Mar 15
7
THE LITTLE WHILE
“In just a little while I will be gone, and you won’t see me anymore. Then, just a little while after that, you will see me again.” —John. 16:16
Long seem the moments when we are separated from the friend we love. An absent brother—how his return is looked and longed for! The “Elder Brother”—the “Living Kinsman”—sends a message to His waiting Church and people—a word of solace, telling that soon (“a little while”), and He will be back again, never again to leave them.
There are indeed blessed moments of communion which the believer enjoys with His beloved Lord now; but how fitful and transient! Today, life is a brief Emmaus Journey—the soul happy in the presence and love of an unseen Savior. Tomorrow, He is gone; and the bereft spirit is led to interrogate itself in plaintive sorrow—”Where is now your God?” Even when there is no such experience of darkness and depression, how much there is in the world around to fill the believer with sadness! His Lord rejected and disowned—His love set at nothing—His providences slighted—His name blasphemed—His creation groaning and travailing in pain—disunion, too, among His people—His loving heart wounded in the house of His friends!
But, in just a little while, and all this mystery of iniquity will be finished. The absent Brother’s footfall will soon be heard—no longer “as a wayfaring man who turns aside to tarry for a night,” but to receive His people into the permanent “mansions” His love has been preparing and from which they shall go no more out. Oh, blessed day! when creation will put on her Easter robes—when her Lord, so long dishonored, will be enthroned amid the Hosannahs of a rejoicing universe—angels lauding Him—saints crowning Him—sin, the dark plague-spot on His universe, extinguished forever—death swallowed up in eternal victory!
And it is but “a little while!” “Yet a little while,” we elsewhere read, “and He that shall come, will come, and will not tarry.” “He will stay not a moment longer”, says Goodwin, “than He has despatched all our business in Heaven for us.” With what joy will He send His mission-Angel with the announcement, “the little while is at an end;” and to issue the invitation to the great festival of glory, “Come! for all things are ready!”
Child of sorrow! think often of this “little while.” “The days of your mourning will soon be ended.” There is a limit set to your suffering time—”After you have suffered a while.” Every wave is numbered between you and the haven; and then when that haven is reached, oh, what an apocalypse of glory!—the “little while” of time merged into the great and unending “while” of eternity!—to be forever with the Lord—the same unchanged and unchanging Savior!
“A little while, and you shall see Me!” Would that the eye of faith might be kept more intently fixed on “that glorious appearing!” How the world, with its guilty fascinations, tries to dim and obscure this blessed hope! How the heart is prone to throw out its tendrils into the earth, and get them rooted in some perishable object! Reader! seek to dwell more habitually on this the grand consummation of all your dearest wishes. “Stand on the edge of your nest, pluming your wings for flight.” Like the mother of Sisera, be looking for the expected chariot.
“He is faithful that promised.”
THE FAITHFULNESS OF GOD
“Your unfailing love, O Lord, is as vast as the heavens; your faithfulness reaches beyond the clouds.” Psalm 36:5
It has been well said, that “the universe around is a parable of grace.” “Just as the mountains surround and protect Jerusalem, so the Lord surrounds and protects his people, both now and forever.” But more stable than even these types of immutability in the kingdom of nature, is the word of a Covenant-keeping God in the kingdom of grace. These mountains (nature’s best emblems of steadfastness) may depart, and the hills be removed, “but,” says their almighty Maker, “my kindness shall not be taken from you!” We can look upwards to the stars of night, and see the “faithfulness” of God “established” in the material heavens- “They continue, to this day, according to your plans; for all are Your servants.” But these are feeble types and symbols of brighter constellations in the spiritual firmament- the declarations of an unchanging God- “Your word is forever settled in heaven!”
What a gracious assurance amid our own unfaithfulness, “The Lord is faithful!”- that the unfaithfulness of the believer never alters, and can never alter– the faithfulness of God. My soul, anchor yourself on this rock of the Divine veracity. Take hold of that blessed parenthesis which has been, to many a tossed soul, as a polar star in its nights of darkness- “Having loved His own which were in the world, He loved them unto the end.” He loves them in life- loves them in death- loves them through death- loves them into glory!
Are you not at this hour a monument of God’s faithfulness? Where would you have been, had not the magnet of His grace kept you, and drawn your fugitive affections towards Himself? From how many temptations has He rescued you- laying hold of you on the precipice, when about to plunge headlong down; employing, sometimes constraining grace, at other times, restraining grace- making this your brief history– “Kept by the power of God,” and overruling all- ALL for His own glory, and your own good?
I love to think of Your faithfulness, O “Tried stone,” “laid in Zion.” You were tried by the Law- by Justice- by the fierce assaults and temptations of Satan- by the mockings and revilings and cruelties of wicked men; and yet You remain faithful! You have been tried in another sense by Prophets and Apostles; by Martyrs and Saints; by youthful sinners, and aged sinners, and dying sinners- and You have been found “faithful,” by all and to all; and You are faithful still!
Reader, never suppose, amid the faithlessness of earth’s trusted friends, that you are doomed to thread your way in loneliness and solitude. There is more than one ‘Emmaus journey’. The “abiding” Friend is still here! He is always the same. “He faints not, neither is weary!” His faithfulness is a tried faithfulness. His word is a tried word. His friendship is a tried friendship. He is always better than His word. He pays ‘with interest’!
“Oh! who could bear life’s stormy doom,
Did not Your word of love
Come brightly bearing through the gloom
A peace-branch from above!
Then sorrow touched by You, grows bright,
With more than rapture’s ray,
As darkness shows us worlds of light
We never saw by day!”
When I think that at this very moment the eye of that faithful Savior God is upon me– “I will lie down and sleep in peace, for you alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety.” Psalm 4:8
THE HOSPICE OF TRUST-John MacDuff
“Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”
“What I do you know not now; but you shall know hereafter.” John 13:7
Most gracious Refuge, specially built on the Hill Difficulty, designed for Faint-hearts and Feeble-minds–weary ones, in their nights of toil and darkness. This saying of the Savior can be condensed in two words, “Trust Me.”
There is much in life’s pilgrimage and its complexities which must be left to faith, and much that is baffling to sight; much demanding the surrender of our own wills and the merging of them in a Higher. “All these things are against me,” said the stricken patriarch. He lived to cancel and reverse this impeachment of the divine faithfulness, and to recognize the love and mindfulness which in an impatient moment he had disowned.
The great apostle of an after age descried the kindling fires of persecution. Too surely anticipating the battles of the faith, he could see little with the eye of sense save conflict and suffering. But faith takes him within the Gospel Hospice. Amid present insecurity, it whispers of nobler things in reversion. Faith puts into his lips this song in the night, “We know that all things work together for good.” He trusted his Lord’s “hereafter” promise, and he lived to make this entry in the diary of his own personal experience, “The things which have happened unto me have fallen out rather unto the furtherance of the gospel.”
It is for us to honor God by implicit reliance on His word.
“You may not see that all is good–
The bow is broken in its strength;
But what is now misunderstood
Will have its ‘wherefore’ solved at length.”
“Providence,” says Flavel, “is like a curious piece of tapestry, made up of a thousand shreds, which, single, we know not what to make of, but put together and stitched up orderly, they represent to the eye a beautiful history.”
“His plans, like lilies pure and white, unfold.
We must not tear the close-shut leaves apart;
Time will reveal the calyxes of gold.”
When the pillar-cloud, as with Israel of old, conducts, not by the short and easy way to Canaan, but by the circuitous route and through the depths of the sea, it is for us to offer no remonstrance, but, with unmurmuring submission and unreasoning faith, to hear the directing Voice, the “marching orders”–“Speak unto the children of Israel, that they go forward.” The Savior’s promise will be abundantly ratified “beyond the flood.” But even in this world it is partially fulfilled.
Not a few can endorse the Psalmist’s averment, “They went through the flood on foot; there [in the very pathway of trial] did we rejoice in HIM.” And if not at the time of chastening and affliction, “yet nevertheless afterward” the need-be is often unfolded, the peaceable fruits of righteousness are yielded and made manifest. But for the diverse sorrows of David, and of the subsequent Babylon minstrels, the best and most affecting portions of the Psalter would have been lost to us.
The eyes of the pilgrim disciples on the way to Emmaus were “closed, so that they knew Him not.” Their hopes had suddenly undergone a great eclipse. The “Sun of their soul” had set in darkness. Tears of blissful communion were a memory–no more. They gazed on the cloud, but there was no trace of the rainbow. They could but echo the dirge wailed by others, “They have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid Him.” But in due time He revealed Himself–“Their eyes were opened, and they knew Him.” Hastening to the upper room in Jerusalem, they joined in the briefest but gladdest of songs which thrilled on the lips of those there assembled, “The Lord is risen indeed!” (Luke 24:34.) The Divine dealing is often not at once but gradually explained. The clouds of mid-day and afternoon slowly but surely take on their crimson and silver linings in the western sky.
“You noble few, who here unbending stand
Beneath life’s pressure! yet bear up awhile,
And what your bounded view, which only saw
A little part, deemed evil, is no more;
The storms of wintry time will quickly pass,
And one unbounded spring encircle all.”
“And it shall come to pass, that at evening time it shall be light.”
“This is the resting place, let the weary rest. This is the place of repose.” Isaiah 28:12