Daily Devotionals

Music For the Soul

Devotional: October 9th

DEATH AND GROWTH

And Joseph died, and all his brethren, and all that generation. And the children of Israel were fruitful, and increased abundantly, and multiplied, and waxed exceeding mighty - Exodus 1:6-7

Here we have an illustration of a twofold process which is always at work - silent dropping away and silent growth. It seems to me that the writer of these words in Exodus, probably unconsciously, being profoundly impressed with certain features of that dropping away, reproduces them most strikingly in the very structure of his sentence: "Joseph died, and all his brethren, and all that generation." The uniformity of the fate, and the separate times at which it befell individuals, are strongly set forth in the clauses, which sound like the threefold falls of earth on a coffin. They all died, but not all at the same time; they went one by one, one by one, till, at the end, they were all gone.

If you were ever out at sea, and looked over a somewhat stormy water, you will have noticed, I dare say, how strangely the white crests of the breakers disappear, as if some force, acting from beneath, had plucked them under, and over the spot where they gleamed for a moment runs the blue sea. So the waves break over the great ocean of time, I might say, like swimmers pulled under by sharks - man after man, man after man, gets twitched down, till at the end - "And Joseph died, and all his brethren, and all that generation."

There is another process going on side by side with this. In the vegetable world, spring and autumn are two different seasons. May rejoices in green leaves and opening buds, and nests with their young broods; but winter days are coming when the greenery drops and the nests are dry, and the birds flown. But the singular and impressive thing (which we should see if we were not so foolish and blind) is that at the same time the two opposite processes of death and renewal are going on; so that if you look at the facts from the one side, it seems nothing but a charnel-house and a Golgotha that we live in, while, seen from the other side, it is a scene of rejoicing, budding young life and growth. You get these two processes in the closest juxtaposition in ordinary life. There is many a house where there is a coffin upstairs and a cradle downstairs. The churchyard is often the children’s playground The web is being run down at the one end and woven at the other. Wherever we look -

"Every moment, dies a man,

Every moment one is born."

"Joseph died, and all his brethren, and all that generation. And the children of Israel . . . multiplied . . . exceedingly." - Exodus 1:6-7

But there is another thought here than that of the contemporaneousness of the two processes, and that is, as it is written on John Wesley’s monument in Westminster Abbey, "God buries the workmen and carries on the work." The great Vizier who seemed to be the only protection of Israel is lying in "a coffin in Egypt." And all these truculent brothers of his that had tormented him, they are gone, and the whole generation is swept away. What of that? They were the depositories of God’s purposes for a little while. Are God’s purposes dead because the instruments that wrought them in part are gone? By no means. If I might use a very vulgar proverb, " There are as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it," especially if God casts the net. So when the one generation has passed away, there is the other to take up the work.