Exodus 5:22-23 - Homiletics

The religious soul takes its griefs straight to God.

When our hopes are disappointed, when matters fall out otherwise than as we wish, when our enemies resist us, and our friends load us with reproach, how sweet to have a safe refuge whither we may betake ourselves, even the besom of our most loving God! "Truly God is loving unto Israel." His hand may be slack, "as men count slackness;" but it is not crippled or paralysed—it is always "mighty to save." Worldlings take their difficulties and their troubles to counsellors whom they deem wise, or to friends whom they regard as powerful, or to subordinates whom they think to be crafty, but never to God. The religious soul's first instinct in deep trouble is to seek solitude, to fly from man, and to pour out all its grief before the Lord. It will even venture, like Moses, to expostulate—to ask to be shown the reason why God has disappointed it and troubled it—to demand "Why is thy wrath so hot? ' and "When wilt thou comfort me?" It does not doubt but that in the end all will be right, that God will do as he has promised; but it wants to be sustained, upheld, comforted as to the intermediate time—to be assured that God "has not forgotten to be gracious" that he is still nigh at hand, that he "will not leave it nor forsake it."