Psalm 119:68 You are good, and do good; teach me your statutes. We will not deny that evil is evil, we will make no hard pretence that pain is anything but painful; but leaving that insoluble problem, we may rest, at any rate, in the conviction that pain and misery are the accidents — to a great extent the avoidable accidents — of life, not its end and object; that happiness and blessing so far preponderate over them that every one of us may sincerely thank God for His creation. 1. First, as regards ourselves, pain and sickness are chiefly due to the working of laws which have this obviously beneficent nature that they are meant to warn us against things inherently vile, hateful to God, and destructive to our own nature. Physical anguish and moral remorse, often in the individual, and always in the race, are nothing in the world but a part of the stream of sin taken a little lower down in its course. Man himself, if he would but keep the Ten Commandments, if he would but live in temperance, soberness, and chastity, might, to an immense extent, sweep his own life clean of foul diseases. 2. But even as regards ourselves, pain and sorrow are not only salutary warnings against impurity and excess, but, when rightly borne, they uplift us in every other respect. They help us to endure "as seeing Him who is invisible," they make us yearn for unrealized ideals beyond our small moods and our vulgar comforts; they turn us from the near and the present to the distant and the future; they enable us to pass the death-doom on our mean and shivering egotisms. Take even the most innocent of all our sorrows — the aching anguish of bereavement. When we have lost those whom we have loved, has it not been to thousands simply as a golden chain between their hearts and God? 3. I turn to the lessons which pain and sorrow have for us as regards the world in general. I do not hesitate again to say that they are the stern saviours of society, that they have enriched humanity with its noblest types of character, that they have been as the storms which lash into fury the lazy elements lest they should stagnate in pestilence. (1) For, first of all, they save society from itself. "A dissolute society," says a thoughtful writer, "is the most tragical spectacle which history has ever to present; a nest of disease, of jealousy, of ruin, of despair, whose last hope is to be washed off the world and to disappear." Such societies must die sooner or later by their own gangrene, by their own corruption, because the infection of evil, spreading into unbounded selfishness, ever intensifying and reproducing passions which defeat their own aim, can never end in anything except moral desolation. They go too far, such societies; they overreach themselves; they culminate at last in some hideous crime which awakens the flame of a moral indignation in which all their social shame and gorgeous gluttonies become as scum in the avenging flame. Nor do pain and sorrow only help the deliverers of the oppressed. They tend further to enrich the blood and uplift the ideals of the world. It is the pity for them which kindles the passion of the prophet standing undaunted before angry kings and mocking peoples, and the supremacy of the martyr who wields God's lightning while he stands in his shirt of flame. (Dean Farrar.) Parallel Verses KJV: Thou art good, and doest good; teach me thy statutes. |
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