the Third Week after Easter
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Daily Devotionals
Bowen's Daily Meditations
" He will not always chide, neither will he keep his anger forever." - Psalms 103:9.
The believer walks as seeing him who is invisible, and receives everything from the hand of his heavenly Father. He does not overlook the part that he himself may have had in bringing about a calamity; nor the part that his fellow-men may have had in it; nor the agency of evil spirits; nor the laws of nature, if so you choose to call them; but after noticing these causes his soul looks away to the Great Cause, to him who sitteth upon the throne of the universe and is not unmindful of a fluttering sparrow.
God has not given a constitution to the universe that limits in the least his power to deal, at any and every moment, with each individual soul in the way that his blessed impulses may suggest. How lamentably defective, how strangely erring are those philosophies that imagine that the Almighty has tied up his own hands, and only loosens them at some great intervals to give the machinery of creation a new activity. Men in general conceive of God as without present liberty to do anything in the universe; with far less faculty of spontaneous action than they themselves possess. They may like or dislike, give or withhold, but God must let the course of nature flow unbrokenly on. But the Christian is not thus without God in the world. Not only are all things of him, but all things are through him and to him. He is not only at the beginning and end of time, but present with all his works throughout the entire course of time.
The Christian knows that there is a relation connecting him and God, and he sees and knows all things in this relation. You might suppose, perhaps, that in the day of his affliction it would be an aggravation of his grief to recognize God as the author of it; but I assure you that he is not at all willing to exchange this conviction for the notion that his affliction came undesigned. " Let me rather," he says, ’ feel that God is chiding me, than that God is without care for me. Woe is me, if I am cast adrift upon the ocean of circumstances. I would not desire a heaven that circumstances could give me. The light and glory of this universe is gone, the dignity of existence is destroyed, the attraction of the future is no more, when it becomes doubtful that God is in immediate relation with every one of his creatures. I know that He is mine and that I am His; and when He chides, I accept it as a gracious token of his interest in me, and rejoice to think that it will soon be succeeded by tokens of a heavenlier kind. If he chide, it is but for a small moment, the smallest possible moment that the necessities of my nature will admit of."
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