“Wherefore do the wicked
live?” - JOB xxi: 7,
Poor Job! With tusks and horns
and hoofs and stings, all the misfortunes of life
seemed to come upon him at once. Bankruptcy,
bereavement, scandalization, and eruptive disease so
irritating that he had to re-enforce his ten finger-nails
with pieces of earthenware to scratch himself withal.
His wife took the diagnosis of his complaints and
prescribed profanity. She thought he would feel
better if between the paroxysms of grief and pain
he would swear a little. For each boil a plaster
of objurgation.
Probably no man was ever more tempted
to take the bad advice than when, at last, Job’s
three exasperating friends came in, Eliphaz, Zophar,
and Bildad, practically saying to him, “You old
sinner, serves you right; you are a hypocrite; what
a sight you are! God has sent these chastisements
for your wickedness.”
The disfigured invalid, putting down
the pieces of broken saucer with which he had been
rubbing his arms, with swollen eyelids looks up and
says to his garrulous friends in substance, “The
most wicked people sometimes have the best health
and are the most prospered,” and then in that
connection hurls the question which every man and woman
has asked in some juncture of affairs, “Wherefore
do the wicked live?”
They build up fortunes that overshadow
the earth. They confound all the life-insurance
tables on the subject of longevity, dying octogenarians,
perhaps nonagenarians, possibly centenarians.
Ahab in the palace, Naboth in the cabinet. Unclean
Herod on the throne, consecrated Paul twisting ropes
for tent-making. Manasseh, the worst of all the
kings of Juda, living longer than any of them.
While the general rule is the wicked do not live out
half their days, there are exceptions where they live
on to great age and in a Paradise of beauty and luxuriance,
and die with a whole college of physicians expending
its skill in trying further prolongation of life, and
have a funeral with casket under mountain of calla-lilies,
the finest équipages of the city jingling and
flashing into line, the poor, angle-worm of the dust
carried out to its hole in the ground with the pomp
that might make a spirit from some other world suppose
that the Archangel Michael was dead.
Go up among the finest residences
of the city, and on some of the door-plates you will
find the names of those mightiest for commercial and
social iniquity. They are the vampires of society they
are the gorgons of the century. Some of these
men have each wheel of their carriage a juggernaut
wet with the blood of those sacrificed to their avarice.
Some of them are like Caligula, who wished that all
the people had only one neck that he might strike
it off at one blow. Oh, the slain, the slain!
A long procession of usurers and libertines and infamous
quacks and legal charlatans and world-grabbing monsters.
What apostleship of despoliation! Demons incarnate.
Hundreds of men concentering all their energies of
body, mind, and soul in one prolonged, ever-intensifying,
and unrelenting effort to scald and scarify and blast
and consume the world. I do not blame you for
asking me the quivering, throbbing, burning, resounding,
appalling question of my text, “Wherefore do
the wicked live?”
In the first place, they live to demonstrate
beyond all controversy the long-suffering patience
of God. You sometimes say, under some great affront,
“I will not stand it;” but perhaps you
are compelled to stand it. God, with all the
batteries of omnipotence loaded with thunderbolts,
stands it century after century. I have no doubt
sometimes an angel comes to Him and suggests, “Now
is the time to strike.” “No,”
says God; “wait a year, wait twenty years, wait
a century, wait five centuries.” What God
does is not so wonderful as what He does not do.
He has the reserve corps with which He could strike
Mormonism and Mohammedanism and Paganism from the earth
in a day. He could take all the fraud in New
York on the west side of Broadway and hurl it into
the Hudson, and all the fraud on the east side of
Broadway and hurl it into the East River in an hour.
He understands the combination lock of every dishonest
money-safe, and could blow it up quicker than by any
earthly explosive. Written all over the earth,
written all over history are the words, “Divine
forbearance, divine leniency, divine long-suffering.”
I wonder that God did not burn this
world up two thousand years ago, scattering its ashes
into immensity, its aérolites dropping into other
worlds to be kept in their museums as specimens of
a defunct planet. People sometimes talk of God
as though He were hasty in His judgments and as though
He snapped men up quick. Oh, no! He waited
one hundred and twenty years for the people to get
into the ark, and warned them all the time one
hundred and twenty years, then the flood came.
The Anchor Line gives only a month’s announcement
of the sailing of the “Circassia,” the
White Star Line gives only a month’s announcement
of the sailing of the “Britannic,” the
Cunard Line gives only a month’s announcement
of the sailing of the “Oregon;” but of
the sailing of that ship that Noah commanded God gave
one hundred and twenty years’ announcement and
warning. Patience antediluvian, patience postdiluvian,
patience in times Adamic, Abrahamic, Mosaic, Davidic,
Pauline, Lutheran, Whitefieldian. Patience with
men and nations. Patience with barbarisms and
civilizations. Six thousand years of patience!
Overtopping attribute of God, all of whose attributes
are immeasurable. Why do the wicked live?
That their overthrow may be the more impressive and
climacteric. They must pile up their mischief
until all the community shall see it, until the nation
shall see it, until all the world shall see it.
The higher it goes up the harder it will come down
and the grander will be the divine vindication.
God will not allow sin to sneak out
of the world. God will not allow it merely to
resign and quit. This shall not be a case that
goes by default because no one appears against it.
God will arraign it, handcuff it, try it, bring against
it the verdict of all the good, and then gibbet it
so high up that if one half of the gibbet stood on
Mount Washington and the other on the Himalaya, it
would not be any more conspicuous.
About fifteen years ago we had in
this country a most illustrious instance of how God
lets a man go on in iniquity, so that at the close
of the career his overthrow may be the more impressive,
full of warning and climacteric. First, an honest
chairmaker, then an alderman, then a member of congress,
then a supervisor of a city, then school commissioner,
then state senator, then commissioner of public works on
and up, stealing thousands of dollars here and thousands
of dollars there, until the malfeasance in office
overtopped anything the world had ever seen making
the new Court House in New York a monument of municipal
crime, and rushing the debt of the city from thirty-six
million dollars to ninety-seven millions. Now,
he is at the top of millionairedom.
Country-seat terraced and arbored
and parterred clear to the water’s brink.
Horses enough to stock a king’s equerry.
Grooms and postilions in full rig. Wine cellars
enough to make a whole legislature drunk. New
York finances and New York politics in his vest pocket.
He winked, and men in high place fell. He lifted
his little finger, and ignoramuses took important
office. He whispered, and in Albany and Washington
they said it thundered. Wider and mightier and
more baleful his influence, until it seemed as if
Pandemonium was to be adjourned to this world, and
in the Satanic realm there was to be a change of administration,
and Apollyon, who had held dominion so long, should
have a successful competitor.
To bring all to a climax, a wedding
came in the house of that man. Diamonds as large
as hickory nuts. A pin of sixty diamonds representing
sheaves of wheat. Musicians in a semicircle, half-hidden
by a great harp of flowers. Ships of flowers.
Forty silver sets, one of them with two hundred and
forty pieces. One wedding-dress that cost five
thousand dollars. A famous libertine, who owned
several Long Island Sound steamboats, and not long
before he was shot for his crimes, sent as a wedding
present to that house a frosted silver iceberg, with
representations of arctic bears walking on icicle-handles
and ascending the spoons. Was there ever such
a convocation of pictures, bronzes, of bric-a-brac,
of grandeurs, social grandeurs? The
highest wave of New York splendor rolled into that
house and recoiled perhaps never again to rise so high.
But just at that time, when all earthly and infernal
observation was concentered on that man, eternal justice,
impersonated by that wonder of the American bar, Charles
O’Connor, got on the track of the offender.
First arraignment, then sentence to twelve years’
imprisonment under twelve indictments, then penitentiary
on Blackwell’s Island, then a lawsuit against
him for six million dollars, then incarceration in
Ludlow Street jail, then escape to foreign land, to
be brought back under the stout grip of the constabulary,
then dying of broken heart in a prison cell.
God allowed him to go on in iniquity until all the
world saw as never before that “the way of the
transgressor is hard,” and that dishonesty will
not declare permanent dividends, and that you had
better be an honest chairmaker with a day’s wages
at a time than a brilliant commissioner of public
works, all your pockets crammed with plunder.
What a brilliant figure in history
is William the Conqueror, the intimidator of France,
of Anjou, of Brittany, victor at Hastings, snatching
the crown of England and setting it on his own brow,
destroying homesteads that he might have a larger game
forest, making a Doomsday Book by which he could keep
the whole land under despotic espionage, proclaiming
war in revenge for a joke uttered in regard to his
obesity. Harvest fields and vineyards going down
under the cavalry hoof. Nations horror-struck.
But one day while at the apex of all observation he
is riding out and the horse put his hoof on a hot
cinder, throwing the king so violently against the
pommel of the saddle that he dies, his son hastening
to England to get the crown before the breath has
left his father’s body.
The imperial corpse drawn by a cart,
most of the attendants leaving it in the street because
of a fire alarm that they might go off and see the
conflagration. And just as they are going to put
his body down in the church which he had built, a
man stepping up and saying, “Bishop, the man
you praise is a robber. This church stands on
my father’s homestead. The property on
which this church is built is mine. I reclaim
my right. In the name of Almighty God I forbid
you to bury the king here, or to cover him with my
glebe.” “Go up,” said the ambition
of William the Conqueror. “Go up by conquest,
go up by throne, go up in the sight of all nations,
go up by cruelties.” But one day God said,
“Come down, come down by the way of a miserable
death, come down by the way of an ignominious obsequies,
come down in the sight of all nations, come clear
down, come down forever.” And you and I
see the same thing on a smaller scale many and many
a time illustrations of the fact that God
lets the wicked live that He may make their overthrow
the more climacteric.
What is true in regard to sin is true
in regard to its author, Satan, called Abaddon, called
the Prince of the Power of the Air, called the serpent,
called the dragon. It seems to me any intelligent
man must admit that there is a commander-in-chief
of all evil.
The Persians called him Ahriman, the
Hindus called him Siva. He was represented on
canvas as a mythological combination of Thor and Cerberus
and Pan and Vulcan and other horrible addenda.
I do not care what you call him, that monster of evil
is abroad, and his one work is destruction. John
Milton almost glorified him by witchery of description,
but he is the concentration of all meanness and of
all despicability. My little child, seven years
of age, said to her mother one day, “Why don’t
God kill the devil at once, and have done with it?”
In less terse phrase we have all asked the same question.
The Bible says he is to be imprisoned and he is to
be chained down. Why not heave the old miscreant
into his dungeon now? Does it not seem as if
his volume of infamy were complete? Does it not
seem as if the last fifty years would make an appropriate
peroration? No; God will let him go on to the
top of all bad endeavor, and then when all the earth
and all constellations and galaxies and all the universe
are watching, God will hurl him down with a violence
and ghastliness enough to persuade five hundred eternities
that a rebellion against God must perish. God
will not do it by piecemeal, God will not do it by
small skirmish. He will wait until all the troops
are massed, and then some day when in defiant and
confident mood, at the head of his army, this Goliath
of hell stalks forth, our champion, the son of David,
will strike him down, not with smooth stones from
the brook, but with fragments from the Rock of Ages.
But it will not be done until this giant of evil and
his holy antagonist come out within full sight of the
two great armies. The tragedy is only postponed
to make the overthrow more impressive and climacteric.
Do not fret. If God can afford to wait you can
afford to wait. God’s clock of destiny strikes
only once in a thousand years. Do not try to
measure events by the second-hand on your little time-piece.
Sin and Satan go on only that their overthrow may
at last be the more terrific, the more impressive,
the more resounding, the more climacteric.
Why do the wicked live? In order
that they may build up fortresses for righteousness
to capture. Have you not noticed that God harnesses
men, bad men, and accomplishes good through them?
Witness Cyrus, witness Nebuchadnezzar, witness the
fact that the Bastile of oppression was pried open
by the bayonets of a bad man. Recently there came
to me the fact that a college had been built at the
Far West for infidel purposes. There was to be
no nonsense of chapel prayers, no Bible reading there.
All the professors there were pronounced infidels.
The college was opened, and the work went on, but,
of course, failed. Not long ago a Presbyterian
minister was in a bank in that village on purposes
of business, and he heard in an adjoining room the
board of trustees of that college discussing what
they had better do with the institution, as it did
not get on successfully, and one of the trustees proposed
that it be handed over to the Presbyterians, prefacing
the word Presbyterians with a very unhappy expletive.
The resolutions were passed, and that fortress of
infidelity has become a fortress of old-fashioned,
orthodox religion, the only religion that will be
worth a snap of your finger when you come to die or
appear in the Day of Judgment. The devil built
the college. Righteousness captured it.
In some city there goes up a great
club-house the architecture, the furniture,
all the equipment a bedazzlement of wealth. That
particular club-house is designed to make gambling
and dissipation respectable.
Do not fret. That splendid building
will after a while be a free library, or it will be
a hospital, or it will be a gallery of pure art.
Again and again observatories have been built by infidelity,
and the first thing you know they go into the hand
of Christian science. God said in the Bible that
He would put a hook in Sennacherib’s nose and
pull him down by a way he knew not. And God has
a hook to-day in the nose of every Sennacherib of
infidelity and sin, and will drag him about as He
will. Marble halls deserted to sinful amusements
will yet be dedicated for religious assemblage.
All these castles of sin are to be captured for God
as we go forth with the battle-shout that Oliver Cromwell
rang out at the head of his troops as he rode in on
the field of Naseby: “Let God arise and
let His enemies be scattered!” After a great
fire in London, amid the ruins there was nothing left
but an arch with the name of the architect upon it;
and, my friends, whatever else goes down, God stays
up.
Why do the wicked live? That
some of them may be monuments of mercy.
So it was with John Newton, so it
was with Augustine, perhaps so it was with you.
Chieftains of sin to become chieftains of grace.
Paul, the apostle, made out of Saul, the persecutor.
Baxter, the flaming evangel, made out of Baxter, the
blasphemer. Whole squadrons, with streamers of
Emmanuel floating from the masthead, though once they
were launched from the dry-docks of diabolism.
God lets these wicked men live that He may make jewels
out of them for coronets, that He may make tongues
of fire out of them for Pentecosts, that He may make
warriors out of them for Armageddons, that he may make
conquerors out of them for the day when they shall
ride at the head of the white-horse host in the grand
review of the resurrection.
Why do the wicked live? To make
it plain beyond all controversy that there is another
place of adjustment. So many of the bad up, so
many of the good down. It seems to me that no
man can look abroad without saying no man
of common sense, religious or irreligious, can look
abroad without saying, “There must be some place
where brilliant scoundrelism shall be arrested, where
innocence shall get out from under the heel of despotism.”
Common fairness as well as eternal justice demands
it.
We adjourn to the great assizes, the
stupendous injustices of this life. They are
not righted here. There must be some place where
they will be righted. God can not afford to omit
the judgment day or the reconstruction of conditions.
For you can not make me believe that that man stuffed
with all abomination, having devoured widows’
houses and digested them, looking with basilisk or
tigerish eyes upon his fellows, no music so sweet
to him as the sound of breaking hearts, is, at death,
to get out of the landau at the front door of the sepulcher
and pass right on through to the back door of the sepulcher,
and find a celestial turnout waiting for him, so that
he can drive tandem right up primrosed hills, one
glory riding as lackey ahead, and another glory riding
as postilion behind, while that poor woman who supported
her invalid husband and her helpless children by taking
in washing and ironing, often putting her hand to
her side where the cancerous trouble had already begun,
and dropping dead late on Saturday night while she
was preparing the garments for the Sabbath day, coming
afoot to the front door of the sepulcher, shall pass
through to the back door of the sepulcher and find
nothing waiting, no one to welcome, no one to tell
her the way to the King’s gate. I will not
believe it. Solomon was confounded in his day
by what he represents as princes afoot and beggars
a-horseback, but I tell you there must be a place
and a time when the right foot will get into the stirrup.
To demonstrate beyond all controversy that there is
another place for adjustment, God lets the wicked
live.
Why do the wicked live? For the
same reason that He lets us live to have
time for repentance.
Where would you and I have been if
sin had been followed by immediate catastrophe?
While the foot of Christ is fleet as that of a roebuck
when He comes to save, it does seem as if he were hoppled
with great languors and infinite lethargies when He
comes to punish. Oh, I celebrate God’s
slowness, God’s retardation, God’s putting
off the retribution! Do you not think, my brother,
it would be a great deal better for us to exchange
our impatient hypercriticism of Providence because
this man, by watering of stock, makes a million dollars
in one day, and another man rides on in one bloated
iniquity year after year would it not be
better for us to exchange that impatient hypercriticism
for gratitude everlasting that God let us who were
wicked live, though we deserved nothing but capsize
and demolition? Oh, I celebrate God’s slowness!
The slower the rail-train comes the better, if the
drawbridge is off.
How long have you, my brother, lived
unforgiven? Fifteen, twenty, forty, sixty years?
Lived through great awakenings, lived through domestic
sorrow, lived through commercial calamity, lived through
providential crises that startled nations, and you
are living yet, strangers to God, and with no hope
for a great future into which you may be precipitated.
Oh, would it not be better for us to get our nature
through the Grace of Christ revolutionized and transfigured?
For I want you to know that God sometimes changes His
gait, and instead of the deliberate tread He is the
swift witness, and sometimes the enemies of God are
suddenly destroyed, and that without remedy.
Make God your ally. What an offer
that is! Do not fight against Him. Do not
contend against your best interests. Yield this
morning to the best impulse of your heart, and that
is toward Christ and heaven. Do not fight the
Lord that made you and offers to redeem you.
Philip of France went out with his
army, with bows and arrows, to fight King Edward III.
of England; but just as they got into the critical
moment of the battle, a shower of rain came and relaxed
the bow-strings so that they were of no effect, and
Philip and his army were worsted. And all your
weaponry against God will be as nothing when he rains
upon you discomfiture from the heavens. Do not
fight the Lord any longer. Change allegiance.
Take down the old flag of sin, run up the new flag
of grace. It does not take the Lord Jesus Christ
the thousandth part of a second to convert you if
you will only surrender, be willing to be saved.
The American Congress was in anxiety during the Revolutionary
War while awaiting to hear news from the conflict
between Washington and Cornwallis, and the anxiety
became intense and almost unbearable as the days went
by. When the news came at last that Cornwallis
had surrendered and the war was practically over, so
great was the excitement that the doorkeeper of the
House of Congress dropped dead from joyful excitement.
And if this long war between your soul and God should
come to an end this morning by your entire surrender,
the war forever over, the news would very soon reach
the heavens, and nothing but the supernatural health
of your loved ones before the throne would keep them
from being prostrated with overjoy at the cessation
of all spiritual hostilities.