"In the same day shall the Lord shave with a razor that is
hired, namely, by them beyond the river, by the King of
Assyria."--ISAIAH vii: 20.
The Bible is the boldest book ever written. There are no similitudes
in Ossian or the Iliad or the Odyssey so daring. Its imagery sometimes
seems on the verge of the reckless, but only seems so. The fact is
that God would startle and arouse and propel men and nations. A tame
and limping similitude would fail to accomplish the object. While
there are times when He employs in the Bible the gentle dew and the
morning cloud and the dove and the daybreak in the presentation of
truth, we often find the iron chariot, the lightning, the earthquake,
the spray, the sword, and, in my text, the razor.
This keen-bladed instrument has advanced in usefulness with the ages.
In Bible times and lands the beard remained uncut save in the seasons
of mourning and humiliation, but the razor was always a suggestive
symbol. David says of Doeg, his antagonist: "Thy tongue is a sharp
razor working deceitfully;" that is, it pretends to clear the face,
but is really used for deadly incision. In this morning's text the
weapon of the toilet appears under the following circumstances: Judea
needed to have some of its prosperities cut off, and God sends
against it three Assyrian kings--first Sennacherib, then Esrahaddon,
and afterward Nebuchadnezzar. Those three sharp invasions, that cut
down the glory of Judea, are compared to so many sweeps of the razor
across the face of the land. And these circumstances were called a
hired razor because God took the kings of Assyria, with whom He had no
sympathy, to do the work, and paid them in palaces and spoils and
annexations. These kings were hired to execute the divine behests. And
now the text, which on its first reading may have seemed trivial or
inapt, is charged with momentous import: "In the same day shall the
Lord shave with a razor that is hired--namely, by them beyond the
river, by the King of Assyria."
Well, if God's judgments are razors, we had better be careful how we
use them on other people. In careful sheath these domestic weapons are
put away, where no one by accident may touch them, and where the hands
of children may not reach them. Such instruments must be carefully
handled or not handled at all. But how recklessly some people wield
the judgments of God! If a man meet with business misfortune, how many
there are ready to cry out: "That is a judgment of God upon him
because he was unscrupulous, or arrogant, or overreaching, or miserly.
I thought he would get cut down! What a clean sweep of everything! His
city house and country house gone! His stables emptied of all the fine
bays and sorrels and grays that used to prance by his door! All his
resources overthrown, and all that he prided himself on tumbled into
demolition! Good for him!" Stop, my brother. Don't sling around too
freely the judgments of God, for they are razors.
Some of the most wicked business men succeed, and they live and die in
prosperity, and some of the most honest and conscientious are driven
into bankruptcy. Perhaps his manner was unfortunate, and he was not
really as proud as he looked to be. Some of those who carry their head
erect and look imperial are humble as a child, while many a man in
seedy coat and slouch hat and unblacked shoes is as proud as Lucifer.
You can not tell by a man's look. Perhaps he was not unscrupulous in
business, for there are two sides to every story, and everybody that
accomplishes anything for himself or others gets industriously lied
about. Perhaps his business misfortune was not a punishment, but the
fatherly discipline to prepare him for heaven, and God may love him
far more than He loves you, who can pay dollar for dollar, and are put
down in the commercial catalogues as A1. Whom the Lord loveth He gives
four hundred thousand dollars and lets die on embroidered pillows? No:
whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth. Better keep your hand off the
Lord's razors, lest they cut and wound people that do not deserve it.
If you want to shave off some of the bristling pride of your own heart
do so; but be very careful how you put the sharp edge on others.
How I do dislike the behavior of those persons who, when people are
unfortunate, say: "I told you so--getting punished--served him right."
If those I-told-you-so's got their desert they would long ago have
been pitched over the battlements. The mote in their neighbor's
eyes--so small that it takes a microscope to find it--gives them more
trouble than the beam which obscures their own optics. With air
sometimes supercilious and sometimes Pharisaical, and always
blasphemous, they take the razor of the divine judgment and sharpen it
on the hone of their own hard hearts, and then go to work on men
sprawled out at full length under disaster, cutting mercilessly. They
begin by soft expressions of sympathy and pity and half praise, and,
lather the victim all over before they put on the sharp edge.
Let us be careful how we shoot at others lest we take down the wrong
one, remembering the servant of King William Rufus who shot at a deer,
but the arrow glanced against a tree and killed the king. Instead of
going out with shafts to pierce, and razors to cut, we had better
imitate the friend of Richard Coeur de Lion, who, in the war of the
Crusades, was captured and imprisoned, but none of his friends knew
where. So his loyal friend went around the land from stronghold to
stronghold, and sung at each window a snatch of song that Richard
Coeur de Lion had taught him in other days. And one day, coming before
a jail where he suspected his king might be incarcerated, he sung two
lines of song, and immediately King Richard responded from his cell
with the other two lines, and so his whereabouts were discovered, and
immediately a successful movement was made for his liberation. So let
us go up and down the world with the music of kind words and
sympathetic hearts, serenading the unfortunate, and trying to get out
of trouble men who had noble natures, but, by unforeseen
circumstances, have been incarcerated, thus liberating kings. More
hymn-book and less razor.
Especially ought we to be apologetic and merciful toward those who,
while they have great faults, have also great virtues. Some people are
barren of virtues. No weeds verily, but no flowers. I must not be too
much enraged at a nettle along the fence if it be in a field
containing forty acres of ripe Michigan wheat. At the present time,
naturalists tell us, there is on the sun a spot twenty thousand miles
long, but from the brightness and warmth I conclude it is a good deal
of a sun yet.
Again, when I read in my text that the Lord shaves with the hired
razor of Assyria the land of Judea, I bethink myself of the precision
of God's providence. A razor swung the tenth part of an inch out of
the right line means either failure or laceration, but God's dealings
never slip, and they do not miss by the thousandth part of an inch the
right direction. People talk as though things in this world were at
loose ends. Cholera sweeps across Marseilles and Madrid and Palermo,
and we watch anxiously. Will the epidemic sweep Europe and America?
People say, "That will entirely depend on whether inoculation is a
successful experiment; that will depend entirely on quarantine
regulations; that will depend on the early or late appearance of
frost; that epidemic is pitched into the world, and it goes blundering
across the continents, and it is all guess-work and an appalling
perhaps."
My friends, I think, perhaps, that God had something to do with it,
and that His mercy may have in some way protected us--that He may have
done as much for us as the quarantine and the health officers. It was
right and a necessity that all caution should be used, but there has
come enough macaroni from Italy, and enough grapes from the south of
France, and enough rags from tatterdemalions, and hidden in these
articles of transportation enough choleraic germs to have left by this
time all Brooklyn mourning at Greenwood, and all Philadelphia at
Laurel Hill, and all Boston at Mount Auburn. I thank all the doctors
and quarantines; but, more than all, and first of all, and last of
all, and all the time, I thank God. In all the six thousand years of
the world's existence there has not one thing merely "happened so."
God is not an anarchist, but a King, a Father.
When little Tod, the son of President Lincoln, died, all the land
sympathized with the sorrow in the White House. He used to rush into
the room where the cabinet was in session, and while the most eminent
men of the land were discussing the questions of national existence.
But the child had no care about those questions. Now God the Father,
and God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost are in perpetual session in
regard to this world and kindred worlds. Shall you, His child, rush in
to criticise or arraign or condemn the divine government? No; the
Cabinet of the Eternal Three can govern and will govern in the wisest
and best way, and there never will be a mistake, and like razor
skillfully swung, shall cut that which ought to be cut, and avoid that
which ought to be avoided. Precision to the very hair-breadth. Earthly
time-pieces may get out of order and strike wrong, saying that it is
one o'clock when it is two, or two when it is three. God's clock is
always right, and when it is one it strikes one, and when it is twelve
it strikes twelve, and the second hand is as accurate as the minute
hand.
Further, my text tells us that God sometimes shaves nations: "In the
same day shall the Lord shave with the razor that is hired." With one
sharp sweep He went across Judea and down went its pride and its
power. In 1861 God shaved our nation. We had allowed to grow Sabbath
desecration, and oppression, and blasphemy, and fraud, and impurity,
and all sorts of turpitude. The South had its sins, and the North its
sins, and the East its sins, and the West its sins. We had been warned
again and again, and we did not heed. At length the sword of war cut
from the St. Lawrence to the Gulf, and from Atlantic seaboard to
Pacific seaboard. The pride of the land, not the cowards, but the
heroes, on both sides went down. And that which we took for the sword
of war was the Lord's razor.
In 1862, again, it went across the land. In 1863 again. In 1864 again.
Then the sharp instrument was incased and put away. Never in the
history of the ages was any land more thoroughly shaved than during
those four years of civil combat; and, my brethren, if we do not quit
some of our individual sins, national sins, the Lord will again take
us in hand. He has other razors within reach besides war: epidemics,
droughts, deluges, plagues--grasshopper and locust; or our
overtowering success may so far excite the jealousy of other lands
that, under some pretext, the great nations of Europe and Asia may
combine to put us down. This nation, so easily approached on north
and south and from both oceans, might have on hand at once more
hostilities than were ever arrayed against any power.
We have recently been told by skillful engineers that all our
fortresses around New York harbor could not keep the shells from being
hurled from the sea into the heart of these great cities. Insulated
China, the wealthiest of all nations, as will be realized when her
resources are developed, will have adopted all the modes of modern
warfare, and at the Golden Gate may be discussing whether Americans
must go. If the combined jealousies of Europe and Asia should come
upon us, we should have more work on hand than would be pleasant. I
hope no such combination against us will ever be formed, but I want to
show that, as Assyria was the hired razor against Judea, and Cyrus the
hired razor against Babylon, and the Huns the hired razor against the
Goths, there are now many razors that the Lord could hire if, because
of our national sins, He should undertake to shave us. In 1870,
Germany was the razor with which the Lord shaved France. England is
the razor with which very shortly the Lord will shave Russia. But
nations are to repent in a day. May a speedy and world-wide coming to
God hinder, on both sides the sea, all national calamity. But do not
let us, as a nation, either by unrighteous law at Washington, or bad
lives among ourselves, defy the Almighty.
One would think that our national symbol of the eagle might sometimes
suggest another eagle, that which ancient Rome carried. In the talons
of that eagle were clutched at one time Britain, France, Spain, Italy,
Dalmatia, Rhactia, Noricum, Pannonia, Moesia, Dacia, Thrace,
Macedonia, Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, Phoenicia, Palestine, Egypt, and
all Northern Africa, and all the islands of the Mediterranean, indeed,
all the world that was worth having, an hundred and twenty millions of
people under the wings of that one eagle. Where is she now? Ask
Gibbon, the historian, in his prose poem, the "Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire." Ask her gigantic ruins straggling their sadness through
the ages, the screech owl at windows out of which world-wide
conquerors looked. Ask the day of judgment when her crowned
debauchees, Commodus and Pertinax, and Caligula and Diocletian, shall
answer for their infamy? As men and as nations let us repent, and have
our trust in a pardoning God, rather than depend on former successes
for immunity! Out of thirteen greatest battles of the world, Napoleon
had lost but one before Waterloo. Pride and destruction often ride in
the same saddle.
But notice once more, and more than all in my text, that God is so
kind and loving, that when it is necessary for Him to cut, He has to
go to others for the sharp-edged weapon. "In the same day shall the
Lord shave with a razor that is hired." God is love. God is pity. God
is help. God is shelter. God is rescue. There are no sharp edges about
Him, no thrusting points, no instruments of laceration. If you want
balm for wounds, He has that. If you want salve for divine eyesight,
He has that. But if there is sharp and cutting work to do which
requires a razor, that He hires. God has nothing about Him that hurts,
save when dire necessity demands, and then He has to go clear off to
some one else to get the instrument.
This divine geniality will be no novelty to those who have pondered
the Calvarean massacre, where God submerged Himself in human tears,
and crimsoned Himself from punctured arteries, and let the terrestrial
and infernal worlds maul Him until the chandeliers of the sky had to
be turned out, because the universe could not endure the indecency.
Illustrious for love He must have been to take all that as our
substitute, paying out of His own heart the price of our admission at
the gates of heaven.
King Henry II., of England, crowned his son as king, and on the day of
coronation put on a servant's garb and waited, he, the king, at the
son's table, to the astonishment of all the princes. But we know of a
more wondrous scene, the King of heaven and earth offering to put on
you, His child, the crown of life, and in the form of a servant
waiting on you with blessing. Extol that love, all painting, all
sculpture, all music, all architecture, all worship! In Dresdenian
gallery let Raphael hold Him up as a child, and in Antwerp Cathedral
let Rubens hand Him down from the cross as a martyr, and Handel make
all his oratorio vibrate around that one chord--"He was wounded for
our transgressions, bruised for our iniquity." But not until all the
redeemed get home, and from the countenances of all the piled-up
galleries of the ransomed shall be revealed the wonders of redemption,
shall either man or seraph or archangel know the height, and depth,
and length, and breadth of the love of God.
At our national capital, a monument in honor of him who did more than
any one to achieve our American Independence, was for scores of years
in building, and most of us were discouraged and said it never would
be completed. And how glad we all were when in the presence of the
highest officials of the nation, the work was done! But will the
monument to Him who died for the eternal liberation of the human race
ever be completed? For ages the work has been going up; evangelists
and apostles and martyrs have been adding to the heavenly pile, and
every one of the millions of the redeemed going up from earth, has
made to it contribution of gladness, and weight of glory is swung to
the top of other weight of glory, higher and higher as the centuries
go by, higher and higher as the whole millenniums roll, sapphire on
the top of jasper, sardonyx on the top of chalcedony, and chrysoprasus
above topaz, until, far beneath shall be the walls and towers and
domes of the great capitol, a monument forever and forever rising, and
yet never done. "Unto Him who hath loved us and washed us from our
sins in His own blood, and made us kings and priests forever."
Allelujah, amen.