Bible Commentaries

The Taking of Ai Spiritualised

Joshua 8:5). That must be the rule of the Church in all its great moral wars. The battle is not to be handed over to a few persons, however skilful and zealous. The work of teaching the world and saving the world is a work committed to the whole Christian body. There are to be no laymen in this war. We must obliterate the official distinction between clergy and laity, pulpit and pew. The living Church of the living God is one. Forgetting this rule, what has come to pass?—that destructive work and constructive work, acts of benevolence and charity, have devolved upon handfuls of men, and they have been left to do all that was needful in battle and in charity. They have been favoured with the criticism of those who have stayed at home. Criticism has never been a scarce article in human history! Persons who have done nothing, sacrificed nothing, given nothing, are the very people who are able, by some vicious inspiration, to find fault with everybody else. When the Church realises its totality, when every man is part of an army and not an isolated warrior, then every Ai doomed of heaven shall reel under the battering-ram which the Church will employ. When all the people are at work, there can be no criticism: they are involved in the same strife and issue; they are common patriots, fellow-soldiers, parts of the same great multitude, and there is no time for mutual exasperation and folly. The clever men, therefore, were in the second instance displaced. They supposed that they had realised quite a clever idea, that all the great body of Israel might remain at home and two or three thousand young, sharp, clever, active men might go up and do all the work, and come galloping home at night conquerors rich with spoil. The Lord will not have it so. Joshua must himself go up, and all the people must go up with him. There are to be no mere critics; there are to be thousands of active soldiers.

This being Joshua 8:32 reads:—"And Joshua wrote there upon the stones a copy of the law of Moses, which he wrote in the presence of the children of Israel." This is complete work—destruction, the erected altar, the inscribed law. This is healthy work. The surgeon has done his duty, and now nature will proceed to heal and comfort and bless. The enemy has been driven off the field! Now the altar is put up and the law is promulgated. Society without law is chaos. An altar without righteousness is evaporative sentiment. Prayer without duty may be a detachment of the wings from the bird they were intended to assist.

The picture is a right noble one. Omitting all that was local, incidental, and temporary, here stands the great law of spiritual conflict:—a right character, a right cause, a unanimous advance, a super-excellent shrewdness, a business that touches the early morning and the late night, fire set to the devoted abomination, an altar built upon the ashes, the law written upon the altar,—that is the programme; and any programme whose lines are not covered by this sublime delineation maybe a clever invention, but it is not a revelation from heaven. We are thus called to energy, called to labour, called to sacrifice. We are all called. Merely to hear what the army has been doing is not patriotism. In the Church there is no place for indolence, there is no place for criticism, there is no place for mere sentiment. Has the world to be captured for Jesus Christ, or has it not? If you say it has not, then abandon the standard altogether; if you say it has, then never forsake the standard. Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. Strive to enter in at the strait gate. Take unto you the whole armour of God. Stand against the wiles of the devil. Never leave it an open question as to which side you are upon. Having done the destructive work, do not imagine that the whole programme is complete; now begin the construction of the altar. And having made a place for prayer, do not suppose that the whole duty of man has been perfected; next put up the law:—battle, prayer, law; law, prayer, battle. If there is aught else, it has not yet been to me revealed.

Prayer

Almighty God, the bitterness of death is past: the world's worst history has been lived; and now the latter days have come upon us—days of morning, beauteous and rich with light; the glory of hope is round about us, and heaven is near at hand. We will not sorrow as men who have no hope; this would be to offend thee grievously, for thy providence was never so near our life as it is at this moment. All things teach us the divine nearness. Our own life is a witness that the whole world has become a sanctuary because of the Cross of Christ, and the whole priesthood of the Son of God. We bless thee that the future is lighted up with ineffable glory: now we speak of abolished death, of descending heaven, of immortality, of life all purity, service all music, and hope that cannot fade away. This is the realisation of the gospel of Jesus Christ,—the very perfectness of love, the bringing to maturity of thine eternal thought concerning man. We will therefore dry our tears, and assure our hearts, and go forward like men inspired and made strong. May all tone of mourning be taken out of our voices, all colour suggestive of dismay and fear be wholly removed from the whole course of our being; may our life be a daily witness to the power and goodness of God. For thine open book we bless thee; for its most ancient history we thank thee; for everything that shows the unity of manhood and the human heart we cannot but be grateful to God. The earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof. All time is thy clothing; yea, thou hast made a garment of the universe, and thou standest amongst us clothed with that glittering humiliation. Behold, for God to be, is to make all other being possible, and yet to distress it with a sense of infinite distance. Thou chargest the angels with folly; the heavens are not clean in thy sight;—what can compare with the infinite pureness of God? Still, thou comest near to us, and thou diest upon a cross; thou settest forth a great mystery of sacrificial blood: we understand it not, but we know it to be the gospel which the heart most needs. Amen.

"Handfuls of Purpose"

For All Gleaners

"... an altar of whole stones, aver which no man hath lift up any iron."— Joshua 8:31

This is a point in the spiritual education of man.—We must think ourselves back to the time when such mechanical exactitude was part of personal and national religion.—The uses of such studies may be to show how far we have advanced, and to inquire into the methods by which our progress has been realised.—We do not advance from those points unless we have really been at them ourselves, either literally or sympathetically.—It is not enough to know that the Israelites were at the point of literal detail, such as is indicated in the text; we must ourselves have been at that point in some clearly recognised sense; we do not descend upon great spiritual privileges, but we work up to them through processes of subservience; we are not born into this household of grace and liberty, but are brought into it by long processes of self-rebuke, self-chastisement, and self-denial; all men must begin at the alphabet, and pursue their way into the delights of literature.—It is the same with religion as it is with education.—We are born into a great literary estate, full of philosophy, poetry, history, and imagination; yet though we are born into this inheritance and have certain rights to it, we can only claim the inheritance by becoming patient inquirers and students: when the philosopher leaves his philosophy to the world, even his own children must begin at the alphabet, and toil up the ascent upon which the great fortune stands.—Passages of this kind rebuke the idea that religion now is a merely off-handed exercise, a pleasure that can be taken up or laid down: a species of luxury which may be languidly enjoyed or languidly declined.—To build the altar is not to create the God.—To build the church is not to unfold the revelation.—There is a wonderful co-operation in the whole process of religion.—God will, so to say, be met half-way.—He will come to the top of the mountain, and meet us at the end of our opportunity.—A beautiful thought is this, that God sometimes will come no further down than to the top of the mountain; if he remained one league above it, we could not reach him; but it is in accord with his mercy that he begins where man ends; man toils to the top of the mountain, and cannot proceed one step further, and it is in this extremity that God creates his own opportunity.—Although altar-building may now have been done away, and much of mechanical process may have been abrogated, yet still there remains the great fact that man must always make some preparation to meet God and enter into the full enjoyment of religious privileges.—The preparation indicates the spirit of the worshipper.—When called upon to offer hospitality to a king, we prepare according to the dignity of the guest; when summoned to the presence of some great one, all our preparations are made with a view to the greatness of the man whom we have to meet.—We have only to apply these facts in a religious direction to discover what we ought to do when we are called upon to commune with Heaven.