'Then said He unto me, Son of man, hast thou seen what the ancients
of the house of Israel do in the dark, every man in the chambers of
his imagery!'--EZEKIEL viii. 12.
This is part of a vision which came to the prophet in his captivity. He
is carried away in imagination from his home amongst the exiles in the
East to the Temple of Jerusalem. There he sees in one dreadful series
representations of all the forms of idolatry to which the handful that
were left in the land were cleaving. There meets him on the threshold of
the court 'the image of jealousy,' the generalised expression for the
aggregate of idolatries which had stirred the anger of the divine
husband of the nation. Then he sees within the Temple three groups
representing the idolatries of three different lands. First, those with
whom my text is concerned, who, in some underground room, vaulted and
windowless, were bowing down before painted animal forms upon the walls.
Probably they were the representatives of Egyptian worship, for the
description of their temple might have been taken out of any book of
travels in Egypt in the present day. It is only an ideal picture that
is represented to Ezekiel, and not a real fact. It is not at all
probable that all these various forms of idolatry were found at any
time within the Temple itself. And the whole cast of the vision
suggests that it is an ideal picture, and not reality, with which
we have to do. Hence the number of these idolaters was seventy--the
successors of the seventy whom Moses led up to Sinai to see the God
of Israel! And now here they are grovelling before brute forms painted
on the walls in a hole in the dark. Their leader bears a name which
might have startled them in their apostasy, and choked their prayers
in their throats, for Jaazan-iah means 'the Lord hears.' Each man has
a censer in his hand--self-consecrated priests of self-chosen deities.
Shrouded in obscurity, they pleased themselves with the ancient lie,
'The Lord sees not; He hath forsaken the earth.' And then, into that
Sanhedrim of apostates there comes, all unknown to them, the light of
God's presence; and the eye of the prophet marks their evil.
I have nothing to do here with the other groups which Ezekiel saw in his
vision. The next set were the representatives of the women of Israel,
who, false at once to their womanhood and to their God, were taking part
in the nameless obscenities and abominations of the worship of the
Syrian Adonis. And the next, who from their numbers seem to be intended
to stand for the representatives of the priesthood, as the former were
of the whole people, represent the worshippers who had fallen under the
fascinations of a widespread Eastern idolatry, and with their backs to
the house of the Lord were bowing before the rising sun.
All these false faiths got on very well together. Their worshippers had
no quarrel with each other. Polytheism, by its very nature and the
necessity of its being, is tolerant. All its rabble of gods have a
mutual understanding, and are banded together against the only One that
says, 'Thou shalt have none other gods beside Me.'
But now, I take this vision in a meaning which the prophet had no
intention to put on it. I do not often do that with my texts, and when I
do I like to confess frankly that I am doing it. So I take the words now
as a kind of symbol which may help to put into a picturesque and more
striking form some very familiar and homely truths. Look at that
dark-painted chamber that we have all of us got in our hearts; at the
idolatries that go on there, and at the flashing of the sudden light of
God who marks, into the midst of the idolatry, 'Hast thou seen what the
ancients of the children of Israel do in the dark, each man in the
chambers of his imagery?'
I. Think of the dark and painted chamber which we all of us carry in our
hearts.
Every man is a mystery to himself as to his fellows. With reverence, we
may say of each other as we say of God--'Clouds and darkness are round
about Him.' After all the manifestations of a life, we remain enigmas to
one another and mysteries to ourselves. For every man is no fixed
somewhat, but a growing personality, with dormant possibilities of good
and evil lying in him, which up to the very last moment of his life may
flame up into altogether unexpected and astonishing developments.
Therefore we have all to feel that after all self-examination there lie
awful depths within us which we have not fathomed; and after all our
knowledge of one another we yet do see but the surface, and each soul
dwells alone.
There is in every heart a dark chamber. Oh, brethren! there are very,
very few of us that dare tell all our thoughts and show our inmost
selves to our dearest ones. The most silvery lake that lies sleeping
amidst beauty, itself the very fairest spot of all, when drained off
shows ugly ooze and filthy mud, and all manner of creeping abominations
in the slime. I wonder what we should see if our hearts were, so to
speak, drained off, and the very bottom layer of every thing brought
into the light. Do you think you could stand it? Well, then, go to God
and ask Him to keep you from unconscious sins. Go to Him and ask Him to
root out of you the mischiefs that you do not know are there, and live
humbly and self-distrustfuliy, and feel that your only strength is:
'Hold Thou me up, and I shall be saved.' 'Hast thou seen what they do in
the _dark_?'
Still further, we may take another part of this description with
possibly permissible violence as a symbol of another characteristic of
our inward nature. The walls of that chamber were all painted with
animal forms, to which these men were bowing down. By our memory, and by
that marvellous faculty that people call the imagination, and by our
desires, we are for ever painting the walls of the inmost chambers of
our hearts with such pictures. That is an awful power which we possess,
and, alas! too often use for foul idolatries.
I do not dwell upon that, but I wish to drop one very earnest caution
and beseeching entreaty, especially to the younger members of my
congregation now. You, young men and women, especially you young men,
mind what you paint upon those mystic walls! Foul things, as my text
says, 'creeping things and abominable beasts,' only too many of you are
tracing there. Take care, for these figures are ineffaceable. No
repentance will obliterate them. I do not know whether even Heaven can
blot them out. What you love, what you desire, what you think about, you
are photographing on the walls of your immortal soul. And just as
to-day, thousands of years after the artists have been gathered to the
dust, we may go into Egyptian temples and see the figures on their
walls, in all the freshness of their first colouring, as if the painter
had but laid down his pencil a moment ago; so, on your hearts, youthful
evils, the sins of your boyhood, the pruriences of your earliest days,
may live in ugly shapes, that no tears and no repentance will ever wipe
out. Nothing can do away with 'the marks of that which once hath been.'
What are you painting on the chambers of imagery in your hearts?
Obscenity, foul things, mean things, low things? Is that mystic shrine
within you painted with such figures as were laid bare in some chambers
in Pompeii, where the excavators had to cover up the pictures because
they were so foul? Or, is it like the cells in the convent of San Marco
at Florence, where Fra Angelico's holy and sweet genius has left on the
bare walls, to be looked at, as he fancied, only by one devout brother
in each cell, angel imaginings, and noble, pure celestial faces that
calm and hallow those who gaze upon them? What are you doing, my
brother, in the dark, in your chambers of imagery?
II. Now look with me briefly at the second thought that I draw from this
symbol,--the idolatries of the dark chamber.
All these seventy grey-bearded elders that were bowing there before the
bestial gods which they had portrayed, had, no doubt, often stood in the
courts of the Temple and there made prayers to the God of Israel, with
broad phylacteries, to be seen of men. Their true worship was their
worship in the dark. The other was conscious or unconscious hypocrisy.
And the very chamber in which they were gathered, according to the ideal
representation of our text, was a chamber in, and therefore partaking of
the consecration of, the Temple. So their worship was doubly criminal,
in that it was sacrilege as well as idolatry. Both things are true about
us.
A man's true worship is not the worship which he performs in the public
temple, but that which he offers down in that little private chapel,
where nobody goes but himself. Worship is the attribution of supreme
excellence to, and the entire dependence of the heart upon, a certain
person. And the people or the things to which a man attributes the
highest excellence, and on which he hangs his happiness and well-being,
these be his gods, no matter what his outward profession is. You can
find out what these are for you, if you will ask yourself, and honestly
answer, one or two questions. What is that I want most? What is it which
makes my ideal of happiness? What is that which I feel that I should be
desperate without? What do I think about most naturally and
spontaneously, when the spring is taken off, and my thoughts are allowed
to go as they will? And if the answer to none of these questions is
'God!' then I do not know why you should call yourself a worshipper of
God. It is of no avail that we pray in the temple, if we have a dark
underground shrine where our true adoration is rendered.
Oh, dear brethren! I am afraid there are a great many of us nominal
Christians, connected with Christian Churches, posing before men as
orthodox religionists, who keep this private chapel where we do our
devotion to an idol and not to God. If our real gods could be made
visible, what a pantheon they would make! All the foul forms painted on
that cell of this vision would be paralleled in the creeping things,
which crawl along the low earth and never soar nor even stand erect, and
in the vile, bestial forms of passion to which some of us really bow
down. Honour, wealth, literary or other distinction, the sweet
sanctities of human love dishonoured and profaned by being exalted to
the place which divine love should hold, ease, family, animal appetites,
lust, drink--these are the gods of some of us. Bear with my poor words
and ask yourselves, not whom do you worship before the eye of men, but
who is the God to whom in your inmost heart you bow down? What do you do
in the dark? That is the question. Whom do you worship there? Your other
worship is not worship at all.
Do not forget that all such diversion of supreme love and dependence
from God alone is like the sin of these men in our text, in that it is
sacrilege. They had taken a chamber in the very Temple, and turned it
into a temple of the false gods. Whom is your heart made to enshrine?
Why! every stone, if I may so say, of the fabric of our being bears
marked upon it that it was laid in order to make a dwelling-place for
God. Whom are you meant to worship, by the witness of the very
constitution of your nature and make of your spirits? Is there anybody
but One who is worthy to receive the priceless gift of human love
absolute and entire? Is there any but One to whom it is aught but
degradation and blasphemy for a man to bow down? Is there any being but
One that can still the tumult of my spirit, and satisfy the immortal
yearnings of my soul? We were made for God, and whensoever we turn the
hopes, the desires, the affections, the obedience, and that which is
the root of them all, the confidence that ought to fix and fasten upon
Him, to other creatures, we are guilty not only of idolatry but of
sacrilege. We commit the sin of which that wild reveller in Babylon was
guilty, when, at his great feast, in the very madness of his presumption
he bade them bring forth the sacred vessels from the Temple at
Jerusalem; 'and the king and his princes and his concubines drank in
them and praised the gods.' So we take the sacred chalice of the human
heart, on which there is marked the sign manual of Heaven, claiming it
for God's, and fill it with the spiced and drugged draught of our own
sensualities and evils, and pour out libations to vain and false gods.
Brethren! Render unto Him that which is His; and see even upon the walls
scrabbled all over with the deformities that we have painted there,
lingering traces, like those of some dropping fresco in a roofless
Italian church, which suggest the serene and perfect beauty of the image
of the One whose likeness was originally traced there, and for whose
worship it was all built.
III. And now, lastly, look at the sudden crashing in upon the cowering
worshippers of the revealing light.
Apparently the picture of my text suggests that these elders knew not
the eyes that were looking upon them. They were hugging themselves in
the conceit, 'the Lord seeth not; the Lord hath forsaken the earth.' And
all the while, all unknown, God and His prophet stand in the doorway and
see it all. Not a finger is lifted, not a sign to the foolish
worshippers of His presence and inspection, but in stern silence He
records and remembers.
And does that need much bending to make it an impressive form of
putting a solemn truth? There are plenty of us--alas! alas! that it
should be so--to whom it is the least welcome of all thoughts that there
in the doorway stand God and His Word. Why should it be, my brother,
that the properly blessed thought of a divine eye resting upon you
should be to you like the thought of a policeman's bull's-eye to a
thief? Why should it not be rather the sweetest and the most calming and
strength-giving of all convictions--'Thou God seest me'? The little
child runs about the lawn perfectly happy as long as she knows that her
mother is watching her from the window. And it ought to be sweet and
blessed to each of us to know that there is no darkness where a Father's
eye comes not. But oh! to the men that stand before bestial idols and
have turned their backs on the beauty of the one true God, the only
possibility of composure is that they shall hug themselves in the vain
delusion:--'The Lord seeth not.'
I beseech you, dear friends, do not think of His eye as the prisoner in
a cell thinks of the pin-hole somewhere in the wall, through which a
jailer's jealous inspection may at any moment be glaring in upon him,
but think of Him your Brother, who 'knew what was in man,' and who knows
each man, and see in Christ the all-knowing Godhood that loves yet
better than it knows, and beholds the hidden evils of men's hearts, in
order that it may cleanse and forgive all which it beholds.
One day a light will flash in upon all the dark cells. We must all be
manifest before the judgment-seat of Christ. Do you like that thought?
Can you stand it? Are you ready for it? My friend! let Jesus Christ
come to you with His light. Let Him come into the dark corners of your
hearts. Cast all your sinfulness, known and unknown, upon Him that died
on the Cross for every soul of man, and He will come; and His light,
streaming into your hearts, like the sunbeam upon foul garments, will
cleanse and bleach them white by its shining upon them. Let Him come
into your hearts by your lowly penitence, by your humble faith, and all
these vile shapes that you have painted on its walls will, like
phosphorescent pictures in the daytime, pale and disappear when the 'Sun
of Righteousness, with healing in His beams, floods your soul, leaving
no part dark, and turning all into a temple of the living God.'