Micah 2:10 Arise you, and depart; for this is not your rest: because it is polluted, it shall destroy you, even with a sore destruction. The arising and the departure, as the passage stands, referred to a visible residence; there was to be a literal change of place. But even there the act was required as part of a religious discipline and for a Divine purpose. The national condition that made such a migration necessary was one incident in a peculiar providential history. The outward removal was the result of an inward state, — a state of moral deterioration and danger. Domestic comfort must be abandoned for the sake of the spiritual safety, purity, and progress of a corrupt, imperilled people. The call is made in the name and by the Spirit of the Lord God. There is no violence in transferring it from a Hebrew to a Christian age. The need that a self-absorbed heart should bestir itself and arise — should go forth and follow God's call, should be moulded into a new form and born into a new life, through separation, travail, and sacrifice, is as independent of the differences of time and country as any attribute of humanity. Indeed, this permanence of the essential realities of life through all social changes, wherever a human soul lives, sins and suffers, furnishes the starting point in this subject. 1. The true growth of every really progressive character is made through a succession of decided departures out of positions, habits, estates of thought and feeling, which have once been familiar, into untried territories. There is the passage from the com paratively irresponsible, and dependent period of early childhood, into the greater self-determination of youth. Within the safe enclosures of a guarded external innocence the moral purposes will not stay any longer. They would not be fulfilling the Creator s design if they did. That is not their rest; they must arise and depart. Youth must see its visions, dream its dreams, and taste its awful liberty. Again, later, there is a transition from youth into maturity. The dream is broken. That graceful, airy tent which the uncommitted thought reared for itself at will is dissolved. A more real habitation, of severer shape, supplants it. Or rather, it is now a field of outdoor service. Chilly as the future looks, the least enterprising must go to meet it. In some vague, indefinite way this decree of departure makes itself felt in all thoughtful souls. Beyond these early and successive departures, from one period of our age to another, there are a great variety of other changes, having the same general purpose and illustrating the same plan of God. Sometimes the dissolution of our former order of life is made unavoidable by conditions beyond our control. A particular line of employment is found to have furnished all of opportunity, or stimulus, or trial, that the great former of our characters intended, and it is broken off. A particular place of residence has exhausted all its helps and ministries upon us: and we must take up the little parcels that we call our goods, and go to be schooled in some new neighbourhood, etc. In other cases, with less visible signals, but not less effectually, we are moved out of our moral and mental habitations. So long as we are in them nothing seems more fixed than our opinions, tastes, and estimates. But they may become too fixed. Estimates of men and things stiffen into prejudices. And hence by one process and another we are led to give many of them up, or to modify them. Events are ordered to that end. 2. These turns of the inner life will often be painful, demanding something more than a natural, or Stoic courage. Religious indifference wishes only to be let alone. But no. Pain comes. The insensible heart must be startled. The earthly and the Divine fight together within us, and we suffer under the conflict. Sometimes this separation from familiar evil is a struggle as between life and death, shaking the whole soul, and tearing its shrinking quick in torture. And yet, such is the power of the conviction of the spirit of truth when humility has once begun its holy and honest work within us, how many even go out to meet that saving sorrow! Blessed is the mind that springs with alacrity and thanksgiving to its better ministry! 3. All true souls, really touched with the Spirit and consecrated to the fellowship of Christian obedience, will be ready for this sacrifice. Not all equally. This, in fact, is the test of the sincerity of faith: the willingness to give up all that has been precious, but not holy, and launch out upon the future, trusting only to an unseen hand. So, through familiar analogies, we are led to see how the sacred provision is made, in our fallen but still aspiring nature, for that one only radical and complete transformation which changes the governing motive of life, — the "regeneration" of the Gospel. It has been said that no period of our life becomes quite intelligible to us till we quit it for the next. And there is certainly truth here. But retrospect is not all our outlook: Our best wisdom is not gained from what is behind us, but from what is above. When the heart is really made new, and is filled with all the holy life of its Lord, it matters nothing what the outward place or scenery may be. To this, then, we are brought, that there is one migration of the soul more complete and adventurous than all besides: that which takes it over from every kind of self-direction into a pure self-renunciation to the Spirit of God; one "going forth" more decisive and sublime than all journeys and discoveries — from the miserable effort to satisfy ourselves into the liberty of the sons of God; one central and all transforming change — that which refashions us, by a new principle of life, from the likeness of sinful men into the likeness of God's Son. All other transitions touch us at certain points or parts of our nature: this transfuses another spirit through the whole; old things pass away, because the old evil is gone, and all things are new. (F. D. Huntington, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: Arise ye, and depart; for this is not your rest: because it is polluted, it shall destroy you, even with a sore destruction. |
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