02.18. The Calamities of the Wilderness Life
Chapter 18 THE CALAMITIES OF THE WILDERNESS LIFE. The wilderness wandering of the Israelites has been often called a type of the regenerated life. This is a mistake. It is intended to show the spiritual condition certain to come upon the Christian who neglects or refuses to enter the Canaan of Perfect Love or Holiness.
It was not long after leaving Egypt that God’s people were brought to Kadesh-barnea, and bidden to go over. Accepting the evil report of the spies, and putting God’s will and word aside they, in full view of the Land of Promise, went back into the wilderness. It was the beginning of a life long, dreary wandering, in which the bodies of every adult save two were left to decay and bleach in the sands of Arabia.
Sooner or later every regenerated person is brought to the border line of entire sanctification. Under a sermon, good book, desperate sickness, or powerful revival, Kadesh-barnea is seen, and the inward urging of the Spirit, and call of the Word to the child of God is to go over. But just like the Jews, many believers become unbelievers at this all important place and time, and, receiving the false report of the majority instead of the true testimony of a minority, turn back into a wilderness wandering that is the inevitable result of not entering upon Holiness. The calamities in both cases, though separated by thousands of years, are identical. Out of seven distinct woes recorded by the Bible we mention three.
One was the divine displeasure.
"With whom," writes Paul, "was he grieved? Was it not with them that had sinned, whose carcasses fell in the wilderness? So we see that they could not enter in because of unbelief." To think of God being "grieved forty years" with an individual or people! To think of one’s being persistently disobedient to Heaven all that length of time, and feeling for forty years the offended face of God fixed upon the beclouded soul!
Men who go counter to the will and command of God, are bound to have this as their portion. The Jews languished under it, and there are Christians today dying under it. There are men all over this broad country, both in pulpit and pew, who are walking day by day, and from one year’s end to another under the aggrieved, displeased countenance of the Almighty. And they know it. Our observation is that nothing can atone for this calamity. That nothing of human favor or worldly position can make up to the soul for the loss of the smile and light of the countenance of God. Truly we can bear to have everybody displeased with us in the social circle, the household, the church, and the whole world itself, but we cannot afford to have God offended.
It is possible for a man to have a whole community or nation frowning upon and opposing, but so long as the face of God is uplifted upon him, he can be happy, useful and victorious through it all. But if the Lord is grieved, if he turns away the light of his countenance, then are we poor, weak, helpless and miserable indeed. The stars seem to fight in their courses against us, the chariot wheels stick in the mud, the ditches run blood instead of water, and there is the sound of an opposing army marching in the air.
Alas for the man or woman with whom God is displeased. What an uphill work is duty.
How hymns drag. How prayer is driven like smoke back in the face. What heaviness, uneasiness and trepidation come upon the soul, when the man is called to lead a congregation in prayer, or preach the gospel before a crowded house. And yet under this thick cloud of divine displeasure thousands of church members and Christians are walking today. And all because they refused to "go over" and "enter into his rest," though the life lay outspread before them in all its loveliness, and Kadesh-barnea in the form of a book, conversation, sermon, or revival meeting, was inviting and smiling like an open doorway before them. A second calamity mentioned is that of no progression. The Israelites were steadily marching through the years, but they got nowhere. With all their traveling, after thirty years and more, they would be no nearer Canaan than they were two or three decades before. They were going in circles. They doubled on their tracks. Their retreats equaled their advances. Their backslidings were as numerous as their forward movements.
What a strange sensation, yes, horror must have swept over them when they would come upon the remains of old campfires where they had abided a while long years before. There were the heaps of ashes, ends of unburned sticks, and even bones they had gnawed upon lying around. And lo! they had thought they were approaching Canaan!
Here is calamity indeed, to be ostensibly serving God, and yet really making no advancement and getting nowhere. To think that we are steadily progressing when we are simply going in rings. To be saying in class meetings for forty years that we are growing in grace, and yet no nearer Canaan or Holiness than then we started.
What a shock it must be to the man or woman who has not lost all spiritual life, and become a carcass in the wilderness, to suddenly come upon the camping place of ten, twenty, thirty, and even forty years ago! In other words, to find the same low state of grace, the same weakness in temptation, the same faultfinding and sensitiveness, the same disposition to take offense, and indisposition to forgive wrongs and injuries, lying round about in the soul. Here are the unburned ends of sticks, piles of gray ashes, and half-gnawed bones of a former camping place.
Here we are back again. And the bones, sticks and ashes are so many sign posts, telling us that we have gotten nowhere; that we are still in the old place.
Calamity indeed! After all our professions, and boastings, and church attendings, and after saying, "We had it all," and did not need a second work of grace, thus to run up on these dry bones and mouldy ash heaps! To see that in spite of all our orthodoxies, moralities, liberalities, decencies, activities, board meetings, convention attendings, and many other things which we had construed into a steady advancement; to discover we have been only going in rings and circles in the wilderness life instead of approaching the border line of holiness! That we have been "marking time" instead of marching forward; that we have been trotting all day long, indeed all the life long in the shade of one tree.
There are men today in the active work, who ten, fifteen and twenty years ago were sanctified and put into a larger field of usefulness. Now and then they get a home church paper, and find its columns filled with things that they have left long ago. There are the squabbles over modes of water baptism, wranglings over rules of order, windy disputes about some one-horse college, records of some preacher’s "pounding," teachers’ institute or Chautauqua gathering.
It was a vision of an old camping place. It was as though he was sitting among cold ash piles where he had once warmed himself, and held old dry bones in his hand upon which he had gnawed some fifteen to twenty years before. A third calamity that comes from going back into the wilderness is the inability to distinguish between the false and true. The time came to the Jews that they could not tell a brass censer from a gold one, nor false fire from the holy flame which burned on God’s altar. They also followed Dathan and Abiram rather the Moses, and then God slew the two false teachers and misleaders of Israel, they were quite angry.
It is a dreadful thought that we can lose spiritual discernment, and true knowledge of doctrine and experience, and become a prey to evil spirits and false teaching. The land today has many thousands of people who once walked with God, but turned back and are now going into every long-haired, wild-eyed doctrine that comes along. They cannot tell brass from gold, false fire from true fire, the counterfeit from the genuine, nor the devil’s messenger from the prophet and servant of God.
Such persons seem to prefer humbug to truth. They mistake plausibility and volubility for Gospel liberty and unction, and prefer to be guided by the writings of some man or woman rather than the inspired Word of God. They take to the revived, or, rather, galvanized teachings of some old, defunct religion or philosophy of a departed age rather than be blessed, and filled by a salvation all embracing in its scope, purifying and satisfying in its nature, holy in it work and transforming the worshipper into the likeness of the God who is its author.
Turning from the grand elevating truths of the Bible, as being too great for credence, they proceed to swallow the most absurd, contradictory and unreasonable of human doctrines. They cannot endure a God-sent Moses, but are ravished with a self appointed Korah and Dathan, for whom God in his disgust caused the earth the open and destroy. They cannot follow a saintly Wesley or Fletcher, whom God continually honored, but take up with writers and preachers who were never accused of being holy by the warmest of their admirers and never had a revival under their preaching all the days of their lives.
They prefer falsehood to truth, brass to gold, false fire to true fire, Abiram to Moses, and any and every old thing, like Spiritualism, Sanfordism, Eddyism and Sin itself to Full Salvation or Holiness of Heart and Life through Consecration and Faith in the Blood of Christ.
These are some of the results of turning back from Kadesh-barnea. It would have been infinitely better to have gone over into Canaan.
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