Holiness and Obedience.
'Ye have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bare you on
eagles' wings, and brought you _unto myself_. Now therefore, if ye
will _obey my voice indeed_, and keep my covenant, ye shall be a
peculiar treasure unto me above all people: ye shall be unto me an
_holy_ nation.'--Ex. xix. 4-6.
Israel has reached Horeb. The law is to be given and the covenant made.
Here are God's first words to the people; He speaks of redemption and
its blessing, fellowship with Himself: 'Ye have seen how I brought you
_unto myself_.' He speaks of holiness as His purpose in redemption: 'Ye
shall be unto me an _holy_ nation.' And as the link between the two He
places obedience: 'If ye will indeed _obey_ my voice, ye shall be unto
me an _holy_ nation.' God's will is the expression of His holiness; as
we do His will, we come into contact with His holiness. The link between
Redemption and Holiness is Obedience.
This takes us back to what we saw in Paradise. God sanctified the
seventh day as the time for sanctifying man. And what was the first
thing He did with this purpose? He gave him a commandment. Obedience to
that commandment would have opened the door, would have been the
entrance, into the Holiness of God. Holiness is a moral attribute; and
moral is that which a free will chooses and determines for itself. What
God creates and gives is only naturally good; what man wills to have of
God and His will, and really appropriates, has moral worth, and leads to
holiness. In creation God manifested His wise and good will. His holy
will He speaks in His commands. As that holy will enters man's will, as
man's will accepts and unites itself with God's will, he becomes holy.
After creation, in the seventh day, God took man up into His work of
sanctification to make him holy. Obedience is the path to holiness,
because it is the path to union with God's holy will; with man unfallen,
as with fallen man, in redemption here and in glory above, in all the
holy angels, in Christ the Holy One of God Himself, obedience is the
path of holiness. It is not itself holiness: but as the will opens
itself to accept and to do the will of God, God communicates Himself and
His Holiness. To obey His voice is to follow Him as He leads in the way
to the full revelation and communication of Himself and His blessed
nature as the Holy One.
Obedience. Not knowledge of the will of God, not even approval, not even
the will to do it, but the doing of it. Knowledge, and approval, and
will must lead to action; the will of God must be _done_. 'If ye indeed
obey my voice, ye shall be unto me an holy nation.' It is not faith, and
not worship, and not profession, that God here asks in the first place
from His people when He speaks of holiness; it is obedience. God's will
must be _done_ on earth, as in heaven. 'Remember _and do_ all my
commandments, that ye may be holy to your God' (Num. xv. 40). 'Sanctify
yourselves therefore, and be ye holy; and ye shall keep my statutes _and
do_ them. I am the Lord which sanctify you' (Lev. xx. 7, 8). 'Therefore
shall ye keep my commandments _and do_ them: I am the Lord: I will be
hallowed among the children of Israel: I am the Lord which hallow you,
that brought you up out of the land of Egypt' (xxii 21, 33).
A moment's reflection will make the reason of this clear to us. It is in
a man's work that he manifests what he is. I may know what is good, and
yet not approve it. I may approve, and yet not will it. I may in a
certain sense will it, and yet be wanting in the energy, or the
self-sacrifice, or the power that will rouse and do the thing. Thinking
is easier than willing, and willing is easier than doing. Action alone
proves whether the object of my interest has complete mastery over me.
God wants His will _done_. This alone is obedience. In this alone it is
seen whether the whole heart, with all its strength and will, has given
itself over to the will of God; whether we live it, and are ready at any
sacrifice to make it our own by doing it. God has no other way for
making us holy. 'Ye shall keep my statutes _and do_ them: I am the Lord
which make you holy.'
To all seekers after holiness this is a lesson of deep importance.
Obedience is not holiness; holiness is something far higher, something
that comes from God to us, or rather, something of God coming into us.
But obedience is _indispensable_ to holiness: it cannot exist without
it. While, therefore, your heart seeks to follow the teaching of God's
word, and looks in faith to what God has done, as He has made you _holy
in Christ_, and to what God is still to do through the Spirit of
Holiness as He fulfils the promise, 'The very God of peace sanctify you
wholly,' never for one moment forget to be obedient. 'If ye shall indeed
obey my voice, ye shall be an holy nation to me.' Begin by doing at once
whatever appears right to do. Give up at once whatever conscience tells
that you dare not say is according to the will of God. Not only pray for
light and strength, but _act_; do what God says. 'He that _doeth_ the
will of God is my brother,' Jesus says. Every son of God has been
begotten of the will of God: in it he has his life. To do the Father's
will is the meat, the strength, the mark, of every son of God.
It is nothing less than the surrender to such a life of simple and
entire obedience that is implied in becoming a Christian. There are,
alas! too many Christians who, from the want either of proper
instruction, or of proper attention to the teaching of God's word, have
never realized the place of supreme importance that obedience takes in
the Christian life. They know not that Christ, and redemption, and faith
all lead to it, because through it alone is the way to the fellowship of
the Love, and the Likeness, and the Glory of God. We have all, possibly,
suffered from it ourselves: in our prayers and efforts after the perfect
peace and the rest of faith, after the abiding joy and the increasing
power of the Christian life, there has been a secret something hindering
the blessing, or causing the speedy loss of what had been apprehended. A
wrong impression as to the absolute necessity of obedience was probably
the cause. It cannot too earnestly be insisted on that the freeness and
mighty power of grace has this for its object from our conversion
onwards, the restoring us to the active obedience and harmony with God's
will from which we had fallen through the first sin in Paradise.
Obedience leads to God and His Holiness. It is in obedience that the
will is moulded, and the character fashioned, and an inner man built up
which God can clothe and adorn with the beauty of holiness.
When a Christian discovers that this has been the missing link, the
cause of failure and darkness, there is nothing for it but, in a grand
act of surrender, deliberately to choose obedience, universal,
whole-hearted obedience, as the law of his life in the power of the Holy
Spirit. Let him not fear to make his own the words of Israel at Sinai,
in answer to the message of God we are considering: 'All that the Lord
hath spoken, _we will do_;' 'All that the Lord hath said _will we do_,
and be obedient.' What the law could not do, in that it was weak through
the flesh, God hath done by the gift of His Son and Spirit. The
law-giving of Sinai on tables of stone has been succeeded by the
law-giving of the Spirit on the table of the heart: the Holy Spirit is
the power of obedience, and is so the Spirit of Holiness, who, in
obedience, prepares our hearts for being the dwelling of the Holy One.
Let us in this faith yield ourselves to a life of obedience: it is the
New Testament path to the realization of the promise: 'If ye will _obey_
my voice indeed, ye shall be unto me an _holy_ nation.'
We have already seen how holiness in its very nature supposes the
personal relation to God, His personal presence. 'I have brought you
_unto myself_; if ye obey, ye shall be _unto me_ an holy nation.' It is
as we understand and hold fast this personal element that obedience will
become possible, and will lead to holiness. Mark well God's words: 'If
ye will obey my _voice_, and keep my covenant.' The voice is more than a
law or a book; it always implies a living person and intercourse with
him. It is this that is the secret of gospel obedience: hearing the
voice and following the lead of Jesus as a personal friend, a living
Saviour. It is being led by the Spirit of God, having Him to reveal the
Presence, and the Will, and the Love of the Father, that will work in us
that personal relation which the New Testament means when it speaks of
doing everything unto the Lord, as pleasing God.
Such obedience is the pathway of holiness. Its every act is a link to
the living God, a surrender of the being for God's will, for God Himself
to take possession. In the process of assimilation, slow but sure, by
which the will of God, as the meat of our souls, is taken up into our
inmost being, our spiritual nature is strengthened, is spiritualized,
growing up into an holy temple in which God can reveal Himself and take
up His abode.
Let every believer study to realize this. When God sanctified the
seventh day as His period of making holy, He taught us that He could not
do it at once. The revelation and communication of holiness must be
gradual, as man is prepared to receive it. God's sanctifying work with
each of us, as with the race, needs time. The time it needs and seeks is
the life of daily, hourly obedience. All that is spent in self-will, and
not in the living relation to the Lord, is lost. But when the heart
seeks day by day to hearken to the voice and to obey it, the Holy One
Himself watches over His words to fulfil them: 'Ye shall be unto me an
holy nation.' In a way of which the soul beforehand can have but little
conception, God will overshadow and make His abode in the obedient
heart. The habit of always listening for the voice and obeying it will
only be the building of the temple: the Living God Himself, the Holy
One, will come to take up His abode. The glory of the Lord will fill
the house, and the promise be made true, 'I will sanctify it by my
glory.'
'I brought you _unto myself_; if ye will obey _my voice_ in deed, ye
shall be _unto me_ an holy nation.' Seekers after holiness! God has
brought you to Himself. And now His voice speaks to you all the thoughts
of His heart, that as you take them in, and make them your own, and make
His will your own by living and doing it, you may enter into the most
complete union with Himself, the union of will as well as of life, and
so become a holy people unto Him. Let obedience, the listening to and
the doing the will of God, be the joy and the glory of your life; it
will give you access unto the Holiness of God.