Faith in the Earnest God
DAILY READINGS
Throughout our studies we have been thinking of the effect of faith on
the one who exercises it. As an introduction to this week's thought on
the earnestness of God, let us approach the effect of faith from
another angle. Faith has enormous influence on the one in whom it is
reposed; not only the believer but the one in whom he believes is
affected by his faith.
Ninth Week, First Day
=I commend unto you Phoebe our sister, who is a servant of the church
that is at Cenchreæ: that ye receive her in the Lord, worthily of the
saints, and that ye assist her in whatsoever matter she may have need
of you: for she herself also hath been a helper of many, and of mine
own self.=
=Salute Prisca and Aquila my fellow-workers in Christ Jesus, who for
my life laid down their own necks; unto whom not only I give thanks,
but also all the churches of the Gentiles: and salute the church that
is in their house. Salute Epænetus my beloved, who is the
first-fruits of Asia unto Christ. Salute Mary, who bestowed much
labor on you. Salute Andronicus and Junias, my kinsmen, and my
fellow-prisoners, who are of note among the apostles, who also have
been in Christ before me. Salute Ampliatus my beloved in the
Lord.--Rom. 16:1-8.=
This series of personal commendations is only the beginning of the
last chapter of Paul's letter to the Romans. All the way through one
hears the individual names of Paul's friends and fellow-laborers, with
his discriminating and hearty praise of each. It is clear that he has
faith in these men and women; he believes in them and relies on them.
Consider the effect on them that Paul's confidence in their Christian
fidelity would naturally have. There is no motive much more stirring
than the consciousness that somebody believes in us, is trusting and
counting on us. Whatever is fine and noble in human life responds to
that appeal. Soldiers who feel that their country is relying upon
their fidelity, children who are conscious that their parents believe
in them, friends who are heartened by the assurance that some folk
completely trust them--how much of the best in all of us has come
because we have been the objects of somebody's faith! A Connecticut
volunteer in the American Revolution has written that George
Washington once paused for a moment in front of his company and said
simply, "I am counting on you men from Connecticut." And the recruit
clasped his musket in his arms and wept with the devotion which
Washington's confidence evoked. Would not the sixteenth chapter of
Romans have a similar effect on those who read it?
_O Thou loving and tender Father in heaven, we confess before Thee,
in sorrow, how hard and unsympathetic are our hearts; how often we
have sinned against our neighbors by want of compassion and
tenderness; how often we have felt no true pity for their trials and
sorrows, and have neglected to comfort, help, and visit them. O
Father, forgive this our sin, and lay it not to our charge. Give us
grace ever to alleviate the crosses and difficulties of those around
us, and never to add to them; teach us to be consolers in sorrow, to
take thought for the stranger, the widow, and the orphan; let our
charity show itself not in words only, but in deed and truth. Teach
us to judge as Thou dost, with forbearance, with much pity and
indulgence; and help us to avoid all unloving judgment of others; for
the sake of Jesus Christ Thy Son, who loved us and gave Himself for
us. Amen._--Johann Arndt, 1555.
Ninth Week, Second Day
=And it came to pass in these days, that he went out into the
mountain to pray; and he continued all night in prayer to God. And
when it was day, he called his disciples; and he chose from them
twelve, whom also he named apostles: Simon, whom he also named
Peter, and Andrew his brother, and James and John, and Philip and
Bartholomew, and Matthew and Thomas, and James the son of Alphæus,
and Simon who was called the Zealot, and Judas the son of James, and
Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor.--Luke 6:12-16.=
The power that comes to men when someone believes in them must have
come to these disciples whom Jesus trusted with his work. We often
note the power that was theirs through their faith in Christ; consider
today the inspiration that came from Christ's faith in them. He picked
them out, commissioned them, relied on them, and believed in their
ability with God's help to carry his work to a successful issue. All
that is most distinctive and memorable in their character came from
their response to that divine trust. How they must have encouraged
themselves in times of failure and disheartenment by saying: He
believes in us; even though we are ignorant and sinful, he believes in
us; he has trusted his work to us, and for all our inability he has
faith that we can carry it to triumph! Their faith in themselves and
what they could do with God's help must have been almost altogether a
reflex of his faith in them. Our contention, therefore, that faith is
the dynamic of life has now a new confirmation: _the faith that
lifts and motives life is not simply our faith in the Divine, but the
faith of the Divine in us_. One of the most glorious results of
believing in God is that a man can press on to the further confidence
that God believes in us. If he did not, he would never have made us.
The very fact that we are here means that he does believe in us, in
our possibilities of growth, in our capacities of service, in what he
can do in and for and through us before he is done. Man's faith in God
and God's faith in man together make an unequalled motive for great
living. Yet there is always a sad appendix to every list of trusted
men, with somebody's blighted name: "Judas Iscariot, who became a
traitor."
_Loving Father, our hearts are moved to gratitude and trust when we
look up to Thee. We rejoice that through our fleeting days there runs
Thy gracious purpose. We praise Thee that we are not the creatures of
chance, nor the victims of iron fate, but that out from Thee we have
come and into Thy bosom we shall return. We would not, even if we
could, escape Thee. Thou alone art good, and to escape from Thee is
to fall into infinite evil. Thy hand is upon us moving us on to some
far-off spiritual event, where the meaning and the mystery of life
shall be made plain and Thy glory shall be revealed. Look in pity
upon our ignorance and childishness. Forgive us our small
understanding of Thy purpose of good concerning us. Be not angry with
us, but draw us from the things of this world which cannot satisfy
our foolish hearts. Fill us with Thyself, that we may no longer be a
burden to ourselves. So glorify the face of goodness that evil shall
have no more dominion over us. Amen._--Samuel McComb.
Ninth Week, Third Day
The fact that God has faith in us is not alone a source of comfort; it
presents a stirring challenge. It means that he is in earnest about
achieving his great purposes in human life and that he is counting
upon us to help. He has set his heart on aims, about which he cares,
and to whose achievement he is calling us; he is confident that with
him we can work out, if we will, loftier character and a better world.
Let us consider some of the purposes which God is counting on us, in
fellowship with him, to achieve. The prophet Micah, in a brief but
perfect drama, gives one clue. First the Lord summons his people to a
trial, with the eternal mountains for judges:
=Hear ye now what Jehovah saith: Arise, contend thou before the
mountains, and let the hills hear thy voice. Hear, O ye mountains,
Jehovah's controversy, and ye enduring foundations of the earth; for
Jehovah hath a controversy with his people, and he will contend with
Israel.--Micah 6:1, 2.=
Then, the Lord presents his case:
=O my people, what have I done unto thee? and wherein have I wearied
thee? testify against me. For I brought thee up out of the land of
Egypt, and redeemed thee out of the house of bondage; and I sent
before thee Moses, Aaron, and Miriam. O my people, remember now what
Balak king of Moab devised, and what Balaam the son of Beor answered
him; remember from Shittim unto Gilgal, that ye may know the
righteous acts of Jehovah.--Micah 6:3-5.=
Then the people put in their hesitant, questioning plea.
=Wherewith shall I come before Jehovah, and bow myself before the
high God? shall I come before him with burnt-offerings, with calves a
year old? will Jehovah be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten
thousands of rivers of oil? shall I give my first-born for my
transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?--Micah
6:6, 7.=
Then the mountains pronounce judgment:
=He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth Jehovah
require of thee, but to do justly, and to love kindness, and to walk
humbly with thy God?--Micah 6:8.=
God, then, is in earnest about _just_, _kind_, _and humble
character_. He believes in it as a possibility; he sees the making
of it now in human hearts; he is pledged to further and establish it
with all his power; and he is counting on us for loyal cooperation
with all our powers of choice. Vital faith means a transforming
partnership with a God who is in earnest about character.
_O Thou who art the Father of that Son which hast awakened us and yet
urgeth us out of the sleep of our sins, and exhorteth us that we
become Thine, to Thee, Lord, we pray, who art the supreme Truth, for
all truth that is, is from Thee. Thee we implore, O Lord, who art the
highest Wisdom, through Thee are wise, all those that are so. Thou
art the supreme Joy, and from Thee all have become happy that are so.
Thou art the highest Good and from Thee all beauty springs. Thou art
the intellectual Light, and from Thee man derives his understanding.
To Thee, O God, we call and speak. Hear us, O Lord, for Thou art our
God and our Lord, our Father and our Creator, our Ruler and our Hope,
our Wealth and our Honor, our Home, our Country, our Salvation, and
our Life; hear, hear us, O Lord. Few of Thy servants comprehend Thee,
but at least we love Thee--yea, love Thee above all other things. We
seek Thee, we follow Thee, we are ready to serve Thee; under Thy
power we desire to abide, for Thou art the Sovereign of all. We pray
Thee to command us as Thou wilt; through Jesus Christ Thy Son our
Lord. Amen._--King Alfred, 849.
Ninth Week, Fourth Day
God also is in earnest about _social righteousness_.
=I hate, I despise your feasts, and I will take no delight in your
solemn assemblies. Yea, though ye offer me your burnt-offerings and
meal-offerings, I will not accept them; neither will I regard the
peace-offerings of your fat beasts. Take thou away from me the noise
of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols. But let
justice roll down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty
stream.--Amos 5:21-24.=
Anyone who cares about character must care about social conditions,
for every unfair economic situation, every social evil left to run its
course means ruin to character. And the God of the Bible, because he
cares supremely for personal life at its best, is zealously in earnest
about social justice; his prophets blazed with indignation at all
inequity, and his Son made the coming Kingdom, when God's will would
be done on earth, the center of his message. To fellowship with this
earnest purpose of God we all are summoned; God believes in the
glorious possibilities of life on earth; he is counting on us to put
away the sins that hold the Kingdom back and to fight the abuses that
crush character in men. To believe in God, therefore--the God who is
fighting his way with his children up through ignorance, brutality,
and selfishness to "new heavens and a new earth wherein dwelleth
righteousness"--is no weakly comfortable blessing. It means joining a
moral war; it means devotion, sacrifice; its spirit is the Cross and
its motive an undiscourageable faith. And our underlying assurance
that this war for a better world can be won is not simply our belief
that it can be done, but _our faith that God is, and that he
believes that it can be done_. When we pray we say, "Thy Kingdom
come," and we are full of hope about the long, sacrificial struggle,
for the purpose behind and through it all is first of all God's. Our
earnestness is but an echo of his.
_O Thou Eternal One, we adore Thee who in all ages hast been the
great companion and teacher of mankind; for Thou hast lifted our race
from the depths, and hast made us to share in Thy conscious
intelligence and Thy will that makes for righteousness and love.
Thou alone art our Redeemer, for Thy lifting arms were about us and
Thy persistent voice was in our hearts as we slowly climbed up from
savage darkness and cruelty. Thou knowest how often we have resisted
Thee and loved the easy ways of sin rather than the toilsome gain of
self-control and the divine irritation of Thy truth...._
_We pray Thee for those who amid all the knowledge of our day are
still without knowledge; for those who hear not the sighs of the
children that toil, nor the sobs of such as are wounded because
others have made haste to be rich; for those who have never felt the
hot tears of the mothers of the poor that struggle vainly against
poverty and vice. Arouse them, we beseech Thee, from their selfish
comfort and grant them the grace of social repentance. Smite us all
with the conviction that for us ignorance is sin, and that we are
indeed our brother's keeper if our own hand has helped to lay him
low. Though increase of knowledge bring increase of sorrow, may we
turn without flinching to the light and offer ourselves as
instruments of Thy spirit in bringing order and beauty out of
disorder and darkness. Amen._--Walter Rauschenbusch.
Ninth Week, Fifth Day
The thought which we have been pursuing leads us to a truth of major
importance: if God is thus in earnest, believing in man's possibilities
and laboring for them, then he cannot be known by anyone who does not
share his purpose and his labor. _Action is a road to knowledge and
some things never can be known without it._ If one would know the
business world, he must be an active business man; no amount of
abstract study and speculation can take the place of vital
participation in business struggle. The way to understand any movement
or enterprise is to go into it, share its enthusiasms and hopes, labor
sacrificially for its success, bear its defeats as though they were
our own, and rejoice in its achievements as though nothing so much
mattered to our happiness. Such knowledge is thorough and vital; when
one who so has learned what war is, or the missionary enterprise, or
the fight against the liquor traffic, stands up to speak, a merely
theoretical student of these movements sounds unreal and tame. If
therefore God is earnest Purpose, with aims in which he calls us to
share, no one can thoroughly know him merely by _thinking_; he must
know him by _acting_.
=But he that doeth the truth cometh to the light, that his works may
be made manifest, that they have been wrought in God.--John 3:21.=
=Jesus therefore answered them, and said, My teaching is not mine,
but his that sent me. If any man willeth to do his will, he shall
know of the teaching, whether it is of God, or whether I speak from
myself.--John 7:16, 17.=
Many people endeavor to reach a satisfactory knowledge of God by
clarifying their thought and working out a rational philosophy. But,
by such intellectual means alone, they could not gain satisfactory
knowledge of so familiar a thing as home life. To know home life one
elemental act is essential: get into a home and share its problems,
its satisfactions, and its hopes. So the most adequate philosophy by
itself can bring no satisfactory knowledge of God; only by working
with God, sharing his purposes for the world, sacrificially laboring
for the aims he has at heart can men know him.
_Eternal God, who hast formed us, and designed us for companionship
with Thee; who hast called us to walk with Thee and be not afraid;
forgive us, we pray Thee, if craven fear, unworthy thought, or hidden
sin has prompted us to hide from Thee. Remove the suspicion which
regards Thy service as an intrusion on our time and an interference
with our daily task. Shew to us the life that serves Thee in the
quiet discharge of each day's duty, that ennobles all our toil by
doing it as unto Thee. We ask for no far-off vision which shall set
us dreaming while opportunities around slip by; for no enchantment
which shall make our hands to slack and our spirits to sleep, but for
the vision of Thyself in common things for every day; that we may
find a Divine calling in the claims of life, and see a heavenly
reward in work well done. We ask Thee not to lift us out of life, but
to prove Thy power within it; not for tasks more suited to our
strength, but for strength more suited to our tasks. Give to us the
vision that moves, the strength that endures, the grace of Jesus
Christ, who wore our flesh like a monarch's robe and walked our
earthly life like a conqueror in triumph. Amen._--W. E. Orchard.
Ninth Week, Sixth Day
Because action with God is essential to any satisfying knowledge of
him, action is one of the great resolvers of doubt. Many minds,
endeavoring to think through the mystifying problems of God's
providence, find themselves in a clueless labyrinth. The more they
think the more entangled and confused their minds become. Their
thoughts strike a fatal circle, like wanderers lost in the woods, and
return upon their course, baffled and disheartened. To such perplexed
minds the best advice often is: Cease your futile thinking and go to
work. Let action take the place of speculation. Break the fatal round
of circular thought that never will arrive, and go out to act on the
basis of what little you do believe. Your mind like a dammed stream is
growing stagnant; set it running to some useful purpose, if only to
turn mill-wheels, and trust that activity will bring it cleansing in
due time. Horace Bushnell, the great preacher, while a skeptical tutor
at Yale, was disturbed because so many students were unsettled by his
disbelief. In the midst of a revival he said that like a great snag he
caught and stopped the newly launched boats as fast as they came down.
Unable to think his way out of his intellectual perplexity, he faced
one night this arresting question: "What is the use of my trying to
get further knowledge, so long as I do not cheerfully yield to what I
already know?" And kneeling he prayed after this fashion: "O God, I
believe there is an eternal difference between right and wrong, and I
hereby give myself up to do the right and to refrain from the wrong. I
believe that Thou dost exist, and if Thou canst hear my cry and wilt
reveal Thyself to me, I pledge myself to do Thy will, and I make this
pledge fully, freely, and forever." What wonder that in time the light
broke and that Bushnell became a great prophet of the faith!
Even Paul, finishing his laborious discussion of God's providence
toward Israel, acknowledges his baffled thought:
=O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of
God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past tracing
out! For who hath known the mind of the Lord? or who hath been his
counsellor? or who hath first given to him, and it shall be
recompensed unto him again? For of him, and through him, and unto
him, are all things. To him be the glory for ever. Amen.--Rom.
11:33-36=.
And then, as if he turned from philosophy to action with gratitude, he
begins the twelfth chapter:
=I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present
your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is
your spiritual service. And be not fashioned according to this world:
but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove
what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God.--Rom. 12:1, 2.=
_O God, we thank Thee for the sweet refreshment of sleep and for the
glory and vigor of the new day. As we set our faces once more toward
our daily work, we pray Thee for the strength sufficient for our
tasks. May Christ's spirit of duty and service ennoble all we do.
Uphold us by the consciousness that our work is useful work and a
blessing to all. If there has been anything in our work harmful to
others and dishonorable to ourselves, reveal it to our inner eye with
such clearness that we shall hate it and put it away, though it be at
a loss to ourselves. When we work with others, help us to regard
them, not as servants to our will, but as brothers equal to us in
human dignity, and equally worthy of their full reward. May there be
nothing in this day's work of which we shall be ashamed when the sun
has set, nor in the eventide of our life when our task is done and we
go to our long home to meet Thy face. Amen._--Walter Rauschenbusch.
Ninth Week, Seventh Day
=Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye
blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the
foundation of the world: for I was hungry, and ye gave me to eat; I
was thirsty, and ye gave me drink; I was a stranger, and ye took me
in; naked, and ye clothed me; I was sick, and ye visited me; I was in
prison, and ye came unto me. Then shall the righteous answer him,
saying, Lord, when saw we thee hungry, and fed thee? or athirst, and
gave thee drink? And when saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in?
or naked, and clothed thee? And when saw we thee sick, or in prison,
and came unto thee? And the King shall answer and say unto them,
Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of these my
brethren, even these least, ye did it unto me.--Matt. 25:34-40.=
The earnestness of God is not about any diffuse generality; it is
about persons. His purposes concern them, and he believes in them and
in their capacities for fellowship with him, for growing character and
for glorious destiny. If, therefore, one wishes the sense of God's
reality which comes from active co-partnership, let him serve persons,
believe in them, and be in earnest about them. A woman, troubled by
invincible doubts, was given by a wise minister the Gospel of John and
a calling-list of needy families, and was told to use them both. She
came through into a luminous faith, and which helped her more, her
reading or her service, she could never tell. When the Master said
that the good we did to the least of his brethren, we did to him, he
indicated a road to vital knowledge of him; he said in effect that we
can always find him in the lives of people to whom we give love and
help. Many will never find him at all unless they find him there. The
great believers have been the great servants; and the reason for this
is not simply that faith produced service, but also that _service
produced faith_. The life of Sir Wilfred Grenfell, for example,
makes convincingly plain that his faith sent him to Labrador for
service, and that then he drew out of service a compound interest on
his original investment of faith.
_O God, the Father of the forsaken, the Help of the weak, the
Supplier of the needy, who hast diffused and proportioned Thy gifts
to body and soul, in such sort that all may acknowledge and perform
the joyous duty of mutual service; Who teachest us that love towards
the race of men is the bond of perfectness, and the imitation of Thy
blessed Self; open our eyes and touch our hearts, that we may see and
do, both for this world and for that which is to come, the things
which belong to our peace. Strengthen us in the work we have
undertaken; give us counsel and wisdom, perseverance, faith, and
zeal, and in Thine own good time, and according to Thy pleasure,
prosper the issue. Pour into us a spirit of humility; let nothing be
done but in devout obedience to Thy will, thankfulness for Thine
unspeakable mercies, and love to Thine adorable Son Christ Jesus....
Amen._--Earl of Shaftesbury, 1801.
COMMENT FOR THE WEEK
I
Throughout our studies we have been asserting that faith in God
involves confidence that creation has a purpose. But we shall not see
the breadth and depth of the affirmation, or its significant meaning
for our lives, unless more carefully we face a question, which, as
keenly as any other, pierces to the marrow of religion: _Is God in
earnest?_
That the God of the Bible is in earnest is plain. If we open the Book
at the Exodus, we hear him saying, "I have surely seen the affliction
of my people, ... and have heard their cry, ... and I am come down to
deliver them" (Exodus 3:7, 8). If we turn to the prophets, we find
Hosea, interpreting the beating of God's heart: "How am I to give thee
up, O Ephraim? How am I to let thee go, O Israel? How am I to give
thee up? My heart is turned upon me, my compassions begin to boil"[5]
(Hos. 11:8). Everywhere in the Old Testament, God is in earnest: about
personal character--"What doth Jehovah require of thee, but to do
justly, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with thy God?" (Micah
6:8); about social righteousness--"Let justice roll down as waters,
and righteousness as a mighty stream" (Amos 5:24); about the salvation
of the world--"It is too light a thing that thou shouldest be my
servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the preserved
of Israel: I will also give thee for a light to the Gentiles, that
thou mayest be my salvation unto the end of the earth" (Isa. 49:6).
When from the Old Testament one turns to the New, he faces an
assertion of God's earnestness that cannot be surpassed: "God so loved
the world that he gave his only begotten Son." God in the New
Testament is as much in earnest as that, and all the major
affirmations of the Book cluster about the magnetism of this central
faith. God is even like a shepherd with a hundred sheep, who having
lost one, leaves the ninety and nine and goes after that which is
lost, until he finds it (Luke 15:4). From the earliest Hebrew seer
dimly perceiving him, to the last apostle of the New Covenant, the God
of the Bible is tremendously in earnest.
How profoundly the acceptance of this faith deepens the meaning and
value of life is evident. For a moment some might think that the major
question is not whether _God_ is in earnest but whether _we_
are; but when a man considers the hidden fountains from which the
streams of his human earnestness must flow, he sees how necessary is
at least the hope that at the heart of it creation is in earnest too.
Von Hartmann, the pessimist, makes one of his characters say, "The
activities of the busy world are only the shudderings of a fever." How
shall a man be seriously in earnest about great causes in a world like
that? The men whose devoted lives have made history great have seen in
creation's busyness more than aimless shuddering. Moses was in
earnest, but behind his consecration was his vision of the Eternal,
saying to Pharaoh, "Let my people go!" The Master was in earnest, but
with a motive that took into its account the purposefulness of God,
"My Father worketh hitherto, and I work" (John 5:17).
Indeed, no satisfying meaning, no real unity are conceivable in a
purposeless universe. The plain fact is that _within_ the universe
nobody explains anything without the statement of its purpose. A chair
is something to sit down on; a watch is something to tell time by; a
lamp is something to give illumination in the dark--and lacking this
purposive description, the story of the precedent history of none of
these things, from their original materials to their present shape,
would in the least tell what they really are. One who knows all else
about a telephone, practically knows nothing, unless he is aware of
what it is _for_. Nor is the necessity of such explanation lessened
when scientists endeavor descriptions in their special realms. Huxley,
narrating the growth of a salamander's egg, writes, "Let a moderate
supply of warmth reach its watery cradle, and the plastic matter
undergoes changes so rapid, and yet so steady and so purposelike in
their succession, that one can only compare them to those operated by
a skilled modeler upon a formless lump of clay. As with an invisible
trowel, the mass is divided and subdivided into smaller and smaller
portions, until it is reduced to an aggregation of granules not too
large to build withal the finest fabrics of the nascent organism.
And, then, it is as if a delicate finger traced out the line to be
occupied by the spinal column and moulded the contour of the body;
pinching up the head at one end, the tail at the other, and fashioning
flank and limb into the due salamandrine proportions, in so artistic a
way, that, after watching the process hour by hour, one is almost
involuntarily possessed by the notion that some more subtle aid to
vision than an achromatic, would show the hidden artist, with his plan
before him, striving with skilful manipulation to perfect his work."
The obvious fact is that salamanders' eggs act as though they were
seriously intent on making salamanders; and lion's cells as though
they were tremendously in earnest about making lions. As Herbert
Spencer said of a begonia leaf, "We have therefore no alternative but
to say, that the living particles composing one of these fragments,
have an innate tendency to arrange themselves into the shape of the
organism to which they belong." _But if this is so, purpose is
essential in the description of every living thing._ All about us is a
world of life with something strikingly like purposeful action rampant
everywhere, so that in describing an elm tree it will not do to say
only that forces from behind pushed it into being; one must say, too,
that from our first observation of its cells they acted as though they
were intent on making nothing else but elm. They went about their
business as though they had a purpose. The tree's cause is not alone
the forces from behind; it is as well the aim that in the cells'
action lay ahead.
Men can describe nothing in heaven above or on the earth beneath
without the use of purposive terminology. How shall they try otherwise
to describe the universe? _A world in which the minutest particles
and cells all act as though they were eagerly intent on achieving
aims, can only with difficulty be thought of as an aimless whole._
Man's conviction is insistent and imperious that creation, so
surcharged with purposes, must have Purpose. The greatest scientists
themselves are often our best witnesses here. Charles Darwin and
Alfred Russel Wallace are the twin discoverers of evolution. Said the
former: "If we consider the whole universe the mind refuses to look at
it as the outcome of chance." Said the latter: the world is "a
manifestation of creative power, directive mind, and ultimate purpose."
What such men have coldly said, the men of devout religion have set
on fire with passionate faith. They have been sure that this world is
not
"A tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."
In every cause that makes for man's salvation they have seen the
manifest unveiling of divine intent. _God is in earnest_--this
conviction has possessed them utterly, and to live and die for those
things on behalf of which the Eternal is tremendously concerned has
been the aim, the motive, and the glory of their lives.
II
One need only watch with casual observance the multitudes who say that
they believe in God, to see how few of them believe in this God who is
in earnest. When they confess their faith in deity they have something
else in mind beside the God of the Bible, compassionately purposeful
about his world and calling men to be his fellow-workers. Let us
therefore consider some of the fallacies that enable men to believe in
a God who is _not_ in earnest.
For one thing, some _put God far away_. Missionaries in Africa's
interior find tribes worshiping stocks, stones, demons, ghosts, but
this does not mean that no idea of a great original god is theirs.
Often they are not strangers to that thought, but, as an old
Africander woman said, "He never concerned himself with me; why should
I concern myself with him?" To such folk a great god exists, but he
does not care; he dwells apart, an indifferent deity, who has left
this world in the hands of lesser gods that really count. The task of
the missionary, therefore, is not to prove the existence of a
creator--"No rain, no mushrooms," said an African chief; "no God, no
world"--but it is to persuade men that the God who seems so far away
is near at hand, that he really cares, and over each soul and all his
world is sacrificially in earnest.
Such missionary work is not yet needless among Christian people. Said
a Copenhagen preacher in a funeral discourse, "God cannot help us in
our great sorrow, because he is so infinitely far away; we must
therefore look to Jesus." One feels this Siberian exile of God from
all vital meaning for our humanity, when he is called the "Absolute,"
the "Great First Cause," the "Energy from which all things proceed."
Like the man, examined by the Civil Service, who, asked the distance
from sun to earth, answered, "I do not know how far the sun is from
the earth; but it is far enough so that it will not interfere with the
proper performance of my duties at the Customs Office," so men with
phrases like "the Great First Cause" put God an immeasurable distance
off. No man has dealings with a "Great First Cause," no "Great First
Cause" ever had vital, personal, constraining meanings for a man.
Rather across infinite distance and time unthinkable, we vaguely
picture a dim Figure, who gave this toboggan of a universe its primal
shove and has not thought seriously of it since. So a wanderer down
the street might put a child upon her sled and giving her a start
down-hill, go on his way. She may have a pleasant slide, but he will
not know; she may fall off, but he will not care; there may be a
tragic accident, but that will not be his concern--he has gone away
off down the street. Multitudes of nominal believers have a god like
that.
In comparison with such, one thinks of men like Livingstone. His God
was compassionately concerned for Africa, spoke about black folk as
Hosea heard him speak concerning Israel, "How can I give thee up? How
can I let thee go?" until the fire of the divine earnestness lit a
corresponding ardor in Livingstone's heart and he went out to be God's
man in the dark continent. Such men have smitten the listless world as
winds fill flapping sails, crying "Move!" And the God of such has been
tremendously in earnest.
III
Some gain a God lacking serious purpose, not by putting him afar off,
but by endeavoring to bring him so near that they _diffuse him
everywhere_. Writers tell us that God is in every rustling leaf and in
every wave that breaks upon the beach; we are assured that God is in
every gorgeous flower and in every flaming sunset. And the poetry of
this is so alluring that we cannot bear to have God specially
anywhere, because we are so anxious to keep him everywhere. Preachers
delight to illustrate their thought of God with figures drawn from
nature's invisible energies--
"Who has seen the wind?
Neither I nor you:
But when the leaves hang trembling
The wind is passing through.
Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I:
But when the trees bow down their heads
The wind is passing by."
By such comparisons are we taught to see that God invisibly is
everywhere.
For all the valuable truth that such speech contains, its practical
issue, in many minds today, is to strip God of the last shred of
personality, and with that loss to end the possibility of his being in
earnest about anything. He has become refined Vapor thinly diffused
through space. Folk say they love to meditate on him, and well they
may! For such a god asks nothing of anybody except meditation; he has
no purposes that call for earnestness in them. When little children
are ruined in a city's tenements, when the liquor traffic brutalizes
men, when economic inequity makes many poor that a few may be made
rich, when war clothes the world with unutterable sorrow, such a god
does not care. He is not in earnest about anything. For the only thing
in the universe that can be consciously in earnest is personality, and
when one depersonalizes God, the remainder is a deity who has no love,
no care, no purpose. Thousands do obeisance to such a gaseous idol.
From this fallacy spring such familiar confessions of faith as this,
"God is not a person; he is spirit." If by this negation one intends
to say that God is not a limited individual, that is obviously true;
but _the contrast between personality and spirit is impossible_. One
may as well speak of dry water as of impersonal spirit. Rays of radium
are unimaginably minute and swift, but they are not spirit. Nothing in
the impersonal realm can be conceived so subtle and refined that it is
spirit. Spirit begins only where love and intelligence and purpose
are, and these all are activities of personality. No one can _really_
believe what Jesus said, "God is a Spirit," without being ready to
pray as Jesus prayed, "Our Father."
Between an impersonal, diffused, and gaseous god, and the God of the
Bible, how great the difference! God's pervading omnipresence is
indeed affirmed in Scripture. There, as much as in any modern thought,
the heavens declare his glory, the flowers of the field are
illustrations of his care, and the influences of his spirit are like
the breeze across the hills. To the ancient Hebrew, heaven and sheol
were the highest and the lowest, but of each the Psalmist says to God,
"Thou art there," and as for the uttermost parts of the sea, "even
there shall thy hand lead me" (Psalm 139:7-10). Cries Jeremiah from
the Old Testament, "Am I a God at hand, saith Jehovah, and not a God
afar off? Can any hide himself in secret places so that I shall not
see him? saith Jehovah. Do not I fill heaven and earth?" (Jer. 23:23,
24). And Paul answers from the New Testament, "Not far from every one
of us: for in him we live, and move, and have our being" (Acts 17:27,
28). But the God of the Bible who so pervades and sustains all
existence never degenerates into a Vapor. When Egyptian taskmasters
crack their whips over Hebrew slaves, he cares. When exiles try in
vain to sing the songs of Zion in a strange land, he cares. When evil
men build Jerusalem with blood, and rapacious men pant after the dust
on the head of the poor, he cares. He is prodigiously in earnest, and
those who best represent him, from the great prophets to the
sacrificial Son, are like him in this, that they are mastered by
consuming purpose. The God of the Bible is sadly needed by his people.
For lack of him religion grows often listless and churches become
social clubs.
IV
By another road men travel to believe in a God who is not in earnest:
_they think of him as an historic being_. It was said of Carlyle,
shrewdly if unjustly, that his God lived until the death of Oliver
Cromwell. Whatever may be the truth about Carlyle, it is easy to find
folk whose God to all intents and purposes is dead. Long since he
closed his work, spoke his last word, and settled down to inactivity
and silence. He made the world, created man, thundered from Sinai,
established David's kingdom, brought back the exiles, inspired the
prophets and sent his Son. He _once_ was earnest; the record of his
ancient acts is long and glorious, and men find comfort in reading
what he used to do. They would not explicitly confess it, but in fact
they habitually think of God in the past tense. They cannot conceive
the universe as happening by chance, and they posit God as making it;
they cannot believe that the transcendent characters of olden times
were uninspired, so God becomes the explanation of their power. When
such believers wish to assure themselves of God they go to the stern
of humanity's ship and watch the wake far to the rear; but they never
stand on the ship's bridge, and feel it sway and turn at the touch of
a present Captain in control. They have not risen to the meaning of
the Bible's reiterated phrase, "_the living God_."
Höffding tells us that in a Danish Protestant church, well on into the
nineteenth century, worshipers maintained the custom of bowing, when
they passed a certain spot upon the wall. The reason, which no one
knew, was discovered when removal of the whitewash revealed a Roman
Catholic Madonna. Folk had bowed for three centuries before the place
where the Madonna _used to be_. So some folk worship deity; he is
not a present reality but a tradition; their faith is directed not
toward the living God himself, but toward what some one else has
written about a God who used to be alive. They do not feel now God's
plans afoot, his purposes as certainly in progress now as ever in
man's history. They stand rather like unconverted Gideon, facing
backwards and lamenting, "Where are all his wondrous works which our
fathers told us of?" (Judges 6:13).
Not by what we say, but by our practical attitudes we most reveal how
little we believe in an earnest, living God whose voice calls _us_,
whose plans need _us_, as much as ever Moses or David or Paul was
summoned and required. If we say that we do believe in this living God
we are belied by our discouragements, deserving as we often do the
rebuke which Luther's wife administered to the Reformer. "From what
you have said," she remarked, standing before him clothed in deep,
mourning black, "and from the way you feel and act I supposed that God
was dead." If we say that we believe in a living, earnest God, we are
belied by our reluctance to expect and welcome new revelations of
God's truth and enlarging visions of his plan. Willing to believe what
the astronomers say, that light from a new star reaches the earth
each year, we act as though God's spiritual universe were smaller than
his physical, and do not eagerly await the new light perpetually
breaking from his heavens. But most of all the little influence which
our faith in God has upon our practical service is a scathing
indictment of its vitality and power. No one who really believes in an
earnest, living God can have an undedicated life. He may not think of
the Divine in the past tense chiefly; the present and the future even
more belong to God; and through each generation runs the earnest
purpose of the Eternal, who has never said his last word on any
subject, nor put the final hammer blow on any task. A faith like this,
deeply received and apprehended, is a masterful experience. It changes
the inner quality of life; it makes the place whereon we stand holy
ground; it urgently impresses us into the service of those causes that
we plainly see have in them the purpose of God. No outlook upon life
compares with this in grandeur; no motive for life is at once so
weighty and so fine.
V
One of the subtlest fallacies by which we miss believing in an earnest
God is not describable as an opinion. Men fall into it, who neither
reduce God to a Great First Cause, nor diffuse him into a vapor, nor
regard him as an historic being. _They rather allow their superstitious
sentiments to take the place of worthy faith._ Plenty of people who
warmly would insist on their religion, reveal in their practical
attitudes how utterly bereft of serious moral purpose their God is.
They think their fortune will be better if they do not sit thirteen at
a table or occupy room thirteen at a hotel; on occasion they throw
salt or look at the moon over their right shoulders and rap on wood to
assure their safety or their luck; and to be quite certain of divine
favor they hang fetishes, like rabbits' feet, about their necks. Their
attitude toward such surviving pagan superstitions is like
Fontenelli's toward ghosts. "I do not believe in them," he said, "but
I am afraid of them." That this is a law-abiding universe with moral
purpose in it, such folk obviously do not believe. Their God is not in
earnest. He spends his time watching for dinner parties of thirteen or
listening for folk who forget to rap on wood when they boast that
they have not been ill all winter. The utter poverty to which great
words may be reduced by meager minds is evident when such folk say
that they believe in God.
Even when these grosser forms of superstition are not present, others
hardly more respectable may take their place. God is pictured as a
King, surrounded with court ritual, in the complete and proper
observance of which he takes delight, and any rupture in whose
regularity awakes his anger. To go to church, to say our prayers, to
read our Bibles, to be circumspect on Sunday, to help pay the
preacher's salary and to contribute to the missionary cause--such
things as these comprise the court ritual of God. These Christian acts
are not presented as gracious privileges, opportunities, like fresh
air and sunshine and friendship, to make life rich and serviceable;
they are presented as works of merit, by which we gain standing in
God's favor and assure ourselves of his benignity. For with those who
so conform to his ordinances and respect his taboos, he is represented
as well-pleased, and he blesses them with special favors. But any
infraction of these rituals is sure to bring terrific punishment. God
watches those who do not sing his praises or who fail in praying, and
he marks them for his vengeance! Dr. Jowett tells us that in the
Sunday school room of the English chapel where as a child he
worshiped, a picture hung that to his fascinated and frightened
imagination represented the character of God: a huge eye filled the
center of the heavens, and from it rays of vision fell on every sort
of minute happening and small misdeed on earth. As such a monstrous
Detective, jealous of his rights and perquisites, God is how often
pictured to the children! So H. G. Wells indignantly interprets his
experience: "I, who write, was so set against God, thus rendered. He
and his Hell were the nightmare of my childhood; I hated him while I
still believed in him, and who could help but hate? I thought of him
as a fantastic monster, perpetually spying, perpetually listening,
perpetually waiting to condemn and to strike me dead; his flames as
ready as a grill-room fire. He was over me and about my feebleness and
silliness and forgetfulness as the sky and sea would be about a child
drowning in mid-Atlantic. When I was still only a child of thirteen,
by the grace of the true God in me, I flung this lie out of my mind,
and for many years, until I came to see that God himself had done
this thing for me, the name of God meant nothing to me but the hideous
sear in my heart where a fearful demon had been."
This "bogey God" is in earnest about nothing except the observance of
his little rituals; he is unworthy of a good man's worship, he has no
purpose that can capture the consent and inspire the loyalty of
serious folk. How many so-called unbelievers are in revolt against
this perversion of the idea of God, taught them in childhood! The
deity whom they refuse to credit is not the Father, with "the eternal
purpose which he purposed in Christ" (Eph. 3:11); often they have not
heard of him. Their denial is directed against another sort of God. "I
wish I could recall clearly," writes one, "the conception of God which
I gained as a boy in Sunday school. He was as old as grandfather, I
know, but not so kind. We were told to fear him." Surely the real God
must sympathize with those who hate his caricature. A vindictive
Bogey, querulous about the mint, anise, and cummin of his ritual, in
earnest about nothing save to reward obsequious servants and to have
his vengeance out on the careless and disobedient, is poles asunder
from the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ with his majestic
purpose for the world's salvation.
VI
Of all the sentiments, however, by which a worthy faith is made
impossible, none is so common, in these recent years, _as the
ascription to God of a weak and flaccid affectionateness_. God's love
is interpreted by love's meaning in hours when we are gentle with our
children or tender with our friends. The soft and cosy aspects of
love, its comforts, its pities, its affections, are made central in
our thought of God. We are taught, as children, that he loves us as
our mothers do; and as from them we look for coddling when we cry for
it, so are our expectations about God. Our religion becomes a selfish
seeking for divine protection from life's ills, a recipe for ease, an
expectant trust, that as we believe in God he in return will nurse us,
unharmed and happy, through our lives. No one intimately acquainted
with the religious life of men and women can be unaware of this
widespread, ingrained belief in a soft, affectionate, grandmotherly
God. What wonder that life brings fearful disillusionment! What
wonder that in a world where all that is valuable has been
"Battered with the shocks of doom
To shape and use,"
the God of coddling love seems utterly impossible!
The lack in this fallacious faith is central; there is no place in it
for the movement of God's moral purpose. _To ascribe love to God
without making it a quality of his unalterable purpose, which must
sweep on through costs in suffering however great, is to misread the
Gospel._ Many kinds of love are known in our experience, from a
nursing mother with her babe to a military leader with his men. In
Donald Hankey's picture of "the Beloved Captain" we see affection and
tenderness, as beautiful as they are strong: "It was a wonderful
thing, that smile of his. It was something worth living for, and worth
working for.... It seemed to make one look at things from a different
point of view, a finer point of view, his point of view. There was
nothing feeble or weak about it.... It meant something. It meant that
we were his men and that he was proud of us.... When we failed him,
when he was disappointed in us, he did not smile. He did not rage or
curse. He just looked disappointed, and that made us feel far more
savage with ourselves than any amount of swearing would have done....
The fact was that he had won his way into our affections. We loved
him. And there isn't anything stronger than love, when all's said and
done."
Yet, this Captain, loving and beloved, will lead his men in desperate
charges, where death falls in showers, but where the purpose which
their hearts have chosen forces them to go. The love of God must be
like that; it surely is if Jesus' love is its embodiment. His
affection for his followers, his solicitude and tenderness have been
in Christian eyes, how beautiful! They shine in words like John's
seventeenth chapter where love finds transcendent utterance. Yet this
same Master said: "Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of
wolves" (Matt. 10:16); "Blessed are ye when men shall reproach you,
and persecute you, and say all manner of evil against you falsely for
my sake" (Matt. 5:11); "Then shall they deliver you up unto
tribulation, and shall kill you; and ye shall be hated of all the
nations for my name's sake" (Matt. 24:9); "They shall put you out of
the synagogues; yea, the hour cometh, that whosoever killeth you shall
think that he offereth service unto God" (John 16:2); "If any man
cometh unto me, and hateth not his own father, and mother, and wife,
and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also,
he cannot be my disciple" (Luke 14:26). The love of Jesus was no
coddling affection; it had for its center a moral purpose that balked
at no sacrifice. He took crucifixion for himself, and to his beloved
he cried, "If any man would come after me, let him deny himself, and
take up his cross, and follow me" (Matt. 16:24). Such love is God's;
and _preachers who advertise his Fatherhood as a gentle nurse that
shelters us from suffering have sapped the Gospel of its moral power_.
God's love is austere as well as bountiful; he is, as Emerson said,
the "terrific benefactor."
Indeed, faith in a God of coddling love may be one of the most
pernicious influences in human life. Our trust, so misinterpreted,
becomes a cushion on which to lie, a sedative by which to sleep. When
ills afflict the world that men could cure, such misbelievers merely
trust in God; when tasks await man's strength, they quietly retreat
upon their faith that God is good and will solve all, until religion
becomes a by-word and a hissing on the lips of earnest men. Such
misbelievers have not dimly seen the Scripture's meaning, where faith
is not a pillow but a shield, from behind which plays a sword (Eph.
6:16) and where men do not sleep by faith, but "fight the good fight
of faith" instead (I Tim. 6:12). Or if such misbelievers do rouse
themselves to lay hold on their Divinity, it is to demand God's love
for them and not to offer their lives to God. As Sydney Smith
exclaimed about some people's patriotism, "God save the King! in these
times too often means, God save my pension and my place, God give my
sisters an allowance out of the Privy Purse, let me live upon the
fruits of other men's industry and fatten upon the plunder of the
public."
Faith in God never is elevated and ennobling until we overpass "_God
for our lives!_" to cry "_Our lives for God!_" Then at the luminous
center of our faith shines the divine purpose, costly but wonderful,
that binds the ages together in spiritual unity. To that we dedicate
our lives; in that we exceedingly rejoice. No longer do we test God's
goodness by our happiness or our ill-fortune; we are _his_ through
fair weather and through foul. No longer do we merely hold beliefs, we
are held by them, captured now and not simply consoled by faith. Only
so are we learning discipleship to Christ and are beginning really to
believe in the Christian God.
VII
From all these common fallacies of thought and sentiment one turns to
the New Testament to find the God of the Gospel. The very crux of the
Good Tidings is that God is so much in earnest that he is the eternal
Sufferer. The ancient Greeks had a god of perfect bliss; he floated on
from age to age in undisturbed tranquillity; no cry of man ever
reached his empyrean calm; his life was an endless stream of liquid
happiness. How different this Greek deity is from ours may be
perceived if one tries to say of him those things which the Scripture
habitually says of God. "In all their affliction he was afflicted"
(Isa. 63:9); "Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should
not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, these may forget, yet
will not I forget thee" (Isa. 49:15); "God, being rich in mercy, for
his great love wherewith he loved us even when we were dead through
our trespasses" (Eph 2:4, 5); "God so loved the world that he gave his
only begotten Son" (John 3:16). None of these things that Christians
say about their God can be said of a deity who dwells in tranquil
bliss.
Indeed let one stand over against a war-torn, unhappy world and try to
think that God does not suffer in man's agony, and he will see how
useless and incredible such a God would be. God looks on Belgium and
he does not care; he looks on Armenia desolate and Poland devastated,
and he does not care; he sits in heaven and sees his children wounded
and alone in No-man's land, watches the deaths, the heart-breaks, the
poverty of war, its ruined childhood and its shattered families, and
he does not care--how impossible it is to believe in such a God! A God
who does not care does not count.
Christians, therefore, have the God who really meets the needs of men.
He cares indeed, and, with all the modesty that words of human
emotion must put on when they are applied to him, he suffers in the
suffering of men and is crucified in his children's agonies. God
limited himself in making such a world as this; in it he cannot
lightly do what he will; he has a struggle on his heart; he makes his
way upward against obstacles that man's imagination cannot measure.
There is a cross forever at the heart of God. He climbs his
everlasting Calvary toward the triumph that must come, and he is
tremendously in earnest.
One important consequence follows such faith as this. Confidence in
such an earnest, sacrificial God makes inevitable the Christian faith
in immortality. Our solar system is no permanent theater for God's
eternal purposes; it is doomed to dissolution as certainly as any
human body is doomed to die. In the Lick observatory one reads this
notice under a picture of the sun: "The blue stars are considered to
be in early life, the yellow stars in middle life, the red stars in
old age.... From the quality of its spectrum the sun is classified as
a star in middle age." Those, therefore, who, denying their own
immortality, comfort themselves with prophesying endless progress for
the race upon the earth, have no basis for their hopes. "We must
therefore renounce those brilliant fancies," says Faye the scientist,
"by which we try to deceive ourselves in order to endow man with
unlimited posterity, and to regard the universe as the immense theater
on which is to be developed a spontaneous progress without end. On the
contrary, life must disappear, and the grandest material works of the
human race will have to be effaced by degrees under the action of a
few physical forces which will survive man for a time. Nothing will
remain--'Even the ruins will perish.'"
If one believes, therefore, in the God who is in earnest, he cannot
content himself with such a universe--lacking any permanent element,
any abiding reality in which the moral gains of man's long struggle
are conserved. God's purpose cannot be so narrow in horizon that it is
satisfied with a few million years of painful experiment, costly
beyond imagination, yet with no issue to crown its sacrifice. In such
a universe as Faye pictures, lacking immortality, generation after
generation of men suffer, aspire, labor, and die, and this shall be
the history of all creation, until at last Shakespeare's prophecy
shall be fulfilled,
"The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind."
If such is to be the story of creation, there is no purpose in it and
the Christian faith in an earnest God is vain.
Only one truth is adequate to crown our confidence in a purposeful
universe and to make it reasonable: _personality must persist_.
We believe in immortality, not because we meanly want rewards ahead,
but because in no other way can life, viewed as a whole, find sense
and reason. If personality persists, this transient theater of action
and discipline may serve its purpose in God's time, and disappear. He
is in earnest, but not for rocks and suns and stars, he is in earnest
about persons--the sheep of his pasture are men. They are not mortal;
they carry over into the eternal world the spiritual gains of earth;
and all life's struggle--its vicarious sacrifice, its fearful
punishments, its labor for better circumstance and worthier life--is
justified in its everlasting influence on personality. When we say
that God cares, we mean no vague, diffusive attitude toward a system
that lasts for limited millenniums and then comes to an uneventful end
in a cold sun and a ruined earth. We mean that he cares for
personality which is his child, that he suffers in the travail of his
children's character, and that this divine solicitude has everlasting
issues when the heavens "wax old like a garment." Still Paul's
statement stands, one of the most worthy summaries of God's
earnestness that ever has been written: "The creation waits with eager
longing for the sons of God to be revealed" (Rom. 8:19).[6]
[5] George Adam Smith's Translation.
[6] Moffatt's Translation.