the Third Week after Easter
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Daily Devotionals
Mornings and Evenings with Jesus
Surely the. wrath of man shall praise thee. - Psalms 76:10.
THIS is, indeed, far from being the natural design and tendency of it. In this sense, “the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God.” But his wisdom and power are infinite; and by his overruling providence he causes the expression of human rage to conduce to the display of his own glory, and thus turns the curse into a blessing. The Bible abounds with instances of this, and a very striking exemplification will be found in the case of Jehoiakim, king of Judah.
Jeremiah was commanded to write on a roll all the words which had been denounced against Israel and Judah. This he did by means of Baruch, who not only transcribed the roll, but read it in the court of the temple of the Lord, the people standing underneath. Michaiah heard him, and related the substance to the princes, who were assembled in the scribes’ chamber, in the house of the king. The king immediately ordered Jehudi to go and fetch the roll. “Now, the king sat in the winter-house, in the ninth month; and there was a fire on the hearth, burning before him. And it came to pass, that when Jehudi had read three or four leaves, he cut it with the penknife, and cast it into the fire that was burning on the hearth.”
Vain rage! would this hinder the execution of the threatenings? Nay; it could not prevent the infliction of them. Jeremiah is ordered to take another roll:- “After that the king had burned the roll, and the words which Baruch wrote at the mouth of Jeremiah, saying, Take thee again another roll, and write in it all the former words that were in the first roll, which Jehoiakim, the king of Judah had burned.” Nor was this all: the roll, instead of being eventually destroyed or injured, was even enlarged and improved. But since the days of Jehoiakim there have been, and there are to be found, persons who would destroy the Scriptures.
We seem to shudder at the very proposal; we wonder that any person should be capable of such an action as this wicked king, who cut to pieces the divine roll and threw it into the fire. About one hundred and seventy years before Christ, Antiochus caused all the copies of the Jewish Scriptures he could find to be burnt; and three hundred and three years after, Dioclesian, the Roman emperor, by an edict, ordered all the Scriptures to be committed to the flames; and Eusebius, the historian, tells us he saw large heaps of them burning in the market-place. We have heard of Voltaire and Paine, and other lampooners and revilers of the Bible, who have, by their deeds, more than betrayed the wishes of their hearts; and every wicked man, though restrained from burning the Bible, may be considered as an enemy to it.
Men make the Book their enemy, and then they become its enemies, and hate it, because it does not prophesy good of them, but evil. As Carlile, the infidel, said to Mr. Wilberforce, “I’ll bear nothing from that book. How can you suppose that I can bear that book? For, if that book be true, I am a miserable man.”
Go home to thy friends, and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee, and hath had compassion on thee. And he departed, and began to publish in Decapolis how great things Jesus had done for him; and all men did marvel. - Mark 5:19-20.
OFTEN when men do good they think more of their own advantage and praise than of the objects of their beneficence; not only their left hand must know what their right hand is doing, but all the neighbourhood, and all the nation, if possible. But, in the pure benevolence of our Saviour, there was no ostentation; it terminated with the individual. When the poor widow of Nain was bemoaning the loss of her son, the prop of her life, whom she must now see no more, mark the delicacy of the Saviour: “He gave him to his mother.”
What a trophy this poor man would have been of his power, had he chosen to exhibit him, to introduce him on every occasion to the company or to the congregation. But no; this was his language: “Go home to thy friends, and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee, and hath had compassion on thee.” There is nothing in the religion of Jesus unnaturally to disarrange the decorum of social or domestic life. He that is not relatively godly is not really so. A man who is bad at home is bad throughout. It was a wise reply of Whitfield, when asked, Is such a man a good man? “How should I know that? I never lived with him,”
The religion of Jesus Christ calls us into the world as well as out of it. It calls us out of the world as to its Spirit and maxims, and into it as the sphere of activity and place of trial. The idea of living among the Gadarenes must have been uncomfortable to the renewed mind of the poor man. Yet he is directed to go without murmuring or gainsaying; not indeed in the spirit of the Pharisee to say: “Stand by, I am holier than thou;” nor of the rigid and bigoted professor, who, while he confesses that “a man can receive nothing unless it be given him from above,” is occupied all day in maligning and censuring his neighbours, but to display a heavenly meekness and the gentleness of Jesus Christ in his conduct and conversation; to relate his recovery, to honour the Physician, and to direct others to him.
And there is nothing strikes like a fact. What attention in the neighbourhood the case of this poor man would excite. Don’t you remember John such a one, the poor demoniac who has been dwelling among the tombs? he is now dispossessed and tranquillised, and is become as gentle and mild as a lamb; he is the most benevolent creature in the neighbourhood, and is ever engaged in doing good. We should take especial care, while we recommend religion to others, that we ourselves are the subjects of it.
Many professors had better be dumb as stones for the good they effect by all they say. Oh, it is a moral sickness to hear them talk of the “precious Saviour,” of “communion with God,” and “the gospel,” while they are at the same time vain, proud, worldly-minded, covetous, hard-hearted, and unforgiving. May the Lord give us consistency of character, sanctify our tempers and our tongues, and make us in our actions such as we are in our words, that we may make known to others the mercy we have ourselves received; that like Andrew we may find a brother Simon or like Philip a friend Nathaniel; or, like the woman of Samaria, we may bring a whole neighbourhood to Christ.
