What God has done, God can do.
The stamp of "impossible" cannot rest upon anything if we are able to say concerning it, "It has been done." And that we are able to say concerning every kind of strain or calamity that "turns up" in a religious experience. "There is no temptation ever overtakes us but such as is common to man," and God has had to deal with just such things—and even with just such things in relation to just such people—before now.
I. WHAT GOD HAS DONE.
1. Compassed all the features and forms of the commonplace of life. It is necessary to dwell on this, because of the frail human disposition to separate the thought of God from the little, and associate him only with the great. But life is in the main commonplace, ordinary, little. And we need to realize that God has had direct association with absolutely everything that can come into the commonplace of life. In dealing with the first race of men, it may reverently be observed that God had no experience of what men would be and do, to guide his ways with them. Experience was in the making. It is made now. Enough generations of men in diversified relations have passed to cover the whole circle of human possibilities. Man can only repeat himself; he never surprises God. And God has adjusted his gracious help and guidance to every kind of ordinary human circumstance and need. Therefore is the Bible given to us so largely in the biographical form. We are to trace the working of God in lives that are essentially like our own.
2. Efficiently adapted his grace to the unusual of life. There is perhaps, strictly speaking, no unusual in life. From the Divine point of view there are no exigencies, no surprises. "The thing which is hath already been." But for instructive purposes we may point out that the unusual, though it may not be in things, may be in the relation of things to persons. God has to deal with the disposition of each one, and with the effect of events on each disposition. But here again we may see that his experience of adjustments is so extensive that a new and bewildering set of complications for him is inconceivable.
II. WHAT GOD CAN DO. Be to us the Help which he has always been to his people. Do for us what he has always done for his people. What has he done in our lives? That he can still do. What has he done in the lives of others? That he can do in our lives if need be. What has he done in the vicissitudes of the ages? That he can do for our age and for us. We are "not straitened in God," seeing that he can "supply all our need."—R.T.