We have seen that the fruit of Abraham's faith was God's entrance into
close covenant relations with him; or, as James puts it, 'It was
reckoned unto him for righteousness; and he was called the friend of
God.' This incident shows us the intercourse of the divine and human
friends in its familiarity, mutual confidence, and power. It is a
forecast of Christ's own profound teachings in His parting words in the
upper chamber, concerning the sweet and wondrous intercourse between
the believing soul and the indwelling God.
1. The friend of God catches a gleam of divine pity and tenderness.
Abraham has no relations with the men of Sodom. Their evil ways would
repel him; and he would be a stranger among them still more than among
the Canaanites, whose iniquity was 'not yet full.' But though he has no
special bonds with them, he cannot but melt with tender compassion when
he hears their doom. Communion with the very Source of all gentle love
has softened his heart, and he yearns over the wicked and fated city.
Where else than from his heavenly Friend could he have learned this
sympathy? It wells up in this chapter like some sudden spring among
solemn solitudes--the first instance of that divine charity which is
the best sign that we have been with God, and have learned of Him. All
that the New Testament teaches of love to God, as necessarily issuing
in love to man, and of the true love to man as overleaping all narrow
bounds of kindred, country, race, and ignoring all questions of
character, and gushing forth in fullest energy towards the sinners in
danger of just punishment, is here in germ. The friend of God must be
the friend of men; and if they be wicked, and he sees the frightful
doom which they do not see, these make his pity the deeper. Abraham
does not contest the justice of the doom. He lives too near his friend
not to know that sin must mean death. The effect of friendship with God
is not to make men wish that there were no judgments for evil-doers,
but to touch their hearts with pity, and to stir them to intercession
and to effort for their deliverance.
2. The friend of God has absolute trust in the rectitude of His acts.
Abraham's remonstrance, if we may call it so, embodies some thoughts
about the government of God in the world which should be pondered.
His first abrupt question, flung out without any reverential preface,
assumes that the character of God requires that the fate of the
righteous should be distinguished from that of the wicked. The very
brusqueness of the question shows that he supposed himself to be
appealing to an elementary and indubitable law of God's dealings. The
teachings of the Fall and of the Flood had graven deep on his
conscience the truth that the same loving Friend must needs deal out
rewards to the good and chastisement to the bad. That was the simple
faith of an early time, when problems like those which tortured the
writers of the seventy-third Psalm, or of Job and Ecclesiastes, had not
yet disturbed the childlike trust of the friend of God, because no
facts in his experience had forced them on him. But the belief which
was axiomatic to him, and true for his supernaturally shaped life with
its special miracles and visible divine guard, is not the ultimate and
irrefragable principle which he thought it. In widespread calamities
the righteous are blended with the wicked in one bloody ruin; and it is
the very misery of such judgments that often the sufferers are not the
wrongdoers, but that the fathers eat the sour grapes, and the
children's teeth are set on edge. The whirlwind of temporal judgments
makes no distinctions between the dwellings of the righteous and the
wicked, but levels them both. No doubt, the fact that the impending
destruction was to be a direct Divine interposition of a punitive kind
made it more necessary that it should be confined to the actual
culprits. No doubt, too, Abraham's zeal for the honour of God's
government was right. But his first plea belongs to the stage of
revelation at which he stood, not to that of the New Testament, which
teaches that the eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell were not
sinners above all men in Jerusalem. Abraham's confidence in God's
justice, not Abraham's conceptions of what that justice required, is to
be imitated. A friend of God will hold fast by the faith that 'His way
is perfect,' and will cherish it even in the presence of facts more
perplexing than any which met Abraham's eyes.
Another assumption in his prayer is that the righteous are sources of
blessing and shields for the wicked. Has he there laid hold of a true
principle? Certainly, it is indeed the law that 'every man shall bear
his own burden,' but that law is modified by the operation of this
other, of which God's providence is full. Many a drop of blessing
trickles from the wet fleece to the dry ground. Many a stroke of
judgment is carried off harmlessly by the lightning conductor. Where
God's friends are inextricably mixed up with evil-doers, it is not rare
to see diffused blessings which are destined indeed primarily for the
former, but find their way to the latter. Christians are the 'salt of
the earth' in this sense too, that they save corrupt communities from
swift destruction, and for their sakes the angels delay their blow. In
the final resort, each soul must reap its own harvest from its own
deeds; but the individualism of Christianity is not isolation. We are
bound together in mysterious community, and a good man is a fountain of
far-flowing good. The truest 'saviours of society' are the servants of
God.
A third principle is embodied in the solemn question, 'Shall not the
Judge of all the earth do right?' This is not meant in its bearing
here, as we so often hear it quoted, to silence man's questionings as
to mysterious divine acts, or to warn us from applying our measures of
right and wrong to these. The very opposite thought is conveyed;
namely, the confidence that what God does must approve itself as just
to men. He is Judge of all the earth, and therefore bound by His very
nature, as by His relations to men, to do nothing that cannot be
pointed to as inflexibly right. If Abraham had meant, 'What God does,
must needs be right, therefore crush down all questions of how it
accords with thy sense of justice,' he would have been condemning his
own prayer as presumptuous, and the thought would have been entirely
out of place. But the appeal to God to vindicate His own character by
doing what shall be in manifest accord with His name, is bold language
indeed, but not too bold, because it is prompted by absolute confidence
in Him. God's punishments must be obviously righteous to have moral
effect, or to be worthy of Him.
But true as the principle is, it needs to be guarded. Abraham himself
is an instance that men's conceptions of right do not completely
correspond to the reality. His notion of 'right' was, in some
particulars, as his life shows, imperfect, rudimentary, and far beneath
New Testament ideas. Conscience needs education. The best men's
conceptions of what befits divine justice are relative, progressive;
and a shifting standard is no standard. It becomes us to be very
cautious before we say to God, 'This is the way. Walk Thou in it,' or
dismiss any doctrine as untrue on the ground of its contradicting our
instincts of justice.
3. The friend of God has power with God. 'Shall I hide from Abraham
that thing which I do?' The divine Friend recognises the obligation of
confidence. True friendship is frank, and cannot bear to hide its
purposes. That one sentence in its bold attribution of a like feeling
to God leads us deep into the Divine heart, and the sweet reality of
his amity. Insight into His will ever belongs to those who live near
Him. It is the beginning of the long series of disclosures of 'the
secret of the Lord' to 'them that fear Him,' which is crowned by
'henceforth I call you not servants; but ... friends; for all things
that I have heard of My Father I have made known unto you.' So much for
the divine side of the communion.
On the human side, we are here taught the great truth, that God's
friends are intercessors, whose voice has a mysterious but most real
power with God. If it be true, that, in general terms, the righteous
are shields and sources of blessing to the unholy, it is still more
distinctly true that they have access to God's secret place with
petitions for others as well as for themselves. The desires which go up
to God, like the vapours exhaled to heaven, fall in refreshing rain on
spots far away from that whence they rose. In these days we need to
keep fast hold of our belief in the efficacy of prayer for others and
for ourselves. God knows Himself and the laws of His government a great
deal better than any one besides does; and He has abundantly shown us
in His Word, and by many experiences, that breath spent in intercession
is not wasted. In these old times, when worship was mainly sacrificial,
this wonderful instance of pure intercession meets us, an anticipation
of later times. And from thence onwards there has never failed proof to
those who will look for it, that God's friends are true priests, and
help their brethren by their prayers. Our voices should 'rise like a
fountain night and day' for men. But there is a secret distrust of the
power, and a flagrantly plain neglect of the duty, of intercession
nowadays, which need sorely the lesson that God 'remembered Abraham'
and delivered Lot. Luther, in his rough, strong way, says: 'If I have a
Christian who prays to God for me, I will be of good courage, and be
afraid of nothing. If I have one who prays against me, I had rather
have the Grand Turk for my enemy.'
The tone of Abraham's intercession may teach us how familiar the
intercourse with the Heavenly Friend may be. The boldest words from a
loving heart, jealous of God's honour, are not irreverent in His eyes.
This prayer is abrupt, almost rough. It sounds like remonstrance quite
as much as prayer. Abraham appeals to God to take care of His name and
honour, as if he had said, If Thou doest this, what will the world say
of Thee, but that Thou art unmerciful? But the grand confidence in
God's character, the eager desire that it should be vindicated before
the world, the dread that the least film should veil the silvery
whiteness or the golden lustre of His name, the sensitiveness for His
honour--these are the effects of communion with Him; and for these God
accepts the bold prayer as truer reverence than is found in many more
guarded and lowly sounding words. Many conventional proprieties of
worship may be broken just because the worship is real. 'The frequent
sputter shows that the soul's depths boil in earnest.' We may learn,
too, that the most loving familiarity never forgets the fathomless gulf
between God and it. Abraham remembers that he is 'dust and ashes'; he
knows that he is venturing much in speaking to God. His pertinacious
prayers have a recurring burden of lowly recognition of his place.
Twice he heralds them with 'I have taken upon me to speak unto the
Lord'; twice with 'Oh let not the Lord be angry.' Perfect love casts
out fear and deepens reverence. We may come with free hearts, from
which every weight of trembling and every cloud of doubt has been
lifted. But the less the dread, the lower we shall bow before the
Loftiness which we love. We do not pray aright until we tell God
everything. The 'boldness' which we as Christians ought to have, means
literally a frank speaking out of all that is in our hearts. Such
'boldness and access with confidence' will often make short work of
so-called seemly reverence, but it will never transgress by so much as
a hair's-breadth the limits of lowly, trustful love.
Abraham's persistency may teach us a lesson. If one might so say, he
hangs on God's skirt like a burr. Each petition granted only encourages
him to another. Six times he pleads, and God waits till he has done
before He goes away; He cannot leave His friend till that friend has
said all his say. What a contrast the fiery fervour and unwearying
pertinacity of Abraham's prayers make to the stiff formalism of the
intercessions one is familiar with! The former are like the successive
pulses of a volcano driving a hot lava stream before it; the latter,
like the slow flow of a glacier, cold and sluggish. Is any part of our
public or private worship more hopelessly formal than our prayers for
others? This picture from the old world may well shame our languid
petitions, and stir us up to a holy boldness and persistence in prayer.
Our Saviour Himself teaches that 'men ought always to pray, and not to
faint,' and Himself recommends to us a holy importunity, which He
teaches us to believe is, in mysterious fashion, a power with God. He
gives room for such patient continuance in prayer by sometimes delaying
the apparent answer, not because He needs to be won over to bless, but
because it is good for us to draw near, and to keep near, the Lord. He
is ever at the door, ready to open, and if sometimes, like Rhoda to
Peter, He does not open immediately, and we have to keep knocking, it
is that our desires may increase by delay, and so He may be able to
give a blessing, which will be the greater and sweeter for the tarrying.
So the friendship is manifested on both sides: on God's, by disclosure
of His purpose and compliance with His friend's request; on Abraham's,
by speech which is saved from irreverence by love, and by prayer which
is acceptable to God by its very importunity. Jesus Christ has promised
us the highest form of such friendship, when He has said, 'I have
called you friends: for all things that I have heard of My Father I
have made known unto you'; and again, 'If ye abide in Me, ... ye shall
ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you.'