Do I mean that these disasters come as punishments to the people who are killed by them? That is exactly what I do not mean. It was true of the flood. It is true, no doubt, in many other cases. But our blessed Lord has specially forbidden us to settle when it is true to say that any particular set of people are destroyed for their sins: forbidden us to say that the poor creatures who perish in this way are worse than their neighbours.
‘Thinkest thou,’ he says, ‘that those Galilæans whose blood Pilate mingled with their sacrifices, were sinners above all the Galilæans? Or those eighteen, on whom the tower in Siloam fell, and killed them; think you that they were sinners above all who dwelt in Jerusalem? I tell you nay.’
‘Judge not,’ he says, ‘and ye shall not be judged,’ and therefore we must not judge. We have no right to say, for instance, that the terrible earthquake in Italy, two years ago, came as a punishment for the sins of the people. We have no right to say that the twenty or thirty thousand human beings, with innocent children among them by hundreds, who were crushed or swallowed up by that earthquake in a few hours, were sinners above all that dwelt in Italy. We must not say that, for the Lord God himself has forbidden it.
But this we may say (for God himself has said it in the Bible), that these earthquakes, and all other disasters, great or small, do not come of themselves—do not come by accident, or chance, or blind necessity; but that he sends them, and that they fulfil his will and word. He sends them, and therefore they do not come in vain. They fulfil his will, and his will is a good will. They carry out his purpose, but his purpose is a gracious purpose. God may send them in anger; but in his anger he remembers mercy, and his very wrath to some is part and parcel of his love to the rest. Therefore these disasters must be meant to do good, and will do good to mankind. They may be meant to teach men, to warn them, to make them more wise and prudent for the future, more humble and aware of their own ignorance and weakness, more mindful of the frailty of human life, that remembering that in the midst of life we are in death, they may seek the Lord while he may be found, and call upon him while he is near. They may be meant to do that, and to do a thousand things more. For God’s ways are not as our ways, or his thoughts as our thoughts. His ways are unsearchable, and his paths past finding out. Who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him, or even settle what the Lord means by doing this or that?
All we can say is—and that is a truly blessed thing to be able to say—that floods and earthquakes, fire and storms, come from the Lord whose name is Love; the same Lord who walked with Adam in the garden, who brought the children of Israel out of Egypt, who was born on earth of the Virgin Mary, who shed his life-blood for sinful man, who wept over Jerusalem even when he was about to destroy it so that not one stone was left on another, and who, when he looked on the poor little children of Judæa, untaught or mistaught, enslaved by the Romans, and but too likely to perish or be carried away captive in the fearful war which was coming on their land, said of them, ‘It is not the will of your Father in heaven, that one of these little ones shall perish.’ Him at least we can trust, in the dark and dreadful things of this world, as well as in the bright and cheerful ones; and say with Job, ‘Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him. I have received good from the hands of the Lord, and shall I not receive evil?’
SERMON V. ABRAHAM
(First Sunday in Lent)
GENESIS xvii. 1, 2. And when Abram was ninety years old and nine, the Lord appeared to Abram, and said unto him, I am the Almighty God; walk before me, and be thou perfect.
I have told you that the Bible reveals, that is, unveils the Lord God, Jesus Christ our Lord, and through him God the Father Almighty. I have tried to show you how the Bible does so, step by step. I go on to show you another step which the Bible takes, and which explains much that has gone before.
From whom did Moses and the holy men of old whom Moses taught get their knowledge of God, the true God?