By Beverly Carradine
Jacob, in the face of a great trouble looming up in the near future, had met
God on the side of the brook Peniel. The prayer of that night in its length,
agony, wrestling spirit and great triumph has swept up to a first place
among all victorious supplications.
At daybreak the man of God crossed the brook as a conqueror in the
spiritual realm, and called by the Lord himself a prince. As he left the
place of his triumph and went on his way, the effect of a touch given him
by the Almighty became manifest. A conqueror went forth, but he was
lame. He was a prince, but he had a limp.
The Bible says he halted upon his thigh. This statement, quietly made in
Holy Writ, is to the mind of the writer full of significance. It arouses one
to observe the curious fact, that all of God's princes on earth have limps.
They are, however, far from being the same. There are several classes of
them.
One is God-given.
This was the case with Jacob. The same fact is seen in the slow or
stammering speech of Moses and the thorn in the flesh sent to Paul. It is a
rare thing to meet a man much used of God, one who is evidently a prince
and prevailer in the spiritual life, without being impressed with the fact of
the limp. We do not mean sin, or even weakness of character. We refer to
something that is God-given or God-permitted.
These things appear very plainly in the biographies of men who were great
in goodness. Sometimes it was a physical blemish, or a delicate
constitution, or a domestic trial or sorrow. It was certainly melancholy to
see a man who had been aflame for an hour or more in the pulpit, swaying
the crowd as God willed, suddenly sink down on the floor with face white
as death with acute suffering, or lip and handkerchief crimsoned with
blood streaming from the lungs. It was sadder still to see a man towering
like an intellectual and spiritual giant before a spell-bound audience, and an
hour afterwards behold him in the privacy of a friend's home with his head
bowed dejectedly on his breast, crushed and heartbroken over a history of
shame and sorrow in his own family.
A gifted speaker we recall who would be afflicted at times with inability to
connect his thoughts. He would be irresistible on a number of occasions
and then at some important hour would be profoundly humiliated before a
great audience through confusion of ideas, loss of memory and lack of
command of language. The prince had been seen, but just as unmistakable
was the limp.
We cannot give in this chapter a full enumeration, much less a description
of these various 'limps.' When we add to what already has been
mentioned, the lack of eloquence, logical power, offhand speech and
mental concentration, we have only made a beginning of the list.
The question at once arises as to why God permits all this; and the answer
is readily given now, and has been given long before by one who was thus
afflicted. He said, 'Lest I should be exalted above measure through the
abundance of the revelations, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh,
the messenger of Satan to buffet me.'
This covers the ground. The prince is in danger. He might be puffed up by
his own gifts and with the earthly and heavenly honor he receives. So the
laming touch is given him as a kind of anchor to hold him down, or ballast
to keep him steady, or a rope to prevent the balloon from flying away.
The reader will remember the story of the eastern king who had a man to
follow him about and remind him again and again that he was mortal and
would soon be in the grave. So this messenger of pain and humiliation has
a language and message of its own. Remember who you are, it says. Do
you observe your limp?
Moreover, the limp is given or permitted to show the people that the man
is not divine. There is such a tendency to hero-worship in the human
breast. Such a disposition to bow down to gifts in others with almost the
first appearance of superiority, genius, or success the cry is made the gods
are come down to us, and straightway the garlands and oxen are brought
out for gifts and sacrifices.
Not all humanly applauded men will do like the apostle and cry out: 'Sirs,
why do ye these things? We also are men of like passions with you.' The
trouble is that many individuals love to sniff such incense and will not
correct the people in their unwise and wrong adulation. So God gives a
limp to the prince.
A second class of limps is recognized in character weakness.
Such lameness, of course, God is not responsible for. The man himself is
alone to blame.
We have all seen this person. He has a royal mind and a gifted tongue. He
is heaven-honored again and again in his work, and yet is observed
afterwards doing and saying things which puzzle, humble and distress the
church of God, and cause the tongues of worldly people to go at a great
and mortifying rate.
Such limps are beheld in foolish speech, giddy actions, buffoonery,
imprudent conduct and a score of similar things. The limp is also seen in
untidy dress, a slovenly kept house, a disposition to borrow money and
an indisposition to pay debts.
The people saw him do well in the pulpit. He prayed powerfully in the
meeting. He talked well, convincingly and convictingly at church, when, lo!
the next hour or day as he went forth and crossed the brook everybody
saw him limp. We recall such a preacher of whom we heard much as a boy.
Every one spoke of his great gifts in the pulpit. The people were proud of
him on Sunday, but during the balance of the week he was a mortification
to them. One of his weaknesses was a continual hinting for gifts. One of
his members, a most excellent man, in speaking of him uttered these
remarkable words:
'When I see him in the pulpit I think he ought never to come out
of it; and when I see him out of it I feel he ought never to go back
into it.'
In a word, the prince limped.
A third class of limps consists of conditions for which the man is not
responsible.
He never had the benefit of an education, and is made keenly to feel it in
the midst of his useful and successful life. At times, just the memory
would bring embarrassment and create a sense of mental halting in him. He
felt as he spoke his burning words that he occasionally limped. He knew
also that scholarly men in the audience saw that he halted. This, of course,
deepened the pain of his heart.
A fourth class of limps seen in princes is a certain lack of refinement of
manners.
The style of eating is coarse, the speech blunt and rude. The finger nails
are cleaned in public, often during divine service; the hand is sometimes
manipulated as a napkin, sometimes as a handkerchief, and the fork used
as a toothpick.
No one thinks of calling these practices sins. They simply jar and grate on
certain sensibilities. They act as a sudden letting-down of exalted
conceptions. The man who looked like a prince in the pulpit, as he crosses
the brook into social everyday life, is seen to halt upon his thigh. He is a
limper as well as a prince.
The shock is so great to some people that previous good done is
neutralized, while others, who feel the grandeur of the man in spite of his
limp, can but wish that the lameness could be cured. As we meditate upon
these phenomena in the pew and pulpit we draw some conclusions.
First, a prince who has a limp given by the Lord will likely never be
delivered from it in this world. Paul prayed fervently in this regard, but
the Lord would not remove the thorn, while at the same time he
assured his servant that his grace would be sufficient for him.
Second, when men possess only the limp and have not the prince
nature as a kind of compensation for the lack of the spiritually great
and good in them, the case is simply intolerable.
Third, much of the human limp we can be delivered from, and so we
should strive to correct ourselves at those points where we offend
good taste and shock a true culture.
Fourth, if the choice has to be made, we would far rather be a prince
with a limp, than no prince at all.
Fifth, whatever else happens, let us all see to it that we are princes.
Through grace any one can be a prince in the kingdom of God who
will.
Sixth, if we have to carry a limp, let us see to it that it shall not be one
of our making, but of divine manufacture.
Seventh, meantime let us exercise the greatest of charity toward all
limpers when the lameness has no moral or rather immoral root.
Perhaps, if we could see how little we look to others towering above
us; if we knew what intellectual pygmies we were beside the angels; if
we realized how little we knew, we would be glad to take a lowly place
among the band of halting ones we have mentioned and adopt as our
escutcheon and coat of arms a couple of broken thigh bones.
