The Gospel of the Pentateuch: A Set of Parish Sermons

Yes, my friends, settle in your hearts that the book of Deuteronomy is meant for you, and for all the nations upon earth, as much as for the old Jews.  That its promises and warnings are to you and to your children as surely as they were to the old Jews.  Ay, that they are meant for every nation that is, or ever was, or ever will be upon earth.  If you would prosper on the earth, fear God and keep his commandments; and know and consider it in your heart that the Lord Jesus Christ he is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath: there is none else.  He it is who gives grace and honour.  He it is who delivers us out of the hands of our enemies.  He it is who blesses the fruit of the womb, and the fruit of the flock, and the fruit of the garden and the field.  He is the living God, in whom this world, as well as the world to come, lives and moves and has its being; and only by obeying his laws can man prosper, he and his children after him, upon this earth of God.

SERMON XVI.  NATIONAL WEALTH

(Fifth Sunday after Easter.)

Deut. viii. 11-18.  Beware that thou forget not the Lord thy God, in not keeping his commandments, and his judgments, and his statutes, which I command thee this day: lest when thou hast eaten and art full, and hast built goodly houses, and dwelt therein; and when thy herds and thy flocks multiply, and thy silver and thy gold is multiplied, and all that thou hast is multiplied; then thine heart be lifted up, and thou forget the Lord thy God, which brought thee forth out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage; who led thee through that great and terrible wilderness, wherein were fiery serpents, and scorpions, and drought, where there was no water; who brought thee forth water out of the rock of flint; who fed thee in the wilderness with manna, which thy fathers knew not, that he might humble thee and that he might prove thee, to do thee good at thy latter end: and thou say in thine heart, My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth.  But thou shall remember the Lord thy God: for it is he that giveth thee power to get wealth, that he may establish his covenant which he sware unto thy fathers, as it is this day.

I told you before that the book of Deuteronomy was the foundation of all sound politics—as one would expect it to be, if its author were Moses, the greatest lawgiver whom the world ever saw.  But here, in this lesson, is a proof of the truth of what I said.  For here, in the text, is Moses’ answer to the first great question in politics, What makes a nation prosperous?

To that wise men have always answered, as Moses answered, ‘Good government; government according to the laws of God.’  That alone makes a nation prosperous.

But the multitude—who are not wise men, nor likely to be for some time to come—give a different answer.  They say, ‘What makes a nation prosperous is its wealth.  If Britain be only rich, then she must be safe and right.’

To which Moses, being a wise lawgiver, and having, moreover, in him the Spirit of the Lord who knoweth what is in man, makes a reasonable, liberal, humane answer.

Moses does not deny that wealth is a good thing.  He does not bid them not try to be rich.  He takes for granted that they will grow rich; that the national fruit of their good government will be that they will increase in cattle and in crops and in money, and in all which makes an agricultural people rich.

He takes for granted, I say, that these Jews will grow very rich; but he warns them that their riches, like all other earthly things, may be a curse or a blessing to them.  Nay, that they are not good in themselves, but mere tools which may be used for good or for evil.  He warns them of a very great danger that riches will bring on them.  And herein he shows his knowledge of the human heart; for it is a certain fact that whenever any nation has prospered, and their flocks and herds, and silver and gold, all that they had, have multiplied, then they have, as Moses warned the Jews, forgotten the Lord their God, and said, ‘My power and the might of my hand hath gotten me this wealth.’

And it is true, also, that whenever any nation has begun to say that, they have fallen into confusion and misery, and sometimes into utter ruin, till they repented, and turned and remembered the Lord their God, and found out that the strength of a nation did not consist in riches, but in virtue.  For it is he that giveth the power to get wealth.  He gives it in two ways: First, God gives the raw material; secondly, he gives the wit to use it.

You will all agree that God gives the first; that he gives the soil, the timber, the fisheries, the coal, the iron.

Do you believe it?  I hope and trust that you do.  But I fear that now-a-days many do not; for they boast of the resources of Britain as if we ourselves had made Britain, and not Almighty God; as if we had put the coal and the iron into the rocks, and not Almighty God ages before we were born.

And if they will not say that openly, at least they will say, ‘But the coal, and iron, and all other raw material would have been useless, if it had not been for the genius and energy of the British race.’

Of course not.  But who gave them that genius and energy?  Who gave them the wit to find the coal and iron?

God; and God gave it to us when we needed it, and not before.

Think of this, I beseech you; for it is true, and wonderful, and a thing of which I may say, ‘Come, and I will reason with you of the righteous acts of the Lord.’

Men say, ‘As long as England is ahead of the world in coal and iron she may defy the world.’  I do not believe it; for if she became a wicked nation all the coal and iron in the universe would not keep her from being ruined.

But even if it were true, which it is not, that the strength of Britain lies in coal and iron, and not in British hearts, what right have we to boast of coal and iron?

Did our forefathers know of them when they came into this land?  Did they come after coal and iron?

Not they.  They came here to settle as small yeomen; to till miserable little patches of corn, of which we should be now ashamed, and to feed cattle on the moors, and swine in the forests—and that was all they looked to.  Then they found that there was iron, principally down south, in Sussex and Surrey; and they worked it, clumsily enough, with charcoal; and for more than twelve hundred years they were here in England, with no notion of the boundless wealth in iron and coal lying together in the same rocks which God had provided for them; or if they did guess at it, they could not use it, because they could not work deep mines, being unable to pump out the water; for God had not opened their eyes and shown them how to do it.

But just when it was wanted, God did show them.  About the middle of the last century the iron in the Weald was all but worked out; the charcoal wood was getting scarcer and scarcer, and there was every chance that England, instead of being ahead of all nations in iron, would have fallen behind other nations; and then where should we have been now?

But, just about one hundred years ago, it pleased God to open the eyes of certain men, and they invented steam-engines.  Then they could pump the mines, then they could discover and use the vast riches of our coal-mines.  Then, too, sprung up a thousand useful arts and manufactures; while the land, not being wanted for charcoal and firewood, as of old, could be cleared of wood, and thousands of acres set free to grow corn.  Population, which had been all but standing still, without increasing, has now more than doubled, and wealth inestimable has come to this generation, of which our forefathers never dreamed.

Now what have we to boast of in that?  What, save to confess ourselves a very stupid race, who for twelve hundred years could not discover, or at least use the boundless wealth which God had given us, because we had not wit enough to invent so simple a thing as a steam-engine.

All we should do, instead of boasting, is to bless God that he revealed to us just what we needed, and at the very time at which we needed it, and confess that it is he that giveth us power to get wealth.  It is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves.

Look again at another case, even more extraordinary, which has happened during our own times—indeed within the last ten years—the discovery of gold in Australia.

There had been rumours and whispers of gold for years before; and yet no one looked for gold, cared for it, hardly believed in it.  God had dulled their understanding and blinded their eyes for some good purpose of his own.  That is what the Bible would have said of such a matter, and that is what we should say.

And at last some man finds lying out upon the downs a huge lump of gold—by accident (as men call it; by the special providence of God, as they ought to call it); and at that every one starts up and awakes, and begins looking for gold.  And now that their eyes are opened, behold! the gold is everywhere.  Not merely in lonely forests and unexplored mountains, but on farms where the sheep have been pastured for years past; ay, even Melbourne streets were full of gold, under the feet of the passengers and the wheels of the carriages; there had the gold been all along, but men could not see it till God opened their eyes.  Verily, verily, God is great, and man is small.  I do not say that this was a miracle in the common meaning of the word; but I do say that this was a striking instance of that everlasting and special providence of the living God, who ordereth all things in heaven and earth, from the rise of a nation to the fall of a sparrow; and does so, not by breaking his own laws, but by making his laws work exactly as he will, when he will, and where he will; and I say that it is a fresh proof of the great saying, that no man can see a thing unless God shows it to him.  For it is the Lord who gives us power to get wealth.  It is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves; and in him we live and move, and have our being.

This, then, was what Moses commanded—to remember that they owed all to God.  What they had, they had of God’s free gift.  What they were, they were by God’s free grace.  Therefore they were not to boast of themselves, their numbers, their wealth, their armies, their fair and fertile land.  They were to make their boast of God, and of God’s goodness.

He that gloried was to glory in the Lord, and confess that a Syrian ready to perish was their father Jacob, when the Lord had mercy on him, and made him the head of a great tribe, and the father of a great nation; that not themselves, but God had brought them out of Egypt with signs and wonders; that they got not the land in possession by their own bow, neither was it their own sword that helped them, but that God had driven out before them nations greater and mightier than they.

This they were to remember, because it was true.  And this we are to remember, because it is more or less true of us.  God has put us where we are.  God has made of us a great nation; God has discovered to us the immense riches of this land.  It is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves.

But more.  You will see that Moses warns them that if they forget God, the Lord who brought them out of the land of Egypt, they would go after other gods.

He cannot part the two things.  If they forget that God brought them out of Egypt, they will turn to idolatry, and so end in ruin.

Now why was this?

Why should not the Jews have gone on worshipping one God, even if they had forgotten that he brought them out of the land of Egypt?

Some people now-a-days think that they would, and that they might have very well been what is called Monotheists, without believing all the story of the signs and wonders in Egypt, and the passage of the Red Sea, and the giving of the law to Moses.

Such men may be very learned; but there is one thing of which they know very little, and that is, human nature.  Moses knew human nature; and he knew that if men forgot that God was the living God, the acting God, who had helped them once, and was helping them always, and only believed about there being one God far away in heaven, and not two, that that sort of dead faith in a dead God would never keep them from idols.  They would want gods who would help them, who would hear their prayers, to whom they could feel gratitude and trust; and they would invent them for themselves, and begin to worship things in the heavens above, and the earth beneath, because they had forgotten their true friend and helper, the living God.

And so shall we.  If we forget that God is the living God, who brought our forefathers into this land; who has revealed to us the wealth of it step by step, as we needed it; who is helping and blessing us now, every day and all the year round—then we shall begin worshipping other gods.

I do not mean that we shall worship idols, though I do not see why our children’s children should not do so a few hundred years hence if we teach them to forget the living God.  There are too many Christians at this day who worship saints, and idols of wood and stone; and so may our descendants do—or do even worse.

But we ourselves shall begin—indeed we are doing it too much already—worshipping the so-called laws of nature, instead of God who made the laws, and so honouring the creature above the creator; or else we shall worship the pomps and vanities of this world, pride and power, money and pleasure, and say in our hearts, ‘These are our only gods which can help us—these must we obey.’  Which if we do, this land of England will come to ruin and shame, as surely as did the land of Israel in old time.

If we do not believe in the living God, we shall believe in something worse than even a dead god.

For in a dead god—a god who does nothing, but lets mankind and the world go their own way—no man nor nation ever will care to believe.

And now, nay dear friends, remember that a nation is, after all, only the people in that nation: you, and I, and our neighbours, and our neighbours’ neighbours, and so forth; and that therefore, in as far as we are wrong, we do our worst to make the British nation wrong.  If we give way to ungodly pride and self-sufficiency, then we are injuring ourselves; and not only that, but injuring our neighbours and our children after us, as far as we can.  And therefore our duty is, if we wish well to our nation, not to judge our neighbour, nor our neighbour’s neighbour, but to judge ourselves.

If we go on trusting in ourselves rather than God; if we keep within us the hard self-sufficient spirit, and boast to ourselves (though we may be ashamed to boast to our neighbours), ‘My power and the strength of my hands have got me this and that;’ and in fact live under the notion, which too many have, that we could do very well without God’s help if God would let us alone—then we are heaping up ruin and shame for ourselves and for our children after us.  Ruin and shame, I say.  We are apt to forget how easy and common it is for God to turn the wisdom of men into folly; to frustrate the tokens of the liars, and make the prophets mad.  How men blow great bubbles, and God bursts them with the slightest touch.  How, when all seems well, and men cry peace and safety, sudden destruction comes upon them unawares.  How, when men say, ‘Soul, take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry; thou hast much goods laid up for many years,’ God answers, ‘Thou fool, this night shall thy soul be required of thee.’

My friends, we see God doing thus in these very days by great nations, by great branches of industry.  Look at the American war, look at the Manchester cotton famine, and see how God can confound the strong and cunning, and blind their eyes to the ruin which is coming till it is come in all its might.  And then think, If it be so easy for him to confound such as them, is it less easy for him to confound you and me, if we begin to fancy that we can do without him, and ask, ‘Doth God perceive it?  Or is there knowledge in the Most High?  We are they that ought to speak.  Who is Lord over us?’

Yes, in this sense God is indeed a jealous God, who will not give his honour to another.  And a blessed thing for men it is that God is a jealous God, that he will punish us for trusting in anything but him—will punish us for trusting in ourselves, or in our wisdom, or in wealth, or in science, or in armies and navies, or in constitutions and laws; in anything, in short, save the living God.

For if he left us alone to go our own way without trusting or fearing him, we should surely go down and down (as the Chinese seem to have gone down), generation after generation, till we became only a mere cunning and spiteful sort of animals, hateful and hating one another.  But when we are chastened for our folly, we are chastened by him that we may be partakers of his holiness; that we may be his children, looking up to him as our father, from whom comes every good and perfect gift; the Father of Lights, with whom is no variableness or shadow of turning; and who therefore will and can give us, his children, light, more and more to understand those his invariable and eternal laws, by which he has made earth and heaven; who has given us his Son Jesus Christ our Lord, and will with him likewise freely give us all things.

SERMON XVII.  THE GOD OF THE RAIN

(Fifth Sunday after Easter.)

DEUT. xi.  11, 12.  The land, whither ye go to possess it, is a land of hills and valleys, and drinketh water of the rain of heaven.  A land which the Lord thy God careth for: the eyes of the Lord thy God are always upon it, from the beginning of the year, even unto the end of the year.

I told you, when I spoke of the earthquakes of the Holy Land, that it seems as if God had meant specially to train that strange people the Jews, by putting them into a country where they must trust him, or become cowards and helpless; that so they might learn not to fear the powers of Nature which the heathen worshipped, but to fear him the living God.

In this chapter is another instance of the same.  They were to be an agricultural people.  Their very worship was (if you can understand such a thing now-a-days) to be agricultural.  Pentecost was a feast of the first-fruits of the harvest.  The Feast of Tabernacles was a great national harvest home.  The Passover itself, though not at first an agricultural festival, became one by the waving of the Paschal sheaf, which gave permission to the people to begin their spring-harvest—so thoroughly were they to be an agricultural and cattle-feeding people.  They were going into a good land, a land of milk and honey and oil olive; a land of vines and figs and pomegranates; a rich land; but a most uncertain land—a land which might yield a splendid crop one year, and be almost barren the next.

It was not as the land of Egypt—a land which was, humanly speaking, sure to be fertile, because always supplied with water, brought out of the Nile by dykes and channels which spread in a network over every field, and where—as I believe is done now—the labourer turned the water from one land to the other simply by moving the earth with his foot.

It was a mountain land, a land of hills and valleys, and drank water of the rain of heaven; a land of fountains of water, which required to be fed continually by the rain.  In that hot climate it depended entirely on God’s providence from week to week whether a crop could grow.

Therefore it was a land which the Lord cared for—a land which needed his special help, and it had it.  ‘The eyes of the Lord God were always upon it, from the beginning of the year unto the end of the year.’

Beautiful, simple, noble, true words—deeper than all the learned words, however true they may be (and true they are, and to be listened to with respect), which men talk about the laws of Nature and of weather.  Who would change them for all the scientific phrases in the world?  The eyes of the Lord were upon the land.  It needed his care; and therefore his care it had.

Therefore the Jew was to understand from his first entry into the land, that his prosperity depended utterly on God.  The laws of weather, by which the rain comes up off the sea, were unknown to him.  They are all but unknown to us now.  But they were known to God.  Not a drop could fall without his providence and will; and therefore they were utterly in his power.

‘And it shall come to pass, if ye shall hearken diligently unto my commandments which I command you this day, to love the Lord your God, and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul, that I will give you the rain of your land in his due season, the first rain and the latter rain, that thou mayest gather in thy corn, and thy wine, and thine oil.  And I will send grass in thy fields for thy cattle, that thou mayest eat and be full.  Take heed to yourselves, that your heart be not deceived, and ye turn aside and serve other gods, and worship them; and then the Lord’s wrath be kindled against you, and he shut up the heaven, that there be no rain, and that the land yield not her fruit; and lest ye perish quickly from off the good land which the Lord giveth you.’

Now the Bible story is, that this warning came true.  More than once we read of drought—long, and severe, and ruinous.  In one famous case, there was no rain for three years; and Ahab has to go out to search through the land for a scrap of pasture.  ‘Peradventure we shall find grass enough to save the horses and mules alive.’

And most distinctly does the Bible say that these droughts came at times when the Jews had fallen into idolatry, and profligacy therewith.  That is the Scripture account.  And if you believe in the living God, whose providence ordereth all things in heaven and earth, that account will seem reasonable and credible to you.

What special means God used to bring about these great droughts we cannot know, any more than we can know why a storm or a shower should come one week and not another.  And we need not know.  God made the world, and God governs the world, and that is enough for us.

Be that as it may, Moses goes down to the very root and ground and true cause of the riches of the land, and of the rainfall, and of the prosperity of the Jews, and of the prosperity of any living nation on earth, when he says, ‘Therefore shall ye lay up these my words in your heart and in your soul, and bind them for a sign upon your hand, that they may be as frontlets between your eyes.’

‘Ye shall lay up these my words in your heart and your soul, and teach them your children when thou sittest in thine house and when thou walkest by the way, when thou liest down and when thou risest up.’  That is, thou shalt believe continually in a living God—a God who is working everywhere at every moment, about thy path and about thy bed, and spying out all thy ways; and not only about thee, but about all that thou seest.  From him comes alike rain and sunshine; from him comes the life of man; from him comes all which makes it possible for man to live upon the earth.

And it is a plain fact that the Jews for a long time did believe this—at least the prophets, psalmists and good men among them—to the most intense degree; to a degree in which perhaps no nation has believed it since.  With them God is everything, and man nothing.  Man finds out nothing: God reveals it to him.  Man’s intellect does nothing: the Spirit of God gives him understanding to do it—even, says Isaiah, understanding to plough, and to sow, and to reap his crops in due season.  It is the Spirit of God, according to the prophets and psalmists, which makes the difference between a man and a beast.  But upon the beasts too, and the green things of the earth, and on all nature, the Spirit of God works.  He is the Lord and giver of life.  Take only those four Psalms, the 8th, 18th, 29th, 104th, and learn from them what the old Jews thought of this wonderful world in which we live.

‘These all wait upon thee’—all living things by land and sea—‘that thou mayest give them meat in due season.  When thou givest it them they gather it.  When thou openest thy hand they are filled with good.  When thou hidest thy face they are troubled.  When thou takest away their breath they die, and are turned again to their dust.  When thou lettest thy breath go forth they shall be made, and thou shalt renew the face of the earth.’

So again, in the world of man, God is the living Judge, the living overlooker, rewarder, punisher of every man, not only in the life to come, but in this life.  His providence is a special providence.  But not such a poor special providence as men are too apt to dream of now-a-days, which interferes only now and then on some great occasion, or on behalf of some very favoured persons, but a special providence looking after every special act of man, and of the whole universe, from the fall of a sparrow to the fall of an empire.