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Expositions Of Holy Scripture

A >> Alexander Maclaren >> Expositions Of Holy Scripture




If any of you were ever out at sea, and looked over a somewhat
stormy water, you will have noticed, I dare say, how strangely the
white crests of the breakers disappear, as if some force, acting
from beneath, had plucked them under, and over the spot where they
gleamed for a moment runs the blue sea. So the waves break over the
great ocean of time; I might say, like swimmers pulled under by
sharks, man after man, man after man, gets twitched down, till at
the end--'Joseph died, and all his brethren, and _all_ that
generation.'

There is another process going on side by side with this. In the
vegetable world, spring and autumn are two different seasons: May
rejoices in green leaves and opening buds, and nests with their
young broods; but winter days are coming when the greenery drops and
the nests are empty, and the birds flown. But the singular and
impressive thing (which we should see if we were not so foolish and
blind) which the writer of our text lays his finger upon is that at
the same time the two opposite processes of death and renewal are
going on, so that if you look at the facts from the one side it
seems nothing but a charnel-house and a Golgotha that we live in,
while, seen from the other side, it is a scene of rejoicing, budding
young life, and growth.

You get these two processes in the closest juxtaposition in ordinary
life. There is many a house where there is a coffin upstairs and a
cradle downstairs. The churchyard is often the children's
playground. The web is being run down at the one end and woven at
the other. Wherever we look--

'Every moment dies a man,
Every moment one is born.'

'Joseph died, and all his brethren, and all that generation. And the
children of Israel ... multiplied ... exceedingly.'

But there is another thought here than that of the
contemporaneousness of the two processes, and that is, as it is
written on John Wesley's monument in Westminster Abbey, 'God buries
the workmen and carries on the work.' The great Vizier who seemed to
be the only protection of Israel is lying in 'a coffin in Egypt.'
And all these truculent brothers of his that had tormented him, they
are gone, and the whole generation is swept away. What of that? They
were the depositories of God's purposes for a little while. Are
God's purposes dead because the instruments that in part wrought
them are gone? By no means. If I might use a very vulgar proverb,
'There are as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it,'
especially if God casts the net. So when the one generation has
passed away there is the other to take up the work. Thus the text is
a fitting introduction to the continuance of the history of the
further unfolding of God's plan which occupies the Book of Exodus.

II. Such being the twofold process suggested by this text, let us
next note the lessons which it enforces.

In the first place, let us be quite sure that we give it its due
weight in our thoughts and lives. Let us be quite sure that we never
give an undue weight to the one half of the whole truth. There are
plenty of people who are far too much, constitutionally and (perhaps
by reason of a mistaken notion of religion) religiously, inclined to
the contemplation of the more melancholy side of these truths; and
there are a great many people who are far too exclusively disposed
to the contemplation of the other. But the bulk of us never trouble
our heads about either the one or the other, but go on, forgetting
altogether that swift, sudden, stealthy, skinny hand that, if I
might go back to my former metaphor, is put out to lay hold of the
swimmer and then pull him underneath the water, and which will clasp
us by the ankles one day and drag us down. Do you ever think about
it? If not, surely, surely you are leaving out of sight one of what
ought to be the formative elements in our lives.

And then, on the other hand, when our hearts are faint, or when the
pressure of human mortality--our own, that of our dear ones, or that
of others--seems to weigh us down, or when it looks to us as if
God's work was failing for want of people to do it, let us remember
the other side--'And the children of Israel ... increased ... and
waxed exceeding mighty; ... and the land was filled with them.' So
we shall keep the middle path, which is the path of safety, and so
avoid the folly of extremes.

But then, more particularly, let me say that this double
contemplation of the two processes under which we live ought to
stimulate us to service. It ought to say to us, 'Do you cast in your
lot with that work which is going to be carried on through the ages.
Do you see to it that your little task is in the same line of
direction as the great purpose which God is working out--the
increasing purpose which runs through the ages.' An individual life
is a mere little backwater, as it were, in the great ocean. But its
minuteness does not matter, if only the great tidal wave which rolls
away out there, in the depths and the distance amongst the
fathomless abysses, tells also on the tiny pool far inland and yet
connected with the sea by some narrow, long fiord.

If my little life is part of that great ocean, then the ebb and flow
will alike act on it and make it wholesome. If my work is done in
and for God, I shall never have to look back and say, as we
certainly shall say one day, either here or yonder, unless our lives
be thus part of the divine plan, 'What a fool I was! Seventy years
of toiling and moiling and effort and sweat, and it has all come to
nothing; like a long algebraic sum that covers pages of intricate
calculations, and the _pluses_ and _minuses_ just balance each other;
and the net result is a great round nought.' So let us remember the
twofold process, and let it stir us to make sure that 'in our embers'
shall be 'something that doth live,' and that not 'Nature,' but
something better--God--'remembers what was so fugitive.' It is not
fugitive if it is a part of the mighty whole.

But further, let this double contemplation make us very content with
doing insignificant and unfinished work.

Joseph might have said, when he lay dying: 'Well! perhaps I made a
mistake after all. I should not have brought this people down here,
even if I have been led hither. I do not see that I have helped them
one step towards the possession of the land.' Do you remember the
old proverb about certain people who should not see half-finished
work? All our work in this world has to be only what the
physiologists call functional. God has a great scheme running on
through ages. Joseph gives it a helping hand for a time, and then
somebody else takes up the running, and carries the purpose forward
a little further. A great many hands are placed on the ropes that
draw the car of the Ruler of the world. And one after another they
get stiffened in death; but the car goes on. We should be contented
to do our little bit of the work. Never mind whether it is complete
and smooth and rounded or not. Never mind whether it can be isolated
from the rest and held up, and people can say, 'He did that entire
thing unaided.' That is not the way for most of us. A great many
threads go to make the piece of cloth, and a great many throws of
the shuttle to weave the web. A great many bits of glass make up the
mosaic pattern; and there is no reason for the red bit to pride
itself on its fiery glow, or the grey bit to boast of its silvery
coolness. They are all parts of the pattern, and as long as they
keep their right places they complete the artist's design. Thus, if
we think of how 'one soweth and another reapeth,' we may be content
to receive half-done works from our fathers, and to hand on
unfinished tasks to them that come after us. It is not a great trial
of a man's modesty, if he lives near Jesus Christ, to be content to
do but a very small bit of the Master's work.

And the last thing that I would say is, let this double process
going on all round us lift our thoughts to Him who lives for ever.
Moses dies; Joshua catches the torch from his hand. And the reason
why he catches the torch from his hand is because God said, 'As I
was with Moses so I will be with thee.' Therefore we have to turn
away in our contemplations from the mortality that has swallowed up
so much wisdom and strength, eloquence and power, which the Church
or our own hearts seem so sorely to want: and, whilst we do, we have
to look up to Jesus Christ and say, 'He lives! He lives! No man is
indispensable for public work or for private affection and solace so
long at there is a living Christ for us to hold by.'

Dear brethren, we need that conviction for ourselves often. When
life seems empty and hope dead, and nothing is able to fill the
vacuity or still the pain, we have to look to the vision of the Lord
sitting on the empty throne, high and lifted up, and yet very near
the aching and void heart. Christ lives, and that is enough.

So the separated workers in all the generations, who did their
little bit of service, like the many generations of builders who
laboured through centuries upon the completion of some great
cathedral, will be united at the last; 'and he that soweth, and he
that reapeth, shall rejoice together' in the harvest which was
produced by neither the sower nor the reaper, but by Him who blessed
the toils of both.

'Joseph died, and all his brethren, and all that generation'; but
Jesus lives, and therefore His people 'grow and multiply,' and His
servants' work is blessed; and at the end they shall be knit
together in the common joy of the great harvest, and of the day when
the headstone is brought forth with shoutings of 'Grace! grace unto
it.'




THE ARK AMONG THE FLAGS


'And there went a man of the house of Levi, and took to
wife a daughter of Levi. 2. And the woman conceived, and
bare a son: and when she saw him that he was a goodly
child, she hid him three months. 3. And when she could
not longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes,
and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the
child therein; and she laid it in the flags by the river's
brink. 4. And his sister stood afar off, to wit what would
be done to him. 5. And the daughter of Pharaoh came down
to wash herself at the river; and her maidens walked
along by the river's side; and when she saw the ark among
the flags, she sent her maid to fetch it. 6. And when
she had opened it, she saw the child: and, behold, the
babe wept. And she had compassion on him, and said, This
is one of the Hebrews' children. 7. Then said his sister
to Pharaoh's daughter, Shall I go and call to thee a nurse
of the Hebrew women, that she may nurse the child for
thee? 8. And Pharaoh's daughter said to her, Go. And the
maid went and called the child's mother. 9. And Pharaoh's
daughter said unto her, Take this child away, and nurse
it for me, and I will give thee thy wages. And the woman
took the child, and nursed it. 10. And the child grew,
and she brought him unto Pharaoh's daughter, and he
became her son. And she called his name Moses: and she
said, Because I drew him out of the water.'--EXODUS ii. 1-10.

I. It is remarkable that all the persons in this narrative are
anonymous. We know that the names of 'the man of the house of Levi'
and his wife were Amram and Jochebed. Miriam was probably the
anxious sister who watched what became of the little coffer. The
daughter of Pharaoh has two names in Jewish tradition, one of which
corresponds to that which Brugsch has found to have been borne by
one of Rameses' very numerous daughters. One likes to think that the
name of the gentle-hearted woman has come down to us; but, whether
she was called 'Meri' or not, she and the others have no name here.
The reason can scarcely have been ignorance. But they are, as it
were, kept in shadow, because the historian saw, and wished us to
see, that a higher Hand was at work, and that over all the events
recorded in these verses there brooded the informing, guiding Spirit
of God Himself, the sole actor.

'Each only as God wills
Can work--God's puppets, best and worst,
Are we: there is no last nor first.'

II. The mother's motive in braving the danger to herself involved in
keeping the child is remarkably put. 'When she saw that he was a
goodly child, she hid him.' It was not only a mother's love that
emboldened her, as it does all weak creatures, to shelter her
offspring at her own peril, but something in the look of the infant,
as it lay on her bosom, touched her with a dim hope. According to
the Septuagint translation, both parents shared in this. And so the
Epistle to the Hebrews unites them in that which is here attributed
to the mother only. Stephen, too, speaks of Moses as 'fair in God's
sight.' As if the prescient eyes of the parents were not blinded by
love, but rather cleared to see some token of divine benediction
resting on him. The writer of the _Hebrews_ lifts the deed out
of the category of instinctive maternal affection up to the higher
level of faith. So we may believe that the aspect of her child woke
some prophetic vision in the mother's soul, and that she and her
husband were of those who cherished the hopes naturally born from
the promise to Abraham, nurtured by Jacob's and Joseph's dying wish
to be buried in Canaan, and matured by the tyranny of Pharaoh. Their
faith, at all events, grasped the unseen God as their helper, and
made Jochebed bold to break the terrible law, as a hen will fly in
the face of a mastiff to shield her brood. Their faith perhaps also
grasped the future deliverance, and linked it in some way with their
child. We may learn how transfiguring and ennobling to the gentlest
and weakest is faith in God, especially when it is allied with
unselfish human love. These two are the strongest powers. If they
are at war, the struggle is terrible: if they are united, 'the
weakest is as David, and David as an angel of God.' Let us seek ever
to blend their united strength in our own lives.

Will it be thought too fanciful if we suggest that we are taught
another lesson,--namely, that the faith which surrenders its earthly
treasures to God, in confidence of His care, is generally rewarded
and vindicated by receiving them back again, glorified and
sanctified by the altar on which they have been laid? Jochebed
clasped her recovered darling to her bosom with a deeper gladness,
and held him by a surer title, when Miriam brought him back as the
princess's charge, than ever before. We never feel the preciousness
of dear ones so much, nor are so calm in the joy of possession, as
when we have laid them in God's hands, and have learned how wise and
wonderful His care is.

III. How much of the world's history that tiny coffer among the
reeds held! How different that history would have been if, as might
easily have happened, it had floated away, or if the feeble life
within it had wailed itself dead unheard! The solemn possibilities
folded and slumbering in an infant are always awful to a thoughtful
mind. But, except the manger at Bethlehem, did ever cradle hold the
seed of so much as did that papyrus chest? The set of opinion at
present minimises the importance of the individual, and exalts the
spirit of the period, as a factor in history. Standing beside
Miriam, we may learn a truer view, and see that great epochs require
great men, and that, without such for leaders, no solid advance in
the world's progress is achieved. Think of the strange cradle
floating on the Nile; then think of the strange grave among the
mountains of Moab, and of all between, and ponder the same lesson as
is taught in yet higher fashion by Bethlehem and Calvary, that God's
way of blessing the world is to fill men with His message, and let
others draw from them. Whether it be 'law,' or 'grace and truth,' a
man is needed through whom it may fructify to all.

IV. The sweet picture of womanly compassion in Pharaoh's daughter is
full of suggestions. We have already noticed that her name is handed
down by one tradition as 'Merris,' and that 'Meri' has been found as
the appellation of a princess of the period. A rabbinical authority
calls her 'Bithiah,' that is, 'Daughter of Jehovah'; by which was,
no doubt, intended to imply that she became in some sense a
proselyte. This may have been only an inference from her protection
of Moses. There is a singular and very obscure passage in I
Chronicles iv. 17, 18, relating the genealogy of a certain Mered,
who seems to have had two wives, one 'the Jewess,' the other
'Bithiah, the daughter of Pharaoh.' We know no more about him or
her, but Keil thinks that Mered probably 'lived before the exodus';
but it can scarcely be that the 'daughter of Pharaoh,' his wife, is
our princess, and that she actually became a 'daughter of Jehovah,'
and, like her adopted child, refused royal dignity and preferred
reproach. In any case, the legend of her name is a tender and
beautiful way of putting the belief that in her 'there was some good
thing towards the God of Israel.'

But, passing from that, how the true woman's heart changes languid
curiosity into tenderness, and how compassion conquers pride of race
and station, as well as regard for her father's edict, as soon as
the infant's cry, which touches every good woman's feelings, falls
on her ear! 'One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.' All the
centuries are as nothing; the strange garb and the stranger mental
and spiritual dress fade, and we have here a mere woman, affected,
as every true sister of hers to-day would be, by the helpless
wailing. God has put that instinct there. Alas that it ever should
be choked by frivolity or pride, and frozen by indifference and
self-indulgence! Gentle souls spring up in unfavourable soil.
Rameses was a strange father for such a daughter. How came this dove
in the vulture's cage? Her sweet pity beside his cold craft and
cruelty is like the lamb couching by the lion. Note, too, that
gentlest pity makes the gentlest brave. She sees the child is a
Hebrew. Her quick wit understands why it has been exposed, and she
takes its part, and the part of the poor weeping parents, whom she
can fancy, against the savage law. No doubt, as Egyptologists tell
us, the princesses of the royal house had separate households and
abundant liberty of action. Still, it was bold to override the
strict commands of such a monarch. But it was not a self-willed
sense of power, but the beautiful daring of a compassionate woman,
to which God committed the execution of His purposes.

And that is a force which has much like work trusted to it in modern
society too. Our great cities swarm with children exposed to a worse
fate than the baby among the flags. Legislation and official charity
have far too rough hands and too clumsy ways to lift the little life
out of the coffer, and to dry the tears. We must look to Christian
women to take a leaf out of 'Bithiah's' book. First, they should use
their eyes to see the facts, and not be so busy about their own
luxury and comfort that they pass the poor pitch-covered box
unnoticed. Then they should let the pitiful call touch their heart,
and not steel themselves in indifference or ease. Then they should
conquer prejudices of race, pride of station, fear of lowering
themselves, loathing, or contempt. And then they should yield to the
impulses of their compassion, and never mind what difficulties or
opponents may stand in the way of their saving the children. If
Christian women knew their obligations and their power, and lived up
to them as bravely as this Egyptian princess, there would be fewer
little ones flung out to be eaten by crocodiles, and many a poor
child, who is now abandoned from infancy to the Devil, would be
rescued to grow up a servant of God. She, there by the Nile waters,
in her gracious pity and prompt wisdom, is the type of what
Christian womanhood, and, indeed, the whole Christian community,
should be in relation to child life.

V. The great lesson of this incident, as of so much before, is the
presence of God's wonderful providence, working out its designs by
all the play of human motives. In accordance with a law, often seen
in His dealings, it was needful that the deliverer should come from
the heart of the system from which he was to set his brethren free.
The same principle which sent Saul of Tarsus to be trained at the
feet of Gamaliel, and made Luther a monk in the Augustinian convent
at Erfurt, planted Moses in Pharaoh's palace and taught him the
wisdom of Egypt, against which he was to contend. It was a strange
irony of Providence that put him so close to the throne which he was
to shake. For his future work he needed to be lifted above his
people, and to be familiar with the Egyptian court as well as with
Egyptian learning. If he was to hate and to war against idolatry,
and to rescue an unwilling people from it, he must know the
rottenness of the system, and must have lived close enough to it to
know what went on behind the scenes, and how foully it smelled when
near. He would gain influence over his countrymen by his connection
with Pharaoh, whilst his very separation from them would at once
prevent his spirit from being broken by oppression, and would give
him a keener sympathy with his people than if he had himself been
crushed by slavery. His culture, heathen as it was, supplied the
material on which the divine Spirit worked. God fashioned the
vessel, and then filled it. Education is not the antagonist of
inspiration. For the most part, the men whom God has used for His
highest service have been trained in all the wisdom of their age.
When it has been piled up into an altar, then 'the fire of the Lord'
falls.

Our story teaches us that God's chosen instruments are immortal till
their work is done. No matter how forlorn may seem their outlook,
how small the probabilities in their favour, how divergent from the
goal may seem the road He leads them, He watches them. Around that
frail ark, half lost among the reeds, is cast the impregnable shield
of His purpose. All things serve that Will. The current in the full
river, the lie of the flags that stop it from being borne down, the
hour of the princess's bath, the direction of her idle glance, the
cry of the child at the right moment, the impulse welling up in her
heart, the swift resolve, the innocent diplomacy of the sister, the
shelter of the happy mother's breast, the safety of the palace,--all
these and a hundred more trivial and unrelated things are spun into
the strong cable wherewith God draws slowly but surely His secret
purpose into act. So ever His children are secure as long as He has
work for them, and His mighty plan strides on to its accomplishment
over all the barriers that men can raise.

How deeply this story had impressed on devout minds the truth of the
divine protection for all who serve Him, is shown by the fact that
the word employed in the last verse of our lesson, and there
translated 'drawn,' of which the name 'Moses' is a form, is used on
the only occasion of its occurrence in the Old Testament (namely
Psalm xviii. 16, and in the duplicate in 2 Sam. xxii. 17) with plain
reference to our narrative. The Psalmist describes his own
deliverance, in answer to his cry, by a grand manifestation of God's
majesty; and this is the climax and the purpose of the earthquake
and the lightning, the darkness and the storm: 'He sent from above,
He took me, He drew me out of many waters.' So that scene by the
margin of the Nile, so many years ago, is but one transient instance
of the working of the power which secures deliverance from
encompassing perils, and for strenuous, though it may be
undistinguished, service to all who call upon Him. God, who put the
compassion into the heart of Pharaoh's dusky daughter, is not less
tender of heart than she, and when He hears us, though our cry be
but as of an infant, 'with no language but a cry,' He will come in
His majesty and draw us from encompassing dangers and impending
death. We cannot all be lawgivers and deliverers; but we may all
appeal to His great pity, and partake of deliverance like that of
Moses and of David.




THE BUSH THAT BURNED, AND DID NOT BURN OUT


'And, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush
was not consumed.' EXODUS iii. 1

It was a very sharp descent from Pharaoh's palace to the wilderness,
and forty years of a shepherd's life were a strange contrast to the
brilliant future that once seemed likely for Moses. But God tests
His weapons before He uses them, and great men are generally
prepared for great deeds by great sorrows. Solitude is 'the mother-
country of the strong,' and the wilderness, with its savage crags,
its awful silence, and the unbroken round of its blue heaven, was a
better place to meet God than in the heavy air of a palace, or the
profitless splendours of a court.

So as this lonely shepherd is passing slowly in front of his flock,
he sees a strange light that asserted itself, even in the brightness
of the desert sunshine. 'The bush' does not mean one single shrub.
Rather, it implies some little group, or cluster, or copse, of the
dry thorny acacias, which are characteristic of the country, and
over which any ordinary fire would have passed like a flash, leaving
them all in grey ashes. But this steady light persists long enough
to draw the attention of the shepherd, and to admit of his
travelling some distance to reach it. And then--and then--the Lord
speaks.

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