1 Chronicles 1:48 And when Samlah was dead, Shaul of Rehoboth by the river reigned in his stead. "The king is dead. Long live the king!" After the Saxon comes the Norman; after George the First George the Second, and then George the Third. So is history written with wearying monotony. These chapters have their lessons, and not the least significant is contained in the words "reigned in his stead." We hear the tramp of many generations as we read these verses. The march of the human family has been always towards a grave. That is the end of every life. "And so death passed on all men; for all have sinned." Who were Bela, and Jobad, and Husham, and Hadad, Samlah, and Shaul? They were kings once, but who cares anything about them now? They are dead, and their deeds are forgotten. Another man shall fill my pulpit; another man shall attend to your business; another man shall sit in your chair. Our text suggests the thought of the death of the individual and the perpetuation of the race. Instead of father comes the son. Whether we like it or not, our children will soon be pushing us out of our places. The world demands strong hands and nimble intellects. The cry is for young men. It is pathetic, it is sometimes heart-breaking, to see how cavalierly the world treats the aged. With rude hands it pushes them aside to make way for their successors. The moral suggestiveness of the genealogical chapters is great. The Bible has a wonderful method of epitomising. It informs us of the creation of the world, the sun, moon, and stars, earth, heaven, and sea in a single chapter. It tells the whole story of Redemption in one verse (John 3:16). The very brevity is significant. What importance we poor mortals attach to very trifling things! Our pleasures, our troubles, our work, our family, its marriages, its funerals; and we sometimes feel aggrieved that these things have not a deeper interest for others. Here are many generations of men all crammed into one chapter. "Behold God is very great." And so He tells of many generations of men in a few verses. It is such a small thing to Him. The individual passes away, but the race continues. Men die, but man endures. "One generation cometh and another goeth." The earth is very beautiful, hut it is, after all, one vast cemetery, in which repose the ashes of our forefathers. It is a lovely garden full of flowers and singing birds, but in the garden there is always a new tomb. The dead outnumber the living. We pride ourselves on our possessions. A few years ago they were not ours, they belonged to the departed; in a few years to come they will not be ours, they will be held by our successors. God lends us a house to live in, clothes to wear, money to use, and we grow arrogant, and exclaim," See how rich I am!" We shut our fists tight over our gold, and say, "This is mine; I will keep it. Nobody else shall have it." And Death comes, and says, "Give it up. Thou mayest retain it no longer." Twenty — thirty generations of men. What solemn thoughts the words suggest! But who could not weep over this vast host who have all felt the joy and beauty of life, but are now dead? Where are the ancient seers and prophets whose eagle vision peered through the mists of time and read with unerring certainty the fate of great nations and the purposes of God? Gone! Prepare thyself! Thou shalt die and another reign in thy stead. Our text suggests the solidarity of our race. We are all children of one earthly father, as we are an the children of one Heavenly Father. All the fountains of history have their rise in the solitary pair who were driven from the gates of Paradise by the flaming sword of the angel sentinel of God. We are all descendants of a gardener, and the proudest crest might well have upon it a spade. The common brotherhood of the race is, I trust, soon to receive practical recognition by statesmen. Long enough have poets sung of equal rights and preachers repeated stale platitudes about "all men being as one in God's sight"; and yet the nations have gone on murdering one another, and, under the plea of extending civilisation, have extirpated many a tribe whose only crime was that they would not give up the land of their fathers to satisfy the territorial greed of the white man. Our text reminds us of our indebtedness to the past. Every man is an epitome of the race. In him history has its reflection and development. He is the incarnation of the past and the prophecy of the future. No man can isolate himself. Where did this man get that imagination which transforms the commonplaces of life, and gives to the veriest mudbank hues of iridescent beauty? Where did that other get his logical faculty, his mathematical accuracy, or his genius for construction? You would have to trace his ancestry back through centuries to answer those questions. Some of us, alas! have inherited from the past other qualities which are the bane and cross of our life. But there is another way in which we are indebted to the past. We have come into a heritage of noble deeds and splendid thoughts. We are heirs of all the ages. For us the thinkers of past ages burned the midnight oil, for us the workers tolled when Nature bade them sleep. For a shilling I can purchase the plays it took Shakespeare a lifetime to write. A few coppers will make Milton my life companion. We are indebted to the nameless dead, as well as to those favoured few who have snatched immortality from the hand of fate. The world is better for their unrecorded heroism, their quiet, patient suffering, as the atmosphere is sweeter for the fragrance of the violet. The civil liberties we enjoy, the freedom to worship God according to the dictates of our own conscience, have been bought for us by the rich blood of brave men and women. Let us hand to our sons unimpaired the holy legacy of our sires. Our text also suggests the debt we owe to the future. Posterity has a claim upon us as well as the past. Let it be ours to make the bounds of freedom wider yet; to leave at least one evil less than when we were born. It is glorious, and yet it is awful to think that in writing our own history we are also determining the character of generations to come. To the young I say, Prepare yourselves to take our places. We mean to make it as easy for you to reign in our stead as we can by removing out of the way some of the difficulties and dangers that have beset our own lives. We mean to make it u hard for you to succeed us as we can by living so well that it shall only be by the most strenuous efforts that you shall surpass us in moral effort, in high purpose, in brave deeds, and aspiring thoughts. Get ready, I say, for the larger duties and greater responsibilities the future has in store for you. The business of the world, its philanthropies and its religion, will soon be in your hands. Another lesson of these chapters is that of our own insignificance. They tend to correct our overwhelming self-esteem. Men come and pass away, but the old world goes on. There is no place but what can be filled; no man is indispensable. Who will succeed you? Who will lift the sword that you lay down, who will wear your mantle, who will fill your office? Can anybody do it? Yes; but you have nothing to do with that. It is yours to make it difficult for any man to succeed you by doing your work so well that it cannot be done better. We are all apt to magnify our own importance. Our place may not be so hard to fill as we imagine. Some ruddy country lad may come with his sling and stone, and in simple faith hurl a pebble in the name of God at the giants before where we have trembled and fled. At the weaver's loom may be another David Livingston, in the market garden a Robert Moffat, at the cobbler's bench a William Carey, in the school a Charles Haddon Spurgeon. One closing thought, rues to us, and that is, in the common aspirations, longings, and desires of men; in their common origin and destiny, we find an argument for a common redemption. "As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive." Generation after generation of men and not one absolutely holy save Him who bore all our sins on the Cross, but had no sin of His own. In due time Christ died for the ungodly. The cry of all ages has been a cry for deliverance from the curse of sin. That cry found its answer at Calvary. Jesus is the only King of whom the text will never be true. He sits on an eternal throne. His crown will never lose its lustre. We sinners cannot do without the Redeemer. The gospel we proclaim is a resurection gospel. Because He lives we shall live also. (S. Horton.) Parallel Verses KJV: And when Samlah was dead, Shaul of Rehoboth by the river reigned in his stead.WEB: Samlah died, and Shaul of Rehoboth by the River reigned in his place. |
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