There is a phrase which echoes through the Old Testament like the
refrain of some solemn music--the "God of Jacob." "The God of Jacob,"
says the 46th Psalmist, "is our refuge." Yet when you think of it, it
is a strange title. The "God of Abraham" you can understand, for
Abraham was a great and faithful soul. And the "God of Isaac," also,
for Isaac was a saint. But the "God of Jacob" is a combination of ideas
of a very different sort. For though, by God's grace, Jacob became a
saint in the end, it took much discipline and trouble to mould him into
a true godliness. And, for the greater part of his life, and many of
his appearances on the stage of Scripture, his actions and ideals are
not such as to make us admire him very passionately. We like Esau for
all his faults, but we do not like Jacob for all his virtues. There is
something cold and calculating about Jacob that repels affection. For
all his religion, the Jacob of the earlier chapters is a mean soul,
successful but unscrupulous, pious but not straight, spiritually-minded
but not lovable. And yet the Almighty condescends to be known as the
God of Jacob, and the Bible loves that name for God!
What does that say to you? To me it says this--and I think we all need
to learn it--that God is the God even of unlovable people! That even
unlovable people have a God! That the Lord is very gracious to sinners,
we all rejoice to believe, for that is the Evangel of Jesus, and He
Himself was found practising it even among the waifs and outcasts of
society. But that unlovable people have a God, too, is actually harder
for us to realise, for the plain fact is that unlovable, disagreeable
people irritate and annoy us more even than the sinners. If you
question that, just analyse your attitude to the Prodigal in our Lord's
wonderful story, compared with that toward his respectable, cold-hearted
and priggish elder brother. The brother irritates us. We call him,
with some heat, as Henry Drummond did, a baby, and we want to shake him.
But we never want to shake the prodigal.
Now, we all have, on our list of acquaintances, people whom we have
labelled disagreeable, who continually rub us the wrong way, as we put
it. There is the man who is always talking about himself, and is filled
with conceit like a bladder with air. "There is the man," says Hazlitt
in one of his Essays, "who asks you fifty questions as to the commonest
things you advance, and, you would sooner pardon a fellow who held a
pistol at your breast and demanded your money." There is the
ill-tempered, sulky person, and the grumbling, whining, dolorous soul
never without an ache or a grievance. So we can all draw up our own
private "Index Expurgatorius" of the people we bar or dislike. We say
these people are unlovable.
And, since the corruption of the best is the worst, we are agreed that
the most unlovable of all types is the religious undesirable, the smug,
unctuous, oily person, for example, whose sincerity is continually in
question, the narrow, intolerant, little soul who cannot see any sort of
truth or righteousness except his own, or the prim and pious man who is
cocksure of his interest in the life to come, but is not straight in the
affairs of the life which now is. There are others, but enumeration is
not a very profitable or a pleasant task. Take them all together,
gather them in a crowd in your memory, and then set yourself this
exercise for your sanctification and growth in grace. Realise that the
Lord your God is the God also of these unlovable people. Get that idea
thoroughly into your heart, and say it to yourself, if need be, many
times a day. These people look up to Him in worship just as you do.
They have their sacred hours in His presence just as you have. There is
nothing you look for to God, that they do not seek, too, from Him. They
are not of a different order from you, but the same order. And though
you do not love them, God does. Though they are outside of your circle,
they are not outside of His. The God of Jacob is their God. And
therein lies for them, as it did for Jacob, the hope and promise of
better things to come.
If we remembered that, should we not be more patient and forbearing with
them than we are, keener to look for the best in them, and to make the
best of them than we are? Just to think of what is meant by the "God of
Jacob" is to set our sharp and bitter judgments of others over against
the infinitely tender compassion and patience and longsuffering of God.
All the wonder of the divine grace is hidden in the phrase. And this is
the wonder--that God never grows tired even of disagreeable people. He
does not give up caring even for the unlovable. But oh! what poor sons
and daughters of the Lord Almighty _we_ are, with our quick, rash final
judgments and our hard, unbrotherly hearts!
Did you ever ask yourself what some of these unlovable people are doing,
the while you and I are telling each other how impossible and unlovable
they are? George Eliot suggests it somewhere thus:--"While we are
coldly discussing a man's career, sneering at his mistakes, and
labelling his opinions 'Evangelical and narrow' or 'Latitudinarian and
pantheistic,' or 'Anglican and supercilious,' that man in his solitude
is perhaps shedding hot tears because his sacrifice is a hard one,
because strength and patience are failing him to speak the difficult
word and do the difficult deed." Ah, yes, it's a mercy that there is a
God even for unlovable people!
But there is a question that has been waiting all this time, and we must
ask it before we close. _What about ourselves, you and me_? Are we
such lovable people that we can afford to judge others? Do we never rub
our friends the wrong way, and, without meaning it, annoy and disappoint
and repel them? Are _our_ religious profession and our daily practice
so very much in keeping that we may talk about prigs and self-righteous
people as if they belonged to an entirely different world? May I speak
for you all and say humbly "No"? No, God knows they are not! The fact
is that if we know ourselves at all well, we must be aware that we have
it in us to be quite as disagreeable and selfish and self-righteous as
anybody. It is only our best beloved who do not get tired of us, and
sometimes even they must be hard put to it.
But there is a blessed Gospel for those who have made that discovery
about themselves. There is a God of Jacob. Abraham is too high for us,
and Isaac is too saintly, but Jacob, faulty, disappointing, unlovable,
yet by God's grace redeemed and perfected at last, Jacob is the man for
us! The hope and comfort of all who have learned what they really are
is that "the God of Jacob is our refuge."