'Thou meetest him that rejoiceth and worketh righteousness, those that
remember Thee in Thy ways.'--ISAIAH lxiv. 5.
The prophet here shows us how there is a great staircase which we
ourselves build, which leads straight from earth to heaven, and how we
can secure that we shall meet with God and God with us. 'Isaiah' is
often called the evangelical prophet. He is so, not only because of his
predictions of the suffering Servant of Jehovah which are 'fulfilled'
in Christ, but because his conceptions of the religious life tremble on
the very verge of the full-orbed teaching of the New Testament. In
these ancient words of my text, in very different phraseology indeed,
we see a strikingly accurate and full anticipation of the very central
teaching of Paul and his brother apostles, as to the way by which God
and man come into union with one another. 'Thou meetest him that
rejoiceth'; that joy is to be manifested by 'working righteousness,'
but the joy which is the parent of righteousness is the child of
something else--'those that remember Thee in Thy ways.' If we ponder
these words, and carefully mark their relation to each other, we may
discern, as it were, a great staircase with three flights in it, and at
the top God's face.
We have to begin with the last clause of our text--'Thou meetest him
... that remembers Thee in Thy ways.'
The first stage on the road which will bring any man into, and keep any
man in, contact with God, and loving fellowship with Him, is the
contemplation of His character as it is made known to us by His acts.
God, like man, is known by His 'fruits.' You cannot get at a clear
conception of God by speculation, or by thinking about Him or about
what He is in Himself. Lay hold of the clue of His acts, and it leads
you straight into His heart. But the act of acts, in which the whole
Godhead concurs, in which all its depths and preciousness are
concentrated, like wine in a golden cup, is the incarnation and life
and death of Jesus Christ our Lord. There, and not in the thoughts of
our own hearts nor the tremors of our own consciences, nor in the
enigmatical witness of Providence--which is enigmatical until it is
interpreted in the light of the Incarnation and the Crucifixion--there
we see most clearly the 'ways' of God, the beaten, trodden path by
which He is wont to come forth out of the thick darkness into which no
speculation can peer an inch, and walk amongst men. The cross of
Christ, and, subordinately, His other dealings with us, as interpreted
thereby, is the 'way of the Lord,' from everlasting to everlasting. And
it is by a loving gaze upon that 'way' that we learn to know Him for
what He is. It is there, and there only, that the thick darkness passes
into glorious light. It is at that point alone that the closed circle
of the Infinite nature of Deity opens so as that a man can press into
the very centre of the glory, and feel himself at home in the blaze. It
is 'those that remember Thee in Thy ways,' and especially in that way
of righteousness and peace, the way of the cross--it is they who have
built the first flight of the solemn staircase that leads up from the
lownesses and darknesses of earth into the loftinesses and lights of
heaven.
But note that word 'Remember,' for it suggests the warning that such
contemplation of the ways of the Lord will not be realised by us
without effort. We shall forget, assuredly, unless we earnestly try to
'remember.' There are so many things within us to draw us away, the
duties, and the joys, and the sorrows of life so insist upon having a
place in our hearts and thoughts, that assuredly, unless by resolute
effort, frequently repeated, we clear a space in this crowded and
chattering market-place, where we can stand and gaze on the white
summits far beyond the bustling crowd, we shall never see them, though
they are visible from every place. Unless you try to remember, you will
certainly forget.
Many voices preach to-day many duties for Christians. Let me plead for
times of quiet, for times of 'doing' nothing, for fruitful times of
growth, for times when we turn all the rout and rabble of earthly
things, and even the solemn company of pressing duties, out of our
hearts and thoughts, and shut up ourselves alone with God. Be sure you
will never build even the first step of the staircase unless you know
what it is to go into the secret place of the Most High, and, alone
with God, to summon to 'the sessions of sweet, silent thought' His
ways, and especially Him who is 'the Way,' both of God to us, and of us
to God.
Now, the second flight of this great staircase is pointed out in the
first clause of my text: 'Thou meetest him that rejoiceth.'
That meditative remembrance of the ways of God will be the parent of
holy joy which will bring God near to our heart. Alas! it is too often
the very opposite of true that men's joys are such as to bring God to
them. The excitement, and often the impure elements, that mingle with
what the world calls 'joy,' are such as to shut Him out from us. But
there is a gladness which comes from the contemplation of Him as He is,
and as He is known by His 'ways' to be, which brings us very near to
God, and God very near to us. It is that joy which was spoken of in an
earlier part of this context: 'I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, My
soul shall be joyful in my God; for He hath clothed me with the
garments of salvation.' Here, then, is the second stage--gladness,
deep, pure, based upon the contemplation of God's character as
manifested in His work. I do not think that the ordinary type of modern
Christianity is half joyful enough. And I think that we have largely
lost the very thought that gladness is a plain Christian _duty_, to be
striven after in the appropriate manner which my text suggests, and
certainly to be secured if we seek it in the right way. We all know how
outward cares, and petty annoyances, and crushing sorrows, and daily
anxieties, and the tear and wear of work, and our own restlessness and
ungovernableness, and the faults that still haunt our lives, and
sometimes make us feel as if our Christianity was all a sham--how all
these things are at enmity with joy in God. But in face of them all, I
would echo the old grand words of the epistle of gladness written by
the apostle in prison, and within hail of his death: 'Rejoice in the
Lord alway, and again I say rejoice.' Recognise it as your duty to be
glad, and if it is hard to be so, ask yourselves whether you are doing
what will make you so, remembering 'Thee in Thy ways.' That is the
second flight of the staircase.
The third stage is working righteousness because of such joy. 'Thou
meetest him that rejoiceth, and '--because he does--'worketh
righteousness.' Every master knows how much more work can be got out of
a servant who works with a cheery heart than out of one that is driven
reluctantly to his task. You remember our Lord's parable where He
traces idleness to fear: 'I knew thee that thou wast an austere man,
gathering where thou didst not strew, and I was afraid, and I went and
hid thy talent.' No work was got out of that servant because there was
no joy in him. The opposite state of mind--diligence in righteous work,
inspired by gladness which in its turn is inspired by the remembrance
of God's ways--is the mark of a true servant of God. The prophet's
words have the germ of the full New Testament doctrine that the first
step to all practical obedience and righteous living is the recognition
of the great truth of Christ's death for us on the Cross; that the
second step is the acceptance of that great work, and the gladness that
comes from the assurance of forgiveness and acceptance with God, and
that the issue of both these things, the preached gospel and the faith
that grasps it and the love by which the faith is followed, is
obedience, instinct with willingness and buoyant with joyfulness, and
therefore tending to be perfect in degree and in kind. The work that is
worth doing, the work which God regards as 'righteous,' comes, and
comes only, from the motives of 'remembering Thee in Thy ways,' and
rejoicing because we do remember.
And the gladness which is wholesome and blessed, and is 'joy in the
Lord,' will manifest itself by efflorescing into all holiness and all
loftiness and largeness of obedience. You may try to frighten men into
righteousness, you will never succeed. You may try to coerce their
wills, and your strongest bands will be broken as the iron chains were
by the demoniac. But put upon them the silken leash of love, and you
may lead them where you will. You cannot grow grapes on an iceberg, and
you cannot get works of righteousness out of a man that has a dread of
God at the back of his heart, killing all its joy. But let the spring
sunshine come, and then all the frost-bound earth opens and softens,
and the tender green spikelets push themselves up through the brown
soil, and in due time come 'the blade, and the ear, and the full corn
in the ear.' Isaiah anticipated Paul when he said, 'Thou meetest him
that rejoiceth and worketh righteousness.'
Lastly, we have the landing-place to which the stair leads. God comes
to such a man. He meets him indeed at all the stages, for there is a
blessed communion with God, that springs immediately from remembering
Him in His ways, and a still more blessed one that springs from
rejoicing in His felt friendship and Fatherhood, and a yet more blessed
one that comes from practical righteousness. For if there is anything
that breaks our communion with God, it is that there linger in our
lives evils which make it impossible for God and us to come close
together. The thinnest film of a non-conductor will stop the flow of
the strongest electric current, and an almost imperceptible film of
self-will and evil, dropped between oneself and God, will make a
barrier impermeable except by that divine Spirit who worketh upon a
man's heart and who may thin away the film through his repentance, and
then the Father and the prodigal embrace. 'Thou meetest him,' not only
'that worketh righteousness,' but that hates his sin.
Only remember, if there is the practice of evil, there cannot be the
sunshine of the Presence of God. But remember, too, that the commonest,
homeliest, smallest, most secular tasks may become the very highest
steps of the staircase that brings us into His Presence. If we go about
our daily work, however wearisome and vulgar and commonplace it often
seems to us, and make it a work of righteousness resting on the joy of
salvation, and that reposing on the contemplation of God as He is
revealed in Jesus Christ, our daily work may bring us as close to God
as if we dwelt in the secret place of the Most High, and the market and
the shop may be a temple where we meet with Him.
Dear brethren, there are two kinds of meeting God: 'Thou meetest him
that rejoiceth and worketh righteousness,' and that is blessed, as when
Christ met the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. There is another
kind of meeting with God. 'Who, making war, sitteth not down first, and
consulteth whether he be able with ten thousand to meet him that cometh
against him with twenty thousand?'
'THE GOD OF THE AMEN'
'He who blesseth himself in the earth shall bless himself in the God of
truth; and he that sweareth in the earth shall swear by the God of
truth.'--ISAIAH lxv. 16.
The full beauty and significance of these remarkable words are only
reached when we attend to the literal rendering of a part of them which
is obscured in our version. As they stand in the original they have, in
both cases, instead of the vague expression, 'The God of truth,' the
singularly picturesque one, 'The God of the Amen.'
I. Note the meaning of the name. Now, _Amen_ is an adjective, which
means literally firm, true, reliable, or the like. And, as we know, its
liturgical use is that, in the olden time, and to some extent in the
present time, it was the habit of the listening people to utter it at
the close of prayer or praise. But besides this use at the end of some
one else's statement, which the sayer of the 'Amen' confirms by its
utterance, we also find it used at the beginning of a statement, by the
speaker, in order to confirm his own utterance by it.
And these two uses of the expression reposing on its plain meaning, in
the first instance signifying, 'I tell you that it is so'; and in the
second instance signifying, 'So may it be!' or, 'So we believe it is,'
underlie this grand title which God takes to Himself here, 'the God of
the Amen,' both His Amen and ours. So that the thought opens up very
beautifully and simply into these two, His truth and our faith.
First, it emphasises the absolute truthfulness of every word that comes
from His lips. There is implied in the title that He really _has_
spoken, and declared to man something of His will, something of His
nature, something of His purposes, something of our destiny. And now He
puts, as it were, the broad seal upon the charter and says, 'Amen!
Verily it is so, and My word of Revelation is no man's imagination, and
My word of command is the absolute unveiling of human duty and human
perfectness, and My word of promise is that upon which a man may rest
all his weight and be safe for ever.' God's word is 'Amen!' man's word
is 'perhaps.' For in regard to the foundation truths of man's belief
and experience and need, no human tongue can venture to utter its own
asseverations with nothing behind them but itself, and expect men to
accept them; but that is exactly what God does, and alone has the right
to do. His word absolutely, and through and through, in every fibre of
it, is reliable and true.
Now do not forget that there was one who came to us and said, 'Amen!
Amen! I say unto you.' Jesus Christ, in all His deep and wonderful
utterances, arrogated to Himself the right which God here declares to
be exclusively His, and He said, 'I too have, and I too exercise, the
right and the authority to lay My utterances down before you, and
expect you to take them because of nothing else than because I say
them.' God is the God of the Amen! The last book of Scripture, when it
draws back the curtain from the mysteries of the glorified session of
Jesus Christ at the right hand of God, makes Him say to us, 'These
things saith the Amen!' And if you want to know what that means, its
explanation follows in the next clause, 'the faithful and true witness.'
But then, on the other hand, necessarily involved in this title, though
capable of being separately considered, is not only the absolute
truthfulness of the divine word, but also the thorough-going reliance,
on our parts, which that word expects and demands. God's 'Amen,' and
'Verily,' of confirmation, should ever cause the 'Amen' of acceptance
and assent to leap from our lips. If He begins with that mighty word,
so soon as the solemn voice has ceased its echo should rise from our
hearts. The city that cares for the charter which its King has given it
will prepare a fitting, golden receptacle in which to treasure it. And
the men who believe that God in very deed has spoken laws that
illuminate, and commandments that guide, and promises that calm and
strengthen and fulfil themselves, will surely prepare in their hearts
an appropriate receptacle for those precious and infallible words.
God's truth has corresponding to it our trust. God's faithfulness
demands, and is only adequately met by, our faith. If He gives us the
sure foundation to build upon, it will be a shame for us to bring wood,
hay, stubble, and build these upon the Rock of Ages. The building
should correspond with its foundation, and the faith which grasps the
sure word should have in it something of the unchangeableness and
certainty and absoluteness of that word which it grasps. If His
revelation of Himself is certain, you and I ought to be certain of His
revelation of Himself. Our certitude should correspond to its certainty.
Ah! my friend, what a miserable contrast there is between the firm,
unshaken, solid security of the divine word upon which we say that we
trust, and the poor, feeble, broken trust which we build upon it. 'Let
not that man think that He shall receive anything of the Lord'; but let
us expect, as well as 'ask, in faith, nothing wavering'; and let our
'Amen!' ring out in answer to God's.
The Apostle Paul has a striking echo of the words of my text in the
second Epistle to the Corinthians: 'All the promises of God in Him are
yea! and through Him also is the Amen!' The assent, full, swift,
frank--the assent of the believing heart to the great word of God comes
through the same channel, and reaches God by the same way, as God's
word on which it builds comes to us. The 'God of the Amen,' in both
senses of the word, is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who
is the seal as well as the substance of the divine promises, and whose
voice in us is the answer to, and the grasp of, the promises of which
He is the substance and soul.
II. Now notice, next, how this God of the Amen is, by reason of that
very characteristic, the source of all blessing.
'He who blesseth himself in the earth shall bless himself in the God of
Truth.' That phrase of _blessing oneself in_, which is a frequent Old
Testament expression, is roughly equivalent to invoking, and therefore
receiving, blessing from. You find it, for instance, in the
seventy-second Psalm, in that grand burst which closes one of the books
of the Psalter and hails the coming of the Messianic times, of which my
text also is a prediction. 'Men shall be blessed in Him,' or rather,
'shall bless themselves in Him,' which is a declaration, that all
needful benediction shall come down upon humanity through the coming
Messias, as well as that men shall recognise in that Messias the source
of all their blessing and good. So the text declares that, in those
days that are yet to come, the whole earth shall be filled with men
whose eyes have been purged from ignorance and sin, and from the
illusions of sense and the fascinations of folly, and who have learned
that only in the God of the Amen is the blessing of their life to be
found.
Of course it is so. For only on Him can I lean all my weight and be
sure that the stay will not give. All other bridges across the great
abysses which we have to traverse or be lost in them, are like those
snow-cornices upon some Alp, which may break when the climber is on the
very middle of them, and let him down into blackness out of which he
will never struggle. There is only one path clear across the deepest
gulf, which we poor pilgrims can tread with absolute safety that it
will never yield beneath our feet. My brother! there is one support
that is safe, and one stay upon which a man can lean his whole weight
and be sure that the staff will never either break or pierce his palm,
and that is the faithful God, in whose realm are no disappointments,
amongst whose trusters are no heart-broken and deceived men, but who
gives bountifully, and over and above all that we are able to ask or
think. They who have made experience, as we have all made experience,
of the insufficiency of earthly utterances, of the doubtfulness of the
clearest words of men, of the possible incapacity of the most loving,
to be what they pledge themselves to be, and of the certainty that even
if they are so for a while they cannot be so always--have surely
learned one half, at least, of the lesson that life is meant to teach
us; and it is our own fault if we have not bettered it with the better
half, having uncoiled the tendrils of our hearts from the rotten props
round which they have been too apt to twine themselves, and wreathed
them about the pillars of the eternal throne, which can never shake nor
fail. 'He that blesseth himself in the earth shall bless
himself'--unless he is a fool--'in the God of the Amen!' and not in the
_man_ of the 'peradventure.'
III. Lastly, note how the God of the Amen should be the pattern of His
servants.
'He that sweareth in the earth shall swear by the God of truth,' or,
'of the Amen.' The prophet deduces from the name the solemn thought
that those who truly feel its significance will shape _their_ words
accordingly, and act and speak so that they shall not fear to call His
pure eyes to witness that there are neither, hypocrisy, nor
insincerity, nor vacillation, nor the 'hidden things of dishonesty' nor
any of the skulking meannesses of craft and self-seeking in them. 'I
swear by the God of the Amen, and call Thy faithfulness to witness that
I am trying to be like Thee,' that is what we ought to do if we call
ourselves Christians. If we have any hold at all of Him, and of His
love, and of the greatness and majesty of His faithfulness, we shall
try to make our poor little lives, in such measure as the dewdrops may
be like the sun, radiant like His, and of the same shape as His, for
the dewdrop and the sun are both of them spheres. That is exactly what
the apostle does, in that same chapter in 2 Cor., to which I already
referred. He takes these very thoughts of my text, and in their double
aspect too, and says, 'Just because God is faithful, do you Corinthians
think that, when I told you that I was coming to see you, I did not
mean it?' He brings the greatest thought that He can find about God and
God's truth, down to the settlement of this very little matter, the
vindication of Himself from the charge, on the one hand, of facile and
inconsiderate vacillation, and, on the other hand, of insincerity. So,
we may say, the greatest thoughts should regulate the smallest acts.
Though our maps be but a quarter of an inch to a hundred miles, let us
see that they are drawn to scale. Let us see that He is our Pattern;
and that the truthfulness, the simplicity, and faithfulness, which we
rest upon as the very foundation of our intellectual as well as our
moral and religious being, are, in our measure, copied in ourselves.
'As God is faithful,' said Paul, 'our word to you was not yea! and
nay!' And they who are trusting to the God of the Amen! will live in
all simplicity and godly sincerity; their yea will be yea, and their
nay, nay.