Joshua 20:5

"Handfuls of Purpose"

For All Gleaners

"The avenger of blood." Jos 20:5

The text of course is limited by a local reference, but its suggestions spread themselves over the whole area of life and society. Recognise the fact that there is in all civilisation an avenger of blood. This indeed is necessary to the complete idea of civilisation. If blood could be shed with impunity, civilisation itself would be a continual prey to passion. God has set a high price upon blood; its quality would seem to be kindred to his own; it is full of fire, vitality; it is the very alphabet of immortality. Every human creature is of inexpressible consequence to God. Given a globe consisting of twelve hundred millions of human beings, and who can assign the exact importance to any one of them? What is he but as a fleck of snow upon a landscape, a drop in the Atlantic, an insect hardly visible in the sunbeam in which it dances for a moment? Not such is the divine view; the very hairs of your head are all numbered; the providence of God is minute, personal, critical, exacting the uttermost farthing, and ruling all things with the severest economy. Civilised society takes in its degree the same view of human life, for not a single child may be touched without society instantly arising as an avenger of blood. Surely there can be no great offence in destroying an unconscious life, in putting an end to an infancy which has barely begun, what can be the loss? Yet even society itself instantly demands an answer to the accusation of child-murder: no excuse would be tolerated: no fine theory of limiting the population would be admitted for one moment: organised society instantly becomes as it were the parent of the child, and demands an account of its life and recompense for its loss. This being so with regard to the body, are we not entitled to lift the argument to a higher level, and to contend that there should be an avenger of mind, thought, purpose, as well as an avenger of blood? They that kill the body can do but little; they are indeed hardly to be feared in comparison with those who can sow the seed of wickedness in the opening heart, and suggest evil thoughts to the awakening mind. If we slay him who slays the body, what should be done to him who takes away the life of the soul, who perverts the operation of motive and purpose, and who drags down the whole life to shame and infamy? All this anxiety about the body, its protection and its prerogatives, is but the beginning of an infinitely higher argument, if we are just to its logic. He would be accounted a fool who cared for the child's clothing, but paid no attention to the child's health: how much greater a fool is he who pays attention to the child's health of body and utterly neglects the child's health of mind! Consider how the avenger steadily proceeds in his task: men cannot sin with impunity: they are made to feel the result of their wickedness in their health, in their property, in their whole outlook of life; their fellow men shrink from them; they are distrusted, and handed over to reprobation, if not always openly, and as it were by public demonstration, yet more or less secretly, silently, but surely: whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. There is an avenger of blood upon the track of every bad man; as to when he shall be discovered and punished no man can tell the exact time, but God fixes it, and by the decree of Heaven, though hand join in hand, the wicked shall not be unpunished.