The Consolations of God

“Are the consolations of God small with thee?” — JOB xv. 11.

LIP we could fully tell each other our thoughts of God, or if we could look with perfect clearness into one another’s hearts, and see what thought of the great Father is lying there, no doubt the variety of our conceptions of Him would surprise us very much. He must appear so differently to His different children; and while this difference of our ideas of God indicates, no doubt, in part our blindness and half-sightedness, it indicates still more the many-sidedness of His great nature. He has a different side of Himself to show to each of us.

But this is not all. Not only to different men does God give different impressions of Himself, but on different parts of the same man’s life He shines with very different lights and colors. Can we remember when we were children, and had our own thoughts of God, how very strange, how hard to grasp appeared the pictures of Him which seemed to give our elders such delight; the accounts which we read in grown-up people’s books, or heard in the sermons of grown-up ministers? The truly live and growing Christian might mark the different stages of his advancing life by the different aspects which he saw of God. He might recognize his fifteenth year by one sort of revelation of the Fatherhood, and his twenty-fifth by another, and his fiftieth by another. It would be a noble biography, — the history of the sun’s rising, and of the different stories that it told of itself, the different shadows that it cast, until its perfect noon. It may be that in eternity there shall be some such ageless condition as shall comprise the vision of all ages, and take in at once the whole character of God; but here the beauty of living lies largely in the way in which we are always coming in sight of new characteristics and capacities in Him. I want to speak to-day about God as the Consoler. “Are the consolations of God small with thee?” And I have been led to these opening words by thinking how this side of God’s life shows itself only to certain conditions of this life of ours. It is not for everybody. It is not for the very young and joyous. You would not go to a young man just bursting through the open doors of life, radiant with health, eager for work, with an in finite sense of vitality, and say, “Come, here is God, who consoles men. Give yourself to Him.” To such a soul you have something else to say: “Here is God the strengthened Here is the Setter of great tasks; the God who holds His crown of victory on the tops of high mountains up which His eager-hearted young heroes may climb to win it; the God who asks great sacrifices and who gives glorious rewards.” That is what you would say, or what you ought to say, to the young strong man to whom you want to make God known. You say nothing about the God of repair, the God of consolation, the God who takes the broken life into His hands and mends it; nothing of that God yet. The time will come for that. And is there anything more touching and pathetic in the history of man than to see how absolutely, without exception, the men and women who start out with only the need of tasks, of duties, of something which can call out their powers, and of the smile of God stimulating and encouraging them, — how they all come, one by one, certainly up to the place in life where they need consolation? I will tell you what it seems to me like. Have you ever seen, or perhaps made one of, a party of people who were going to explore some deep, dark cavern, — the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky, or the Catacombs of Rome? They all stand out in the sunlight, and the attendants, who know the journey they are going to make, pass round among them and put into the hands of each a lighted candle. How useless it seems. How pale and colorless the little flame appears in the gorgeous flood of sunlight. But the procession moves along. One after another enters the dark cavern’s mouth. One after another loses the splendor of daylight. In the hands of one after another the feeble candle-flame comes out bright in the darkness, and by and by they are all walking in the dark, holding fast their candles as if they were their very life; totally dependent now upon what seemed so useless half an hour ago. That seems to me to be a picture of the way in which God’s promises of consolation, which we attach but very little meaning to at first, come

out into beauty and value as we pass on into our lives. The nature begins to break somewhere. Perhaps the physical strength gives way first. Long before the courage of the heart or the mind’s quick activity is dimmed, the knees refuse their office and the heart beats slow. It is an epoch in a man’s life when he takes his first medicine to repair the ravages of time, the wear of the machine. Before he has taken food for support; now he take? medicine for repair. He has reached his need of consolation. Or perhaps it is the spirit that gives way before the body breaks. No matter in what order the new need arrives, there is something pathetic in the way in which it comes to everybody. The social life decays, or with one dreadful blow is dashed to pieces. The perfect trust we had in one another is dislodged. The courage goes out on its task and brings back no booty of success. The terrible disappointment in self, the consciousness of sin, bursts or creeps in upon us, and then the hands for the first time are reached out for consolation, and the great doors — which we have hardly noticed as we passed and repassed on this side of the Divine nature, they were shut so close, and we saw so little need of entering this way — are flung wide open to take the tired and disappointed creature in. It is as if we had sailed gayly all day up and down a glorious coast, rejoicing in the winds that swept around its headlands and caught our sails, thinking the bolder the coast the better, never asking whether there were a place of refuge anywhere; till at last the storm burst upon us, and then we never thought the coast so beautiful as when we saw her open an unexpected harbor, and take us into still water behind the rocks that we had been glorying in, out of the tempest’s reach.

The world seems to have lived the same life, with the same succession of experiences in which each man livoe. What is the old story of the book of Genesis but this, — the tale of how the world came to need, and, when it needed, found God the consoler? There was no talk of consolation in those walks beneath the trees, before the sin, when man and his Maker held mysterious converse in ways which we with our blinded senses cannot know. How many ages slipped by so, who can tell? But by and by the, catastrophe whose fruits are in all men’s lives came, and how instantly a new power in God was touched. In all the anger of God in these first chapters of the Book of Life after the fall, we feel still that we have touched a before unmanif ested power of His nature. With the first promise of repair, the first suggestion of a Redeemer, He has opened His power of consolation. It is as if we saw a father stoop, and for the first time pick up and set upon his feet the child who thus far had run strongly on and needed only to be guided. It gives us a new sight into the heart of his fatherhood; and so since Eden the world has rested, not merely on the helps and the commandments, but on the consolations of God.

When we think about the death of children, arid of the other life on which they enter after they have left this world, it seems as if it must be an everlasting difference in that life for them, that they have never known what it is to be consoled by God. That they will be less happy no man can say; for who shall compare with one another the perfect happinesses of Heaven? But surely there must be something of God that has been shown to His venerable servant, who has been consoled a thousand times, whose life has been broken again and again, and again and again repaired by God; something that he knows of God which never can be known to the little child whose life, from its first beginning here to the very end of its eternity, never sinned or sorrowed, and so never needed repair or consolation.

And yet we cannot say how early in this life of ours the God of consolation may be needed, and may show

Himself to the needy soul. I would not seem to count out of my subject for to-day those of my people, the youngest, the happiest, the most hopeful, on whom I should be sorry any Sunday to turn my back and say, “There is nothing for you to-day.” Perhaps their hearts will tell me that they have sorrows and disappointments of their own. And certainly they have, and it is the glory of God’s consolations that they reach every grade and kind of need. The child with his sorrows has as much right to them as the man with his. Indeed, there is one view in which no trouble of man is great enough, and then there is another view in which no trouble of man is too small, to be worthy of touching the heart of God. And so let us count nobody out; let us all come together and try to find what God’s consolations are; try to find how God consoles His people.

1. What I shall say will be good for nothing, will be mere theorizing, unless I simply draw out our own ex perience of God into description, and tell how He really has consoled us all. Let me say, then, first of all, that God is the consoler of man by the very fact of His existence. There is a class of passages in the Bible which to me seem mysteriously beautiful, and which appear to rest the peace of the human soul upon the mere fact of the existence of the larger life of God. Such is that verse of the forty-sixth Psalm, “Be still, and know that I am God.” “Thou shalt know that I, the Lord, am,” is the noble promise that comes again and again, full of reassurance. And when God’s people, trampled, bruised, broken, trodden in the dust in Egypt, asked by Moses for the name of the God who had promised them His deliverance, it was a mere assertion of the awful and supreme existence that was given in reply: “I AM hath sent me.” No doubt in all such cases there is active character within the mere existence and coming out clearly through it, and this character has its declared relations to the man who needs consoling, but still it is primarily the fact of existence. It is because God is that man is bidden to be at peace. And this is not hard to understand. If any body has ever felt that his life, with its little woes, was easier to bear because there were great men living the same human life with him, he can understand it perfectly. The men of larger life of whom he knew never came near him, never touched his life, never spoke to him, perhaps never knew of his existence. It may be they were merely men whose lives he had read in books. For here is one of the greatest uses of really great history and biography, in their peace-giving and consoling power. It was not what the great men of the world had done. It was simply that they had existed. I pity the man who has never in his best moods felt his life consoled and comforted in its littleness by the larger lives that he could look at and know that they too were men, living in the same humanity with himself, only living in it so much more largely.

For so much of our need of consolation comes just in this way, from the littleness of our life, its pettiness and weariness insensibly transferring itself to all life, and making us skeptical about anything great or worth living for in life at all; and it is our rescue from this debilitating doubt that is the blessing which falls upon us when, leaving our own insignificance behind, we let our hearts rest with comfort on the mere fact that there are men of great, broad, generous, and healthy lives, — men like the greatest that we know.

Indeed the power of mere activity is often overrated. It is not what the best men do, but what they are, that constitutes their truest benefaction to their fellow-men. The things that men do get their chief value, after all, from the way in which they are able to show the existence of character which can comfort and help mankind. Certainly, in our own little sphere, it is not the most active people to whom we owe the most. Among the common people whom we know it is not necessarily those who are busiest, not those who, meteor-like, are ever on the rush after some visible change and work. It is the lives, like the stars, which simply pour down on us the calm light of their bright and faithful being, up to which we look and out of which we gather the deepest calm and courage. It seems to me that there is reassurance here for many of us who seem to have no chance for active usefulness. We can do nothing for our fellow-men. But still it is good to know that we can be something for them; to know (and this we may know surely) that no man or woman of the humblest sort can really be strong, gentle, pure, and good, without the world being better for it, without somebody being helped and comforted by the very existence of that goodness.

And now just so it is with God’s life and the life of man. Here is an atheist. He is a thoughtful, conscientious man, but by failure after failure his life has been broken down into a low and hopeless tone. He has come to a terrible doubt whether there is any such thing as be ing good. He seems a mere sham to himself, and all his fellow-men are shams around him. Give what account he will of what men call righteousness, he has really lost the belief of absolute morality altogether. He is demoralized. He has fallen down into the wretched theories of expediency, and he hates himself for lying there, and yet he cannot get away. Does not that man need consolation? Poor fellow, with his broken wings and bewildered brain, where is the man that has any such need as he has to be taken up into some strong, wise arms, and to be refreshed, repaired, remoralized? And then suddenly or gradually it is made known to this man that there is a perfect God. Is that nothing to him? The God does not speak to him yet. He does not know that the God cares for him; not even that the God is aware of him. Only this, that the God is; that purity is not a delusion, and justice not a guess, for there is a perfectly pure, just Being; there is a righteous one. Is it not like the sunrising to that poor broken man? Is he not comforted? I do not believe that there is any darkest, deepest dungeon under any horrible old castle, most utterly and hopelessly out of the reach of sunlight, in which it would not bring a new pang to the heart of the poor wretch imprisoned there if he knew that the sun, which he never saw and never should see again, was gone out of the heavens. Although he lives utterly in the dark, the knowledge that there is sunlight helps him and he is not quite desperate. Although we live petty and foolish lives, the knowledge that there is greatness and wisdom, the knowledge that there is God, is a far greater and more constant consolation to us than we know.

2. But we must go a great deal farther than this. We begin with the knowledge of God’s existence, and that consoles us when we are in perplexity and sorrow. Many and many a heart has entered into that knowledge, and found it the entrance into peace. But what comes next? The sympathy of this same God, whose existence is already real to us. It becomes known to us not merely that He is, but that He cares for us. Not merely His life, but His love, becomes a fact. Surely this is a great step forward. We had to convince ourselves perhaps that there was not something cold and distant in the thought of the divine existence as a source of human consolation. We know that that thought does wonderfully help those to whom it is very real, but it is not so easy to understand beforehand that it will help men to know of the great “I AM.” But here there can be no doubt. Any one will say, “If I could only be sure that He, the God of all things, really cares for me; that when any sorrow comes to me, it strikes right at His heart, and He is sorry too, — if I could be sure of this, I do not know of anything I could not bear. What is there that I could not tolerate? Nay, what is there that I would not almost welcome, if it could by any violence break open a way by which God could come down to me and show me that perfect nature as my friend, my helper, thoughtful for my welfare and my woe?” Nor is this all mere selfishness. I rather like to think that the real rea son why the sufferer rejoices in the sympathy of God is that thereby, through love, that dear and perfect nature after which he has struggled before is made completely known to him. Love is the translating medium. It is not merely that now that whose absolute existence he had comprehended already has become his; that he is reap ing the benefit of that which before he had regarded only as absolutely being. It is not only that the sky, which hung in majesty and peace over the whole earth, at last has dropped its rain upon his garden. It is rather that through this special love for him, the absolute and everlasting Deity has been made known to him. It is that through God’s sympathy he knows God more intensely and more nearly, and so all the consolations of God’s being have become more real to him.

I think that this is so. I think that any sensitive and thoughtful soul will feel the real distinction. And yet I do not think much of such distinctions. I know we do not gain, but rather lose, by any attempt to separate the elements of comfort that come to man’s soul in the one complete round gift of the sympathy of God. Who shall attempt to describe the indescribable, and tell the power of sympathy? You go to see your friend on whom some great sorrow has fallen. You sit beside him. You look into his eyes. You say a few broken and faltering words. And then you go away disheartened. How entirely you have failed to do for him that which you went to do, that which you would have given the world to do. How you have seemed only to intrude on him with vulgar curiosity when you really longed to help him. How many times you have done this, and then how many times you have been afterwards surprised to find that you really did help him with that silent visit. My dear friends, never let the seeming worthlessness of sympathy make you keep back that sympathy of which, when men are suffering around you, your heart is full. Go and give it without asking j ourself whether it is worth the while to give it. It is too sacred a thing for you to tell what it is worth. God, from whom it comes, sends it through you to His needy child. Do not ever let any low skepticism make you distrust it, but speak out what God has put it in your heart to speak to any sufferer. The sympathy of

God for man has just this same difficulty about it, if we try to analyze it. We cannot say that He has done anything for us. We cannot tell even of any thought that He has put into our minds. Merely He has been near us. He has known that we were in trouble and He has been sorry for us.

How do we learn of such a sympathy of God? How can we really come to believe that He knows our individual troubles, and sorrows for them with us? I think that this is a hard question for a great many people. The magnitude of the world, the multitudes of souls that God has made, perplexes many hearts, and makes it very hard for them to believe in personal, individual sympathy and care. More than from any abstract or scientific arguments about the universality of great laws, I think it is the bigness of the world, the millions upon millions of needy souls, that makes it hard for men to believe in the discriminating care and personal love of God for each. Our wider view across the world, the readiness with which we take in all the millions of our fellow-men, makes it harder for us. The Jew, shut up in his little nation, found it easier. In such perplexity what shall we do? I know only the most simple answers. In the first place, give free and bold play to those instincts of the heart which believe that the Creator must care for the creatures He lias made, and that the only real effective care for them must be that which takes each of them into His love, and knowing it separately surrounds it with His separate sympathy. In the next place, open the heart to that same conviction as it has been profoundly pressed upon the hearts of multitudes of men everywhere. It is not inconceivable. It is only the special prominence of certain ideas in our time which have made some people think it inconceivable that a personal God should care separately for every one of His million children. It is not inconceivable when such multitudes of men have conceived it, have rested their whole weight upon that assurance, have run into the shelter of that certainty whenever the storm was too high and too strong for them. Above all, get the great spirit of the Bible. Read into the heart of the Book of Life until you are thoroughly possessed with its idea, — the idea which gives it its whole consistency and shape, the idea without which it would all drop to pieces, — that there is not one life which the Life Giver ever loses out of His sight; not one which sins so that He casts it away; not one which is not so near to Him that whatever touches it touches Him with sorrow or with joy. I know nothing which can secure a man from the sad skepticism about the personal sympathy of God, like a complete entrance into the atmosphere and spirit of the Bible, in which that sympathy is the first accepted fact of life.

3. By His existence and by His felt sympathy, then, God gives His consolations to the souls of those who need them. But more than this. When your friend is in trouble you first of all try to remind him, in some most unobtrusive way, that you are living and that you are his friend. Any little token of your life, a gift of flowers, or any trifle, will do that. Then you go and sit down by him, and without a word let him know not merely in general that you are his friend, but that you are very sorry for him in this special sorrow. But if you really respect him and care for his whole nature, you want to do something more than that. You want, in the kindest and gentlest way, to get certain great consoling thoughts home to his bruised and broken heart. You are not satisfied until the reason, too, has found its consolation, and through its open doors comfort has spread through the part of his nature which is open to that access. And so it is with God. He, too, has His great truths, His ideas which He brings to the hearts He wishes to console. He does not treat His sufferers like children who are simply to be pef.ted with soft words, and patted with soft hands till they forget their grief. He deals with them as men who are capable of knowing the meanings, the explanations, and the purposes of the troubles that come to them. And so He gives them His great truths of consolation. What are those truths? Education, spirituality, and immortality, — these seem to be the sum of them. You are in great distress. Your friend is gone. Your life is broken. Your soul is stunned. Is it possible that, sitting still or walking drearily about in your grief, God should make you know education or the law of growth, the endless principle of the sacrifice of a present for a better future; should reveal spirituality, and make you know the soul’s value as far superior to anything that can concern the outer life; should open to you immortality, and show you the endlessness of His plans, so that what has seemed to your wretchedness to be complete and finished, should appear to be only just begun, and not ready to be judged of yet? Is there no consolation in these great thoughts? They do not take your sorrow off; and oh, my dear friend, whatever be your suffering, I beg you to learn first of all that not that, not to take your sorrow off, is what God means, but to put strength into you that you may carry it as the tired man, who has drunk the strength-giving river, lifts up his burden by the river-bank and goes singing on his way. Be sure your sorrow is not giving you its best unless it makes you a more thoughtful man than you have ever been before, unless it opens to you ideas that have before been unfamiliar; mostly these three ideas, education, spirituality, immortality. Those ideas are the keys of all the mysteries of life, and so the gateways to consolation. And it is wonderful to see how, just as soon as a man is really crushed and sorrowful, God seems by every avenue to be offering those great ideas for that man’s acceptance. He seems to write them on the sky, to whisper them from every movement of the commonest machinery of life, to fill books with them that never seemed to know anything of them before, to make the vacant house and the full grave declare them. You are a child of God whom He is training. You have a soul which is your true value. You are to live forever. Know these truths. By them triumph over the sorrow that He cannot take away, and be consoled.

4. But even this is not’ all. God consoles us by what He is, by what He feels for us, by what He teaches us. But all these, as I tell them over, seem to have some thing passive about them. They show God sitting as it were, and letting His life flow out in blessing upon the emptied life that needs Him. But there is hardly a sufferer who does not crave something more active, if we may say so. He wants to feel, at any rate he thinks how blessed it would be if he could feel, God doing some thing on his life, showing his sympathy by some strong act. “Bow thy heavens, O Lord, and come down,” he cries; “touch the mountains and they shall smoke.” And BO he prays for God to help him, to do something positive for him. What shall it be? Men are puzzled a good deal about prayer nowadays. I suppose a good many men have really stopped praying for some things which they used to pray for, and for some things which God very much wishes them to pray for still. But the prayer of men for what their souls will always count the greatest miracle of God, for spiritual regeneration, for newer, deeper, holier lives, that prayer has probably not been much affected by all the speculations about prayer. It is prayed just as often and as earnestly as ever, and so it will continue to be as long as men’s souls continue to bear witness to the power and reality with which it is answered. “Create me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.” Men will keep on praying that so long as they believe there is a God, even if they have long ceased to pray for the changing of the wind and the stopping of the pestilence. And so when a man in trouble prays God to do something for him, this is the real miracle by which God stands ready to answer that man’s prayer. He will not send an angel as He did to the women at the tomb, but He will come Himself and show His presence and His power by working the miracle of regeneration upon the soul that has cried out for Him. My dear friends, that is the consummate consolation; everything leads up to that. 1 see a poor creature sitting in sorrow. He catches sight of God’s existence and he is helped. God sends him assurance of His sympathy, and a smile finds its way across the face that seemed all given up to sorrow, and looked as if it would never smile again. God teaches him His truth, and the disheartened, heart remembers once more what it was to be brave and strong. But then God comes and takes that soul, and positively, strongly lifts it up and away into the new life. He forgives the man for his sin, and He gives him the new heart. He lays the same strong hand on him that Christ laid upon the leper. He speaks the same sweet word to him that Christ spoke to the adulteress. He forgives him and converts him. He makes him a new man; and then, when the man stands up new, no longer crushed by his sorrow, and yet certainly, thank God, certainly, not having passed out of his sorrow! — but made a new man by the touch of God through his sor row, to him, standing there with his new life before him, a new peace in his face, a new courage in his arm, a new love in his heart, — come to himself as the new man comes by the sacrifice of himself, — come to himself by having come to God, — when we look into his glowing face, and ask the old question that Eliphaz asked of Job, “Are the consolations of God small with thee?” How quick and sure his answer comes back: “No, very great!” Nay, he is able to take these great words of David which it is so terrible to hear people use when they do not mean them, and he fills them with meaning, as he says with serious joy, “It is good for me that I have been afflicted.”

Are the consolations of God small with thee? His existence, His sympathy, His truth, His power. As I recount them all, it seems to me so great and beautiful to be the child of such a God. And pain and suffering grow holy when we think how through them the Father “comes to His children. Let us not be cheated by mere theories to say that sorrow is not dreadful. Let us not stand here in perfect health with our unbroken friendships and dare to say that sickness is not wearisome, and bereavement is not sad. We only mock the sufferers all round us when we say that. It is very cruel. But let us claim that if a man really is close to God there is a victory over the pain and a transfiguration of the sadness. “If a man is close to God.” Can we say that and not remember how the Godhood and the manhood met in the Incarnation? Can we say that and not remember that all we have been saying was supremely realized when the Son of God was born and lived and died for us? God’s being! Who could doubt it, as He walked the streets, and men saw God in His face? He brought it with Him across the threshold of the temple, and through the low doorway of the cottage of Bethany. God’s pity I Who did not bee it as He laid His hands upon the children’s heads and looked down, from the Mount of Olives, on Jerusalem? God’s truth! Who must not hear it speaking as He talks with Nicodemus, or preaches from the mountain? God’s power! What more has it any need of proof, when the finger laid upon the hem of His garment gives the lost health back again, when the death upon the cross is the salvation of the world? All that there is consolatory in God, — being, sympathy, truth, power, — Christ has set in the clearness and the splendor of His life.

And so if you want consolation you must come to Hint. It is not a dead phrase. It was not dead when He spoke it first in Jerusalem, and said “Come to me.” It was the very word of life. You must come to Him, know Him, love Him, serve Him. In His church and His service you must take your place. Nay, let us not say “must.” Our duties are always best stated as our privileges. You may come to Him, for He has said, “Come unto me all ye that are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” May we all come nearer and nearer to Him always, and find peace.