Ever-recurring doubts.
What God has to complain of in every age is our "little faith." "He cannot do many mighty works among us because of our unbelief." The reproach here is of the great proportion of the Jewish people, who had become utterly despondent under their long captivity, and even began to complain, not to God, that would be right, but of God, which was wrong, saying, "The Lord hath forsaken me, and my Lord hath forgotten me." Consider—
I. THE HUMAN REASONABLENESS OF DOUBT. Days went on for those captives, the days made years, the years passed by the score, and with the utmost straining not one gleam of light could be seen in the nation's sky. Indeed, the political conditions and combinations made the hope of return more vain than ever. From the human point of view it was time indeed to doubt. "See how deplorable the case of God's people may be sometimes, such that they may seem to be forsaken and forgotten of their God; and at such times their temptations may be alarmingly violent. Weak believers, in their despondency, are ready to say, "God has forsaken his Church, and forgotten the sorrows of his people'" (Matthew Henry). This text is "not an expression of absolute unbelief; it is the pain of seemingly unreturned affection, which borrows the language of scepticism. The highest act of faith is to see God with the heart when all outward tokens of his presence are removed. There are times when even the noblest of mankind are unequal to such an effort" (Cheyne). So long as we are dependent on the senses, and our knowledge is strictly limited, for disciplinary purposes, so long there is a good sense in which it is reasonable for us to doubt.
II. THE DIVINE UNREASONABLENESS OF DOUBT. Knowing what he is, and what he is purposing and doing, man's doubt must always seem unreasonable to God; and his one response to every doubter is, "Cannot you trust me?" It is the love of God, the unchangeable love of God, which puts our best-grounded doubts and fears to shame. Exactly this is pressed on the attention of despondent Israel by God's comparing himself to a mother whose child is daily feeding on her own life. Such mothers have a most sacrificing, passionate love for their children, and no intenser simile could have been found. "Thou art more than mother dear;" then how can we doubt? Why not rest in the love, and be at peace? Illustrating the strength of mother-love, Lander says he frequently met, during his journey in Africa, with mothers who carried about their persons little wooden images of their deceased infants, to whose lips they presented a portion of food whenever they partook of it themselves, and nothing could induce them to part with these inanimate memorials.—R.T.