"He wounds, and hides the hand that gave the blow;
He flies, He reappears, and wounds again;
Was ever heart that loved you treated so?
Yet I adore You, though it seem in vain."—Cowper.
"For I am mocked and shamed for your sake; humiliation is
written all over my face. Even my own brothers pretend they don't know me;
they treat me like a stranger. Their insults have broken my heart, and I am in
despair. If only one person would show some pity; if only one would turn and
comfort me."— Psalm 69:7, 8, 20.
"My tears have been with me day and night, while they
continually say unto me, Where is your God?"—Verse 3.
The Great Accuser of the brethren in a variety of ways
attempts to insinuate the same dark doubts in the minds of believers, which we
have spoken of in the preceding pages. He tries to shake their confidence in
God—in the veracity of His word, and the faithfulness of His dealings. He
would lead them to discover in His providential dispensations what is
inconsistent with His revealed character and will. In seasons particularly of
outward calamity and trouble, when the body is racked with pain, its nerves
unstrung, or its affections blighted and wounded—when the mind is oppressed
and harassed, the soul in darkness—the Prince of this world, who times his
assaults with such consummate skill, not infrequently gains in such seasons a
temporary triumph. The shadow of a cold scepticism passes over the soul. It is
silent under the cry, "Where is your God?"
Have any of you ever known this acutest anguish of the
human spirit—those appalling moments of doubt, when for a moment the whole
citadel of truth seems to rock to its foundations—when the soul becomes a
dungeon with grated bars, or in which the light of heaven is transmitted
through distorted glass, and the finger of unbelief is pointed inwards, with
the old sneer, "Where is the God you were used to boast of in your day of
prosperity? Where is there evidence that one prayer you ever offered has been
heard—one blessing you ever supplicated been granted—one evil you ever
deprecated been averted or removed? Where one evidence of His hand in your
allotments in life? These heavens have never broken silence! Hundreds of years
have elapsed since His voice was last heard. Moreover, you have only some old
parchment leaves written by converted Pharisees and Galilean fishermen to tell
that Deity ever gave audible utterances out of the thick darkness. May not His
very being be after all a fiction, a delusion—His Bible a worn-out
figment which superstition and priest-craft have successfully palmed upon the
world?
Or if you do believe in a God and in a written revelation,
have you not good reason, at all events, to infer from His adverse dealings
that He cares nothing for you. He has proved Himself deaf to your
cries. Where is the mercy in such an affliction as yours? He has crossed your
every scheme, blasted your fairest gourds. His appointments are surely
arbitrary. He takes useful lives, and leaves useless ones. He takes the wheat,
and leaves the chaff. The chairs he empties are those of the kind and good,
the loving and beloved. He leaves the wicked, and proud, and selfish, and
profligate. Can there be a God on the earth? Where is the justice and judgment
which are 'the habitation of His throne'—where the 'mercy and the truth' that
are said to 'go before His face?'"
Such, you may say, are dreadful imaginations—too dreadful
to speak of. But such there are! It is the horror of great darkness—spirits
from the abyss sent to trouble the pools of ungodly thought, and stir them
from their depths.
You who are thus assaulted, do you ever think, in the midst
of these horrible insinuations, of ONE who had to bear the same? Think of that
challenge which wrung a spotless human soul in the hour of its deepest
anguish—"He trusted on the Lord that He would deliver him: let Him deliver
him, seeing he delighted in Him." (Ps. 22:8.) It was the same taunt in His
case as in yours! It was the cruel, poignant sneer, that He had, during all
his lifetime of confiding filial love, been trusting to a falsehood—that if
God had really been His Father and He His Son, ten thousands of legions of
angels would have been down now by the side of His cross to unbind His cords
and set the Victim free!
Let the merciful, the wondrous forbearance of Christ be a
lesson to ourselves in the endurance of the taunts of a scornful world and of
the Father of lies. How easily might He have resented and answered the
challenge by a descent from the cross, by having the pierced feet and hands
set free—the crown of thorns replaced by a diadem of glory, scattering the
scoffing crew like chaff before the whirlwind! But in meek, majestic silence
the Lamb of God allows Himself to be bound, the Victim gives no struggle. Let
them scoff on! He will save others, Himself he will not save! Nor did all
their scoffing, their taunts and ridicule, tend for a solitary moment to shake
His confidence in His heavenly Father. These fell like spent spray on the Rock
of Ages. When the cup of trembling was in His hands, sinking humanity for the
moment seemed to stagger. He breathed the prayer, "Let it pass from me."
But immediately He added the condition of unswerving filial trust,
"Nevertheless, O my Father, not as I will, but as YOU WILL." Even in the
crisis of all, when He was mourning the eclipse of that Father's
countenance—in that last gasp of superhuman agony, He proclaims, in answer to
the taunts of earth and hell, His unshaken trust, "MY GOD, MY GOD!"
Comforting surely to the reviled, the ridiculed, and
persecuted, that, severe and poignant as their sorrow is, they are undergoing
only what their Lord and Master, in an inconceivably more dreadful form,
experienced before them! Yes! think how HE had to encounter the ingratitude of
faithless, the treachery of trusted friends. The limbs He healed brought no
support—the tongues He unloosed lisped no accents of compassion—the eyes He
unsealed gave no looks of love. Those lips that spoke as never man spoke,
dropping wherever they went balm-words of mercy, now in vain make the appeal
to the scoffing crowd, "Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, O my friends,
for the hand of God has touched me!" Oh, when in deeper than the
water-floods of Gilead, this wounded DEER of Heaven lay panting and bleeding
under the curse—when arrow after arrow was poured upon Him from the shafts of
men, and the bitter cry resounded in His dying ears, Where is your God?—how
did He answer? what was His response? Listen to the apostle's sublime comment
on that scene of blended love and suffering—"Who, when He was reviled,
reviled not again; when He suffered, He THREATENED NOT; BUT COMMITTED HIMSELF
TO HIM THAT JUDGES RIGHTEOUSLY."
As the face, the hidden face of God, beamed upon the Son of
His love in the midst of that apparent desolation, so will it be, children of
affliction and sorrow! with you. Others may see in your tears nothing but an
indication of the desertion of God—the visitations of His wrath and judgment.
But believe it, these very experiences of trouble and calamity, of bereavement
or death, are all meted out and apportioned for you in love—drop by drop, tear
by tear. Seek to see God's hand in all that befalls you. Try, even in the most
adverse providences, to rise above second causes. Be it with you as with David
in his conduct towards Shimei. When the insulting Benjamite was hurling these
cruel taunts against the exiled King and the sorrowing Father, when his
incensed soldiers, burning with indignation, were on the point of drawing
their swords and inflicting full vengeance on the scoffer—"Why should this
dead dog," said Abishai, "curse my lord the king? let me go over, I beg
you, and take off his head"—David's reply is, "No! I hear not that man's
voice—I see not that man's face—my eye is above the human instrument, on the
God who sent him—'Let him curse on, for the Lord has bidden him.'" (2
Sam. 16:11.)
Trust God in the dark. Ah! it is easy for us to follow Him
and to trust Him in sunshine. It is easy to follow our Leader as Israel
did the pillar-cloud, when a glorious pathway was opened up for them through
the midst of the Red Sea—when they pitched under shady palms and gushing
fountains, and heaven rained down bread on the hungry camp. But it is not so
easy to follow when fountains fail and the pillar ceases to guide, and all
outward and visible supports are withdrawn. But then is the time for
faith to rise to the ascendant—When the world is loud with its atheist sneer,
THEN is the time to manifest a simple, childlike trust, and, amid baffling
dispensations and frowning providences, to exclaim, "Though He slays me,
yet will I trust in Him!"
Yes—"troubled, we are NOT distressed; perplexed,
we are NOT in despair; persecuted, we are NOT forsaken; cast down,
we are NOT destroyed." We ARE ready, scoffing world! to answer the
question, Where is your God?
CHILD OF SICKNESS! bound down for years on that lonely
pillow!—the night-lamp your companion—disease wasting your cheeks and
furrowing your brow—weary days and nights appointed you—tell me, Where is
your God? He is here, is the reply; His presence takes loneliness from my
chamber and sadness from my countenance. His promises are a pillow for my
aching head—they point me onwards to that better land where "the inhabitant
shall no more say, I am sick!"
CHILD OF POVERTY! Where is your God? Can He visit
this crude dwelling? Can God's promises be hung on these broken rafters? Can
the light of His word illumine that cheerless hearth and sustain that bent
figure shivering over its smouldering ashes? Yes! He is here. The lips of
Truth that uttered the beatitude, "Blessed are the poor," have not
spoken in vain. Bound down by chill poverty—forsaken and forgotten in old
age—no footstep of mercy heard on my gloomy threshold—no lip of man to drop
the kindly word—no hand of support to replenish the empty cupboard—that God
above has not deserted me. He has led me to seek and lay up my treasure in a
home where poverty cannot enter, and where the beggar's hovel is transformed
into the kingly mansion!
BEREAVED ONE! Where is your God? Where is the arm of
Omnipotence you were used to lean upon? Has He forgotten to be
gracious? Has He mocked your prayers, by trampling in the dust your dearest
and best, and left you to pine and agonize in the bitterness of your swept
heart and home? No, He is here! He has swept down my fondest idol, but
it was in order that He himself might occupy the vacant seat. I know Him too
well to question the faithfulness of His word, and the fidelity of His
dealings. I have never known what a God He was, until this hour of bitter
trial overtook me! There was a "need be" in every tear—every death-bed—every
grave!
DYING MAN! the billows are around you—the world is
receding—the herald symptoms of approaching dissolution are gathering fast
around your pillow—the soul is pluming its wings for the immortal flight;
before memory begins to fade, and the mind becomes a waste—before the names of
friends, when mentioned, will only be answered by a dull, vacant look, and
then the hush of dreadful silence—tell me, before the last lingering ray of
consciousness and thought has vanished, Where is your God?
He is here! I feel the everlasting arms underneath and
round about me. Heart and flesh are failing. The mists of death are dimming my
eyes to the things below, but they are opening on the magnificent vistas of
eternity. YONDER He is! seated amid armies of angels. "My soul thirsts for
God, for the living God!" "This God shall be my God forever and ever!"