“Dear is the Sabbath morn to me,
When village bells awake the day,
And with their holy minstrelsy
Call me from earthly cares away.
“And dear to me the winged hour,
Spent in your hallowed courts,
O Lord, to feel devotion’s soothing power,
And catch the manna of Your Word.
“And dear to me the loud ‘Amen;’
That echoes through the blest abode—
That swells, and sinks, and swells again,
Dies on the ear—but lives to God.
“Often when the world, with iron hand,
Has bound me in its six days’ chain,
This bursts them, like a strong man’s band,
And bade my spirit live again.”
David instructed Zadok to take the Ark of God back into the city. “If the Lord sees fit,” David said, “he will bring me back to see the Ark and the Tabernacle again.” 2 Samuel 15:25
“When I remember these things, I pour out my soul within me: for I had gone with the multitude, I went with them to the house of God, with the voice of joy and praise, with a multitude that kept holy-day.”—Verse 4.
We always commiserate those who have seen better days. Poverty, indeed, under any form, appeals with irresistible power to the sympathies of our better nature. The most heartless and indifferent cannot refuse the tribute of pity to the ragged beggar shivering on the street, or seated in his hovel by the ashes of a spent fire, brooding over a wretched past, with the grim spectral forms of poverty hovering over a miserable future.
Sad, however, as the condition of such may be, the force of habit, in one sense, may have become to that squalid pauper a second nature. He may never have known a more prosperous state. He may have been accustomed from his earliest years to buffet life’s wintry storm. Chill poverty may have rocked his cradle, and ever since sung her crude lullaby over his pallet of straw. Far more is to be pitied the case of those who have sunk from comfort into indigence, around whose early home no bleak winds of adversity ever blew, who were once pillowed in the lap of plenty if not of luxury, but who, by some sudden wave of calamity, have become wrecked on life’s desert shore. If there be one being on God’s earth more to be pitied than another, it is the mother of a once joyous home, turned adrift, in the hour of her widowhood, with her ragged children—forced to beg, from door to door, to escape the jaws of hungry famine—ill disguising, under her heap of squalid rags or her trembling notes of sorrow and despair, the story of brighter days.
Similar is the commiseration we extend (let the shores of this Refuge Island of ours bear testimony) to the hapless patriot or the fallen monarch. These may have been hurled from positions of influence or pinnacles of glory more by their crimes than by their misfortunes. The revolutionary wave that swept them from their country or their thrones may have been a just retribution for misrule; but it is their hour of adversity! They have seen better and more auspicious times. Pity for the fallen knocks, and never knocks in vain, at the heart of a great nation’s sympathies.
Such was David’s position at this time. Denied the sympathy of others, his own soul is filled with recollections of a far different past. The monarch of Israel, the beloved of God, the idol of his people; now a fugitive from his capital—his palace sacked—his crown dishonored—wandering in ignoble exile—a wreck of vanished glory!
But it is not these features of his humiliating fall on which his mind mainly dwells. It is not the thought of his scepter wrested from his grasp—his army in mutiny—his royal residence a den of traitors that fills his soul with most poignant sorrow. He is an exile from the House of God! The joy of his old Sabbaths is for the time suspended and forfeited. No more is the sound of silver trumpets heard summoning the tribes to the new moons and solemn feast-days! No more does he behold, in thought, the slopes of Olivet studded with pilgrim tents or made vocal with “songs in the night!” No more does he see the triumphant procession wending up the hill of Zion—timbrel and pipe and lute and voice celebrating in glad accord the high praises of God—”the singers in front, and the players on instruments behind,”—he himself, harp in hand, (the true father of his people,) leading the jubilant chorus, and Jehovah commanding upon all “the blessing, even life for evermore!”
How changed! To this Sabbath-loving and Sabbath-keeping King nothing but the memory of these remained. “When I remember these things, I pour out my soul within me: for I had gone with the multitude, I went with them to the house of God, with the voice of joy and praise, with a multitude that kept holy-day.”
Jerusalem was the pride and glory of the Jew. Wherever he went, he turned to it as to his best and fondest home. The windows of Daniel’s chamber were “open towards Jerusalem.” With his eye in the direction of the holy city, “he kneeled upon his knees three times a day, and prayed, and gave thanks before his God, as he did aforetime.” (Dan. 6:10.) Jonah was in the strangest of prisons. “The depths closed round about him, the weeds were wrapped about his head, and the earth with its iron bars.” From “the belly of hell” he sent up his cry to God. “I am cast out of your sight, yet I will look again toward your HOLY TEMPLE.” (Jonah 2:2.) Captive Israel are seated, in mute despondency, by the willowed banks of the streams of Babylon. The Euphrates (an ocean river compared with the tiny streams of Palestine) rolled past them. The city of the hundred gates rose, like a dream of giant glory, before their view, with its colossal walls, and towers, and hanging gardens. Yet what were they in the eyes of these exile spectators? Shadows of greatness in comparison with the city and temple of their fathers amid the hills of Judah! When their oppressors demanded of them a Hebrew melody, saying, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion,” they answered, through hot tears of sorrowful remembrance, “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” (Ps. 137:4.) So it was with David now. As a bird taken from its home in the forest and placed in a cage, refuses to warble a joyous note—beats its plumage against the enclosing bars, and struggles to get free—so he seems to long for wings that he may flee away to the hallowed eaves of the sanctuary, and be at rest!
He himself, indeed, uses a similar figure. He tells us, in another Psalm, written on this same occasion, that so blessed did he feel those to be who enjoyed the privilege of “dwelling in God’s house,” and so ardent was his longing to participate in their joy, that he half-envied the swallows who constructed their nests upon its roof. (Psalm 84.) He was not without his solaces in this season of reverse and calamity. He had many faithful adherents still clinging to him in his adversity. The best and bravest chieftains from the tribes on the other side of the Jordan supplied his drooping followers with the produce of their rich pasture lands. “When David arrived at Mahanaim, he was warmly greeted by Shobi son of Nahash of Rabbah, an Ammonite, and by Makir son of Ammiel of Lo-debar, and by Barzillai the Gileadite from Rogelim. They brought sleeping mats, cooking pots, serving bowls, wheat and barley flour, roasted grain, beans, lentils, honey, butter, sheep, and cheese for David and those who were with him. For they said, “You must all be very tired and hungry and thirsty after your long march through the wilderness.” (2 Samuel 17:27-29.)
Glorious, too, was Nature’s temple around him. Its pillars the mountains—the rocks its altar—the balmy air its incense—the range of Lebanon, rising like a holy of holies, with its reverend curtain of mist and cloud, and snowy Hermon towering in solemn grandeur above all, as the very throne of God! Yet what were these compared with JERUSALEM, the place of sacrifice, the resting-place of the Shekinah-glory, the city of solemnities, “where the tribes go up, the tribes of the Lord, unto the testimony of Israel, to give thanks unto the name of the Lord?” (Ps. 122:4.)
This wounded Deer pants for the water-brooks of Zion; Nature’s outer sanctuary had no glory to him, “by reason of the glory that excels.” The God who dwells between the cherubim had “chosen Zion, and desired it for His habitation,” saying, “This is my rest forever: here will I dwell; for I have desired it.” (Ps. 132:13,14.) With the windows of his soul, like Daniel, thrown “open towards Jerusalem,” and his inner eye wistfully straining to its sunny heights, his ear catching the cadence of its festive throng, he seems to say, “If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember you, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.” (Ps. 137:5, 6.)
Do we prize the blessing of our Sabbaths and our sanctuaries? can we say, with somewhat of the emphasis of this expatriated King—“ONE thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in His temple?” Alas! when we are living in the enjoyment of blessings, too true it is that we have seldom a vivid sense of their value. He who is born in a free country, to whom slavery and oppression are strange words, seldom realizes the priceless boon of liberty. But let him suddenly be made the victim of tyrant thraldom; let him feel the irons loading his body, or the worse than material shackles fettering liberty of thought and action, and how will the strains of freedom fall like heavenly music on his ear! When we are in the enjoyment of health and strength, how little do we prize the boon. But let us be laid on a bed of languishing; let the sick lamp flicker for weeks by the sleepless pillow; let the frame be so shattered that even the light tread of loving footsteps across the room quickens the beat of the throbbing brow. In waking visions of these lonely night-watches, how does the day of elastic vigor and unbroken health rise before us! how do we reproach ourselves that the boon was so long ungratefully forgotten and unworthily requited! A parent little knows the strength of the tie which binds him to his child during the brief loan of a loved existence. He gets habituated to the winning ways, and loving words, and constant companionship. He comes to regard that little life as part of himself. He does not fully realize the blessing, because he has never dreamt of the possibility of its removal. But when the startling blow comes—when death, in an unexpected moment, has severed the tie—when his eye lights on the empty chair or the unused toy, when the joyous footfall and artless prattling are heard no more—then comes he to gauge all the depth and intensity of his affection, and to feel how tenderly (too tenderly!) that idol was enshrined in his heart of hearts!
So it is with religious privileges. In such a land as our own, in which, from our earliest infancy, we have been accustomed to a hallowed Sabbath, an open sanctuary, an unclasped and unforbidden Bible, we do not fully estimate the priceless value of the spiritual blessings bequeathed to us, because never have we felt the loss or the lack of them. But go to some land of heathenism, where the exiled child of a British Christian home finds neither minister nor House of God. Go to the thousands who have betaken themselves to a voluntary exile amid American forests or Australian pastures. Or go to the lands of apostate Christendom, where the Bible is a sealed book, and religious liberty is an empty name; where souls thirsting for the living stream are compelled to drink from some adulterated cistern. Alas! many in such circumstances are content to sink into a listless indifference; cold and lukewarm at home, they are too ready to lapse into the chill of spiritual death abroad. But there are others who have not so readily obliterated the holiest records of the past. Ask many tired and jaded emigrants, conscious of nobler aspirations than this world can meet, what recollections, more hallowed than others, linger on their spirits? They will tell you it is the memory of the Sabbath rest and the Sabbath sanctuary, when, at the summons of the village bell, mountain and glen and hamlet poured forth their multitudes to the house of God; seated wherein, the burdens and anxieties, the cares and disquietudes of the work-day world were hushed and set aside, and in listening to the words of everlasting life, sorrows were soothed, faith was revived, and hope brightened. “O God,” their cry is, “our flesh longs for you in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is; to see Your power and Your glory, so as we have seen You in the sanctuary.” (Psalm 63:1, 2.)
Let us seek to prize our means of grace while we have them. In a country which is the reputed citadel of liberty—where the greatest of all liberty, the liberty of the truth, has been purchased by the blood of our fathers, the time, we trust, with God’s help, may never come when these bulwarks will be overthrown—when our sanctuaries will be closed—our Bibles proscribed—our Sabbaths blotted from the statute-book—and bigotry, in league with rampant infidelity, again forge the chain and rear the dungeon.
But remember, that protracted sickness or disease may at any time overtake us, and debar us from the precious blessings of the public sanctuary. Yes! I say the public sanctuary. God’s appointed ordinances can never be superseded or rendered obsolete by human substitutes. Some may urge that books nowadays are better than any preaching—that the press is more potent and eloquent than any living voice. But church or pulpit is not a thing of man’s device. It is a divine institute. The speaker is an ambassador in his Master’s name, charged with a vast mission from the court of high heaven, and the House of God is the appointed audience-chamber. God does not, indeed, (no, far from it,) forsake “the dwellings of Jacob.” The lowliest cottage-home may become a Bethel, with a ladder of love set between earth and heaven, traversed by ministering angels! The secluded sick-chamber may become a Patmos, bright with manifestations of the Redeemer’s presence and grace! But, nevertheless, “Your way, O God, is in the sanctuary.” The promise remains, “I will make my people joyful in my house of prayer.” It is the solemn “meeting-place”—the pledged ground of covenant intercommunion. “THERE I will meet with you, and commune with you from off my mercy-seat!” “The Lord loves the gates of Zion!” “How goodly are your tents, O Jacob, and your tabernacles, O Israel!” (Ex. 25:22; Psalm 87:2; Numb. 24:5.)
Reader, let me ask, How stands it with you? Are you conscious of a reverential regard and attachment to God’s holy place? Does the return of the Sabbath awake in your heart the old melody of this sweet singer of Israel—“This is the day which the Lord has made; we will rejoice and be glad in it?” (Psalm 118:24.) Do you go to the solemn assembly, not to hear the messenger but the message—not to pay homage to a piece of dust, (the vilest and most degraded form of idolatry,) but feeling yourself a beggar in the sight of God, with a soul to save, and an eternity to provide for? Do you approach it as the place of prayer, over which the cloud hovers laden with spiritual blessings? Do you go to it as “the house of God,” seeking fellowship and communion with the Father of spirits; desiring that all its services—its devotions, and praises, and exhortations—may become hallowed magnets, drawing you nearer and binding you closer to the mercy-seat?
Oh, let not the blessings of Sabbath privileges degenerate into an empty form, the mere pageant of custom. Let the Sabbath hours be sacredly kept. Let their lessons be sacredly treasured. Let their close find you a Sabbath-day’s journey nearer heaven. Let their hallowed fragrance follow you through the week. Let them be landmarks in the pilgrimage; towering behind you the further you go—like Alp piled on Alp, flushed with roseate light, guiding and cheering you when low down in the valleys of trial and sorrow, and when called to descend the last and gloomiest Valley of all.
David is mourning, in the words which have given rise to these thoughts, over his altered Sabbath joys. It may be there are some reading these pages, who, though they know nothing like him of literal exile and banishment from the sanctuary, may yet be able painfully to participate in his feelings! They are seated, Sabbath after Sabbath, in their pews; their Bibles are in their hands—the living words of the preacher are sounding in their ears; but their experience may be best interpreted by the language of the Christian poet—
“Where is the blessedness I knew
When first I saw the Lord?
Where is the soul-refreshing view
Of Jesus and His Word?
“How blest the hours I once enjoyed!
How sweet their memory still!
But they have left an aching void
The world can never fill.”
Memory can travel back on Sabbaths and communion seasons when a sunshine of holy joy irradiated their spirits; when their Sabbath was one hallowed Emmaus journey—they, during its sanctuary-hours, traveling side by side with Jesus, and He causing their hearts, as He did those of the disciples of old, to “burn within them.” They were used to come and depart, saying, “This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven.” Now they feel that all is sorrowfully altered. They have comparatively no joy, as once they had, when the Sabbath morning dawns. When they seat themselves in church, there is no fervor in their praises—no earnestness in their prayers—no childlike teachableness in hearing. There is more criticizing of the preacher than worshiping God. There is no living flame on the heart-altar; their befitting exclamation is that of the prophet, “My leanness! my leanness!” They are ready, in the bitterness of their spirits, to say, “When I remember these things, my soul is poured out within me.”
Sad it is to have no food; but sad, too, when we have food and cannot enjoy it! Sad it is, as exiles in a strange land, to have no Sabbath-gates flung open to us, and no Sabbath-bells to welcome the day of God; but sadder still to have these solemn chimes within hearing—to have our sanctuaries open, and faithful ministers proclaiming the words of eternal life, and yet to listen with the adder’s ear—to listen as the dead in our churchyards listen to the tears and laments of the living!
What should be done in such a case as this? Trace the muddy and turgid stream to its source. Discover what earthly clouds are dimming the spiritual skies, and hiding the shinings of the Divine countenance. Sin, in some shape or other, must be the noxious cause. It may be some positive and persevered-in transgression; indulgence in which, shuts up the avenues of prayer, and denies all access to the mercy-seat. Or it may be some no less culpable sin of omission. That mercy-seat may have become unfrequented; the overgrown grass may be waving over its once beaten foot-road; the altar-fire languishing in the closet, must necessarily languish in the sanctuary too. How can the House of God be now fragrant with blessing, if the life is spent in guilty estrangement from Him? Religion cannot be worn as a Sabbath garment, if garments soiled with sin be worn throughout the week.
Self-exile from the joys of the sanctuary! return henceforth to God. If it be positive sin which is marring former blessedness, cast out the troubler in Israel. If it be duties omitted, or perfunctorily discharged, return to former earnest-mindedness. Cultivate more filial nearness to the Hearer of prayer. Seek, on your bended knees, to obtain more tenderness of conscience regarding sin—to have more longing aspirations after the beauties of holiness.
And delay not the return. By doing so, the growing languor and listlessness which is creeping over you, may settle into positive disrelish of God’s house. Imitate the example of the Spouse in the Canticles, who, in mourning over similar spiritual declension, resolves on an instantaneous seeking of the forfeited presence of her Lord. “Tell me, O you whom my soul loves, where you feed, where you make your flock to rest at noon: for why should I be as one that turns aside by the flocks of your companions?” (Song. 1:7.) Go with the words which this exile of Gilead employs in the sequel to this Psalm, written on the same occasion—“O send out Your light and Your truth: let them lead me; let them bring me unto Your holy hill, and to Your tabernacles. Then will I go unto the altar of God, unto God my exceeding joy.” (Psalm 43:3, 4.)
Yes! go, and prove what the God of the sanctuary can do in the fulfillment of His own promise. He seems now to be saying, “Put me to the test.” “Prove me now herewith, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it.” (Mal. 3:10.) Every church is a Peniel, where God meets His people, as He met the patriarch of old at the brook Jabbok. Go and see what may be effected by one lowly, humble, seeking soul—some wrestling Jacob, who, like “a Prince,” has “power with God, and prevails!” The lowliest tabernacle on earth is glorified as being the House of God—the dwelling-place of Omnipotence and Love—the hallowed “home,” where a loving Father waits to dispense to His children the garnered riches of His grace! The time may come when the holy and beautiful sanctuary where we worship may become a heap of ruins. The fire may lay it in ashes—the hand of man may demolish it—the slower but surer hand of time may corrode its walls and crumble its solid masonry stone by stone; but as sure as it is God’s own appointed treasure-house of spiritual mercies, may we not believe that there will be deathless spirits who will be able to point to it in connection with imperishable memories, “buildings of God,” “eternal in the heavens,” beyond the reach of human violence, and wasting elements, and corroding years! Does not the promise stand unrepealed in this Bible—let it ever be the inscription on our temples of worship,”—“Of ZION it shall be said, This and that man was born in her; and the Highest himself shall establish her. The Lord shall count, when He writes up the people, that this man was born there.” (Psalm 87:5, 6.)
Oh that ours may at last be the blessedness of that better Church above, which knows no banishment, no exile, no languor, no weariness—where “the holy-day” is an eternal Sabbath—the festive throng, “a multitude which no man can number”—the voice of joy and praise, “everlasting songs;”—where God’s absence can never be deplored—where He who now tends His temple-lamps on earth, feeding them day by day with the oil of His grace, removing the rust perpetually gathering over them by reason of their contact with sin, will, with the plenitude of His own presence, supersede all earthly luminaries, and ordinances, and sanctuaries—for “they need no candle, neither light of the sun, for the Lord God gives them light, and they shall reign forever and ever!”
