208. The Dead Sea and the Jordan

The Dead Sea and the Jordan

Psa_104:32 : ’93He toucheth the hills and they smoke.’94

The inspired poet here pictures a volcano, and what Church’92s Cotopaxi does on painter’92s canvas, this author does in words. You see a hill, calm and still, and for ages immovable, but the Lord out of the heavens puts his finger on the top of it and from it rise thick vapors, intershot with fire. ’93He toucheth the hills and they smoke.’94

God is the only being who can manage a volcano, and again and again has he employed volcanic action. The pictures on the walls of Pompeii, the exhumed Italian city, as we saw them last November, demonstrate that the city was not fit to live. In the first century, that city, engirdled with palaces, emparadised with gardens, pillared into architectural exquisiteness, was at the foot of a mountain, up the sides of which it ran with vineyards and villas of merchant princes; and all that marble and bronze and imperial baths and arboriculture and rainbowed fountains and a coliseum, at the dedication of which nine thousand beasts had been slain, and a supernal landscape in which the shore gave roses to the sea and the sea gave crystals to the shore; yea, all that beauty and pomp and wealth could give was there to be seen or heard. But the bad morals of the city had shocked the world. In the year 79, on the 4th of August, a black column rose above the adjoining mountain and spread out, Pliny says, as he saw it, like a great pine tree, wider and wider, until it began to rain upon the city, first thin ashes and then pumice stone; and sulphurous fumes swooped, and streams of mud poured through the streets till few people escaped and the city was buried; and some of the inhabitants, eighteen hundred years after, were found embalmed in the scoriae of that awful doom. The Lord called upon volcanic forces to obliterate that profligate city. He touched the hills and they smoked.

Nothing but volcanic action can explain what I shall show you at the Dead Sea upon which I looked one December, a few years ago, and of whose waters I took a bitter and stinging taste. Concerning all that region there has been a controversy enough to fill libraries, science saying one thing, Revelation saying another thing. But admit volcanic action divinely employed and both testimonies are one and the same. Geology, chemistry, geography, astronomy, ichthyology, ornithology and zoology are coming one by one to confirm the Scriptures. Two leaves of one book are Revelation and Creation, and the penmanship is by the same divine hand. Our horseback ride will not be so steep today and you can stay on without clinging to the pommel of the saddle, but the scenes amid which we ride shall, if possible, be more thrilling, and by the time the horses snuff the sulphurous atmosphere of Lake Asphaltites, or the Dead Sea, we will be ready to dismount and read from our Bibles about what was done that day by the Lord when he touched the hills and they smoked.

Take a detour and pass along by the rocky fortress of Masada, where occurred something more wonderful in the way of desperation than you have ever heard of, unless you have heard of that. Herod built a palace amid these heaps of black and awful rocks, which look like a tumbled midnight. A great band of robbers, about one thousand, including their families, afterward held the fortress. When the Roman army stormed that steep and the bandits could no longer hold the place, their chieftain, Eleazar, made a powerful speech which persuaded them to die before they were captured. First the men kissed their families a loving and tearful good-by, and then put a dagger into their hearts, and the women and the children were slain. Then ten men were chosen by lot to slay all the other men, and each man lay down by the dead wife and children and waited for these executioners to do their work. This done, one man of the ten killed the other nine; then the survivor committed suicide. Two women and five children had hid themselves, and, after all was over, came forth to tell of the nine hundred and sixty slaughtered. Great and rugged natural scenery makes the most tremendous natures for good or evil. Great statesmen and great robbers, great orators and great butchers, were nearly all born or reared among mountain precipices. Strong natures are hardly ever born upon the plain. When men have anything greatly good or greatly evil to do, they come down off the rocks.

Pass on from under the shadow of Masada, the scene of concentrated diabolism, and come along where the salt crystals crackle under the horses’92 hoofs. You are near the most God-forsaken region of all the earth. You to whom the word lake has heretofore suggested those bewitchments of beauty, Luzerne or Cayuga’97some great pearl set by a loving God in the bosom of the luxuriant valley’97change all your ideas about a lake, and see this sheet of water which the Bible calls the Salt Sea, or Sea of the Plain, and Josephus calls Lake Asphaltites. The muleteers will take care of the horses while we get down to the brink and dip up the liquid mixture in the palm of the hand. The waters are a commingling of brimstone and pitch, and have a six times larger percentage of salt than those of the Atlantic Ocean, the ocean having four per cent. of salt, and this lake, twenty-six and a quarter per cent. Lake Sir-i-kol of India is the highest lake in the world. This lake, on the banks of which we kneel, is the lowest. It empties into no sea, for the simple reason that water cannot run uphill. It swallows up the river Jordan, and makes no response of thanks, and never reports what it does with the twenty million cubic feet of water annually received from that sacred river. It takes the tree branches and logs floated into it by the Jordan and pitches them on the banks of bitumen to decay there. The hot springs by the name of Calirrhoe near its banks, where King Herod came to bathe off his illnesses, no sooner pour into this sea than they are poisoned. Not a fish-scale swims it; not an insect walks it. It hates life; and if you attempt to swim there, it lifts you by an unnatural buoyancy to the surface, as much as to say: ’93We want no life here, but death is our preference’97death.’94 Those who attempt to wade into this lake, and submerge themselves, come out almost maddened, as with the sting of a hundred wasps and hornets, and with lips and eyelids swollen with the strange ablution. The sparkle of its waters is not like the sparkle of beauty on other lakes, but a metallic lustre like unto the flash of a sword that would thrust at you. The gazelles and ibexes that live on the hills beside it, and the cranes and wild ducks that fly across’97for, contrary to the old belief, birds do safely wing their way over it’97and the Arab horses you have been riding, though thirsty enough, will not drink out of this dreadful mixture. A mist hovers over parts of it almost continually, which, though natural evaporation, seems like a wing of doom spread over liquid desolation. It is the rinsings of abomination. It is an aqueous monster coiled among the hills, or creeping with ripples, and stenchful with nauseating malodors.

In these regions once stood four great cities of Syria’97Sodom, Gomorrah, Adma and Zeboim. The Bible says they were destroyed by a tempest of fire and brimstone after they had filled up their cup of wickedness. ’93No, that is absurd,’94 cries some one. ’93It is evident that this was a region of salt and brimstone and pitch, long before that.’94 And so it was. The Bible says it was a region of sulphur long before the great catastrophe. ’93Well, now,’94 says some one, wanting to raise a quarrel between science and revelation, ’93you have no right to say the Cities of the Plain were destroyed by a tempest of fire and sulphur and brimstone, because this region had these characteristics long before these cities were destroyed.’94 Volcanic action, is my reply. These cities had been built out of very combustible materials. The mortar was of bitumen, easily ignited, and the walls dripped with pitch most inflammable. They sat, I think, on a ridge of hills. They stood high up and conspicuous, radiant in their sins, ostentatious in their debaucheries, four hells on earth. One day there was a rumbling in the earth and a quaking. ’93What’92s that?’94 cry the affrighted inhabitants’97’94what’92s that?’94 The foundations of the earth were giving way. A volcano, whose fires had been burning for ages, at God’92s command burst forth, easily setting everything aflame, and first lifting these cities high in air, and then dashing them down in chasms fathomless. The fires of that eruption intershot the dense smoke, and rolled unto the heavens, only to descend again. And all the configuration of that country was changed, and where there was a hill there came a valley, and where there had been the pomp of uncleanness came widespread desolation. The red-hot spade of volcanic action had shoveled under the Cities of the Plain. Before the catastrophe, the cities stood on the top of the salt and sulphur. After the catastrophe they were under the salt and sulphur. Science right. Revelation right. ’93He toucheth the hills and they smoke.’94

No science ever frightened believers in Revelation so much as geology. They feared that the strata of the earth would contradict the Scriptures, and then Moses must go under. But as in the Dead Sea instance, so in all cases, God’92s writing on the earth and God’92s writing in the Bible are harmonious. The shelves of rock correspond with the shelves of the American Bible Society. Science digs into the earth and finds deep down the remains of plants, and that agrees with the Bible, which announces plants first. Science digs down and says: ’93Marine animals next,’94 and that is what the Bible says: ’93Marine animals next.’94 Science digs down and says: ’93Land animals next,’94 and the Bible responds: ’93Land animals next.’94 ’93Then comes man!’94 says science. ’93Then comes man!’94 responds the Bible. Science digs into the regions about the Dead Sea, and finds result of fire, and masses of brimstone, and announces a wonderful geological formation. ’93Oh, yes,’94 says the Bible; ’93Moses wrote thousands of years ago ’91The Lord rained upon Sodom, and upon Gomorrah, brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven,’92 and the Psalmist wrote: ’91He toucheth the hills and they smoke.’92’93 So I guess we will hold on to our Bibles a little longer. A gentleman in the anteroom of the White House, at Washington, having an appointment with Mr. Lincoln at five o’92clock in the morning, got there fifteen minutes early, and asked the servant: ’93Who is talking in the next room?’94 ’93It is the President, sir!’94 ’93Is anybody with him?’94 ’93No, sir; he is reading the Bible. He spends every morning from four to five o’92clock reading the Scriptures.’94

My text implies that God controls volcanoes not with the full force of his hand, but with the tip of his finger. Etna, Stromboli and Vesuvius fawn at his feet like hounds before the hunter. These eruptions of the hills do not belong to Pluto’92s realm, as the ancients thought, but to the Divine dominions. Humboldt counted two hundred of them; but since then the Indian archipelago has been found to have nine hundred of these great mouthpieces. They are on every continent and in all latitudes. That earthquake which shook all America not many years ago was only the raving around of volcanoes rushing against the sides of their rocky caverns trying to break out. They must come to the surface, but it will be at the Divine call. They seem reserved for the punishment of one kind of sin. The seven cities they have obliterated were celebrated for one kind of transgression. Profligacy was the characteristic of the seven cities of ancient times over which they put their smothering wing’97Pompeii, Herculaneum, Stabi’e6, Adma, Zeboim, Sodom and Gomorrah. If our American cities do not quit their profligacy, if in high life and low life dissoluteness does not cease to be a joke and become a crime, if wealthy libertinism continues to find so many doors of domestic life open to its faintest touch, if Russian and French and American literature, steeped in pruriency, does not get banished from the news-stands and ladies’92 parlors, God will let loose some of these suppressed monsters of the earth. And I tell these American cities that it will be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in the Day of Judgment, whether that Day of Judgment be in this present century or in the closing century of the earth’92s continuance. The volcanic forces are already in existence, but in the mercy of God they are chained in the kennels of subterraneous fire. Yet let profligacy’97whether it stagger into a lazaretto or sit on a commercial throne, whether it laugh in a faded shawl under the street gaslight, or be wrapped in the finest array that foreign loom ever wrought or lapidary ever empearled’97know right well that there is a volcano waiting for it, whether in domestic life or social life or political life or in the foundations of the earth from which sprang out the devastations that swallowed the cities of the plain. ’93He toucheth the hills and they smoke.’94

But the dragoman is rejoiced when we have seen enough of this volcanic region of Palestine, and he gladly tightens the girths around the horses which are prancing and neighing for departure. We are off for the Jordan, only two hours away. We pass Bedouins whose stern features melt into a smile as we give them the salutation, Salaam Aleikoum, ’93Peace be with you,’94 their smile sometimes leaving us in doubt as to whether it is caused by their gladness to see us or by our poor pronunciation of the Arabic. They are a strange race those Bedouins’97such a commingling of ruffianism and honor, of cowardice and courage, of cruelty and kindness! When a band of them came down upon a party in which Miss Whately was traveling, and were about to take pocketbooks, and perhaps life, this lady, sitting upon her horse, took out her note-book and pencil and began to sketch these brigands, and seeing this composure, the bandits thought it something supernatural and fled. Christian womanliness or manliness is all-conquering. When Martin Luther was told that Duke George would kill him if he went to Leipsic, Luther replied: ’93I would go to Leipsic if it rained Duke Georges nine days.’94

Now we come through regions where there are hills having the shape of cathedrals, with altar and column and arch and chancel and pulpit and dome and architecture of the rocks that, I think, can hardly just happen so. Perhaps it is because God loves the Church so well he builds in the solitudes of Yellowstone Park and Yosemite and Switzerland and Palestine these ecclesiastical piles. And who knows, but that unseen spirits may sometimes worship there? ’93Dragoman, when shall we see the Jordan?’94 I ask. All the time we were on the alert, and looking through tamarisk and willows for the most celebrated river of all the earth. The Mississippi is wider, the Ohio is deeper, the Amazon is longer, the Hudson rolls amid regions more picturesque, the Thames has more splendor on its banks, the Tiber suggests more imperial processions, the Ilyssus has more classic memories, and the Nile feeds greater populations by its irrigation; but the Jordan is the queen of rivers and runs through all the Bible, a silver thread strung like beads with heroics; and before night we shall meet on its banks Elijah and Elisha and David and Jacob and Joshua and John and Jesus.

At last between two trees I got a glimpse of a river, and said: ’93What is that?’94 ’93The Jordan,’94 was the quick reply. And all along the line, which had been lengthened by other pilgrims, some from America and some from Europe and some from Asia, the cry was sounded: ’93The Jordan! The Jordan!’94 Thousands of pilgrims have chanted on its banks and bathed in its waters. Many of them dip a wet gown in the wave and wring it out and carry it home for their own shroud. It is an impetuous stream, and rushes on as though it were hastening to tell its story to the ages. Many an explorer has it whelmed, and many a boat has it wrecked. Lieutenant Molineux had copper-bottomed crafts split upon its shelvings. Only one boat, that of Lieutenant Lynch, ever lived to sail the whole length of it. At the season when the snows on Lebanon melt, the rage of this stream is like the Conemaugh when Johnstown perished; and the wild beasts that may be near run for the hills, explaining what Jeremiah says: ’93Behold he shall go up like a lion from the swelling of Jordan.’94 No river so often changes its mind, for it turns and twists, traveling two hundred miles to do that which in a straight line might be done in sixty miles. Among banks now low, now high; now of rocks, now of mud, and now of sand; laving the feet of the terebinths and oleanders and acacias and reeds and pistachios and silver poplars. This river marries the Dead Sea to Lake Galilee, and did ever so rough a groom take the hand of so fair a bride?

This is the river which parted to let an army of two million Israelites across. Here the skilled Major-General of the Syrian host, at the seventh plunge, dropped his leprosy; not only a miraculous cure, but a suggestion to all ages that water and plenty of it has much to do with the sanitary improvement of the world. Here is where some theological students of Elisha’92s time were cutting trees with which to build a theological seminary, and an ax-head, not sufficiently wedged to the handle, flew off into the river and sank, and the young man deplored not so much the loss of the ax-head as the fact that it was not his own and cried: ’93Alas! it was borrowed,’94 and the prophet threw a stick into the river, and, in defiance of the law of gravitation, the iron ax-head came to the surface and floated like a cork upon the water, and kept floating until the young man caught it. A miracle performed to give one an opportunity to return that which was borrowed, and a rebuke in all ages for those who borrow and never return; their bad habit in this respect so established that it would be a miracle if they did return it. Yea; from the bank of this river Elijah took team of fire, showing that the destructive element is servant of the good, and that there is no need that a child of God fear anything; for, if the most desolating of all elements was that day fashioned into a vehicle for a departing saint, nothing can ever hurt you who love and trust the Lord. I am so glad that that chariot of Elijah was not made out of wood, crystal, or anything ordinarily pleasant, but out of fire; and yet he went up without having so much as to fan himself. When, stepping from amid the foliage of these oleanders and tamarisks on the banks of the Jordan, he put his foot on the red step of the red equipage, and took the red reins of vapor in his hands, and urged the galloping steeds toward the wide-open gate of heaven, it was a scene forever memorable. So the hottest afflictions of your life may roll you heavenward. So the most burning persecutions, the most fiery troubles, may become uplifting. Only be sure that when you pull on the bits of fire, you drive up toward God, and not down toward the Dead Sea. When Latimer and Ridley died at the stake they went up in a chariot of fire. When my friend P. P. Bliss, the Gospel singer, was consumed with the rail-train that broke through Ashtabula bridge, and then took flame, I said: ’93Another Elijah gone up in a chariot of fire!’94

But this river is a river of baptisms. Christ was here baptized, and John baptized many thousands. Whether on these occasions the candidate for baptism and the officer of religion went into this river,, and then, while both were standing the water was dipped in the hand of one and sprinkled upon the forehead of the other, or whether the entire form of the one baptized disappeared for a moment beneath the surface of the flood, I do not now declare. While I cannot think without deep emotion of the fact that my parents held me in infancy at the baptismal font in the old meeting-house at Somerville, and assumed vows on my behalf, I must tell you now of another mode of baptism observed in the river Jordan, on that afternoon in December, the particulars of which I now for the first time relate. It was a scene of unimaginable solemnity. A comrade in my Holy Land journey rode up by my side that day, and told me that a young man, who is now in the Gospel ministry, would like to be baptized by me in the river Jordan. I got all the facts I could concerning his earnestness and faith, and, through personal examination, made myself confident he was a worthy candidate. There were among our Arab attendants two robes not unlike those used for American baptisteries, and these we obtained. As we were to have a large group of different nationalities present, I dictated to my daughter a few verses, and had copies enough made to allow all to sing. Our dragoman had a man familiar with the river wade through and across to show the depth and the swiftness of the stream, and the most appropriate place for the ceremony. Then I read from the Bible the accounts of baptisms in that sacred stream, and implored the presence of the Christ on whose head the dove descended at the Jordan. Then, as the candidate and myself stepped into the waters, the people on the banks sang in full and resounding voice:

On Jordan’92s stormy banks I stand

And cast a wistful eye

To Canaan’92s fair and happy land,

Where my possessions lie.

Oh, the transporting, rapturous scene

That rises to my sight!

Sweet fields arrayed in living green,

And rivers of delight.

By this time we had reached the middle of the river. As the candidate sank under the floods and rose again, under a baptism in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, there rushed through our souls a tide of holy emotion such as we shall not probably feel again until we step into the Jordan that divides earth from heaven. Will those waters be deep? Will those tides be strong? No matter, if Jesus steps in with us. Friends on this shore to help us off. Friends on the other shore to help us land. See! They are coming down the hills on the other side to greet us. How well we know their step! How easily we distinguish their voices! From bank to bank we hail them with tears, and they hail us with palm branches. They say to us, ’93Is that you, father? Is that you, mother?’94 and we answer by asking, ’93Is that you, my darling?’94 How near they seem, and how narrow the stream that divides us!

Could we but stand where Moses stood,

And view the landscape o’92er,

Not Jordan’92s stream nor death’92s cold flood

Could fright us from the shore.

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage