fidelity, we ask, "_Where is now thy God?_" "Ye _did_ run well; who
hath hindered you?" What is the guilty cause, the lurking evil, that
has dragged you imperceptibly down from weakness to weakness, and has
left you a poor, baffled thing, with the finger of irreligious scorn
pointed at you, and whose truthfulness is echoed back from the lonely
voids of your desolate heart? Return, O backsliding children! Remain
no longer as you are, at this guilty distance from that God who, amid
all the fitfulness of your love to _Him_, remains unaltered and
unalterable in His love to _you_. Be not absorbed in tears, ringing
your hands in moping melancholy--abandoning yourself to unavailing
remorse and despair. The past may be bad enough! You may have done
foul dishonour to your God. By some sad and fatal inconsistency, you
may have given occasion to the ungodly to point at you the finger of
scorn. The fair alabaster pillar may be stained with some crimson
transgression. Or if there be no special blot to which they can point,
there may be a lamentable spiritual deterioration in your daily walk.
They may have observed your love to God waxing cold--your love of the
world waxing strong. They may have heard you murmur at your Lord's
dealings, question His faithfulness, and refuse to hear and to bear
the rod--manifesting tempers, or indulging in pursuits sadly and
strangely unlike what would be sanctioned by the example of your
Divine Redeemer. Up! and with determined energy resolve henceforth to
repair the breach,--henceforth to make a new start in the heavenly
life. The shrill trumpet sounds--"_Awake, thou that sleepest, and
arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee life_!" We cannot say,
like the King of Nineveh, "_Who can tell if God will turn and
repent?_" _He_ has never turned! _You_ have turned from Him, not He
from _you_. "_Where is now thy God?_" He is the same as ever He
was;--boundless in His compassion--true to His covenant--faithful to
His promises; "_the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever_!"
Reader! if He be afflicting you as He did David;--if with an exile
spirit you be roaming some moral wilderness, the flowers of earth
faded on your path, and the bleak winds of desolation and calamity
sweeping and sighing around, let these times of affliction lead to
deep searchings of heart. Let your tears be as the dewdrops of the
morning on the tender leaves, causing you to bend in lowly sorrow and
self-abasement, only to be raised again, refreshed, to inhale new
fragrance in the summer sun. If, like the weeping woman of Galilee,
you are saying, through blinding tears, "_They have taken away my
Lord, and I know not where they have laid Him_," --if, like the Spouse
in the Canticles, you are going about the city in search of your
Beloved;--seeking Him, He will be found of you. The watchmen may smite
you--repel you--tear off your veil--and load you with reproaches;--but
"_fear not! ye seek Jesus who was crucified!_" He will meet you as He
did the desponding Magdalene, and, listening like her to His own tones
of ineffable love, you will cast yourself at His feet, and exclaim,
"RABBONI--MASTER!"
V.
THE TAUNT.
"He wounds, and hides the hand that gave the blow;
He flies, He reappears, and wounds again;
Was ever heart that loved thee treated so?
Yet I adore Thee, though it seem in vain."
--_Cowper._
"Because for thy sake I have borne reproach; shame hath covered my
face. I am become a stranger unto my brethren, and an alien unto my
mother's children. Reproach hath broken my heart; and I am full of
heaviness: and I looked for some to take pity, but there was none; and
for comforters, but I found none."--_Ps._ lxix. 7, 8, 20.
"My tears have been my meat day and night, while they continually say
unto me, Where is thy God?"--_Verse 3._
V.
THE TAUNT.
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 unfrequently 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 thy 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 wont
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
priestcraft 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 awful imaginations--too awful 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.
Ye 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. xxii. 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 suffers 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_ THOU
WILT." 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 awful 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 succour--the tongues He unloosed lisped no
accents of compassion--the eyes He unsealed gave no looks of love.
Those lips that spake as never man spake, 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 ye my friends, for
the hand of God hath touched me_!" Oh, when in deeper than the
water-floods of Gilead, this wounded HART 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 thy 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
JUDGETH 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 summary vengeance on
the scoffer--"_Why should this dead dog_," said Abishai, "_curse my
lord the king? let me go over, I pray thee, and take off his
head_"--David's reply is, "Nay! 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 hath bidden him_.'" (2 Sam
xvi. 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 tongue 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, child-like trust; and, amid baffling
dispensations and frowning providences, to exclaim, "_Though He slay
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 thy God?_
CHILD OF SICKNESS! bound down for years on that lonely pillow!--the
night-lamp thy companion--disease wasting thy cheeks and furrowing thy
brow--weary days and nights appointed thee--tell me, _Where is thy
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 thy God?_ Can He visit this rude 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 mouldering ashes? Yes! He is here. The lips of
Truth that uttered the beatitude, "_Blessed be ye poor_," have not
spoken in vain. Bound down by chill penury--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 succour 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 want cannot enter, and where
the beggar's hovel is transformed into the kingly mansion!
BEREAVED ONE! _Where is thy God?_ Where is the arm of Omnipotence thou
wast wont to lean upon? Has _He_ forgotten to be gracious? Has He
mocked thy prayers, by trampling in the dust thy dearest and best, and
left thee to pine and agonise in the bitterness of thy swept heart and
home? Nay, 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, till 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 thee--the world is receding--the
herald symptoms of approaching dissolution are gathering fast around
thy pillow--the soul is pluming its wings for the immortal flight; ere
memory begins to fade, and the mind becomes a waste,--ere the names of
friends, when mentioned, will only be answered by a dull, vacant look,
and then the hush of awful silence,--tell me, ere the last lingering
ray of consciousness and thought has vanished, _Where is thy 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
thirsteth for God, for the living God!_" "THIS GOD SHALL BE MY GOD FOR
EVER AND EVER!"
VI.
Sabbath Memories.
"Dear is the Sabbath morn to me,
When village bells awake the day,
And with their holy minstrelsy
Call me from earthly cares away.
"And dear to me the winged hour,
Spent in thy hallow'd courts, O Lord,
To feel devotion's soothing power,
And catch the manna of Thy Word.
"And dear to me the loud 'Amen,'
That echoes through the blest abode--
That swells, and sinks, and swells again,
Dies on the ear--but lives to God.
"Oft when the world, with iron hand,
Has bound me in its six days' chain,
This bursts them, like a strong man's band,
And bade my spirit live again."
"And the king said unto Zadok, Carry back the ark of God into the
city: if I shall find favour in the eyes of the Lord, he will bring me
again, and shew me both it, and his habitation."--_2 Sam._ xv. 25.
"When I remember these things, I pour out my soul in me: for I had
gone with the multitude, I went with them to the house of God, with
the voice of joy and praise, with a multitude that kept
holy-day."--_Verse 4._
VI.
SABBATH MEMORIES.
We always commiserate those who have seen better days. Poverty,
indeed, under any form, appeals with irresistible power to the
sympathies of our better nature. The most heartless and indifferent
cannot refuse the tribute of pity to the ragged beggar shivering on
the street, or seated in his hovel by the ashes of a spent fire,
brooding over a wretched past, with the grim spectral forms of want
hovering over a miserable future.
Sad, however, as the condition of such may be, habit, in one sense,
may have become to that squalid pauper a second nature. He may never
have known a more prosperous state. He may have been inured from his
earliest years to buffet life's wintry storm. Chill penury may have
rocked his cradle, and ever since sung her rude lullaby over his
pallet of straw. Far more is to be pitied the case of those who have
sunk from comfort into indigence, around whose early home no bleak
winds of adversity ever blew, who were once pillowed in the lap of
plenty if not of luxury, but who, by some sudden wave of calamity,
have become wrecks on life's desert shore. If there be one being on
God's earth more to be pitied than another, it is the mother of a once
joyous home, turned adrift, in the hour of her widowhood, with her
ragged children;--forced to sing, from door to door, to escape the
jaws of hungry famine,--ill disguising, under her heap of squalid rags
or her trembling notes of sorrow and despair, the story of brighter
days.
Similar is the commiseration we extend (let the shores of this Refuge
Island of ours bear testimony) to the hapless patriot or the fallen
monarch. These may have been hurled from positions of influence or
pinnacles of glory more by their crimes than by their misfortunes. The
revolutionary wave that swept them from their country or their thrones
may have been a just retribution for misrule; but it is their hour of
adversity! They have seen better and more auspicious times. Pity for
the fallen knocks, and never knocks in vain, at the heart of a great
nation's sympathies.
Such was David's position at this time: Denied the sympathy of others,
his own soul is filled with recollections of a far different past. The
monarch of Israel, the beloved of God, the idol of his people; now a
fugitive from his capital--his palace sacked--his crown
dishonoured--wandering in ignoble exile--a wreck of vanished glory!
But it is not these features of his humiliating fall on which his mind
mainly dwells. It is not the thought of his sceptre wrested from his
grasp--his army in mutiny--his royal residence a den of traitors--that
fills his soul with most poignant sorrow. He is an exile from the
House of God! The joy of his old Sabbaths is for the time suspended
and forfeited. No more is the sound of silver trumpets heard summoning
the tribes to the new moons and solemn feast-days! No more does he
behold, in thought, the slopes of Olivet studded with pilgrim tents or
made vocal with "songs in the night!" No more does he see the
triumphant procession wending up the hill of Zion--timbrel and pipe
and lute and voice celebrating in glad accord the high praises of
God;--"the singers in front, and the players on instruments
behind,"--he himself, harp in hand, (the true father of his people,)
leading the jubilant chorus, and Jehovah commanding upon all "the
blessing, even life for evermore!"
How changed! To this Sabbath-loving and Sabbath-keeping King nothing
but the memory of these remained. "_When I remember these things, I
pour out my soul in me: for I had gone with the multitude, I went with
them to the house of God, with the voice of joy and praise, with a
multitude that kept holy-day._"
Jerusalem was the pride and glory of the Jew. Wherever he went, he
turned to it as to his best and fondest home. The windows of Daniel's
chamber were "open _towards Jerusalem_." With his eye in the direction
of the holy city, "_he kneeled upon his knees three times a-day, and
prayed, and gave thanks before his God, as he did aforetime_." (Dan.
vi. 10.) Jonah was in the strangest of prisons. "The depths closed
round about him, the weeds were wrapped about his head, and the earth
with its iron bars." From "the belly of hell" he sent up his cry to
God. "I am cast out of thy sight, yet I will look again _toward thy_
HOLY TEMPLE." (Jonah ii. 2.) Captive Israel are seated, in mute
despondency, by the willowed banks of the streams of Babylon. The
Euphrates (an ocean river compared with the tiny streams of Palestine)
rolled past them. The city of the hundred gates rose, like a dream of
giant glory, before their view, with its colossal walls, and towers,
and hanging gardens. Yet what were they in the eyes of these exile
spectators? _Shadows_ of greatness in comparison with the city and
temple of their fathers amid the hills of Judah! When their oppressors
demanded of them a Hebrew melody, saying, "Sing us one of the songs of
Zion," they answered, through hot tears of sorrowful remembrance,
"_How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?_" (Ps. cxxxvii.
4.) So it was with David now. As a bird taken from its home in the
forest and placed in a cage, refuses to warble a joyous note--beats
its plumage against the enclosing bars, and struggles to get free,--so
he seems to long for wings that he may flee away to the hallowed eaves
of the sanctuary, and be at rest!
He himself, indeed, uses a similar figure. He tells us, in another
Psalm, written on this same occasion, that so blessed did he feel
those to be who enjoyed the privilege of "dwelling in God's house,"
and so ardent was his longing to participate in their joy, that he
half-envied the swallows who constructed their nests upon its roof.
(Ps. lxxxiv.) He was not without his solaces in this season of reverse
and calamity. He had many faithful adherents still clinging to him in
his adversity. The best and bravest chieftains from the tribes on the
other side of the Jordan supplied his drooping followers with the
produce of their rich pasture lands. "_Shobi of Ammon, and Machir of
Lo-debar, and Barzillai the Gileadite_"--these brought, besides camp
utensils, "_wheat, and barley, and flour, and parched corn, and beans,
and lentiles, and parched pulse, and honey, and butter, and sheep, and
cheese of kine, for David, and for the people that were with him, to
eat: for they said, The people is hungry, and weary, and thirsty, in
the wilderness._" (2 Sam. xvii. 27-29.) Glorious, too, was Nature's
temple around him. Its pillars the mountains--the rocks its altar--the
balmy air its incense--the range of Lebanon, rising like a holy of
holies, with its reverend curtain of mist and cloud, and snowy Hermon
towering in solemn grandeur above all, as the very throne of God! Yet
what were these compared with JERUSALEM, the place of sacrifice, the
resting-place of the Shekinah-glory, the city of solemnities,
"_whither the tribes go up, the tribes of the Lord, unto the testimony
of Israel, to give thanks unto the name of the Lord_?" (Ps. cxxii. 4.)
This wounded Hart pants for the water-brooks of Zion; Nature's outer
sanctuary had no glory to him, "by reason of the glory that
excelleth." The God who dwelleth between the cherubim had "_chosen
Zion, and desired it for His habitation_," saying, "_This is my rest
for ever: here will I dwell; for I have desired it_." (Ps. cxxxii. 13,
14.) With the windows of his soul, like Daniel, thrown "open _towards
Jerusalem_," and his inner eye wistfully straining to its sunny
heights, his ear catching the cadence of its festive throng, he seems
to say, "_If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her
cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof
of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy._" (Ps.
cxxxvii. 5, 6.)