"And he removed from thence unto a mountain on the east of Beth-el, and pitched his tent, having Beth-el on the west, and Hai on the east: and there he builded an altar unto the Lord, and called upon the name of the Lord."
GENESIS xii. 3.
These are the two first acts of Abram in the land of Canaan.
1. _All life should blend earthly and heavenly._
They are not to be separated. Religion should run through everything and take the whole of life for its field. Where we cannot carry it is no place for us. It is a shame that heathenism should be more penetrated by its religion than Christendom is.
2. _The family should be a church._
Domestic religion. New Testament households. Abram a priest. The decay of family religion, worship, and instruction.
3. _The service to G.o.d should be more costly than to ourselves._
Pitching a tent cheaper than building an altar. Give G.o.d the best. We build ourselves ceiled houses and the ark dwells in curtains. Pagans build elaborate temples, but their houses are hovels. Too many Christians do the opposite.
4. _Building for G.o.d lasts, for selves perishes._
A tent is stricken, and no trace remains but embers. The stones of Jacob"s altar may be standing yet. The Parthenon of Athens remains: where are the hovels of the people? "He that doeth the will of G.o.d abideth for ever." Permanent results of transitory deeds.
THE IMPORTANCE OF A CHOICE
"And Abram went up out of Egypt, he, and his wife, and all that he had, and Lot with him, into the south. And Abram was very rich in cattle, in silver, and in gold.
And he went on his journeys from the south even to Beth-el, unto the place where his tent had been at the beginning, between Beth-el and Hal; Unto the place of the altar, which he had made there at the first: and there Abram called on the name of the Lord. And Lot also, which went with Abram, had flocks, and herds, and tents. And the land was not able to bear them, that they might dwell together: for their substance was great, so that they could not dwell together. And there was a strife between the herdmen of Abram"s cattle and the herdmen of Lot"s cattle; and the Canaanite and the Perizzite dwelled then in the land. And Abram said unto Lot, Let there be no strife, I pray thee, between me and thee, and between my herdmen and thy herdmen; for we be brethren. Is not the whole land before thee? Separate thyself, I pray thee, from me: if thou wilt lake the left hand, then I will go to the right; or if thou depart to the right hand, then I will go to the left. And Lot lifted up his eyes, and beheld all the plain of Jordan, that it was well watered every where, before the Lord destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, even as the garden of the Lord, like the land of Egypt, as thou comest unto Zoar. Then Lot chose him all the plain of Jordan; and Lot journeyed east: and they separated themselves the one from the other. Abram dwelled in the land of Canaan, and Lot dwelled in the cities of the plain, and pitched his tent toward Sodom.
But the men of Sodom were wicked and sinners before the Lord exceedingly."--GENESIS xiii. 1-13.
The main lesson of this section is the wisdom of seeking spiritual rather than temporal good. That is ill.u.s.trated on both sides.
Prosperity attends Abram and Lot while they think more of obeying G.o.d than of flocks and herds. Lot makes a mistake, as far as this world is concerned, when he chooses his place of abode for the sake of its material advantages. But the introductory verses (vv. 1-4) suggest a question, and seem to teach an important lesson. Was Abram right in so soon leaving the land to which G.o.d had led him, and going down to Egypt? Was that not taking the bit between his teeth? He had been commanded to go to Canaan; should he not have stopped there--famine or no famine--till the same authority commanded him to leave the land? If G.o.d had put him there, should he not have trusted G.o.d to keep him alive in famine? The narrative seems to imply that his going to Egypt was a failure of faith. It gives no hint of a divine voice leading him thither. We do not hear that he builded any altar beside his tent there, as he had done in the happier days of life by trust. His stay resulted in peril and in something very like lying, for which he had to bear the disgrace of being rebuked by an idolater, and having no word of excuse to offer. The great lesson of the whole section, and indeed of Abram"s whole life, receives fresh ill.u.s.tration from the story thus understood, which preaches loudly that trust is safety and wellbeing, and that it is always sin and always folly to leave Canaan, where G.o.d has put us, even if there be a famine, and to go down into Egypt, even if its harvests be abundant.
But another lesson is also taught. After the interruption of the Egyptian journey, Abram had to begin all his Canaan life over again.
Very emphatically the narrative puts it, that he went to "the place where his tent had been at the beginning," to the altar which he had made at the first. Yes! that is the only place for a man who has faltered and gone aside from the course of obedience. He must begin over again. The backsliding Christian has to resort anew to the place of the penitent, and to come to Christ, as he did at first for pardon.
It is a solemn thought that years of obedience and heroisms of self-surrender, may be so annihilated by some act of self-seeking distrust that the whole career has, as it were, to be begun anew from the very starting-point. It is a blessed thought that, however far and long we may have wandered, we can always return to the place where we were at the beginning, and there call on the name of the Lord.
Note how we are taught here the great truth for the Old Testament, that outward prosperity follows most surely those who do not seek for it.
Abram"s wealth has increased, and his companion, Lot, has shared in the prosperity. It is because he "went with Abram" that he "had flocks, and herds, and tents." Of course, the connection between despising the world and possessing it is not thus close in New Testament times. But even now, one often sees that the men who _will_ be rich fall into a pit of poverty, and that a heart set on higher things, which counts earthly advantages second and not first, wins a sufficiency of these most surely. Foxlike cunning, and wolf-like rapacity, and Devil-like selfishness, which make up a large portion of what the world calls "great business capacity," do not always secure the prize. But the real possession of earth and all its wealth depends to-day, as much as ever it did in Abram"s times, on seeking "first the kingdom of G.o.d, and His righteousness." Only when we are Christ"s are all things ours. They are ours, not by the vulgar way of what the world calls ownership, but in proportion as we use them to the highest ends of helping us to grow in wisdom and Christ-likeness, in the measure in which we subordinate them to heavenly good, in the degree in which we employ them as means of serving Christ. We can see the Pleiades best by not looking directly at, but somewhat away from, them; and just as pleasure, if made the direct object of life, ceases to be pleasure, so the world"s goods, if taken for our chief aim, cease to yield even the imperfect good which they can bestow.
But now we have to look at the two dim figures which the remainder of this story presents to us, and which shine there, in that far-off past, types and instances of the two great cla.s.ses into which men are divided,--Abram, the man of faith; Lot, the man of sense.
Mark the conduct of the man of faith. Why should he, who has G.o.d"s promise that all the land is his, squabble with his kinsman about pasture and wells? The herdsmen naturally would come to high words and blows, especially as the available land was diminished by the claims of the "Canaanite and Perizzite." But the direct effect of Abram"s faith was to make him feel that the matter in dispute was too small to warrant a quarrel. A soul truly living in the contemplation of the future, and filled with G.o.d"s promises, will never be eager to insist on its rights, or to stand on its dignity, and will take too accurate a measure of the worth of things temporal to get into a heat about them.
The clash of conflicting interests, and the bad blood bred by them, seem infinitely small, when we are up on the height of communion with G.o.d. An acre or two more or less of gra.s.s land does not look all-important, when our vision of the city which hath foundations is clear. So an elevated calm and "sweet reasonableness" will mark the man who truly lives by faith, and he will seek after the things that make for peace. Abram could fight, as Old Testament morality permitted, when occasion arose, as Lot found out to his advantage before long. But he would not strive about such trifles.
May we not venture to apply his words to churches and sects? They too, if they have faith strong and dominant, will not easily fall out with one another about intrusions on each other"s territory, especially in the presence, as at this day, of the common foe. When the Canaanite and the Perizzite are in the land, and Unbelief in militant forms is arrayed against us, it is more than folly, it is sin, for brethren to be turning their weapons against each other. The common foe should make them stand shoulder to shoulder. Abram"s faith led, too, to the n.o.ble generosity of his proposal. The elder and superior gives the younger and inferior the right of option, and is quite willing to take Lot"s leavings. Right or left--it mattered not to him; G.o.d would be with him, whichever way he went; and the glorious Beyond, for which he lived, blazed too bright before his inward sight to let him be very solicitous where he was. "I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content." It does not matter much what accommodation we have on ship-board, when the voyage is so short. If our thoughts are stretching across the sea to the landing at home, and the welcome there, we shall not fight with our fellow-pa.s.sengers about our cabins or places at the table. And notice what rest comes when faith thus dwindles the worth of the momentary arrangements here. The less of our energies are consumed in a.s.serting ourselves, and scrambling for our rights, and cutting in before other people, so as to get the best places for ourselves, the more we shall have to spare for better things; and the more we live in the future, and leave G.o.d to order our ways, the more shall our souls be wrapped in perfect peace. Mark the conduct of the man of sense. We can fancy the two standing on the barren hills by Bethel, from one of which, as travellers tell us, there is precisely the view which Lot saw. He lifted up his greedy eyes, and there, at his feet, lay that strange Jordan valley with its almost tropical richness, its dark lines of foliage telling of abundant water, the palm-trees of Jericho perhaps, and the glittering cities. Up there among the hills there was little to tempt,--rocks and scanty herbage; down below, it was like the lost Eden, or the Egypt from which they had but lately come.
What need for hesitation? True, the men of the plain were "wicked and sinners before the Lord exceedingly," as the chapter says with grim emphasis. But Lot evidently never thought about that. He knew it, though, and ought to have thought about it. It was his sin that he was guided in his choice only by considerations of temporal advantage. Put his action into words, and it says, "Gra.s.s for my sheep is more to me than fellowship with G.o.d, and a good conscience." No doubt he would have had salves enough. "I do not need to become like them, though I live among them." "A man must look after his own interests." "I can serve G.o.d down there as well as up here." Perhaps he even thought that he might be a missionary among these sinners. But at bottom he did not seek first the kingdom of G.o.d, but the other things.
We have seldom the choice put before us so dramatically and sharply; but it is as really presented to each. There is the shameless cynicism of the men who avowedly only ask the question, "Will it pay?" But there are subtler forms which affect us all. It is the standing temptation of Englishmen to apply a money standard to everything, to adopt courses of action of which the only recommendation is that they promote getting on in the world. Men who call themselves Christians select schools for their children, or professions for their boys, or marriages for their daughters, down in Sodom, because it will give them a lift in life which they would not get up in the starved pastures at Bethel, with n.o.body but Abram and his like to a.s.sociate with. If the earnestness with which men pursue an end is to be taken as any measure of its importance in their eyes, it certainly does not look much as if modern average Christians did believe that it was of more moment to be united to G.o.d, and to be growing like Him, than to secure a good large share of earthly possessions. Tried by the test of conduct, their faith in getting on is a great deal deeper than their faith in getting up. But if our religion does not make us put the world beneath our feet, and count all things but loss that we may win Christ, we had better ask ourselves whether our religion is any better than Lot"s, which was second-hand, and was much more imitation of Abram than obedience to G.o.d.
Lot teaches us that material good may tempt and conquer, even after it has once been overcome. His early life had been heroic; in his young enthusiasm, he had thrown in his portion with Abram in his great venture. He had not been thinking of his flocks when he left Haran.
Probably, as I have just said, he was a good deal galvanised into imitation; but still, he had chosen the better part. But now he has tired of a pilgrim"s life. There are men who cut down the thorns, and in whom the seed is sown; but thorns are tenacious of life, and quick growing, and so they spread over the field and choke the seed. It is easier to take some one bold step than to keep true through life to its spirit. Youth contemns, but too often middle-age worships, worldly success. The world tightens its grasp as we grow older, and Lot and Demas teach us that it is hard to keep for a lifetime on the heights.
Faith, strong and ever renewed by communion, can do it; nothing else can.
Lot"s history teaches what comes of setting the world first, and G.o.d"s kingdom second. For one thing, the a.s.sociation with it is sure to get closer. Lot began with choosing the plain; then he crept a little nearer, and pitched his tent "towards" Sodom; next time we hear of him, he is living in the city, and mixed up inextricably with its people.
The first false step leads on to connections unforeseen, from which the man would have shrunk in horror, if he had been told that he would make them. Once on the incline, time and gravity will settle how far down we go. We shall see, in subsequent sections, how far Lot"s own moral character suffered from his choice. But we may so far antic.i.p.ate the future narrative as to point out that it affords a plain instance of the great truth that the sure way to lose the world as well as our own souls, is to make it our first object. He would have been safe if he had stopped up among the hills. The shadowy Eastern kings who swooped down on the plain would never have ventured up there. But when we choose the world for our portion, we lay ourselves open to the full weight of all the blows which change and fortune can inflict, and come voluntarily down from an impregnable fastness to the undefended open.
Nor is this all; but at the last, when the fiery rain bursts on the doomed city, Lot has to leave all the wealth for which he has sacrificed conscience and peace, and escapes with bare life; he suffers loss even if he himself is "saved as dragged through the fire." The world pa.s.seth away and the l.u.s.t thereof, but he that doeth the will of G.o.d abideth for ever. The riches which wax not old, and need not to be left when we leave all things besides, are surely the treasures which the calmest reason dictates should be our chief aim. G.o.d is the true portion of the soul; if we have Him, we have all. So, let us seek Him first, and, with Him, all else is ours.
ABRAM THE HEBREW
"And there came one that had escaped, and told Abram the Hebrew."
GENESIS xiv. 13.
This is a singular designation of Abram as "The Hebrew." Probably we have in its use here a trace of the customary epithet which he bore among the inhabitants of Canaan, and perhaps the presence of the name in this narrative may indicate the influence of some older account, traditional or written, which owed its authorship to some of them. At all events, this is the first appearance of the name in Scripture. As we all know, it has become that of the nation, but a Jew did not call himself a "Hebrew" except in intercourse with foreigners. As in many other cases, the national name used by other nations was not that by which the people called themselves. Here, obviously, it is not a national name, for the very good reason that there was no nation then.
It is a personal epithet, or, in plain English, a nickname, and it means, probably, as the ancient Greek translation of Genesis gives it, neither more nor less than "The man from the other side," the man that had come across the water. Just as a mediaeval prince bore the _sobriquet_ Outremere-the "man from beyond the sea"--so Abram, to the aboriginal, or, at least, long-settled, inhabitants of the country, was known simply as the foreigner, the "man from the other side" (of the Jordan, or more probably of the great river Euphrates), the man from across the water.
Now that name may suggest, with a permissible, and, I hope, not misleading play of fancy, just two things, which I seek now to press upon our hearts and consciences. The one is as to how men become Christians, and the other is as to how they look to other people when they are.
1. Men become Christians by a great emigration.
"Get thee out from thy father"s house, and from thy country, and from thy kindred," was the command to Abram. And he became the heir to G.o.d"s promises and the father of the faithful, because he did not hesitate a moment to make the plunge and to leave behind him all his past, his a.s.sociations, his loves, much of his possessions, and, in a very profound sense, his old self, and put a great impa.s.sable gulf between him and them all.
Now I am not going to say anything so narrow or foolish as that the Christian life must always begin with a conscious and sudden change; but this I am quite sure of, that in the vast majority of cases of thoroughly and out-and-out religious men, there must be a conscious change, whether it has been diffused through months or years, or concentrated in one burning moment. There has been a beginning; whether it has been like the dawn, or whether it has been like the kindling of a candle, the beginning of the flashing of the divine light into the heart; and the men that are most really under the influence of religious truth can, as a rule, looking back upon their past experience, see that it divides itself into two halves, separated from each other by a profound gulf--the time on the other side, and that on this side, of the great river. We must take heed lest by insisting on any one way of entrance into the kingdom we seem to narrow G.o.d"s mercy, or sadden true hearts, or make the method of approach a test of the fact of entrance. G.o.d"s city has more than twelve gates; they open to all the thirty-two points of the compa.s.s, yet there is, in the religious experience of the truest saints, always something a.n.a.logous to this change. And what I desire to press upon you is, that unless you are only religious people after the popular superficial fashion of the day, there will be something like it in your lives.
There will be a change in a man"s deepest self, so that he will be a "new creature," with new tastes, new motives stirring to action, new desires pressing for satisfaction, new loves sweetly filling his heart, new insight into the meanings and true good of life and time guiding his conduct, new aversions withdrawing him from old delights which have become hateful now, new hopes pluming their growing wings, and new powers bearing him along a new road. There will be a change in his relations to G.o.d and to G.o.d"s will. G.o.d in Christ will have become his centre, instead of self, which was so before. He lives in a new world, being himself a new man.
Our Lord uses this very ill.u.s.tration when He says, "He that heareth My Word, and believeth Him that sent Me, hath eternal life, and cometh not into judgment, but hath pa.s.sed out of death into life." That is a great migration, is it not, from the condition of a corpse to that of a living man? Paul, too, gives the same idea with a somewhat different turn of the ill.u.s.tration, when he gives "thanks to the Father who delivered us out of the power of darkness, and translated us into the kingdom of,"--not, as we might expect to complete the ant.i.thesis, "the light," but--the "kingdom of the Son of His love," which is the same thing as the light. The ill.u.s.tration is probably drawn from the practice of the ancient conquering monarchs, who, when they subjugated a country, were wont to lead away captive long files of its inhabitants as compulsory colonists, and set them down in another land. Thus the conquering Christ comes, and those whom He conquers by His love, He shifts by a great emigration out of the dominion of that darkness which is at once tyranny and anarchy, and leads them into the happy kingdom of the light.
Thus, then, all Christian men become such, because they turn their backs upon their old selves, and crucify their affections and l.u.s.ts; and paste down the leaf, as it were, on which their blotted past is writ, and turn over a new and a fairer one. And my question to you, dear brethren, is, Are you men from the other side, who were not born where you live now, and who have pa.s.sed out of the native Chaldea into the foreign--and yet to the new self home--land of union with G.o.d?
2. This designation may be taken as teaching that a Christian should be known as a foreigner, a man from across the water.
Everybody in Canaan that knew Abram at all knew him as not one of themselves. The Hebrew was the name he went by, because his unlikeness to the others was the most conspicuous thing about him, even to the shallowest eye. Abram found himself, when he had migrated into Canaan, in no barbarous country, but plunged at once into the midst of an organised and compact civilisation, that walled its cities, and had the comforts and conveniences and regularities of a settled order; and in the midst of it all, what did he do? He elected to live in a tent. "He dwelt in tabernacles, as the Epistle to the Hebrews comments upon his history, "because he looked for a city." The more his expectations were fixed upon a permanent abode, the more transitory did he make his abode here. If there had been no other city to fill his eyes, he would have gone and lived in some of those that were in the land. If there had been no other order to which he felt himself to belong, he would have had no objection to cast in his lot with the order and the people with whom he lived on friendly terms. But although he bought and sold with them, and fought for them and by their sides, and acquired from them land in which to bury his dead, he was not one of them, but said, "No!
I am not going into your city. I stay in my tent under this terebinth tree; for I am here as a stranger and a sojourner." No doubt there were differences of language, dress, and a hundred other little things which helped the impression made on the men of the land by this strange visitor who lived in amity but in separation, and they are all crystallised in the name which the popular voice gave him, "The man from the other side."
That is the impression which Christian people ought to make in the world. They should be recognised, by even un.o.bservant eyes who know nothing of the inner secret of their lives, as plainly belonging to another order. If we seek to keep fresh in our own minds the consciousness that we do so, it will make itself manifest in all our bearing and actions. So that exhortation to cultivate the continual sense that our true city--the mother city of our hearts and hopes--is in heaven is ever to be reiterated, and as constantly obeyed, as the necessary condition of a life worthy of our true affinities and of our glorious hopes.
Nor less needful is the other exhortation--live by the laws of your own land, not by those of the foreign country where you are for a time. If you do that thoroughly, you will not need to say, "I am from another country." Your conduct will say it for you. An English ship is a bit of England, in whatever lat.i.tude it may be, and however far beyond the three-mile limit of the King"s authority upon the seas it may float.
And so, wherever there is a Christian man, there is a bit of G.o.d"s kingdom, and over that little speck in the midst of the ocean of the world the flag with the Cross on it should fly, and the laws of the Christ should be the only laws that have currency. If it could be said of us as Haman said to his king about the Jews, that we were a people with laws "diverse from those of all people," we should be doing more than, alas! most of us do, to honour Him whom we profess to serve.
Follow Christ, and people will be quick enough to say of you "The man from the other side," "He does not belong to our city." There is no need for ostentation, nor for saying, "Come and see my zeal for the Lord," nor for blowing trumpets before us at street corners or elsewhere. The less of all that the better. The more we try to do the common things done by the folk round us, but from another motive, the more powerful will be our witness for our Master.
For instance, when John Knox was in the French galleys, he was fastened to the same oar with some criminal, perhaps a murderer. The two men sat on the same bench, did the same work, tugged at the same heavy sweep, were fed with the same food, suffered the same sorrows. Do you think there was any doubt as to the infinite gulf between them? We may be working side by side, at the very same tasks, and under similar circ.u.mstances, with men that have no share in our faith, and no sympathy with our hopes and aspirations, and yet, though doing the same thing, it will _not_ be the same thing. And if we keep Christ before us, and follow His steps who has left us an example, depend upon it people will very soon find out that we are men "from across the water."