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It is remarkable how frequently in the Book of Deuteronomy, when God is giving his final summary of instructions to the Israelites, the warning is repeated, that the Jewish church forget not God and His dealings with them in connexion with their deliverance from Egypt, and their wanderings in the wilderness. Such warnings strike us the more forcibly, because the people to whom they were addressed had come into the closest contact with God, and had been favoured with the clearest visible evidences of His presence in the midst of them. We are conscious, in our own case, of a painful forgetfulness of God; He seems so far off from us; we cannot get near to Him; we are inclined to say with Job, "Behold, I go forward, but He is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive Him; on the left hand where He doth work, but I cannot behold Him; He hideth Himself on the right hand, that I cannot see Him;" and hence we look upon our forgetfulness of God as a consequence of that more spiritual dispensation under which we are placed. We are called to walk by faith instead of by sight. What wonder that we fail in the attempt, when we can none of us, like the beloved apostle, speak literally of "that which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled of the word of life!" To have seen Jesus in the flesh, to have heard His words of grace and love, to have witnessed His miracles, these would have been privileges, the memory and impression of which could have never passed away; having once actually seen God in the person of Jesus Christ, we could never have been forgetful of Him again.

Now all such reasonings are mere self-deception; they have, through the subtlety of Satan, injured many souls, and turned them away from that life of faith which constitutes the highest and closest communion with God. That there is a

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deep fallacy involved therein, is manifest from the fact that the Jewish church, which had the most abundant ocular demonstration of God and of His power, is so repeatedly cautioned against this forgetfulness of God. When the Israelites were assembled in the plains of Moab to hear the last charges of God by His servant Moses, they could not only in the case of all who were then and there present, take up the exclamation of the psalmist in later days, and say, "We have heard with our ears, O God; our fathers have told us what thou didst in their days, in the times of old; " but many of the number had in their own persons passed through those remarkable scenes in which Jehovah manifested himself to the Israelites. The sentence of destruction during the forty years' wandering was graciously limited by God to those who at the time of the report of the spies, and consequent unbelief of the people, had reached the age of twenty years, "all that were numbered of you, according to your whole number, from twenty years old and upward, which have murmured against me, doubtless ye shall not come into the land concerning which I sware to make you dwell therein...as for you, your carcases, they shall fall in the wilderness." All who at that period were from ten to twenty years old might retain a vivid impression of scenes such as man had never passed through before. They had walked, or been led by a parent's hand, through the Red Sea as by dry land, and their eyes had gazed upwards upon the towering waters which were as a wall to them on the right hand and on the left;-they had 'quaked beneath the thunderings and lightnings and trumpet-peals of Mount Sinai, when the mountain burned with fire unto the midst of heaven, with darkness, clouds, and thick darkness, and the Lord spake out of the midst of the fire; they had seen the earth open her mouth and swallow up Korah and his company, and had fled in dread from the tents of those wicked men, and on the morrow had witnessed the desolating plague as it carried off fourteen thousand and seven hundred of those that murmured against the Lord ;and they had been present at that other murmuring against God, which the apostle tells us was against Christ, and had seen the divine wrath manifested in the plague of living serpents; in some cases, it may be, they had themselves been bitten, and had writhed in agony as the burning poison of the venomous fang circulated through their veins, and only found healing as their eye turned to the appointed remedy, the uplifted serpent of brass.

Of these and many other similar scenes no inconsiderable portion of those to whom the charges of the Book of Deuteronomy were addressed were eye-witnesses, the rest received the narrative of such wonderful things from the very lips of eye-witnesses; if they were not yet born, or were too young to

know and observe what was passing, their own fathers and mothers took part in these events, and in the tent doors in the wilderness, in the cool of the day, had related and depicted every circumstance of wonder or of horror to their listening children. And yet these are the persons to whom God says by Moses, "Only take heed to thyself, and keep thy soul diligently, lest thou forget the things which thine eyes have seen, and lest they depart from thine heart all the days of thy life, specially the day that thou stoodest before the Lord thy God in Horeb." We may seem to have dwelt too long upon this introductory part of our subject, but the time will not have been lost if these remarks prepare the reader for the great truth to be deduced from what has been said, which will form the basis of this paper, that forgetfulness of God is one of the characteristics of our fallen nature that it is not to be accounted for or excused upon the ground of the spirituality of the gospel dispensation; that it will manifest itself under every variety of outward circumstances; and that it is to be treated as a part of that infirmity of man's fallen state, by reason of which the memory is indisposed to retain clear thoughts of God and of His dealings, just as the other faculties of our mental and bodily constitution are alienated from Him and His service.

With this fact impressed upon our minds, it will be profitable to consider the ways in which forgetfulness of God displays itself. This tendency will be perceived in respect to God himself. We acknowledge that it is in God that we live and move and have our being; none would deny that it is to His sovereign power we owe our continued existence, and to His fatherly care the daily provision for our wants; yet we rarely find a sustained recognition of God. The appeal to Jehovah by the prophet may be addressed in its full force to us: "I, even I, am He that comforteth you. Who art thou that thou shouldest be afraid of a man that shall die, and of the son of man who shall be made as grass, and forgettest the Lord thy Maker, that hath stretched forth the heavens, and laid the foundations of the earth?" We do not walk day by day as seeing by the eye of faith Him who is invisible. What an importance would it give to life could we attain to that deep sense of the consciousness of God's immediate presence and majesty, which is implied in the brief but full description of the spiritual life of those of whom it is recorded, that they walked with God. Here is the remedy against the fear of man, and the antidote against the ensnaring influence of worldlymindedness; here is the source of conscious dignity, and the secret of spiritual strength. The very lowest point to which man can sink is, when it may be said of him that God is not in all his thoughts, and there can scarcely be a higher one than

when we can adopt as our own experience the psalmist's words, "I have set the Lord always before me."

But, besides this forgetfulness of God in His abstract nature and perfections, we trace this evil in a similar forgetfulness of Him in His operations. God in His glorious majesty dwelleth in the highest heavens, but in His operations and providential dealings He is ever as it were coming down to earth and meeting us closely and continually in the pathway of our lives. Every comfort is held out to our acceptance by the hand of God; in every trial we may trace the discipline of God: in our joys, in our sorrows, in our difficulties, in our temptations, and in every single circumstance of life, the voice of God is speaking to us, and calling us to the exercise of gratitude, and hope, and expectation, and confiding trust. But this we overlook: human agency, second causes, personal effort, self-dependence, come in between us and God. Backsliding Israel at length reached this point, that they knew not that it was God who gave them their corn and wine and oil, and multiplied their silver and gold, which they prepared for Baal. Our forgetfulness of God in the daily circumstances of life tends in the same direction; our ordinary provision is received as a matter of course; the thanksgiving for our daily food is a mere form. Our homes and our children, our health and our strength, our peaceful times and fruitful seasons, our national blessings and our spiritual privileges, are given us that we might set our hope in God and not forget the works of God; but this end is now imperfectly attained, and the most observant of God's operations amongst us has reason to rouse up his languid spirit with the exhortation of the psalmist, "Bless the Lord, O my soul; and all that is within me bless His holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits."

Forgetfulness of God also displays itself in respect to that covenant which He has made with us in Christ. The Jewish church had a special warning upon this head: Take heed unto yourselves, lest ye forget the covenant of the Lord your God which He made with you. A covenant with man is not disregarded nor trifled with; we note down, in order that we may bear carefully in mind the terms of our agreement, the bond wherewith we have bound ourselves, the manner in which it is to be fulfilled, the penalties which attach to the breach of it. We are less scrupulous with respect to God. Our covenant with God goes beyond that of the Jewish church, in that it brings Christ before us in His finished work, and no longer veiled in types and shadows. All that God can give to sinful man is our covenant portion in the Son of His love, the Lord Jesus Christ. Converted and renewed by the Holy Spirit, adopted into the family of God, receiving continually fresh measures of light, and fresh degrees of edification, as we grow in

grace and attain to a closer union with Christ, we might expect that our minds would be ever reverting to and dwelling upon that covenant of grace whereby alone we become the recipients of these spiritual blessings. The counsels of the Eternal Trinity, the manifestation of God's love in Christ, the covenant well ordered in all things and sure, its confirmation by the blood of the Son of God and the solemn oath of Jehovah, our own obligations and responsibilities commensurate with the privileges offered by God, the vows which are upon us by virtue of our dedication to God in baptism, the renewal of those vows at confirmation, and the repeated oblation and consecration of ourselves, our souls, and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and lively sacrifice unto the Lord,-these, surely, are things of such deep interest and absorbing importance that memory should store them up in her inmost and safest treasure-house. On these it should ever dwell, and upon these exercise its highest and most active powers. Conscience, however, will testify that, excepting in cases of special care and prayerful watchfulness, the habitual state of the ordinary Christian is one in which the words of the wise man apply to him in full force," he forgetteth the covenant of his God."

Another painful feature of this infirmity is to be found in the forgetfulness of the Lord Jesus as our Saviour. It is noted as one point in the sinfulness of Israel, that they forgat God their Saviour, who had done great things in Egypt. The almighty power of God, as developed in the salvation of His people, was the lesson to be learned from those scenes wherein, by a mighty hand and stretched-out arm, God rescued his oppressed church from Egyptian bondage. The Passover was to be the means of maintaining a devout remembrance of this deliverance: "This day shall be unto you for a memorial; and ye shall keep it a feast to the Lord throughout your generations.... Ye shall observe this thing for an ordinance to thee and to thy sons for ever. . . . And it shall come to pass, when your children shall say unto you, What mean ye by this service? that ye shall say it is the sacrifice of the Lord's passover, who passed over the houses of the children of Israel in Egypt, when He smote the Egyptians and delivered our houses." In like manner, the Lord's Supper was to be a commemorative ordinance to keep ever before the minds of His people a lively remembrance of their greater deliverance by the death and sufferings of the Redeemer. Do this, says our Lord, in remembrance So needful was it, under both dispensations, that provision should be made against man's indisposition to exercise his memory upon spiritual things. The grace and condescension, the tender love and never-failing compassion of the Saviour, his sufferings, and agony, and death, fade from our recollection. It is not that the Saviour is altogether unknown or uncared

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