"The Lord went before them by night in a pillar of fire."
"I will lead the blind down a new path, guiding them
along an unfamiliar way. I will make the darkness bright before them and
smooth out the road ahead of them. Yes, I will indeed do these things; I
will not forsake them."—Isaiah 42:16.
"What I do you know not now; but you shall know
hereafter."—John 13:7.
A twin voice speaking from the Glory-Cloud. That
Cloud, as of old, often conducts, as we have again and again noted, not by
the short and easy way to the true Canaan, but through formidable leagues of
desert. The cry of the fainting Hebrew host is repeated still: "We are
entangled; the wilderness has shut us in." So great also, now and then, is
the gloom, that with misgiving hearts we ask—Can the testimony in our case,
be indeed true—"He led them ALL the night with a light of fire"? "O rest in
the Lord, and wait patiently for Him." The luminous token, temporarily
obscured, will in due time appear. He will subject you to no unnecessary
peril, no needless circuitous road. Trust this promise; trust it in the
dark; trust it when you fail to trace—"I will lead the blind down a new
path, guiding them along an unfamiliar way. I will make the darkness bright
before them and smooth out the road ahead of them. Yes, I will indeed do
these things; I will not forsake them."
What a wondrous succession of wilderness watch-words! all
crowned by the gracious assurance that HE "appoints all"; and that though
the light of the Pillar-cloud may seem to us fitful and wavering, He does
not, and will not, abandon His covenant Israel.
It was but the other day I saw a picture of a blind man.
The name—the impressive title—given to it by the artist, was "Lighten our
darkness, O Lord!" The subject of the picture was reading from the
raised letters of a Bible. A lamp was throwing its brightness on the
reader's countenance, and on the hieroglyphics of the sacred page. God, who
commanded the light to shine out of darkness, was then and there shining
into his heart with the light of the knowledge of His own glory. The
principal figure seemed from the reflected glow on the face to say, "And HE
took the blind man by the hand and led him" (Mark 8:23). Here surely are
suggestively portrayed what the Lord does with our rayless souls in the
gloom of blinding trial—"If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even
the night shall be light about me" (Psalm 139:11).
I love the thought—God the Leader of the blind;
and in their very blindness interpreting His ways!
Turn we now to the added motto-verse. We have spoken of
it specifically in a previous page. But we may recur to it here as a New
Testament parallel with the Old. "What I do you know not now."
The Divine Brother in our nature, about to expiate the sins of the world by
laying down His own life, uttered the saying. The time He uttered it was
that, when surely, beyond all others, an electric chord of sympathy was
linking Him with universal suffering humanity. He could then and there, with
a deeper intensity and pathos, use the declaration He made of old in the
night of the Exodus—"I know your sorrows." The same balm-word was whispered
in this the most solemn crisis of all time. It came from the lips of
dying love. 'I am about,' He seems to say, 'to encounter the hour and
power of darkness for you. Will you not accept My own self-surrender
and sacrifice, My tears and groans and agony, as the pledge that I can
enter, from personal experience, into your uttermost griefs? I can send no
unnecessary trial. Trust My "hereafter promise." And, meanwhile, let the
reverential saying be your own—the saying I am about to utter in the
garden-shade, in the name of all sufferers—"This cup which My heavenly
Father gives Me to drink, shall I not drink it?"'
Yes, "hereafter." "I will make" (not "I have made")
"crooked things straight." "Hereafter"—Reader, let that word ring its
solitary chime in your darkness. We cannot too often recall, how
emphatically the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews loves to echo the
same—"Nevertheless AFTERWARD" (Heb. 12:11). It is the Divine order and
sequence. Present ignorance, future unfoldings. Present darkness, future
illumination. Present blindness, the full vision of God; His "light of fire"
transforming the arid wastes and sands of the wilderness into a pathway of
safety and peace. Even in this world, when, as just noted, the atmosphere is
dulled with haze and mist and cloud, we have flashing gleams from the
Pillar—revelations, partial and incomplete it may be, of the ways of the
Almighty, strange minglings of light and shadow. In the unblighted home
above, there will be a finished retrospect of wisdom and faithfulness, the
light of fire without the murky cloud—the pathetic appeal of the patriarch
sufferer heard no more—"When shall I arise and the night be gone?" (Job
7:4).
Recognize, then, sorrowing one, God's hand and presence
in this, and all the solemn passages of your life; the day-cloud given to
temper the heat of prosperity, the fire-cloud to counteract the noxious
exhalations of adversity. "When I am weary and disappointed," says a
sympathetic writer, "when the skies lower into the somber night, when there
is no song of bird, and the perfume of flowers is but their dying breath;
when all is unsetting and autumn; then I yearn for Him who sits with the
summer of love in His soul, and feel that earthly affection is but a
glow-worm light, compared to that which blazes with such effulgence in the
heart of God." Other lights maybe obscured or missing; yours may possibly
even now be either the mourner's watch, with its hushed vigils, or you may
be sundered by death from dearly loved ones, yearning for "the touch of the
vanished hand." You cannot be away from the touch of God. "The Lord your God
is with you wherever you go." Grow not weary of His correction. He loves you
through your anguish, and will yet assuredly vindicate the rectitude of all
His procedure.
The lines seem so appropriate, in closing this
meditation, that their familiarity will not deter transcribing them. They
form the prayer and solace of all "Pilgrims of the night," as they look
upwards to their Guiding Pillar—
"Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom,
Lead me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home,
Lead me on!
O keep my feet: I do not ask to see
The distant scene—one step enough for me.
"So long Your power has blest me, sure it still
Will lead me on
Over moor and marsh, over crag and torrent, until
The night is gone.
And with the morn those angel faces smile
Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile."
Ceasing unavailing tears, look forward to the time when
the promise of earth will be perpetuated without symbol in the heavenly
city: and when a new meaning will be given to the old words of the
Wilderness Leader—"But all the children of Israel had light in their
dwellings."