THE
GARDINER
SPRING
CHAPTER THREE
SUBMISSION
UNDER SORROW
“At the funeral of President Samuel Davies,
(1723-1761) [a former president of Princeton College,] just as the people were
about to take up the coffin, his mother, an aged widow, came to take a last
look at her son. She gazed intently upon him and her tears fell upon the face
of the corpse as she bent over it; and then, stepping back as she still gazed
at him, she exclaimed, ‘There lies my only son, my only earthly comfort and
earthly support. But there [also] lies the will of God, and I am satisfied.’”
This was Christian submission.
Afflictions are [often] sent as a test of this great trait of the Christian
character. Rightly employed, they serve not only to bring out that character,
but to produce and cultivate a satisfied state of mind. It doesn’t consist in
having a stoical insensibility concerning trials; far from it. Natural
affections were given to us so that we would weep for ourselves, and weep also
with them that weep, just as Jesus wept at the grave of Lazarus. It doesn’t
consist in not having a will of our own; but rather in having a chastened and
subdued spirit which submits that the will of God ought to be done, rather than
our own will. There is no greater conquest over a supremely selfish heart than
this. Many a man submits to God’s will because he has to, but a forced
submission is a contradiction. There is no acquiescence when he rebels as long
as he can, and then finally does submit only because he has no other choice because
God is stronger than he is. There are also those who flatter themselves that
they have a submissive spirit, when they actually have nothing to submit to.
They are satisfied with the dispensations of
The only difficulty in exercising a submissive spirit is that men naturally
love themselves more than God. When the carnal mind that is hostile towards God
is subdued, and they love God more than they love themselves and also more than
they do everyone else, this very love of him, if it is active, will give
preference to his will above their own. If our wishes and our will are not as
precious to us as are God’s, then we will have no desire to oppose his will in
any thing. “What pleases him pleases us.” If, on the other hand, we love
ourselves more than we do God; if we love our treasures, our fame, our power,
our children, our friends more than God, we cannot say, when he smites our
idols, “It is well,” because we have no such bonding to the divine will which
leads us to subject our will to his.
Where there is no submission to God’s will, afflictions give rise to morbid
insensibility, discontent, murmuring and rebellion. Where submission to God’s
will does exist, they prove its reality and its value. When the rod of God is
upon our habitation, and we can say, “I am in your hands. Do with me as seems
good and right to you” Jeremiah 26:14
(ESV). When the bitter cup passes
round, and we can say, “Shall I not drink the cup that the Father has given
me?" John 18:11 (ESV), when
the burdened and afflicted soul “delights more in the will of God than in any
thing God’s will can take away,” who will say that afflictions are appointed by
God in vain? One such thought, one such holy emotion, one such act of sweet
submission to the divine will, called into exercise and cultivated by trials,
is worth all the sorrow it costs. It will live and grow and be perpetuated when
this world and its idols and idolatrous attachments have passed away. When
Shimei cursed David, he was able to say, “Let him curse, for the Lord has told
him to,” (2 Samuel 16:11 ESV). When
the enemy fell upon the family of Job, and slew his children and servants; when
the fire burnt up his possessions, and a great wind from the wilderness smote
the four corners of the house, and it fell upon the young men, “Job arose and
rent his mantle, and shaved his head, and fell down upon the ground and
worshipped, and said, “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be
the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21 KJV). When the two sons of Aaron were suddenly
made the victims of God’s displeasure, “Aaron held his peace” (Leviticus 10:3).
Amid all the bitterness of their sorrow, they were happy men. They had no
distrust of God. Unlike the troubled sea, their minds were tranquil. It was
enough to be able to say, “The
Lord reigns, let the earth rejoice!” (Psalms
97:1 ESV). The Holy One of
“Peace all our angry passions then;
Let each rebellions sigh
Be silent at his sovereign will,
And every murmur die,” (Isaac Watts).
Has the God only wise acted hastily in this matter? Is it difficult for you to
believe that perfect righteousness cannot do wrong, that infinite wisdom cannot
err, and that infinite goodness never acts unkindly? If the Sovereign Dispenser
[of your trials] were ignorant and unwise, if he were unreasonable and unjust,
or if he were merely indifferent to the sufferer’s well-being, there might be
ground for complaint. But there is no such God in the universe. A being
possessing such attributes is not God.
We all feel our sorrows, and sometimes so intensely that our confidence in God
is shaken, and it breaks away from its strong foundations. This is wrong. True
piety is confiding, and gives its voice for God even when he “dwells in the
thick darkness.” If we could perceive the reasons and motives of his conduct as
they lie in his own mind, unless we are of a rebellious spirit, we would be
satisfied. God is a Rock; his work is perfect. These painful dispensations, as
we have already seen, are designed to unfold his true character. In view of
them, we may well say with the apostle, “O the depth of the riches, both of the
wisdom and the knowledge of God. How unsearchable are his judgments, and his
ways past finding out,” (Romans 11:33 KJV). We shall know more hereafter in
eternity, and see more clearly how
bright his wisdom and goodness shines in today’s dark dispensations. We cannot
grasp infinity, and it is asking too much of infinite Wisdom, that God ought to
lower himself to our littleness and see every thing the way we do.
“Lord, we are blind, poor mortals blind;
We can’t behold thy bright abode:
Oh, ‘tis beyond a creature mind
To glance a thought half way to God,” (Isaac Watts).
Poor blind creatures are those who desire that we and ours should be in our own
hands rather than in his! His hand reaches through all these checkered scenes
of our earthly existence. It reaches to the chambers of sickness and the bed of
death; it reaches down to the grave, and up from the grave through all the
successive generations of men, and all the relations they bear to him and to
one another, and to the eternity where he dwells. “Such knowledge is too wonderful for
us; it is high; we cannot attain it,” Psalms
139:6. Let us not then sit in judgment on what he does, but rather, “be
still, and know that he IS GOD,” (Psalm 46:10 KJV).
What if he had not sent these trials upon you and yours? What if he had let you
alone? Are you sure your trials would have been fewer or lighter, and your
condition in every way better than it now is? I say, are you sure of this? Are
you sure the time will never come when you will see that it was better for you
that you have been afflicted with the very trials over which you mourn so
bitterly today? Are you sure your departed one would have been as well cared for
better than he or she is now, and that you could have done as well for that
beloved child as God has done? It was rightly the object of your tenderest love
and most cheering hopes. Are you sure that love would not have been grieved,
and those hopes disappointed? Do you know for certain that, foreseeing the dark
shadows upon its pathway, Love greater than yours, and purer, has not taken
your loved one from the evil to come, and housed the person safe from the
storm? Could you say, if he or she had lived, that “the days of your loved ones
mourning would have ended;” that he or she would sin and weep no more? Could
you have introduced he or she into “the general assembly and church of the
first-born,” where the spirits of just men are made perfect, and where angels
are its guardians and teachers, where “the glory of God enlightens it, and the
Lamb is the light thereof?” Why, why look so intently into the grave, and never
beyond it? The departed are not there. It is but the moldering clay house that
slumbers. The intelligent, moral, and immortal one is numbered among the
millions of those ransomed ones, out of whose mouth God has perfected praise. A
voice from that holy world repeats the command, “BE STILL, AND KNOW THAT I AM GOD,”
(Psalm 46:10 KJV). His arrangements in these sorrows may excite an idolatrous
heart to complain and an unyielding heart to rebellion, so that it is none but
a selfish heart which will complain and only a heart with an idolatrous
attachment which will rebel.