the Third Week after Easter
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Daily Devotionals
Bowen's Daily Meditations
"In a little wrath I hid my face from thee for a moment; but with everlasting kindness will I have mercy on thee." - Isaiah 54:8.
If God withholds from us the tokens of his love, an explanation may almost always be found in the fact that we had made light of them in some way or another. God gives his love unto us that he may draw us by its sweet influences to renounce evil and to embrace good. If we receive the expressions of his loving-kindness and manifest no corresponding readiness to forsake sin, then it becomes needful that we should take lessons in the value and virtue of his love, through the privation of it.
There is amazing condescension in this language. The Lord as it were apologizes to his people. It is but a little wrath; I hid my face for a moment only; I will make it up to you a million fold with everlasting kindness.
We can imagine a certain believer replying; " Thou doest all things well; and after what thou hast already shown of thy wisdom and love, thou canst well be trusted with the government of thy people. Still blame me not, if I urge that thy wrath is something so fearful, so unendurable, that a little of it, even a grain of mustard seed of it, is to our feelings something altogether tremendous and mountainous. If thou pour out thy wrath upon those that know thee not, they may indeed pine for the loss of this and that temporal blessing, but the thought of thy anger gives them not a moment’s unhappiness. But thy love is our life, nay, a thousand times more than life; it is that which raises life to an infinite value; and the loss of it reduces life to an infinite evil. Far be it ever from thee. Lord, to give us to taste of thy unmixed wrath. If it be needful that we should experience a little wrath, let there be much love mixed with it. Let us not be bereft of the promises. Let us see the light shining at the extremity of the dark passage that we have to thread. Treat us not as though we were so insensible to thy love that a large privation of it could be easily borne.
The language of the text will have a different meaning to different believers. Some have been permitted to experience such marvellous discoveries of the grace of God, they have been brought into such secrets of the divine favor, that the privation which seems to them utterly insupportable, would not affect another in the least.
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