| Devotional Hours with the Bible |
Chapter 40 |
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We may get a lesson here about the needlessness of anxiety over difficulties in our way. Wherever God wants us to go He will open the way for us. It is ours only to go straight on, in confidence and faithfulness, doing our simple duty, and leaving to divine love and wisdom the opening go of the path, the rolling away of the stones. Impossibilities become easy possibilities when God is leading.
Fearlessly the women entered in and found that the body was not there. This greatly perplexed them. But suppose they had found the body in the grave — what then would have been the conclusion? That would have meant no resurrection, Jesus still held in the clasp of death. The women were disappointed in not finding the body, but in this disappointment lay the glorious hope out of which all our Christian joy comes today.
We should get here a lesson of comfort for our own hearts when we stand by the graves of our Christian dead. The body of our loved one may be in the grave, but the friend we knew and loved is not there — he is with his Lord. Speaking of believers who are departed, Paul says they are “absent from the body.” “At home with the Lord” (see 2 Cor. 5:8). You go to an old house where your friend used to live. You knock, but get no answer. The house is empty. Then you find that your friend has moved to a new house, a larger and better one, on the hill. You stand by the form of your dead and speak, but get now answer. The house of clay is empty. Your friend is not there — he is absent, he has gone away. Where is he? He has moved out of the old house and is now “at home with the Lord.” That is the story of Christian death. It is life, not death.
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