Now, I emphasize that, because there used to be a great deal of thinking about God's relation to those that love Him and whom He loves—a great deal of teaching in the Christian Church that counted itself most orthodox, and which was, indeed, deadly heresy, coarse, materialistic, despicable, misunderstanding the ideal grandeur of the Bible promises. Some of you know the sort of teaching that used to prevail—the idea that God's saints should be exceptionally favoured; the sun would shine on their plot of corn, and it would not shine on the plot of corn of the bad man; their ships would not sink at sea, their children would not catch infectious diseases; God would pamper them, exempt them from bearing their part in the world's great battle, with hardness and toil of labour, with struggle, and attainment, and achievement. It came of a very despicable conception of what a father can do for a child, as if the best thing for a father to do for his son was to pet and indulge him, and save him all bodily struggle and all difficulties, instead of giving him a life of discipline. As if a general in the army would, because of his faltering heart, refuse to let his son take the post of danger; as if he would not rather wish for that son—ay, with a great pang in his own soul—that he should be the bravest, the most daring, the one most exposed to the deadliest hazard. Ah, we have got to recognise that we whom God loves may be sick and dying, and yet God does love us. Lazarus was loved by Jesus, yet he whom Jesus loved was sick and dying. Ah, and there is a still more poisonous difficulty in that materialistic, that worldly way of looking at God's love; that horrible, revolting misjudgment that Christ condemned, crushed with indignation when it confronted Him. "The men on whom the tower of Siloam fell must have been sinners worse than us on whom it did not fall." Never, never! The great government of the world is not made up of patches and strokes of anger and outbursts of weak indulgence. The world is God's great workshop, God's great battle-field. These have their places. Here a storm of bullets falls, and brave and good men as well as cowards fall before it. You mistake if you try to forestall God's judgments, God's verdicts on the last great day of reckoning. Still we have got the fact that Christ does not interpose to prevent death, that Christ does not hinder those dearest to Him from bearing their share of life's sicknesses and sufferings, that God Himself suffers death to go on, apparently wielding an undisputed sway over human existence.