Deuteronomy 4:22

"Handfuls of Purpose"

For All Gleaners

"I must not go... but ye shall go." Deu 4:22

This is a brave speech on the part of an old man. Such speeches ought to be uttered by the most advanced Christians today. This man utters his speech without complaint. It seems impossible to reconcile the imperfect revelation granted to some men with the goodness of God. They come so near seeing the perfect light, and yet die without beholding the noontide glory. It would have been very different with the people had Moses been a man of another spirit; querulous, discontented, complaining against God. The spirit of progress rejoices in the progress of others. We are not to limit the revelation of God by that which we see ourselves. We must look to the future of the race and see in that future something brighter than has yet shone upon our own vision. That thought may be applied to theological thinkers. There is nothing final in theological investigation. Interpretation will show the progressiveness even of the Bible itself. The greatest students of the book die exclaiming to the younger men, "Ye shall go over, and possess the good land." The thought should also be applied to Christian workers as well as to Christian students. Though we die without reaping the harvest, the harvest will surely be reaped by others.

We should so live that when we come to die our last speech may be one of encouragement to the men who are following. The man who dies thus does not die at all, in any degrading sense. Moses, though dead according to the flesh, lived in all the power of the spirit, and was a continual inspiration to the people whom he had led so many years in the wilderness. There is always a good land to be possessed; a land of larger liberty; a land of larger knowledge; a land of surer trust in divine realities. The spirit of the Church must be a spirit of conquest; when it drops from this noble elevation it inflicts upon itself a most humiliating disability.