New epistles from old lands

Front matter

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

NEW EPISTLES FROM OLD LANDS.

BOOKS BY

Contents

CHAPTER. PAGE

I. — New Epistles from Old Lands, . . .17 II — What God Is to His People, and What He

III. — The Things We Should Leave for Christ 75 IV. — The Plumbline or, the Herdsmen of Tekoa ioi V — Why Not the Men as Well as the Women? or, a Family from the Seashore of Galilee, . . . . . . .127

II

What God Is to His People and What He Is Not.

" Have I been a wilderness unto Israel ? " — Jer. ii. 31. " The glorious Lord will be unto us a place of broad rivers." — ISA. xxxiii. 21.

This sermon has a history. It is a product of Palestine. It grew in the land where its text grew. I found it in the wilderness of Judea, not far from the city of Jerusalem. Prior to my visit to the Holy Land I had never been in a wilderness. But on the morning of a bright May-day I started from Jerusalem for a trip through the wilderness thirty miles down to the Jordan valley and the banks of the Dead Sea. I was on my way to Jericho. In this trip I reached the very heart of the wilderness of Judea. It formed a great contrast to what I had seen a few days before, when I rode over the plain of Sharon, which was all abloom with flowers and richly freighted with waving harvests. The centre of the wilderness of Judea is wildness itself. It is pure, unrelieved desolation ; it is pastureless ; it is lifeless ; it is utterly unremunerative ; it is devoid of every trace or suggestion of the human. There is not even a black tent of a swarthy Bedouin there. There are hills there, but they are bald, and smooth, and white, and without a tint of verdure. There are great gorges there, black and yawning, rock-ribbed and stony. There are steep precipices there, which make the tourist shudder as he rides along their slippery edges. There is flying dust there, and, driven by the wind, it sweeps the place in blinding and stifling clouds. There is great heat there, and most of the year the wilderness is like a burning oven. A man out there amid those stony hills is as isolated as a man out in the midst of the great waves of mid-ocean with not a sail in sight. It is the land of silence. The perpetual stillness there is overwhelming and oppressive. The sterile solitudes are so deep and so lonely that they set one talking to his own soul for the sake of company and relief. This is the one place of all the earth for God to talk to a man, and to talk effectively. There is positively nothing to interrupt; nothing to break the attention of man. This is God's auditorium, roofed by a wonderful sky, and grand with the grandeur of vastness. It was out here that Elijah lived and received his messages from God, messages which were straightforward and without ornament, craggy and granite in their substance and form. It was out here that John the Baptist separated himself to God, and here he began to preach the coming of the kingdom. It was out here that Jesus Christ was tempted. On one

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side of this wilderness Amos was born, and on another and. different side of it Jeremiah was born, and the visions of both of these prophets have the ruggedness of this wilderness in them. They both make the wilderness of Judea talk to Israel concerning God, and concerning God's dealings with His covenant people. It was out here, while I was in the very heart of barrenness and chaos and emptiness, that the text of this morning came to me. " Have I ever been a wilderness to thee? " The question came with such force that it seemed as though I heard an audible voice and as though God Himself spake down from the skies. For a time I rode on in the stillness of the wilderness without saying a single word. I let God talk. I allowed Him to amplify His question. " Have I been a barren God to you ? Have you planted your faith in Me, and reaped nothing ? Have you cultivated your love toward Me and received no love in return? Has your fellowship with Me yielded you nothing more than these broken, chasmic rocks have yielded the shepherds and the husbandmen of Judea? As your God, am I to you as the things which you see around you — blinding dust, oppressive heat which weakens and makes faint, yawning chasm which affrights and terrifies, perpetual emptiness which disappoints, a mighty field of unfruitful rocks bald and barren, unable to give man the bread of life, able only to hold his bones while they bleach in the sun, and crumble 4 to atoms, and blow away ? Am I only a wilderness to you ? You know now what a wilderness is. Answer My question here in the heart of this Judean desert. Answer it to your own soul, answer it to the world, answer it to Me."

How did I deal with God's question ? How did I frame my answer ? What did I say to God in response? I will tell you. I threw God's question up over the barren hills, to the crested edge of the wilderness, to a little oasis there, where I saw a shepherd feeding his flock in the morning as I started out on my wilderness trip ; and an answer to God's question came back from that picturesque scene in the form of the Twenty-third Psalm :

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.

Turning that psalm into the song of my soul, I sent it to God as my answer. I threw God's question over to the summit of Mount Moriah, and out from the old Temple of God came floating in the air the words of the Thirty-sixth Psalm :

Thy loving kindness, O Lord, is in the heavens. Thy faithfulness reacheth unto the skies. Thy righteousness is like the great mountains. Thy judgments are a great deep.

O Lord, thou preservest man and beast. How precious is thy loving kindness, O God! Therefore the children of men put their trust under the shadow of thy wings.

They shall be abundantly satisfied with the fatness of thy house.

And thou shalt make them drink of the river of thy pleasures.

For with thee is the fountain of life.

In thy light shall we see light.

I turned these words also into the song of my soul that day, and sent the Thirty-sixth Psalm to God as my answer.

Mount Nebo was in sight from the spot where I was, so I threw God's question up there to Moses, and back from him came these words of the Ninetieth Psalm :

Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations.

I threw 7 God's question over to Mount Zion to the palace of David, the King of Israel, and from his harp of praise came back the One Hundred and Third Psalm, and I made that the song of my soul and sent the One Hundred and Third Psalm to God as my answer. Why should I not use these inspired osalms as my answer ? I was in the psalm country, wnere God's goodness grew these psalms, and they answered the fitness of things. I threw God's question over to Bethlehem, and to Calvary, and to the empty tomb, and to the Mount of Olives, and back came the Gospels, and the eighth chapter of Romans, and the fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians, and, by an act of appropriating faith, I made these mine once more and sent them to God as my answer. I was in the midst of these historic and sacred places, I had seen them all that very day, and why should I not interrogate them for the answer which I knew they held ? Summing up my answer into one short sentence, with Israel of old, I said : " Lord, thou hast been as a River of Life unto me." A river of life is the very opposite of a wilderness. Israel of old said : "The glorious Lord will be unto us a place of broad rivers."

We see now what God is not. He is not a wilderness to His people. The other question before us is, "What is He?" Our text answers: "He is a River to His people."

Did I see illustrations of the value of the life-giving river while in yonder world of antiquity ? I did. And what is remarkable, ofttimes I saw the fertile river- valley and the bleak and blasted wilderness-region coexisting side by side. The striking contrast emphasized to me the word " wilderness" and the word "river." I saw the Nile and the fertile valley which it has made. Egypt is the creature of the Nile. Geographically Egypt is a broad tract of country, but so far as civilization is concerned the real Egypt is the comparatively narrow strip of the valley of the Nile, broadening out below Cairo into the Delta. On each side of the rich valley there is an arid region of rocky and sandy hills, on which scarcely a trace of vegetation

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can be seen. The fertile valley is marked off from the desert as cleanly as if the dividing line had been cut by a knife. That desert is a mighty sea of yellow sand which the wind has tossed everywhere into wave shapes. It is crinkled and billowed, just like the ocean. It is out there that the bland Sphinx rears its mighty head, and the gigantic pyramids keep perpetual watch. Take away the Nile, and Egypt in a very short time would lapse into the great African desert. These sands, which are forever dashing up against the Sphinx and the pyramids, would roll over this Eden valley and make it one sea of sand.

What is seen in Egypt is seen in Syria, viz. : fertility and desert side by side. The rich plain of Damascus is surrounded by great sand hills as bleak and as verdureless as the human eye ever rested upon. The contrast sets off the beauty of the city of Damascus. It is a city of gardens, and itself stands in the midst of a vast garden. It is the great White City of the Orient; and its minarets and dome-shaped buildings, all white, give it the appearance of an island of pearls and opals gleaming out of a sea of emerald. You know the characteristics of this noted city. It is noted for its great antiquity and astonishing vitality. It is the oldest city of the world. It antedates Abraham. Eliezer, Abraham's servant, was from Damascus.

It has had vitality to live through millenniums.

Babylon is a ruin, Nineveh is a ruin, but Damascus still stands and shows no sign of decay. Rome is called the Eternal City, but Damascus is twice the age of Rome. Its history goes back to the world's beginning and bids fair to go on to the world's end. It is noted for its great beauty. It is called the Paradise of the East. It got this name from the story of Mohammed. It is related of him that, when he was a poor muleteer, he came on one of his journeys to the neighborhood of Damascus. When he caught sight of the city, lying in the midst of its bowers, he gazed on its beauty and turned away without entering it, exclaiming : " Man can have but one Paradise, and my Paradise is fixed above." The prophet Jeremiah, in the name of a citizen of Damascus, calls it "the city of praises, the city of my joy." But why speak thus in praise of Damascus ? That I may make this point : Its beauty, its vitality, its antiquity, its wealth are all due to one cause, viz., the river Abana. " Are not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel ? " The Abana is the very life-blood of great Damascus and of the whole surrounding fertile plain. But for it the whole plain would match the bleak hills that loom around it. It is literally a river of life.

Naaman, the Syrian, was right when, physically, he pooh-poohed at the river Jordan in comparison with this river which made Damascus. There was no such river in all Israel. The Jordan was no such river. I traced the Jordan, from the spot where it ingloriously empties itself into the Dead Sea, up to its source in Dan, where it gushes almost full size from the base of Mount Hermon, but I found it as nothing in comparison with the Abana. It did not make Galilee, it did not make Judea. It never created any civilization. It never turned a mill-wheel. No great city was ever built on its banks. The valley through which it flows, owing to its tropical heat, is malarious and drives the population to the adjacent highlands. It has never been anything for navigation. No fishing industry has ever been carried on in its waters. It has helped agriculture only in a limited way, and that in Galilee. The Judean half of it might disappear without producing any serious loss to the civilization of Palestine. The civilization of Palestine is found, not in its valley, but up on the centre tableland, hundreds of feet higher than the Jordan valley. The Jordan got its famous history, not from its physical value, but from its relation to the God of Israel. It was a sacramental river. It was as such that it made its record. God made its waters life-giving to Naaman of Damascus. The touch of the sacred feet of the priests and the mantle of Elijah gave it its fame. John and Jesus made it holy water by converting it into God's Baptistry . Jesus Christ was baptized in it. It was the silver cord upon which

God strung as golden beads the thrilling events in the history of His covenant people.

Jerusalem knew just what the Jordan was; that it meant nothing to a great city ; that it meant nothing to the surrounding country of a great city; that it produced nothing in civilization. Jerusalem said to God, " I have no Nile to make me as Egypt. I have no Euphrates to make me as Babylon. I have no Abana to make me as Damascus. I have only this little Jordan; and it is nothing." God replied to Jerusalem : " I know it. You have no Nile; no Euphrates; no Abana. I am your Nile; I am your Euphrates; I am your Abana. I will be a River unto thee. I will make thee great without the Nile; without the Euphrates; without the Abana. Have I ever been a wilderness unto Israel ? "

What God promised to be, that He was to Jerusalem; its River; the Source of its life. What if Damascus have the Abana ; is not God better than the Abana? Can Damascus, the Abana-made city, compare with Jerusalem, the God-made city ? Notwithstanding the great age of Damascus, notwithstanding its large population in all times, we cannot associate a single great action with Damascus, or a single great action with any one born in Damascus. I mean an action that has blessed the wide world. The associations of Damascus are all of idolatry, cruelty, and bloodshed. You cannot say that of Jerusalem. Jerusalem, with

God in place of a river, has a better record than that.

In Judea there were none of the natural conditions of a great city; but God built Jerusalem there, and made it a great city. God made it the leading city of the world ; for, far above and beyond Athens, and far above and beyond Rome, it taught the nations truth and justice, and gave to mankind that which purifies and makes society strong and blessed. It became so grand, and beautiful, and estimable that it gave its name to that ideal city which men have all along been trying to build on this earth, viz., the New Jerusalem, the City of God descending out of Heaven. Jerusalem was not impregnable, but, what was far better, it was in charge of an invincible Providence. So long as its people were loyal to God, it stood invincible.

My fellow-men, you know the history of Israel, and the relations of God A to that history. Answer : Was not God everything to that nation? You know how God talked with that nation, in the person of Moses, on the threshold of its career. The words of Moses are familiar to you :

If thou shalt hearken diligently unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe and to do all his commandments, thy God will set thee high above all nations of the earth, and all these blessings shall come on thee. Blessed shalt thou be in the city, and blessed shalt thou be in the field. Blessed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy ground, and the fruit of thy cattle, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep. Blessed shall be thy basket, and thy store. Blessed shalt thou be when thou comest in, and blessed shalt thou be when thou goest out.

The Lord shall cause thine enemies that rise up against thee to be smitten before thy face: they shall come up against thee one way. and flee before thee seven ways. The Lord shall bless thee in all that thou settest thine hand unto. The Lord shall establish thee an holy people unto Himself. All people of the earth shall see that thou art called by the name of the Lord, and they shall be afraid of thee.

The Lord shall open unto thee his good treasure, the heaven to give rain unto thy land in its season, and to bless all the work of thine hand, and thou shalt lend unto many nations, and shalt not borrow!

You know how these words were fulfilled. You know what God was to Israel when Israel trusted God. God was the equivalent of harvests — infinite harvests. God meant the early and the latter rain. God meant the cedars of Lebanon, the clothing of the mountains of Palestine; and the Rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valley, the clothing of the lowlands and plains of Palestine. God meant progress, growth, victory. God was the equivalent of an all-around greatness. As Moses said, Israel became so great under God that she gave to the world; never borrowed, never received from the world. The world had nothing to do in her making, but she had everything to do in the making of the world. L'nder God, she gave the world principles, precedents, theologies, moral sciences, holy men, and magnificent leaders. " Thou shalt lend unto the nations, and not borrow ! " She has given the world more than Egypt, the cradle of learning, has given; more than Babylon, the centre of ancient wealth ; more than Tyre or Sidon, the creator of silks and colors ; more than robust Germany ; more than brilliant France ; more than sunny and tuneful Italy, the land of artists and architects; more than Christian England, with its statesmen and scholars; and more than great America, the land of civil and religious liberty. The golden crops of ideas, and principles, and moralities, and spiritualities, and religion, reaped from the harvest-fields of Judea, Samaria, and Galilee, have nowhere as yet been equalled in all' the world. "Thou shalt lend unto the nations, and shalt not borrow ! "

This is the story of God in His relation to Israel, His covenant people, viz. : He made Judea the land of righteousness, and truth, and peace, and goodness, and uprightness, and salvation. Certainly this is not the harvest of a wilderness. He made Jerusalem a city of magnificent fellowships, with holy and infinite ideas ; holy and infinite purposes ; holy and infinite loves ; holy and infinite relationships; holy and infinite memories. It was the city of sublime faith in the one living and true God. It was nothing short of a soul rapture. Certainly this is not the harvest of a wilderness. Look at the products of this land. It grew Abraham and the patriarchs ; Moses and the prophets ; David and the psalmists ; John and the evangelists; Peter and the Apostles ; Jesus Christ and great Christendom; the Bible, the Book of God, and Christianity. Certainly, this is not the harvest of a wilderness. These grand things can grow only upon the banks of the River of Life.

We talk about the blessings which the Jew has given the world, and we explain his fruitfulness by saying that his was the aristocracy of brain, and his the aristocracy of blood. This is not the explanation. The true explanation is this : The Jew has given to the nations of the world, and not borrowed, because he has been the covenant-child of God. God in the Jew made him a blessing ; God in his brain made him an Isaiah, with the roll of prophecy in his hand ; and a John, with the Apocalypse in his hand. God was in his brain ; the indwelling God always expands the mind. God was in his blood ; God was in his civilization ; God was in his sacred writings ; God was in his Messiah. God explains the Jew, and only God. God, not as a wilderness, but God as a River of Life. Because God was what He was to his covenant people, therefore He could challenge them with the question of the text, " Have I been a wilderness unto Isarel ? "

My fellow-men, God is dealing with us this morning just as of old He dealt with His ancient covenant-people. He is here with His old question, and He puts it directly to us : " Have I ever been a wilderness unto thee ? Have I been regardless of your need of salvation ? Have I overlooked the fact that you are ignorant and need instruction ? Have I been deaf to your entreaty ? Have I been without sympathy in your time of affliction ? Have I but half opened the door when you sought to return to My love and confidence ? Have I starved you ? Have I led you amid stony places? Have I been inhospitable to you when you looked up to Me for the Bread of Life, and for nourishment ? " What a power a simple question is when used by the Lord. It is a witness against the soul ; it is an impeachment ; a challenge ; an accusation ; an argument ; a criticism. When God asks a question He pronounces a judgment. His question searches us through and through. His question carries its own answer. It is judicial, and leaves us without defence before God.

But why does God come this morning and ask us the question of the text ? I suppose the reason is : We have minimized our God ; we have underestimated Him ; we have misrepresented Him to ourselves; we have neglected Him; we have failed to apply to Him, and to make large appropriations of Him. He questions us because of our low thoughts of Him ; our murmurings ; our dissatisfactions ; our lean and hungry looks ; our low attainments ; our forgetfulness ; our shifting policies; and our worldly alliances. He sees that we are positively weary of Him, and that we are limiting Him, and keeping Him from working out His grand ideals in and through us.

Brethren, God is not a wilderness to us. We have been false and barren to ourselves ; but God to us, never. Whenever we have let God into our lives, and His blessed Son, and His sacred Book, and His holy day, and His Eternal Spirit, we have had all things, and have abounded.

That you may be helped to give a right answer to God's question, let me mention at least three things relative to God in which there is not an atom of the wilderness.

I. His precepts, whereby He instructs us, are not a wilderness.

It is, as the Psalmist says concerning His commandments, " Each thought of thine, a deep it is ! " We need His precepts as a guide, and in no day more than in this day. There are others speaking to us from other books than the Bible. They are intellectual men, able men. They are persons capable of treating great subjects in a great manner. They have long ago discounted Moses, and the prophets, and the psalmists, and the apostles. They have taken their own consciousness as a guide. They exalt what they call their spiritual instinct. They make that infallible, in place of God's Word. The result is, they are leading man away from God. Let me ask you, Is man's instinct equal to God's omniscience? If not, then the time has not yet come to give up

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God as our guide, especially in the things which pertain to eternity. It is said that in Norway, every three or four years, swarms of little animals, called the lemming, find their way to the coast, and swim out to sea where they perish in great numbers. A false trust in instinct, or, rather, in an experience too narrow, seems to be the clew to this phenomenon of collective suicide. Instinct is all right within narrow lines. It is all right in swimming little Norway rivers and lakes ; but it is all too inadequate when the lemmings reach the vast ocean, with its unknown areas. Let no one here be the victim of the overweening confidence of man. Wait until God fails you ; wait until He proves a wilderness, before you put in His place any man, however gifted, as a leader in things which pertain to the eternities. Israel may count upon it that God will lead her safely to Canaan.

2. His promises, whereby He heartens and inspires us, are not a wilderness.

I need not stop to utter a single word of argument in confirmation of this fact. The statement is almost axiomatic. And yet, notwithstanding, we, many of us, are like wilderness people. Spiritually we are gaunt and lean, and half- starved. We are rich in promises, only we do not know it. In the Kingdom of God we are like the historic Indian in the republic of America. This Indian found his way into one of our Western settlements. He was in search of food, for he was starving. A bright-colored ribbon was seen around his neck, from which there hung a small pouch. He was asked what this was, and he replied that it was a charm given him in his younger days. He opened it and took out a worn and crumpled piece of paper and handed it to the settlers for inspection. On examination, this crumpled piece of paper was found to be a regular discharge from the Federal army entitling him to a pension for life. It was signed by General Washington himself. Here was a man with a duly signed promise securing him ample provision for every emergency, and yet he was wandering about hungry and helpless and forlorn, begging bread to keep him from starvation. That is a picture of many Christians. They are poverty-stricken while holding in their hands divine claims upon the very wealth of Heaven. Take the promises to God and have them realized. Get them cashed in courage, in peace of conscience, in assurance, and in divine communion. Our need is receptivity — power to receive God.

3. His Christ, by whom we are saved> is not a wilderness.

He is the supremacy of God's revelation. As the Revealer of God, He has a name that is above every name. He shows us that the genius of God is infinite love, infinite plentifulness. In Jesus Christ, God gives to mankind universally. Christ was not local, He was universal. True, He walked in Galilee and talked with the fishermen of that place ; but He talked to the universal soul. True, He sat on the hillside over across from Capernaum, and, in a low, sweet voice, uttered those wonderful Beatitudes of His; but at the same time He preached that immortal Sermon on the Mount to all future generations of men. True, He partook of a simple meal in an upper chamber of Jerusalem, with nobody present save His twelve disciples; but it is just as true that around that board, in the vision of faith, there were ranged the weary, and the penitent, and the bereaved of all nations and of all centuries. We know what we have in Him — pardon of sin, freedom from all condemnation, peace of conscience, ideals toward which to grow, freedom from the fear of death, and the purifying and uplifting hope of a blessed immortality. These are not the harvest of a wilderness. Strike Jesus Christ and His few months of ministry in Palestine out of existence, and all the elements and facts which vivify society and ennoble our life disappear as the rays of light disappear when the sun is quenched. Our chiefest blessings radiate from His divine personality. Christ is God at His best — God in His fulness. In reaching God through Moses the lawgiver, through David the sweet singer, through Isaiah the evangelical prophet, and then through Jesus Chirst the divine Son, we are like the traveller in the Alpine land making new and advancing dis- 5 coveries of the beauties of the Alps.