Misread Passages of Scriptures

by James Baldwin Brown

We approach a dread, an awful subject, when we contemplate the condition of those who pass into the unseen world impenitent and faithless; who despise finally, as far as we can trace, the riches of the mercy and the love of God. It is a subject which is occupying the most earnest and solemn thoughts of some of the wisest of our Christian thinkers, and on which a large freedom of judgment will have to be conceded within the visible pale of the Christian Church. It is easy to state the doctrine of universalism, and to offer it as a solution of the dark difficulties with which the subject is surrounded. But it is not easy to get the doctrine of universalism out of the Bible; nay, it is not possible, without grievous violence to some of its plainest and most awful statements: nor, on the other hand, is it easy to harmonize it with any intelligent conceptions of the moral freedom and responsibility of every child of the human race. Others seek refuge, for it is as a refuge that they appear to cling to it, in the theory of annihilation—that is, the annihilation on a vast scale of that which God made to be His masterpiece, which He constituted in His own image, and into which He infused by inspiration the breath of His own life. More grievous violence must be done to the plain language of Scripture by the advocates of this theory than by those of the former; and it seems to us still harder to find for it a place in any intelligent and harmonious conception of the scheme on which God made the worlds.

Were it possible for us to hold it, it would seem to unfold a terrible vision of the issue of the great experiment of creation. The free beings whom God made to be the glory of His universe, drooping down in throngs, after a life struggle full of anguish and despair, into the darkness of the everlasting night! One would be tempted to ask passionately in that case, Why was not the dire experiment of liberty ended in the hour of the first transgression? why was not the free universe, parent of such wrongs and miseries, strangled in its birth?

Nor may we dare to hide from ourselves and others, in these days, the dread considerations involved in the doctrine which the Church has drawn from explicit statements in the word of God. Eternal punishment; eternal suffering in the universe; moans rising up ever in the ear of heaven; the cries of souls in anguish piercing the serenity of the heavenly rest. Eternal evil too. Evil never more to die out of the worlds on which the dew of the primal benediction lay, and which flashed back the smile of Him who looked upon them and saw that “they were very good.” The curse rioting, sin reigning unto death, in some region of the universe sustained and ruled by the Divine hand; never to be expelled from the creation, never to be drawn under the merciful reign of God. We are too prone to hide the awful reality which is behind this language, by vague notions of the judgment as the final banishing of evil from the sight of God and of the blessed. Nothing that is can be banished from the sight of God; nothing that exists—we will not say lives, life is a sacred word—can exist from moment to moment without the interposition of the Divine hand. Ever present before the great Father must be the anguish and the moans of the souls in torment; ever to His eye there must be this dark counterfoil to the joy and glory of the redeemed. And yet the question forces itself upon us: What else can the plain statements of the Scriptures mean; nay, what else can in the essential nature of things befall a free spirit that chooses to exercise its freedom in sin? We may well feel with a wise one of old, “Such knowledge is too wonderful for us: it is as high as heaven, what can we do? it is as deep as hell, what can we know?”

Sore difficulties beset us in working out a clear and harmonious theory of the judgment and its issues. But blessed be God that we can rest in the belief that all will be, in ways that we see not, so wisely and righteously ordered by the Judge of all the earth, as to satisfy the yearning heart, not of the great Father only, but of the Redeemer of humanity, and to fill the universe with praise. Here as elsewhere, when we are bewildered and perplexed by thoughts too high for us and which reach too far, we find a sure refuge and rest in faith. We believe God in Christ, and we can leave our future and the future of humanity in His hand. Meanwhile, our work, our duty is clear: “Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us: we pray you in Christ’s stead, be ye reconciled to God.” “This is the work of God, that ye believe on him whom he hath sent.” “Other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ.” “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.”

But this is beside the scope of the present discourse. I have to consider what these words, so strangely misapplied, do mean, and to draw from them those most pregnant lessons concerning the conduct of life which they are intended to afford. “Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days. Give a portion to seven, and also to eight; for thou knowest not what evil shall be upon the earth. If the clouds be full of ram, they empty themselves upon the earth: and if the tree fall toward the south, or toward the north, in the place where the tree falleth, there it shall be. He that observeth the wind shall not sow; and he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap. As thou knowest not what is the way of the spirit, nor how the bones do grow in the womb of her that is with child: even so thou knowest not the works of God who maketh all. In the morning sow thy seed, and in the evening withhold not thine hand: for thou knowest not whether shall prosper, either this or that, or whether they both shall be alike good.”

I. The key to the passage, the broad idea which underlies the whole, is in the first verse. In the sixth verse the writer repeats the thought under a varied form, and it is evident that it rules the whole. Let us ask ourselves what it means. It is a fair question whether we have here a reference to a popular proverb descriptive of the most useless and apparently hopeless work, “casting bread upon the waters;” or whether there is a reference to Egyptian husbandry, which might seem just as futile a method, did not experience prove that a harvest of splendid abundance is the well-nigh certain result. I do not think that it is needful to settle the rival claims of the two interpretations,[B] inasmuch as the essential point of the author’s meaning is involved in both. In either case you have a husbandry of faith; and in either case you have a grand image of all noble spiritual work. All husbandry is of faith to an extent which we little realize, but most especially this husbandry. The seed-corn scattered from the hand vanishes from sight, the very bed in which it is hidden lies buried, and an uncongenial, impenetrable element spreads its barrier between the sower and the seed, which he must leave in the hands of God. The farmer who has ploughed his field and settled his seed in the furrows feels less shut out from it; he sees at least where it lies, he can test its condition, he can trace the first green bloom on the brown surface of his fields, which is the prophecy and the pledge of harvest. But seed cast into the waters! where is it? who can trace it? what can withhold the waters from rotting it, and burying the promise of the seed and the hope of the husbandman in their depths? And the seed dropped into the furrows of the human seed-field, the heart that has been broken up by the deep ploughshare of God’s discipline, and over which a fertilizing flood of quickening influences has passed,—where lies it? What glance can follow it? What hand can touch it? What eye can foresee, what brain can forecast, its destiny? There is a dread likeness here, to the eye of the understanding, between this perilous husbandry and spiritual labour; man’s knowledge is so limited, man’s hand is so powerless, the seed passes so far out of his ken, and lies buried in such deep depths within.

There is a mystery in all husbandry which it is manifestly the purpose of God to keep clearly before the eye of the soul. He will not suffer us to forget it. “And he said, So is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast seed into the ground; and should sleep, and rise night and day, and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how. For the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself; first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear. But when the fruit is brought forth, immediately he putteth in the sickle, because the harvest is come” (Mark iv. 26-29). This is the daily miracle of nature, the “sign” which is done daily before our eyes. There are those, and they constitute a large and powerful school of thinkers in our day, who refuse coldly to listen to any evidence as to the miracles of Scripture, and who see this sign of an unseen energy at work around them and within them each moment, but feel powerless even to inquire from what fountain it springs. It is deeply unjust to brand the Positivist school of philosophy as explicitly either materialistic or atheistic. They are by no means blind to the fact that there is a hidden mystery in nature; they see quite as clearly as we do its marvellous depths. There is something quite as wonderful in their sight in the daily growth of the corn and the assimilation of our daily bread, as in the feeding of five thousand in the lonely wilderness by the word which came forth from the mouth of the Saviour. But they say, this region is simply impenetrable by the human intellect; in all its efforts at discovery it simply meets with shadows projected under various conditions and at various angles by itself. Our fair charge against them is, not that they are blind to the fact of a mystery in nature, but that they dishonour the royal faculty of the reason with which God has gifted them, by distrusting its ability to deal with a vast class of phenomena—the manifestations of the working of unseen powers with which God has surrounded them—which are as definite and substantial as the physical facts out of which they educe their laws. The world of spiritual experience and activity with which mainly the Bible deals, claims from us, at any rate, observation, thought, and deduction, as reverent as that which we joyfully devote to the phenomena of nature; and we accept as eagerly the thoughts and suggestions of seers who have insight into this world of mystery, as we accept the teachings of science concerning things which are beyond our sight. And if words come to us from this higher sphere, which harmonize discordant elements and make the chaos of our spiritual consciousness and experience a cosmos ruled by intelligence and love, we joyfully accept the truth which sustains and explains the phenomena, and feel that in proclaiming it we are “holding forth a word of life” to our fellow-men. And the Scripture miracle is to us a flash of sunlight, which illumines the darkness of the unknown: we see unveiled the Hand which is working each moment these signs and wonders within and around us; and, studying the nature, the mind, the heart, by which that Hand is guided, we find rest in the assurance that the power whose awful manifestation in nature might well appal and overwhelm us, is under the absolute rule of One whose declaration of Himself is that He is Love. We receive an emancipation from both the terrors and the idols of the imagination, when we learn that the daily bread of our lives comes to us from the hand of the Father, and is crowned with His benediction. The poor believe it quite simply: they have a beautiful sense of dependence on the Hand which feeds the birds and clothes the lilies. As a child hangs on the mother’s breast, they hang daily as trustfully on the bounty of the Lord. And they are more free from vain fancies herein than the philosophers. It is the wise and the scribe who are in bondage to idols: simple hearts, which have received the revelation of the relations of the two worlds which the Bible offers, walk free in the sunlight, and dwell quiet from the fear of evil.

“Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days.”

The main point here then is, that in all husbandry there are two elements—the intelligence and energy of the man, and the co-operation of a secret force, the springs of which and the methods of which escape him, but on which absolutely depend all his fruits. Neither without the other can produce the harvest. Paul plants, Apollos waters; but God giveth the increase: but neither without Paul’s planting does the harvest spring. “Behold, a sower went forth to sow.” The human sower is, as far as we see, the indispensable fellow-worker with the Most High God. But God, and not the human sower, has the absolute control of the result.

Let us look at this more closely. To impress this upon us is the main object of the writer in the text.