LEARNING HIM
LEARNING HIM
The greater the blank the heart finds down here, the more it is fitted to learn what the Lord can be to us in His own transcendent worth. The desolation caused by the death of the one dearest to us is just the suited preparation for learning Him. Death has done its worst, and you survive only to feel what has been done. The greater your desolation because of death, the more is Christ (the resurrection and the life) to your heart.
In the sense of desolation here, the heart turns to Him with delight to find Him near. In the gloom, which sorrow welcomes, no one can be admitted fully but Himself. ‘My sorrow lies too deep for human ministry. It knows not how to tell itself to any but to Thee.’ He can make full allowance for the tears of anguish, His grief has been greater. He not only feels for you but He loves the heart that feels, and that is drawn nearer to Him by the very depth of the feeling.
[p. 495] The death that rests on man was of the deepest sorrow to Himself when He was here, and He respects this sorrow in you. You need not try to keep it from Him. He joins in it, He feels for you in it. But, to a heart thus wrenched with sorrow for the loss of one so dear to it, He can in a special way say: “Remember me”. He might say to Mary: ‘I approve of your sorrow for Lazarus, I join in it and feel for you’; but He might add: ‘How will you feel when I am dead? I do expect that you will feel it far beyond this, and as no one felt for you so much, or consoled you so much when Lazarus was dead as I did, I expect you will find that no one else can comfort you in the utter desolation of heart in which you find yourself here because of My death’. Mary Magdalene could never forget the deep desolation of that hour when she realised the death of her Lord. The One who causes the blank is the very One who can remove the blank. His death had caused the blank, and her heart clung to Him. He likes this devotedness, He draws near to this sorrow and He will not comfort her only, but He will confide His mind to love like hers - “I love them that love me; and those that seek me early shall find me” (Proverbs 8: 17). Personal devotedness to Himself is the one sure way of drawing out His heart and His hand. He can confide in one who fully loves Him, and who truly feels how insupportable this scene is without Him. We are down here where He is not, but near Him, we find ourselves in heart where He is, with Him, outside the scene of desolation and death, where He is known as the resurrection and the life. To every one who feels the desolation caused by His death and absence from this scene He not only appears to comfort and console, but He leads you to His place where life and glory are, and thus fits you to remain here to do His pleasure here in His absence! May your heart be increasingly led into the fellowship of His death, that you may feel how right and just it is that everything here should wither and [p. 496] die to us because of that blessed One having died here.
Thus may the brightest morning open out to you from this night of sorrow!