October 14

They shall take hold of the shirt of him that is a Jew, saying, We will go with you, for we have heard that God is with you. - Zechariah 8:23.

KNOWLEDGE is necessary to all influence, but all knowledge is not influential. “If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them;” but we here see that the knowledge of these people was effective; it constrained them to “lay hold of the skirt of him that is a Jew, saying, We will go with you.” This is a simple and striking expression. We have seen a dear little infant, when he wished to engage the attention of his mother, pulling her by the clothes. When a child has been walking along with his father, and has been afraid that he would leave him, he not only cries, but lays hold of his coat. When the cripple had been healed at the beautiful gate of the temple, he held Peter and John, and was afraid to let them go (probably dreading a return of his former misery), as much as to say: You shall not go, and if you do I will go with you, and you shall draw me after you. Just so it is here. It shows conviction, attachment, eager attention, a wishing to be among them and to be of them. Ah, says one of them, I see they are rich, they are happy; oh that I was with them in glory everlasting. I see that they are travelling, and they are bound for that very country which I now long to enter. I must join them. Will they receive me into their number?

God is with them, and it is God I now want. I have been living without him in the world, but I can live without him no longer. It is God I now want-his favour-his presence- the comforts of his Holy and Blessed Spirit. What can I do without God? If I find prosperity in the world, my prosperity will destroy me, and what can I do with adversity, if it should come upon me, without God? What shall I do, if I have no God, when I come to die? Before this other qualities, other companions, attracted and drew the man; but, as the Apostle says, “If any man be in Christ he is a new creature,” he has new views, new feelings, new hopes, new pleasures, new aversions, and new companions.

How much depends on association. While the “companion of fools will be destroyed,” “he that walketh with the wise shall be wise.” He that chooses good men for his companions will have God as his Guide, Guardian, and Comforter, and Portion in the land of the living. We shall have fellowship with them while we live, and when we come to die we may say as a good man once said, “I am going to change my place, but not my company.” Death will take us to our home, to the general assembly and church of the first-born, whose names are written in heaven, where

“For us our elder brethren stay,

And angels beckon us away,

And Jesus bids us come.”