Ah! the experience of His people is often still the same. What are many of God's dispensations?--a baffling enigma--all strangeness--all mystery to the eye of sense. _Useless_ lives prolonged, _useful_ ones taken! The honoured minister of God struck down, the unfaithful watchman spared! The philanthropic and benevolent have an arrest put on their manifold deeds of kindness and generosity; the grasping, the avaricious, the mean-souled--those who neither fear God nor do good to man, are suffered to live on from day to day! What is it but the picture here presented eighteen hundred years ago--_Judas_ spared to be a _traitor to his Lord_, while--_Lazarus is dead_! But let us be still! The Saviour, indeed, does not now lead us forth, amid the scene of our trial, as He did the bereft sisters, to unravel the mysteries of His providence, and to shew glory to God, redounding from the darkest of His dispensations. To _us_ the grand sequel is reserved for eternity. The grand development of the divine plan will not be fully accomplished till _then_; faith must meanwhile rest satisfied with what is baffling to sight and sense. This whole narrative is designed to teach the lesson that there is an undeveloped future in all God's dealings. There is an unseen "why and wherefore" which cannot be answered here. Our befitting attitude and language _now_ is that of simple confidingness--"Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?"--Listening to one of these Bethany sayings (we shall by and by consider), whose meaning will be interpreted in a brighter world by Him who uttered it in the days of His flesh--"Said I not unto thee, that if thou wouldest _believe_ thou shouldest _see_ the glory of God?" "O thou who mournest on thy way, With longings for the close of day, He walks with thee, that Angel kind, And gently whispers--'Be resign'd; Bear up--bear on--the end shall tell, The dear Lord ordereth all things well.'" Our duty, meanwhile, is that of children, simply to trust the faithfulness of a God whose footsteps of love we often fail to trace. All will be seen at last to have been not only _for_ the best, but really _the best_. Dark clouds will be fringed with mercy. What we call now "baffling dispensations," will be seen to be wondrous parts of a great connected whole,--the wheel within wheel of that complex machinery, by which "all things" (yes, ALL things) are now working together for good. "Lazarus is dead!" The choicest tree in the earthly Eden has succumbed to the blast. The choicest cup has been dashed to the ground. Some great lights in the moral firmament have been extinguished. But God can do without human agency. His Church can be preserved, though no Moses be spared to conduct Israel over Jordan, and no Lazarus to tell the story of his Saviour's grace and love, when other disciples have forsaken Him and fled.