and the prophet who has seen there is a difference as wide as the sea.
We are today overrun with orthodox scribes, but the prophets, where are
they? The hard voice of the scribe sounds over evangelicalism, but the
Church waits for the tender voice of the saint who has penetrated the
veil and has gazed with inward eye upon the Wonder that is God. And yet,
thus to penetrate, to push in sensitive living experience into the holy
Presence, is a privilege open to every child of God.
With the veil removed by the rending of Jesus' flesh, with nothing on
God's side to prevent us from entering, why do we tarry without? Why do
we consent to abide all our days just outside the Holy of Holies and
never enter at all to look upon God? We hear the Bridegroom say, "Let me
see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice; for sweet is thy voice and
thy countenance is comely." We sense that the call is for us, but still
we fail to draw near, and the years pass and we grow old and tired in
the outer courts of the tabernacle. What doth hinder us?
The answer usually given, simply that we are "cold," will not explain
all the facts. There is something more serious than coldness of heart,
something that may be back of that coldness and be the cause of its
existence. What is it? What but the presence of _a veil in our hearts_?
a veil not taken away as the first veil was, but which remains there
still shutting out the light and hiding the face of God from us. It is
the veil of our fleshly fallen nature living on, unjudged within us,
uncrucified and unrepudiated. It is the close-woven veil of the
self-life which we have never truly acknowledged, of which we have been
secretly ashamed, and which for these reasons we have never brought to
the judgment of the cross. It is not too mysterious, this opaque veil,
nor is it hard to identify. We have but to look in our own hearts and we
shall see it there, sewn and patched and repaired it may be, but there
nevertheless, an enemy to our lives and an effective block to our
spiritual progress.
This veil is not a beautiful thing and it is not a thing about which we
commonly care to talk, but I am addressing the thirsting souls who are
determined to follow God, and I know they will not turn back because the
way leads temporarily through the blackened hills. The urge of God
within them will assure their continuing the pursuit. They will face the
facts however unpleasant and endure the cross for the joy set before
them. So I am bold to name the threads out of which this inner veil is
woven.
It is woven of the fine threads of the self-life, the hyphenated sins of
the human spirit. They are not something we do, they are something we
_are_, and therein lies both their subtlety and their power.
To be specific, the self-sins are these: self-righteousness, self-pity,
self-confidence, self-sufficiency, self-admiration, self-love and a host
of others like them. They dwell too deep within us and are too much a
part of our natures to come to our attention till the light of God is
focused upon them. The grosser manifestations of these sins, egotism,
exhibitionism, self-promotion, are strangely tolerated in Christian
leaders even in circles of impeccable orthodoxy. They are so much in
evidence as actually, for many people, to become identified with the
gospel. I trust it is not a cynical observation to say that they appear
these days to be a requisite for popularity in some sections of the
Church visible. Promoting self under the guise of promoting Christ is
currently so common as to excite little notice.
One should suppose that proper instruction in the doctrines of man's
depravity and the necessity for justification through the righteousness
of Christ alone would deliver us from the power of the self-sins; but it
does not work out that way. Self can live unrebuked at the very altar.
It can watch the bleeding Victim die and not be in the least affected by
what it sees. It can fight for the faith of the Reformers and preach
eloquently the creed of salvation by grace, and gain strength by its
efforts. To tell all the truth, it seems actually to feed upon orthodoxy
and is more at home in a Bible Conference than in a tavern. Our very
state of longing after God may afford it an excellent condition under
which to thrive and grow.
Self is the opaque veil that hides the Face of God from us. It can be
removed only in spiritual experience, never by mere instruction. As well
try to instruct leprosy out of our system. There must be a work of God
in destruction before we are free. We must invite the cross to do its
deadly work within us. We must bring our self-sins to the cross for
judgment. We must prepare ourselves for an ordeal of suffering in some
measure like that through which our Saviour passed when He suffered
under Pontius Pilate.
Let us remember: when we talk of the rending of the veil we are speaking
in a figure, and the thought of it is poetical, almost pleasant; but in
actuality there is nothing pleasant about it. In human experience that
veil is made of living spiritual tissue; it is composed of the sentient,
quivering stuff of which our whole beings consist, and to touch it is to
touch us where we feel pain. To tear it away is to injure us, to hurt us
and make us bleed. To say otherwise is to make the cross no cross and
death no death at all. It is never fun to die. To rip through the dear
and tender stuff of which life is made can never be anything but deeply
painful. Yet that is what the cross did to Jesus and it is what the
cross would do to every man to set him free.
Let us beware of tinkering with our inner life in hope ourselves to rend
the veil. God must do everything for us. Our part is to yield and trust.
We must confess, forsake, repudiate the self-life, and then reckon it
crucified. But we must be careful to distinguish lazy "acceptance" from
the real work of God. We must insist upon the work being done. We dare
not rest content with a neat doctrine of self-crucifixion. That is to
imitate Saul and spare the best of the sheep and the oxen.
Insist that the work be done in very truth and it will be done. The
cross is rough, and it is deadly, but it is effective. It does not keep
its victim hanging there forever. There comes a moment when its work is
finished and the suffering victim dies. After that is resurrection glory
and power, and the pain is forgotten for joy that the veil is taken away
and we have entered in actual spiritual experience the Presence of the
living God.
_Lord, how excellent are Thy ways, and how devious and dark are the ways
of man. Show us how to die, that we may rise again to newness of life.
Rend the veil of our self-life from the top down as Thou didst rend the
veil of the Temple. We would draw near in full assurance of faith. We
would dwell with Thee in daily experience here on this earth so that we
may be accustomed to the glory when we enter Thy heaven to dwell with
Thee there. In Jesus' name, Amen._
IV
_Apprehending God_
O taste and see.--Psa. 34:8
It was Canon Holmes, of India, who more than twenty-five years ago
called attention to the inferential character of the average man's faith
in God. To most people God is an inference, not a reality. He is a
deduction from evidence which they consider adequate; but He remains
personally unknown to the individual. "He _must_ be," they say,
"therefore we believe He is." Others do not go even so far as this; they
know of Him only by hearsay. They have never bothered to think the
matter out for themselves, but have heard about Him from others, and
have put belief in Him into the back of their minds along with the
various odds and ends that make up their total creed. To many others God
is but an ideal, another name for goodness, or beauty, or truth; or He
is law, or life, or the creative impulse back of the phenomena of
existence.
These notions about God are many and varied, but they who hold them have
one thing in common: they do not know God in personal experience. The
possibility of intimate acquaintance with Him has not entered their
minds. While admitting His existence they do not think of Him as
knowable in the sense that we know things or people.
Christians, to be sure, go further than this, at least in theory. Their
creed requires them to believe in the personality of God, and they have
been taught to pray, "Our Father, which art in heaven." Now personality
and fatherhood carry with them the idea of the possibility of personal
acquaintance. This is admitted, I say, in theory, but for millions of
Christians, nevertheless, God is no more real than He is to the
non-Christian. They go through life trying to love an ideal and be loyal
to a mere principle.
Over against all this cloudy vagueness stands the clear scriptural
doctrine that God can be known in personal experience. A loving
Personality dominates the Bible, walking among the trees of the garden
and breathing fragrance over every scene. Always a living Person is
present, speaking, pleading, loving, working, and manifesting Himself
whenever and wherever His people have the receptivity necessary to
receive the manifestation.
The Bible assumes as a self-evident fact that men can know God with at
least the same degree of immediacy as they know any other person or
thing that comes within the field of their experience. The same terms
are used to express the knowledge of God as are used to express
knowledge of physical things. "O _taste_ and see that the Lord is good."
"All thy garments _smell_ of myrrh, and aloes, and cassia, out of the
ivory palaces." "My sheep _hear_ my voice." "Blessed are the pure in
heart, for they shall _see_ God." These are but four of countless such
passages from the Word of God. And more important than any proof text is
the fact that the whole import of the Scripture is toward this belief.
What can all this mean except that we have in our hearts organs by means
of which we can know God as certainly as we know material things through
our familiar five senses? We apprehend the physical world by exercising
the faculties given us for the purpose, and we possess spiritual
faculties by means of which we can know God and the spiritual world if
we will obey the Spirit's urge and begin to use them.
That a saving work must first be done in the heart is taken for granted
here. The spiritual faculties of the unregenerate man lie asleep in his
nature, unused and for every purpose dead; that is the stroke which has
fallen upon us by sin. They may be quickened to active life again by the
operation of the Holy Spirit in regeneration; that is one of the
immeasurable benefits which come to us through Christ's atoning work on
the cross.
But the very ransomed children of God themselves: why do they know so
little of that habitual conscious communion with God which the
Scriptures seem to offer? The answer is our chronic unbelief. Faith
enables our spiritual sense to function. Where faith is defective the
result will be inward insensibility and numbness toward spiritual
things. This is the condition of vast numbers of Christians today. No
proof is necessary to support that statement. We have but to converse
with the first Christian we meet or enter the first church we find open
to acquire all the proof we need.
A spiritual kingdom lies all about us, enclosing us, embracing us,
altogether within reach of our inner selves, waiting for us to recognize
it. God Himself is here waiting our response to His Presence. This
eternal world will come alive to us the moment we begin to reckon upon
its reality.
I have just now used two words which demand definition; or if definition
is impossible, I must at least make clear what I mean when I use them.
They are "reckon" and "reality."
What do I mean by _reality_? I mean that which has existence apart from
any idea any mind may have of it, and which would exist if there were no
mind anywhere to entertain a thought of it. That which is real has being
in itself. It does not depend upon the observer for its validity.
I am aware that there are those who love to poke fun at the plain man's
idea of reality. They are the idealists who spin endless proofs that
nothing is real outside of the mind. They are the relativists who like
to show that there are no fixed points in the universe from which we can
measure anything. They smile down upon us from their lofty intellectual
peaks and settle us to their own satisfaction by fastening upon us the
reproachful term "absolutist." The Christian is not put out of
countenance by this show of contempt. He can smile right back at them,
for he knows that there is only One who is Absolute, that is God. But he
knows also that the Absolute One has made this world for man's uses,
and, while there is nothing fixed or real in the last meaning of the
words (the meaning as applied to God) _for every purpose of human life
we are permitted to act as if there were_. And every man does act thus
except the mentally sick. These unfortunates also have trouble with
reality, but they are consistent; they insist upon living in accordance
with their ideas of things. They are honest, and it is their very
honesty that constitutes them a social problem.
The idealists and relativists are not mentally sick. They prove their
soundness by living their lives according to the very notions of reality
which they in theory repudiate and by counting upon the very fixed
points which they prove are not there. They could earn a lot more
respect for their notions if they were willing to live by them; but
this they are careful not to do. Their ideas are brain-deep, not
life-deep. Wherever life touches them they repudiate their theories and
live like other men.
The Christian is too sincere to play with ideas for their own sake. He
takes no pleasure in the mere spinning of gossamer webs for display. All
his beliefs are practical. They are geared into his life. By them he
lives or dies, stands or falls for this world and for all time to come.
From the insincere man he turns away.
The sincere plain man knows that the world is real. He finds it here
when he wakes to consciousness, and he knows that he did not think it
into being. It was here waiting for him when he came, and he knows that
when he prepares to leave this earthly scene it will be here still to
bid him good-bye as he departs. By the deep wisdom of life he is wiser
than a thousand men who doubt. He stands upon the earth and feels the
wind and rain in his face and he knows that they are real. He sees the
sun by day and the stars by night. He sees the hot lightning play out of
the dark thundercloud. He hears the sounds of nature and the cries of
human joy and pain. These he knows are real. He lies down on the cool
earth at night and has no fear that it will prove illusory or fail him
while he sleeps. In the morning the firm ground will be under him, the
blue sky above him and the rocks and trees around him as when he closed
his eyes the night before. So he lives and rejoices in a world of
reality.
With his five senses he engages this real world. All things necessary to
his physical existence he apprehends by the faculties with which he has
been equipped by the God who created him and placed him in such a world
as this.
Now, by our definition also God is real. He is real in the absolute and
final sense that nothing else is. All other reality is contingent upon
His. The great Reality is God who is the Author of that lower and
dependent reality which makes up the sum of created things, including
ourselves. God has objective existence independent of and apart from any
notions which we may have concerning Him. The worshipping heart does not
create its Object. It finds Him here when it wakes from its moral
slumber in the morning of its regeneration.
Another word that must be cleared up is the word _reckon_. This does not
mean to visualize or imagine. Imagination is not faith. The two are not
only different from, but stand in sharp opposition to, each other.
Imagination projects unreal images out of the mind and seeks to attach
reality to them. Faith creates nothing; it simply reckons upon that
which is already _there_.
God and the spiritual world are real. We can reckon upon them with as
much assurance as we reckon upon the familiar world around us.
Spiritual things are there (or rather we should say _here_) inviting
our attention and challenging our trust.
Our trouble is that we have established bad thought habits. We
habitually think of the visible world as real and doubt the reality of
any other. We do not deny the existence of the spiritual world but we
doubt that it is real in the accepted meaning of the word.
The world of sense intrudes upon our attention day and night for the
whole of our lifetime. It is clamorous, insistent and
self-demonstrating. It does not appeal to our faith; it is here,
assaulting our five senses, demanding to be accepted as real and final.
But sin has so clouded the lenses of our hearts that we cannot see that
other reality, the City of God, shining around us. The world of sense
triumphs. The visible becomes the enemy of the invisible; the temporal,
of the eternal. That is the curse inherited by every member of Adam's
tragic race.
At the root of the Christian life lies belief in the invisible. The
object of the Christian's faith is unseen reality.
Our uncorrected thinking, influenced by the blindness of our natural
hearts and the intrusive ubiquity of visible things, tends to draw a
contrast between the spiritual and the real; but actually no such
contrast exists. The antithesis lies elsewhere: between the real and the
imaginary, between the spiritual and the material, between the temporal
and the eternal; but between the spiritual and the real, never. The
spiritual _is_ real.
If we would rise into that region of light and power plainly beckoning
us through the Scriptures of truth we must break the evil habit of
ignoring the spiritual. We must shift our interest from the seen to the
unseen. For the great unseen Reality is God. "He that cometh to God must
believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently
seek him." This is basic in the life of faith. From there we can rise to
unlimited heights. "Ye believe in God," said our Lord Jesus Christ,
"believe also in me." Without the first there can be no second.
If we truly want to follow God we must seek to be other-worldly. This I
say knowing well that that word has been used with scorn by the sons of
this world and applied to the Christian as a badge of reproach. So be
it. Every man must choose his world. If we who follow Christ, with all
the facts before us and knowing what we are about, deliberately choose
the Kingdom of God as our sphere of interest I see no reason why anyone
should object. If we lose by it, the loss is our own; if we gain, we rob
no one by so doing. The "other world," which is the object of this
world's disdain and the subject of the drunkard's mocking song, is our
carefully chosen goal and the object of our holiest longing.
But we must avoid the common fault of pushing the "other world" into the
future. It is not future, but present. It parallels our familiar
physical world, and the doors between the two worlds are open. "Ye are
come," says the writer to the Hebrews (and the tense is plainly
present), "unto Mount Zion, and unto the city of the living God, the
heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels, to the
general assembly and church of the firstborn, which are written in
heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made
perfect, and to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood
of sprinkling, that speaketh better things than that of Abel." All these
things are contrasted with "the mount that might be touched" and "the
sound of a trumpet and the voice of words" that might be heard. May we
not safely conclude that, as the realities of Mount Sinai were
apprehended by the senses, so the realities of Mount Zion are to be
grasped by the soul? And this not by any trick of the imagination, but
in downright actuality. The soul has eyes with which to see and ears
with which to hear. Feeble they may be from long disuse, but by the
life-giving touch of Christ alive now and capable of sharpest sight and
most sensitive hearing.
As we begin to focus upon God the things of the spirit will take shape
before our inner eyes. Obedience to the word of Christ will bring an
inward revelation of the Godhead (John 14:21-23). It will give acute
perception enabling us to see God even as is promised to the pure in
heart. A new God consciousness will seize upon us and we shall begin to
taste and hear and inwardly feel the God who is our life and our all.
There will be seen the constant shining of the light that lighteth every
man that cometh into the world. More and more, as our faculties grow
sharper and more sure, God will become to us the great All, and His
Presence the glory and wonder of our lives.
_O God, quicken to life every power within me, that I may lay hold on
eternal things. Open my eyes that I may see; give me acute spiritual
perception; enable me to taste Thee and know that Thou art good. Make
heaven more real to me than any earthly thing has ever been. Amen._
V
_The Universal Presence_
Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from
thy presence?--Psa. 139:7
In all Christian teaching certain basic truths are found, hidden at
times, and rather assumed than asserted, but necessary to all truth as
the primary colors are found in and necessary to the finished painting.
Such a truth is the divine immanence.
God dwells in His creation and is everywhere indivisibly present in all
His works. This is boldly taught by prophet and apostle and is accepted
by Christian theology generally. That is, it appears in the books, but
for some reason it has not sunk into the average Christian's heart so as
to become a part of his believing self. Christian teachers shy away from
its full implications, and, if they mention it at all, mute it down till
it has little meaning. I would guess the reason for this to be the fear
of being charged with pantheism; but the doctrine of the divine Presence
is definitely not pantheism.
Pantheism's error is too palpable to deceive anyone. It is that God is
the sum of all created things. Nature and God are one, so that whoever
touches a leaf or a stone touches God. That is of course to degrade the
glory of the incorruptible Deity and, in an effort to make all things
divine, banish all divinity from the world entirely.
The truth is that while God dwells in His world He is separated from it
by a gulf forever impassable. However closely He may be identified with
the work of His hands _they_ are and must eternally be _other than He_,
and He is and must be antecedent to and independent of them. He is
transcendent above all His works even while He is immanent within them.
What now does the divine immanence mean in direct Christian experience?
It means simply that _God is here_. Wherever we are, God is here. There
is no place, there can be no place, where He is not. Ten million
intelligences standing at as many points in space and separated by
incomprehensible distances can each one say with equal truth, God is
here. No point is nearer to God than any other point. It is exactly as
near to God from any place as it is from any other place. No one is in
mere distance any further from or any nearer to God than any other
person is.
These are truths believed by every instructed Christian. It remains for
us to think on them and pray over them until they begin to glow within
us.
"In the beginning God." Not _matter_, for matter is not self-causing. It
requires an antecedent cause, and God is that Cause. Not _law_, for law
is but a name for the course which all creation follows. That course had
to be planned, and the Planner is God. Not _mind_, for mind also is a
created thing and must have a Creator back of it. In the beginning God,
the uncaused Cause of matter, mind and law. There we must begin.