Bible Commentaries

Curious Things In Life

Ezekiel 47:17); "This is the east side" ( Ezekiel 47:18); "This is the south side" ( Ezekiel 47:19); "This is the west side" ( Ezekiel 47:20). "So shall ye divide." Everything is done for us in grand totals. Within the main boundaries we do a great deal of detail, and so foolish are we and so easily imposed upon that sometimes we think we fix the main boundaries themselves. If we could but know that everything—birth, death, riches, poverty—is marked out, and that we live within positive bounds, we might make a great deal more of our strength, and we might spend to greater advantage the solicitudes which are now wasted upon impossibilities. Am I a whale, that thou hast set a watch over me? Am I a sea, that thou hast written round about my foaming billows, Hitherto, but no further? We see this illustrated every day, and yet every day we doubt it or deny it, and the day following we go out as if we had learned nothing. We have added some lamps to the thoroughfares, but we have not extended the horizon one ten thousandth part of an inch in all the ages of human history. No, we are committed to detailed work, comparatively small interior work, but with the four points and the great outline of history we have simply nothing to do. God is the Measurer, and all things are meted out. What, then, is the suggestion of wisdom? Surely it Ezekiel 47:9

The river would have been of small consequence to us but for this declaration. Ezekiel is not describing poetically a river which he saw in vision or in dream. The poet may deal only in words, but the poet-prophet deals in realities. The river means something; it means beauty and fruitfulness and issues a thousandfold. The whole story of the river is told in these words—"Every thing shall live whither the river cometh." In the earlier part of the verse we have the same thought—"It shall come to pass, that every thing that liveth, which moveth, whithersoever the rivers shall come, shall live." We do not need to spiritualise this river, for it spiritualises itself. The river is Christian life, Christian revelation. It is the revelation of Christ; it is the dispensation of the Spirit; it is the outflow from heaven of all blessing and truth and goodness. No other interpretation would fit the occasion; small poetical annotations would not rise to the dignity of the central thought. Here is a divine outflow, making for itself a channel everywhere, and wherever the channel is the banks are full of green trees, and the trees are fruit trees, and the leaves are medicinal, and the whole vision is a glimpse of heaven. We might profitably commit the first twelve verses of this chapter to memory. Teach your children such recitations. They will outlive the comic song, the foolish and impossible romance, the pile of words that ends in evaporation. Fill the memory of your child with such words as these, and they will come up in old age a rich and imperishable inheritance.

Ponder the words. "Afterward he brought me again unto the door of the house." The heathen have a proverb that we might as Christians well copy. The heathen proverb says, "Follow the gods wherever they lead." Have we exceeded that thought? Is not heathenism a rebuke to us in this matter? Have all the great thoughts of the human mind not been anticipated? Is not antiquity the really modern thought and modern literature? It is like going back, not to ten miles farther down the stream—that would be nothing; it is like going back to the well-head. You like to go back to the spring, the fountain, and the origin of the uncommon water. Who has not, who has entered upon the danger and enterprise of exploration at all, desired to find the sources of the Nile? No man has been content to go twenty miles down the river and say he has come to that point and means to stand there. Twenty miles is nothing, fifty miles is a mockery; that is not going back to antiquity. You must find the source, the fountain, or you have found nothing, and all your journeying is a fool's enterprise. Who is this anonymous "he" who is always bringing men to new visions, and undreamed-of rivers, and revelations that glow and shine like summer skies? Who is that other person? Has he no name? Did he not sign on our roll of signatures? We cannot get rid of him; he finishes the experiment, or he begins it, or he interrupts it in the middle. There is a ghostly quantity or force always having its own way. We cannot explain it. Why did you pray so long? You cannot tell. Why did your thoughts fix themselves in one tremendous centralisation upon a point? We cannot tell; tomorrow we shall know. There is a Ghost in the world. You may vote out God, and you may vote out all the theological terms, and come down to the plain vulgar word ghost; but there it is. When you come to the full comprehension thereof you will return to the old words and say they are best—God, Father, Sovereignty, Providence. Some men have to go a long way round to get at their theology, but if they are honest men they will come to it at the last, and we shall find that antiquity is the present day, and the present day is a poor experiment that may end in nothing.

What saw the prophet?—"waters issued out from under the threshold of the house eastward." Who knows what water is? Yet how we reject it! The universe could not live a day without water. It could live a little whilst the water was sinking down, but when the water really went out of it the universe itself would collapse. Christ is water; Christ is commonplace; Christ flows and trickles; Christ is not a measured wine, he is an unmeasured and immeasurable river, now a torrent, now a stream of silver, now a river that a lamb might gambol in, so shallow; and now a river so deep that navies might rock themselves in its abundance of water. There was a man who had a line in his hand, and he went forth eastward to measure a thousand cubits. Who is this man who is always measuring the world? He cannot lay that line down. Is the world growing, shrinking? Why this eternal measurement? Plato said, God is always measuring the world. We find these waters in Joel and in Zechariah and in the Apocalypse, and we find this measuring man everywhere. The earth is mapped in heaven. Heaven's map will be the final geography. We may meet in military committees for the purpose of redistributing geographical areas, but the map of the old sinning earth is kept in the archives of heaven. One day, we shall see, the desert shall be marked out as gardenland, and stony places shall glow with flowers. What a marvellous river was this! The man "measures a thousand cubits," and "the waters were to the ankles"—hardly more than a pool: yonder a little bird was sitting at the brink, farther on a lamb was lapping its daily portion, a little farther on and green grass was waving above the little stream. It was a beauteous lake, hardly more than a mirror, laughing at the blue heavens, and doubling them. And then there was a second measure, another thousand cubits, and "the waters were to the knees"; another thousand, and "the waters were to the loins"; another thousand, and there "was a river," a river "to swim in." The waters never broke, they increased; at last they demanded a sea. The river must find the sea, or make one. All this motion means a grand finale. This increase means ultimate benediction. This is the way of the gospel in the world: first very little, then more, then still more, and then the mightiest and grandest of all objects. O Saviour of the world, what is thy kingdom like? It is like a grain of mustard-seed. So small? Yes, so small in itself, but when it is grown it is a cathedral for birds to sing in. Oh tell us more, thou gentle One! to what is the kingdom of heaven like? It is like unto leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal until the whole was leavened. We think that God should reveal himself in some tremendous exposure or declaration. God will not work after this manner; the path of the just is as the shining light which shineth more and more unto the perfect day. The year has its springtime; life has its infancy; the river reaches to the ankles at first, but at the last it cannot be passed over. Here is the law of progress, beneficent, continuous, and consummating increase.

Then said the anonymous one, "Son of man,"—literally, Adam,—"hast thou seen this?"—then be wise: in the little see the great; in the seed see the harvest; in hints see consummations. This is the very gift of God, the intellectual miracle, the spiritual coronation of man, namely, that he shall see in beginnings the meanings of endings, that he shall see in the first chapter and the first verse of Genesis the meaning of the Apocalypse. That is the difference between the literalist and the prophet. The literalist gets no further on; the prophet is at the end when he is beginning. His soul burns with heaven.

Beautiful is this imagery, but not so beautiful as the reality. Sometimes history has to lag after symbolism. In the case of Christian missions or the propagation of the truths of the Cross, history shakes off the brightest symbolism as being inadequate to express the glorious realities. We are to judge of the river, fairly, clearly, by the life which it brings. The Lord is always willing to submit himself to practical tests. If Christ cannot give life, disbelieve him. Do not talk about his beautiful expression, his tender poetic strain, his gracious voice, his manifold appearances; but put the testing, crucial question, What does it total up to? and if the answer be other than life, let him be crucified; he is the prince of mocking poetasters, he is not the Son of God. Even when Christianity is willing to be judged in this way it by so much establishes a great claim upon the confidence of man. Christianity does not say, Examine my metaphysics, consider me as a philosophy, compare me as an effort in thinking with all the other religions in creation: Christianity says, Judge me by my fruit, see what I do, and if I do not make the dead live, then I am going forth on false pretences. Is it true that wherever Christianity has gone—the spiritual idea, the true conception of God, the right view of the Cross of Christ—is it true that wherever this has gone life has gone? We hold it to be true upon every ground, and we undertake to prove its truth not by tropes but by figures statistical and by facts human, palpable, and accessible. He would not enter upon any very perilous experiment who undertook to prove that the Christian idea—by that involving the whole work and function of Christ—has done more for the commerce of the world than any other force. Christianity has turned over more money than any other thought of man. Christianity has kept more workpeople, paid more wages, patronised more art, than any other religion, or any other conception of the human mind. The highest artists could not have lived without the religious genius and the religious fact. This is true in sculpture, in oil, in music, in architecture, in literature, in poetry. Take out of the world all the cathedrals, all the churches, chapels, religious houses; take away all the monuments that Christianity has erected; take away all the pictures that represent religious or Christian subjects; burn all the oratorios and all the music that derives its sublimity from Christian inspiration; take away all the books that have been printed, all the engravings that have been published, representing Christian thought and Christian history; go into the nursery and into the drawing-room and into the studio, and take out of them everything that the Christian thought has done,—and then, viewed commercially, you have inflicted the greatest possible loss upon the civilised world. "Every thing shall live whither the river cometh": plenty of business, plenty of work,—clearing forests, building cities, exchanging merchandise; the seas alive with vessels, and the desert encroached upon for more city-room.

This religion of Christ is a great business thought. It is the principal factor in civilisation of an active kind. There has been civilisation without it, there is civilisation today that ignores Christianity; but what a languid civilisation, what a self-enjoying and self-destroying civilisation! How wanting in pathos, in pity, in care for others; how exclusive, how selfish, how little! We do not call that civilisation from the point of view of the Cross. When Christianity uses the term civilisation it means to use it in its deepest and most inclusive senses. So judged, Christianity keeps the widest market-place in the world, circulates most money, keeps the world alive. Not the less truly so that some who carry on the merchandise of the world do not know under what inspiration they are working. Who cares for atmosphere? Who cares to go into subtle questions about spiritual relationships, spiritual movements for operating upon the mind and heart? Who knows the mystery of dreams that have ended in temples and in civilisation? Yet there must be a sanctuary in which all these things are adjusted, regulated, and directed to certain positive issues.

Or, leaving the commercial thought altogether and looking at moral progress, only those who have not studied the history of missions can be wanting in sensitiveness on this point. If men would read the Acts of the Apostles published yesterday they would see that the Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament is being continued in many a glowing supplement. How many people have heard, from a missionary point of view, of New Guinea? It was a heathen country, given over to all manner of debasement and corruption and foulness and cruelty. To-day it blossoms as the rose. Why? Because the gospel has been instituted there, preached there, received there; and men who once would have devoured you are now inquiring about the very highest possibilities of thought and destiny. In the name of justice, find the cause of this transformation, and acknowledge it. Did a band of purely scientific persons go over there and colonise? Not they. Was New Guinea transformed by a little brigade of botanists? Never. Who went first? The man who always goes first—the Christian. Then crowds follow, and the crowds that follow are apt to think they made the highway on which they travel. Not a stone of it did they lay. Have you heard of Madagascar and the islands of the Pacific—of any missionary field at all? The missionary has gone and found it given over to all manner of evil, all manner of cruelty, and he has left it a comparative paradise. The question ought to be asked, What did it? and the answer is, The river came, the river brought life with it. It may seem to be a simple thing to say, but it contains a whole philosophy of civilisation, that the river does not come to the city, the city comes to the river. What a gracious thing it was for the Thames to come to London! The Thames never did come to London; the Thames made London. We as a city are built on the Thames. Rome stands on the Tiber. How kind of Rome to receive the Tiber! How very condescending of London to make way for the Thames to roll through almost her very centre! The river did not come. Where water is men go. Build a magnificent palace, anywhere, and then find out at the end there is no water in the neighbourhood: now you may sell your palace to any fool who will buy it. What is wanting? The river. Has a river anything to do with building? Everything. No water, no life; no river, no home. Yet how many persons act as if they thought London had brought the river, and act as if they thought that they were the creditors of religion, and not debtors to it! The truth is, men do not go back to facts; they do not force themselves back to first principles and starting-points; they accept civilisation as it is without tracing it to its fount and origin. Has the river brought life to your house? Wherever it has come it has brought life, has tamed ferocious nature, has made the feeble strong, has made the sick at heart hopeful and glad. Has the river come into your soul? If so, you are a new man. You live now; your thought is quicker, more sensitive, larger, tenderer; now you think about other people, and when you put on all your wrappages you wonder if you could not find room for poor shivering poverty under one corner of your gaiety; when you make a feast you are, at all events, now disposed to give the leavings to the poor: by-and-by you will reverse the arrangement and let the poor sit down first. "Every thing shall live whither the river cometh"—honesty and beauty, and all holy purpose, and all generous thought and effort; everything shall live: the domestic animals on your hearthstone, your horse in the stable, your man in the loft. When you are converted the poorest beggar that knocks at your door will know it.