1 Chronicles 22:2

"Handfuls of Purpose,"

For All Gleaners

"And David commanded to gather together the strangers that were in the land of Israel; and he set masons to hew wrought stones to build the house of God." 1 Chronicles 22:2 .

The "strangers" are the aliens. We read of them in 1 Kings 9:20-21 , "And all the people that were left of the Amorites, Hittites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites, which were not of the children of Israel, their children that were left after them in the land, whom the children of Israel also were not able utterly to destroy, upon those did Solomon levy a tribute of bondservice unto this day." There is a very pathetic expression in this account of the strangers, "whom the children of Israel also were not able utterly to destroy." Was not the destruction only partial in order to realise a divine providence? Would not such strangers or aliens be useful in the building of the temple? Whom we are not able to destroy we may be able to employ in holy service, is a doctrine which is not applicable to persons only, but has a distinct reference to emotions, passions, impulses, and sympathies. We are to hold ourselves in bondage, and often we are to drive ourselves to forced labour, and to become hewers of wood and stone, bearers of burdens, and indeed slaves to our higher manhood. David did not hesitate to reckon the Canaanite serfs in the census which he took of the people. In taking the census of a nation we do not only count the king, the statesmen, the military officers, and men of similar rank and position; we count down, even to young children; yea, we do not exclude the cradle itself when we number the people. There is a higher as well as a lower census. For civil and military purposes the infant is of no account, but the statesman looks not at the infant as he is to-day, but at the man as he will be in due process of time. The magistrate counts life, not years only. He says the nation is strong to such and such an extent, because he counts the little as well as the great. A man should take a census of himself in the same way; he is not all genius, intellect, might, faculty; he has his peculiarities, infirmities, his germs of power, his beginnings and possibilities of strength; all this he should reckon when he takes a census of himself, and in reckoning even the least of his elements and faculties he should regard them not as they immediately are, but as what they are in possibility under rightly-accepted divine training.