But who hears the dew fall? What microphone could reveal that music to our “gross unpurged ears”?
The dew distils in silence. So does the speech of our God. Most frequently in the silence of trust already spoken of. In that stillness God’s silent love can be condensed into dew like communications; not read, not heard, but made known by the direct power of the Spirit upon the soul.
Most often He does this by thrilling into remembrance something from the written Word, already learned, but now flashing out in the quickened memory as if it had never been heard before.
We do not get much of this if we are always in the midst of noise and turmoil and bustle. He can, and now and then He does, send this “speech” through a very chaos of bustle or trouble. He can make a point of silence in the very center of a cyclone, and speak there to our hearts. But the more usual way is to make a wider silence for His dew to fall, by calling us apart into some quiet place of sorrow or sickness. So when we find ourselves thus led into a wilderness, let us forthwith look out for the dew, and it will not fail. Then our desert will rejoice and blossom as the rose; very likely much more so than the hot harvest fields, or the neat gardens from which we have been called away.
The dew distils in darkness.
Not in the darkness of external trial alone. It is easy to understand that, and most of us have experienced it. The beautiful thing is that the life-giving speech distils even in soul darkness. “Who is among you that feareth the Lord, that walketh in darkness and hath no light? Let him trust in the name of the Lord, and stay himself upon his God.” There are times when we simply cannot see anything, when there is nothing for it but to hold on and trust in the dark; times when we do not seem even to be walking in the dark, but when, like Micah, we “sit in darkness,” too feeble even to grope. Such darkness often comes in a time of reaction and weariness after special work and exertion, very often indeed after great or exciting success, sometimes even after unusually vivid spiritual blessing. An interval of convalescence after acute illness, when the overtaxed nervous energy has more than it can do in slowly refilling the chalice of life that had been so nearly “spilled on the ground,” is peculiarly liable to it. And the sufferers who never pass beyond that stage, who are never any more than “a little better,” know its shadow perhaps best of all. It does not say so, but I think the Lord Jesus must have known it, because He was made like unto us in all things, and submitted not only to the causes but to the effects of all the natural experiences of the nature which He took on Him.
Now it seems to me that it is in this kind of darkness that His speech distils as the dew. You look out some dark night after a hot dusty day; there is no storm, no rain, there is not the least token to your senses of what is going on. You look out again in the morning, and you see every blade and leaf tipped with a dewdrop; everything is revived and freshened, prepared for the heat of the day, and smiling at the glow. Just so His words are silently falling on your souls in the darkness, and preparing them for the day. They do not come with any sensible power, nothing flashes out from the page as at other times, nothing shines so as to shed any pleasant light on your path, you do not hear any sound of abundance of rain. You seem as if you could not take the words in; and if you could, your mind is too weary to meditate on them.
But they are distilling as the dew all the time!
Do not quarrel with the invisible dew because it is not a visible shower. The Lord would send a shower if that was the true need to be supplied to His vineyard; but as He is sending His speech in another form, you may be quite sure it is because He is supplying your true need thereby. You cannot see why it is so and I do not pretend to explain; but what does that matter! He knows which way to water His vineyard. These words of His, which you are remembering so feebly, or reading without being able to grasp, are not going to return void. They are doing His own work on your soul, only in a quite different way to what you would choose. By and by they will sparkle out in the light of a new morning, and you will find yourself starting fresh, and perhaps wondering how it is that the leaves of life which hung so limp and drooping are so fresh and firm again on their stems. This also cometh forth from the Lord of hosts, who is wonderful in counsel, and excellent in working.
The dew falls not in one mass of water, but innumerable little drops. What one drop does not reach another does. So it is not one overwhelmingly powerful word which does this holy night work in the soul, but the unrealized influence of many, dropping softly on the plants of the Lord which He has planted, one resting here, another there; one touching an unrecognized need, and another reaching an unconsciously failing grace. Each drop uncounted hath its own mission, and is duly sent to its own leaf or blade.
Sometimes God’s dew goes on falling through many hours of the night. The watches seem very long, and the starlight does not reveal it. But none of it is lost; some is already doing a hidden work as it falls around the very roots of our being, and some is ready to be revealed in sparkling brightness when the night is over, lessons learned among the shadows to be lived out in the sunshine.
The object of the dew is to maintain life in dry places and seasons. Dwellers in rainless regions understand this better than we do, but we can see enough of it in any dry week in summer to understand the beauty of the figure. So this speech is spirit and life to souls which are, however feebly, yet really alive unto God. Dew does nothing for the stones. You would not know there ever was any at all if you only look at the gravel path. And it makes no difference at all to a dead leaf. But if it falls on the little fading plant that could hardly have lived through many more days of July sunshine, the weak little stem straightens up as the leaves absorb the life-renewing moisture, and the closed blossom can open out again with fresher fragrance than before. So God keeps on distilling His speech into our frail spiritual life, or it would soon wither up. Dryness is more to be dreaded than darkness.
Only let us be trustfully content to let this dew of heaven fall in the dark, and when we cannot hear or see, recollect that He says, “My speech shall distil as the dew.” Our part is to believe this, and leave ourselves open to it as we read what perhaps seems a very dim page of the Bible with very tired eyes; or, perhaps, lie still through the long hours of a literal night, with no power to mediate on the fitful gleams of half recollected verses that just cross our minds and seem to leave no trace.
Never mind, the dew is falling!
Softly the dew in the evening
descends,
Cooling the sun-heated ground
and the gale;
Flow’rets all fainting it soothingly
tends,
Ere the consumings of mid-day
prevail.
Sweet gentle dewdrops, how
mystic your fall
Wisdom and mercy float down
in you all.
Softer and sweeter by far is that
Dew
Which from the Fountain of
Comfort distils,
When the worn heart is created
anew,
And hallowed pleasure its emptiness
fills.
Lord, let Thy Spirit bedew my
dry fleece!
Faith then shall triumph, and
trouble shall cease.