'So Moses the servant of the Lord died there in the land of Moab,
according to the word of the Lord. 6. And he buried him in a valley in
the land of Moab, ... but no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this
day.'--DEUT. xxxiv.5, 6.
A fitting end to such a life! The great law-giver and leader had been
all his days a lonely man; and now, surrounded by a new generation, and
all the old familiar faces vanished, he is more solitary than ever. He
had lived alone with God, and it was fitting that alone with God he
should die.
How the silent congregation must have watched, as, alone, with 'natural
strength unabated,' he breasted the mountain, and went up to be seen no
more! With dignified reticence our chapter tells us no details. He
'died there,' in that dreary solitude, and in some cleft he was buried,
and no man knows where. The lessons of that solitary death and unknown
tomb may best be learned by contrast with another death and another
grave--those of the Leader of the New Covenant, the Law-giver and
Deliverer from a worse bondage, and Guide into a better Canaan, the Son
who was faithful over His own house, as Moses was 'faithful in all his
house, as a servant.' That lonely and forgotten grave among the savage
cliffs was in keeping with the whole character and work of him who lay
there.
Here,--here's his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form,
Lightnings are loosened,
Stars come and go! Let joy break with the storm,
Peace let the dew send!
Lofty designs must close in like effects; Loftily lying,
Leave him--still loftier than the world suspects,
Living and dying.'
Contrast that grave with the sepulchre in the garden where Jesus lay,
close by a city wall, guarded by foes, haunted by troops of weeping
friends, visited by a great light of angel faces. The one was hidden
and solitary, as teaching the loneliness and mystery of death; the
other revealed light in the darkness, and companionship in the
loneliness. The one faded from men's memory because it was nothing to
any man; no impulses, nor hopes, nor gifts, could come from it. The
other forever draws hearts and memories, because in it was wrought out
the victory in which all our hopes are rooted. An endured cross, an
empty grave, an occupied throne, are as the threefold cord on which all
our hopes hang. Moses was solitary as God's servant in life and death,
and oblivion covered his mountain grave. Christ's 'delights were with
the sons of men.' He lived among them, and all men 'know his sepulchre
to this day.'
I. Note, then, first, as a lesson gathered from this lonely death, the
penalty of transgression.
One of the great truths which the old law and ordinances given by Moses
were intended to burn in on the conscience of the Jew, and through him
on the conscience of the world, was that indissoluble connection
between evil done and evil suffered, which reaches its highest
exemplification in the death which is the 'wages of sin.' And just as
some men that have invented instruments for capital punishment have
themselves had to prove the sharpness of their own axe, so the
lawgiver, whose message it had been to declare, 'the soul that sinneth
it shall die,' had himself to go up alone to the mountain-top to
receive in his own person the exemplification of the law that had been
spoken by his own lips. He sinned when, in a moment of passion (with
many palliations and excuses), he smote the rock that he was bidden to
address, and forgot therein, and in his angry words to the rebels, that
he was only an instrument in the divine hand. It was a momentary
wavering in a hundred and twenty years of obedience. It was one failure
in a life of self-abnegation and suppression. The stern sentence came.
People say, 'A heavy penalty for a small offence.' Yes; but an offence
of Moses could not be a small offence.' _Noblesse oblige!_ The higher a
man rises in communion with God, and the more glorious the message and
office which are put into his hands, the more intolerable in him is the
slightest deflection from the loftiest level. A splash of mud, that
would never be seen on a navvy's clothes, stains the white satin of a
bride or the embroidered garment of a noble. And so a little sin done
by a loftily endowed and inspired man ceases to be small.
Nor are we to regard that momentary lapse only from the outside and the
surface. One little mark under the armpit of a plague-sufferer tells
the physician that the fatal disease is there. A tiny leaf above ground
may tell that, deep below, lurks the root of a poison plant. That
little deflection, coming as it did at the beginning of the resumption
of his functions by the Lawgiver after seven-and-thirty years of
comparative abeyance, and on his first encounter with the new
generation that he had to lead, was a very significant indication that
his character had begun to yield and suffer from the strain that had
been put upon it; and that, in fact, he was scarcely fit for the
responsibilities that the new circumstances brought. So the penalty was
not so disproportionate to the fault as it may seem.
And was the penalty such a very great one? Do you think that a man who
had been toiling for eighty years at a very thankless task would
consider it a very severe punishment to be told, 'Go home and take your
wages'? It did not mean the withdrawal of the divine favour. 'Moses and
Aaron among his priests. ... Thou wast a God that forgavest them,
though Thou tookest vengeance of their inventions.' The penalty of a
forgiven sin is never hard to bear, and the penalty of a forgiven sin
is very often punctually and mercifully exacted.
But still we are not to ignore the fact that this lonely death, with
which we are now concerned, is of the nature of a penal infliction. And
so it stands forth in consonance with the whole tone of the Mosaic
teaching. I admit, of course, that the mere physical fact of the
separation between body and spirit is simply the result of natural law.
But that is not the death that you and I know. Death as we know it, the
ugly thing that flings its long shadows across all life, and that comes
armed with terrors for conscience and spirit, is 'the wages of sin,'
and is only experienced by men who have transgressed the law of God. So
far Moses in his life and in his death carries us--that no
transgression escapes the appropriate punishment; that the smallest sin
has in it the seeds of mortal consequences; that the loftiest saint
does not escape the law of retribution.
And no further does Moses with his Law and his death carry us. But we
turn to the other death. And there we find the confirmation, in an
eminent degree, of that Law, and yet the repeal of it. It is confirmed
and exhausted in Jesus Christ. His death was 'the wages of sin.' Whose?
Not His. Mine, yours, every man's. And because He died, surrounded by
men, outside the old city wall, pure and sinless in Himself, He therein
both said 'Amen' to the Law of Moses, and swept it away. For all the
sins of the world were laid upon His head, He bore the curse for us
all, and has emptied the bitter cup which men's transgressions have
mingled. Therefore the solitary death in the desert proclaims 'the
wages of sin'; that death outside the city wall proclaims 'the gift of
God,' which is 'eternal life.'
II. Another of the lessons of our incident is the withdrawal, by a hard
fate, of the worker on the very eve of the completion of his work.
For all these forty years there had gleamed before the fixed and
steadfast spirit of the sorely tried leader one hope that he never
abandoned, and that was that he might look upon and enter into the
blessed land which God had promised. And now he stands on the heights
of Moab. Half a dozen miles onwards, as the crow flies, and his feet
would tread its soil. He lifts his eyes, and away up yonder, in the far
north, he sees the rolling uplands of Gilead, and across the deep gash
where the Jordan runs, he catches a glimpse of the blue hills of
Naphtali or of Galilee, and the central mountain masses of Ephraim and
Manasseh, where Ebal and Gerizim lift their heads; and then, further
south, the stony summits of the Judaean hills, where Jerusalem and
Bethlehem lie, and, through some gap in the mountains, a gleam as of
sunshine upon armour tells where the ocean is. And then his eye falls
upon the waterless plateau of the South, and at his feet the fertile
valley of Jordan, with Jericho glittering amongst its palm trees like a
diamond set in emeralds, and on some spur of the lower hill bounding
the plain, the little Zoar. This was the land which the Lord had
promised to the fathers, for which he had been yearning, and to which
all his work had been directed all these years; and now he is to die,
as my text puts it, with such pathetic emphasis, 'there in Moab,' and
to have no part in the fair inheritance.
It is the lot of all epoch-making men, of all great constructive and
reforming geniuses, whether in the Church or in the world, that they
should toil at a task, the full issues of which will not be known until
their heads are laid low in the dust. But if, on the one hand, that
seems hard, on the other hand there is the compensation of 'the vision
of the future and all the wonder that shall be,' which is granted many
a time to the faithful worker ere he closes his eyes. But that is not
the fate of epoch-making and great men only; it is the law for our
little lives. If these are worth anything, they are constructed on a
scale too large to bring out all their results here and now. It is easy
for a man to secure immediate consequences of an earthly kind; easy
enough for him to make certain that he shall have the fruit of his
toil. But quick returns mean small profits; and an unfinished life that
succeeds in nothing may be far better than a completed one, that has
realised all its shabby purposes and accomplished all its petty
desires. Do you, my brother, live for the far-off; and seek not for the
immediate issues and fruits that the world can give, but be contented
to be of those whose toil waits for eternity to disclose its
significance. Better a half-finished temple than a finished pigstye or
huckster's shop. Better a life, the beginning of much and the
completion of nothing, than a life directed to and hitting an earthly
aim. 'He that soweth to the spirit shall of the Spirit reap life
everlasting,' and his harvest and garner are beyond the grave.