Remember all the Way Thou shalt remember all the way which the Lord thy God hath led thee these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble thee, to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart, whether thou wouldest keep his commandments, or no.—Deuteronomy 8:2. The Book of Deuteronomy might very well be called a book of remembrance. It was written much later than the time when the events recorded in it occurred; and it was written to bring the people to remembrance in a time of calamity and apostasy. The aim of the writer was to show the nation what great things the Lord had done for them in the days gone by, and, by stirring them in this way to gratitude, to stir them to nobler and higher service of the God whom many of them had forsaken. And, of course, the theme of the book is the theme of many of the other books of the Bible. God is constantly calling His people to recollection—to think of the past, to realize what has been done, and out of the past to gather lessons of inspiration and hope for the future. I Remember 1. Memory is at once the condition and the proof of our self-identity. We should not know ourselves in any real sense had we not power to recall the past. Apart from memory, our minds would be a blank, except to the sensation of the passing moment. Knowledge, mental growth, even thought itself would be impossible. But as we are constituted, each experience as it goes leaves its sediment in the mind, and is unified in the process with all that has been and is capable of being revived in the form of an image when the impression itself has ceased. This seems a very simple fact, yet it is one that lies at the root of all our mental and spiritual life. By means of it the past lives on in the present; by means of it the far-off is brought near, and made a part of our conscious life here and now; by means of it we can reproduce our former experiences and converse with the ghosts of what we were ten, twenty years ago; by means of it we can call up the slowly vanishing image of the friends who have long since passed away from the stage of life. More, without this faculty we could not come into touch with God Himself—Him in whom are the all-knowing mind and the fadeless memory—and our highest spiritual exercise, next to present fellowship with Him, is to “utter the memory of his great goodness and sing of his righteousness.” Tell me what things you can remember easily, and I will tell you what manner of man you are; whether you are cultured or coarse, scholarly or vulgar, healthy-minded or morbid. The humorist has a mind stored with jokes and anecdotes, the philosopher can recall a complicated train of reasoning without an effort, the cheerful man remembers his holidays and his joys, the melancholy his trials and bereavements and losses. And so it runs through the complicated varieties of human temperament and character.1 [Note: E. Griffith-Jones.] 2. According to the teaching of most of the people who wrote the books of the Bible, memory is a gift of God—a gift to be used especially for spiritual purposes. Nearly the whole of a man’s spiritual life rests upon some foundation of memory; he naturally and inevitably goes back to this first source of his spiritual inspiration, to those first moments of spiritual consciousness, to those days when the truth of God was more vivid than it is now, to those springs of the religious life which can be traced slowly back, as the source of a great river can be traced to the spring on the mountain-side. It is in this direction and for reasons of this kind that the religious life with some people is so vivid and so clear; and it may be clear and vivid with every one of us if we will use this discipline of memory which God has put into our hands. There is a remarkable passage at the close of Augustine’s Confessions, in which he searches his mind for the root of his knowledge of God, and he finds it chiefly in his memory. “I come,” he says, “… to the fields and spreading courts of memory, where are treasures of unnumbered impressions of every kind.… For there the heaven, and the earth, and the sea, and all that in them is, which I have been able to discern by sense, are ready to my hand.… There, also, I meet with myself and I remember myself, what I did, and when, and where, and in what way, when I did it, I was attracted by it.… A great amazement fills me when I think of this; surprise astounds me. And men travel to enjoy the heights of the mountains, and the mighty billows of the sea, and the wide tides of the rivers, and the expanse of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars, and leave themselves behind, and feel no wonder that though I speak of these things I do not see them with my eyes; and yet I could not speak of them did I not see them in my memory, in those spaces so vast, mountains and billows, and rivers and stars, which I have seen, and ocean, of which I have heard, as though I were looking at them without.… So great is the power of memory, so great the power of life in mortal man. What shall I do then, O, Thou my true life, my God? I will pass even through and beyond this power of mine which is called memory; yea, I will pass beyond it [O, Thou who madest all things contained in memory, and the memory itself that contains them] that I may attain unto Thee, O sweet Light, who shinest through all things.” In this fine passage we have a faithful record of what passes through every devout mind. In the cavernous recesses of memory, as well as in the vast universe outside, dwells the Divine Spirit, and if we cannot find Him in that inner chamber, it will do us little good to find Him elsewhere.” 3. The Book of Deuteronomy is full of suggestions about the use of memory; about the kind of things we ought to remember, and the purpose for which we ought to remember them. Let us refer to some of these texts in succession, and let us see what suggestions they have for our life. One of them is the present text, which will thereafter be taken up by itself and treated fully. (1) “Remember the day when thou camest forth out of the land of Egypt” (Deuteronomy 16:3). The day when thou camest forth out of the land of Egypt. What day was that? It was the birthday of the nation. To remember it meant to print upon the heart the sense of an original and inexpressible debt to God. It was God who had brought Israel out of Egypt. It was He who did it by His great power and outstretched arm. It was He who made a way for them through the sea; He who had overwhelmed their enemies in its depths. Whatever Israel might forget, they were never to forget that great event which gave them birth as a nation. They were never to escape from beneath the impression of it; never to lose the sense of their immeasurable debt to God. What day is that for us? What strictly answers to it is the day when God’s redeeming love in Jesus Christ first shone out before our eyes, and took possession of our hearts. That is the day when we came out of the land of Egypt. But is it a day in the calendar? Is it a day that everybody can date? There are people like St. Paul who always remember that day on the road to Damascus. And though John Wesley remembers the very spot and the very hour, “nine o’clock at night in the Moravian Meeting House in Fetter Lane,” when the light of the Gospel of the glory of God shone into his heart, and he knew that there was instant, full, and free salvation in Jesus Christ for every man, yet it is quite possible that many Christians should be just as unconscious of the time of their spiritual birth as of their natural birth. But it is never possible for the Church to remain a Church if it forgets the time when God brought it out of the house of bondage. The day in the life of the Church that answers to this is that mighty act of God to which we look back, just as Israel looked back to the Red Sea; that mighty act of God which includes the presence of Christ in the world, and His death, and resurrection, and ascension, and the gift of the Holy Spirit. If we are to remain Christians at all, if we are to have the character of God’s people in us, our life must always remain under the impression of that great theme. To realize what it means that Jesus Christ lived in this world, lived our life, died our death, ascended to the Father, and poured out the gift of His Spirit, to realize that is to realize what a Christian means when he uses the word “God.” (2) “Remember, forget thou not, how thou provokedst the Lord thy God to wrath in the wilderness” (Deuteronomy 9:7). In the life of Israel there were days that were eminent in evil. These forty years that had been passed in the wilderness might in some respects seem very monotonous. One year and one day were only too painfully like another, but there were days eminent in badness, days when they had done monumental deeds of wickedness, things that provoked God to anger; days of rebellion; days of mutiny; days of distrust, when they challenged God; days of degrading sensuality. What hideous recollections some of these were! And is there not something corresponding to them in the life of every man? You cannot date your conversion, perhaps, but you can remember the very day when you gave way to anger and hatred, to envy, to profanity, to sensuality, to some kind of evil passion that provoked the wrath of God. There are acts of sin that have a kind of evil prominence even in our bad lives, and God says to us, “Remember these: remember how thou provokedst the Lord thy God to wrath in the wilderness.” Why should we remember things like that? They are to be remembered, for one thing, that we may understand the long-suffering of God, and praise Him for it. There is nothing more wonderful in God than the way in which He bears with us. His long-suffering sustains the provocation of our iniquities, and gives us new opportunities again and again; is not wearied with receiving our penitence, and multiplies His own marvel. And we need to remember those things that we ourselves may grow in penitence. A man does not repent and then be done with it. Repentance is not like the payment of a debt that we pay and then it is over. Repentance is a habit of daily virtue. Repentance is not something that is extinguished by forgiveness. Repentance is something that is begotten by forgiveness. Repentance is something that goes on, ever deepened and purified and made more powerful just by the prolonged experience of the pardoning love of God. And we need to remember these things also, that they may teach us to abstain from hasty judgments of others. How inconsiderate people can be in spite of their need of consideration! If we remember how we did provoke the Lord our God in the wilderness, then we will not be so harsh and peremptory with the man who needs patience from us. (3) “Remember all the way which the Lord thy God hath led thee these forty years in the wilderness” (Deuteronomy 8:2). It is taken for granted that our life here is under the providence and guidance of God. “The Lord thy God hath led thee these forty years in the wilderness.” Now providence is difficult to prove except to a man who has learned to believe in redemption. The Christian doctrine of providence is not something antecedent to redemption; the Christian doctrine of providence is an inference from redemption. You must know God’s love at the place where it is hardest of all to believe in it, or else you will never be able to believe in it anywhere at all. You have an illustration of this in an ordinary family. When everything goes pleasantly, a boy hardly knows what it means when he is told his father loves him. He gets his regular meals; he gets clothes; he gets shelter; he gets education—of course he does (that is what he thinks)—why should not he? But if the boy were ill, dangerously ill, ill to the point of death, and he saw his father abandon everything to think of him, then it would come home to him that the love of his father was a real thing. And after that it would be credible to him, and he would understand, that the love of his father covered all his life, even in what had once seemed indifferent things; even in what once seemed perverse and cross and untoward things; he would understand that his father’s affection might even in these be seeking his good. It is just like that with providence. A man cannot believe in providence unless providence is an inference from the Cross. And you will notice that that is the way it is put in the New Testament. St. Paul says, “We know that all things work together for good to them that love God.” Who know? We Christians know. We who have stood beside the Cross of Christ, and have seen the love of God there come to us in our extremity, identify itself with us in our guilt and misery and despair, take all our burden on itself and lift us up; we who have that assurance of God’s love can see the light of it fall on all our life, and know that God is everywhere making it all contribute to our good. Those who can say, “He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all,” can say, “Shall he not with him also freely give us all things?” We ought to recall our life and to recall it in this way—as the demonstration of God’s omnipresent, fatherly, providential care. We should have an autobiography in our minds, if not on paper, of the influences, and especially the personal influences, which have entered into our lives. We should recall the occasion when we met our best friend, or when we encountered the successful rival who snatched some prize from our hand, because that is in God’s providence too. We should remember the time when we came across the book that opened a new world to us. We should remember the purposes that have been crossed, the hopes that have been frustrated, the aspirations that have been fulfilled, or that have not been fulfilled, and think to what all that has led in the providence of God. Nothing is more certain, whenever we begin to look back upon our life, than what the prophet Jeremiah says—“O Lord, … it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps.” It is not we who have made our life what it is. It is not we; it is God. (4) “Remember the Lord thy God, for it is he that giveth thee power to get wealth” (Deuteronomy 8:18). The tendency of success is to make us forget God. The Psalms are full of that teaching, and so are the words of our Lord. Prosperity engenders the feeling that we are equal to anything. The rich man’s wealth, as Solomon says, is his strong city. He entrenches himself in it, he fortifies himself in it, he feels secure in it. He is secure against chance, secure against accidents, secure against any reasonable or unreasonable kind of bad fortune, secure against Providence, secure against God. His very sense of being independent overleaps itself, and falls, before he knows it, into a kind of practical atheism. Well, here is a direction for the use of memory by prosperous and successful men. “Remember the Lord thy God, for it is he that giveth thee power to get wealth.” It is only when we remember God that the getting of wealth ceases to be an end in itself. It is only when we remember God that the sense of responsibility attaches to success and to the possession of wealth. The man who is making money almost unconsciously begins to feel as if he were independent. Of course there is a legitimate sense in which independence is to be aimed at. Burns speaks of “the glorious privilege of being independent.” But how little, when we think of it, can independence really amount to! The most prosperous man is not independent of his neighbours, of his servants, of the forces of nature; and still less is he independent of God. (5) “Remember what Amalek did unto thee by the way” (Deuteronomy 25:17). “By the way.” Amalek had followed on the rear of Israel and cut off the stragglers, and shown every kind of inhumanity to the defenceless people. So what this suggestion means is something like this: life abounds in illustrations of human character, even of inhumanity; as we live and come through things we see what men are capable of, and we are not to forget it; it is to be remembered, not for vengeance, but for wisdom. Now, perhaps that may seem an uncharitable, an unchristian counsel to some, but it is not really so. Have you noticed how often our Lord says, “Beware of men”? There are persons and institutions that have shown their character, and are not to be trusted any more. They are thoroughly, and consistently, and in principle bad, and we should be false to what experience can teach if we forgot that and trusted them again. We know that there are institutions and movements which in the very soul of them are powers of darkness and of bondage, and can never be anything else, and that the Lord will have war with them from generation to generation. And it is not uncharitable to remember that, and to hold no terms with them. It is just gathering the heart of wisdom that God means us, by our experience, to get.1 [Note: J. Denney.] II Remember all the Way 1. The circumstances under which this exhortation was delivered were solemnly impressive. It was the speaker’s purpose to hearten the people for the future by an appeal to the past; he grounded faith and hope in experience. Glancing at the chapter which follows, we see that he does not allow his hearers to harbour any illusions as to what is about to be required of them. They are to go in to possess nations greater and mightier than themselves; a people great and tall, of whom it had been said, Who can stand against the sons of Anak? It is to nerve and animate them for this momentous and critical enterprise that he rehearses in their ears the experiences of the days gone by. The great leader of Israel in this memorial service made the memories of history sacramental. Thou shalt remember, he said; and he forced it upon the worst man there, the man of narrowest and meanest intellect, the man of most selfish character, that he, too, had been hedged about with divinity, and that, however he might have rough-hewn them, an overpowering Providence had shaped his ends. Somehow he had to make valiant men, heroes, knights, out of tribes of craven and mean-spirited people, and infuse into a servile and pusillanimous host the spirit of conquerors. And he did it by these means. He read them chapters from their past, elucidated and interpreted them, until God’s will, God’s hand, God’s presence became so manifest that the dullest laggard among them must have felt the lift of a great destiny. “Thou shalt remember.” A greater than Moses spake, to no multitude of hearers, but to a mere handful of disciples, and said to them, “This do in remembrance of me.” For did He not know that all things were possible to be endured and achieved, suffered and accomplished, to those who brooded over His life and death and love, until they read the very soul and substance of His work and person—to those who kept ever before them the glad, yet awful, memory of the Cross?1 [Note: C. S. Horne.] There was once, so the story says, a poor musician in Germany who loved a maiden of high degree, and in order to win her went away to distant lands and strove to obtain money and fame. When at last he had obtained both he came back and claimed his bride. They were walking out one evening by the side of the river, and he sought to reach a tuft of little blue flowers for her. In doing so his foot slipped and he fell into the river Rhine; and the story says that, as he was being carried away by the strong current, he flung the bunch of blue flowers to land, crying as he did so, “Forget me not.” From that time, and from this story, the little blue flower, known before as the “Mouse’s Ear,” has been known in Europe everywhere as the “Forget-me-not.” It is a much prettier name than the other, and no man has a sweeter memorial raised to him than that poor drowning musician has in the sweet little flowers that make the face of the earth so beautiful for us year by year.2 [Note: J. M. Gibbon.] 2. Let us emphasize the “all.” “Remember all the way.” Remember only one part of the way, and then not only the whole, but even that particular portion, will inevitably be misunderstood. Take it all together. The very principle of it implies a wholeness, a continuity of purpose, which can only be fully comprehended in the result. No way explains itself at every step. It bends hither and thither, now on the right hand, now on the left; now it ascends, now it descends, obedient to necessities which only he who stands on a lofty vantage-ground can understand. The man who made it took that wide masterly survey. He saw the starting-point and the end, and their best possible junction; and we travel in faith daily, hourly, along the highways of this world, believing that wise men made them; that difficulties were patent to their eye that are hidden from ours; and that on the whole they have chosen for us the best way to the end. And we believe that a Being of unerring wisdom laid the plan of our life-course; that He led it not through weary wastes without a clear insight into the nature and conditions of our journey, and the certainty that that was the best way to our home. We believe that a Father’s wise and loving eye has surveyed the whole of it; and that not a quagmire, not a perilous passage, not a torrent, not a mountain gorge, not a steep, rocky path, not a bare, sandy plain, has been ordained that could have been spared. Thou shalt consider all the way. The Alpine peasant in his lonely glen, Who sees the sudden lake formed at its head Burst all at once its icy barrier, And sweep his village from its perilous ledge; Or hears the avalanche roar down the heights, A cataract of snow, whose very breath The stoutest pine-tree snaps like brittle reed, Scattering destruction in its awful path, And burying home and field in one white grave; His vision bounded by his narrow hills— His sense impressed by his own loss alone— Imagines that these evils are the work Of some dread Power, that loves but to destroy. But we who live beneath more spacious skies, And take a wider survey of the world, See in these evils but the needful links In a vast scheme, by which the parched earth Is watered and the treasures of the snow, For ever melted and renewed, are borne, With most beneficent economy, Down from their storehouse on the lofty peaks, To give prosperity and wealth to realms That otherwise would have been barren wastes. And so the sorrows that o’erwhelm our lot And chill our hearts, which, in the narrow space Of their own dark horizon, we are apt To view with terror, as the wanton sport Of some malicious fate that seeks our hurt; Viewed from a loftier vantage-ground of faith, With wider outlook of experience, Are seen to be but transient incidents In a great plan of loving-kindness, meant To make our whole life richer and more blest, And spread the fruitage of a heavenly love O’er deserts useless both to God and man. Beyond those hills that our horizon bound, And hem us in and darken all our sky, Stretch the fair lands which these white realms make green,— The watered gardens, whose serener heavens Through distant storms have gained a purer blue. Why should a living man complain, whose life Transcends the limit of all mortal woe, And ranges far beyond, where absolute And everlasting compensations are!1 [Note: Hugh Macmillan, The Christmas Rose, 7. (1) Remember the Sins of the way. There are times when it is profitable to revive the memories of forgotten sins; to exhume the carcases, or, rather, read out the fading inscriptions on the headstones of the graves, of self-will, folly, or lust. Generally it is wholesome advice to “let the dead past bury its dead.” Morbid natures, brooding over the memories of sins, beget the appetite for fresh ones. The past is best buried under a nobler present, for I held it truth, with him who sings To one clear harp in divers tones, That men may rise on stepping-stones Of their dead selves to higher things. But that the present may be nobler, let the sins of the past, with their attendant sorrows, sometimes come into remembrance, if only to magnify the patience and long-suffering of God. The sins of the way are sometimes remembered whether we will or not, for memory is only partially under our control. It has laws of its own, which run their course in spite of us. If we could always forget what we wanted to forget, and remember only what we desired to remember, we should find life very much simplified. There would be no sense of guilt, no remorse, no passionate and vain longing to get rid of the ghosts of the past. The murderer, the thief, the repentant prodigal would in that case be haunted by no disquieting dreams. But God could not entrust us with such a power over our own past. And so He has given conscience a memory independent of our will. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth were the victims of this inability to forget; he, by day, in his waking moments, she, at night, in dreams and nightmares, were pursued by the undying ghost of Banquo, which was but the objectified image of their own conscience, as it drove its shadowy sword into their inmost hearts till he cried: “O, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife!” and she wandered about in her sleep, striving in vain to wipe the blood-spot from her hand. This involuntary ethical memory is one of the safeguards of virtue, one of the restraints of vice. (2) But let the memory be also of the Forgiveness of sin. For it is not enough that our present life be renewed, while the ugly past remains as it was. God’s salvation must stretch its redeeming hand over our past as well. He must give us the powers which will purify the secret place where the vanished joys as well as the undying sorrows of the days of old are stored up. Heaven would be no heaven to us if we were to be at the mercy of our past. Those who know Dante will remember how, when he came into the last circle of Purgatory on his way heavenward, he was taken to the brink of two rivers, and given their waters to drink. The first was Lethe, a draught from which cleared the memory of all its stains and scars, its shadows and its corruptions. The second was Eunoe, whose waters brought back to the mind all the happy, soul-lifting recollections of bygone days. With profound insight into the deepest facts of our nature, the great poet there teaches us that God’s last, best gift—the key to the soul’s true heaven—is a regenerated memory. But where shall we find the true Lethe and Eunoe of the soul? God in His infinite mercy has provided us with them. God’s Lethe is His forgiving love. It flows, sweet and vivifying, from beneath the Cross of our Redeemer. And those who drink of these healing waters are relieved from the incubus of their evil past. Not by forgetting, but by transfiguring the mistakes and failures and sins of the days of old, does this heavenly secret of forgiveness do its blessed work for the soul. It transmutes the torment of memory into an undying gratitude to Him who has redeemed us by His precious blood, and has enabled us to see in our worst sins the memorials of an Almighty and ever-potent redemption. And Eunoe? What is this but the certainty of God’s gracious leadership and kindly discipline? When once we realize how that Hand has led us, and preserved us, and kept us till now, how life’s strength has flowed from His sustaining grace, how He has peopled every day with the memorials of His love—then how brightly do even the sorrows of the past shine as we gaze down the chequered vista of our experience! Deeply had the writer of Deuteronomy drunk of these sweet waters of Eunoe. The book is a psalm of grateful praise for the remembered mercies of the days of old. “And thou shalt remember all the way which the Lord thy God hath led thee these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble thee, to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart, whether thou wouldest keep his commandments, or no.”1 [Note: E. Griffith-Jones.] There were many burning hours on the heart-sweet tide, And we passed away from ourselves, forgetting all The immortal moods that faded, the god who died, Hastening away to the King on a distant call. There were ruby dews shed when the heart was riven, And passionate pleading and prayers to the dead we had wronged; And we passed away, unremembering and unforgiven, Hastening away to the King for the peace we longed. Love unremembered and heart-ache we left behind, We forsook them, unheeding, hastening away in our flight; We knew the hearts we had wronged of old we would find When we came to the fold of the King for rest in the night.2 [Note: A. E., The Divine, Vision, 8. (3) Remember the Happiness of the way as well as the sorrow. We do not take half joy enough, the joy which we have a right to take, in the goodly world which our God hath built and adorned for us, in the wonderful and beautiful work which is spread round us with unsparing hand, and which an angel might stop to gaze on with rapture. Poor we may be and struggling, and all the higher interests and joys of life—art, literature, music—may be tasted but rarely, and in drops. But the Great Artist has taken thought for the poor. He wills that their joys shall not be scant. The beauty, the glory, which Art at its highest faintly adumbrates, is theirs in profusion. Each moment they have within easy reach works of His hand whose far-off image, reproduced by man, the rich of this world would buy at untold cost. There are those who indulge in the morbid memory. They live among the sorrows of the past and haunt its graves. They are familiar with the great illnesses and minor ailments of their lives, and date every event by some misfortune that happened in the same year or week. There is nothing they love more than to tell us in circumstantial detail of all the unpleasant, terrible, tragic things that have happened since last we met. Their memory is like a vault. Happy are those whose memory is like that old sundial in Italy—of which Hazlitt writes so finely—inscribed with the motto, “I record only the sunny hours,” and who, in thinking of the days gone by, try to preserve only the brighter, kindlier, vitalizing treasures of experience. A few days before sailing for England from America I went to see a blind man who had been among the veterans of Pittsburg, and who had the medal given by his nation for valour in the field. I looked upon him with emotion, for he had been a gallant soldier and a devoted patriot. I said to him, “What do you do in these days of darkness?” and his reply was, “Thank God, doctor, for fifty years I had my sight, and I was permitted to see Abraham Lincoln, and I heard the bugles call men to the fight for freedom and for truth, and I now go back to those scenes while shut in this walled darkness and bring them before me in stately procession, and throw around them my imaginative powers, and so the hours of dulness and despair are kept at a distance. When I lost my sight I gained new powers of memory.”1 [Note: S. Parkes Cadman.] There is a description which I have never forgotten, in one of Robert Louis Stevenson’s fascinating books of travel, of the impression produced upon his mind by listening to the wail of the Miserere in a Continental cathedral. “I take it,” he said, “to be the composition of an atheist.” The verdict is severe, but I am bound to think it just. At any rate, the deliberate rehearsal of all the miseries and agonies of men must inevitably cultivate in them the feeling of self-pity, with an underlying insinuation, I should say, that they have been hardly used, and that life is a dismal matter at the best. So far as we can understand the situation, the Hebrews, the people to whom Moses spoke, had very generally become infected with the temper and spirit of self-pity.1 [Note: C. S. Horne.] In The Glasgow Herald of 6th May 1911 there appeared a sketch entitled “An East Coast Fishwife,” by E. A. G. K., from which the following is taken: “It must have been a hard, busy life all those years. Would you care to go through it all again?” I asked. She looked thoughtfully at me for a moment. “Aye, wad I, frae the very beginning. I’ve had health and strength, a gude faither an’ mither, an’ a kind man. Jamie and me had aye muckle tae be thankfu’ for. Gin the day’s wark was lang, we had oor ain fireside, and oor rest at nicht; and the bairns had a’dune weel. I wadna want ony o’t. Whiles when I’m sittin’ yonder daein’ ma bit shooin’—for I can see fine tae shoo yet—I jist see them a’ afore me, leevin and deid, wee bairnies an’ auld folk, and I aye think the Almichty is won’erfu’ kind in gie’n’ auld folk the power o’ mindin’ a’ the pleesures they hae had, and the lang road they have traivelt, an’ the folk they have kent. Gin ye hae a lang life, ye hae mony memories; an’ I wadna pairt wi’ ony o’ mine.” III Remember the Leading of God The Israelites had been led through the wilderness. This was the great fact of their journey. And it is this fact beyond all others that they are now commanded to remember. Thou shalt remember all the way because it is the way by which the Lord thy God has led thee. 1. Was God the leader of Israel only? He who leadeth out the stars as a shepherd leadeth his flock is the sovereign leader of all the nations. He is the King of all the earth. The harps of psalmists and the lyres of prophets sounded forth the glorious truth that God is the God of all mankind, and that, even if they acknowledge Him not, He is guiding them, and He is controlling their affairs. And when St. Paul, standing on Mars’ Hill, declared how God had to do with the seats and settlements of the nations, he struck a blow at the polytheism of the time with its localized divinities, and also a blow at the narrow conception of God and His ways which some professing Christians are not ashamed to entertain. But if God be the God of nations, He is also the guide and leader of all those movements which from time to time have sprung up in the breasts of nations, having the elevation and the advance of mankind for their aim and their design. Surely we cannot exclude God from these! The chief of them undoubtedly is Christianity, because it had a Divine Person as its founder, and because it united in itself the sublimest revelations of God with the noblest duties pertaining to man. But alongside of Christianity, and oftentimes by means of contact with it, there have been great movements originated and carried forward, and in every one of them are to be found the presence and the power of God. We can hardly imagine a greater affront to Divine Majesty than to deny this—to suppose that there can be goodness without Him; to suppose that there can be blessedness without His blessing; to suppose that there can be rays of light, cheering the condition of man, which have not proceeded from God, the Father of lights. In the year 1836, and in the month of January, devout men met in the city of Boston (United States) to consider what could be done to stay the ravages of intemperance in that country. They met in a house of prayer, and, having met, they prayed, deliberated, decided, and they also acted. They formed in February “The American Society for the Promotion of Temperance.” They did this in order that they might, as it were, give vent to a cry of anguish at the appalling evils that had come upon a Christian and civilized land from one direct and removable agency; and they did it as a protest against that great neglect which had been allowed to continue for so many years—a neglect chargeable both upon the Churches and upon the State. And who gave this inspiration to these men? Was it not God? Did He not breathe into their souls of His own Spirit to move them in this enterprise? Did He not give them the pity they felt and their earnest resolve to action? Did not He Himself take the command of the movement? Was He not at the heart of it? Was He not in the very front of it? And has not that been the place that He has occupied from that time down to the present hour?1 [Note: Dawson Burns.] 2. Is the way we have travelled the way the Lord has led us? That is the great question. We have to confess, some of us, that it is not. It has been our own way; we have mapped it out for ourselves, and we have been proud of the achievement. We have said, “My own wits and the might of my own hands have gotten me this wealth,” have felt that we were self-sufficient men and women, and that we were not dependent on any. There are people who like to forget God’s leadership, and in life as we know it in these days the sense of God’s presence is very hard to keep before us, and very easily let slip. But life on any other terms than by God’s guidance is a very unsatisfactory business at the best, and it is good for us to remember that the Lord our God is leading us, sometimes even when we are least conscious of it. Religion simply means the guiding of God in history and in the individual life. We want to get back to that old doctrine which is sometimes wrongly called the Puritan doctrine, the doctrine of Providence—that behind the things we can see, and touch, and handle there is the will of God; that, hidden from our mortal eyes, but present to our spiritual sense, there is the fact of God caring and leading; that behind this personal will of ours there is another Will directing us, and that in this life there is a purpose being fulfilled, a purpose for which the Divine Will alone is responsible. God leads me! Through all the old unquiet years, Shadowed by failure and by sin, When selfish grief and selfish fears Made all the way I stumbled in A mystery of darkness—still I think He led me. Looking back It seems to me His Blessed Will Fashioned my life, and any lack Of presence or of riches or of power Were angels in disguise. However much I hungered for A present earthly paradise, God held me!1 [Note: J. W. Taylor, The Doorkeeper, 9. 3. Do we recognize the Providence of God as we journey, or is it only in the memory and at a distance that we can see the love that has led us? It is a fact that in the spiritual sense we are, almost all of us, long-sighted; we see the things at a distance more clearly and truly than the things that are right upon us. There is little or nothing Divine to us in this poor, mean, commonplace existence of ours as we are passing through it. It is as one has seen the waters round a steamer in mid-ocean dull and drab; but away in the wake waves, flecked with foam, have taken the colouring of the sunset, and put on an ethereal radiance. Memory is the eye through which we see our past life in the light of God’s love. We need distance for the perspective; we do not see things true till we have moved a little stage away. Then we observe, of our halting-places, as the patriarch of his, “Verily God was in this place and I knew it not.” God was in this sorrow, this success, this separation, this reunion, this failure, this conquest. While my spirit slept and I knew nothing but that my pillow was a stone, and the way of life was hard and sore to travel, the Lord was in this place, and the impulses and forces of my pilgrimage were verily the hand of God. There is no discovery like that to put soul into the hesitating or misgiving or despairing. There is a death of memory that is brought Not by oblivion, but by coming light. It fades as childhood fades in manhood’s thought, It dies as starlight dies at morning’s sight, Not needing things behind. May this forgetfulness, my heart, be thine; Not the great deadness of an outgrown sorrow, But the deep trust that ceases to repine, Since yesterday shall come again to-morrow, Bearing the things behind. Fields of the past to thee shall be no more The burial-ground of friendships once in bloom, But seed-plots of a harvest on before, And prophecies of life with larger room For things that are behind. Live thou in God, and thy dead past shall be Alive for ever with eternal day; And planted on His bosom thou shalt see The flowers revived that withered on the way Amid the things behind. 4. Do we observe that God keeps moving obstacles out of our way as we go? “Speak unto the children of Israel that they go forward”—that is our duty: the rest is God’s. And as we go, the threatening waters divide. In Switzerland you see sometimes an immense mass of ice and snow detached from the top of a mountain, and as it comes thundering down it seems as if it would overwhelm the whole valley. But it strikes first on one point, then on another. It is shattered into a million pieces, and instead of crushing the traveller, the dust of it simply cools his forehead. It is ofttimes like that in life. Many a time do we look and think that something is going to crush us and overwhelm us; but the Master, with His wonderful skill, turns the disaster away, and we suffer no evil. The thing that we feared is to us an inspiration and a refreshment. A gentleman told me some time ago that he was driving into Lincoln. He had a farm a few miles out, and those of you who know Lincoln will know how the Cathedral from that particular point of view seems to block up the high road. The gentleman was driving with his little boy, and the little fellow looked piteously at this obstacle, and at last he burst into tears, and said, “Oh! father, how are we going to get over that?” But it was all right; the father drove on, and they had the sight of the lovely Minster—that was all.1 [Note: W. L. Watkinson.] 5. And do we observe how often He turns apparent evil into good? Have no significant dates, no critical junctures, no days of darkness lifted themselves along our track through life? Have we come across no oasis and spot of verdure where we thought we should like to abide awhile, but which we had to leave? Can we recall no day of astonishment and of trembling, of paleness and fear, when the knees were weak, and the heart melted like wax? Has nothing happened in our life which has put forth a controlling influence, shaped our course, and made us largely what we are? Do we see the way by which we have come? Do we see where we made a profound, irremediable mistake? Do we see, too, how that something else in us which erred was overruled and compounded for the best, so that we did not suffer so much damage as should naturally have occurred? Do we recall our happy hits, right choices, successful moves, and also the slough of despond in which we have been mired and the angry seas upon which we have been tossed and the dark entries through which we have groped our uncertain way? I was sailing down the St. John River, Canada, which is the Rhine and the Hudson commingled in one scene of beauty and grandeur, and while I was on the deck of the steamer a gentleman pointed out to me the places of interest, and he said, “All this is interval land, and it is the richest land in all the provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.” “What,” said I, “do you mean by interval land?” “Well,” he said, “this land is submerged for a part of the year; spring freshets come down, and all these plains are overflowed with the water; the water leaves a rich deposit, and when the waters are gone the crop springs up, and there is the grandest harvest that was ever reaped.” And I instantly thought, “It is not the heights of the Church and it is not the heights of this world that are the scene of the greatest prosperity; it is the soul over which the floods of sorrow have gone, the soul over which the freshets of tribulation have torn their way, that yields the greatest fruits of righteousness, and the largest harvest for time, and the richest harvest for eternity.” Bless God that your soul is interval land.1 [Note: T. de Witt Talmage.] All around I heard the whispering larches Swinging to the low-lipped wind; God, they piped, is lilting in our arches, For He loveth leafen kind. Ferns I heard, unfolding from their slumber, Say confiding to the reed: God well knoweth us, Who loves to number Us and all our fairy seed. Voices hummed as of a multitude Crowding from their lowly sod; ’Twas the stricken daisies where I stood, Crying to the daisies’ God.2 [Note: Shane Leslie.] I read the other day of some travellers who were going through Asia, and who came to a very dismal valley; it was filled with the bones of men and animals that had been killed on the heights, and been carried down by the torrents. It was a dreary and desolate place, and they said, “We will call this ‘The Valley of Dry Bones.’ ” But the next morning, when they got to the top, they saw a rare butterfly, a most beautiful thing, fluttering in the pleasant sunshine. One of them caught it, and they were all filled with admiration and wonder at the beauty of its wings, and they said, “We will not call this valley ‘The Valley of Dry Bones’; we will call it ‘The Butterfly Pass.’ ”1 [Note: J. M. Gibbon.] IV Remember the Purpose of God 1. These chapters of Deuteronomy purport to be a kind of valedictory or compendious summing up by Moses of the salient points of Hebrew history since the days of the Exodus. They had been casting about in the frightful desert of Sin, a tract lying south of Palestine, into which desolate region they entered after leaving the Red Sea. Their apparently aimless wanderings had consumed forty years, and towards the close of that period, and as his own end drew nigh, Moses is reported to have delivered this farewell discourse. He reminds his people of the battles they had fought with the Canaanitish tribes, the difficulties that blocked their advance, and the discouragements that appalled them. He also states the conditions upon which their future prosperity and permanence depend, that they must remember Mount Horeb and the Decalogue; and he intimates the reason why, instead of marching directly up out of Egypt into the promised possession, they had been led by such a toilsome, circuitous route. It was not because they could not have reached their inheritance by a shorter cut; indeed, ninety days at the utmost would have sufficed to bring them, bag and baggage, man and beast, into the land of milk and honey. But, says their great leader, remember that it has required forty years to accomplish this march, and this in order to put you under conditions that should test the qualities of your disposition, and to ascertain whether or not you were made of stern stuff and were fit for your new responsibilities. Such, then, appears to be the theory of Moses concerning the Hebrew Exodus; it was virtually an examination into character, an investigation into the national propensities and tastes. The Divine idea was not to carry them all safe to Canaan, and land them punctually, according to a pre-arranged schedule, but rather, by a winnowing process, to discover who were fit to arrive, and who among them would make the best material for the new political structure. Hence they traversed the wilderness of Paran, marching and countermarching, hithering and thithering, now camping, now all afoot again, for forty tedious years, when a fraction of the period would have set a term to their pilgrimage, if done in a concerted, rapid manner, and if the question had been simply a geographical one. But, as a matter of fact, it was a moral question, and this made a vast difference. The grand feature of the Old Testament is that it recognizes the moral idea in the government of the race. An Egyptian historian, a Greek historian, or a Roman historian simply gives a number of pictures, pictures of kings, camps, marches, cities, battles won and lost; and when he has done that, he comes to the end of his knowledge and his task. It is the great merit of the Hebrew law-givers and prophets that they go behind the pictures, and seize the fact that the world is ruled to a distinct end, and that end moral and righteous. 2. All great thinkers feel that at the back of this visible sphere there is a Divine Architect building with a plan, a Divine Artist who is working out a distinct plan and idea, a Divine Dramatist who fits the various parts into a perfect drama. It is impossible to look at this planet with its orderliness, its harmony, its evolution, without believing in a Divine and Supreme Ruler. It would be difficult to believe anything else, and it is not difficult to believe in the government of God, if we look into the history of the human race. It would be as difficult to resist the conception of government in respect of the human race as it is to resist the conception of government in regard to the material Universe. It is not difficult to believe in the Divine government when you look at the career of extraordinary men. When you look at Cyrus or Cæsar, when you think of Paul or Luther, it is very easy to believe in the supernaturalism that shapes the ends of these magnificent and influential lives. If you will only take a wide theatre, if you will only regard the evolution of a race, you can scarcely escape from the conception of an overshadowing supernaturalism, of a sovereign and a shaping Head. I will tell you where the difficulty begins. The difficulty begins the very moment that you begin to think of that supernatural order taking care of ordinary people like us and the trivial interests that we represent. A man is not a sceptic looking at the starry firmament—not when he takes cognizance of the planet, not when he regards the sweep and evolution of the race—the scepticism comes in when a man begins to think of that magnificent order embracing him, shaping his lot, and commanding his trifling interests.1 [Note: W. L. Watkinson.] Astrologers and physicists, who, shut out from the knowledge of God, ascribe changes and events to the stars and to nature, resemble an ant that, seeing a pen making marks upon paper, should be overjoyed and cry out, “I have found out the secret of the effect. It is the pen that causes the marks.” A second ant, looking on with attention, sees that the pen does not move of itself, but rather by the will of the hand, and says to the first ant, “You were mistaken, you did not perceive the real nature of the thing; you thought the marks and movements were caused by the pen. It is not so; the whole influence proceeds from the fingers, and the pen is subject to the fingers.” This ant resembles the astrologer, who ascribes effects to the constellations. He does not know that he also is mistaken, that the stars and the constellations are subject to the angels, and that the angels can do nothing without the command of God.2 [Note: Al Ghazzali.] 3. What was the purpose of the leading of the Israelites? It was humiliation and probation—“to humble thee and to prove thee.” (1) Humility is a great Christian virtue, and the humbling discipline to which men and women are subjected under God is a Christian commonplace. And just because it is a commonplace of our spiritual furniture we think so lightly of it. People talk about the rarity of Christian charity, but Christian humility is much more rare, and if there is one thing that men and women want to-day it is a little humbling. We are all so proud of ourselves, we are all so sure that if we were left to ourselves we could do things so well. God teaches us with absolute certainty that we cannot stand alone. There has been a discussion going on of late whether all talk in the Bible about sin is not a mistake, whether our ordinary, respectable congregations ought to be spoken to at all about sin, whether the language of humiliation, which is so often used in Christian services, is not misused. All this is wonderfully characteristic of to-day. People are all so sure of everything; this life has become so safe, so pleasant, so easy, that any notion of humiliation or any note of weakness strikes them as being altogether foreign—a thing that need not be entertained.1 [Note: W. B. Selbie.] Hear me, O God! A broken heart Is my best part: Use still Thy rod, That I may prove Therein Thy love. If Thou hadst not Been stern to me, But left me free, I had forgot Myself and Thee. For sin’s so sweet, As minds ill bent Rarely repent, Until they meet Their punishment.2 [Note: Ben Jonson.] (2) “To prove thee.” God’s guidance is a guidance for discipline; it means testing. The whole history of the Hebrew people was a testing process, to see whether they would be fit for their great work in the history of the world; and the whole of God’s dealing with us is a testing, to make us fit for the particular work that He has for us to do. The Bible and Christianity represent the earth as a theatre erected by the Supreme Wisdom to be the scene of an experiment—not a mechanical or chemical experiment, but, far more serious, a moral one. This is the Christian theory of the earth and man, not stated in terms of matter and force, but in terms of mind and morality. So that while gold, iron, brass are hidden in the interior of the earth, and while forests of timber grow out of it, while seas tumble and flash on its surface, and harvests return year after year to feed man’s hunger, and he may build up his lofty civilisation out of the raw materials furnished in nature, clothing himself in furs and fine linen, hewing his dwelling-place out of porphyry and granite, baking clay for brick, and feeding upon the finest wheat, nevertheless, it was not the primary design to create and upholster a planet that should simply satisfy the animal appetite, and where man could browse and fatten and frisk like a calf. The true conception of the earth is as a place where each element, each fact, is a symbol of something occult and supernatural. Consequently it is not so important that men should hunt for gold as that they should know what use to make of it when found. It is not so important that they should build arks and leviathans fit to ride stormy seas as it is that the nations be drawn together and the federation of the world be hastened. It is not so important that they should grind glasses and set and sight telescopes, resolve nebulæ, weigh planets, and predict eclipses, as it is that behind the stars and the firmaments they should detect mind, intelligence, and will. Without this moral intention the universe becomes a great grist-mill, and man a blind horse on an endless plank. The earth’s flora and fauna, its marbles and metals, its sunrises and sunsets, all that it contains and carries—all is part of a curriculum provided for the instruction and elevation of man. The whole experiment of this revolving earth is in order to the fashioning of human faculties and that man should be led up to the top of his possibilities. If we leave out this consideration, it will be hard to account for the present constitution of things; the earth will deteriorate into a larder, a ranch for cattle, instead of being a solemn scene where man, made in the image of God, is getting stature, and wisdom and expansion, and making increase in the higher elements of personality.1 [Note: J. Sparhawk Jones.] 4. This proving is to know what was in their hearts, whether they would keep His commandments or not. And it is a truth of great moment that God is conducting men and women through this earthly scene in order to show what is in their hearts. And, if so, one can imagine what thrilling tragedies, broad farces, amazing spectacles are enacted on these boards of time. We pass across the platform, each playing his little part, each pushed by his strongest impulse, each illustrating his leading trait, each acting out his deepest, most real self and showing forth what is in his heart. God leads men as He led those forlorn, overspent, wandering Jews, through drought and heat, through alarms and ambuscades, to see if they are strong enough to assault and carry some battlemented Jericho and to eat the purple clusters of Eshcol. It is a solemn truth, indeed, that your life is the solution of a problem—a public exhibition of your personal character and moral temper. Are you a sensualist? Well, then, you will have abundant opportunity to show what is in your heart—eating and drinking your way through the world, and living by the force of the natural appetites. Are you addicted to greed and money-getting? This is only pouring the cedar-oil of immortality around perishable commodities and showing what is in your heart. Are you devoured by love of self-display, with a wolf’s hunger for admiration, applause, popularity? This is little better than the strutting of a lordly peacock in gay plumage, self-centred and self-seeking. Everywhere, at every turn, in the shop, in the office, in the drawing-room, on the street, we are showing what is in our heart—our ideals, aims, by what arguments and motives we are actuated. Study it carefully, and this is really a prolific principle, and one of wide applicability, that underlay the Exodus. For it comes to this, that, however we may designate our callings and occupations in life, there is a deep below, and in the Divine idea of them they are, essentially, the ways and means by which we are discovered to ourselves and displayed to others.1 [Note: J. Sparhawk Jones.] When Joseph overheard his brothers saying, “We are verily guilty,” he did not at once reveal himself to them and offer them forgiveness. Some readers blame him on this account. A foreign writer says, “He is hard-hearted enough systematically and in cold blood to punish them for the suffering they inflicted on him” and “to put them to the torture,” when he should have instantly fallen upon their necks and kissed them. If Joseph had been a weaker man he would have done as is here suggested. If his amiability had been untempered by principle, he would have done it. But Joseph’s conscience was as sound as his heart was tender. He had serious work to do before he indulged in emotion. He avoided the sentiment which blurs the distinctions between good and evil. Forgiveness was not his only duty to his brothers. He had to test the reality of their repentance, to drive the arrow of conviction deeper into their hearts, keeping his own lips sealed till the right moment came for divulging to them his secret. He could endure the pain of seeing them suffer, in the hope that suffering would bring them to a better mind. Providence was making him their judge, as nature had made him their brother, and he loved them with that exacting love which has often been an erring brother’s salvation. He would rejoice to have them reconciled to himself, but still more to see them reconciled to God. Love does not always caress and soothe and say kind things. Sometimes it scourges. Its mingled goodness and severity are the reflection of the perfect love of God, who leads His children along rough ways to repentance that He may at last have the joy of giving them the kiss of forgiveness.1 [Note: J. Strachan, Hebrew Ideals, pt. ii. 120. 5. God finds out what is in men’s hearts, whether they will keep His commandments or not. The history of the past, the discipline of the past, the way by which God has led us, all come to this—to the discovery whether we are willing to keep God’s commandments or not. We do not need to confine ourselves to these words, these commands, these ordinances which we have in this Book. That was merely a temporary and evanescent way of expressing God’s will for His people. We, in our time, have to read into all these commandments all we know of God and His requirements and His leading. It may not be very much; with some of us it is not very much. We can at least be firm, faithful and fervent in our lives; can believe it is better to be pure than impure, to be truthful than false, to be honest than dishonest; and if we have nothing more to say about God than to make Him a kind of moral rule, that will carry us a long way. We can at least realize that these things which we ought to be and do represent to us the command of God, and we can live for these things rather than for ourselves; we can keep these commandments rather than our own; we can let God be our law rather than be a law unto ourselves. And O, my heart, my heart, Be careful to go strewing in and out Thy way with good deeds, lest it come about That when thou shalt depart, No low lamenting tongue be found to say, The world is poorer since thou went’st away.2 [Note: Alice Cary.] V The Uses of Remembering 1. To remember the way that God has led us is to feel Gratitude. The Israelites were, for the most part, ungrateful. They were always forgetting that God was taking care of them. They did so in the wilderness and out of it; it was their constant fault all through their national history. It was the great complaint of the prophets, speaking as God’s interpreters, that the people did not consider. This entry is longer than a Bible module can hold. The rest is at https://www.sermonindex.net/commentary/greattexts/ The Good Will of a Lifetime The good will of him that dwelt in the bush. — Deuteronomy 33:16. 1. Moses had been young and now was old. The words of the text are taken from his benediction, which he pronounced upon the children of Israel as he stood with them on the borders of the promised land. There is something very touching in the reminiscence. The long journey through the desert is over. He has done God’s work nobly and successfully. Well may he be proud of this people that he has led up to the threshold of their inheritance. But now his mind is running backward. This crowning of his mission with clear success reminds him of the time when his mission started out in mystery and weakness. He sees again a bush which he once saw by a wayside. He is a young man again, a shepherd keeping his father-in-law’s flock on the back side of the desert, by Mount Horeb. He sees once more the bush on fire. He draws near again with unshod feet, and once more in his aged ears he hears the voice out of the bush commissioning him for the great work of his life. With that impulse which we all have felt, that brings up at the close of any work the freshened memory of its beginning, this old man sees the burning bush again as he saw it years before, only with deeper understanding of its meaning, and a completer sense of the love of God which it involved. He looks into the past, and all the mercy that had come in between—all the miraculous food, and the wonderful victories, and the parted waters, and the constant guidance, he sees now, were all certainly involved in that first summons of God which he had once obeyed so blindly; and when he wants to give his people the benediction that represents to him the most complete and comprehensive love, it is touching to hear the old man go back and invoke “the good will of him that dwelt in the bush.” 2. There seems a peculiar appropriateness in this reference being put into the mouth of the ancient Lawgiver, for to him even Sinai, with all its glories, cannot have been so impressive and so formative of his character as was the vision granted to him when solitary in the wilderness. It is to be noticed that the characteristic by which God is designated here never occurs except in this one place. It is intended to intensify the conception of greatness, and preciousness, and all-sufficiency of that “good will.” If it is that “of him that dwelt in the bush,” it is sure to be all that a man can need. The words occur in the blessing pronounced on “Joseph”—that is, the two tribes which represented Joseph—in which all the greatest material gifts that could be desired by a pastoral people are first called down upon them, and then the ground of all these is laid in “the good will of him that dwelt in the bush.” “The blessing—let it come on the head of Joseph.” 3. Do not let us forget the place which the text holds in this blessing on the head of Joseph. It is preceded by an invoking of “the precious things of heaven” and “the precious fruits brought forth by the sun” … “the chief things of the ancient mountains,” and “the precious things of the lasting hills,” and “the precious things of the earth and fulness thereof.” They are all heaped together in one great mass for the beloved Joseph. And then, like the golden spire that tops some of those campaniles in Italian cities, and completes their beauty, above them all there is set, as the shining apex of all, “the good will of him that dwelt in the bush.” That is more precious than all other precious things; it is set last because it is to be sought first; set last as in the building of some great structure the top stone is put last of all; set last because it gathers all others into itself, secures that all others shall be ours in the measure in which we need them, and arms us against all possibilities of evil. So the blessing of blessings is the “good will of him that dwelt in the bush.” 4. It is the retrospect of a lifetime. Like another psalmist, Moses says, “Surely goodness and mercy have followed me all the days of my life.” And now at the end of it he blesses Joseph with the blessing of God’s good-will—the good-will he found at the beginning of his public life, the good-will that followed him throughout it, the good-will that was still with him at the end. I. Good-will at the Beginning. II. Good-will all the Way. III. Good-will at the End. I Good-will at the Beginning 1. “The good will of him that dwelt in the bush.” In these words the old man Moses goes back across the long years of his wilderness life, back across Elim and Marah, back across Massah and Meribah, back to that lonely bush in Horeb and the God who once met him there. That God has never left him. That fire has never gone out in his life. In pillar of cloud by day and fire by night, it has gone with him all the way, and now, standing at the end of all, he feels there is no blessing he can wish any man better than this: “May that God be his. May he too be blessed with the good will of him that dwelt in that burning bush.” 2. “Good-will”—the word, perhaps, might bear a little stronger rendering. “Good-will” is somewhat tepid. A man may have a good enough will, and yet no very strong emotion of favour or delight, and may do nothing to carry his good-will into action. But the word that is employed here, and is a common enough one in Scripture, always carries with it a certain intensity and warmth of feeling. It is more than “good-will”; it is more than “favour”; perhaps “delight” would be nearer the meaning. It implies, too, not only the inward sentiment of complacency, but also the active purpose of action in conformity with it, on God’s part. Now it needs few words to show that these two things, which are inseparable, do make the blessing of blessings for every one of us—the delight, the complacency, of God in us, and the active purpose of good in God for us. These are the things that will make a man happy wherever he is. “Thou, Lord, wilt bless the righteous; with favour wilt thou compass him as with a shield.” Thy crystal battlement is round a man, keeping far away from him all manner of real evil, and filling his quiet heart, as he stands erect behind the rampart, with the sense of absolute security. That is one of the blessings that God’s favour or good-will will secure for us. Again, we read: “By thy favour thou hast made my mountain to stand strong.” He who knows himself to be the object of the Divine delight, and who by faith knows himself to be the object of the Divine activity in protection, stands firm, and his purposes will be carried through, because they will be purposes in accordance with the Divine mind, and nothing has power to shake him. So he who grasps the hand of God can say, not because of his grasp, but because of the Hand that he holds, The Lord “is at my right hand; I shall not be greatly moved.” “By thy favour thou hast made our mountain to stand strong.” And again, in another analogous but yet diversified representation, we read: “In thy name shall they rejoice all the day,” “and in thy favour shall our horn be exalted.” That is the emblem, not only of victory, but of joyful confidence; and so he who knows himself to have God for his friend and his helper can go through the world keeping a sunny face, whatever the clouds may be, erect and secure, light of heart and buoyant, holding up his chin above the stormiest waters, and breasting all difficulties and dangers with a confidence far away from presumption, because it is the consequence of the realization of God’s presence. So the good-will of God is the chiefest good.1 [Note: A. Maclaren.] 3. A great writer has said that the last act of a man’s life is the test of it. “Show me thy fruits,” says Browning— Show me thy fruits, this latest act of thine; For in the last is summed the first and all. And no doubt there is truth in the words. The last intelligent act in a man’s life is in a sense the summing up of it, the flower and the fruit of the whole; for then we see coming to their full fruition the forces that have often been unseen till then. Nevertheless, if the last act is the fruit of a man’s life, the first is the root of it. When once I have seen God face to face in some great elemental experience, when once my life has burned with the fire of His presence—then I have something that will never leave me, something that will go with me all the wilderness way; and when I stand at the end of it I shall be ready like Moses to speak of “the good will of him” that met me long ago, and made my life burn with the fire of His presence. (1) First look at the value of such a vision as an influence on a man’s character. What is the glory of character? Is it not strength? A character may have any virtues you like, but if it lacks strength, it stands condemned. It may be brilliant, sacrificing, and that is its crown. But if it lacks strength, what is the use of it all? Who is the man to whom you look for help in the hour of a country’s need? Is it the great orator, the brilliant speaker, the Aaron? No, it is the Moses-like man, the “iron-pillar,” the man who knows his mind and can stick to it amidst opposition, obloquy, and contempt. And, on the other hand, who is the woman to whom you look for true companionship and guidance in the long battle of life? Is it the merely brilliant woman, the gifted talker, the drawing-room ornament? No; it is the woman of fidelity, the woman who can be true and loving when all others go against you. And what is the secret of truth? Truth is just the other side of courage. As Walter Smith says— It needeth courage to be true. Courage, strength—the rock-like foundations of life; these are the first things. You can build on them afterwards anything you like. Without these the superstructure falls to ruin. The glory, then, of character is its strength, but strength comes only from a great experience; and in the highest sense it comes only from the vision of God. We can understand why Moses should have desired that his people might be blessed by God with “the precious things of heaven,” with “the dew and the deep that coucheth beneath,” with “the precious fruits brought forth by the sun” and “the precious things put forth by the moon.” But why should he ask for them such a blessing as this?—the good-will that God manifested when He dwelt in the unquenchable fire. Was not that aspect of Israel’s God an aspect of deepest terror? Did it not reveal Him in those attributes which do not suggest good-will? Nay, my brother, it is not so. It is not only in the calm that the good-will of thy God appears, it is not only in nature’s smile that the blessing of thy Father is seen. The heart of thy Father beats for thee beneath every cloud as well as in every sunbeam; the blessing of thy Father is in thy night as well as in thy day. To thee, as to every man, He comes betimes in a chariot of fire; with thee, as with every man, He dwells betimes in the burning bush of a wilderness; but the fire chariot is His chariot, the burning bush is His dwelling-place. The fire of thy God is love; its burning is the burning of love. The pains of thy life are not accidents; they are gifts from thy Father’s hand. The fire of the burning bush is meant to set fire to thy heart. It is designed to kindle thee into a glow of enthusiasm, to warm thee with the love of humanity. How canst thou be warmed with the love of humanity if thou hast not in thee that fellowship of the Cross which unites soul to soul? The fire that comes to thee from the bush is that which consumes the barrier between thy heart and the heart of thy brother.1 [Note: G. Matheson.] Across the lone floor of the rayless night One came to a door that was barred on light, A glimmer a-gleam through beckoning chink, As with lamp’s still beam, as with taper’s blink, And sore she sued their shrine to win, From mirk and moan of the wild shut in, And fled the fear its menace bore With shrouding of shadow evermore. So out of the dark, as it breathed its dread, Shrill crying, she knocked with a hope ill-sped, For grim and stark that portal wide At her hand’s touch mocked, and her prayer denied. Then sick at heart, that found not grace, She turned her again the night to face, As terror turns on swift-foot foes— And lo! the clear east all climbing rose.2 [Note: Jane Barlow.] (2) Next see the influence which the vision of God leaves on a man’s life-work. It produces continuance, perseverance, tenacity. If the glory of a man’s character is its strength, the glory of his work is its perseverance. You can see that even in common life. Two young men come into the city—one a lad of brilliant parts, but without tenacity; the other a dull, plodding, persevering fellow. What do you find after ten years? Almost always this, that it is the plodding man who wins the race over the man of erratic gifts. And if that be true of common life, how much more of the Christian race! The Christian race is not a hundred yards’ affair. It is a Marathon race, and they alone can win it who run with patience, with endurance, the course that is set before them. One step more, and the race is ended; One word more, and the lesson’s done; One toil more, and a long rest follows At set of sun. Who would fail, for one step withholden? Who would fail, for one word unsaid? Who would fail, for a pause too early? Sound sleep the dead. One step more, and the goal receives us; One word more, and life’s task is done; One toil more, and the Cross is carried And sets the sun.1 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti.] I sometimes think the silences of Scripture more impressive than its speech. There is no record of it here, but I picture Moses going out of a morning to the tent door, after rising from his bed on the desert floor, and contemplating the desert with its sand and stones, with its red hills, and relentless sun, and murmuring people. It was for this he left the pleasant land of Midian. It was for this he “refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter.” Forty years in the wilderness, and at the end the promised land fading away like a mirage in the desert. What kept him up? It was the memory of that “burning bush.” Yes, whenever his spirit grew faint and weary, he went back in memory to that wondrous day. Once again he saw the unconsuming fire. Once again he heard the voice of God quivering through the silence of that lonely desert, and in a moment the feeble knees were strong again, and with a new courage he grasped his shepherd’s staff, and went forth to meet the inevitable tasks and trials of the day.2 [Note: W. M. Mackay.] John Paton of the New Hebrides tells us that one of his most vital memories was the day he left home for Glasgow, where he was to start life in earnest. In these days the journey had to be made on foot, and his father accompanied him for the first few miles of the way. At length came the parting. His father tried to frame the words of a suitable farewell, but emotion choked his utterance, and he could say little more than “Goodbye, John; God bless you!” “And I, too,” says Paton, “I could say little more. I wrung his hand and hurried on.” After he had gone on a little, however, curiosity and love made him turn round to get a last glimpse of his beloved father. He was still standing, “with head uncovered,” where he had left him. He was praying, and Paton says, “I knew he was praying for me.” “That sight,” he adds, “never left me.” In times of temptation, in hours of trial, in the city, in the foreign field, where he often stood face to face with death, that picture, silhouetted in the golden frame of memory, was to him a constant inspiration and a defence. This is “the good will of him that dwelt in the bush”—that it never leaves a man who has truly known it, but returns like a bright visitant in every time of need with reinforcement of faith and courage. II Good-will all the Way The God of the Bush had been with Moses all his life. Let us consider, first, who was the God of the Bush, and, next, what His presence through life does for a man. i. The God of the Bush 1. He was the Eternal God.—When Moses, shrinking from the magnitude of the task laid upon him, wished to know what he should say if the people to whom he went should ask, Who sent you? what is his name? this answer was given him: “I am that I am: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.” I AM—it is the expression of independent self-existence—appropriate to none but Deity, whose consciousness is an eternal present. The thought is overwhelming; yet, overwhelming as it is, it is also steadying and comforting in its influence, and it is appropriate that in that psalm which is called the Psalm of Moses, it is said, “Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art—God.” The fire that did not burn out is the emblem of the Divine nature which does not tend to death because it lives, nor to exhaustion because it energizes, nor to emptiness because it bestows, but after all times is the same; lives by its own energy and is independent. “I am that I have become”—that is what men have to say. “I am that I once was not, and again once shall not be” is what men have to say. “I am that I am” is God’s name. And this eternal, ever-living, self-sufficing, absolute, independent, unwearied, inexhaustible God is the God whose favour is as inexhaustible as Himself, and eternal as His own being. “Therefore the children of men” shall “put their trust under the shadow of thy wings,” and if they have “the good will of him that dwelt in the bush,” they will be able to say, “Because thou livest we shall live also.” 2. He was the Covenant God.—He said, “I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” In His reasoning with the Sadducees of His day, the Saviour drew from these words an argument for the resurrection of the body; for as God is the God not of the dead, but of the living, it must follow that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were still in existence when God so described Himself, and as such would yet have their humanity perfected and glorified. The Sadducees grounded their objection to the resurrection of the body on their rejection of the immortality of the soul, and the Lord answers in this way the underlying heresy of His antagonists, leaving it to His own resurrection to prove the falsity of that which they had built thereon. 3. He was the Delivering God.—He said, “I have surely seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters; for I know their sorrows; and I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians.” Pharaoh had long oppressed them, making their lives bitter with hard bondage, and there seemed to be no Divine protest against his procedure. It looked almost as if God had forgotten the Hebrews, and for generations they were cruelly maltreated. But He was not unmindful of them, and in the fulness of time He sent Moses to be their emancipator. 4. He was the Long-suffering God.—How tenderly He treated Moses on that occasion! From the extreme of rashness the son of Amram had recoiled to that of timidity; and he who, forty years before, attempted to run without being sent, now sought to decline his commission altogether. He was profuse in excuses, such as that he was unworthy of the honour which was offered him; that he was unable to answer the Israelites if they should ask him, “Who sent you?” that, even if he went, the people would not believe him; and that he was not eloquent, but slow of speech and of a slow tongue. These were the pretexts which he put forward in order, if possible, to evade the duty that was laid upon him, but out of them all God nourished him into such strength that he went at length, and became the leader of the Exodus. 5. He was the God of Promise.—When Moses said, “Who am I, that I should go unto Pharaoh?” the voice out of the bush answered, “Certainly I will be with thee.” So, after Jesus had said to His followers, “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you”; and when, perhaps, He saw on their countenances an expression of consternation at the magnitude of the charge which He had given them, He added, “And, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world”—a large promise which only Deity would dare to make, and which, in its likeness to the words addressed to Moses—“Certainly I will be with thee”—indicates that it came from the same Divine source. Not with unjoyful care Nor with unpraiseful prayer We live below; Assailed by pain and sin, We yet are born to win The holy heaven wherein No evils grow. God of the peaceful height, Thy word of promise bright Spans the rough sea; A rainbow fair to view, As broad as bright of hue, And all souls may come through Travelling to Thee.1 [Note: Thomas Toke Lynch.] ii. What the Good-will of God does for us Religion delights both in reminiscence and in anticipation. Being full of the sense of God, it finds a unity in life which no atheistic thought can discover. The identity of God’s eternal being stretches under, and gives consistence to, our fragmentary lives. God’s eternity makes our time coherent. And so it was God in the bush that made it still visible to Moses across the eventful interval. He saw that bush when all the other bushes of Egypt had faded out of sight, because that bush was on fire with God. And as Christianity is the most vivid of all religions, with its personally manifested God, there is a more perfect unity in a Christian life than in any other. It keeps all its parts, and from its consummations looks back with gratitude and love to its beginnings. The crown that it casts before the throne at last is the same that it felt trembling on its brow in the first ecstatic sense of Christ’s forgiveness, and that has been steadily glowing into greater clearness as perfecting love has more and more completely cast out fear. The feet that go up to God into the mountain, at the end, are the same that first put off their shoes beside the burning bush. This is why the Christian, more than other men, not merely dares, but loves, to look back and remember. Let us think, then, of the young Christian and the old Christian—the same man in his first apprehension, and in his ripened knowledge, of Christ. What is the difference between the two? What is the growth which brings one into the other? Everybody claims that the Christian experience ripens and deepens. What is there riper and deeper in the full existence that there was not in the incipient life? 1. As every Christian becomes more and more a Christian, there must be a larger and larger absorption of truth or doctrine into life. We hear all around us nowadays a great impatience with the prominence of dogma—that is, of truth abstractly and definitely stated—in Christianity. And most of those who are thus impatient really mean well. They feel that Christianity, being a thing of personal salvation, ought to show itself in characters and lives. There they are right. But to decry dogma in the interest of character is like despising food as if it interfered with health. Food is not health. The human body is built just so as to turn food into health and strength. And truth is not holiness. The human soul is made to turn, by the subtle chemistry of its digestive experience, truth into goodness. And this is just what the Christian, as he goes on, finds himself doing under God’s grace. Before the young Christian lie the doctrines of his faith—God’s being, God’s care, Christ’s incarnation, Christ’s atonement, immortality. What has the old Christian, with his long experience, done with them? He holds them no longer crudely, as things to be believed merely. He has taken them home into his nature. He has transmuted them into forms of life. God’s being appears now filling his life with reverence. God’s care clothes every act and thought of his with gratitude. Christ’s incarnation is the inspiration of his new, dear love of all humanity. The atonement is the power of his all-pervading and deep-rooted faith. And immortality! He no longer regards as a doctrine that which has become a great constant flood of life, ever resting over and illuminating the far-off hill-tops—now grown so near, so real—of the eternal life. The young dogmatist boasts of his dogmas. The old saint lives his life. Both are natural in their places and times, as are the unripe and the ripened fruit. Her prayer-book had repose, One word her heart sufficed, Scent of a hidden rose: “Christ!” To creeds her soul was shut, For her confession of The Christian faith was but Love. 2. In the second place, as a consequence of this feature of growth, there will come a growing variety in Christian character as Christians grow older. We should expect a uniformity and resemblance in younger Christians, and a diversity in older ones, because life is more various than doctrine. Each young Christian has his doctrine, crude and dogmatic still. The maturer Christians have not merely worked those doctrines into life, but each has worked them into his own sort of life. The truth is the same for all; the life it makes is infinite. The more deeply it has been digested, the more strongly the individuality comes out. The truth that God gives us is like the wheat that a bounteous country sends into the city. It is all the same wheat; but men go and buy it and eat it, and this same identical wheat is turned into different sorts of force in different men. It is turned into bartering force in one, and thinking force in another, and singing force in another, and governing force in another. It is manifold as soon as it passes into men. Gladstone, Newman, and Rainy—perhaps the three most remarkable men of their day of those who really applied their minds to the matters of Christian faith—were all in agreement not only as to personal experience of religion, but also—if we except certain matters about the Church (and these are not in the Creed)—as to the fundamental doctrines of Christianity. But the intellectual attitude of each of these minds to these doctrines was distinct. Gladstone’s mind was essentially and constitutionally orthodox, and he was never critical regarding ecclesiastical dogma. Newman’s was essentially and constitutionally sceptical, and the Church’s authoritative system was to him less the native home of his mind than its only refuge. Rainy’s mind was well content to lodge in Catholic forms of doctrine, but he neither denied the element of imperfection and difficulty in such forms nor was disturbed by it, for this only made him more deeply feel “how great a thing it is to believe in God.”1 [Note: P. Carnegie Simpson, The Life of Principal Rainy, i. 287. 3. And as individuality is developed with the deepening spiritual life, so the willingness to recognize and welcome individual differences of thought and feeling and action increases too as Christians grow riper. Seeing ourselves made more ourselves as our faith grows richer, we are glad to see other men made more themselves too. This is true charity. It is your undeveloped, crude, commonplace Christian who is uncharitable. He expects other Christians to be like himself. He has never felt that Divine, deep movement of Christ in his own soul, telling him that from all eternity there has been one certain place for him to fill, one certain thing for him to be, and summoning him to come and fill his place and be himself. I can well understand that the seeds in a sower’s basket might be very uncharitable to one brother-seed that had dropped out of the basket and taken root and grown to be a stalk of corn. It is too unlike them. It is too original and singular. But let them all fall together and take root, and then, with life in all of them, they will not compare their ears and tassels, each being so busy in growing to the best that its separate bit of earth can bring it to. The true Christian charity is that which life teaches. It is the tried and cultured souls that understand each other’s trials and cultures, though they may be wholly different from their own. And no sight is more beautiful than this grace growing in a body of believers.1 [Note: Phillips Brooks.] 4. And here comes in another noble characteristic of the growing spiritual experience—its ever-increasing independence. This is the best personal result of charity. There is an independence that is arrogant and defiant, and there is a dependence that is weak and fawning. Both come of narrowness. Both are the signs of immature and meagre life. One man arms himself against his brethren because he holds them to be wholly wrong and himself wholly right. Another man yields to his brethren because he fears that he is wrong and they are right. Here is a man of mellow strength who, deeply conscious of the work the Lord has done in him, made sure of it by long feeling the very pressures of God’s hand kneading the truth into his nature, stands by that work, will let no man cavil it away from his tenacious consciousness, is so perfectly dependent upon Christ that he can hang upon no fellow-man, respects himself by the same reverence for the individuality of the Divine life that makes him also respect his brethren. Not long ago I read this in what many hold to be our ablest and most thoughtful journal: “It is a law, which in the present condition of human nature holds good, that strength of conviction is always in. the inverse ratio of the tolerant spirit.” If that is so, then the present condition of human nature is certainly very much depraved. But if human nature can ever be rescued by a personal salvation, if mankind can ever become possessed by the Spirit of God, lifting the mass by filling the individuals each with his own strong manifestation of its power, then the world may still see some maturer type of Christianity, in which new ages of positive faith may still be filled with the broadest sympathy, and men may tolerate their brethren without enfeebling themselves. Such ages may God hasten.2 [Note: Ibid.] Berry reached Chicago on Saturday, 20th November, and was entertained at a reception at the house of Professor W. Douglas Mackenzie. On the following day he preached in the morning in the Union Park Congregational Church, and in the evening in the Second Presbyterian Church. On the Monday morning he addressed what was nominally a gathering of the ministers of the city in the auditorium of the Y.M.C.A. The hall was crowded to excess by an influential and representative audience composed of the leaders of the churches of the city, about a thousand people being present at an early hour. A little slip which he made in the course of his speech caused much good-natured amusement, and at the same time revealed the orator’s readiness of wit and presence of mind. The Rev. Hugh Price Hughes and he had gone through England together advocating this federation of which he was speaking, and that without surrendering any of their theological convictions. “In fact, we had none to surrender,” said Berry grandly. The house came down in a roar of laughter that pealed out again and again. When at last it subsided Berry said quietly, “That is one of the things which, as Punch would say, one had rather have expressed differently. Don’t misunderstand me. There are no two men in England so full of theology as Price Hughes and myself—from the sole of our feet to the crown of our heads we are brimful. What I intended to convey was that there is nothing of these theological convictions that we are called upon to surrender so as to work upon a common platform and in a common cause.”1 [Note: J. S. Drummond, Charles A. Berry, 164. 5. Another sign of the growth of Christian character is to be found in what may be called the growing transfiguration of duty. To every young Christian the new service of Christ comes largely with the look of a multitude of commandments. They throng around his life, each one demanding to be obeyed. He welcomes them joyously. He takes up his tasks with glad hands still, because they are his Master’s tasks. But as he grows older in grace, is there no difference? Tell me, you who have been long the servants of our dear and gracious Lord, has there come in your long Christian life no change in the whole aspect of your service? Has not your more and more intimate sympathy with Him let you in behind many and many a duty which once seemed dark and hard, and allowed you to see the light of His loving intention burning there? Have you not grown into a clearer and deeper understanding of what Jesus meant by those sweet and wonderful words, “Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you”? In every opening Christian life there is something Mosaic, something Hebrew. The order of the Testaments is to a certain degree repeated in the experience of every believer. At last, in the fulness of time, the New Testament has perfectly come. The law is given first, and then grace and truth come by Jesus Christ. It is no sudden transformation. It cannot be, because it cannot come otherwise than by the gradual teaching of life. But when it has wholly come, then, full of the complete consciousness of Christ, duty is done not simply because Christ has commanded it and we love Him, but because Christ has filled us with Himself, transformed our standards, and recreated our affections; and we love the duty too, seeing its essential beauty as He sees it out of whose nature it proceeds. Duty was renamed Delight, and love was ready for the winds Of Liberty that shake the trees upon The uplands of God’s will.1 [Note: Anna Bunston, The Porch of Paradise, 24. 6. But, after all, the profoundest and most reliable sign of the maturing spiritual life is deepening personal intimacy with Him who is the Christian’s life, the Lord Jesus Christ. All comes to that at last. Christianity begins with many motives. It all fastens itself at last upon one motive, which does not exclude, but is large enough to comprehend, all that is good in all the rest. “That I may know him.” Those are St. Paul’s words. How constantly we come back to his large, rounded life, as the picture of what the Christian is and becomes. Set before you the young man at Damascus and the old man at Rome, and compare the two. “That I may know him.” We have all seen, if it has been our privilege to watch true Christians growing old, the special and absorbing way with which the personal Christ—their knowledge of Him, and His knowledge of them—comes to be all their religion. Christ, to the Christian growing older, seems to be what the sun is to the developing day, which it lightens from the morning to the evening. When the sun is in the zenith in the broad noonday, men do their various works by his light; but they do not so often look up to him. It is the sunlight that they glory in, flooding a thousand tasks with clearness, making a million things beautiful. But as the world rolls into the evening, it is the sun itself at sunset that men gather to look at and admire and love. So to the earlier and middle stages of a Christian life, Christ is the revealer of duty and of truth; and duty and truth become clear and dear in His light. The young Christian glories in the way in which, under his Master’s power, he can work for humanity, for truth, for his nation, for society, for his family. But as the Christian life ripens into evening, it is not on these things, though they are not forgotten, that the soul dwells most. It is on the Lord Himself. It is that He is the soul’s, and the soul is His. It is His wondrousness, His dearness, and His truth that fill the life as it presses closer to where He stands—as the setting earth rolls on towards the sun. Now, if the personal presence of Christ becomes clearer to us as we grow riper in the Christian life, there are certain effects which it will produce. They are the noble characteristics of the maturest Christians. (1) It will make us more unworldly. To be always living with One whose kingdom is not of this world, to be constantly conversant, as we hold intercourse with Him, with the thought that there are other worlds also over which He presides, and with which we have something to do through our union with Him—how this breaks up and scatters the littleness of life, the bondage of the seen. How it lets us out, free to trace the course of every action, the career of every thought, as it seeks vast untold issues in other spheres. (2) And, if we get this, then something else must come, namely, more hopefulness. St. Paul has a noble verse which says that experience worketh hope. It must, if it is full of Christ. The soul that is getting deeper and deeper into the certain knowledge of Him must be learning that it has no right to fear; that, however hopeless things look, there can be nothing but success for every good cause in the hand of Christ. It is a noble process for a man’s life that gradually changes the cold dogma that “truth is strong and must prevail” into a warm, enthusiastic certainty that “my Christ must conquer.” It is terrible to see a man calling himself a Christian who despairs more of the world the longer he lives in it. It shows that he is letting the world’s darkness come between him and his Lord’s light. It shows that he is not near enough to Christ. (3) And with the growing hopefulness there comes a growing courage. How timid we are at first. It seems as if just to get this soul of ours saved were all that we could dare to try; but as the Saviour’s strength becomes more manifest to us, as we know Him more, we see that He is able to do much more than that. We begin to aspire to have a little part in the great conquest of the world in which He is engaged. And so the Soldier of the Cross at last is out in the very thick of the battle, striking at all his Master’s enemies in the perfect assurance of his Master’s strength. (4) And then, as the crown of all these, there comes to the maturing Christian, out of his constant companionship with Christ, that true and perfect poise of soul which grows more and more beautiful as we grow tired, one after another, of the fantastic and one-sided types of character which the world admires, and which seem to us very attractive at first. Expectant without impatience; patient without stagnation; waiting, but always ready to advance; loving to advance, but always ready to wait; full of confidence, but never proud; full of certainty, but never arrogant; serene, but enthusiastic; rich as a great land is rich in the peace that comes to it from the government of a great, wise, trusty governor—this is the life whose whole power is summed up in one word—Faith. “Here is the patience and faith of the saints.” This is the life to which men come who, through long years, “follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth.”1 [Note: Phillips Brooks.] A state Where all is loveliness, and power, and love; Where all sublimest qualities of mind, Not infinite, are limited alone By the all-surrounding godhood; and where nought But what createth glory and delight To creature and Creator is; where all Enjoy entire dominion o’er themselves, Acts, feelings, thoughts, conditions, qualities, Spirit and soul and mind.2 [Note: P. J. Bailey, Festus.] III Good-will at the End In the mouth of Moses the words, “The good will of him that dwelt in the bush” had, in this blessing of the tribe of Joseph just before he died, a far richer significance than they could have had when, after having seen the great sight and heard the great words, he turned away from the desert of Midian, and took his journey into Egypt. He went on there in faith, but now he could look back upon a rich experience. Between the bush and the plains of Moab lay forty years of the fullest realization of all that Jehovah had promised, and so he commended Joseph’s children to One whom he knew to be faithful to His word. Had he not been to Egypt and brought out his people into freedom? Had he not enjoyed closest fellowship with God as a man talketh with his friend? Had he not been directed by Him in every difficulty and provided for by Him in every strait? So now he tells them that whom he had proved, they might trust. The Lord who had with him stood the strain of the Exodus, and the test of the wilderness wanderings, and was with him still, would not fail them in their time of need. Is not this true of our Lord yet? Whom has He failed? When has He broken His word? Who dares to say that he has gone to Him and been cast out? Is it not the unvarying testimony of His people in all generations that they never found Him wanting? While there is so much that is parallel to the gospel in this conference between Jehovah and Moses at Midian, there is in one point a marked difference between the two. The Jehovah of the bush said, “Draw not nigh hither,” but the Jesus of the Cross says, “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” That is just the great distinction between the old dispensation and the new, and it was rendered necessary by the circumstances of the times. In those ancient days the world was not ready to receive the gospel invitation. There needed yet a long education before men would listen to it either with patience or appreciation, and so the truth, while preserved among them in the figurative system of Judaism, needed also to be protected from them by the restrictions which hedged that system round. These restrictions were like the horn framework of the lantern through which the light shone, no doubt, only dimly, but by which, also, it was kept from being extinguished by the rude blasts of idolatry and immorality. Now, however, they have served their purpose and are no longer needed. The veil of the temple has been rent asunder; the temple itself has disappeared; and, instead of the “Draw not nigh,” we may hear the “Come unto me”; for in Him “we have boldness and access with confidence by the faith of him.” 1. The old man refers to the days of his youth. He is no longer old; he is young. With his shepherd’s staff, tending his sheep below the bare mountain of Horeb, he sees what he had never seen before—a thorn-tree in flame. The old man places his one hand upon the first object of his life, and his other hand he places upon the last, and between the two his whole history is comprised—from Sinai, through Egypt, through the Red Sea, through the desert to the Jordan. It is all there. His whole life is in his grasp, and he is carrying it with him up the mountain and into eternity. 2. The beginning and the end of life are brought together. The man, one hundred and twenty years old, burdened with the weight of days, his eye bright as ever, his natural force of character but little impaired, his hair white, the sign at once of age and of a vast experience, leaning upon the staff that he carried for support, giving the words of affectionate blessing that come so well from the aged. Here he parts from those with whom he had journeyed so long. It is the last glimpse that we have of the man. Here he enters into the dark portal. That is one picture. But the other picture is that of an active, careless young man, who had broken loose from the restraint of Egyptian society, wandering about as a Bedouin Arab. How great a contrast between those two! And yet those two are the same man. What a wonderful thing is this continuance of personality. 3. Observe lastly the deep mark made on an old man by his religious experience. Moses goes back to the hour when, in the loneliness of the desert, he first realized the presence and the reality of God; when the spiritual world first became to him a real world, and with deep feeling he felt that he stood upon holy ground. In that hour he was first called by God summoning him to an earnest life. It was that meeting with God that coloured his whole history; and now when strength is failing, and death is near, he goes back to it, and he wishes for those whom he leaves that the blessing which came to him in that experience may come to them also—“The good will of him that dwelt in the bush.” On what is it that our eye will rest most lovingly as it glances along the line of our closing life? It will not be on the hours of folly or sin by which our life has been stained. It will rather be on the fitful moments when those things have been real to us which to most men are unreal—when, as through an opening in a tangled forest, we have looked upwards and seen the blue sky above us, and have shaped our course by the glimpse that we have had. God was near us then. We heard His voice then; we felt His presence in our souls and we were assured of His good-will. We chose then the better part, and we trusted ourselves to Him as our Father and as our Saviour. And now, when strength is failing and the shades of eventide are falling thick and fast, and the unknown future is before us, we know that we have His good-will.1 [Note: J. Cameron Lees.] Never, my heart, wilt thou grow old! My hair is white, my blood runs cold, And one by one my powers depart, But youth sits smiling in my heart. Downhill the path of age! oh, no; Up, up with patient steps I go; I watch the skies fast brightening there, I breathe a sweeter, purer air. Beside my road small tasks spring up, Though but to hand the cooling cup, Speak the true word of hearty cheer, Tell the lone soul that God is near. Beat on, my heart, and grow not old! And when thy pulses all are told, Let me, though working, loving still, Kneel as I meet my Father’s will.2 [Note: Louisa Jane Hall.] Literature Brooks (P.), The Candle of the Lord, 39. Mackay (W. M.), Bible Types of Modern Men, 1. Maclaren (A.), Expositions: Deuteronomy–1 Samuel, 61. Matheson (G.), Moments on the Mount, 256. Smellie (A.), In the Secret Place, 183. Taylor (W. M.), Contrary Winds, 200. Christian World Pulpit, xlvii. 139 (Lees). God Who is our Home The eternal God is thy dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms.—Deuteronomy 33:27. These words, while almost the last, are also among the most memorable, in the psalm so fitly described as “the blessing, wherewith Moses the man of God blessed the children of Israel before his death.” They express one of the sublimest truths of faith—a truth Moses himself had realized in the court of Pharaoh, on the peak of Sinai, in the hurry of flight, and in the calm and glory of the Divine Face. He had finished his work, the law was given, the wilderness traversed, the goodly land in sight, and now he had but to be led by the hand of God to the top of Nebo, and thence into great eternity. The voice he knew and loved so well had said to him, “Get thee up into this mountain of Abarim unto Mount Nebo, and die in the mount whither thou goest up, and be gathered unto thy people.” That was a very sweet and soothing command to the weary soul of the old man. His had been a long day; and now, travel-sick, toil-worn, in its mellow autumn twilight, he was to set— As sets the morning star, which goes not down Behind the darkened west, nor hides obscured Among the tempests of the sky, but melts away Into the light of heaven. But before he goes to the point of evanishment into the everlasting light, he pauses to bless the people; and as he stands on the border-land between time and eternity, feeling his soul in the hands of God, he utters this truth of highest, holiest import, “The eternal God is thy dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms.” The two lines of the text are not identical. The second line is not a mere repetition of the first. It is the usual manner of Hebrew poetry to run in couplets, but the second line of the couplet usually carries the thought a stage further than the first, or gives it a closer application. The thought of the first line is that God is the dwelling-place of His people, their home—with all that the word “home” carries or can carry to our hearts and minds. Then the second line arrests a possible doubt. Is there no danger that we may slip away from the Divine shelter? We need not fear; “underneath are the everlasting arms.” I The Eternal God is thy Dwelling-place The children of Israel had need to be reminded of the eternal refuge and support when they were about to lose the presence and guidance of the man who had been their leader and companion in their toilsome and troubled march through the wilderness for forty years. Moses was leaving them, but leaving them with God. They were homeless, and their national future was uncertain and hidden; but to-morrow, as to-day, from generation to generation, they would be in the presence and care of the Eternal, in the arms of the everlasting power and peace. i. The Eternal God “I feel that if I can believe in God I believe in all that I need,” wrote an eminent Presbyterian divine in the record of his private reflections. To believe truly and fully in God may be all that we really need to inspire and sustain our hearts, but this most necessary thing is the most difficult thing in the world. It is the hardest and rarest attainment of life. Oh blessed soul! that has reached and realized through its own experience this ancient and sublime trust: “The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.” “The eternal God” is the God of old, literally aforetime. The word denotes what is ancient rather than what is eternal. It is often used of the Mosaic age, or other distant periods of Israel’s past (Psalms 44:1; Psalms 74:2; Psalms 74:12; Isaiah 51:9; Micah 7:20), and even of a former period of a single lifetime (Job 29:2). It is used also of mountains (Deuteronomy 33:15), of the heavens (Psalms 68:33). Besides the present text it is used of God in Habakkuk 1:12; Psalms 55:19 (where the R.V. is “he that abideth of old”). 1. What does a man mean when he says, “I believe in God”? “God” is a most elastic term, capable of narrowing to suit the meanest capacity, of expanding to fill the largest. It seems to have a sense intelligible to the simplest mind, while to the profoundest it becomes the symbol of thoughts too high to be spoken, too immense to be comprehended. But though it may signify very different things to different minds, what it signifies does not thereby become unreal. It stands as the symbol of the best and highest Being man can conceive, his idea of the Being rising with his thought of the good and the high. 2. The notions of the men who first called the Being they worshipped God do not bind the latest; the word may remain while its contents are transfigured, as it were changed from one degree of glory to another. But while later ages may outgrow the ideas earlier ages expressed by the term “God,” they do not outgrow the idea which the term represents. The symbol widens to their thought as the firmament has widened to the telescope, telling, as it widens, secrets before undreamed of, showing such infinite reaches of space, such multitudes and varieties of star clusters, of worlds beyond worlds, as to awe the imagination in its loftiest mood. 3. When we speak of God we speak of Him as a personal Being, a free and conscious Will. If God be impersonal, He can have no heart tender with love, no will moved by swift-footed mercy, regulated by the large righteousness that loves order and deals with the individual through his relations to the whole, no gracious ends for the universe, or energies active in it that may cheer the despondent and help him in his sad struggle with ill. I have only that which the poor have equally with the rich; which the lonely have equally with the man of many friends. To me this whole strange world is homely, because in the heart of it there is a home; to me this cruel world is kindly, because higher than the heavens there is something more human than humanity. If a man must not fight for this, may he fight for anything? I would fight for my friend, but if I lost my friend I should still be there. I would fight for my country, but if I lost my country I should still exist. But if what that devil dreams were true, I should not be—I should burst like a bubble and be gone; I could not live in that imbecile universe. Shall I not fight for my own existence?1 [Note: G. K. Chesterton, The Ball and the Cross.] What are the elements essential to a person? They are two—consciousness and will; or the knowledge by a being that he is, that he knows, that he acts and has reasons for his action; and the power of free or spontaneous, or, simply, rational choice. Where these are, there is a person; where they are not, there is only a thing. Personality is simply the power of ordered and reasonable conduct, whether it be in ruling a world or in regulating a life.2 [Note: A. M. Fairbairn.] Personality expresses itself, not by eternal processes, but by individual words and deeds. If there be personality in God at all, it means that He who is behind me, and beneath me, and above me, who besets me everywhere, who is in all nature—the source of forces, the measure of law, the orderer of events—can also, can, as Person with person, stand face to face with me on the platform of His own world to speak and to be answered. But can He do it worthily? Can He do it so as to complete, without fatally perplexing, the manifestation of Himself? I point for answer to Jesus Christ.3 [Note: Life of Principal Rainy, ii. 134. 4. Let it be noted that the text expresses no transcendental or speculative doctrine of Moses, but simply a fact of his experience. The eternal God had been his refuge. He had known better than most men the extremes of wealth and poverty, power and weakness, fulness and want. He had known solitude amid the gaieties and glories of the then most splendid court on earth. He had enjoyed Divine society on the sultry and solitary slopes of Horeb. He knew the best that Pharaoh could do for him, the worst that he could do against him, and had found both to be infinitely little. He had known, in all its anxious and bitter phases, what it was to be the loved and hated, trusted and suspected, praised and blamed, leader of a mutinous and murmuring and unstable people. The realities and semblances, the dreams and the disappointments, the actualities and the illusions of life he had alike experienced; and the grand truth which had amid all given stability, strength, and comfort was, “The eternal God my refuge, and underneath the everlasting arms.” 5. A great poet, whose words are equally dear to men of letters and to men of science, tells us “the eternal womanliness draws us ever on”; that is, the love, the beauty, the sweet and potent gentleness personified in ideal woman is a ceaseless inspiration to man, wakes him to admiration, wins him to love. But there is one term that embraces everlasting womanliness and infinitely more, the term Eternal Father, or in its simple and beautiful paraphrase, “God is love.” When we think of the eternal God, then we think of the living Source of good, active at all moments in all lives. He is righteousness, but also love; He is truth, but grace as well. His character determines His ends, His ends justify His ways. His acts become Him, are not accommodated to our deserts, but to His own character and designs. He does not deal with us after our sins, but according to His mercies and in harmony with His own ends. No man is to God an isolated individual, but a unit within a mighty whole, loved as a person, but handled as one whose being was deemed necessary to complete the universe, and judged through the ends of Him who means the universe to be complete. And the man who believes in God, believes in One who loved him from eternity, whose love called him into being, designed and prepared a place for him in the system His wisdom ordained and His will maintains. He knows that, amid all the shadows and sorrows and shame of life, underneath him and around are the everlasting arms. The two sublimest affirmations concerning the Deity in the inspired Word are these—“God is Light,” “God is Love.” It is the latter of these two which, apparently, had so taken hold of the mind and the heart of Browning that he never wearies of reiterating the statement of the fact in numerous connexions and in various forms. In “Paracelsus” he declares unhesitatingly: God! Thou art love! I build my faith on that. And presently, praying for one who has erred, and for himself, he says: Save him, dear God; it will be like Thee: bathe him In light and life! Thou art not made like us; We should be wroth in such a case; but Thou Forgivest—so, forgive these passionate thoughts Which come unsought and will not pass away! I know Thee, who hast kept my path, and made Light for me in the darkness, tempering sorrow So that it reached me like a solemn joy; It were too strange that I should doubt thy love.1 [Note: J. Flew, Studies in Browning, 23. ii. A Dwelling-place Our need of the eternal God is but too manifest. Weak and mortal, man feels himself a most helpless being. Birth and death are stronger than he; of the one he is the product, of the other the victim. He comes out of a past eternity, in which he had no conscious being; he must go into an eternal future where he is to be—he knows not what. This little conscious present is all he has, all that sense can discover or intellect disclose. Mind can see, can feel, the lonely sadness of this little life—can look out into the infinities of space and time, realize their boundlessness and its own minute personality, till it feels like a small self-conscious star twinkling solitary in an immense expanse. In moments when the thought of these infinities, conceived only as such, has been strong in me, I have felt like one standing, and reeling while he stood, on a narrow pillar reared high in space, looking up to a starless sky, out on a boundless immensity, down into a bottomless abyss, till in the despair of utter loneliness the soul has cried, “Oh for the face of the eternal God above, and the everlasting arms below.”2 [Note: A. M. Fairbairn.] The dearest things in this fair world must change; Thy senses hurry on to sure decay; Thy strength will fail, the pain seem no more strange, While love more feebly cheers the misty way. What then remains above the task of living? Is there no crown where that rude cross hath pressed? Yes, God remains, His own high glory giving To light thy lonely path, to make it blest. Yea, God remains, though suns are daily dying,— A gracious God, who marks the sparrow’s fall; He listens while thine aching heart is sighing; He hears and answers when His children call; His love shall fill the void when death assails,— The one, eternal God, who never fails.3 [Note: William Ordway Partridge.] 1. What man needs is a permanent consciousness of the eternal God as a daily presence, the very atmosphere in which the soul lives, moves, and has its being. To this, two movements are necessary, one from God to man, one from man to God. There’s heaven above, and night by night I look right through its gorgeous roof; No suns and moons though e’er so bright Avail to stop me; splendour-proof I keep the broods of stars aloof: For I intend to get to God, For ’tis to God I speed so fast, For in God’s breast, my own abode, Those shoals of dazzling glory passed, I lay my spirit down at last.1 [Note: Browning, Johannes Agricola in Meditation.] (1) God’s movement is one in fact and essence, though manifold in form and manifestation—Love. There is truth Divine and universal in that saying of the Psalmist—“Thy gentleness hath made me great.” All man’s greatness comes from God’s gentleness. Were He wroth, our spirits would fail before Him; but He remains merciful, and we endure. “Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him.” His heart, boundless as space, infinite as eternity, beats with mercy; and the eternal God around us means simply, Man is enveloped in eternal love. Two little girls were playing with their dolls, and singing— Safe in the arms of Jesus, Safe on His gentle breast, There, by His love o’ershaded, Sweetly my soul shall rest. Mother was busy writing, only stopping to listen to the little ones’ talk: “Sister, how do you know you are safe?” asked Nellie, the younger of the two. “Because I am holding Jesus, with both my hands, tight,” replied her sister. “That’s not safe,” said the other. “Suppose Satan came along and cut your two hands off!” Little sister looked troubled, dropped dolly, and thought. Suddenly her face shone with joy. “Oh, I forgot! Jesus is holding me, and Satan can’t cut off His hands; so I am safe.”1 [Note: W. Armstrong.] The child, that to its mother clings, Lies not all safely on her breast, Till she her arm around it flings, Sweetly caressing and caressed: Ev’n so, my God, Thy mighty arms, Not my poor Faith, shield me from harms. I bless Thy Name for every grace, Wherewith Thou dost enrich Thine own; Yea, I would seek each day to trace Myself more like my Master grown: Yet, O my God, Thy mighty arms, Not my faint Love, shield me from harms.2 [Note: A. B. Grosart, Songs of the Day and Night, 12. (2) But, on the other hand, let us not forget that the movement from man to God is as needful as the movement from God to man. The one, like the other, is a movement of love; yet with a difference. Divine pity moves down to all men; but only from filial hearts does human trust move up to God. The Fatherhood is universal; but only where the sonship is consciously realized can the spirit cry, “Abba, Father!” His loving-kindness falls on us like incense by night. The Divine Father is not the same to all devout men; He is to some more of a daily Presence, more of a permanent Friend; and this larger sense of God rises from a larger need and conscious use of Him in the soul. Vacancies made in the heart are often only rooms in it swept and beautified for God; and His presence at once, glorifies the chamber thus prepared, sheds a mellow light back upon the past, and splendid hopes forward upon the future. Were it possible to reduce a pious soul to a consciousness of only two beings—first and pre-eminently of God, next and feebly of self—then it were possible to endow that soul with the supremest happiness possible to a creature; and the more nearly any man approaches to that consciousness the more blessed will he be. Of a truth, he is happy who can say, “As for me, I shall behold thy face in righteousness; I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness.”3 [Note: A. M. Fairbairn.] 2. God is a dwelling-place (1) to the nation, and (2) to the individual. (1) The words were spoken, as all the greatest utterances of the Old Testament were spoken, to a people. The hope of the Israelite was a national hope. His fathers had known God and done their work and passed to their rest. He in his turn was allowed to know God and do his share of work and be buried with his fathers, leaving children and children’s children to carry the work still further forward till at last it should reach its glorious consummation. The nation lived on and expanded and developed, blessed when it feared the Lord, punished when it forgot Him. Thousands and tens of thousands of its sons and daughters passed, but the nation still lived on, and learned to look for its perfect glory in the future, when the king Messiah should reign in righteousness over the whole earth, sitting on David’s throne in Jerusalem. This was the ideal of the great poets and prophets of the Jewish people. It was a national and not an individual hope. In times of critical strain and trial to civilization and the State, amid great political and social troubles and changes, let us not fail to remember and realize that the eternal God is our refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms. It is not our decrees and institutions that are upholding the world, but the everlasting laws—another name for the everlasting arms. Our refuge in times of distress is not parliaments and governments and compromising politicians, but the eternal God. Our rulers and governors may help or hinder progress, but they do not decide the supreme and final issue of things. There is another Providence in affairs than the human providence. This world is, after all, God’s world. Let us not, therefore, lose courage and hope because in the complications of disintegration and change we do not see what is to follow. 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. Jerusalem destroyed is better than Jerusalem saved, and the fall of the Roman Empire better for the moral health of the peoples of the earth than its continuance. The children of Israel had no other, and therefore if God were not their dwelling-place, they were houseless. Pilgrims of the weary foot, they found no city to dwell in; at eventide they pitched their tents, but they struck them again in the morning; the trumpet sounded and they were up and away; if they were in a comfortable valley for one day, yet that relentless trumpet bade them resume their wearisome march through the wilderness in the morning; and perhaps they thought they lingered longest where an encampment was least desirable. Nevertheless they always had a dwelling-place in their God. If I might use such a description without seeming to be fanciful, I would say that the great cloudy canopy which covered them all day long from the heat of the sun was their roof-tree, and that the blazing pillar which protected them by night was their family fireside.1 [Note: C. H. Spurgeon.] (2) But if the national reference of these words is their primary reference, yet we are justified in giving them a further and more personal reference in the light of the Christian revelation. 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 larger and more varied his experience of the world and life, and the more deeply he feels and thinks, the more does he realize the assurance of the Divine protection and care to be the most pressing and imperious of all his practical needs. Of all substitutes for God—wealth, comfort, amusement, music, beauty, learning, friendship, love, philanthropy—he must say, at least in all his most searching and critical experiences, “Miserable comforters are ye all!” To state the fundamental facts of human life is, indeed, to affirm religion. In the generalized experience of mankind lies the real basis of religion. And all religion must somehow have its beginning and its end in God. Religion is God; God is religion. The ancient words interpret and give immortal expression to a universal and indestructible need of humanity. They were true before they were written, and they would be true if they had not been written in the sacred book of religion. Centuries have passed away and generations have come and gone, but they still lay upon us their solemn spell, and we continue to use them, as we do all the great words of the Bible, because they find us, divine our hearts for us, and utter what in us is but faintly felt and dimly thought with the clear and certain sound of complete conviction, and with the energy of a faith that quickens and strengthens our wavering trusts and hopes.1 [Note: J. Hunter.] The infinities of space and time are like boundless deserts, silent, void, till filled with a personal God and Father; but once He lives in and through them, they become warm, vital, throbbing, like hearts pulsing with tides of infinite emotion rushing towards us and breaking into the music of multitudinous laughter and tears. The sky above is no longer space gleaming with stars; but filling it, round the stars, round and through the world, in and about each individual man, is God, daily touching us, daily loving us, giving us life and being in Himself. The Eternities behind and before us are no longer dark, empty, or, at best, a grim procession of births and deaths; they are a living, loving God, from whom man came, to whom he returns. And that Eternal God makes all things secure, restful, blessed. No moment, either here or hereafter, can ever be without God; therefore in none can the good man be otherwise than happy. What is beyond death is not beyond God. He is there as here; and so, whether we live or die, the eternal God is our refuge, and underneath us are the everlasting arms.2 [Note: A. M. Fairbairn.] O Name, all other names above, What art Thou not to me, Now I have learned to trust Thy love And cast my care on Thee! What is our being but a cry, A restless longing still, Which Thou alone canst satisfy, Alone Thy fulness fill! Thrice blessèd be the holy souls That lead the way to Thee, That burn upon the martyr-rolls And lists of prophecy. And sweet it is to tread the ground O’er which their faith hath trod; But sweeter far, when Thou art found, The soul’s own sense of God! The thought of Thee all sorrow calms; Our anxious burdens fall; His crosses turn to triumph-palms, Who finds in God his all.1 [Note: Frederick Lucian Hosmer.] II Underneath are the Everlasting Arms God surrounds His children on all sides: they dwell in Him. The passage before us shows that the Lord is above them, for we read, “There is none like unto the God of Jeshurun, who rideth upon the heaven in thy help, and in his excellency on the sky.” Assuredly He is around them, for “the eternal God is thy refuge”; and He is before them, for “He shall thrust out the enemy from before thee; and shall say, Destroy them.” Here, according to the text, the Lord is also under His saints, for “underneath are the everlasting arms.” “Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations,” and by Thee we are everywhere surrounded as the earth by the atmosphere. Within thy circling power I stand; On every side I find thy hand; Awake, asleep, at home, abroad, I am surrounded still with God. 1. The meaning is that God is our support, and our support just when we begin to sink. We want support when we are sinking, and the arms being “underneath” implies that this support is given just when we are going down. At certain seasons the Christian sinks very low in humiliation. He has a deep sense of his own sin; he is humbled before God, till he scarce knows how to lift up his face and pray, because he appears, in his own sight, so abject, so mean, so base, so worthless. Well, let him remember that when he is at his worst “underneath are the everlasting arms.” Sin may sink him ever so low, but the great atonement is still under all. Here is a text which proves it: “He is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by him.” You may have gone very low, but you can never have gone so low as “the uttermost.” Here is another: “All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men.” Have you plunged into nearly every kind of sin; have you gone into “all manner of blasphemy”? Even if you have, it may be forgiven, so that this promise goes underneath you. The love of God, the power of the blood, and the prevalence of the intercession, are deeper down than sin with all its hell-born vileness can ever sink the sinner, while breath is in his nostrils. I dare approach that Heaven Which has not bade a living thing despair, Which needs no code to keep its grace from stain, But bids the vilest worm that turns on it Desist and be forgiven.1 [Note: Browning, A Blot in the ’Scutchcon.] “Underneath are the everlasting arms.” That means Personality. That means an all-enfolding, all-embracing love. That means power, the power of the right arm of the Most High. That means redemption, an arm that is not shortened that it cannot save; not “shortened” by any material limitations or physical obstacles. It is not shortened that it cannot save. It can reach down through all defects of being, through all taints of blood, through all grossness of the flesh, through all warpings of the will, and corruptions of the mind and heart; it can get within, to the mysterious soul and core of all character, the springs of all conduct—“underneath are the everlasting arms.”2 [Note: C. S. Horne.] 2. The word “underneath” has never been used in the Bible before, and it is never used again. It is of its own order; a word big with meaning and suggestiveness. It is the index to a whole system of thought, philosophical and theological. No solitary word, perhaps, could imply more than this. It opens to us the attitude of wonder and reverent faith in which the deepest minds have pondered what we call to-day the phenomenal; the things that are seen, that strike upon the senses of touch and taste, sight and sound. Such deep minds, brooding over phenomena, have never been satisfied with merely registering those properties and qualities of the material world which they can test and know. They have divided and subdivided matter till they have reduced it to its tiniest possible elements, and then have been conscious that their world and thought end in a note of interrogation after all. It is all summed up, let us say, in this word “underneath.” It has been said that “the great contribution of science to the sum of modern belief has been that underneath phenomena is that which is everlasting.” During “the wonderful century” the men of science cleaved the rocks, penetrated the skies, scanned the hidden depths, looked into the secrets of nature, brought to light strange knowledge, and set much wisdom in order; and the strangest and most wonderful discovery of all is that the temporal rests on the eternal, that every commonest thing we see, and every commonest thing we handle, has beneath it the everlasting which becomes clear to patient thinking. I heard my father say he understood it was A building, people built as soon as earth was made Almost, because they might forget (they were afraid) Earth did not make itself, but came of Somebody. They laboured that their work might last, and show thereby He stays, while we and earth, and all things come and go. Come whence? Go whither? That, when come and gone, we know Perhaps, but not while earth and all things need our best Attention: we must wait and die to know the rest. Ask, if that’s true, what use in setting up the pile? To make one fear and hope: remind us, all the while We come and go, outside there’s Somebody that stays.1 [Note: Browning, Fifine at the Fair.] 3. When do we most need to know that underneath are the everlasting arms? (1) When we have reached a state of special joy and exaltation in our religious life.—Sometimes God takes His servants and puts them on the pinnacle of the temple. Satan does it sometimes: God does it too—puts His servants up on the very pinnacle, where they are so full of joy that they scarce know how to contain themselves, whether in the body or out of the body they cannot tell. Well, now, suppose they should fall! for it is so easy for a man, when full of ecstasy and ravishment, to make a false step and slip. They are safe enough, as safe as though they were in the Valley of Humiliation, for underneath are the arms of God. Suffering has been long acknowledged as an indispensable factor in the building up of souls; the place of love and happiness is less secure. It is at least possible that there are stunted souls who cannot converse fully with the Divine Father till they have had ampler draughts from the breasts of natural joy.1 [Note: Anna Bunston, The Porch of Paradise, xi.] It’s O my heart, my heart, To be out in the sun and sing! To sing and shout in the fields about, In the balm and the blossoming. Sing loud, O bird in the tree; O bird, sing loud in the sky, And honey-bees blacken the clover seas: There are none of you glad as I. The leaves laugh low in the wind, Laugh low with the wind at play; And the odorous call of the flowers all Entices my soul away! For O but the world is fair, is fair: And O but the world is sweet! I will out in the gold of the blossoming mould, And sit at the Master’s feet. And the love my heart would speak, I would fold in the lily’s rim, That the lips of the blossom, more pure and meek, May offer it up to Him. Then sing in the hedgerow green, O thrush, O skylark, sing in the blue; Sing loud, sing clear, that the King may hear, And my soul shall sing with you!2 [Note: Ina Donna Coolbrith.] (2) When we are specially depressed and in fear.—There are times when the burdens of life’s unintelligible secret rest upon us with a weight almost too heavy to be borne. There are so many things which it seems to us infinitely important that we should know, but about which we yet know almost nothing. Mystery circumscribes our little lives as with a wall of adamant; we can hardly advance one single step in thought without dashing ourselves against it; we know not what we are came, we know not whither we came, we know not whither we are going, and none can tell us. We cry aloud for surer knowledge, and while to the forward and presumptuous there comes back no answer except the echo of their own voice, even for humble and faithful questioners there is only the whisper, “What I do thou knowest not now; but thou shalt know hereafter.” There is silence and there is darkness. Our vaunted science cannot break that silence and cannot dissipate that gloom. The eternal God is our refuge from the unsearchable mystery of life. We cannot escape from mystery. It grows with our growing knowledge. What a world this is in which we live, and how awful in some of its aspects is our life in it! Does it not require something more than our little systems and schemes to keep the mind and soul in strength and peace in the midst of this troubled world and troubled life? Where else can we find the sense of shelter and security than where Moses found it long ago? “The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.” Let us yield nothing to our fears. That the Unknown and the Unknowable may be trusted is the message of religion. Our discipleship to Jesus Christ inspires this lofty confidence in the beneficence of the universe, in a universe essentially good and making for goodness—a confidence which is the anticipation of much that modern knowledge is now slowly declaring. In the companionship and fellowship of the Son of God we know that where His trust was in Gethsemane and on Calvary ours can ever rest. “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” Often as a child I have trembled to cross at night the courtyard of a lonely country mill. Every little object that moonlight or starlight revealed in other than natural proportions was a source of fear—seemed to hide shapes terrible to childish flesh and blood. But if my little hand was laid in the large hand of my father, I could cross the courtyard as gleefully and carelessly at night as at noonday. So, with our spirits held in the hands of the eternal God, who is above, around, and before, the dark places of Life, Death, and the great for Ever become light; and, trusting where we cannot see, our steps are firm, when otherwise they would falter and fail.1 [Note: A. M. Fairbairn.] I suppose some brethren have neither much elevation nor much depression. I could almost wish to share their peaceful life, for I am much tossed up and down, and although my joy is greater than that of most men, my depression of spirit is such as few can have any idea of. This week has been in some respects the crowning week of my life, but it closed with a horror of great darkness, of which I will say no more than this—I bless God that at my worst, underneath me I found the everlasting arms.2 [Note: C. H. Spurgeon.] Till last night I never knew what depression was. I had no illness; one or two things had happened to grieve me, but still they were comparatively slight; but I never felt so thoroughly downcast about myself and all the world, or so bitter and serious a struggle within me. It tore me through and through, yet it was a great mercy and a special answer to prayer; for having previously felt my own indifference and want of real sense of danger, I had entreated to be bruised and brought low to feel the burthen, that I might appreciate what deliverance might be, and it was granted; consequently this morning I felt such as I had never felt before at the whole service and communion. I never till then had an adequate notion of the power and beauty of our Liturgy, and, on the other hand, of its inferiority to the Word of God. I gained some faint idea of what the Bible was; I felt the glorious depth of the declaration, “Now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept,” a passage which I had merely understood before.3 [Note: F. J. A. Hort, Life and Letters, i. 36] Dark and sad the hours have been In the valley and shade of Death, Where no light mine eyes have seen But the far, cold stars of faith. And my heart with haunting fears Almost sank into despair; Yet the harvest of my years Mostly has been gathered there. (3) When sorrow has come in upon us like a flood.—By a strange and stern law of compensation, which equalizes the distribution of pain, where the material loss is the less felt the heart’s loss is often the greater. No hunger, no cold, no nakedness enters this house by reason of the new record in the registry of death. Externally, maternally, all is as before. But there is the more room and scope for the agony of bereavement; there is the less possibility of assuagement by the good offices of others. Gifts can do nothing here to help; and words, we know, are often less kind than silence. The stranger cannot intermeddle; no anxious effort we can make can mitigate the bitterness. A king once planted in his garden a beautiful rose-tree, and bade his gardener so tend and train it as to make its flowers the richest and loveliest possible. The tree grew and flourished, and year by year blushed into blossoms of manifold beauty. But it sent out so many shoots, formed so many buds, that its very fertility threatened to injure the quality of its flowers. So the gardener removed the shoots, pruned away the buds, till the tree seemed to bleed all over in loss and pain; but the wounds healed, the sap and strength ran up to those buds that were spared, and when the season of ripeness was come, the roses were lovelier and sweeter than ever—most meet of all in the garden to be carried into the palace of the great king, to fill its galleries and chambers with delicious and grateful fragrance. God gives us love. Something to love He lends us; but, when love is grown To ripeness, that on which it throve Falls off, and love is left alone. But it is left alone that it may be the one perfect bond between the human and the Divine, the fragrant sacrifice that rejoices God, the glorious beauty that makes man a source and seat of joy for ever. If all my years were summer, could I know What my Lord means by His “made white as snow”? If all my days were sunny, could I say, “In His fair land He wipes all tears away”? If I were never weary could I keep Close to my heart, “He gives His lovèd sleep”? Were no graves mine, might I not come to deem The life eternal but a baseless dream? My winter, yea, my tears, my weariness, Even my graves may be His way to bless; I call them ills, yet that can surely be Nothing but good that shows my Lord to me. (4) In the fear of death.—When, at last, each of us is laid on the bed of death, and the moment has come when we must enter into the presence of God and see our souls, with every mask of hypocrisy, conscious or unconscious, torn away, see our souls as they are and as God sees them; when we are sinking naked and possessionless into the grave; when we feel the mist in our eyes, the fog in our throats, and the voices of our friends no longer reach us, or if they do we have no strength even to sigh back an answer or to return the pressure of the hand—what can help us then? Alone we must enter that dark valley—no troops of friends can accompany us there; alone must our souls seem to sink downwards as through unfathomable seas of gloom. Which of us can tell how soon that awful hour may be awaiting us? And when it comes, how will every one of the things which we have desired on earth seem to shrink into utter insignificance in comparison with “the one thing needful,” which, perhaps, we may have altogether neglected. When the solid earth itself seems to be crumbling under our feet, when we lie helpless in the grasp of that inexorable force, there is one thing which gives to the Christian not only hope, but “peace which passeth all understanding”; it is when we feel that for us death can have no sting, and the grave no victory, because the eternal God is our refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms. Mr. B., an eager business man in middle life, declared that, till he found a way of escape, to go to bed was to go to hell. Just as he was about to lose consciousness there had been almost always presented to his mind the idea and sensation of himself falling through boundless space. The perspiration stood on his face as he avowed that the phrase “bottomless pit” was to him overwhelming in its suggestiveness. This torture he had begun to experience while he was yet a schoolboy. At the school prayers on Sunday night the boys had always sung Ken’s evening hymn. The lines— Teach me to live that I may dread The grave as little as my bed had seemed terrible in their irony to one who dreaded nothing so much as his bed. Relief had not come to him until he was well on in manhood. Strolling one evening in a country churchyard, his eyes were arrested by the words on a gravestone “Underneath are the Everlasting Arms,” and in a flash of inspiration he saw his safety. That very night, as the solid platform of the earth was falling away from him, “he rested on the promise”—for so he described his mental attitude—and he affirmed that since that time he had always at his command a sense of physical comfort and safety upon which he could sleep as on a pillow.1 [Note: The Spectator, July 2, 1910. The embers of the day are red Beyond the murky hill. The kitchen smokes: the bed In the darkling house is spread: The great sky darkens overhead, And the great woods are shrill. So far have I been led, Lord, by Thy will: So far I have followed, Lord, and wondered still. The breeze from the embalmèd land Blows sudden toward the shore, And claps my cottage door. I hear the signal, Lord—I understand. The night at Thy command Comes. I will eat and sleep and will not question more.2 [Note: R. L. Stevenson, Songs of Travel.] Literature Armstrong (W.), Five-Minute Sermons to Children, 46. Darlow (T. H.), The Upward Calling, 154. Fairbairn (A. M.), The City of God, 190. Fairbairn (R. B.), College Sermons, 302. Horan (F. S.), A Call to Seamen, 131. Hunter (J.), De Profundis Clamavi, 310. Hutton (J. A.), The Fear of Things, 1. Parks (L.), The Winning of the Soul, 201. Robinson (J. A.), Unity in Christ, 123, 137. Robinson (J. A.), Holy Ground, 7, 15. Smellie (A.), In the Secret Place, 345. Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xi. (1865), No. 624; xiv. (1868), No. 803; xxiv. (1878), No. 1413. Wardell (R. J.), Studies in Homiletics, 94. Christian Age, xxx. 66 (Farrar). Christian World Pulpit, xxix. 209 (Farrar); Leviticus 4 (Horne); lxviii. 401 (Hunter). Churchman’s Pulpit: The Old and New Year, ii. 412 (Hunter); Sermons to the Young, xvi. 288 (Ross); Harvest Thanksgiving, 31 (Fairbairn). The Death and Burial of Moses 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 the valley in the land of Moab over against Beth-peor: but no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.—Deuteronomy 34:5-6. The more carefully we study the Old Testament, the more we shall be convinced that it contains a development of truth, not merely by spoken revelations, but through events and incidents divinely arranged, and made the subjects of thought to those ancient believers, under the teaching of God’s Spirit. These incidents are planted like seeds in the popular heart, and grow up slowly into leaf and flower in recognized doctrines. This was Christ’s own method of instruction in His miracles and parables, and we may expect to find it in the Divine history throughout. No one can close the Old Testament and open the New without seeing that, during the interval, immense progress had been made in the unfolding of religious truth. The expectation of a Redeemer and a redemption had become clear and concentrated, and the belief in an eternal life, and in the resurrection, was held by many. There is, we believe, no satisfactory way of accounting for this but by the work of God’s own Spirit, in the heart of thoughtful men, using for His instrument the revelation which had already been given. Let us take the account of the death and burial of Moses, and seek to show how it was fitted to be such a source of fruitful reflection to the Old Testament Church. The text is in three parts— I. The death of Moses was at God’s command: “So Moses died according to the word of the Lord.” II. His death took place before Israel entered the land of promise: “Moses died there in the land of Moab.” III. He was buried by God and his sepulchre is unknown: “He buried him in the valley, but no man knoweth of his sepulchre.” I Death at the Command of God “So Moses the servant of the Lord died there in the land of Moab, according to the word of the Lord.” The Hebrew is “according to the mouth of Jehovah”; the meaning is “according to the command of Jehovah.” The same expression is translated in the case of Aaron’s death “at the commandment of the Lord” (Numbers 33:38). Mouth in the sense of command is a common Hebrew idiom; nevertheless the Jews understood it here literally, and from the paraphrase in the Targum arose the Rabbinic legend that Moses died by the kiss of God. i. The Common Destiny We live to die. When or where, it is vain to inquire; but that we must pass through the gates of death, no room is left for us to doubt. It is the common lot. Death is life’s shadow. It is not coeval with life, but it is coexistent with it. Wherever you find the one in this world of ours, you find the other. There is not a tree that grows, not a bird that sings, not a flower that blooms, not a child that laughs, not a man that toils, not anything that lives, but is destined to die. So Moses, the servant of the Lord died. There is no pause in the succession. “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever,”—that is, throughout these successive generations of men. It abides, but they are gone. The mount from whose flaming summit the voice of God came forth still looks down upon the depths around it, and the dreary wilderness beyond it; but Moses, the tribes, and the tents of Israel have disappeared. The Sea of Tiberias still lies embedded, bright and blue, amid the hills of Galilee; but the men who crowded its shores to listen to the voice of One who spake as never man spake are nowhere to be found—all are “gathered to their fathers.” Leaves, leaves, dead leaves of autumn everywhere! They reddened all the floor of Fontainebleau And rustled under every heedless foot. They choked the gutters of the streets and filled The carts of scavengers. They danced before My steps, an eerie ghostly dance, and touched My cheek and wailed about my ears. “Brief life Is theirs,” said one who, passing, deemed he knew My thought. “Brief life?” I captured one and read A long, long story on its rusty face, An age-long tale of life upon the tree Alternating with death upon the ground. I saw the forest dropping wintry tears On leaves slow lapsing back to formlessness. I saw the little sun, the little frost Of verdant life, the fall, the death again. The myriads and myriads of leaves That make the forest mould cried out to me: “Infinity, eternity we taste Who have not breath enough to die, but what Of man?” The roadway echoed to my steps: “Infinity, eternity, but what Of man?” And when I had attained the town Each foot that hurried through the falling night Beat oat the words: “To-day the little sun The little frost of life, but yesterday We were not, and to-morrow shall not be— Infinity, eternity, but what Of man?”1 [Note: Anna Bunston, The Porch of Paradise, 3. In the old times, before the settlements in the great north-west, when the fur companies would establish here and there a great trading post and send out their trappers to all parts of the country, trails were made in every direction, but they all ended at the post. North, south, east, west, for hundreds of miles in every direction, along large rivers, following small streams into the mountains, crossing lakes, searching through deep canyons, the trails would wind, but you could begin a hundred miles away, on any one of them, and however devious its course might be, it would end at the trader’s camp. The grave is the end of the trail of this world’s life. A man may start where he will. He may climb the heights of wealth or traverse the deep canyons of poverty. He may follow up the mountains of hard struggle or paddle his canoe on a stream of idleness. But when you get to the end of the trail, it is all the same. It is an open grave. Whether he brings many pelts there or few, however great or small have been the spoils of his life chase is of no account, for the grave is too narrow to hold any of them. We brought nothing with us into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. God help us that we may learn over again the old, old lesson that we learn so often and forget so soon—that we are with rapid feet following the trail to the grave. As we go over the trail but once, we never know how near the end is. It may be a long way off. It may be just over the hill.1 [Note: L. A. Banks.] ii. At the Word of God All life in the universe, our existence now and for ever, depends upon the Divine will. No one ever died a moment sooner than God designed, or lived a moment longer. We are entirely in His hands. He gave us birth. He willed our being. He placed us here, according to His wisdom, as was best for us. He takes us hence when it is best for us. We talk of accidental deaths, and premature graves. The language has really no meaning; it expresses notions, not truths. What are chances to us are purposes with God. Our course, from first to last, is ordered by Him. We not only come but go at His bidding. He gives life when He pleases, and when He chooses He takes it away. “All the days of my appointed time will I wait, till my change come.” From out what Silent Land I came, on Earth to stand And learn life’s little art, Is not in me to say: I know I did not stray,— Was sent; to come, my part. And down what Silent Shore Beyond yon little door I pass, I cannot tell; I know I shall not stray, Nor ever lose the way,— Am sent; and all is well.2 [Note: William Channing Gannett.] There is an inscription on the tombstone of a little child in one of our country churchyards, as follows:— “Who plucked that flower?” cried the gardener, as he walked through the garden. His fellow-servant answered, “The Master” and the gardener held his peace. “I was dumb, I opened not my mouth; because thou didst it.”1 [Note: J. Davies.] iii. The Death to die Moses came to his death with courage and confidence. The reason for this is an open secret. Many years before, he had made the supreme choice of his life. He had chosen rather to suffer affliction with the people of God than to enjoy for a season the pleasures of sin. And all the years of his experience since had but confirmed that great choice. He had given himself over to be guided by the Spirit of God. He had communed with God in joy and in sorrow, in hours of glorious victory and amid the gloom of stinging defeat; he had come to trust God with all his heart and soul; with every drop of his blood he was sure that God meant him good. Now, though his strength was unabated and his eye not dim and he must have had many natural desires to complete the work on which he had laboured so long, and to see his people safely housed in the Promised Land, he went without a word of complaint or of doubt to lay his body in the grave. My own feeling now is that everything which has hitherto happened to me, and been done by me, whether well or ill, has been fitting me to take greater fortune more prudently, and to do better work more thoroughly. And just when I seem to be coming out of school—very sorry to have been such a foolish boy, yet having taken a prize or two, expecting now to enter upon some more serious business than cricket, I am dismissed by the Master I hoped to serve, with a—“That’s all I want of you, sir.”2 [Note: A. C. Benson, Ruskin: A Study in Personality, 156. I was sitting in my study one Saturday evening, when a message came to me that one of the godliest among the shepherds who tended their flocks upon our Highland hills was dying, and wanted to see his minister. Without loss of time I crossed the wide heath to his comfortable little cottage. When I entered the low room I found the old shepherd propped up with pillows and breathing with such difficulty that it was apparent he was near his end. As soon as the door was closed he turned his grey eyes upon me and said, in a voice shaken with emotion: “Minister, I’m dying, and—I’m afraid!” I began at once to repeat the strongest promises with which God’s Word furnishes us, but in the midst of them he stopped me. “I ken them a’,” he said mournfully; “I ken them a’, but somehow, they dinna gie me comfort.” I took up the well-worn Bible which lay on his bed and turned to the twenty-third Psalm. I slowly repeated the verse, “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me.” “You have been a shepherd all your life, and you have watched the heavy shadows pass over the valleys and over the hills, hiding for a little while all the light of the sun. Did these shadows ever frighten you?” He looked at me with curious eyes. I continued, “The shadow of death is over you, and it hides for a little the Sun of Righteousness, which shines all the same behind it; but it’s only a shadow. Remember, that is what the Psalmist calls it—a shadow that will pass; and when it has passed, you will see the everlasting hills in their unclouded glory!” The old shepherd covered his face with his trembling hands, and for a few minutes maintained an unbroken silence; then, turning upon me a face now bright with an almost supernatural radiance, he exclaimed, lifting his hands reverently to heaven: “Ay, ay! I see it a’ now. Death is only a shadow, with Christ behind it—a shadow that will pass.” When death is coming near, When thy heart shrinks in fear And thy limbs fail, Then raise thy hands and pray To Him who smooths thy way Through the dark vale. Seest thou the eastern dawn, Hear’st thou in the red morn The angel’s song? Oh, lift thy drooping head, Thou who in gloom and dread Hast lain so long. Death comes to set thee free; Oh, meet him cheerily As thy true friend, And all thy fears shall cease, And in eternal peace Thy penance end.1 [Note: De la Motte Fouqué.] iv. Death less than Life 1. Scripture speaks much of life and little of the manner of dying. Men imagine that the hour of death is the greatest test of faith in God, and thus they are not satisfied unless they know that in the last hours of a great and good man that faith shone out with unusual splendour. The Bible speaks of the battle of life as the real test of faith; and having told us that its heroes fought that battle faithfully, it does not stay to tell us whether their faith flashed out brightly in the end. Men think of death as a dark and awful mystery to be undergone with all possible heroism, and thus they inquire eagerly after death-bed experiences, and delight to dwell on triumphant departures. The Bible speaks of the death of the good as of the entrance into the blessed presence of Him whom they had served here; and having told us that His servants served Him, having spoken of their Divine heroism in living and doing, it seldom describes the close of their course, leaving us to feel that God took care of them then. Thus we have no long description of the death of Moses. The book, indeed, does record his last words to the people, but in them he speaks not of his own feelings, but of God; he does not attract their attention to his experience, but shows them how God had guided every step of their way. And thus, in speaking of a man whom it describes as one of the greatest prophets of all time, God’s Book says with sublime simplicity, “So Moses died, and the Lord buried him.” Jewish, Mussulman, and Christian traditions crowd in to fill up the blank. “Amidst the tears of the people, the women beating their breasts and the children giving way to uncontrolled wailing, he withdrew. At a certain point in his ascent he made a sign to the weeping multitude to advance no farther, taking with him only the elders, the high priest Eliezer, and the general Joshua. At the top of the mountain he dismissed the elders, and then, as he was embracing Eliezer and Joshua, and still speaking to them, a cloud suddenly stood over him, and he vanished in a deep valley.” So spoke the tradition as preserved in the language, here unusually pathetic, of Josephus. Other wilder stories told of the Divine kiss which drew forth his expiring spirit; others of the “Ascension of Moses” amidst the contention of good and evil spirits over his body. The Mussulmans, regardless of the actual scene of his death, have raised to him a tomb on the western side of the Jordan, frequented by thousands of Mussulman devotees. But the silence of the sacred narrative refuses to be broken. “In” that strange land, “the land of Moab, Moses the servant of the Lord died, according to the word of the Lord.” “He buried him in ‘a ravine’ in the land of Moab, over against the idol temple of Peor.” Apart from his countrymen, honoured by no funeral obsequies, visited by no grateful pilgrimages, “no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.”1 [Note: A. P. Stanley, History of the Jewish Church, i. 178. The Bible is the book of life. Its pages teem with biography; they contain but scant memorials of death. The only death they describe at length is that of Him who in dying slew death. The very minuteness of the description there shows how unique and all-important it was. Men make more of death than of life as a gauge of character. A few pious sentences spoken then will go far to efface the memory of years of inconsistency. God makes most of life.2 [Note: F. B. Meyer.] “Are saints Enskied,” I asked, “so linked with living men?” “The brightest lily of the Lenten woods,” He said “arrayed in livery of the sun, Depends upon a buried bulb; the bulb Depends on mediating leaves that bring The breath of Heaven to the dust of earth; And so the Church in glory, rest and war Has triune life or none. Can clouds exist Without the sun or sea? Would light and sound Survive if air were dead? All things that are Interdepend eternally. Herein Consists the awfulness of human life, That no man knows the confines of a sin, The generations of a virtuous deed; And hence the obligation to entreat All men with tender charity, since al. Are victims if offenders too; and oft The fractures of the wicked are derived From flaws of saints. And since one perfect Life Can leaven all, perhaps one sinning soul Can stay the bliss of all the Church of God.”3 [Note: Anna Bunston, The Porch of Paradise, 32. 2. But was Moses’ life so profound a failure? The history before us gives us the answer. The purpose that Moses might not carry out was to be accomplished by Joshua, his successor. His life, therefore, had not failed; the hope he had thought to realize was yet to be realized in another way—for his labour had inspired a man who had caught his spirit, and was to finish the work he had begun. In that knowledge Moses might rest. There is a spiritual connexion between men. One race is united by spiritual ties of influence to the succeeding race; age is joined by bonds of influence to age. Man is this bond for ever to future generations. He dies, and the spirit of his life is caught by his successors—so even here he “fulfils his course.” Therefore no life is ever lost, no holy purpose ever really fails. The life of Stephen, the first martyr, seemed like a hurried dream; he had just entered God’s army when in the first conflict he died. Men might say “he died before his time.” The Church made great lamentation over him. Its strongest soldier had gone. His life seemed vain. But his spirit entered the soul of St. Paul! So with the martyrs of the first ages. Their spirit lives yet. The mantles of departing prophets fall on other men, and clothe these with power to accomplish the work they had to leave unfinished. To labour and not to see the end of our labours; to sow and not to reap; to be removed from this earthly scene before our work has been appreciated, and when it will be carried on not by ourselves, but by others—is a law so common in the highest characters of history, that none can be said to be altogether exempt from its operation. It is true in intellectual matters as well as in spiritual; and one of the finest applications of any passage in the Mosaic history is that first made by Cowley, and enlarged by Lord Macaulay, to the great English philosopher, who Did on the very border stand Of the blessed Promised Land; And from the mountain’s top of his exalted wit Saw it himself, and show’d us it; But life did never to one man allow Time to discover worlds and conquer too.1 [Note: A. P. Stanley.] Each generation, however much it may seem to be absorbed in its own interests, works, not really for itself, but for a generation to come. That sense of incompleteness, of disappointment, which so often hangs like a cloud over the best work—work which has conscience, enthusiasm, and duty in it—is not final, it is only the veil which hides the land of promise from the gaze of the tired worker. Moses had to lay down his life’s work and forgo his own reward just as it seemed within his grasp, but yet he found his vindication in the greatness of a people whom, more than anyone, he had striven to make. He had to let go all the vital interests with which his life was bound up, as it were before his time, and yet time proved that he was right. When we have done, as Moses did, what we have power and wisdom for, God, in the order of the world, takes the work out of our hands and gives it to another who will do the rest better than we could do it. If we lived on, the work would then be unfinished. It is by our death that it comes to a finish, in the hands of another. A porcelain cup passes, in a great manufactory, from hand to hand till it is completed. A young hand, seeing the cup taken from him without the handle, might think, “Alas, why may I not finish? My work is spoiled.” He does not know that another man in the next room will put on the handle better than Hebrews 1 [Note: S. A. Brooke.] We are to die; but even I perceive ’Tis not a very hard thing so to die. My cousin of the pale-blue tearful eyes, Poor Cesca, suffers more from one day’s life With the stern husband; Tisbe’s heart goes forth Each evening after that wild son of hers, To track his thoughtless footstep through the streets: How easy for them both to die like this! I am not sure that I could live as they.2 [Note: Browning, A Soul’s Tragedy.] II Death in the Desert Moses’ time had come. But he was none the less with God. And when he felt the time draw near, he went to the top of a high mountain whence he could see the land of Israel’s heritage. Many have wished—it is especially a prophet’s wish—to be alone in death, alone in the silence of nature, high up, nearer the stars, where one may be able, in the absence of the noise of earth, to realize the nearness of the invisible Spirit. So he was carried to the top of Pisgah, and left in solitude on that peak of Pisgah which is called Nebo; and from thence he saw the country promised to his fathers. It is a mighty landscape, and there is scarcely a point in it which did not afterwards become a memory in the history of the Jewish people, scarcely a name which has not some significance in the spiritual history of mankind. There, to the north, lay Gilead and the mountain plateau divided by the ford of Jabbok, rocky plains, hill pastures, forests of oak and pine; and beyond, Gennesaret and Merom, all the wild land on either side of Jordan, crowned by the eternal snows of Hermon; and Lebanon spread its cedars far away; and towards the Great Sea, he saw the cornfields of Esdraelon, the mount of Carmel, Gilboa, and the broken highlands where Ephraim was soon to couch like a lion in his den. Nearer at hand, more to the west, was the plain of Judah, and nearer still the dry limestone rocks of Judah, where, years afterwards, Israel’s Jerusalem uprose, even more than Rome, the centre of the imagination of the world. And below, right at his feet, lay the Dead Sea, in its crater-cup of hills, and Jericho in its pastures, and the mountain pass that led to the hill that men afterwards called Zion. This was the land which the Lord had promised to the fathers, for which he had been yearning, and to which all his work had been directed all these years; and now he is to die, as the text puts it, with such pathetic emphasis, “there in Moab,” and to have no part in the fair inheritance. To Moses, so far as we know, the charm of that view—pronounced by the few modern travellers who have seen it to be unequalled of its kind—lay in the assurance that this was the land promised to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, and to their seed, the inheritance—with all its varied features of rock and pasture, and forest and desert—for the sake of which he had borne so many years of toil and danger, in the midst of which the fortunes of his people would be unfolded worthily of that great beginning. To us, as we place ourselves by his side, the view swells into colossal proportions as we think how the proud city of palm-trees is to fall before the hosts of Israel; how the spear of Joshua is to be planted on height after height of those hostile mountains; what series of events, wonderful beyond any that had been witnessed in Egypt or in Sinai, would in after ages be enacted on the narrow crest of Bethlehem, in the deep basin of the Galilean lake, beneath the walls of “Jebus which is Jerusalem.”1 [Note: A. P. Stanley.] As Moses looked upon the scene that met his eyes, he thought, “This is the promised land. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob saw it before me. They were but pilgrims in it. I have worked for it; I have come to the edge of it; I may not enter into it.” And as he lay there in the deep silence, his first thought was, no doubt, regret. “Why, having done all I could have done, may I not see the end? Would that I could go with my people and share their glory and their conquest! Does God do right to take me away now? I have borne the burden and heat of the day; why should I not taste of the grapes of Eshcol?” It is the lot of all epoch-making men, of all great constructive and reforming geniuses, whether in the Church or in the world, 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. But if, on the one hand, that seems hard, on the other hand there is the compensation of “the vision of the future and all the wonder that shall be” which is granted many a time to the faithful worker ere he closes his eyes. But it is not the fate of epoch-making and great men only; it is the law for our little lives. If these are worth anything, they are constructed on a scale too large to bring out all their results here and now. It is easy for a man to secure immediate consequences of an earthly kind; easy enough for him to make certain that he shall have the fruit of his toil. But quick returns mean small profits; and an unfinished life that succeeds in nothing may be far better than a completed one that has realised all its shabby purposes and accomplished all its petty desires.2 [Note: A. Maclaren.] That low man seeks a little thing to do, Sees it and does it: This high man, with a great thing to pursue, Dies ere he knows it. That low man goes on adding one to one, His hundred’s soon hit: This high man, aiming at a million, Misses an unit. That, has the world here—should he need the next, Let the world mind him! This, throws himself on God, and unperplexed Seeking shall find Him.1 [Note: Browning, A Grammarian’s Funeral.] What is the meaning, then, of unfulfilled purposes in life? It is evident that Moses felt this as one of the saddest aspects of his departure. The earnest prayer that the Divine sentence should be recalled, and that he should lead his people into their own land, shows how keenly this thought pressed upon him. The answer to that prayer—the permission to behold the land he might not enter—shows this still more powerfully, for it exhibits God’s sympathy with the sorrow that filled his heart. And, indeed, if we reflect on his circumstances at that time, we shall find that they must all have brought before him the mysterious fact that the grand purpose of his life was never to be realized. One thought had given meaning to his history for eighty years—the thought of guiding the nation into the land promised to his forefathers. That must have cheered him through many a desolate day in the wilderness, and it must have helped him to be calm when the people’s murmurings grew loud. The difficulties of their progress, and the apparent disappointment of their hopes would react on him in new power. For difficulties have two effects on man. On the man of feeble purpose they act with a withering might that renders him undecided and desponding; on the man of strong faith and powerful purpose they act like the rocks that, by limiting the space of a torrent, give it greater force—they nerve him to stronger effort, and brace him for more strenuous toil; and every difficulty must thus have inspired the one aim of Moses with fuller energy. His feelings towards the people, too, would exert on that purpose a higher and a holier power. Their welfare had become part of his life. His sympathy with their weakness, their ignorance, their sorrow, must have kindled into burning ardour the desire to bring them to their home. But on the very verge of its accomplishment—on the very border of the land, with its hills in sight—that purpose must be surrendered and he must die. What was the meaning of his death at that time? The question might have but a feeble interest for us if it were not that the facts of life force it upon us daily. Is it not a mystery by which we all are baffled—a mystery which in some hours we strive to confront because of its deep sadness, and which at other times seems to darken before us through our useless questionings—that the greatest and holiest purposes men cherish seem never to be attained? The common phrase that speaks of men “dying before their time” is the confession of a riddle which cannot be solved. It met the old heathen who, without the light of Christianity, said, in his simplicity, “Whom the gods love die young.” And he has thought but little who has not asked in perplexity, Why should such men die, as if the greatness of their aim had shattered the chain of their earthly life, while those who have no God-given purpose so often live on till a useless old age creeps over them? The truest servants of the Lord come to life’s end with one common confession that they have attained but a fragment of their purposes. The Christian Church repeats from age to age the story that its most earnest men are too frequently the first to die; and no Christian ever awoke to the deep conviction that life was not to be spent in selfishness, but in Christ like effort for man, without discovering that his aim, in this world, is never fulfilled; and that is the world-wide mystery. His father had several friends, wont to spend an evening hour or two in his study, to which John was now admitted on equal terms. Amongst these was a young advocate, a tall and energetic man, full of vitality, brimming over with good spirits and laughter. He went into the country on some business connected with his profession, slept at a little inn in damp sheets, took a chill, and died of rapid consumption, disappearing from his accustomed place with a suddenness which startled John as if a miracle had taken place before his eyes. The man had been the very embodiment of overflowing health. There had been no natural mounting up to full maturity and gradual decadence to death. In the bloom and vigour of early manhood death smote him and laid him low. That old men should die seemed plain enough; that weakly children should fade from life was grievous, but not mysterious; but that, after all the preparation which youth must undergo to fit the man for life—that, so fitted and equipped, on the very threshold of usefulness and experience, death might leap from an ambuscade and lay him low—that pulled him up from all easy-going acceptance of what to-day and to-morrow had to offer, since the third day might find him face to face with the same dread experience.1 [Note: A. M. Stoddart, John Stuart Blackie, i. 22. A famous historian died, leaving incomplete his one master-work to which he had given all his strength and all his love. He was not afraid of death. He set his affairs in order with great thoughtfulness. He said good-bye to his friends with unbroken courage. But one thing broke his heart. He had not finished his book. The long years spent in gathering knowledge and in solving problems; the patient labour to which he had sacrificed pleasures, and riches, and bodily health; they were never to bear their expected fruit. The bitterness of the thought was too much for his fortitude, and his dying cry was a cry of regret: “My book, my unfinished book!” The English statesman, Pitt, who gave his life to the task of bringing his country through the great struggle with Napoleon, died of the task at forty-seven years of age. His closing moments were made dark and sad by the thought that he must leave the work undone. They brought to him the news of Napoleon’s last victory. He turned his face to the wall, murmuring,” My country! how I leave my country!” “Go home content, the evening falls, Day’s tired sinews are unbent; No more the thrush or linnet calls, The twilight fades, go home content.” “Father, the field is but half-turned, And yet the spring is well-nigh spent.” “My son, the hour of rest is earned, The day’s work done, go home content.” 1. The first answer is that the desire of Moses was unfulfilled because of his sin. One of the great truths which the old law and ordinances given by Moses were intended to burn in on the conscience of the Jew, and through him on the conscience of the world, was that indissoluble connexion between evil done and evil suffered, which reaches its highest exemplification in the death which is the wages of sin. And just as some men that have invented instruments for capital punishment have themselves had to prove the sharpness of their own axe, so the lawgiver, whose message it had been to declare, “the soul that sinneth, it shall die,” had himself to go up alone to the mountain-top to receive in his own person the exemplification of the law that had been spoken by his own lips. He sinned when, in a moment of passion (with many palliations and excuses), he smote the rock that he was bidden to address, and forgot therein, and in his angry words to the rebels, that he was only an instrument in the Divine hand. It was a momentary wavering in a hundred and twenty years of obedience. It was one failure in a life of self-abnegation and suppression. The stern sentence came. It is pathetic to find him among that great company of martyrs for the public good, those who in order to serve their people have neglected their own characters. Under the stress of public work and the pressure of the stupidity and greed of those whom they have sought to guide, many leaders of men have been tempted, and have yielded to the temptation, to forget the demands of their better nature. But whatever their services to the world, such unfaithfulness does not pass unpunished. They have to bear the penalty, whosoever they be; and Moses was no more an exception than Cromwell or Savonarola was, to mention only some of the nobler examples.1 [Note: A. Harper.] (1) If we ask why that single and apparently trifling disobedience unfitted him to lead the people into the land, while men far more rebellious and with less temptation afterwards became their rulers, I do not know that we can find an adequate reply. It may be that God would show how one act may darken the whole of man’s earthly hopes; how the subtle influence of one act of disobedience—because in disobedience lies the germ of all sin—may pervade with its gloom the whole of a man’s history, and cause his holiest efforts to fail just at the moment they seem about to succeed. In that we have the hidden source of life’s incompleteness unveiled. It may not be true to say that some special and definite sin ever prevents the man who has a great purpose from accomplishing it, but this history points out that the presence of sin has destroyed all the completeness of life, and accounts for all that failure of the holiest aims which saddens and perplexes us. One little mark under the arm-pit of a plague-sufferer tells the physician that the fatal disease is there. A tiny leaf above ground may reveal deep below the root of a poison-plant. That little deflection, coming as it did at the beginning of the resumption of his functions by the Lawgiver after seven-and-thirty years of comparative abeyance, and on his first encounter with the new generation that he had to lead, was a very significant indication that his character had begun to yield and suffer from the strain that had been put upon it; and that, in fact, he was scarcely fit for the responsibilities that the new circumstances brought.1 [Note: A. Maclaren.] (2) People say, “A heavy penalty for a small offence.” Yes! But an offence of Moses could not be a small offence. Noblesse oblige! The higher a man rises in communion with God, and the more glorious the message and office which are put into his hands, the more intolerable in him is the slightest deflection from the loftiest level. A splash of mud that would never be seen on a navvy’s clothes stains the white satin of a bride or the embroidered garment of a noble. And so a little sin done by a loftily endowed and inspired man ceases to be small. It is one of the laws of the Divine government of the world, that with those to whom God specially draws near He is more rigorous than with others. Amos clearly saw and proclaimed this principle. “Hear this word that the Lord hath spoken against you, O children of Israel,” he says; “you only have I known of all the families of the earth: therefore I will visit upon you all your iniquities” (Amos 3:1-2). (3) We cannot suppose that the sudden outburst of impetuous temper at Meribah—when his spirit was agitated by a fierce whirlwind of wrath, as a storm sweeping down some mountain-rent on an inland lake—could remain long unforgiven. As far as the east is from the west, so far had that transgression been removed. But though the remission was complete, yet the result lingered in his life, and shut him out from an experience which should have been the crown of his career. “The Lord hath put away thy sin,” said Nathan to the royal transgressor; “but thy child shall die, and the sword shall not depart out of thy house.” (4) But there is more. Moses was one with Israel. When they sinned he interceded as for himself. When Jehovah made him the offer that He would make of him a great nation, he declined it solely from his love to Israel. He lived for the nation, and for the nation he died. Remember how once he went so far as to say, “If not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written.” In every way he was of the people, bone of their bone, and flesh of their flesh; Israel was hidden in his heart; and out of that master-passion of sympathy with the people came the weakness which at last made him speak unadvisedly with his lips. They strove with God; and though Moses never yielded a point to them in that wicked contest, yet their unbelief so far influenced him that he spake in anger, and said, “Hear now, ye rebels; must we fetch you water out of this rock?” Then “the Lord spake unto Moses and Aaron, Because ye believed me not, to sanctify me in the eyes of the children of Israel, therefore ye shall not bring this congregation into the land which I have given them” (Numbers 20:10; Numbers 20:12). Three times in the Book of Deuteronomy Moses tells the people that the Lord was angry with him for their sakes. It was not so much what Moses did personally that involved him in judgment; but he suffered because of his being mixed up with Israel. As the Lord had spared the people aforetime for Moses’ sake, it became necessary that, when he in any measure shared in their great sin of unbelief, he should be chastened for their sake as well as his own. His faith had saved them, and now his unbelief, being backed by theirs, secures for him the sentence of exclusion from the land. Were not the Israelites much more guilty? Why were they allowed to enter the land from which he was shut out? We are called by Christ’s name; we believe the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ; and we ought to be able to see the answer in the Psalmist’s words: “They angered him also at the waters of strife, so that it went ill with Moses for their sakes.” “For their sakes.” “By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin”; by one man’s endurance of the curse we are all redeemed to God. The Christian doctrine of Atonement is neither an evasion of the law affixing penalty to sin, nor an after-thought supplying the deficiencies of that law; it is the doctrine of human life; it is part of the very constitution of society, that we bear the sins of one another, and are helped by one another’s endurance of penalty. If we find it hard to believe that God is, righteously and graciously, thus visiting the sins of Israel on Moses, is it not because we have not rightly apprehended the righteousness and grace of God in our own redemption? The constitution of society which makes it inevitable that a man shall share in the transgression of his fellows is an integral part of the law which God “magnified and made honourable” in the Cross; it is this that made possible Christ’s sacrifice and mediation. 2. There is sometimes success in failure, sublimity in defeat. If we will consider it, there is nothing more sublime in the history of Moses than the story of his death. Tried by a worldly standard, it seems a poor and shameful ending to such a life. Who so fit, we might ask, to lead the children of Israel into the promised land as he who had, for their sakes, defied the wrath of Pharaoh; who had led them out of Egypt, and shared with them the wanderings of the wilderness; endured their perversity, and often interceded with God on their behalf? But when we speak thus, the poverty and shame are in our way of judging character and its rewards. Whether is better?—honour, or a resolute and chastened spirit? Who is the nobler man?—he who rejoices in the fulfilment of his hopes, or he who knows how to endure, and see the fruit of disappointment? If we believe to be a meek and humble man is better than any blare of trumpets or pompous triumph, we shall see that God had provided some better thing for Moses than to lead the tribes into the promised land. To me it seems that the man Moses, with eye undimmed and natural force not abated, resigning to another the office he was still fit to bear, quietly accepting the decree which took his leadership from him, is surrounded with a purer lustre than had ever before rested on him; the ascent of Nebo is more glorious than the descent of Sinai.1 [Note: A. Mackennal.] Moses, the patriot fierce, became The meekest man on earth, To show us how love’s quick’ning flame Can give our souls new birth. Moses, the man of meekest heart, Lost Canaan by self-will, To show, where Grace has done its part, How sin defiles us still. Thou, who hast taught me in Thy fear, Yet seest me frail at best, O grant me loss with Moses here, To gain his future rest!2 [Note: J. H. Newman.] There is little that is wise or noble about Ruskin hitherto. It had been a career of unbroken success of a small and self-centred kind; his genius had showed itself in his incredible laboriousness, and in a vitality of immense elasticity and toughness. But not by these things is the world changed! And now he was to be given a new heart. He was to see and to feel; he was to be mocked and derided; he was to wrestle with hateful thoughts; he was to torment himself over the evils of society: he was to build up an elaborate scheme for its amelioration. His scheme was to fail, and not even to fail nobly; it was to be viewed not only with indifference, but with open ridicule and contempt. Yet he was to become, without knowing it, in his humiliation and pain, more august, more pathetic, more noble, more Divine, till he was to appear in the minds of all who cared for purity and goodness and beauty, like a seamed and scarred mountain peak, above the peaceful valleys, cold and lonely and isolated, and yet looking out across the fields of life to some awful sunrise of truth, climbing and glimmering over shining tracts and unknown seas.1 [Note: A. C. Benson, Ruskin: A Study in Personality, 88. Although you seem to till a thankless soil, Your prayers are never vain, nor vain your toil; Some fruit you yet may have to cheer your heart, In some new epoch you may bear a part; But ev’n if now, through your short span of years Your work be weary, and no fruit appears,— Though, in humility, you look within, Deeming your failure the result of sin,— It is not so; for still our Father knows What each requires—on each He still bestows The discipline most needed; still He weighs Our work with heavenly scales; our purblind gaze Finds failure often where He knows success.2 [Note: Mackenzie Bell.] 3. One thought remains. The desires of Moses, unfulfilled here, were fulfilled in a higher sense elsewhere. The history before us may be silent, but we cannot be silent. By looking at the death of Moses in the light of the revelation brought by Christ we can speak with confidence. Christ redeemed all life—He glorified it all—therefore we may believe that no earnest efforts of this life are ever, for the man himself, really unfulfilled. And if that does not seem to prove their actual fulfilment, we may get some light on the subject by referring to a great law that pervades all the government of God. God leaves none of His works unfinished. In the world of nature no atom is lost, although we may not see the fulfilment of every existence because of our blindness. In the world of souls we perceive glimpses of the same law. Every act of the Spirit has an end which it completes, for every act has had its share in making us what we are. We are linked to our past. We find it out unmistakably now and then. If that be true, do you think that the holy purposes God has inspired us with have no fulfilment somewhere and somehow within our own experience? Can you believe that they are doomed to perish except in the possible effect they may have on other men? Does God inspire men to work through the turmoil and the doubt—through the mystery and sorrow of life—and leave those high desires to fade, having no consummation in the blessed life of Heaven? No! we must believe that, though in a different way, they are fulfilled there. We must believe that the spirit is everlasting, although the outward actions may die. We must believe that Moses, though he might not himself accomplish the purpose of his life and lead the people into rest, yet found that the great hope which had burned through storm and darkness upon earth, was consummated in nobler service and in a grander scene when he joined the companies who sing the song of Moses and the Lamb. When men die in the fulness of their powers, as Moses died, we think that there is a waste of power. So there might be, if the power of those who die were really extinguished. But that is not our belief. Our belief is that it is expanded, ennobled, set at once to work, that it can do its work better, that its energies are more developed, that the range and objects of its work are tenfold greater and more numerous than they are on earth. Waste! when God and His work are everywhere. Waste! when the whole universe of humanity in the other world is open to him whom we have lost on earth. Waste of power! It is a thought impossible to the Christian man as he looks upon his dead.1 [Note: Stopford A. Brooke.] (1) The Israelites themselves would discern, if dimly, this truth. The great truths of life and immortality must surely have begun to stir in the hearts of thoughtful men when they knew that “the Lord buried him.” Shall God, then, pay such regard to the perishable frame, and neglect the nobler part which dwelt in it? The outward shape and fashioning of clay, made of the dust and returning to it, was this then Moses, and not rather the living soul, breathed into it by God, as Moses himself records? And can the Maker put so disproportionate an estimate upon His own handiwork, as carefully to store up the casket and throw away the precious jewel which it held? Could we cherish the portrait of one beloved and leave himself to perish, when we might save him by stretching out the hand? Can this be the kindness of God to His friends?—for either He must wish to preserve the souls of His servants and want the power, or He must possess the power but want the wish; and where, in the one case, would be a God worthy of reverence, or where, in the other, a God who could attract our love? When men become assured of His power, that He is the Father of spirits, and when He proves His regard for the frail and fading form, the burial of Moses might become God’s way of leading reflective men out to hopeful thoughts of the spirit that had given such brightness to the now darkened face. When such questionings arose, “Wilt thou shew wonders to the dead? Shall the dead arise and praise thee?” (Psalms 88:10); then a record like this might lead to the conviction, “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints” (Psalms 116:15). “Therefore my heart is glad, and my glory rejoiceth; my flesh also shall rest in hope. Thou wilt shew me the path of life” (Psalms 16:9; Psalms 16:11).1 [Note: John Ker.] (2) Moses’ sin was blotted out, and he knew it, although the earthly effect of it remained. But if compensation is to be complete it must include the removal of the earthly penalty. The perfect idea of God’s forgiveness is that He should take away not merely the inward pain of sin but the outward stigma of it, and that He should make all life what it would have been without that sin, or still richer and higher for the very fall and rising. The spiritual Physician should not only heal the wound but obliterate the scar, and give “beauty instead of burning.” In the case of Moses this does not at first appear. “The Lord buried him,” but not in Canaan; and He showed him the land, but did not permit him to tread it. To an ancient Jew this must for a while have seemed strange almost to harshness,—to think that the meanest in all their tribes should enter and look on it, and eat of its plenty and drink of its sweet, and that he who had toiled and agonized for this lifelong end, so faithful to God and so self-sacrificing, should be excluded! No Israelite could look round on that noble home and the rejoicing family which dwelt in it without thinking of the great leader who stumbled at the door and lay buried by the threshold. Is Canaan then all, and is the whole life of Moses shut up in wanderings through a wilderness? Slowly but irresistibly the thought of another land must have risen, must have dawned upon the mind’s eye—a land of which this earthly one was only the symbol, and which must have given Moses perfect compensation for all he lost in death. It could not be otherwise. They were attracted and compelled to it by all they knew of God and of His servant. It was God’s very purpose in these events to educate them to a belief in another world, and to give them some faint conception of it—a world where the things and ties of earth are carried up to a heavenly temper and perfection. When a prophet came in after ages with the promise, “Thine eyes shall see the king in his beauty: they shall behold the land that is very far off” (Isaiah 33:17), it must have been felt by many to be suitable to this death of Moses, and may have had its origin in his last look, which took in “the precious things of heaven,” as well as “the precious things of the earth and the fulness thereof.” (3) And to Moses himself this vision would not be wholly denied. We may well imagine as the evening deepened on the mountain-top, and the land below grew dim in mist, and Moses felt God draw nearer in the twilight, that the same thoughts entered into the soul of Moses, and his regret for not entering the land passed finally away. Nothing was left but death and God. Why should he ever have regretted that? There, only wars, fresh cares, new pain, day after day, of weary battle would await him. Here, in death, there was another Canaan, the substance of the shadow he had pursued so long. In it there were green pastures and still waters, and the Shepherd of the soul. To dying men still comes the vision of the goodly land beyond the Jordan. It is not far away—only just across the river. On fair days of vision, when some strong wind parts the veils of mist and smoke that too often dominate our spiritual atmosphere, it is clearly visible. But the vision is most often reserved for those who are waiting on the confines of the Land, ready for the signal to enter. They tell us that on that borderland they hear voices, and discern visions of beauty and splendour of which heart had not conceived. Dr. Payson said, shortly before he died, “The Celestial City is full in my view. Its glories have been upon me; its breezes fan me; its odours are wafted to me; its sounds strike upon my ears, and its spirit is breathed into my heart.”1 [Note: F. B. Meyer.] On one occasion Dr. Kidd was alluding to the unwillingness which even good people sometimes had to die. “It just reminds me,” he said, “of what happened when I left the auld hoose. When a’ the furniture was oot, and a’ the rest had gane to the new ane, I couldna leave; I paced up and doon the room in which my children were born; I gazed upon the wa’s of the chamber where I studied and wrestled with God, and I couldna tear myself away. But Betty, the servant, came, and she said, “Come awa’, sir, come awa’; the time’s up, and the ither hoose is far better than this.”2 [Note: J. Stark, Dr. Kidd of Aberdeen, 141. III An Undiscovered Grave There is something strange and altogether singular in this, that Moses, the greatest of all the Old Testament prophets, should find a resting-place in the earth and no man be able to point it out. The sepulchres of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are known among the groves of Hebron; the bones of Joseph, after many wanderings, rest in Shechem, in that parcel of ground which his father gave to him, the best beloved son. Rachel’s tomb, watered by many a tear, stands on the way to “Ephrath, which is Bethlehem”; for there her strength failed her, and she sank, as did all the ancient saints on the way to that birthplace of hope. The sepulchre of David is by Jerusalem, the home of his heart. But the last abode of Moses, the servant of God and the lawgiver of Israel, is claimed by no city in the wide land. 1. The first thing to notice is that the grave is not unknown to God. As it is in death, so is it in the grave—alone yet not alone. Moses dies alone, with no hand to clasp his, none to close his eyes; but God’s finger does it. The outward form of his death is but putting into symbol and visibility the awful characteristics of that last moment for us all. However closely we have been twined with others, each of us has to unclasp all hands, and make that journey through the narrow, dark tunnel by ourselves. We even live alone in a real sense, but we each have to die as if there were not another human being in the whole universe but ourselves. But the solitude may be a solitude with God. Up there alone, with the stars and the sky and the everlasting rocks and menacing death, Moses had for companion the supporting God. That awful path is not too desolate and lonely to be trodden if we tread it with Him. Moses’ lonely death leads to a society yonder. If you refer to the 32nd chapter you will find that when he was summoned to the mountain God said to him, “Die in the mount whither thou goest up, and be gathered unto thy people.” He was to be buried there, up amongst the rocks of Moab, and no man was ever to visit his sepulchre to drop a tear over it. How was he “gathered unto his people”? Surely only thus, that, dying in the desert alone, he opened his eyes in the city, surrounded by “solemn troops and sweet societies” of those to whom he was kindred. So the solitude of a moment leads on to blessed and eternal companionship. As we trust God to supply the needs of the body in life, so let us trust Him for its burial in death. He marks where the dust of each of His children mingles with its mother earth. When a grave is opened, His eye rests on it; and though no foot may ever tread its soil, no hand keep it decked with flowers, He never forgets it; and none will be overlooked when the archangel blows his trumpet over land and sea.1 [Note: F. B. Meyer.] Into the silent, starless Night before us, Naked we glide; No hand has mapped the constellations o’er us, No comrade at our side, No chart, no guide. Yet fearless toward that midnight, black and hollow, Our footsteps fare: The beckoning of a Father’s hand we follow— His love alone is there, No curse, no care.2 [Note: Edward Rowland Sill.] 2. Again, no man must take from God the honour which belongs to Him alone, or stand between Him and the worship of His people. The first great lesson which the Jewish people were to be taught was the supremacy of the one true God. This was the indispensable basis of every other revelation,—the one God, alone, supreme,—and then His attributes, His law, His way to man. They were taken from among the nations, and reclaimed from idolatry to carry this truth to the world; and then, when sovereignty was established, mercy could be fully proclaimed. It was the lifelong work of Moses to fix this truth of God’s sovereignty. The word given him to bear was, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord.” All his labours and his trials arose from the difficulty of impressing this on their deep and constant conviction, and his death would have brought him no regret had he felt assured that his work was done. How solemn and pathetic his warnings to cleave to the true God, and wander to no other, as if he felt already the misgivings of their defection. And yet what he had done for them made it not unlikely that their reverence for him might prove their snare, and that they might be tempted to give him the place he desired to secure for God. Death, which lifts every great man higher, might have raised Moses above the lesson of his life—the unapproachable supremacy of God Himself. The deification of their heroes was the manner of the nations round them; it was the atmosphere of the age; and in this event we can surely see a means taken to guard the Israelites from the temptation. Had Moses himself obtained his choice, it would have been that, in death, he might carry out the lesson of his life, and here he gains it. He dies apart, and is buried in secret, where his grave can be dishonoured by no pilgrimage, and where no false veneration can rear altars to his memory. And this first lesson did not fail. The nation worshipped many strange deities, but it never gave the place of God to His prophets. If any life could have tempted them to such a course it would have been that of Moses, and when God removes him from their sight, and leaves no relic for sense or imagination to build its worship on, there is no successor of Moses who can assume the place. How constantly the heroes of other nations have become their gods; how naturally the tomb becomes an altar, and the shrine a temple. Never was there hero that might more readily receive the idolatrous regard of a nation than he whose memory was so immediately associated with their religion, to whom they owed their national existence, their very liberties, their lives, their hopes. How easily would the burial-place of such a saint and hero become a place of pilgrimage and an object of worship. Seven hundred years afterwards Hezekiah is distinguished as the bold reformer who broke in pieces the serpent of brass which Moses had made. “Unto those days,” we are told, “the children of Israel did burn incense to it.” Thus is it that for Israel’s sake Moses is led up the mountain-height away into that utter loneliness; and there he dies, and God buries him, and no man knoweth the place of his sepulchre unto this day.1 [Note: M. G. Pearse.] 3. In the history of the greatest and the best, the tomb is often remembered and the life forgotten. It is an easier thing to revere the dust than to follow the example. There is an admonition in the Bible, “Remember them which have the rule over you, who have spoken unto you the word of God: whose faith follow, considering the end of their conversation” (Hebrews 13:7); and here, at the commencement of the lengthened roll, God inscribes it on an emphatic act. He takes away the grave of Moses that they may have before them, in full and undisturbed relief, the man himself. His words, living and dying, his walk with God till God took him, all that he was to God and to them, in self-devotion and affection, these survive him and can never die. If they came to his grave, they approached the creature and its fleeting part; but in coming to his words and his life they come to Moses himself and to God. Men are liable to underrate the great and good in their lifetime, but after their departure they discover their goodness, and seek to compensate for their own neglect by extolling their memory. This is often true regarding men of genius. During their lives they have been misunderstood by those who cared not for their aims; but when they have passed away, the world has discovered its loss, and sought by posthumous praise to atone for its neglect. Many a gifted spirit, in uttering the truth by which he has been inspired, has met with mockery and malicious misrepresentation, but when death has stilled the restless heart of the thinker, the men who reap the results of his work attempt by laudation to obliterate their opposition; and many a servant of God has worn out life and hope in self-sacrificing labour, and been opposed by those he was trying to help; and it has not been until God has taken His servant home that they have discovered the true nature of his work. The sepulchre of the greater Prophet than Moses is equally unknown, and may we not wonder that Christians, under a system of spirit and life, have been more slow than Jews to learn the lesson? Once, and once only, were men invited to “see the place where the Lord lay,” that they might be assured it was empty, and refrain from seeking any more the living among the dead. If research the most patient has hitherto done aught, it has been to show that the spot has left no trace upon our earth. God has made the march of armies and the desolation of centuries do for the sepulchre of Christ what His own hand did for the grave of Moses.1 [Note: John Ker.] 4. The lonely death and the lost grave are signs of honour. (1) Notice the title given to Moses: “So Moses the servant of the Lord died.” It is a title given to him by Jehovah Himself: “My servant Moses” (Numbers 12:7). What an honourable title it is! And Moses was this of choice, for he willed to be the servant of God, rather than to be great in the land of the Pharaohs. Such he was most perseveringly throughout the whole of his life. Such he was most intensely; for he waited upon God for his directions, as a servant waits upon his master; and he endeavoured to do all things according to the pattern which was shown him in the holy mount. Though he was king in Jeshurun, he never acted on his own authority, but was the lowly instrument of the Divine will. This entry is longer than a Bible module can hold. The rest is at https://www.sermonindex.net/commentary/greattexts/