The Gospel of the Pentateuch: A Set of Parish Sermons

So much easier, my friends, is it to know what is right than to do what is right.

What then was wrong in Balaam?

This, that he was double-minded.  He wished to serve God.  True.  But he wished to serve himself by serving God, as too many do in all times.

That was what was wrong with him—self-seeking; and the Bible story brings out that self-seeking with a delicacy, a keenness, and a perfect knowledge of human nature, which ought to teach us some of the secrets of our own hearts.  Watch how Balaam, as a matter of course, inquires of the Lord whether he may go, and refuses, seemingly at first honestly.

Then how the temptation grows on him; how, when he feels tempted, he fights against it in fine-sounding professions, just because he feels that he is going to yield to it.  Then how he begins to tempt God, by asking him again, in hopes that God may have changed his mind.  Then when he has his foolish wish granted he goes.  Then when the terrible warning comes to him that he is on the wrong road, that God’s wrath is gone out against him, and his angel ready to destroy him, he is full still of hollow professions of obedience, instead of casting himself utterly upon God’s mercy, and confessing his sin, and entreating pardon.

Then how, instead of being frightened at God’s letting him have his way, he is emboldened by it to tempt God more and more, and begins offering bullocks and rams on altars, first in this place and then in that, in hopes still that God may change his mind, and let him curse Israel; in hopes that God may be like one of the idols of the heathen, who could (so the heathen thought) be coaxed and flattered round by sacrifices to do whatever their worshippers wished.

Then, when he finds that all is of no use; that he must not curse Israel, and must not earn Balak’s silver and gold, he is forced to be an honest man in spite of himself; and therefore he makes the best of his disappointment by taking mighty credit to himself for being honest, while he wishes all the while he might have been allowed to have been dishonest.  Oh, if all this is not poor human nature, drawn by the pen of a truly inspired writer, what is it?

Moreover, it is curious to watch how as Balaam is forced step by step to be an honest man, so step by step he rises.  A weight falls off his mind and heart, and the Spirit of God comes upon him.

He feels for once that he must speak his mind, that he must obey God.  As he looks down from off the mountain top, and sees the vast encampment of the Israelites spread over the vale below, for miles and miles, as far as the eye can see, all ordered, disciplined, arranged according to their tribes, the Spirit of God comes upon him, and he gives way to it and speaks.

The sight of that magnificent array wakens up in him the thought of how divine is older, how strong is order, how order is the life and root of a nation, and how much more, when that order is the order of God.

‘How goodly are thy tents, O Jacob, and thy tabernacles, O Israel!  As the valleys are they spread forth, as gardens by the river’s side, as the trees of lign aloes which the Lord hath planted, and as cedar trees beside the waters.  His king shall be higher than Agag,’ and all his wild Amalekite hordes.  He will be a true nation, civilized, ordered, loyal and united, for God is teaching him.

Who can resist such a nation as that?  ‘God has brought him out of Egypt.  He has the strength of an unicorn.’  ‘I shall see him,’ he says, ‘but not now; I shall behold him, but not nigh: there shall come a Star out of Jacob, and a Sceptre shall rise out of Israel, and shall smite the corners of Moab, and destroy all the children of Sheth.’  And when he looked on Amalek, he took up his parable, and said, ‘Amalek was the first of the nation; but his latter end shall be that he perish for ever.’  And he looked on the Kenites, and took up his parable, and said, ‘Strong is thy dwelling-place, and thou puttest thy nest in a rock.  Nevertheless, the Kenite shall be wasted, till Asshur shall carry thee away captive.’  ‘Alas, who shall live when God doeth this!’

And then, beyond all, after all the Canaanites and other Syrian races have been destroyed, he sees, dimly and afar off, another destruction still.

In his home in the far east the fame of the ships of Chittim has reached him; the fame of the new people, the sea-roving heroes of the Greeks, of whom old Homer sang; the handsomest, cunningest, most daring of mankind, who are spreading their little trading colonies along all the isles and shores, as we now are spreading ours over the world.  Those ships of Chittim, too, have a great and glorious future before them.  Some day or other they will come and afflict Asshur, the great empire of the East, out of which Balaam probably came; and afflict Eber too, the kingdom of the Jews, and they too shall perish for ever.

Dimly he sees it, for it is very far away.  But that it will come he sees; and beyond that all is dark.  He has said his say; he has spoken the whole truth for once.  Balak’s house full of silver and gold would not have bought him off and stopped his mouth when such awful thoughts crowded on his mind.  So he returns to his place—to do what?

If he cannot earn Balak’s gold by cursing Israel, he can do it by giving him cunning and politic advice.  He advises Balak to make friends with the Israelites and mix them up with his people by enticing them to the feasts of his idols, at which the women threw themselves away in shameful profligacy, after the custom of the heathens of these parts.

In the next chapter we read how Moses, and Phinehas, Aaron’s grandson, put down those filthy abominations with a high hand; and how Balaam’s detestable plot, instead of making peace, makes war; and in chapter xxxi. you read the terrible destruction of the whole nation of the Midianites, and among it this one short and terrible hint: ‘Balaam also, the son of Beor, they slew with the sword.’

But what may we learn from this ugly story?

Recollect what I said at first, that we should find Balaam too like many people now-a-days; perhaps too like ourselves.

Too like indeed.  For never were men more tempted to sin as Balaam did than in these days, when religion is all the fashion, and pays a man, and helps him on in life; when, indeed, a man cannot expect to succeed without professing some sort of religion or other.

Thereby comes a terrible temptation to many men.  I do not mean to hypocrites, but to really well-meaning men.  They like religion.  They wish to be good; they have the feeling of devotion.  They pray, they read their Bibles, they are attentive to services and to sermons, and are more or less pious people.  But soon—too soon—they find that their piety is profitable.  Their business increases.  Their credit increases.  They are trusted and respected; their advice is asked and taken.  They gain power over their fellow-men.  What a fine thing it is, they think, to be pious!

Then creeps in the love of the world; the love of money, or power, or admiration; and they begin to value religion because it helps them to get on in the world.  They begin more and more to love Piety not for its own sake, but for the sake of what it brings; not because it pleases God, but because it pleases the world; not because it enables them to help their fellow-men, but because it enables them to help themselves.

So they get double-minded, unstable, inconsistent, as St. James says, in all their ways; trying to serve God and Mammon at once.  Trying to do good—as long as doing good does not hurt them in the world’s eyes; but longing oftener and oftener to do wrong, if only God would not be angry.  Then comes on Balaam’s frame of mind, ‘If Balak would give me his house full of silver and gold, I cannot go beyond the commandment of the Lord.’

Oh no.  They would not do a wrong thing for the world—only they must be quite sure first that it is wrong.  Has God really forbidden it?  Why should they not take care of their interest?  Why should they not get on in the world?  So they begin, like Balaam, to tempt God, to see how far they can go; to see if God has forbidden this and that mean, or cowardly, or covetous, or ambitious deed.  So they soon settle for themselves what God has forbidden and what he has not; and their rule of life becomes this—that whatsoever is safe and whatsoever is profitable is pretty sure to be right; and after that no wonder if, like Balaam, they indulge themselves in every sort of sin, provided only it is respectable, and does not hurt them in the world’s eyes.

And all the while they keep up their religion.  Ay, they are often more attentive than ever to religion, because their consciences pinch them at times, and have to be silenced and drugged by continual church-goings and chapel-goings, and readings and prayings, in order that they may be able to say to themselves with Balaam, ‘Thus saith Balaam, he who heard the word of God, and had the knowledge of the Most High.’

So they say to themselves, ‘I must be right.  How religious I am; how fond of sermons, and of church services, and church restorations, and missionary meetings, and charitable institutions, and everything that is good and pious.  I must be right with God.’  Deceiving their ownselves, and saying to themselves, ‘I am rich and increased with goods, I have need of nothing,’ and not knowing that they are wretched, and miserable, and blind, and naked.

Would God that such people, of whom there are too many, would take St. John’s warning and buy of the Lord gold tried in the fire—the true gold of honesty—that they may be truly rich, and anoint their eyes with eye-salve that they may see themselves for once as they are.

But what does this story teach us concerning God?  For remember, as I tell you every Sunday, that each fresh story in the Pentateuch reveals to us something fresh about the character of God.  What does Balaam’s story reveal?  Balaam himself tells us in the text, ‘God is not a man that he should lie, nor the son of man that he should repent.  Hath he said, and shall he not do it?’

Yes.  Fancy not that any wishes or prayers of yours can persuade God to alter his everlasting laws of right and wrong.  If he has commanded a thing, he has commanded it because it is according to his everlasting laws, which cannot change, because they are made in his eternal image and likeness.  Therefore if God has commanded you a thing, do it heartily, fully, without arguing or complaining.  If you begin arguing with God’s law, excusing yourself from it, inventing reasons why you need not obey it in this particular instance, though every one else ought, then you will end, like Balaam, in disobeying the law, and it will grind you to powder.

But if you obey God’s law honestly, with a single eye and a whole heart, you will find in it a blessing, and peace, and strength, and everlasting life.

SERMON XV.  DEUTERONOMY

(Third Sunday after Easter.)

Deut. iv. 39, 40.  Know therefore this day, and consider it in thine heart, that the Lord he is God in heaven above, and upon the earth beneath: there is none else.  Thou shall keep therefore his statutes and his commandments, which I command thee this day, that it may go well with thee, and with thy children after thee, and that thou mayest prolong thy days upon the earth, which the Lord thy God giveth thee, for ever.

Learned men have argued much of late as to who wrote the book of Deuteronomy.  After having read a good deal on the subject, I can only say that I see no reason why we should not believe the ancient account which the Jews give, that it was written, or at least spoken by Moses.

No doubt there are difficulties in the book.  If there had not been, there would never have been any dispute about the matter; but the plain, broad, common-sense case is this:

The book of Deuteronomy is made up of several great orations or sermons, delivered, says the work itself, by Moses, to the whole people of the Jews, before they left the wilderness and entered into the land of Canaan; wherefore it is called Deuteronomy, or the second law.  In it some small matters of the law are altered, as was to be expected, when the Jews were going to change their place and their whole way of life.  But the whole teaching and meaning of the book is exactly that of Exodus and Leviticus.  Moreover, it is, if possible, the grandest and deepest book of the Old Testament.  Its depth and wisdom are unequalled.  I hold it to be the sum and substance of all political philosophy and morality of the true life of a nation.  The books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, grand as they are, are, as it were, its children; growths out of the root which Deuteronomy reveals.

Now if Moses did not write it, who did?

As for the style of it being different from that of Exodus and Leviticus, the simple answer is, Why not?  They are books of history and of laws.  This is a book of sermons or orations, spoken first, and not written, which, of course, would be in a different style.  Besides, why should not Moses have spoken differently at the end of forty years’ such experience as never man had before or since?  Every one who thinks, writes, or speaks in public, knows how his style alters, as fresh knowledge and experience come to him.  Are you to suppose that Moses gained nothing by his experience?

As for a few texts in it being like Isaiah or Jeremiah, they are likely enough to be so; for if (as I believe) Deuteronomy was written long before those books, what more likely than that Isaiah and Jeremiah should have studied it, and taken some of its words to themselves when they were preaching to the Jews just what Deuteronomy preaches?

As for any one else having written it in Moses’ name, hundreds of years after his death, I cannot believe it.  If there had been in Israel a prophet great and wise enough to write Deuteronomy, we must have heard more about him, for he must have been famous at the time when he did live; while, if he were great enough to write Deuteronomy, he would have surely written in his own name, as Isaiah and all the other prophets wrote, instead of writing under a feigned name, and putting words into Moses’ mouth which he did not speak, and laws he did not give.  Good men are not in the habit of telling lies: much less prophets of God.  Men do not begin to play cowardly tricks of that kind till after they have lost faith in the living God, and got to believe that God was with their forefathers, but is not with them.  A Jew of the time of the Apocrypha, or of the time of our Lord, might have done such a thing, because he had lost faith in the living God; but then his work would have been of a very different kind from this noble and heart-stirring book.  For the pith and marrow, the essence and life of Deuteronomy is, that it is full of faith in the living God; and for that very reason I am going to speak to you to-day.

For the rest, whether Moses wrote the book down, and put it together in the shape in which we now have it, we shall never be able to tell.  The several orations may have been put together into one book.  Alterations may have crept in by the carelessness of copiers; sentences may have been added to it by later prophets—as, of course, the grand account of Moses’ death, which probably was at first the beginning of the book of Joshua.  And beyond that we need know nothing—even if we need know that.

There the book is; and people, if they be wise, will, instead of trying to pick it to pieces, read and study it in fear and trembling, that the curses pronounced in it may not come, and the blessings pronounced in it may come upon this English land.

Now these Jews were to worship and obey Jehovah, the one true God, and him only.  And why?

Why, indeed?  You must understand why, or you will never understand this book of Deuteronomy or any part of the Old Testament, and if you do not, then you will understand very little, if anything, of the New.

You must understand that this was not to be a mere matter of religion with the old Jews, this trusting and obeying the true God.  Indeed, the word religion, so far as I know, is never mentioned once in the Old Testament at all.  By religion we now mean some plan of believing and obeying God, which will save our souls after we die.  But Moses said nothing to the Jews about that.  He never even anywhere told them that they would live again after this life.  We do not know the reason of that.  But we may suppose that he knew best.  And as we believe that God sent him, we must believe that God knew best also; and that he thought it good for these Jews not to be told too much about the next life; perhaps for fear that they should forget that God was the living God; the God of now, as well as of hereafter; the God of this life, as well as of the life to come.  My friends, I sometimes think we need putting in mind of that in these days as much as those old Jews did.

However that may be, what Moses promised these Jews, if they trusted in the living God, was that they should be a great nation, they and their children after them; that they should drive out the Canaanites before them; that they should conquer their enemies, and that a thousand should flee before one of them; that they should be blessed in their crops, their orchards, their gardens; that they should have none of the evil diseases of Egypt; that there should be none barren among them, or among their cattle.  In a word, that they should be thoroughly and always a strong, happy, prosperous people.

This is what God promised them by Moses, and nothing else; and therefore this is what we must think about, and see whether it has anything to do with us, when we read the book of Deuteronomy, and nothing else.

On the other hand, God warned them by the mouth of Moses that if they forgot the Lord God, and went and worshipped the things round them, men or beasts, or sun and moon and stars, then poverty, misery, and ruin of every kind would surely fall upon them.

And that this last was no empty threat is proved by the plain facts of their sacred history.  For they did forget God, and worshipped Baalim, the sun, moon, and stars; and ruin of every kind did come upon them, till they were carried away captive to Babylon.  And this we must think of when we read the book of Deuteronomy, and nothing else.  If they wished to prosper, they were to know and consider in their hearts that Jehovah was God, and there was none else.  Yes—this was the continual thought which a true Jew was to have.  The thought of a God who was his God; the God of his fathers before him, and the God of his children after him; the God of the whole nation of the Jews, throughout all their generations.

But not their God only.  No.  The God of the Gentiles also, of all the nations upon the earth.  He was to believe that his God alone, of all the gods of the nations, was the true and only God, who had made all nations, and appointed them their times and the bounds of their habitations.