'For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways,
saith the Lord. 9. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are
My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your
thoughts.'--ISAIAH lv. 8, 9.
Scripture gives us no revelations concerning God merely in order that
we may know about Him. These words are grand poetry and noble theology,
but they are meant practically and in fiery earnestness. The 'for' at
the beginning of each clause points us back to the previous statement,
and both of the verses of our text are in different ways its
foundation. And what has preceded is this: 'Let the wicked forsake his
way and the unrighteous man his thoughts, and let him return unto the
Lord, for He will have mercy upon him, and to our God, for He will
abundantly pardon.' That is why the prophet dilates upon the difference
between the 'thoughts' and the 'ways' of God and of men.
If we look at these two verses a little more closely we shall perceive
that they by no means cover the same ground nor suggest the same idea
as to the relationship between God's 'ways' and 'thoughts' and ours.
The former of them speaks of unlikeness and opposition, the latter of
elevation and superiority; the former of them is the basis of an
indictment and an exhortation, the latter is the basis of an
encouragement and a promise. The former of them is the reason why 'the
wicked' and 'unrighteous man' ought to and must 'turn' from 'his ways'
and 'thoughts,' the latter of them is the reason why, 'turning,' he may
be sure that the Lord 'will abundantly pardon.'
And so we have here two things to consider in reference to the relation
between the divine purposes and acts and man's purposes and acts.
First, the antagonism, and the indictment and exhortation that are
based upon that; second, the analogy but superiority, and the
exhortation and hope that are built upon that. Let me deal, then, with
these separately.
I. We have here an unlikeness declared, and upon that is rested an
appeal.
Notice the remarkable order and alternation of pronouns in the first
verse. '_My_ thoughts are not _your_ thoughts,' saith the Lord. The
things that God thinks and purposes are not the things that man thinks
and purposes, and therefore, because the thoughts are different, the
outcomes of them in deeds are divergent. God's 'ways' are His acts, the
manner and course of His working considered as a path on which He
moves, and on which, in some sense, we can also journey. Our
'ways'--our manner of life--are not parallel with His, as they should
be.
But that opposition is expressed with a remarkable variation. Observe
the change of pronouns in the two clauses. First, '_My_ thoughts are
not your thoughts'--you have not taken My truth into your minds, nor My
purposes into your wills; you do riot think God's thoughts.
Therefore--'_your_ ways (instead of 'My,' as we should have expected,
to keep the regularity of the parallelism) are not My ways'--I
repudiate and abjure your conduct and condemn it utterly.
Now, of course, in this charge of man's unlikeness to God, there is no
contradiction of, nor reference to, man's natural constitution, in
which there are, at one and the same time, the likeness of the child
with the parent and the unlikeness between the creature and the
Creator. If our thoughts were not in a measure like God's thoughts, we
should know nothing about Him. If our thoughts were not like God's
thoughts, we should have no standard for life or thinking.
Righteousness and beauty and truth and goodness are the same things in
heaven and earth, and alike in God and man. We are made after His
image, poor creatures though we be; and though there must ever be a
gulf of unlikeness, which we cannot bridge, between the thoughts of Him
whose knowledge has no growth nor uncertainty, whose wisdom is infinite
and all whose nature is boundless light, and our knowledge, and must
ever be a gulf between the workings and ways of Him who works without
effort, and knows neither weariness nor limitation, and our work, so
often foiled, so always toilsome, yet in all the unlikeness there is
(and no man can denude himself of it) a likeness to the Father. For the
image in which God made man at the beginning is not an image that it is
in the power of men to cast away, and in the worst of his corruptions
and the widest of his departures he still bears upon him the signs of
likeness 'to Him that created him.' The coin is rusty, battered,
defaced; but still legible are the head and the writing. 'Whose image
and superscription hath it?' Render unto God the things that are
declared to be God's, because they bear His likeness and are stamped
with His signature.
But that very necessary and natural likeness between God and man makes
more solemnly sinful the voluntary unlikeness which we have brought
upon ourselves. If there were no analogy, there could be no contrast.
If God and man were utterly unlike, then there would be no evil in our
unlikeness and no need for our repentance.
The true state for each of us is that we should, as the great
astronomer said he had done in regard to his own science, 'think God's
thoughts after Him,' and have our minds filled with His truth and our
wills all harmonised with His purposes, and that we should thus make
our ways to run parallel with the ways of God. The blessedness, the
peace, the true manhood of a man, are that his ways and thoughts should
be like God's. And so my text comes with its indictment--You who by
nature were formed in His image, you to whom it is open to sympathise
with His designs, to harmonise your wills with His will, and to bring
all the dark and crooked ways in which you walk into full parallelism
with His way--you have departed into darkness of unlikeness, and in
thought and in ways are the opposites of God.
Mark how wonderfully, in the simple language of my text, deep truths
about this sin of ours are conveyed. Notice its growth and order. It
begins with a heart and mind that do not take in God's thoughts,
truths, purposes, desires, and then the alienated will and the darkened
understanding and the conscience which has closed itself against His
imperative voice issue afterwards in conduct which He cannot accept as
in any way corresponding with His. First comes the thought unreceptive
of God's thought, and then follow ways contrary to God's ways.
Notice the profound truth here in regard to the essential and deepest
evil of all our evil. '_Your_ thoughts'; '_your_
ways,'--self-dependence and self-confidence are the master-evils of
humanity. And every sin is at bottom the result of saying--'I will not
conform myself to God, but I am going to please myself, and take my own
way.' My own way is never God's way; my own way is always the devil's
way. And the root of all sin lies in these two strong, simple words,
'_Your_ thoughts not Mine; _your_ ways not Mine.'
Notice, too, how there are suggested the misery and retribution of this
unlikeness. 'If you will not make My thoughts your thoughts, I shall
not take your ways as My ways. I will leave you to them.' 'You will be
filled with the fruit of your own devices. I shall not incorporate your
actions into My great scheme and purpose.' Men
'Would not know His ways,
And He has left them to their own.'
So here we have the solemn indictment brought by God's own voice
against us all. The criminality of our unlikeness to Him rests upon our
original likeness.
The unlikeness roots itself in thought, and blossoms in the poisonous
flower of God-displeasing acts. It brings down upon our heads the
solemn retribution of separation from Him, and being filled with the
fruit of our own devices. Such is the indictment brought against every
soul of man upon the earth, and there is built upon it the call to
repentance and change,' let the wicked forsake his _way_, and the
unrighteous man his _thoughts_.' The question rises in many a heart,
'How am I to forsake these paths on which my feet have so longed
walked?' And if I do, what about all the years behind me, full of wild
wanderings and thoughts in all of which God was not?
II. The second verse of our text meets that despairing question. It
proclaims the elevation of God's ways and thoughts above ours, and
thereon bases the assurance of pardon.
The relation is not only one of unlikeness and opposition, but it is
also one of analogy and superiority. The former clause began with
thoughts which are the parents of ways, and, as befits the all-seeing
Judge, laid bare first the hidden discord of man's heart and will, ere
it pointed to the manifest antagonism of his doings. This clause begins
with God's ways, from which alone men can reach the knowledge of His
thoughts. The first follows the order of God's knowledge of man; the
second, that of man's knowledge of God.
It is a wonderful and beautiful turn which the prophet here gives to
the thought of the transcendent elevation of God. The heavens are the
very type of the unattainable; and to say that they are 'higher than
the earth' seems, at first sight, to be but to say, 'No man hath
ascended into the heavens,' and you sinful men must grovel here down
upon your plain, whilst they are far above, out of your reach. But the
heavens bend. They are an arch, and not a straight line. They touch the
horizon; and there come from them the sweet influences of sunshine and
of rain, of dew and of blessing, which bring fertility. So they are not
only far and unattainable, but friendly and beneficent, and
communicative of good. Like them, in true analogy but yet infinite
superiority to the best and noblest in man, is the boundless mercy of
our pardoning God:
'The glorious sky, embracing all,
Is like its Maker's love,
Wherewith encompassed, great and small
In peace and order move.'
'As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than
your ways.' _The_ special 'thought' and 'way' which is meant here is
God's thought and way about sin. There are three points here on which I
would touch for a moment. First, God's way of dealing with sin is
lifted up above all human example. There is such a thing as pardoning
mercy amongst men. It is a faint analogy of, as it is an offshoot from,
the divine pardon, but all the forgivingness of the most placable and
long-suffering and gladly pardoning of men is but as earth to heaven
compared with the greatness of His. Our forgiveness has its
limitations. We sometimes cannot pardon as freely as we thought,
because there blends with our indignation against evil a passionate
personal sense of wrong done to us which we cannot get rid of, and that
disturbs the freeness and the joyfulness of many a human pardon. But
God's pardon is undisturbed and hindered by any sense of personal
resentment, though sin is an offense against Him, and in its freeness,
its fulness, its frequency, and its sovereign power to melt away that
which it forgives, it towers above the loftiest of earth's beauties of
forgiveness, as the starry heavens do above the flat plain.
God's pardon is above all human example, even though, having once been
received by us, it ought to become for us the pattern by which we shape
and regulate our own lives. Nothing of which we have any experience in
ourselves or in others is more than as a drop to the ocean compared
with the absolute fulness and perfect freeness and unwearied frequency
of His forgiveness. 'He will abundantly pardon.' He will multiply
pardon. 'With Him there is plenteous redemption.' We think we have
stretched the elasticity of long suffering and forgiveness further than
we might have been reasonably expected to do if seven times we forgive
the erring brother, but God's measure of pardon is seventy times seven,
two perfectnesses multiplied into themselves perfectly; for the measure
of His forgiveness is boundless, and there is no searching of the
depths of His pardoning mercy. You cannot weary Him out, you cannot
exhaust it. It is full at the end as at the beginning; and after all
its gifts still it remains true, 'With Him is the multiplying of
redemption.'
Again, God's way of dealing with sin surpasses all our thought. All
religion has been pressed with this problem, how to harmonise the
perfect rectitude of the divine nature and the solemn claims of law
with forgiveness. All religions have borne witness to the fact that men
are dimly aware of the discord and dissonance between themselves and
the divine thoughts and ways; and a thousand altars proclaim to us how
they have felt that something must be done in order that forgiveness
might be possible to an all-righteous and Sovereign Judge. The Jew knew
that God was a pardoning God, but to him that fact stood as needing
much explanation and much light to be thrown upon its relations with
the solemn law under which he lived. We have Jesus Christ. The mystery
of forgiveness is solved, in so far as it is capable of solution, in
Him and in Him alone. His death somewhat explains how God is just and
the Justifier of him that believeth. High above man's thoughts this
great central mystery of the Gospel rises, that with God there is
forgiveness and with God there is perfect righteousness. The Cross as
the basis of pardon is the central mystery of revelation; and it is not
to be expected that our theories shall be able to sound the depths of
that great act of the divine love. Perhaps our plummets do not go to
the bottom of the bottomless after all; but is it needful that we
should have gone to the rim of the heavens, and round about it on the
outside, before we rejoice in the sunshine? Is it needful that we
should have traversed the abysses of the heavens, and passed from star
to star and told their numbers, before we can say that they are bright,
or before we can walk in their light? We do not need to understand the
'how' in order to be sure of the fact that Christ's death is our
forgiveness. Do not be in such a hurry as some people are nowadays, to
declare that the doctrine of the Cross is contrary to man's
conceptions. It _surpasses_ them, and the very fact that it surpasses
ought to stop us from pronouncing that it _contradicts_. 'As the
heavens are higher than the earth, so are My thoughts higher than your
thoughts.'
Lastly, we are taught here that God's way of dealing with sin is the
very highest point of His self-revelation. There are many glories of
the divine nature set forth in all His ways, but the loftiest of them
all is this, that He can neutralise and destroy the fact of man's
transgressing, wiping it out by pardon; and in the very act of pardon
reconstituting in purity, and with a heart for all holiness, the sinful
men whom He forgives. This is the shining apex of all that He has done,
rising above creation and every other 'way' of His, as high as the
loftiest heavens are above the earth.
Therefore, have a care of all forms of Christianity which do not put
God's pardoning mercy in the foreground. They are maimed, and in them
mist and cloud have covered with a roof of doleful grey the low-lying
earth, and separated it from the highest heavens. The true glory of the
revelation of God gathers round that central Cross; and there, in that
Man dying upon it in the dark--the sacrifice for a world's sin--is the
loftiest, most heavenly revelation of the all-revealing God. Strike out
the Cross from Christianity, or weaken its aspect as a message of
forgiveness and redemption, and you have quenched its brightest light,
and dragged it down to be but a little higher, if any, than many
another scheme of other moralists, philosophers, poets, and religious
teachers. The distinctive glory of Christianity is this--it tells us
how God sweeps away sin.
And so my last thought is that, if we desire to see up on the highest
heavens of God's character, we must go down into the depths of the
consciousness of our own sin, and learn first, how unlike our ways and
thoughts are to God, ere we can understand how high above us, and yet
beneficently arching over us, are His ways and thoughts to us. We lie
beneath the heavens like some foul bog full of black ooze, rotten earth
and putrid water, where there is nothing green or fair. But the promise
of the bending heavens, with their sweet influences, declares the
possibility of reclaiming even that waste, and making it rejoice and
blossom as the rose. Spread yourselves out, dear friends, in lowly
submission and penitent acknowledgment beneath the all-vivifying mercy
of that shining heaven of God's pardon; and then the old promise will
be fulfilled in you: 'Truth shall spring out of the earth, and
righteousness shall look down from heaven; yea, the Lord shall give
that which is good, and our land'--barren and poisoned as it has
been--responding to the skyey influences, 'shall yield her increase.'