In defining the word "tribulation," the Oxford English Dictionary gives, "A condition of great affliction, oppression, or misery;" and Webster adds, "A trouble; trial." With these definitions in thought, the passage in Acts which says that "we must through much tribulation enter into the kingdom of God," affords little consolation to the average person. He believes there is Scriptural authority for holding that sickness and adversity are visited on him by a severe Deity; and, indeed, some persons, finding themselves enjoying a somewhat better sense of health than that apparently enjoined by the Scriptures, have resorted to physical self-punishment, fasts, and the like, in order to propitiate a jealous creator, seeking thus to insure for themselves eternal life "beyond," as joyful as their earthly experiences have been sad. Hence the "long face" became known as the pious face.
The old order changeth, however, for the leaven of Truth is at work; and now we may hear the happy little child telling us that the Father must have wanted us to rejoice, else He would not have commanded us to do it so often as He has done in the Good Book. For the sake of illustration, however, let us look a little farther into the meaning of the word "tribulation." Coleridge gave us a useful suggestion when he pointed out that "to get the full sense of a word we should first present to our minds the visual image that forms its primary meaning." With this helpful thought uppermost, let us examine this word "tribulation," for it appears that a misinterpretation of it has brought unhappiness to many.
Let us take a mental journey back through the ages and arrive, just at harvest time, at the quaint little farm of the Roman husbandman. He has cut his wheat; it has been thoroughly dried, and the sheaves have been undone and spread over the threshing floor. He has hitched the oxen to his tribulum, which was a cumbersome sledge constructed of rough, heavy timbers, studded with jagged teeth of stone or iron. This tribulum was dragged round and round over the wheat on the threshing floor, twisting, rubbing, and tearing it, until the grains were freed and found their way to the floor. After this primitive rubbing and mangling process, the straw was gathered up and carried out, and the chaff was winnowed or fanned away, leaving only the clean grains of wheat.
