Mothers' Education Course.
Notes from a Divinity Paper
by Mrs. T. S. Cole.
Volume 14, 1903, pgs. 28-32
Probably the force and value of the Messianic Psalms is largely discounted by us because we have been so accustomed from our earliest days to think of Christ and these Psalms in connection. Suppose that knowing our Gospels, we had suddenly come across these passages in the Jewish poetry bearing upon Him. Or suppose that knowing our Psalms we had suddenly been introduced to the gospel pictures of Christ, having previously known nothing of them. What an intense and eager interest would have been awakened in us by so marvellous a response of literature to literature across the ages! "How came this to be?" we should ask. "May we argue from this coincidence a unity beneath all the apparent dissimilarity?" Certain the fact remains, however we choose to think of it. Jewish poetry supplies words which Christ Himself appropriates to Himself. Take the Passion Psalms--to say the least of it, does it not appear wonderful that centuries before the event such graphic phrases should be written as these in the 22nd Psalm: "All they that see me laugh me to scorn; they shoot out the lip, they shake the head.....I am poured out like water and all my bones are out of joint.....My strength is dried up like a potsherd; and my tongue cleaveth to my jaws.....They pierce my hands and my feet.....They part my garments among them, and upon my vesture do they cast lots." Even those who deny the divinity of our Lord must feel the pathetic suggestiveness of the quotation of the opening verse of this Psalm in the very moment of His dying agony. Or turn to the 69th and read again: "They that hate me without a cause are more than the hairs of mine head.....For the zeal of thine house hath eaten me up: and the reproaches of them that reproach Thee are fallen upon me.....And I looked for some to take pity, but there was none; and for comforters, but I found none: They gave me also gall for my meat; and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink."
Suppose one says: "Truly a marvellously appropriate quotation, but nothing more--nothing unparalleled in literature." Still, we maintain the suggestiveness of the fact that such descriptions of the deepest depths of human agony should be more perfectly realised in the Christ than in any other human being. He stands before us as the supreme Sufferer. If we try to let that fact have its due and lawful effect on us--Christ the Sufferer--and then ask ourselves "Why?" What unfathomable abysses open before us! In casting about for an answer there surely must come to us, at all events tentatively, gleaming for a moment down the black gulf of unmerited agony, such words as Isaiah's: "Surely He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows: He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon Him; and with His stripes we are healed."
The Psalms then enforce the teaching of the Gospels as no other literature could. When we turn to such Psalms as the 2nd, the 45th, the 72nd, the 110th,--picturing the triumph of the Messiah--we cannot, from our present standpoint, see their aptness in the same way. That waits for the future to reveal it. But who can blame us if we nevertheless cling to them with special affection? The New Testament is full, not only of interpretation of the past, but of great and wonderful hope for the future. It points not only backwards but forwards, and while the Passion Psalms find in the New Testament their fulfilment, the other Messianic Psalms join it in looking still onward and forward to an accomplishment, an achievement still beyond the power of mortal mind to conceive. Psalms and Gospels thus strengthen and confirm each other.
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"I will have mercy and not sacrifice."
The spirit of this word of Christ's is one easy to understand in the present day. We are eminently practical in our religious views. Philanthropic schemes never met with readier support than they do to-day. We, to a large extent, estimate the worth of religious people, the value of their religion, by what they do for their fellow creatures. And we fully sympathize with the intensely practical spirit of the old prophets who insisted again and again that religion was not a matter of fasts, and feasts, and solemn assemblies, but of love and care for our fellow-creatures. But there is another familiar Old Testament word which we need to remember side by side with this one to-day. "To obey is better than sacrifice." We are not in much danger of exalting sacrifice over what we are pleased to call "service," meaning thereby the service of our fellow-men. But we are in danger of becoming so imbued with the idea of mercy rather than sacrifice, that we undervalue that obedience to God's will, that inward service of God with all the powers of our being, that devotion to God of mind, and soul, and body, which alone can qualify us for real and lasting usefulness to those around us. We need to remember not only that works of mercy are better than mere formalities of religion, but that works of mercy themselves need to be inspired not only by love of our fellow-men, but by devotion to the great Lover of mankind, who alone can fill our hearts with the tenderness, the compassion, the patience that will fit us to bear with the infirmities, and weaknesses, and incapacities of those whom we seek to serve. We may be sure that Christ our Master never meant by quoting this passage to exalt the Marthas over the Marys but only to point out the futility of formal religious service without a corresponding yielding of the man, the inmost shrine of being to the great God and Father of all.
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"Give us this day our daily bread."
For a child of 5.
Come, little one; I am going into those lovely yellow cornfields for a walk, will you come too? You remember your kindergarten song about the farmer ploughing the field and the rain watering it, and the dainty green blades shooting up--now come and see the tall beautiful golden corn. You know how it will be cut down and thrashed, and taken to the miller and ground, and then the flour will be made into bread. What a lot of people to get our bread ready for us! The sower, the ploughman, the miller, the baker--we ought to be very thankful to them all, for we couldn't do their hard work, and get our own bread ready. But is there anyone else we ought to thank? Tell me, who watered those golden fields? You and I have been very busy this dry season refreshing our little plants every evening with our water cans. You know how tired they looked before being watered, and how they held their heads up bright and fresh again after it. They couldn't do without water. Could the corn? Well, then, who waters it? Who makes the big clouds of rain come travelling along the sky, presently to send showers of refreshing water down on the cracked and thirsty fields? No one but God our Father can do that. So really He gives us our bread, doesn't He? Shall we thank Him by trying to be kind and good with everybody about us? and every time we pray this prayer--whether in church, or alone, or at our family prayers together, let us thank God at the same time, and try more to please Him.
For a child of 15.
I wonder if ever you and I have sat down to our well-spread table full of the thought--"This is God's answer to my constant prayer for daily bread." I am afraid it has not been so often, if ever. The meaning has dropped out of the prayer, partly because we have said it so often, and partly because we have never had brought home to us our need of it. Yet it is a prayer which Christ Himself, our Master, put into our lips. He must have meant it to mean something for us. Shall we spend just a moment or two thinking about it, that it may be a more real prayer to us when we use it again? Why did Christ put this clause into the prayer He taught His disciples? Do you agree with me in thinking that probably one reason was His wish to remind us perpetually of our dependence upon God for all the good gifts of this life? We can easily track our comforts back to the earthly father who works hard day by day to earn money to keep the home going, or to the mother who is constantly busy managing the house, and caring for the children. But it needs a little effort to realize how at the bottom of all there is God the great Father. In the case of bread, it is easy to see how no farmer can grow corn without rain, which God alone can give. And Christ takes bread as a type of all our other mercies. If we will be at the pains to think, we shall find that not one of them could be secured by man's unaided effort, any more than bread could.
Then again, why did Christ teach us to ask for daily bread? Is it not because He would teach us in connection with the commonest of all our necessities the great lesson of trusting Him moment by moment? You and I in our easy comfortable homes cannot possibly realize what this prayer has meant, and still means, in its literal simplicity to those whose very subsistence is uncertain from day to day. If we could go round with some "Sister" among the slums of East London, and hear from one and another poor hard-worked, weary creature the testimony that God has never forsaken them, that even in their direst necessities, some opportune gift has arrived just in time, we should see more in this prayer than we ever saw before. But I think as bread stands as a type of all our other mercies, so the difficulty of getting bread stands as the type of all our other difficulties. You and I have no difficulty in getting bread, but already you have loved long enough to find that the path of human life is not all easy. I remember as a girl at college, with an important examination coming on, being left to entertain a friend of my mother's, who was arriving unexpectedly while she was away. I remember so well the puzzle,--"How can I possibly take this friend out to the place where she wants to be taken, if the examination is fixed for the time she arrives?" Ah! these "ifs." How needlessly they worry us. The hour of the examination was announced, the time of the friend's arrival was arranged, and when the day came, all worked out as smoothly as possible. I was free in ample time to do my duty by the friend.
And as life goes on, this lesson is taught over and over again--difficulties which looked insurmountable work out all right in the light of patience, and trust in God. That's why this word "daily" stands here. We are not to see all the road clearly mapped before us. Where then would be the manifest need of our Guide? We are to walk day by day--nay, often hour by hour--perhaps right up to the great wall across our path--in fear and trembling if we do not trust--but with quietness and confidence if we do. And be sure when the right time comes for you to pass the wall, the right way will be opened. Perhaps
"A way no more expected,
Than when God's sheep
Passed through the deep,
By crystal walls protected."
But there the way will be.
Shall we try as we use this petition day by day to remember more vividly our dependence upon God, and to practise more constantly the hourly faith in God which is "the victory that overcometh the world"?
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