MURMURING AGAINST GOD

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jul 30, 1902

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 28, No. 31.

MURMURING AGAINST GOD.

“The murmurings of the people,” says Dr. Alexander McLaren, on Exodus 16, in the Sunday School Times, “fill a larger space in the lesson than the supply of the manna, and we may well pause on them. We may learn from them how quickly men forget God’s benefits when difficulties or losses come, and may ask ourselves if our thankfulness is more stable and independent of the moment’s circumstances than theirs was. There are flowers that shut themselves up if a cloud comes over the sun, and there are flowers that hold their petals wide open all the day, tho the light comes only from a veiled sky. Which of the two is our gratitude to God like? Can we sing in a darkened cage? We may learn, too, what tricks memory plays when we are discontented with our present, painting our past for us, like a Japanese picture, without any shadows. There are moods in which we remember the fleshpots and forget the bondage, and that not because we have learned to look wisely at past sorrows, but because we are looking unwisely at present ones.

“Again, these murmurers remind us how apt we are to lay the blame of our losses or trials at the door of men, and to ignore God in them. ‘Ye have brought us into this wilderness,’ said they. If they had said, ‘God has brought us,’ they would probably have gone on to realize that, if so, He would take care of them. They had not got so far as to venture yet to murmur against God, and so they launched their reproaches against Moses and Aaron. But the arrows from bitter tongues glanced off the two instruments and struck the hand that wielded them. ‘We often mean God when we say ‘Ye,’ and are really accusing Him when we do not venture to name Him, but complain of His tools.’”