Joshua 8:31

"Handfuls of Purpose"

For All Gleaners

"... an altar of whole stones, aver which no man hath lift up any iron." Jos 8:31

This is a point in the spiritual education of man. We must think ourselves back to the time when such mechanical exactitude was part of personal and national religion. The uses of such studies may be to show how far we have advanced, and to inquire into the methods by which our progress has been realised. We do not advance from those points unless we have really been at them ourselves, either literally or sympathetically. It is not enough to know that the Israelites were at the point of literal detail, such as is indicated in the text; we must ourselves have been at that point in some clearly recognised sense; we do not descend upon great spiritual privileges, but we work up to them through processes of subservience; we are not born into this household of grace and liberty, but are brought into it by long processes of self-rebuke, self-chastisement, and self-denial; all men must begin at the alphabet, and pursue their way into the delights of literature. It is the same with religion as it is with education. We are born into a great literary estate, full of philosophy, poetry, history, and imagination; yet though we are born into this inheritance and have certain rights to it, we can only claim the inheritance by becoming patient inquirers and students: when the philosopher leaves his philosophy to the world, even his own children must begin at the alphabet, and toil up the ascent upon which the great fortune stands. Passages of this kind rebuke the idea that religion now is a merely off-handed exercise, a pleasure that can be taken up or laid down: a species of luxury which may be languidly enjoyed or languidly declined. To build the altar is not to create the God. To build the church is not to unfold the revelation. There is a wonderful co-operation in the whole process of religion. God will, so to say, be met half-way. He will come to the top of the mountain, and meet us at the end of our opportunity. A beautiful thought is this, that God sometimes will come no further down than to the top of the mountain; if he remained one league above it, we could not reach him; but it is in accord with his mercy that he begins where man ends; man toils to the top of the mountain, and cannot proceed one step further, and it is in this extremity that God creates his own opportunity. Although altar-building may now have been done away, and much of mechanical process may have been abrogated, yet still there remains the great fact that man must always make some preparation to meet God and enter into the full enjoyment of religious privileges. The preparation indicates the spirit of the worshipper. When called upon to offer hospitality to a king, we prepare according to the dignity of the guest; when summoned to the presence of some great one, all our preparations are made with a view to the greatness of the man whom we have to meet. We have only to apply these facts in a religious direction to discover what we ought to do when we are called upon to commune with Heaven.