Deuteronomy 8:3

Deuteronomy 8:3

If this text be true, what a strange comment on it is the world at the present hour! Turn to whatever class of our countrymen you like, and in every accent of their voices you will hear uttered their practical belief that they can live by bread alone. It is for bread that is, for material things that men toil, and strive, and exhaust their finest energies. Now, if ever, it is needful to thunder in the ears of our countrymen, "Man shall not live by bread alone." And as statesmen, and philosophers, and priests behold these things, each comes forward with his Gospel for mankind.

I. We have the "Gospel of education:" Let us take care that each child learns the elementary principles of knowledge, and we must hope that the coming generation shall have a higher form of national and social life. Education is good, but if men look to it as a panacea for the evils around them, they will assuredly one day find out their terrible mistake. Man doth not live by the fruits of the tree of knowledge alone.

II. We have then the message of the philosophers: Let us eat of the tree of science and live for ever. But science is not the bread for sorrowing, sinning humanity. This is not the tree whose leaves are for the healing of the nations.

III. The only power that can win souls from their selfishness and sin is the preaching of a personal, crucified Christ; the Incarnate Word of God is still and ever the bread by which nations and men must live. It was not a new science, it was not an improved philosophy, it was not the idyllic life of a Galilean peasant, that men preached in the early days, in the purple dawn, of Christianity, and by the preaching of it shook the empire and revolutionised the world. And it is not by a vague, "accommodating theology," with no doctrinal articulation which, polype-like, floats on the tides of human thought, rising as they rise, falling as they fall, that men and nations can be saved now. It is as of old by the preaching of the Word, Jesus Christ and Him crucified. "I am the Bread of life," said Christ.

I. Teignmouth Shore, The Life of the World to Come,p. 39.

References: Deuteronomy 8:3. A. Macleod, The Gentle Heart,p. 211; Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. vii., No. 418. Deuteronomy 8:3. Ibid.,vol. xvi., No. 939; Parker, Christian Chronicle,June 4th, 1885.