Greater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 255. The Glory of Strength

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Greater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 255. The Glory of Strength


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I



In Moab



1. The village of Bethlehem is visited by famine. Driven to consternation, one of the families resolves to emigrate. It consists of a man Elimelech, his wife Naomi, and their two sons Mahlon and Chilion. They come into the land of Moab, a transition which means much more than a modern emigration from England to America. England and America are divided by the Atlantic; but Israel and Moab were separated by something to which the Atlantic is but a mill-pond-a difference in religion. To the Jew there was no land so distant as the land of a foreign worship. He measured all distance by the distance from his God. It was therefore a tremendous voyage which was taken by this family of Bethlehem, a voyage not to be estimated by miles, not to be gauged by the intervention of lands or seas, but to have its boundaries determined by the whole length and breadth of a universe of mind.



2. There seems to have been no absolute necessity why Elimelech should thus leave his home. Others tided over the period of distress, and so might he. But we may believe that the Bethlehemite, if he made a mistake in removing to Moab, acted in good faith and did not lose his hope of the Divine blessing. The people of Moab were nearly related to the people of Israel; but they had had a very different history. They were the descendants of Lot, the nephew of Abraham, but they had ceased to be the heirs of the covenant and of the promises. The pure faith that had grown up in the tents of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, which had blossomed forth into splendour in the days of Moses, had among the Moabites dwindled away and decayed and died. All that was noble in the old faith had completely disappeared. The Moabites had been a thorn in the flesh to Israel as they came out from Egypt and had even led them away into the practice of wickedness.



3. In the new and heathen land the emigrant family prospered not. In a few years Naomi was a widow and was left in very destitute circumstances. Her two sons married wives in the foreign country, adherents of the alien worship. Very soon these young men also sank by the wayside, weary with the burden and the heat of noonday toil; and, like their father, they left nothing. To all appearance Naomi was desolate. Husband and children were gone; poverty was extreme; the place of sojourn was a land of strangers; the voices of the old sanctuary were silent. Her heart and spirit were broken; her conscience was up in arms. The God of her fathers, she felt, had deserted her for her desertion of Him. She must retrieve the past; she must go back-back to the old soil, back to the favour of her God.



There is nothing the human heart so much dreads as the thought of being utterly alone. I have felt it when walking about amid the surge and roar of London. To think of these dense masses of human beings utterly cut off from you makes you feel as if you were in the midst of perfect solitude. It is the thought of utter loneliness which gives its power and pathos to Hood's Bridge of Sighs. You remember the picture of the poor unfortunate alone on the bridge on that wild March night. The lines are among the most mournful ever penned. I learned them many long years ago from the lips of a Scone weaver, before I had ever heard of such a man as Hood. The sentiment of loneliness gives them their power. It is the same sentiment that gives its awfulness not only to Christ's death but to all death-that we must all leave the world alone; as De Quincey says: “King and priest, warrior and maiden, philosopher and child,-all must walk those mighty galleries alone.” We all like to have a human hand in ours and a human heart beating for our own, at least in the great crises and troubles of life. There is One, the Friend that sticketh closer than a brother, who has promised that He will never leave us, never forsake us, not even when heart and flesh do faint and fail. Let us seek a closer interest in Him, the Holy Lamb of God. It will brighten every joy God may give us in life. It will soothe whatever sorrow He may send us to know and feel that in Christ we have a Brother and a Friend.”1 [Note: Dr. MacGregor of St. Cuthberts, 131.]