Note that phrase--'Ye that bear the vessels of the Lord.' The returning
exiles as a whole are so addressed, but the significance of the
expression, and the precise metaphor which it is meant to convey, may
be questionable. The word rendered 'vessel' is a wide expression,
meaning any kind of equipment, and in other places of the Old Testament
the whole phrase rendered here, 'ye that bear the vessels,' is
translated 'armour-bearers.' Such an image would be quite congruous
with the context here, in which warlike figures abound. And if so, the
picture would be that of an army on the march, each man carrying some
of the weapons of the great Captain and Leader. But perhaps the other
explanation is more likely, which regards 'the vessels of the Lord' as
being an allusion to the sacrificial and other implements of worship,
which, in the first Exodus, the Levites carried on the march. And if
that be the meaning, as seems more congruous with the command of purity
which is deduced from the function of bearing the vessels, then the
figure here, of course, is that of a company of priests. I venture to
throw the two ideas together, and to say that we may here find an ideal
of the Christian community as being a great company of warrior-priests
on the march, guarding a sacred deposit which has been committed to
their charge.
Look, then, at that combination in the true Christian character of the
two apparently opposite ideas of warrior and priest. It suggests that
all the life is to be conflict, and that all the conflict is to be
worship; that everywhere, in the thick of the fight, we may still bear
the remembrance of the 'secret place of the most High.' It suggests,
too, that the warfare is worship, that the offices of the priest and of
the warrior are one and the same thing, and both consist in their
mediating between man and God, bringing God in His Gospel to men, and
bringing men through their faith to God. The combination suggests,
likewise, how, in the true Christian character, there ought ever to be
blended, in strange harmony, the virtues of the soldier and the
qualities of the priest; compassion for the ignorant and them that are
out of the way, with courage; meekness with strength; a quiet, placable
heart hating strife, joined to a spirit that cheerily fronts every
danger and is eager for the conflict in which evil is the foe and God
the helper. The old Crusaders went to battle with the Cross on their
hearts, and on their shoulders, and on the hilts of their swords; and
we, too, in all our warfare, have to remember that its weapons are not
carnal but spiritual, and that only then do we fight as the Captain of
our salvation fought, when our arms are meekness and pity, and our
warfare is waged in gentleness and love.
Note, further, that in this phrase we have the old, old metaphor of
life as a march, but so modified as to lose all its melancholy and
weariness and to become an elevating hope. The idea which runs through
all poetry, of life as a journey, suggests effort, monotonous change, a
uniform law of variety and transiency, struggle and weariness, but the
Christian thought of life, while preserving the idea of change,
modifies it into the blessed thought of progress. Life, if it is as
Christ meant it to be, is a journey in the sense that it is a
continuous effort, not unsuccessful, toward a clearly discerned goal,
our eternal home. The Christian march is a march from slavery to
freedom, and from a foreign land to our native soil.
Again, this metaphor suggests that this company of marching priests
have in charge a sacred deposit. Paul speaks of the 'glorious Gospel
which was committed to my trust.' 'That good thing which was committed
unto thee by the Holy Ghost, keep.' The history of the return from
Babylon in the Book of Ezra presents a remarkable parallel to the
language of my text, for there we are told how, in the preparation for
the march, the leader entrusted the sacred vessels of the temple, which
the liberality of the heathen king had returned to him, to a group of
Levites and priests, weighing them at the beginning, and bidding them
keep them safe until they were weighed again in the courts of the
Lord's house in Jerusalem.
And, in like manner, to us Christians is given the charge of God's
great weapons of warfare, with which He contends with the wickedness of
the world--viz. that great message of salvation through, and in, the
Cross of Jesus Christ. And there are committed to us, further, to guard
sedulously, and to keep bright and untarnished and undiminished in
weight and worth, the precious treasures of the Christian life of
communion with Him. And we may give another application to the figure
and think of the solemn trust which is put into our hands, in the gift
of our own selves, which we ourselves can either waste, and stain, and
lose, or can guard and polish into vessels 'meet for the Master's use.'
Gathering, then, these ideas together, we take this as the ideal of the
Christian community--a company of priests on the march, with a sacred
deposit committed to their trust. If we reflected more on such a
conception of the Christian life, we should more earnestly hearken to,
and more sedulously discharge, the commands that are built thereon. To
these commands I now turn.