Job 1:21 And said, Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither: the LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away… It sounds a Christian commonplace when we sing that all blessings flow from God. Existence itself, with its range of faculty and wealth of delight, becomes ours by the daily will of God, to be recalled and revoked at His good pleasure. For these unnumbered bounties and benefits we find it easy to bless the Lord who gives. But can we, as we lose them, one after another, also bless the Lord who takes away? How hardly we learn to trust in God the subtractor! Consider, for instance, how springtime belongs to us all to begin with — and bounding health and sunny spirits and the zest of being alive. In life's April we are happy as with a singing of birds in the heart. But the season draws on when He who gave these boons of youth will take some of them, perchance most of them away. And so, too, we have hope granted us to begin with, and generous ambitions, and gallant dreams of what we will be and what we can do. These also are the gifts of God. It is an instinct with the young to gird themselves for the peaks and prizes of life, albeit we see only a few in each generation walking with tranquil breath about those high tablelands, for which we all secretly feel that we were born. And this is not because, as in a competition, some must be first. Real eminence is a region, not a pinnacle, and those who dwell there beckon us up to the ample spaces by their side. Yet the forlorn sense of limitation creeps over most men in middle age. You have measured your own powers by that time, and found the end of your tether. The God who kindled those brave hopes and plans is the God who quenches them one by one. Can we accept our limitation, and gain peace even in what seems defeat and failure, as we say quietly, The will of the Lord be done? Then again, how strangely God often gives a man his great opportunity. Once perhaps in a lifetime the door opens, and he may enter in and obtain his heart's desire and win his fame and success. But it is not for always. The man himself may have no blame to bear. Yet the door shuts again as strangely as it opened, and God has taken the opportunity away. For the rest of his days that man will never go any farther. But when the roses fade out of your own garden, can you say as you stand among their dead petals, Blessed be the name of the Lord? Or think again of friendship, that golden gift of God, which is granted to most of us but for a season. How sadly our dearest friends divide and scatter, or more sadly we outlast their affection. For the bitterest losses and withdrawals of life there is no final or sufficient solution. We can but accept them in blind faith which falls back on the Inscrutable Will. The Lord hath taken away is "the last word that can be said. Nothing can go beyond it, and at times it is the only ground which we feel does not shake under our feet." The Lord Himself is left. And in the hour of our utmost desolation it is He who whispers, "I am thy Youth, and thy Health, and thy Opportunity, and thy Success, and thy Consolation. I am thy Friend and thy Shield, and the whole inward nature lies parched and barren, when impulse flags and sickens, and desire grows languid, and the fountain of love seems shrunken and low. The holiest and most mysterious gifts of God — the touch of His awful presence, the solemn rapture of His communion, the clasp and embrace of His love — they are not with us always. When we say, The Lord gave, sometimes we must say also, The Lord hath taken away. Too many Christians fret and perplex and blame themselves when they sink below the high-water mark of some former experience of the Divine bounty. Yet from the nature of the case that must needs be. No pilgrim to Jerusalem may linger on the shining Mount of Transfiguration. It may be that our Lord's warning against treasures on earth applies to the hoarding up even of spiritual experiences and emotions. The apostle's word that we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain that we can carry nothing out, may prove true at last concerning those inward possessions which even the saints have prided themselves on, and clung to and trusted in. God will bring our very faith to the bare simplicity of childhood, so that we may repose not in our creed, not in our fidelity, but in Himself alone. And thus it comes to pass with the Christian who has suffered the loss of all things, that he gathers grace to bless God even out of that very nakedness to which God has reduced his spirit. Yet the ultimate truth stands sure, that the gifts and calling of God are without repentance. He cannot tantalise His children with a mere loan of blessings which they must so soon lament. What He grants once He never reclaims absolutely and forever. When we confess that we look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come, we affirm more than bare immortality. We mean that the life to come shall realise and make perfect all that this life has come short of, and failed at, and left undone. Heaven for a Christian is the home prepared for his lost causes and unfinished labours and impossible loyalties. Christ Himself has taken charge of all our dead hopes, our ruined plans, our buried joys, our vanished years, our broken dreams. He has laid them away safe in His holy sepulchre. So the resurrection of the dead shall include the blossoming again of every fair thing that has faded and withered out of our hearts. The world to come shall renew all the fulness and glow and passion of existence which this world half bestowed and then extinguished. The time-worn disciple can feel at last detached and disengaged from everything save the Father's perfect will. God has taken away so much from him that he has now so many hostages in Paradise. One after another his treasures have been lifted into heavenly places, until his heart is only waiting for the call to follow and regain them there. (T. H. Darlow, M. A.) Parallel Verses KJV: And said, Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither: the LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD. |
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