“O thou who mournest on thy way,
With longings for the close of day,
He walks with thee, that Angel kind,
And gently whispers—‘Be resign’d;
Bear up—bear on—the end shall tell,
The dear Lord ordereth all things well.’”
Our duty, meanwhile, is that of children, simply to trust the faithfulness of a God whose footsteps of love we often fail to trace. All will be seen at last to have been not only for the best, but really the best. Dark clouds will be fringed with mercy. What we call now “baffling dispensations,” will be seen to be wondrous parts of a great connected whole,—the wheel within wheel of that complex machinery, by which “all things” (yes, all things) are now working together for good.
“Lazarus is dead!” The choicest tree in the earthly Eden has succumbed to the blast. The choicest cup has been dashed to the ground. Some great lights in the moral firmament have been extinguished. But God can do without human agency. His Church can be preserved, though no Moses be spared to conduct Israel over Jordan, and no Lazarus to tell the story of his Saviour’s grace and love, when other disciples have forsaken Him and fled.
We may be calling, in our blind unbelief, as we point to some ruined fabric of earthly bliss—some tomb which has become the grave of our fondest affections and dearest hopes—“Shall the dust praise thee, shall it declare thy truth?” Believe! believe! God will not give us back our dead as He did to the Bethany sisters; but He will not deprive us of aught we have, or suffer one garnered treasure to be removed, except for His own glory and our good. Now it is our province to believe it—in Heaven we shall see it. Before the sapphire throne we shall see that not one redundant thorn has been suffered to pierce our feet, or one needless sorrow to visit our dwelling, or tear to dim our eye. Then our acknowledgment will be, “We have known and believed the love which God hath to us.”
“Oh, weep not though the beautiful decay,
Thy heart must have its autumn—its pale skies
Leading mayhap to winter’s cold dismay.
Yet doubt not. Beauty doth not pass away;
His form departs not, though his body dies.
Secure beneath the earth the snowdrop lies,
Waiting the spring’s young resurrection-day.”[9]
Be it ours to have Jesus with us, and Jesus for us, in all our afflictions. If we wish to insure these mighty solaces, we must not suffer the hour of sorrow and bereavement to overtake us with a Saviour till then a stranger and unknown. St Luke tells us the secret of Mary’s faith and composure at her loved one’s grave:—She had, long before her day of trial, learned to sit at her Redeemer’s feet. It was when in health Jesus was first resorted to and loved.
In prosperity may our homes and hearts be gladdened with His footstep; and when prosperity is withdrawn, and is succeeded by the dark and cloudy day, may we know, like Martha and Mary, where to rush in our seasons of bitter sorrow; listening from His glorified lips on the throne to those same exalted themes of consolation which, for eighteen hundred years, have to myriad, myriad mourners been like oil thrown on the troubled sea. Jesus is with us! The Master is come! His presence will extract sorrow from the bitterest cup, and make, as He did at Bethany, a very home of bereavement and a burial scene to be “hallowed ground!”