That question lies deep in all men's hearts, and underlies sacrifices
and priesthoods and asceticisms and tortures of all sorts, and is the
inner meaning of Hindoos swinging with hooks in their backs, and others
of them measuring the road to the temple by prostrating themselves every
yard or two as they advance. These self-torturers are all asking the
same question: 'Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord?' It
sometimes rises in the thoughts of the most degraded, and it is present
always with some of the better and nobler of men.
Now, there are three places in the Old Testament where substantially the
same question is asked. There is this psalm of ours; there is another
psalm which is all but a duplicate, which begins with 'Lord, who shall
abide in Thy tabernacle? who shall dwell in Thy holy hill?' And there is
another shape into which the question is cast by the fervent and
somewhat gloomy imagination of one of the prophets, who puts it thus:
'Who among us shall dwell with the devouring fire? Who shall dwell with
the everlasting burnings?' There never was a more disastrous
misapplication of Scripture than the popular idea that these two last
questions suggest the possibility of a creature being exposed to the
torments of future punishment. They have nothing to do with that. 'Who
among us shall dwell with the devouring fire?' If you want a commentary,
remember the words, 'Our God is a consuming fire.' That puts us on the
right track, if we needed any putting on it, for answering this
question, not in the gruesome and ghastly sense in which some people
take it, but in all the grandeur of Isaiah's thought. He sees God as
'the everlasting burnings.' Fire is the emblem of life as well as of
death; fire is the means of quickening as well as of destroying; and
when we speak of Him as 'the everlasting burnings' we are reminded of
the bush in the desert, where His own signature was set, 'burning and
not consumed.'
So the question in all the three places referred to is substantially the
same--and what does it indicate? It indicates the deep consciousness
that men have that they need to be in that home, that for life and peace
and blessedness, they must get somehow to the side of God, and be quiet
there, as children in their Father's house. We all know that this is
true, whether our life is regulated by it or not. Very deep in every
man's conscience, if he will attend to its voice, there is that which
says, 'You are a pilgrim and a sojourner, and homeless and desolate
until you nestle beneath the outspread wings in the Holy Place, and are
a denizen of God's house.'
The question further suggests another. The universal
consciousness--which is, I believe, universal--though it is overlain and
stifled by many of us, and neglected and set at nought by others--is
that this fellowship with God, which is indispensable to a man's peace,
is impossible to a man's impurity. So the question raises the thought of
the consciousness of sin which comes creeping over a man when he is
sometimes feeling after God, and seems to batter him in the face, and
fling him back into the outer darkness, 'How can I enter in there?' and
conscience has no answer, and the world has none, and as I shall have to
say presently, the answer which the Old Testament, as Law, gives is
almost as hopeless as the answer which conscience gives. But at all
events that this question should rise and insist upon being answered as
it does proves these three things--man's need of God, man's sense of
God's purity, man's consciousness of his own sin.
And what does that ascent to the hill of the Lord include? All the
present life, for, unless we are 'dwelling in the house of the Lord all
the days of our lives beholding His beauty and inquiring in His Temple,'
then we have little in life that is worth the having. The old Arab right
of claiming hospitality of the Sheikh into whose tent the fugitive ran
is used in Scripture over and over again to express the relation in
which alone it is blessed for a man to live--namely, as a guest of
God's. That is peace. That is all that we require, to sit at His
fireside, if I may so say, to claim the rites of hospitality, which the
Arab chief would not refuse to the veriest tatterdemalion, or the
greatest enemy that he knew, if he came into his tent and sought it. God
sits in the door of His tent, and is ready to welcome us.
The ascent to the hill of the Lord means more than that. It includes
also the future. I suppose that when men think about another
world--which I am afraid none of us think about as often as we ought to
do, in order to make the best of this one--the question, in some shape
or other, which this band of singers lifted up, rises to their lips,
'Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord, or who shall stand in His
Holy Place' beyond the stars? Well, brethren! that is the question which
concerns us all, more than anything else in the world, to have clearly
and rightly answered.