There is evidently something very wrong with the world, “the foundations of the earth are out of course.” It is filled with vicarious suffering—the innocent victims bearing burdens, enduring pains and laying down their lives, leaving however legacies of perennial benefits to the race. It is not only a few individual cases, as where Lucilius shall deliver himself to death that Brutus may live, or Selwood dies for Fuller, or Lilla springs forward to receive Eumer's dagger, aimed at Edwin, into his breast; nor is it that a nation shall occasionally inherit salvation from the martyrdom of an innocent benefactor, as when king Cedrus died for Athens, or mail-clad Curtius rides into the gulf for Rome, or Winkelreid dies on the Austrian spears to free the Swiss. It is that there is no human being alive whose existence is not the outcome of vicarious agonies. The child inherits the boons of life, love, and light from the suffering of the mother. And in every direction this strange principle operates; for it may be doubted whether there be a possession that we have worth holding—material, political, or religious—which is not the result of the toil, tears, and blood of sages, prophets, and martyrs, most of whom have died in shame and apparent failure, bequeathing gifts in exchange for blows, and benedictions for imprecations.
He who was to be, above all others, the Blameless and Vicarious Sufferer is everywhere foreshadowed in the Old Testament. And whenever, in any of the types or prophetic Psalms, vicarious suffering is brought before us, we find outflowing therefrom a stream of grace and blessing in which all may participate. Thus from the sacrifice on Mount Moriah flows out a course of divine” favor and benison, beginning with the promise of posterity and dominion, and culminating in the birth of Jacob.
“But not unmixed with pangs” —a long time must elapse before the promise, or even its first syllable, is fulfilled;. and meantime we receive the “sentence of death in ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God which raiseth the dead.” The immediate sequence is the departure of Sarah and Abraham is brought in very personal contact with death. That is, that those who are connected with the sacrifice of Christ, and are the objects of present promises and future blessings by reason of it, should pass experimentally through the fellowship of His sufferings, and bear about in the body the deadness—νέκρωσιν—of the Lord Jesus Christ. Connected with this is an important surrender of all earthly rights: Abraham owned the whole country, God having given it to him; yet he will not accept—at present—so much as an acre of it without paying for it.
If a man reckon himself dead, he will not be insisting on his earthly rights. The sword of the Spirit is like that with which, in Scandinavian mythology, Wieland clove Amilias through helmet and armor with a blow so swift and keen, that he did not know that he had been struck till he essayed to move, and then he fell asunder in two pieces. It cleaves the natural man to the ground, though he knows nothing of it, nor suspects that he has such a “sentence of death in himself,” till he is moved by the impulses of spiritual, life, and then he has practical experience of death. So much we may learn when we descend from the heights of Moriah and stand in the field, of Ephron listening to the sighing of the wind through the trees of Mature and its moaning and mourning in the caves of Machpelah.
Observe the courtesy of the man of faith: the dignity with which he declines the gift is noticeable at once. But if he is obliged to act with dignity and reject a proffered gift from the sons of Heth, he does not repulse with harshness but declines with grace. They address him with flattery and friendship— “My Lord, thou art a mighty prince......in the choice of our sepulchers bury thy dead.” Ephron says, “Nay, my Lord, hear me: the field give I thee and the cave that is therein I give it thee what are four hundred shekels betwixt me and thee?” It is very hard to decline a gift thus proffered, when the refusal will evidently give pain Abraham, however, must be unyielding in purpose, but he is by no means harsh or rigid in demeanor: he “stood up and bowed himself to the people,.........saying, If it be your mind that, &c.......and Abraham bowed down himself.” Thus was conducted the first commercial transaction of human record. Probably it was more painful to Abraham to decline these friendly overtures than to join battle with the king of Chedorlaomer; but in consistency it must be done, and he does it in the most gracious way. The man that is firmest in purpose is generally the most courteous in bearing. We read of an iron hand in a velvet glove: suaviter in modo, fortiter in re.