Bible Commentaries

Memorial Stones

Joshua 4:1-3

THUS a memorial was to be set up, commemorating the power and goodness of God. The way of life should be full of such cairns. But is it not early in the history to be setting up stones of memory? The battle has not begun. Israel did not march forth to cross a river but to overthrow a city well-walled and hoary with antiquity. Is it not, then, rather early in the day to be building altars and to be setting up signs of triumph? It is in putting such questions as these that we show the littleness of our faith. In all great spiritual controversy the beginning is the end. The whole history is in one sentence. The entire history of the human race is in the first few chapters of Genesis; all the rest has been translation, variation, rearrangement of particles and individualities and colours; but the soul of the history is all there. With God the end and the beginning are one. To have crossed Jordan is to have torn down all the Jerichos that opposed us. One step is the pledge of another. The first miracle is the pledge of the last. He who turns water into wine at the beginning will raise himself from the dead at the end. The miracles are one. One miracle carries with it all the host of wonders. So it is in all the departments of properly-regulated and disciplined life. It is so in any properly-graduated system of education. He who has conquered one book has conquered all books. The reason why men do not conquer the third book is that they have not conquered the first. No student can set himself heart and soul to the mastery of the First Book of Euclid without therein and thereby mastering the next and the next, until the very end. There must be no paltering, no half and half work, no touching the labour with reluctant and dainty fingers, but a real tussle, a tremendous wrestling, at the first. Jordan passed, Jericho shall totter and fall. Why is the Church so hesitant and uncertain in its movement? Perhaps because it does nothing firmly and completely; it may not have mastered its first principles; it may have considered itself altogether too advanced in life to trouble itself with elementary theologies and considerations, but so considering it will never take any Jericho. The place of evil will have faces at every window smiling upon its furious feebleness. The devil will open his idol-temples shoulder by shoulder with any cathedral or minster we can build; he says—These people did not perform the first miracle: they never got through Jordan; they are still splashing in the waters that lave the brink of the channel; they are not complete students, they are not well-equipped thinkers; they have nothing in their hearts they are quite sure about; they are changing all the time,—now it is a great argument which none can comprehend, now it is a radiant cloud on which no man can satisfy his hunger, now it is an elaborate and pompous programme without a beginning and without an end and without any reason for its existence at all;—these people will never fight me; if they could but get hold of one thing and be perfectly certain of that my days would be numbered, but they have nothing in the possession of certitude; they call themselves "honest doubters" and "patient inquirers," and whilst they are doubting and inquiring I am digging hell miles deeper. Could we but really read one book of the Bible, could we but hold one Gospel in our hearts, could we but get hold of something and say, This one thing I have and know and use,—all the rest would come in happy sequence. So it was not too early to set up a cairn on the one side of the bank and on the other side of the bank. We must have memorials in life. If we do not set up stony memorials we shall still leave footprints. Every man has his history, and every man has had his opportunity and has left behind him a record as to its use or abuse. Blessed is the life that is full of memorial stones! It ought never to be far back to the last one; and if whilst we are building the next one the enemy should suddenly come down upon us in some black suggestion, in some terrific temptation, we should flee back to the memorial last put up, and, under the shadow of that Ebenezer, calmly await the future. Why this unbuilt life? Why this life without any pillar of stone or temple behind it? What wonder if in turning round and seeing nothing a great fear should seize us, and we should suppose that we had been given over to the enemy of souls? There should hardly be one step between one memorial stone and another, so that we may instantly retire for a moment to recruit our strength and renew our hope and confidence in God. How mean are some lives in this matter of erecting no memorial; no diary is kept, no journal is posted up, no entry written, it may be in a trembling hand, but yet setting forth the formula: The true God was with me today; he helped me to cross the river, he enabled me to run through a troop and to leap over a wall; and though I can scarcely read the words yet I will inscribe them every one and come back to them as to a Bible and to a revelation. Men who live in times of haste say they have no leisure for such enterings. The enterings need not be literal: we need not be talking about material paper and ink, but about the tablets of the heart, the records of the memory, always having a vivid recollection of the last deliverance, the last vision, the last mighty prayer, the last sublime victory. There is no other way in which to make life rich and thoughtful. When accused, we should be able to flee back to God's last record; when tempted to disbelieve him, we should go back to the last fact. Our life should not be a mysterious argument, in the processes of which we may be vexed and troubled by subtler intellects than our own: life should be its own fact, its own confirmation of spiritual truths, its own sanctuary, its own refuge. Have the witness in yourselves. Do not wait for posterity to build the cairns; build your own memorials. Posterity will come and read them, but we might build our own altars, set up our own standards and unfurl our own banners, and accept the responsibility, as we have received the reward, of our own religion. So building we should crowd out all unworthy houses. We should want every inch of land. The whole earth would be filled with the divine presence and glory. Every room in the house would be a church; every window in the dwelling would look towards the Jerusalem that is above; every chair would be an altar;—the whole dwelling would burn with unconsuming fire. We cannot, then, begin too soon. The moment the first conviction is wrought in the mind, build a stone memorial; the moment you are conscious of having taken the first real step in advance, build; vow never to retire behind that building, for it begins your best history, it points towards your broadest, brightest future.

We have spoken of posterity. The cairn was to be a sign among the Israelites:—

"That this may be a sign among you, that when your children ask their fathers in time to come, saying, What mean ye by these stones? Then ye shall answer them, That the waters of Jordan were cut off before the ark of the covenant of the Lord; when it passed over Jordan, the waters of Jordan were cut off: and these stones shall be for a memorial unto the children of Israel for ever" ( Joshua 4:6-7)

History should be matter of interest to all men, and in all history we should be able to identify Providence with the past and to speak of the wonders of the days of old. Here there ought to be no mystery and no doubt. The wonders of redemption may lie far from our intellectual grasp, but the goodness of providence should lie quite handy to every man. Every intelligent man should be able to say—Be the mysteries what they may, it is perfectly certain that this life of ours is bound, limited, directed: its ambitions are checked, its blood-thirstiness cannot go beyond a certain range; it is watched;—at all events that is the best explanation of life which we have yet discovered; it is so near being almighty, and yet so near being powerless: now it stands upon some eminence as if it would be lord of all, and presently it overreaches itself and falls down in utterest humiliation; we are watched, barred in, shut up. We go certain lengths as if we could go ten times farther, and, lo, in a moment, a great wall of darkness asserts the limit and defines the prison. On this matter of Providence there ought to be no uncertain sound. It is not supposable that any life amongst us has not within itself elements sufficient for the construction of a practical argument on behalf of a living, loving Providence. But are there not many broken lives, sad hearts, perplexed souls? Unquestionably there are; but there are men who have seen God even in darkness and have acknowledged his hand even amid the chastening of affliction; there are men who have said, "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him." There was one singer so valiant in spiritual music that when all nature seemed to be given up to silence and despair he said, "Although the fig tree shall not blossom... I will joy in the God of my salvation;"—my religion is not an affair of abundant herbs and plentiful harvests and green meadows: I live in the sanctuary of God's love, and as a child adopted into his family I will sing as loudly in winter as in summer: I will make up for the inhospitableness of the desert by the loudness and sweetness of my song. So we must not retire upon our desertions, difficulties, broken-hearted-nesses, and say, Whoever may have arguments, we have none. It is possible for ruins to be so shaped and so left as to excite inquiry, touch commiseration, and awaken reverence.

Thus miracles were to be brought within the lines of history: the time was to come when men would speak about miracles as they would speak about the commonplaces of life. The miracle is very startling at first, but there comes a time when men can write about the miracles with hands that do not tremble, with a certitude in which there is no flutter. At first they amazed and stupefied: we questioned their possibility; but by living along that line, moving steadily step by step along that course, we come to a period when we can write about a miracle as if it were a common occurrence, when we can sing the sublimest poetry as if it were glorified prose, when our prayer gradually ascends into praise. Do not, therefore, be deterred by men who ask questions about the miracles, and especially by those men who have proved to their own satisfaction that miracles are impossible. There is nothing so impossible to my imagination as the existence of a man who can deny miracles. He indeed is an enigma in the course of my reading. How he can have unmade himself, choked the angel within him, suffocated the infant spirit,—how he can have been guilty of this infanticide I cannot tell: I must leave him to be expounded by-and-by. Meanwhile, my own life springs up into a daily miracle—a miracle every moment, a day crowned with wonders; and the time comes when we speak about these things as if they were commonplaces—not in the sense of being unsuggestive or unworthy of heed, but in the sense of being so abundant that we have come to regard them with reverent familiarity, and to expect them as men expect the miracle of the harvest. Yes, the miracle of the harvest! The seed is sown and left in the cold earth, but the whole chemic ministry of nature works upon it: the dew and the rain; the morning does its work, and the evening continues its labour; and by-and-by the seed springs up some thirty, some sixty, some an hundredfold, without a stain of earth upon it, pure as if it had grown downwards from the sky,—a great golden answer to the prayer of industry. Miracles! The air is full of them, life throbs with them. We have been so blind that we have not seen them, or so fond of doubt that we have questioned their possibility. If we were to live in God we would live as God, and the coming and the going of nature—the perpetual miracle—would be the perpetual rest. O that men were wise, that they understood these things! This was the Church of sacred romance. We have left romance out of the history of the Church now. It is a question of surface, of bulk, of statistics, of movable figures. Would God the day of sacred romance would return when great things were attempted and great things done in the name of the Almighty God!

There is a Jordan before every one of us. That Jordan must be passed. We call it Death. We speak of it as the black last river. We talk of it sometimes as in swelling indignation and fury, and ask what shall we do in the swellings of Jordan? To the Christian, Jordan is already past. In a material, physical, and limited sense the little conquest has yet to be won, but in all its spiritual significance and glory Jordan is dried up, and they who are in Christ Jesus, the great priest of the everlasting covenant, walk through the bed of the river as upon dry ground. This is our Christian confidence, this is our spiritual hope, this is our standing in life. Death is abolished. The miracles have been completed in the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. All that follows will follow like a cadence, without effort,—a sweet necessity, the logic of poetry.

Prayer

Almighty God, thou art always drying up rivers before us, or Red Seas, or beating down mountains, or making straight that which is crooked. Thy love is a daily concern for us, leaving nothing untouched and unblessed, but covering the whole sphere of our life as with summer sunshine. We bless thee for thy love, for we live in it. Thy love encourages us, inspires and sustains us, and makes the wilderness into a fruitful field. We know thy love in providence: we see it everywhere every day; but we see thy love most of all in the Cross of Jesus Christ, thy Joshua 4:13-15

"We have no such visions now" may be the easy comment of men who walk by sight and not by faith. Everything depends upon what you mean by "vision." Jesus Christ said—How is it that ye cannot discern the signs of the times? Jesus Christ saw signs. All men whose eyes are set in their head see tokens, omens, and prefigurations of many kinds and full of urgent suggestion. We should see more if we looked more. He who looks sees. But there is a looking which is not seeing—a casual inspection, a hurried glance, a superficial regard scarcely to be distinguished from utter unconcern. We should put things together; we should follow facts until they become laws. This indeed is the only way of finding out laws—namely, to gather facts together from every quarter, facts of every quality and every degree; fearlessly bring together whatever has been established in the way of fact, and then when the evidence is thus as nearly complete as our time can make it, the inference which we draw from this collation will have of necessity the authority and force of a law. We must not judge by one fact, nor must we betake ourselves to any special field and say—all the facts we require are to be found within the four corners of this particular plot. All facts must be recognised, admitted into the great composition, and from the whole of them we must bring those inductions which settle themselves into law, until still larger facts are brought in to displace them or give them newness of accent and value. The "man" is still standing over against us. Nothing has been lost of all that is morally significant in this apocalypse. We have been looking in the wrong direction, or we have not been looking with sufficient eagerness, or we have failed before the spirit of languor, having succumbed to its lull; and so we have lost our hold upon the age and all its forces. There is a man (visible to the spiritual eye) standing in this day or in that day over the whole continent with a drawn sword. It is the day of war. We shall hear presently, when we see such signs, the clash of battle. All the uneasiness, restlessness, discontent, unholy ambition with which we are made familiar from time to time, being interpreted means that the war spirit is ahead, is animating the sentiment of nations, is troubling the peace of the world. Thus we can find out from the journals of the day what figure it is that presides over the fortunes of the hour; but we must bring, let us repeat, steadily and fearlessly, facts from every quarter, and shape them into this Joshua 4:15-24

THE Canaanites might reasonably have looked upon the Jordan as one of their natural defences. This it was at all times, but it was to all human appearance more so at this season than at other periods of the year. Springing among the spurs of the Lebanon, at a great height above the level of the sea, becoming first Lake Merom, and then expanding into the Lake Tiberias, so large and important that it was called the Sea of Galilee, its impetuous course terminated in the Dead Sea. It would seem to have been made to roll just where it did that it might be a natural protection or defence for the people upon the side of the Canaanites. The time of this history was April or May. We know from another passage that it was the harvest of flax and barley; all the snow upon Hermon had melted, and was pouring down into the valley through which the swollen torrent plunged and roared on its way to the Dead Sea. The time of the year is thus worth noticing; it was a time at which the Jordan was in the very pride of its fulness and strength. It has been pointed out as a striking contrast that "when the Goths, in the fifth century, nearly a million of people, crossed the Danube to seek a home in the south of Europe, they had a fleet of vessels at their command; yet the crossing of the Goths occupied many days, and many lives were lost in the passage." Be it observed, then, that the writers make no doubt as to the reality of this miracle. Fifty days later the wheat harvest would have set in, and at the time of the wheat harvest Jordan had considerably subsided. Sceptical critics might therefore have said that the Israelites crossed at low water; there were many shallow places in the channel, and no doubt they took advantage of the subsidence of the river in order to cross. But the sacred historian makes it very clear that the Jordan was at its height: there was no mistake about its fulness and urgency; so we have to deal with the facts as we find them stated in the record. There is happily confirmatory evidence as to the time at which the Israelites passed, and that evidence tends to show that the river must have been at its fullest. Nature only apparently protects doomed men. We can imagine the Canaanites on their side of the river thinking that nature was in their interest, that nature was concerned for them, and had provided a defence inviolable; but nature is never on the side of the doomed man; certainly nature is never on the side of the bad man; even if apparently Joshua 4:19).

What is that to us? These are forgotten dates? No, there is nothing forgotten. Great things took place upon this date long ago, and it ought to be familiar to us. In Exodus 12:5, the people had been commanded to take them a lamb for an house that they might eat the Passover. When was that? "On the tenth day of the first month." That was exactly to a moment forty years before. Coincidences of time are full of suggestion. History repeats itself in many ways in very subtle colourings and suggestions. So we seem to have been here before, and to have read this discourse, or to have heard this speech somewhere, long ago. Did we dream this scene? Who told us of it? There is a strange and even weird familiarity about the place, the Joshua 4:24)

Prayer

Oh that we knew where we might find him! We would come even onto his seat and plead with him mightily and long. We bless thee that we need not repeat the words of thy servant of old, for we know where thou art: thou art not a God afar off but nigh at hand. Thou hast, in Christ Jesus thy Joshua 4:23

This presents God as doing the little and doing the great: in the one case he dried up a river; in the other case he dried up a sea.—The idea to be kept steadily before the mind is, that it is the same God that worketh all in all.—Omnipotence is as much required in the drying up of the Jordan as in the dividing of the Red Sea; and the Omnipotence that divided the Red Sea condescended to dry up the river.—Every action on the part of God must of necessity be a condescension.—When God made the universe he humbled himself.—When God made man he subjected the Deity to degradation.—This must not be looked upon in the light of experiment, but in the light of necessity. Terms which seem to indicate the contrary are merely terms of accommodation, and not terms which express the essence of things.—We are to reason from the greater to the less; thus, if God dried up the Red Sea, he will also dry up the Jordan; if God enabled us to kill a lion, he will enable us to slay a man; if God enabled us to climb a mountain, he will not forsake us when we have to pass over a molehill.—The text is an appeal to memory as well as an appeal to confidence.—That we may live well in the future we should live steadfastly in the past.—The witness of God's personality and presence in life must be found in a man's own experience; he can only assent to them with the intellect, but he can claim them as verities, and affirm them as the truest facts of life only in proportion to the richness of his personal experience in divine things. Thus growing life should be growing religiousness; old age should be itself an argument; memory should be a library of exposition and defence.—What is forgotten so soon as grace or favour even on the part of man to man? It is even so with God.—We forget that our whole life has been a miracle. We forget this in proportion as we draw a line beyond which our recollection is not permitted to go— Recollection must be helped by association or analogy.—Thus we can go back to our own infancy by carefully regarding the infancy of others, marking its frailty and its continual exposure to fatal danger.—Life regarded thus from the beginning to its end becomes itself a piece of work which no human hands could have executed, a very miracle of mystery and beauty.—The Old Testament saints in particular were accustomed to reason from the past to the future. David did so in relation to Goliath. That is but a typical instance. Job did so when he contended that, as God had been with him in six troubles, he would not forsake him in seven; or when God himself affirmed this to be the line of his treatment of mankind.—Our own hymn-writers have celebrated this truth in many a soothing and encouraging line,—"His love in time past forbids me to think," etc.