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We know that to them that love God all things work together for good, even to them that are called according to his purpose.—Rom_8:28.
I
All for Good
“All things work together for good.”
i. All things
1. The dark things.—The reference of the text is perhaps more especially to the dark side of things, because the early Christians were more familiar with this aspect. Now, St. Paul’s philosophy of the facts of life is this, that, amid these earthly scenes, the upright, the humble, the pure are in process of being prepared for the power and glory of an endless life. This is his explanation of the world so far as the children of God are concerned with it. Bodily pain, mental disquiet, the secret grief, the burden, bitterness, heaviness that lies upon the heart, behind the mask, often, of a smiling face, the whole complement of experience, is steadily and surely leading up toward a day of interpretation.
When Jacob’s sons returned to Canaan, and told him what had befallen them in Egypt, they seemed to infect him with their own fear. He refused to see anything but the dark side of things. There is a plaintive cadence in his words—
Me have ye bereaved of my children:
Joseph is not, and Simeon is not,
And ye will take Benjamin away:
All these things are against me. (Gen_42:36.)
And he adds forebodings of mischief, grey hairs, sorrow, and Sheol (Rom_8:38). Melancholy Jacob’s faith is not yet perfected. Nursing his sorrow, saturating his mind with self-pity, he finds a dreary pleasure in counting his troubles, and inferring that they are all (the grand total is three!) against him; while we, who know how the drama is unfolding, perceive that all the things in question, and many more, are working together for his good, and that he will live to confess that God has redeemed him out of all evil. God conceals “His bright designs” in order that His servants may learn to trust Him in the dark as well as in the light. It has been finely said, by George Macdonald, that “the secrets God keeps must be as good as those He tells.” And as our knowledge of Him increases, we find, with Whittier,
That more and more a providence
Of love is understood,
Making the springs of time and sense
Sweet with eternal good.1 [Note: J. Strachan, Hebrew Ideals, pt. ii. 125.]
Hours there will come of soulless night,
When all that’s holy, all that’s bright,
Seems gone for aye:
When truth and love, and hope and peace,
All vanish into nothingness,
And fade away.
Fear not the cloud that veils the skies,
’Tis out of darkness light must rise,
As e’er of old:
The true, the good, the fair endure,
And thou, with eyes less dim, more pure,
Shalt them behold.2 [Note: F. M. White.]
The Apostle does not ignore or belittle the disorder and evil that exist; he concedes that the constitution and course of things is not perfectly satisfactory, that man is born to trouble, and that society is full of confusion and sin; he only asks us to postpone sentence upon the facts until the time when an intelligent decision will be possible. The philosophical doctrine called Pessimism,—that the world, if not the worst possible, is worse than none at all—finds no countenance in the Bible. Nevertheless the Bible recognizes the deep and awful disorder that prevails, and the evil that clings to both man and nature.
Love understands the mystery, whereof
We can but spell a surface history:
Love knows, remembers: let us trust in Love:
Love understands the mystery.
Love weighs the event, the long pre-history,
Measures the depth beneath, the height above,
The mystery, with the ante-mystery.
To love and to be grieved befits a dove
Silently telling her bead-history:
Trust all to Love, be patient and approve:
Love understands the mystery.1 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti.]
2. The bright things.—When St. Paul says “All things work together for good to them that love God,” he is not taking a merely negative view of life. It is not only of trials and calamities, of losses and sufferings, that he is speaking. He does not say all trials, but all things—health, strength, youth, beauty and intellect, vigour of mind and vigour of body.
Do honour to your bodies. Reverence your physical natures, not simply for themselves. Only as ends they are not worthy of it, but because in health and strength lies the true basis of noble thought and glorious devotion. A man thinks well and loves well and prays well, because of the rich running of his blood.2 [Note: Phillips Brooks.]
We should be as happy as possible, and our happiness should last as long as possible; for those who can finally issue from self by the portal of happiness know infinitely wider freedom than those who pass through the gate of sadness.3 [Note: Maurice Maeterlinck.]
One shivering evening, cold enough for frost, but with too high a wind, and a little past sundown, when the lamps were beginning to enlarge their circles in the growing dusk, a brace of barefooted lassies were seen coming eastward in the teeth of the wind. If the one was as much as nine, the other was certainly not more than seven. They were miserably clad; and the pavement was so cold you would have thought no one could lay a naked foot on it unflinching. Yet they came along waltzing, if you please, while the elder sang a tune to give them music. The person who saw this, and whose heart was full of bitterness at the moment, pocketed a reproof which has been of use to him ever since, and which he now hands on, with his good wishes, to the reader.1 [Note: R. L. Stevenson, Notes on Edinburgh.]
Spirit of sacred happiness,
Who makest energy delight,
And love to be in weakness might;
Now with enlivening impulse bless,
Now re-confirm our steadfastness,
And make us vigorous and bright.2 [Note: T. T. Lynch, The Rivulet, 90.]
When the physician has prescribed some medicine, we go to the chemist to have it made up; and he takes one ingredient from this phial, and another from that, and another from elsewhere; any one of these taken alone might kill us outright, but when they have been well compounded and mixed they work together for a perfect cure.3 [Note: F. B. Meyer.]
All that is harmony for thee, O universe, is in harmony with me as well. Nothing that comes at the right time for thee is too early or too late for me.4 [Note: Marcus Aurelius, Meditations.]
The Summum Pulchrum rests in heaven above;
Do thou, as best thou may’st, thy duty do;
Amid the things allowed thee live and love;
Some day thou shalt it view.5 [Note: Clough.]
2. In the second place, we must make no mistake about what St. Paul means by “good.” When the Apostle declares that all things work together for good, he is thinking of good in God’s sense of that word. Happiness is one thing, good is another and a very different thing. Good in this sense will, in the long-run, no doubt bring in its turn perfect blessedness; it will bring unsullied and unmixed joy; but good is not happiness, good is not freedom from strife, care, and pain. If we think that all things work together to give the godly man all he desires, to deliver him from trial, trouble, worry, and distress, to make him prosperous, smiling, contented with everything about him, and unruffled in temper, person, and estate, we entirely misread these words, and I we shall in all probability be woefully disappointed.
Many think that the chief end of life is to secure ease and happiness, and they say that the object of all our social and political endeavours should be to provide the greatest possible amount of happiness for the greatest number. That may be good utilitarianism, but it is not Christianity. It is not the Divine idea. If this world had been intended mainly to make the people who live in it perfectly happy, we can only say that it has been constructed on wrong principles. We can easily conceive of a world in which there would be much more happiness than there has ever been, or ever will be, in this. God has a higher purpose. It is to make the world a moral school, a training-place for character; a place in which patience may be learned, and righteousness and strength of soul, and Christ-likeness; a training-place which is to prepare for a better and fuller life hereafter. Those who are called after God’s purpose are called for this—to be conformed to the image of Christ. And St. Paul was thinking of this end, and of this end only, when he used the words,” All things work together for good to them that love God.”
For some of us, perhaps, those words may be associated with a feeling of impatience. We may have heard them used with a narrow view of good, and of the lovers of God, or with a deficient sense of the demand that is being made for faith and farsightedness, or with some lack of that deep and burning reality whereby heart speaks to heart, and wins an answering of assent. But they are among the words that experience fills with light—the words that are real to us in proportion as we ourselves are real. Only lot us try to have a right judgment as to what good is, and we shall rind that there is no sort of trouble that may not work for good to those whose hearts are set, though it be but timidly, towards God; to those who love Him, though it be but vaguely, and who long to know and love Him more. If good meant only comfort and success and security and satisfaction with one’s self, and a life without harassing or pain, the words would be false in principle and in fact. But if good means that for which men were made; if it means purity of heart, and unselfishness, and nearness and likeness to God and liberty and peace, and the power to help others, and the beginning or faint forecast of the life of heaven amidst the things of earth, then one need not live long to see how the words come true. Even the strangest miseries, the saddest hours, the bitterest disappointments, do work for good in this, the one true sense. God sees to it that those who want to serve Him better are not blinded or overborne by these things in His pity He shows them what the trouble really means, Ha releases for them the blessing that is hidden in it. And so that great love of His, which no violence can wrench aside from the souls He seeks, fulfils itself in many ways; even the wildest tumult of this world is constrained and overruled to do Him service; and men look back to the days that were full of anguish and perplexity as the very time when He did most for them—the dawn of clearer light within their hearts, the awaking to truer thoughts of life and higher aims, the first guiding of their feet into the way of peace.1 [Note: Francis Paget, The Redemption of War, 66.]
Have you seen that beautiful play called Eagerheart? The little heroine of the piece has set her heart on entertaining the King in her little room. When she has got everything ready, a poor tired workman comes with his wife and child, very badly dressed, looking very worn and footsore, and says: “Will you take me in for to-night?” Poor little Eagerheart, who has prepared everything for her King, says: “Not to-night; any night except to-night.” “Oh,” says the poor man, “that is what they all say! I have been all through this city, and they have all said ‘Any night except to-night.’ ” Then the poor little woman’s heart melts. “Oh, well, come in, come in! Farewell, my idle dream!” she cries, disappointed, broken-hearted, to think she has lost her chance. Then follow the shepherds and the wise men, and, to her astonishment, they come in their search for the King—to her door; and she says: “But there must be some mistake. This is my poor little humble dwelling; there is no King here.” “Yes,” the wise men say, “he is here.” And there in a blaze of glory, was the infant King of Kings, whom she had taken in in her disappointment.1 [Note: Bishop Winnington Ingram.]
Reciprocal, Love
“Them that love God.” “Them that are called.”
In Jesus, the whole moral life of the Absolute is manifested in integrity and completeness. Can we not love Him? Can we not go even as far as Renan, whom no man would accuse of superstition, credulity, or theological narrowness? And Renan, in his Vie de Jésus, apostrophizes the Incarnate One in these words: “Thou Jesus shalt become the corner-stone of humanity, inasmuch as to tear Thy name from the world would be to shake it to its very foundations; no more shall men distinguish between Thee and God.”1 [Note: B. Wilberforce.]
Begin from first when He encradled was
In simple cratch, wrapt in a wad of hay,
Between the toilful ox and humble ass,
And in what rags, and in how base array,
The glory of our heavenly riches lay,
When Him the silly shepherds came to see,
Whom greatest princes sought on lowest knee.
From thence read on the story of His life,
His humble carriage, His unfaulty ways,
His cancred foes, His flights, His toil, His strife,
His pains, His poverty, His sharp assayes,
Through which He passed His miserable days.
Offending none, and doing good to all,
Yet being maliced both of great and small.
Then thou shalt feel thy spirit so possessed
And ravished with devouring great desire
Of His dear self, that shall thy feeble breast
Inflame with love, and set them all on fire
With burning zeal, through every part entire,
That in no earthly thing shalt thou delight,
But in His sweet and amiable sight.2 [Note: Spenser.]
2. If at any time we should be shaken in our conviction of the blessed end of God’s dealing, by the fear that we do not satisfy the condition of loving Him, then let us remember that this love is not so much a feeling as a posture or habit of the soul. It is clinging to Him. And if He should seem too distant to be grasped, too remote for us to touch even the hem of His garment, so that we cry, “Oh that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his seat!” then let us still further remember that the essence of love is obedience: “This is love, that we should walk after his commandments.” And if we seek to follow His guidance, and submit ourselves to His hand, if we are willing to be made what we wish to become, and to be fashioned after the image of Christ, He will make good His word to us, and perfect that which concerneth us.
Perhaps there is no better daily prayer for the Christian than the collect of St. Gelasius: “O God, who hast prepared for them that love Thee such good things as pass man’s understanding: Pour into our hearts such love toward Thee, that we, loving Thee above all things, may obtain Thy promises, which exceed all that we can desire; through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
3. It is the Divine love that draws the human. “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us.” “We love, because he first loved us.” Our immediate consciousness is just this; we love. Not, we have read the book of life; we have had a glimpse of the eternal purpose in itself; we have heard our names recited in a roll of the chosen; but, we love. We have found in Him the eternal Love. In Him we have peace, purity, and that deep, final satisfaction, that view of “the king in his beauty,” which is the summum bonum of the creature. It was our fault that we saw it no sooner, that we loved Him no sooner. It is the duty of every soul that He has made to reflect upon its need of Him, and upon the fact that it owes it to Him to love Him in His holy beauty of eternal love. If we could not it was because we would not. If we cannot it is because, somehow or other, we will not—will not put ourselves without reserve in the way of the vision. “Oh taste and see that the Lord is good.”
Because Love is the fountain, I discern
The stream as love: for what but love should flow
From fountain Love? not bitter from the sweet!
I ignorant, have I laid claim to know?
Oh teach me, Love, such knowledge as is meet
For one to know who is fain to love and learn.1 [Note: C. G. Rossetti.]
2. With this lesson of uttermost humiliation, the truth of the heavenly Choice, and its effectual Call, brings us also an encouragement altogether Divine. Such a “purpose” is no fluctuating thing, shifting with the currents of time. Such a call to such an embrace means a tenacity, as well as a welcome, worthy of God. “Who shall separate us?” “And no man is able to pluck them out of my Father’s hand.” That is the motive of the words in this wonderful context, where everything is made to bear on the safety of the children of God, in the midst of all imaginable dangers.
Have you not stood sometimes amidst the scene of an awful tragedy; some ancient castle to which has clung the story of dreadful wrong? And, lo, about the walls the ivy creeps, and in the crevices the flowers cluster; and the happy song of the birds and the cooing of doves has gladdened the loneliness; and forth from the ancient towers you have looked across the meadows where the cattle lie, and past the winding river to the silvery sea. Over all the scene was sunshine, stillness, and beauty. Nature had bent in pity and covered up the shame, and breathed about it all a perfect peace. So is it that our Heavenly Father transforms us by His unceasing love and unwearied patience. He doth not slumber nor sleep. It means that no possibility of advantage is suffered to pass unused; no budding promise within us is neglected or withered by the frost; no lightest chance or opportunity of gain is thrown away. Ever watchful, ever careful, ever eager for our greatest good, He that keepeth thee shall neither slumber nor sleep.1 [Note: M. G. Pearse.]
On easy terms with law and fate,
For what must be I calmly wait,
And trust the path I cannot see,—
That God is good sufficeth me.
Knowing
“We Know.”
There is an old German tale which might be a parable of the purpose in our life of the unintelligible things. The story is told of a baron who, having grown tired of the gay and idle life of the Court, asked leave of his King to withdraw from it. He built for himself a fort on a rugged rock, beneath which rolled the Rhine. There he dwelt alone. He hung wires from one wing of the fort to the other, making an Æolian harp, on which the winds might play to solace him. But many days and nights had passed, and winds had come and gone, yet never had there been music from that harp. And the baron interpreted the silence as the sign of God’s unremoved displeasure. One evening the sky was torn with wild hurrying clouds, the sun was borne away with a struggle, and as night fell a storm broke out which shook the very earth. The baron walked restlessly through his rooms in loneliness and disquiet. At length he went out into the night, but stopped short upon the threshold. He listened, and behold the air was full of music. His Æolian harp was singing with joy and passion high above the wildness and the storm. Then the baron knew. Those wires, which were too thick to give out music at the call of common days, had found their voice in a night of stress and storm.1 [Note: John A. Hutton, Guidance from Browning, 101.]
You doubt if there be any God?
Doubt is the torpid man’s complaint;
Still hibernating ’neath your clod,
Your sins and virtues grow too faint.
But come where life is all ablow:
Be a murderer or a saint,
And you will know.2 [Note: Anna Bunston.]
Who of us, in the face of the broad features of everywhere-abounding suffering, dares to repeat the Apostle’s words, or is able to say that he partakes of the bold confidence of his assertion? And yet, how desirable to be able to do so! For that man is certainly to be envied who can contemplate impending famine, pestilence, and war with unmoved confidence as to the issue; who can call to mind all our military establishments armed for conflict, our gaols with their usual quota of men of violence and crime, our madhouses and their deplorable inmates, our hospitals and their patients, our poorhouses and their mass of pauperism, the accidents and fatalities that attend our life, the destitution that everywhere abounds; the different forms of vice and crime that roam at large unassailable by our laws, and, in the presence of all, maintain unmoved that all things work together for good to those who love God.
Fifty years or so before Christ, a cultivated Roman represents himself as discoursing pleasantly with his friends on the momentous question of the supreme good. With great skill and clearness he states and explains the views of the rival philosophers who had made this the subject of elaborate discussion. But, after a calm and dispassionate survey of the whole field, he puts down his pen without a word to indicate in which direction his own preference lay. In this, perhaps, he represented the majority of the thoughtful men of his time. To them, life was a problem without any sure key to its solution, an arena on which incongruous and conflicting forces, whose laws and tendencies were alike inscrutable, played themselves out. It baffled speculation. It refused to be amenable to any theory.
About fifty years after Christ, or a century later, there were living in Rome and its adjacent districts a community of men who had arrived at the most novel and astonishing conclusions on this very point. Though they were few in number, of insignificant position, and counting scarcely any of the learned in their ranks, they were persuaded that all the complex and varied experiences of life were specially disposed to enable them to reach the highest blessedness, and they were not in the least doubt as to what that blessedness was. “We know,” says the Apostle, speaking for his readers as well as for himself, “that to them that love God all things work together for good, even to them that are called according to his purpose.”1 [Note: C. Moinet.]
1. How did St. Paul arrive at this state of certainty?—When St. Paul says “We know.” he is speaking under a persuasion or conclusion to which he was compelled by his religious feeling rising to the degree and temperature of certainty. If God is such an one as we are obliged to believe Him to be, He will surely take care of His own. This is the argument. He frequently uses this formula, “We know.” Thus he says, “We know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain … waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.” Again, “We know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands.” Again, “I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him.” He calls these high matters subjects of knowledge, but in the last analysis they belong to faith, an inward persuasion carried clear up to the threshold of certainty. This spiritual instinct, inward witness, secret inspiration which enabled St. Paul to declare “We know” in relation to invisible, eternal things, is a highly important possession and a rare endowment. There is too much conjecture and doubt in the matter of religious truths, and too little conviction and certitude. We do not get joy out of religion because we are not sure enough about it. Most Christians lack that private assurance which with St. Paul was equivalent to knowledge. This is a great defect in current religious experience; we grope in a fog, we set foot on a void, we do not feel solidity and resistance beneath our tread.
2. How can we arrive at such a state of certainty?
(1) In the first place, we must find an answer to another question—How do we know anything with certainty? Now, we can know a fact intuitively, such as that two straight lines having no inclination towards each other cannot intersect. Or we can know it upon premises of argument and deduction, as when a boy at school assents to a demonstration in Euclid. Or we may be said to know a fact by reason of confidence in the authority or veracity of others, belief in such a case becoming knowledge for all practical purposes.
(2) Now extend the same line of argument to the higher knowledge. It is noticeable that, as we approach the great leading principles and rules of life and conduct and the fundamental thinking that underlies our action, the mind is thrown more upon its own native original powers and capacities; it perceives, it seizes intuitively, in place of calling for laboured proofs and long deductions. For instance, take man himself, and what is good for him, what he ought to be, what type of character he ought to elaborate, how he ought to live and act; or take the idea of God, the Supreme Being, His existence, disposition, and attributes; or take nature, the external world of phenomena, its reality, its uses, value for man; take these large general conceptions that underlie all our life, and the nearer we approach them the more evident it becomes that if they are apprehended at all it must be by the quick instinct and native affinity of the mind for them. This was the origin of St. Paul’s sanguine optimism. His conclusion was not a deliverance of any of the five organic senses; it was not necessarily supernatural inspiration; it was an inference from a set of rational premises. If there is a personal God, who loves rectitude, purity, goodness, then it follows that they also who love these things shall be at one with Him. This is surely a valid piece of reasoning, that God will not disown or ignore in the creature qualities which constitute His own essence and glory. Such moral inconsistency is not conceivable in a being worthy of reverence and worship.
“We know”—we may say with St. Paul—with the cognition of faith; that is to say, because God, absolutely trustworthy, guarantees it by His character, and by His word. Deep, even insoluble, is the mystery, from every other point of view. The lovers of the Lord are indeed unable to explain, to themselves or to others, how this concurrence of “all things” works out its infallible issues in them. And the observer from outside cannot understand their certainty that it is so. But the fact is there, given and assured, not by speculation upon events, but by personal knowledge of an Eternal Person. “Love God, and thou shalt know.”1 [Note: Bishop Moule.]
Literature
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Gardner (C. E. L.), in A Book of Lay Sermons, 181.
Greenhough (J. G.), The Mind of Christ in St. Paul, 165.
Ingram (A. F. W.), The Mysteries of God, 66.
Jones (J. S.), The Invisible Things, 112.
Liddon (H. P.), Christmastide Sermons, 306.
Livesey (H.), The Silver Vein of Truth, 9.
Mackenzie (R.), The Loom of Providence, 9.
Meyer (F. B.), Present Tenses, 132.
Moinet (C.), The Great Alternative, 263.
Moule (H. C. G.), The Epistle to the Romans, 235.
Pearse (M. G.), Parables and Pictures, 59.
Potts (A. W.), School Sermons, 253.
Pulsford (W.), Trinity Church Sermons, 93.
Robinson (C. S.), Studies in the New Testament, 14.
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Tulloch (J.), Some Facts of Religion and Life, 106.
Wellbeloved (C. H.), in The Outer and the Inner World, 103.
Wilberforce (B.), Feeling after Him, 65.
British Congregationalist, Jan. 16, 1908, 60 (Jowett).
Christian World Pulpit, lx. 294 (Norton); lxxiii. 56 (Marshall); lxxvii. 170 (Ingram); lxxix. 101 (Barson).
Homiletic Review, lii. 65.