The Balances of God

“God is a God of knowledge, and by Him actions are weighed.” (1 Samuel 2:3)

We are apt to measure things by their size and not by their weight. We too often prefer the things which make the most show. We admire big things, and we are not deeply concerned with their essential content. And so we appreciate the Pharisee’s loud-sounding offering more than the widow’s mite. We are more attracted by swelling rhetoric than by simple speech. We delight in the big canvas. We rejoice in pageants and demonstrations. Our admiration is usually determined by scale rather than by weight.

But our God weighs things. He weighs our offerings, and He weighs them in His own spiritual scales, to see what spiritual significance there is in them. He weighs our money-gifts to ascertain their weight of sacrifice. And so it comes to pass that the widow’s mite wins His praise rather than the rich man’s abundance.

He weighs our prayers to see what weight of holy desire there is in them. Prayers may be very long and very empty, and in the scales of God they are as light as the lightest chaff. In our prayers it is desire that weighs heavily, and penitence, and humility, and serious purpose of amendment. In our intercessions it is our self-forgetfulness that wins the favour of the Lord — our sacrifice in thoughtfulness, our true sympathy, the burden of our brother’s need.

God weighs our joys, and it is our thankfulness which reveals its mighty presence in the scales. In the estimation of the Lord many things are very weighty which have no regard in the esteem of the world. It is the spiritual and the sacrificial which truly count in all things. Without these everything is light as vanity, however imposing the display it makes in the eyes of the world.

“Thou didst well it was in thine heart” (1 Kings 8:18). Here is the Lord weighing an inner desire. David yearns to build a temple, and the yearning is not to be realised. But the gracious Lord puts the longing into His scales, and it is found to have the weight of a perfected act. God does not wait for material creations, and then measure the value of our life by visible results.

Our hungers are the vital part of our character, and a discerning judgment will estimate their force and intensity. “Blessed are they that hunger!” (Matthew 5:6). God weighs the inner things, the yearnings, the prayings, and the dreams. We measure only finished accomplishments. We revel in the dimensions of the temple which is built. God weighs the desire for a temple that was never built, and in His gracious judgment it has all the solidity of a temple made with hands.

The man or the woman who longs to be a missionary, but whose yearnings cannot be realised, is counted as a missionary in the eyes of the Lord, and the will to do is reckoned as the deed done. “Thou didst well it was in thine heart.”

Here are rich men ostentatiously dropping their offerings into the temple treasury. How the temple officials rejoiced in the sensational gifts! How they sounded the praises abroad! And there came a poor widow, and she quietly left her offering for the Lord. Judged by measure it was next to nothing: when put into the scales of the Lord it outweighed all the other offerings put together. On a subscription list it would never have been noticed. Nay, it would never have been published at all, but it shone radiantly in the Lamb’s book of life. The widow’s service had in it something of Calvary, and the poor contributor was a blood-relation of the Lord. God weighs everything, and love-sacrifice is the heaviest thing in the world.

J.H.J.