We live in a wonderful world, a world that offers us the greatest contrasts. The high and the low, the large and the small, the exalted and the ridiculous, the tragic and the comic, the beautiful and the ugly, the good and the bad, truth and lies are mixed together in an incomprehensible manner. Alternately the seriousness and the vanity of life take hold of us. Sometimes we are inclined to pessimism, sometimes to optimism; the man who weeps alternates every moment with the man who laughs. The whole world is marked by humor, rightly described as a smile in a tear.
The deepest cause of this present state of the world lies in the fact that God continually manifests His wrath on account of man’s sin, and yet, according to His own will, also continually manifests His grace. We perish in His wrath, and yet in the morning we are saturated with His mercy, Ps. 90:7, 14. There is a moment in His wrath, but a lifetime in His mercy; in the evening weeping fades away, but in the morning there is jubilation, Ps. 30:6. Curse and blessing are so wonderfully connected and mixed together that they often seem to merge into one another.
Work in the sweat of the brow is both a curse and a blessing at the same time. And thus together they point to the Cross, which is at the same time the highest judgement and the richest grace. And that is why the Cross is the center of history and the reconciliation of all contradictions.
Herman Bavinck. Magnalia Dei.
