The Christian's Work
There remaineth yet very much land to be possessed.” — Joshua, xiii. 1.
The land of Canaan, to which my text refers, has been employed both by inspired and uninspired men, as a type of heaven — of the happy rest on which believers enter at the dread hour of death. Nor does it need a lively fancy to see the salient points in the history of a saint as they are set forth in the events of that wonderous journey which began in Egypt, and ended in the land of promise.
In the slavery, oppression, degradation, and intolerable miseries which the Hebrews suffered in the house of bondage, all who have been brought by God’s grace to know, and feel, the evil of sin, see a striking figure of the estate of sin and misery in which every man is born. Then look at Moses, the leader of their exodus I Sprung from the race whom he was to deliver, bone of their bone, and flesh of their flesh; plucked in early infancy from violent and murderous hands; reappearing, after years of retirement and obscurity, on the stage where he was to play so conspicuous a part; making miracles, whether he turned water into blood, or the sea into dry land, or the rock into flowing
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streams, common tilings; standing between the wrath of an offended God, and a stiff-necked and guilty people; on such terms of familiar intercourse with God himself, as no mere mortal was before, or has been since; resigning his commission only when he had brought Israel through innumerable, and, to all but divine power, insurmountable difficulties, to the banks of Jordan; and then with an eye not dimmed, nor strength abated, nor mark of age on his raven locks, ascending a mountain to vanish on a sudden, and for ever from view — Moses in these, as well as other, respects is a remarkable type of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Then look at the Hebrew host! Through the darkness of night, and the very depths of the oc-ean, see them in haste and alarm making for the other shore. Next morning, they find themselves saved, at liberty — the sea strewing her beach with the carcasses of their enemies, and rolling her joyous waves between Israel and the land of bondage. What an image of that conversion, new birth, heavenly baptism, burial to sin, through which the child of God passes, on leaving nature to enter upon a state of grace; with which he begins his pilgrimage to heaven, and without which our Lord declares that no man shall see the kingdom of God.
The journey now begins. How full it is of events and circumstances, that more or less clearly symbolize those of the Christian’s life!
The Hebrew host subsist on food which is not reaped on the fields of earth, but falls from the skies; the water they drink is not found in pools, nor drawn from wells, Itut gushes to the stroke 31 Moses’ rod from a flinty rock; their steps are guidfed through the pathless desert by a pillar that moves before them, forming a cloudy screen in the heat of day, and in the midnight darkness a blazing light — things these which were the types of good things to come through Him who is the Rock of Ages, the true Bread from heaven, the pillar of all our hopes, the divine guide and guardian of a believer’s heavenward way. Nor do the types and points of resemblance between the host in the desert, and Christ’s church on earth, end here. In their discontent and outbursts of rebellion, in their longings to return to the flesh-pots of Egypt, in their coward fears and frequent backslidings, and in the whole of that journey of many comforts, but also of many hardships — of great mercies on the part of God, and great sins on theirs, who can fail to see a remarkable type of the lights and shadows, the faults and failings, of every believer’s life?
The journey now reaches its close; and the host, purified through the deaths of forty years from the bad elements it brought out of Egypt, arrives on the banks of Jordan. Their feet have reached the end of a long, weary pilgrimage; nor does anything now but a deep, dark flood interpose between them and the green fields, and golden harvests, and vine-clad hills, on which they gaze with rapture. That flood is a symbol of the river of death; and when Jordan’s waters are di nded, and, types of Jesus, the white-robed priests hold the bed of the stream till the last Hebrew is over, and the host, with “not a hoof left behind,” enters the promised land, we have an emblem of the child of God going down at the close of life into the river — entering by death into eternal rest.
Thus far the analogy holds; in these particulars, but not in others. Heaven is the peculiar dwelling-place of God; and its happy tenants are holy angels and the redeemed — the spirits of just men made perfect; and on the other side of death’s dark flood the shore is lined with “shining ones,” some with palms, some with harps, who wait to bid us welcome to the realms of bliss. How different the passage of Jordan! The Hebrews entered Canaan marching, sword in hand, marshalled for battle. They had to meet, and to fight the enemy in many a bloody field. The land was theirs by promise, but not by possession. Years have passed since they entered it; Joshua’s sun is now nigh its setting; still, in the words of my text, “There remaineth yet very much land to be possessed.”
Thus Canaan, though commonly used as a type of heaven, is, in some of its aspects, a type rather of a state of grace than of a state of glory. And taking this view of it, I remark that —
I. Canaan, as the Israelites found it, represents the state of man’s heart when the grace of God enters it.
When the Hebrews burst like a flood into the Land of Promise, it was peopled by bold, active, warlike tribes, who were as superior to their invaders in the arts of peace, as in those of war. The land was cultivated like a garden, and peopled like a bee-hive or an ant-hill; and on its plains, which were thickly studded with towns and villages, stood many a mighty city. Its armies were recruited, not from the dregs of towns, but by a race of giants; walls of immense strength and height guarded its principal cities; and on fortalices perched on many a rocky crag. War sat armed — guarding the treasures of trade and husbandry, and ready to do battle for a country well worth defending, flowing with corn, and oil, and wine, and milk, and honey.
This is no fancied picture. Hear the report of the spies whom Moses sent out to explore the land — “We came into the land whither thou sentest us, and surely it floweth with milk and honey; nevertheless the people be strong that dwell in the land, and the cities are walled and very great. Moreover, we saw the children of Anak there. The Amalekites dwell in the land of the South; and the Hittites, and the Jebusites, and the Amorites dwell in the mountains; and the Canaanites dwell by the sea, and by the coast of Jordan; and all the people that we saw in it are men of a great stature: There we saw, the giants the sons of Anak; and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in theirs.”
Such was the state of Canaan; and such the people who held it, and were prepared to fight for it, against all comers. And where could we find a truer picture of the bad habits, powerful corruptions, and unholy passions of the unrenewed heart, than in the Jebusites, Amalekites, Amorites, Hittites, and Canaanites — the heathen, from whose stout hands, for God, and by
God’s help, Joshua must wrest this fair and lorely land. Its native inhabitants were idolatrous, worshipping every God but the true one; gross sensualists indulging in brutal pleasures, and living in the practice of such abominable immoralities as at once filled other nations with shame, and God with such anger that he declared he would spue them out of his mouth; monsters of inhumanity, who added cruelty to conquest, and took pride in their courts ofi’ering such a spectacle as this: — Three score and ten kings, saith the king of Jerusalem, having their thumbs and great toes cut off, gathered their meat under my table. How lamentable that so fair a land should be possessed by such tenants.
There is something infinitely more lamentable. Think of a soul like thine, made at first in the image of God; a being such as thou art, once occupying a rank in creation next to and but a little lower than that of angels; a heart like thine which, though blighted by sin, still retains some traces of departed glory — alienated from the true God, held captive of the devil, ruled by unholy passions, full of corruptions as difficult to root out as were these sons of Anak who, in Goliath and his giant race, disturbed the peace of Israel, and defied the armies of the living God many long years after the land was, in a sense, both conquered and possessed. The Hebrews did not enter Canaan to find an empty land, which they had nothing to do but to occupy; nor does Jesus, when he enters our heart by his Spirit and saving grace. It is in possession of his enemies. They are there to dispute his rights, and resist his entrance
—sons of Anak, indeed; more formidable still; for giant sins are less easily conquered than giant men. Let David bear witness. Did not he find it easier, when a beardless lad, to overcome a son of Anak, than when a mature and saintly man, to master his vicious passions, and, ruling his own spirit, conquer himself.
II. The blessings of the kingdom of grace, like those of Canaan, have to be fought for.
A band of emigrants, sailing from their native shores to seek a home in our colonies, presents almost no analogy to the Hebrew nation in its exodus from Egypt, and its march through the desert to the land of Canaan. As a tree rudely torn from its birth-place leaves in broken, bleeding fibres, part of its roots behind, our emio’rants leave affections clinsins to the old land, to their brothers, their sisters, their parents, to the homes and churches — to the very graves they leave behind them — and from the deck of the ship that bears them away, they continue to gaze fixedly and sorrowfully, and with tears gushing from their eyes, on their own blue mountains, till they sink beneath the waves. But the contrast between them and the Israelites does not lie so much in the feelings with which each left the old land, as in their manner of entering the new one. The only arms which our emigrant carries, are spade and plough to subdue the soil, and axe to subdue the forests. No hostile foe lines the beach to dispute hia landing. A few wretched, degraded, half naked savages, slowly retreating before the steps of civilization, and rapidly perishing from the face of the earth, before the vices which Christians have taught them to practice, are the thinly scattered tenants of rolling prairie and gloomy forest. The emigrant plunges into the woods, where he finds nothing but natural difiiculties to contend with. They fall before his stout arm. The only wounds he inflicts are made by his axe on the trees, and by his ploughshare on the bosom of a virgin soil. By day he works; on Sabbath he rests, and he sleeps away the night safe from harm within his rude log-cabin. And after a few busy years, a smiling garden and fields of golden corn, and a rosebowered home, and happy, sun-browned children playing around his door, proclaim the triumphs, and reward the toils, of honest industry. He sowed in tears, but he reaps in joy.
On entering Canaan the children of Israel were called to other labours. They had none of the ordinary work of emigrants to undertake. They had neither forests to clear; nor soil to break up; nor fields to fence; nor vines to plant; nor houses to rear; nor cities to build. These were all furnished to their hand — like the blessings of salvation, which are without money or price. There lay the land across Jordan’s rolling flood; and to eyes weary of the glaring sand, how beautiful its verdure, and to feet weary of a long, wandering pilgrimage, how tempting its rest. It was theirs by gift, not by right; theirs not by purchase, but by promise. They had it not yet in possession. They must wrest it from the stout heathen who held it; and, God blessing them, and fighting on tlieif side, they must reap these fields, not with songs and peaceful sickles, but with shouts of battle and the sword of war.
The blessinfys of the kinsrdom also ai’e the believer’s by free gift, the purchase of a Saviour’s blood, and the promise of him who is not a man that he should lie, nor the son of man that he should repent. Yet, no more than the Israelites in the days of old, docs any man enter on the easy, undisputed, peaceful possession of them, — or find that so soon as he is converted he enters into rest, and has nothing more to do than to sit down and enjoy the blessings prefigured by that country which was full of corn and wine, and flowed with milk and honey. Rest! There is a rest that remaineth for the people of God; but it is in heaven, not here. Here, we have to fight with corruptions difficult to kill, breaking out like old sores which had been skinned over; bursting out like a fire that was smouldering in its ashes, and ony needed a breath to blow it into flame! Here, we have to maintain a continual watch against, and wage incessant warfare with, bad habits, bad desires, bad propensities. Here, these like the old Canaanites, fight hard to keep what they hold, and to regain what they have lost. The fate which God pronounced on the Canaanites, Jebusites, Hittites, Perizzites, Amalekites, is that to which we are to doom our dearest sins. They were to drive them out of the land — to slay them. Nor, child of God, fancy that your state is a right one, or that your work is done, so long as one sin lives within you — be it pride, ambition, envy, lust, malice, an ugly or a beautiful fiend; be its type the Jebusite, that met Israel in battle, or this loTely woman who throws her chains OTei the strong man’s neck, and leads him captive — the dupe of her fascinating, but fatal charms. You must spare neither. Bring out every sin before the Lord, and let it be condemned to death; pass the sword of the Spirit through and through it, till it has breathed out its cursed life, and has no more dominion over you. As the apostle says, Let him that nameth the name of Christ depart from all iniquity. Beware how you leave innate corruption, and old sinful habits, to draw down on you the anger of a holy God, and the afflictions threatened on Israel in these words, “If ye will not drive out the inhabitants of the land before you, then it shall come to pass, that those which you let remain shall be pricks in your eyes, and thorns in your flesh; and shall vex you in the land wherever ye dwell.”
III. The most advanced Christian has much to do in the way of sanctification.
We think of an aged Christian as of one seated on the banks of Jordan, enjoying the calm evening of a busy, holy, useful life — looking back on the past without any other regret than what springs from the recollection of his sins, and looking forward on the future without the shadow of a fear; as a servant with his task done, waiting to receive his wages, and the welcome summons that calls him home. We fancy him by the eye of faith piercing the mists that hang over death’s dark flood *, and as he descries the shining ones on the other shore, stretching out his aged arms, and crying, as he longs to be gone and be with them, 0 thai I had the wings of a dove, that I might fly away and be at rest.
Our fancy’s picture may be beautiful. It is more beautiful than true; such cases are rare. The Christian commonly dies in harness, in the battle-field, in the thick of battle, fighting on to the last gasp. The servant commonly needs all his time for his work; and is engaged down to life’s last hour — to the cry, Behold, the bridegroom cometh — trimming his lamp, and setting the house in order. The fruit does not hang on the branch, but commonly drops so soon as it is mellow; and the corn shakes out so soon as it is ripe. The death-bed of the saint has been indeed the scene of his hardest work, his deepest grief, his bitterest tears, and the most terrible assaults of the Evil One. “Stern all “is the cry when the monster of the deep begins his dying struggles; and then every man bends to his oar, pulling out of the sweep of that tremendous tail, which, as she pours out her heart’s blood, beats the billows and churns them into crimsoned foam. Not less formidable sometimes are the last, the dying struggles of sin. What says our Lord?” The kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force f and it happens there as with a beleaguered city at the storming — the hardest fight is in the breach; the battle rages fiercest just before it ceases, and with a few more strokes, the city is entered, and the prize is won.
How truly may it be said to the most experienced, aged, honoured Christian, as the Lord said to Joshua, Thou art old and well stricken in years, and yet there is miicli laud to be possessed. Sin still lias mors or less power over you, and it should have none; your corruy)tions are wounded, dying of mortal wounds, but they are not yet dead; your affections are set on heaven; yet how nnich are they still entangled with earthly things; your heart, like the needle of a sailor’s compass to its pole, points to Christ, but how easily is it disturbed, how tremblingly and unsteady does it often point to him; your spirit has wings, but how short are its flights, and how often, like a half fledged eaglet, has it to seek the nest, and come back to rest on the Rock of Ages; your soul is a garden in which, when north and south winds blow to call out its spices, Christ delights to walk, but with many a beautiful flower, how many vile weeds are there — ready to spring up, and ill to keep down; requiring constant care and watching. Indeed, so many impurities and imperfections cleave to the best of us, that it seems to me a change must take place at death only second to what took place at conversion. The holiness of the holiest man, how far short it is of the holiness of heaven! A great deal of sin is in every case left behind with the body, to be, thank God, for ever buried in its grave; and could we see the spirit it its departure, as Elisha saw his ascending master, we should see a mantle of impurity and imperfection dropt from the chariot that bears it to the skies. In the very hour of death, therefore, the Spirit of God must crown all his other labours with a rapid and extraordinary work of sanctifying. How that is done, is a mystery which we cannot fathom but it would seem as if grace, like the species of cerevs which opens its gorgeous flower only at midnight, burst ont into fullest beauty amid the darkness of a dying hour. It is enough for us to know that God will perfect that which concerneth us; that he ,will bring us safely home; and that no vessel chartered for glory, shall be lost at the harbour’s mouth. It takes one whole summer, with its showers and sunshines, to ripen the fields of corn; it takes five hundred summers to bring the oak to full maturity; but he at whose word the earth sprang into being, bearing on its bosom loaded orchards, and golden harvests, and clustering vines, the tall palm, and the gigantic cedar, woman in full blown charms, and man in his perfect manhood, lie with whom one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day, is able in the twinkling of an eye to complete and crown the work of his grace. He will do it. He that began a good work in you will carry it on to the day of the Lord Jesus; and thus apparelled in the righteousness of his Son, and wholly sanctified by the power of his Spirit, his saints shall appear before him —” nat having spot, or vrinkle, or any such thing.’’