They are there, though you do not see them yet. All round your door they sit, ready to meet you and to bay out condemnation as you go forth. They are there, and one day you will find out that they are. For this is the law, certain as the revolution of the stars and fixed as the pillars of the firmament: "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap" There is no seed which does not sprout in the harvest of the moral life. Every deed germinates according to its kind. For all that a man does he has to carry the consequences, and every one shall bear his own burden. "If thou doest not well," it is not, as we fondly conceive it sometimes to be, a mere pa.s.sing deflection from the rule of right, which is done and done with, but we have created, as out of our very own substance, a witness against ourselves whose voice can never be stifled. "If thou doest not well" thy sin takes permanent form and is fastened to thy door.
And then let me remind you, too, how the metaphor of our text is confirmed by other obvious facts, on which I need but briefly dwell.
Putting aside all the remoter bearings of that thought of responsibility, I suppose we all admit that we have consciences; I suppose that we all know that we have memories; I suppose we all of us have seen, in the cases of others, and have experienced for ourselves, how deeds long done and long forgotten have an awful power of rising again after many long years.
Be sure that your memory has in it everything that you ever did. A landscape may be hidden by mists, but a puff of wind will clear them away, and it will all lie there, visible to the furthest horizon. There is no fact more certain than the extraordinary swiftness and completeness with which, in certain circ.u.mstances of life, and often very near the close of it, the whole panorama of the past may rise again before a man, as if one lightning flash showed all the dreary desolation that lay behind him. There have been men recovered from drowning and the like, who have told us that, as in an instant, there seemed unrolled before their startled eyes the whole scroll of their earthly career.
The records of memory are like those pages on which you write with sympathetic ink, which disappears when dry, and seems to leave the page blank. You have only to hold it before the fire, or subject it to the proper chemical process, and at once it stands out legible. You are writing your biography upon the fleshly tables of your heart, my brother; and one day it will all be spread out before you, and you will be bid to read it, and to say what you think of it. The stings of a nettle will burn for days, if they are touched with water. The sting and inflammation of your evil deeds, though it has died down, is capable of being resuscitated, and it will be.
What an awful menagerie of unclean beasts some of us have at our doors!
What sort of creatures have you tethered at yours? Crawling serpents, ugly and venomous; wild creatures, fierce and b.l.o.o.d.y, obscene and foul; tigers and bears; l.u.s.tful and mischievous apes and monkeys? or such as are lovely and of good report,--doves and lambs, creatures pure and peaceable, patient to serve and gentle of spirit? Remember, remember, that what a man soweth--be it hemlock or be it wheat--that, and nothing else, "shall he reap."
2. Now, let us look for a moment at the next thought that is here; which is put into a strong, and, to our modern notions, somewhat violent metaphor;--the horrible longing, as it were, of sin toward the sinner: "Unto thee shall be its desire."
As I explained, these words are drawn from the previous chapter, where they refer to the holy union of heart and affection in husband and wife. Here they are transferred with tremendous force, to set forth that which is a kind of horrible parody of that conjugal relation. A man is married to his wickedness, is mated to his evil, and it has, as it were, a tigerish longing for him, unhallowed and murderous. That is to say--our sins act towards us as if they desired to draw our love to themselves. This is just another form of the statement, that when once a man has done a wrong thing, it has an awful power of attracting him and making him hunger to do it again. Every evil that I do may, indeed, for a moment create in me a revulsion of conscience; but it also exercises a fascination over me which it is hard to resist. It is a great deal easier to find a man who has never done a wrong thing than to find a man who has only done it once. If the wall of the d.y.k.e is sound it will keep the water out, but if there is the tiniest hole in it, the flood will come in. So the evil that you do a.s.serts its power over you, or, in the vigorous metaphor of my text, it has a fierce, longing desire after you, and it gets you into its clutches.
"The foolish woman sitteth in the high places of the city, and saith, Whoso is simple let him turn in hither." And foolish men go after her, and--"know not that her guests are in the depth of h.e.l.l." Ah! my brother! beware of that siren voice that draws you away from all the sweet and simple and pure food which Wisdom spreads upon her table, to tempt the beast that is in you with the words, "Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant." Beware of the first step, for as sure as you are living, the first step taken will make the second seem to become necessary. The first drop will be followed by a bigger second, and the second, at a shorter interval, by a more copious third, until the drops become a shower, and the shower becomes a deluge. The river of evil is ever wider and deeper, and more tumultuous. The little sins get in at the window, and open the front door for the full-grown house-breakers. One smooths the path for the other. All sin has an awful power of perpetuating and increasing itself. As the prophet says in his vision of the doleful creatures that make their sport in the desolate city, "None of them shall want her mate. The wild beasts of the desert shall meet with the wild beasts of the island." Every sin tells upon character, and makes the repet.i.tion of itself more and more easy. "None is barren among them." And all sin is linked together in a slimy tangle, like a field of seaweed, so that the man once caught in its oozy fingers is almost sure to be drowned.
3. And now, lastly, one word about the command, which is also a promise: "To thee shall be its desire, and thou shalt rule over it."
Man"s primitive charter, according to the earlier chapters of Genesis, was to have dominion over the beasts of the field. Cain knew what it was to war against the wild creatures which contested the possession of the earth with man, and to tame some of them for his uses. And, says the divine voice, just as you war against the beasts of prey, just as you subdue to your purposes and yoke to your implements the tamable animals over which you have dominion, so rule over _this_ wild beast that is threatening you. It is needful for all men, if they do not mean to be torn to pieces, to master the animal that is in them, and the wild thing that has been created out of them. It is bone of your bone and flesh of your flesh. It is your own evil that is thus incarnated there, as it were, before you; and you have to subdue it, if it is not to tyrannise over you. We all admit that in theory, but how terribly hard the practice! The words of our text seem to carry but little hope or comfort in them, to the man who has tried--as, no doubt, many of us have tried--to flee the l.u.s.ts that war against the soul, and to bridle the animal that is in him. Those who have done so most honestly know best how hard it is, and may fairly ask, Is this useless repet.i.tion of the threadbare injunction all that you have to say to us? If so, you may as well hold your tongue. A wild beast sits at my door, you say, and then you bid me, "Rule thou over it!" Tell me to tame the tiger!
"Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a hook? Wilt thou take him a servant for ever?"
I do not undervalue the earnest and sometimes partially successful efforts at moral reformation which some men of more than usual force of character are able to make, emanc.i.p.ating themselves from the outward practice of gross sin, and achieving for themselves much that is admirable. But if we rightly understand what sin is--namely, the taking self for our law and centre instead of G.o.d--and how deep its working and all-pervading its poison, we shall learn the tragic significance of the prophets question, "Can the leopard change his spots?" Then may a man cast out sin from his nature by his own resolve, when the body can eliminate poison from the veins by its own energy. If there is nothing more to be said to the world than this message, "Sin lieth at thy door--rule thou over it," we have no gospel to preach, and sin"s dominion is secure. For there is nothing in all this world of empty, windy words, more empty and windy than to come to a poor soul that is all bespattered and stained with sin, and say to him: "Get up, and make thyself clean, and keep thyself so!" It cannot be done.
So my text, though it keeps itself within the limits of the law and only proclaims duty, must have hidden, in its very hardness, a sweet kernel of promise. For what G.o.d commands G.o.d enables us to do.
Therefore these words, "Rule thou over it," do really point onwards through all the ages to that one fact in which every man"s sin is conquered and neutralised, and every man"s struggles may be made hopeful and successful, the great fact that Jesus Christ, G.o.d"s own Son, came down from heaven, like an athlete descending into the arena, to fight with and to overcome the grim wild beasts, our pa.s.sions and our sins, and to lead them, transformed, in the silken leash of His love.
My brother! your sin is mightier than you. The old word of the Psalm is true about every one of us, "Our iniquities are stronger than we." And, blessed be His name! the hope of the Psalmist is the experience of the Christian: "As for my transgressions, Thou wilt purge them away."
Christ will strengthen you, to conquer; Christ will take away your guilt; Christ will bear, has borne your burden; Christ will cleanse your memory; Christ will purge your conscience. Trusting to Him, and by His power and life within us, we may conquer our evil. Trusting to Him, and for the sake of His blood shed for us all upon the cross, we are delivered from the burden, guilt, and power of our sins and of our sin.
With thy hand in His, and thy will submitted to Him, "thou shalt tread on the lion and the adder; the young lion and the dragon thou shalt trample under foot."
WITH, BEFORE, AFTER
"Enoch walked with G.o.d,"--GENESIS v. 22.
"Walk before Me."--GENESIS xvii. 1.
"Ye shall walk after the Lord your G.o.d."--DEUTERONOMY xiii. 4.
You will have antic.i.p.ated, I suppose, my purpose in doing what I very seldom do--cutting little snippets out of different verses and putting them together. You see that these three fragments, in their resemblances and in their differences, are equally significant and instructive. They concur in regarding life as a walk--a metaphor which expresses continuity, so that every man"s life is a whole, which expresses progress, which expresses change, and which implies a goal.
They agree in saying that G.o.d must be brought into a life somehow, and in some aspect, if that life is to be anything else but an aimless wandering, if it is to tend to the point to which every human life should attain. But then they diverge, and, if we put them together, they say to us that there are three different ways in which we ought to bring G.o.d into our life. We should "walk _with_ Him," like Enoch; we should "walk _before_" Him, as Abraham was bade to do; and we should "walk _after_" Him, as the command to do was given to all Israel. And these three prepositions, _with_, _before_, _after_, attached to the general idea of life as a walk, give us a triple aspect--which yet is, of course, fundamentally, one--of the way in which life may be enn.o.bled, dignified, calmed, hallowed, focussed, and concentrated by the various relations into which we enter with Him. So I take the three of them.
1. "Enoch walked _with_ G.o.d."
That is a sweet, simple, easily intelligible, and yet lofty way of putting the notion which we bring into a more abstract and less impressive shape when we talk about communion with G.o.d. Two men travelling along a road keep each other company. "How can two walk together except they be agreed?" The companion is at our side all the same, though the mists may have come down and we cannot see Him. We can hear His voice, we can grasp His hand, we can catch the echoes of His steps. We know He is there, and that is enough. Enoch and G.o.d walked together, by the simple exercise of the faith that fills the Invisible with one great, loving Face. By a continuous, definite effort, as we are going through the bustle of daily life, and amid all the pettiness and perplexities and monotonies that make up our often weary and always heavy days, we can realise to ourselves that He is of a truth at our sides, and by purity of life and heart we can bring Him nearer, and can make ourselves more conscious of His nearness. For, brethren, the one thing that parts a man from G.o.d, and makes it impossible for a heart to expatiate in the thought of His presence, is the contrariety to His will in our conduct. The slightest invisible film of mist that comes across the blue abyss of the mighty sky will blot out the brightest of the stars, and we may sometimes not be able to see the mist, and only know that it is there because we do not see the planet. So unconscious sin may steal in between us and G.o.d, and we shall no longer be able to say, "I walk with Him."
The Roman Catholics talk, in their mechanical way, of bringing down all the spiritual into the material and formal, about the "practice of the presence of G.o.d." It is an ugly phrase, but it means a great thing, that Christian people ought, very much more than they do, to aim, day by day, and amidst their daily duties, at realising that most elementary thought which, like a great many other elementary thoughts, is impotent because we believe it so utterly, that wherever we are, we may have Him with us. It is the secret of blessedness, of tranquillity, of power, of everything good and n.o.ble.
"I am a stranger with Thee, and a sojourner, as all my fathers were,"
said the Psalmist of old. If he had left out these two little words, "with Thee," he would have been uttering a tragic complaint; but when they come in, all that is painful, all that is solitary, all that is transient, bitterly transient, in the long succession of the generations that have pa.s.sed across earth"s scene, and have not been kindred to it, is cleared away and changed into gladness. Never mind, though you are a stranger, if you have that companion. Never mind, though you are only a sojourner; if you have Him with you, whatever pa.s.ses He will not pa.s.s; and though we dwell here in a system to which we do not belong, and its transiency and our transiency bring with them many sorrows, when we can say, "Lord! Thou hast been our dwelling-place in all generations," we are at home, and that eternal home will never pa.s.s.
Enoch "walked with G.o.d," and, of course, "G.o.d took him," There was nothing else for it, and there could be no other end, for a life of communion with G.o.d here has in it the prophecy and the pledge of a life of eternal union hereafter. So, then, "practise the presence of G.o.d."
An old mystic says: "If I can tell how many times to-day I have thought about G.o.d, I have not thought about Him often enough." Walk with Him by faith, by effort, by purity.
2. And now take the other aspect suggested by the other word G.o.d spoke to Abraham: "I am the Almighty G.o.d, walk _before_ Me and be thou perfect."
That suggests, as I suppose I do not need to point out, the idea not only of communion, which the former phrase brought to our minds, but that of the inspection of our conduct. "As ever in the great Taskmaster"s eye," says the stern Puritan poet, and although one may object to that word "Taskmaster," yet the idea conveyed is the correct expansion of the commandment given to Abraham. Observe how "walk before Me" is dovetailed, as it were, between the revelation "I am the Almighty G.o.d" and the injunction "Be thou perfect." The realisation of that presence of the Almighty which is implied in the expression "Walk before Me," the a.s.surance that we are in His sight, will lead straight to the fulfilment of the injunction that bears upon the moral conduct.
The same connection of thought underlies Peter"s injunction, "Like as He ... is holy, so be ye holy in all manner of conversation," followed immediately as it is by, "If ye call on Him as Father, who without respect of persons judgeth"--as a present estimate--"according to every mail"s work, pa.s.s the time of your sojourning here in fear"--that reverential awe which will lead you to be "holy even as I am holy."
This thought that we are in that divine presence, and that there is silently, but most really, a divine opinion being formed of us, consolidated, as it were, moment by moment through our lives, is only tolerable if we have been walking with G.o.d. If we are sure, by the power of our communion with Him, of His loving heart as well as of His righteous judgment, then we can spread ourselves out before Him, as a woman will lay out her webs of cloth on the green gra.s.s for the sun to blaze down upon them, and bleach the ingrained filth out of them. We must first walk "with G.o.d" before the consciousness that we are walking "before" Him becomes one that we can entertain and not go mad. When we are sure of the "with" we can bear the "before."
Did you ever see how on a review day, as each successive battalion and company nears the saluting-point where the General inspecting sits, they straighten themselves up and dress their ranks, and pull themselves together as they pa.s.s beneath his critical eye. A master"s eye makes diligent servants. If we, in the strength of G.o.d, would only realise, day by day and act by act of our lives, that we are before Him, what a revolution could be effected on our characters and what a transformation on all our conduct!
"Walk before Me" and you will be perfect. For the Hebrew words on which I am now commenting may be read, in accordance with the usage of the language, as being not only a commandment but a promise, or, rather, not as two commandments, but a commandment with an appended promise, and so as equivalent to "If you will walk before Me you will be perfect." And if we realise that we are under "the pure eyes and perfect judgment of" G.o.d, we shall thereby be strongly urged and mightily helped to be perfect as He is perfect.
3. Lastly, take the other relation, which is suggested by the third of my texts, where Israel as a whole is commanded to "walk _after_ the Lord" their G.o.d.
In harmony with the very frequent expression of the Old Testament about "going after idols" so Israel here is to "go after G.o.d." What does that mean? Communion, the consciousness of being judged by G.o.d, will lead on to aspiration and loving, longing effort to get nearer and nearer to Him. "My soul followeth hard after Thee," said the Psalmist, "Thy right hand upholdeth me." That element of yearning aspiration, of eager desire to be closer and closer, and liker and liker, to G.o.d must be in all true religion. And unless we have it in some measure, it is useless to talk about being Christian people. To press onwards, not as though we had already attained, but following after, if that we may apprehend that for which also we are apprehended, is the att.i.tude of every true follower of Christ. The very crown of the excellence of the Christian life is that it never can reach its goal, and therefore an immortal youth of aspiration and growth is guaranteed to it. Christian people, are you following after G.o.d? Are you any nearer to Him than you were ten years ago? "Walk with Me, walk before Me, walk after Me."
I need not do more than remind you of another meaning involved in this same expression. If I walk after G.o.d, then I let Him go before me and show me my road. Do you remember how, when the ark was to cross Jordan, the commandment was given to the Israelites to let it go well on in front, so that there should be no mistake about the course, "for ye have not pa.s.sed this way heretofore." Do not be in too great a hurry to press upon the heels of G.o.d, if I may so say. Do not let your decisions outrun His providence. Keep back the impatience that would hurry on, and wait for His ripening purposes to ripen and His counsels to develop themselves. Walk after G.o.d, and be sure you do not go in front of your Guide, or you will lose both your way and your Guide.
I need not say more than a word about the highest aspect which this third of our commandments takes, "His sheep follow Him"--"leaving us an example that we should follow in His steps," that is the culmination of the walking "with," and "before," and "after" G.o.d which these Old Testament saints were partially practising. All is gathered into the one great word, "He that saith he abideth in Him ought himself also so to walk even as He walked."
THE COURSE AND CROWN OF A DEVOUT LIFE
"And Enoch walked with G.o.d; and he was not, for G.o.d took him."
GENESIS v. 24.
This notice of Enoch occurs in the course of a catalogue of the descendants of Adam, from the Creation to the Deluge. It is evidently a very ancient doc.u.ment, and is constructed on a remarkable plan. The formula for each man is the same. So-and-so lived, begat his heir, the next in the series, lived on after that so many years, having anonymous children, lived altogether so long, and then died. The chief thing about each life is the birth of the successor, and each man"s career is in broad outline the same. A dreary monotony runs through the ages. How brief and uniform may be the records of lives of striving and tears and smiles and love that stretched through centuries! Nine hundred years shrink into less than as many lines.
The solemn monotony is broken in the case of Enoch. This paragraph begins as usual--he "lived"; but afterwards, instead of that word, we read that he "walked with G.o.d"--happy they for whom such a phrase is equivalent to "live"--and, instead of "died," it is said of him that "he _was not_." That seems to imply that he, as it were, slipped out of sight or suddenly disappeared; as one of the psalms says, "I looked, and lo! he was not." He was there a moment ago--now he is gone; and my text tells how that sudden withdrawal came about. G.o.d, with whom he walked, put out His hand and took him to Himself. Of course. What other end could there be to a life that was all pa.s.sed in communion with G.o.d except that apotheosis and crown of it all, the lifting of the man into closer communion with his Father and his Friend?
So, then, there are just these two things here--the n.o.blest life and its crown.
1. The n.o.blest life.
"He walked with G.o.d." That is all. There is no need to tell what he did or tried to do, how he sorrowed or joyed, what were his circ.u.mstances.
These may all fade from men"s knowledge as they have somewhat faded from his memory up yonder. It is enough that he walked with G.o.d.
Of course, we have here, underlying the phrase, the familiar comparison of life to a journey, with all its suggestions of constant change and constant effort, and with the suggestion, too, that each life should be a progress directly tending to one clearly recognised goal. But pa.s.sing from that, let us just think for a moment of the characteristics which must go to make up a life of which we can say that it is walking with G.o.d. The first of these clearly is the one that the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews puts his finger upon, when he makes faith the spring of Enoch"s career. The first requisite to true communion with G.o.d is vigorous exercise of that faculty by which we realise the fact of His presence with us; and that not as a jealous-eyed inspector, from whose scrutiny we would fain escape, but as a companion and friend to whom we can cleave. "He that cometh to G.o.d," and walks with G.o.d, must first of all "believe that He _is_"; and pa.s.sing by all the fascinations of things seen, and rising above all the temptations of things temporal, his realising eye must fix upon the divine Father and see Him nearer and more clearly than these. You cannot walk with G.o.d unless you are emanc.i.p.ated from the dominion of sense and time, and are living by the power of that great faculty, which lays hold of the things that are unseen as the realities, and smiles at the false and forged pretensions of material things to be the real. We have to invert the teaching of the world and of our senses. My fingers and my eyes and my ears tell me that this gross, material universe about me is the real, and that all beyond it is shadowy and (sometimes we think) doubtful, or, at any rate, dim and far off. But that is false, and the truth is precisely the other way. The Unseen is the Real, and the Material is the merely Apparent. Behind all visible objects, and giving them all their reality, lies the unchangeable G.o.d.