Daily Devotionals

Mornings and Evenings with Jesus

Devotional: October 12th

Why then is all this befallen us? - Judges 6:13.

PERHAPS there is hardly a truth that we hold, however firmly, but something far below ingenuity may embarrass by questions which wisdom itself may not be able to answer. And what wonder if this should be the case with regard to an infinite Being, who in none of his works, and by none of his creatures, can be found out unto perfection? Thus some have said, if “God is love,” how comes he to leave so much misery in the world, which he could hinder? Now, we admit the difficulty is great, very great; and there will be many things which we shall be unable to harmonize with the assertion of the Apostle John, -“God is love.”

This difficulty, however, no more belongs to Christians than to other men. All meet with it, all feel it; and as to a deist, he must feel it peculiarly. He believes in a God; but he believes that God is pure, omnipotent, and benevolent, therefore he denies a future state of misery. But he cannot disprove a present state of misery. He therefore only shifts the difficulty instead of removing it. Any misery in God’s empire, since he could have prevented it, is inconsistent with the deist’s notion of a Deity. And yet he goes on reproaching Christianity with what no more belongs to Christianity than to deism. Suppose Christianity had never appeared: suppose it was now destroyed: why, the case would remain the very same; misery would remain, disease would remain, and the sufferings of children too, who have not sinned after the similitude of Adam’s transgression, would remain. God has much to explain hereafter. There is much in his government which seems to be at variance with the doctrine that “God is love;” but that does not prove the doctrine false.

All this is in appearance, and because we have not those views which God has, and which we shall have hereafter. Oh, let us distrust ourselves, and not dishonour God. “If the tree is known by its fruit,” let us remember that there are cases in which the fruit must be judged by the tree. For instance, now, if we knew a person who has been remarkable for wisdom and goodness, and has never done any thing incompatible with these all through life, we repose a kind of implicit trust in him; and should any thing be alleged against his character, what do we? Why, we give him credit till he has an opportunity to explain himself, and we deem it very disingenuous to judge of the whole by a part, and we would rather judge of a part by the whole.

Let us do the same with regard to the blessed God, and let us remember not only that our present faculties, are very limited, and that only small portions of the divine proceedings ever come under our observation, and that we are ignorant of the bearing of these upon others, and also of their issues with regard to the whole, but let us also remember that it is a part of our moral discipline to walk here by faith and not by sight. Let us remember, too, that we are now in a course of training; and if we are in training for a future and an invisible state, the principle of that training must be, and can only be, trust. We may be assured that all God permits is good and necessary upon the whole.

Men will hereafter be made perfectly sensible that they have been the authors of their own misery.

My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure. - Isaiah 46:10.

THE word counsel now signifies advice, direction, deliberation, but when the Bible was translated it more commonly signified scheme, purpose, design. Hence it is said, “He worketh all things after the counsel of his own will.” Hence we read in the liturgy of the Church that from God “all holy desires, all good counsels, and all good works do proceed.” Good “counsels” there, means just aims and designs; they are distinguished from “holy desires” going before, and “good works” following after. Here the word intends the scheme, the purpose, and the design of God with regard to the salvation of his people; and it is so called not because God deliberates or consults, but to show us “wherein he hath abounded toward us in all wisdom and prudence.”

To bring sin into the world was an easy thing; to take it away was a work to which God, and only God, was equal. We have imperfect views of the evil of sin, and also of the holiness and justice of God, and therefore we are not sufficiently struck with the difficulties that stood in the way of our salvation; but God knows them perfectly, and his scheme for removing them all and restoring us to himself is contained in the gospel. And that is what Paul means by “the counsel of God,” which he made the principal subject of his preaching. It was not human science, though he was a man of genius and education, nor the politics of the world, though he knew that the Christian did not abolish the man and the citizen, not the petty interests of mortality; he “looked not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen,” knowing that “the things which are seen are temporal, but that the things which are not seen are eternal.”

He considered himself as “the servant of the most High God, to show unto men the way of salvation,” even Jesus, who is “the way, the truth, and the life;” to show how a rebellious subject can be reconciled to his displeased and injured sovereign, how a wretched slave can be redeemed from the curse of the law, and the bondage of corruption, and enter into the glorious liberty of the sons of God; how the guilty can be justified freely from all things; how the unholy can be sanctified; how the weak can “hold on their way, and wax stronger and stronger;” how the opposed can be “more than conquerors through him that hath loved them;” how the most abject, miserable, and the mortal, and the dying can enter into life eternal; how the poor and the needy can obtain the unsearchable riches of Christ, and be blessed with all Spiritual blessings in heavenly places in him; how (in a word) man, the sinner, can be raised above the angels who never sinned, and not only have life, but have it more abundantly; how sin can be pardoned and yet condemned; how the law can suffer the sinner to escape and yet be fulfilled, and magnified, and made honourable; how mercy and truth have met together, righteousness and peace have kissed each other; how, while he redeems Jacob, he “glorifies himself in Israel;” and how “Glory to God in the highest” can be blended with “Peace on earth and good will toward men.”

This is the counsel of God, the good pleasure of his will, which is to be published to the ends of the earth; and for its universal diffusion the dispensations of Providence are all at work, until “the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together; for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.”