166. Narrow Escapes

Narrow Escapes

Job_19:20 : ’93I am escaped with the skin of my teeth.’94

Job had it hard. What with boils and bereavements and bankruptcy and a fool of a wife he wished he was dead; and I do not blame him. His flesh was gone, and his bones were dry. His teeth wasted away until nothing but the enamel seemed left. He cries out, ’93I am escaped with the skin of my teeth.’94

There has been some difference of opinion about this passage. St. Jerome and Schultens, and Doctors Good and Poole, and Barnes, have all tried their forceps on Job’92s teeth. You deny my interpretation, and say, ’93What did Job know about the enamel of the teeth?’94 He knew everything about it. Dental surgery is almost as old as the earth. The mummies of Egypt, thousands of years old, are found today with gold-filling in their teeth. Ovid and Horace and Solomon and Moses wrote about these important factors of the body. To other provoking complaints, Job, I think, has added an exasperating toothache, and, putting his hand against the inflamed face, he says, ’93I am escaped with the skin of my teeth.’94

A very narrow escape, you say, for Job’92s body and soul; but there are thousands of men who make just as narrow escape for their soul. There was a time when the partition between them and ruin was no thicker than a tooth’92s enamel; but, as Job finally escaped, so have they. Thank God! Thank God!

Paul expresses the same idea by a different figure when he says that some people are ’93Saved as by fire.’94 A vessel at sea is in flames. You go to the stern of the vessel. The boats have shoved off. The flames advance; you can endure the heat no longer on your face. You slide down on the side of the vessel, and hold on with your fingers, until the forked tongue of the fire begins to lick the back of your hand, and you feel that you must fall, when one of the lifeboats comes back, and the passengers say they think they have room for one more. The boat swings under you; you drop into it; you are saved. So some men are pursued by temptation until they are partially consumed, but after all get off’97’94saved as by fire.’94 But I like the figure of Job a little better than that of Paul, because the pulpit has not worn it out; and I want to show you, if God will help, that some men make narrow escape for their souls, and are saved as ’93with the skin of their teeth.’94

It is as easy for some people to look to the Cross as for you to look to the pulpit. Mild, gentle, tractable, loving, you expect them to become Christians. You go over to the store and say, ’93Grandon joined the Church yesterday.’94 Your business comrades say, ’93That is just what might have been expected; he always was of that turn of mind.’94 In youth, this person whom I describe was always good. He never broke things. He never laughed when it was improper to laugh. At seven years of age he could sit an hour in church, perfectly quiet, looking neither to the right hand nor to the left, but straight into the eyes of the minister, as though he understood the whole discussion about the eternal decrees. He never upset things, nor lost them. He floated into the kingdom of God so gradually that it is uncertain just when the matter was decided.

Here is another one, who started in life with an uncontrollable spirit. He kept the nursery in an uproar. His mother found him walking on the edge of the house-roof to see if he could balance himself. There was no horse that he dared not ride’97no tree he could not climb. His boyhood was a long series of predicaments; his manhood was reckless; his mid-life was very wayward. But now he is converted, and you go over to the store and say, ’93Arkwright joined the Church yesterday.’94 Your friends say, ’93It is not possible! You must be joking.’94 You say, ’93No; I tell you the truth. He joined the Church.’94 Then they reply, ’93There is hope for any of us if old Arkwright has become a Christian!’94 In other words, we all admit that it is more difficult for some men to accept the Gospel than for others.

There may be some who have cut loose from churches and Bibles and Sundays, and who come to church with no intention of becoming Christians themselves, but just to see what is going on; and yet you may find yourself escaping, before you leave, as ’93with the skin of your teeth.’94 I have seen boats go off from Cape May or Long Branch, and drop their nets, and after a while come ashore, pulling in the nets without having caught a single fish. It was not a good day, or they had not the right kind of a net. But we expect no such excursion tonight. The water is full of fish; the wind is in the right direction; the Gospel net is strong. O Thou who didst help Simon and Andrew to fish, show us how to cast the net on the right side of the ship!

Some of you, in coming to God, will have to run against skeptical notions. It is useless for people to say sharp and cutting things to those who reject the Christian religion. I cannot say such things. By what process of temptation or trial or betrayal you have come to your present state, I know not. There are two gates to your nature: the gate of the head, and the gate of the heart. The gate of your head is locked with bolts and bars that an archangel could not break; but the gate of your heart swings easily on its hinges. If I assaulted your body with weapons you would meet me with weapons, and it would be sword-stroke for sword-stroke, and wound for wound, and blood for blood; but if I come and knock at the door of your house, you open it, and give me the best seat in your parlor. If I should approach you with an argument, you would answer me with an argument; if with sarcasm, you would answer me with sarcasm; blow for blow, stroke for stroke; but when I come and knock at the door of your heart, you open it and say, ’93Come in, my brother, and tell me all you know about Christ and heaven.’94

Listen to two or three questions: Are you as happy as you used to be when you believed in the truth of the Christian religion? Would you like to have your children travel on in the road in which you are now traveling? You had a relative who professed to be a Christian, and was thoroughly consistent, living and dying in the faith of the Gospel. Would you not like to live the same quiet life, and die the same peaceful death? Here is a letter, sent me by one who has rejected the Christian religion. It says, ’93I am old enough to know that the joys and pleasures of life are evanescent, and to realize the fact that it must be comfortable in old age to believe in something relative to the future, and to have a faith in some system that proposes to save. I am free to confess that I would be happier if I could exercise the simple and beautiful faith that is possessed by many whom I know. I am not willingly out of the Church or out of the faith. My state of uncertainty is one of unrest. Sometimes I doubt my immortality, and look upon the death-bed as the closing scene, after which there is nothing. What shall I do that I have not done?’94 Ah! skepticism is a dark and doleful land. Let me say that this Bible is either true or false. If it be false, we are as well off as you; if it be true, then which of us is safer?

Let me also ask whether your trouble has not been that you confused Christianity with the inconsistent character of some who profess it. You are a lawyer. In your profession there are mean and dishonest men. Is that anything against the law? You are a doctor. There are unskilled and contemptible men in your profession. Is that anything against medicine? You are a merchant. There are thieves and defrauders in your business. Is that anything against merchandizing? Behold, then, the unfairness of charging upon Christianity the wickedness of its disciples. We admit some of the charges against those who profess religion. Some of the most gigantic swindles of the present day have been carried on by members of the Church. There are men standing in the front rank in the churches who would not be trusted for five dollars without good collateral security. They leave their business dishonesties in the vestibule of the church as they go in and sit at the communion. Having concluded the sacrament, they get up, wipe the wine from their lips, go out, and take up their sins where they left off. To serve the devil is their regular work; to serve God a sort of play-spell. With a Sunday sponge they expect to wipe off from their business slate all the past week’92s inconsistencies. You have no more right to take such a man’92s life as a specimen of religion than you have to take the twisted irons and split timbers that lie on the beach at Coney Island as a specimen of an American ship. It is time that we drew a line between religion and the frailties of those who profess it.

Do you not feel that the Bible, take it all in all, is about the best book that the world has ever seen? Do you know any book that has as much in it? Do you not think, upon the whole, that its influence has been beneficent? I come with both hands extended toward you. In one hand I have the Bible, and in the other I have nothing. This Bible in one hand I will surrender forever just as soon as in my other hand you can put a book that is better. I invite you back into the good old-fashioned religion of your fathers’97to the God whom they worshiped, to the Bible they read, to the promises on which they leaned, to the cross on which they hung their eternal expectations. You have not been happy a day since you swung off; you will not be happy a minute until you swing back.

Again, there may be some of you who, in the attempt after a Christian life, will have to run against powerful passions and appetites. Perhaps it is a disposition to anger that you have to contend against; and perhaps, while in a very serious mood, you hear of something that makes you feel that you must swear or die. I know of a Christian man who was once so exasperated that he said to a mean customer, ’93I cannot swear at you myself, for I am a member of the Church; but if you will go down stairs my partner in business will swear at you.’94 All your good resolutions heretofore have been torn to tatters by explosions of temper. Now there is no harm in getting mad, if you only get mad at sin. You need to bridle and saddle these hot-breathed passions, and with them ride down injustice and wrong. There are a thousand things in the world that we ought to be mad at. There is no harm in getting red-hot if you only bring to the forge that which needs hammering. A man who has no power of righteous indignation is an imbecile. But be sure it is a righteous indignation, and not a petulancy that blurs and unravels and depletes the soul.

There is a large class of persons in mid-life who have still in them appetites that were aroused in early manhood, at a time when they prided themselves on being a ’93little fast,’94 ’93high livers,’94 ’93free and easy,’94 ’93hail fellows well met.’94 They are now paying in compound interest for troubles they collected twenty years ago. Some of you are trying to escape, and you will’97yet very narrowly, ’93as with the skin of your teeth.’94 God and your own soul only know what the struggle is. Omnipotent grace has pulled out many a soul that was deeper in the mire than you are. They line the beach of heaven’97the multitude whom God has rescued from the thrall of suicidal habits. If you this day turn your back on the wrong, and start anew, God will help you. Oh, the weakness of human help! Men will sympathize for a while, and then turn you off. If you ask for their pardon, they will give it, and say they will try you again; but, falling away again under the power of temptation, they cast you off forever. But God forgives seventy times seven; yea, seven hundred times; yea though this be the ten thousandth time, he is more earnest, more sympathetic, more helpful this last time than when you took your first misstep.

If, with all the influences favorable for a right life, men make so many mistakes, how much harder it is when, for instance, some appetite thrusts its iron grapple into the roots of the tongue and pulls a man down with hands of destruction! If, under such circumstances, he break away, there will be no sport in the undertaking, no holiday enjoyment, but a struggle in which the wrestlers heave from side to side and bend and twist and watch for an opportunity to get in a heavier stroke until, with one final effort, in which the muscles are distended and the veins stand out and the blood starts, the swarthy habit falls under the knee of the victor, who has escaped at last as with the skin of his teeth.

The ship Emma, bound from Gothenburg to Harwich, was sailing on, when the man on the lookout saw something that he pronounced a vessel bottom up. There was something on it that looked like a sea-gull, but was afterward found to be a waving handkerchief. In the small boat the crew pushed out to the wreck, and found that it was a capsized vessel, and that three men had been digging their way out through the bottom of the ship. When the vessel capsized they had no means of escape. The captain took his penknife and dug away through the planks until his knife broke. Then an old nail was found, with which they attempted to scrape their way up out of the darkness, each one working until his hand was well-nigh paralyzed, and he sank back faint and sick. After long and tedious work, the light broke through the bottom of the ship. A handkerchief was hoisted. Help came. They were taken on board the vessel and saved. Did ever men come so near a watery grave without dropping into it? How narrowly they escaped’97escaped only ’93with the skin of their teeth.’94 So there are men who have been capsized of evil passions, and capsized mid-ocean, and they are a thousand miles away from any shore of help. They have for years been trying to dig their way out. They have been digging away and digging away, but they can never be delivered unless tonight they will hoist some signal of distress. However weak and feeble it may be, Christ will see it, and bear down upon the helpless craft and take them on board; and it will be known on earth and in heaven how narrowly they escaped’97’94escaped as with the skin of their teeth.’94 There are others who, in attempting to come to God, must run between a great many business perplexities. If a man go over to business at ten o’92clock in the morning, and comes away at three o’92clock in the afternoon, he has some time for religion; but how shall you find time for religious contemplation when you are driven from sunrise until sunset, and have been for five years going behind in business, and are frequently dunned by creditors whom you cannot pay; and when, from Monday morning until Saturday night, you are dodging bills that you cannot meet? You walk day by day in uncertainties that have kept your brain on fire for the past three years. Some, with less business troubles than you, have gone crazy. The clerk has heard a noise in the back counting-room, and gone in, and found the chief man of the firm a raving maniac; or the wife has heard the bang of a pistol in the back parlor, and gone in, stumbling over the dead body of her husband’97a suicide. There are hundreds of men pursued, harassed, trodden down and scalped of business perplexities, and which way to turn next they do not know. Now God will not be hard on you. He knows what obstacles are in the way of your being a Christian, and your first effort in the right direction he will crown with success. Do not let Satan, with cotton-bales and kegs and hogsheads and counters and stocks of unsalable goods, block up your way to heaven. Gather up all your energies. Tighten the girdle about your loins. Take an agonizing look into the face of God, and then say, ’93Here goes one grand effort for life eternal,’94 and then bound away for heaven, escaping ’93as with the skin of your teeth.’94

In the last day it will be found that Hugh Latimer and John Knox and Huss and Ridley were not the greatest martyrs, but Christian men who went up incorrupt from the contaminations and perplexities of Wall Street, Water Street, Pearl Street, Broad Street, State Street, and Third Street. On earth they were called brokers or stock-jobbers or retailers or importers; but in heaven, Christian heroes. No fagots were heaped about their feet; no Inquisition demanded from them recantation; no soldier aimed a pike at their heart; but they had mental tortures, compared with which all physical consuming is as the breath of a spring morning.

I find in the community a large class of men who have been so cheated, so lied about, so outrageously wronged, that they have lost their faith in everything. In a world where everything seems so topsy-turvy, they do not see how there can be any God. They are confounded and frenzied and misanthropic. Elaborate arguments to prove to them the truth of Christianity, or the truth of anything else, touch them nowhere. Hear me, all such men. I preach to you no rounded periods, no ornamental discourse; but I put my hand on your shoulder, and invite you into the peace of the Gospel. Here is a rock on which you may stand firm, though the waves dash against it harder than the Atlantic, pitching its surf clear above Eddystone Lighthouse. Do not charge upon God all these troubles of the world. As long as the world stuck to God, God stuck to the world; but the earth seceded from his government, and hence all these outrages and all these woes. God is good. For many hundreds of years he has been coaxing the world to come back to him; but the more he has coaxed, the more violent have men been in their resistance, and they have stepped back and stepped back until they have dropped into ruin.

Try this God, ye who have had the bloodhounds after you, and who have thought that God had forgotten you. Try him, and see if he will not help. Try him, and see if he will not pardon. Try him, and see if he will not save. The flowers of spring have no bloom so sweet as the flowering of Christ’92s affections. The sun hath no warmth compared with the glow of his heart. The waters have no refreshment like the fountain that will slake the thirst of thy soul. At the moment the reindeer stands with his lip and nostril thrust into the cool mountain torrent, the hunter may be coming through the thicket. Without crackling a stick under his foot, he comes close by the stag, and aims his gun, draws the trigger, and the poor thing rears in its death-agony and falls backward, its antlers crashing on the rocks; but the panting hart that drinks from the water-brooks of God’92s promise shall never be fatally wounded, and shall never die.

This world is a poor portion for your soul, O business man! An Eastern king had graven upon his tomb two fingers, represented as sounding upon each other with a snap, and under them the motto, ’93All is not worth that.’94 Apicus C’9clius hanged himself because his steward informed him that he had only eighty thousand pounds sterling left. All of this world’92s riches make but a small inheritance for a soul. Robespierre attempted to win the applause of the world; but when he was dying, a woman came rushing through the crowd, crying to him, ’93Murderer of my kindred, descend to hell, covered with the curses of every mother in France!’94 Many who have expected the plaudits of the world have died under its Anathema Maranatha.

Oh, find your peace in God! Make one strong pull for heaven. No half-way work will do it. There sometimes comes a time on shipboard when everything must be sacrificed to save the passengers. The cargo is nothing, the rigging nothing. The captain puts the trumpet to his lip and shouts, ’93Cut away the mast!’94 Some of you have been tossed and driven, and you have, in your effort to keep the world, well-nigh lost your soul. Until you have decided this matter, let everything else go. Overboard with all those other anxieties and burdens! You will have to drop the sails of your pride, and cut away the mast. With one earnest cry for help, put your cause into the hand of him who helped Paul out of the breakers of Melita, and who, above the shrill blast of the wrathiest tempest that ever blackened the sky or shook the ocean, can hear the faintest imploration for mercy.

I shall go home tonight feeling that some of you, who have considered your case as hopeless, will take heart again, and that with a blood-red earnestness, such as you have never experienced before, you will start for the good land of the Gospel’97at last to look back, saying, ’93What a great risk I ran! Almost lost, but saved! Just got through, and no more! Escaped by the skin of my teeth.’94

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage