176. Parentage of the Shower

Parentage of the Shower

Job_38:28 : ’93Hath the rain a father?’94

This book of Job has been the subject of unbounded theological wrangle. Men have made it the ring in which to display their ecclesiastical pugilism. Some say that this book of Job is a true history; others, that it is an allegory; others, that it is an epic poem; others, that it is a drama. Some say that Job lived eighteen hundred years before Christ; others say that he never lived at all. Some say that the author of this book was Job; others, David; others, Solomon. The discussion has landed some in blank infidelity.

Now, I have no trouble with the book of Job or the Revelation’97the two most mysterious books in the Bible’97because of a rule I adopted some years ago. I wade down into a Scripture passage as long as I can touch bottom, and when I cannot then I wade out. I used to wade in until it was over my head, and then I was drowned. I study a passage of Scripture so long as it is a comfort and help to my soul; but when it becomes a perplexity and a spiritual upturning, I quit. In other words, we ought to wade in up to our heart, but never wade in until it is over our head. No man should ever expect to wade across this great ocean of divine truth. I go down into that ocean as I go down into the Atlantic Ocean at East Hampton, Long Island, just far enough to bathe; then I come out. I never had any idea that with my weak hand and foot I could strike my way clear over to Liverpool. So while there is much in the book of Job I cannot fathom, there is much that is beautiful and suggestive, and these passages we take for our instruction and comfort. One of these I have chosen for my text.

I suppose you understand your family genealogy. You know something about your parents, your grandparents, your great-grandparents. Perhaps you know where they were born, or where they died. Have you ever studied the parentage of the shower? ’93Hath the rain a father?’94 This question is not asked by a poetaster or a scientist, but by the Head of the Universe. To humble and to save Job, God asks him fourteen questions: about the world’92s architecture, about the refraction of the sun’92s rays, about the tides, about the snow-crystal, about the lightnings, and then he arraigns him with the interrogation of the text: ’93Hath the rain a father?’94 With the scientific wonders of the rain I have nothing to do. A minister gets through with that kind of sermons within the first three years, and if he has piety enough, he gets through with it in the first three months. A sermon has come to me to mean one word of four letters: ’93Help!’94

You all know that the rain is not an orphan. You know it is not cast out of the gates of heaven a foundling. You would answer the question of my text in the affirmative. Safely housed during the storm, you hear the rain beating against the window-pane, and you find it searching all the crevices of the window sill. It first comes down in solitary drops, spattering the dust, and then it deluges the fields and angers the mountain torrents and makes the traveler implore shelter. You know that the rain is not an accident of the world’92s economy. You know it was born of the cloud. You know it was rocked in the cradle of the wind. You know it was sung to sleep by the storm. You know that it is a flying evangel from heaven to earth. You know it is the gospel of the weather. You know that God is its father. A shower is not as might be supposed, the elements in a fit of angry passion.

If this be true, then, how wicked is our murmuring about climatic changes! The first eleven Sabbaths after I entered the ministry, it stormed. Through the week it was clear weather, but on the Sabbaths the old country meeting-house looked like Noah’92s ark before it landed. A few drenched people sat before a drenched pastor; but most of the farmers stayed at home and thanked God that what was bad for the church was good for the crops. I committed a good deal of sin in those days in denouncing the weather. Ministers of the Gospel sometimes fret about stormy Sabbaths or hot Sabbaths or inclement Sabbaths. They forget the fact that the same God who ordained the Sabbath and sent forth his ministers to announce salvation, also ordained the weather. Merchants, also, with their stores filled with new goods and their clerks hanging idly around the counters, commit the same transgression. There have been seasons when the whole spring and fall trade has been ruined by protracted wet weather. The merchants then examined the ’93weather probabilities’94 with more interest than they read their Bibles. They watched for a patch of blue sky. They went complaining to the store, and came complaining home again. In all that season of wet feet and dripping garments and impassable streets, they never once asked the question: ’93Hath the rain a father?’94

So agriculturists commit this sin. There is nothing more annoying than to have planted corn rot in the ground because of too much moisture, or hay all ready for the mow dashed of a shower, or wheat almost ready for the sickle spoiled with the rust. How hard it is to bear the agricultural disappointments! God has infinite resources, but I do not think He has capacity to make weather to please all the farmers. Sometimes it is too hot or it is too cold, it is too wet or it is too, dry, it is too early or it is too late. They forget that the God who promised seedtime and harvest, summer and winter, cold and heat, also ordained all the climatic changes. There is one question that ought to be written on every barn, on every fence, on every farmhouse: ’93Hath the rain a father?’94

If we only knew what a vast enterprise it is to provide appropriate weather for this world, we would not be so critical of the Lord. Isaac Watts, at ten years of age, complained that he did not like the hymns that were sung in the English chapel. ’93Well, Isaac,’94 said his father, ’93instead of your complaining about the hymns, go and make hymns that are better.’94 And he did go and make hymns that were better. Now I say to you, if you do not like the weather, do you think you could get up a weather company, and have a president and a secretary and a treasurer and a board of directors and ten million dollars of stock, and then provide weather that will suit all of us?

There is a man who has a weak head, and he cannot stand the glare of the sun. You must have a cloud always hovering over him. I like the sunshine; I cannot live without plenty of sunlight; so you must always have enough light for me. Two ships meet in mid-Atlantic. The one is going to Southampton, the other is going to New York. Provide weather that, while it is abaft for one ship is not a head wind for the other. There is a farm that is dried up for lack of rain, and here is a pleasure party going out for a field excursion. Provide weather that will suit the dry farm and the pleasure excursion. I will not take one dollar of stock in your weather company. There is only one Being in the universe who knows enough to provide the right kind of weather for this world. ’93Hath the rain a father?’94

My text also suggests God’92s minute supervisal. You see the Divine Sonship in every drop of rain. The jewels of the shower are not flung away by a spendthrift who knows not how many he throws or where they fall. They are all shining princes of heaven. They all have eternal lineage. They are all the children of a King. ’93Hath the rain a father?’94 Well, then, I say if God takes notice of every minute raindrop, he will take notice of the most insignificant affair of my life.

It is the astronomical view of things that bothers me. We look up into the night heavens and we say: ’93Worlds! worlds!’94 and how insignificant we feel! We stand at the foot of Mount Washington or Mont Blanc, and we feel that we are only insects, and then we say to ourselves: ’93Though the world is so large, the sun is 1,400,000 times larger. If God wheels that great machinery through immensity, he will not take the trouble to look down at me.’94 Infidel conclusion! Saturn, Mercury, and Jupiter are no more rounded and weighed and swung by the hand of God than are the globules on a lilac-bush the morning after a shower. God is no more in magnitudes than he is in minutiae. If he has scales to weigh the mountains, he has balances delicate enough to weigh the infinitesimal. You can no more see him through the telescope than you can see him through the microscope’97no more when you look up than when you look down. Are not the hairs of your head all numbered? And if Himalaya has a God, ’93Hath not the rain a father?’94

I take this doctrine of a particular Providence, and I thrust it into the midst of your every-day life. If God fathers a raindrop, is there anything so insignificant in your affairs that God will not father that? When Druyse, the gunsmith, invented the needle-gun, which decided the battle of Sadowa, was it a mere accident? When a farmer’92s boy showed Blucher a short cut by which he could bring his army up soon enough to decide Waterloo for England, was it a mere accident? When Lord Byron took a piece of money and tossed it up to decide whether or not he should be affianced to Miss Millbank, was it a mere accident which side of the money was up and which was down? When the Protestants were besieged at Bezors, and a drunken drummer came in at midnight and rang the alarm bell, not knowing what he was doing, but waking up the host in time to fight their enemies that moment arriving, was it an accident? When, in the Irish rebellion, a starving mother, flying with her starving child, sank down and fainted on the rock in the night, and her hand fell on a warm bottle of milk, did that just happen so? God is either in the affairs of men, or our religion is worth nothing at all, and you had better take it away from us, and instead of this Bible, which teaches the doctrine, give us a secular book, and let us, as the famous Mr. Fox, the member of Parliament, in his last hour, cry out: ’93Read me the eighth book of Virgil.’94 Let us rouse up to an appreciation of the fact that all the affairs of our life are under a king’92s command, and under a father’92s watch.

Alexander’92s war-horse Bucephalus would allow anybody to mount him when he was unharnessed; but as soon as they put on that war-horse, Bucephalus, the saddle and the trappings of the conqueror, he would allow no one but Alexander to touch him. And if a soulless horse could have so much pride in his owner, shall not we immortals exult in the fact that we are owned by a King?

Again, my subject teaches me that God’92s dealings with us are inexplicable. That was the original force of my text. The rain was a great mystery to the ancients. They could not understand how the water should get into the cloud, and getting there, how it should be suspended, or, falling, why it should come down in drops. Modern science comes along and says there are two portions of air of different temperature, and they are charged with moisture, and the one portion of air decreases in temperature, so that the water can no longer be held in vapor, and it falls. And they tell us that some of the clouds that look to be no larger than a man’92s hand, and to be almost quiet in the heavens, are great mountains of mist, 4,000 feet from base to top, and that they rush miles a minute. But after all the brilliant experiments of Dr. James Hutton and de Saussurre and other scientists, there is an infinite mystery about the rain. There is an ocean of the unfathomable in every raindrop, and God says today, as he said in the time of Job: ’93If you cannot understand one drop of rain, do not be surprised if my dealings with you are inexplicable.’94

Why does that aged man, decrepit, beggared, vicious, sick of the world, and the world sick of him, live on, while here is a man in mid-life, consecrated to God, hardworking, useful in every respect, who dies? Why does that old gossip, gadding along the street about everybody’92s business but her own, have such good health, while the Christian mother, with a flock of little ones about her, whom she is preparing for usefulness and for heaven’97the mother who you think could not be spared an hour from that household’97why does she lie down and die with a cancer? Why does that man, selfish to the core, who goes on adding fortune to fortune, consuming everything on himself, continue to prosper, while that man, who has been giving ten per cent. of all his income to God and the church, goes into bankruptcy?

Before we make stark fools of ourselves, let us stop pressing this everlasting ’93Why.’94 Let us worship where we cannot understand. Let a man take that one question ’93Why,’94 and pursue it far enough, and push it, and he will land in wretchedness and perdition. We want in our theology fewer interrogation marks and more exclamation points. Heaven is the place for explanation. Earth is the place for trust. If you cannot understand so minute a thing as a raindrop, how can you expect to understand God’92s dealings? ’93Hath the rain a father?’94

My text makes me think that the rain of tears is of divine origin. Great clouds of trouble sometimes hover over us. They are black, and they are gorged, and they are thunderous. They are more portentous than Salvator or Claude ever painted’97clouds of poverty or persecution or bereavement. They hover over us, and they get darker and blacker, and after a while a tear starts, and we think by a heavy pressure of the eyelid to stop that tear, but we cannot stop it. Others follow, and after a while there is a shower of tearful emotion. Yes, there is a rain of tears. ’93Hath that rain a father?’94

’93Oh,’94 you say, ’93a tear is nothing but a drop of limpid fluid secreted by the lachrymal gland’97it is only a sign of weak eyes.’94 Great mistake! It is one of the Lord’92s richest benedictions to the world. There are people in Blackwell’92s Island Insane Asylum, and at Utica, and at all the asylums of this land, who are demented by the fact that they could not cry at the right time. Said a maniac in one of our public institutions, under a Gospel sermon that started the tears: ’93Do you see that tear? That is the first tear that I have wept for twelve years. I think it will help my brain.’94 There are a great many in the grave who could not stand any longer under the glacier of trouble. If that glacier had only melted into weeping, they could have endured it.

There have been times in your life when you would have given the world, if you had possessed it, for one tear. You could shriek, you could blaspheme, but you could not cry. Have you never seen a man holding the hand of a dead wife who had been all the world to him? The temples livid with excitement, the eye dry and frantic, no moisture on the upper or lower lid. You saw there were bolts of anger in the cloud, but no rain. To your Christian comfort, he said: ’93Don’92t talk to me about God; there is no God; or if there is, I hate him. Don’92t talk to me about God. Would he have left me and these motherless children?’94 But a few days or hours after, coming across some pencil that she owned in life, or some letters which she wrote when he was away from home, with an outcry that appalls there bursts the fountain of tears; and as the sunlight of God’92s consolation strikes that fountain of tears, you find out that it is a tender-hearted, merciful, pitiful, and all-compassionate God who is the father of that rain.

’93Oh,’94 you say, ’93it is absurd to think that God is going to watch over tears.’94 No, my friends; there are three or four kinds of them that God counts, bottles, and eternizes. First, there are all paternal tears, and there are more of these than of any other kind, because the most of the race die in infancy, and that keeps parents mourning all around the world. They never get over it. They may live to shout and sing afterward, but there is always a corridor in the soul that is silent, though it once resounded. My parents never mentioned the death of a child who died fifty years before without a tremor in the voice and a sigh, oh, how deep-fetched! It was better she should die. It was a mercy she should die. She would have been a lifelong invalid. But you cannot argue away a parent’92s grief. How often you hear the moan, ’93Oh, my child! my child!’94

Then there are the filial tears. Little children soon get over the loss of parents. They are easily diverted with a new toy. But where is the man that has come to thirty or forty or fifty years of age who can think of the old people without having all the fountains of his soul stirred up? You may have had to take care of her a good many years, but you can never forget how she used to take care of you. Have you never heard of an old man, in the delirium of some sickness, call for his mother? The fact is, we get so used to calling for her the first ten years of our life, we never get over it, and when she goes away from us, it makes deep sorrow. Sometimes, perhaps, in the days of trouble and darkness, when the world would say, ’93You ought to be able to take care of yourself,’94 you wake up from your dreams finding yourself saying, ’93Oh, mother! mother!’94

Have these tears no divine origin? Why, take all the warm hearts that ever beat in all lands, and in all ages, and put them together, and their united throb would be weak compared with the throb of God’92s eternal sympathy. Yes, God also is the father of all those tears of repentance. Did you ever see a man repent? I see people going around, trying to repent. They cannot repent. Do you know, no man can repent until God helps him to repent? How do I know? By this passage: ’93Him hath God exalted to be a Prince and a Saviour to give repentance.’94 Oh, it is a tremendous hour when one wakes up and says: ’93I am a bad man; I have not sinned against the laws of the land, but I have wasted my life; God asked me for my services, but I haven’92t given those services. Oh, my sins! God forgive me!’94 When that tear starts, it thrills all heaven. An angel cannot keep his eye off it, and the Church of God assembles around, and there is a commingling of tears’97a rain of tears’97and God is the father of that rain. The Lord, long-suffering, merciful, and gracious.

In a religious assemblage a man arose and said: ’93I have been a very wicked man; I broke my mother’92s heart; I became an infidel; but I have seen my evil ways, and I have surrendered my heart to God; yet it is a grief I can never get over, that my parents should never have heard of my salvation. I don’92t know whether they are living or dead.’94 While yet he was standing in the audience, a voice from the gallery said: ’93Oh, my son! my son!’94 He looked up and recognized her. It was his old mother. She had been praying for him for a great many years, and when, at the foot of the cross, the prodigal son and the praying mother embraced each other, there was a rain, a tremendous rain of tears, and God was the father of those tears. Would that God would break us down with the sense of our sin, and then lift us with the appreciation of his mercy. Tears over our wasted life. Tears over a grieved Spirit. Tears over an injured Father. Repent! Repent!

The king of Carthage was dethroned. His people rebelled against him. He was driven into banishment. His wife and children were outrageously abused. Years went by, and the king of Carthage made many friends. He gathered up a great army. He marched again toward Carthage. Reaching the gates of Carthage, the best men of the place came out barefooted and bareheaded, and with ropes around their necks, crying for mercy. They said: ’93We abused you, and we abused your family, but we cry for mercy.’94 The king of Carthage looked down upon the people from his chariot and said: ’93I came here to bless, I did not come to destroy. You drove me out, but this day I pronounce pardon for all the people. Open the gate and let the army come in.’94 The king marched in and took the throne, and the people all shouted: ’93Long live the king!’94

My friends, you have driven the Lord Jesus Christ, the King of the Church, away from your heart; you have been maltreating him all these years; but he comes back and he stands in front of the gates of your soul. If you will only pray for his pardon, he will meet you with his gracious spirit and he will say: ’93Thy sins and thine iniquities I will remember no more. Open wide the gate; I will take the throne. My peace I give unto you.’94 And then, from the young and from the old, there will be a rain of tears, and God will be the father of that rain.

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage