“In the same day shall
the Lord shave with a razor that is
hired, namely, by them beyond
the river, by the King of
Assyria. - Isaiah
vii: 20.
The Bible is the boldest book ever
written. There are no similitudes in Ossian
or the Iliad or the Odyssey so daring. Its imagery
sometimes seems on the verge of the reckless, but
only seems so. The fact is that God would startle
and arouse and propel men and nations. A tame
and limping similitude would fail to accomplish the
object. While there are times when He employs
in the Bible the gentle dew and the morning cloud
and the dove and the daybreak in the presentation of
truth, we often find the iron chariot, the lightning,
the earthquake, the spray, the sword, and, in my text,
the razor.
This keen-bladed instrument has advanced
in usefulness with the ages. In Bible times and
lands the beard remained uncut save in the seasons
of mourning and humiliation, but the razor was always
a suggestive symbol. David says of Doeg, his
antagonist: “Thy tongue is a sharp razor
working deceitfully;” that is, it pretends to
clear the face, but is really used for deadly incision.
In this morning’s text the weapon of the toilet
appears under the following circumstances: Judea
needed to have some of its prosperities cut off, and
God sends against it three Assyrian kings first
Sennacherib, then Esrahaddon, and afterward Nebuchadnezzar.
Those three sharp invasions, that cut down the glory
of Judea, are compared to so many sweeps of the razor
across the face of the land. And these circumstances
were called a hired razor because God took the kings
of Assyria, with whom He had no sympathy, to do the
work, and paid them in palaces and spoils and annexations.
These kings were hired to execute the divine behests.
And now the text, which on its first reading may have
seemed trivial or inapt, is charged with momentous
import: “In the same day shall the Lord
shave with a razor that is hired namely,
by them beyond the river, by the King of Assyria.”
Well, if God’s judgments are
razors, we had better be careful how we use them on
other people. In careful sheath these domestic
weapons are put away, where no one by accident may
touch them, and where the hands of children may not
reach them. Such instruments must be carefully
handled or not handled at all. But how recklessly
some people wield the judgments of God! If a
man meet with business misfortune, how many there
are ready to cry out: “That is a judgment
of God upon him because he was unscrupulous, or arrogant,
or overreaching, or miserly. I thought he would
get cut down! What a clean sweep of everything!
His city house and country house gone! His stables
emptied of all the fine bays and sorrels and grays
that used to prance by his door! All his resources
overthrown, and all that he prided himself on tumbled
into demolition! Good for him!” Stop, my
brother. Don’t sling around too freely
the judgments of God, for they are razors.
Some of the most wicked business men
succeed, and they live and die in prosperity, and
some of the most honest and conscientious are driven
into bankruptcy. Perhaps his manner was unfortunate,
and he was not really as proud as he looked to be.
Some of those who carry their head erect and look
imperial are humble as a child, while many a man in
seedy coat and slouch hat and unblacked shoes is as
proud as Lucifer. You can not tell by a man’s
look. Perhaps he was not unscrupulous in business,
for there are two sides to every story, and everybody
that accomplishes anything for himself or others gets
industriously lied about. Perhaps his business
misfortune was not a punishment, but the fatherly
discipline to prepare him for heaven, and God may love
him far more than He loves you, who can pay dollar
for dollar, and are put down in the commercial catalogues
as A1. Whom the Lord loveth He gives four hundred
thousand dollars and lets die on embroidered pillows?
No: whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth.
Better keep your hand off the Lord’s razors,
lest they cut and wound people that do not deserve
it. If you want to shave off some of the bristling
pride of your own heart do so; but be very careful
how you put the sharp edge on others.
How I do dislike the behavior of those
persons who, when people are unfortunate, say:
“I told you so getting punished served
him right.” If those I-told-you-so’s
got their desert they would long ago have been pitched
over the battlements. The mote in their neighbor’s
eyes so small that it takes a microscope
to find it gives them more trouble than
the beam which obscures their own optics. With
air sometimes supercilious and sometimes Pharisaical,
and always blasphemous, they take the razor of the
divine judgment and sharpen it on the hone of their
own hard hearts, and then go to work on men sprawled
out at full length under disaster, cutting mercilessly.
They begin by soft expressions of sympathy and pity
and half praise, and, lather the victim all over before
they put on the sharp edge.
Let us be careful how we shoot at
others lest we take down the wrong one, remembering
the servant of King William Rufus who shot at a deer,
but the arrow glanced against a tree and killed the
king. Instead of going out with shafts to pierce,
and razors to cut, we had better imitate the friend
of Richard Coeur de Lion, who, in the war of the Crusades,
was captured and imprisoned, but none of his friends
knew where. So his loyal friend went around the
land from stronghold to stronghold, and sung at each
window a snatch of song that Richard Coeur de Lion
had taught him in other days. And one day, coming
before a jail where he suspected his king might be
incarcerated, he sung two lines of song, and immediately
King Richard responded from his cell with the other
two lines, and so his whereabouts were discovered,
and immediately a successful movement was made for
his liberation. So let us go up and down the
world with the music of kind words and sympathetic
hearts, serenading the unfortunate, and trying to get
out of trouble men who had noble natures, but, by
unforeseen circumstances, have been incarcerated,
thus liberating kings. More hymn-book and less
razor.
Especially ought we to be apologetic
and merciful toward those who, while they have great
faults, have also great virtues. Some people are
barren of virtues. No weeds verily, but no flowers.
I must not be too much enraged at a nettle along the
fence if it be in a field containing forty acres of
ripe Michigan wheat. At the present time, naturalists
tell us, there is on the sun a spot twenty thousand
miles long, but from the brightness and warmth I conclude
it is a good deal of a sun yet.
Again, when I read in my text that
the Lord shaves with the hired razor of Assyria the
land of Judea, I bethink myself of the precision of
God’s providence. A razor swung the tenth
part of an inch out of the right line means either
failure or laceration, but God’s dealings never
slip, and they do not miss by the thousandth part of
an inch the right direction. People talk as though
things in this world were at loose ends. Cholera
sweeps across Marseilles and Madrid and Palermo, and
we watch anxiously. Will the epidemic sweep Europe
and America? People say, “That will entirely
depend on whether inoculation is a successful experiment;
that will depend entirely on quarantine regulations;
that will depend on the early or late appearance of
frost; that epidemic is pitched into the world, and
it goes blundering across the continents, and it is
all guess-work and an appalling perhaps.”
My friends, I think, perhaps, that
God had something to do with it, and that His mercy
may have in some way protected us that He
may have done as much for us as the quarantine and
the health officers. It was right and a necessity
that all caution should be used, but there has come
enough macaroni from Italy, and enough grapes from
the south of France, and enough rags from tatterdemalions,
and hidden in these articles of transportation enough
choleraic germs to have left by this time all Brooklyn
mourning at Greenwood, and all Philadelphia at Laurel
Hill, and all Boston at Mount Auburn. I thank
all the doctors and quarantines; but, more than all,
and first of all, and last of all, and all the time,
I thank God. In all the six thousand years of
the world’s existence there has not one thing
merely “happened so.” God is not
an anarchist, but a King, a Father.
When little Tod, the son of President
Lincoln, died, all the land sympathized with the sorrow
in the White House. He used to rush into the
room where the cabinet was in session, and while the
most eminent men of the land were discussing the questions
of national existence. But the child had no care
about those questions. Now God the Father, and
God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost are in perpetual
session in regard to this world and kindred worlds.
Shall you, His child, rush in to criticise or arraign
or condemn the divine government? No; the Cabinet
of the Eternal Three can govern and will govern in
the wisest and best way, and there never will be a
mistake, and like razor skillfully swung, shall cut
that which ought to be cut, and avoid that which ought
to be avoided. Precision to the very hair-breadth.
Earthly time-pieces may get out of order and strike
wrong, saying that it is one o’clock when it
is two, or two when it is three. God’s clock
is always right, and when it is one it strikes one,
and when it is twelve it strikes twelve, and the second
hand is as accurate as the minute hand.
Further, my text tells us that God
sometimes shaves nations: “In the same
day shall the Lord shave with the razor that is hired.”
With one sharp sweep He went across Judea and down
went its pride and its power. In 1861 God shaved
our nation. We had allowed to grow Sabbath desecration,
and oppression, and blasphemy, and fraud, and impurity,
and all sorts of turpitude. The South had its
sins, and the North its sins, and the East its sins,
and the West its sins. We had been warned again
and again, and we did not heed. At length the
sword of war cut from the St. Lawrence to the Gulf,
and from Atlantic seaboard to Pacific seaboard.
The pride of the land, not the cowards, but the heroes,
on both sides went down. And that which we took
for the sword of war was the Lord’s razor.
In 1862, again, it went across the
land. In 1863 again. In 1864 again.
Then the sharp instrument was incased and put away.
Never in the history of the ages was any land more
thoroughly shaved than during those four years of
civil combat; and, my brethren, if we do not quit
some of our individual sins, national sins, the Lord
will again take us in hand. He has other razors
within reach besides war: epidemics, droughts,
deluges, plagues grasshopper and locust;
or our overtowering success may so far excite the
jealousy of other lands that, under some pretext,
the great nations of Europe and Asia may combine to
put us down. This nation, so easily approached
on north and south and from both oceans, might have
on hand at once more hostilities than were ever arrayed
against any power.
We have recently been told by skillful
engineers that all our fortresses around New York
harbor could not keep the shells from being hurled
from the sea into the heart of these great cities.
Insulated China, the wealthiest of all nations, as
will be realized when her resources are developed,
will have adopted all the modes of modern warfare,
and at the Golden Gate may be discussing whether Americans
must go. If the combined jealousies of Europe
and Asia should come upon us, we should have more
work on hand than would be pleasant. I hope no
such combination against us will ever be formed, but
I want to show that, as Assyria was the hired razor
against Judea, and Cyrus the hired razor against Babylon,
and the Huns the hired razor against the Goths, there
are now many razors that the Lord could hire if, because
of our national sins, He should undertake to shave
us. In 1870, Germany was the razor with which
the Lord shaved France. England is the razor
with which very shortly the Lord will shave Russia.
But nations are to repent in a day. May a speedy
and world-wide coming to God hinder, on both sides
the sea, all national calamity. But do not let
us, as a nation, either by unrighteous law at Washington,
or bad lives among ourselves, defy the Almighty.
One would think that our national
symbol of the eagle might sometimes suggest another
eagle, that which ancient Rome carried. In the
talons of that eagle were clutched at one time Britain,
France, Spain, Italy, Dalmatia, Rhactia, Noricum,
Pannonia, Moesia, Dacia, Thrace, Macedonia, Greece,
Asia Minor, Syria, Phoenicia, Palestine, Egypt, and
all Northern Africa, and all the islands of the Mediterranean,
indeed, all the world that was worth having, an hundred
and twenty millions of people under the wings of that
one eagle. Where is she now? Ask Gibbon,
the historian, in his prose poem, the “Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire.” Ask her
gigantic ruins straggling their sadness through the
ages, the screech owl at windows out of which world-wide
conquerors looked. Ask the day of judgment when
her crowned debauchees, Commodus and Pertinax,
and Caligula and Diocletian, shall answer for their
infamy? As men and as nations let us repent, and
have our trust in a pardoning God, rather than depend
on former successes for immunity! Out of thirteen
greatest battles of the world, Napoleon had lost but
one before Waterloo. Pride and destruction often
ride in the same saddle.
But notice once more, and more than
all in my text, that God is so kind and loving, that
when it is necessary for Him to cut, He has to go
to others for the sharp-edged weapon. “In
the same day shall the Lord shave with a razor that
is hired.” God is love. God is pity.
God is help. God is shelter. God is rescue.
There are no sharp edges about Him, no thrusting points,
no instruments of laceration. If you want balm
for wounds, He has that. If you want salve for
divine eyesight, He has that. But if there is
sharp and cutting work to do which requires a razor,
that He hires. God has nothing about Him that
hurts, save when dire necessity demands, and then
He has to go clear off to some one else to get the
instrument.
This divine geniality will be no novelty
to those who have pondered the Calvarean massacre,
where God submerged Himself in human tears, and crimsoned
Himself from punctured arteries, and let the terrestrial
and infernal worlds maul Him until the chandeliers
of the sky had to be turned out, because the universe
could not endure the indecency. Illustrious for
love He must have been to take all that as our substitute,
paying out of His own heart the price of our admission
at the gates of heaven.
King Henry ii., of England, crowned
his son as king, and on the day of coronation put
on a servant’s garb and waited, he, the king,
at the son’s table, to the astonishment of all
the princes. But we know of a more wondrous scene,
the King of heaven and earth offering to put on you,
His child, the crown of life, and in the form of a
servant waiting on you with blessing. Extol that
love, all painting, all sculpture, all music, all
architecture, all worship! In Dresdenian gallery
let Raphael hold Him up as a child, and in Antwerp
Cathedral let Rubens hand Him down from the cross
as a martyr, and Handel make all his oratorio vibrate
around that one chord “He was wounded
for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquity.”
But not until all the redeemed get home, and from
the countenances of all the piled-up galleries of
the ransomed shall be revealed the wonders of redemption,
shall either man or seraph or archangel know the height,
and depth, and length, and breadth of the love of
God.
At our national capital, a monument
in honor of him who did more than any one to achieve
our American Independence, was for scores of years
in building, and most of us were discouraged and said
it never would be completed. And how glad we
all were when in the presence of the highest officials
of the nation, the work was done! But will the
monument to Him who died for the eternal liberation
of the human race ever be completed? For ages
the work has been going up; evangelists and apostles
and martyrs have been adding to the heavenly pile,
and every one of the millions of the redeemed going
up from earth, has made to it contribution of gladness,
and weight of glory is swung to the top of other weight
of glory, higher and higher as the centuries go by,
higher and higher as the whole millenniums roll, sapphire
on the top of jasper, sardonyx on the top of chalcedony,
and chrysoprasus above topaz, until, far beneath shall
be the walls and towers and domes of the great capitol,
a monument forever and forever rising, and yet never
done. “Unto Him who hath loved us and washed
us from our sins in His own blood, and made us kings
and priests forever.”
Allelujah, amen.