Verses 1-11
The Lord's Artillery
WE have seen how Gibeon made peace with Joshua. Adoni-zedec, king of Jerusalem, was exceedingly displeased with the men of Gibeon for making peace with the enemy. He sent, therefore, unto the mountain kings of the Amorites, inviting them to smite Gibeon, saying, "It hath made peace with Joshua and with the children of Israel." So the five kings of the Amorites went up; and the Lord said unto Joshua, "Fear them not.... there shall not a man of them stand before thee." "So Joshua ascended from Gilgal, he, and all the people of war with him, and all the mighty men of valour." And Joshua smote the enemy "with a great slaughter at Gibeon, and chased them along the way that goeth up to Beth-horon, and smote them to Azekah, and unto Makkedah;" and when Joshua had done all that lay in his power, the Lord took up the case, and he hailed out of heaven upon the enemy, and "they were more which died with hailstones than they whom the children of Israel slew with the sword." The Lord never loses a battle. The picture of that fight is most vivid. It gleams with many colours, and as it stands in the gallery of ancient history, it seems to say, This is how it always is; study me, and see the providence of the Lord. We accept the invitation.
The divine cause has enemies. The miracle is upon our side. Why complain or utter wonders equal to complaints about miracles divine? The miracle is on the human side, and is expressed in the incredible fact that the divine cause has human enemies. Reason seems to be offended by the statement. A voice within us protests against the possibility of an anomaly so glaring and so violent. We should listen to the protest if we could shut our eyes to the facts. Show us something divine, and we will worship it. Men would say in certain moods, Show us the truly beautiful, and we will fall down before it in an attitude of adoration. Thus we exclaim. The common doctrine would seem to be: we have only to see the good, and we will accept it; to behold the beautiful, and we will worship it; to know the right, and we will do it. It would be pleasant to believe this. We want to believe it for our own creed's sake. But facts are dead against us. We are witnesses against ourselves. We see the right, and yet the wrong pursue. We say openly, with frankness that will be turned against us some day, This is the right road. But we are going in an opposite direction, that is the miracle! When you have settled and determined that anomaly, then you may begin to challenge the possibility of miracles upon the upper or divine side. "Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth: I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me." What do you make of facts? We sentimentalise, or dream, or speculate, what is your answer to the awful mystery that a man, not only can say, but does say, This is right, but I decline to do it? If this were matter of speculation, you would put the speculation from your mind as unworthy of the dignity of human reason. If this were a charge laid against a distant nation, we should make some trifling remark upon the incident, describing it as romantic, if not impossible; but it is the great line of our own life, the broad line which marks our whole experience, action, and attitude; and we are continually face to face with the solemn charge, that we know the Lord's way and the Lord's cause, and we set ourselves in distinct disobedience to his law and claim.
But the enemies of the divine cause have both earth and heaven against them: the sword of Israel, and the hail of God. The living God has two great forces; if you escape one, you fall under the power of the other. Men cannot do with the earth as they please. They think they can, but that is a deadly mistake. What can they do with the earth? Consider the case, and learn how little is human power in relation to those very things which seem to come easily within its sway. What can men do with the earth, which is under their feet, as if in sign of humiliation and unworthiness? Can they stop it? Can they reverse its motion? Can they illuminate it? What can these masters do with their nominal slave? They can smite it with iron, and make it grow what they please. No, they cannot! The dull earth, hoed into grooves, will not obey the iron pick, will not turn to the pluck of the bit and bridle given by violent hands. What, then, can we do with the earth? We are obliged to study it, to find out all its moods and whims and tempers. We are compelled to humour the old earth. We have to treat it very delicately and very kindly. At first we think we have only to smite it with iron, and it will be only too glad to respond in harvests: but the earth is a mystery; the earth will not do what we want it to do. It openly says, I will not grow this crop; this year you must change my food; I am tired of this monotony, and I will not move again. We form associations to consider the earth, to report upon it, to take measurements and temperatures, and to arrange means to ends; and there the old earth swings on in the darkness, now night, now day, and must be humoured like a living thing. How dreadful is this place! This is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven. The stones of the field seem to have a mind, and the winds and the stars to be under a purpose, and to be expressing a design. Then the upper earth if I may so call the atmosphere for what is it but an upper and enlarged earth? We may be able to do some little thing with spade and mattock, with plough and harrow, but what can we do up in the clouds? There is a minister of wrath called the weather. We have never been able to bribe him, propitiate him, bring him within the circle of our influence. The weather has come down upon our navies, and broken them into wet chips. The weather has stopped our great steam-horses, and said, No further on this road just now! It an earthquake had done it, there would have been some harmony between the process and the result; but little flakes of snow have done it white little wings, things that look like beautiful insects, down they have come, and down, until that which in detail weighed nothing accumulated itself into millions of tons, and great steam-horses, challenging and thundering and roaring, have had to stand still before the white opponent, unable to move one inch. Why, our power is quite a nominal thing after all. We thought we were so great, and yet the earth beats us, or if we win a little success in the soil and report it, we can do nothing in the clouds; we have no ladder a hundred feet long, or two hundred feet long, or five hundred feet long, and if we had, there is nothing to set it against. After all, our pride is shaken down, our vanity is cut in two; and men who have discovered a new variety of crop for the soil have to say parenthetically, almost religiously, "weather permitting"! When Christian men charge reformers and empirics with inability to touch the heart's deadly sore, they can illustrate their position and vindicate their fear by the littleness of the limit which binds in the power of all men even in matters terrestrial and confessedly material. Mend the weather before you mend human manners. Stop the rain before you attempt by merely human means to stop the torrent of human iniquity. When you have won triumphs in your own world, we will accept them as proofs that you may be able to do some mightier thing on broader lines.
All things fight for God. The hailstones are his friends and allies; the stars in their courses beat and throb according to his purpose and express his intent. The bad cause has no friends; it comes to an ignominious end; it is overwhelmed by hailstones. It is so humbling! If men could have shown on the forehead a great scar made by a gleaming sword swung by the arms of a Hercules a very giant in stature and strength we should have said, Well, you had a foeman worthy of your steel; it is equal to a victory to have been felled by that man. You come in under stress of weather. Hailstones! you beaten back by hailstones? Yes! Why then there is no glory in it, not a whit. Come back because of the weather? Yes. Well, that is very crushing. Exceedingly so. But you are a man; why didn't you "stand up like a man"? I did, but the hailstones knocked me down! Why is it so? All the world over. You cannot lock the hail up. You cannot find a shutter that will certainly keep the lightning on the outside: God takes the hasp off after we have shut up the front-door. Consider the ignominy of the end! To be slain with a sword is to meet a soldier's fate; to be killed with hailstones is to be treated as an inferior creature is to feel the contempt of an invisible and infinite enemy.
These are the strongholds and grounds of the Christian attack. We are not speaking to men, you see, who can walk as if with the wings of the wind, and make the clouds the dust of their feet, and bring in the spring when they please, and detain the summer as long as they have a mind to detain that shining guest; we are speaking to men, however great or little, to men who have to make careful parentheses and reservations in their boldest talk; to men whose triumphant essays are wetted through and drenched by God's snow, so that they cannot read their own writing. "Acquaint now thyself with him, and be at peace." There is only one safe motion, only one astronomic rhythm, and if you get out of beat and harmony with that, you are at war with God. A short fight is his who encounters gravitation. Foist moment he may leap, but he will soon lie down; for a little while he may seem as if master of the situation, but the great serene law moves on and flattens whatever opposes its tranquil operation. "Acquaint now thyself with him, and be at peace."
The bad cause perishes in contempt. The five kings ran away and hid themselves in a cave, and Joshua said, Bring them out! and to the men of Israel, Put your feet upon their necks; and the men of Israel put their feet upon the necks of the kings; and he said, Now hang them upon trees; and the men of Israel hanged the five kings upon five trees, and at the evening hour cut them down and threw them into the very cave in which they had hidden themselves, and laid great stones against the mouth of the cave, and there they are until this day. The great life-lesson running out of all this ancient history is: it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. "Acquaint now thyself with him, and be at peace." No hailstone ever ranked itself on the bad side. No rain ever offered itself to help the bad man. Though it may appear to have done so incidentally, it never did so finally; and the stones will be faithful unto the last. There shall come a day when men shall say to the rocks and to the mountains, "Fall on us," and rock and mountain will stand without a sign. "Hide us from the wrath of the Lamb!" and the rock and the mountain will stand upon their foundations without a quiver or a spasm. "Acquaint now thyself with him, and be at peace." This is science: we are invited into the astronomic movement. It is the call of gravitation, not of speculative theology. It is the music of the spheres, not some hymn of despicable sentiment. What say you? To be with Christ, with God, is to be in the laws of gravitation. Have you any objection to that? It is to be marching step for step. Have you any complaint to make against that appeal? Why try to go the other way when all the gates are locked and the keys are not to be found? Why not have on our side God, and all that God implies and involves the whole mystery of power and grace, righteousness and wisdom? Then we shall know what it is to triumph. We shall hear a voice behind us and within us say, "It is God that justifieth, who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died, yea, rather, that is risen again." Who shall lay anything to the charge of those who are in rhythm with God? The appeal seems to me so based on all that is true in science, in nature, in the reality and necessity of things, that but for the miracle which we indicated at the outset, it would seem impossible but that every man should rise and say, I will be on the Lord's side, I will live by the divine movement, I will find peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. That is what Jesus Christ came to do. He found we were opposing the law of spiritual gravitation; trying to create a universe of our own, and only making a hell; trying to silence music by discord, and being lost in the tumult which we made. He is our peace. In him we are safe evermore. When the hail pours down, it will be upon the enemy, not upon the friend; and when the lightning gleams and blazes and burns, it shall not come nigh the heart that rests in the Cross in the infinite mystery of the infinite atonement. Bad man, you can go on a while if you like, but not for long: the hail is against you. You can make yourself so trusted as to be allowed to go and change the securities and rob the strong-box, but not for long: nature has her eye upon you, the constables of the universe are on your track. You can succeed for a while, you can do wonders for a while, but only for a while; you will be hanged, cut down, ruthlessly and contemptuously flung into a cave, and be forgotten. Do not imagine that your course is quite run yet: you may have twenty-four hours more; but the hand from which there is no release is already groping for you. There is no peace, saith my God, to the wicked. The ungodly are like the chaff which the wind driveth away. The triumphing of the wicked is short. Only righteousness is eternal; only honesty goes through the weather without getting wet; only the truth can put out to sea in any weather, plunging into the troughs, mounting up on the billows, swinging on the crest, down again, up again, but all the time steering straight for the green summer shore. Oh, go not to sea in some paper boat of your own making! The vessel of God's righteousness and love is open to us all. Let us enter. It cannot be wrecked.
Prayer
Almighty God, we are alive this day to praise thee. Thou canst call upon living men to bear witness to thy rule and thy care. Thou art not the God of the dead, but the God of the living; thou dost not refer to the ancient time beyond our memory, thou dost appeal unto ourselves, thou dost ask us to read the record of our own life and to consider all the way along which thou hast conducted us. This we will gladly do. Herein is our joy, secret and public. We love to commune with our own hearts, and to take note of all the care thou hast shown unto us day by day from the first; and we love in the open sanctuary to make public mention of thy goodness, and to sing a loud song unto God, and to make a joyful noise unto the rock of our salvation. We have seen thy goodness, handled it, felt it, known it in the core of the heart; therefore we will not be silent, but will magnify thy name day by day, at the entering in of the city, in the place of public concourse, quietly at home, all but silently in the chamber of sickness: but we will not forget thy benefits, nor cease to remember the mercies of God. Thou hast led us by a way that we have not known. We have come upon strange names in the outworking of our history; unfamiliar places we have trodden; unfriendly tribes have accosted us and encountered us with stubborn resistance; we have looked round for water where there were no wells, and have gone out to pluck fruit where there were no trees; and, behold, thou hast not sent us back unrefreshed or empty-handed: thou hast created fountains in the wilderness, and trees thou hast planted on the rocks. Thou art a God of miracles, working wonders in light and in darkness. Thou dost send unto us messages in all the blowing winds, yea, in the cold and mighty tempest, and in the gentle summer breeze; and all the year long thou dost never forget us: we are graven upon the palms of thy hands. We will magnify thy name, and praise it. New mercies shall create new songs; new visions of truth shall touch the soul into nobler praise. Thus will we spend the few days of our life, a handful at the most, praying that the last may be brighter than the first, yea, that the last on earth may be the first in heaven. We pray that our own life may continue to be the object of thy care. We can only live in God. We can only live in God as we bear the fruit which is consistent with thy purpose in our creation. Every branch that beareth not fruit is cut down, and cast away, and burned in the fire. We would bear fruit unto thy glory: we would have living minds, clean hearts, responsive spirits, industrious hands, souls that live in prayer; the Lord grant unto us our heart's desire! For thy Book we daily bless thee: it is brighter than the morning; it is fuller of truth than the night is full of stars. Help us to read it patiently, sympathetically, devoutly; whilst we read, may the Writer himself be present, the inspiring Holy Spirit, that so the inspired reader may peruse the inspired writing, and in thy light see light, and behold and wonder at the ever-expanding revelation of God. Be with us wherever we are in the twelve hours of the day and the twelve hours of the night. Make our bread pleasant to our eating; grant a blessing upon the water we drink from the streams which descend from heaven; give us the apt mind in business, the clear head, the eye that sees afar, the sensitiveness which men knowing not God cannot explain; be with us in all family darkness, trouble, bereavement: when sickness comes, or loss, or bare poverty, may we find room for them, because they may be angels in disguise. Direct us in all our path; give us the right word when a sudden answer is demanded; save us from mental perplexity when besieged by an unrighteous ability; the Lord give us steadfastness and love of truth in the soul, and the incorruptible sincerity which burns all evil and finds its way to God through storm and cloud, through rock and desert and difficulty. Send a plentiful rain upon thine inheritance; bless thy people with peace; crown their lives with forgiveness. Above all, make us like thy Son Jesus Christ, brightness of thy glory, express image of thy person; may we in our degree be beautiful as he: pure and noble and self-surrendering; may we know somewhat of the mystery of his Cross, the pathos of his suffering, the atonement which he wrought out in the mystery and passion of love. For his sake, hear us; for his sake, bless us; for his sake, withhold not any good thing from us. Amen.
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