"Jacob left Beersheba and set out for Haran. When he
reached a certain place, he stopped for the night because the sun had set.
Taking one of the stones there, he put it under his head and lay down to
sleep." Genesis 28:10-11
None but those who have been in Palestine, can understand
or appreciate the beauty and grandeur of an eastern sunset. The tamest of
its landscapes is ennobled and transfigured with the magical light of
'Eventide.'
While many such scenes may occur to the recollection,
there is pre-eminently one which, owing to its being seen from so many
different points, leaves on the mental vision an ineffaceable impression. I
refer to the varied tints on the mountain wall of Moab, when its dull rocks
are transmuted by 'the last fires of day' into a delicate mass of purple,
amethyst, and gold. These remarkable mountains of the Land of Promise would
in all likelihood now meet the eye of Jacob. From the upland territory,
along which he hastened, this great trans-Jordanic "bastion" is specially
conspicuous. He would watch the melting hues until, one by one, they had
died away, and left nothing but the cold grey mass behind. Not an inapt
picture of his own inner experience at the moment; when what had given to
life its best morning brightness had faded from his sight. "The sun had
set!"
And if a Palestine sunset is gorgeous, equally so, also,
we may add, is its nightly sky. No wonder the Israelites loved to travel to
their great annual celebration when the luster of moon and stars irradiated
their path (Isa. 30:29), the pensive hour of thought doubtless adding
intensity to their pious enthusiasm. Possibly these brilliant galaxies spoke
to Jacob as they could speak to none other. Fugitive as he was, he could not
be unconscious of the fact that he had been served heir to the covenant
promise. Could he fail to think of those evenings of his boyhood, at
Kirjath-Arba, when his aged grandfather had led him forth by the hand, and
pointing him upwards to the myriad lights gemming the skies, told him how
the God he served had made them the silent prophets and evangelists of the
future. "Look now toward heaven, and count the stars, if you be able to
number them. And he said unto him, So shall your seed be" (Gen. 15:5).
Nor is what we have now said regarding those hours of
night, when "echo slumbers," to be relegated to the domain of mere
sentiment. It is the season which brings God and spiritual things
specially near the soul. The garish light of day is shut out. The din of
the world's traffic and busy industry is hushed. Night is a great temple, in
whose courts the Omniscient Presence is specially felt and realized.
"It is a season for the quiet thought,
And the still reckoning with yourself.
The night gives back the spirits of the dead,
And the heart, calling its affections up,
Counts its wasted ingots. Life stands still,
And settles like a fountain; and the eye
Sees clearly through its depths, and notes all
That stirred its troubled waters."
It was "by night" Eliphaz was startled from his couch
with the Divine appearance and the Divine voice. Night was the season when
the King of Judah rose to his highest inspiration. "I meditate on You in the
night watches," has been the utterance of many a devout spirit, since the
Great Minstrel sang "The heavens are telling." When Jacob, twenty years
later, wrestled with the covenant angel at Jabbok, it was at night. The
wrestling continued until morning dawn, when it ceased as if the special
season for Divine communication was then over--"Let me go," said the
mysterious Personage, "for the day breaks."
May it not have been so with the patriarch now. The
natural darkness was preparing his soul the better for the disclosure of
inner light. It was the outer portico which conducted him into 'the Most
Holy Place,' the haunt of ministering Seraphim. Under the gleam of these
celestial altar lights, the sense of the Divine nearness and presence comes
over him, and before he left that spot he would be able to add his joyful
experience, "I remembered Your name, O Lord, in the night" (Ps. 119:55).
All this, however, has a higher and truer spiritual
acceptation. No pilgrim is without his night season. There are
moments in every life when, in a figurative sense of the words, "The sun has
set."
Such a 'setting' is that, when suddenly summoned to a bed
of pain and sickness, when "wearisome nights are appointed." The world, that
was so lately clothed with light as with a garment, puts on its sackcloth
attire, and the sufferer is made familiar only with the dim lamp, the
restrained footfall, the whisper with bated breath.
Such a sunset is that, when some treasured orb in the
domestic skies is quenched; when, through the long, dreary night-watches,
sleep is banished, and the pulses throb like the heaving of the ocean which
cannot rest. Nothing seems to fall on the ear but the dirge over buried
love, and a later cry of the patriarch of Bethel is wrung from the broken
heart, "I AM bereaved!"
But with many, how often are these, and such like
seasons, made the foretastes of the heavenly dream; the introduction to
Divine realities before unthought of. It is affliction, in some one of its
diversified forms, which has dictated or repeated the utterance of the
Beloved disciple in his island prison--"I saw a door opened in heaven, and I
heard a voice saying unto me, Come up here!" (Rev. 4:1). The discipline and
strengthening of the moral nature cannot be effected amid the distractions
and fascinations of broad day; but when the sun of earthly prosperity goes
down, in the realized loneliness and desolation which steals over the soul,
out come the clustering stars of Divine promise. These require to have the
blaze of light withdrawn, in order that they may be revealed to the
spiritual eye. The saying becomes true, "God, our Maker, gives songs in
the night." The sorrowing come forth comforted, the weak strengthened,
the doubting confirmed--yes, and often the gloomy and the selfish are
transfigured into the noble, and manly, and sympathetic. "By the sadness of
the countenance, the heart is made better."
With some who read these pages it may be more than the
shades which follow sunset--the gloom of one solitary watch. It may be, as
with Jacob, a "tarrying all night." The infinity of darkness may seem
gathering and deepening around you, every star swept from your stormy skies.
Night-watch succeeds night-watch, but no response of the warder is heard
with tidings of the dawn.
TRUST GOD IN THE DARK. This is the highest effort and
triumph of faith. Whether it be the darkness engendered by bodily affliction
or by inward trouble--physical, intellectual, or spiritual; your "tarrying
time," as much as "the certain place," of which we have spoken, is of His
appointing. Jesus tarried in distant Perea two days after getting the
urgent message from the disconsolate sisters at Bethany. How they marveled
(perhaps murmured) at the apparently strange, unusual indifference with
which the tidings sent by them were received; instead of hastening, as they
expected, up the Jericho valley to emancipate them at once from their
anguish. When He did come, His 'tarrying' elicited the reproachful
remonstrance--"If You had been here, our brother had not died!" How did that
Lord of life and love, however, subsequently vindicate the wisdom and
righteousness of His mysterious delay? But for that 'tarrying,' what lessons
would have been lost to the family of Bethany--to His own disciples at the
approach of the great crisis-hour; to believers in the Apostolic age--to the
Church until the end of time. His gentle rebuke to the outspoken child of
sorrow is what He whispers in the ear of many still, who are ready in His
tarrying seasons to accuse the love and rectitude of His dealings--"Did I
not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?" (John
11--40).
To not a few, who for the present are thus dwelling on
the night-watches of Bethel, instead of the sunny memories of Hebron and
Beersheba, the 'needs be' may yet be made apparent even here. At all events,
be assured, these gloomy experiences during the exile of earth, are designed
only to lead you the more to center your desires and thoughts on "The Better
Country"--to endear to you the more the home and harbor of the skies.
"Commit everything you do to the Lord. Trust him, and he will help you. He
will make your innocence as clear as the dawn, and the justice of your cause
will shine like the noonday sun." Psalm 37:5-6.
"The way is dark, my Father! Cloud on cloud
Is gathering thickly over my head, and loud
The thunders roar above me. See, I stand
Like one bewildered! Father, take my hand.
"The day goes fast, my Father! and the night
Is drawing darkly down. My faithless sight
Sees ghostly visions; fears, a spectral band,
Encompass me. O Father! take my hand.
"The way is long, my Father! and my soul
Longs for the rest and quiet of the home,
While yet I journey through this weary land,
Keep me from wandering. Father, take my hand."
There is a gracious answer--
"The way is dark, my child! but leads to light,
I would not always have you walk by sight;
My dealings now you can not understand,
I meant it so, but I will take your hand.
"The way is long, my child! but it shall be
Not one step longer than is best for thee;
And you shall know, at last, when you shall stand
Safe at the goal, how I did take your hand."
Youth has often its own exceptional experiences of sunset
and night. Not to speak of others, one phase of that darkness, often too
among the noblest and most ingenuous minds, is that to which I have already
incidentally alluded--the darkness and convulsion of intellectual doubt, an
experience so well described by the poet, with Bethel for the foreground and
imagery--
"I falter where I firmly trod;
And falling with my weight of cares
Upon the world's great altar stairs
That slope through darkness up to God:
"I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,
And gather dust and chaff, and call
To what I feel is Lord of all,
And faintly trust the larger hope."--"In Memorium."
Religion hitherto has been accepted on trust. But the
young explorer, waking up to the consciousness of fresh intellectual
convictions and responsibilities, begins to test for himself the strength of
the old foundations. Not infrequently, also, we must add, in the traffic
with baser minds, disquieting misgivings are at times unhappily insinuated;
the stable is made to seem insecure, the strong links of the golden chain
seem to pulverize into dust, the vessel of faith is adrift from its
moorings. Perhaps worse than all, in the sudden revulsion of family
influences, the crushing secret of these devil-born doubts has to be borne
alone and unshared, the hand of home sympathy and loving authority and
counsel has relaxed its grasp. The future is blank--there is truly a
"tarrying all night, for the sun is set!"
What is the panacea (one panacea at least), in
ministering to a mind diseased like this? It is prayer to God to enlighten
the eyes of your understanding. "Enlighten my eyes lest I sleep the sleep of
death" (Ps. 13:3). I repeat, that very agony of doubt is not infrequently
part of a tribulation through which many of God's best and truest children
have to pass--"walking in darkness and seeing no light." Their cry of
despondency is "Watchman, how much longer until morning? When will the night
be over?" The watchman replies, "Morning is coming, but night will soon
follow." (Isa. 21:11, 12).
Be assured the utterance of simple faith--"Lord, I
believe, help my unbelief;" "Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things
out of Your law," will not be uttered in vain. "Unto the upright there
arises light in the darkness." Who is among you that fears the Lord, that
obeys the voice of His servant, that walks in darkness and has no light? let
him trust in the name of the Lord, and stay upon his God" (Ps. 112:4; Is.
50:10). "There is, indeed," says Bishop Ellicott, an able scholar and
divine, "a quick and living truth in every sentence of the blessed Gospel,
and they who read with a loving and reverential spirit shall find it in its
fullest measures. Oh! pray fervently against the first motions of a spirit
of doubt and questioning. By those prayers which you learned at a mother's
knee, by that holy history which perchance you first heard from a mother's
lips, give not up the first childlike faith of earlier, and it may be purer
days--that simple heroic faith which such men as Niebuhr and Neander knew
how to appreciate and to glorify, even while they felt its fullest measures
could never be their own. Remember that when faith grows cold, love soon
passes away, and hope soon follows it. And oh! believe me, that the
world cannot exhibit a spectacle more utterly mournful, more full of deepest
melancholy, than a young yet doubting, a fresh yet unloving, an eager yet
hopeless and forsaken heart."
Go then, pray on, trust on, believe on, hope on, and "the
still, small voice" will in due time come--after the thunder, and the
earthquake, and the hurricane have spent themselves. The sun is only below
the horizon. "O my God! Now I am deeply discouraged, but I will remember
your kindness— from Mount Hermon, the source of the Jordan, from the land of
Mount Mizar. I hear the tumult of the raging seas as your waves and surging
tides sweep over me. Through each day the Lord pours his unfailing love upon
me, and through each night I sing his songs, praying to God who gives me
life." Psalm 42:6-8
And then, in the midst of these night-watches and night
experiences, whether in the case of youth, or manhood, or old age; when we
think of Jacob--when we think of ourselves--can we fail to make the
application which some of the early writers give to this passage, as
suggestive of One, who Himself, (and that for no sin of His own) left His
Father's house "a Pilgrim," and all solitary and alone traversed the desert
of earth! How often did He, also, in a literal sense, stretch His weary
frame under the open canopy of heaven, with no other covering but His cloak,
to protect Him from the dews of night. How often had He the stone of
Palestine, or the coil of rope, on which to rest His head; and at last a
harder pillow even than these! In our nights of darkness and sorrow, well
may we recall the Divine experience of this Prince of sufferers; the sun
set, but no sanctity of stars to relieve the gloom--"My God! My God! why
have You forsaken Me? I have trodden the winepress alone." Prayer was
His resort in the very climax of His woe--"Father!" "O My Father!"
"Being in an agony, He prayed the more earnestly." It turned His night
season into a time of invigoration and strength. So also will it be in the
experience of His waiting people. "The Lord is near unto all who call upon
Him"--"A very present help in trouble." In every Gethsemane of life, an
angel will be sent from heaven to strengthen. It is in "the fourth watch,"
when the darkness is often deepest, that He Himself, mightier than any
angel, still comes "walking on the sea." It is when "the sun has set" on the
mountains of Bethel, that, as we shall presently find--
"The sky is as a temple arch;
The blue and wavy air
Is glorious with the spirit-march
Of messengers of prayer."