Verse 29
Connecting Lines
We have seen the earth open and swallow up the rebels; now we may expect to have peace. A great judgment has fallen upon Israel, and from this time there will be no more murmuring and complaining. An earthquake will settle everything. If one could rise from the dead and visit the living, one sight of the dead man would cause the mind to think, the heart to dissolve in tears, and the whole will to consecrate itself to perpetual obedience. We have often invented methods of evangelising the world. Were an angel to stand in the very centre of the mid-day sky so that every one upon the earth could see him, and were he to preach some brief sermon to the sons of men, all the populations upon the face of the globe would instantly hail Jesus Christ, Son of man, Son of God, Saviour of the world. If during some great outrage or crime of nations the earth were suddenly to tremble, shaking down tower and temple here and there, as if about to shake down all cities, men would begin to think, and repent, and pray, and believe. How long shall we forget that history is full of miracles and wonders and signs intended to convey moral instruction to the nations and to bring the peoples to sobriety of mind and religiousness of purpose? All these inventions which we suppose ought to accompany a divine administration of affairs have been tried and they have all failed. The earthquake is useless, and the great flood, the drowning deluge, and the storm of fire and brimstone; these things are exploded as arguments for the purpose of pointing in the direction of the right method of converting the world. An instance in point is now before us ( Num 16:41 ). "But on the morrow all the congregation of the children of Israel murmured against Moses and against Aaron, saying, Ye have killed the people of the Lord." When did this murmuring occur? The very day that the divine judgment was inflicted. Earthquakes have no abiding moral; great physical demonstrations seem to perish in the using. An earthquake becomes a familiarity; a plague becomes a topic of common gossip; darkening heavens and shooting lightnings are remarked upon by the people who pass under the tempestuous canopy. The world is not to be sobered as we thought to be steadied and brought into prayerful mood and temper; it is not by miracle, nor by earthquake, nor by fire, but by some other way subtler, farther off, apparently less effectual, and a method requiring long time to develop itself and apply itself to the whole line of human action and human need. It would be difficult to believe all this if we could not corroborate it by our own experience. When was the great sin committed in your case? "On the morrow" after the judgment. Can men sin so suddenly and immediately after the divine chastisement for wrong-doing? As an argument we should say, No, they cannot do so; but we are forced back upon facts, realities, solid and personal experiences, and all these combine to say: Hardly will the night pass to separate men from the great judgment before they are back at the forbidden altar, drinking the forbidden cup, and lifting up their hand in obstinate challenge to Heaven. It is so everywhere. Men see the evil results of wrong courses of behaviour, and they repeat those wrong courses as soon as their energy is recruited; men feel the ill effects of wrong living, and they will repeat that wrong living to-morrow. Daily we see what comes of evil practice, ignoble purpose, unholy thought, and yet we no sooner look at the punishment than we go away to do the very thing which involved the judgment of God. Account for this. There is no accounting for it argumentatively. If this were a mere matter of words, it could only be settled in one way. Were it possible for any human fancy so to forget all the history of the world as to stand up and say what men would do under such and such circumstances, detailing the very facts of life as we ourselves know them, we should resent the suggestion, we should declare it an exaggeration, an expression of an absurd impossibility. The witness is in ourselves: our conscience condemns us. Why is it important to dwell upon this? To show that human nature is one, to show that the Bible deals with one kind of humanity, and that one kind of humanity is found in all lands, in all ages it never changes; and it is important also as aggravating a condition to which some reply must be made from Heaven. We mass ourselves up into one terrific solid, and God must find some answer to the tremendous consolidation which we present. He must answer it with judgment, or he must answer it with mercy. The answer must come from above, be it what it may; and it can only be one of two answers: destruction salvation; anger pity; an assertion of sovereign and majestic power, or a condescension of divine majesty to the low condition and awful apostasy of human nature. Reading the Bible through thus, page by page, steadily and patiently, one may come upon the Cross with a feeling which would be utterly impossible under any other conditions of Biblical perusal. The Lord is angry with the people; he says he will destroy them after all: he will send a plague upon the camp which shall utterly burn it up. Is the Lord not sometimes tempted to fight us with our own weapons? Is not the divine patience apparently exhausted? Does it not seem as if only in one way can God get hold of us, and that by the way of destruction? So often is his hand lifted up and so often does it fall without inflicting the penalty. This is a holy vacillation; this is a glorious hesitancy. Looking at history we say, Now the arm will fall and nothing can prevent it; and suddenly as by a breath soft as the breath of prayer that great arm is turned aside, and the blow is not struck. This is divinity. It would be fickleness but in God; it would be an incertitude of mind but in the Most High. God knows that the way of salvation is the best way, not the readiest, not the directest destruction always lies handiest to the law that has been outraged; but salvation may be so conceived, wrought out, and applied as to vindicate itself in the long run. Any time in relation to eternity must be a quantity infinitesimal. We store up our millenniums and call them long periods; we pile one thousand years upon another thousand years and multiply the double thousand by ten until our poor imaginations stagger under the vastness of the result; but the accumulated millenniums are but the flicker of a pulse, coming, going, dying, in the twinkling of an eye, compared with the duration of the divine throne. It will be seen, therefore, in Heaven's by-and-by, that the method of salvation, though apparently so indirect and so remote in its influence and effect, is a divine method the only method, the method that alone can vindicate itself by its sublimest issues.
So Moses and Aaron turned aside the divine wrath, and the Lord took to another course. He said, This matter of rulership and guidance must be settled once for all. If the tone of impatience could enter the divine voice, it would be under such daily and vexatious provocation. So he will appeal to the eyes of the people; he would have the rods laid up, according to the statement in the seventeenth chapter, he would have every one of them take a rod according to the house of their fathers, of all their princes according to the house of their fathers: twelve rods; and every man's name was to be written upon his rod, and the man whose rod budded was to have the rulership and the primacy of Israel. So God will become an infant to us, because we are infants. This is the great method of human education. The philosopher has to become a child if he would teach a child; the mother can only charm the baby as she herself becomes a baby; God can only help man as he becomes a man. Great is the mystery of godliness, because always great is the mystery of love. Great is the mystery of condescension infinite is the miracle of stooping to the lowest condition. Now Israel shall see a sight, it is the stoop of God. The rods were laid up, in due time they were examined, and there was one rod budding and blooming like a living thing, and nor bud nor blossom could be seen upon the other rods. Whose rod budded and blossomed? It was Aaron's rod. Henceforth it was to be a sign of power and divine election, and the sight of that rod was to settle all conflict, all controversy. Did that succeed? Nothing can succeed that is outward, visible, typical, or even miraculous. The miracles have all been tried, and they have all failed. Christ laid them down as useless tools. He knew from the beginning that they were useless; but he must adapt his plans to the condition of the scholars who are supposedly attending his school. So he leads us to drop miracle and sign and wonder and judgment, and causes us to cry out, What then is the strength of God? what is the method of Heaven? and when our judgment and imagination have been purged of false conclusions and vain imaginings, then he says and he could have said it at no earlier period, "God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." To have said so at the beginning, would have been to puzzle the human mind, and distract the human imagination. First of all man must be cleared of the sophism that judgment can work wonders, that rising from the dead can convert families and nations. The miracle delusion must be destroyed. Yet the purpose of the miracle remains; when the mere miracle drops off, the spirit which animated it abides for ever a spirit of compassion, condescension, gracious and tender appeal to men, willing in any way, if by any means the human heart can be touched with religious and ennobling emotion. This miracle in its great moral purpose is still wrought amongst us. The Bible is the rod that buds. We have laid up all other books along with it: we have given them plenty of time together, and now when we open the place where they were put together, we find that only one Book has upon it bud and blossom, and sign of satisfying fruit. Our appeal is to facts. Many books have arisen to dispute the supremacy of the Bible; many plans have been invented for overturning Christ's method of saving the world; the mocker has laughed, the vain imagination has invented its fancies, and the troubled conscience has wrought miracles in casuistry and in the base use of language with double and triple meanings, and men have invented noises for the purpose of destroying spiritual and moral voices and appeals; but after all the experiments there is one rod that buds, one Book that blossoms, one tree whose leaves are for the healing of the nations. We must, therefore, go through miracles to facts, through spaces which daze the mind by their mystery or their vastness, to the simple realities of life; and the Bible this day and every day calls men to any Carmel they may choose, and on the height of the solemn hill it will settle the controversy by appealing to the influence exerted upon human life, to mastery of human affairs, and to the power of giving solace under all the exacerbations and infinite distresses of human life.
Now the history passes on, and we find, presently, that the little company of leaders becomes less. In the twentieth chapter and the first verse we have one line which says, "And Miriam died there, and was buried there." You could scarcely say less about a dog! She began bravely and musically did this woman, but she was full of thought; she inspired her feeble brother Aaron that they might together challenge the pontificate of Moses. She began with timbrel and dance, with a thrilling soprano; she was first among those who sang the Song of Deliverance, and we thought then she would do well; but hers was a poor course a bright promise that never came to any solid effect. She murmured against Moses, she found fault with his marriage, she disputed his supremacy, she inspired the most fickle and feeblest of all great men, namely, Aaron her brother, that he might take share in the cowardly attack upon Moses; and now history solemn, impartial, awful history avenges the cause of righteousness and gives Miriam but one line: "Miriam died there, and was buried there." We may so live as to be so characterised ourselves. It is possible for us so to live that nobody may miss us when we die. Of course we must have a grave: the earth must be scarred in some few inches to let us into its impartial bosom; but it is poor work; and there lies here a man over whose grave no child ever wept, over whose resting-place no heart ever beat with unusual quickness as if stirred by grateful emotion; here lies a man who took up room that a better man might have occupied, and he is thrust in here without any memorial. It is possible to live so. There is a happier possibility: we may live so that our grave shall be a sacred spot, a kind of altar inscribed to the honour of the mercy and goodness of the living God, so that men passing it may say, He was a brave soul; he had a noble heart; no suspicious thought ever vitiated that man's thinking; no mean desire or purpose ever warped and depraved his career, in relation to the cause of weakness and poverty and pain. Such men cannot die, except in the narrowest sense of that term; when they are laid away they seem to be more with us than ever. We multiply our dead: we magnify our good ones; we create a little heaven in our own imagination and heart, and we remember little words, quiet tones, and gentle touches, subtle references, and sum up all these things into the judgment of goodness, and the record of gratitude. That the sweet singer that the sister of Moses that a woman with the spirit of leadership in her, should simply have "died" and been "buried" is a lesson to us. How arc the mighty fallen! how have the sons of the morning lost their light!
Was Moses, then, perfect? The two brothers are left alone now, was Moses a perfect man? Let us thank God that he was not. The perfect man is a most discouraging influence in any community. He repels rather than attracts, being simply a man and perfect as such, first because perfection is impossible, secondly because its appearance, assumption, or attainment, discourages men who feel that they cannot advance with its pace or attain to its pre-eminence. So Moses falters; Moses will become in some degree one of us. When the people murmured for want of water, the Lord said, Go forward; show them the rod, and quiet their murmurings. But this was never done. Moses went forward, and in a moment of rage or impatience not to be wondered at he struck the rock; and because of that stroke God struck him. We must not do things in our own way; we must show the rod, not strike with the rod. By such fine distinctions are men judged. The difference between men is not the difference between black and white great broad issues, but often becomes a distinction between full obedience and partial obedience, continual sacrifice and occasional sacrifice; a difference of tone too loud, too low; too emphatic, too hesitant. So critical so minute is the vision and the judgment of God.
Then we come to the time when Moses was left alone.
"And when all the congregation saw that Aaron was dead, they mourned for Aaron thirty days, even all the house of Israel" ( Num 20:29 ).
They took the nobler view of the man. After all he was God's priest. We must have some regard to the men who have thrown even the censer of the sanctuary. He was sometimes feeble to contemptibleness, sometimes perhaps a little vain, though he would not have been half so vain but for the prompting of his ambitious sister; he made the calf of gold, he did things which he ought not to have done; still for him the ephod was made, on him the sacerdotal robes were set as by the very hands of God; he was Aaron after all. So when he died there was a thirty days' mourning for him, "even all the house of Israel." They remembered the old man's best qualities: they said, he was always valiant: he seemed he was a good man in the soul of him: the rotten places were all outside: the core of the old priest was a sound and healthy core. The people have the spirit of judgment; the people know the true from the false. There is hardly any bar of judgment out of heaven so exact in its decisions as the bar of the common opinion of the nations. So Aaron was mourned for by all the house of Israel. We shall said they in effect see the old man no more; he had a noble speech: he was the rhetor of the wilderness: he was chosen because of his eloquence: he was to be a mouth unto Moses and Moses was to be as God unto him. So they complemented one another: what the one had the other had not: what the one had not the other had; they were brothers indeed, and the mourning was touched with a deeper pathos when Israel caught sight of Moses. Miriam gone, Aaron gone who next can go but the great chief himself? So wondrously are the events of life related to one another, touched by one another, coloured by one another, and so profound and subtle is the mystery of pathos itself. Who remains? The Lord abideth for ever Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever. The singing Miriam dies, but the music still flows on; priestly Aaron passes away, but our Melchizedek abideth a Priest for ever; the great Moses dies with the only pomp possible to the majesty of his career in the solitude of the divine companionship, but the God of Moses lives. This must be our confidence in the day of fear, when we ask, What shall Israel do when Miriam ceases to sing, when Aaron ceases to pray, when Moses ceases to lead? What shall be done when the prophets drop their mantle and the fathers say Adieu? Our confidence must be in God: his heaven is full of angels, his ministers are without number in their host, and never yet sang human voice, never yet resounded human eloquence, never yet went forth the champion of human liberties, whose place God could not supply with an ampler abundance. There is no searching of his understanding. The Church does not stand in the song of its singers, in the eloquence of its preachers, in the prayers of its priests; the Church stands in Christ. When he dies, the Church dies. He abideth for ever; the Church is, therefore, assured as to its duration by the eternity of its Lord.
Prayer
Almighty God, thou dost lead us by the right way. Its length is determined, and all the influences which operate upon it are under thy control. We did not begin the way, nor do we know one turning that is upon it, nor can we determine the length thereof. It is not in man that walketh to direct his steps; the way of man is from the Lord which made heaven and earth, and he will sustain the traveller, he will bring the weary pilgrim to the heavenly rest. Thou hast led us these many years in the wilderness, and thou hast made a garden of the desert, and thou hast found for us orchards amongst the rocks; thy course towards us has been a daily miracle, a surprise of love, a new revelation of light. So now we begin to see somewhat of God's meaning in what to us has been so long confusion and bewilderment. Thou dost work secretly, so that we cannot see thee; thine hand is not always visible to us so that we can say, This is the Lord, and this is his work, and, behold, he doeth it in his own way and time. We cannot see much; we can hear but a little; we must, therefore, live our larger life the life of faith, the noble, eternal life of trust in the living God; saying daily, until our very voice becomes musical by the exercise, The will of the Lord be done: it is best; thy will be done on earth as it is done in heaven. When we can speak this prayer with our hearts, we shall know that the pinnacle is being put upon the temple, that the topstone is being set upon the tower, and that our life's education upon earth is nearly completed. Do thou take us, by thine own way, to the city which hath habitations built for the sons of men. We think we nee the shorter road; but our life is full of mistakes of our own making: so we will judge nothing before the time, but wait in the spirit of trust and in the meekness of patience. We will leave all the way to God. We will not take our life-course from our passion, our imagination, our selfishness; we will have nothing to do with it, except in God and through the ministry of the Holy Spirit. Then our thirst shall be a blessing, our hunger shall be a means of grace, our difficulties shall be elements of delight, and the strain that is put upon our weakness shall be the beginning and the assurance of power. Bring us into the inner places of God's house; take us from chamber to chamber until we see the innermost centre possible to earthly vision; give us to feel the warmth of the sanctuary its tender, hospitable glow; give us to feel assurance of God's nearness and God's love and God's almightiness to save. Protect us from impression made through the senses only, and undertake for us that we shall learn wholly from thy Spirit, disregarding appearances which we can neither understand nor control. Enable us to trust thee, and love thee, and serve thee: and when the enemy's hand is mighty upon us, may the hand of God be mightier still; and when the discouragement of the way is very severe, may our gift in prayer be greatly enlarged, and our souls see an open gate to the throne of the heavenly grace. We bless thee for thy Son Jesus Christ, our Saviour. We love him because he first loved us. Whilst we were yet sinners he died for us, much more now that he is raised and throned in heaven will he mightily succour us by his consolations and ennoble us by his promises. Comfort thy people; say unto them their iniquity is pardoned, and grant unto them assurance that the enemy hath no more power over them, seeing they are bought with a price and are marked by the sign of God and are guided by the Spirit Eternal. We remember our loved ones everywhere, praying for them with all prayer and supplication, that they, with us, may enjoy the common blessings of the sanctuary, and, having happiness of home, may have triumph in the house of God and great success in the marketplace; the Lord bless them in basket and in store, in property, in children, in all manner of business and avocation, in travelling by sea and by land; and show us all that there can be no distance from one another, where there is no distance from the common centre; if we love God, we shall be near one another, though mountains intervene and seas roll between us; we touch a common Cross, we look at a common Light, we breathe to the One, the Universal, Father; and in this sweet, noble fellowship we are conscious of living union. Make the sick thy care. In many cases they are quite beyond us; our gentlest touch is roughness, our whispered affection is a loud voice; but thou canst speak to souls nearing heaven, thou canst comfort those whose feet are touching the last cold river, thou canst trim the light when we cannot touch it. So we hand over our sick chambers and all our suffering loved ones to the Physician and Healer of the universe, willing to be his servants that we may work as he bids us, and wait all the time until our patience is completed. The Lord hear us in these things; the Lord send us answers more than we have capacity to receive; the Lord show us that he is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think: that in our mightiest prayer we have not begun to touch the infinity of his reply. Amen.
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