FAMINE—GOD’S MESSENGER
‘The Lord hath called for a famine.’
I. What is the meaning of this expression?—Simply, the Lord hath produced it—ordered it; it is part of His Providence. ‘God said, Let there be light: and there was light.’ A wonderful thing is this we find in the whole Bible—God calling for circumstances as if they were creatures which could hear Him and respond to His call; as if famine and plenty, pestilence and scourge of every name, were so many personalities, all standing back in the clouds, and God said, Famine, forward! and immediately the famine came, and took away the bread of the people; but then next door to famine stands plenty, and God says to abundance, Forward! and the earth laughs in harvests; the table is abundantly spread, and every living thing is satisfied. Take Ezekiel 36:29 as presenting the pleasant side of this call by the voice Divine: ‘I will call for the corn, and will increase it, and lay no famine upon you.’ Hear how the Divine voice rolls through all this sphere of revelation. If you proceed to Romans 4:17 you will find in the last clause of the verse words often overlooked: ‘God … calleth those things which be not as though they were.’ God is always creating, calling something out of nothing, amazing the ages by new flashes of glory, unexpected disclosures of presence and grace. Calling for a famine is a frequent expression. You find it, for example, in Psalms 105:16: ‘Moreover He called for a famine upon the land: He brake the whole staff of bread’; and you find it in so out-of-the-way a corner as the prophecy of Haggai 1:11: ‘And I called for a drought upon the land, and upon the mountains, and upon the corn, and upon the new wine, and upon the oil, and upon that which the ground bringeth forth, and upon men, and upon cattle, and upon all the labour of the hands.’
II. The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof.—So there are men who still believe that plague, pestilence, and short harvest, and things evil that are of a material kind, have a subtle and often immeasurable relation to a Divine thought, to a new disclosure of Divine Providence; that all these things round about us are used as instruments in the chastening, and education, and sanctification of the human race. We cannot be laughed out of this citadel. Sometimes we have half left it under the joke of the jiber, because we had no answer to the mocker’s laugh; but presently we began to see how things are related, how mysteriously earth belongs to heaven, and how the simplest, meanest flower that grows draws its life-blood from the sun; then we have returned into the sanctuary, and said, ‘Be the mysteries dark as they may and all but innumerable, there is a comfort in this doctrine that there is in none other’—and not a quieting comfort after the nature of a soporific, but an encouraging, stimulating, rousing comfort, that lifts our prayer into a nobler elevation, and sharpens our voice by the introduction of a new accent. So we abide in this Christian faith, and await the explanation which God has promised.