The mysteries of Providence.
"We know not, Israel knew not, by what precise means their deliverance from the hosts of Pharaoh was wrought; we know not by what precise track through the gulf the passage was effected. We know not, and we need not know; the obscurity, the mystery here, as elsewhere, was part of the lesson All that we see distinctly is that through this dark and terrible night, with the enemy pressing close behind, and the driving sea on either side, he led his people like sheep by the hand of Moses and Aaron" (Stanley). And that great event of the Exodus, the mercy and mystery of which were so alike conspicuous, has often been taken as the symbol of those manifold and often mysterious dealings of God with his people in which we can do nothing but believe and trust that, through these deep waters and by these unknown ways, he will bring us out into a full deliverance from all that oppresses us. And for those who trust him this is assuredly what he will do. But the mind cannot keep, and, indeed, it need not, from reverently asking why God's providence is often so full of mystery as well as of pain to men? Calamities frightful in their nature, desolations terrible and widespread, so that human life at times becomes like the prophet's scroll, which was full, both within and without, of mourning, lamentation, and woe. What is to be said of these things? Certainly they are instrumental in much that is good.
HUMAN LIFE OWES MORE TO ITS PAINS THAN TO ITS PLEASURES.
1. How would faith be educated and developed but for the demands made upon it by the trials of life? Trust in God is an absolute essential to the strength, the joy, the power, and the permanence of the Christian life. There must, then, be occasions and demands for its exercise, and the trials of life supply them.
2. What a spur to invention earthly calamities are! Perhaps there is no one single safeguard against such calamities in which we now rejoice, but owed its existence to their occurrence, and the pressure they put upon men to discover such safeguard. Is there a lighthouse anywhere along our coasts but where some gallant ship has, for want of it, gone down with many precious lives?
3. What power there is in life's sorrows to bind together hearts that otherwise would have remained apart! There is a blessed uniting power in sorrow.
4. The calamities of life, when death seems to reign in terrible power, serve to startle the conscience of sinful men, and, as it were, force them to think of God and things eternal (Isaiah 26:9).
5. They strengthen the argument for the future life. The justice and goodness of God could not be maintained, if "in this life only we have hope."
6. The good man is by them drawn nearer to God, and hides the more closely within the blessed shelter of God's never-failing love.
7. They serve as revelations of character to the self-deceived, and show such how far other than they have thought they really are.
8. They teach us to sympathize with the sorrowful. Even Christ learned through the things that he suffered.
9. Suffering is the way to life. "Through much tribulation we must enter the kingdom."
10. They show, what men are apt to forget, that "here we have no continuing city."—S.C.