1 Chronicles 22:14

"Handfuls of Purpose,"

For All Gleaners

"Now, behold, in my trouble I have prepared for the house of the Lord an hundred thousand talents of gold, and a thousand thousand talents of silver; and of brass and iron without weight; for it is in abundance: timber also and stone have I prepared; and thou mayest add thereto." 1 Chronicles 22:14 .

For the word "trouble" the margin reads "poverty." One commentator reads, "by my strenuous labour I have prepared;" another, "by my toil or pains I have prepared." In all these senses there is pathetic meaning. Say that David prepared out of his poverty, which of course would in his case be a relative term, we have here the spirit of sacrifice. Say that he prepared by strenuous labour, here is an acceptable spirit of complete devotedness. Say that it was by toil and pain that he brought the preparation to an end, here we have that self-denial without which there can be no real piety We must not measure David's words literally; an hundred thousand talents of gold, and a thousand thousand talents of silver, are terms we cannot accurately estimate. According to the value of the post-Babylonian Hebrew talent, the gold here spoken of has been calculated to be worth more than a thousand millions of English pounds sterling, and the silver has been calculated to be worth more than four hundred millions. Do not regard these as arithmetical sums; look upon them as indicating that nothing had been spared, nothing had been withheld in the service of the house of the Lord. Why will men be so literal in reading the divine word? The literalist has never made the Bible a book of music and light and true help to the soul. We must bring something other than grammar to bear upon the interpretation of the divine word. From the very beginning of the book, time is treated with indifference, and words are used with a largeness of meaning to which we have become accustomed after long and profound reading of the book itself. Throughout the Bible this spirit of expansiveness of thought prevails. So we return to the doctrine that we find the Bible within the Bible, and again and again is proved the utter worthlessness of words as exhaustive symbols. "Passeth understanding" must be our comment upon many a passage, and yet although we cannot understand in an intellectual sense, we can understand as it were emotionally, our whole soul rising in noble rapture in response to sacred appeals, to heavenly music, to calls which can reach the heart without the medium of words. How anxious was David to build a house for the Lord! How willingly and with what ineffable gladness Solomon devoted himself to the execution of his father's will, and how through all the human planning and preparing there runs a divine decree, the very call of God from heaven! Is not all this predictive of the uprearing of a temple not made with hands? Is not God himself the great temple builder? What are we but hewers of wood and drawers of water? Squaring the stones, preparing the gold and the silver; yet at the last the servant shall be as his Lord, and they who have toiled faithfully, lovingly, self-sacrificingly, shall not be denied a place of honour in the eternal temple.