Verses 1-49
The Journeys of Israel
This chapter gives a very graphic and instructive picture of a much larger scheme of journeying. The local names may mean nothing to us now, but the words "departed," "removed," "encamped," have meanings that abide for ever. We are doing in our way, and according to the measure of our opportunity, exactly what Israel did in this chapter of hard names and places mostly now forgotten. Observe, this is a written account: "And Moses wrote their goings out." The life is all written. It is not a sentiment spoken without consideration and forgotten without regret: it is a record a detailed and critical writing, condescending to geography, locality, daily movement, position in society and in the world. It is, therefore, to be regarded as a story that has been proved, and that will bear to be written and rewritten. Who would write again a mere dream? Who would spend ink upon so vapoury a thing as a nightmare? If Israel had passed through the Red Sea in some distorted dream, would Moses have cared to make actual history of it at least, in form and expression, for there is no hint in all the story that the man is parabolising or drawing upon a vivid and masterful imagination? The whole experience has been long past, and here it is recalled and set down with a firm hand, without hesitancy or staggering. Here it stands like stern history, plain fact, something that did actually and positively occur. Men may write about miracles so frequently as to divest them of the element which first touched surprise and awakened suspicion through the medium of the imagination. We may read of miracles until we lose their pomp and their meaning. But life is a miracle: every day is a sign from heaven. We have outgrown the infantile mind which could only see miracles in form and hear them in noise and be amazed at them in tumult and earthquake and varied violence, and now we see the meant-miracle, the ever-intended wonder, of life coming out of death, light springing upon darkness and chasing it away with victorious power, as if one bright beam could slay a million nights. So now, in the absence of startling phenomenon and tumult and vision apocalyptic, we see in quietness itself a miracle, in light a token, in summer the wonderworking power of the loving God. Life is twice written. We have amongst us what are termed, by some stretch of imagination occasionally encroaching upon the impossible, "biographers." It is a complimentary term. Biography is, in the deepest and truest sense, impossible. A man cannot write his own life: he can but hint at it, and the only surprise he can feel, when he has finished the page, is amazement at its emptiness. Yet it is good for a man to put down the facts of his life. His birthplace should be dear to him, as also the place where he fought his early battles, and won his first victories, and opened his first gates, and saw his first chances, and struggled in the agony of his first prayers, and seized with the hand of faith the first blessings of heaven meant for his soul's nurture and strengthening; and it is good to continue the page, fill it up, turn it over, and to go on to the new page, and charge the whole book with memories intended to express amazement and thankfulness. The one perfect Biographer is God. Every life is written in the book that is kept in the secret places of the heavens. All things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do. Nothing is omitted. The writing is plain so plain that the blind man may read the story which God has written for his perusal. Who would like to see the book? Who could not write a book about his brother that would please that brother? Without being false, it might yet be highly eulogistic and comforting. But who would like to see his life as sketched by the hand of God? "Enter not into judgment with thy servant: for in thy sight shall no man living be justified." "Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness: according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions."
What a monotony there is in this thirty-third chapter. This will be evident to the eye. The reader sees but two words or three, and all the rest are difficult terms or polysyllables unrelated to his life. The terms are "departed," "removed," "went." It is almost pathetic to see how the writer tries to vary his expressions and cannot. Verse after verse he uses the word "departed;" then verse after verse he uses the word "removed;" here and there he said "they went," but back again he comes to "departed," and then to "removed," and back to "went." "They removed... and pitched," that is the little story. Is it not so with us too? How dull the days are. How full of tedious similitude is the succession of events. We want variety; we cry for amusement; we sigh for change; we propose rearrangements and re-combinations that we may at least please the eye with what seems to be a varying picture. Very few words are needed for the record of most lives; as to outward and actual event, very few words are needed at all. If you have in any language, say, five thousand words, you can really conduct the business of life upon about five hundred of them. There are great stores of words that are locked up in the prisons of lexicons: they are only wanted now and then, and they are, therefore, but occasionally liberated. The language of actual life is a narrow language which may be learned in a very brief time. So with our daily life: we rise, we sit, we retire; we eat and drink, and bless one another in the name of God; and go round the little circle, until sometimes we say, Can we not vary all that and add to it some more vivid line? Has no friend of ours the power of flushing this pale monotony into some tint of blood? Then we fall back into the old lines: we "depart" and "remove" and "pitch;" we "pitch" and "depart" and "remove;" we come and go and settle and return; until there comes almost unconsciously into the strain of our speech some expressive and mournful sigh. "Few and evil have been the days of thy servant."
Yet, not to dwell too much upon this well-ascertained fact, we may regard the record of the journeys of Israel as showing somewhat of the variety of life. Here and there a new departure sets in, or some new circumstance brightens the history. For example, in the ninth verse we read "And they removed from Marah, and came unto Elim: and in Elim were twelve fountains of water, and threescore and ten palm trees." Sweet entry is that! It occurs in our own secret diaries. Do we not dwell with thankfulness upon the places where we find the waters, the wells, the running streams, the beautiful trees, and the trees beautiful with luscious fruitage? It is a dull life that has nothing in it about the fountain, and the palm tree, and the beautiful day that seemed to throw its radiance upon a hundred other days and give them some glint of celestial beauty. The pleasant lines are not many, but when they do come they are the more pleasant because of their infrequency. We all remember the beautiful garden in the May-time, when the whole scene was one blossom. How we hastened home to write the story of the garden-day, when everything seemed to be in vernal glee, in high spirits, bird outvying bird in sparkles of music, note after note shot out like star after star into the willing and hospitable space; and the birthday and the wedding-day, and some holy time, quiet like an anticipated Sabbath; and the time of victory in prayer, when we received the answers in the very act of offering the supplications, times of enlargement and vital communion with God. Then comes the fourteenth verse: "And they removed from Alush, and encamped at Rephidim, where was no water." Such are the changes in life. We have passed through precisely the transitions here indicated. No water; nothing to satisfy even the best appetences of the mind and spirit; all heaven one sheet of darkness, and the night so black upon the earth that even the altar-stairs could not be found in the horrid gloom; if there was water, it had no effect upon the thirst; if there was bread, it was bitter; if there was a pillow, it was filled with pricking thorn. When we were at Elim, we said we should always be glad: the plash of the fountain and the shade of the palm tree would accompany us evermore; and yet, behold, at Rephidim there "was no water for the people to drink." How singular is Providence! apparently, so contradictory; apparently, so wanting in consistency. Why is there not one great deep river flowing all the globe around a belt of blessing?' Why these arid places the wildernesses without fountains, these deserts unblest with a flower? Why? In that "Why" there is no suspicion, nor is there one accent of distrust, but there certainly is an expression of wonder. It is so in all departments of life say, even, in life intellectual. Sometimes the mind has it all its own way; it can see heaven opened and the Son of man standing at the right hand of God; as for language, it knows all the languages of the earth claims them, absorbs them, repeats them so as to astound every man with the music of the tongue in which he was born. At other times, that same life seems nothing, has no language, no vision, no touch of God's presence or hint of God's blessing. We go from Elim to Rephidim in that department of life. There is another variety of the story; the thirty-eighth verse presents it: "And Aaron the priest went up into mount Hor at the commandment of the Lord, and died there." Is that line wanting in our story? All men do not die on mountains. Would God we may die upon some high hill! It seems to our imagination nearer heaven to die away up on the mountain peaks than to die in the low damp valleys. Granted, that it is but an imagination. We need such helps: we are so made that symbol and hint and parable assist the soul in its sublimest realisation of things divine and of things to come. There is a black margin upon every man's diary, here a child died, there a sweet mother said good-bye, there a strong father the man who was never tired, the tower of strength said he must go home.
This, also, presents a focalised life: all the lines are tending to one point. So it is in our own story. What is that point? the modern teacher might say. It is a grave. That is only intermediately so; that is but atheistically so. We are moving to the tomb to the one black gate that keeps us out of the city of light; and we will, in God's strength, unlock it, break it, triumph over it and all the strength it represents, and join the blood-washed throng of holy victors on the other side. We will not finish the song with the word "tomb," it is no poetry whose ultimate syllable is in the grave. We are moving if in Christ, washed by his blood, pardoned through his propitiation, to the land of light and summer and blissful immortality. "Every beating pulse we tell leaves the number less;" every night we "pitch our moving tent a day's march nearer home." Whilst we look at the various localities and their relation to one another upon the map now moving north, now south, now east, now west, we say, What is the meaning of this tumultuous movement? It is only so broken up within a small compass, measured by heaven's meridian, the direction is in one line, at the end of which burns all the warmth and light of heaven.
And yet, there is an unwritten life. This cannot be all: there must be some reading between the lines. Life was never an affair of such grim and unfamiliar polysyllables: between the lines, there must have been loving, praying, weeping, suffering, rejoicing, wedding, dying, fierce word, and word of benediction. This is but a river-map: all the cities have to be filled in and all the city-life to be created. Still, wherein it is but an outline it is like our own story as we ought to tell it or represent it to others. No man knoweth the spirit of a man but the spirit itself that is within the man, and that spirit has revelations for which there is no language visions that cannot be syllabled and printed to the eye and apprehension of outside observers and critics.
Selected Note
A visit to Mount Hor ( Jebel Harùn, "Mount of Aaron"), or at least a distant view of its wild precipices and ravines, helps to make the visit to Petra memorable. Here it was that Aaron, the priest laden with years and weary with the toil of the desert-wandering, was "gathered to his people." Even Scripture has few more solemn and majestic pictures than this of the two aged men brothers in heart and sacred service ascending with the youthful Eleazar to this wild mountain-top. "In his full priestly dress" walked Aaron to his burial. He knew it; and so did all in that camp, who now, for the last time, reverently and silently looked upon the venerable figure of him who these forty years had ministered unto them in holy things. There were no farewells. In that typical priesthood, all depended on the unbroken continuance of the office, not of the person. And hence on the mountain-top, Aaron was first unclothed of his priestly robes, and Eleazar his son formally invested with them. Thus the priesthood had not for a moment ceased when Aaron died. Then, not as a priest, but simply as one of God's Israel, was he "gathered unto his people." But over that which passed between the three on the mount has the hand of God drawn the veil of silence. And so the new priest Eleazar came down from the solemn scene on Mount Hor to minister amidst a hushed and awe-stricken congregation. "And when all the congregation saw that Aaron was dead, they mourned for Aaron thirty days, even all the house of Israel." The traditionary tomb of the high-priest is shown to visitors in a vault below a small chapel, which evidently occupies the place of a more imposing structure, and is built out of its ruins. The Bedawin still holds the name of Aaron in great veneration. A singular custom of theirs is to sacrifice a kid or sheep to his memory, in sight of Mount Hor, raising a heap of stones where the blood of the animal has fallen. These heaps are seen all through the neighbouring valley.
Pictures from Bible Lands, by Samuel G. Green, D.D.
Prayer
Almighty God, kindle a light in our hearts that can never go out: the light of Christian confidence, the glory of Christian hope; may we walk amidst its beauty, and enjoy its nourishment and warmth. We need the comfort of heaven: we pine for a blessing from on high; we shall know it when we receive it, for none can resemble it in all-tenderness and sufficiency and inspiration. Withhold not thy regard from us, and let thine attention be the outlook of love. We may not say this in our own name, for it is valueless in heaven. We have fallen: we have done the things we ought not to have done; we have forfeited all right of speech with the throne. But Jesus is our Daysman: he is able to lay his hands upon both of us, and to bring us together in happy communion. There is one Advocate with the Father, and he is the Son of man. He pleads our cause; he bears our name as well as thine; and he will plead for us with all the agony of blood, and with all the tenderness of love. He is able to save unto the uttermost all that come unto God by him, seeing that he ever liveth to make intercession for us. We are strong in confidence: we are bold at the Cross. The Cross has turned the throne of judgment into a throne of mercy, and now we come before the King, clothed with the righteousness of his Son, and there plead for such blessing as our poor life continually needs. We thank thee for the sacred Book, and that it is written in many places in our mother-tongue. We know it here and there; sometimes we are quite familiar with it: it falls upon us like a remembered song of youth, which made us glad and hopeful in the early time. Here it is a mountain we cannot climb, a cloud we cannot penetrate, a deep river we dare not touch; but oftentimes it is a hill covered with flowers, a cloud bright with chastened light, and a screen that makes glad the city of our life. Help us to read it with the heart, to answer it with the will, and to be found always commenting upon it with the eloquence of an obedient life. Pity us wherein we are weak; have mercy upon us wherein we have forfeited our lives; continue thy blessing unto us wherein we have begun to do right under the guidance of thy Spirit; and, at last, give us an abundant entrance among the heroic band who fought thy fight, O Christ, in thy strength, and won their every victory in thy name. Amen.
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