Daily Devotionals

Devotional: December 21st

A HOPE BORN IN THE DARKNESS

That through patience and through comfort of the Scriptures, we might have hope. - Romans 15:4

WHO can tell how many struggling souls have taken heart again, as they pondered over the sweet stories of sorrow subdued which stud the pages of Scripture like stars in its firmament? The tears shed long ago which God has put "in His bottle," and recorded in " His book," have truly been turned into pearls. That long gallery of portraits of sufferers, who have all trodden the same rough road, and been sustained by the same hand, and reached the same home, speaks cheer to all who follow them. Hearts wrung by cruel partings from those dearer to them than their own souls turn to the pages which tell how Abraham, with calm sorrow, laid his Sarah in the cave of Machpelah; or how, when Jacob’s eyes were dim that he could not see, his memory still turned to the hour of agony when Rachel died by him, and he sees clear in its light her lonely grave, where so much of himself was laid; or to the more sacred pages which record the struggle of grief and faith in the hearts of the sisters of Bethany. All who are anyways afflicted in mind, body, or estate find in the Psalms men speaking their deepest experiences before them; and the grand majesty of sorrow that marks " the patience of Job," and the flood of sunshine that bathes him, revealing the " rod of the Lord," have strengthened countless sufferers to bear and to hold fast and to hope. We are all enough of children to be more affected by living examples than by dissertations, however true; and so Scripture is mainly history, revealing God by the record of His acts, and disclosing the secret of human life by telling us the experiences of living men. But Scripture has another method of ministering encouragement to our often fainting and faithless hearts. It cuts down through all the complications of human affairs, and lays bare the innermost motive power. It not only shows us in its narratives the working of sorrow and the power of faith, but it distinctly lays down the source and the purpose, the whence and the whither, of all suffering. No man need quail or faint before the most torturing pains, or most disastrous strokes of evil, who holds firmly the plain teaching of Scripture on these two points: they all come from my Father, and they all come for my good. It is a short and simple creed, easily apprehended. It pretends to no recondite wisdom. It is homely philosophy, which common intellects can grasp, which children can understand, and hearts half-paralyzed by sorrow can take in. So much the better. Grief and pain are so common that their cure had need to be easily obtained. Ignorant and stupid people have to writhe in agony as well as wise and clever ones; and till grief is the portion only of the cultivated classes, its healing must come from something more universal than philosophy, or else the nettle would be more plentiful than the dock, and many a poor heart would be stung to death. Blessed be God! the Christian view of sorrow, while it leaves much unexplained, focuses a steady light on these two points: its origin and its end. The slings and arrows which strike are no more flung blindly by an "outrageous fortune," but each bears an inscription, like the fabled bolts, which tells what hand drew the bow, and they come with His love.

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