Quiet Talks by Samuel Dickey: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks About Our Lord's Return: 61. Amidst the Encircling Gloom

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Quiet Talks by Samuel Dickey: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks About Our Lord's Return: 61. Amidst the Encircling Gloom



TOPIC: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks About Our Lord's Return (Other Topics in this Collection)
SUBJECT: 61. Amidst the Encircling Gloom

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Amidst the Encircling Gloom

The making and training of the Hebrew nation was a stupendous task, taking long generations of time, and the infinite patience of God. This is the subject of the first five books. There is given the statement of the light with which they were being entrusted. The books following are concerned wholly with tracing the dimming, and the reviving, of that light. This is the warp into which the whole story is woven. We have often wondered at the use of men so full of failure as were some of the leaders in this national movement. But that use of them does not spell out God's approval, nor even His passing over lightly their evil traits. It spells out His need of men in His great task. These were the best there were of the group that must be used.

The nation reached its greatest extent, and wealth, and national glory, in Solomon. And the same hour revealed its saddest failure in the person of its king. The wisest man by God's gracious gift became in his life the greatest moral fool. Here is revealed afresh the tremendous task to which God had set Himself. The point of greatest gift and opportunity became the point of saddest—up to this time, saddest failure. From that time the going down is steady, with breaks enough to make one see more sharply what a sharp slant down it was.

But as kings failed, prophets came, and amid severest persecution, and with greatest difficulty, held up the light. When the traitor nation lay dismembered in the Babylonian plain, the greatest glory of the light shined out through prophetic torch. The nation's pedigree might be put thus,—a man, tribes, a nation,—yet only in numbers, otherwise an unruly mob; a disciplined nation, ragged remnants of a nation, a Book, an ideal revealed afresh in that Book; such an ideal as could not be found elsewhere, so far had man's fingers loosened their hold on the light.

The nation had failed, yet even in its failure God's wondrous loving wisdom had succeeded in doing measurably what He was aiming at from the first;—the light was preserved in the midst of the gathering gloom. It was not preserved as He had planned. It was not being lived by the nation; so He planned, even as He plans. The greatest light-holder is not a word but a life; not a message, but a message lived.

The Hebrew nation was meant to preserve the light, and give it out to all men; it was meant to walk in the light, and so become in its very life the messenger of light. It was meant to be the doorway through which the Light should come in among men in such a way that they could not fail to understand. Such was God's plan for the Hebrew nation. Its failure reveals anew His matchless wisdom and unfailing faithfulness to His purpose, and His race of men. The utmost that seems outwardly to have been gotten, as they were scattered, was an insufferable egotism that they were God's peculiar people. So their dominant spirit revealed the very absence of the likeness to the God whose favourites they supposed themselves to be.

Yet, in the forbearance of God, the witness was borne. Wherever the Jew went, there was found the synagogue, the Book, the witness to the true God, the shining of the Light of the world. And about these centres, there came to be grouped many drawn out from the surrounding nations by the shining of the clearer light.