01.04. GATHERED IN PEACE.
Chapter 4 GATHERED IN PEACE.
" Behold, I will gather thee to thy fathers, and thou shalt be gathered to thy grave in peace."
" The archers shot at King Josiah ; and the king said unto his servants. Have me away ; for I am sore wounded. . . . And they brought him to Jerusalem, and he died."
2 Chronicles 35:23-24 In these two passages we have a prophecy and its fulfillment The event seems strangely unlike the prediction, " I will gather thee to thy fathers in peace." Is that fulfilled by the keen arrow, and the blood dropping from the king’s heart on the floor of the chariot, and the premature death ? Even so. Josiah, the King of Judah, to whom these words were spoken, and in whose death they were so strangely accomplished, had been smitten by the sudden discovery of the departure of himself and his nation from the precepts of the book of the Law, which had been found during the restoration of the neglected temple. It is not my purpose to enter at all on the questions of present interest connected with that discovery. Whatever that book was, and whether, as is thought by many now, those who hid knew where to find, the effect produced on the king was horror and penitence. He bade his advisers "inquire of the Lord" for him and his diminished people " concerning the words of this book " - apparently whether there was possibility of averting its threatenings. Remarkably, the godly counselors turned at once to a woman, the wife of an inferior officer, who seems to have been principally known as his father’s son, and from Huldah the prophetess they received the answer of which our first text is part. The judgments on the nation were declared irreversible, but the penitence of the king opened a way for his individual safety. Threatening and pardon were both revealed in the answer. Because Josiah’s heart was tender, and he had humbled himself before God, therefore the mitigation announced in the former of our texts should be extended to him. Then, some twelve or fourteen years after, came the bloody death in battle, which seems to give the lie to the prophetess’s assurance. It is worth while to lay the two side by side and gather the lessons of the juxtaposition.
I We may first notice how these two passages of Scripture disclose the true Worker at the centre of things.
" I will gather thee," says God, speaking through Huldah. We turn the page, and where do we see His hand in the story of vulgar motives and godless strife ? Josiah’s death came about as " naturally " as possible, as the sequel of conflicts with which he had nothing directly to do. The chronic strife between Egypt and the kingdoms to the north of Judah had broken out again. This time the reigning Pharaoh was on his march against the strong Carchemish, which has recently, after so many millenniums of eclipse, become more than a name to us. He had no quarrel with Josiah, who seems to have pushed himself into the strife quite unnecessarily, with wrongheaded haste and obstinacy, in spite of the dignified and kindly remonstrances of the King of Egypt. The latter asserts his Divine com mission, which he does not trace to any Egyptian deity, but to " God," and which he warns Josiah, as a worshiper of God, from opposing to his own ruin. The Chronicler endorses Pharaoh’s claim, and declares his words to have been " from the mouth of God." So God sought to stay Josiah from the rashness which was to be his ruin, even though that ruin was determined, and determined to be effected by that act. Men are the authors of their own fall, and if they rush to their deaths, it is by their own obstinacy, in spite of Divine warnings. God can speak through a heathen king’s lips, and good counsel has ever its source in Him, whatever be its channel. But if Josiah will be obstinate, and mix himself up in a quarrel which is not his, God works out His purposes through even the obstinacy of one man and the ambitions of another. Then came the fatal skirmish on that plain of Megiddo, which has run with blood so often from the days of Deborah and Barak down to almost our own, and perhaps has not yet heard for the last time " the noise of the captains and the shouting," nor seen Kishon sending a reddened current to the sea. The poor precaution of a disguise availed nothing for the hapless king. The archer’s bow drawn at a venture sent an unaimed arrow, which a Divine hand directed, into his side. Lifted into a spare chariot, he lived over the jolting and agony of a swift flight to Jerusalem, and there died - one of the best of the kings of Judah, mourned by a nation’s tears, and having thrown away his life out of pure wilfulness. And all this play of commonplace motives - Pharaoh’s pugnacity, Josiah’s obstinacy, the forgotten politics of two empires, the chance arrow of an unconscious archer - is the fulfillment of that word, "I will gather thee to thy fathers." Is not this a penetrating glance beneath the whirling surface ? Sometimes one sees on a swift river a tiny whirlpool, opening a pit an inch or two deep into the tawny raging flood. So here is, as it were, an eddy in the stream, that goes down to the very bottom and shows us the bed. We look through the cross-play of human purposes and acts, which are in themselves cognizant of nothing more than themselves, and discern what is really at work, determining their flow, and dashing one against the other or blending them in smooth flow.
Now, we say that we believe this and regard it as such a commonplace, that it is scarcely worth my while to repeat it, or yours to listen to it. But do we carry that steady eye which looks through all the play of so called causes, and discerns God’s hand in them all? Is it a living, ever present conviction with us, influencing all our lives and thoughts? If we really believed it - and we do not really believe anything that is not present with us, shaping our habitual thinking - how different everything else would look ! It is easy for us to set metaphysical puzzles. Any quantity of such may be picked up anywhere. But the old thought, which is here illustrated anew, has practical and devotional uses so manifold and valuable that we cannot afford to dismiss it as a commonplace. Commonplaces have to be reiterated till they are incorporated with the web of our thoughts, far more thoroughly than this one has yet become in the case of any of us. Not till we habitually see a present God working everywhere, and all things become transparent to His light, shining through them to our eyes, can we afford to put aside this truth as threadbare. If it ruled in us as it should do, how it would nourish faith and stimulate effort ; how it would strengthen resignation and unreluctant submission ; how it would deliver from vain and weakening regrets ; how it would keep us from being angry with anything, or fretted with carking cares which gnaw at the very seat of life ! If we saw God working everywhere and always, we should not be jaded with futile effort, nor disappointed or despairing, nor should we live among the tombs of a dead and buried past, and be blind to the worth of the living present. If we heard God speaking through all voices and sounds, whether of tempest and thunder, or of harpers harping with their harps, and saw His mighty hand moving all that moves, and His will dominant in all, fear would be far from us, and sorrow would wear a benignant cheer, and in our hearts would dwell the great peace, which is the dower of him who says, " It is the Lord; let Him do what seemeth Him good." Let us pray and strive for the clear and constant vision which looks through the things seen, which are but recipients and transmitters of power, to the energy which they receive and transmit. " I will gather thee to thy fathers," though the instruments be thine own obstinacy, the conflict of heathen powers, and the arrow of an ignorant bowman, who aimed at nothing, and never knew that he had killed a king and executed a Divine sentence.
II There is, further, in these words a glimpse, though it be but dim, into the regions beyond the grave. The two expressions in the former of these texts are by no means synonymous. " I will gather thee to thy fathers" is one thing; "Thou shalt be gathered to thy grave in peace " is quite another. The former phrase seldom occurs in the Old Testament, and never is found in the New. It appears principally in the Pentateuch, and in the closely related Book of Judges, and in these is found in a slightly different form, namely, "gathered to thy people" instead of " to thy fathers." It is used in that shape in reference to the deaths of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Ishmael, Aaron, and Moses. The generation contemporary with Joshua are spoken of as being "gathered to their fathers," and the same expression is employed in our text and in the parallel in 2 Kings, The variation of " people " and " fathers " is natural. The former phrase is applied to the fathers themselves, beyond whom the vision of their descendants did not travel backwards, whereas the latter is fitting when applied to later generations, to whom union with the venerable ancestors of the nation was honour. Now, this " gathering to thy people " or " thy fathers " is distinctly separated from both death and burial. The account of the last days of Abraham (Genesis 25:8) is a fair specimen of all the narratives in which this expression occurs, and in it three stages are clearly distinguished: "Abraham gave up the ghost, and died . . . and was gathered to his people. And Isaac and Ishmael his sons buried him." The lonely tomb on Mount Hor did not hinder Aaron’s being gathered to his people, nor did the mysterious burial on Nebo shut out Moses from their society. That conception of accession to the great company somewhere is no mere euphemism for death, and still less refers to what may afterwards befall the body of the dead man. If, then, we are led, in all honesty of interpretation, to exclude both death and burial from the meaning of the phrase, what remains but to regard it as a faint gleam of insight into the condition, after death and burial, of the true self, which passes through death undying, and is not laid to moulder with the disused garment of flesh ? The Cuneiform inscriptions have taught us how developed the doctrine of a future life was in Abraham’s native country, and there is nothing improbable now in ascribing some share in that knowledge to Israel, however faint the traces of it in Scripture. To see in this remarkable phrase the conception of a future social life is not to read later ideas into a vague expression, which we make unnecessarily definite, but not to see that thought in it seems rather to evacuate it of its true significance. There is no doubt a danger, against which we are abundantly warned, of committing the anachronism of reading the results of later Revelations into the earlier records ; but there is also a danger, which is less often insisted upon, of reading out of the earlier Revelations what is really in them, and of thus exaggerating the ignorance of early ages.
Surely this sweet and pathetic expression did spring from, and did suggest, some conceptions of a life beyond life, in which those who have lived solitary here should be knit together in a great company. In the earlier form the phrase held forth the hope that, after death, the desert wanderers should join the community to which they be longed, and from which they had been parted in life. In its later form, as in our text, it gave the hope that the descendants of the ancestors who had become august and sacred by lapse of time should be set with these venerated heroes and patriarchs of the nation, and that there should be, somehow and somewhere, as it were a great family home with many mansions, where the kindred of the fathers should dwell. The principle of the anticipated association seems to have been purely that of natural kinship. The children of Abraham were to be gathered round him, a happy clan in that dim world. Beyond these two ideas of society and repose, the hope expressed in this phrase apparently did not soar. But we may use the earlier and inadequate phrase as the vehicle of our deeper conceptions and higher hopes. We too have to look forward to a state where, " in solemn troops and sweet societies," souls that have toiled weary and lonely through the changeful desert of this life, shall find at last rest and companionship, and shall " sit down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom " of the great Father of all. The earlier hope is translated into a loftier, for we know that the principle of association in that solemn, blessed state, where perfect society is realized by hearts isolated in life, is not that of natural but of spiritual affinity, and that there the same law of like to like, which binds happy souls to their Lord and to one another, shall knit other spirits alien from these into a dark confraternity of repulsion and yet of contiguity.
Here and now men are grouped by other uniting forces, but hereafter spiritual character shall determine company and sphere, and each shall find himself surrounded by the environment of persons and circumstance for which he has fitted himself. "What maketh heaven, that maketh hell." That is manifoldly true, and this is one sphere in which it holds. " Being let go, they went unto their own company." When set free from the disturbing influences of life here, men will arrange themselves according to character. The stones on the eternal shore will lie in order, as on some beaches we see the heavier blocks laid in long rows and the lighter ranged together, and then the sand. The tide has sorted them. Life classifies and aggregates men, and yonder they are with their likes. So Judas " went to his own place," wherever that may have been. He passed into the sphere fitted for him, and there found others. A solemn law of spiritual affinity as determining the future associations of each lies hid in the old words, "I will gather thee to thy fathers," and still more clearly in the other form of the saying, " He was gathered to his people." The former expression suggests, too, the hope of personal communion with the venerable names whose spiritual children we smaller men are proud to call ourselves. A community implies communication, and a gathering together of spirits which forbade intercourse would be no gathering ; for spirits are not together by juxtaposition, but by intercourse and affinity. It would be easy to let fancy run wild in pictures of that intercourse, and to summon up a long list of glorious names ; but the fact itself is more than all our ignorant amplifications of it, and the vividness of expectation does not increase with the increase of imaginative details, which smother rather than enforce the truth. It is enough to believe that those who are united to the same Lord shall form a real unity, which necessarily includes communication. The future is set forth as a city. Are the citizens not to exchange thought and feeling by some better means than words, our imperfect medium here ? They shall dwell in deep peace, encompassed by congenial natures, and delivered from the lifelong torture of grating against harsh contraries of their truest selves. While they are in the midst of their own people, in that they are surrounded with those like them, they shall be gathered to their fathers, in that they will be capable of association with those who excel them in strength, and are before them in spiritual stature. The whole blissful company shall partake of a common progress, yet retaining the individuality of its separate parts and the unity of the whole, like some cloud saturated with sunshine, and slowly drifting nearer the sun. The loftiest will be the helpful companions of the lowliest. The unity of life in each will forbid the diverse degrees of life from becoming barriers. In that blessed society will be both impulse and rest. The same law will work in darker fashion in souls that are void of that Christ derived life ; but there likeness will bring no repose, and the community of alienation from God will ensure no community of friendship among the alienated. It is conceivable that such aggregation may be worse than solitude or than hostile neighborhood; for companions in evil here are not friends, and yonder the same result may follow in an intenser degree. There may be a kingdom, but a kingdom of anarchy. There may be similarity in the fundamental relation to God, along with fierce antagonism and repulsion otherwise. One awestruck glance is all permitted us, and it shows us how this principle of association according to character in a future world, may be as a fountain doing what James said that no fountain could do, sending forth both sweet waters and bitter. The word rendered " gather" is often employed for the action of the reaper or of him who collects fruits. May we not blend some such allusion with its use here ? It is God who says, " I will gather thee," and there is tenderness and care in the word. That last parting from the familiar things of earth is no violent dragging away, but the act of the great Husbandman, who plucks the ripe fruit because it is precious to Him. Sentiment talks of Death as the reaper, but the antique simplicity of our text goes far deeper than that representation. Not Death, but God, is the Reaper. Death is only His sickle. It is He who gathers in His sheaves and stores them in His great storehouse.
III Finally, we may see here a discovery of the true sphere of peace. Was Huldah one of the juggling prophetesses who palter with a double sense, keeping a promise in some fashion and yet breaking it? So it might seem to one looking at the poor young king in his chariot, faint with loss of blood and fleeing from the fatal field. Was this being " gathered to his fathers in peace " ? If the prophecy was fulfilled thus, what would nonfulfilment be? The fact looks like a flat contradiction of the promise, and so prosaic commentators have puzzled themselves as to how to reconcile the two. But surely there is no mystery in the matter, and the reconcilement of the apparent contra diction is easy, as is so often the case, if we understand the meaning of the words employed. For what does God’s Spirit mean by " peace " ? Surely something deeper and more inward and inwrought with the substance of the soul than the mere absence of outward strife and battle. The peace which was promised to Josiah was maintained whether or no Pharaoh Necho’s soldiers stormed across Palestine, and the arrows flew thick on the plain of Jezreel.
Such a promise so fulfilled is meant to teach us the great truth for life and for death, that true peace does not depend on the absence of tumult, but on the presence of God. It is an attribute of the soul, not of circumstances, and is often more fully possessed in conflict than in calm. They who look for it in any conjunction of outward good, search for it in the wrong place. If it live not in the heart of the seeker, he seeks it in vain, and it lives only in the heart where God abides. The foot of Christ is the only charm to still the heaving billows, and round Him, as He moves in the greatness of His strength across the wild ocean, is an atmosphere of calm. If we pass into it, the wildest storm will not ruffle a fluttering garment or lift a light hair. We may carry our own weather with us through all storms, and dwell in the peace of God, as in a fortress, though enemies rage around. " In the world ye shall have tribulation, but in Me ye shall have peace." The outward life in the world must be disturbed, harassed, beset in a hundred ways by strifes and annoyances ; but the true life which is rooted in Jesus Christ, by faith, and love, and desire, and obedience, may all the while be the seat of holy calm, as some still oratory in the centre of a beleaguered castle. To be " in Christ " is to be " in peace." In like manner, the fulfillment of this prophecy in the death of Josiah referred not to the outward fashion of his dying, but to the composure and resignation of spirit, not haply without some fore-gleams of a great assemblage of saints to welcome his coming, with which he passed hence. As for the outward fact, the fierce current of the fight, the shout of battle, the agony and flight, were very unlike what the recipient of the promise may have expected ; but may not his death have been as peaceful there as if in the seclusion of his palace, amid careful tending? Not the curtained chamber, the loving hands to smooth the pillow, or any of the other alleviations of the last conflict, make it death " in peace." That is secured only by the same thing as secures the like blessing for life- even the presence of God in Christ, realized by faith. Many of us may have seen the horrible frescoes in a church in Rome, where all varieties of cruel martyrdoms are grossly pictured. " These all died in faith," and if they did, they died in peace, though nameless tortures wrung their poor frames. Virgins whose blood reddened the sands of the amphitheater, confessors wrapped in pitch and set flaming in Caesar’s garden, martyrs stretched on the rack or burned at the stake, died, according to the estimate of sense, in agony and tumult which it would be foolish to call peace ; but according to the estimate of God, which is the ultimate truth and reality of things, their deaths were but as the peaceful harvesting of the shock of corn fully ripe. The first Christian martyr, crushed by the heavy stones flung by fanatic hands, and kneeling outside the city wall in a pool of his own blood, died so peacefully that the only word to describe his gentle departure is, " he fell asleep," like a tired child on its mother’s lap. (Psalms 131:1-3) So this King of Israel, smitten between the joints of his armour by the keen Egyptian arrow, was by battle brought to his grave in peace. So we, whatever be the circumstances attending our passage from this death which we call life into the life which men call death, may meet them and pass through them with quiet hearts, and have peace as well as hope in our death.
Let us understand the deep meaning of the great promise of peace, which this story obliges us to recognize, and we shall see in the apparent contradiction its real fulfillment, and gain a lesson very profitable for life and for death. If, living, we live unto the Lord, and dying, die unto Him, and so, living and dying, are the Lord’s, then, living or dying, we shall keep and be kept in His last gift of perfect peace, which shall not be broken by any of the tumults of life or the terrors and tempests of death.