281. The Bare Arm of God

The Bare Arm of God

Isa_52:10 : ’93The Lord hath made bare his holy arm.’94

It almost takes our breath away to read some of the Bible imagery. There is such boldness of metaphor in my text that I have been for some time getting my courage up to preach from it. Isaiah, the evangelistic prophet, is sounding the jubilate of our planet redeemed, and cries out, ’93The Lord hath made bare his holy arm.’94 What overwhelming suggestiveness in that figure of speech, ’93the bare arm of God!’94 The people of Palestine to this day wear much hindering apparel, and when they want to run a special race or lift a special burden or fight a special battle, they put off the outside apparel, as in our land when a man proposes a special exertion he puts off his coat and rolls up his sleeves. Walk through our foundries, our machine-shops, our mines, our factories, and you will find that most of the toilers have their coats off and their sleeves rolled up.

Isaiah saw that there must be a tremendous amount of work done before this world becomes what it ought to be, and he foresees it all accomplished, and accomplished by the Almighty; not as we ordinarily think of him, but by the Almighty with the sleeve of his robe rolled back to his shoulder: ’93The Lord hath made bare his holy arm.’94

Nothing more impresses me in the Bible than the ease with which God does most things. There is such a reserve of power. He has more thunderbolts than he has ever flung; more light than he has ever distributed; more blue than that with which he has over-arched the sky; more green than that with which he has emeralded the grass; more crimson than that with which he has burnished the sunsets. I say it with reverence: from all I can see, God has never half tried.

You know as well as I do that many of the most elaborate and expensive industries of our world have been employed in creating artificial light. Half of the time the world is dark. The moon and the stars have their glorious uses, but as instruments of illumination they are failures. They will not give you light enough to read a book, or stop the ruffianism of your great cities. Had not the darkness been persistently fought back by artificial means, the most of the world’92s enterprises would have halted half the time, while the crime of our great municipalities would for half the time have run rampant and unrebuked. Hence, all the inventions for creating artificial light, from the flint struck against steel in centuries past, to the dynamo of our electrical manufactories. What uncounted numbers of people at work the year round in making chandeliers, lamps and fixtures and wires and batteries where light shall be made or along which light shall run or where light shall poise! How many bare arms of human toil’97and some of those bare arms are very tired’97in the creation of light and its apparatus; and after all the work, the greater part of the continents and hemispheres at night have no light at all, except perhaps the fireflies flashing their small lanterns across the swamp. But see how easily God made the light. He did not make bare his arm; he did not even put forth his robed arm; he did not lift so much as a finger. The flint out of which he struck the noonday sun was the word, ’93Light.’94 ’93Let there be light!’94 Nature did not see the sun until the fourth day, for, though light was created on the first day, the sun’92s rays were first seen on the fourth day penetrating the dense mass of fluids by which this earth was compassed. Did you ever hear of anything so easy as that? Out of a word came light, to be concentrated in the blaring sun, the father of flowers and warmth. Out of a word building a fireplace for all nations of earth to warm themselves by! Yea, seven other worlds; five of them inconceivably larger than our own, and seventy-nine asteroids, or worlds on a smaller scale! The warmth and light for this great brotherhood, great sisterhood, great family of worlds, eighty-seven larger or smaller worlds, all from that one magnificent fireplace made out of the one word’97’94Light.’94 The sun eight hundred and eighty-six thousand miles in diameter. I do not know how much grander a solar system God could have created if he had put forth his robed arm, to say nothing of an arm made bare! But this I know: that our noonday sun was a: spark struck from the anvil of one word, and that word’97’94Light.’94

’93But,’94 says some one, ’93do you not think that in making the machinery of the universe, of which our solar system is comparatively a small wheel working into mightier wheels, it must have cost God some exertion? The upheaval of an arm, either robed, or an arm made bare?’94 No; we are distinctly told otherwise. The machinery of a universe God made simply with his fingers. David, inspired in a night song, says so: ’93When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers.’94

A Scottish clergyman once told me of dyspeptic Thomas Carlyle walking out with a friend one starry night, and as the friend looked up and said: ’93What a splendid sky!’94 Mr. Carlyle replied, as he glanced upward: ’93Sad sight, sad sight!’94 Not so thought David as he read the great Scripture of the night heavens. It was a sweep of embroidery, of vast tapestry, God manipulated. That is the allusion of the Psalmist to the woven hangings of tapestry, as they were known long before David’92s time. Far back in the ages what enchantment of thread and color, the velvets of silk and gold and Persian carpets woven of goats’92 hair! If you have been in the Gobelin manufactory of tapestry in Paris’97alas! now no more’97you witnessed wondrous things; as you saw the wooden needle or broach, going back and forth and in and out, you were transfixed with admiration at the patterns wrought. No wonder that Louis XIV bought it and it became the possession of the throne; and for a long while none but thrones and palaces might have any of its work! What triumphs of loom! What victory of skilled fingers! So David says of the heavens, that God’92s fingers wove into them the light; that God’92s fingers tapestried them with stars; that God’92s fingers embroidered them with worlds.

How much of the immensity of the heavens David understood, I know not. Astronomy was born in China twenty-eight hundred years before Christ was born. During the reign of Hoang-Ti, astronomers were put to death if they made wrong calculations about the heavens. Job understood the refraction of the sun’92s rays, and said they were ’93turned as the clay to the seal.’94 The pyramids were astronomical observatories, and they were built so long ago that Isaiah refers to one of them in his nineteenth chapter, and calls it the ’93Pillar at the border.’94 The first of all the sciences born was astronomy. Whether from knowledge already abroad, or from direct inspiration, it seems to me David had wide knowledge of the heavens. Whether he understood the full force of what he wrote, I know not; but the God who inspired him knew, and he would not let David write anything but truth; and therefore all the worlds that the telescope ever reached, or Copernicus or Galileo, or Kepler or Newton or Laplace or Herschel or our own Mitchell ever saw were so easily made that they were made with the fingers. As easily as with your fingers you mold the wax or the clay or the dough to particular shapes, so the Creator decided the shape of our world, and appointed for all worlds their orbits and their color’97the white to Sirius; the ruddy to Aldebaran; the yellow to Pollux; the blue to Altair’97marrying some of the stars, as the twenty-four hundred double stars that Herschel saw; administering to the whims of the variable stars as their glance becomes brighter or dim, preparing what astronomers called ’93The girdle of Andromeda,’94 and the nebula in the sword-handle of Orion. Worlds on worlds! Worlds under worlds! Worlds above worlds! Worlds beyond worlds! So many that arithmetics are of no use in the calculation! But he counted them as he made them, and he made them with his fingers! Reservation of power! Suppression of Omnipotence! Resources as yet untouched! Almightiness yet undemonstrated! Now I ask, for the benefit of all disheartened Christian workers, if God accomplished so much with his fingers, what can he do when he puts out all his strength, and when he unlimbers all the batteries of his Omnipotence? The Bible speaks again and again of God’92s outstretched arm; but only once, and that in the text, of the bare arm of God.

My text makes it plain that the rectification of this world is a stupendous undertaking. It takes more power to make this world over again than it took to make it at the first. A word was only necessary for the first creation, but for the new creation the unsleeved and unhindered forearm of the Almighty! The reason of that I can understand. ’91In the shipyards of Liverpool or Glasgow or New York a great vessel is constructed. The architect draws out the plan, the length of the beam, the capacity of tonnage, the rotation of wheel or screw, the cabins, the masts, and all appointments of this great palace of the deep. The architect finishes his work without any perplexity, and the carpenters and the artisans toil on the craft so many hours a day, each one doing his part, until, with flags flying and thousands of people huzzaing on the docks, the vessel is launched. But out on the sea that steamer breaks her shaft, and is limping slowly along toward harbor, when Caribbean whirlwinds’97those mighty hunters of the deep, looking out for prey of ships’97surround that wounded vessel and pitch it on a rocky coast, and she lifts and falls in the breakers until every joint is loose and every spar is down and every wave sweeps over the hurricane deck as she parts midships. Would it not require more skill and power to get that splintered vessel off the rocks and reconstruct her than it required originally to build her? Ay! Our world that God built so beautiful, and which started out with all the flags of Edenic foliage and with the chant of Paradisaical bowers, has been sixty centuries pounding in the Skerries of sin and sorrow, and to get her out and to get her off and to get her on the right way again, will require more of Omnipotence than it required to build her and launch her. So I am not surprised that though in the dry-dock of one word our world was made, it will take the unsleeved arm of God to lift her from the rocks and put her on the right course again. It is evident from my text, and its comparison with other texts, that it would not be so great an undertaking to make a whole constellation of worlds and a whole galaxy of worlds and a whole astronomy of worlds, and swing them in their right orbits, as to take this wounded world, this stranded world, this bankrupt world, this destroyed world and make it as good as when it started.

Now, just look at the enthroned difficulties in the way, the removal or overthrow of which seems to require the bare right arm of Omnipotence. There stands heathenism, with its eight hundred and sixty million victims. I do not care whether you call them Brahmins or Buddhists, Confucians or Fetish idolaters. At the World’92s Fair in Chicago those monstrosities of religion tried to make themselves respectable, but the long hair and baggy trousers and trinketed robes of their representatives cannot hide from the world the fact that those religions are the authors of funeral pyre and Juggernaut crushing and Ganges infanticide and Chinese shoe torture and the aggregated massacres of many centuries. They have their heels on India, on China, on Persia, on Borneo, on three-fourths of the acreage of our poor old world. I know that the missionaries, who are the most sacrificing and Christlike men and women on earth, are making steady and glorious inroads upon these built-up abominations of the centuries. All this stuff that you see in some of the newspapers about the missionaries as living in luxury and idleness is promulgated by corrupt American or English, or Scotch merchants, whose ungodly behavior in heathen cities has been rebuked by the missionaries; and these corrupt merchants write home or tell innocent and unsuspecting visitors in India or China or the darkened islands of the sea, these falsehoods about our consecrated missionaries, who, turning their backs on home and civilization and emolument and comfort, spend their lives in trying to introduce the principles of the Gospel among the down-trodden of heathenism. Some of those merchants leave their families in America or England or Scotland and stay for a few years in the ports of heathenism while they are making their fortunes in the tea or rice or opium trade; and while they are thus absent from home, give themselves to orgies of dissoluteness, such as no pen or tongue could, without the abolition of decency, attempt to report. The presence of the missionaries with their pure and noble households, in those heathen ports, is a constant rebuke to such debauchees and miscreants. If Satan should visit heaven’97from which he was once roughly, but justly expelled’97and should write home to the realms Pandemoniac, his correspondence published in Diabolos Gazette, or Apollyonic News, about what he had seen, he would report the Temple of God and the Lamb as a broken-down church, and the House of Many Mansions as a disreputable place, and the Cherubim as of doubtful morals. Sin never did like holiness, and you had better not depend upon satanic report of the sublime and beneficent work of our missionaries in foreign lands. But notwithstanding all that these men and women of God have achieved, they feel, and we all feel, that if the idolatrous lands are to be Christianized, there needs to be a power from the heavens that has not yet been exerted; and we feel like crying out in the words of Charles Wesley:

Arm of the Lord, awake, awake,

Put on thy strength, the nations shake!

Ay, it is not only the Lord’92s arm that is, needed, the holy arm, the outstretched arm, but the bare arm!

There, too, stands Mohammedanism, with its one hundred and seventy-six million victims. Its Bible is the Koran, a book not quite so large as our New Testament, which, according to his story, was revealed to Mohammed when in epileptic fits, and dictated to scribes when he was resuscitated from these fits. Yet it is read today by more people than any other book ever written, except the Bible. Mohammed, the founder of that religion, a polygamist, with superfluity of wives, the first step of his religion on the body, mind, and soul of woman; and no wonder that the heaven of the Koran is an infinite seraglio, about which Mohammed promises that each follower shall have in that place seventy-two wives, in addition to all the wives he had on earth, but that no old woman shall ever enter heaven. When a bishop of England recently proposed that the best way of saving Mohammedans was to let them keep their religion, but engraft upon it some new principles from Christianity, he perpetrated an ecclesiastical joke, at which no man can laugh who has ever seen the tyranny and domestic wretchedness which always appear where the Mohammedan religion gets foothold. It has marched across continents, and now proposes to set up its filthy and accursed banner in America, and what it has done for Turkey, it would like to do for our nation. A religion that brutally treats womanhood ought never to be tolerated in our country. But there never was a religion so absurd or wicked that it did not get disciples, and there are enough fools in America to make a large discipleship of Mohammedanism. This corrupt religion has been making steady progress for hundreds of years; and notwithstanding all the splendid work done by the Jessups and the Goodells and the Blisses and the Van Dykes and the Posts and the Misses Bowen and the Misses Thompson and scores of other men and women of whom the world was not worthy, there it stands, the giant of sin, Mohammedanism, with one foot on the heart of woman, and the other on the heart of Christ, while it mumbles from its minarets this stupendous blasphemy: ’93God is great, and Mohammed is his prophet.’94 Let the Christian printing-presses at Beyrout and Constantinople keep on with their work, and the men and women of God in the mission fields toil until the Lord crowns them; but what we are all hoping for is something supernatural from the heavens, as yet unseen, something stretched down out of the skies, something like an arm uncovered, the bare arm of the God of Nations!

There stands also the Archdemon of alcoholism. Its throne is white, and made of bleached human skulls. On one side of that throne of skulls kneels in obeisance and worship, Democracy, and on the other side Republicanism; and the one that oftenest kisses the cancerous and gangrened foot of this despot gets the most benedictions. There is a Hudson river, an Ohio, a Mississippi of strong drink rolling through this nation; but as the rivers from which I take my figure of speech empty into the Atlantic or the Gulf, this mightier flood of sickness and insanity and domestic ruin and crime and bankruptcy and woe empties into the hearts and the homes and the churches and the time and the eternity of a multitude beyond all statistics to number or describe. All nations are mauled and scarified with baleful stimulus, or killing narcotic. The pulque of Mexico, the cashew of Brazil, the hasheesh of Persia, the opium of China, the guavo of Honduras, the wedro of Russia, the soma of India, the aguardiente of Morocco, the arak of Arabia, the mastic of Syria, the raki of Turkey, the beer of Germany, the whisky of Scotland, the ale of England, the all-drinks of America, are doing their best to stupefy, inflame, dement, impoverish, brutalize, and slay the human race. Human power, unless re-enforced from the heavens, can never extirpate the evils I mention.

Much good has been accomplished by the heroism and fidelity of Christian reformers, but the fact remains that there are more splendid men and magnificent women this moment going over the Niagara abysm of inebriety than at any time since the first grape was turned into wine, and the first head of rye began to soak in a distillery. When people touch this subject they are apt to give statistics as to how many millions are in drunkards’92 graves, or with quick tread marching on toward them. The land has been full of talk of high tariff and low tariff, but what about the highest of all tariffs in this country, the tariff of nine hundred million dollars which Rum put upon the United States in 1891; for that is what it cost us. You do not tremble or turn pale when I say that. The fact is we have become hardened by statistics and they make little impression. But if some one could gather into one mighty lake all the tears that have been wrung out of orphanage and widowhood; or into one organ diapason all the groans that have been uttered by the suffering victims of this holocaust; or into one whirlwind all the sighs of centuries of dissipation; or from the wicket of one immense prison have look upon us the glaring eyes of all those whom strong drink has endungeoned, we might, perhaps, realize the appalling desolation. But, no, no, the sight would forever extinguish our vision; the sound would forever stun our souls. Go on with your temperance literature; go on with your temperance platforms; go on with your temperance laws. But we are all hoping for something from above; and while the bare arm of suffering, and the bare arm of invalidism, and the bare arm of poverty, and the bare arm of domestic desolation, from which Rum hath torn the sleeve, are lifted up in beggary and supplication and despair, let the bare arm of God strike the distilleries and the breweries and the liquor stores and the corrupt politics and the license laws and the whole inferno of grogshops all around the world! Down, thou accursed Bottle, from the Throne! Into the dust, thou king of the Demijohn! Parched be thy lips, thou Wine cup, with fires that shall never be quenched!

But I have no time to specify the manifold evils that antagonize Christianity. And I think I have seen in some Christians and read in some newspapers and heard from some pulpits, a disheartenment, as though Christianity were so worsted that it is hardly worth while to attempt to win this world for God, and that all Christian work would collapse, and that it is no use for you to teach a Sabbath-class or distribute tracts or exhort in prayer-meeting or preach in a pulpit, as Satan is gaining ground. To rebuke that pessimism, the Gospel of Smashup, I preach this sermon, showing that you are on the winning side. Go ahead! Fight on! What I want to demonstrate today is that our ammunition is not exhausted; that all which has been accomplished has been only the skirmishing before the great Armageddon; that not more than one of the thousand fountains of beauty in the King’92s Park has begun to play; that not more than one brigade of the innumerable hosts to be marshaled by the Rider on the White Horse has yet taken the field; that what God has done yet has been with arm folded in flowing robe; but that the time is coming when he will rise from his throne and throw off that robe and come out of the palaces of eternity and come down the stairs of heaven with all-conquering step and halt in the presence of expectant nations, and, flashing his omniscient eyes across the work to be done, will put back the sleeve of his right arm to the shoulder and roll it up there and for the world’92s final and complete rescue make bare his arm. Who can doubt the result when, according to my text, Jehovah does his utmost; when the last reserve force of Omnipotence takes the field; when the last sword of Eternal Might leaps from its scabbard?

Do you know what decided the battle of Sedan? The hills a thousand feet high. Eleven hundred cannon on the hills. Artillery on the heights of Givonne, and twelve German batteries on the heights of La Moncello. The Crown Prince of Saxony watched the scene from the heights of Mairy. Between a quarter to six o’92clock in the morning and one o’92clock in the afternoon of September 2d, 1870, the hills dropped the shells that shattered the French host in the valley. The French Emperor and the eighty-six thousand of his army captured by the hills. So in this conflict now raging between holiness and sin ’93our eyes are unto the hills.’94 Down here in the valleys of earth we must be valiant soldiers of the Cross, but the Commander of our host walks the heights and views the scene far better than we can in the valleys, and at the right day and the right hour all heaven will open its batteries on our side, and the commander of the hosts of unrighteousness with all his followers will surrender, and it will take eternity to fully celebrate the universal victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. ’93Our eyes are unto the hills.’94

It is so certain to be accomplished that Isaiah in my text looks down through the field-glass of prophecy, and speaks of it as already accomplished; and I take my stand where the prophet took his stand, and look at it as all achieved. ’93Hallelujah, ’91tis done.’94 See! Those cities without a tear! Look! Those continents without a pang! Behold! Those hemispheres without a sin! Why, those deserts, Arabian desert, American desert, and Great Sahara desert, are all irrigated into gardens where God walks in the cool of the day. The atmosphere that encircles our globe transmitting not one groan. All the rivers and lakes and oceans dimpled with not one falling tear. The climates of the earth have dropped out of them the rigors of the cold and the blasts of the heat, and it is universal Spring! Let us change the old world’92s name. Let it no more be called the Earth, as when it was reeking with everything pestiferous and malevolent, scarleted with battle-fields and gashed with graves; but now so changed, so aromatic with gardens and so resonant with song and so rubescent with beauty, let us call it Immanuel’92s Land or Beulah or Millennial Gardens or Paradise Regained or Heaven! And to God, the only Wise, the only Good, the only Great, be glory forever. Amen.

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage