is the history of God’s ways with mankind, how He has schooled and
brought them up until the coming of Christ; that if we read the Bible
histories, one after another, in the same order in which God has put them
in the Bible, we shall see that they are all regular steps in a line,
that each fresh story depends on the story which went before it; and yet,
in each fresh history, we shall find God telling men something
new—something which they did not know before. And that so the whole
Bible, from beginning to end, is one glorious, methodic, and organic tree
of life, every part growing out of the others and depending on the
others, from the root—that foundation, other than which no man can lay,
which is Christ, revealing Himself, though not by name, in that wonderful
first chapter of Genesis,—up to the _fruit_, which is the kingdom of
Christ, and Gospel of Christ, and the salvation in which we here now
stand. I told you that the lesson which God has been teaching men in all
ages is faith in God—that the saints of old were just the men who learnt
this lesson of faith. Now this, as we all know, was the secret of
Abraham’s greatness, that he had faith in God to leave his own country at
God’s bidding, and become a stranger and a pilgrim on the earth,
wandering on in full trust that God would give him another country
instead of that which he had left—“a city which hath foundations, whose
builder and maker is God.” This was what Abraham looked for. Something
of what it means we shall see presently.
You remember the story of the tower of Babel? How certain of Noah’s
family forgot the covenant which God had made with Noah, forgot that God
had commanded them to go forth in every direction and fill the earth with
human beings, solemnly promising to protect and bless them, and took on
themselves to do the very opposite—set up a kingdom of their own fashion,
and herded together for selfish safety, instead of going forth to all the
quarters of the world in a natural way, according to their families, in
their tribes, after their nations, as the eleventh chapter of Genesis
says they ought to have done. “Let us build us a city and a tower, and
make us a name, lest,” they said, “we be scattered abroad over the face
of the whole world.” Here was one act of disobedience to God’s order.
But besides this they had fallen into a slavish dread of the powers of
nature—they were afraid of another flood. They set to to build a tower,
on which they might worship the sun and stars, and the host of heaven,
and pray to them to send no more floods and tempests. They thus fell
into a slavish fear of the powers of nature, as well as into a selfish
and artificial civilisation. In short, they utterly broke the covenant
which God had made with Noah. But by miraculously confounding their
language, God drove them forth over the face of the whole earth, and so
forced them to do that which they ought to have done willingly at first.
Now, we must remember that all this happened in the very country in which
Abraham lived. He must have heard of it all—for aught we know he had
seen the tower of Babel. So that, for good or for evil, the whole Babel
event must have produced a strong effect on the mind of a thoughtful man
like Abraham, and raised many strange questionings in his heart, which
God alone could answer for him, _or for us_. Now, what did God mean to
teach Abraham by calling him out of his country, and telling him, “I will
make of thee a great nation?” I think He meant to shew him, for one
thing, that that Babel plan of society was utterly absurd and accursed,
certain to come to naught, and so to lead him on to hope for a city which
had foundations, and to see that _its_ builder and maker must be, not the
selfishness or the ambition of men, but the will, and the wisdom, and
providence of God.
Let us see how God led Abraham on to understand this—to look for a city
which had foundations; in short, to understand what a State and a nation
means and ought to be. First, God taught him that he was not to cling
coward-like to the place where he was born, but to go out boldly to
colonise and subdue the earth, for the great God of heaven would protect
and guide him. “Get thee out of thy country and from thy father’s house
unto a land which I will shew thee. And I will bless them that bless
thee, and curse them that curse thee.” Again; God taught him what a
nation was: “_I_ will make of thee a great nation.” As much as to say,
‘Never fancy, as those fools at Babel did, that a nation only means a
great crowd of people—never fancy that men can make themselves into a
nation just by feeding altogether, and breeding altogether, and fighting
altogether, as the herds of wild cattle and sheep do, while there is no
real union between them.’ For what brought those Babel men together?
Just what keeps a herd of cattle together—selfishness and fear. Each man
thought he would be _safer_, forsooth, in company. Each man thought that
if he was in company, he could use his neighbours’ wits as well as his
own, and have the benefit of his neighbours’ strength as well as his own.
And that is all true enough; but that does not make a nation.
Selfishness can join nothing; it may join a set of men for a time, each
for his own ends, just as a joint-stock company is made up; but it will
soon split them up again. Each man, in a merely selfish community, will
begin, after a time, to play on his own account as well as work on his
own account—to oppress and overreach for his own ends as well as to be
honest and benevolent for his own ends, for he will find ill-doing far
easier, and more natural, in one sense, and a plan that brings in quicker
profits, than well-doing; and so this godless, loveless,
every-man-for-himself nation, or sham nation rather, this joint-stock
company, in which fools expect that universal selfishness will do the
work of universal benevolence, will quarrel and break up, crumble to dust
again, as Babel did. “But,” says God to Abraham, “I will make of thee a
great nation. I make nations, and not they themselves.” So it is, my
friends: this is the lesson which God taught Abraham, the lesson which we
English must learn nowadays over again, or smart for it bitterly—that God
makes nations. He is King of kings; “by Him kings reign and princes
decree judgment.” He judges all nations: He nurtureth the nations. This
is throughout the teaching of the Psalms. “It is He that hath made us,
and not we ourselves; we are His people, and the sheep of His pasture;”
for this I take to be the true bearing of that glorious national hymn the
100th Psalm, and not merely the old truism that men did not create
themselves, when it exhorts _all_ nations to praise God because it is He
that hath made them nations, and not they themselves. The Psalms set
forth the Son of God as the King of all nations. In Him, my friends,—in
Him all the nations of the earth are truly blessed.
He the Saviour of a few individual souls only? God forbid! To Him _all
power_ is given in heaven and earth; by Him were all things created,
whether in heaven or earth, visible and invisible, whether they be
thrones or dominions, or principalities or powers;—all national life, all
forms of government, whether hero-despotisms, republics, or monarchies,
aristocracies of birth, or of wealth, or of talent,—all were created by
Him and for Him, and He is before all things, and by Him all things
_consist_ and hold together. Every thing or institution on earth which
has systematic and organic life in it—by _Him_ it consists—by Him, the
Life and the Light who lighteneth every man that cometh into the world.
From Him come law, and order, and spiritual energy, and loving
fellow-feeling, and patriotism, the spirit of wisdom, and understanding,
and prudence—all, in short, by which a nation consists and holds
together. It is not constitutions, and acts of parliament, and social
contracts, and rights of the people, and rights of kings, and so on,
which make us a nation. These are but the effects, and not the
consequences, of the national life. _That_ is the one spirit which is
shed abroad upon a country, whose builder and maker is God, and which
comes down from above—comes down from Christ the King of kings, who has
given each nation its peculiar work on this earth, its peculiar
circumstances and history to mould and educate it for its work, and its
peculiar spirit and national character, wherewith to fulfil the destiny
which Christ has appointed for it.
Believe me, my friends, it takes long years, too, and much training from
God and from Christ, the King of kings, to make a nation. Everything
which is most precious and great is also most slow in growing, and so is
a nation. The Scripture compares it everywhere to a tree; and as the
tree grows, a people must grow, from small beginnings, perhaps from a
single family, increasing on, according to the fixed laws of God’s world,
for years and hundreds of years, till it becomes a mighty nation, with
one Lord, one faith, one work, one Spirit.
But again; God said to Abraham, when He had led him into this far
country, “Unto thy seed will _I give this land_.” This was a great and a
new lesson for Abraham, that the earth belonged to that same great
invisible God who had promised to guide and protect him, and make him
into a nation—that this same God gave the earth to whomsoever He would,
and allotted to each people their proper portion of it. “He (said St.
Paul on the Areopagus) hath determined the times before appointed for all
nations, and the bounds of their habitation, that they may seek after the
Lord and find Him.” Ah! this must have been a strange and a new feeling
to Abraham; but, stranger still, though God had given him this land, he
was not to take possession of a single foot of it; the land was already
in the hands of a different nation, the people of Canaan; and Abraham was
to go wandering about a sojourner, as the text says, in this very land of
promise which God had given him, without ever taking possession of his
own, simply because it belonged to others already. How this must have
taught Abraham that the rights of property were sacred things—things
appointed by God; that it was an awful and a heinous sin to make wanton
war on other people, to drive them out and take possession of their land;
that it was not mere force or mere fancy which gave men a right to a
country, but the providence of Almighty God! Now Abraham needed this
warning, for the men of Babel seem from the first to have gone on the
plan of driving out and conquering the tribes round them. They seem to
have set up their city partly from ambition. “Let us make us a name,”
they said, meaning, ‘Let us make ourselves famous and terrible to all the
people around us, that we may subdue them.’ And we read of Nimrod, who
was their first king and the founder of Babel, that he was a mighty
hunter before the Lord, that is, as most learned men explain it, a mighty
conqueror and tyrant in defiance of God and His laws, as the poet says of
him,
“A mighty hunter, and his game was man.”
The Jews, indeed, have an old tradition that Nimrod cast Abraham into a
fiery furnace for refusing to worship the host of heaven with him. The
story is very likely untrue, but still it is of use in shewing what sort
of reputation Nimrod left behind him in his own part of the world. We
may thus see that Abraham would need warning against these habits of
violence, tyranny, and plunder, into which the men of Babel and other
tribes were falling. And this was what God meant to teach him by keeping
him a stranger and a pilgrim in the very land which God had promised to
him for his own. Thus Abraham learnt respect for the rights and
properties of his neighbours; thus he learnt to look up in faith to God,
not only as his patron and protector, but as the lord and absolute owner
of the soil on which he stood.
Now in the 14th chapter of Genesis there is an account of Abraham’s being
called on to put in practice what he had learnt, and, by doing so,
learning a fresh lesson. We read of four kings making war against five
kings, against Chedorlaomer, king of Elam or Persia, who had been
following the ways of Nimrod and the men of Babel, and conquering these
foreign kings and making them serve him. We read of Chedorlaomer and
four other kings coming down and wantonly ravaging and destroying other
countries, besides the five kings who had rebelled against them, and at
last carrying off captive the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, and Lot,
Abraham’s nephew. We read then how Abraham armed his trained servants,
born in his own house, three hundred and eighteen men, and pursued after
these tyrants and plunderers, and with his small force completely
overthrew that great army. Now that was a sign and a lesson to Abraham,
as much as to say, ‘See the fruits of having the great God of heaven and
earth for your protector and your guide,—see the fruits of having men
round you, not hirelings, keeping in your company just to see what they
can get by it, but born in your own house, who love and trust you, whom
you can love and trust,—see how the favour of God, and reverence for
those family ties and duties which He has appointed, make you and your
little band of faithful men superior to these great mobs of selfish,
godless, unjust robbers,—see how hundreds of these slaves ran away before
one man, who feels that he is a member of a family, and has a just cause
for fighting, and that God and his brethren are with him.’
Here, you see, was another hint to Abraham of what it was and who it was
that made a great nation.
And now some of you may say, ‘This is a strange sermon. You have as yet
said nothing of Christ, nothing of the Holy Spirit, nothing of grace,
redemption, sanctification. What kind of sermon is this?’
My friends, do not be too sure that I have not been preaching Christ to
you, and Christ’s Spirit to you, and Christ’s redemption too, most truly
in this sermon, although I have mentioned none of them by name. There
are times for ornamenting the house, there are times for repairing the
wall, there are times, too, for thoroughly examining the foundation,
because, if that be not sound, it is little matter what fine work is
built up upon it; and there are times when, as David says, the
foundations of the earth are out of course, when men have forgotten sadly
the very first principles of society and religion.
And, surely, men are doing so in these days; men are forgetting that
other foundation can no man lay save that which _is_ laid, which is
Christ; they laugh at the thought of a city, that is, a state and form of
government, “not made with hands, eternal in the heavens;” they have
forgotten that St. Paul tells them in the Hebrews that we _have_ “a city
which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God,” a kingdom which
cannot be moved. Yes, men who call themselves learned and worldly wise,
and good men too, alas! who fancy that they are preaching God’s gospel,
go about and tell men, ‘The men of Babel were right after all. What have
nations to do with God and religion? Nations are merely earthly, carnal
things, that were only invented by sinful men themselves, to preserve
their bodies and goods, and make trading easy. Religion has only to do
with a man’s private opinions, his single soul; the government has
nothing to do with the Church: a Christian has nothing to do with
politics.’ And so these men most unwittingly open a door to all sorts of
covetousness and meanness in the nation, and all sorts of trickery and
cowardice in the government. Tell a man that his business has nothing to
do with God, and you cannot wonder if he acts without thinking of God.
If you tell a nation that it is selfishness which makes it prosperous, of
course you must expect it to be selfish. If you tell us Englishmen that
the duties of a citizen are not duties to God, but only duties to the
constable and the tax-gatherer, what wonder if men believe you and become
undutiful to God in their citizenship? No, my friends, once for all, as
sure as God made Abraham a great nation, so if we English are a great
nation, God has made us so—as sure as God gave Abraham the land of Canaan
for his possession, so did _He_ give us this land of England, when He
brought our Saxon forefathers out of the wild barren north, and drove out
before them nations greater and mightier than they, and gave them great
and goodly cities which they builded not, and wells digged which they
digged not, farms and gardens which they planted not, that we too might
fear the Lord our God, and serve Him, and swear by His name;—as sure as
He commanded Abraham to respect the property of his neighbours, so has He
commanded us;—as sure as God taught Abraham that the nation which was to
grow from him owed a duty to God, and could be only strong by faith in
God, so it is with us: we, English people, owe a duty to God, and are to
deal among ourselves, and with foreign countries, by faith in God, and in
the fear of God, “seeking first the kingdom of God and His
righteousness,” sure that then all other things—victory, health,
commerce, art, and science—will be added to us, as the first Lesson says.
For this is your wisdom and understanding in the sight of the nations,
which shall say, Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding
people! For what nation is grown so great, that hath statutes and
judgments so righteous as these laws, this gospel, which God sets before
us day by day?—us, Englishmen!
And I say that these are proper thoughts for this place. This is not a
mere preaching-house, where you may learn every man to save his own soul;
this is a far nobler place; this building belongs to the National Church
of England, and we worship here, not merely as men, but as men of
England, citizens of a Christian country, come here to learn not merely
how to save ourselves, but how to help towards the saving of our
families, our parish, and our nation; and therefore we must know what a
country and a nation mean, and what is the meaning of that glorious and
divine word, “a citizen;” that by learning what it is to be a citizen of
England, we may go on to learn fully what it is to be a citizen of the
kingdom of God.
For this is part of the whole counsel of God, which He reveals in His
Holy Bible; and this also we must not, and dare not, shun declaring in
these days.
SERMON XIII.
ABRAHAM’S OBEDIENCE.
HEBREWS, xi. 17–19.
“By faith Abraham, when he was tried, offered up Isaac; and he that
had received the promises offered up his only-begotten son, of whom
it was said, That in Isaac shall thy seed be called: accounting that
God was able to raise him up, even from the dead; from whence also he
received him in a figure.”
IN this chapter we come to the crowning point of Abraham’s history, the
highest step and perfection of his faith; beyond which it seems as if
man’s trust in God could no further go.
You know, most of you, doubtless, that Isaac, Abraham’s son, was come to
him out of the common course of nature—when he and his wife, Sarah, were
of an age which seemed to make all chance of a family utterly hopeless.
You remember how God promised Abraham that this boy should be born to him
at a certain time, when He appeared to him on the plains of Mamre, in
that most solemn and deep-meaning vision of which I spoke to you last
Sunday. You remember, too, no doubt, most of you, how God had promised
Abraham again and again, that in his seed, his children, all the nations
of the earth should be blessed; so that all Abraham’s hopes were wrapped
up in this boy Isaac; he was his only son, whom he loved; he was the
child of his old age, his glory and his joy; he was the child of God’s
promises. Every time Abraham looked at him he felt that Isaac was a
wonderful child: that God had a great work for him to do; that from that
single boy a great nation was to spring, as many in multitude as the
stars in the sky, or the sand on the sea-shore, for the great Almighty
God had said it. And he knew, too, that from that boy, who was growing
up by him in his tent, all the nations in the earth should be blessed: so
that Isaac, his son, was to Abraham a daily sacrament, as I may say, a
sign and a pledge that God was with him, and would be true to him; that
as surely as God had wonderfully and beyond all hope given him that son,
so wonderfully and beyond all hope He would fulfil all His other
promises. Conceive, then, if you can, what Abraham’s astonishment, and
doubt, and terror, and misery, must have been at such a message as this
from the very God who had given Isaac to him: “And it came to pass after
these things that God did tempt Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and
he said, Behold, here I am. And he said, Take now thy son, thine only
son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and
offer him there for a burnt-offering upon one of the mountains which I
will tell thee of.”
What a storm of doubt it must have raised in Abraham’s mind! How unable
he must have been to say whether that message came from a good or bad
spirit, or commanded him to do a good action or a bad one; that the same
God who had said, “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be
shed;” who had forbidden murder as the very highest of crimes, should
command him to shed the blood of his own son; that the same God who had
promised him that in Isaac all the nations of the earth should be
blessed, should command him to put to death that very son upon whom all
his hopes depended! Fearful, indeed, must have been the struggle in
Abraham’s mind, but the good and the right thought conquered at last.
His feeling was, no doubt, ‘This God who has blessed me so long, who has
guided me so long, whom I have obeyed so long, shall I not trust Him a
little further yet? how can I believe that He will do wrong? how can I
believe that He will lead me wrong? If it is really wrong that I should
kill my son, He will not let me do it: if it really is His will that I
should kill my son, _I will do it_. Whatever He says must be right; it
is agony and misery to me, but what of that? Do I not owe Him a thousand
daily and hourly blessings? Has He not led me hither, preserved me,
guided me, taught me the knowledge of Himself,—chosen me to be the father
of a great nation? Do I not owe Him everything? and shall I not bear
this sharp sorrow for His sake? I know, too, that if Isaac dies, all my
hope, all my joy, will die with him; that I shall have nothing left to
look for, nothing left to work for in this world. Nothing! shall I not
have God left to me? When Isaac is dead will the Lord die? will the Lord
change? will He grow weak?—Never! Years ago did He declare to me that He
was the Almighty God; I will believe that He will be always Almighty; I
will believe that though I kill my son, my son will be still in God’s
hands, and I shall be still in God’s hands, and that God is able to raise
him again, even from the dead. God can give him back to me, and if He
will _not_ give him back to me, He can fulfil His promises in a thousand
other ways. Ay, and He will fulfil His promises, for in Him is neither
deceit, nor fickleness, nor weakness, nor unrighteousness of any kind;
and, come what will, I will believe His promise and I will obey His
will.’