030. A Delicate Question

A Delicate Question

Gen_47:8 : ’93How old art thou?’94

The Egyptian capital was the focus of the world’92s wealth. In ships and barges there had been brought to it from India frankincense and cinnamon and ivory and diamonds; from the North, marble and iron; from Syria, purple and silk; from Arabia, some of the finest horses of the world, and from Greece some of the most brilliant chariots; and from all the earth, that which could best please the eye and charm the ear and gratify the taste. There were temples aflame with red sandstone entered by gateways that were guarded by pillars bewildering with hieroglyphics and garlanded with brazen serpents and adorned with winged creatures’97their eyes and beaks and pinions glittering with precious stones. There were marble columns blooming into white flower beds; there were stone pillars at the top bursting into the shape of the lotus when in full bloom. Along the avenues lined with sphinx and fane and obelisk, there were princes who came in gorgeously upholstered palanquins, carried by servants in scarlet, or elsewhere drawn by vehicles, the snow-white horses, golden-bitted and six abreast, dashing at full run. On floors of mosaic the glories of Pharaoh were spelled out in letters of porphyry and beryl and flame. There were ornaments twisted from the wood of tamarisk, embossed with silver breaking into foam. There were footstools made out of a single precious stone. There were beds fashioned out of crouched lion in bronze. There were chairs spotted with the sleek hides of leopards. There were sofas footed with the claws of wild beasts, and armed with the beaks of birds. As you stand on the level beach of the sea on a summer day, and look either way, there are miles of breakers, white with the ocean foam, dashing shoreward, so it seemed as if the sea of the world’92s pomp and wealth in the Egyptian capital for miles and miles flung itself up into white breakers of marble temple, mausoleum and obelisk.

It was to this capital and the palace of Pharaoh that Jacob, the plain shepherd, came to the royal apartment to meet his son Joseph, who had become Prime Minister. Pharaoh and Jacob met, dignity and rusticity, the gracefulness of the court and the plain manners of the field. The king, wanting to make the old countryman at ease, and seeing how white his beard is and how feeble his step, looks familiarly into his face and says to the aged man: ’93How old art thou?’94

On this first day of the new year I feel that it is not an inappropriate question that I ask you, as Pharaoh did Jacob, the patriarch: ’93How old art thou?’94 People who are truthful on every other subject lie about their ages, so that I do not solicit from you any literal response to the question I have asked. I would put no one under temptation; but I simply want to see by what rod it is we are measuring our earthly existence. There is a right way and a wrong way of measuring a door, or a wall, or an arch, or a tower, and so there is a right way and a wrong way of measuring our earthly existence. It is with reference to this higher meaning that I confront you this morning with the stupendous question of the text, and ask: ’93How old art thou?’94

There are many who estimate their by mere worldly gratification. When Lord Dundas was wished a happy New Year, he said: ’93It will have to be a happier year than the past, for I hadn’92t one happy moment in all the twelve months that have gone.’94 But that has not been the experience of most of us. We have found that though the world is blasted with sin, it is a very bright and beautiful place to reside in. We have had joys innumerable. There is no hostility between the Gospel and the merriments and festivities of life. I do not think that we sufficiently appreciate the worldly pleasures God gives us. When you recount your enjoyments you do not go far enough back. Why do you not go back to the time when you were an infant in your mother’92s arms, looking up into the heaven of her smile; to those days when you filled the house with the uproar of boisterous merriment; when you shouted as you pitched the ball on the playground; when, on the cold, sharp winter night, muffled up, on skates you shot out over the resounding ice of the pond? Have you forgotten all those good days that the Lord gave you? Were you never a boy? Were you never a girl? Between those times and this, how many mercies the Lord has bestowed upon you! How many joys have breathed up to you from the flowers, and shone down to you from the stars, and chanted to you with the voice of soaring bird, and tumbling cascade, and booming sea, and thunders that with bayonets of fire, charged down the mountain side! Joy! Joy! If there is any one who has a right to the enjoyments of the world, it is the Christian, for God has given him a lease of everything in the promise: ’93All are yours.’94 But I have to tell you that a man who estimates his life on earth by mere worldly gratification is a most unwise man. Our life is not to be a game of chess. It is not a dance in the lighted hall, to quick music. It is not the froth of an ale pitcher. It is not the settlings of a wine cup. It is not a banquet with intoxication and roistering. It is the first step on a ladder that mounts into the skies, or the first step on a road that plunges into a horrible abyss. ’93How old art thou?’94 Toward what destiny are you tending, and how fast are you getting on toward it?

Again, I remark that there are many who estimate their life on earth by their sorrows and misfortunes. Through a great many of your lives the ploughshare hath gone very deep, turning up a terrible furrow. You have been betrayed, and misrepresented, and set upon, and slapped of impertinence, and pounded of misfortune. The brightest life must have its shadows, and the smoothest path its thorns. On the happiest brood the hawk pounces. No escape from trouble of some kind. While glorious John Milton was losing his eyesight he heard that Salmasius was glad of it. While Sheridan’92s comedy was being enacted in Drury Lane Theatre, London, his enemy sat growling at it in the stage box. While Bishop Cooper was surrounded by the favor of learned men, his wife took the manuscript of his lexicon, the product of a long life of anxiety and toil, and threw it into the fire. Misfortune, trial, vexation for almost every one. Pope, applauded of all the world, has a stoop in the shoulder that annoys him so much that he has a tunnel dug so that he may go unobserved from garden to grotto, and from grotto to garden. Cano, the famous Spanish artist, is disgusted with the crucifix that the priest holds before him, because it is such a poor specimen of sculpture. And so, sometimes through taste, and sometimes through learned menace, and sometimes through physical distresses’97aye, in ten thousand ways’97troubles come to harass and annoy.

And yet, it is unfair to measure a man’92s life by his misfortunes, because where there is one stalk of nightshade there are fifty marigolds and harebells; where there is one cloud, thunder charged, there are hundreds that stray across the heavens, the glory of land and sky, asleep in their bosom. Because death came and took your child away, did you immediately forget all the five years or the ten years, or the fifteen years, in which she came every night for a kiss, all the tones or the soft touch of her hand? Because in some financial Euroclydon your fortune went into the breakers, did you forget all those years in which the luxuries and extravagances of life showered on your pathway? Alas, that is an unwise man, an ungrateful man, an unfair man, an unphilosophic man, and, most of all, an unchristian man, who measures his life on earth by groans, and tears, and dyspeptic fit, and abuse, and scorn, and terror, and neuralgic thrust.

Again, I remark that there are many people who estimate their life on earth by the amount of money they have accumulated. They say, ’93The year 1866, or 1870, or 1898, was wasted.’94 Why? ’93Made no money.’94 Now, it is all cant and insincerity to talk against money, as though it had no value. It may represent refinement, and education, and many blessed surroundings. It is the spreading of the table that feeds the children’92s hunger. It is the lighting of the furnace that keeps you warm. It is the making of the bed on which you rest from care and anxiety. It is the carrying of you at last to decent sepulchre, and the putting up of the slab on which is chiseled the story of your Christian hope. It is simply hypocrisy, this tirade in pulpit and lecture-hall against money. But while all this is so, he who uses money or thinks of money as anything but a means to an end, will find out his mistake when the glittering treasures slip out of his nerveless grasp, and he goes out of this world without a shilling of money or a certificate of stock. He might better have been the Christian porter that opened his gate, or the Christian workman who last night heaved the coal into his cellar. Bonds and mortgages and leases have their use, but they make a poor yardstick with which to measure life. ’93They that boast themselves in their wealth and trust in the multitude of their riches, none of them can, by any means, redeem his brother, or give to God a ransom for him, that he should not see corruption.’94

But I remark, there are many’97I wish there were more’97who estimate their life by their moral and spiritual development. It is not sinful egotism for a Christian man to say, ’93I am purer than I used to be. I am more consecrated to Christ than I used to be. I have got over a great many of the bad habits in which I used to indulge. I am a great deal better man than I used to be.’94 There is no sinful egotism in that. It is not base egotism for a soldier to say, ’93I know more about military tactics than I used to, before I took a musket in my hand and learned to ’91present arms,’92 and when I was a pest to the drill-officer.’94 It is not base egotism for a sailor to say, ’93I know better how to clew down the mizzen topsail than I used to, before I had ever seen a ship.’94 And there is no sinful egotism when a Christian man, fighting the battles of the Lord, or, if you will have it, voyaging toward a haven of eternal rest, says, ’93I know more about spiritual tactics and about voyaging toward heaven than I used to.’94

Why, there are those among us who have measured lances with many a foe and unhorsed it. We know Christian men who have become swarthy by hammering at the forge of calamity. They stand on an entirely different plane of character from that which they once occupied. They are measuring their life on earth by golden-gated Sabbaths, by pentecostal prayer-meeting, by communion-tables, by baptismal fonts, by hallelujahs in the temple. They have stood on Sinai, and heard it thunder. They have stood on Pisgah, and looked over into the Promised Land. They have stood on Calvary, and seen the cross bleed. They can, like Paul the Apostle, write on their heaviest troubles ’93light’94 and ’93but for a moment.’94 Even on the darkest night their soul is irradiated, as was the night over Bethlehem, by the faces of those who have come to proclaim glory and good cheer. They are only waiting for the gate to open and the chains to fall off and the glory to begin.

I remark again: There are many’97and I wish there were more’97who are estimating life by the good they can do John Bradford said he counted that day nothing at all in which he had not, by pen or tongue, done some good. If a man begin right, I cannot tell how many tears he may wipe away, how many burdens he may lift, how many orphans he may comfort, how many outcasts he may reclaim. There have been men who have given their whole life in the right direction, concentrating all their wit and ingenuity and mental acumen and physical force and enthusiasm for Christ. They climbed the mountain and delved into the mine and crossed the sea and trudged the desert and dropped, at last, into martyr’92s graves, waiting for the resurrection of the just. They measured their lives by the chains they broke off, by the garments they put upon nakedness, by the miles they traveled to alleviate every kind of suffering. They felt in the thrill of every nerve, in the motion of every muscle, in every throb of their heart, in every respiration of their lungs, the magnificent truth: ’93No man liveth unto himself.’94 They went through cold and through heat, foot-blistered, cheek-smitten, back-scourged, tempest-lashed, to do their whole duty. That is the way they measured life’97by the amount of good they could do. Do you want to know how old Luther was; how old Richard Baxter was; how old Philip Doddridge was? Why, you cannot calculate the length of their lives by any human arithmetic. Add to their lives ten thousand times ten thousand years, and you have not expressed it’97what they have lived or will live. Oh, what a standard that is to measure a man’92s life by! There are those among us who think they have only lived thirty years. They will have lived a thousand’97they have lived a thousand. There are those who think they are eighty years or age. They have not even entered upon their infancy, for one must become a babe in Christ to begin at all.

Now, I do not know what your advantages or disadvantages are; I do not know what your tact or talent is; I do not know what may be the fascination of your manners or the repulsiveness of them; but I know this: There is for you, my hearer, a field to cultivate, a harvest to reap, a tear to wipe away, a soul to save. If you have worldly means, consecrate them to Christ. If you have eloquence, use it on the side that Paul and Wilberforce used theirs. If you have learning, put it all into the poor-box of the world’92s suffering. But if you have none of these’97neither wealth, nor eloquence, nor learning’97you, at any rate, have a smile with which you can encourage the disheartened; a frown with which you may blast injustice; a voice with which you call the wanderer back to God. ’93Oh,’94 you say, ’93that is a very sanctimonious view of life!’94 It is not. It is the only bright view of life, and it is the only bright view of death. Contrast the death-scene of a man who has measured life by the worldly standard with the death-scene of a man who has measured life by the Christian standard. Quinn, the actor, in his last moments, said, ’93I hope this tragic scene will soon be over, and I hope to keep my dignity to the last.’94 Malherbe said in his last moments to the confessor, ’93Hold your tongue! your miserable style puts me out of conceit with heaven.’94 Lord Chesterfield in his last moments, when he ought to have been praying for his soul, bothered himself about the proprieties of the sick-room, and said, ’93Give Dayboles a chair.’94 Godfrey Kneller spent his last hours on earth in drawing a diagram of his own monument. Compare the silly and horrible accompaniments of the departure of such men with the seraphic glow on the face of Edward Payson, as he said in his last moment: ’93The breezes of heaven fan me. I float in a sea of glory.’94 Or, with Paul the Apostle, who said in his last hour, ’93I am now ready to be offered up, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought the good fight, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will give me.’94 Or compare it with the Christian deathbed that you witnessed in your own household. Ah, this world is a false god! It will consume you with the blaze in which it accepts your sacrifice, while the righteous shall be held in everlasting remembrance; and when the thrones have fallen, and the monuments have crumbled and the world has perished, they shall banquet with the conquerors of earth and the hierarchs of heaven.

This is a good day in which to begin a new style of measurement. ’93How old art thou?’94 You see the Christian way of measuring life and the worldly way of measuring it. I leave it to you to say which is the wiser and better way. The wheel of time has turned very swiftly, and it has hurled us on. The old year has gone. The new year has come. For what you and I have been launched upon it, God only knows. Now let me ask you all. Have you made any preparation for the future? You have made preparation for time, my dear brother; have you made any preparation for eternity? Do you wonder that when that man on the Hudson river, in indignation, tore up the tract which was handed to him, and just one word landed on his coatsleeve’97the rest of the tract being pitched into the river’97that one word aroused his soul? It was that one word, so long, so broad, so high, so deep’97’94eternity!’94 Some of you, during the past year, made preparation for eternity, and it makes no difference to you really, as to the matter of safety, whether you go now, or go some other year’97whether this year or the next year. Both your feet on the rock, the waves may dash around you. You can say, ’93God is our refuge and strength’97a very present help.’94 You are on the rock, and you may defy all earth and hell to overthrow you. I congratulate you, I give you great joy. It is a happy New Year to you.

I can see no sorrow at all in the fact that our years are going. You hear some people say, ’93I wish I could go back again to boyhood.’94 I would not want to go back again to boyhood. I am afraid I might make a worse life out of it than I have made. You could not afford to go back to boyhood if it were possible. You might do a great deal worse than you have done. The past is gone! Look out for the future! To all Christians it is a time of gladness. I am glad the years are going. You are coming on nearer home. Let your countenance light up with the thought’97Nearer home!

In 1835 the French resolved that at Ghent they would have a kind of musical demonstration that had never been heard of. It would be made up of the chimes of bells and the discharge of cannon. The experiment was a perfect success. What with the ringing of the bells and the report of the ordnance, the city trembled, and the hills shook with the triumphal march that was as strange as it was overwhelming. With a most glorious accompaniment will God’92s dear children go into their high residence, when the trumpets shall sound and the Last Day has come. At the signal given, the bells of the towers, and of the lighthouses, and of the cities, will strike their sweetness into a last chime that shall ring into the heavens and float off upon the sea, joined by the boom of bursting mine and magazine, augmented by all the cathedral towers of heaven’97the harmonies of earth and the symphonies of the celestial realm making up one great triumphal march, fit to celebrate the ascent of the redeemed to where they shall shine as the stars forever and ever.

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage