The Battlements of the Lord

“Take away her battlements, for they are not the Lord’s.” — JEREMIAH v. 10.

IT seems to be a hard and cruel cry which the Prophet Jeremiah utters in these words. Jerusalem was the City of God. Over the choosing and winning of the picturesque site where it was to stand, over its gradual growth, over the building of its temple, over its fortifications and embellishments, over its fortunes in peace and war, God had watched with peculiar care. Its enemies had been His enemies, its friends His friends. And now His city was beset by foes. She stood, almost visibly trembling, upon the rocky height where God had set her, almost as if she were a frightened deer which had taken refuge there from the dogs of war whom she could hear all round her, howling for her blood. The Chaldeans were pressing upon her and thirsting for her life. And the poor city was getting comfort out of the single thought that she was well protected. Harassed and frightened, she looked up to her walls and there were the battlements which she had built. They surely would protect her. To be sure they were her own, not God’s. He had not bade her build them. She had built them even against

His will. But now, how strong they looked! How well it was that she had ventured to put them up! How the enemy would tremble at them! Only to picture herself without them made her shudder. And just then rang the stern voice of her prophet through her streets, “Her battlements are not the Lord’s, take them away!” The very thing she trusted in! Her pride and strength and hope and confidence — take them away! Was this the God who loved her, who had promised to protect her? Was this His prophet whose voice now cruelly commanded the destruction of the only thing that could save His city? Well may the people have trembled in the streets and thought that their God had forsaken them indeed!

This is the picture which stands out in the prophet’s verse. Of what that picture represents and stands for in our modern life I want to speak this morning. Every human life is dear to God. Every human life, when it thinks of how God has blessed it and shown to it the tokens of His love, must seem to itself to be a sort of Jerusalem, a city built and furnished and glorified by God. Such a resemblance between the life which God loves and the city which He used to love so dearly has been often suggested. The picture of Jesus weeping over Jerusalem, for instance, has been always appropriated by souls which wanted to depict the sorrow of the Saviour over the wasted opportunities of any life. Souls are Jerusalems which God has built and which are perpetually watched and protected by His love.

And then the parallel seems to go on. As God by His prophet bade the defences of old Jerusalem to be swept away, and would not tolerate any attempt to save the city by means which He had not ordained, and with what seemed severest cruelty stripped her bare of the very things of which she had been most proud and in which she had most trusted, so there are many souls which seem to have been treated by God in the same way. They too have built themselves defences and decorations which He has broken down. They too have been left desolate and bare just at the time when it seemed as if they most needed luxuriance and fulness. They too have seemed to find God cruel and stern as, with a hand which appeared to have no pity, He tore their dearest things away; and they too have had at last to learn, just as Jerusalem did, that their God had never been so kind to them as just in those days when He took away the battlements which were not His and left them naked and exposed, with nothing to trust to but His help. It is of this treatment of lives by God — the taking away of the battlements which are not His — that I desire to speak.

The distinction which the words imply is one that every man who is aware of God at all can easily understand. God is so universal, so complete, that the life which He occupies and guards He claims entirely for His own guardianship and occupancy. He wants it wholly for Himself. That which the man who lives in the life does, he must do as God’s tenant, everything that he does being embraced and surrounded by God’s ownership. All that the man does to make his life safe and strong and growing, he must do as the tenant of God, completing and strengthening God’s life — the life that belongs to God — in God’s way. Thus every good effort of a man to perfect his life, every right and healthy culture which he gives to himself in reverence of and obedience to God, is one of God’s battlements — one of the methods by which God through him develops and protects this city of His love. But when a man forgets his tenantry and tries to strengthen his life as if it were no property of God’s, as if it were no sacred, holy thing, but merely a personal possession of his own; when, then, he defends it by mere earthly policies and plans, or even by deeds which are wicked and base, — then he is putting on God’s city battlements which are not God’s; and it is these which God often pulls down because the strength which seems to be in them is weakness. All that a man does to make his life safer and better and stronger, in obedience to God, are the battlements of God; all that a man does to strengthen his life in selfishness and disregard of God are the man’s own battlements; and however for a time these last may stand, and men may trust in them, at last they must come down, and it is the mercy of God that calls for their removal.

Indeed, no man has compassed and gone around the mercifulness of God on every side, who has not discovered this kind of mercy in Him and felt its richness and beauty. A child has certainly known only part of his father’s love who has thought of his father as loving only in his indulgence. There is a whole other region of his father’s love which he has never entered, — the region in which his father, with a profounder care for him and also with a completer trust in him, shall show his mercy by denial. We can all remember, I suppose, how once if men had asked us how we knew God loved us, the answer that leaped to our lips would have been the glowing catalogue of all that He had given us, all the incentives which He had put into our lives, all the securities by which He had surrounded us, all the successes by which He had shown us that we belonged to Him. These still remain. These still are on our lips when we sing His praises; but if we have at all compassed His love as the years have swept along, there is another side of it which has grown also dear to us, and which has in its dearness a peculiar depth and strength and sweetness which are all its own. There is a profound strain in our thankfulness which sings of the many times in which it has been through the exhibition of our own weakness that God has shown us His strength; of the plans and purposes which He has brought to failure in order that out of their failure He might build success. It is a poor and wretched life which has not such consecrations of its disappointments and its miseries. A life which has not these carries as a burden what it ought to be hugging as a treasure; and one whole side of the perfect sun of God’s mercy, which burns with a glory all its own, this life has never seen.

Let me come to more special illustrations of what

I mean; and just in passing I may note how true our truth is of the history of the great groups of men, of states and churches, — the truth that God often in seeming cruelty tears down what seems to be a life’s strongest protection and most beautiful adornments, in order that He may make the life really safe and really beautiful. The groups of men, the nations and the churches, often seem as if they were men seen through some sort of lens which magnified their size, and, while it blurred many of their more delicate details, brought out in broader exhibition the great fundamental features of human character and tendency, and so gave us a chance to study some things concerning man and them in a way which the individual man did not make possible. And what can tell the story of the breaking down of old and treasured institutions in the state, what can put a meaning behind the terrible convulsions or the slow growths by which autocracy and feudalism have disappeared from half the world, what can read to us the grand and simple secret of the destruction here in our own land of slavery which to so many men seemed to be the very palladium of our liberties and the very battlemented crown upon our nation’s head, but this, that God saw in each age that what the nations called their strength was really their weakness, and out of heaven He sent forth His voice crying: “Take her battlements away. They are not Mine.”

And in the Church’s history, who does not know how church members have always been setting their heart upon something, some statement of doctrine or some expedient of organization, and then piling up all the most sacred interests of their religion behind that; as men in a besieged town bring their most delicate and precious possessions and heap them up in the one bomb-proof that they think most absolutely impregnable. Often they were not wholly sure that the doctrine on which they staked everything was absolutely true, or that the expedient to which they trusted was wholly righteous; but their pride and their fear united to make them treasure it and raise on it their brightest banner, and think that in it the Church’s safety lay. And what are all the Reformations, with their fearful convulsions, but just the thunder of the voice of God shaking these false defences, which make His Church not strong, but weak; what are His commissions to His great Reformers, His Luthers and His Cromwells, but the same old message which He sent by His Jeremiah — the message which always sounds so cruel, and really comes out of the heart of His tenderest and most divine compassion — bidding them take down the battlements which are not His.

But I do not want to dwell upon the nations or the churches. I want to come more close to you. What I have been saying may serve for illustration; and now, turn to the way in which God treats our lives, the way in which, I think, some of you will recognize that He has treated you.

i. The blankest, plainest, and most common case of all is that in which a man tries to secure prosperity by fraud or some kind of unrighteousness. The forms of such attempts are numberless. The essence of them all is one. If I could issue a summons and subpoena the experiences of you business men, I should not lack for testimony or for illustrations in the very lines of life where you are most familiar. There is no line of life wherein men seek success in which there are not men who believe that they can get success, and protect success when it is got, by fraud. The petty shopkeeper who misrep resents his goods, the great capitalist who misleads the market, the office-seeker who defrauds the polls, the doctor trying to impress men with pretensions which he knows are not true, the lawyer pretending to believe what he does not believe, the writer making men read what he writes by flavoring it with impurity, the leaders of society who degrade its purity that they may add to its attractiveness, — where should we end the catalogue! It bewilders us when we think of the amount of labor which has been expended, which is being expended every day, in building these false defences of men’s wealth and comfort.

And then what comes? God does not want you to be poor; He does not want you to be wretched; and yet, in spite of countless exceptions and delays, how the conviction has grown rife among men that there is some power whose tendency it is to break down every battlement of fraud and iniquity, and leave exposed to ruin the prosperity which tried to shelter itself behind such feebleness. “A power not ourselves which makes” against unrighteousness — that is the impression which many men’s experience, conspiring with their own misgivings as to what ought to be the world’s construction and government, has given them of God. Has God shown Him self so at all to you? Have you seen any of your tricks for the support of your prosperity fall into ruin? Have you looked up, ready to curse God for His cruelty? And then perhaps have you seen some thing in the face of God which made you stop, which put a new question in your soul, which called up the deeper perception of a deeper love, and at last, as you thought and thought and thought about it, has let you see that God never was so kind to you as when He broke down the wrong and the sham behind which you had sheltered your budding hopes and compelled you to trust those hopes to Him, that He might first make them over into such hopes as should be worthy of a child of His, and then might ripen them into fulfilment in His own time and His own way? If you have known any such experience as that, you have been taken into one of the richest rooms of God’s great schoolhouse, one of the rooms in which He makes His ripest and completest scholars. Oh, if our souls to-day could mount to the height of some such prayer as this: “Lord, if I am building around the prosperity of my life any battlements which are not Thine, any defences of deceit or injustice or selfishness, break down those battlements whatever pain it brings, however it may seem to leave my hopes exposed,” — if we could go up into some mountain of aspiration and pray that prayer, how earnest and calmly ready for whatever God chose to do to us our souls would grow!

2. Again, see how God deals with men’s efforts to secure for themselves peace and repose of mind, freedom from disturbance and anxiety. The way that a man first tries to secure that precious treasure is often by the studious culture of his self-complacency: “Let me be able to think well of myself, and then behind that wall of self-esteem my soul may sit down undisturbed.” And so a man goes to work to cultivate his satisfaction with himself. He tells over to himself his own good qualities. He shuts his eyes to all his own defects. He keeps in the company of the men who are most sure to praise him. He shuns any rough, honest soul who will remind him of his faults. He does the things he can do best, and so keeps conscious of his powers. He avoids the tasks which it is hard for him to do, and which will expose his weakness. So he tends his self-complacency. He feeds it and pets it and makes it grow, and behind it he sits down in the peace of self-content. But then how often, when a man has just got his self-complacency built up, there comes some dreadful blow that breaks it down. Some terrible mortification comes. Some shameful exposure breaks out- Men find out as it seems by diabolic instinct where your weak spot is. Or, without any blow, any attack or open scandal, there just comes creeping in upon you misgivings about yourself, visions of your own meaner and smaller parts which you have tried to hide and to forget, and you find that your whole bulwark of self-complacency is riddled and honeycombed with doubts and suspicions about yourself; and your well-sheltered peace shivers and shudders behind its useless barricade. It is a terrible condition unless it can be but preliminary to another, unless where the worthless barrier of self-complacency has fallen the true protection of humility can be built up, and the soul can come to that only true peace and repose which is attained by the absolute distrust of itself and the hiding of itself behind the great, wise, strong, loving guardianship of God. This was what Jesus did for Nicodemus. This is what He wants to do for all our souls, which He first exposes and fills with shame, and then shelters in all their conscious nakedness behind Himself.

3. Then take another of the precious things of human life which a man may try to keep safe behind false defences. The esteem of our fellow-men — no standard of life is true and healthy which does not count that a very precious thing indeed. Not the most precious, — on the contrary, a thing to be always held with a certain looseness, as a man in shipwreck holds the box in which his property is contained, ready to let it drop at any moment when it must be dropped to save his life. So a man ought to hold his fellow-men’s esteem, ready to let it drop the moment that he cannot hold it and yet keep with it his own self-respect and his loyalty to God. But while it is not the most precious, it is a very precious thing. All true men desire it and value it. And now suppose that that esteem, your reputation among men, is guarded and kept safe behind some false conception which they have formed of you. They think some act which you have done was brave when it was really cowardly, or unselfish when it was really full of selfishness, or the result of deliberate intelligence when it was really nothing but a happy blunder. It may be that you have falsely claimed these merits for yourself, or it may be that they have chosen to attribute them to you. In either case there sits your reputation behind its false defences, its battlements which are not truth’s and are not God’s. I think that very often a man is genuinely impatient with such a misconception of his merits. He even hates it. The reputation which is shielded behind it seems to be a mean and sickly thing. But very seldom has a man the strength of soul to put up his own hand and pull that misconception down. It is a hard thing for a man to speak out and say: “I am not what you think me. Here is what I am. Judge me truly, and hate or praise me as I genuinely deserve.” In our nobler moods we may do that; but often God, kind to our feebleness, spares us the effort and does it for us. Very often He tears away our false repute and shows us as we are, lets men behold us at our worst. And many and many a man, I think, who would not have the strength himself to tell men that he was not all they thought him, is profoundly glad when God in some way sweeps the cloud aside and, reducing the exaggerated reputation to reality, gives him a chance to win men’s truer, even though it be far more moderate, honor for what he really is. 4. I shall take only one illustration more, but it is perhaps the most urgent and impressive of them all. Every one of us has been tempted — and most of us have yielded sometimes to the temptation — to guard the truths which we hold dear and sacred, and the faith which we have in the truths we hold, by battlements which, if we questioned ourselves, we knew were certainly not God’s. I believe some truth of my religion; I believe it really; I know that it is true. But I know also that there is a great deal in the world which is in conspiracy against my truth. I know that I hold it against enemies. I know that my faith in it is constantly in danger; and, knowing that, it is only too natural that I should try to build around it every possible defence, and even tolerate and help to build defences which I know are not strong and sound. See what some of those false defences are. I may put forward arguments, not merely to other people, but to myself, which I know are fallacies and do not really support the faith I hold. I may defame the character and the religious life of men who do not hold my truth, trying to make out that disbelief in it makes a man wicked, and so hoping to strengthen my faith in it by all my dread of sin. I may put forward the authority of men who have believed what I believe, and who have been very good and noble men, but whose goodness and nobleness I know had no

inherent and essential connection with their having believed this truth. Or I may try to intensify my sense of its preciousness by making it exclusive, talking of what ought to be the world’s possession as if it were my own peculiar privilege, or by narrowing the truth to my form of it so as to think that no man holds it who does not hold it just like me. Or, finally, I may build up around my faith the sheer, dense wall of bigotry — that gross, coarse, thick, unreasonable mixture of pride and fear and obstinacy and hesitation, all mingled and kneaded together into a stubborn mass, through which men flatter themselves that no arrow of doubt can penetrate, but through which it is also absolutely certain that no light can come.

These are the false defences which men build about their faith, and when they are built they seem to their builders to be not merely part of the faith which they assume to protect, but often its most precious part. The very fact that it is of the man’s own building, and not of God’s, makes the cabinet in which he has enshrined his faith even dearer to a man’s soul than God’s jewel it enshrines. Sooner or later, to every man who builds such battlements about his faith the hour of their destruction comes, and it is very terrible. The false argument is triumphantly refuted. The slandered heretic does some noble act that refutes at one stroke all my slanders. The authorities on whom I have relied desert me. And, so far from accepting my faith in the narrow and sectarian way in which I hold it, the world makes it evident to me that my faith never can become its faith until it has broadened itself to meet needy humanity with the entire truth. And, finally, my bigotry displays its essential stupidity and hatefulness so that not even I, the bigot, can give it any longer reverence or love or trust. These are terrible blows to a man’s faith, when its trusted defences fall. The faith, stripped and exposed, frightened and bewildered, halts and thinks that everything is gone. It sees the sceptic standing and shouting on the ruins of its battlements, with his sword drawn, all ready to leap over the wall and take its life.

And just then it is — then, in the moment of its apparent failure — that to many a frightened faith the revelation of its true strength has come. It is just then, when it seemed as if what he had believed was at the mercy of every unbelieving enemy, that many and many a believer has to his wonder learned that the only real strength of a belief lies in its absolute truth; that, in the long run, no weight of accumulated authority and no sacredness of organized institutions can keep a faith safe which is not true; and likewise that no faith which is true can ever perish for the mere lack of the weak battlements of human authority or institutional support. There is no confidence or real belief in that which he believes for any man till he learns that. Until he learns that, you will see him out upon the walls after every gale of unbelief, anxiously counting his authorities and setting up his pasteboard battlements which have been blown down. When he has learned that, he trusts his faith and lives in it. Driven back to the fundamental questions concerning it, enlarging it into its most majestic simplicity, finding the witness of its truth in God’s Word and his own soul, finding every day new strength and new simplicity in his faith as it meets each new attack, there is no gratitude in all his grateful heart so deep, so earnest, as that with which he thanks the God who let him be bewildered and frightened by the destruction of the weak, unreal protections of his faith. “Now, at last,” he says, “I know what it is really to believe.”

Oh, there are many believers among us for whom God has done all that. As they look back over their lives, there are days whose memory still makes them shudder, days when it seemed to them as if all faith were gone and all the world of truth were but the very blackness of darkness of despair. And yet these very days are the days out of which came the light that now makes their life a perpetual song and joy. For then God showed them that for His child there can be no final witness of His truth except Himself and the immediate testimony of His Spirit, and that whatever hinders or restrains the giving of Himself to His child’s soul, however sacred or necessary it may seem, it must be His wish and His child’s best blessing to have swept away.

I turn back from these illustrations to the general truth which they all illustrate. I hope that they have made it clear. Failure, the breaking down of men’s confidences, the going to pieces of men’s plans, — failure means many things. One of the things which it means is this: that God will not let the soul hide behind any protection which He knows is insecure. His whole love binds Him to let the soul know its blunder before it is too late. The general goes through the field where his army lies full in the face of the enemy. He sees each soldier building his little section of the rampart which, all together, is to protect the army. What shall he do when he comes to one poor fellow who, instead of piling up stones, is twisting bits of straw together and making an ingenious, pretty fence that the wing of a flying bird might knock away? Is it cruelty when the wise general with his drawn sword cuts the flimsy fabric down, and leaves the silly soldier ashamed, perhaps angry, but convicted and exposed and ready for better work? So a young man lays out his plans; says, “I will be this, I will do this, I will think this”; devises how he will construct his fragment of the long wall that all true men are building, which is to stand between human nature and its enemies. He thinks his plans are perfect, and then they all fail. What does it mean? It may mean many things. It is blessed, indeed, if the young man can learn, there at the very outset of his life, that one of the things which it means is this: that his Father loves him so, and has such great things for him to be and do, that He wants him to trust His love completely — His love and nothing else, — so that He may be able to give Him self completely to His child. In such an early failure of his first bright hopes has been the light and salvation of many a man’s life.

Sometimes it is an old man and not a young man to whom the failure comes. When, as the evening gathers in, a man for whom life has seemed but one long success looks up, and lo! much that has seemed success has changed its whole aspect and is evidently failure; when, not because he has had enough of them and is tired of them, but because he has come into the fuller light and sees them as they really are, the ambitions, and pleasures, and occupations in which he has spent his days look empty and dreary and worthless to him; when the old man stands and says of his long life, “What a long failure!” — is there no meaning of love and kindness in that revelation which has come to him, at the very last, from his patient and loving God? Blessed, indeed, it is for him if, at the very last, standing among the ruins of the battlements which it has been the business of his life to build, he can in utter despair of himself give himself penitently and absolutely up to God, and look forward to the joy of testifying by the long obedience of eternity his thankfulness for the mercy which, before his life here was wholly over, has scattered its delusions and shown him his weakness and his sin.

I hope that I have not seemed to preach to you as if God were a mere destroyer, jealously taking away out of our lives the things He did not like, tearing away the poor defences that we had patched up for our prosperity, our peace, our reputation, and our faith, but giving us nothing in their place. I have tried to say all along that all of God’s de structions are only to make way for stronger building of His own. Let me tell you that as earnestly as I can before I close. For everything human and weak that God tears out of your life He has some thing strong and divine to put in it. He takes away the battlements of selfishness only that He may defend you with Himself. Everything which you have a right to do at all, and which you are doing now in self-reliance, it is possible for you to do in direct reliance upon Him; and our lives so be long to His life that it is only when the healthy activities of life are based upon and built around by trust in God that the noble capacity of those activities comes out and the whole life shines; and the old Jerusalem which sat upon her earthly hill be comes the New Jerusalem which is hung down from heaven by the golden chains of God’s love.

If the work of Christ for a man’s soul is to fill it with complete humility, and then, when it is utterly humbled and made distrustful of itself, to bid it stand up upon its feet and bravely begin the new life with trust in Him, — then is it not Christ, the Lord to whom we must be always coming back, of whom I really have been preaching to you to-day? Oh, that from all our souls He may tear away every falsehood, every shelter of sin, no matter what it costs us, no matter how it seems as if He tore our heart out with it. And then, where these used to be, oh, that He may set Himself, knitting His life into our life by the meeting of repentance and pardon, of grace and gratitude, making Himself our tower, hiding us safely forever and ever behind the battlements of His love!