For whom Christ died

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I. The Brother for Whom Christ Died . 3 II. A Complaint and an Answer . . -23

III. The Monotony of Sin . . . .43

II II

" And the children of Joseph spake unto Joshua, saying, Why hast thou given me but one lot and one portion to inherit, seeing I am a great people." — JoSHUA xvii. 14.

It is the language of complaint against the orderings of divine providence ; these children of Joseph, the two tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh, had grown very great among the tribes of Israel, and they complained that they had not been given a proportionately great lot of land. They brought their complaint to Joshua, and expected him quickly to attend to it, seeing that he himself was of the tribe of Ephraim.

We may take these discontented tribesmen as a type of the discontented of every age who have been ready to complain that the lot assigned them has not been equal to their abihty or their desert. Such complainers have been very common.

You will see the children in the nursery at the cutting of the cake, each watching jealously, and loud in his complaints if brother seems to get a crumb too much in his portion, and he himself a crumb too Httle. The world is full of people who are children grown a little larger, without leaving their childish quarrels and jealousies behind them. Our text sets before us a striking example of that kind of fretful and jealous complaining.

Now let me say at the outset that, under some circumstances, this complaint, as addressed to the man Joshua, might have been just ; if the whole land had been conquered, so that there was no more to be had, and now in the division one tribe with only a few thousand people in it were given as large a portion as another tribe with hundreds of thousands of people in it — that were a wrong that ought to be righted.

There has often been a great deal of that kind of injustice in the human distribution of the various opportunities of life. To correct it has been the great aim of every true reformer. We have all learned, in theory at least, to set our faces against monopoly in land, or any other kind of monopoly. Wherever there is only so much of any valuable commodity to be had, and some one favored individual or family or tribe has got the whole of it, or an undue share of it, we all join in the complaint and the demand for redress ; as it was in France, for example, or indeed in any country of Europe, before the great Revolution ; when certain favored classes owned nearly all the land there was, while the mass of the people lived by sufferance in a country which in no sense belonged to them ; here a crowded village of peasants nearly starving, and over there a single noble family using its vast estates for preserving game. It may not always be easy to say who is to blame for such an outrage, or just how to correct it ; but if we can in any way get the ear of Joshua we shall tell him that such a distribution of the world's opportunities is an awful wrong, and must somehow be set right.

There is no reason to suppose that we have got all these wrongs righted yet, or ever shall till the Millennium. We are still a long distance from our goal. But the goal is to offer to every child ever born into this world an equal chance with every other to make the most of that one life he has to live here. An equal chance, I say ; whether or not the child improves it will be for him to determine ; but we hold ourselves ready to hear the complaints of those who have not had that equal chance. So I would say with all possible emphasis, that under some conditions such a complaint as these men of Ephraim brought to

Joshua might have been entirely just, and worthy of the most careful consideration. . But in fact the conditions were very different from that ; the land had not all been conquered and occupied; "there remaineth yet very much land to be possessed " ; the opportunities for each tribe were still practically unlimited; the only question was, would they improve them? And here was this tribe of Ephraim complaining that though it was so great and strong, it had a very small inheritance. But Joshua stopped them just there ; the blunt old soldier has very little patience with that complaint. He answers them out of their own mouth. " If you be a great people," he says, " then get you up to the wood-country, and cut out a place for yourself ; if your Mount Ephraim is too narrow for you, find a broader territory." They seemed to think that because they were so big a tribe, some one else ought to conquer and clear a great territory for them ; but Joshua answers : " The land is open ; if you are a big tribe truly, go out and conquer and clear that large inheritance for yourself"

Now Joshua stood to the various tribes as a representative of divine Providence. Many of the complaints that men bring against Providence ought to be answered as this bluff old soldier answered his fellow-tribesmen. For in substance the complaint is that we deserve a better portion than we have received ; the answer is that, if we really deserve it, we must go and get it ; there is nothing to hinder; the land is open; there is room enough yet. However it may be in other countries, here in America, thank God, the land is still open; there is room and to spare for all the tribes ; and if these querulous men of Ephraim are really speaking the truth, and if they are really worthy of a larger inheritance, there is nothing in the world to prevent their getting it.

I do not say that all the good things of life are equitably distributed among us ; far from it ; for I think some people have a great deal more than they deserve, and a great deal more than is good for them. Our national wealth has been increasing at such a portentous rate of speed that it yields a large overflow which no one can be said fairly to have earned ; and the way this overflow is distributed among the people perplexes our sense of justice not a little ; I do not think the worthiest tribe always gets the biggest share of that surplus, that unearned increment.

But that has nothing to do with the question before us this morning. If some men get more than they deserve, more than they have earned, we may leave it for them to settle that with Providence as best they may. If some of the tribes should feel impelled to come back to Joshua with the title deed of a portion of their allotment, saying, " It is too much for us ; we do not deserve it all ; we cannot use it all ; take some of it back," we can leave Joshua and that tribe to settle it together. To-day we are interested in a tribe that brought the opposite complaint, that it had received too little. And such are the common complaints even in this land of promise, but I think it is still possible for Joshua to reply to such a complaint generally : " If you say that your portion is too little for your abilities, then go and win more."

You see the trouble with the people of Ephraim was that they expected to profit by a kind of favoritism. Joshua was their own fellow-tribesman, and they expected him to give them land that some other tribe had already conquered and cleared. They thought so big and strong a tribe as theirs ought to be able to get all the land they wanted without fighting and working for it ; that some favor ought to be shown them because of their size. But Joshua answered, " If you really are big and strong, that is the very reason why you do not need any favor or partiality ; use your strength like men, go and get your own inheritance."

It is much as if some boy were beginning to work in his father's business establishment, and says to his father : " Of course you will give me an easier place than the other clerks, and better pay, because I am your son." But the father, happening to be a man of some discretion, answers : " If you are a true son of mine, you will not be needing favors. The advantages- that you have been enjoying ever since you were born in our home ought to enable you to give favors rather than ask them. If you feel yourself capable of filling a higher position and earning more pay than your fellow-clerks, go up and win the position ; the way is open." Not all earthly fathers are wise enough to make that response to their children ; our feelings often run away with our judgment; but that is the response which the heavenly Father through His providence makes to His children when they come with such complaints. There is no respect of persons with Him, and the providential answer to each complaint is : " If you are, as you say, big enough for a bigger position, go and get it." Listen once more to old Joshua's words ; he stood there on this occasion, I think, as a true prophet, a spokesman for God ; " If thou be a great people, then get thee up to the wood-country ; and if it be too narrow for thee.

then cut down for thyself there in the land of the Perizzites and of the giants."

That is the way the larger inheritances are really won. Oh ! it would be a good thing for many of us in our moods of idle complaining if we could study a little biography ; if we could come to understand by what hard effort and fighting some of our neighbors have won their inheritance, some of those perhaps whom we were most disposed to envy as if they were petted children of fortune on whom her favors had been showered ; if we could know by what terribly hard work they had first proved their fitness to receive them.

Joshua's answer did not suit the men of Ephraim at all. They drew back in dismay. " The hill is too small for us," they kept on saying, " and the broad plain about it is full of Canaanites, and they have chariots of iron." That was not what they wanted at all ; where was the advantage of being a big and popular tribe, with their own tribesman for judge, if they must go and carve out a future for themselves by hard working and fighting, like any other family of people ? But Joshua is firm : that is just what they will have to do. " If you want more room, the mountain is yours," he says, "And you must cut down the forests and make more room for yourselves ; and if that is not enough, spread as far as you will over the plain, and drive out the enemies that are there, terrible iron chariots and all ; for ye are a great people and strong ; there is your inheritance."

It is a good word for any of us who are looking forward over the future with its opportunities. Not many of us are altogether satisfied with the past allotment. The mountain so far opened has been too narrow. We have a notion that we were made for something a little larger. The young men especially — and you know these children of Joseph stood for the young, for Joseph was next to the youngest of all the sons of Jacob. Always the young men, young merchants, lawyers, doctors, authors, whatever they are, are looking for more room. They hope that the coming year will furnish more room. And that is well. Only how do you propose to get it ? Are you coming up in the spirit of greedy place-hunters : expecting some one else to win and clear an inheritance for you, to put your neighbor out, and to put you in ? If so, I think each new year's providences will silence your complaint with some such calm response as Joshua gave to his tribe when he said : " If you are big enough, and strong enough, to deserve a larger inheritance, then you must be big and strong enough to go and win it."

But I am impatient to broaden the scope of our subject, so as to make it more worthy of the place where we are met together. For we must broaden it a good deal to make it fit well with the breadth of the gospel of Jesus. The kinds of opportunity we have been speaking of, however valuable in their place, are not the kind that Jesus encouraged His disciples to seek most earnestly, and neither did He promise that they would always find them. Furthermore, His gospel is not preached only to the young, or to the big and strong tribes, like Ephraim and Judah in their central positions of influence, but it offers its message with peculiar urgency and tenderness to the smaller and less favored people, Hke little Dan, or dwindling Simeon and Reuben ; or, far away in the north, Zebulon and NephthaHm. You remember that beautiful prophecy which Matthew puts at the very beginning of his account of our Lord's ministry : " The land of Zebulon, and the land of NephthaHm, . . . Galilee of the Gentiles ; the people which sat in darkness saw great light ; and to them which sat in the region and shadow of death light is sprung up." I have spoken of the opportunities that the future may open before big, strong Ephraim, boasting in the vigor of his youth. What opportunities are there for any who have seemed to themselves small, enfeebled, and discouraged, and sitting in the region and shadow of death ? Why, the very best opportunities of all, perhaps, if only they are willing to seize them and use them.

Do you remember the impatient murmur of our great Puritan poet when first his blindness came upon him, " ere half his days in this dark world and wide " ? A man who in his youth had been so brave and resolute in using to the utmost every talent his Creator had lodged with him, now his soul is more bent than ever to serve his Maker and present a true account; but this dreadful blindness stops him ; and he cries, " Doth God exact day labor, light denied?" But the answer is,

" Who best bear his mild yoke, they serve him be&t."

and,

" They also serve who only stand and wait,"

Do you remember that other earlier servant, greater than Milton, but with a Hke impetuous spirit, who had prayed God again and again to take from him that thorn in the flesh which weakened and humbled him and hindered his activity at the very time when his soul was most bent to make every talent serve his Maker; and the answer came, My grace is sufficient for thee : for My strength is made perfect in weakness " ?

Add those messages, if you will, from Milton and from Paul, to the message that we have been studying from honest old Joshua : so we may gain some faint conception of the rich abundance of opportunity that God is really opening before every one of us every day of our lives to render to Him some honorable day's service. So long as we felt young and strong there was opportunity to serve Him by using that strength in manfully overcoming difficulties, cutting down the forests, and driving out the enemies with their chariots of iron. But when disappointments come, or sickness, or the infirmities of age, there is our opportunity to render service to God, — and it may be the most acceptable service of all, — in bearing this trial with resolute good cheer. So every day and every year are bringing to ever}^ one opportunity for the largest, best, most honorable and most acceptable service he has it in him to render.

Oh ! but it is hard work — hard work to win and clear that inheritance — always hard work ; hard to do things efficiently; harder still to endure cheerfully and to wait patiently.

At first we were not looking for such hard work. We were hke those men of Ephraim, hoping to come into our inheritance by some easier course; we were to be treated as favored children. A lot that some other had taken and cleared was to be handed over to us all ready for our enjoyment. We expected to inherit our

e

father's triumphant faith in God, his firm assurance of the reality of things unseen, his bright hope of heaven, his power of prayer, as easily as we expected to inherit his dollars or his acres. But some day when we wake up to a sense of the fact that it is not so, that we have not inherited these things, we are surprised and almost indip"nant. Instead of those broad territories of Christian faith on which we have been counting, we find ourselves cramped in a position that hardly gives us room for the soles of our feet — when the time of stress comes, and our easily inherited faith is put to the test and crumbles away from us ; when we begin to need most the help of prayer, and find that we never have learned to pray ; when we need most a Saviour from the awful assault of temptation, and find we have made no personal acquaintance with any; when we most sorely need the promises of the Holy Book, and find we never have made them ours, and that we do not know even where to look for them between the covers.

Oh ! it is very hard ; we had flattered ourselves that the entire highway reaching from the cradle to the grave, and to the heavenly home beyond it, belonged to us, bestowed upon us by some divine favoritism, because of the happy circumstances of our birth in Christian homes ; and now under this storm of doubt and trouble it all has disappeared. Everything behind us and before us and above us is gone. We are sure of nothing but this present moment, this little instant of time on which we stand. Why, it seems to us that no benighted heathen in Africa is left more completely without God and without hope than we disinherited children of the faith.

That is a common experience, I believe, and comes sooner or later to many who have been reared in Christian homes, and it seems very hard to us. But when we begin to speak or to think our complaints over such treatment, the question comes back out of the silence : " Of what are you complaining? What better have you deserved? If there is enough character in you to deserve a more spacious faith, there must be enough to go out and win it." But to win a faith in God will mean hard working sometimes, and hard fighting sometimes, and hard waiting and much patient enduring. That is the way other men have learned — it is the way your own father learned to believe and pray. And every year will give you plentiful opportunities — every day of every year is full of them— for driving back these cruel, insolent doubts, and winning a faith that shall be yours to keep forever.

Oh, let us have done with this idle complaining against God. The Judge of all the earth does right — be sure of it — in distributing gifts, both temporal and spiritual. When the time comes that we can look back and see the whole course of events by which the land has been portioned out among the different tribes, we shall see that no one of them has anything to complain about ; no tribe has received from God a smaller portion than it had fairly earned.

No; no tribe, no man, has received from God a smaller portion than he has fairly earned. Rather, we are continually receiving from God larger portions than we have fairly earned. God is just to all ; He never ceases to be just, but He is also wonderfully generous and gracious. Every day of our lives — this day — what a multitude of forfeited opportunities He renews to us ! How He turns even our failures, cowardices, and sins, into new and unexpected offers of inheritance!

We could not understand this at first ; we did not know it so long as we were boasting and complaining. The answer that came to us then was like Joshua's stern answer to the men of Ephraim, " If you say you deserve a larger inheritance, then go and win it. You shall be given all you earn." But the moment we drop that foolish, fretful, boastful pride, and begin to confess our own fault and weakness ; and to ask God of His mercy to help us, though we do not deserve His help ; like the poor boy in the parable who came back from his folly, cr^'ing, " Father I have sinned, . . . and am no more worthy to be called thy son " ; then our answer does not come to us through such a one as Joshua. The stern old soldier must step aside ; for God begins to speak to us through the lips of His well-beloved Son, Jesus, who came to bless the unworthy. In our confessed weakness He begins to make His strength perfect; in our confessed sin. He begins to make His grace sufficient ; in our poverty. He grants us some share of His eternal inheritance. Then He will send us out to go in our turn on like errands of helpfulness. When we have learned from Jesus, there will be no time left to worry that so httle has been done for us ; for we shall always be wondering how we can do more for some one else. When we have learned from Jesus, it will seem to us that the choicest opportunity of all is that of doing a kindness or a service for some neighbor.

I do not know just how much the men of Ephraim learned from Joshua's counsel — enough, one would hope, to shame them out of their idle complaining. But if instead of Joshua, our Captain, Jesus, had stood among them. He would have made those strong Ephraimites from that time on a sort of champions among all the tribes. Their battle-cry would have been, " We that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak, and not to please ourselves." Wherever they could learn of any other weaker tribe that faltered under the assault of its enemies, any tribe that began to be enfeebled by age, or disheartened by failure, or in any way disinherited, — for the converted Ephraimites that would be the dearest opportunity of all, — not a chance to get more land for themselves, but a chance to do more service for their brethren.

Ill

Ill

** And he did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord : he departed not from all the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin." — II. Kings 14 : 24.

Some years ago the Sunday-school lessons in the International Course were appointed for several months from the historical books of the Old Testament. They included the history of the Northern Kingdom of Israel ; and I well remember the general agreement among scholars and teachers that it was not an interesting series of lessons. While the study lasted there was a good deal of complaint that the series had not been wisely selected.

But when we reached the end and looked back over the whole period, there was at least one instructive fact to carry away, namely, that wickedness is apt to be a monotonous, tiresome thing. We had been studying the lives of a series of bad men ; and when we had learned about one of them, it appeared that we had learned nearly all there was to tell worth telling about all of them. It was nearly the same lesson, Sunday after Sunday, only with a different name for the king. It happened that the first of these northern sovereigns was named Jeroboam, son of Nebat : and he set the fashion of sinning against God byworshiping golden calves. And whenever one more king died and the historian was writing a record of his life, the regular thing to say was : " He departed not from all the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin."

We grew tired studying that same thing over every Sunday for six months : but just think how tiresome it must have been for the people of the kingdom of Israel to go on living that same thing over and over for two hundred and fifty years. Intolerable monotony ! Really it seemed that the whole nation might have given a sigh of relief when at last the Assyrians came up and conquered them and took them off into captivity in a strange land, where they might hear no more of " Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin."

That may be an instructive chapter of history, I think, for the very reason that it is not at all an interesting chapter, but so desperately monotonous. For the lesson is that when a king, or a people, starts out to be bad, before they are through, they will find it intolerably tiresome and uninteresting and slow.

Of course, that has not been the common idea about sin — not at all. Men think that goodness is the uninteresting and old-fashioned affair, and that sin is the novelty, entertaining, vivacious, venturesome, anything but slow. We call a bad man fast. Men are tempted to do wrong for the sake of the novelty, pleasure, change, and exhilaration of spirit, that it promises them.

Now if that promise is a lie, it will be well to know it ; and it is a lie. These sinners often cultivate the manner of being audacious, venturesome, and brilliant ; but, after all, how little originality has appeared among them within the last six thousand years ?

You read the pages of history, and as far back as you can go you will find our latest styles of wickedness already old-fashioned — cruelty, avarice, unprincipled ambition, licentiousness, drunkenness. The archaeologists have been shedding much light on these subjects within the last few years, and, judging from what they tell us, if you should take one of old Pharaoh's courtiers through the streets of New York some night, trying to show him modern life in its most startling and novel varieties, you would soon catch him yawning. **We had all that in Egypt," he would say, " before the pyramids were built. You have nothing new in what you call New York." Or if it were one of Nebuchadnezzar's nobles he would rub his eyes sleepily and say : " Yes ; but, you know, we did these same things rather better in the good old days in Babylon," Or if you should take a Roman senator of the days of the Empire to some luxurious scene of debauchery, he would complain that it all seemed rather tame and insipid compared with the spreads that Apicius used to give in Rome before he committed suicide — poor fellow. " Suicide ! What in the world did he commit suicide for ? " " Oh, he got tired to death of it all after a while."

So one of the revelers of the old French kingdom would be reminded of his own Paris ; and one of George the Fourth's boon companions, of London and Brighton. Not a man of them all would admit that the fast society of New York had discovered any really novel way of going to perdition. Always some old Jeroboam or other, whose monument crumbled into dust a thousand years ago, had set the fashion for each of these latest novelties in wickedness.

There are novelties in our modern world ; but to discover them you will need some other guide than these leaders in the ways of sin — the useful inventions of our day, for instance: the steamship, the railway, the printing press. " There is something new indeed," our resurrected ancient would say. " We had some ancient arts of our own : simple contrivances that looked in this direction ; prophecies, of which this is the nobler fulfillment ; but nothing up to this. Tell me the names of the men who introduced these refreshing and rejuvenating novelties to the aged world."

Or the freedom of our day, and the comparative equality ; no slaves at one end of the social chain, no irresponsible despots at the other ; the law of the land as a power ruling over all ; the respect shown for honest labor ; the reverence for woman ; the pubHc peace and security ; the safety with which a man may travel round the world unarmed and unharmed. Not that we have attained perfection along any of these lines ; but, as compared with what used to be, we have here something that might bring an expression of lively interest back into the face even of an Egyptian mummy if you could once set his heart beating again and get the breath of life back into him.