NOTES OF AN ADDRESS BY THE LATE ROCHFORT HUNT.
“What can full joy and blessing be,
But being where Thou art?”
Let us read Deuteronomy 34, Matthew 16:24-28, 17:1-8. We may look at the death of Moses in a dispensational way. The lawgiver could never lead the people into the land. We must all feel that if our blessing depended on our obedience, we should never have the blessing. In going on, the acknowledgment is more and more drawn out from the saint, that the grace which he experiences from the Lord is as great as the grace which saved him at the first. Trials are good for us. One has said, “An untried saint is an unsavory saint.”
“As herbs, though scentless when entire, Perfume the air when bruised.”
Moses was a tried saint, and precious is the ointment which flows to us from it.
We can also look at the personal history of this beloved servant of God. We know the story of his failure, which shut him out from the land. He forgot that “power belongeth unto God.” It is vested in His hands, and bestowed by Him in successive grants on individuals. If we turn to Numbers 17, we see how God’s grace chose Levi. And who was Levi? In the end of Genesis we find him left under the malediction of the head of the family. And Moses, too, was of Levi, and had been “drawn out” from the waters of death. He was a man who could appreciate and enter into the character of God, and He said of him, “My servant Moses — with him I will speak face to face.”
And was it not much more to him to have that hour on the mount, talking with Jesus, than to lead the people into the land? Man naturally, whatever may be said to the contrary, is made to look up to One above him, to look up to God. We see it even in our human surroundings, how one of character and influence is looked up to. It is a rare thing to find a man in whose character both strength and gentleness are united. One with a strong character may fail in gentleness, or a gracious man may be weak. Some of us have clinging hearts, and God knows that. He who made the heart knows what it is, and what alone will satisfy it. Our hearts are too large for the world to fill them. In the Lord Jesus we have One who can enter into the feelings of our hearts. If we go to Him, we shall find in Him such tenderness, such delicacy, such refinement of feeling. He alone can satisfy the heart. We cannot be satisfied with the little things around us, though we may take pleasure in them, but things will all come to an end, and our hearts can only be satisfied with what will not come to an end. An eternity of things could never satisfy the heart, we must have an Object.
May we, as it were, get up on the mount, and lay down “our things,” and be satisfied with Him.