"Wherefore do the wicked live?"--JOB xxi: 7,
Poor Job! With tusks and horns and hoofs and stings, all the
misfortunes of life seemed to come upon him at once. Bankruptcy,
bereavement, scandalization, and eruptive disease so irritating that
he had to re-enforce his ten finger-nails with pieces of earthenware
to scratch himself withal. His wife took the diagnosis of his
complaints and prescribed profanity. She thought he would feel better
if between the paroxysms of grief and pain he would swear a little.
For each boil a plaster of objurgation.
Probably no man was ever more tempted to take the bad advice than
when, at last, Job's three exasperating friends came in, Eliphaz,
Zophar, and Bildad, practically saying to him, "You old sinner, serves
you right; you are a hypocrite; what a sight you are! God has sent
these chastisements for your wickedness."
The disfigured invalid, putting down the pieces of broken saucer with
which he had been rubbing his arms, with swollen eyelids looks up and
says to his garrulous friends in substance, "The most wicked people
sometimes have the best health and are the most prospered," and then
in that connection hurls the question which every man and woman has
asked in some juncture of affairs, "Wherefore do the wicked live?"
They build up fortunes that overshadow the earth. They confound all
the life-insurance tables on the subject of longevity, dying
octogenarians, perhaps nonagenarians, possibly centenarians. Ahab in
the palace, Naboth in the cabinet. Unclean Herod on the throne,
consecrated Paul twisting ropes for tent-making. Manasseh, the worst
of all the kings of Juda, living longer than any of them. While the
general rule is the wicked do not live out half their days, there are
exceptions where they live on to great age and in a Paradise of beauty
and luxuriance, and die with a whole college of physicians expending
its skill in trying further prolongation of life, and have a funeral
with casket under mountain of calla-lilies, the finest equipages of
the city jingling and flashing into line, the poor, angle-worm of the
dust carried out to its hole in the ground with the pomp that might
make a spirit from some other world suppose that the Archangel Michael
was dead.
Go up among the finest residences of the city, and on some of the
door-plates you will find the names of those mightiest for commercial
and social iniquity. They are the vampires of society--they are the
gorgons of the century. Some of these men have each wheel of their
carriage a juggernaut wet with the blood of those sacrificed to their
avarice. Some of them are like Caligula, who wished that all the
people had only one neck that he might strike it off at one blow. Oh,
the slain, the slain! A long procession of usurers and libertines and
infamous quacks and legal charlatans and world-grabbing monsters. What
apostleship of despoliation! Demons incarnate. Hundreds of men
concentering all their energies of body, mind, and soul in one
prolonged, ever-intensifying, and unrelenting effort to scald and
scarify and blast and consume the world. I do not blame you for asking
me the quivering, throbbing, burning, resounding, appalling question
of my text, "Wherefore do the wicked live?"
In the first place, they live to demonstrate beyond all controversy
the long-suffering patience of God. You sometimes say, under some
great affront, "I will not stand it;" but perhaps you are compelled to
stand it. God, with all the batteries of omnipotence loaded with
thunderbolts, stands it century after century. I have no doubt
sometimes an angel comes to Him and suggests, "Now is the time to
strike." "No," says God; "wait a year, wait twenty years, wait a
century, wait five centuries." What God does is not so wonderful as
what He does not do. He has the reserve corps with which He could
strike Mormonism and Mohammedanism and Paganism from the earth in a
day. He could take all the fraud in New York on the west side of
Broadway and hurl it into the Hudson, and all the fraud on the east
side of Broadway and hurl it into the East River in an hour. He
understands the combination lock of every dishonest money-safe, and
could blow it up quicker than by any earthly explosive. Written all
over the earth, written all over history are the words, "Divine
forbearance, divine leniency, divine long-suffering."
I wonder that God did not burn this world up two thousand years ago,
scattering its ashes into immensity, its aerolites dropping into
other worlds to be kept in their museums as specimens of a defunct
planet. People sometimes talk of God as though He were hasty in His
judgments and as though He snapped men up quick. Oh, no! He waited one
hundred and twenty years for the people to get into the ark, and
warned them all the time--one hundred and twenty years, then the flood
came. The Anchor Line gives only a month's announcement of the sailing
of the "Circassia," the White Star Line gives only a month's
announcement of the sailing of the "Britannic," the Cunard Line gives
only a month's announcement of the sailing of the "Oregon;" but of the
sailing of that ship that Noah commanded God gave one hundred and
twenty years' announcement and warning. Patience antediluvian,
patience postdiluvian, patience in times Adamic, Abrahamic, Mosaic,
Davidic, Pauline, Lutheran, Whitefieldian. Patience with men and
nations. Patience with barbarisms and civilizations. Six thousand
years of patience! Overtopping attribute of God, all of whose
attributes are immeasurable. Why do the wicked live? That their
overthrow may be the more impressive and climacteric. They must pile
up their mischief until all the community shall see it, until the
nation shall see it, until all the world shall see it. The higher it
goes up the harder it will come down and the grander will be the
divine vindication.
God will not allow sin to sneak out of the world. God will not allow
it merely to resign and quit. This shall not be a case that goes by
default because no one appears against it. God will arraign it,
handcuff it, try it, bring against it the verdict of all the good, and
then gibbet it so high up that if one half of the gibbet stood on
Mount Washington and the other on the Himalaya, it would not be any
more conspicuous.
About fifteen years ago we had in this country a most illustrious
instance of how God lets a man go on in iniquity, so that at the close
of the career his overthrow may be the more impressive, full of
warning and climacteric. First, an honest chairmaker, then an
alderman, then a member of congress, then a supervisor of a city, then
school commissioner, then state senator, then commissioner of public
works--on and up, stealing thousands of dollars here and thousands of
dollars there, until the malfeasance in office overtopped anything the
world had ever seen--making the new Court House in New York a monument
of municipal crime, and rushing the debt of the city from thirty-six
million dollars to ninety-seven millions. Now, he is at the top of
millionairedom.
Country-seat terraced and arbored and parterred clear to the water's
brink. Horses enough to stock a king's equerry. Grooms and postilions
in full rig. Wine cellars enough to make a whole legislature drunk.
New York finances and New York politics in his vest pocket. He winked,
and men in high place fell. He lifted his little finger, and
ignoramuses took important office. He whispered, and in Albany and
Washington they said it thundered. Wider and mightier and more baleful
his influence, until it seemed as if Pandemonium was to be adjourned
to this world, and in the Satanic realm there was to be a change of
administration, and Apollyon, who had held dominion so long, should
have a successful competitor.
To bring all to a climax, a wedding came in the house of that man.
Diamonds as large as hickory nuts. A pin of sixty diamonds
representing sheaves of wheat. Musicians in a semicircle, half-hidden
by a great harp of flowers. Ships of flowers. Forty silver sets, one
of them with two hundred and forty pieces. One wedding-dress that cost
five thousand dollars. A famous libertine, who owned several Long
Island Sound steamboats, and not long before he was shot for his
crimes, sent as a wedding present to that house a frosted silver
iceberg, with representations of arctic bears walking on
icicle-handles and ascending the spoons. Was there ever such a
convocation of pictures, bronzes, of bric-à-brac, of grandeurs, social
grandeurs? The highest wave of New York splendor rolled into that
house and recoiled perhaps never again to rise so high. But just at
that time, when all earthly and infernal observation was concentered
on that man, eternal justice, impersonated by that wonder of the
American bar, Charles O'Connor, got on the track of the offender.
First arraignment, then sentence to twelve years' imprisonment under
twelve indictments, then penitentiary on Blackwell's Island, then a
lawsuit against him for six million dollars, then incarceration in
Ludlow Street jail, then escape to foreign land, to be brought back
under the stout grip of the constabulary, then dying of broken heart
in a prison cell. God allowed him to go on in iniquity until all the
world saw as never before that "the way of the transgressor is hard,"
and that dishonesty will not declare permanent dividends, and that you
had better be an honest chairmaker with a day's wages at a time than
a brilliant commissioner of public works, all your pockets crammed
with plunder.
What a brilliant figure in history is William the Conqueror, the
intimidator of France, of Anjou, of Brittany, victor at Hastings,
snatching the crown of England and setting it on his own brow,
destroying homesteads that he might have a larger game forest, making
a Doomsday Book by which he could keep the whole land under despotic
espionage, proclaiming war in revenge for a joke uttered in regard to
his obesity. Harvest fields and vineyards going down under the cavalry
hoof. Nations horror-struck. But one day while at the apex of all
observation he is riding out and the horse put his hoof on a hot
cinder, throwing the king so violently against the pommel of the
saddle that he dies, his son hastening to England to get the crown
before the breath has left his father's body.
The imperial corpse drawn by a cart, most of the attendants leaving it
in the street because of a fire alarm that they might go off and see
the conflagration. And just as they are going to put his body down in
the church which he had built, a man stepping up and saying, "Bishop,
the man you praise is a robber. This church stands on my father's
homestead. The property on which this church is built is mine. I
reclaim my right. In the name of Almighty God I forbid you to bury the
king here, or to cover him with my glebe." "Go up," said the ambition
of William the Conqueror. "Go up by conquest, go up by throne, go up
in the sight of all nations, go up by cruelties." But one day God
said, "Come down, come down by the way of a miserable death, come down
by the way of an ignominious obsequies, come down in the sight of all
nations, come clear down, come down forever." And you and I see the
same thing on a smaller scale many and many a time--illustrations of
the fact that God lets the wicked live that He may make their
overthrow the more climacteric.
What is true in regard to sin is true in regard to its author, Satan,
called Abaddon, called the Prince of the Power of the Air, called the
serpent, called the dragon. It seems to me any intelligent man must
admit that there is a commander-in-chief of all evil.
The Persians called him Ahriman, the Hindus called him Siva. He was
represented on canvas as a mythological combination of Thor and
Cerberus and Pan and Vulcan and other horrible addenda. I do not care
what you call him, that monster of evil is abroad, and his one work is
destruction. John Milton almost glorified him by witchery of
description, but he is the concentration of all meanness and of all
despicability. My little child, seven years of age, said to her mother
one day, "Why don't God kill the devil at once, and have done with
it?" In less terse phrase we have all asked the same question. The
Bible says he is to be imprisoned and he is to be chained down. Why
not heave the old miscreant into his dungeon now? Does it not seem as
if his volume of infamy were complete? Does it not seem as if the last
fifty years would make an appropriate peroration? No; God will let him
go on to the top of all bad endeavor, and then when all the earth and
all constellations and galaxies and all the universe are watching, God
will hurl him down with a violence and ghastliness enough to persuade
five hundred eternities that a rebellion against God must perish. God
will not do it by piecemeal, God will not do it by small skirmish. He
will wait until all the troops are massed, and then some day when in
defiant and confident mood, at the head of his army, this Goliath of
hell stalks forth, our champion, the son of David, will strike him
down, not with smooth stones from the brook, but with fragments from
the Rock of Ages. But it will not be done until this giant of evil and
his holy antagonist come out within full sight of the two great
armies. The tragedy is only postponed to make the overthrow more
impressive and climacteric. Do not fret. If God can afford to wait you
can afford to wait. God's clock of destiny strikes only once in a
thousand years. Do not try to measure events by the second-hand on
your little time-piece. Sin and Satan go on only that their overthrow
may at last be the more terrific, the more impressive, the more
resounding, the more climacteric.
Why do the wicked live? In order that they may build up fortresses for
righteousness to capture. Have you not noticed that God harnesses men,
bad men, and accomplishes good through them? Witness Cyrus, witness
Nebuchadnezzar, witness the fact that the Bastile of oppression was
pried open by the bayonets of a bad man. Recently there came to me the
fact that a college had been built at the Far West for infidel
purposes. There was to be no nonsense of chapel prayers, no Bible
reading there. All the professors there were pronounced infidels. The
college was opened, and the work went on, but, of course, failed. Not
long ago a Presbyterian minister was in a bank in that village on
purposes of business, and he heard in an adjoining room the board of
trustees of that college discussing what they had better do with the
institution, as it did not get on successfully, and one of the
trustees proposed that it be handed over to the Presbyterians,
prefacing the word Presbyterians with a very unhappy expletive. The
resolutions were passed, and that fortress of infidelity has become a
fortress of old-fashioned, orthodox religion, the only religion that
will be worth a snap of your finger when you come to die or appear in
the Day of Judgment. The devil built the college. Righteousness
captured it.
In some city there goes up a great club-house--the architecture, the
furniture, all the equipment a bedazzlement of wealth. That particular
club-house is designed to make gambling and dissipation respectable.
Do not fret. That splendid building will after a while be a free
library, or it will be a hospital, or it will be a gallery of pure
art. Again and again observatories have been built by infidelity, and
the first thing you know they go into the hand of Christian science.
God said in the Bible that He would put a hook in Sennacherib's nose
and pull him down by a way he knew not. And God has a hook to-day in
the nose of every Sennacherib of infidelity and sin, and will drag him
about as He will. Marble halls deserted to sinful amusements will yet
be dedicated for religious assemblage. All these castles of sin are to
be captured for God as we go forth with the battle-shout that Oliver
Cromwell rang out at the head of his troops as he rode in on the field
of Naseby: "Let God arise and let His enemies be scattered!" After a
great fire in London, amid the ruins there was nothing left but an
arch with the name of the architect upon it; and, my friends, whatever
else goes down, God stays up.
Why do the wicked live? That some of them may be monuments of mercy.
So it was with John Newton, so it was with Augustine, perhaps so it
was with you. Chieftains of sin to become chieftains of grace. Paul,
the apostle, made out of Saul, the persecutor. Baxter, the flaming
evangel, made out of Baxter, the blasphemer. Whole squadrons, with
streamers of Emmanuel floating from the masthead, though once they
were launched from the dry-docks of diabolism. God lets these wicked
men live that He may make jewels out of them for coronets, that He may
make tongues of fire out of them for Pentecosts, that He may make
warriors out of them for Armageddons, that he may make conquerors out
of them for the day when they shall ride at the head of the
white-horse host in the grand review of the resurrection.
Why do the wicked live? To make it plain beyond all controversy that
there is another place of adjustment. So many of the bad up, so many
of the good down. It seems to me that no man can look abroad without
saying--no man of common sense, religious or irreligious, can look
abroad without saying, "There must be some place where brilliant
scoundrelism shall be arrested, where innocence shall get out from
under the heel of despotism." Common fairness as well as eternal
justice demands it.
We adjourn to the great assizes, the stupendous injustices of this
life. They are not righted here. There must be some place where they
will be righted. God can not afford to omit the judgment day or the
reconstruction of conditions. For you can not make me believe that
that man stuffed with all abomination, having devoured widows' houses
and digested them, looking with basilisk or tigerish eyes upon his
fellows, no music so sweet to him as the sound of breaking hearts, is,
at death, to get out of the landau at the front door of the sepulcher
and pass right on through to the back door of the sepulcher, and find
a celestial turnout waiting for him, so that he can drive tandem right
up primrosed hills, one glory riding as lackey ahead, and another
glory riding as postilion behind, while that poor woman who supported
her invalid husband and her helpless children by taking in washing and
ironing, often putting her hand to her side where the cancerous
trouble had already begun, and dropping dead late on Saturday night
while she was preparing the garments for the Sabbath day, coming afoot
to the front door of the sepulcher, shall pass through to the back
door of the sepulcher and find nothing waiting, no one to welcome, no
one to tell her the way to the King's gate. I will not believe it.
Solomon was confounded in his day by what he represents as princes
afoot and beggars a-horseback, but I tell you there must be a place
and a time when the right foot will get into the stirrup. To
demonstrate beyond all controversy that there is another place for
adjustment, God lets the wicked live.
Why do the wicked live? For the same reason that He lets us live--to
have time for repentance.
Where would you and I have been if sin had been followed by immediate
catastrophe? While the foot of Christ is fleet as that of a roebuck
when He comes to save, it does seem as if he were hoppled with great
languors and infinite lethargies when He comes to punish. Oh, I
celebrate God's slowness, God's retardation, God's putting off the
retribution! Do you not think, my brother, it would be a great deal
better for us to exchange our impatient hypercriticism of Providence
because this man, by watering of stock, makes a million dollars in one
day, and another man rides on in one bloated iniquity year after
year--would it not be better for us to exchange that impatient
hypercriticism for gratitude everlasting that God let us who were
wicked live, though we deserved nothing but capsize and demolition?
Oh, I celebrate God's slowness! The slower the rail-train comes the
better, if the drawbridge is off.
How long have you, my brother, lived unforgiven? Fifteen, twenty,
forty, sixty years? Lived through great awakenings, lived through
domestic sorrow, lived through commercial calamity, lived through
providential crises that startled nations, and you are living yet,
strangers to God, and with no hope for a great future into which you
may be precipitated. Oh, would it not be better for us to get our
nature through the Grace of Christ revolutionized and transfigured?
For I want you to know that God sometimes changes His gait, and
instead of the deliberate tread He is the swift witness, and sometimes
the enemies of God are suddenly destroyed, and that without remedy.
Make God your ally. What an offer that is! Do not fight against Him.
Do not contend against your best interests. Yield this morning to the
best impulse of your heart, and that is toward Christ and heaven. Do
not fight the Lord that made you and offers to redeem you.
Philip of France went out with his army, with bows and arrows, to
fight King Edward III. of England; but just as they got into the
critical moment of the battle, a shower of rain came and relaxed the
bow-strings so that they were of no effect, and Philip and his army
were worsted. And all your weaponry against God will be as nothing
when he rains upon you discomfiture from the heavens. Do not fight the
Lord any longer. Change allegiance. Take down the old flag of sin, run
up the new flag of grace. It does not take the Lord Jesus Christ the
thousandth part of a second to convert you if you will only surrender,
be willing to be saved. The American Congress was in anxiety during
the Revolutionary War while awaiting to hear news from the conflict
between Washington and Cornwallis, and the anxiety became intense and
almost unbearable as the days went by. When the news came at last that
Cornwallis had surrendered and the war was practically over, so great
was the excitement that the doorkeeper of the House of Congress
dropped dead from joyful excitement. And if this long war between your
soul and God should come to an end this morning by your entire
surrender, the war forever over, the news would very soon reach the
heavens, and nothing but the supernatural health of your loved ones
before the throne would keep them from being prostrated with overjoy
at the cessation of all spiritual hostilities.