Now the key to the difference between these two statements and moods of
feeling seems to me to be a very plain one. In the former of them there
is nothing about God. It is all Jacob. In the latter we notice that
there is a great deal more about God than about Jacob, and that
determines the whole tone of the retrospect. In the first text Jacob
speaks of 'the days of the years of _my_ pilgrimage,' 'the days of the
years of _my_ life,' and so on, without a syllable about anything
except the purely earthly view of life. Of course, when you shut out
God, the past is all dark enough, grey and dismal, like the landscape
on some cloudy day, where the woods stand black, and the rivers creep
melancholy through colourless fields, and the sky is grey and formless
above. Let the sun come out, and the river flashes into a golden
mirror, and the woods are alive with twinkling lights and shadows, and
the sky stretches a blue pavilion above them, and all the birds sing.
Let God into your life, and its whole complexion and characteristics
change. The man who sits whining and complaining, when he has shut out
the thought of a divine Presence, finds that everything alters when he
brings that in.
And, then, look at the two particulars on which the patriarch dwells.
'I am only one hundred and thirty years old,' he says; a mere infant
compared with Abraham and Isaac! How did he know he was not going to
live to be as old as either of them? And 'if his days were evil,' as he
said, was it not a good thing that they were few? But, instead of that,
he finds reasons for complaint in the brevity of the life which, if it
were as evil as he made it out to be, must often have seemed
wearisomely long, and dragged very slowly. Now, both things are
true--life is short, life is long. Time is elastic--you can stretch it
or you can contract it. It is short compared with the duration of God;
it is short, as one of the Psalms puts it pathetically, as compared
with this Nature round us--'The earth abideth for ever'; we are
strangers upon it, and there is no abiding for us. It is short as
compared with the capacities and powers of the creatures that possess
it; but, oh! if we think of our days as a series of gifts of God, if we
look upon them, as Jacob looked upon them when he was sane, as being
one continued shepherding by God, they stretch out into blessed length.
Life is long enough if it manifests that God takes care of us, and if
we learn that He does. Life is long enough if it serves to build up a
God-pleasing character.
It is beautiful to see how the thought of God enters into the dying
man's remembrances in the shape which was natural to him, regard being
had to his own daily avocations. For the word translated 'fed' means
much more than supplied with nourishment. It is the word for doing the
office of shepherd, and we must not forget, if we want to understand
its beauty, that Jacob's sons said, 'Thy servants are shepherds; both
we and also our fathers.' So this man, in the solitude of his pastoral
life, and whilst living amongst his woolly people who depended upon his
guidance and care, had learned many a lesson as to how graciously and
tenderly and constantly fed, and led, and protected, and fostered by
God were the creatures of His hand.
It was he, I suppose, who first gave to religious thought that metaphor
which has survived temple and sacrifice and priesthood, and will
survive even earth itself; for 'I am the Good Shepherd' is as true
to-day as when first spoken by Jesus, and 'the Lamb which is in the
midst of the throne shall lead them,' and be their Shepherd when the
flock is carried to the upper pastures and the springs that never fail.
The life which has brought us that thought of a Shepherd-God has been
long enough; and the days which have been so expanded as to contain a
continuous series of His benefits and protections need never be
remembered as 'few,' whatsoever be the arithmetic that is applied to
them.
The other contradiction is equally eloquent and significant. 'Few and
evil' have my days been, said Jacob, when he was not thinking about
God; but when he remembered the Angel of the Presence, that mysterious
person with whom he had wrestled at Peniel, and whose finger had lamed
the thigh while His lips proclaimed a blessing, his view changed, and
instead of talking about 'evil' days, he says, 'The Angel that redeemed
me from all evil.' Yes, his life had been evil, whether by that we mean
sorrowful or sinful, and the sorrows and the sins had been closely
connected. A sorely tried man he had been. Far away back in the past
had been his banishment from home; his disappointment and hard service
with the churlish Laban; the misbehaviour of his sons; the death of
Rachel--that wound which was never stanched; and then the twenty years'
mourning for Rachel's son, the heir of his inheritance. These were the
evils, the sins were as many, for every one of the sorrows, except
perhaps the chiefest of them all, had its root in some piece of
duplicity, dishonesty, or failure. But he was there in Egypt beside
Joseph. The evils had stormed over him, but he was there still. And so
at the end he says, 'The Angel ... redeemed me from evil, though it
smote me. Sorrow became chastisement, and I was purged of my sin by my
calamities.' The sorrows are past, like some raging inundation that
comes up for a night over the land and then subsides; but the blessing
of fertility which it brought in its tawny waves abides with me yet.
Joseph is by my side. 'I had not thought to see thy face, and God hath
showed me the face of thy seed.' That sorrow is over. Rachel's grave is
still by the wayside, and that sorest of sorrows has wrought with
others to purify character. Jacob has been tried by sorrows; he has
been purged from sins. 'The Angel delivered me from all evil.' So, dear
friends, sorrow is not evil if it helps to strip us from the evil that
we love, and the ills that we bear are good if they alienate our
affections from the ills that we do.
2. Secondly, note the wisdom and the duty of taking the completer and
brighter view.
These first words of Jacob's are very often quoted as if they were the
pattern of the kind of thing people ought to say, 'Few and evil have
been the days of the years of my pilgrimage.' That is a text from which
many sermons have been preached with approbation of the pious
resignation expressed in it. But it does not seem to me that that is
the tone of them. If the man believed what he said, then he was very
ungrateful and short-sighted, though there were excuses to be made for
him under the circumstances. If the days had been evil, he had made
them so.
But the point which I wish to make now is that it is largely a matter
for our own selection which of the two views of our lives we take. We
may make our choice whether we shall fix our attention on the brighter
or on the darker constituents of our past.
Suppose a wall papered with paper of two colours, one black, say, and
the other gold. You can work your eye and adjust the focus of vision so
that you may see either a black background or a gold one. In the one
case the prevailing tone is gloomy, relieved by an occasional touch of
brightness; and in the other it is brightness, heightened by a
background of darkness. And so you can do with life, fixing attention
on its sorrows, and hugging yourselves in the contemplation of these
with a kind of morbid satisfaction, or bravely and thankfully and
submissively and wisely resolving that you will rather seek to learn
what God means by darkness, and not forgetting to look at the
unenigmatical blessings, and plain, obvious mercies, that make up so
much of our lives. We have to govern memory as well as other faculties,
by Christian principle. We have to apply the plain teaching of
Christian truth to our sentimental, and often unwholesome,
contemplations of the past. There is enough in all our lives to make
material for plenty of whining and complaining, if we choose to take
hold of them by that handle. And there is enough in all our lives to
make us ashamed of one murmuring word, if we are devout and wise and
believing enough to lay hold of them by that one. Remember that you can
make your view of your life either a bright one or a dark one, and
there will be facts for both; but the facts that feed melancholy are
partial and superficial, and the facts that exhort, 'Rejoice in the
Lord alway; and again I say, Rejoice,' are deep and fundamental.
3. So, lastly, note how blessed a thing it is when the last look is the
happiest.
When we are amongst the mountains, or when we are very near them, they
look barren enough, rough, stony, steep. When we travel away from them,
and look at them across the plain, they lie blue in the distance; and
the violet shadows and the golden lights upon them and the white peaks
above make a dream of beauty. Whilst we are in the midst of the
struggle, we are often tempted to think that things go hardly with us
and that the road is very rough. But if we keep near our dear Lord, and
hold by His hand, and try to shape our lives in accordance with His
will--whatever be their outward circumstances and texture--then we may
be very sure of this, that when the end comes, and we are far enough
away from some of the sorrows to see what they lead to and blossom
into, then we shall be able to say, It was all very good, and to thank
Him for all the way by which the Lord our God has led us.
In the same conversation in which the patriarch, rising to the height
of a prophet and organ of divine revelation, gives this his dying
testimony of the faithfulness of God, and declares that he has been
delivered from all evil, he recurs to the central sorrow of his life;
and speaks, though in calm words, of that day when he buried Rachel by
'Ephrath, which is Bethel.' But the pain had passed and the good was
present to him. And so, leaving life, he left it according to his own
word, 'satisfied with favour, and full of the blessing of the Lord.' So
we in our turns may, at the last, hope that what we know not now will
largely be explained; and may seek to anticipate our dying verdict by a
living confidence, in the midst of our toils and our sorrows, that 'all
things work together for good to them that love God.'
'THE HANDS OF THE MIGHTY GOD OF JACOB'
The archers shot at him, but his bow abode in strength,
and the arms of his hands were made strong by the hands
of the mighty God of Jacob.'
GENESIS xlix. 23, 24.
These picturesque words are part of what purports to be one of the
oldest pieces of poetry in the Bible--the dying Jacob's prophetic
blessing on his sons. Of these sons there are two over whom his heart
seems especially to pour itself--Judah the ancestor of the royal tribe,
and Joseph. The future fortunes of their descendants are painted in
most glowing colours. And of these two, the blessing on the 'son who
was dead and is alive again, who was lost and is found' is the fuller
of tender desire and glad prediction. The words of our text are
probably to be taken as prophecy, not as history--as referring to the
future conflicts and victories of the tribe, not to the past trials and
triumphs of its father. But be that as it may, they contain, in most
vivid metaphor, the earliest utterance of a very familiar truth. They
are the first hint of that thought which is caught up and expanded in
many a later saying of psalmist, and prophet, and apostle. We hear
their echoes in the great song ascribed to David 'in the day that the
Lord delivered him from the hand of all his enemies, and from the hand
of Saul': 'He teacheth my hands to war, so that a bow of steel is
broken by mine arms'; and the idea receives its fullest carrying out
and noblest setting forth, in the trumpet-call of the apostle, who had
seen more formidable weapons and a more terrible military discipline in
Rome's legions than Jacob knew, and who pressed them into his
stimulating call: 'Be strong in the Lord, and in the power of His
might.' 'Put on the whole armour of God.' Strength for conflict by
contact with the strength of God is the common thought of all these
passages--a very familiar thought, which may perhaps be freshened for
us by the singular intensity with which this metaphor of our text
presents it. Look at the picture.--Here stands the solitary man, ringed
all round by enemies full of bitter hate. Their arrows are on the
string, their bows drawn to the ear. The shafts fly thick, and when
they have whizzed past him, and he can be seen again, he stands
unharmed, grasping his unbroken bow. The assault has shivered no
weapon, has given no wound. He has been able to stand in the evil
day--and look! a pair of great, gentle, strong hands are laid upon his
hands and arms, and strength passes into his feebleness from the touch
of 'the hands of the mighty God of Jacob.' So the enemy have two, not
one, to reckon with. By the side of the hunted man stands a mighty
figure, and it is His strength, not the mortal's impotence, that has to
be overcome. Some dream of such divine help in the struggle of battle
has floated through the minds, and been enshrined in the legends, of
many people, as when the panoplied Athene has been descried leading the
Grecian armies, or, through the dust of conflict, the gleaming armour
and white horses of the Twin Brethren were seen far in advance of the
armies of Rome. But the dream is for us a reality. It _is_ true that we
go not to warfare at our own charges, nor by our own strength. If we
love Him and try to make a brave stand against our own evil, and to
strike a manful blow for God in this world, we shall not have to bear
the brunt alone. Remember he who fights for God never fights without
God.
There is a strange story in a later book of Scripture, which almost
reads as if it had been modelled on some reminiscence of these words of
the dying Jacob--and is, at any rate, a remarkable illustration of
them. The kingdom of Israel, of which the descendants of Joseph were
the most conspicuous part, was in the very crisis and agony of one of
its Syrian wars. Its principal human helper was 'fallen sick of the
sickness whereof he died.' And to his death-bed came, in a passion of
perplexity and despair, the irresolute weakling who was then king,
bewailing the impending withdrawal of the nation's best defence. The
dying Elisha, with curt authority, pays no heed to the tears of Joash,
but bids him take bow and arrows. 'And he said to the king of Israel,
Put thine hand upon the bow,' and he put his hand upon it; and '_Elisha
put his hands upon the king's hands_.' Then, when the thin, wasted,
transparent fingers of the old man were thus laid, guiding and infusing
strength, by a strange paradox, into the brown, muscular hands of the
young king, he tells him to open the casement that looked eastward
towards the lands of the enemy, and, as the blinding sunshine and the
warm air streamed into the sick-chamber, he bids him draw the bow. He
was obeyed, and, as the arrow whizzed Jordanwards, the dying prophet
followed its flight with words brief and rapid like it, 'the arrow of
the Lord's deliverance.' Here we have all the elements of our text
singularly repeated--the dying seer, the king the representative of
Joseph in the royal dignity to which his descendants have come, the
arrows and the bow, the strength for conflict by the touch of hands
that had the strength of God in them. The lesson of that paradox that
the dying gave strength to the living, the feeble to the strong, was
the old one which is ever new, that mere human power is weakness when
it is strongest, and that power drawn from God is omnipotent when it
seems weakest. And the further lesson is the lesson of our text, that
our hands are then strengthened, when His hands are laid upon them, of
whom it is written: 'Thou hast a mighty arm: strong is Thy hand, and
high is Thy right hand.
As a father in old days might have taken his little boy out to the
butts, and put a bow into his hand, and given him his first lesson in
archery, directing his unsteady aim by his own firmer finger, and
lending the strength of his wrist to his child's feebler pull, so God
does with us. The sure, strong hand is laid on ours, and is 'profitable
to direct.' A wisdom not our own is ever at our side, and ready for our
service. We but dimly perceive the conditions of the conflict, and the
mark at which we should aim is ever apt to be obscured to our
perceptions. But in all cases where conscience is perplexed, or where
the judgment is at fault, we may, if we will, have Him for our teacher.
And when we know not where to strike the foes that seem invulnerable,
like the warrior who was dipped in the magic stream, or clothed in mail
impenetrable as rhinoceros' hide, He will make us wise to know the one
spot where a wound is fatal. We shall not need to fight as he that
beats the air; to strike at random; or to draw our bow at a venture, if
we will let Him guide us.
Or if ever the work be seen clearly enough, but our poor hands cannot
take aim for very trembling, or shoot for fear of striking something
very dear to us, He will steady our nerves and make our aim sure and
true. We have often, in our fight with ourselves, and in our struggle
to get God's will done in the world, to face as cruel a perplexity as
the father who had to split the apple on his son's head. The evil
against which we have to contend is often so closely connected with
things very precious to us, that it is hard to smite the one when there
is such danger of grazing the other. Many a time our tastes, our
likings, our prejudices, our hopes, our loves, make our sight dim, and
our pulses too tumultuous to allow of a good, long, steady gaze and a
certain aim. It is hard to keep the arrow's point firm when the heart
throbs and the hand shakes. But in all such difficult times He is ready
to help us. 'Behold, we know not what to do, but our eyes are upon
Thee,' is a prayer never offered in vain.
The word that is here rendered 'made strong,' might be translated 'made
pliable,' or 'flexible' conveying the notion of deftness and dexterity
rather than that of simple strength. It is practised strength that He
will give, the educated hand and arm, masters of the manipulation of
the weapon. The stiffness and clumsiness of our handling, the obstinate
rigidity as well as the throbbing feebleness of our arms, the dimness
of our sight, may all be overcome. At His touch the raw recruit is as
the disciplined veteran; the prophet who cannot speak because he is a
child, gifted with a mouth and wisdom which all the adversaries shall
not be able to gainsay nor to resist. Do not be disheartened by your
inexperience, or by your ignorance; but as the prophet said to the
young king, Take the bow and shoot. God's strong hand will hold yours,
and the arrow will fly true.
That strong hand is laid on ours, and lends its weight to our feeble
pull. The bow is often too heavy for us to bend, but we do not need to
strain our strength in the vain attempt to do it alone. Tasks seem too
much for us. The pressure of our daily work overwhelms us. The burden
of our daily anxieties and sorrows is too much. Some huge obstacle
starts up in our path. Some great sacrifice for truth, honour, duty,
which we feel we cannot make, is demanded of us. Some daring defiance
of some evil, which has caught us in its toils, or which it is
unfashionable to fight against, seems laid upon us. We cannot rise to
the height of the occasion, or bring ourselves to the wrench that is
required. Or the wearing recurrence of monotonous duties seems to take
ail freshness out of our lives, and all spring out of ourselves; and we
are ready to give over struggling any more, and let ourselves drift.
Can we not feel that large hand laid on ours; and does not power, more
and other than our own, creep into our numb and relaxed fingers? Yes,
if we will let Him. His strength is made perfect in our weakness; and
every man and woman who will make life a noble struggle against evil,
vanity, or sin, may be very sure that God will direct and strengthen
their hands to war, and their fingers to fight.
But the remarkable metaphor of the text not only gives the fact of
divine strength being bestowed, but also the _manner_ of the gift. What
a boldness of reverent familiarity there is in that symbol of the hands
of God laid on the hands of the man! How strongly it puts the contact
between us and Him as the condition of our reception of power from Him!
A true touch, as of hand to hand, conveys the grace. It is as when the
prophet laid himself down with his warm lip on the dead boy's cold
mouth, and his heart beating against the still heart of the corpse,
till the life passed into the clay, and the lad lived. So, if we may
say it, our Quickener bends Himself over all our deadness, and by His
own warmth reanimates us.
Perhaps this same thought is one of the lessons which we are meant to
learn from the frequency with which our Lord wrought His miracles of
healing by the touch of His hand. 'Come and lay Thy hand on him, and he
shall live.' 'And He put forth His hand and touched him, and said, I
will, be thou clean.' 'Many said, He is dead; but Jesus took him by the
hand and lifted him up, and he arose.' The touch of His hand is healing
and life. The touch of our hands is faith. In the mystery of His
incarnation, in the flow of His sympathy, in the forth-putting of His
power, He lays hold not on angels, but He lays hold on the seed of
Abraham. By our lowly trust, by the forth-putting of our desires, we
stretch 'lame hands of faith,' and, blessed be God! we do not 'grope,'
but we grasp His strong hand and are held up.
The contact of our spirits with His Spirit is a contact far more real
than the touch of earthly hands that grasp each other closest. There is
ever some film of atmosphere between the palms. But 'he that is joined
to the Lord is one spirit,' and he that clasps Christ's outstretched
hand of help with his outstretched hand of weakness, holds Him with a
closeness to which all unions of earth are gaping gulfs of separation.
You remember how Mary cast herself at Christ's feet on the resurrection
morning, and would have flung her arms round them in the passion of her
joy. The calm word which checked her has a wonderful promise in it.
'Touch me not, for I am not yet ascended to my Father'; plainly leading
to the inference, 'When I am ascended, then you may touch Me.' And that
touch will be more reverent, more close, more blessed, than any
clasping of His feet, even with such loving hands, and is possible for
us all for evermore.
Nothing but such contact will give us strength for conflict and for
conquest. And the plain lesson therefore is--see to it, that the
contact is not broken by you. Put away the metaphor, and the simple
English of the advice is just this:--First, live in the desire and the
confidence of His help in all your need, of His strength as all your
power. As a part of that confidence--its reverse and under side, so to
speak--cherish the profound sense of your own weakness.
'In our own strength we nothing can;
Full soon were we down-ridden'--
as Luther has taught us to sing. Let there be a constant renewal, in
the midst of your duties and trials, of that conscious dependence and
feeling of insufficiency. Stretch out the empty hands to Him in that
desire and hope, which, spoken or silent, is prayer. Keep the
communications open, by which His strength flows into your souls. Let
them not be choked with self-confidence, with vanities, with the
rubbish of your own nature, or of the world. Do not twitch away your
hands from under the strong hands that are laid so gently upon them.
But let Him cover, direct, cherish, and strengthen your poor fingers
till they are strong and nimble for all your work and warfare. If you
go into the fight trusting to your own wit and wisdom, to the vigour of
your own arm, or the courage of your own heart, that very foolhardy
confidence is itself defeat, for it is sin as well as folly, and
nothing can come of it but utter collapse and disaster. But if you will
only go to your daily fight with yourself and the world, with your hand
grasping God's hand, you will be able to 'withstand in the evil day,
and having done all, to stand.' The enemies may compass you about like
bees, but in the name of the Lord you can destroy them. Their arrows
may fly thick enough to darken the sun, but, as the proud old boast has
it, 'then we can fight in the shade'; and when their harmless points
have buried themselves in the ground, you will stand unhurt, your
unshivered bow ready for the next assault, and your hands made strong
by the hands of the mighty God of Jacob. 'In all these things we are
more than conquerors, through Him that loved us.'