As we pass through wilderness circumstances on our way (often so painful and trying) to the rest of God, there is nothing that so braces the soul and cheers the heart, imparting a fresh spring of life and energy and joy, as the sense of what God Himself is, and, we may add, of what He must of very necessity be, in the deep perfections of His Being. We feel the trials of the way — sorrow, suffering, pressure, need—but the soul that knows God well knows that of these things He is origin and source because it is His joy to bless, His nature to do good, and thus that only what is good, and worthy therefore of Himself, can ever flow from the heart of the blessed God. No taint of sin, no seed of suffering or sorrow, was there to mar that fair and wondrous scene of a completed creation when the Creator, as He looked on the work of His hands, pronounced it all very good. And as we look at the ruin and the desolation and feel its sad effects, whether in us or without us, we can only say, “An enemy hath done this,” while we look forward to that blessed and unending rest, the rest of God Himself, in which all shall be the eternal witness, the everlasting display of goodness supreme that must expend, but can never exhaust, itself in the blessing of all within its sway.
J.E.B., Christian Friend, Vol. 10