FEEDING ON ASHES

'He feedeth on ashes: a deceived heart hath turned him aside, that he

cannot deliver his soul, nor say, Is there not a lie in my right

hand?'--ISAIAH xliv. 20.

The prophet has been pouring fierce scorn on idolaters. They make, he

says, the gods they worship. They take a tree and saw it up: one log

serves for a fire to cook their food, and with compass and pencil and

plane they carve the figure of a man, and then they bow down to it and

say, 'Deliver me, for thou art my god!' He sums up the whole in this

sentence of my text, in which the tone changes from bitter irony to

astonished pity. Now, if this were the time and the place, one would

like to expand and illustrate the deep thoughts in these words in

reference to idolatry; thoughts which go dead in the teeth of a great

deal that is now supposed to be scientifically established, but which

may be none the more true for all that. He asserts that idolatry is

empty, a feeding on ashes. He declares, in opposition to modern ideas,

that the low, gross forms of polytheism and idol-worship are a

departure from a previous higher stage, whereas to-day we are told by a

hundred voices that all religion begins at the bottom, and slowly

struggles up to the top. Isaiah says the very opposite. The pure form

is the primitive; the secondary form is the gross, which is a

corruption. They tell us too, nowadays, that all religion pursues a

process of evolution, and gradually clears itself of its more imperfect

and carnal elements. Isaiah says, 'he cannot deliver his soul'; and no

religion ever worked itself up, unless under the impulse of a

revelation from without. That is Isaiah's philosophy of idolatry, and I

expect it will be accepted as the true one some day.

But my text has a wider bearing. It not only describes, in pathetic

language, the condition of the idolater, but it is true about all

lives, which are really idolatrous in so far as they make anything else

than God their aim and their joy. Every word of this text applies to

such lives--that is to say, to the lives of a good many people

listening to me now. And I would fain try to lay the truths here on

some hearts. Let me just take them as they lie in the words before me.

I. A life that substantially ignores God is empty of all true

satisfaction.

'He feedeth on ashes'! Very little imagination will realise the force

of that picture. The gritty cinders will irritate the lips and tongue,

will dry up the moisture of the mouth, will interfere with the

breathing, and there will be no nourishment in a sackful of them.

Dear brethren, the underlying truth is this--God is the only food of a

man's soul. You pick up the skeleton of a bird upon a moor; and if you

know anything about osteology--the science of bones--you will see, in

the very make of its breast-bone and its wing-bones, the declaration

that its destiny was to soar into the blue. You pick up the skeleton of

a fish lying on the beach, and you will see in its very form and

characteristics that its destiny is to expatiate in the depths of the

sea. And, written on you, as distinctly as flight on the bird, or

swimming on the fish, is this, that you are meant, by your very make,

to soar up into the heights of the glory of God, and to plunge deep

into the abysses of His infinite love and wisdom. Man is made for God.

'Whose image and superscription hath it?' said Christ. The coin belongs

to the king whose head and titles are displayed upon it; and on your

heart, friend, though a usurper has tried to recoin the piece, and put

his own foul image on the top of the original one, is stamped deep that

you belong to the King of kings, to God Himself.

For what does our heart want? A perfect, changeless, all-powerful love.

And what does our mind want? Reliable, guiding, inexhaustible, and yet

accessible truth. And what does our will want? Commandments which have

an authoritative ring in their very utterance, and which will serve for

infallible guides for our lives. And what do our weak, sinful natures

want? Something that shall free our consciences, and shall deliver us

from the burden of our transgressions, and shall calm our fears, and

shall quicken and warrant our lofty hopes. And what do men whose

destiny is to live for ever want but something that shall go with them

through all changes of condition, and, like a light in the midst of the

darkest tunnel, shall burn in the passage between this and the other

world, and shall never be taken away from them? We want a Person to be

everything to us. No accumulation of things will satisfy a man. And we

want all our treasures to be in one Person, and we need that that

Person shall live as long as we live, and as long as we need shall be

sufficient to supply us. And all this is only the spelling in many

letters of the one name--God. That is what we want, that, and nothing

less.

Then the next step that I suggest to you is, that where a man will take

God for the food of his spirit, and turn love and mind and will and

conscience and practical life to Him, seeing Him in everything, and

seeing all things in Him; saturating, as it were, the universe with the

thought of God, and recreating his own spirit with communion of

friendship to Him; to that man lower goods do first disclose their real

sweetness, their most poignant delight, and their most solid

satisfaction. To say of a world where God has set us, that it is all

'vanity and vexation of spirit,' goes in flat contradiction to what He

said when, creation finished, He looked upon His world, and proclaimed

to the waiting seraphim around that 'it was very good.' There is a view

of the world which calls itself pious, but is really an insult to God;

and the irreligious pessimism that is fashionable nowadays, as if human

life were a great mistake, and everything were mean and poor and

insufficient, is contrary to the facts and to the consciousness of

every man. But if you make things first which were meant to be second,

then you make what was meant to be food 'ashes.' They are all good in

their place. Wealth is good; wisdom is good; success is good; love is

good. And all these things may be enjoyed without God, and will each of

them yield their proportional satisfaction to the part of our nature to

which they belong. But if you put them first you degrade them; a change

passes over them at once. A long row of cyphers means nothing; put a

significant digit in front of it, and it means millions. Take away the

digit, and it goes back to nothing again. The world, and all its fading

sweets, if you put God in the forefront of it, and begin the series

with Him, is sweet, though it may be fleeting, and is meant to be felt

by us as such. But if you take away Him, it is a row of cyphers

signifying nothing, and able to contribute nothing to the real, deepest

necessities of the human soul. And so the old question comes--'Why do

ye spend your money for that which is not bread?' It is bread, if only

you will remember first that God is the food of your souls. But if you

try to nourish yourselves on it alone, then, as I said, a sackful of

such ashes will not stay your appetite. Oh! brethren, God has not so

blundered in making the world that He has surrounded us with things

that are all lies, but He has so made it that whosoever flies in the

face of the gracious commandment which is also an invitation, 'Seek ye

first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness,' has not only no

security that the 'other things' shall 'be added unto him,' but has the

certainty that though they were added to him, in degree beyond his

dreams and highest hopes, they would avail nothing to satisfy the

hunger of his heart. As George Herbert puts it--

Shadows well mounted, dreams in a career,

Embroidered lies, nothing between two dishes,

These are the pleasures here.'

'He feedeth on ashes,' because he does not take God for the food of his

soul.

II. So, secondly, notice that a life which thus ignores God is

tragically unaware of its own emptiness.

'A deceived heart hath turned him aside.' That explains how the man

comes to fancy that ashes are food. His whole nature is perverted, his

vision distorted, his power of judgment marred. He is given over to

hallucinations and illusions and dreams.

That explains, too, why men persist in this feeding on ashes after all

experience. There is no fact stranger or more tragical in our histories

than that we do not learn by a thousand failures that the world will

not avail to make us restful and blessed. You will see a dog chasing a

sparrow,--it has chased hundreds before and never caught one. Yet, when

the bird rises from the ground, away it goes after it once more, with

eager yelp and rush, to renew the old experience. Ah! that is like what

a great many of you are doing, and you have not the same excuse that

the dog has. You have been trying all your lives--and some of you have

grey hairs on your heads--to slake your thirst by dipping leaky buckets

into empty wells, and you are at it yet. As some one says, 'experience

throws a light on the wave behind us,' but it does very little to fling

a light on the sea before us. Experience confirms my text, for I

venture to put it to the experience of every man--how many moments of

complete satisfaction and rest can you summon up in your memory as

having been yours in the past? 'He that loveth silver shall not be

satisfied with silver, nor he that loveth abundance with increase.'

Appetite always grows faster than supply. And so, though we have tried

them in vain so often, we turn again to the old discredited sources,

and fancy we shall do better this time. Is it not strange? Is there any

explanation of it, other than that of my text? 'A deceived heart hath

turned him aside.'

And that deceived heart, stronger than experience, is also stronger

than conscience. Do you not know that you ought to be Christians? Do

you not know that it is both wrong and foolish of you to ignore God? Do

you not know that you will have to answer for it? Have you not had

moments of illumination when there has risen up before you the whole

vanity of your past lives, and when you have felt 'I have played the

fool, and erred exceedingly'? And yet, what has come of it all with

some of you? Why, what comes of it with the drunkard in the Book of

Proverbs, who, as soon as he has got over the bruises and the sickness

of his last debauch, says, 'I will seek it yet again.' 'A deceived

heart hath turned him aside.'

And how is it that this hallucination that you have fed full and been

satisfied, when all the while your hunger has not been appeased, can

continue to act on us? For the very plain reason that every one of us

has in himself a higher and a lower self, a set of desires for the

grosser, more earthly, and, using the word in its proper sense, worldly

sort--that is to say, directed towards material things, and a higher

set which look right up to God if they were allowed fair play. And of

these two sets--which really are one at bottom, if a man would only see

it--the lower gets the upper hand, and suppresses the higher and the

nobler. And so in many a man and woman the longing for God is crushed

out by the grosser delights of sense.

One sometimes hears of cowardly, unmanly sailors, who in shipwreck push

the women and children aside, and struggle to the boats. And there are

in all of us groups of sturdy mendicants, so to speak, who elbow their

way to the front, and will have their wants satisfied. What becomes of

the gentler group that stand behind, unnoticed and silent? It is an

awful thing when men and women do, as so many of us do, pervert the

tastes that are meant to lead them to God, in order to stifle the

consciousness that they need a God at all. There are tribes of low

savages who are known as 'clay-eaters.' That is what a great many of us

are; we feed upon the serpent's meat, the dust of the earth, and let

all the higher heavenly food, which addresses itself first to loftier

desires, but also satisfies these lower ones, stand unnoticed, unsought

for, unpartaken of. Dear friends, do not be befooled by that

treacherous heart of yours, but let the deepest voices in your soul be

heard. Understand, I beseech you, that their cry is for no created

person or thing, and that only God Himself can satisfy them.

III. And now, lastly, notice that a life thus ignoring God needs a

power from without to set it free.

'He cannot deliver his soul.' Can you? Do you think you can break the

habits of a lifetime? Do you think that, left to yourself, you would

ever have any inclination to break them? Certainly, left to yourselves,

you will never have the power. These long indulged appetites of ours

grow with indulgence; and that which first was light as a cobweb, and

soft as a silken bracelet, becomes heavier and solider until it is an

iron fetter upon the limb, which no man can break. There is nothing

more awful in life than the influence of habit, so unthinkingly

acquired, so inexorably certain, so limiting our possibilities and

enclosing us in its grip.

Dear brethren, there is something more wanted than yourselves to break

this chain. You have tried, I have no doubt, in the course of your

lives, more and more resolutely, to cure yourselves of some more or

less unworthy habits. They may be but mere slight tricks of attitude or

intonation, or movement. Has your success been such as to encourage you

to think that you can revolutionise your lives, and dethrone the

despots that have ruled over you in the past? I leave the question to

yourselves. To me it seems that the world of men is certain to go on

ignoring God, and seeking its delight only in the world of creatures,

unless there comes in an outside power into the heart of the world and

revolutionises all things.

It is that power that I have to preach, the Christ who is the 'Bread of

God that came down from Heaven,' who can lift up any soul from the most

obstinate and long-continued grovelling amongst the transitory things

of this limited world, and the superficial delights of sense and a

gratified bodily life; who can bring the forgiveness which is

essential, the deliverance from the power of evil which is not less

essential, and who can fill our hearts with Himself the food of the

world. He comes to each of us; He comes to you, with the old

unanswerable question upon His lips, 'Why do you spend your money for

that which is not bread, and your labour for that which satisfieth

not?' It is unanswerable, for you can give no reason sufficient for

such madness. All that you could say, and you durst not say it to Him,

is, 'a deceived heart hath turned me aside.' He comes with the old

gracious word upon His lips, 'Take! eat! this is My body which is

broken for you.' He offers us Himself. He can stay all the hungers of

all mankind. He can feed your heart with love, your mind with truth

which is Himself, your will with His sweet commands.

As of old He made the thousands sit down upon the grass, and they did

all eat and were filled, so He stands before the world to-day and says,

'I am the Bread of Life; He that cometh to Me shall never hunger.' And

if you will only come to Him--that is to say, will trust yourselves

altogether to the merits of His sacrifice, and the might of His

indwelling Spirit--He will take away all the taste for the leeks and

onions and garlic, and will give you the appetite for heavenly food. He

will spread for you a table in the wilderness, and what would else be

ashes will become sweet, wholesome, and nourishing. Nor will He cease

there, for in His own good time He will call us to the banqueting house

above, where He will make us to sit down to meat, and come forth

Himself and serve us. Here, hunger often brings pain, and eating is

followed by repletion. But there, appetite and satisfaction will

produce each other perpetually, and the blessed ones who then hunger

will not hunger so as to feel faintness or emptiness, nor be so filled

as to cease to desire larger portions of the Bread of God. I beseech

you, cry, 'Lord, ever more give us this bread!'