Chapter V
The Warrior’s Unknown Tomb
I was admiring yesterday a noble painting. It was entitled The Sepulchre of Moses. It represents the awesome, almost terrifying, scenery amidst which Israel’s immortal leader was laid to rest. It is what Sir Walter Scott would call a vale of cairn and scaur. In every direction are towering summits, with their splintered peaks and jagged pinnacles, their scarped crags and beetling cliffs. The whole valley is a place of melancholy recesses, narrow defiles, and dark ravines. Everything about it is wild, weird, precipitous, desolate, and grand. On the loftiest eminence an eagle stands poised, with wings outspread in readiness for flight. It was to this frowning solitude that Moses, the Man of God, turned his face when his life’s brave work was done. So Moses, the servant of the Lord, died there in the land of Moab: and the Lord buried him over against Beth-peor: but no man knoweth his sepulchre to this day.
Near one of the loftiest summits, the old traditions say, Moses came upon three archangels— Michael, Gabriel, and Uriel —busily engaged in hewing out a grave. It was almost finished, and steps had been cut in the rock leading down to the floor of the tomb. Moses asked for whom it was intended.
‘For one’, said Michael, ‘dear unto our Lord.’
And Moses looked around him for some sign
Of a dead body, whereat Gabriel spake;
‘This grave, O Man of God, is meant for thee!’
Taking his hand, they led him down the steps
And then took up their places, one on either side,
And one at the grave’s head. Then, suddenly,
A Presence shone with light ineffable
And took the vacant place at the grave’s foot.
‘Lie down,’ It said, ‘and close thine eyes and sleep!’
‘But Lord, I am afraid,’ Moses replied,
‘For I have sinned and sadly wounded Thee!’
‘Thy sins are blotted out,’ the Presence said,
‘Thy service only is remembered’
Then, like a tired child, he laid him down;
The Presence bent above him, lip to lip;
And, in the sweetness of that lingering kiss,
The soul of Moses left its clay behind.
He lay like some chaste statue finely carved.
The angels filled the grave so cunningly
That no man ever found it to this day.
In wandering through Westminster Abbey I have often been impressed by the fact that the immortal names inscribed upon it stately monuments divide themselves into two classes-the heroe who have been buried by the hands of men and the heroes who have been buried by the hands of God. Some sleep beneath the Abbey floor; but others rest in distant and unknown graves. Are there, for example, any more moving inscriptions in the Abbey than the epitaphs written by Lord Tennyson for the memorials of Sir John Franklin and General Gordon? ‘Not here!’ he says of Franklin:
Not here! the White North hath thy bones, and thou,
Heroic Sailor Soul!
Art passing on thy happier voyage now
Towards no earthly Pole!
And of General Gordon, whose body was lost, not among Arctic
snows, but among tropic sands, he wrote:
Warrior of God, man’s friend, not laid below,
But somewhere dead, far in the waste Soudan,
Thou livest in all hearts, for all men know
This earth hath borne no simpler, nobler man.
‘Not here!’ ‘Not laid below!’ These are men of the order and
quality of Moses.
I remember, many years ago, being deeply touched by a letter that the postman brought me. A few months earlier a young Australian student of the finest type, impressed by the importance of the secrets that these vast lands still hold within their grasp, set out into the unknown to solve at least one of those geographical riddles. But, instead of lessening the number of our Australian mysteries, he added still another to the volume. For, sad to say, he was never seen again. Search parties, led by his father, in association with expert bushmen, set out to scour the difficult country into which he had plunged, but they returned empty-handed. When the incident had faded from the columns of our newspapers, I one morning received a letter from the mother of the young explorer. She told me that, in those agonizing days in which she was waiting, waiting, waiting for the news that never came, she felt a sudden impulse to read one of my books. Taking it from the shelf, and opening it at random, she found herself confronting a chapter entitled The Undertaker, ‘I felt’, she wrote, ‘as if I had touched a snake, and, in my involuntary horror, I hurled the book to the far corner of the room, where it fell behind a large armchair.’ Reflecting on the incident during the sleepless night that followed, it occurred to her that she had judged the book hastily. Why had she been so strongly moved read it unless there was something in it that might brace and comfort her? In the early morning she returned to the empty sitting-room, retrieved the book from behind the armchair, and resolutely forced herself to read the chapter from which she had so violently recoiled. She then discovered that it was written to show that whilst men who die in their beds have to rely upon the services of human undertakers, there are great commanders who go down with their ships, gallant airmen who vanish with their planes, brave explorers who leave their bones to bleach on the trails that they have so gallantly blazed, and countless heroes upon other fields who are buried, like Moses, by the hand of the Lord, no man knowing the place of their sepulture. ‘Then,’ my good friend wrote, ‘I was wonderfully comforted. I felt that my boy was in God’s hand and under his care; and I realized that, even if he never came back I could think of him as a member of that shining company who have been buried like Moses by the Lord’s own hand!’
Southey, in his Life of Nelson, congratulates the hero of Trafalgar on the hour at which he died. Is it conceivable that he could have enhanced the lustre of his name by living longer? Moses could not have chosen a more propitious moment for his departure. The people were passing, not only from one land to another, but from one life to another. They were forsaking the nomadic for the agricultural and the military. Obviously, they needed a new leader. The work of Moses was done, and no sensible man wished beyond that point, to linger on.
By dying on Mount Nebo, Moses was saved from the bitterness of disillusionment. When I read of the troubles that overtook the people after entering the Promised Land, I feel thankful that Moses was not there. It would have broken his heart. In his old age, with all his ambitions realized, Max Muller wrote that ‘the dream of the reality was better than the reality of the dream’. It was given to Moses to enjoy the beauty of the dream and to be spared the bitterness of the reality.
Moreover, if Moses had entered the Promised Land, and had been buried there, his monument would have been regarded as the monument of a notable Palestinian. It would have been a tragedy of the first magnitude. For who thinks of Moses as a Jew He is the most outstanding cosmopolite of the ages. With his Levitical code and his Ten Commandments, he has been Prime Minister of every Christian country through countless centuries.
No statesman at this hour would dare to legislate in the teeth of Moses. A man fashioned on so titanic a mould ought not to be imprisoned in a mausoleum or a vault. It is fitting that, buried in a sepulchre that no man knoweth, he should become the property of the ages.
It is commonly assumed that Moses was denied the privilege of leading the people into the Promised Land because God was angry with him for having smitten the rock instead of merely speaking to it. By smiting the rock, it is argued, he made it appear that he had made the water to gush forth by some magic of his own; by commanding the rock in the name of the Lord to yield its life-giving streams, he would have ascribed the glory of the deed to its true source. There is some ground for this interpretation; but it must not be pressed too far.
It reminds me of the lady whose little daughter displeased her. ‘Maggie,’ she said sternly, ‘you are very naughty to have disobeyed me: you must go to bed to-night immediately after tea!’ Tea was usually at five and Maggie went to bed at eight. On that particular night, however, tea was served very late; so that the dreadful threat was carried into execution with a minimum of discomfort to Maggie.
Moses was certainly denied the honour of leading the people into the land, but whether or not this was a real deprivation it is difficult to say. To begin with, he was permitted, from Pisgah’s lofty height, to see the land, in its lengths and its breadths, as few of his associates ever saw it. In one of the most eloquent passages of his essay on Lord Bacon, Macaulay describes the magnificent panorama that Moses surveyed on that day of days. And, in his The Land and the Book, Dr. W. M. Thomson has written of the incomparable and almost incredible view of the whole land to be obtained, under favourable conditions, from the summit of Mount Pisgah. Like a beautiful coloured map, the country towards which he had led the people, the country of so many dreams, lay unrolled before his astonished eyes. He saw it as no other man ever saw it, and as he himself could never have seen it had he remained with the host on the plains below.
In that moment of ecstatic vision, he beheld the land in all it loveliness— the land that, for the time being, he was forbidden to enter. But, fifteen centuries later, the embargo was removed and Moses entered the Promised Land after all! He appeared in Palestine in the hour of Palestine’s glory; the hour in which, over those holy fields, there walked those blessed feet that were destined to be pierced for our salvation. Of the burial on Mount Nebo Mrs. Alexander sings:
And had he not high honour,
The hillside for a pan,
To lie in state while angels wait,
With stars for tapers tall;
And the dark rock pines, like tossing plumes,
Over his bier to wave,
And God’s own hand, in that lonely land,
To lay him in his grave?
But what was that glory compared with the glory that came later? To meet the Son of God amidst the splendours of the Transfiguration; to share that unspeakable privilege with Elijah, the Prophet of Fire, and with Peter and James and John, and to converse with his Lord on the most momentous themes on which human speed can be employed-the Cross, the redemption of the world, and the triumph that lay beyond the tomb.
Nor was this all. For, amidst the dazzling effulgence of that apocalyptic vision with which the Bible closes, I catch still another vision of Moses. I saw, says the seer, I saw as it were a sea of glass, mingled with fire … and they sing the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb.
John heard angels and archangels and all the company of the heavenly host singing of Moses ! It is indisputably true that, in a weak and impetuous moment, Moses sinned. It is true that God, feeling grievously affronted by his misconduct, felt it necessary to exercise discipline and severe chastisement. But, true as all this is, it is not the whole of the truth. For what am I to make of these companion records— the entrancing vision given to Moses from the peaks of Pisgah; the signal honour conferred upon him by his celestial sepulture; his appearance amidst the radiant glories of the Transfiguration of his Lord; and the fact that John heard the hosts of heaven singing the song of Moses-the song of Moses and the Lamb? What does this mean?
I shall allow a missionary—and a pioneer missionary at that—to answer that question. Is there a more gallant record, in all the annals of missionary adventure, than the record of James Gilmour of Mongolia? Amidst those Eastern scenes in which he spent so many solitary years, Gilmour found himself puzzling over this problem. How does it come about that Moses, so sternly rebuked and so severely punished for his transgression, was afterwards so conspicuously honoured? ‘It just shows’, writes Gilmour, ‘that God does not keep things up!’
There is no other explanation. He pardoneth iniquity because He delighteth in mercy. He loves doing it! How else can you explain the Cross? How else can you account for the everlasting Gospel and for all those sublimities and profundities that Moses discussed with his Lord on the holy Mount? God does not keep things up! We may very well leave it at that, appropriating, as we do so, all the comfort that the thought suggests.
-F.W. Boreham
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