“Now when Jacob saw that there was corn in Egypt, Jacob said unto his sons,Why do ye look one upon another? And he said, Behold, I have heard that there is corn in Egypt: get you down thither, and buy for us from thence; that we may live, and not die.”—Genesis 42:1, 2.
God in his wisdom hath so made the outward world, that it is a strange and wonderful picture of the inner world. Nature has an analogy with grace. The wonders that God does in the heart of man, each of them finds a parallel, a picture, a metaphor, an illustration, in the wonders which God performs in providence. It is the duty of the minister always to look for these analogies. Our Saviour did so. He is the model preacher: his preaching was made up of parables, pictures from the outer world, accommodated to teach great and mighty truths. And so is man’s mind constituted that we can always see a thing better through a picture than anyhow else. If you tell a man a simple truth, he does not see it nearly so well as if you told it to him in an illustration. If I should attempt to describe the flight of a soul from sin to Christ, you would not see it one half so readily as if I should picture John Bunyan’s pilgrim running out of the city of destruction, with his fingers in his ears, and hastening with all his might to the wicket gate. There is something tangible in a picture, a something which our poor flesh and blood can lay hold of; and therefore the mind, grasping through the flesh and the blood, is able to understand the idea, and to appropriate it. Hence the necessity and usefulness of the minister always endeavonring to illustrate his sermon, and to make his discourse as much as possible like the parables of Jesus Christ.
Now, there are very few minds that can make parables. The fact is, I do not know of but one good allegory in the English language, and that is, the “Pilgrim’s Progress in Parables, pictures, and analogies are not so easy as some think; most men can understand them, but few can create them. Happy for us who are ministers of Christ, we have no great trouble about this matter; we have not to make parables; they are made for us. I believe that Old Testament history has for one of its designs the furnishing of the Christian minister with illustrations; so that a truth which I find in the New Testament in its naked form taught me as a doctrine, I find in the Old Testament cast into a parable. And so would we use this most excellent ancient book, the Old Testament, as an illustration of the New, and as a means of explaining to our minds the truth that is taught to us in a more doctrinal form in the New Testament.
What, then, do we see in these two verses of the forty-second chapter of Genesis? We have here a picture of man’s lost estate, he is in a sore soul-devouring famine. We discover here man’s hope. His hope lies in that Joseph whom he knows not, who has gone before him and provided all things necessary, that his wants may be supplied. And we have here practical advice, which was preeminently wise on the part of Jacob to his sons in his case, and which, being interpreted, is also the wisest advice to you and to me. Seeing that there is mercy for sinners, and that Jesus our brother has gone before us to provide for us an all-sufficient redemption, “why sit we here and look one upon another?” There is mercy in the breast of God, there is salvation in Christ; “get you down thither, and buy for us from thence; that we may live, and not die.”
Three things, then, this morning: first, a pitiful plight; secondly, good news; and thirdly, excellent advice.
I. First, A PITIFUL PLIGHT. These sons of Jacob were overtaken by a famine. We may talk of famines, friends, but none of us know what they are. We have heard of a famine in Ireland, and some dreadful stories have been related to us that have harrowed our hearts and almost made our hair stand up on end; but even there the full fury of famine was not known. We have heard too, to our great grief, that there are still in this city, dark and hideous spots, where men and women are absolutely perishing from hunger, who have sold from off their backs the last rags that covered them, and are now unable to leave the house, and positively perishing of famine. Such cases we have seen in our daily journals, and our hearts have been sick to think that such things should now occur. But we cannot any of us guess what is the terror of an universal famine, when all men are poor, because all men lack bread, when gold and silver are as valueless as the stones of the street, because mountains of silver and gold would scarce suffice to buy a single sheaf of wheat. Read the history of the famine of Samaria, and see the dreadful shifts to which women were driven, when they did even eat their own offspring. Famines are hells on earth. The famine which had overtaken Jacob was one which, if it had not at the moment of which this passage speaks, exactly arrived at that dreadful pitch, was sure to come to it; for the famine was to last for seven years; and if, through the spendthrift character of Eastern nations, they had not saved in the seven years of plenty enough even for one year, what would become of them during the sixth or seventh year of famine? This was the state of Jacob’s family. They were cast into a waste, howling wilderness of famine with but one oasis, and that oasis they did not hear of till just at the time to which our text refers, when they learned to their joy that there was corn in Egypt. Permit me now to illustrate the condition of the sinner by the position of these sons of Jacob.
First, the sons of Jacob had a very great need of bread. There was a family of sixty-six of them. We are apt, when we read these names of the sons of Jacob, to think they were all lads. Are you aware, that Benjamin, the youngest of them, was the father of ten children, at the time he went into Egypt, so that he was not so very small a lad at any rate, and all the rest had large families, so that there were sixty-six to be provided for. Well, a famine is frightful enough when there is one man who is starving—when there is one brought down to a skeleton through leanness and hunger: but when sixty-six mouths are craving for bread, that is indeed a horrible plight to be in. But what is this compared with the sinner’s needs! His necessities are such that only Infinity can supply them; he has a demand before which the demands of sixty-six mouths are as nothing. He has before him the dreadful anticipation of a hell, from which there is no escape; he has upon him the heavy hand of God, who has condemned him on account of his sins. What needs he? Why, all the manna that came down from heaven in the wilderness would not supply a sinner’s necessities, and all the water that gushed from the rock in the desert would not be sufficient to quench his thirst. Such is the need of the sinner, that all the handsfull of Egypt’s seven years would be lost upon him. He needs great mercy; the greatest of mercy, nay, he needs an infinity of mercy, and unless this be given him from above, he is worse than starved, for he dies the second death, and lives in eternal death, without the hope of annihilation or escape. The demands of a hungry man are great; but the demands of a hungry soul are greater still; until that soul gets the love and mercy of God manifested to it, it will always hunger and always thirst, though it had worlds given it for mouthfulls, its hungry stomach would be still unsatisfied, for nothing but the Trinity can fill the heart of man; nothing but an assurance of the everlasting, immutable love of God, and an application of the most precious blood of Jesus, can ever stay the terrible hunger of the sinner’s soul.
“This article originally appeared here at Bible Bulletin Board.”
