The Everlasting Arms
O great Heart of God! whose loving
Cannot hindered be nor crossed,
Will not weary, will not even
In our death itself be lost — Love divine! of such great loving,
Only mothers know the cost — Cost of love, which all love passing,
Gave a Son to save the lost.
Saxe Holm.
Bible words are for all ages. What God said to Moses was for him, but it is for us as well. The promises are like the stars; they shone down on Abraham, on David, on Jesus; but they shine down on us with the same light. Wherever we find a word which God gave to any of his children, even thousands of years since, we have a right to appropriate it to ourselves, just as if it were now spoken directly out of the heavens to us.
This is the true way to read the Bible — to let it speak always directly to us. Its words are like bubbling springs by life’s wayside. For
86 ages, pilgrims have been drinking from them as they passed by. To-day, you and I come weary and thirsty, and we stoop and dip up the sweet water, as sweet to us as it was to those who first drank of it when the spring was opened. Every precious word in the Bible is for us, if we are God’s children. For example, here is a word that was first spoken among the blessings wherewith Moses, the man of God, blessed the children of Israel. But it is present tense: “Underneath are the everlasting arms;” so it is true always for every believer.
The Bible is a book of love. The heart of God beats in all its chapters. So long as sorrow, suffering, weakness and need are in the world, so long will the Bible have a welcome among men. In a thousand gentle ways does it reveal to us the affectionateness and tenderness of God. What could be more sweet and winning than the thought of the everlasting arms underneath God’s child?
The words suggest the truth of the divine upholding, support and keeping. There is great comfort in this view of our relation to God. This is a large world. It is full of dangers and trials. Circumstances, not under our control, would crush us, if we had to contend with them in our own strength. None of us live
87 long until we learn that we cannot take care of ourselves. How comforting it is then to have such a vision as this — held in the embrace of everlasting arms! We are not fighting our own battles, unaided. We are not alone, unsheltered, unprotected, in this great world of danger. We are kept — kept by the power of God. God’s omnipotence encircles us and enfolds us. The things that are too strong for us, we need not fear, for almighty arms are about us. “Underneath are the everlasting arms.” Our part, then, is simple trust. The picture suggested is that of a little child, held in the strong arms of a father who is able to withstand all dangers and to shelter his child from the same.
There is a special thought here for the children. A strangely sweet Messianic promise in Isaiah reads: “He shall gather the lambs with his arm, and carry them in his bosom.” The lambs cannot walk all the long, rough way, when the flock is led out to find water or pasture. They sink down in the heat, or on the steep hills. Does the shepherd then go on with his flock, and leave the fainting lambs to perish? No; he gathers them with his arms and carries them in his bosom.
One of the most beautiful things in all the Bible is the gentleness of God everywhere shown
88 toward the children. In the old Jewish church they were early given to God and the wings of the divine shelter were spread over them. The most minute rules were given for their instruction, that their minds might be filled with holy thoughts. In the New Testament, no picture is more beautiful than that of Jesus taking infants in his arms and blessing them.
There is a special thought here also for the old. At life’s two extremes we find weakness, defencelessness. Childhood, with its innocence and inexperience, cannot care for itself. Then old age, with its infirmities, its dimness of eye, its trembling limbs, cannot stand before the roughness and under the burdens of life. But there is a promise which says: “Even to your old age I am he; and even to hoar hairs will I carry you: I have made, and I will bear; even I will carry, and will deliver you.” The old people need not be afraid as their infirmities multiply, and as dangers thicken. “Underneath are the everlasting arms.”
God comes to us, first, in our infancy, in our mothers, who bear us in their arms. All love is of God; mother-love is likest God’s of all human loves. The old Jewish rabbis used to say, “God cannot be everywhere, and therefore he made mothers.” A mother’s arms are under-
89 neath her child in its infancy. Most of us know what mother-love is. Perhaps those who have lost it know best what it is, for while we have it we cannot see all its beauty; only when it is gone, is all its preciousness revealed. Our mothers leave us after they have taught us in their own life a little of God’s tenderness, but God himself remains and his arms never unclasp.
After Horace Bushnell’s death, they found, dimly penciled on a sheet of paper, these words: “My mother’s loving instinct was from God, and God was in her in love to me, first, therefore; which love was deeper than hers and more protracted. Long years ago she vanished, but God stays by me still, embracing me in my gray hairs as tenderly and carefully as she did in my infancy, and giving to me as my joy and the principal glory of my life, that he lets me know him and helps me, with real confidence, to call him my Father.”
This thought is very beautiful. Mother-love is God’s love revealing itself first to the child in tender human ways which it can understand. It could not then be made to know God’s love in any other way. If God should appear, his glory would terrify the child. By and by the mother vanishes, but the lesson has been learned;
90 the love remains — revealed no longer in the human voice and touch and help, yet no less real, no less tender, and infinitely deeper and stronger and more lasting. The mother does her work for her child when she has taught it the love of God. Then she goes away. What mother-love is to the infant, heart-filling, satisfying, God’s love is to the motherless old man who rests in the clasp of the everlasting arms.
In this world of peril, the place of the believer in Christ is in the clasp of God’s love. In one of the great freshets of the West, when the wild waters spread over the valley, bearing trees and fences and crops and buildings in their floods, some men in a boat saw a baby’s cradle floating amid the wreckage. Rowing to it, they found the baby dry and safe, and sleeping sweetly in its warm blankets. So, amid earth’s perils and wrecks, the feeblest of God’s little ones are kept, secure and unharmed, in the everlasting arms. “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee.”
There are some definite suggestions in the figure of an embracing arm. What does an arm represent? One thought is protection. A father puts his arm about his child when it is in danger. God protects his children. Temptations beset us on every hand. Many people think of dying
91 with dread, fearing to meet it. But life has far more perils than death. It is easy to die when one has lived truly; it is only entering into joy and blessedness. But it is hard to live. At every point there are perils. We need protection. Here we have it. “The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.” There is an invisible protection. One morning the servant of the prophet arose and looked out of the window and saw Syrian soldiers encircling the town. “Alas! my master; how shall we do?” he cried in alarm. But the prophet answered calmly, “Fear not: for they that be with us are more than they that be with them.” The servant looked out again, and lo! the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire, round about Elisha. Inside the circle of soldiers was a circle of heavenly protection. Whatever dangers beset the Christian there is an unseen defence. “Underneath are the everlasting arms.”
Another suggestion is affection. The father’s arm about the child means love. The child is held in the bosom, near the heart. John lay on Christ’s bosom. The shepherd gathers the lambs with his arms and carries them in his bosom. This picture of God embracing his children with his arm, tells of his love for them.
It tells also of intimacy, closeness of relation. The bosom is the children’s place.
There is yet a tenderer phase of the thought here, for it is especially in the time of danger or suffering that the mother carries the child in her arms. She takes it up when it has fallen and hurt itself, and comforts it by holding it in her arms. When it is sick she bears it thus and presses it to her bosom. When the minister went to baptize a sick child the mother told him it had scarcely been out of her arms for three days and nights. This is a peculiar privilege of love, therefore, for times of pain or suffering — to be held in the arms — and tells of peculiar sympathy and tenderness in our heavenly Father for his children, when they are in pain or in trouble. This is one of the blessings of suffering of which we do not always think — that it gets us the inner place of divine affection, nearest to the Father’s heart. God draws us nearest when we are in trouble or in pain.
“As feeble babes that suffer,
Toss and cry and will not rest,
Are the ones the tender mother
Holds the closest, loves the best;
So when we are weak and wretched,
By our sins weighed down, distressed,
Then it is that God’s great patience
Holds us closest, loves us best.”
The arm is also the symbol of strength. A mother’s arm may be physically frail, but love makes it strong. The arm of God is strong. It is omnipotent. It supports the worlds. When that divine arm is folded about a feeble child, all the power of the universe cannot tear it away. We know what it is, even in human friendship, to have one on whose arm we can lean with confidence. There are some people whose mere presence gives us a sense of security. We believe in them. In their quiet peace there is strength which imparts something of itself to all who come near them. Every true human friend is more or less a strength to us. Yet the finest, securest human strength is only a little fragment of the divine strength. This is omnipotence. “In the Lord Jehovah is everlasting strength.” There is an arm that never can be broken, and out of its clasp we never can be torn.
Another thought in the everlasting arm is endurance. There might be protection, affection and strength, and yet the blessings might not last. We have all these in human love, but human arms grow weary, even in love’s embrace. They cannot long press the child to the bosom. Here is a man whose arm is paralyzed and hangs powerless by his side. No more can that arm
94 wind itself about the feebleness which it has so long and with such gentleness embraced. But the arms of God are everlasting. They shall never grow weary. It is everlastingness that is the highest blessedness of divine affection and care.
A young man stood by the coffin of his beloved wife, after only one short year of wedded happiness. It was very, very sweet, — the clasp of that love, but, oh, how brief a time it lasted, and how desolate now was the life that had lost the precious companionship! A little baby, two weeks old, was left motherless. The mother clasped her baby to her breast and drew her feeble arms about it in one long, loving embrace; but the child will nevermore have a mother’s arms about it, for even God cannot twice give a mother. So pathetic is human life, with its broken affections, its little moments of loving, followed by separation, its winding of arms around the life only to be torn away in an hour. But here is something that lasts, that knows no separation, that never unclasps. The arms of God are everlasting. Neither death nor life can separate. The mountains shall depart, crumble, vanish, but God’s kindness shall never depart from his child.
There is a very sacred thought in the word
95 “underneath.” A father tried to save his child in the waves, clasping his arms about the loved form. But the arms were too weak and the child slipped from them, sank away in the dark waters and perished. But the arms of God are underneath his children and no one can sink out of their embrace. These arms are always underneath. The waves of sorrow are very deep, but still and forever, underneath the deepest floods are the everlasting arms. We cannot sink below them. If we lie down in sickness, the everlasting arms are underneath us. If human friendships are stripped off and we stand alone in our bereavement, still we are not alone. He who changes not abides with us. Underneath are the everlasting arms. God remains and God suffices. Then, when death comes and every earthly thing is gone from beneath us and every hand unclasps from ours and every face of love fades from our eyes, and we sink away into what seems darkness and the shadow of death, it will be only into the everlasting arms. When Jesus was dying, he said, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” He found no darkness, no loneliness, — only the everlasting arms. That is what dying is to every believer in Christ — out of the earth’s weariness into the bosom of Christ.
We need to train ourselves to trust God unwaveringly. Yet it is here that so many are weak. They are not sure of their trust in Christ, and therefore they are easily alarmed. Trouble dismays them. Their peace is broken with small cares and trials. They have little zeal in Christian work. They are easily discouraged. Their religion is a matter of temperature, rising and falling like the mercury. They begin things and drop them. Their praying is fitful. Their good resolves are like summer blossoms which fall off when the first frost comes.
If our minds were stayed on Christ, we should have perfect peace. If we realized that the eternal God is our refuge, and that the everlasting arms are truly underneath us, our joy would not fluctuate as it does, nor our zeal be so fitful. The revival we need is a closer relation with Christ, a deeper repose in him, a more trustful settling down upon him and upon his atoning work. Then nothing could disturb our confidence, chill our ardor, or hinder our consecration. Then in sorrow we should rejoice, in temptation we should be victorious, in all life we should be strong.