Acts 13:36 For David, after he had served his own generation by the will of God, fell on sleep, and was laid to his fathers, and saw corruption: The text is capable of three different constructions. The Authorised Version gives it in the form just read to you. "David, after he had served his own generation by the will (counsel) of God, fell on sleep." The Revised Version gives it in another way: "David, after he had in his own generation served the counsel of God, fell on sleep." The margin of the Revised Version suggests a third arrangement: "David, after he had served his own generation by the counsel of God, fell on sleep." In all forms of the sentence we have the threefold thought of a generation, a service, and a counsel of God concerning it. There may be longer, more detailed, more laudatory epitaphs — the fashion of the last century covered the walls of our churches with elaborate and fulsome panegyrics, amongst which this short sentence of St Paul's might have seemed scanty and grudging in its meed of praise — but the truer taste and more reverent feeling of our own age will appreciate the more expressive, and in reality the more majestic, brevity, "He served his generation, and fell on sleep." The text presents us with two pairs of synonyms: Life is Service, and Death is Sleep. I. LIFE IS SERVICE. One rendering says, the service of God. Another rendering says, the service of a generation. But the most ignorant of thinkers or scholars will see no conflict, scarcely a divergence, in this variation. The moment the idea of service has attached itself to the idea of life enough has been done to preclude any practical uncertainty as to its nature or object. To be told that this life is not self-contained, not self-centred, not dominant, and not independent, but, on the contrary, that it is a ministry and a service as much as if I were receiving the wages and wearing the livery of an employer, is a surprise and a shock at the first hearing, or would be so if it were heard in the heart, heard as a revelation and heard as a call. Who shall pretend to say that the service of the generation may not have in it the service of a second or a third or a tenth generation, by reason of the impression made by its elevation, by its purity, by its benevolence, by its wisdom, upon the very ideas and principles of human living? It is given to a few men to leave a memory behind them in the shape of immortal writings, powerfully affecting the thought of all nations and languages, sometimes starting afresh into a novelty of influence at some great crisis of history, and moulding the taste or the judgment of posterity by a power only strengthened by lapse of time. Such men are necessarily few and far between. But speaking of average men, and of men above the average, men who have not one of these exceptional embassies, whether of transcendent genius or of Divine inspiration, to a worldwide and age-long audience, it is true — painfully true, or instructively true, as they hear and as they read it — that they can, at the best, serve but one generation, and then must "see corruption." Great ability, great knowledge, great sagacity, great personal influence, great oratory, great generalship, great statesmanship, all are of the generation. There is nothing in any one of these of a nature to live on after the death of the possessor. We have seen all these by turns wield enormous power and yet pass away. In this place it is not inappropriate to speak of knowledge as ephemeral. The man who has only read, never written, the man who has spent his strength in accumulating from libraries and observatories — the man who has written, and written largely, and for a world of readers, while he was here to hold them — is as much lost to the succeeding generation (for there is a fashion, as well as a progress, even in knowing) as the brilliant talker who was the fascination of society, or the persuasive ecclesiastic of the pulpit or the confessional. Commonly, if life reaches anything like its natural limit of the threescore and ten or fourscore years, all these powers of which we have spoken wane and fade before the reaching. Not to mention probabilities of physical enfeeblement, the latter days of the life are, from perfectly distinct causes, less brilliant than the earlier — less active, less conspicuous, less impressive, less attractive, less influential. It is the rarest thing in the world if a man remains to the end so much as in sympathy with his generation. When at last the fulness of the time is come, and he is laid to his fathers to "see corruption," it is but in a very few hearts that he leaves either a void or an impression. "He served his own generation, and then fell on sleep." This is all that can be said of him. Shall we count this a small thing? Is it not enough if it can be said with truth of any man? If there is here the reproof of human vanity, is there not also here the repose of human restlessness? To serve one generation, is not this large enough and grand enough to satisfy any reasonable ambition? We fear rather lest some here should be saying, It is too large and too grand for such as I am! "He served his own generation"; yes, it is much to say of any man. A generation is a vast thing, an inconceivable thing, while we so speak of it. We must break it up into its elements before we can apprehend it. A generation in the mass and in the gross is the whole number of living and thinking beings alive at one time upon this great earth. How can a man imagine himself to be serving all that multitude? It is to fill the post assigned with diligence, with seriousness, with unselfishness, with God in sight. It may be done equally by prince and peasant, by master and servant, by man and woman. No one touches his generation at more than a few points — most people touch it but at one. That point of contact is the place of service; he serves his generation who serves faithfully that particular town or village or hamlet, that particular neighbourhood or family or home which is, for him, the little fragment or morsel of the generation as a whole. There is this also to reconcile us to the humbler and less conspicuous places of service — that the smaller the surface covered the deeper commonly and the more intense is the influence exercised. These are the compensations of the humble service, and of the generous Lord who takes it for His own. There is another sense, also, in which the thought of life as service has a tranquilising and even equalising influence. We have seen that the extent or space covered by it is nothing — so is it also with the duration of time. Some of the most telling "services of the generation" have been accomplished within the span of a few years. The thought of the "generation" is pregnant with applications. It reminds us of the succession and series of the inhabitants of each spot of this earth. It reminds us that there is no standing still and no looking backward, but a perpetual movement and reaching forth, in the collective life of God's human family. To serve one's generation is to help it on. We ought to be ashamed of contributing nothing to the old sum, such as we found it, of human notions and of human practices. Each true servant of his generation does in some real, though to himself unconscious way, help to make the next generation after it better and happier. Certainly in this place of brief generations we have seen, we have felt it so! Something survives of each life of service. Something is immortal of each beautiful life! Some one is assisted in being good by each servant of the past. What has not David done for them that came after? The thought never came to him, but the thing was done. Who does not turn in trouble to that man's compositions? Who stays to say to himself, David lived so many hundreds of years before Christ, how then can he sound the depths of Christian sorrow and Christian ecstasy? He was as much the commissioned minstrel of the universal Church of God as Moses was its lawgiver or Isaiah its prophet. And yet David was no saint, if saintliness were perfection. Oh, if this thought of serving the one generation were once rooted and grounded in us — if the last suggestion of the manifoldness and unexpectedness of the ways and forms of serving were but worked out by each one in reference to his own experiences, the joyous and the grievous, as it ought to be, there would be an end in us forever of all restlessness and all mortification, there would be a definiteness and a concentration of purpose in us all; we should know exactly where we stood and how, we should feel it honour enough and to spare for the like of us if it could be written by the finger of God at last on the tomb of our resting, "He served his generation...and fell on sleep." "He served his generation," and in doing so he served "God's counsel" concerning himself. How reassuring amidst all adverse appearances, how comforting amidst all misgivings and all gainsayings, to know that God has a will, has a "counsel" concerning each life! We are not the casual, accidental, haphazard things that infidelity would make of us. God had a "counsel" concerning each one, in fixing the place and the time, the conditions and circumstances of His being. Let us fulfil their high destiny! Enough if of one of us this may be the record, "He served the counsel of God,...and he fell on sleep." Who shall tell us, concerning one of whom this is God's record, that that sleep shall have no waking? The very words which tell of it, that it is a "laying" or "adding" or "gathering" to our fathers, seem to make the funeral itself a reunion. In the light of such revelations, death a falling on sleep, burial a gathering to the fathers, even the thought of "seeing corruption" shall lose for us its terror. (Dean Vaughan.) Parallel Verses KJV: For David, after he had served his own generation by the will of God, fell on sleep, and was laid unto his fathers, and saw corruption: |
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