Daily Devotionals

Bowen's Daily Meditations

Devotional: June 21st

"His anger endureth but a moment; in his favor is life." - Psalms 30:5.

The idea is, that his anger is fugitive, his favor perennial. The contrast is between the words moment and life. The contrast is sustained in what follows: " Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning," even in the morning of a day, whose sun shall never go down. Paul renews it in the words, " Our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory." As the ages of our prospective existence unfold to us, the misery of our mortal span will be reduced by an easy arithmetical progression, to something utterly infinitesimal. Seventy years of suffering are not very much in an existence that reaches to a thousand years; far from much, when proportioned to a period of ten thousand years; in a hundred thousand years they are but as a drop to the bucket; in millions of years as a drop to the ocean, a mere thought, a flash of lightning; in eternity, what?

You venture to observe, perhaps, that man is so constituted that the present is to him necessarily like a mountain bounding his vision, and that he cannot be greatly affected by the conception of unending plains stretching beyond.

To man’s true constitution belongs faith, by means of which he soars aloft and looks down upon his past, present, and future. Observe, that the momentary anger bears a most important relation to the eternal favor. It is that you may be led to press more eagerly towards this, and battle more bravely with the enemies that would cut you off from it, that weeping is given to you for a night.

In all God’s anger to his people there is mercy. It is an Unspeakable condescension in him to be angry. He might just put forth his power and sweep you away into everlasting misery. But no! he deigns to express to you his displeasure. Thus did he even to the Ninevites; and they inferred that he might, after all, pardon them.

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