Deuteronomy 22:8 When you build a new house, then you shall make a battlement for your roof, that you bring not blood on your house… We are all builders — building character, building for eternity. The text gives an important principle — that prevention is better than cure. Better put up the barrier above, than have to pick up the mangled body from the pavement below. Better prevent the formation of bad habits than attempt their eradication later in life. I. NOTICE SOME OF THE BATTLEMENTS WHICH NEED TO BE REARED ABOUT OUR SOUL LIFE AND ABOUT THE LIFE OF SOCIETY. 1. The Christian Sabbath, one of the oldest balustrades reared for man's protection. A week without a Sabbath is a year without a summer, a summer without flowers, a night without a morn. 2. Family prayer. Some are ready to talk in meeting, whose lips are dumb in prayer at home. The devoutness of heathen rebukes such prayerlessness. Pericles, before an oration, used to plead with the gods for guidance, and Scipio, before a great undertaking, went to pray in the temple of Jupiter. 3. Reverence for God's Word. Men of real culture, though not believers, well know that all that is noblest in art, sweetest in song, and most inspiring in thought, had its source in this volume. 4. Gospel temperance. Guard the young. Keep them pure. Even the blood of Christ cannot wash out the memory of sin. It mars and pollutes the soul. 5. The all-inclusive battlement is personal faith in Jesus Christ. II. The battlement of old was FOR ORNAMENT AND FOR PROTECTION. Through the lower part an arrow could be shot, and in later years a bullet. So religion serves this double purpose. See to it that your house is thus built, and when this earthly tabernacle is taken down, you will have another, not built with bands, eternal in the heavens. (R. S. McArthur, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: When thou buildest a new house, then thou shalt make a battlement for thy roof, that thou bring not blood upon thine house, if any man fall from thence. |
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