1. For seventeen years more Jacob lived an old age serene and bright, within a fertile land. The sunset is the fairest time of rainy days, the calmest of tempestuous ones; and Jacob's sunset life was so fair and calm that the memory of all his storm but enhanced his peace. It is a pleasant picture to dwell on: the old man outliving his last years in a stillness broken only by the visits of his children, honoured of Pharaoh, at peace with his household, watching the swift growth of his race in the pastoral life in Goshen, basking in the sunshine of those rainless skies.
As he draws nearer to his end, the halo round his withered brow glows with yet brighter colours. The sorrows of the past are a departing vision; the bitter breaking up of his life from the tent of Isaac and the companionship of his mother; the cruel treachery of Laban; the loss of Rachel, the well-beloved wife; the quarrels and the scandals of his family-all, one by one, melt away in the distance. The one remaining and ever-increasing idea of that life is the presence of God with it; the vision before his going down into Egypt gradually expands over and covers the canvas; other voices die away; this only he hears-“I am God, the God of thy father; fear not … I will go down with thee into Egypt.”
We were with the Rasūl on a journey, and some men stood up repeating aloud, “God is most great”; and the Rasūl said, “O men! be easy on yourselves, and do not distress yourselves by raising your voices; verily you do not call to one deaf or absent, but verily to one who heareth and seeth; and He is with you; and He to whom you pray is nearer to you than the neck of your! camel.”1 [Note: The Sayings of Muhammad (ed. Al-Suhrawardy), 116.]
Is God's presence a practical power in our lives? Does it ever try a fall with some strong sin and come off conqueror? Is it a principle of life for us? Does it come into our calculations and rule our estimate of things? Does it rise within us ever like a fountain of fresh force when we find ourselves near one in need of help? Does it sometimes surprise us with its suddenness of assistance, its strange opportunity of aid? Does it fill our future for us? Is life for us a growing experience of getting to know God? Does His presence subdue our hopes and pacify our fears? Does it rule our action towards others? Does it ever lower the lifted arm or arrest the hasty judgment? Is God's will a reality? Does our will ever give way to it? Are we seeing our lives grow like it? Are we getting clearer and clearer sights of it, and more and more strength to do it, when it is seen?2 [Note: R. W. Barbour, Thoughts, 76.]
2. Then “the time drew nigh that Israel must die”; and his one thought, oftentimes repeated, was that his bones should not rest in that strange land; not in pyramid or painted chamber, but in the cell that he “had digged for himself,” in the primitive sepulchre of his fathers. “Bury me not, I pray thee, in Egypt: but I will lie with my fathers, and thou shalt carry me out of Egypt, and bury me in their buryingplace.”
The request indicates a sense of approaching dissolution, and at the same time a lively faith in the promises of God to himself and his descendants-a conviction that they would not always remain exiles in Egypt, but would return one day to their own “promised land,” there to continue a great and powerful people until their destiny was accomplished. It was his desire to cast in his lot with his people. The glories of an Egyptian funeral, of embalming, of a gorgeous mummy-case and a richly ornamented sepulchral chamber, perhaps surmounted by a handsome monument, did not tempt him for a moment to swerve from his design: he would be buried in the dim and bare “cave of Machpelah” at Hebron, “with his fathers,” with Abraham, and Isaac, and Sarab, and Rebekah, and Leah, in the tomb that Abraham bought of Ephron the Hittite, together with the field wherein it lay, for a possession of a burying-place.
And round his dying bed the powers of the world to come arrayed themselves, and there fell on him the breath of clear, exalted prophecy. From the shadows of his own coming end, his eye ranged along the ages until, in prophetic foresight, he saw the Conqueror of death. A stranger himself, tarrying for a season in the land of ancient sovereignties, he speaks of his own race, though yet subject, as royal, and of its rule as universal: “The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be.”
In many pictures of the Crucifixion-that of Guido Reni, for instance, in the Vatican, which more than any other affects the general public-a skull is found lying at the foot of the Cross. The skull placed there is supposed to be that of Adam, and expresses the early tradition that Christ was crucified in the place where Adam was buried. This is alluded to by St. Chrysostom: “Some say that Adam died there and there lieth, and that Jesus in that place where death had reigned, there also set up the trophy of victorious life. For He went forth bearing the Cross as a trophy over the tyranny of death, and as conquerors do, so bare He upon His shoulders the symbol of victory.”1 [Note: J. Burns, Illustrations from Art (1912), 37.]
3. How beautiful, at last, was Jacob's death! The Bible does not deal much with details of death-scenes, but we may well be thankful that Jacob's is portrayed so vividly and minutely. We see him dying, but as a conqueror! There is no tremor of fear now. With loving regard, he alternately warns and encourages his sons, and bestows his parting benediction; and on his sons' sons, likewise, the dying patriarch invokes the blessing of Him, the Covenant Angel of Peniel, who, as he said, had redeemed him from all evil. Then quietly, and with princely dignity, he yields his spirit up to God. Joy and peace had done on him their consoling, blessed work. He was fit to be gathered to his fathers-the ambitious, pushing, passionate, suffering heart was at rest at last; the education was completed.
As we look back now upon the long and sometimes anxious waiting of those autumn weeks, with their eager interchange at first of hopes and fears, the memory seems altogether bright. There was a long and peaceful glow about the sunset of Tait's life, and the days were never days of gloom. I may be allowed, perhaps, to quote a page from the diary of his youngest daughter; she, too, has since then passed to join him in the larger world beyond.
“After that Sunday evening service,” she writes, “in which he bid us pray for him in the village church, we had three more months of quiet watching and waiting: watching and waiting first with a hope that, though slowly, he was surely gaining ground, and would, in God's love, be with us some time more, doing more work here for Him: watching and waiting afterwards for the day and hour of the home-going as the work here was done, well done, and finished in God's love. How thankful we all are for those months! It was a quiet happy time in spite of the anxiety and need of patience both for him and us.… They will be a help to us all our life, I think, those quiet watchings: such a feeling of peace, of finished work, and of waiting for the Master's call to go home. We always feel as if we had spent that time like the pilgrims in the Land of Beulah, waiting for the messenger and the crossing of the river, and he was like Mr. Stand-fast, for ‘the day he was to cross, there was a great calm at that time in the river,' and the river was so quiet and so shallow that ‘he stood a long time in the water talking to those who had come with him to the water's edge.' ”1 [Note: Life of Archibald Campbell Tait, Archbishop of Canterbury, ii. 597.]
4. We are expressly told in the Epistle to the Hebrews that Jacob was one of those who “died in faith.” He was the heir of Promise. The land promised to Abraham and Isaac had not as yet passed into his possession; it was still held by the wandering and settled tribes, who had eyed his journeyings with such evident suspicion. All he had was the assured promise that in the coming days it should be his through his seed. As the years passed on he was compelled to realize that he would never live to be lord of Canaan. Nevertheless, he clung tenaciously to the blessed promise, so often reiterated to Abraham, that the land should become his people's; and his assurance that God would keep His word flung over his dying moments a radiance which neither sorrow nor adversity could dim. Oh, glorious faith! which carries a torch through the long catacombs of sorrow, keeping the heart from fainting, until the welcome dawn of accomplishment grows upon the sight. So Jacob, as he neared the City of God, so dear to faithful hearts, approved his kinsman-ship with the elect spirits of all ages, by reaching forth towards it his aged, trembling hands. And as God looked down upon that eager attitude of faith, and hope, and desire, He was not ashamed to be called his God. Have we Jacob's faith? When the end comes will it come as calmly? Will it come with like assurance?
The red-rose flush fades slowly in the west.
The golden water, basking in the light,
Pales to clear amber and to silver white.
The velvet shadow of a flame-crowned crest
Lies dark and darker on its shining breast,
Till lonely mere and isle and mountain-height
Grow dim as dreams in tender mist of night,
And all is tranquil as a babe at rest.
So still! So calm! Will our life's eve come thus?
No sound of strife, of labour or of pain,
No ring of woodman's axe, no dip of oar.
Will work be done, and night's rest earned, for us?
And shall we wake to see sunrise again?
Or shall we sleep, to see and know no more?1 [Note: Ada Cambridge, The Hand in the Dark (1913), 122.]
