The Ark of the Covenant

“And the ark of the covenant of the Lord went before them.” — NUMBERS x. 33.

WHENEVER a Jew read these words they must have presented to him a very vivid picture in his people’s history. They present the same picture only less vividly to us. The host of Israel is leaving Sinai on its long journey across the desert. Their caravan in its vast numbers has trailed its slow length out of the camp at the foot of the mountain where it has tarried so long and is stretched out to ward the Promised Land. It goes slowly crawling, like a vast serpent, along the dreary stretches of sand. And there are other caravans in sight. Just as to-day, the Arab from the South, the Egyptian from the West, the mixed nomadic tribes who live on the bright spots of the desert itself, are moving hither and thither, breaking the monotonous horizon and giving some variety and interest to the desolate sameness of the scene. But among all the caravans this one of his forefathers is marked and separated to the Hebrew’s eye. Not merely by its size, not merely because it is a moving nation, not merely because it is his forefathers, but mainly be cause of something which is always carried at the head of the procession, which gives a tone and character to it and all its movements. It is a certain box or chest; not very large, some five feet long and three feet high and broad, covered with cloths and hidden from their sight. This is the Ark of the Covenant. No other caravan in all the desert has anything like this mysterious and sacred chest. Wherever it moves the eyes of all the host are on it. Whenever they encamp the tents of the host are pitched around it, as if that they might protect it, and it might bless them. Whenever it started upon the march the voice of Moses is heard, crying aloud: “Rise up, Lord, and let thine enemies be scattered; and let. them that hate thee flee before thee.” Whenever it rests and stands still the same voice cries: “Return, O Lord, unto the many thousands of Israel.” This is what marks the moving army of the Israelites, that wherever they go, the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord goes before them.

At first it looks like superstition and some foolish dream of magic. But it is not that at all. The following of the ark has a reasonable meaning. Really, that golden chest, wrapped in its curtains, represents a truth, and that truth it really is which is moving on before them and on which their eyes are always fastened for direction and for inspiration. The truth is that centre-truth of Judaism, that they are God’s chosen people. That truth, not any mere box of wood and gold, it is which is leading them and keeping up their courage. It is inside the ark, this truth of their national belonging to God, in the shape of three sacred and venerable relics, — two stone tables, on which God had written their fundamental law, a pot of manna which God had sent from heaven to satisfy their hunger, and a rod with buds upon it which had been the symbol of God’s life and inspiration imparted to their national High Priest, Aaron. God’s law, God’s care, God’s communication, — these three facts grouped together in the ark represented the one truth, — that God was their God, that He had taken them for His, that He and they belonged to one another. It was that truth which they set at the head of their army; around that truth the silver trumpets blew, and behind it the whole multitude of the people marched. They followed after it all the day-time, and they clustered close around it all the night. No wonder that the ark in which the symbols of that truth were enshrined came to seem almost as if it were God present in their midst. When it was lifted up, it seemed as if it were indeed God rising to go against His enemies and theirs. When it was set down upon the ground it was almost as if God Himself planted Himself among the many thousands of Israel.

This covenant ark was to the Jews the promise of two things which they needed every day and hour — safety and direction. It was not safe for them where they were, and they did not know which way to go. There were the Midianites and Moabites about them, and there were the pathless sands before them; what could they do without a protector and a guide? And He who helped them must be both of these to them. It was of no use to them that He should protect them if they were still left to wander hopelessly. It was of no use to them that He should guide them if it were only into dangers from which He could not keep them safe. Both wisdom and power they must have to look to. As David sang long afterwards, their Lord God must be a sun and a shield. And both of these they knew were in that symbolic ark which they followed as they marched, and clustered around while they rested. Wisdom and power met in the stone tables and the miraculous manna and in the budded rod.

And now, how far off all this seems! How long ago, how far away this caravan of Jews trampling along through the weary sand between Arabia and Syria, with their strange ark borne along before them three thousand years ago! How far away from us here on this Sunday morning! It startles and delights our sense of picturesqueness to lift our eyes all at once from this modern life and let them rest away off across the ocean and across the centuries upon this foreign picture. But have we nothing more to do with it than that? If we have really got at what the picture means, and if you have really minds and hearts to look not at the forms alone but at the hearts of things, I hope to make you see in that procession following the ark the picture of a possible life of yours — the picture of a life that, reconciled, covenanted, given away and dedicated to God, follows the truth of its dedication, makes that the leading and inspiring truth of everything, and gets safety and guidance out of it every day it lives. The Christian life so often seems to men a weight and a restraint. It seems so often as if it put a man’s life into danger and bewilderment, instead of into safety and clearness, to give it to God, that I wish we could see it all differently; I wish that we could really see, among all the purposeless, defenceless nations of the desert, wandering without a plan, unsafe, unguided, this one procession of the Israelites moving safely and surely day after day because they alone had God, because they followed the Ark of the Covenant.

The soul led and protected by its covenant with God — that, then, is our subject. But first of all, I think we often hesitate at that word “covenant.” It has an ancient, Jewish sound. It was a word under which Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob conceived their relationship to God. But now it often seems as if the word had a hard kind of contract sound about it.

It appears to picture God as standing and weighing out His love and benefaction, grain by grain, against the scrupulously exacted equivalent which man was called upon to render. It seems to miss the whole idea of freedom and spontaneousness which we rather love to make prominent in the thought of God blessing man. But I am sure that there is danger of a great deal of our modern talk doing injustice to the grand, straightforward religion of the old Jews, partly by attributing to them ways of thinking which they never had, and partly by losing sight of the real eternal value of a great many of their broad and simple truths which modern subtlety has refined away.

For instance, the Jews no doubt had deeply engrained in their religion the notion of the necessary mutualness of every relationship between God and man. They believed, that is, that it was impossible for God to do anything for man, without man’s meeting God with a responsive activity of his own. God could not bless a people unless the people were obedient. God could not speak to a soul unless the soul would listen. God could not lead a man unless the man would follow. The necessities were not artificial but essential. Now, that is a great idea. It is an idea which it is dangerous, nay, ab solutely fatal, for religion to lose. We look around, and is there one thoughtful man among us who is not often in fear for the religion which we see the most of now-a-days, lest it should grow weak and perish from its losing just this idea of the necessary mutualness of the relation of God and man? — men expecting to be blessed without being obedient, expecting to be enlightened without humble devoutness, expecting to be led to truth and righteousness when they make no attempt to follow. These are the indications of how that old Jewish idea may be lost, and of what is the peril of losing it. Now, this is just the idea that the Jew pictured to himself under the form of a covenant. He was to do some thing and God was to do something. “Draw near to me, and I will draw nigh to you”; “Do this, and you shall live”; “If you will be my people, then I will be your God.” The mutualness was essential and necessary, not merely arbitrary. It was pictured in sacrifices minutely described and punctiliously demanded; but at the bottom it was this great, true, everlasting idea, — that for God and man to come together both must do something, that God cannot meet live men as the sunlight strikes a dead rock, merely giving itself to what is helpless, but as the sunlight strikes a live tree which must open to receive its bounty. There is no covenant with the rock. There is a covenant with the tree.

No doubt the Jews dropped away from the lofty simplicity and truth of this idea. With perhaps the same tendency to barter which has characterized the Hebrew in all times, they did degrade this great mutualness of life into a close, hard bargain in which, by doing certain formal things, they might bind God down to certain mercies of which they could not otherwise be sure. The prophets found this state of things, and in strong opposition to it they proclaimed the perfect freeness of God’s mercy: “Ho! every one that thirsteth! He that hath no money, come ye, buy and eat, without money and without price.”

Jesus found the same state of things, — every mercy of God ticketed in the price-list of Rabbinical scrupulousness, — and He, too, exalted the freedom of God. “Whosoever will, let him come.” “If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink.” No doubt the high idea of covenant did run down into a low idea of contract; but in itself it is a high idea, the high idea of the necessary mutualness in the life and relationship of God and man.

As a Christian man, I believe fully that all the modern discussion of the being and work of God, more or less connected with natural science, which often sounds like atheism, is really tending, under God, to a better knowledge, on our part, of what He is and how He relates Himself to us. And some times it seems to me as if, with its strong assertion of the human side, it were just this covenant idea which the modern discussion of God is destined to restore and to confirm, — as if without weakening the absoluteness of God it were bringing forth the way in which He has bound Himself to man and made it seem impossible for Him to send His best mercies until men have risen to their part in the mutual relationship. The modern physical philosopher, solemnly insisting that the price of health is cleanliness and decency, often reminds us strangely of the Hebrew Prophet denouncing pestilence upon the people who refused to hear and obey the word of God. At least this covenant truth of mutualness is in them both.

I have dwelt upon this truth of the covenant be cause it appears in its perfection in the relation which the Christian holds to God. I hope that after what we have said there is no trouble for our minds in carrying over the word “covenant” to the richer relations between God and man which Christianity makes known, and hearing Jesus called “the Mediator of the new covenant.” The Christian has made a covenant with God! It was a phrase more common once than now. But still it is a great and precious truth. What does it mean? Not, surely, that the Christian has bargained his obedience against a certain forgiveness and a certain help, not that he has undergone a certain humiliation and contrition in virtue of which God has bound Him self that he shall not be punished but shall go to heaven: nothing of that sort. But this, — that he has entered into a mutualness of life with God; that he has met God’s willingness to help him with a willingness to be helped; that he saw God wanted to forgive him, but could not because he was impenitent, and so he repented and received forgiveness; that he saw God was willing to pour light and strength into him, but could not because he was proud, and so he humbled himself and the light streamed in; that he took God and God took him; that he could not have taken God without God’s taking him, and that God could not have taken him without his taking God; but that by mutual love they met, one bringing submission and the other help, and that those two meeting made the soul’s salvation-time.

That is a man’s covenant consciousness. And when the man becomes aware that out of that covenant is coming the impulse and the safety of his life, that what is guarding him from sin and throwing light on duty, and keeping up his courage and filling him with hope, is the certainty that all this has taken place — that he has given himself to God, — when a man knows that, the power by which he lives all issues from the certainty of the position in which he stands with the great Lord and Master of his life. He is the man — walking on strongly behind and in the light of this sublime transaction between his soul and God — he is the man who is following the Ark of the Covenant.

Years, years ago, perhaps, a young man somewhere, in some church, some shop, some school, who had before lived as if on this green earth, under this blue sky, there were no greater being than him self, came to know God. God came to him! He came to God! Both of these sentences tell the story of what happened. It was not an unwilling God who laid His hand upon the soul and blessed it. It was not an unwilling soul that laid itself upon the bosom of the mercy. The soul and God met in the covenant of life. Well, years have passed away, and now the man is old. How many acts the man has done, how many thoughts, how many words have crowded in since that day of his boyhood, when he and God gave themselves to one another. But ask him, and he will tell you that all his life has just been following out the promise of that day. All that he has done or been of good was wrapped up in that perfect gift of himself to the Eternal Good. All that he has received of blessing really descended on him when the Lord became his God. When he has doubted, he has looked up and seen His promise shining; when he has been tempted that promise has sustained him. He is where he is to-day in character and life because of that meeting of his life with God’s, in church, or shop, or school, so many years ago. What shall we say of such a life? It has followed the Ark of the Covenant. How it brings out the difference in men! They have traversed the same desert, been parched with the same thirst, drank of the same springs, had the same comforts or discomforts; but one has had peace and purpose, and the other only unrest and discontent. One has walked in the footsteps of an apprehended God; the other has gone in the ways of his own will. One has lived the Israelites’ life, and the other the Midianites’ life; and so one comes to Canaan, and the other is lost among the sands.

But take one step more. How is it possible that a conscious and remembered relationship to God should constitute a rule of life. “I grant,” one says, “that it is good for you who are God’s child to know your Father and to come to as true an understanding as you can with Him; but tell me, how does that practically help you? How does it unravel for you this snarl of life? How does it make you know what you ought to do to-morrow morning? How does it teach you how to treat this troublesome, ungrateful friend? The Jews’ Ark of the Covenant was different. It was not merely a memory and an idea; it was there in wood and gold. They could see it; when it turned north they saw it; when it turned south they saw it. They had only to keep their eyes on it and they were safe.”

But remember the experience to which the Christian soul looks back; its covenant which it remembers was not a mere emotional transaction, begun and ended in itself. Just as in the Jews’ covenant, something came in, — the tables and the manna and the rod, — which were mediators, as it were, which brought the authority and mercy on the one side to the need and the submission on the other, so in the Christian’s covenant there was a mediator, not a thing any longer, but a Living Person who brought the willingness of God and the willingness of man together. The Christian’s whole remembrance of his new covenant with God is bound up in association with the Christ in whom it was made. “He brought God to me, and me to God, and we met in Him,” the Christian says. “I never should have known how God loved me, and I never should have known how I needed God, if He had not shown me both.” And then when the Christian looks up and says, “Where is this covenant of mine to lead me?” when he asks just the question that you asked — “How will it make for me a rule of life? “— behold there, walking before him, a Human Life which lightens up all human living, goes He in whom the covenant is represented — Jesus Christ, its Mediator. What the golden and wooden chest was to the Hebrew, this Saviour in His own flesh and blood is to the Christian. He goes before His people. He is the Ark of our covenant. To follow the Christian Ark of the Covenant is to follow Him. O my dear friends, I promise you that I will never preach to you any mere vain theological speculations, that cannot touch your life; but I must tell you of what so many Christians here among you know so well, of how the covenant between the soul and God issues into the service of Him in whom the covenant is made, and the life of the Christian be comes the following of Christ. “To follow Christ! — that sounds vague. Christ lived so long ago! If

I had been there, I could have followed Him. I could have kept close to Him and imitated every action. But now the times have altered. Here in our modern homes, now in our youngest century, how can I shape these daily acts upon such different daily acts of One who lived so long ago, so far away?”

But if you ever tried it, you would cease to wonder. For this is the power of that life of Jesus, — a power which you cannot know till you do try it, a power which all who have ever tried it will bear witness to, — that they who enter into living sympathy with Him by gratitude do truly see not merely how to do those certain things He did, but how He would have done, how He would wish to have His servants do, every most different and modern thing which it may come into their lots, so different from His lot, to attempt. The Christian, thoroughly in sympathy with Jesus, knows how his Christ, who never bought or sold, would manage his great business; knows how his Christ, who had no wife or child, would rule a household; knows how his Christ, who lived the patient subject of a despotism, would vote as the free and responsible citizen of a Republic. He finds his Lord a legible and shining Law in every strangest place to which his duty calls him. And, doing everywhere what he knows that there the Christ would do, in and through whom He has been brought near to God, he is living a larger service than any Jew tramping through the sands after his ark, or any disciple following Jesus about the city streets. In a higher and fuller way than either of them, he is following the Ark of the Covenant.

I said of the ark that went before the Israelite in the desert that it gave him two things — safety and guidance. These same two things come to the Christian out of his following of Christ. He has both security and progress. He is at once kept from danger and led on to ever greater things. And it is clear that both these things must meet in any strong and happy life. Merely to be safe, to rest outside of danger, but to make no advance, to conquer no new ground, to grow to nothing greater day by day — that is a most depressing life. And merely to advance when every step is uncertain, when the consciousness of danger is haunting every footstep, when you cannot tell whether you are going right or wrong — that is a most distressing life. And yet almost all our expedients of living seem to aim at one of these ends, not at both of them; either at safety or at progress, not at the two together. Conservatism with all its forces tries to make men safe, radicalism with its forces tries to keep men moving, till safety in thinking and acting comes to sound of deadness and torpidity, and progress to many ears is full of the ideas of reckless peril and destruction. It is the privilege of the true follower of Christ that these two, so often separated, meet for him.

See how it is in thought. A man whose whole life is led by the consciousness that his life belongs not to himself but to his God — led by the Ark of the Covenant — is armed most strongly against the worst dangers of thinking men. Every thought that comes to him is brought into that obedience. He cannot think wilfully merely to please himself. He cannot think servilely merely to please other people. Whim, pride, the love of novelty, the fear of novelty, these, which you all know are the perils of thinking men, are swallowed up in the conviction that he must not think anything lightly or unworthily of Him whom he follows. But at the same time the limitlessness of the Christ who leads him, the certainty that He has infinitely more of truth to show than He has yet made known, makes His true follower impatient after new ideas and broader fields of thought. The Israelite host was at once safer where it stood, and yet surer to move onward to new camp ing grounds, than the loose tribes of Moabites and Midianites around them. So the Christian thinker ought to be at once surer of what he holds and more eager to move on to new truth than the disciple of any other master. If he loses either his safety or his progress, if he grows either a sceptic or a bigot, he surrenders his privilege. The intellectual man, following the Ark of the Covenant, learns the true harmony of positive convictions with free and enterprising thought.

And it is with life and conduct just as it is with thought. Here, too, there seems to be a struggle. Safety and progress will not blend with one another. One man says: “Let me be safe. Let me be sure of doing nothing wrong.” And so he shuts himself up to a little circle of conventionally good things; he cuts off a multitude of innocent pleasures which he chooses to consider doubtful; he never dreams of enterprising and original goodness; and all his life grows meagre. Another man, seeing him, grows afraid of the paralysis of virtue, and goes forth recklessly in the fields of wildest license. He casts all thoughts of safety aside. What good men have most called wrong shall become right for him. He will walk through the midst of impurity and yet be pure. He will go to the bottom of fiendishness and bring up a new kind of saintliness from thence. The movement, the zest of life, is everything. Safety is too low a thing to think of.

And then comes Christ and His follower; what does He do? He binds the follower’s heart completely to Himself by love. He makes His life and His disciple’s really one. He makes it His servant’s one desire to be like Him. This great desire, as a triple wall, He builds about His servant’s purity. He makes him safe with the protection of His own character and standards always present therethrough love. The Christian is assaulted by temptation. He looks up and sees that the sin to which he is tempted is a desertion of his Lord, is a wrong and pain to Jesus, and he will not do it. Is there any safety so complete as that? But then it is no safety of mere laws. It is no limited and bounded negative. It is an infinite and boundless positive. As his loyalty to Christ restrains him, so also it incites him. As he will not do anything in disobedience to Christ’s nature, so he will not be satisfied until he has completely matched that nature with hi?

own. It stretches before him into new realms of growth and duties that have seemed impossible. Virtue is no longer paralysis, but inspiration.

What is the result? A fear of sin that does not bind the feet, but loosens them, and gives them wings towards holiness. A longing for holiness that is all the more tenderly conscious of its danger of temptation. The Christian will always surprise men with this mixture of fear and freedom. He will refuse to do things which men see no harm in, saying: “I dare not. It is not safe. I cannot expose my soul.” And then he will boldly go forth into some new field of adventurous duty that men think most perilous, doing most unconventional work there, saying, “The Master whose I am and whom I serve is leading me.”

I am talking all in vain unless you who are Christians understand me. Do you remember an old life when you alternately stood guard over your character and tried to live a live, real life? Some times it was one and sometimes it was the other; sometimes safety and peace, sometimes progress and action. And then came Christ. You gave yourself to Him. The new life opened. You have lived since then with a new consciousness — that you were His — filling everything, sinking down and spreading out through all of you. Tell me the story of that life. Is it not that safety has ceased to be sluggish and action has ceased to be dangerous to you, now that safety is rest in Christ and action is work for Him? He guards you, and that stimulates you. He sets you to work, and that rests you. Righteousness and peace, which used to be at variance in your life, have kissed each other and are reconciled.

Is not this what we want? — to be safe with a security that is not cowardice or palsy, to be alive with a vitality that is not wearing us out — safety and progress? And we can have them both only as we do not dare to try to make these lives our own, but give them up to God, and live them not for ourselves but for Him. The Jew who wants safety only stays ignominiously in Egypt. The Jew who wants freedom only starts out by himself across the desert and is seen no more, but leaves his bones whitening among the sands. The Jew who wants safety and freedom both gives himself to God and follows the Ark of the Covenant.

And so the Christian follows Christ. Now upon this side and now upon that he wanders in his weakness, but he always comes back to the central track in which the Ark has passed. He will carry nothing with him that cannot go through the often straight and narrow places where his Leader walks. He will never let a thought of fear come in so long as he sees that Leader out before him, to show him that he is on the right road. And so at last, just as the ark led the Jews across the Jordan and into the Promised Land, and there they set it down in its new place, and lived the new life of their new home around it; so when Christ has led us safely intoHeaven, He who has led us shall take His place in our midst, and, gathered around Him, the new life of the redeemed soul shall begin and go on, by His grace, in perfect safety and unhindered growth forever.