The Blessing of the Lord

“The blessing of the Lord, it maketh rich and He addeth no sorrow with it.” — Proverbs x. 22.

There is always a peculiar feeling in our minds when we listen to Solomon talking about happiness. We are sure that he knows what he is telling us about when he declares where happiness is not to be found. A man of such exuberant and enterprising life as few men have, he had determined to be happy, and the result had been a most unhappy story. Much that was bright and pleasant he had found, but yet the sum of life for him was vanity. All the time he had been haunted by the knowledge that there was something better which he might have if he would. It is out of all this experience that he bursts forth with this proverb, “The blessing of the Lord, it maketh rich.”

You can see where the pathos of the proverb lies as Solomon utters it. It is in those last words, “He addeth no sorrow with it.” Plenty of riches Solomon had found, but always there had been a sorrow with it. The charm, the glory of the riches which the blessing of the Lord should give was that there was no sorrow in it. There is where lies the deepest feeling of the verse, in those quiet words at the end which are like a deep pool in which a running stream gathers its stillest and profoundest waters. And it is with special reference to these words that I want to speak about the verse to-day.

For we all have enough of the great king’s experience to understand him; we have all felt the trouble in life which he felt. It is not that the world has not its blessings which bring their riches to us, but that every kind of riches comes dogged with its own kind of sorrow. Still the riches is attractive enough to make us seek it, to spend our lives, to give away our lives in seeking it perhaps; but always the feet are hindered in running to it, the hands that we have stretched out to it hesitate and are almost drawn back just as they are on the point of grasping it, because we know that with the joy we certainly must take a sorrow. “No rose without its thorn” sings the old, threadbare proverb, and if we think of it there is something deeply pathetic in the fact that such a proverb as that should have grown threadbare in the hands of men. The experience which is embodied in that proverb looks out from history to greet each new generation of men as it grows up, like a solemn, sad face painted years ago out of the soul of some great master on the walls of the market-place of some Italian town, in sight of which all the people of that town have grown up from boys and girls to men and women for centuries. We can see the power of that experience everywhere. All human life in its perpetual pursuits is full of eagerness which yet is very seldom hearty and f uU-souled, but trembles with a hesitation which, while it does not make men cease to seek the prizes of the world, weakens their heart and chills their enthusiasm in their struggles.

Think how this consciousness appears in several of the kinds of wealth which the world offers. First there is literal riches, the actual money which men seek so earnestly. It comes — sometimes it comes abundantly — but how rarely it comes without sorrow! How often the man has had to soil his conscience a little in order to secure it; or, if there is not that, how immediately the fear of losing it begins to beset the joy of having it, — how the simplicity of life grows complicated with many cares, how the fear lest men shall not recognize our wealth and do us honor haunts a vast number of the rich men’s hearts, how the jealousy of other men’s wealth comes in with the possession of our own, and how, to men of too high a nature for these lower sorrows to affect, the limitations of the wealth which they have won, its powerlessness to create moral character, to make men good, seems to make its possession a worthless and unsatisfying thing. These are the sorrows that the world gives when it gives wealth. There is no need of any vulgar abuse of money or any foolish denial of the privileges that it gives. Only this is as sure as is the happiness that it brings, that with the happiness comes sorrow.

And so it is with a far better thing than money, so it is with learning. There, too, are the two great hindrances, the two great sorrows that come with increasing knowledge and haunt the scholar’s study.

—first, the sense of limitation, the vast outlying region of that which knowledge cannot do. Neither can knowledge any more than money make men good or noble. And, second, the pestilence of jealousy, the fear or the dislike of other men who have learned more than we have, or whose learning has carried them to different conclusions from those that we have reached. These are the two spectres that haunt all man’s gaining of knowledge, the sense of incompleteness and the jealousy that comes of selfishness.

The same is true of social influence and fellow-men’s esteem. It, too, brings its sorrows with it. You win the place that you have sought for in your brethren’s regard, and immediately the knowledge of how slight your influence is and the fear that the fickle will of those you touch may turn them any day from your influence to some other which is wholly different, gathers round you and will not let you enjoy your coveted popularity in peace. And so of fame. It is all full of spots of defamation, and a hundred hands are eager to pull down the idol of the hour from his pedestal. So even of friendship, the choicest and purest of earth’s treasures. The earth gives you your friend and thenceforth all your life is bright with a new brightness; but the earth gives you sorrow with your friend. The insufficiency of the best life to satisfy any other life, the pain with which you take your friend’s weaknesses and faults, as it were, as an addition to your own, the suspicion and jealousy with which you watch the answering love, the constant dread of the great break of death which is not wholly dreadful for any man until he dreads it not merely for the mysterious pain that it will bring himself, but for the woe that it will bring to some one who is dearer to him than himself, — all these are the sorrows that the earth gives a man always with one hand when with the other she holds out to him the most precious thing she has to give, a friend.

We dwell upon these various particulars and we see the mysterious mixture everywhere. But perhaps it is not by dwelling on particulars, but by standing with a sensitive and sympathetic nature in the midst of the great general tumult of human life, and letting it express itself upon us, that we get most vividly the impression of this truth of how sorrow comes like a shadow behind — or perhaps rather like a subtle and spiritual essence in — all the good things that the world has to give us. What is the great feeling of men about human life? Here is the great tireless struggle to keep alive, the deep and universal dread of dying, the determination that they will not die. Here are men revelling in life, finding the sun dear every morning, turning to recruit their living powers with new strength every night. Here are men standing beside the grave of their brother who has died, and pitying him. And then in the midst of all this some voice breaks out, more or less earnestly, in an article in a review, and asks, “Is life worth living?” and instantly you see that the question has touched some latent and unowned misgiving, has often stirred the deepest suspicions in just the lives that seemed the happiest and fullest. What does it mean? Is it not simply this — the deep abiding conviction that life is good, and yet the perpetual conviction, growing out of long experience, that the good life will always bring sorrow in its hand? The bright and hopeful souls trust, in the face of a thousand disappointments, that the bliss will shed the sorrow and shine out clear and serene; the souls that are less sanguine go on thinking that, on the whole, life is well worth taking even with its inevitable pain; but all alike keep underneath a sense of joy in living, an expectation of disappointment and alloy which is always present and which is constantly finding itself an utterance.

We talk of all this, but I think that Solomon knew it all better than any of us. He had tried life on every side. He was no secluded saint who had lived above temptation — that unfound being at whom men of the world are always sneering, when, instead of that, if they could find him they ought to stand before him in reverence, with the shoes off their feet — Solomon was not that. He was a man who knew what the world could give and how its gifts came always backed and haunted by a sorrow. And then came the words of his proverb. He knew something else. He knew what God could give. He knew how God’s gifts differed from the world’s gifts. “The blessing of the Lord it maketh rich and He addeth no sorrow with it.” Do we not see now how much these words contain? It is the purity, the freedom from mixture and alloy, the absoluteness and simplicity of God’s blessings, that seems beautiful and precious to him. And oh, how often that is what seems so precious and beautiful to us! Not to be very rich, but to hold what wealth I have so purely that it shall do nothing but good to me or to my brethren; not to sweep across the world with my influence, but so far as it does reach, in the little circle which it does cover, to have it an influence absolutely for blessing and not a curse to any man, — that is the kind of desire which I think grows strongest in the true man’s heart. Not greatness, but purity; not a vast range, but a complete sincerity, — these are what we want. And when Solomon says that these come only by God’s gift, I think there are two different regions in which we can consider the truth of what he says. First, there are the things which men take from the world, and find to be haunted by sorrow. These same things, taken from God’s hand, are robbed of their sorrow and become sources of pure joy. Second, there are the things which the world cannot give at all, which God must give and which, therefore, must bring only happiness. Let us look at both.

It would be easy to run once more through the different kinds of riches which I specified, and see how each drops the element of pain which we saw in it the moment that it is taken as God’s gift. Think of mere money. If I learn to hold it as God’s steward, what has become of the trouble that it used to bring me when I thought that I had won it by my shrewdness and must hold it by my strength? I cannot be haunted by the fear of losing it! May not He take it away who gave it to me? I cannot be anxious to display it! It is really His, not mine and He will let it be seen as He thinks best. I Citnnot be jealous of my neighbor who has a little more than I have! It is only that God distributes His gifts among His children as seems best to Him. There is nothing left, no sorrow, no anxiety except only this deep anxiety that I may use the wealth that He has given me as He, the Giver, would have wished; and that anxiety His constant presence is always making a joy because it keeps me in perpetual sympathy and consultation with Him. When we think of the dignity of that conception of the rich man’s life, how vulgar all the ordinary ways in which our rich men live appear. And so of learning. If it be God’s message and not my discovery, there, too, the discontents and jealousies which haunted it are gone. The incompleteness of it only carries my thought and heart up to the dear hand in which the part that is withheld from me is kept. And the rivalry of my fellow-student is only as if two brothers stood at different points to hear what their father spoke to both of them, and yet were near enough to speak across to one another, and what each heard became the portion of the other, and out of the united hearing of the two their knowledge of his will was gathered. Still more of friendship, that which I called the most precious gift of man. What many and many a friendship needs to clarify it, to take out the suspiciousness, the jealousy, the fretful sense of limitation that is in it, is the simple and certain sense that behind the choice which each friend made of the other, God put the two together. That, you know, is the consumniate sacredness of marriage, the safeguard of its purity, the warrant of its permanence. And what your friendship with your friend needs to have put into it is the notion of divine gift. If it had that, the human friend would be supplied, as it were, by the abundance of the divine friend, the utterance of whose love he would have become.

I am anxious that you should see what I mean by this notion of taking everything as God’s gift, which so robs life of sorrow. It is no foolish attempt to get rid of second causes. It is no fantastic effort to make believe that money is not to be won by industry and knowledge gained by study and friends by friendliness. But it is the everlasting feeling of the fountain behind the stream. It is the sense of the first cause behind the second cause. Your dinner is on your table. If you put it there, and only you, then as you taste its sweetness, the very taste suggests the wonder whether you will always be able to provide a dinner, and you are wondering how your neighbor feeds compared with you; or, if you are a nobler man, you find the pleasure of the senses always suggesting how much there is beyond the senses that is not fed. The plentiful food for the body wakens the hunger of the hungry soul. All that is changed, all those besetting troubles disappear the moment that God spreads your table for you, the moment that you know that it is God who spreads your table. Then it is like the manna in the desert which brought to the Israelites none of the sorrows which our self-earned dinner brings to us. Every morning as they found it on the sands they took and ate it, not doubting that to-morrow morning they should find it there again, not grudging their brother Israehte his supply who stooped and gathered by their side, and always led on to the thought of spiritual need and spiritual mercy as they collected the body’s food that seemed to be yet warm from the almighty hand. Or, if we dared to look yet higher for our illustration, the meal which lies upon your table as the gift of God, has something of the abundant and unmixed joy which must belong to the mystic feast of heaven of which the book of the Revelation tells, the marriage supper of the Lamb. “Blessed are they which are called to that marriage supper,” says the book. They shall sit down in peace. No sign of doubt or fear or sorrow can be upon their faces or their hearts. They take the sacred food out of the very hand of God. For them the old proverb of the king is perfectly fulfilled, “The blessing of the Lord maketh them rich, and He addeth no sorrow with it.” And an anticipation of that unmixed joy is in the way in which every soul that really believes in God takes the things of ordinary life from Him, and is thrilled with the touching of His hand in taking them.

The two elements of sorrow in the joys which are given to us in this world are imperfection and jealousy. It is because our own possession of them is incomplete, and because we grudge our brethren their possession of them, — it is for these reasons that they give us such imperfect pleasure. The incompleteness cannot be done away with, cannot be made complete, but, coming from God’s hand, it may become to us the interpretation of the way in which His completeness shall be given to us just as fully as we can receive it. The jealousy cannot be lifted off by any assurance that we and we alone shall have God’s richest gifts, but it may be drowned and lost in a sincere delight that all our brethren may have them as well as we. Our own possession of them may only make clear to us the abundant possibility of other men. When those great changes come then the sting that lay at the heart of our dearest and most precious things is gone; and those great changes must come when any man, given to God himself, feels God giving Himself to him in everything.

But we want to press on and speak of the other class of blessings which come to us from God, those which come to us direct from Him, which the world cannot give to any man even as a second cause. These are the riches of the soul; they are the religious blessings which surpass all others until they seem to be the only valuable things to the man who really has them. What are they? There is one noble comprehensive description of them in the New Testament which tells their whole story. St. John calls Jesus the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. “Grace and truth.” That is what God gives to any soul which He makes fully rich. And what is grace? It is at once a character and an action. It is the nature of God passing over by an act of God to become character in us. I think that in this word, grace, which is at once the name of a nature and the name of an action, we have a very striking indication of how perfectly nature and action are at one, are at perfect harmony in God. When I say grace, I mean first the very substance of the being which God is. When I say grace, I mean, again, the forgiveness which God in His mercy gives man for his sins. When I say grace, finally, I mean that new life in man which begins in gratitude for God’s pardon, and grows on and up into greater and greater likeness to the God it thanks. How rich and full the great word is! And so with truth, religious truth — that, too, if we follow it well out to its idea, is not mere knowledge imparted. It is God’s own being shed by love into the being of His children. “I am the truth,” said Jesus. Truth, religious truth, is light which is first a quality in the sun, then an action reaching all the way from the sun through space to earth, and then a quality in the earth making it lustrous and sunlike. And these two words, grace and truth, describe the riches which God gives to the soul on which He bestows Himself. Forgiveness and enhghtenment! The soul of poor blind Lazarus, the soul of great and mighty David, the soul of the poor stumbling child, the soul of the great. Christian scholar, the soul of the patient sufferer at perfect peace in his dark room, the soul of the strong hero going forth with leaping heart to battle in the sunshine; — just as soon as you fold back the robe of accident and find the heart and soul of what his Lord has done for each of them, you find it still the same, forgiveness and enlightenment, grace and truth! The thing for which man searches the face of his beloved fellow-man most eagerly, throwing his whole soul into his earnest sympathizing gaze, is to see whether in that face he can discover the assurance that God has given to that friend of his the new life of forgiveness and enlightenment, grace and truth. As the mother searches the face of her first-born to find the signs first that there is life and then that there is reason there, so does the man who knows that there is no real life without the forgiveness and enlightenment, the grace and truth of God, seek for them in his friend’s face, and refuse to be satisfied until he finds them there. When he has found them he rejoices over his friend’s new birth.

And now about these deepest and holiest gifts of God — grace and truth — is that true which Solomon wrote about all His mercies? When God sends these riches does He send no sorrow with them? At once there start up, as we ask the questions, memories of much in our own lives, and stories that other men have told us of their lives, which make us wonder whether the proverb has not perhaps exhausted its truth before it comes to this profoundest kind of blessing. How is it with forgiveness? When God sends that, does He not send sorrow with it? The shame! the humbleness! the miserable consciousness of ingratitude! the hard tearing away of the sin which had rooted itself into the deepest places of our souls! the self-denials! the self-disgusts! No sorrow! Is it not all sorrow, this hard and bitter labor of repentance? And then of truth! Does God give that to any man except through pain? What shall we say about the long and bitter doubts?

the horror of great darkness that is on many minds; the bewilderment among false lights on every side that distracts others? What of those days when, with the growing certainty that we cannot live without truth, there seems to be likewise a growing certainty that we shall never find it? The plucking out of old prejudices and errors which have come to be part of our life, the misconceptions of our brethren, the distrust of ourselves, what shall we say of all of these? Has it not grown to be the very commonplace of spiritual history that it is by suffering that God makes His best soil ready for the seed that He is meaning to sow in it? How thick the questions spring up as we think about it! And yet to all these questions I think there are two answers to be given. I do not say that they are satisfactory. I only think that they indicate the direction in which satisfaction lies, and help us to see that, in spite of all appearances, God does not, if we could see Him fully, send us anything but joy, — that the sorrow which comes with His spiritual mercies is something which we add to them ourselves.

The first consideration is that the spiritual treatment and the suffering which comes with it are always separable in our thought from one another. The treatment is essential. God could not make us what it is of all importance that we should be made without it. The suffering that attends on the reception of the treatment is an accident. It belongs to the condition in which the spiritual treatment finds us, — we can conceive of the same treatment finding us in other conditions and giving us nothing but unmixed joy. For instance, God has given me a truth, which is to me a source of endless peace and happiness. In order that it might completely reach my heart that truth had to break and tear its way through obstinacy and a settled faithlessness. God gave His truth such force, so winged it with His own convincingness, that it could conquer for itself that entrance, and in its victory over me I was hurt and suffered. Now what shall we say? Shall I declare that God sent the sorrow with the truth. The truth was unmixed joy. If it had come to an open, willing soul it would have slid like a sunbeam into its life, instead of crushing in like a cannon-ball as it did into mine. It would have ridden in at the gate like a king over flowers, instead of bursting in like a soldier through the broken wall. Can I say, then, truly that God sends the sorrow which is an accident of the condition in which His truth finds me? Can I lay the pain on Him? Is it not as if His bright stream struck some feebly built house on the sand, and swept it down to ruin? I may say that the sorrow started with the river where it sprang out of the fountain, and came hurrying down with it through all its course. That makes the river’s gay laughter, as it crept through the thickets and the fields and caught the shadows of the flowers on its bosom, a dreadful mockery. May I not say more truly that the stream brought no sorrow with it, but only brought out evidently and sealed with visible ruin the sorrow which it found waiting for it in the disguise of happy safety on its bank?

And the other consideration is that the sorrow which accompanies the reception of God’s best blessings, His forgiveness and enlightenment, His grace and truth, shares subtly in the very nature of the joy that causes it. It is not wholly sorrowful. The pain of giving up a dear prejudice to make place for a truth is radiant already with the joy which that truth is to give me. This sort of transfiguration is familiar to all the best experiences of the highest lives. You and I may not understand it, but all the shining moments in the history of the human soul bear witness of the reality that is in it. The martyr stands at his stake, and we dare to pity him; we say “Your truth and faith are glorious, but how sad it is that you could not have them without this!” But he replies, “They have become glorious to me in this as I could never have seen them otherwise.” Did the three children in the furnace, with the “One like unto the Son of Man” walking beside them in the flames, think that the flame was terrible? Except for it they could not have seen Him, and so it was a portion of their joy. And if when your forgiveness comes to you out of the hand of God, the repentance, the humility, the self-surrender through which you take it make it far dearer and more beautiful and precious to you than it could have been without that pain; then is not the pain itself a pleasure, and does not the soul, finding the heart of its suffering full of joy, forget the mere rough outside in which that heart of joy is folded, and triumphantly declare that when the Lord sent His forgiveness He “sent no sorrow with it?” I think that such considerations, while they cannot answer our question perfectly, do yet show us something of where the answer to our question lies. And all this becomes clearer if we turn from our poor attempt to describe it and see it perfectly illustrated in. the life of Jesus. In that wonderful life all that we have said came to its perfect exhibition. The blessing of His Father made Him rich beyond any conception of ours. We waste poor pity upon the poverty of Jesus. There is something almost insulting in the way in which we dwell upon the privations of His earthly lot. He never dwelt on them Himself. When He said that the foxes had holes and the birds of the air had nests but He was homeless, it was no weak self-pity. It was no appeal for sympathy. It was the simple fact of His life told to a scribe who had offered to follow Him, — told in order that the soul of the new disciple might be tested, that there might be no misunderstanding nor mistake. “Alone and yet not alone, because the Father is with Me,” — that is the way in which His life looked to Himself.

And now, how was it with this richness that His Father gave Him — did He, as our old proverb promises, “add no sorrow with it “? Sorrow enough there certainly was. The outward pain and inward struggle have been ever since the wonder of the world. He was the man of sorrows. The suffering of the body culminating in the agony of the Cross, the wounds of ingratitude, the wearing misery of delay and disappointment, the daily bruising of the sinless nature against sin, the burden of men’s and women’s troubles on his sympathy, the separation from His Father — how all this was mingled with the richness of His Father’s gift, with the joy of His own holiness and of the work that He was doing! And yet I think that as we read the dear old story deeply, there grows up in our minds a conviction that each of these truths was supremely true about our Lord which we have seen to be true also of His disciples. For Him, too, the pain was separable from the joy. The joy was of His Father’s giving — the sending of the willing Son to seek His brethren. The pain that mingled with the joy was born of the meeting of the Son’s holiness with the world’s sin, which the Father did not make. If we can conceive of an Incarnation which, manifesting God to a perfectly sinless and obedient world, should have had no trace of suffering about it, should even have added a new delight to the already perfect happiness of Deity, — then we can see how separable in the soul of Jesus may have been the joy of His Messiahship from the suffering which His Messiahship involved; how, even in His greatest agony upon the Cross, feeling that God had given Him the privilege of Saviourhood and seeing that essential privilege separate itself and stand apart from all its accidents of woe in its own intrinsic gladness. He may even then have lifted up His failing heart and cried, “I thank Thee! Thy blessing has made me rich, and thou hast added no sorrow with it.” And when you add to that the other truth, that in the pain itself was a deep heart of joy, that inasmuch as only by suffering with them could He come close to these brethren of His, and to come close to them was His one longing desire, therefore the suffering itself was joy. When you add that, then is there not some light shed through the everlasting mystery, and can we not see how it was that out of every darkness the soul of Jesus always cleared itself into the light, how peace came after the temptation, and after Gethsemane, and the Son never ceased to thank the Father for His tried and tortured life.

And in the way in which Christ received His Father’s gift is there not, O my dear friends, the constant picture of the way in which we must receive Christ? The soul that takes the Lord and His service is sure to take pain and distress. Temptations gather round him as he timidly lets the signal of his new faith be seen. Men’s misconceptions fill his ears — above all and behind all his own sins dismay him the moment that he has set out to escape from his sins through Christ. But yet he knows, or gradually learns, that the Gospel is all joy. The sorrow comes not from what God is, but from what he is. And even in the sorrow there is hidden a new joy because by it he may be more faithful, more humble, more patient, more utterly given to his Lord. Oh, let me picture to myself some poor bewildered, struggling soul hidden somewhere among these pews this morning. It is a picture of my imagination only because I do not know behind which of your faces that soul sits. But that such a soul is somewhere here is no imagination of mine but is a certain fact. That soul has heard Christ’s invitation. The marvellous offer of the Lord has won its way to your acceptance.” The bread that I will give is my flesh which I will give for your life,” — so He has spoken and so you have heard. You have taken Him, and not for all the world would you let Him go. The blessing of the Lord has made you rich. But then — but then you hesitate. Has He not added sorrow with it? Does it not seem as if He had deliberately made it hard for you to be a Christian? Perhaps it is all right. It may be all for the best that it should be hard, but surely the fact is clear. He has made it hard, not easy! O my dear friend, that is not true! The hardness has not been in Him, but entirely in you! In Him there has been nothing but love, nothing but the desire that with as gentle and as smooth a journey as possible you should come to Him. Not the Father’s hand puts obstacles in the child’s way to Him; not even that the child may value Him the more when he shall find Him, does He so obstruct his path. The value of Himself, which the Father would have His prodigal children learn, is not the value that comes by long denial of the prize, but the preciousness which the Father’s love wins as the child learns how long it has been waiting for him, how it has struggled in every way to show itself, and how it has labored to remove every hindrance and give itself away.

I beg you, O my dear friends, to whom Christ has come and who have come to Christ, to find the deepest preciousness of your new life in its perfect freedom. Do not expect your religion to be hard. If there be hardness in it, count that hardness to be of your making, not of God’s sending. Be sure that

God would rather have you believe than doubt, rather have you hope than fear, rather have you show your humility by the complete trust with which you take His mercy than by the distressed perplexity with which you wonder whether it is possible for you to take it.