Part 20 (1/2)
The earnestness of G.o.d is not about any diffuse generality; it is about persons. His purposes concern them, and he believes in them and in their capacities for fellows.h.i.+p with him, for growing character and for glorious destiny. If, therefore, one wishes the sense of G.o.d's reality which comes from active co-partners.h.i.+p, let him serve persons, believe in them, and be in earnest about them. A woman, troubled by invincible doubts, was given by a wise minister the Gospel of John and a calling-list of needy families, and was told to use them both. She came through into a luminous faith, and which helped her more, her reading or her service, she could never tell. When the Master said that the good we did to the least of his brethren, we did to him, he indicated a road to vital knowledge of him; he said in effect that we can always find him in the lives of people to whom we give love and help. Many will never find him at all unless they find him there. The great believers have been the great servants; and the reason for this is not simply that faith produced service, but also that _service produced faith_. The life of Sir Wilfred Grenfell, for example, makes convincingly plain that his faith sent him to Labrador for service, and that then he drew out of service a compound interest on his original investment of faith.
_O G.o.d, the Father of the forsaken, the Help of the weak, the Supplier of the needy, who hast diffused and proportioned Thy gifts to body and soul, in such sort that all may acknowledge and perform the joyous duty of mutual service; Who teachest us that love towards the race of men is the bond of perfectness, and the imitation of Thy blessed Self; open our eyes and touch our hearts, that we may see and do, both for this world and for that which is to come, the things which belong to our peace. Strengthen us in the work we have undertaken; give us counsel and wisdom, perseverance, faith, and zeal, and in Thine own good time, and according to Thy pleasure, prosper the issue. Pour into us a spirit of humility; let nothing be done but in devout obedience to Thy will, thankfulness for Thine unspeakable mercies, and love to Thine adorable Son Christ Jesus....
Amen._--Earl of Shaftesbury, 1801.
COMMENT FOR THE WEEK
I
Throughout our studies we have been a.s.serting that faith in G.o.d involves confidence that creation has a purpose. But we shall not see the breadth and depth of the affirmation, or its significant meaning for our lives, unless more carefully we face a question, which, as keenly as any other, pierces to the marrow of religion: _Is G.o.d in earnest?_
That the G.o.d of the Bible is in earnest is plain. If we open the Book at the Exodus, we hear him saying, ”I have surely seen the affliction of my people, ... and have heard their cry, ... and I am come down to deliver them” (Exodus 3:7, 8). If we turn to the prophets, we find Hosea, interpreting the beating of G.o.d's heart: ”How am I to give thee up, O Ephraim? How am I to let thee go, O Israel? How am I to give thee up? My heart is turned upon me, my compa.s.sions begin to boil”[5]
(Hos. 11:8). Everywhere in the Old Testament, G.o.d is in earnest: about personal character--”What doth Jehovah require of thee, but to do justly, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with thy G.o.d?” (Micah 6:8); about social righteousness--”Let justice roll down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream” (Amos 5:24); about the salvation of the world--”It is too light a thing that thou shouldest be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the preserved of Israel: I will also give thee for a light to the Gentiles, that thou mayest be my salvation unto the end of the earth” (Isa. 49:6).
When from the Old Testament one turns to the New, he faces an a.s.sertion of G.o.d's earnestness that cannot be surpa.s.sed: ”G.o.d so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.” G.o.d in the New Testament is as much in earnest as that, and all the major affirmations of the Book cl.u.s.ter about the magnetism of this central faith. G.o.d is even like a shepherd with a hundred sheep, who having lost one, leaves the ninety and nine and goes after that which is lost, until he finds it (Luke 15:4). From the earliest Hebrew seer dimly perceiving him, to the last apostle of the New Covenant, the G.o.d of the Bible is tremendously in earnest.
How profoundly the acceptance of this faith deepens the meaning and value of life is evident. For a moment some might think that the major question is not whether _G.o.d_ is in earnest but whether _we_ are; but when a man considers the hidden fountains from which the streams of his human earnestness must flow, he sees how necessary is at least the hope that at the heart of it creation is in earnest too.
Von Hartmann, the pessimist, makes one of his characters say, ”The activities of the busy world are only the shudderings of a fever.” How shall a man be seriously in earnest about great causes in a world like that? The men whose devoted lives have made history great have seen in creation's busyness more than aimless shuddering. Moses was in earnest, but behind his consecration was his vision of the Eternal, saying to Pharaoh, ”Let my people go!” The Master was in earnest, but with a motive that took into its account the purposefulness of G.o.d, ”My Father worketh hitherto, and I work” (John 5:17).
Indeed, no satisfying meaning, no real unity are conceivable in a purposeless universe. The plain fact is that _within_ the universe n.o.body explains anything without the statement of its purpose. A chair is something to sit down on; a watch is something to tell time by; a lamp is something to give illumination in the dark--and lacking this purposive description, the story of the precedent history of none of these things, from their original materials to their present shape, would in the least tell what they really are. One who knows all else about a telephone, practically knows nothing, unless he is aware of what it is _for_. Nor is the necessity of such explanation lessened when scientists endeavor descriptions in their special realms. Huxley, narrating the growth of a salamander's egg, writes, ”Let a moderate supply of warmth reach its watery cradle, and the plastic matter undergoes changes so rapid, and yet so steady and so purposelike in their succession, that one can only compare them to those operated by a skilled modeler upon a formless lump of clay. As with an invisible trowel, the ma.s.s is divided and subdivided into smaller and smaller portions, until it is reduced to an aggregation of granules not too large to build withal the finest fabrics of the nascent organism.
And, then, it is as if a delicate finger traced out the line to be occupied by the spinal column and moulded the contour of the body; pinching up the head at one end, the tail at the other, and fas.h.i.+oning flank and limb into the due salamandrine proportions, in so artistic a way, that, after watching the process hour by hour, one is almost involuntarily possessed by the notion that some more subtle aid to vision than an achromatic, would show the hidden artist, with his plan before him, striving with skilful manipulation to perfect his work.”
The obvious fact is that salamanders' eggs act as though they were seriously intent on making salamanders; and lion's cells as though they were tremendously in earnest about making lions. As Herbert Spencer said of a begonia leaf, ”We have therefore no alternative but to say, that the living particles composing one of these fragments, have an innate tendency to arrange themselves into the shape of the organism to which they belong.” _But if this is so, purpose is essential in the description of every living thing._ All about us is a world of life with something strikingly like purposeful action rampant everywhere, so that in describing an elm tree it will not do to say only that forces from behind pushed it into being; one must say, too, that from our first observation of its cells they acted as though they were intent on making nothing else but elm. They went about their business as though they had a purpose. The tree's cause is not alone the forces from behind; it is as well the aim that in the cells'
action lay ahead.
Men can describe nothing in heaven above or on the earth beneath without the use of purposive terminology. How shall they try otherwise to describe the universe? _A world in which the minutest particles and cells all act as though they were eagerly intent on achieving aims, can only with difficulty be thought of as an aimless whole._ Man's conviction is insistent and imperious that creation, so surcharged with purposes, must have Purpose. The greatest scientists themselves are often our best witnesses here. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace are the twin discoverers of evolution. Said the former: ”If we consider the whole universe the mind refuses to look at it as the outcome of chance.” Said the latter: the world is ”a manifestation of creative power, directive mind, and ultimate purpose.”
What such men have coldly said, the men of devout religion have set on fire with pa.s.sionate faith. They have been sure that this world is not
”A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.”
In every cause that makes for man's salvation they have seen the manifest unveiling of divine intent. _G.o.d is in earnest_--this conviction has possessed them utterly, and to live and die for those things on behalf of which the Eternal is tremendously concerned has been the aim, the motive, and the glory of their lives.
II
One need only watch with casual observance the mult.i.tudes who say that they believe in G.o.d, to see how few of them believe in this G.o.d who is in earnest. When they confess their faith in deity they have something else in mind beside the G.o.d of the Bible, compa.s.sionately purposeful about his world and calling men to be his fellow-workers. Let us therefore consider some of the fallacies that enable men to believe in a G.o.d who is _not_ in earnest.
For one thing, some _put G.o.d far away_. Missionaries in Africa's interior find tribes wors.h.i.+ping stocks, stones, demons, ghosts, but this does not mean that no idea of a great original G.o.d is theirs.
Often they are not strangers to that thought, but, as an old Africander woman said, ”He never concerned himself with me; why should I concern myself with him?” To such folk a great G.o.d exists, but he does not care; he dwells apart, an indifferent deity, who has left this world in the hands of lesser G.o.ds that really count. The task of the missionary, therefore, is not to prove the existence of a creator--”No rain, no mushrooms,” said an African chief; ”no G.o.d, no world”--but it is to persuade men that the G.o.d who seems so far away is near at hand, that he really cares, and over each soul and all his world is sacrificially in earnest.
Such missionary work is not yet needless among Christian people. Said a Copenhagen preacher in a funeral discourse, ”G.o.d cannot help us in our great sorrow, because he is so infinitely far away; we must therefore look to Jesus.” One feels this Siberian exile of G.o.d from all vital meaning for our humanity, when he is called the ”Absolute,”
the ”Great First Cause,” the ”Energy from which all things proceed.”
Like the man, examined by the Civil Service, who, asked the distance from sun to earth, answered, ”I do not know how far the sun is from the earth; but it is far enough so that it will not interfere with the proper performance of my duties at the Customs Office,” so men with phrases like ”the Great First Cause” put G.o.d an immeasurable distance off. No man has dealings with a ”Great First Cause,” no ”Great First Cause” ever had vital, personal, constraining meanings for a man.
Rather across infinite distance and time unthinkable, we vaguely picture a dim Figure, who gave this toboggan of a universe its primal shove and has not thought seriously of it since. So a wanderer down the street might put a child upon her sled and giving her a start down-hill, go on his way. She may have a pleasant slide, but he will not know; she may fall off, but he will not care; there may be a tragic accident, but that will not be his concern--he has gone away off down the street. Mult.i.tudes of nominal believers have a G.o.d like that.
In comparison with such, one thinks of men like Livingstone. His G.o.d was compa.s.sionately concerned for Africa, spoke about black folk as Hosea heard him speak concerning Israel, ”How can I give thee up? How can I let thee go?” until the fire of the divine earnestness lit a corresponding ardor in Livingstone's heart and he went out to be G.o.d's man in the dark continent. Such men have smitten the listless world as winds fill flapping sails, crying ”Move!” And the G.o.d of such has been tremendously in earnest.