forgiveness and cleansing, which are in every case the indispensable
premises of life with God, Isaiah was left to himself. No direct summons
was addressed to him, no compulsion was laid on him; but he heard the
voice of God asking generally for messengers, and he, on his own
responsibility, answered it for himself in particular. He heard from the
Divine lips of the Divine need for messengers, and he was immediately
full of the mind that he was the man for the mission, and of the heart
to give himself to it. So great an example cannot be too closely studied
by candidates for the ministry in our own day. Sacrifice is not the
half-sleepy, half-reluctant submission to the force of circumstance or
opinion, in which shape it is so often travestied among us, but the
resolute self-surrender and willing resignation of a free and reasonable
soul. There are many in our day who look for an irresistible compulsion
into the ministry of the Church; sensitive as they are to the material
bias by which men roll off into other professions, they pray for
something of a similar kind to prevail with them in this direction also.
There are men who pass into the ministry by social pressure or the
opinion of the circles they belong to, and there are men who adopt the
profession simply because it is on the line of least resistance. From
which false beginnings rise the spent force, the premature stoppages,
the stagnancy, the aimlessness and heartlessness, which are the scandals
of the professional ministry and the weakness of the Christian Church in
our day. Men who drift into the ministry, as it is certain so many do,
become mere ecclesiastical flotsam and jetsam, incapable of giving
carriage to any soul across the waters of this life, uncertain of their
own arrival anywhere, and of all the waste of their generation, the most
patent and disgraceful. God will have no driftwood for His sacrifices,
no drift-men for His ministers. Self-consecration is the beginning of
His service, and a sense of our own freedom and our own responsibility
is an indispensable element in the act of self-consecration."--G.A.
SMITH: _Isaiah_.
[12] I do not know that I have ever seen an entirely satisfactory
statement of what constitutes a call to the ministry. Probably it is one
of those things of the Spirit which cannot be mathematically defined.
The variety of the calls in Scripture warns us against laying down any
scheme to which the experience of every one must conform. It is the same
as with the commencement of the spiritual life, where also the work of
the Spirit of God overflows our definitions. While some can remember and
describe the whole process through which they have passed, others who
exhibit as undeniably the marks of the Divine handiwork can give
comparatively little account of how it took place. The test of the
reality of the change is not its power of being made into a good story.
In the one case, however, as in the other, a conscientious man will give
all diligence to make his calling and election sure. Excellent chapters
on the subject will be found in Spurgeon's _Lectures to My Students_ and
Blaikie's _For the Work of the Ministry_.
[13] "You have to be busy men, with many distractions, with time not
your own: and yet, if you are to be anything, there is one thing you
must secure. You must have time to enter into your own heart and be
quiet, you must learn to collect yourselves, to be alone with
yourselves, alone with your own thoughts, alone with eternal realities
which are behind the rush and confusion of moral things, alone with God.
You must learn to shut your door on all your energy, on all your
interests, on your hopes and fears and cares, and in the silence of your
chamber to 'possess your souls.' You must learn to look below the
surface; to sow the seed which you will never reap; to hear loud voices
against you or seductive ones, and to find in your own heart the
assurance and the spell which makes them vain. Whatever you do, part not
with the inner sacred life of the soul whereby we live _within_ to
'things not seen,' to Christ, and truth and immortality. Your work, your
activity, belong to earth; no real human interest, nothing that stirs or
attracts or that troubles men in this scene of life, ought to be too
great or too little for you. But your thoughts belong to heaven; and it
is to that height that they must rise, it is _there_ that in solitude
and silence they must be rekindled, and enlarged, and calmed, if even
activity and public spirit are not to degenerate into a fatal
forgetfulness of the true purpose of your calling--a forgetfulness of
the infinite tenderness and delicacy, of the unspeakable sacredness, of
the mysterious issues, which belong to the ministry of souls."--DEAN
CHURCH.
[14] "Habet autem ut obedienter audiatur quantacunque granditate
dictionis majus pondus vita dicentis."--ST. AUGUSTINE.
[15] As he has been dead for several years, I need not hesitate to give
the name of my dear and honoured friend--the Rev. James Black, of
Dunnikier.
LECTURE III.
THE PREACHER AS A PATRIOT.
We have committed ourselves, in our mode of dealing with the subject
of these lectures, to the guidance of Scripture; and I have already,
in the opening lecture, alluded to the doubt, which might arise in
some minds that this method might carry us away from the living
questions of the present age. But long experience has taught me to be
very confident in this method of study. It is astonishing how
directly, when trusting to the leading hand of Scripture, one is
conducted to the heart of almost any subject, and how frequently one
is thus compelled to take up delicate aspects of present questions
which one would otherwise timidly avoid; while there is, besides, this
other great advantage, that one can always go forward with a firm
step, having at one's back a Divine warrant and authority. To-day we
shall have an illustration of this; for the method which we are
obeying will carry us straight into the midst of the burning questions
of the hour; and the example of the prophets will press on our
attention an aspect of ministerial duty which the times are urgently
clamouring for, but which it is by no means easy to face. In our last
lecture we were occupied with the call of the prophet to the service
of God; to-day we have to study wherein consisted this service itself.
* * * * *
Here we are at once confronted with a contrast between the work of Old
Testament prophets and that of modern ministers, to which it is by no
means easy to adjust the mind. Our message in modern times is
addressed to the individual; but the message of the prophets was
addressed to the nation. The unit in our minds is always the soul; we
warn every man to flee from the wrath to come; we reason and wrestle
with him in the name of Heaven; we watch over the growth of his
character; and we estimate our success by the number of individuals
brought into the kingdom. In the prophets there is a complete absence
of all this. They are no less in earnest; their aim is equally clear
before them; but the unit in their minds is different: it is the
Jewish state, or at least the city of Jerusalem, as a whole. A recent
commentator[16] on Isaiah has raised the question, whether Isaiah has
a gospel for the individual. He makes out that he has; but it is in a
somewhat round-about way; and it is not done without, to some extent,
attributing to Isaiah a point of view which was not his. It was Christ
who introduced the modern point of view. He was the discoverer of the
individual. It was He who taught the world to believe in the dignity
and destiny of the single soul; and He trained His ministers to seek
and save it.
Isaiah's position, however, is well worth studying, and has its own
lesson for us. Only we must acknowledge it to be what it really is,
and endeavour to place ourselves on his standpoint. To him the New
Testament position was no more possible than the modern view of ethics
was to the ancient philosophers; and the student of philosophy
saturated from birth with the modern ideas of freedom and
individuality, has an exactly similar difficulty to overcome, as he
reads, for example, the _Republic_ of Plato, where the state is
everything and the individual nothing.
While a message to any individual is rare in the prophetical books,
that which we come upon wherever we open them is a patriotic and
statesman-like appeal on the condition of the country. The prophets
addressed themselves by preference to the heads and representatives of
the people, such as kings, princes and priests; because the power to
effect changes in the situation of the country rested in their hands.
But they also took advantage of large popular gatherings, and in some
conspicuous place, such as the city-gate or the court of the temple,
delivered their message, which thus might reach every corner of the
land. A name which they delight to apply to themselves is Watchmen. As
the watchman, stationed on his tower over the city-gate, kept guard
over the safety of the place, giving notice when danger was
approaching and summoning the citizens to defend themselves, so the
prophets from their watch-tower--that is, the position of elevation
and observation which inspiration gave them--watched over the weal of
the state, observing narrowly its condition within, keeping their eye
on the influences to which it was exposed from without, and, when
danger threatened, giving the alarm. Their acquaintance is
extraordinary with the state of every part of the country; and still
more astonishing is their knowledge of surrounding countries. When
they have to speak of Moab or Edom, they seem as familiar with the
towns and rivers, the customs and history of these countries, as with
those of Judah; and they appear to be as well acquainted with what is
going on in the cities on the Nile or the Euphrates as with what is
happening in Jerusalem. No home secretary is as well acquainted with
the internal affairs of his own country, and no foreign secretary with
the affairs of foreign countries. It was their vocation to be
sensitively alive to all the influences, near or remote, by which
their native land could be affected.
* * * * *
The contents of the prophetic writings, notwithstanding their variety,
easily fall into a few great masses. The chief are these
three--Criticism, Denunciation and Comfort.
1. There is a great mass of what may be called Criticism. Standing on
their watch-tower and turning their observation on the internal
condition of the state, the prophets could nearly always discern
diseased symptoms in the body corporate, and it was their duty to
point them out. So Isaiah commences his prophecies: "The whole head is
sick, and the whole heart faint. From the sole of the foot even unto
the head there is no soundness in it; but wounds, and bruises, and
putrifying sores: they have not been closed, neither bound up, neither
mollified with ointment." And he thus gives expression to the
obligation which was laid on him to make these discoveries known: "Cry
aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and show My people
their transgression, and the house of Jacob their sins."
The sins which the prophets had to reprehend were pretty uniform all
through the prophetic period; and it is interesting to compare them
with those by which our own age is afflicted. There is no school in
which the conscience can be so well educated to a sense of public sin
as in the writings of the prophets.
The root evil was always Idolatry. The nation was continually falling
away from the worship of the true God to idols, or at least the
worship of other deities was incorporated with that of Jehovah. This
was always both a symptom of advanced degradation and the head and
fountain of other evils of the worst kind. All the prophets attack it
with all the weapons in their armoury--with hot indignation and close
argument and scalding tears. Isaiah is remarkable for attacking it
with raillery and sarcasm. He takes his readers into the idol workshop
and details the process of their manufacture. He shows us the workmen,
surrounded with their plates of metal and logs of wood, out of which
the god is to be fashioned, and busy with their files and planes,
their axes and hammers, putting together the helpless thing. The
idolmaker, he says, has a fine ash or oak or cedar-tree, and makes a
pretty idol with it; but with the same wood he lights his fire and
cooks his dinner--"He burneth part thereof in the fire; with part
thereof he eateth flesh; he roasteth roast and is satisfied; yea, he
warmeth himself and saith, Aha, aha, I am warm, I have seen the fire;
and the residue thereof he maketh a god, even his graven image; he
falleth down unto it and worshippeth it and prayeth unto it, and
saith, Deliver me, for thou art my god."
Closely associated with idolatry was Luxury. So successful to our
minds is the polemic of a prophet like Isaiah against idolatry that
the wonder to us is that it was ever necessary; and, indeed, there are
few things more puzzling to the ordinary reader of Scripture than the
constant lapses of the people of God into idolatry. How could they,
knowing the true God, exchange a worship so rational and elevated for
the worship of stocks and stones? The explanation is a simple but a
humiliating one. The worship of these foreign deities was accompanied
with sensual excesses, which appealed to the strongest elementary
passions of human nature. Feasts, dances and drunken orgies formed
part of the worship of Baal and the other Canaanite divinities.
Idolatry in Israel was never due to theoretic changes of opinion; it
was only the way in which an outbreak of laxity and luxury manifested
itself. Its equivalent in our day would be an excessive development of
the passion for amusement and excitement, destroying the dignity and
seriousness of life. The wealthy and fashionable classes led the way,
as they generally do in periods of moral retrogression; and the worst
symptom of all was when the womanhood of the country surrendered
itself to the prevailing tendencies. This last feature of degradation
had developed itself in Isaiah's day; and he attacks it with a strange
combination of humour and moral indignation: "Because the daughters of
Jerusalem are haughty, and walk with outstretched neck and wanton
eyes, walking and mincing as they go, making a tinkling with their
feet, therefore ... the Lord will take away the bravery of their
tinkling ornaments about their feet, and their cauls and their round
tires like the moon, the chains and the bracelets and the mufflers,
the bonnets and the ornaments of the legs and the headbands, the
tablets and the earrings, the rings and nose jewels, the changeable
suits of apparel and the mantles and the wimples and the crisping
pins, the glasses and the fine linen, and the hoods and the veils; and
it shall come to pass that instead of sweet smell there shall be
stink, and instead of a girdle a rent, and instead of well-set hair
baldness, and instead of a stomacher a girdle of sackcloth, and
burning instead of beauty."
Then there was Oppression. Excessive luxury in the upper classes is
usually accompanied with misery among those at the opposite end of the
social scale; because the rich in such a state of society are
heartless, and not only neglect the poor, but oppress them. The
prophets are full of the wrongs inflicted on the weak by the powerful.
The wealthy landowners took advantage of the difficulties of their
less prosperous neighbours to rob them of their holdings and remove
the ancient landmarks; and the courts of law were so corrupt that
those who could not bribe the occupants of the chair of justice had no
chance of redress. The spirit of the constitution was so far violated
that the rich held their own fellow-countrymen in slavery, and did not
even give them the advantage of the year of jubilee. Many a page of
the writings of the prophets looks like a programme for the reform of
abuses with which we are too familiar in our own civilisation. "Woe,"
says Jeremiah, "to him that buildeth his house by unrighteousness and
his chambers by wrong; that useth his neighbour's services without
wages and giveth him not for his work."
Last of all there was Hypocrisy. In spite of these sins, crying to
Heaven, there was seldom any lack of religiosity or the outward forms
of religion. Religion was divorced from morality, and ritual was
substituted for righteousness. There is no commoner or weightier
burden in the prophets than this. It is on this subject that Isaiah
lets loose the whole force of his prophetic soul in his very first
chapter, where there is a truly appalling picture of the combination
of religious rites the most multiplied with moral abuses the most
clamant: "To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices to Me?
saith the Lord. I am full of the burnt-offerings of rams and the fat
of fed beasts; and I delight not in the blood of bullocks or of rams
or of he-goats. When ye come to appear before Me, who hath required
this at your hands, to tread My courts? Bring no more vain oblations;
incense is an abomination unto Me; the new moons and Sabbaths, the
calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the
solemn meeting. Your new moons and your appointed feasts My soul
hateth; they are a trouble unto Me; I am weary to bear them. And, when
ye spread forth your hands, I will hide Mine eyes from you; yea, when
ye make many prayers, I will not hear. Your hands are full of blood.
Wash you; make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before
Mine eyes; cease to do evil; learn to do well; seek judgment; relieve
the oppressed; judge the fatherless; plead for the widow."
Thus did these watchmen search out the moral and religious condition
of the people to the very bottom and, in the most expressive language,
bring home to their fellow-countrymen how they stood in the eyes of
God.
2. A second large mass of the prophetic writings is occupied with
Denunciation, or the prediction of calamities about to come as the
punishment of sin. As sure as the prophets were that the God of the
universe was a righteous God, so certain were they that the public
sins which they exposed would bring down the wrath of Heaven; for
"though hand join in hand, the wicked shall not be unpunished."
The instruments of punishment were not far to seek. Israel was
surrounded by nations which entertained towards her feelings of bitter
hostility and needed only the slightest provocation to attack her.
Such were Edom and Moab, Philistia and Syria. But, above all, she was
hemmed in on both sides by great and warlike powers--Egypt on the one
hand and Assyria or Babylonia on the other. These were incessantly
watching each other, and, in doing so, they had to look across Israel.
She lay in the way which the one had to take in order to get at the
other. The secular historian would say that she could not but fall
sooner or later into the hands of the one or the other, and that she
would probably pass frequently from hand to hand. But to the prophets
these warlike powers were the scourges in God's hand to punish the
sins of His people; and, looking outwards from their watch-tower,
after exposing the sins within the state, they announced that the
storm-cloud of calamity was rising from this quarter or that long
before any suspicion of it had dawned on the citizens themselves.
Jehovah turns the hearts of kings and peoples as the rivers of water,
and He stirred up these hostile nations when His people were in need
of chastisement; He could wield their power as the axe which assails a
tree is wielded by the woodman; He could call the mightiest conqueror
to serve His secret purposes, as a man calls a dog to his foot.[17]
They did not know that they were being thus used. They had their own
designs, and their hatred and cruelty towards God's people were real
enough. They were even, after doing God's work on His people, to be
punished in turn for the animosity and violence with which they
performed it. But in the meantime the will of Jehovah was
accomplished, and the discipline of His providence wreaked on the sins
of the nation.
3. The third great element in these books is Comfort. Not
unfrequently, in delivering these predictions of approaching calamity,
the prophets had to put themselves into opposition to popular forms of
patriotism and incur the danger of being regarded as enemies of their
country. This was especially the case with Jeremiah, who was burdened
all his life with the sad task of proclaiming that the time for
repentance was past, and the Jewish state, with its capital, must be
destroyed. When the enemy was before the walls of Jerusalem, and the
heads of the state were rallying the citizens to the last and most
sacred duty of defending their hearths and altars, he had still to
predict that resistance was useless; and he was imprisoned as a
traitor, because his words were disheartening the soldiers. When at
last the city fell into the hands of the enemy, he was set free from
imprisonment and loaded with honours by the conqueror as one who had
been a valuable ally. Never was a position more equivocal occupied by
a patriot. Yet never has there beaten in a human breast a heart more
patriotic than Jeremiah's. Patriotism, strong as a man's passion and
tender as a woman's love, is the keynote of every chapter of his
prophecies. This is characteristic of all the prophets. They loved
Israel, and especially the city of Jerusalem, with an ardour of
affection such as has rarely, if ever, been bestowed on any other
country or city on earth. There was something natural in this passion;
for Palestine was a lovely country, whose fruitful plains and
picturesque valleys and vine-clad hills easily captivated the hearts
of its inhabitants; and Jerusalem was a city beautiful for situation.
But this natural attachment was transfigured into a higher sentiment.
Jerusalem was the hearth and sanctuary of the true religion. The
country was dear to the hearts of the prophets, because it had been
specially chosen by Jehovah as a home for His people, in which they
might work out their destiny. The people who inhabited this country
were to be married to Jehovah; He was to penetrate them with His
spirit and character; and in them and their seed all nations of the
earth were to be blessed.
To this sublime conception of the nation the hearts of all the
prophets clung. However unworthy of it their own generation might be,
they believed in the inexhaustible resources of their race, which was
immortal till its destiny was accomplished. It was this faith,
inspiring Isaiah, which enabled him to rally his fellow-countrymen to
the defence of Jerusalem, when, according to all human probabilities,
extinction stared it in the face. And even Jeremiah, though he had to
predict the ruin of the city of his heart, never dreamed for a moment
that its career was at an end; but, looking beyond the calamities of
the immediate future, he predicted that God would restore the
captivity of His people and yet make Zion a praise in the earth. It
was, indeed, in times of calamity and suffering that the patriotism
of the prophets burned most ardently. It was then that, speaking in
God's name, they poured out on the stricken city the affection which
breathes in such wonderful words of Isaiah as these: "Can a mother
forget her sucking child that she should not have compassion on the
son of her womb? Yea, they may forget: yet will I not forget thee.
Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of My hands; thy walls are
continually before Me." The second half of Isaiah,[18] addressed to
the exiles in Babylon, overflows with such outbursts of tenderness;
and, although there is obviously a love in them which is more than
human, yet the Divine love could not have found an outlet and a voice
for itself except through a human heart of the most exquisite
sensibility and passionate patriotism.[19] The prophets, who could
scourge the people in the height of their prosperity and wantonness
with words which smote like swords, became in the days of calamity the
assiduous ministers of comfort, pouring balm into the wounds of their
country and never allowing the daughter of Zion to despair of her
future.