TENDER DEALING FROM THOUGHTS
OF GOD by John McDuff 1864 How precious are your thoughts unto
me, O God! Therefore, behold, I am now going
to allure her I will lead her into the wilderness and speak
tenderly to her." Hosea chapter 2 verses 14 and 15. Therefore
has a strangely beautiful connection in this verse. God's people had
been grievously backsliding. He had been loading them with
mercies, and they had been guiltily disowning his hand. They had
taken the gifts and spurned the giver. She did not know that
I gave her corn, and wine, and oil, and multiplied her silver
and gold. No. More, she had shamelessly
gone after her lovers. She had deliberately preferred
the ways of sin to the ways of God. What will his thoughts be
towards this treacherous one? Can they be anything else but
those of merited retribution? Casting her out and casting her
off forever? We expect when we hear the concluding
word, therefore, that it is the awful summing up of his controversy,
the turning of the judge to pronounce righteous sentence. We listen. But lo, only utterances of love
are heard. Therefore, I am now going to
allure her. I will lead her into the wilderness
and speak tenderly to her. There, I will give her back her
vineyards. This is the way he deals with
his people still. They often forget him in the
glare and glitter of prosperity. He then hushes the din of the
world, takes him out into the solitudes of trial, and there,
while obeys, humbled, chastened, he unburdens in their ear his
thoughts of love, forgiveness, and comfort. Oh, what infinite
tenderness characterizes the dealings of this heavenly chastener!
How slow to abandon those who have abandoned him! Every means
and instrumentality is employed, rather than leave them to the
bitter fruits of their own guilty estrangement. The kindest human
thoughts towards an offender are harshness and severity, when
compared with his. What were the thoughts, the deeds
of the watchman in the Song of Solomon towards the bride, as
she wandered disconsolate in search of her heavenly bridegroom,
and that, too, in consequence of her own unwatchfulness and
sloth? They tore off her veil, smote
her, reviled her, and loaded her with reproach. But when she
found her lost lord, though she had kept him standing amid the
cold dews of night, he smites her not, he abrades her not. No angry syllable escapes his
lips. He brings her into the wilderness
and speaks comfortably to her. And the next picture in the inspired
allegory is the restored one coming up from that wilderness,
leaning on her beloved. Reader, is God dealing with you
by affliction? Has he blighted your earthly
hopes, caused your mirth to seize, destroyed your vines and fig
trees, and made all around your wilderness? Think what it would
have been had he allowed you to go on in your course of guilty
estrangement, your truant heart plunging deeper and deeper in
its career of sin. Is it not mercy in him that he
has dimmed that false and deceptive glitter of earth? You would not
listen to his voice in prosperity. You took the ten thousand precious
gifts of his bestowing. But there was no breathing of
gratitude to the Infinite Bestower. You sat, it may be, sullen, peevish,
proud, ungrateful. at the very moment when His horn
of plenty was being emptied in your lap. He has brought you
into the wilderness, as Jesus did with His disciples of old
when He would nerve them for coming trial. He has taken you
to a high mountain alone, a solitary place, apart from the world. He has there humbled you and
proved you. He may have touched you to the
quick, Touched you in your tenderest point, Severed hollowed companionships,
Leveled in the dust clay idols. Yes, it was all his doing. Behold! I will allure. I will bring into the wilderness.
I will comfort. He leads us into the wilderness,
and he leads us through it and out of it. As He gives us our
comforts, our oil and wine, our wool and flax, our vines and
our fig trees, just so, when He sees fit, does He take them
away. Whatever are the voices He may
be now addressing to me, Be it mine to recognize in them the
thoughts and utterances of unalterable love, and to say, I listen carefully
to what God the Lord is saying, for He speaks peace to His people,
His faithful ones.