That place implies that all human sorrows and sufferings are consequences of human evil. And that is true inasmuch as many of them are distinctly and naturally its results. Disease is often the result of dissipation, poverty of indolence, friendlessness of selfishness. How many of the miseries of our great cities, how many of the miseries of nations, result from criminal neglect and injustice! 'Man's inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn.' Ah! if all men were saying from the heart, 'Thy will be done,' how many of their griefs would be at an end! And it is true that sorrows are the consequences of sin inasmuch as suffering has been introduced by God into the world because of sin. He has been forced by our rebellion to use judgments, and that to bring us back.
And it is true that sorrows are the consequences of sin inasmuch as the sting is taken out of them when our sins are forgiven and we love God. Then they so change their characters as scarcely to deserve to be called by their old name, and the paradox, 'sorrowful yet always rejoicing,' becomes a sober fact of experience.
III. The divine opposition to evil.
This prayer implies that all evil is contrary to His will. The one kind is so, absolutely and always. The other is a method to which He has had recourse, but not that which, if things had gone right, He would have adopted.
So this prayer breathes confidence that God will overcome both kinds.
How much there is to make us believe that evil is eternal.
How apt we are to fall into despair, to lose heart for ourselves and our fellows; to say that it has always been so, and it always will be so.
For all social reformers here is encouragement.
For ourselves, when we seem to do so little in setting ourselves right, here is confidence.
But it must be _God_ who conquers the world's evil.
Our most potent weapon in the struggle with our own and the world's evil is the earnest offering of this petition.
Think of the failure of godless schemes; how often we have been on the verge of political and other millenniums.
Only the God, who cures sin, can cure the world's ills.
We are not to substitute praying for working. God may answer our prayer by setting us to work.
Remember that you pledge yourselves to work for your fellows by that _Us_, and to try to reduce, were it by ever so little, the sum of human misery.
IV. The manner of God's deliverance from evil. God delivers us by Christ, that is the sum of all.
He delivers us from sin by His answers to the previous petitions.
He delivers us from suffering by teaching us how to bear it, and by showing us the meaning of it. The evil in evil is taken away. There shines a brightness round about the devouring fire (Ezek. i. 4). 'All things work together for good.'
Finally, He delivers by taking us to Himself.
This prayer goes beyond present experience. It is the yearning for full redemption. It is the last which is answered. But there lies in it a not indistinct prophecy of that great and blessed time when we shall be like Him, and delivered from all evil.
For ourselves and for the world it carries the assurance that neither sorrow nor sin shall be permitted to deform for ever the face of this fair creation; but that the day comes when God's name being everywhere hallowed, and His will done on earth, and His kingdom set up, and all our wants supplied, and all our sins forgiven, and all temptations taken out of the way, evil of every kind shall be scourged out of God's universe, and 'the ransomed of the Lord shall return with joy upon their heads, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.'