Hebrews 8:5 Who serve to the example and shadow of heavenly things, as Moses was admonished of God when he was about to make the tabernacle: for… Moses, when he went down from God on Sinai, knew what he was. going to build, and how he was going to build it. The thought of a thing, the conception of it, is its first and largest half. It is easier to pour in the molten iron than to make in the sand the mould into which it is to be poured. I want, first, to say something generally about plan and pattern and purpose. As I look through Scripture I discover that the men who did the best work and the most of it first wrought out in thought what they were afterwards going to work out in act and word. The Creator Himself wrought out first His creative designs. In that sense the world is as old as God. When at the end of the first week He said "All very good," He meant that things had now become in fact what they had first and for ever been in idea. Nothing, perhaps, comes nearer God's workmanship in this respect than art; hence our ha it of speaking of the creations of art. The modern architect, like the one on Sinai, sees the building he is going to construct before the timber has been cut or the ground broken. Gerard von Rile, six hundred years ago, saw the cathedral which has just been completed at Cologne. Slowly since the year 1200, German artisans have been copying into stone Von Rile's thought, working from his plan, and the cathedral is perfect to-day because it was perfect then. All that God does is in prosecution of a plan, an eternal idea come to utterance. The tree ripens to the grade of a purpose that was ripe before the tree, and before the third day. It is all one whether we say that the plan is deposited in the seed, or that God builds the plant each moment against the pattern of His thought, as the mason lays bricks close to the plumb-line. It all sums up into the same result. With such examples of pattern and purpose before us, I want to go on and say that there are at least three advantages that come from having a plan in our life and work, and working and living from that plan. 1. One is, that in an open field and with a long prospect our purposes will lay themselves out in a larger and wiser proportion than when framed at close quarters and at the dictation of momentary impulse. The captain brings his ship to Liverpool in less time by having the whole course settled at the outset than by settling a little of it every day. A man's longest purposes will be his best purposes. Immediate results are meagre results. The men who are doing most for their own day are such as are working toward an aim that is a score or a century of years away. In the days of American slavery the poor fugitive reached liberty by walking towards the stars. 2. Not only shall we think wiser and grander purposes when we mature them in advance; there is also a solidifying and invigorating power in a long purpose clearly defined. You can generally tell from a man's gait whether he has a purpose. Plan intensities. Pursuance of a purpose makes our life solid and consecutive. Plan concentrates energies as a burning-glass does sunbeams. We cannot do to-morrow's work to-day, but we can have to-day's work shaped and but ressed by what we are intending to do to-morrow. In a life which has meaning in it, past and future sustain each other. 3. Then, in the next place, knowing with definiteness what we are attempting to do is a moral safeguard. Purposelessness is the fruitful toothier of crime. When men live only in conference with circumstances lying next them, they lose their bearings. A drifting boat always drifts down-stream. Young aimlessness is the seminary of old iniquity. Out of 904 convicts received at the Michigan State in the three years ending 1880. 822 (91 per cent.) were unskilled labourers — prison had never been taught how to work. Such facts challenge the attention of the Church as well as of the political economists. Character, purpose, and apprenticeship will never get far apart from each other, whether among immigrants or native population. But Moses not only approached his work with a purpose and a pattern, but brought down his pattern from on high. This teaches that there are celestial ways of doing earthly, things, and that human success consists in getting into the secrecies of God's mind and working in the direction o! His method. Human success is a quotation from overhead. Men are enriched with presentiments of the way God would work if placed in our stead. These presentiments we call ideals. We discover, not invent, them. "In the mount" we reach after them and ascend to them. They are a continuous firmament that overarches us, but a clouded firmament that yields itself to us only in broken hints. (C. H. Parkhurst, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: Who serve unto the example and shadow of heavenly things, as Moses was admonished of God when he was about to make the tabernacle: for, See, saith he, that thou make all things according to the pattern shewed to thee in the mount. |
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