Our Father Knows Best by L. M. GATES

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Feb 26, 1867

Our Father Knows Best.

By L. M. GATES

Happy indeed is it for us that all our affairs are ordered by an unerring Parent, who knows the end from the beginning, while we have the assurance that “all things work together for good to them that love God.” Though “in heaviness through manifold temptations,” though our trials should be of a kind peculiarly hard for human nature to bear, still we may ever surely know that our heavenly Father knows just what is best for his wayward children, and perhaps this very thing, which we feel that we ought not to have to bear, may be one of the “all things” which shall eventually work for our eternal good. Though sorrows encompass, and the waves of affliction threaten to overwhelm us; though bereavements come unexpectedly upon us in such a manner that our lacerated hearts, bleeding at every pore, seem crushed beneath the blow, still our “Father is at the helm,” who has promised, “I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee.”

I have in my mind at this moment the cases of those two devoted servants of God who suffered violent deaths almost one year ago, nearly at the same time; Bro. Lawton, of Mackford, Wis., who, far from friends and home, came to his end so suddenly by a fall from a bridge, and Bro. Orton, of Rochester, N. Y., who fell by the ruthless hand of an assassin. I have asked myself, Why were these tried and faithful ones taken, who were blessings to their families, pillars in the church of God, and who, in their daily lives, were “living epistles, known and read of all men?” To us it seemed that nothing could ever swerve them from the truth, and that we could not well spare them from our ranks. But our Father in infinite wisdom suffered them to come under the power of death for a season, why, we may never know in the present state. Jesus says, “What I do thou knowest not now, but thou shalt know hereafter.”

Who, since the days of the apostles, ever espoused the cause of truth, with whole heart and soul, more fully, or labored in the service of his divine Master more arduously, than did Wm. Miller; and yet we learn that God saw it necessary to lay him in the grave, to save him.

Again, I am reminded of Eld. Taylor, and many others, myself among the number, whom death has written childless, within the past few years. Oh! it was not a blind chance that removed those loved ones; the arrow of death was not suffered to thus enter our dwellings without the permission of our Father, who doeth all things well. While mourning for my lost one, I have at times almost seemed to hear an audible voice, saying, “From that child’s earliest infancy thou hast prayed for her salvation, and in no other way could the Lord answer thy prayers, surrounded as she was by every influence calculated to draw her young heart from God, except what little thou couldst feebly exert.” I have felt rebuked, dried my tears, and thanked God that my little one was so safe, so sure of eternal life.

What abundant reason have we for thankfulness that we are not left to mark out our own path, to choose our own trials or even our own blessings. How often would the coveted good we so earnestly sought, have proved a snare to our unwary feet.

I bless the Lord in my heart that we, and ours, are in the hands of Omnipotent Wisdom, “who is too wise to err, and too good to be unkind.”

L. M. GATES.

Beaver Dam, Feb., 1867.