Vision in Old Age
“His eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated” — Deut. xxxiv. 7.
Most of us have our brightest visions in the days of our youth. The time when men commonly stand on Mount Nebo is the hour of life’s morning; it is then that the promised land appears most glorious, it is then that the prospective eye is least dimmed by experience. But this man Moses was an exception to the rule; his vision came in old age. The days of his youth and manhood had been too prosaic for poetic flights. They had been days of danger, days of anxiety, days of burden-bearing, days of commonplace annoyances, more hard to endure because they were commonplace. It was only at the last that his child-life came. It was only amid the twilight shadows that there rose to him that vision which men are wont to behold at morning — the vision of coming glory, the prospect of a promised land.
His age of anticipation began where his age of experience ended, bis inner man was renewed where bis outer man was about to perish. In the vigour of manhood, in front of the burning fire of God, he had felt bis vision dim; in the extremity of old age he had neither a doubt nor a fear. “His eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated.”
My soul, if thou couldst live this life of sacrifice, thou too wouldst have a vision in the hour of death. There is a life whose natural force is not abated with the years; it grows stronger when other things fade. “Whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away; but love never faileth.” It is the Nebo of old age, the height from which amid surrounding ruins the heart surveys its promised land. That height of certainty may be thine. If love be in thee, it will survive all things. Memory may fade, fancy may droop, judgment may waver, perception may languish, but the eye of the heart shall grow brighter toward the close. That which men have called “the valley” shall be to thee a mountain. Thou shalt face the setting sun, and shalt see in it a new rising. The clouds that environ the intellect shall break before the childhood of the spirit, and amid the snows of winter thy time for the singing of birds shall come. Thou shalt gaze upon a world’s dissolving views, and say, “0 death, where is thy sting? 0 grave, where is thy victory?”