There Is Always God


Then Samuel took a stone, and set it between Mizpeh and Shen, and called the name of it Ebenezer, saying, Hitherto hath the Lord helped us.--I Sam. 7: 12.

To Israel this Ebenezer-stone was to be a perpetual reminder of God’s help and deliverance in an hour when disaster had threatened to overwhelm them. It was to be the voice of experience, saying to them that they could always count on God and need never despair of hope.

Some will say that experience dims hope. That is not true when God has entered into our experience. There is no surer incentive to faith than the recollection of God’s past mercies and blessings. Some people remember only the worst that has happened to them, and naturally for them experience can only be a prophecy of the worst.

The message of Ebenezer and, indeed, of all Scripture and all experience, is that the worst never happened. There is no recorded disaster or calamity which could not have been worse. In the realm of personal experience, there has been no sorrow or loss that might not conceivably have been worse, or might not have been accompanied by those compensations and mitigations which take the edge off life’s bitterest experiences.

Another truth to be cherished is that the worst never will happen. The story is told of a famous Welsh preacher’s catching a congregation as only a dramatic Welsh can. “Do you remember,” he asked in his guileless way, “that year when the winter was so protracted that the trees did not bud?” He went on to describe the things that did not happen as they should have done in springtime. And just as the congregation was worked up trying to recall the particular year, he broke in: “Of course you don’t remember; it never happened--and never will!”

Strange things happen in the world--famines, pestilences, earthquakes, storms; and in the human world social upheavals, revolutions, wars. Sometimes it looks as though the worst has happened or must surely happen. But over against the background of all these dark events and threatening, there is always the light of hope. There is always God!