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TOPIC: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks on Following the Christ (Other Topics in this Collection)
SUBJECT: 72. A Yet Deeper Meaning
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A Yet Deeper Meaning
When we turn to the leaders of the latter years of the Kingdom time of God's teacher-nation, the prophetic time, there is one thing that stands out sharply in the men God used. It was this, a man's inner personal life and experience were made use of to an unusual degree. It is as though the sacred inner life were sacrificed. The holy privacies were laid bare to the public gaze. The sweets of the inner holy of holies of the personal life were given up. The people were so far God-hardened that only acted preaching, lived messages, that took it out of one's very life, with pain in the taking, had any effect.
This is most markedly so in the case of Hosea, whose experience it seems almost if not wholly impossible for us to take in. (Hos_1:2-9; Hos_3:1-3.) It is true that the Christianized West has conceptions of personal privacy to which the East is a stranger. Yet, even so, the way in which these men were asked to yield up their inner personal lives, must have been a most marked thing to these Orientals. For God used it as the one thing apparently, the extreme thing, to touch their hearts with His appeal.
Isaiah had just such peculiar experiences. The birth of a son is planned for, and told of for the purpose of making more emphatic the message to the dull ears and slow heart of the nation. (Isa_7:3-17.) His two sons bore names of strange meaning, as a means of teaching truths that were peculiarly distasteful to the people. Isaiah takes one of these strangely named sons as he goes to deliver a message to the king. And the son standing by his father's side is a reminder in his name of a disagreeable truth. (Isa_8:1-3.) A little later the man is actually required to go about barefooted, and without clothing sufficient for conventional respectability, and to continue this for three years. (Isa_20:1-4.) When we remember that he was not an erratic extremist, but a sober-minded, fine-grained gentleman of refinement and of a good family, it helps us to understand a little how hard-hearted and stubborn were a people that could be appealed to only in such a way.
And it tells us, too, how utterly surrendered was the man who was willing thus to give up his private personal life. How much easier to have been simply an earnest, eloquent preacher, with his inner personal life lived free from public gaze, a thing sacred to himself. Following meant the giving up of the sacred private life to a strangely marked degree, for God to use.
Even more marked are the experiences that Jeremiah was asked and consented to go through. It would seem as though the repeated conspiracies against his life, the repeated imprisonments in vile dungeons dangerous to health and life, and the shame of being put in the public stocks before the rabble, would have been much for God to ask, and for a man to give. But there is something that goes much farther and deeper into the very marrow of his life than these. He is bidden not to marry, not to have a family life of his own. (Jer_16:1-4.) And he obeyed. This was to be so only and solely as a message to the people. A message couched in such startling language they might listen to. Again we must remember the Oriental setting to appreciate the significance of this. In the East the unit of society is not the individual but the family. A man's marriage is planned for by the family, as a means of building up the family. To be childless and especially son-less was felt to be peculiarly unfortunate, almost bordering on disgrace.
This meant for Jeremiah not only the loss of personal joys and delights, but that his line would be broken off from his father's family. He would be without heir, or future, in the family history. So following meant going yet deeper into the inner personal life, for the sake of God's plan. This giant's strength is revealed in nothing more than in his tear-wet laments over his people. And he gave all this strength to following. He said "Yes" to God's need and request, though it must have taken his very life to say it.
But Ezekiel was asked to do something even beyond this. He was the messenger of God to the colony of Hebrew exiles in Assyria. His accounts of the visions of God reveal a remarkable power of detailed description, and a remarkably strong mentality. Strange to say, these people in captivity are yet harder to reach than were their fathers in their native land. Yet, not strange, for the human heart is the same when it won't open to the purifying of the upper currents of air. Here the man himself literally became the message. He actually lay upon his left side for thirteen months and then on his right side for six weeks longer.
During all that time he ate food that was particularly repugnant, and it was carefully weighed out, and the water as carefully measured out for his use. He had to rise, no doubt, for various reasons, but the bulk of the time for nearly fifteen months he lay out where all could see him. His fellow-exiles, I suppose, looked and wondered, laughed and gossiped perhaps, and then as time wore on, they thought and thought more, and were awed as they began slowly to take in the meaning of this strange message of God. Thereafter Ezekiel was the leader, to whose house the leaders of the colony came, and to whose words they intently listened.
But there was a yet deeper meaning to following than we have found yet. It is a meaning that awes one's heart into amazed silence. He was married. His wife is spoken of very tenderly as "the desire of thine eyes." He was told that she would be taken away out of his life. She would die. That was the great thing. Then he was not to mourn outwardly for her; this was the second thing. He was to be before the people as though the greatest sorrow of his life had not happened. Is it any wonder the people came astonished to know what this meant? The simple brevity with which he tells of the occurrence takes hold of one's heart. "So I spake unto the people in the morning; and at even my wife died; and I did in the morning as I was commanded." (Eze_24:15-19.) There was no questioning, no hesitancy of action, but a simple, prompt obedience, even though his heart was breaking. This was what God asked of him. God needed this in His dealings with these people of His in whom His world-plan centred. How desperate must have been the need that called for such an experience as this! Ezekiel said "Yes" even to this. Surely there was here some of that Calvary meaning, of the secondary sort, of which we have spoken together. Following meant not only giving his personality and life, but now it meant giving what must have been more than life itself.