The Thrice Hearken
‘Be still, sad soul! lift thou no passionate cry,
But spread the desert of thy being bare
To the full searching of the All-seeing eye;
Wait ! — and through dark misgiving, blank despair,
God will come down in pity, and fill the dry
Dead place with light, and life, and vernal air.”
J. C. SHAIRP.
ISAIAH li. 1-8.)
HESE paragraphs are exceedingly dramatic. We become conscious that we are approaching a revelation of unparalleled sublimity which shall be in Scripture what heart or brain or eye is in the human body. The encasing of each of these in strong protecting walls convinces the most superficial of
the priceless value of the treasure they are formed to guard.
And as we consider the thrice “Hearken” of this paragraph,
and the thrice “Awake” of the succeeding one, we realize that
we are entering the presence-chamber of the profoundest mysteries of love and redemption.
Travellers who have visited the ruined temples of Egypt describe the splendour of their approaches. Long corridors, guarded by the imperturbable and stupendous statues of defunct deities, avenues of pillars, and the shadow of imposing fagades and porticoes — everything that human art could devise prepared the mind for the magnificence of the inner shrine. Similarly, as we read these chapters, our mind becomes educated, our eye focussed and adjusted, our sense of perspective trained, that with hushed and awful dread we may pass in to worship before the dying Man of Calvary.
The people, notwithstanding the promises of deliverance from exile and the summons to depart, seemed unable to believe that they were destined to become again a great nation, or that Zion’s wastes would be repaired! Already the Servant of Jehovah had sought to answer their anxious questionings, and reassure them by announcing a love that would not let them go. And in these words He betakes Himself to the same strain. He prefaces his words by the thrice repeated “Hearken,” addressed to those “that follow after righteousness” in the first verse; and to “those that know righteousness” in the seventh. These are always the stages in the development of character: they that follow presently possess.
I. THE LESSONS OF RETROSPECT. — It is wholesome for the pillar, with its fluted column and decorated coronal, to look down to the quarry whence it came; and for us all to look back to the lowliness and obscurity of our origin. Such considerations deepen our humility, and augment our thankfulness for the grace of God which has made us what we are.
Remember, O man, the rock of the first Adam, the pit of self-hood, passion, murder, out of which thou wast taken! She who plucked the tempting fruit in violation of her Maker’s word was thy mother; and he who cast the blame on her and preferred the indulgence of the flesh to the regimen of the spirit was thy father. For thy brother thou must take Cain, and for thy sister Rahab. Thou knowest the strong affinities by which thou art bound to each of these. Thou canst not rid thyself of the features of the family likeness, nor wholly escape the bewraying accent of the family speech! What has brought thee from such an origin, and made thee a pillar in the temple of God, but the grace which had no reason save itself, no measure save infinity? Boast not thyself. There is nothing in thee to account for such transformation. Render thy homage where it belongs, and reason, that if God has done so much, He can easily perfect it. If thou wert excavated, surely thou canst be shaped! If thou wert hewn, surely thou canst be polished! If thou wert justified, surely thou canst be sanctified! If, when an enemy, thou wert reconciled by the death of
— — “Pook Back!” - 117
his Son, how much more, being reconciled, thou shalt be saved by his life!
It was for her encouragement that Israel was primarily directed to this retrospect. The nation was greatly reduced in numbers, and the Godly were but a handful. It seemed preposterous to suppose that they would ever attain to such prolific numbers as to rival the sands on the shore, or the stars of space. The tree had been so mercilessly cut down, and pruned, that they despaired of again beholding its spreading branches, laden with fruit. In answer to such forebodings the voice of inspiration cries, “Look back! Consider Abraham and Sarah. There was a time when they were the sole representatives of the Hebrew race; yet of them and of the one son of their old age sprang countless myriads. What little cause, then, is there for fear! Though you were reduced to a single aged pair, these might become the origin of a mighty nation! How much more is there reason for hope now that you may still be counted by your thousands!” “Look unto Abraham your father, and unto Sarah that bare you; for when he was but one I called him, and blessed him and made him many.”
Let us recount the steps of Abraham’s pruning, on which God lays stress in saying, “When he was but one, I called him.”
He stood alone. First, Terah died, after having started with him for the Land of Promise, emblem of those who in old age start on the pilgrimage of faith and hope, not too much tied by the conservatism of nature, or the traditions of the past. Then Lot dropped away, and went down to Sodom; and it must have been difficult for the old man, as he saw the retreating forms of his camp followers, to be wholly unmoved. Then Sarah’s scheme miscarried, and Hagar was thrust from his tents with her child. Lastly, his Isaac was laid upon the altar. By successive strokes the shadows grew deeper and darker; and he stood alone, face to face with God and his purpose. But the fire that burned in his heart rose higher, shone brighter, and has ignited myriads with its flame. You only need a spark to light a conflagration. Chicago was burnt down by the upsetting of a tiny lamp. If there be heroic faith in one lonely heart, it shall spread to untold millions.
His faith was sorely tried. First by the long delay; then by the growing unlikelihood that he should have a child, since natural force was spent; then by the summons to offer Isaac on Mount Moriah: every test was applied to his power of endurance. To the end of his life he was a stranger and pilgrim, only seeing the promises from afar, and dying with an unfulfilled hope. He little realized the perfect work his patience was producing. He may not have understood how utterly God must reduce and cut us down before He can graft upon us his rarest fruit. He did not see that our proud flesh will glory, though it be of a strand, a smoking flax, a broken reed. To him the necessity for knife and fire was not so patent as to us. As we look back upon it all, we see that it could not have been otherwise. If the seed was to be a Divine gift to his faith, then nature herself must forfeit vitality and hope, that God might be all in all.
From Abraham I turn to thee, much-suffering believer, cut to the quick and to the roots, brought into the dust of death, stripped of reputation, wealth, prestige, the gifts and graces of oratory, faculty to command. Yet be of good cheer ! — Abraham passed this way before thee. It is all part of a necessary process. Nothing has happened to hinder, but all to help thee to become the parent of a great spiritual progeny, Because of the destruction of nature, thou mayest reckon on the prolific abundance of grace.
His history is the type of God’s dealings with men. Not once nor twice in the record of the Church the cause of truth has been entrusted to a tiny handful of defenders, who have deemed it forlorn or lost. The prophet has stood alone lamenting that he only was left. The dens and caves have sheltered the loyal but diminished few. Ragged, tattered, harried, exiled, these have gathered around the banner and followed it. None of the mighty, noble, or learned have been called, and not many of the poor. But suddenly God has called out from some unlikely quarter one man, and it has seemed as though the dust were suddenly transformed into warriors, and truth sprang up from the dust as luxuriantly as grass after spring rains. Sir Walter Scott’s picture of the apparently empty glen suddenly teeming with armed men at the sign of the chieftain has often had its counterpart in the great army which has arisen from the life, or words, or witness, of a single man.
It was so in the days of the Arian heresy, when Athanasius stood alone against the world for the deity of Christ. It was so at the Reformation, when Europe lay asleep under the soporific of the Papacy. It was so when first the abolition of slavery began to be agitated. God has repeatedly shown that He has no taste for strong battalions; He chooses a Gideon, a Judas Maccabeeus, a Luther, a Wilberforce. The history of the Church is largely a story of the lives of individuals. It is through a Livingstone, a Judson, a Carey, that whole nations have been brought to the feet of Jesus, to sit clothed and in their right mind.
If, therefore, some lone and single-handed Christian worker should read these words, there is no reason for despair. Art thou a cypher? but thou mayest have God in front of thee! Art thou but a narrow strait? yet the whole ocean of Godhead is waiting to pour through thee! The question is not what thou canst or canst not do, but what thou art willing for God to do. When God makes use of one man, he becomes the father of a vast multitude, as Abraham of Israel. The only condition is the presence of God in us, with us, through us. Open thy whole being to God; for God is about to comfort the waste places of Zion. He will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord; joy and gladness shall be found therein, thanksgiving and the voice of melody.
II. THE IMPERISHABLENESS OF SPIRITUAL QUALITY. — In the following verses there is a marvellous contrast between the material and the un-material, the temporal and the eternal. The gaze of the people is directed to the heavens above and the earth beneath. Those heavens seem stable enough, far removed from the convulsions and shocks of time. To them surely no change can come. Yet they shall vanish like a puff of smoke borne down the wind. And as for the earth, it shall wax old. Nature has often been described as God’s vesture, the veil under which He hides. But the day shall come when it shall be laid aside. There shall be new heavens and a new earth, for the first heavens and the first earth shall pass away. But amid the general wreck, spiritual qualities will remain imperishably the same. “My salvation shall be for ever, and my righteousness shall not be abolished” (6).
This shall be for ever true of God. We cannot discern what awaits us in the near future. This world is destined to see — and perhaps soon — the sudden unveiling of the Divine plan, to which God has been working through the ages; vast national convulsions; nature in the throes of travail; the advent of the King; the setting up of the Judgment; the Resurrection. But though such things take place around us, we need not doubt that God will remain the same — his love and faithfulness, his covenant and promise, his purpose and choice. Our friend’s heart is the same when he appears in a new attire; and God will be the same in his feelings and dealings towards us amid the crash of matter and the wreck of worlds as He is to-day. We shall still be his adopted children, still accepted in the Beloved, still included in his everlasting covenant, still one with his Son, as members of his Body and his Bride.
The Jews took great comfort in the thought of God’s unchangeableness. Had He not said that his righteousness was near and his salvation gone forth; that his arms should judge the people, and the isles wait for Him? Then Babylon might fall beneath the assault of Cyrus, and the whole world be in confusion; floods of anarchy might burst on the nation, yet God’s word would be fulfilled; He could not recede from his purpose or alter it; they might possess their souls in the sure confidence that, as He had promised, so He would perform. Some such assurance may well steal into our hearts, as we anticipate the changes that are always coming over ourselves, our homes, our churches, and our time. Everything else alters — the most stable foundations of our trust give way — but God is unchangeably the same; the qualities of his character are as permanent as his throne.:
Working for Gternity. 121 4, This shall be for ever true of man. When we partake of God’s righteousness, and assimilate it, we acquire a permanence which defies time and change. The love we derive from the heart of God, and have to each other, abideth for ever. The peace we receive deepens in its perennial flow. The patience, courage, strength of character, which we acquire here with so much pain, are not to go out as a candle, nor vanish as a puff of smoke. If it were so, what would become of God’s infinite painstaking! No; our school-house may be in ruins, and not a vestige of it left; the horn-books from which we read, the hard forms on which we sat, may vanish, but the characters we acquired shall outlive the world of matter. These shall be for ever, and shall not be abolished. Oh, let us not murmur at the slow progress of our education, and at the care that God takes for us thoroughly to master each lesson — turning it back, making us review it again and again. He is working for eternity.
What a lesson is given in these words of the relative value of things! To the man of the world the Zaving is all-important; to the man of faith the deinmg. The child of sense sacrifices all for what is but a puff of smoke, or a moth-eaten garment at the best; but the child of eternity looks for a kingdom that hath foundations, whose Builder and Maker is God — where the moth does not eat, nor rust corrupt, nor fire consume, nor. change intrude. A man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things that he possesses, but in meekness, faith, fidelity, devotion, love.
Ill. THE IMPOTENCE OF MAN. — These exiled Jews hardly dared to hope that they would be able to break away from their foes. The air was laden with their reproaches and revilings. What mercy could they hope for from those who refused to stint their bitter words? When their oppressors passed from malignant threats to action, there would be little shrift or quarter. We have all known something of this fear of man, who seemed waiting to destroy. But to us, as to the exiles in Babylon, the Divine word comes, “Fear ye not, neither be dismayed” (7).
122 Ohe Thrice “‘ Bearken.”’
The paragraph closes with an application of the word used by the great Servant of Himself.” “The moth shall eat them up,” we heard Him saying to Himself; “they shall all wax old as a garment” (I. 9). But now we are bidden to apply those same expressions to ourselves. ‘The moth shall eat them up like a garment, and the worm shall eat them like wool” (li. 8). With these assurances behind us, we may face a world in arms. Men may try to wear out the saints, but they must fail; because our souls are fed from the perennial springs of the Divine nature, and because God has imparted to us Loth patience and courage which are eternal in their nature. He will take care of his own.