In the years when men’s beards resided like manes upon their necks for fear of their chins, Alexander MaClaren (1826-1910) preached the Gospel in the British Isles. Scottish by birth, Londoner by raising, he was a prolific Non-Conformist minister of the Baptist persuasion. Of his many accomplishments, one worth highlighting is his ability and willingness to connect theological truth to understandable events in history. One particular sermon demonstrated this to the maximum as the illustration virtuoso launched into a tour de force of no less than five stories back to back to make his point. The selected text? The single, enigmatic verse of Matthew 24:28 which reads:

For wheresoever the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered together. (KJV)

To be honest, this is a verse that most pastors would rather skip. It is a heavy verse from an already difficult chapter in the Bible. Let us join MaClaren’s sermon already in progress as he teaches on the meaning of this apocalyptic prophesy:

Genocide or Justice?

Take that story which people stumble over in the early part of the Old Testament revelation—the sweeping away of those Canaanitish nations whose hideous immoralities had turned the land into a perfect sty of abominations. There they had been wallowing, and God’s Spirit, which strives with men ever and always, had been striving with them, we know not for how long, but when the time came at which, according to the grim metaphor of the Old Testament, ‘the measure of their iniquity was full,’ then He hurled upon them the fierce hosts out of the desert, and in a whirlwind of fire and sword swept them off the face of the earth. 

In this first illustration, MaClaren acknowledges that he is referencing an often-misunderstood portion of scripture. When many point to the Old Testament conquest as an indictment against divine justice, MaClaren cites it as the prime example of the same. Instead of focusing on the role of the Israelites as the agents of God, he humanizes the Canaanites. They are a people that God strove to reach. When they rejected God continuously, they judged themselves. This is the Old Testament equivalent of what Jesus declared in John 3:19, “And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil” (ESV). 

The God of Third and Fourth Chances

These very people, who had been the executioners of divine judgement, settled in the land, fell into the snare—and you know the story. The captivities of Israel and Judah were other illustrations of the same thing. The fall of Jerusalem, to which our Lord pointed in the solemn context of these words, was another. For millenniums God had been pleading with them, sending His prophets, rising early and sending, saying, ‘Oh, do not do this abominable thing which I hate!’ ‘And last of all He sent His Son.’ Christ being rejected, God had shot His last bolt. He had no more that He could do. Christ being refused, the nation’s doom was fixed and sealed, and down came the eagles of Rome, again God’s scavengers, to sweep. Away the nation on which had been lavished such wealth of divine love.[1]

This illustration traces patterns of disobedience and destruction: the cycle of the Judges, the Assyrian and Babylonian invasions, and the final crushing blows of Rome. This last Empire being especially helpful to his illustrative purposes as the eagle was the Roman imperial symbol. It was easy to imagine Roman talons swooping down on the errant faithful. In a sobering reference to the Parable of the Tenants, with all other avenues exhausted the Master finally sent His Son (Mark 12:6). 

A Giant Gothic Fist and the Roman Mosquito

Take another illustration how, once more, the executants of the law fall under its power. That nation which crushed the feeble resources of Judaea, as a giant might crush a mosquito in his grasp, in its turn became honeycombed with abominations and immoralities; and then down from the frozen north came the fierce Gothic tribes over the Roman territory. One of their captains called himself the 'Scourge of God,' and he was right. Another swooping down of the vultures flashed from the blue heavens, and the carrion was torn to fragments by their strong beaks.

Keeping the same, keen eye on historical cycles of sin and decadence, MaClaren noted that even though God used Rome, their own punishment was brewing. Gothic tribes brought the mighty low and humbled the proud as the arm of God’s judgment. Truly, no people, no matter how advanced, was immune from falling to their own sin. The descendants of both the Romans and some of their Northern invaders relearned the same lesson in the next illustration.

Liberté, égalité, and toppled luxury

Take one more illustration—that French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. The fathers sowed the wind, and the children reaped the whirlwind. Generations of heartless luxury, selfishness, carelessness of the cry of the poor, immoral separation of class from class, and all the sins which a ruling caste could commit against a subject people, had prepared for the convulsion. Then, in a carnival of blood and deluges of fire and sulphur, the rotten thing was swept off the face of the earth, and the world breathed more freely for its destruction.

In hindsight, they should have seen it coming. (But that’s how it usually is with sin.) The aristocracy abused their power and marginalized the concerns of the poor and unconnected for centuries. However, new ideas from the growing Enlightenment began to fill the hearts of ordinary men with thoughts of equality and freedom. Before long, heads rolled in a terrible overcorrection of justice as the vulture of Madame Guillotine gorged on her gourmet fete. Oppression’s bloody boot could only hold back the wave of judgment for a season. 

The Moral and Mortal Decay of American Slavery

Take another illustration, through which many of us have lived. The bitter legacy of negro slavery that England gave to her giant son across the Atlantic, which blasted and sucked the strength out of that great republic, went down amidst universal execration. It took centuries for the corpse to be ready, but when the vultures came they made quick work of it.

This final illustration was very contemporary to MaClaren’s world. He identified the slowness of American action to end slavery as another predicable sign that judgement was certainly coming. While England recognized its own sin and ended the slave trade in 1807 and the entire institution in 1833, the United States allowed the evil to rot until 1863 and continued to face terrible consequences for generations to come. 

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In the growing age of science and reason, MaClaren presented this principle of God from Matthew 24 to be as true as a Law of Nature. In all these instances, sin led to judgement as surely as a rotting corpse always attracted birds of prey. Like decaying roadkill, the stench of sin gathers a predictable flock. ‘The wheels of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small’ quotes the same sermon later. MaClaren and Christ warn all listeners to not be surprised when our maggoty sin attacks the fowl visitation of judgement.

Bonus Illustration: Jezebel and the “National Undertakers”

They threw her out the window in II Kings 9. Frederic William Farrar retells the rest of the story:

But no one had taken the trouble so much as to look after the corpse of Jezebel. The populace of Jezreel were occupied with their new king. Where Jezebel fell, there she had been suffered to lie; and no one, apparently, cared even to despoil her of the royal robes, now saturated with bloodshed. Flung from the palace-tower, her body had fallen in the open space just outside the walls—what is called "the mounds" of an Eastern city. In the strange carelessness of sanitation which describes as "fate" even the visitation of an avoidable pestilence, all sorts of offal are shot into this vacant space to fester in the tropic heat. I myself have seen the pariah dogs and the vultures feeding on a ghastly dead horse in a ruined space within the street of Beit-Dejun; and the dogs and the vultures—"those national undertakers"—had done their work unbidden on the corpse of the Tyrian queen. When men went to bury her, they only found a few dog-mumbled bones—the skull, and the feet, and the palms of the hands. They brought the news to Jehu as he rested after his feast. It did not by any means discompose him. He at once recognised that another levin-bolt had fallen from the thunder-crash of Elijah's prophecy, and he troubled himself about the matter no further. Her carcase, as the man of God had prophesied, had become as dung upon the face of the field, so that none could say, "This is Jezebel."[2]

This final illustration comes from the writings of Frederic William Farrar (1831-1903). His interesting resume shows him to be both an Anglican cleric and a pallbearer to Charles Darwin. This selection comes from his commentary on the second book of Kings in his Expositor’s Bible. Jezebel’s wickedness had festered too long according to this assessment, and her undertakers awaited with baited breath.

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MaClaren’s sermon can be found in print in: “The Carrion and Vultures.” Expositions of the Holy Scriptures, vol 7. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1982: 157-166. 

The full text is also available here.

[1]Further omitted statements on this illustration by MaClaren take on an anti-Semitic tone by today’s standards. His logic was actually a medieval application that believed the modern Jews to be a living object lesson of God’s judgement that lived among Christians as a “living death” (MaClaren’s phrase). He seemed incapable of interpreting their scattered presence as a testimony to God’s sovereign preservation (i.e. a remnant theme, etc.) as an alternative hermeneutic.

[2]http://www.gutenberg.org/files/42027/42027-h/42027-h.htm