LIKE AS A WOMAN WITH CHILD

The figure of a woman in the pangs of childbearing, crying out in pain, is often used in scripture to depict the sorrows of the nation of Israel. Examples of this may be found in Psalm 48 verse 6, Jeremiah chapter 6 verse 24, Jeremiah chapter 13 verse 21, and indeed in other places almost too numerous to mention.

In the normal course of events, this would be a time of anguish but with expectation of deliverance followed by joy. The Lord Jesus used the metaphor in this sense for the comfort and assurance of His disciples whom He was soon to leave behind in the world. They would indeed have sorrow at His departure, but their sorrow would soon turn to joy. A woman when she is in travail hath sorrow, because her hour is come: but as soon as she is delivered of the child, she remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world’, John 16. 21.

Sadly, however, it was not so with Israel and the prophet laments. Like a woman with child they had indeed known the pain, the anguish, and doubtless they had harboured expecta­tion of deliverance and joy, but this had not come. How often in their times of captivity they had hoped for deliverance only to be disappointed and left to lapse into sorrow again. Perhaps indeed it may have been so in that earliest bondage in Egypt. There they groaned and God heard their groaning, Exod. 2. 24; 6. 5. Eventually, deliverance did come but how much grief and disappointment must have preceded their emancipation. Will it be so again when Antichrist rules in days of great tribulation?

In Babylon they hung their harps on the drooping willows, unable to sing the songs of Zion. What pain! What anguish! How many false hopes there were before they were eventually freed. ‘We have been with child’, they say, ‘we have been in pain’. As John Wesley writes, ‘We have had the torment of a woman in child-bearing, but not the comfort of a living child’.

Is it a principle that the Lord will often leave His people to their own endeavours that they may learn not to be self-reliant? It may be a difficult lesson to learn but it must be learnt, that without His presence and power nothing can be accomplished. Happy are they who have learned to depend wholly on Him.