know that the same hand which dispenses our afflictions furnishes also those medicinal agents which help to combat them. Hence even the sharp dispensations of God do not deaden our exertions, but rather rouse and stimulate our energies. Let others who know no better resign themselves with folded hands and shackled feet to impending calamities. For us Christians these ought rather to excite and evoke any powers within us that may be under restraint. In every individual there are powers which otherwise might perhaps lie dormant for ever, but which awake when the hammer of the divine dispensations deals its thundering strokes. Alas! it is no easy task to exercise a truly Christian faith in the Omnipotent. How clearly the unbelief of my heart reveals itself afresh whenever God is pleased to beset my path with thorns! We know and repeat to ourselves a thousand times, that as the eternal wisdom, justice, and love is likewise omnipotence, it is able at every moment to execute what it wills. But notwithstanding, how hard we find it to acknowledge the disposal of Omnipotence in the thorns as well as in the roses that bestrew our path; how hard to believe that it is the will of God which calls us to suffer, not less than when it calls us to act! We nourish the delusion that it is only the act lying behind the suffering, the freedom behind the fetter, which God wills, and not the suffering and the fetter too. These, we fancy, have been interposed by some foreign hand; and in this manner we forego the blessing which the Lord intends afflictions and restraints and hindrances to convey. The idea that the divine Omnipotence removes distress, is one on which every man broods far longer than upon the thought that it is also divine Omnipotence that inflicts it, and that there must have been as good grounds for sending as for mending it. Men are always saying, "God will soon make it well again." Why do they not as often say, "It was God who made it what it is"? Think not that from some foe the burden came, The cross, the curb, are His, because the same Almighty power must will who could repair it. Almighty God, whose hand none can stay, and of whom none can ask, "What doest Thou?" I reckon it a blessed thing that all that I am and all that I possess are solely at Thy disposal. Weak as a child, why should I resist Thee? inasmuch as I must perish if I do. Foolish as a child, why should I question Thee? Thou knowest best what Thou doest. I count it my greatest happiness to have Thee for my absolute God, and to know that I am the work of Thy hand. And why not, assured as I am that Thine omnipotence is but the omnipotence of wisdom and love? With such a belief, a man ought always to be strong. There are, however, seasons in which I feel myself very weak; but oh, do Thou arm me with that strength of mind which can taste in the bitters Thou offerest, no less than in the sweets, Thy loving and almighty will. What though the cup be bitter, ought it not to be sweetened by the hand which presents it? Let suns then be extinguished, and worlds sink into the abyss, I have learned, O Almighty God, to know Thee so well, as never more to have any doubts about Thee. I wrap myself in the outermost hem of Thy mantle, and shut my eyes in soft repose, like the babe upon the mother's lap, for I know whose are the eyes that watch over me for ever. O what a blessed thing to rest Soothed in Jehovah's loving arms! Cheer up, my soul! thy place remains A hand omnipotent fulfils. 22. Ne is angry with the Wicked. God is a healthful light or a consuming fire- His children all bask in the cheerful rays, The stubborn sinner brooks the angry blaze. ROм. i. 18. "For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who hold the truth in unrighteousness." HEB. xii. 28, 29. "Wherefore we receiving a kingdom. which cannot be moved, let us have grace, whereby we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear : for our God is a consuming fire." I PETER, i. 17. "And if ye call on the Father, who without respect of persons judgeth according to every man's work, pass the time of your sojourning here in fear." WH 7HO knoweth the power of Thine anger? who fears as he ought Thy wrath ?" 1 was the exclamation of the veteran Moses. Alas! is it not an exclamation which, in these days of ours, ought to be rung into the ears of men from every pulpit? Blindness has fallen upon this generation. "Thou hast stricken them, but they have not grieved; Thou hast consumed them, but they have refused to receive correction." God is love; and therefore, in place of keeping to Himself the felicity and the blessings which He enjoys, He is willing to share them with us. If men, however, despise and reject them, His love is converted into a consuming fire. In His inmost heart He desires to bless; and therefore it is written, "He doth not afflict willingly, nor grieve the children of men."3 But should the children of men refuse His blessing, He is quite 1 Psalm xc. II-Luther's vers. 2 Jer. v. 3. 3 Lam. iii. 33. as much in earnest to smite and retaliate. When the terrors of conscience awaken in the sinner-when it becomes openly manifest that iniquity is the people's ruin-when the wicked fall into the pit which they themselves digged, and when sin brings forth death-who will deny that these things are the wrath of God against unrighteousness? No doubt, God's wrath is different from the wrath of man ; but neither does He love in man's passionate and capricious way. They who deny His wrath must have had little experience of the heat of temptation, when, according to Luther, "Conscience sweats as in a bath, and the Almighty casts the sinner into the furnace as it is written, 'Yea, I will gather you, and blow upon you in the fire of my wrath, and ye shall be melted in the midst thereof;' "2 when He sets in array before his eyes all his secret misdeeds, so that he is forced to cry out with David, "Thine arrows stick fast in me, and Thy hand presseth me sore. There is no soundness in my flesh because of Thine anger; neither is there any rest in my bones because of my sin. For mine iniquities are gone over mine head: as an heavy burden they are too heavy for me."3 Can any one fail to see in all this the expression of a keen and active abhorrence of iniquity? Were one to call it mere love, he would feel that he was lying to himself. No doubt, the love of God is not wholly extinguished, although His anger is so hot. For if the fierceness of His wrath have produced its due effect, the sun of His grace will rise again. Has He not said, "I kill, and I make alive; I wound, and I heal"? "In my wrath I smote thee, but in my favour have I had mercy on thee."4 Nor is that all; for inasmuch as in His inmost heart He desires to bless all the works of His hand, His wrath itself is a wrath of love, which no doubt bespeaks His abhorrence of sin, and His determination to punish it by the penalties it inflicts, but which likewise intends to soften the heart, and while destroying the sin, to save the sinner. Accordingly, His wrath and 1 James, i. 20. 2 Ezek. xxii. 21. While, on vengeance are poured out in proportion as the stubborn heart refuses to melt in the divine furnace, and merely feels the pain, but does not reap the profit, of the chastisement. the other hand, in the same degree in which the stubborn heart consents to soften, the Lord shows forth His love. Just as in the promises and threatenings of the law, so in all the punishments He inflicts, He declares, "Behold, I set before you the way of life and the way of death." In this view there is, no doubt, truth in what the poet says:— "God is as near to Satan as to the Seraphim The difference is that Satan dares to turn his back on Him." But just because Satan turns his back upon God, God is near to Satan, not as the Sun of grace, but as a consuming fire; whereas, would Satan only turn his face to God, God would then be near to him too as a Sun of grace. And inasmuch as the ground of His being is goodwill to all the creatures, so that He would rather bless than destroy them, the Scriptures declare with greater truth that God is far from the sinner who turns his back upon Him, and to whom, therefore, He manifests Himself as a consuming fire, although even in that distance there is still on God's part a certain interest in the sinner, for in punishing He still cleaves to him, and does not wholly cast him off. Give me, O holy Being, enlightened eyes that I may never suffer the weakness of the flesh to blind me, but may still hold fast the persuasion that Thou art in earnest alike in Thy wrath as in Thy love. By grace Thou hast adopted me to be Thy child, but even Thy grace I may turn into licentiousness, and the old man within me may from time to time become manifest in works of the flesh. And when such things happen, do I not, O Lord, subject myself to Thy righteous indignation? Even we who are Christians ought, as is expressed in Thy Word, "to pass the time of our sojourning here in fear." True, it is also written that "perfect love casteth out fear;" but the fear 1 1 Jer. xxi. 8. |