Verses 1-14
Memorial Stones
THUS a memorial was to be set up, commemorating the power and goodness of God. The way of life should be full of such cairns. But is it not early in the history to be setting up stones of memory? The battle has not begun. Israel did not march forth to cross a river but to overthrow a city well-walled and hoary with antiquity. Is it not, then, rather early in the day to be building altars and to be setting up signs of triumph? It is in putting such questions as these that we show the littleness of our faith. In all great spiritual controversy the beginning is the end. The whole history is in one sentence. The entire history of the human race is in the first few chapters of Genesis; all the rest has been translation, variation, rearrangement of particles and individualities and colours; but the soul of the history is all there. With God the end and the beginning are one. To have crossed Jordan is to have torn down all the Jerichos that opposed us. One step is the pledge of another. The first miracle is the pledge of the last. He who turns water into wine at the beginning will raise himself from the dead at the end. The miracles are one. One miracle carries with it all the host of wonders. So it is in all the departments of properly-regulated and disciplined life. It is so in any properly-graduated system of education. He who has conquered one book has conquered all books. The reason why men do not conquer the third book is that they have not conquered the first. No student can set himself heart and soul to the mastery of the First Book of Euclid without therein and thereby mastering the next and the next, until the very end. There must be no paltering, no half and half work, no touching the labour with reluctant and dainty fingers, but a real tussle, a tremendous wrestling, at the first. Jordan passed, Jericho shall totter and fall. Why is the Church so hesitant and uncertain in its movement? Perhaps because it does nothing firmly and completely; it may not have mastered its first principles; it may have considered itself altogether too advanced in life to trouble itself with elementary theologies and considerations, but so considering it will never take any Jericho. The place of evil will have faces at every window smiling upon its furious feebleness. The devil will open his idol-temples shoulder by shoulder with any cathedral or minster we can build; he says These people did not perform the first miracle: they never got through Jordan; they are still splashing in the waters that lave the brink of the channel; they are not complete students, they are not well-equipped thinkers; they have nothing in their hearts they are quite sure about; they are changing all the time, now it is a great argument which none can comprehend, now it is a radiant cloud on which no man can satisfy his hunger, now it is an elaborate and pompous programme without a beginning and without an end and without any reason for its existence at all; these people will never fight me; if they could but get hold of one thing and be perfectly certain of that my days would be numbered, but they have nothing in the possession of certitude; they call themselves "honest doubters" and "patient inquirers," and whilst they are doubting and inquiring I am digging hell miles deeper. Could we but really read one book of the Bible, could we but hold one Gospel in our hearts, could we but get hold of something and say, This one thing I have and know and use, all the rest would come in happy sequence. So it was not too early to set up a cairn on the one side of the bank and on the other side of the bank. We must have memorials in life. If we do not set up stony memorials we shall still leave footprints. Every man has his history, and every man has had his opportunity and has left behind him a record as to its use or abuse. Blessed is the life that is full of memorial stones! It ought never to be far back to the last one; and if whilst we are building the next one the enemy should suddenly come down upon us in some black suggestion, in some terrific temptation, we should flee back to the memorial last put up, and, under the shadow of that Ebenezer, calmly await the future. Why this unbuilt life? Why this life without any pillar of stone or temple behind it? What wonder if in turning round and seeing nothing a great fear should seize us, and we should suppose that we had been given over to the enemy of souls? There should hardly be one step between one memorial stone and another, so that we may instantly retire for a moment to recruit our strength and renew our hope and confidence in God. How mean are some lives in this matter of erecting no memorial; no diary is kept, no journal is posted up, no entry written, it may be in a trembling hand, but yet setting forth the formula: The true God was with me today; he helped me to cross the river, he enabled me to run through a troop and to leap over a wall; and though I can scarcely read the words yet I will inscribe them every one and come back to them as to a Bible and to a revelation. Men who live in times of haste say they have no leisure for such enterings. The enterings need not be literal: we need not be talking about material paper and ink, but about the tablets of the heart, the records of the memory, always having a vivid recollection of the last deliverance, the last vision, the last mighty prayer, the last sublime victory. There is no other way in which to make life rich and thoughtful. When accused, we should be able to flee back to God's last record; when tempted to disbelieve him, we should go back to the last fact. Our life should not be a mysterious argument, in the processes of which we may be vexed and troubled by subtler intellects than our own: life should be its own fact, its own confirmation of spiritual truths, its own sanctuary, its own refuge. Have the witness in yourselves. Do not wait for posterity to build the cairns; build your own memorials. Posterity will come and read them, but we might build our own altars, set up our own standards and unfurl our own banners, and accept the responsibility, as we have received the reward, of our own religion. So building we should crowd out all unworthy houses. We should want every inch of land. The whole earth would be filled with the divine presence and glory. Every room in the house would be a church; every window in the dwelling would look towards the Jerusalem that is above; every chair would be an altar; the whole dwelling would burn with unconsuming fire. We cannot, then, begin too soon. The moment the first conviction is wrought in the mind, build a stone memorial; the moment you are conscious of having taken the first real step in advance, build; vow never to retire behind that building, for it begins your best history, it points towards your broadest, brightest future.
We have spoken of posterity. The cairn was to be a sign among the Israelites:
"That this may be a sign among you, that when your children ask their fathers in time to come, saying, What mean ye by these stones? Then ye shall answer them, That the waters of Jordan were cut off before the ark of the covenant of the Lord; when it passed over Jordan, the waters of Jordan were cut off: and these stones shall be for a memorial unto the children of Israel for ever" ( Jos 4:6-7 )
History should be matter of interest to all men, and in all history we should be able to identify Providence with the past and to speak of the wonders of the days of old. Here there ought to be no mystery and no doubt. The wonders of redemption may lie far from our intellectual grasp, but the goodness of providence should lie quite handy to every man. Every intelligent man should be able to say Be the mysteries what they may, it is perfectly certain that this life of ours is bound, limited, directed: its ambitions are checked, its blood-thirstiness cannot go beyond a certain range; it is watched; at all events that is the best explanation of life which we have yet discovered; it is so near being almighty, and yet so near being powerless: now it stands upon some eminence as if it would be lord of all, and presently it overreaches itself and falls down in utterest humiliation; we are watched, barred in, shut up. We go certain lengths as if we could go ten times farther, and, lo, in a moment, a great wall of darkness asserts the limit and defines the prison. On this matter of Providence there ought to be no uncertain sound. It is not supposable that any life amongst us has not within itself elements sufficient for the construction of a practical argument on behalf of a living, loving Providence. But are there not many broken lives, sad hearts, perplexed souls? Unquestionably there are; but there are men who have seen God even in darkness and have acknowledged his hand even amid the chastening of affliction; there are men who have said, "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him." There was one singer so valiant in spiritual music that when all nature seemed to be given up to silence and despair he said, "Although the fig tree shall not blossom... I will joy in the God of my salvation;" my religion is not an affair of abundant herbs and plentiful harvests and green meadows: I live in the sanctuary of God's love, and as a child adopted into his family I will sing as loudly in winter as in summer: I will make up for the inhospitableness of the desert by the loudness and sweetness of my song. So we must not retire upon our desertions, difficulties, broken-hearted-nesses, and say, Whoever may have arguments, we have none. It is possible for ruins to be so shaped and so left as to excite inquiry, touch commiseration, and awaken reverence.
Thus miracles were to be brought within the lines of history: the time was to come when men would speak about miracles as they would speak about the commonplaces of life. The miracle is very startling at first, but there comes a time when men can write about the miracles with hands that do not tremble, with a certitude in which there is no flutter. At first they amazed and stupefied: we questioned their possibility; but by living along that line, moving steadily step by step along that course, we come to a period when we can write about a miracle as if it were a common occurrence, when we can sing the sublimest poetry as if it were glorified prose, when our prayer gradually ascends into praise. Do not, therefore, be deterred by men who ask questions about the miracles, and especially by those men who have proved to their own satisfaction that miracles are impossible. There is nothing so impossible to my imagination as the existence of a man who can deny miracles. He indeed is an enigma in the course of my reading. How he can have unmade himself, choked the angel within him, suffocated the infant spirit, how he can have been guilty of this infanticide I cannot tell: I must leave him to be expounded by-and-by. Meanwhile, my own life springs up into a daily miracle a miracle every moment, a day crowned with wonders; and the time comes when we speak about these things as if they were commonplaces not in the sense of being unsuggestive or unworthy of heed, but in the sense of being so abundant that we have come to regard them with reverent familiarity, and to expect them as men expect the miracle of the harvest. Yes, the miracle of the harvest! The seed is sown and left in the cold earth, but the whole chemic ministry of nature works upon it: the dew and the rain; the morning does its work, and the evening continues its labour; and by-and-by the seed springs up some thirty, some sixty, some an hundredfold, without a stain of earth upon it, pure as if it had grown downwards from the sky, a great golden answer to the prayer of industry. Miracles! The air is full of them, life throbs with them. We have been so blind that we have not seen them, or so fond of doubt that we have questioned their possibility. If we were to live in God we would live as God, and the coming and the going of nature the perpetual miracle would be the perpetual rest. O that men were wise, that they understood these things! This was the Church of sacred romance. We have left romance out of the history of the Church now. It is a question of surface, of bulk, of statistics, of movable figures. Would God the day of sacred romance would return when great things were attempted and great things done in the name of the Almighty God!
There is a Jordan before every one of us. That Jordan must be passed. We call it Death. We speak of it as the black last river. We talk of it sometimes as in swelling indignation and fury, and ask what shall we do in the swellings of Jordan? To the Christian, Jordan is already past. In a material, physical, and limited sense the little conquest has yet to be won, but in all its spiritual significance and glory Jordan is dried up, and they who are in Christ Jesus, the great priest of the everlasting covenant, walk through the bed of the river as upon dry ground. This is our Christian confidence, this is our spiritual hope, this is our standing in life. Death is abolished. The miracles have been completed in the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. All that follows will follow like a cadence, without effort, a sweet necessity, the logic of poetry.
Prayer
Almighty God, thou art always drying up rivers before us, or Red Seas, or beating down mountains, or making straight that which is crooked. Thy love is a daily concern for us, leaving nothing untouched and unblessed, but covering the whole sphere of our life as with summer sunshine. We bless thee for thy love, for we live in it. Thy love encourages us, inspires and sustains us, and makes the wilderness into a fruitful field. We know thy love in providence: we see it everywhere every day; but we see thy love most of all in the Cross of Jesus Christ, thy Son, and looking upon the Cross we say, Herein is love; and we hear thy voice saying thou didst so love the world as to create and glorify this Cross. At the Cross we bow; at the Cross we wait; here is forgiveness and here alone. This is the beginning of a new life, this is a gate opening upon eternal blessedness. We therefore glory in the Cross of Christ, and have no other glory, by reason of its celestial majesty. It is the voice of God to the pleading of man, the answer of mercy to the demand of law. May we love the Cross more and more, dying upon it with Christ, with Christ buried, with Christ rising, crowned, and sharing his throne. May this be our life-word; may this be the speech of our tongue and the testimony of our conduct, that we live, yet not we, but that Christ liveth in us, and that the life which we now live in the flesh we live by faith on the Son of God, who loved us and gave himself for us. As for rivers, thou didst make them flow, and thou canst make them cease; as for the desert, it is of thine own ordination, and thou canst turn it into a garden more beautiful than paradise. About these things we have no fear; we are in God's hands and God's love. What fear we have relates to sin, guiltiness of soul, forfeiture of sonship and standing in the family of God; and herein where our fear abounds, the glory of thy love abounds still more, so that we have yet hope in the prison-house, and are assured that our sins, which are many, are all forgiven us. In this faith we live; in this faith we serve; in this faith we would die. Amen.
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