“I do set this Bow in the Cloud”-
“The Lord reigneth.”
No Bow of Promise in “the dark and cloudy day” shines more radiantly than this.
God – my God – the God who gave Jesus, – orders all events, and overrules all for my good!
“When I,” says He, “bring a cloud over the earth.” He has no wish to conceal the hand which shadows, for a time, earth’s brightest prospects. It is He alike who “brings” the cloud, who brings us into it, and in mercy leads us through it. His kingdom ruleth over all. “The lost is cast into the lap, but the whole disposing thereof is of the Lord.” We are tenants at will; but blessed thought, at God’s will. He puts the burden on, and keeps it on, and at His own time will remove it.
Beware of brooding over second causes. It is the worst form of atheism. When our most fondly-cherished gourds are smitten – when our fairest flowers lie withered in our bosom – this is the silencer of all reflections, “The Lord prepared the worm.” When the Temple of the Soul is smitten with lightening – its pillars rent – “The Lord is in His holy temple.” Accident, Chance, Fate, Destiny, have no place in the Christian’s creed. His is no unpiloted vessel, left to the mercy of the storm, -no weed left to the sport of the fitful waves. “The voice of the Lord is upon the waters.” “Fear not: It is I, be not afraid.” There is but one explanation of all that befalls us: “I will be dumb, I will open not my mouth, because Thou didst it.”
Death to the human spectator, seems the most capricious and wayward of events. But not so. The keys of Hades are in the hands of this same reigning God. Look at the Parable of the Fig-tree. Its prolonged existence, or its doom as a cumberer, forms matter of conversation in Heaven; -the axe cannot be laid at its root until God gives the warrent. How much more will this be the case regarding every “Tree of Righteousness, the planting of the Lord?” It will be watched over by Him, “lest any one should hurt it.” Every trembling fibre He will care for, and if made early to succumb to the inevitable stroke, “who knoweth not in all these, that the hand of the Lord hath wrought this? ” (Job 12:9)
Be it mine to merge my own will in His; not cavil at His ways, or seek to have on jot or tittle of that will altered; but to lie passive in His hands; -to take the bitter as well as the sweet, -knowing that the cup is mingled by One, who loves me too well to add one ingredient that might have been spared. “We should say,” says Philip Henry “what pleases God, pleases me. As in active obedience, we do duty because it is His will to command; so, in passive endurance, we bear, because it is His will to inflict.” “Nothing,” says Jeremy Taylor, “does so establish the mind amidst the rollings and turbulence of present things, as both a look above them, and a look beyond them; -above them, to the steady and good hand by which they are ruled; and beyond them, to the sweet and beautiful end to which, by that hand, they will be brought.”
Who can wonder, that the sweet Psalmist of Israel, as he sees it spanning the lowering heavens, should seek to fix the arrested gaze of a whole world on the softened tints of this Bow of Comfort- “The Lord reigneth, let the Earth rejoice.”
“And it shall come to pass,
when I bring a cloud over the earth, that
the bow shall be seen in the cloud.”
-From The Bow in the Cloud: Words of Comfort for Hours of Sorrow by Rev. J. R. Macduff
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