There is bitter irony in the prophet's description of the poor flickering spot of light in the black waste and of its swift dying out. The travellers without a watchfire are defenceless from midnight prowlers. How full of solemn truth about godless lives the vivid outline picture is!
Men try to free themselves from the miseries of ignorance, sin, and sorrow.
Think of the insufficiency of all such attempts, the feeble flicker which glimmers for an hour, and then fuel fails and it goes out. Then the travellers can journey no further, but lie down in sorrow,' and without a watchfire they become a prey to all the beasts of the field. It is a little picture taken from the life.
It vividly paints how men will try to free themselves from the miseries of their condition, how insufficient all their attempts are, how transient the relief, and how bitter and black the end.
We may apply these thoughts to-
1. Men-made grounds of hope before God.
2. Men-made attempts to read the mysteries.
We do not say this of all human learning, but of that which, apart from God's revelation, deals with the subjects of that revelation.
3. Men-made efforts at self-reformation.
4. Men-made attempts at alleviating sorrow. Scripture abounds in other metaphors for the same solemn spiritual facts as are set before us in this picture of the dying watchfire and the sad men watching its decline. Godless lives draw from broken cisterns out of which the water runs. They build with untempered mortar. They lean on broken reeds that wound the hand pressed on them. They spend money for that which is not bread. But all these metaphors put together do not tell all the vanity, disappointments, and final failure and ruin of such a life. That last glimpse given in the text of the sorrowful sleeper stretched by the black ashes, with darkness round and hopeless heaviness within, points to an issue too awful to be dwelt on by a preacher, and too awful not to be gravely considered by each of us for himself.
