The covenant of peace

Front matter

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Contents

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I. — The Mountains and God's Kindness, . . i

II. — The Seed of Light, 18

I. The Mountains And God's Kindness

"For the mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed, but my kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed, saith the Lord that hath mercy on thee'* — ISA. liv. 10.

GOD in Scripture frequently uses nature to illustrate grace. What is still more remarkable, He uses often the sterner aspects of nature, those with which power and terror are associated, to illustrate or to emphasize His tenderness and love toward His children. The Hebrews, for instance, did not like the sea. You will find the sea in their writings employed as an emblem of terror and distress. Yet we hear the Psalmist saying, " The sea is His and He made it. O come, let us worship and bow down ; we are the people of His pasture and the sheep of His hand. Let us come before His presence with thanksgiving." The forty-second Psalm is a psalm of distress and longing. It is set in the key of a stormy ocean. In it is heard the sound of the floods. " Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of Thy waterspouts. All Thy waves and Thy billows are gone over me." But out of the noise of the waves comes a voice of hope and cheerful trust. " Yet the Lord will command His loving-kindness in the daytime, and in the night His song shall be with me, and my prayer unto the God of my life. Hope thou in God. I shall yet praise Him who is the health of my countenance and my God."

The mountains are symbols of this sterner character. The)' suggest power and fixedness and duration, rather than Love and gentleness. When associated with God,

they are used to suggest His might and His eternity. They are called " the everlasting hills." To shake them implies more than human power. By His strength God ct setteth fast the mountains, being girded with power.*' When lie appears in His majesty, " the perpetual hills do bow." Yet the mountains are used, as in this text, to set forth to us the loving-kindness of God. What we should naturally suppose would repel, or at least awe us into silence and helplessness, becomes, in the hands of inspiration, full of attraction, invitation, and rest. The mountains bring peace.

And this association of ideas is neither forced nor arbitrary. The apparent contradiction, as we go deeper down, resolves itself into a beautiful harmony of thought. For weakness naturally betakes itself, not to beauty, but to power. Helplessness seeks the shadow of true majesty. True spiritual discernment detects the greatest tenderness in real strength. Hence it was most deeply natural for the pilgrim in the desert, as the night drew on and the sense of its terrors and mysterious dangers forced itself upon his mind, to say, "I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills. Whence should my help come?" God is a God of might. He made heaven and earth; but for that very reason my help cometh from Him.

THE MOUNTAINS AND GO US KINDNESS. 3

He that keepeth me will not slumber. He shall preserve my going out and my coming in.

In the light of these general truths we are to read our text to-day. This chapter of the prophet Isaiah is full of comfort and 'hope. Its burden is consolation to the afflicted people of God ; and here, therefore, the mountains and the hills are introduced, this time by way of contrast with the immutability of divine love and kindness. These vast masses which divine power has heaved up and set fast, which symbolize to human minds eternal power and stability, which seem to stand fast forever — these great bulks of nature are mutable and transitory compared with the eternal love and tenderness of Jehovah. In days of calamity, when the enemy sweeps over the plains and lays waste the homes of men, when the torrents break their banks and overflow the pleasant corn-lands, men flee to the mountains as to a friendly and inaccessible shelter. But even the mountains are not eternal. The mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed ; but my kindness is beyond the reach of all convulsion or change. " My kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed." Thus saith the Lord that setteth fast the mountains ; at whose touch they melt. He is the Lord that hath mercy on thee.

Possibly the prophet was not embodying a mere fancy when he uttered this comparison. Job spoke of a natural fact when he said, " Surely the mountain, falling, cometh to naught, and the rock is removed out of his place." In volcanic regions such as that in which Job lived, a mountain, undermined by subterraneous fires, often falls in and crumbles away, and the earthquake shakes and shatters the solid rocks. The simple doctrine of our text, then, is that God's kindness is like Himself, immutable. That however nature may change and decay, as it does change and decay, though the world itself pass away, as it does pass away, God's kindness to His children is above all these changes and abides forever.

Now as I have said, this is not a surface truth ; and that is the reason why it is urged and emphasized in so many forms in Scripture. Naturally I think we tend to reason the other way, and to ascribe to nature a permanency which we see, or think we see, is denied to man. Do we not often find ourselves musing after this fashion, as we stand in the presence of nature's vastness : " That ocean ! I shall be gone soon, and the places which know me so well will forget me, but those tides will continue to flow ; those surges will break on the cliffs, those billows will bear the stately ships, long after I shall have gone. Those mountains will lift themselves toward heaven, those streams will continue to flow, those trees will stretch out their arms, and the spring shall clothe them with green and the autumn with purple and gold, when I shall have returned to dust. That sun will shine still : those stars will continue to look down from their serene heights : the earth will be running its round, and seed-time and harvest coming at their appointed seasons, when the last trace of this which now loves and hopes and strives shall have vanished." Truly it seems as if it is the natural and material that abides: as though God's care over one were short-lived. I live fourscore years or less. That mountain-peak has stood in its majesty from the day the morning stars sang together. My work is fragmentary and short-lived : but those rocky buttresses which nature piles up, those growths which strike their branching roots out and down into the bosom of the earth, those abysses filled with the briny floods — they abide. What a trifle I am beside a single Alpine peak, the lowest of them. A single rock from that mass, a mere speck compared with its total bulk, rolls down and crushes me out of life in an instant. A mass of snow comes down and I disappear forever. I, with mind and will and thought, I who can plan and hope and aspire, I am worse than helpless in the grasp of that brute bulk of water, pressed on by the power of gravity to leap over yonder precipice and break in idle foam on the rocks below.

That is the way our thought shapes itself ofttimes. It is not so unreasonable either at the first glance. It looks as though God cared more for matter than for spirit.

And I may pause to say here that that kind of reasoning (if it be reasoning) is legitimate, I fear conclusive, if the theories of modern materialism are true which go to identify spirit with matter, and soul with body. If I am of one piece with the mountains and trees, it is humiliating enough to know that I do not last as long as they do : that God has far less care for perpetuating my thinking personality than He has for perpetuating a heap of rocky layers or a huge mass of waters. If that position is the true one, then I must adjust the demands and emergencies of a nature capable of desire and hope and suffering to these rigid lines of matter as best I can. I have no hope beyond my brief connection with the economy of sea and mountain and forest. It is a little matter that I am to live in my influence, as the philosophers of this school tell me. How much does my influence count on beings who are going down to the dust like myself and of whom the dust is the end ? It may make their brief day perhaps a little brighter or happier, but truly that hardly seems worth all the effort and struggle and repression which go to build up character, if annihilation is the end of the race. At any rate that does not satisfy or comfort me. Somehow I am so made that an immortality (if it be an immortality) of influence, impersonal influence, does not satisfy me. Something in me craves personal life prolonged and widened. I want eternity. Perhaps it is a presumptuous and conceited craving. Be it so. I only know it is there ; and with Augustine I say, " My soul is restless until it repose in God."

Now you see that Scripture leads us away from all such musings and all such conclusions as those : and it does so, moreover, with a clear recognition, and a clear showing of all the facts in the case. For nowhere more plainly and emphatically than in Scripture is the frailty and the transitoriness of man set forth. Look at the ninetieth Psalm. There are the mountains again, those savage, purple cliffs on which Moses gazed, and turned

THE MOUNTAINS AND GOD'S KINDNESS. y

from them to see a generation dying in the wilderness. They are thrown into contrast with the eternity of God on the one hand, but on the other hand with the mortality of man. " Thou turnest man to destruction, and sayest, l Return, ye children of men.' Thou earliest them away as with a flood : they arc as a sleep in the morning : they are like grass which groweth up and pcrisheth in a day. The days of our years arc soon cut off and we fly away." So the apostle takes up the same theme. " What is your life ? It is even as a vapor." And the prophet answers out of the past: "All flesh is grass, and all the goodlincss thereof is as the flower of the field." You can easily multiply these utterances of Scripture.

But, on the other hand, in full view of this fact, nothing is so emphatic as Scripture in setting forth the eternal hope and rich promise which attaches to man, and the peculiar and high place which he holds in the eye of God. This Bible centres in him. It is made for him with its wealth of instruction and promise and consolation. There is an eye from heaven ever directed upon him ; a hand stretched forth from heaven to guide and to uphold him. God takes upon Himself the conduct of His child's life. He leaves to no one inferior to Himself 1 lie regulation of his ways. "The steps of a good man are ordered of the Lord. Though he fall he shall not be utterly east down, for the Lord uphold-* eth him with His hand." Exposed to sin and its seductions and consequences, God interposes in his behalf with a gigantic scheme of redemption. From the very beginning God is at work to save him and to reconcile him to Himself. For him God becomes manifest in the flesh. For him that wondrous, perfect life of the divine Son puts itself alongside of his littleness, his sin, his sorrow. Christ is the incarnation of the truth that manhood means an essential and eternal connection with God. For him are all the history and all the utterances of prophets and kings. Through his feeble instrumentality God has been pleased to work out great and abiding results. God has honored him with high commissions and vindicated him with decisive victories, and made him the herald of messages pregnant with life and hope to his kind. What privileges He has bestowed upon him : to know God, to love God, to commune with God, to be filled with His fulness, to enjoy His fellowship. For him is the promise of immortality ; of seeing God as He is ; of being changed into God's image ; of enjoying an eternity of divine fellowship and divine ministry. The facts of human frailty and of the brevity of human life, are offset with the promise of eternal life. Death is confronted with resurrection. The world does indeed pass away, "but he that doeth the will of God abideth forever." In the light of these facts, is not the kindness of God shown to be stronger and more enduring than the hills? Does not the spirit of man, after all, appear to be, in His eyes, of more account than matter? It is only the world that passeth away. God's son and heir does not pass away. He is longer-lived than the hills. He serves a higher purpose : he is the subject of a larger divine intent : he has a higher destiny.

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But in this part of the text God's eternal kindness is shown by comparison and contrast. In the second part of the text it is stated directly and absolutely, and in legal terms. It is put as a matter of agreement. God binds Himself to be eternally kind to His children, by a covenant of peace. This covenant is to stand forever. " It shall not totter" (to translate literally). My covenant of peace shall not be removed. It is a wonderful thought. Jehovah enters into a compact of eternal loving-kindness. Let us look at some sides of it.

In the first place, there is something very suggestive in that word " kindness." Kindness is originally that which is felt and shown to one's kind or kin. Kind is kinned ; so that, according to the primitive signification of the word, kindness grows out of natural relationship. And this is really the basis of God's kindness. Men are His children : and the relation of parent and child implies kindness. And so Adam, when he came fresh from the hand of God, was compassed about with the divine kindness. Blessings poured upon him from the heavens. God came down and walked and communed with him in the paradise which He had made for him. There was an agreement or covenant implied in that relation, just as there is in the filial and parental relation everywhere : an agreement to the effect that the son, by receiving and enjoying his father's gifts, is bound to loyalty and obedience : but as long as the son lives in loyalty and love, the legal aspect of the relation falls into the background. When man, by disobedience, forfeited his privileges as a son of God, violated the sacredness of the original filial relation, God's kindness did not depart from him. He did not cease to be a son, though he was an erring and straying son. God was, from the very first, untiring in His effort to win him back to allegiance and love. The fact that he was a son of God and made in God's image was never lost out of sight in the divine counsels. Sin did not drive God out of the world. It set Him working in the world (if we may reverently cast the thought into this form) under new manifestations. It inaugurated the economy of reconciliation. And thus it brought into prominence necessarily the legal aspect of the relation between God and man ; for wherever there is sin, there law asserts itself. And so from the sweet, natural, harmonious intercourse of God and man, where the kindness of fatherly love was met by filial love and obedience, we pass into an economy of invitations, promises, entreaties, covenants : we feel the strain of the chords at which man is obstinately pulling in the endeavor to break away from God, and the tension from God's side as He endeavors to hold him and to draw him back to Himself. Man has learned to distrust God's kindness. Hence God asserts it. Man has forgotten his obligations. God emphasizes them in formal laws. And yet, behind all law and ordinances, is felt the deep, strong pulsation of divine love and fatherly yearning, as if God were saying to the recreant and rebellious race, " Only see here ! See what I am ready to do for you ! See what power I have to enrich and bless you ! See how I love you ! I yearn to be kind to you. My love is like a great tide that chafes against its banks and

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struggles to break out of the dikes which your folly and rebellion have built. Why will you not let me be kind to you ? Why will you not put yourselves where I can let loose upon you all the pent-up love and yearning of my heart ? " Such is the feeling which breaks out here and there over the whole surface of the Old Testament, as when it is said, " In His love and pity He redeemed them and bare and carried them all the days of old. Forty years long was I grieved with this generation. Oh, that there were such a heart in them that they would hear me and keep my commandments. How shall I give thee up, Ephraim ? "

Man's rebellion and alienation from God introduces us to an economy of adjustment. In the natural, healthful relation between father and son we hear little or nothing about terms of agreement. The terms are all included in the fact of mutual love. When the relation is disturbed, then covenants and agreements and promises come to the front. It is as if God said, "You have put yourselves off the higher ground of sonship ; I will come down and meet you on the lower ground. I will agree and covenant to be kind to you." And so you will observe how this matter of stipulation with men on God's part keeps coming out in the Bible history of redemption. It is in the form of a promise to the first guilty pair that the seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent's head. It is a covenant with Abraham ratified by human symbols, as the burning lamp and smoking furnace pass between the pieces of the parted victim. It is a promise to Jacob in the vision at Bethel, and a covenant of Jacob with God, when, in his first waking moments, he sets up as a pillar the stone on which his head has rested, and pouring oil upon it, enters into solemn agreement with the Most High. Study the terms in which, again and again, God pledges Himself to bless and foster the people of Israel. Read what He says by the mouth of His prophet, Jeremiah : " Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Judah : not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers ; but this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel : After those days, saith the Lord, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts ; and will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall teach no more every man his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord : for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord : for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more."

And then pass on to that memorable night in the upper chamber at Jerusalem, and see the Son of God as He lifts the cup in His hands, so soon to be pierced in ratification of His pledge, and says, " Drink ye all of this, for this is my blood of the new covenant which is shed for you and for many for the remission of sins."

Note, too, the phrase, " covenant of peace." Peace ! It is the word which defines and embodies the kindness of God in Jesus Christ. The agreement which God makes with man is, in the first place, that man shall be

THE MOUNTAINS AND GOD'S KINDNESS.

at peace with Him : that alienation shall cease : that the man shall come back from his attitude of an enemy into his normal attitude as a son of God : that he shall be no more a stranger, but a fellow-citizen with God's own : no more a prodigal in a far country, but a son at home in his Father's house : no more working against God, but enlisted and working with Him in the interests of His eternal kingdom : having fellowship with the Father and with His Son, Jesus Christ.

Then, further, growing out of this right attitude of man toward his Father God, is God's agreement to give him peace in the sense of restfulness. " Come unto me," says Christ, " and I will give you rest." That is more than a promise, it is a covenant. There are two parties and two mutual obligations. The weary and the sinburdened are to come to Christ — that is their part. Christ on His part stands pledged to give rest unto their souls : rest in the eternal part of their being ; rest at the centre of life which touches God and eternity.

And those who have truly entered into this covenant, need no words of mine to prove to them that it is a covenant which carries with it the loving-kindness of God. Take it as related to sin. You have known what sin is. You have known its seductions and have felt its lash. You have known what it was to go seeking rest and finding none, and finally to go, bowed and burdened, covered with shame and anguish, to the feet of your crucified Lord, confessing your sin and pleading for mercy. And you can answer for it to-day that you met there nothing but kindness. Every other feeling on the

THE MOUNTAINS AND GOD'S KINDNESS.

part of your justly-offended Lord was swallowed up in His joy at your return. You have found what was in the heart of Christ when He pictured the prodigal's return and the father's joy, and the tumult of delight which shook the whole household. Yes, poor, sinful, contrite soul, when you came to the cross, you were met, not with heaven's thunder of indignation, but with heaven's rapturous joy over one sinner that had repented.

Since that time you have not been faultless. Your life as a disciple has been marked by numerous lapses. It has developed both infirmity and transgression. I ask you this morning if, in the face of this fact, God's kindness has been removed? Has it ever wavered? Have you not always found at His mercy-seat compassion for your weakness ; a helping hand in your struggle after reformation and purity ; pardon for your lapses ; a healing touch upon your bruises and scars ; a word of warning and of caution, but also a tender whisper — " Go into peace " ?

Or trouble. You know something of life, and therefore you know what trouble is. You have been anxious and care-worn ; sore beset, and worried, as with myriad sting9. And yet can you say that you have not been helped through the worst ; that you have not had strength descend upon you for the hardest push ; that, even when your gloomiest anticipations were more than realized, you have not had power given you to do and to bear ; that even in the straitest place there has not been opened for you a way out ? Has the kindness of God

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been removed from you in your loneliness? Has it ever failed to put another and a stronger prop in the place of the broken reed on which you had leaned ? And yet, perhaps, in the face of all this, you have sometimes suffered trouble to be eating out your heart when you might have cast all your care on God. Perhaps you have fretted and been anxious when you might have been at rest in the assurance of God's immutable kindness. If so, resolve that with God's help, you will gather up your faith, and with all your hearts believe that, though the mountains depart and the hills be removed, His loving-kindness shall not depart from you, neither shall the covenant of His peace be removed. Often we have sung together the old hymn, which better than any other I know, gathers up this train of thought :

" Awake, my soul, to joyful lays, And sing the great Redeemer's praise ; He justly claims a song from me : His loving-kindness, oh, how free !

" He saw me ruined in the fall, Yet loved me, notwithstanding all ; He saved me from my lost estate : His loving-kindness, oh, how great !

" Though numerous hosts of mighty foes, Though earth and hell my way oppose, He safely leads my soul along : His loving-kindness, oh, how strong !

" When trouble, like a gloomy cloud, Has gathered thick and thundered loud,

He near my soul has always stood : His loving-kindness, oh, how good ! "

It shall not be removed. No, the covenant of God's peace with His people is an everlasting covenant. Neither life, nor death, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate them from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus, the Mediator of the new covenant. His loving-kindness reaches into the future. The covenant is a covenant of promise. Hear how beautifully the prophet in the context puts this promise under the figure of a lovely palace which shall be the dwellingplace of God's own : " O, thou afflicted, tossed with tempest, and not comforted ; behold, I will lay thy stones with fair colors, and lay thy foundations with sapphires. And I will make thy windows of agates, and thy gates of carbuncles, and all thy borders of pleasant stones."

So we look to the mountains, their foundations laid of old, those everlasting hills which lifted themselves in the beginning of time, with their vast bastions, and their steep battlements, their icy pinnacles, their lonely snowfields, — those giant forms which seem to defy the touch of time — we look to them only to look away to something more enduring, the loving-kindness of God. " They shall perish, but Thou shalt endure. Yea, all of them shall wax old as a garment. As a vesture shalt Thou roll them up and they shall be changed : but Thou

THE MOUNTAINS AND GOD'S KINDNESS.

art the same. Thy years shall have no end." And out of their clefts, from behind the ramparts of their power, comes a voice : " The mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed, but my kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed, saith the Lord that hath mercy on thee."

II. The Seed Of Light

"Light is sown for the righteous, and gladness for the upright in heart." — Psalm xcvii. n.

LIGHT and gladness. It is natural to desire them, and God does not crucify nature. He only trains and corrects it. This text tells us that light and gladness are for the upright, and the next verse bids the righteous rejoice. An eagle desires the air, and a fish the water. Is it strange ? A child of God is a child of light, begotten of Him who is light and in whom is no darkness at all. If he longs for the light, is that strange? The apostle John tells us that we lie if we say we have fellowship with Him and walk in darkness ; and the wise man says that the hope of the righteous shall be gladness.

But what about the peculiar way in which this promise of light and gladness is put? Light and gladness are sown. A startling figure that, and a grand, one too. God as a sower, scattering seeds of light. The statement is : God gives light to His children as seed. What does that mean?

If you will think for a moment, you will see that the

truth is not out of harmony with much that you already

know in your Bibles. You must have noticed how often (18)

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our Lord uses the figure of seed, and the reason is not very far to find. The figure simply recognizes the great law of growth which everything in the universe, from a grass-blade to the spiritual kingdom of God on earth, obeys. Nothing comes into life full-grown. The tree and the grain grow up from seed. The man is a babe first. The kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard-seed. It becomes a great tree, but not at a leap. So of the fruits of the spirit in men. Knowledge, faith, love, joy, grow through successive stages, like the blade, the ear, and the full corn.