Joseph Cross
Old Wine and New: Occasional Discourses
Published by Good Press, 2019
EAN 4064066141226
Table of Contents
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Would to Heaven we might all thus feel our guilt, and haste to the shelter of the divine mercy! Sinners—great sinners—are we all. Is there one of us that has not sinned more deeply than David ever did? And, instead of being an exceptional act, our sin has been the habit of our lives. Justice, with double-flaming sword, is hard upon our heels. What shall we do, or whither turn, for safety? To thee, O Crucified Love! we come; and, with broken hearts, cast ourselves down at thy feet. All other saviours we renounce: all other merits we disclaim; all other sacrifices we abjure. Thou of God art made unto us wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption. Perishing, we implore thy mercy. Take us to the arms that were stretched upon the cross. Hide us in the heart that was opened by the soldier's spear. When we faint in the valley of the shadow of death, let us feel the assuring pressure of the nail-pierced hand. When the heavens are flaming above and the earth is dissolving beneath, "be thou our strong rock, for a house of defence to save us"!
[1] Preached in Ithaca, N.Y., 1838.
[2] Ps. lxix. 1–4, 19, 20.
[3] Ps. lv. 2–8.
[4] Ps. vii. 1, 2.
[5] xvii. 7, 8.
[6] xxxv. 1–3.
[7] Ps. xxxvii, 7, 8, 10.
[8] Ps. lxix. 14–17.
[9] Ps. li. 1–4, 7–14.
V.
PARENTAL DISCIPLINE.[1]
His sons made themselves vile, and he restrained them not.—1 Sam. iii. 13.
Few things in the Bible are more beautiful than the child-life of Samuel. A gift of the loving God to a devout but sorrowful woman, his mother gladly gave him back to the Giver, and he ministered before the Lord in the sanctuary at Shiloh. At that time Eli was both high-priest and magistrate in Israel. As a man of God, and to him much more than a father, Samuel seems to have loved him very tenderly and honored him very highly. To ease himself somewhat of his onerous duties, perhaps, Eli had raised his two sons, Hophni and Phinehas, to the dignity of the priesthood. In the exercise of their sacred trust, the young men had committed great excesses and abuses. From all sides the fact came to the ears of their father. Sweetly and gently he remonstrated with the offenders, but neglected to hold them back with the strong hand of parental authority. Probably from the first there had been some radical defect in the moral discipline of the family. An amiable and indulgent father, Eli had neglected the severer duty which his sacred office, even more than his paternal relation, imposed upon him. To make him sensible of his great delinquency, the guilt of his sons must be brought home upon his hoary head.
"Divinely called and strongly moved,
A prophet from a child approved,"
Samuel is commissioned to announce to him the heavy tidings, that God will judge his house forever, because "his sons made themselves vile, and he restrained them not."
In the outset, we cannot help observing the difference between the sons of Eli and his little ward. Samuel received his first lessons from the lips of a godly mother in the quiet home at Ramah. From his earliest consciousness he knew that he was to be a Nazarite, consecrated wholly to the service of Jehovah. His special training afterward in the house of the Lord was well adapted to fit him for the grand career before him. The gross misconduct of some who ought to have set him the best example must have wounded deeply his innocent heart, while it impressed him strongly with the deadly evil of sin and the mischief resulting inevitably from the relaxation of morals among the rulers of the people and the ministers of religion. Growing up in daily contact with the mysteries and symbols of the divine service, the sacred ritual which was to Hophni and Phinehas merely an empty form was to him replete with the spirit and power of holiness, elevating his thoughts, purifying his feelings, and moulding his whole character to its noble design. The names and things with which he was constantly occupied conformed him gradually but unalterably to God's gracious purpose, and made him the steadfast and uncompromising servant of the Most High—the man to reprove, rebuke, exhort, instruct the people—to retrieve losses, restore justice, reform abuses, assuage excitements, reduce chaos to order, establish the schools of the prophets, and wield a controlling power over the throne. Such a ministry required a character of steady growth, and the personal influence of a consistent and holy life. None of your modern revivals could ever have made a Samuel.
True it is, indeed, that some of God's most eminent servants—as St. Paul and St. Augustine—were converted in manhood, after a wasted youth of sin and crime; yet such instances are no real exceptions to the rule, that God directs the training of his servants from childhood, shaping his instruments by every act of his providence. St. Paul was thoroughly educated in the rabbinical learning of his day, and well acquainted with Greek literature and Greek philosophy, and so far prepared for his Christian apostleship to both Jews and Gentiles; and the logical and rhetorical studies of St. Augustine unconsciously made him the great Christian dialectician that he was, while the sensual indulgences of his earlier years intensified his knowledge both of the power of sin and the efficacy of divine grace which he was to preach to others. Generally, the Lord's most honored servants, like Samuel, have been chosen from their childhood, and nourished up for their special ministry under the hallowed influence of his truth and worship. Some of them, it is true, were afterward for a while occupied in other callings, before they went to their divinely appointed labor. Moses was a shepherd in the very wilderness through which he was to lead the Lord's beloved, and on the very mountain where he was to receive for them a law from the lips of God. David also was a shepherd, and a musician, and a warrior, and a fugitive, and an outcast from his country; and by all these conditions and experiences was he trained for his future pre-eminence, as the king of Israel, and the psalmist of the sanctuary, and the man after God's own heart. And Chrysostom was a lawyer, and Ambrose was a civilian and a prefect, and Cyprian was a professor of rhetoric, before they entered upon their nobler life-work for Christ and the Church. In all these cases, to which many others might be added, God's good providence wisely ordered the discipline of his servants, through knowledge, and sorrow, and conflict, and a great variety of experiences, out of which were developed those characters and qualities which were essential to their success in the high calling for which they were designed. And so with the holy Baptist, chosen to be the immediate harbinger of the Messiah; and the Galilæan fishermen, whom he afterward ordained as his apostles; and Timothy, appointed the first bishop of Ephesus; and Luther, the destined sword of Heaven to Papal Rome. And so it was with Samuel, from his very birth consecrated to God, growing up in the house of the Lord, becoming the prophet and judge of his people, the invincible champion of truth and righteousness; with such heroic energy maintaining the authority of the divine law, rebuking iniquity in high places, withstanding the current of the national degeneracy, and like an angel of God pronouncing the doom of a fallen monarch, that "all Israel even from Dan to Beersheba knew that Samuel was established to be a prophet of the Lord."
To return to Eli and his sons. The father's fault seems to have been too