BY forgetting the benefits of our God, we sin against our own soul. And yet the temptation to this sin never lies closer to the door of our heart than in days of mourning and bereavement.
You agree, God’s benefits are never mechanical or for the sake of form, but are always seriously meant. We ourselves are frequently no deeper in our benefits, which we confer upon others, than with the hand, which defrays the cost. Our benefits we so frequently would rather not have conferred, and that we did confer them, was very often because for the sake of propriety we could not do otherwise. Not infrequently even selfishness has a hand in it. Give in the hope of getting again. And though it be, that also among men many benefits are shown, which sprang from the urge to do good and from the desire to bless, yet it also applies here, that even our best deeds are ever yet stained with sin. Perfectly holy is our love in what we do for others never.
But God’s benefits to us are always altogether perfect. The Lord is Himself always entirely alive in every benefit which He bestows upon us. They are always to the bottom aglow and tintillating with His Divine Love. To the last detail they are thought out. They are always put into beautiful and proportionate relation to our whole life and our whole being. They all hang mutually together and form together one wondrous whole of interlinked chains of love. Every benefit of God is a pearl, chosen with fatherly care and with Divine ordinance strung in the necklace of love wherewith He adorns us.
But just because God’s benefits, one by one, are put by the hand of His faithfulness as twinkling stars in the heaven of our life, for signs to us of His faithfulness and love, it is so sinful in us, when we have no eye for them, and when under the sparkling of His fidelity we go along on our pathway of life, with somber eyes cast down toward earth.
That insults His Fatherheart. That hurts His Divine compassion. That is returning love with unthankfulness.
And consider this well. It is not enough in general to be mindful of the multiplicity of God’s benefits.
Piece by piece, one by one, they must sparkle in the mirror of the heart and love and praise must be reflected back to our Father Who is in the heavens.
Forget not one of His benefits! (Ps. 103, 2, Dutch version).
BUT this, before we know it, is what mourning and bereavement of our heart goes in against.
O, the tempter of our heart does not let go of us even at the grave, and with holiest sorrow of our soul endeavors to divert us from the praises of our Lord.
He then whispers to us, that it is already much for our faith, if we do not murmur; that to rest in the will of God is piety in good measure; and that he who puts the hand on his mouth, and with a broken heart subjects himself to the hard lot that came upon him, can already measure up to the most saintly.
And yet this is not so.
You submit, you put the hand upon your mouth, you are resigned, when you face a power, against which you can do nothing, and when you stand over against a majesty, which demands awe and reverence.
But such should not be the attitude of a child of God over against his Father in the heavens.
When in whatever need or mortal danger, be it for ever so short a moment, we give up faith in God’s faithfulness and love, God is gone from us. Then He is no more our God, and the sparkling of His benefits hides behind a veil of vapors.
The world does not understand this. From her God can not have His honor. She can not address His Fatherheart with real understanding of His love.
And now God looks after His child, whether that child of His love stands sufficiently strong in the faith, even in the most painful hour to look up to Him with thankfulness and praise.
And only when such is the case, and faith thus gloriously triumphs over the sadness of the heart, so that at no moment the eternal faithfulness of our Father in the heavens is suspected, then there is rejoicing among the angels of God above, and a human heart on earth gives an echo to their song of praise before the Throne.
IN this let God’s children strengthen one another mutually. And when every time again the tempter tries to draw away the eye, to have it gaze hopelessly upon the dark spot, which broke away sweet life, then comes brother to the help of brother, over against this temptation, to put before our eye again the benefits of our God.
One alone would not be able to bring it to an end in praise and love. But then comes to our help the fellowship of saints. And that draws away the heart from mourning, and makes the eye of the soul interested again in the benefits of our God. And so by struggle comes triumph. And the end is, that a smile of love breaks through the tears again, and that from the wound itself of the heart praise and thanksgivings ascend again to our Father Who is in the heavens.
And that is just what in such an hour God looks for with His child.
Not a setting aside of one’s grief. Not to camouflage mourning. On the contrary, the deeper and the more fully we sink away in our sorrow, the more God the Lord is glorified. The reality must be lived through and felt with clear, deep consciousness, in all its bitterness. And when from the sadness and mourning of a heart thus wounded in its deepest parts, finally there ascends a note of praise and love, of thanks and worship, then, but also only then, the Fatherheart above enjoys, what it asks of the heart of His child, and what is so aboundingly due unto our God.
AND considered more deeply it altogether depends upon the viewpoint, at which we put ourselves before the eye of the Lord, or if you will upon the question, whether at the grave of our dead complaint is in place, that already now God took them from us, or rather the note of thanks, that He gave them unto us and so long spared them to us.
Are we the center of things, and have we enriched ourselves by creating for ourselves the possession of husband or wife or child, and does God now cruelly come in between to rob us of that glorious possession? Or was that husband, that wife, that child created by God, and by God alone, His property, and brought to us by His love, to rejoice therein for the time appointed of Him?
About the answer there can be no hesitation. For God created that husband, that dear wife and that precious child for His own Selfsake, that, first here and presently above, they should praise, serve and glorify Him.
Even when He brought them to us He did not relinquish the right of possession. They were not even loaned to us. But even while tenderest ties bound us to them, He merely intended that we should walk part of the way together, and on that way together serve and glorify Him.
Our possession of our beloveds was merely a very small part of their existence, an insignificant subdivision in their eternal existence, and hence our being together with them but a very small fragment of their eternal calling.
And when now in the great counsel of God the hour is come, that they have consummated the part of their calling on earth, and the place is open and waits, where they will now have to consummate their new calling, what else can there be in the soul of God’s child, save thanks, that the new calling which now comes, is still, O, so much more glorious, than the richest that was thus far finished.
ALSO the estimation of what we so sadly lost, comes only so to stand before our heart under the Divinely correct viewpoint.
He who with his heart continues to incline toward the side of his mourning, at every remembrance of what was precious in what he carried out to the grave, becomes ever poorer and more bereft.
But he who may see in his beloved dead children of God, on whom their and our Father has the first claim, with a relieved mind loses himself in all this wondrous treasure, which God had hid in those who went before, and in observing each new gift, which lay hidden in their heart, only becomes the more gratefully attuned, that so much wealth was given to surround him and to accompany him on the way.
It is then no more the greatness of man that we seek in our remembrances of so much that was noble, but in the full broad estimates of human excellence it is one magnifying of the Name of the Lord, who had so formed them, so unfolded, and so spiritually adorned them with the best of His heavenly adornments.
All conflict between God and that at first so cruel grave then falls away, and almost nowhere fuller than at that grave can the note ascend of thanksgiving and praise and adoration to our Father in the heavens.
NOTHING, nothing except sin makes here also the mists to arise. O, how we could wish with our whole soul, to have known our beloved dead without sin, and much more still, ourselves without sin to have enjoyed and possessed them.
Alas, such was not the case, and bitterly complains the soul discovered to herself about her own guilt and shortcoming. O, one would pray so ardently, that that living together might be done over again. How much more glorious it then could be!
And this God the Lord knows also, and therefore there follows in the psalm upon the striking words: “Forget not one of His benefits,” that other: “Who forgiveth all thine iniquities.”
And so there is added to the benefits of the past, of which we should not forget a single one, this new, this most glorious benefit, that He our God takes away from before the image of our beloved dead every haze of sin, and makes us see them in the white raiment of God’s saints, and that also at the grave of our dear dead He sprinkles us with the blood of the Holy Lamb of God. So far as the East is removed from the West so far also at the first opened and then closed grave doth He remove our transgressions from us.
And so everything from the side of God becomes love and faithfulness. Benefit of God what we possessed. Benefit of God what was shown to our dead. And benefit to our own soul in that wondrous Reconciliation of Christ.
Bless the Lord, ye His angels.
Bless the Lord, ye who went from us in the assembly of the just made perfect.
Bless the Lord, O my soul!
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