Immutability

God may have been proclaiming to you, through severe and varied discipline, that earth is not your home, that you are but sojourners here, that your dwellings are not freehold but leasehold. He would lead you not to mistake the shelter of the wayfarer for the permanent abiding Mansion; the perishable refuge for the magnificent clefts of the Rock of Ages. He would lead you, as "strangers on earth," to have your "citizenship in heaven." These trials may be only the tones of His own tender voice, issuing the invitation—"Go, My people, enter your rooms and shut the doors behind you; hide yourselves for a little while until His wrath has passed by" (Isaiah 26:20). He may be putting a thorn in your earthly nest and earthly home, to drive you to the wing and teach you to warble as you soar up to heaven's gate—"Lord, amid the frailty and failing of all created things, I turn to the One only unfailing, unvarying, unchanging portion! My dwelling place shall henceforth be in You. My flesh and my heart fails, but You are the strength of my heart and my portion forever!" In such a Home, when fully realized and tested as no phantasm and shadow—but a sublime truth, who cannot enjoy, even with regard to earthly things, the feeling of satisfaction and of safety? "You will keep him in perfect peace (lit. 'peace, peace') whose mind is stayed on You, because he trusts in You." The child dreads no danger so long as the strong encompassing arm of his father is around him. The winter storm may revel at will outside, but in the paternal dwelling he is safe. There is a special promise given to all who thus confidingly resort to the Everlasting God as their home and portion. "Because you have made the Lord, who is my refuge, even the Most High, your habitation; there shall no evil (no real evil) befall you" (Ps. 91:9, 10). In the most adverse circumstances He will prove to His people their protector; so that, in the words put into the lips of Ezekiel, "They shall dwell safely in the wilderness and sleep in the woods" (Ezek. 34:25), in the unlikeliest places and seasons they may feel sweetly secure. It is in Himself that His own promise has its most glorious fulfillment—"Your people will live in peaceful dwelling places, in secure homes, in undisturbed places of rest" (Isa. 32:18). Nor can we omit a closing reference to the last clause of our motto-verse—"in all generations." A noble thought—Jehovah the unchanging dwelling-place of His Church and His people in every age! Even Moses, who had not the long centuries of holy tradition and divine and saintly memory we enjoy, loved to repose on the thought of God, not only as "the God of his fathers," but as the God of all the years, as well as of all the families of earth. Perhaps he penned the psalm some night in the desert—night with its darkness, as in the shadow of the Almighty's wings. He may have delighted to think that the same silent stars which kept vigil over the tents of Mamre, Shechem, and Bethel in the generations of old, were stooping that hour over the sleeping earth. But more comforting still the reflection, that He who lighted up these altar-fires in the great nightly temple, was ever living and loving; the unchanging sanctuary of His people from age to age. The generations had passed away and perished—He was still, and ever would be, the same. Let ours be the prayer, "Be my rock of refuge, to which I can always go!" And, as in the picture of a blessed earthly home, there must be harmony of will and congeniality of taste and feeling among the occupants, let it be our constant and lofty aspiration that our human wills may gradually be made to agree with the Divine, our hearts filled with love to Him, and love for all on whom His own boundless love is lavished. Having this as the master passion—the dominant principle in our regenerated nature, the motive principle of our spiritual life, we shall know that as children we are within the dwelling-place of our Father, "For he that dwells in love dwells in God, and God in him." "Let the beauty of the Lord," is the closing prayer of the psalm, "be upon us:" or as that is rendered in the Targum, "Let the sweetness of the garden of Eden be upon us;" that beauty and sweetness which is better than shade of palm-tree, or breath of flower, or music of fountain—the habitual realization of God's gracious favor and paternal guardianship—"They shall rest in His love" (Zeph. 3:17). "Plan not, nor scheme, but calmly wait, His choice is best. While blind and erring is thy sight; His wisdom sees and judges right, So trust and rest. "Strive not, nor struggle; thy poor might Can never wrest The meanest thing to serve thy will. All power is His alone: Be still, And trust and rest." "What dost thou fear? His wisdom reigns Supreme confessed; His power is infinite; His love Thy deepest, Fondest dreams above, So trust and rest." "He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty."