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Expositions of Holy Scripture

A >> Alexander Maclaren >> Expositions of Holy Scripture




So, looking at life in the light of Christ, we have to give new
contents to the two words 'good' and 'evil,' and a new meaning to the
two words 'for' and 'against.' And when we do that, then the
difficulties straighten themselves out, and there are not any more
knots, but all is plain; and the old faith of the Old Testament, which
reposed very largely upon abnormal and extraordinary conditions of
life, comes back in a still nobler form, as possible to be held by us
amidst the commonplace of our daily existence.

For everything is my friend, is for me and not against me, that helps
me nearer to God. To live for Him, to live with Him, to be conscious
ever of communion with Himself, to feel the touch of His hand on my
hand, and the pressure of His breast against mine, at all moments of my
life, is my true and the highest good. And if it is true that the
'river of the water of life' which 'flows from the Throne of God' is
the only draught that can ever satisfy the immortal thirst of a soul,
then whatever drives me away from the cisterns and to the fountain, is
on my side. Better to dwell in a 'dry and thirsty land, where no water
is,' if it makes me long for the water that rises at the gate of the
true Bethlehem--the house of bread--than to dwell in a land flowing
with milk and honey, and well watered in every part! If the cup that I
would fain lift to my lips has poison in it, or if its sweetness is
making me lose my relish for the pure and tasteless river that flows
from the Throne of God, there can be no truer friend than that
calamity, as men call it, which strikes the cup from my hands, and
shivers the glass before I have raised it to my lips. Everything is my
friend that helps me towards God.

Everything is my friend that leads me to submission and obedience. The
joy of life, and the perfection of human nature, is an absolutely
submitted will, identified with the divine, both in regard to doing and
to enduring. And whatever tends to make my will flexible, so that it
corresponds to all the sinuosities, so to speak, of the divine will,
and fits into all its bends and turns, is a blessing to me. Raw hides,
stiff with dirt and blood, are put into a bath of bitter infusion of
oak-bark. What for? For the same end as, when they are taken out, they
are scraped with sharp steels,--that they may become flexible. When
that is done the useless hide is worth something.

'Our wills are ours, we know not how;
Our wills are ours, to make them Thine.'

And whatever helps me to that is my friend.

Everything is a friend to the man that loves God, in a far sweeter and
deeper sense than it can ever be to any other. Like a sudden burst of
sunshine upon a gloomy landscape, the light of union with God and
friendship with Him flooding my daily life flashes it all up into
brightness. The dark ribbon of the river that went creeping through the
black copses, when the sun glints upon it, gleams up into links of
silver, and the trees by its bank blaze out into green and gold.
Brethren! 'Who follows pleasure follows pain'; who follows God finds
pleasure following him. There can be no surer way to set the world
against me than to try to make it for me, and to make it my all They
tell us that if you want to count those stars that 'like a swarm of
fire-flies tangled in a silver braid' make up the Pleiades, the surest
way to see the greatest number of them is to look a little on one side
of them. Look away from the joys and friendships of creatural things
right up to God, and you will see these sparkling and dancing in the
skies, as you never see them when you gaze at them only. Make them
second and they are good and on your side. Make them first, and they
will turn to be your enemies and fight against you.

This conviction will be established still more irrefragably and
wonderfully in that future. Nothing lasts but goodness. 'He that doeth
the will of God abideth for ever.' To oppose it is like stretching a
piece of pack-thread across the rails before the express comes; or
putting up some thin wooden partition on the beach on one of the
Western Hebrides, exposed to the whole roll of the Atlantic, which will
be battered into ruin by the first winter's storm. Such is the end of
all those who set themselves against God.

But there comes a future in which, as dim hints tell us, these texts of
ours shall receive a fulfilment beyond that realised in the present
condition of things. 'Then comes the statelier Eden back to man,' and
in a renewed and redeemed earth 'they shall not hurt nor destroy in all
My holy mountain'; and the ancient story will be repeated in higher
form. The servants shall be like the Lord who, when He had conquered
temptation, 'was with the wild beasts' that forgot their enmity, and
'angels ministered unto Him.' That scene in the desert may serve as a
prophecy of the future when, under conditions of which we know nothing,
all God's servants shall, even more markedly and manifestly than here,
help each other; and every man that loves God will find a friend in
every creature.

If we take Him for our Commander, and enlist ourselves in that
embattled host, then all weathers will be good; 'stormy winds,
fulfilling His word,' will blow us to our port; 'the wilderness will
rejoice and blossom as the rose'; and the whole universe will be
radiant with the light of His presence, and ringing with the music of
His voice. But if we elect to join the other army--for there is another
army, and men have wills that enable them to lift themselves up against
God, the Ruler of all things--then the old story, from which my first
text is taken, will fulfil itself again in regard to us--'the stars in
their courses will fight against' us; and Sisera, lying stiff and
stark, with Jael's tent-peg through his temples, and the swollen
corpses being swirled down to the stormy sea by 'that ancient river,
the river Kishon,' will be a grim parable of the end of the men that
set themselves against God, and so have the universe against them.
'Choose ye this day whom ye will serve.'




LOVE MAKES SUNS
'Let them that love Him be as the sun when he goeth forth in his might.'
JUDGES V. 51.


These are the closing words of Deborah, the great warrior-prophetess of
Israel. They are in singular contrast with the tone of fierce
enthusiasm for battle which throbs through the rest of the chant, and
with its stern approval of the deed of Jael when she slew Sisera. Here,
in its last notes, we have an anticipation of the highest and best
truths of the Gospel. 'Let them that love Him be as the sun when he
goeth forth in His might.' If we think of the singer, of the age and
the occasion of the song, such purely spiritual, lofty words must seem
very remarkable.

I. Note, then, first of all, how here we have a penetrating insight
into the essence of religion.

This woman had been nourished upon a more or less perfect edition of
what we know as the 'Mosaic Law.' Her faith had been fed by forms. She
moved amidst a world full of the cruelties and dark conceptions of a
mysterious divine power which torture heathenism apart from
Christianity. She had forced her way through all that, and laid hold of
the vital centre. And there, a way out amidst cruelty and murder,
amidst the unutterable abominations and terrors of heathenism, in the
centre of a rigid system of ceremonial and retaliation, the woman's
heart spoke out, and taught her what was the great commandment.
Prophetess she was, fighter she was, she could burst into triumphant
approval of Jael's bloody deed; and yet with the same lips could speak
this profound word. She had learned that 'Thou shalt _love_ the
Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all
thy strength, and with all thy mind,' summed up all duty, and was the
beginning of all good in man. That precept found an echo in her heart.
Whatever part in her religious development may have been played by the
externalisms of ceremonial, she had pierced to the core of religion.
Advanced modern critics admit the antiquity of Deborah's song, and this
closing stanza witnesses to the existence, at that early period, of a
highly spiritual conception of the bond between God and man. Deborah
had got as far, in a moment of exaltation and insight, as the teaching
of the Apostle John, although her thought was strangely blended with
the fierceness of the times in which she lived. Her approval of Jael's
deed by no means warrants our approving it, but we may thankfully see
that though she felt the fierce throbbing of desire for vengeance, she
also felt this--'Them that _love_ Him; that is the Alpha and the
Omega of all.'

Our love must depend on our knowledge. Deborah's knowledge was a mere
skeleton outline as compared with ours. Contrast the fervour of
emotional affection that manifestly throbbed in her heart with the
poor, cold pulsations which we dignify by the name of love, and the
contrast may put us to shame. There is a religion of fear which
dominates hundreds of professing Christians in this land of ours. There
is a religion of duty, in which there is no delight, which has many
adherents amongst us. There is a religion of form, which contents
itself with the externals of Christianity, and that is the religion of
many men and women in all our churches. And I may further say, there is
a religion of faith, in its narrower and imperfect sense, which lays
hold of and believes a body of Christian truth, and has never passed
through faith into love. Not he who 'believes that God is,' and comes
to Him with formal service and an alienated or negligent heart; not he
who recognises the duty of worship, and discharges it because his
conscience pricks him, but has no buoyancy within bearing him upwards
towards the object of his love; not he who cowers before the dark
shadow which some call God; but he who, knowing, trusts, and who,
knowing and trusting 'the love which God hath to us,' pulses back the
throbs of a recipient heart, and loves Him in return--he, and he only,
is a worshipper. Let us learn the lesson that Deborah learnt below the
palm-trees of Lapidoth, and if we want to understand what a religious
man is, recognise that he is a man who loves God.

II. Further, note the grand conception of the character which such a
love produces.

'Let them be as the sun when he goeth forth in his might.' Think of the
fierce Eastern sun, with 'sunbeams like swords,' that springs up from
the East, and rushes to the zenith, and 'nothing is hid from the heat
thereof'--a sun the like of which we, in our cloudy skies, never see
nor feel, but which, to the Oriental, is the very emblem of splendour
and of continuous, victorious power. There are two things here,
radiance and energy, light and might.

'As the sun when he goeth forth in his strength.' Deborah was a
'prophetess,' and people say, 'What did she prophesy?' Well, she
prophesied the heart of religion--as I have tried to show--in reference
to its essence, and, as one sees by this phrase, in reference to its
effects. What is her word but a partial anticipation of Christ's
saying, 'Ye are the light of the world'; and of His disciple's
utterance, 'Ye were sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the
Lord: walk as children of light'?

It is too plain to need any talking about, that the direct tendency of
what we venture to call love to God, meaning thereby the turning of the
whole nature to Him, in aspiration, admiration, longing for likeness,
and practical imitation, is to elevate, ennoble, and illuminate the
whole character. It was said about one woman that 'to love her was an
education.' That was exaggeration; but it is below the truth about God.
The true way to refine and elevate and educate is to cultivate love to
God. And when we get near to Him, and hold by Him, and are continually
occupied with Him; when our being is one continual aspiration after
union with Him, and we experience the glow and rapture included in the
simple word 'love,' then it cannot but be that we shall be like Him.

That is what Paul meant when he said, 'Now are ye light in the Lord.'
Union with Him illuminates. The true radiance of saintly character will
come in the measure in which we are in fellowship with Jesus Christ.
Deborah's astronomy was not her strong point. The sun shines by its own
light. We are planets, and are darkness in ourselves, and it is only
the reflection of the central sun that ever makes us look silvery white
and radiant before men. But though it be derived, it is none the less
our light, if it has passed into us, as it surely will, and if it
streams out from us, as it no less surely will, in the measure in which
love to God dominates our whole lives.

If that is so, dear brethren, is not the shortest and the surest way to
have our faces shining like that of Moses when he came down from the
mountain, or like Stephen's when he 'saw the heavens opened,' to keep
near Jesus Christ? It is slow work to hammer bits of ore out of the
rock with a chisel and a mallet. Throw the whole mass into the furnace,
and the metal will come out separated from the dross. Get up the heat,
and the light, which is the consequence of the heat, will take care of
itself. 'In the Lord' ye shall be 'light.'

Is Deborah's aspiration fulfilled about me? Let each of us ask that.
'As the sun when he goeth forth in his strength'--would anybody say
that about my Christian character? Why not? Only because the springs
have run low within is the stream low through the meadows. Only because
the love is cold is the light feeble.

There is another thought here. There is power in sunlight as well as
radiance. On that truth the prophetess especially lays a finger; 'as
the sun when he goeth forth in his _strength_.' She did not know
what we know, that solar energy is the source of all energy on this
earth, and that, just as in the deepest spiritual analysis 'there is no
power but of God,' so in the material region we may say that the only
force is the force of the sun, which not only stimulates vegetation and
brings light and warmth--as the pre-scientific prophetess knew--but in
a hundred other ways, unknown to her and known to modern science, is
the author of all change, the parent of all life, and the reservoir of
all energy.

So we come to this thought: The true love of God is no weak,
sentimental thing, such as narrow and sectional piety has often
represented it to be, but it is a power which will invigorate the whole
of a man, and make him strong and manly as well as gentle and gracious;
being, indeed, the parent of all the so-called heroic and of all the
so-called saintly virtues.

The sun 'goeth forth in his strength,' rushing through the heavens to
the zenith. As one of the other editions of this metaphor in the Old
Testament has it, 'The path of the just is as the shining light, that
shineth more and more until the noontide of the day.' That light,
indeed, declines, but that fact does not come into view in the metaphor
of the progressive growth towards perfection of the man in whom is the
all-conquering might of the true love of Jesus Christ.

Note the context of these words of our text, which, I said, presents so
singular a contrast to them. It is a strange thing that so fierce a
battle-chant should at the end settle down into such a sweet swan-song
as this. It is a strange thing that in the same soul there should throb
the delight in battle and almost the delight in murder, and these lofty
thoughts. But let us learn the lesson that true love to God means
hearty hatred of God's enemy, and that it will always have to be
militant and sometimes stern and what people call fierce. Amidst the
amenities and sentimentalities of modern life there is much necessity
for remembering that the Apostle of love was a 'son of thunder,' and
that it was the lips which summoned Israel to the fight, and chanted
hymns of triumph over the corpses borne down by the rushing Kishon,
which also said: 'Let them that love Him be as the sun when he shineth
forth in his strength.' If you love God, you will surely be a strong
man as well as an emotional and affectionate Christian.

That energy is to be continuous and progressive. The sun that Deborah
saw day by day spring from his station in the east, and climb to his
height in the heavens, and ray down his beams, has been doing that for
millions of years, and it will probably keep doing it for uncounted
periods still. And so the Christian man, with continuity unbroken and
progressive brilliance and power, should shine 'more and more till the
unsetting noontide of the day.'

III. That brings me to the last thought, which passes beyond the limits
of the prophetess' vision. Here is a prophecy of which the utterer was
unaware.

There is a contrast drawn in the words of our text and in those
immediately preceding. "So," says Deborah, after the fierce description
of the slaughter of Sisera--'So let all Thine enemies perish, O Lord!
but let them that love Thee be as the sun when he shineth in his
strength.' She contrasts the transiency of the lives that pit
themselves against God with the perpetuity that belongs to those which
are in harmony with Him. The truth goes further than she probably knew;
certainly further than she was thinking when she chanted these words.
Let us widen them by other words which use the same metaphor, and say,
'they that be wise'--that is a shallower word than 'them that love
Thee'--'they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the
firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for
ever and ever.' Let us widen and deepen them by sacreder words still;
for Jesus Christ laid hold of this old metaphor, and said, describing
the time when all the enemies shall have perished, and the weeds have
been flung out of the vineyard, 'Then shall the righteous shine forth
like the sun, in the Kingdom of their Father,' with a brilliancy that
will fill heaven with new splendours, bright beyond all that we see
here amidst the thick atmosphere and mists and clouds of the present
life!

Nor need we stop even there, for Jesus Christ not only laid hold of
this metaphor in order to describe the eternal glory of the children of
the Kingdom, but at the last time that human eyes on earth saw Him, the
glorified Man Christ Jesus is thus described: 'His countenance was as
the sun shineth in his strength.' Love always tends to likeness; and
love to Christ will bring conformity with Him. The perfect love of
heaven will issue in perfect and perpetual assimilation to Him. Science
tells us that the light of the sun probably comes from its contraction;
and that that process of contraction will go on until, at some point
within the bounds of time, though far beyond the measure of our
calculations, the sun himself shall die, the ineffectual beams will be
paled, and there will be a black orb, with neither life nor light nor
power. And then, then, and after that for ever, 'they that love Him'
shall continue to be as that dead sun once was, when he went forth in
his hot might.




GIDEON'S ALTAR

'Then Gideon built an altar there unto the Lord, and called it Jehovah-
shalom [God is peace].'--JUDGES vi. 24.


I need not tell over again, less vividly, the picturesque story in this
chapter, of the simple husbandman up in the hills, engaged furtively in
threshing out a little wheat in some hollow in the rock where he might
hide it from the keen eyes of the oppressors; and of how the angel of
the Lord, unrecognised at first, appeared to him; and gradually there
dawned upon his mind the suspicion of who He was who spoke. Then follow
the offering, the discovery by fire, the shrinking of the man from
contact with the divine, the wonderfully tranquillizing and
condescending assurance, cast into the form of the ordinary salutation
of domestic life: 'And the Lord said unto him Peace be unto thee!'--as
any man might have said to any other--'fear not! thou shalt not die.'
Then Gideon piles up the unhewn stones on the hillside into a rude
altar, apparently not for the purpose of offering sacrifice, but for a
monument, to which is given this strange name, strange upon such
warrior lips, and strange in contemplation of the fierce conflict into
which he was immediately to plunge, 'the Lord is peace.'

How I think that this name, imposed for such a reason and under such
circumstances, may teach us a good many things.

I. The first thing that it seems to me to suggest is the great
discovery which this man had made, and in the rapture of which he named
his altar,--that the sight of God is _not_ death, but life and
peace.

Gideon was a plain, rude man, with no very deep religious experience.
Apparently up to the moment of this vision he had been contentedly
tolerating the idolatrous practices which had spread over all the
country. He had heard of 'Jehovah.' It was a name, a tradition, which
his fathers had told him. That was all that he knew of the God of
Israel. Into this hearsay religion, as in a flash, while Gideon is busy
about his threshing floor, thinking of his wheat or of the misery of
his nation, there comes, all at once, this crushing conviction,--'the
_hearsay_ God is beside you, speaking to you! You have personal
relations to Him, He is nearer you than any human being is, He is no
mere Name, here He stands!'

And whenever the lightning edge of a conviction like that cuts its way
through the formalisms and traditionalisms and hearsay repetitions of
conventional religion, then there comes what came to Gideon, the swift
thought, 'And if this be true, if I really do touch, and am touched by,
that living Person whose name is Jehovah, what is to become of me?
Shall I not shrivel up when His fiery finger is laid upon me? I have
seen Him face to face, and I must die.'

I believe that, in the case of the vast majority of men, the first
living, real apprehension of a real, living God is accompanied with a
shock, and has mingled with it something of awe, and even of terror.
Were there no sin there would be no fear, and pure hearts would open in
silent blessedness and yield their sweetest fragrance of love and
adoration, when shone on by Him, as flowers do to the kiss of the
sunbeams. But, taking into account the sad and universal fact of sin,
it is inevitable that men should shrink from the Light which reveals
their evil, and that the consciousness of God's presence should strike
a chill. It is sad that it should be so. But it is sadder still when it
is not so, but when, as is sometimes the case, the sight of God
produces no sense of sin, and no consciousness of discord, or
foreboding of judgment. For, only through that valley of the shadow of
death lies the path to the happy confidence of peace with God, and
unless there has been trembling at the beginning, there will be no firm
and reasonable trust afterwards.

For Gideon's terror opened the way for the gracious proclamation, which
would have been needless but for it--'Peace be unto thee; fear not,
thou shalt not die.'

The sight of God passes from being a fear to a joy, from being a
fountain of death to a spring of life, Terror is turned to tranquil
trust. The narrow and rough path of conscious unworthiness leads to the
large place of happy peace. The divine word fits Gideon's condition,
and corresponds to his then deepest necessity; and so he drinks it in
as the thirsty ground drinks in the water; and in the rapture of the
discovery that the Name, that had come down from his fathers to him,
was the Name of a real Person, with whom he stood in real
relationships, and those of simple friendship and pure amity, he piles
up the rough stones of the place, and makes the name of his altar the
echo of the divine voice. It is as if he had said with rapture of
surprise, 'Then Jehovah _is_ peace; which I never dreamed of
before.'

Dear friends, do you know anything of such an experience? Can you build
your altar, and give it this same name? Can you write upon the memorial
of your experiences, 'The Lord is my peace'? Have you passed from
hearsay into personal contact? Can you say, 'I have heard of Thee by
the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth Thee'? Do you know the
further experience expressed in the subsequent words of the same
quotation: 'Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes'?
And have you passed out of that stormy ocean of terror and self-
condemnation into the quiet haven of trust in Him in whom we have peace
with God, where your little boat lies quiet, moored for ever to the
Rock of Ages, to 'Jehovah, who is Peace'?

In connection with this rapturous discovery, and to Gideon strange new
thought, we may gather the lesson that peace with God will give peace
in all the soul. The 'peace with God' will pass into a wider thing, the
'peace of God.' There is tranquillity in trust. There is rest in
submission. There is repose in satisfied desires. When we live near
Him, and have ceased from our own works, and let Him take control of us
and direct us in all our ways, then the storms abate. The things that
disturb us are by no means so much external as inward; and there is a
charm and a fascination in the thought, 'the Lord is peace,' which
stills the inward tempest, and makes us quiet, waiting upon His will
and drawing in His grace. The secret of rest is to cease from self,
from self as guide, from self as aim, from self as safety. And when
self-will is cast out, and self-dependence is overcome, and self-
reliance is sublimed into hanging upon God's hand, and when He, not
mine own inclination, is my Director, and the Arbiter of my fate, then
all the fever of unrest is swept wholly out of my heart, and there is
nothing left in it on which the gnawing tooth of anxiety or of care can
prey. God being my peace, and I yielding myself to Him, 'in quietness
and confidence' is my 'strength.' 'Thou shalt keep him in perfect peace
whose mind is stayed upon Thee, because he trusteth in Thee.'

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