Was Isaac, I ask, a vessel marred on the wheel? Was he a vessel laid aside as not fit for the Master’s use? or at least not fit for it any longer? His history seems to tell us this. Abraham had not been such an one. All the distinguishing features of "the stranger here," all the proper fruits of that energy that quickened him at the outset, were borne in him and by him to the very end. We have looked at this already in the walk of Abraham. (See pp. 134-137.) Abraham’s leaf did not wither. He brought forth fruit in old age. So was it with Moses, with David, and with Paul. They die with their harness on, at the plough or in the battle. Mistakes and more than mistakes they made by the way, or in their cause, or at their work; but they are never laid aside. Moses is counselling the camp near the banks of the Jordan; David is ordering the conditions of the kingdom, and putting it (in its beauty and strength) into the hand of Solomon; Paul has his armour on, his loins girded. When, as I may say, the time of their departure was at hand, the Master, as we read in Luke xii., found them "so doing," as servants should be found. But thus was it not with Isaac. Isaac is laid aside. For forty long years we know nothing of him; he had been, as it were, decaying away and wasting. The vessel was rusting till it rusted out. There surely is meaning in all this, meaning for our admonition. And yet--such is the fruitfulness and instruction of the testimonies of God--there are others, in Scripture, of other generations, who have still more solemn lessons and warnings for us. It is humbling to be _laid aside_ as no longer fit for use; but it is sad to be left merely to _recover ourselves_, and it is terrible to remain to _defile ourselves_. And illustrations of all this moral variety we get in the testimonies of God. _Jacob_, in his closing days in Egypt, is not as a vessel laid aside, but he is there recovering himself. I know there are some truly precious things connected with him during those seventeen years that he spent in that land, and we could not spare the lesson which the Spirit reads to us out of the life of Jacob in Egypt. But still, the moral of it is this--a saint, who had been under holy discipline, recovering himself, and yielding fruit meet for recovery. And when we think of it a little, that is but a poor thing. But _Solomon_ is a still worse case. He lives to defile himself; sad and terrible to tell it. This was neither Isaac nor Jacob--it was not a saint simply laid aside, nor a saint left to recover himself. Isaac was, in the great moral sense, blameless to the end, and Jacob’s last days were his best days; but of Solomon we read, "It came to pass, _when Solomon was old_, that his wives turned away his heart after other gods," and this has made the writing over his name, the tablet to his memory, equivocal, and hard to be deciphered to this day.