The Epistles of St. Peter: Chapter 27 - The Leisureliness of God
2 Peter iii. 3, 4, 8, 9.
Mockers shall come with mockery, walking after their own lusts, and saying, Where is the promise of His presence? . . . One day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some count slackness; but is longsuffering to you-ward, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.
"Where is the promise of His presence?" [Verse 4] Where are the signs of the King's presence and ministry? Where are the prints of His goings? Show us the proofs of His interposition, the evidences of His revolutionary and transforming work! Reveal to us the witness of His handiwork, or at any rate let us see and touch the hem of His garment!" Where is the promise of His presence? "It is the uproarious cry of the mockers, "walking after their own lusts." [Verse 3] They are proclaiming the heedlessness of the Almighty; "The Lord God is not moving, with attentive ministry, along the ways of men! He is far away, in the boundless hunting-ground of space, engaged with larger prey!"
"Where is the promise of His presence?" It is not only the shout of the scoffer, it is the low, poignant cry of the devout. The voices in this Book are many and manifold. You can hear the loud, laughing jeer of the mocker, rising in the very midst of prophecy and psalm: and you can hear the wail of the perplexed, like a low, long moan of pain. "How long wilt Thou forget me, Lord?" "Lord, how long wilt Thou look on?" "How long, Lord, how long?" The defiant and reckless scorn, and the agonising doubt, concern themselves with one thing--the apparent heedlessness of God.
What, then, is the problem? It is this. Men are confronted with an apparently undiscriminating and uncompassionating juggernaut. No hand seems to be busy in human affairs engaged in just and discerning judgment. There is no selection determined by moral worth. The vast movement is blind and capricious. The gigantic machine staggers along, like some untended traction engine, and its huge, grinding wheels bruise and break all things into a common mass, stones and little children, the wasteful and the useful, the sinner and the saint.
Let me read to you a short passage from one of the most delicate and sensitive of our present-day writers, who thus expresses a part of this sharp and burdensome problem: "Last summer, as I walked in my garden, I heard a fledgeling sparrow chirruping merrily under a bush. Possibly he had by accident dropped out of his nest, and, by making parachutes of his wings, had so broken his fall as to reach ground without taking hurt, and was now in a flutter, between pride and fear, at his own daring. For a few minutes I watched him ruffling it as roguishly as a robin, now cocking his glossy head at a sprawling worm, now stropping his tiny beak, razor-wise, upon a twig, and twittering lustily meanwhile for very joy of his freedom and of his merry youth and of the summer morning. . . . I insinuated myself into my hammock, and with my ringers between the pages of a book, lay a-swing in the sunshine as in the centre of a golden globe. For a time I forgot both book and bird. Then suddenly my golden globe shattered into darkness at a sound--a mere thimbleful of sound--a scream of terror and agony, so tiny and yet so haunting and so horrible, that I seem to hear it even now. A tame rook that has the run of my garden had pinned the sparrow, breast upward, under his talons, and, as I looked, was stabbing the life out of him with iron beak. For that wee bird no happy warbling among the leaves: no happier rearing of his young. . . . The sight of that helpless nestling, done to death in the June sunshine, and by one of his feathered kin, turned me sick and faint with horror." "Where is the promise of His presence?"
I had just written these words when an urgent letter was placed upon my desk. I paused in my work to open and read it, and this sentence gave its crimson hue to deepen the colour of my page: "We have had another physician to see her, and he pronounces the disease to be cancer." The victim is an incarnate angel, who has moved along the hard roads of life with all the sweetening and reviving ministry of a perfume. Her life has been a daily death; she has acquired only that she might give again, she has spent herself in order that by the energy of sacrificial blood others might be made alive. And now, cancer! "We have had another physician to see her, and he pronounces the disease to be cancer." That cancer should have come to her! "Where is the promise of His presence?"
The same morning I had read these words in my daily paper: "The 6th Company of the 23rd Siberian Regiment reached the summit, and rushed in the Japanese defences. They were, however, received with fixed bayonets, the captain being lifted into the air by several Japanese on the points of their weapons. The rest of the company all perished before the companies following could get up. This is the tenth day such a butchery has been going on. The Turkish War was a joke to this! Over all this vast field of action, an area of thirty miles, the ground is strewn with the dead, and tens of thousands of human wrecks are being carried south and north from this unexampled battlefield." Let that gory record add its quota to the already deeply dyed and troubled page. "Where is the promise of His presence?"
And that is not all. The difficulty is accentuated when one turns from the victims to some of those who apparently escape. Notoriously bad men are housed in comfort, and useless women are clothed in silks and satins, and walk the sunny side of the way. Dishonesty sweeps by in the carriage, while integrity creeps foot sore by the kerb. "Fools ride on horseback, while princes walk by their side." The sleep of the beast is untroubled, while the saint moans through the night in pain. The contrasts are apparently appalling, and fortune does not favour the brave! "Where is the promise of His presence?"
What shall we say to these things? Let us say, first of all, that we are very ignorant, that our eyes are only endowed with short range, and that our knowledge has severe and almost immediate limitations. Do not let us regard our uncertain guessings as final judgments. Let us admit the mystery, and cease our bitter dogmatisms until the mist has rolled away. How little we know! That little fledgling, done to death by the rook, how little we know about him! The dropping from the nest, his little chirp, his material equipment, the scream and . . . we know no more! "If God saw fit," says our literary friend, "to set that little creature singing in the green groves of Paradise (and who dare say that God has no place in His universe for the sparrow, that God Himself has told us is evermore within His care!), if God saw fit, at the cost of a moment's pain, to take His bird--where danger shall menace never more, what is that to you?" Our range of vision is ineffective, and we haven't the evidence to justify a harsh and bitter verdict.
