Evening, July 2
Go To Morning Reading
“Unto thee will I cry, O Lord my rock; be not silent to me: lest, if
thou be silent to me, I become like them that go down into the pit.”
Psalm 28:1
A cry is the natural expression of sorrow, and a suitable utterance
when all other modes of appeal fail us; but the cry must be alone
directed to the Lord, for to cry to man is to waste our entreaties
upon the air. When we consider the readiness of the Lord to hear,
and his ability to aid, we shall see good reason for directing all
our appeals at once to the God of our salvation. It will be in vain
to call to the rocks in the day of judgment, but our Rock attends
to our cries.
“ Be not silent to me .” Mere formalists may be content without answers to their prayers,
but genuine suppliants cannot; they are not satisfied with the results
of prayer itself in calming the mind and subduing the will—they must go further, and obtain actual replies from heaven, or they
cannot rest; and those replies they long to receive at once, they
dread even a little of God’s silence. God’s voice is often so terrible that it shakes the wilderness; but his
silence is equally full of awe to an eager suppliant. When God seems
to close his ear, we must not therefore close our mouths, but rather
cry with more earnestness; for when our note grows shrill with eagerness
and grief, he will not long deny us a hearing. What a dreadful case
should we be in if the Lord should become forever silent to our prayers?
“ Lest, if thou be silent to me, I become like them that go down into the pit .” Deprived of the God who answers prayer, we should be in a more pitiable
plight than the dead in the grave, and should soon sink to the same
level as the lost in hell. We must have answers to prayer: ours is an urgent case of dire necessity;
surely the Lord will speak peace to our agitated minds, for he never
can find it in his heart to permit his own elect to perish.