What is an affecting picture of misery?

Posted : 25 May, 2013 08:54 AM

Psalm 119:83 For I am become like a bottle in the smoke, yet do I not forget Your statutes.





What an affecting picture of misery! Not only were his

patience and hope- but his very body-"dried up" by long continued affliction. This is he, who in the prime of youth was

"ruddy and of a beautiful countenance, and goodly to look to,"-

now shriveled up like a bottle of skin, hung up in the smoke!

Such is the mark that the rod of "chastening" leaves on the

body of humiliation. The soul is strengthened-the body

withers-under the stroke. What might naturally have been expected to have been the

result of this lengthened exercise? Saul, under protracted trial,

resorted to the devil for relief. An infidel nation took occasion

from thence to throw off the yoke. Even a good man, under a

few hours' trial, murmurs against God-no, even defends his

murmuring. How did this man of God behave? When his soul

was fainting, his hope in the word kept him from sinking.

Under the further continuance of the trial, the same

recollection gives him support-yet do I not forget Your

statutes.

Now-Christian-do not expect a new way to heaven to be made

for you. Prepare for the cross. It may be-as with David-a

heavy, long-continued burden, and, should it come-look on it

as your appointed trial of faith, and your training discipline for

more enduring conflicts. And remember that your determined

resolution rather to pine away in affliction, than "make a way

of escape" by sin-is the proof of the reality of His own grace in

you, and of His faithful love towards you. Think how honorably

He manifests your relation to Christ, by causing "His

sufferings to abound in you," and making you "bear in your

body the marks of the Lord Jesus." And do you not thus

realize, as you could not otherwise do, the sympathy of our

High Priest, who was Himself "a root out of a dry ground,

having no form nor loveliness, and no beauty that He should

be desired-despised and rejected of men" to the end? Oh,

what a supporting cordial to His afflicted people is the

sympathy of this suffering, tempted Savior!

But to look at David, under his long-continued trials,

preserving his recollection of the Lord's statutes-what a

striking evidence of the presence of his God, and the

sustaining power of his word! If we then-blessed with much

larger Scriptures than he-fail in deriving from them the same

support, it can only be, that we do not search them in a

dependent, prayerful, and humble spirit-that we do not simply look for the revelation of Christ; to mark His glory, and to

increase in the knowledge of Him. In this spirit we should have

more to say of the comfort of remembering the Lord's statutes;

and of their upholding influence, when all other stays were

found as "the trust in the shadow of Egypt-shame and

confusion."

Job's history strikingly illustrates both the trial and its

sanctified results. When "scraping himself with a potsherd,

and sitting down among the ashes,"-the temporary victim of

Satanic power-he might well have taken up the complaint, I

am become like a bottle in the smoke. But when in this hour of

temptation he was enabled to resist the tempter in the person

of his own wife, and commit himself with implicit resignation

into the hands of his faithful God, "What! shall we receive

good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?"-was

not this the confidence,-Yet do I not forget Your statutes?

This confidence is indeed an encouraging seal of the Lord's

love to our souls. For we never should have remembered His

statutes, had He not written His covenant promises upon our

hearts. And how much more honorable to our God is it than

the desponding complaint-"The Lord has forsaken me, and my

God has forgotten me!" Let us watch then against a proud

sullenness under every little trial-such as the coldness of

friends, the unkindness of enemies, or our Father's

providential dispensations. How sinful to allow hard thoughts

of Him, whose name and character, "without variableness or

shadow of turning," is "Love!" A steady trust in the long and

wearisome seasons of tribulation, is indeed "to glorify God in

the fires." Nothing honors Him so much as this enduring,

overcoming faith, persevering in despite of opposition, in

destitution of all outward prospects of relief. It is when "against

hope we believe in hope, not staggering at the promise of God

through unbelief," that we are "strong in faith, giving glory to

God."



by

Charles Bridges

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