God's Warning
“But if ye will not do so, behold, ye have sinned against the Lord; and be sure your sin will find you out.’” — Num. xxxii. 23.
Should we not have expected a fiercer denunciation, a stronger form of Divine threatening? Should we not have looked for such words as these, “If ye will not do so, behold, ye have sinned against the Lord, and the thunderbolt of the Lord will strike you?” Does it not seem a lame and impotent conclusion to tell these men merely that if they broke the Divine command the result of their sin would one day overtake them, that the seed of their own sowiug would one day be a seed of bitterness? Is this mild language consistent with our thought of the majesty of God? Nay, verily, for we have never thought worthily of that majesty. We have thought of Him as a being who shall destroy us if we do not obey Him. It is not He that shall destroy, it is ourselves; He wants to save us from ourselves. His is not a threatening, it is a warning — a warning whose fulfilment He would deplore more than we. Wherefore does He say, “In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die “? Not because He is vindictive, but because sin is mortal. Thy sin carries her stinoin her own bosom, and the infinite love that is hid in the bosom of the Father yearns to find it and to extract it ere pt shall find and destroy thee.
0 Love unspeakable and full of glory, whose majesty is not to destroy but to save, save me from myself. My past relentlessly pursues me. Days that I thought dead live over again, deeds that I deemed buried meet me on the way; be thou my rearward, 0 my God. Fill up that which my life has left behind, undo that which my life has done amiss. Repair the places I have wasted, bind the hearts I have wounded, dry the eyes I have flooded. Make the evil I have done to work for good, so that I myself would not know it. Overrule the acts I did in malice; Weave them into Thy Divine mosaic, that my very wrath may be made to praise Thee. Take up my yesterdays into Thine own golden light, and transfigure them there, that I may learn with joyful surprise how even against my will I was labouring together with Thee; so shall my former self find me no more.