'Surely every man walketh in a vain shew.... 12. I am a stranger
with Thee, and a sojourner, as all my fathers were.'
--PSALM xxxix. 6, 12.
These two sayings are two different ways of putting the same thing.
There is a common thought underlying both, but the associations with
which that common thought is connected in these two verses are
distinctly different. The one is bitter and sad--a gloomy half truth.
The other, out of the very same fact, draws blessedness and hope. The
one may come from no higher point of view than the level of worldly
experience; the other is a truth of faith. The former is at best
partial, and without the other may be harmful; the latter completes,
explains, and hallows it.
And that this progress and variety in the thought is the key to the
whole psalm is, I think, obvious to any one who will examine it with
care. I cannot here enter on that task but in the hastiest fashion, by
way of vindicating the connection which I trace between the two verses
of our text. The Psalmist begins, then, with telling how at some time
recently passed--in consequence of personal calamity not very clearly
defined, but apparently some bodily sickness aggravated by mental sorrow
and anxiety--he was struck dumb with silence, so that he 'held his peace
even from good.' In that state there rose within him many sad and
miserable thoughts, which at last forced their way through his locked
lips. They shape themselves into a prayer, which is more complaint than
petition--and which is absorbed in the contemplation of the manifest
melancholy facts of human life--'Thou hast made my days as an
handbreadth; and mine age is as nothing before Thee.' And then, as that
thought dilates and sinks deeper into his soul, he looks out upon the
whole race of man--and in tones of bitterness and hopelessness, affirms
that all are vanity, shadows, disquieted in vain. The blank hopelessness
of such a view brings him to a standstill. It is true--but taken alone
is too dreadful to think of. 'That way madness lies,'--so he breaks
short off his almost despairing thoughts, and with a swift turning away
of his mind from the downward gaze into blackness that was beginning to
make him reel, he fixes his eyes on the throne above--'And now, Lord!
what wait I for? my hope is in Thee.' These words form the turning-point
of the psalm. After them, the former thoughts are repeated, but with
what a difference--made by looking at all the blackness and sorrow, both
personal and universal, in the bright light of that hope which streams
upon the most lurid masses of opaque cloud, till their gloom begins to
glow with an inward lustre, and softens into solemn purples and reds. He
had said, 'I was dumb with silence--even from good.' But when his hope
is in God, the silence changes its character and becomes resignation and
submission. 'I opened not my mouth; because Thou didst it.' The variety
of human life and its transiency is not less plainly seen than before;
but in the light of that hope it is regarded in relation to God's
paternal correction, and is seen to be the consequence, not of a defect
in His creative wisdom or love, but of man's sin. 'Thou with rebukes
dost correct man for iniquity.' That, to him who waits on the Lord, is
the reason and the alleviation of the reiterated conviction, 'Every man
is vanity.' Not any more does he say every man 'at his best state,' or,
as it might be more accurately expressed, 'even when most firmly
established,'--for the man who is established in the Lord is not vanity,
but only the man who founds his being on the fleeting present. Then,
things being so, life being thus in itself and apart from God so
fleeting and so sad, and yet with a hope that brightens it like sunshine
through an April shower--the Psalmist rises to prayer, in which that
formerly expressed conviction of the brevity of life is reiterated, with
the addition of two words which changes its whole aspect, 'I am a
stranger _with Thee_.' He is God's guest in his transient life. It is
short, like the stay of a foreigner in a strange land; but he is under
the care of the King of the Land--therefore he need not fear nor sorrow.
Past generations, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob--whose names God 'is not
ashamed' to appeal to in His own solemn designation of Himself--have
held the same relation, and their experience has sealed His faithful
care of those who dwell with Him. Therefore, the sadness is soothed, and
the vain and fleeting life of earth assumes a new appearance, and the
most blessed and wisest issue of our consciousness of frailty and
insufficiency is the fixing of our desires and hopes on Him in whose
house we may dwell even while we wander to and fro, and in whom our life
being rooted and established shall not be vain, howsoever it may be
brief.
If, then, we follow the course of contemplation thus traced in the
psalm, we have these three points brought before us--first, the thought
of life common to both clauses; second, the gloomy, aimless hollowness
which that thought breathes into life apart from God; third, the
blessedness which springs from the same thought when we look at it in
connection with our Father in heaven.
I. Observe the very forcible expression which is given here to the
thought of life common to both verses.
'Every man walketh in a vain show.' The original is even more striking
and strong. And although one does not like altering words so familiar as
those of our translation, which have sacredness from association and a
melancholy music in their rhythm--still it is worth while to note that
the force of the expression which the Psalmist employs is correctly
given in the margin, 'in an image'--or 'in a shadow.' The phrase sounds
singular to us, but is an instance of a common enough Hebrew idiom, and
is equivalent to saying--he walks in the character or likeness of a
shadow, or, as we should say, he walks as a shadow. That is to say, the
whole outward life and activity of every man is represented as fleeting
and unsubstantial, like the reflection of a cloud which darkens leagues
of the mountains' side in a moment, and ere a man can say, 'Behold!' is
gone again for ever.
Then, look at the other image employed in the other clause of our text
to express the same idea, 'I am a stranger and a sojourner, as all my
fathers.' The phrase has a history. In that most pathetic narrative of
an old-world sorrow long since calmed and consoled, when 'Abraham stood
up from before his dead,' and craved a burying-place for his Sarah from
the sons of Heth, his first plea was, 'I am a stranger and a sojourner
with you.' In his lips it was no metaphor. He was a stranger, a visitor
for a brief time to an alien land; he was a sojourner, having no rights
of inheritance, but settled among them for a while, and though dwelling
among them, not adopted into their community. He was a foreigner, not
naturalised. And such is our relation to all this visible frame of
things in which we dwell. It is alien to us; though we be in it, our
true affinities are elsewhere; though we be in it, our stay is brief, as
that of 'a wayfaring man that turns aside to tarry for a night.'
And there is given in the context still another metaphor setting forth
the same fact in that dreary generalisation which precedes my text,
'Every man at his best state'--or as the word means, 'established,'--with
his roots most firmly struck in the material and visible--'is
only a breath.' It appears for a moment, curling from lip and nostril
into the cold morning air, and vanishes away, so thus vaporous, filmy,
is the seeming solid fact of the most stable life.
These have been the commonplaces of poets and rhetoricians and moralists
in all time. But threadbare as the thought is, I may venture to dwell on
it for a moment. I know I am only repeating what we all believe--and all
forget. It is never too late to preach commonplaces, until everybody
acts on them as well as admits them--and this old familiar truth has not
yet got so wrought into the structure of our lives that we can afford to
say no more about it.
'Surely every man walketh in a shadow.' Did you ever stand upon the
shore on some day of that 'uncertain weather, when gloom and glory meet
together,' and notice how swiftly there went, racing over miles of
billows, a darkening that quenched all the play of colour in the waves,
as if all suddenly the angel of the waters had spread his broad wings
between sun and sea, and then how in another moment as swiftly it flits
away, and with a burst the light blazes out again, and leagues of ocean
flash into green and violet and blue. So fleeting, so utterly perishable
are our lives for all their seeming solid permanency. 'Shadows in a
career, as George Herbert has it--breath going out of the nostrils. We
think of ourselves as ever to continue in our present posture. We are
deceived by illusions. Mental indolence, a secret dislike of the
thought, and the impostures of sense, all conspire to make us blind to,
or at least oblivious of, the plain fact which every beat of our pulses
might preach, and the slow creeping hands of every parish clock confirm.
How awful that silent, unceasing footfall of receding days is when once
we begin to watch it! Inexorable, passionless--though hope and fear may
pray, 'Sun! stand thou still on Gibeon; and thou moon! in the valley of
Ajalon,'--the tramp of the hours goes on. The poets paint them as a
linked chorus of rosy forms, garlanded, and clasping hands as they dance
onwards. So they may be to some of us at some moments. So they may seem
as they approach; but those who come hold the hands of those who go, and
that troop has no rosy light upon their limbs, their garlands are faded,
the sunshine falls not upon the grey and shrouded shapes, as they steal
ghostlike through the gloom--and ever and ever the bright and laughing
sisters pass on into that funereal band which grows and moves away from
us unceasing. Alas! for many of us it bears away with it our lost
treasures, our shattered hopes, our joys from which all the bright
petals have dropped! Alas! for many of us there is nothing but sorrow in
watching how all things become 'part and parcel of the dreadful past.'
And how strangely sometimes even a material association may give new
emphasis to that old threadbare truth. Some more permanent _thing_ may
help us to feel more profoundly the shadowy fleetness of _man_. The
trifles are so much more lasting than their owners. Or, as 'the
Preacher' puts it, with such wailing pathos, 'One generation passeth
away, and another generation cometh, but the earth abideth for ever.'
This material is perishable--but yet how much more enduring than we are!
The pavements we walk upon, the coals in our grates--how many
millenniums old are they? The pebble you kick aside with your foot--how
many generations will it outlast? Go into a museum and you will see
hanging there, little the worse for centuries, battered shields, notched
swords, and gaping helmets--aye, but what has become of the bright eyes
that once flashed the light of battle through the bars, what has become
of the strong hands that once gripped the hilts? 'The knights are dust,'
and 'their good swords are' _not_ 'rust.' The material lasts after its
owner. Seed corn is found in a mummy case. The poor form beneath the
painted lid is brown and hard, and more than half of it gone to pungent
powder, and the man that once lived has faded utterly: but the handful
of seed has its mysterious life in it, and when it is sown, in due time
the green blade pushes above English soil, as it would have done under
the shadow of the pyramids four thousand years ago--and its produce
waves in a hundred harvest fields to-day. The money in your purses now,
will some of it bear the head of a king that died half a century ago. It
is bright and useful--where are all the people that in turn said they
'owned' it? Other men will live in our houses, will preach from this
pulpit, and sit in these pews, when you and I are far away. And other
June days will come, and the old rose-trees will flower round houses
where unborn men will then be living, when the present possessor is gone
to nourish the roots of the roses in the graveyard!
'Our days are as a shadow, and there is none abiding.' So said David on
other occasions. We know, dear brethren! how true it is, whether we
consider the ceaseless flux and change of things, the mystic march of
the silent-footed hours, or the greater permanence which attaches to the
'things which perish,' than to our abode among them. We know it, and yet
how hard it is not to yield to the inducement to act and feel as if all
this painted scenery were solid rock and mountain. By our own
inconsiderateness and sensuousness, we live in a lie, in a false dream
of permanence, and so in a sadder sense we walk in 'a vain
show,'--deluding ourselves with the conceit of durability, and refusing
to see that the apparent is the shadowy, and the one enduring reality
God. It is hard to get even the general conviction vivified in men's
minds, hardest of all to get any man to reflect upon it as applying to
himself. Do not think that you have said enough to vindicate neglect of
my words now, when you call them commonplace. So they are. But did you
ever take that well-worn old story, and press it on your own
consciousness--as a man might press a common little plant, whose juice
is healing, against his dim eye-ball--by saying to yourself, 'It is true
of _me_. _I_ walk as a shadow. _I_ am gliding onwards to my doom.
Through _my_ slack hands the golden sands are flowing, and soon _my_
hour-glass will run out, and _I_ shall have to stop and go away.' Let me
beseech you for one half-hour's meditation on that fact before this day
closes. You will forget my words then, when with your own eyes you have
looked upon that truth, and felt that it is not merely a toothless
commonplace, but belongs to and works in _thy_ life, as it ebbs away
silently and incessantly from _thee_.
II. Let me point, in the second place, to the gloomy, aimless hollowness
which that thought, apart from God, infuses into life.
There is, no doubt, a double idea in the metaphor which the Psalmist
employs. He desires to set forth, by his image of a shadow, not only the
transiency, but the unsubstantialness of life. Shadow is opposed to
substance, to that which is real, as well as to that which is enduring.
And we may further say that the one of these characteristics is in great
part the occasion of the other. Because life is fleeting, therefore, in
part, it is so hollow and unsatisfying. The fact that men are dragged
away from their pursuits so inexorably makes these pursuits seem, to any
one who cannot see beyond that fact, trivial and not worth the
following. Why should we fret and toil and break our hearts, 'and scorn
delights, and live laborious days' for purposes which will last so short
a time, and things which we shall so soon have to leave? What is all our
bustle and business, when the sad light of that thought falls on it, but
'labouring for the wind'? 'Were it not better to lie still?' Such
thoughts have at least a partial truth in them, and are difficult to
meet as long as we think only of the facts and results of man's life
that we can see with our eyes, and our psalm gives emphatic utterance to
them. The word rendered 'walketh' in our text is not merely a synonym
for passing through life, but has a very striking meaning. It is an
intensive frequentative form of the word--that is, it represents the
action as being repeated over and over again. For instance, it might be
used to describe the restless motion of a wild beast in a cage, raging
from side to side, never still, and never getting any farther for all
the racing backward and forward. So here it signifies 'walketh to and
fro,' and implies hurry and bustle, continuous effort, habitual unrest.
It thus comes to be parallel with the stronger words which follow,--'Surely
they are _disquieted_ in vain'; and one reason why all this
effort and agitation are purposeless and sad, is because the man who is
straining his nerves and wearying his legs is but a shadow in regard to
duration--'He heapeth up riches, and knoweth not who shall gather them.'
Yes! if we have said all, when we have said that men pass as a fleeting
shadow--if my life has no roots in the Eternal, nor any consciousness of
a life that does not pass, and a light that never perishes, if it is
derived from, directed to, 'cribbed, cabined, and confined' within this
visible diurnal sphere, then it is all flat and unprofitable, an
illusion while it seems to last, and all its pursuits are folly, its
hopes dreams, its substances vapours, its years a lie. For, if life be
thus short, I who live it am conscious of, and possess whether I be
conscious of them or no, capacities and requirements which, though they
were to be annihilated to-morrow, could be satisfied while they lasted
by nothing short of the absolute ideal, the all-perfect, the
infinite--or, to put away abstractions, 'My soul thirsteth for God, the
living God!' 'He hath put eternity in their heart,' as the book of
Ecclesiastes says. Longings and aspirations, weaknesses and woes, the
limits of creature helps and loves, the disproportion between us and the
objects around us--all these facts of familiar experience do witness,
alike by blank misgivings and by bright hopes, by many disappointments
and by indestructible expectations surviving them all, that nothing
which has a date, a beginning, or an end, can fill our souls or give us
rest. Can you fill up the swamps of the Mississippi with any cartloads
of faggots you can fling in? Can you fill your souls with anything which
belongs to this fleeting life? Has a flying shadow an appreciable
thickness, or will a million of them pressed together occupy a space in
your empty, hungry heart?
And so, dear brethren! I come to you with a message which may sound
gloomy, and beseech you to give heed to it. No matter how you may get on
in the world--though you may fulfil every dream with which you began in
your youth--you will certainly find that without Christ for your Brother
and Saviour, God for your Friend, and heaven for your hope, life, with
all its fulness, is empty. It lasts long, too long as it sometimes seems
for work, too long for hope, too long for endurance; long enough to let
love die, and joys wither and fade, and companions drop away, but
without God and Christ, you will find it but 'as a watch in the night.'
At no moment through the long weary years will it satisfy your whole
being; and when the weary years are all past, they will seem to have
been but as one troubled moment breaking the eternal silence. At every
point _so_ profitless, and all the points making so thin and short a
line! The crested waves seem heaped together as they recede from the eye
till they reach the horizon, where miles of storm are seen but as a line
of spray. So when a man looks back upon his life, if it have been a
godless one, be sure of this, that he will have a dark and cheerless
retrospect over a tossing waste, with a white rim of wandering barren
foam vexed by tempest, and then, if not before, he will sadly learn how
he has been living amidst shadows, and, with a nature that needs God,
has wasted himself upon the world. 'O life! as futile then as frail';
'surely,' in such a case, 'every man walketh in a vain show.'
III. But note, finally, how our other text in its significant words
gives us the blessedness which springs from this same thought of life,
when it is looked at in connection with God.
The mere conviction of the brevity and hollowness of life is not in
itself a religious or a helpful thought. Its power depends upon the
other ideas which are associated with it. It is susceptible of the most
opposite applications, and may tend to impel conduct in exactly opposite
directions. It may be the language of despair or of bright hope. It may
be the bitter creed of a worn-out debauchee, who has wasted his life in
hunting shadows, and is left with a cynical spirit and a barbed tongue.
It may be the passionless belief of a retired student, or the fanatical
faith of a religious ascetic. It may be an argument for sensuous excess,
'Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die'; or it may be the stimulus
for noble and holy living, 'I must work the works of Him that sent me
while it is day. The night cometh.' The other accompanying beliefs
determine whether it shall be a blight or a blessing to a man.
And the one addition which is needed to incline the whole weight of that
conviction to the better side, and to light up all its blackness, is
that little phrase in this text, 'I am a stranger _with Thee_, and a
sojourner.' There seems to be an allusion here to remarkable words
connected with the singular Jewish institution of the Jubilee. You
remember that by the Mosaic law, there was no absolute sale of land in
Israel, but that every half century the whole returned to the
descendants of the original occupiers. Important economical and social
purposes were contemplated in this arrangement, as well as the
preservation of the relative position of the tribes as settled at the
Conquest. But the law itself assigns a purely religious purpose--the
preservation of the distinct consciousness of the tenure on which the
people held their territory, namely, obedience to and dependence on God.
'The land shall not be sold for ever, for the land is Mine, for ye are
_strangers and sojourners with Me_.' Of course, there was a special
sense in which that was true with regard to Israel, but David thought
that the words were as true in regard to his whole relation to God, as
in regard to Israel's possession of its national inheritance.
If we grasp these words as completing all that we have already said, how
different this transient and unsubstantial life looks! You must have the
light from both sides to stereoscope and make solid the flat surface
picture. Transient! yes--but it is passed in the presence of God.
Whether we know it or no, our brief days hang upon Him, and we walk, all
of us, in the light of His countenance. That makes the transient
eternal, the shadowy substantial, the trivial heavy with solemn meaning
and awful yet vast possibilities. 'In our embers is something that doth
live.' If we had said all, when we say 'We are as a shadow,' it would
matter very little, though even then it _would_ matter something, how we
spent our shadowy days; but if these poor brief hours are spent 'in the
great Taskmaster's eye,'--if the shadow cast on earth proclaims a light
in the heavens--if from this point there hangs an unending chain of
conscious being--Oh! then, with what awful solemnity is the brevity,
with what tremendous magnitude is the minuteness, of our earthly days
invested! 'With Thee'--then I am constantly in the presence of a
sovereign Law and its Giver; 'with Thee'--then all my actions are
registered and weighed yonder; 'with Thee'--then 'Thou, God, seest me.'
Brethren! it is the prismatic halo and ring of eternity round this poor
glass of time that gives it all its dignity, all its meaning. The lives
that are lived before God cannot be trifles.
And if this relation to time be recognised and accepted and held fast by
our hearts and minds, then what calm blessedness will flow into our
souls!
'A stranger with Thee,'--then we are the guests of the King. The Lord of
the land charges Himself with our protection and provision; we journey
under His safe conduct. It is for His honour and faithfulness that no
harm shall come to us travelling in His territory, and relying on His
word. Like Abraham with the sons of Heth, we may claim the protection
and help which a stranger needs. He recognises the bond and will fulfil
it. We have eaten of His salt, and He will answer for our safety.--'He
that toucheth you toucheth the apple of Mine eye.'
'A stranger with Thee,'--then we have a constant Companion and an
abiding Presence. We may be solitary and necessarily remote from the
polity of the land. We may feel amid all the visible things of earth as
if foreigners. We may not have a foot of soil, not even a grave for our
dead. Companionships may dissolve and warm hands grow cold and their
close clasp relax--what then? He is with us still. He will join us as we
journey, even when our hearts are sore with loss. He will walk with us
by the way, and make our chill hearts glow. He will sit with us at the
table--however humble the meal, and He will not leave us when we discern
Him. Strangers we are indeed here--but not solitary, for we are
'strangers with Thee.' As in some ancestral home in which a family has
lived for centuries--son after father has rested in its great chambers,
and been safe behind its strong walls--so, age after age, they who love
Him abide in God.--'Thou hast been our dwelling-place in all
generations.'
'Strangers with Thee,'--then we may carry our thoughts forward to the
time when we shall go to our true home, nor wander any longer in a land
that is not ours. If even here we come into such blessed relationships
with God, that fact is in itself a prophecy of a more perfect communion
and a heavenly house. They who are strangers with Him will one day be
'at home with the Lord,' and in the light of that blessed hope the
transiency of this life changes its whole aspect, loses the last trace
of sadness, and becomes a solemn joy. Why should we be pensive and
wistful when we think how near our end is? Is the sentry sad as the hour
for relieving guard comes nigh? Is the wanderer in far-off lands sad
when he turns his face homewards? And why should not we rejoice at the
thought that we, strangers and foreigners here, shall soon depart to the
true metropolis, the mother-country of our souls? I do not know why a
man should be either regretful or afraid, as he watches the hungry sea
eating away this 'bank and shoal of time' upon which he stands--even
though the tide has all but reached his feet--if he knows that God's
strong hand will be stretched forth to him at the moment when the sand
dissolves from under him, and will draw him out of many waters, and
place him high above the floods in that stable land where there is 'no
more sea.'
Lives rooted in God through faith in Jesus Christ are not vanity. Let us
lay hold of Him with a loving grasp--and 'we shall live also' _because_
He lives, _as_ He lives, _so long_ as He lives. The brief days of earth
will be blessed while they last, and fruitful of what shall never pass.
We shall have Him with us while we journey, and all our journeyings will
lead to rest in Him. True, men walk in a vain show; true, 'the world
passeth away and the lust thereof,' but, blessed be God! true, also, 'He
that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.'