The Pulpit Commentary — Matthew — Volume 1 — Section 78

of healing remediee. With these hinte the Bible story will yield abundant instances, o.nd we shall come to eee that there ie a method of Divine wisdom in this strange form of Divine dealings. I. Goo NEVER BUPEBBEDEB MAN, In the sense of doing for man what man can do for himself. An idea may prevail that God may desire to make a show of his power, and so he may put man aside and seem to say, "Let me do it." But we need not think thus of God. Man's powers, in relation to man's sphere, are the Divine arrange- ment, and may be left to their free working. Let man think, observe, plan, and carry out as he can ; in all the ten thousand things of life he will be left alone of God. No man need look for miracle. Its intervention can be in no human ordering; it depends on Divine omniscience and sovereignty. When the supernatural can wisely supersede the natural God e.lone can decide, and his decisions may well seem to us strange. II. Goo EVER SUPPLEMENTS MAN. That is the place of miracle. In the Divine idea something is good for man, but either man is not ready enough, or skilful enough, or prompt enough to attain it, and therefore God graciously intervenes and supplements man's weakness. In connection with the text, Divine action came in because prompt action was necessary; there was no time for the ordinary human forces to work the right result in.-R. T. Ver. 18.-Vicarious sorrow. "Rachel weeping for her children." It seems to be a most strange Divine permission that the innocent babes of Bethlehem should be slaughtered. One asks, but the question cannot be answered, "Why did not some miraculous hand preserve those innocents from Herod's shameless device?" We can only say that God's interventions are always held in the strictest limitations. They just effect their end, but interfere as little as possible with the ordinary course of human affairs, with the consequences of the passions and the sins of men. God's working is as a thread running through all the piece of human life, but it does not interfere with the making of the piece. But this hardly meets the difficulty we feel here. This calamity for the Bethlehem children comes out of the Divine providence that led to Jesus being born in Bethlehem; and so we feel as if a kind of responsibility rested on God for the safety of the Bethlehem children. To answer this we are thrown back upon the principle of vicariousness which runs through all life-associations. Every- where men are bearing burdens for others, and it is only when the calamity is very terrible, or imperils life, that we feel or express any great surprise. I. THE VI0ABIOUB BORBOW OF THE A0TUAL MOTHERS. As the inhabitants of Bethle- hem could not have been more than two thousand, there were not more than twenty babes slain; but that was sorrow in twenty homes and woe in twenty hearts. Vicarious parent-sorrow is effectively revealed in David's wail over the slain Absalom, "Would God I had died for thee I " This opens up a full consideration of the way in which mothers vicariously bear every pain, disability, or trouble of their children. And mothers are but the highest types of the relations which knit man to man all the world over, so that no one man can ever suffer, but all others within reach vicariously suffer with him. From this, rise to conceive of the vicarious sorrow of the heavenly Father. II. THE VI0ARIOUB SYMPATHY OF THE RACE-MOTHER. Such Rachel is conceived to be. Poetically-but poetry is the deepest truth-Rachel is conceived as disturbed in her tomb near Bethlehem, by her sympathy with the stricken mothers and her sorrow for the slaughtered children. The race-mother is finely conceived as actually blending sympathetic tears with the bereaved mothers of Bethlehem, who are vicariously bereaved for Messiab's sake.-R. T. Ver. 22.-Fears qualifying faith. Joseph was a good, God-fearing, obedient man. He bad clear intimations of the will of God concerning him and bis. And yet the directions were not so explicit as to interfere with the exercise of his own judgment. He was to return, with the Child and his mother, into the "land of Israel;" but where in the land of Israel, he was not told. It might seem as if be was expected to return to Bethlehem, and this appears to have been taken into consideration. He had faith in that Divine direction he had received. He proceeded to obey. He started out on his journey. But he received news, as he approached the land of J udab, that Archelans was Governor of J udrea in place of the dead Herod; and the cbaraclec ')f Archclaus was IIATTl.mW, If  66 TllE GOSPEL .AOCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW. [oH. m, 1-17,