'And Jacob went on his way, and the angels of God met
him. And when Jacob saw them, he said, This is God's
host: and he called the name of that place Mahanaim'
(_i.e._ Two camps).--GENESIS xxxii. 1, 2.
This vision came at a crisis in Jacob's life. He has just left the
house of Laban, his father-in-law, where he had lived for many years,
and in company with a long caravan, consisting of wives, children,
servants, and all his wealth turned into cattle, is journeying back
again to Palestine. His road leads him close by the country of Esau.
Jacob was no soldier, and he is naturally terrified to meet his justly
incensed brother. And so, as he plods along with his defenceless
company trailing behind him, as you may see the Arab caravans streaming
over the same uplands to-day, all at once, in the middle of his march,
a bright-harnessed army of angels meets him. Whether visible to the eye
of sense, or, as would appear, only to the eye of faith, they _are_
visible to this troubled man; and, in a glow of confident joy, he calls
the name of that place 'Mahanaim,' two camps. One camp was the little
one of his down here, with the helpless women and children and his own
frightened and defenceless self, and the other was the great one up
there, or rather in shadowy but most real spiritual presence around
about him, as a bodyguard making an impregnable wall between him and
every foe. We may take some very plain and everlastingly true lessons
out of this story.
1. First, the angels of God meet us on the dusty road of common life.
'Jacob went on his way, and the angels of God met him.'
As he was tramping along there, over the lonely fields of Edom, with
many a thought on his mind and many a fear at his heart, but feeling
'There is the path that I have to walk on,' all at once the air was
filled with the soft rustle of angel wings, and the brightness from the
flashing armour of the heavenly hosts flamed across his unexpecting
eye. And so is it evermore. The true place for us to receive visions of
God is in the path of the homely, prosaic duties which He lays upon us.
The dusty road is far more likely to be trodden by angel feet than the
remote summits of the mountain, where we sometimes would fain go; and
many an hour consecrated to devotion has less of the manifest presence
of God than is granted to some weary heart in its commonplace struggle
with the little troubles and trials of daily life. These make the
doors, as it were, by which the visitants draw near to us.
It is the common duties, 'the narrow round, the daily task,' that not
only give us 'all we ought to ask,' but are the selected means and
channels by which, ever, God's visitants draw near to us. The man that
has never seen an angel standing beside him, and driving his loom for
him, or helping him at his counter and his desk, and the woman that has
never seen an angel, according to the bold realism and homely vision of
the old German picture, working with her in the kitchen and preparing
the meal for the household, have little chance of meeting such
visitants at any other point of their experience or event of their
lives.
If the week be empty of the angels, you will never catch sight of a
feather of their wings on the Sunday. And if we do not recognise their
presence in the midst of all the prose, and the commonplace, and the
vulgarity, and the triviality, and the monotony, the dust of the small
duties, we shall go up to the summit of Sinai itself and see nothing
there but cold grey stone and everlasting snows. 'Jacob went on his
way, and the angels of God met him.' The true field for religion is the
field of common life.
And then another side of the same thought is this, that it is in the
path where God has bade us walk that we shall find the angels round us.
We may meet them, indeed, on paths of our own choosing, but it will be
the sort of angel that Balaam met, with a sword in his hand, mighty and
beautiful, but wrathful too; and we had better not front him! But the
friendly helpers, the emissaries of God's love, the apostles of His
grace, do not haunt the roads that we make for ourselves. They confine
themselves rigidly to 'the paths in which God has before ordained that
we should walk in them.' A man has no right to expect, and he will not
get, blessing and help and divine gifts when, self-willedly, he has
taken the bit between his teeth, and is choosing his own road in the
world. But if he will say, 'Lord! here I am; put me where Thou wilt,
and do with me what Thou wilt,' then he may be sure that that path,
though it may be solitary of human companionship, and leading up
amongst barren rocks and over bare moorlands, where the sun beats down
fiercely, will not be unvisited by a better presence, so that in sweet
consciousness of sufficiency of rich grace, he will be able to say, 'I,
being in the way, the Lord met me.'
2. Still further, we may draw from this incident the lesson that God's
angels meet us punctually at the hour of need.
Jacob is drawing nearer and nearer to his fear every step. He is now
just on the borders of Esau's country, and close upon opening
communications with his brother. At that critical moment, just before
the finger of the clock has reached the point on the dial at which the
bell would strike, the needed help comes, the angel guards draw near
and camp beside him. It is always so. 'The Lord shall help her, and
that right early.' His hosts come no sooner and no later than we need.
If they appeared before we had realised our danger and our
defencelessness, our hearts would not leap up at their coming, as men
in a beleaguered town do when the guns of the relieving force are heard
booming from afar. Often God's delays seem to us inexplicable, and our
prayers to have no more effect than if they were spoken to a sleeping
Baal. But such delays are merciful. They help us to the consciousness
of our need. They let us feel the presence of the sorrow. They give
opportunity of proving the weakness of all other supports. They test
and increase desire for His help. They throw us more unreservedly into
His arms. They afford room for the sorrow or the burden to work its
peaceable fruits. So, and in many other ways, delay of succour fits us
to receive succour, and our God makes no tarrying but for our sakes.
It is His way to let us come almost to the edge of the precipice, and
then, in the very nick of time, when another minute and we are over, to
stretch out His strong right hand and save us. So Peter is left in
prison, though prayer is going up unceasingly for him--and no answer
comes. The days of the Passover feast slip away, and still he is in
prison, and prayer does nothing for him. The last day of his life,
according to Herod's purpose, dawns, and all the day the Church lifts
up its voice--but apparently there is no answer, nor any that regarded.
The night comes, and still the vain cry goes up, and Heaven seems deaf
or apathetic. The night wears on, and still no help comes. But in the
last watch of that last night, when day is almost dawning, at nearly
the last minute when escape would have been possible, the angel touches
the sleeping Apostle, and with leisurely calmness, as sure that he had
ample time, leads him out to freedom and safety. It was precisely
because Jesus loved the Household at Bethany that, after receiving the
sisters' message, He abode still for two days in the same place where
He was. However our impatience may wonder, and our faithlessness
venture sometimes almost to rebuke Him when He comes, with words like
Mary's and Martha's--'Lord, if Thou hadst been here, such and such
sorrows would not have happened, and Thou couldst so easily have been
here'--we should learn the lesson that even if He has delayed so long
that the dreaded blow has fallen, He has come soon enough to make it
the occasion for a still more glorious communication of His power.
'Rest in the Lord, wait patiently for Him, and He shall give thee the
desires of thine heart.'
3. Again, we learn from this incident that the angels of God come in
the shape which we need.
Jacob's want at the moment was protection. Therefore the angels appear
in warlike guise, and present before the defenceless man another camp,
in which he and his unwieldy caravan of women and children and cattle
may find security. If his special want had been of some blessing of
another kind, no doubt another form of appearance, suited with
precision to his need, would have been imposed upon these angel
helpers. For God's gifts to us change their character; as the Rabbis
fabled that the manna tasted to each man what each most desired. The
same pure heavenly bread has the varying savour that commends it to
varying palates. God's grace is Protean. It takes all the forms that
man's necessities require. As water assumes the shape of any vessel
into which it is put, so this great blessing comes to each of us,
moulded according to the pressure and taking the form of our
circumstances and necessities. His fulness is all-sufficient. It is the
same blood that, passing to all the members, ministers to each
according to the needs and fashion of each. And it is the same grace
which, passing to our souls, in each man is shaped according to his
present condition and ministers to his present wants.
So, dear brethren, in that great fulness each of us may have the thing
that we need. The angel who to one man is protection, to another shall
be teaching and inspiration; to another shall appear with chariots of
fire and horses of fire to sweep the rapt soul heavenward; to another
shall draw near as a deliverer from his fetters, at whose touch the
bonds shall fall from off him; to another shall appear as the
instructor in duty and the appointer of a path of service, like that
vision that shone in the castle to the Apostle Paul, and said, 'Thou
must bear witness for me at Rome'; to another shall appear as opening
the door of heaven and letting a flood of light come down upon his
darkened heart, as to the Apocalyptic seer in his rocky Patmos. And
'all this worketh that one and the self-same' Lord of angels 'dividing
to every man severally as He will,' and as the man needs. The
defenceless Jacob has the manifestation of the divine presence in the
guise of armed warriors that guard his unwarlike camp.
I add one last word. Long centuries after Jacob's experience at
Mahanaim, another trembling fugitive found himself there, fearful, like
Jacob, of the vengeance and anger of one who was knit to him by blood.
When poor King David was flying from the face of Absalom his son, the
first place where he made a stand, and where he remained during the
whole of the rebellion, was this town of Mahanaim, away on the eastern
side of the Jordan. Do you not think that to the kingly exile, in his
feebleness and his fear, the very name of his resting-place would be an
omen? Would he not recall the old story, and bethink himself of how
round that other frightened man
'Bright-harnessed angels stood in order serviceable'
and would he not, as he looked on his little band of friends, faithful
among the faithless, have his eyesight cleared to behold the other
camp? Such a vision, no doubt, inspired the calm confidence of the
psalm which evidently belongs to that dark hour of his life, and made
it possible for the hunted king, with his feeble band, to sing even
then, 'I will both lay me down in peace and sleep, for Thou, Lord,
makest me dwell in safety, solitary though I am.'
Nor is the vision emptied of its power to stay and make brave by all
the ages that have passed. The vision was for a moment; the fact is for
ever. The sun's ray was flashed back from celestial armour, 'the next
all unreflected shone' on the lonely wastes of the desert--but the host
of God was there still. The transitory appearance of the permanent
realities is a revelation to us as truly as to the patriarch; and
though no angel wings may winnow the air around our road, nor any
sworded seraphim be seen on our commonplace march, we too have all the
armies of heaven with us, if we tread the path which God has marked
out, and in our weakness and trembling commit ourselves to Him. The
heavenly warriors die not, and hover around us to-day, excelling in the
strength of their immortal youth, and as ready to succour us as they
were all these centuries ago to guard the solitary Jacob.
Better still, the 'Captain of the Lord's host' is 'come up' to be our
defence, and our faith has not only to behold the many ministering
spirits sent forth to minister to us, but One mightier than they, whose
commands they all obey, and who Himself is the companion of our
solitude and the shield of our defencelessness. It was blessed that
Jacob should be met by the many angels of God. It is infinitely more
blessed that '_the_ Angel of the Lord'--the One who is more than the
many--'encampeth round about them that fear Him, and delivereth them.'
The postscript of the last letter which Gordon sent from Khartoum
closed with the words, 'The hosts are with me--Mahanaim.' Were they
not, even though death was near? Was that sublime faith a mistake--the
vision an optical delusion? No, for their ranks are arrayed around
God's children to keep them from all evil while He wills that they
should live, and their chariots of fire and horses of fire are sent to
bear them to heaven when He wills that they should die.