Faith in God is faith in His purpose and in His providence It is also acceptance of His will.
1. First of all, there is a desire for help from God. For God has a way of letting the sinner or the sufferer wander on and try all other ways of cure, not to tantalize him with shadows, but to lead him through them to the great reality. He lets the prodigal go far away and deep down among the swine and the husks, and make experience of all man’s friendships, such as they are in his poor circle, and find them all hollow and heartless, that his Father’s house and face may rise glowing before him in the depth of his darkness, and he be driven to know them as never before. So He has suffered us perhaps to wander and exhaust all our strength and hope, sometimes on the world’s pleasures, sometimes its moralities, sometimes on its business, sometimes its philosophy, and still to find the burden and the sore and the void, till, wearied in the greatness of the way, toil-worn and travel-sick, we say, “There is no hope,” that out of our despair this hope may rise like the morning-star out of black night. All other physicians have been tried, that this question may be stirred — “Is there no balm in Gilead ; is there no physician there ?”
2. Next, there is confidence in the love and care of God. No doubt there are mysteries in God’s providence, and there is a necessity that there should be mysteries ; but still the one question remains, “Are the known ways of God so full of goodness that faith in Him for the yet unknown is a claim that He may justly make ?” What are these mysteries? So far as they are of a moral nature, with which alone we are concerned, they arise from this—that all earthly experience is for the education of our souls, in kinship to God Himself; in the notable words of Christ, that we may come to have life in ourselves. It was mystery that made possible the existence of such a being as Christ—the mystery that goodness should suffer, the mystery that the innocent should seem stricken of God and deserted, the mystery that the righteous should be delivered into the hands of the unrighteous, that power should wait upon sin, and the Holy One of the Father have no place to lay His head. Remove such mysteries and you remove the Cross, you remove the spiritual glory of Christ; and human goodness, without a struggle, without a difficulty, without a temptation, could only be spontaneous movements following natural -instincts—that is, it could only be an animal development.
We should become only as God’s creatures who cannot disobey His will, and cease to be His children who give Him our hearts. One of the finest incidents recorded in that “tall quarto of 533 pages” in which Robert Stevenson told the story of his operations at the Bell Eock Lighthouse may here he narrated as it is given in A Family of Engineers. A great storm had broken upon the rock and the ship Pharos riding at her anchor beside it, on September 5, 1807. All the following day it raged with unabated violence, now threatening to tear her from her moorings, now to overwhelm and break her to pieces as she rode. After twenty-seven hours of what to the landsman seemed imminent peril, he made the best of his way aft and saw the tremendous spectacle of the waves. “On deck there was only one solitary individual looking out, to give the alarm in the event of the ship breaking from her moorings . . . and he stood aft the foremast, to which he had lashed himself with a gasket or small rope round his waist, to prevent his falling upon deck or being washed overboard. When the writer looked up, he appeared to smile.”
The writer goes on to record that he had been much relieved by that “smile of the watch on deck, though literally lashed to the foremast. From this time he felt himself almost perfectly at ease; at any rate he was entirely resigned to the ultimate result.” We offer no apology for telling the story as a very perfect allegory of the grandson’s faith. His storm also was long and affrighting, and he was not only “entirely resigned to the ultimate result,” but indeed “almost perfectly at his ease.” The reason was that he too, looking out, had seen a smile upon a certain Face.
Well roars the storm to those that hear
A deeper voice across the storm. [Note: J. Kelman, The Faith of Robert Louis Stevenson, 266. ]
God Thou art love I build my faith on that.
Even as I watch beside Thy tortured child
Unconscious whose hot tears fall fast by him,
So doth Thy right hand guide us through the world
Wherein we stumble . . .
I know Thee, who hast kept my path, and made
Light for me in the darkness, tempering sorrow
So that it reached me like a solemn joy;
It were too strange that I should ‘doubt Thy love. [Note: Browning, “Paracelsus.”]
3. Faith is desire for help and includes a glad hope in a God of all goodness, and then a restful acquiescence in His righteous will. It is held to be righteous, since man’s will is urged to seek righteousness; the pains in nature cease to be an insurmountable obstacle when regard is had to the surest knowledge we possess— knowledge, moreover, which relates to the last and crowning product of the world, namely, the human will. Such faith, as is seen from the circumstances in which it appears, is not a blind, irrational feeling, but a reasonable trust. The highest morality is reasonable; the choice of the highest goodness is wisdom, the fine flower of intelligence, being reason not in the form of abstract knowledge, but as directly applied for the regulation and moulding of life. Hence, as faith in God follows upon that choice; and is in intimate connexion with it, faith is not a product of blindness, but has as one of its elements and concomitants the best kind of intellectual activity, the knowledge which is wisdom.
On the next day I addressed a thousand negro children, and when I enquired, “May I send an invitation to the good Abraham Lincoln to come down and visit you?” one thousand little black hands went up with a shout. Alas, we knew not that at that very hour their beloved benefactor was lying cold and silent in the East room at Washington! At Fortress Monroe, on our homeward voyage, the terrible tidings of the President’s assassination pierced us like a dagger, on the wharf. Near the Fortress poor negro women had hung pieces of coarse black muslin around every little huckster’s tables. “Yes, sah, Fathah Lincum’s dead. Dey killed our bes’ fren, but God be libben; dey can’t kill Him, I’s sho ob dat.” Her simple childlike faith seemed to reach up and grasp the everlasting arm which had led Lincoln while leading her race “out of the house of bondage.” [Note: T. Cuyler, Recollections of a Long Life, 152.]
Whatso it be, howso it be, Amen.
Blessed it is, believing, not to see.
Now God knows all that is; and we shall, then,
Whatso it be.
God’s Will is best for man whose will is free.
God’s Will is better to us, yea, than ten
Desires whereof He holds and weighs the key.
Amid her household cares He guides the wren,
He guards the shifty mouse from poverty
He knows all wants, allots each where and when,
Whatso it to be. [Note: Christina G. Rossetti, Poetical Works, 201.]
