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There is a pain that can gnaw like a wolf. Perhaps a word might have been spoken, or a letter written, that would have prevented a journey which ended disastrously, as we on earth use the word. But God has a thousand ways of turning His child back from the wrong path: He can make even asses talk, when those who could speak better are absent or silent. “I being in the way, the Lord led me” must be true, however things appear, and we torment our hearts in vain when we forget this.
What if He, for reasons not told yet, hindered the speaking of that preventing word, the writing of that letter? He can guide by withholding rays of light as well as by causing them to illuminate a path.
We are far too complex in our thoughts of the mercy of God. We need to be simple, and willing to accept simple comfort.
There is quietness and assurance forever in the simplicity of our Lord’s words when “for the first time He opens heaven to faith” and speaks of the many mansions of His Father’s House.{6} He is speaking of something better than mere dwelling places where adventure ends, and we settle down, as it were. The “mansions” are resting places like the stations on the great roads of olden times, where travelers found refreshment as they journeyed on—this was a new revelation about the heavenly life. And our Lord says of this surprising thing, “If it were not so, I would have told you.”
Vistas open with the word. We have been about our Father’s business on the dusty roads of earth. We shall soon be traveling on those other roads; on what errands we are not told, whence and whither we are not told. Do the stars light those great roads like mighty street lamps? We do not know. Only one thing we know: this immeasurable joy, these discoveries of joy will be ours, tomorrow—if it were not so our Lord Jesus would have told us.
We are always moving towards unimaginable happiness though as yet we see only a shadow of good things to come, not the very image of the things. But they are eternal in the heavens. The most satisfying answer to all the questions (that we shall never ask), the most comforting end to the sorrow that seems so comfortless now, the most beautiful end to our story, the most glorious of new beginnings—all this will be, “If it were not so I would have told you.”
Sometimes there cannot be a glimmer of light on this side of time. The snapping of the delicate thread which we call reason can make a sunless gloom, but it cannot disannul the promises of God. “The Lord redeemeth the soul of His servants: and none of them that trust in Him shall be desolate” (“condemned,” or “held guilty,” as in the A.S.V. and marginal reading). The Septuagint of this verse (Psalm 34:22) says gently, “None of them that hope in Him shall go wrong.”
For God sees the whole man, and He has a tender way of looking at a soul at its highest, not its lowest. He does not do as we so often do, misjudge it because of what its diseased mind made its body do in a blind and broken hour. And our dealings are with a Love that can grasp the poor hands as they reach out to Him in that darkness—what father would not do that? And He is our Father.
But when those who have prayed for such a one have no assurance that there was ever any turning to Him who alone can save, then indeed we seem to be viewing a land like that hopeless country the prophet Isaiah describes, whose streams shall be turned into pitch, and the dust thereof into brimstone. “And He shall stretch out upon it the line of confusion and the stones of emptiness.” But a word of peace comes through the confusion: prayer in the name of His Beloved Son does not fall upon stones of emptiness. Sometime, somewhere, we shall know better than we know now how gracious the Lord is. “Thy noblesse and infinite goodness ceaseth not to do well, yea, to the unkind and far turned away from Thee.” Such thoughts do not tend to carelessness. Who could be careless about sin with Calvary in view? It is not by looking at sin that we see it for what it is, but by looking at the love of God and His pure holiness. As we look at that we begin to understand something of the texture and nature of sin.