God's Help in Tribulation
By George Matheson
“He was with the wild beasts, and the angels ministered unto him.” Mark 1: 13. It was a meeting of extremes—the wild beasts and the angels. Two ends of the ladder of creation rested on the Son of man. His human nature had never been so lowly, never so near the ground. He was experiencing what we all at times experience—a sense of the desert. The sheer had faded from the waters of Jordan; the dove had departed; the crowd had deserted; again, as in his infancy, he was with the beasts of the field. Yet it was now again that the angels came. It is always in his depression that I read of the angels coming—in the manger, in the wilderness, in the garden. Why do they come in his depression? Because there is a virtue in depression?—Nay, the reverse—because there is a danger in it. God will not let me have a cross without the alabaster box; he fears the effect of unqualified pain on me. There is not in all his providence a night without a star. He plants a flower on every grave, and that flower is the boundary line beyond which grief can not go. Therefore it is, O Father, that I do not die. I could not have lived with the wild beasts if the angels had not come. I have often marveled that I did not die in the desert. When I saw it from afar, I said, “I could not live there.” Yet I have passed through, and my life is preserved. The moment I entered the desert, I felt a nameless strength. It was thy nameless angel, O Father—the angel that struggled with Jacob to keep him standing when he fain would fall. So would I have fallen, but for thy nameless angel. Thy strength passeth understanding. It was not that my anticipation of the desert proved false; it was as bad as I expected it to be. If I had been left to myself, I should have groveled on the ground. But the nameless Hand upheld me, the unseen Presence saved me, the indefinable Peace supported me. It was an incomprehensible peace. It came where it had no right to be. By all the laws of nature I ought to have fallen; the gravity of the whole earth was dragging me down; wherefore did I stand? It was thy veiled arm that held me, O Peace irrational, O Strength invisible, O Rest inexplicable, O Power that movest through shut doors, I have lived by thee! Thy staff in the valley, thy rose in the desert, thy star in the night, thy crown in the cross, thy bells in the snow, thy voice in the storm, thy print in the wounds, thine angel with the beasts of the field—it is they that have comforted me.—George Matheson, D. D.