Seven Baskets Full (Matt. 15:37)
Seven Baskets Full (Matt. 15:37)
Dr. A. J. Gordon relates the comments of the Hebrew Christian scholar Rabinowitz on the first and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet:
"Do you know what questionings and controversies the Jews have kept up over Zechariah 12:10, 'They shall look upon Me whom they have pierced'? They will not admit that it is Jehovah whom they have pierced. Hence the dispute about the 'whom'. But this word 'whom' is, in the original, simply the first and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet, aleph and tav. Do you wonder that I was filled with awe and astonishment when I opened to Revelation 1:7, 8, and there read, 'Behold, He cometh with clouds; and every eye shall see Him, and they also which pierced Him'; and then read on and heard the glorified Lord saying, 'I am Alpha and Omega'. The Lord Jesus seemed to say to me, 'Do you doubt who it is "whom" you pierced? I am the Aleph and Tav of Zechariah 12:10, the Alpha and Omega, Jehovah the Almighty.’"
The One who was "pierced" is in both passages Alpha and Omega or Aleph and Tav.
—Courtesy Moody Monthly
Do You Go With a Large Basket?
Madaki, the chief elder in the church, is also one of the most prosperous farmers in Kwoi, Nigeria. On a recent Sunday, the following announcement was made: "Madaki wants all the women to gather at his house tomorrow morning. Pass on the news."
When the women went to his house the next morning, Madaki asked them to go to his farm, about three and a half miles away, to carry home his field corn. One hundred and four women and girls responded and went to the farm with their baskets--little, big, and middle-sized. Some brought back a big load, others only a few ears of grain. One woman took such a load that her strength failed before she got home. When all the loads had been brought in, Madaki called the women together and told them that each might keep what she had brought! There were shouts of joy and thanksgiving, but also sighs of regret. "If only I had known, I would have taken a larger basket," was the complaint of some.
There were those who had refused to go saying, "I have work enough of my own." These went to Madaki the following morning (their work seemed less important now!) and begged him to let them go and bring in a load. But he told them quietly, "The time is past; the corn was brought in yesterday." Through this kind deed Madaki not only helped many needy families, but he also preached a quiet sermon. The Christians are telling and retelling this story all over town, always adding,"That is how it is in the Jesus way."
—Sudan Witness
An American Indian’s Version of the Twenty-third Psalm
The Great Father above is a Shepherd Chief. I am His and with Him. I want not. He throws out to me a rope, and the name of the rope is love, and He draws me, and He draws me to where the grass is green and the water not dangerous, and I eat and lie down satisfied.
Sometimes my heart is very weak, and falls down, but He lifts it up again and draws me into a good road. His name is Wonderful.
Some time, it may be very soon, it may be longer, it may be a long, long time, He will draw me into a place between mountains. It is dark there, but I’ll draw back not. I’ll be afraid not, for it is in there between the mountains that the Shepherd Chief will meet me, and the hunger I have felt in my heart all through this life will be satisfied. Sometimes He makes the love-rope into a whip, but afterwards He gives me a staff to lean on.
He spreads a table before me with all kinds of food. He puts His hands upon my head, and all the "tired" is gone.
My cup He fills till it runs over.
What I tell you is true, I lie not. These roads that are "away ahead " will stay with me through this life, and afterward I will go to live in the "Big Tepee," and sit down with the Shepherd Chief forever.
A Christian man was once tortured by thumb-screws. A friend remarked, "I cannot understand how it was you did not shriek out in agony." He replied, "I was nearly swooning with joy!"
Dr. J. H. Jowett once visited a man who was dying of cancer. As he saw the pale face and wasted form, he was completely overcome. With deep emotion he said, "My friend, you will soon be in heaven." The dying man could not speak, but he wrote on a piece of paper, "I've been in heaven seven years."
When Rutherford was imprisoned at Aberdeen, he wrote to a friend, "The Lord is with me, I care not what man can do. No person is provided for better than I am. My chains are even gilded with gold. No pen, no words; nothing can express the beauty of Christ."
Of her imprisonment in Vincennes, Madame Guyon said, "The joy of my heart gave a brightness to the objects around me. The stones of my prison looked in my eyes like rubies."
Exquisite are the lessons of the wheat:
(1) Unlike Israel's emblem the fig-tree which, with roots driven deep into the earth, abides deeply rooted in this world, the Church is a fragile annual with no physical power to resist earth's storms--passing rapidly from the earth in successive harvests; the Church's garner is a better world.
(2) Wheat dies downward, as it ripens upward; the stalk and roots are dead, as the grain is ripe--so the soul that dies to earth is the soul that ripens to the Throne of God. It is the sanctity of the relaxing grasp.
(3) A ripe wheatfield is a field of bowed heads; ripening tares remain stiffly erect. The heavier our load of grace, the lowlier will be our faces.
(4) Sun after sun smites its burning into the grain and turns it to sweetness; trial, for God's child, is the burning of His Father's sunshine.
(5) Wheat ripens by absorbing light. To abide in our Light is to bear much fruit--abiding means ripening. "He that abideth in Me, and I in him, the same beareth much fruit" (John 15:5).
Dr. Paton, of the New Hebrides, surrounded by savages howling for his life, says of the experience:
"I climbed into the tree, and was left there alone in the bush. The hours I spent there live all before me as if it were but yesterday. I heard the frequent discharging of muskets, and the yells of the savages. Yet I sat there among the branches, as safe in the arms of Jesus! Never, in all my sorrows, did my Lord draw nearer to me, and speak more soothingly in my soul, than when the moonlight flickered among these chestnut leaves, and the night air played on my throbbing brow, as I told all my heart to Jesus. Alone, yet not alone! If thus thrown back upon your own soul, alone, all, all alone, in the midnight, in the bush, in the very embrace of death itself, have you a Friend that will not fail you then?"
In Matthew 13:45, our Lord likens the kingdom of heaven "unto a man that is a merchant seeking goodly pearls, and having found one pearl of great price, he went and sold all that he had, and bought it." A professional pearl-diver, while at the bottom of the sea, noticed an oyster holding a piece of printed paper between its closed shells. The diver secured the slip, and through the goggles of his head-dress began to read. It was a Gospel tract, and coming to him thus strangely, so impressed his heart that he said, "I can hold out against God's mercy no longer, since it pursues me thus." At the bottom of the sea, he thus became a penitent and, as he was assured, a forgiven man.
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