201. The Place of Thunder

The Place of Thunder

Psa_81:7 : ’93I answered thee in the secret place of thunder.’94

It is past midnight, and two o’92clock in the morning, far enough from sunset and sunrise to make the darkness very thick, and the Egyptian army in pursuit of the escaping Israelites are on the bottom of the Red Sea, its waters having been set up on each side in masonry of sapphire, for God can make a wall as solid out of water as out of granite, and the trowels with which these two walls were built were none the less powerful because invisible. Such walls had never before been lifted. When I saw the waters of the Red Sea rolling through the Suez Canal, they were blue and beautiful and flowing like other waters, but tonight, as the Egyptians look up to them built into walls, now on one side and now on the other, they must have been frowning waters, for it was probable that the same power that lifted them up might suddenly fling them prostrate. A great lantern of cloud hung over this chasm between the two walls. The door of that lantern was opened toward the Israelites ahead, giving them light, and the back of the lantern was toward the Egyptians, and it growled and rumbled and jarred with thunder; not thunder like that which cheers the earth after a drought, promising the refreshing shower, but charged and surcharged with threats of doom. The Egyptian captains lost their presence of mind, and the horses reared and snorted and would not answer to their bits, and the chariot wheels got interlocked and torn off, and the charioteers were hurled headlong, and the Red Sea fell on all the host. The confusing and confounding thunder was in answer to the prayer of the Israelites. With their backs cut by the lash and their feet bleeding and their bodies decrepit with the suffering of whole generations, they had asked Almighty God to ensepulcher their Egyptian pursuers in one great sarcophagus, and the splash and the roar of the Red Sea as it dropped to its natural bed were only the shutting of the sarcophagus on a dead host. That is the meaning of the text when God says: ’93I answered thee in the secret place of thunder.’94

Now, thunder, all up and down the Bible, is the symbol of power. Small wits depreciate the thunder and say, ’93It is the lightning that strikes.’94 But God evidently thinks the thunder of some importance or he would not make so much of it. That man must be without imagination and without sensitiveness and without religion who can without emotion see the convention of summer clouds called to order by the falling gavel of the thunderbolt. There is nothing in the natural world that so awes and solemnizes me as the thunder. The Egyptian plague of hail was accompanied with this full diapason of the heavens. While Samuel and his men were making a burnt offering of a lamb, and the Philistines were about to attack them, it was by terrorizing thunder they were discomfited. Job, who was a combination of the Dantesque and the Miltonic, was solemnized by this reverberation of the heavens, and cried: ’93The thunder of his power, who can understand?’94 and he challenges the universe by saying: ’93Can’92st thou thunder with a voice like him?’94 and he throws Rosa Bonheur’92s ’93Horse Fair’94 into the shade by the Bible photograph of a war horse, when he describes his neck as ’93clothed with thunder.’94 Because of the power of James and John, they were called ’93the sons of thunder.’94 The law given on the basaltic crags of Mount Sinai was emphasized with this cloudy ebullition. The skies all around about St. John at Patmos were full of the thunder of war and the thunder of Christly triumph and the thunder of resurrection and the thunder of eternity.

But, when my text says, ’93I answered thee in the secret place of thunder,’94 it suggests there is some mystery about the thunder. To the ancients the cause of this bombarding the earth with loud sound must have been more of a mystery than it is to us. The lightnings, which were to them wild monsters ranging through the skies, in our time have been domesticated. We harness electricity to vehicles, and we cage it in lamps, and every schoolboy knows something about the fact that it is the passage of electricity from cloud to cloud that makes the heavenly racket which we call thunder. But, after all that chemistry has taught the world, there are mysteries about this sky resonance, and my text, true in the time of the Psalmist, is true now and always will be true, that there is some secret about the place of thunder.

To one thing known about the thunder, there are a hundred things not known. After all the scientific batteries have been doing their work for a thousand years to come and learned men have discoursed to the utmost about atmospheric gravity and magnetic electricity and galvanic electricity and thermotic electricity and frictional electricity and positive electricity and negative electricity, my text will be as suggestive as it is today, when it speaks of the secret place of thunder.

Now, right along by a natural law, there is always a spiritual law. As there is a secret place of thunder, there is a secret place of moral thunder. In other words, the religious power that you see abroad in the church and in the world has a hiding-place, and in many cases it is never discovered at all. I will use a similitude. I can give only the dim outline of a particular case, for many of the remarkable circumstances I have forgotten. Many years ago there was a large church. It was characterized by strange and unaccountable conversions. There were no great revivals, but individual cases of spiritual arrest and transformation. A young man sat in one of the front pews. He was a graduate of Yale, brilliant as the North Star and notoriously dissolute. Everybody knew him and liked him for his geniality, but deplored his moral errantry. To please his parents he was every Sabbath morning in church. One day there was a ringing of the doorbell of the pastor of that church, and that young man, whelmed with repentance, implored prayer and advice, and passed into complete reformation of heart and life. All the neighborhood was astonished and asked: Why was this? His father and mother had said nothing at that time to him about his soul’92s welfare. On another aisle of the same church sat an old miser. He paid his pew rent, but was hard on the poor and had no interest in any philanthropy. Piles of money! And people said: ’93What a struggle he will have when he quits this life, to part with his bonds and mortgages.’94 One day he wrote to his minister: ’93Please to call immediately. I have a matter of great importance about which I want to see you.’94 When the pastor came in, the man could not speak for emotion, but after a while he gathered self-control enough to say: ’93I have lived for this world too long. I want to know if you think I can be saved, and, if so, I wish you would tell me how.’94 Upon his soul the light soon dawned, and the old miser, not only revolutionized in heart but in life, began to scatter benefactions; and toward all the great charities of the day he became a cheerful and bountiful almoner. What was the cause of this change? everybody asked; and no one was capable of giving an intelligent answer. In another part of the church sat, Sabbath by Sabbath, a beautiful and talented woman, who was a great society leader. She went to church because that was a respectable thing to do, and in the neighborhood where she lived it was hardly respectable not to go. Worldly was she to the last degree, and all her family worldly. She had at her house the finest germans that were ever danced, and the costliest favors that were ever given, and though she attended church, she never liked to hear any story of pathos, and, as to religious emotion of any kind, she thought it positively vulgar. Wines, cards, theaters, rounds of costly gaiety were to her the highest satisfaction. One day a neighbor sent in a visiting card, and this lady came down the stairs in tears, and told the whole story of how she had not slept for several nights, and she feared she was going to lose her soul, and she wondered if some one would not come around and pray with her. From that time her entire demeanor was changed, and though she was not called upon to sacrifice any of her amenities of life, she consecrated her beauty, her social position, her family, her all to God and the church and usefulness. Everybody said in regard to her: ’93Have you noticed the change, and what in the world caused it?’94 and no one could make satisfactory explanation.

In the course of two years, though there was no general awakening in that church, many such isolated cases of such unexpected and unaccountable conversions took place. The very people whom no one thought would be affected by such considerations were converted. The pastor and the officers of the church were on the lookout for the solution of this religious phenomenon. ’93Where is it?’94 they said, ’93and who is it, and what is it?’94 At last the discovery was made and all was explained. A poor old Christian woman standing in the vestibule of the church one Sunday morning, trying to get her breath again before she went up-stairs to the gallery, heard the inquiry and told the secret. For years she had been in the habit of concentrating all her prayers for particular persons in that church. She would see some man or woman present, and, though she might not know the person’92s name, she would pray for that person until he or she was converted to God. All her prayers were for that one person’97just that one. She waited and waited for communion days to see when the candidates for membership stood up whether her prayers had been effectual. It turned out that these marvelous instances of conversion were the result of that old woman’92s prayers as she sat in the gallery Sabbath by Sabbath, bent and wizened and poor and unnoticed. A little cloud of concentrated humanity hovering in the galleries: that was the secret of the thunder.

There is some hidden, unknown, mysterious source of almost all the moral and religious power demonstrated. Not one out of a million’97not one out of ten million prayers ever strikes a human ear. On public occasions a minister of religion voices the supplications of an assemblage, but the prayers of all the congregation are in silence. There is not a second in a century when prayers are not ascending, but myriads of them are not even as loud as a whisper, for God hears a thought as plainly as a vocalization. That silence of supplication’97hemispheric and perpetual’97is the secret place of thunder.

In the winter of 1875, we were worshiping in the Brooklyn Academy of Music in the interregnum of churches. We had the usual great audiences, but I was oppressed beyond measure by the fact that conversions were not more numerous. One Tuesday, I invited to my house five old, consecrated Christian men’97all of them now gone, except Father Pearson, and he in blindness and old age, waiting for the Master’92s call to come up higher. These old men came, not knowing why I had invited them. I took them to the top room of my house. I said to them: ’93I have called you here for special prayer. I am in an agony for a great turning to God of the people. We have vast multitudes in attendance and they are attentive and respectful, but I cannot see that they are saved. Let us kneel down and each one pray and not leave this room until we are all assured that the blessing will come and has come.’94 It was a most intense crying unto God. I said: ’93Brethren, let this meeting be a secret,’94 and they said it would be. That Tuesday night special service ended. On the following Friday night occurred the usual prayer-meeting. No one knew of what had occurred on Tuesday night, but the meeting was unusually thronged. Men accustomed to pray in public in great composure broke down under emotion. The people were in tears. There were sobs and silence and solemnities of such unusual power that the worshipers looked into each other’92s faces as much as to say: ’93What does all this mean?’94 And, when the following Sabbath came, although we were in a secular place, over four hundred arose for prayers and a religious awakening took place that made that winter memorable for time and for eternity. There are many living now who were brought to God during that great gathering, but few of them know that the upper room in my house, where those five old Christian men poured out their souls before God, was the secret place of thunder.

The day will come’97God hasten it’97when people will find out the velocity, the majesty, the multi-potence of prayer. We brag about our limited express trains which put us down a thousand miles away in twenty-four hours, but here is something by which in a moment we may reach people five thousand miles away. We brag about our telephones, but here is something that beats the telephone in utterance and reply, for God says, ’93Before they call, I will hear.’94 We brag about the phonograph, in which a man can speak his words and the tones of his voice can be kept for ages, and by the turning of a crank the words may come forth upon the ears of another century, but prayer allows us to speak words into the ears of everlasting remembrance and on the other side of all eternities they will be heard. Oh! ye who are wasting your breath and wasting your brains and wasting your nerves and wasting your lungs wishing for this good and that good for the church and the world, why do you not go into the secret place of thunder.

’93But,’94 says some one, ’93that is a beautiful theory, yet it does not work in my case, for I am in a cloud of trouble or a cloud of sickness or a cloud of persecution or a cloud of poverty or a cloud of bereavement or a cloud of perplexity.’94 How glad I am that you told me that. That is exactly the place to which my text refers. It was from a cloud that God answered Israel’97the cloud over the chasm cut through the Red Sea’97the cloud that was light to the Israelites and darkness to the Egyptians. It was from a cloud, a tremendous cloud, that God made reply. It was a cloud that was the secret place of thunder. So you cannot get away from the consolation of my text by talking that way. Let all the people under a cloud hear it. ’93I answered thee in the secret place of thunder.’94

This subject helps me to explain some things you have not understood about certain useful men and women. There are multitudes of them and the multitude is multiplying by the minute. Many of them have not a superabundance of education. If you had their brain in a post-mortem examination, and you could weigh it, it would not weigh any heavier than the average. They have not anything especially impressive in personal appearance. They are not very fluent of tongue. They pretend to nothing unusual in mental faculty or social influence, but you feel their power; you are elevated in their presence; you are a better man or a better woman, having known them. You realize that in intellectual endowment you are their superior, while in the matter of moral and religious influence they are vastly your superior. Why is this? To find the revelation of this secret, you must go back thirty or forty or, perhaps, sixty years to the homestead where this man was brought up. It is a winter morning, and the tallow candle is lighted, and the fires are kindled, sometimes the shavings hardly enough to start the wood. The mother is preparing the breakfast, and the blue-edged dishes are on the table, and the lid of the kettle on the hearth begins to rattle and steam, and the shadow of the industrious woman, by the flickering flame on the hearth, is moved up and down the wall. The father is at the barn feeding the stock’97the oats thrown into the horses’92 bin and the cattle cranching the corn. The children, earlier than they would like, and after being called twice, are gathered at the table. The blessing of God is asked on the food, and, the meal over, the family Bible is put upon the white table-cloth and a chapter is read and a prayer made which includes all the interests of the family for this world and the next. The children pay not much attention to the prayer, for it is about the same thing day after day, but it puts upon them an impression that ten thousand years will only make more vivid and tremendous. As long as the folks live, their prayer is for their children and their children’92s children. Day in and day out, month in and month out, year in and year out, decade in and decade out, the sons and daughters of that family are remembered in earnest prayer, and they know it, and they feel it, and they cannot get away from it. Two funerals after a while’97not more than two years apart, for it is seldom that there is more than that lapse of time between father’92s going and mother’92s going’97two funerals put out of sight the old folks. But where are the children? The daughters are in homes where they are incarnations of good sense, industry and piety. The sons’97perhaps one a farmer, another a merchant, another a mechanic, another a physician, another a minister of the gospel’97useful, consistent, admired, honored. What a power for good these seven sons and daughters! Where did they get the power? From the schools and the seminaries and the colleges? Oh, no! though these may have helped. From their superior mental endowment? No, I do not think they had unusual mental caliber. From accidental circumstances? No, they had nothing of what is called good luck. I think we will take a train, and ride to the depot nearest to the homestead from which those men and women started. The train halts. Let us stop a few minutes at the village graveyard and see the tombstones of the parents. Yes, the one was seventy-four years of age and the other was seventy-two, and the epitaph says that ’93After a useful life, they died a Christian death.’94 How appropriate the Scripture passage cut on the mother’92s tombstone, ’93She hath done what she could,’94 and how beautiful the passage on the father’92s tombstone, ’93Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord, for they rest from their labors and their works do follow them.’94 On over the country road we ride’97the road a little rough, for the spring weather is not quite settled, and once down in a rut it is hard to get the wheels out again without breaking the shafts. But, at last, we come to the lane in front of the farmhouse. Let me get out of the wagon and open the gate while you drive through. Here is the arbor under which those boys and girls many years ago used to play. But it is quite out of order now, for the property is in other hands. Yonder is the orchard where they used to thresh the trees for apples, sometimes before they were quite ripe. There is the mow where they hunted for eggs before Easter. There is the door-sill upon which they used to sit. There is the room in which they had family prayers and where they all knelt’97the father there, the mother there, and the boys and girls there. We have got to the fountain of pious and gracious influences at last. That is the place that decided those seven earthly and immortal destinies. Behold! Behold! That is the secret place of thunder.

Boys are seldom more than their fathers will let them be. Girls are seldom more than their mothers will let them be. But there come times when it seems that parents cannot control their children. There come times in a boy’92s life when he thinks he knows more than his father does, and I remember now that I knew more at fifteen years of age than I have ever known since. There come times in a girl’92s life when she thinks her mother is notional and whimsical, and does not understand what is proper and best, and the sweet child says, ’93Oh, pshaw!’94 and she longs for the time when she will not have to be dictated to, and she goes out of the door or goes to bed with pouting lips, and these mothers remember for themselves that they knew more at fourteen years of age than they have ever known since. But father and mother, do not think you have lost your influence over your child. You have a resource of prayer that puts the sympathetic and omnipotent God into your paternal undertaking. Do not waste your time in reading flimsy books about the best way to bring up children. Go into the secret place of thunder.

The reason that we ministers do not accomplish more is because others do not pray enough for us, and we do not pray enough for ourselves. Every minister could tell you a thrilling story of sermons’97sermons hasty and impromptu, because of funerals and sickbeds and annoyances in the parish; yet those sermons harvesting many souls for God. And then of sermons prepared with great care and research and toil uninterrupted; yet those sermons falling flat or powerless. Or of the same sermon mightily blessed on one occasion and useless on another. How well I remember a sermon I preached at a great outdoor meeting in the upper part of New York State. For several days in that place prayers had been offered for the success of the service, and I had myself been unusually prayerful, and we had a Pentecostal blessing while I was preaching. That afternoon I took the train for a great outdoor meeting in Ohio. I said to myself: ’93This sermon was blessed today and it is fresh in my mind, and I will preach it to-morrow in Ohio.’94 And I did preach it, but not in as prayerful a spirit, and I think no one else had been praying about it, and it turned into the most inane and profitless discourse that I ever delivered. It was practically the same sermon, but on Wednesday it had on it a power that comes from the secret place of thunder, and on Thursday it had on it no such power at all.

Oh! pray for us! Poor sermons in the pulpit are the curse of God on a prayerless parish. People say: ’93What is the matter with the ministers in our time? So many of them seem dissatisfied with the Bible and they are trying to help Moses and Paul and Christ out of inconsistencies and contradictions by fixing up the Bible.’94 As well let the musicians go to work to fix up Haydn’92s ’93Creation,’94 or Handel’92s ’93Israel in Egypt,’94 or let the painters go to fixing up Raphael’92s ’93Transfiguration,’94 or architects go to fixing up Christopher Wren’92s St. Paul’92s. But I will tell you what is the matter. There are too many unconverted ministers. Their hearts have never been changed by the grace of God. A mere intellectual ministry is the deadest failure this side of perdition. Alas for the Gospel of icicles! From apologetics, and hermeneutics, and dogmatics, good Lord deliver us! They are trying to get their power from transcendental theology, or from profound exegesis, or from the art of splitting hairs between north and northwest side, instead of getting their power from the secret place of thunder. We want the power a man gets when he is alone, the door locked; on his knees; at midnight; with such a burden of souls upon him that makes him cry out, first in lamentation and then in rapture.

Let all the Sabbath-school teachers, and Bible-class instructors, and all reformers and all evangelists, and all ministers know that diplomas and dictionaries and encyclopedias and treaties and libraries are not the source of moral and spiritual achievement, but that the room of prayer, where no one but God is present, and no one but God hears, is the secret place of thunder. Secret? Ah, yes! So secret that comparatively few ever find it. At Boscobel, England, we visited a house where a king was once hid. No one, unless it were pointed out to him, could find the door through which the king entered his hiding-place. When there hidden the armed pursuers looked in vain for him, and afterward through an underground passage, far out in the fields he came out in the open air. So this imperial power of spiritual influence has a hiding-place, a secret place which few know, and it comes forth sometimes in strange and mysterious ways, and far off from the place where it was hidden. You can find it only by diligent searching. But you may find it, and some of you will find it, and I wish you might all find it’97the secret place of thunder.

At nine o’92clock Wednesday morning, June fifteenth next, on the steamer City of New York, I expect to sail for Liverpool, to be gone until September. It is in acceptance of many invitations that I am going on a preaching tour. I expect to devote my time to preaching the Gospel in England, Scotland, Ireland, and Sweden. I want to see how many souls I can gather for the kingdom of God. Those countries have for many years belonged to my parish, and I go to speak to them and shake hands with them. I want to visit more thoroughly than before those regions from which my ancestors came, Wales and Scotland.

But who is sufficient for the work I undertake? I call upon you who have long been my coadjutors to go into the secret place of the Almighty, and every day from now until my work is done on the other side of the sea, to have me in your prayers. In proportion to the intensity and continuance and faith of the prayers, yours and mine, will be the results. If you remember me in the devotional circle, that will be well, but what I most want is your importuning, your wrestling supplication in the secret place of thunder. God and you alone may make me the humble instrumentality in the redemption of thousands of souls. I shall preach in churches, in chapels, and in the fields. I will make it a campaign for God and eternity, and I hope to get during this absence a baptism of power that will make me of more service to you when I return than I ever yet have been.

Dear brethren and sisters in Christ, our opportunity for usefulness will soon be gone, and we shall have our faces uplifted to the Throne of Judgment, before which we must give account. That day there will be no secret place of thunder, for all the thunders will be out. There will be the thunder of the tumbling rocks. There will be the thunder of the bursting graves. There will be the thunder of the descending chariots. There will be the thunder of the parting heavens. Boom! Boom! But all that din and uproar and crash will find us unaffrighted, and will leave us undismayed, if we have made Christ our confidence, and, as after an August shower when the whole heavens have been an unlimbered battery cannonading the earth, the fields are more green, and the sunrise is the more radiant, and the waters are the more opaline; so thunders of the last day will make the trees of life appear more emerald, and the sardonyx of the wall more crimson, and the sapphire seas the more shimmering, and the sunrise of eternal gladness the more empurpled. The thunders of the dissolving nature will be followed by a celestial psalmody the sound of which St. John on Patmos described, when he said, ’93I heard a voice like the voice of mighty thunderings!’94

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage