Christians, to be sure, go further than this, at least in theory. Their creed requires them to believe in the personality of G.o.d, and they have been taught to pray, "Our Father, which art in heaven." Now personality and fatherhood carry with them the idea of the possibility of personal acquaintance. This is admitted, I say, in theory, but for millions of Christians, nevertheless, G.o.d is no more real than He is to the non-Christian. They go through life trying to love an ideal and be loyal to a mere principle.
Over against all this cloudy vagueness stands the clear scriptural doctrine that G.o.d can be known in personal experience. A loving Personality dominates the Bible, walking among the trees of the garden and breathing fragrance over every scene. Always a living Person is present, speaking, pleading, loving, working, and manifesting Himself whenever and wherever His people have the receptivity necessary to receive the manifestation.
The Bible a.s.sumes as a self-evident fact that men can know G.o.d with at least the same degree of immediacy as they know any other person or thing that comes within the field of their experience. The same terms are used to express the knowledge of G.o.d as are used to express knowledge of physical things. "O _taste_ and see that the Lord is good."
"All thy garments _smell_ of myrrh, and aloes, and ca.s.sia, out of the ivory palaces." "My sheep _hear_ my voice." "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall _see_ G.o.d." These are but four of countless such pa.s.sages from the Word of G.o.d. And more important than any proof text is the fact that the whole import of the Scripture is toward this belief.
What can all this mean except that we have in our hearts organs by means of which we can know G.o.d as certainly as we know material things through our familiar five senses? We apprehend the physical world by exercising the faculties given us for the purpose, and we possess spiritual faculties by means of which we can know G.o.d and the spiritual world if we will obey the Spirit"s urge and begin to use them.
That a saving work must first be done in the heart is taken for granted here. The spiritual faculties of the unregenerate man lie asleep in his nature, unused and for every purpose dead; that is the stroke which has fallen upon us by sin. They may be quickened to active life again by the operation of the Holy Spirit in regeneration; that is one of the immeasurable benefits which come to us through Christ"s atoning work on the cross.
But the very ransomed children of G.o.d themselves: why do they know so little of that habitual conscious communion with G.o.d which the Scriptures seem to offer? The answer is our chronic unbelief. Faith enables our spiritual sense to function. Where faith is defective the result will be inward insensibility and numbness toward spiritual things. This is the condition of vast numbers of Christians today. No proof is necessary to support that statement. We have but to converse with the first Christian we meet or enter the first church we find open to acquire all the proof we need.
A spiritual kingdom lies all about us, enclosing us, embracing us, altogether within reach of our inner selves, waiting for us to recognize it. G.o.d Himself is here waiting our response to His Presence. This eternal world will come alive to us the moment we begin to reckon upon its reality.
I have just now used two words which demand definition; or if definition is impossible, I must at least make clear what I mean when I use them.
They are "reckon" and "reality."
What do I mean by _reality_? I mean that which has existence apart from any idea any mind may have of it, and which would exist if there were no mind anywhere to entertain a thought of it. That which is real has being in itself. It does not depend upon the observer for its validity.
I am aware that there are those who love to poke fun at the plain man"s idea of reality. They are the idealists who spin endless proofs that nothing is real outside of the mind. They are the relativists who like to show that there are no fixed points in the universe from which we can measure anything. They smile down upon us from their lofty intellectual peaks and settle us to their own satisfaction by fastening upon us the reproachful term "absolutist." The Christian is not put out of countenance by this show of contempt. He can smile right back at them, for he knows that there is only One who is Absolute, that is G.o.d. But he knows also that the Absolute One has made this world for man"s uses, and, while there is nothing fixed or real in the last meaning of the words (the meaning as applied to G.o.d) _for every purpose of human life we are permitted to act as if there were_. And every man does act thus except the mentally sick. These unfortunates also have trouble with reality, but they are consistent; they insist upon living in accordance with their ideas of things. They are honest, and it is their very honesty that const.i.tutes them a social problem.
The idealists and relativists are not mentally sick. They prove their soundness by living their lives according to the very notions of reality which they in theory repudiate and by counting upon the very fixed points which they prove are not there. They could earn a lot more respect for their notions if they were willing to live by them; but this they are careful not to do. Their ideas are brain-deep, not life-deep. Wherever life touches them they repudiate their theories and live like other men.
The Christian is too sincere to play with ideas for their own sake. He takes no pleasure in the mere spinning of gossamer webs for display. All his beliefs are practical. They are geared into his life. By them he lives or dies, stands or falls for this world and for all time to come.
From the insincere man he turns away.
The sincere plain man knows that the world is real. He finds it here when he wakes to consciousness, and he knows that he did not think it into being. It was here waiting for him when he came, and he knows that when he prepares to leave this earthly scene it will be here still to bid him good-bye as he departs. By the deep wisdom of life he is wiser than a thousand men who doubt. He stands upon the earth and feels the wind and rain in his face and he knows that they are real. He sees the sun by day and the stars by night. He sees the hot lightning play out of the dark thundercloud. He hears the sounds of nature and the cries of human joy and pain. These he knows are real. He lies down on the cool earth at night and has no fear that it will prove illusory or fail him while he sleeps. In the morning the firm ground will be under him, the blue sky above him and the rocks and trees around him as when he closed his eyes the night before. So he lives and rejoices in a world of reality.
With his five senses he engages this real world. All things necessary to his physical existence he apprehends by the faculties with which he has been equipped by the G.o.d who created him and placed him in such a world as this.
Now, by our definition also G.o.d is real. He is real in the absolute and final sense that nothing else is. All other reality is contingent upon His. The great Reality is G.o.d who is the Author of that lower and dependent reality which makes up the sum of created things, including ourselves. G.o.d has objective existence independent of and apart from any notions which we may have concerning Him. The worshipping heart does not create its Object. It finds Him here when it wakes from its moral slumber in the morning of its regeneration.
Another word that must be cleared up is the word _reckon_. This does not mean to visualize or imagine. Imagination is not faith. The two are not only different from, but stand in sharp opposition to, each other.
Imagination projects unreal images out of the mind and seeks to attach reality to them. Faith creates nothing; it simply reckons upon that which is already _there_.
G.o.d and the spiritual world are real. We can reckon upon them with as much a.s.surance as we reckon upon the familiar world around us.
Spiritual things are there (or rather we should say _here_) inviting our attention and challenging our trust.
Our trouble is that we have established bad thought habits. We habitually think of the visible world as real and doubt the reality of any other. We do not deny the existence of the spiritual world but we doubt that it is real in the accepted meaning of the word.
The world of sense intrudes upon our attention day and night for the whole of our lifetime. It is clamorous, insistent and self-demonstrating. It does not appeal to our faith; it is here, a.s.saulting our five senses, demanding to be accepted as real and final.
But sin has so clouded the lenses of our hearts that we cannot see that other reality, the City of G.o.d, shining around us. The world of sense triumphs. The visible becomes the enemy of the invisible; the temporal, of the eternal. That is the curse inherited by every member of Adam"s tragic race.
At the root of the Christian life lies belief in the invisible. The object of the Christian"s faith is unseen reality.
Our uncorrected thinking, influenced by the blindness of our natural hearts and the intrusive ubiquity of visible things, tends to draw a contrast between the spiritual and the real; but actually no such contrast exists. The ant.i.thesis lies elsewhere: between the real and the imaginary, between the spiritual and the material, between the temporal and the eternal; but between the spiritual and the real, never. The spiritual _is_ real.
If we would rise into that region of light and power plainly beckoning us through the Scriptures of truth we must break the evil habit of ignoring the spiritual. We must shift our interest from the seen to the unseen. For the great unseen Reality is G.o.d. "He that cometh to G.o.d must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him." This is basic in the life of faith. From there we can rise to unlimited heights. "Ye believe in G.o.d," said our Lord Jesus Christ, "believe also in me." Without the first there can be no second.
If we truly want to follow G.o.d we must seek to be other-worldly. This I say knowing well that that word has been used with scorn by the sons of this world and applied to the Christian as a badge of reproach. So be it. Every man must choose his world. If we who follow Christ, with all the facts before us and knowing what we are about, deliberately choose the Kingdom of G.o.d as our sphere of interest I see no reason why anyone should object. If we lose by it, the loss is our own; if we gain, we rob no one by so doing. The "other world," which is the object of this world"s disdain and the subject of the drunkard"s mocking song, is our carefully chosen goal and the object of our holiest longing.
But we must avoid the common fault of pushing the "other world" into the future. It is not future, but present. It parallels our familiar physical world, and the doors between the two worlds are open. "Ye are come," says the writer to the Hebrews (and the tense is plainly present), "unto Mount Zion, and unto the city of the living G.o.d, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels, to the general a.s.sembly and church of the firstborn, which are written in heaven, and to G.o.d the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect, and to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling, that speaketh better things than that of Abel." All these things are contrasted with "the mount that might be touched" and "the sound of a trumpet and the voice of words" that might be heard. May we not safely conclude that, as the realities of Mount Sinai were apprehended by the senses, so the realities of Mount Zion are to be grasped by the soul? And this not by any trick of the imagination, but in downright actuality. The soul has eyes with which to see and ears with which to hear. Feeble they may be from long disuse, but by the life-giving touch of Christ alive now and capable of sharpest sight and most sensitive hearing.
As we begin to focus upon G.o.d the things of the spirit will take shape before our inner eyes. Obedience to the word of Christ will bring an inward revelation of the G.o.dhead (John 14:21-23). It will give acute perception enabling us to see G.o.d even as is promised to the pure in heart. A new G.o.d consciousness will seize upon us and we shall begin to taste and hear and inwardly feel the G.o.d who is our life and our all.
There will be seen the constant shining of the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. More and more, as our faculties grow sharper and more sure, G.o.d will become to us the great All, and His Presence the glory and wonder of our lives.
_O G.o.d, quicken to life every power within me, that I may lay hold on eternal things. Open my eyes that I may see; give me acute spiritual perception; enable me to taste Thee and know that Thou art good. Make heaven more real to me than any earthly thing has ever been. Amen._
V
_The Universal Presence_
Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?--Psa. 139:7
In all Christian teaching certain basic truths are found, hidden at times, and rather a.s.sumed than a.s.serted, but necessary to all truth as the primary colors are found in and necessary to the finished painting.
Such a truth is the divine immanence.
G.o.d dwells in His creation and is everywhere indivisibly present in all His works. This is boldly taught by prophet and apostle and is accepted by Christian theology generally. That is, it appears in the books, but for some reason it has not sunk into the average Christian"s heart so as to become a part of his believing self. Christian teachers shy away from its full implications, and, if they mention it at all, mute it down till it has little meaning. I would guess the reason for this to be the fear of being charged with pantheism; but the doctrine of the divine Presence is definitely not pantheism.
Pantheism"s error is too palpable to deceive anyone. It is that G.o.d is the sum of all created things. Nature and G.o.d are one, so that whoever touches a leaf or a stone touches G.o.d. That is of course to degrade the glory of the incorruptible Deity and, in an effort to make all things divine, banish all divinity from the world entirely.
The truth is that while G.o.d dwells in His world He is separated from it by a gulf forever impa.s.sable. However closely He may be identified with the work of His hands _they_ are and must eternally be _other than He_, and He is and must be antecedent to and independent of them. He is transcendent above all His works even while He is immanent within them.
What now does the divine immanence mean in direct Christian experience?
It means simply that _G.o.d is here_. Wherever we are, G.o.d is here. There is no place, there can be no place, where He is not. Ten million intelligences standing at as many points in s.p.a.ce and separated by incomprehensible distances can each one say with equal truth, G.o.d is here. No point is nearer to G.o.d than any other point. It is exactly as near to G.o.d from any place as it is from any other place. No one is in mere distance any further from or any nearer to G.o.d than any other person is.
These are truths believed by every instructed Christian. It remains for us to think on them and pray over them until they begin to glow within us.
"In the beginning G.o.d." Not _matter_, for matter is not self-causing. It requires an antecedent cause, and G.o.d is that Cause. Not _law_, for law is but a name for the course which all creation follows. That course had to be planned, and the Planner is G.o.d. Not _mind_, for mind also is a created thing and must have a Creator back of it. In the beginning G.o.d, the uncaused Cause of matter, mind and law. There we must begin.
Adam sinned and, in his panic, frantically tried to do the impossible: he tried to hide from the Presence of G.o.d. David also must have had wild thoughts of trying to escape from the Presence, for he wrote, "Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?"
Then he proceeded through one of his most beautiful psalms to celebrate the glory of the divine immanence. "If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in h.e.l.l, behold, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me." And he knew that G.o.d"s _being_ and G.o.d"s _seeing_ are the same, that the seeing Presence had been with him even before he was born, watching the mystery of unfolding life. Solomon exclaimed, "But will G.o.d indeed dwell on the earth? behold the heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain thee: how much less this house which I have builded." Paul a.s.sured the Athenians that "G.o.d is not far from any one of us: for in him we live, and move, and have our being."
If G.o.d is present at every point in s.p.a.ce, if we cannot go where He is not, cannot even conceive of a place where He is not, why then has not that Presence become the one universally celebrated fact of the world?
The patriarch Jacob, "in the waste howling wilderness," gave the answer to that question. He saw a vision of G.o.d and cried out in wonder, "Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not." Jacob had never been for one small division of a moment outside the circle of that all-pervading Presence. But he knew it not. That was his trouble, and it is ours. Men do not know that G.o.d is here. What a difference it would make if they knew.
The Presence and the manifestation of the Presence are not the same.
There can be the one without the other. G.o.d is here when we are wholly unaware of it. He is _manifest_ only when and as we are aware of His Presence. On our part there must be surrender to the Spirit of G.o.d, for His work it is to show us the Father and the Son. If we co-operate with Him in loving obedience G.o.d will manifest Himself to us, and that manifestation will be the difference between a nominal Christian life and a life radiant with the light of His face.
Always, everywhere G.o.d is present, and always He seeks to discover Himself. To each one he would reveal not only that He is, but _what_ He is as well. He did not have to be persuaded to discover Himself to Moses. "And the Lord descended in the cloud, and stood with him there, and proclaimed the name of the Lord." He not only made a verbal proclamation of His nature but He revealed His very Self to Moses so that the skin of Moses" face shone with the supernatural light. It will be a great moment for some of us when we begin to believe that G.o.d"s promise of self-revelation is literally true: that He promised much, but promised no more than He intends to fulfill.
Our pursuit of G.o.d is successful just because He is forever seeking to manifest Himself to us. The revelation of G.o.d to any man is not G.o.d coming from a distance upon a time to pay a brief and momentous visit to the man"s soul. Thus to think of it is to misunderstand it all. The approach of G.o.d to the soul or of the soul to G.o.d is not to be thought of in spatial terms at all. There is no idea of physical distance involved in the concept. It is not a matter of miles but of experience.
To speak of being near to or far from G.o.d is to use language in a sense always understood when applied to our ordinary human relationships. A man may say, "I feel that my son is coming nearer to me as he gets older," and yet that son has lived by his father"s side since he was born and has never been away from home more than a day or so in his entire life. What then can the father mean? Obviously he is speaking of _experience_. He means that the boy is coming to know him more intimately and with deeper understanding, that the barriers of thought and feeling between the two are disappearing, that father and son are becoming more closely united in mind and heart.