Exegetical and Hermeneutical Commentary of Mark 8:18
Having eyes, see ye not? and having ears, hear ye not? and do ye not remember?
18. Having eyes, see ye not? andhaving ears, hear ye not?See on Mt13:13.
and do ye not remember?
Fuente: Jamieson, Fausset and Brown’s Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible
Having eyes, see ye not?…. Meaning perhaps both the eyes of their bodies, and of their understandings: they had bodily eyes, and with them saw the miracles he wrought, and yet took little notice of them; and the eyes of their understandings were enlightened by Christ, and yet saw things but very darkly:
and having ears, hear ye not? They had their natural hearing, and yet made but little use of it; and did not so diligently attend to the sound of Christ’s words: and though they had spiritual ears given them to hear, yet were very dull of, understanding, and taking in things:
and do ye not remember? the interpretation of parables formerly given, and the miracles of the loaves lately wrought.
Fuente: John Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible
1) ”Having eyes, see ye not?” (ophthalmous echontes ou blepete) “All of you have eyes, do you not see?” With them, as He repeated what was said concerning the multitude on the day of the parables, Mar 4:12; Isa 6:9-10.
2) ”And having ears, hear ye not?” (kai ota echontes ouk akouete) ”And all of you have ears, do you not hear?” with them. Are you spiritually both blind and deaf, with no more natural understanding than an heathen unregenerate, or an idol god? 1Co 2:14; Psa 115:5-6; Psa 115:8.
3) “And do ye not remember?” (kai ou mnemoneuete) “And do you all not remember or recall?” is your understanding darkened, like that of a lost person? Eph 1:17-18; Eph 4:17-18; 2Co 4:3-4
Fuente: Garner-Howes Baptist Commentary
Mar 8:18. And do ye not remember? Continue this on with what follows, and it seems to connect more properly. Do ye not remember, when I broke the five loaves, how many baskets? &c. As in Mat 16:9. See Bowyer’s Conjectures on Mark.
Fuente: Commentary on the Holy Bible by Thomas Coke
Seeing Differences
Mar 8:18
Our Saviour would have us use all our faculties. Christianity never forbids a man looking and listening and considering and concluding for himself. The great complaint which Jesus Christ made when he was upon the earth was that men would not look, would not hear, would not consider, would not sit down and think out for themselves great questions. They were traditionalists, they were believers in legends, and tales, and glosses, and ceremonies; but they would not use their faculties. Jesus Christ says, “Having ears, hear ye not?” you must hear something: what is it you hear? noise, tumult, uproar? but you ought to hear more, you ought to hear music, whispering voices, minor tones, winds that come down as if by stealth from heaven, fragrance-laden, and attuned to the very symphonies of the sky. Having eyes, what do you see? surfaces, appearances? What do you see in the city? a network of thoroughfares, a panorama of street-life, a great confusion of traffic? That is not the city. The city is within all that; it is in the home life, in the beneficence, in the purpose, in the education, in the discipline of the citizens; the citizens are the city. “Having eyes, see ye not?” You see broad differences; but a beast could almost tell the difference between night and day. Things are not classified into right hand and left hand, and are not thus roughly distributed; there are fine distinctions, gradual shadings, colours that run into one another and run out of one another again, making strange alternations of expression and suggestion and symbol: why do ye not see the fine lines, the microscopic lines? it is there that the difference is to be really found. When difference comes to be a mere vulgarity, then anybody can be trusted with it; but as to critical difference, the soul needs to be trained, taught, inspired. The natural man receiveth not the things that are of God, for they are spiritually discerned. The naked eye is assisted by the lenses of inspired reason and inspired faith. So our Saviour would have us use every faculty we have: be up and stirring, ask questions, knock at doors, insist upon answers, show yourselves to be enthusiastic students, and God will give you some reply. He never answers indifference; he pays no heed to patronage; he is deaf to mere eulogium: but how he listens to the sighing of the broken heart, and to the prayer of him that is ill at ease! We are face to face, therefore, with a teacher who means to prosecute his inquiries to the end. Men do injustice to Jesus Christ if they suppose that he never wants them to ask any questions or raise any difficulties or state any doubts: he says, Empty your heart, be your own very self; if you are blaspheming, out with it; if you are doubting, speak your doubt; if you are wondering, tell like a little child what your wonder is. Thus he would deal frankly with men and lovingly; he would handle them like a creator, he would bless them like a saviour. Yet what a false impression exists regarding him! To go to church is now considered by some people to be a species of weakness. To read the New Testament is considered to be a kind of attention to ancient literature that no man of ample and complete scholarship would like to neglect. It should be otherwise, never man spake like this Man. We should hasten to where he teaches as hungering men would rush to bread, and thirsting men would speed and almost fly to water, to fountains, and wells in the desert. Let us commune with him awhile; if he will touch us we shall feel the glow in our hearts.
We are called to sight, to discernment, to careful critical readings of all things; so the Saviour would challenge us, and say to men who are hastening along the road, See ye not that there is an end as well as a beginning to things? Men do not see the end; they see the beginning, the frothing glass, the glittering gold, the immediate pleasure. Who sits down and counts costs and reckons up and says, The sum total of this is and then states the whole in plain figures? It would seem to be part of our policy to shut our eyes, and to butt at things with a deadly fatalism. Why do not men hold up their heads, and look, and perceive, and penetrate, and detain things until they have been analysed and examined and cross-examined, and made to bear frank and complete testimony? If your religion has come into your souls without cross-examination and practical test and severest handling, let me say plainly that you have no true religion; you are simply giving house-room to a mocking and burdensome superstition. Look at the end; mysteries will then be solved, perplexities will then be disentangled, embarrassments will be smoothed down, and all things that have troubled even the conscience will be made to stand up in simplicity and be invested with self-vindication. To a little fellow-traveller I once said, “We may save a great deal of this journey by taking this cross-lane,” a little path which lay like a diagonal across the field, “shall we go?” He was a little philosopher; said he, “I always find ” it was a short “always,” but it was the only always he had “that there is something at the other end, a wall to climb over, or a ditch to leap over, or something very hard to do at the other end;” so he preferred taking the longer way round. I wish we could lay that more to heart. There are easy roads, tempting paths, and we say, Why not thus, and so, and be home almost at once? And, lo, at the other end we find we are in a blind alley, or there is a pit, or a ditch, or a high hedge, over which to leap or through which to force our perilous way. If men would look at the end as well as at the beginning they would be saved from a good deal of rash adventure.
See ye not that in the structure and economy of nature one thing bears upon another, that there is nothing alone, isolated, by itself, but that everything is part of something else; and that therefore we stand within a system of Providence? We do not always see how things are to connect themselves one with the other. Occasionally we have said, This is a solitary instance, and must be regarded as such, and must be wholly neglected with regard to all possible issues. Yet in seven years’ time that very solitary thing has come up and said, You will need me now: I have been waiting all this time; this is your opportunity; if I were not here you could not complete the case; you neglected me once, but to-day I am a necessity. We cannot escape the idea that there is a Providence. We may write it with a little p or a large P; we may call it Force, or Fate, or Necessity, or Mystery: but there it is, an invisible Hand that puts things together, that stretches itself out beyond common lines to bring back things that have been ejected. There is a shaping hand. Each man may see it in his own life. Do not throw your experience away. It would be like murdering your best friend; nay, it would be a species of suicide. What is a man but his experience? What is to-day but the gathered past, the culmination of the centuries that are gone? Who made you, directed you, nursed you? Who was kinder than mother, gentler than nearest friend? Who opened the gate when you had lost the key? Who saved you in the peril, the danger, the household extremity, when there was no light and when no voice could be heard but your own, and that voice was lifted up not in thanksgiving but in agony and distress? Some of us could not go back from this testimony. If we did we should write upon our hearts Liar, Coward, Ingrate, unfit for the society of the beasts that perish. We have had strange lives; they have been wondrously handled and directed; and we are here to say that many things that we thought were hard and cruel, and at the time intolerable, were amongst the richest of our treasures, the most sacred of our possessions and memories. But Providence means two things; it does not stand by itself; if it may be represented as having two hands it lays one hand upon Creation and the other hand upon Redemption. Only a Creator could be a true Father in all this ministry of Providence. The one necessitates the other. Only he who created the world can guide it. We may have to take it back to him again and again that he may pay attention to it, because we have spoiled part of its mechanism. He alone knows all its intricacy, all its economy, and he alone can guide it and bring it to its proper issues. If God care for one blade of grass, he must redeem the world. This is the sublimity of his love; it does not end upon little things; it begins upon them to show that it means still greater sacrifice. If God built one rosebud he built the heavens; and if he made man he meant to save him: and it will go hard if Omnipotence be worsted. I know not what will happen; no man may make conjecture into a dogma, and set up his own speculations as authoritative conclusions; but it will go hard if God do not win at the last. No man can tell when the last is. God never gives up, until he finds the case utterly hopeless. Yet has he given to man the power of electing at last to be lost. What controversies God and man will have we cannot tell, but man has the dread power of telling God to his face that he has elected to be damned.
See ye not that there is a great difference in the functions, the gifts, and powers of men? Who made all this difference? It cannot be self-arranged. Self-arrangement of this kind would be scouted in all things material: why should it be admitted in things that are immaterial, intellectual, spiritual, and that lie close upon the metaphysic line that is not far from the existence of God himself? Let us say that every building in the town elected its own shape. Not a child that can go to school but would smile at the foolish idea. Let us propose to the child that the pillar said it would be a pillar, and the window a window, and the lamp a lamp, and the beam a beam, and that thus it was all settled, see how the little one chuckles his unbelief, and looks upon you as a species of intellectual fool. Am I then to look upon society and say Painter, poet, farmer, merchant, preacher, you arranged all this among yourselves? Nothing of the kind. If men are going along the right line of development they are carrying out a divine economy. The poet never could be anything but a poet. The adventurer never could be anything but an adventurer. You cannot keep an explorer at home; you may attire him in the clothes of civilisation, and set him down by your fireside with the very nicest book that has lately been issued from the press, and you may whisper to one another that you think he is now likely to remain at home. He will never remain at home. The spirit of travel is in him. He would crush his destiny if he remained at home longer than to please us for a moment or two. He must be off, child of the wind, child of the sea, he is at home in the wilderness, in the black continent, in the far-away places of the earth; otherwise he is not at home. All this difference makes society possible. If we were all alike we could not have society It is because we differ that we can cohere; it is because we are nor alike that we can hold companionship one with the other. This makes society tolerable. Without it society would be intolerable, because it would be monotonous, flat, blank; no man would have any idea different from any other man, and all speech would be useless. And this makes society progressive. We live by friction, we live by attrition; it is because we have conflict, controversy, contention, that we advance in our highest education and complete our spiritual manhood under the inspiration and guidance of divine providence. If men do not see these things, these things will become to them mysteries, elaborate confusions, stunning and stupefying bewilderments. Keep your eye open and watch, and see how cunningly he works who builds the stars and paints the flowers. He doeth all things well; give him time; pray to him with your patience; praise him with your forbearance; show your confidence in him by your long-suffering, by the end he elects to be judged.
See ye not that all this wondrous economy of nature and life is marked by a very marvellous system of compensation? so that the little may be great, and the great may be little; he that hath much may have nothing over, and he that hath little may have nothing under, and the very frailest life known to us has its own palace, and its own crown, and its own sceptre, and its own unique ability. What a study is here! Along this line men may meet with revelations every day. The microscope writes its own bible; the telescope unfolds its own revelation. There are some poor weak animals that in the daytime have an almost contemptible appearance, but they can see in the dark and you cannot; you must judge by the night as well as by the day. You cannot tell how very contemptible you look in the night-time when you are stumbling about and do not know where you are; and the creatures you laughed at in the hours of the daylight are looking at you and wondering how you dare venture out at all. There are creatures that have enormous strength, and there are other creatures that have no strength at all, but they have all but infinite cunning, and they do not fear your mightiness; they will make no noise or demonstration, and yet they will overturn you, and bring you to ruin. There is a power of cunning as well as a power of muscle. The whole scheme of nature is written over with the word Compensation. One bird wants to be an eagle, but the Lord says, You have got something the eagle would like to have. Some poor things look very feeble on land, but they become poetical symbols of grace when they move into the water. Is there a more ungainly figure than that of a swan trying to walk? It attracts universal attention; it is smiled at as a very grotesque thing: but the moment that same swan presses the waves poets come to write about it, and painters come to paint it, and people say, How exceedingly graceful! There are compensations all through and through nature. You, for example, are very poor: but look how cheerful you are! Your cheerfulness is worth who shall say what it is worth? What hope you have! How you sing in the night-time! How in the coldest winter day you come upon men like a cheerful fire! Is no consideration to be paid to that? You have no social standing; but look what health you have! what a digestion! what a monstrous digestion! Is that to be set down in cyphers? Is no account to be made of that? Reckon up your mercies. You are not tall; but how alert you are! You have no vigour in muscular fight; but what sagacity you have in counsel! Draw the balance well, be just to God. What bird shall fight the eagle? None. Yet there is a bird that shall drive the eagle mad; and the eagle cannot get at it. Which is the smallest bird? The hummingbird, and the hummingbird can kill the eagle. The eagle would strike a lion, but the hummingbird is so small that the eagle cannot get at it. Naturalists have told us that the hummingbird, dear little ruby throat, settles on the head of the eagle, and pecks out the feathers one by one; and the eagle flies away, mad with agony, screaming through the infinite arch; it is only a little hummingbird that is just taking the feathers out, and pecking away at the head all the time. “Fly away,” says the hummingbird, “I like this very much.” If the eagle could get at that hummingbird we know what would happen. Alas! that parable has more interpretations than one. It is your little trouble that bites you. You could fight a whole court of lawyers, but some little care lays hold of your head and takes such interest in you that sleep is an impossibility; and a man dies for want of sleep. The conies are a feeble folk, but they make their houses in the rock. Spiders have been found, saith the proverb, in kings’ houses. Other animals that are very weak in themselves go forth in bands, all together, then how mighty they become! There is a locust that has defied an army of soldiers, a beetle that has beaten a standing army, that has gone forth night and day and eaten up all the crops; and soldiers have had swords and sabres and spears and guns, and none can tell how many other weapons of war, and the beetle has still gone on eating. It is a curious system in which we live. It never made itself. Is there anything more melancholy than that a man should go through the world blind? “Having eyes, see ye not? ” that a man should go through a whole day’s history and have nothing to write about at night? that a man should walk through the city, and have seen nothing of poverty, necessity, sorrow, pain? This is to lose the world; this is to lose all that is best in life.
One great question may sum up the whole: See ye not a difference, large and vital, between Christ and every other teacher? Compare them. Jesus Christ is always willing to be compared, to have a true opinion formed, to have himself tested by the spirit which he inculcates, and the conduct which he inspires. What has done for the world what Christianity has done? Let us be just. We have seen what was done for Terra del Fuego by Thomas Bridges; we have seen how a place which British ships of war were forbidden to touch has become a civilised and Christian garden through the ministry of Christ. Have you seen a remarkable book called “Metlakahtla,” edited by Henry S. Welcome? No man can read that book without becoming a Christian. Everything may be risked upon that one testimony. The Metlakahtlans are described in that book as amongst the most ferocious and murderous tribes on the North Pacific coast men of intellectual capacity though in barbarism; men civilised enough to be able to make very cunning workmanship in bracelets and jewellery; men philosophical enough to find that fire may be produced by friction; men civilised enough to get mad by drinking rum. One man, William Duncan, had it laid upon his heart that he would like to teach the people Christianity. His thought was laughed at and scorned. The people who were approaching the frontier had to build strong fortifications, and to watch them night and day lest these ferocious and murderous people should break through and work havoc and ruin in so-called civilised life. William Duncan still had his dream of evangelisation. He enlisted the services of one who could initiate him into the mysteries of the language of Metlakahtla. He found it a picturesque language, full of metaphorical colour and image and force; he studied it, made a phonetic representation of it for there was no written language and acquainted himself so far with it as to be able to tell a little plain simple tale. He told the people he wished to tell them about the white man’s God, if they would allow him. He went a step at a time, cautiously, little by little; and without professing now to give the detail of the wonderful volume, the end was a garden of the Lord, every man subdued; within thirty years the whole place transformed, transfigured. And if certain metaphysical Christians had not gone there the simplicity of the Metlakahtlans would have remained uncorrupted. It is when your unbalanced theologian or mere metaphysician wants to vex the human mind with distinctions that are not vital that great Christian labour is brought to an unhappy end. But there stands the fact. The Metlakahtlans were found in this condition; a man goes amongst them with nothing but a warm heart and a clear conception of Christ’s work, and the end is civilisation, education, an interest in spiritual things, a falling down before the Cross of Christ, and an acceptance of Christ as the God and King and Saviour of men. Who did it? What was his name? Buddha? No. Mahomet? No. What was his name? “Jesus Christ the Son of God.” He never loses his power. To-day he will make the wilderness to blossom as the rose. Why not tell the world this, and turn its wildernesses into smiling fruit-fields?
Fuente: The People’s Bible by Joseph Parker
18 Having eyes, see ye not? and having ears, hear ye not? and do ye not remember?
Ver. 18. Do ye mot remember ] All is lost that is not well laid up in this pot of manna, the sanctified memory, 1Co 15:2 .
Fuente: John Trapp’s Complete Commentary (Old and New Testaments)
Mar 8:18 repeats in reference to the Twelve the hard saying uttered concerning the multitude on the day of the parables (Mar 4:12 ). In Mar 8:19-20 Jesus puts the Twelve through their catechism in reference to the recent feedings, and then in Mar 8:21 (according to reading in [69] ) asks in the tone of a disappointed Master: How do you not understand? If we may emphasise the imperfect tense of , He said this over and over again, half speaking to them, half to Himself; another of Mk.’s realistic features. All this shows how much the Twelve needed special instruction, and it is obviously Mk.’s aim to make this prominent. Desire for leisure to attend to their instruction is in his narrative the key to the excursions in the direction of Tyre and Sidon and to Caesarea Philippi.
[69] Codex Vaticanus (sc. iv.), published in photographic facsimile in 1889 under the care of the Abbate Cozza-Luzi.
Fuente: The Expositors Greek Testament by Robertson
Mark
THE PATIENT TEACHER, AND THE SLOW SCHOLARS
THE RELIGIOUS USES OF MEMORY
Mar 8:18
The disciples had misunderstood our Lord’s warning ‘against the leaven of the Pharisees,’ which they supposed to have been occasioned by their neglect to bring with them bread. Their blunder was like many others which they committed, but it seems to have singularly moved our Lord, who was usually so patient with His slow scholars. The swift rain of questions, like bullets rattling against a cuirass, of which my text is one, shows how much He was moved, if not to impatience or anger, at least to wonder.
But what I wish particularly to notice is that He traces the disciples’ slowness of perception and distrust mainly to forgetfulness. There was a special reason for that, of course, in that the two miracles of the feeding the multitude, one of which had just before occurred, ought to have delivered them from any uneasiness, and to have led them to apprehend His higher meaning.
But there is a wider reason for the collocation of questions than this. There is no better armour against distrust, nor any surer purge of our spiritual sight, than religious remembrance. So my text falls in with what I hope are, or at any rate should be, thoughts which are busy in many of our hearts now. Every Sunday is the last Sunday of a year. But we are influenced by the calendar, even though there is nothing in reality to correspond with the apparent break, and though time runs on in a continuous course. I would fain say a word or two now which may fit in with thoughts that are wholesome for us always, but, I suppose, come with most force to most of us at such a date as this. And, if you will let me, I will put my observations in the form of exhortations.
I. First of all, then, remember and be thankful.
Chiefest of these is the power of memory, when applied to our own past lives, to bring out, more clearly than was possible while that past was being lived, the perception of the ever-present care and working of our Father, God. It is hard to recognise Him in the bustle and hurry of our daily lives, and the meaning of each event can only be seen when it is seen in its relation to the rest of a life. Just as a landscape, which we may look at without the smallest perception of its beauty, becomes another thing when the genius of a painter puts it on canvas, and its symmetry and proportion become more manifest, and an ethereal clearness broods over it, and its colours are seen to be deeper than our eyes had discerned, so the common events of life, trivial and insignificant while they are passing, become, when painted on the canvas of memory, nobler and greater, and we understand them more completely than we can do whilst we are living in them.
We need to be at the goal in order to judge of the road. The parts are only explicable when we see the whole. The full interpretation of to-day is reserved for eternity. But, by combining and massing and presenting the consequences of the apparently insignificant and isolated events of the past, memory helps us to a clearer perception of God, and a better understanding of our own lives, On the mountain-summit a man can look down all along the valley by which he has wearily plodded, and understand the meaning of the divergences in the road, and the rough places do not look quite so rough when their proportion to the whole is a little more clearly in his view.
Only, brethren, if we are wisely to exercise remembrance, and to discover God in the lives which, whilst they are passing, had little perception of Him, we must take into account what the meaning of all life is-that is, to make men of us after the pattern of His will.
‘Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way.’
So I venture to say that thankful remembrance should exclude no single incident, however bitter, however painful, of any life. There is a remembrance of vanished hands, of voices for ever stilled, which is altogether wrong and weakening. There is a regret, a vain regret which comes with memory for some of us, that interferes with thankfulness.
But it is possible-and, if we understand that the meaning of all is to make us Godlike, it is not hard-to remember vanished joys, and to confer upon them by remembrance a kind of gentle immortality. And, thus remembered, they are ennobled; for all the gross material body of them, as it were, is got rid of, and only the fine spirit is left. The roses bloom, and over bloom, and drop, but a poignant perfume is distilled from the fallen petals. The departed are greatened by distance; when they are gone we recognise the ‘angels’ that we ‘entertained unawares’: and that recognition is no illusion, but it is the disclosure of their real character, to which they were sometimes untrue, and we were often blind. Therefore I say, ‘Thou shalt remember all the way by which the Lord thy God hath led thee,’ and in the thankfulness include departed joys, vanished hands, present sorrows, the rough places as well as the smooth, the crooked things as well as the straight.
II. Secondly, let me say, remember and repent.
We look back upon a past, of which God gave us the warp and we had to put in the woof. The warp is all bright and pure. The threads that have crossed it from our shuttles are many of them very dark, and all of them stained in some part. So, dear brethren, let us take the year that has gone, and spread them out by the agency of this servant of the court, Memory, before the supreme judge, Conscience.
Let us remember that we may be warned and directed. We shall understand the true moral character of our actions a great deal better when we look back upon them calmly, and when all the rush of temptation and the reducing whispers of our own weak wills are silenced. There is nothing more terrible, in one aspect, there is nothing more salutary and blessed in another, than the difference between the front and the back view of any temptation to which we yield-all radiant and beautiful on the hither side, and when we get past it and look back at it, all hideous. Like some of those painted canvases upon the theatre-stage: seen from this side, with the delusive brilliancy of the footlights thrown upon them, they look beautiful works of art; seen at the back, dirty and cobwebbed canvas, all splashes and spots and uglinesses. Let us be thankful if memory can show us the reverse side of the temptations that on the near side were so seductive.
It is when you see your life in retrospect that you understand the significance of the single deeds in it. We are so apt to isolate our actions that we are startled-and it is a wholesome shock-when we see how, without knowing it, we have dropped into a habit. When each temptation comes, as the moments are passing, we say, ‘Oh, just this once, just this once.’ And the ‘ onces’ come nearer and nearer together; and what seem to be distinctly separated points, coalesce into a line; and the acts that we thought isolated we find out to our horror-our wholesome horror-have become a chain that binds and holds us. Look back over the year, and drag its events to the bar of Conscience, and I shall be surprised if you do not discover that you have fallen into wrong habits that you never dreamed had dominion over you. So, I say, remember and repent.
Brethren, I do not wish to exaggerate, I do not wish to urge upon you one-sided views of your character or conduct. I give all credit to many excellences, many acts of sacrifice, many acts of service; and yet I say that the main reason why any of us have a good opinion of ourselves is because we have no knowledge of ourselves; and that the safest attitude for all of us, in looking back over what we have made of life, is, hands on mouths, and mouths in dust, and the cry coming from them, ‘Unclean! unclean!’ A little mud in a stream may not be perceptible when you take a wine-glassful of it and look at it, but if you saw a river-full or a lake-full you would soon discover the taint. Summon up the past year to the sessions of silent thought, and let the light of God’s will pour in upon it, and you will find how dark has been the flow of the river of your lives.
The best use which the memory can serve for us is that it should drive us closer to Jesus Christ, and make us cling more closely to Him. That past can be cancelled, these multitudinous sins can be forgiven. Memory should be one of the strongest strands in the cord that binds our helplessness to the all-forgiving and all-cleansing Christ.
III. Lastly, let me say, remember and hope.
Our thankful remembrance of a past which was filled and moulded by God’s perpetual presence and care ought to make us sure of a future which will in like manner be moulded. ‘Thou hast been my help’-if we can say that, then we may confidently pray, and be sure of the answer, ‘Leave me not nor forsake me, O God of my salvation.’ And if we feel, as memory teaches us to feel, that God has been working for us, and with us, we can say with another Psalmist: ‘Thy mercy, O Lord, endureth for ever. Forsake not the work of Thine own hands’; and we can rise to his confidence, ‘The Lord with perfect that which concerneth me.’
Our remembrance, even of our imperfections and our losses and our sorrows, may minister to our hope. For surely the life of every man on earth, but most eminently the life of a Christian man, is utterly unintelligible, a mockery and a delusion and an incredibility, if there be a God at all, unless it prophesies of a region in which imperfection will be ended, aspirations will be fulfilled, desires will be satisfied. We have so much, that unless we are to have a great deal more, we had better have had nothing. We have so much, that if there be a God at all, we must have a great deal more. The new moon, with a ragged edge, ‘even in its imperfection beautiful,’ is a prophet of the complete resplendent orb. ‘On earth the broken arc, in heaven the perfect round.’
Further, the memory of defeat may be the parent of the hope of victory. The stone Ebenezer, ‘Hitherto hath the Lord helped us,’ was set up to commemorate a victory that had been won on the very site where Israel, fighting the same foes, had once been beaten. There is no remembrance of failure so mistaken as that which takes the past failure as certain to be repeated in the future. Surely, though we have fallen seventy times seven-that is 490, is it not?-at the 491st attempt we may, and if we trust in God we shall, succeed.
So, brethren, let us set our faces to a new year with thankful remembrance of the God who has shaped the past, and will mould the future. Let us remember our failures, and learn wisdom and humility and trust in Christ from our sins. Let us set our ‘hope on God, and not forget the works of God, but keep His commandments.’
Fuente: Expositions Of Holy Scripture by Alexander MacLaren
Having eyes, &c. Quoted from Jer 5:21.
see. Greek blepo. App-133.
not. Greek. ou. App-105.
Fuente: Companion Bible Notes, Appendices and Graphics
see: Mar 4:12, Deu 29:4, Psa 69:23, Psa 115:5-8, Isa 6:9, Isa 6:10, Isa 42:18-20, Isa 44:18, Jer 5:21, Mat 13:14, Mat 13:15, Joh 12:40, Act 28:26, Act 28:27, Rom 11:8
do: 2Pe 1:12
Reciprocal: Jos 7:7 – to deliver Job 33:14 – perceiveth Isa 40:28 – thou not known Isa 42:19 – Who is blind Eze 12:2 – which Mat 13:13 – General Mat 13:51 – Have Mat 15:16 – General Mar 6:52 – they Mar 9:32 – were Mar 16:14 – and upbraided Luk 11:34 – light of Luk 24:25 – O fools Joh 14:5 – we know not 2Th 2:5 – Remember Heb 2:1 – we should Heb 5:11 – dull
Fuente: The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge
8
This verse means they did not use their faculties to arrive at just conclusions, even when they had visible facts on which to base their reasoning.