Under a Cloud

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Michigan · Apr 8, 1902

PEOPLE speak of being “under a cloud” when they feel despondent; and to have the way cloudy means to them the absence of hope; yet God spoke to Moses and to all Israel out of the cloud, giving them instruction for all time; and it was by a pillar of cloud that he led them through the wilderness. It was only those who had rejected God that found the cloud a trouble. The same cloud that was darkness and gloom and disaster to the Egyptians, was brightness and joy and salvation to the Israelites.

The same thing is true to-day; for the same God is leading his people from the same “house of bondage” to the same deliverance, and by the same means. “The Lord hath his way in the whirlwind and in the storm, and the clouds are the dust of his feet.” Nahum 1:3. Our gloom and destruction or our hope and salvation depend on our relation to the cloud. On one side it is dark, but on the side next to God it is light. Nothing that human eye has ever seen is more gloriously beautiful than a cloud lighted up by the sun. Whoever is crucified with Christ, and so risen with him, has been made to sit with him in the heavenly places, and so can look upon every cloud from God’s side of it. No cloud can shut out God from the view of him who makes Christ his dwelling place.—Selected.