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Expositions Of Holy Scripture

A >> Alexander Maclaren >> Expositions Of Holy Scripture




Is not that all true about us? We have no guiding cloud like this.
So much the better. Have we not a more real guide? God guides us by
circumstances, God guides us by His word, God guides us by His
Spirit, speaking through our common-sense and in our understandings,
and, most of all, God guides us by that dear Son of His, in whom is
the fire and round whom is the cloud. And perhaps we may even
suppose that our Lord implies some allusion to this very symbol in
His own great words, 'I am the Light of the world. He that followeth
Me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.'
For the conception of 'following' the light seems to make it plain
that our Lord's image is not that of the sun in the heavens, or any
such supernal light, but that of some light which comes near enough
to a man to move before him, and behind which he can march. So, I
think, that Christ Himself laid His hand upon this ancient symbol,
and in these great words said in effect, 'I am that which it only
shadowed and foretold.' At all events, whether in them He was
pointing to our text or no, we must feel that He is the reality
which was expressed by this outward symbol. And no man who can say,
'Jesus Christ is the Captain of my salvation, and after His pattern
I march; at the pointing of His guiding finger I move; and in His
footsteps, He being my helper, I try to tread,' need feel or fancy
that any possible pillar, floating before the dullest eye, was a
better, surer, or diviner guide than he possesses. They whom Christ
guides want none other for leader, pattern, counsellor, companion,
reward. This Christ is our Christ 'for ever and ever, He will be our
guide even unto death' and beyond it. The pillar that we follow,
which will glow with the ruddy flame of love in the darkest hours of
life--blessed be His name!--will glide in front of us through the
'valley of the shadow of death,' brightest then when the murky
midnight is blackest. Nor will the pillar which guides us cease to
blaze, as did the guide of the desert march, when Jordan has been
crossed. It will still move before us on paths of continuous and
ever-increasing approach to infinite perfection. They who here
follow Christ afar off and with faltering steps shall there 'follow
the Lamb whithersoever He goeth.'

In like manner, the same absolute uncertainty which was intended to
keep the Israelites (though it failed often to do so) in the
attitude of constant dependence, is the condition in which we all
have to live, though we mask it from ourselves. That we do not know
what lies before us is a commonplace. The same long tracts of
monotonous continuance in the same place and doing the same duties
befall us that befell these men. Years pass, and the pillar spreads
itself out, a defence above the unmoving sanctuary. And then, all in
a flash, when we are least thinking of change, it gathers itself
together, is a pillar again, shoots upwards, and moves forwards; and
it is for us to go after it. And so our lives are shuttlecocked
between uniform sameness which may become mechanical monotony, and
agitation by change which may make us lose our hold of fixed
principles and calm faith, unless we recognise that the continuance
and the change are alike the will of the guiding God, whose will is
signified by the stationary or moving pillar.

III. That leads me to the last thing that I would note--viz. the
docile following of the Guide.

In the context, the writer does not seem to be able to get away from
the thought that whatever the pillar indicated, immediate prompt
obedience followed. He says so over and over and over again. 'As
long as the cloud abode they rested, and when the cloud tarried long
they journeyed not'; and 'when the cloud was a few days on the
Tabernacle they abode'; and 'according to the commandment they
journeyed'; and 'when the cloud abode until the morning they
journeyed'; and 'whether it were two days, or a month, or a year
that the cloud tarried they journeyed not, but abode in their
tents.' So, after he has reiterated the thing half a dozen times or
more, he finishes by putting it all again in one verse, as the last
impression which he would leave from the whole narrative--'at the
commandment of the Lord they rested in their tents, and at the
commandment of the Lord they journeyed.' Obedience was prompt;
whensoever and for whatsoever the signal was given, the men were
ready. In the night, after they had had their tents pitched for a
long period, when only the watchers' eyes were open, the pillar
lifts, and in an instant the alarm is given, and all the camp is in
a bustle. That is what we have to set before us as the type of our
lives. We are to be as ready for every indication of God's will as
they were. The peace and blessedness of our lives largely depend on
our being eager to obey, and therefore quick to perceive, the
slightest sign of motion in the resting, or of rest in the moving,
pillar which regulates our march and our encamping.

What do we need in order to cultivate and keep such a disposition?
We need perpetual watchfulness lest the pillar should lift
unnoticed. When Nelson was second in command at Copenhagen, the
admiral in command of the fleet hoisted the signal for recall, and
Nelson put his telescope to his blind eye and said, 'I do not see
it.' That is very like what we are tempted to do. When the signal
for unpleasant duties that we would gladly get out of is hoisted, we
are very apt to put the telescope to the blind eye, and pretend to
ourselves that we do not see the fluttering flags. We need still
more to keep our wills in absolute suspense, if His will has not
declared itself. Do not let us be in a hurry to run before God. When
the Israelites were crossing the Jordan, they were told to leave a
great space between themselves and the guiding ark, that they might
know how to go, because they had 'not passed that way heretofore.'
Impatient hurrying at God's heels is apt to lead us astray. Let Him
get well in front, that you may be quite sure which way He desires
you to go, before you go. And if you are not sure which way He
desires you to go, be sure that He does not at that moment desire
you to go anywhere.

We need to hold the present with a slack hand, so as to be ready to
fold our tents and take to the road, if God will. We must not reckon
on continuance, nor strike our roots so deep that it needs a
hurricane to remove us. To those who set their gaze on Christ, no
present, from which He wishes them to remove, can be so good for
them as the new conditions into which He would have them pass. It is
hard to leave the spot, though it be in the desert, where we have so
long encamped that it has come to feel like home. We may look with
regret on the circle of black ashes on the sand where our little
fire glinted cheerily, and our feet may ache, and our hearts ache
more, as we begin our tramp once again, but we must set ourselves to
meet the God-appointed change cheerfully, in the confidence that
nothing will be left behind which it is not good to lose, nor
anything met which does not bring a blessing, however its first
aspect may be harsh or sad.

We need, too, to cultivate the habit of prompt obedience. It is
usually reluctance which puts the drag on. Slow obedience is often
the germ of incipient disobedience. In matters of prudence and of
intellect, second thoughts are better than first, and third
thoughts, which often come back to first ones, better than second;
but in matters of duty, first thoughts are generally best. They are
the instinctive response of conscience to the voice of God, while
second thoughts are too often the objections of disinclination, or
sloth, or cowardice. It is easiest to do our duty when we are at
first sure of it. It then comes with an impelling power which
carries us over obstacles as on the crest of a wave, while
hesitation and delay leave us stranded in shoal water. If we would
follow the pillar, we must follow it at once.

A heart that waits and watches for God's direction, that uses
common-sense as well as faith to unravel small and great
perplexities, and is willing to sit loose to the present, however
pleasant, in order that it may not miss the indications which say,
'Arise, this is not your rest,' fulfils the conditions on which, if
we keep them, we may be sure that He will guide us by the right way,
and bring us at last to 'the city of habitation.'




HOBAB


'And Moses said unto Hobab ... Come thou with us, and
we will do thee good: for the Lord hath spoken good
concerning Israel.'--NUM. x. 29.

There is some doubt with regard to the identity of this Hobab.
Probably he was a man of about the same age as Moses, his brother-
in-law, and a son of Jethro, a wily Kenite, a Bedouin Arab. Moses
begs him to join himself to his motley company, and to be to him in
the wilderness 'instead of eyes.' What did Moses want a man for,
when he had the cloud? What do we want common-sense for, when we
have God's Spirit? What do we want experience and counsel for, when
we have divine guidance promised to us? The two things work in
together. The cloud led the march, but it was very well to have a
man that knew all about the oases and the wells, the situation of
which was known only to the desert-born tribes, and who could teach
the helpless slaves from Goshen the secrets of camp life. So Moses
pressed Hobab to change his position, to break with his past, and to
launch himself into an altogether new and untried sort of life.

And what does he plead with him as the reason? 'We will do thee
good, for the Lord hath spoken good concerning Israel.' Probably
Hobab looked rather shy at the security, for I suppose he was no
worshipper of Jehovah, and he said, 'No; I had rather go home to my
own people and my own kindred and my father's house where I fit in,
and keep to my own ways, and have something a little more definite
to lay hold of than your promise, or the promise of your Jehovah
that lies behind it. These are not solid, and I am going back to my
tribe.' But Moses pressed and he at last consented, and the
following verses suggest that the arrangement was made
satisfactorily, and that the journeyings began prosperously. In the
Book of Judges we find traces of the presence of Hobab's descendants
as incorporated among the people of Israel. One of them came to be
somebody, the Jael who struck the tent-peg through the temples of
the sleeping Sisera, for she is called 'the wife of Heber the
_Kenite_.' Probably, then, in some sense Hobab must have become
a worshipper of Jehovah, and have cast in his lot with his brother-
in-law and his people. I do not set Hobab up as a shining example.
We do not know much about his religion. But it seems to me that this
little glimpse into a long-forgotten and unimportant life may teach
us two or three things about the venture of faith, the life of
faith, and the reward of faith.

I. The venture of faith.

I have already said that Hobab had nothing in the world to trust to
except Moses' word, and Moses' report of God's Word. 'We will do you
good; God has said that He will do good to us, and you shall have
your share in it.' It was a grave thing, and, in many circumstances,
would have been a supremely foolish thing, credulous to the verge of
insanity, to risk all upon the mere promise of one in Moses'
position, who had so little in his own power with which to fulfil
the promise; and who referred him to an unseen divinity, somewhere
or other; and so drew bills upon heaven and futurity, and did not
feel himself at all bound to pay them when they fell due, unless God
should give him the cash to do it with. But Hobab took the plunge,
he ventured all upon these two promises--Moses' word, and God's word
that underlay it.

Now that is just what we have to do. For, after all talking about
reasons for belief, and evidences of religion, and all the rest of
it, it all comes to this at last--will you risk everything on Jesus
Christ's bare word? There are plenty of reasons for doing so, but
what I wish to bring out is this, that the living heart and root of
true Christianity is neither more nor less than the absolute and
utter reliance upon nothing else but Christ, and therefore on His
word. He did not even condescend to give reasons for that reliance,
for His most solemn assurance was just this, 'Verily, verily, I say
unto you.' That is as much as to say, 'If you do not see in Me,
without any more argument, reason enough for believing Me, you do
not see Me at all.'

Christ did not argue--He asserted, and in default of all other
proof, if I might venture to say so, He put His own personality into
the scales and said, 'There, that will outweigh everything.' So no
wonder that 'they were astonished at His doctrine,'--not so much at
the substance of it as at the tone of it, 'for He taught them
_with authority_.'

But what right had He to teach them with authority? What right has
He to present Himself there in front of us and proclaim, 'I say unto
you, and there is an end of it'? The heart and essence of Christian
faith is doing, in a far sublimer fashion, precisely what this wild
Arab did, when he uprooted himself from the conditions in which his
life had grown up, and flung himself into an unknown future, on bare
trust in a bare word. Jesus Christ asks us to do the same by Him.
Whether His word comes to us revealing, or commanding, or promising,
it is absolute, and, for His true followers, ends all controversy,
all hesitation, all reluctance. When He commands it is ours to obey
and live. And when He promises it is for us to twine all the
tendrils of our expectations round that faithful word, and by faith
to make 'the anchor of the soul, sure and steadfast.' The venture of
faith takes a _word_ for the most solid thing in the universe,
and the Incarnate Word of God for the basis of all our hope, the
authority for all our conduct, 'the Master-light of all our seeing.'

II. Hobab suggests to us, secondly--

The sort of life that follows the venture of faith. The hindrances
to his joining Moses were plainly put by himself. He said in effect,
'I will not come; I will depart to mine own land and to my kindred.
Why should I attach myself to a horde of strangers, and go wandering
about the desert for the rest of my life, looking out for
encampments for them, when I can return to where I have been all my
days; and be surrounded by the familiar atmosphere of friends and
relatives?' But he bethought himself that there was a nobler life to
live than that, and because he was stirred by the impulse of
reliance on Moses and his promise, and perhaps by some germ of
reliance on Moses' God, he finally said, 'The die is cast. I choose
my side. I will break with the past. I turn my back on kindred and
home. Here I draw a broad line across the page, and begin over again
in an altogether new kind of life. I identify myself with these
wanderers; sharing their fortunes, hoping to share their prosperity,
and taking their God for my God.' He had perhaps not been a nomad
before, for there still are permanent settlements as well as nomad
encampments in Arabia, as there were in those days, and he and his
relatives, from the few facts that we know of them, seem to have had
a fixed home, with a very narrow zone of wandering round it. So
Hobab, an old man probably, if he was anything like the age of his
connection by marriage, Moses, who was eighty at this time, makes up
his mind to begin a new career.

Now that is what we have to do. If we have faith in Christ and His
promise, we shall not say, 'I am going back to my kindred and to my
home.' We shall be prepared to accept the conditions of a wanderer's
life. We shall recognise and feel, far more than we ever have done,
that we are indeed 'pilgrims and sojourners' here. Dear Christian
friends, we have no business to call ourselves Christ's men, unless
the very characteristic of our lives is that we are drawn ever
forward by the prospect of future good, and unless that future is a
great deal more solid and more operative upon us, and tells more on
our lives, than this intrusive, solid-seeming present that thrusts
itself between us and our true home. That is a sure saying. The
Christian obligation to live a life of detachment, even while
diligent in duty, is not to be brushed aside as pulpit rhetoric and
exaggeration, but it is the plainest teaching of the New Testament.
I wish it was a little more exemplified in the daily life of the
people who call themselves Christians.

If I am not living for the unseen and the future, what right have I
to say that I am Christ's at all? If the shadows are more than the
substance to me; if this condensed vapour and fog that we call
reality has not been to our apprehension thinned away into the
unsubstantial mist that it is, what have the principles of
Christianity done for us, and what worth is Christ's word to us? If
I believe Him, the world is--I do not say, as the sentimental poet
put it, 'but a fleeting show, for man's illusion given';--but as
Paul puts it, a glass which may either reveal or obscure the
realities beyond; and according as we look at, or look through, 'the
things seen and temporal,' do we see, or miss, 'the things unseen
and eternal.' So, then, the life of faith has for its essential
characteristic--because it is a life of reliance on Christ's bare
word--that future good is consciously its supreme aim. That will
detach us, as it did Hobab, from home and kindred, and make us feel
that we are 'pilgrims and sojourners.'

III. Lastly, our story suggests to us--

The rewards of faith.

'Come with us,' says Moses; 'we are journeying unto the place of
which the Lord said, I will give it you. Come thou with us, and we
will do thee what goodness the Lord shall do unto us.' He went, and
neither he nor Moses ever saw the land, or at least never set their
feet on it. Moses saw it from Pisgah, but probably Hobab did not
even get so much as that.

So he had all his tramping through the wilderness, and all his work,
for nothing, had he? Had he not better have gone back to Midian, and
made use of the present reality, than followed a will-of-the-wisp
that led him into a bog, if he got none of the good that he set out
expecting to get? Then, did he make a mistake? Would he have been a
wiser man if he had stuck to his first refusal? Surely not. It seems
to me that the very fact of this great promise being given to this
old--dare I call Hobab a 'saint'?--to this old saint, and never
being fulfilled at all in this world, compels us to believe that
there was some gleam of hope, and of certainty, of a future life,
even in these earliest days of dim and partial revelation.

To me it is very illuminative, and very beautiful, that the dying
Jacob bursts in his song into a sudden exclamation, 'I have waited
for Thy salvation, O Lord!' It is as if he had felt that all his
life long he had been looking for what had never come, and that it
could not be that God was going to let him go down to the grave and
never grasp the good that he had been waiting for all his days. We
may apply substantially the same thoughts to Hobab, and to all his
like, and may turn them to our own use, and argue that the
imperfections of the consequences of our faith here on earth are
themselves evidences of a future, where all that Christ has said
shall be more than fulfilled, and no man will be able to say, 'Thou
didst send me out, deluding me with promises which have all gone to
water and have failed.'

Hobab dying there in the desert had made the right choice, and if we
will trust ourselves to Christ and His faithful word, and, trusting
to Him, will feel that we are detached from the present and that it
is but as the shadow of a cloud, whatever there may be wanting in
the results of our faith here on earth, there will be nothing
wanting in its results at the last. Hobab did not regret his
venture, and no man ever ventures his faith on Christ and is
disappointed. 'He that believeth shall not be confounded.'




THE HALLOWING OF WORK AND OF REST


'And it came to pass, when the ark set forward, that
Moses said, Rise up, Lord, and let Thine enemies be
scattered; and let them that hate Thee flee before Thee.
36. And when it rested, he said, Return, O Lord, unto
the many thousands of Israel.'--Num. x. 35, 36.

The picture suggested by this text is a very striking and vivid one.
We see the bustle of the morning's breaking up of the encampment of
Israel. The pillar of cloud, which had lain diffused and motionless
over the Tabernacle, gathers itself together into an upright shaft,
and moves, a dark blot against the glittering blue sky, the sunshine
masking its central fire, to the front of the encampment. Then the
priests take up the ark, the symbol of the divine Presence, and fall
into place behind the guiding pillar. Then come the stir of the
ordering of the ranks, and a moment's pause, during which the leader
lifts his voice--'Rise, Lord, and let Thine enemies be scattered,
and let them that hate Thee flee before Thee.' Then, with braced
resolve and confident hearts, the tribes set forward on the day's
march.

Long after those desert days a psalmist laid hold of the old prayer
and offered it, as not antiquated yet by the thousand years that had
intervened. 'Let God arise, and let His enemies be scattered,'
prayed one of the later psalmists; 'let them that hate Him flee
before Him.' We, too, in circumstances so different, may take up the
immortal though ancient words, on which no dimming rust of antiquity
has encrusted itself, and may, at the beginnings and the endings of
all our efforts and of each of our days, and at the beginning and
ending of life itself, offer this old prayer--the prayer which asked
for a divine presence in the incipiency of our efforts, and the
prayer which asked for a divine presence in the completion of our
work and in the rest that remaineth.

I. So, then, if we put these two petitions together, I think we
shall see in them first, a pattern of that realisation of, and
aspiration after, the divine Presence, which ought to fill all our
lives.

'Rise, Lord, let Thine enemies be scattered.'

But was not that moving pillar the token that God had risen? And was
not the psalmist who reiterated Moses' prayer asking for what had
been done before he asked it? Was not the ark the symbol of the
divine Presence, and was not its movement after the pillar a pledge
to the whole host of Israel that the petition which they were
offering, through their leader's lips, was granted ere it was
offered? Yes. And yet the present God would not manifest His
Presence except in response to the desire of His servants; and just
because the ark was the symbol, and that moving column was the
guarantee of God's being with the host as their defence, therefore
there rose up with confidence this prayer, 'Rise, Lord, and let
Thine enemies be scattered.'

That twofold attitude, the realisation of, and therefore the
aspiration after, the divine gifts, which are given before they are
desired, but are not appropriated and brought into operation in our
lives unless they are desired, is precisely the paradox of the
Christian life. Having, we long for, and longing, we have, and
because we possess God we pray, 'Oh! that we might possess Thee.'
The more we long, the more we receive. But unless He gave Himself in
anticipation of our longing, there would be neither longing nor
reception. Only on condition of our desiring to have Him does He
flow into our lives, victorious and strength-giving, and the more we
experience that omnipotent might and calming, guiding nearness, the
more assuredly we shall long for it.

Let us then, dear brethren, blend these two things together, for
indeed they are inseparable one from the other, and there can be no
real experience in any depth of the one of them without the other.
Blessed be God! there need be no long interval of waiting between
sowing the seed of supplication and reaping the harvest of fruition.
That process of growth and reaping goes on with instantaneous
rapidity. 'Before they call I will answer,' for pillar and ark were
there ere Moses opened his lips; and 'while they are yet speaking I
will hear,' for, in response to the cry, the host moved
triumphantly, guarded through the wilderness. So it may be, and
ought to be, with each of us.

In like manner, coupling these two petitions together, and taking
them as unitedly covering the whole field of life in their great
antitheses of work and rest, effort and accomplishment, beginning
and ending, morning and evening, we may say that here is an example,
to be appropriated in our own lives, of that continuous longing and
realisation which will encircle all life as with a golden ring, and
make every part of it uniform and blessed. To begin, continue, and
end with God is the secret of joyful beginning, of patient
continuance, and of triumphant ending. There is no reason in heaven,
though there are hosts of excuses on earth, why there should not be,
in the case of each of us, an absolutely continuous and
uninterrupted sense of being with God. O brethren! that is a stage
of Christian experience high above the one on which most of us
stand. But that is our fault, and not the necessity of our
condition. Let us lay this to heart, that it is possible to have the
pillar always guiding our march, and possible to have it stretching,
calm and motionless, over all our hours of rest.

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