OUR heart is continually inclined to rebel against the Lord our God. So really to rebel, that O, so gladly, were it but for a single day, we would take from His hands the reins of His supreme rule, imagining that we would manage things far better and direct them far more effectively than God.
This we cannot do, for His is the power, and powerlessness cleaveth unto us. But this does not take away, that the desire for this is in us. If only we were able. More still, that frequently umbrage passes through our soul when we observe what God doeth, and no answer follows upon the thousandfold questions, which continually rise in our dissatisfied and vexed heart.
This feeling is strong in us sometimes, when the Lord offends us in our own lot in life. Then we have our plans and prospects for the future. Sometimes even of a very sacred and serious nature. That which is sinful and selfish, we here pass by, because with all such deliberations and intentions the conscience steps in between, throws us back upon ourselves, and thereby justifies God. No, really, disappointments that come when you are in a sinful way are not so problematical to your faith. You rather feel, that when God blows in upon your faith, it is strengthened. But when time and again you perceive and experience, that sinful deliberations can work themselves out and have free play, while on the contrary, noble purposes and godly plans, which you had made, are frustrated, umbrage comes; then the soul faces a problem, which she cannot solve; and then the question so easily comes to the lips: Wherefore does the Lord let evil prosper, and wherefore does He prevent what was meant so sacredly for the honor of His Name?
THIS impression of the Divine government is frequently very grievous. In the Netherlands, Protestants and martyrs succeeded in fighting themselves free; but were not the Huguenots in France, whose martyrblood also flowed, as good as eradicated and destroyed? God the Lord lets destructive unbelief prosper in state and science. That flourishes and blooms, and scarcely knows opposition; while faith struggles, with sober means to remain standing and to keep the head erect! In the neighborhood is a saloon, which prospers and makes money like water, and close by is a Christian school, which almost succumbs under its shortages. Two men go into business, one a child of God, who is above criticism, the other a child of the world; yet the small, pious man is at the point of bankruptcy, and that competitor lays by money every year. With him every one comes to buy. And yet, it is God Who sends clients to every store; and also in commerce and trade nothing happens by chance.
You will have two children, one a son of sorrow, who disappointed the hope of your parentheart, who amounts to nothing, and sorely tries you, and by the side of him God had given you another son, who was the delight of your soul, because he feared God and took his stand with holy energy. And see, God will spare you the boy who turned away from you, and the other, on whom hung your soul, God will take from you, and cut him off in the early strength of his years. If now this led to the conversion of the one who had wandered off, you would understand it. But of this also you have no intimation. Your sorrow remains, and the delight of your life is taken from you.
And God doeth this.
It is not sickness, that in opposition to God’s will snatches him from you. Nothing ever happens more surely, than the high command of the Lord’s Word. And, moreover, from Job’s story you learn, that it was God Himself, Who allowed it and Who let it, that all these evil things should come upon His servant Job.
AND do not think, that by looking at others, you might be comforted.
On the contrary, the more your heart goes outside of itself, and shares life with others, and comes away from its selfishness, the stronger from every side this shocking problem of God’s supreme rule presses upon you.
Love increases sorrow, and the more sympathetically as child of God you enter into the life of others, and watch the course of life around you, the more painfully you are affected.
O, it is said so readily, that in God’s providence there is provision for every one’s need.
But who then divides the goods of this earth? Does not the Lord? And is it not then painful to your human perception, to know, that there is so many a poor widow, who looks pale and thin, because with all her trying finds that she cannot earn enough for her living, while so many a rich man, squanders in extravagance great sums of money for which he never did anything, and which he simply inherited?
When there is a pestilence in the land, and you see an only son, who was the support of his poor mother, taken away, while on the street back of her house a good-for-nothing, who regards neither God nor man, is spared, is there then not something in your heart that quails.
For you would say, it lay at hand, that God employed such a pestilence to clear out from His earth a number of useless, wicked people. And see, these He lets stand, and he who was well-nigh indispensable, He takes away.
And what speaks stronger still, because it is so exclusively in God’s power, He will grant unbelief all sorts of men of mighty talent and inborn genius, while Christians in all lands must struggle with mediocrity, wherein no power is.
Even in the animal world you meet with the same problems.
A hart is a noble animal, and will graze with its young, till, see, a tiger rushes from the woods, attacks and murders it amid the mortal terror of the young.
NEVER say, therefore, that God’s doing justifies itself to you, as allwise and allgood.
This can say he who does not think deeply, he who pays no heed to what goes on around him, and who is already so used to the contrasts of life, that they no more affect him.
But if you have still remained young and fresh of heart, and love inspires you, and what you see happen round about you grips you, leaves you no rest and compels you to think, no, then never say, that the common course of life teaches you God’s wisdom and God’s love.
It is rather as though a thwarting power goes through all of life, and as though intentionally God does otherwise, than, as we honestly think, it ought to have come to pass, that in the face of what we see, by faith alone we should hold ourselves to God, and, in spite of every experience of life, should confess, that God is good to all (Ps. 145, 9).
And so it should certainly not be expressed. Of the why we literally know nothing. But this much is certain, that he who lives along with things at large and observes what goes on about him, can only and alone by faith hold on to the wisdom and goodness of God.
As the Psalmist puts it: “The Lord is good to all and his tender mercies are over all his works”; no, this we do not see, and this life does not show us. This can only be witnessed to by the Holy Ghost in your innermost self.
BUT so alone you come to the one true viewpoint, and you have a testimony concerning your God, which neither want nor death can tear out of your heart.
Then your faith in God’s goodness is a conquest, which you have won with spiritual power upon the crushing contradiction of reality around you.
Then the song that God is wise and good, is no longer a child’s exercise to you, which you have sung after others, but it becomes to you a psalm of life, welling up from the inward address of your soul. And then if it goes through fire, and though the waters of bitterest reality threaten to engulf you, you yet triumph, and in the face of trouble and anguish of soul, of want and suffering, of death and grave, you yet sing of the goodness of God.
And then you do not try to explain this, in which you can nohow succeed, and then you do not reason about it, as though to hang your confession of God’s goodness on the cobweb of your reasoning. For then you have the high courage, to look cold-bloodedly the bitterness of your trouble in the eye, and to drink the cup of your suffering to the dregs. And then you do not hide it, that you do not understand God, that of His love you see the contrary, of His wisdom rather the reverse. But yet you hold yourself immovably fast to what your faith in you testifies, and with the Psalmist you continue to jubilate: “The Lord is good to all, good also to me.”
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