Bible Commentaries
Deuteronomy 33

Verse 16

The Good Will of a Lifetime

The good will of him that dwelt in the bush . — Deuteronomy 33:16 .

1. Moses had been young and now was old. The words of the text are taken from his benediction, which he pronounced upon the children of Israel as he stood with them on the borders of the promised land. There is something very touching in the reminiscence. The long journey through the desert is over. He has done God’s work nobly and successfully. Well may he be proud of this people that he has led up to the threshold of their inheritance. But now his mind is running backward. This crowning of his mission with clear success reminds him of the time when his mission started out in mystery and weakness. He sees again a bush which he once saw by a wayside. He is a young man again, a shepherd keeping his father-in-law’s flock on the back side of the desert, by Mount Horeb. He sees once more the bush on fire. He draws near again with unshod feet, and once more in his aged ears he hears the voice out of the bush commissioning him for the great work of his life. With that impulse which we all have felt, that brings up at the close of any work the freshened memory of its beginning, this old man sees the burning bush again as he saw it years before, only with deeper understanding of its meaning, and a completer sense of the love of God which it involved. He looks into the past, and all the mercy that had come in between—all the miraculous food, and the wonderful victories, and the parted waters, and the constant guidance, he sees now, were all certainly involved in that first summons of God which he had once obeyed so blindly; and when he wants to give his people the benediction that represents to him the most complete and comprehensive love, it is touching to hear the old man go back and invoke “the good will of him that dwelt in the bush.”

2. There seems a peculiar appropriateness in this reference being put into the mouth of the ancient Lawgiver, for to him even Sinai, with all its glories, cannot have been so impressive and so formative of his character as was the vision granted to him when solitary in the wilderness. It is to be noticed that the characteristic by which God is designated here never occurs except in this one place. It is intended to intensify the conception of greatness, and preciousness, and all-sufficiency of that “good will.” If it is that “of him that dwelt in the bush,” it is sure to be all that a man can need. The words occur in the blessing pronounced on “Joseph”—that is, the two tribes which represented Joseph—in which all the greatest material gifts that could be desired by a pastoral people are first called down upon them, and then the ground of all these is laid in “the good will of him that dwelt in the bush.” “The blessing—let it come on the head of Joseph.”

3. Do not let us forget the place which the text holds in this blessing on the head of Joseph. It is preceded by an invoking of “the precious things of heaven” and “the precious fruits brought forth by the sun” … “the chief things of the ancient mountains,” and “the precious things of the lasting hills,” and “the precious things of the earth and fulness thereof.” They are all heaped together in one great mass for the beloved Joseph. And then, like the golden spire that tops some of those campaniles in Italian cities, and completes their beauty, above them all there is set, as the shining apex of all, “the good will of him that dwelt in the bush.” That is more precious than all other precious things; it is set last because it is to be sought first; set last as in the building of some great structure the top stone is put last of all; set last because it gathers all others into itself, secures that all others shall be ours in the measure in which we need them, and arms us against all possibilities of evil. So the blessing of blessings is the “good will of him that dwelt in the bush.”

4. It is the retrospect of a lifetime. Like another psalmist, Moses says, “Surely goodness and mercy have followed me all the days of my life.” And now at the end of it he blesses Joseph with the blessing of God’s good-will—the good-will he found at the beginning of his public life, the good-will that followed him throughout it, the good-will that was still with him at the end.

I. Good-will at the Beginning.

II. Good-will all the Way.

III. Good-will at the End.

I

Good-will at the Beginning

1. “The good will of him that dwelt in the bush.” In these words the old man Moses goes back across the long years of his wilderness life, back across Elim and Marah, back across Massah and Meribah, back to that lonely bush in Horeb and the God who once met him there. That God has never left him. That fire has never gone out in his life. In pillar of cloud by day and fire by night, it has gone with him all the way, and now, standing at the end of all, he feels there is no blessing he can wish any man better than this: “May that God be his. May he too be blessed with the good will of him that dwelt in that burning bush.”

2. “Good-will”—the word, perhaps, might bear a little stronger rendering. “Good-will” is somewhat tepid. A man may have a good enough will, and yet no very strong emotion of favour or delight, and may do nothing to carry his good-will into action. But the word that is employed here, and is a common enough one in Scripture, always carries with it a certain intensity and warmth of feeling. It is more than “good-will”; it is more than “favour”; perhaps “delight” would be nearer the meaning. It implies, too, not only the inward sentiment of complacency, but also the active purpose of action in conformity with it, on God’s part. Now it needs few words to show that these two things, which are inseparable, do make the blessing of blessings for every one of us—the delight, the complacency, of God in us, and the active purpose of good in God for us. These are the things that will make a man happy wherever he is.

“Thou, Lord, wilt bless the righteous; with favour wilt thou compass him as with a shield.” Thy crystal battlement is round a man, keeping far away from him all manner of real evil, and filling his quiet heart, as he stands erect behind the rampart, with the sense of absolute security. That is one of the blessings that God’s favour or good-will will secure for us. Again, we read: “By thy favour thou hast made my mountain to stand strong.” He who knows himself to be the object of the Divine delight, and who by faith knows himself to be the object of the Divine activity in protection, stands firm, and his purposes will be carried through, because they will be purposes in accordance with the Divine mind, and nothing has power to shake him. So he who grasps the hand of God can say, not because of his grasp, but because of the Hand that he holds, The Lord “is at my right hand; I shall not be greatly moved.” “By thy favour thou hast made our mountain to stand strong.” And again, in another analogous but yet diversified representation, we read: “In thy name shall they rejoice all the day,” “and in thy favour shall our horn be exalted.” That is the emblem, not only of victory, but of joyful confidence; and so he who knows himself to have God for his friend and his helper can go through the world keeping a sunny face, whatever the clouds may be, erect and secure, light of heart and buoyant, holding up his chin above the stormiest waters, and breasting all difficulties and dangers with a confidence far away from presumption, because it is the consequence of the realization of God’s presence. So the good-will of God is the chiefest good. 1 [Note: A. Maclaren.]

3. A great writer has said that the last act of a man’s life is the test of it. “Show me thy fruits,” says Browning—

Show me thy fruits, this latest act of thine;

For in the last is summed the first and all.

And no doubt there is truth in the words. The last intelligent act in a man’s life is in a sense the summing up of it, the flower and the fruit of the whole; for then we see coming to their full fruition the forces that have often been unseen till then. Nevertheless, if the last act is the fruit of a man’s life, the first is the root of it. When once I have seen God face to face in some great elemental experience, when once my life has burned with the fire of His presence—then I have something that will never leave me, something that will go with me all the wilderness way; and when I stand at the end of it I shall be ready like Moses to speak of “the good will of him” that met me long ago, and made my life burn with the fire of His presence.

(1) First look at the value of such a vision as an influence on a man’s character. What is the glory of character? Is it not strength? A character may have any virtues you like, but if it lacks strength, it stands condemned. It may be brilliant, sacrificing, and that is its crown. But if it lacks strength, what is the use of it all? Who is the man to whom you look for help in the hour of a country’s need? Is it the great orator, the brilliant speaker, the Aaron? No, it is the Moses-like man, the “iron-pillar,” the man who knows his mind and can stick to it amidst opposition, obloquy, and contempt. And, on the other hand, who is the woman to whom you look for true companionship and guidance in the long battle of life? Is it the merely brilliant woman, the gifted talker, the drawing-room ornament? No; it is the woman of fidelity, the woman who can be true and loving when all others go against you. And what is the secret of truth? Truth is just the other side of courage. As Walter Smith says—

It needeth courage to be true.

Courage, strength—the rock-like foundations of life; these are the first things. You can build on them afterwards anything you like. Without these the superstructure falls to ruin. The glory, then, of character is its strength, but strength comes only from a great experience; and in the highest sense it comes only from the vision of God.

We can understand why Moses should have desired that his people might be blessed by God with “the precious things of heaven,” with “the dew and the deep that coucheth beneath,” with “the precious fruits brought forth by the sun” and “the precious things put forth by the moon.” But why should he ask for them such a blessing as this?—the good-will that God manifested when He dwelt in the unquenchable fire. Was not that aspect of Israel’s God an aspect of deepest terror? Did it not reveal Him in those attributes which do not suggest good-will? Nay, my brother, it is not so. It is not only in the calm that the good-will of thy God appears, it is not only in nature’s smile that the blessing of thy Father is seen. The heart of thy Father beats for thee beneath every cloud as well as in every sunbeam; the blessing of thy Father is in thy night as well as in thy day. To thee, as to every man, He comes betimes in a chariot of fire; with thee, as with every man, He dwells betimes in the burning bush of a wilderness; but the fire chariot is His chariot, the burning bush is His dwelling-place. The fire of thy God is love; its burning is the burning of love. The pains of thy life are not accidents; they are gifts from thy Father’s hand. The fire of the burning bush is meant to set fire to thy heart. It is designed to kindle thee into a glow of enthusiasm, to warm thee with the love of humanity. How canst thou be warmed with the love of humanity if thou hast not in thee that fellowship of the Cross which unites soul to soul? The fire that comes to thee from the bush is that which consumes the barrier between thy heart and the heart of thy brother. 1 [Note: G. Matheson.]

Across the lone floor of the rayless night

One came to a door that was barred on light,

A glimmer a-gleam through beckoning chink,

As with lamp’s still beam, as with taper’s blink,

And sore she sued their shrine to win,

From mirk and moan of the wild shut in,

And fled the fear its menace bore

With shrouding of shadow evermore.

So out of the dark, as it breathed its dread,

Shrill crying, she knocked with a hope ill-sped,

For grim and stark that portal wide

At her hand’s touch mocked, and her prayer denied.

Then sick at heart, that found not grace,

She turned her again the night to face,

As terror turns on swift-foot foes—

And lo! the clear east all climbing rose. 2 [Note: Jane Barlow.]

(2) Next see the influence which the vision of God leaves on a man’s life-work. It produces continuance, perseverance, tenacity. If the glory of a man’s character is its strength, the glory of his work is its perseverance. You can see that even in common life. Two young men come into the city—one a lad of brilliant parts, but without tenacity; the other a dull, plodding, persevering fellow. What do you find after ten years? Almost always this, that it is the plodding man who wins the race over the man of erratic gifts. And if that be true of common life, how much more of the Christian race! The Christian race is not a hundred yards’ affair. It is a Marathon race, and they alone can win it who run with patience, with endurance, the course that is set before them.

One step more, and the race is ended;

One word more, and the lesson’s done;

One toil more, and a long rest follows

At set of sun.

Who would fail, for one step withholden?

Who would fail, for one word unsaid?

Who would fail, for a pause too early?

Sound sleep the dead.

One step more, and the goal receives us;

One word more, and life’s task is done;

One toil more, and the Cross is carried

And sets the sun. 1 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti.]

I sometimes think the silences of Scripture more impressive than its speech. There is no record of it here, but I picture Moses going out of a morning to the tent door, after rising from his bed on the desert floor, and contemplating the desert with its sand and stones, with its red hills, and relentless sun, and murmuring people. It was for this he left the pleasant land of Midian. It was for this he “refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter.” Forty years in the wilderness, and at the end the promised land fading away like a mirage in the desert. What kept him up? It was the memory of that “burning bush.” Yes, whenever his spirit grew faint and weary, he went back in memory to that wondrous day. Once again he saw the unconsuming fire. Once again he heard the voice of God quivering through the silence of that lonely desert, and in a moment the feeble knees were strong again, and with a new courage he grasped his shepherd’s staff, and went forth to meet the inevitable tasks and trials of the day. 2 [Note: W. M. Mackay.]

John Paton of the New Hebrides tells us that one of his most vital memories was the day he left home for Glasgow, where he was to start life in earnest. In these days the journey had to be made on foot, and his father accompanied him for the first few miles of the way. At length came the parting. His father tried to frame the words of a suitable farewell, but emotion choked his utterance, and he could say little more than “Goodbye, John; God bless you!” “And I, too,” says Paton, “I could say little more. I wrung his hand and hurried on.” After he had gone on a little, however, curiosity and love made him turn round to get a last glimpse of his beloved father. He was still standing, “with head uncovered,” where he had left him. He was praying, and Paton says, “I knew he was praying for me.” “That sight,” he adds, “never left me.” In times of temptation, in hours of trial, in the city, in the foreign field, where he often stood face to face with death, that picture, silhouetted in the golden frame of memory, was to him a constant inspiration and a defence. This is “the good will of him that dwelt in the bush”—that it never leaves a man who has truly known it, but returns like a bright visitant in every time of need with reinforcement of faith and courage.

II

Good-will all the Way

The God of the Bush had been with Moses all his life. Let us consider, first, who was the God of the Bush, and, next, what His presence through life does for a man.

i. The God of the Bush

1. He was the Eternal God.—When Moses, shrinking from the magnitude of the task laid upon him, wished to know what he should say if the people to whom he went should ask, Who sent you? what is his name? this answer was given him: “I am that I am: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.” I AM—it is the expression of independent self-existence—appropriate to none but Deity, whose consciousness is an eternal present. The thought is overwhelming; yet, overwhelming as it is, it is also steadying and comforting in its influence, and it is appropriate that in that psalm which is called the Psalm of Moses, it is said, “Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art—God.”

The fire that did not burn out is the emblem of the Divine nature which does not tend to death because it lives, nor to exhaustion because it energizes, nor to emptiness because it bestows, but after all times is the same; lives by its own energy and is independent. “I am that I have become”—that is what men have to say. “I am that I once was not, and again once shall not be” is what men have to say. “I am that I am” is God’s name. And this eternal, ever-living, self-sufficing, absolute, independent, unwearied, inexhaustible God is the God whose favour is as inexhaustible as Himself, and eternal as His own being. “Therefore the children of men” shall “put their trust under the shadow of thy wings,” and if they have “the good will of him that dwelt in the bush,” they will be able to say, “Because thou livest we shall live also.”

2. He was the Covenant God.—He said, “I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” In His reasoning with the Sadducees of His day, the Saviour drew from these words an argument for the resurrection of the body; for as God is the God not of the dead, but of the living, it must follow that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were still in existence when God so described Himself, and as such would yet have their humanity perfected and glorified. The Sadducees grounded their objection to the resurrection of the body on their rejection of the immortality of the soul, and the Lord answers in this way the underlying heresy of His antagonists, leaving it to His own resurrection to prove the falsity of that which they had built thereon.

3. He was the Delivering God.—He said, “I have surely seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters; for I know their sorrows; and I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians.” Pharaoh had long oppressed them, making their lives bitter with hard bondage, and there seemed to be no Divine protest against his procedure. It looked almost as if God had forgotten the Hebrews, and for generations they were cruelly maltreated. But He was not unmindful of them, and in the fulness of time He sent Moses to be their emancipator.

4. He was the Long-suffering God.—How tenderly He treated Moses on that occasion! From the extreme of rashness the son of Amram had recoiled to that of timidity; and he who, forty years before, attempted to run without being sent, now sought to decline his commission altogether. He was profuse in excuses, such as that he was unworthy of the honour which was offered him; that he was unable to answer the Israelites if they should ask him, “Who sent you?” that, even if he went, the people would not believe him; and that he was not eloquent, but slow of speech and of a slow tongue. These were the pretexts which he put forward in order, if possible, to evade the duty that was laid upon him, but out of them all God nourished him into such strength that he went at length, and became the leader of the Exodus.

5. He was the God of Promise.—When Moses said, “Who am I, that I should go unto Pharaoh?” the voice out of the bush answered, “Certainly I will be with thee.” So, after Jesus had said to His followers, “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you”; and when, perhaps, He saw on their countenances an expression of consternation at the magnitude of the charge which He had given them, He added, “And, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world”—a large promise which only Deity would dare to make, and which, in its likeness to the words addressed to Moses—“Certainly I will be with thee”—indicates that it came from the same Divine source.

Not with unjoyful care

Nor with unpraiseful prayer

We live below;

Assailed by pain and sin,

We yet are born to win

The holy heaven wherein

No evils grow.

God of the peaceful height,

Thy word of promise bright

Spans the rough sea;

A rainbow fair to view,

As broad as bright of hue,

And all souls may come through

Travelling to Thee. 1 [Note: Thomas Toke Lynch.]

ii. What the Good-will of God does for us

Religion delights both in reminiscence and in anticipation. Being full of the sense of God, it finds a unity in life which no atheistic thought can discover. The identity of God’s eternal being stretches under, and gives consistence to, our fragmentary lives. God’s eternity makes our time coherent. And so it was God in the bush that made it still visible to Moses across the eventful interval. He saw that bush when all the other bushes of Egypt had faded out of sight, because that bush was on fire with God.

And as Christianity is the most vivid of all religions, with its personally manifested God, there is a more perfect unity in a Christian life than in any other. It keeps all its parts, and from its consummations looks back with gratitude and love to its beginnings. The crown that it casts before the throne at last is the same that it felt trembling on its brow in the first ecstatic sense of Christ’s forgiveness, and that has been steadily glowing into greater clearness as perfecting love has more and more completely cast out fear. The feet that go up to God into the mountain, at the end, are the same that first put off their shoes beside the burning bush. This is why the Christian, more than other men, not merely dares, but loves, to look back and remember.

Let us think, then, of the young Christian and the old Christian—the same man in his first apprehension, and in his ripened knowledge, of Christ. What is the difference between the two? What is the growth which brings one into the other? Everybody claims that the Christian experience ripens and deepens. What is there riper and deeper in the full existence that there was not in the incipient life?

1. As every Christian becomes more and more a Christian, there must be a larger and larger absorption of truth or doctrine into life. We hear all around us nowadays a great impatience with the prominence of dogma—that is, of truth abstractly and definitely stated—in Christianity. And most of those who are thus impatient really mean well. They feel that Christianity, being a thing of personal salvation, ought to show itself in characters and lives. There they are right. But to decry dogma in the interest of character is like despising food as if it interfered with health. Food is not health. The human body is built just so as to turn food into health and strength. And truth is not holiness. The human soul is made to turn, by the subtle chemistry of its digestive experience, truth into goodness. And this is just what the Christian, as he goes on, finds himself doing under God’s grace. Before the young Christian lie the doctrines of his faith—God’s being, God’s care, Christ’s incarnation, Christ’s atonement, immortality. What has the old Christian, with his long experience, done with them? He holds them no longer crudely, as things to be believed merely. He has taken them home into his nature. He has transmuted them into forms of life. God’s being appears now filling his life with reverence. God’s care clothes every act and thought of his with gratitude. Christ’s incarnation is the inspiration of his new, dear love of all humanity. The atonement is the power of his all-pervading and deep-rooted faith. And immortality! He no longer regards as a doctrine that which has become a great constant flood of life, ever resting over and illuminating the far-off hill-tops—now grown so near, so real—of the eternal life. The young dogmatist boasts of his dogmas. The old saint lives his life. Both are natural in their places and times, as are the unripe and the ripened fruit.

Her prayer-book had repose,

One word her heart sufficed,

Scent of a hidden rose:

“Christ!”

To creeds her soul was shut,

For her confession of

The Christian faith was but

Love.

2. In the second place, as a consequence of this feature of growth, there will come a growing variety in Christian character as Christians grow older. We should expect a uniformity and resemblance in younger Christians, and a diversity in older ones, because life is more various than doctrine. Each young Christian has his doctrine, crude and dogmatic still. The maturer Christians have not merely worked those doctrines into life, but each has worked them into his own sort of life. The truth is the same for all; the life it makes is infinite. The more deeply it has been digested, the more strongly the individuality comes out.

The truth that God gives us is like the wheat that a bounteous country sends into the city. It is all the same wheat; but men go and buy it and eat it, and this same identical wheat is turned into different sorts of force in different men. It is turned into bartering force in one, and thinking force in another, and singing force in another, and governing force in another. It is manifold as soon as it passes into men.

Gladstone, Newman, and Rainy—perhaps the three most remarkable men of their day of those who really applied their minds to the matters of Christian faith—were all in agreement not only as to personal experience of religion, but also—if we except certain matters about the Church (and these are not in the Creed)—as to the fundamental doctrines of Christianity. But the intellectual attitude of each of these minds to these doctrines was distinct. Gladstone’s mind was essentially and constitutionally orthodox, and he was never critical regarding ecclesiastical dogma. Newman’s was essentially and constitutionally sceptical, and the Church’s authoritative system was to him less the native home of his mind than its only refuge. Rainy’s mind was well content to lodge in Catholic forms of doctrine, but he neither denied the element of imperfection and difficulty in such forms nor was disturbed by it, for this only made him more deeply feel “how great a thing it is to believe in God.” 1 [Note: P. Carnegie Simpson, The Life of Principal Rainy, i. 287.]

3. And as individuality is developed with the deepening spiritual life, so the willingness to recognize and welcome individual differences of thought and feeling and action increases too as Christians grow riper. Seeing ourselves made more ourselves as our faith grows richer, we are glad to see other men made more themselves too. This is true charity. It is your undeveloped, crude, commonplace Christian who is uncharitable. He expects other Christians to be like himself. He has never felt that Divine, deep movement of Christ in his own soul, telling him that from all eternity there has been one certain place for him to fill, one certain thing for him to be, and summoning him to come and fill his place and be himself.

I can well understand that the seeds in a sower’s basket might be very uncharitable to one brother-seed that had dropped out of the basket and taken root and grown to be a stalk of corn. It is too unlike them. It is too original and singular. But let them all fall together and take root, and then, with life in all of them, they will not compare their ears and tassels, each being so busy in growing to the best that its separate bit of earth can bring it to. The true Christian charity is that which life teaches. It is the tried and cultured souls that understand each other’s trials and cultures, though they may be wholly different from their own. And no sight is more beautiful than this grace growing in a body of believers. 1 [Note: Phillips Brooks.]

4. And here comes in another noble characteristic of the growing spiritual experience—its ever-increasing independence. This is the best personal result of charity. There is an independence that is arrogant and defiant, and there is a dependence that is weak and fawning. Both come of narrowness. Both are the signs of immature and meagre life. One man arms himself against his brethren because he holds them to be wholly wrong and himself wholly right. Another man yields to his brethren because he fears that he is wrong and they are right. Here is a man of mellow strength who, deeply conscious of the work the Lord has done in him, made sure of it by long feeling the very pressures of God’s hand kneading the truth into his nature, stands by that work, will let no man cavil it away from his tenacious consciousness, is so perfectly dependent upon Christ that he can hang upon no fellow-man, respects himself by the same reverence for the individuality of the Divine life that makes him also respect his brethren.

Not long ago I read this in what many hold to be our ablest and most thoughtful journal: “It is a law, which in the present condition of human nature holds good, that strength of conviction is always in. the inverse ratio of the tolerant spirit.” If that is so, then the present condition of human nature is certainly very much depraved. But if human nature can ever be rescued by a personal salvation, if mankind can ever become possessed by the Spirit of God, lifting the mass by filling the individuals each with his own strong manifestation of its power, then the world may still see some maturer type of Christianity, in which new ages of positive faith may still be filled with the broadest sympathy, and men may tolerate their brethren without enfeebling themselves. Such ages may God hasten. 2 [Note: Ibid.]

Berry reached Chicago on Saturday, 20th November, and was entertained at a reception at the house of Professor W. Douglas Mackenzie. On the following day he preached in the morning in the Union Park Congregational Church, and in the evening in the Second Presbyterian Church. On the Monday morning he addressed what was nominally a gathering of the ministers of the city in the auditorium of the Y.M.C.A. The hall was crowded to excess by an influential and representative audience composed of the leaders of the churches of the city, about a thousand people being present at an early hour. A little slip which he made in the course of his speech caused much good-natured amusement, and at the same time revealed the orator’s readiness of wit and presence of mind. The Rev. Hugh Price Hughes and he had gone through England together advocating this federation of which he was speaking, and that without surrendering any of their theological convictions. “In fact, we had none to surrender,” said Berry grandly. The house came down in a roar of laughter that pealed out again and again. When at last it subsided Berry said quietly, “That is one of the things which, as Punch would say, one had rather have expressed differently. Don’t misunderstand me. There are no two men in England so full of theology as Price Hughes and myself—from the sole of our feet to the crown of our heads we are brimful. What I intended to convey was that there is nothing of these theological convictions that we are called upon to surrender so as to work upon a common platform and in a common cause.” 1 [Note: J. S. Drummond, Charles A. Berry, 164.]

5. Another sign of the growth of Christian character is to be found in what may be called the growing transfiguration of duty. To every young Christian the new service of Christ comes largely with the look of a multitude of commandments. They throng around his life, each one demanding to be obeyed. He welcomes them joyously. He takes up his tasks with glad hands still, because they are his Master’s tasks. But as he grows older in grace, is there no difference? Tell me, you who have been long the servants of our dear and gracious Lord, has there come in your long Christian life no change in the whole aspect of your service? Has not your more and more intimate sympathy with Him let you in behind many and many a duty which once seemed dark and hard, and allowed you to see the light of His loving intention burning there? Have you not grown into a clearer and deeper understanding of what Jesus meant by those sweet and wonderful words, “Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you”? In every opening Christian life there is something Mosaic, something Hebrew. The order of the Testaments is to a certain degree repeated in the experience of every believer. At last, in the fulness of time, the New Testament has perfectly come. The law is given first, and then grace and truth come by Jesus Christ. It is no sudden transformation. It cannot be, because it cannot come otherwise than by the gradual teaching of life. But when it has wholly come, then, full of the complete consciousness of Christ, duty is done not simply because Christ has commanded it and we love Him, but because Christ has filled us with Himself, transformed our standards, and recreated our affections; and we love the duty too, seeing its essential beauty as He sees it out of whose nature it proceeds.

Duty was renamed

Delight, and love was ready for the winds

Of Liberty that shake the trees upon

The uplands of God’s will. 1 [Note: Anna Bunston, The Porch of Paradise, 24.]

6. But, after all, the profoundest and most reliable sign of the maturing spiritual life is deepening personal intimacy with Him who is the Christian’s life, the Lord Jesus Christ. All comes to that at last. Christianity begins with many motives. It all fastens itself at last upon one motive, which does not exclude, but is large enough to comprehend, all that is good in all the rest. “That I may know him.” Those are St. Paul’s words. How constantly we come back to his large, rounded life, as the picture of what the Christian is and becomes. Set before you the young man at Damascus and the old man at Rome, and compare the two. “That I may know him.” We have all seen, if it has been our privilege to watch true Christians growing old, the special and absorbing way with which the personal Christ—their knowledge of Him, and His knowledge of them—comes to be all their religion.

Christ, to the Christian growing older, seems to be what the sun is to the developing day, which it lightens from the morning to the evening. When the sun is in the zenith in the broad noonday, men do their various works by his light; but they do not so often look up to him. It is the sunlight that they glory in, flooding a thousand tasks with clearness, making a million things beautiful. But as the world rolls into the evening, it is the sun itself at sunset that men gather to look at and admire and love. So to the earlier and middle stages of a Christian life, Christ is the revealer of duty and of truth; and duty and truth become clear and dear in His light. The young Christian glories in the way in which, under his Master’s power, he can work for humanity, for truth, for his nation, for society, for his family. But as the Christian life ripens into evening, it is not on these things, though they are not forgotten, that the soul dwells most. It is on the Lord Himself. It is that He is the soul’s, and the soul is His. It is His wondrousness, His dearness, and His truth that fill the life as it presses closer to where He stands—as the setting earth rolls on towards the sun.

Now, if the personal presence of Christ becomes clearer to us as we grow riper in the Christian life, there are certain effects which it will produce. They are the noble characteristics of the maturest Christians.

(1) It will make us more unworldly. To be always living with One whose kingdom is not of this world, to be constantly conversant, as we hold intercourse with Him, with the thought that there are other worlds also over which He presides, and with which we have something to do through our union with Him—how this breaks up and scatters the littleness of life, the bondage of the seen. How it lets us out, free to trace the course of every action, the career of every thought, as it seeks vast untold issues in other spheres.

(2) And, if we get this, then something else must come, namely, more hopefulness. St. Paul has a noble verse which says that experience worketh hope. It must, if it is full of Christ. The soul that is getting deeper and deeper into the certain knowledge of Him must be learning that it has no right to fear; that, however hopeless things look, there can be nothing but success for every good cause in the hand of Christ. It is a noble process for a man’s life that gradually changes the cold dogma that “truth is strong and must prevail” into a warm, enthusiastic certainty that “my Christ must conquer.” It is terrible to see a man calling himself a Christian who despairs more of the world the longer he lives in it. It shows that he is letting the world’s darkness come between him and his Lord’s light. It shows that he is not near enough to Christ.

(3) And with the growing hopefulness there comes a growing courage. How timid we are at first. It seems as if just to get this soul of ours saved were all that we could dare to try; but as the Saviour’s strength becomes more manifest to us, as we know Him more, we see that He is able to do much more than that. We begin to aspire to have a little part in the great conquest of the world in which He is engaged. And so the Soldier of the Cross at last is out in the very thick of the battle, striking at all his Master’s enemies in the perfect assurance of his Master’s strength.

(4) And then, as the crown of all these, there comes to the maturing Christian, out of his constant companionship with Christ, that true and perfect poise of soul which grows more and more beautiful as we grow tired, one after another, of the fantastic and one-sided types of character which the world admires, and which seem to us very attractive at first. Expectant without impatience; patient without stagnation; waiting, but always ready to advance; loving to advance, but always ready to wait; full of confidence, but never proud; full of certainty, but never arrogant; serene, but enthusiastic; rich as a great land is rich in the peace that comes to it from the government of a great, wise, trusty governor—this is the life whose whole power is summed up in one word—Faith. “Here is the patience and faith of the saints.” This is the life to which men come who, through long years, “follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth.” 1 [Note: Phillips Brooks.]

A state

Where all is loveliness, and power, and love;

Where all sublimest qualities of mind,

Not infinite, are limited alone

By the all-surrounding godhood; and where nought

But what createth glory and delight

To creature and Creator is; where all

Enjoy entire dominion o’er themselves,

Acts, feelings, thoughts, conditions, qualities,

Spirit and soul and mind. 2 [Note: P. J. Bailey, Festus.]

III

Good-will at the End

In the mouth of Moses the words, “The good will of him that dwelt in the bush” had, in this blessing of the tribe of Joseph just before he died, a far richer significance than they could have had when, after having seen the great sight and heard the great words, he turned away from the desert of Midian, and took his journey into Egypt. He went on there in faith, but now he could look back upon a rich experience. Between the bush and the plains of Moab lay forty years of the fullest realization of all that Jehovah had promised, and so he commended Joseph’s children to One whom he knew to be faithful to His word. Had he not been to Egypt and brought out his people into freedom? Had he not enjoyed closest fellowship with God as a man talketh with his friend? Had he not been directed by Him in every difficulty and provided for by Him in every strait? So now he tells them that whom he had proved, they might trust. The Lord who had with him stood the strain of the Exodus, and the test of the wilderness wanderings, and was with him still, would not fail them in their time of need.

Is not this true of our Lord yet? Whom has He failed? When has He broken His word? Who dares to say that he has gone to Him and been cast out? Is it not the unvarying testimony of His people in all generations that they never found Him wanting? While there is so much that is parallel to the gospel in this conference between Jehovah and Moses at Midian, there is in one point a marked difference between the two. The Jehovah of the bush said, “Draw not nigh hither,” but the Jesus of the Cross says, “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” That is just the great distinction between the old dispensation and the new, and it was rendered necessary by the circumstances of the times. In those ancient days the world was not ready to receive the gospel invitation. There needed yet a long education before men would listen to it either with patience or appreciation, and so the truth, while preserved among them in the figurative system of Judaism, needed also to be protected from them by the restrictions which hedged that system round. These restrictions were like the horn framework of the lantern through which the light shone, no doubt, only dimly, but by which, also, it was kept from being extinguished by the rude blasts of idolatry and immorality. Now, however, they have served their purpose and are no longer needed. The veil of the temple has been rent asunder; the temple itself has disappeared; and, instead of the “Draw not nigh,” we may hear the “Come unto me”; for in Him “we have boldness and access with confidence by the faith of him.”

1. The old man refers to the days of his youth. He is no longer old; he is young. With his shepherd’s staff, tending his sheep below the bare mountain of Horeb, he sees what he had never seen before—a thorn-tree in flame. The old man places his one hand upon the first object of his life, and his other hand he places upon the last, and between the two his whole history is comprised—from Sinai, through Egypt, through the Red Sea, through the desert to the Jordan. It is all there. His whole life is in his grasp, and he is carrying it with him up the mountain and into eternity.

2. The beginning and the end of life are brought together. The man, one hundred and twenty years old, burdened with the weight of days, his eye bright as ever, his natural force of character but little impaired, his hair white, the sign at once of age and of a vast experience, leaning upon the staff that he carried for support, giving the words of affectionate blessing that come so well from the aged. Here he parts from those with whom he had journeyed so long. It is the last glimpse that we have of the man. Here he enters into the dark portal. That is one picture. But the other picture is that of an active, careless young man, who had broken loose from the restraint of Egyptian society, wandering about as a Bedouin Arab. How great a contrast between those two! And yet those two are the same man. What a wonderful thing is this continuance of personality.

3. Observe lastly the deep mark made on an old man by his religious experience. Moses goes back to the hour when, in the loneliness of the desert, he first realized the presence and the reality of God; when the spiritual world first became to him a real world, and with deep feeling he felt that he stood upon holy ground. In that hour he was first called by God summoning him to an earnest life. It was that meeting with God that coloured his whole history; and now when strength is failing, and death is near, he goes back to it, and he wishes for those whom he leaves that the blessing which came to him in that experience may come to them also—“The good will of him that dwelt in the bush.”

On what is it that our eye will rest most lovingly as it glances along the line of our closing life? It will not be on the hours of folly or sin by which our life has been stained. It will rather be on the fitful moments when those things have been real to us which to most men are unreal—when, as through an opening in a tangled forest, we have looked upwards and seen the blue sky above us, and have shaped our course by the glimpse that we have had. God was near us then. We heard His voice then; we felt His presence in our souls and we were assured of His good-will. We chose then the better part, and we trusted ourselves to Him as our Father and as our Saviour. And now, when strength is failing and the shades of eventide are falling thick and fast, and the unknown future is before us, we know that we have His good-will. 1 [Note: J. Cameron Lees.]

Never, my heart, wilt thou grow old!

My hair is white, my blood runs cold,

And one by one my powers depart,

But youth sits smiling in my heart.

Downhill the path of age! oh, no;

Up, up with patient steps I go;

I watch the skies fast brightening there,

I breathe a sweeter, purer air.

Beside my road small tasks spring up,

Though but to hand the cooling cup,

Speak the true word of hearty cheer,

Tell the lone soul that God is near.

Beat on, my heart, and grow not old!

And when thy pulses all are told,

Let me, though working, loving still,

Kneel as I meet my Father’s will. 2 [Note: Louisa Jane Hall.]

Literature

Brooks (P.), The Candle of the Lord, 39.

Mackay (W. M.), Bible Types of Modern Men, 1.

Maclaren (A.), Expositions: Deuteronomy–1 Samuel, 61.

Matheson (G.), Moments on the Mount, 256.

Smellie (A.), In the Secret Place, 183.

Taylor (W. M.), Contrary Winds, 200.

Christian World Pulpit, xlvii. 139 (Lees).

Verse 27

God Who is our Home

The eternal God is thy dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms.— Deuteronomy 33:27.

These words, while almost the last, are also among the most memorable, in the psalm so fitly described as “the blessing, wherewith Moses the man of God blessed the children of Israel before his death.” They express one of the sublimest truths of faith—a truth Moses himself had realized in the court of Pharaoh, on the peak of Sinai, in the hurry of flight, and in the calm and glory of the Divine Face. He had finished his work, the law was given, the wilderness traversed, the goodly land in sight, and now he had but to be led by the hand of God to the top of Nebo, and thence into great eternity. The voice he knew and loved so well had said to him, “Get thee up into this mountain of Abarim unto Mount Nebo, and die in the mount whither thou goest up, and be gathered unto thy people.” That was a very sweet and soothing command to the weary soul of the old man. His had been a long day; and now, travel-sick, toil-worn, in its mellow autumn twilight, he was to set—

As sets the morning star, which goes not down

Behind the darkened west, nor hides obscured

Among the tempests of the sky, but melts away

Into the light of heaven.

But before he goes to the point of evanishment into the everlasting light, he pauses to bless the people; and as he stands on the border-land between time and eternity, feeling his soul in the hands of God, he utters this truth of highest, holiest import, “The eternal God is thy dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms.”

The two lines of the text are not identical. The second line is not a mere repetition of the first. It is the usual manner of Hebrew poetry to run in couplets, but the second line of the couplet usually carries the thought a stage further than the first, or gives it a closer application. The thought of the first line is that God is the dwelling-place of His people, their home—with all that the word “home” carries or can carry to our hearts and minds. Then the second line arrests a possible doubt. Is there no danger that we may slip away from the Divine shelter? We need not fear; “underneath are the everlasting arms.”

I

The Eternal God is thy Dwelling-place

The children of Israel had need to be reminded of the eternal refuge and support when they were about to lose the presence and guidance of the man who had been their leader and companion in their toilsome and troubled march through the wilderness for forty years. Moses was leaving them, but leaving them with God. They were homeless, and their national future was uncertain and hidden; but to-morrow, as to-day, from generation to generation, they would be in the presence and care of the Eternal, in the arms of the everlasting power and peace.

i. The Eternal God

“I feel that if I can believe in God I believe in all that I need,” wrote an eminent Presbyterian divine in the record of his private reflections. To believe truly and fully in God may be all that we really need to inspire and sustain our hearts, but this most necessary thing is the most difficult thing in the world. It is the hardest and rarest attainment of life. Oh blessed soul! that has reached and realized through its own experience this ancient and sublime trust: “The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.”

“The eternal God” is the God of old, literally aforetime. The word denotes what is ancient rather than what is eternal. It is often used of the Mosaic age, or other distant periods of Israel’s past ( Psalms 44:1; Psalms 74:2; Psalms 74:12; Isaiah 51:9; Micah 7:20), and even of a former period of a single lifetime ( Job 29:2). It is used also of mountains ( Deuteronomy 33:15), of the heavens ( Psalms 68:33). Besides the present text it is used of God in Habakkuk 1:12; Psalms 55:19 (where the R.V. is “he that abideth of old”).

1. What does a man mean when he says, “I believe in God”? “God” is a most elastic term, capable of narrowing to suit the meanest capacity, of expanding to fill the largest. It seems to have a sense intelligible to the simplest mind, while to the profoundest it becomes the symbol of thoughts too high to be spoken, too immense to be comprehended. But though it may signify very different things to different minds, what it signifies does not thereby become unreal. It stands as the symbol of the best and highest Being man can conceive, his idea of the Being rising with his thought of the good and the high.

2. The notions of the men who first called the Being they worshipped God do not bind the latest; the word may remain while its contents are transfigured, as it were changed from one degree of glory to another. But while later ages may outgrow the ideas earlier ages expressed by the term “God,” they do not outgrow the idea which the term represents. The symbol widens to their thought as the firmament has widened to the telescope, telling, as it widens, secrets before undreamed of, showing such infinite reaches of space, such multitudes and varieties of star clusters, of worlds beyond worlds, as to awe the imagination in its loftiest mood.

3. When we speak of God we speak of Him as a personal Being, a free and conscious Will. If God be impersonal, He can have no heart tender with love, no will moved by swift-footed mercy, regulated by the large righteousness that loves order and deals with the individual through his relations to the whole, no gracious ends for the universe, or energies active in it that may cheer the despondent and help him in his sad struggle with ill.

I have only that which the poor have equally with the rich; which the lonely have equally with the man of many friends. To me this whole strange world is homely, because in the heart of it there is a home; to me this cruel world is kindly, because higher than the heavens there is something more human than humanity. If a man must not fight for this, may he fight for anything? I would fight for my friend, but if I lost my friend I should still be there. I would fight for my country, but if I lost my country I should still exist. But if what that devil dreams were true, I should not be—I should burst like a bubble and be gone; I could not live in that imbecile universe. Shall I not fight for my own existence? 1 [Note: G. K. Chesterton, The Ball and the Cross.]

What are the elements essential to a person? They are two—consciousness and will; or the knowledge by a being that he is, that he knows, that he acts and has reasons for his action; and the power of free or spontaneous, or, simply, rational choice. Where these are, there is a person; where they are not, there is only a thing. Personality is simply the power of ordered and reasonable conduct, whether it be in ruling a world or in regulating a life. 2 [Note: A. M. Fairbairn.]

Personality expresses itself, not by eternal processes, but by individual words and deeds. If there be personality in God at all, it means that He who is behind me, and beneath me, and above me, who besets me everywhere, who is in all nature—the source of forces, the measure of law, the orderer of events— can also, can, as Person with person, stand face to face with me on the platform of His own world to speak and to be answered. But can He do it worthily? Can He do it so as to complete, without fatally perplexing, the manifestation of Himself? I point for answer to Jesus Christ. 3 [Note: Life of Principal Rainy, ii. 134.]

4. Let it be noted that the text expresses no transcendental or speculative doctrine of Moses, but simply a fact of his experience. The eternal God had been his refuge. He had known better than most men the extremes of wealth and poverty, power and weakness, fulness and want. He had known solitude amid the gaieties and glories of the then most splendid court on earth. He had enjoyed Divine society on the sultry and solitary slopes of Horeb. He knew the best that Pharaoh could do for him, the worst that he could do against him, and had found both to be infinitely little. He had known, in all its anxious and bitter phases, what it was to be the loved and hated, trusted and suspected, praised and blamed, leader of a mutinous and murmuring and unstable people. The realities and semblances, the dreams and the disappointments, the actualities and the illusions of life he had alike experienced; and the grand truth which had amid all given stability, strength, and comfort was, “The eternal God my refuge, and underneath the everlasting arms.”

5. A great poet, whose words are equally dear to men of letters and to men of science, tells us “the eternal womanliness draws us ever on”; that is, the love, the beauty, the sweet and potent gentleness personified in ideal woman is a ceaseless inspiration to man, wakes him to admiration, wins him to love. But there is one term that embraces everlasting womanliness and infinitely more, the term Eternal Father, or in its simple and beautiful paraphrase, “God is love.” When we think of the eternal God, then we think of the living Source of good, active at all moments in all lives. He is righteousness, but also love; He is truth, but grace as well. His character determines His ends, His ends justify His ways. His acts become Him, are not accommodated to our deserts, but to His own character and designs. He does not deal with us after our sins, but according to His mercies and in harmony with His own ends. No man is to God an isolated individual, but a unit within a mighty whole, loved as a person, but handled as one whose being was deemed necessary to complete the universe, and judged through the ends of Him who means the universe to be complete. And the man who believes in God, believes in One who loved him from eternity, whose love called him into being, designed and prepared a place for him in the system His wisdom ordained and His will maintains. He knows that, amid all the shadows and sorrows and shame of life, underneath him and around are the everlasting arms.

The two sublimest affirmations concerning the Deity in the inspired Word are these—“God is Light,” “God is Love.” It is the latter of these two which, apparently, had so taken hold of the mind and the heart of Browning that he never wearies of reiterating the statement of the fact in numerous connexions and in various forms. In “Paracelsus” he declares unhesitatingly:

God! Thou art love! I build my faith on that.

And presently, praying for one who has erred, and for himself, he says:

Save him, dear God; it will be like Thee: bathe him

In light and life! Thou art not made like us;

We should be wroth in such a case; but Thou

Forgivest—so, forgive these passionate thoughts

Which come unsought and will not pass away!

I know Thee, who hast kept my path, and made

Light for me in the darkness, tempering sorrow

So that it reached me like a solemn joy;

It were too strange that I should doubt thy love. 1 [Note: J. Flew, Studies in Browning, 23.]

ii. A Dwelling-place

Our need of the eternal God is but too manifest. Weak and mortal, man feels himself a most helpless being. Birth and death are stronger than he; of the one he is the product, of the other the victim. He comes out of a past eternity, in which he had no conscious being; he must go into an eternal future where he is to be—he knows not what. This little conscious present is all he has, all that sense can discover or intellect disclose. Mind can see, can feel, the lonely sadness of this little life—can look out into the infinities of space and time, realize their boundlessness and its own minute personality, till it feels like a small self-conscious star twinkling solitary in an immense expanse.

In moments when the thought of these infinities, conceived only as such, has been strong in me, I have felt like one standing, and reeling while he stood, on a narrow pillar reared high in space, looking up to a starless sky, out on a boundless immensity, down into a bottomless abyss, till in the despair of utter loneliness the soul has cried, “Oh for the face of the eternal God above, and the everlasting arms below.” 2 [Note: A. M. Fairbairn.]

The dearest things in this fair world must change;

Thy senses hurry on to sure decay;

Thy strength will fail, the pain seem no more strange,

While love more feebly cheers the misty way.

What then remains above the task of living?

Is there no crown where that rude cross hath pressed?

Yes, God remains, His own high glory giving

To light thy lonely path, to make it blest.

Yea, God remains, though suns are daily dying,—

A gracious God, who marks the sparrow’s fall;

He listens while thine aching heart is sighing;

He hears and answers when His children call;

His love shall fill the void when death assails,—

The one, eternal God, who never fails. 3 [Note: William Ordway Partridge.]

1. What man needs is a permanent consciousness of the eternal God as a daily presence, the very atmosphere in which the soul lives, moves, and has its being. To this, two movements are necessary, one from God to man, one from man to God.

There’s heaven above, and night by night

I look right through its gorgeous roof;

No suns and moons though e’er so bright

Avail to stop me; splendour-proof

I keep the broods of stars aloof:

For I intend to get to God,

For ’tis to God I speed so fast,

For in God’s breast, my own abode,

Those shoals of dazzling glory passed,

I lay my spirit down at last. 1 [Note: Browning, Johannes Agricola in Meditation.]

(1) God’s movement is one in fact and essence, though manifold in form and manifestation—Love. There is truth Divine and universal in that saying of the Psalmist—“Thy gentleness hath made me great.” All man’s greatness comes from God’s gentleness. Were He wroth, our spirits would fail before Him; but He remains merciful, and we endure. “Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him.” His heart, boundless as space, infinite as eternity, beats with mercy; and the eternal God around us means simply, Man is enveloped in eternal love.

Two little girls were playing with their dolls, and singing—

Safe in the arms of Jesus,

Safe on His gentle breast,

There, by His love o’ershaded,

Sweetly my soul shall rest.

Mother was busy writing, only stopping to listen to the little ones’ talk:

“Sister, how do you know you are safe?” asked Nellie, the younger of the two.

“Because I am holding Jesus, with both my hands, tight,” replied her sister.

“That’s not safe,” said the other. “Suppose Satan came along and cut your two hands off!”

Little sister looked troubled, dropped dolly, and thought. Suddenly her face shone with joy. “Oh, I forgot! Jesus is holding me, and Satan can’t cut off His hands; so I am safe.” 1 [Note: W. Armstrong.]

The child, that to its mother clings,

Lies not all safely on her breast,

Till she her arm around it flings,

Sweetly caressing and caressed:

Ev’n so, my God, Thy mighty arms,

Not my poor Faith, shield me from harms.

I bless Thy Name for every grace,

Wherewith Thou dost enrich Thine own;

Yea, I would seek each day to trace

Myself more like my Master grown:

Yet, O my God, Thy mighty arms,

Not my faint Love, shield me from harms. 2 [Note: A. B. Grosart, Songs of the Day and Night, 12.]

(2) But, on the other hand, let us not forget that the movement from man to God is as needful as the movement from God to man. The one, like the other, is a movement of love; yet with a difference. Divine pity moves down to all men; but only from filial hearts does human trust move up to God. The Fatherhood is universal; but only where the sonship is consciously realized can the spirit cry, “Abba, Father!” His loving-kindness falls on us like incense by night.

The Divine Father is not the same to all devout men; He is to some more of a daily Presence, more of a permanent Friend; and this larger sense of God rises from a larger need and conscious use of Him in the soul. Vacancies made in the heart are often only rooms in it swept and beautified for God; and His presence at once, glorifies the chamber thus prepared, sheds a mellow light back upon the past, and splendid hopes forward upon the future. Were it possible to reduce a pious soul to a consciousness of only two beings—first and pre-eminently of God, next and feebly of self—then it were possible to endow that soul with the supremest happiness possible to a creature; and the more nearly any man approaches to that consciousness the more blessed will he be. Of a truth, he is happy who can say, “As for me, I shall behold thy face in righteousness; I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness.” 3 [Note: A. M. Fairbairn.]

2. God is a dwelling-place (1) to the nation, and (2) to the individual.

(1) The words were spoken, as all the greatest utterances of the Old Testament were spoken, to a people. The hope of the Israelite was a national hope. His fathers had known God and done their work and passed to their rest. He in his turn was allowed to know God and do his share of work and be buried with his fathers, leaving children and children’s children to carry the work still further forward till at last it should reach its glorious consummation. The nation lived on and expanded and developed, blessed when it feared the Lord, punished when it forgot Him. Thousands and tens of thousands of its sons and daughters passed, but the nation still lived on, and learned to look for its perfect glory in the future, when the king Messiah should reign in righteousness over the whole earth, sitting on David’s throne in Jerusalem. This was the ideal of the great poets and prophets of the Jewish people. It was a national and not an individual hope.

In times of critical strain and trial to civilization and the State, amid great political and social troubles and changes, let us not fail to remember and realize that the eternal God is our refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms. It is not our decrees and institutions that are upholding the world, but the everlasting laws—another name for the everlasting arms. Our refuge in times of distress is not parliaments and governments and compromising politicians, but the eternal God. Our rulers and governors may help or hinder progress, but they do not decide the supreme and final issue of things. There is another Providence in affairs than the human providence. This world is, after all, God’s world. Let us not, therefore, lose courage and hope because in the complications of disintegration and change we do not see what is to follow. In all ages, men, bewildered by the vision of great changes, have pronounced the doom of the world because they were not able to see or understand the process of its salvation. Let us not be fearful even if the worst happens. The worst that can happen is often the best for the world. Jerusalem destroyed is better than Jerusalem saved, and the fall of the Roman Empire better for the moral health of the peoples of the earth than its continuance.

The children of Israel had no other, and therefore if God were not their dwelling-place, they were houseless. Pilgrims of the weary foot, they found no city to dwell in; at eventide they pitched their tents, but they struck them again in the morning; the trumpet sounded and they were up and away; if they were in a comfortable valley for one day, yet that relentless trumpet bade them resume their wearisome march through the wilderness in the morning; and perhaps they thought they lingered longest where an encampment was least desirable. Nevertheless they always had a dwelling-place in their God. If I might use such a description without seeming to be fanciful, I would say that the great cloudy canopy which covered them all day long from the heat of the sun was their roof-tree, and that the blazing pillar which protected them by night was their family fireside. 1 [Note: C. H. Spurgeon.]

(2) But if the national reference of these words is their primary reference, yet we are justified in giving them a further and more personal reference in the light of the Christian revelation.

Sooner or later every son of man is taught the lesson of his own insufficiency, of his need of a strength he does not find in himself, and of a shelter and support which his fellows cannot give, and no earthly interest or object can yield. The larger and more varied his experience of the world and life, and the more deeply he feels and thinks, the more does he realize the assurance of the Divine protection and care to be the most pressing and imperious of all his practical needs. Of all substitutes for God—wealth, comfort, amusement, music, beauty, learning, friendship, love, philanthropy—he must say, at least in all his most searching and critical experiences, “Miserable comforters are ye all!” To state the fundamental facts of human life is, indeed, to affirm religion. In the generalized experience of mankind lies the real basis of religion. And all religion must somehow have its beginning and its end in God. Religion is God; God is religion.

The ancient words interpret and give immortal expression to a universal and indestructible need of humanity. They were true before they were written, and they would be true if they had not been written in the sacred book of religion. Centuries have passed away and generations have come and gone, but they still lay upon us their solemn spell, and we continue to use them, as we do all the great words of the Bible, because they find us, divine our hearts for us, and utter what in us is but faintly felt and dimly thought with the clear and certain sound of complete conviction, and with the energy of a faith that quickens and strengthens our wavering trusts and hopes. 1 [Note: J. Hunter.]

The infinities of space and time are like boundless deserts, silent, void, till filled with a personal God and Father; but once He lives in and through them, they become warm, vital, throbbing, like hearts pulsing with tides of infinite emotion rushing towards us and breaking into the music of multitudinous laughter and tears. The sky above is no longer space gleaming with stars; but filling it, round the stars, round and through the world, in and about each individual man, is God, daily touching us, daily loving us, giving us life and being in Himself. The Eternities behind and before us are no longer dark, empty, or, at best, a grim procession of births and deaths; they are a living, loving God, from whom man came, to whom he returns. And that Eternal God makes all things secure, restful, blessed. No moment, either here or hereafter, can ever be without God; therefore in none can the good man be otherwise than happy. What is beyond death is not beyond God. He is there as here; and so, whether we live or die, the eternal God is our refuge, and underneath us are the everlasting arms. 2 [Note: A. M. Fairbairn.]

O Name, all other names above,

What art Thou not to me,

Now I have learned to trust Thy love

And cast my care on Thee!

What is our being but a cry,

A restless longing still,

Which Thou alone canst satisfy,

Alone Thy fulness fill!

Thrice blessèd be the holy souls

That lead the way to Thee,

That burn upon the martyr-rolls

And lists of prophecy.

And sweet it is to tread the ground

O’er which their faith hath trod;

But sweeter far, when Thou art found,

The soul’s own sense of God!

The thought of Thee all sorrow calms;

Our anxious burdens fall;

His crosses turn to triumph-palms,

Who finds in God his all. 1 [Note: Frederick Lucian Hosmer.]

II

Underneath are the Everlasting Arms

God surrounds His children on all sides: they dwell in Him. The passage before us shows that the Lord is above them, for we read, “There is none like unto the God of Jeshurun, who rideth upon the heaven in thy help, and in his excellency on the sky.” Assuredly He is around them, for “the eternal God is thy refuge”; and He is before them, for “He shall thrust out the enemy from before thee; and shall say, Destroy them.” Here, according to the text, the Lord is also under His saints, for “underneath are the everlasting arms.” “Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations,” and by Thee we are everywhere surrounded as the earth by the atmosphere.

Within thy circling power I stand;

On every side I find thy hand;

Awake, asleep, at home, abroad,

I am surrounded still with God.

1. The meaning is that God is our support, and our support just when we begin to sink. We want support when we are sinking, and the arms being “underneath” implies that this support is given just when we are going down. At certain seasons the Christian sinks very low in humiliation. He has a deep sense of his own sin; he is humbled before God, till he scarce knows how to lift up his face and pray, because he appears, in his own sight, so abject, so mean, so base, so worthless. Well, let him remember that when he is at his worst “underneath are the everlasting arms.” Sin may sink him ever so low, but the great atonement is still under all. Here is a text which proves it: “He is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by him.” You may have gone very low, but you can never have gone so low as “the uttermost.” Here is another: “All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men.” Have you plunged into nearly every kind of sin; have you gone into “all manner of blasphemy”? Even if you have, it may be forgiven, so that this promise goes underneath you. The love of God, the power of the blood, and the prevalence of the intercession, are deeper down than sin with all its hell-born vileness can ever sink the sinner, while breath is in his nostrils.

I dare approach that Heaven

Which has not bade a living thing despair,

Which needs no code to keep its grace from stain,

But bids the vilest worm that turns on it

Desist and be forgiven. 1 [Note: Browning, A Blot in the ’Scutchcon.]

“Underneath are the everlasting arms.” That means Personality. That means an all-enfolding, all-embracing love. That means power, the power of the right arm of the Most High. That means redemption, an arm that is not shortened that it cannot save; not “shortened” by any material limitations or physical obstacles. It is not shortened that it cannot save. It can reach down through all defects of being, through all taints of blood, through all grossness of the flesh, through all warpings of the will, and corruptions of the mind and heart; it can get within, to the mysterious soul and core of all character, the springs of all conduct—“underneath are the everlasting arms.” 2 [Note: C. S. Horne.]

2. The word “underneath” has never been used in the Bible before, and it is never used again. It is of its own order; a word big with meaning and suggestiveness. It is the index to a whole system of thought, philosophical and theological. No solitary word, perhaps, could imply more than this. It opens to us the attitude of wonder and reverent faith in which the deepest minds have pondered what we call to-day the phenomenal; the things that are seen, that strike upon the senses of touch and taste, sight and sound. Such deep minds, brooding over phenomena, have never been satisfied with merely registering those properties and qualities of the material world which they can test and know. They have divided and subdivided matter till they have reduced it to its tiniest possible elements, and then have been conscious that their world and thought end in a note of interrogation after all. It is all summed up, let us say, in this word “underneath.”

It has been said that “the great contribution of science to the sum of modern belief has been that underneath phenomena is that which is everlasting.” During “the wonderful century” the men of science cleaved the rocks, penetrated the skies, scanned the hidden depths, looked into the secrets of nature, brought to light strange knowledge, and set much wisdom in order; and the strangest and most wonderful discovery of all is that the temporal rests on the eternal, that every commonest thing we see, and every commonest thing we handle, has beneath it the everlasting which becomes clear to patient thinking.

I heard my father say he understood it was

A building, people built as soon as earth was made

Almost, because they might forget (they were afraid)

Earth did not make itself, but came of Somebody.

They laboured that their work might last, and show thereby

He stays, while we and earth, and all things come and go.

Come whence? Go whither? That, when come and gone, we know

Perhaps, but not while earth and all things need our best

Attention: we must wait and die to know the rest.

Ask, if that’s true, what use in setting up the pile?

To make one fear and hope: remind us, all the while

We come and go, outside there’s Somebody that stays. 1 [Note: Browning, Fifine at the Fair.]

3. When do we most need to know that underneath are the everlasting arms?

(1) When we have reached a state of special joy and exaltation in our religious life.—Sometimes God takes His servants and puts them on the pinnacle of the temple. Satan does it sometimes: God does it too—puts His servants up on the very pinnacle, where they are so full of joy that they scarce know how to contain themselves, whether in the body or out of the body they cannot tell. Well, now, suppose they should fall! for it is so easy for a man, when full of ecstasy and ravishment, to make a false step and slip. They are safe enough, as safe as though they were in the Valley of Humiliation, for underneath are the arms of God.

Suffering has been long acknowledged as an indispensable factor in the building up of souls; the place of love and happiness is less secure. It is at least possible that there are stunted souls who cannot converse fully with the Divine Father till they have had ampler draughts from the breasts of natural joy. 1 [Note: Anna Bunston, The Porch of Paradise, xi.]

It’s O my heart, my heart,

To be out in the sun and sing!

To sing and shout in the fields about,

In the balm and the blossoming.

Sing loud, O bird in the tree;

O bird, sing loud in the sky,

And honey-bees blacken the clover seas:

There are none of you glad as I.

The leaves laugh low in the wind,

Laugh low with the wind at play;

And the odorous call of the flowers all

Entices my soul away!

For O but the world is fair, is fair:

And O but the world is sweet!

I will out in the gold of the blossoming mould,

And sit at the Master’s feet.

And the love my heart would speak,

I would fold in the lily’s rim,

That the lips of the blossom, more pure and meek,

May offer it up to Him.

Then sing in the hedgerow green, O thrush,

O skylark, sing in the blue;

Sing loud, sing clear, that the King may hear,

And my soul shall sing with you! 2 [Note: Ina Donna Coolbrith.]

(2) When we are specially depressed and in fear.—There are times when the burdens of life’s unintelligible secret rest upon us with a weight almost too heavy to be borne. There are so many things which it seems to us infinitely important that we should know, but about which we yet know almost nothing. Mystery circumscribes our little lives as with a wall of adamant; we can hardly advance one single step in thought without dashing ourselves against it; we know not what we are came, we know not whither we came, we know not whither we are going, and none can tell us. We cry aloud for surer knowledge, and while to the forward and presumptuous there comes back no answer except the echo of their own voice, even for humble and faithful questioners there is only the whisper, “What I do thou knowest not now; but thou shalt know hereafter.” There is silence and there is darkness. Our vaunted science cannot break that silence and cannot dissipate that gloom.

The eternal God is our refuge from the unsearchable mystery of life. We cannot escape from mystery. It grows with our growing knowledge. What a world this is in which we live, and how awful in some of its aspects is our life in it! Does it not require something more than our little systems and schemes to keep the mind and soul in strength and peace in the midst of this troubled world and troubled life? Where else can we find the sense of shelter and security than where Moses found it long ago? “The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.” Let us yield nothing to our fears. That the Unknown and the Unknowable may be trusted is the message of religion. Our discipleship to Jesus Christ inspires this lofty confidence in the beneficence of the universe, in a universe essentially good and making for goodness—a confidence which is the anticipation of much that modern knowledge is now slowly declaring. In the companionship and fellowship of the Son of God we know that where His trust was in Gethsemane and on Calvary ours can ever rest. “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.”

Often as a child I have trembled to cross at night the courtyard of a lonely country mill. Every little object that moonlight or starlight revealed in other than natural proportions was a source of fear—seemed to hide shapes terrible to childish flesh and blood. But if my little hand was laid in the large hand of my father, I could cross the courtyard as gleefully and carelessly at night as at noonday. So, with our spirits held in the hands of the eternal God, who is above, around, and before, the dark places of Life, Death, and the great for Ever become light; and, trusting where we cannot see, our steps are firm, when otherwise they would falter and fail. 1 [Note: A. M. Fairbairn.]

I suppose some brethren have neither much elevation nor much depression. I could almost wish to share their peaceful life, for I am much tossed up and down, and although my joy is greater than that of most men, my depression of spirit is such as few can have any idea of. This week has been in some respects the crowning week of my life, but it closed with a horror of great darkness, of which I will say no more than this—I bless God that at my worst, underneath me I found the everlasting arms. 2 [Note: C. H. Spurgeon.]

Till last night I never knew what depression was. I had no illness; one or two things had happened to grieve me, but still they were comparatively slight; but I never felt so thoroughly downcast about myself and all the world, or so bitter and serious a struggle within me. It tore me through and through, yet it was a great mercy and a special answer to prayer; for having previously felt my own indifference and want of real sense of danger, I had entreated to be bruised and brought low to feel the burthen, that I might appreciate what deliverance might be, and it was granted; consequently this morning I felt such as I had never felt before at the whole service and communion. I never till then had an adequate notion of the power and beauty of our Liturgy, and, on the other hand, of its inferiority to the Word of God. I gained some faint idea of what the Bible was; I felt the glorious depth of the declaration, “Now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept,” a passage which I had merely understood before. 3 [Note: F. J. A. Hort, Life and Letters, i. 36]

Dark and sad the hours have been

In the valley and shade of Death,

Where no light mine eyes have seen

But the far, cold stars of faith.

And my heart with haunting fears

Almost sank into despair;

Yet the harvest of my years

Mostly has been gathered there.

(3) When sorrow has come in upon us like a flood.—By a strange and stern law of compensation, which equalizes the distribution of pain, where the material loss is the less felt the heart’s loss is often the greater. No hunger, no cold, no nakedness enters this house by reason of the new record in the registry of death. Externally, maternally, all is as before. But there is the more room and scope for the agony of bereavement; there is the less possibility of assuagement by the good offices of others. Gifts can do nothing here to help; and words, we know, are often less kind than silence. The stranger cannot intermeddle; no anxious effort we can make can mitigate the bitterness.

A king once planted in his garden a beautiful rose-tree, and bade his gardener so tend and train it as to make its flowers the richest and loveliest possible. The tree grew and flourished, and year by year blushed into blossoms of manifold beauty. But it sent out so many shoots, formed so many buds, that its very fertility threatened to injure the quality of its flowers. So the gardener removed the shoots, pruned away the buds, till the tree seemed to bleed all over in loss and pain; but the wounds healed, the sap and strength ran up to those buds that were spared, and when the season of ripeness was come, the roses were lovelier and sweeter than ever—most meet of all in the garden to be carried into the palace of the great king, to fill its galleries and chambers with delicious and grateful fragrance.

God gives us love. Something to love

He lends us; but, when love is grown

To ripeness, that on which it throve

Falls off, and love is left alone.

But it is left alone that it may be the one perfect bond between the human and the Divine, the fragrant sacrifice that rejoices God, the glorious beauty that makes man a source and seat of joy for ever.

If all my years were summer, could I know

What my Lord means by His “made white as snow”?

If all my days were sunny, could I say,

“In His fair land He wipes all tears away”?

If I were never weary could I keep

Close to my heart, “He gives His lovèd sleep”?

Were no graves mine, might I not come to deem

The life eternal but a baseless dream?

My winter, yea, my tears, my weariness,

Even my graves may be His way to bless;

I call them ills, yet that can surely be

Nothing but good that shows my Lord to me.

(4) In the fear of death.—When, at last, each of us is laid on the bed of death, and the moment has come when we must enter into the presence of God and see our souls, with every mask of hypocrisy, conscious or unconscious, torn away, see our souls as they are and as God sees them; when we are sinking naked and possessionless into the grave; when we feel the mist in our eyes, the fog in our throats, and the voices of our friends no longer reach us, or if they do we have no strength even to sigh back an answer or to return the pressure of the hand—what can help us then? Alone we must enter that dark valley—no troops of friends can accompany us there; alone must our souls seem to sink downwards as through unfathomable seas of gloom. Which of us can tell how soon that awful hour may be awaiting us? And when it comes, how will every one of the things which we have desired on earth seem to shrink into utter insignificance in comparison with “the one thing needful,” which, perhaps, we may have altogether neglected. When the solid earth itself seems to be crumbling under our feet, when we lie helpless in the grasp of that inexorable force, there is one thing which gives to the Christian not only hope, but “peace which passeth all understanding”; it is when we feel that for us death can have no sting, and the grave no victory, because the eternal God is our refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.

Mr. B., an eager business man in middle life, declared that, till he found a way of escape, to go to bed was to go to hell. Just as he was about to lose consciousness there had been almost always presented to his mind the idea and sensation of himself falling through boundless space. The perspiration stood on his face as he avowed that the phrase “bottomless pit” was to him overwhelming in its suggestiveness. This torture he had begun to experience while he was yet a schoolboy. At the school prayers on Sunday night the boys had always sung Ken’s evening hymn. The lines—

Teach me to live that I may dread

The grave as little as my bed

had seemed terrible in their irony to one who dreaded nothing so much as his bed. Relief had not come to him until he was well on in manhood. Strolling one evening in a country churchyard, his eyes were arrested by the words on a gravestone “Underneath are the Everlasting Arms,” and in a flash of inspiration he saw his safety. That very night, as the solid platform of the earth was falling away from him, “he rested on the promise”—for so he described his mental attitude—and he affirmed that since that time he had always at his command a sense of physical comfort and safety upon which he could sleep as on a pillow. 1 [Note: The Spectator, July 2, 1910.]

The embers of the day are red

Beyond the murky hill.

The kitchen smokes: the bed

In the darkling house is spread:

The great sky darkens overhead,

And the great woods are shrill.

So far have I been led,

Lord, by Thy will:

So far I have followed, Lord, and wondered still.

The breeze from the embalmèd land

Blows sudden toward the shore,

And claps my cottage door.

I hear the signal, Lord—I understand.

The night at Thy command

Comes. I will eat and sleep and will not question more. 2 [Note: R. L. Stevenson, Songs of Travel.]

Literature

Armstrong (W.), Five-Minute Sermons to Children, 46.

Darlow (T. H.), The Upward Calling, 154.

Fairbairn (A. M.), The City of God, 190.

Fairbairn (R. B.), College Sermons, 302.

Horan (F. S.), A Call to Seamen, 131.

Hunter (J.), De Profundis Clamavi, 310.

Hutton (J. A.), The Fear of Things, 1.

Parks (L.), The Winning of the Soul, 201.

Robinson (J. A.), Unity in Christ, 123, 137.

Robinson (J. A.), Holy Ground, 7, 15.

Smellie (A.), In the Secret Place, 345.

Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xi. (1865), No. 624; xiv. (1868), No. 803; xxiv. (1878), No. 1413.

Wardell (R. J.), Studies in Homiletics, 94.

Christian Age, xxx. 66 (Farrar).

Christian World Pulpit, xxix. 209 (Farrar); Leviticus 4 (Horne); lxviii. 401 (Hunter).

Churchman’s Pulpit: The Old and New Year, ii. 412 (Hunter); Sermons to the Young, xvi. 288 (Ross); Harvest Thanksgiving, 31 (Fairbairn).