he tried to hide from the Presence of God. David also must have had wild
thoughts of trying to escape from the Presence, for he wrote, "Whither
shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?"
Then he proceeded through one of his most beautiful psalms to celebrate
the glory of the divine immanence. "If I ascend up into heaven, thou art
there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. If I take the
wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; even
there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me." And he
knew that God's _being_ and God's _seeing_ are the same, that the seeing
Presence had been with him even before he was born, watching the mystery
of unfolding life. Solomon exclaimed, "But will God indeed dwell on the
earth? behold the heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain thee:
how much less this house which I have builded." Paul assured the
Athenians that "God is not far from any one of us: for in him we live,
and move, and have our being."
If God is present at every point in space, if we cannot go where He is
not, cannot even conceive of a place where He is not, why then has not
that Presence become the one universally celebrated fact of the world?
The patriarch Jacob, "in the waste howling wilderness," gave the answer
to that question. He saw a vision of God and cried out in wonder,
"Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not." Jacob had never
been for one small division of a moment outside the circle of that
all-pervading Presence. But he knew it not. That was his trouble, and it
is ours. Men do not know that God is here. What a difference it would
make if they knew.
The Presence and the manifestation of the Presence are not the same.
There can be the one without the other. God is here when we are wholly
unaware of it. He is _manifest_ only when and as we are aware of His
Presence. On our part there must be surrender to the Spirit of God, for
His work it is to show us the Father and the Son. If we co-operate with
Him in loving obedience God will manifest Himself to us, and that
manifestation will be the difference between a nominal Christian life
and a life radiant with the light of His face.
Always, everywhere God is present, and always He seeks to discover
Himself. To each one he would reveal not only that He is, but _what_ He
is as well. He did not have to be persuaded to discover Himself to
Moses. "And the Lord descended in the cloud, and stood with him there,
and proclaimed the name of the Lord." He not only made a verbal
proclamation of His nature but He revealed His very Self to Moses so
that the skin of Moses' face shone with the supernatural light. It will
be a great moment for some of us when we begin to believe that God's
promise of self-revelation is literally true: that He promised much, but
promised no more than He intends to fulfill.
Our pursuit of God is successful just because He is forever seeking to
manifest Himself to us. The revelation of God to any man is not God
coming from a distance upon a time to pay a brief and momentous visit to
the man's soul. Thus to think of it is to misunderstand it all. The
approach of God to the soul or of the soul to God is not to be thought
of in spatial terms at all. There is no idea of physical distance
involved in the concept. It is not a matter of miles but of experience.
To speak of being near to or far from God is to use language in a sense
always understood when applied to our ordinary human relationships. A
man may say, "I feel that my son is coming nearer to me as he gets
older," and yet that son has lived by his father's side since he was
born and has never been away from home more than a day or so in his
entire life. What then can the father mean? Obviously he is speaking of
_experience_. He means that the boy is coming to know him more
intimately and with deeper understanding, that the barriers of thought
and feeling between the two are disappearing, that father and son are
becoming more closely united in mind and heart.
So when we sing, "Draw me nearer, nearer, blessed Lord," we are not
thinking of the nearness of place, but of the nearness of relationship.
It is for increasing degrees of awareness that we pray, for a more
perfect consciousness of the divine Presence. We need never shout across
the spaces to an absent God. He is nearer than our own soul, closer than
our most secret thoughts.
Why do some persons "find" God in a way that others do not? Why does God
manifest His Presence to some and let multitudes of others struggle
along in the half-light of imperfect Christian experience? Of course the
will of God is the same for all. He has no favorites within His
household. All He has ever done for any of His children He will do for
all of His children. The difference lies not with God but with us.
Pick at random a score of great saints whose lives and testimonies are
widely known. Let them be Bible characters or well known Christians of
post-Biblical times. You will be struck instantly with the fact that
the saints were not alike. Sometimes the unlikenesses were so great as
to be positively glaring. How different for example was Moses from
Isaiah; how different was Elijah from David; how unlike each other were
John and Paul, St. Francis and Luther, Finney and Thomas a Kempis. The
differences are as wide as human life itself: differences of race,
nationality, education, temperament, habit and personal qualities. Yet
they all walked, each in his day, upon a high road of spiritual living
far above the common way.
Their differences must have been incidental and in the eyes of God of no
significance. In some vital quality they must have been alike. What was
it?
I venture to suggest that the one vital quality which they had in common
was _spiritual receptivity_. Something in them was open to heaven,
something which urged them Godward. Without attempting anything like a
profound analysis I shall say simply that they had spiritual awareness
and that they went on to cultivate it until it became the biggest thing
in their lives. They differed from the average person in that when they
felt the inward longing they _did something about it_. They acquired the
lifelong habit of spiritual response. They were not disobedient to the
heavenly vision. As David put it neatly, "When thou saidst, Seek ye my
face; my heart said unto thee, Thy face, Lord, will I seek."
As with everything good in human life, back of this receptivity is God.
The sovereignty of God is here, and is felt even by those who have not
placed particular stress upon it theologically. The pious Michael Angelo
confessed this in a sonnet:
My unassisted heart is barren clay,
That of its native self can nothing feed:
Of good and pious works Thou art the seed,
That quickens only where Thou sayest it may:
Unless Thou show to us Thine own true way
No man can find it: Father! Thou must lead.
These words will repay study as the deep and serious testimony of a
great Christian.
Important as it is that we recognize God working in us, I would yet warn
against a too-great preoccupation with the thought. It is a sure road to
sterile passivity. God will not hold us responsible to understand the
mysteries of election, predestination and the divine sovereignty. The
best and safest way to deal with these truths is to raise our eyes to
God and in deepest reverence say, "O Lord, Thou knowest." Those things
belong to the deep and mysterious Profound of God's omniscience. Prying
into them may make theologians, but it will never make saints.
Receptivity is not a single thing; it is a compound rather, a blending
of several elements within the soul. It is an affinity for, a bent
toward, a sympathetic response to, a desire to have. From this it may be
gathered that it can be present in degrees, that we may have little or
more or less, depending upon the individual. It may be increased by
exercise or destroyed by neglect. It is not a sovereign and irresistible
force which comes upon us as a seizure from above. It is a gift of God,
indeed, but one which must be recognized and cultivated as any other
gift if it is to realize the purpose for which it was given.
Failure to see this is the cause of a very serious breakdown in modern
evangelicalism. The idea of cultivation and exercise, so dear to the
saints of old, has now no place in our total religious picture. It is
too slow, too common. We now demand glamour and fast flowing dramatic
action. A generation of Christians reared among push buttons and
automatic machines is impatient of slower and less direct methods of
reaching their goals. We have been trying to apply machine-age methods
to our relations with God. We read our chapter, have our short devotions
and rush away, hoping to make up for our deep inward bankruptcy by
attending another gospel meeting or listening to another thrilling story
told by a religious adventurer lately returned from afar.
The tragic results of this spirit are all about us. Shallow lives,
hollow religious philosophies, the preponderance of the element of fun
in gospel meetings, the glorification of men, trust in religious
externalities, quasi-religious fellowships, salesmanship methods, the
mistaking of dynamic personality for the power of the Spirit: these and
such as these are the symptoms of an evil disease, a deep and serious
malady of the soul.
For this great sickness that is upon us no one person is responsible,
and no Christian is wholly free from blame. We have all contributed,
directly or indirectly, to this sad state of affairs. We have been too
blind to see, or too timid to speak out, or too self-satisfied to desire
anything better than the poor average diet with which others appear
satisfied. To put it differently, we have accepted one another's
notions, copied one another's lives and made one another's experiences
the model for our own. And for a generation the trend has been downward.
Now we have reached a low place of sand and burnt wire grass and, worst
of all, we have made the Word of Truth conform to our experience and
accepted this low plane as the very pasture of the blessed.
It will require a determined heart and more than a little courage to
wrench ourselves loose from the grip of our times and return to Biblical
ways. But it can be done. Every now and then in the past Christians have
had to do it. History has recorded several large-scale returns led by
such men as St. Francis, Martin Luther and George Fox. Unfortunately
there seems to be no Luther or Fox on the horizon at present. Whether or
not another such return may be expected before the coming of Christ is a
question upon which Christians are not fully agreed, but that is not of
too great importance to us now.
What God in His sovereignty may yet do on a world-scale I do not claim
to know: but what He will do for the plain man or woman who seeks His
face I believe I do know and can tell others. Let any man turn to God in
earnest, let him begin to exercise himself unto godliness, let him seek
to develop his powers of spiritual receptivity by trust and obedience
and humility, and the results will exceed anything he may have hoped in
his leaner and weaker days.
Any man who by repentance and a sincere return to God will break himself
out of the mold in which he has been held, and will go to the Bible
itself for his spiritual standards, will be delighted with what he finds
there.
Let us say it again: The Universal Presence is a fact. God is here. The
whole universe is alive with His life. And He is no strange or foreign
God, but the familiar Father of our Lord Jesus Christ whose love has for
these thousands of years enfolded the sinful race of men. And always He
is trying to get our attention, to reveal Himself to us, to communicate
with us. We have within us the ability to know Him if we will but
respond to His overtures. (And this we call pursuing God!) We will know
Him in increasing degree as our receptivity becomes more perfect by
faith and love and practice.
_O God and Father, I repent of my sinful preoccupation with visible
things. The world has been too much with me. Thou hast been here and I
knew it not. I have been blind to Thy Presence. Open my eyes that I may
behold Thee in and around me. For Christ's sake, Amen._
VI
_The Speaking Voice_
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the
Word was God.--John 1:1
An intelligent plain man, untaught in the truths of Christianity, coming
upon this text, would likely conclude that John meant to teach that it
is the nature of God to speak, to communicate His thoughts to others.
And he would be right. A word is a medium by which thoughts are
expressed, and the application of term to the Eternal Son leads us to
believe that self-expression is inherent in the Godhead, that God is
forever seeking to speak Himself out to His creation. The whole Bible
supports the idea. God is speaking. Not God spoke, but _God is
speaking_. He is by His nature continuously articulate. He fills the
world with His speaking Voice.
One of the great realities with which we have to deal is the Voice of
God in His world. The briefest and only satisfying cosmogony is this:
"He spake and it was done." The _why_ of natural law is the living Voice
of God immanent in His creation. And this word of God which brought all
worlds into being cannot be understood to mean the Bible, for it is not
a written or printed word at all, but the expression of the will of God
spoken into the structure of all things. This word of God is the breath
of God filling the world with living potentiality. The Voice of God is
the most powerful force in nature, indeed the only force in nature, for
all energy is here only because the power-filled Word is being spoken.
The Bible is the written word of God, and because it is written it is
confined and limited by the necessities of ink and paper and leather.
The Voice of God, however, is alive and free as the sovereign God is
free. "The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are
life." The life is in the speaking words. God's word in the Bible can
have power only because it corresponds to God's word in the universe. It
is the present Voice which makes the written Word all-powerful.
Otherwise it would lie locked in slumber within the covers of a book.
We take a low and primitive view of things when we conceive of God at
the creation coming into physical contact with things, shaping and
fitting and building like a carpenter. The Bible teaches otherwise: "By
the word of the Lord were the heavens made; and all the host of them by
the breath of his mouth.... For he spake, and it was done; he commanded,
and it stood fast." "Through faith we understand that the worlds were
framed by the word of God." Again we must remember that God is referring
here not to His written Word, but to His speaking Voice. His
world-filling Voice is meant, that Voice which antedates the Bible by
uncounted centuries, that Voice which has not been silent since the dawn
of creation, but is sounding still throughout the full far reaches of
the universe.
The Word of God is quick and powerful. In the beginning He spoke to
nothing, and it became _something_. Chaos heard it and became order,
darkness heard it and became light. "And God said--and it was so." These
twin phrases, as cause and effect, occur throughout the Genesis story of
the creation. The _said_ accounts for the _so_. The _so_ is the _said_
put into the continuous present.
That God is here and that He is speaking--these truths are back of all
other Bible truths; without them there could be no revelation at all.
God did not write a book and send it by messenger to be read at a
distance by unaided minds. He spoke a Book and lives in His spoken
words, constantly speaking His words and causing the power of them to
persist across the years. God breathed on clay and it became a man; He
breathes on men and they become clay. "Return ye children of men" was
the word spoken at the Fall by which God decreed the death of every man,
and no added word has He needed to speak. The sad procession of mankind
across the face of the earth from birth to the grave is proof that His
original Word was enough.
We have not given sufficient attention to that deep utterance in the
Book of John, "That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that
cometh into the world." Shift the punctuation around as we will and the
truth is still there: the Word of God affects the hearts of all men as
light in the soul. In the hearts of all men the light shines, the Word
sounds, and there is no escaping them. Something like this would of
necessity be so if God is alive and in His world. And John says that it
is so. Even those persons who have never heard of the Bible have still
been preached to with sufficient clarity to remove every excuse from
their hearts forever. "Which show the work of the law written in their
hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the
mean while either accusing or else excusing one another." "For the
invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen,
being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and
Godhead; so that they are without excuse."
This universal Voice of God was by the ancient Hebrews often called
Wisdom, and was said to be everywhere sounding and searching throughout
the earth, seeking some response from the sons of men. The eighth
chapter of the Book of Proverbs begins, "Doth not wisdom cry? and
understanding put forth her voice?" The writer then pictures wisdom as a
beautiful woman standing "in the top of the high places, by the way in
the places of the paths." She sounds her voice from every quarter so
that no one may miss hearing it. "Unto you, O men, I call; and my voice
is to the sons of men." Then she pleads for the simple and the foolish
to give ear to her words. It is spiritual response for which this Wisdom
of God is pleading, a response which she has always sought and is but
rarely able to secure. The tragedy is that our eternal welfare depends
upon our hearing, and we have trained our ears not to hear.
This universal Voice has ever sounded, and it has often troubled men
even when they did not understand the source of their fears. Could it be
that this Voice distilling like a living mist upon the hearts of men has
been the undiscovered cause of the troubled conscience and the longing
for immortality confessed by millions since the dawn of recorded
history? We need not fear to face up to this. The speaking Voice is a
fact. How men have reacted to it is for any observer to note.
When God spoke out of heaven to our Lord, self-centered men who heard it
explained it by natural causes: they said, "It thundered." This habit
of explaining the Voice by appeals to natural law is at the very root of
modern science. In the living breathing cosmos there is a mysterious
Something, too wonderful, too awful for any mind to understand. The
believing man does not claim to understand. He falls to his knees and
whispers, "God." The man of earth kneels also, but not to worship. He
kneels to examine, to search, to find the cause and the how of things.
Just now we happen to be living in a secular age. Our thought habits are
those of the scientist, not those of the worshipper. We are more likely
to explain than to adore. "It thundered," we exclaim, and go our earthly
way. But still the Voice sounds and searches. The order and life of the
world depend upon that Voice, but men are mostly too busy or too
stubborn to give attention.
Everyone of us has had experiences which we have not been able to
explain: a sudden sense of loneliness, or a feeling of wonder or awe in
the face of the universal vastness. Or we have had a fleeting visitation
of light like an illumination from some other sun, giving us in a quick
flash an assurance that we are from another world, that our origins are
divine. What we saw there, or felt, or heard, may have been contrary to
all that we had been taught in the schools and at wide variance with all
our former beliefs and opinions. We were forced to suspend our acquired
doubts while, for a moment, the clouds were rolled back and we saw and
heard for ourselves. Explain such things as we will, I think we have not
been fair to the facts until we allow at least the possibility that such
experiences may arise from the Presence of God in the world and His
persistent effort to communicate with mankind. Let us not dismiss such
an hypothesis too flippantly.
It is my own belief (and here I shall not feel bad if no one follows me)
that every good and beautiful thing which man has produced in the world
has been the result of his faulty and sin-blocked response to the
creative Voice sounding over the earth. The moral philosophers who
dreamed their high dreams of virtue, the religious thinkers who
speculated about God and immortality, the poets and artists who created
out of common stuff pure and lasting beauty: how can we explain them? It
is not enough to say simply, "It was genius." What then is genius? Could
it be that a genius is a man haunted by the speaking Voice, laboring and
striving like one possessed to achieve ends which he only vaguely
understands? That the great man may have missed God in his labors, that
he may even have spoken or written against God does not destroy the idea
I am advancing. God's redemptive revelation in the Holy Scriptures is
necessary to saving faith and peace with God. Faith in a risen Saviour
is necessary if the vague stirrings toward immortality are to bring us
to restful and satisfying communion with God. To me this is a plausible
explanation of all that is best out of Christ. But you can be a good
Christian and not accept my thesis.
The Voice of God is a friendly Voice. No one need fear to listen to it
unless he has already made up his mind to resist it. The blood of Jesus
has covered not only the human race but all creation as well. "And
having made peace through the blood of his cross, by him to reconcile
all things unto himself; by him, I say, whether they be things in earth,
or things in heaven." We may safely preach a friendly Heaven. The
heavens as well as the earth are filled with the good will of Him that
dwelt in the bush. The perfect blood of atonement secures this forever.
Whoever will listen will hear the speaking Heaven. This is definitely
not the hour when men take kindly to an exhortation to _listen_, for
listening is not today a part of popular religion. We are at the
opposite end of the pole from there. Religion has accepted the monstrous
heresy that noise, size, activity and bluster make a man dear to God.
But we may take heart. To a people caught in the tempest of the last
great conflict God says, "Be still, and know that I am God," and still
He says it, as if He means to tell us that our strength and safety lie
not in noise but in silence.
It is important that we get still to wait on God. And it is best that we
get alone, preferably with our Bible outspread before us. Then if we
will we may draw near to God and begin to hear Him speak to us in our
hearts. I think for the average person the progression will be something
like this: First a sound as of a Presence walking in the garden. Then a
voice, more intelligible, but still far from clear. Then the happy
moment when the Spirit begins to illuminate the Scriptures, and that
which had been only a sound, or at best a voice, now becomes an
intelligible word, warm and intimate and clear as the word of a dear
friend. Then will come life and light, and best of all, ability to see
and rest in and embrace Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord and All.
The Bible will never be a living Book to us until we are convinced that
God is articulate in His universe. To jump from a dead, impersonal world
to a dogmatic Bible is too much for most people. They may admit that
they _should_ accept the Bible as the Word of God, and they may try to
think of it as such, but they find it impossible to believe that the
words there on the page are actually for them. A man may _say_, "These
words are addressed to me," and yet in his heart not feel and know that
they are. He is the victim of a divided psychology. He tries to think of
God as mute everywhere else and vocal only in a book.
I believe that much of our religious unbelief is due to a wrong
conception of and a wrong feeling for the Scriptures of Truth. A silent
God suddenly began to speak in a book and when the book was finished
lapsed back into silence again forever. Now we read the book as the
record of what God said when He was for a brief time in a speaking mood.
With notions like that in our heads how can we believe? The facts are
that God is not silent, has never been silent. It is the nature of God
to speak. The second Person of the Holy Trinity is called the _Word_.
The Bible is the inevitable outcome of God's continuous speech. It is
the infallible declaration of His mind for us put into our familiar
human words.