Triumphing When in Trouble¹

James Meikle

While I am mortal, I must taste of the waters of Mara [bitterness], drink of the cup of adversity and swim the tempestuous ocean. It is the perfection of angels that they can never know the sadness of mental disquiet, or the pangs of anguish; and it is the happiness of departed saints to obtain joy for mourning, a crown for crosses, and to forget their misery, if not wholly, yet to remember it as waters, once swelled to a dreadful flood, but that are now for ever to flow away. It is then the misery of the sons of men, only while here, to be, as it were, a mark set up for the arrows of tribulation and to be engaged in constant war and in perpetual quarrels. But it is the privilege of the Christian soldier to wear the shield of faith, with which he shall be able to quench the fiery darts of Satan and to ward off the slingstones of tribulation which pelt him from every quarter. How greatly I may then triumph under all my afflictions if I consider that:

1. They come from God, whatever may be the instrument: “Thou hast chastised me, and I was chastised”; “Thou in faithfulness hast afflicted me”.

2. They come through love: “Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom He receiveth”.

¹Meikle (1730-99) was a ship’s surgeon in the Royal Navy and wrote various meditations when he was at sea. This is an edited extract from one entitled, “Affliction the lot of saints below”, published in his Solitude Sweetened. He later became an elder in a Secession Church.

1. They are for my good: “Fathers of our flesh . . . chastened us after their own pleasure; but He for our profit, that we might be partakers of His holiness”.

2. They are for the exercise of grace, even of that noble grace of faith: “What time I am afraid I will trust in thee”; here faith is improved by affliction. “My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations; knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience”. “Not only so, but [strange to tell] we glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experience; and experience, hope: and hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost.”

3. They are noble antidotes against sin and preservatives from it: “Before I was afflicted I went astray: but now have I kept Thy word”.

4. They assimilate the saints to their glorious Head, their sympathising and feeling High Priest, who was “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief”. In the work of redemption, “the Captain of their salvation [was made] perfect through sufferings”.

5. They produce a general distaste for all created things and prove them to be subject to vanity; hence, says one much inured to affliction, “I have seen an end of all perfection”.

6. They teach humanity and sympathy to fellow creatures in the same circumstances. Because Israel had been strangers, they would know the heart of a stranger and were to deal kindly with them. And, in this, men are to imitate Him who “suffered being tempted”, that He might know how “to succour them that are tempted” and “be a merciful and faithful High Priest” to His people.

7. They make one very humble and break the haughty mind and bring down the lofty thought: “I shall go softly all my years in the bitterness of my soul”; “My soul is even as a weaned child”. And God has this in view by them: to hide pride from man.

8. They make the man rightly exercised in them to know himself and think on his former ways; to resort often to the throne of grace, go often to God and increase, as it were, the acquaintance between God and his soul: “In the day of my trouble I sought the Lord”.

9. They give clear and certain proof of the providence of God, who in six troubles, and in seven, delivers out of them. They preach His power, who makes His people pass through fire and water, not to utter ruin, which we might well expect, but to a wealthy place, to heaven and to glory.

10. They prepare for glory and make us fit to join the company of those that came out of great tribulation, and have washed their garments and made them white in the blood of the Lamb; therefore are they before the throne of God, and enjoy Him in all His divine fullness, world without end.