When He spoke of the thing He told His disciples, first of all, the perfect, complete truth. "This," said Jesus, "is not to end in death's darkness. Its real goal and termination is to be the glory of God, revealed in the glory of his Son, the Christ on earth." That is the end of it; nevertheless, Lazarus must die. God's glory is to find its consummation, not in rescuing Lazarus from the grave, but in restoring him from death, and bringing him back into life. It was part of the material Christ used in building up His kingdom—the sickness and the death of Lazarus. He did delay, not in that seeming revolting, cold-blooded fashion in which it is often portrayed. He did deliberately hold His hand and delay; ay, and He held His loving human heart too, and He let his friend sicken, and suffer pain, and die, and He let the hearts of those two women that loved Him well-nigh break. He did it. Can we justify Him? Did the sisters divine truly when they sent that message, "He whom Thou lovest is sick"? If He loved him, why did He prolong the agony? Why did He not intervene? Why did He not at once cancel death? Why those terrible four days of mourning, and gloom, and darkness, and doubt? Now that is precisely the painful position of all of us in this world of sin, and pain, and sickness, and parting, and death. We think a good God made our world; we think a loving Father holds our lives in His hands; and then we turn and look at this world, we look at the terrible strifes and struggles, we look at the great entail of sin that lies on our race, we see the ravages of disease, and disaster, and violence, and cruelty, and see everywhere the last black enigma of death and the grave, and this in spite of all our Christian faith, learnt from the Bible; ay, learnt from God's Spirit speaking often in the instincts of our heart and nature—we, too, are forced to ask the question, "Lord, why art Thou not here? Why does our brother die? If Thou wert here Thou couldest save him. Dost Thou love him? and if Thou lovest, why are we sick? Why do we die?"