Job 12:25

"Handfuls of Purpose"

For All Gleaners

"He maketh them to stagger like a drunken man." Job 12:25

Here are men who are drunk, but not with wine; men who suppose themselves to be highly gifted, and yet who do not know their way home again when they have once gone astray. God controls all physical substance and faculty: he toucheth the strength of a man, and it fades away: he waves his hand, so to say, across his brain, and all power of thinking is for ever suspended: he turneth a man's purposes upside down. The deplorable and lamentable thing, viewed from a human standing-point, is that the men appear to be as strong and prosperous as ever, when their right hand has forgotten its cunning and their tongue can no longer speak familiar words: they represent death in life; they are as walking sepulchres: all the framework is there in its entirety, but the spirit within is humiliated, dispossessed, or quenched. What, then, is our security? What is the guarantee that to the end we may possess sanity of mind, strength and dignity of judgment? We are only safe in proportion as we keep company with God; as we invoke the abiding presence and ministry of the Holy Ghost; as we remember that we are nothing and have nothing, and that every good gift and every perfect gift cometh down from the Father of lights. We sometimes ascribe great failures of mind and body to small causes. We should remember that there is a great Sovereign above all, who appoints and disappoints, who leads forward and smites backward, who makes the first last, and the last first, not according to some arbitrary will, but according to a law of grace and love, the full scope of which we have not yet comprehended. Better to be abased in this world, than to be destroyed in the next. Better to understand here and now that we are only servants than to be taught hereafter that there is no hope for us. This is the time of school, of drill, of discipline, of all the educational processes which may end in mature wisdom and strength. Here, again, we come upon the salutary exhortation, "Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom." We are limited on every side. Our wisdom is but partial. Our greatest intellectual successes are but beginnings. We shall begin to go down in all the best qualities of our soul, when we suppose we have approached the point of finality, because then we may turn round and make demands upon society, which are unsupported by reason and justice. Hold thou me up, and I shall be safe: put thine hand round about me, then I shall no longer stagger like a drunken man. What is my hope? What is my confidence? Yea, what is my expectation? Truly I will think nothing of myself, and attempt to be nothing in my own power and right: I will live as God's servant, I will pray as God's little child, I will have no way of my own from morning to night; in life, in death, my cry shall be: Not my will, but thine, be done.