Bible Commentaries

SICKNESS SANCTIFIED

‘I shall go softly all my years in the bitterness of my soul.’

Isaiah 38:15

In the text occurs an expression which opens the jubilant portion of Hezekiah’s song of thanksgiving for recovery. The King James Version here reads, ‘I shall go softly all my years in the bitterness of my soul.’ But our Revised Version gives the meaning correctly, ‘because of the bitterness of my soul.’

The new marginal reading gives as a substitute for ‘go softly,’ ‘as in solemn procession.’ It is as though Hezekiah saw in grateful vision the long processional of his days and years, in the sight of his people, going up before God, an anthem of praise to his deliverer.

Sickness, sorrow, or suffering of any kind, when sanctified, has this softening effect. In remembrance of what we have felt and learned, we want to go softly, tenderly, gently. This shows itself in three ways:—

I. In tenderness of conscience.—Having just learned more of our own weakness, we find the need of walking softly, tenderly. As a man would walk over thin ice, looking around him on either side for something strong to rest upon, so will we do, knowing that we must go over hard and trying places, and looking to Christ and the Holy Spirit in all our weakness and insufficiency.

II. He who has been shaken by the hand of God, either physically or morally, must have learned a larger, tenderer charity for the weakness of others, for their doubts and wanderings.—Sickness almost always brings something of this softening effect into the heart and life for a time. It chastens and subdues the angles and roughnesses of character.

III. Sanctified sickness will produce softness of spirit before God.—Our thoughts of Him will be more loving, more grateful, more personal. We are apt to think of God as an abstraction; to talk of Him as the chemist and the astronomer talk of the principles of science, or of the problem about which they do sums on their slates. But I shall think of Him not as the great Ruler, the general Benefactor, but as my Friend, my Healer, the One Who has lifted me up from the gates of death. My voice as I utter His name will be tremulous with feeling, and soft with intensity and tenderness of love.