Bible Commentaries

Memory and Duty

Deuteronomy 4:16-18). We must not touch God in the matter of making similitudes of him at any point. It is quite true that God fills his creation, and that any pebble taken up from the sea-shore might be made a symbol of his presence; but, seeing that no object can represent him in his totality, there must be no attempt to engrave the image of the Eternal. He is without shape, without gender; he is in the beast of the earth; he is in the winged fowl that flieth in the air; he is not ashamed of any worm he ever made to wriggle in the meanest soil; he is not ashamed to hear the young lions when they cry, or to entertain the insects at his bountiful table;—they are his: every pulse is his, every drop of blood is his; but he will not be figured, represented, or monumentalised in fragments and in detail. "God is a Spirit,"—a marvellous revelation of that which cannot be revealed! We seem to have heard something, but we have heard nothing; the soul is enchanted by the music of a new expression, but not helped by the carving of a new symbol. The soul delights in the meaning, seizes the purpose of the Deuteronomy 4:20

Imagery is sometimes the most real method of representation. There was neither furnace nor iron in the case in any literal sense, and yet the moral experience of the people could not better be represented than that of having spent no small portion of their life in a burning fiery furnace.—Sorrow creates its own imagery.—What is exaggeration to one man is literal truth to another.—We are indebted to sorrow for the sublimest imagery.—The Psalm are full of proof that such is the case.—The divine power is always magnified by spiritual worshippers.—They do not look upon history as a scries of chances, but as a line along which the divine Being moves with dignity and beneficence.—He allows men to be thrown into the iron furnace, and has profound reasons for so doing; it is not his pleasure that they should be there, but it is certainly for their good that they should know the ministry of fire: the Lord knows exactly how long we have been in the furnace: he knows precisely what benefit has arisen from our being there: he knows when to liberate us from distress and despair.—There is no furnace too deep for the Lord to penetrate.—Though the furnace be of iron he can melt it and lead forth the captive with a new song in his mouth.—Do not regard furnaces as of men's construction, or as expressing the triumph of evil principles.—There hath no temptation happened unto you that is not directly sent of God, in the sense of trial and discipline.—He who has come out of the furnace can speak most tenderly of the power and compassion of God.—Not to have been in the furnace is not to have been in one of the most fruitful schools appointed by Providence for the education of mankind.—To have been in the furnace is to have learned the holy art of sympathy. To have been comforted ourselves is to be qualified to give comfort to others.—He who has dug most graves can speak most tenderly to the bereaved.—He who has stood in the midst of desolated acres without losing his confidence in God is by so much qualified to preach the duty and the joy of resignation.—The whole human race will one day be led out of the furnace, but not until the lessons of that tremendous discipline have been fully learned and applied in all the progress and duty of life.—Throughout the whole of the Scriptures it is the Lord who is magnified and not man who is praised for having found out some secret way of escape.—To know the Lord as a Deliverer in great crises and straits is to be assured that, in all the minor difficulties and trials of life, his presence shall be our protection and our hope.

"Handfuls of Purpose"

For All Gleaners

"I must not go... but ye shall go."— Deuteronomy 4:22

This is a brave speech on the part of an old man. Such speeches ought to be uttered by the most advanced Christians today.—This man utters his speech without complaint.—It seems impossible to reconcile the imperfect revelation granted to some men with the goodness of God.—They come so near seeing the perfect light, and yet die without beholding the noontide glory.—It would have been very different with the people had Moses been a man of another spirit; querulous, discontented, complaining against God.—The spirit of progress rejoices in the progress of others.—We are not to limit the revelation of God by that which we see ourselves.—We must look to the future of the race and see in that future something brighter than has yet shone upon our own vision.—That thought may be applied to theological thinkers.—There is nothing final in theological investigation.—Interpretation will show the progressiveness even of the Bible itself.—The greatest students of the book die exclaiming to the younger men, "Ye shall go over, and possess the good land."—The thought should also be applied to Christian workers as well as to Christian students.—Though we die without reaping the harvest, the harvest will surely be reaped by others.

—We should so live that when we come to die our last speech may be one of encouragement to the men who are following.—The man who dies thus does not die at all, in any degrading sense.—Moses, though dead according to the flesh, lived in all the power of the spirit, and was a continual inspiration to the people whom he had led so many years in the wilderness.—There is always a good land to be possessed; a land of larger liberty; a land of larger knowledge; a land of surer trust in divine realities.—The spirit of the Church must be a spirit of conquest; when it drops from this noble elevation it inflicts upon itself a most humiliating disability.

The Speciality of the Bible

Deuteronomy 4:32-40

This is the eternal challenge of the Bible. The appeal may be regarded as a call to the study of comparative religions. There are many religions in the world; gather them up into one view, extend the inquiry far and wide, through time and space, and see whether the Bible does not separate itself from all other books by miracles that cannot be rivalled and by excellences that cannot be equalled. Other miracles are not denied, other excellences are not disputed; the point is whether the Bible after occupying common ground with many other religions does not represent forces and qualities unknown to any of them. Let it not be supposed that other good books are denied; let it not be imagined that idolatries are ignored; let it not be supposed that the Bible is afraid of comparison or competition. God himself inquires for all other gods; he will have them skilfully displayed: the best of our artists may be engaged in arranging all the deities that were ever named in mythology or philosophy, or the best dreaming of the human mind; God will have them well shown: there shall be no attempt whatever to underrate values and dignities, or to cover with the disadvantage of obscurity any god who can do anything. The God of the Bible says concerning gods, "Where are they?" and awaiting the production of other gods there is silence in the universe. If the Bible were a priest's book, or a mere trick on the part of some incipient divinity, it would keep all to itself: it would ignore the existence of all other gods and religious claims and even Deuteronomy 4:32). Never forget this challenge on the part of the Bible. It is a noble speech. The Bible will not remain with us one day longer than it can supply what no other book can furnish. The Bible awaits to be displaced. As soon as any one can arise who can speak in a nobler eloquence, in a tenderer music, with a profounder Deuteronomy 4:39

I should like it to be understood, that I occupy the position of a distinctively Christian teacher, with the Christian Scriptures open before me, and everything I say is to be judged by this fact. A pagan might argue for the existence of a Creator; but the pagan and I would mean different things, though we might employ exactly the same words. Mine is a Christian faith; therefore I seek to teach truth as it is in Jesus. This you must bear in mind if you would follow my meaning closely and correctly.

I can imagine a man of average education and intelligence, asking me some such question as this: How is it that God does not show himself more clearly to us than he does, and so put an end to all uncertainty concerning himself? I answer: Are we capable of understanding what is and what is not the proper degree and method of divine manifestation? Have we so proved our own wisdom as to be justified even to ourselves in saying that we are competent to judge how far God has manifested himself, and how much further he ought to have done so? Every day, as a matter of mere fact, we convict ourselves of making mistakes in the commonest affairs of life. Each day is marked by its own special sin. We are always going too far or not far enough. If we are just to ourselves, we shall apply the scourge of self-reproach to our hearts and understanding every day. Are we, then, with all these mistakes, like so many wrecks lying about us; are we, after all, the men to say how God should manifest himself, and when he should do so? Is it decent that we should take upon ourselves this high task of dictation? Is it becoming in men, who cannot certainly tell what will happen in one single hour, that they should write a programme for God, and appoint the way of the Almighty?

These things cause me to say that religious questions, if they are to be profitably considered at all, must be considered in a deeply religious spirit. You can make no advancement in this learning unless you bring a right heart with you. That is the beginning. If my scholar escape me at this point he will flounder through all the rest of the lesson. What is your sincere desire? What is the condition of your heart? Are you really and truly anxious about this matter? Are you self-sufficient, boastful, confident in your own strength? Do you light the candle of your own wit and judge the universe by such little light as it can shed? Or are you reverent, humble, meek, and wishful to learn things as they really are? Everything depends upon the tone and temper of your spirit in entering upon any course of religious inquiry and instruction. If a man shall spring into the arena, where Christian inquirers and worshippers are assembled praying and considering these questions, and say, "Now then, look about, I am coming to see what the whole thing means. I shall set up this standard and lay down this rule; I shall put things round about and set them in the right way; I shall examine and cross-examine, and none will get over me"—if a man shall come into the arena talking with such vigour as that, he will one day certainly have an arena worthy of his incoherence. But God will not speak to him; the universe will be hushed, and the fool shall hear nothing but his own noise!

I shall not soon forget standing upon a lofty and magnificent hill, amidst some of the most romantic and impressive scenery in Britain. It was summer noonday. A spirit of rest seemed to be upon everything; the eternal hills were talking to me, and the great grey rocks, which might have been the tombstones of centuries, were standing there, witnesses of my youthfulness and comparative insignificance. I enjoyed the scene as if it had been the house of God and the very gate of heaven. But there came upon it half-a-dozen wanderers, laughing and jibing and exchanging their poor vulgar jokes with one another; and when they got upon the hill-top one of them said, "What have we come up here for? there's nothing up here." He was right; there was nothing for him there. He was a trespasser and ought to have been arrested as a criminal; he was out of his sphere; give such people sandwiches, and barrels of beer, and dancing bears, and brass bands, and then the scene would have been "worth going to." But the eternal hills spake not, and the grand old majesties of the rocks were silent! They have nothing to say to vulgarity, and rudeness, and boisterousness. Incline thine ear and they will speak to thee; be calm, be struck with wonder and reverence and intelligent admiration in their hoary presence, and the hill tops will tell thee many a story of the past, and the rocks will have sermons upon their rugged faces graven there by the hand of Time!

It is so in the consideration of great religious questions. A man is not to come into this school and say, "I have it; I will show you how it is; I have a measure in my pocket, and a plumb-line in my hand, and a pair of compasses; I will undertake to examine the whole thing for you and pronounce an opinion upon it." Never! "To this man will I look." When God looks, it is morning; when he does not look, it is midnight! "To this man will I look." The man that is going to square up everything—the man that uses contemptuous expressions—the man who says, "Hoity-toity," and takes the Bible and throws it into the fire, and tells his wife and children that "religion is all nonsense, you know"? No! "To this man will I look." Lord, to which man wilt thou look? To the man that is humble; to the man who is of a humble and contrite heart, and that trembleth at my word. This is a qualification for the religious school. A truly reverent and earnest desire to know what God's meaning is, and God's will. To the man who possesses these qualifications, every page of the inspired volume will bring messages of light and comfort and heaven.

I once heard a peculiar controversy or conversation in a garden; it quite entertained me. There were, after some heavy rains, two worms that had struggled out of the earth, and found their way upon the wet green grass; and they began to talk in a very decided and mocking manner about myself. One, the elder and better-to-do of the two, said, "Eh, eh, eh! we have been told that this garden has an owner, or somebody that takes care of it, that nourishes the roots of things, and that altogether presides over the affair. Eh, eh, eh! I never saw him. If there is such an owner why does he not show himself more clearly? why does he not come to the front and let us see him?" And the leaner of the two said, "That is an unanswerable argument. I never saw him. There may be such a being, but I care nothing about him: only, if he is alive, why does he not show himself?" They quite wriggled in contemptuous triumph; yet all the while I was standing there, looking at the poor creatures, and hearing them! I could have set my foot upon them and crushed them; but I did not. There is a way of wasting strength; there is also a way of showing patience. But the worms could not understand my nature. I was standing there, and they knew me not! What if it be so with ourselves in the greater questions? And if out of this homely illustration we may get a far-off glimpse of the fact that we who are talking about God manifesting himself, and asking him to come to the front,—what if one day we are compelled to exclaim, "Lo! God is here, and I knew it not! This is the house of God; this is the gate of heaven!" That, whilst we are discussing about God and calling his existence in question, he is listening to us. He could put the tip of his finger upon us and destroy our life. He could touch our reason and wither our intellect. Yet he spares us. For judgment is his strange work, and mercy is his supreme delight.

Proceeding with our statement respecting the revelation of God, I ask you to believe with me, as a matter of fact—First: That we stand to God in the relation of dependants. That is our actual position in life. "What hast thou that thou didst not receive?" Let a man begin his studies there, and he will become correspondingly reverent. Have you genius? Who lighted the lamp? Have you health? Who gave you your constitution? Do you find the earth productive? "Yes." Who made it productive? "I did. I till it; I supply all the elements of nourishment needful; I did." Did you? Can you make it rain? Can you make the sun shine? Come, I will set you a little task, mighty man, potentate! This: Change the quarter of the wind! Now, come, that is a very little thing for a great man like you. "Well," you say, "that is the sort of thing that I really cannot do." Then, clear a fog off the hill. You can do that. Look what a port you have, and what infinite impudence. Come, clear a fog! Where would your tilling, and your manuring, and your subsoiling, and your harrowing and rolling all be, and what would they come to, if God were to say to the wind, "Never leave the east;" if God were to say to the clouds, "Stand still;" if God were to say to the sun, "Do not show thyself for a year"? All these things show us that we are, notwithstanding our resources, which are undoubtedly numerous and great, dependants. There is a point at which we must give up and stand still, and say, "We can do no more." That is a matter of certainty in common daily life; and out of it will come such reflections as these: I have nothing that has not upon it God's signature and God's superscription. I can work; but my work may come to nothing. I may sow my seed; but if he withhold the baptism of the dew and the rain, and the benediction of the sunlight, all my labour will come to nothingness, mortification and pain! This must have some meaning. There must, in such a combination of circumstances as these, be a purpose which I ought to know, and understand, and work by. If a man once be started on that course of reflection, the probability is, that he who begins as a reverent inquirer, will end as a devout worshipper.

The very fact of being dependent should lead us to be very careful how we measure the sovereignty and the government of God. He has made us servants, not masters. We are little children, not old beings, in his household and universe. We are mysteries to ourselves. We need not go from home to seek mysteries. Sometimes it seems to be supposed that we have only to give up the idea of God and all will be light. There will be no difficulty about anything. Life will then be a straightforward course, and we shall have no enigmas to answer and no spectral mysteries to affright us. It is a misrepresentation of facts. Oh man, thou art thyself a riddle, but half answered! What is the secret of thine own life? Explain the secret of thy desires, thy restlessness, thy ambition, thy hunger which cannot be appeased by the stones and the dust of this world! Hast thou seen thine own soul? Where is it? What is its image, and what is its nature? Are there not secrets in thine own blood and life which have never spoken to thee? Are there not spaces in thy hidden being on which the candle of finite knowledge has never thrown its dim ray? Canst thou stop the throbbing heart that is within thee, and say to it successfully, "Tell me thy secret, let me know what it is in thee"? The heart has stopped. Can you start it again? You can touch it; you can put your finger and thumb upon it; can you not start it into action again? You are very clever; you want to know all about God, and you have turned your back upon the Almighty, because your little questions are not answered; why cannot you just take hold of that little heart that has stopped its beating, and say, "Begin again"? There is a man with blighted reason. Why do you not go and breathe a new summer upon the man's brain? There is a brain in which reason has lost her way. Why do you not find the poor wanderer and set her in the right course again? If you cannot do that—who are you, I ask, that you should determine the measure and the method of divine manifestation, and pronounce dogmatic opinions upon the sovereignty and the government of God?

The very fact of the mystery of our own life should be the beginning and the defence of our faith in God. Reason from yourself upwards. There is a way out of the human to the divine. It is a commendable course of procedure to reason from the known to the unknown. If you are such a mystery to your own child, if the philosopher is such a mystery to the uninstructed nan, if you are such a mystery to yourself,—why may there not be power around more mysterious still, higher and nobler yet? Reason from yourselves,—from your own capacities and your own resources. Is not the maker greater than the thing made? Will you show me the machine you have made, and say to me, "I made that machine, and the machine is greater than I am"? Is it within the compass of any man's ability to make something that is greater than himself? Does not the thing made prove always to be less than the maker of it? It is so in our own life. The artist is greater than his picture; the engineer is greater than his viaduct, his tunnel, his railway, or his steam engine. The man is greater than the mere manual labourer. If it be so amongst ourselves, may we not carry the reasoning up to its religious application, and say, he who made the sun and the stars and the whole universe, what can he be but the sum of all mysteries, even God blessed for evermore! I am convinced of this, that for men of a certain type of mind to become religious—profoundly and truly religious—they must study this with care; they must work from the point of their own mystery, and carry the wondrousness of their own nature up to its highest and best applications.

Pascal said, "I am greater than the sun!" How so? "I am greater than the sun." Show it. "The sun could fall and crush me; but I should be conscious of defeat, whilst the sun would be unconscious of victory!" Herein is the wondrous greatness of man. Even his failures show the mystery of his being,—he is majestic in ruin; he is all but divine even in death!

Take away the idea of God from human thinking, and mark the immediate and necessary consequences. This is a method of reasoning which I commend to the attention of young inquirers, who are earnest about this business, the method, namely, of withdrawment. If a man doubts concerning God, I shall withdraw the idea of God from human thinking, and see the necessary result. If a man has any argument to adduce against Christianity, take Christianity out of the country, and see what will be left. Take out the doctrine, take out the practice, take out, not only Christian theology, but Christian morality, and see how many hospitals would be left, how many refuges for the homeless and the destitute, how many penitentiaries, infirmaries, schools, and asylums for the deaf and the dumb and the blind and the idiotic. So take away the idea of God from human thinking, and see the immediate and inevitable consequences. There is no God: then there is no supreme supervision of human life as a whole; for none could have the eye that could see the whole orbit of things. We see points, not circumferences. There is no God: then there is no final judgment by which the wrongs of centuries can be avenged; there is no heart brooding over us to which we can confide the story of our sorrow, or tell the anguish of our pain: the promise of a cloudless morning, and a graveless world, is the bitterest irony of human speech: the weak must die under the heel of the strong: human culture is but the carving of so much dead wood: poetry is but falsehood set to music: the shining heavens, in whose every star we have seen a welcoming light to something higher, whose every golden morning has been to us as the gate of glory, instead of being the beginning of a better universe, those shining heavens are but the upper boundaries of a magnificent prison: and as for the mysteries of our own hearts, their hope, their pain, their struggles after something better, their dreams, their battles, "their fond desires, their longings after immortality," what are these, but the refinement of cruelty, and the very torture of hell! Set God again on the throne, and all that makes life worth having, even imaginatively, comes back again. Set God upon the throne, and all things take upon them a new, true, beautiful meaning; there is hope of judgment, and a certainty that right will eventually be done.

Need I ask you to remember—that our little day has been too short to know the. full mystery of God? When an infant of yours has gone to school, do you expect the little one to come back at twelve o"clock on the first day and be able to read you a chapter even out of the simplest book? When your little boy, six years of age, first looked at his arithmetic, did you expect him to come back, after two hours" teaching, and be able to reduce a certain set of fractions to a common denominator? Did you expect him, after an hour's consideration of arithmetical questions, to be able to do the most advanced rules, and to throw the book up before your face and say, "No more of your arithmetic for me, let me go into algebra at once"? You did not expect that, did you? You would have said, "That boy, depend upon it, is half crazy; he does not know what he is talking about;" and you would probably consult the most prudent adviser about the prodigy. Yet we want to know all about God at once, and we cannot get the information! How old do you say you are? "Old! why, threescore years and ten." "No! threescore years and ten! Why, there is a tree two hundred years old, which has seen generations of your family buried." "How old?" "Getting on for fourscore years." "Are you? There is a star; look at it; ten thousand years ago that star was shining! You are an old man; yes, but a young being, an infantile being. Very old indeed, if you think of insuring yourself, or buying another estate, or laying out a great sum of money, very, very old indeed; but if you are talking of the universe, you are the insect of a moment—hardly born! But you wish to read the book called the Universe through at one sitting, like a cheap novel. You cannot do so! When you have concluded your school day here, you have only begun just to turn over the first leaf,—hardly that indeed, perhaps. Put your seventy years—an expression which fills your mouth and which is intended to awe the human family into respect and veneration for your person—put it down and look at it, multiply it by ten thousand, and then by ten thousand more, multiply the whole by millions of ages, and eternity has hardly yet begun!"

We are of yesterday and know nothing; and the teacher, what is he, but a man who having seen one ray of light amid thick and terrible gloom, comes to say you may see the same beautiful revelati6n? All this shows us what our spirit ought to be. All this ought to put young men upon their guard respecting such as suppose themselves able to answer every question, and to settle every difficulty, and to determine every controversy. Is there one of them can tell you what will happen in the next five minutes? At the very beginning, therefore, we must all agree that we are of yesterday, and of ourselves we know nothing, and that we are dependent for the revelations of God upon God himself. And this, let me say to you, young men, The greatest men I have ever known have been the most humble, docile, self-distrustful. If Isaac Newton likened himself to a child on the sea-shore, gathering a few pebbles brighter than the rest, and humbly said that the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before him; who are we that we should set ourselves up in mid-water and say, "We see the other side of the sea"? We must begin at the beginning; we must begin in a religious spirit; we must not come with any preconceived conclusions and prejudices, and argue along our own lines and in our own way. We must remember our ignorance, look our own mistakes fully in the face, and say: With these things around me, I dare not be boastful, I cannot be confident; I will say with my heart, "Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth." And the Samuel who shall put himself in that attitude before God and his book, shall in due time become a learned and able man in the school of Christ,—well controlled in his spirit and temper, charitable and noble in all his sympathies, gracious to the weak, a source of strength to those who have no helper, a very pillar and ornament of society.

Prayer

Almighty God, thou dost, by thy Son Jesus Christ, take away the sin of the world. Thou dost not cleanse the outside, thou dost purify the inmost life. Out of renewed and sanctified motive thou dost bring pure and noble conduct. Other gods tempt us, and mock us; but thou dost take away the sin of the world. Who but thyself, thou Christ of God, could lift the infinite load? What power but thine could dispel the infinite cloud? We cannot take away sin; but the blood of Jesus Christ the Son of God taketh away all sin. We cast our sins on Jesus. We do not understand his love, but we answer it with tears and faith and sacred hope, if this is not the way of salvation, then is there no other. We have hewn out unto ourselves cisterns—broken cisterns—that could hold no water, and we have attempted to build towers that should reach even unto heaven. But we stand before thee now, convicted, burning with shame, having utterly failed to do the thing which we set our hand to accomplish. Thou dost teach us in many ways: by fear, by poverty, by joy, by wealth; and by all the ministry of life, thou art teaching us the holy truth, and shedding upon us the upper light, and drawing us more nearly to thyself. Being in a school, may we not forget the lesson. Having an opportunity of learning wisdom, may we not live and die as foolish men. May we know the rod, and him who hath appointed it. Enable us to kiss the chastening hand. Lift upon us the light of thy countenance, and our tears shall be beautiful. Take not thy Holy Spirit from us in the night of sorrow, suffering, disappointment, and pain. Sanctify to us all trouble, distress, and fear, and sadness, and out of death itself may we see a springing of immortal life. Work before our eyes this wondrous mystery. Show us how thou dost bring beauty out of that which is unbeautiful; how the morning rises upon the night, and how summer comes swiftly after winter. Thus may we have hope, through Christ, in the living God. Teach us that all things work together for good to them that love thee. When the cup is very bitter, may we drink it in thy strength, and because thou hast given it unto us. Teach us to bring all prayers into one, saying, with full hearts, with unbroken, ever-hoping trust, "Not my will, but thine be done." In that spirit there is triumph; in that faith there is no overthrow. Lord, increase our faith. Then from the place of darkness shall we see the stars. In the night-time of solitude shall we have angel-like companionship, and up the steep hill we shall feel the sustaining hand of God. Amen.