1 Chronicles 29:15-16 For we are strangers before you, and sojourners, as were all our fathers: our days on the earth are as a shadow… Every solemn moment of human life discovers more or less its vanity. It is not only when we stand beside the grave and mourn the wreck of hopes sad aspirations buried out of eight. The marriage festival also awakens a sense of insecurity, and the shadow of parting is thrown over the commencing union. The meetings of friends recall the thought of their separation, sad the inauguration of great works of public ceremonial brings up the image of those changes which all end in dissolution. Thus was it with David, when on the last public ceremony of his kingly life he presented with his people the offerings for the temple to the God of Israel It was a turn of thought poetical and yet natural to break away from that splendid throng, laden with gold and silver and other offerings for the house of God, and resonant with the sounds of music and the acclamations of joy, to dwell upon the shadows of vanished generations, and to anticipate the day when the living race should be one shadow more added to the crowd that had passed away. I. First, then, what are some of the lessons of HUMILIATION taught by the shadowy and vanishing character of human existence? 1. The insufficiency of man, for his own happiness. If he is but a "stranger and sojourner upon the earth," if he is only one of a succession of vanishing ciphers, if his days be only as a "shadow that declineth," and which soon passes into darkness, is it possible for such a creature, if he have no higher resources, to be happy? At best we must say that happiness is only possible on one of two conditions. Either the nature of man must be capable of being satisfied with this transient existence, when it is prolonged to its greatest duration, or his nature must be capable of averting its view from all the risks and hazards which tend at any moment to bring it to a close. Could the longest life satisfy, man might have here some measure of true good; or could he forget the perils which threaten at any moment to shorten it, he might not be altogether miserable. But neither of these alternatives is possible. Take the longest and the most untroubled life, the most filled with worldly advantage and prosperity — can it satisfy the human soul upon the supposition that this is the whole of existence? No. The soul shrinks from annihiilation. But it it be impossible to be happy even with an untroubled life that vanishes into nothing, how much less when the shadow of death is constantly invading us and refusing to be put away! To forget the rapid flight of time and the certain descent to the grave is for us impossible. Our life is strewn with mementos of its speedy end. We have seen the summer flowers and the winter snows alike swept aside to prepare a grave. The insufficiency of man to be his own portion is thus only too visible. He cannot, because life does not contain sufficient scope for him, and because the little that it contains is checkered with the thread of death in all its texture. Man must learn that he is at best a frail and dying creature, and that if in this life only he have hope he is of all God's creatures most miserable. 2. The blindness of human nature to its own mortality. We cannot make ourselves happy either by resting in life as a whole, or by shutting out the shadows of death which cloud it; but we are perpetually attempting to do so, and thus are fighting against the nature of things and against God. What is the whole struggle of the ungodly man but an attempt to build his all upon a mortal foundation; to make a pilgrimage a home, a shadow a reality, the surface of a river a solid and lasting pavement? 3. The third and last lesson of humiliation which I notice is the evil of sin. Sin is the parent of death, the grand destroyer of life's joys, and the creator of its gloom, its shadow, and its insufficiency. Sin mows down all the generations of mankind with relentless sternness. The plague of sin has been in our bones, and therefore their strength has perished, and the beauty of man has consumed like a moth, and he has been altogether vanity. II. Having thus spoken of lessons of humiliation, let me now mention some lessons of CONSOLATION that may be set over against the brevity and uncertainty of earthly existence. I confine myself to two drawn from the text. 1. We have for our consolation the knowledge of God's eternity. "We are," says the King of Israel, "strangers before Thee." This is the first ray of comfort. It is like a rock in the midst of the tossing ocean. Take away an everlasting God, and what an awful sadness covers all! If there be no living personal Being before whom our little life is led, by whom its moments are measured out and its destinies fixed; if all be under the dominion of a dark, stern fate that knows and feels nothing, or of a blind chance that orders nothing; if we are tossed and driven upon a waste and melancholy ocean, which at last engulfs our frail bark in its dull, unconscious surge, with no sun or star or eternal eye looking down upon our struggles and our extinction — then, oh how dreary, how unrelieved the picture of utter hopelessness and emptiness, making it good for us that we had never been born! The eternity of a living God was David's consolation, and that of all the fathers of Israel. It is not less ours; and from this high tower we look down with composure on all the waves of trouble, and feel that so long as we are not "without God" we can never be "without hope in the world." 2. But we have also, for our consolation, the knowledge of God's covenant love. David prays. The mutable and perishable addresses the Immutable and the Imperishable. He rests on the basis of a covenant. He is dealing with a God who has come near, who has His tabernacle with men, who is pacified towards them for their sins, who has compassion upon their sorrows and their death, and has delivered them from going down to the pit, having found a ransom. This is the inspiration of David's prayer. His confession is not the melancholy utterance of nature's despondency, which gives up all for lost. It is only the voice of pious humility, which renounces all creature trust, that it may recover all in God. We see more clearly than did David how God, the eternal Justice, is become the dying sinner's friend and portion; how the greatness of His attributes harmonised in Christ, becomes the measure of the greatness of our deliverance; how, united to Him, our life is no more the shadow, but our death, and that which marks our true nature is not the evanescent, but the abiding and the eternal. "Because I live, ye shall live also." Oh! be it ours to lay hold of this covenant of which Jesus is the Mediator; and then, in unison with the eternal God, we may defy death to leave on us the print of its corrupting finger, and to involve our existence in one permanent shadow, for He whose life is the light of men shall swallow up our death in victory, and neither things present nor things to come shall part us from His covenant love. III. I now come, in the third and last place, to mention some lessons of EXHORTATION arising out of our mortality and decay. 1. The first lesson of exhortation is to diligence in God's work. David does not reason, as some do, "What can shadows like us accomplish in building up the temple of God?" This is an unworthy and an un-Christian despondency. As David served his generation, in spite of his keen perception of the evaneseance of human life in general, so should we. The Church of God has been brought to its present state of advancement by such shadows. Each generation has helped it forward, though by small degrees; and as the coral insects build the islands of the Pacific Ocean, so have these small and insignificant labourers of the human family, whose "foundation is in the dust and who are crushed before the moth," reared up the walls of Jerusalem, and given it its present strength and beauty in the eyes of all nations. Let us repel the idea that our life is of little worth and value in relation to the advancement of the kingdom of God. The treasure may be in earthen vessels, but the excellency of the power is all the more seen to be Divine. Life is ours as death is theirs; and so long as we are in the world let us labour like our blessed and Divine Lord to be the light of the world. 2. Our second lesson of exhortation is to acquiesce in God's appointments. David at this time felt himself on the edge of the grave, and was willing to hand over to Solomon the prosecution of the work on which his heart had so long been set. He felt that it belonged to God to choose His own instruments, and from a rapidly vanishing race to select such individuals for His work as to Him seemed best. We may apply this lesson in the way of teaching us to be willing to depart and leave the work of God to others, whenever He shall so ordain. But we may also apply it in another way, so as to teach us to be willing to remain, and do the work of God which has fallen into our hands, though others are withdrawn. 3. Our third lesson of exhortation is to prepare for our own departure. We must be strangely constituted if the removal of others awakens in us no foreboding of our own end. Are we, then, prepared? Preparation is of two kinds. The saint is prepared when he is doing with his might whatsoever his hand findeth to do; when he is steadfast and immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord; when his eye is constantly directed towards the Cross that so he may wash away the stains of daily sin, and not less towards the throne that he may receive his daily instructions from his unseen Lord, and run in the way of His commandments with enlarged heart. But there is also, the preparation of the sinner, and this must begin at an earlier starting-point. Years have not repealed the law, "Ye must be born again"; nor has the multitude of feet smoothed an entrance into the Zion of God. (John Cairns.) Parallel Verses KJV: For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were all our fathers: our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding. |
    |