And others of you grip hold of your faith, but yet your heart cries out against it. You believe that God is good, but has He been quite good to you? Like Martha, you feel as if you had some doubt; you feel bound in your prayers; you say, "O God, I do not mean to reproach Thee;" weak, sinful if you will, yet the sign of a true follower of the Christ.
And then the enemies of Christ, the worldlings all about in this earth of ours, as they look upon death's ravages, they are saying, "If there were a God, if there were a Father, if there were a great heart that could love, why does not He show it?" Now, I said to you that at first it looks as if nothing but evil came of God's delay to interpose against death; but when you look a little deeper I think you begin to discover an infinitely greater good and benefit come out of that evil.
I must very briefly, very rapidly, trace to you in the story, and you can parallel it in the life of yourselves, that discipline of goodness there is in God's refraining from checking sickness and death. Christ said, the end of it is first of all death, but that is not the termination. Through death this sickness, this struggle of doubt and faith, should end in the glory of God. He meant this: In the preparation of His life and His death the death and resurrection of Lazarus held a central position. It was the turning-point, the thing that determined His crucifixion on Calvary. That tremendous miracle compelled the rulers of Jerusalem to resolve on and carry out His death. That miracle of Lazarus' resurrection gave to the faith of the disciples and of Christ's followers a strength of clinging attachment that carried them through the eclipse of their belief when they saw Him die on Calvary.
Now, what would you say? Was it cruel of Christ to allow His friend Lazarus, His dear friends Mary and Martha, to go through that period of suspense, of anxiety, of sickness, of death, and of the grave, that they might do one of the great deeds in bringing in the world's Redeemer? Oh, men and women, if God be wise, and if God be great, then must it not be that somehow or other the structure of this world is the best for God's end, and our tears, and partings, and calamities but incidents in the grand campaign that shall end in the resplendent glory of heaven? Yes, for the glory of God, and for the sake of others, for the sake of the disciples, for the sake of the world, says Christ, I have suffered My friend Lazarus to die.
"Ah," you say, "you have still got to show God's goodness and kindness to me individually. My death may be for God's glory, it may be for the good of others; but how about me and those who mourn?" Well, now, look at it. You must get to the end of the story before you venture to judge the measure, the worth, of God's goodness. After all, was that period of sickness and death unmitigated gloom, and horror, and agony? Oh, I put it to you, men and women, who have passed through it, watching by the death of dear father or mother that loved the Lord and loved you, and whom you loved—dark, and sore, and painful enough at the time; but oh, if I called you to speak out, would you not say it was one of the most sacred periods of your life—the unspeakable tenderness, the sweet clinging love, the untiring service, the grateful responses, the sacredness that came into life? Ay, and when the tie was snapped, the new tenderness that you gave to the friends that are left, the new pledge binding you to heaven, and to hope for it, and long for it—death is not all an evil to our eyes. Death cannot ultimately be an evil, since it is universal—the consummation, climax, crown of every human life. Ah, if we had the grander majesty of soul to look at it from God's altitude, we should call death, not a defeat, but a victory, a triumph. I think sometimes that if death did not end these lives of ours, how weary they would get. Think of it—to live on for ever in the sordidness, in the littleness, in the struggle, the pain, the sin of this life of ours. Oh, we need that angel of death to come in, and now and then stir the pool of our family life, that there may be healing in it, that there may be blessing in it! Death, holding the hand of God through it, to those that stand by and see the sweetness of human love, the triumph of faith celestial, has a grandeur in it, like Christ's death on the cross; it hides out of sight of the people the ghastly, the doubt-creating features and elements of its external impediment—death becomes God's minister. It is going home to one's Father.
Yes, but you want the guarantee that death is not the end, and that day it was right and lawful for Christ to give it, to anticipate the last great day, when in one unbroken army, radiant and resplendent, shining like jewels in a crown, He shall bring from the dark grave all that loved Him, fought for Him, and were loyal to Him on the road, and went down into the dark waters singly, one by one, in circumstances of ignominy often, and yet dying with Christ within them, the Resurrection and the Life.
Ah, that great, grand vindication of God, and interpretation of this world's enigma was made clear that day when Christ called Lazarus back, and gave him alive to his sisters in the sight of His doubting disciples, in the sight of those sneering enemies. And what I like to think as best of all and most comforting of all is this, that Christ did that deed of love and goodness to hearts that so misunderstood Him, were so ignorant of His glory, denied and disbelieved so much of His claims, were then and there so despairing, so hopeless, that perhaps it was only in one heart, the heart of Mary, there was hope or faith like a grain of mustard-seed. Yet He did it. Why? He whom He loved died, and they whom He loved mourned. It was not that they loved Him; it was that He loved them.
Ah, when I read sneers at the simple Evangelical Gospel that says, "Put away all thoughts of earning heaven; your good works are rags"—true enough, true enough—the sneers are mistaken. It is a very grand Gospel that, for what it says is this, "There is hope, salvation from sin, life eternal, for you and for me, not for anything in us, nor for anything we can do, even if we did the best we could. We hold the hope and confidence of redemption, resurrection, in our hearts, because the God that made us loves us;" and so—as I read lately in a recently published book, amid much that I think is foolish, what yet struck me as singularly tender and true—"When in the hour of death we cry, 'Good Lord, deliver us,' we might stop and leave out the 'deliver us.' It is quite enough if we are dying in the arms of a God that is good."