'And a man shall be as an hiding place from the wind, and a covert from
the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a
great rock in a weary land.'--ISAIAH xxxii. 2.
We may well say, Of whom speaketh the prophet this? Here are distinctly
attributed to one of ourselves, if we take the words in their
simplicity and fulness, functions and powers which universal experience
has taught us not to look for in humanity. And there have been a great
many attempts--as it seems to me, altogether futile and baseless
ones--to break the force of these words as a distinct prophecy of Jesus
Christ. Surely the language is far too wide to have application to any
real or ideal Jewish monarch, except one whose kingdom is an
everlasting kingdom? Surely the experience of a hundred centuries might
teach men that there is _one_ man, and one alone, who is the refuge
from all dangers, the fruition of all desires, the rest and refreshment
in all toils.
And I, for my part, have no hesitation in saying that the only
reference of these words which gives full value to their wealth of
blessing, is to regard them as a prophecy of _the_ man--Christ Jesus;
hiding in whom we are safe, 'coming' to whom we 'never thirst,' guarded
and blest by whom no weariness can befall us, and dwelling in whom this
weary world shall be full of refreshment and peace!
I do not need to point out the exquisite beauty of the imagery or the
pathos and peace that breathe in the majestic rhythm of the words.
There is something more than poetical beauty or rhetorical
amplification of a single thought in those three clauses. The
'hiding-place' and 'covert' refer to one class of wants; the 'rivers of
water in a dry place' to yet another; and 'the shadow of a great rock
in a weary land' to yet a third. And, though they are tinged and dyed
in Eastern imagery, the realities of life in Western lands, and in all
ages, give them a deeper beauty than that of lovely imagery, and are
the true keys to understanding their meaning. We shall, perhaps, best
grasp the whole depth of that meaning according to the Messianic
reference which we give to the text, if we consider the sad and solemn
conception of man's life that underlies it; the enigmatical and
obstinate hope which it holds out in the teeth of all experience--'A
_man_ shall be a refuge'; and the solution of the riddle in the man
Christ Jesus.
I. First, there underlies this prophecy a very sad but a very true
conception of human life.
The three classes of promises have correlative with them three phases
of man's condition, three diverse aspects of his need and misery. The
'covert' and the 'hiding-place' imply tempest, storm, and danger; the
'river of water' implies drought and thirst; 'the shadow of a great
rock' implies lassitude and languor, fatigue and weariness. The view of
life that arises from the combination of these three bears upon its
front the signature of truth in the very fact that it is a sad view.
For, I suppose, notwithstanding all that we may say concerning the
beauty and the blessedness scattered broadcast round about us;
notwithstanding that we believe, and hold as for our lives the happy
'faith that all which we behold is full of blessing,' it needs but a
very short experience of this life, and but a superficial examination
of our own histories and our own hearts, in order to come to the
conclusion that the world is full of strange and terrible sadness, that
every life has dark tracts and long stretches of sombre tint, and that
no representation is true to fact which dips its pencil only in light
and flings no shadows on the canvas. There is no depth in a Chinese
picture, because there is no shade. It is the wrinkles and marks of
tear and wear that make the expression in a _man's_ portrait. 'Life's
sternest painter "is" its best.' The gloomy thoughts which are charged
against Scripture are the true thoughts about man and the world as man
has made it. Not, indeed, that life needs to be so, but that by reason
of our own evil and departure from God there have come in as a
disturbing element the retributive consequences of our own godlessness,
and these have made danger where else were safety, thirst where else
were rivers of water, and weariness and lassitude where else were
strength and bounding hope.
So then, look for a moment at these three points that come out of my
text, in order to lay the foundation for subsequent considerations.
We live a life defenceless and exposed to many a storm and tempest. I
need but remind you of the adverse circumstances--the wild winds that
go sweeping across the flat level, the biting blasts that come down
from the snow-clad mountains of destiny that lie round the low plain
upon which we live. I need but remind you of the dangers that are
lodged for our spiritual life in the temptations to evil that are round
us. I need but remind you of that creeping and clinging consciousness
of being exposed to a divinely commissioned retribution and punishment,
which perverts the Name that ought to be the basis of all our
blessedness into a Name unwelcome and terrible, because threatening
judgment. I need but remind you how men's sins have made it needful
that when the mighty God, even the Lord, appears before them, 'it shall
be very tempestuous round about him.' Men fear and ought to fear 'the
blast of the breath of His nostrils,' which must burn up all that is
evil. And I need but remind you of that last wild wind of Death that
whirls the sin-faded leaves into dark corners where they lie and rot.
My brother, you have not lived thus long without learning how
defenceless you are against the storm of adverse circumstances. You
have not lived thus long without learning that though, blessed be God!
there do come in all our lives long periods of halcyon rest, when
'birds of calm sit brooding on the charmed wave,' and the heavens above
are clear as sapphire, and the sea around is transparent as opal--yet
the little cloud, no bigger than a man's hand, may rise on the horizon,
and may thicken and blacken and grow greater and nearer till all the
sky is dark, and burst in lightning and rain and fierceness of wind,
till 'through the torn sail the wild tempest is streaming,' and the
white crests of the waves are like the mane of Death's pale horse
leaping upon the broken ship. We have all learnt in how profound a
sense, by reason of outward adverse circumstances and inward
temptations, by reason of the fears of a Justice which we know is
throned at the centre of the creation, by reason of a death which to us
is a terror, and by reason of that universal fear of 'after death the
judgment,' storm and tempest swoop upon our paths. God made the
sunshine, and we have made it a storm. God made life blessed and full
of safety and peace, and we have wrenched ourselves from Him and stand
defenceless amidst its dangers.
Then, there is another aspect and conception of life which underlies
these words of my text. The image of the desert was before the
prophet's rapt vision. He saw the sand whirled into mad dancing columns
before the blast which swept across the unsheltered flat, with nothing,
for a day's march, to check its force. But the wilderness is not only
shelterless, it is waterless too--a place in which wild and ravening
thirst finds no refreshing draughts, and the tongue cleaves to the
blackening gums.
'Rivers of water in a dry place'; and what is the prose fact of that?
That you and I live in the midst of a world which has no correspondence
with, nor power of satisfying, our truest and deepest selves--that we
bear about with us a whole set of longings and needs and weaknesses and
strengths and capacities, all of which, like the climbing tendrils of
some creeping plant, go feeling and putting out their green fingers to
lay hold of some prop and stay--that man is so made that for his rest
and blessedness he must have an external object round which his spirit
may cling, on which his desires may fasten and rest, by which his heart
may be blessed, which shall be authority for his will, peace for his
fears, sprinkling and cleansing for his conscience, light for his
understanding, shall be in complete correspondence with his inward
nature--be water for his thirst, and bread for his hunger.
And as thus, on the very nature which each of us carries, there is
stamped the signature of dependence, and the necessity of finding an
external object on which to rest; and as, further, men will not be
tutored even by their own miseries or by the voice of their own wants,
and ever confound their wishes with their wants and their whims with
their needs, therefore it comes to pass that the appetite which was
only meant to direct us to God, and to be as a wholesome hunger in
order to secure our partaking with relish and delight of the divine
food that is provided for it, becomes unsatisfied, a torture, and
unslaked, a ravening madness; and men's needs become men's misery; and
men's hunger becomes men's famine; and men's thirst becomes men's
death. We do dwell in a dry land where no water is.
All about us there are these creatures of God, bright and blessed and
beautiful, fit for their functions and meant to minister to our
gladness. They are meant to be held in subordination. It is not meant
that we should find in them the food for our souls. Wealth and honour
and wisdom and love and gratified ambition and successful purpose, and
whatsoever other good things a man may gather about him and achieve--he
may have them all, and yet in spite of them all there will be a great
aching, longing vacuity in his soul. His true and inmost being will be
groping through the darkness, like a plant growing in a cellar, for the
light which alone can tinge its pale petals and swell its shrivelling
blossoms to ripeness and fruit.
A dry place, as well as a dangerous place--have not you found it so? I
believe that every soul of man has, if he will be honest with himself,
and that there is not one among us who would not, if he were to look
into the deepest facts and real governing experience of his life,
confess--I thirst: 'my soul thirsteth.' And oh, brethren, why not go on
with the quotation, and make that which is else a pain, a condition of
blessedness? Why not recognise the meaning of all this restless
disquiet, and say 'My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God'?
And then there is the other idea also underlying these words, yet
another phase of this sad life of ours--not only danger and drought,
but also weariness and languor. The desert stretches before us again,
where there is no shelter from the blast and no trickling stream amid
the yellowing sand; where the fierce ball above beats down cruelly, and
its hot rays are flung up cruelly into our faces, and the glare blinds
us, and the stifling heat wearies us, and work is a torture and motion
is misery, and we long for nothing so much as to be quiet and to hide
our heads in some shade.
I was reading recently one of our last books of travel in the
wilderness of the Exodus, in which the writer told how, after toiling
for hours under a scorching sun, over the hot, white, marly flat,
seeing nothing but a beetle or two on the way, and finding no shelter
anywhere from the pitiless beating of the sunshine, the weary
travellers came at last to a little Retem bush only a few feet high,
and flung themselves down and tried to hide, at least, their heads,
from those 'sunbeams like swords,' even beneath its ragged shade. And
my text tells of a great rock, with blue dimness in its shadow, with
haply a fern or two in the moist places of its crevices, where there is
rest, and a man can lie down and be cool, while all outside is burning
sun, and burning sand, and dancing mirage.
Oh! the weariness felt by us all, of plod, plod, plodding across the
sand! That fatal monotony into which every man's life stiffens, as far
as outward circumstances, outward joys and pleasures go! the depressing
influence of custom which takes the edge off all gladness and adds a
burden to every duty! the weariness of all that tugging up the hill, of
all that collar-work which we have to do! Who is there that has not his
mood, and that by no means the least worthy and man-like of his moods,
wherein he feels not, perhaps, that all is vanity, but--'how infinitely
wearisome it all is.'
And so every race of man that ever has lived has managed out of two
miseries to make a kind of shadowy gladness; and, knowing the weariness
of life and the blackness of death, has somewhat lightened the latter
by throwing upon it the thought of the former, and has said, 'Well, at
any rate, if the grave be narrow and dark, and if outside "the warm
precincts of the cheerful day" there be that ambiguous night, at least
it is the place for sleep; and, if we cannot be sure of anything more,
we shall rest then, at any rate.' So the hope of 'long disquiet merged
in rest' becomes almost bright, and man's weariness finds most pathetic
expression in his thinking of the grave as a bed where he can stretch
himself and be still. Life is hard, life is dry, life is dangerous.
II. But another thought suggested by these words is--The Mysterious
Hope which shines through them.
One of ourselves shall deliver us from all this evil in life. '_A man_
shall be a refuge, rivers of water, the shadow of a great rock.' Such
an expectation seems to be right in the teeth of all experience and far
too high-pitched ever to be fulfilled. It appears to demand in him who
should bring it to pass powers which are more than human, and which
must in some inexplicable way be wide as the range of humanity and
enduring as the succession of the ages.
It is worth while to realise to ourselves these two points which seem
to make such words as these of our text a blank impossibility.
Experience contradicts them, and common-sense demands for their
fulfilment an apparently impossible human character.
All experience seems to teach--does it not?--that no human arm or heart
can be to another soul what these words promise, and what we need. And
yet the men who have been disappointed and disenchanted a thousand
times do still look among their fellows for what their fellows, too,
are looking for, and none have ever found. Have _we_ found what we seek
among men? Have we ever known amongst the dearest that we have clung
to, one arm that was strong enough to keep us in all danger? Has there
ever been a human love to which we can run with the security that
_there_ is a strong tower where no evil can touch us? There have been
many delights in all our lives mediated and ministered to us by those
that we loved. They have taught us, and helped us, and strengthened us
in a thousand ways. We have received from them draughts of wisdom, of
love, of joy, of guidance, of impulse, of comfort, which have been, as
water in the desert is, more precious than gold. Our fellow-travellers
have shared their store with us, 'letting down their pitchers upon
their hand,' and giving us drink; but has the draught ever slaked the
thirst? They carry but a pitcher, and a pitcher is not a fountain. Have
there been any in all the round of those that we have loved and
trusted, to whom we have trusted absolutely, without having been
disappointed? They, like us, are hemmed in by human limitations. They
each bear a burdened and thirsty spirit, itself needing such supplies.
And to the truest, happiest, most soul-sufficing companionship, there
comes at last that dread hour which ends all sweet commerce of giving
and receiving, and makes the rest of life, for some of us, one
monotonous ashen-grey wilderness where no water is. These things make
it impossible for us to find anywhere amongst men our refuge and our
fruition.
And yet how strange, how pathetic, is the fact that after all
disappointments, men still obstinately continue to look among their
fellows for guidance and for light, for consolation, for defence, and
for strength! After a thousand failures they still hope. Does not the
search at once confess that hitherto they have not found, else why be
seeking still?--and that they yet believe they will yet find, else why
not cease the vain quest? And surely He who made us, made us not in
vain, nor cursed us with immortal hopes which are only persistent lies.
Surely there is some living Person who will vindicate these
unquenchable hopes of humanity, and receive and requite our love and
trust, and satisfy our longings, and explain the riddle of our lives.
If there be not, nor ever has been, nor ever can be a man who shall
satisfy us with his love, and defend us with his power, and be our
all-sufficient satisfaction and our rest in weariness, then much of
man's noblest nature is a mistake, and many of his purest and
profoundest hopes are an illusion, a mockery, and a snare. The
obstinate hope that, within the limits of humanity, we shall find what
we need is a mystery, except on one hypothesis, that it, too, belongs
to 'the unconscious prophecies' that God has lodged in all men's hearts.
Nor need I remind you, I suppose, how such functions as those of which
my text speaks not only seem to be contradicted by all experience, but
manifestly and obviously to transcend the possibilities of human
nature. _A man_ to defend me; and he himself--does _he_ need no
defence? A man to supply my wants; and is his spirit, then, other than
mine, that it can become the all-sufficient fulness for my emptiness?
He that can do this for one spirit must be greater than the spirit for
which he doeth it. He that can do it for the whole race of man, through
all ages, in all circumstances, down to the end of time, in every
latitude, under every condition of civilisation--who must _he_ be who,
for the whole world, evermore and always, is their defence, their
gladness, their shelter, and their rest?
The function requires a divine power, and the application of the power
requires a human hand. It is not enough that I should be pointed to a
far-off heaven, where there dwells an infinite loving God--I believe
that we need more than that. We need both of the truths: 'God is my
refuge and my strength,' and 'A man shall be a hiding-place from the
wind, and a covert from the tempest.'
III. That brings me to the last point to be noticed, namely:--The
solution of the mystery in the person of Jesus Christ.
That which seemed impossible is real. The forebodings of humanity have
not fathomed the powers of Divine Love. There _is_ a man, our brother,
bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh, who can be to single souls
the adequate object of their perfect trust, the abiding home of their
deepest love, the unfailing supply for their profoundest wants. There
_is_ one man to whom it is wise and blessed to look as the exclusive
source of all our peace, the absolute ruler of all our lives. There
_is_ a man in whom we find all that we have vainly sought in men. There
_is_ a man, who can be to all ages and to the whole race their refuge,
their satisfaction, their rest. 'It behoved Him to be made in all
points like unto His brethren,' that His succour might be ever near,
and His sympathy sure. The man Christ Jesus who, being man, is God
manifest in the flesh, exercises in one and the same act the offices of
divine pity and human compassion, of divine and human guardianship, of
divine and human love.
'And so the Word had breath, and wrought
With human hands the creed of creeds
In loveliness of perfect deeds,
More strong than all poetic thought.'
The dreams of weary hearts that have longed for an impossible
perfection are all below the reality. The fact surpasses all
expectation. It is more than all prophecies, it is more than all hopes,
it is more than all praise. It is God's unspeakable gift. Well might an
angel voice proclaim the mystery of love, 'Unto you is _born_ a
Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.' The ancient promise of our text is
history now. A man has been and is all these things for us.
A refuge and a hiding-place from every storm--adverse circumstances
sweep upon us, and His mighty hand is put down there as a buckler,
behind which we may hide and be safe. Temptations to evil storm upon
us, but if we are enclosed within Him they never touch us. The fears of
our own hearts swirl like a river in flood against the walls of our
fortress home, and we can laugh at them, for it is founded upon a rock!
The day of judgment rises before us solemn and certain, and we can
await it without fear, and approach it with calm joy. I call upon no
mountains and hills to cover me.
'Rock of ages, cleft for me, Let me hide myself in Thee.'
'Rivers of water in a dry place,'--hungry and thirsty, my soul fainted
within me. I longed for light, and behold darkness. I longed for help,
and there was none that could come close to my spirit to succour and to
give me drink in the desert. My conscience cried in all its wounds for
cleansing and stanching, and no comforter nor any balm was there. My
heart, weary of limited loves and mortal affections, howsoever sweet
and precious, yearned and bled for one to rest upon all-sufficient and
eternal. I thirsted with a thirst that was more than desire, that was
pain, and was coming to be death, and I heard a voice which said, 'If
any man thirst, let him come unto Me and drink.'
'The shadow of a great rock in a weary land,'--and my heart was weary
by reason of the greatness of the way, and duties and tasks seemed
toils and burdens, and I was ready to say, 'Wherefore has Thou made me
and all men in vain? Surely all this is vanity and vexation of spirit,'
and I heard One that laid His hand upon me and said, 'Come unto Me, and
I will give thee rest.' I come to Thee, O Christ, faint and perishing,
defenceless and needy, with many a sin and many a fear; to Thee I turn
for Thou hast died for me, and for me thou dost live. Be Thou my
shelter and strong tower. Give me to drink of living water. Let me rest
in Thee while in this weary land, and let Thy sweet love, my Brother
and my Lord, be mine all on earth and the heaven of my heaven!