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So Moses the servant of the Lord died there in the land of Moab, according to the word of the Lord. And he buried him in the valley in the land of Moab over against Beth-peor: but no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.—Deu_34:5-6.
The text is in three parts—
I. The death of Moses was at God’s command: “So Moses died according to the word of the Lord.”
II. His death took place before Israel entered the land of promise: “Moses died there in the land of Moab.”
III. He was buried by God and his sepulchre is unknown: “He buried him in the valley, but no man knoweth of his sepulchre.”
Death at the Command of God
Mouth in the sense of command is a common Hebrew idiom; nevertheless the Jews understood it here literally, and from the paraphrase in the Targum arose the Rabbinic legend that Moses died by the kiss of God.
There is no pause in the succession. “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever,”—that is, throughout these successive generations of men. It abides, but they are gone. The mount from whose flaming summit the voice of God came forth still looks down upon the depths around it, and the dreary wilderness beyond it; but Moses, the tribes, and the tents of Israel have disappeared. The Sea of Tiberias still lies embedded, bright and blue, amid the hills of Galilee; but the men who crowded its shores to listen to the voice of One who spake as never man spake are nowhere to be found—all are “gathered to their fathers.”
Leaves, leaves, dead leaves of autumn everywhere!
They reddened all the floor of Fontainebleau
And rustled under every heedless foot.
They choked the gutters of the streets and filled
The carts of scavengers. They danced before
My steps, an eerie ghostly dance, and touched
My cheek and wailed about my ears. “Brief life
Is theirs,” said one who, passing, deemed he knew
My thought. “Brief life?” I captured one and read
A long, long story on its rusty face,
An age-long tale of life upon the tree
Alternating with death upon the ground.
I saw the forest dropping wintry tears
On leaves slow lapsing back to formlessness.
I saw the little sun, the little frost
Of verdant life, the fall, the death again.
The myriads and myriads of leaves
That make the forest mould cried out to me:
“Infinity, eternity we taste
Who have not breath enough to die, but what
Of man?” The roadway echoed to my steps:
“Infinity, eternity, but what
Of man?” And when I had attained the town
Each foot that hurried through the falling night
Beat oat the words: “To-day the little sun
The little frost of life, but yesterday
We were not, and to-morrow shall not be—
Infinity, eternity, but what
Of man?”1 [Note: Anna Bunston, The Porch of Paradise, 3.]
In the old times, before the settlements in the great north-west, when the fur companies would establish here and there a great trading post and send out their trappers to all parts of the country, trails were made in every direction, but they all ended at the post. North, south, east, west, for hundreds of miles in every direction, along large rivers, following small streams into the mountains, crossing lakes, searching through deep canyons, the trails would wind, but you could begin a hundred miles away, on any one of them, and however devious its course might be, it would end at the trader’s camp. The grave is the end of the trail of this world’s life. A man may start where he will. He may climb the heights of wealth or traverse the deep canyons of poverty. He may follow up the mountains of hard struggle or paddle his canoe on a stream of idleness. But when you get to the end of the trail, it is all the same. It is an open grave. Whether he brings many pelts there or few, however great or small have been the spoils of his life chase is of no account, for the grave is too narrow to hold any of them. We brought nothing with us into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. God help us that we may learn over again the old, old lesson that we learn so often and forget so soon—that we are with rapid feet following the trail to the grave. As we go over the trail but once, we never know how near the end is. It may be a long way off. It may be just over the hill.1 [Note: L. A. Banks.]
From out what Silent Land
I came, on Earth to stand
And learn life’s little art,
Is not in me to say:
I know I did not stray,—
Was sent; to come, my part.
And down what Silent Shore
Beyond yon little door
I pass, I cannot tell;
I know I shall not stray,
Nor ever lose the way,—
Am sent; and all is well.2 [Note: William Channing Gannett.]
There is an inscription on the tombstone of a little child in one of our country churchyards, as follows:—
“Who plucked that flower?” cried the gardener, as he walked through the garden. His fellow-servant answered, “The Master” and the gardener held his peace.
“I was dumb, I opened not my mouth; because thou didst it.”1 [Note: J. Davies.]
My own feeling now is that everything which has hitherto happened to me, and been done by me, whether well or ill, has been fitting me to take greater fortune more prudently, and to do better work more thoroughly. And just when I seem to be coming out of school—very sorry to have been such a foolish boy, yet having taken a prize or two, expecting now to enter upon some more serious business than cricket, I am dismissed by the Master I hoped to serve, with a—“That’s all I want of you, sir.”2 [Note: A. C. Benson, Ruskin: A Study in Personality, 156.]
I was sitting in my study one Saturday evening, when a message came to me that one of the godliest among the shepherds who tended their flocks upon our Highland hills was dying, and wanted to see his minister. Without loss of time I crossed the wide heath to his comfortable little cottage. When I entered the low room I found the old shepherd propped up with pillows and breathing with such difficulty that it was apparent he was near his end. As soon as the door was closed he turned his grey eyes upon me and said, in a voice shaken with emotion: “Minister, I’m dying, and—I’m afraid!” I began at once to repeat the strongest promises with which God’s Word furnishes us, but in the midst of them he stopped me. “I ken them a’,” he said mournfully; “I ken them a’, but somehow, they dinna gie me comfort.” I took up the well-worn Bible which lay on his bed and turned to the twenty-third Psalm. I slowly repeated the verse, “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me.” “You have been a shepherd all your life, and you have watched the heavy shadows pass over the valleys and over the hills, hiding for a little while all the light of the sun. Did these shadows ever frighten you?” He looked at me with curious eyes. I continued, “The shadow of death is over you, and it hides for a little the Sun of Righteousness, which shines all the same behind it; but it’s only a shadow. Remember, that is what the Psalmist calls it—a shadow that will pass; and when it has passed, you will see the everlasting hills in their unclouded glory!” The old shepherd covered his face with his trembling hands, and for a few minutes maintained an unbroken silence; then, turning upon me a face now bright with an almost supernatural radiance, he exclaimed, lifting his hands reverently to heaven: “Ay, ay! I see it a’ now. Death is only a shadow, with Christ behind it—a shadow that will pass.”
When death is coming near,
When thy heart shrinks in fear
And thy limbs fail,
Then raise thy hands and pray
To Him who smooths thy way
Through the dark vale.
Seest thou the eastern dawn,
Hear’st thou in the red morn
The angel’s song?
Oh, lift thy drooping head,
Thou who in gloom and dread
Hast lain so long.
Death comes to set thee free;
Oh, meet him cheerily
As thy true friend,
And all thy fears shall cease,
And in eternal peace
Thy penance end.1 [Note: De la Motte Fouqué.]
Jewish, Mussulman, and Christian traditions crowd in to fill up the blank. “Amidst the tears of the people, the women beating their breasts and the children giving way to uncontrolled wailing, he withdrew. At a certain point in his ascent he made a sign to the weeping multitude to advance no farther, taking with him only the elders, the high priest Eliezer, and the general Joshua. At the top of the mountain he dismissed the elders, and then, as he was embracing Eliezer and Joshua, and still speaking to them, a cloud suddenly stood over him, and he vanished in a deep valley.” So spoke the tradition as preserved in the language, here unusually pathetic, of Josephus. Other wilder stories told of the Divine kiss which drew forth his expiring spirit; others of the “Ascension of Moses” amidst the contention of good and evil spirits over his body. The Mussulmans, regardless of the actual scene of his death, have raised to him a tomb on the western side of the Jordan, frequented by thousands of Mussulman devotees. But the silence of the sacred narrative refuses to be broken. “In” that strange land, “the land of Moab, Moses the servant of the Lord died, according to the word of the Lord.” “He buried him in ‘a ravine’ in the land of Moab, over against the idol temple of Peor.” Apart from his countrymen, honoured by no funeral obsequies, visited by no grateful pilgrimages, “no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.”1 [Note: A. P. Stanley, History of the Jewish Church, i. 178.]
The Bible is the book of life. Its pages teem with biography; they contain but scant memorials of death. The only death they describe at length is that of Him who in dying slew death. The very minuteness of the description there shows how unique and all-important it was. Men make more of death than of life as a gauge of character. A few pious sentences spoken then will go far to efface the memory of years of inconsistency. God makes most of life.2 [Note: F. B. Meyer.]
“Are saints
Enskied,” I asked, “so linked with living men?”
“The brightest lily of the Lenten woods,”
He said “arrayed in livery of the sun,
Depends upon a buried bulb; the bulb
Depends on mediating leaves that bring
The breath of Heaven to the dust of earth;
And so the Church in glory, rest and war
Has triune life or none. Can clouds exist
Without the sun or sea? Would light and sound
Survive if air were dead? All things that are
Interdepend eternally. Herein
Consists the awfulness of human life,
That no man knows the confines of a sin,
The generations of a virtuous deed;
And hence the obligation to entreat
All men with tender charity, since al.
Are victims if offenders too; and oft
The fractures of the wicked are derived
From flaws of saints. And since one perfect Life
Can leaven all, perhaps one sinning soul
Can stay the bliss of all the Church of God.”3 [Note: Anna Bunston, The Porch of Paradise, 32.]
2. But was Moses’ life so profound a failure? The history before us gives us the answer. The purpose that Moses might not carry out was to be accomplished by Joshua, his successor. His life, therefore, had not failed; the hope he had thought to realize was yet to be realized in another way—for his labour had inspired a man who had caught his spirit, and was to finish the work he had begun. In that knowledge Moses might rest.
There is a spiritual connexion between men. One race is united by spiritual ties of influence to the succeeding race; age is joined by bonds of influence to age. Man is this bond for ever to future generations. He dies, and the spirit of his life is caught by his successors—so even here he “fulfils his course.” Therefore no life is ever lost, no holy purpose ever really fails. The life of Stephen, the first martyr, seemed like a hurried dream; he had just entered God’s army when in the first conflict he died. Men might say “he died before his time.” The Church made great lamentation over him. Its strongest soldier had gone. His life seemed vain. But his spirit entered the soul of St. Paul! So with the martyrs of the first ages. Their spirit lives yet. The mantles of departing prophets fall on other men, and clothe these with power to accomplish the work they had to leave unfinished.
To labour and not to see the end of our labours; to sow and not to reap; to be removed from this earthly scene before our work has been appreciated, and when it will be carried on not by ourselves, but by others—is a law so common in the highest characters of history, that none can be said to be altogether exempt from its operation. It is true in intellectual matters as well as in spiritual; and one of the finest applications of any passage in the Mosaic history is that first made by Cowley, and enlarged by Lord Macaulay, to the great English philosopher, who
Did on the very border stand
Of the blessed Promised Land;
And from the mountain’s top of his exalted wit
Saw it himself, and show’d us it;
But life did never to one man allow
Time to discover worlds and conquer too.1 [Note: A. P. Stanley.]
Each generation, however much it may seem to be absorbed in its own interests, works, not really for itself, but for a generation to come. That sense of incompleteness, of disappointment, which so often hangs like a cloud over the best work—work which has conscience, enthusiasm, and duty in it—is not final, it is only the veil which hides the land of promise from the gaze of the tired worker. Moses had to lay down his life’s work and forgo his own reward just as it seemed within his grasp, but yet he found his vindication in the greatness of a people whom, more than anyone, he had striven to make. He had to let go all the vital interests with which his life was bound up, as it were before his time, and yet time proved that he was right.
When we have done, as Moses did, what we have power and wisdom for, God, in the order of the world, takes the work out of our hands and gives it to another who will do the rest better than we could do it. If we lived on, the work would then be unfinished. It is by our death that it comes to a finish, in the hands of another. A porcelain cup passes, in a great manufactory, from hand to hand till it is completed. A young hand, seeing the cup taken from him without the handle, might think, “Alas, why may I not finish? My work is spoiled.” He does not know that another man in the next room will put on the handle better than Hebrews 1 [Note: S. A. Brooke.]
We are to die; but even I perceive
’Tis not a very hard thing so to die.
My cousin of the pale-blue tearful eyes,
Poor Cesca, suffers more from one day’s life
With the stern husband; Tisbe’s heart goes forth
Each evening after that wild son of hers,
To track his thoughtless footstep through the streets:
How easy for them both to die like this!
I am not sure that I could live as they.2 [Note: Browning, A Soul’s Tragedy.]
Death in the Desert
This was the land which the Lord had promised to the fathers, for which he had been yearning, and to which all his work had been directed all these years; and now he is to die, as the text puts it, with such pathetic emphasis, “there in Moab,” and to have no part in the fair inheritance.
To Moses, so far as we know, the charm of that view—pronounced by the few modern travellers who have seen it to be unequalled of its kind—lay in the assurance that this was the land promised to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, and to their seed, the inheritance—with all its varied features of rock and pasture, and forest and desert—for the sake of which he had borne so many years of toil and danger, in the midst of which the fortunes of his people would be unfolded worthily of that great beginning. To us, as we place ourselves by his side, the view swells into colossal proportions as we think how the proud city of palm-trees is to fall before the hosts of Israel; how the spear of Joshua is to be planted on height after height of those hostile mountains; what series of events, wonderful beyond any that had been witnessed in Egypt or in Sinai, would in after ages be enacted on the narrow crest of Bethlehem, in the deep basin of the Galilean lake, beneath the walls of “Jebus which is Jerusalem.”1 [Note: A. P. Stanley.]
As Moses looked upon the scene that met his eyes, he thought, “This is the promised land. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob saw it before me. They were but pilgrims in it. I have worked for it; I have come to the edge of it; I may not enter into it.” And as he lay there in the deep silence, his first thought was, no doubt, regret. “Why, having done all I could have done, may I not see the end? Would that I could go with my people and share their glory and their conquest! Does God do right to take me away now? I have borne the burden and heat of the day; why should I not taste of the grapes of Eshcol?”
It is the lot of all epoch-making men, of all great constructive and reforming geniuses, whether in the Church or in the world, that they should toil at a task, the full issues of which will not be known until their heads are laid low in the dust. But if, on the one hand, that seems hard, on the other hand there is the compensation of “the vision of the future and all the wonder that shall be” which is granted many a time to the faithful worker ere he closes his eyes. But it is not the fate of epoch-making and great men only; it is the law for our little lives. If these are worth anything, they are constructed on a scale too large to bring out all their results here and now. It is easy for a man to secure immediate consequences of an earthly kind; easy enough for him to make certain that he shall have the fruit of his toil. But quick returns mean small profits; and an unfinished life that succeeds in nothing may be far better than a completed one that has realised all its shabby purposes and accomplished all its petty desires.2 [Note: A. Maclaren.]
That low man seeks a little thing to do,
Sees it and does it:
This high man, with a great thing to pursue,
Dies ere he knows it.
That low man goes on adding one to one,
His hundred’s soon hit:
This high man, aiming at a million,
Misses an unit.
That, has the world here—should he need the next,
Let the world mind him!
This, throws himself on God, and unperplexed
Seeking shall find Him.1 [Note: Browning, A Grammarian’s Funeral.]
What is the meaning, then, of unfulfilled purposes in life? It is evident that Moses felt this as one of the saddest aspects of his departure. The earnest prayer that the Divine sentence should be recalled, and that he should lead his people into their own land, shows how keenly this thought pressed upon him. The answer to that prayer—the permission to behold the land he might not enter—shows this still more powerfully, for it exhibits God’s sympathy with the sorrow that filled his heart. And, indeed, if we reflect on his circumstances at that time, we shall find that they must all have brought before him the mysterious fact that the grand purpose of his life was never to be realized. One thought had given meaning to his history for eighty years—the thought of guiding the nation into the land promised to his forefathers. That must have cheered him through many a desolate day in the wilderness, and it must have helped him to be calm when the people’s murmurings grew loud. The difficulties of their progress, and the apparent disappointment of their hopes would react on him in new power. For difficulties have two effects on man. On the man of feeble purpose they act with a withering might that renders him undecided and desponding; on the man of strong faith and powerful purpose they act like the rocks that, by limiting the space of a torrent, give it greater force—they nerve him to stronger effort, and brace him for more strenuous toil; and every difficulty must thus have inspired the one aim of Moses with fuller energy. His feelings towards the people, too, would exert on that purpose a higher and a holier power. Their welfare had become part of his life. His sympathy with their weakness, their ignorance, their sorrow, must have kindled into burning ardour the desire to bring them to their home. But on the very verge of its accomplishment—on the very border of the land, with its hills in sight—that purpose must be surrendered and he must die.
What was the meaning of his death at that time? The question might have but a feeble interest for us if it were not that the facts of life force it upon us daily. Is it not a mystery by which we all are baffled—a mystery which in some hours we strive to confront because of its deep sadness, and which at other times seems to darken before us through our useless questionings—that the greatest and holiest purposes men cherish seem never to be attained? The common phrase that speaks of men “dying before their time” is the confession of a riddle which cannot be solved. It met the old heathen who, without the light of Christianity, said, in his simplicity, “Whom the gods love die young.” And he has thought but little who has not asked in perplexity, Why should such men die, as if the greatness of their aim had shattered the chain of their earthly life, while those who have no God-given purpose so often live on till a useless old age creeps over them? The truest servants of the Lord come to life’s end with one common confession that they have attained but a fragment of their purposes. The Christian Church repeats from age to age the story that its most earnest men are too frequently the first to die; and no Christian ever awoke to the deep conviction that life was not to be spent in selfishness, but in Christ like effort for man, without discovering that his aim, in this world, is never fulfilled; and that is the world-wide mystery.
His father had several friends, wont to spend an evening hour or two in his study, to which John was now admitted on equal terms. Amongst these was a young advocate, a tall and energetic man, full of vitality, brimming over with good spirits and laughter. He went into the country on some business connected with his profession, slept at a little inn in damp sheets, took a chill, and died of rapid consumption, disappearing from his accustomed place with a suddenness which startled John as if a miracle had taken place before his eyes. The man had been the very embodiment of overflowing health. There had been no natural mounting up to full maturity and gradual decadence to death. In the bloom and vigour of early manhood death smote him and laid him low. That old men should die seemed plain enough; that weakly children should fade from life was grievous, but not mysterious; but that, after all the preparation which youth must undergo to fit the man for life—that, so fitted and equipped, on the very threshold of usefulness and experience, death might leap from an ambuscade and lay him low—that pulled him up from all easy-going acceptance of what to-day and to-morrow had to offer, since the third day might find him face to face with the same dread experience.1 [Note: A. M. Stoddart, John Stuart Blackie, i. 22.]
A famous historian died, leaving incomplete his one master-work to which he had given all his strength and all his love. He was not afraid of death. He set his affairs in order with great thoughtfulness. He said good-bye to his friends with unbroken courage. But one thing broke his heart. He had not finished his book. The long years spent in gathering knowledge and in solving problems; the patient labour to which he had sacrificed pleasures, and riches, and bodily health; they were never to bear their expected fruit. The bitterness of the thought was too much for his fortitude, and his dying cry was a cry of regret: “My book, my unfinished book!”
The English statesman, Pitt, who gave his life to the task of bringing his country through the great struggle with Napoleon, died of the task at forty-seven years of age. His closing moments were made dark and sad by the thought that he must leave the work undone. They brought to him the news of Napoleon’s last victory. He turned his face to the wall, murmuring,” My country! how I leave my country!”
“Go home content, the evening falls,
Day’s tired sinews are unbent;
No more the thrush or linnet calls,
The twilight fades, go home content.”
“Father, the field is but half-turned,
And yet the spring is well-nigh spent.”
“My son, the hour of rest is earned,
The day’s work done, go home content.”
1. The first answer is that the desire of Moses was unfulfilled because of his sin. One of the great truths which the old law and ordinances given by Moses were intended to burn in on the conscience of the Jew, and through him on the conscience of the world, was that indissoluble connexion between evil done and evil suffered, which reaches its highest exemplification in the death which is the wages of sin. And just as some men that have invented instruments for capital punishment have themselves had to prove the sharpness of their own axe, so the lawgiver, whose message it had been to declare, “the soul that sinneth, it shall die,” had himself to go up alone to the mountain-top to receive in his own person the exemplification of the law that had been spoken by his own lips. He sinned when, in a moment of passion (with many palliations and excuses), he smote the rock that he was bidden to address, and forgot therein, and in his angry words to the rebels, that he was only an instrument in the Divine hand. It was a momentary wavering in a hundred and twenty years of obedience. It was one failure in a life of self-abnegation and suppression. The stern sentence came.
It is pathetic to find him among that great company of martyrs for the public good, those who in order to serve their people have neglected their own characters. Under the stress of public work and the pressure of the stupidity and greed of those whom they have sought to guide, many leaders of men have been tempted, and have yielded to the temptation, to forget the demands of their better nature. But whatever their services to the world, such unfaithfulness does not pass unpunished. They have to bear the penalty, whosoever they be; and Moses was no more an exception than Cromwell or Savonarola was, to mention only some of the nobler examples.1 [Note: A. Harper.]
(1) If we ask why that single and apparently trifling disobedience unfitted him to lead the people into the land, while men far more rebellious and with less temptation afterwards became their rulers, I do not know that we can find an adequate reply. It may be that God would show how one act may darken the whole of man’s earthly hopes; how the subtle influence of one act of disobedience—because in disobedience lies the germ of all sin—may pervade with its gloom the whole of a man’s history, and cause his holiest efforts to fail just at the moment they seem about to succeed. In that we have the hidden source of life’s incompleteness unveiled. It may not be true to say that some special and definite sin ever prevents the man who has a great purpose from accomplishing it, but this history points out that the presence of sin has destroyed all the completeness of life, and accounts for all that failure of the holiest aims which saddens and perplexes us.
One little mark under the arm-pit of a plague-sufferer tells the physician that the fatal disease is there. A tiny leaf above ground may reveal deep below the root of a poison-plant. That little deflection, coming as it did at the beginning of the resumption of his functions by the Lawgiver after seven-and-thirty years of comparative abeyance, and on his first encounter with the new generation that he had to lead, was a very significant indication that his character had begun to yield and suffer from the strain that had been put upon it; and that, in fact, he was scarcely fit for the responsibilities that the new circumstances brought.1 [Note: A. Maclaren.]
(2) People say, “A heavy penalty for a small offence.” Yes! But an offence of Moses could not be a small offence. Noblesse oblige! The higher a man rises in communion with God, and the more glorious the message and office which are put into his hands, the more intolerable in him is the slightest deflection from the loftiest level. A splash of mud that would never be seen on a navvy’s clothes stains the white satin of a bride or the embroidered garment of a noble. And so a little sin done by a loftily endowed and inspired man ceases to be small.
It is one of the laws of the Divine government of the world, that with those to whom God specially draws near He is more rigorous than with others. Amos clearly saw and proclaimed this principle. “Hear this word that the Lord hath spoken against you, O children of Israel,” he says; “you only have I known of all the families of the earth: therefore I will visit upon you all your iniquities” (Amo_3:1-2).
(3) We cannot suppose that the sudden outburst of impetuous temper at Meribah—when his spirit was agitated by a fierce whirlwind of wrath, as a storm sweeping down some mountain-rent on an inland lake—could remain long unforgiven. As far as the east is from the west, so far had that transgression been removed. But though the remission was complete, yet the result lingered in his life, and shut him out from an experience which should have been the crown of his career. “The Lord hath put away thy sin,” said Nathan to the royal transgressor; “but thy child shall die, and the sword shall not depart out of thy house.”
(4) But there is more. Moses was one with Israel. When they sinned he interceded as for himself. When Jehovah made him the offer that He would make of him a great nation, he declined it solely from his love to Israel. He lived for the nation, and for the nation he died. Remember how once he went so far as to say, “If not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written.” In every way he was of the people, bone of their bone, and flesh of their flesh; Israel was hidden in his heart; and out of that master-passion of sympathy with the people came the weakness which at last made him speak unadvisedly with his lips. They strove with God; and though Moses never yielded a point to them in that wicked contest, yet their unbelief so far influenced him that he spake in anger, and said, “Hear now, ye rebels; must we fetch you water out of this rock?” Then “the Lord spake unto Moses and Aaron, Because ye believed me not, to sanctify me in the eyes of the children of Israel, therefore ye shall not bring this congregation into the land which I have given them” (Num_20:10; Num_20:12). Three times in the Book of Deuteronomy Moses tells the people that the Lord was angry with him for their sakes. It was not so much what Moses did personally that involved him in judgment; but he suffered because of his being mixed up with Israel. As the Lord had spared the people aforetime for Moses’ sake, it became necessary that, when he in any measure shared in their great sin of unbelief, he should be chastened for their sake as well as his own. His faith had saved them, and now his unbelief, being backed by theirs, secures for him the sentence of exclusion from the land.
Were not the Israelites much more guilty? Why were they allowed to enter the land from which he was shut out? We are called by Christ’s name; we believe the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ; and we ought to be able to see the answer in the Psalmist’s words: “They angered him also at the waters of strife, so that it went ill with Moses for their sakes.” “For their sakes.” “By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin”; by one man’s endurance of the curse we are all redeemed to God. The Christian doctrine of Atonement is neither an evasion of the law affixing penalty to sin, nor an after-thought supplying the deficiencies of that law; it is the doctrine of human life; it is part of the very constitution of society, that we bear the sins of one another, and are helped by one another’s endurance of penalty. If we find it hard to believe that God is, righteously and graciously, thus visiting the sins of Israel on Moses, is it not because we have not rightly apprehended the righteousness and grace of God in our own redemption? The constitution of society which makes it inevitable that a man shall share in the transgression of his fellows is an integral part of the law which God “magnified and made honourable” in the Cross; it is this that made possible Christ’s sacrifice and mediation.
2. There is sometimes success in failure, sublimity in defeat. If we will consider it, there is nothing more sublime in the history of Moses than the story of his death. Tried by a worldly standard, it seems a poor and shameful ending to such a life. Who so fit, we might ask, to lead the children of Israel into the promised land as he who had, for their sakes, defied the wrath of Pharaoh; who had led them out of Egypt, and shared with them the wanderings of the wilderness; endured their perversity, and often interceded with God on their behalf? But when we speak thus, the poverty and shame are in our way of judging character and its rewards. Whether is better?—honour, or a resolute and chastened spirit? Who is the nobler man?—he who rejoices in the fulfilment of his hopes, or he who knows how to endure, and see the fruit of disappointment?
If we believe to be a meek and humble man is better than any blare of trumpets or pompous triumph, we shall see that God had provided some better thing for Moses than to lead the tribes into the promised land. To me it seems that the man Moses, with eye undimmed and natural force not abated, resigning to another the office he was still fit to bear, quietly accepting the decree which took his leadership from him, is surrounded with a purer lustre than had ever before rested on him; the ascent of Nebo is more glorious than the descent of Sinai.1 [Note: A. Mackennal.]
Moses, the patriot fierce, became
The meekest man on earth,
To show us how love’s quick’ning flame
Can give our souls new birth.
Moses, the man of meekest heart,
Lost Canaan by self-will,
To show, where Grace has done its part,
How sin defiles us still.
Thou, who hast taught me in Thy fear,
Yet seest me frail at best,
O grant me loss with Moses here,
To gain his future rest!2 [Note: J. H. Newman.]
There is little that is wise or noble about Ruskin hitherto. It had been a career of unbroken success of a small and self-centred kind; his genius had showed itself in his incredible laboriousness, and in a vitality of immense elasticity and toughness. But not by these things is the world changed! And now he was to be given a new heart. He was to see and to feel; he was to be mocked and derided; he was to wrestle with hateful thoughts; he was to torment himself over the evils of society: he was to build up an elaborate scheme for its amelioration. His scheme was to fail, and not even to fail nobly; it was to be viewed not only with indifference, but with open ridicule and contempt. Yet he was to become, without knowing it, in his humiliation and pain, more august, more pathetic, more noble, more Divine, till he was to appear in the minds of all who cared for purity and goodness and beauty, like a seamed and scarred mountain peak, above the peaceful valleys, cold and lonely and isolated, and yet looking out across the fields of life to some awful sunrise of truth, climbing and glimmering over shining tracts and unknown seas.1 [Note: A. C. Benson, Ruskin: A Study in Personality, 88.]
Although you seem to till a thankless soil,
Your prayers are never vain, nor vain your toil;
Some fruit you yet may have to cheer your heart,
In some new epoch you may bear a part;
But ev’n if now, through your short span of years
Your work be weary, and no fruit appears,—
Though, in humility, you look within,
Deeming your failure the result of sin,—
It is not so; for still our Father knows
What each requires—on each He still bestows
The discipline most needed; still He weighs
Our work with heavenly scales; our purblind gaze
Finds failure often where He knows success.2 [Note: Mackenzie Bell.]
3. One thought remains. The desires of Moses, unfulfilled here, were fulfilled in a higher sense elsewhere. The history before us may be silent, but we cannot be silent. By looking at the death of Moses in the light of the revelation brought by Christ we can speak with confidence. Christ redeemed all life—He glorified it all—therefore we may believe that no earnest efforts of this life are ever, for the man himself, really unfulfilled. And if that does not seem to prove their actual fulfilment, we may get some light on the subject by referring to a great law that pervades all the government of God. God leaves none of His works unfinished. In the world of nature no atom is lost, although we may not see the fulfilment of every existence because of our blindness. In the world of souls we perceive glimpses of the same law. Every act of the Spirit has an end which it completes, for every act has had its share in making us what we are. We are linked to our past. We find it out unmistakably now and then. If that be true, do you think that the holy purposes God has inspired us with have no fulfilment somewhere and somehow within our own experience? Can you believe that they are doomed to perish except in the possible effect they may have on other men? Does God inspire men to work through the turmoil and the doubt—through the mystery and sorrow of life—and leave those high desires to fade, having no consummation in the blessed life of Heaven? No! we must believe that, though in a different way, they are fulfilled there. We must believe that the spirit is everlasting, although the outward actions may die. We must believe that Moses, though he might not himself accomplish the purpose of his life and lead the people into rest, yet found that the great hope which had burned through storm and darkness upon earth, was consummated in nobler service and in a grander scene when he joined the companies who sing the song of Moses and the Lamb.
When men die in the fulness of their powers, as Moses died, we think that there is a waste of power. So there might be, if the power of those who die were really extinguished. But that is not our belief. Our belief is that it is expanded, ennobled, set at once to work, that it can do its work better, that its energies are more developed, that the range and objects of its work are tenfold greater and more numerous than they are on earth. Waste! when God and His work are everywhere. Waste! when the whole universe of humanity in the other world is open to him whom we have lost on earth. Waste of power! It is a thought impossible to the Christian man as he looks upon his dead.1 [Note: Stopford A. Brooke.]
(1) The Israelites themselves would discern, if dimly, this truth. The great truths of life and immortality must surely have begun to stir in the hearts of thoughtful men when they knew that “the Lord buried him.” Shall God, then, pay such regard to the perishable frame, and neglect the nobler part which dwelt in it? The outward shape and fashioning of clay, made of the dust and returning to it, was this then Moses, and not rather the living soul, breathed into it by God, as Moses himself records? And can the Maker put so disproportionate an estimate upon His own handiwork, as carefully to store up the casket and throw away the precious jewel which it held? Could we cherish the portrait of one beloved and leave himself to perish, when we might save him by stretching out the hand? Can this be the kindness of God to His friends?—for either He must wish to preserve the souls of His servants and want the power, or He must possess the power but want the wish; and where, in the one case, would be a God worthy of reverence, or where, in the other, a God who could attract our love?
When men become assured of His power, that He is the Father of spirits, and when He proves His regard for the frail and fading form, the burial of Moses might become God’s way of leading reflective men out to hopeful thoughts of the spirit that had given such brightness to the now darkened face. When such questionings arose, “Wilt thou shew wonders to the dead? Shall the dead arise and praise thee?” (Psa_88:10); then a record like this might lead to the conviction, “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints” (Psa_116:15). “Therefore my heart is glad, and my glory rejoiceth; my flesh also shall rest in hope. Thou wilt shew me the path of life” (Psa_16:9; Psa_16:11).1 [Note: John Ker.]
(2) Moses’ sin was blotted out, and he knew it, although the earthly effect of it remained. But if compensation is to be complete it must include the removal of the earthly penalty. The perfect idea of God’s forgiveness is that He should take away not merely the inward pain of sin but the outward stigma of it, and that He should make all life what it would have been without that sin, or still richer and higher for the very fall and rising. The spiritual Physician should not only heal the wound but obliterate the scar, and give “beauty instead of burning.” In the case of Moses this does not at first appear. “The Lord buried him,” but not in Canaan; and He showed him the land, but did not permit him to tread it. To an ancient Jew this must for a while have seemed strange almost to harshness,—to think that the meanest in all their tribes should enter and look on it, and eat of its plenty and drink of its sweet, and that he who had toiled and agonized for this lifelong end, so faithful to God and so self-sacrificing, should be excluded! No Israelite could look round on that noble home and the rejoicing family which dwelt in it without thinking of the great leader who stumbled at the door and lay buried by the threshold. Is Canaan then all, and is the whole life of Moses shut up in wanderings through a wilderness? Slowly but irresistibly the thought of another land must have risen, must have dawned upon the mind’s eye—a land of which this earthly one was only the symbol, and which must have given Moses perfect compensation for all he lost in death. It could not be otherwise. They were attracted and compelled to it by all they knew of God and of His servant. It was God’s very purpose in these events to educate them to a belief in another world, and to give them some faint conception of it—a world where the things and ties of earth are carried up to a heavenly temper and perfection. When a prophet came in after ages with the promise, “Thine eyes shall see the king in his beauty: they shall behold the land that is very far off” (Isa_33:17), it must have been felt by many to be suitable to this death of Moses, and may have had its origin in his last look, which took in “the precious things of heaven,” as well as “the precious things of the earth and the fulness thereof.”
(3) And to Moses himself this vision would not be wholly denied. We may well imagine as the evening deepened on the mountain-top, and the land below grew dim in mist, and Moses felt God draw nearer in the twilight, that the same thoughts entered into the soul of Moses, and his regret for not entering the land passed finally away. Nothing was left but death and God. Why should he ever have regretted that? There, only wars, fresh cares, new pain, day after day, of weary battle would await him. Here, in death, there was another Canaan, the substance of the shadow he had pursued so long. In it there were green pastures and still waters, and the Shepherd of the soul.
To dying men still comes the vision of the goodly land beyond the Jordan. It is not far away—only just across the river. On fair days of vision, when some strong wind parts the veils of mist and smoke that too often dominate our spiritual atmosphere, it is clearly visible. But the vision is most often reserved for those who are waiting on the confines of the Land, ready for the signal to enter. They tell us that on that borderland they hear voices, and discern visions of beauty and splendour of which heart had not conceived. Dr. Payson said, shortly before he died, “The Celestial City is full in my view. Its glories have been upon me; its breezes fan me; its odours are wafted to me; its sounds strike upon my ears, and its spirit is breathed into my heart.”1 [Note: F. B. Meyer.]
On one occasion Dr. Kidd was alluding to the unwillingness which even good people sometimes had to die. “It just reminds me,” he said, “of what happened when I left the auld hoose. When a’ the furniture was oot, and a’ the rest had gane to the new ane, I couldna leave; I paced up and doon the room in which my children were born; I gazed upon the wa’s of the chamber where I studied and wrestled with God, and I couldna tear myself away. But Betty, the servant, came, and she said, “Come awa’, sir, come awa’; the time’s up, and the ither hoose is far better than this.”2 [Note: J. Stark, Dr. Kidd of Aberdeen, 141.]
An Undiscovered Grave
1. The first thing to notice is that the grave is not unknown to God. As it is in death, so is it in the grave—alone yet not alone. Moses dies alone, with no hand to clasp his, none to close his eyes; but God’s finger does it. The outward form of his death is but putting into symbol and visibility the awful characteristics of that last moment for us all. However closely we have been twined with others, each of us has to unclasp all hands, and make that journey through the narrow, dark tunnel by ourselves. We even live alone in a real sense, but we each have to die as if there were not another human being in the whole universe but ourselves. But the solitude may be a solitude with God. Up there alone, with the stars and the sky and the everlasting rocks and menacing death, Moses had for companion the supporting God. That awful path is not too desolate and lonely to be trodden if we tread it with Him. Moses’ lonely death leads to a society yonder. If you refer to the 32nd chapter you will find that when he was summoned to the mountain God said to him, “Die in the mount whither thou goest up, and be gathered unto thy people.” He was to be buried there, up amongst the rocks of Moab, and no man was ever to visit his sepulchre to drop a tear over it. How was he “gathered unto his people”? Surely only thus, that, dying in the desert alone, he opened his eyes in the city, surrounded by “solemn troops and sweet societies” of those to whom he was kindred. So the solitude of a moment leads on to blessed and eternal companionship.
As we trust God to supply the needs of the body in life, so let us trust Him for its burial in death. He marks where the dust of each of His children mingles with its mother earth. When a grave is opened, His eye rests on it; and though no foot may ever tread its soil, no hand keep it decked with flowers, He never forgets it; and none will be overlooked when the archangel blows his trumpet over land and sea.1 [Note: F. B. Meyer.]
Into the silent, starless Night before us,
Naked we glide;
No hand has mapped the constellations o’er us,
No comrade at our side,
No chart, no guide.
Yet fearless toward that midnight, black and hollow,
Our footsteps fare:
The beckoning of a Father’s hand we follow—
His love alone is there,
No curse, no care.2 [Note: Edward Rowland Sill.]
2. Again, no man must take from God the honour which belongs to Him alone, or stand between Him and the worship of His people. The first great lesson which the Jewish people were to be taught was the supremacy of the one true God. This was the indispensable basis of every other revelation,—the one God, alone, supreme,—and then His attributes, His law, His way to man. They were taken from among the nations, and reclaimed from idolatry to carry this truth to the world; and then, when sovereignty was established, mercy could be fully proclaimed. It was the lifelong work of Moses to fix this truth of God’s sovereignty. The word given him to bear was, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord.” All his labours and his trials arose from the difficulty of impressing this on their deep and constant conviction, and his death would have brought him no regret had he felt assured that his work was done. How solemn and pathetic his warnings to cleave to the true God, and wander to no other, as if he felt already the misgivings of their defection. And yet what he had done for them made it not unlikely that their reverence for him might prove their snare, and that they might be tempted to give him the place he desired to secure for God. Death, which lifts every great man higher, might have raised Moses above the lesson of his life—the unapproachable supremacy of God Himself. The deification of their heroes was the manner of the nations round them; it was the atmosphere of the age; and in this event we can surely see a means taken to guard the Israelites from the temptation. Had Moses himself obtained his choice, it would have been that, in death, he might carry out the lesson of his life, and here he gains it. He dies apart, and is buried in secret, where his grave can be dishonoured by no pilgrimage, and where no false veneration can rear altars to his memory. And this first lesson did not fail. The nation worshipped many strange deities, but it never gave the place of God to His prophets. If any life could have tempted them to such a course it would have been that of Moses, and when God removes him from their sight, and leaves no relic for sense or imagination to build its worship on, there is no successor of Moses who can assume the place.
How constantly the heroes of other nations have become their gods; how naturally the tomb becomes an altar, and the shrine a temple. Never was there hero that might more readily receive the idolatrous regard of a nation than he whose memory was so immediately associated with their religion, to whom they owed their national existence, their very liberties, their lives, their hopes. How easily would the burial-place of such a saint and hero become a place of pilgrimage and an object of worship. Seven hundred years afterwards Hezekiah is distinguished as the bold reformer who broke in pieces the serpent of brass which Moses had made. “Unto those days,” we are told, “the children of Israel did burn incense to it.” Thus is it that for Israel’s sake Moses is led up the mountain-height away into that utter loneliness; and there he dies, and God buries him, and no man knoweth the place of his sepulchre unto this day.1 [Note: M. G. Pearse.]
3. In the history of the greatest and the best, the tomb is often remembered and the life forgotten. It is an easier thing to revere the dust than to follow the example. There is an admonition in the Bible, “Remember them which have the rule over you, who have spoken unto you the word of God: whose faith follow, considering the end of their conversation” (Heb_13:7); and here, at the commencement of the lengthened roll, God inscribes it on an emphatic act. He takes away the grave of Moses that they may have before them, in full and undisturbed relief, the man himself. His words, living and dying, his walk with God till God took him, all that he was to God and to them, in self-devotion and affection, these survive him and can never die. If they came to his grave, they approached the creature and its fleeting part; but in coming to his words and his life they come to Moses himself and to God.
Men are liable to underrate the great and good in their lifetime, but after their departure they discover their goodness, and seek to compensate for their own neglect by extolling their memory. This is often true regarding men of genius. During their lives they have been misunderstood by those who cared not for their aims; but when they have passed away, the world has discovered its loss, and sought by posthumous praise to atone for its neglect. Many a gifted spirit, in uttering the truth by which he has been inspired, has met with mockery and malicious misrepresentation, but when death has stilled the restless heart of the thinker, the men who reap the results of his work attempt by laudation to obliterate their opposition; and many a servant of God has worn out life and hope in self-sacrificing labour, and been opposed by those he was trying to help; and it has not been until God has taken His servant home that they have discovered the true nature of his work.
The sepulchre of the greater Prophet than Moses is equally unknown, and may we not wonder that Christians, under a system of spirit and life, have been more slow than Jews to learn the lesson? Once, and once only, were men invited to “see the place where the Lord lay,” that they might be assured