BREAD FOR GOD’S PEOPLE
By D. M.
PANTON.
The Old Testament is the picture-book of the New Testament
realities. For the Old Testament
sometimes portrays, under cover of inspired symbol, certain doctrines which,
while always true, more particularly belong to the New; and in the narrative of
the Poisonous Vine, the Holy Spirit, if I mistake not, has given a picture
replete with instruction for our own
difficult and perilous days.
The Sons of the Prophets were assembled before Elisha. 2 Kings 4: 38-41. The sons of the prophets were the godly
of their generation: it was an assembly
of the regenerate in an age of apostasy. They are assembled for a meal; and as
that which is literal in the Old Testament is frequently spiritual in the New,
the meal is a spiritual one, the feeding of the soul. It is a gathering of God’s flock
for that assimilation of the Word without which the sheep starve. Whilst they are thus assembled, Elisha (who, it may be, typifies Christ) directs a servant
to see the pottage for the sons of the prophets; reminding us of our
Lord’s words, “The faithful and wise servant, whom his lord hath set over his
household, to give them their food in
due season” (Matt. 24: 45). One - either a servant or one of the
sons of the prophets - goes out to gather herbs; and he brings back a lapful of
wild gourds, and shreds them into the pot.
Here the significance of the scene begins.
Let us fasten our attention first on the Wild Vine. Four points about it are of especial
significance.
(1) The food brought for the sons of the prophets is not God’s food. God had a Vine, but it was not a wild
vine; and it bore grapes, not gourds.
God’s Vine was
(2) The gourds are gathered in a time
of dearth. “There was a dearth in the land, and the sons of the prophets were sitting before him.” Amos expounds what such a dearth is:
“Behold, the days come, saith the Lord God, that
I will send a famine in the land,
not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord”
(Amos 8:
11). How had this dearth
arisen? God’s Vine was no
longer bearing grapes. Jehovah had
to say through Jeremiah: “I had planted thee a
noble vine, wholly a right seed: how then art thou turned into the
degenerate plant of a strange vine unto Me?” (Jer. 2: 21).
(3) It is a wild vine; that is to say,
it was self-sown, a vine never planted by God; it was a Gentile vine.
[* On Philippians,
p. 259.]
“The best elements of the
non-Christian religions,” says a Servant who has gone abroad into
the Field, “must be conserved for
the enrichment of Christian theology and life.
[** The Baptist Missionary Herald, January,
1906].
(4) One thing more about the vine: it
is an unrecognised vine. “He gathered wild gourds … and shred them into the pot,
… for they
knew them not.”
The servant had no wish to poison; he meant to feed the flock of God;
but he was guilty of culpable [i.e., ‘blameworthy’] ignorance.
“That servant … that knew not, and did things worthy
of stripes, shall be beaten;” but, “with
few
stripes” (Luke 12: 48). Conscientious
devotion and a service springing from a truly regenerate heart may belong to
one who is gathering wild gourds: his judgment must be left to his
Lord. 1
Cor. 3: 10-15.
Soon a sharp outcry arises. “As they
were eating … they cried out, …
O man of God, there is death in the pot; … and
they could not eat thereof.”
Gentile gourds, consumed as a sole diet, not only starve, they kill,
the soul; and the error is discovered by the sons of the prophets barely in
time to save their lives.* Our Lord shows that all worship based, not on God’s revealed Word, but on man’s
invented doctrines, is the solemn overthrow of the worshippers. “Ye have
made void the word of God because of your tradition. Ye hypocrites, well did Isaiah
prophesy of you, saying, ... In vain do they worship me, teaching as
their doctrines the precepts
of men” (Matt. 15: 6). The gourds poison the pottage. But now observe a crucial point:‑ the
safety of the assembly arose from its ability to analyse its own food. It was quick to detect poison: it
was whole-souled in rejecting it. So every assembly should be. “Solid food is for full-grown men, even those who by
reason of use have their
senses exercised to discern good and evil” (Heb. 5: 14). The
pew must share the solemn burden of the pulpit. Large and powerful assemblies to-day
insist on being fed with wild gourds.
“For the time will come when they will not endure the sound doctrine;
but, having itching ears, will heap to themselves teachers after their own
lusts: and will turn away their ears from the truth, and turn aside unto fables”
(2 Tim.
4: 3). Fables and traditions
and philosophies are the wild gourds of the soul. Col.
2: 8. Cf. Job. 34: 3.
[* It is mercifully true that life cannot be quenched in a
soul once generated (John 10: 27, 28): yet a
death-like swoon, called death by our Lord, can overtake it (Rev. 3: 1; 1 Tim. 5: 6.) An advertisement - an epitaph over such
a soul - appeared in the Times for
Nov. 5, 1902. “A Church of England clergyman, of nearly twenty years’
standing, whose faith is much shaken by
events and controversies of the day, seeks secular employment. Good business abilities. Unblemished character. Present
position almost unbearable.”* (Post-Millennialists and
A-Millennialists take note. – Ed.)]
Now we arrive at the central citadel of this truth. How is the poison to be dealt with? In
the vast vintage of wild gourds, now being gathered from the fields of the
world, and poured into the lap of the Church, what is to be done? What is the antidote? Elisha’s
answer is as profound, as blessed, and perhaps as startling, as an answer could
be. “THEN BRING MEAL.” Observe at once the significance of the
reply.
(1) Our whole soul is
to be engrossed, not with the world’s poison, nor its progress, but with God’s
truth. Souls cannot be fed
on negations [i.e., ‘contradictions and unreal things’]: the assembly requires to be shown, not what it may
not eat, but what it may. “Then bring meal.” One of the cleverest of Satan’s
present devices appears to be so to concentrate attention on the poison, that
the church is forgetting the meal; or else to produce such doubt of the meal
that, while it is being freely handled, it is not being eaten: whereas Elisha
knows that merely to forbid the pottage is to starve the sons of the prophets.
(2) The meal neutralizes the poison. Here is the pulsating heart of the
miracle, as it is also the superb solution of the problem. “He cast
it into the pot ... and there was no harm in the pot,” or, as the Hebrew is, “no evil thing;” the good had cast out the bad.
The supreme, the divine, the perfect method by which to uproot error
is to
plant the truth. As Jeremiah beautifully expounds it:- “Thy words
were found” - not gourds
– “and I did eat them; and thy words were unto me a joy and the rejoicing of my
heart” (Jer. 15: 16).
Cardinal Wiseman has given a curiously effective
illustration of the power of the meal totally to neutralize the poison. Of converts to
[*Doctrines and
Practices of the Catholic Church, p. 19.]
(3) God’s meal is the nutriment of the soul. “Holy men
of old spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost” (2 Pet. 2: 21);
their hands wrought, but God thought;
and the Scriptures are the crystals
of His breath. “All Scripture is inbreathed of God” (2 Tim. 3: 16). The
sacred books of other religions are man’s effort to reach God; the Bible
is God’s effort to reach man: and which effort is likely to be
successful? It is the manna of
the soul. A poor widow was once
asked if she had a Bible. “Have a Bible?”
she replied; “what should I do without one? It was the guide of my youth, and it is
the staff of my age; it wounded me, and it healed me; it condemned me, and it
acquitted me; it showed me I was a sinner, and it led me to my Saviour; it has
given me comfort through life, and I trust it will give me hope in death.” God has given us sixty-six books that
our souls may not be lean. All
Scripture “is profitable for teaching, for
reproof, for correction, for instruction which is in righteousness: THAT THE MAN OF GOD MAY BE COMPLETE,
furnished completely unto every
good work” (2 Tim. 3: 16). By
the knowledge of creation we learn the power of God; by the knowledge of the
Law we learn the holiness of God; by the knowledge of inspired history we learn
the providence of God; by the knowledge of prophecy we learn the plans of God;
by the knowledge of Christ we learn the love of God; by the knowledge of the
Epistles we learn how to please God; by the knowledge of the Apocalypse we
learn the triumph of God. A
crippled diet produces a crippled life. Each Scripture portion, like a bodily
food, goes to feed brain, or nerve, or blood, or muscle, in the soul; that the
man of God may be full-grown (Heb. 5: 14). It is an inexhaustible meal. Robert
Chapman said, “I have been more than seventy
years reading the Bible, and to-day it is more new and glorious than ever.”
There is an even higher Bread of God.* “The bread
of God is that which cometh down out of heaven, and giveth life unto the world
... I AM THE LIVING BREAD” (John
6: 51). Is my reader an
unbeliever? Your whole soul’s
nutriment is the wild gourd of the world’s literature, - novels,
newspapers, magazines, scientific works; - and all the world’s gourds are
powerless to impart life to the soul.
But it is not so with this higher Bread. “The bread
of God giveth life unto the
world:” it expels the poison; it feeds the soul. A poison has been known to kill in thirteen seconds; a look at Christ will heal in one:‑for “as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so
must the Son of man be lifted up: that whosoever believeth may in him have eternal
life” (John 3: 14).
Eat and live. The soul
may have fed on poison, and even produced poison, for years, and yet savingly absorb the Bread of life. Stephen
Grellet visited Tom Paine on his death-bed. “If the
Devil,” Paine turned and said to his nurse, “has ever had any agency in any work, he has had it in my
writing the ‘Age of Reason.’” Nevertheless he died with these words
upon his lips:- “Lord Jesus, have mercy upon me!”** The Bread of God will expel the most
virulent poison. Let the sons of
the prophets mark the wild vines at home - impure thoughts, sharp words, cruel
tempers, bitter gourds of the soul and let them bring more meal.
Brainerd wrote a few days
before his death:- “Charge my people in the name
of their dying minister ... to live and walk as becomes the Gospel. Tell them how great the expectations of
God and His people are for them, and how awfully they will wound God’s
cause if they fall. ... Their experiences are rotten, ... their joys are delusive unless the
main tenor of their lives be spiritual, watchful, and holy. ... Pursue
after personal holiness; be as much in fasting and prayer as health will allow
live above the level of common Christians.”
[* The meal which the servant brings is, like the Bible, limited: the Bread which God sends (2 Kings 4: 43) is, like Christ, miraculously multiplied. It is also true that both expel the poison and both are inexhaustible.
** Guest’s Stephen
Grellet, p. 69.]
We want more of Christ: will He suffice? What do we read of the meal which God
provided? “They did eat, and left thereof, according to the word of the Lord”
(2 Kings 4: 44). Our Meal is inexhaustible: however much
we have fed on it, there will always be
more; and it always expels the poison.
THEN BRING MEAL.
Thou, O Christ, art all I want;
More than all in Thee I find:
Raise the fallen, cheer the faint,
Heal the sick, and lead the blind:
All my trust on Thee is stay'd,
All my help from Thee I bring
Cover my defenceless head
With the shadow of Thy wing.
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