"The Lord went before them by night in a pillar of fire."
"O Israel, how can you say the Lord does not see your
troubles? How can you say God refuses to hear your case? Have you never
heard or understood? Don't you know that the Lord is the everlasting God,
the Creator of all the earth? He never grows faint or weary. No one can
measure the depths of his understanding."—Isaiah 40:27, 28.
"The Lord is good unto those who wait for Him, to the
soul that seeks Him."—Lam. 3:25.
"O Israel, how can you say the Lord does not see your
troubles? How can you say God refuses to hear your case?" Strong,
impassioned as are these words, how truthfully they interpret the thoughts
of many a sorrowing heart! Yes, of many a Christian heart. For,
observe, the tender reproach and admonition is not addressed to the
unbeliever, with his sceptic devil-born doubts; but to God's own covenant
people—"Israel." Disguise it as we may, in the depths of profound grief, and
despite of all accepted dogmas and creeds, such reflections will
obtrude themselves. "Has not God forgotten me? I adore Him and cling to Him
as my Heavenly Father—it is the assurance I shall be the last to surrender.
But why this terrible trial? Where are any footprints of His love? I fail to
hear even the faintest tones of the voice from the cloudy Pillar. Life is
bereft of its beauty and brightness, and I am called to tread the dreary
corridors of death, wedded to sepulchral silence. My prayers are apparently
unheard. They only seem to lead from darkness to darkness. Surely He is,
like Baal, asleep, leaving me to cry unsupported in the lonely desert—My
soul thirsts for You, in a dry and weary land, where there is no water."
In vain I make my appeal to the God of the Fiery Column.
In vain I plead the memories of the old pilgrim march—"Awake, awake, put on
strength, O arm of the Lord!…Are you not the One who dries up the sea, the
waters of the great deep, who made the depths of the sea a way for the
ransomed to pass over?" (Isaiah 51:9, 11). I call in the anguish and
desertion of despair, "Keep not silence, O God. Hold not Your peace, and be
not still, O God!" (Psalm 83:1).
These, sorrowing one, in your seasons of despondency—it
may be even now—are the tones of your muffled harp. Like the Syrophenician
woman you eagerly follow the steps of the Great Helper—seeking deliverance
from Him who alone can give it. You can, as little as she did, understand
the strange silence, the unheeded appeal, the apparent repulse. Is this
like—is it not rather sadly unlike His loving heart? "Surely my way is
hidden from the Lord,"—might well have been her agonizing soliloquy. But the
tide of Divine-human sympathy was only for the time pent up and restrained.
The sluices were before long withdrawn—her trust was commended; her child
restored. The word of the Gracious Consoler was a bequest for the
importunate of all ages, "O woman, great is your faith; be it unto you even
as you will."
Call to remembrance, child of affliction, a higher than
any mere human experience. Christ could Himself enter into the mystery—shall
I say, the terribleness of apparently unheard and unsuccoured prayer.
Read that psalm so unquestionably His own; the psalm of the Eloi-cry, "My
God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" His tearful pleadings were, "Why are
You so far from the words of My roaring? O My God, I cry unto You in the
daytime, but You hear not, and in the night season I am not silent!" What is
His solace and balm-word in that hour of apparent desolation? He rests
contented with the assurance, "But You are Holy" (Psalm 22:3).
Think, in the midst of your crisis-hours with their
silences of grief, how He traversed this, as well as other solitudes—how He
drank this, as well as other sorrow-brooks by the way (Psalm 110:7). Under
the shade of these moonlit olives, the Master is giving utterance to
importunate pleadings. But the cup is not allowed to pass, and that, also,
though "being in an agony, He prayed the more earnestly," "BUT, You are
Holy." He will not surrender His confidence in God—in His Heavenly
Father's righteousness, faithfulness, and truth. At last, light breaks
through the darkness; and before the Psalm of the Agony closes, He can tell
the joyful experience, imparting help and hope and courage to all His people
in their hours of misgiving—"Snatch me from the lions' jaws, and from the
horns of these wild oxen. The poor will eat and be satisfied. All who seek
the Lord will praise him. Their hearts will rejoice with everlasting joy."
(Psalm 22:21, 26). The pathway of thorns is changed into that of triumph.
Take courage from the example and experience of the Great
Sufferer. Plead the promise of this same praying Savior, whose heart
vibrates and throbs on the throne to the woes of humanity—"Verily, verily I
say unto you, Whatever you shall ask the Father in My name He will give it
you." Only adding, as He did, "Nevertheless not as I will, but as You will."
The great lesson He would teach His children is "Be
patient." Let faith rise above the obscurations of sight and sense. This was
the philosophy of affliction manifested in the case of the smitten patriarch
of Uz. "Behold we count them happy who endure. You have heard of the
patience of Job, and have seen the end of the Lord; that the Lord is very
pitiful and of tender mercy" (James 5:11). In the case of this much tried
servant, the mysterious dealings came at last to be vindicated; and in
anticipation he sang the song of victory on his bed of ashes—"Though He
slays me yet will I trust in Him." "For I know that my Redeemer lives!"
Seek to imitate this creed of the Pilgrim Father. Chide
your buffeted and baffled faith with the verse which heads this meditation,
"Why say you, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel?" "Israel!" that is the tenderest
word in the remonstrance, for it again recalls the wrestler in Peniel—the
conflict all night long, which left a struggling wayfarer the triumphant
"Soldier of God!" Hope on; trust on; fight on; pray on. Feel the calm
assurance that "the prayer of faith shall save," and that, also, despite of
thwarted purposes and apparently unanswered requests.
The following words simply but truthfully describe the
sorrowful—the at times despairing yearnings of one who feels the mystery of
unsupported pleadings; but who feels also, that these "silences," rightly
understood, have deep meanings, if not in most cases triumphant issues—and
alluring, at all events, to higher hopes, even though the way leads through
shadow and darkness—
"Will not the baffled soul, dismayed,
Fall prostrate in the dust?
The expectant child-like heart, afraid,
Forget its early trust?
"They shall not be ashamed who wait,
Are words that cannot fail.
Blessed who linger at the gate
Until their suit prevail.
"Forthwith, transfigured, smiles each sense
Over which the darkness fell;
The notes of praise swell dear and keen—
'He does all things well.'"
They are an echo of the more familiar words of the
Laureate—
"The world's great Altar-Stairs,
Which slope through darkness up to God."
Not a few, doubtless, have personally experienced—more
likely have witnessed in others such notable results and triumphs. One aged
mother in Israel, well known to the writer, never ceased for years,
undeterred by adverse, almost hopeless influences, to plead, and plead, and
plead again—rising from her bed at night, in the darkness, to pursue her
importunate suit. She refused to surrender the conviction that the answer
would come. Though it tarried, she "waited for it." Come it did, in time to
gladden her waning existence and to enable her on her own death-bed—"the
sleep of the beloved"—to adore her faithful God as the Hearer and
Answerer of prayer. Her experience for years might well have been that
of our verse, "My way is hidden from the Lord, and my cause is passed over
from my God." But she had "known and heard," and testified—that "the
everlasting God (the God of Eternity), the Lord, the Creator of the ends of
the earth, faints not, neither is weary."
Reader, look and long for the assured gleams of this
Pillar of Fire. "The Lord is good unto those who wait for Him, to the soul
that seeks Him." He never said unto any of the seed of Jacob, "you seek My
face in vain." Three times Christ prayed the prayer of His agony before He
was heard. Three times Paul prayed the prayer for the removal of the
buffeting thorn before he was heard. In both cases, at last, support was
given, not in the way it was asked for (by removal), but an angel was sent
from heaven to strengthen. You may be now like the Apostle on another
occasion, in the dungeons of Philippi: your soul under scourging; your feet
fast in the stocks—the plaintive dirge on your lips, "Where is now my God?"
But, as with him, "at midnight," the darkest hour of all, deliverance—not
perhaps as you expect it, will be given. The gracious though deferred
accents will be heard—"You called me in troubles, and I delivered you: and
heard you what time as the storm fell upon you" (Psalm 81:7). Yes, following
the Pillar—peering for its light in the surrounding darkness, sooner or
later the experience and the prayer of the desert Psalm will be your own:
"They cried unto the Lord in their trouble, and He saved them out of their
distresses. He brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death, and
broke their bands in sunder. Oh, that men would praise the Lord for His
goodness, and for His wonderful works to the children of men!"
"O house of Jacob, come and let us walk in the light of
the Lord."