Verses 10-11
Penitence and Punishment
That is the loss we have all to mourn. Why do we grieve over merest trifles? The thing to mourn over is spiritual loss, heart-alienation from God. We are given to tears: why do we not weep over the right causes; why misspend our sorrows? The literal, solemn, universal fact is that we have gone away from God; then why cry about something secondary and superficial? Why afflict ourselves about symptoms, whilst the cruel persistent disease is feeding on the vitals of our very heart? Yet men will thus befool themselves to themselves and before God. How seldom it is that a man smites his breast, as did the contrite publican, and says, It is not providence that is awkward, it is not discipline that is severe, it is not the chain of events that is crooked or disentangled; it is I that am wrong: my heart has gone astray from God; I have forgotten to pray, I have forgotten to live upon heaven; I have turned away from the Holy One, and fixed the attention of my heart upon altars which my own hands have made: I am a fool, I am a sinner: God pity me; God be merciful to me a sinner! That is fundamental talk; that is coming to the root and core of things. If you are only whimpering about your symptoms, no good will come of it: hold God's burning candle over the pit of your heart, and see how deep and black that pit is, and then cry mightily to God to take you home again by the way of the Cross. Not until we get into this fundamental soliloquy, self-talk, shall we come to any good issue in religious inquiry, or in pious self-discipline.
Hear how the Lord talks! He will Smite the bodies of these God-forgetters. There is only one way of getting at some men. Once we could have appealed to their higher nature; once they were subject to the pleasure and the eloquence of reason; once they had a conscience tender, sensitive, responsive; now they are spiritually dead, no conscience, no reason, no unselfishness; the whole nature has gone down in volume and in quality into a terrible emaciation: what shall be done? Smite their harvest! then like beasts they will miss their food. God does not delight in this; it is the poorest violence, it is the feeblest department of his providence; but he knows that it is the only providence some men can understand. As long as they have their regular sustenance they will be fat atheists; they must be hungered into reflection, they must be starved back into prayer. What mouth full of fatness can ask God's blessing on the food? Take away the food, and the empty mouth may pray. God does not want to impoverish us; it is not in the nature of God wantonly to take the root off our house, and to pour the rain-floods down upon our fire and our hearthstone; that is not the way of the heart of God. But having pleaded with us, and reasoned with us, yea, to agony; having mightily desired our conversion and return and forgiveness; having watched for us all the twenty-four hours of the day; having lived for us and died for us, and sent for us by every angel-ministry at his command, and we will not come, what remains? Starve them! is the last resort of offended, dishonoured Providence. God thus takes away our health, and because of the soreness and weakness of the body we begin to wonder about the soul. That is God's meaning. It is nothing to God to crush your bones or to afflict your blood poisonously; that gives him no pleasure: but that was the only way of bringing you to church, to the sanctuary, to consideration. You smote the heavens in your pride, and the heavens smote you in return, and then you began to say, What have I done? and God told you what you had done; you had forsaken the rock of your salvation, and gone away from your own faith and your father's faith, and the whole idea of fatherliness and redemption and destiny; you had become atheists, godless ones, and that was the only way to bring you home again. He got you back to the Church through inflammation, through fever, through paralysis, through pain, through loss, through desolation; you came back over the graveyard No matter, said God; when he got you into his house again he said, This my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found. It is in the reclamation, not in the punishment, that God takes pleasure. Curious words, "penitence" and "punishment," etymologically growing out of the same root. Penitence and punishment why, they seem to walk away from one another into opposite directions; so they may, but they belong to the same etymological root. When we begin to be punished God means us to begin to repent, and when we begin to repent the right way we begin to feel that the punishment is not arbitrary, but divine; and thus out of the same root grow very different flowers, yet the same in quality, and the same in their highest symbolism.
Notice the reasonableness of this course. God makes it a matter of argument; the Lord uses our little, logical, connective terms; he says "therefore," and "because"; so we have it in this very instance "Because thou hast forgotten... therefore." This is reasoning together. God does not come before us and say, I will tell you nothing, you shall hear nothing of my reasons, I will afflict you from the point of my sovereignty, and not from the point of my Fatherhood. There shall be no condescension in this infliction of divine wrath: on the contrary, he says whilst his hand is lifted, This chastisement is "because." Thus we, if in a right spirit, consent to our own punishment, the strokes of God, how terrible soever, being only too weak to represent even our own estimate of our base ingratitude. Who is it that has been forgotten? The Giver, the Father, the Servant of all. We have taken things as if we had a right to them. No man can so take things and enjoy them. When we pluck the flower by divine permission, oh, how fragrant, how sweet in wordless gospels, how beautiful in all discernible and undiscernible images! We may have grown the flower on our freehold or on our rented ground, but the earth is the Lord's; the freeholder is only a tenant-at-will; it doth please his withering majesty to call himself freeholder; not an inch of all the great state is his but by secondary right and for purposes of convenience. Having forgotten the Father, how can we expect to have harvest after harvest, as if we had remembered him in love, and honoured him in service? Men cannot trifle with the system within which they are placed and be held blameless. Let us understand more and more that we are members of a scheme, parts of a unity; that nothing is complete in itself, or self-ending; that every life palpitates with some other life and for some other life: thus, realising that we are parts of a plan, and not isolated individualities or particles, we shall feel that we cannot trifle with a divinely-constructed economy, and come out at the other end as if we had done nothing wrong. We have interfered with the whole machine. It may have been a very little wheel we have injured; but who can tell what a little wheel is in so complicated a piece of mechanism or organism as is this portion of creation within which we live? What are little wheels? It hath pleased God to turn little things to great purposes.
The one thing we have forgotten is that we are part and parcel of something else. There is no licentious liberty. A man cannot drink himself to death and be the only suffering party. You are wrong when you say that certain persons only injure themselves; it hath pleased God so to build the human universe that no man can injure himself without injuring other people. You may now be injuring posterity. Remember how sensitive are all human and vital relations. The drink you are taking into your blood now may turn some poor soul hellward a century hence; then the people will blame him, and call him fool, and reproach him, and shut him up in gaol, and sentence him to penal servitude or to the gallows. It is you, you, who ought now to be damned, but for the mercy of God. Thus circuitously but certainly God comes down upon us by way of judgment or by way of blessing; proving to us that no man liveth unto himself and no man dieth unto himself, that every life is of consequence to every other life in the universe. Can a watch break the mainspring and go on just as if nothing had happened? Can the clay mould itself into shape and beauty? Can the marble by some inward motion of its own throw off the burdens and accumulations that hide the beauty of chiselled sculpture? If a man cannot neglect his physical health without entailing suffering, how can a soul neglect its God and still enjoy his universe?
Mark how life is based either upon infatuation or upon reason. Every man has some foundation for his policy and action in life. The Lord in this seventeenth chapter of Isaiah is very ironical and satirical, as we shall see. He says, "Therefore shalt thou plant pleasant plants, and shalt set it with strange slips: in the day shalt thou make thy plant to grow, and in the morning shalt thou make thy seed to flourish." What mockery is like the sarcasm of heaven? How bitter can the kind heavens be! How terrible is the laugh of God! The Lord will allow those who have left him to plant pleasant plants, to set them in a row, to build them on a terrace; the seed shall flourish, and men shall say amid their pleasant plants and their strange slips, their exotics and their fine gatherings of slips and cuttings, Behold how these grow! see, no blight falls upon them because of our spiritual rebellion; we have done what we pleased with ourselves and before God; lo, how kind the garden is to us: if God hath himself forsaken us the heavens smile and the earth brings forth abundantly behold behold! Then the Lord says, "But." Oh that reservation of God, that parenthesis of providence, that interrupting, interpolating voice and mastery! "But the harvest shall be a heap in the day of grief and of desperate sorrow"; all your strange flowers and strange slips shall blossom and bloom but for one day; in the morning the seed flourishes, the strange plants live one day. These occasional sun-gleams may foretoken the thunderstorm. God can mock, God can lead the bullock to the knife by way of a fat pasture. There is therefore a promise here, but the promise is limited. You shall have mushroom growths, you shall see wonderful things within the span of a single day; but what shall the harvest be? The meaning is, we may be infatuated by appearances, by immediate successes, by flowers and strange slips growing up within the compass of one little day, and we may say to ourselves, Behold, here is success: God has not rewarded us according to the brokenness of his law; he has forgotten to reward us with shame and with disappointment. This, let us repeat, is the satire of heaven. Give the ox six weeks of a thick pasture before the poleaxe; let the culprit sleep well the night before the gallows; let the atheist have one fat day, one gleesome festival; let the rebellious have their mouths filled with meat, and whilst their teeth are still fastened upon the food I will smite them with pestilence and death. That is a tragedy; that is the doom of heaven. We know you have your riches, you have your beautiful estates, you have your heavy balances at the bank; we know that many things are growing round about you right luxuriantly; but what shall the harvest be? If a man will not ply himself with that question, and bring himself to answer it, he is a fool.
The harvest tries everything. The harvest is the end, the issue; the harvest determines what it all comes to. Call no man happy until he is dead; call no man a failure until his last effort has been made; call no man rich who has only money; call no man strong who has only a healthy body. Strength is a larger term than mere physical health, and wealth is a larger term than the mere possession of money. Oh, sons of men, what shall the permanent quantity be? what shall the harvest be? Is this severe? No: it is righteous. It would be severe if it operated in one direction only. Happily, this is only one aspect of the divine government; we are entitled to reverse this text, and say, Because thou hast remembered the God of thy salvation, and hast been mindful of the rock of thy strength, therefore shall thy barns be filled with plenty, and thy presses burst out with new wine. Thou hast not withheld from God the gladness and the service of thine heart, and he will not withhold from thee the music and the rapture and the abundance of harvest. The way of the Lord is equal.
Prayer
Father of our spirits, teach us how near thou art. Once we thought thee afar off, because we ourselves were far off from thee: now we know that thou art near us, within us, and that we live, and move, and have our being in thee. Enable us to realise this more and more clearly, that we may draw from it all the infinite comfort with which it is charged; then shall we be at rest, and in the security of great peace we shall serve thee with a steadier will. Be within us as a light that does not dazzle, a fire that does not consume, a judgment that does not cast into despair. Make all the incidents of life helpful to our education; may we be wise men, noticing the times, reckoning up all the forces that operate upon us, and drawing from all we see and hear lessons concerning the providence of God: thus shall we be at church every day, and spend our lives at the altar, and shall be possessed of that understanding without which all other wealth is mockery. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom: may we begin there, for no other beginning is possible, and growing up into all life, yea, into the very sky of the brightness of wisdom, may we be children of the light, known and read of all men as simple and true and honest All these desires are the creation of God; they are strange to us, they are not born in us of the flesh; these are the miracles of thy grace: may it please thee to strengthen them all, encourage them and sustain them, and bring them to ample fruition. We bless thee for thy continued care. He that keepeth Israel doth not slumber, yea, his eyelids close not: behold, thou art the same to us by night as by day, and the darkness and the light are both alike unto God. Direct our steps in wisdom; suffer us not to follow the false light of our own fancy, or to seek to consummate the purposes of our perverted will: may we know no will but thine; then shall there be joy in the heart as those who keep wedding festival, and there shall be brightness before us as those who dwell on the mountain-tops, far above the cloud and fog of the earth. We beseech thee to give us a clearer apprehension of Jesus Christ as the incarnate God, God in flesh, God in vision, God near enough to be seen, and touched, and heard with the open ear, and through him may we become sons of God; may he lift up our whole being, and make us know the joy of the security of spiritual adoption: then shall all our prayer be "Father," and if beyond that we have no utterance, it is enough; it means all thy love and all our need. Be more than loving to those who need thee most to the sick, whose days are grief and whose nights are pain; to those who watch the dying and who thus die many deaths. Be with those who are mourning great losses, who have dug deep graves" and cannot fill them up. Be with all who would be in the sanctuary if they could, but are kept away from it by illness. Be with all travellers on land and on sea, and comfort them, and give them security and favour in the sight of the people; bring them back again in health and joy. Be with all who are in perplexity, not knowing what to do, whose life is a series of failing experiments, who try and fail, who travel up the hill and fall backward at eventide, so that the journey remains unaccomplished; the Lord give them steadiness of mind, or surely they will faint away and die in bewilderment. Give the children thy blessing; take them up in thine arms and bless them; then when thou dost set them down again they will be ready for all the duty of time. Have mercy upon us wherein we have sinned; when we say we are miserable sinners we know the depth of the meaning of the words: the Lord send to us messages from the Cross, and wherein we cry from our hearts, and are contrite in our spirits, really and truly sorry for the wreck we have wrought, do thou lift us up again into the sunlight of forgiveness, and give us the liberty of pardon. Be with us for the few nights and days we have yet to work off on the wheel of time: they fly away, and they are not; they are gone, and we cannot count them. May we, through the blood of the everlasting Covenant and the eternal energy of the Spirit, be better to-day than we were yesterday. Amen.
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