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The topic for our consideration this evening is genocide and the future of Israel. Let us prepare ourselves for our study by reading then in the book of Exodus and chapter one. The book of Exodus, chapter one. While you are finding the place, let me remind you that, God willing, on Saturday next at half past seven— half past seven the talks are on Saturdays, we shall be considering the title The Lord in the midst of the earth. And if you would like to do some preliminary reading for that occasion, then the appropriate chapters to read would be chapters 3 to nine.
Chapters three through nine, as the Americans say. Now the book of Exodus, beginning to read in chapter one, and verse one. Now these are the names of the sons of Israel which came into Egypt. Every man and his household came with Jacob. Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah, Ithaca, Zebulun, and Benjamin, Dan and Naphtali, Gad, and Asher. And all the souls that came out of the loins of Jacob were seventy souls, and Joseph was in Egypt already.
And Joseph died, and all his brethren, and all that generation. The children of Israel were fruitful and increased abundantly and multiplied and waxed exceeding mighty, and the land was filled with them. Now there arose a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph. And he said unto his people, Behold, the children of Israel are more and mightier than we. Come, let us deal wisely with them, lest they multiply and it come to pass that when there falleth out any war, they also join themselves unto our enemies and fight against us and get them up out of the land.
Therefore they did set over them taskmasters to afflict them with their burdens. They built for Pharaoh store cities, Tithon and Rameses. But the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied, and the more they spread abroad. They were grieved because of the children of Israel. Indeed, the Egyptians made the children of Israel to serve with rigor. They made their lives bitter with hard service in mortar and in brick, and in all manner of service in the field, all their service wherein they made them serve with rigor. And the king of Egypt spake to the Hebrew midwives, of which the name of the one was Shipra and the other Tua, and he said, when you do the office of a midwife to the Hebrew women and see them upon the birth stool, if it be a son, then you shall kill him, but if it be a daughter, then she shall live.
But the midwives feared God and did not as the king of Egypt commanded them, but saved the men-children alive. And the king of Egypt called for the midwives and said unto them, Why have you done this thing and have saved the men-children alive? The midwives said unto Pharaoh, Because the Hebrew women are not as the Egyptian women, for they are lively and are delivered, let the midwife come unto them. And God dealt well with the midwives, and the people multiplied and waxed very mighty. And it came to pass, because the midwives feared God, that he made them houses. And Pharaoh charged all his people, saying, every son that is born you shall cast into the river, and every daughter you shall save with fire, w- uh, save alive.
God give us good understanding of his holy word. When the book of Exodus opens, we learn from the genealogy that forms its preface that Israel have been in Egypt for some long generations. We are told also that during those long generations they have prospered exceedingly. But I want you to notice at once two things. That these long years and centuries, compared with the years of the patriarchs in Canaan, have been, as far as we are told, years of silence on the part of God.
As far as our record goes, I repeat, they form a vivid contrast with the years when the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were living in the land of Palestine. Those patriarchal years were times of delight, when God in his mercy treated his people as a father will treat his infant children, condescending to them, coming down to their level. And time and again did God come down to earth, now to visit Abraham's tent and eat a dinner with him, now to wrestle with Jacob in his difficulties. But then Israel grew up and came into Egypt, and there they lived for centuries and prospered.
But in contrast to the patriarchal years, these centuries, as far as we are given to know, were centuries of silence on the part of God. No new revelation that we read of came to them. Life just went on. There seemed to have been no further visions nor voices. Notice, will you too, this second thing, that now as we commence this book of Exodus, those long years of silence are nearly over. This particular period of Israel's history is beginning to come to its end.
Presently, the end will come, and will come in an outburst of frightful iniquity on the part of the Gentile nation, and in particular on the part of its king. Frightful violence and iniquity and oppression against Israel herself. An attempt even to destroy Israel and eradicate her. And what is more, a frightful, frightful outburst of rebellion against Almighty God himself. As man in the proud confidence of his scientific ability and the powers of the boffin boys behind the scenes, challenges Almighty God to the rule of earth and defies Jehovah to do anything about man's deliberate secession.
When this particular age of Israel's history comes to its end, you will perceive how God cannot any longer remain silent, nor any longer remain apparently distant. These are the days when God must intervene, when God must poke his finger, to use the b- the biblical metaphor, when God must poke his finger in the work and show man that there is a God and that the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof. So we are to read of the final days of that particular era.
There shall be days, on the one hand, gloomy with records of judgments and warnings and catastrophes coming from the hand of Almighty God on a rebellious and defiant nation. Though at the same time, they shall be chapters bright with the glory of God's grace and the marvel of his mercy towards vessels of mercy which he foreprepared for glory. Eventually, the rebellious nation shall be subdued, we shall find, and Israel will be delivered.
And amidst those catastrophic judgments, God will teach the earth one of its early lessons about the nature of God and the glory of his character and the divine attitude to sin. Tonight, however, our topic shall lead us not to those final days of that era of history, not to the previous years, to the run up towards those final days. Tonight we think not of that Pharaoh who was the Pharaoh of the time of the Exodus. We think of the Pharaoh who was his runner up, the one who immediately preceded him.
And we are to think for a moment now of the policies that he began to put into operation in those days that came just before the end of that particular age. We are to think how that for reasons of state, for reasons of economics and politics, this pharaoh put into action a scheme that virtually amounted to the genocide of Israel, to the deliberate extermination of a complete nation. The story might have struck us in our modern times as perhaps lurid and exaggerated.
Is it possible that any government would turn to the deliberate extermination, child by child, of a whole nation. Yet we have lived through such periods of history as we can no longer be shocked, and we believe it implicitly. Many of us here gathered tonight live through the period in modern history when Hitler deliberately set himself to the destruction of the descendants of this same nation, Israel, and gassed five or six million of them deliberately and systematically in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
We have heard rumors, have we not, in recent years and months of what may well be true, the virtual extermination of all opposition by physical massacre in Cambodia. But whereas this kind of thing has happened to other nations, we cannot help being struck by the fact that it has happened to Israel perhaps more than to any other nation on record. The persecution, the anti-Semitism have been so persistent as invite us to consider whether there may not be some deeper reason behind their persecution than lies behind the normal atrocities that politics have given birth to.
We think of the early oppressions under Antiochus Epiphanes of the Jews in, in Judea. We think of the anti-Semitic riots in Egypt under the Roman Empire. We think of those ugly days in Spain when a so-called Christian church tortured and persecuted Jews. We think of Russian pogroms, we think of our own evil kings in these islands who persecuted Jews for the sake of their money. We think of Hitler's persecutions, we think of what is still going on in the U- uh, in the United Soviet Republic.
The very idea that Hitler conceived of, of deliberately gassing five or six million people, how will you explain it merely in terms of human perversity and cruelty? It seems that behind it lies a far more sinister power. For Israel it was who, even in these early days, was the character, the carrier of the purposes of God. Israel to whom the oracles of God had even then begun to be revealed. Israel who were presently to be the vehicle of God's law from Mount Sinai.
Israel, the nation to whom God had made the promise through Abraham, their forefather, in thee and in thy seed shall all the nations of the world be blessed. And in as much as it was the divine purpose already made known that Israel was to be a marked nation in the middle of the earth, the vehicle of God's great redemption for mankind, it is a thing not to be surprised at, that his satanic majesty should at once and immediately attempt what he has attempted many times since, to exterminate that race through whom God had planned redemption for mankind, and through whom one day the blessed redeemer himself was to come.
When that evil king made known his deliberate policies, then the impact of it and the challenge of it was felt in Israel first of all, not by Israel's prophets or Israel's priests, but by midwives in the course of their professional duties. These women that have secured themselves an honor- honored place in the role of honor of Holy Scripture would otherwise perhaps have gone unknown, had it not been for this, that in the course of their professional duties, they came head on against the policy of the then government.
It is a reminder to us at once, is it not, that some of the biggest battles that are being fought in our age are not fought out in the cloistered calm of St. August's Church. They are fought out still by the midwives and the gynecologists and the doctors and the lawyers and the businessmen and the school teachers as they go about their daily professions. Or perhaps, as we have been sketching into ourselves the conditions of things in this period of Israel's history, when that particular age was beginning to come to its end, you have seen a faint and distant analogy of our own time.
We too have been living through centuries when God has been silent. When since the resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ, his son, there have come no voices, no additional revelations beyond our New Testament. For years, God has been silent. But there seem to be signs around us, do there not, that this age is beginning to come to its end. Why, that could have been said, I suppose, by any apostle, and some of them did say it.
Paul, for instance, observed in his day the mis- the mystery of iniquity doth already work. And if Paul in his day saw features already beginning that should come to their full harvest at the end of the age, it is not perhaps surprising that we should see those features even more clearly marked. And tendencies in our modern societies beginning to gather momentum that shall inevitably come to their harvest in the days of the end of this age. Therefore, we shall find practical encouragement as well as warning and exhortation.
By the example of these midwives and the other faithful people in Israel whom we shall meet. We shall find, I say, exhortation and example, uh, that we may yet be called upon to stand in our daily professions against the introduction of principles that insidiously shall undermine not only the truth of our gospel, but undermine people's faith in the basic goodness of nature, in the basic belief that life, all life, comes from God and must be respected as a something that comes from its divine creator.
Here, let me say again, was an Egyptian monarch. Who was prepared to regard human life as something definitely secondary and of secondary importance to the state, to political advantage, and economic considerations. The midwives opposed him. They opposed him on two grounds. They were Israelites anyway, and they weren't going to stand by to see their nation exterminated, to see all hope of future generations stifled.
But then it went against them and their professional principles as midwives. Theirs was a great task to be the guardians and promoter of the sanctities of physical life. And they were not going to take their profession, whose task it was to guard the sanctities of life, and turn it to the destruction of human life. And they opposed the Pharaoh. I wonder, were they the only two midwives in Israel? Learned and scholarly men with beards to stroke have questioned, as they have stroked those beards, whether these records can be true.
They say that Israel, according to the text, were so many thousands of thousands. Surely they would have needed more than two midwives. How come there were only two? But then the scripture doesn't say there were only two. There could have been more. It singles out these two. perhaps it singles them out because they were shining examples, such as all the other midwives in Israel followed. I hope it was that way, don't you? I hope none of the other midwives gave in to Pharaoh.
Had I been a midwife, what an unlikely situation, had I been a midwife, I think I might have found my knees a-quaking and have been tempted to all sorts of temporizing rationalizations. Some of them, of course, could have been afraid, couldn't they? That if they opposed the Pharaoh, they might have lost their jobs. Do you notice how the text records that when these midwives stood half by their duty, their faith in God, to guard the sacredness of life, God intervened, we are told, and he made them houses.
God intervened to look after them, to maintain their jobs, to give them a roof over their head and enough money to buy their daily bread. For they were doing a very risky thing, opposing Pharaoh, and could have stood to lost their, lose their jobs. They might have stood to lose their necks as well. And I think even in our own day, how some of our consultant doctors and surgeons must face equally demanding decisions and stand not to get posts that otherwise they would have got.
If for conscience towards God and in opposition to certain features of the health service, they refuse to perform operations that they regard as unethical. And these good midwives, some of them could, couldn't they? Have excused themselves, saying, well, you know, it's not for us humble midwives to take decisions like this. This is government policy. We don't form government policy. It's the government that forms the policy, and we as simple midwives, well, if we carry out what they say, God won't blame us, he'll blame the government.
All thanks be to God that those two midwives at least didn't argue that way wrong. Government or no government, if the government bade them to do something that went against their conscience and the law of God, then they took the stand that later on the apostles took when they said, judge you whether we should obey man rather than God, or God rather than man. And they could have rationalized, couldn't they, in the manner of some moderns. They could have said, you know, these poor darling little infants. Why, I'm not now giving vent to imagination, am I?
But I thought I heard it on the wireless in a debate in the summer. An argument that went like this, not exactly as now I put it, but it went after this manner somehow. It said, you know, consider those darling little infants. Every infant has got a right to be wanted in this world, and therefore if some infants are liable to come and they're not wanted, better eliminate them. What a curious run of logic. You have a right to be wanted, but if you haven't, uh, if you're not wanted, uh, don't come. How's that for a right to be wanted? And they could have argued, couldn't they? Ah, well, this is a wicked world, and these pharaohs are likely to get worse than better.
Fancy bringing a little infant into this world to face all this desperate trouble. Wouldn't it be better to snuff its little life out and save it a lot of trouble? And so arguing, they might have fouled their conscience. Oh, praise God, they didn't. Midwives they were with tremendous responsibilities, but they didn't add to their responsibilities the responsibilities of Almighty God himself. To decide when a life is worth living. How would you measure it anyway? Why, for Israel, with the possibility of life itself, and as now we know, the possibility of a redemption and canion lying ahead.
Who gave it to the midwives to decide whether life were worth living. Even suppose Pharaoh didn't want them. When we think of the eternal potentialities that cluster around and in every human being. We might be well advised not to start taking over the divine responsibility, deciding whether a life is worth living or not. And so you'll perceive that the opening verses of this ancient book introduce us at once to problems that are pressing upon us still in our age, and will press more as we in turn come towards the end of a period of human history.
We are witnessing, are we not, in our day and age, a sad and a serious decline in the regard that is paid to the sanctity and sacredness of human life. I am conscious, of course, that I speak as a layman, and please let me say explicitly, I am not now referring to therapeutic abortions. On that topic, responsible Christian doctors, taking their grave decisions responsibly and in the fear of God and in the love of men, responsible doctors, Christian doctors, come to different opinions, and I am not one to decide the matter for them.
But abortion on demand is another thing altogether from therapeutic abortion. And what would worry me as a layman, if a layman may be allowed to speak on such topics, what worries me is that the arguments that are frequently put forward in favor of abortion on demand are arguments that could equally well, when with the exact same cogency, be applied to the elimination of the old and the elderly. They say, for instance, do they not, here is a poor woman, and if she gives birth to this child, it will lead her to much physical suffering and distress in the family, for the family is hard put to make ends meet already, and the woman, well, she has burdens enough without another child.
Even I, as a bachelor, can feel sympathy going through my heart for a woman in that situation. And they who are privileged to be more than bachelors, I dare say, feel even more genuine sympathy. But before we let that sympathy be our final arbiter, ought we not to consider how that that same kind of consideration, if allowed to be the final arbiter, would get rid of granddad as well? For here is granddad living with his married daughter, for they haven't anywhere else to put the poor old boy, and he's beginning to lose his memory and is a bit doddery, and everybody knows when you have mastered everything that compassion can say, then elderly granddaddies can be a source of trial in a home sometimes.
And if he goes on like this, he'll be a burden to his daughter, hard-pressed mother that she is, and her health way m- may well suffer. What is the answer then? To eliminate grandfather. I repeat, merely allowing that kind of compassion to be our final arbiter could lead us at the other end of life to very serious, and what shall I call them? In days gone by, they would have been called crimes.
And what shall we call them now? But it is not merely in this restricted field at the beginning and end of life that we shall presently face problems on a big scale. Now give our scientists and biologists a few more years to do their experiments, to make further advances, if they can, in biological engineering, and we get maybe faced with even bigger problems to decide. And here, I admit to you, I can only speculate, but how far do you judge that God will allow men to go towards cracking the code that spells life.
Some I know seriously take the view that God will never let man discover what is the secret code of life, never be able to discover that combinations of genes and chromosomes and other oddities that there are, that eventually, when put in the right combination, spell life. And you may well be right. God may never allow men to find that secret. I wouldn't myself wa- wish to be a hundred percent and dogmatically sure. I read in the book of the Revelation that when at last the beast, the man of sin, shall come, his religious lieutenant, the false prophet, shall be able to do astounding miracles with the aid of supernatural and sinister and satanic power.
He shall come with all deceivable lying wonders. He shall call down fire from heaven, says the book of the Revelation, a sign which in the ancient world was performed by Elijah, as in those days, a clear and indisputable sign of divine power. Such will be the deceit wielded by the man of sin in the final days of this age, that he shall counterfeit what used to be an indubitable and incontrovertible sign of God's power. The man of sin shall have it done.
He shall be given to give breath to the image. I leave you to work out what that may mean. He shall be able to give breath to that image in such fashion as the image will both talk and be able to point out and declare who among men secretly doesn't worship the beast. And if in the divine wisdom God allows men to go further into the secrets of those combinations that spell human life, then there will inevitably arise grave ethical and moral problems relating to the sanctity of life.
For let us be sure, governments haven't in the past always stopped short of tampering with human life. Hitler got it into his head, didn't he, that it would be a good thing to produce a superhuman race by controlling genetics. Suppose the psychologists prevail. They don't seem too strong just at the moment, thank God. Who would tell us that man is merely a machine.
That man's brain is nothing more than a sophisticated machine. And that therefore, wrong human behavior should not any longer be dealt with in moral terms, but simply in physical terms. After all, when your car won't start in the morning or stalls in the middle of a traffic jam, you don't take your car along to a preacher, do you, or give it a moral sermon. What you say to your car, well, might be at a distance mistaken for a moral sermon, but I'm sure it falls short of that somewhere. You take your car and its malfunctioning engine to a garage because the thing is only a machine of this.
And you don't ask its pardon and inquire whether it would like it done this way. You just twist the necessary screws and repair the odd valve, or if you have the Reader's Digest book, kick it in the right place. Ah, but what if one of these days there prevails in a society that has become utterly godless, if there prevails the idea that man is merely a machine, and that evil behavior is merely a malfunction of the old machines. Then the proponents of that view will tell us then, as they tell us now, that the way to cure human wrong behavior is simply to get working on the old mechanics of the brain by the old computers and electroencephalograms and electric shocks and good knows what, goodness knows what else, and electrodes planted within the brain.
For according to this view, man is nothing but a machine. And God be thanked for all those advances in modern science that help us to understand those parts of our makeup that can suitably dealt with, be dealt with as machines. One of these days we may find ourselves called upon to stand even more firmly and vigorously, and even more against the mounting tides of public opinion, for the fact that man, that human life is not just a machine, but that there is an element in human life that, coming from God, is related to God and made in the image of God, and is thereby sacred and eternally sacred.
That there is a spiritual dimension about man, that if we lose it, we have lost all that is worthwhile in man. This kind of battle, I repeat, is liable to be fought out, not so much in church, but in our daily professions of medicine and nursery school and university. For pray consider, it is not what people do when the days are easy.
It is what people do when there arises in politics a figure who is brilliant in his genius and almost absolute in his power, but is half a maniac or worse. Under the ancient Romans, there were multitudes of highly intelligent men. Rome had not come to be mistress of the ancient world by being led by termite heads. But when there rose up figures like Tiberius and Nero, distorted freaks of personality.
And by the changing circumstances of politics, these men got virtually absolute power in their hand and commanded the most dastardly of crimes against humanity. Then the professional men, then the politicians, grovelled at their feet, apart from certain notable exceptions. Germany was a leading nation in Europe, was she not? Her poets and artists, her professional men of all sorts, were leaders of well thought. They were not all dragons incarnate. But it is not what they did when they lived in fair days.
It is what they did when they came under the power of that half maniac Hitler, and they grovelled, didn't they? Lessons modern and lessons ancient warn us to think and think hard and think through our basic human values before God, when days are easy. Lest little by little standards are whittled and whittled away until we find ourselves powerless to resist. When some turn of politics brings to power a government that is totally atheistic and materialistic in its outlook and begins to press us to conform to their government policy.
But it wasn't only the midwives that earned themselves honorable mention. We come next to the story of Moses' parents, mother and father. When Moses was born, we are told that his mother saw him, that he was a goodly child. Nor is there anything remarkable, perhaps you might think, in the statement. My mother, bless her heart, was an honest woman. She thought all her children were goodly children. I think she thought the last of them, uh, had that quality in special degree, I know not.
Oh, I dare say she was right for all that. But she used to confess with her native Suffolk wit that it was a well-known phenomenon that every old crows is the whitest. Perhaps in this part of the world you cannot understand that language. Let me translate it for you. Crows in our part of the world are normally black, and some are very black, and some are not quite so black. And since all crows are black, those crows which are less black and others are regarded, so we are told, uh, as somewhat superior to those that are jet black. Not ordinary crows, those that are a little bit gray.
And fond mother crows are in the habit, so we are reliably informed, of imagining that their baby crow is not like all other crows, jet black. It's decidedly superior. It is more white than most. Hence the saying that every old crows is the whitest. And we can't, uh, find fault, can we, with the mother who thinks that, uh, while all children are lovely, there never was a child like her child. And when we're done with the natural affection and some of the sentiment that sometimes goes therewith, it remains, doesn't it?
Take any newborn child you come across, and it is literally true there never was a child like that child. That little personality is unique, and the God that never created two blades of grass alike or two snowflakes alike creates with every child born a unique personality, a something whose value is infinite and incomparable. See it there, as Shakespeare called it, a pokey infant pooing all over the place.
Perhaps if you're not mu- a mother, you might have, uh, need of some imagination now to follow what I'm going to say, but you are looking at a something whose potential beggars description. Made in the image of God. Please God, if one day redeemed, here is a personality that shall be a prince or princess and adorn the heavenly court of its creator eternally. That instinct that Moses' mother had over that infant child is not a mockery. It is not exaggerated.
Here is beldame nature starting off the process that, please God, will grow into something even bigger. An ordinary mother's maternal instinct and love for her child that one day will develop into a care for its soul and spirit. Mother of a something, of a someone, one day to be conformed to the image of Christ, made all glorious eternally. Moses' mother wasn't, uh, wasn't giving up that value. She would risk her life, she would risk her everything for the child and its potential that God had given her.
She goes down in the New Testament as one of the heroines of faith, because she saw in nature not something merely to be naturally pleased and proud of, but she saw in that child a potential for God and dared to believe and stake her faith in God for the future of that child, and as it turned out, for the future of her whole nation, for the coming of the Redeemer, for the solution of the problems of the world, and then the introduction of the millennium itself. It would be arrogance, I suppose, of any one of us to think we've given birth to a Moses.
But the humblest child carries nonetheless an eternal potential. Oh God, write it on our hearts in days when human life is cheap. In days when the average child, by the time it's grown up, has seen literally thousands of murders cheaply performed on its television screen. When in the name of pleasure and convenience, human life becomes degraded and devalued.
All God write on our hearts, the basic values inherent in physical life, in parenthood, in the child. And then not only the medics and the mothers, but thank God, the teachers come in for their commendation. For when Pharaoh's daughter came, she was moved with compassion for the child and its weeping. Oh, you gentlemen may think of that as mere sob stuff.
All right, could be a little bit sentimental, couldn't it? I like it better than I like the powerlust of the politicians, I must say. If we're going to be guided by instincts, I think I would prefer to be guided by the instinctive compassions of a woman for a child than I would be be guided by the instincts of some great world politician whose instincts are sheer powerlust. Well, when Pharaoh's daughter bore the child, she took it into her home and her own establishment. Here was a child who was privileged to have an older sister who was looking on and guarding him, and then suggested a bright idea to her imperial princess that the child would need a nursemaid, uh, and a teacher for his infant years.
And Moses' mother was secured and acted as nursemaid and teacher. 'Tis an honorable profession, if I may forget all modesty for a moment and speak, I who have the easier end of that particular profession. That is an honorable profession indeed, and none more important than those who labor in those early days, When for the child the voice of teacher is next to the voice of God. When for the child the fact that teacher said it is practically the last court of appeal on earth or heaven.
Tremendously important, uh, profession this. To teach, whether it is mother with the child at her knee or, or the infant school teacher, or in technical college or high school or university or wherever. To teach the sane, healthy things of life and literature and trade. Not forever to be evangelizing overtly and preaching John three sixteen, but teaching in faith of God, teaching on that basic axiom that this world is God's world. Teaching people to think if there be anything lovely, truthful, of good report, teaching the young mind to think on these things and not on some of the filth that they are frequently served up with.
And teaching by example, and sometimes by lip, that life makes no sense ultimately, unless it be lived in faith of the Creator. Or do you think Moses' mother taught the young and growing boy, if it wasn't she taught him the stories of their past? And the great acts of God's redemption with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. And the promises that the faithful in Israel had nurtured and kept these passing centuries, in spite of the long silence of God.
As was in those early years, were the foundations built for what was to be such a spectacular career for this man of God. And as we close our study tonight, we must now observe that noble as this wa- as was the stand of the midwife and the mother and the teacher mother. All these things put together would not have sufficed to have redeemed Israel. The trouble went far too deep.
We must now turn to considerations that tell us, quite sanely, that if Israel is ever to be redeemed from this s- s- situation in which they are, then it will not come apart from the personal intervention of God as redemption, as redeemer. There is no ultimate redemption, not in medicine, nor in family life, nor in education, nor in politics, nor in art, nor in literature. There is no redemption in them. We may stand as best we can for healthy standards at that level of ordinary life, and God help us so to do.
But we must face the fact that redemption will not come that way, and the millennium will not come that way. Man's problems shall not be solved merely by a better health service, by a better educational service, by improving the lot of the infant in the nursery school, by steadying the parents to discharge their responsibilities thereafter. The basic malaise of the human heart is a deeper and more serious thing than that. And to deliver from it, it will need, I say, nothing less than the redemption of God. For consider now Moses grown to be a man.
He comes out from the palace with his love of his fellow countrymen and sees an Egyptian smiting an Israelite, and his blood runs to his head and to his heart. And he smites the Egyptian, thinking by sheer brute force to cure the problem. Stand up for the oppressed, use force if need be. And he thought that was recipe enough to cure the world's problems. Next day, he was in for a shattering disillusionment. He went out the next day and he saw not an Israelite and Egyptian, he saw two Israelites fighting together.
And when he tried to calm them and sort out their differences, they both rounded on him and bade him be gone. He found that day that not only are the oppressors wicked, but the oppressed are wicked too. He found that day that not only is the tyrannical overlord a sinner and selfish at heart, he found that not only was the pagan Egyptian a selfish, aggressive man, he found that the Israelites who professed faith in God was at heart a fallen, basically aggressive and selfish man.
A mere force of arms and guerrilla warfare and paying out money to activist groups wouldn't cure the trouble then, as it won't cure it now. And he went off, disillusioned, into the wilderness. And from the palace came to the desert, and from being a prince he came to be a shepherd. And even in the desert, amongst those naturally simple folk, you know, those noble savages, those half civilized, who aren't caught up in the rat race of the modern world, with all its pyramids and chariots and pharaohs and kings.
You know, those nice simple folk who got back to nature and live. He found among them... by the very same thing. The women shepherdesses. They had no trouble in those days with shepherd curtains. They were shepherdesses. Came to the well to get their water. And the shepherd men came and drove them away. They had a bigger union, you see, the shepherd men. There was a demarcation dispute and a differential difference. Of course there was. What do you think? And the shepherd men had got together to stand up for the rights of shepherd men.
Of course they were interested in the new social world, if they got the biggest lot of the water first. And I'm quite sure that having started out for championing the cause of the underdog, that they were really concerned with the weaker unions? I mean, I mean the weaker women. For the human heart is as basically selfish, be it found here or there, on right or left, capital or communist. And it's a sorry old tangled world.
Not all the political and economic and social engineering will save it. There must have been many a day when Moses despaired and saw no future in anything. Such a tangled world it was. And with such gloomy thoughts in his mind, you have to live, don't you? He, by this time he got a wife, well, you can't help it mostly. And if you've got a wife and children, you've got to maintain them. So he was, uh, doing a shepherd's job. And looking at all those old thorn bushes, I wonder, did he mutter through his beard, that ain't Egypt, this is it.
Oof. And here was me once upon a time. I used to be woken up with, uh, by servants with my, well, not tea, but the best equivalent that the Egyptians could manage. Now I get my own breakfast amidst these fleas in the wilderness and these stinking old sheep. And look at these old thorn bushes. Aye, this isn't Egypt. No, this isn't Eden either, is it? Ah, for Eden. Those stories my mum told me of a time when earth was beautiful and the trees were lovely and the fruit was luscious, and God came down in the cool of the day and walked with men.
Was it true? Or was that merely a imaginary fairy tale concocted to comfort slaves at their burdens in Egypt? Look at it now, anyway. No longer lovely trees and flowers and fruits, but a barren wilderness with scratchy old thorn bushes, tangles of the curse. Why live? That old thorn bush must have spoken volumes to Moses about his own people, that tangled quarrel there between his brethren, the tangle of politics in Egypt, the very curse of God seemed on it, and the tangle of his own life.
Where would it all end? And what hope was there for it, when presently he saw a something? I thought I saw a flame there, said he. Yes, so it is, that bush is on fire. But what matter if an old thorn bush catch on fire, because the end of thorns is to be burned, so we are told. Good riddance to bad rubbish. And he was about to turn aside and go on when, when he noticed that the bush was burning, but the bush was not consumed. And he drew near to find the secret why this scratchy old thorn bush, curse of God, burned, but was not consumed.
God had come down and was in the bush. Oh, marvelous thing. Man's sin had indeed made a desert and a thorn bush of what God had planted as a garden. Why then didn't God scrap it? Why didn't he burn up the thornbush, the desert, and the little planet and have done with this sorry phenomenon of humankind? The God who made it is not to be so easily defeated as to give up now when man sin has ruined it all.
God has come down. See Moses? God isn't standing outside the thorn bush criticizing it for not being an oak tree or an apple tree. God's in the bush. That's why it is not confused. That day Moses had a vision of God that started him on his spiritual pilgrimage. He had to wait to see this glory until first he had seen what a tangled, disillusioning thing life can be. And he turned to see God burning in the bush and guaranteeing a future for Israel.
Later, he was to have more exalted visions of God, visions of the glory of God on Mount Sinai in splendor, in the tabernacle in glory. This was where it started. This was the thing that began Moses on his pilgrimage. It is a similar site that will start us on our pilgrimage. A pilgrimage that will give us hope even in this world, fallen and corrupt as it is, will give us hope for a future for this world, and for a future long after this world is done. Do I speak to somebody who has discovered the thorn bushes of life?
You had your ideals of what life could be. It isn't, is it now, the unreasonableness of your children, the spitefulness of some you have loved dear, the cruelty and perversity of men in industry. Be it what it will, it, it disillusions you. And perhaps that's the place where God will meet with you. In your disillusionment. To begin for you a pilgrimage.
To a fairer world and a glorious inheritance which will never fade. Or have you not seen this glory? In your mind's eye once more, and in a spirit of worship, with shoes off your feet, come with me to the most barren place this world has ever known or shall Oh know. no. Calvary and a human figure spiked on a cross, torn with thorns and mutilated by men, where men's envy and ambition and powerlust and greed and spite and sadism have worked until they have wrecked that human form and made it scarce recognizable as human.
All the poverty, all the disillusionments of Calvary. Is there any hope? Ah, see it again. See the crown of thorns and the emblem of a curse. Ask, why wasn't he consumed? And the answer comes back, God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing unto them their trespasses.
Here we find the dawn of heaven, while upon thy cross we gaze. Here we find hope that creation herself shall one day be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glory of the children of God. Here I find hope. Not for the tangle that is this world and my contemporaries merely. Here I find hope for that thorn bush that is my own life, my tangled, gnarled, broken personality.
For whom there would be no hope, were it not for a God who is faithful to what he has created. Here I find hope that through Christ who bore my curse, one day I too should be fully and finally delivered and fashioned to the image of God's eye. That is not that thorn bush, the end of the journey, but it is the beginning that guarantees the end. Shall we pray?
Now, God, we ask simply that thou, the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, who in spite of those years of silence, wast watching thy people and the affairs of men. Thou who didst come down into that thorn bush, save it from being consumed, and gave to Moses new hope and to his people eventually deliverance and glory. O thou God of Moses, now this moment be our God too, we beseech this. Show us thy glory through and in spite of our disillusionment.
Show us again thy thorn-crowned son. Giving us to understand the significance of Calvary. Cause us to find thereat, rising in our hearts, new hope, new significance. That Calvary becomes for each one of us the beginning of a pilgrimage that shall go on into ever greater and deeper knowledge of thyself, until it arrives at the unclouded glory of thine immediate presence, which things we ask, through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.
