Destiny without God is a riddle: history without God is a tragedy. But if God be to you what He was to St. Paul — " the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and God of all comfort " — does not life assume a new complexion ? If you believe — not accept theoretically but believe in your heart of hearts, grasp as the fundamental fact of existence for you — if you believe in a God whom you can describe with these words of St. Paul, what can you say but, thankfully, adoringly, " Blessed be God " ? What does it matter what a man believes about God ? the world says. Nothing else matters. All else by comparison is a thing of indifference.
^ There is no real comfort in the Bible sense apart from faith. Time may mitigate or assuage or harden, the world may make us forget, life may distract, work may fill up the gap, friends may cheer and support, but only God can comfort. It is always so in the Bible. The Divine comfort is the only comfort worth speak- ing of. " Let thy merciful kindness be for my comfort," prayed the Psalmist. The unfailing source of comfort in both the Old and the New Testaments is the Divine presence. " Our Lord Jesus Christ himself, and God our Father which loved us and gave us eternal comfort and good hope through grace, comfort your hearts and stablish them in every good work and word," is Paul's
14 COMFORT
desire for the Thessalonians. "The God of all comfort" is His designation from whom alone can consolation come. It is only a man's faith that can cut deep down to the roots of his life. His life follows the fortunes of his faith. Our faith settles everything, even the quality of our possible comfort.^
2. Notice the names which St. Paul gives to God.
(1) He is " the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ." For always to the Apostle consolation abounds " through Christ." He is the Mediator through whom it comes. To partake in His sufferings is to be united to Him ; and to be united to Him is to partake in His life. The Apostle anticipates here a thought on which he enlarges in the fourth chapter: "Always bearing about in the body the dying of Jesus, that the life also of Jesus may be manifested in our body." In our eagerness to emphasize the nearness and the sympathy of Jesus, it is to be feared that we do less than justice to the New Testament revelation of His glory. He does not suffer now. He is enthroned on high, far above all principality and power and might and dominion. The Spirit which brings His presence to our hearts is the Spirit of the Prince of Life ; its function is not to be weak with our weakness, but to help our infirmity and to strengthen us with all might in the inner man. The Christ who dwells in us through His Spirit is not the Man of Sorrows, wearing the crown of thorns, but the King of kings and Lord of lords, who makes us partakers of His triumph. There is a weak tone in much of the religious literature which deals with suffering, utterly unlike that of the New Testament. It is a degradation of Christ to our level that it teaches, instead of an exaltation of man toward Christ's. But the last is the apostolic ideal: "More than conquerors through him that loved us." The comfort of which St. Paul makes so much here is not necessarily deliverance from suffering for Christ's sake, still less exemption from it; it is the strength and courage and immortal hope which rise up, even in the midst of suffering, in the heart in which the Lord of glory dwells. Through Him such comfort abounds ; it wells up to match and more than match the rising tide of suffering,
^ We cannot read the New Testament intelligently without being impressed that a new sense of power and a new source of
^ Hugh Black, Christ's Service qf Love, 52.
2 COR. I. 3, 4 15
Comfort came to men who had learned to know God through Jesus Christ. The contrast is most marked when we know the world into which the new message came, and this we can do to- day as never before. The epitaphs and papyri which are being discovered in such numbers in Egypt and elsewhere tell us of the customs of the common people, and show us the common point of view in the time of early Christianity before it had laid hold of the world. We see the mass of the people hungering for religion, and with nothing substantial to satisfy the hunger, and on that account open to all manner of superstition. We see them in their helplessness before the inevitable distress of death and before the great problem of life, usually either with a hopeless resignation or with a forced gaiety that is more pathetic still. One of these witnesses to a past life is suggestive as indicating the comfortless state of the world. In Yale University Library there has been deposited a Greek Papyrus of the second century, which is a letter of comfort sent over a bereavement. It reads thus : " Eirene to Taonnophris and Philon good cheer ! I was as much grieved and shed as many tears over Eumoiros as I shed for Didymus, and I did everything that was fitting, and so did my whole family. But still there is nothing one can do in the face of such trouble. So I leave you to comfort yourselves. Goodbye," It is quite evidently not meant to be heartless, but there was not anything more to be said before the final passion of life, Paul's word is thrown into bold relief when he wrote to his converts " that ye sorrow not, even as the rest, which have no hope," ^