THE MISSION OF SORROW

THE MISSION OF SORROW

GARDINER SPRING

CHAPTER ONE

SORROW—GOD’S WITNESS

It must be a hard heart that is not touched with the sorrows of the bereaved. Our sympathy may give courage to the mourner, and relieve his solitude, even where it cannot alleviate his woes. Calamity in every form makes an appeal to every Christian mind for correspondent feeling, for fellowship, for counsel. The sorrows which for months past have inundated this land and which now sweep over it like the waves of the sea [i] have been vividly present to the writer of these pages; and he would gladly give utterance to a few thoughts in which his own heart beats in unison with the afflicted. We weep with those who weep. “A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity, as being ourselves also in the body.” We have all much to be thankful for, and much to mourn over. Sorrow has its approved mission. If the Father of mercies “does not afflict willingly, nor grieve the children of men,” a “needs” be that is absolute and imperative. We should “hear the rod, and Him who has appointed it.”

Atheism is the great vice of the human mind. It is the nature of sin to be blindfold, especially to the existence and attributes and presence of the Great Unseen One. It is the element of sin to live at a distance from God. It is the refuge and triumph of sin, when “the fool has said in his heart, ‘there is no God.”’

“The owlet Atheism,

Sailing on obscure wings across the noon,

Drops his blue-fringed lids, and shuts them close,

And hooting at the glorious sun in heaven,

Cries out, Where is it?”[ii]

There is no more emphatic or terse description of wicked men than they are “without God in the world.” This is their character, and leads to all their negligence, all their unbelief, and all the varied forms of their ungodliness. When a man loses sight of the God of heaven, and has no abiding impressions of Him “in whose hand is the soul of every living thing,” who can measure or limit his roving, or tell where he will stop? Yet to this practical atheism men are everywhere exposed. The tendency to it is strong and seductive, and impelled by all the subtlety of him “who goes about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.”

Men live and go forth into the world, and look on its beauty and its bloom, every planet and star reflecting the image of the Deity, every stream and summer cloud and breathing fragrance all with one voice vocal with his praise; yet they are ignorant of God, estranged from God, alienated from God. What they are taught concerning him, they do not understand, they misinterpret; what they do not misinterpret, they forget, and choose to forget, because they “do not like to retain God in their knowledge.” The language of their hearts is, “Depart from us; for we desire no knowledge of your ways.” They have no notion of being controlled by “a Power above them,” but rather shake off all impressions of religious obligation, that they may sin without restraint and without remorse.

It is a great thought to enter the mind that THERE IS A GOD. The knowledge of God lies at the foundation of all knowledge, of all truth, all morality, all religion, all real and permanent happiness. “This is life eternal, that they might know you, the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”

Just as the whole frame of the universe would totter to its foundation if there were no God, so all sense of moral obligation and all true religion have nothing to rest upon where God is not known. Men must be made to think of God, to see him in some measure as he is, guiding, directing, and governing all things after the council of his own will. They may not stop their ears when he speaks, nor flee from his presence when he comes near; rather must they acquaint themselves as a God at hand, and not a God afar off, and as a very present help in the time of trouble. And this is THE MISSION OF SORROW. It is God’s witness. It speaks for God to this thoughtless and suffering world.

Among the methods pursued in order to set this great and good Being before the minds of men, The Scriptures often advert to the afflictive dispensations of his providence. “The Lord is known by his judgments which he executes.[iii] This is one of the laws of his kingdom. Severe judgments indicate his being, his presence, his displeasure. They testify to his agency in all the affairs of men, and trace them to the great First Cause. A truly devout mind, one would judge, finds some repose here. It is cold comfort to be told that “man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward,” and that it is the law of his being that he must be a sufferer. Yet so it is. It is not more a law of nature that bodies lighter than the atmosphere ascend, and those that are heaver descend towards the earth, than it is the law of his being that he must be a sufferer. Every man knows this; but he would know more. And he may know more. The laws of nature are not fortuitous arrangements, but form the principles on which the God of nature conducts his wise and benevolent procedures throughout the physical creation.

It is our joy to know that there is no such thing as chance in the kingdom of nature. Everything is the result of design, and indicates the all-wise Designer. And is it less so in the moral world, and in the kingdom of grace? It would be a revolting thought that the sorrows, either of good or bad men, are uncaused, undirected, and that no all-unseeing eye restrains and controls them; and that while there is a wise and sovereign Arbiter, who balances the clouds and prepares rain for the earth, and makes the grass to grow upon the mountains, who silences the storm, and says to the invader, “hitherto shall you come, and no further,” there is no such wise and benevolent supremacy over the thousand ills that flesh is heir to. Human life would be scarcely worth enjoying if blind fate were the controller. The more thoughtful and virtuous would reason as some of the wiser heathen reasoned, when, in their attempts to strike the balance between the good and the ill of mans existence, they were driven to the conclusion that it is a doubtful question whether existence is a blessing or a curse.

It is well that the Scriptures put this whole subject at rest, and explicitly instruct us, that whatever the form or degree of suffering in our world, it is the visitation of God. Sickness and poverty, drought and pestilence, disarrangement and perplexity, bereavement and death-no matter what the trial, “affliction comes not forth [from], of the dust, neither does trouble spring out of the ground.” “Shall there be evil in the city, and the Lord has not done it?” Be the means what they may, and the subordinate agents what they may-they be the sword of the enemy, or the sirocco of the desert; be they flood or fire; be they man’s malignity or his envenomed tongue, the hand of God is in all.

It is not always that we realize this great truth. We stop at second causes; yet second causes are but his messengers and do his bidding. And though there are sufferings so fearful that we almost hesitate at attributing them to his providence, yet it is the responsibility of directing them, one which he everywhere assumes, and which he well knows all the reasons for these dark dispensations, until the curtain is drawn aside and lets in upon them the stronger light of eternity. It is enough to know that, though they are the darker expressions of his nature we here behold, and behold with mingled awe and reverence, behind the cloud is the pure Spirit of the full orbed Deity.

The bereaved may indeed, under severe bereavements lose sight of the Sovereign Dispenser. They may grieve the Holy Spirit, and take refuge in some comfortless error, and be submerged in darkness and doubt, and sink in despondency and gloom. But this is not the fitting tendency of their afflictions. When the Lord of heaven and earth thus comes out of his place to judge his enemies or chastise his friends, he sets himself directly before their minds. When he poured his wrath on Egypt, and overthrew Pharaoh and his host in the Red Sea, it was that “his name might be declared throughout all the earth.” When the Destroyer cut off one hundred and eighty-five thousand of the enemies of Israel in a single night, it was to teach Israel and their enemies, that God himself was in the midst of them. When the angel of the Lord smote Herod Agrippa, and he was eaten by worms; when the proud Roman boasted that there was no other God but his sword, and he and his were consumed by lightening from heaven; when the atheist monarch of Assyria affected divine honors, and in despair set fire to his palace and buried himself-in its ruins; when Nebuchadnezzar, for his presumptuous contempt of the Most High, was driven from among men to herd with the beasts of the field and eat grass like oxen; and when Judas want and hanged himself- these and events like these announce the judicial, the executive Deity.

Anyone who reads the prophecy of Ezekiel with care, cannot but notice the reason there given for the desolating judgments spoken of in that prophecy. And what is it? More than seventy times, if I mistake not, it is given in the following words-“THAT MEN MAY KNOW THAT I AM THE LORD IN THE MIDST OF THE EARTH.” It has been well said that “God is in history,” and what lesson does the history of the world and the church inculcate, if not this, that “verily there is a God who judges the earth?”

Men are not apt to stop at second causes, and overlook the great First Cause, when a resistless providence throws them into the furnace. The foundations of their skepticism then give way. Atheism itself is constrained to confess that there is a God in heaven. It is no earthly voice that speaks then. And it falls in the admonitory tones, “See now, that I, even I am he, and there is no strange God with me. I kill, and I make alive; I wound, and I heal-neither is there any that can deliver out of my hand.”

This is a lesson the mourner needs to learn. It is God himself who has smitten you, my afflicted friend. It becomes you to say with one of old, “I was dumb; I opened not my mouth, because you did it.” I repeat it, it was God himself, and not another, who struck the blow. And he meant to do it. “Behold, he takes away. Who can hinder him; who shall say unto him, “What did you do?”

‘Tis God who lifts our comforts high,

Or sinks them in the grave;

He gives, and blessed be his name,

He takes but what he gave.’[iv]

He had a higher claim upon the departed than your fond affection can urge. The beloved one was not yours, but his-his creature, his property, created by him, cared for by him. And has he not a right to do what he will with his own? He has not taken away more than belongs to him, nor anything which he encouraged you to believe you should long enjoy. Your rights are limited and overruled by his. It is now willingly that he afflicts, yet wisely. The season of affliction is one he employs for high and holy purposes, and for nothing more high and holy than that men might know that he exists and governs, and is the Rewarder. When he “bows” his heavens and comes down, and darkness is under his feet,” it is that men may know that “there is the hiding of his power.”

And not infrequently, at such seasons, there are thoughts and views which so fill and absorb the mind that God the Infinite One shuts out every other object. He has access to the mourners, and of set purpose sets them in circumstances well fitted to lead them to see and acknowledge his hand. They are seasonable and well- timed instructions, and not infrequently more effective and profitable than all other teaching, and constrain them to exclaim, “Who teaches like him!”

From blank atheism I know the mind starts back with horror; yet what multitudes are satisfied with a cold and speculative belief of the Divine existence, until they feel the weight of his resistless and invisible hand. It is not the name of God merely that constitutes the Deity, but those attributes and prerogatives which are inseparable from his existence, and of which men have such faint expressions until he speaks from the thick darkness.

God governs everywhere, but there are those who see him nowhere. His providence is concerned in everything but they see him in nothing. They exclude God from his own creation. They have a god in name, but not in reality. They are “without God in the world.” It is to this undutiful, ungrateful, presumptuous, and hopeless state of mind that sorrow comes to speak on God’s behalf, and to remind men how much he has to do with them, and they with him. As our views of God are, so is our religion. The mere thought of God, to a mind that feels it, has more weight than all other thoughts. It is with every man either everything or nothing. It is everything to the children of sorrow.