"All These Things Are Against Me"
A GRIEVOUS mistake the patriarch made when lie uttered that complaint! All things against him? Was it “against him” to have that favorite boy, Joseph, (whose supposed loss he was bewailing,) made the lord of Egypt? Was it “against him” that Benjamin was taken from his arms to be brought back again laden with a brother’s munificent bounty? Was that all-wise Providence, that he so faithlessly distrusted, working “against him” when it evolved at last such a merciful preservation for him and all his house from famine? The man who had wes-ALL THESE THINGS,” ETC. 127
tied with God at Penuel, and experienced the deliverances which the brook Jabbok had witnessed, should never have vented such words as those.
But the race of mistrusting Jacobs has not jet passed away. The assurances of the Christian’s Bible, united to the Christian experiences of forty centuries, have not been suflScient to hinder those who have been tried as Jacob was, from complaining as Jacob did — “All things are against me.” I stand beside the sick-bed of one who is but ill-accustomed to such hours of suffering and pain. His frame is racked with anguish. The fever is drinking dry his blood. On his uneasy bed he tosses to and fro; and as he remembers the many requirements of his neglected business, he is ready to say — “All things are against me!” But in that lonely chamber he is brought near to the gates of eternity. The flames of the pit flash in his very face. His sins rise with appalhng terrors before his awakened conscience. He cries ont — God be merciful to me a sinner!
As he rises once more from that couch of suffering — which has been to him the birth-place of his spiritual life — and goes back again into a world now less dear to him than before, his grateful song is — “It was good for me that I was afflicted! Blessed be God for that near view of eternity! But for that my soul had been lost!”
Mayhap these lines may reach some one who can recall the remembrance of an earthly idol which once held far too high a place in the temple of her affections. Her life was bound up in the life of the lad. To that idol was he “joined;” but a mercifal God would not “let her “all these things,” etc. 12^
alone” in her idolatry. At length the trial came. In terror and dismay she saw how the color began to fade out from the cheek, and the much-loved voice has died into a murmur. Each sweet word fell fainter and fainter from his tongue. The mark of the Destroyer grew fatally vivid, and in her wild despair she cried out — ‘’All things are against me. Let me not, 0 God! see the death of the child!” And when the breath of the departed one no longer fanned her cheek, like David has she exclaimed — “Would God I had died for thee! my son! my son!” But when the first gush of maternal anguish has passed away, she has had time to look about her and see her danger — a danger from which she is now delivered. ISTow she beholds with terror and compunction how ungrateful was that idolatry! how completely her first affec-
<«, tions were stolen from the Saviour — how she was leaning on a reed, and how perilous was that guilty idolatry to her own soul. It is not, therefore, the melancholy pleasure of knowing that that tender plant — taken away by angel-reapers frojn the “evil to come,” — now blooms amid the paradise of God, which alone sustains her, but the sense of rescue from a state of guilt and forgetfulness of God, and a rescue too by the merciful hand of that very neglected and forgotten Father in heaven. This, more than all, fills the smitten soul with a strange and trembling gratefulness, and prompts the heart-breaking confession — “What have I now to do with idols? Whom have I in heaven hut thee f and there is none on earth whom I desire beside thee.”
The record-book of Christian experiences has many such narratives to dis- “ALL THESE TSINGS,” ETC. 131
close. In this way earthly bereavements have been sent in mercy to save the soul from the worst of all bereavements — the loss of God’s favor. Many a commercial bankruptcy has saved from a bankruptcy of the soul. As the idolized riches of this world have taken to themselves wings and flown away, the disappointed soul has been led to look higher — even toward those treasures that no moth can corrupt, and no thief can reach. Many a sick-bed has delivered the sufferer from a bed in hell! “There,” said a young man once, as he pointed to a diseased limb that was destroying his life — “there it is; and a precious treasure it has been to me. It saved me from the folly of youth — it made me cleave to God as my only portion; and I think it has now brought me very near to my Father’s house.” It may be “against” the ungodly worldling to go
;to the house of mourning, but the true saint finds it often a meet preparation for the Marriage Supper. It may go “against” the enemy of God most fearfully, to lay his head on a dying pillow, but to the saint that pillow is one of down; for
“While he feels his heart-strings break,
How sweet the moments roll!
A mortal paleness on his cheek,
But glory in his soul!”
All things are indeed “against” the sinner, while he remains a sinner; but in my Bible I find that “All things work together /or good to them that love God to them who are the called according to His purpose.”