Man’s Stocks and God’s Earthquakes.
By W. F. Crofts
God’s truth was a “troubler of Israel.” Wherever its messenger proclaimed it, there went up the cry, as about Paul and Silas: “These men do exceedingly trouble our city.” And the mission of God’s truth has always been to “turn the world upside down,” because it is wrong side up. It comes to make the crooked places straight and the rough places plain, and, of course, crookedness and roughness rebel against it. It scatters no honey-balls of flattery, crying, “Peace, peace, when there is no peace, saith my God to the wicked,” but rather it cries to Pride, “Bow the knee,” to Self-Righteousness, “Ye must be born again.” Truth, like the Master, always “stirreth up the people.” Hence we find, as we should expect, that Pride and Self-Righteousness cut clubs, and kindle fires, and build stocks, and forge chains to check and crush this troublesome truth of God. “If it were of the world, the world would love its own; but as it is not of the world, the world hateth it.” Any gospel of which its disciples can say, “I like my religion because it lets me do as I am a mind to,” is not the religion of Him who brought to sin “not peace, but a sword.” History in all its strata is full of the fossilized and rusty weapons formed against the truth which have not prospered. In the very first stratum, we find the club of Cain, which was raised against the faithful disciple of God’s truth, “because his own works were evil and his brother’s righteous.” But that club, formed against God’s truth, only scarred the forehead of him who raised it, so deeply that centuries have not one whit healed the scar. A little higher we find the rusty spears and chariots of the Egyptians lying with the white bones of the warriors as tiles of the sea-floor. They were formed against the truth of God to defy the command, “Let my people go;” and when their bearers found God’s people flanked by mountains, confronted by the sea, and followed by their armed hosts, they thought God’s truth was surely thrust into the inner prison, and its feet made fast in the stocks, but, like an earthquake, came the rush of many waters, and “the horse and his rider were drowned in the depth of the sea.” Their weapons only hastened God’s people “forward” toward Canaan, and then were wrenched from them by the waves of God’s wrath. As God’s truth “was upon Jeremiah,” that he might declare it with his words, so the Spirit of God “was upon Samson” just as directly, that he might show forth that truth by his deeds. Men tried to fetter it with withes, and he broke them with laughter; with cords, and he snapped them with scorn; with the brazen gates of Gaza, and the gates were borne away upon his shoulders. Haman built a lofty gallows, cruelly perfect, to hang this truth, and found God’s power could make the man, who thought to handle the rope, dangle upon it. God had said to Jeremiah: “I have put my words into thy mouth.” Men said, “We will put you and your message into fetters and silence;” but God’s power made the prison-walls a reflector to send forth his light to the ends of the world, and in that light every tear of the weeping prophet shines like the stars forever and ever. The scribes and Pharisees had seen Jesus laid in the tomb, but they remembered, even better than his disciples, that he had said he would rise again, and they wished to seal the stone and set a guard about the tomb, and the governor said: “Make it as sure as ye can.” There was a big stone at the door; they added the seal and stationed the guard, but when they have made it “as sure as they can,” and have, as it were, cast the truth as it is in Jesus into the inner prison, and made its feet fast in the stocks, suddenly there is a great earthquake, and the sealed stone door is opened, and the bands of death are loosed, and the cry goes forth: “He is risen.” Peter was taken as the representative of God’s truth, and they wished to make its fetters strong. There were “two chains,” and “two soldiers,” and “the iron gate,” and thus the truth was “made fast in the stocks,” but the angel of God touched the chains, and they fell harmless, like the serpent from the arm of Paul; and the iron gate heard a heavenly voice cry, “Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and my King of truth shall come forth,” and it opened unto them of its own accord. Paul and Silas came “troubling the city” with salvation, and they were seized by the order of the mob. The jailer was charged to “keep them safely,” who, having received such a charge, thrust them into the inner prison, and made their feet fast in the stocks. At midnight, they prayed and sang praises to God. We thought it grand, in the Peace Jubilee, when the cannon chimed in with the music by a contrivance of man; but when Paul and Silas sang, God chimed in with the earthquake, and shook the singing prisoners out of their stocks, and the locks in the heavy doors were turned back, and the jailer was shaken also from the prison-house of carnal security; so that God’s earthquake more than undid the work of man’s stocks. They exiled John to rocky, dreary Patmos, in order to exile the truth of God that he represented, and thought they had thrust it into an inner prison, where its voice should no more be heard; but God transfigured the rocks into jasper and pearl, and brought the rocky isle “quite to the verge of Heaven,” and made the voice of John like the sound of many waters to cry to his persecutors and all the earth; “The kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ.” Jewish pride and Roman hate dragged Paul into that deep, dark dungeon of the Mamertine Prison. Far below the earth, Paul was heavily fettered, and nothing relieved the bareness of the wall save his chain: no light entered his prison save from a narrow opening above him. Pride and hate have thrust God’s truth into the inner dungeon, and made it fast with chains. They have only driven a cartridge into a gun, and that truth comes forth with more power than ever from “the prisoner of the Lord.” All the world hear him cry from the dungeon depths: “Thanks be unto God that giveth us the victory; not to my enemies, but to me is the crown.” From the bottom of a well stars can be seen even by day that could not be seen by one standing on the earth. So Paul was lowered into the depths of the dungeon that he might look into the heights of heaven and see things that “cannot be uttered.” The foot of tyranny pressed the spring into the earth, but the reaction lifted it into “heavenly places in Christ Jesus.” And when the church was yet struggling in its weakness, there went forth the decree of the Roman Empire that this new gospel should be burned, killed, exterminated, and buried forever. The edict was stamped with the Roman seal, sent to every Roman province, backed up with spears and chains and flames and tortures, in order that they may “make it as sure as they can;” but every time the hand of persecution was laid upon them, it brought them to their knees, and each fall renewed them, like the giant of old, so that they rose stronger from every conflict. The British cannon-balls that fell thick and fast into the soft palmetto-wood of Fort Moultrie only sank into the wood and strengthened the fort for new attacks. The cannon-ball that flew, winged with hate, among the thirsting soldiers of the Crimea, only opened a spring in the hillside where it struck. So the attacks of persecution in the early church only strengthened the faith of God’s people, and gave them purer draughts of the water of life.—W. F. Crofts.