You know how, in a happy home, the near approach of a birthday is
signalised, how parcels are mysteriously smuggled in and hidden in
secret places, and, though everything seems to be going on as usual, yet
the plans are being laid in train that will surprise and delight the
fortunate owner of the birthday when the festal day dawns. That is our
feeble, human way of trying to surprise one another with the blessings
of goodness. That is how we "prevent" our beloved with tokens of our
remembrance. So, says the Psalmist, does God deal with us. Not only
have we--what we so much need--His forgiveness of our past, and His help
and presence for the day which now is; He is working for us in the
future too, sowing the days to come with blessings for us to pick up
when the passage of time brings us to the places where He has hidden
them.
The idea that God has been beforehand in our history, getting ready, as
it were, for our coming, though not a very usual one, is very helpful,
and it finds abundant illustration and proof in all directions. When a
child arrives on this earth, he enters into the enjoyment of bounties
and blessings prepared, not merely weeks, but literally ages before his
coming. Warmth he needs, and aeons ago the coal beds were formed in the
bowels of the earth. Food he needs, and God "laboured for ages," as Sir
Oliver Lodge puts it, to bring corn into existence. For corn needs
soil, and, to make that, the Creator had to set the glaciers grinding
over the granite, and to loosen the forces of rain and frost and running
water over great stretches of time.
Every child born into the world becomes the heir of all the ages past.
What blessings have been prepared for most of us, in advance, in the
homes into which we were born, and the gracious influences under which
we have grown up! "I have to thank the gods," says Marcus Aurelius the
pagan Emperor, "that my grandfathers, parents, sisters, preceptors,
relations, friends and domestics were almost all of them persons of
probity." "I have to thank the gods." Who else is there to thank but
God who prevents us in this way with the blessings of goodness? God is
working beforehand in our interest in all these things. So, when we
awaken to a sense of Him, there is His Church, established of old,
awaiting to take us by the hand and help us on our way. When we learn
our need of a Saviour, behold Christ stands at the door and knocks.
When, in penitence of heart, we ask God's mercy, we learn that, long
since, it was laid up in store for us. Before we thought of loving God,
He first loved us, and gave Himself for us in Jesus Christ our Lord. Is
it not gloriously true all the way along that God has been beforehand
with His goodness?
And that, of course, is the explanation of all the glad surprises of
life. The Lord has prepared them for us beforehand. He has sown the
future with good things and watched our surprise as we picked them up.
When Mary Mardon and her father, in Mark Rutherford's "Autobiography,"
went to the seaside to look for lodgings they saw a dismal row of very
plain-looking houses. Mary objected instinctively to the dull street,
but her father said he could not afford to pay for a sea view, so they
went in to inquire. To their delight they found that what they thought
were the fronts of the houses were really the backs, for the real fronts
faced the bay, had pretty gardens before the doors, and a glorious sunny
prospect over the ocean. Isn't that what we often find to be the case?
Our most treasured friends are not always those whom we fall in love
with at first sight. The thing we greatly fear dissolves like mist. An
envied, but despaired-of, blessing is flung into our lap. A door of
splendid hope opens in a dead wall. Life is full of the unexpected as
if wonder were one of the things God wanted very much to keep alive in
us. When, as you think, everything has been exhausted, God surprises
you with a fresh gladness. And, aback of all, there is the unending
surprise of God's patience with us, and of that daily mercy of His,
which we so ill requite, and so often forget.
Of course, no one dreams of suggesting that all our surprises are of a
happy sort. It is not so. But the point is that if it is God who has
hidden the blessings for us to come upon, it is He also who has hidden
the other things. God's hand does not slip so that we get the wrong
parcel by accident. He prevents us also with the blessings that we do
not call by that name at all. In his Lay Sermons, Huxley, describing
the tadpole in its slimy cradle, says: "After watching the process hour
after hour, one is almost possessed by the notion that some more subtle
aid to vision than an achromatic object-glass would show the hidden
artist with his plan before him, striving with skilful manipulation to
perfect his work." If, in that wonderful fashion, God is working
beforehand according to a plan of His own, in the life of a tadpole, is
it not much more likely that He is so working in your life and mine, not
in its joys only, but also in its dark hours and its sorrows? That,
indeed, is the very message and comfort of the Lord Jesus Christ, that
not even a sparrow falleth to the ground--calamity indeed for the
sparrow--without our Father.
If it be true that God our Father is working in advance of us all the
time, then surely it is wrong to speak of the monotony of life? For we
are on a road which God Himself has sown with surprises for us, and the
hour of our deadliest weariness may be the immediate percursor of our
richest and most joyous find. Who could have supposed, at the end of
the eighteenth century, when poetry in England seemed dead, that a great
galaxy of stars--Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats--was on
the very eve of rising? The unexpected can always happen. You may come
upon another of God's hidden blessings to-morrow. Let us not talk of
monotony, therefore, in an age which has seen so many wonderful things
happen. Rather let us hold to the faith that all the while God is going
before us with the blessings of goodness.
This faith puts another complexion on all our fears and forebodings.
Before we live it, the web of our life passes through God's hands. And
the shaded parts, as well as the bright parts, are in His wise and
loving design. Nobody can promise us freedom from sorrow, but the Bible
promises that God is beforehand to make the sorrow bearable. He has
adjusted our temptations to our strength, and never a one has He hidden,
where we come upon it, that it is impossible for us by His help to
withstand. Before the mother puts her little child into his hot bath at
night, she tests the water first with her fingers. And the Psalmist
means us to believe that life comes to us from God, who has measured and
adapted it for us, beforehand, in a like fashion.
Viewed in the light of this faith, Death itself takes on a different
aspect. Oliver Wendell Holmes has suggested that the story of this life
and the next can be fully written in two strokes of the pen, an
interrogation-point, and, above it, a mark of exclamation--fear and
question here below, and, above, adoration, wonder, surprise. "I go to
prepare a place for you," said Christ to His disciples. If the
preparation for us here is so wonderful, is it likely to fail yonder? If
Love made ready for us here, shall it not be beforehand there too? Yea,
verily. Our experience of how God prevents us here with His loving
kindness ought to strengthen in us all the "faith of our Lord Jesus
Christ, and the saint's trust in every age, that when we pass hence it
will be to meet the grandest, the most blessed, and the most surprising
provision of all."