THE SOUL'S PORTION
"This is the resting place, let the weary rest; and this
is the place of repose" Isaiah 28:12
"You are my portion, O Lord." Psalm 119:57
God is the only true and satisfying portion of the
spirit—the realized happiness, for which earthly schools and systems of
philosophy hopelessly searched. The soul, endowed with immortality,
altogether fails to have its longings and aspirations satisfied with the
seen and the temporal; as little as the Israelite, in the desert
of the wandering, would have been satisfied with burning patches of
unsheltered sand for his camping ground, as compared with the twelve
refreshing springs of Elim with their seventy encircling palms. Too truthful
and suggestive is the symbolic truth conveyed by a painter in an allegorical
picture of human life—children in a churchyard, sporting with soap-bubbles
by the side of an opened grave! The bubbles are beautiful—lustrous with
rainbow tints; but, one by one, they burst, some in the air, others as they
touch the fringing grass; the misty moisture of all falling into that dark
hollow at their feet. The world's skeptic poet thus warbles in plaintive
monotone—
"I fly like a bird of the air,
In search of a home to rest;
A balm for the sickness of care,
A bliss for a bosom unblest."
We repeat, the only rest of the soul is in God.
You cannot detain the eagle in the forest. You may gather around him a
chorus of choicest birds—you may give him a perch on the finest pine—you may
charge winged messengers to bring him choicest dainties—but he will spurn
them all. Spreading his lordly wings, and, with his eye on the Alpine cliff,
he will soar away to his own ancestral halls among the munitions of rocks
and the wild music of tempest and waterfall! The heart of man, in its eagle
soarings, will rest with nothing short of the Rock of Ages. Its ancestral
halls are the halls of Heaven. Its munitions of rocks are the attributes of
God. The sweep of its majestic flight is Eternity! "Lord, YOU have been our
dwelling-place in all generations!"
"Once," says a gifted American writer, "I looked across a
landscape in a season of great drought, and all the elms looked sickly and
yellow, as if verging to decay. But one elm was fresh and green, as if
spring showers were hourly falling upon it. Coming nearer to observe,
behold! a silent river flowed at the foot of the tree; and its roots
stretched far out into its living waters. So is he, in the drought and heat
of this earth, whose soul is rooted in God."
The world has its joys and its portions too, and we do
not affirm that they are devoid of attractiveness. Had this been the case,
they would not be so fondly and eagerly clung to as they are. But this we
can affirm, that while they are certain, sooner or later to perish,
they are fitful and inconstant even while they last. They are
sand-built, not rock-built. They are, at best, but the passing gleam of the
meteor; not like the Christian's happiness, the steady luster of the true
constellation. On a deathbed, one memory of triumph over sin and of
successfully-resisted temptation will outbid and outmatch them all. Yes, the
joys of the true believer survive all others.
True Religion is like a castle on a mountain summit,
catching the earliest sunbeam, and gilded by the last evening ray. When low
down in the world's valleys, the shadows are falling and the lights are
already in the windows, the radiance still tarries on these lofty peaks of
gladness. That castle, moreover, is full of all kinds of furnishings. God
has furnished it with every attractive blessing that can invite the weary
wanderer in. He has crowded it with love-tokens, with which He may welcome
back His long-absent children—just as a mother (to use again a recent
illustration) decorates her room for the welcome of her absent boy. As every
available nook is crowded with tokens of affection, so God has filled that
castle with love-pledges. Its walls are tapestried with proofs and promises
of His grace and love in Jesus.
And having found God in Christ, and Christ in God as our
soul's all-sufficient portion, let us dread everything that would lead us
away from Him, and forfeit the possession of the Divine favor and regard. It
is the short but touching epitaph seen in the catacombs at Rome, and we can
annex to it another meaning besides its reference to death—"In Christ, in
peace". With Him as our covenant-possession we are independent of all
others. "If He gives quietness (rest), who can make trouble?" It is a
peace which the world, with all its riches, cannot give; and which the
world, with all its sorrows and its trials, cannot take away. "In the
world," says Jesus, "you shall have tribulation, but in Me you shall
have peace."
Blessed Savior, to whom can I go but unto You? The
wandering sheep may turn scornfully from its restoring shepherd; the eagle
may cling to its ignoble cage, and despise its rocky fastnesses; the
prodigal may mock a parent's pleas and recklessly cling to his foreign home
and beggar's fare; the thirsty pilgrim may turn with averted head from the
gushing stream; but You alone the unfailing Portion, You alone the
unchanging Friend, let me never be guilty of the ingratitude of forgetting
or forsaking You! "Many are asking, 'Who can show us any good?' Let the
light of Your face shine upon us, O Lord."
"Let me Your power, Your beauty see,
So shall my vain aspirings cease,
And my free heart shall follow Thee
Through paths of everlasting peace.
My strength, Your gift, my life, Your care,
I shall forget to seek elsewhere
The joy to which my soul is heir."
"Whom have I in heaven but You? And earth has nothing I
desire besides You."