OUR warm sympathy for the world of flowers is no invention of our own heart. God Himself created those flowers for us, and us so, that we enjoy those flowers, feel relation to those flowers, and also can understand the language of those flowers.
For, those flowers address us with a speech, which God has laid in them, and in beautiful forms, luxurious fragrance, in tints that enchant the eye, interpret to us, children of men, the course of our own lot in life.
Scripture therefore never wearies, ever and again to point us to that world of flowers. You know what it relates of the lily among the thorns, and of the rose of Sharon. From the sermon on the mount you know Jesus’ moving reference to the lilies of the field, more beautifully clothed by God, than in all his glory Solomon was ever clothed. And you know no less, how Scripture every time again points you to the grass and to the “flowers of the field,” to remind you of the transitoriness of your human existence.
Especially in the East, where it pleased God to have the Scripture originate, the fieldflower is so incredibly short-lived and evanescent. With the warm climate it springs up as by a wondergrowth quickly in the midst of blades of grass. At once you see a field, that yesterday was green with grass alone, gayly adorned with thousands of little flowers, which opened their yellow and blue and red cups. But just as quickly all that beauty can be gone again. When but for half a day the scorching wind of the desert has passed over it, all the grass lies withered, and amidst that withered grass those thousands of faded fieldflowerets are scarcely any more findable.
And with an eye to this the Psalmist says so beautifully, that your life also is not so unlike to the life of that fieldflower in the grass.
“As for man, his days are as grass, as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth; but just so soon as the wind has passed over it, it is gone, and the place thereof knoweth it no more” (Ps. 103, 15).
ESPECIALLY with the ever continuous dying of so many little darlings that fieldflower addresses you so touchingly, and never better than at the grave of those little ones do you understand that quiet disappearing, as the trackless snatching away of the fieldflower in the grass.
Mature persons in their dying impress us differently. They had taken more root. Long years they had summered and wintered by and with us. Their person and character had assumed more fixed forms. They occupied a broader place. And when finally they left us, we received more the impression of a trunk that was felled, than of a fieldflower, that broke on its stem and at once was gone.
But when God the Lord calls away little children, to come unto Him, is not then that fieldflower, which blossomed so briefly and then so silently disappeared, the touching accurate expression of what you observed?
In that little, young life there was so little trunk as yet, it was still all flower. No flower yet on a high stem, but a fieldflower hidden in the grass and but just lifting up its colorful little head above that grass. And now came the wind from the desert, the wind, that carried in itself the breath of death. And under that touch it succumbed. The litle head bent itself; the colors paled, the unfixed forms melted. And so it disappeared; to leave behind nothing but a hovering image, and round about it memories at play. Memories sacred only in a narrower circle, of which the world has no knowledge, because so young a child is not able to capture a place for itself in that world.
So it was a coming, to go; an appearing, to disappear. And so they die away by hundreds and thousands, those little darlings, known of God, but passed by unnoticed of men.
Fieldflowerets, which God had sown, and which God’s angels plucked away again.
They were not for here.
God had appointed them as ornaments for His holy temple.
That dying of these little ones is therefore so rich in significance; and you miss so much, when you pass lightly over their mysterious disappearing.
When a great man passes away, there is always so much to be said about that great man, that there is almost no notice taken of God’s doing; but at the deathbed and at the grave of an infant God’s doing is so largely the one and all that counts.
That little infant had scarcely yet reason for existence, otherwise than in what God intended to do with him; and of that plan of God with such a child you scarcely knew anything, and even now you know so little. It was as a book of which you read the first ten pages; and then it was taken out of your hands. All the rest of it remains to you always a deep hiddenness.
Neither have you any token, with such an infant, by which to estimate his piety, from which piety to form any idea of his part in God’s grace, and so to place your hope on what was before your eyes. For also in the life of the soul everything was here equally enigmatical. All that was done in and to that hidden life of the soul, was done by God.
Because of his years that infant was still so altogether passive, and a work of grace could be there solely from the side of God.
A single ray of higher light might at times have broken through. A tender childlike word may have sweet echoes in the memory. But yet, all that had too little substance to it, for you to build upon. What with such an infant you build upon, is only what God spake of this little one; what addresses you with all blessing and comfort, is His holy and glorious promise; what as an event of the past pours rest into the soul, is his holy Baptism.
For in that Baptism He told you, that no child can die so young, but that it can have been operated upon by Him with grace.
That you, who are older in years, have read a little more and heard and known, makes no difference.
God’s work of grace is not dependent upon your intellectual development; and the fieldfloweret, that scarcely unfolded to wither again, was as well bedewed by the dew of heaven as the cedar and the palm tree, which still resist the storms.
A CHILD of God therefore tarries with his ponderings so willingly at the dying of the little darlings, because especially at their dying and at their grave God the Lord is so great.
In His doing with these little ones there is such speechless majesty.
We thought we knew them, but understood almost nothing as yet of them, while God saw through and knew all the being of the little ones, knowing all the germs, which for an eternal growth were increated by Himself in their soul.
Just think that an Abraham or an Isaiah, a Paul or a John had died as little lambs, the world would never have imagined from far, what had died away in them, but God would have seen it, and would have been on guard, that with their departure nothing that had aught of eternal worth would be lost.
And therefore it is so offensively foolish of us, to deem, that only they, who have become important personages here on earth, shall also be great in heaven, and as though these millions of little ones, who died young, shall scarcely be of any count.
Why should not God have among these little ones His choice spirits, His chosen instruments?
With us they were conceived and born in sin; of course. They were dead as we, and can have no life except through regeneration, no atonement save in Christ’s blood.
But how great is their advantage, that with them the dying unto sin took already place so early, and that that hard, cruel development of bosomsin, which often weighs so heavily upon God’s children, was almost altogether spared them!
How slow is our development in the knowledge of God, while for them in death suddenly and at once the full light dawned.
Why God calls away one-half of the children of men so early, we know not. What the reason is, that He brings one-half of His elect to blessedness so altogether differently from the other half, that remains behind on earth, is a question, that forces itself upon us every time again, but which God does not answer.
He, the Lord, remains the all-powerful, the Sovereign God, Who doeth not alone with us, but also with our children according to His good pleasure.
But however different our lot may be from theirs, there is connection between their soul’s existence and the life of our own soul.
Not with every child that dies young is there mention of blessedness. Without the deep root of election no blessedness can flower, as little with us as with our baptized children. And so it is believing parents only, of whom it is said, that they must not doubt the blessedness of their children, whom God calls away early from this life.
No sentiment, no emotional play of feeling, faith alone remains here also the starting point.
He who believes, that is to say, he who by a propelling power, that springs from the root of the life of his soul, practices personal fellowship with the Eternal Being, through the Mediator, can in this faith also not let go of his young deceased child, but in his God finds powers, and with his God ways, and in His Word light, and by His Spirit blessed comfort, at the grave also of what was his own flesh and bone, to glory in the face of death, and, with his seed hidden in Jesus, to rest in the majesty of his God.
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