The Expositor's Bible: The Book of Genesis
by Marcus Dods · English · Gutenberg #39395 · 772,425 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Expositor's Bible: The Book of Genesis
Author: Marcus Dods
Editor: Sir W. Robertson Nicoll
Release date: April 7, 2012 [eBook #39395]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/39395
Credits: Produced by Colin Bell, Nigel Blower and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EXPOSITOR'S BIBLE: THE BOOK OF GENESIS ***
Produced by Colin Bell, Nigel Blower and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive)
[Transcriber's Note:
_Italic words_ have been enclosed in underscores.
As the oe ligature cannot be included in this format, it has been
replaced with the separate letters in "manoeuvre" and "Phoenician".
A few minor typographical errors have been silently corrected.
Some inconsistent hyphenation has been retained.
The Table of Contents refers to original page numbers.]
THE BOOK
OF
GENESIS.
BY
MARCUS DODS, D.D.,
AUTHOR OF "ISRAEL'S IRON AGE,"
"THE PARABLES OF OUR LORD,"
"THE PRAYER THAT TEACHES TO PRAY," ETC.
NEW YORK:
A. C. ARMSTRONG AND SON
714, BROADWAY.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
CHAPTER I.
THE CREATION 1
CHAPTER II.
THE FALL 15
CHAPTER III.
CAIN AND ABEL 28
CHAPTER IV.
CAIN'S LINE, AND ENOCH 42
CHAPTER V.
THE FLOOD 55
CHAPTER VI.
NOAH'S FALL 68
CHAPTER VII.
THE CALL OF ABRAHAM 81
CHAPTER VIII.
ABRAM IN EGYPT 96
CHAPTER IX.
LOT'S SEPARATION FROM ABRAM 108
CHAPTER X.
ABRAM'S RESCUE OF LOT 121
CHAPTER XI.
COVENANT WITH ABRAM 134
CHAPTER XII.
BIRTH OF ISHMAEL 147
CHAPTER XIII.
THE COVENANT SEALED 159
CHAPTER XIV.
ABRAHAM'S INTERCESSION FOR SODOM 172
CHAPTER XV.
DESTRUCTION OF THE CITIES OF THE PLAIN 186
CHAPTER XVI.
SACRIFICE OF ISAAC 198
CHAPTER XVII.
ISHMAEL AND ISAAC 212
CHAPTER XVIII.
PURCHASE OF MACHPELAH 226
CHAPTER XIX.
ISAAC'S MARRIAGE 240
CHAPTER XX.
ESAU AND JACOB 254
CHAPTER XXI.
JACOB'S FRAUD 267
CHAPTER XXII.
JACOB'S FLIGHT AND DREAM 279
CHAPTER XXIII.
JACOB AT PENIEL 293
CHAPTER XXIV.
JACOB'S RETURN 307
CHAPTER XXV.
JOSEPH'S DREAMS 321
CHAPTER XXVI.
JOSEPH IN PRISON 339
CHAPTER XXVII.
PHARAOH'S DREAMS 355
CHAPTER XXVIII.
JOSEPH'S ADMINISTRATION 369
CHAPTER XXIX.
VISITS OF JOSEPH'S BRETHREN 383
CHAPTER XXX.
THE RECONCILIATION 396
CHAPTER XXXI.
THE BLESSINGS OF THE TRIBES 415
I.
_THE CREATION._
GENESIS i. and ii.
If any one is in search of accurate information regarding the age of
this earth, or its relation to the sun, moon, and stars, or regarding
the order in which plants and animals have appeared upon it, he is
referred to recent text-books in astronomy, geology, and palaeontology.
No one for a moment dreams of referring a serious student of these
subjects to the Bible as a source of information. It is not the object
of the writers of Scripture to impart physical instruction or to enlarge
the bounds of scientific knowledge. But if any one wishes to know what
connection the world has with God, if he seeks to trace back all that
now is to the very fountain-head of life, if he desires to discover some
unifying principle, some illuminating purpose in the history of this
earth, then we confidently refer him to these and the subsequent
chapters of Scripture as his safest, and indeed his only, guide to the
information he seeks. Every writing must be judged by the object the
writer has in view. If the object of the writer of these chapters was to
convey physical information, then certainly it is imperfectly fulfilled.
But if his object was to give an intelligible account of God's relation
to the world and to man, then it must be owned that he has been
successful in the highest degree.
It is therefore unreasonable to allow our reverence for this writing to
be lessened because it does not anticipate the discoveries of physical
science; or to repudiate its authority in its own department of truth
because it does not give us information which it formed no part of the
writer's object to give. As well might we deny to Shakespeare a masterly
knowledge of human life, because his dramas are blotted by historical
anachronisms. That the compiler of this book of Genesis did not aim at
scientific accuracy in speaking of physical details is obvious, not
merely from the general scope and purpose of the Biblical writers, but
especially from this, that in these first two chapters of his book he
lays side by side two accounts of man's creation which no ingenuity can
reconcile. These two accounts, glaringly incompatible in details, but
absolutely harmonious in their leading ideas, at once warn the reader
that the writer's aim is rather to convey certain ideas regarding man's
spiritual history and his connection with God, than to describe the
process of creation. He does describe the process of creation, but he
describes it only for the sake of the ideas regarding man's relation to
God and God's relation to the world which he can thereby convey. Indeed
what we mean by scientific knowledge was not in all the thoughts of the
people for whom this book was written. The subject of creation, of the
beginning of man upon earth, was not approached from that side at all;
and if we are to understand what is here written we must burst the
trammels of our own modes of thought and read these chapters not as a
chronological, astronomical, geological, biological statement, but as a
moral or spiritual conception.
It will, however, be said, and with much appearance of justice, that
although the first object of the writer was not to convey scientific
information, yet he might have been expected to be accurate in the
information he did advance regarding the physical universe. This is an
enormous assumption to make on _a priori_ grounds, but it is an
assumption worth seriously considering because it brings into view a
real and important difficulty which every reader of Genesis must face.
It brings into view the twofold character of this account of creation.
On the one hand it is irreconcilable with the teachings of science. On
the other hand it is in striking contrast to the other cosmogonies which
have been handed down from pre-scientific ages. These are the two patent
features of this record of creation and both require to be accounted
for. Either feature alone would be easily accounted for; but the two
co-existing in the same document are more baffling. We have to account
at once for a want of perfect coincidence with the teachings of science,
and for a singular freedom from those errors which disfigure all other
primitive accounts of the creation of the world. The one feature of the
document is as patent as the other and presses equally for explanation.
Now many persons cut the knot by simply denying that both these features
exist. There is no disagreement with science, they say. I speak for many
careful enquirers when I say that this cannot serve as a solution of the
difficulty. I think it is to be freely admitted that, from whatever
cause and however justifiably, the account of creation here given is not
in strict and detailed accordance with the teaching of science. All
attempts to force its statements into such accord are futile and
mischievous. They are futile because they do not convince independent
enquirers, but only those who are unduly anxious to be convinced. And
they are mischievous because they unduly prolong the strife between
Scripture and science, putting the question on a false issue. And above
all, they are to be condemned because they do violence to Scripture,
foster a style of interpretation by which the text is forced to say
whatever the interpreter desires, and prevent us from recognising the
real nature of these sacred writings. The Bible needs no defence such as
false constructions of its language bring to its aid. They are its worst
friends who distort its words that they may yield a meaning more in
accordance with scientific truth. If, for example, the word 'day' in
these chapters, does not mean a period of twenty-four hours, the
interpretation of Scripture is hopeless. Indeed if we are to bring these
chapters into any comparison at all with science, we find at once
various discrepancies. Of a creation of sun, moon, and stars, subsequent
to the creation of this earth, science can have but one thing to say. Of
the existence of fruit trees prior to the existence of the sun, science
knows nothing. But for a candid and unsophisticated reader without a
special theory to maintain, details are needless.
Accepting this chapter then as it stands, and believing that only by
looking at the Bible as it actually is can we hope to understand God's
method of revealing Himself, we at once perceive that ignorance of some
departments of truth does not disqualify a man for knowing and imparting
truth about God. In order to be a medium of revelation a man does not
need to be in advance of his age in secular learning. Intimate
communion with God, a spirit trained to discern spiritual things, a
perfect understanding of and zeal for God's purpose, these are qualities
quite independent of a knowledge of the discoveries of science. The
enlightenment which enables men to apprehend God and spiritual truth,
has no necessary connection with scientific attainments. David's
confidence in God and his declarations of His faithfulness are none the
less valuable, because he was ignorant of a very great deal which every
school-boy now knows. Had inspired men introduced into their writings
information which anticipated the discoveries of science, their state of
mind would be inconceivable, and revelation would be a source of
confusion. God's methods are harmonious with one another, and as He has
given men natural faculties to acquire scientific knowledge and
historical information, He did not stultify this gift by imparting such
knowledge in a miraculous and unintelligible manner. There is no
evidence that inspired men were in advance of their age in the knowledge
of physical facts and laws. And plainly, had they been supernaturally
instructed in physical knowledge they would so far have been
unintelligible to those to whom they spoke. Had the writer of this book
mingled with his teaching regarding God, an explicit and exact account
of how this world came into existence--had he spoken of millions of
years instead of speaking of days--in all probability he would have been
discredited, and what he had to say about God would have been rejected
along with his premature science. But speaking from the point of view of
his contemporaries, and accepting the current ideas regarding the
formation of the world, he attached to these the views regarding God's
connection with the world which are most necessary to be believed. What
he had learned of God's unity and creative power and connection with
man, by the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, he imparts to his
contemporaries through the vehicle of an account of creation they could
all understand. It is not in his knowledge of physical facts that he is
elevated above his contemporaries, but in his knowledge of God's
connection with all physical facts. No doubt, on the other hand, his
knowledge of God reacts upon the entire contents of his mind and saves
him from presenting such accounts of creation as have been common among
polytheists. He presents an account purified by his conception of what
was worthy of the supreme God he worshipped. His idea of God has given
dignity and simplicity to all he says about creation, and there is an
elevation and majesty about the whole conception, which we recognise as
the reflex of his conception of God.
Here then instead of anything to discompose us or to excite unbelief, we
recognise one great law or principle on which God proceeds in making
Himself known to men. This has been called the Law of Accommodation. It
is the law which requires that the condition and capacity of those to
whom the revelation is made must be considered. If you wish to instruct
a child, you must speak in language the child can understand. If you
wish to elevate a savage, you must do it by degrees, accommodating
yourself to his condition, and winking at much ignorance while you
instil elementary knowledge. You must found all you teach on what is
already understood by your pupil, and through that you must convey
further knowledge and train his faculties to higher capacity. So was it
with God's revelation. The Jews were children who had to be trained
with what Paul somewhat contemptuously calls "weak and beggarly
elements," the A B C of morals and religion. Not even in morals could
the absolute truth be enforced. Accommodation had to be practised even
here. Polygamy was allowed as a concession to their immature stage of
development: and practices in war and in domestic law were permitted or
enjoined which were inconsistent with absolute morality. Indeed the
whole Jewish system was an adaptation to an immature state. The dwelling
of God in the Temple as a man in his house, the propitiating of God with
sacrifice as of an Eastern king with gifts; this was a teaching by
picture, a teaching which had as much resemblance to the truth and as
much mixture of truth as they were able then to receive. No doubt this
teaching did actually mislead them in some of their ideas; but it kept
them on the whole in a right attitude towards God, and prepared them for
growing up to a fuller discernment of the truth.
Much more was this law observed in regard to such matters as are dealt
with in these chapters. It was impossible that in their ignorance of the
rudiments of scientific knowledge, the early Hebrews should understand
an absolutely accurate account of how the world came into being; and if
they could have understood it, it would have been useless, dissevered as
it must have been from the steps of knowledge by which men have since
arrived at it. Children ask us questions in answer to which we do not
tell them the exact full truth, because we know they cannot possibly
understand it. All that we can do is to give them some provisional
answer which conveys to them some information they can understand, and
which keeps them in a right state of mind, although this information
often seems absurd enough when compared with the actual facts and truth
of the matter. And if some solemn pedant accused us of supplying the
child with false information, we would simply tell him he knew nothing
about children. Accurate information on these matters will infallibly
come to the child when he grows up; what is wanted meanwhile is to give
him information which will help to form his conduct without gravely
misleading him as to facts. Similarly, if any one tells me he cannot
accept these chapters as inspired by God, because they do not convey
scientifically accurate information regarding this earth, I can only say
that he has yet to learn the first principles of revelation, and that he
misunderstands the conditions on which all instruction must be given.
My belief then is, that in these chapters we have the ideas regarding
the origin of the world and of man which were naturally attainable in
the country where they were first composed, but with those important
modifications which a monotheistic belief necessarily suggested. So far
as merely physical knowledge went, there is probably little here that
was new to the contemporaries of the writer; but this already familiar
knowledge was used by him as the vehicle for conveying his faith in the
unity, love and wisdom of God the creator. He laid a firm foundation for
the history of God's relation to man. This was his object, and this he
accomplished. The Bible is the book to which we turn for information
regarding the history of God's revelation of Himself, and of His will
towards men; and in these chapters we have the suitable introduction to
this history. No changes in our knowledge of physical truth can at all
affect the teaching of these chapters. What they teach regarding the
relation of man to God is independent of the physical details in which
this teaching is embodied, and can as easily be attached to the most
modern statement of the physical origin of the world and of man.
What then are the truths taught us in these chapters? The first is that
there has been a creation, that things now existing have not just grown
of themselves, but have been called into being by a presiding
intelligence and an originating will. No attempt to account for the
existence of the world in any other way has been successful. A great
deal has in this generation been added to our knowledge of the
efficiency of material causes to produce what we see around us; but when
we ask what gives harmony to these material causes, and what guides them
to the production of certain ends, and what originally produced them,
the answer must still be, not matter but intelligence and purpose. The
best informed and most penetrating minds of our time affirm this. John
Stuart Mill says: "It must be allowed that in the present state of our
knowledge the adaptations in nature afford a large balance of
probability in favour of creation by intelligence." Professor Tyndall
adds his testimony and says: "I have noticed during years of
self-observation that it is not in hours of clearness and vigour that
[the doctrine of material atheism] commends itself to my mind--that in
the hours of stronger and healthier thought it ever dissolves and
disappears, as offering no solution of the mystery in which we dwell and
of which we form a part."
There is indeed a prevalent suspicion, that in presence of the
discoveries made by evolutionists the argument from design is no longer
tenable. Evolution shows us that the correspondence of the structure of
animals, with their modes of life, has been generated by the nature of
the case; and it is concluded that a blind mechanical necessity and not
an intelligent design rules all. But the discovery of the process by
which the presently existing living forms have been evolved, and the
perception that this process is governed by laws which have always been
operating, do not make intelligence and design at all less necessary,
but rather more so. As Professor Huxley himself says: "The teleological
and mechanical views of nature are not necessarily exclusive. The
teleologist can always defy the evolutionist to disprove that the
primordial molecular arrangement was not intended to evolve the
phenomena of the universe." Evolution, in short, by disclosing to us the
marvellous power and accuracy of natural law, compels us more
emphatically than ever to refer all law to a supreme, originating
intelligence.
This then is the first lesson of the Bible; that at the root and origin
of all this vast material universe, before whose laws we are crushed as
the moth, there abides a living conscious Spirit, who wills and knows
and fashions all things. The belief of this changes for us the whole
face of nature, and instead of a chill, impersonal world of forces to
which no appeal can be made, and in which matter is supreme, gives us
the home of a Father. If you are yourself but a particle of a huge and
unconscious universe--a particle which, like a flake of foam, or a drop
of rain, or a gnat, or a beetle, lasts its brief space and then yields
up its substance to be moulded into some new creature; if there is no
power that understands you and sympathizes with you and makes provision
for your instincts, your aspirations, your capabilities; if man is
himself the highest intelligence, and if all things are the purposeless
result of physical forces; if, in short, there is no God, no
consciousness at the beginning as at the end of all things, then nothing
can be more melancholy than our position. Our higher desires which seem
to separate us so immeasurably from the brutes, we have, only that they
may be cut down by the keen edge of time, and wither in barren
disappointment; our reason we have, only to enable us to see and measure
the brevity of our span, and so live our little day, not joyously as the
unforeseeing beasts, but shadowed by the hastening gloom of anticipated,
inevitable and everlasting night; our faculty for worshipping and for
striving to serve and to resemble the perfect living One, that faculty
which seems to be the thing of greatest promise and of finest quality in
us, and to which is certainly due the largest part of what is admirable
and profitable in human history, is the most mocking and foolishest of
all our parts. But, God be thanked, He has revealed himself to us; has
given us in the harmonious and progressive movement of all around us,
sufficient indication that, even in the material world, intelligence and
purpose reign; an indication which becomes immensely clearer as we pass
into the world of man; and which, in presence of the person and life of
Christ attains the brightness of a conviction which illuminates all
besides.
The other great truth which this writer teaches is, that man was the
chief work of God, for whose sake all else was brought into being. The
work of creation was not finished till he appeared: all else was
preparatory to this final product. That man is the crown and lord of
this earth is obvious. Man instinctively assumes that all else has been
made for him, and freely acts upon this assumption. But when our eyes
are lifted from this little ball on which we are set and to which we
are confined, and when we scan such other parts of the universe as are
within our ken, a keen sense of littleness oppresses us; our earth is
after all so minute and apparently inconsiderable a point when compared
with the vast suns and planets that stretch system on system into
illimitable space. When we read even the rudiments of what astronomers
have discovered regarding the inconceivable vastness of the universe,
the huge dimensions of the heavenly bodies, and the grand scale on which
everything is framed, we find rising to our lips, and with tenfold
reason, the words of David: "When I consider Thy heavens, the work of
Thy fingers; the moon and the stars which Thou hast ordained; what is
man that Thou art mindful of him, or the son of man that Thou visitest
him?" Is it conceivable that on this scarcely discernible speck in the
vastness of the universe, should be played out the chiefest act in the
history of God? Is it credible that He whose care it is to uphold this
illimitable universe, should be free to think of the wants and woes of
the insignificant creatures who quickly spend their little lives in this
inconsiderable earth?
But reason seems all on the side of Genesis. God must not be considered
as sitting apart in a remote position of general superintendence, but as
present with all that is. And to Him who maintains these systems in
their respective relations and orbits, it can be no burden to relieve
the needs of individuals. To think of ourselves as too insignificant to
be attended to is to derogate from God's true majesty and to
misunderstand His relation to the world. But it is also to misapprehend
the real value of spirit as compared with matter. Man is dear to God
because he is like Him. Vast and glorious as it is, the sun cannot think
God's thoughts; can fulfil but cannot intelligently sympathize with
God's purpose. Man, alone among God's works, can enter into and approve
of God's purpose in the world and can intelligently fulfil it. Without
man the whole material universe would have been dark and unintelligible,
mechanical and apparently without any sufficient purpose. Matter,
however fearfully and wonderfully wrought, is but the platform and
material in which spirit, intelligence and will, may fulfil themselves
and find development. Man is incommensurable with the rest of the
universe. He is of a different kind and by his moral nature is more akin
to God than to His works.
Here the beginning and the end of God's revelation join hands and throw
light on one another. The nature of man was that in which God was at
last to give His crowning revelation, and for that no preparation could
seem extravagant. Fascinating and full of marvel as is the history of
the past which science discloses to us; full as these slow-moving
millions of years are in evidences of the exhaustless wealth of nature,
and mysterious as the delay appears, all that expenditure of resources
is eclipsed and all the delay justified when the whole work is crowned
by the Incarnation, for in it we see that all that slow process was the
preparation of a nature in which God could manifest Himself as a Person
to persons. This is seen to be an end worthy of all that is contained in
the physical history of the world: this gives completeness to the whole
and makes it a unity. No higher, other end need be sought, none could be
conceived. It is this which seems worthy of those tremendous and subtle
forces which have been set at work in the physical world, this which
justifies the long lapse of ages filled with wonders unobserved, and
teeming with ever new life; this above all which justifies these latter
ages in which all physical marvels have been outdone by the tragical
history of man upon earth. Remove the Incarnation and all remains dark,
purposeless, unintelligible: grant the Incarnation, believe that in
Jesus Christ the Supreme manifested Himself personally, and light is
shed upon all that has been and is.
Light is shed on the individual life. Are you living as if you were the
product of blind mechanical laws, and as if there were no object worthy
of your life and of all the force you can throw into your life? Consider
the Incarnation of the Creator, and ask yourself if sufficient object is
not given to you in His call that you be conformed to His image and
become the intelligent executor of His purposes? Is life not worth
having even on these terms? The man that can still sit down and bemoan
himself as if there were no meaning in existence, or lounge languidly
through life as if there were no zest or urgency in living, or try to
satisfy himself with fleshly comforts, has surely need to turn to the
opening page of Revelation and learn that God saw sufficient object in
the life of man, enough to compensate for millions of ages of
preparation. If it is possible that you should share in the character
and destiny of Christ, can a healthy ambition crave anything more or
higher? If the future is to be as momentous in results as the past has
certainly been filled with preparation, have you no caring to share in
these results? Believe that there is a purpose in things; that in
Christ, the revelation of God, you can see what that purpose is, and
that by wholly uniting yourself to Him and allowing yourself to be
penetrated by His Spirit you can participate with Him in the working out
of that purpose.
II.
_THE FALL._
GENESIS iii.
Profound as the teaching of this narrative is, its meaning does not lie
on the surface. Literal interpretation will reach a measure of its
significance, but plainly there is more here than appears in the letter.
When we read that the serpent was more subtile than any beast of the
field which the Lord God had made, and that he tempted the woman, we at
once perceive that it is not with the outer husk of the story we are to
concern ourselves, but with the kernel. The narrative throughout speaks
of nothing but the brute serpent; not a word is said of the devil, not
the slightest hint is given that the machinations of a fallen angel are
signified. The serpent is compared to the other beasts of the field,
showing that it is the brute serpent that is spoken of. The curse is
pronounced on the beast, not on a fallen spirit summoned for the purpose
before the Supreme; and not in terms which could apply to a fallen
spirit, but in terms that are applicable only to the serpent that
crawls. Yet every reader feels that this is not the whole mystery of the
fall of man: moral evil cannot be accounted for by referring it to a
brute source. No one, I suppose, believes that the whole tribe of
serpents crawl as a punishment of an offence committed by one of their
number, or that the whole iniquity and sorrow of the world are due to an
actual serpent. Plainly this is merely a pictorial representation
intended to convey some general impressions and ideas. Vitally important
truths underlie the narrative and are bodied forth by it; but the way to
reach these truths is not to adhere too rigidly to the literal meaning,
but to catch the general impression which it seems fitted to make.
No doubt this opens the door to a great variety of interpretation. No
two men will attach to it precisely the same meaning. One says, the
serpent is a symbol for Satan, but Adam and Eve are historical persons.
Another says, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is a figure,
but the driving out from the garden is real. Another maintains that the
whole is a picture, putting in a visible, intelligible shape certain
vitally important truths regarding the history of our race. So that
every man is left very much to his own judgment, to read the narrative
candidly and in such light from other sources as he has, and let it make
its own impression upon him. This would be a sad result if the object of
the Bible were to bring us all to a rigid uniformity of belief in all
matters; but the object of the Bible is not that, but the far higher
object of furnishing all varieties of men with sufficient light to lead
them to God. And this being so, variety of interpretation in details is
not to be lamented. The very purpose of such representations as are here
given is to suit all stages of mental and spiritual advancement. Let the
child read it and he will learn what will live in his mind and influence
him all his life. Let the devout man who has ranged through all science
and history and philosophy come back to this narrative, and he feels
that he has here the essential truth regarding the beginnings of man's
tragical career upon earth.
We should, in my opinion, be labouring under a misapprehension if we
supposed that none even of the earliest readers of this account saw the
deeper meaning of it. When men who felt the misery of sin and lifted up
their hearts to God for deliverance, read the words addressed to the
serpent, "I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy
seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his
heel"--is it reasonable to suppose that such men would take these words
in their literal sense, and satisfy themselves with the assurance that
serpents, though dangerous, would be kept under, and would find in the
words no assurance of that very thing they themselves were all their
lifetime striving after, deliverance from the evil thing which lay at
the root of all sin? No doubt some would accept the story in its literal
meaning,--shallow and careless men whose own spiritual experience never
urged them to see any spiritual significance in the words would do so;
but even those who saw least in the story, and put a very shallow
interpretation on its details, could scarcely fail to see its main
teaching.
The reader of this perennially fresh story is first of all struck with
the account given of man's primitive condition. Coming to this narrative
with our minds coloured by the fancies of poets and philosophers, we are
almost startled by the check which the plain and sober statements of
this account give to an unpruned fancy. We have to read the words again
and again to make sure we have not omitted something which gives support
to those glowing descriptions of man's primitive condition. Certainly he
is described as innocent and at peace with God, and in this respect no
terms can exaggerate his happiness. But in other respects the language
of the Bible is surprisingly moderate. Man is represented as living on
fruit, and as going unclothed, and, so far as appears, without any
artificial shelter either from the heat of the sun or the cold of night.
None of the arts were as yet known. All working of metals had yet to be
discovered, so that his tools must have been of the rudest possible
description; and the arts, such as music, which adorn life and make
leisure enjoyable, were also still in the future.
But the most significant elements in man's primitive condition are
represented by the two trees of the garden; by trees, because with
plants alone he had to do. In the centre of the garden stood the tree of
life, the fruit of which bestowed immortality. Man was therefore
naturally mortal, though apparently with a capacity for immortality. How
this capacity would have actually carried man on to immortality had he
not sinned, it is vain to conjecture. The mystical nature of the tree of
life is fully recognised in the New Testament, by our Lord, when He
says: "To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life,
which is in the midst of the Paradise of God;" and by John, when he
describes the new Jerusalem: "In the midst of the street of it, and on
either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bare twelve
manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of
the tree were for the healing of the nations." Both these
representations are intended to convey, in a striking and pictorial
form, the promise of life everlasting.
And as of the tree of life which stands in the Paradise of the future it
is said "Blessed are they that do His commandments, that they may have
right to the tree of life;" so in Eden man's immortality was suspended
on the condition of obedience. And the trial of man's obedience is
imaged in the other tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
From the child-like innocence in which man originally was, he was to
pass forward into the condition of moral manhood, which consists not in
mere innocence, but in innocence maintained in presence of temptation.
The savage is innocent of many of the crimes of civilized men because he
has no opportunity to commit them; the child is innocent of some of the
vices of manhood because he has no temptation to them. But this
innocence is the result of circumstance, not of character; and if savage
or child is to become a mature moral being he must be tried by altered
circumstances, by temptation and opportunity. To carry man forward to
this higher stage trial is necessary, and this trial is indicated by the
tree of knowledge. The fruit of this tree is prohibited, to indicate
that it is only in presence of what is forbidden man can be morally
tested, and that it is only by self-command and obedience to law, and
not by the mere following of instincts, that man can attain to moral
maturity. The prohibition is that which makes him recognise a
distinction between good and evil. He is put in a position in which good
is not the only thing he can do; an alternative is present to his mind,
and the choice of good in preference to evil is made possible to him. In
presence of this tree child-like innocence was no longer possible. The
self-determination of manhood was constantly required. Conscience,
hitherto latent, was now evoked and took its place as man's supreme
faculty.
It is in vain to think of exhausting this narrative. We can, at the
most, only remark upon some of the most salient points.
(1) Temptation comes like a serpent; like the most subtile beast of the
field; like that one creature which is said to exert a fascinating
influence on its victims, fastening them with its glittering eye,
stealing upon them by its noiseless, low and unseen approach, perplexing
them by its wide circling folds, seeming to come upon them from all
sides at once, and armed not like the other beasts with one weapon of
offence--horn, or hoof, or teeth--but capable of crushing its victim
with every part of its sinuous length. It lies apparently dead for
months together, but when roused it can, as the naturalist tells us,
"outclimb the monkey, outswim the fish, outleap the zebra, outwrestle
the athlete, and crush the tiger." How naturally in describing
temptation do we borrow language from the aspect and movements of this
creature. It does not need to hunt down its victims by long continued
pursuit, its victims come and put themselves within its reach. Unseen,
temptation lies by our path, and before we have time to think we are
fascinated and bewildered, its coils rapidly gather round us and its
stroke flashes poison through our blood. Against sin, when once it has
wreathed itself around us, we seem helpless to contend; the very powers
with which we could resist are benumbed or pinned useless to our
side--our foe seems all round us, and to extricate one part is but to
become entangled in another. As the serpent finds its way everywhere,
over every fence or barrier, into every corner and recess, so it is
impossible to keep temptation out of the life; it appears where least we
expect it and when we think ourselves secure.
(2) Temptation succeeds at first by exciting our curiosity. It is a
wise saying that "our great security against sin lies in being shocked
at it. Eve gazed and reflected when she should have fled." The serpent
created an interest, excited her curiosity about this forbidden fruit.
And as this excited curiosity lies near the beginning of sin in the
race, so does it in the individual. I suppose if you trace back the
mystery of iniquity in your own life and seek to track it to its source,
you will find it to have originated in this craving to taste evil. No
man originally meant to become the sinner he has become. He only
intended, like Eve, to taste. It was a voyage of discovery he meant to
make; he did not think to get nipped and frozen up and never more return
from the outer cold and darkness. He wished before finally giving
himself to virtue, to see the real value of the other alternative.
This dangerous craving has many elements in it. There is in it the
instinctive drawing towards what is mysterious. One veiled figure in an
assembly will attract more scrutiny than the most admired beauty. An
appearance in the heavens that no one can account for will nightly draw
more eyes than the most wonderful sunset. To lift veils, to penetrate
disguises, to unravel complicated plots, to solve mysteries, this is
always inviting to the human mind. The tale which used to thrill us in
childhood, of the one locked room, the one forbidden key, bears in it a
truth for men as well as for children. What is hidden must, we conclude,
have some interest for us--else why hide it from us? What is forbidden
must have some important bearing upon us. Else why forbid it? Things
which are indifferent to us are left in our way, obvious, and without
concealment. But as action has been taken regarding the things that are
forbidden, action in view of our relation to them, it is natural to us
to desire to know what these things are and how they affect us.
There is added to this in young persons, a sense of incompleteness. They
wish to be grown up. Few boys wish to be always boys. They long for the
signs of manhood, and seek to possess that knowledge of life and its
ways which they very much identify with manhood. But too commonly they
mistake the path to manhood. They feel as if they had a wider range of
liberty and were more thoroughly men when they transgress the limits
assigned by conscience. They feel as if there were a new and brighter
world outside that which is fenced round by strict morality, and they
tremble with excitement on its borders. It is a fatal delusion. Only by
choosing the good in presence of the evil are true manhood and real
maturity gained. True manliness consists mainly in self control, in a
patient waiting upon nature and God's law and when youth impatiently
breaks through the protecting fence of God's law, and seeks growth by
knowing evil, it misses that very advancement it seeks, and cheats
itself out of the manhood it apes.
(3) Through this craving for an enlarged experience unbelief in God's
goodness finds entrance. In the presence of forbidden pleasure we are
tempted to feel as if God were grudging us enjoyment. The very arguments
of the serpent occur to our mind. No harm will come of our indulging;
the prohibition is needless, unreasonable and unkind; it is not based on
any genuine desire for our welfare. This fence that shuts us out from
knowing good and evil is erected by a timorous asceticism, by a
ridiculous misconception of what truly enlarges human nature; it shuts
us into a poor narrow life. And thus suspicions of God's perfect wisdom
and goodness find entrance; we begin to think we know better than He
what is good for us, and can contrive a richer, happier life than He has
provided for us. Our loyalty to Him is loosened, and already we have
lost hold of His strength and are launched on the current that leads to
sin, misery, and shame. When we find ourselves saying Yes, where God has
said No; when we see desirable things where God has said there is death;
when we allow distrust of Him to rankle in our mind, when we chafe
against the restrictions under which we live and seek liberty by
breaking down the fence instead of by delighting in God, we are on the
highway to all evil.
(4) If we know our own history we cannot be surprised to read that one
taste of evil ruined our first parents. It is so always. The one taste
alters our attitude towards God and conscience and life. It is a
veritable Circe's cup. The actual experience of sin is like the one
taste of alcohol to a reclaimed drunkard, like the first taste of blood
to a young tiger, it calls out the latent devil and creates a new nature
within us. At one brush it wipes out all the peace, and joy, and
self-respect, and boldness of innocence, and numbers us among the
transgressors, among the shame-faced, and self-despising, and hopeless.
It leaves us possessed with unhappy thoughts which lead us away from
what is bright, and honourable, and good, and like the letting out of
water it seems to have tapped a spring of evil within us. It is but one
step, but it is like the step over a precipice or down the shaft of a
mine; it cannot be taken back, it commits to an altogether different
state of things.
(5) The first result of sin is shame. The form in which the knowledge
of good and evil comes to us is the knowing we are naked, the
consciousness that we are stripped of all that made us walk unabashed
before God and men. The promise of the serpent while broken in the
sense is fulfilled to the ear; the eyes of Adam and Eve were opened and
they knew that they were naked. Self-reflection begins, and the first
movement of conscience produces shame. Had they resisted temptation,
conscience would have been born but not in self-condemnation. Like
children they had hitherto been conscious only of what was external to
themselves, but now their consciousness of a power to choose good and
evil is awakened and its first exercise is accompanied with shame. They
feel that in themselves they are faulty, that they are not in
themselves complete; that though created by God, they are not fit for
His eye. The lower animals wear no clothes because they have no
knowledge of good and evil; children feel no need of covering because
as yet self-consciousness is latent, and their conduct is determined
for them; those who are re-made in the image of God and glorified as
Christ is, cannot be thought of as clothed, for in them there is no
sense of sin. But Adam's clothing himself and hiding himself were the
helpless attempts of a guilty conscience to evade the judgment of
truth.
(6) But when Adam found he was no longer fit for God's eye, God provided
a covering which might enable him again to live in His presence without
dismay. Man had exhausted his own ingenuity and resources, and exhausted
them without finding relief to his shame. If his shame was to be
effectually removed, God must do it. And the clothing in coats of skins
indicates the restoration of man, not indeed to pristine innocence, but
to peace with God. Adam felt that God did not wish to banish him
lastingly from His presence, nor to see him always a trembling and
confused penitent. The self-respect and progressiveness, the reverence
for law and order and God, which came in with clothes, and which we
associate with the civilised races, were accepted as tokens that God was
desirous to co-operate with man, to forward and further him in all good.
It is also to be remarked that the clothing which God provided was in
itself different from what man had thought of. Adam took leaves from an
inanimate, unfeeling tree; God deprived an animal of life, that the
shame of His creature might be relieved. This was the last thing Adam
would have thought of doing. To us life is cheap and death familiar, but
Adam recognised death as the punishment of sin. Death was to early man a
sign of God's anger. And he had to learn that sin could be covered not
by a bunch of leaves snatched from a bush as he passed by and that would
grow again next year, but only by pain and blood. Sin cannot be atoned
for by any mechanical action nor without expenditure of feeling.
Suffering must ever follow wrong-doing. From the first sin to the last,
the track of the sinner is marked with blood. Once we have sinned we
cannot regain permanent peace of conscience save through pain, and this
not only pain of our own. The first hint of this was given as soon as
conscience was aroused in man. It was made apparent that sin was a real
and deep evil, and that by no easy and cheap process could the sinner be
restored. The same lesson has been written on millions of consciences
since. Men have found that their sin reaches beyond their own life and
person, that it inflicts injury and involves disturbance and distress,
that it changes utterly our relation to life and to God, and that we
cannot rise above its consequences save by the intervention of God
Himself, by an intervention which tells us of the sorrow He suffers on
our account.
For the chief point is that it is God who relieves man's shame. Until we
are certified that God desires our peace of mind we cannot be at peace.
The cross of Christ is the permanent witness to this desire on God's
part. No one can read what Christ has done for us without feeling sure
that for himself there is a way back to God from all sin--that it is
God's desire that his sin should be covered, his iniquity forgiven. Too
often that which seems of prime importance to God seems of very slight
importance to us. To have our life founded solidly in harmony with the
Supreme, seems often to excite no desire within us. It is about sin we
find man first dealing with God, and until you have satisfied God and
yourself regarding this prime and fundamental matter of your own
transgression and wrong-doing you look in vain for any deep and lasting
growth and satisfaction. Have you no reason to be ashamed before God?
Have you loved Him in any proportion to His worthiness to be loved? Have
you cordially and habitually fallen in with His will? Have you zealously
done His work in the world? Have you fallen short of no good He intended
you should do and gave you opportunity to do? Is there no reason for
shame on your part before God? Has His desire to cover sin no
application to you? Can you not understand His meaning when He comes to
you with offers of pardon and acts of oblivion? Surely the candid mind,
the clear-judging conscience can be at no loss to explain God's
solicitous concern for the sinner; and must humbly own that even that
unfathomable Divine emotion which is exhibited in the cross of Christ,
is no exaggerated and theatrical demonstration, but the actual carrying
through of what was really needed for the restoration of the sinner. Do
not live as if the cross of Christ had never been, or as if you had
never sinned and had no connection with it. Strive to learn what it
means; strive to deal fairly with it and fairly with your own
transgressions and with your present actual relation to God and His
will.
III.
_CAIN AND ABEL._
GENESIS iv.
It is not the purpose of this narrator to write the history of the
world. It is not his purpose to write even the history of mankind. His
object is to write the history of redemption. Starting from the broad
fact of man's alienation from God, he means to trace that element in
human history which results in the perfect re-union of God and man. The
key-note has been struck in the promise already given that the seed of
the woman should prevail over the seed of the serpent, that the effects
of man's voluntary dissociation from God should be removed. It is the
fulfilment of this promise which is traced by this writer. He steadily
pursues that one line of history which runs directly towards this
fulfilment; turning aside now and again to pursue, to a greater or less
distance, diverging lines, but always returning to the grand highway on
which the promise travels. His method is first to dispose of collateral
matter and then to proceed with his main theme. As here, he first
disposes of the line of Cain and then returns to Seth through whom the
line of promise is maintained.
The first thing we have to do with outside the garden is death--the
curse of sin speedily manifests itself in its most terrible form. But
the sinner executes it himself. The first death is a murder. As if to
show that all death is a wrong inflicted on us and proceeds not from God
but from sin, it is inflicted by sin and by the hand of man. Man becomes
his own executioner, and takes part with Satan, the murderer from the
beginning. But certainly the first feeling produced by these events must
have been one of bitter disappointment, as if the promise were to be
lost in the curse.
The story of Cain and Abel was to all appearance told in order to point
out that from the very first men have been divided into two great
classes, viewed in connection with God's promise and presence in the
world. Always there have been those who believed in God's love and
waited for it, and those who believed more in their own force and
energy. Always there have been the humble and self-diffident who hoped
in God, and the proud and self-reliant who felt themselves equal to all
the occasions of life. And this story of Cain and Abel and the
succeeding generations does not conceal the fact, that for the purposes
of this world there has been visible an element of weakness in the godly
line, and that it is to the self-reliant and God-defying energy of the
descendants of Cain that we owe much of the external civilisation of the
world. While the descendants of Seth pass away and leave only this
record, that they "walked with God," there are found among Cain's
descendants, builders of cities, inventors of tools and weapons, music
and poetry and the beginnings of culture.
These two opposed lines are in the first instance represented by Cain
and Abel. With each child that comes into the world some fresh hope is
brought; and the name of Cain points to the expectation of his parents
that in him a fresh start would be made. Alas! as the boy grew they saw
how vain such expectation was and how truly their nature had passed into
his, and how no imparted experience of theirs, taught him from without,
could countervail the strong propensities to evil which impelled him
from within. They experienced that bitterest punishment which parents
undergo, when they see their own defects and infirmities and evil
passions repeated in their children and leading them astray as they once
led themselves; when in those who are to perpetuate their name and
remembrance on earth they see evidence that their faults also will be
perpetuated; when in those whom they chiefly love they have a mirror
ceaselessly held up to them forcing them to remember the follies and
sins of their own youth. Certainly in the proud, self-willed, sullen
Cain no redemption was to be found.
Both sons own the necessity of labour. Man is no longer in the primitive
condition, in which he had only to stretch out his hand when hungry, and
satisfy his appetite. There are still some regions of the earth in which
the trees shower fruit, nutritious and easily preserved, on men who shun
labour. Were this the case throughout the world, the whole of life would
be changed. Had we been created self-sufficing or in such conditions as
involved no necessity of toil, nothing would be as it now is. It is the
need of labour that implies occasional starvation and frequent poverty,
and gives occasion to charity. It is the need of labour which involves
commerce and thereby sows the seed of greed, worldliness, ambition,
drudgery. The ultimate physical wants of men, food and clothes, are the
motive of the greater part of all human activity. Trace to their causes
the various industries of men, the wars, the great social movements,
all that constitutes history, and you find that the bulk of all that is
done upon earth is done because men must have food and wish to have it
as good and with as little labour as possible. The broad facts of human
life are in many respects humiliating.
The disposition of men is consequently shown in the occupations they
choose and the idea of life they carry into them. Some, like Abel,
choose peaceful callings that draw out feeling and sympathy; others
prefer pursuits which are stirring and active. Cain chose the tillage of
the ground, partly no doubt from the necessity of the case, but probably
also with the feeling that he could subdue nature to his own purposes
notwithstanding the curse that lay upon it. Do we not all sometimes feel
a desire to take the world as it is, curse and all, and make the most of
it; to face its disease with human skill, its disturbing and destructive
elements with human forethought and courage, its sterility and
stubbornness with human energy and patience? What is stimulating men
still to all discovery and invention, to forewarn seamen of coming
storms, to break a precarious passage for commerce through eternal ice
or through malarious swamps, to make life at all points easier and more
secure? Is it not the energy which opposition excites? We know that it
will be hard work; we expect to have thorns and thistles everywhere, but
let us see whether this may not after all be a thoroughly happy world,
whether we cannot cultivate the curse altogether out of it. This is
indeed the very work God has given man to do--to subdue the earth and
make the desert blossom as the rose. God is with us in this work, and he
who believes in God's purpose and strives to reclaim nature and compel
it to some better products than it naturally yields, is doing God's
work in the world. The misery is that so many do it in the spirit of
Cain, in a spirit of self-confident or sullen alienation from God,
willing to endure all hardship but unable to lay themselves at God's
feet with every capacity for work and every field He has given them to
till for Him and in a spirit of humble love to co-operate with Him. To
this spirit of godless energy, of merely selfish or worldly ambition and
enterprise, the world owes not only much of its poverty and many of its
greatest disasters, but also the greater part of its present advantages
in external civilisation. But from this spirit can never arise the
meekness, the patience, the tenderness, the charity which sweeten the
life of society and are more to be desired than gold; from this spirit
and all its achievements the natural outcome is the proud, vindictive,
self-glorifying war-song of a Lamech.
The incompatibility of the two lines and the persecuting spirit of the
godless are set forth by the after history of Cain and Abel. The one
line is represented in Cain, who with all his energy and indomitable
courage, is depicted as of a dark, morose, suspicious, jealous, violent
temper; a man born under the shadow of the fall. Abel is described in
contrast as guileless and sunny, free from harshness and resentment.
What was in Cain was shown by what came out of him, murder. The reason
of the rejection of his offering was his own evil condition of heart.
"If thou doest well, shalt not thou also be accepted;" implying that he
was not accepted because he was not doing well. His offering was a mere
form; he complied with the fashion of the family; but in spirit he was
alienated from God, cherishing thoughts which the rejection of his
offering brings to a head. He may have seen that the younger son won
more of the parents' affection, that his company was more welcome.
Jealousy had been produced, that deep jealousy of the humble and godly
which proud men of the world cannot help betraying and which has so very
often in the world's history produced persecution.
This cannot be considered too weak a motive to carry so enormous a
crime. Even in a highly civilised age we find an English statesman
saying: "Pique is one of the strongest motives in the human mind. Fear
is strong but transient. Interest is more lasting, perhaps, and steady,
but weaker; I will ever back pique against them both. It is the spur the
devil rides the noblest tempers with, and will do more work with them in
a week, than with other poor jades in a twelve-month." And the age of
Cain and Abel was an age in which impulse and action lay close together,
and in which jealousy is notoriously strong. To this motive John
ascribes the act: "Wherefore slew he him? Because his own works were
evil, and his brother's righteous."
We have now learned better how to disguise our feelings; and we are
compelled to control them better; but now and again we meet with a
deep-seated hatred of goodness which might give rise to almost any
crime. Few of us can say that for our own part we have extinguished
within us the spirit that disparages and depreciates and fixes the
charge of hypocrisy or refers good actions to interested motives,
searches out failings and watches for haltings and is glad when a blot
is found. Few are filled with unalloyed grief when the man who has borne
an extraordinary reputation turns out to be just like the rest of us.
Many of us have a true delight in goodness and humble ourselves before
it when we see it, and yet we know also what it is to be exasperated by
the presence of superiority. I have seen a schoolboy interrupt his
brother's prayers, and gird at him for his piety, and strive to draw him
into sin, and do the devil's work with zest and diligence. And where
goodness is manifestly in the minority how constantly does it excite
hatred that pours itself out in sneers and ridicule and ignorant
calumny.
But this narrative significantly refers this early quarrel to religion.
There is no bitterness to compare with that which worldly men who
profess religion, feel towards those who cultivate a spiritual religion.
They can never really grasp the distinction between external worship and
real godliness. They make their offerings, they attend to the rites of
the religion to which they belong and are beside themselves with
indignation if any person or event suggests to them that they might have
saved themselves all their trouble, because these do not at all
constitute religion. They uphold the Church, they admire and praise her
beautiful services, they use strong but meaningless language about
infidelity, and yet when brought in contact with spirituality and
assured that regeneration and penitent humility are required above all
else in the kingdom of God, they betray an utter inability to comprehend
the very rudiments of the Christian religion. Abel has always to go to
the wall because he is always the weaker party, always in the minority.
Spiritual religion, from the very nature of the case, must always be in
the minority; and must be prepared to suffer loss, calumny, and
violence, at the hands of the worldly religious, who have contrived for
themselves a worship that calls for no humiliation before God and no
complete surrender of heart and will to Him. Cain is the type of the
ignorant religious, of the unregenerate man who thinks he merits God's
favour as much as any one else; and Cain's conduct is the type of the
treatment which the Christ-like and intelligent godly are always likely
to receive at such hands.
We never know where we may be led by jealousy and malice. One of the
striking features of this incident is the rapidity with which small sins
generate great ones. When Cain went in the joy of harvest and offered
his first fruits no thought could be further from his mind than murder.
It may have come as suddenly on himself as on the unsuspecting Abel, but
the germ was in him. Great sins are not so sudden as they seem.
Familiarity with evil thought ripens us for evil action; and a moment of
passion, an hour's loss of self-control, a tempting occasion, may hurry
us into irremediable evil. And even though this does not happen,
envious, uncharitable, and malicious thoughts make our offerings as
distasteful as Cain's. He that loveth not his brother knoweth not God.
First be reconciled to thy brother, says our Lord, and then come and
offer thy gift.
Other truths are incidentally taught in this narrative.
(1) The acceptance of the offering depends on the acceptance of the
offerer. God had respect to Abel and his offering--the man first and
then the offering. God looks through the offering to the state of soul
from which it proceeds; or even, as the words would indicate, sees the
soul first and judges and treats the offering according to the inward
disposition. God does not judge of what you are by what you say to Him
or do for Him, but He judges what you say to Him and do for Him by what
you are. "By _faith_" says a New Testament writer, "Abel offered a more
acceptable sacrifice than Cain." He had the faith which enabled him to
believe that God is, and that He is a rewarder of them that diligently
seek Him. His attitude towards God was sound; his life was a diligent
seeking to please God; and from all such persons God gladly receives
acknowledgment. When the offering is the true expression of the soul's
gratitude, love, devotedness, then it is acceptable. When it is a merely
external offering, that rather veils than expresses the real feeling;
when it is not vivified and rendered significant by any spiritual act on
the part of the worshipper, it is plainly of no effect.
What is true of all sacrifices is true of the sacrifice of Christ. It
remains invalid and of none effect to those who do not through it yield
themselves to God. Sacrifices were intended to be the embodiment and
expression of a state of feeling towards God, of a submission or
offering of men's selves to God; of a return to that right relation
which ought ever to subsist between creature and Creator. Christ's
sacrifice is valid for us when it is that outward thing which best
expresses our feeling towards God and through which we offer or yield
ourselves to God. His sacrifice is the open door through which God
freely admits all who aim at a consecration and obedience like to His.
It is valid for us when through it we sacrifice ourselves. Whatever His
sacrifice expresses we desire to take and use as the only satisfactory
expression of our own aims and desires. Did Christ perfectly submit to
and fulfil the will of God? So would we. Did He acknowledge the infinite
evil of sin and patiently bear its penalties, still loving the Holy and
Righteous God? So would we endure all chastening, and still resist unto
blood striving against sin.
(2) Again, we here find a very sharp and clear statement of the welcome
truth, that continuance in sin is never a necessity, that God points the
way out of sin, and that from the first He has been on man's side and
has done all that could be done to keep men from sinning. Observe how He
expostulates with Cain. Take note of the plain, explicit fairness of the
words in which He expostulates with him--instance, as it is, of how
absolutely in the right God always is, and how abundantly He can justify
all His dealings with us. God says as it were to Cain; Come now: and let
us reason together. All God wants of any man is to be reasonable; to
look at the facts of the case. "If thou doest well, shalt thou not (as
well as Abel) be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the
door," that is, if thou doest not well, the sin is not Abel's nor any
one's but thine own, and therefore anger at another is not the proper
remedy, but anger at yourself, and repentance.
No language could more forcibly exhibit the unreasonableness of not
meeting God with penitent and humble acknowledgment. God has fully met
our case, and has satisfied all its demands, has set Himself to serve us
and laid Himself out to save us pain and misery, and has so entirely
succeeded in making salvation and blessedness possible to us, that if we
continue in sin we must trample not only upon God's love and our own
reason, but on the very means of salvation. State your case at the
worst, bring forward every reason why your countenance should be fallen
as Cain's and why your face should lower with the gloom of eternal
despair--say that you have as clear evidence as Cain had that your
offerings are displeasing to God, and that while others are accepted you
receive no token from Him,--in answer to all your arguments, these
words addressed to Cain rise up. If not accepted already you have the
means of being so. If you do well to be hardened in sin it is not
because it is necessary, nor because God desires it. If you are to
continue in sin you must put aside His hand. It can only be _sin_ which
causes you either to despair of salvation or keeps you any way separate
from God--there is no other thing worse than sin, and for sin there is
an offering provided. You have not fallen into some lower grade of
beings than that which is designated sinners, and it is sinners that God
in His mercy hems in with this inevitable dilemma He presented to Cain.
If, therefore, you continue at war with God it is not because you must
not do otherwise: if you go forward to any new thought, plan, or action
unpardoned; if acceptance of God's forgiveness and entrance into a state
of reconciliation with Him be not your first action, then you must
thrust aside His counsel, backed though it is with every utterance of
your own reason. Some of us may be this day or this week in as critical
a position as Cain, having as truly as he the making or marring of our
future in our hands, seeing clearly the right course, and all that is
good, humble, penitent and wise in us urging us to follow that course,
but our pride and self-will holding us back. How often do men thus
barter a future of blessing for some mean gratification of temper or
lust or pride; how often by a reckless, almost listless and indifferent
continuance in sin do they let themselves be carried on to a future as
woful as Cain's; how often when God expostulates with them do they make
no answer and take no action, as if there were nothing to be gained by
listening to God--as if it were a matter of no importance what future I
go to--as if in the whole eternity that lies in reserve there were
nothing worth making a choice about--nothing about which it is worth my
while to rouse the whole energy of which I am capable, and to make, by
God's grace, the determination which shall alter my whole future--to
choose for myself and assert myself.
(3) The writer to the Hebrews makes a very striking use of this event.
He borrows from it language in which to magnify the efficacy of Christ's
sacrifice, and affirms that the blood of Christ speaketh better things,
or, as it must rather be rendered, crieth louder than the blood of Abel.
Abel's blood, we see, cried for vengeance, for evil things for Cain,
called God to make inquisition for blood, and so pled as to secure the
banishment of the murderer. The Arabs have a belief that over the grave
of a murdered man his spirit hovers in the form of a bird that cries
"Give me drink, give me drink," and only ceases when the blood of the
murderer is shed. Cain's conscience told him the same thing; there was
no criminal law threatening death to the murderer, but he felt that men
would kill him if they could. He heard the blood of Abel crying from the
earth. The blood of Christ also cries to God, but cries not for
vengeance but for pardon. And as surely as the one cry was heard and
answered in very substantial results; so surely does the other cry call
down from heaven its proper and beneficent effects. It is as if the
earth would not receive and cover the blood of Christ, but ever exposes
it before God and cries to Him to be faithful and just to forgive us our
sins. This blood cries louder than the other. If God could not overlook
the blood of one of His servants, but adjudged to it its proper
consequences, neither is it possible that He should overlook the blood
of His Son and not give to it its proper result.
If then you feel in your conscience that you are as guilty as Cain, and
if sins clamour around you which are as dangerous as his, and which cry
out for judgment upon you, accept the assurance that the blood of Christ
has a yet louder cry for mercy. If you had been Abel's murderer, would
you have been justly afraid of God's anger? Be as sure of God's mercy
now. If you had stood over his lifeless body and seen the earth refusing
to cover his blood, if you felt the stain of it crimson on your
conscience and if by night you started from your sleep striving vainly
to wash it from your hands, if by every token you felt yourself exposed
to a just punishment, your fear would be just and reasonable were
nothing else revealed to you. But there is another blood equally
indelible, equally clamorous. In it you have in reality what is
elsewhere pretended in fable, that the blood of the murdered man will
not wash out, but through every cleansing oozes up again a dark stain on
the oaken floor. This blood can really not be washed out, it cannot be
covered up and hid from God's eye, its voice cannot be stifled, and its
cry is all for mercy.
With how different a meaning then comes now to us this question of
God's: "Where is thy brother?" Our Brother also is slain. Him Whom God
sent among us to reverse the curse, to lighten the burden of this life,
to be the loving member of the family on Whom each leans for help and
looks to for counsel and comfort--Him Who was by His goodness to be as
the dayspring from on high in our darkness, we found _too_ good for our
endurance and dealt with as Cain dealt with his more righteous brother.
But He Whom we slew God has raised again to give repentance and
remission of sins, and assures us that His blood cleanseth from all sin.
To every one therefore He repeats this question, "Where is thy brother?"
He repeats it to every one who is living with a conscience stained with
sin; to every one that knows remorse and walks with the hanging head of
shame; to every one whose whole life is saddened by the consciousness
that all is not settled between God and himself; to every one who is
sinning recklessly as if Christ's blood had never been shed for sin; and
to every one who, though seeking to be at peace with God, is troubled
and downcast--to all God says, "Where is thy brother?" tenderly
reminding us of the absolute satisfaction for sin that has been made,
and of the hope towards God we have through the blood of His Son.
IV.
_CAIN'S LINE, AND ENOCH._
GENESIS iv. 12-24.
"My punishment is greater than I can bear," so felt Cain as soon as his
passion had spent itself and the consequences of his wickedness became
apparent--and so feels every one who finds he has now to live in the
presence of the irrevocable deed he has done. It seems too heavy a
penalty to endure for the one hour of passion; and yet as little as Cain
could rouse the dead Abel so little can we revive the past we have
destroyed. Thoughtlessness has set in motion agencies we are powerless
to control; the whole world is changed to us. One can fancy Cain turning
to see if his victim gave no sign of life, striving to reanimate the
dead body, calling the familiar name, but only to see with growing
dismay that the one blow had finished all with which that name was
associated, and that he had made himself a new world. So are we drawn
back and back in thought to that which has for ever changed life to us,
striving to see if there is no possibility of altering the past, but
only to find we might quite as well try to raise the dead. No voice
responds to our cries of grief and dismay and too late repentance. All
life now seems but a reaping of the consequences of the past. We have
put ourselves in every respect at a disadvantage. The earth seems
cursed so that we are hampered in our employments and cannot make as
much of them as we would had we been innocent. We have got out of right
relations to our fellow-men and cannot feel the same to them as we ought
to feel; and the face of God is hid from us, so that now and again as
time after time our hopes are blighted, our life darkened and disturbed
by the obvious results of our own past deeds, we are tempted to cry out
with Cain: "My punishment is greater than I can bear."
Yet Cain's punishment was less than he expected. He was not put to death
as he would have been at any later period of the world's history, but
was banished. And even this punishment was lightened by his having a
token from God, that he would not be put to death by any zealous avenger
of Abel. He would experience the hardships of a man entering unexplored
territory, but to an enterprising spirit this would not be without its
charms. As the fresh beauties of the world's youth were disclosed to him
and by their bright and peaceful friendliness allayed the bitterness of
his spirit, and as the mysteries and dangers of the new regions excited
him and called his thoughts from the past, some of the old delight in
life may have been recovered by him. Probably in many a lonely hour the
recollection of his crime would return and with it all the horrors of a
remorse which would drive rest and peace from his soul, and render him
the most wretched of men. But busied as he was with his new enterprises,
there is little doubt that he would find it, as it is still found, not
impossible to banish such dreary thoughts and live in the measure of
contentment which many enjoy who are as far from God as Cain.
It is not difficult to detect the spirit he carried with him, and the
tone he gave to his line of the race. The facts recorded are few but
significant. He begat a son, he built a city; and he gave to both the
name Enoch, that is "initiation," or "beginning," as if he were saying
in his heart, "What so great harm after all in cutting short one line in
Abel? I can begin another and find a new starting point for the race. I
am driven forth cursed as a vagabond, but a vagabond I will not be; I
will make for myself a settled abode, and I will fence it round with
knife-blade thorns so that no man will be able to assault me."
In this settling of Cain, however, we see not any symptom of his ceasing
to be a vagabond, but the surest evidence that now he was content to be
a fugitive from God and had cut himself off from hope. His heart had
found rest and had found it apart from God. _Here_, in this city he
would make a fresh beginning for himself and for men. Here he abandoned
all clinging memories of former things, of his old home and of the God
there worshipped. He had wisdom enough not to call his city by his own
name, and so invite men to consider his former career or trace back
anything to his old life. He cut it all off from him; his crime, his God
also, all that was in it was to be no more to him and his comrades. He
would make a clean start, and that men might be led to expect a great
future he called his city, Enoch, a Beginning.
But it is one thing to forgive ourselves, another thing to have God's
forgiveness. It is one thing to reconcile ourselves to the curse that
runs through our life, another thing to be reconciled to God and so
defeat the curse. It is sometimes, though by no means always, possible
to escape some of the consequences of sin: we can change our front so as
to lessen the breadth of life that is exposed to them, or we can
accustom and harden ourselves to a very second-rate kind of life. We can
teach ourselves to live without much love in our homes or in our
connections with those outside; we can learn to be satisfied if we can
pay our way and make the time pass and be outwardly like other people;
we can build a little city, and be content to be on no very friendly
terms with any but the select few inside the trench, and actually be
quite satisfied if we can _defend ourselves against_ the rest of men; we
can forget the one commandment, that we should love one another. We can
all find much in the world to comfort, to lull, to soothe sorrowful but
wholesome remembrances; much to aid us in an easy treatment of the
curse; much to shed superficial brightness on a life darkened and
debased by sin, much to hush up the sad echoes that mutter from the dark
mountains of vanity we have left behind us, much that assures us we have
nothing to do but forget our old sins and busily occupy ourselves with
new duties. But no David will say, nor will any man of true spiritual
discernment say, "Blessed is the man whose transgression is
_forgotten_;" but only, "Blessed is the man whose transgression is
forgiven." By all means make a fresh start, a new beginning, but let it
be in your own broken heart, in a spirit humble and contrite, frankly
acknowledging your guilt and finding rest and settlement for your soul
in reconciliation with God.
It is in the family of Lamech the characteristics of Cain's line are
most distinctly seen, and the significance of their tendencies becomes
apparent. As Cain had set himself to cultivate the curse out of the
world, so have his children derived from him the self-reliant hardiness
and hardihood which are resolute to make of this world as bright and
happy a home as may be. They make it their task to subdue the world and
compel it to yield them a life in which they can delight. They are so
far successful that in a few generations they have formed a home in
which all the essentials of civilized life are found--the arts are
cultivated and female society is appreciated.
Of his three sons, Jabal--or "Increase"--was "the father of such as
dwell in tents and of such as have cattle." He had originality enough to
step beyond all traditional habits and to invent a new mode of life.
Hitherto men had been tied to one spot by their fixed habitations, or
found shelter when overtaken by storm in caves or trees. To Jabal the
idea first occurs, I can carry my house about with me and regulate its
movements and not it mine. I need not return every night this long weary
way from the pastures, but may go wherever grass is green and streams
run cool. He and his comrades would thus become aware of the vast
resources of other lands, and would unconsciously lay the foundations
both of commerce and of wars of conquest. For both in ancient and more
modern times the most formidable armies have been those vast moving
shepherd races bred outside the borders of civilization and flooding as
with an irresistible tide the territories of more settled and less hardy
tribes.
Jubal again was, as his name denotes, the reputed father of all such as
handle the harp and the organ, stringed and wind instruments. The stops
of the reed or flute and the divisions of the string being once
discovered, all else necessarily followed. The twanging of a bow-string
in a musical ear was enough to give the suggestion to an observant mind;
the varying notes of the birds; the winds expressing at one time
unbridled fury and at another a breathing benediction, could not fail to
move and stir the susceptible spirit. The spontaneous though untuned
singing of children, that follows no mere melody made by another to
express _his_ joy, but is the instinctive expression of their own joy,
could not but give however meagrely the first rudiments of music. But
here was the man who first made a piece of wood help him; who out of the
commonest material of the physical world found for himself a means of
expressing the most impalpable moods of his spirit. Once the idea was
caught that matter inanimate as well as animate was man's servant and
could do his finest work for him, Jabal and his brother Jubal would make
rapid work between them. If the rude matter of the world could _sing_
for them, what might it not do for them? They would see that there was a
precision in machine-work which man's hand could not rival--a regularity
which no nervous throb could throw out and no feeling interrupt, and yet
at the same time when they found how these rude instruments responded to
every finest shade of feeling, and how all external nature seemed able
to express what was in man, must it not have been the birth of poetry as
well as of music? Jubal in short originates what we now compendiously
describe as the Fine Arts.
The third brother again may be taken as the originator of the Useful
Arts--though not exclusively--for being the instructor of every
artificer in brass and iron, having something of his brother's genius
for invention and more than his brother's handiness and practical
faculty for embodying his ideas in material forms, he must have promoted
all arts which require tools for their culture.
Thus among these three brothers we find distributed the various kinds of
genius and faculty which ever since have enriched the world. Here in
germ was really all that the world can do. The great lines in which
individual and social activity have since run were then laid down.
This notable family circle was completed by Naamah, the sister of
Tubal-Cain. The strength of female influence began to be felt
contemporaneously with the cultivation of the arts. Very early in the
world's history it was perceived that although debarred from the rougher
activities of life, women have an empire of their own. Men have the
making of civilisation, but women have the making of men. It is they who
form the character of the individual and give its tone to the society in
which they live. It is natural to men to consider the feelings and
tastes of women and to adapt their manners and conversation to them; and
it is for women to exercise worthily the sway they thus possess.
Practically and to a large extent women settle what subjects shall be
spoken of, and in what tone, trifling or serious; and each ought
therefore to recognise her own burden of responsibility, and see to it
that the deference paid to her shall not lower him who pays it, and that
the respect shown to her shall help him who shows it to respect what is
pure and true, charitable, just, and worthy. Let women show that it is
worldly trifling or slanderous malignity or empty tittle-tattle that
delights them, then they act the part of Eve and tempt to sin; let them
show that they prize most highly the mirth that is innocent and the
conversation that is elevating and helpful, and while they win
admiration for themselves they win it also for what is healthy and
purifying. No woman can renounce her influence; helpful or hurtful she
certainly is and must be in proportion as she is pleasing and
attractive.
Thus early did it appear how much of what is admirable and serviceable
clung to human nature apart from any recognition of God. The worldly
life was then what it is now, a life not wholly and obviously polluted
by excess, nor destroyed by violence, but displaying features which
appeal to our sensibilities and provoke applause; a life of manifold
beauty, of great power and resource, of abundant promise. There is
abundant material in the world for beautifying and elevating human life,
and this material may be used and is used by men who acknowledge neither
its origin in God nor the ends He would serve by it. The interests of
men may be advanced and the best work of the world done by three
distinct classes of men--by those who work as God's children in thorough
sympathy with His purposes; by those who do not know God but who are
humble in heart and would sympathise with God's purposes, did they
become acquainted with them; and by those who are proud and self-willed,
positively alienated from God, and who do the world's work for their own
ends. And so far as the external work goes the last-named class of men
may be most efficient. In mental endowment, social and political wisdom,
scientific aptitude, and all that tends to substantial utility, it is
quite possible they may excel the godly, for "not many noble, not many
wise are called." But we have nothing to measure permanent success by,
save conformity with God's will; and we have nothing by which we can
estimate how character will endure and how deeply it is rooted save
conformity with the nature of God. If a man believes in God, in one
Supreme Who rules and orders all things for just, holy and wise ends;
if he is in sympathy with the nature and will of God and finds his
truest satisfaction in forwarding the purposes of God, then you have a
guarantee for this man's continuance in good and for his ultimate
success.
The precarious nature of all godless civilisation and the real tendency
of self-sufficing pride are shown in Lamech.
It is in Lamech the tendency culminates and in him the issue of all this
brilliant but godless life is seen. Therefore though he is the father,
the historian speaks of him _after_ his children. In his one recorded
utterance his character leaps to view definite and complete--a character
of boundless force, self-reliance and godlessness. It is a little
uncertain whether he means that he has actually slain a man, or whether
he is putting a hypothetical case--the character of his speech is the
same whichever view is taken.
"I have slain," he says, or suppose I slay, "a man for wounding me,
A young man for hurting me:
But if Cain shall be avenged seven-fold--then Lamech seventy and
seven-fold."
That is, I take vengeance for myself with those good weapons my son has
forged for me. He has furnished me with a means of defence many times
more effectual than God's avenging of Cain. This is the climax of the
self-sufficiency to which the line of Cain has been tending. Cain
besought God's protection; he needed God for at least one purpose, this
one thread bound him yet to God. Lamech has no need of God for any
purpose; what his sons can make and his own right hand do is enough for
him. This is what comes of finding enough in the world without God--a
boastful, self-sufficient man, dangerous to society, the incarnation of
the pride of life. In the long run separation from God becomes isolation
from man and cruel self-sufficiency.
The line of Seth is followed from father to son, for the sake of showing
that the promise of a seed which should be victorious over evil was
being fulfilled. Apparently it is also meant that during this uneventful
period long ages elapsed. Nothing can be told of these old world people
but that they lived and died, leaving behind them heirs to transmit the
promise.
Only once is the monotony broken; but this in so striking a manner as to
rescue us from the idea that the historian is mechanically copying a
barren list of names. For in the seventh generation, contemporaneous
with the culmination of Cain's line in the family of Lamech, we come
upon the simple but anything but mechanical statement: "Enoch walked
with God and he was not; for God took him." The phrase is full of
meaning. Enoch walked with God because he was His friend and liked His
company, because he was going in the same direction as God, and had no
desire for anything but what lay in God's path. We walk with God when He
is in all our thoughts; not because we consciously think of Him at all
times, but because He is naturally suggested to us by all we think of;
as when any person or plan or idea has become important to us, no matter
what we think of, our thought is always found recurring to this
favourite object, so with the godly man everything has a connection with
God and must be ruled by that connection. When some change in his
circumstances is thought of, he has first of all to determine how the
proposed change will affect his connection with God--will his conscience
be equally clear, will he be able to live on the same friendly terms
with God and so forth. When he falls into sin he cannot rest till he
has resumed his place at God's side and walks again with Him. This is
the general nature of walking with God; it is a persistent endeavour to
hold all our life open to God's inspection and in conformity to His
will; a readiness to give up what we find does cause any
misunderstanding between us and God; a feeling of loneliness if we have
not some satisfaction in our efforts at holding fellowship with God, a
cold and desolate feeling when we are conscious of doing something that
displeases Him. This walking with God necessarily tells on the whole
life and character. As you instinctively avoid subjects which you know
will jar upon the feelings of your friend, as you naturally endeavour to
suit yourself to your company, so when the consciousness of God's
presence begins to have some weight with you, you are found
instinctively endeavouring to please Him, repressing the thoughts you
know He disapproves, and endeavouring to educate such dispositions as
reflect His own nature.
It is easy then to understand how we may practically walk with God--it
is to open to Him all our purposes and hopes, to seek His judgment on
our scheme of life and idea of happiness--it is to be on thoroughly
friendly terms with God. Why then do any not walk with God? Because they
seek what is wrong. You would walk with Him if the same idea of good
possessed you as possesses Him; if you were as ready as He to make no
deflexion from the straight path. Is not the very crown of life depicted
in the testimony given to Enoch, that "he pleased God"? Cannot you take
your way through life with a resolute and joyous spirit if you are
conscious that you please Him Who judges not by appearances, not by your
manners, but by your real state, by your actual character and the
eternal promise it bears? Things were not made easy to Enoch. In evil
days, with much to mislead him, with everything to oppose him, he had by
faith and diligent seeking, as the Epistle to the Hebrews says, to
cleave to the path on which God walked, often left in darkness, often
thrown off the track, often listening but unable to hear the footfall of
God or to hear his own name called upon, receiving no sign but still
diligently seeking the God he knew would lead him only to good. Be it
yours to give such diligence. Do not accept it as a thing fixed that you
are to be one of the graceless and ungodly, always feeble, always
vacillating, always without a character, always in doubt about your
state, and whether life might not be some other and better thing to you.
"Enoch was not, for God took him." Suddenly his place on earth was empty
and men drew their own conclusions. He had been known as the Friend of
God, where could he be but in God's dwelling-place? No sickness had
slowly worn him to the grave, no mark of decay had been visible in his
unabated vigour. His departure was a favour conferred and as such men
recognised it. "God has taken him," they said, and their thoughts
followed upward, and essayed to conceive the finished bliss of the man
whom God has taken away where blessing may be more fully conferred. His
age corresponded to our thirty-three, the age when the world has usually
got fair hold of a man, when a man has found his place in life and means
to live and see good days. The awkward, unfamiliar ways of youth that
keep him outside of much of life are past, and the satiety of age is not
yet reached; a man has begun to learn there is something he can do, and
has not yet learned how little. It is an age at which it is most
painful to relinquish life, but it was at this age God took him away,
and men knew it was in kindness. Others had begun to gather round him,
and depend upon him, hopes were resting in him, great things were
expected of him, life was strong in him. But let life dress itself in
its most attractive guise, let it shine on a man with its most
fascinating smile, let him be happy at home and the pleasing centre of a
pleasing circle of friends, let him be in that bright summer of life
when a man begins to fear he is too prosperous and happy, and yet there
is for man a better thing than all this, a thing so immeasurably and
independently superior to it that all this may be taken away and yet the
man be far more blessed. If God would confer His highest favours, He
must take a man out of all this and bring him closer to Himself.
V.
_THE FLOOD._
GENESIS v.-ix.
The first great event which indelibly impressed itself on the memory of
the primeval world was the Flood. There is every reason to believe that
this catastrophe was co-extensive with the human population of the
world. In every branch of the human family traditions of the event are
found. These traditions need not be recited, though some of them bear a
remarkable likeness to the Biblical story, while others are very
beautiful in their construction, and significant in individual points.
Local floods happening at various times in different countries could not
have given birth to the minute coincidences found in these traditions,
such as the sending out of the birds, and the number of persons saved.
But we have as yet no material for calculating how far human population
had spread from the original centre. It might apparently be argued that
it could not have spread to the sea-coast, or that at any rate no ships
had as yet been built large enough to weather a severe storm; for a
thoroughly nautical population could have had little difficulty in
surviving such a catastrophe as is here described. But all that can be
affirmed is that there is no evidence that the waters extended beyond
the inhabited part of the earth; and from certain details of the
narrative, this part of the earth may be identified as the great plain
of the Euphrates and Tigris.
Some of the expressions used in the narrative might indeed lead us to
suppose that the writer understood the catastrophe to have extended over
the whole globe; but expressions of similar largeness elsewhere occur in
passages where their meaning must be restricted. Probably the most
convincing evidence of the limited extent of the Flood is furnished by
the animals of Australia. The animals that abound in that island are
different from those found in other parts of the world, but are similar
to the species which are found fossilized in the island itself, and
which therefore must have inhabited these same regions long anterior to
the Flood. If then the Flood extended to Australia and destroyed all
animal life there, what are we compelled to suppose as the order of
events? We must suppose that the creatures, visited by some presentiment
of what was to happen many months after, selected specimens of their
number, and that these specimens by some unknown and quite inconceivable
means crossed thousands of miles of sea, found their way through all
kinds of perils from unaccustomed climate, food, and beasts of prey;
singled out Noah by some inscrutable instinct, and surrendered
themselves to his keeping. And after the year in the ark expired, they
turned their faces homewards, leaving behind them no progeny, again
preserving themselves intact, and transporting themselves by some
unknown means to their island home. This, if the Deluge was universal,
must have been going on with thousands of animals from all parts of the
globe; and not only were these animals a stupendous miracle in
themselves, but wherever they went they were the occasion of miracle in
others, all the beasts of prey refraining from their natural food. The
fact is, the thing will not bear stating.
But it is not the physical but the moral aspects of the Flood with which
we have here to do. And, first, this narrator explains its cause. He
ascribes it to the abnormal wickedness of the antediluvians. To describe
the demoralised condition of society before the Flood, the strongest
language is used. "God saw that the wickedness of man was great,"
monstrous in acts of violence, and in habitual courses and established
usages. "Every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil
continually,"--there was no mixture of good, no relentings, no
repentances, no visitings of compunction, no hesitations and debatings.
It was a world of men fierce and energetic, violent and lawless, in
perpetual war and turmoil; in which if a man sought to live a righteous
life, he had to conceive it of his own mind and to follow it out unaided
and without the countenance of any.
This abnormal wickedness again is accounted for by the abnormal
marriages from which the leaders of these ages sprang. Everything seemed
abnormal, huge, inhuman. As there are laid bare to the eye of the
geologist in those archaic times vast forms bearing a likeness to forms
we are now familiar with, but of gigantic proportions and wallowing in
dim, mist-covered regions; so to the eye of the historian there loom
through the obscurity colossal forms perpetrating deeds of more than
human savagery, and strength, and daring; heroes that seem formed in a
different mould from common men.
However we interpret the narrative, its significance for us is plain.
There is nothing prudish in the Bible. It speaks with a manly frankness
of the beauty of women and its ensnaring power. The Mosaic law was
stringent against intermarriage with idolatresses, and still in the New
Testament something more than an echo of the old denunciation of such
marriages is heard. Those who were most concerned about preserving a
pure morality and a high tone in society were keenly alive to the
dangers that threatened from this quarter. It is a permanent danger to
character because it is to a permanent element in human nature that the
temptation appeals. To many in every generation, perhaps to the
majority, this is the most dangerous form in which worldliness presents
itself; and to resist this the most painful test of principle. With
natures keenly sensitive to beauty and superficial attractiveness, some
are called upon to make their choice between a conscientious cleaving to
God and an attachment to that which in the form is perfect but at heart
is defective, depraved, godless. Where there is great outward attraction
a man fights against the growing sense of inward uncongeniality, and
persuades himself he is too scrupulous and uncharitable, or that he is a
bad reader of character. There may be an undercurrent of warning; he may
be sensible that his whole nature is not satisfied and it may seem to
him ominous that what is best within him does not flourish in his new
attachment, but rather what is inferior, if not what is worst. But all
such omens and warnings are disregarded and stifled by some such silly
thought as that consideration and calculation are out of place in such
matters. And what is the result? The result is the same as it ever was.
Instead of the ungodly rising to the level of the godly, he sinks to
hers. The worldly style, the amusements, the fashions once distasteful
to him, but allowed for her sake, become familiar, and at last wholly
displace the old and godly ways, the arrangements that left room for
acknowledging God in the family; and there is one household less as a
point of resistance to the incursion of an ungodly tone in society, one
deserter more added to the already too crowded ranks of the ungodly, and
the life-time if not the eternity of one soul embittered. Not without a
consideration of the temptations that do actually lead men astray did
the law enjoin: "Thou shalt not make a covenant with the inhabitants of
the land, nor take of their daughters unto thy sons."
It seems like a truism to say that a greater amount of unhappiness has
been produced by mismanagement, folly, and wickedness in the relation
subsisting between men and women than by any other cause. God has given
us the capacity of love to regulate this relation and be our safe guide
in all matters connected with it. But frequently, from one cause or
another, the government and direction of this relation are taken out of
the hands of love and put into the thoroughly incompetent hands of
convenience, or fancy, or selfish lust. A marriage contracted from any
such motive is sure to bring unhappiness of a long-continued, wearing
and often heart-breaking kind. Such a marriage is often the form in
which retribution comes for youthful selfishness and youthful
licentiousness. You cannot cheat nature. Just in so far as you allow
yourself to be ruled in youth by a selfish love of pleasure, in so far
do you incapacitate yourself for love. You sacrifice what is genuine and
satisfying, because provided by nature, to what is spurious,
unsatisfying, and shameful. You cannot afterwards, unless by a long and
bitter discipline, restore the capacity of warm and pure love in your
heart. Every indulgence in which true love is absent is another blow
given to the faculty of love within you--you make yourself in that
capacity decrepit, paralyzed, dead. You have lost, you have killed the
faculty that should be your guide in all these matters, and so you are
at last precipitated without this guidance into a marriage formed from
some other motive, formed therefore against nature, and in which you are
the everlasting victim of nature's relentless justice. Remember that you
cannot have both things, a youth of loveless pleasure and a loving
marriage--you must make your choice. For as surely as genuine love kills
all evil desire; so surely does evil desire kill the very capacity of
love, and blind utterly its wretched victim to the qualities that ought
to excite love.
The language used of God in relation to this universal corruption
strikes every one as remarkable. "It repented the Lord that He had made
man on the earth, and it grieved Him at His heart." This is what is
usually termed anthropomorphism, _i.e._ the presenting of God in terms
applicable only to man; it is an instance of the same mode of speaking
as is used when we speak of God's hand or eye or heart. These
expressions are not absolutely true, but they are useful and convey to
us a meaning which could scarcely otherwise be expressed. Some persons
think that the use of these expressions proves that in early times God
was thought of as wearing a body and as being very like ourselves in His
inward nature. And even in our day we have been ridiculed for speaking
of God as a magnified man. Now in the first place the use of such
expressions does not prove that even the earliest worshippers of God
believed Him to have eyes and hands and a body. _We_ freely use the same
expressions though we have no such belief. We use them because our
language is formed for human uses and on a human level, and we have no
capacity to frame a better. And in the second place, though not
absolutely true they do help us towards the truth. We are told that it
degrades God to think of Him as hearing prayer and accepting praise;
nay, that to think of Him as a Person at all, is to degrade Him. We
ought to think of Him as the Absolutely Unknowable. But which degrades
God most, and which exalts Him most? If we find that it is impossible to
worship an absolutely unknowable, if we find that practically such an
idea is a mere nonentity to us, and that we cannot in point of fact pay
any homage or show any consideration to such an empty abstraction, is
not this really to lower God? And if we find that when we think of Him
as a Person, and ascribe to Him all human virtue in an infinite degree,
we can rejoice in Him and worship Him with true adoration, is not this
to exalt Him? While we call Him our Father we know that this title is
inadequate, while we speak of God as planning and decreeing we know that
we are merely making shift to express what is inexpressible by us--we
know that our thoughts of Him are never adequate and that to think of
Him at all is to lower Him, is to think of Him inadequately; but when
the practical alternative is such as it is, we find we do well to think
of Him with the highest personal attributes we can conceive. For to
refuse to ascribe such attributes to Him because this is degrading Him,
is to empty our minds of any idea of Him which can stimulate either to
worship or to duty. If by ridding our minds of all anthropomorphic ideas
and refusing to think of God as feeling, thinking, acting as men do, we
could thereby get to a really higher conception of Him, a conception
which would practically make us worship Him more devotedly and serve
Him more faithfully, then by all means let us do so. But if the result
of refusing to think of Him as in many ways like ourselves, is that we
cease to think of Him at all or only as a dead impersonal force, then
this certainly is not to reach a higher but a lower conception of Him.
And until we see our way to some truly higher conception than that which
we have of a Personal God, we had better be content with it.
In short, we do well to be humble, and considering that we know very
little about existence of any kind, and least of all about God's, and
that our God has been presented to us in human form, we do well to
accept Christ as our God, to worship, love, and serve Him, finding Him
sufficient for all our wants of this life, and leaving it to other times
to get the solution of anything that is not made plain to us in Him.
This is one boon that the science and philosophy of our day have
unintentionally conferred upon us. They have laboured to make us feel
how remote and inaccessible God is, how little we can know Him, how
truly He is past finding out; they have laboured to make us feel how
intangible and invisible and incomprehensible God is, but the result of
this is that we turn with all the stronger longing to Him who is the
Image of the Invisible God, and on whom a voice has fallen from the
excellent glory, "This is My beloved Son, hear Him."
The Flood itself we need not attempt to describe. It has been remarked
that though the narrative is vivid and forcible, it is entirely wanting
in that sort of description which in a modern historian or poet would
have occupied the largest space. "We see nothing of the death-struggle;
we hear not the cry of despair; we are not called upon to witness the
frantic agony of husband and wife, and parent and child, as they fled in
terror before the rising waters. Nor is a word said of the sadness of
the one righteous man, who, safe himself, looked upon the destruction
which he could not avert." The Chaldean tradition which is the most
closely allied to the Biblical account is not so reticent. Tears are
shed in heaven over the catastrophe, and even consternation affected its
inhabitants, while within the ark itself the Chaldean Noah says, "When
the storm came to an end and the terrible water-spout ceased, I opened
the window and the light smote upon my face. I looked at the sea
attentively observing, and the whole of humanity had returned to mud,
like seaweed the corpses floated. I was seized with sadness; I sat down
and wept and my tears fell upon my face."
There can be little question that this is a true description of Noah's
feeling. And the sense of desolation and constraint would rather
increase in Noah's mind than diminish. Month after month elapsed; he was
coming daily nearer the end of his food, and yet the waters were
unabated. He did not know how long he was to be kept in this dark,
disagreeable place. He was left to do his daily work without any
supernatural signs to help him against his natural anxieties. The
floating of the ark and all that went on in it had no mark of God's hand
upon it. He was indeed _safe_ while others had been destroyed. But of
what good was this safety to be? Was he ever to get out of this
prison-house? To what straits was he to be first reduced? So it is often
with ourselves. We are left to fulfil God's will without any sensible
tokens to set over against natural difficulties, painful and pinching
circumstances, ill health, low spirits, failure of favourite projects
and old hopes--so that at last we come to think that perhaps safety is
all we are to have in Christ, a mere exemption from suffering of one
kind purchased by the endurance of much suffering of another kind; that
we are to be thankful for pardon on any terms; and escaping with our
_life_, must be content though it be bare. Why, how often does a
Christian wonder whether, after all, he has chosen a life that he can
endure, whether the monotony and the restraints of the Christian life
are not inconsistent with true enjoyment?
This strife between the felt restriction of the Christian life and the
natural craving for abundant life, for entrance into all that the
world can show us, and experience of all forms of enjoyment--this
strife goes on unceasingly in the heart of many of us as it goes on
from age to age in the world. Which is the true view of life, which is
the view to guide _us_ in choosing and refusing the enjoyments and
pursuits that are presented to us? Are we to believe that the ideal
man for this life is he who has tasted all culture and delight, who
believes in nature, recognising no fall and seeking for no redemption,
and makes enjoyment his end; or he who sees that all enjoyment is
deceptive till man is set right morally, and who spends himself on
this, knowing that blood and misery must come before peace and rest,
and crowned as our King and Leader, not with a garland of roses, but
with the crown of Him Who is greatest of all, because servant of
all--to Whom the most sunken is not repulsive, and Who will not
abandon the most hopeless? This comes to be very much the question,
whether this life is final or preparatory?--whether, therefore, our
work in it should be to check lower propensities and develop and train
all that is best in character, so as to be fit for highest life and
enjoyment in a world to come--or should take ourselves as we find
ourselves, and delight in this present world? whether this is a placid
eternal state, in which things are very much as they should be, and in
which therefore we can live freely and enjoy freely; or whether it is
a disordered, initial condition in which our main task should be to do
a little towards putting things on a better rail and getting at least
the germ and small beginnings of future good planted in one another?
So that in the midst of all felt restriction, there is the highest
hope, that one day we shall go forth from the narrow precincts of our
ark, and step out into the free bright sunshine, in a world where
there is nothing to offend, and that the time of our deprivation will
seem to have been well spent indeed, if it has left within us a
capacity permanently to enjoy love, holiness, justice, and all that is
delighted in by God Himself.
The use made of this event in the New Testament is remarkable. It is
compared by Peter to baptism, and both are viewed as illustrations of
salvation by destruction. The eight souls, he says, who were in the ark,
"were saved by water." The water which destroyed the rest saved them.
When there seemed little hope of the godly line being able to withstand
the influence of the ungodly, the Flood came and left Noah's family in a
new world, with freedom to order all things according to their own
ideas. In this Peter sees some analogy to baptism. In baptism, the
penitent who believes in the efficacy of Christ's blood to purge away
sin, lets his defilement be washed away and rises new and clean to the
life Christ gives. In Christ the sinner finds shelter for himself and
destruction for his sins. It is God's wrath against sin that saves us by
destroying our sins; just as it was the Flood which devastated the
world, that at the same time, and thereby, saved Noah and his family.
In this event, too, we see the completeness of God's work. Often we feel
reluctant to surrender our sinful habits to so final a destruction as is
implied in being one with Christ. The expense at which holiness is to be
bought seems almost too great. So much that has given us pleasure must
be parted with; so many old ties sundered, a condition of holiness
presents an aspect of dreariness and hopelessness; like the world after
the flood, not a moving thing on the surface of the earth, everything
levelled, prostrate, and washed even with the ground; here the corpse of
a man, there the carcase of a beast; here mighty forest timber swept
prone like the rushes on the banks of a flooded stream, and there a city
without inhabitants, everything dank, dismal and repellent. But this is
only one aspect of the work; the beginning, necessary if the work is to
be thorough. If any part of the sinful life remain it will spring up to
mar what God means to introduce us to. Only that is to be preserved
which we can take with us into our ark. Only that is to pass on into our
life which we can retain while we are in true connection with Christ,
and which we think can help us to live as His friends, and to serve Him
zealously.
This event then gives us some measure by which we can know how much God
will do to maintain holiness upon earth. In this catastrophe every one
who strives after godliness may find encouragement, seeing in it the
Divine earnestness of God for good and against evil. There is only one
other event in history that so conspicuously shows that holiness among
men is the object for which God will sacrifice everything else. There is
no need now of any further demonstration of God's purpose in this world
and His zeal for carrying it out. And may it not be expected of us His
children, that we stand in presence of the cross until our cold and
frivolous hearts catch something of the earnestness, the "resisting unto
blood striving against sin," which is exhibited there? The Flood has not
been forgotten by almost any people under heaven, but its moral result
is _nil_. But he whose memory is haunted by a dying Redeemer, by the
thought of One Whose love found its most appropriate and practical
result in dying for him, _is_ prevented from much sin, and finds in that
love the spring of eternal hope, that which his soul in the deep privacy
of his most sacred thoughts can feed upon with joy, that which he builds
himself round and broods over as his inalienable possession.
VI.
_NOAH'S FALL._
GENESIS ix. 20-27.
Noah in the ark was in a position of present safety but of much anxiety.
No sign of any special protection on God's part was given. The waters
seem to stand at their highest level still; and probably the risk of the
ark's grounding on some impracticable peak, or precipitous hill-side,
would seem as great a danger as the water itself. Five months had
elapsed, and though the rain had ceased the sky was heavy and
threatening, and every day now was worth many measures of corn in the
coming harvest. A reflection of the anxiety within the ark is seen in
the expression, "And God remembered Noah." It was needful to say so, for
there was as yet no outward sign of this.
To such anxieties all are subject who have availed themselves of the
salvation God provides. At the first there is an easy faith in God's
aid; there are many signs of His presence; the subjects in whom
salvation operates have no disposition or temptation to doubt that God
is with them and is working for them. But this initial stage is
succeeded by a very different state of things. We seem to be left to
ourselves to cope with the world and all its difficulties and
temptations in our own strength. Much as we crave some sign that God
remembers us, no sign is given. We no longer receive the same urgent
impulses to holiness of life; we have no longer the same freshness in
devotion as if speaking to a God at hand. There is nothing which of
itself and without reasoning about it says to us, Here is God's hand
upon me.
In fact, the great part of our life has to be spent under these
conditions, and we need to hold some well-ascertained principle
regarding God's dealings, if our faith is to survive. And here in God's
treatment of Noah we see that God may as certainly be working for us
when not working directly upon us, as when His presence is palpable. His
absence from us is as needful as His presence. The clouds are as
requisite for our salvation as the sunny sky. When therefore we find
that salvation from sin is a much slower and more anxious matter than we
once expected it to be, we are not to suppose that God is not hearing
our prayers. When Noah day by day cried to God for relief, and yet night
after night found himself "cribb'd, cabin'd, and confined," with no sign
from God but such as faith could apprehend, depend upon it he had very
different feelings from those with which he first stepped into the ark.
And when we are left to one monotonous rut of duty and to an unchanging
and dry form of devotion, when we are called to learn to live by faith
not by sight, to learn that God's purposes with us are spiritual, and
that slow and difficult growth in self-command and holiness is the best
proof that He hears our prayers, we must strive to believe that this
also is a needful part of our salvation; and we must especially be on
our guard against supposing that as God has ceased to disclose Himself
to us, and so to make faith easy, we may cease to disclose ourselves to
Him.
For this is the natural and very frequent result of such an experience.
Discouraged by the obscurity of God's ways and the difficulty of
believing when the mind is not sustained by success or by new thoughts
or manifest tokens of God's presence, we naturally cease to look for any
clear signs of God's concernment about our state, and rest from all
anxious craving to know God's will about us. To this temptation the
majority of Christian people yield, and allow themselves to become
indifferent to spiritual truth and increasingly interested in the
non-mysterious facts of the present world, attending to present duties
in a mechanical way, seeing that their families have enough to eat and
that all in their little ark are provided for. But to this temptation
Noah did not yield. Though to all appearance abandoned by God, he did
what he could to ascertain what was beyond his immediate sight and
present experience. He sent out his raven and his dove. Not satisfied
with his first enquiry by the raven, which could flit from one piece of
floating garbage to another, he sent out the dove, and continued to do
so at intervals of seven days.
Noah sent out the raven first, probably because it had been the most
companionable bird and seemed the wisest, preferable to "the silly
dove;" but it never came back with God's message. And so has one often
found that an enquiry into God's will, the examination, for example, of
some portion of Scripture, undertaken with a prospect of success and
with good human helps, has failed, and has failed in this peculiar
ravenlike way; the enquiry has settled down on some worthless point, on
some rotting carcase, on some subject of passing interest or worldly
learning, and brings back no message of God to us. On the other hand,
the continued use, Sabbath after Sabbath, of God's appointed means, and
the patient waiting for some message of God to come to us through what
seems a most unlikely messenger, will often be rewarded. It may be but a
single leaf plucked off that we get, but enough to convince us that God
has been mindful of our need, and is preparing for us a habitable world.
Many a man is like the raven, feeding himself on the destruction of
others, satisfied with knowing how God has dealt with others. He thinks
he has done his part when he has found out who has been sinning and what
has been the result. But the dove will not settle on any such
resting-place, and is dissatisfied until for herself she can pluck off
some token that God's anger is turned away and that now there is peace
on earth. And if only you wait God's time and renew your endeavours to
find such tokens, some assurance will be given you, some green and
growing thing, some living part, however small, of the new creation
which will certify you of your hope.
On the first day of the first month, New Year's day, Noah removed the
covering of the ark, which seems to have stranded on the Armenian
tableland, and looked out upon the new world. He cannot but have felt
his responsibility, as a kind of second Adam. And many questionings must
have arisen in his mind regarding the relation of the new to the old.
Was there to be any connection with the old world at all, or was all to
begin afresh? Were the promises, the traditions, the events, the
genealogies of the old world of any significance now? The Flood
distinctly marked the going out of one order of things and the
establishment of another. Man's career and development, or what we call
history, had not before the Flood attained its goal. If this development
was not to be broken short off, and if God's purpose in creation was to
be fulfilled, then the world must still go on. Some worlds may perhaps
die young, as individuals die young. Others endure through hair-breadth
escapes and constant dangers, find their way like our planet through
showers of fire, and pass without collision the orbits of huge bodies,
carrying with them always, as our world does, the materials of their
destruction within themselves. But catastrophes do not cut short, but
evolve God's purposes. The Flood came that God's purpose might be
fulfilled. The course of nature was interrupted, the arrangements of
social and domestic life were overturned, all the works of men were
swept away that this purpose might be fulfilled. It was expedient that
one generation should die for all generations; and this generation
having been taken out of the way, fresh provision is made for the
co-operation of man with God. On man's part there is an emphatic
acknowledgment of God by sacrifice; on God's part there is a renewed
grant to man of the world and its fulness, a renewed assurance of His
favour.
This covenant with Noah was on the plane of nature. It is man's natural
life in the world which is the subject of it. The sacredness of life is
its great lesson. Men might well wonder whether God did not hold life
cheap. In the old world violence had prevailed. But while Lamech's sword
may have slain its thousands, God had in the Flood slain tens of
thousands. The covenant, therefore, directs that human life must be
reverenced. The primal blessing is renewed. Men are to multiply and
replenish the earth; and the slaughter of a man was to be reckoned a
capital crime; and the maintenance of life was guaranteed by a special
clause, securing the regularity of the seasons. If, then, you ask, Was
this just a beginning again where Adam began? Did God just wipe out man
as a boy wipes his slate clean, when he finds his calculation is turning
out wrong? Had all these generations learned nothing; had the world not
grown at all since its birth?--the answer is, it had grown, and in two
most important respects,--it had come to the knowledge of the uniformity
of nature, and the necessity of human law. This great departure from the
uniformity of nature brought into strong relief its normal uniformity,
and gave men their first lesson in the recognition of a God who governs
by fixed laws. And they learned also from the Flood that wickedness must
not be allowed to grow unchecked and attain dimensions which nothing
short of a flood can cope with.
Fit symbol of this covenant was the rainbow. Seeming to unite heaven and
earth, it pictured to those primitive people the friendliness existing
between God and man. Many nations have looked upon it as not merely one
of the most beautiful and striking objects in nature, but as the
messenger of heaven to men. And arching over the whole horizon, it
exhibits the all-embracing universality of the promise. They accepted it
as a sign that God has no pleasure in destruction, that He does not give
way to moods, that He does not always chide, that if weeping may endure
for a night joy is sure to follow. If any one is under a cloud, leading
a joyless, hopeless, heartless life, if any one has much apparent reason
to suppose that God has given him up to catastrophe, and lets things
run as they may, there is some satisfaction in reading this natural
emblem and recognising that without the cloud, nay, without the cloud
breaking into heavy sweeping rains, there cannot be the bow, and that no
cloud of God's sending is permanent, but will one day give place to
unclouded joy. Let the prayer of David be yours, "I know, O Lord, that
Thy judgments are right, and that Thou in faithfulness hast afflicted
me. Let, I pray Thee, Thy merciful kindness be for my comfort according
to Thy word unto Thy servant."
It may be felt that the matters about which God spoke to Noah were
barely religious, certainly not spiritual. But to take God as our God in
any one particular is to take Him as our God for all. If we can eat our
daily bread as given to us by our Father in heaven, then we are heirs of
the righteousness which is by faith. It is because we wait for some
wonderful and out-of-the-way proofs that God is keeping faith with us
that we so much lack a real and living faith. If you think of God only
in connection with some spiritual difficulty, or if you are waiting for
some critical spiritual experience about which you may deal with
God,--if you are not transacting with Him about your daily work, about
your temporal wants and difficulties, about your friendships and your
tastes, about that which makes up the bulk of your thought, feeling, and
action, then you have yet to learn what living with God means. You have
yet to learn that God the Infinite Creator of all is present in all your
life. We are not in advance of Noah, but behind him, if we cannot speak
to God about common things.
Besides, the relation of man to God was sufficiently determined by this
covenant. When any man in that age began to ask himself the question
which all men in all ages ask, How shall I win the favour of God? it
must, or it might, at once have struck him, Why, God has already
favoured me and has bound Himself to me by express and solemn pledges.
And radically this is all that any one needs to know. It is not a change
in God's attitude towards you that is required. What is required is that
you believe what is actually the case, that the Holy God loves you
already and is already seeking to bless you by making you like Himself.
Believe that, and let the faith of it sink more and more deeply into
your spirit, and you will find that you are saved from your sin.
What remains to be told of Noah is full of moral significance. Rare
indeed is a _wholly_ good man; and happy indeed is he who throughout his
youth, his manhood, and his age lets principle govern all his actions.
The righteous and rescued Noah lying drunk on his tent-floor is a
sorrowful spectacle. God had given him the earth, and this was the use
he made of the gift; melancholy presage of the fashion of his posterity.
He had God to help him to bear his responsibilities, to refresh and
gladden him; but he preferred the fruit of his vineyard. Can the most
sacred or impressive memories secure a man against sin? Noah had the
memory of a race drowned for sin and of a year in solitude with God. Can
the dignity and weight of responsibility steady a man? This man knew
that to him God had declared His purpose and that he only could carry it
forward to fulfilment. In that heavy helpless figure, fallen insensible
in his tent, is as significant a warning as in the Flood.
Noah's sin brings before us two facts about sin. First, that the
smaller temptations are often the most effectual. The man who is
invulnerable on the field of battle amidst declared and strong enemies
falls an easy prey to the assassin in his own home. When all the world
was against him, Noah was able to face single-handed both scorn and
violence, but in the midst of his vineyard, among his own people who
understood him and needed no preaching or proof of his virtue, he
relaxed.
He was no longer in circumstances so difficult as to force him to watch
and pray, as to drive him to God's side. The temptations Noah had before
known were mainly from without; he now learnt that those from within are
more serious. Many of us find it comparatively easy to carry clean hands
before the public, or to demean ourselves with tolerable seemliness in
circumstances where the temptation may be very strong but is also very
patent; but how careless are we often in our domestic life, and how
little strain do we put upon ourselves in the company of those whom we
can trust. What petulance and irritability, what angry and slanderous
words, what sensuality and indolence could our own homes witness to!
Noah is not the only man who has walked uprightly and kept his garment
unspotted from the world so long as the eye of man was on him, but who
has lain uncovered on his own tent-floor.
Secondly, we see here how a man may fall into new forms of sin, and are
reminded especially of one of the most distressing facts to be observed
in the world, viz., that men in their prime and even in their old age
are sometimes overtaken in sins of sensuality from which hitherto they
have kept themselves pure. We are very ready to think we know the full
extent of wickedness to which we may go; that by certain sins _we_
shall never be much tempted. And in some of our predictions we may be
correct; our temperament or our circumstances may absolutely preclude
some sins from mastering us. Yet who has made but a slight alteration in
his circumstances, added a little to his business, made some new family
arrangements, or changed his residence, without being astonished to find
how many new sources of evil seem to have been opened within him? While
therefore you rejoice over sins defeated, beware of thinking your work
is nearly done. Especially let those of us who have for years been
fighting mainly against one sin beware of thinking that if only _that_
were defeated we should be free from sin. As a man who has long suffered
from one bodily disease congratulates himself that at least he knows
what he may expect in the way of pain, and will not suffer as some other
man he has heard of does suffer; whereas though one disease may kill
others, yet some diseases only prepare the body for the assault of worse
ailments than themselves, and the constitution at last breaks up under a
combination of ills that make the sufferer a pity to his friends and a
perplexity to his physicians. And so is it in the spirit; you cannot say
that because you are so consumed by one infirmity, others can find no
room in you. In short, there is nothing that can secure us against the
unspeakable calamity of falling into new sins, except the direction
given by our Lord, "Watch and pray, lest ye enter into temptation."
There _is need_ of watching, else this precept had never been uttered;
too many things absolutely needful for us to do have to be enjoined upon
us to leave any room for the injunction of precepts that are
unnecessary, and he who is not watching has no security that he shall
not sin so as to be a scandal to his friends and a shame to himself.
Noah's sin brought to light the character of his three sons--the coarse
irreverence of Ham, the dignified delicacy and honour of Shem and
Japheth. The bearing of men towards the sins of others is always a
touchstone of character. The full exposure of sin where good is expected
to come of the exposure and when it is done with sorrow and with shame
is one thing, and the exposure of sin to create a laugh and merely to
amuse is another. They are the true descendants of Ham, whether their
faces be black or white, and whether they go with no clothes or with
clothes that are the product of much thought and anxiety, who find
pleasure in the mere contemplation of deeds of shame, in real life, on
the boards of the theatre, in daily journals, or in works of fiction.
Extremes meet, and the savage grossness of Ham is found in many who
count themselves the last and finest product of culture. It is found
also in the harder and narrower set of modern investigators, who glory
in exposing the scientific weakness of our forefathers, and make a jest
of the mistakes of men to whom they owe much of their freedom, and whose
shoe latchet they are not worthy to tie, so far as the deeper moral
qualities go.
But neither is religious society free from this same sin. The faults and
mistakes and sins of others are talked over, possibly with some show of
regret, but with, as we know, very little real shame and sadness, for
these feelings prompt us, not to talk them over in companies where no
good can be done in the way of remedy, but to cover them as these
sorrowing sons of Noah, with averted eye and humbled head. Charity is
the prime grace enjoined upon us and charity _covers_ a multitude of
sins. And whatever excuses for exposing others we may make, however we
may say it is only a love of truth and fair play that makes us drag to
light the infirmities of a man whom others are praising, we may be very
sure that if all _evil_ motives were absent this kind of evil speaking
would cease among us. But there is a malignity in sin that leaves its
bitter root in us all, and causes us to be glad when those whom we have
been regarding as our superiors are reduced to our poor level. And there
is a cowardliness in sin which cannot bear to be alone, and eagerly
hails every symptom of others being in the same condemnation.
Before exposing another, think first whether your own conduct could bear
a similar treatment, whether you have never done the thing you desire to
conceal, said the thing you would blush to hear repeated, or thought the
thought you could not bear another to read. And if you be a Christian,
does it not become you to remember what you yourself have learnt of the
slipperiness of this world's ways, of your liability to fall, of your
sudden exposure to sin from some physical disorder, or some slight
mistake which greatly extenuates your sin, but which you could not plead
before another? And do you know nothing of the difficulty of conquering
one sin that is rooted in your constitution, and the strife that goes on
in a man's own soul and in secret though he show little immediate fruit
of it in his life before men? Surely it becomes us to give a man credit
for much good resolution and much sore self-denial and endeavour, even
when he fails and sins still, because such we know to be our own case,
and if we disbelieve in others until they can walk with perfect
rectitude, if we condemn them for one or two flaws and blemishes, we
shall be tempted to show the same want of charity towards ourselves, and
fall at length into that miserable and hopeless condition that believes
in no regenerating spirit nor in any holiness attainable by us.
VII.
_THE CALL OF ABRAHAM._
GENESIS xi. 27-xii. 5.
With Abraham there opens a new chapter in the history of the race; a
chapter of the profoundest significance. The consequences of Abraham's
movements and beliefs have been limitless and enduring. All succeeding
time has been influenced by him. And yet there is in his life a
remarkable simplicity, and an entire absence of such events as impress
contemporaries. Among all the forgotten millions of his own time he
stands alone a recognisable and memorable figure. But around his figure
there gathers no throng of armed followers; with his name, no vast
territorial dominion, no new legislation, not even any work of
literature or art is associated. The significance of his life was not
military, nor legislative, nor literary, but religious. To him must be
carried back the belief in one God. We find him born and brought up
among idolaters; and although it is certain there were others besides
himself who here and there upon earth had dimly arrived at the same
belief as he, yet it is certainly from him the Monotheistic belief has
been diffused. Since his day the world has never been without its
explicit advocacy. It is his belief in the true God, in a God who
manifested His existence and His nature by responding to this belief,
it is this belief and the place he gave it as the regulating principle
of all his movements and thoughts, that have given him his everlasting
influence.
With Abraham there is also introduced the first step in a new method
adopted by God in the training of men. The dispersion of men and the
divergence of their languages are now seen to have been the necessary
preliminary to this new step in the education of the world--the fencing
round of one people till they should learn to know God and understand
and exemplify His government. It is true, God reveals Himself to all men
and governs all; but by selecting one race with special adaptations, and
by giving to it a special training, God might more securely and more
rapidly reveal Himself to all. Each nation has certain characteristics,
a national character which grows by seclusion from the influences which
are forming other races. There is a certain mental and moral
individuality stamped upon every separate people. Nothing is more
certainly retained; nothing more certainly handed down from generation
to generation. It would therefore be a good practical means of
conserving and deepening the knowledge of God, if it were made the
national interest of a people to preserve it, and if it were closely
identified with the national characteristics. This was the method
adopted by God. He meant to combine allegiance to Himself with national
advantages, and spiritual with national character, and separation in
belief with a distinctly outlined and defensible territory.
This method, in common with all Divine methods, was in strict keeping
with the natural evolution of history. The migration of Abraham occurred
in the epoch of migrations. But although for centuries before Abraham
new nations had been forming, none of them had belief in God as its
formative principle. Wave upon wave of warriors, shepherds, colonists
have left the prolific plains of Mesopotamia. Swarm after swarm has left
that busy hive, pushing one another further and further west and east,
but all have been urged by natural impulses, by hunger, commerce, love
of adventure and conquest. By natural likings and dislikings, by policy,
and by dint of force the multitudinous tribes of men were finding their
places in the world, the weaker being driven to the hills, and being
schooled there by hard living till their descendants came down and
conquered their conquerors. All this went on without regard to any very
high motives. As it was with the Goths who invaded Italy for her wealth,
as it is now with those who people America and Africa because there is
land or room enough, so it was then. But at last God selects one man and
says, "_I_ will make of thee a great nation." The origin of this nation
is not facile love of change nor lust of territory, but belief in God.
Without this belief this people had not been. No other account can be
given of its origin. Abraham is himself already the member of a tribe,
well-off and likely to be well-off; he has no large family to provide
for, but he is separated from his kindred and country, and led out to be
himself a new beginning, and this because, as he himself throughout his
life said, he heard God's call and responded to it.
The city which claims the distinction of being Abraham's birthplace, or
at least of giving its name to the district where he was born, is now
represented by a few mounds of ruins rising out of the flat marshy
ground on the western bank of the Euphrates, not far above the point
where it joins its waters to those of the Tigris and glides on to the
Persian gulf. In the time of Abraham, Ur was the capital city which gave
its name to one of the most populous and fertile regions of the earth.
The whole land of Accad which ran up from the sea-coast to Upper
Mesopotamia (or Shinar) seems to have been known as Ur-ma, the land of
Ur. This land was of no great extent, being little if at all larger than
Scotland, but it was the richest of Asia. The high civilisation which
this land enjoyed even in the time of Abraham has been disclosed in the
abundant and multifarious Babylonian remains which have recently been
brought to light.
What induced Terah to abandon so prosperous a land can only be
conjectured. It is possible that the idolatrous customs of the
inhabitants may have had something to do with his movements. For while
the ancient Babylonian records reveal a civilisation surprisingly
advanced, and a social order in some respects admirable, they also make
disclosures regarding the worship of the gods which must shock even
those who are familiar with the immoralities frequently fostered by
heathen religions. The city of Ur was not only the capital, it was the
holy city of the Chaldeans. In its northern quarter rose high above the
surrounding buildings the successive stages of the temple of the
moon-god, culminating in a platform on which the priests could both
accurately observe the motions of the stars and hold their night-watches
in honour of their god. In the courts of this temple might be heard
breaking the silence of midnight, one of those magnificent hymns, still
preserved, in which idolatry is seen in its most attractive dress, and
in which the Lord of Ur is invoked in terms not unworthy of the living
God. But in these same temple-courts Abraham may have seen the
firstborn led to the altar, the fruit of the body sacrificed to atone
for the sin of the soul; and here too he must have seen other sights
even more shocking and repulsive. Here he was no doubt taught that
strangely mixed religion which clung for generations to some members of
his family. Certainly he was taught in common with the whole community
to rest on the seventh day; as he was trained to look to the stars with
reverence and to the moon as something more than the light which was set
to rule the night.
Possibly then Terah may have been induced to move northwards by a desire
to shake himself free from customs he disapproved. The Hebrews
themselves seem always to have considered that his migration had a
religious motive. "This people," says one of their old writings, "is
descended from the Chaldeans, and they sojourned heretofore in
Mesopotamia because they would not follow the gods of their fathers
which were in the land of Chaldea. For they left the way of their
ancestors and worshipped the God of heaven, the God whom they knew; so
they cast them out from the face of their gods, and they fled into
Mesopotamia and sojourned there many days. Then their God commanded them
to depart from the place where they sojourned and to go into the land of
Canaan." But if this is a true account of the origin of the movement
northwards, it must have been Abraham rather than his father who was the
moving spirit of it; for it is certainly Abraham and not Terah who
stands as the significant figure inaugurating the new era.
If doubt rests on the moving cause of the migration from Ur, none rests
on that which prompted Abraham to leave Charran and journey towards
Canaan. He did so in obedience to what he believed to be a Divine
command, and in faith on what he understood to be a Divine promise. How
he became aware that a Divine command thus lay upon him we do not know.
Nothing could persuade him that he was not commanded. Day by day he
heard in his soul what he recognised as a Divine voice, saying: "Get
thee out of thy country and from thy kindred and from thy father's
house, unto a land that I will show thee!" This was God's first
revelation of Himself to Abraham. Up to this time Abraham to all
appearance had no knowledge of any God but the deities worshipped by his
fathers in Chaldea. Now, he finds within himself impulses which he
cannot resist and which he is conscious he ought not to resist. He
believes it to be his duty to adopt a course which may look foolish and
which he can justify only by saying that his conscience bids him. He
recognises, apparently for the first time, that through his conscience
there speaks to him a God Who is supreme. In dependence on this God he
gathered his possessions together and departed.
So far, one may be tempted to say, no very unusual faith was required.
Many a poor girl has followed a weakly brother or a dissipated father to
Australia or the wild west of America; many a lad has gone to the deadly
west coast of Africa with no such prospects as Abraham. For Abraham had
the double prospect which makes migration desirable. Assure the colonist
that he will find land and have strong sons to till and hold and leave
it to, and you give him all the motive he requires. These were the
promises made to Abraham--a land and a seed. Neither was there at this
period much difficulty in believing that both promises would be
fulfilled. The land he no doubt expected to find in some unoccupied
territory. And as regards the children, he had not yet faced the
condition that only through Sarah was this part of the promise to be
fulfilled.
But the peculiarity in Abraham's abandonment of present certainties for
the sake of a future and unseen good is, that it was prompted not by
family affection or greed or an adventurous disposition, but by faith in
a God Whom no one but himself recognised. It was the first step in a
life-long adherence to an Invisible, Spiritual Supreme. It was that
first step which committed him to life-long dependence upon and
intercourse with One Who had authority to regulate his movements and
power to bless him. From this time forth all that he sought in life was
the fulfilment of God's promise. He staked his future upon God's
existence and faithfulness. Had Abraham abandoned Charran at the command
of a widely ruling monarch who promised him ample compensation, no
record would have been made of so ordinary a transaction. But this was
an entirely new thing and well worth recording, that a man should leave
country and kindred and seek an unknown land under the impression that
thus he was obeying the command of the unseen God. While others
worshipped sun, moon, and stars, and recognised the Divine in their
brilliance and power, in their exaltation above earth and control of
earth and its life, Abraham saw that there was something greater than
the order of nature and more worthy of worship, even the still small
voice that spoke within his own conscience of right and wrong in human
conduct, and that told him how his own life must be ordered. While all
around him were bowing down to the heavenly host and sacrificing to them
the highest things in human nature, he heard a voice falling from these
shining ministers of God's will, which said to him, "See thou do it not,
for we are thy fellow-servants; worship thou God!" This was the triumph
of the spiritual over the material; the acknowledgment that in God there
is something greater than can be found in nature; that man finds his
true affinity not in the things that are seen but in the unseen Spirit
that is over all. It is this that gives to the figure of Abraham its
simple grandeur and its permanent significance.
Under the simple statement "The Lord said unto Abram, Get thee out of
thy country," there are probably hidden years of questioning and
meditation. God's revelation of Himself to Abram in all probability did
not take the determinate form of articulate command without having
passed through many preliminary stages of surmise and doubt and mental
conflict. But once assured that God is calling him, Abraham responds
quickly and resolutely. The revelation has come to a mind in which it
will not be lost. As one of the few theologians who have paid attention
to the method of revelation has said: "A Divine revelation does not
dispense with a certain character and certain qualities of mind in the
person who is the instrument of it. A man who throws off the chains of
authority and association must be a man of extraordinary independence
and strength of mind, although he does so in obedience to a Divine
revelation; because no miracle, no sign or wonder which accompanies a
revelation can by its simple stroke force human nature from the innate
hold of custom and the adhesion to and fear of established opinion; can
enable it to confront the frowns of men, and take up truth opposed to
general prejudice, except there is in the man himself, who is the
recipient of the revelation, a certain strength of mind and
independence which concurs with the Divine intention."
That Abraham's faith triumphed over exceptional difficulties and enabled
him to do what no other motive would have been strong enough to
accomplish, there is therefore no call to assert. During his after-life
his faith was severely tried, but the mere abandonment of his country in
the hope of gaining a better was the ordinary motive of his day. It was
the _ground_ of this hope, the belief in God, which made Abraham's
conduct original and fruitful. That sufficient inducement was presented
to him is only to say that God is reasonable. There is always sufficient
inducement to obey God; because life is reasonable. No man was ever
commanded or required to do anything which it was not for his advantage
to do. Sin is a mistake. But so weak are we, so liable to be moved by
the things present to us and by the desire for immediate gratification,
that it never ceases to be wonderful and admirable when a sense of duty
enables a man to forego present advantage and to believe that present
loss is the needful preliminary of eternal gain.
Abraham's faith is chosen by the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews as
an apt illustration of his definition of Faith, that it is "the
substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." One
property of faith is that it gives to things future and which are as yet
only hoped for all the reality of actual present existence. Future
things may be said to have no existence for those who do not believe in
them. They are not taken into account. Men do not shape their conduct
with any reference to them. But when a man believes in certain events
that are to be, this faith of his lends to these future things the
reality, the "substance" which things actually existing in the present
have. They have the same weight with him, the same influence upon his
conduct.
Without some power to realize the future and to take account of what is
to be as well as of what already is, we could not carry on the common
affairs of life. And success in life very greatly depends on foresight,
or the power to see clearly what is to be and give it due weight. The
man who has no foresight makes his plans, but being unable to apprehend
the future his plans are disconcerted. Indeed it is one of the most
valuable gifts a man can have, to be able to say with tolerable accuracy
what is to happen and what is not; to be able to sift rumours, common
talk, popular impressions, probabilities, chances, and to be able to
feel sure what the future will really be; to be able to weigh the
character and commercial prospects of the men he deals with, so as to
see what must be the issue of their operations and whom he may trust.
Many of our most serious mistakes in life arise from our inability to
imagine the consequences of our actions and to forefeel how these
consequences will affect us.
Now faith largely supplies the want of this imaginative foresight. It
lends substance to things future. It believes the account given of the
future by a trustworthy authority. In many ordinary matters all men are
dependent on the testimony of others for their knowledge of the result
of certain operations. The astronomer, the physiologist, the navigator,
each has his department within which his predictions are accepted as
authoritative. But for what is beyond the ken of science no faith in our
fellow-men avails. Feeling that if there is a life beyond the grave, it
must have important bearings on the present, we have yet no data by
which to calculate what will then be, or only data so difficult to use
that our calculations are but guesswork. But faith accepts the testimony
of God as unhesitatingly as that of man and gives reality to the future
He describes and promises. It believes that the life God calls us to is
a better life, and it enters upon it. It believes that there is a world
to come in which all things are new and all things eternal; and, so
believing, it cannot but feel less anxious to cling to this world's
goods. That which embitters all loss and deepens sorrow is the feeling
that this world is all; but faith makes eternity as real as time and
gives substantial existence to that new and limitless future in which we
shall have time to forget the sorrows and live past the losses of this
present world.
The radical elements of greatness are identical from age to age, and the
primal duties which no good man can evade do not vary as the world grows
older. What we admire in Abraham we feel to be incumbent on ourselves.
Indeed the uniform call of Christ to all His followers is even in form
almost identical with that which stirred Abraham, and made him the
father of the faithful. "Follow Me," says our Lord, "and every one that
forsaketh houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or
wife, or children, or lands, for My name's sake, shall receive an
hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life." And there is something
perennially edifying in the spectacle of a man who believes that God has
a place and a use for him in the world, and who puts himself at God's
disposal; who enters upon life refusing to be bound by the circumstances
of his upbringing, by the expectations of his friends, by prevailing
customs, by prospect of gain and advancement among men; and resolved to
listen to the highest voice of all, to discover what God has for him to
do upon earth and where he is likely to find most of God; who virtually
and with deepest sincerity says, Let God choose my destination: I have
good land here, but if God wishes me elsewhere, elsewhere I go: who, in
one word, believes in the call of God to himself, who admits it into the
springs of his conduct, and recognises that for him also the highest
life his conscience can suggest is the only life he can live, no matter
how cumbrous and troublesome and expensive be the changes involved in
entering it. Let the spectacle take hold of your imagination--the
spectacle of a man believing that there is something more akin to
himself and higher than the material life and the great laws that govern
it, and going calmly and hopefully forward into the unknown, because he
knows that God is with him, that in God is our true life, that man
liveth not by bread only, but by every word that cometh out of the mouth
of God.
Even thus then may we bring our faith to a true and reliable test. All
men who have a confident expectation of future good make sacrifices or
run risks to obtain it. Mercantile life proceeds on the understanding
that such ventures are reasonable and will always be made. Men might if
they liked spend their money on present pleasure, but they rarely do so.
They prefer to put it into concerns or transactions from which they
expect to reap large returns. They have faith and as a necessary
consequence they make ventures. So did these Hebrews--they ran a great
risk, they gave up the sole means of livelihood they had any experience
of and entered what they knew to be a bare desert, because they believed
in the land that lay beyond and in God's promise. What then has your
faith done? What have you ventured that you would not have ventured but
for God's promise? Suppose Christ's promise failed, in what would you be
the losers? Of course you would lose what you call your hope of
heaven--but what would you find you had lost in this world? When a
merchant's ships are wrecked or when his investment turns out bad, he
loses not only the gain he hoped for, but the means he risked. Suppose
then Christ were declared bankrupt, unable to fulfil your expectations,
would you really find that you had ventured so much upon His promise
that you are deeply involved in His bankruptcy, and are much worse off
in this world and now than you would otherwise have been? Or may I not
use the words of one of the most cautious and charitable of men, and
say, "I really fear, when we come to examine, it will be found that
there is nothing we resolve, nothing we do, nothing we do not do,
nothing we avoid, nothing we choose, nothing we give up, nothing we
pursue, which we should not resolve, and do, and not do, and avoid, and
choose, and give up, and pursue, if Christ had not died and heaven were
not promised us." If this be the case--if you would be neither much
better nor much worse though Christianity were a fable--if you have in
nothing become poorer in this world that your reward in heaven may be
greater, if you have made no investments and run no risks, then really
the natural inference is that your faith in the future inheritance is
small. Barnabas sold his Cyprus property because he believed heaven was
his, and his bit of land suddenly became a small consideration; useful
only in so far as he could with the mammon of unrighteousness make
himself a mansion in heaven. Paul gave up his prospects of advancement
in the nation, of which he would of course as certainly have become the
leader and first man as he took that position in the Church, and plainly
tells us that having made so large a venture on Christ's word, he would
if this word failed be a great loser, of all men most miserable because
he had risked his all _in this life_ on it. People sometimes take
offence at Paul's plain way of speaking of the sacrifices he had made,
and of Peter's plain way of saying "we have left all and followed Thee,
what shall we have therefore?" but when people have made sacrifices they
know it and can specify them, and a faith that makes no sacrifices is no
good either in this world's affairs or in religion. Self-consciousness
may not be a very good thing: but self-deception is a worse.
Here as elsewhere a clear hope sprang from faith. Recognising God,
Abraham knew that there was for men a great future. He looked forward to
a time when all men should believe as he did, and in him all families of
the earth be blessed. No doubt in these early days when all men were on
the move and striving to make a name and a place for themselves, an
onward look might be common. But the far-reaching extent, the certainty,
and the definiteness of Abraham's view of the future were unexampled.
There far back in the hazy dawn he stood while the morning mists hid the
horizon from every other eye, and he alone discerns what is to be. One
clear voice and one only rings out in unfaltering tones and from amidst
the babel of voices that utter either amazing follies or misdirected
yearnings, gives the one true forecast and direction--the one living
word which has separated itself from and survived all the
prognostications of Chaldean sooth-sayers and priests of Ur, because it
has never ceased to give life to men. It has created for itself a
channel and you can trace it through the centuries by the living green
of its banks and the life it gives as it goes. For this hope of Abraham
has been fulfilled; the creed and its accompanying blessing which that
day lived in the heart of one man only has brought blessing to all the
families of the earth.
VIII.
_ABRAM IN EGYPT._
GENESIS xii. 6-20.
Abram still journeying southward and not as yet knowing where his
shifting camp was finally to be pitched, came at last to what may be
called the heart of Palestine, the rich district of Shechem. Here stood
the oak of Moreh, a well-known landmark and favourite meeting-place. In
after years every meadow in this plain was owned and occupied, every
vineyard on the slopes of Ebal fenced off, every square yard specified
in some title-deed. But as yet the country seems not to have been
densely populated. There was room for a caravan like Abram's to move
freely through the country, liberty for a far-stretching encampment such
as his to occupy the lovely vale that lies between Ebal and Gerizim. As
he rested here and enjoyed the abundant pasture, or as he viewed the
land from one of the neighbouring hills, the Lord appeared to him and
made him aware that this was the land designed for him. Here accordingly
under the spreading oak round whose boughs had often clung the smoke of
idolatrous sacrifice, Abram erects an altar to the living God in devout
acceptance of the gift, taking possession as it were of the land jointly
for God and for himself. Little harm will come of worldly possessions so
taken and so held.
As Abram traversed the land, wondering what were the limits of his
inheritance, it may have seemed far too large for his household. Soon he
experiences a difficulty of quite the opposite kind; he is unable to
find in it sustenance for his followers. Any notion that God's
friendship would raise him above the touch of such troubles as were
incident to the times, places, and circumstances in which his life was
to be spent, is quickly dispelled. The children of God are not exempt
from any of the common calamities; they are only expected and aided to
be calmer and wiser in their endurance and use of them. That we suffer
the same hardships as all other men is no proof that we are not
eternally associated with God, and ought never to persuade us our faith
has been in vain.
Abram, as he looked at the bare, brown, cracked pastures and at the dry
watercourses filled only with stones, thought of the ever-fresh plains
of Mesopotamia, the lovely gardens of Damascus, the rich pasturage of
the northern borders of Canaan; but he knew enough of his own heart to
make him very careful lest these remembrances should make him turn back.
No doubt he had come to the promised land expecting it to be the real
Utopia, the Paradise which had haunted his thoughts as he lay among the
hills of Ur watching his flocks under the brilliant midnight sky. No
doubt he expected that here all would be easy and bright, peaceful and
luxurious. His first experience is of famine. He has to look on his herd
melting away, his favourite cattle losing their appearance, his servants
murmuring and obliged to scatter. In his dreams he must have night after
night seen the old country, the green breadth of the land that Euphrates
watered, the heavy headed corn bending before the warm airs of his
native land; but morning by morning he wakes to the same anxieties, to
the sad reality of parched and burnt-up pastures, shepherds hanging
about with gloomy looks, his own heart distressed and failing. He was
also a stranger here who could not look for the help an old resident
might have counted on. It was probably years since God had made any sign
to him. Was the promised land worth having after all? Might he not be
better off among his old friends in Charran? Should he not brave their
ridicule and return? He will not so much as make it possible to return.
He will not even for temporary relief go north towards his old country,
but will go to Egypt, where he cannot stay, and from which he must
return to Canaan.
Here, then, is a man who plainly believes that God's promise cannot
fail; that God will magnify His promise, and that it above all else is
worth waiting for. He believes that the man who seeks without flinching
and through all disappointment and bareness to do God's will, shall one
day have an abundantly satisfying reward, and that meanwhile association
with God in carrying forward His abiding purposes with men is more for a
man to live upon than the cattle upon a thousand hills. And thus famine
rendered to Abram no small service if it quickened within him the
consciousness that the call of God was not to ease and prosperity, to
land-owning and cattle-breeding, but to be God's agent on earth for the
fulfilment of remote but magnificent purposes. His life might seem to be
down among the commonplace vicissitudes, pasture might fail, and his
well-stocked camp melt away, but out of his mind there could not fade
the future God had revealed to him. If it had been his ambition to give
his name to a tribe and be known as a wide-ruling chief, that ambition
is now eclipsed by his desire to be a step towards the fulfilment of
that real end for which the whole world is. The belief that God has
called him to do His work has lifted him above concern about personal
matters; life has taken a new meaning in his eyes by its connection with
the Eternal.
The extraordinary country to which Abram betook himself, and which was
destined to exercise so profound an influence on his descendants, had
even at this early date attained a high degree of civilisation. The
origin of this civilisation is shrouded in obscurity, as the source of
the great river to which the country owes its prosperity for many
centuries kept the secret of its birth. As yet scholars are unable to
tell us with certainty what Pharaoh was on the throne when Abram went
down into Egypt. The monuments have preserved the effigies of two
distinct types of rulers; the one simple, kindly, sensible, stately,
handsome, fearless, as of men long accustomed to the throne. These are
the faces of the native Egyptian rulers. The other type of face is heavy
and massive, proud and strong but full of care, with neither the
handsome features nor the look of kindliness and culture which belong to
the other. These are the faces of the famous Shepherd kings who held
Egypt in subjection, probably at the very time when Abram was in the
land.
For our purposes it matters little whether Abram's visit occurred while
the country was under native or under foreign rule, for long before the
Shepherd kings entered Egypt it enjoyed a complete and stable
civilisation. Whatever dynasty Abram found on the throne, he certainly
found among the people a more refined social life than he had seen in
his native city, a much purer religion, and a much more highly developed
moral code. He must have kept himself entirely aloof from Egyptian
society if he failed to discover that they believed in a judgment after
death, and that this judgment proceeded upon a severe moral code. Before
admission into the Egyptian heaven the deceased must swear that "he has
not stolen nor slain any one intentionally; that he has not allowed his
devotions to be seen; that he has not been guilty of hypocrisy or lying;
that he has not calumniated any one nor fallen into drunkenness or
adultery; that he has not turned away his ear from the words of truth;
that he has been no idle talker; that he has not slighted the king or
his father." To a man in Abram's state of mind the Egyptian creed and
customs must have conveyed many valuable suggestions.
But virtuous as in many respects the Egyptians were, Abram's fears as he
approached their country were by no means groundless. The event proved
that whatever Sarah's age and appearance at this time were, his fears
were something more than the fruit of a husband's partiality. Possibly
he may have heard the ugly story which has recently been deciphered from
an old papyrus, and which tells how one of the Pharaohs, acting on the
advice of his princes, sent armed men to fetch a beautiful woman and
make away with her husband. But knowing the risk he ran, why did he go?
He contemplated the possibility of Sarah's being taken from him; but, if
this should happen, what became of the promised seed? We cannot suppose
that, driven by famine from the promised land, he had lost all hope
regarding the fulfilment of the other part of the promise. Probably his
idea was that some of the great men might take a fancy to Sarah, and
that he would so temporise with them and ask for her such large gifts as
would hold them off for a while until he could provide for his people
and get clear out of the land. It had not occurred to him that she might
be taken to the palace. Whatever his idea of the probable course of
events was, his proposal to guide them by disguising his true
relationship to Sarah was unjustifiable. And his feelings during these
weeks in Egypt must have been far from enviable as he learned that of
all virtues the Egyptians set greatest store by truth, and that lying
was the vice they held in greatest abhorrence.
Here then was the whole promise and purpose of God in a most precarious
position; the land abandoned, the mother of the promised seed in a harem
through whose guards no force on earth could penetrate. Abram could do
nothing but go helplessly about, thinking what a fool he had been, and
wishing himself well back among the parched hills of Bethel. Suddenly
there is a panic in the royal household; and Pharaoh is made aware that
he was on the brink of what he himself considered a great sin. Besides
effecting its immediate purpose, this visitation might have taught
Pharaoh that a man cannot safely sin within limits prescribed by
himself. He had not intended such evil as he found himself just saved
from committing. But had he lived with perfect purity, this liability to
fall into transgression, shocking to himself, could not have existed.
Many sins of most painful consequence we commit, not of deliberate
purpose, but because our previous life has been careless and lacking in
moral tone. We are mistaken if we suppose that we can sin within a
certain safe circle and never go beyond it.
By this intervention on God's part Abram was saved from the consequences
of his own scheme, but he was not saved from the indignant rebuke of the
Egyptian monarch. This rebuke indeed did not prevent him from a
repetition of the same conduct in another country, conduct which was met
with similar indignation: "What have I offended thee, that thou hast
brought on me and on my kingdom this great sin? Thou hast done deeds
unto me that ought not to be done. What sawest thou that thou hast done
this thing?" This rebuke did not seem to sink deeply into the conscience
of Abram's descendants, for the Jewish history is full of instances in
which leading men do not shrink from man[oe]uvre, deceit and lying. Yet
it is impossible to suppose that Abram's conception of God was not
vastly enlarged by this incident, and this especially in two
particulars.
(1) Abram must have received a new impression regarding God's truth. It
would seem that as yet he had no very clear idea of God's holiness. He
had the idea of God which Mohammedans entertain, and past which they
seem unable to get. He conceived of God as the Supreme Ruler; he had a
firm belief in the unity of God and probably a hatred of idolatry and a
profound contempt for idolaters. He believed that this Supreme God could
always and easily accomplish His will, and that the voice that inwardly
guided him was the voice of God. His own character had not yet been
deepened and dignified by prolonged intercourse with God and by close
observation of His actual ways; and so as yet he knows little of what
constitutes the true glory of God.
For learning that truth is an essential attribute of God he could not
have gone to a better school than Egypt. His own reliance on God's
promise might have been expected to produce in him a high esteem for
truth and a clear recognition of its essential place in the Divine
character. Apparently it had only partially had this effect. The
heathen, therefore, must teach him. Had not Abram seen the look of
indignation and injury on the face of Pharaoh, he might have left the
land feeling that his scheme had succeeded admirably. But as he went at
the head of his vastly increased household, the envy of many who saw his
long train of camels and cattle, he would have given up all could he
have blotted from his mind's eye the reproachful face of Pharaoh and
nipped out this entire episode from his life. He was humbled both by his
falseness and his foolishness. He had told a lie, and told it when truth
would have served him better. For the very precaution he took in passing
off Sarai as his sister was precisely what encouraged Pharaoh to take
her, and produced the whole misadventure. It was the heathen monarch who
taught the father of the faithful his first lesson in God's holiness.
What he so painfully learned we must all learn, that God does not need
lying for the attainment of His ends, and that double-dealing is always
short-sighted and the proper precursor of shame. Frequently men are
tempted like Abram to seek a God-protected and God-prospered life by
conduct that is not thoroughly straightforward. Some of us who statedly
ask God to bless our endeavours, and who have no doubt that God approves
the ends we seek to accomplish, do yet adopt such means of attaining our
ends as not even men with any high sense of honour would countenance. To
save ourselves from trouble, inconvenience, or danger, we are tempted to
evasions and shifts which are not free from guilt. The more one sees of
life, the higher value does he set on truth. Let lying be called by
whatever flattering title men please--let it pass for diplomacy,
smartness, self-defence, policy, or civility--it remains the device of
the coward, the absolute bar to free and healthy intercourse, a vice
which diffuses itself through the whole character and makes growth
impossible. Trade and commerce are always hampered and retarded, and
often overwhelmed in disaster, by the determined and deliberate
doubleness of those who engage in them; charity is minimised and
withheld from its proper objects by the suspiciousness engendered in us
by the almost universal falseness of men; and the habit of making things
seem to others what they are not, reacts upon the man himself and makes
it difficult for him to feel the abiding effective reality of anything
he has to do with or even of his own soul. If then we are to know the
living and true God we must ourselves be true, transparent, and living
in the light as He is the Light. If we are to reach His ends we must
adopt His means and abjure all crafty contrivances of our own. If we are
to be His heirs and partners in the work of the world, we must first be
His children, and show that we have attained our majority by manifesting
an indubitable resemblance to His own clear truth.
(2) But whether Abram fully learned this lesson or not, there can be
little doubt that at this time he did receive fresh and abiding
impressions of God's faithfulness and sufficiency. In Abram's first
response to God's call he exhibited a remarkable independence and
strength of character. His abandonment of home and kindred on account of
a religious faith which he alone possessed, was the act of a man who
relied much more on himself than on others and who had the courage of
his convictions. This qualification for playing a great part in human
affairs he undoubtedly had. But he had also the defects of his
qualities. A weaker man would have shrunk from going into Egypt and
would have preferred to see his flocks dwindle rather than take so
venturesome a step. No such hesitations could trammel Abram's
movements. He felt himself equal to all occasions. That part of his
character which was reproduced in his grandson Jacob, a readiness to
rise to every emergency that called for management and diplomacy, an
aptitude for dealing with men and using them for his purposes--this came
to the front now! To all the timorous suggestions of his household he
had one reply: Leave it all to me; I will bring you through. So he
entered Egypt confident that single-handed he could cope with their
Pharaohs, priests, magicians, guards, judges, warriors; and find his way
through the finely-meshed net that held and examined every person and
action in the land.
He left Egypt in a much more healthy state of mind, practically
convinced of his own inability to work his way to the happiness God had
promised him, and equally convinced of God's faithfulness and power to
bring him through all the embarrassments and disasters into which his
own folly and sin might bring him. His own confidence and management had
placed God's promise in a position of extreme hazard; and without the
intervention of God Abram saw that he could neither recover the mother
of the promised seed nor return to the land of promise. Abram is put to
shame even in the eyes of his household slaves; and with what burning
shame must he have stood before Sarai and Pharaoh, and received back his
wife from him whose wickedness he had feared, but who so far from
meaning to sin as Abram suspected, was indignant that Abram should have
made it even possible. He returned to Canaan humbled and very little
disposed to feel confident in his own powers of managing in emergencies;
but quite assured that God might at all times be relied on. He was
convinced that God was not depending upon him, but he upon God. He saw
that God did not trust to his cleverness and craft, no, nor even to his
willingness to do and endure God's will, but that He was trusting in
Himself, and that by His faithfulness to His own promise, by His
watchfulness and providence, He would bring Abram through all the
entanglements caused by his own poor ideas of the best way to work out
God's ends and attain to His blessing. He saw, in a word, that the
future of the world lay not with Abram but with God.
This certainly was a great and needful step in the knowledge of God.
Thus early and thus unmistakably was man taught in how profound and
comprehensive a sense God is his Saviour. Commonly it takes a man a long
time to learn that it is God who is saving him, but one day he learns
it. He learns that it is not his own faith but God's faithfulness that
saves him. He perceives that he needs God throughout, from first to
last; not only to make him offers, but to enable him to accept them; not
only to incline him to accept them to-day, but to maintain within him at
all times this same inclination. He learns that God not only makes him a
promise and leaves him to find his own way to what is promised; but that
He is with him always, disentangling him day by day from the results of
his own folly and securing for him not only possible but actual
blessedness.
Few discoveries are so welcome and gladdening to the soul. Few give us
the same sense of God's nearness and sovereignty; few make us feel so
deeply the dignity and importance of our own salvation and career. This
is God's affair; a matter in which are involved not merely our personal
interests, but God's responsibility and purposes. God calls us to be
His, and He does not send us a-warring on our own charges, but
throughout furnishes us with _everything_ we need. When we go down to
Egypt, when we quite diverge from the path that leads to the promised
land and worldly straits tempt us to turn our back upon God's altar and
seek relief by our own arrangements and devices, when we forget for a
while how God has identified our interests with His own and tacitly
abjure the vows we have silently registered before Him, even then He
follows us and watches over us and lays His hand upon us and bids us
back. And this only is our hope. Not in any determination of our own to
cleave to Him and to live in faith on His promise can we trust. If we
have this determination, let us cherish it, for this is God's present
means of leading us onwards. But should this determination fail, the
shame with which you recognise your want of steadfastness may prove a
stronger bond to hold you to Him than the bold confidence with which
to-day you view the future. The waywardness, the foolishness, the
obstinate depravity that cause you to despair, God will conquer. With
untiring patience, with all-foreseeing love, He stands by you and will
bring you through. His gifts and calling are without repentance.
IX.
_LOT'S SEPARATION FROM ABRAM._
GENESIS xiii.
Abram left Egypt thinking meanly of himself, highly of God. This humble
frame of mind is disclosed in the route he chooses; he went straight
back "unto the place where his tent had been at the beginning, unto the
altar which he had made there at the first." With a childlike simplicity
he seems to own that his visit to Egypt had been a mistake. He had gone
there supposing that he was thrown upon his own resources, and that in
order to keep himself and his dependants alive he must have recourse to
craft and dishonesty. By retracing his steps and returning to the altar
at Bethel, he seems to acknowledge that he should have remained there
through the famine in dependence on God.
Whoever has attempted a similar practical repentance, visible to his own
household and affecting their place of abode or daily occupations, will
know how to estimate the candour and courage of Abram. To own that some
distinctly marked portion of our life, upon which we entered with great
confidence in our own wisdom and capacity, has come to nothing and has
betrayed us into reprehensible conduct, is mortifying indeed. To admit
that we have erred and to repair our error by returning to our old way
and practice, is what few of us have the courage to do. If we have
entered on some branch of business or gone into some attractive
speculation, or if we have altered our demeanour towards some friend,
and if we are finding that we are thereby tempted to doubleness, to
equivocation, to injustice, our only hope lies in a candid and
straightforward repentance, in a manly and open return to the state of
things that existed in happier days and which we should never have
abandoned. Sometimes we are aware that a blight began to fall on our
spiritual life from a particular date, and we can easily and distinctly
trace an unhealthy habit of spirit to a well-marked passage in our
outward career; but we shrink from the sacrifice and shame involved in a
thoroughgoing restoration of the old state of things. We are always so
ready to fancy we have done enough, if we get one heartfelt word of
confession uttered; so ready, if we merely turn our faces towards God,
to think our restoration complete. Let us make a point of getting
through mere beginnings of repentance, mere intention to recover God's
favour and a sound condition of life, and let us return and return till
we bow at God's very altar again, and know that His hand is laid upon us
in blessing as at the first.
Out of Egypt Abram brought vastly increased wealth. Each time he
encamped, quite a town of black tents quickly rose round the spot where
his fixed spear gave the signal for halting. And along with him there
journeyed his nephew, apparently of almost equal, or at least
considerable wealth; not dependent on Abram, nor even a partner with
him, for "Lot also had flocks and herds and tents." So rapidly was their
substance increasing that no sooner did they become stationary than
they found that the land was not able to furnish them with sufficient
pasture. The Canaanite and the Perizzite would not allow them unlimited
pasture in the neighbourhood of Bethel; and as the inevitable result of
this the rival shepherds, eager to secure the best pasture for their own
flocks and the best wells for their own cattle and camels, came to high
words and probably to blows about their respective rights.
To both Abram and Lot it must have occurred that this competition
between relatives was unseemly, and that some arrangement must be come
to. And when at last some unusually blunt quarrel took place in presence
of the chiefs, Abram divulges to Lot the scheme which had suggested
itself to him. This state of things, he says, must come to an end; it is
unseemly, unwise, and unrighteous. And as they walk on out of the circle
of tents to discuss the matter without interruption, they come to a
rising ground where the wide prospect brings them naturally to a pause.
Abram looking north and south and seeing with the trained eye of a large
flock-master that there was abundant pasture for both, turns to Lot with
a final proposal: "Is not the whole land before thee? Separate thyself,
I pray thee, from me: if thou wilt take the left hand, then I will go to
the right; or if thou depart to the right hand, then I will go to the
left."
Thus early did wealth produce quarrelling among relatives. The men who
had shared one another's fortunes while comparatively poor, no sooner
become wealthy than they have to separate. Abram prevented quarrel by
separation. "Let us," he says, "come to an understanding. And rather
than be separate in heart, let us be separate in habitation." It is
always a sorrowful time in family history when it comes to this, that
those who have had a common purse and have not been careful to know what
exactly is theirs and what belongs to the other members of the family,
have at last to make a division and to be as precise and documentary as
if dealing with strangers. It is always painful to be compelled to own
that law can be more trusted than love, and that legal forms are a surer
barrier against quarrelling than brotherly kindness. It is a confession
we are sometimes compelled to make, but never without a mixture of
regret and shame.
As yet the character of Lot has not been exhibited, and we can only
calculate from the relation he bears to Abram what his answer to the
proposal will probably be. We know that Abram has been the making of his
nephew, and that the land belongs to Abram; and we should expect that in
common decency Lot would set aside the generous offer of his uncle and
demand that he only should determine the matter. "It is not for me to
make choice in a land which is wholly yours. My future does not carry in
it the import of yours. It is a small matter what kind of subsistence I
secure or where I find it. Choose for yourself, and allot to me what is
right." We see here what a safeguard of happiness in life right feeling
is. To be in right and pleasant relations with the persons around us
will save us from error and sin even when conscience and judgment give
no certain decision. The heart which feels gratitude is beyond the need
of being schooled and compelled to do justly. To the man who is
affectionately disposed it is superfluous to insist upon the rights of
other persons. The instinct which tells a man what is due to others and
makes him sensitive to their wrongs will preserve him from many an
ignominious action which would degrade his whole life. But such
instinct was awanting in Lot. His character though in some respects
admirable had none of the generosity of Abram's in it. He had allowed
himself on countless previous occasions to take advantage of Abram's
unselfishness. Generosity is not always infectious; often it encourages
selfishness in child, relative, or neighbour. And so Lot instead of
rivalling, traded on his uncle's magnanimity; and chose him all the
plains of Jordan because in his eye it was the richest part of the land.
This choice of Sodom as a dwelling-place was the great mistake of Lot's
life. He is the type of that very large class of men who have but one
rule for determining them at the turning points of life. He was swayed
solely by the consideration of worldly advantage. He has nothing deep,
nothing high in him. He recognises no duty to Abram, no gratitude, no
modesty; he has no perception of spiritual relations, no sense that God
should have something to say in the partition of the land. Lot may be
acquitted of a good deal which at first sight one is prompted to lay to
his charge, but he cannot be acquitted of showing an eagerness to better
himself, regardless of all considerations but the promise of wealth
afforded by the fertility of the Jordan valley. He saw a quick though
dangerous road to wealth. There seemed a certainty of success in his
earthly calling, a risk only of moral disaster. He shut his eyes to the
risk that he might grasp the wealth; and so doing, ruined both himself
and his family.
The situation is one which is ceaselessly repeated. To men in business
or in the cultivation of literature or art, or in one of the
professions, there are presented opportunities of attaining a better
position by cultivating the friendship or identifying oneself with the
practice of men whose society is not in itself desirable. Society is
made up of little circles, each of which has its own monopoly of some
social or commercial or political advantage, and its own characteristic
tone and enjoyments and customs. And if a man will not join one of these
circles and accommodate himself to the mode of carrying on business and
to the style of living it has identified with itself, he must forego the
advantages which entrance to that circle would secure for him. As
clearly as Lot saw that the well-watered plain stretching away under the
sunshine was the right place to exercise his vocation as a flock-master,
so do we see that associated with such and such persons and recognised
as one of them, we shall be able more effectively than in any other
position to use whatever natural gifts we have, and win the recognition
and the profit these gifts seem to warrant. There is but one drawback.
"The men of Sodom were wicked and sinners before the Lord exceedingly."
There is a tone you do not like; you hesitate to identify yourself with
men who live solely and with cynical frankness only for gain; whose
every sentence betrays the contemptible narrowness of soul to which
worldliness condemns men; who live for money and who glory in their
shame.
The very nature of the world in which we live makes such temptation
universal. And to yield is common and fatal. We persuade ourselves we
need not enter into close relations with the persons we propose to have
business connections with. Lot would have been horrified, that day he
made his choice, had it been told him his daughters would marry men of
Sodom. But the swimmer who ventures into the outer circle of the
whirlpool finds that his own resolve not to go further presents a very
weak resistance to the water's inevitable suction. We fancy perhaps
that to refuse the companionship of any class of men is pharisaic; that
we have no business to condemn the attitude towards the Church, or the
morality, or the style of living adopted by any class of men among us.
This is the mere cant of liberalism. We do not condemn persons who
suffer from smallpox, but a smallpox hospital would be about the last
place we should choose for a residence. Or possibly we imagine we shall
be able to carry some better influences into the society we enter. A
vain imagination; the motive for choosing the society has already sapped
our power for good.
Many of the errors of worldly men only reveal their most disastrous
consequences in the second generation. Like some virulent diseases they
have a period of incubation. Lot's family grew up in a very different
atmosphere from that which had nourished his own youth in Abram's tents.
An adult and robust Englishman can withstand the climate of India; but
his children who are born in it cannot. And the position in society
which has been gained in middle life by the carefully and hardily
trained child of a God-fearing household, may not very visibly damage
his own character, but may yet be absolutely fatal to the morality of
his children. Lot may have persuaded himself he chose the dangerous
prosperity of Sodom mainly for the sake of his children; but in point of
fact he had better have seen them die of starvation in the most barren
and parched desolation. And the parent who disregards conscience and
chooses wealth or position, fancying that thus he benefits his children,
will find to his life-long sorrow that he has entangled them in
unimagined temptations.
But the man who makes Lot's choice not only does a great injury to his
children, but cuts himself off from all that is best in life. We are
safe to say that after leaving Abram's tents Lot never again enjoyed
unconstrainedly happy days. The men born and brought up in Sodom were
possibly happy after their kind and in their fashion; but Lot was not.
His soul was daily vexed. Many a time while hearing the talk of the men
his daughters had married, must Lot have gone out with a sore heart, and
looked to the distant hills that hid the tents of Abram, and longed for
an hour of the company he used to enjoy. And the society to which you
are tempted to join yourself may not be unhappy, but you can take no
surer means of beclouding, embittering, and ruining your whole life than
by joining it. You cannot forget the thoughts you once had, the
friendships you once delighted in, the hopes that shed brightness
through all your life. You cannot blot out the ideal that once you
cherished as the most animating element of your life. Every day there
will be that rising in your mind which is in the sharpest contrast to
the thoughts of those with whom you are associated. You will despise
them for their shallow, worldly ideas and ways; but you will despise
yourself still more, being conscious that what they are through
ignorance and upbringing, you are in virtue of your own foolish and mean
choice. There is that in you which rebels against the superficial and
external measure by which they judge things, and yet you have
deliberately chosen these as your associates, and can only think with
heart-broken regret of the high thoughts that once visited you and the
hopes you have now no means of fulfilling. Your life is taken out of
your own hands; you find yourself in bondage to the circumstances you
have chosen; and you are learning in bitterness, disappointment, and
shame, that indeed "a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the
things which he possesseth." To determine your life solely by the
prospect of worldly success is to risk the loss of the best things in
life. To sacrifice friendship or conscience to success in your calling
is to sacrifice what is best to what is lowest, and to blind yourself to
the highest human happiness. For happily the essential elements of the
highest happiness are as open to the poor as to the rich, to the
unsuccessful as to the successful--love of wife and children, congenial
and educating friendships, the knowledge of what the best men have done
and the wisest men have said; the pleasure and impulse, the sentiments
and beliefs which result from our knowledge of the heroic deeds done
from year to year among men; the enlivening influence of examples that
tell on all men alike, young and old, rich and poor; the insight and
strength of character that are won in the hard wrestle with life; the
growing consciousness that God is in human life, that He is ours and
that we are His--these things and all that makes human life of value are
universal as air and sunshine, but must be missed by those who make the
world their object.
Though in point of fact Lot cut himself off by his choice from direct
participation in the special inheritance to which Abram was called by
God, it might perhaps be too much to say that his choice of the valley
of Jordan was an explicit renunciation of the special blessedness of
those who find their joy in responding to God's call and doing His work
in the world. It might also be extravagant to say that his choice of the
richest land was prompted by the feeling that he was not included in the
promise to Abram, and might as well make the most of his present
opportunities. But it is certain that Abram's generosity to Lot arose
out of his sense that in God he himself had abundant possession. In
Egypt he had learned that in order to secure all that is worth having a
man need never resort to duplicity, trickery, bold lying. He now learns
that in order to enter on his own God-provided lot, he need shut no
other man out of his. He is taught that to acknowledge amply the rights
of other men is the surest road to the enjoyment of his own rights. He
is taught that there is room in God's plan for every man to follow his
most generous impulses and the highest views of life that visit him.
It was Abram's simple belief that God's promise was meant and was
substantial, that made him indifferent as to what Lot might choose. His
faith was judged in this scene, and was proved to be sound. This man
whose very calling it was to own this land, could freely allow Lot to
choose the best of it. Why? Because he has learned that it is not by any
plan of his own he is to come into possession; that God Who promised is
to give him the land in His own way, and that his part is to act
uprightly, mercifully, like God. Wherever there is faith, the same
results will appear. He who believes that God is pledged to provide for
him cannot be greedy, anxious, covetous; can only be liberal, even
magnanimous. Any one can thus test his own faith. If he does not find
that what God promises weighs substantially when put in the scales with
gold; if he does not find that the accomplishment of God's purpose with
him in the world is to him the most valuable thing, and actually compels
him to think lightly of worldly position and ordinary success; if he
does not find that in point of fact the gains which content a man of
the world shrivel and lose interest, he may feel tolerably certain he
has no faith and is not counting as certain what God has promised.
It is commonly observed that wealth pursues the men who part with it
most freely. Abram had this experience. No sooner had he allowed Lot to
choose his portion than God gave him assurance that the whole would be
his. It is "the meek" who "inherit the earth." Not only have they, in
their very losses and while suffering wrong at the hands of their
fellows, a purer joy than those who wrong them; but they know themselves
heirs of God with the certainty of enjoying all His possessions that can
avail for their advantage. Declining to devote themselves as living
sacrifices to business they hold their soul at leisure for what brings
truest happiness, for friendship, for knowledge, for charity. Even in
this life they may be said to inherit the earth, for all its richest
fruits are theirs--the ground may belong to other men, but the beauty of
th
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