So when we sing, "Draw me nearer, nearer, blessed Lord," we are not thinking of the nearness of place, but of the nearness of relationship.
It is for increasing degrees of awareness that we pray, for a more perfect consciousness of the divine Presence. We need never shout across the s.p.a.ces to an absent G.o.d. He is nearer than our own soul, closer than our most secret thoughts.
Why do some persons "find" G.o.d in a way that others do not? Why does G.o.d manifest His Presence to some and let mult.i.tudes of others struggle along in the half-light of imperfect Christian experience? Of course the will of G.o.d is the same for all. He has no favorites within His household. All He has ever done for any of His children He will do for all of His children. The difference lies not with G.o.d but with us.
Pick at random a score of great saints whose lives and testimonies are widely known. Let them be Bible characters or well known Christians of post-Biblical times. You will be struck instantly with the fact that the saints were not alike. Sometimes the unlikenesses were so great as to be positively glaring. How different for example was Moses from Isaiah; how different was Elijah from David; how unlike each other were John and Paul, St. Francis and Luther, Finney and Thomas a Kempis. The differences are as wide as human life itself: differences of race, nationality, education, temperament, habit and personal qualities. Yet they all walked, each in his day, upon a high road of spiritual living far above the common way.
Their differences must have been incidental and in the eyes of G.o.d of no significance. In some vital quality they must have been alike. What was it?
I venture to suggest that the one vital quality which they had in common was _spiritual receptivity_. Something in them was open to heaven, something which urged them G.o.dward. Without attempting anything like a profound a.n.a.lysis I shall say simply that they had spiritual awareness and that they went on to cultivate it until it became the biggest thing in their lives. They differed from the average person in that when they felt the inward longing they _did something about it_. They acquired the lifelong habit of spiritual response. They were not disobedient to the heavenly vision. As David put it neatly, "When thou saidst, Seek ye my face; my heart said unto thee, Thy face, Lord, will I seek."
As with everything good in human life, back of this receptivity is G.o.d.
The sovereignty of G.o.d is here, and is felt even by those who have not placed particular stress upon it theologically. The pious Michael Angelo confessed this in a sonnet:
My una.s.sisted heart is barren clay, That of its native self can nothing feed: Of good and pious works Thou art the seed, That quickens only where Thou sayest it may: Unless Thou show to us Thine own true way No man can find it: Father! Thou must lead.
These words will repay study as the deep and serious testimony of a great Christian.
Important as it is that we recognize G.o.d working in us, I would yet warn against a too-great preoccupation with the thought. It is a sure road to sterile pa.s.sivity. G.o.d will not hold us responsible to understand the mysteries of election, predestination and the divine sovereignty. The best and safest way to deal with these truths is to raise our eyes to G.o.d and in deepest reverence say, "O Lord, Thou knowest." Those things belong to the deep and mysterious Profound of G.o.d"s omniscience. Prying into them may make theologians, but it will never make saints.
Receptivity is not a single thing; it is a compound rather, a blending of several elements within the soul. It is an affinity for, a bent toward, a sympathetic response to, a desire to have. From this it may be gathered that it can be present in degrees, that we may have little or more or less, depending upon the individual. It may be increased by exercise or destroyed by neglect. It is not a sovereign and irresistible force which comes upon us as a seizure from above. It is a gift of G.o.d, indeed, but one which must be recognized and cultivated as any other gift if it is to realize the purpose for which it was given.
Failure to see this is the cause of a very serious breakdown in modern evangelicalism. The idea of cultivation and exercise, so dear to the saints of old, has now no place in our total religious picture. It is too slow, too common. We now demand glamour and fast flowing dramatic action. A generation of Christians reared among push b.u.t.tons and automatic machines is impatient of slower and less direct methods of reaching their goals. We have been trying to apply machine-age methods to our relations with G.o.d. We read our chapter, have our short devotions and rush away, hoping to make up for our deep inward bankruptcy by attending another gospel meeting or listening to another thrilling story told by a religious adventurer lately returned from afar.
The tragic results of this spirit are all about us. Shallow lives, hollow religious philosophies, the preponderance of the element of fun in gospel meetings, the glorification of men, trust in religious externalities, quasi-religious fellowships, salesmanship methods, the mistaking of dynamic personality for the power of the Spirit: these and such as these are the symptoms of an evil disease, a deep and serious malady of the soul.
For this great sickness that is upon us no one person is responsible, and no Christian is wholly free from blame. We have all contributed, directly or indirectly, to this sad state of affairs. We have been too blind to see, or too timid to speak out, or too self-satisfied to desire anything better than the poor average diet with which others appear satisfied. To put it differently, we have accepted one another"s notions, copied one another"s lives and made one another"s experiences the model for our own. And for a generation the trend has been downward.
Now we have reached a low place of sand and burnt wire gra.s.s and, worst of all, we have made the Word of Truth conform to our experience and accepted this low plane as the very pasture of the blessed.
It will require a determined heart and more than a little courage to wrench ourselves loose from the grip of our times and return to Biblical ways. But it can be done. Every now and then in the past Christians have had to do it. History has recorded several large-scale returns led by such men as St. Francis, Martin Luther and George Fox. Unfortunately there seems to be no Luther or Fox on the horizon at present. Whether or not another such return may be expected before the coming of Christ is a question upon which Christians are not fully agreed, but that is not of too great importance to us now.
What G.o.d in His sovereignty may yet do on a world-scale I do not claim to know: but what He will do for the plain man or woman who seeks His face I believe I do know and can tell others. Let any man turn to G.o.d in earnest, let him begin to exercise himself unto G.o.dliness, let him seek to develop his powers of spiritual receptivity by trust and obedience and humility, and the results will exceed anything he may have hoped in his leaner and weaker days.
Any man who by repentance and a sincere return to G.o.d will break himself out of the mold in which he has been held, and will go to the Bible itself for his spiritual standards, will be delighted with what he finds there.
Let us say it again: The Universal Presence is a fact. G.o.d is here. The whole universe is alive with His life. And He is no strange or foreign G.o.d, but the familiar Father of our Lord Jesus Christ whose love has for these thousands of years enfolded the sinful race of men. And always He is trying to get our attention, to reveal Himself to us, to communicate with us. We have within us the ability to know Him if we will but respond to His overtures. (And this we call pursuing G.o.d!) We will know Him in increasing degree as our receptivity becomes more perfect by faith and love and practice.
_O G.o.d and Father, I repent of my sinful preoccupation with visible things. The world has been too much with me. Thou hast been here and I knew it not. I have been blind to Thy Presence. Open my eyes that I may behold Thee in and around me. For Christ"s sake, Amen._
VI
_The Speaking Voice_
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with G.o.d, and the Word was G.o.d.--John 1:1
An intelligent plain man, untaught in the truths of Christianity, coming upon this text, would likely conclude that John meant to teach that it is the nature of G.o.d to speak, to communicate His thoughts to others.
And he would be right. A word is a medium by which thoughts are expressed, and the application of term to the Eternal Son leads us to believe that self-expression is inherent in the G.o.dhead, that G.o.d is forever seeking to speak Himself out to His creation. The whole Bible supports the idea. G.o.d is speaking. Not G.o.d spoke, but _G.o.d is speaking_. He is by His nature continuously articulate. He fills the world with His speaking Voice.
One of the great realities with which we have to deal is the Voice of G.o.d in His world. The briefest and only satisfying cosmogony is this: "He spake and it was done." The _why_ of natural law is the living Voice of G.o.d immanent in His creation. And this word of G.o.d which brought all worlds into being cannot be understood to mean the Bible, for it is not a written or printed word at all, but the expression of the will of G.o.d spoken into the structure of all things. This word of G.o.d is the breath of G.o.d filling the world with living potentiality. The Voice of G.o.d is the most powerful force in nature, indeed the only force in nature, for all energy is here only because the power-filled Word is being spoken.
The Bible is the written word of G.o.d, and because it is written it is confined and limited by the necessities of ink and paper and leather.
The Voice of G.o.d, however, is alive and free as the sovereign G.o.d is free. "The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life." The life is in the speaking words. G.o.d"s word in the Bible can have power only because it corresponds to G.o.d"s word in the universe. It is the present Voice which makes the written Word all-powerful.
Otherwise it would lie locked in slumber within the covers of a book.
We take a low and primitive view of things when we conceive of G.o.d at the creation coming into physical contact with things, shaping and fitting and building like a carpenter. The Bible teaches otherwise: "By the word of the Lord were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth.... For he spake, and it was done; he commanded, and it stood fast." "Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of G.o.d." Again we must remember that G.o.d is referring here not to His written Word, but to His speaking Voice. His world-filling Voice is meant, that Voice which antedates the Bible by uncounted centuries, that Voice which has not been silent since the dawn of creation, but is sounding still throughout the full far reaches of the universe.
The Word of G.o.d is quick and powerful. In the beginning He spoke to nothing, and it became _something_. Chaos heard it and became order, darkness heard it and became light. "And G.o.d said--and it was so." These twin phrases, as cause and effect, occur throughout the Genesis story of the creation. The _said_ accounts for the _so_. The _so_ is the _said_ put into the continuous present.
That G.o.d is here and that He is speaking--these truths are back of all other Bible truths; without them there could be no revelation at all.
G.o.d did not write a book and send it by messenger to be read at a distance by unaided minds. He spoke a Book and lives in His spoken words, constantly speaking His words and causing the power of them to persist across the years. G.o.d breathed on clay and it became a man; He breathes on men and they become clay. "Return ye children of men" was the word spoken at the Fall by which G.o.d decreed the death of every man, and no added word has He needed to speak. The sad procession of mankind across the face of the earth from birth to the grave is proof that His original Word was enough.
We have not given sufficient attention to that deep utterance in the Book of John, "That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world." Shift the punctuation around as we will and the truth is still there: the Word of G.o.d affects the hearts of all men as light in the soul. In the hearts of all men the light shines, the Word sounds, and there is no escaping them. Something like this would of necessity be so if G.o.d is alive and in His world. And John says that it is so. Even those persons who have never heard of the Bible have still been preached to with sufficient clarity to remove every excuse from their hearts forever. "Which show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while either accusing or else excusing one another." "For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and G.o.dhead; so that they are without excuse."
This universal Voice of G.o.d was by the ancient Hebrews often called Wisdom, and was said to be everywhere sounding and searching throughout the earth, seeking some response from the sons of men. The eighth chapter of the Book of Proverbs begins, "Doth not wisdom cry? and understanding put forth her voice?" The writer then pictures wisdom as a beautiful woman standing "in the top of the high places, by the way in the places of the paths." She sounds her voice from every quarter so that no one may miss hearing it. "Unto you, O men, I call; and my voice is to the sons of men." Then she pleads for the simple and the foolish to give ear to her words. It is spiritual response for which this Wisdom of G.o.d is pleading, a response which she has always sought and is but rarely able to secure. The tragedy is that our eternal welfare depends upon our hearing, and we have trained our ears not to hear.
This universal Voice has ever sounded, and it has often troubled men even when they did not understand the source of their fears. Could it be that this Voice distilling like a living mist upon the hearts of men has been the undiscovered cause of the troubled conscience and the longing for immortality confessed by millions since the dawn of recorded history? We need not fear to face up to this. The speaking Voice is a fact. How men have reacted to it is for any observer to note.
When G.o.d spoke out of heaven to our Lord, self-centered men who heard it explained it by natural causes: they said, "It thundered." This habit of explaining the Voice by appeals to natural law is at the very root of modern science. In the living breathing cosmos there is a mysterious Something, too wonderful, too awful for any mind to understand. The believing man does not claim to understand. He falls to his knees and whispers, "G.o.d." The man of earth kneels also, but not to worship. He kneels to examine, to search, to find the cause and the how of things.
Just now we happen to be living in a secular age. Our thought habits are those of the scientist, not those of the worshipper. We are more likely to explain than to adore. "It thundered," we exclaim, and go our earthly way. But still the Voice sounds and searches. The order and life of the world depend upon that Voice, but men are mostly too busy or too stubborn to give attention.
Everyone of us has had experiences which we have not been able to explain: a sudden sense of loneliness, or a feeling of wonder or awe in the face of the universal vastness. Or we have had a fleeting visitation of light like an illumination from some other sun, giving us in a quick flash an a.s.surance that we are from another world, that our origins are divine. What we saw there, or felt, or heard, may have been contrary to all that we had been taught in the schools and at wide variance with all our former beliefs and opinions. We were forced to suspend our acquired doubts while, for a moment, the clouds were rolled back and we saw and heard for ourselves. Explain such things as we will, I think we have not been fair to the facts until we allow at least the possibility that such experiences may arise from the Presence of G.o.d in the world and His persistent effort to communicate with mankind. Let us not dismiss such an hypothesis too flippantly.
It is my own belief (and here I shall not feel bad if no one follows me) that every good and beautiful thing which man has produced in the world has been the result of his faulty and sin-blocked response to the creative Voice sounding over the earth. The moral philosophers who dreamed their high dreams of virtue, the religious thinkers who speculated about G.o.d and immortality, the poets and artists who created out of common stuff pure and lasting beauty: how can we explain them? It is not enough to say simply, "It was genius." What then is genius? Could it be that a genius is a man haunted by the speaking Voice, laboring and striving like one possessed to achieve ends which he only vaguely understands? That the great man may have missed G.o.d in his labors, that he may even have spoken or written against G.o.d does not destroy the idea I am advancing. G.o.d"s redemptive revelation in the Holy Scriptures is necessary to saving faith and peace with G.o.d. Faith in a risen Saviour is necessary if the vague stirrings toward immortality are to bring us to restful and satisfying communion with G.o.d. To me this is a plausible explanation of all that is best out of Christ. But you can be a good Christian and not accept my thesis.
The Voice of G.o.d is a friendly Voice. No one need fear to listen to it unless he has already made up his mind to resist it. The blood of Jesus has covered not only the human race but all creation as well. "And having made peace through the blood of his cross, by him to reconcile all things unto himself; by him, I say, whether they be things in earth, or things in heaven." We may safely preach a friendly Heaven. The heavens as well as the earth are filled with the good will of Him that dwelt in the bush. The perfect blood of atonement secures this forever.
Whoever will listen will hear the speaking Heaven. This is definitely not the hour when men take kindly to an exhortation to _listen_, for listening is not today a part of popular religion. We are at the opposite end of the pole from there. Religion has accepted the monstrous heresy that noise, size, activity and bl.u.s.ter make a man dear to G.o.d.
But we may take heart. To a people caught in the tempest of the last great conflict G.o.d says, "Be still, and know that I am G.o.d," and still He says it, as if He means to tell us that our strength and safety lie not in noise but in silence.
It is important that we get still to wait on G.o.d. And it is best that we get alone, preferably with our Bible outspread before us. Then if we will we may draw near to G.o.d and begin to hear Him speak to us in our hearts. I think for the average person the progression will be something like this: First a sound as of a Presence walking in the garden. Then a voice, more intelligible, but still far from clear. Then the happy moment when the Spirit begins to illuminate the Scriptures, and that which had been only a sound, or at best a voice, now becomes an intelligible word, warm and intimate and clear as the word of a dear friend. Then will come life and light, and best of all, ability to see and rest in and embrace Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord and All.
The Bible will never be a living Book to us until we are convinced that G.o.d is articulate in His universe. To jump from a dead, impersonal world to a dogmatic Bible is too much for most people. They may admit that they _should_ accept the Bible as the Word of G.o.d, and they may try to think of it as such, but they find it impossible to believe that the words there on the page are actually for them. A man may _say_, "These words are addressed to me," and yet in his heart not feel and know that they are. He is the victim of a divided psychology. He tries to think of G.o.d as mute everywhere else and vocal only in a book.
I believe that much of our religious unbelief is due to a wrong conception of and a wrong feeling for the Scriptures of Truth. A silent G.o.d suddenly began to speak in a book and when the book was finished lapsed back into silence again forever. Now we read the book as the record of what G.o.d said when He was for a brief time in a speaking mood.
With notions like that in our heads how can we believe? The facts are that G.o.d is not silent, has never been silent. It is the nature of G.o.d to speak. The second Person of the Holy Trinity is called the _Word_.
The Bible is the inevitable outcome of G.o.d"s continuous speech. It is the infallible declaration of His mind for us put into our familiar human words.
I think a new world will arise out of the religious mists when we approach our Bible with the idea that it is not only a book which was once spoken, but a book which is _now speaking_. The prophets habitually said, "Thus _saith_ the Lord." They meant their hearers to understand that G.o.d"s speaking is in the continuous present. We may use the past tense properly to indicate that at a certain time a certain word of G.o.d was spoken, but a word of G.o.d once spoken continues to be spoken, as a child once born continues to be alive, or a world once created continues to exist. And those are but imperfect ill.u.s.trations, for children die and worlds burn out, but the Word of our G.o.d endureth forever.
If you would follow on to know the Lord, come at once to the open Bible expecting it to speak to you. Do not come with the notion that it is a _thing_ which you may push around at your convenience. It is more than a thing, it is a voice, a word, the very Word of the living G.o.d.
_Lord, teach me to listen. The times are noisy and my ears are weary with the thousand raucous sounds which continuously a.s.sault them. Give me the spirit of the boy Samuel when he said to Thee, "Speak, for thy servant heareth." Let me hear Thee speaking in my heart. Let me get used to the sound of Thy Voice, that its tones may be familiar when the sounds of earth die away and the only sound will be the music of Thy speaking Voice. Amen._