Verse 9
God, a Continual Discovery
The text reads like an exclamation, like a great utterance of glad surprise. We may discover in it the voice of people who have been long expecting deliverance, and have at length realised it. The text is, therefore, an exclamation. The exclamation is an argument. The argument is that God is a daily or continual discovery to the religious consciousness. He is always more than he was yesterday; the heart is continually exclaiming, This is what we have been waiting for; behold, this is the glory of God; every other thing we have seen is simple and common compared with what we now look upon. It is thus the visions of history come and go; but always there stands right up in heaven's centre the astounding light, old as eternity, yet new as a surprise. We are not dissatisfied with the past, we do not compare the present and the past invidiously, or to the disadvantage of the past; we look upon all things that are gone as but introductory, symbolic, and that vision or truth which we hold here and now is the God we have been waiting for. Let us, so to say, have the God of to-day. He is not new; he is gathered history, he is focused revelation; all that the prophets have spoken and the psalmists have sung concerning him we realise in his personality: and yet he is the God of to-day in a great, glad, solemn sense, the greatest that has revealed itself to the religious consciousness. That is orthodoxy to be orthodox up to date, to seize the immediate vision, the present truth; not as something new, detached, isolated; but as the last flash of the ever-burning glory released to drive away some further reach of our great gloom. It is possible to hold on to the past, and yet to hold on to the present; and that is only truly modern which is ancient, and that is only truly worth keeping in antiquity which adapts itself to the immediate need of life's little day. We know what it is to be going through delightful and enchanting scenery. Hear the travellers: How beautiful is this land; how goodly a land to live in; how well the little cottage home would nestle on that slope or near yonder wood! Let a few miles be passed, and they say, No, this is the place bolder, finer altogether in every landscape feature, more fresh air here: this is the place! A few miles farther on, and why is the party dumb? Some are blind with tears, all are silent: what is this? They have just beheld the Jungfrau, its majestic figure, its unspeakable purity, and their tears say, This this! Do they despise the simpler country through which they have come? Not at all: but for that simpler country they never could have come to this great vision; they walked to it through the common turnpike, then up the rocky steeps, then along the greensward, and little by little they came into the presence of this revelation; then they said, This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven. The man who can chatter in the presence of the Jungfrau can have no heaven.
This is the very glory and the chief delight of religious study. It is so that we apply the thought in the Bible. It is always on the next page that the former vision is eclipsed. We are delighted with all the pages; the first page gives us a creation, and we are pleased with the wonderful house in which we have to live; but by-and-by the house becomes more luminous and beautiful and hospitable; presently it is filled with love, and family life, and joy, and music; and we are continually saying as we read the Bible, This is the page. Yet it is not the page for to-morrow; the page for to-morrow is farther on, for all ages farther on. Never does there come a disappointment, but continually there burns or shines a hope which makes all realised joy seem small. If we had not the great hope we should be content with what we already hold in the hand; it is the hope which seems to turn all possession into more or less of mockery and disappointment. It is also the same with providence. Providence enlarges itself every day into some new vision or apocalypse. It does not seem as if we could have a better day than the present; yet when to-morrow comes we forget it as to its superior claim, and only remember it as a transient vision or stimulus by the way, thankful for it, yet it is to-day that brings into itself all things radiant and all things musical. God's providence never ceases. God has not written one providential chapter once for all, and then left the world to study it: God rewrites his Bible in the events of every day. The record of the present time is not the record of man, though man may think so. God often guides the hand that drives the recording pen. When we look back upon great breadths of journalism, we come to see that through the whole there has passed one organic thought, or nerve, or purpose, and that there has been shaping where we thought there was nothing but inchoateness and chaos. So when all the journal is written up to the last, when the weary pen writes Finis , the journal will have quite a Bible look. This is the wonder of God: he cannot be found out unto perfection; he cannot be measured and set up in standard figure; he is more like the horizon; evidently there, yet where? place without locality. Approach the horizon; it enlarges and recedes. A child thinks he can clutch the golden band that circles the mountains at eventide, and yet behold he is farther away than ever his dreams wandered; it is here, there, yonder, beyond: an eternal lure, an eternal illusion as to the mere handling and literal realisation.
What is the proper attitude or disposition of religious students? "We have waited for him." That is the right attitude. Waiting does not imply lethargy. He does not wait who lingers in a do-nothing and slothful condition. That is not waiting, that is idleness; that is not tarrying, that is practical blasphemy. Waiting implies energy, hope, restrained passion. The man who really waits really burns. Waiting is not incompatible with service; on the contrary, it implies service, it implies desire, expectation. The man who has a great expectancy does not look down; his face is not a blank, it is a burning, glowing symbol; the expectation is in him, it makes him glow. He cannot be impetuous, petulant, querulous, vehement, or demonstrative; but in proportion to the hope or promise that is in him is his zeal. If we were to measure our waiting by our lethargy, surely some of us wait well! We are princes in slothfulness; we take every prize ever offered for lethargy. Do not call that waiting or standing still. It is an inversion of every thought and purpose of God.
What is the great end of religious discipline? The text in forms us: "He will save us." These are words so short that a child might remember them. They are but four in number, yet they hold within their little limit everything that can be thought about sin, history, recovery, destiny. "He will save us." He will not disappoint our waiting, he will not satirise our manhood; he is not a God who has given us the aspiration of angels and then condemned us to the fate of dogs: it is not by such paradox that the loving God administers his universe. Judge of your destiny by your present personality as seen or witnessed in your aspiration, your passion, your desire, your capacity for service; judge of the possible future by your greatest hours of consciousness or realised power and personality. Somehow you have been so constituted as to pray; then you cannot have been so made as to be destroyed like dogs. Whether you can commit suicide is another question; we can close our eyes against the noontide, and declare from our point of view it is midnight; in making such a declaration we are keeping strictly to the line of personal fact at a given moment; yet we are not speaking the universal truth. Men should be careful how they degrade partial personal experiences into universal propositions. We must not misjudge God. If we have been capable of waiting for him, by that very capacity of patience we prove that God has been meaning all the time to come to us and to save us. Singing means more than mere utterance. God never meant the soul that can sing to him to vanish like an extinguished spark. Take thy singing as a pledge of thy possible immortality in blessed heaven; take all the little beginnings and germs of personality and power as pledges that God means harvest golden infinite harvest. Why not reason yourselves upwards? Why this continual groping after the grave as if it were the only home you were destined to occupy? You might reason the other way, and be really glad of heart, and have great riches of grace and treasures of hop and confidence. How long will ye refuse to accept the whole benediction of God?
Here, then, we have our three words, and we should keep them as three precious jewels, that God is a daily discovery to the religious consciousness, that is to say, he is always more and more, clearer and clearer, nearer and nearer, tenderer and tenderer. Here is the attitude which the soul should maintain towards him an attitude of waiting for him in the confidence that he will come; and here is the end for which all our religious consciousness should be cultivated to be saved not in some narrow, selfish, impoverished sense, but in the greatest sense: saved from despair, saved from moral degradation, saved from perdition, whatever that grim and awful word may mean; and not only saved from certain destinies, but saved into blessed inheritances and realisations, saved into manhood, into pureness, into virtue, into service, into liberty, into heaven. He does not preach the gospel who limits the word "salvation" to one act. Is there a greater word in human speech than this word salvation? He does mischief and not good who so speaks about salvation as to limit it to an aspect of selfish regard; on the other hand, he is the apostle of heaven who sees in salvation a new sphere of service, a new motive to action, a new pledge of immortality. We always use the word salvation with the word Christ. They were never meant to be dissociated. Christ did visibly come into the world of a certainty, but he was in the world spiritually from the foundation thereof. And he was only in the world thus incidentally because he was in the world before the world was created. Nor was he in existence simply as a Personality, a metaphysical Deity; he was in the creation as the Lamb slain, before a single line of stones had been laid as the foundation of the earth. We have often had occasion to say, and to rejoice in the saying, The atonement was rendered before the guilt was contracted. Here is a thought, then, of continually heightening sublimity. We do not exhaust God, we continually approach him; we cannot surpass him, he always leads our education, and heads our spiritual progress. We have read thus of the living God; we have said, This is God in judgment, he drowned the wide world, this is God; he burned Sodom and Gomorrah, this is God. Men are so prone to see God in terrible things in pestilence, in famine, in sore distress, of family and nation. We then turn over into historic matter, and we say, This is God, ordering, shaping, leading all the movements of man, leading the blind by a way that they know not; lo, this is God! Then we go farther on, and come to the singing brethren, the Davids and the Asaphs of the ages, and as they touch their harps, and lift their trumpets to their lips, or breathe out psalm and song, we say in the church of music, This is God, and we have waited for him; this is the meaning of all government, of all history, music, song, rapture, gladness; this is our God, and we have waited for him. We pass on, and we come to the evangelists, we read their little condensation of history; we come to a place called Calvary; we see the uplifted Priest, we see the Agony, the Blood, the Dying, and we say, Lo, this is God; we have waited for him, and he will save us!
Note
"Isaiah was not the first who attained to a knowledge of the personality of Messiah. Isaiah's vocation was to render the knowledge of this personality clearer and more definite, and to render it more efficacious upon the souls of the elect, by giving it a greater individuality. The person of the Redeemer is mentioned even in Genesis 49:10 : 'The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a law-giver from between his feet, until Shiloh ( the tranquilliser) come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be' (i.e. him shall the nations obey). The personality of Messiah occurs also in several psalms which were written before the times of Isaiah; for instance, in the second and one hundred and tenth, by David; in the forty-fifth, by the sons of Korah; in the seventy-second, by Solomon. Isaiah has especially developed the perception of the prophetic and priestly office of the Redeemer, while in the earlier annunciations of the Messiah the royal office is more prominent; although in Psalm cx. the priestly office also is pointed out. Of the two states of Christ, Isaiah has expressly described that of the exinanition of the suffering Christ, while, before him, his state of glory was made more prominent. In the Psalms the inseparable connection between justice and suffering, from which the doctrine of a suffering Messiah necessarily results, is not expressly applied to the Messiah. We must not say that Isaiah first perceived that the Messiah was to suffer, but we must grant that this knowledge was in him more vivid than in any earlier writer; and that this knowledge was first shown by Isaiah to be an integral portion of Old Testament doctrine." Kitto's Cyclopædia of Biblical Literature.
Prayer
Almighty God, we come to the throne of grace, not of judgment, and there we may plead the blood that was shed for sin, and by the mighty mystery of the Cross, and all its gracious truth and meaning, we may enter into the mystery of pardon and into the joy of peace with God; therefore, being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. We know the reality of the faith by the depth of the peace. This is the gift of God; this is the portion of those who have in them the Spirit of eternal life; this is their sign and their proof and their testimony. So, looking upon the calm of the soul, they live without fear, and they contemplate death in the spirit of victory. We bless thee for thy Word beginning far away, taking our thoughts back to beginnings and suggestions, and from the Genesis of thy revelation conducting our thought onward and upward to the glorious Apocalypse. May we walk steadily all the way, marvelling at thy wonderful power, and adoring thy wisdom and thy grace; recognising thy sovereignty, and watching the continual and gracious unfoldment of thy high purpose. Thus shall the word of Christ dwell in us richly; we shall receive nutrition from heaven, and in the strength derived from the Bread of Life we shall go on from day to day, until being disembodied, and having no longer this weary tabernacle of the flesh, we shall enter into the joy of perfect spiritual worship, seeing God by the pureness of our heart, and worshipping him with all the faculties he has redeemed and sanctified. Comfort those who are dejected; give a word of counsel and inspiration to any whose thoughts are bewildered. Lead the blind by a way that they know not. Take out of to-morrow the cloud, or the sting, or the fear which makes men dread the dawn; and by giving us peace with God we shall also have given unto us peace with men, and we shall begin to pray where we expected to die. The Lord work this miracle for us in the name and grace of God the Son; then in the wilderness we shall have a garden, and in the place of the hot sand a fountain of living water. Amen.
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