Part 6 (1/2)
In Christian experience there is a highly satisfying love content that distinguishes it from all other religions and elevates it to heights far beyond even the purest and n.o.blest philosophy. This love content is more than a thing; it is G.o.d Himself in the midst of His Church singing over His people. True Christian joy is the heart's harmonious response to the Lord's song of love.
Thou hidden love of G.o.d, whose height, Whose depth unfathomed, no man knows, I see from far Thy beauteous light, Inly I sigh for Thy repose; My heart is pained, nor can it be At rest till it finds rest in Thee.
Gerhard Tersteegen
Chapter 21.
The Holiness of G.o.d Glory be to G.o.d on high. We praise Thee, we bless Thee, we wors.h.i.+p Thee, for Thy great glory. Lord, I uttered that I understood not; things too wonderful for me which I knew not. I heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth Thee and I abhor myself in dust and ashes. O Lord, I will lay my hand upon my mouth. Once have I spoken, yea, twice, but I will proceed no further.
But while I was musing the fire burned. Lord, I must speak of Thee, lest by my silence I offend against the generation of Thy children. Behold, Thou has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, and the weak things of the world to confound the mighty. O Lord, forsake me not. Let me show forth Thy strength unto this generation and Thy power to everyone that is to come. Raise up prophets and seers in Thy Church who shall magnify Thy glory and through Thine almighty Spirit restore to Thy people the knowledge of the holy. Amen.
The moral shock suffered by us through our mighty break with the high will of heaven has left us all with a permanent trauma affecting every part of our nature. There is disease both in ourselves and in our environment.
The sudden realization of his personal depravity came like a stroke from heaven upon the trembling heart of Isaiah at the moment when he had his revolutionary vision of the holiness of G.o.d. His pain-filled cry, Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts,' expresses the feeling of every man who has discovered himself under his disguises and has been confronted with an inward sight of the holy whiteness that is G.o.d. Such an experience cannot but be emotionally violent.
Until we have seen ourselves as G.o.d see us, we are not likely to be much disturbed over conditions around us as long as they do not get so far out of hand as to threaten our comfortable way of life. We have learned to live with unholiness and have come to look upon it as the natural and expected thing. We are not disappointed that we do not find all truth in our teachers of faith, fulness in our politicians or complete honesty in our merchants or full trustworthiness in our friends That we may continue to exist we make such laws as are necessary to protect us from our fellow men and let it go at that.
Neither the writer nor the reader of these words is qualified to appreciate the holiness of G.o.d. Quite literally a new channel must be cut through the desert of our minds to allow the sweet waters of truth that will heal our great sickness to flow in. We cannot grasp the true meaning of the divine holiness by thinking of someone or something very pure and then raising the concept to the highest degree we are capable of.
G.o.d's holiness is not simply the best we know infinitely bettered. We know nothing like the divine holiness. It stands apart, unique, unapproachable, incomprehensible and unattainable. The natural man is blind to it. He may fear G.o.d's power and admire His wisdom, but His holiness he cannot even imagine.
Only the Spirit of the Holy One can impart to the human spirit the knowledge of the holy. Yet as electric power flows only through a conductor, so the Spirit flows through truth and must find same measure of truth in the mind before He can illuminate the heart. Faith wakes at the voice of truth but responds to no other sound. Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of G.o.d.' Theological knowledge is the medium through which the Spirit flows into the human heart, yet there must be humble penitence in the heart before truth can produce faith. The Spirit of G.o.d is the Spirit of truth. It is possible to have same truth in the mind without having the Spirit in the heart, but it is never possible to have the Spirit apart from truth.
In his penetrating study of the holy, Rudolf Otto makes a strong case for the presence in the human mind of something he names the numinous,' by which, apparently, he means a sense that there is in the world a vague, incomprehensible Something, the Mysterium Tremendum, the awesome Mystery, surrounding and enfolding the universe. This is an It, an awful Thing, and can never be intellectually conceived, only sensed and felt in the depths of the human spirit. It remains as a permanent religious instinct, a feeling for that unnamed, undiscoverable Presence that runs quicksilverlike through creation's veins' and sometimes stuns the mind by confronting it with a supernatural, suprarational manifestation of itself. The man thus confronted is brought down and overwhelmed and can only tremble and be silent.
This nonrational dread, this feeling for the uncreated Mystery in the world, is back of all religion. The pure religion of the Bible, no less than the basest animism of the naked tribesman, exists only because this basic instinct is present in human nature. Of course, the difference between the religion of an Isaiah or a Paul and that of the animist is that one has truth and the other has not; he has only the numinous' instinct. He feels after an unknown G.o.d, but an Isaiah and a Paul have found the true G.o.d through His own self-disclosure in the inspired Scriptures.
The feeling for mystery, even for the Great Mystery, is basic in human nature and indispensable to religious faith, but it is not enough. Because of it men may whisper, That awful Thing,' but they do not cry, Mine Holy One!' In the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures G.o.d carries forward His self-revelation and gives it personality and moral content. This awful Presence is shown to be not a Thing but a moral Being with all the warm qualities of genuine personality. More than this, He is the absolute quintessence of moral excellence, infinitely perfect in righteousness, purity, rect.i.tude, and incomprehensible holiness. And in all this He is uncreated, self-sufficient and beyond the power of human thought to conceive or human speech to utter.
Through the self-revelation of G.o.d in the Scriptures and the illumination of the Holy Spirit the Christian gains everything and loses nothing. To his idea of G.o.d there are added the twin concepts of personality and moral character, but there remains the original sense of wonder and fear in the presence of the world-filling Mystery. Today his heart may leap up with the happy cry, Abba Father, my Lord and my G.o.d!' Tomorrow he may kneel with the delighted trembling to admire and adore the High and Lofty One that inhabiteth eternity.
Holy is the way G.o.d is. To be holy He does not conform to a standard. He is that standard. He is absolutely holy with an infinite, incomprehensible fullness of purity that is incapable of being other than it is. Because He is holy, His attributes are holy; that is, whatever we think of as belonging to G.o.d must be thought of as holy. G.o.d is holy and He has made holiness the moral condition necessary to the health of His universe. Sin's temporary presence in the world only accents this. Whatever is holy is healthy; evil is a moral sickness that must end ultimately in death. The formation of the language itself suggests this, the English word holy deriving from the Anglo-Saxon halig, hal, meaning, well, whole.'
Since G.o.d's first concern for His universe is its moral health, that is, its holiness, whatever is contrary to this is necessarily under His eternal displeasure. To preserve His creation G.o.d must destroy whatever would destroy it. When He arises to put down iniquity and save the world from irreparable moral collapse, He is said to be angry. Every wrathful judgment in the history of the world has been a holy act of preservation. The holiness of G.o.d, the wrath of G.o.d, and the health of the creation are inseparably united. G.o.d's wrath is His utter intolerance of whatever degrades and destroys. He hates iniquity as a mother hates the polio that take the life of her child.
G.o.d is holy with an absolute holiness that knows no degrees, and this He cannot impart to His creatures. But there is a relative and contingent holiness which He shares with angels and seraphim in heaven and with redeemed men on earth as their preparation for heaven. This holiness G.o.d can and does impart to His children. He shares it with them by imputation and by impartation, and because He has made it available to them through the blood of the Lamb, He requires it of them. To Israel first and later to His Church G.o.d spoke, saying, Be ye holy; for I am holy.' He did not say Be ye as holy as I am holy,' for that would be to demand of us absolute holiness, something that belongs to G.o.d alone.
Before the uncreated fire of G.o.d's holiness angels veil their faces. Yea, the heavens are not clean, and the stars are not pure in His sight. No honest man can say I am holy,' but neither is any honest man willing to ignore the solemn words of the inspired writer, Follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord.'
Caught in this dilemma, what are we Christians to do? We must like Moses cover ourselves with faith and humility while we steal a quick look at the G.o.d whom no man can see and live. The broken and the contrite heart He will not despise. We must hide our unholiness in the wounds of Christ as Moses hid himself in the cleft of the rock while the glory of G.o.d pa.s.sed by. We must take refuge from G.o.d in G.o.d. Above all we must believe that G.o.d sees us perfect in His Son while He disciplines and chastens and purges us that we may be partakers of His holiness.
By faith and obedience, by constant meditation on the holiness of G.o.d, by loving righteousness and hating iniquity, by a growing acquaintance with the Spirit of holiness, we can acclimate ourselves to the fellows.h.i.+p of the saints on earth and prepare ourselves for the eternal companions.h.i.+p of G.o.d and the saints above. Thus, as they say when humble believers meet, we will have a heaven to go to heaven in.
How dread are Thine eternal years, O everlasting Lord!
By prostrate spirits day and night Incessantly adored!
How beautiful, how beautiful The sight of Thee must be, Thine endless wisdom, boundless power, And awful purity!
Oh how I fear Thee, living G.o.d!
With deepest, tenderest fears, And wors.h.i.+p Thee with trembling hope, And penitential tears.
Frederick W. Faber
Chapter 22.
The Sovereignty of G.o.d Who wouldst not fear Thee, O Lord G.o.d of Hosts, most high and most terrible? For Thou art Lord alone. Thou has made heaven and the heaven of heavens, the earth and all things that are therein, and in Thy hand is the soul of every living thing, Thou sittest king upon the flood; yea, Thou sittest king forever. Thou art a great king over all the earth. Thou art clothed with strength; honor and majesty are before Thee.
Amen.
G.o.d's sovereignty is the attribute by which He rules His entire creation, and to be sovereign G.o.d must be all-knowing, all-powerful, and absolutely free. The reasons are these: Were there even one datum of knowledge, however small, unknown to G.o.d, His rule would break down at that point. To be Lord over all the creation, He must possess all knowledge. And were G.o.d lacking one infinitesimal modic.u.m of power, that lack would end His reign and undo His kingdom; that one stray atom of power would belong to someone else and G.o.d would be a limited ruler and hence not sovereign.
Furthermore, His sovereignty requires that He be absolutely free, which means simply that He must be free to do whatever He wills to do anywhere at any time to carry out His eternal purpose in every single detail without interference. Were He less than free He must be less than sovereign.
To grasp the idea of unqualified freedom requires a vigorous effort of the mind. We are not psychologically conditioned to understand freedom except in its imperfect forms. Our concepts of it have been shaped in a world where no absolute freedom exists. Here each natural object is dependent upon many other objects, and that dependence limits its freedom.
Wordsworth at the beginning of his Prelude' rejoiced that he had escaped the city where he had long been pent up and was now free, free as a bird to settle where I will.' But to be free a bird is not to be free at all. The naturalist knows that the supposedly free bird actually lives its entire life in a cage made of fears, hungers, and instincts; it is limited by weather conditions, varying air pressures, the local food supply, predatory beasts, and that strangest of all bonds, the irresistible compulsion to stay within the small plot of land and air a.s.signed it by birdland comity. The freest bird is, along with every other created thing, held in constant check by a net of necessity. Only G.o.d is free.
G.o.d is said to be absolutely free because no one and no thing can hinder Him or compel Him or stop Him. He is able to do as He pleases always, everywhere, forever. To be thus free means also that He must possess universal authority. That He has unlimited power we know from the Scriptures and may deduce from certain other of His attributes. But what about His authority?
Even to discuss the authority of Almighty G.o.d seems a bit meaningless, and to question it would be absurd. Can we imagine the Lord G.o.d of Hosts having to request permission of anyone or to apply for anything to a higher body? To whom would G.o.d go for permission? Who is higher than the Highest? Who is mightier than the Almighty? Whose position antedates that of the Eternal? At whose throne would G.o.d kneel? Where is the greater one to whom He must appeal? Thus saith the Lord the King of Israel, and his redeemer the Lord of hosts; I am the first, and I am the last; and beside me there is no G.o.d.'
The sovereignty of G.o.d is a fact well established in the Scriptures and declared aloud by the logic of truth. But admittedly it raises certain problems which have not to this time been satisfactorily solved: These are mainly two. The first is the presence in the creation of those things which G.o.d cannot approve, such as evil, pain, and death. If G.o.d is sovereign He could have prevented their coming into existence. Why did He not do so?