Verses 1-30
The Last Song
The old man whom we have known so long dies singing. All men should die so; all men may so die: God is not sparing in his gift of song or privilege of music: music was in his purpose long before speech: all things are to end in a great song. What speeches may be delivered on high we cannot tell: few if any have been reported even by dreamers and seers; but they have all told us of the singing that characterises life in the upper spaces: they quote the very words of the noble song; they give some idea of the innumerableness of the numbers who sing the triumphant hymn. God means, therefore, that every life should end in a song not necessarily in the mechanical definition of that term, but as to its spiritual scope and meaning: there is triumph in serenity yea, serenity may be the last expression of triumph. There are songs without words: there is singing without articulate and audible voice: we may sing with the spirit and with the understanding. Blessed are they who, before going up to Nebo to die, sing in the valley, and, so to say, pass out of sight with their singing robes around them; to this end we are invited in Christ, and in Christ this is the only possible end namely, triumph, song; the rapture of expectancy, and the inspiration of hope.
The song was to be a "witness" for God "against" the children of Israel, say, rather, as between himself and the children of Israel. Witness does not always imply accusation: it quite as frequently implies confirmation, endorsement, approval; it embodies in itself a sure testimony, strong because of its indisputableness. God is said to be "Judge," and we too frequently attach somewhat of harshness to that word; in many of its relations it is noble in its tenderness: it is a refuge to which the soul may continually flee. God is the "Judge" of the widow and the fatherless. Does the Scripture mean that God will hold them to standards that are severe and bind upon them penalties which are intolerable? On the contrary: instead of Judge, say "Vindicator." God is the Judge of the widow and fatherless: he will hear their cause and determine it; he will attemper judgment with mercy: in wrath he will remember mercy; to the Judge of all the earth all good causes may appeal, and all weakness, and all inculpable infirmity, and all broken-heartedness. God is the Judge of the little, the mean, the helpless, the widow, the orphan. The word "witness" is to be interpreted after some such fashion. The song is not to be put up to accuse the children of Israel only: it is not an impeachment merely; it is a witness, a record, a testimony, a distinct writing that can be appealed to in all critical or ambiguous circumstances.
Moses wrote the song "the same day." We speak of our efforts of genius, and the time required for the elaboration of this or that attempt to serve the sanctuary; but if you can write a song at all you can write it at once. Herein the great French poet's dictum is true: said one to Victor Hugo, "Is it not difficult to write epic poetry?" "No," said the great genius of his day, "No: easy or impossible." "Difficult" implies that the poetry can be written with due time, and after due effort; but the French judge would have no such construction put upon the term. Poetry is breathing, looking, the last expression of inspired genius. Moses wrote the song "the same day:" he could not stop the rush of the musical storm: the moment he got the first note he had all the rest in him. How many men would be burning lives, in all the best sense of ardour, if they could but get the first spark! they have fuel enough in them: they have great latent power; but they have not the starting spark, the first ignition, which would set on a blaze whole volumes of noble matter.
Moses has been trained to this effort: he has sung before; but he always sings after great disclosures of the divine face after the most vivid consciousness of the divine presence and touch. His songs are all in the same key: they roll along the same lofty level; they never beat into weakness, they are never impaired by meanness; from end to end they are God's own songs, and Moses seems to have been but a hand in the grasp of Omnipotence when he traces the immortal words. Such is to be our ministry; such is to be our life: "We have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us."
What are the characteristics of a great song? The first most noticeable characteristic of this song is that it is intensely theological. The keyword is GOD in his majesty, in his com passion, in his righteousness, in his tears God in a species of incarnation thousands of years before the event of Bethlehem. Without God there is no song that fills the whole arch; there are snatches of song that want unity, cohesion, and massiveness, stray notes, wandering chords, confused vibrations; but in God you have the upgathering of every chord, bar, suggestion, and tone of music: he is the centralising, uniting, all-cohering force. Have nothing to do with songs that do not lead up to God. This will not exclude many songs that are supposed to be of a secular kind. Who made the earth? Who cut off the little slice from eternity which we call time? God is the God of the whole world, and his is the fulness of the sea. Many a song that dips down towards recreation, amusement, entertainment, may have in it the true music of heaven; let such be the beginning, and let the end be grand as thunder, solemn as lightning, appalling as the height of heaven.
Another characteristic of the song is its broad human history. Read the thirty-second chapter from end to end, and you will find it a record of historical events. Facts are the pedestals on which we set sculptured music. We must know our own history if we would know the highest religious arguments, and apply with unquestionable and beneficent skill great Christian appeals. The witness must be in ourselves: we must know, and taste, and feel, and handle of the word of life, and live upon it, returning to it as hunger returns to bread and thirst flies swiftly to sparkling fountains. We do not live upon the history of other people: we only read the history of Israel to show how true it is that God is one and that his government is an indissoluble whole. To the Christian student there is no ancient history in the sense of history that is antiquated, obsolete, and no longer applicable to human circumstances. What we call ancient history was done yesterday from a divine point of view; from that point of view, indeed, there is but one day, quick with the tumultuous pulses of a thousand years. As we have often seen, we impoverish ourselves and lower the temperature of all noblest history by causing great spaces to intervene between our personal consciousness and the actual transaction of the events. Everything has occurred today. Early on the summer morning God said, "Let there be light," and the east whitened, and the dawn blushed, and over all the hills and vales and streams there came a tender glory. This very morning God shaped us in his own image and likeness. He was with us in the darkness, bearing our aching and weary heads, remaking us, reconstructing us, putting a distance between ourselves and our last sin and our most recent failure, and setting us up in the strength of recruited power to attempt the labour of another day. Speak not of ancient history in any sense that severs present consciousness from the eternal providence of God. When you are doubtful as to religious mysteries, read your own personal record; when metaphysics are too high or too deep, peruse facts, put the pieces of your lives together: see how they become a shape a house not made with hands, a temple fashioned in heaven. The days are not to be detached from one another: they are to be linked on and held in all the symbolism and reality of their unity. Hence, another characteristic of the song is its record of providence. God found Jacob
"In a desert land, and in the waste howling wilderness; he led him about, he instructed him, he kept him as the apple of his eye. As an eagle stirreth up her nest, fluttereth over her young, spreadeth abroad her wings, taketh them, beareth them on her wings: so the Lord alone did lead him, and there was no strange god with him" ( Deu 32:10-12 ),
"Jeshurun waxed fat, and kicked: thou art waxen fat, thou art grown thick, thou art covered with fatness; then he forsook God which made him, and lightly esteemed the Rock of his salvation" ( Deu 32:15 ).
Moses able to say all this after such experience as he knew! This is a noble testimony; this, indeed, is a complete and happy vindication of the ways of God to man. It is Moses who writes this; no poet was created for the purpose: no hidden genius or flower born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air was developed for the purpose of writing these noble stanzas, these rolling, thunderous bursts of song. The old legislator, the holy leader, the man who had to bear so much, who knew all the providence of God in human history even from the beginning to the end he was elected to be poet. That is God's way. Serve on faithfully; bend the back, use your arms, toil in the dust; but whatever you do carry it out with both hands, with reality and simplicity of purpose; and, by-and-by, when the poet is wanted, you, toiler, may be told to stand up and sing. This is the loving way of God: those who pass his scrutiny go in through the gate of pearl to sing on the inner side: after hearing God's "Well done, good and faithful servant," everything but a song becomes impossible; from that poetry there can be no apostasy into prosaic moods and contracted spaces.
In this song we have the commandments all repeated, that is to say, you find nothing in the Ten Commandments, as to the formation of human character and the shaping of human destiny, that is not to be found in this great song. Commandments must be the severe side of true music; duty is only the outer aspect of song. Without the commandments of God there could be no songs of men with reality in them and with the fire pentecostal and the touch that gives immortality God will have his commandments honoured: first he will state them in plain, stern terms: "Thou shalt," "Thou shalt not:" there shall be no mistake about the literal meaning of the commands of God; but after long years every commandment will come back again upon us in song, in appeal, in persuasion, in tears, in the Cross of Christ, and in all the love spoken by the Gospel. Thus the Bible is one: the spirit of the Bible is a spirit of righteousness, truth, compassion, redemption. Everything in human history is in the Pentateuch; every romance that can be read aloud and every true work of fiction repeats the commandments of Sinai. Men do more than perhaps they mean to do. We cannot escape the circle of God in any lawful industry, in any conscientious effort. A man shall set himself to depict in parable or fiction the life of his day; he may describe himself as an artist, he may even go so far as to describe himself as a mere artist a devotee of art, a student of proportion, perspective, and colour; he little knows that in proportion as he succeeds in rightly interpreting life he is a preacher. Great is the company of preachers! They would not be called by that name: they are suspicious of that limited term, because it has been limited by the very men who should have glorified it. You find all the fiction in the world that is true to human life in the parable of the Prodigal Son: the pen of fiction has never touched a point that is not involved within the sweep of that nobler delineation. The parables of Christ contain everything every spark of genius, every throb of poetry, every moral of sound teaching. So we return to find all the commandments of God in the last song of Moses; as God first gives the commandments, and then gives the history, and then gives the song, so all life is under his control, and he is revealing his purposes and providences in many a book never meant to call attention to his sovereignty. Many are called they know not why, or how, or to what end: the first may be last, the last may be first. As for those who are nominally Christians and preachers baptised men, anointed with a sacred unction what if they fall short of their calling and other men should come from the east and from the west, from the north and from the south, and they the supposed lineage of God should be shut out! The Christian reader of all history should make it his business to include, wherever he can, every effort and attempt made to lighten human burdens, to soothe human misery, and disentangle human perplexity; we cannot have such service described as worldly, secular, atheistic. He who dries a child's innocent tears is by so much serving God; he who but closes his eyes silently before partaking of his food recognises a Hand unseen a Giver quite near; he who writes a poem for the purpose of brightening family life and cheering solitary wanderers he who leaves behind him some sign which may be seen after many days, that a forlorn and shipwrecked brother seeing may take heart again, is a minister not ordained by human touch or recognition of an ecclesiastical kind, but a helper in the human strife, a friend of the friendless. Do not reject commandments because they come in the form of song, and do not regard song as being destitute of the inspiration and virility of righteousness. The Bible combines strength and beauty, law and gospel Moses and the Lamb. Our life is meant to fall into music. Music is an abused term. The musicians have been as unkind to music as the theologians have been unkind to theology. Definitions need enlargement; terms need ampler reference and application. Many a man is musical who cannot sing; the spirit of music is in the man: he knows the true tone when he hears it not from the critical point of view but it touches his soul, comes into his being like an inspiration, and soothes him like a benediction, or stirs him like a war-trumpet. Music is the inheritance of little children the angel that sits upstairs watching the weak and the dying when hired eyes tire and fall into needed slumber. So with the Gospel of Jesus Christ: it has its stern theology, its profound metaphysics, its awful morality the very snow of heaven, the spotless whiteness of the ineffable purity; but it has its song, its musical strain, and it calls us all to walk in step to go processionally: our feet are to fall harmoniously: the whole motion of the Church is to be a motion united, massive, coherent, resonant, providences turned into psalms, afflictions elevated into music, and righteousness itself the stern commandment is to be made to take up the harp and re-express itself in tender strains. Do be musical, do be harmonious in life; as for the mere vocal exercise, that may be poor or uncultivated, but there is another kind of music a spiritual, intellectual, moral music, and to that we are all called a blessed, a sacred destiny.
Prayer
We would see Jesus. He is the fairest among ten thousand, and altogether lovely. Our eyes ever desire to look upon him, and now we have come to the place of his appointment. Where two or three are gathered together, there Jesus is in the midst; he is always the centre. We know him to be the way, the truth, and the life, and none may dispute his place. We will have this Man to reign over us, for it is his right to reign. We call him King of kings; we hail him Lord of lords; we bow down before him, and worship the Son of God, God the Son, Immanuel God with us. We have praises to sing, and we would sing them with a loud, clear voice. We are not ashamed of the providence of God. Thou art our Father: thou dost guide us with thine eye; thine arms are round about us; thy smile is our soul's day, thy frown the night in which our soul trembles. Thou hast spread our table bountifully, so that our hunger has been more than satisfied; thou hast kept our house, so that there is peace at home; thou hast given us music in every room and light on every point of the dwelling; verily, thou art the God of the families of the earth, and our households trust in thee. As for our afflictions, it was good for us that we were afflicted: we were chastened, sobered, refined; there came into our voice a tenderer tone, and there settled in our hearts a nobler trust: thou hast sanctified thy chastening, and turned our smarting to our spiritual account. We bless the rod, we kiss the hand that lifted it, and at the grave-side we desire to say, It is well. For all thy mercies we bless thee for every flower that blooms, for every bird that sings, for every stream that moistens the green grass, for all the promise of the year, for a good seed-time and bay harvest, and prospect of plentifulness of bread; the Lord has been in the field, and the orchard, and the garden, and has filled the river with riches. Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power be unto the name of the God of Providence! We will not ask thee for the earth: it is too small a gift for a King; we want thyself, we desire thy Spirit, we yearn for clearer sight of thy love and for further hold of thy purpose, that when we are tossed upon the deep, the tumult may be but local, for in our souls immortal there is rest a deep and eternal tranquillity. We desire to read thy word with new vision, to enter into the spirit of its history and its prophecy, its minstrelsy and gospel, that the word of Christ may dwell in us richly, abounding in gracious fulness, so as to make the enemy afraid because of the holiness of our souls. We desire to see thee in all the way of life, to say every day, This is the Lord: lo, God was here, and I knew it not; and even among these rocks he has set up his ladder. We pray for one another: for the young, and the bright, and the tuneful, that they may rise up into nobleness and usefulness of life; for the sad and the weary; for the man who has just seen life's emptiness, and turned away with discontent from the place where he meant to find his pleasure. Thou dost send that revelation upon us all; we say, Surely on the mountain-top we shall find our home, and, lo, we cannot stay there, because of the darkness, and the cold, and the dreariness of stony places. We said, Surely now we shall find what we needed of wealth, and beauty, and comfort, and enjoyment; now will begin the dance of pleasure, now will break out the music of lasting gladness; and, behold, we fell among serpents and into dangerous places, and every tree shook as with alarm, and the wind was full of fear. We now see that light is in heaven only, and rest in truth, and peace in faith, and joy in purity; thou hast scourged out of us our old vanities and misleading sophisms and false expectations, and now we see where the garden of the Lord is, and that it opens but at one place, and with one key Jesus, Son of Mary, Son of man, Son of God. We pray for the friends we love, and without whom we could not live the hearts we look for, the travellers we expect with joy, the souls that light every room of the house with tender glory; for our friends who are far away, across the great sea, in the colonies wanderers in places they have not yet known. We pray for those in trouble on the sea that great and terrible waste. We pray for all who are visiting us from distant places: may they feel at home; may there be some touch in thy house that they shall recognise with ardent love and thankfulness. We pray for our sick ones: some nigh unto death; some are sick of body weary, utterly exhausted: the grasshopper is a burden; others are ailing in mind: they are disappointed, they are mortified, they have not found what they expected: they dug in earth that they might find heaven, and, lo, heaven was not there. We pray for those whose graves are quite new, for the grass has not yet had time to grow upon them, there is not a flower upon the mould that hides the dead; be thou the resurrection and the life in the hearts of such, and make them glad even in the churchyard: turn that last resting-place into a garden of flowers, and make it a place where they will keep appointments with those who from death would learn how to live. The Lord be with us now; and we need no other presence. Amen.
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