will be blown away as sand and dust.
Do I say too much? Do I say more than is true? Yes, surely, I say too much, I say more than is true so far as we look at ourselves, think of ourselves, of that which is before our eyes, of the ordinary, small, miserable, commonplace man, whom we all are. He does not stand before God, he flees before Him; he does not believe in eternity, he does not live in the fear and adoration of the Lord. And, therefore, seen from his standpoint, the world always remains as it is. But I do not say too much and do not say anything that is not true, when I think of Him in whom this eternal, incomprehensible and true (though contrary to appearance) revelation is given unto us: Christ Jesus. While we are what we are, poor, small, sinning, dying, commonplace people, who each moment forget the eternity which we are approaching, He came and took our forgetfulness of eternity upon Himself and bore it, took it for us upon Himself and carried it for us; for us He thought of God, became for us, through struggling and suffering, obedient unto death, yes unto death on the cross, and by death He broke through into eternal life.
If it is true that God has put eternity into the heart of man; if it is more than a distant wishing and hoping; if it is so true that we can live and die by it, then it is true only in Jesus Christ. In Him the opposite shores come together, in Him that which is divided becomes united, in Him time and eternity meet. In Him God, who is hidden from us and of whom we of ourselves can know nothing, is revealed as the Father.
Hence everything depends upon this, that Jesus Christ speaks to us men who pass on with the fleeting times. There are men and times to whom Jesus Christ becomes manifest. They are not yet new times and new men in the final sense; but they are the times and the men that, in the midst of the old time and of the old condition, point and aim toward the really new time and the really new men who hear the word of the eternal love of the Father, the word of the forgiveness of sins, and know the one thing besides which there is nothing else. There are times and men that have to do with eternity, because they have learnt to look upon Him who has brought to light eternity in the midst of time. Life for such men does not flow smooth and easy. He, who has received eternity into his heart, must seek to understand “what God does from the beginning to the end.” That means unrest, conflict, and pilgrimage. But there is rest in this unrest, there is victory in this struggle; this pilgrimage has a goal and an end. For God has set eternity into the heart of man, and how could God leave those without an answer who at His behest are seeking Him?
If such a time ever dawns—and why should it not dawn? Let it bring what it will in other respects, it will be a new time (yet with all reserve be it said!), a year of salvation and refreshing, a year in which peace and truth and righteousness will come to light, even though it be a time of heaviness. Let us pray God that He send us such a time and make us men of such a sort. If we earnestly pray for it, the new time has come through such praying; for how could we earnestly beseech Him, if He had not already heard us, had He not already set eternity into our hearts through His Spirit?
For a small moment have I forsaken thee; but with great mercies will I gather thee. In overflowing wrath I hid my face from thee for a moment; but with everlasting lovingkindness will I have mercy on thee, saith Jehovah thy Redeemer. For this is as the waters of Noah unto me; for as I have sworn that the waters of Noah shall no more go over the earth, so have I sworn that I will not be wroth with thee nor rebuke thee. For the mountains may depart, and the hills be removed; but my lovingkindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall my covenant of peace be removed, saith Jehovah that hath mercy on thee.—Isaiah 54:7–10.
Our text speaks of a “small moment.” But it is the moment of wrath, when God has forsaken us and hid His face from us; while the waters of Noah go over the earth, the mountains depart, and the hills are removed. In a “small moment” Adam sinned and in “a small moment” Christ died on the cross. But how great was and is the darkness of these small moments. Measured by the endless ages of the mountains, the sea, and the stars, my life, also, is but a “small moment.” But when I consider that the riddle of my life is the moment of my guilt and punishment, it seems to me the endless times are no longer than this “small moment.” The dark, grievous years, through which the nations of the earth are now going, will be regarded in the future as “a small moment,” of which one may speak in the shortest words; a curious picture from the distant past in which few will be interested. But what then will appear as a mere drop, our unrighteous deeds and sufferings, our woe and helplessness, is, in this “small moment” of the present, a great ocean, for it is our wrong, our woe, our distress. Sometime there will be for each of us a “small moment” when we die, die as our fathers did. The narrow gap behind us will quickly be closed up and the small track which we have made will soon be obliterated. But the small moment will determine whether we shall go from reality into nothingness or from nothingness into reality. All our earlier decisions will be questioned, and, by a knife’s edge, it will be decided whether our way has led into eternal life or into eternal death. And this will be most difficult—in no case can we ourselves give the answer; neither by what we wish, nor by what we know, nor by what we are. Dies irae, dies illa (day of wrath, that day); who, O Lord, can stand in thy presence?
What is meant by a “small moment,” when the smallest moment through the weight of its content outweighs thousands of years, when it is at hand, not in the past, not in the future, but in the present. Should not the moment, of which the prophet speaks, be just as long as time? Or will there be a moment in time, of which, when it has come, we can speak with the same dreadful seriousness as the prophet speaks of the “small moment,” and which will turn it into a really weighty, great, unending moment? Yes, it is a “small moment,” says the word of God. But that it is small does not seem true to men—one cannot merely say so. When it is said, it is either one of those cheap consolations with which men try to comfort one another or it is true, mighty, comforting, redemptive as the spoken, revealed, unbelievable word of God, which one can only believe.
A “moment of wrath,” the prophet calls it. At any rate he does not think of comforting us as men seek to comfort one another. He does not try to make easy what becomes easy only when it is taken to be altogether difficult. He tells us that the door of our prison is bolted on the outside and can be opened only from the outside. In answer to the question: Why this “moment,” so “small” and yet so great, is so mysterious? he says what one scarcely dare say after him: “Because God is angry, because he has forsaken us, because he has hid his face from us.” That is what is meant by this “moment.”
Or do we understand it better? O yes, at any rate, we may understand it better. We need much grace and truth before we really will accept the word of the Bible concerning the wrath of God. No more and no less is needed than that which was first told us: “My lovingkindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall my covenant of peace be removed.” Whence could we know what time is, if we did not know what eternity is? Whence would we know that, without God, we are lost, if we would not be saved through God? In Jesus Christ we know what eternity is, that we are saved through God. But before we know this and since we constantly forget it, we simply cannot bear to hear of the wrath of God; we oppose it with innumerable restrictions, mitigations, and open or secret protests. You may have looked deep, yea very deep, into the goodness and the badness of man; you are not ready to grant that the last word that may be said by us, from our point of view, is that man is under wrath, indeed under the wrath of God. Perhaps you are a severely humiliated and, through the discipline of life, a broken man; but something within you rises in protest when you are told that God is, for you and all of us, really and truly a hidden God.
The honor of God may lie close to your heart and you gladly will grant that His thoughts are higher than our thoughts; but for the sake of the very honor of God, as you imagine, you will deny that His thoughts are so much higher than our thoughts as to compel us to concede that for “a small moment he has forsaken us.” If there is a God, you will say: “All this must be taken as figurative language.”
