The Canaanites Would Dwell in That Land

OF you had visited the Land of Canaan, the Land of Promise, the Holy Land, any time between its conquest by Joshua and the fall of Jerusalem, you would have found its great cities and its rich plains filled with the families of the chosen people. But if you had climbed up into its hill countries; if you had scaled its rocky fastnesses; if you had penetrated into its inaccessible strongholds, you would have found many unsubdued remnants of the aboriginal Canaanites still lurking there. The old, aboriginal, corrupt, and accursed Canaanites were never completely cleared out of the promised land. Even after the land was conquered by Joshua and his generals, and was divided among the twelve tribes of covenanted Israel, the original possessors of the land still harboured in their thousands in the hidden recesses of the land, and from time to time descended upon the fields and the vineyards of their conquerors to despoil them and to lay them waste. Sometimes, on occasion, they came down in their falsehood and deceitfulness and proposed truces of peace and leagues of friendship. And there were times, still on record, when they so succeeded in deceiving the foolish Israelites as to get their sons and their daughters married into covenanted families till a race arose in Israel that was far more like the heathen castaways than they were like the circumcised seed of Abraham. And this went on till we have Hebrew prophets denouncing and condemning their own people in such ways as this: ‘ They did not root out the nations concerning whom the Lord had commanded them, but were mingled among the heathen and learned their evil works. And they served the idols of Canaan which were a snare unto them. Yea, they sacrificed their sons and their daughters unto devils, and the land was polluted with blood. Therefore was the wrath of the Lord kindled against His people, insomuch that He abhorred His own inheritance.’ And again, ‘ Oh that my people had hearkened unto Me, and Israel had walked in My ways! I should soon have subdued their enemies, and turned my hand against their adversaries. The haters of the Lord should have submitted themselves unto Him, but their time should have endured for ever. He should have fed them also with the finest of the wheat, and with honey out of the rock should I have satisfied thee.’ All which things, while they are only too true Old Testament history, are also a true forecast and allegory and illustration of the life of grace in the souls of some eminent New Testament saints. So much so, that the very best of New Testament saints takes this very text and carries it over in as many words into his own agonised cry concerning his so invaded and so harassed and so often desolated life of sanctification. You will all remember the parallel passage: ‘ For we know that the law is spiritual: but I am carnal, sold under sin.... Now, then, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. But if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.’ Could anything be more clear? Could anything be more impressive? Could anything come more home to our experience than first, the first chapter of the J udges, and then the seventh chapter of the Romans? How intensely interesting the parallel and parable is! How impressive! How fearful, indeed! But at the same time, blessed be God, how consoling!

Some of you will have discovered Bishop Andrewes’ private devotion for the fourth day of the week, which runs thus: ‘ Defend me from Amorite pride, and from Hittite envy, and from Perizzite wrath, and from Girgashite gluttony, and from Hivite lasciviousness, and from Canaanite covetousness, and from Jebusite sloth. And give me humility, pitifulness, patience, sobriety, purity, contentment, and ready zeal.’ That is a sample of the way in which the great preachers of old were wont to work the Bible accounts of the Canaanites into their experimental sermons. And that is a sample also of the way they both watched and prayed themselves and then taught their people to watch and pray. And I do not think I can do better by my text, or bette. by Paul, or better by you and myself, than j ust to take the Bishop’s syllabus and programme for our exegesis and our meditation and our self-examination this evening. Come, then, with me and let us take the pride of the Amorites first; that is to say, our own proud and unsanctified hearts. Well, it would sometimes be so that the Israelites would be busy in their harvest fields and in their vineyards, like our own Scottish husbandmen at this season of the year, when, suddenly, and without a moment’s w’arning, a band of the aboriginal Amorites would swoop down upon them and would carry off the whole harvest to their mountain fastnesses, and would lay waste what they could not carry off‘. And exactly so is it sometimes with some of ourselves. We have conquered our own proud hearts so often, and at such a cost, that we say to ourselves, Surely, now, we shall be left in peace. Surely, at last, we shall be left alone to pursue our daily duty, safe from any sudden assault of our original and indwelling sin. But behold, suddenly, some day, the mere name of some man is mentioned in our hearing, or we read that man’s mere name in print, or, still more mysteriously and unaccountably, there is some sudden uprising or down-rushing of this hidden evil of our hearts — God knows where it comes from! — and we are that moment laid low under the diabolical wickedness of a proud and a haughty and a revengeful heart. That man once so offended us, he so humiliated us, he so despised us, he so passed us by, and so preferred another to us, he so found fault with us, he so took it upon him to correct us and to instruct us, that ever since that day, and it is many years ago, to hear his hated name, or to come upon it in print, hell itself opens that moment in our heart.

Or, again, you will not all have forgotten how Thomas Shepard was sitting one day at one of those sermons of his which cost him so much sweat and so many tears, when a number of the New England Gazette was handed into his study. He tried to write on and not to notice the paper. But he could not do it; he could not leave his temptation alone. He knew that there would be in that week’s issue that much-talked-of sermon of his friend, Mr. T. H., but he had not as yet attained to love his neighbour as himself, nor his neighbour’s sermons as his own. You will not all believe it, but it is a fact that Shepard could compose no more all that day, he was so out of sorts, and he only slept with fits and starts all the next night. At midnight will I rise, said David, when he could not sleep for his sinfulness. And so was it all that night with the founder of Harvard. My loins are filled with a loathsome disease, sobbed the spiritually-minded psalmist. I am feeble and sore broken, and I have roared all night by reason of the disquietness of my heart. I am sick of a strange disease, my neighbour’s health, sobbed Sapia, when she also was struck down with a sudden stroke of Hittite envy. Thank God, you say, there can be nobody among us like that! Those were the dark ages! Those were the Old Testament and Papist and Puritan days before the full light arose upon us! But the Puritan key has been turned back, and the prison has been opened! Yes, and I feel sure if we had lived in the days of the Judges, and if we had had our house in one of the fenced cities, and if we had taken a run out for a week-end to the gardens of Sharon, or to the vineyards of Engedi, and had run home again on the Monday morning, we would have lived in peace all our days, and never have so much as seen a single aboriginal Canaanite. Nor would we have believed the half of the sensational stories that were told about them. But if we had inherited a farm or rented a vineyard far from the centres of population, it might well have been that we would have had personal experiences of both the Amorites and the Hittites; experiences that would have quite eclipsed every disastrous descent of which we had ever heard. At any rate, here is the advice of one who had long been liable to those sudden descents, till he learned to fence in his vineyard, and to build a tower in it, and to man his tower in this way. Addressing himself to some new settlers in that so exposed, so often assaulted land, a master in Israel says to them: ‘ When at any time you find in your heart sudden surprisals of envy towards any person, whether on account of his riches, his power, his reputation, his learning, or his advance¬ ment, if you should immediately at that time betake yourself to your prayers and pray to God to bless and prosper your neighbour in that very thing which has aroused your envy: if you should express and repeat your petitions in the strongest terms, beseech¬ ing God to grant him all the happiness from the enjoy¬ ment of his prosperity that can possibly be received; you would soon find such prayer to be the best anti¬ dote in the world to expel the venom of that poisonous passion.’ Such is the advice of one who himself garnered great harvests of corn and wine in spite of the incessant assaults of the green-eyed Hittites.

And so on; with all the incessant and sudden assaults of Perizzite anger, and Girgashite gluttony, and Hivite uncleanness, and Jebusite sloth. Every true Israelite among us will have discovered, long ere now, what that sin is which so easily besets him. And every true Israelite will be learning how, better and better, to fence his vineyard and to build a tower and to set a watch.

Before we break up, here are one or two things that every true Israelite who is so surrounded by his enemies will do well to keep always in mind. And first — Paul and your sin-assaulted soul are exactly alike, and that is something for you to think about, is it not Like you, when Paul would do good evil would suddenly assail him. That is to say, when he would have all his thoughts, and all his feelings, and all his imaginations, and all his emotions all according to the holy law of God, behold, in a moment, he would be overwhelmed with a rush of inward evils that would make him the most miserable man then living on the face of the earth. He would be writing the Epistle to the Romans after his day’s work, when a letter or a newspaper of the day would be delivered to him that would plunge him into such an agony that all the other lodgers would hear his outcries through the wall all that night. ‘ O wretched man that I am! ’ they heard him cry, till they thought that he must have committed murder sometime and some¬ where before he came to Corinth. And as they held their breath and listened they would make out such incoherent cries as these: ‘ Sold under sin! That which I hate, I do! In me dwelleth no good thing! Sin alone dwelleth in me! ’ And then, ‘ I thank God through Jesus Christ! ’ After which the house would be quiet for the rest of the night. And they would return to their interrupted sleep saying to one another: He is the best of fellow-workmen, and the kindest of fellow-lodgers, but there is a strain of madness in him sometimes! And they were not far wrong. Only it was not ordinary moonstruck madness. It was that heavenly madness that the Holy Ghost lays only on the hearts of the very holiest of men.

And remember to keep this also always in mind for your comfort. That is to say, such of you as are afflicted as the apostle was so often afflicted. ‘ A sin,’ says Bass Rock Brea, ‘ under which a man truly mourns, and which he loathes like hell, that sin will not in the end destroy that man’s soul. It is sin entertained and indulged and hidden in the heart, that alone destroys a man’s soul.’ Remember that when you are again suddenly assaulted with your indwelling sin. And keep singing this and the like of this, continually: —

‘ Saints by the power of God are kept
Till the salvation come:

We walk by faith as strangers here;

But Christ shall call us home.

A hope so great, and so divine.

May trials well endure;

And purge the soul from sense and sin,
As Christ Himself is pure/