Till she Find it

“TILL she find it” — no rest, no cessation, for the object of her search is precious. Because her lost treasure was dear to her heart the woman lighted the candle and swept the house, and searched diligently. The coin described as the piece of silver was probably one of the ten which made the wreath, as we may term the ornament for the head commonly worn by women in Palestine. One piece lost, the whole would forfeit its perfect character and charm. And in accord with the custom of the East the woman would presently make known her loss to her neighbors and friends. There was no secret about it. Her loss was a real loss to her, so she searched with care and persistency till she found the piece she had lost.
By this simple incident of daily life the Lord holds our wondering hearts to meditate upon the love of God to lost sinners. Like the piece of silver, the sinner is precious — precious in the eye of God; and because of worth and value to Him is sought for. The intrinsic value of the piece of silver mentioned in the parable amounts to but a few pence, for the Lord illustrated His gracious meaning by selecting a humble incident from daily life; yet even in its small actual worth may we not read how God chooses “not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble,” but “the things which are despised.”
The love of the triune God to sinners is expressed in the three parables — the love of the Son in that of the shepherd, the love of the Holy Spirit in that of the woman, and, lastly, the love of the Father. The gracious love of the Holy Spirit of God is then before us in the story of the search after the lost piece of silver, The Holy Spirit works through human hearts. He has not committed the toil of the seeking and the finding of sinners to angels. He sheds abroad in our hearts the love of God. Hence Divine love to sinners expresses itself in the earnest search after the lost, by which so many are found. Not that this alone is the subject of the parable, for, in addition to the earnest search which is recorded in the parable of the shepherd, in this before us, a candle is lighted I She lights a candle. The light of God’s truth, the light of His word, shines in the house. Perhaps, as our illustration seems to show, the light does not illumine a very large space at one time; it is made to shine for one object — to discover the specific piece of silver which was lost. And so it is in the search for souls. The light of God’s truth is, by the Spirit, brought to bear upon them, to show where they are. The light of His word is so vast that it reaches from eternity to eternity, manifests heaven and hell and the course of this world, and displays God Himself. But when the Holy Spirit brings the light of Divine truth to bear upon one soul, that light shows the sinner where he is. And it seems to the sinner as if God, exposed him and nothing else. For at such a moment nothing save God’s work in revealing the soul to itself, is the subject of contemplation.
The search for souls is a toilsome under taking! But love never grows weary. Sinners have to be sought if they are to be found. They know not their own value. Like the piece of silver, they are utterly insensible to the energy of love which labors after them. God the Spirit fills the hearts of God’s people with His desires after lost sinners; He stirs up their souls to labor after the lost. The spirit of true searching for souls is a gift of the Holy Ghost. But who shall describe the heavenly joy of finding the lost one! Perhaps in some miserable hovel — but a piece of silver none the less because of its surroundings; perhaps in the palace, but a piece of silver all the same, though lost in the glory of this world. Oh! the joy of the finding, the divine joy of finding the once lost sinner!
So great is the joy that friends and neighbors are called to rejoice together with the woman who found the piece she had lost. “Rejoice with me,” she says. “Rejoice with Me” is a heavenly word, which those hear who are in God’s sympathies in His gospel, and who by the energy of the Spirit in them toil after souls, and delight with God in the lost being found for Him.
The woman no doubt placed the piece of silver she found together with the others; and if we might ask ourselves, “Where is the lost sinner when found put?” we should say, “He or she goes along with others to be an ornament for Christ — to be one of the ornaments for His crown!”

Narratives from the Gospels in the Light of Jewish Customs.
THE SCRIBES AND THEIR TRADITIONS.
“YE have made the commandment of God of none effect by your traditions.” This was the exceeding grave charge brought against the Scribes by the Lord Jesus. We are familiar with the occasion. The disciples of Jesus were eating with “common (that is to say, unwashen) hands.” The Pharisees and certain of the Scribes, seeing this, “found fault.” “Why walk not Thy disciples according to the tradition of the elders?” they ask of Jesus. And, indeed, judged by the standard which was acknowledged by these objectors, the offense of the disciples was no mean one. For, by “the traditions of the elders,” the law of this ceremonial rite is thus laid down: “Though a man should only have water enough to drink, he is to wash his hands with part of it, and then to eat, and to drink the remainder.”
Any breach of this command was compared to the guilt of committing the vilest of sins.
But the Lord Jesus, after applying to the Scribes and Pharisees Isaiah’s solemn words: “This people honoureth Me with their lips, but their heart is far from Me,” said also to them: “Full well ye reject the commandment of God, that ye may keep your own tradition. For Moses said, Honor thy father and thy mother; and, Whoso curseth father or mother, let him die the death: but ye say, If a man shall say to his father or mother, ‘It is Korban (that is to say, a gift), by whatsoever thou mightest be profited by me’; he shall be free. And ye suffer him no more to do ought for his father or his mother; making the word of God of none effect through your tradition, which ye have delivered.”
Briefly, the matter is this: “Korban” means “a gift,” “an offering [to God],” and, in Israel’s olden days, property declared by vow to be “Korban” went to the treasury of God, and, of course, could not be appropriated to the use of private persons. But, under “the traditions of the elders,” though the word was retained, its meaning was greatly debased, — it simply served to debar a person to whom the words of the vow might be addressed from benefiting by the property declared to be “Korban.” In the case put forward by the Lord, the effect of using the terms of the vow was this: the property would not go to the Temple treasury, but the father, however much in want, could derive no benefit from his son’s possessions, just as if it had been truly consecrated to the service of God. But the son retained his property for his own use. It is true that the command of God: “Honor thy father and thy mother,” seemed to stand in the way of thoroughly carrying out this “doctrine of men,” but the Rabbis declared, in solemn council, that “honor of father and mother” did not invalidate such a vow, though, if the father were starving, the vow might be evaded by the son giving food, &c., to a third person, who, in his turn, could give to the father. But it is the most sober fact that God’s own command, and every prompting of natural affection as well, was, under the elders’ tradition, crushed by the vow of “Korban.” God’s word should have possessed supreme authority over the consciences of His people; it really was “rejected” (or, as the margin puts it, “frustrated”) by the traditions of men.
How, we may well ask, did these traditions of the scribes, (commonly called “the Oral Law,”) acquire such an ascendency over the consciences of the people as to set aside the plainest commands of God?
A glance at the gospels shows what a power the Scribes were in Jewish life and history. The Scribe, though he might be a Pharisee, was more, — he had a regular position, was Rabbi — “my great one” — to him all must look for explanation and light upon the law; he must be honored more than father or mother. Thus says the oral law. “As a man is commanded to honor and fear his father, so is he bound to honor and fear his Rabbi more than his father.” And again: “Thou must consider no honor greater than the honor of the Rabbi, and no fear greater than the fear of the Rabbi. The wise men have said, ‘The fear of thy Rabbi is as the fear of God.’” And when we read the Lord’s words, that they “love greetings in the market places, and to be called of men Rabbi, Rabbi,” our thoughts turn to that other command of theirs: “It is forbidden to a disciple to call his Rabbi by name, even when not in his presence” ; and again, “Neither is he to salute his Rabbi, nor to return his salutation in the same manner that salutations are given or returned amongst friends. On the contrary, he is to bow down before the Rabbi, and to say to him, with reverence and honor, Peace be unto thee, Rabbi!’”
We ask, How did the Rabbis attain their position? According to their traditions, when God gave the law to Moses He gave also full explanations and meanings of the law by word of mouth, which were not committed to writing. These were the “oral law” as distinguished from “the written.”
Moses called Aaron into his tent, and repeated these communications. Aaron in his turn repeated them to his sons; his sons to the elders, and the elders to the people.
After the death of Moses the trust of the oral law passed to Joshua. After Joshua, Caleb and Phineas, with other elders, took up the charge, and so it was handed down through Eli to Samuel, David, and others, till the time of Ezra.
In Ezra’s days — we are still in the region of tradition — a senate or synod was formed, composed of one hundred and twenty of the leading men of the time — priests, elders, and judges. They were the Sopherim,or Scribes. This assembly — the Great Synagogue, or the Sanhedrim — besides becoming the depositary of the oral law, said to have been received by Moses on Mount Sinai, set itself to gather together all the traditions and explanations of the law of God to which any value had been attached in the past. These explanations were commonly stated in the form of a rule or direction, and each separate one was called a Halachah (i.e., a rule, or canon). The whole collection was called the Mishna (i.e., “learning”), and received also the name of “The Second Law.” This is what is referred to by the term “the traditions,” or “the oral law.” At the time of the Lord Jesus these traditions were really an unwritten — an oral — law, roughly arranged into six hundred sections. It was a point of great importance to repeat them in the very words of the previous teacher, and thus they were handed down from Rabbi to disciple, the latter in time becoming the Rabbi of a fresh generation of disciples. It needed prodigious labor and a very faithful memory to learn and to hand down such a mass of undigested traditions, increasing with every year.
There is a tendency even in the present day to attach to some human explanation of God’s word more importance than to that word itself. This may be done unconsciously; but the Scribes did the same thing very willfully. At the first their words claimed only to be an explanation of the law; by-and-by they sought more glory for their words than for the law itself. “It is more punishable,’ says the Mishna, “to act against the words of the Scribes than against those of Scripture.” And a common proverb said that the Law was like water; the Mishna (the oral directions), like wine; and the Gemara (a commentary on the Mishna), like spiced wine. The Scribes had discussed and settled the point that the oral law was more precious and more to be loved than the written — that is, they claimed for their traditions more reverence than for the word of the living God.
We must not forget that they asserted a divine origin of their words — that according to them these words had come down, through a long chain of succession, from God Himself. But in the result the succession became everything, and the weight of learned names as sanctioning some disputed point was more coveted and relied on than the authority and sanction of the Scriptures. For example: one set of men would appeal to Rabbi Hillel, the head of one school; others to Rabbi Shammai, a rival teacher; and, if both these men agreed upon any matter, there was no room for further controversy.
These were the views and claims with which the Lord Jesus Christ came into conflict in His life. Their debasing and God-dishonoring tendency is evident. “Thou hast magnified Thy word above all Thy Name,” says the Scripture. The oral law made that word “of none effect.” And thus we understand why it was Christ set Himself against these self-constituted teachers, and uttered His solemn warning, “Beware of the Scribes!” We understand, too, something of their envious feelings, as they gathered round Him and asked, “By what authority doest Thou these things, or who gave Thee this authority to do these things?” With themselves it was indeed a question of authority —to be able to cite some former Rabbi, and in his name to propound some point of doctrine or of ceremony. But Jesus appealed to no Rabbi as His teacher; He came from God; He declared the things that He had heard from His Father. And it was this heavenly and divine authority which clothed His words, that made the people marvel at His doctrine, for He “taught not as the Scribes.”
In a word, the error of the Scribes was the substitution of human authority for divine. The word of God was overruled by the word of man. But we shall sadly miss the lesson of those times if we imagine that we are beyond the reach of like influences and tendencies. It is a question we may well ask ourselves, What is the authority to which we make our appeal for doctrine and for life? Is it the word of God, or that word as explained by man? We are entangled by “the traditions of the elders” if that holy word is put down from its lawful place of supreme authority, and the explanations of some favorite commentary, or some esteemed teacher (a true gift of God as each may be), usurp its place. We thereby do not only grave dishonor to God, but the loss to our own souls is immense. We leave the light of the word — that “lamp to our feet” — for the uncertain flicker of men’s rushlights; we quit the living streams for the hewn cisterns; the sweet “honey and the droppings of the honeycombs” for unsavoury morsels. The Gospels show the complete authority which the Lord Jesus assigned to the written word; in His controversy with Sadducees, with lawyers, and with Pharisees, to that word did He make His appeal, and with it did He put to silence those who would have entangled Him. The very temptations of Satan were met by the word; yea, even upon the cross Jesus cried, “I thirst,” in order that the Scripture might be fulfilled. And if God’s word is loved, and honored, and obeyed by us, it will be impossible that any “traditions” or “commandments of men” shall obtain authority over us, or lead to that “rejection” of the word of God, which was so strongly censured in the Scribes by the Lord a