Bible Commentaries

Unexpected Retribution

Numbers 20:14-21

ALL these things have an explanation. The judgment of things does not lie upon the bare surface, nor is our life a quantity constituted between four visible and measurable points. Life is a mystery—sometimes distant, shapeless and measureless as a cloud, and sometimes a veil so thin we can almost see through it, yet when we touch it, it is a hard wall built by hands invisible, and rising up with darkening height to the very clouds from which we expected revelations of morning and summer. Why do we whine and complain, and say we are ill-used and Edom is unkind and ungenerous, wanting in hospitality, and in all the tenderest attributes of human nature? It is an ill speech; it is as wanting in honesty and self-recognition as it is in sound reasoning. Israel was not the poor little innocent wanderer that it appeared to be from the plaintive, suppliant speech of Moses. Nothing is self-contained. We must go into yesterday to find the explanation of to-day. To-day!—What is it? An up-gathering and sharp, yet transient, representation of things that happened in the centuries dead but never forgotten and never inoperative. Who pleads? Israel. To whom is the plea addressed? To a brother. How did the word brother come into the narrative? It came historically. We have here Jacob and Esau. Edom is the name by which Esau was known. Wherever we find the term Edom, our minds may instantly associate with it the history of Esau, and an action of divine sovereignty in relation to that history. Jacob supplanted Esau, ran away in the night time, met his brother at some distance of time afterwards, the brothers fell upon one another's necks, kissed each other, and seemed to sink the infinite outrage in grateful and perpetual oblivion. Nothing of the kind. Life cannot be managed thus; things do not lie between man and man only. Herein is the difference between crime and sin. Crime may be an affair open, visible, measurable, to which adequate penalty may be measured out; but sin hurts the heavens, insults and stains the sceptre of the universe—pains the heart of God. Can men shake hands over it, sponge it out by some act of transient generosity, and say,—Let it be forgotten, as though it had never been? We cannot treat our own sin. The answer to the sin of men must come from the God against whom the sin was committed. Do not let us imagine that sin is a breach of etiquette, a perversion of social custom, an eccentricity of personal taste, a mere outrage of a conventional kind. If we talk thus flippantly and superficially about sin, we shall be astounded when we behold the Cross that was erected for its obliteration and pardon. We must know the sinfulness of sin before we can know the compassionateness of mercy. So Jacob and Esau come face to face throughout the ages. The supplanter cannot sponge out his miserable cunning and selfish deceit and unpardonable fraud. Jacob the individual dies, Esau the individual dies: but Jacob and Esau, as representing a great controversy, can never die: to the end of the chapter Edom will encounter Israel with deep and lasting animosity. We cannot always explain the animosities which burn in our excited hearts; examined and cross-examined as to their history, we may be quite unable to give any exact account of genesis and growth and culmination. Man cannot explain himself to himself; he only knows that inexplicably he feels an animosity which cataracts cannot quench—a burning, blazing scorn which seas cannot drown. There is a mystery in human development. Things are larger than they seem to be. Awkward, perplexing, distressing, is the fact we are bound to recognise, that we come up against ourselves day by day, and our ghostly history follows us from wedding to burial, from feast to battle, from day to night; and when we would be gladdest it thrusts in its sting the furthest. Let us take care of this life. The day is more than twelve hours long; invisible threadlets pass through the dark night and connect themselves with the next day.—Our life is not a thread like a line; it is a web moving in various directions, and thickening itself into substance not always easy to handle, and sometimes wrapping itself round us like a robe that burns off our skin, and sometimes lifting itself above us to shut out the fire and blessing of the sun. Fools are they who live from hand to mouth,—yea, fools inexplicable and unpardonable and wholly undesirable as to companionship, who live a flippant life, thinking that things are in no wise related, and forgetting that to-morrow brings the harvest of to-day.

Influence is not limited by personal action. What is a "person"? There is no such thing, in any narrow and limited sense of the term. A man stands Up and says,—Am I not a man?—; and I say,—No, you are not—; there need not be any long and wordy discussion about that. What is an "individual"? There is no such thing, in the sense of a quantity that can be measured, weighed, and set down in exact figures, and as having no relation whatever to anything past or to come. When the little child stands up, generations beat in his pulse. When a man asks if he is not a "person," an "individual," he forgets that all his forefathers gather up mysterious influences in his breathing, his attitude, and his action. We are more than we appear to be. We do not bury the past and shut it out as an operative factor in the daily ministry of being. This makes life solemn even to awfulness. When the young life coughs and heaves under the influence of internal pain, what is it that happens? Whole generations of weakness gather up in that sense of distress and powerlessness. When a young and apparently lovely character suddenly deflects from the straight line and goes away into forbidden places, what has happened? Generations of criminals have asserted their ascendency over the individual will, and the wanderer may have run off to meet in invisible council more than two or three generations of men.

Jacob must meet Esau again and again. There is no easy escape for wrongdoers. The eternal distrust which subsists between man and Numbers 20:29

We have seen the earth open and swallow up the rebels; now we may expect to have peace. A great judgment has fallen upon Israel, and from this time there will be no more murmuring and complaining. An earthquake will settle everything. If one could rise from the dead and visit the living, one sight of the dead man would cause the mind to think, the heart to dissolve in tears, and the whole will to consecrate itself to perpetual obedience. We have often invented methods of evangelising the world. Were an angel to stand in the very centre of the mid-day sky so that every one upon the earth could see him, and were he to preach some brief sermon to the sons of men, all the populations upon the face of the globe would instantly hail Jesus Christ, Son of Numbers 16:41). "But on the morrow all the congregation of the children of Israel murmured against Moses and against Aaron, saying, Ye have killed the people of the Lord." When did this murmuring occur? The very day that the divine judgment was inflicted. Earthquakes have no abiding moral; great physical demonstrations seem to perish in the using. An earthquake becomes a familiarity; a plague becomes a topic of common gossip; darkening heavens and shooting lightnings are remarked upon by the people who pass under the tempestuous canopy. The world is not to be sobered as we thought—to be steadied and brought into prayerful mood and temper; it is not by miracle, nor by earthquake, nor by fire, but by some other way subtler, farther off, apparently less effectual, and a method requiring long time to develop itself and apply itself to the whole line of human action and human need. It would be difficult to believe all this if we could not corroborate it by our own experience. When was the great sin committed in your case? "On the morrow" after the judgment. Can men sin so suddenly and immediately after the divine chastisement for wrong-doing? As an argument we should say, No, they cannot do so; but we are forced back upon facts, realities, solid and personal experiences, and all these combine to say: Hardly will the night pass to separate men from the great judgment before they are back at the forbidden altar, drinking the forbidden cup, and lifting up their hand in obstinate challenge to Heaven. It is so everywhere. Men see the evil results of wrong courses of behaviour, and they repeat those wrong courses as soon as their energy is recruited; men feel the ill effects of wrong living, and they will repeat that wrong living to-morrow. Daily we see what comes of evil practice, ignoble purpose, unholy thought, and yet we no sooner look at the punishment than we go away to do the very thing which involved the judgment of God. Account for this. There is no accounting for it argumentatively. If this were a mere matter of words, it could only be settled in one way. Were it possible for any human fancy so to forget all the history of the world as to stand up and say what men would do under such and such circumstances, detailing the very facts of life as we ourselves know them, we should resent the suggestion, we should declare it an exaggeration, an expression of an absurd impossibility. The witness is in ourselves: our conscience condemns us. Why is it important to dwell upon this? To show that human nature is one, to show that the Bible deals with one kind of humanity, and that one kind of humanity is found in all lands, in all ages it never changes; and it is important also as aggravating a condition to which some reply must be made from Heaven. We mass ourselves up into one terrific solid, and God must find some answer to the tremendous consolidation which we present. He must answer it with judgment, or he must answer it with mercy. The answer must come from above, be it what it may; and it can only be one of two answers: destruction—salvation; anger—pity; an assertion of sovereign and majestic power, or a condescension of divine majesty to the low condition and awful apostasy of human nature. Reading the Bible through thus, page by page, steadily and patiently, one may come upon the Cross with a feeling which would be utterly impossible under any other conditions of Biblical perusal. The Lord is angry with the people; he says he will destroy them after all: he will send a plague upon the camp which shall utterly burn it up. Is the Lord not sometimes tempted to fight us with our own weapons? Is not the divine patience apparently exhausted? Does it not seem as if only in one way can God get hold of us, and that by the way of destruction? So often is his hand lifted up and so often does it fall without inflicting the penalty. This is a holy vacillation; this is a glorious hesitancy. Looking at history we say,—Now the arm will fall and nothing can prevent it;—and suddenly as by a breath—soft as the breath of prayer—that great arm is turned aside, and the blow is not struck. This is divinity. It would be fickleness but in God; it would be an incertitude of mind but in the Most High. God knows that the way of salvation is the best way,—not the readiest, not the directest—destruction always lies handiest to the law that has been outraged;—but salvation may be so conceived, wrought out, and applied as to vindicate itself in the long run. Any time in relation to eternity must be a quantity infinitesimal. We store up our millenniums and call them long periods; we pile one thousand years upon another thousand years and multiply the double thousand by ten until our poor imaginations stagger under the vastness of the result; but the accumulated millenniums are but the flicker of a pulse, coming, going, dying, in the twinkling of an eye, compared with the duration of the divine throne. It will be seen, therefore, in Heaven's by-and-by, that the method of salvation, though apparently so indirect and so remote in its influence and effect, is a divine method—the only method, the method that alone can vindicate itself by its sublimest issues.

So Moses and Aaron turned aside the divine wrath, and the Lord took to another course. He said,—This matter of rulership and guidance must be settled once for all. If the tone of impatience could enter the divine voice, it would be under such daily and vexatious provocation. So he will appeal to the eyes of the people; he would have the rods laid up, according to the statement in the seventeenth chapter,—he would have every one of them take a rod according to the house of their fathers, of all their princes according to the house of their fathers: twelve rods; and every man's name was to be written upon his rod, and the man whose rod budded was to have the rulership and the primacy of Israel. So God will become an infant to us, because we are infants. This is the great method of human education. The philosopher has to become a child if he would teach a child; the mother can only charm the baby as she herself becomes a baby; God can only help man as he becomes a man. Great is the mystery of godliness, because always great is the mystery of love. Great is the mystery of condescension—infinite is the miracle of stooping to the lowest condition. Now Israel shall see a sight,—it is the stoop of God. The rods were laid up, in due time they were examined, and there was one rod budding and blooming like a living thing, and nor bud nor blossom could be seen upon the other rods. Whose rod budded and blossomed? It was Aaron's rod. Henceforth it was to be a sign of power and divine election, and the sight of that rod was to settle all conflict, all controversy. Did that succeed? Nothing can succeed that is outward, visible, typical, or even miraculous. The miracles have all been tried, and they have all failed. Christ laid them down as useless tools. He knew from the beginning that they were useless; but he must adapt his plans to the condition of the scholars who are supposedly attending his school. So he leads us to drop miracle and sign and wonder and judgment, and causes us to cry out,—What then is the strength of God? what is the method of Heaven? and when our judgment and imagination have been purged of false conclusions and vain imaginings, then he says—and he could have said it at no earlier period, "God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Numbers 20:29).

They took the nobler view of the man. After all he was God's priest. We must have some regard to the men who have thrown even the censer of the sanctuary. He was sometimes feeble to contemptibleness, sometimes perhaps a little vain, though he would not have been half so vain but for the prompting of his ambitious sister; he made the calf of gold, he did things which he ought not to have done; still for him the ephod was made, on him the sacerdotal robes were set as by the very hands of God; he was Aaron after all. So when he died there was a thirty days" mourning for him, "even all the house of Israel." They remembered the old man's best qualities: they said,— he was always valiant: he seemed—he was—a good man in the soul of him: the rotten places were all outside: the core of the old priest was a sound and healthy core. The people have the spirit of judgment; the people know the true from the false. There is hardly any bar of judgment out of heaven so exact in its decisions as the bar of the common opinion of the nations. So Aaron was mourned for by all the house of Israel. We shall—said they in effect—see the old man no more; he had a noble speech: he was the rhetor of the wilderness: he was chosen because of his eloquence: he was to be a mouth unto Moses and Moses was to be as God unto him. So they complemented one another: what the one had the other had not: what the one had not the other had; they were brothers indeed, and the mourning was touched with a deeper pathos when Israel caught sight of Moses. Miriam gone, Aaron gone—who next can go but the great chief himself? So wondrously are the events of life related to one another, touched by one another, coloured by one another, and so profound and subtle is the mystery of pathos itself. Who remains? The Lord abideth for ever—Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever. The singing Miriam dies, but the music still flows on; priestly Aaron passes away, but our Melchizedek abideth a Priest for ever; the great Moses dies with the only pomp possible to the majesty of his career—in the solitude of the divine companionship, but the God of Moses lives. This must be our confidence in the day of fear, when we ask,—What shall Israel do when Miriam ceases to sing, when Aaron ceases to pray, when Moses ceases to lead? What shall be done when the prophets drop their mantle and the fathers say Adieu? Our confidence must be in God: his heaven is full of angels, his ministers are without number in their host, and never yet sang human voice, never yet resounded human eloquence, never yet went forth the champion of human liberties, whose place God could not supply with an ampler abundance. There is no searching of his understanding. The Church does not stand in the song of its singers, in the eloquence of its preachers, in the prayers of its priests; the Church stands in Christ. When he dies, the Church dies. He abideth for ever; the Church is, therefore, assured as to its duration by the eternity of its Lord.

Prayer

Almighty God, thou dost lead us by the right way. Its length is determined, and all the influences which operate upon it are under thy control. We did not begin the way, nor do we know one turning that is upon it, nor can we determine the length thereof. It is not in man that walketh to direct his steps; the way of man is from the Lord which made heaven and earth, and he will sustain the traveller, he will bring the weary pilgrim to the heavenly rest. Thou hast led us these many years in the wilderness, and thou hast made a garden of the desert, and thou hast found for us orchards amongst the rocks; thy course towards us has been a daily miracle, a surprise of love, a new revelation of light. So now we begin to see somewhat of God's meaning in what to us has been so long confusion and bewilderment. Thou dost work secretly, so that we cannot see thee; thine hand is not always visible to us so that we can say,—This is the Lord, and this is his work, and, behold, he doeth it in his own way and time. We cannot see much; we can hear but a little; we must, therefore, live our larger life—the life of faith, the noble, eternal life of trust in the living God; saying daily, until our very voice becomes musical by the exercise,—The will of the Lord be done: it is best; thy will be done on earth as it is done in heaven. When we can speak this prayer with our hearts, we shall know that the pinnacle is being put upon the temple, that the topstone is being set upon the tower, and that our life's education upon earth is nearly completed. Do thou take us, by thine own way, to the city which hath habitations built for the sons of men. We think we nee the shorter road; but our life is full of mistakes of our own making: so we will judge nothing before the time, but wait in the spirit of trust and in the meekness of patience. We will leave all the way to God. We will not take our life-course from our passion, our imagination, our selfishness; we will have nothing to do with it, except in God and through the ministry of the Holy Spirit. Then our thirst shall be a blessing, our hunger shall be a means of grace, our difficulties shall be elements of delight, and the strain that is put upon our weakness shall be the beginning and the assurance of power. Bring us into the inner places of God's house; take us from chamber to chamber until we see the innermost centre possible to earthly vision; give us to feel the warmth of the sanctuary—its tender, hospitable glow; give us to feel assurance of God's nearness and God's love and God's almightiness to save. Protect us from impression made through the senses only, and undertake for us that we shall learn wholly from thy Spirit, disregarding appearances which we can neither understand nor control. Enable us to trust thee, and love thee, and serve thee: and when the enemy's hand is mighty upon us, may the hand of God be mightier still; and when the discouragement of the way is very severe, may our gift in prayer be greatly enlarged, and our souls see an open gate to the throne of the heavenly grace. We bless thee for thy Son Jesus Christ, our Saviour. We love him because he first loved us. Whilst we were yet sinners he died for us, much more now that he is raised and throned in heaven will he mightily succour us by his consolations and ennoble us by his promises. Comfort thy people; say unto them their iniquity is pardoned, and grant unto them assurance that the enemy hath no more power over them, seeing they are bought with a price and are marked by the sign of God and are guided by the Spirit Eternal. We remember our loved ones everywhere, praying for them with all prayer and supplication, that they, with us, may enjoy the common blessings of the sanctuary, and, having happiness of home, may have triumph in the house of God and great success in the marketplace; the Lord bless them in basket and in store, in property, in children, in all manner of business and avocation, in travelling by sea and by land; and show us all that there can be no distance from one another, where there is no distance from the common centre; if we love God, we shall be near one another, though mountains intervene and seas roll between us; we touch a common Cross, we look at a common Light, we breathe to the One, the Universal, Father; and in this sweet, noble fellowship we are conscious of living union. Make the sick thy care. In many cases they are quite beyond us; our gentlest touch is roughness, our whispered affection is a loud voice; but thou canst speak to souls nearing heaven, thou canst comfort those whose feet are touching the last cold river, thou canst trim the light when we cannot touch it. So we hand over our sick chambers and all our suffering loved ones to the Physician and Healer of the universe, willing to be his servants that we may work as he bids us, and wait all the time until our patience is completed. The Lord hear us in these things; the Lord send us answers more than we have capacity to receive; the Lord show us that he is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think: that in our mightiest prayer we have not begun to touch the infinity of his reply. Amen.