Dearest Α.,
The principle which I have to bring under your notice in this letter, is one full of the richest consolation to the heart of every faithful servant of Christ. It is this, In all ages, and under all the dispensations of God, whatever may have been the condition of God’s people as a whole, it was the privilege of the individual believer to tread as lofty a path and enjoy as high communion as ever was known in the very brightest and palmiest days of the dispensation.
Such is my present thesis which I hope to be able to prove from the word of God. I have, in former letters, sought to prove that, in every instance in which man has been placed in a position of responsibility, he has utterly failed. And, further, that. God never restores a fallen witness. I trust I have fully established these two points. My present task is a much more pleasing one, inasmuch as it involves the setting forth of the great truth that, in darkest days, faith has ever found its springs in the living God Himself, and, therefore, the deeper the moral gloom all around, the brighter are the flashes of individual faith. The dark background of the corporate condition has thrown individual faith into bright and beauteous relief.
Now I confess, my beloved friend, that this line of truth has peculiar charms for my heart. I have for many years found in it solace and encouragement; and I doubt not we have often dwelt upon it, both in our personal intercourse and in our public ministry. I do not think it is possible to overstate its value and importance, and I am thankful for this opportunity of bringing it out and throwing it into permanent form.
There is a strong and constant tendency in the mind of God’s people to lower the standard of devotedness to the level of the general condition of things. This must be carefully guarded against. It is destructive of all service and testimony. “The foundation of God standeth sure, having this seal, The Lord knoweth them that are his. And, Let everyone that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity.” 2 Tim. 2:19.
This weighty passage embodies in its brief compass the whole subject which I desire to unfold in this letter. God is faithful. His standard ever remains the same. His foundation can never be moved; and it is the province and the privilege of the individual believer to rest on that foundation and abide by that standard, come what may. Faith can count on God, and draw upon His inexhaustible resources, though the public condition of things be characterized by hopeless ruin. Were it not so, what would have become of the faithful in all ages? How could the Baraks, the Gideons, the Jephthahs, the Samsons, have stood their ground, and wielded the sword against the uncircumcised, if they had allowed themselves to be influenced by the general condition of the people of God? If any one of these illustrious servants had folded his arms and abandoned himself to the paralyzing power of unbelief, because of the state of the nation, what would have been the issue? Assuredly they would never have achieved those splendid victories which the Holy Ghost has graciously recorded for our encouragement, and which we may study with such spiritual delight and profit.
But I think I must seek to prove and illustrate my thesis by bringing before you in an orderly manner some prominent cases in which its truth is specially exemplified. Knowing as I do your profound interest in the word of God, I shall not attempt to offer any apology for copious references to scripture; or, if needs be, elaborate quotation from it. I fancy I hear you saying, “By all means give me scripture. There is nothing like the word. It must be our only standard of appeal—our one grand authority which settles all questions, solves all difficulties, closes all discussion. Give me scripture.” This I know is your mind; and thanks be to God, it is the mind of your correspondent also.
To scripture therefore we shall turn, in dependence upon the guidance and teaching of Him by whom that scripture was indicted.
The first proof then, my beloved friend, which I shall offer you will be found in Exod. 33 What, let me ask, was at that moment the condition of the nation of Israel? Let chapter 32 furnish the sad and humiliating reply. The very highest and most privileged man in the whole congregation had made a gulden calf! Yes; here is the terrible record: “And when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down out of the mount, the people gathered themselves together unto Aaron, and said unto him, Up, make us gods, which shall go before us; for as for this Moses, the man that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we wot not what is become of him.”
What a picture is here, dearest Α., of the debasing and absurd folly of the human heart! Only think of a whole congregation of people giving utterance to such gross and palpable absurdity. “Make us gods.” We listen with amazement to such accents, emanating as they do from the lips of those who not long before had lifted their voice to heaven in a triumphal hymn of praise. Who would have thought that the worshippers on the shore of the Bed Sea should ever give utterance to such words as “Make us gods which shall go before us”? They had said in their magnificent song, “Who is like unto thee, Ο Lord, among the gods? Who is like thee, glorious in holiness, fearful in praises, doing wonders?” Had they now found out someone like Him? It would seem so. And who? A golden calf! How dreadful! And yet this is man. Yes; man, in every age. If we duly ponder the scene of the golden calf—if we thoroughly seize the moral of it—if we fully apprehend its teaching, it will go far in preparing us for some of the grossest features in the present condition of things. “These things happened unto them for ensamples: and they are written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world are come.” (Literally, “upon whom the ends of the ages have met.”) But let us proceed with our subject.
“And Aaron said unto them, Break off the golden earrings which are in the ears of your wives, of your sons, and of your daughters, and bring them unto me. And all the people brake off the golden earrings which were in their ears, and brought them unto Aaron. And he received them at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, after he had made it a molten calf: and they said, These be thy gods, Ο Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt. And when Aaron saw it, he built an altar before it; and Aaron made proclamation and said, To-morrow is a feast to the Lord. And they rose up early on the morrow, and offered burnt-offerings, and brought peace-offerings; and the people sat down to eat and to drink, and rose up to play.”
What a picture! A whole assembly—the entire nation of Israel sunk, in a moment, into absurd and degrading idolatry—all, with one consent, bowed before a god made of the earrings which a little before had hung from the ears of their wives and daughters! And this, too, in the face of all they had witnessed of the mighty acts of Jehovah. They had seen the land of Egypt trembling under the successive strokes of His judicial rod. They had seen the Red Sea laid open before them, and a pathway formed for them by His omnipotent arm through these very waters which proved a grave for Egypt’s armies. He had sent down manna from heaven, and brought forth water from a flinty rock, to meet their need. All this they had witnessed; and yet, in a moment, as it were, they could forget this marvelous array of evidence, and mistake a piece of gold for the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel. Terrible exhibition, this, of what is in man, and of what we are to expect from him if left to himself!
Nor should we, my beloved friend, ever forget who it was that led the people into this most disastrous course of action. It was no less a personage than Aaron—the elder brother of the lawgiver himself. It may be deemed a digression to refer to this; but it is a profitable digression; because it tends to illustrate the exceeding folly of leaning on, or looking to, the very highest and best of men.
In the early part of the book of Exodus we find Moses shrinking from the divine legation. He hesitated to go into Egypt at the bidding of God, though assured again and again that Jehovah would be with him, that He would be a mouth and wisdom to him, nevertheless, he shrank and would fain retire from the responsibility. But the very moment he heard that Aaron should accompany him, he was ready to go. And yet this very man was the source of the deepest sorrow that Moses ever tasted. This was the man who made the golden calf!
How admonitory is all this! What a sad mistake it is to lean on an arm of flesh! And yet how prone we are all to do so in one way or another! We lean on our fellow-mortal instead of leaning on the living God, and in the sequel we find we have been trusting to a broken reed. “Confidence in an unfaithful man in time of trouble is like a broken tooth, or a foot out of joint.” “Cease ye from man whose breath is in his nostrils; for wherein is he to be accounted of?”
But we must return to our theme, and consider the path of the man of God, in the face of the condition of things with which he was surrounded—a condition, to say the least of it, gloomy enough.
The heart of Moses might well sink and cower as he beheld the whole congregation of Israel, with Aaron his brother at their head, sunk in abominable idolatry. All seemed hopelessly gone. But “the foundation of God standeth sure.” This is a grand and immutable truth in all ages. Nothing can touch the truth of God. It shines out all the brighter from amid the deepest and darkest shades into which man is capable of sinking. We can form but very little idea of what the heart of Moses, that beloved and honored servant of God, passed through when he saw his Lord displaced by a golden calf. But he could count on God. Yea, and he could also act for God. The two things ever go together. The man of faith cannot afford to spend his time in unavailing lamentations over the condition of things. He has his work to do, and his path to tread, and that work and that path are never more marked than in the very midst of abounding error and hopeless confusion. “The foundation of God standeth sure, having this seal. The Lord knoweth them that are his. And, Let every one that nameth the name of Christ, depart from iniquity.”
See how blessedly this fine practical principle was carried out by Moses, the man of God—a principle as true in the day of the golden calf, as amid the appalling ruins of Christendom. “And Moses took the tabernacle, and pitched it without the camp, afar off from the camp, and called it the tabernacle of the congregation. And it came to pass, that every one which sought the Lord went out unto the tabernacle of the congregation which was without the camp.”
Here we have what we may call a bold and magnificent piece of acting. Moses felt that Jehovah and a golden calf could not be together, and hence if a calf was in the camp, Jehovah must be outside. Such was the simple reasoning of faith; faith always reasons aright. When the public body is all wrong, the path of individual faith is outside. “Let every one that nameth the name of Christ, depart from iniquity.” It never can be right, and, thanks be to God, it is never necessary, to go on with iniquity. No, no, “depart” is the watchword for the faithful soul, when iniquity is set up in that which assumes to be the witness for God on the earth. Cost what it may, we are to depart. It may look like exclusiveness, and a setting ourselves up to be holier and better and wiser than our neighbors. But no matter what it looks like, or what people may call it, we must “depart from iniquity.” “Every one which sought the Lord” had to go outside of the defiled place to find Him, and yet that very place was none other than the camp of Israel where Jehovah had taken up His abode.
Thus we see that Moses on this occasion was preeminently a man for the crisis. He acted for God, and he was the honored instrument of opening up a path for God’s people whereby they might escape from a scene of hopeless pollution, and enjoy the rich and rare privilege of communion with God in an evil day. And as for himself, we learn what he gained by this marvelous transaction from the following record, “And the Lord spake unto Moses face to face as a man speaketh unto his friend.”
Am I wrong, dearest Α., in adducing Moses in proof of my thesis, “That no matter what may be the actual condition of the people of God as a whole, it is the privilege of the individual believer to tread as lofty a path and enjoy as high communion as was ever known in the brightest and palmiest days?” I think you will say, No.
And here I must close this long letter. If you so desire, you shall hear again from
Yours, my dearest Α., Most affectionately in Christ,