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Expositions of Holy Scripture

A >> Alexander Maclaren >> Expositions of Holy Scripture




So we may be bold in the march, and draw upon our stock of strength to
the utmost. There is no fear that it will fail us. We may put all our
force into our work, we shall not weaken the power which 'by reason of
use is exercised,' not exhausted. For the grace which Christ gives us
to serve Him, being divine, is subject to no weariness, and neither
faints nor fails. The bush that burned unconsumed is a type of that
Infinite Being who works unexhausted, and lives undying, after all
expenditure is rich, after all pouring forth is full. And of His
strength we partake.

Whensoever a man puts forth an effort of any kind whatever--when I
speak, when I lift my hand, when I run, when I think-there is waste of
muscular tissue. Some of my strength goes in the act, and thus every
effort means expenditure and diminution of force. Hence weariness that
needs sleep, waste that needs food, languor that needs rest. We belong
to an order of being in which work is death, in regard to our physical
nature; but our spirits may lay hold of God, and enter into an order of
things in which work is not death, nor effort exhaustion, nor is there
loss of power in the expenditure of power.

That sounds strange, and yet it is not strange. Think of that electric
light which is made by directing a strong stream upon two small pieces
of carbon. As the electricity strikes upon these and turns their
blackness into a fiery blaze, it eats away their substance while it
changes them into light. But there is an arrangement in the lamp by
which a fresh surface is continually being brought into the path of the
beam, and so the light continues without wavering and blazes on. The
carbon is our human nature, black and dull in itself; the electric beam
is the swift energy of God, which makes us 'light in the Lord.' For the
one, decay is the end of effort; for the other, there is none. 'Though
our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.'
Though we belong to the perishing order of nature by our bodily frame,
we belong to the undecaying realm of grace by the spirit that lays hold
upon God. And if our work weary us, as it must do so long as we
continue here, yet in the deepest sanctuary of our being, our strength
is greatened by exercise. 'Thy shoes shall be iron and brass.' 'Thy
raiment waxed not old upon thee, neither did thy foot swell, these
forty years.' 'Stand, therefore, having your feet shod with the
preparedness of the Gospel of peace.'

But this is not all. There is an advance even upon these great promises
in the closing words. That second clause of our text says more than the
first one. 'Thy shoes shall be iron and brass,' that promises us powers
and provision adapted to, and unexhausted by, the weary pilgrimage and
rough road of life. But 'as thy days, so shall thy strength be,' says
even more than that. The meaning of the word rendered 'strength' in our
version is very doubtful, and most modern translators are inclined to
render it 'rest.' But if we adhere to the translation of our version,
we get a forcible and relevant promise, which fits on well to the
previous clause, understood as it has been in my previous remarks. The
usual understanding of the words is 'strength proportioned to thy day,'
an idea which we have found already suggested by the previous clause.
But that explanation rests on, or at any rate derives support from, the
common misquotation of the words. They are not, as we generally hear
them quoted, 'As thy day, so shall thy strength be,'--but 'day' is in
the plural, and that makes a great difference. 'As thy days, so shall
thy strength be,' that is to say: the two sums--of 'thy days' and of
'thy strength'--keep growing side by side, the one as fast as the other
and no faster. The days increase. Well, what then? The strength
increases too. As I said, we are allied to two worlds. According to the
law of one of them, the outer world of physical life, we soon reach the
summit of human strength. For a little while it is true, even in the
life of nature, that our power grows with our days. But we soon reach
the watershed, and then the opposite comes to be true. Down, steadily
down, we go. With diminishing power, with diminishing vitality, with a
dimmer eye, with an obtuser ear, with a slower-beating heart, with a
feebler frame, we march on and on to our grave. 'As thy days, so shall
thy weakness be,' is the law for all of us mature men and women in
regard to our outward life.

But, dear brethren, we may be emancipated from that dreary law in
regard to the true life of our spirits, and instead of growing weaker
as we grow older, we may and we should grow stronger. We may be and we
should be moving on a course that has no limit to its advance. We may
be travelling on a shining path through the heavens, that has no noon-
tide height from which it must slowly and sadly decline, but tends
steadily and for ever upwards, nearer and nearer to the very fountain
itself of heavenly radiance. 'The path of the just is as the shining
light, which shineth more and more till the noon-tide of the day.' But
the reality surpasses even that grand thought, for it discloses to us
an endless approximation to an infinite beauty, and an ever-growing
possession of never exhausted fulness, as the law for the progress of
all Christ's servants. The life of each of us may and should be
continual accession and increase of power through all the days here,
through all the ages beyond. Why? Because 'the life which I live, I
live by the faith of the Son of God.' Christ liveth in me. It is not my
strength that grows, so much as God's strength in me which is given
more abundantly as the days roll. It is so given on one condition. If
my faith has laid hold of the infinite, the exhaustless, the immortal
energy of God, unless there is something fearfully wrong about me, I
shall be becoming purer, nobler, wiser, more observant of His will,
gentler, liker Christ, every way fitter for His service, and for larger
service, as the days increase.

Those of us who have reached middle life, or perhaps gone a little over
the watershed, ought to have this experience as our own in a very
distinct degree. The years that are past ought to have drawn us
somewhat away from our hot pursuing after earthly and perishable
things. They should have added something to the clearness and
completeness of our perception of the deep simplicity of God's gospel.
They should have tightened our hold and increased our possession of
Christ, and unfolded more and more of His all-sufficiency. They should
have enriched us with memories of God's loving care, and lighted all
the sky behind with a glow which is reflected on the path before us,
and kindles calm confidence in His unfailing goodness. They should have
given us power and skill for the conflicts that yet remain, as the Red
Indians believe that the strength of every defeated and scalped enemy
passes into his conqueror's arm. They should have given force to our
better nature, and weakening, progressive weakening, to our worse. They
should have rooted us more firmly and abidingly in Him from whom all
our power comes, and so have given us more and fuller supplies of His
exhaustless and ever-flowing might.

So it may be with us if we abide in Him, without whom we are nothing,
but partaking of whose strength 'the weakest shall be as David, and
David as an angel of God.'

If for us, drawing nearer to the end is drawing nearer to the light,
our faces will be brightened more and more with that light which we
approach, and our path will be 'as the shining light which shines more
and more unto the noon-tide of the day,' because we are closer to the
very fountain of heavenly radiance, and growingly bathed and flooded
with the outgoings of His glory. 'As thy days, so shall thy strength
be.'

The promise ought to be true for us all. It _is_ true for all who
use the things that are freely given to them of God. And whilst thus it
is the law for the devout life here, its most glorious fulfilment
remains for the life beyond. There each new moment shall bring new
strength, and growing millenniums but add fresh vigour to our immortal
life. Here the unresting beat of the waves of the sea of time gnaws
away the bank and shoal whereon we stand, but there each roll of the
great ocean of eternity shall but spread new treasures at our feet and
add new acres to our immortal heritage. 'The oldest angels,' says
Swedenborg, 'look the youngest.' When life is immortal, the longer it
lasts the stronger it becomes, and so the spirits that have stood for
countless days before His throne, when they appear to human eyes,
appear as--'young men clothed in long white garments,'--full of unaging
youth and energy that cannot wane. So, whilst in the flesh we must obey
the law of decay, the spirit may be subject to this better law of life,
and 'while the outward man perisheth, the inward man be renewed day by
day.' 'Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men
shall utterly fall; but they that wait on the Lord shall renew their
strength.'




A DEATH IN THE DESERT

'So Moses the servant of the Lord died there in the land of Moab,
according to the word of the Lord. 6. And he buried him in a valley in
the land of Moab, ... but no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this
day.'--DEUT. xxxiv.5, 6.


A fitting end to such a life! The great law-giver and leader had been
all his days a lonely man; and now, surrounded by a new generation, and
all the old familiar faces vanished, he is more solitary than ever. He
had lived alone with God, and it was fitting that alone with God he
should die.

How the silent congregation must have watched, as, alone, with 'natural
strength unabated,' he breasted the mountain, and went up to be seen no
more! With dignified reticence our chapter tells us no details. He
'died there,' in that dreary solitude, and in some cleft he was buried,
and no man knows where. The lessons of that solitary death and unknown
tomb may best be learned by contrast with another death and another
grave--those of the Leader of the New Covenant, the Law-giver and
Deliverer from a worse bondage, and Guide into a better Canaan, the Son
who was faithful over His own house, as Moses was 'faithful in all his
house, as a servant.' That lonely and forgotten grave among the savage
cliffs was in keeping with the whole character and work of him who lay
there.

Here,--here's his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form,
Lightnings are loosened,
Stars come and go! Let joy break with the storm,
Peace let the dew send!
Lofty designs must close in like effects; Loftily lying,
Leave him--still loftier than the world suspects,
Living and dying.'

Contrast that grave with the sepulchre in the garden where Jesus lay,
close by a city wall, guarded by foes, haunted by troops of weeping
friends, visited by a great light of angel faces. The one was hidden
and solitary, as teaching the loneliness and mystery of death; the
other revealed light in the darkness, and companionship in the
loneliness. The one faded from men's memory because it was nothing to
any man; no impulses, nor hopes, nor gifts, could come from it. The
other forever draws hearts and memories, because in it was wrought out
the victory in which all our hopes are rooted. An endured cross, an
empty grave, an occupied throne, are as the threefold cord on which all
our hopes hang. Moses was solitary as God's servant in life and death,
and oblivion covered his mountain grave. Christ's 'delights were with
the sons of men.' He lived among them, and all men 'know his sepulchre
to this day.'

I. Note, then, first, as a lesson gathered from this lonely death, the
penalty of transgression.

One of the great truths which the old law and ordinances given by Moses
were intended to burn in on the conscience of the Jew, and through him
on the conscience of the world, was that indissoluble connection
between evil done and evil suffered, which reaches its highest
exemplification in the death which is the 'wages of sin.' And just as
some men that have invented instruments for capital punishment have
themselves had to prove the sharpness of their own axe, so the
lawgiver, whose message it had been to declare, 'the soul that sinneth
it shall die,' had himself to go up alone to the mountain-top to
receive in his own person the exemplification of the law that had been
spoken by his own lips. He sinned when, in a moment of passion (with
many palliations and excuses), he smote the rock that he was bidden to
address, and forgot therein, and in his angry words to the rebels, that
he was only an instrument in the divine hand. It was a momentary
wavering in a hundred and twenty years of obedience. It was one failure
in a life of self-abnegation and suppression. The stern sentence came.

People say, 'A heavy penalty for a small offence.' Yes; but an offence
of Moses could not be a small offence.' _Noblesse oblige!_ The
higher a man rises in communion with God, and the more glorious the
message and office which are put into his hands, the more intolerable
in him is the slightest deflection from the loftiest level. A splash of
mud, that would never be seen on a navvy's clothes, stains the white
satin of a bride or the embroidered garment of a noble. And so a little
sin done by a loftily endowed and inspired man ceases to be small.

Nor are we to regard that momentary lapse only from the outside and the
surface. One little mark under the armpit of a plague-sufferer tells
the physician that the fatal disease is there. A tiny leaf above ground
may tell that, deep below, lurks the root of a poison plant. That
little deflection, coming as it did at the beginning of the resumption
of his functions by the Lawgiver after seven-and-thirty years of
comparative abeyance, and on his first encounter with the new
generation that he had to lead, was a very significant indication that
his character had begun to yield and suffer from the strain that had
been put upon it; and that, in fact, he was scarcely fit for the
responsibilities that the new circumstances brought. So the penalty was
not so disproportionate to the fault as it may seem.

And was the penalty such a very great one? Do you think that a man who
had been toiling for eighty years at a very thankless task would
consider it a very severe punishment to be told, 'Go home and take your
wages'? It did not mean the withdrawal of the divine favour. 'Moses and
Aaron among his priests. ... Thou wast a God that forgavest them,
though Thou tookest vengeance of their inventions.' The penalty of a
forgiven sin is never hard to bear, and the penalty of a forgiven sin
is very often punctually and mercifully exacted.

But still we are not to ignore the fact that this lonely death, with
which we are now concerned, is of the nature of a penal infliction. And
so it stands forth in consonance with the whole tone of the Mosaic
teaching. I admit, of course, that the mere physical fact of the
separation between body and spirit is simply the result of natural law.
But that is not the death that you and I know. Death as we know it, the
ugly thing that flings its long shadows across all life, and that comes
armed with terrors for conscience and spirit, is 'the wages of sin,'
and is only experienced by men who have transgressed the law of God. So
far Moses in his life and in his death carries us--that no
transgression escapes the appropriate punishment; that the smallest sin
has in it the seeds of mortal consequences; that the loftiest saint
does not escape the law of retribution.

And no further does Moses with his Law and his death carry us. But we
turn to the other death. And there we find the confirmation, in an
eminent degree, of that Law, and yet the repeal of it. It is confirmed
and exhausted in Jesus Christ. His death was 'the wages of sin.' Whose?
Not His. Mine, yours, every man's. And because He died, surrounded by
men, outside the old city wall, pure and sinless in Himself, He therein
both said 'Amen' to the Law of Moses, and swept it away. For all the
sins of the world were laid upon His head, He bore the curse for us
all, and has emptied the bitter cup which men's transgressions have
mingled. Therefore the solitary death in the desert proclaims 'the
wages of sin'; that death outside the city wall proclaims 'the gift of
God,' which is 'eternal life.'

II. Another of the lessons of our incident is the withdrawal, by a hard
fate, of the worker on the very eve of the completion of his work.

For all these forty years there had gleamed before the fixed and
steadfast spirit of the sorely tried leader one hope that he never
abandoned, and that was that he might look upon and enter into the
blessed land which God had promised. And now he stands on the heights
of Moab. Half a dozen miles onwards, as the crow flies, and his feet
would tread its soil. He lifts his eyes, and away up yonder, in the far
north, he sees the rolling uplands of Gilead, and across the deep gash
where the Jordan runs, he catches a glimpse of the blue hills of
Naphtali or of Galilee, and the central mountain masses of Ephraim and
Manasseh, where Ebal and Gerizim lift their heads; and then, further
south, the stony summits of the Judaean hills, where Jerusalem and
Bethlehem lie, and, through some gap in the mountains, a gleam as of
sunshine upon armour tells where the ocean is. And then his eye falls
upon the waterless plateau of the South, and at his feet the fertile
valley of Jordan, with Jericho glittering amongst its palm trees like a
diamond set in emeralds, and on some spur of the lower hill bounding
the plain, the little Zoar. This was the land which the Lord had
promised to the fathers, for which he had been yearning, and to which
all his work had been directed all these years; and now he is to die,
as my text puts it, with such pathetic emphasis, 'there in Moab,' and
to have no part in the fair inheritance.

It is the lot of all epoch-making men, of all great constructive and
reforming geniuses, whether in the Church or in the world, that they
should toil at a task, the full issues of which will not be known until
their heads are laid low in the dust. But if, on the one hand, that
seems hard, on the other hand there is the compensation of 'the vision
of the future and all the wonder that shall be,' which is granted many
a time to the faithful worker ere he closes his eyes. But that is not
the fate of epoch-making and great men only; it is the law for our
little lives. If these are worth anything, they are constructed on a
scale too large to bring out all their results here and now. It is easy
for a man to secure immediate consequences of an earthly kind; easy
enough for him to make certain that he shall have the fruit of his
toil. But quick returns mean small profits; and an unfinished life that
succeeds in nothing may be far better than a completed one, that has
realised all its shabby purposes and accomplished all its petty
desires. Do you, my brother, live for the far-off; and seek not for the
immediate issues and fruits that the world can give, but be contented
to be of those whose toil waits for eternity to disclose its
significance. Better a half-finished temple than a finished pigstye or
huckster's shop. Better a life, the beginning of much and the
completion of nothing, than a life directed to and hitting an earthly
aim. 'He that soweth to the spirit shall of the Spirit reap life
everlasting,' and his harvest and garner are beyond the grave.

III. Again, notice here the lesson of the solitude and mystery of
death.

Moses dies alone, with no hand to clasp his, none to close his eyes;
but God's finger does it. The outward form of his death is but putting
into symbol and visibility the awful characteristics of that last
moment for us all. However closely we have been twined with others,
each of us has to unclasp dear hands, and make that journey through the
narrow, dark tunnel by himself. We live alone in a very real sense, but
we each have to die as if there were not another human being in the
whole universe but only ourselves. But the solitude may be a solitude
with God. Up there, alone with the stars and the sky and the
everlasting rocks and menacing death, Moses had for companion the
supporting God. That awful path is not too desolate and lonely to be
trodden if we tread it with Him.

Moses' lonely death leads to a society yonder. If you refer to the
thirty-second chapter you will find that, when he was summoned to the
mountain, God said to him, 'Die in the mount whither thou goest up, and
be gathered to thy people.' He was to be buried there, up amongst the
rocks of Moab, and no man was ever to visit his sepulchre to drop a
tear over it. How, then, was he 'gathered to his people'? Surely only
thus, that, dying in the desert alone, he opened his eyes in 'the
City,' surrounded by 'solemn troops and sweet societies' of those to
whom he was kindred. So the solitude of a moment leads on to blessed
and eternal companionship.

So far the death of Moses carries us. What does the other death say?
Moses had none but God with him when he died. There is a drearier
desolation than that, and Jesus Christ proved it when He cried, 'My
God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?' That was solitude indeed, and
in that hour of mysterious, and to us unfathomable, desertion and
misery, the lonely Christ sounded a depth, of which the lawgiver in His
death but skimmed the surface. Christ was parted from God in His death,
because He bore on Him the sins that separate us from our Father, and
in order that none of us may ever need to tread that dark passage
alone, but may be able to say, 'I will fear no evil, for Thou art with
me'--Thou, who hast trodden every step in its rough and dreary path,
uncheered by the presence which cheers us and millions more. Christ
died that we might live. He died alone that, when we come to die, we
may hold His hand and the solitude may vanish.

Then, again, our incident teaches us the mystery that wrapped death to
that ancient world, of which we may regard that unknown and forgotten
sepulchre as the visible symbol. Deep darkness lies over the Old
Testament in reference to what is beyond the grave, broken by gleams of
light, when the religious consciousness asserted its indestructibility,
in spite of all appearance to the contrary; but never growing to the
brightness of serene and continuous assurance of immortal life and
resurrection. We may conceive that mysteriousness as set forth for us
by that grave that was hidden away in the defiles of Moab, unvisited
and uncared for by any.

We turn to the other grave, and there, as the stone is rolled away, and
the rising sunshine of the Easter morning pours into it, we have a
visible symbol of the life and immortality which Jesus Christ then
brought to light by His Gospel. The buried grave speaks of the
inscrutable mystery that wrapped the future: the open sepulchre
proclaims the risen Lord of life, and the sunlight certainty of future
blessedness which we owe to Him. Death is solitary no more, though it
be lonely as far as human companionship is concerned; and a mystery no
more, though what is beyond is hidden from our view, and none but
Christ has ever returned to tell the tale, and He has told us little
but the fact that we shall live with Him.

We rejoice that we have not to turn to a grave hid amongst the hills
where our dead Leader lies, but to an open sepulchre by the city wall
in the sunshine, from whence has come forth the ever-living 'Captain of
our salvation.'

IV. The last lesson is the uselessness of a dead leader to a generation
with new conflicts.

Commentators have spent a great deal of ingenuity in trying to assign
reasons why God concealed the grave of Moses. The text does not say
that God concealed it at all. The ignorance of the place of his
sepulchre does not seem to have been part of the divine design, but
simply a consequence of the circumstances of his death, and of the fact
that he lay in an enemy's land, and that they had had something else to
do than go to look for the grave of a dead commander. They had to
conquer the land, and a living Joshua was what they wanted, not a dead
Moses.

So we may learn from this how easily the gaps fill. 'Thirty days'
mourning,' and says my text, with almost a bitter touch,' so the days
of mourning for Moses were ended.' A month of it, that was all; and
then everybody turned to the new man that was appointed for the new
work. God has many tools in His tool-chest, and He needs them all
before the work is done. Joshua could no more have wielded Moses' rod
than Moses could have wielded Joshua's sword. The one did his work, and
was laid aside. New circumstances required a new type of character--the
smaller man better fitted for the rougher work. And so it always is.
Each generation, each period, has its own men that do some little part
of the work which has to be done, and then drop it and hand over the
task to others. The division of labour is the multiplication of joy at
the end, and 'he that soweth and he that reapeth rejoice together.'
But whilst the one grave tells us, 'This man served his generation by
the will of God, and was laid asleep and saw corruption,' the other
grave proclaims One whom all generations need, whose work is
comprehensive and complete, who dies never. 'He liveth and was dead,
and is alive for evermore.' Christ, and Christ alone, can never be
antiquated. This day requires Him, and has in Him as complete an answer
to all its necessities as if no other generation had ever possessed
Him. He liveth for ever, and for ever is the Shepherd of men.

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