270. The East Wind

The East Wind

Isa_27:8 : ’93He stayeth his rough wind in the day of the east wind.’94

The north wind is bracing, the south wind is relaxing, but the east wind is irritating and full of threat. Eighteen times does the Bible speak against the east wind. Moses describes the thin ears blasted by the east wind. The Psalmist describes the breaking of the ships of Tarshish by the east wind. The locusts that plagued Egypt were borne in on the east wind. The gourd that sheltered Jonah was scattered by the east wind; and in all the six thousand summers, autumns, winters, springs, of the world’92s existence, the worst wind that ever blew is the east wind. Now, if God would only give us a climate of perpetual nor’92-wester, how genial and kind and placid and industrious Christians we would all be! But it takes almighty grace to be what we ought to be under the east wind. Under the chilling and wet wing of the east wind the most of the world’92s villainies, frauds, outrages, suicides, and murders have been hatched out. I think if you should keep a meteorological history of the days of the year, and put right beside it the criminal record of the State, you would find that those were the best days for public morals which were under the north or west wind, and that those were the worst days for public morals which were under the east wind. The points of the compass have more to do with the world’92s morals and the church’92s piety than you have yet suspected. Rev. Dr. Archibald Alexander, eminent for learning and for consecration, when asked by one of his students at Princeton whether he always had full assurance of faith, replied: ’93Yes, except when the wind blows from the east.’94 Dr. Francia, Dictator of Paraguay, when the wind was from the east, made oppressive enactments for the people; but when the weather changed, repented him of the cruelties, repealed the enactments, and was in good humor with all the world.

Before I overtake the main thought of my subject, I want to tell Christian people they ought to be observant of climatical changes. Be on your guard when the wind blows from the east. There are certain styles of temptations that you cannot endure under certain kinds of weather. When the wind blows from the east, if you are of a nervous temperament, go not among exasperating people, try not to settle bad debts, do not try to settle old disputes, do not talk with a bigot on religion, do not go among those people who delight in saying irritating things, do not try to collect funds for a charitable institution, do not try to answer an insulting letter. If these things must be done, do them when the sun shines and when the wind is from the north, or the south, or the west, but not when the wind is from the east.

You say that men and women ought not to be so sensitive and nervous. I admit it, but I am not talking about what the world ought to be; I am talking about what the world is. While there are persons whose disposition does not seem to be affected by changes in the atmosphere, nine out of ten are mightily susceptible to such influences. O Christian man! under such circumstances do not write hard things against yourself, do not get worried about your fluctuating experience. You are to remember that the barometer in your soul is only answering the barometer of the weather. Instead of sitting down and being discouraged and saying, ’93I am not a Christian because I do not feel exhilarant,’94 get up and look out of the window and see the weather vane pointing in the wrong quarter, and then say, ’93Get thee behind me, Satan, thou prince of the power of the air; get out of my house! get out of my heart, thou demon of darkness horsed on the east wind. Away!’94 However good and great you may be in the Christian life, your soul will never be independent of physical condition. I feel I am uttering a most practical, useful truth here, one that may give relief to a great many Christians who are worried and despondent at times.

Dr. Rush, a monarch in medicine, after curing hundreds of cases of mental depression, himself fell sick and lost his religious hope, and he would not believe his pastor when the pastor told him that his spiritual depression was only a consequence of physical depression. Andrew Fuller, Thomas Scott, William Cowper, Thomas Boston, David Brainerd, Philip Melanchthon were mighty men for God, but all of them illustrations of the fact that a man’92s soul is not independent of his physical health. An eminent physician gave as his opinion that no man ever died a greatly triumphant death whose disease was below the diaphragm. Stackhouse, the learned Christian commentator, says he does not think Saul was insane when David played the harp before him, but it was a hypochondria coming from inflammation of the liver. How many good people have been mistaken in regard to their religious hope, not taking these things into consideration! The Dean of Carlisle, one of the best men that ever lived, and one of the most useful, sat down and wrote: ’93Though I have endeavored to discharge my duty as well as I could, yet sadness and melancholy of heart stick close by and increase upon me. I tell nobody, but I am very much sunk indeed, and I wish I could have the relief of weeping as I used to. My days are exceedingly dark and distressing. In a word, Almighty God seems to hide his face, and I intrust the secret hardly to any earthly being. I know not what will become of me. There is doubtless a good deal of bodily affliction mingled with this, but it is not all so. I bless God, however, that I never lose sight of the cross, and though I should die without seeing my personal interest in the Redeemer’92s merits, I hope that I shall be found at his feet. I will thank you for a word at your leisure. My door is bolted at the time I am writing this, for I am full of tears.’94

What was the matter with the Dean of Carlisle? Had he got to be a worse man? No. The physicians said that the state of his pulse would not warrant his living a minute. Oh, if the east wind affects the spleen, and affects the lungs, and affects the liver, it will affect your immortal soul. Appealing to God for help, brace yourself against these withering blasts and destroying influences, lest that which the Psalmist said broke the ships of Tarshish shipwreck you.

But here comes in the glorious promise of my text: ’93He stayeth his rough wind in the day of the east wind.’94 Mind you, he does not say that the wind will not blow from the east; it must sometimes blow from that quarter; the east wind is just as important as the north wind, or the south wind, or the west wind, but not so pleasant. Trial must come. The text does not say you will escape the cutting blast. Whoever did escape it? Especially who that accomplished anything for Church or State ever escaped it? I was one summer in the pulpit of John Wesley, in London, a pulpit where he stood one day and said: ’93I have been charged with all the crimes in the catalogue except one’97that of drunkenness,’94 and his wife arose in the audience and said: ’93You know you were drunk last night.’94 John Wesley passing under the flail! I saw in a foreign journal a report of one of George Whitefield’92s sermons’97a sermon preached a hundred and twenty or thirty years ago. It seemed that the reporter stood to take the sermon, and his chief idea was to caricature it; and these are some of the reportorial interlinings of the sermon of George Whitefield. After calling him by a nickname indicative of a physical defect in the eye, it goes on to say: ’93Here the preacher clasps his chin on the pulpit cushion. Here he elevates his voice. Here he lowers his voice. Holds his arms extended. Bawls aloud. Stands trembling. Makes a frightful face. Turns up the whites of his eyes. Clasps his hands behind him. Clasps his arms around him, and hugs himself. Roars aloud. Holloas. Jumps. Cries. Changes from crying. Holloas and jumps again.’94 Well, my brother, if that good man went through all that process, do not be surprised if you in your occupation, in your profession, in your store, in your shop, at the bar, in the sickroom, in the editorial chair, somewhere, you will have to go through a similar process; you cannot escape it.

Keats wrote his famous poem, and the hard criticism of the poem killed him’97literally killed him. Tasso wrote his poem entitled ’93Jerusalem Delivered,’94 and it had such a cold reception it turned him into a raving maniac. Stillingfleet was slain by his literary enemies. The frown of Henry VIII slew Cardinal Wolsey. The Duke of Wellington refused to have the fence around his house, which had been destroyed by an excited mob, repaired, because he wanted the fence to remain as it was, a reminder of the mutability and uncertainty of popular favor.

And you will have trial of some sort. You have had it already. Why need I prophesy? I might better mention an historical fact in your history. You are a merchant. What a time you had with that old business partner! How hard it was to get rid of him! Before you bought him out, or he ruined both of you, what magnitude of annoyance! Then after you had paid him down a certain sum of money to have him go out, and to promise he would not open a store of the same kind of business in your street, did he not open the very same kind of business as near to you as possible, and take all your customers as far as he could take them? And then, knowing all your frailties and weaknesses, after being in your business firm for so many years, is he not now spending his time in making a commentary on what you furnished as a text?

You are a physician, and in your sickness, or in your absence, you get a neighboring doctor to take your place in the sickroom, and he ingratiates himself into the favor of that family, so that you forever lose their patronage. Or, you take a patient through the serious stages of a fever, and some day the impatient father or husband of the sick one rushes out and gets another medical practitioner, who comes in just in time to get the credit of the cure. Or, you are a lawyer, and you come in contact with a trickster in your profession, and in your absence, and contrary to agreement, he moves a nonsuit or the dismissal of the case; or a judge on the bench, remembering an old political grudge, rules against you every time he gets a chance, and says with a snarl, ’93If you do not like my decisions, take an exception.’94 Or, you are a farmer, and the curculio stings the fruit, or the weevil gets into the wheat, or the drought stunts the corn, or the long-continued rains give you no opportunity for gathering the harvest. Your best cow gets the hollow-horn, your best horse gets foundered. A French proverb said that trouble conies in on horseback and goes away on foot. So trouble dashed in on you suddenly, but oh, how long it was in getting away! Came on horseback, goes away on foot. Rapid in coming, slow in going. That is the history of nearly all your troubles. Again and again and again you have experienced the power of the east wind. It may be blow-in from that direction this morning.

My friends, God intended these troubles and trials for some particular purpose. They do not come at random. Here is the promise: ’93He stayeth his rough wind in the day of the east wind.’94 In the Tower of London the swords and the guns of other ages are burnished and arranged into huge passion-flowers, and huge sun-flowers, and bridal cakes, and you wonder how anything so hard as steel could be put into such floral shapes. I have to tell you that the hardest, sharpest, most cutting, most piercing sorrows of this life may be made to bloom and blossom and put on bridal festivity. My text says they shall be mitigated, they shall be assuaged, they shall be graduated. God is not going to allow you to be overthrown. A Christian woman, very much despondent, was holding her child in her arms, and the pastor, trying to console the woman in her spiritual depression, said, ’93There, you will let your child drop.’94 ’93Oh, no,’94 she said, ’93I couldn’92t let the child drop.’94 He said, ’93You will let the child drop.’94 ’93Why,’94 she said, ’93if I should drop the child here, it would dash his life out!’94 ’93Well, now,’94 said the Christian minister, ’93do you not think God is as good as you are? Will not God, your Father, take as good care of you, his child, as you take care of your child? God will not let you drop.’94

I suppose God lets the east wind blow just hard enough to drive us into the harbor of God’92s protection. We all feel we can manage our own affairs. We have helm and compass and chart and quadrant. Give us plenty of sea-room and we sail on and sail on; but after a while there comes a Caribbean whirlwind up the coast, and we are helpless in the gale, and we cry out for harbor. All our calculations upset, we say with the poet,

Change and decay on all around I see;

O thou that changest not, abide with me!’94

The south wind of mild providence makes us throw off the robe of Christian character and we catch cold, but the sharp east wind of trouble makes us wrap around us warm promises. The best thing that ever happens to us is trouble. That is a hard thing perhaps to say; but I repeat it, for God declares it again and again, the best thing that happens to us is trouble.

When the French army went down into Egypt under Napoleon, an engineer, in digging for a fortress, came across a tablet which has been called the Rosetta stone. There were inscriptions in three or four languages on that Rosetta stone. Scholars studying out the alphabet of hieroglyphics from that stone were enabled to read ancient inscriptions on monuments and on tombstones. Well, many of the handwritings of God in our life are indecipherable hieroglyphics; we cannot understand them until we take up the Rosetta stone of divine inspiration, and the explanation all comes out, and the mysteries all vanish, and what was before beyond our understanding now is plain in its meaning, as we read, ’93All things work together for good to those who love God.’94 So we decipher the hieroglyphics. Oh, my friends! have you ever calculated what trouble did for David? It made him the sacred minstrel for all ages. What did trouble do for Joseph? Made him the keeper of the corn-cribs of Egypt. What did it do for Paul? Made him the greatest apostle to the Gentiles. What did it do for Samuel Rutherford? Made his invalidism more illustrious than robust health. What did it do for Richard Baxter? Gave him capacity to write of the ’93Saint’92s Everlasting Rest.’94 What did it do for John Bunyan? Showed him the shining gates of the city. What has it done for you? Since the loss of that child, your spirit has been purer. Since the loss of that property, you have found out that earthly investments are insecure. Since you lost your health, you feel as never before a rapt anticipation of eternal release. Trouble has humbled you, has enlarged you, has multiplied your resources, has equipped you, has loosened your grasp from this world and tightened your grip on the next. Oh! bless God for the east wind. It has driven you into the harbor of God’92s sympathy.

Nothing like trouble to show us that this world is an insufficient portion. Hogarth was about done with life, and he wanted to paint the end of all things. He put on canvas a shattered bottle; a cracked bell; an unstrung harp; a sign-board of a tavern called ’93The World’92s End’94 falling down; a shipwreck; the horses of Ph’9cbus lying dead in the clouds; the moon in her last quarter, and the world on fire. ’93One thing more,’94 said Hogarth, ’93and my picture is done.’94 Then he added the broken palette of a painter. Then he died. But trouble, with hand mightier and more skilful than Hogarth’92s, pictures the falling, failing, moldering world. And we want something permanent to lay hold of, and we grasp with both hands after God, and say, ’93The Lord is my light, the Lord is my love, the Lord is my fortress, the Lord is my sacrifice, the Lord, the Lord is my God.’94

Bless God for your trials. Oh, my Christian friend! keep your spirits up by the power of Christ’92s Gospel. Do not surrender. Do you not know that when you give up, others will give up? You have courage, and others will have courage. The Romans went into the battle, and by some accident there was an inclination of the standard. The standard upright meant forward march; the inclination of the standard meant surrender. Through the negligence of the man who carried the standard, and the inclination of it, the army surrendered. Oh! let us keep the standard up, whether it be blown by the east wind, or the north wind, or the south wind. No inclination to surrender. Forward into the conflict.

There is near Bombay a tree that they call the ’93sorrowing tree,’94 the peculiarity of which is it never puts forth any bloom in the daytime, but in the night puts out all its bloom and all its redolence. And I have to tell you that though Christian character puts forth its sweetest blossoms in the darkness of sickness, the darkness of financial distress, the darkness of bereavement, the darkness of death, ’93Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.’94 Across the harsh discords of this world rolls the music of the skies’97music that breaks from the lips, music that breaks from the harps and rustles from the palms, music like falling water over rocks, music like wandering winds among leaves, music like carolling birds among forests, music like ocean billows storming the Atlantic beach: ’93They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more, neither shall the sun light on them nor any heat; for the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall lead them to living fountains of water, and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.’94 I see a great Christian fleet approaching that harbor. Some of the ships come in with sails rent and bulwarks knocked away, but still afloat. Nearer and nearer the shining shore. Nearer and nearer eternal anchorage. Haul away, my lads! haul away! Some of the ships had mighty tonnage, and others were shallops easily lifted of the wave. Some were men-of-war and armed with the thunders of Christian battle, and others were unpretending tugs taking others through the ’93Narrows,’94 and some were coasters that never ventured out into the deep seas of Christian experience; but they are all coming nearer the wharf’97brigantine, galleon, line-of-battle ship, long-boat, pinnace, war-frigate’97and as they come into the harbor I find that they are driven by the long, loud, terrific blast of the east wind. It is through much tribulation that you are to enter into the kingdom of God.

You have blessed God for the north wind, and blessed him for the south wind, and blessed him for the west wind; can you not in the light of this subject bless him for the east wind?

Nearer, my God, to thee,

Nearer to thee,

E’92en though it be a cross

That raiseth me;

Still all my song shall be,

Nearer, my God, to thee,

Nearer to thee.

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage