane when His mind was overwrought with
the greatness of the thoughts which pressed upon
Him then; and we read of angels, too, appearing on
the Resurrection day with their message of explana-
tion of the things which the faithful Disciples saw.
But in our own day we do not perhaps realize quite
so fully that there is ever about us, above us, this
great realm of unseen beings under the government
of God, pure and holy souls, servants of the same God
57
Vv. 1-32.
GENESIS XXXII
Vv. 24 and 29.
Whom we serve, and it may be that perhaps in think-
ing too seldom of them we miss an uplifting thought
that we might otherwise have to help us in our
religious life. May we not endeavour, acting upon
the suggestion which comes to us at this time through
the occurrence of Michaelmas Day, the feast of St.
Michael and all Angels, to see whether we cannot put
some more thought about the great realm unseen into
our minds ?
II. Joy amongst the Angels. — Not only may we
in our times of worship have our thoughts uplifted
and imaginations warmed, our conception extended,
by thinking of all the inhabitants of this great unseen
world over which our God rules, but we can go out
from our worship into the world of our daily duties
in which we meet as men and women. We know well,
as Christian men and women held down by their
human infirmities, by the sins which they are continu-
ally committing, we can go out with the thought that
not only may we in church worship be linked with
the holy angels of God, but we can go out with the
thought that these angels are with us during the life
we live day by day, taking cognizance of all the efforts
we make to win other souls to God, and we go out
with the assurance that there is joy in the presence
of these angels of God when through the effort of
ourselves or through the effort of any other believer
in the Lord one sinner only repenteth. Let us be
encouraged at this time by the thought of the great-
ness of the realm to which we belong. God, in calling
us into His service and making us His sons, has not
made us members of a small concern, not united us
into a tiny family, but has given us a great birthright,
made us members of an immense kingdom. We pro-
fess in our creed our belief in Him as ' Almighty,
Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible
and invisible,' and as members of that great kingdom,
as members of that immense family over which God
rules and shows His love, let us go forward inspirited
and ennobled, determined that, so far as our influence
reaches, other souls shall get to know the greatness
of this inheritance which has become ours. So may
we be strengthened to be more happy and joyful in
our own lives, more useful to those who are about us
in the world, and thereby bring more honour, praise,
and glory to our God.
JACOB, A PRINCE WITH QOD
Genesis xxxii. 1-32.
Jacob's name was changed to Israel. Why are the names
of men changed? Sometimes it is just the fashion of
the times ; sometimes it is for safety in time of peril,
as when John Knox signed himself John Sinclair
(his mother's name) ; but in the Bible change of name
indicates change of character, or a new and true ap-
preciation of what a man really is. Abram becomes
Abraham, Simon becomes Peter, Saul becomes Paul.
In the clear light of heaven there is to be a new name
given to every one that overcometh.
References —XXXII. 1. — R. W. Winterbotham, Ser-
mons, p. 461. XXXII. 1-2.— A. Maclaren, Christ in the
Heart, p. 195. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxvi. No. 1544. A.
Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture — Genesis, p. 214.
XXXII. 7, 11, 24, 28.— J. Clifford, Daily Strength for Daily
Living, p. 39. XXXII. 9, 12. — A. Maclaren, Expositions of
Holy Scripture — Genesis, p. 222. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol.
Hi. No. 3010.
REMEMBRANCE OF PAST MERCIES
' I am not worthy of the least of all the mercies, and of all the
truth, which Thou hast shewed unto Thy servant.' —
Genesis xxxii. 10.
Jacob's distinguishing grace . . . was a habit of affec-
tionate musing upon God's providences towards him in
times past, and of overflowing thankfulness for them.
Not that he had not other graces also, but this seems
to have been his distinguishing grace. All good men
have in their measure all graces ; for He, by whom
they have any, does not give one apart from the whole :
He gives the root, and the root puts forth branches.
But since time, and circumstances, and their own use
of the gift, and their own disposition and character,
have much influence on the mode of its manifesta-
tion, so it happens, that each good man has his own
distinguishing grace, apart from the rest, his own
particular hue and fragrance and fashion, as a flower
may have. As, then, there are numberless flowers on
the earth, all of them flowers, and so far like each
other; and all springing from the same earth, and
nourished by the same air and dew, and none without
beauty; and yet some are more beautiful than others;
and of those which are beautiful, some excel in colour
and others in sweetness, and others in form ; and then,
again, those which are sweet have such perfect sweet-
ness, yet so distinct, that we do not know how to
compare them together, or to say which is the
sweeter; so is it with souls filled and nurtured by
God's secret grace — J. H. Newman. '
References. — XXXII. 10. — J. Baldwin Brown, Aids to
the Development of the Divine Life, No. vii. Spurgeon, Ser-
mons, vol. xxx. No. 1787. XXXII. 11, 12. — Ibid. vol. xlix.
No. 2817. XXXII. 12.— Ibid. vol. xxxiii. No. 1938; ibid.
Evening by Evening, p. 109. J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons,
1874, p. 235.
THE NAME OF OOD
'And Jacob was left alone ; and there wrestled a man with him
until the breaking of the day. . . . And Jacob asked him,
and said, Tell me, I pray thee, thy name.' — Genesis xxxii.
24 and 29.
Among simple and primitive folk people are named
after what they are, and therefore to tell their name
is to tell their nature. Thomas means a twin, Peter
means a rock, and in old days, or among primitive
tribes in our own day, a man would not be called
Thomas unless he were a twin, nor Peter unless there
were something about him, or the circumstances of
his birth, reminding of a rock. So are the names of
God in the Old Testament. They are the revelations
of His nature, or aspects of His character. ' God
spake unto Moses, and said unto him, I am the Lord:
And I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto
Jacob, by the name of God Almighty, but by My
name Jehovah was I not known unto them.' Thus
there comes to Moses a deeper insight into the Divine
58
Vv. 24 and 29.
GENESIS XXXII
Ver. 26.
nature than was attained by his forefathers. To
them God was known only as power, God Almighty;
to Moses He becomes known as the Eternal Unity,
the Supreme One. Once more — and this, surely, is
the most beautiful of all the names revealed to those
men of olden time — ' And the Lord descended in the
cloud ' . . . ' and proclaimed the name of the Lord.
And the Lord passed by before him and proclaimed,
The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-
suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth.'
I. To us as much as to any Patriarch or Prophet,
both to us and to our children as much as to the men
who lived three thousand years ago, there is nothing
in all the world and in all our life so important as
the name of God. In every supreme crisis of our
lot, when in the presence of wrong, or of shipwreck,
or grief, or misfortune, or death, when we feel our
littleness and weakness amid the great forces which
move the world, the one thing we need to know is
the name or character of God. If His name be
Father and His heart eternal kindness, then there is
light in the darkness, however dark it be.
II. The Story of Jacob's Midnight Wrestling. —
Jacob had travelled a long way since that dark day
of the cheated birthright and the stolen blessing.
He had travelled a long way since the dream of the
angels on the ladder and the sound of God's voice
above. His heart had been softened and ripened
by the experiences of life, by Rachel and by the
children; and he had grown rich in something more
than in flocks and herds, in camels and in goats, in
friendships, in affections, in the cherished treasures of
the heart; and the man was changed, deepened in
insight and in character; and here, in this matter,
sees he is face to face with the consequences of the sin
of his youth. To-morrow perhaps the pitiless ven-
geance of the desert chieftain may fall not only on
him, but on all whom he loves. The sense of security
and comfort fell away from Jacob, as once and again
it falls from you and from me. His life was stripped
bare by his own conscience, and in that hour of
suspense and of terror, when the evil of his own deed
seemed coming back to judgment, in that hour of
midnight silence and solitude, he felt the unseen
presence with him which is the only stay of man in
his extremity and in his agony. He cried, Tell me,
I pray Thee, thy name. Tell me, thou unseen visitor
to my soul. Art thou mercy or art thou judgment?
Art thou love or fear. Art thou truly my God and
my safety, or dost thou disregard my cry and look
down unmoved as these stars in the midnight sky
while I am delivered to the fate I have deserved.
III. There are Secret Wrestlings of the Soul
which can only be told in Parable — The anguish
of them refuses the poor interpretation of our common
speech. So the wrestling of Jacob by the ford Jabbok
is pictured to us. ' There wrestled a man with him
until the breaking of the day.' It is not possible to
come out of such a struggle without some change of
character, some mark or scar which shall remain with
us all our earthly days, and so we read and interpret
the meaning of that touch of the unseen visitor which
made Jacob from that day forward halt upon his thigh.
IV. It is not to the Wise and Learned only or
chiefly, it is not to the reason and intellect that God
oftenest tells the secret of His name. It is for those
who wrestle and strive with Him, those who struggle
and pray, for light and beauty and the presence
divine ; to those stricken with their own sins and
sorrows, or the sins and sorrow of the world, or they
who are bewildered with the evidence of their own
ill-doing, or pity for the ill-doing of others, who cry
out to Him in their loneliness, ' Tell me, I pray Thee,
Thy name '. And these it is who all their life after-
ward can catch amid the disasters and the distresses
of life, amid the ruin of hopes and the separations of
love, the music of a finer harmony, the music of the
everlasting chime. These it is who can behold, not
indeed unmoved, but confident in a righteous purpose
and a final recompense, who can behold in faith the
catastrophes of the human lot which make up so
much of human history.
References. — XXXII. 24. — Bishop Boyd Carpenter,
Penny Pulpit, No. 608. Archbishop Magee, Penny Putpit,
No. 1708. XXXII. 24, 26, 30.— J. T. Bramston, Fratribus,
p. 58. XXXII. 32.— D. Wilton Jenkins, Christian World
Pulpit, vol. — p. 170.
WRESTLING WITH QOD
'I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.' —
Genesis xxxii. 26.
This passage has been for ages, not only the locus
classicus but also the chief resources of inspiration,
for persevering and persistent prayer. Many of us
can remember to what an extent the old divines loved
to linger with extraordinary affection upon the inci-
dent of Jacob at Penuel, and how eloquently they
expounded the lesson of every detail of the narrative.
I. Now there is a certain mastery that every man
has to acquire and win if he is to rise to the height
of his being and attain his full development. He
will have to be master of his circumstances and prove
master of his fate, but more especially he will have to
master himself, and not only so, but the highest
spiritual blessings are reserved only for those who do
obtain the victory over self, and who by means of
conflict gain supremacy over their lower nature. In
the respect in which God envelopes and encircles our
lives and is in all our environment and has permitted
our limitations and our disabilities, there is no reason
why any man who has to fight against great odds
should not suppose that he is wrestling with God,
and only realize the higher blessings as he wins them
and wrests them from his opponent. In this sense a
man prevails with God.
II. Further, this self-mastery is a condition of our
mastery and effective influence over others. Our im-
pression is that we have more difficulty with regard
to other wills and other men's actions. But, after
all, the surest key to the hearts of other men is to
know how to find our way to our own darker recesses
of being.
59
Ver. 81.
GENESIS XXXII
Ver. 36.
III. This triumph is one of prayer and faith. In
Hosea we read that ' he had power over the angel
and prevailed, he wept and made supplication to him '
(xn. 4). This wrestling was a distinct triumph of
prayer and prayer's supreme effort. The incident is
that of the clashing of wills, and it ended, as all true
prayer does, in the complete surrender to the Divine
and the cheerful acceptance of God's purpose and plan.
— J. G. James, Problems of Prayer, p. 193.
References. — XXXII. 26. — J. T. Brair.ston, Sermons to
Boys, p. 66. W. H. Aitken, Mission Sermons (3rd Series),
p. 38. F. W. Farrar, The Fall of Man, p. 236. XXXII. 28-
29.— F. W. Robertson, Sermons (1st Series), p. 36. XXXII.
28. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. Hi. No. 2978 ; ibid., vol. xlii.
No. 2486. XXXII. 29.— Bishop Thorold, Christian World
Pulpit, vol. xxi. p. 145.
THE DEFEAT UNDER SIN
' And as he passed over Penuel the sun rose upon him, and he
halted upon his thigh.' — Genesis xxxii. 31.
The battle had been severe, mysterious, life-long.
From that battle Jacob came out victorioms — de-
cidedly and completely victorious. Nevertheless, his
own thigh was put out of joint by the power which
he was defeating. And long after he was doomed to
feel the loss and the damage which he had there sus-
tained. ' The sun rose ' upon Jacob ; but still ' he
halted upon his thigh ,'.
In the great conflict with sin the issue is quite safe
at last to all those who engage in it with an honest
purpose and a true heart. Still, none come off with-
out many a scar. You may ' bruise the head ' of the
serpent which is in you; but it will not be till that
serpent has ' bruised your heel '. You may wrestle
and prevail; but there will be touches of the enemy
which will leave their long and bitter memories. Re-
verses, disasters, defeats, there will be all along in the
spiritual warfare, even to the very gate of heaven.
The way to heaven is made up of falling down and
rising up again. The battle is no steady, onward
fight; but rallies and retreats — retreats and rallies.
I. Reasons for Defeat.- — Let us endeavor to see
the reasons of these defeats under sin, which recur,
again and again, in a regenerate man. Perhaps many
of us are not sufficiently alive to the truth that the
old sin of the character continues, and continues with
unabated force, in the heart of a child of God.
(a) Ingenuity of the enemy. — Sometimes, by an
ingenious stratagem of the enemy, an entirely new
temptation, or an old temptation in a perfectly new
form, suddenly presents itself. You had been looking
for danger on the one side, when at once it rises up
before you on the other. Had you only been looking
for it in that direction it would have been nothing.
It is its unexpectedness which gives it its influence
and its success.
(6) A reduction of grace. — All sin in a believer
must arise from the reduction of grace. And whence
that reduction of grace? From grieving the Holy
Ghost. And whence the grieving of the Holy Ghost ?
An omission of something or other; — prayer, the
means of grace, some safeguard. And whence that
omission? Carelessness. And whence that careless-
ness ? Pride, always pride ; self-confidence, self-exal-
tation.
(e) Empty places. — Another secret in your failures
lies in empty places. You can never simply expel a
sin, you must introduce the opposite to the sin, and
so occupy the ground. You can do nothing by a
vacuum. Therefore it is that you are overcome.
You must fill the heart with good; then there will
not be room for the sin.
II. Defeat as Training. — Yet defeat is part of
your training. It may be converted into a positive
good to your soul. God can and will overrule guilt
to gain. Let me see how.
(a) Sorrow for sin. — There is no sorrow for sin
compared to the sorrow after a fall. It is not the
sins which we did before the grace of God, but the
sins after we have tasted peace, which make the bitter-
ness of repentance. All the great recorded sorrows
for sins are sorrows after falls. Therefore God has
allowed this defeat to teach you repentance.
(6) Humbling required. — Depend upon it, you
wanted humbling. God saw that you would never
be what you wished to be, — that you would never be
what He wanted you to be, — that you would never
do what He wanted you to do for him, — till you were
humbled. He saw that nothing would humble you
but sin. Other things had been tried and had failed.
Therefore, God, as He is wont, took up His severest
method, and let you fall, to humble you.
(e) And punishment. — Only go lower, consent to
humiliation, accept that sin as a punishment. Yield
yourself to the penitential feeling which is stealing
over you. And thank God that He still loves you
well enough to give you that miserable sense of sin,
and shame, and nothingness.
(d) Restoration. — Fourthly, get up from your fall
as quickly as you can; the danger does not lie in the
depth of a fall, but in the length of the time that
we lie fallen. The deepest water will not drown us if
we do not stay in it; and the shallowest water will
destroy life if we do.
(e) Union with Christ. — Fifthly, look more to
your union with the Lord Jesus Christ. You see
what you are, and what you are without Christ.
You may ' halt ' ; but ' the sun ' will ' rise ' upon
your ' halting '. You may cross over the last passage
more as a poor, forgiven sinner crosses — but your
crossing will be a safe one.
Reference.- — XXXII. 31. — J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons
(6th Series), p. 33.
ENDURANCE, THE CHRISTIAN'S PORTION
'All these things are against me.' — Genesis xxxii. 36.
From his youth upwards Jacob had been full of
sorrows, and he bore them with a troubled mind. His
first words are, ' If God will be with me . . . then
shall the Lord be my God '. His next, ' Deliver me,
I pray thee '. His next, ' Ye have troubled me '. His
next, ' I will go down into the grave unto my son
60
Ver. 2.
GENESIS XXXIII., XXXV
Vv. 18, 19.
mourning '. His next, ' All these things are against
me'. And his next, 'Few and evil have the days of the
years of my life been '. Blow after blow, stroke after
stroke, trouble came like hail. That one hailstone
falls is a proof, not that no more will come, but that
others are coming surely ; when we feel the first we say,
' It begins to hail,' — we do not argue that it is over,
but that it is to come. Thus was it with Jacob; the
storm muttered around him, and heavy drops fell
while he was in his father's house; it drove him
abroad. It did not therefore cease because he was
out in it: it did not end because it had begun.
Rather, it continued, because it had begun; its
beginning marked its presence; it began upon a law,
which was extended over him in manhood also and
old age, as in early youth. It was his calling to be
in the storm; it was his very life to be a pilgrimage;
it was the very thread of the days of his years to be
few and evil. — J. H. Newman.
References. — XXXII. — Spurgeon, Sermons, Nos. 2739,
2817, 2979, 3010. F. W. Robertson, Notes on Genesis, p. 116.
Genesis xxxiii.
' And he had a fine revenge ; but when Jacob, on his
journey, heard that his brother was near with 400
men, and made division of his flocks and herds, his
man-servants and maid-servants, impetuous as a
swollen hill-torrent, the fierce son of the desert, baked
red with Syrian light, leapt down upon him, and fell
on his neck, and wept. And Esau said, " What
meanest thou by all this drove which I met? " And
Jacob said, " These are to find grace in the sight of
my Lord " ; then Esau said, " I have enough, my
brother ; keep that thou hast unto thyself ". O
mighty prince, didst thou remember thy mother's
guile, the skins upon thy hands and neck, and the
lie put upon the patriarch as, blind with years, he
sat up in his bed snuffing the savoury meat? An
ugly memory, I should fancy ! ' — Alexander Smith
in Dreamthorp.
References. — XXXIII. 9-11. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol.
47, No. 2739. XXXIII.— F. W. Robertson, Notes on Gene-
sis, p. 116. XXXV. 1.— C. Perren, Outline Sermons, p. 308.
Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxiv. No. 1395. A. Maelaren, Ex-
positions of Holy Scripture — Genesis, p. 233. XXXV. 1-3. —
C. Perren, Revival Sermons, p. 180.
' Then Jacob said unto his household, and to all that were with
him, Put away the strange gods that are among you, and
be clean and change your garments.' — Genesis xxxv. 2.
St. John of the Cross says: 'When the patriarch
Jacob wished to go up to the Mount of Bethel in
order to build there an altar to God on which he
should offer sacrifice, he first gave three commands to
his household.' He applies these three commands to
the spiritual life of the Christian. The strange gods
are the ' outside affections and attachments '. ' Use
clean means to get rid of the worldly appetites still
left in the soul.' And the third thing we must have
in order to reach the high mountain is a change of
garments. Through the means of the former two
works God will change our garments from old to new,
putting in the soul a new understanding of God in
God, the old understanding of man being left behind
and a new love for God in God implanted. He will
empty the will of all its old human desires and tastes
and will put within the soul a new knowledge and an
abysmal delight, all other knowledge, all old imagina-
tions, having been cast aside. Thus He will cause to
cease all that belongs to the old man, which is the
clothing of the natural being, and will clothe the soul
in new and supernatural garments according to all its
powers. — Obras, vol. i. p. 21.
Reference — XXXV. 8. — J. W. Bergen, Servants of
Scripture, p. 12.
THE BIRTH OF BENJAMIN
'And it came to pass, as her soul was in departing (for she died)
that she called his name Ben-oni ; but his father called him
Benjamin. And Rachel died, and was buried in the way
to Ephrath, which is Beth-lehem.' — Genesis xxxv. i8, 19.
I. Of all that we read in the book of Genesis of the
faith of the patriarchs, there are few examples that
shine forth more strongly than this of Jacob in the
name that he gave his son; being able to look
beyond the present sorrow to the power of God that
was to be revealed. But for that faith, no doubt he
might well have been content to have left the mother's
name unchanged. But he knew not only from whom
the sorrow came, but whereto he had promised that
all sorrows should lead; in Jacob's seed all families
of the earth were to be blessed ; and as each of his
sons were born, even to this last, he would rejoice as
feeling that the blessing came nearer and was multi-
plied. Thus it was that Jacob's faith was rewarded
by the power of the right hand of the Most High
revealed above all memories of sorrow.
II. Yet the sorrow itself is not without a Gospel
lesson; indeed the lesson of the sorrow contributes
to and bears part in the triumph. Benjamin was
born and Rachel died, not at home, but on a journey;
not even in such a home as Jacob had, when, stranger
and pilgrim though he was, he pitched his tent, and
built an altar, and digged a well, and bought a piece
of ground with money of the sons of the people of the
land. From that home they were driven; it was this
flight most likely that brought on the mother's hard
labour; so that we may say the sorrow wherein Ben-
jamin was born came from his brethren's sin, from the
folly wrought in Israel and the corruption that is in
the world through lust. And even so it was when
Bethlehem saw the birth of another Son of sorrow
and of power, that sorrow was in Him part of this
saving work of love. It became Him who was to be
known as a Man of Sorrows to come as a Child of
Sorrows ; but He was not only born in sorrow Him-
self, He was a Son of His mother's sorrow too. Her
loneliness teaches us scarcely less than this ; for where-
as He had a work to do that we cannot share in, her
work was altogether the same as ours, so that her
example comes the more closely home to us. For her
Son to be homeless was a part of the suffering He
undertook for our sake, and by its merit avails for our
profit; but she was only one of ourselves, a believer
as we are or ought to be; and therefore if she was
61
GENESIS XXXVII
Ver. 18.
a wanderer with Him and suffered with Him, we are
taught that we must suffer with Him before we can
reign with Him.
III. But not only sorrow generally is a discipline
to faith and a means for growth in holiness ; this
special trouble of the wanderer and the homeless is
one which it specially befits us that we should learn
to know and feel. For however perfect happiness
God may have given us on earth, this world or any
place in it is not our real home after all. One day
we must leave it, and we must have learned before-
hand to find a home wherever He is who loves us, if
our departure is to be with joy, and according to the
old bridal blessing, ' From home to home '. — W. H.
Simcox, The Cessation of Prophecy, p. 11.
References. — XXXV. 29. — F. W. Robertson, Notes on
Genesis, p. 126. XXXV. — F. W. Robertson, Notes on Gene-
sis, p. 121. XXXVI. 24.— Expositor (2nd Series), vol. i. p.
S52.
JOSEPH AND HIS BRETHREN
Genesis xxxvn.
With the story of Joseph we come to the last division
of Genesis. The development and progress of the
household of Jacob, until at length it became a nation
in Egypt, had Joseph as a pioneer. The fullness of
the narrative is worthy of consideration. There is a
fourfold value and importance in the record of Joseph's
life. (1) It gives the explanation of the development
of the Hebrews. (2) It is a remarkable proof of the
quiet operation of Divine Providence overruling evil,
and leading at length to the complete victory of
truth and righteousness. (3) It affords a splendid
example of personal character. (4) It provides a
striking series of typical illustrations of Christ.
Joseph exemplifies the testing and triumph of faith.
I. Joseph's Home Life. — Joseph was the child of
Jacob's later life, and escaped all the sad experiences
associated with the earlier years at Haran. His
companions were his half-brothers, the grown-up sons
of Bilhab and Zilpah. From all that we have hither-
to seen of them they must have been utterly unfit
companions for such a youth. The difference between
the elder brethren and Joseph was accentuated by
the fact that ' Joseph brought unto his father the
evil report of his brethren '. It is sometimes thought
that Joseph is blameworthy for telling tales, but
there does not seem any warrant for regarding him
as a mere spy. There was, however, something much
more than this to account for the differences between
Joseph and his brethren. The gift of a coat of many
colours (or pieces), or rather the ' tunic with sleeves,'
was about the most significant act that Jacob could
have shown to Joseph. It was a mark of distinction
that carried its own meaning, for it implied that
exemption from labour which was the peculiar privi-
lege of the heir or prince of the Eastern clan. And
so when his brethren saw these marks of special
favour, ' they hated him, and could not speak peace-
ably unto him '.
II. Joseph's Dreams The hatred of the brothers
was soon intensified through the dreams that Joseph
narrated to them. They were natural in form as
distinct from any Divine vision, and yet they were
clearly prophetic of Joseph's future glory.
III. In the Course of their Work as Shepherds
Jacob's Elder Sons went to Shechem.— It is not
surprising that Israel wished to know how it fared
with his sons and with his flocks. He therefore
commands Joseph to take the journey of inquiry.
The promptness and thoroughness of obedience on
the part of Joseph is very characteristic of him. It
has often and truly been pointed out that Joseph
seems to have combined all the best qualities of his
ancestors — the capacity of Abraham, the quietness of
Isaac, the ability of Jacob.
IV. Joseph's Brethren. — The conspiracy was all
very simply but quite cleverly concocted, every point
was met, the wild beast and the ready explanation.
They shrank from slaying but not from enslaving
their brother.
V. The Outcome. — Reuben seems to have been
away when the proposal to sell Joseph was made and
carried out. People are often away when they are
most needed. They carried out their ideas with
great thoroughness. Jacob refused to be consoled.
We cannot fail to note the unutterable grief of the
aged patriarch. There was no expression of submis-
sion to the will of God, and no allusion to the new
name — Israel — in the narrative. — W. H. Griffith
Thomas, A Devotional Commentary, p. 3.
References. — XXXVII. — F. W. Robertson, Notes on
Genesis, p. 135. XXXVII. 1-11. — A. Maclaren, Expositions
of Holy Scripture — Genesis, p. 234. XXXVII. 3. — J.
Vaughan, Sermons to Children (4th Series), p. 317.
THIRD SUNDAY IN LENT
'And when they saw him afar off, even before he came near
unto them, they conspired against him to slay him.' —
Genesis xxxvn. i8.
We will divide this subject into two parts. First of
all, let us consider it from the point of view of the
brethren, and then as it concerns Joseph.
I. The Attitude of the Brothers l. A distinc-
tion without a difference. — First of all, notice the
distinction these men draw between actual murder
and casting him into this pit and letting him die
there. Do you know, we are sometimes inclined to
draw the same distinction in our conduct towards
people? Are there not a great many men and women
who would rather cut off their right hand than take
the life of another, though they will make the life
of that other a living death? Put forth their hand
to slay a brother? Not so; but by their words day
by day, and by their conduct day by day, they will
make the life of that friend, that one who perhaps
should be very near and dear to them, a misery by
unkind words and insinuations and suggestions, by
unkind, thoughtless, careless conduct. And what of
our relation to our Lord ? There are many people
who will not boldly throw Him over by joining the
ranks of the atheists, who yet bring grief and sorrow
and pain to His loving heart day after day.
62
Ver. 18.
GENESIS XXXVI I., XXXIX
Ver. 9.
2. Willing to receive gifts. — Notice also that these
brethren were quite willing to receive the gifts brought
by their brother Joseph, and yet cast him into the
pit. Can you find anywhere a scene of greater cal-
lousness and cruelty than this scene? Again let us
take care lest we do the same.
3. Evil minds find evil everywhere. — And then,
while thinking of the brethren, notice how evil minds
will always find evil, noisome, pestilent food wherever
they come. What possible temptation to any man
could be a caravan of merchantmen on their way
down to traffic? and yet here are these brethren
with minds bent on evil, falling under the temptation
to wrong-doing found in such an innocent thing as a
caravan of men going down to Egypt.
II. Lessons from Joseph. — Now let us turn our
thoughts for a few minutes to Joseph; we may learn
three very useful lessons from this incident.
1. Life is not easy. — First notice that life is not a
very easy thing after all. Here is Joseph, no doubt
as bright and beautiful a specimen of a boy as you
would wish to see anywhere, full of good resolutions,
full of high ideals, realizing God's blessing within
him, realizing God's gifts and power working and ex-
panding and growing within him. I suppose he
thought that he was going to sweep away all diffi-
culty, and then suddenly there comes this terrible
thing, this awful difficulty. I suppose we all start
more or less like Joseph started, thinking that we are
going to make something of life, and that we are going,
whatever happens to other people, straight ahead.
But disillusionment comes before very long. There
comes an awakening, and we find that life is a way be-
set with briars and thorns, that there are difficulties
and dangers.
2. Difficulties meant to strengthen. — Here we
learn that all these difficulties and trials of life are
not sent to destroy but to strengthen. They are sent
in the way of attainment. Joseph had a great life-
work before him. He was to become ruler of a
mighty nation, to save the life of a nation. He must
be prepared for that work by the suffering, the toil,
and the trial. Let us lay hold of that thought for
our comfort. God wants you to do some great work
in the world, not great perhaps as the world counts
greatness, but some great and good work for Him.
He wants your life to be a useful, noble, and true life,
and the way he fits it is by trial, difficulty, danger,
that you may be taught where strength is to be found,
how truly to make life noble and successful.
3. No true life except by death. — We learn finally
that there is no true life except by death. Joseph
had to learn many bitter lessons in the dark and slimy
pit. He had to learn that good resolutions and high
resolves are not sufficient. God requires that you
•and I should die to ourselves and live unto Him.
References. — XXXVII. 19. — H. J. Wilmot-Buxton,
Sunday Lessons, vol. i. p. 249. XXXVII. ^3-36. — A. Maelaren,
Expositions of Holy Scripture — Genesis, p. 240. XXXVII.
26. — A. G. Mortimer, The Church's Lessons, vol. ii. p. 269.
XXXVII. 28. — J. Banstead, Practical Sermons, vol. i. p. 32.
XXXIX. 2. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxvii. No. 1610. M.
Biggs, Practical Sermons on Old Testament Subjects, p. 74.
XXXIX. 8, 9. — J. T. Bramston, Sermons to Boys, p. 109.
Genesis xxxix 9.
' How can I do this great wickedness, and sin against
God? ' So said Joseph, alone with Potiphar's wife?
The unhappy woman had been enticing Joseph, then
about twenty-seven years old, to gross and grievous
sin. Sin had mastered her ; she was the insane slave
of its power. Now, she in turn craved, by a sort of
dreadful ' law of sin,' to drag down another soul with
her in the pit.
Joseph was not a glorified spirit. He was a young
mortal man, subject to ' like passions ' with ours.
The fiery arrows of the words, acts, looks of the
temptress were aimed upon no automaton, or statue,
but upon a being full of the perils of our nature in
its prime. Not only so; this young man, this young
Oriental man, was placed in circumstances ex-
quisitely hard for virtue and easy for moral relaxa-
tion. Outwardly, there was no call upon him such
as the words noblesse oblige imply; he was but a
purchased slave. And he was in a country, Egypt,
peculiarly infected by moral pollution; he had
breathed for years the air of its opinion and practice
around him. His home in Canaan was no perfect
home, yet it had the breath of the Lord and the
Promise in it. But now he was — a young man —
away from home, awfully away, helplessly separated
from the helps of home, including the moral in-
fluence of a father who had ' seen God face to face,'
poor as his use of that blessing had been. He had
been carried off from home by an act of atrocious
injustice and cruelty, enough to embitter Joseph's
spirit for all time. Awful is the tempter's power
when he comes with some seduction, and finds the
spirit in rebellion under some real wrong, angry with
man, and fretting against Him who has permitted
the wrong to be done.
I can hardly imagine a position more terribly
difficult than that of Joseph, as regarded the open
avenues for the temptation. And now, in all its
force, it came.
I. In this case, unlike Abraham's, the temptation
is put before us as an enticement from the powers of
darkness. But in Abraham's case we saw how the
enemy must have used the test as a lure. So here
we may be confident that Joseph's eternal Master and
Friend used the lure as a test in faithfulness and
love. He took the occasion to give Joseph just that
victory which is won by tested faith alone. The
young man put the sin away at once, in the name
and in the power of God. He was instantly con-
scious of two things ; that sin was sin, and that God
was near. His moral standard was true. Egypt
might condone what it pleased; for him, this act
was a ' great wickedness '. And the essence of it was
that it was ' against God '. He said nothing of
Potiphar's wrath. The all-possessing thought was
God. Jacob was far away; but God was there.
And how could he ' sin against God ' ?
63
Ver. 9.
GENESIS XXXIX
Ver. 22.
II. Joseph's temptation and his victory over it are
both richly typical. His temptation was of a kind
about which it is best to say and to write very little,
unless under the sternest compulsion of manifest
duty. But the kind is a kind awfully present to in-
numerable lives ; the besetments of impurity in one
form or another, where may they not be? ' The
corruption that is in the world through lust ' is a
deep cancer, and a deadly one. Too many a human
life has felt it first in quite young years. And how
persistent it can be, long after the prime is over !
So Joseph's awful trial stands for trials past all count-
ing. And thus there comes through it, at once, at
least this message, that the Word of God ' knows all
about ' these fierce assaults. And in that one simple
reflection lies a help and hope very precious to
tempted hearts.
III. Joseph's secret of victory we have noticed
already. Briefly, and in its essence, it was ' the
practice of the presence of God '. We read nothing,
all through Joseph's life, of his inner spiritual ex-
perience. But this one sentence, spoken in the hour
of temptation, is eloquent to tell us what it must
have been. He must have ' walked with God ' in
close and watchful intercourse. Perhaps that awful
hour in the dry pit at Dothan was his great crisis of
discovery of the supreme reality of God for his soul.
But however, ' God was in all his thoughts ' ; aye, in
the Egyptian house, in the daily task, and so in the
fierce temptation. The enemy assailed him with
desperate force. But it was in vain. The chamber
was not ' empty, swept and garnished '. God was at
home within. — Bishop H. C. G. Moule.
THE VICTORY OF CONSCIENCE AND FAITH
OVER IMPULSE AND OPPORTUNITY
'How then can I do this great wickedness, and sin against
God ?' — Genesis xxxix. 9.
All of us may be benefited by seeing how other men
have acted under given circumstances. Perhaps the
most instructive and helpful biography ever penned,
next to that of the only perfect one, is the life of the
patriarch Jacob's favourite son ; a type in many ways
of Christ.
I. Think of the circumstances which might have
made it easy for him to succumb to the temptation
so powerfully described in this chapter.
(a) He was young. This fact alone in the estimate
of worldly minds is often enough to condone the
gravest offences. Youth has its disadvantages, want
of experience, etc., but it has also an unspeakable
advantage over sinful advanced life in that it is free
from the domination and tyranny of inveterate evil
habit.
(6) He was away from home. How often do young
men think that absence from home gives them license
to do as they think fit. It was not so with Joseph.
He forgot not the lessons he had received under his
father's tent nor the God before whom his father had
taught him to bow.
(c) Joseph might have pleaded that the conse-
quences of his sin would be favour and advancement,
while the consequences of his resistance would be, in
all likelihood, irretrievable disgrace.
II. Consider the way in which Joseph, instead of
yielding to the pressure of these circumstances, met
and overcame the temptation which assailed him.
How did he fortify himself against the enticement
to evil?
(a) By calling things by their right names. He
had not so lived as to bedim or disturb his spiritual
vision; and so he blurted out the truth at once, and
called the act to which he was invited " This great
wickedness ".
(o) By remembering that all wrong-doing is sin
against God # . It may be sin against self also but it
most assuredly is sin against God. The faith which
utters itself in these words was the source at once of
the insight which enabled Joseph to perceive the
true nature of the temptation, and of the strength
in which he was able to overcome it. — J. R. Bailey,
The Contemporary Pulpit, vol. v. p. 160.
References. — XXXIX. 9.— G. W. Brameld, Practical
Sermons, p. 330. C. Kingsley, Gospel of the Pentateuch, p.
103. J. Clifford, Daily Strength for Daily Living, p. 57.
XXXIX. 12. — Spurgeon, Morning by Morning, p. 207.
XXXIX. 20.— G. Brooks, Outlines of Sermons, p. 3G9.
THE GIFT OF INFLUENCE
' The keeper of the prison committed to Joseph's hand all the
prisoners that were in the prison ; and whatsoever they
did there, he was the doer of it.' — Genesis xxxix. 22.
Joseph, as depicted in the beautiful Biblical narrative,
was a born leader. His sweet and gracious nature,
with its brightness and alertness, gave him easy access
to men's hearts. Then he was of a gentle and affec-
tionate disposition, which delighted in giving people
pleasure and in serving them. He was a man of prin-
ciple, too, conscientious, trustworthy, willing to suffer
rather than commit a base or dishonourable act ; and
in the long-run character counts for much and makes
men instinctively trust the man of tried probity. His
supreme qualification was that he had an inner life of
simple faith, which kept him from personal anxiety
about his own future and left him free to think of
others. There was in him in addition the unusual
combination of the imaginative and the practical.
The born leader of men must have something of both
qualities, the power of the dreamer of appealing to
sentiment and creating enthusiasm, bringing a glimpse
of the ideal to his more prosaic followers ; and at the
same time he must prove his capacity and create con-
fidence in his practical wisdom. Joseph showed he
possessed both sets of qualities in all the varied situa-
tions in which he was placed. The young slave, who
rose to be overseer in the house of his master, when
he sank to be a prisoner impressed all there with his
character and his capacity, so that the keeper of the
prison trusted him, and all the inmates readily assented
to his personal superiority, till he took his natural
place as leader so that ' whatsoever the prisoners did
there, he was the doer of it '. The prisoner became
the real governor.
64
Ver. 83.
GENESIS XLI
Vv. 38-49.
I. This is the way all leadership works. It is the
power to do this which constitutes leadership. This
peculiar magnetic power of a great leader makes his
followers associate themselves utterly with his for-
tunes, so that his triumphs become theirs, and his
ambitions write themselves on their minds. In truth
the world waits for leaders in every branch of thought
and activity, waits for men whom it can follow with
a whole heart, whether or not we believe with Carlyle
that universal history, the history of what man has
accomplished in this world, is at bottom the history
of the great men who have worked here. Even for
practical success in every great enterprise there is a
clamant need of leadership. The best designs and the
best organisations will come to little without some in-
spiring head. Every great work needs a controlling
brain and heart, a centre for affection and devotion.
If this be amissing, even though all else be there, the
best results are impossible. The history of the world
may not be what it has been called, merely the bio-
graphy of great men ; but at any rate the history of the
world would be different if the influence of even a few
of its great men had been left out. Sometimes a whole
epoch has been dominated by one man, who has made
history because he was able to move men by the impulse
of his mind and soul. It is a foolish way to treat his-
tory as if it were in a vacuum, the whirl of impersonal
forces without father or mother or any definite human
connexion. To treat the world of man without refer-
ence to the power of personal influence is to make it
inexplicable. Joseph was the key of whatsoever the
prisoners did ; for he was the doer of it. The lines the
Reformation took cannot be understood unless you
understand something of Luther.
II. After all the subtle, magnetic force of a great
man is only a common fact of life and experience, seen
on a larger scale than usual. It is, or may be, the gift
of all in some measure ; and is not merely the privilege
of the few. There is none who may not share in the
burden and the glory of the Kingdom of Heaven. The
patience of the sufferer, the faith of the lowly, the
prayers of the saints, the love of loving hearts, the
ministry of kindly hands, are as incense swung from
the censers of the angels. If you consecrate yourself
to God you will get your place and wield your influ-
ence. What higher work is there than to help another
to a clearer vision of truth, or to a nobler sense of duty,
to encourage good and inspire to high ends? — Hugh
Black, University Sermons, p. 55.
References.— XXXIX. XL. — F. W. Robertson, Notes
on Genesis, p. 140. XL. 1-15. — A. Maclaren, Expositions of
Holy Scripture — Genesis, p. 248. XLI. 4. — Spurgeon, Morn-
ing by Morning, p. 185. XLI. 9. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol.
xii. No. 680.
JOSEPH THE OPTIMIST
'Now therefore let Pharaoh look out a man discreet and wise,
and set him over the land of Egypt.'— Genesis xli. 33.
Neither the personality nor the public position of
Joseph accounts for his effect on posterity. His
peculiarity is not that he rises to a pinnacle of earthly
splendour. It is that his splendour has come out of
his dungeon.
I. The portrait of Joseph is a philosophical picture
— the earliest attempt to delineate a theory of the uni-
verse in the form of the narrative. Joseph is made
the spokesman of the new evangel. He comes before
us as the advocate for optimism.
II. In the life of Joseph there are three periods: —
(a) A child of his father's old age, he has two
qualities by heredity and one by education. From
his grandfather Abraham he has received the spirit
of optimism, from his father Jacob the spirit of
ambition, but from his mode of education the spirit
of selfishness. The infirmity of this boy Joseph is
just his want of encumbrances. He has never had to
ask for anything twice.
(o) The second part is one of enforced service. He
is stolen from home, sold as a slave, and transferred
by them to an Egyptian soldier. Suspected in-
nocently of grave offences, he is immured in a dungeon.
He begins to interpret the dreams of his fellow-
prisoners and reveals his poetic genius as he never has
revealed it before.
(c) The boy of the desert, the youth of the dungeon
has become the adviser of royalty. The enemies of
his boyhood, these brothers whom he had wronged
and his aged father are there. The old patriarchal
life is there. But they are all changed. The father
has given up his unjust partiality, the brothers have
given up their jealousy, and Joseph has given up his
selfishness, his dreams are now humanitarian.
III. There is only one feature of this portrait
which has been alleged to be an artistic blemish, a
blemish in its picture of optimism. It has been said,
Why did Joseph let his father believe him to be dead
for so many years? Had not he been unjust, selfish,
monopolizing, eager to grasp more than his share.
How could he better make reparation than by effac-
ing himself, allowing his name to be blotted out from
the living members of that circle whose harmony he
had done so much to disturb, and whose unity he had
helped to destroy.
IV. Even the closing scene of all, the hour of his
death, is grandly consistent with the ideal of the
picture. Why is it that the writer to the Hebrews
has fixed upon this final hour of Joseph as the typical
hour of his life? It is because, to be optimistic in
that valley is optimism indeed, because the man who
can there keep the light in his soul has proved that
his faith is supreme. — G. Matheson, The Represent-
ative Men of the Bible, p. 174.
'Pharaoh put his ring upon Joseph's hand.' —
Genesis xli. 38-49.
Many specimens of these old Egyptian signet rings
have been found. A writer states that one of the
largest he ever saw was in the possession of a French
gentleman at Cairo. It was a massive ring, containing
some £20 worth of gold. On one face of the stone
was the name of a king, successor to the Pharaoh of
our chapter, on the other side was the engraving of a
lion with the legend, ' Lord of strength '.
65
Ver. 18.
GENESIS XLII
Ver 36.
Refebences.— XLI. 38-48.— A. Maclaren, Expositions of
Holy Scripture— Genesis, p. 253. XLI. 51.— Expositor (3rd
Series), vol. iv. p. 401. XLII. 1-2— Spurgeon, Sermons,
vol. v. No. 234; Hid. vol. xl. No. 2379. XLII. 6.— R. Hiley,
A Year's Sermons, vol. i. p. 152. XLII. 8.— Spurgeon, Even-
ing oy Evening, p. 4. XLII. 9.— F. D. Maurice, The Patri-
archs and Lawgivers of the Old Testament, p. 118.
THE FEAR OF GOD
1 1 fear God.' — Genesis xlii. i8.
No one could say this with more confidence than
Joseph, all whose actions were evidently inspired and
governed by genuine piety. He seems to have used
this language as a pledge of honourable and just
dealing with those who were completely within his
power.
I. What does the Fear of God Involve?
(a) A conviction of God's existence. — Without
this man is little better than the brutes that perish,
to whom an unseen and Superior Being remains un-
known, through the limitation of their faculties. It
is the prerogative of man to know that God is, and
that He is omnipresent and omniscient.
(o) A reverential regard for God's law. — The
Supreme is not only a Creator; He is also a Ruler,
who ordains laws and ordinances for the regulation
of the life of His intelligent and voluntary subjects.
The mind of man can not only comprehend such laws ;
it can appreciate their moral authority, admire their
justice and wisdom, and treat them with loyal re-
spect.
(c) A sense of amenability to God's authority. —
This may take various forms, but from true piety it
is never absent. The godly man fears to offend a
Governor so great, so righteous, and so interested in
the obedience of His people.
II. Is the Fear of God Compatible with the Re-
lation of theChristian to his Saviour? — The ancient
Hebrews cherished toward Jehovah a reverence and
awe which gave an especial gravity and solemnity to
their religion and their worship. The revelation of
the law amid the thunders of Sinai was fitted to form
in the Jewish mind an association between religion
and trembling awe. But * grace and truth came by
Jesus Christ ' ; and we are told that ' perfect love
casteth out fear '. The solution of this difficulty is to
be found in the progressive nature alike of revelation
and of experience. There were reasons why the
earlier revelation should be especially of a God of
righteousness, why the latter revelation should be
of a God of love. And the penitent sinner, whose
religious feelings are first aroused by fear of justly
deserved punishment, advances through the teaching
of the ' spirit of adoption ' to an intimacy of spiritual
fellowship with His Father in heaven which softens
fear into reverence and awe into a chastened love.
Thus the Christian never ceases to say, ' I fear God ' ;
though the expression from his lips has a somewhat
altered shade of meaning.
III. Are Important Social Ends Answered by
the Prevalence among Men of the Fear of God ?
Yes, for it is —
66
(a) A corrective to the undue fear of man.
(6) A preventive from the tendency to follow out
every natural impulse.
(c) A strengthening of the bonds of mutual con-
fidence in society.— Where the members of a
community are understood to be under the influence
of this spiritual and religious motive, there will be
less of suspicion and distrust, and more of harmony
and fellowship and true love.
THE POWER OF CONSCIENCE
'And they said one to another, We are verily guilty concern-
ing our brother.' — Genesis xlii. 31.
The history of Joseph is well known, but let us
briefly recount it up to the point when the brethren
break out in the words of the text. It is here that
the strange part of the story begins.
What was it that made these men, just at this
moment, when they saw one of their number bound
before their eyes to be retained as a hostage, utter
these strange words of self-accusation?
I. It was the Power of Conscience But observe
that conscience was stirred by memory.
(a) Was there anything in the tone of Joseph's
voice which brought back to their minds the thought
of the brother whom they had so many years ago
so wrongfully treated? It is a well-known fact that
the voice changes less than anything that belongs to
us, and when recognition by form and features fails
after years of absence, some well-known and well-
remembered tones will start again forgotten links of
memory.
(6) Was it in the action of blindfolding, which
reminded them of that scene so many long and
forgotten years ago?
(c) Or did they think of what would be the grief
of the^old man at home when he found another son
lost, and did this call to their minds the outburst of
grief when Joseph was thought to be no more? In
any case, it illustrates the fact that conscience is
stirred by memory.
II. The Power of Conscience to Punish How
many times had that scene of anguish, when they
were about to cast Joseph into the pit, caused them
misery, and how they now recall it ! ' We saw the
anguish of his soul and would not hear; therefore is
this distress come upon us.' The face of Joseph is
before them as perfectly as if the deed had only
happened yesterday. See the story of Herod Anti-
pas, the murderer of John the Baptist, in the Gospels.
(a) Conscience is the witness in our hearts of
a moral ruler.
(6) Conscience is the witness to us of a day of
account.
References. — XLII. 21. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xlii.
No. 2497. XLII. 21-22.— J. J. Blunt, Plain Sermons (2nd
Series), p. 236. XLII. 22. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xiv.
No. 840.
Genesis xlii. 36.
' A God of infinite perfections has the whole of
our life in His hands, sees the end from the begin-
Ver. 36.
GENESIS XLIL, XLIII
Ver. 2.
ning, knows how to adjust the strain of trouble to
our powers of endurance, sends appropriate little miti-
gations of one kind or another, like temporary cordials ;
and by a long and wonderful series of interventions,
succours, and secret workings, Jacob, who at one time
said, ' All these things are against me,' finds himself
housed in Goshen, in the land of light.' — James
Smetham, Letters, p. 174.
A SEA OF TROUBLES
'All these things are against me.' — Genesis xlii. 36.
I. There are times when everything seems to be
against us. It is clear that such a time had come
to Jacob. He was old — life's fire was damped — and
the land was famine-stricken and his sons were lost.
Jacob had reached one of those bitter times when
everything seemed to be against him. It is not the
way of the messengers of evil to come at respectable
and ordered distances. Sometimes the hand of one
has barely ceased to knock when the feet of another
are hurrying to the threshold. If this view of the
coming of troubles be a true one, and not a rare or
exceptional experience, there is one proof of it that
we shall be sure to find. We shall find it expressed
and crystallized in proverbs, for a proverb is an epi-
tome of life; and a proverb will only live in people's
tongue if it interpret with some measure of truth a
people's heart. Well then, have we not one proverb
that says, 'Troubles never come singly' ? Have we not
another that says, 'It never rains but it pours'. These
proverbs have lived because men feel that they ring
true. They might be written across this hour in
Jacob's life, and they might form the motto of hours
in your life and mine. May I not say that in the
life of Jesus, too, we find traces of this unequal pres-
sure? There were days for Him when every voice
made music ; there were hours when everything seemed
to be against Him. Had it been otherwise the Bible
dared not have written that He was tempted in all
points like as we are. So to our Lord there came
the hour of darkness when sorrows were massed and
gathered as to a common centre, and pierced not by
one shaft but by a score. He died as a sacrifice upon
the cross.
II. Things that seem against us may not be really
so. God wraps His blessings up in strange disguises
and we rarely have faith to see into their heart.
Many a thing that we should call a curse, in the
language of heaven may be called a blessing; and
many a thing we welcome as a blessing, in the language
of heaven may be called a curse. I would suggest,
then, in all life's darker seasons a wise and reverent
suspense of judgment. It takes the totality to under-
stand the parts, and we shall not see the whole until
the morning.
III. The things that seem against us, then, may
not be really so; then lastly, whether they are or
not we may still triumph. If God be for us who can
be against us — all things are working for our good.
So may a man whose faith is firm and steadfast
wrestle on towards heaven 'gainst storm and wind
and tide till the light affliction which endureth for a
moment, is changed into the glory of the dawn. — G.
H. Morrison, The Unlighted Lustre, p. 207.
References. — XLII. 36. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xiv.
No. 837. J. H. Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons, p.
113. XLII. — P. W. Robertson, Notes on Genesis, p. 152.
XLIII. 1. — H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, Sunday Lessons, vol. i. p.
262.
'Carry down the man a present.'— Genesis xliii. 2.
What a deeply interesting life was that of Jacob the
supplanter! It is a life full of incident. And in
that life the story of Joseph is perhaps the most
illuminative. The dreaming days are over. The
house of Potiphar, with its subtle temptation, and
the prison with its dark despair are for ever gone,
and Joseph sits a ruler, the ruler of Egypt. Famine
drives his brothers, at their father's request, to seek
his face, known only to them as the great Egyptian
governor. They bow themselves before the brother
whom they had wronged and he recognizes them.
They knew him not, but he knew them, and was
moved towards them. He would have them all be-
fore him, and in the presence of them all he desired
to make himself known to them. But Benjamin, the
son of his own mother, was not with them. He must
be brought, and so they are sent back for him, with
the instruction that they should see his face no more
unless he were with them. When the brothers begin
preparations for their return to Egypt, having ob-
tained a very reluctant permission for Benjamin to
accompany them, Jacob suggests that in addition to
taking double money they ' should carry down the
man a present ' to propitiate him, and thereby gain
his favour. That was the old Jacob of a former day
who would rely upon his own resources, his own
cunning, his own artfulness.
I. Notice, then, this characteristic relapse. It is
generally the presence of untoward circumstances
which causes this relapse. We are thrown back upon
our own resources, as it were, and the first question
we ask is this, ' What shall we do ' ? And the
answer is almost invariably a relapse to a former
type, to the embracing of a former stratagem. We
have all yet to learn the philosophy of inactivity.
' What shall we do ' seems to be the first question
uppermost in all minds when confronted with diffi-
culty and danger. When in the straight betwixt
two, in the difficult place, contending with circum-
stances and events over which we have no control,
for the existence of which we cannot be responsible,
our salvation rests in the Divine revealing, and not
in our own plans and schemes. ' Carry down the man
a present ' if you like, but remember it will have no
effect upon the issue of the day.
II. Having regard then to this important truth
that God determines the issue and that none of
our plans and schemes are at all necessary, that God
is first and must always be first, it may become a
gracious and courteous act to ' carry down the man a
present '. It may be well for us to consider this. A
little sympathy, a little attention, a little considera-
67
Vv. 3, 4.
GENESIS XLIV., XLV., XLVI1
Vv. 7-9.
tion, these are the things which sweeten life for us
all. God is so often wounded in the house of His
friends by the utter neglect of those little presents,
the little courtesies, the little tokens of love. Every
man, woman, and child has something they can give.
Society is enriched or impoverished by the individual
gifts or negligences of its members. The home is
made happy, or dull and miserable, upon the same
principle. Give ! Don't think so much about what
you can get, but more about what you can give.
Remember that your salvation is the free gift of God,
' Without money and without price '. — J. Gay, Com-
mon Truths from Queer Texts, p. 137.
References. — XLIII. 27. — S. Baring-Gould, Village
Preaching for a Tear, vol. i. p. 350. XLIII. 30, 31.— C. J.
Vaughan, Lessons of Life and Godliness, p. 98. XLIII. — F.
W. Robertson, Notes on Genesis, p. 156.
TEMPERAMENT AND GRACE
'Reuben, thou art my first-born . . . unstable as water, thou
shalt not excel.'— Genesis xliv. 3, 4.
A man's reputation after death is a very haphazard
thing. History is full of minor characters of whom
after ages have formed a very definite, but possibly
wholly wrong idea, based on some single and perhaps
insignificant incident in their career, or a chance re-
mark upon them. The same thing may even hap-
pen in lifetime: sometimes a man or woman carries
about through mature years a wholly false character,
founded on some irrelevant thing they did or said in
childhood, and which is the only thing their circle of
friends remember them by. One wonders, is this the
case of Reuben, son of Jacob, who has carried down
the ages the burden of a name for ' instability '.
I. But first, are we sure what his father meant by
' unstable as water ' ? I fancy most of us think he re-
ferred to the weak and yielding nature of that ele-
ment. We are wrong. He meant ' boiling over like
water '. He was thinking of a caldron placed on a fire
of desert thorns. The blaze of the quick fuel heats
the pot and suddenly the water bubbles up; as
suddenly the treacherous fuel gives out, and the
boiling water drops again, flat, silent, chill. What
Jacob meant to say of Reuben by this gipsy metaphor
was that he was a spirit which boiled up readily and
as readily grew cold. We may safely take it that in
Reuben we have the type of what we call the impul-
sive man, with the merits and the defects of that
temperament.
II. It has struck me that there is a Reuben also in
the New Testament. This New Testament Reuben is
not a shepherd but a fisherman, but he is generous,
warm-hearted, strong in impulse, weak in constancy,
he boils up and he falls cold. Peter is Reuben in
temperament: yet Reuben was a moral failure, 'he
could not excel,' while Peter was a saint and did excel.
III. The moral I desire to fix on the Old Testa-
ment story is that whatever be our temperament,
too fast like Reuben's, or too slow like some others,
Christ can so remake us that we shall not be failures
in life. I do not mean that Christ alters our tempera-
ments. He did not alter Peter's. The dissimilation
at Antioch, the tradition of Peter's flight from per-
secution at Rome and his return to die, tell us that
he was in natural make the same man. But the
power of Christ recovered him as surely as he fell. —
J. H. Skrine, The Heart's Counsel, p. 85.
References. — XLIV. — F. W. Robertson, Notes on Gene-
sis, p. 161. XLV. 1-5. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xliii. No.
2516. XLV. 1-15. — A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scrip-
ture — Genesis, p. 260. XLV. 3. — R. C. Trench, Sermons
New and Old, p. 37. G. Brooks, Outlines of Sermons, p. 370.
H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit, No. 1488, p. 41. XLV. 3-5.—
Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. viii. No. 449.
Genesis xlv. 4.
' The true tears are those which are called forth by
the beauty of poetry ; there must be as much ad-
miration in them as sorrow. They are the tears
which come to our eyes . . . when Joseph cries out,
" I am Joseph, your brother, whom ye sold into
Egypt ". Who does not feel that the man who wrote
that was no shallow rhetorician, but a born man of
genius, with the true instinct for what is really ad-
mirable?' — M. Arnold, in his Essay on Tarbert.
References. — XLV. 4. — S. Baring-Gould, Village Preach-
ing for a Year, vol. ii. p. 78.
Genesis xlv. 5.
' The case of Themistocles was almost like that of
Joseph; on being banished into Egypt he also grew
in favour with the king, and told his wife " he had
been undone, unless he had been undone ". For God
esteems it one of His glories that He brings good out
of evil; and therefore it were but reason we should
trust God to goven His own world as He pleases ; and
that we should patiently wait till the change cometh,
or the reason be discovered.' — Jeremy Taylor, Holy
Living.
References. — XLV. 5. — S. Baring-Gould, Village Preach-
ing for a year, vol. ii. p. 81. XLV. 8. — R. S. Duff, Christian
World Pulpit, 1890, p. 378. E. Blencowe, Plain Sermons (2nd
Series), p. 179. XLV. 14. — J. Vaughan, Sermons (9th Se-
ries), p. 77. XLV. 19, 20.— J. A. Aston, Early Witness to
Gospel Truth, pp. 161, 175. XLV. 21.— W. F. Shaw, -Ser-
mon. Sketches, p. 47. XLV. 24. — C. Bosanquet, Tender
Grass for the Lambs, p. 33. XLV. 25-28. — J. Bowstead,
Practical Sermons, vol. i. p. 61. XLV. 28. — II. Melvill,
Penny Pulpit, No. 1489, p. 65. XLV. 28. — Spurgeon, Ser-
mons, vol. xlii. No. 2470. XLV. — F. W. Robertson, Notes on
Genesis, p. 165. XLVI. 1-4. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxv.
No. 2116. XLVI. 2.— A. F. Barfield, Christian World Pul-
pit, vol. xxii. p. 12. XLVI. 3, 4. — Spurgeon, Evening oy
Evening, p. 133. XLVI. 3,9. — G. Brooks, Outlines of Ser-
mons, p. 279. XLVII. 1-12. — A. Maclaren, Expositions of
Holy Scripture — Genesis, p. 272.
JACOB'S RETROSPECT OF LIFE
'And Joseph brought in Jacob his father, «nd set him before
Pharaoh : and Jacob blessed Pharaoh. And Pharaoh
said unto Jacob, How old art thou ? And Jacob said
unto Pharaoh, The days of the years of my pilgrimage
are an hundred and thirty years: few and evil have the
days of the years of my life been, and have not attained
unto the days of the years of the life of my fathers in the
days of their pilgrimage.'— Genesis xlvii. 7-9.
I. Jacob had lived a long life as we should count
it ; one of half the length is as much as most men are
68
Vv. 7-9.
GENESIS XLVII
Ver. 9.
able to look forward to. And he had lived a holy
life ; the one great sin of his youth had been punished
by a long and hard discipline that had not been in
vain. The father whom he had deceived had blessed
him again without deceit; and the God of Bethel
had been with him still ever since the hour of his first
covenant with him. How could he complain of so
long a life, so long a pilgrimage, that is, a journey
away from home, as being one of too few days. Can
the days of pilgrimage be too few? Is it not the
object to reach home as soon as the pilgrim can? Or
if few why were they evil? Step after step, year after
year had brought him nearer to the City which hath
foundations, whose Builder and Maker is God. Or
if evil he means, not days of sin but days of suffering
only— much as he had suffered, was it not more than
made up to him by blessings? Surely Jacob, when
he had seen all his sons in peace together, had lived
long enough and happily enough. Enough by our
standard of judging, but not by his. There is no im-
patience in his words ; but there is a holy discontent
a lofty dissatisfaction with self. Not to be satisfied
with the happiness or the holiness he had, with the
work that he had done for God, so long as there was
greater holiness attained, or more work elsewhere;
while he was not the best, to count nothing that he
had good — such was the temper of Jacob, such of the
apostle, and such of every true Israelite.
II. Let this be our temper too. We have, I trust,
had our measures of God's grace, and done some sort
of service to Him in the year that has just gone by.
And yet, were not its three hundred and sixty-five
days, its fifty-two Sundays, too few for us? With all
the grace, all the happiness that God may have given
to any of, were not those few days evil? Have our
days attained to the days of Him, our Father and
Redeemer, in the days of His pilgrimage? If not, let
us be no more content than Jacob was with what our
life has been. He who, as at this time, was brought
under God's old law fulfilled the whole perfectly: if
we with all the grace given us in the Gospel have
our years stained with sin, what can we say but what
Jacob said? Let us not be satisfied with less — with
less than the fulfilment of all righteousness, as Jesus
fulfilled it. Until we have done this, let us think
nothing done; while there is only a single sin on
our conscience, however truly repented, however fully
pardoned, let us confess the days of our years to
be few and evil, and ourselves to be unprofitable
servants.
III. And yet while we despise ourselves do not lose
hope. Looking to Jesus we are humbled; but also
looking to Jesus we are saved. Made like Him by
the keeping of His commandments, however imper-
fectly, made one with Him by His own grace and
love, we trust at last to be found in Him, righteous
in His righteousness, though our own be nothing,
when the few and evil days and years are past,
and our pilgrimage finds its end in Mount Zion.
— W. H. Simcox, The Cessation of Prophecy,
p. 30 -
References— XLVII. 8.— G. Brooks, Outlines of Ser-
mons, p. 280. XLVII. 8, 9.— J. J. Blunt, Plain Sermons
(3rd Series), p. 164.
THE GREATNESS AND LITTLENESS OF
HUMAN LIFE
' The days of the years of my pilgrimage are an hundred and
thirty years : few and evil have the days of the years of
my life been, and have not attained unto the days of the
years of the life of my fathers in the days of their pilgrim-
age.' — Genesis xlvii. g.
The sense of the nothingness of life, impressed on us
by the very fact that it comes to an end, is much
deepened when we contrast it with the capabilities
of us who live it. Had Jacob lived Methuselah's age
he would have called it short. This is what we all
feel, though at first sight it seems a contradiction,
that even though the days as they go be slow, and
be laden with many events, or with sorrows or dreari-
ness, lengthening them out and making them tedious,
yet the year passes quick though the hours tarry, and
time bygone is as a dream, though we thought it
would never go while it was going, and the reason
seems to be this; that, when we contemplate human
life in itself, in however small a portion of it, we see
implied in it the presence of a soul, the energy of
a spiritual existence, of an accountable being; con-
sciousness tells us this concerning it every moment.
But when we look back on it in memory we view it
but externally, as a mere lapse of time, as a mere
earthly history. And the longest duration of this
external world is as dust and weighs nothing against
one moment's life of the world within. Thus we are
ever expecting great things from life, from our internal
consciousness every moment of our having souls ; and
we are ever being disappointed on considering what
we have gained from time past or can hope from time
to come. And life is ever promising and never ful-
filling; and hence, however long it be, our days are
few and evil.
Men there are who, in a single moment of their
lives, have shown a superhuman height and majesty
of mind which it would take ages for them to employ
on its proper objects, and, as it were, to exhaust; and
who by such passing flashes, like rays of the sun, and
the darting of lightning, give token of their immor-
tality, give token to us that they are but angels in
disguise, the elect of God sealed for eternal life, and
destined to judge the world and to reign with Christ
for ever. Yet they are suddenly taken away, and we
have hardly recognized them when we lose them. Can
we believe that they are not removed for higher things
elsewhere ?
Why should we rest in this world when it is the
token and promise of another? Why should we be
content with its surface instead of appropriating what
is stored beneath it? To those who live by faith
everything they see speaks of that future world ; the
very glories of nature, the sup, moon, and stars, and
the richness and the beauty of the earth, are as types
and figures witnessing and teaching the invisible things
of God. All that we see is destined one day to burst
69
Ver. 4.
GENESIS XLIX
Ver. 14.
forth into a heavenly bloom, and to be transfigured
into immortal glory. Heaven at present is out of
sight, but in due time, as snow melts and discovers
what it lay upon, so will this visible creation fade
away before those greater splendours which are behind
it, and on which at present it depends. In that day
shadows will retire, and the substance show itself. — •
J. H. Newman.
References. — XLVII. 9. — H. Woodcock, Sermon Out-
lines, p. 101. J. H. Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons,
vol. iv. p. 214. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture
—Genesis, p. 279. XLVIII. 1-7.— H. W. Beecher, Sermons,
1870, p. 217. XLVIII. 3.— J. Oates, The Sorrow of Ood, p.
81. XLVIII. 15, 16. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxiii. No.
1972. F. W. Robertson, Notes on Genesis, p. 170. H. Mel-
vill, Penny Pulpit, No. 2261. A. Maclaren, Expositions of
Holy Scripture— Genesis, p. 279. XLVIII. 19.— B. R. Wil-
son, A Lent in London, p. 81. XLVIII. 21. — Spurgeon,
Sermons, vol. xxvii. No. 1630. XLIX. 3, 4.— J. C. M. Bel-
lew, Five Occasional Sermons, p. 19.
* Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel.'— Genesis xlix. 4.
The verse which Ruskin once, in a mood of depression,
thought was most suitable for his own epitaph.
' The public men of the times which followed the
Restoration were by no means deficient in courage or
ability ; and some kinds of talent appear to have
been developed amongst them to a remarkable degree.
. . . Their power of reading things of high import, in
signs which to others were invisible or unintelligible,
resembled magic. But the curse of Reuben was upon
them all: " Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel ".'
Macaulay's Essay on Sir William Temple.
REUBEN
' Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel.'— Genesis xlix. 4.
St. John of the Cross remarks on this text: ' The
Patriarch Jacob compared his son Reuben to unstable
water, because in certain sins he had given rein to
his appetite, and he said, "Effusus es sicut aqua, non
crescas"; unstable as water, thou shalt not excel. It
is as if he had said, because in thy appetites thou
art unstable as water, thou shalt not excel in virtue.
As hot water, when it is not covered, easily loses its
heat, and as aromatic spices when they are exposed
to the air gradually lose the fragrance and strength
of their smell, so the soul which is not concentrated
on the love of God alone loses warmth and vigour
in virtue.' — Subida del Monte Carmelo, Book I.
Chapter X.
References. — XLIX. 4. — M. Anderson, Penny Pulpit,
No. 1572, p. 209. J. Vaughan, Children's Sermons, 1875, p.
252. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. iii. No. 158.
SIMEON AND LEVI: BAD BROTHERS
' Simeon and Levi are brethren.'— Genesis xlix. 5.
I. Simeon and Levi Constituted an Unholy
Brotherhood. — Evidently Jacob does not refer simply
to physical brotherhood. A deeper community, a
more real brotherhood is here asseverated ; when Jacob
says ' Simeon and Levi are brethren,' he means that
they are brethren in disposition. What was their
common disposition? We shall see somewhat of
detail presently, meanwhile remember that they were
passionate, headstrong, cruel, deceitful, revengeful, un-
controlled.
II. Simeon and Levi had Unhallowed Be-
longings.
(a) They had sinful homes. Their habitations
would not bear inspection. Many ' instruments '
were necessary in their habitations, but what business
had they with ' instruments of cruelty ' there ? I am
afraid there are very questionable instruments in
some habitations. Is there not a book or two which
ought no longer to defile your library? Is there no
picture which should be banished? There are homes
which need a periodical moral cleaning.
(6) ' Weapons of violence are their swords ' is the
R. V. reading. So Simeon and Levi are charged with
having perverted instrumentalities. Their swords
were legitimate weapons. The original intention of
the sword was defence or at most righteous aggression.
Simeon and Levi used their swords to perpetrate a
wrong on others, not to save themselves from wrong.
They transformed a legitimate weapon into a weapon
of violence.
III. Simeon and Levi's Evil case drew from
their Father a Godly and Reasonable Prayer. —
' O my soul,' cries Jacob, ' come not thou into their
secret, unto their assembly, mine honour, be not thou
united: for in their anger they slew a man, and in
their self-will they digged down a wall.' Reviewing
the sinful courses of these two sons the dying father
prays. Jacob prays concerning his soul. Jacob gives
up a lofty conception of the soul when he terms it
' his honour '. It is a wonderful thing that in these
early days of the world a man had such a vision of
the worth of the soul.
IV. Jacob uttered a Righteous Imprecation
upon Simeon and Levi's Sin. — ' Cursed be their
anger for it was fierce ; and their wrath for it was
cruel.' Their father did not curse them, but their
sin. Jacob does not imprecate all anger but such as
is ' fierce ' and ' cruel '. Fierceness and cruelty are
very remote from Christianity.
V. A Just Judgment was Pronounced upon
Simeon and Levi. — ' I will divide them in Jacob and
scatter them in Israel,' exclaims the departing patri-
arch. Simeon and Levi were not to attain to political
consequence, nor did their tribes or descendants.
Divided and scattered ! That was the righteous
judgment of this evil brotherhood. — Dinsdale T.
Young, Neglected People of the Bible, p. 41.
References. — XLIX. 8-12. — J. Monro-Gibson, The Age
Before Moses, p. 219. XLIX. 10. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol.
xx. No. 1157. C. Stanford, The Symbols of Christ, p. 35.
'Issachar is a strong ass couching down between two
burdens.' — Genesis xlix. 14.
' When I look at the great middle class of this
country, and see all that it has done, and see the
political position in which it has been to some extent
content to rest, I cannot help saying that it reminds
me very much of the language which the ancient
Hebrew patriarch addressed to one of his sons. He
70
Ver. 22.
GENESIS XLIX., L
Ver. 25.
said: "Issachar is a strong ass couching down between
two burdens".' — John Bright at Manchester, 1866.
References. — XLIX. 15. — A. Mursell, Christian World
Pulpit, vol. xxiv. XLIX. 18. — J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons
(9th Series), p. 101. M. Rainsford, The Fulness of God, p. 17.
CHRISTIAN FRUITFULNESS
•Joseph is a fruitful bough, evena fruitful bough by the well;
whose branches run over the wall.'— Genesis xlix. 22.
I. The Christian in his union with Christ is as a
bough. The words of our Lord Jesus which we read
just now are these, 'I am the vine; ye are the
branches ' — ye are the boughs, (a) This suggests to
us first of all the reality which exists between Christ
and His people. You cannot tear the branch from
the tree without injuring the tree as much as you
injure the branch; they are part and parcel each of
the other. So you cannot touch our union with
Christ but you hurt both Him and us. (o) But this
suggests not only the reality of our union with Christ,
but the absoluteness of our dependence upon Christ.
What can the branch do without the tree? How
can it exist at all but as it is sustained by the tree?
Just so is our union with Christ. ' Without Me,' he
says, ' ye can do nothing.' Just as the bough cannot
live without the tree so we cannot exist without Christ.
II. In the outcome of the union with Christ the
Christian is as a fruitful bough. If you go into the
woods now you will see trees pretty much of a much-
ness, and the branches on the trees are very much alike.
But wait you a month or two, while the spring buds
begin to appear, and you will find that, while all the
rest of the tree is covered with beautiful foliage, here
and there will be obtruding themselves from among
the rest mere black sticks, which have no vital union
with the tree, though they keep up their respectable
appearance as far they can as branches, and will
presently be lopped off by the woodman and taken
away to be burned. There are lots of people in our
churches just like that. All through the winter time
they pass muster very well as members. As long as
there is no revival they manage to go in and out
among the rest, and look very much like them ; but
let the time of the singing birds come, let the time
when the noise of the turtle is heard in the land come,
when Zion begins to awake from the dust and shake
fiercely from the bands of her neck — when the sun be-
gins to shine and revigorates the dying Church, and
ye will soon find who they are who live and who they
are who have died.
III. In the secret of his spiritual support the
Christian is as a fruitful bough by a well. That figure
suggests some very precious truths to us ; I see in the
well — what ? That by which the tree lives, certainly,
and therefore I see in it all the fullness of the Deity.
I see in the tree — what? That through which the
branch lives. I see the love of Christ, the one medi-
ator between God and man. I see therefore that
every branch in the tree, having direct intercourse with
the deep well through the tree, must live as long as
the tree itself lasts.
In the higher attainments of the Christian life the
Christian is a fruitful bough by a well,'whose branches
run over the wall'. What wall? There is a wall
which divides the Church from the world to-day.
Would you be like your Master? He is called the
Branch. There was a time when from the highest
glory He looked down upon this poor world of ours —
looked over the heaven's wall and saw us in our low
estate. From yonder heaven he shook the fruits of
redemption down, which we have been gathering up,
and the Christian has not done his duty until he has
let his branches run over the wall of the Church. —
W. H. Burton, The Penny Pulpit, No. xiii.
References. — XLIX. 22. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxv.
No. 2113. XLIX. 23, 24.— A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy
Scripture — Genesis, p. 286. Bishop Bickersteth, Sermons,
p. 202. A. Maclaren, Week-day Evening Addresses, p. 72.
Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. i. No. 17. XLIX. 24. — A. Maclaren,
Expositions of Holy Scripture — Genesis, p. 295 ; ibid. Morn-
ing by Morning, p. 53. A. Maclaren, Week-day Evening Ad-
dresses, p. 81. XLIX. 25. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xliii. No.
2531. XLIX. 29. — H. N. Powers, American Pulpit of To-
day, vol. iii. p. 104. XLIX. 33. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xiii.
No. 783. XLIX. — F. W. Robertson, Notes on Genesis, p. 175.
L. — 12, 13. — F. W. Robertson, Notes on Genesis, p. 187. L.
14-26. — A Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture — Gene-
sis, p. 305. L. 15-21. — A. Maclaren, Sermons (4th Series),
p. 176. L. 19, 21. — J. Bowstead, Practical Sermons, vol. i.
p. 48. L. 24-26. — F. W. Robertson, Notes on Genesis, p. 191.
W. Bull, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxi. p. 371.
JOSEPH'S FAITH
'Joseph took an oath of the children of Israel, saying, God
will surely visit you, and ye shall carry up my bones
from hence.' — Genesis l. 25.
Taking this incident, with the New Testament com-
mentary upon it, it leads us to a truth which we often
lose sight of, but which is indispensable if we would
understand the relations of the earlier and the later
days.
I. Faith is always the same though knowledge
varies. There is a vast difference between a man's
creed and a man's faith. The one may vary, does
vary within very wide limits; the other remains the
same. It is difficult to decide how much Joseph's
gospel contained. Even taking the widest possible
view of the patriarchal creed, what a crude outline it
looks beside ours ! Can there be anything in common
between us? Yes, as I said, faith is one thing, creed
is another. Joseph and his ancestors were joined to
God by the very same bond that unites us to Him.
There has never been but one path of life : ' They
trusted God and were lightened, and their faces were
not ashamed '. In that old covenant the one thing
needful was trust in the living Jehovah. In the new
the one thing needful is the very same emotion,
directed to the very same Lord manifested now and
incarnate in the Divine Son, our Saviour.
II. Faith has its noblest office in detaching from
the present. All his life long from the day of his
captivity Joseph was an Egyptian in outward seem-
ing. He filled his place at Pharaoh's court, but his
dying words open a window in his soul, and betray
Ver. 25.
GENESIS L
Ver. 25.
how little he had felt that he belonged to the order
of things in the midst of which he had been content
to live. Dying, he said, ' Carry my bones up from
hence '. Therefore we may be sure that, living, the
hope of the inheritance must have been buried in his
heart as a hidden light and made him an alien every-
where but on its blessed soil.
And faith will always produce just such effects. If
the unseen is ever to rule in men's lives, it must be-
come not only an object for certain knowledge, but
also for ardent wishes. It must cease to be doubtful,
and must seem infinitely desirable.
III. Faith makes men energetic in the duties of
the present. Take this story of Joseph as giving us
a true view of the effect on present action of faith in,
and longing for, God's future.
He was, as I said, a true Hebrew all his days. But
that did not make him run away from Pharaoh's
service. He lived by hope, and that made him the
better worker in the passing moment, and kept him
tugging away all his life at the oar.
IV. The one thing which saves this life from being
contemptible is the thought of another. It is the
horizon that gives dignity to the foreground. A
picture without sky has no glory. This present, un-
less we see gleaming beyond it the eternal calm of the
heavens, above the tossing tree-tops with withering
leaves, and the smoky chimneys, is a poor thing for
our eyes to gaze at, or our hearts to love, or our hands
to toil on. But when we see that all paths lead to
heaven, and that our eternity is affected by our acts
in time, then it is blessed to gaze, it is possible to
love the earthly shadows of the uncreated beauty, it
is worth while to work. — A. Maclaren, Sermons
Preached in Manchester, p. 1 30.
References. — L. 25. — A. Maclaren, Exposition of Holy
Scripture — Genesis, p. 311. L. 25. — A. Maclaren, Sermons
Preached in Manchester, p. 130. L. 26. — G. Brooks, Outlines
of Sermons, p. 370. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scrip-
ture — Genesis, p. 328.
72
EXODUS
EXODUS
Consider whether any Rune in the wildest imagina-
tion of Mythologist ever did such wonders as,* on the
actual firm Earth, some Books have done! What
built St. Paul's Cathedral? Look at the heart of
the matter, it was that divine Hebrew Book — the
word partly of the man Moses, an outlaw tending
his Midianitish herds, four thousand years ago, in
the wilderness of Sinai! It is the strangest of
things, yet nothing is truer. — Carlyle, Heroes, v.
References. — I. 1-14. — A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy
Scripture, the Books of Exodus, etc. p. 1. I. 6-7. — Ibid. p. 5.
' Now there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew
not Joseph.' — Exodus i. 8.
It is a rare thing to find posterity heirs of their
father's love. How should men's favour be but like
themselves, variable and inconstant ! There is no
certainty but in the favour of God, in whom can be
no change, whose love is entailed upon a thousand
generations. — Bishop Hall.
' Come, let us deal wisely with them.' — Exodus i. io.
Crimes and criminals are swept away by time, nature
finds an antidote for their poisons, and they and their
ill consequences alike are blotted out and perish. If
we do not forgive the villain at least we cease to
hate him, as it grows more clear to us that he injures
none so deeply as himself. But the OrjpKoSrj'; tcaKia,
the enormous wickedness by which humanity itself
has been outraged and disgraced, we cannot forgive ;
we cannot cease to hate that ; the years roll away,
but the tints of it remain on the page of history,
deep and horrible as the day on which they were
entered there. — Froude, Short Studies, I. pp. 468-
469.
Reference. — I. 10-12. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xvii. No.
997.
' But the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and
grew.' — Exodus i. 12.
I have observed, the more the Lord's people are
afflicted, and persecuted, the more they grow ; and
the Gospel never thrives better than when it is per-
secuted. — Fraser of Brea.
' And Pharaoh charged all his people, saying, Every son that is
born ye shall cast into the river.' — Exodus i. 22.
By the decree of Pharaoh, Moses is dead as soon
as he is born ; by the decree of God, Moses is brought
up in Pharaoh's house. In spite of his own decree
Pharaoh nurses, feeds, educates Moses ; and Moses,
on behalf of God, uses against Pharaoh all that he
derives from Pharaoh. God is wiser than Pharaoh.
The devil is old, but God is older. The devil is God's
lowest drudge, and servant of servants, who knows
not the wonderful fabric which will result from his
cross- working. — Dr. Pulsford, Quiet Hours, p. 13.
References. — I. 22. — J. Parker, Wednesday Evenings at
Cavendish Chapel, p. 77. II. 1-10. — B. D. Johns, Pulpit
Notes, p. 22. J. Parker, Wednesday Evenings at Cavendish
Chapel, p. 77. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture —
The Book of Exodus, etc., p. 12. II. 2.— H. J. Wilmot-
Buxton, Holy-Tide Teaching, p. 15. A. Murray, The Children
for\ Christ, p. 70. II. 3. — C. Leach, Mothers of the Bible, p.
27. E. Tremayne Dunstan, Christ in the Common-place, p. 41.
' And his sister stood afar off, to wit what would be done to
him.' — -Exodus ii. 4.
Moses never had a stronger prediction about him, no
not when all his Israelites were pitched about his
tent in the wilderness, than now when he lay sprawl-
ing alone upon the waves ; no water, no Egyptian can
hurt him. Neither friend nor brother dare own him,
and now God challenges his custody. When we seem
most neglected and forlorn in ourselves, then is God
most present, most vigilant. — Bishop Hall.
' And she had compassion on him, and said, This is one of the
Hebrews' children.' — Exodus ii. 6.
See here the merciful daughter of a cruel father. It
is an uncharitable and injurious ground to judge of
the child's disposition by the parents. How well
doth pity beseem great personages ! — Bishop Hall.
It is true that, amidst the clash of arms, the
noblest forms of character may be reared, and the
highest acts of duty done ; thatthese great and precious
results may be due to war as their cause ; and that
one high form of sentiment in particular, the love of
country, receives a powerful and general stimulus
from the bloody strife. But this is as if the furious
cruelty of Pharaoh made place for the benign virtue
of his daughter. — Morley's Life of Gladstone, vol.
in. p. 547.
\ ^References. — II. 6. — Christian World Pulpit, vol. lix.,
p. 1 198. 'g II. 9.— C. Bickersteth, The Shunami te, p. 12. J.
Darlington,! A Sunday School^ Anniversary Sermon, 1895.
H.*J. (Wilmot-Buxton, Sunday Sermonettes for a Year, p. 18.
H. J. Van Dyke, Outlines of Sermons on the Old Testament, p.
24.. F.|W. Farrar, Christian World>,,Pulpit, vol. xliv. 1893,
p.gl. â– > S. Baring-Gould, Village Preaching for a Year, vol.
ii. p. 274. C. Jerdan, Pastures of Tender Grass, p. 1. II.
10. — C. H. Parkhurst, A Little Lower than the Angels, p. 230.
' And he spied an Egyptian smiting an Hebrew, one of his
brethren, . . . and he slew the Egyptian.'— Exodus ii. n-
12.
We are only human in so far as we are sensitive,
and our honour is precisely in proportion to our
passion. — Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies.
I don't want to decry a just indignation ; on the
contrary, I should like it to be more thorough and
73
Ver. 12.
EXODUS II
Ver. 14.
general. A wise man, more than two thousand years
ago, when he was asked what would most tend to
lessen inj ustice in the world, said, ' That every by-
stander should feel as indignant at a wrong as if he
himself were the sufferer'. Let us cherish such in-
dignation. But the long-growing evils of a great
nation are a tangled business, asking for a good deal
more than indignation in order to be got rid of.
Indignation is a fine war-horse, but the war-horse must
be ridden by a man ; it must be ridden by rationality,
skill, and courage, armed with the right weapon, and
taking definite aim. — George Eliot in Felix Holt's
Address to Working-Men.
When another's face is buffeted, perhaps a little
of the lion will become us best. That we are to
suffer others to be injured, and stand by, is not con-
ceivable and surely not desirable. Revenge, says
Bacon, is a kind of wild justice ; its judgments at
least are delivered by an insane j udge ; and in our own
quarrel we can see nothing truly and do nothing
wisely. But in the quarrel of our neighbour, let us
be more bold. — R. L. Stevenson in A Christmas
Sermon.
Reference. — II. 11. — C. Brown, The Birth of a Nation,
p. 95.
UNOBSERVED SINS
' And he (Moses) looked this way and that way, and when he
saw that there was no man, he slew the Egyptian.' —
Exodus n. ra.
I. To think oneself unobserved often makes way for
sin. Moses was unwatched and unobserved ; and it
was the thought of being unobserved that tempted
Moses to his homicide.
There is a somewhat similar scene in the New
Testament in the story of the denial of Simon Peter.
What made it so easy for Peter to fall that night
was the thought that there was nobody to see.
There are some natures which are intensely sensitive
to the reproaching or upbraiding look of human
eyes. There are multitudes to whom the smile of
heaven means little, but who would not forfeit for
worlds the smile of men. There are many whom the
fear of God cannot restrain who are yet restrained
by the fear of human censure. And sin, taking
occasion by that law, whispers to men that they are
unobserved, and so makes it easier to transgress.
1. We see it, for instance, in men who go abroad,
whether to travel or to settle down. It is a matter
of common notoriety how often men are different
when abroad. That is not the highest type of
character. In the highest character there is always
a fine permanence. The man who is rooted in the
life of God will show himself the same in every land.
2. I think we are face to face with this peril in
the seclusion and secrecy of home. There are men
with whose conduct the world can find no fault, but
whose behaviour at home is quite contemptible.
The peril of home for a certain type of character is
j ust the peril of being unobserved.
3. In our modern civilization this is one of the
dangers of our cities. It is because men and women
think themselves unseen there that the way of de-
gradation is so easy.
II. Unobserved sins may have far-reaching con-
sequences. Moses saw no man — his sin was unobserved
— -yet his sin profoundly modified his future.
Our hidden sins tell upon what we are, and what
we are is the secret of our influence. It is the life
that is lived beyond the gaze of men that determines
a man's value at the last. There are eyes that go
to and fro throughout the earth. In the loneliness
of the crowd is One who sees, and our glad assurance
is, He sees to save. — G. H. Morrison, The Wings of
the Morning, p. 288.
Reference. — II. 12. — C. Jerdan, Pastures of Tender Grass,
p. 213.
' Behold, two men of the Hebrews strove together.' —
Exodus n 13.
If there had been but any dram of good nature in
these Hebrews, they had relented : now it is strange
to see that, being so universally vexed with their
common adversary, tbey should yet vex one another.
One would have thought that a common opposition
should have united them more ; yet now private
grudges do thus dangerously divide them. Blows
enow were not dealt by the Egyptians, their own must
add to the violence. — Bishop Hall.
We see Moses when he saw the Israelite and the
Egyptian fight ; he did not say, Why strive ye ? but
drew his sword and slew the Egyptian : but when he
saw the two Israelites fight, he said, You are brethren,
why strive you? If the point of doctrine be an
Egyptian one, it must be slain by the sword of the
spirit, and not reconciled ; but if it be an Israelite,
though in the wrong, then, why strive ye ? We see
of the fundamental points, our Saviour formeth the
league thus, He that is not with us is against us ;
but of points not fundamental, He that is not against
us is for us. . . . So as it is a thing of great use well
to define what, and of what latitude, those points are
which do make men merely aliens and discorporate
from the Church of God. — Bacon, Advancement oj
Learning, pt. 2. xxv. 9.
' And he said, Who made thee a prince and judge over us ? '—
Exodus ii. 14.
Compare the somewhat bitter application of this
incident by Cromwell, during the Little Parliament
of 1653 (letter clxxxix. in Carlyle's edition) : 'Truly
I never more needed all helps from my Christian
Friends than now ! Fain would I have my service
accepted of the Saints, if the Lord will ;— but it is not
so. Being of different judgments, and those of each
sort seeking most to propagate their aim, that spirit
of kindness that is [in me] to them all is hardly
accepted of any. I hope I can say it. My life has
been a willing sacrifice — and I hope — for them all
Yet it much falls out as when the two Hebrews were
rebuked ; you know upon whom they turned then
displeasure ! But the Lord is wise ; and will, I trust
make manifest that I am no enemy.'
74
Ver. 17.
EXODUS II., Ill
Ver. 3.
' Thou killedst the Egyptian. '
What if he did ? What if unjustly ? What was this
to the Hebrew ? Another man's sin is no excuse for
ours. — Bishop Hall.
Reference. — II. 15. — T. G. Selby, The God of the Patriarchs,
p. 163.
' And the shepherds drove them away ; but Moses stood up and
helped them.' — Exodus ii. 17.
In Egypt he delivers the oppressed Israelite ; in
Midian the wronged daughter of Jethro. A good
man will be doing good, wheresoever he is ; his trade
is a compound of charity and justice ... no ad-
versity can make a good man neglect good duties. —
Bishop Hall.
Given a noble man, I think your Lordship may
expect by and by a polite man. — Carlyle, Latter-
day Pamphlets (v.).
In his essay on Mazzini, F. W. H. Myers observes
that ' in men who have risen to wide-reaching power
we generally observe an early preponderance of one
of two instincts — the instinct of rule and order, or
the instinct of sympathy '. The latter he illustrates
from the great Italian's life, as follows: 'Mazzini
as a child was very delicate. When he was about
six years old he was taken for his first walk. For
the first time he saw a beggar, a venerable old man.
He stood transfixed, then broke from his mother,
threw his arms round the beggar's neck, and kissed
him, crying, " Give him something, mother, give him
something ". " Love him well, lady," said the aged
man : " he is one who will love the people." '
'And he gave Moses Zipporah his daughter.' — Exodus ii. ax.
If his espousals remind us for the moment of the
wooing of Isaac and Jacob, what we may call the
romantic element disappears like a bubble, and we
hurry on to that narrative of the origin and growth
of the Law which throws everything personal into the
shade. . . . The wife, the children of the hero, fade
into the background ; it is ' this people ' which forms
the exclusive object of every yearning in his heart.
' And the children of Israel sighed by reason of the bondage,
and they cried, and their cry came up unto God by reason
of the bondage.' — Exodus 11.23.
'These poor persecuted Scottish Covenanters,' said
I to my inquiring Frenchman, in such stinted French
as stood at command, 'Us s'en appelaient d' — 'a
la Postiriu; interrupted he, helping me out. —
' Ah, Monsieur, non, mille fois non ! They ap-
pealed to the Eternal God ; not to posterity at all !
Citait different' — Carlyle in Past and Present.
References.— II. 23-25.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xlv.
No. 2631. III. 1.— E. E. Cleal, Christian World Pulpit, vol.
lxviii. 1905, p. 44. III. 1-14.— C. Stanford, Symbols of Christ,
p. 61. W. A. Gray, The Shadow of the Hand, p. 153.
' And the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire
out of the midst of a bush : and he looked, and behold, the
bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed.'—
Exodus hi. 2.
It is the office and function of the imagination to re-
new life in lights and sounds and emotions that are
outworn and familiar. It calls the soul back once more
under the dead ribs of nature, and makes the meanest
bush burn again, as it did to Moses, with the visible
presence of God. — J. Russell Lowell.
References. — III. 2.— A. M. Mackay, Christian World
Pulpit, vol. xliv. 1893, p. 20. G. F. Browne, ibid. vol. liv.
1898, p. 76. P. McAdam Muir, ibid. vol. lviii. 1900, p.
246. E. E. Cleal, ibid. vol. lxvi. 1904, p. 267 ; see also
ibid. vol. lxviii. 1905, p. 44. A. Maclaren, Expositions of
Holy Scripture, the Books of Exodus, etc. , p. 19. R. J. Camp-
bell, Sermons Addressed to Individuals, p. 207- J. M. Neale,
Sermons For Some Feast Days in the Christian Year, p. 83 ; see
also Sermons Preached in Sackville College Chapel, vol. iv. p.
251. III. 2, 3.— J. M. Neale, Sermons For Some Feast Bays
in the Christian Year, p. 74. A. G. Mortimer, Tlie Church's
Lessons for the Christian Year, Part II. p. 299.
' And Moses said, I will now turn aside and see this great
sight.' — Exodus hi. 3.
It is good to come to the place of God's presence,
howsoever ; God may perhaps speak to thy heart,
though thou come but for novelty. Even those who
have come upon curiosity have been oft taken. — Bishop
Hall.
See also Keble's lines on the Fifth Sunday in Lent.
What we mean by wondering is not only that we
are startled or stunned — that I should call the merely
passive element of wonder. . . . We wonder at the
riddles of nature, whether animate or inanimate, with
a firm conviction that there is a solution to them all,
even though we ourselves may not be able to find it.
Wonder, no doubt, arises from ignorance, but from a
peculiar kind of ignorance, from what might be called
a fertile ignorance. — Max Muller.
What must sound reason pronounce of a mind
which, in the train of a million thoughts, has wandered
to all things under the sun, to all the permanent ob-
jects or vanishing appearances in the creation, but
never fixed its thought on the supreme reality ; never
approached like Moses ' to see this great sight ' ? —
John Foster.
BURNING BUT NOT BURNT
' And Moses said, I will now turn aside, and see this great
sight, why the bush is not burnt.' — Exodus hi. 3.
The story of Moses is the story, at first, of failure.
Two great streams of influences moulded his life : one
drawn from the Egyptian surroundings of his early
days, the other from his mother's teaching. On the
one side he had the speechless-eyed deities of Egypt
looking for ever into his face ; on the other he had
his belief in the governing providence of God. He
looked to find amongst his own people aspirations after
better things, and responsiveness to his own spirit ; he
met only with coldness, and refusal to follow. Then
came his exile in Midian — an exile from all his early
dreams and hopes, from the position he had in Egypt,
from the future which flowed before him.
I. The Vision and its Results. — The vision was
the revelation that restored him to faith and energy.
The revelation was threefold. It was a revelation (a)
of permanence, (b) of purity, (c) of personal power.
75
Ver. 3.
EXODUS III
Ver. 5.
(a) A revelation of -permanence, for the bush was
not consumed ; it held its own life amidst the devour-
ing flame.
(b) A revelation of purity, for before he could
enter into the deep meaning of that vision, a Voice
had bidden him ' put his shoes from off" his feet, for
the place on which he stood was holy '.
(c) A revelation of personal power and love, for
out of the distance, out of the background of the vision,
giving it its heart and life, came the voice of Him
who proclaimed Himself through all the changes and
vicissitudes of the life of Israel as the God of Abraham,
of Isaac, and of Jacob.
II. A Vision for all Time. — The revelation was not
for Moses alone. Note : —
(a) There is in every common bush the light of
God, and only those see it who draw off their shoes.
(6) We forget to turn aside to see the great sights
about us.
(c) If we give our hearts leisure and earnestly
seek to meet with God, God will meet with us.
THE NEGATIVE SIDE
' I will turn aside, and see . . . why not.' — Exodus hi. 3.
I have broken up the text in this way that we may
see more vividly the special point and largest meaning.
Many men turn aside to see why things are ; here is
a man who turns aside to see why things are not. God
disturbs our little law of continuity — as if we knew
anything about continuity ! We were born yesterday,
and are struggling to-day, and to-morrow will be for-
gotten, and we shape our mouths to the utterance of
this great word continuity ! We spoil ourselves by
using long words instead of short ones.
' I will turn aside, and see why not.' If you saw
a river flowing up a hill, perhaps you would turn
aside and see why it does not, like all other rivers, flow
downhill. If you saw an eagle building its nest in the
middle of the Atlantic, perhaps even you and I might
be wakened out of our vulgar narrowness and startled
by the ministry of surprise. God has a great surprise
ministry.
I. I will turn aside, and see why the wicked are
not consumed, and I find an answer in the fact
that God's mercy endureth for ever, of His love there
is no end, and that men may be in reality better than
they themselves suppose. Not what we see in our-
selves, but what God sees in us is the real standard of
judgment. We are never so near the realization of
the great blessing as when we see nothing in ourselves
to deserve it.
II. I will turn aside, and see and inquire why the
departed ones do not speak to us and tell us about
the other and upper side of things. Who shall say
that the departed never speak to us ? What is speak-
ing ? Which is the true ear, the ear of the body or
the ear of the soul? What are these unexplained
noises? What are these sudden utterances of the
summer wind ? Who can interpret this gospel of
fragrance, this apocalypse of blossom, this mystery
of resurrection? Who knows what voices sweep
through the soul, and what tender fingers touch the
heart-strings of the life ? Who is it that whispers
things to the heart ? Who is it that said, Be brave,
take up your work, never stand still till the Master
appear ? Who is it, was it, how could it be ? I will
turn aside, and see this great sight, and I will believe
that more is spoken to us than the ear of the body
can hear.
III. What a rebuke this is as a text to all our little
notions about cause and effect ! The Lord is always
surprising people by unexpected revelations ; the Lord
is always perplexing the mind by tearing human cal-
culations to rags ; again and again through Pente-
costal winds there roars this glorious gospel, The Lord
reigneth. Personality is greater than law ; conscious-
ness is the true continuity ; God is the Master, and
if He pleases to turn the sun into darkness He will do
it, aye, and the moon into blood, and she shall be
melted as into a crimson flame. — Joseph Pabker, City
Temple Pulpit, vol. 1. p. 239.
References. — III. 3. — W. H. Hutchings, Sermon Sketches,
p. 94. W. Boyd Carpenter, The Burning Bush, p. 1.
' God called unto him out of the midst of the bush.' —
Exodus hi. 4.
' I think, sir,' says Dinah Morris in Adam Bede
(ch. viii.), ' when God makes His presence felt through
us, we are like the burning bush : Moses never took
any heed what sort of bush it was — he only saw the
brightness of the Lord.'
The more the microscope searches out the mole-
cular structure of matter, the thinner does its object
become, till we feel as if the veil were not being so
much withdrawn as being worn away by the keen
scrutiny, or rent in twain, until at last we come to
the true Shekinah, and may discern through it, if
our shoes are off", the words 1 am, burning, but not
consumed. — Dr. John Brown on Art and Science.
References. — III. 4. — S. Wilberforce, Sermons Preached on
Various Occasions, p. 37.
HOLY GROUND
'The place whereon thou standest is holy ground.' —
Exodus hi. 5.
The biography of great men is not confined to public
events. It relates the incidents which are private,
and describes the experiences which are spiritual and
account for visible results. Thus it was with Moses ;
we must be with him in the wilderness in order that
we may understand his conduct at the court of
Pharaoh and at the head of the host of Israel.
I. True Sanctity Confined to No Place. — To
Moses the desert was a temple, and the acacia thorn
a shrine. A spot before indistinguishable from any
other in that waste, where the flocks found their
pasture or the wild beast his lair, became henceforth
holy in the memory of this servant of the Lord.
II. The Presence of the Lord Imparts True Holi-
ness. — It needs not that princes should lavish their
wealth, that architects should embody the concep-
tions of their genius, that priests should celebrate
76
Ver. 5.
EXODUS III
Ver. 5.
magnificent rites, that psalms should echo and in-
cense float through aisle and dome, in order that a
place should become consecrated and sacred to the
service of the Eternal. Where God meets with any
soul of man, reveals the majesty of His attributes,
the righteousness of His law, the tenderness of His
love, there is a holy place.
III. A Divinely Consecrated Service. — True holi-
ness is not so much in the place as in the heart. A
man's mission in the world is determined by the
counsels and commands received by him in solitude
and silence. The holy ground of communion from
which God's servants start imparts its holiness to the
long path of their pilgrimage, to the varied scenes
of i their ministry. Moses could never forget the day
of Divine fellowship and revelation from which dated
his conscious devotion, his holy service to Israel and
to God. In how many great men's lives do we trace
this same connexion between holy communion and
holy ministry ! Work acceptable to God and bene-
ficial to men would not have been achieved had not
the power to perform it sprung from the holy point
of contact where the Creator and the created meet.
IV. We may Make a Holy Place. — There is no
spot which may not become the point of contact
between the human spirit and the Divine. In the
lonely desert or the crowded city, in the peaceful
home or the consecrated church, the Divine presence
may be realized and the Divine blessing may be ob-
tained. Earth may be filled with holy places and
life with holy service.
' Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou
standest is holy ground.' — Exodus hi. 5.
We must not only have our hearts bubbling over
with thanksgiving and joy in our Father's presence ;
we must also take off our shoes from our feet, because
we are on holy ground. There is a danger in the
emotions being too much aroused unless the prayer
be truly one of real adoration. — Father Dolling in
The Pilot (4- May, 1901).
All concentrates ; let us not rave ; let us sit at
home with the cause. Let us strive and astonish the
intruding rabble of men and books and institutions,
by a simple declaration of the Divine fact. Bid the
invaders take the shoes from off their feet, for God
is here within. Let our simplicity judge them, and
our docility to our own law demonstrate the poverty
of nature and fortune beside our native riches. —
Emerson on Self -Reliance.
THE CALL TO REVERENCE
' Draw not nigh hither : put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for
the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.' — Exodus
hi. 5-
God demanded all the outward forms of a rigid
reverence as the first step in that fellowship with
Himself to which He was about to summon Moses
and the nation Moses was destined to lead and to
mould.
I. The fact that the name Jehovah is revealed in
immediate connexion with this incident seems to
warrant us in reading some reference in this symbol
to God's essential and unsustained existence. Self-
origination, unwasting spontaneity, self-sufficing, ab-
solute, and eternal life, that can only be known by
contrast to the finite life of the creature — these are
the meanings of the striking object-lesson.
And the vision perhaps indirectly intimates that
God's mysterious love, like His life, was self-
derived, inexhaustible, above all outward con-
ditions. The flame of its unearthly beauty was
maintained by an infinite spontaneity of its own. It
did not depend for its strength or fervour upon the
things it clasped in the embrace of its fidelity and
tenderness.
The vision, with its solemn lessons, had probably a
most vital bearing upon the future character and
history of Moses. It was no unimportant step in
training him to that spiritual aptitude for seeing the
things of God which made him the foremost of the
prophets. Do not think of reverence as one of the
second-rate sentiments of the soul, to which no great
promises are made. This sense of awe was the
threshold to those apocalyptic experiences which
brought such privilege and enrichment to his after
life.
II. When the New Testament is compared with
the Old, it may seem to some minds that the grace
of reverence has passed more or less into the back-
ground. But if we look beneath the surface a little
we shall find that the New Testament is just as
emphatic in its presentation of this obligation as the
Old.
Reverence is the comely sheltering sheath within
which all the vital New Testament virtues are nur-
tured. Only the lower orders of plants produce
their seeds upon the surface of the leaf without the
protection of floral envelopes and seed vessels. The
religious faith is of the rudest and most elementary
type, and will bear only ignoble fruit, where faith is
without this protecting sheath of reverence for its
delicate growths.
Faith without reverence is a pyramid resting
upon its apex.
There can be no Obedience that is entirely
sincere in its qualities without reverence.
There can be no Resignation to the Divine will
apart from habitual tempers of reverence and godly
fear.
Irreverence implies partial ignorance of God, and
where there is partial ignorance of God the possession
of eternal life cannot be rich, free, firmly assured. —
T. G. Selby, The Lesson of a Dilemma, p. 123.
References. — III. 5. — W. J. Butler, Sermons for Working
Men, the Oxford Sermon Library, vol. ii. p. 190. R. D. B.
Rawnsley, Plain Preaching to Poor People, 3rd edition, p. 1.
J. Fraser, Parochial and other Sermons, p. 248. C. J. Vaug-
han, Lessons of Life and Godliness, Sermon viii. III. 5, 6. —
W. R. Shepherd, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lxxiii. 1908,
p. 267. III. 6. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xlv. No. 2633.
G. S. Barrett, Outlines of Sermons on the Old Testament, p. 25.
77
Ver. 8.
EXODUS III
Ver. 14.
G. B. Pusey, Selections, p. 207. HI. 6, 7, 9-14.— J. Clifford,
Christian World Pulpit, vol. lix. 1901, p. 352. III. 7, 8.—
R. W. Hiley, A Year's Sermons, vol. i. p. 165. III. 7, 8,
10, 12.— C. Brown, The Birth of a Nation, p. 107.
' And I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the
Egyptians, and to bring' them up out of that land unto a
good land and a large.' — Exodus hi. 8.
If it please heaven, we shall all yet make our
Exodus from Houndsditch, and bid the sordid con-
tinents, of once rich apparel now grown poisonous
Ole'-Glo', a mild farewell ! Exodus into wider horizons,
into God's daylight once more ; where eternal skies,
measuring more than three ells, shall again overarch
us ; and men, immeasurably richer for having dwelt
among the Hebrews, shall pursue their human pil-
grimage, St. Ignatius and much other saintship, and
superstitious terror and lumber, lying safe behind us,
like the nightmares of a sleep that is past. — Carlyle,
Latter-day Pamphlets, No. viii.
References. — III. 9, 10. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xlv.
No. 2631.
' Come now therefore, and I will send thee unto Pharaoh, that
thou mayest bring forth My people the children of Israel
out of Egypt.'— Exodus hi. io.
' Among our aristocracy,' writes Carlyle in his essay
on ' Corn-law Rhymes,' ' there are men, we trust
there are many men, who feel that they also are
workmen, born to toil, ever in their great Taskmaster's
eye, faithfully with heart and head, for those who
with heart and hand do, under the same great Task-
master, toil for them ; — who have even this noblest
and hardest work set before them ; to deliver out of
that Egyptian bondage to Wretchedness and Ignor-
ance and Sin, the hardhanded millions.'
There are many persons, doubtless, who feel the
wants and miseries of their fellow-men tenderly if not
deeply ; but this feeling is not of the kind to induce
them to exert themselves out of their own small
circle. They have little faith in their individual
exertions doing aught towards a remedy for any of
the great disorders of the world. — Sir Arthur Helps.
In strictness, the vital refinements are the moral
and intellectual steps. The appearance of the Heb-
rew Moses, of the Indian Buddh — in Greece, of the
Seven Wise Masters, of the acute and upright Socrates,
and of the Stoic Zeno, — in Judea, the advent of
Jesus, — and in modern Christendom, of the realists
Huss, Savonarola, and Luther, are causal facts which
carry forward races to new convictions and elevate
the rule of life. — Emerson on Civilization.
'Come now therefore.'
Great men, like great periods, are explosive materials
in which an immense force is accumulated ; it is
always pre-requisite for such men, historically and
physiologically, that for a long period there has been
a collecting, a heaping up, an economizing, and a
hoarding with respect to them, — that for a long time
no explosion has taken place. — Nietzsche in The
Twilight of the Idols.
References.— III. 10.— E. L. Hull, Sermons Preached at
King's Lynn (3rd Series), p. 81. III. 10, 11.— C. M. Short,
Christian World Pulpit, vol. xl. 1891, p. 21. III. 10, 20.— A.
Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture- — Exodus, etc., p. 26.
' And Moses said, Who am I, that I should go unto Pharaoh.'
— Exodus hi. ii.
'For one thing,' says Carlyle in his fourth lecture
on Heroes, ' I will remark that this part of Prophet
to his Nation was not of his seeking ; Knox had lived
forty years quietly obscure, before he became conspic-
uous. . . . He was with the small body of Reformers
who were standing siege in St. Andrews Castle — when
one day in this chapel, the preacher, after finishing
his exhortation to those fighters in the forlorn hope,
said suddenly, that there ought to be other speakers,
that all men who had a priest's heart and gift in them
ought now to speak ; — which gifts and heart one of
their own number, John Knox the name of him, had.
. . . Poor Knox could say no word ; — burst into a flood
of tears, and ran out. It is worth remembering, that
scene. He was in grievous trouble for some days.
He felt what a small faculty was his for this great
work. He felt what a baptism he was called to be
baptized withal.'
At the opening of his Ministry at Collace, Dr. A. A.
Bonar notes in his diary : ' I have been thinking of
the case of Moses. He trembled and resisted before
being sent, but from the moment that he was chosen
we never hear of alarm or fear arising.'
Reference. — III. 11-13. — G. Hanson, Christian World
Pulpit, vol. liii. 1898, p. 101.
' Certainly I will be with thee.' — Exodus hi. 12.
He was not a name, then ; not a tradition, not a
dream of the past. He lived now as He lived then ;
He who had been with men in past ages, was actually
with him at that hour. — F. D. Maurice.
Compare Knox's urgent letter from Dieppe to his
irresolute Scotch friends, in 1557 : ' The invisible and
invincible power of God sustaineth and preserveth ac-
cording to His promise, all such as with simplicity do
obey Him. No less cause have ye to enter in your
former enterprise than Moses had to go to the pres-
ence of Pharaoh ; for your subjects, yea, your brethren
are oppressed ; their bodies and souls holden in bond-
age ; and God speaketh to your conscience that ye
ought to hazard your own lives, be it against kings
or emperors, for their deliverance.'
References. — III. 12. — H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, Sunday
Lessons for Daily Life, p. 276. III. 13. — R. J. Campbell,
Christian World Pulpit, vol. lxiv. 1903, p. 177. J. Parker,
Wednesday Evenings at Cavendish Chapel, p. 105. III. 13-14.
— J. Wordsworth, The One Religion, Bampton Lectures, 1881,
p. 33.
'And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM.'—
Exodus hi. 14.
' Virtue is the adherence in action to the nature of
things,' says Emerson in his essay on Spiritual Laws,
' and the nature of things makes it prevalent. It con-
sists in a perpetual substitution of being for seeming,
78
Ver. 15.
EXODUS III., IV
Ver. 9.
and with sublime propriety God is described as saying
I AM.'
'I have been struck lately,' wrote Erskine of Lin-
lathen to Maurice, 'by the communication which God
made to Moses at the Burning Bush. " I AM " — the
personal presence and address of God. No new truth
concerning the character of God is given ; but Moses
had met God Himself, and was then strengthened to
meet Pharaoh. There is one immense interval between
" He " and " I " — between hearing about God and
hearing God. What an interval ! '
God hath not made a creature that can compre-
hend Him ; it is a privilege of His own nature : ' I
am that I am ' was His own definition to Moses ;
and it was a short one to confound mortality, that
durst question God, or ask Him what He was. Indeed,
He only is ; all others have and shall be. — Sib
Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, pt. i. sec. 2.
References. — III. 14, 15. — J. Leckie, Sermons Preached at
Ibrox, p. 35. Cox, " The Tetragrammaton," Expositor (2nd
Series), i. p. 12. Sherlock, Christian World Pulpit, xx. p. 44.
Harris, Christian World Pulpit, xvi. p. 272. Kingsley, Gospel
of the Pentateuch, Sermon ix. Parker, People's Bible, ii. p. 32.
Roberts, Homiletic Magazine, viii. p. 211. Stanley, Jewish
Church, i. p. 94. T. Arnold, Sermons on Interpretation, p. 209.
' The Lord God of your fathers, the God of Abraham . . . hath
sent Me unto You.' — Exodus hi. 15.
' Neither Moses, nor the Prophets, nor Christ Himself,
nor even Mohammed,' says Max Miiller in the second
volume of his Giffbrd Lectures, ' had to introduce a
new God. Their God was always called the God of
Abraham, even when freed from all that was local
and narrow in the faith of that patriarch.'
References. — III. 15. — C. A. Berry, Vision and Duty,
p. 1.
* The king of Egypt will not let you go, no, not by a mighty
hand. And I will stretch out My hand and smite Egypt. ' —
Exodus hi. ig-20.
What appears to one side a singular proof of the
special interposition of Providence, is used on the
other side, and necessarily with equal force, to show
that Christianity itself is no special interposition of
Providence at all, but the natural result of the
historical events by which it was ushered into the
world. The Duke of Weimar spoke more safely
when he said of the tyranny of the first Napoleon
in Germany, ' It is unjust, and therefore it cannot
last '. He would have spoken more safely still if he
had said, 'Last or not last, it is unjust, and being
unjust, it carries its own sentence in its heart, and
will prove the weakest in the sum of things'. —
Goldwin Smith, Lectures on the Study of History,
pp. 68-69.
When I first heard that Buonaparte had declared that
the interests of small states must always succumb to
great ones, I said, 'Thank God! he has sealed his
fate : from this moment his fall is certain '. — Coleridge.
References. — IV. 1. — T. G. Selby, The Cod of the Patriarchs,
p. 163. IV. 1-10.— G. Hanson, Christian World Pulpit, vol.
liii. 1897, p. 101.
THE ROD THAT IS IN THINE HAND
' What is that in thine hand ? And he said, A rod. . . . Thou
shalt take this rod in thine hand, wherewith thou shalt
do signs.' — Exodus iv. 2, 17.
I. God often does His greatest works by the humblest
means. The great forces of nature are not in the
earthquake which tumbles cities into ruins. This
power passes in a moment ; the soft silent light, the
warm summer rain, the stars whose voice is not heard
— these are the majestic mighty forces which fill the
earth with riches, and control the worlds which con-
stitute the wide universe of God.
II. So in Providence. The founders of Christianity
were fishermen. Christ Himself the Carpenter, the
Nazarene, despised and crucified, was the wisdom and
the power of God. For did He not say — ' I, if I be
lifted up, will draw all men unto Me'? So in the
text, ' What is that in thine hand ? A rod ' — the
emblem, the tool of his daily work. With this Moses
was to do mighty deeds. Rabbinical tradition has
it that Moses was an excellent shepherd. He followed
a lamb across the wilderness, plucked it with his rod
from a precipice amid the rocks, carried it in his
bosom, whereupon God said — 'Let us make this
Moses the shepherd of Israel'. He a stranger, a
fugitive, a humble shepherd, becomes the lawgiver, the
leader, the deliverer of his people.
III. The lesson of the text is plain. God still
meets every man and asks the old question — ' What
is that in thine hand ? ' Is it the tool of an ordinary
trade ? With that God will be served. The artisan
where he is, in his humble workshop, by using the
' rod which is in his hand,' the merchant in his busi-
ness, are in the place where they are now ; all are
called upon to do service. Few have rank, or wealth,
or power, or eloquence. Let those illustrious few use
their ten talents, but let us, the obscure millions, use
the simple duties of life — 'the rod that is in our
hand '. Not extraordinary works, but ordinary works
well done, were demanded by the Master. — J. Cameron
Lees, British Weekly Pulpit, vol. 11. p. 509.
Reference. — IV. 5. — Christian World Pulpit, vol. Ixvi. 1904,
p. 171.
'These two signs.'— Exodus iv. 9.
' Look into the fourth chapter of Exodus,' Erskine
of Linlathen wrote to Lady Elgin, 'and read there
the account of the two first signs of which there is
any record : Moses' hand becoming leprous and then
being cleansed, and his rod becoming a serpent and
then returning into the form of a rod. In these two
signs we have the history and the prophecy of the
world: 1st, human flesh to be sown in corruption,
and to be raised in incorruption — that is, the fall and
the glorious restoration of man's nature ; 2nd, the
serpent gaining a terrible dominion over man, and
then being overcome by man's hand. The prophetic
part of these facts is that which I believe constitutes
79
Ver. 10.
EXODUS IV., V
Ver. 1.
the true character of a sign, and that part is the cleans-
ing of the flesh and the paralysing of the serpent. . . .
The fulfilment in reality of these two signs will be
the realizing of the twenty-fourth and eighth psalms.'
' And Moses said unto the Lord, O my Lord, I am not eloquent.'
—Exodus iv. io.
I blush to-day, and greatly fear to expose my unskil-
fulness, because, not being eloquent, I cannot express
myself with clearness and brevity, nor even as the
spirit moves, and the mind and endowed understand-
ing point out.- — St. Patrick.
' Is not Aaron the Levite thy brother ? I know that he can
speak well.'— Exodus iv. 14.
When a great sentiment, as religion or liberty, makes
itself deeply felt in any age or country, then great
orators appear. As the Andes and Alleghanies indi-
cate the line of the fissure in the crust of the earth
along which they were lifted, so the great ideas that
suddenly expand at some moment the mind of man-
kind indicate themselves by orators. — Emerson on
Eloquence.
1 And also, behold, he cometh forth to meet thee.' — Exodus iv. 14.
There is something in life which is not love, but
which plays as great a part almost — sympathy, quick
response — I scarcely know what name to give it ; at
any moment, in the hour of need perhaps, a door
opens, and some one comes into the room. It may be
a commonplace man in a shabby coat, a placid lady
in a smart bonnet ; does nothing tell us that this is
one of the friends to be, whose hands are to help us
over the stony places, whose kindly voices will sound
to us hereafter voices out of the infinite ? — Miss
Thackeray in Old Kensington.
References. — IV. 15. — R. E. Hutton, The Crown of Christ,
vol. ii. p. 497. IV. 22, 23. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxiv.
No. 1440. IV. 23.— J. Parker, British Weekly Pulpit, vol. ii.
p. 642.
' Then Zipporah . . . said, Surely a bloody husband art thou
to me.' — Exodus iv. 25.
The silken texture of the marriage tie bears a daily
strain of wrong and insult to which no other human
relation can be subjected without lesion. Two people,
by no means reckless of each other's rights and feel-
ings but even tender of them for the most part, may
tear at one another's heart-strings in this sacred bond
with perfect impunity ; though, if they were any other
two, they would not speak or look at each other after
the outrages they exchange. — W. D. Howells.
He had need to be more than a man, that hath a
Zipporah in his bosom, and would have true zeal in
his heart. — Bishop Hall.
You would think, when the child was born, there
would be an end to trouble ; and yet it is only the
beginning of fresh anxieties. . . . Falling in love and
winning love are often difficult tasks to overbearing
and rebellious spirits ; but to keep in love is also a
business of some importance, to which both man and
wife must bring kindness and goodwill. — R. L. Stev-
enson, El Dorado.
References. — IV. 26. — J. M. Neale, Sermons for some Feast
Days in the Christian Year, p. 18.
' And the people believed.'— Exodus iv. 31.
Logic makes but a sorry rhetoric with the multi-
tude ; first shoot round comers, and you may not
despair of converting by a syllogism. ... So well has
this been understood practically in all ages of the
world, that no religion yet has been a religion of
physics or of philosophy. It has ever been synony-
mous with revelation. It never has been a deduction
from what we know ; it has ever been an assertion of
what we are to believe. It has never lived in a con-
clusion ; it has ever been a message, a history, or a
vision. No legislator or priest ever dreamed of edu-
cating our moral nature by science or by argument.
Moses was instructed not to reason from the creation
but to work miracles.— Newman, Grammar of As-
sent, pp. 94-96.
'Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, Let My people go.' —
Exodus v. 1.
Compare these sentences from Mrs. H. B. Stowe's ap-
peal to the women of England in 1862 : 'The writer
of this has been present at a solemn religious festival
in the national capital, given at the home of a portion
of those fugitive slaves who have fled to our lines for
protection — who, under the shadow of our flag, find
sympathy and succour. The national day of thanks-
giving was there kept by over a thousand redeemed
slaves, and for whom Christian charity had spread an
ample repast. Our sisters, we wish you could have
witnessed the scene. We wish you could have heard
the prayer of the blind old negro, called among his
fellows John the Baptist, when in touching broken
English he poured forth his thanksgiving. We wish
you could have heard the sound of that strange
rhythmical chant which is now forbidden to be sung
on Southern plantations — the psalm of this modern
Exodus — which combines the barbaric fire of the
Marseillaise with the religious fervour of the old
Hebrew prophet : —
Oh, go down, Moses,
Way down into Egypt's land !
Tell King Pharaoh
To let my people go !
Stand away dere,
Stand away dere,
And let my people go !
In his Letters (pp. 42-43) Dr. John Ker observes
that ' the whole history of this time seems to me one
of the most remarkable since the Exodus — the free-
ing of as many captives, and the leading a larger
nation, white and black, and a whole continent that
is to be, out into a higher life — for think what would
have become of America had this plague-spot spread !
It is the more remarkable that, though there was an
Egypt, and slaves and a Red Sea, there was no Moses
nor Aaron, for honest Abraham Lincoln will stand
neither for prophet nor for priest. There was only
God, and the rod in His own hand — the Northern
people, sometimes a serpent, sometimes a piece of
80
Ver. 2.
EXODUS V
Ver. 18.
wood, used for the most part unconsciously, as one
can see. But God is very manifest, and it gives one
great comfort to see moral order still working, and a
governor among the nations.'
1 And Pharaoh said, Who is the Lord, that I should obey his
voice?' — Exodus v. 2.
' He had come,' says Maurice, ' to regard himself as
the Lord, his will as the will which all things were to
obey. . . . He had lost the sense of a righteous
government and order in the world ; he had come to
believe in tricks and lies ; he had come to think men
were the mere creatures of natural agencies.'
Note (as Wilkie tells us always to do) the hands
in Charles I.'s portrait — a complete revelation of the
man : the one clutching almost convulsively his baton
in affectation of power ; the other poor hand hanging
weak and helpless. — Westcott.
References. — V. 14-19. — L. M. Watt, Christian World
Pulpit, vol. lxviii. 1905, p. 349.
' Ye are idle, ye are idle : therefore ye say, Let us go and do
sacrifice to the Lord.' — Exodus v. 17.
Moses talks of sacrifice, Pharaoh talks of work.
Anything seems due work to a carnal mind, saving
God's service ; nothing superfluous but religious
duties. — Bishop Hall.
MISTAKEN VIEWS OF RELIGION
' But he said, Ye are idle, ye are idle : therefore ye say, Let us
go and do sacrifice to the Lord.' — Exodus v. 17.
That was Pharaoh's rough-and-ready and foolish esti-
mate of religious aspiration and service. In this
matter Pharaoh lives to-day. There are many people
who cannot understand the utility of religion , they
think religious people are always going to church,
and no good comes of it. We must put up with these
things ; we have to bear many reproaches, and this
we may well add to the number without really in-
creasing the weight or the keenness of the injustice.
Sometimes great men are mistaken, and sometimes
they are unwise, and at no time do they really com-
prehend, if they be outside of it themselves, the true
religious instinct and the true meaning of deep religi-
ous worship, ceremony, and service. The spiritual has
always had to contend with the material ; the praying
man has always been an obnoxious problem to the
man who never prays.
I. This opens up the whole subject of work and its
meaning, spiritual worship and its signification, heart-
sacrifice and its story in red reeking blood. Who is
the worker — the architect or the bricklayer ? I never
hear of the architects meeting in council for the pur-
pose of limiting their hours or increasing their bank
holidays. The bricklayer is the worker ; so it seems ;
in a certain aspect he is the worker ; but how could
he move without the architect ? The architect cannot
do without the builder any more than the builder
can do without the architect ; they are workers to-
gether ; and this is the true idea of society, each
man having his own talent, making his own contri-
bution, working under his own individual sense of
responsibility, and all men catching the spirit of com-
radeship and of union and co-operation, united in the
uprearing of a great cathedral, a poem in wood and
stone, a house of the living God.
II. Insincere religion is idle. People who go to
church when they do not want to go — that is idle-
ness, and that idleness will soon sour and deepen into
blasphemy. Going because I suppose we shall be ex-
pected to go — that is idleness and weariness.
III. Let us not care what Pharaoh says, but ex-
amine our own hearts. The name typified by Pharaoh
has given me an opportunity of cross-examining my-
self, and I will say, Pharaoh, thou thinkest I am idle,
and therefore I want to be religious ; I wonder if
Pharaoh is right ; he is a very astute man, he has
great councillors about him, he has a great country
to administer, and there is a light in those eyes some-
times that suggests that he can see a long way into a
motive. I never thought this would come to pass,
that Pharaoh would say to me that I am an idle
hound, because I want to go and serve the Lord. Is
Pharaoh right ? It is lawful to learn from the enemy,
and if Pharaoh has fixed his eye upon the blemish in
my life, if he does see the hollowness of my heart,
well, I will think over what the king says. We may
learn some things from heathenism. But if I can, by
the grace of God, assure myself that by the Holy
Spirit I am really sincere in wanting to go to this
sermon, this sacrament, this prayer ; if I know through
and through, really, that I do want to go and serve
God, the gates of hell shall not prevail against me. —
Joseph Pabkeb, City Temple Pulpit, vol. 111. p. 142.
' There shall no straw be given you, yet shall ye deliver the
tale of bricks.' — Exodus v. 18.
Is it not the height of vanity, the height of selfish-
ness to demand affection? How can any one say,
' I am a great and noble creature : come and worship
me, pour yourself out before me : I deserve it all '.
Surely, looked at in that way, it seems the height
of blasphemy to demand it. And is it not the
highest pitch of selfishness to require that a perpetual
stream of the same intensity should be continued
whatever occupations may distract you, whatever
new interests may fill your mind — still the most
subtle, the most evanescent, the most inscrutable
outcome of the human soul is to be exacted from you
as by a rigorous taskmaster : you must make your
tale of bricks with or without straw, it matters little.
— Dk. Mandell Cbeighton, Life and Letters, vol. 1.
p. 117.
Describing in The Soul (part 2) the vain effort
after self-amendment made by sensitive hearts, F. W.
Newman observes : ' The conscience taxes them with
a thousand sins before unsuspected. The evil thus
gets worse ; the worshipper is less and less able to
look boldly up into the Pure, All-seeing Eye : and he
perhaps keeps working at his heart to infuse spiritual
affections by some direct process under the guidance
of the will. It cannot be done. He quickens his
conscience thus, but he does not strengthen his soul ;
81 6
Vv. 2, 3.
EXODUS VI
Ver. 9.
hence he is perpetually undertaking tasks beyond his
strength, — making bricks without straw ; a very
Egyptian slavery.'
Reference. — VI. 1. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxiv. No.
1440.
THE NAMES OF GOD
1 And God spake unto Moses, and said unto him, I am the
Lord ; and I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and
unto Jacob, by the name of God Almighty, but by My
name JEHOVAH was I not known to them. '—Exodus
VI. 2, 3.
If we read into the first of these two verses ' Jehovah '
for ' Lord,' we shall get the exact balance and con-
trast of what was here said to Moses. A name is
just the utterance of character. That is its first
and proper meaning. It is the putting out of a
character in a human word, and that is just what
God meant when He gave Himself these various
names. They were intended to be such utterances
as men and women could easily understand and apply
by understanding them to their varied experience.
The text gives us two revealings of names from God,
and God Himself is careful to tell Moses that there
was a progression from the one to the other, that
the first was the preliminary of the second, and the
second was raised, as it were, on the meaning of
the first. Now the conditions of the people to
whom the name was given determined these various
self-revealings.
I. The Progressive Revealing of the Names of
God. — In general the occasions of revealing different
names of God correspond in the history of Israel to
special epochs in that history, or, in the broader area
of the human race, they correspond with great needs
of that race, and gradually, by the successive names,
God tried to show mankind what He really was.
All the revealings of the name of God in the Bible
have crowned and culminated in one name that you
find in the New Testament from the lips of Christ,
the name that carried to Him most of the meaning
of the Godhead and the name that He meant should
carry most of the meaning of the Godhead to you,
for in His last prayer to the Father He speaks in
this wise : ' O, righteous Father, the world hath not
known Thee, but I have known Thee,' and that name
of ' Righteous Father ' is the last utterance of the
Godhead as to what God is and as to how you are to
name God to your own hearts and consciences. Now
all down the Bible it would be an easy matter to
trace historically this development of the name of
God, and you must not wonder that at the beginning
the name was a very primitive one, carrying rather
ideas of power and might and august majesty than
tenderness and gentleness and love, for the full re-
vealing of God at the first would have been utterly
useless, and indeed impossible. God has always re-
vealed the knowledge of Himself and all other know-
ledge in one way. It has been through consecrated
souls and gifted minds who, as a rule, in religious
revelation, have not been the official representatives
of religion, have not been the priests, have not been
the leaders of the religious life of their time, and
have not been popular, as a rule, certainly have not
had a large popular following. Abraham, Moses, as
in my text, all the Hebrew prophets, the Apostles of
the Lord, and Christ Himself, they were all antagon-
ists of the official religion of their times, and God
passed by officialism, and chose out lowly hearts and
gracious minds, and through them revealed the se-
quence of the names of God from lower to higher
and from simple to more wondrous. And God acts
on the same principle in His revealing to souls. That
has been God's way, a progressive revealing of His
name.
II. The Meaning of the Names. — Apply it to
what you have in my text. Here you have two
names, ' God Almighty ' and ' Jehovah '. Now the
first one, ' God Almighty,' is said here to be suitable
to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, but not suitable
to the slaves in Egypt that Moses was to enfranchise.
The other name was fit for them, namely, that great
name of ' Jehovah, the Lord '. This second is an
advance on the first. An inferior idea of God was
given to the great saints ; a superior idea of God was
given to the slaves in Egypt. What do these two
names mean ? The first means simply ' divine al-
mightiness,' the idea of organized power, God Al-
mighty ; the second one is an altogether more involved
name, and in general you may understand it in this
way. It means ' The Unchanging, the Eternal, Trust-
worthy One '. The name Jehovah carries in it the
idea of a covenant-keeping God. By the first, the
idea of power, almightiness, Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob were specially blessed and strengthened, and
it was just what they wanted, it was just the name
suitable to their condition. Round the other name
of the trustworthy, covenant-keeping God, a nation
of slaves was rallied and concentrated and led on to
liberty and national life. Men in sorrow need more
of God, the revealing of more of God's tenderness,
than men in prosperity and health and strength and
happiness.
III. The Greater the Need the Greater the Re-
velation. — The deeper the sorrow, the more the un-
folding of the heart of God. The more poignant
the grief, the more tender the revelation of the name
of God. And that has always been God's way. The
deeper the sin, the more bitter the sorrow of man,
the more tenderly God has revealed Himself. The
thought ought to nerve us to know that God has
given us that last name because the needs of an age
like this are greater than the needs of an age like
that of Abraham ; more of His love has been revealed
to this age than to the Apostles' age.
References. — VI. 3.— J. H. Rushbrooke, Christian World
Pulpit, vol. lxxi. 1907, p. 69. VI. 6-8.— H. W. Webb-Peploe,
The Life of Privilege, p. 44.
' They hearkened not unto Moses for anguish of spirit, and for
cruel bondage.' — Exodus vi. 9.
It is possible to be so disheartened by eailh as to be
deadened towards heaven. — C. G. Rossetti.
82
Ver. 9.
EXODUS VI.-VIII
Ver. 1.
THE HEART'S OBSTRUCTION TO THE HEARER
' They hearkened not unto Moses for anguish of spirit, and for
cruel bondage.' — Exodus vi. 9.
I. It is not always the fault of a preacher that his
message does not go home. ' They hearkened not unto
Moses for anguish of spirit, and for cruel bondage.'
There never was a better preacher, there never was a
more joyous message ; but there was a weight at the
heart of the hearer. There was a stone at the door
of the sepulchre which prevented the voice from pene-
trating inside.
II. Observe, there were two impediments in the
heart — a positive and a negative barrier — a sense of
anguish and a sense of bondage. These often exist
separately. There are some who are the victims of a
definite sorrow ; they have a special cause of grief which
blocks the door of the heart and will let no message of
comfort enter in. There are others, again, who, with-
out being able to point to a special sorrow, are simply
conscious of a chain about the spirit ; they have an
oppression all round, a nameless weight which will not
let them soar. I know not which is more deterrent
to a message — the anguish or the bondage — the poign-
ant grief in a single spot or the dull pain all over.
Either is incompatible with the hearing of a Sermon
on the Mount.
III. How, then, shall I lift the stone from the door
of the sepulchre, that the angel of peace may enter
in ! Can I say it is summer when it is winter ! No, my
Father, Thou wouldst not have me say that. But
Thou wouldst have me forget, not the winter, but my
winter. Thou wouldst have me remember that there
are thousands like me, thousands feeling the same an-
guish, thousands bearing the same bondage. Thou
wouldst not have me ignore the night, but Thou
wouldst have me remember that I watch not there
alone. Is Peter weighted in the Garden; Thou
wouldst have him call to mind that James and John
are also there. Thou wouldst have him watch for one
hour by the burden of James and John. Thou wouldst
have him bury his own beneath the soil till he has re-
turned from his mission of sympathy. Then after the
night watches Thou wouldst have him go back to dis-
inter his burden. Thou wouldst have him turn up the
soil to uncover the spot of the burial. He will cry,
' My burden has been stolen in the night ; the place
where I laid it is vacant ; I left it here, and it is here
no more ; come, see the place where my grief lay ! '
So, my Father, shall he find rest — rest in Thy love.—
G. Matheson, Messages of Hope, p. 46.
References.— VI. 9.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxiv. No.
2026.
'Aaron thy brother shall be thy prophet. Thou shalt speak
all that I command thee ; and Aaron thy brother shall speak
unto Pharaoh.' — Exodus vii. 1-2.
The literature of France has been to ours what Aaron
was to Moses, the expositor of great truths which
would else have perished for want of a voice to utter
them with distinctness. The relation which existed
between Mr. Bentham and M. Dumont is an exact
illustration of the intellectual relation in which the
two countries stand to each other. The great dis-
coveries in physics, in metaphysics, in political science,
are ours. But scarcely any foreign nation except
France has received them from us by direct communi-
cation. Isolated by our situation, isolated by our
manners, we found truth, but we did not impart it.
France has been the interpreter between England and
mankind. — Macauxay on Walpole's Letters.
References.— VII. 3, 4.— E. L. Hull, Sermom Preached at
King's Lynn (3rd Series), p. 94.
' Then Pharaoh also called the wise men and the sorcerers :
now the magicians of Egypt, they also did in like manner
with their enchantments.' — Exodus vii. ii.
We cannot close such a review of our five writers
without melancholy reflections. That cause which
will raise all its zealous friends to a sublime eminence
on the last and most solemn day the world has yet
to behold, and will make them great for ever, pre-
sented its claims full in sight of each of these authors
in his time. The very lowest of these claims could
not be less than a conscientious solicitude to beware of
everything that could in any point injure the sacred
cause. This claim has been slighted by so many as
have lent attraction to an order of moral sentiments
greatly discordant with its principles. And so, many-
are gone into eternity under the charge of having
employed their genius, as the magicians employed
their enchantments against Moses, to counteract the
Saviour of the World. — John Foster on The Aver-
sion of Men of Taste to Evangelical Religion (ix.).
' Aaron's rod swallowed up their rods.' — Exodus vii. 12.
Love, a myrtle wand, is transformed by the Aaron
touch of jealousy into a serpent so vast as to swallow
up every other stinging awe, and makes us mourn the
exchange. — Coleridge.
Reference. — VII. 12. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. ix. No.
521.
• Thus saith the Lord, Let My people go that they may serve
Me.' — Exodus viii. i.
And so the world went its way, controlled by no
dread of retribution ; and on the tomb frescoes you
can see legions of slaves under the lash dragging
from the quarries the blocks of granite which were
to form the eternal monuments of the Pharaoh's
tyranny ; and you read in the earliest authentic
history that when there was a fear that the slave-
races should multiply so fast as to be dangerous
their babies were flung to the crocodiles.
One of these slave-races rose at last in revolt.
Noticeably it did not rise against oppression as such,
or directly in consequence of oppression. We hear of
no massacre of slave-drivers, no burning of towns or
villages, none of the usual accompaniments of peasant
insurrections. If Egypt was plagued, it was not by
mutinous mobs or incendiaries. Half a million men
simply rose up and declared that they could endure
no longer the mendacity, the hypocrisy, the vile and
incredible rubbish which was offered to them in the
sacred name of religion. ' Let us go,' they said,
Ver. 15.
EXODUS VIII., IX
Ver. 35.
'into the wilderness, go out of these soft water-
meadows and cornfields, forsake our leeks and our
flesh-pots, and take in exchange a life of hardship
and wandering, that we may worship the God of our
fathers.' Their leader had been trained in the
wisdom of the Egyptians, and among the rocks of
Sinai had learnt that it was wind and vanity. The
half-obscured traditions of his ancestors awoke to
life again, and were rekindled by him in his people.
They would bear with lies no longer. They shook
the dust of Egypt from their feet, and the prate and
falsehood of it from their souls, and they withdrew
with all belonging to them, into the Arabian desert,
that they might no longer serve cats and dogs and
bulls and beetles, but the Eternal Spirit Who had
been pleased to make His existence known to them.
They sung no paeans of liberty. They were delivered
from the house of bondage, but it was the bondage
of mendacity, and they left it only to assume another
service. The Eternal had taken pity on them. In
revealing His true nature to them, He had taken them
for His children. They were not their own, but His,
and they laid their lives under commandments which
were as close a copy as, with the knowledge which they
possessed, they could make, to the moral laws of the
Maker of the Universe. — F&ovi>E,Short Studies,vo\. n.
Reference. — VIII. 1. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. vi. No.
322.
' But when Pharaoh saw that there was respite, he hardened
his heart' — Exodus viii. 15.
I expected every wave would have swallowed us up,
and that every time the ship fell down, as 1 thought,
in the trough or hollow of the sea, we should never
rise more ; and in this agony of mind I made many
vows and resolutions, that if it would please God here
to spare my life this one voyage, if ever I got once my
foot upon dry land again, I would go directly home to
my father, and never set it into a ship again while I
lived. . . . These wise and sober thoughts continued all
the while the storm continued, and indeed some time
after ; but the next day the wind was abated and the
sea calmer, and I began to be a little inured to it. . . .
In a word, as the sea was returned to its smoothness of
surface and settled calmness by the abatement of that
storm, so the hurry of my thoughts being over, my
fears and apprehensions of being swallowed up by the
sea being forgotten, and the current of my former de-
sires returned, I entirely forgot the vows and promises
that I made in my distress. — Defoe, Robinson
Crusoe (chap. 1.).
References. — VIII. 25. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxi.
No. 1830. VIII. 28.— Ibid., vol. xxxi. No. 1830. IX. 1.—
Stopford A. Brooke, The Old Testament and Modern Life, p.
129. See also Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlv. 1894, p.
214. IX. .7.— J. J. Tetley, Christian World Pulpit, vol.
lx. 1901, p. 94.
THE LONGSUFFERING OF GOD
(For Holy Week)
' Thus saith the Lord God of the Hebrews, Let My people go
that they may serve Me.'— Exodus ix. 13.
How solemn is the week — the Holy Week — upon
which we have entered. The Church brings before
our minds to-day some wonderful teaching concern-
ing our own spiritual life. The record of God's
dealings with Pharaoh will afford us sufficient material
for our meditation.
I. The Longsuffering of God towards Sinners. —
Pharaoh had been insolent and blasphemous, cruel
and vindictive, pitiless and false. Yet God had spared
him. So longsuffering was He, that He even now
addressed to him fresh warnings and gave him fresh
signs of His power, thus by His goodness leading men
to repentance.
II. The Power of God to Break the Will of the
most Determined Sinner — First He sends slight
afflictions, then more serious ones ; finally, if the
stubborn will still refuses to bend, He visits the of-
fender with ' all His plagues '.
III. The Fact that all Resistance of God's Will
by Sinners Tends to Increase, and is Designed to
Increase, His Glory. — 'The fierceness of man turns
to God's praise.' Men see God's hand in the over-
throw of His enemies, and His glory is thereby in-
creased. The message sent by God to Pharaoh adds
that the result was designed.
References. — IX. 13-19. — Heber, 'God's Dealings with
Pharaoh,' Sermons Preached in England, p. 146. Simeon, Works,
i. p. 352. Arthur Roberts, Sermons on the Histories of Scripture,
p. 257. Isaac Williams, ' Pharaoh,' Characters of Old Testament.
Kingsley, ' The Plagues of Egypt,' Gospel of the Pentateuch,
Sermon x. Kingsley, ' The God of the Old Testament is the
God of the New,' Gospel of the Pentateuch, Sermon xi.
Stanley's Jewish Church, i. p. 100, etc. Geikie, Hours with the
Bible, ii. p. 147. Kitto, Daily Bible. Illustrations, ii. p. 56, Bibli-
cal Things, etc., par. 745 ; and see Parker, People's Bible, ii. ;
p. 312. Maurice, Patriarchs and Law-Givers, Sermon ix. Jacox,
Secular Annotations, etc., i. p. 125. IX. 17. — C. Kingsley,
Sermons on National Subjects, p. 325. IX. 27.— Spurgeon,
Sermons, vol. iii. No. 113.
' And when Pharaoh saw that the rain and the hail and the
thunder were ceased, he sinned yet more.' — Exodus ix. 34.
God hath no sooner done thundering, than he hath
done fearing. All this while you never find him care-
ful to prevent any one evil, but desirous still to shift
it off, when he feels it ; never holds constant to any
good motion ; never prays for himself, but carelessly
wills Moses and Aaron to pray for him ; never yields
God, his whole demand but higgleth and dodgeth like
some hard chapmen that would get a release with the
cheapest. — Bishop Hall.
PHARAOH
' And the heart of Pharaoh was hardened, neither would he let
the children of Israel go.'— Exodus ix. 35.
I. The Lord Hardened Pharaoh's Heart — This
has been taken by some to mean that Pharaoh was
not a free agent ; so that the rejection of God's de-
mands was not really the act of Pharaoh's free will,
but was caused by God's compulsion. But if this
were the case, how could God punish Pharaoh for
doing what he could not help doing ?
1. Our moral sense of justice is implanted in us by
God Himself. It is, therefore, impossible to conceive
of God's violating that sense.
84
Ver. 7.
EXODUS X
Ver. 16.
2. In examining carefully the narrative we find
that God is not said to have hardened Pharaoh's heart
until after the sixth plague, when Pharaoh's heart
had become hardened by his own free action. In
other words, the first, six plagues were disciplinary,
and only the last four were penal.
Disciplinary suffering is that which has for its end
the good of the sufferer.
Penal suffering is that which has for its chief end
the good of others.
II. In what Way did God Harden Pharaoh's
Heart? — Plainly, by the judgments and punishments
which He inflicted on him. And in this there is no
evidence that God treated Pharaoh otherwise than He
treats all men who sin against Him.
If a man hardens his heart against God's calls to
repentance, whether sent by preaching or by trial
and punishment into his own life, the result is that
his heart becomes hardened ; and since God sent
those trials, He may be said to have hardened the
man's heart by sending them, although His purpose
was to lead the sinner to penitence. And after such
an one has become finally impenitent, God may still
send judgments which will be entirely penal, and for
the purpose of vindicating God's justice when the man's
penitence is no longer possible. — A. G. Mortimer,
The Church's Lessons for the Christian Year, part
ii. p. 311.
References. — IX. 35. — ' Plain Sermons ' by contributors to
the Tracts for the Times, vol. vi. p. 49. X. 1-20. — Spurgeon,
Sermons, vol. xliii. No. 2503. X. 3.— Ibid., vol. xliii. No.
2503.
' And Pharaoh's servants said unto him, How long shall this
man be a snare unto us ? Let the men go . . . knowest
thou not yet that Egypt is destroyed ? ' — Exodus x. 7.
If there be any one truth which the deductions of
reason alone, independent of history, would lead us
to anticipate, and which again history alone would
establish independently of antecedent reasoning, it is
this : that a whole class of men placed permanently
under the ascendancy of another as subjects, without
the rights of citizens, must be a source, at the best,
of weakness, and generally of danger to the State.
They cannot well be expected, and have rarely been
found, to evince much hearty patriotic feeling towards
a community in which their neighbours looked down
on them as an inferior and permanently degraded
species. While kept in brutish ignorance, poverty,
and weakness, they are likely to feel — like the ass in
the fable — indifferent whose panniers they bear. If
they increase in power, wealth, and mental develop-
ment, they are likely to be ever on the watch for
an opportunity of shaking off a degrading yoke. . . .
Indeed almost every page of history teaches the same
lesson, and proclaims in every different form, ' How
long shall these men be a snare to us ? Let the people
go, that they may serve their God : knowest thou
not yet that Egypt is destroyed?' — Archbishop
Whatei.y.
In a letter, written during 1840, to awaken the
upper orders of Britain to the social evils which the
Chartist movement sprang from, Dr. Arnold of
Rugby wrote : ' My fear with regard to every remedy
that involves any sacrifices to the upper classes, is,
that the public mind is not yet enough aware of the
magnitude of the evil to submit to them. " Knowest
thou not yet that Egypt is destroyed ? " was the
question put to Pharaoh by his counsellors ; for un-
less he did know it, they were aware that he would
not let Israel go from serving them.'
The question with me is, not whether you . have
a right to render your people miserable ; but whether
it is not your interest to make them happy. It
is not what a lawyer tells me I may do ; but what
humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do.
— -Burke, Speech on Conciliation with America.
References. — X. 8. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxi. No.
1830. X. 8, 9.— J. Oswald Dykes, Christian World Pulpit,
vol. xlv. 1894, p. 261. X. 11.— H. J. Wilmot-Buxton,
Sunday Lessons for Daily Life, p. 291.
PHARAOH'S 'I HAVE SINNED*
' Then Pharaoh called for Moses and Aaron in haste ; and he
said, I have sinned against the Lord your God, and against
you.' — Exodus x. 16.
What was Pharaoh's ' I have sinned ? ' Where did
it tend ?
I. It was a Mere Hasty Impulse. — ' Then Pharaoh
called for Moses and Aaron in haste ; and he said,
I have sinned against the Lord your God, and against
you.' There was no thought in it ; no careful dealing
with his own soul ; no depth. Real repentance is
never like that. It may express itself quickly. It
may come suddenly to a crisis. But that which leaps
to the surface is the result of much that has been
going on long before in secret.
II. The Moving Principle was Nothing but Fear.
— He was agitated — greatly agitated — only agitated.
He said it the first time under ' the hail ' ; the second,
under ' the locust '. Property was going ; the land
was being devastated ; his empire was impoverished ;
and he exclaimed, ' I have sinned '. He simply desired
to avert a punishment that was throwing a black
shadow over him ! Now, fear may be, and probably
it must be, a part of real repentance. But I doubt
whether there was ever a real repentance that was
promoted by fear only. This is the reason why so
few — so very few — sick-bed repentances ever stand.
They were dedicated by fear only. When the Holy
Ghost gives repentance, He inspires fear ; and He
also adds, what, if we may not yet call it love, yet has
certainly some soft feeling — some desire towards God
Himself. If you have fear, do not wish it away.
But ask God to mingle something with your fear —
some other view of God, which, coming in tenderly,
and mellowingly, may melt fear, and make re-
pentance.
III. Pharaoh's Thoughts were Directed far too
much to Man. — It was not the ' Against Thee, Thee
only, I have sinned '. He never went straight to
God. Observe what he said : ' I have sinned against
the Lord your God, and against you. Now, there-
85
Ver. 23.
EXODUS X., XI
Ver. 10.
fore, forgive ' — Moses and Aaron — ' forgive, I pray
thee, my sin only this once, and intreat the Lord
your God, that He may take away from me this death
only '. The more God is immediate to you, there
will be repentance. The more you go to Him with-
out any intervention whatsoever — feeling : ' It is God
I have grieved, it is God must forgive ; it is God only
who can give me what I want ; it is God only who can
speak peace ' — the more genuine your sorrow will be ;
and the more surely it will be accepted.
References. — X. 16. — J. Vaughan, Sermons Preached in
Christ Church, Bru/hton (7th Series), p. 71. X. 20. — J. Owen,
Christian World Pulpit, vol. xli. 1892, p. 166.
' But all the children of Israel had light in their dwellings.'—
Exodus x. 23.
If all Egypt had been light, the Israelites would
not have had the less ; but to enjoy that light alone,
while their neighbours lived in thick darkness, must
make them more sensible of their privilege. Dis-
tinguishing mercy affects more than any mercy. —
Baxter, Saints' Rest, chap. in.
' In the great majority of things,' said John Foster,
' habit is a greater plague than ever afflicted Egypt ;
in religious character it is eminently a felicity.'
References. — X. 24. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxi. No.
1830. X. 26.— Ibid. vol. vi. No. 309. Ibid. vol. xxxi. No.
1830. XI. 1-10. — A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture
— Exodus, etc., p. 33.
DIFFERENCES IN CHARACTER
' That ye may know how that the Lord doth put a difference
between the Egyptians and Israel.' — Exodus xi. 7.
That there are diversities in human character and
conduct, in human fortune and destiny, no one ques-
tions. The atheist sees in such diversities the result
of circumstances and, since in his view there is no con-
trolling mind in the universe, of inexplicable caprice.
The Christian, on the contrary, believes that in these
diversities there exists, though it is not alway dis-
coverable, the operation of Divine wisdom, and even
of Divine benevolence. The providence of God and
the moral nature of man are sufficient, if both were
fully understood, to account for all.
I. What is Implied in this Difference ? — 1. Divine
ivisdom. — What is inexplicable is not arbitrary, but
is the outworking of a wisdom beyond the human.
Why the Almighty chose Israel to be the depository
of a revealed truth, and left Egypt to work its own
way unaided save by the light of nature, we cannot
tell. But so it was ; and Israel was informed by
Jehovah that this election was owing to no native
moral excellence in the object of Divine choice.
% Difference in religious position. — There was,
however, in the case before us, a difference in the
religious position of the two nations. The Egyptians
were idolaters ; the Hebrews, with all their ignorance,
carnality, and obstinacy, were worshippers of Jehovah.
Israel was thus called to a higher platform of pro-
bation. Apostasy in Israel was a fouler sin than
polytheism in Egypt. Life is not always accord-
ing to privilege, and higher privilege often, alas !
becomes the occasion of sorer condemnation. Yet to
be trained in a Christian land and in the knowledge
of the Christian faith is in itself a ' difference ' for
which it behoves us to offer daily thanks.
3. Difference in the Purposes of God. — There was
a difference in the purpose which God had in view
regarding the two peoples. It would be childish to
suppose that the providence of God had no appointed
place for Egypt in the world's great plan, but it would
be unreasonable as well as unbelieving to fail to recog-
nize in Israel's vocation the counsels of the Omniscient
Ruler. Alike for individuals and for communities
there is appointed by God's wisdom a special work.
One man, one nation, cannot step into another's
place.
II. What Results from this Difference? — 1. A
difference in Divine treatment. — Jehovah treated
the Egyptians in one way, the Israelites in another.
The Scripture narrative points out the hand of God
in this. It is well and wise when the ways of Provi-
dence perplex us to say, ' It is the Lord.'
2. A difference in human responsibility. — There
are degrees in men's knowledge of the Lord's will, and
there are corresponding degrees in the measure of
accountability.
3. A difference in the ultimate issues of proba-
tion.- — There is no reason to believe in a dead level
of uniformity among spiritual beings in the future any
more than in the present.
References. — XI. 7. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. vi. No.
305.
'And the Lord hardened Pharaoh's heart.' — Exodus xi. 10.
jEschylus recognizes in certain forms of mental
blindness a Divine influence. There is a malady of
the mind, a heaven-sent hurt, which drives the sinner
to destruction. This infatuation or Ate is a clouding
both of heart and of intellect ; it is also both the
penalty and the parent of crime. But only when a
man has wilfully set his face towards evil, when, like
Xerxes in the Persae, or Ajax in the play of Sophocles,
he has striven to rise above human limits, or like Creon
in the Antigone has been guilty of obdurate impiety,
is a moral darkening inflicted on him in anger. Here
vEschylus and Sophocles agree. As we read in the
Old Testament that ' the Lord hardened Pharaoh's
heart,' so in iEschylus, ' when a man is hasting to
his ruin, the god helps him on '. It is the dark con-
verse of ' God helps those who help themselves '.
— Prof. Butcher, Aspects of- the Greek Genius,
p. 115 f.
References. — XII. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xix. No. 1092.
C. Kingsley, Sermons on National Subjects, p. 337. XII. —
Rutherford Waddell, Behold the Lamb of God, p. 41. XII. 1,
2. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxviii. No. 1637. XII. 1-14. —
A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture — Exodus, p. 38.
XII. 1-20.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xlvii. No. 2727. XII. 1-
27.— Ibid. vol. Hi. No. 3013. XII. 1-29.— T. A. Gurney, The
Living Lord and the Opened Grave, p. 57. XII. 3, 4. — Spurgeon,
Sermons, vol. li. No. 2937. XII. 3, 23.— A. Murray, The
Children for Christ, p. 77.
86
Ver. 26.
EXODUS XII
Ver. 35.
' With bitter herbs they shall eat it.'— Exodus xii. 8.
Christianity, considered as a moral system, is made
up of two elements, beauty and severity ; whenever
either is indulged to the loss or disparagement of the
other, evil ensues. . . . Even the Jews, to whom this
earth was especially given, and who might be sup-
posed to be at liberty without offence to satiate them-
selves in its gifts, were not allowed to enjoy it without
restraint. Even the Paschal Lamb, their great typi-
cal feast, was eaten ' with bitter herbs '. — Newman,
Sermons on Subjects of the Day, pp. 120-121.
References. — XII. 8. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xlvii. No.
2727. XII. 13.— Ibid. vol. v. No. 228 ; ibid. vol. xxi. No.
1251 ; see also Twelve Sermons on the Atonement, p. 25. XII.
14. — H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, Sunday Lessons for Daily Life,
p. 317. XII.— 21-22.— J. McNeill, Regent Square Pulpit, vol.
ii. p. 33. XII. 21-27. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxiii. No.
1988 ; see also Twelve Sermons to Young Men, p. 252.
' Your children shall say unto you, What mean ye by this
service ? ' — Exodus xii. 26.
' What then,' asks the author of Let Youth But
Know (p. 50), ' is the fundamental task of a liberal
education ? What should be its constant endeavour ?
Surely to awaken and to keep ever alert the faculty
of wonder in the human soul. To take life as a
matter of course — whether painful or pleasurable—
that is the true spiritual death. From the body of
that death it is the task of education to deliver us.'
THE MEANING OF THE OBSERVANCE OF
EASTER
' And it shall come to pass, when your children shall say unto
you, What mean ye by this service ? That ye shall say,
It is the sacrifice of the Lord's Passover, who passed over
the houses of the children of Israel in Egypt, when He
smote the Egyptian.' — Exodus xii. 26, 27.
Take the first things commemorated by the Jewish
Passover, and see how they are fulfilled in the Chris-
tian's Easter.
I. The Passover told, first, of the deliverance from
the misery of Egyptian bondage ; and Easter tells
of man's deliverance from a bondage worse than that
of Egypt — the bondage of sin.
II. The Passover commemorated the means by
which the Israelites were delivered — the death of the
first-born, the substituted blood of the lamb. And
this is what Good Friday and Easter preaches to the
Christian — the love of God, Who spared not His
own Son, but delivered Him up for us all — the
power of Christ's resurrection, and the fellowship of
His sufferings, by which we are freed from the bonds
of our sins, and are raised with Him.
III. The Jews were reminded by the Passover that
the Agent of their deliverance was none other than
Jehovah Himself, Who overthrew their enemies and
brought them safely through the Red Sea. And we
are reminded that the Agent of our sanctification is
the Holy Ghost, by whose special grace preventing
us all good desires are poured into our hearts, and by
whose operation in the sacraments both actual and
sanctifying grace are conveyed to our souls.
IV. We observe that in the feast of the Passover
was fulfilled God's command, ' This day shall be unto
you for a memorial ; and ye shall keep it a feast to
the Lord throughout your generations ; ye shall keep
it a feast by an ordinance for ever'.
The Passover, like other Jewish rites, has been
abrogated ; or, rather, has been taken up into and
fulfilled in its highest sense in the sacrifice of the
altar, whereby, according to our Lord's holy institu-
tion, we ' continue a perpetual memory of that His
precious death until His coming again '. — A. G. Mor-
timer, The Church's Lessons for the Christian Year,
part ii. p. 336.
References. — XII. 26. — Henry Alford, Quebec Chapel Ser-
mons, vol. i. p. 17. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxviii. No. 2268.
XII. 26, 27.— R. E. Hutton, The Crown of Christ, vol. ii. p.
343. A. Murray, The Children for Christ, p. 84.
' And it came to pass, that at midnight the Lord smote all the
first-born in the land of Eeypt . . . there was not a house
where there was not one dead.' — Exodus xii. 29-30.
Speaking in favour of peace with Russia, John Bright
once employed this passage most effectively in the
House of Commons. ' I do not suppose,' he said,
' that your troops are to be beaten in actual conflict
with the foe, or that they will be driven into the
sea ; but I am certain that many homes in England
in which there now exists a fond hope that the dis-
tant one may return — many such homes may be
rendered desolate when the next mail shall arrive.
The Angel of Death has been abroad throughout
the land ; you may almost hear the beating of his
wings. There is no one, as when the first-born were
slain of old, to sprinkle with blood the lintel and the
two side-posts of our doors, that he may spare and
pass on ; he takes his victims from the castle of the
noble, the mansion of the wealthy, and the cottage
of the poor and lowly, and it is on behalf of all these
classes that I make this solemn appeal.'
References. — XII. 29. — T. A. Gurney, The Living Lord
and the Opened Grave, p. 57. XII. 30. — A. Ainger, Christian
World Pulpit, vol. lix. 1901, p. 91.
' And the people took their dough before it was leavened, their
kneading troughs being bound up in their clothes upon
their shoulders.' — Exodus xii. 34.
No one doctrine can be named which starts complete
at first, and gains nothing afterwards from the in-
vestigations of faith and the attacks of heresy. The
Church went forth from the old world in haste, as
the Israelites from Egypt ' with their dough before
it was leavened, their kneading troughs being bound
up in their clothes upon their shoulders '. — Newman,
Development of Christian Doctrine (chap. 11. 1).
' And the children of Israel borrowed of the Egyptians jewels
of silver, and jewels of gold, and raiment.'— Exodus xii. 35.
Writing, in his Letters (p. 4-2), of one practical pro-
blem which emerged at the time of the slave emanci-
pation in America, Dr. John Ker observes : ' While
the slave owes nothing to the system except to run
away from it, there may have been, and I believe were,
masters who held up the chains they could not break,
and made the system, in fact, not slavery, and a
85
Ver. 38.
EXODUS XII., XIII
Ver. 14.
runaway slave might owe such a master something
in honour. The Israelites borrowed — asked— jewels
from the Egyptians — their kept back wages, I suppose
— but then we live under a more generous economy.'
' And a mixed multitude went up also with them.' —
Exodus xii. 38.
Aberrations there must ever be, whatever the doc-
trine is, while the human heart is sensitive, capricious,
and wayward. A mixed multitude went out of Egypt
with the Israelites. There will ever be a number of
persons professing the opinions of a movement party,
who talk loudly and strangely, do odd or fierce things,
display themselves unnecessarily, and disgust other
people ; persons too young to be wise, too generous
to be cautious, too warm to be sober, or too intellectual
to be humble. Such persons will be very apt to
attach themselves to particular persons, to use par-
ticular names, to say things merely because others
do, and to act in a party-spirited way. — Newman,
Apologia pro Vita Sua, p. 99.
THE MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF EXODUS
' All the hosts of the Lord went out from the land of Egypt'—
Exodus xii. 41.
The story of Exodus is the story of a Divine de-
liverance.
I. This story of deliverance is in its first stage a
story of an awakening. When God came to Israel
in Egypt he found her in bondage. She was the
slave of Pharaoh, fulfilling his purpose and doing his
work. But Pharaoh had no right to Israel's services
— Israel belonged to God. What she needed was
awakening to a sense of her true dignity and her
high destiny. Now this awakening God brought
about in a twofold way : —
I. By increasing the severity of the oppression
until it became unbearable. Then the children of
Israel sighed by reason of their bondage, and they
cried, and their cry came up unto God by reason of
the bondage.
% And then, j ust as this national conscience was
awaking, God sent Moses to nurse it into vigorous life.
II. The awakening past, the story begins.
A story of struggle. When Israel awoke to desire
deliverance and to work for it, there began one of
the greatest struggles in the world's history. Israel
never knew how strong the arm of Pharaoh was until
she tried to shake herself loose from it — just as no
man knows what a grip sin has on him until he
strives to be free from it ; but the moment Israel
awoke it began. God then fought for Israel, as He
always fights for the soul who is seeking to be His.
So the story of struggle becomes a story of de-
liverance. In this story of deliverance two things
are specially emphasized : (1) that from beginning to
end the deliverance was the work of God ; (2) that
this deliverance was a deliverance through blood-
shedding. All the might of the first nine plagues
did not avail. It required the knife that shed the
blood of the Paschal Lamb to sever the cords that
kept the Israelites slaves.
III. Having recorded the Deliverance, the book
takes a step forward and becomes a story of Guidance
and Instruction. With this story the greater part
of the book is filled. From the Red Sea Israel is led
to Sinai. Instruction is the necessaiy sequence of
deliverance. So Israel is brought to Sinai to receive
it. There God gives a law, obedience to which will
furnish the fullest expression for a godly life.
But after the laws for the regulation of life have
been given there follow laws for the regulation of
worship. It is important then for us to note this :
While our whole life is to be a life of worship, re-
cognition of this must not prevent our engaging in
special acts of worship. But when we worship God,
God desires that in our worship we should accept
His guidance. Therefore after the laws for the
regulation of life come the directions for the making
of the Tabernacle. And then the current of the
book is for the time changed to remind us that, in
the life of the saved, there is always the possibility of
backsliding. The book of Exodus would be distinctly
less valuable, and its picture of the spiritual life dis-
tinctly less complete, had it not contained the story
of the Golden Calf.
The last six chapters of the book are devoted to a
record of how Moses, in implicit obedience to the
orders he had received, made the Tabernacle.
And how does the story close ? ' So Moses finished
the work . . . and the glory of the Lord filled the
Tabernacle.' That was the supreme reward of
Israel's obedience. By her obedience she became a
people among whom God dwelt. The Lord her God
was in the midst of her, blessing her, saving her,
guiding her in all her journeys, until he led her
right into the promised land. — G. H. C. Macgregor,
Messages of the Old Testament, p. 17.
Reference. — XII. 41. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. ii. No. 55.
' It is a night to be much observed unto the Lord for bringing
them out from the land of Egypt.' — Exodus xii. 42.
The lesson taught to Pharaoh and to Israel on
that awful, that joyous night of deliverance, is still
a living lesson; not one jot of its force is abated.
God neither slumbers nor sleeps. He watches ever.
Not one slip passes unrecorded in the heavenly vol-
ume. . . . This is the first lesson taught by our
watch-night — the lesson of the sleepless justice of
God, which brings home at last the sin to the guilty,
and which remembers pitifully, lovingly, every suf-
fering soul that sin has wronged. — Morris Joseph,
The Ideal in Judaism, p. 65.
References. — XII. 42. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xix. No.
1092. XII. 48.— W. Binnie, Sermons, p. 72. XIII. 1, 13-
15.— A. Murray, The Children for Christ, p. 92. XIII. 8.—
C. S. Robinson, Simon Peter, p. 63. XIII. 9. — A. Maclaren,
Expositions of Holy Scripture — Exodus, etc., p. 46.
' When thy son asketh thee in time to come, saying, What is
this? thou shalt answer him.' — Exodus xiii. 14.
Compare Mr. A. R. Wallace's remark on Darwin
in whose character, he observed, ' the restless curiosity
of the child to know the " what for ? " the " why ? "
88
Ver. 17.
EXODUS XIII
Ver. 19.
and the " how ? " of everything seems never to have
abated its force '.
References.— XIII. 14-17— F. D- Maurice, The Doctrine
of Sacrifice, p. 49.
NEAR-CUTS NOT GOD'S
' God led them not through the way of the land of the Philis-
tines although that was near.'— Exodus xiii. 17.
I. That, then, was one feature of God's guidance.
It shunned the near road, and it took the round-
about ; and if you have been living with the open
eye, and watching the method of the Divine in things,
you have seen much that is analogous to this.
1. Think of the discovery of nature's secrets : of
coal, of iron, of steam, of electricity. A single whis-
per from God would have communicated everything,
and put mankind in possession of the secrets. But
God never led us that way, though that way was near.
2. Or rising upward, think of the coming of Jesus.
I detect the same leadership of God in that. Surely,
in response to the world's need, He might have come
a thousand years before ! But God had no near way
to Bethlehem. He led the world about, and through
the desert, before He brought it to the King at Na-
zareth. We see now that there was a fullness of the
time. There was kindness and education on the road.
3. There is one other region where a similar guid-
ance of God is very evident. I refer to the evangel-
izing of the world. Slowly, by a man here, and by a
woman there, and the men not saints, but of like
passions with ourselves — and by unceasing labour, and
by unrecorded sacrifice, the world is being led to know
of Jesus.
II. I have noticed that most of the high and
generous souls — the gallant spirits of the two coven-
ants, let me say — have been tempted with the temp-
tation to take the near-cut, and in the power of God
have conquered it.
1. Take Abraham, for instance. Tempted by the
near road, he refused it. He felt by faith that God's
ways were roundabout.
2. Or think of David. When at last, after Mount
Gilboa, he came to his throne by the way that God
appointed, I warrant you he felt God's ways were best.
3. Or think with all reverence of Jesus Christ,
tempted in all points like as we are, yet without sin.
Why did He come to earth to live and die for us, but
that the kingdoms of this world might become His.
And the devil taketh Him up into an exceeding high
mountain, and showeth Him all the kingdoms of the
world, and saith to Him : ' All these things will I
give Thee, if Thou wilt fall down and worship me '. It
was the old temptation. I speak with utmost rever-
ence — it was Jesus being tempted by near ways. And
when I think of the long road of Jesus, round by the
villages, and through the Garden, and on the Cross,
and into the grave, I feel, if I never felt it in my life
before, that near-cuts are not God's. — G. H. Morri-
son, Sun-Rise, p. 64.
References.— XIII. 17, 18.— J. Day Thompson, Christian
World Pulpit, vol. liv. 1898, p. 134.
'THE BONES OF JOSEPH:' A PATHETIC IN-
SPIRATION
' And Moses took the bones of Joseph with him.' —
Exodus xiii. ig.
I. We cannot Dissociate Ourselves from the Past. —
In all our exoduses we carry ' the bones of Joseph '
with us. We cannot ignore the past. As Dr.
Punshon expresses it, 'Part of the past to all the
present cleaves '.
There is an historic past from which we desire
never to be severed. We are its heirs.
There is a past we long to be dissociated from : the
evil of history.
Then the personal past follows us. There is an
individual past from which we would on no account
be divided. But our past of personal evil shadows us.
Seeing we all have a painful past — all, at least
whose consciences are awakened — what is our wisdom ?
Ever have recourse to Him Who can expunge the
guilt of the past. Ever make the most of the present.
Soon our present will be our past.
II. Mortality marks the Noblest. — The brand of
mortality is on us all. It were madness to forget
this lesson of the ' hallowed burden ' Israel bore.
III. The Great and Good Departed should not be
Forgotten. — It is abundantly to the credit of Moses
that in the hour of triumphant exodus, with all the
responsibility of leadership upon him, he did not
forget the director of the Egyptian empire to whom
Israel owed so much. Contemplate the departed
saints and emulate their faith.
IV. We should Fulfil the Injunctions of the
Sainted Ones. — ' Moses took the bones of Joseph
with him.' This strange act had been directly en-
joined by Joseph. The laying of that behest upon
Israel was an illustration of Joseph's wonderful faith
as well as of his ingrained love of his people.
V. The Past gives Inspiration for Future Ex-
periences. — We need, amid the routine of duties, all
manner of inspiration, and here is one type. Re-
member the past. Recollect what, by God's grace,
others have been and done. God did not fail our
fathers, and they did not fail God.
The past inspires us for trials and sorrows. What
God has done for tired and suffering saints in ages
gone, He will do again. The history of the Church,
and the biographies of Christians, are replete with
inspiration for the chequered experiences of the un-
known to-morrow.
VI. ' Moses took the Bones of Joseph with him.'
— But it is not enough to have the hero's bones.
Moses did not take Joseph's bones alone. He had
Joseph's faith, Joseph's calibre of soul, Joseph's
spirit, Joseph's heroism ; all this, and yet more
abundantly.
There is really danger lest, instead of using the
splendid past, we abuse it. What an irony to have
Joseph's bones with you, but not his spirit in you !
This is a danger alike of Churches and of individuals.
The noblest memorial of a hero is the reproduction
of his heroism.
Ver. 21.
EXODUS XIII
Ver. 21.
VII. The Good Succession does not Perish. —
Joseph is dead, but Moses lives to be Israel's Liberator
and Leader.
VIII. We may Inspire Future Generations. —
They who lead a Joseph-like life shall have a Joseph-
like influence upon others.
IX. 'Moses took the Bones of Joseph with him.'
— Yet God's Presence is the Essential Presence.
The sombre presence of the dead was not the
supreme presence among the Israelites as they marched
to the bounds of Canaan. Hear the words of the
twenty-first verse — ' And the Lord went before them '.
Without that august Presence it is vain to have ' the
bones of Joseph '. He is everything. — Dinsdalf. T.
Young, Unfamiliar Texts, p. 102.
' And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of a cloud,
to lead them the way ; and by night in a pillar of fire, to
give them light ; to go by day and night.' — Exodus xiii.
21.
In his Autobiographic Sketches De Quincey applies
this figure to his sister Elizabeth. ' For thou, dear,
noble Elizabeth, around whose ample brow, as often
as thy sweet countenance rises upon the darkness, I
fancy a tiara of light or a gleaming aureola in token
of thy premature intellectual grandeur — thou whose
head, for its superb developments, was the astonish-
ment of science — thou who wert summoned away from
our nursery ; and the night which for me gathered
upon that event ran after my steps far into life ; and
perhaps at this day I resemble little for good or for
ill that which else I should have been. Pillar of fire
that didst go before me to guide and to quicken —
pillar of darkness, when thy countenance was turned
away to God, that didst too truly reveal to my dawn-
ing fears the secret shadow of death ! '
To increase the reverence for Human Intellect or
God's Light, and the detestation of Human Stupidity
or the Devil's Darkness, what method is there ? No
method — except even this, that we should each of us
pray for it. . . . Such reverence, I do hope, and even
discover and observe, is silently yet extensively going
on among us even in these sad years. In which small
salutary fact there burns for us, in this black coil of
universal baseness fast becoming universal wretched-
ness, an inextinguishable hope ; far-off but sure, a
Divine 'pillar of fire by night'. Courage, courage.
— Carlyle, Latter-day Pamphlets, iii.
' Cromwell and his officers,' says Carlyle once again in
the sixth lecture on Heroes, ' armed soldiers of Christ,
as they felt themselves to be ; a little band of Chris-
tian Brothers, who had drawn the sword against a
great black devouring world not Christian but Mam-
monish, devilish — they cried to God in their strait,
in their extreme need, not to forsake the cause that
was His. The light which now rose upon them, —
how could a human soul, by any means at all, get
better light ? Was not the purpose so formed like
to be precisely the best, wisest, the one to be followed
without hesitation any more ? To them it was as the
shining of Heaven's own splendour, in the waste-
howling darkness ; the Pillar of Fire by night, that
was to guide them in their desolate, perilous way.
Was it not such? Can a man's soul, to this hour,
get guidance by any other method than intrinsically
by that same— devout prostration of the earnest,
struggling soul before the Highest, the Giver of all
Light ; be such prayer a spoken, articulate, or be
it a voiceless, inarticulate one? There is no other
method.'
Again, in his essay on The Life and Writings of
Werner, he observes : ' The subject of Religion, in
one shape or another, nay of propagating it in new
purity by teaching and preaching, had nowise van-
ished from his meditation. On the contrary, we can
perceive that it still formed the master-principle of
his soul, " the pillar of cloud by day, and the pillar of
fire by night," which guided him, so far as he had any
guidance, in the pathless desert of his now solitary,
barren and cheerless existence.'
In his Loss and Gain (Vol. II. chap, ix.) Newman de-
picts an undergraduate's religion as follows : ' Charles'
characteristic, perhaps more than anything else, was
an habitual sense of the Divine Presence — a sense
which, of course, did not ensure uninterrupted con-
formity of thought and deed to itself, but still there
it was ; the pillar of the cloud before him and guiding
him. He felt himself to be God's creature, and re-
sponsible to Him ; God's possession, not his own.'
The access to the Scriptures was no more the actual
cause of Luther's spiritual revolution than were the
pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire the cause of the
departure of Israel from Egypt. But for the Scrip-
tures, indeed, Luther and his followers might have
perished in the desert of fanaticism after their exodus
from Rome. But the pillar and cloud which guided
the Reformer's steps were not made visible until the
sands of the untravelled waste were already flying
around their path, and the brick-kilns of their task-
masters were lost behind them in the distance. —
R. H. Hutton, Theological Essays, p. 396.
THE PROPHETIC ELEMENT
' And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of a cloud, to
lead them the way ; and by night in a pillar of fire, to give
them light ; that they might go by day and by night' —
Exodus xiii. si.
Here we see in a figure the fact that God goes before
the race; anticipating, providing, adjusting, so that
in due season He may bring us into the Canaan of
His accomplished purpose. The most cursory view
of the world and history impresses one with the feel-
ing that all things have been thought out before-
hand ; and closer examination, revealing how the
sense of the future dominates the present, confirms
us in the belief of a supernatural, prescient govern-
ment that controls individual life and universal
movement to some ulterior perfection. This special
aspect we desire now to consider.
I. The Divine Preparation of the Earth as the
Scene for Human Life and Discipline furnishes an
90
Ver. 21.
EXODUS XIII
Ver. 22.
instructive illustration of our text. Ages before
man's advent on this planet we behold the Divine
hand fashioning it for his habitation. The darkness
that ' rested upon the face of the waters ' was the
hiding of the creative Spirit whilst He resolved the
rude elements into order and beauty. Think of the
cloud of the carboniferous era eclipsing the sun and
wrapping everything in awful shadow ! Yet the fire
and darkness of geologic ages were pillars of the Lord
heralding a new earth.
What a firm ground of confidence we find here
touching the abiding welfare of the race ! Pessi-
mistic spirits are fond of propounding sceptical
conundrums respecting the future. What will pos-
terity do when the forests are depleted ? what when
the coal measures fail ? what when population out-
strips the means of subsistence? How truly absurd
these apprehensions are ! As the need arises, our
scientists open to us storehouses which have been
sealed from the foundation of the world. They are
ever discovering new elements, lights, forces, fruits,
which our fathers knew not. The ' faithful Creator '
has in reserve a thousand secret magazines which He
will discover as the race reaches its successive stages
of development. Nature abounds with signs that
God has passed this way before, that He has antici-
pated us with the blessings of His goodness, and means
to see His children through.
II. The Government of the Race supplies another
illustration of the Divine prescience. The future con-
stitutes the main thought of revelation ; and it every-
where teaches that the government of the world at
any given point is regulated by a concern for the
future, for a distant future. The whole of revelation
is pervaded by the thought of the future ; and so far
it is in correspondence with the accredited science of
the age. ' The Lord went before them in a cloud.'
His purpose is always beyond the present ; and the
present is shaped and disciplined with a view to that
ultimate design which shall justify the whole pro-
cess. In the history of Israel, we venture to think,
we have an illustration on a small scale of God's larger
method of government. ' Thou broughtest a vine out
of Egypt : Thou preparedst room before it.' Pales-
tine was prepared for Israel. ' He sent a man before
them, even Joseph, who was sold for a servant.'
Joseph set in motion a train of events which prepared
Israel to take possession of Palestine. Is not this
process of adjustment and progress ever going on in
the wide world and in the sweep of the ages ? Surely
God is preparing waste lands as theatres of new
empire, in due season to be occupied by elect nations.
We cannot contemplate vast regions of the earth
now opening up, climes rich with possibilities, with-
out anticipating the period when they will be in-
herited by mighty populations yet unborn. They
are the waiting Canaans of God's predestined ones.
What, then, is our consolation amid the nebulousness
and perplexity of human life ? That our times are
in His hands who knows the future, and whose attri-
bute of prescience ever works on our behalf. Sydney
Smith's counsel that we should take ' short views ' is
excellent; but the justification of the short view is
that we hold the hand of One who takes the long view.
III. The Divine Anticipation of our Spiritual Need
affords another proof of the prescient element of the
world. When the morning stars sang for joy over the
new-made and radiant world, they could never have
guessed that it was destined to become the stage of
tragedy. They would only have prophesied for it
golden ages of glory and joy. The event, however,
has proved fax* otherwise. The rosy dawn was
followed by a long sad day ; let us rather say, by a
long dark night. Yet here again God went before the
race in the provision of His mercy.
All the scenes and experiences of life are antidated
by grace. Nature is full of prevision. ' Spring hides
behind autumn's mask ; ' and as Richard Jeff'eries puts
it, ' The butterflies of next summer are somewhere
under the snow '. The future dominates all nature,
and the observer marks prophetic signs in every living
thing. We have seen that the same is true in the
evolution of society ; the general life of to-day being
determined by considerations transcending the pre-
sent. And we feel sure that in the education and
discipline of His children the future is a factor never
lost sight of by the Heavenly Father. ' Light is
sown for the righteous, and gladness for the upright
in heart.'
IV. That Christ has gone before us into the
Heavenly Place shall furnish our final illustration.
' A cloud received Him out of their sight.' As in
a cloud the Creator went before us, fashioning this
world for our indwelling, so in the cloud of the As-
cension has the Redeemer gone before us to make
ready a new sphere of beauty and delight. ' I go to
prepare a place for you,' was His solemn assurance in
the parting hour — an assurance that He is fulfilling
every day for thousands of His people. ' For Christ
entered not into a holy place made with hands, like
a pattern to the true ; but into heaven itself, now to
appear before the face of God for us.' As in the
ancient time He prepared Palestine for Israel, so now
He prepares the sphere of glory for the saints, and
makes the saints meet for their inheritance in light.
— W. L. Watkinson, The Fatal Barter, pp. 110-126.
Reference.— XIII. 21. — G. H. Morrison, Christian World
Pulpit, vol. lxii. 1902, p. 415.
' He took not away the pillar of the cloud by day, nor the pillar
of fire by night, from before the people.'— Exodus xiii. 22.
Such was to be our Church, a church not made with
hands, catholic, universal, all whose stones should be
living stones, its officials the cherubim of Love and
Knowledge, its worship wiser and purer action than
has before been known to men. To such a Church
men do indeed constitute the state, and men indeed
we hope form the American Church and State, men
so truly human that they could not live while those
made in their own likeness were bound down to the con-
dition of brutes. Should such hopes be baffled, should
such a Church fall in the building, should such a state
91
Ver. 22.
EXODUS XII I., XIV
Ver. 15.
find no realization except to the eye of the poet, God
would still be in the world, and surely guide each
bird, that can be patient, on the wing to its home at
last. But expectations so noble, which find so broad
a basis in the past, which link it so harmoniously
with the future, cannot lightly be abandoned. The
same Power leads by a pillar of cloud as by a pillar
of fire — the Power that deemed even Moses worthy
only of a distant view of the Promised Land. — Mar-
garet Fuller.
Dm you ever think of the spiritual meaning of the
pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night,
as connected with our knowledge and our ignorance,
our light and our darkness, our gladness and our
sorrow ? The everyday use of this Divine alternation
to the wandering children of Israel is plain enough.
Darkness is best seen against light, and light against
darkness ; and its use, in a deeper sense of keeping
forever before them the immediate presence of God
in the midst of them, is not less plain ; but I some-
times think, that we who also are still in the wilder-
ness, and coming up from our Egypt and its flesh-pots,
and on our way, let us hope, through God's grace, to
the celestial Canaan, may draw from these old-world
signs and wonders that, in the midday of knowledge,
with daylight all about us, there is, if one could but
look for it, that perpetual pillar of cloud — that sacred
darkness which haunts all human knowledge, often
the most at its highest noon ; that ' look that
threatens the profane ' ; that something, and above
all that sense of some one, that Holy One, who in-
habits eternity and its praises, who makes darkness
His secret place, His pavilion round about, darkness
and thick clouds of the sky-
And again, that in the deepest, thickest night of
doubt, of fear, of sorrow, of despair ; that then, and
all the most then — if we will look in the right
airt, and with the seeing eye and the understanding
heart — there may be seen that pillar of fire, of
light and of heat, to guide and quicken and cheer ;
knowledge and love, that everlasting love which we
know to be the Lord's. — Dr. John Brown in Horoe
Subsecivce.
Compare also the last paragraph of Huxley's essay
on ' Administrative Nihilism ' with its account of true
education, which, among other benefits, ' promotes
morality and refinement, by teaching men to discipline
themselves, and by leading them to see that the
highest, as it is the only permanent, content is to be
attained, not by grovelling in the rank and steam-
ing valleys of sense, but by continual striving towards
those high peaks, where, resting in eternal calm,
reason discerns the undefined but bright ideal of the
highest Good — " a cloud by day, a pillar of fire by
night".'
References. — XIV. — T. A. Gurney, The Living Lord and
the Opened Grave, p. 57. XIV. 2. — H. H. Snell, Christian
World Pulpit, vol. lxviii. 1905, p. 395. XIV. 3.— Spurgeon,
Sermons, vol. xxxvii. No. 2188. XIV. 10 and 15.— H. E. Piatt,
Church Times, vol. xliii. 1900, p. 60.
' Stand still and see the salvation of the Lord.'— Exodus
xiv. 13.
In explaining (Apologia, pp. 262 f.) why he had not
come forward in defence of Catholic truth against
the scientific heresies of the age, Newman writes : ' It
seemed to be specially a time in which Christians had
a call to be patient, in which they had no other way
of helping those who were alarmed than that of ex-
horting them to have a little faith and fortitude and
to " beware," as the poet says, " of dangerous steps." '
In this policy he also felt the Papal authorities would
support him. ' And I interpret recent acts of that
authority as fulfilling my expectation ; I interpret
them as tying the hands of a controversialist, such as
I should be, and teaching us that true wisdom which
Moses inculcated on his people, when the Egyptians
were pursuing them, " fear ye not, stand still ; the
Lord shall fight for you, ye shall hold your peace ".'
Faith, whether we receive it in the sense of adher-
ence to resolution, obedience to law, regardfulness of
promise, in which from all time it has been the test,
as the shield, of the true being and life of man ; or
in the still higher sense of trustfulness in the pre-
sence, kindness, and word of God, in which form it
has been exhibited under the Christian dispensation.
For, whether in one or other form — whether the
faithfulness of men whose path is chosen and portion
fixed, in the following and receiving of that portion,
as in the Thermopylae camp ; or the happier faith-
fulness of children in the good giving of their Father,
and of subjects in the conduct of their king, as in
the ' Stand still and see the salvation of God ' of the
Red Sea shore, there is rest and peacefulness, the
' standing still ' in both, the quietness of action
determined, of spirit unalarmed, of expectation un-
impatient. — Ruskin, Modem Painters (vol. n.).
References. — XIV. 13. — H. H. Snell, Christian World
Pulpit, vol. lxviii. 1905, p. 395. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. ix.
No. 541.
' Speak unto the children of Israel, that they go forward.'
— Exodus xiv. 15.
The Elizabethan seamen, says Froude in his essay
on 'England's Forgotten Worthies,' in all seas and
spheres 'are the same indomitable God-fearing men
whose life was one great liturgy. " The ice was strong,
but God was stronger," says one of Frobisher's men,
after grinding a night and a day among the icebergs,
not waiting for God to come down and split the ice
for them, but toiling through the long hours himself
and the rest fending all the vessel with poles and
planks, with death glaring at them out of the rocks.'
Dr. W. C. Smith quoted this text at the Jubilee
Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland in 1893.
He said : ' When Moses first appeared before Pharaoh,
all he asked was that the people might be allowed to
go a three days' journey into the desert that they
might offer to the Lord those sacrifices which it was
not lawful to offer in Egypt, where bulls and goats
Ver. 16.
EXODUS XIV
Ver. 27.
were not sacrifices but deities. There was no sort of
deception in that request. Moses, you may be very
certain, honestly meant to return as soon as the
religious rites had been performed. But when Israel
had left Goshen the very first word that God said to
his servant was " Speak to the children of Israel that
they go forward ". Nulla vestigia retrorsum. Their
way lay onward and they were to realize the great
history and the noble destiny to which they had been
appointed.'
References. — XIV. 15. — R. Nicholl*, Christian World
Pulpit, vol. xxxviii. 1890, p. 138. F. W. Farrar, Christian
World Pulpit, vol. lix. 1901, p. 1. J. H. Devonport, Christian
World Pulpit, vol. lxi. 1902, p. 253. W. Ross Taylor, Christian
World Pulpit, vol. lxvi. 1904, p. 168. H. H. Snell, Christian
World Pulpit, vol. lxviii. 1905, p. 395. Bishop Creighton,
University and other Sermons, p. 160. J. Vaughan, Sermons
Preached in Christ Church, Brighton, (7th Series), p. 15.
Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. x. No. 548 ; ibid. vol. xlix. No. 2851.
' Lift thou up thy rod, and stretch out thine hand over the sea.
— Exodus xiv. i6.
When Moses held the rod over the Red Sea, he was
the sign of man holding up the serpent in triumph
to the view of the creation, and in right of his victory
exercising dominion, long lost but now recovered.
That is still a prophecy. . . . The power by which
this is now carrying forward is the spirit of Christ in
man's heart. This is the true preparation for the
cleansing of the leprosy and the binding of Satan ;
and the signs are prophetic pictures to animate hope.
— Thomas Erskine.
Perhaps it is not improbable that the grand moral
improvements of a future age may be accomplished
in a manner that shall leave nothing to man but
humility and grateful adoration. His pride so obstin-
ately ascribes to himself whatever good is effected on
the globe, that perhaps the Deity will evince his own
interposition by events as evidently independent of
the right of man as the rising of the sun. It may be
that some of them may take place in a manner but
little connected even with human operation. Or if
the activity of men shall be employed as the means
of producing all of them, there will probably be as
palpable a disproportion between the instrument and
the events, as there was between the rod of Moses
and the amazing phenomena which followed when it
was stretched forth. No Israelite was foolish enough
to ascribe to the rod the power that divided the sea ;
nor will the witnesses of the moral wonders to come
attribute them to man.— John Foster, on the Appli-
cation of the Epithet Romantic, v.
References. — XIV. 16. — J. M. Neale, Sermons Preached in
Sackville College Chapel, vol. iii. p. 320. XIV. 19.— N. M.
Wright, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lxxii. 1907, p. 57.
XIV. 19, 20.— Spurgeou, Sermons, vol. xxx. No. 1793. XIV.
19-31. — A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture — Exodus,
etc., p. 52. XIV. 20.— E. E. Cleal, Christian World Pulpit,
vol. lxiv. 1903, p. 425.
' And the children of Israel went into the midst of the sea.' —
Exodus xiv. 22.
The Israelites, marching up to the edge of the Red
Sea till the waves parted before their feet, step by
step, are often taken as an illustration of what our
faith should do — advance to the brink of possibility,
and then the seemingly impossible may be found to
open. — Dr. John Ker, Thoughts for Heart and Life,
p. 101.
' And the Lord looked unto the host of the Egyptians through
the pillar of fire and of the cloud, and troubled the host of
the Egyptians.' — Exodus xiv. 24.
Compare the dialogue between Helstone and Moore
in the third chapter of Shirley, where in answer to
the latter's cynical remark that ' God often defends
the powerful,' Helstone cries out : ' What ! I suppose
the handful of Israelites standing dry-shod on the
Asiatic side of the Red Sea, was more powerful than
the host of the Egyptians drawn up on the African
side ? Were they more numerous ? Were they better
appointed ? Were they more mighty, in a word — eh ?
Don't speak, or you'll tell a lie, Moore ; you know
you will. They were a poor over-wrought band of
bondsmen. Tyrants had oppressed them through
four hundred years ; a feeble mixture of women and
children diluted their thin ranks ; their masters, who
roared to follow them through the divided flood,
were a set of pampered Ethiops, about as strong and
brutal as the lions of Libya. They were armed, horsed,
and charioted, the poor Hebrew wanderers were afoot ;
few of them, it is likely, had better weapons than
their shepherds' crooks, or their masons' building-
tools ; their meek and mighty leader himself had only
his rod. But bethink you, Robert Moore, right was
with them ; the God of Battles was on their side.
Crime and the lost archangel generalled the ranks of
Pharaoh, and which triumphed ? We know that well :
"The Lord saved Israel that day out of the hand of
the Egyptians, and Israel saw the Egyptians dead
upon the sea-shore " ; yea, " the depths covered then),
they sank to the bottom as a stone". The right
hand of the Lord became glorious in power ; the right
hand of the Lord dashed in pieces the enemy ! '
' You are all right ; only you forget the true parallel :
France is Israel, and Napoleon is Moses. Europe,
with her old over-gorged empires and rotten dynasties,
is corrupt Egypt ; gallant France is the Twelve
Tribes, and her fresh and vigorous Usurper the Shep-
herd of Horeb.' ' I scorn to answer you.'
' And the Lord overthrew the Egyptians in the midst of the
sea.' — Exodus xiv. 27.
Napoleon, when at Suez, made an attempt to follow
the supposed steps of Moses by passing the creek at
this point ; but it seems, according to the testimony
of the people of Suez, that he and his horsemen
managed the matter in a way more resembling the
failure of the Egyptians than the success of the
Israelites. According to the French account,
Napoleon got out of the difficulty by that warrior-like
presence of mind which served him so well when the
fate of nations depended on the decision of a moment ;
he commanded his horsemen to disperse in all direc-
tions, in order to multiply the chances of finding
shallow water, and was thus enabled to discover a
98
Ver. 29.
EXODUS XIV., XV
Vv. 13-18.
line by which he and his people were extricated. The
story told by the people of Suez is very different ;
they declare that Napoleon parted from his horse, got
water-logged and nearly drowned, and was only fished
out by the aid of the people on shore. — Kinglake,
Eothen, chap. xxn.
• But the children of Israel walked upon dry land in the midst
of the sea.' — Exodus xiv. 29.
The sack of Jewry after Jewry was the sign of
popular triumph during the Barons' War. With its
close fell on the Jews the more terrible persecution of
the law. . . .At last persecution could do no more,
and on the eve of his struggle with Scotland, Edward,
eager for popular favour, and himself swayed by the
fanaticism of his subjects, ended the long agony of the
Jews by their expulsion from the realm. Of the six-
teen thousand who preferred exile to apostasy few
reached the shores of France. Many were wrecked,
others robbed and flung overboard. One shipmaster
turned out a crew of wealthy merchants on to a
sandbank, and bade them call a new Moses to save
them from the sea. — Green, Short History of English
People, pp. 198-199.
References. — XIV. 30. — Phillips Brooks, The Mystery of
Iniquity, p. 55. C. Brown, The Birth of a Nation, p. 130.
' And Israel saw that great work which the Lord did upon the
Egyptians : and the people feared the Lord.' — Exodus xiv.
Some believe the better for seeing Christ's sepulchre ;
and, when they have seen the Red Sea, doubt not of
the miracle. Now contrarily, I bless myself and am
thankful that I lived not in the days of miracles ;
that I never saw Christ nor His disciples. I would
not have been one of those Israelites that passed the
Red Sea ; nor one of Christ's patients, on whom he
wrought His wonders ; then had my faith been thrust
upon me ; nor should I enjoy that greater blessing
pronounced to all who believe and saw not. — Sib
Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (pt. i.).
References. — XV. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxix. No.
2301. XV. 1, 2.— Ibid. vol. xxxi. No. 1867. XV. 1-21.—
Ibid. vol. xliv. No. 2509.
' The Lord is my strength and song, and He is become my
salvation : He is my God.' — Exodus xv. 2.
Happy the heart that has learned to say my God !
All religion is contained in that short expression, and
all the blessedness that man or angel is capable of. —
Thomas Erskine.
' He is my God . . . my father's God.'
Compare the early reflection of Dr. John G. Paton,
the New Hebrides missionary, as he watched the
piety of his old father in the home : ' He walked with
God ; why may not I ? '
Lord, I find my Saviour's genealogy strangely
chequered with four remarkable changes in four
immediate generations : —
1. Rehoboam begat Abijam : i.e. a bad father
begat a bad son.
2. Abijam begat Asa : i.e. a bad father begat
a good son.
3. Asa begat Jehoshaphat : i.e. a good father be-
gat a good son.
4. Jehoshaphat begat Joram : i.e. a good father
begat a bad son.
I see, Lord, from this that my father's piety cannot
be entailed : that is bad news for me. But I see also
that actual impiety is not always hereditary : that is
good news for my son. — Thomas Fuller.
References. — XV. 2. — R. E. Hutton, The Crown of Christ,
vol. i. p. 53. XV. 2-13. — A. Maclaren, Expositions 'of Holy
Scripture — Exodus, etc., p. 61.
'The Lord is a Man of war.' — Exodus xv. 3.
It may help us to understand the scrupulous regard
for the rights of the God of War entertained by the
Gauls, the Hebrews, and other nations of antiquity,
if we look for a moment at the traces of this feeling
which manifest themselves among the civilized nations
of modem times : I need only allude to the singing of
solemn Te Deums after victory, or to our praying in
this country that our Queen ' may be strengthened to
vanquish and overcome all her enemies,' and to our
adorning our cathedrals with the tattered flags of the
foreigner. That ' the Lord is a Man of war ' is a
sentiment by no means confined to the song of Moses ;
it is found to be still a natural one ; and I need only
remind you of the poet Wordsworth's ode for the
English thanksgiving on the morning of the 18th day
of January, 1816, and more especially the following
lines : —
The fierce tornado sleeps within thy courts-
He hears the word — he flies —
And navies perish in their ports ;
For thou art angry with thine enemies.
Rhys, Celtic Heathenism, p. 52.
ANTICIPATIONS OF FAITH
' Thou in Thy mercy hast led forth the people which Thou hast
redeemed : Thou hast guided them in Thy strength unto
Thy holy habitation,' etc. — Exodus xv. 13-18.
' Thou in Thy mercy hast led forth the people which
Thou hast redeemed.' He had only led them forth a
single night's journey, but in that single night's journey
they saw the completion of the whole long journey
they were to take. In the anticipation of faith victory
is already obtained before the war has commenced.
I. When we come to ask ourselves the secret of this
triumphant anticipation we shall find that it is all ex-
pressed in one single sentence — ' Thou hast redeemed '.
The joyful confidence of the Israelites sprang not
merely from the abstract consideration that the God
Who had shown Himself so strong to save alreadv,
was capable of any further exhibition of strength that
might be demanded of Him. Beyond all that there
was the consideration that the deliverance of the pre-
sent was a part of one grand purpose completed already
in the mind of God ; a purpose which had been in-
dicated to them in the mission of Moses.
II. We too have been the subjects of a great deliver-
ance, a deliverance as supernatural in its character
and as astonishing in its conditions as ever was the
94
Vv. 14-15.
EXODUS XV
Vv. 23-24.
deliverance of Israel from Egypt. This deliverance
is also the product of redemption. We are saved in
order that we may rise to the prize of our high calling,
and become inheritors of our true Land of Promise ;
and the first great deliverance is with us also surely
an earnest and a pledge of all that is to follow.
III. Instead of joyous anticipation, how common a
thing it is to meet with gloomy forebodings on the
part of the newborn children of God, fresh from the
cross of Christ, just rising, as we may say, spiritually
out of the waters of the Red Sea.
How common a thing it is to meet with young
Christians who seem indeed to be on the right side of
the Red Sea, but who appear to be more inclined to
wring their hands in terror than to ' sound the loud
timbrel ' in exultation !
And thus our anticipations of coming disaster take
all the bloom off our early joy, and mar our triumph
before it has well begun. And thus we pave the way
for failure ; for if we begin by doubting the God who
has redeemed us, at the very outset of our Christian
life, when the great fact of deliverance lies fresh be-
fore our view, how can we expect to trust Him better
when the actual struggle has begun ? and not to trust
Him is to ensure necessary defeat and failure.
Now all this dismal apprehension, this cowardly
misgiving, comes of our not sufficiently realizing what
it is that is contained in redemption. We do not see
that our justification is not only a fact of the present,
but a pledge for the future.
We forget that we have passed from nature into
grace, and now we have to count upon Divine re-
sources. We forget that Christ is the First and the
Last ; that as He is the Alpha, so He is also the
Omega, and that He is all the alphabet between the
Alpha and Omega. — W. Hay M. H. Aitken, The
Highway of Holiness, p. 63.
' The people shall hear and be afraid ; sorrow shall take hold
on the inhabitants of Palestina. Then the dukes of Edom
shall be amazed ; the mighty men of Moab, trembling
shall take hold upon them ; all the inhabitants of Canaan
shall melt away.' — Exodus xv. 14-15.
Dr. Chalmers used to quote these verses as an illus-
tration of verbal suggestiveness : ' I have often felt,
in reading Milton and Thomson, a strong poetical
effect in the bare enumeration of different countries,
and this strongly enhanced by the statement of some
common and prevailing emotion, which passed from
one to another.'
Reference. — XV. 17. — A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy
Scripture — Exodus, etc., p. 03.
' And Miriam the prophetess took a timbrel in her hand ; and
all the women went out after her with timbrels and with
dances.' — Exodus xv. 20.
In the seventh letter of Time and Tide Ruskin
describes a monotonous, twitching, girl's dance which
he once witnessed in the theatre. ' While this was
going on, there was a Bible text repeating itself over
and over again in my head, whether I would or no,'
viz., this verse of Exodus. ' The going forth of the
women of Israel after Miriam with timbrels and
with dances was, as you doubtless remember, their ex-
pression of passionate triumph and thankfulness,
after the full accomplishment of their deliverance
from the Egyptians. That deliverance had been by
the utter death of their enemies, and accompanied by
stupendous miracle ; no human creature could, in an
hour of triumph, be surrounded by circumstances more
solemn. Consider only for yourself what that " seeing
of the Egyptians dead upon the seashore " meant to
every soul that saw it. And then reflect that these
intense emotions of mingled horror, triumph and
gratitude were expressed, in the visible presence of the
Deity, by music and dancing . . . both music and
dancing being, among all ancient nations, an ap-
pointed and very principal part of the worship of the
gods, and that very theatrical entertainment at
which I sate thinking on these things for you — that
pantomime, which depended throughout for its suc-
cess on our appeal to the vices of the lower London
populace, was, in itself, nothing but a corrupt rem-
nant of the religious ceremonies which guided the
most serious faiths of the Greek mind.'
References. — XV. 20. — J. Vickery, Ideals of Life, p. 271.
J. G. Stevenson, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lvii. 1905, p. 38.
XV. 22-26. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxix. No. 2301.
' And when they came to Marah, they could not drink of the
waters of Marah, for they were bitter, and the people mur-
mured against Moses.' — Exodus xv. 23-24.
The enthusiasm with which men of all classes had
welcomed William to London at Christmas had
greatly abated before the close of February. The
new king had, at the very moment at which his fame
and fortune reached the highest point, predicted the
coming reaction. That reaction might, indeed, have
been predicted by a less sagacious observer of human
affairs. For it is to be chiefly ascribed to a law as
certain as the laws which regulate the succession of
the seasons and the course of the trade winds. It is
the nature of man to overrate present evil, and to
underrate present good ; to long for what he has not,
and to be dissatisfied with what he has. This pro-
pensity, as it appears in individuals, has often been
noticed both by laughing and by weeping philo-
sophers. It was a favourite theme of Horace and of
Pascal, of Voltaire and of Johnson. To its influence
on the fate of great communities may be ascribed most
of the revolutions and counter revolutions recorded
in history. A hundred generations have passed
away since the first great national emancipation of
which an account has come down to us. We read in
the most ancient of books that a people bowed to the
dust under a cruel yoke, scourged to toil by hard
taskmasters, not supplied with straw, yet compelled to
furnish the daily tale of bricks, became sick of life,
and raised such a cry of misery as pierced the heavens.
The slaves were wonderfully set free ; at the mo-
ment of their liberation they raised a song of grati-
tude and triumph ; but in a few hours they began to
regret their slavery, and to reproach the leader who
had decoyed them away from the savoury fare of the
house of bondage to the dreary waste which still
95
Ver. 2.
EXODUS XVI
Ver. 15.
separated them from the land flowing with milk and
honey. Since that time the history of every great
deliverer has been the history of Moses retold. Down
to the present hour rejoicings like those on the shore
of the Red Sea have ever been speedily followed by
murmurings like those at the Waters of Strife. The
most just and salutary revolution must produce much
suffering. The most just and salutary revolution
cannot produce all the good that had been expected
from it by men of uninstructed minds and sanguine
tempers. Even the wisest cannot, while it is still re-
cent, weigh quite fairly the evils which it has caused
against the evils which it has removed. For the
evils which it has caused are felt, and the evils which
it has removed are felt no longer.
Thus it was now in England. The public was, as
it always is during the cold fits which follow its hot
fits, sullen, hard to please, dissatisfied with itself, dis-
satisfied with those who had lately been its favourites.
— Macaulay, History of England, chap. xi.
Though every man of us may be a hero for one fatal
minute, very few remain so after a day's march even.
— George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard
Feverel, chap. xxx.
References. — XV. 23. — T. L. Cuyler, Christian World
Pulpit, vol. lxvii. 1905, p. 62. XV. 23-25.— Spurgeon,
Sermons, vol. xvii. No. 987. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy
Scripture — Exodus, etc., p. 64. R. Winterbotham, Sermons
and Expositions, p. 46. XV. 25. — J. M. Neale, Sermons for the
Church Year, vol. ii. p. 185. T. G. Rooke, The Church in the
Wilderness, p. 36. F. B. Meyer, The British Weekly Pulpit,
vol. ii. p. 561. XV. 26. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxviii.
No. 1664. XV. 27.— C. Silvester Home, Christian World
Pulpit, vol. lxvi. 1904, p. 87. G. Dawson, Sermons, p. 19.
XVI.— J. McNeill, British Weekly Pulpit, vol. ii. p. 489.
XVI. 1-5, 11-36. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxix. No. 2332.
' And the whole congregation of the children of Israel mur-
mured against Moses and Aaron.' — Exodus xvi. 2.
It is ' worthy of remark,' Milton indignantly observes
in his Second Defence, ' that those who are the most
unworthy of liberty are wont to behave most un-
gratefully towards their deliverers '.
Compare the further application of this passage by
Milton in his tract on ' The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth, and the Excel-
lence thereof, compared with the Inconveniences and
Dangers of Readmitting Kingship in this Nation '.
Towards the close of his remonstrance, he writes thus :
' If the people be so affected as to prostitute religion and
liberty to the vain and groundless apprehension that
nothing but kingship can restore trade . . . and that
therefore we must forego and set to sale religion,
liberty, honour, safety, all concernments Divine or
human, to keep up trading : if, lastly, after all this
light among us, the same reason shall pass for current,
to put our necks again under kingship, as was made
use of by the Jews to return back to Egypt and to
the worship of their idol queen, because they falsely
imagined that they then lived in more plenty and
prosperity ; our condition is not sound, but rotten,
both in religion and all civil prudence. . . . Rut I
trust I shall have spoken persuasion to abundance of
sensible and ingenuous men ; to some, perhaps, whom
God may raise from these stones to become children
of reviving liberty ; and may reclaim, though they
seem now choosing them a captain back for Egypt,
to bethink themselves a little, and consider whence
they are rushing ; to exhort this torrent also of the
people, not to be so impetuous, but to keep their one
channel.'
Contrast the character of the Duke of Wellington,
as Coleridge in his Table-Talk (4 July, 1830) draws
it : ' He seems to be unaccustomed to, and to despise,
the inconsistencies, the weaknesses, the bursts of
heroism followed by prostration and cowardice, which
invariably characterize all popular efforts. He forgets
that, after all, it is from such efforts that all the
great and noble institutions of the world have come.'
' Behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you.'—
Exodus xvi. 4.
St. John of the Cross notes on this text that the
manna was not given to the Israelites until the corn
they had brought from Egypt failed. ' This teaches
us that we must first renounce all things, for this
manna of the angels neither belongs nor is given to
the palate which still relishes the food of men.' He
quotes the words of Numbers xi. 4, ' Who shall give
us flesh to eat ? ' ' They would not content themselves
with that so simple manna, but desired and begged
for manna of flesh. And our Lord was displeased
because they wished to mix so low and coarse a food
with one so high and pure : — a manna which, simple
as it was, contains within itself the savour of all
foods.' — Obras, vol. 1. p. 19.
References. — XVI. 4. — J. B. Mozley, Sermons Parochial
and Occasional, p. 287. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxix. No.
2332. XVI. 4-12.— A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scrip-
ture— Exodus, etc., p. 65. XVI. 14, 15.— R. E. Hutton, The
Crown of Christ, vol. ii. p. 239.
HOLY COMMUNION : THE BREAD OF LIFE
' And when the children of Israel saw it, they said one to
another, What is it ? for they wist not what it was. And
Moses said unto them, It is the bread which the Lord
hath given you to eat.'— Exodus xvi. 15.
Our subject is the supply given by God to His people
for one of their great needs. In the wilderness, where
no food could grow or could be obtained, God gave
His people bread from heaven to eat.
I. The Jews expected the Messiah to give them
food from heaven. The manna they expected from
their second Redeemer may not have been bodily
food ; it was, according to some interpreters, food for
the soul. The second Redeemer brought with Him
from heaven heavenly food. Rut, alas ! the Jews did
not recognize the heavenly food when it came.
II. We are travelling through the wilderness of
our promised land, and that wilderness provides us
with nothing which can supply the wants of our
being. God gives us day by day our daily bread,
but man cannot live by bread alone. So God gives
96
Ver. 16.
EXODUS XVI., XVII
Ver. 4.
us something more precious, something which can
really sustain our life. He gives us that which is no
product of earth, the true bread from heaven — the
living bread †” the only bread which can support us
in our journeyings — the only food which can deliver
us from death, and that food is the Son of God
Whom He sent to be the life of the world.
III. And how do we feed upon Him ? We can feed
upon Him at any time. We do feed upon Him when
our faith goes forth from us and takes hold of Him
as the source and stay of our life. But undoubtedly
there is a special means provided for us by God that
we may feed upon Him, namely, the Sacrament of
His Body and Blood.
We need faith above all in our Communions.
Faith to realize the Presence of the Saviour — faith
to feed upon His Body and Blood— faith to assimilate
the Divine life which flows to us from Him. Having
deep repentance and true faith, we shall necessarily
have fervent love, for we shall know and feel the
greatness of God's love to us unworthy sinners.
Having then all three Christian virtues, we shall
nourish our souls to everlasting life by feeding on the
manna in Christ's own way. And having the Divine
life within us, we shall pass along our desert way, till
Jordan being past, we shall no longer need to receive
our heavenly gifts through earthly signs. Sacra-
ments will cease when we see our Lord face to face,
even as the manna ceased when the Israelites entered
Canaan. — F. Watson, The Christian Life Here and
Hereafter, p. 79.
Reference. — XVI. 15. — J. M. Neale, Sermons on the
Blessed Sacrament, p. 24.
' Gather ye of it, every man.' — Exodus xvi. i6.
The same hand that rained manna upon their tents
could have rained it into their mouths or laps. God
loves we should take pains for our spiritual food.
Little would it have availed them, that the manna
lay about their tents, if they had not gone forth and
gathered it, beaten it, baked it. Let salvation be
never so plentiful, if we bring it not home and make
it ours by faith, we are no whit the better. — Bishop
Hall.
AN OMER FOR EACH MAN
How great a virtue is temperance, how much of
moment through the whole life of man ! Yet God
commits the managing so great a trust, without par-
ticular law or prescription, wholly to the demeanour
of every grown man, and therefore when He Himself
tabled the Jews from heaven, that omer, which was
every man's daily portion of manna, is computed to
have been more than might have well sufficed the
heartiest feeder thrice as many meals. For those
actions which enter not into a man, rather than issue
out of him, and therefore defile not, God trusts him
with the gift of reason to be his own chooser. — Milton,
Areopagitica.
References. — XVI. 29. — R. F. Horton, Christian World
Pulpit, vol. lxx. 1906, p. 1. XVI. 35.— C. Perren, Revival
Sermons in Outline, p. 229. XVII. 1-7.— K. Moody-Stuart,
Light from the Holy Hills, p. 42.
1 And Moses said unto them, Why strive ye with me ? Where-
fore do ye tempt the Lord?' — Exodus xvn. 2.
In the first expostulation condemning them of in-
justice^ — since not he, but the Lord, hath afflicted
them ; in the second, of presumption ; that since it
was God that tempted them by want, they should
tempt Him by murmuring. In the one He would have
them see their wrong ; in the other, their danger. —
Bishop Hall.
You, therefore, who wish to remain free, either in-
stantly be wise, or, as soon as possible, cease to be
fools ; if you think slavery an intolerable evil, learn
obedience to reason and the government of yourselves ;
and finally bid adieu to your discussions, your jeal-
ousies, your superstitions, your outrages, your rapine,
and your lusts. — Milton, Second Defence.
' And Moses cried unto the Lord, saying, What shall I do unto
this people? they be almost ready to stone me.' — Exodus
xvn. 4.
Compare John Foster's remarks to a misanthropist,
in the fourth chapter of A Man's Writing Memoirs
of Himself: 'Frail and changeable in virtue, you
might perhaps have been good under a series of
auspicious circumstances ; but the glory had been to
be victoriously good against malignant ones. Moses
lost none of his generous concern for a people on
whom you would have invoked the waters of Noah
or the fires of Sodom to return ; and that Greater
than Moses, who endured from men such a matchless
excess of injustice, while for their sake alone He so-
journed and suffered on earth, was not alienated to
misanthropy in his life or at His death.
' This people.' — Exodus xvii. 4.
The glory of all heroes and patriots grows pale
before that of Moses ; others deliver, he creates a
nation. With him, 'this people' is, for the first
time, recognized as a unity, the chaos of warring
tribes is subdued into a cosmos, and the unity of a
family expanded into the unity of a possible nation.
— Miss Wedgwood, Message of Israel, p. 44.
Look almost where you will in the wide field of
history, you find religion, whenever it works freely
and mightily, either giving birth to and sustaining
states, or else raising them up to a second life after
their destruction. It is a great state-builder in the
hands of Moses and Ulfilas, Gregory and Nicholas. —
Sir John Seeley, Natural Religion, pp. 188 f.
He did not, like the Egyptians, fashion his works of
art out of bricks and granite. He erected human
pyramids, he carved out human obelisks, he took a
poor shepherd tribe, and from it he created a people
fit to defy the centuries, a great, a holy, an eternal
people, a people of God ! With greater justice than
the Roman poet might this artist, this son of Amram
and Jochebed, boast that he had erected a monument
which should outlive all the creations of brass. —
Heine.
97
Ver. 7.
EXODUS XVII., XVIII
Ver. 18.
THE LESSON OF MASSAH AND MERIBAH
' He called the name of the place Massah, and Meribah,
because of the striving of the children of Israel, and because
they tempted the Lord, saying, Is the Lord among us,
or not?' — Exodus xvii. 7.
I. Few incidents during the wanderings in the
wilderness made a deeper impression upon the Jews
than the striking of the rock by Moses, and the
supply of water from it which followed, if, at least,
we may judge from the number of references to it in
their national literature.
But if, on the one hand, the incident thus stood
out brightly as a signal manifestation of God's power
and love, there was a darker side to it as well, for on
the other hand, it was a no less striking and mourn-
ful example of the faithlessness and unbelief of God's
people, and as such also it made a deep impression.
So in that Psalm which the Christian Church has
taken for daily use in her morning service there is a
reference which the English reader is apt to miss, for
when in the Venite the appeal is made, ' To-day if
ye will hear His voice,' etc., there is in the original a
definite and clear allusion to that which happened
' at Meribah, in the day of Massah ' ; and these
names, which were given to the spot in commemora-
tion of the incident, stood forth to all time as a
memorial of Israel's ingratitude, for Meribah means
strife and Massah temptation. It was indeed a
tempting of God. After so many manifestations of
His power and goodness towards them they were still
unable to trust Him for an instant.
II. When Israel is said to have ' tempted Jehovah,'
it means that they acted as if doubting whether His
promise was true, or whether He was really faithful
to the character in which He had so often revealed
Himself as a present God, able and ready to supply
their every need. It indicated on their part a
temper of distrust, a readiness to fall into a panic, to
doubt God, and so to forsake Him at the first diffi-
culty ; and for this it is that it is so often alluded to
in the subsequent history as a warning and example
to all time.
III. Can we say that we of to-day have no need to
lay to heart the warning which is writ so large on the
face of the story, and that the temper shown by
Israel has no counterpart among us now? The
doubt which Israel felt of God's power and presence,
because of an unexpected difficulty and a new prob-
lem, seems to me typical of that timid, faithless
attitude which comes over so many when the advance
of knowledge and discovery raises some difficulty
with regard to the Christian faith. — Bishop Gibson,
Messages from the Old Testament, p. 29.
References. — XVII. 8. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xii.
No. 712. XVII. 8, 9.— Ibid. vol. xxxvii. No. 2233. XVII.
8-11.— R. E. Hutton, The Crown of Christ, vol. ii. p. 509.
XVII. 9.— Ibid. vol. iii. No. 112.
' Choose us out men, and go out, fight with Amalek.' — Exodus
xvii. 9.
Then only can we pray with hope, when we have
done our best. In vain shall Moses be upon the hill,
if Joshua be not in the valley. Prayer without
means is a mockery of God. — Bishop Hall.
' And it came to pass, when Moses held up his hand, that Israel
prevailed.' — Exodus xvii. ii.
Moses, when the battle was raging, held up his arms
to heaven, with the rod of God in his hand ; and thus
Israel overcame Amalek. Hence a notion got abroad
through the world that in times of difficulty or dan-
ger the mightiest weapon a man can make use of is
prayer. But Moses' arms grew heavy ; and he was
forced to call in Aaron and Hur to hold them up. In
like manner do we all too readily weary of prayer, and
feel it become a burthen, and let our hands drop ; and
then Amalek prevails. . . . As our flesh is so weak,
that our prayers soon drop and become faint, unless
they are upheld, Christ and the Holy Spirit vouch-
safe to uphold our prayers, and to breathe the power
of faith into them, so that they may mount heaven-
ward, and to bear them up to the very Throne of
Grace. — Julius Hare in Guesses at Truth.
References. — XVII. 11. — A. F. Winnington Ingram,
Under the Dome, p. 75. H.I.M. William II. of Germany,
Christian World Pulpit, vol. lix. 1901, p. 49.
'And Aaron and Hur stayed up his hands.' — Exodus xvii. 12.
Aaeon was brother to Moses : there cannot be a more
brotherly office than to help one another in our
prayers, and to excite our mutual devotions. No
Christian may think it enough to pray alone. He is
no true Israelite that will not be ready to lift up the
weary hands of God's saints. — Bishop Hall.
We do not find that Joshua's hands were heavy in
fighting, but Moses' hands were heavy in praying.
The more spiritual any service is, the more apt we are
to fail and flag in it. — Matthew Henry.
References.- — XVII. 12. — J. M. Neale, Sermons Preached
in a Religious House, vol. i. p. 34. XVII. 13. — T. Chamj>-
ness, New Coins from Old Gold, p. 66. XVII. 15.— A. Mac-
laren, Expositions of Holy Scripture — Exodus, etc., p. 72. Prof.
Findlay, British Weekly Pulpit, vol. ii. p. 285. T. G. Rooke,
The Church in the Wilderness, p. 53. XVIII. 3, 4.— A. Mac-
laren, Expositions of Holy Scripture — Exodus, etc., p. 80.
XVIII. 7.— D. Strong, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlii. 1892,
p. 166.
' In the thing wherein they dealt proudly He was above them.' —
Exodus xviii. ii.
You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong. ' No
man ever had a point of pride that was not injurious
to him,' said Burke. . . . Treat men as pawns and
ninepins, and you shall suffer as well as they. —
Emerson on Compensation.
' This thing is too heavy for thee : thou art not able to perform
it alone.' — Exodus xviii. 18.
' Manning,' says Mr. Purcell in his Life of the great
Cardinal (ii. p. 505), ' never understood early or late
the wisdom of co-operation ; never valued the virtue
of competition. His idea was the concentration of
authority ; one mind to conceive, one hand to exe-
cute. This narrowness of mind was his chief intel-
lectual defect. It led by degrees to the isolation of
his life.'
98
Ver. 21.
EXODUS XVIII. -XX
Ver. 1.
' Thou shalt provide out of all the people able men, such as fear
God, men of truth, hating covetousness.'— Exodus xviii. ax.
Oue Bishops in St. George's Company will be consti-
tuted in order founded on that appointed by the
first Bishop of Israel, namely, that their Primate, or
Supreme Watchman, shall appoint under him ' out of
all the people able men, such as fear God, men of
truth, hating covetousness, and place such over them
to be rulers (or, at the least, observers) of thousands,
rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of
tens '. . . . Of course for such work, I must be able to
find what Jethro of Midian assumes could be found
at once in Israel, these ' men of truth, hating covet-
ousness,' and all my friends laugh me to scorn for
thinking to find any such. Naturally, in a Christian
country, it will be difficult enough ; but I know there
are still that kind of people among Midianites, Caffres,
Red Indians, and the destitute afflicted, and tor-
mented, in dens and caves of the earth, where God
has kept them safe from missionaries : — and, as I
above said, even out of the rotten mob of money-
begotten traitors calling itself a ' people ' in England,
I do believe I shall be able to extricate, by slow
degrees, some faithful and true persons, hating covet-
ousness, and fearing God.
And you will please to observe that this hate and
fear are flat opposites one to the other ; so that if a
man fear or reverence God, he must hate covetous-
ness ; and if he fear or reverence covetousness, he must
hate God ; and there is no intermediate way whatso-
ever. — Ruskin, Fors Clavigera, Letter Ixii.
'Able men, such as fear God.'
The Italians have an ungracious proverb : Tanto
iuon che val niente : so good that he is good for
nothing. And one of the Doctors of Italy, Nicholas
Macchiavel, had the confidence to put in writing,
almost in plaine Termes : that the Christian Faith
had given up Good Men in prey to those that are
tyrannical and unjust. Which he spake because
indeed there never was Law or Sect or Opinion did so
much magnifie Goodnesse as the Christian religion
doth. Therefore to avoid the Scandall and the
Danger both, it is good to take knowledge of the
Errours of a Habit so excellent. Seeke the good of
other men, but be not in bondage to their Faces or
Fancies ; for that is but Facilitie or Softnesse ; which
taketh our honest Minde Prisoner. — Bacon, Essays
{'of Goodnesse').
One has nothing to fear from those who fear God. —
Eugenie de Guerin.
References. — XVIII. 21. — A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy
Scripture — Exodus, etc., p. 88. C. Silvester Home, Christian
World Pulpit, vol. xli. 1892, p. 403. XVIII. 24.— M. East-
wood, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xliv. 1893, p. 22.
' Ye have seen what I did unto the Egyptians, and how I bare
you on eagles' wings, and brought you unto Myself. Now
therefore, if ye will obey My voice indeed, and keep My
covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto Me.'
— Exodus xix. 4-5.
A great deliverance, whether of a man or of a society,
is a great claim on the life that is saved. The Israel-
ites carried with them a grand inheritance of holiness
and truth. They were saved because of it. As a
nation they betrayed it. — Edward Thring.
References. — XIX. 5, 6. — Bishop Gibson, The Old Testa-
ment in the New, p. 31. XIX. 6. — Bishop Diggle, Sermons for
Daily Life, p. 100.
' And the Lord said unto Moses, Go unto the people, and
sanctify them to-day and to-morrow.' — Exodus xix. 10.
After the deification of the emperors we are told
that it was considered impious so much as to use any
coarse expression in the presence of their images.
To Marius the whole of life seemed full of sacred
presences demanding of him a similar collectedness.
— Pater, Marius the Epicurean, i. p. 24.
' The Lord will come down in the sight of all the people upon
Mount Sinai.' — Exodus xix. ii.
Lady Beaumont told me that when she was a child,
previously to her saying her prayers, she endeavoured
to think of a mountain or great river, or something
great, in order to raise up her soul and kindle it. —
Coleridge, Anima Poetce, p. 56.
' There were thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon
the mount.' — Exodus xix. 16.
Rituals, Liturgies, Credos, Sinai Thunder : I know
more or less the history of these ; the rise, progress,
decline and fall of these. Can thunder from all the
thirty-two azimuths, repeated daily for centuries of
years, make God's laws more godlike to me ? Brother,
No. Perhaps I am grown to be a man now ; and
do not heed the thunder and the terror any longer !
Perhaps I am above being frightened ; perhaps it is
not Fear, but Reverence alone, that shall now lead
me. — Carlyle, Past and Present.
Reference. — XIX. 20. — K. Moody-Stuart, Light from the
Holy Hills, p. 35.
' And God spake all these words.' — Exodus xx. i.
' We have had thirty years of unexampled clerical
activity among us,' said Froude to the St. Andrews'
students in 1869. ' Churches have been doubled ; theo-
logical books, magazines, reviews, newspapers have been
passed out by the hundreds of thousands ; while by
the side of it there has sprung up an equally astonish-
ing development of moral dishonesty. . . . We have
false weights, false measures, cheating and shoddy
everywhere. Yet the clergy have seen all this grow
up in absolute indifference ; and the great question
which at this moment is agitating the Church of
England is the colour of the ecclesiastical petticoats.
Many a hundred sermons have I heard in England,
many a dissertation on the mysteries of the faith,
on the divine mission of the clergy, on apostolical
succession, on bishops, and justification, and the
theory of good works, and verbal inspiration, and the
efficacy of the sacrament ; but never, during these
thirty wonderful years, never one that I can recollect
on common honesty, or these primitive command-
ments, Thou shalt not lie, and Thou shalt not
steal.'
99
Ver. 2.
EXODUS XX
Ver. 2.
The teaching of art is the suggestion — far more con-
vincing than assertion — of an ethical science, the
germs of which are to the mass of mankind incom-
municable ; and the broad daylight of this teaching
can be diffused only by those who live in and absorb
the direct splendour of an unknown, and, to the
generality, an unknowable sun. The mere ignoring
of morality, which is what the more respectable of
modern artists profess, will not lift them into the
region of such teachers ; much less will the denial of
morality do so, as some modern artists seem to think.
The Decalogue is not art, but it is the guide-post
which points direct to where the source of art springs ;
and it is now, as in the days when Numa and Moses
made their laws : — he is profane who presents to the
gods the fruit of an unpruned vine ; that is, sensitive
worship before the sensitive soul has been sanctified
by habitual confession of and obedience to therational ;
and still worse than he who offers the Muses the ' false
fire ' of his gross senses, is he who heats the flesh-pots
of Egypt with flames from the altar, and renders
emotions, which were intended to make the mortal
immortal, themselves the means and the subjects of
corruption. Of all kinds of corruption, says St.
Francis of Sales, the most malodorous is rotten lilies.
— Coventry Patmore, Religio Poetce, pp. 88, 89.
There is no strange self-deceit more deeply and ob-
stinately fixed in men's hearts than this : that those
whom God favours may take liberties that others may
not ; that religious men may venture more safely to
transgress than others ; that good men may allow
themselves to do wrong things. There is no more
certain fact in the range of human experience than
that with strong and earnest religious feeling there
may be a feeble and imperfect hold on the moral law,
often a very loose sense of justice, truth, purity. . . .
All history is full of warnings: of great religious
characters spoiled or distorted, of great religious
efforts hopelessly marred and degenerate, because in
the eagerness and confidence of a good intention the
Ten Commandments were left on one side, or kept
out of view, or it was taken for granted that of course
they were obeyed, because people meant to do God
service. — R. W. Church, Discipline of Christian
Character, pp. 41, 48.
References.— XX. 1. — T. F. Lockyer, The Inspirations of
the Christian Life, p. 19. F. W. Farrar, The Voice from Sinai,
p. 37. H. Scott Holland, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lxix.
1906, p. 264. XX. 1, 2.— G. S. Barrett, Christian World Pul-
pit, vol. lxi. 1902, p. 214. XX. 1-11.— A. Maclaren, Exposi-
tions of Holy Scripture — Exodus, etc., p. 97. XX. 1-17. —
Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. li. No. 2928.
' I am the Lord thy God.' — Exodus xx. 2.
' I have many times essayed,' said Luther in his Table-
Talk, ' thoroughly to investigate the Ten Command-
ments ; but at the very outset, " I am the Lord thy
God," I stuck fast ; that very one word, I, put me to
a non-plus. He that has but one word of God before
him, and out of that word cannot make a sermon, can
never be a preacher.'
FROM EGYPT TO CANAAN
' I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the
land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.' — Exodus
XX. 2.
Life is a journey, on which we did not start for our-
selves to travel to God ; but He started us. He
brought us out of the dark night of nothingness, and
made us living creatures ; He gave us man's powers
of thinking and working and loving. It was not, we
may be sure, for nothing. This is true of the life of
each one of us ; it is true of that larger life of which
we are each one little part, the life of mankind on
earth. What God begins, He means to carry on, and
to bring to a good end. And so the very root truth
of religion is this : God is, and there is a purpose in
life.
I. Redemption has been wrought for us ; and we
walk in the light of it. Egypt and the Red Sea lie
behind. Consider what this means. What is the
bondage under which the world groans ? (1) There
is the bondage of sin : the evil which holds us, and
we cannot do right. But Jesus Christ broke that
bondage once for all by being entirely and perfectly
good ; by making a good human life a living reality,
and not merely a dream ; so that now even our im-
perfect goodnesses, joining on to Him, have got a sure
promise of victory. (2) There is the bondage of guilt.
But Jesus Christ broke that bondage too, He ' made
peace through the blood of His Cross '. (3) There is
once more the bondage of pain and grief and death :
but Christ suffered every pain of that iron slavery ;
He died the death of the slave, and through death,
like a new Red Sea, passed to victory.
II. How true it is that the Christian Church is the
body which bears the stamp of that deliverance. You
see it in her faith ; in her sure and certain hope ; in
her patience and her joy. She knows whence she
started : the start has made her sure of the finish.
III. And that is what in the Church each of us
must learn. The true Christian is a man upon whose
life, mind, and character a great deliverance from God
has set its stamp. The power of it was given to each
of us in our baptism. That is our beginning ; from
it we are to go, sure that God is with us, sure that
He will be with us to bring us through ; sure that He
Who brought us out of Egypt has strength to bring
us to Canaan, and means to do it ; sure that He will
perform the cause which we have in hand.
This is what gives its strength and firmness to the
Christian character, and lights it with hope and joy
and peace which are not of the world. But this also
is what makes us penitent. What will stir us really
to repent is not to be told that if we do perhaps God
will redeem us, but to know of a surety that He has
redeemed us ; that we have been forgetfully, ungrate-
fully, rebelliously sinning against our redemption ; but
that the Redeemer, with His long-suffering patience,
waits for us to turn to Him, and when we do so, will
accomplish for us His Redemption. — Bishop Talbot,
Sermons Preached in the Leeds Parish Church,
1889-95, p. 117.
100
Ver. 3.
EXODUS XX
Vv. 5, 6;.
Reference. — XX. 2, 3. — Bishop Gore, Christian World
Pulpit, vol. lvii. 1900, p. 155.
' Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.'— Exodus xx. 3.
' What is the whole Psalter,' said Luther, ' but
merely thought and exercises on the First Command-
ment ? '
'It is evident to my reason that the existence of
God,' says Coleridge in his Omeriana, ' is absolutely
and necessarily insusceptible of a scientific demon-
stration, and that Scripture has so represented it.
For it commands us to believe in one God. / am
the Lord thy God : thou shalt have none other gods
but Me. Now all commandment necessarily relates
to the will ; whereas all scientific demonstration is
independent of the will.'
All self-sacrifice, made solely for the love of man, or
for the gratification of some merely human ambition,
is not a righteous but a sinful thing — and, as sin, will
assuredly find its punishment. This furnishes, appar-
ently, a solution to the great mystery, why so many
noble self-sacrifices are so futile, so aimless, so posi-
tively injurious. ' I am the Lord thy God ; thou
shalt have none other gods but Me.' If we make to
ourselves idols of any sort — that is, if we allow love
to conquer right, and set aside what we ought to do
in favour of what we like to do, we suffer accordingly
— and God Himself, who is justice as well as mercy,
cannot save us from suffering. — Mrs. Ceaik, Sermons
Out of Church, pp. 39-40.
References. — XX. 3. — ' Plain Sermons ' by contributors
to the Tracts for the Times, vol. ix. p. 240. F. W. Farrar, The
Voice from Sinai, p. 105 ; see also Christian World Pulpit,
vol. xl. 1891, p. 129. H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, The School of
Christ, p. 73. W. C. E. Newbolt, Church Times, vol. xxix.
1891, p. 1059. G. Campbell Morgan, Christian World Pulpit,
vol. lvii. 1900, p. 61. G. S. Barrett, Christian World Pulpit,
vol. Ixi. 1902, p. 264.
' Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.' —
Exodus xx. 4.
' In regard to idolatry,' says Melanchthon to Calvin
in Landor's Imaginary Conversations, ' I see more
criminals who are guilty of it than you do. I go
beyond the stone quarry and the pasture, beyond the
graven image and the ox -stall. If we bow before the
distant image of God, while there exists within our
reach one solitary object of substantial sorrow, which
sorrow our efforts can remove, we are guilty (I pro-
nounce it) of idolatry ; we prefer the intangible effigy
to the living form. Surely we neglect the service of
our Maker if we neglect His children.'
' Thou shalt not.'— Exodus xx. 4.
There is a whole life reluctant as well as a life
consenting. The involuntary words, the thoughts
we would not think, the things we would not do, and
those that we do not love, are among the strongest
influences of our lives. — Miss Thackeray in Old
Kensington.
References.— XX. 4.— F. W. Farrar, The Voice from
Sinai, pp. 123, 321 ; see also Christian World Pulpit, vol.
xl. 1891, p. 145. XX. 4, 5.— J. Hamilton, Faith in God, p.
61. XX. 4, 5, 6. — Bishop Gore, Church Times, vol. xliii.
1900, p. 315; see also Christian World Pulpit, vol. lvii.
1900, p. 161. G. S. Barrett, ibid. vol. Ixi. 1902, p. 358.
AN INHERITANCE OF BLESSING
' I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of
the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth
generation of them that hate Me ; and shewing mercy
unto thousands of them that love Me, and keep My com-
mandments.' — Exodus xx. 5, 6.
I. Visiting the Sins of the Fathers upon the
Children. — The Jews spoke of that visitation as a
Divine punishment for a particular sin. Here we
have a law of nature, a law which is continually ful-
filling itself in that district of nature which we call
human society. The moral struggle of each man that
is born into the world is made harder for him by
each failure to resist sin on the part of those who
went before him. When we hear men speak of
the law of heredity, it is this that they generally
have in their minds, the transmitted tendency to
evil.
II. Visiting the Sins of the Fathers upon the
Children. — Is that all ? Nay ; for He shows mercy
unto thousands of them that love Him and keep
His commandments.
The inheritance of evil is not the sole inheritance
which we receive from our forefathers. The scathing
satire which Shakespeare puts into the mouth of
Antony : —
The evil that men do lives after them ;
The good is oft interred with their bones,
was certainly not intended to teach that the influence
of evil is more potent than the influence of good.
There is no law of life which tells that evil tendencies
are handed down from father to son which does not
tell us more plainly that good tendencies are. That,
indeed, is the very law by which the world grows.
The survival of the fittest — what does it mean but
that good is more enduring than evil ? That evil
propagates itself is true ; but in each succeeding
generation its influence becomes less and less baneful.
The curse is to the third and fourth generation.
Good, on the other hand, increases in power and in
fertility as it is handed on from one to another in the
march of the race.
III. The true inheritance of the Christian soul is
the grace of Jesus Christ, Incarnate, tempted, suffer-
ing, but victorious over sin as over death. Here again
is a heritage which comes to you through no conscious
act of your own. Just as surely as the disciplined
lives of your fathers make it easier for you to lead
disciplined lives, far more surely than the sins of your
fathers beset you in your conflict with sin is the grace
of Christ yours for battle, for endurance, for achieve-
ment. Here at least is an inheritance with no taint
of evil, which maybe used for yourselves and for those
who shall come after you in untold blessing. Ye see
your calling. And the Voice which calls you is the
Voice of Jesus Christ Himself, in whose Body ye are
101
Ver. 7
EXODUS XX
Ver. 12.
very members incorporate. — J. H. Bernard, Via
Domini, p. 92.
References. — XX. 5. — G. Tyrrell, Oil and Wine, p. 230.
C. Kingsley, Sermons on National Subjects, pp. 144, 153.
XX. 6, 6.— A. H. Moncure Sime, Christian World Pulpit, vol.
li. 1897, p. 74. W. G. Elmslie, Expository Lectures and Ser-
mons, p. 150.
' Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.'
— Exodus xx. 7.
' Many persons,' says Julius Hare in Guesses at Truth,
'are so afraid of breaking the third commandment
that they never speak of God at all ; and to make
assurance doubly sure, never think of Him. Others
seem to interpret it by the law of contraries : for
they never take God's name except in vain.'
THE SACRED BANNER
' Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain ; for
the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh His name
in vain.' — Exodus xx. 7.
The Hebrew word translated ' take ' has sometimes
been connected by commentators with the solemn
phrase which refers to Jehovah's name as the banner
or standard under which we advance to work or to
fight. It was under that standard that Moses and
Joshua secured the first victory of the Lord's people
in the earliest beginning of their national life and
recorded it in the name of Jehovah Nissi — the Lord
my banner.
I. New Tests of Loyalty. — ' Thou shalt not take
the name of the Lord thy God in vain.' The tempta-
tion comes in two different ways. Have we a right
to claim the title and privileges of Christian be-
lievers in the Lord God if we are ceasing firmly and
courageously and openly to defend His banner — the
banner under which we were enlisted in Baptism —
from those who do it wrong? If we think that
nothing in the realm of belief matters very much, it
is not likely that we shall be particularly brave or
outspoken in its defence. To claim as a Christian,
the ' holy sanction ' of our Bedeemer's Name means, or
ought to mean, a quite deliberate admission of the
demands, sometimes the exacting demands, to which
membership in His society makes us liable.
The Church has been put in trust with a sacred
deposit of essential truth which God has in Jesus
Christ revealed to man, and no respect for other
people's opinions, much less any mere good-natured
and almost careless kindliness, will justify us in
tampering with that deposit or belittling its unique
authority.
II. The Spirit of Persecution. — We must be not
less sternly on our guard against too ready an appro-
priation of that sacred banner and its sanctions, on
behalf of every honest opinion which we may any of
us form in matters of Christian faith or Christian
usage. There is more than one way in which genu-
inely religious people can take the Name of the Lord
their God in vain.
III. Conscience and the Law. — The danger is,
I suppose, greatest when we reach the border, or
cross the border of what is commonly called the realm
of conscience. Is it possible that the old-fashioned
reverence for law and order shown forth in things
Divine and human, in Nature and in national life,
has somewhat waned amongst us, and not least
amongst earnestly religious men ?
IV. ' Verities ' and ' Opinions '. — There are great
things and small, great issues and small, in our re-
ligious life. There are mighty and unchallengeable
verities, the things which cannot be shaken, and
there are pious and reasonable opinions, and devout
and wholesome usages which stand upon a humbler
level, and are neither unchallengeable nor unchal-
lenged. Do not confuse the two kinds of verities, or
mistake the one for the other. — Archbishop Davidson,
Christian World Pulpit, vol. lxxii. 1907, p. 218.
References. — XX. 7. — Bishop Gore, Church Times, vol.
xlii. 1899, p. 174. F. W. Farrar, The Voice from Sinai, p.
143; see also Christian World Pulpit, vol. xl. 1891, p. 321.
G. Campbell Morgan, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lvii. 1900,
p. 301. G. S. Barrett, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lxii. 1902,
p. 27.
' Remember the Sabbath Day, to keep it holy.'— Exodus xx. 8.
What is meant by to ' keep holy ' ? Nothing but to
devote ourselves to holy words, works, and life. For
the day requires no special hallowing : it is holy in
itself; but God wills that it be holy to thee. — Luther.
There was a time when it delighted me to flash my
satire on the English Sunday ; I could see nothing
but antiquated foolishness and modern hypocrisy in
this weekly pause from labour and from bustle. Now
I prize it as an inestimable boon, and dread every
encroachment upon its restful stillness. . . . The idea
is surely as good a one as ever came to heavy-laden
mortals ; let one whole day in every week be removed
from the common life of the world, lifted above
common pleasures as above common cares. With all
the abuses of fanaticism, this thought remained rich
in blessings ; . . if its ancient use perish from among
us, so much the worse for our country. — George
Gissing, Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, pp.
86-87.
References. — XX. 8.— J. Percival, Some Helps for School
Life, p. 186. C. Holland, Gleanings from a Ministry of Fifty
Years, p. 233. F. W. Farrar, The Voice from Sinai, p. 163 ;
see also Christian World Pulpit, vol. xl. 1891, p. 337. R.
W. Church, Village Sermons (2nd Series), p. 337. XX. 8,
9. — E. Fowle, Plain Preaching to Poor People (3rd Series), p.
25. XX. 8, 11. — Lyman Abbott, Christian World Pulpit, vol.
xl. 1891, p. 412. G. Campbell Morgan, Christian World Pulpit,
vol. lviii. 1900, p. 13. G. S. Barrett, Christian World Pulpit,
vol. lxii. 1902, p. 84. XX. 9.— W. J. Hocking, Christian
World Pulpit, vol. xli. 1892, p. 284. J. H. Shakespeare,
Christian World Pulpit, vol. lviii. 1900, p. 248. XX. 10.—
A. Murray, The Children for Christ, p. 100.
' Honour thy father and thy mother.'— Exodus xx. 12.
In the first of his lectures on Alexandria and Her
Schools Kingsley applies this commandment to the
true relation of one generation to another. 'On
reverence for the authority of bygone generations,
102
Ver. 13.
EXODUS XX
Ver. 16.
depends the permanence of every form of thought or
belief, as much as of all social, national, and family
life : but on reverence of the spirit, not of the letter ;
of the methods of our ancestors, not of their con-
clusions.'
And this is maternity — to give the best years and
best love to ensure the fate of being despised. —
Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native.
'I don't know who would be a mother,' says Mrs.
Transome to her son in Felix Holt (chap, u.), ' if she
could foresee what a slight thing she will be to her
son when she is old.' And in her essay on Riehl,
George Eliot observes how ' among rustic moral
tales and parables ' of the German peasantry, ' not
one is more universal than the story of the ungrateful
children, who made their grey-headed father, depen-
dent on them for a maintenance, eat at a wooden
trough, because he shook the food out of his trembling
hands. Then these same ungrateful children observed
one day that their own little boy was making a tiny
wooden trough ; and when they asked him what it
was for, he answered — that his father and mother
might eat out of it, when he was a man and had to
keep them.'
Of all forms of self-elevation, the one which, even
when it amounts to absolute self-sacrifice, we cannot
but regard with very tender and lenient eyes, is the
devotion of the young to the old, of children to
parents. No doubt, there is a boundary beyond
which even this ought not to be permitted ; but the
remedy lies on the elder side. There are such things
as unworthy, selfish, exacting parents, to whom duty
must be done, simply for the sake of parenthood,
without regarding their personality. ' Honour thy
father and thy mother' is the absolute command,
bounded by no proviso as to whether the parents are
good or bad. Of course no one can literally ' honour '
that which is bad — still one can respect the abstract
bond, in having patience with the individual. But I
think every high or honourable instinct in human
nature will feel that there is hardly a limit to be set
to the devotion of a child to a good parent — righteous
devotion, repaying to a failing life all that its own
young life once received, of care and comfort and
blessing. — Mus. Craik, Sermons Out of Church, pp.
37-38.
References. — XX. 12. — F. W. Farrar, The Voice from
Sinai, p. 187 ; see also Christian World Pulpit, vol. si. 1891,
p. 353. A. Murray, The Children for Christ, p. 108. G.
Campbell Morgan, Christian World Pulpit, vol. Iviii. 1900, p.
93. G. S. Barrett, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lxii. 1902, p.
139. XX. 12-21.- — A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture
— Exodus, etc., p. 107.
'Thou shalt not kill.' — Exodus xx. 13.
Catholics still revere the memory of Carlo Borromeo,
Cardinal Archbishop of Milan, who gave his blessing
to Campion and Parson, on their way to stir up re-
bellion in England, as well as in Ireland, and to
assassinate Elizabeth if opportunity should serve.
God said, ' Thou shalt do no murder '. The Pope,
however, thought that God had spoken too broadly,
and that some qualification was required. The sixth
commandment could not have been intended for the
protection of heretics ; and the Jesuits, if they did
not inspire, at least believed him. — Herbert Paul,
Life of Froude, p. 140.
References. — XX. 13. — F. W. Farrar, The Voice from
Sinai, p. 209 ; see also Christian World Pulpit, vol. xli. 1892,
p. 1. G. Campbell Morgan, Christian World Pulpit , vol. Iviii.
1900, p. 156.
'Thou shalt not commit adultery.'— Exodus xx. 14.
The Bible is God's great Police Court, as well as His
Temple, and till life ceases to be coarse, lessons on
coarseness will be needed. — Edward Thring.
Those who penetrate below the surface of society
cannot bring themselves to speak lightly of these
sins. They are destructive alike to the family and
to the State. For the State is based on justice, and
voluptuousness is a cruel injustice, for it engages in
a combat which is both unequal and cowardly ; the
aggressor risks comparatively nothing, and the victim
risks all. — Vinet.
References.— XX. 14.— F. W. Farrar, The Voice from Sinai,
p. 233. G. Campbell Morgan, Christian World Pulpit, vol.
Iviii. 1900, p. 294.
4 Thou shalt not steal.'— Exodus xx. 15.
Under ' stealing, generically taken,' says Carlyle, ' you
may include the whole art of scoundrelism ; for what
is lying itself but a theft of my belief?'
So far as a nation is to be considered a natural
being, ' thou shalt not steal ' is as much a natural law
as ' thou shalt not breathe without oxygen '. National
life is as impossible without honesty as natural life
without oxygen. — Miss Wedgwood, Message of Israel,
p. 280.
What is there in the world worth lying, or robbing,
or ferociously striving for ? If one could cheat death
by cheating one's neighbour, there might be some
sense in it. If one could steal genius or knowledge —
could filch away ' this man's art and that man's scope '
— in that, too, there would be some show of reason.
But nothing worth having is capable of being stolen,
either by force or fraud. What can be stolen, or
otherwise basely acquired, is the means of enjoying
the pleasures of ostentation, sensuality, or sport —
the very things which a religion of the intellect would
most decisively discount.— Let Youth But Know, p.
198.
References.— XX. 15.— S. Pearson, Christian World Pulpit,
vol. Hi. 1897, p. 99. G. Campbell Morgan, Christian World
Pulpit, vol. Iviii. 1900, p. 326. G. S. Barrett, Christian World
Pulpit, vol. lxii. 1902, p. 416. F. W. Farrar, The Voice from
Sinai, p. 257.
'Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.'—
Exodus xx. 16.
Dr. Johnson, once arguing with Gairick and Gifford
on the lack of accent and emphasis in actors' read-
ing, declared, ' Well now, I'll give you something to
speak, with which you are little acquainted, and then
103
Ver. 19.
EXODUS XX., XXI
Ver. 1.
we shall see how just my observation is. That shall
be the criterion. Let me hear you repeat the ninth
commandment, " Thou shalt not bear false witness
against thy neighbour".' 'Both tried at it,' says
Boswell, reporting a friend's account of the incident,
'and both mistook the emphasis, which should be
upon not and false witness. Johnson put them right,
and enjoyed his victory with great glee.'
References. — XX. 16. — F. W. Farrar, The Voice from Sinai,
p. 281. G. Campbell Morgan, Christian World Pulpit, vol.
lix. 1901, p. 13. G. S. Barrett, Christian World Pulpit, vol.
lxiii. 1903, p. 35. XX. 17.— F. W. Farrar, The Voice from
Sinai, p. 302 ; see also Christian World Pulpit, vol. xli. 1892,
p. 177. G. Campbell Morgan, Christian World Pulpit, vol.
lix. 1901, p. 116. G. S. Barrett, Christian World Pulpit, vol.
lxiii. 1903, p. 123. XX. 18-20.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol.
xxxv. No. 2097.
' And they said unto Moses, Speak thou with us, and we will
hear : but let not God speak with us, lest we die.' — Exodus
xx. ig.
As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are
their creeds a disease of the intellect. They say with
those foolish Israelites, ' Let not God speak to us lest
we die. Speak thou, speak any man with us, and we
will obey.' Everywhere I am hindered of meeting
God in my brother, because he has shut his own
temple doors and recites fables merely of his brother's
or his brothers' brother's God. — Emekson on Self
Reliance.
Let nothing come between you and the light. Re-
spect men as brothers only. When you travel to the
Celestial City, carry no letter of introduction. When
you knock, ask to see God — none of the servants. —
Thokeau.
The Children of Israel in times past said unto
Moses, ' Speak thou unto us, and we will hear : let not
the Lord God speak to us, lest we die '. Not so, Lord,
not so do I beseech Thee. Let not Moses nor any of
the prophets speak to me, but rather Thou Thyself,
who inspirest and enlightenest all prophets. For
Thou, apart from them, canst instruct me perfectly,
whereas without Thee they can avail nothing. Let
not Moses therefore speak unto me, but Thou, O
Lord my God, the Truth Eternal, lest I die and prove
unfruitful, being only warmed outwardly and not
kindled inwardly. — The Imitatio Christi (vol. rv.
chap. H.).
References. — XX. 21. — ' Sermons ' by contributors to the
Tracts for the Times, vol. ii. p. 89. XX. 23.— H. Scott Hol-
land, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lxix. 1906, p. 280. XX.
24. (R.V.)— F. S. Webster, In Remembrance of Me, p. 11.
' Now these are the judgments which thou shalt set before them.'
— Exodus, xxi. i.
The Maker's Laws, whether they are promulgated
in Sinai thunder, to the ear or imagination, or quite
otherwise promulgated, are the Laws of God ; trans-
cendent, everlasting, demanding obedience from all
men. The Universe is made by Law ; the great Soul
of the World is just and not unjust. Look then, if
thou have eyes or soul left, into this Shoreless Incom-
prehensible ; into the heart of its tumultuous Ap-
pearances, Embroilments and mad Time- Vortexes, is
there not, silent, eternal, an All-just, an All-beautiful ;
sole Reality and ultimate controlling power of the
Whole ? This is not a figure of speech ; this is a
fact. — Caklyle, Past and Present.
The Egyptians were the first people upon the earth
who emerged into what is now called civilization.
How they lived, how they were governed during the
tens of hundreds of generations which intervened
between their earliest and latest monuments, there is
little evidence to say. At the date when they become
distinctly visible they present the usual features of
effete Oriental societies ; the labour executed by
slave gangs, and a rich luxurious minority spending
their time in feasting and revelry. Wealth accumu-
lated, Art flourished. Enormous engineering works
illustrated the talent or ministered to the vanity of
the priestly and military classes. The favoured of
fortune basked in perpetual sunshine. The millions
sweated in the heat under the lash of the task-master
and were paid with just so much of the leeks and onions
and flesh-pots as would continue them in a condition
to work. Of these despised wretches some hundreds
of thousands were enabled by Providence to shake off
the yoke, to escape over the Red Sea into the Arabian
desert, and there receive a code of laws under which
they were to be governed in the land where they
were to be planted.
What were these laws ? A revelation of the true
God was bestowed on them, from which, as from a
fountain, a deeper knowledge of the Divine Nature was
to flow out over the earth ; and the central thought
of it was the realization of the Divine government —
not in a vague hereafter, but in the living present.
The unpractical prospective justice which had become
an excuse for tyranny was superseded by an immediate
justice in time. They were to reap the harvest of
their deeds, not in heaven, but on earth. There was
no life in the grave whither they were going. The
future state was withdrawn from their sight till the
mischief which it had wrought was forgotten. It was
not denied, but it was veiled in a cloud. It was left
to private opinion to hope or to fear ; but it was no
longer held out either as an excitement to piety or a
terror to evildoers. The God of Israel was a living
God, and His power was displayed visibly and immedi-
ately in rewarding the good and punishing the wicked
while they remained in the flesh.
It would be unbecoming to press the parallel, but
phenomena are showing themselves which indicate
that an analogous suspension of belief provoked by
the same causes may possibly be awaiting ourselves.
It may be that we require once more to have the
living certainties of the Divine government brought
home to us more palpably ; that a doctrine which has
been the consolation of the heavy-laden for eighteen
hundred years may have generated once more a
practical infidelity ; and that by natural and intelli-
gent agencies, in the furtherance of the everlasting
104
Ver. 2.
EXODUS XXIII
Ver. 19
Eurposes of our Father in heaven, the belief in a life
eyond the grave may again be about to be with-
drawn. — Froude, Short Studies, vol. n.
References. — XXI. 5, 6. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xx. No.
1174. XXII. 21, 22.— H. Adler, The Orphan and the Helpless,
Sermons, 1855-84. XXII. 29.— R. B. Brindley, Christian World
Pulpit, vol. xl. p. 41.
' Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil.' —
Exodus xxiii. 2.
At certain seasons the only way of being right in the
future consists in knowing how to resign ourselves to
being unfashionable in the present. — Renan.
Universal suffrage assembled at hustings — I will
consult it about the quality of New Orleans pork,
or the coarser kinds of Irish butter ; but as to the
character of men, I will if possible ask it no question :
or if the question be asked and the answer given, I
will generally consider, in cases of any importance,
that the said answer is likely to be wrong, — that I
have to listen to the said answer and receive it as
authentic, and for my own share to go, and with
whatever strength may lie in me, do the reverse of
the same. Even so, your Lordship ; for how should
I follow a multitude to do evil ? There are such
things as multitudes full of beer and nonsense, even
of insincere factitious nonsense, who by hypothesis
cannot but be wrong. — Carlyle, Latter-day Pamph-
lets (ii.).
Human authority at the strongest is but weak, but the
multitude is the weakest part of human authority. —
John Hales.
Reference. — XXIII. 2. — J. Cole Coghlan, Penny Pulpit,
vol. xiv. No. 828, p. 293.
' Thou shalt not wrest the judgment of thy poor in his cause.' —
Exodus xxiii. 6.
It is a lamentable fact that pure and uncorrupt
justice has never existed in Spain, as far at least as
record will allow us to judge ; not that the principles
of justice have been less understood there than in
other countries, but because the entire system of
justiciary administration has ever been shamelessly
profligate and vile. Spanish justice has invariably
been a mockery, a thing to be bought and sold,
terrible only to the feeble and innocent, and an
instrument of cruelty and avarice. — Borrow's The
Gypsies of Spain (chap. xi. pt. i.).
' The gift blindeth the wise, and perverteth the words of the
righteous.' — Exodus xxiii. 8.
And that he would for no respect digress from justice
well appeared by a plain example of another of his
sons-in-law, Mr. Heran. For when he, having a
matter before him in the Chancery, presuming too
much of his favour, would by him in no wise be per-
suaded to agree to any indifferent order, then made
he in conclusion a flat decree against him. . . . And
one Mr. Gresham likewise having a cause depending
in the Chancery against him, sent him for a new
year's gift a fair cup, the fashion whereof he very
well liking caused one of his own to be brought out
of his chamber, which he willed the messenger to
deliver in recompense, and under other conditions
would he in no wise receive it. Many things more
of like effect for the declaration of his innocence and
clearness from corruption, or evil affection, could I
here rehearse besides. — Roper's Life of Sir Thomas
More.
Compare the discussion on bribery in Macaulay's
Essay on Bacon.
' Thou shalt not oppress a stranger ; for ye know the heart of
a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.'
— Exodus xxiii. g.
It was God's argument to the Israelites, to be kind
to strangers, because themselves had been strangers in
the land of Egypt. So should you pity them that
are strangers to Christ, and to the hopes and comforts
of the saints, because you were once strangers to
them yourselves. — Baxter, Saints' Rest, chap. rx.
' The seventh year thou shalt let it rest and lie still ; that the
poor of thy people may eat.' — Exodus xxiii. ii.
God throws the poor upon our charge — in mercy to
lis. Couldn't He take care of them without us if He
wished ? are they not His ? It's easy for the poor to
feel, when they are helped by us, that the rich are a
godsend to them ; but they don't see, and many of
their helpers don't see, that the poor are a godsend
to the rich. They're set over against each other to
keep pity and mercy and charity in the human heart.
If every one were entirely able to take care of him-
self we'd turn to stone. . . . God Almighty will never
let us find a way to quite abolish poverty. Riches
don't always bless the man they come to, but they
bless the world. And so with poverty; and it's no
contemptible commission to be appointed by God to
bear that blessing to mankind which keeps its brother-
hood universal. — G. W. Cable, Dr. Sevier, p. 447.
References. — XXIII. 12. — J. H. Shakespeare, Christian
World Pulpit, vol. lviii. 1900, p. 248. XXIII. 14, 15.— A. M.
Fairbairn, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lxiii. 1903, p. 316.
XXIII. 15-17.— G. Monks, Pastor in Ecclesia, p. 135. XXIII.
16. — A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture — Exodus, etc.,
p. 115. XXIII. 18-20.— Bishop Simpson's Sermons, p. 347.
' Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother's milk.' —
Exodus xxiii. 19.
' In less than two minutes,' says Scott, describing at
the close of Kenilworth the murder of Amy Robsart,
' Foster heard the tramp of a horse in the court-
yard, and then a whistle similar to that which was
the Earl's usual signal ; — the instant after, the door of
the Countess's chamber opened, and in the same
moment the trap-door gave way. There was a rush-
ing sound — a heavy fall — a faint groan — and all was
over. ..." So pass our troubles," said Varney, enter-
ing the room ; " I dreamed not I could have mimicked
the Earl's call so well." "Oh, if there be judgment
in Heaven, thou hast deserved it," said Foster, " and
wilt meet it ! Thou hast destroyed her by means of
her best affections. It is a seething of the kid in the
mother's milk ! " '
105
Ver. 29.
EXODUS XXII I., XXIV
Ver. 11.
Compare Newman's resentful application of this verse
to the behaviour of the Anglican Bishops towards
himself in 1843. 'I resigned my living on Sep-
tember the 18th. I had not the means of doing
it legally at Oxford. The late Mr. Goldsmid was
kind enough to aid me in resigning it in London.
I found no fault with the Liberals ; they had beaten
me in a fair field. As to the act of the Bishops, I
thought, to borrow a Scriptural image from Walter
Scott, that they had " seethed the kid in his mother's
milk".'
Reference.— XXIII. 20, 21.— J. B. Brown, The Divine
Life in Man, p. 235.
' I will not drive them out all at once.' — Exodus xxiii. 29.
I had never an extraordinary enlargement, either of
joy, strength, or sanctification, but the waters dried
up. There are no sudden steps in grace ; ' I will not
drive them out all at once '. — Feasee of Beea,
Memoirs (chap. 1.).
References. — XXIII. 30. — C. Jerdan, Pastures of Tender
Grass, p. 299. XXIV. 1-12.— A. Maclaren, Expositions of
Holy Scripture — Exodus, etc., p. 118.
' And Moses alone shall come near the Lord.'— Exodus xxiv. 2.
All deep feelings of a chronic class agree in this,
that they seek for solitude, and are fed by solitude.
Deep grief, deep love, how naturally do these ally
themselves with religious feeling ! — and all three, love,
grief, religion, are haunters of solitary places. — De
Quincey.
' All the words which the Lord hath said will we do.' —
Exodus xxiv. 3.
Undee baleful Atheisms, Mammonisms, Joe-Manton
Dilettantisms, with their appropriate Cants and
Idolisms, and whatsoever scandalous rubbish obscures
and all but extinguishes the soul of man — religion
now is ; its Laws, written if not on stone tables, yet on
the azure of Infinitude, in the inner heart of God's
Creation, certain as Life, certain as Death ! I say the
Laws are there, and thou shalt not disobey them. It
were better for thee not. Better a hundred deaths
than yes. Terrible ' penalties ' withal, if thou still
need 'penalties,' are there for disobeying. — Caelyle
in Past and Present.
Reference. — XXIV. 3. — E. Talbot, Sermons Preached in the
Leeds Parish Church, 1889-95, p. 126.
THE VISION OF GOD AND THE FEAST BEFORE
HIM
' They saw God, and did eat and drink.' — Exodus xxiv. ii.
I. Considee the vision of God possible for us.
The Bible says two things about that. It asserts,
and it denies with equal emphasis, the possibility of our
seeing Him. That vision which is impossible is the
literal vision by sense, or, in a secondary meaning,
the full, adequate, direct knowledge of God. The
vision which is affirmed is the knowledge of Him,
clear, certain, vivid, and, as I believe, yielding nothing
to sense in any of these respects.
What lessons does this vision bring for us ? That
we Christians may, even here and now, see God, the
God of the covenant. Christ, the revealer of God,
makes God visible to us.
The degree of this vision depends upon ourselves,
and is a matter of cultivation. There are three things
wanted for sight — something to see ; something to
see by ; something to see with. God has given us the
two first, and He will help us to the last if we like.
Christ stands before us, at once the Master- Light of
all our seeing, and the Object. Faith, meditation,
purity, these three are the purging of our vision, and
the conditions in us of the sight of God.
II. Notice the feast in the Divine presence.
' They did eat and drink.' That suggests, in the
singular juxtaposition of the two things, that the
vision of God is consistent with, and consecrates ;
common enjoyment and everyday life. If we see God
there is only one thing that we shall be ashamed to
do in His presence, and that is to sin.
That strange meal on the mountain was no doubt
made on the sacrifices that had preceded, of which a
part were peace-offerings. The same meaning lies in
this meal on the mountain that lay in the sacrificial
feast of the peace-offering, the same meaning that lies
in the great feast of the New Covenant, ' This is My
Body ; this is My Blood '. The vision of God and the
feast on the mountain are equally provided and made
possible by Christ our Passover, who was sacrificed
for us.
III. We may gather out of this incident a glimpse
of a prophetic character, and see in it the perfecting
of the vision and of the feast.
Whatever may be the change in manner of know-
ledge, and in measure of apprehension, and in proxim-
ity of presence, there is no change in heaven in the
medium of revelation. Christ is forever the Mani-
fester of God, and the glorified saints see God as we
see Him in the face of Jesus Christ, though they see
that face as we do not.
The feast means perfect satisfaction, perfect repose,
perfect gladness, perfect companionship. — A. Mac-
laeen, The Unchanging Christ, p. 125.
VISION AND DRUDGERY
' Also they saw God, and did eat and drink.'— Exodus xxiv. ii.
It has been said by a very competent scholar, that
this is the most significant chapter in the whole of
the Old Testament. It is the basis of that covenant
between God and man, which is glorified in the New
Covenant of Christ. There was first the shedding of
the blood of oxen, and ' This cup is the New Covenant
in My Blood '. There was the pouring of half the
blood upon the altar, in token of lives that were for-
feited to God. And then there was the sprinkling
of the people with the other half, as if God were
saying, ' My children, live again '. For the blood is
the life, and God, in covenant-mercy, was redeeming
them from the death which they deserved. It was
then that Moses and the seventy elders went up-
106
Ver. 11.
EXODUS XXIV
Ver. 11.
wards to the rocky heights of Sinai. And above a
heaven, blue as a sapphire stone, somehow the vision
of the Eternal broke on them. And they saw God,
not with the eye of sense, for no man hath seen God
at any time — and they saw God and did eat and
drink. Is not that a strange conclusion to the
matter? It is a magnificent and unequalled anti-
climax. They saw God and began to sing His
praise ? Not so ; they saw God and did eat and
drink. What does it mean?
I. First, the vision of God is the glory of the
commonplace.
It was an old and a widespread belief that the
vision of God was the harbinger of death. You are
all familiar with Old Testament passages where men
have voiced this primitive conviction. We are far
away from that conception now, thanks to the coming
of our Lord Jesus Christ. Our God is love ; He has
a Father's heart ; He has a Father's yearning for the
prodigal. But God was terrible and dreadful once ;
and to see Him was not a blessing but a woe, driving
a man apart from all his fellows into a loneliness
horrible as death. I have no doubt that these
seventy men of Israel had some such heavy feeling in
their hearts. Let them see God, and then farewell
for ever to the common lights and shadows of human-
ity. And so they climbed the hill, and had their
vision above the pavement of the sapphire stones,
and they saw God, and did eat and drink. Do you
see what they were learning in that hour ? They
were learning that the vision of God does not with-
draw us. It is not vouchsafed to drive a man apart,
and rob him for ever of familiar joys. It is vouch-
safed to consecrate the commonplace ; to shed a glory
on the familiar table ; to send a man back into his
daily round with the light that never was on sea or
land.
II. The vision of God is the secret of tranquillity.
That day at Sinai, as you may well conceive, had
been a day of most intense excitement. It was a day
when the most deadened heart was wakened to awe
and to expectancy. If that were so with the body
of the people, it was doubly so with these seventy
elders. Think what it must have signified to them
as they clambered up the rocky steeps of Sinai.
There God had dwelt: there He had spoken to
Moses : there there was blackness and darkness and
tempest, and so terrible was the sight that even
Moses said, 'I exceedingly fear and quake'. I do
not think that these seventy elders were in any state
to think of food or drink. Like a soldier in the ex-
citement of the charge, they forgot that they were
hungry or athirst. And then they had their' vision
of the infinite, and it brought them to their quiet
selves again, and the tumult and confusion passed
away, and they saw God, and did eat and drink.
That means that in the vision of God there is a
certain tranquillizing power. Just to realize that He
is here, is one of the deep secrets of repose. The man
who has learned that can eat and drink and join in
the happiness of feast and fellowship, although his
table be set upon Mount Sinai, and be ringed about
with darkness and with fire. — G. H. Morrison, The
Return of the Angels, p. 235.
THE VISION OF QOD
'They saw God, and did eat and drink.' — Exodus xxiv. ii.
Bishop Chadwick remarks on this passage : ' They
saw the God of Israel,' and under His feet the blue-
ness of the sky like intense sapphire. And they were
secure : they beheld God, and ate and drank.
I. But in privilege itself there are degrees : Moses
was called up still higher, and left Aaron and Hur to
govern the people while he communed with his God.
For six days the nation saw the flanks of the moun-
tain swathed in cloud, and its summit crowned with
the glory of Jehovah like devouring fire. Then Moses
entered the cloud, and during forty days they knew
not what had become of him. Was it time lost?
Say rather that all time is wasted except what is
spent in communion, direct or indirect, with the
Eternal.
The narrative is at once simple and sublime. We
are sometimes told that other religions besides our
own rely for sanction upon their supernatural origin.
' Zarathustra, Sakya-Mooni, and Mahomed pass among
their followers for envoys of the Godhead ; and in the
estimation of the Brahmin the Vedas and the laws of
Manou are holy, Divine books ' (Kuenen, Religion of
Israel, i. p. r>). This is true. But there is a wide differ-
ence between nations which assert that God privately
appeared to their teachers, and a nation which asserts
that God appeared to the public. It is not upon the
word of Moses that Israel is said to have believed ;
and even those who reject the narrative are not en-
titled to confound it with narratives utterly dissimilar.
There is not to be found anywhere a parallel for this
majestic story.
II. But what are we to think of the assertion that
God was seen to stand upon a burning mountain ?
He it is Whom no man hath seen or can see, and
in His presence the seraphim veil their faces.
It will not suffice to answer that Moses ' endured
as seeing Him that is invisible,' for the paraphrase is
many centuries later, and hostile critics will rule it
out of court as an after-thought. At least, however,
it proves that the problem was faced long ago, and
tells us what solution satisfied the early Church.
With this clue before us, we ask what notion did
the narrative really convey to its ancient readers ?
If our defence is to be thoroughly satisfactory, it must
show an escape from heretical and carnal notions of
deity, not only for ourselves, but also for careful
readers from the very first.
Now it is certain that no such reader could for one
moment think of a manifestation thorough, exhaustive,
such as the eye receives of colour and of form. Be-
cause the effect produced is not satisfaction, but desire.
Each new vision deepens the sense of the unseen.
Thus we read first that Moses and Aaron, Nadab and
107
Ver. 12.
EXODUS XXIV
Ver. 18.
Abihu and the seventy elders, saw God, from which
revelation the people felt and knew themselves to be
excluded. And yet the multitude also had a vision
according to its power to see ; and indeed it was more
satisfying to them than was the most profound insight
enjoyed by Moses. To see God is to sail to the
horizon ; when you arrive, the horizon is as far in
front as ever ; but you have gained a new conscious-
ness of infinitude. ' The appearance of the glory of
the Lord was seen like devouring fire in the eyes of
the children of Israel.' But Moses was aware of a
glory far greater and more spiritual than any material
splendour. When theophanies had done their utmost,
his longing was still unslaked, and he cried out, ' Show
me, I pray thee, Thy glory '. To his consciousness
that glory was still veiled, which the multitude
sufficiently beheld in the flaming mountain. And the
answer which he received ought to put the question
at rest for ever, since, along with the promise ' All
My goodness shall pass before thee,' came the asser-
tion ' Thou shalt not see My face, for no man shall
see Me and live '.
III. So, then, it is not our modern theology, but
this noble book of Exodus itself, which tells us that
Moses did not and could not adequately see God,
however great and sacred the vision which he beheld.
From this book we learn that, side by side with the
most intimate communion and the clearest possible
unveiling of God, grew up the profound consciousness
that only some attributes and not the essence of deity
had been displayed.
Reference. — XXIV. 11. — J. Kerr Campbell, Christian
World Pulpit, vol. xli. 1892, p. 119.
' Come up to Me into the mount, and be there ; and I will give
thee tables of stone, and a law, and commandments, which
I have written; that thou mayest teach them.'— Exodus
XXIV. 12.
' The monastical life,' says Bacon in the second part
of The Advancement of Learning, ' is not simple,
contemplative, but performeth the duty either of
incessant prayers and supplications, which hath been
truly esteemed as an office in the Church, or else of
writing or taking instructions for writing concerning
the law of God, as Moses did when he abode so long in
the mount. . . . But for contemplation which should
be finished in itself, without casting beams upon
society, assuredly divinity knoweth it not.'
My life is not stolen from me. I give it. A pleasure
which is for myself alone touches me slightly. It is
for myself and for my friends that I read, that I
reflect, that I write, that I meditate, that I hear, that
I observe, that I feel. I have consecrated to them
the use of all my senses. — Diderot.
' And Moses went up into the mount.' — Exodus xxiv. 15.
' There was an idea of sanctity,' says Ruskin, in the
third volume of Modern Painters, ' attached to rocky
wilderness, because it had always been among hills
that the Deity had manifested Himself most inti-
mately to men, and to the hills that His saints had
nearly always retired for meditation, for especial
communion with Him, and to prepare for death.
Men acquainted with the history of Moses, alone at
Horeb, or with Israel at Sinai . . . were not likely to
look with irreverent or unloving eyes upon the blue
hills that girded their golden horizon, or drew down
upon them the mysterious clouds out of the height of
the darker heaven.'
How insignificant Sinai appears when Moses stands
on its summit ! This mountain seems but a pedestal
whereon rest the feet of the man, whilst his head
reaches to the clouds, where he speaks with God. —
Heine.
' And Moses went into the midst of the cloud.' — Exodusxxiv. 18.
If we insist upon perfect intelligibility and complete
declaration in every moral subject, we shall instantly
fall into misery of unbelief. Our whole happiness
and power of energetic action depend upon our being
able to breathe and live in the cloud ; content to see
it opening here and 'closing there ; rejoicing to catch,
through the thinnest films of it, glimpses of stable
and substantial things ; but yet perceiving a noble-
ness even in the concealment, and rejoicing that the
kindly veil is spread where the untempered light might
have scorched us, or the infinite clearness wearied. —
Ruskin, Frondes Agrestes, p. 24.
The region of dimness is not wholly without relations
towards our moral state. — F. W. Newman.
FORTY DAYS
' Moses was in the mount forty days and forty nights.' —
Exodus xxiv. 18.
Moses was forty days and forty nights in the mount.
He was away. The mount means high elevation, an
altitude crowned with golden clouds, utmost distance,
perspective, and all the music of mystery. Some-
times we can only say of the great man, legislator,
poet, or prophet, He is not here. Where is he?
Away. Where ? No man can tell ; in the hidden
places, in the invisible sanctuaries ; away among the
shaping clouds that are sometimes almost living
presences. It is only when we are at some distance
from our own life that we can make anything really
of it ; you cannot deeply consider that problem in the
throng, you cannot use your slate and pencil in the
great city multitude ; you must go away into a
mountain or valley or hang over the sanctuary-sea ;
in order to see yourself you must stand some distance
back from yourself.
I. Moses was in the mount forty days and forty
nights. What was he receiving ? He was receiving
the law. Our greatest men are not the men on the
streets. We call these men on the streets very active
persons, much too active ; the law is not a street
anecdote or an incident of the thoroughfare, the law
is away in the sanctuary of the infinite, the invisible,
and the ineffable.
II. Moses was away forty days and forty nights
receiving, not inventing, the law. There is a
108
Ver. 18.
EXODUS XXIV., XXV
Vv. 18-20.
wondrous deliberation about the movement of God.
The few commandments which we once called the
law could be written in less than a minute each ; it
was not the handwriting but the heart-writing that
required the time.
III. In Matthew iv. 2 we read that Jesus was
tempted in the wilderness, ' And when He had fasted
forty days and forty nights, He was afterward an
hungered '. Moses and the Lamb ; the similarities
between their histories are worth tracing out ; such
collocation of coincidence and repetition constitutes
itself into an argument. Forty days and forty
nights Jesus was fasting : surely great preparation
means great issues ; surely this is an athlete in train-
ing for some fight ; this cannot be a mere pedantic
arrangement ; we must wait and see what comes of
this trial of the soul : it may be that fasting is the
true feasting, it may be that this disciplining the
body and all that gathering up of force which we call
passion or desire may mean that the greatest contest
ever fought on the theatre of time is about to take
place.
IV. What is the meaning of all this withdrawal,
of all this forty days and forty nights' experience ?
1. The meaning is rest. The prophets must go
away for a time, they must become nothing, enter
into a state of negativeness, forget for the time being
their own office and function ; to forget it may be
best to remember it. But the withdrawal must not
be too long ; too much rest would mean weariness ;
there is a rest that leads to reluctance, disbelief, and
despair. A measurable rest, and then a happy re-
newal of service, that is the Lord's idea of the
ministry of His own discipleship.
2. The meaning is self-culture. A man may be
too busy keeping other vineyards to keep his own,
a man may be so much from his own fireside that
his own children shall be turned into atheists by a
misconstruction of his false piety. We should not
indulge in any culture that separates us from the
people.
3. The meaning is reception. There must be a
time of intaking, there must be periods when we
are not giving out, but when we are receiving in.
Understand therefore that withdrawment from the
prophetic office and service, as in the case of Moses
and Elijah, does not mean abandonment of that
office, but further preparation for it, and that the
best withdrawment is a withdrawment which takes
us right into the very sanctuary of the soul of Jesus
Christ. — Joseph Parker, City Temple Pulpit, vol.
i. p. 132.
' Purple and scarlet.' — Exodus xxv. 4.
We know it to have been by Divine command that
the Israelites, rescued from servitude, veiled the taber-
nacle with its rain of purple and scarlet, while the
under sunshine flashed through the fall of the colour
from its tenons of gold. — Ruskin, Stones of Venice,
(vol. 11.).
References. — -XXV. 8. — W. Allen Whitworth, The Sanc-
tuary of God, p. 1. T. Champness, New Coins from Old Gold,
p. 32. XXV. 9.— T. M. Morris, Christian World Pulpit, vol.
lxiv. 1903, p. 228. XXV. 10-22.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol.
xlix. No. 2838. XXV. 15.— S. Baring-Gould, Sermon Sketches,
p. 19. XXV. 18. — T. Jones, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lii.
1897, p. 268.
THE MERCY-SEAT
Exodus xxv. 18-20.
It would be a great mistake to suppose that the
mercy-seat was a mere lid, an ordinary portion of the
ark itself. It was made of a different and more
costly material, of pure gold, with which the ark
was only overlaid. There is separate mention that
Bezaleel ' made the ark, . . . and he made the mercy-
seat,' and the special presence of God in the Most
Holy Place is connected much more intimately with
the mercy-seat than with the remainder of the struc-
ture. Thus He promises to 'appear in the cloud
above the mercy-seat '. And when it is written that
' Moses heard the Voice speaking unto him from above
the mercy-seat which is upon the ark of the testimony,'
it would have been more natural to say directly ' from
above the ark ' unless some stress were to be laid upon
the interposing slab of gold. In reality no distinction
could be sharper than between the ark and its cover,
from whence to hear the Voice of God. And so
thoroughly did all the symbolism of the Most Holy
Place gather around this supreme object, that in one
place it is actually called ' the house of the mercy-
seat '.
Let us, then, put ourselves into the place of an
ancient worshipper. Excluded though he is from the
Holy Place, and conscious that even the priests are
shut out from the inner shrine, yet the high priest
who enters is his brother ; he goes on his behalf ; the
barrier is a curtain, not a wall.
But while the Israelite mused upon what was be-
yond, the ark, as we have seen, suggests the depth of
his obligation ; for there is the rod of his deliverance
and the bread from heaven which fed him ; and there
also are the commandments which he ought to have
kept. And his conscience tells him of ingratitude
and a broken covenant ; by the law is the knowledge
of sin.
It is therefore a sinister and menacing thought
that immediately above the ark of the violated cove-
nant burns the visible manifestation of God, his
injured Benefactor.
And hence arises the golden value of that which
interposes, beneath which the accusing law is buried,
by means of which God 'hides His face from our
sins '.
The worshipper knows this cover to be provided by
a separate ordinance of God, after the ark and its
contents had been arranged for, and finds in it a vivid
concrete representation of the idea ' Thou hast cast
all my sins behind Thy back'. That this was its
true intention becomes more evident when we ascer-
tain exactly the meaning of the term which we have
not too precisely rendered ' mercy-seat '.
109
Ver. 22.
EXODUS XXV., XXVIII
Ver. 21.
THE FIRST TOKEN OF DIVINE FELLOWSHIP
' I will commune with thee from above the mercy seat.'—
Exodus xxv. 22.
I. Is it not rather a strange place for communion
between God and man. Communion always implies
some affinity of nature between two or more minds.
One would think the mercy seat the last place for
affinity of man with God. It is a meeting of ex-
tremes — the Holy One and the conscious sinner, the
Righteous Judge and the suppliant for pardon, the
Sitter on the Great White Throne and the convicted
miscreant at the bar of justice.
II. We could have understood communion with the
Divine in other quarters. We could have felt it under
the throbbing stars, where our hearts vibrate with
the sense of the infinite. We could have realized it
in the presence of genius where our spirit is made to
forget its own limits. We could have learned it
even from our moments of spiritual thirst, for the
thirst for God implies a capacity for God. But that
there should be communion in the moment of our
moral conviction, that there should be Divine fellow-
ship in the hour when we recognize that we are clothed
in rags — this is a startling thing ! And yet it is true.
For, what is it that convicts a man ? What is it that
makes a human soul a suppliant for mercy ? It is
holiness already begun. The white throne of God
is only visible to the eye that is emerging from impure
waters. I am never so near to God as when I cry,
' Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord ! '
Not even when vibrating 'neath the stare am I so near
as then. The stars reveal something beyond me ; the
conviction of sin reveals something in me.
III. George Macdonald has somewhere said that
there are colours which are only brought to light by
a cloudy day. I think it is pre-eminently true in the
sphere of the mercy seat. I never learn that I have a
little good in me till I have realized my worthlessness.
It is not increased poverty but increased means that
makes me a suppliant. It is the light, not the dark-
ness, that brings me to my knees. The shadow that
I see is the shadow of my God. I mistake the shadow
for nightfall ; I sit down to weep. I imagine that I
am sitting on the cold ground ; and all the time I am
on the doorstep of my Father's house, and the door is
open, and my Father is coming out to take me in.
It is the brightness of God's face that makes me cry
for mercy. — G. Matheson, Messages of Hope, p. 113.
References. — XXV. 22. — J. W. Atkinson, The Penny
Pulpit, vol. xiv. No. 841, p. 405. XXV. 30.— A Maclaren,
Expositions of Holy Scripture — Exedus, etc., p. 126. XXV. 31.
— Ibid. p. 134.
' And look that thou make them after their pattern, which was
shewed thee in the mount.' — Exodus xxv. 40.
He is not altogether silent about religion. But he
has the power of suspending absolutely his belief and
the natural effect it would have on a thoughtful mind
busy with man's nature and fortunes ; he lodges it
apart, and above him, in dignity and honour, but
where it has no more influence on the temptation, the
troubles, the issues of the real world than the gods
of the epicurean heaven. . . . He looked on it as a
sort of art or mystery, with rules and grounds inde-
pendent of and unconnected with the ordinary works
and thought of life. — R. W. Chuech on Montaigne,
Miscellaneous Essays, pp. 80-81.
In different ages, a different pattern is shown to the
prophets on the mount ; always what is fairer and
more august than can be seen in the restless plain of
life below. . . . The Soul of Christ, the sinless, risen,
and immortal, is the pattern shown to us ; shown
first upon the field of history, and on the paths of
this living world, and then taken to the heavens, to
look down thence on the uplifted eye of faith and
love throughout successive generations. — Martineau.
Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its
details, worthy of the contemplation of his most
elevated and critical hour. — Thoreau, Walden.
References. — XXVII. 3-8. — Newton H. Marshall, Christian
World Pulpit, vol. lxix. 1906, p. 187. XXVIII. 12, 29.— A.
Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture — Exodus, etc., p. 144.
' And thou shalt make the breastplate of judgment with cun-
ning work . . . and thou shalt set in it settings of stones.'
— Exodus xxviii. 15, 17.
Aaron had to wear upon his breast before the Lord
twelve precious stones, not of one sort, but each one
reflecting the light differently from his neighbour.
There was one nearly black, whatever the diamond
thought of him. But all the stones being set equally
upon the priest's breast, no one of them might quarrel
with another, saying, ' You are quite wrong, you are ;
you ought to reflect the light as I do. You will
never be admitted into the most holy place.' Even
the dark jasper reflected its measure of light as freely
as brilliant diamond. The former may have a meek-
ness the latter has not. Indeed, it is a known fact
that the diamond is harder than any other stone.
And hardness is distance from life in proportion to
the hardness.
One thing is clear, there is a tribe in Israel corre-
sponding with each stone. And the Lord requested
that He might see the twelve stones upon Aaron's
breast, with the names of the Twelve Tribes engraven
on them, as often as he appeared before Him to
minister in the priest's office (Exod. xxvm. 29).
Perhaps it was in virtue of his representing, im-
partially, every tribe of God's people, that he obtained
Divine responses pertaining to every tribe. A man
cannot be the medium of truth to all the tribes of
God, unless all truth has a place in him. Learn,
whether the priests and ministers of God ought
not to comprehend in their souls and characters con-
siderable breadth and variety. — Dr. Pulsford, Quiet
Hours.
' And the stones shall be with the names of the children of
Israel, twelve.' — Exodus xxviii. 21.
As the High Priest of old, when he entered into the
Holy of Holies, bore upon his breast those twelve
jewels which witnessed to the Twelve Tribes of Israel,
so now, with a converse fitness and an equal duty, a
religious and just people, advancing towards the gates
110
Ver. 29.
EXODUS XXVII I. -XXX
Ver. 12.
of its new and higher destinies, must bear upon its
breast that cause which is the cause of God. — Aubrey
de Verb.
'When he goeth in unto the holy place.'— Exodus xxviii. 29.
If the veil has as yet been but little withdrawn from
the Holy of Holies, those who come after us will have
learnt at least this one lesson, that this lifting of the
veil which was supposed to be the privilege of priests,
is no longer considered as a sacrilege, if attempted
by any honest seekers after truth. — Max Muller.
References.— XXVIII. 29. — S. Baring-Gould, Village
Preaching for a Year, vol. ii. p. 132.
4 Thou shalt put in the breastplate of judgment the Urim and
the Thummim ; and they shall be upon Aaron's heart, when
he goeth in before the Lord.'— Exodus xxviii. 30.
' May I ask you,' said John Bright to the citizens of
Birmingham in 1858, ' to believe, as I do most de-
voutly believe, that the moral law was not written
for men alone in their individual character, but that
it was written as well for nations, and for nations
great as this of which we are citizens. If nations
reject and deride that moral law, there is a penalty
which will inevitably follow. It may not come at
once ; it may not come in our life-time ; but, rely
upon it, the great Italian is not a poet only, but a
prophet, when he says : —
The sword of Heaven is not in haste to smite.
Nor yet doth linger.
We have experience, we have beacons, we have land-
marks enough. . . . We are not left without a guide.
It is true we have not, as an ancient people had, Urim
and Thummim — those oraculous gems on Aaron's
breast — from which to take counsel, but we have the
unchangeable and eternal principles of the moral
law to guide us, and only so far as we walk by that
guidance can we be permanently a great nation, or
our people a happy people.'
References. — XXVIII. 36. — A. Maclaren, Expositions of
Holy Scripture — Exodus, etc., p. 151. R. F. Horton, Christian
World Pulpit, vol. 1. 1896, p. 232. XXVIII. 36-38.— Spur-
geon, Sermons, vol. xxxvi. No. 2153.
BACTERIA IN THE CHALICE
' Aaron shall bear the iniquity of the holy things, which the
children of Israel shall hallow in all their holy gifts.'—
Exodus xxviii. 38 (R.V.).
Science tells us that bacteria lurk in the white snow
and sparkling dew ; and the purest saints are con-
scious of secret frailty marring holiest things and
hours. Infection, alloy, degeneration, play their part
in the spiritual as well as the natural sphere.
I. In private devotional hours it is not difficult to
shut the door of our chamber, but it is far from easy
to close the door of the mind upon base and secular
images and feelings. Our prayers are hindered by
insincerity, uncharitableness, impatience, and unbe-
lief; we regard iniquity in our heart, and therefore
many petitions we offer can never be put into the
golden censer.
II. Outside sanctuaries, Sabbaths, and Scriptures
are institutions, days, and relations whose sacredness
we must not forget. The loves of the home, kinship,
friendship, citizenship, the treasures of literature, the
gifts of beauty, the stewardship of wealth, the flowers
and lutes of pleasure — these are holy also. But if
these things are great and noble, Divine symbols and
instruments of infinite suggestion and purport, how
often are we forgetful and perverse, awakening in our
better moments to reproach ourselves with the sin of
sacrilege !
III. We must not think lightly of these sins be-
cause they seem in their refinement to stand apart
from and beyond ordinary morality. They are not
ecclesiastical but real sins, and with all their apparent
subtilization they injuriously affect the whole sphere
of character and action equally with coarser faults.
In coining, the addition to gold of one five-hundredth
part by weight of bismuth produces an alloy which
crumbles under the die and refuses to take an im-
pression ; the very scent of an incongruous element
sometimes debases and destroys the whole vast mass
into which it enters. And if in physics the influence
of minute admixtures is so immense, we may be sure
that the iniquity of our holy things is not less per-
vasive and disastrous, affecting all that we are and
do, and vitiating what otherwise would be the pure
gold of life and action. — W. L. Watkinson, Thernes
for Hours of Meditation, p. 66.
References. — XXIX. 1. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xx. No.
1203. XXIX. 26-28.— J. Pulsford, Our Deathless Hope, p. 241.
XXIX. 33.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xliii. No. 2528. XXIX.
43.— A. Rowland, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xliv. 1893,
p. 74.
' And I will dwell among the children of Israel, and be their
God.' — Exodus xxix. 45.
So long as there is in man's heart one fibre to vibrate
at the sound of what is just and true and honourable,
so long as the instinctively pure soul prefers purity
to life, so long as friends of truth are to be found
who are ready to sacrifice their peace in the cause of
science, friends of righteousness ready to devote them-
selves to holy and useful works of mercy, womanly
hearts to love whatsoever is good, beautiful, and pure,
and artists to express it by sound and colour and
words of inspiration — so long God will dwell within
us. — Renan on Spinoza.
References. — XXX. 1. — A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy
Scripture — Exodus, etc., p. 159. XXX. 1-4. — W. Garrett
Horder, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lii. 1897, p. 330. XXX.
7, 8. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxix. No. 1710. XXX. 11, 12,
15. — J. M. Neale, Sermons Preached in Sackville College Chapel,
vol. ii. p. 361. XXX. 11-16. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxvii.
No. 1581. J. Hammond, What Shall I Give for My Life 'I A
Sermon for the Census.
THE CENSUS AND ITS RELIGIOUS ASPECT
' When thou takest the sum of the children of Israel.'—
Exodus xxx. 12.
I. This first census of which we have any recorded his-
tory took place more than three thousand years ago.
It was taken in the wilderness, and in a very differ-
ent way from that in which our census is taken.
Ill
Ver. 15.
EXODUS XXX. -XXXII
Ver. 2.
From the grouped tribes every man of twenty
years of age and upwards was called out, and after-
wards passed over to the crowd of the ' numbered '.
No women or children were numbered. Women and
children owe even more than men to the influence of
Jesus Christ. Then each man had to pay a half-
shekel, about thirteenpence-halfpenny, at the express
command of God, to be devoted to religious purposes.
The census was the solemn recognition of the separate
individuality, the responsible manhood of every full-
grown Israelite.
II. The payment of the half-shekel was an acknow-
ledgment of his obligation to sue for the mercy of
Heaven and to do the will of God. When you fill up
your census-paper remember that you are a sinful being
before you are anything else. Do you not realize
the necessity of paying the half-shekel, of ransoming
your soul ? The census expresses the solidarity of our
interests. All humanity is one great organism, one
colossal" man, as Pascal says, of whom Christ is the
Head. No one can say that he is so insignificant
that it does not matter whether he goes to the devil
or not. Nobody will be left out because of his
poverty or crime. — Hugh Peice Hughes, The Sermon
Year Book, 1891, p. 362.
Reference. — XXX. 12. — A." Maclaren, Expositions of
Holy Scripture — Exodus, etc., p. 168.
' The rich shall not give more, and the poor shall not give less,
than half a shekel, when they give an offering unto the
Lord, to make an atonement for your souls.' — Exodus xxx.
15-
The tribute to be paid for the ransom of the soul
was half a shekel, about fifteenpence of our money.
The rich were not to give more nor the poor less ;
to intimate that the souls of the rich and poor were
alike precious. — Matthew Henry.
Reference. — XXX. 15. — A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy
Scripture — Exodus, etc., p. 170.
' And I have filled him with the spirit of God, in wisdom, and
in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all manner of
workmanship, to devise cunning works.' — Exodus xxxi. 3-4.
The ambition of art, to come ever nearer to a per-
fect work, is an evidence that the spirit of the Master-
Artist stirs and quickens the human spirit. ' See, I
have filled him with the spirit of God, in wisdom, and
in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all
manner of workmanship, to devise cunning works.'
In the spirit of God every art is latent. . . . Faith and
art have all the sympathy of mother and child.
Neither of them is content with nature's conditions.
Faith discerns a higher world, and art would fain
body it forth. — Dr. John Pulsford, The Supremacy
of Man, pp. 97 f.
Compare Adam Bede's words to his brother, in the
opening chapter of Adam Bede : ' There's such a
thing as being over-speritial ; we must have some-
thing beside Gospel i' this world. Look at the
canals, an' th' aqueducs, an' th' coal-pit engines, and
Arkwright's mills there at Cranford ; a man must
learn summat beside Gospel to make them things, I
reckon. But t' hear some o' them preachers, you'd
think as a man must be doing nothing all's life but
shutting's eyes and looking what's a-going on inside
him. I know a man must have the love o' God in
his soul, and the Bible's God's word. But what does
the Bible say ? Why, it says as God put His sperrit
into the workman as built the tabernacle, to make
him do all the carved work and things as wanted a
nice hand. And this is my way o' lookin' at it :
there's the sperrit o' God in all things and all times
— week-day as well as Sunday— and i' the great
works and inventions, and i' the figuring and the
mechanics. And God helps us with our headpieces
and our hands as well as with our souls.'
Reference. — XXXI. 3-4. — G. Matheson, Voices of the
Spirit, p. 8.
' Verily My sabbaths ye shall keep.' — Exodus xxxi. 13.
If we measure things not as they were divinely in-
tended, nor as they are in themselves, but as they
are subjectively entertained, it might be a question
whether the Scottish Sabbath was not for 200 years
a greater Christian Sacrament, a larger, more vital,
and more influential fact in the Christianity of the
country than the annual or sometimes semi-annual
celebration of the Lord's Supper, or the initiatory rite
of Baptism, or both together. . . . We are born, on
each Lord's day morning, into a new climate, a new
atmosphere ; and in that new atmosphere (so to speak),
by the law of a renovated nature, the lungs and heart
of the Christian life should spontaneously and continu-
ously drink in the vital air. — W. E. Gladstone, Later
Gleanings, pp. 342 f.
Where every day is not the Lord's, the Sunday is His
least of all. — George Macdonald, Donal Grant, chap.
VII.
There is a deep Christian instinct in England, an in-
stinct which has come down to us through many gene-
rations, and for the last 350 years at any rate, founded
in a large measure on Puritan belief, fed by what may
be called the ' two Puritan Sacraments ' — the Bible and
Sunday. — Father Dolling in The Pilot (10 Nov.,
1900).
References. — -XXXII. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xli. No.
2398. XXXII. l.—W. C. E. Newbolt, Church Times, vol.
xxxii. 1894, p. 244. W. C. Magee, Outlines of Sermons on the
Old Testament, p. 28. XXXII. 1-8, 30-35.— A. Maclaren, Ex-
positions of Holy Scripture — Exodus, etc., p. 171. XXXII. 1-29.
— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. liii. No. 2884.
1 And Aaron said to them, Break off the golden ear-rings which
are in the ears of your wives.' — Exodus xxxii. 2.
Who would not have been ashamed to hear this ans-
wer from the brother of Moses, ' Pluck off your ear-
rings ' ? He should have said, ' Pluck this idolatrous
thought out of your hearts '. — Bishop Hall.
112
Ver. 3.
EXODUS XXXII
Ver. 6.
' And all the people brake off the golden ear-rings which were
in their ears, and brought them unto Aaron.'— Exodus xxxii. 3.
Unless reason be employed in ascertaining what
doctrines are revealed, humility cannot be exercised
in acquiescing in them ; and there is surely at least
as much presumption in measuring everything by our
own fancies, feelings, and prejudices, as by our own
reasonings. Such voluntary humiliation is a prostra-
tion, not of ourselves before God, but of one part of
ourselves before another part, and resembles the
idolatry of the Israelites in the wilderness : ' The
people stripped themselves of their golden orna-
ments, and cast them into the fire, and there came out
this calf. — Archbishop Whately, Annotations to
Bacon's Essays (i.).
' These be thy gods, O Israel.'— Exodus xxxii. 4.
It is the very j oy of man's heart to admire, where he
can ; nothing so lifts him from all his mean imprison-
ments, were it but for moments, as true admiration.
Thus it has been said, ' All men, especially all women,
are born worshippers ' ; and will worship, if it be but
possible. Possible to worship a Something, even a
small one ; not so possible a mere loud-blaring
Nothing ! What sight is more pathetic than that of
poor multitudes of persons met to gaze at Kings'
Progresses, Lord Mayors' Shows, and other gilt-
gingerbread phenomena of the worshipful sort, in
these times ; each so eager to worship ; each, with a
dim fatal sense of disappointment, finding that he
cannot rightly here ! These be thy gods, O Israel ?
and thou art so willing to worship— poor Israel. —
Carlyle in Past and Present.
' And Aaron made proclamation, and said, To-morrow is a feast
unto the Lord.' — Exodus xxxii. 5.
Writing in 1657 to Lord Craighall, Samuel Ruther-
ford warns him seriously against kneeling before the
consecrated elements. ' Neither will your intention
help, which is not of the essence of worship ; for then,
Aaron in saying, "To-morrow shall be a feast for
Jehovah," that is, for the golden calf, should not have
been guilty of idolatry ; for he intended only to decline
the lash of the people's fury, not to honour the calf.
Your intention to honour Christ is nothing, seeing
that religious kneeling, by God's institution, doth
necessarily impart religious and Divine adoration.'
RECREATIONS AND AMUSEMENTS
' And the people sat down to eat and to drink, and rose up to
play.' — Exodus xxxii. 6. t
I. We must have 'play'. Even the children of
Israel must. We have great examples in this matter.
Our Incarnate Lord and His Apostles had their
feasts as well as their fasts ; then- quiet hours as well
as their hours crowded with holy toil.
Such ' play ' is greatly needed in our over- worked
days. Physical labour requires mental amusement,
and mental labour demands physical recreation.
The words ' amusement ' and ' recreation ' are in
themselves full of suggestiveness. The idea of the
word 'amusement' is 'to draw the mind to' some-
thing lighter. ' Recreation ' obviously signifies a
fresh creation.
Everything, however, depends upon the quality
and the quantity of our recreations and amusements.
II. Let me enumerate some good amusements and
recreations. Some ' play ' that is to be held honour-
able to all.
Earliest in such a category I would place pure
light literature.
Music, at home and in public, is one of the most
exalted and delightful of recreations.
Art offers splendid and tranquil amusement and
recreation.
What delights modern science opens to the multi-
tude ! Nature teems with instructive delights.
I hardly need to remind young men or young
women in these times of the athletic pleasures which
abound.
A good walk in the city streets will, if we practise
an educated observation, be a manifold benefit to us.
Charles Kingsley said that a walk along Regent
Street was an intellectual tonic. A walk in the
country, especially with the ministry of pleasant and
profitable conversation, may be a memorable and
every way beneficial experience.
The pleasures of travel are happily now by the co-
operative plan within reach of large numbers of young
people.
Church life affords the best recreation to some.
Ever remember the noble words of Dean Church,
' Every real part of our life ought to be part of our
Christian life '.
III. Suffer me to warn you against certain evil
amusements and recreations.
Shun that class of entertainments which vulgarizes
and sullies mind and soul.
It is not wholly superfluous to caution you against
exhausting amusements. Whatever impairs your vital
energy and lowers your physical tone is a foe to your
highest well-being. Nor is it fatuous to enter a
caution against such amusements and recreations as
disincline you for more serious pursuits. Few, if any,
amusements work such injury as do betting and
gambling.
The ' play ' in which Israel occupied itself and to
which my text refers was arrantly unworthy. May
this ancient lapse save us from similar lapse. Take
heed lest evil ' play ' discredit and ruin you. • —
Christ is the ultimate source of true pleasures.
He causes these to abound to the believing soul. —
Dinsdale T. Young, Messages for Home and Life,
p. 47.
Illustration. — You have heard the story of the
young hunter at Ephesus : returning from the chase
with his unstrung bow in his hand he entered the house
of the venerable St. John. To his utter astonish-
ment John was playing with a tame dove. He indi-
cated his surprise that the seer should be so frivolously
occupied. St. John asked him why he carried his
bow unstrung. ' In order that my bow may retain
its elasticity,' was his immediate reply. ' Just so,' said
113
8
Ver. 18.
EXODUS XXXII
Ver. 35.
St. John ; ' and mind and body will not retain their
elasticity or usefulness unless they are at times un-
strung ; prolonged tension destroys their power.' —
Dinsdale T. Young, Messages for Home and Life,
p. 47.
References. — XXXII. 7-14. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xlii.
No. 2486. XXXII. 10, 31, 32.— T. G. Selby, The God of the
Patriarchs, p. 185. XXXII. 14. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol.
xli. No. 2398. XXXII. 15-26.— A. Maclaren, Expositions of
Holy Scripture — Exodus, etc., p. 177.
EPIPHANY
' And Moses said, I beseech Thee, show me Thy glory. And
God said, I -will make all My goodness pass before thee,
and I will proclaim the name of the Lord before thee.' —
Exodus xxxii. i8.
I. The pleading supplication, ' I beseech Thee, show
me Thy glory,' is the language of the human heart,
under the pressure of the deepest desire man can ex-
perience. It is the voicing of the ceaseless, age-long
yearning on the part of man for tangible, ocular de-
monstration of God. And the answer given to Moses
is an authoritative declaration of the only demonstra-
tion of the existence and character of God possible
to beings in the finite condition of earth's education.
The only proof of the existence of any primal force
is that force in action ; the absolute is only known as
it is conditioned. God to us, only is as He acts ;
and so the answer to the universal appeal of human-
ity is, 'I will make all My goodness pass before
thee '.
II. The unwillingness on the part of man to accept
this answer of God as final has been the cause of most
of the defective apprehension, narrowness, supersti-
tion, and second-hand religion which have clipped
the wings of Godward growtb. He who follows God's
clue is he whose eyes are slowly opened. God makes
all His goodness to pass before him. He has dis-
covered and acknowledged physical beauty in the
universe, and moral beauty in man ; he infers logic-
ally that there must be a Divine ideal of both physical
and moral beauty, of which he has recognized the
shadow, and he knows that that Divine ideal must be
God.
Moses, the servant of the Lord, affords a striking
example, from the ancient world, of a standard thus
slowly raised, till his one absorbing need was to see
God. He had followed the clue. Symbolisms and
limitations had no power to satisfy the instincts of
his heart, and his whole soul goes out in the cry, ' I
beseech Thee, show me Thy glory '. A picture-lesson
of the same process is afforded by our Lord's dealings
with His disciples. Slowly He unfolds their aspira-
tions, as the sun unfolds a flower. At last, one of
them, as the spokesman of the rest, bursts out with
the cry, ' Lord, show us the Father, and it sufficeth
us '. And in each case the answer is the same : to
Moses it is, ' I will make all My goodness pass before
thee ' ; to Philip it is, ' Have I been so long time with
you, and hast thou not known Me, Philip ? He that
hath seen Me hath seen the Father.'
III. Now, is not this the meaning of the Festival
of the Epiphany? The story of that star leading
thoughtful Zoroastrians across the wilderness to
Bethlehem, is the analogy of the secret drawing of
the Infinite Mother-Heart, leading watchful souls
through the deserts of materialism, idolatry, imper-
fect Theism, to the oasis of the Incarnation, the
highest philosophical demonstration of the character
of God.
Two conditions appear to be suggested by to-day's
Epiphany teaching as pre-requisite for the right
apprehension of this full restful revelation of God :
the one is aspiration, the other is activity. God is
often not known because He is not wanted. At the
threshold of every spiritual function there is a want,
a restlessness, a desire, a hunger, that the largest
promises of the world cannot fill. Prayer, thought,
aspiration, will quicken and vitalize that blessed
restlessness.
The second condition is activity, usefulness, minis-
try. A life of selfish vanity, a life of idle indulgence,
a life of mean self-concentration, may have a good
deal of religion in it, but it cannot see God. — B.
Wilberforce, Following on to Know the Lord, p.
57.
Illustration. — O, my God, let me see Thee; and
if to see Thee is to die, let me die, that I may see
Thee. — Prayer of St. Augustine, p. 58.
References. — XXXII. 24. — J. H. Halsey, The Spirit of
Truth, p. 261. XXXII. 26.— H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, God's
Heroes, p. 197. C. Perren, Revival Sermons in Outline, p. 303.
Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxvi. No. 1531 ; see also vol. 1. No.
2884. XXXII. 31, 32.— E. L. Hull, Sermons Preached at
King's Lynn (3rd Series), p. 106.
' Yet now, if Thou wilt forgive their sin ; — and if not, blot me,
I pray Thee, out of Thy book which Thou hast written.'
— Exodus xxxii. 32.
' Not by reading, but by some bitterly painful experi-
ence,' said Maurice (Life, i. p. 171), ' I seem to have
been taught that to aim at any good to myself while
I contemplate myself apart from the whole body of
Christ, is a kind of contradiction.
Let my name be blotted out, and my memory perish,
if only France may be free. — Danton.
' And the Lord plagued the people because they made the calf. '
— Exodus xxxii. 35.
Afflictions speak convincingly, and will be heard
when preachers cannot. If our dear Lord did not put
these thorns under our head, we should sleep out our
lives and lose our glory. — Baxter, Saints' Rest,
chap. x.
References. — XXXIII. — W. Gray Elmslie, Expository
Lectures and Sermons, p. 295. XXXIII. 7. — Spurgeon, Ser-
mons, vol. vii. No. 359. XXXIII.— R. J. Campbell, City Temple
Sermons, p. 27. C. Brown, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lxix.
1906, p. 273. XXXIII. 12-14.— H. Varley, Spiritual Light and
Life, p. 97. XXXIII. 12-23.— A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy
Scripture — Exodus, etc., p. 186.
114
Vv. 13-15.
EXODUS XXXIII
Ver. 14.
THE PRESENCE SHALL ENLIGHTEN THE
WAY
(For the New Year)
'Shew me now Thy way. . . . And He said, My presence shall
go with thee, and I will give thee rest. And he said unto
Him, If Thy presence go not with me, carry us not up hence.'
— Exodus xxxiii. 13-15.
We have here : —
I. An unenlightened prayer for light. A rash
prayer, impatient, unwise, and of the kind which God
never answers according to our pleasure. Show me
now Thy way. He wanted to have the sealed book
opened, unrolled and set before him — that book in
which God has written things to come.
The Lord is too merciful to let us look ahead. It
is in mercy that He overthrows our predictions and
mocks our guesses. It is nearly always the unex-
pected that appears. We know not anything about
to-morrow — we can only hope and trust : and it is
better so. The uncertainties of life keep us sober,
watchful, reverently humble and prayerful. They
help to make us patient, brave, dutiful and religious.
It would not help us to know the way that God is
going to take with us.
II. The rash and inconsiderate prayer is answered
in God's larger wisdom. Show me what is coming,
said Moses. And the voice replies, Only this much
will I show thee. My presence shall go with you, and
I will give thee rest. God strips tbe request of all
that is presumptuous and unwise, and answers what
remains. He denies the wish that would work mischief,
and grants the sure blessing. It is a mercy that most
of our prayers are dealt with in this manner. Faith and
foolishness go hand in hand in most of our approaches
to God. We should miss most of the best and high-
est things of life if God were to say yes to all our
requests, and we should imbibe a great deal of poison
in the course of life if He allowed us to drink every
cup that we asked for. If the presence go with us,
all will be well. In the desert there will be water
springs, and in all barren and rugged places the green
pastures of His love.
III. Now see how faith at once recognizes that
this is the surest and best blessing, and eagerly asks
that it may be given. Yes, cries Moses at the finish,
that is what I need, just that and not the other thing
— Thy presence. If Thy presence go not with me,
cany us not up hence.
This will be the confession of every religious man
and woman at the beginning of the year. We dare
not trust ourselves ; we cannot depend upon any of
life's uncertainties. If the past has taught us any-
thing it is this : That we were weak when we thought
ourselves strong, often most foolish when we deemed
ourselves specially wise, most erring where we claimed
infallibility, most disappointed where our calcula-
tions were most confident, and that we only acted
wisely and well when we took hold of God's hand
and in trustful prayer let Him lead us. — J. G. Green-
hough, Christian Festivals and Anniversaries,
p. 10.
' My presence shall go with thee, and I will give thee rest' —
Exodus xxxiii. 14.
Many are quite conscious that the person has never
yet appeared who can unlock for them and lead their
way into the depths and hiding-places of their nature.
Others are quite conscious that the presence of cer-
tain individuals gives them a totally new and different
possession of their being. ... If the presence of a
gifted creature be so mysteriously helpful, what help
must there be for us in the Divine Presence ? — Dr.
Pulsford, Quiet Hours, pp. 222 f.
I WILL GIVE THEE REST
Compare Nietzsche's analysis in The Twilight of the
Idols of spurious ' peace of soul '. It may be the be-
ginning of fatigue, the first shadow which the evening
— every sort of evening — casts. Or a sign that the
air is moist, that southern winds arise. Or uncon-
scious gratitude for a good digestion or the quieting
dawn of the convalescent to whom all things have a
new taste and who is waiting in expectancy. Or the
condition which follows upon a full gratification of
our ruling passion, the agreeable feeling of a rare
satiety. Or the senile weakness of our will, of our
desires, of our vices. Or laziness, persuaded by con-
ceit to deck itself out in moral guise.
GOD'S PRESENCE AND GOD'S REST
(Third Sunday after the Epiphany)
' And He said, My presence shall go with thee, and I will give
thee rest.' — Exodus xxxiii. 14.
I. God's Presence. — Notice the promise of the text,
'My presence shall go with thee'. Whatever the
world may say, however men may scoff, there is some-
thing real in the presence of God.
(a) God's presence gives us safety. — Whatever
our work may be, in whatever land it may lie, how-
ever risky it may seem to men, if we have God's
presence with us we are truly safe.
(b) God's presence gives us also perfect strength.
— It was in the realization of that presence that David
went forth to meet Goliath. If God is with you, you
will have strength to be holy.
(c) God' 8 presence gives strength to live as God
would have us live.
(d) God's presence gives us the song. — You re-
member the Psalmist's words, ' In Thy presence is
fullness of joy ; at Thy right hand there are pleasures
for evermore'. When the Lord Jesus Christ had
ascended to heaven the disciples ' returned to Jerusa-
lem with their joy.'
II. God's Rest. — The rest God gave to Moses was
not a rest of idleness without service, but a rest in
service, and if you have God's presence with you, you
will find rest even in your busiest moments. You will
find that you must be up and doing, that you cannot,
you dare not, be idle, as, for every hour, you must give
account to God ; but in the midst of service, service
which is tiring and oftentimes dispiriting, you will
find that the presence of God will give you perfect
rest.
115
Ver. 14.
EXODUS XXXIII
Ver. 19.
III. The Condition of God's Presence. — God will
not come and take possession of an unholy temple.
The heavenly Dove will never dwell in a foul nest.
If you want His presence you must come out from all
that is evil and be separate, and then He will be a
Father to you, and you His son or daughter. Do you
know His presence ? If you want to know it, you
will know it. Give yourself up to Him, wholly and
entirely, for as you give yourself wholly you shall be
holy. Holiness lies in being wholly Christ's.
A NEW YEAR'S PROMISE
{For New Year's Day)
' My presence shall go with thee, and I will give thee rest.' —
Exodus xxxiii. 14.
I. The Call to Service.- — To-day there is a call to
consecrate again ourselves and our time to the service
of Almighty God : as this new year stretches before
us all uncertain in its issue, to step out, upheld by the
great resolve that by God's help our feet shall be set
upon a higher ridge than before, that we shall go
across a battle-field where we shall not always be the
vanquished, that our lives shall have less of self in
them and more of God, that we will cast away some
garment that impedes our every step and rise and come
to Jesus, that we will take the wider views, look for
larger horizons. Dim and misty and all uncertain
lies before us this coming year. As you and I have
sat upon some hill in the early morning, and have
seen all the country covered with a mist, here and
there perhaps some hill top or mountain standing out,
so lies our life before us to-day. But read these words
of the text into that life, and they will intershine it,
will irradiate it and make it to glow with the purpose
and the power of our God.
II. Freedom in Service. — Freedom is a necessity if
we would enter into the meaning of the words of our
text. Freedom is not licence to live to self, but power
to live to God. And how is the presence here spoken
of manifested but through love ? What are the de-
sires that we are conscious of from time to time, desires
for something better, something purer, something
higher than we ourselves ever yet attained to — what
are these but God bending down to the soul to draw
it up to Him, and the soul reaching up to God that it
may answer to that attraction ? In order that I may
be able to render the free service of love, God has
given me the power of refusing His love, and of refus-
ing His service, in order that my service which is
evoked by the love of God may be the service of a
free and a willing man. So through the love of God
raising in us an echo, the returning love of our soul,
there comes the free service that we would render to
God. In the family life and in the life of the family
of God, first there comes the love, and then the love
issues into the desire of obedience or of service on the
part of the members of the family, and so that love
of God that evokes my love in willing service is to me
an abiding proof of the presence in me of One Who
not only attracts but upholds, supports, uplifts me.
And then there comes that mysterious guiding of the
116
hand of God of which we must be conscious from time
to time in our lives. Looking back, we can see that
there has been something mysterious from time to
time that has shaped and guided our life, and we re-
cognize the finger-marks of God upon the life.
III. The Promised Rest. — And the rest that is
promised, what are we to understand by that ?
(a) Partakes of God's character. — If it is to
come from God it is clear that it must partake of the
character of God. When God rested from the work
of creation, as we read, did it mean inactivity, or did
it mean a passing on to further and still greater work ?
Our Lord has answered that question for us, ' My
Father worketh hitherto and I work ' — work, progress
in work, change in work. In active loving service
there is rest for the spirit of man. There stands be-
fore us the Central Figure in the history of the world,
and from His lips is coming the precious promise,
' Come unto Me all ye that labour and are heavy
laden, and I will give you rest,' and He goes on to
tell us still, ' Take My yoke upon you, and learn of
Me, for I am meek and lowly in heart ; and ye shall
find rest unto your souls '. To take the yoke, the
daily burden under the guiding hand of God, to do
the Lord's work that He sets for you and me to-day,
to live the life of God by the power that God can
give us — thus may we find rest unto our souls. In
doing the will of God alone is there rest for the soul
of man. We look into the Garden of Gethsemane
and we see the Lord battling there with all the evil
weight of temptation, and we see at last the human
will bending to the will of God the Father ; then it
is that the rest begins and the agony is over, ' Never-
theless not My will but Thine be done '.
(6) Sanctified by the presence of God. — In pro-
portion as we learn to recognize the presence of God
with us we shall be able to bow our will before God.
In that surrender and in the active service of God
that follows depend upon it we shall experience the
promised rest. To-day once more we try by the
power of God to prepare our hearts that the presence
of God may be there. Let us rise to the height of
our vocation ! Try sometimes to take wider views,
to look to more boundless horizons ; not always to
walk with our heads down and hearts heavy and lives
depressed, but to look up into the sunshine.
References. — XXXIII. 14. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxvii.
No. 1583. J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons (9th series), p. 249.
R. Higinbotham, Sermons, p. 84. C. Brown, Christian World
Pulpit, vol. Ixv. 1904, p. 22. C. Stanford, Central Truths, p.
227. XXXIII. 14, 15.— T. G. Rooke, The Church in the
Wilderness, p. 139. R. H. McKira, The Gospel in the Christian
Year, p. 61. XXXIII. 15. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xlviii.
No. 2811. XXXIII. 18.— W. Winn, Christian World Pulpit,
vol. xliii. 1893, p. 262. R. Waddy Moss, The Discipline of
the Soul, p. 219. XXXIII. 18, 19.— H. Varley, Spiritual
Light and Life, p. 113. S. Baring-Gould, Village Preaching
for a Year, vol. ii. p. 264.
' I will make all my goodness pass before thee . . . and will be
gracious to whom I will be gracious.' — Exodus xxxiii. ig.
God's goodness appeareth in two things, giving and
forgiving. — Matthew Henry.
Ver. 3.
EXODUS XXXIV
Ver. 7.
References.— XXXIII. 19.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. x.
No. 553. XXXIII. 19-23.— C. H. Osier, Christian World
Pulpit, vol. lxxiv. 1908, p. 121. XXXIII. 23.— R. Collyer,
Where the Light Dwelleth, p. 249. XXXIV. 1-10, 27-35.— A.
B. Davidson, The Called of God, p. 129. XXXIV. 2.— J. W.
Mills, After Glow, p. 111.
'Neither let [the flocks nor herds feed before that mount.' —
Exodus xxxiv. 3.
St. John of the Cross remarks that by this verse the
soul is taught that ' he who seeks to climb the mount
of perfection and to hold communion with God must
not only renounce all things but must not even allow
his appetites, which are the beasts, to feed within sight
of the mount.'
THE USE OF ISOLATED MOMENTS
' No man shall come up with thee.'— Exodus xxxiv. 3.
I. Here was a Divine call to solitude. There are
moments of many souls in which they are doomed to
be alone — to have no man with them. The inspira-
tions of genius are such moments ; the voices of the
crowd then sound from afar. The throbs of con-
science are such moments ; the heart then speaks to it-
self alone. The arrests by sickness are such moments ;
we feel shunted from the common way. The ap-
proaches of death are such moments ; the hour comes
to all, but it comes separately to each. We should
have missed something from the Bible if amid the
many voices of God there had been no place found
for such moments as these. But with this verse of
Exodus before us, the want is supplied. I learn that
my times of solitude as well as my days of crowded-
ness are a mission from the Divine.
II. There is a lesson which my soul can only get
from solitude; it is the majesty of the individual.
Society tells me I am only a cipher — an insignificant
drop in a mighty stream. But when I am alone,
when the curtain is fallen on my brother man, when
there seems in the universe but God and I, it is then
I know what it is to be an individual soul ; it is then
that there breaks on me the awful solemnity, the
dread responsibility, the sublime weightedness, of
having a personal life.
III. Therefore it is that betimes my Father sum-
mons me into the solitude. Therefore it is that
betimes He calls me up to the lonely mount and
cries, ' Let no man come with thee '. Therefore it is
that betimes He shuts the door on my companion-
ships, and bars the windows to the street, and deafens
the ear of the world's roar. He would have me see
myself by His light, measure myself by His standard,
know myself even as I am known. — G. Matheson,
Messages of Hope, p. 23.
Reference.— XXXIV. 5.— J. Halsey, The Spirit of Truth,
p. 34.
'And the Lord passed by before him, and proclaimed, The
Lord, The Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering,
and abundant in goodness and truth.'— Exodus xxxiv. 6.
Compare Cromwell's words in his letter to Fleetwood
of 1652 : ' The voice of Fear is : If I had done this ;
if I had avoided that ; how well it had been with me.
Love argueth in this wise : What a Christ have I ;
what a Father in and through Him ! What a Name
hath my Father: merciful, gracious, long-suffer-
ing, abundant in goodness and truth ; forgiving
iniquity, transgression and sin. What a Nature
hath my Father : He is Love ; free in it, unchange-
able, infinite ! '
Then the Recorder stood up on his feet, and first
beckoning with his hand for silence, he read out with
loud voice the pardon. But when he came to these
words, 'The Lord, The Lord God, merciful and
gracious, pardoning iniquity and transgressions, and
sins ; and to them, all manner of sin and blasphemy
shall be forgiven,' etc., they could not forbear leap-
ing for joy. For this you must know, that there was
conjoined herewith every man's name in Mansoul ;
also the seals of the pardon made a brave show. —
Bunyan, Holy War.
Reference. — XXXIV. 6. — A. Maclaren, Expositions of
Holy Scripture — -Exodus, etc., p. 195.
' Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and trans-
gression and sin, and that will by no means clear the
guilty ; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the
children.' — -Exodus xxxiv. 7.
In his reminiscences of Erskine of Linlathen, Dean
Stanley recalls how the Scottish theologian ' was
fond of dwelling on the passages in the Bible which
bring out the overbalance of love and mercy as against
vengeance and wrath. " This," he said, " shows the
right proportion of faith." And one of these to
which he often referred was the close of the second
commandment — " visiting the sins of the fathers unto
the third and fourth generation of them that hate
me, and showing mercy unto ( — not thousands, as
of individuals — but) unto the thousanth and thou-
santh generation — (quoting the words of the Hebrew
original — ) of them that love Me ". I never read that
part of the commandment without thinking of this
saying, and of the tones in which he uttered it.'
THE DARK LINE IN GOD'S FACE
' That will by no means clear the guilty ; visiting the iniquity
of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's
children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.'
— Exodus xxxiv. 7.
I. Consider the Proof of this Dark Line. — 'And
that will by no means clear the guilty.' Mark, at
the outset, how clear is the testimony of Scripture.
In the first story of God's dealing with man, that
story of the Garden which foreshadows all His love
and grace, we see it in the face of God. Adam and
Eve are driven out of Eden, and the angel with the
flaming sword which turned every way keeps the way
of the tree of life. That is the first declaration that
God will by no means clear the guilty.
Mark it again on the broader page of universal
history. The one truth of which all secular historians
are sure is that the Nemesis of judgment forgets
nothing and forgives nothing. In narrower spheres
of life the truth is as evident and as appalling. The
little child who is ushered into life, misshapen in
body, cramped in mind, darkened in spirit, has done
117
Ver. 7.
EXODUS XXXIV
Ver. 14.
no sin, but its helplessness and torture are the
terrifying proofs that God will by no means clear
the guilty, and that He visits the iniquity of the
fathers upon the children and upon the children's
children.
Mark it again in the teaching of Jesus. There is
scarcely a parable which does not emphasize it. But
the more convincing and definite sayings of Jesus are
those which affirm that this dark line remains in
God's face in the world to come. He speaks in grave
warning of the outer darkness, the everlasting fire,
the shut door, the weeping and wailing and gnashing
of teeth.
II. Consider the Significance of this Dark Line
in the Face of God. — Have you never known a
human face in which there were lines, at first sight
stern and forbidding, but as you learned their mean-
ing, and came to know what lay behind their severity,
they gave the face its strength and distinction and
charm ? This dark line makes God wondrously
beautiful.
Its first significance is His inflexible justice. It
declares that God is unswervingly just and impartially
righteous towards all men. Now we can look up at
that dark line and see its beauty.
Its second significance is His wrath at sin. The
darkest line in a human face is the line of an anger
which is shot through with grief. It is not other-
wise with the face of God.
The third significance is His passionate desire
for holiness. Here we touch the deeper significance.
Where only justice and aggrieved wrath are found
there is no room for mercy or for healing, but where
a passionate desire for holiness lodges, there is hope
even for the worst. This line in God's face is darker
when it sees the sin of His own, because of His
passion for holiness.
III. Now let us Learn why so Many Refuse to
see the Truth and Beauty of This Dark Line. — The
reason is that one of the most controlling truths in
God's character is overlooked. What stirs God to
the depths is not suffering, but sin. If men would
take God's way, and deal first with the world's sin,
the world's suffering would greatly cease.
Nowhere can it be more movingly seen than at the
Cross that God will by no means clear the guilty.
Nowhere is it more sadly plain that He visits the
iniquity of the fathers upon the children, than when
He laid the sins of men upon the Son of Man. In
the Cross we see the dark line of God's face, and
understand His justice, His grieved anger, and His
passionate desire for holiness. Had there been no
dark line in God's face there would have been no
Cross. What Jesus saw as He was dying was this
line in a face of love dark with anger at the sin of
man. — W. M. Clow, The Cross in Christian Ex-
perience, p. 28.
References. — XXXIV. 7. — H. Ward Beecher, Sermons
(4th Series), p. 183. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy
Scripture—Exodus, etc., p. 199. XXXIV. 8, 9.— J. K.
Popham, Sermons, p. 116.
' O Lord, let my Lord, I pray thee, go among us ; for it is a
stiff-necked people.' — Exodus xxxiv. g.
Read that account on the proclaiming of God's name
to Moses given in the 33rd and 34th chapters of
Exodus, ' The Lord, The Lord God, forgiving iniquity,
transgression and sin, without clearing the guilty'
(which last expression refers to the sacrifice of Christ,
and just means through an atonement). As soon as
Moses heard it, he thought, This is just the God that
we want, for the people are continually committing sin,
and this is a sin-forgiving God ; and Moses made
haste and said, Go with us ; for this is a stiff-necked
people. That for is an extraordinary word. — Thomas
Erskine of Linlathen, Letters, p. 121.
THE DIVINE JEALOUSY
'For the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God.' —
Exodus xxxiv. 14.
Is jealousy primarily a vice masking as a much-suffer-
ing virtue, or is it a virtue that has caught many of
the basenesses of a vice ? May we ascribe jealousy to
the holy and glorious God without reflecting the least
stain of dishonour upon His nature ?
I. Our literature, like that of all nations, indeed,
abounds in pictures of this consuming passion. Per-
haps the most familiar and impressive delineation of
the passion is that presented by Shakespeare in his
great masterpiece, ' Othello the Moor '. If you recall
the chief outlines of the tragedy you will have a con-
crete illustration before you from which to start in
studying the subject of the Divine jealousy.
1. Our condemnation of jealousy is not infrequently
condemnation of the ignorance and infatuation
with which it is mixed. Jealousy must always rank
with the vices rather than virtues when, like that of
Othello, it is blind — blind with the guilty blindness
that will not consent to see.
2. Our condemnation of jealousy is very often
condemnation of the despotic temper, in which it
has its root. We class it with the vices rather than
the virtues, because in many cases it is not love seek-
ing the just return of love. How often is it thinly
disguised ambition, aggressive and overbearing ego-
tism ? I have no doubt Shakespeare meant us to
recognize an element of this sort in the jealousy of
Othello.
3. Our condemnation of jealousy, again, is some-
times the condemnation of moral unfitness to win
and to retain the love that has been vainly sought
or miserably abused. The temper is often a vice,
because the chilled affection that has provoked it is
the just retribution of neglect, ungraciousness, intem-
perance of disposition and behaviour.
4. Our condemnation of jealousy is often a con-
demnation of the merciless and savage forms in
which it expresses itself. We class it with the vices
rather than with the virtues, because when the passion
is once encouraged it tends to become a masterful
impulse akin to homicidal madness.
II. The flaws in our current human jealousies not-
withstanding, may not the very highest moral and
118
Ver. 29.
EXODUS XXXIV
Ver. 29.
spiritual forces go to inform and energize this senti-
ment? The heart which upon just and righteous
occasion is incapable of jealousy is likewise incapable
of love. Love has rights it can never renounce with-
out proving false to its own deepest qualities. And
if no love can compare with God's, no right can rival
the right that is inherent in the foundation qualities
of that love.
All humane and civilized governments which ac-
count themselves responsible for the well-being of the
people committed to their care are characterized by
this temper of jealousy, and the strength of the temper
is a test of their very right to exist. In such cases
the passion is emphatically a virtue.
The jealousy exercised in the interests of others
must be holy and beneficent. God will brook no in-
trusion into His work, no division of His authority,
no departure from His laws. He alone can guide us
through the rocks and whirlpools, and bring us to our
far-off' goal. That He should be supreme is the very
salvation of the universe.
III. Now let us face the question : if jealousy has
this high and holy basis, and if God's jealousy does
not need to be held in check because of the imperfec-
tion of knowledge, the risk of mistake, or the fear
lest the passion once kindled should hurry into inor-
dinate and unconsidered excess, is not the Divine
type of the passion likely to be more terribly intense
and overwhelming than any of the modern types we
find around us? God gives incalculably more love
than others, and 'He is moved with a deeper in-
dignation when you suffer a rival to reign in His
place.
Mark how this feature reappears in the character
and teaching of Jesus Christ, who is the image of the
Father's person and glory. ' He that loveth father
or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me.' The
holy jealousy of Christ's life is as true a hint of the
surpassing qualities of His love as the vicariousness
of His bitter death. — T. G. Selby, The Lesson of a
Dilemma, p. 102.
References. — XXXIV. 14. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. ix.
No. 502. XXXIV. 23.— C. S. Robinson, Simon Peter, p. 41.
SPIRITUAL BEAUTY
' Moses wist not that . . . his face shone.' — Exodus xxxiv. 29.
Spiritual beauty is loveliest when it is unconsciously
possessed.
I. Moses has been closeted with God. The glory
of the Lord has been poured upon him, bathing him
in unearthly brightness, so that when he returns to
the mountain-base his countenance shines like the
light. The same transformation is effected every day,
and by the same means. Spiritual communion alters
the fashion of the countenance. The supreme beauty
of a face is its light, and spirituality makes ' a face
illumined '. The face of Moses was transfigured by
the glory of the Eternal.
II. But 'Moses wist not that his face shone'.
That is the supreme height of spiritual loveliness ; to
be lovely, and not to know it. Surely this is a lesson
we all need to learn. Virtue is so apt to become
self-conscious, and so to lose its glow.
1. Take the grace of humility. Humility is very
beautiful when we see it unimpaired. It is exquisite
with the loveliness of Christ. But there is a self-
conscious humility which is only a very subtle species
of pride. Humility takes the lowest place, and does
not know that her face shines. Pride can take the
lowest place, and find her delight in the thought of
her presumably shining face.
2. Charity is a lovely adornment of the Christian
eye, but if charity be self-conscious it loses all its
charm. The Master says that true charity does not
let the left hand know what the right hand doeth.
The counsel is this — do not talk about thy giving to
thyself. Do not let it be done in a boastful self-
consciousness, or its beauty is at once impaired.
3. It is even so with the whole shining multitude
of virtues and graces. No virtue has its full strength
and beauty until its possession is unnoticed by its
owner. Virtue must become so customary as to be
unconsciously worn.
III. And so it is that the problem shapes itself
thus — we must become so absorbed in God as to for-
get ourselves. We cannot gaze much upon God's
face and remain very conscious of ourselves. — J. H.
Jowett, Meditations for Quiet Moments, p. 22.
THE ELEMENT OF UNCONSCIOUSNESS IN
CHARACTER
' Moses wist not that the skin of his face shone while he talked
with Him.' — Exodus xxxiv. 29. ' (Samson) wist not that
the Lord was departed from him.' — Judges xvi. 20.
Moses wist not, he did not know, that the skin of his
face shone after he had been with God. Samson wist
not, he did not know, that the strength which he had
with God had departed from him until he arose and
wished to shake himself as at other times, and then
he found, and it was a sad discovery, that all his
strength was gone, that the Lord had gone away
from him. Now why was this ? Why were they both
unconscious, one that his appearance was so glorified
and the other that he had become so weak ? In both
cases this unconsciousness was due to their former
way of life.
I. Think of Moses. — You cannot read the story in
the early books of the Bible without having the truth
brought very closely home that Moses was a man of
prayer. He never forgot the need of supplication, of
asking God to help him in every hour of his difficulties
as he led the children of Israel through the many
trials of the wilderness. He was a man who trusted
in God. He never forgot that he was in God's hands,
and he thought all the time of the honour and glory
of God. He did not think of how he himself could
gain honour and glorify himself, but he remembered
the great truth that every one who loves God must
learn, that we must seek first the honour and glory of
God. And so throughout his life he was one who
spent much time in God's presence, and all this had
an effect upon his character. It brought him more
119
Ver. 29.
EXODUS XXXIV
Ver. 30.
and more into union with God Almighty, and he be-
came more humble, maybe. He remembered all the
time that God was his loving Father, and that his life
was safe in the keeping of God, and that all the people
who were trusted to his care would be safe, because
they were in God's hands. But here is the remarkable
fact, he does not seem to have been conscious of it.
He does not seem to have recognized his own power
and his own greatness ; he thought of the glory of
God. And this was the most marked and most evi-
dent when he was in the mount with God. He met
God face to face. He had the letters written upon
the tables of stone, and he brought them down and
gave them to the children of Israel, and when he
came down from the mountain a wonderful thing
happened : his very countenance shone so that he was
compelled to veil his face before the people could look
upon him and he could speak to them. Yes, so it was
with Moses in some marvellous way, because he lived
so near to God there was beauty in his life and in his
character. He came down from the mountain, and he
was a different man from what he was when he went up.
II. There are many People to-day, and there have
been many people in every age in the world's history,
who are also very anxious to know what they are like
in the sight of God. It may be that they have so
often drawn near God that they have humbled them-
selves, that they think themselves the greatest sinners
of all (like Saint Paul, who, we know, was such a holy
man and yet thought he was the least of all saints),
and they are disappointed, it may be, and cast down ;
but here is a great encouragement which I would
bring to you, that if you feel your sin is so great you
can yet feel that the power of the Saviour is greater,
that if you are conscious of your terrible state in God's
sight, that there is One Who has taken the sin upon
Himself, and all is well. It may be that the work of
these people for God, though it seems so unimportant,
will one day be recognized, and their faces will shine.
III. Look at Samson. — He was entrusted with a
great gift, he was a very strong man ; but that great
physical strength given him by God was given to him
for a special purpose. He, like Moses, had work to do
for his God. He was a chosen vessel, he was to be
used of God. He was set apart to bring salvation to
the people, and yet he seems to have thought of his
own strength, and not of the honour and glory of God.
He tampered with temptation. He went into the
very stronghold of the Philistines, into Gaza, and then
all through his life forgot the work he had been called
to do. The years passed by, and Samson forgot God.
The life of Samson seems so sad when we think of his
great opportunities, what he might have been, and
how he failed. And why was it ? It surely was that
great reason that he had forgotten God. If he had
remembered that he was set apart, if he had under-
stood that from his earliest years his work in life was
to free the people from the burden of the Philistines
and from the trouble that was in the country, he would
have looked up to God and trusted Him and been
able to do great things for God.
IV. We need to Live very near the Lord Jesus
Christ if our life is to be a life of usefulness and bring
honour and glory to God. We need to sink ourselves,
to be very humble, not to trust in our own strength,
but to put all our trust in our God. Then our life,
like Moses' life, will be a life of usefulness. We shall
not get into the bad habits which bind so many people
as Samson was bound, but we shall be able to help
others on the heavenly road.
' When he came down from the mount, Moses wist not that
the skin of his face shone.' — Exodus xxxiv. 29.
Christians that are really the most eminent saints,
and therefore have the most excellent experiences,
. . . are astonished at and ashamed of the low de-
grees of their love and thankfulness, and their little
knowledge of God. Moses, when he had been con-
versing with God in the mount, and his face shone so
bright in the eyes of others as to dazzle their eyes,
wist not that his face shone. — Jonathan Edwards,
The Religious Affections (part hi.).
Men of elevated minds are not their own historians
and panegyrists. So is it with faith and other Chris-
tian graces. Bystanders see our minds ; but our
minds, if healthy, see but the objects which possess
them. As God's grace elicits our faith, so His holi-
ness stirs our fear, and His glory kindles our love.
Others may say of us, 'here is faith,' and 'there is
conscientiousness,' and ' there is love ' ; but we can
only say, 'this is God's grace,' and 'that is His holi-
ness,' and ' that is His glory '. — Newman, Lectures on
Justification, p. 337.
Let thy face, like Moses', shine to others, but make
no looking-glasses for thyself. — Jeremy Taylor.
The late Dr. Andrew Bonar, when visiting Mr.
Moody at Northfield, was out in his garden at early
morning one day talking with his host. Along came
a band of happy students, who shouted out : ' We've
been having an all-night prayer meeting ; can't you
see our faces shine ? ' Dr. Bonar turned to them, and
said, with a quiet smile, and shake of the head :
' Moses wist not that his face shone '.
References. — XXXIV. 29. — W. J. Back, A Book of Lay
Sermons, p. 247. S. G. McLennan, Christian World Pulpit,
vol. lxv. 1904, p. 83. T. Teignmouth Shore, The Life of the
World to Gome, p. 157. W. A. Gray, The Shadow of the Hand,
p. 177. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture. — Exodus,
etc., p. 204. XXXIV. 29-35. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxvi.
No. 2143.
' Behold, the skin of his face shone.' — Exodus xxxiv. 30.
Make conscience of beginning the day with God.
For he that begins it not with Him, will hardly end
it with Him. It is he that finds God in his closet
that will carry the savour of Him into his house, his
shop, and his more open conversation. When Moses
had been with God in the mount, his face shone, he
brought of that glory into the camp. — Bunyan.
High gracious affections leave a sweet savour and
relish of Divine things on the heart, and a stronger
bent of soul towards God and holiness ; as Moses'
.120
Ver. 1.
EXODUS XXXV. -XL
Ver. 13.
face not only shone while he was in the mount, ex-
traordinarily conversing with God, but it continued
to shine after he came down from the mount. —
Jonathan Edwards.
'Millais was the best trained of all,' says Mr.
Holman Hunt in his History of Pre-Raphaelitism
(i. p. 139). ' Not one hour of his life had been lost to
his purpose of being a painter. The need of groping
after systems by philosophic research and deductions
was superseded in him by a quick instinct which
enabled him to pounce as an eagle upon the prize he
searched for. . . . He felt the fire of his message ; it
seemed to make his face shine, so that Rossetti, to
justify an expression of his in " Hand and Soul," said
that when he looked at Millais in full, his face was
that of an angel.'
Reference. — XXXIV. 30. — John Ker, Sermons, p. 170.
* These are the words which the Lord hath commanded, that
ye should do them.' — Exodus xxxv. i.
Religion is the recognition of all our duties as if
they were Divine commandments. — Kant.
References.— XXXV. 21. — A. Maclareu, Expositions of
Holy Scripture — Exodus, etc., p. 213.
' And he hath filled him with the spirit of God, in wisdom, in
understanding, and in knowledge, and in all manner of
workmanship.' — Exodus xxxv. 31.
Religion devotes the artist, hand and mind, to the
service of the gods ; superstition makes him the slave
of ecclesiastical pride, and forbids his work altogether,
in terror or disdain. — Ruskin, On the Old Road
(I.).
' And he hath put it in his heart that he may teach.'— Exodus
xxxv. 34.
The art which scorns all point of contact with
morals, which denies all responsibility as a teacher,
and knows no law but itself — nay, which evokes from
the artist no real self-restraint, no recognition of
the consecrating power of his gift, is a sterile art
which has missed its purpose. — Morris Joseph, The
Ideal in Judaism, p. 180.
' The people bring much more than enough for the service of
the work, which the Lord commanded to make.'— Exodus
xxxvi. 5.
When will the earth again hear the glad announce-
ment that the people bring much more than enough
for the service of the work, which the Lord com-
manded to make ? Yet, until we bring more than
enough, at least until we are kindled by a spirit which
will make us desire to do so, we shall never bring
enough. — Julius Hare in Guesses at Truth.
References. — XXXVII. 7. — S. Baring-Gould, Village
Preaching for a Year, vol. ii. p. 103. XXXVII. 23.— Ibid. vol.
ii. p. 145.
And he made the altar of incense of shittim wood . . . and
he overlaid it with pure gold.' — Exodus xxxvii. 25, 26.
The carved and pictured chapel — its entire surface
animated with image and emblem — made the parish
church a sort of book and Bible to the people's eye. —
Emerson, Essay on Religion.
References.— XXXVIII. 8.— S. Baring-Gould, Village
Preaching for a Year, vol. i. p. 189. XXXVIII. 26, 27.—
Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxvii. No. 1581. XXXIX. 8. — T.
Champness, New Coins from Old Gold, p. 234.
' A bell and a pomegranate, round about the hem of the robe.' —
Exodus xxxix. 26.
The golden bells on this ephod, by their precious
matter and pleasant sound, do well represent the
good profession that the saints make ; and the pome-
granates the fruit they bring forth. And as, in the
hem of the ephod, bells and pomegranates were con-
stantly connected, as is once and again observed,
there was a golden bell and a pomegranate, a
golden bell and a pomegranate, so it is in the true
saints. Their good profession and their good fruit
do constantly accompany one another. The fruit
they bring forth in life evermore answers the pleasant
sound of their profession. — Jonathan Edwards, The
Religious Affections (part iii.).
'And Moses did look on all the work, and behold they had
done it as the Lord had commanded, even so had they
doneit.' — Exodus xxxix. 43.
Though the gift of inspiring enthusiasm for duty
and virtue is like other gifts, very unequally distri-
buted among well-meaning persons, I do not believe
that anyone who had himself an ardent love of good-
ness ever failed to communicate it to others. He
may fail in his particular aims, he may use ill-devised
methods, meet with inexplicable disappointments,
make mistakes which cause him bitter regret ; but
we shall find that after all, though the methods may
have failed, the man has succeeded ; somewhere, some-
how, in some valuable degree, he has — if I may use
an old classical image — handed on the torch of his
own ardour to others who will run the race for the
prize of virtue. — Sir Leslie Stephen.
Reference. — XL. 1-16. — A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy
Scripture — Exodus, etc., p. 223.
' Thou shalt set up the tabernacle of the tent of the congrega-
tion.' — Exodus xl. 2.
What makes worship impressive is just its publicity,
its external manifestation, its sound, its splendour, its
observance universally and visibly, holding its sway
through all the details both of our outward and of our
inward life. — Joubert.
All the charm of ritual and ceremonial in worship
has for Pater an indefinable and constant attraction.
He is for ever recurring to it, because it seems to
him to interpret and express an emotion, a need of
the human spirit, whose concern is to comprehend if
it can what is the shadowy figure, the mysterious will,
that moves behind the world of sight and sense. —
A. C. Benson, Pater, p. 216.
' And thou shalt sanctify Aaron, that he may minister to me in
the priest's office.' — Exodus xl. 13.
This very Aaron, whose infirmity had yielded to so
foul an idolatry, is chosen by God to be a priest to
himself. As the light is best seen in darkness, the
mercy of God is most magnified in our unworthiness.
— Bishop Hall.
121
Ver. 16.
EXODUS XL
Ver. 37.
Abraham Lincoln once used this passage to defend
his appointment to a high position of some official
who had wronged and opposed him. He argued from
God's magnanimity. ' I have scriptural authority
for appointing him. You remember that when the
Lord was on Mount Sinai getting out a commission
for Aaron, that same Aaron was at the foot of the
mountain making a false god for the people to
worship. Yet Aaron got his commission, you know.'
1 Thus did Moses : according to all that the Lord commanded
him, so did he.' — Exodus xl. i6.
I lighted in the Journal on a very appreciative
notice of Faraday, whose death I was grieved to
observe. It is by one who signs himself A. de la
Rive, and I am sure you will be gratified by the close
of it. After describing his scientific career, and
speaking of the failing health of latter years, he says,
' . . . Sa fin a ete aussi douce que sa vie ; on peut
dire de lui qu'il s'est endormi au Seigneur. J'ai rare-
ment vu un chretien plus convaincu et plus conse-
quent.' That word consequent I like — one who
follows it up into all its consequences. — De. John
Kee, Letters, pp. 40-41.
' So Moses finished the work.' — Exodus xl. 33.
It is more of this quality of will that is needed — this
faithful, loyal temperament that cannot put its hand
to the plough and afterwards lightly turn back. A
persistent will — patient and unfaltering — above all
things it is well to nurse this quality in children —
faithfulness to the work once taken in hand, be it
ever so trivial. Faithfulness is the backbone of faith,
and without faith enthusiasm will fade or flicker,
after which virtue will be very moderate indeed.
And faithfulness implies a sense of duty, a habit of
taking conduct as a series of acts that ought to be
done, or as pledges that ought to be fulfilled — a sense
of responsibility for the accurate and thorough ful-
filment of every piece of work. — Dr. Sophie Bryant,
Studies in Character, p. 170.
' If the cloud were not taken up, then they journeyed not till
the day that it was taken up.'— Exodus xl. 37.
All our troubles come from impatience, from not
trusting God. It is like moving, when the cloud is
still. — General Gordon, Letters, p. 268.
122
LEVITICUS
LEVITICUS— THE BOOK OF LAWS
This book has been aptly called the handbook of the
priests. The content of the book is linked to the
subjects dealt with in Exodus and is in direct con-
tinuation thereof.
I. Dedication. — In this division there is revealed
the provision of God for the approach of His people
to Himself in worship. The offerings are first de-
scribed and then their laws are enunciated. There fol-
lowed instructions concerning the method of offering,
which revealed the true attitude of the worshipper.
II. Meditation. — The second division consists of a
brief historical portion which gives an account of the
actual ceremony of the consecration of the priests and
the tabernacle, and the common cement of worship.
III. Separation. — While provision for approach
was made, and the method of appropriation was pro-
vided there were still very definite conditions which
must be fulfilled in order that the people might avail
themselves of the provision made. These conditions
may be summarized as those of entire separation to
God. This division also deals with the responsi-
bilities of the priests.
IV. Consecration. — The feasts of Jehovah were
the national signs and symbols of the fact that the
people, dedicated to God as the offering witnessed,
permitted to approach through the mediation of the
priestly service, separated in all the details of life,
were by God consecrated to Himself.
V. Ratification. — The laws of ratification consisted
of the outward signs of the principle of possession
to be observed in the land together with solemn
promises and warnings. The first sign was of
the sabbath of the land. In the seventh year of
rest the original Ownership of God was recognized.
The second sign was that of the jubilee, wherein
great human inter-relationships, dependent upon the
fact of Divine possession, were insisted upon. The
book ends with a section dealing with vows. The
principle laid down is that it is not necessary that
vows should be made, but that if they are made they
must be religiously observed. — G. Campbell Morgan,
The Analysed Bible, p. 55.
References. — I. 1. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxx. No.
1771. I. 4, 5. — Spurgeon, Twelve Sermons on the Atonement,
p. 49. I. 5.— Ibid. p. 383. I. 9.— J. Flemming, The Gospel in
Leviticus, p. 46. I. 7. — J. Monro Gibson, The Mosaic Era,
p. 171. II. 1, 2. — J. Flemming, The Gospel in Leviticus, p.
96. II. 11. — Herbert Windross, The Life Victorious, p. 17.
IV. 2, 3.— Ibid. p. 107. IV. 3.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol.
xiii. Mo. 739. IV. 6 and 7.— Spurgeon, Twelve Sermons on
the Atonement, p. 395. VI. 13.— Bishop Bickersteth, Ser-
mons, p. 16. VIII. 22, 23.— H. Bonar, Short Sermons for
Family Reading, p. 212.
HOLY AND COMMON
' This shall be a statute for ever throughout your generations :
ye shall put a difference between holy and unholy, between
clean and unclean.'— Leviticus x. io.
Reheaese the circumstances : They had confused
' holy ' and ' common '.
I. This distinction was the leading idea of religion
for many years. It was not based upon any intrinsic
difference, moral or physical. Nor was it confined to
Judaism.
II. Now, something has changed our way of think-
ing. Priesthood cannot be regarded apart from the
personal quality of the man. The punishment of
sacrilege, as such, has been everywhere abolished.
III. Is this because our time is less religious ? No,
but because it is more so. The change has been
effected by Christ. He has subordinated every other
distinction to the fundamental one of intrinsic good-
ness or badness.
IV. But the distinction of 'holy' and 'common'
is a constant one also. The governing principle
seems to be that goodness is of transcendent value ;
and lifts into value everything connected with itself.
— S. D. McConnell, Sermon Stuff, p. 101.
THE SCAPEGOAT
Leviticus xvi. 8-22.
Among a primitive people who seemed to have more
moral troubles than any other and to feel greater need
of dismissing them by artificial means, there grew
up the custom of using a curious expedient. They
chose a beast of the field, and upon its head symbolic-
ally piled all the moral hard-headedness of the several
tribes ; after which the unoffending brute was banished
to the wilderness and the guilty multitude felt relieved.
However crude that ancient method of transferring
mental and moral burdens, it had at least this redeem-
ing feature ; the early Hebrews heaped their sins upon
a creature which they did not care for and sent it away.
In modern times we pile our burdens upon our dearest
fellow-creatures and keep them permanently near us
for further use. What human being but has some
other upon whom he nightly hangs his troubles as he
hangs his different garments upon hooks and nails in
the walls around him ? — James Lane Allen in The
Mettle of the Pasture, pp. 161-162.
THE HIGH PRIEST AND THE ATONEMENT
' On that day shall the priest make an atonement for you to
cleanse you, that ye may be clean from all your sms before
the Lord.' — Leviticus xvi. 30.
I. There were many priests, but only one high priest.
He only could make atonement. Under the gospel all
believers are priests. But there is but one high priest,
123
Ver. 11.
LEVITICUS XVII
Ver. 11.
Jesus Christ, called the Great High Priest ; He alone
can make atonement ; He only can forgive sin.
II. The high priest on the day of atonement was
an humbled priest. On this day he came out clothed
in fine linen only. And Jesus, when He made atone-
ment, was an humbled priest. They stripped from
Him even the seamless garment that He wore.
III. The high priest on that day was a spotless
priest. Aaron had to be ceremonially purified. We
have a spotless High Priest ; He needed no atonement
for Himself — He had no sin to put away.
IV. The high priest on that day was a solitary priest.
It is remarkable that no disciple died with Christ.
His disciples forsook Him and fled. We owe all our
salvation to Him, and to Him alone.
V. The high priest on that day was a laborious
priest. Jewish authorities assert that on that day
everything was done by Him. Jesus, though He had
toiled before, yet never worked as He did on that
wondrous day of atonement. — C. H. Spuegeon, Outline
Sermons, p. 254.
THE BLOOD OF CHRIST
(For Good Friday and Easter)
' The life of the flesh is in the blood ,
maketh an atonement for the soul.
. . it is the blood that
-Leviticus xvii. II.
The thoughts of Easter and of Good Friday must
keep close together. They are, of course, at first
sight, poles apart. And yet they are two sides of one
great event. Consider this by help which God Him-
self has given us in the Old Testament.
The precious Blood of Christ, that certainly is a
Good Friday thought, but yet that Blood is at the
centre of our Easter feast. It is the power of eternal
life. In it are washed the robes of the redeemed.
The text from the old law gives us the clue to under-
standing this.
I. In the sacrifices of the Jewish Temple, meant to
prepare for and point to Christ, the Blood was the
most important thing. It was offered to God ; with
it the holy place and the altar were sprinkled. With
it the leper was touched. The high priest once a
year carried it into the holiest before the mercy seat.
It was the symbol of God's own presence. And the
reason of this was in the belief that the Blood is the
life : ' For the life of the flesh is in the blood '. To us
carnage and blood-shedding mean the same, and speak
only of the ghastly incidents of death. To the Jew
blood-shedding meant release of life. The innocent
animal gave its life for a high and Divinely ordered
purpose. A wonderful mystery indeed. It declared
the power of life that had passed through death.
The ox or the goat could only die in its own time,
but there was one way in which it could, as we see,
give its life before its time by its owner's free will
and at his cost. The animal stood, and was at least
partly understood by the Jew to stand, for the man
that offered it, and then the meaning begins to come
clear. The life in man must die with the death of
the body, and see corruption, and be no more, unless
some stainless life — for the Temple victims had to be
without spot or blemish — could be freely given up to
pass out through death as an offering to God, and
then it would bless and reconcile and purify. This
it is which we, in its wonderful fulfilment, have been
allowed to see.
Good Friday shows the slaughter, the inhuman and
cruel murder of the Holy One and the Just. It is a
day of tragedy and gloom. All the same, there was
done there the noblest thing ever done on earth, and
it shines with glory amidst the darkness. For the
life slaughtered was also a life laid down. The death
which darkens the earth is also the coming out of the
life, free, powerful, new, and quickening, as the glory
of the Resurrection follows to prove. The death had
to be, but it is the life that remains, and it sprinkles,
and cleanses, and quickens. Unli ke the coarse natural
blood of the old sacrifices, this life can still, in rite
and symbol, give itself as blood to be drunk and to
be consumed. ' The Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ,
which was shed for thee, preserve thy body and soul
unto everlasting life.' It enters into us, and we live
with a double life, our own, and His, and in the power
of that life we can approach to God, having boldness
to enter into the holiest by the Blood of Jesus.
II. We have here the truth, at once severe and
splendid, which Good Friday and Easter should leave
with us. We have, like the animals slain of old in
the Temple, our natural life in us which must die.
If we live by the flesh, we must die ; but the Cross
shows us a way of using death which makes it to
be a power of life. We can make a sacrifice of life.
It has its opportunities and chances, its dangers and
risks, its sorrows and joys, its temptations, and
through all we can carry the spirit of sacrifice. So
we can do in small ways that which Jesus did
through life, and completed on Calvary. We can
mortify our members which are on the earth, we can
die unto sin, we can be united with Jesus by His
death. But such dying is really life. Like the
slaughter of the victim, it sets free the blood which
is the true life ; like the sacrifice of the Cross, it
opens into the glory of the Resurrection. We are to
reckon ourselves alive, not with the old life that must
die, but alive unto God in Christ Jesus with the new
life that cannot die. That is the mystery of Easter,
gathering up all the sorrow and severity of Good
Friday into its joy, and it sheds a glory over all life.
This present life is not a thing merely to be despised
and cast away. The body of the victim slain, slain
to yield the blood, was not treated as a worthless
carcass to be cast aside, but as holy food upon which
the offerer might feed. The Body of the Redeemer,
from which the Blood was shed upon the Cross, was
a holy thing, and when He makes His Sacrament, it
is not of the Blood only that He takes, but also :
' The Body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given
for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting
life '. The earthly life which has in it the spirit of
sacrifice, gains already on earth a fuller strength and
truer beauty. Thus it is, too, that even the bodies
of Christians partake of the glory. The spirituality
124
Ver. 21.
LEVITICUS XX
Ver. 26.
which despises them is not the spirituality of Scrip-
ture or of Christ. Our bodily natures may be sancti-
fied by the sacrifice of disciplined, sober, and thankful
use as well as by the sacrifice of surrender. It must
be for each as God appoints, and He calls.
THE LIMITATIONS OF THE DWARF
' A dwarf . . . shall not come nigh to offer the bread of his
God.' — Leviticus xx. 21.
Under the old Hebrew priesthood the dwarf, while
permitted to partake of the holy bread, was restrained
from offering it to others. He was not to blame for
being a dwarf, but only men without blemish, and
who had the full measure of manly power, were per-
mitted to exercise the functions of that holy office.
I. It is the bitterest sorrow of weakness that a man
cannot render aid to the helpless. And in the higher
realm the sorest pang that a man can know is that he
is so dwarfed in his spiritual nature that he cannot
offer the bread of his God to his fellows. The physi-
cal dwarf is very often, and indeed usually, without
personal blame. It is his misfortune, which may
have come to him by inheritance, or by accident.
But the spiritual dwarf, while the conduct of others
may have contributed to his lamentable condition, is
in the last analysis personally responsible, for the
power to emerge from such a condition is always
within his reach.
II. The Hebrew priest that was born a dwarf, or
who had been dwarfed by accident or by cruel treat-
ment in childhood, could never become anything else.
No penitence, no care, no culture could ever give him
the broad shoulders, the splendid presence, and the
noble personality of the full-grown and mature man-
hood necessary for his office. But God is more
gracious in spiritual things, or rather the spirit is not
subject to the limitations of the flesh, and the man
who has been dwarfed by poverty, or affliction, or
harsh treatment, into narrowness of vision and ex-
perience, may through devotion and self-surrender to
God emerge out of the dwarfed manhood he now
knows into the large and splendid personality which
shall give him the privilege of offering the bread of
God to humanity.
III. We do not need to be weak and powerless.
We need not go along the way of life spiritual dwarfs.
God is no respecter of persons. He is seeking for
men and women to offer the bread of life to hungry
souls. All that is needed is that we should surrender
ourselves to Him for the highest and holiest service.
What folly that for a few paltry dollars, or for a few
years of sensual pleasure, or for a few shouts of
applause from unthinking crowds, we should miss the
building up of soul and character into those splendid
proportions that shall fit us for Divine usefulness. —
L. A. Banks, Sermons which have Won Soids, p.
211.
References. — XX. 26. — J. Vaughan, Sermons (9th Series),
p. 117. XXI. -XXII.— H. Bonar, Short Sermons for Family
Reading, p. 358. XXII. 21. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxii.
No. 1897. XXIII. 42.— Bishop Woodford, Sermons on Sub-
jects from the Old Testament, p. 1. XXIII.-XXVII. — J. Monro
Gibson, The Mosaic Era, p. 223. XXIV. 5-9.— J. H. Hol-
ford, Memorial Sermons, p. 127. XXV. 9, 10. — J. Flemming,
The Gospel of Leviticus, pp. 91, 123. XXV. 10. — J. A. Aston,
Early Witness to Gospel Truth, pp. 23, 36.
THE MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF LEVITICUS
' Ye shall be holy unto Me, for I the Lord am holy.' — Leviticus
xx. 26.
The book of Leviticus is one which we all feel to be
specially difficult. Yet there is no book that more
amply repays study. At every point it proves itself
to be the Word of God, and as such profitable for
doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for inspiration in
righteousness. While, by the advent of the Lord
Jesus, many of the forms enjoined in Leviticus were
abolished, the principles which found expression in
these forms have been reasserted with greater force
than ever. The book has a message for us to-day,
and it is this message which we must now strive to
discover. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about
it is its insistence on the holiness of the body.
Leviticus recognizes what is expressly asserted at a
later period in revelation, that the body is meant to
be a temple of the Holy Ghost, and as such must be
kept holy unto God.
I. It set before the Israelite his duty to God. In
its religious aspect this code is the exposition of the
first and great commandment. It bade the Israelite
recognize Jehovah as the one object of worship. It
bade him recognize Jehovah as the ultimate ground
of all morality, it bade him see in what was good and
right the expression of the will of God. It bade him
recognize Jehovah as the Lord of Life and the Lord
of Time, the giver of every good and perfect gift.
Moreover it bade the Israelite recognize that Jehovah
was a God terrible in His moral government.
II. Then this law of holiness set before the Israelite
his duty to his fellow-men. It endeavoured to ex-
plain also the second great commandment of the law,
' Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself '. In the
precepts that it lays down there is a wisdom and
an enlightenment from which present-day legislators
would do well to learn. To begin with, it puts social
relations in their right place. But having defined
the relation between our duty to God and our duty
to man, it goes on to demand for our brother men
j ustice, honesty, forbearance, kindness, purity, tender-
ness, and love.
III. And then this law of holiness set before the
Israelite his personal duty as a member of the holy
nation. This it did in an indirect manner by the
regulations it enjoined for maintaining the purity of
the priests. All Israelites were not priests and did
not actually minister at the altar. But Israel was
not allowed to forget that she was a priestly nation.
With such care manifested that the priest who
ministered to the law should be holy, pure, and with-
out blemish, the law of necessity taught the Israelite
how holy his God was, and at the same time taught
him that he also must be holy if be would stand
accepted in God's presence. Then having dealt with
125
Ver. 23.
LEVITICUS XXV
Ver. 23.
the holy life in its Godward, manward, and selfward
aspects, the section of Leviticus closes by announcing
the rewards which God has promised to the obedient,
and the punishment threatened to those who wilfully
disobey. This code completes the short appendix,
and the matter of vows brings the whole book to
a close. — G. H. C. Macgkegok, Messages of the Old
Testament, p. 31.
SOJOURNING WITH QOD
' The land shall not be sold for ever ; for the land is Mine ; for
ye are strangers and sojourners with Me.' — Leviticus
xxv. 23.
There are two views to be taken of that famous land
about which so much of Old Testament history
gathers. (1) When you are looking at the children
of Israel passing out of Egypt and through the wilder-
ness, their prospect of this promised land awaiting
them reminds you of the heavenly inheritance held out
to believers as the rest that remaineth for the people
of God. (2) But when you think, of the Israelites in
actual occupation of Canaan, then there are aspects
of it which rather suggest the provision of earthly
support during this mortal life, which God has pro-
mised to His children here in this world.
I. The first thing suggested is the sojourning con-
dition of the children of God in this world. They
are strangers and sojourners. It must be admitted
in the first place that they have much in common
with everybody else. All are lately come into exist-
ence — ere long shall cease to be connected with the
present order of things, and therefore sojourners.
Those therefore are sojourners who really have in
view another country ; another system of things as
their durable inheritance.
II. Observe a great element in this sojourning state
emphasized in the text. To be strangers and so-
journers has something depressing in it ; but a great
element of gladness comes when we hear the voice
that says ' The land is Mine ; ye are strangers and
sojourners with Me ". For a believer this world be-
comes God's world, and in his sojournings he is
assured of a Divine companionship and communion.
III. What way of dealing with our earthly posses-
sions is expected of us in this situation ? The
' prohibition implied that the Israelite was not to
claim absolute ownership, nor was he to act as if he
claimed it '. He had a use of it under restrictions,
but the land continued to be the Lord's ; the Lord
had the abiding possession ; the Israelite only a
transient use as a stranger and a sojourner with God.
And you are sojourners so that you are also stewards.
These are your Lord's goods. For the direct interest
of the cause of God, be stewards — be stewards that
shall not fear the reckoning. — Robert Rainy, So-
journing with God, p. 1.
Reference. — XXVI. 2. — R. G. Soans, Sermons for the
Young, p. 7.
126
NUMBERS
NUMBERS
References.— IV. 1-23.— Spurgeon, Sermcms, vol. xlix.
No. 2833. IV. 23.— A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture
—Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers, p. 297. IV. 24-26.— Spur-
geon, Sermons, vol. xlix. No. 2829. IV. 49.— Ibid. vol. xxv.
No. 1457.
THE AARONIC BLESSING
' The Lord bless thee and keep thee.'— Numbers vi. 22-27.
I. — ' The Lord bless thee and keep thee.' This is pre-
eminently the blessing of the Father. The language
sets forth the positive and negative side of God's
ever-watchful beneficence. It involves all good gifts
and deprecates all the opposite evils.
II. — The second part of the benediction is especially
the blessing of the Father through the Son. The
words suggest the thought of favour and of revela-
tion. The Aaronic blessing is a prophecy of the
Incarnation, for we cannot help thinking of St. Paul's
words, ' God, who commanded the light to shine out
of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the
light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the
face of Jesus '. The true characteristic of the revela-
tion given by Christ was graciousness.
III. — The blessing of the Holy Ghost is seen in
the third movement of this benediction. The Holy
Spirit lights up that glorious and gracious face of
Christ before our eyes, and gives us peace thereby. —
J. Mason, Sermon Year Book, 1891, p. 369.
References. — VI. 22-27. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxvi.
No. 2170. VI. 23-27.— W. Binnie, Sermons, p. 58. W.
Alexander, Verbum Orucis, p. 163. VI. 24-26.— W. F.
Hook, Outlines of Sermons on the Old Testament, p. 35. J.
Brand, The Dundee Pulpit, 1872, p. 113. VII. 9.— T. G.
Rooke, The Church in the Wilderness, p. 174. VIII. 5-22.—
Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xlix. No. 2829. IX. — Ibid. vol. xli.
No. 2407. IX. 11, 12.— Ibid. vol. xli. No. 2407.
THE GUIDING PILLAR
' So it was alway : the cloud covered the tabernacle by day,
and the appearance of fire by night' — Numbers ix. 16.
I. Note the Double Form of the Guiding Pillar. —
The fire was the centre, the cloud was wrapped around
it. The same double element is found in all God's
manifestations of Himself to men. In every form
of revelation are present both the heart and core of
light, which no eye can look upon, and the merciful
veil which, because it veils, unveils ; because it hides,
reveals ; makes visible because it conceals ; and shows
God because it is the hiding of His power. It re-
appears in both elements in Christ, but combined in
new proportions, so as that ' the veil, that is to say,
His flesh,' is thinned to transparency and all aglow
with the indwelling lustre of manifest Deity.
Note also the varying appearance of the pillar ac-
cording to need. By day it was a cloud, by night it
glowed in the darkness.
Both these changes of aspect symbolize for us the
reality of the Protean capacity of change according
to our ever-varying needs, which for our blessing we
may find in that ever-changing, unchanging, Divine
presence which will be our companion, if we will.
II. Note the Guidance of the Pillar.— When it
lifts the camp marches ; when it glides down and lies
motionless the march is stopped and the tents are
pitched. Never, from moment to moment, did they
know when the moving cloud might settle, or the
resting cloud might soar.
Is not that all true about us ? God guides us by
circumstances, God guides us by His word, God
guides us by His Spirit, speaking through our common
sense and in our understandings, and, most of all,
God guides us by that dear Son of His, in whom is
the fire and round whom is the cloud.
In like manner, the same absolute uncertainty which
was intended to keep the Israelites (though it failed
often) in the attitude of constant dependence, is the
condition in which we all have to live, though we
mask it from ourselves.
III. The Docile Following of the Guide. — ' At the
commandment of the Lord they rested in their tents,
and at the commandment of the Lord they journeyed.'
Obedience was prompt ; whensoever and for whatso-
ever the signal was given, the men were ready.
What do we want in order to cultivate and keep
such a disposition ? We need perpetual watchfulness
lest the pillar should lift unnoticed. We need still
more to keep our wills in absolute suspense, if His will
has not declared itself. Do not let us be in a hurry
to run before God. We need to hold the present with
a slack hand, so as to be ready to fold our tents and
take to the road, if God will. We need, too, to
cultivate the habit of prompt obedience. If we would
follow the pillar, we must follow it at once. — A.
Maclaeen, The Unchanging Christ, p. 203.
References. — IX. 16. — A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy
Scripture — Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers, p. 305. X. 1, 2. —
C. Jerdan, Pastures of Tender Grass, p. 98. X. 10.— J. Baines,
Sermons, p. 1.
HOBAB'S OPPORTUNITY
'Come thou with us, and we will do thee good.'— Numbers
x. 2g.
Hobab was the son of Raguel the Midianite, who is
called Reuel in Exodus n. 18, and elsewhere Jethro.
Hobab was therefore the brother-in-law of Moses.
When Jethro, having brought back Zipporah and
her two sons to Moses (Exod. xvm.), returned to his
own house, Hobab appeal's to have remained in the
127
Ver. 6.
NUMBERS XI
Ver. 9.
camp. But now that the Israelites were about to
continue their journey to the Promised Land, he
expressed a desire to return to his own kindred and
country. Moses, however, urged him to cast in his
lot with the people of God, and he prevailed. The
descendants of Hobab are spoken of in the books of
Judges and Samuel as dwelling in Canaan. We have
in the text : —
I. A Cordial Invitation. — ' Come thou with us.'
Three things are implied. He was invited : —
1. To conform to their principles. ' He could not
remain with them and serve other gods.'
2. To share their privileges. 'The Lord hath
spoken good concerning Israel.'
3. To enjoy their prospects. ' We are journeying
unto the land,' etc.
II. A Solemn Promise. — A. ' We will do thee
good.'
1. By social intercourse. ' As iron sharpeneth
iron,' etc.
2. By wise counsel. ' Admonish one another.'
3. By a holy example. ' Let your light so shine/
etc.
4. By genuine sympathy. ' Bear ye one another's
burdens,' etc.
B. ' What goodness the Lord shall do unto us, the
same will we do unto thee.'
We can only give as we receive. — F. J. Austin,
Seeds and Saplings, p. 31.
References. — X. 29. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xvi. No.
916. C. Perren, Revival Sermons in Outline, p. 145. A.
Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture — Exodus, Leviticus, and
Numbers, p. 314. X. 29-31. — -Hugh Black, University Sermons,
p. 259 ; see also Christian World Pulpit, vol. lxvii. 1905, p.
65. X. 33.— Phillips Brooks, The Law of Growth, p. 328.
X. 35. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. vii. No. 368. X. 35, 36. —
J. E. C. Welldon, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lxiv. 1894, p.
243. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture — Exodus,
Leviticus, and Numbers, p. 321 ; see also Outlines of Sermons on
the Old Testament, p. 39. XI. 1-10. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol.
xxxix. No. 2332. XI. 4.— C. Gore, Christian World Pulpit,
vol. lv. 1899, p. 265. i
THE IRKSOMENESS OF RELIGION
' There is nothing at all, beside this manna, before our eyes.' —
Numbers xi. 6.
We all know how after a certain time the children
of Israel began to loathe the manna. Their soul re-
jected it, it was light food. It was bread from heaven,
says the Psalmist — angels' bread, and yet it proved dis-
tasteful to the camp. The strange thing is that it
was they — and not God's enemies — who found the
manna such a distasteful dish. It was the children
of Israel who felt the diet irksome, and the children
of Israel were the people of God.
I. That leads me by quite a competent spiritualizing
— for did not Jesus say, ' I am the bread '? — to dwell on
a very urgent matter, I mean the irksomeness inherent
in religion. There is nothing on earth so paramount
and vital as the relationship of the human soul to
God. Yet men who have felt all that, and feel it now
— and wherever an awakened soul is, there it is felt —
such men and women, whensoever they reveal their
souls, confess to the seasons, sometimes unbroken
years, when religion was an irksome thing to them.
Or again, one might say religion cannot be irksome
if the great key -words of the New Testament be true.
There is rest, and there is joy and love on the narrow
path which Jesus Christ hath trodden. But for all
that, there are few travellers on that path who have
not felt the irksomeness of their religion.
II. We detect it sometimes by the quiet relief we
feel when our religious exercises are concluded — a
certain secret sense of satisfaction when the prayer is
got over, and the worship done.
We detect it again in the way in which many try
to put service in the place of personal religion.
But the irksomeness of a quiet and abiding piety
is seen above all in the love of religious excitement.
III. I wonder if we can discern the grounds of this
element of irksomeness in heart-religion ? Surely the
first and the deepest is just this — religion is spiritual,
and we are carnal. It is because we are far from
Christlike yet ; it is because God is holiness and love
and purity and truth, and because in religion we must
walk with God, that even to the saint it has its irk-
someness.
Another reason for that same feeling is this, we
strive and seem to make so little progress.
But in our religion, I think it is the Cross above
all else that does it. It is the fact that in the very
centre there hangs the pallid figure on the tree. In
other words, it is the abnegation, it is the humility
and self-denial, it is the renunciation of much that is
sweet to us, and the eye fixed on a dying and bleeding
Saviour ; it is that, when life is sweet and full of music,
and calling us as to the freedom of a bird, that may
keep an element of irksomeness in all following of the
blessed Lord. — G. H. Morrison, Sun-Rise, p. 279.
DEW AND MANNA
' And when the dew fell upon the camp in the night, the manna
fell upon it.' — Numbers xi. g.
Israel represents humanity in its pitiful failure to
realize the goodness of Divine providence.
I. Here are Usual and Unusual Mercies. — Dew is
usual, manna is unusual. Dew falls everywhere and
always ; not so manna. Life, however, receives both
dew and manna. The sad fact is that we often fail
to appreciate either class of mercies.
II. Here are Natural and Spiritual Mercies. — Dew
is a natural blessing ; manna represents a spiritual
good. One is according to the established course of
nature, the other a supernatural gift of God. And
yet the distinction between natural and spiritual is
largely man-made. To the Christian it is almost im-
possible to differentiate between the two spheres.
God is behind the dew as surely as the manna. The
spiritual represents the supernatural, but not the
unnatural.
III. Here are Mysterious Processes in Life. — Who
understands the dew? Who understands manna?
The very word carries the idea of mystery. It con-
128
Ver. 26.
NUMBERS XL, XIII
Ver. 27.
notes an inquiry — ' What is it ? ' None can evacuate
either gift of its mystery. And life is full of mysteri-
ous processes. There is mystery about the ordinary
and mystery about the usual. If we give up religion
because of its mystery, both logic and honesty will
compel us to surrender a host of other things, for they
are instinct with mystery. Life would be a dreary
monotony if there were no mystery ; and you would
not accept a religion devoid of mystery, for mystery is
the sign of divinity.
IV. 'Dew and Manna.' Life abounds in Com-
mon Mercies. — ' When the dew fell upon the camp,
the manna fell upon it.' It was a universal benefit.
Both dew and manna were common to all Israel.
Do not the best gifts of life bear the stamp of uni-
versality ? The dew and manna fall upon ' the camp '.
Sir Walter Scott, in the latter part of his life, said to
a young friend, ' The older you grow, the more you
will be thankful that the finest of God's mercies are
common mercies '. It is profoundly true. The Apostle
Jude writes of ' our common salvation '. Peter speaks
of ' the common faith '. Moses spoke of ' the common
death '. Recall that fine saying of Schiller's : ' Death
cannot be an evil, for it is universal '.
V. ' When the Dew fell upon the Camp in the
Night, the Manna fell upon it.' Here are Associ-
ated Mercies.
VI. How regular, too, are'God's Mercies ! — ' When
the dew fell, the manna fell.' Neither sprang out of
the earth : they fell from wondrous heights. The
sun never fails on any single day to appear. The air
currents are always flowing. Harvest comes every
year. God's constancy is the miracle of miracles.
VII. God's Mercies do not Absolve Man from his
Duty. — God sends the dew, but only that we may
utilize the ground He thus prepares for us. God
sends the manna, but it is »ot to be eaten just as it
falls. Grace is to be improved.
VIII. Dew and Manna are Typical Gifts. — They
are typical in two respects : —
1. In the case before us the season of their bestow-
ment is full of parabolic suggestiveness. When did
these blessings fall ? ' In the night.' Spiritual bene-
dictions are often richest in darkest hours.
2. Dew is the symbol of grace. Manna, too, is
typical. In the 6th chapter of John's great gospel
Christ sets Himself in apposition to the manna. —
Dinsdale T. Young, Unfamiliar Texts, p. 189.
References. — XI. 14. — A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy
Scripture— Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers, p. 329. XI. 23. —
Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. vii. No. 363. XI. 25. — G. Matheson,
Voices of the Spirit, p. 11. XI. 26.— T. G. Rooke, The Church
in the Wilderness, p. 209.
Numbers xi. 26.
Lord, Thy servants are now praying in the church, and
I am staying at home, detained by necessary occasions,
such as are not of my seeking, but of Thy sending.
My care could not prevent them, my power could not
remove them. Wherefore, though I cannot go to
church, there to sit down at table with the rest of
Thy guests, be pleased, Lord, to send me a dish of
their meat hither, and feed my soul with holy thoughts.
Eldad and Medad, though staying still in the camp
(no doubt on just cause), yet prophesied as well as
the other elders. Though they went not out to
the spirit, the spirit came home to them. — Thomas
Fuller.
Numbers xi. 33.
Lord, grant me one suit, which is this — deny me all
suits which are bad for me : when I petition for what
is unfitting, O let the King of heaven make use of
His negative voice. Rather let me fast than have
quails given with intent that I should be choked in
eating them. — Thomas Fuller.
References. — XI. 27. — W. J. Dawson, Christian World
Pulpit, vol. Hi. 1897, p. 296. XI. 29.— T. G. Selby, The Holy
Spirit and Christian Privilege, p. 215. W. Sanday, Inspira-
tion, p. 168. T. De Witt Talmage, Sermons, p. 221. T. M.
Rees, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lxviii. 1905, p. 293. J.
Warschauer, Christian World Pulpit, vol. Ixxiv. 1908, p. 417.
XI. 34. — J. Baldwin Brown, The Soul's Exodus and Pilgrimage,
p. 279. XII. 3.— T. R. Stevenson, Christian World Pulpit,
vol. xxxix. 1891, p. 109. XIII. 16.— J. M. Neale, Sermons
for Some Feast Days in the Christian Year, p. 213. G. Trevor,
Types and the Antitype, p. 115. XIII. 17-33.— A. Maclaren,
Expositions of Holy Scripture — Exodus, Leviticus, and Num-
bers, p. 332. XIII. 21, 23, 27.— R. Winterbotham, Sermons
Preached in Holy Trinity Church, Edinburgh, p. 275. XIII.
23. — W. Brooke, Sermons, p. 30.
A LAND FLOWING WITH MILK AND HONEY
' And they told Him, and said, We came unto the land whither
Thou sentest us, and surely it floweth with milk and honey ;
and this is the fruit of it.' — Numbers xiii. 27.
The idea suggested is, that the true disciples of the
Lord Jesus are expected to show to the world some
illustration of the heavenly country to which they
are journeying. In a sense they have been there,
and have come back. But in what sense ?
I. The idea with many persons is, that the future
condition of man is so completely different from this,
that it is out of the question to attempt to form a
conception of it. Heaven, they think, is absolutely
unlike earth. Now, it is true, St. Paul tells us, ' that
eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered
into the heart of man, the things which God hath pre-
pared for them that love Him.' But it is also true,
^as the Apostle goes on to say, that ' God hath revealed
them unto us by His Spirit '. Some people then are
in a position to understand what the heavenly king-
dom is like. They have ideas, true ideas, about it —
foretastes, anticipations. In fact, ' Heaven ' is really
the expansion and development of a life begun here
below. ' He that hath the Son hath life.'
II. What then has the true disciple to show as speci-
mens of the produce of this unseen and unknown
country ? Briefly, the character of Christ reproduced
in him, by the Power of the Holy Spirit. It is faintly,
imperfectly reproduced ; still it is reproduced. The
more Christlike we are, the more truly shall we bear
in our hands the ' fruit ' of the better land.
III. It is by the presentation of these fruits of the
land that souls are won. No doubt there are some
129
Ver. 30.
NUMBERS XIII
Ver. 30.
persons in the world to whom Christ and everything
belonging to Christ are only repulsive ; and these will
scrutinize the disciple with an unfriendly eye, and re-
joice if they can find, or fancy they find, any incon-
sistency in his conduct. But there are also many
others of a different temper. They are halting be-
tween two opinions. They say, not of course in words,
but by their feelings and manner, 'show us the fruits
of the heavenly land, of which you think so much and
speak so much. You are amongst us as a citizen of
the heavenly city. Enable us to gather from your
conduct what are the characteristics of that noble land,
of that bright and glorious companionship.'
What is the practical conclusion to be drawn from
the whole subject thus discussed? Surely it is this
— that we, who profess to serve and follow the Lord
Jesus Christ, should be careful to recognize the re-
sponsibility laid upon us to give a good report, like
Caleb and Joshua, and not a bad report, like the ten
other spies, of the unseen land. We shall give a bad
report if our lives are not attractive, and are not con-
sistent, or if we say, as the ten did, ' Well, it is true
enough that the land is glorious and magnificent, but
the difficulties to be overcome are so many, the foes
that stand in the way of occupation so powerful, that
it is useless to attempt to fight our way into it '. —
Gordon Calthrop, Harvest and Thanksgiving
Services, p. 157.
THE MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF NUMBERS
' Let us go up at once and possess it.' — Numbers xiii. 30.
The Book of Numbers tells the story of arrested
deliverance.
I. The book begins well. The object of the en-
campment at Sinai has been accomplished. And now
Jehovah had taken up His abode among His people
to lead them to the Promised Land. But this land
was not to be occupied peaceably ; the inhabitants
of it had to be driven out. The land, which was in
right theirs by the gift of God, had to become in fact
theirs by actual conquest. Therefore the people,
which up to this time had been the flock of Jehovah,
were now to be organized as the army of Jehovah.
This is the meaning of the census, the account of
which occupies the opening chapters of the book, and
has given the book its name in our English Bibles.
By this census three lessons were taught Israel ;
lessons which were enforced subsequently by the
legislative enactments and the historical incidents
recorded in the book.
1. Israel was taught the aloneness, the majesty,
and the sovereignty of Jehovah her God.
2. Israel was taught also the separateness of the
Levites as the priests of the law.
3. There was also taught the separateness of the
people of Jehovah : this was implied of course in the
other two lessons. *
II. When the census was completed the march from
Sinai began. Of this march we have the account in
chapters ten to fourteen. I think it is most impor-
tant to distinguish between this march and the
subsequent wanderings. Under the trials of their
wilderness experiences the people often fell. Their
wilderness life was a chequered one, but it was on
the whole a life of progress. They were all the time
in the line of the will of God. The cloud was guiding
them, steadily moving forward, each day bringing
them nearer the Promised Land, and so after a brief
period they reached Kadesh-Barnea on its very
borders.
III. But here a crisis occurred. God had willed
that His people should have certain wilderness ex-
periences. But by the time they reached Kadesh this
had been learned, and God willed now that their
wilderness experiences should cease. He said of
Canaan, ' This is the land which I give,' not / will
give, but I give to you. He set before them an open
door, and said, ' Go up and possess the land '. But
Israel refused to go up. At Kadesh-Barnea Israel
deliberately refused to fall in with the purpose of
But with this act of opposition the character of
Israel's experiences became entirely changed — the
wilderness ended, the temptation began ; the march
ended, the wandering began. Of this time of temp-
tation we may notice lessons : —
1. It was not in the purpose of God for Israel, it
was not in the promise of God for Israel. It grieved
Him sorely that they did not fall in with His purpose,
and that He had so terribly to punish them, but
their unbelief left Him no alternative.
2. The time of wandering was a time inconceivably
blank and unutterably dreary.
3. Yet we must not go so far as to say that these
years were utterly useless. God makes the very
wrath of man to redound to His glory. This time
of death and doom to the rebels of Kadesh was, in
God's mercy, made a time of discipline to their
children.
4. The time came to an end. The people were
restored to obedience, and were once more willing to
do what God told them. The forty years passed and
they were brought back to Kadesh. When the new
start was made it was found that obedience was the
secret of victory. The nation was not perfect, far
from it ; still it murmured, and still it had to be
punished. But it had learned to believe in God and
to obey God, and so it went forward to victory. —
G. H. C. Macgregor, Messages of the Old Testament,
p. 45.
' Let us go up at once and possess it ; for we are well able to
overcome it' — Numbers xiii. 30.
A favourite missionary text of Hugh Price Hughes.
In one sermon, preached for the extinction of a debt,
he said : ' Caleb and Joshua were confident that the
tribes of Israel were well able to capture Palestine
for three reasons : God had promised Canaan to
them again and again ; He had already begun to
accomplish their marvellous destiny by delivering
them from Egypt and conducting them to the borders
of the Promised Land, and although their enemies
appeared to be strong, they were in reality hopelessly
130
Ver. 81.
NUMBERS XI II., XIV
Ver. 24.
weak. God had with equal clearness promised the
whole world to Christ.'
References.— XIII. 30.— J. K. Popham, Sermons, p. 93.
XIII. 30, 31.— H. Gorton Edge, Christian World Pulpit, vol.
lxxiv. 1908, p. 183.
ON THE EDGE OF THE LAND— AFRAID TO
QO UP
' We be not able to go up against the people ; for they are
stronger than we.'— Numbers xm. 31.
I. God has given us, His people, a great deliverance,
and received each of us into it at our baptism. We
have had our Red Sea. He has taught His cove-
nant and law. We have had our Sinai ; the Creed,
the Lord's Prayer, and the Ten Commandments,
telling us what to believe, how to worship, how to
obey. He calls us to enter on our privileges, full
members of His Kingdom and Church, in the good
land which He blesses ; fed with its milk and honey,
in His Sacrament, and in all the grace and inward
peace which He gives to His people. It will be a
fighting life, as Israel's would have been at first, if
they had gone up into Canaan : the world, the flesh,
and the devil, are most real enemies ; but it may be
a conquering life. Only for that there is but one
secret— faith in God's help. But now comes the
temptation. A voice speaks — it may be in your
heart, it may be from some companion — and says :
' It is too big a thing for such as me. It is too hard.
There is something which I shall never conquer.
There are the enemies, all the many temptations,
all the things against me, in the ways of the world,
in companions ; and if I could beat the rest, there
are the giants ; some strong passion that burns in
me ; some lust, some pride or temper. Or there are
the cities walled up, those habits that have fortified
themselves in my life and my heart, and that hands
cannot break down.'
II. What shall we say ? That the enemies are
not strong and not many ? Surely not. The spies
were right. The people of the land were strong ;
the giants were formidable ; the cities were walled
and very great. So it is now. The lusts of the flesh
are very strong ; the snares of the world are very
deceiving and difficult. Only something is left out
of account. There are things stronger than walls
and bulwarks. Those things are the righteous laws
and holy will of God. Those cities which seemed so
strong were really doomed. The sentence had gone
out against them ; the iniquity of the Amorite
was full. ' Their defence,' said faithful Caleb, ' is
departed from them.' Evil is always really weak.
It threatens us, it blusters against us, it makes itself
out ever so much bigger than it is ; but go right up
to it straight and you will find how weak it is, how
it gives way, how its tempting or formidable shows
are turned to paint and sham. Go right up to it
straight, trusting not in your own strength, but in
the Name of God. ' The Lord is with us, fear them
not.' The unseen power is on your side.
III. Remember that the Israelites were so far
right, at least, in this : that if they did not attack
they must go back to Egypt, and Egypt is the house
of bondage. If you do not fight in God's name
against your temptations, and so enter on the free,
conquering life of Christ's good soldier, you will
assuredly find yourself in that old iron slavery under
the evil which you might have slain. If you want to
have a free life, fight for it now.
Or is there, perhaps, something between the two ?
Yes, there may be. Because we would not wholly
live for God ; because we would not give our first
young strength to cut down certain faults of in-
dulgence, or of temper, when with God's help we
might have done it, He may condemn us to live and
pine forty years in the wilderness outside the land —
not indeed destroyed and cast away, because God's
own mercy in Christ has pleaded for us, as Moses did
that day for Israel, but still not admitted to the
freedom, and the wealth, and the nearness to God,
of those whom He has brought into their own land. —
Bishop Talbot, Sermons Preached in the Leeds
Parish Church, 1889-95, p. 136.
References.— XIII. 31.— T. G. Selby, The God of the
Patriarchs, p. 237. XIII. 32. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. iv.
No. 197. XIV. 1-10.— A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy
Scripture — Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers, p. 340. XIV. 6,
7. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. iv. No. 197. XIV. 9. — D. J.
Hiley, Christian World Pulpit, vol. 1. 1896, p. 388. XIV.
11. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxv. No. 1498. ' Plain Sermons '
by contributors to the Tracts for the Times, vol. v. p. 217.
XIV. 13-19.— W. Binnie, Sermons, p. 106. XIV. 19.— A.
Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture, Exodus, Leviticus, and
Numbers, p. 349.
CALEB
'But My servant Caleb, because he had another spirit with
him, and hath followed Me fully,' etc. — Numbers xiv. 24.
I. Ood's Testimony Concerning Caleb.
1. He had another spirit with him. The con-
trast is between the spirit which he cherished and
(a) that of the spies who brought back a discourag-
ing report ; (6) that of the people who were thereby
roused to murmuring and rebellion. The spirit of
Caleb was : —
(i) A conciliatory spirit. ' Blessed are the peace-
makers.'
(ii) A cheerful spirit. 'All things work together
for good,' etc.
(iii) A prompt spirit. ' Let us go up at once.'
(iv) A courageous spirit. He stood almost alone.
(v) A trustful spirit. ' The Lord is with us.'
2. He followed the Lord fully. One of the greatest
needs of the present age in the Church and in the
world is thoroughness.
(i) Only a thorough Christian is of much real service
in the cause of Christ.
(ii) Only a thorough Christian enters fully into the
enjoyment which Christ's service affords.
(iii) Only a thorough Christian will remain stead-
fast in the hour of trial.
II. The reward which God promised Caleb. —
' Him will I bring,' etc.
131
Vv. 10, 11.
NUMBERS XX
Ver. 12.
It is useless to pretend to be indifferent to rewards.
The promise was fulfilled at last.
God has promised something better for us.
Our hopes and expectations rest upon the Word of
God. 'The Lord hath said.' — F. J. Austin, Seeds
and Saplings, p. 62.
References. — XIV. 24. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. ix. No.
638. XV. 18-21.— J. Pulsford, Our Deathless Hope, p. 241.
XV. 27-31.— W. Binnie, Sermons, p. 187. XVI. 3.— W. C. E.
Newbolt, Counsels of Faith and Practice, p. 77. XVI. 8-10. —
A. G. Mortimer, The Church's Lessons for the Christian Year,
part ii. p. 347. XVI. 9. — J. M. Neale, Sermons Preached in a
Religious House, vol. ii. p. 634. C. New, The Baptism of the
Spirit, p. 110. S. M. Taylor, The Choir Alan's Ministry,
S.P.C.K. Tracts, 1897-1904. XVI. 14.— W. L. Watkinson,
The Fatal Barter, pp. 195-212. XVI. 41.— H. J. Wilmot-
Buxton, Sunday Lessons for Daily Life, p. 330. XVI. 47, 48.
— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. vi. No. 341. XVIII. 7. — A. Mac-
laren, Expositions of Holy Scripture — Exodus, Leviticus, and
Numbers, p. 352. XVIII. 25, 32.— J. Pulsford, Our Deathless
Hope, p. 241. XIX. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xlii. No. 2495.
XIX. 2, 3.— Ibid. vol. ix. No. 527. XX. 1-13.— A. Maclaren,
Expositions of Holy Scripture — Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers,
p. 353. XX. 5.—W. Hay M. H. Aitken, The Highway of
Holiness, p. 79. XX. 7-13.— K. Moody-Stuart, Light from the
Holy Hills, p. 42. XX. 8.— S. Baring-Gould, Village Preaching
for a Year, vol. ii. p. 112. J. Parker, City Temple Pulpit, vol.
v. p. 175.
MOSES SMITES THE ROCK
' Hear now, ye rebels ; must we fetch you water out of the rock ?
And Moses lifted up his hand and smote the rock twice.' —
Numbers xx. io, ii.
I. It is a memorable incident in the Jews' history, and
it is rich in warning to us at this day. What, you
will ask, had Moses done, that he should be so sorely
punished ? He had failed in his duty towards God ;
and that in three particulars. (1) He had failed in
strict obedience ; God had bid him ' speak to the
rock,' and he had smitten it, smitten it twice. (2)
He had shown temper, used hard language, ' Hear
now, ye rebels '. (3) He had taken to himself the
credit of supplying the Israelites with water. ' Must
we fetch water for you out of the rock.'
II. It is a standing admonition to us, (1) not to
depart in the least jot or tittle from any law of God.
(2) The immense importance attached to temperate
speech ; the necessity of keeping a check on temper,
and not letting ourselves be moved, however we may
be provoked, to hot and angry words. It is very
noticeable how still our Lord was under provocation ;
when reviled, He reviled not again ; He was never
pushed by the taunt of His enemies to hasty, angry
reply.
The want of self-control was visited — very heavily
visited — upon Moses, and upon ' Aaron the saint of
the Lordl'. Because of it, they were shut out of
Canaan.
III. The scene at the, rock at Meribah is further
useful as carrying our thoughts upwards to Him Who
is the source of all our hopes, the nourishment of our
soul, the very life of our religion — even the Lord
Jesus Christ. The rock in the desert was but a type
and shadow ; the reality it typified is represented in
Jesus Christ. Just as the water in the desert kept
those six hundred thousand Israelites alive, so does
the water which Christ has to give — which He offers
freely and without price to all — serve to the comfort
of unnumbered souls, to the cleansing, refreshing and
sustaining, and the saving them from everlasting
death. — R. D. B. Rawnsley, Village Sermons (3rd
Series), p. 100.
Reference. — XX. 10.— R. W. Hiley, A Year's Sermons,
vol. iii. p. 166.
THE SIN OF MOSES
' Because ye believed Me not, to sanctify Me in the eyes of the
children of Israel, therefore ye shall not bring this congrega-
tion into the land which I have given them.' — Numbers
XX. 12.
The life of Moses was so remarkable, his difficulties
so great, his patience so terribly tried, his time of
service so long, and his fidelity so staunch throughout
the whole of those forty years that it does seem sad
to find him, when veiy near the end of his work, cut
off from the enjoyment of that land of promise to
which, from the beginning, he had been leading his
people.
One thing, however, it is important to observe,
viz. that it affected only his enjoyment of Canaan,
and left his soul perfectly safe. We know this be-
cause 1500 years afterwards he was seen, with Elias,
conversing with the Lord Jesus at the Transfigura-
tion.
What was the cause of his rejection ?
He was directed not to smite the rock as on a
previous occasion, but to speak. The direction was
(v. 8), ' Speak ye unto the rock before their eyes '.
Moses was to bring forth water for the people, but
the instrument was to be not a blow but a word.
How often we observe that a soft word will accom-
plish more than the hardest blow ! But with this
Moses does not appear to have been satisfied. He
doubtless remembered how successfully he had smitten
the rock in Rephidim, so he would do the same again,
and, after using some very intemperate language to
the people, he ' lifted up his hand, and with his rod
he smote the rock twice' (v. 11).
Such, then, were the facts, and some people may
say that it did not much matter whether he smote
the rock or spoke to it, especially as the people got
the water, so that nobody suffered. But it did matter
supremely, and was the one cause why Moses never
crossed the Jordan. What, then, was the sin ?
I. There was Disobedience. — We do not know
his motive. Some people think he lost his temper,
and acted hastily as an angry man. Some think it
was simple carelessness — that he was worried and
vexed, and did not trouble himself to attend to the
directions given him by God. He may have used
those three words that have proved so fatal to
many a noble enterprise, ' It will do '. At all events
God told him to do one thing, and he went straight
off and did another. He that was the great lawgiver,
and the great uph61der of law amongst the people of
God ; he, for some cause best known to himself, m the
132
Ver. 4.
NUMBERS XXI
Ver. 4.
face of all the people, disobeyed. Surely it was high
time that God should vindicate His own authority,
and let even Moses learn that, whatever men may
think of it, disobedience is sin ?
II. It was an Act of Unbelief. — Disobedience and
unbelief are continually linked together. Unbelief
leads to disobedience, and disobedience strengthens
unbelief. So unbelief is the sin especially mentioned
in this v. 12 : ' Because ye believed Me not '. Man
could see the act of disobedience, but God saw the
root of unbelief from which it sprang.
III. It Hindered God's Purposes. — Moses was a
typical character, and what he was directed to do was
typical. We are taught by St. Paul (1 Cor. x. 4) that
this very transaction was a type. ' They drank of that
spiritual Rock that followed them, and that Rock
was Christ.' There was a most important type both
in the smiting of the rock and in the speaking to it.
The rock gave forth no water till it was smitten, for
it was necessary that our blessed Saviour should be
' smitten of God ' before the water of life could flow
through Him to His people. Then, again, the rock,
when once smitten, required no second blow, for the
first was sufficient ; and after that blow was once
given all that was required was that Moses should
speak. Have we not here a wonderful type of the
work of our blessed Saviour ? When He died on that
Cross He ' was wounded for our transgressions, He
was bruised for our iniquities '. But when He had
once made that full, perfect, and complete satisfac-
tion for sin there remained no more place for a fresh
sacrifice.
References. — XX. 12. — W. H. Hutchings, Sermon- Sketches,
p. 122. A. G. Mortimer, The Church's Lessons for the Christian
Year, part ii. p. 361. XX. 23-29.— K. Moody-Stuart, Light
from the Holy Hilh, p. 50. XX. 27, 28.— H. P. Liddon, Ser-
mons on Old Testament Subjects, p. 51.
DISCOURAGEMENT
' And they journeyed from Mount Hor by the way of the Red
Sea, to compass the land of Edom : and the soul of the
people was much discouraged because of the way.' — Num-
bers xxi. 4.
I. Discouragement is a cause of failure. What are
its causes ?
1. It may be a result of bodily weakness. The
better heart you can keep, the better your strength
and health is like to be.
2. Modesty and earnestness. There are people
to whom modesty, or what looks like it, may become
a snare.
Remember that pure modesty and simple earnest-
ness will not cause discouragement. There must be
dross in them in order to do that. Modesty, know-
ing itself little, will be prepared to do what is little,
and earnestness will be keen to do the little well.
3. The great cause of discouragement is pride. It
may hide behind modesty or earnestness, or mix itself
up with these ; but there it generally is. We are apt
to forget that it is one and the, same sort of heart
which is vain of being in front, or mortified at being
behind. Is it not that you could do a little, but
wanted to do much ? You thought you could be
good in a hurry, and are not content to plod along ?
Or you thought you were fully ready for the joys and
blessings of a Christian ; his sure trust, his comforts
in trouble, his stay of faith, his delight in God, and
his pleasure in God's worship. And behold you get
a little way, and you find it all disappointing. Like
the men of Israel in the wilderness, you say, ' Our
soul loatheth this light bread '. And you do not see
that what discourages you is really, if you take it
patiently and humbly, a sign that you are getting on.
Egypt with its leeks and its onions, those coarse
things you relished once, is left behind, and you are
on the way to the heavenly country, if only you will
not throw up, if only you will persevere.
4. Double-mindedness. — When one sways back-
wards and forwards between serving God and pleasing
one's self, between doing right out and out or letting
it go and doing wrong, no wonder we get discouraged.
5. Indolence. — How much discouragement, grumb-
ling, and downheartedness come simply from being
' weary in well-doing,' and giving in to the weariness.
II. The means by which we may be saved from
this great danger of discouragement.
The promise of God's most ready and kind forgive-
ness, if we have got far wrong, and begin, although
feebly, to work backwards towards Him ; the promise
of God's sufficient grace, and of His mercy still going
with us, although we keep stumbling, so long only as
we do not stop or go back, but struggle on ; the
promise for those who have long served God, that
He will never leave them, that He will complete the
good work which He has begun, that discouragement
is only another trial through which they may be
schooled for Him. The whole aim of God's work for
us is to bring us to joy. It is a bold saying of Mr.
Ruskin, that the only duty which God's creatures
owe to Him, and the only service they can render to
Him, is to be happy. But it is deeply true ; it echoes
the Apostle's words, 'Rejoice alway'.
III. Whatever there is in us of the things which
make man's answer to God, of faith, hope, and love,
goes to drive out discouragement, with its clouded
thoughts and cold, spiritless distrust.
But there are special helps.
1. The experience of God's people.
2. If you steadily use your Bible, you will find
there is no help like it against discouragement, just be-
cause it shows you so tenderly that you are not alone
in bearing its burdens and fighting against its danger.
3. Only, to take this comfort and to stand in this
hope, there must be humility. We must be humble
enough to tarry, if God will ; to bear what we de-
serve ; to turn the murmurings of discouragement
into the words of true repentance.
4. There is the great help of prayer : prayer in that
largest sense in which it includes the praise, by which
we tell over those great acts of God, or those glories
of His Being, which are the ground of our hope. —
Bishop Talbot, Sermons Preached in the Leeds
Parish Church, 1889-95, p. 15.
133
Ver. 9.
NUMBERS XXI
Vv. 16-18.
References. — XXI. 4, 5. — H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, Sun-
day Lessons for Daily Life, p. 344. XXI. 4-9. — Spurgeon,
Sermons, vol. xxix. No. 1722. A. Maclaren, Expositions of
Holy Scripture — Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers, p. 362. XXI.
8. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. v. No. 285.
THE BRAZEN SERPENT
' It came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when
he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived.'— Numbers xxi. g.
In the history of the wandering, we recognize in
Jehovah not merely the bountiful Lord Who supplies
His people's wants, but the skilful and merciful
Physician Who heals His people's diseases. In both
capacities alike He demands adoration, He deserves
gratitude, He justifies confidence.
1. A Spiritual Malady. — 1. A poisonous malady.
The serpent's bite is in its virulence symbolical of sin.
2. A destructive malady. As the serpent's bite
was death-dealing, so sin destroys the moral nature
and the eternal prospects of men.
3. A widespread malady. The serpents committed
devastation throughout the camp of Israel. There
is no region inhabited by mankind where the mis-
chievous and disastrous effects of sin are not known.
II. A Divine Remedy. — Our Lord Himself has
authorized the parallel between the serpent of brass
and the crucified Redeemer.
1. Observe the participation of the Saviour in the
nature of those He came to save. As the healing
object was in the form of the destroyer, so Christ,
Who knew no sin, became sin for us.
2. Observe the publicity of the remedy. The
brazen serpent was reared on a banner-staff" and set
on high, and in like manner Christ was lifted up to
draw all men unto Himself.
III. The Means of Salvation. — As they who looked
towards the serpent of brass received healing and life,
even so those who direct the gaze of faith to the
crucified Redeemer of the world experience His heal-
ing virtue.
IV. Spiritual Recovery. — The healing of the
obedient Israelites seems to have been both instan-
taneous and complete. And we are assured that ' as
Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so
must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whosoever be-
lieveth in Him should not perish,buthaveeierwai life '.
References. — XXI. 9. — W. H. Hutchings, Sermon-Sketches
(2nd Series), p. 141. W. J. Knox-Little, Church Times, vol.
xxxi. 1893, p. 356 ; see also Christian World Pulpit, vol. xliii.
1893, p. 227. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxv. No. 1500.
THE SONQ OF THE WELL
' And thence to Be'er : this is the Be'er (or Well) of which the
Lord said unto Moses, Gather the people together, and I
will give them water. Then sang Israel this song : —
Spring up, O well ! Sing ye back to her 1
Well which princes digged,
Which nobles of the people delved,
With the sceptre and with their staves.'
— Numbers xxi. 16-18, R.V.
The drawers who sang this song knew that their well
was alive. They called to each other to sing back
to it : the verb means to sing in antiphon, to answer
the music of the waters with their own.
I. In such a song I find much inspiration. We
are all, whatever our callings may be, ministers of the
common life, with the constant need to ennoble and
glorify its routine. All of us who are worthy to
work, have to do with wearisome details ; and as it
were, like those Eastern water-drawers, hand over
hand every day upon the same old ropes. And the
tendency of many, even of those whose is the ministry
of the Word and the Church, is to feel their life
dreary and their work cheap. There is not a bit of
routine, however cheap our unthinking minds may
count it, but it was started by genius. In manual
toil, in commerce, in education, in healing, and in
public service, not a bit of routine rolls on its way
but the saints and the heroes were at the start of it.
Princes dug this well, yea the nobles of the people
delved it with the sceptre and with their staves.
II. But the Light, which lighteneth every man
that cometh into the world, Himself took flesh and
dwelt among us. Among the million memories of
men we have one that is unique. We can trace the
sacredness and glory of our life to-day, not only to
this or that great man whom God raised up to think
and to work, but to the Incarnation of God Himself.
In the person of Jesus Christ, God Himself did dig
these wells of ours. The liberties, offices, and inspira-
tions were opened and fulfilled by Jesus Christ. See
how His parables reveal Him in touch with every
common office of society !
The parables are the measure of the breadth of our
Lord's Incarnation ; but His Temptation, His Pain and
Weariness, His Shame of the world's sin, His Agony
and Forsakenness, His Cross and Death, are its depths.
When we remember breadth and depth alike, we
understand how sacramental every hour of life may be.
III. These religious uses of memory, we are now
ready to apply to that routine, to which we are
bound as members and ministers of Christ's Church.
I do not mean the life of the Church as a whole, but
the work and conduct of the single congregation.
Of no other routine in social life may we more justly
say that princes digged this well, that the nobles of
the people delved it with the sceptre and with their
staves.
The influence of the Christian congregation upon
history, the contribution of the parish to the world,
is a subject which is waiting for a historian. He will
lay bare a thousand almost forgotten wells which
from all the centuries still feed some of the strongest
currents of human life. — G. A. Smith, The Forgive-
ness of Sins and Other Sermons, p. 218.
BEER, OR THE DIGGING OF THE WELL BY
STAVES
' And from thence they went to Beer ; that is the well whereof
the Lord spake unto Moses, Gather the people together,
and I will give them water. Then Israel sang this song,
Spring up, O well ; sing ye unto it : the princes digged the
well, the nobles of the people digged it, by the direction of
the lawgiver, with their staves.'— Numbers xxi. 16-18.
The traveller in Switzerland, as he approaches Zer-
matt, has his attention generally so absorbed in con-
134
Vv. 16-18.
NUMBERS XXI
Ver. 17.
templating the magnificence of the Matterhorn, that
for a time he retains scarcely any impression of the
neighbouring heights. In a similar manner the mind
of the Church of Christ has been so fixed upon the
lifting up of the brazen serpent and its miraculous
effects, that the subsequent incident at Beer has been
wellnigh forgotten. The object of my sermon is to
draw attention to some of the more patent teachings
of the digging of the well on the eastern border of
Do O
Moab.
The giving of the manna and the miracidous supply
of the water represent the Divine side of redemption ;
the serpent lifted up by human agency and the
well dug up by human hands speak of the earthly
side.
I. We Notice, First, God's Promise. — God said to
Moses, ' Gather the people together, and I will give
them water '. God alone could supply the water for
His people. 'I will give them water.' And yet
human agency is to be employed. ' Gather the people
together. . . . The princes digged the well, the nobles
of the people digged it, by the direction of the law-
giver, with their staves' (Num. xxi. 5, 18). This they
could do, and what they could do God expected from
them. It is so with us. God makes promises, but we
are to use the means which He provides.
II. Notice that the ' Princes Digged it, by the
Direction of the Lawgiver'. — When the rock was
smitten in Horeb, it was smitten 'in the sight of
the elders of Israel ' ; but here the well was dug by
them.
III. Observe that they Dug with their Staves.—
They needed spades and mattocks, not sticks, for such
a work as this ! How disproportionate to the toil of
digging a well whose waters were to supply the wants
of so vast a multitude ! The lesson is apparent.
We must use the means we have. It has been one
of the great features of the spread of Christianity
that God has made use of very weak instruments.
IV. Notice the Spirit with which they Dug. —
They dug (a) prayerfully, (b) joyfully. The song
at Beer, it has been said, is ' a little carol, bright and
fresh and sparkling as the water itself. It was,
doubtless, used afterwards by the maidens of Israel
as they drew water from the village wells.
Spring up, O well ! sing to it 3
Well which the princes dug,
Which the nohles of the people bored
With the sceptres of office, with their staves.
In the incident which we have been considering we
have the four great elements of success in all work
for God. (1) United prayer. When the voice of
united prayer ascends to the God of all grace from
workers who realize their dependence on Him, then
we may expect that the Pentecostal blessing will
come. (2) United praise. 'Sing ye to it.' (3)
United effort. It was not Moses alone who digged,
but the princes also, his representatives, his helpers.
(4) Order. 'By the direction of the lawgiver.' He
commanded — they obeyed. Order is Heaven's first
law. — J. W. Bardsley, Many Mansions, p. 199.
BIBLE WELLS
' Spring up, O well.' — Numbers xxi. 17.
How many wells are mentioned in the whole Bible ?
We cannot pretend to count them. Sometimes the
well is in the singular number, and frequently the word
well swells into the plural number, as if it became a
gathering of waters and a meeting of singing streams.
I. We find one wonderful well in Genesis xxi. 19 :
'And God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of
water '. It was there all the time, but the eyes were
not there. But had not the woman eyesight ? Yes,
of a bodily kind ; but all that is sensuous ought to
be typical and sacramental. 'And she went, and
filled the bottle with water.' She only took a bottle-
ful when she might have had a whole well. We
might have more gospel if we had more capacity ;
sometimes we need a greater boldness that we may
test the generosity of God ; for saith He to those who
draw from His wells, Bring another vessel, another,
another ; until the recipient says, Lord, I have been
looking for more vessels, but I cannot find any. It
is the receiver that gives in, not the Giver. She
' gave the lad drink ' — water drink, the true drink,
the wine of heaven, in which no man ever found
murder, lust, shame. 'The lad' — that is a generic
designation, taking in all the lads of the world ; but
in this particular instance she gave a nation drink,
she nourished a nation in her bosom.
A great range of subject is started by this Hagar's
well, covering such suggestions as the unexpected
supplies of life. We were at our extremity, and
that extremity became God's opportunity. Also re-
ferring to the unexpected deliverances of life.
Then the subject further suggests the unexpected
friends, the human wells that occur or arise in life.
This man will befriend me when I am in difficulty ?
Where is he ? Gone. I am sure that I can apply to
such an old comrade when this poor head fails and
this poor hand can no longer serve itself ; I will go in
quest of him. And lo, he does not know me ; he
knew me when I was young and strong and pros-
perous. Yet I have friends and deliverances and
supplies : how did I get them ? You did not get
them, God sent them ; and the same night when
Herod would have brought you forth to your mock-
ery and contempt and derision, so far as society was
concerned, the Lord sent His angel, and the chain
melted at his touch.
II. There is a curious little idyll about a well in
this same book of Genesis — xxiv. 13 : ' Behold, I
stand here by the well of water ; and the daughters
of the men of the city come out to draw water'.
They will all come to the well. You may not meet
them in the field or in the wood or on the broad
wayside ; only now and then people come to such
places or pass through them ; but the well — that is
the point of union, that the wedding-ring place.
Perhaps we may meet these fair daughters of men in
the gardens of spices. Perhaps not ; now and then
they may be there, and we may be fortunate enough
to catch a vision of such living beauty, but I can
135
Ver. 18.
NUMBERS XXII
Vv. 18, 19.
promise you nothing positive about that. f;We may
find them in the cornfields. Well, the cornfields are
a kind of annual festival, there is a time when the
cornfields are thronged with people ; but I cannot
make you any definite promise about meeting the
persons you are in quest of even in the cornfields, but
I can promise you that all the city will be at the
well. What ! is it water ? so simple and poor a
thing as water that will bring men together ? Many
a man has been in such straits for want of water that
he would have emptied his pockets if you would have
given him one vessel full of spring water.
III. Here is a well mentioned in Proverbs v. 15,
' Drink waters out of thine own cistern, and running
waters out of thine own well '. Have a city of the
mind. There is an atheistical fidgeting ; there is a
yearning or a solicitude after outward things that
would make the sacrament you drank in the morning
of no effect.
IV. Does any other well occur to you? The
greatest well of all. Jesus sat thus by the well,
Jacob's well, Himself a deeper well, Himself, indeed,
the creator of that well. Do you not read in the
prophets this wondrous expression, ' The wells of sal-
vation ' ? It is a beautiful picture. Men are draw-
ing water out of the wells of salvation, and as they
do so they sing a sweet song unto the Lord ; for who
can be silent in the plash of living streams ? — Joseph
Parker, City Temple Pulpit, vol. in. p. 98.
References. — XXI. 16-18. — Spurgecm, Sermons, vol. xiii.
No. 776. XXI. 17, 18.— T. G. Rooke, The Churchnn the
Wilderness, p. 296. XXII. -XXV. — B. J. Snell, Christian
World Pulpit, vol. li. 1897, p. 153. XXII. 5.— A. Maclaren,
Expositions of Holy Scripture — Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers,
p. 367. Marcus Dods, Christ and Man, p. 163. \XXII.
7. — Hiley, A Year's Sermons, vol. i. p. 228. XXII. 12, 20-
22. — Hugh Black, University Sermons, p. 223.
Numbers xxii.
' Carlyle,' says Mr. Herbert Paul in his Life of
Froude (pp. 312-313), 'was in truth one of the
noblest men that ever lived. His faults were all on
the surface. His virtues were those that lie at the
foundation of our being. For the common objects
of vulgar ambition he had a scorn too deep for words.
He never sought, and he did not greatly value, the
praise of men. He had a message to deliver, in
which he profoundly believed, and he could no more
go beyond it, or fall short of it, than Balaam when
he was tempted by Balak. . . . Popularity was not his
aim. His aim was to tell people what was for their
good, whether they would bear or whether they would
forbear.'
BALAAM
' If Balak would give me his house full of silver and gold, I
cannot go beyond the word of the Lord my God, to do
less or more.' — Numbers xxii. i8.
Let us point out two chief lessons that there are for
ourselves in Balaam's history.
I. Beware of tampering with conscience. In all
questions of doubt and difficulty use yourselves to
consult the living oracle, the Tabernacle of witness
which God has set within you, however enticing
the bait may be by which Satan, or Satan's agents,
the world, and the flesh would seduce you — seek to
lead you astray. However great the promises that
Balak may make of earthly honour and reward, put
it back with a resolute hand and steadfast denial ;
' If Balak would give me his house full of silver and
gold, I cannot go beyond the word of the Lord my
God, to do less or more '.
II. How vain are good wishes when separated
from good actions.
Balaam's famous wish, ' Let me die the death of
the righteous, and let my last end be like his,' is a
wish that finds an echo in every heart. It is but
right that we should so pray and wish, but we must
do more than wish and pray, or else the wish in
itself will profit us nothing — profit us no more than
it profited Balaam, for in spite of his good and pious
wish, he died a miserable and untimely death. To
have our wish fulfilled, we must first live (God help-
ing us) the life of His servant, live as those who have
been redeemed of the Lord ; live soberly, live right-
eously, live godly ; walk in all His statutes and
ordinances, live in His faith and fear.
III. Trust not to mere good wishes, or to utterance
of warm, excited feelings, to secure to yourselves a
truly happy, a truly blessed death. 'Awake to
righteousness and sin not,' ' the sting of death is sin,'
sin never forsaken, never repented of, persisted in to
the end. Till that sting be done away, there can be
no peace, no good ground of hope for the dying
man. You know how alone that sting can be
removed, you say with me ' thanks be to God, which
giveth us the victory, through our Lord Jesus Christ '.
— R. D. B. Rawnsley, Village Sermons (3rd Series),
p. 109.
THE STORY OF BALAAM
' And Balaam answered and said unto the servants of Balak,
If Balak would give me his house full of stiver and gold, I
cannot go beyond the word of the Lord my God, to do less
or more. Now therefore, I pray you, tarry ye also here
this night, that I may know what the Lord will say unto
me more.' — Numbers xxii. i8, 19.
Balaam is one of those extraordinary characters that
we meet with in Holy Writ, who flash across the page
of Scriptural history and we know no more about
them. He is referred to both in the Old and the New
Testament, but nothing certain is stated regarding
his past history, nor have we any of those details
which we should be so glad to know regarding this
most interesting person. He was a prophet of the
Lord, and as we read his history, so graphic, so clear,
we feel absolutely sure that it is a true account, a true
history of a true person, because it reveals to us one
of those mysteries of human life so hard to explain,
and yet not so very remote from our own experience.
I. Balaam's Temptation. — We see, in spite of
the privileged position which he held, that he had a
very strong temptation. He was susceptible to one
136
Vv. 18, 19.
NUMBERS XXII
Ver. 34.
temptation above others — the temptation of covetous-
ness, and, yielding to that temptation, he betrayed
away all the privilege which he had enjoyed as the
chosen servant of God, and ended his life fighting
against the people of God. Balak sent to Balaam.
What does Balaam do ? He asks the will of God —
Is it my duty to go with these men ? And the
answer comes clear : ' Thou shalt not go with them '.
And Balaam told the messengers : ' No, I cannot go '.
But the temptation came a second time, for Balak
sent messengers more honourable. He repeated the
invitation and offered larger rewards than those
which had been offered by the first messengers.
Balaam knows perfectly well what he has to do. He
knows what the answer of God has been. He says,
' If Balak would give me his house full of silver and
gold, I cannot go beyond the word of the Lord '.
Whatever temptation Balak could hold out, nothing
should tempt him to move to the right or to the left
bevond the will of God.
II. Balaam's Fall. — But he does not stop there.
He is very anxious to go and he begins to trifle with
his conscience, to see whether, after all, he cannot re-
concile what he wants to do with the will of God.
He bids the messengers ' tarry . . . this night '. Yet
he had received his answer, and was convinced of the
will of God ; but he said, I will have another try, it
will bring me such a great advantage. Is there not
another way by which I can do what I want to do
without disobeying the command of God ? The
messengers stay another night, and God allows him
to go, but, nevertheless, He says : ' The word which I
shall say unto thee, that thou shalt speak '. He is
delighted with the result of his second inquiry, in
the face of what God had told him in the first in-
stance ; and what is the result ? The angel of God
appears to him to turn him back. He receives the
awful warning. And the angel of the Lord said
unto him in effect, ' If thou hadst not turned back, I
would have smitten thee to the earth '. Now he sees
his mistake, but he does not tear the desire from his
heart. ' If it displease thee, I turn '—but why not
in the first instance ? He had gone to God and got
his answer. He is given permission to go and he
goes, but he is only able to speak the words which
God puts into his mouth. Having trifled with his
conscience, in the end he does not hesitate to risk the
souls of a whole nation in order that he may get
what he wants. And so he falls, fighting on the side
of God's enemies.
III. Balaam a Warning to Us. — What a sad
history it is ! Balaam's aspiration, ' Let me die the
death of the righteous,' is that of every one of us ;
but, like him, we forget that if we are to die the
death of the righteous we must live the life of the
righteous.
References. — XXII. 18, 19. — A. G. Mortimer, The Church's
Lessons for the Christian Year, part ii. p. 372. XXII. 20. —
M. G. Glazebrook, Prospice, p. 48. XXII. 20-22.— A.
Jessopp, Norwich School Sermons, p. 149.
BALAAM'S I HAVE SINNED'
' And Balaam said unto the angel of the Lord, I have sinned.' —
Numbers xxii. 34.
Balaam's ' I have sinned ' was of a very different
character from Pharaoh's. Pharaoh's was the confes-
sion, under terror, of a very hard heart : Balaam's heart
— at least at this point — -was anything but a hard one.
See the exact position of Balaam. On his lips, ' I
have sinned ' ; probably in his heart a condemning
sense that he was wrong ; a conviction that he had
made a great mistake ; but his passions high-wrought ;
a resolute will and purpose in direct antagonism to
the known will of God ; one sin, all the while, tightly
grasped ; and a worldly, covetous affection in the
ascendant ! This was Balaam, as he went out at
Pethor that early morning, through the vineyards of
the city. Reduce the picture to the scale of ordinary
life, and it is the life of many.
I. An Emotional Repentance. — There is an
acknowledgment of sin, under sorrow, which often
clothes itself in very strong expressions, even to tears,
and which is little else than a passion. It is not al-
together an hypocrisy. At the moment, it is sincere,
very earnest. But it is an emotion — only an emotion.
It goes with many other emotions, some good and
some bad. It is one of the developments of an ecstatic
temperament. The person who has it is very affec-
tionate ; capable of great and loving deeds. And the
repentance, in the moment of compunction, takes the
shape of the mould of the man's natural disposition.
It is rapid — inflated — short !
II. But Without Love. — Need I say, there is no
real love to God in it ? There is no true sense of sin.
There is no relation to Christ. It does not go on to
action. It ranges, with other feelings, in the mind,
which are just as strongly wrong. It is only the
necessary vent of the heat of an ardent spirit, when
anything happens to awaken it to a brief solemnity,
or to send the toss of its thoughts to death, to
eternity, to God ; a natural sentiment, clothing
itself in a religious dress.
III. One Sin held Back. — I have known a person,
whose wonder and regret was that his penitence never
seemed to deepen or increase ; yet he said, and said
often, and said truly, ' I have sinned '. The reason
was, he never put the ' I have sinned,' upon the right
thing. He said it about his sins generally, or he said
it about some particular sin ; but, all the while, there
was another sin behind, about which he did not say
it. That sin he willingly forgot — he connived at it
—he allowed it ! All the rest he was willing to give
up, but not that. And that was his sin. And that
sin, reserved and in the background, poisoned and
deadened the repentance of all other sins ! The ' I
have sinned' fell to the ground impotent— like a
withered blossom. That was Balaam — and that may
be you !
References.— XXII. 34.— J. Vaughan, Sermons Preached
in Christ Church, Brighton (7th Series), p. 78. F. W. Farrar,
Christian World Pulpit, vol. xlvii. 1895, pp. 312, 321.
Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. iii. No. 113.
137
Ver. 38.
NUMBERS XXII., XXIII
Ver. 23.
THE PREACHER AND HIS MESSAGE
'The word that God putteth in my mouth, that shall I speak.'
— Numbers xxii. 38.
Whether the extraordinary and scarcely explicable
character who thus expressed himself used this lan-
guage with intelligence, sincerity, and resolution, or
vaguely and insincerely, may be questioned ; but it
cannot be questioned that in themselves these words
utter a high, sacred, and noble purpose. It was a
prophet's profession, and the proof of Balaam's pro-
phetical office is this, that his solemn utterances cor-
responded with the profession he herein made.
I. It is God's to Give the Word.
(a) This is obviously true with reference to in-
spiration, to the ' living oracles ' of God. The great
lawgiver Moses, the inspired chroniclers, the majestic
prophets of the Hebrews — all received the word from
heaven. Their formula was this, 'Thus saith the
Lord'.
(b) It is true of every reverent and faithful
teacher of religion. Such a teacher does not ask,
' Is this doctrine acceptable to human nature ? ' but,
' Is it of the Lord ? ' To put human fancies and
speculations in the place of teaching divinely author-
ized is not the part of the Lord's servant and prophet.
Such a one looks up ; asks for a communication, a
message ; honours the God of truth and wisdom by
seeking light and the vision from Heaven.
II. It is Man's to Speak the Word. — High is the
honour, precious the privilege, the Creator bestows
upon human nature in making man the vehicle to
convey Divine truth to his fellow-man. The prophet,
the teacher sent from God, echoes the voice which
has reached him from above, reflects the sacred light
which has shone upon his soul. This vocation he is
bound to fulfil with scrupulous care and unremitting
diligence. No consideration of his own selfish in-
terests, no regard for the prejudices, no desire for the
favour of those who receive his message, should induce
him to deviate from his path, to betray his trust.
The word ' put into his mouth ' he is bound to utter
fearlessly and yet with sympathy and affection, with
authority and yet with persuasiveness.
III. Application.
(a) The preacher learns from his language the
dignity and responsibility of his vocation.
(b) The hearer of the Divine Word learns that
he is not at liberty to neglect or to refuse a message
which is not from man, but from God Himself.
SACRIFICE WITHOUT OBEDIENCE
' And God met Balaam : and he said unto Him, I have pre-
pared seven altars, and I have offered upon every altar a
bullock and a ram.' — Numbers xxiii. 4.
Balaam wished to serve his own ends, and yet, if
possible, to please God. He has prepared seven
altars, etc. ; will not God be appeased and accept his
service, and be won over to his side ? This is the kind
of attempt that many people make.
I. Perfect Orthodoxy in place of Humble Christian
Graces. — Balaam is particular as to the number.
The number seven, sacred and complete. Nothing
has been omitted. But might we not say that the
very elaborateness and completeness are suspicious
and dangerous? So much thought expended on
the tithing of mint and cummin left little for the
weightier matters of the law ; designedly turned itself
away from these weightier matters. There is always
a danger of proud, conceited orthodoxy and scrupu-
lous ceremonial.
II. Great Efforts in place of Constant Dutifulness.
— The seven bullocks and rams rather than the daily
offering of devoted service. But the Christian life is
a walk, not an occasional race or flight. Every day
brings its new duty, every relation of life has its own
claims. Wait continually on Christ, and ask, ' Lord,
what wilt Thou have me to do ? '
III. A Complacent Looking Back upon the Past.
— ' I have prepared seven altars and have offered,' etc.
I was converted at such a time. Are they always the
best Christians who are sure of the very date of their
conversion? It is doubtful. A good tree cannot
bring forth evil fruit, or a bad tree good fruit. Let
not the Christian rest on past services, however great,
that he may have rendered to Christ and his fellow-
men. The question is not, How many and how high
altars have you reared in the past, and how many and
how noble victims have you laid upon them? but,
What offerings of love and service are you now ready
to bring to Him Who gave His life for you ?
References. — XXIII. 10. — A. G. Mortimer, Studies in Holy
Scripture, p. 71 ; see also Lenten Preaching, p. 159. Morgan
Dix, Sermons Doctrinal and Practical, p. 1. H. J. Wilmot-
Buxton, Sunday Lessons for Daily Life, p. 358. C. Parsons
Reichel, Sermons, p. 27. Henry Alford, Quebec Chapel Sermons,
vol. iii. p. 218. Barlow, Rays from the Sun of Righteousness, p.
213. T. M'Crie, Sermons, p. 235. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol.
xiii. No. 746. XXIII. 10 ; XXXI. 8.— A. Maclaren, Exposi-
tions of Holy Scripture — Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers, p.
371. XXIII. 13.— Phillips Brooks, The Mystery of Iniquity, p.
208. XXIII. 21.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxix. No. 1709.
C. W. Stubbs, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lx. 1901, p. 1.
THE LIVING CHRIST
' What hath God wrought ? ' — Numbers xxiii. 23.
To every age our Father who is in heaven, and to
whom all times are alike, proportions the evidence and
the Divine helps to the needs and circumstances of
His children. The one thing perpetually to remember
is this, that in all cases, and in all circumstances, and
in all times, the walk must be by faith and not by
sight.
I. The particular application of this principle which
I ask you to consider, is in looking round on the world
in which we are moving to see the influence and the
power of our spiritual and invisible King. The actual
effect of the faith of Christ about us is the evidence
which is the most immediate support of our own be-
lief. Still greater weight has the evidence of our own
conscience. And here it is that I wish particularly
that we should remind ourselves of the rule that while
we may justly expect a reasonable confirmation of our
138
Ver. 23.
NUMBERS XXII I., XXIV
Ver. 16.
hopes from the signs of the hand of God about us,
we have no right to look for demonstration. It is
because they look for demonstration that so many are
disappointed. The kingdom of God cometh not with
observation. Many thoughtful men who have not
grasped this principle weary and vex themselves if
they find any movement or tendency or practice or
fact amongst a people nominally Christian which is
contrary to the teaching of our King. And so, as
they have been looking in the wrong direction, Christ
has seemed to them very far off". Fallacies have been
the food of their hopes. Far from any promise exist-
ing that the world as the world would love Christ and
be obedient to Him, we are taught the very reverse.
And far from promising or predicting any special or
exclusive blessing on public movements, or policies, or
legislation, or on what is called social progress, our
Lord has most distinctly warned us that His kingdom
was in no sense of this world, but that the only re-
volution, or change, or dominion which He wished to
create, and from which He would expect any benefit,
was in the secret heart of the individual.
II. The kingdom of heaven is within us. That
which is the substance of religion, its hopes and con-
solations, its intermixture with the thoughts by day
and by night, the devotion of the heart, the control
of the appetite, the steady direction of the will to the
commands of God, is necessarily invisible. Yet upon
these depend the virtue and the happiness of millions.
This cause renders the representations of history with
respect to religion defective and fallacious in a greater
degree than they are upon any other subject. Re-
ligion operates most upon those of whom history
knows least.
III. But there is this further. The Christian re-
ligion does also act on public wages and institutions,
even though it is by an operation which is only
secondary and indirect. Christianity is not a code of
civil law. It can only reach institutions through
private character. Little as legislation can do, still it
is of immeasurable consequence that for the most part
our laws have had a Christian and not an unchristian
spirit and moulding. — W. M. Sinclair, Christ and
Our Times, p. 105.
Illustration. — Well has it been said by a Socialist
writer, Cabet : ' If Christianity had been interpreted
and applied in the spirit of Jesus Christ, if it had been
well known and faithfully practised by the numerous
portions of Christians who are animated by a sincere
piety, and who have only need to know truth well to
follow it, then this Christianity, its morals, its philo-
sophy, its precepts, would have sufficed, and would still
suffice, to establish a perfect society and political
organization, to deliver humanity from the evil which
weighs it down, and to assure the happiness of the
human race on the earth.' — W. M. Sinclaik, Christ
and Our Times, p. 115.
' According to the time it shall be said, What hath God wrought.'
— Numbers xxiii. 23.
This was John Wesley's text when he laid the founda-
tion-stone of City Road Chapel, London, in 1777.
References.— XXIII. 23.— P. H. Hall, The Brotherhood of
Man, p. 37. XXIII. 25-27.— Marcus Dods, Christian World
Pulpit, vol. xlvi. 1894, p. 10. XXIV. 5.— J. M. Neale, Ser-
mons Preached in Sackville College Chapel, vol. iv. p. 218.
TRANCE AND TRENCH
' Falling into a trance, but having his eyes open.' — Numbers
xxiv. 16.
It is the picture of a man, or rather of a group of
men, in which we may find our own faces ; for we,
like Balaam, know something of that double life which
corresponds to the trance and the trench — the falling
into a trance, and yet living the common, working,
trench life ; the rapture and the routine, religion and
business, commerce and our Communions, the Sacra-
mental and the social, the secular and the sacred.
And we thought sometimes that these two lives are
hopelessly at variance, and we made the mistake of
pitting these two lives one against the other in terrible
competition instead of combining both of them to-
gether — falling into a trance, leading the spiritual
life, and yet having our eyes open to the common
daily life ; the trance — the devotional life ; the trench
— the daily life. We made that dreadful mistake,
and therefore life was a dismal failure, or it was
utterly dreary, or deadly dull, because we either felt
that life must be wholly ideal or else it must be wholly
at low level. And then we learned that we belonged
to both worlds at the same time. It is not in the
separation, it is not in the divorce, but it is in the
union of these two lives that we find our strength and
our happiness.
I. The Trench Life. — We are to lead the trench
life, but we are not to lead it apart from the trance
life. The trench life — our eyes are to be open to the
world in which we live. God knew what He was
about when He put us where He has. To close our
eyes to facts, to the seamy side of life, would be the
height of folly. We must be wideawake, if we would
not go to the wall in the life on earth that God has
put us in. The man that wool-gathers is the man
that is worsted in life. Having our eyes open, we
must go through the world, we must send our children
out into the world with their eyes wide open to the
world as we have met it, to the world as they will
meet it. Our eyes must be opened when, morning by
morning, every post brings in this circular or that
circular, from the money-lender, from the one who at
some exorbitant interest will pander to the passing
want that so many of us have felt, and then, then it
is that the eyes must be wide open to the realities of
the life that is around us ; but not to the exclusion
of the trance.
II. The Trance Life. — There are men known to us
all who have combined these two lives — the trance
and the trench — in one. There are thousands of
honest men. There are merchants, there are shopmen,
there are business men and business women, who have
seen the trance and yet have their eyes fully open to
the trench. Men and women who will say their prayers
before they go out to their work, men of standing,
men looked up to in commerce and the money market,
189
Ver. 23.
NUMBERS XXXI I., XXXV
Ver. 6.
who are regular Communicants as well as regular in
their business. It is false to say that you must be
either all trench or all trance ; it is the action of the
trance life upon the trench life that makes that solid
body of British merchants, or English business people,
who form the backbone, the very spinal cord of the
English nation.
III. The Union of Trance and Trench. — This is
the life that you and I have got to aim at. Some
men never look at the trance, they are all trench.
They never look above the fog, the mere low level of
self-interest. Their eyes are never open save to the
short sight that comes from living in the midst of
self-contemplation from week end to week end. They
are like the animals, always looking down as the
animals do, and not as a man, looking up at men,
should do. They need their trance. You may re-
member the oldest Church in England, St. Martin's,
Canterbury. There, in days gone by, a woman knelt,
praying that her husband's eyes might be opened,
and that he might see the trance of Christianity
which she had seen, and lo ! a vision, wondrous and
beautiful, came to Ethelbert, and he too had his eyes
opened, and he saw the outward through the inward,
became a Christian, and England was converted.
Monica prayed for Augustine as he was dipping into
all the depths of the sin of Carthage. His eyes were
opened ; he, too, became the man of the trance and
the man of the trench. Some are all trance and no
trench, living in an unreal, dreamy state, always in
the clouds, whose religion chiefly consists in making
things uncomfortable for other people, upsetting the
home life, and refusing the commonplace — always
being in a trance. They, too, need the sharp ordeal
of being taught the other side of life. They want
the home-spun life, they want the trench life. But
it is in the union of these two lives that they alone
can happily live. Have your trance and have your
trench ; so try to live, ' falling into a trance, but
having your eyes open'. — E. E. Holmes, Church
Times, Vol. LIV. 1905, p. 303.
References. — XXV. 6-8.— J. M. Neale, Sermons Preached in
Sackville College Chapel, vol. i. p. 258 ; see also Readings for the
Aged (4th Series), p. 60. XXVI. 63-65.— Spurgeon, Sermons,
vol. xxxvii. No. 2198. XXVII. 18.— J. Baines, Twenty
Sermons, p. 277. XXXI. 8.— Henry Alford, Quebec Chapel
Sermons, vol. iii. p. 218. XXXI. 16.— B. J. Snell, Christian
World Pulpit, vol. li. 1897, p. 153. XXXI. 23.— T. G. Rooke,
The Church in the Wilderness, p. 312.
MORAL CONSEQUENCES OF SINGLE SINS
' Be sure your sin will find you out' — Numbers xxxii. 23.
Few men are great saints. There is always a some-
thing ; I am not speaking of wilful or admitted sins —
sins against the conscience (they of course exclude a
man altogether from any hope), but of a defect of
view and principle, a perversion of character. This
is the common case even with the better sort of
Christians ; they are deformed in stature, they are
not upright, they do not walk perfectly with God.
And you cannot tell why it is ; they have ever lived
religiously, they have been removed from temptation,
had good training and instruction, and they fulfil
their calling, are good husbands or wives, good
parents, good neighbours — still when you come to
know them well, there is in them this or that great
inconsistency. This consideration, moreover, tends to
account for the strange way in which defects of
character are buried in a man. He goes on, for
years perhaps, and no one ever discovers his par-
ticular failings, nor does he know them himself, till
at length he is brought into certain circumstances,
which bring them out. Hence men turn out so very
differently from what was expected ; and we are
seldom able to tell beforehand of another, and scarcely
even dare we promise for ourselves as regards the
future. The proverb, for instance, says, power tries
a man ; so do riches, so do various changes of life.
We find that after all we do not know him, though
we have been acquainted with him for years. We
are disappointed, nay sometimes startled, as if he
had almost lost his identity ; whereas perchance it is
but the coming to light of sins committed long before
we knew him.
Who can pretend to estimate the effect of an
apparently slight transgression upon the spiritual
state of any one of us? Who can pretend to say
what the effect of it is in God's sight? What do
the angels think of it ? What does our own guardian
angel, if one be vouchsafed us, who has watched over
us, and been intimate with us from our youth up ;
who joyed to see how we once grew together with
God's grace, but who now is in fear for us ? What
is the real condition of our heart itself? Dead bodies
keep their warmth a short time ; and who can tell
but a soul so circumstanced may be severed from the
grace of the ordinances, though he partakes of them
outwardly, and is but existing upon and exhausting
the small treasure of strength and life which is laid
up within him ? Nay, we know that so it really is
if the sin be deliberate and wilful ; for the word of
Scripture assures us that such sin shuts us out from
God's presence, and obstructs the channels by which
He gives us grace. — J. H. Newman.
References.— XXXII. 23. — -Marcus Dods, Christ and
Man, p. 188. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxii. No. 1916. A.
W. Potts, School Sermons, p. 56. XXXII. 27.— H. W. Adler,
Our Provincial Brethren, p. 1.
JESUS CHRIST OUR REFUGE
' Among the cities, which ye shall give unto the Levites there
shall be six cities for refuge.' — Numbers xxxv. 6.
I. The Cities of Refuge were so placed, three on either
side of Jordan, that they provided the greatest possible
readiness of access. The devout imagination has al-
ways pictured for the cities conditions almost ideal in
character. The gates of the cities, like those of the
New Jerusalem, were to be kept always open, both day
and night. *
The refugee, whether an Israelite or a stranger, was
safe the moment he entered the gate of the city of
refuge.
140
Ver. 6.
NUMBERS XXXV
Ver. 6.
This merciful provision of the Cities of Refuge acted
as a preventive to idolatry ; the involuntary man-
slayer was not driven to seek a home among the
heathen nations around, but was allowed to live in his
own land, among his own kindred, who held like him
the faith in Israel's God.
The Cities of Refuge were not merely civil institu-
tions serving a local purpose. They were also types
of heavenly things, and taught the people lessons of
the very deepest significance.
The Cities of Refuge embodied in themselves truths
of the highest importance concerning the salvation of
God, and His provision of grace and security for His
children.
II. The Cities of Refuge point to Christ as the
sinner's refuge, and that in more ways than one. They
are found in careful and prayerful study to suggest
Gospel principles, Gospel promises, Gospel privileges.
Christ is the city of refuge.
The six Cities of Refuge belonged to the priestly
tribe of Levi. The forty -eight cities of Levi possessed
the right of asylum, but the six Cities of Refuge were
bound to receive and to entertain, without cost, the
involuntary homicide. They were priestly cities, with
peculiar privileges of their own.
The refugee, flying from the avenger, had but to
pass through the gate, and not only was he immune,
free from the slightest danger, but he ranked at once as
a fellow-citizen with the priests of the Most High God.
III. Jesus Christ is our first and only Priest. The
Levitical priesthood which pointed to Him has been
realized and fulfilled in His life and work.
Jesus Christ is the one eternal High Priest, through
whom salvation comes to man, and in whom man has
communion with God. The Christian believer stands
safe and secure within this refuge.
Jesus Christ is not only the divinely appointed way
of escape, He is, in Himself, the city of refuge. — W.
J. Armitage, The Cities of Refuge, p. 7.
References. — XXXV. 9-11. — C. Stowell Pedley, Christian
World Pulpit, vol. liii. p. 217. XXXV. 11.— Spurgeon,
Sermons, vol. xlv. No. 2621.
141
DEUTERONOMY
DEUTERONOMY— THE BOOK OF REVIEWS
This book is essentially a book of Moses, for it con-
sists of his final words to the people whom he had
led. It may therefore be most simply divided by the
six discourses which it chronicles.
I. Retrospective. — In reviewing the forty years of
wandering Moses dealt with the three great move-
ments ; from Horeb to Kadesh-barnea, from Kadesh-
barnea to Heshbon, and finally, from Heshbon to
Beth-peor. Having surveyed the history he exhorted
the people to obedience, and continuing this exhor-
tation he looked unto the future. At the close of
the first discourse we have a brief account of his
appointment of three cities of refuge.
II. Resume of Laws. — A general introduction
indicates the place, time, and subject of this second
discourse, which deals with testimonies, statutes, and
judgment. The testimonies were the actual words of
the law given. The statutes were the provisions for
worship and the conduct harmonizing therewith. The
judgment dealt with the arrangements for civil and
religious authority and the administration of justice.
III. Warnings. — Before proceeding to the more
specific purpose of this discourse, he spoke of the
blessings which would follow obedience. The effect of
disobedience he described first in their own borders ;
and we find here a detailed description of the Roman
victories which came so long after.
IV. The Covenant — The terms of the covenant
had been already given. In urging the people to be
true to it, Moses referred to the Lord's deliverance
wrought in the past. We have here a great prophetic
evangel the value of which Israel has perhaps not
learned even until to-day. Moses spoke to the people
of his own departure and encouraged their hearts in
view of their coming into the land by reassuring them
of the presence and power of God.
V. The Song of Moses. — Preceding the public
utterance of the great song, Moses and Joshua ap-
peared before the Lord in order that the latter might
be officially appointed to succeed in the administration
of affairs. The first part of the song consisted of
a call to attention, and a statement concerning its
nature. Then in a description equally brief he re-
ferred to the people. There follows a description of
the tender government of God which is full of ex-
quisite beauty. In strange contrast the song now
became a wail as the unfaithfulness of the loved
people was described. The song ttien broke out into
lament, ' Oh that they were wise,' and celebrated God's
ultimate deliverance of His people. Finally Moses
appealed to the people to be obedient.
VI. The Blessing. — These were the final words of
the man of God. His last words were of blessing
only. In stately and majestic language he affirmed
anew the majesty of Jehovah. The great words of
blessing were pronounced upon the tribes, Simeon
only being omitted. The last chapter of Deuteron-
omy contains the story of the death of Moses, the
equipment of Joshua for his work, and a last ten-
der reference to the great leader and lawgiver. — G.
Campbell Morgan, The Analysed Bible, p. 85.
IMPERATIVE AND DESIRABLE CHANGES
' The Lord our God spake unto us in Horeb, saying, Ye have
dwelt long enough in this mount.' — Deuteronomy i. 6.
' The Lord our God spake unto us in Horeb.' And
He has been saying it at intervals ever since to com-
munities and families and individuals, and often to
their pain and wonder.
I. On one side of our human nature we are never
satisfied, always craving for enlargement and novelty.
But on another side we are satisfied far too easily ;
we want to settle down in comfort, to be undisturbed,
to rest and be content with the amount of knowledge
we have, or of goodness, or usefulness ; we have found,
after hard marching, a sunny and sheltered spot, and
we want to stay in it. And the voice which spoke to
Moses speaks to us and says, ' Long enough : Arise ye
and depart, for this is not your rest '.
Perhaps more often we have no choice in the
matter ; we are bidden, and though we go with heavy
feet and reluctant and remonstrant hearts, we must
move.
Our plans are decided for us. Our plans are
broken up, we are hustled out of our pleasant abode,
the door is slammed upon us, and only one other door
is opened, and it is that or nothing.
1. God is saying this to people who are living
in the land of dreams and pleasure. You have
lived here long enough.
52. He sometimes says it to people who are in
ease and prosperity and comfort. Then we are
loath to listen. Therein lies much of the pain and the
bewilderment of life. It is difficult, almost impossible,
for a time to believe in the goodness of God. Blessed
is the man who can go from one mountain to another,
Horeb to the Amorites, and believe that God is lead-
ing. In the old simile — ' As the eagle stirreth up her
nest, so the Lord leadeth His own '.
3. God is sometimes compelled to say it because
of our wrongdoing. Jacob is driven from his home
because he has lied to his father and cheated his
brother. In the book of Micah (n. 10) the reason
given for the command to depart is, ' For this is not
142
Ver. 22.
DEUTERONOMY I
Ver. 22.
your nest : because it is polluted '. So men foul their
nest and it is overturned ; men presume upon a
privileged position and are driven from it.
II. Will you observe where it is that they have
dwelt long enough ? That perhaps is the startling
aspect of the situation. It is Mount Horeb, the
place of revelation, where these men were alone
with God, where the law was given. They had
stayed long enough there, and the unmistakable
inference is that it was possible for them to stay there
too long. Even Horeb the Mount of God may be
abused.
I gather from this that God has something else
for Israel to do besides receive revelations. They
are to go from Mount Horeb to the Mount of the
Amorites, i.e. from praying to fighting, to subduing,
possessing, and tilling the land. God has His Horebs
where He calls His children aside and reveals to them
His will, but they are not to stay there. There are
times, and you must keep them, for sitting at Jesus'
feet and leaning on His breast, but there are times
when it is better for us to be doing something else.
III. We may believe that every disturbance of our
ease — everv moving forth to seek fresh settlement— is
for the expansion and enriching of our life. It is not
surprising to be told that Israel shrank from moving
on from Horeb. Between them and the Mount of
the Amorites lay that great and terrible wilderness,
and then beyond that fierce fighting. And it is
scarcely surprising, to those who know human nature,
that ultimately they failed.
The great and terrible wilderness and the great
and terrible warfare that comes after it are not for
our destruction — they are to be the theatre and the
means of our triumph through the strength of God's
grace. Through the desert of trial and hardship,
through the warfare of questioning and doubt, we
come to a richer life and a surer faith. — C. Brown,
God and Man, p. 75.
THE WITNESS OF THE SAINTS
' We â– will send men before us, and they shall search us out the
land, and bring us word again by what way we must go up,
and into what cities we shall come.' — Deuteronomy i. 22.
This is one great value of the saints of God ; they
are the men who have gone before us to search out
the heavenly country and to bring us word again.
The kingdom of God is a kingdom that begins
even in this world in the Church ; the gift of the
Spirit has been bestowed upon us already, and every-
thing that we need has been bestowed upon us in that
great gift, and the saints are our witness to what the
Spirit can do, and the possibility of living the life of
God fully.
I. This Witness of the Saints is a Witness of the
Goodness of that Land to which God Calls Us
" And they took of the fruit of the land in their hand,'
says Moses, ' and brought it down to us, and brought
us word again and said, It is a good land which the
Lord our God giveth us '. The saints are those who
bring to us the fruit of the spiritual country. And we
know what that fruit is ; the fruit of the Spirit, St. Paul
tells us, is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness,
goodness, faithfulness, meekness, temperance. When
the Spirit of God is fully in a man, love at once springs
up there, because the love of God is shed abroad in his
heart by the Holy Ghost. Joy springs up there be-
cause the kingdom of God is righteousness and peace
and joy in the Holy Ghost ; and peace springs up
there because the Spirit of God bears witness with our
spirits. And all those other fruits that we need in our
intercourse one with another, they all spring from the
presence of the Spirit, because the Spirit of God brings
to us the character of Christ, and all those fruits are
included there.
II. The Saints Show Us in their Own Lives that
the Spiritual Fruits of the Country are Really to be
Won. — They are men and women like ourselves. They
belong, as Moses puts it, to the very tribes to which
we belong ourselves ; and yet the fruits of the Spirit
are seen in all their wonder and beauty in them ; and
if in them, why not in ourselves also ? So, then, the
saints give to us the witness of the goodness of the
heavenly country. And they bring to us also the wit-
ness that we can certainly gain it for ourselves. The
saints never tell us for one moment that we can win
the kingdom of God without a struggle, or that our
enemies will give way except inch by inch. But they
witness that the life-conflict, through the power of God,
is also of victory ; they tell us that, as St. Paul puts
it, though they may be perplexed, yet it is not unto
despair, though they may be pressed yet they are not
forsaken, though smitten down they are never de-
stroyed ; they tell us that God's grace is sufficient for
us in whatever position we may be, and that no tempta-
tion will ever take us but such as through the power
of God we are able to bear. If our enemies are
stronger and mightier than we, they are not stronger
than God Who goes before us and goes with us. And
if the cities of the enemies' country are great and walled
up to heaven, not one has a wall that God's power
cannot throw down.
III. Are we not Called now to Receive their Wit-
ness and to Act upon it ? — It is fear in one form or
another that prevents us from going forward. We
are afraid of losing the comforts of our lives, afraid of
having to sacrifice our worldly ambitions, afraid of
ridicule ; worst of all, we are afraid that, if we give our-
selves to God altogether, God will not be with us, and
our efforts will come to nought. And so we go on in
the old lives of the wilderness, just simply trying to
obey certain external rules, knowing nothing of love,
joy, and peace, nothing of the real glory of the king-
dom of God. God does mean us to go forward, God
does mean us to give ourselves, all that we are, to Him,
that we may be able to return all that He gives to us,
receiving continually the very fullness of the gift of the
Spirit, and then to look to that Spirit day by day, hour
by hour, even moment by moment, to show us what
God would have us to do, and to uphold us as we try
to do it.
143
Ver. 32.
DEUTERONOMY LI 1 1
Ver. 26.
PARTIAL TRUTH
' In this thing ye did not believe the Lord your God.' —
Deuteronomy i. 32.
These are the great battles of the world. Not the
clang of swords and the roar of kingdoms, but the
conflict of man with God, — man calling God a liar ;
these are the disastrous and fatal wars.
I. We are often called upon to contemplate what
may be called partial faith. We do believe some
things, but generally they are things of no import-
ance. We believe things that cost us nothing. Who
believes the thing that has a Cross, wet with red
blood, in the middle of it ? We are all partially re-
ligious, whimsically religious, religious after a very
arbitrary and mechanical fashion.
We see what is meant by partial faith when we
contemplate a vision which comes before us every
day of our life, and that is the vision of partial char-
acter. Where is there a man that is all reprobate ?
The son of perdition occurs but now and then in the
rolling transient centuries. Who is there who has
not some good points about him ? How we magnify
those points into character ; how the man himself
takes refuge in these scattered or detached virtues,
and builds himself a reputation upon these incoherent
fragments ! Always the great challenge falls upon
us from the angry clouds, In this thing, in that
thing, ye did not believe ; at this point you suspended
your faith, at that point you were a practical atheist ;
and know ye, say the angry clouds, the chain is no
stronger than its weakest link.
II. We all believe in Providence. Which provi-
dence? how much providence? in what seasons do
we believe in providence ? We are great believers in
blossoming-time, but what faith have we when the
snow upon our path is six feet deep and the wind a
hail and frost? The Lord has many fine-day fol-
lowers.
Do we really believe in Providence? — in the
shepherdly God, in the fatherly God, in the motherly
God, in the God of the silent step, Who comes with
the noiselessness of a sunbeam into the chamber of
our solitude and desolation? Do we really believe
in the God Who fills all space, yet takes up no poor
man's room, and Who is constantly applying to
broken or wounded hearts the balm that grows only
in old sweet Gilead ? Do we believe that the very
hairs of our head are all numbered ? Are we per-
fectly sure that if God should take away this one
little child of ours, the only child, that all would be
well ? How deep is our faith in Providence ? I want
Habakkuk's great sounding faith ; he said about fig-
trees and herbs and flocks and olive-yards that if they
were all swept away yet he would trust in God and
strike his harp to the praise of the Almighty Father.
I am not so old in faith as mighty Habakkuk, I could
see many trees blighted without losing my faith, but
there is one tree, if aught should happen to any single
branch or twig of that tree, my soul's faith would
wither as a blossom would wither under the breath
of nightly frost ; in that thing I should fail. What,
then, can be my faith, if it is true, and it is true, that
a chain is no stronger than its weakest link ? Lord,
save me, or I perish !
III. We believe in prayer. How much? At
what time do we believe in prayer ? Do we believe
in a particular providence, and do we so deeply be-
lieve in that providence that we would ask God to
intervene and save us from the final disaster? Is
there not a time when prayer itself becomes dumb ?
Remember the possibility of our having a partial
faith, a partial faith in Providence, a partial faith in
prayer, and remember that the chain is no stronger
than its weakest point, and if in this thing or that
we do not believe the Lord our God we may strike the
rest of our faith dead as with a sword-stroke. —
Joseph Parker, City Temple Pulpit, vol. 11. p. 42.
References. — I. 32. — S. Martin, Westminster Chapel Pul-
pit (5th Series), No. 24. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. ix. No.
537. W. M. Taylor, Moses the Law Giver, p. 408. II. 7.—
Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. No. 1179. II. — J. L. Williams,
Sermons by Welshmen, p. 48.
' But Sihon King of Heshbon would not let us pass by him :
for the Lord thy God hardened his spirit, and made his
heart obstinate.' — Deuteronomy ii. 30.
Professor Andrew Harper remarks on this verse that
the writer ' does not mean ... to lay upon God the
causation of Sihon's obstinacy, so as to make the man
a mere helpless victim. His thought rather is, that
as God rules all, so to Him must ultimately be traced
all that happens in the world. In some sense all acts,
whether good or bad, all agencies, whether beneficent
or destructive, have their source in, and their power
from, Him. But nevertheless men have moral re-
sponsibility for their acts, and are fully and justly
conscious of ill desert. Consequently that hardening
of spirit or of heart, which at one moment may be
attributed solely to God, may at another be ascribed
solely to the evil determination of man.'
References. — III. 25-27. — J. A. Aston, Early Witness to
Gospel Truth, p. 1. III. 25-29. — H. Bonar, Short Sermons for
Family Reading, p. 424.
PRAYERS THAT MUST CEASE
' Speak no more unto Me of this matter.' — Deuteronomy hi. 26.
' The prayers of David the son of Jesse are ended.'
There are prayers that must not be prolonged. We
have wearied God, we are talking unwisely to Him ;
we think we are praying when we are only aggravating
Divine providence ; it would be the supreme mercy
if we could only leam to hold our tongue. It is as
if God had said, We have had enough of this matter ;
this is mere ignorance or selfishness ; this is no piety,
it is anything but piety ; thou art now talking
wordily and ineffectively, and nothing can follow such
talk as this but bitter disappointment ; drop it !
This is a great and blessed mystery in the Divine
sovereignty and providence of the world. Some
people you cannot get to be still ; your only hope of
partial safety is in not allowing them to begin ; by all
144
Ver. 26.
DEUTERONOMY III., IV
Ver. 9.
means prevent them from opening their lips ; if you
once permit them to begin, they will never imagine that
it can be possible that you would wish them to end.
A remarkable instance is that of Moses. There
was a longing in his courageous, kingly old heart to
go over and to go into the land. ' I pray Thee let
me go over and see the good land that is beyond
Jordan, that goodly mountain and Lebanon ; I have
had a long hard time of it ; who could repeat the
miserable experience I have had with this wild, un-
chastened Israel ? Do let me go over and see the
end of it all, which shall also be the beginning of it
all, as sunset seems to hide in its radiant heart white
and glorious sunrise.' The Lord said in effect : Moses,
we have had enough of this ; let there be no whining
and no continuance of this poor mean prayer ; speak
no more to Me of this matter ; the arrangement is
complete and final ; fall into My hands, having first
encouraged Joshua, thy successor, who has not done
one-hundredth part of thy work ; but I have a
meaning in this ; speak no more about it. Hence we
come almost abruptly upon the subject of stifled
prayers, prayers cut right in two, a most tragic and
heart-paining bisection of our prayer. We thought
we might talk always to God, but herein we are re-
buked ; we have been offering, mayhap, poor prayers,
mean, worthless, superstitious, or superficial prayers ;
we have not gone deeply down into the root and life
of the matter ; and God seems to say, For My sake,
drop it ; speak no more about it. ' The Lord was
wroth with me for your sakes, and would not hear
me,' would not hear even me after this lifetime of
priestly solicitude and fatherly intercession. Thus
we are driven to consider whether there may not be
some prayers that ought not to be prayed, and thus
we are further driven to consider whether we may not
have sinned in prayer ; for if some people begin there
is no getting rid of them any more.
I. What are the prayers which ought to be stifled,
and of which God wishes to hear nothing more ? They
are selfish or self-considering prayers, which never
find their way into heaven. No nail could carry them
up so high, no eagle-nail so strong in pinion could
lift up the burden of such worthless prayers to the
threshold of heaven.
One of the things we shall have to repent of some
day, when we are bigger and wiser souls, will be our
prayers.
II. There are prayers that minister subtly but
surely to intellectual or social vanity. A man will
set himself to pray for knowledge of the future. The
future has always been fascinating to a certain type
of imagination. If we could only find out, without
other people being also able to find out, what is
coming to-morrow ! There is a field for fancy ! The
Lord will not hear us ; when He does admit anybody
into His more secret chambers it is the babe. What
babe ever took up any room, or were we not so fond
of the babe that we imagined it occupied no place at
all, but was just as welcome as a sunbeam and as little
likely to incommode us in the matter of space ?
III. There are prayers that do not involve thorough
renewal and submission of heart ; they are anecdote
prayers, little pottering prayers about fine days and
fine harvests and rain and divers little comforts that
are specially and locally desired and needed ; it will
require all the grace of God to turn these whinings
into real and effectual prayers. There is no prayer
worth praying that does not aim at the submission
of the human will to the Divine — ' Nevertheless, not
my will, but Thine be done '. That is true prayer,
and prayer, we have often said, that is always and
necessarily, when offered in the right spirit, answered
and glorified. — Joseph Parkek, City Temple Pulpit,
vol. in. p. 40.
REMEMBERING THE PAST
(For the Last Sunday of the Year)
' Only take heed to thyself and keep thy soul diligently, lest thou
forget the things which thine eyes have seen, and lest they
depart from thy heart all the days of thy life.' — Deuter-
onomy iv. g.
I. How far ought we to Remember the Past, and
how far ought we to Forget it ? — It may indeed be
said that remembrance and forgetfulness are largely
independent of our control. We are naturally en-
dowed with strong or with weak memories, and ardent
or placid temperaments, and our fortunes in life are
only to a small extent within our own determination.
Whether we shall pass through experiences which
cut deeply into the mind, or whether our years shall
flow on smoothly without anything happening in
them which stirs the depths of our memory, is an
alternative which is not within our choice. We enter
into life as soldiers into a battle. What the day will
bring to the several combatants none of them can
tell till night falls on the stricken field. It is not
less true that we have a very large power of directing
our own thoughts, and can determine for ourselves
whether we will cherish memories or banish them,
brood over experiences of life, or lift our minds off
them. We are concerned together with the treat-
ment of memory which does lie within our own com-
petence.
II. What, then, of Experiences ? — It is the grand
principle to remember them by virtue of the lessons
they taught us, or at least were able to teach us.
' Only take heed to thyself, and keep thy soul dili-
gently, lest thou forget the things which thine eyes
have seen, and lest they depart from thy heart all
the days of thy life.' Two great facts stood out in
that reminiscence : on the one hand the favour of
Jehovah, on the other the folly of deserting His ser-
vice. Everything depends on the purpose with which,
and the spirit in which, we read that volume of per-
sonal experience which carries the record of what we
have done, what we have not done, what we have
been, what we have endured, and what we have
suffered. The recollection of past achievement may
stir in us nothing more than an indolent complacence,
and we may live in our own view on the limitless
credit of our own record, but none of us can thus live
145
10
Ver. 21.
DEUTERONOMY IV
Ver. 23.
on credit. Past achievement must stir us to the
honourable resolve not to fall below a standard al-
ready reached.
III. In the same Way, there is a Right and a
Wrong Way of Remembering our Faults. — There
is no moral advantage, there may be great moral
danger, in continually remembering every particular
sin, for such melancholy concentration of thought on
failure induces the depression of spirit which takes
the heart out of the spiritual conflict, and may even
lead to a miserable acceptation of failure. Despond-
ency and despair are close relatives, and when the
one establishes itself in the mind, the other is on the
way to follow. Such morbid dwelling upon sin is
altogether contrary to the drift and spirit of Christ's
religion. The forgiveness of sins is an article of the
Christian Creed, and it stands in the forefront of the
Apostolic teaching ; but if sins, though forgiven, are
still to hold dark dominion over the imagination,
and destroy the peace of the mind, it is all one with
their not being forgiven at all. The essence of for-
giveness is no change in the disposition of the
' Father of lights, with Whom can be no variableness,
neither shadow that is cast by turning,' but a change
in the disposition of the sinner, which makes him
renounce that which he indulged in. The moral
invigoration which comes from the consciousness of
being forgiven is weakened, if not altogether de-
stroyed, when the dolorous remembrance of the
failure is allowed to dominate the mind. We are to
remember our faults for modesty and watchfulness.
We are to learn, through them, what sins we ought
most to guard against.
References. — IV. 9. — T. Arnold, Christian Life, p. 297.
H. Woodcock, Sermon Outlines, p. 1. IV. 9, 10. — J. Bow-
stead, Practical Sermons, vol. ii. p. 329. IV. 21, 22. — R.
Winterbotham, Sermons, p. 450. R. C. Trench, Sermons
New and Old, p. 152.
THE JUDGMENT ON MOSES
' Furthermore the Lord was angry with me for your sakes.' —
Deuteronomy iv. 21.
We cannot consider the close of the great prophet's
life without feeling that there are manifold lessons of
instruction presented by it.
I. A Life may Appear in some Leading Point of it
to have been a Failure, and may for all this have
been a life most acceptable to God, and consummated
with a death very precious in His sight.
The lives of few men are rounded and complete ;
there is something wanting in almost all, and this
quite as much in the lives of God's saints as in the
lives of other men.
God writes His sentence of vanity upon all things
here.
II. We see here an Example of the Strictness
with which God will call even His own to Account,
and while His judgments are in all the world, will
cause them to begin at His own house.
Moses' sin seems to us to have been a compara-
tively small one, a momentary outbreak of impatience
or unbelief, and yet it entailed this penalty upon
him, this baffling of the dearest hopes of his life.
III. We are Wont to Regard the Death of Moses,
as Something Unlike the deaths of other men, and
so in a sense it was.
Yet look at it in another point of view, and what
was it but the solitude of every death-bed ? Je
mourrai seul, said the great Pascal, and the words
are true of every man.
We may live with others, but we must die by our-
selves.
IV. Observe the Way in which Qod so often
Overrules the Lives of the Saints of the Elder
Covenant that by them He may, in type and shadow,
set forth to us the eternal verities of the Gospel.
Think not of Moses that he can ever be more than
a schoolmaster to Christ ; that he can bring thee a
foot further than to the borders of the land of thine
inheritance.
Another must lead thee in, if ever that good land
shall be thine. Jesus, our Joshua, our Saviour — He
must do this.
THE ADDRESS OF MOSES TO ISRAEL
' Take heed unto yourselves, lest ye forget the covenant of the
Lord your God, which He made with you.' — Deuteronomy
iv. 23.
This address by Moses was given ' on this side Jordan
in the wilderness ' (v. 46). He felt it was exceedingly
necessary to remind the people of some of the mighty
things the Lord had done for them in the land of
Ham and other parts since they left it ; and the
place where they had now pitched their tents for a
little while was well fitted for this important end.
More : privileged with a brief rest, they were in a
meet state for calm and holy thought ; and hence it
was both wise and good of their great leader to bring
the past before them, to excite their spirit of stead-
fastness and diligence in the future. His address was
long and loving ; but God and His Law are the
leading topics of the whole.
I. The Spirituality of the Divine Nature.— When
God gave Israel His covenant, they heard His voice,
but saw no form or figure of Him, so that they could
have no ground for attempting to make any kind of
image for the purpose of worshipping Him as exhibited
by it. The truth is — God is without body or parts ;
yet the Bible speaks of ' the face,' ' the eyes,' ' the
arms,' ' the feet ' of God ; these, however, are meta-
phors only, and represent the truth relating to Him
as seen from a human standpoint.
1. God is a Spirit. Hence no form of materialism
can represent His nature. Matter cannot possibly
convey any right idea of the Divine attributes, such
as eternity, omnipresence, wisdom, purity, love, joy.
It is obviously inferior to spirit, and inseparable from
imperfection ; it consists of separate and ceaselessly
reacting atoms, and therefore cannot be one, nor
immutable, nor infinite. To say, then, that matter
is united with spirit in God as in man, is to degrade
Him, and bind Him fast under the limitations of
146
Ver. 29.
DEUTERONOMY IV
Ver. 29.
time and space. Yet some men have attempted the
impossible (Is. xl. 19-25).
k. Belief in the spirituality of God is indispens-
able to real worship. An idol god is thought to be
satisfied with the bended knee and the uplifted hand ;
but God, being a Spirit, will accept of no worship
but that of the mind and heart — a pure, a holy, a
spiritual worship. To offer merely the service of the
body with a sapless spirit is a sacrilege of the same
nature as that of the Israelites when they presented
dead beasts to the Lord. ' God is a Spirit,' said
Jesus to the woman of Samaria, ' and they that wor-
ship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth '.
Such worship is enlightened ; it perceives and re-
joices in its object ; it is the evidence of faith ; and
it is the fire kindled by the Holy Ghost on the altar
of the heart.
II. The Perfection of the Divine Law — Taken in
connexion with the state of morals at the time of
its publication, it is certainly Divine. No man or
angel could have invented it : ' the finger of God '
alone could write it.
1. Its perfection is apparent from its order. It
consists of ' ten words,' and this number denotes the
entire being ; so that the law includes not only all
that should be done, but all that should be left un-
done. Furthermore : God is first in it, as He should
be ; then His worship ; then His name ; then His
day ; and then those who stand next to Him. These
things were engraven on the first table, according to
Josephus and Philo ; while the things on the second
table relate to moralities of the highest and purest
character.
2. Its perfection is apparent from its teaching.
The Law not only gives instruction about outward
conduct, but also about inward principle. No wrong
is to be done to anyone either in thought, or word,
or deed. ' And the Law recognizes love as the root of
obedience, and the want of love as the cause of dis-
obedience. How strongly the Great Teacher spoke
on these points ! (St. Matt. xxn. 35-40 ; v. 17-48).
Love is verily the fulfilling of the Law.
3. Its perfection is apparent from its per-
manency. It was written on durable material, and
was given to Israel for their observance alway. As
the utterance of righteousness, Law is as unalterable
as righteousness itself, and while everything human
is perpetually changing, it remains as God's finger
wrote it. The Gospel, therefore, has not set its
obligations aside ; nay, it has rather rendered them
still more imperative. The Holy Spirit works and
sanctifies in harmony with it. And the final judg-
ment will be conducted by it as the standard of
Divine approval or condemnation.
ENCOURAGEMENT TO RETURN TO GOD
' But if from thence thou shalt seek the Lord thy God, thou
shalt find Him, if thou seek Him with all thy heart and
with all thy soul.' — Deuteronomy iv. 29.
I. The State Supposed. — This is a state of deep apos-
tasy and backsliding in a people who are professedly
the people of God ; and that aggravated by every
circumstance increasing guilt, which can be found in
the abundance of mercies which have formed the sub-
jects of the rich experience of former years. On a
survey of the particular case, you will find it to
import —
(a) Apostasy and backsliding under circumstances
of long experience of abundant mercies.
(b) A separation from all former privileges.
(c) A conformity to the world who know not God.
(d) An increase of tribulation.
II. The Return Anticipated. — The inspired writer
anticipates a return unto God even from all the depths
of apostasy which he had specified, when the Lord
should visit His people with sanctified afflictions, and
thus make manifest in them the spirit of adoption,
while He caused them to turn to Him who had smit-
ten them. Even previously to their fall, their re-
covery is predicted of sinners. This was particularly
the case with Peter. The return of backsliding pro-
fessors of godliness, if they be partakers of grace, is
anticipated, expected, declared ; the Lord has prom-
ised to heal all their backslidings, however great, or
manifold, or aggravated they may be.
EVEN FROM THENCE
Deuteronomy iv. 29.
The book of Deuteronomy was designed not purely
for those to whom it was first addressed by Moses,
but for all the Jews of all after times. In the subse-
quent history of the Jewish nation, this promise was
not unfrequently the only light that shone upon
them in the cheerless night of their calamity, and
guided by it they returned to the God of their
fathers and obtained deliverance. Particularly was
this the case in the time of their captivity in Baby-
lon. But this book was not written for Jews alone,
and the promise before us is not to be restricted to
the seed of Abraham according to the flesh. It con-
tains within it the principles of God's merciful pro-
cedure with men yet, and assures them that they
shall find God if they seek Him with all their hearts.
I. Look at the Case Specified — It is not that of
the sinner who is hearing of God and of His mercy
for the first time. The first reference of this promise
is to the Jews who had been brought up in the know-
ledge of the oracles of God, but who, in spite of mani-
fold privileges, had become idolaters. Now where
shall we find the parallels of these sinners under the
New Testament dispensation ? Not in the heathen
abroad, not in the heathen at home ; but this promise
speaks to those whose guilt is of deeper dye than
theirs, because they have been favoured with far higher
privileges and have disregarded them. It appeals to
those who have been taught to pray beside a parent's
knee, who have been members of the Church, but who
have lapsed into one or other of the many forms of
idolatry that have been set up in the land — as the
worship of mammon, of fame, of power, of self, of
pleasure — yet even to them this promise comes, the
assurance that if they return God will pardon.
147
Ver. 29.
DEUTERONOMY IV
Ver. 32.
II. The Blessing Promised 'Thou shalt find
Him '. — To many this promise would read very like
a threatening-, inasmuch as they know that they have
sinned against God, and their guilty consciences as-
sociate Him with vengeance. But when it is said
that the contrite souls shall find God, the meaning is
not that He will reveal Himself to them in their
punishment, but rather that He will make Himself
known to them as He would have done if they had
never wandered away from Him. They shall find the
God whom they had lost, and they shall find Him
toward them precisely as He was before they lost
Him. Nor is this all : the contrite sinner shall find
God restoring to him the title to the heavenly in-
heritance which he had forfeited.
III. The Qualification Annexed to the Promise. —
' If thou seek Him with all thy heart and with all
thy soul.' Now what is it to seek God ? It cannot
be a mere outward search. We need not look for
Him in outward forms or ceremonies of worship ; we
need not seek Him in fasting, or in prayer or in
almsgiving. We need not seek Him in mere external
reformation of conduct. The search we make must
be spiritual. Now God has told us that He is to be
found in Jesus Christ, when we come to Jesus in
simple confiding faith. Christ is the meeting-place
of the sinner and his God. Jehovah has come in
Christ seeking to reconcile us to Himself, and if we
wish reconciliation we must go for it to God in Christ.
There must be no half-heartedness in the search, no
mental reservations ; nothing but our unqualified sub-
mission of the soul to be saved on God's terms, and in
God's way. This is seeking God with all the heart
and soul.
IV. The Grounds Warranted that the Promise is
to be Believed. 'Whereby shall I Know that I
shall Inherit it ? ' — Remember that this is God's
promise. But we have something more than the
Word of God to rest on here, for He has made this
promise over sacrifice. Go to Calvary and behold
the confirmation given there to this precious promise.
Then God has performed this promise in numberless
instances. Manasseh, the penitent thief, Saul of
Tarsus, the Philippian Jailer, all found God by seek-
ing Him with all their heart. God is faithful who
hath promised, and His word is as stable as His
throne. — W. M. Tayloe, The Clerical Library, vol.
n. p. 43.
References. — IV. 29. — Parker, Old Testament Outlines, p.
43. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxii. No. 1283.
DAYS THAT ARE PAST
' The days that are past.' — Deuteronomy iv. 32.
I. Looking Back to the Sanctuary of the Past we
gain strength for the future.
(a) So it is that the past is our sanctuary ;
(b) the present our opportunity ;
(c) thejuture our hope.
II. Never Despair of the Gospel of our Lord and
Saviour Jesus Christ. — There may be a temptation
to you, knowing as you do the attacks which are made
upon the foundations of the faith, to think, as men
will tell you, that Christianity is fairly played out,
and that the twentieth century will see the end of it.
Let us, living in the sanctuary of the past, see God's
hand for the future, and know that whenever and
wherever and however Christ is lifted up men will
come to Him. Wherever he is lifted up He will
draw all men unto Him.
III. Do not Despair of the Future.— You who
know that God has helped you ever since you drew
breath, who see the golden thread of His love and
providence all through your life till to-day, you can
trust Him, you can die in His arms. It is true that
you and I know nothing of the future. No man hath
gone that way hitherto. It is unknown ; but we may
step out into the unknown bravely and boldly because
we have seen God's goodness to us in the days that
are past.
IV. If this is True of us Individually it is True of
this Church. — We do not know what God is going
to do with this Church. We do not know. We
abandon it into His hands, and say plainly that He
Who has been so good to this place and has held it
up through all its vicissitudes and brought it to this
day, can take care of His own. We abandon the
future into His hands.
THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF HISTORY
' Ask now of the days that are past which were before thee.' —
Deuteronomy iv. 32.
The word Deuteronomy means ' the second Law '.
And much of the book which we are now reading
is in effect a republication of the older law. But
Deuteronomy is not a law book in the ordinary sense
of the term. The voice that speaks to us in chapter
after chapter is not so much the voice of a lawgiver
formulating a code of rules as it is the voice of a
prophet or preacher. The author of Deuteronomy
was one who had thought deeply on that most serious
of questions, What really makes for the permanent
good of the people ? And if there was one conviction
that was dearer to him than others, it was that no
people and no commonwealth can be in a state of
well-being unless it is grounded on a great moral
belief.
I. The groundwork of all obedience to human laws
is knowledge of the fact, dwelt upon so emphati-
cally all through this book, that God, in placing men
under a Divine law and making them conscious of
His invisible guidance, has bestowed upon them the
greatest possible good ? To know this, knew the
prophet, was everything. This is why we are reminded
all through this book of the uninterrupted continuity
between what God is doing now and what He had
done in the days of old.
II. We can never apprehend God's dealing with the
nations and families in the present unless we study
them in the light shed on them by the accumulated
experience of the past. If we want to know man,
and what causes make for his welfare or for his ruin,
we must study man in history. We must ask of the
148
Ver. 2.
DEUTERONOMY V
Ver. 2.
ages that have gone before, and be guided by their
verdict. Further, we must do this in a religious spirit,
with our minds prepossessed with the belief in a
righteous God, who has discovered Himself to man.
In the Bible we have not the dry bones of history.
We have its living principles illustrated and enforced.
In God's moral government of the world there is no
caprice, no room for accident.
III. The special lesson of the book of Deuteronomy
is the religious use of history or, what is much the
same thing, the paramount need of studying history
in a religious spirit. Apart from the illuminating
idea of an orderly movement in human affairs, and of
God as presiding over that movement, the whole past
becomes a bewildering dream. The Bible is a record
of moral progress, a record of the gradual triumph of
spiritual over material forces, of reason and conscience
and the sense of moral obligation over mere animal
instinct, and the desire of every man to be a law
to himself. ' In the unreasoning movements of the
world a wiser spirit is at work for us.' Thus history
is the study which shows a man the whole, of which
he is a part, and throws a clear light on the great
process of which his own life is but a brief moment.
— J. W. Shepard, Light and Life, p. 49.
References. — IV. 32. — H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, Sunday
Lessons, vol. i. p. 382. IV. 39. — C. Kingsley, Gospel of the
Pentateuch, p. 222.
-Deuteronomy v.
30 June,
The Decalogue.-
Luther wrote from Coburg on 30 June, 1530, to
Justus Jonas : ' I have gone to school again here to
the Decalogue. As if I were a boy once more, I learn
it word for word, and I see how true it is that " His
understanding is infinite " (Psalm cxlvii. 5). [et video
verum esse, quod sapientiae ejus non est numerus.] '
Enders, Luther's Briefwechsel, vol. vm. p. 48.
THE PEOPLE OF THE COVENANT
'The Lord our God made a covenant with us in Horeb.' —
Deuteronomy v. 2.
The idea of covenant runs through the Bible. It
was a very natural figure to use to express the
relationship between God and His people. Men,
even in the most primitive conditions, understood a
covenant to be a mutual compact of some kind. The
compact need not be between equals, but applied
often to the mercy extended by a conqueror to a
vanquished foe, as when Ahab after his great victory
over the Syrians, made a covenant with the King
Ben-hadad to let him live. With a word of such
wide and elastic meaning, we can see how appropriate
it was to represent the relationship in which Israel
believed herself to stand towards God. Indeed all
religions are more or less in the form of a covenant.
The most typical of all the covenants, the one which
became the very centre of the religious life of Israel,
was this one at Sinai, when God entered into relation-
ship with the whole people as a people.
I. The essential features of the thought are —
(a) That God of His grace condescends to enter
into this relationship. Every Divine covenant is of
grace, the loving-kindness of a Father.
(6) The two parties to a covenant are free moral
agents. If it is of the free grace of God, it is also of
the free will of man.
(c) Since a covenant need not be between equals,
and may be (as it must be when God is one of the
parties to it) all giving on the one side, and all taking
on the other, and yet nevertheless implies mutual
freedom, it therefore implies obligation on both sides.
Each party to the bargain has rights.
II. On the other side of the bargain were the con-
ditions on which they received the Divine favours.
These conditions are stated in the Ten Command-
ments, the words of the covenant. The people are
to be separated, dedicated, consecrated. Their lives
are to belong to God. It is this ethical aspect of the
covenant relationship which saved it from the arro-
gance and national pride, and empty presuming on
favour, which otherwise would soon have killed re-
ligion. Israel's privilege (the spiritual teachers never
ceased to remind them) was Israel's penalty. Every
right, every favour, meant a duty.
III. The fact of covenant is the very heart of re-
ligion. The Bible is the record of Divine covenant.
This great figure has been too often stated merely
forensically, as a legal contract. Because of this
it has repelled men. But it is an eternal truth
nevertheless ; and you must in some way restate it
spiritually to yourself before religion has its birth in
you.
IV. What did this covenant relationship do for
Israel ? Without it there would have been no Israel.
The assurance of a covenant with God brought
strength to the national life. This assurance made
them a nation, welded them into one, and carried
them victoriously over difficulties.
V. The very real temptation which this sense of
Divine favour engendered was the temptation to pre-
sumption. It overtook the Jews more than once in
their later history. But that was the defect of the
quality, or rather the natural temptation of the privi-
lege. This state of presumption was common at the
time of our Lord. Against this much of our Lord's
teaching was directed. But He did not deny the
fact upon which the presumption fed itself. He
attacked the vain deduction which was drawn from
the fact.
VI. Of the reality of fellowship with God every
religious man is assured. Religion implies such a
relationship of love and grace on the part of God.
How such a consciousness brings strength and com-
fort to a human heart let every one who knows the
power of salvation attest. Even in debased and
vicious forms it can be seen to be powerful, making
a man strong in a blatant land. It is seen in its
debased form in such a man as Napoleon, with his
faith in his own star, feeling himself to be the man of
destiny. The faith, such as it was, carried him far. —
Hugh Black, Christ's Service of Love, p. 292.
149
Vv. 6, 7.
DEUTERONOMY V
Ver. 22.
THE TERMS OF THE COVENANT
' I am the Lord thy God, which brought thee out of the land
of Egypt, from the house of bondage. Thou shalt have
none other gods before Me.' — Deuteronomy v. 6, y.
In the figure of covenant, which colours the whole
Bible language of the relationship between God and
man, there are three elements common to the idea.
The first essential feature of the thought is that God
of His free grace enters into this covenant relation-
ship ; and the second is that the two parties to the com-
pact are free moral agents, that it is of the free will
of man as well as of the free grace of God. The third
feature which follows from that is that there is implied
obligation on both sides. It is the last of these that
specially concerns us in our text. In this covenant
at Horeb, which is the typical covenant of the Old
Testament, the covenant to which all the prophets
appealed in the warnings and pleadings and threaten-
ings, we have the two sides, the two contracting
parties, the obligations which rest upon both God and
His people — the terms of the covenant.
I. The Divine Side of the Covenant. — The terms of
the compact are these : On God's side He promises to
be to them the same gracious loving Providence which
they and their fathers have known, ' I am the Lord
thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt,
from the house of bondage '. This is more than the
statement of a fact, more than a succinct resume of
history. It is a statement of what God engages Him-
self to be and to do. It is a promise based first of all
on His very nature, on what He has revealed Himself
to be. The other side of the covenant, the Ten
Commandments, takes its force from this, making an
exclusive and almost stern appeal to fulfil the con-
ditions implied in the covenant. Religion is abso-
lutely determined by the character of the God
worshipped.
II. The Human Side of the Covenant. — We see at
once how the first commandment exactly balances
that, ' Thou shalt have no other gods before Me '.
That is the terms of the covenant on the human side.
From that all the other commandments flow, of wor-
ship of God and of duty to men. The Divine promise
is balanced by human obligation. This obligation is
set forth in the Ten Commandments. But they are
not arbitrary conditions imposed as tests of faith ;
they follow essentially from the revelation of the
character of God made to them. Thus the Decalogue,
which expresses the fundamental relationship between
God and man, is grounded on a moral basis.
III. The History of Revelation is the history of
the relationship between God and man, fitly pictured
under the figure of a covenant ; and so the relation
of God in Christ is spoken of as the new covenant, a
nearer, sweeter relationship. The terms of the cove-
nant are the same as those of the covenant at Horeb,
only of richer content. He is the Lord our Re-
deemer who delivered us from the house of bondage,
who has shown Himself in the face of Jesus Christ as
our Heavenly Father condescending to men, display-
ing the miracle of Divine sacrifice, redeeming us at the
jeopardy of blood, loving us with an everlasting love.
— Hugh Black, Christ's Service of Love, p. 304.
References. — V. 6, 7 — J. Oswald Dykes, The Law of the
Ten Words, p. 19. V. 12.— J. Budgen, Parochial Sermons, vol.
i. p. 12. H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, The School of Christ, p. 94. V.
12-15.— J. Oswald Dykes, The Law of the Ten Words, p. 87.
V. 16.— Ibid. p. 105.
THE FINALITY OF THE TEN COMMAND-
MENTS
'And He added no more.'— Deuteronomy v. 22.
Thkse words may be very sad or they may be very
joyous. We cannot tell what they are merely from
reading them — it is needful to go a little into the
circumstances in order that we may catch their pre-
cise significance. Moses has first copied down the
commandments as they were given to him by the
Lord, and having gone through the whole Ten Words,
as these commandments were anciently called, he
says : ' He,' that is ' God,' ' added no more '. He did
not give eleven commandments ; He gave ten. Man
must stop where God stops as he must begin where
God began. The words would be sad if the Lord had
turned away in anger, saying, ' I will not speak again
to you ' ; but they may be very joyous, yea, musical
after a heavenly sort, when God has said just enough
to meet the necessity and the weakness of man, and
when He forbears to add one word that would over-
tax his strength and throw his dying hope into
melancholy and despair.
I. You have something like completeness of law in
these Ten Commandments — a completeness adapted
to the time in which they were delivered. God Him-
self puts the full stop to the legal literature which He
has written on the two tables of stone. His delight
is, as little as may be needful for proper discipline,
and to secure loyal, loving and sufficient obedience.
Has He written all the universe over with command-
ments? He has written the universe over with
promises and blessings, and here and there His com-
manding word is written — for too many benedictions
and promises, untempered by these severer words,
might lead us into presumption, and might end in
making us molluscous instead of strong and grand.
This is a kind of authority which begets love and
thankfulness. God never shows me His power merely
for the sake jof inspiring me with awe. When I
see the universe I see the suppression of His al-
mightiness, not its extent, not its. abundance. God
has given me a memory short and shadowed. He
could have turned it into a daily plague by the mul-
titude of His commandments and requirements ; He
gives me ten, it is enough ; by and bv He will shorten
them to one. Here is the authority of gentleness,
authority limited to my condition, stooping to my
capacity.
II. What marvellous commandments these are
when looked at in their simplicity. They are ten
speeches to little children. These are not command-
ments for the manhood of the world, but for its child-
150
Vv. 22-33.
DEUTERONOMY V
Ver. 27.
age. ' He added no more.' It was beautiful in its
tenderness, it was Divine in its pathos. The com-
mandments are not abolished, they are fulfilled,
glorified, carried up their highest interpretation and
most beneficent meanings. Jesus Christ said, ' Think
not that I am come to destroy, I am not come to
destroy the law but to fulfil it,' to carry it on to its
higher meanings. Now how does He deliver the Ten
Commandments ? ' Thou shalt not steal ' becomes ' If
you would like to steal, you have stolen '. He digs
down the outer wall and searches into the chambers
of imagery and there, on the walls around, are seen
symbols and images and faces and pantomimes of
evil that the heart does and that the life would like
to do. So we who are in Christ are not under the
law, and yet we are under the law as Israel never was.
Jesus Christ has given one commandment — will it be
easier to keep one than ten. ' A new commandment
I give unto you, that ye love one another,' and we
must all confess ' I count not myself to have attained,
but press towards the mark '.
III. How easy for Christ to lay down the law. No,
He did not lay it down ; He did it. He became
obedient unto death, even the Cross-death, that He
might redeem us. ' By this shall all men know that ye
are My disciples,' — not if you utter the same theologi-
cal Shibboleth, but by this ' if ye have love one to
another '. Love is the highest exposition, love is the
profoundest criticism, of Christianity. Love repeats
the cross and sets the crown above its bleeding head.
— J. Pulsford, The Clerical Library, vol. n. p. 49.
Reference. — V. 22. — J. Oswald Dykes, The Law of the Ten
Words, p. 1.
Moses as mediator. — Deuteronomy v. 22-33.
' This representation of Moses,' says Prof. Harper,
' is not accidental. It is in complete accord with a
characteristic of Israelite literature from beginning to
end. In the earliest historical records we find that
the chief heroes of the nation are mediators, standing
for God in the face of evil men, and pleading with
God for men when they are broken and penitent, or
even when they are only terrified and restrained by
the terror of the Lord. At the beginning of the
national history we see the noble figure of Abraham
in an agony of supplication and entreaty before God
on behalf of the cities of the plain. At the end of it,
we see the Christ, the Supreme Mediator between God
and man, pouring out His soul unto death for men
" while they were yet sinners," dying, the just for the
unjust, taking upon Himself the responsibility for the
sin of man, and refusing to let him wander away into
permanent separation from God.'
HEARING FOR OTHERS
' Go thou near, and hear all that the Lord our God shall say :
and speak thou unto us all that the Lord our God shall
speak unto thee ; and we will hear it, and do it.' — Deuter-
onomy v. 27.
' Go thou near, and hear for us.' That is an old and
still abiding plea. It is born of an old and still abid-
ing necessity. It has been the cry of the human
heart in all ages in its endeavours to find God and
worship Him and learn His will. As we look at
Moses standing in the lurid shadow of the mountain
that might not be touched, standing and listening in
the place of thunder — whilst the people waited afar
off not daring to draw nigh, we can see, if we will,
not an incident of ancient history about which cer-
tain critical minds can grow brilliantly sceptical, but
a great fact, too deeply grounded in human experi-
ence for any wise soul to doubt it. I mean the ever
personal and persistent need for mediation.
God speaks to men through men. We are in this
world, all resonant with His voice, to hear not only
for ourselves but also for other people. Now hearing
for other people suggests a task which some find by
no means unpleasant or difficult, indeed a task to
which they address themselves with enthusiasm and
delight. ' Hearing for other people ' sometimes means
dodging the truth with a fervent hope that it will
hit some one else. It means becoming an expert in
so receiving the shafts of rebuke or warning coming
straight for your own conscience that they glance
harmlessly aside and bury themselves in your neigh-
bour's conscience. It is the subtle art of misapplica-
tion. And it is essentially unprofitable. The gains
thereof are a heart of pride and a starved soul.
There is not one of us but can ill afford to miss one
of those life-enriching pains God sends to teachable
and listening souls.
I. But there is a way of hearing for other people
that is wholly meet and right, and that plays a neces-
sary part in the religious education of the race.
Think for a moment of music. It is a mediated
treasure. There are a few great names, and we call
them the masters. I think we might call them the
listeners. They heard for duller ears the choral har-
mony that is wherever God is. Did the great poets
fashion their poems out of their own vibrant and
sensitive souls ? If we could ask them I think they
would say ' No, we heard these things '. The musician
and the poet have been men with ears to hear. The
music of the ' Messiah ' was waiting for Handel, the
message of the hills and vales of Cumberland was
waiting for Wordsworth. And through them he
may hear who will.
II. Most people consider originality a very desir-
able thing. Strange to say, however, people often
think that the short cut to originality is found by
copying some one else. The attempt to be original
invariably defeats itself. Yet originality is a very
precious thing. It is worth a great deal to the world.
And the one thing that truly develops and safeguards
it in human life is the worshipping and the listening
spirit. The most original man is the most devout
man. The freshest thing any man can give to the
world — the one thing the world can never have un-
less he does give it — is the word of God spoken in his
own soul — the transcript of his personal experience of
divinity. The hardest task a man can have in this
world is to find himself. Indeed no man can make that
all-important discovery unless God guides him to it.
151
Ver. 4.
DEUTERONOMY VI
Ver. 7.
III. The word that is given to a man thus is an
authoritative word. The children of Israel said to
Moses, Tell us what God shall say to you ; and we
will hear it, and do it. How did they know it would
be God's word he would bring back to them, since
they would not be present at that awful communion ?
Whence this readiness of theirs to obey a word not
yet spoken ? They knew that in this matter decep-
tion was impossible. A man can fashion many de-
ceits, but he cannot speak God's word until he has
heard it. It does not take a spiritual expert to
detect a sham divinity. There is an instinct in the
human heart that can always tell how far a word has
travelled. Men can always tell whether your life
message is an echo of the temporalities — a word
picked up in the valley of time — or whether it has
come through your hearts listening to the voice of
the Eternal. — P. Ainsworth, The Pilgrim Church,
p. 117.
References.— V. 29. — R. D. B. Rawnsley, A Course of Ser-
mons for the Christian Year, p. 209. V. 31. — J. Keble, Sermons
for Easter to Ascension Day, p. 182.
THE MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF DEUTER-
ONOMY
'Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is One.'—
Deuteronomy vi. 4.
The book which lies before us is, in many ways, the
most interesting and impressive of the Pentateuch.
The message that this book brings us, coming as it
does after the book of Numbers, is a most essential
one. Numbers told us of the arrest in the deliver-
ance of the nation ; of the thirty-seven years of
wandering sent as the punishment of unbelief. But
it told us also how the people were brought back to
obedience, and were made ready to go into and possess
the land. Could anything be more fitting than that,
ere they actually entered on the work, the great law-
giver should recapitulate in their hearing that law,
in obedience to which lay their only hope of blessing ?
I. First we have the laws which concern religion.
These enjoined that only at one central sanctuary
should offerings be offered. Further, all idol prophets,
all who entice to idolatry, are to be destroyed, and
all idolatrous practices utterly renounced. The dis-
tinction between clean and unclean animals is to be
observed in the matter of food, tithes are to be paid,
and the year of release and the feasts of the law are
to be duly celebrated.
II. Next comes a section of laws regulating the
conduct of the government and the executive. These
laws define the authority of the judges and the judi-
cial functions of the priests. They prescribe the
method of demonstration in the courts of justice,
they regulate the authority of the King, and exhibit
the place that he is to fill in the Theocracy. They
determine the position and privileges of the priests
and Levites as members of the nation, and point the
procedure to be followed in the case of the man-
slayer who flies to one of the cities of refuge. This
section concludes with the chapter devoted to the
laws of war, whether waged against nations generally,
or specially against the inhabitants of the land.
III. From laws affecting public personages the
writer passes to deal with the laws concerning the
private and social life of the people. The discourse
as a whole is a very remarkable one, and fitted to re-
buke those who speak disparagingly of the Old Testa-
ment. Deuteronomy being a recapitulation of the
law, and, in a certain sense, the summary of the pre-
ceding books, we might expect to find emphasized in
it the lessons of those books ; and this we do find.
The Divine holiness implying national holiness, which
is the theme of Leviticus, is kept constantly in view
in the book before us, and this holiness is constantly
held up before the people as the standard which is
to determine their conduct ever in matters secular.
The book was spoken to the people as they were ready
to enter the land, to fill them with enthusiasm to
obey the Lord, and it was fitted to do this. For it
spoke of the land which was to be possessed, and of
the law as a law to be obeyed in the land. There is
much retrospect in the book, but the main outlook
of it is forward. — G. H. C. Macgregoh, Message of
the Old Testament, p. 59.
' Hear, O Israel : the Lord our God is one Lord.' — Deuter-
onomy vi. 4.
On this verse Prof. Harper observes : ' The worship at
the High Places had led, doubtless, to belief in a
multitude of local Yahvehs, who in some obscure
way were yet regarded as one, just as the multitudin-
ous shrines of the Virgin in Romanist lands lead to
the adoration of our Lady of Lourdes, our Lady of
Etaples, and so on, though the Church knows only
one Virgin Mother. This incipient and unconscious
polytheism it was our author's purpose to root out
by his law of one altar; and it seems congruous,
therefore, that he should sum up the first table of
the Decalogue in such a way as to bring out its
opposition to this great evil.'
References. — VI. — A. G. Mortimer, The Church's Lessons,
vol. ii. p. 398. J. Johns, Preacher's Magazine, vol. xix. p.
354. J. Oswald Dykes, Servwns, p. 123 ; The Law of the Ten
Words, p. 35. J. Vaughan, Sermons (10th Series), p. 6. VI.
4, 5. — J. Budgen, Parochial Sermons, vol. ii. p. 25. VI. 6, 7.
— E. W. Attwood, Sermons for Clergy and Laity, p. 369.
W. H. Hutchings, Sermon Sketches, p. 140. J. Budgen,
Parochial Sermons, vol. ii. p. 254. VI. 6. — M. Briggs, Practi-
cal Sermons on Old Testament Subjects, p. 125.
' Thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children,' etc.—
Deuteronomy vi. 7,
On the religious education contemplated in this
passage, Prof. Harper says : ' To compensate for the
restrictions which the Decalogue puts upon the natural
impulses, Yahveh was to be held up to every child
as an object of love, no desire after which could be
excessive. Love to Yahveh, drawn out by what He
had shown Himself to be, was to turn the energies of
the young soul outward, away from self, and direct
them to God, Who works and is the sum of all good.
Obviously those upon whom such education had its
perfect work would never be fettered by the material
152
Ver. 12.
DEUTERONOMY VI., VII
Ver. 9.
aspects of things. Their horizon could never be so
darkened that the twilight gods worshipped by the
Canaanites should seem to them more than dim and
vanishing shadows. Every evil, incident to their
circumstances as conquerors, would fall innocuous at
their feet.'
Reference. — VI. 10-12. — Archbishop Benson, Sermons
Preached in Wellington College Chapel, p. 1.
THE LAMP OF MEMORY
' Beware lest thou forget the Lord, which brought thee forth
out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.'—
Deuteronomy vi. 12.
Dr. Johnson defined a patriot as ' one whose ruling
passion is a love for his native country '. Jesus Christ
showed Himself to be a profound patriot, and the
Old Testament, which was His Bible, is the most
patriotic book in the world.
I. The gift of memory is a strange and mysterious
power which holds its seat in the very fortress and
citadel of the inward man. We are persons, because
we can remember. We English are anxiously un-
mindful of our own national past, though few people
ever had such a past to be proud of and thankful
for. Each green battlefield where English liberty
was won, each crumbling castle and cathedral on
English soil, is preaching its silent sermon, warning
us, and teaching us how much God has done for us,
and for our fathers.
II. ' The sense of greatness keeps a nation great.'
Mr. William Watson's line comes true if ' greatness '
be the greatness of our calling and election in God's
will, of our high privileges by God's grace, of our
sacred charge and duty to be the standard-bearers
of liberty and mercy and truth in the world. But if
the sense of greatness only inflates us with a conceit
of ourselves and contempt for other peoples, if we use
our privileges selfishly and recklessly, and boast our-
selves like Nebuchadnezzar over our imperial state
and power — then England's decay and downfall have
begun already. For that insolent temper in any
nation has its root in rottenness and its blossom in
the dust.— T. H. Dahlow, The Upward Galling, p. 70.
References.— VI. 16.— H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit, No.
2178. VII. 2.— M. Biggs, Practical Sermons on Old Testament
Subjects, p. 134. VII. 2-4.— T. Arnold, The Interpretation of
Scripture, p. 24. J. Keble, Sermons for Easter to Ascension
Bay, p. 192.
GROWING GREAT IDEAS
'A thousand generations.'— Deuteronomy vii. 9.
How to begin to teach the supreme ideas of time and
space, and God and heaven, and eternity; that is
the subject. We are familiar with these great words,
so familiar indeed with them that we think nothing
about them. We thus ruin ourselves by reading
religious books and going to religious services.
Nothing so ruinous as going to church, if we do not
go in the right spirit and with adequate intelligence
of the meaning of the act. I know nothing so really
bad for the soul as religion, if not rightly compre-
hended and understood.
I. For instance, how to introduce the great word
Heaven in its spiritual and ideal sense. It is intro-
duced, therefore, first of all in its material sense. The
Lord makes a great canopy — oh, so azure blue, and
so written over with cloud parables — and He says,
We will call that heaven. It is no heaven, but that
would do as a toy-word, and that would be an ex-
cellent beginning in object-teaching. Said the Lord
God Almighty in effect, This great space with all its
great poem of light we will call heaven. It was not
heaven as we understand the word now, but it would
not have done to have introduced the truly spiritual
heaven all at once. The Lord is a wise Father-
Mother, so He begins with nouns and objects and
shining lights and glittering points that want to
show their bigness, but distance will not allow them.
There is a lesson to us poor preachers. We begin
by thrusting eternity upon the attention of the
people all at once. We should promise them some-
thing less but something typical, something that
carries a parable in its heart and whose lips are
warm with a poem. But we expect to get the people
to understand the Trinity in one morning sermon.
II. How difficult it was for God to get the idea of
philanthropy into the minds of the people ! Phil-
anthropy means love of man, love of human nature
because it is human nature, and being human nature
is allied to the Divine and all-redeeming personality
of God. Did the Lord begin by telling the people
to love everybody ? He did not, He ignored ' every-
body,' and fixed the attention of the people upon
themselves and their wives and families and their
tribes and their nation ; and then the Lord dropped
a word about another section of humanity. He said,
You will now and then come upon the 'stranger'.
That is a new word ; we know ourselves and our
households and the tribe to which we belong, but if
we see a stranger we will slay him. Thus the Lord
created an opportunity for Himself: He said, If you
see a stranger, invite him into your house ; he may
be tired on his journey, let him sit down at least
outside your door ; the stranger may happen to come
to you at sundown, at the preparation before the
Sabbath ; you will not think of allowing the poor
wayfarer to go out on the Sabbath Day, you will
therefore have a stranger within your gates and you
must treat him as if he were one of the family.
What a subtle method of proceeding ; how remote
the point of approach, yet how direct and sure!
Thus the great Christianizing, which is also the
great fraternizing, policy proceeded and expanded
until it does seem now and then — with sad and terrible
exceptions, which I trust are only momentary — as if
the angel song would become the true song of the
nations — ' Peace on earth ; goodwill toward men,' —
goodwilling about one another, speeches in the
parliament of man about benevolence and mutual
trust.
III. Now we come to the third point of starting,
which is the point of the text — 'a thousand genera-
tions '. What is the Lord intending to teach now ?
153
Ver. 9.
DEUTERONOMY VII., VIII
Ver. 2.
He has taught what the people can receive about a
generation ; in fact they have lived through a genera-
tion, they know that word very well, it is quite a
simple word in their vernacular ; a generation may
be thirty years or thirty centuries, or whatever it is
or whatever it was, it was a unit which could be in
some sense realized by the people to whom the words
were addressed. But God means more than this,
and how can He begin to say what He means ? If
He said ' immortality ' nobody would understand what
He was talking about at that time of the world's
history and at that period of spiritual vision. So
the Lord met the people where they could meet
Him ; He stooped to their infancy, He spake their
one-syllabled language. Having got the people to
say that they knew the meaning of a generation,
He proceeded thus ; then two generations, then three
generations, and the children smiled incredulously ;
four generations, then reason began to totter. There
is a wonderful division of the generations ; they now
come before us in groups — fourteen generations, and
fourteen generations, and fourteen generations — what
is this? Thus the Lord introduced the notion of
immortality, for ever and ever and ever ; and at
length the grand revelation was made that Christ
brought life and immortality to light in the Gospel ;
so we do not talk about a generation in heaven but
about God's for ever in the skies. We take the
wrong way of reaching people ; we begin with im-
mortality, and nobody understands the word. That
is a word into the full meaning of which we must
grow. — Joseph Parker, City Temple Pulpit, vol.
iv. p. 78.
DOES GOD HAVE FAIR PLAY?
' Know therefore that the Lord thy God, He is God, the faithful
God.' — Deuteronomy vii. 9.
It is the declaration of the Scriptures from beginning
to end that the Lord our God is a faithful God.
Has God been faithful to us ; and if so, are we justi-
fied in assuming that the same faithfulness is the ex-
perience of others ?
I. Christ does not pledge the Divine faithfulness to
our desires — it is pledged to our needs. The purpose
of God in us is character, and once we have it, estab-
lished in Divine grace and ensphered in the human
will of a sufficient number of us, we shall soon make
our new and better world. Without this character
we may hope for nothing. With it we need despair
of nothing. To say that there are experiences in the
lives of individuals, and even of communities, which
we cannot explain, is no proof that the universe is
immoral.
II. Remember there are some things God cannot
do for us and yet leave us men. He cannot make a
better world without the consent of our individual
obedience and the co-operation of our will. Instead
of asking, how can God be God and permit wrong to
be in the world, let us face the truth that wrong is in
the world for this reason — that we permit it. God is
faithful : therefore good must be possible. Evil is, as
it were, embedded in our nature ; and for that we are
not accountable. It is the greatness of the Christian
religion that it not only tells us what it were good
to do, but it offers to us the power to do it.
III. We have to find out that we cannot serve two
masters. However we fall short in practice, the in-
tention must be all for God, or it will be none. Good-
ness is possible ; and not to achieve it is to defeat the
purpose for which we were born into this world. The
iesson for us to learn is to labour and to wait ; to give
God and ourselves space to work in. Let us trust the
faithful God, and we shall be taught to regard the
troubles that test, and the limitations that perplex
us, as the agents of His Providence through the
courses of time. — Ambrose Shepherd, Men in the
Making, p. 245.
References. — VII. 9, 10. — R. D. B. Rawnsley, Village Ser-
mons (2nd Series), p. 21. VII. 12, 13. — J. Keble, Sermons for
Easter to Ascension Day, p. 375. VII. 20. — Spurgeon, Sermons,
vol. xii. p. 673. VII. 21. — F. D. Maurice, Sermons, vol. vi. p.
145. VII. 22. — C. Vince, The Unchanging Saviour, p. 292.
VII. 22-26. — F. D. Maurice, The Patriarchs and Lawgivers of
the Old Testament.
THE WAY IN THE WILDERNESS
(First Sunday of the Year)
' Thou shalt consider all the way which the Lord thy God hath
led thee ... in the wilderness.' — Deuteronomy viii. 2.
(i) Let us emphasize the word all, for on that word
the emphasis of the sentence truly lies.
(ii) The character of the path to be estimated not
by the present difficulty or danger, but by the impor-
tance of the end.
(iii) The infinite variety of the way.
(iv) The beauty of the way. It is a goodly world
which our God hath built and adorned for us, a
world whose goodliness is ever around us.
(v) The bread of the wilderness. This miracle of
the manna is repeated every day before our eyes.
(vi) The perils of the wilderness. Life is one long
peril.
(vii) The sins of the wilderness. The past is best
buried under a nobler present.
(viii) The chastisements of the way.
(ix) The Elims of the way, the sunny spots, the
living verdure, the murmuring fountains, the rustling,
shadowing palms.
(x) The end of the way. Each step the path will
brighten as it nears the precincts of the Promised
Land. — J. Baldwin Brown, Contemporary Pulpit
vol. vi. p. 371.
References. — VIII. 2. — D. Burns, Christian World Pulpit,
1890, p. 88. John Mason, Lord's Bay Entertainments, vol. ii.
p. 297. Bradley, Sermons, vol. ii. p. 284. E. M. Goulburn,
Sermons, p. 485. Simeon, Works, vol. ii. p. 299. John Venn,
Sermons, vol. iii. p. 397. T. Binney, Sermons (1st Series), p.
362. Kingsley, Discipline, p. 40. A. Maclaren, A Year's
Ministry (1st Series), p. 151. Christian World Pulpit, vol. iv.
pp. 397 and 417. F. Bourdillon, Plain Sermons for Family
Reading, p. 84. J. Vaughan, Sermons (14th Series), p. 156.
A. Maclaren, A Year's Ministry (1st Series), p. 151. VIII.
154
Ver. 12.
DEUTERONOMY X., XII
Ver. 13.
2, 3.— C. M. Betts, Eight, Sermons, p. 61. VIII. 3.— J. W.
Walker, A Book of Lay Sermons, p. 133. Spurgeon, Sermons,
vol. vii. No. 418. VIII. 10, 11.— G. A. Sowter, Sowing
and Reaping, p. 84. VIII. 11-18. — C. Kingsley, Gospel of
the Pentateuch, p. 197. VIII. 15. — J. M. Neale, Readings
for the Aged (4th Series), p. 175 ; ibid. Sermons Preached in
Sackville College Chapel, vol. ii. p. 336. IX. 1. — T. Arnold,
Christian Life, vol. v. p. 305. IX. 6. — Bishop Goodwin, Parish
Sermons (5th Series), p. 78. IX. 26-29.— F. D. Maurice,
Sermons, vol. ii. p. 53. IX. 29. — -Bishop Lightfoot, Contem-
porary Pulpit, vol. ii. p. 63. T. Arnold, Christian Life, p.
305.
THE TEST OF NATIONAL PROSPERITY
' And now, Israel, what doth the Lord require of thee ? ' —
Deuteronomy x. 12.
The Old Testament is concerned with tribes and
nations rather than with individuals. The Law of
Moses deals with Israel collectively as a whole. The
prophets utter their burdens of doom not against evil
persons, but against wicked kingdoms like Babylon,
and Moab, and Egypt, and their great messages of
hope and warning and consolation are addressed to
Judah or Jerusalem rather than any single Jew. In
this sense it is true that no Scripture is merely of pri-
vate interpretation. Redemption includes the race,
or else it could not embrace the individual. The Gos-
pel claims all mankind just as definitely as it appeals
to you and me.
I. Recently Englishmen have been stirred up to dis-
cuss with new eagerness the problem of our national
prosperity. Are we really prosperous ? How can we
safeguard and develop our mercantile success ? What
is the secret of its continuance and its expansion ? The
air is thick with controversy over such questions as
these. Yet the answers given are confined for the most
part to material considerations. At such a time we
need more than ever to remind ourselves how the Bible
tests and measures prosperity. If the Old Testament
applies to individuals as well as to nations, the New
Testament is true for nations as well as for individuals.
A nation's life consisteth not in the abundance of the
things which it possesseth, nor in the extent of the
empire which it rules. What shall it profit a nation
if it gain the whole world and lose its own soul.
II. Let us be very certain that personal vices, how-
ever common and popular they become, can never be
transmuted into public virtues. The same conduct
which ruins an individual will in the long run wreck
a state. To oppress and plunder the poor is equally
accursed, whether it be perpetrated by a crowned
tyrant, or carried out quietly under legal forms by a
trust or a syndicate, a trade corporation or a vested
interest.
III. The seal of a people's unity is a sense of the
Divine calling and election. It remains true in Eng-
land, as it was in Israel, that a covenant with God
is the one sure ground of all covenants between man
and man. National sincerity and veracity are bred in
a people in proportion as they recognize the judgments
and the m ercies of the God of truth. National loyalty
depends at last on common faithfulness to our im-
mortal and invisible King. — T. H. Darlow, The Up-
ward Calling, p. 220.
GOD'S REQUIREMENTS
Deuteronomy x. 12.
The vastness of God's requirements makes the despair
of the morning of the Christian life, but it is the sure
hope of its noon. Had He required less, this life could
not be eternal. ' It is a prejudicial but too common
error among Christians,' said Pascal, in a letter to
Madame Perier, ' and even among those who make a
profession of piety, to believe that there is a measure
of perfection sufficient for safety, beyond which it is
not necessary to aspire. It is an absolute evil to stop
at any such point, and we shall assuredly fall below it
if we aim not to advance higher and higher.'
References. — X. 12. — H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, Sunday Les-
sons for Daily Life, p. 76. X. 14-16. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol.
vi. No. 303. X. 16. — J. Keble, Sermons for Christmas to
Epiphany, p. 193. XI. 10-12. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. ii. p.
58. XI. 12.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xiii. p. 728. XI. 18.—
Melvill, Penny Pulpit, No. 2580. XI. 19.— T. Arnold, Ser-
mons, vol. iii. p. 131. XI. 21. — G. Brooks, Outlines of Sermons,
p. 326. XI. 26-28.— J. S. Boone, Sermons, p. 155. XII.
8, 9. — Sermons for Ascension Day to Trinity Sunday, p. 53.
THE FRIENDSHIP OF CHRIST
(A University Sermon)
' Take heed to thyself that thou offer not thy burnt offerings in
every place that thou seest.' — Deuteronomy xh. 13.
' Behold, I stand at the door and knock.' — Revelation hi. 20.
Your college days are pre-eminently days when you
open the doors of your hearts and let new friends in.
In these years you are generous, and ready to hear a
knock, and to respond to it.
I. Never has the history of any human life been
truly and fully related. I fancy that if such a thing
could be, the record would be mainly of those who at
different stages and periods have come into it. Many
of them have come and gone, but some have remained.
To let another human being into your life means far
more than you can possibly imagine now. Let us
consider what a true friendship means and how blessed
it is.
(a) First of all, there is in a true friendship a com-
plete and joyous frankness. We go about disguised.
Most of our intercourse with fellow-beings is alto-
gether on the surface. In a true friendship all that
we have dealt with in the outer court we take as
ended. There the veils are torn ; we are heart to
heart.
(b) A true friendship means also sympathy and
tenderness. In its high estate it fears nothing from
life or even from death. The friends who are together
in the class-room to-day are going out to their en-
counter with the world, and in that one may succeed
and the other may fail. But it is not upon the
hazards of fortune that a true friendship turns. A
true friendship is to be for solace and for cheer in all
the relations and passages of life and death.
(c) Also a true friendship is an education in trust,
155
Vv. 13-17.
DEUTERONOMY XVI., XVIII
Vv. 9-22.
in magnanimity. Great friendships are not to be
broken on mere suspicion. They are not even to be
broken by fault, for all of us err. There is something
in a high friendship which survives all that, and if
life is a lesson in magnanimity, we shall learn it best
from the dearest and noblest of our friends. This
friendship cannot be broken by death.
II. But as Emerson says, true friendship demands
a religious treatment. We are not to strike links of
friendship with cheap persons where no friendship is.
We are not to offer our burnt offerings in every place
we see.
III. Whoever comes or goes, there is one Friend
who continually knocks at the door of our hearts,
and His friendship is all-sufficing. There are many
who even in the crowd are lonely and loveless. It
was for them that Christ died. It is their love that
Christ is seeking. Remember that no one who has
let Christ into his life ever repented of it.
IV. There is no such great mystery about conver-
sion. You know already what it is to let some human
being enter into your life. Everything is changed by
it more or less. What could be better, happier, wiser
for you than to open the door to this Seeker, this
Knocker, this Beseecher ? Let him in. Say to Him,
say it to Him now in the silence of your souls, Come
in Thou Blessed of the Lord : why standest Thou
without? — W. Robertson Nicoll, The British
Weekly, vol. xlv. p. 353.
Deuteronomy xn. 13. — Exposition of this verse in
Mark Rutherford's Revolution in Tanner's Lane,
chap. xxiv.
References. — XIII. 1-3. — F. D. Maurice, Patriarchs and
Lawgivers of the Old Testament, p. 274. XIII. 11. — J. M.
Neale, Sermons Preached in Sackville College Chapel, vol. iv. p.
29. XIV. 21.— R. F. Horton, The Hidden God, p. 65. C. J.
Vaughan, Memorials of Harrow Sundays, p. 138. XV. 11. — J.
Keble, Miscellaneous Sermons, p. 41. J. M. Neale, Sermons on
the Prophets, vol. ii. p. 218. XV. 15. — Spurgeon, Sermons,
vol. xxiv. No. 1406. XVI. 1.— C. S. Robinson, Simon Peter,
p. 53. E. White, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxv. p. 120.
XII. 2. — H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, Sunday Lessons, vol. i. p. 416.
THE FEAST OF TABERNACLES
(A Harvest Sermon)
' Thou shalt observe the feast of tabernacles seven days, after
that thou hast gathered in thy corn and thy wine ; every
man shall give as he is able, according to the blessing
of the Lord thy God which He hath given thee.' — Deu-
teronomy xvi. 13-17.
The three great feasts of Israel- — -the Passover, the
Feast of Weeks or Pentecost, and the Feast of Taber-
nacles — were not only commemorative of national
blessings or prophetic of yet greater spiritual bles-
sings to be bestowed, but they were conspicuously
connected with the three great seasons of the tillage
of Palestine — the barley and the wheat harvests and
the vintage. This Feast of Tabernacles was the
most joyous of them all. Above and beyond all
other marks of joy and utterances of thanksgiving, the
law laid stress on the thankofferings of love. Men
were not to appear before the Lord empty. The
law, ' Freely have ye received, freely give,' applies to
the natural as well as to the spmtual life, and there can
be no true fulfilment in the latter if it is neglected in
the former. Harvest festivals are valuable in this age.
I. They tell us of the truth which we are con-
stantly tempted to forget — that the God of grace is
also the God of nature ; that the Son of God is also
the Divine Word, the Eternal Wisdom, by whom all
laws of nature are ordained ; that the Holy Ghost is
also the Lord and giver of life, and that not only are
all holy thoughts and desires His gifts, but that even
the skill of the artist and the builder speak of a
wisdom for all manner of workmanship which is His
gift. Harvest thanksgivings help us to look out on
the world of nature and of men with more large-
hearted sympathies.
II. They bear their witness that we believe that
the laws of nature are the expression of an Almighty
Father's will, and that we accept its workings, not
with simple submission, but with thankfulness and
trust.
III. They bring us into fellowship with the old
religious life of Israel. It adds to the interest with
which we think of this feast, to remember that one
large and important part of our Lord's teaching
was connected with it. The history of one feast
of Tabernacles occupies four chapters of St. John's
Gospel. Its ritual was present to the eyes of men,
and to His own thoughts, when He stood and cried,
' I am the Light of the world. If any man thirst, let
him come unto Me and drink.' — E. H. Plumfire,
The Clerical Library, vol. 11. p. 51.
References. — XVII. 16. — J. Laidlaw, Studies in the Par-
ables, p. 217. W. M. Taylor, Contrary Winds, p. 93.
The prophet like Moses. — Deuteronomy xviii. g-22.
' A Prophet.' How doth Christ execute the office of
a prophet ? In the following passages our Lord
claims prophetic powers : ' My doctrine is not
Mine, but His that sent Me '. ' Then shall ye know
that I do nothing of Myself, but as the Father hath
taught Me, I speak these things.'
' Like unto Moses.' Christ has the whole prophetic
life in Himself, says a German writer. He has the
pathos of an Isaiah, the melancholy of an Hosea, the
meekness of a Jeremiah, the joy in nature of an
Amos, the power of observation of the proverb-writers,
the whole world of feeling of the Psalmists. In what
particular respects, then, may we say that Christ was
especially like unto Moses ? First, He was a mediator
between God and the people. Second, He is a de-
liverer from bondage as well as a revealer of God's
will. Third, He was signally meek and supremely
faithful.
Note how often in the New Testament this pre-
diction is applied to Jesus. Philip refers to it when
he says to Nathanael, ' We have found Him of whom
Moses in the Law did write'. Our Lord Himself
doubtless had it in mind when He said, ' Moses wrote
of Me'. Peter quoted it when preaching to the
crowd who had gathered when the lame man was
healed. Stephen, in his defence, cited it also.
156
Vv. 1-3.
DEUTERONOMY XXII
Ver. 8.
References. —XVIII. 15. — E. H. Gifford, Twelve Lectures,
p. 151. J. H. Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. vii.
p. 118. XVIII. 15-19. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxv. No.
1487. XIX. 5, 6. — E. M. Goulburn, Sermons in the Parish
Church of Holywell, p. 101. XIX. 32.— J. N. Norton, Every
Sunday, p. 249. XX. 2-4. — J. M. Neale, Sermons for the
Church Year, p. 167. XX. 8. — W. Ray, Thursday Penny Pulpit,
vol. xi. p. 233. J. M. Neale, Sermons for the Church Year,
p. 177.
YOUR RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR BROTHER
' Thou shalt not see thy brother's ox or his sheep go astray,
and hide thyself from them : thou shalt in any case bring
them again unto thy brother.' — Deuteronomy xxii. 1-3.
A recent writer in one of our religious papers has
said, with all the omniscience and infallibility that
attach to the press, that no one preaches from the
Pentateuch in these days. By this he probably sug-
gests that there is no Gospel in the Pentateuch, and
in suggesting this he shows hopeless, unblushing
ignorance. One of the best books Charles Kingsley
wrote was The Gospel in the Pentateuch ; and any-
one who takes the trouble to look for it will find that
he cannot read a couple of pages of the Pentateuch
without finding therein Gospel truth and teaching.
Among many things that are stern and severe
there is much that is tender and beautiful, much
that breathes the spirit of Jesus. Notably there is
tender and thoughtful care for weak things in nature,
dumb creatures who serve men, and for children, for
the outcast, the stranger, and the poor. There is
also a great deal about brotherhood, enough I should
think to satisfy the most ardent Socialist. The per-
sonal responsibility of man for man is constantly
insisted on, and this passage is an example of it,
' Thou shalt not see thy brother's ox or his sheep go
astray,' etc.
I. The teaching of this passage seems to me to be
that we have a large share of responsibility for the
wrongs which go on about us, and we are bound,
even at cost and inconvenience to ourselves, to try
to prevent and rectify them. Look at this picture
again, and suppose that these cattle are being driven
away. The man who sees it is bound to interfere.
His interference may mean an altercation with the
thief, it may mean that for some days he must find
pasturage for his neighbour's sheep, it may mean a
great deal of inconvenience and loss ; but this is the
law of God, and from it there is no appeal. He is
bound to do his best to right the wrong.
II. The law obtains for us Christian people in the
moral and spiritual realm. As a Christian man every-
thing that concerns my brother should be a concern
to me, even to his ox and ass and raiment, and I must,
wherever possible, guard him against loss and damage.
If I am to care for his ox and his ass, I am surely to
care for his character. He will get over the loss of a
sheep, but he will with difficulty recover a lost virtue.
There are three classes of people which come up to
one's view, as one thinks of words like these and gives
them their largest interpretation. They may be re-
presented here as —
(i) The people who lead others astray and cause
them loss, people who have wronged their brother.
(ii) People who have iseen their brother wronged
or suffering loss, and have hidden themselves ; who
have deliberately refused to take any trouble or pains.
(iii) The people who have suffered loss and who
themselves are being led astray. — C. Brown, Light of
Life, p. 151.
THE HOUSE AND ITS BATTLEMENT
' When thou buildest a new house, then thou shalt make a
battlement for thy roof, that thou bring not blood upon
thine house, if any man fall from thence.' — Deuteronomy
xxii. 8.
The natural exposition of the text is a very simple
one. Eastern houses were built with flat roofs for
obvious reasons. As it was a hot clime people were
glad to get to the top of the house for fresh air, and
there would be little children, thoughtless — compara-
tively so — and if they were allowed at any time on
the roof, where they would most likely wish to go,
there would be a feeling of insecurity unless there
was something to prevent a disaster. And so God
in His infinite kindness, care, and thought for the
welfare of the nation of Israel gives this special direc-
tion to those who had the building of houses, that
they should not overlook this most necessary arrange-
ment for safety, and build a parapet round the house
that would prevent any one being placed in immediate
peril, so that unless they presumptuously scaled that
wall they would be as safe on the top as underneath.
The gracious and eternal God, who in His conde-
scension, care, and pity for fallen sinners, sees fit to
make a law for their temporal safety, in building His
spiritual house is none the less careful.
I. The need of the battlement.
(a) The house top in the East would be frequently
used as a watch-tower. The children of Israel were
ofttimes surrounded by invading hosts. Now there
would be a special danger without the battlement.
In their undue anxiety for their own safety, in watch-
ing the on-coming foe they would most likely forget
where they were, and in their excitement step right
off' and not know what they were doing. Here we
have a spiritual lesson. What a difficulty it is to find
that narrow pathway between a gracious and salutary
solicitude for our safety and that undue anxiety which
comes through seeing the strength of our enemies
surrounding us.
(b) The house-roof in the East would also be used
as a place of relaxation, exercise, and recreation ; they
would often repair there to view things proceeding
around them in the ordinary way. Here we see the
need of the parapet or battlement for safety. How
this brings before us the dangers that surround the
footsteps of the young. What a danger there is lest
in spiritual glee and satisfaction they may tumble if
there is not the battlement.
(c) The house-roof in the East was frequently used
as a place of repose and sleep. A battlement would
be necessary to enable one to take pleasant repose.
When God says ' I will cause my flock to lie down '
He means ' I will give them to realize such a feeling
157
Ver. 10.
DEUTERONOMY XXV 1., XXVIII
Ver. 67.
of safety in My keeping, by strength and protection,
that they shall be able to lie down comfortably '.
II. This battlement was to be a component or
essential part of the building of the house. And so
it is in reference to the securing love and mercy and
faithfulness of God, it is a part of His own structure
and never can be removed.
III. This battlement is to be used and not pre-
sumptuously abused. We shall either be looking
upon the security of God's people as an impetus to
encourage us to remember His keeping power, to
cause us to hope in His mercy notwithstanding the
sense of our failure, and to put the hand of our
trembling faith into the hand of His great love, or
we shall be found among those who have presump-
tuously climbed over God's restrictions.
References. — XXII. 8. — C. Perren, Revival Sermons, p.
234. XXV. 4.— R. F. Horton, The Hidden God, p. 65.
NATIONAL SAFEGUARDS
' Behold, I have brought the first-fruits of the land, which thou,
O Lord, hast given me.' — Deuteronomy xxvi. io.
Each young man takes an immense stride in experi-
ence when he discovers that God has made him
not only the member of a family but also the
citizen of a nation. Gradually he comes to realize
how much the word ' nation ' means. The earlier part
of the Bible occupies itself not so much with individuals
as with the fortunes of a chosen nation. We read
in the Old Testament how God called and trained up
and delivered and chastened and restored His people
Israel. And these precepts in Deuteronomy xxvi.
were given as safeguards to the nation after it had
entered into possession of Canaan, and had become
settled and peaceful and prosperous, for the real test
and touchstone of any people or any individual are
how they endure prosperity. The whole tenor of
these verses implies that a people's security depends
not on outward but on inward conditions. And
hence we may infer what are those invincible powers
which alone can garrison the heart of any nation.
I. The first of these great guardian angels is re-
verence for the nation's past. The previous chapter
has recalled Israel's deliverance from Amalek, and
ends with the warning words ' Thou shalt not forget '.
And through the Old Testament God's warnings and
promises and appeals are based on the actual facts of
Hebrew history. That wonderful and glorious record
must never fall out of mind. And it still remains
true that a nation which ignores its history is like a
man who has lost his memory.
II. Hand in hand with such understanding comes
a sense of the nation's election. God's calling and
discipline had been manifest throughout the long
generations of Israel. God Himself had chosen them
and sealed them for His own high ends, and moulded
them by the secret ' counsel of His will, and made
them His witnesses and standard-bearers in the world.
And on our land also God's finger has stamped a
manifest and marvellous destiny which should needs
make us humble and sober in proportion as we real-
ize what it means.
III. Beyond the sense of national responsibility
there must also be gratitude for national blessings.
If Israel could rejoice in every good thing which God
had given them, we too are bound to praise Him for
all His benefits to us. Young men and women who
have never lived in less favoured lands fail to estimate
the incalculable blessings of their own.
IV. A nation's supreme safeguard lies in the dedi-
cation of its youth. Those first-fruits laid on the
ancient Jewish altar were but an allegory. And we
fulfil the spirit of the ancient command only as we
consecrate the flower and first-fruits of our own lives.
— T. H. Daelow, The Upward Calling, p. 80.
Reference. — XXVII. 15. — C. C. Bartholomew, Sermons
Chiefly Practical, p. 464.
A BLESSING ON THE STOREHOUSE
' The Lord shall command the blessing upon thee in thy store-
houses.' — Deuteronomy xxviii. 8.
The storing of the grain is the last of the processes
of harvest. We may therefore take the blessing of
God upon the housed and winnowed corn as includ-
ing His blessing upon all previous stages of growth
or ingathering.
I. The Sowing Time — This is where industry
comes in, and the gift of God is seen also to be His
reward and blessing upon human diligence. The
preparation of the soil and the choice of the seed —
application to human life.
II. The Period of Growth, the Waiting Time.—
With growth itself the farmer has nothing to do.
It is the work of God, in which man has no part.
But he has to weed and protect the crop. Carry
the thoughts here suggested into the realm and
province of life.
III. The Gathering Time. — We are all gleaners in
the harvest-field of life. What use have we made of
the season which God has given us ?
IV. The Testing, the Winnowing Time — for
' every man's work ' shall be tried ' of what sort it is '.
Holy Scripture employs three figures to enforce and
emphasize the strict and searching nature of this
trial : —
(a) The process of winnowing.
(b) The process of the analyst.
(c) The process of burning, the trial by fire.
— Vivian R. Lennard, Harvest-tide, p. 101.
Reference. — XXVIII. 67. — T. Arnold, The Interpretation
of Scripture, p. 32.
THE DESIRED MORNING
' Would God it were morning ! ' — Deuteronomy xxviii. 67.
This cry is going up from all the earth in all
languages, and sometimes unconsciously. The heart
is one, the passion, the vehemence of life is expressive
of a common humanity.
In the first instance, all this refers to a great
matter of punishment which the Lord was about to
inflict upon His disobedient people. He would not
leave them alone, night or day, He would make them
feel the thong for every sin they had committed ; for
158
Ver. 67.
DEUTERONOMY XXVII I., XXIX
Ver. 29.
every evil word and every evil deed there should be a
lash as of a scorpion sting. ' Would God it were
morning ! ' It is a great cry, the interpretation of
the soul's dumb desire. The soul is weary, it is con-
fused, confounded, perplexed, mocked, and the dark-
ness itself becomes a whip wherewith the hand
almighty scourges and chastises the soul.
I. The text may be regarded as an aspiration,
a hopeful and vehement desire. ' Would God it
were morning ! ' That is the aspiration of a puzzled
student, a most perplexed and bewildered thinker.
He is drooping towards atheism, down to the low
dank levels of dejection if not despair. Why so?
' Because,' he replies, ' things are so mysterious ;
nothing ends in itself; the tuft of smoke has gone
back to some primal fire ; and all things are so con-
fused, intermingled, and so deeply and tragically en-
gaged in internecine conflict ; and there is so much
apparently needless suffering on this small globe.
II. This cry, ' Would God it were morning ! ' is
occasioned by Sorrow, written with a large capital, as
if it were personalized, turned into an eloquent but
grim personality and figure. Yet how poor the
world would be if all the books that Sorrow has
written were taken out of it ! What if sorrow be
but the broken clouds of a very sunny day, helping
us to see better into the depths of the sky and to feel
more sensitively the meaning of interpreting light ?
III. This cry for the true morning is the expres-
sion of struggling but hopeful faith. The soul can
never give up that idea of the morning. Sometimes
its grasp seems to be relaxed, but God will take care
that the hope and promise, the sweet confidence of
morning, shall not be taken out of the hand. Some-
times we can feel ourselves growing in wisdom ;
sometimes we are quite sure that we have made an
advance upon yesterday. Now and again the old
tone of confidence comes into the voice so long
choked by tears and sobs, and takes part in some
dropped hymn and makes it live again with the new-
ness of its own life. These are mysteries, these are
hopes and comforts ; these constitute the morning
we have been sighing for.
1. This cry for the morning has been sustained by
saintly histories.
The answer to this aspiration is justified by saintly
experience. Men have been delivered ; souls have
been saved ; as a matter of fact, light has really and
fully come, so that men have stood up when all other
men seemed to be sitting down, and they have
towered up to a great representative personality, and
have said, ' This poor man cried unto the Lord, and
the Lord answered him '.
2. The morning has come to many ; it may come
to all. It has come to the grave. One bold sent-
ence in the holy book is, ' He hath abolished death ! '
— expunged it, rubbed it out of the world's language ;
there is no such word in any gruesome meaning now.
The resurrection of Christ was the morning that
came upon the death-land. Those who stand upon
the Rock of Faith, upon the tomb of Christ emptied
and angel-filled, are confident that the morning has
come in some places and is coming in all places. —
Joseph Paekee, City Temple Pulpit, vol. v. p. 194.
Reference. — XXIX. 4. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxvii.
No. 1638.
THE SECRET AND THE UNREVEALED
THINGS
' The secret things belong unto the Lord our God : but those
things which are revealed belong unto us, and to our
children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law. '
— Deuteronomy xxix. 29.
Theee are some things respecting which we ought
to be agnostics. They are the secret things which
belong to God. There are other things concerning
which we ought not to be agnostics. They are the
revealed things which belong to us and to our
children.
I. The things which concern us, which touch our
life, lie within the realm of our knowledge ; the things
which do not touch us, which do not concern our
life, concerning which we may hold one theory or
another theory, and our life still remain right, do not
belong to us. We may discuss them, but they are
not part of the vital truths of religion.
II. In a similar manner there is the known and
the unknown in religion. And the difficulty about
religious discussion has been that most of it has been
fighting about the unknown. 'Nothing is more
certain,' says Herbert Spencer, 'than that we are
ever in the presence of an infinite and eternal Energy
from which all things proceed.' Now what can we
know about that infinite and eternal Energy ? We
say that He is omnipresent. But we do not know.
All we know is that everywhere in the universe He
is operative.
III. But whenever God comes in touch with us, we
do know. We know that there is a natural order in
the universe ; we know that there is somewhere a
rule ; and we know that these rules are absolute, un-
changeable, immutable. We do not know in what
way God operates on the mind. But we do know
Christ's relation to us ; and that is enough for us to
know. What God is in His essence we cannot know.
What is His method of manifesting Himself to others
we cannot know ; but we can open our hearts to His
sunshine and receive His life. What the Christ is
in His relation to the eternal Father we cannot
know ; but to us He can be the model which we
follow and the revelation of God whom we adore. —
Lyman Abbott, Homiletic Review, 1904, vol.
xlviii. p. 291.
KNOWLEDGE: REVEALED AND SECRET
' The secret things belong unto the Lord our God : but those
things which are revealed belong unto us, and to our
children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law. '
— Deuteronomy xxix. 29.
I will first of all take the two terms of my text and
then the declaration of the purpose lying behind the
truth of the terms — revealed things ; secret things.
I. First, the revealed things. The Hebrew word
very literally means things denuded, laid bare. I
159
DEUTERONOMY XXX
Ver. 14.
have said to you that a thing revealed cannot be
perfect and complete ; but it is a revealed thought.
This hymn-book, for example, is a thing revealed to
us by this imperfect manner of words. It is the same
thing in the moral world. There are things revealed
and things I know — a flower, a storm, light and heat,
and the mystery of pain, the great affirmations of
Christian truth.
II. Take the next term of the text : secret things.
As the first word means things denuded, the second
means things clothed, things hidden by a covering.
The covering demonstrates the presence of the thing
beneath. The covering is revealed, the thing is hidden.
It is the intangible, impenetrable, illusive mystery
that lurks at the back of everything revealed. I take
up this book again. There is as much mystery in
that hymn-book as there is in God. When you can
fathom the mystery of this book, you can fathom the
mystery of the universe.
III. It is the great declaration of revealed religion
that everything that baffles the human intellect and
bewilders the human heart because of its mystery is
not a mystery with God. He knows it thoroughly.
Carry this idea into the second half of the declaration.
Everything revealed is revealed for us and is united
to the secret and hidden forces and expresses so much
of them as is for us to know. The truth is that
everything of which I am certain is but the apparition
of a heavenly thing and teaches a spiritual truth.
Take away the secret things and you will lose God.
It is the secret of Divine government that demon-
strates the fact of Divine government. — G. Campbell
Morgan, Horniletic Review, 1904, vol. xlviii. p.
451.
References. — XXIX. 29. — J. O. Davies, Sermons by Welsh-
men, p. 59. J. Bunting, Sermons, vol. i. p. 346. G. Brooks,
Outlines of Sermom, p. 193.
Loving and obeying God. — Deuteronomy xxx.
' The word is very nigh unto thee.' In one of his
poems Lowell tells the story of an ancient prophet
who made a pilgrimage into the wilderness until he
reached Mount Sinai. God's presence had deserted
him, and he thought that there, if anywhere, he
should find it again. As he engaged in prayer on
Sinai, expecting some strange and startling answer,
the moss at his feet unfolded, and a violet showed
itself through the moss. Then he remembered that
just before he left home his little daughter had come
running to him, offering him a nosegay of these very
flowers. They grew at his own door ; he saw them
day by day ; he had travelled all that distance for a
message that had been very nigh unto him all the
time.
Love and Obedience (v. 15-20). A poor, half-witted
girl suffering from arrested brain-development, was
taken into a school opened by a group of benevolent
ladies. The leader of the enterprise was known as
Mistress Mary, and the forlorn girl loved her dearly.
One day in San Francisco the half-witted scholar was
in one of the upper storeys of a cheap clothing factory
when fire broke out. To come back down the staircase
was impossible. The crowd shouted to her to leap into
a blanket that they held out. But she looked down
and was petrified by fright, for she knew not the
voice of strangers. At length Mistress Mary ap-
peared. She cried in a clear, sweet voice, ' Leap,
darling, leap ! ' And the half-paralysed child, re-
cognizing the voice she loved, obeyed. She leaped,
swooning as she fell through the air, but was saved.
CHRIST'S NEARNESS TO HIS PEOPLE
(.4 Christmas Sermon)
' The wordiis very nigh.' — Deuteronomy xxx. 14.
Our Lord was known by many titles — The Christ or
Messiah, Jesus or Joshua the Saviour, the Lamb of
God, the Vine, the Door, the Good Shepherd, the Son
of Man, and many others. Perhaps no title is more
fitting than the ' Word,' for He came to reveal God
to man, to reveal the will and mind of the Father,
just as a word spoken reveals the thought which gave
it birth and being. And the Word is very nigh.
In other language, Christ is very near.
I. His Nearness to those whose Love and Desire
is Set upon Him. — The idea of an actual and real
presence of the Lord Jesus is a stumbling-block to
some men. These men cannot receive such a doctrine,
neither can they realize it. Now the presence of
Christ to the Christian is no fancy of the imagination
and no mere uncertainty, but it is a real and personal
presence, with power to help and power to guide, and
a presence to Whom we may speak with a reasonable
certainty of being heard and helped and blessed.
II. A Christmastide Nearness. — In very deed the
Word is nigh unto us on this day. A great oppor-
tunity is at hand. Loving hearts must open on
Christmas Day with all the affection of which they
are capable to receive Him ; and stony hearts, and
sinful hearts, and indifferent hearts, and selfish hearts,
and hearts of all kinds, for there will be a blessing
for them all. The Word is very nigh with life and
hope and promise, and fair prospect, and the offer of
a great future.
III. His Sacramental Presence. — Jesus is never
nearer to us, perhaps, than when we are met together,
with true hearts, at His holy table. And in no sense
can we hold nearer or sweeter communion with Him
than when we are at His Eucharist, filled with the
sense of His presence. And we shall not begin our
Christmas quite in the right way if we fail to come
and partake in the Holy Ordinance. He will not be
to us as nigh as He might. If we draw nigh to Him,
He will draw nigh to us.
IV. His Nearness in His Second Advent. — It is
nigh, even at the doors. But of this it is difficult to
speak much. As to when it will be we know not.
And is this to be wondered at ? Hath not He Him-
self told us that of that hour knoweth no man, nor
yet indeed the angels, nor the Son Himself, but the
Father only ? The thought of His Second Coming is
an awesome and terrible one. But our terrors are
160
Ver. 14.
DEUTERONOMY XXX., XXXI., XXXIII
Vv. 2, 3.
mitigated by a reflection that He Who shall come is
none other than the Word, Christ Jesus our Lord. —
J. A. Craigik, The Country Pulpit, p. 40.
'THAT THOU MAYEST DO IT'
' The Word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy
heart, that thou mayest do it.' — Deuteronomy xxx. 14.
Human religions have prided themselves upon their
profundity and mystery. The Divine religion pro-
fesses to be intelligible to all men and adapted to all.
Rightly regarded, this characteristic of religion, set
forth in the text, is an evidence of its divinity. A
little mind makes a mystery even of a trifle ; a great
mind brings down a mystery to its simplest form ;
the Divine Mind makes the most glorious truths ac-
cessible to the plainest understanding.
I. The Plainness of Religion. —
(a) The fact that God's communication with men
is by means of the Word is itself an element in its
simplicity.
(0) The Word is intelligible to the human under-
standing. The language in which God speaks is
human language, and His commandments are such as
can scarcely be misunderstood.
(c) The Word is impressive to the human heart.
The sentiments appealed to are common to all man-
kind, such as faith and gratitude and love.
(d) There are providential circumstances which
render the blessings of the Gospel peculiarly accessible.
The Scriptures are circulated in our own language,
the Gospel is preached at our very doors, etc.
II. The Purpose for which Religion is made so
very Plain and Accessible. — This is not simply that
we may understand the Word. As the text expresses
it, it is that ' thou mayest do it '.
(a) Obedience is thus rendered more easy.
(b) Disobedience is thus rendered more culpable
and inexcusable.
Be it remembered that however plain the Word,
this will not avail unless the heart be receptive, and
in cordial sympathy with Divine truth and law, with
Divine Gospel and promise.
References.— XXX. 15-22.— A. K. H. Boyd, Graver
Thoughts of a Country Parson (3rd Series), p. 177. XXX. 19.
—J. Vaughan, Sermons (15th Series), p. 157. F. D. Maurice,
The Patriarchs and Lawgivers of the Old Testament, p. 289. H.
Alford, Sermons, p. 1. XXX. 19, 20.— C. Kingsley, Good
News of God, p. 80 ; Westminster Sermons, p. 271. XXXI. 14.—
F. E. Paget, Helps and Hindrances to the Christian Life, vol. i.
p. 44. .XXXI. 23.— I. Williams, Characters of the Old Testa-
ment, p. 138.
Deuteronomy xxxi. 23.
Moses, in God's name, did counsel Joshua, Be
strong and of a good courage : for thou shalt bring
the children of Israel into the land which I sware
unto them. God immediately did command him
(Josh. i. 6), Be strong and of a good courage ; and
again (v. 7), Only be thou strong and very cour-
ageous ; and again (v. 9), Have I not commanded
thee ? Be strong and of a good courage. Lastly,
the Reubenites and Gadites heartily desired him
(v. 18), Only be strong and of a good courage.
Was Joshua a dunce or a coward ? Did his wit or
his valour want an edge, that the same precept must
so often be pressed upon him ? No doubt neither,
but God saw it needful that Joshua should have
courage of proof, who was to encounter both the fro-
ward Jew and the fierce Canaanite. Though metal
on metal, colour on colour, be false heraldry, line on
line, precept on precept is true divinity. — Thomas
Fuller.
1 Take this book of the law and put in the side of the ark of
the covenant of the Lord your God.' — Deuteronomy xxxi.
26.
St. John of the Cross says that God commanded
that nothing should be placed within the ark which
contained the manna except the book of the law and
Aaron's rod, ' which signifies the Cross '. ' Thus the
soul which cares for no other thing except to keep
perfectly the Law of the Lord and to bear the Cross
of Christ, will be a true Ark which will have within
it the true Manna, which is God.' — Obras, Vol. 1.
p. 22.
References. — XXXII. 11, 12. — J. M. Neale, Sermons
Preached in a Religious House, vol. ii. p. 331. W. J. Brock,
Sermons, p, 1. W. M. Taylor, The Limitations of Life, p.
78. XXXII. 20. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxx. No. 1784.
XXXI. -XXXII.— Ibid. p. 341. J. Monro-Gibson, The Mosaic
Era, p. 333. XXXII. 8, 9.— M. Dods, Israel's Iron Age, p.
172. XXXII. 31.— J. Barton Bell, Christian World Pulpit,
1890, p. 74. D. Moore, Penny Pulpii, No. 3342. P. McAdam
Muir, Modern Substitutes for Christianity, p. 173. XXXII.
39. — Bishop Alexander, The Great Question, p. 30. XXXII.
47.— H. J. Buxton, God's Heroes, p. 226. XXXII. 48-50.—
C. D. Bell, Hills that Bring Peace, p. 143. XXXII. 48-52.—
J. W. Boulding, Sermons, p. 1. XXXII. 52.— R. Betts,
Christian World Pulpit, 1890, p. 51.
THE LAW OF ANTAGONISM
' From His right hand went a fiery law for them. Yea, He
loved the people.' — Deuteronomy xxxiii. 2, 3.
At first sight the text might seem to involve a con-
tradiction, but closer consideration will show that it
expresses a great truth, viz. that the severity of human
life is an expression of the Divine goodness.
I. Consider the truth of the text as it finds expres-
sion in Nature. Nature is imperative, uncompromis-
ing, terrible. A lofty and unyielding commandment
is written over all things, and behind the fiery law is
a right hand capable of enforcing it to the utmost, of
exacting the last farthing of the overwhelming penalty.
In our day the severity of Nature has been recognized
as the struggle for existence, and students have shown
with great clearness and power how full the world is
of antagonism and suffering ; yet these same students
distinctly perceive that the struggle for existence is at
bottom merciful, and that whenever Nature chooses an
evil it is a lesser evil to prevent a greater, (a) They
see the advantage of severity as far as all sound and
healthy things are concerned. The student of Nature
knows well that the fiery law, the law which demands
constant awareness, movement, tension, resistance,
endeavour, is the law of salvation and perfecting to
the whole animal world. (6) These students of Nature
161
11
Vv. 2, 3.
DEUTERONOMY XXXIII
Ver. 27.
see also the advantage of severity so far as defective
things are concerned. It does indeed seem harsh that
by the law of the world weak things go to the wall,
and it is often difficult to reconcile ourselves to the
grim fact. Yet the scientist sees truly that the fiery
law which smites weakness into the dust is just as kind
as the sweet light of the sun. It is better for the
world at large that weak organisms should be elimin-
ated, otherwise the earth would be filled with imper-
fection and wretchedness ; it is better for the creatures
concerned that they should perish, for why should a
miserable existence be prolonged ?
II. We consider the text as it finds expression in
civilization, (a) Take the struggle of man with
Nature. All climates and countries have their special
inconveniences, inhospitalities and scourges, and every-
where men live in a more or less decided conflict with
the elements and seasons. But is not this conflict
with Nature part of the inspiration and programme
of civilization ? The law of life is truly severe which
enjoins that men shall eat bread in the sweat of his
face, but in this struggle for life our great antagonist
is our great helper ; we are leaving barbarism behind
us, we are undergoing a magnificent transformation,
we are becoming princes of God and heirs of all things.
(6) Take the struggle of man with man. Society is
a great system of antithesis. There are international
rivalries, a relentless competition between the several
races and nations for power and supremacy. But this
social rivalry brings its rich compensations. It is so
with the international rivalry. Our husbandmen will
be compelled to put away all droning ; they must go
to school again, they must invent new methods, they
must adopt new machines, sow choicer seeds, breed
superior cattle ; they must grub up the old canker-
eaten, lichen-laden orchards and plant fresh fruit-trees
of the best varieties.
III. We consider the truth of the text as it finds
expression in character. The law concerning human
character and duty knows nothing of accommodating
itself to our weakness and infirmity, it does not invite
or admit excuses for failure or fidelity, it is imperative
and uncompromising — a fiery law. And yet we must
contend that this severity is only another expression
of eternal love. The scientist is reconciled to austere
Nature by the consideration that she ' chooses a lesser
evil to prevent a greater,' and the same consideration
must reconcile us to life. For as the catastrophes of
Nature are, after all, but partial and temporary, pre-
venting immeasurably greater calamities, so our physi-
cal pain, impoverishment, social suffering, severe toil,
bereavement, and all our terrestrial woes are the lesser
evils, saving us from the infinitely greater one of the
superficiality, corruption, misery, and ruin of the soul.
VV. L. Watkinson, The Transfigured Sackcloth,
p. 191.
J. M. Neale, Sermons Preached
p. 53. XXXIII. 12.— J. N.
References. — XXXIII. 7
in a Religious House, vol.
Norton, Golden Truths, p. 391. Bagnall-Baker, Thursday
Penny Pulpit, vol. iii. p. 121. XXXIII. 16.— W. M. Taylor,
Contrary Winds, p. 200.
WATCHWORDS FOR A NEW YEAR
' Thy shoes shall be iron and brass ; and as thy days so shall
thy strength be.' — Deuteronomy xxxiii. 25.
We stand at the threshold of another year. The
past is irrevocable. The future is before us. How
shall we prepare ourselves to go up into it ?
I. There are tasks awaiting us ; the life of a true
disciple of Christ is not a sinecure. His prayer for
us is that we may bear ' fruit,' ' much fruit,' ' more
fruit '. Passive piety is scarcely better than none at
all. If we are followers of the Christ we may not
shrink from cares and burdens and responsibilities.
Yet who is sufficient for these things ? If we set out
alone and unprepared the journey will be too much
for us. My weakness — God's strength, these are the
sandals wherewith we journey successfully along the
path of duty.
II. There are temptations before us. This needs
must be. The grapes must be pressed or there will
be no wine, but we are never alone in the hour of
trial unless we choose to be. A wrongdoer says :
' I couldn't help it ; the temptation was greater than
I could bear '. This is never true. The word of the
Lord assures us to the contrary. ' Lo, I am with you
alway ; I will not leave you alone, I will come to you '.
If we yield to temptation it is because we refuse His
help, for He is not far from every one of us. And
besides this present Christ we have the strong staff"
of the Written Word to lean on. A Bible Christian
is a strong Christian.
III. There are sorrows before us. And where shall
we find comfort ? God knows. There is strength in
that. ' God is not the author of our calamities. But
there is a sense in which God is present always in the
midst of pain and sorrow. It does not spring up out
of the ground. It does not come to pass without His
permission, decree. He controls it, restrains it, and
in the long run makes all things work together for
good to them that love Him. And our affliction after
all is ' light, and but for a moment '. A glance at the
starry heavens reveals ten thousand times ten thou-
sand worlds, and the longer we gaze the more come
whirling into view. How little this world seems:
how infinitesimal. So is time in relation to eternity.
So is the pain of to-day to the glory of to-morrow.
— David J. Bueeell, Homiletic Review, vol. lvii.
p. 67.
References.— XXXIII. 25.— W. H. Brookfield, Sermons,
p. 196. C. Bradley, The Christian Life, p. 191. J. Vaughan,
Fifty Sermons, 1874, p. 256. Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. iv. No.
210. H. W. Beecher, Forty-eight Sermons, vol. i. p. 1.
XXXIII. 26-28.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xiv. No. 803.
THE EVERLASTING ARMS
' The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the ever-
lasting arms.' — Deuteronomy xxxiii. 27.
This is the blessing wherewith Moses, the man of
God, blessed the children of Israel before his death.
Like the dying prophecy of Jacob, the aged patriarch,
when he gathered his sons about him, and like the
162
Ver. 27.
DEUTERONOMY XXXIII
Ver. 29.
last prayer of David the king when he bequeathed
his throne to Solomon his son, this farewell of Israel's
great leader and lawgiver rises into the music of a
psalm.
I. There come times to every man and woman,
even to the young who are sensitive and enthusiastic,
when they are beset with a horrible sense of human
futility. This evil mood of contempt for one's self
curdles into a temper of scorn for one's brothers.
They and we alike seem too ignoble, too fleeting, to
be worth seriously troubling over.
II. Besides the dreadful sense of worthlessness and
futility there is another horror of great darkness
which sometimes oppresses the soul. You realize, in
imagination, what it would mean to be literally ' lost '
amid the infinite spaces and silences, without a path
or a home or a helper.
III. We are not the puppets of evil fate, the play-
things of blind forces. We are embraced in our
father's arms. These very circumstances which we
rebel against, these checks and limits which hedge us
in, are really the clasp and pressure of His eternal
tenderness carrying us along the way which He would
have us go. — T. H. Daelow, The Upward Calling,
p. 154.
THE ETERNAL GOD THY REFUGE
' The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the ever-
lasting arms. '—Deuteronomy xxxiii. 27.
I. A Cry of the Human Spirit. — The text is not the
utterance of an exceptional soul, but a genuine cry
of the human spirit ; not merely a line of sublime
poetry, but a voice from distant ages, which still ex-
presses to the world the most fundamental of human
needs and becomes the personal and cherished con-
fession of the confidence of every religious man, and
of every man in his deeper and more religious hours.
Sooner or later every son of man is taught the lesson
of his own insufficiency, of his need of a strength he
does not find in himself, and of a shelter and support
which his fellows cannot give, and no earthly interest
or object can yield. The truly religious man is just
the man to whom God is no mere name, tradition, or
opinion, but his one sure refuge and support — the
man who has proved in his own experience that God
is here and now to the children what He was long
ago to the fathers — no less mighty to protect, uphold,
and save, and no less abounding in loving kindness
and tender mercy.
II. The Law of Mediation. — We are set within a
system of mediation. It is the office of the natural
to lead us to the spiritual, and of the temporal to
lead us to the eternal. The whole material universe
is a system of mediation by which God would draw
us to Himself. The creation is but the Divine
thought clothing itself in visible form, and it comes
forth into form not only because self-manifestation is
a necessity of deity, but in order that the children of
God may be led by it nearer to Him Who is the source
of their being, and the unseen Power of all good.
III. The Refuge from Unsearchable Mystery. —
The eternal God is our refuge from the unsearchable
mystery of life. In all ages men, bewildered by the
vision of great changes, have pronounced the doom
of the world because they were not able to see or
understand the process of its salvation. Let us not
be fearful even if the worst happens. The worst that
can happen is often the best for the world. ' From
evil good ever evolving,' is perhaps the best descrip-
tion we can give of the Divine method. Human life
in its evolution has its end as it had its beginning in
God. There can be no evil, therefore, in any of the
permanent forces which are shaping human society.
IV. The Refuge of Sufferers and Sinners. — In
times of critical strain and trial to ourselves, and
changes in our days which make us feel as if there
were nothing steadfast, in the hour of disappoint-
ment and unforeseen calamity and loss, in the dark-
ness of temptation and sin, sickness and death, let
this be our confidence : ' The eternal God is thy
refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms ' —
' thy refuge ' from the world without and the tumults
of thine own spirit ; ' thy refuge ' from all the dark
shadows which haunt thee, from sleeplessness, tor-
menting memories of evil done, and from all invisible
terrors ; ' thy refuge ' when thy thoughts baffle thee,
and thy faith fails thee ; ' thy refuge ' from the
loneliness of life and in the hour of thy final passion
and conflict. — John Huntek, The Christian World
Pulpit, vol. lxx. 1906, p. 401.
References. — -XXXIII. 27. — A. M. Fairbairn, City of God,
p. 190. Spurgeop, Sermons, vol. xi. No. 624. A. R. Hender-
son , God and Man in the Light of To-day, p. 263.
THE SEARCH FOR HAPPINESS
' Happy art thou, O Israel.'— Deuteronomy xxxiii. 29.
It has often been noted that we bestow least thought
upon our greatest blessings. When a man is healthy
he thinks very little of health. Now as it is with
health so it is with happiness. The happy man sel-
dom thinks how happy he is. But the heart that is
happy is rarely introspective. There is a childlike
unconsciousness in its enjoyment. I think then that
all the world's talk of happiness is a proof that un-
happiness is abroad. Now it is one of the strange
contradictions of our faith that the Gospel should
have proved itself so unquestionably a powerful
factor in creating happiness ; and yet the central
figure of the Gospel was a Man of Sorrows and
acquainted with grief.
I. It is commonly admitted that happiness is only
gained as a by-product. If a man makes it the busi-
ness of his life to extract happiness from any ore he
is almost certain to have his toil in vain. It is when
we do not seek happiness that we find it. Make it
your all in all, it vanishes. Forget it, then in the
passion for sublimer things it comes. The Gospel of
Jesus Christ deals with happiness along these very
lines. The Gospel of Jesus never says ' Be happy ' ;
but the Gospel of Jesus says ' Be holy ' ; aim at the
highest, and happiness will come.
II. It has been commonly recognized that human
happiness has two great enemies. The one is anxiety,
and the other is ennui, or listlessness. The Gospel of
163
Vv. 1-12.
DEUTERONOMY XXXIV
Vv. 5, 6.
Jesus is marvellously equipped to fight these foes. I
cannot conceive how any Christian can be a listless
character. With a soul to save and a character to
build, with passions to master and virtues to achieve,
with men to help, and with a Christ to know, I think
there is work enough for the idlest.
III. It has been commonly admitted that happi-
ness is to be found among life's common things. It
is not the rare gifts, the possessions of the few ; it is
not great gifts, great genius, or great power that
make the possessors happy. It is health, it is friend-
ship, it is love at home, it is the voices of children, it
is sunshine. And now comes in the Gospel of Jesus
with its great power to consecrate the commonplace.
A Christian, as one has said, is not a man who
does extraordinary things ; he is a man who does the
ordinary things, but he does them in an extraordinary
way. He links his commonest joy on to the chain
that runs right up to the throne of the Eternal.
References. — XXXIII. 29. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol.
xxiii. No. 1359. XXXIII.-XXXIV.— J. Monro-Gibson, The
Mosaic Era, p. 345. XXXIV. 1-12.— W. M. Taylor, Moses
the Lawgiver, p. 434.
THE DEATH OF MOSES
Deuteronomy xxxiv. 1-12.
' Unto the mountain of Nebo, to the top of Pisgah '
(v. 1). There were other Old Testament death-scenes
transacted on the mountains. It was on Mount Gilboa
that Saul leaned upon his spear and slew himself. And
it was on the summit of Hor that Aaron died. It was
near the top of Pisgah that Balaam said, ' Let me die
the death of the righteous, and let my last end be like
his '. Compare these two. Very near the place where
Balaam was Moses died. Yet what a difference !
There are many, says Matthew Henry, who desire to
die the death of the righteous, but do not endeavour
to live the life of the righteous.
According to the word of the Lord (v. 5) — literally,
according to the mouth of the Lord ; whence grew the
popular belief that God kissed Moses and he died.
LIFE'S UNFINISHED TASKS
' But thou shalt not go over thither.' — Deuteronomy xxxiv. 4.
Moses, after so many years of toil and suffering,
stands at the border of the Promised Land, but is
not allowed to cross that border. One sin kept him
out. Very few of us are allowed to finish the work
to which we have set our hand, and we are called from
our work just when the reward of completed labour is
almost within our reach.
I. These words come to the thinker, to the man
who seeks an answer to the questions of the reason,
to him who would read the riddle of the painful earth.
What do our greatest scientists know of matter ?
What matter is in itself they cannot tell. Or the
thinker may ask what is space ? What is time ?
Again we ask, Is there a Divine and Sovereign Will
in the universe? Is there some far-off Divine event
to which the whole creation moves ? These are but
a few of the questions thinkers have been discussing
for nearly three thousand years. To every thinker,
who struggles to reach the region of metaphysical or
scientific certitude, there come the words that came
of old to Moses.
II. But these words come not only to the man of
thought, but also to the man of action — the reformer,
the statesman, the philanthropist, the inventor, the
artist. Livingstone devoted thirty years of his life
to Africa, and travelled thirty thousand African
miles, that he might not only bring to that dark
Continent the blessings of the Christian religion, but
also that he might open it up to legitimate traffic,
but he died before his task was done. It is said of
Opie, that great painter, that despairing of reaching
his ideal of artistic perfection, he one day flung down
his brushes and cried, 'I never, never shall be a
painter '. Why, we ask, are men snatched away thus
prematurely ? It is something to have seen the land
as Moses did, even from afar. Saint Columba, ere
he died, had a vision of the fame and the influence
of the little island of Iona. Those who have lived
like Moses and Saint Columba died assured that
their labours were not in vain.
III. These words also come to the saint. The
Christian is one who is always looking forward to an
ideal, to complete conformity to the image of Christ,
to moral likeness to God in a human being. But that
ideal the true Christian knows he has never attained.
— T. B. McCorkindale, Christian World Pulpit,
vol. lxxiv. p. 75.
Illustration. — Max Miiller, the great German
philologist, while a young student in Paris, conceived
the ambition of being enrolled amongst the members
of the French Academy. He received that coveted
honour and many another besides, for he was made a
member of almost every learned society in Europe.
When his youthful ambition was realized, he entered
in one of his letters the words so full of pathos,
coming from the pen of a man whose life was singu-
larly fortunate : ' The dream of the reality was
better than the reality of the dream '.
References. — XXXIV. 4. — J. M. Neale, Readings for the
Aged (3rd Series), p. 9 ; Sermons Preached in Sackville College
Chapel, vol. i. p. 160. Bishop Woodford, Sermons, p. 27.
A DEATH IN THE DESERT
' So Moses the servant of the Lord died there in the land of
Moab, according to the word of the Lord. And He buried
him in a valley in the land of Moab. But no man knoweth
of his sepulchre unto this day.' — Deuteronomy xxxiv. 5, 6.
The lessons of that death may best be learned if we
bring them into contrast with another death and
another grave — those of the Leader of the New Cove-
nant.
I. The Penalty of Transgression. — A little sin
done by a loftily endowed and inspired man ceases
to be small. The smallest sin has in it the seeds of
mortal consequences ; and the loftiest saint does not
escape the law of retribution. Turn to the other
death — His death was 'the wages of sin' too, and
yet it proclaims ' the gift of God,' which is ' eternal
life'.
164
Ver. 6.
DEUTERONOMY XXXIV
Ver. 6.
II. The Withdrawal, by a Hard Fate, of the
Worker on the very Eve of the Completion of his
Work. — It is the lot of all epoch-making men that
they should toil at a task the full issues of which will
not be known until their heads are laid low in the
dust.
III. The Lesson of the Solitude and Mystery of
Death. — Moses in that solitude had the supporting
presence of God. There is a drearier desolation, and
Jesus Christ proved it when He cried ' My God, My
God, why hast Thou forsaken Me ? '
IV. The Uselessness of a Dead Leader to a Genera-
tion with New Conflicts. — Moses did his work and
was laid aside. Christ, and Christ alone, can never
be antiquated. — A. Maclaren, The Freeman, 4 May,
1888.
References.— XXXIV. 5, 6.— J. W. Boulding, Sermons,
p. 1. J. E. Walker, The Death of Aaron, and the Hidden
Grave of Moses, No. 12. C. Kingsley, The Gospel of the
Pentateuch, p. 222.
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE BURIAL OF
MOSES
'And God buried him in a valley of the land of Moab ; but no
man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.' — Deuter-
onomy xxxiv. 6.
I. I have often put to myself the question : Sup-
pose this fragment of the Bible had been lost, should
we drop any flower from the garland of revelation ?
I think we should. I think there is one thing re-
vealed here which is quite unique and which is
planted here alone ; I mean the fact that there is
such a thing as burial by God.
II. Some of the deepest distresses of bereavement
come from the denial of funeral rites. Where the
body is buried in the mine, where the body is en-
gulfed in the sea, where the body is stretched on the
battle-field indistinguishable amid the mutilated slain,
there is a deeper tone added to the heart's knell. It
is a note which Christianity has rather increased
than diminished, for the doctrine of resurrection has
consecrated the body and made its very dust dear.
To such a state of mind what comfort this passage
brings ! Here is an explorer lost in the mountain
snow. His friends know he is dead ; and it adds to
their pain that no human lips have consecrated his
dust. And to them there comes this voice : Ye that
weep for the dead, ye that lament the burial rites
denied, know ye not that there are graves which are
consecrated by God alone ! Where the prayer is
breathed not, where the Book is opened not, where
the wreath is planted not, where the human tear is
shed not, there may be a burial of unsullied solemnity
— a burial by the hand of your Father. There are
consecrated graves where priest never stood, where
mourners never knelt, where tear never fell. There
are spots hallowed by your Father which to you are
barren ground. God's acre is larger than the church-
yard. Out on yon bleak hillside He wrapped your
friend to rest in a mantle of spotless snow. Is not
that bleak hillside God's acre evermore ? Is it not
as holy to you as if you had brought sweet spices to
the tomb ? It has no chant but the winds, no book
but the solemn silence, no bell but some wild bird's
note, no wreath but the wreath of snow ; yet there is
no more sacred spot in all the diocese of God. — G.
Matheson, Messages of Hope, p. 50.
1 No man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.' — Deuter-
onomy xxxiv. 6.
Prof. Harper thinks that the fact that the grave of
Moses is unknown is indicative of truth : 'Though it
would be absurd to say that wherever we have the
graves of great men pointed out, there we have a
mythical story, it is nevertheless true that in the case
of every name or character which has come largely
under the influence of the myth-making spirit, the
grave has been made much of. The Arabian imagi-
nation here seems to be typical of the Semitic imagi-
nation ; and in all Moslem lands the graves of tbe
prophets and saints of the Old Testament are pointed
out, even, or perhaps we should say especially, if they
be eighty feet long. Though a well-authenticated
tomb of Moses, therefore, would have been a proof
of his real existence and life among men, the absence
of any is a stronger proof of the sobriety and truth
of the narrative.'
References. — XXXIV. 6. — H. J. Buxton, God's Heroes,
p. 52. Bishop Goodwin, Cambridge Lent Sermons, p. 253.
XXXIV. 10.— J. H. Jellett, The Elder Sim, p. 77. XXXIV.
10-12. — W. M. Taylor. Moses the Lawgiver, p. 451.
165
JOSHUA
JOSHUA ENCOURAGED
Joshua i. i-ii.
' Be strong and of a good courage ' (v. 6). When
Luther was summoned before the Diet of Worms, his
friends did all that they could to dissuade him from
going. They were afraid that his safe-conduct would
not be respected. But nothing would keep the brave
Reformer back, and what was thought of his courage
is shown in the words which a great captain is said to
have addressed to him : ' Little monk ! little monk !
you are venturing to-day on a more hazardous march
than I or any other captain ever did. But if your
cause is right, and you are sure of it, go on in God's
name, and be of good comfort. He will not forsake
thee.' And it was in the same spirit that in the
presence of his enemies Luther himself uttered the
famous words : ' I cannot do otherwise. Here I stand ;
God help me ! Amen.'
'In a large party at the Grand Master's Palace in
Malta, I had observed,' says the poet Coleridge, 'a
naval officer of distinguished merit listening to Sir A.
Ball, whenever he joined in the conversation, with a
mixed expression of awe and affection that gave a more
than common interest to so manly a countenance.
This officer afterwards told me that he considered him-
self indebted to Sir Alexander for that which was
dearer to him than his life. " When he was Lieuten-
ant Ball," said he, "he was the officer I accompanied
in my first boat expedition, being then a midshipman,
and only in my fourteenth year. As we were rowing
up to the vessel which we were to attack, amid a dis-
charge of musketry, I was overpowered by fear, and
seemed on the point of fainting away. Lieutenant
Ball, who saw the condition I was in, placed himself
close beside me, and still keeping his countenance di-
rected towards the enemy, pressed my hand in the most
friendly manner, and said in a low voice, ' Courage,
my dear boy ; you will recover in a minute or so. I
was just the same when I first went out in this way.'
Sir," added the officer to me, "it was just as if an
angel had put a new soul into me." '
THE CHARACTER OF JOSHUA
Dr. W. G. Blaikie writes : ' We must earnestly desire
... to draw aside the veil that covers the eight-and-
. thirty years and see how he [Joshua] was prepared for
his great work. ... A religious warrior is a peculiar
character ; a Gustavus Adolphus, an Oliver Cromwell,
a Henry Havelock, a General Gordon ; Joshua was of
the same mould, and we should have liked to know him
more intimately ; but this is denied to us. He stands
out to us simply as one of the military heroes of the
faith. In depth, in steadiness, in endurance his faith
was not excelled by that of Abraham or of Moses him-
self. The one conviction that dominated all in him
was that he was called by God to his work. If that
work was often repulsive, let us not on that account
withhold our admiration from the man who never con-
ferred with flesh and blood, and who was never appalled
either by danger or difficulty, for he " saw Him who
is invisible ".'
References. — I. 1-11. — A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy
Scripture — Deuteronomy, Joshua, etc., p. 87. 1. 2. — J. F.
Cowan, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lxxii. 1907, p. 355. I. 2,
3. — Spurgeou, Sermons, vol. xxxv. No. 2086.
THE MESSAGE OF THE BOOK OF JOSHUA
' Every place that the sole of your foot shall tread upon, that
have I given unto you.' — Joshua i. 3.
In the book of Joshua we have three sections ; the
first containing the story of the conquest of the land ;
the second containing the story of the distribution
of the land; while the third gives us an account
of the great leader's farewell to his beloved
people.
I. The story of the conquest is contained in the
first twelve chapters.
1. In the story of the conquest there are, I think,
three keynotes ; the first of these is Prepare. The
account of the preparation is given in the opening
chapters, and given in such a way as to teach us the
solemn lesson that God's soldiers must be right with
God before they can fight God's battles.
2. The second is Pass over. This is the note
specially sounded at Jordan, when the people drew
their swords and flung away their scabbards, and by
crossing the river committed themselves in face of
gigantic odds to victory or death. It teaches us
that ere God's soldiers are fit to fight there must be
in their lives a definite decisive consecration of them-
selves to the Lord.
3. And the third is Possess; and this note we
have sounded throughout that brilliant series of
campaigns which began with the fall of Jericho, and,
proceeding from the South to the North, ceased not
until the whole of the land was subdued.
To the story of the conquest of the land follows : —
II. The story of the distribution of the land.
This is the second section of the book, and extends
from chapter xin. to chapter xxi. It has been aptly
compared to the Domesday Book of the Norman
conquerors of England.
At the twenty-third chapter begins : —
III. The story of the leader's farewell. This
section contains two addresses, and is one of the most
touching and impressive parts of the whole book.
While the first address was delivered specially to the
heads of the people — the leaders, the judges, and
166
Ver. 6.
JOSHUA I., Ill
Ver. 4.
the officers — the second address was delivered speci-
ally to the people themselves.
From this book we learn : —
(a) God gives, but we must take possession.
As it was with Israel so it is with us. As God
gave Canaan to Israel, so He gave Jesus Christ to us.
And as the gift of Canaan meant the gift of all that
Canaan contained, so the gift of Jesus Christ means
the gift of all that He is, and of all that He has.
But our enjoyment of all this is conditioned by the
claim of our faith. Christ is to us actually what we
trust Him to be.
(b) In taking possession of what God has given
us our strength is of God. This is the lesson taught
by what is in some respects the most singular section
of the whole book, the section containing the story of
the captain of the Lord's host. Joshua knew that
victory lay before him, but he thought that it lay
with him to compass this victory. But on the plains
of Jericho he learned that as it was God's grace which
had given them Canaan, so it was God's power which
was to enable them to take possession. For us, in our
strength, to live up to our privileges is as impossible
as to win the privileges up to which we long to live.
(c) There is always power enough at our dis-
posal for taking possession of what God has given
to us. When we have honestly set out to subdue
the land we shall see the vision of the Captain of the
Lord's host. Every place on which the sole of our
feet treads becomes ours. — G. H. C. Macgregor,
Messages of the Old Testament, p. 73.
References.— I. 5. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxi. No. 1214.
H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, God's Heroes, p. 71 ; see also Sunday
Sermons for Daily Life, p. 404. I. 5, 6. — Edward King, Out-
lines of Sermons on the Old Testament, p. 55. J. Matthews,
Christian World Pulpit,ivol. xxxix. p. 300. I. 6. — G. Jackson,
Christian World Pulpit, vol. lxviii. 1905, p. 75. I. 6, 7, 9, 18.
— T. Parr, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lviii. 1900, p. 74.
I. 7. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xiv. No. 796. H. Montagu
Butler, Harrow School Sermons, p. 73. I. 7, 8. — A. Maclaren,
Expositions of Holy Scripture — Deuteronomy, Joshua, etc., p. 91.
I. 8.— J. Stalker, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lvi. 1899, p. 43.
I. 9.— A. H. Shaw, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lvi. 1899,
p. 56. A. Jessopp, Norioich School Sermons, p. 97. I. 10, 11.
— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxiv. No. 2039. II. J. McNeill,
Regent Square Pulpit, vol. iii. p. 361. II. 21. — H. J. Wilmot-
Buxton, Common Life Religion, p. 205.
' Be strong and of a good courage.' — Joshua i. 6 ; Psalms xxvii.
14 ; Psalms xxxi. 24 ; 2 Chronicles xxxii. 7.
Courage, my soul ! now learn to wield
The weight of thine immortal shield ;
Close on thy head thy helmet bright ;
Balance thy sword against the fight ;
See where an army, strong as fair,
With silken banners spreads the air !
Now, if thou be'st that thing Divine,
In this day's combat let it shine,
And show that Nature wants an art
To conquer one resolved heart. — Marvell.
' Jordan divided.' — Joshua hi.
' In the mosaics of the earliest churches of Rome and
Ravenna,' says Dean Stanley, 'before Christian and
pagan art were yet divided, the Jordan appears as a
river-god pouring his streams out of his urn. The
first Christian Emperor had always hoped to receive
his long-deferred baptism in the Jordan up to the
moment when the hand of death struck him at
Nicomedia. . . . Protestants, as well as Greeks and
Latins, have delighted to carry off its waters for the
same sacred purpose to the remotest regions of the
West.'
THE FUTURE ALL UNKNOWN
{For the New Year)
1 Ye have not passed this way heretofore.' — Joshua hi. 4.
What a thought for the New Year ! We have here
a great statement, and this statement is given as a
reason for a certain kind of action. The circum-
stances were these : The Israelites had spent forty
long, wearisome years away from the Promised Land
to which God had said He would bring them, and
now they found themselves on the very threshold of
the land of promise. They have to go into that land
of promise by a strange, mysterious, fearful way.
They have to pass through the very bed of the River
Jordan, and God, Who has brought them thus far,
is to pile up the waters on either side of them while
they go through on dry ground. If you will picture
them about to cross the river you will realize how
fully this statement is true — that they had never
passed that way before. It was totally new, abso-
lutely strange. Before they reached the Promised
Land they had many difficulties to face. They had
victories to win and foes to conquer, and had they
not the initial difficulty of crossing that great divid-
ing river which separated them from that great,
mysterious land of promise beyond ?
I. There is a Strange Parallel between the Posi-
tion of the Israelites and that of Ourselves To-day.
— Have we not, by God's grace, been brought to the
threshold of another year ? A new year, an unknown
year, an untrodden path. And in this new year that
lies before you and me we must serve God's great
purpose. There is fresh land to occupy ; there are
victories, through God's strength, to win ; there are
foes ; there are sins which, by God's grace, we are
meant to conquer. ' Ye have not passed this way
heretofore,' and in entering upon this new year we are
treading on new ground, consecrated ground, which
our foot has never yet defiled.
II. Guidance Vouchsafed. — What was the plan
arranged for their guidance? We read it in the
third verse. ' When ye see the ark of the covenant
of the Lord your God and the priests the Levites
bearing it, then ye shall remove from your place and
go after it.' What a comforting thing for these
Israelites that the ark of God was to lead them !
All through their strange difficulties they had before
them that old ark that they had followed all the time
and which they loved, which kept them in touch, as it
were, with God. What a difference it must have made !
III. Let us See that the Ark of God's Presence
Goes Before Us — takes us into our difficulties and
167
Ver. 12.
JOSHUA V
Ver. 13.
out of our difficulties, so that through the presence
of God we may conquer our sins and gain from Him
our strength in this life. If this be so, we need not
fear ; we can face the year with confidence. Let us
see that Jesus still leads on till our rest be won. We
need to know the way in which we must go. There
will be many times of difficulty in this new year. We
shall sometimes want to know what words to use and
what position to take up in the various incidents of
our daily lives ; what course of action we ought to
follow. There are bound to be difficulties in the way,
and the only way to fight them with anything like
hope, with anything like assurance, is that God be
asked to help us, that God be asked to make His
way clear before our face. ' O God, set watch on my
mouth, keep the door of my lips.' Let us trust in
Christ to lead us in the right way.
IV. The Ark of God never Led them Wrong. —
And so it will be if Jesus leads us on, and we are
following Him and asking Him to teach us what to
say and what to do, He will never lead us wrong.
References. — III. 4. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xviii. No.
1057. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture — Deuter-
onomy, Joshua, etc., p. 99. C. S. Robinson, Sermons on Ne-
glected Texts, p. 224. W. M. Taylor, Outlines of Sermons on
the Old Testament, p. 56. W. R. Inge, All Saints' Sermons,
1905-7, p. 49. J. M. Neale, Sermons Preached in Sack-
ville College Chapel, vol. iv. p. 34. F. B. Cowl, Straight Tracks,
p. 41. J. Laidlaw, Studies in the Parables, p. 217. J.Parker,
Ark of God, p. 26. III. 5.— E. R. Conder, Outlines of Ser-
mons on the Old Testament, p. 57. III. 5-17. — A. Maclaren,
Expositions of Holy Scripture — Deuteronomy, Joshua, etc., p.
107. III. 11. — A. G. Mortimer, The Church's Lessons for the
Christian Year, part iii. p. 49. III. 15, 17. — R. J. Campbell,
Sermons Addressed to Individuals, p. 89. IV. 6. — P. T.
Forsyth, Christian World Pulpit, vol. lix. \ 1901, p. 415. IV.
7.—W. H. Hutchings, Sermon-Sketches, p. 162. IV. 9.— J. M.
Neale, Sermons for Some Feast Days in the Cliristian Year,
p. 183. IV. 10-24. — A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scrip-
ture — Deuteronomy, Joshua, etc., p. 115.
THE CEASING OF THE MANNA
' The manna ceased on the morrow after they had eaten of the
old corn of the land.' — Joshua v. 12.
There was a deep doctrine in the giving of the
manna. There was a doctrine not less deep in its
withdrawal.
I. The ceasing of the manna should teach us that
there is inevitable loss in all our gains. It was a
great thing for Israel to gain the plains of Jericho,
but when they had done so, they lost the bread of
angels.
We talk sometimes about the gains of our losses,
and it is true that we often gain by what we lose.
But remember that if we gain by what we lose, it is
also true that we lose by what we gain. And he
alone is wise and brave and cheerful who recognizes
that inevitable law, and presses forward, undaunted,
to the best with the courage to forget what is behind.
We gain the promised land and lose the manna. We
gain experience and lose the morning dew.
II. The ceasing of the manna teaches us to be very
cautious in asserting that anything is indispensable.
If there was one thing graven upon the heart of Israel
it was that without the manna they could not live at
all. They had to learn their lesson from that failure
that God fulfils Himself in many ways. The manna
ceased, but the harvesting began.
III. The ceasing of the manna gave to Israel new
views of the presence and providence of God. It
taught them to see God in common things, and to
realize His presence in the fields. The manna ceased
— they were cast back on nature to find in nature
the same care of God. And so they learned, what is
so hard to learn, that providence had a wider reach
than once they dreamed, and that the common field
may be as full of heaven as the manna which is the
bread of angels.
It is not very hard for any man to feel that God is
near in the great hours. When there is nothing
startling or arresting, what do you make of the pro-
vidence of God ? It is a great thing to see God in
the miracle. It is a greater to see Him in the usual.
IV. There is one other lesson which I love to link
with the ceasing of the manna. It is how God, as
we advance in life, brings us back to the food of long
ago. That was the path by which God led His
people. He brought them back to the old, and it
was new. That is the path by which God leads us
all if we are in earnest to know and do His will. —
G. H. Moreison, The Wings of the Morning, p. 44.
References. — V. 12. — J. M. Neale, Sermons on the Blessed
Sacrament, p. 143. W. Boyd Carpenter, Christian World
Pulpit, vol. Iii. 1897, p. 113.
THE ARMOUR OF GOD
' And it came to pass, when Joshua was by Jericho, that he
lifted up his eyes and looked, and, behold, there stood a
man over against him with his sword drawn in his hand.'
— Joshua v. 13.
I. This ancient book of Joshua, while its simple
puipose is to set forth the providence of God in one
great episode of a nation's history, is yet by common
consent of the succeeding generations of men looked
on, not merely as an historical record of the conquest
of Canaan, but as a continual allegory of Christian
life. Such was the conception of life, based on in-
dividual and general experience, in the minds of
those who, when the sign of Christ's cross was marked
on our brow in baptism, pledged us thereby to a
loyal soldiership in an unceasing warfare with evil.
Such is the conception thrust upon us by the facts of
life, which, as thought deepens and knowledge widens,
confronts every son of God. Over against us there
stands a man with his sword in his hand, unsheathed,
drawn for the using, for offence, for action, for achieve-
ment. Over against us there lies a Jordan to be
crossed, a Jericho to be assaulted, a Promised Land
to be won, only in many an arduous campaign — our
weapon the sword of the Spirit, our strength the
strength of Him Who has girt that sword upon us,
Whose abiding Presence in our life is our sole promise
and hope of successful soldiership.
Gathering the whole teaching together, who can
deny the undoubted call to leave the wilderness of
168
JOSHUA VIII., X., XIII
Ver. 1.
wandering, unpurposeful life, of cold-hearted, listless
stagnation, and cross the river of resolve, to the
place of effort and the country of combat ?
II. A man with a drawn sword — a weapon of
offence for and with others. True, we need, and have
given us, armour of defence as well ; a shield of faith
to guard us from our own fears and doubts and cares
and sorrows, from the evil we see in nature and
in man ; a helmet of salvation — the hope which
strengthens the weak-hearted, which guards the place
where thought abides, and where plans of battle and
of work are formed ; a breastplate to protect the
heart, where lie the issues of life, the treasures of pure
passion, the loves, the sorrows — round these we are to
bind the armour of righteous habit ; and for the loins,
where lies the strength of man, woven in and out in
knitted muscle and sinew, there is the safeguard of
truth — the inevitable necessity of sincerity.
III. These for defence. But our motto is not de-
fence, but defiance ; and for this there is the sword of
the Spirit — the Word, the thought of God, all the
Divine ideas expressed through the words and lives of
men. Let it be drawn, and bright and clean, that so
we may wage a continuing and a conquering warfare
with evil around and within. Not defence alone,
but defiance.
References. — V. 13-14.— W. H. Simcox, The Cessation of
Prophecy, p. 89. V. 13-15.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xiv,
No. 795. A. F. Wlnnington Ingram, Under the Dome, p
254. C. Stanford, Symbols of Christ, p. 89. S. A. Tipple
Sunday Mornings at Norwood, p. 215. V. 14. — A. Maclaren
Expositions of Holy Scripture — Deuteronomy, Joshua, etc., p
123. VI.— J. McNeill, Regent Square Pulpit, vol. ii. p. 161
VI. 2, 3.— Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xi. No. 629. VI. 10, 11
— A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture — Deuteronomy.
Joshua, etc., p. 132. VI. 17. — W. H. Hutchings, Sermon-
Sketches (2nd Series), p. 183. VI. 10.— C. Leach, Christian
World Pulpit, vol. xl. 1891, p. 262. VI. 25.— A. Maclaren
Expositions of Holy Scripture — Deuteronomy, Joshua, etc., p
140. VII. 1-12.— Ibid., p. 145. VII. 3.— Spurgeon, Sermons,
vol. xxiii. No. 1358. VII. 19, 20.— J. T. Bramston, Sermons
to Boys, p. 40. VII. 20. — J. Vaughau, Sermons Preached in
Christ Church, Brighton (7th Series), p. 94. Spurgeon, Ser-
mons, vol. iii. No. 113.
The valley of Shechem. — Joshua viii.
By general consent the valley of Shechem holds the
distinction of being one of the most beautiful in the
country. ' Its western side,' says Stanley, ' is bounded
by the abutments of two mountain ranges, running
from west to east. These ranges are Gerizim and
Ebal ; and up the opening between them, not seen
from the plain, lies the modern town of Nablous
[Neapolis = Shechem]. ... A valley green with grass,
grey with olives, gardens sloping down on each side,
fresh springs running down in all directions ; at the
end a white town embosomed in all this verdure,
lodged between the two high mountains which extend
on each side of the valley — that on the south Gerizim,
that on the north Ebal ; this is the aspect of Nablous,
the most beautiful, perhaps it might be said the only
very beautiful, spot in Central Palestine.'
References. — -VIII. 1. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxiii. No.
1358. VIII. 30-34.— K. Moody-Stuart, Light from the Holy
Hills, p. 75.
1 Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon,' etc.— Joshua x.
Db. W. G. Bi.aikie remarks that some commentators
look on these words as akin to the prayer of Aga-
memnon (Iliad II, 412 sq.) that the sun must not
go down till he had sacked Troy. He goes on : ' But
whatever allowance we may make for poetical licence
of speech, it is hardly possible not to perceive that the
words as they stand imply a miracle of extraordinary
sublimity ; nor do t we see any sufficient ground for
resisting the common belief that in whatsoever way
it was effected, there was a supernatural extension of
the period of light to allow Joshua to finish his work.
References. — X. 6. — R. E. Hutton, The Crown of Christ,
vol. i. p. 39. X. 12. — A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy
Scripture — Deuteronomy,-, Joshua, etc., p. 153. W. Walsham
How, Plain Preaching for a Year, vol. i. p. 339. X. 12, 13. —
E. C. S. Gibson, Messages from the Old Testament, p. 55. X.
12-14.— W. Ewen, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xli. 1892, p.
294. X. 22-26.— R. E. Hutton, The Crown of Christ, vol. i. p.
239. XI. 18.— C. Jerdan, Pastures of Tender Grass, p. 17.
XI. 23. — W. Alexander, The Conquest of the Earth, Sermons,
1872-73.
VICTORIES IN OLD AQE
'And the Lord said unto him, Thou art old . . . and there
remaineth yet very much land to be possessed.' — Joshua
xiii. I.
God often speaks very plainly. Few care to be told
to their face that they are old. But the Almighty re-
cognizes these awkward facts and bids men recognize
them. He is sometimes almost blunt, as He was in
addressing Joshua. His is the directness of loving
faithfulness. Matthew Henry says : ' It is good for
those who are old ... to be put in remembrance of
their being so'. And it was for Joshua's highest
good that God now puts him in memory of this
unwelcome fact.
The Bible renders us the great service of introduc-
ing us to numerous aged or ageing people. They
are not the least interesting figures of its fascinating
and often pathetic gallery. Abraham, Sarah, David,
Zacharias, and Elizabeth, have honoured place among
the venerable saints of Scripture. It is to be observed
that old age is associated in the Bible, I think invari-
ably, with the saints. The tragedy of godless old age
is not alluded to. Only the old age which is a crown
of glory, because found in the way of righteousness,
is honoured in the sacred treasury of honour.
I. Achievement — Jehovah cheers His aged servant
by a great and inspiring implication. It lurks delight-
fully in that 'yet'. Thank God for that delectable
adverb. ' Yet ' carries the idea of ' in addition.'
and addition implies something already in existence.
' There remaineth yet very much land to be possessed.'
Much land had already been possessed. Great vic-
tories had been won. The territory of the enemy
had been heroically acquired. Joshua had not lived
in vain. His greyed head had won its laurels and won
them worthily and well. There is a gospel of sweet
reminiscence and kindly hope in that gracious ' yet '.
169
Ver. 1.
JOSHUA XII L, XIV., XXIV
Ver. 1.5.
The Lord, the great Encourager, delights to remind
his old warriors of the battles they have by His grace
fought and won. He gives them light at evening
time in many ways, and not least by recalling to them
the ' land ' they have already ' possessed '. Divinely
inspired memories are among the treasures of old age.
1. When we are old we, in many cases, have the
recollection of temporal achievement.
2. It is a great thing to come to age and know
that we have achieved doctrinally. Blessed are they
who have possessed themselves of 'much' of this
Emmanuel's Land !
S. Experimentally some of God's children achieve
grandly ere they are old. They become experts in
believing prayer. They abound in thanksgiving.
They delight themselves in the Law of the Lord.
They hate every evil way. They have fellowship
with all such as love Jesus Christ in sincerity. Happy
souls that in old age can give glorv to God because
they have possessed themselves of ' much land ' in the
Canaan of Christian experience !
4. It appertains to some to recognize in their old
age that they have achieved altruistically.
II. Omission. — When God said to Joshua, 'Thou
art old . . . and there remaineth yet very much land
to be possessed,' there was kindly reproof in the faith-
ful word. If there had been achievement, there had
been omission. ' There remaineth yet ' — much had
been left undone. He and his braves had possessed
themselves grandly, but imperfectly. Jerusalem,
Gezer, Bethshean, were but instances of the 'very
much' that was still unaccomplished. Those forts
were still untaken.
What a parable of life ! Age reveals, and increas-
ingly reveals, our omissions. Oh, the Jerusalems,
Gezers, Bethsheans, of our soldiership ! Why did
we not take those proud fortresses when we had
boundless vigour ? ' There remaineth yet very much
land to be possessed.'
III. Opportunity. — Even though Joshua was old,
he had spacious opportunity before him. ' Very much
land remained' 'to be possessed'. He had not the
opportunity of earlier days, but it was an opportunity
relatively very great. The 'very much' was the
measure of his possibilities.
Age always has its opportunity, greater or lesser.
What land may not veteran victors possess ! Do not
regard old age as defeat ; make it a triumph. God
can strengthen Joshua to possess 'very much land,'
albeit he be ' old '. Bishop Creighton said, ' We can
scarcely recognize as one of the problems of life how
to grow old happily '. But it is one of life's hardest
and yet most hopeful problems.
IV. Endeavour. — ' The Lord said unto him, Thou
art old . . . and there remaineth yet very much land
to be possessed.' Then Joshua must make immediate
endeavour. ' You are not dangerously ill,' said a
physician to a patient; 'but you are dangerously
old.' Ah, that is the spiritual peril of some. At
once such must bestir themselves. There is no time
to be lost if the ' very much land ' is not to be lost.
Arise, my friend, and call earnestly upon thy God
and go forth to the battle and to the victory ! ' 'Tis
time to live if I grow old ' was a favoui-ite exclamation
of John Wesley in his closing years. And it is well
for all old people to soliloquize thus if they would be
victors whilst the shadows lengthen.
Very trustful such may well be as they war their
good warfare. Philip Henry declared, 'Christ is a
Master that does not cast off His old servants '. No !
He never does. And He will not cast you off in the
time of old age ! The comforter shall still be with
you. The Risen Lord shall empower you. You
shall possess the land. — Dinsdale T. Young, The
Gospel of the Left Hand, p. 43.
References. — XIII. 1. — C. Vince, The Unchanging Saviour,
p. 120. John McNeill, Regent Square Pulpit, vol. iii. p. 393.
XIII. 1-6. — A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture —
Deuteronomy, Joshua, etc., p. 158. XIV. 6. — Ibid. p. 160.
D. T. Young, Neglected People of the Bible, p. 59.
Joshua and Caleb. — Joshua xiv. 6-15.
' It is beautiful,' says Dr. Blaikie, ' to see that there
was no rivalry between them. Not only did Caleb
interpose no remonstrance when Joshua was called to
succeed Moses, but he seems all through the wars to
have yielded to him the most loyal and hearty sub-
mission. God had set His seal on Joshua, and Caleb
was too magnanimous to allow any poor ambition of
his, if he had any, to come in the way of the Divine
will and the public good.' Dr. Blaikie remarks also
that there is something singularly touching in Caleb's
asking as a favour what was really a most hazardous
but important service to the nation. The driving out
of the Anakim was a formidable duty, and the task
might have seemed more suitable for one who had the
strength and enthusiasm of youth on his side. But
Caleb, though eighty-five, was yet young.
References. — XIV. 8. — H. G. Edge, Christian World
Pulpit, vol. lxxiv. 1908, p. 183. XIV. 8 and 12.— J. T. Forbes,
Christian World Pulpit, vol. lxxiii. 1908, p. 186. XIV. 12.—
K. Moody-Stuart, Light from the Holy Hills, p. 68. XVII.
14. — Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxii. No. 1882. XVII. 18. —
Ibid. vol. xxxiv. No. 2049. C. Herbert, Christian World
Pulpit, vol. lxiv. 1903, p. 378. XX. 1-5.— Dr. Barnardo,
Penny Pulpit, vol. xiv. No. 816, p. 209. XX. 1-9.— A.
Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture — Deuteronomy, Joshua,
etc., p. 168. XXI. 43-45 ; XXII. 1-9.— Ibid. p. 175. XXII.
10. — T. Bowman Stephenson, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xl.
1891, p. 305. XXIII. 1. — J. H. Newman, Sermons Bearing on
Subjects of the Day, p. 170. XXIII. 8.— F. E. Paget, Sermons
for Special Occasions, p. 115. XXIV. 4. — Spurgeon, Sermons,
vol. xxix. No. 1718. XXIV. 10.— B. J. Snell, Christian
World Pulpit, vol. li. 1899, p. 153.
THE ETERNAL CHOICE
' Choose you this day whom ye will serve.' — Joshua xxiv. 15.
Joshua here calls Israel to decide between Jehovah's
service and the service of other gods, such as their
fathers served in Mesopotamia, or such as the neigh-
bouring Amorites served. They were no longer to
give a half-hearted service, but to choose whom they
would serve wholly. The call did not imply neutral-
170
Ver. 15.
JOSHUA XXIV
Ver. 27.
ity, or that they were not bound to serve Jehovah ;
but it was meant to arouse the indifferent, and those
who thought they could combine Jehovah's service
with that of other gods. A similar call comes to men
in the Gospel.
I. God's Call to Us. — God demands real and actual
service ; not the intention, profession, or appearance,
but the thing itself. He is entitled to service as our
Creator, Benefactor, Redeemer. In a sense we are
all servants. There is no escape from service. We
serve that to which our whole heart is given. God's
call is to serve Him.
II. The Choice. — It is for ourselves to choose
whether our service shall be the holy and blessed one
of Jehovah or that of other gods. That we may
choose is implied in the call to choose ; while it is
true that man cannot choose God's service without
being made willing by God's grace. God expects us
to choose ; offers help to our choosing ; counts us
responsible for our choice. In point of fact we must
choose, and do actually choose, one service or another.
No neutrality is possible, and God will not have a
constrained service.
III. The Urgency of the Call. — The call is impera-
tive for ' to-day '. The decision is to be immediate ;
not certainly rash and reckless, without due calcula-
tion of the cost, yet certainly prompt on a sufficient
view of what the service involves. God's urgency is
gracious ; He knows the danger of delay and the evil
of indecision, and how men let slip, through careless-
ness and procrastination, their most precious oppor-
tunities.
(a) We may choose now. There is no need to
postpone the decision from ignorance of the objects
of choice, from their number, from their distance, or
from the difficulty of the act of choosing. The infor-
mation for guiding the choice is ample and varied,
and yet capable of being condensed into simple and
exhaustive terms. The objects of choice are practic-
ally two, Jehovah or other gods ; two services that
cannot be mistaken for each other, and that cannot
be combined. There is no embarrassing multiplicity
or distracting similarity.
(6) We shall find the choice more difficult the
longer it is delayed. Delay in doing a thing that
is felt to be disagreeable always increases the repug-
nance, enfeebles the resolution, paralyses the will
Some things need to be done at once if they are to
be done at all. Sinful habits, making the choice of
God's service seem painful, grow in power. Delayed
repentance is difficult repentance.
(c) The time for choosing is limited. We cannot
reckon on a longer or another time than this day.
Divine patience even has its limits. The day of grace
is not running on for ever, and indecision may pro-
voke its abrupt termination.
Therefore choose this day. Indecision is contempt-
ible and dangerous. You are as unsafe in indecision
as if you had decided boldly not to serve the Lord.
References. — XXIV. 15. — Spurgeon, Sernumt, voL xri.
No. 1229. A. H. Bradford, Sermon*, vol. xliv. 1903, p.
104. A. Murray, The Children for Christ, p. 124. Henry
Alford, Quebec Chapel Sermon*, vol. iii. pp. 423, 439, 456.
XXIV. 19.— J. Ker, Sermon*, p. 56. XXIV. 19-28.— A.
Maclaren, Exposition* of Holy Scripture — Deuteronomy, Joshua,
etc., p. 183. XXIV. 25.— W. M. Punshon, The Covenant of
Joshua, p. 913 ; see also Outline* of Sermon* on the Old Testa-
ment, p. 59.
LISTENING STONES
'This stone . . . hath heard.'— Joshua xxiv. 27.
Axd Joshua wrote these words in the book of the
law of God, and took a great stone — if not great in
size, yet in its purpose and symbolism — 'and set it
up there under an oak' — well matched — 'that was
by the sanctuary of the Lord ' ; the sanctuary is an
oak, and the oak is a sanctuary. ' And Joshua said
unto all the people, Behold, this stone shall be a
witness unto us' — or a witness against us, it may be
both — ' for it hath heard all the words of the Lord
which He spake unto us.' Curious, exciting, incred-
ible, certain. ' It shall be therefore a witness unto
you, lest ye deny your God,' lest you shake off the
memory of your own prayers, lest you break your
own covenants, ye men of bad faith, for your history
is against you. We want to apply this, not only on
the Divine side, but on the human side. Sometimes
poetry is the only reality. How often have we quoted
the word, that fiction is the greater fact. The king-
dom of heaven is represented in parables, and the
parables mean that we do not half-understand yet
what the kingdom of God is.
L Christ had a good deal to say about stones.
Said He once to people who were boasting of them-
selves and boasting of their ancestry, ' Godf is able of
these stones to raise up children unto Abraham'.
Jesus once said to the devU, to the black face of the
universe when that face tempted the Christ to make
bread out of stones, 'Man shall not live by bread
alone ' — there is no bread of your kind in eternity.
God made man come up from eternity, and you could
live, if God so willed it, on a word, a syllable, a tone
On another occasion the people said, ' Hearest Thou
not this crying and tumult ? can this be permitted ? '
He said, If these little children and young folks were
to hold their peace, the very stones would cry out,
they are listening, and they will not permit too much
neglect of Christ The prayerless house may one
day rush down, because the stones will stand no
longer in protection of atheism so blank and horrible.
II. Our very footprints may preach. Some poor
forlorn and shipwrecked brother coming and seeing
them on the wet sand, they may preach to him a
gospel of hope and renewed courage and spiritual
blessing. We cannot tell what we are doing, no man
can follow the range of his own influence. When
did any farmer ever foresee a harvest that would be
worth the sickle ? ' There will be no corn this year :
such and such was the condition of affairs in March,
such and such were the conditions climatic in April,
that there will be no harvest this year : there is no
prospect of our having any need to wield the scythe
or the sickle; there is a poor look-out this year.' The
171
Ver. 27.
JOSHUA XXIV
Ver. 27.
stones heard it, and the soil registered it, and lo,
August was aflame with the gifts of God. The stars
were listening to what we said, good or bad. They
are a long way off, they are quite near at hand.
Why, the sun is within whisper-reach, if we knew
things really as they are : and all the stars coming
out, trooping forth, to bear witness for us or against
us to God. And when we begin to say, ' If we had
heard the Gospel we would have believed it,' the
stones will say, You did hear it, you know you heard
it. The stones are full of the words that God spake
in your hearing. The stone caught it, the sermon
you forgot it treasures in its stony heart.
III. There were other listeners. Your little child
heard when you thought it was not listening. When
is a child not listening ? The little child there, four
to five years of age, heard that oath you spoke under
your breath, and that oath may follow the dear little
pilgrim all the days of its life ; it may not be able
to explain why, but the oath that fell from your livid
lips struck that little creature, and ever after it will
hear something, and memory may help the little
one to remember what was spoken that day when
you thought nobody heard you curse your wife, or
husband, or fortune, or life.
IV. God hears, God listens, Christ hears, Christ
hears everything, nothing can escape the attention
of the Divine Hearer ; the whole Trinity is a listen-
ing Trinity ! And the stones listen, and the things
we call inferior animals have wonderful uses. Let us
take care ! The stone heard the words of the Lord,
and the stone also heard our replies. Be no longer
fools and wasters of time, but heed the living God,
and let no opportunity pass. — Joseph Parker, City
Temple Pulpit, vol. v. p. 262.
References. — XXIV. 27. — Henry Alford, Quebec Chapel
Sermons, vol. v. p. 63. Phillips Brooks, The Mystery of Iniquity,
p. 260. XXIV. 29.— H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, God's Heroes,
p. 61.
172
JUDGES
JUDGES— DELIVERANCES
The book of Judges historically covers the period from
the conquest of the land and the death of Joshua to
the judgeship of Samuel and the introduction of the
monarchy. The chronological history of the book
ends with chapter xvi., which connects naturally with
the first book of Samuel. That history properly be-
gins in chapter in. The book has three divisions :
Conditions after Joshua (l-iii. 6) ; the Period of the
Judges (in. 7-xvi.) ; Appendix (xvii.-xxi.).
I. Conditions after Joshua. — The first act of the
people after the death of Joshua was that of seeking
to know the will of God as to who should commence
the final work of conquest. Judah, the kingly tribe,
was appointed. The story is told of the coming of
the messenger from Gilgal. A brief retrospect follows
of the condition of affairs under Joshua, and then a
synopsis of the history which is to be set out in greater
detail.
II. The Period of the Judges. — This division of
the book contains the story of seven consecutive
failures, punishments and deliverances and details the
history of Israel under the seven judges. Here ends
the history of the book. It is taken up again in the
first book of Samuel. The remaining chapters and
the book of Ruth have their chronological place in
the period already dealt with.
III. Appendix. — The events here chronicled may
have taken place closely following the death of Joshua.
They give us a picture of the internal condition of
the people, and it is most probable that they were
added with that as the intention of the historian. —
G. Campbell Morgan, The Analysed Bible, p. 115.
' Who shall go up for us against the Canaanites first ? ' —
Judges i. i.
Clarkson, in so far as that question regarded time,
was the inaugurator of the great conflict ' against the
slave-trade, as De Quincey observes. ' That was his
just claim. He broke the ground, and formed the
earliest camp, in that field ; and to men that should
succeed, he left no possibility of ranking higher than
his followers or imitators.'
The exploit in which no one will consent to go
first remains unachieved. You wait until there
are persons enough agreeing with you to form an
effective party. And how many members constitute
the innovating band an effective force ? ... No man
can ever know whether his neighbours are ready for
change or not. He has all the following certainties
at least : That he himself is ready for the change ;
that he believes it would be a good and beneficent
one ; that unless some one begins the work of pre-
paration, assuredly there will be no consummation ;
and that if he declines to take part in the matter,
there can be no reason why every one else in turn
should not decline in like manner, and so the work
remain for ever unperformed. — John Morley.
We are afraid of responsibility, afraid of what people
will say of us, afraid of being alone in doing right ;
in short, the courage which is allied to no passion
— Christian courage, as it may be called — is in all
ages and among all people one of the rarest posses-
sions. — Sir Arthur Helps.
The initiation of all wise or noble things comes,
and must always come, from individuals — generally at
first from some one individual. The honour and glory
of the average man is that he is capable of following
that initiation ; that he can respond internally to
wise and noble things. — J. S. Mill, Liberty.
SIMPLICITY IN PRAYER
' The children of Israel asked the Lord.' — Judges i. i.
I. ' The children of Israel asked the Lord,' whispered
to Him, hailed Him, arrested His condescending atten-
tion by some sign of necessity. They whispered to
the Lord, they told Him plainly the condition in
which they were placed, and brought the whole need
under His attention ; they wanted leadership and
captaincy and guidance, and they said, Who shall
do this ? If any man lack wisdom, let him ask. That
is the old word, ' ask,' short but deep, easy to pro-
nounce, impossible to measure. We have changed
all that ; we now are in danger of approaching the
Lord as if He were an infinite Shah, and must
needs be approached with long words and logical
sequence.
II. 'The children of Israel asked the Lord.' That
was the plain way, that was the simple way, that is
the intensely rational way. We have got rid of some
men by putting them into an atmosphere which is
fatal to healthy thinking and to resonant and
emphatic speaking. We have given them coronets
that they may hold their tongues ; we may have pro-
moted them that we may get rid of them. It may
be so in its spiritual significance with the Lord ; we
have polysyllabled Him and addressed Him in long
formal speeches ; we have lost the old way of asking
Him, talking to Him, breathing upon Him, kissing
His hand, and whispering to Him just what we want.
Our hope, and the hope of the whole Church, is in
simplicity. Such was the method of the text, such
the method of Jesus Christ, and of Paul and of James
and of all the great historic suppliants on whose girdle
has hung the key of the upper sanctuary.
173
Ver. 3.
JUDGES I
Ver. 29.
III. Asking God, talking to God, communing with
God, elevates the mind.
Talking to God, asking God, laying the whole case
before God, sometimes laying it before Him without
words, sometimes simply looking into His face, some-
times letting our throbbing, aching misery look into
the infinite peace of the Divine tranquillity, will lift a
man to a new status and clothe him with a new in-
fluence and enrich him with an abiding benediction.
Let your misery seek the face of the King.
IV. ' The children of Israel asked the Lord.' They
did not dictate to Him. Prayer is not dictation ;
prayer is 
