Moses: A Man of Selfless Dedication

by Charles R. Swindoll

Clarence Macartney’s words speak eloquently of such moments: “I have no dread of a cemetery,” he wrote. “Sometimes it is better to be there and have fellowship with the dead who are buried than to walk down the streets of our cities and meet the unburied dead; that is, those in whom faith and hope and love and purity have long been dead, leaving only the animal alive. In the cemetery the Bible of life is open and a passionless voice reads to us its great lessons and tells us to apply our hearts unto wisdom. Sometimes we can learn more from the silence of the dead than from the speech of the living.” He continues, “Whether it be a little churchyard, where under ancient elms the dead lie close to holy walls, or the dark spaces of some hoary cathedral, where the dead sleep under sculptured sarcophagus and lettered marble, or some wilderness battlefield where the nation had gathered the bodies of the soldiers who there gave their last full measure of devotion, or some rural hillside where the wind blows free, or some quiet acre by the banks of a river that flows silently and swiftly away like man’s life—wherever it may be, the resting place of the dead has always something worthwhile to say to the living.”1