The Faithfulness of God from
Night Watches by John McDuff. Your unfailing love, O Lord,
is as vast as the heavens. Your faithfulness reaches beyond
the clouds. Psalm 36 verse 5. It has been well said that the
universe around is a parable of grace. Just as the mountains
surround and protect Jerusalem, so the Lord surrounds and protects
His people, both now and forever. But more stable than even these
types of immutability in the kingdom of nature is the word
of a covenant-keeping God in the kingdom of grace. These mountains,
nature's best emblems of steadfastness, may depart and the hills be removed. But, says their Almighty Maker,
my kindness shall not be taken from you. We can look upwards
to the stars of night and see the faithfulness of God established
in the material heavens. They continue to this day according
to your plans, for all are your servants. But these are feeble
types and symbols of brighter constellations in the spiritual
firmament, the declarations of an unchanging God. Your word
is forever settled in heaven. What a gracious assurance amid
our own unfaithfulness. The Lord is faithful. that the
unfaithfulness of the believer never alters and can never alter
the faithfulness of God. My soul, anchor yourself on this
rock of the divine veracity. Take hold of that blessed parenthesis
which has been to many a tossed soul as a polar star in its nights
of darkness. Having loved His own which were
in the world, He loved them unto the end. He loves them in life,
loves them in death, loves them through death, loves them into
glory. Are you not at this hour a monument
of God's faithfulness? Where would you have been had
not the magnet of His grace kept you and drawn your fugitive affections
toward Himself? from how many temptations has
He rescued you, laying hold of you on the precipice when about
to plunge headlong down, employing sometimes constraining grace
and other times restraining grace, making this your brief history,
kept by the power of God, and overruling all, all for His own
glory and your own good. I love to think of your faithfulness,
O Tried Stone, laid in Zion. You were tried by the law, by
justice, by the fierce assaults and temptations of Satan, by
the mockings and revilings and cruelties of wicked men, and
yet you remained faithful. You have been tried in another
sense by prophets and apostles, by martyrs and saints, by youthful
sinners and aged sinners, and dying sinners. And you have been
found faithful by all and to all, and you are faithful still. Reader, never suppose, amid the
faithlessness of Earth's trusted friends, that you are doomed
to thread your way in loneliness and solitude. There is more than
one Emmaus journey. The abiding friend is still here. He is always the same. He faints
not, neither is weary. His faithfulness is a tried faithfulness. His word is a tried word. His friendship is a tried friendship. He is always better than his
word. He pays with interest. Oh, who could bear life's stormy
doom? Did not your word of love come
brightly bearing through the gloom, a peace branch from above? Then sorrow touched by you grows
bright with more than rapture's ray, as darkness shows us worlds
of light we never saw by day. When I think that at this very
moment the eye of that faithful Savior God is upon me, I will
lie down and sleep in peace. For you alone, O Lord, make me
dwell in safety. Psalm 4 verse 8